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you go and slap 'em in the face!" "I didn't slap 'em in the face." "You do--practically. You slams the door in their face, and that's all we see of 'em ever. I wouldn't 'ave 'ad this 'appen not for a ten-pound note." He rounded his regrets with a grunt. For a while there was silence, save for the little stir of Ann's movements preparing the tea. "Tea, Artie," said Ann, handing him a cup. Kipps took it. "I put sugar _once_," said Ann. "Oo, dash it! Oo cares?" said Kipps, taking an extraordinarily large additional lump with fury quivering fingers, and putting his cup with a slight excess of force on the recess cupboard. "Oo cares? "I wouldn't 'ave 'ad that 'appen," he said, bidding steadily against accomplished things, "for twenty pounds." He gloomed in silence through a long minute or so. Then Ann said the fatal thing that exploded him. "Artie!" she said. "What?" "There's Buttud Toce down there! By your foot!" There was a pause, husband and wife regarded one another. "Buttud Toce!" he said. "You go and mess up them callers and then you try and stuff me up with Buttud Toce! Buttud Toce indeed! 'Ere's our first chance of knowing anyone that's at all fit to 'sociate with----. Look 'ere, Ann! Tell you what it is--you got to return that call." "Return that call!" "Yes, you got to return that call. That's what you got to do! I know----" He waved his arm vaguely towards the miscellany of books in the recess. "It's in Manners and Rools of Good S'ity. You got to find jest 'ow many cards to leave and you got to go and leave 'em. See?" Ann's face expressed terror. "But, Artie, 'ow _can_ I?" "'Ow _can_ you? 'Ow _could_ you? You got to do it, any'ow. They won't know you--not in your Bond Street 'at! If they do, they won't say nothing." His voice assumed a note of entreaty. "You mus', Ann." "I can't." "You mus'." "I can't and I won't. Anything in reason I'll do, but face those people again I can't--after what 'as 'appened." "You won't?" "No!"... "So there they go--orf! And we never see them again! And so it goes on! So it goes on! We don't know nobody and we _shan't_ know anybody! And you won't put yourself out not a little bit, or take the trouble to find out anything 'ow it ought to be done." Terrible pause. "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie, that's the troof." "Oh! _don't_ go into that." "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie. I'm not equal to the position. If you 'adn't said you'd drown yourself----" She choked. "I don' see why you shouldn't _try_, Ann. _I've_ improved. Why don't you? 'Stead of which you go sending out the servant and 'namelling floors, and then when visitors come----" "'Ow was _I_ to know about y'r old visitors?" cried Ann in a wail, and suddenly got up and fled from amidst their ruined tea, the tea of which "toce, all buttery," was to be the crown and glory. Kipps watched her with a momentary consternation. Then he hardened his heart. "Ought to 'ave known better," he said, "goin' on like that!" He remained for a space rubbing his knees and muttering. He emitted scornfully: "I carn't an' I won't." He saw her as the source of all his shames. Presently, quite mechanically, he stooped down and lifted the flowery china cover. "Ter dash 'er Buttud Toce!" he shouted at the sight of it, and clapped the cover down again hard.... When Gwendolen came back she perceived things were in a slightly unusual poise. Kipps sat by the fire in a rigid attitude reading a casually selected volume of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and Ann was upstairs and inaccessible--to reappear at a later stage with reddened eyes. Before the fire and still in a perfectly assimilable condition was what was evidently an untouched supply of richly buttered toast under a cracked cover. "They've 'ad a bit of a tiff," said Gwendolen, attending to her duties in the kitchen, with her outdoor hat still on and her mouth full. "They're rummuns--if ever! My eye!" And she took another piece of Ann's generously buttered toast. 4 The Kippses spoke no more that day to one another. The squabble about cards and buttered toast was as serious to them as the most rational of differences. It was all rational to them. Their sense of wrong burnt within them; their sense of what was owing to themselves, the duty of implacability, the obstinacy of pride. In the small hours Kipps lay awake at the nadir of unhappiness and came near groaning. He saw life as an extraordinarily desolating muddle; his futile house, his social discredit, his bad behaviour to Helen, his low marriage to Ann.... He became aware of something irregular in Ann's breathing.... He listened. She was awake and quietly and privately sobbing! He hardened his heart; resolutely he hardened his heart. The stupid little tragedies of these clipped and limited lives! What is the good of keeping up the idyllic sham and pretending that ill-educated, misdirected people "get along very well," and that all this is harmlessly funny and nothing more? You think I'm going to write fat, silly, grinning novels about half-educated, under-trained people and keep it up all the time, that the whole thing's nothing but funny! As I think of them lying unhappily there in the darkness, my vision pierces the night. See what I can see! Above them, brooding over them, I tell you there is a monster, a lumpish monster, like some great, clumsy griffin thing, like the Crystal Palace labyrinthodon, like Coote, like the leaden goddess Dulness Pope Abhorred, like some fat, proud flunkey, like pride, like indolence, like all that is darkening and heavy and obstructive in life. It is matter and darkness, it is the anti-soul, Stupidity. My Kippses live in its shadow. Shalford and his apprenticeship system, the Hastings Academy, the ideas of Coote, the ideas of the old Kippses, all the ideas that have made Kipps what he is, all these are its shadow. But for that monster they might not be groping among false ideas and hurt one another so sorely and so stupidly; but for that, the glowing promise of childhood and youth might have had a happier fruition, thought might have awakened in them to meet _the_ thought of the world, the quickening sunshine of literature pierced to the substance of their souls, their lives might not have been divorced, as now they are divorced for ever, from the apprehension of beauty that we favoured ones are given--the vision of the Grail that makes life fine for ever. I have laughed, and I laugh at these two people; I have sought to make you laugh.... But I see through the darkness the souls of my Kippses, as they are, as little pink strips of living stuff, like the bodies of little, ill-nourished, ailing, ignorant children, children who feel pain, who are naughty and muddled and suffer and do not understand why. And the claw of this Beast rests upon them! CHAPTER III TERMINATIONS 1 Next morning came a remarkable telegram from Folkestone. "Please come at once, urgent, Walshingham," said the telegram, and Kipps, after an agitated but still ample breakfast, departed.... When he returned his face was very white and his countenance disordered. He let himself in with his latchkey and came into the dining-room where Ann sat, affecting to work at a little thing she called a bib. She heard his hat fall in the hall before he entered, as though he had missed the peg. "I got something to tell you, Ann," he said, disregarding their overnight quarrel, and went to the hearthrug and took hold of the mantel, and stared at Ann as though the sight of her was novel. "Well?" said Ann, not looking up and working a little faster. "'E's gone!" Ann looked up sharply and her hands stopped. "_Who's_ gone?" For the first time she perceived Kipps' pallor. "Young Walshingham--I saw 'er and she tole me." "Gone? What d'you mean?" "Cleared out! Gone off for good!" "What for?" "For 'is 'ealth," said Kipps, with sudden bitterness. "'E's been speckylating. He's speckylated our money and 'e's speckylated their money, and now 'e's took 'is 'ook. That's all about it, Ann." "You mean?" "I mean 'e's orf and our twenty-four thousand's orf, too! And 'ere we are! Smashed up! That's all about it, Ann." He panted. Ann had no vocabulary for such an occasion. "Oh, Lor'!" she said, and sat still. Kipps came about and stuck his hands deeply in his trouser pockets. "Speckylated every penny--lorst it all--and gorn." Even his lips were white. "You mean we ain't got nothin' left, Artie?" "Not a penny! Not a bloomin' penny, Ann. No!" A gust of passion whirled across the soul of Kipps. He flung out a knuckly fist. "If I 'ad 'im 'ere," he said, "I'd--I'd--I'd wring 'is neck for 'im. I'd--I'd----" His voice rose to a shout. He thought of Gwendolen in the kitchen and fell to "Ugh!" "But, Artie," said Ann, trying to grasp it, "d'you mean to say he's took our money?" "Speckylated it!" said Kipps, with an illustrative flourish of the arm, that failed to illustrate. "Bort things dear and sold 'em cheap, and played the 'ankey-pankey jackass with everything we got. That's what I mean 'e's done, Ann." He repeated this last sentence with the addition of violent adverbs. "D'you mean to say our money's _gone_, Artie?" "Ter-dash it, _Yes_, Ann!" swore Kipps, exploding in a shout. "Ain't I tellin' you?" He was immediately sorry. "I didn't mean to 'oller at you, Ann," he said, "but I'm all shook up. I don't 'ardly know what I'm sayin'. Ev'ry penny."... "But, Artie----" Kipps grunted. He went to the window and stared for a moment at a sunlit sea. "Gord!" he swore. "I mean," he said, coming back to Ann and with an air of exasperation, "that he's 'bezzled and 'ooked it. That's what I mean, Ann." Ann put down the bib. "But wot are we going to _do_, Artie?" Kipps indicated ignorance, wrath and despair with one comprehensive gesture of his hands. He caught an ornament from the mantel and replaced it. "I'm going to bang about," he said, "if I ain't precious careful." "You saw _'er_, you say?" "Yes." "What did she say 'xactly?" said Ann. "Told me to see a s'licitor--tole me to get someone to 'elp me at once. She was there in black--like she used to be--and speaking cool and careful-like. 'Elen!... She's precious 'ard, is 'Elen. She looked at me straight. 'It's my fault,' she said, 'I ought to 'ave warned you.... Only under the circumstances it was a little difficult.' Straight as anything. I didn't 'ardly say anything to 'er. I didn't seem to begin to take it in until she was showing me out. I 'adn't anything to say. Jest as well, perhaps. She talked like a call a'most. She said--what _was_ it she said about her mother? 'My mother's overcome with grief,' she said, 'so naturally everything comes on me.'" "And she told you to get someone to 'elp you?" "Yes. I been to old Bean." "O' Bean?" "Yes. What I took my business away from!" "What did he say?" "He was a bit off'and at first, but then 'e come 'round. He couldn't tell me anything till 'e knew the facts. What I know of young Walshingham, there won't be much 'elp in the facts. No!" He reflected for a space. "It's a smash-up, Ann. More likely than not, Ann, 'e's left us over'ead in debt. We got to get out of it just 'ow we can.... "We got to begin again," he went on. "_'Ow_, I don't know. All the way 'ome my 'ead's been going. We got to get a living some'ow or other. 'Aving time to ourselves, and a bit of money to spend, and no hurry and worry, it's all over for ever, Ann. We was fools, Ann. We didn't know our benefits. We been caught. Gord!... Gord!" He was on the verge of "banging about" again. They heard a jingle in the passage, the large soft impact of a servant's indoor boots. As if she were a part, a mitigatory part of Fate, came Gwendolen to lay the midday meal. Kipps displayed self-control forthwith. Ann picked up the bib again and bent over it, and the Kippses bore themselves gloomily perhaps, but not despairfully, while their dependant was in the room. She spread the cloth and put out the cutlery with a slow inaccuracy, and Kipps, after a whisper to himself, went again to the window. Ann got up and put away her work methodically in the cheffonier. "When I think," said Kipps, as soon as the door closed again behind Gwendolen, "when I think of the 'ole people and 'aving to tell 'em of it all--I want to smesh my 'ead against the nearest wall. Smesh my silly brains out! And Buggins--Buggins what I'd 'arf promised to start in a lill' outfitting shop in Rendezvous Street."... Gwendolen returned and restored dignity. The midday meal spread itself slowly before them. Gwendolen, after her custom, left the door open and Kipps closed it carefully before sitting down. He stood for a moment, regarding the meal doubtfully. "I don't feel as if I could swaller a moufful," he said. "You got to eat," said Ann.... For a time they said little, and once swallowing was achieved, ate on with a sort of melancholy appetite. Each was now busy thinking. "After all," said Kipps, presently, "whatever 'appens, they can't turn us out or sell us up before nex' quarter-day. I'm pretty sure about that." "Sell us up!" said Ann. "I dessey we're bankrup'," said Kipps, trying to say it easily and helping himself with a trembling hand to unnecessary potatoes. Then a long silence. Ann ceased to eat, and there were silent tears. "More potatoes, Artie?" choked Ann. "I couldn't," said Kipps. "No." He pushed back his plate, which was indeed replete with potatoes, got up and walked about the room. Even the dinner-table looked distraught and unusual. "What to do, I _don't_ know," he said. "Oh, _Lord_!" he ejaculated, and picked up and slapped down a book. Then his eye fell upon another postcard that had come from Chitterlow by the morning's post, and which now lay by him on the mantel-shelf. He took it up, glanced at its imperfectly legible message, and put it down. "Delayed!" he said, scornfully. "Not prodooced in the smalls. Or is it smells 'e says? 'Ow can one understand that? Any'ow 'e's 'umbugging again.... Somefing about the Strand. No! Well, 'e's 'ad all the money 'e'll ever get out of me!... I'm done." He seemed to find a momentary relief in the dramatic effect of his announcement. He came near to a swagger of despair upon the hearthrug, and then suddenly came and sat down next to Ann and rested his chin on the knuckles of his two clenched hands. "I been a fool, Ann," he said in a gloomy monotone. "I been a brasted fool. But it's 'ard on us, all the same. It's 'ard." "'Ow was you to know?" said Ann. "I ought to 'ave known. I did in a sort of way know. And 'ere we are! I wouldn't care so much if it was myself, but it's _you_, Ann! 'Ere we are! Regular smashed up! And you----" He checked at an unspeakable aggravation of their disaster. "I knew 'e wasn't to be depended upon and there I left it! And you got to pay.... What's to 'appen to us all, I don't know." He thrust out his chin and glared at fate. "'Ow do you know 'e's speckylated everything?" said Ann, after a silent survey of him. "'E 'as," said Kipps, irritably, holding firm to disaster. "She say so?" "She don't know, of course, but you depend upon it that's it. She told me she knew something was on, and when she found 'im gone and a note lef' for her she knew it was up with 'im. 'E went by the night boat. She wrote that telegram off to me straight away." Ann surveyed his features with tender, perplexed eyes; she had never seen him so white and drawn before, and her hand rested an inch or so away from his arm. The actual loss was still, as it were, afar from her. The immediate thing was his enormous distress. "'Ow do you know----?" she said and stopped. It would irritate him too much. Kipps' imagination was going headlong. "Sold up!" he emitted presently, and Ann flinched. "Going back to work, day after day--I can't stand it, Ann, I can't. And you----" "It don't do to think of it," said Ann. Presently he came upon a resolve. "I keep on thinking of it, and thinking of it, and what's to be done and what's to be done. I shan't be any good 'ome s'arfernoon. It keeps on going 'round and 'round in my 'ead, and 'round and 'round. I better go for a walk or something. I'd be no comfort to you, Ann. I should want to 'owl and 'ammer things if I 'ung about 'ome. My fingers is all atwitch. I shall keep on thinking 'ow I might 'ave stopped it and callin' myself a fool."... He looked at her between pleading and shame. It seemed like deserting her. Ann regarded him with tear-dimmed eyes. "You'd better do what's good for you, Artie," she said.... "_I'll_ be best cleaning. It's no use sending off Gwendolen before her month, and the top room wants turning out." She added with a sort of grim humour: "May as well turn it out now while I got it." "I _better_ go for a walk," said Kipps.... And presently our poor exploded Kipps was marching out to bear his sudden misery. Habit turned him up the road towards his growing house, and then suddenly he perceived his direction--"Oh, Lor'!"--and turned aside and went up the steep way to the hill crest and the Sandling Road, and over the line by that tree-embowered Junction, and athwart the wide fields towards Postling--a little, black, marching figure--and so up the Downs and over the hills, whither he had never gone before.... 2 He came back long after dark, and Ann met him in the passage. "Where you been, Artie?" she asked, with a strained note in her voice. "I been walking and walking--trying to tire myself out. All the time I been thinking what shall I do. Trying to fix something up all out of nothing." "I didn't know you meant to be out all this time." Kipps was gripped by compunction.... "I can't think what we ought to do," he said, presently. "You can't do anything much, Artie, not till you hear from Mr. Bean." "No; I can't do anything much. That's jest it. And all this time I keep feelin' if I don't do something the top of my 'ead'll bust.... Been trying to make up advertisements 'arf the time I been out--'bout finding a place, good salesman and stock-keeper, and good Manchester dresses, window-dressing--Lor'! Fancy that all beginning again!... If you went to stay with Sid a bit--if I sent every penny I got to you--I dunno! I dunno!" When they had gone to bed there was an elaborate attempt to get to sleep.... In one of their great waking pauses Kipps remarked in a muffled tone: "I didn't mean to frighten you, Ann, being out so late. I kep' on walking and walking, and some'ow it seemed to do me good. I went out to the 'illtop ever so far beyond Stanford, and sat there ever so long, and it seemed to make me better. Just looking over the marsh like, and seeing the sun set."... "Very likely," said Ann, after a long interval, "it isn't so bad as you think it is, Artie." "It's bad," said Kipps. "Very likely, after all, it isn't quite so bad. If there's only a little----" There came another long silence. "Ann," said Kipps in the quiet darkness. "Yes," said Ann. "Ann," said Kipps, and stopped as though he had hastily shut a door upon speech. "I kep' thinking," he said, trying again, "I kep' thinking--after all--I been cross to you and a fool about things--about them cards, Ann; but"--his voice shook to pieces--"we _'ave_ been 'appy, Ann ... some'ow ... togever." And with that he and then she fell into a passion of weeping. They clung very tightly together--closer than they had been since ever the first brightness of their married days turned to the grey of common life again. All the disaster in the world could not prevent their going to sleep at last with their poor little troubled heads close together on one pillow. There was nothing more to be done, there was nothing more to be thought; Time might go on with his mischiefs, but for a little while at least they still had one another. 3 Kipps returned from his second interview with Mr. Bean in a state of strange excitement. He let himself in with his latch-key and slammed the door. "Ann!" he shouted, in an unusual note; "Ann!" Ann replied distantly. "Something to tell you," said Kipps; "something noo!" Ann appeared apprehensive from the kitchen. "Ann," he said, going before her into the little dining-room, for his news was too dignified for the passage, "very likely, Ann, o' Bean says, we shall 'ave----" He decided to prolong the suspense. "Guess!" "I can't, Artie." "Think of a lot of money!" "A 'undred pounds p'raps?" He spoke with immense deliberation. "O v e r a f o u s a n d p o u n d s!" Ann stared and said nothing, only went a shade whiter. "Over, he said. A'most certainly over." He shut the dining-room door and came forward hastily, for Ann, it was clear, meant to take this mitigation of their disaster with a complete abandonment of her self-control. She came near flopping; she fell into his arms. "Artie," she got to at last and began to weep, clinging tightly to him. "Pretty near certain," said Kipps, holding her. "A fousand pounds!" "I _said_, Artie," she wailed on his shoulder with the note of accumulated wrongs, "very likely it wasn't so bad."... "There's things," he said, when presently he came to particulars, "'e couldn't touch. The noo place! It's freehold and paid for, and with the bit of building on it, there's five or six 'undred pound p'raps--say worf free 'undred, for safety. We can't be sold up to finish it, like we thought. O' Bean says we can very likely sell it and get money. 'E says you often get a chance to sell a 'ouse lessen 'arf done, 'specially free'old. _Very_ likely, 'e say. Then there's Hughenden. Hughenden 'asn't been mortgaged not for more than 'arf its value. There's a 'undred or so to be got on that, and the furniture and the rent for the summer still coming in. 'E says there's very likely other things. A fousand pounds, that's what 'e said. 'E said it might even be more."... They were sitting now at the table. "It alters everything," said Ann. "I been thinking that, Ann, all the way 'ome. I came in the motor car. First ride I've 'ad since the smash. We needn't send off Gwendolen, leastways not till _after_. You know. We needn't turn out of 'ere--not for a long time. What we been doing for the o' people we can go on doing a'most as much. And your mother!... I wanted to 'oller coming along. I pretty near run coming down the road by the hotel." "Oh, I _am_ glad we can stop 'ere and be comfortable a bit," said Ann. "I _am_ glad for that." "I pretty near told the driver on the motor--only 'e was the sort won't talk.... You see, Ann, we'll be able to start a shop, we'll be able to get _into_ something like. All about our 'aving to go back to places and that; all that doesn't matter any more." For a while they abandoned themselves to ejaculating transports. Then they fell talking to shape an idea to themselves of the new prospect that opened before them. "We must start a sort of shop," said Kipps, whose imagination had been working. "It'll 'ave to be a shop." "Drapery?" said Ann. "You want such a lot of capital for the drapery, mor'n a thousand pounds you want by a long way--to start it anything like proper." "Well, outfitting. Like Buggins was going to do." Kipps glanced at that for a moment, because the idea had not occurred to him. Then he came back to his prepossession. "Well, I thought of something else, Ann," he said. "You see, I've always thought a little book-shop. It isn't like the drapery--'aving to be learnt. I thought--even before this smash-up--'ow I'd like to 'ave something to do, instead of always 'aving 'olidays always like we 'ave been 'aving." He reflected. "You don't know _much_ about books, do you, Artie?" "You don't want to." He illustrated. "I noticed when we used to go to that Lib'ry at Folkestone, ladies weren't anything like what they was in a draper's--if you 'aven't got _just_ what they want it's 'Oh, no!' and out they go. But in a book shop it's different. One book's very like another--after all, what is it? Something to read and done with. It's not a thing that matters like print dresses or serviettes--where you either like 'em or don't, and people judge you by. They take what you give 'em in books and lib'ries, and glad to be told _what_ to. See 'ow we was--up at that lib'ry."... He paused. "You see, Ann---- "Well, I read 'n 'dvertisement the other day. I been asking Mr. Bean. It said--five 'undred pounds." "What did?" "Branches," said Kipps. Ann failed to understand. "It's a sort of thing that gets up book shops all over the country," said Kipps. "I didn't tell you, but I arst about it a bit. On'y I dropped it again. Before this smash, I mean. I'd thought I'd like to keep a shop for a lark, on'y then I thought it silly. Besides it 'ud 'ave been beneath me." He blushed vividly. "It was a sort of projek of mine, Ann. "On'y it wouldn't 'ave done," he added. It was a tortuous journey when the Kippses set out to explain anything to each other. But through a maze of fragmentary elucidations and questions, their minds did presently begin to approximate to a picture of a compact, bright, little shop, as a framework for themselves. "I thought of it one day when I was in Folkestone. I thought of it one day when I was looking in at a window. I see a chap dressin' a window and he was whistlin' reg'lar light-'arted.... I thought then I'd like to keep a bookshop, any'ow, jest for something to do. And when people weren't about, then you could sit and read the books. See? It wouldn't be 'arf bad."... They mused, each with elbows on table and knuckles to lips, looking with speculative eyes at each other. "Very likely we'll be 'appier than we should 'ave been with more money," said Kipps presently. "We wasn't 'ardly suited," reflected Ann, and left her sentence incomplete. "Fish out of water like," said Kipps.... "You won't 'ave to return that call now," said Kipps, opening a new branch of the question. "That's one good thing." "Lor'!" said Ann, visibly brightening, "no more I shan't!" "I don't s'pose they'd want you to, even if you did--with things as they are." A certain added brightness came into Ann's face. "Nobody won't be able to come leaving cards on us, Artie, now, any more. We are out of _that_!" "There isn't no necessity for us to be stuck up," said Kipps, "any more for ever! 'Ere we are, Ann, common people, with jest no position at all, as you might say, to keep up. No sev'nts, not if you don't like. No dressin' better than other people. If it wasn't we been robbed--dashed if I'd care a rap about losing that money. I b'lieve"--his face shone with the rare pleasure of paradox--"I reely b'lieve, Ann, it'll prove a savin' in the end." 4 The remarkable advertisement which had fired Kipps' imagination with this dream of a bookshop opened out in the most alluring way. It was one little facet in a comprehensive scheme of transatlantic origin, which was to make our old-world methods of book-selling "sit up," and it displayed an imaginative briskness, a lucidity and promise that aroused the profoundest scepticism in the mind of Mr. Bean. To Kipps' renewed investigations it presented itself in an expository illustrated pamphlet (far too well printed, Mr. Bean thought, for a reputable undertaking) of the most convincing sort. Mr. Bean would not let him sink his capital in shares in its projected company that was to make all things new in the world of books, but he could not prevent Kipps becoming one of their associated booksellers. And so when presently it became apparent that an epoch was not to be made, and the "Associated Booksellers' Trading Union (Limited)" receded and dissolved and liquidated (a few drops) and vanished and went away to talk about something else, Kipps remained floating undamaged in this interestingly uncertain universe as an independent bookseller. Except that it failed, the Associated Booksellers' Trading Union had all the stigmata of success. Its fault, perhaps, was that it had them all instead of only one or two. It was to buy wholesale for all

s'licitor

How many times the word 's'licitor' appears in the text?

you go and slap 'em in the face!" "I didn't slap 'em in the face." "You do--practically. You slams the door in their face, and that's all we see of 'em ever. I wouldn't 'ave 'ad this 'appen not for a ten-pound note." He rounded his regrets with a grunt. For a while there was silence, save for the little stir of Ann's movements preparing the tea. "Tea, Artie," said Ann, handing him a cup. Kipps took it. "I put sugar _once_," said Ann. "Oo, dash it! Oo cares?" said Kipps, taking an extraordinarily large additional lump with fury quivering fingers, and putting his cup with a slight excess of force on the recess cupboard. "Oo cares? "I wouldn't 'ave 'ad that 'appen," he said, bidding steadily against accomplished things, "for twenty pounds." He gloomed in silence through a long minute or so. Then Ann said the fatal thing that exploded him. "Artie!" she said. "What?" "There's Buttud Toce down there! By your foot!" There was a pause, husband and wife regarded one another. "Buttud Toce!" he said. "You go and mess up them callers and then you try and stuff me up with Buttud Toce! Buttud Toce indeed! 'Ere's our first chance of knowing anyone that's at all fit to 'sociate with----. Look 'ere, Ann! Tell you what it is--you got to return that call." "Return that call!" "Yes, you got to return that call. That's what you got to do! I know----" He waved his arm vaguely towards the miscellany of books in the recess. "It's in Manners and Rools of Good S'ity. You got to find jest 'ow many cards to leave and you got to go and leave 'em. See?" Ann's face expressed terror. "But, Artie, 'ow _can_ I?" "'Ow _can_ you? 'Ow _could_ you? You got to do it, any'ow. They won't know you--not in your Bond Street 'at! If they do, they won't say nothing." His voice assumed a note of entreaty. "You mus', Ann." "I can't." "You mus'." "I can't and I won't. Anything in reason I'll do, but face those people again I can't--after what 'as 'appened." "You won't?" "No!"... "So there they go--orf! And we never see them again! And so it goes on! So it goes on! We don't know nobody and we _shan't_ know anybody! And you won't put yourself out not a little bit, or take the trouble to find out anything 'ow it ought to be done." Terrible pause. "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie, that's the troof." "Oh! _don't_ go into that." "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie. I'm not equal to the position. If you 'adn't said you'd drown yourself----" She choked. "I don' see why you shouldn't _try_, Ann. _I've_ improved. Why don't you? 'Stead of which you go sending out the servant and 'namelling floors, and then when visitors come----" "'Ow was _I_ to know about y'r old visitors?" cried Ann in a wail, and suddenly got up and fled from amidst their ruined tea, the tea of which "toce, all buttery," was to be the crown and glory. Kipps watched her with a momentary consternation. Then he hardened his heart. "Ought to 'ave known better," he said, "goin' on like that!" He remained for a space rubbing his knees and muttering. He emitted scornfully: "I carn't an' I won't." He saw her as the source of all his shames. Presently, quite mechanically, he stooped down and lifted the flowery china cover. "Ter dash 'er Buttud Toce!" he shouted at the sight of it, and clapped the cover down again hard.... When Gwendolen came back she perceived things were in a slightly unusual poise. Kipps sat by the fire in a rigid attitude reading a casually selected volume of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and Ann was upstairs and inaccessible--to reappear at a later stage with reddened eyes. Before the fire and still in a perfectly assimilable condition was what was evidently an untouched supply of richly buttered toast under a cracked cover. "They've 'ad a bit of a tiff," said Gwendolen, attending to her duties in the kitchen, with her outdoor hat still on and her mouth full. "They're rummuns--if ever! My eye!" And she took another piece of Ann's generously buttered toast. 4 The Kippses spoke no more that day to one another. The squabble about cards and buttered toast was as serious to them as the most rational of differences. It was all rational to them. Their sense of wrong burnt within them; their sense of what was owing to themselves, the duty of implacability, the obstinacy of pride. In the small hours Kipps lay awake at the nadir of unhappiness and came near groaning. He saw life as an extraordinarily desolating muddle; his futile house, his social discredit, his bad behaviour to Helen, his low marriage to Ann.... He became aware of something irregular in Ann's breathing.... He listened. She was awake and quietly and privately sobbing! He hardened his heart; resolutely he hardened his heart. The stupid little tragedies of these clipped and limited lives! What is the good of keeping up the idyllic sham and pretending that ill-educated, misdirected people "get along very well," and that all this is harmlessly funny and nothing more? You think I'm going to write fat, silly, grinning novels about half-educated, under-trained people and keep it up all the time, that the whole thing's nothing but funny! As I think of them lying unhappily there in the darkness, my vision pierces the night. See what I can see! Above them, brooding over them, I tell you there is a monster, a lumpish monster, like some great, clumsy griffin thing, like the Crystal Palace labyrinthodon, like Coote, like the leaden goddess Dulness Pope Abhorred, like some fat, proud flunkey, like pride, like indolence, like all that is darkening and heavy and obstructive in life. It is matter and darkness, it is the anti-soul, Stupidity. My Kippses live in its shadow. Shalford and his apprenticeship system, the Hastings Academy, the ideas of Coote, the ideas of the old Kippses, all the ideas that have made Kipps what he is, all these are its shadow. But for that monster they might not be groping among false ideas and hurt one another so sorely and so stupidly; but for that, the glowing promise of childhood and youth might have had a happier fruition, thought might have awakened in them to meet _the_ thought of the world, the quickening sunshine of literature pierced to the substance of their souls, their lives might not have been divorced, as now they are divorced for ever, from the apprehension of beauty that we favoured ones are given--the vision of the Grail that makes life fine for ever. I have laughed, and I laugh at these two people; I have sought to make you laugh.... But I see through the darkness the souls of my Kippses, as they are, as little pink strips of living stuff, like the bodies of little, ill-nourished, ailing, ignorant children, children who feel pain, who are naughty and muddled and suffer and do not understand why. And the claw of this Beast rests upon them! CHAPTER III TERMINATIONS 1 Next morning came a remarkable telegram from Folkestone. "Please come at once, urgent, Walshingham," said the telegram, and Kipps, after an agitated but still ample breakfast, departed.... When he returned his face was very white and his countenance disordered. He let himself in with his latchkey and came into the dining-room where Ann sat, affecting to work at a little thing she called a bib. She heard his hat fall in the hall before he entered, as though he had missed the peg. "I got something to tell you, Ann," he said, disregarding their overnight quarrel, and went to the hearthrug and took hold of the mantel, and stared at Ann as though the sight of her was novel. "Well?" said Ann, not looking up and working a little faster. "'E's gone!" Ann looked up sharply and her hands stopped. "_Who's_ gone?" For the first time she perceived Kipps' pallor. "Young Walshingham--I saw 'er and she tole me." "Gone? What d'you mean?" "Cleared out! Gone off for good!" "What for?" "For 'is 'ealth," said Kipps, with sudden bitterness. "'E's been speckylating. He's speckylated our money and 'e's speckylated their money, and now 'e's took 'is 'ook. That's all about it, Ann." "You mean?" "I mean 'e's orf and our twenty-four thousand's orf, too! And 'ere we are! Smashed up! That's all about it, Ann." He panted. Ann had no vocabulary for such an occasion. "Oh, Lor'!" she said, and sat still. Kipps came about and stuck his hands deeply in his trouser pockets. "Speckylated every penny--lorst it all--and gorn." Even his lips were white. "You mean we ain't got nothin' left, Artie?" "Not a penny! Not a bloomin' penny, Ann. No!" A gust of passion whirled across the soul of Kipps. He flung out a knuckly fist. "If I 'ad 'im 'ere," he said, "I'd--I'd--I'd wring 'is neck for 'im. I'd--I'd----" His voice rose to a shout. He thought of Gwendolen in the kitchen and fell to "Ugh!" "But, Artie," said Ann, trying to grasp it, "d'you mean to say he's took our money?" "Speckylated it!" said Kipps, with an illustrative flourish of the arm, that failed to illustrate. "Bort things dear and sold 'em cheap, and played the 'ankey-pankey jackass with everything we got. That's what I mean 'e's done, Ann." He repeated this last sentence with the addition of violent adverbs. "D'you mean to say our money's _gone_, Artie?" "Ter-dash it, _Yes_, Ann!" swore Kipps, exploding in a shout. "Ain't I tellin' you?" He was immediately sorry. "I didn't mean to 'oller at you, Ann," he said, "but I'm all shook up. I don't 'ardly know what I'm sayin'. Ev'ry penny."... "But, Artie----" Kipps grunted. He went to the window and stared for a moment at a sunlit sea. "Gord!" he swore. "I mean," he said, coming back to Ann and with an air of exasperation, "that he's 'bezzled and 'ooked it. That's what I mean, Ann." Ann put down the bib. "But wot are we going to _do_, Artie?" Kipps indicated ignorance, wrath and despair with one comprehensive gesture of his hands. He caught an ornament from the mantel and replaced it. "I'm going to bang about," he said, "if I ain't precious careful." "You saw _'er_, you say?" "Yes." "What did she say 'xactly?" said Ann. "Told me to see a s'licitor--tole me to get someone to 'elp me at once. She was there in black--like she used to be--and speaking cool and careful-like. 'Elen!... She's precious 'ard, is 'Elen. She looked at me straight. 'It's my fault,' she said, 'I ought to 'ave warned you.... Only under the circumstances it was a little difficult.' Straight as anything. I didn't 'ardly say anything to 'er. I didn't seem to begin to take it in until she was showing me out. I 'adn't anything to say. Jest as well, perhaps. She talked like a call a'most. She said--what _was_ it she said about her mother? 'My mother's overcome with grief,' she said, 'so naturally everything comes on me.'" "And she told you to get someone to 'elp you?" "Yes. I been to old Bean." "O' Bean?" "Yes. What I took my business away from!" "What did he say?" "He was a bit off'and at first, but then 'e come 'round. He couldn't tell me anything till 'e knew the facts. What I know of young Walshingham, there won't be much 'elp in the facts. No!" He reflected for a space. "It's a smash-up, Ann. More likely than not, Ann, 'e's left us over'ead in debt. We got to get out of it just 'ow we can.... "We got to begin again," he went on. "_'Ow_, I don't know. All the way 'ome my 'ead's been going. We got to get a living some'ow or other. 'Aving time to ourselves, and a bit of money to spend, and no hurry and worry, it's all over for ever, Ann. We was fools, Ann. We didn't know our benefits. We been caught. Gord!... Gord!" He was on the verge of "banging about" again. They heard a jingle in the passage, the large soft impact of a servant's indoor boots. As if she were a part, a mitigatory part of Fate, came Gwendolen to lay the midday meal. Kipps displayed self-control forthwith. Ann picked up the bib again and bent over it, and the Kippses bore themselves gloomily perhaps, but not despairfully, while their dependant was in the room. She spread the cloth and put out the cutlery with a slow inaccuracy, and Kipps, after a whisper to himself, went again to the window. Ann got up and put away her work methodically in the cheffonier. "When I think," said Kipps, as soon as the door closed again behind Gwendolen, "when I think of the 'ole people and 'aving to tell 'em of it all--I want to smesh my 'ead against the nearest wall. Smesh my silly brains out! And Buggins--Buggins what I'd 'arf promised to start in a lill' outfitting shop in Rendezvous Street."... Gwendolen returned and restored dignity. The midday meal spread itself slowly before them. Gwendolen, after her custom, left the door open and Kipps closed it carefully before sitting down. He stood for a moment, regarding the meal doubtfully. "I don't feel as if I could swaller a moufful," he said. "You got to eat," said Ann.... For a time they said little, and once swallowing was achieved, ate on with a sort of melancholy appetite. Each was now busy thinking. "After all," said Kipps, presently, "whatever 'appens, they can't turn us out or sell us up before nex' quarter-day. I'm pretty sure about that." "Sell us up!" said Ann. "I dessey we're bankrup'," said Kipps, trying to say it easily and helping himself with a trembling hand to unnecessary potatoes. Then a long silence. Ann ceased to eat, and there were silent tears. "More potatoes, Artie?" choked Ann. "I couldn't," said Kipps. "No." He pushed back his plate, which was indeed replete with potatoes, got up and walked about the room. Even the dinner-table looked distraught and unusual. "What to do, I _don't_ know," he said. "Oh, _Lord_!" he ejaculated, and picked up and slapped down a book. Then his eye fell upon another postcard that had come from Chitterlow by the morning's post, and which now lay by him on the mantel-shelf. He took it up, glanced at its imperfectly legible message, and put it down. "Delayed!" he said, scornfully. "Not prodooced in the smalls. Or is it smells 'e says? 'Ow can one understand that? Any'ow 'e's 'umbugging again.... Somefing about the Strand. No! Well, 'e's 'ad all the money 'e'll ever get out of me!... I'm done." He seemed to find a momentary relief in the dramatic effect of his announcement. He came near to a swagger of despair upon the hearthrug, and then suddenly came and sat down next to Ann and rested his chin on the knuckles of his two clenched hands. "I been a fool, Ann," he said in a gloomy monotone. "I been a brasted fool. But it's 'ard on us, all the same. It's 'ard." "'Ow was you to know?" said Ann. "I ought to 'ave known. I did in a sort of way know. And 'ere we are! I wouldn't care so much if it was myself, but it's _you_, Ann! 'Ere we are! Regular smashed up! And you----" He checked at an unspeakable aggravation of their disaster. "I knew 'e wasn't to be depended upon and there I left it! And you got to pay.... What's to 'appen to us all, I don't know." He thrust out his chin and glared at fate. "'Ow do you know 'e's speckylated everything?" said Ann, after a silent survey of him. "'E 'as," said Kipps, irritably, holding firm to disaster. "She say so?" "She don't know, of course, but you depend upon it that's it. She told me she knew something was on, and when she found 'im gone and a note lef' for her she knew it was up with 'im. 'E went by the night boat. She wrote that telegram off to me straight away." Ann surveyed his features with tender, perplexed eyes; she had never seen him so white and drawn before, and her hand rested an inch or so away from his arm. The actual loss was still, as it were, afar from her. The immediate thing was his enormous distress. "'Ow do you know----?" she said and stopped. It would irritate him too much. Kipps' imagination was going headlong. "Sold up!" he emitted presently, and Ann flinched. "Going back to work, day after day--I can't stand it, Ann, I can't. And you----" "It don't do to think of it," said Ann. Presently he came upon a resolve. "I keep on thinking of it, and thinking of it, and what's to be done and what's to be done. I shan't be any good 'ome s'arfernoon. It keeps on going 'round and 'round in my 'ead, and 'round and 'round. I better go for a walk or something. I'd be no comfort to you, Ann. I should want to 'owl and 'ammer things if I 'ung about 'ome. My fingers is all atwitch. I shall keep on thinking 'ow I might 'ave stopped it and callin' myself a fool."... He looked at her between pleading and shame. It seemed like deserting her. Ann regarded him with tear-dimmed eyes. "You'd better do what's good for you, Artie," she said.... "_I'll_ be best cleaning. It's no use sending off Gwendolen before her month, and the top room wants turning out." She added with a sort of grim humour: "May as well turn it out now while I got it." "I _better_ go for a walk," said Kipps.... And presently our poor exploded Kipps was marching out to bear his sudden misery. Habit turned him up the road towards his growing house, and then suddenly he perceived his direction--"Oh, Lor'!"--and turned aside and went up the steep way to the hill crest and the Sandling Road, and over the line by that tree-embowered Junction, and athwart the wide fields towards Postling--a little, black, marching figure--and so up the Downs and over the hills, whither he had never gone before.... 2 He came back long after dark, and Ann met him in the passage. "Where you been, Artie?" she asked, with a strained note in her voice. "I been walking and walking--trying to tire myself out. All the time I been thinking what shall I do. Trying to fix something up all out of nothing." "I didn't know you meant to be out all this time." Kipps was gripped by compunction.... "I can't think what we ought to do," he said, presently. "You can't do anything much, Artie, not till you hear from Mr. Bean." "No; I can't do anything much. That's jest it. And all this time I keep feelin' if I don't do something the top of my 'ead'll bust.... Been trying to make up advertisements 'arf the time I been out--'bout finding a place, good salesman and stock-keeper, and good Manchester dresses, window-dressing--Lor'! Fancy that all beginning again!... If you went to stay with Sid a bit--if I sent every penny I got to you--I dunno! I dunno!" When they had gone to bed there was an elaborate attempt to get to sleep.... In one of their great waking pauses Kipps remarked in a muffled tone: "I didn't mean to frighten you, Ann, being out so late. I kep' on walking and walking, and some'ow it seemed to do me good. I went out to the 'illtop ever so far beyond Stanford, and sat there ever so long, and it seemed to make me better. Just looking over the marsh like, and seeing the sun set."... "Very likely," said Ann, after a long interval, "it isn't so bad as you think it is, Artie." "It's bad," said Kipps. "Very likely, after all, it isn't quite so bad. If there's only a little----" There came another long silence. "Ann," said Kipps in the quiet darkness. "Yes," said Ann. "Ann," said Kipps, and stopped as though he had hastily shut a door upon speech. "I kep' thinking," he said, trying again, "I kep' thinking--after all--I been cross to you and a fool about things--about them cards, Ann; but"--his voice shook to pieces--"we _'ave_ been 'appy, Ann ... some'ow ... togever." And with that he and then she fell into a passion of weeping. They clung very tightly together--closer than they had been since ever the first brightness of their married days turned to the grey of common life again. All the disaster in the world could not prevent their going to sleep at last with their poor little troubled heads close together on one pillow. There was nothing more to be done, there was nothing more to be thought; Time might go on with his mischiefs, but for a little while at least they still had one another. 3 Kipps returned from his second interview with Mr. Bean in a state of strange excitement. He let himself in with his latch-key and slammed the door. "Ann!" he shouted, in an unusual note; "Ann!" Ann replied distantly. "Something to tell you," said Kipps; "something noo!" Ann appeared apprehensive from the kitchen. "Ann," he said, going before her into the little dining-room, for his news was too dignified for the passage, "very likely, Ann, o' Bean says, we shall 'ave----" He decided to prolong the suspense. "Guess!" "I can't, Artie." "Think of a lot of money!" "A 'undred pounds p'raps?" He spoke with immense deliberation. "O v e r a f o u s a n d p o u n d s!" Ann stared and said nothing, only went a shade whiter. "Over, he said. A'most certainly over." He shut the dining-room door and came forward hastily, for Ann, it was clear, meant to take this mitigation of their disaster with a complete abandonment of her self-control. She came near flopping; she fell into his arms. "Artie," she got to at last and began to weep, clinging tightly to him. "Pretty near certain," said Kipps, holding her. "A fousand pounds!" "I _said_, Artie," she wailed on his shoulder with the note of accumulated wrongs, "very likely it wasn't so bad."... "There's things," he said, when presently he came to particulars, "'e couldn't touch. The noo place! It's freehold and paid for, and with the bit of building on it, there's five or six 'undred pound p'raps--say worf free 'undred, for safety. We can't be sold up to finish it, like we thought. O' Bean says we can very likely sell it and get money. 'E says you often get a chance to sell a 'ouse lessen 'arf done, 'specially free'old. _Very_ likely, 'e say. Then there's Hughenden. Hughenden 'asn't been mortgaged not for more than 'arf its value. There's a 'undred or so to be got on that, and the furniture and the rent for the summer still coming in. 'E says there's very likely other things. A fousand pounds, that's what 'e said. 'E said it might even be more."... They were sitting now at the table. "It alters everything," said Ann. "I been thinking that, Ann, all the way 'ome. I came in the motor car. First ride I've 'ad since the smash. We needn't send off Gwendolen, leastways not till _after_. You know. We needn't turn out of 'ere--not for a long time. What we been doing for the o' people we can go on doing a'most as much. And your mother!... I wanted to 'oller coming along. I pretty near run coming down the road by the hotel." "Oh, I _am_ glad we can stop 'ere and be comfortable a bit," said Ann. "I _am_ glad for that." "I pretty near told the driver on the motor--only 'e was the sort won't talk.... You see, Ann, we'll be able to start a shop, we'll be able to get _into_ something like. All about our 'aving to go back to places and that; all that doesn't matter any more." For a while they abandoned themselves to ejaculating transports. Then they fell talking to shape an idea to themselves of the new prospect that opened before them. "We must start a sort of shop," said Kipps, whose imagination had been working. "It'll 'ave to be a shop." "Drapery?" said Ann. "You want such a lot of capital for the drapery, mor'n a thousand pounds you want by a long way--to start it anything like proper." "Well, outfitting. Like Buggins was going to do." Kipps glanced at that for a moment, because the idea had not occurred to him. Then he came back to his prepossession. "Well, I thought of something else, Ann," he said. "You see, I've always thought a little book-shop. It isn't like the drapery--'aving to be learnt. I thought--even before this smash-up--'ow I'd like to 'ave something to do, instead of always 'aving 'olidays always like we 'ave been 'aving." He reflected. "You don't know _much_ about books, do you, Artie?" "You don't want to." He illustrated. "I noticed when we used to go to that Lib'ry at Folkestone, ladies weren't anything like what they was in a draper's--if you 'aven't got _just_ what they want it's 'Oh, no!' and out they go. But in a book shop it's different. One book's very like another--after all, what is it? Something to read and done with. It's not a thing that matters like print dresses or serviettes--where you either like 'em or don't, and people judge you by. They take what you give 'em in books and lib'ries, and glad to be told _what_ to. See 'ow we was--up at that lib'ry."... He paused. "You see, Ann---- "Well, I read 'n 'dvertisement the other day. I been asking Mr. Bean. It said--five 'undred pounds." "What did?" "Branches," said Kipps. Ann failed to understand. "It's a sort of thing that gets up book shops all over the country," said Kipps. "I didn't tell you, but I arst about it a bit. On'y I dropped it again. Before this smash, I mean. I'd thought I'd like to keep a shop for a lark, on'y then I thought it silly. Besides it 'ud 'ave been beneath me." He blushed vividly. "It was a sort of projek of mine, Ann. "On'y it wouldn't 'ave done," he added. It was a tortuous journey when the Kippses set out to explain anything to each other. But through a maze of fragmentary elucidations and questions, their minds did presently begin to approximate to a picture of a compact, bright, little shop, as a framework for themselves. "I thought of it one day when I was in Folkestone. I thought of it one day when I was looking in at a window. I see a chap dressin' a window and he was whistlin' reg'lar light-'arted.... I thought then I'd like to keep a bookshop, any'ow, jest for something to do. And when people weren't about, then you could sit and read the books. See? It wouldn't be 'arf bad."... They mused, each with elbows on table and knuckles to lips, looking with speculative eyes at each other. "Very likely we'll be 'appier than we should 'ave been with more money," said Kipps presently. "We wasn't 'ardly suited," reflected Ann, and left her sentence incomplete. "Fish out of water like," said Kipps.... "You won't 'ave to return that call now," said Kipps, opening a new branch of the question. "That's one good thing." "Lor'!" said Ann, visibly brightening, "no more I shan't!" "I don't s'pose they'd want you to, even if you did--with things as they are." A certain added brightness came into Ann's face. "Nobody won't be able to come leaving cards on us, Artie, now, any more. We are out of _that_!" "There isn't no necessity for us to be stuck up," said Kipps, "any more for ever! 'Ere we are, Ann, common people, with jest no position at all, as you might say, to keep up. No sev'nts, not if you don't like. No dressin' better than other people. If it wasn't we been robbed--dashed if I'd care a rap about losing that money. I b'lieve"--his face shone with the rare pleasure of paradox--"I reely b'lieve, Ann, it'll prove a savin' in the end." 4 The remarkable advertisement which had fired Kipps' imagination with this dream of a bookshop opened out in the most alluring way. It was one little facet in a comprehensive scheme of transatlantic origin, which was to make our old-world methods of book-selling "sit up," and it displayed an imaginative briskness, a lucidity and promise that aroused the profoundest scepticism in the mind of Mr. Bean. To Kipps' renewed investigations it presented itself in an expository illustrated pamphlet (far too well printed, Mr. Bean thought, for a reputable undertaking) of the most convincing sort. Mr. Bean would not let him sink his capital in shares in its projected company that was to make all things new in the world of books, but he could not prevent Kipps becoming one of their associated booksellers. And so when presently it became apparent that an epoch was not to be made, and the "Associated Booksellers' Trading Union (Limited)" receded and dissolved and liquidated (a few drops) and vanished and went away to talk about something else, Kipps remained floating undamaged in this interestingly uncertain universe as an independent bookseller. Except that it failed, the Associated Booksellers' Trading Union had all the stigmata of success. Its fault, perhaps, was that it had them all instead of only one or two. It was to buy wholesale for all

air

How many times the word 'air' appears in the text?

you go and slap 'em in the face!" "I didn't slap 'em in the face." "You do--practically. You slams the door in their face, and that's all we see of 'em ever. I wouldn't 'ave 'ad this 'appen not for a ten-pound note." He rounded his regrets with a grunt. For a while there was silence, save for the little stir of Ann's movements preparing the tea. "Tea, Artie," said Ann, handing him a cup. Kipps took it. "I put sugar _once_," said Ann. "Oo, dash it! Oo cares?" said Kipps, taking an extraordinarily large additional lump with fury quivering fingers, and putting his cup with a slight excess of force on the recess cupboard. "Oo cares? "I wouldn't 'ave 'ad that 'appen," he said, bidding steadily against accomplished things, "for twenty pounds." He gloomed in silence through a long minute or so. Then Ann said the fatal thing that exploded him. "Artie!" she said. "What?" "There's Buttud Toce down there! By your foot!" There was a pause, husband and wife regarded one another. "Buttud Toce!" he said. "You go and mess up them callers and then you try and stuff me up with Buttud Toce! Buttud Toce indeed! 'Ere's our first chance of knowing anyone that's at all fit to 'sociate with----. Look 'ere, Ann! Tell you what it is--you got to return that call." "Return that call!" "Yes, you got to return that call. That's what you got to do! I know----" He waved his arm vaguely towards the miscellany of books in the recess. "It's in Manners and Rools of Good S'ity. You got to find jest 'ow many cards to leave and you got to go and leave 'em. See?" Ann's face expressed terror. "But, Artie, 'ow _can_ I?" "'Ow _can_ you? 'Ow _could_ you? You got to do it, any'ow. They won't know you--not in your Bond Street 'at! If they do, they won't say nothing." His voice assumed a note of entreaty. "You mus', Ann." "I can't." "You mus'." "I can't and I won't. Anything in reason I'll do, but face those people again I can't--after what 'as 'appened." "You won't?" "No!"... "So there they go--orf! And we never see them again! And so it goes on! So it goes on! We don't know nobody and we _shan't_ know anybody! And you won't put yourself out not a little bit, or take the trouble to find out anything 'ow it ought to be done." Terrible pause. "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie, that's the troof." "Oh! _don't_ go into that." "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie. I'm not equal to the position. If you 'adn't said you'd drown yourself----" She choked. "I don' see why you shouldn't _try_, Ann. _I've_ improved. Why don't you? 'Stead of which you go sending out the servant and 'namelling floors, and then when visitors come----" "'Ow was _I_ to know about y'r old visitors?" cried Ann in a wail, and suddenly got up and fled from amidst their ruined tea, the tea of which "toce, all buttery," was to be the crown and glory. Kipps watched her with a momentary consternation. Then he hardened his heart. "Ought to 'ave known better," he said, "goin' on like that!" He remained for a space rubbing his knees and muttering. He emitted scornfully: "I carn't an' I won't." He saw her as the source of all his shames. Presently, quite mechanically, he stooped down and lifted the flowery china cover. "Ter dash 'er Buttud Toce!" he shouted at the sight of it, and clapped the cover down again hard.... When Gwendolen came back she perceived things were in a slightly unusual poise. Kipps sat by the fire in a rigid attitude reading a casually selected volume of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and Ann was upstairs and inaccessible--to reappear at a later stage with reddened eyes. Before the fire and still in a perfectly assimilable condition was what was evidently an untouched supply of richly buttered toast under a cracked cover. "They've 'ad a bit of a tiff," said Gwendolen, attending to her duties in the kitchen, with her outdoor hat still on and her mouth full. "They're rummuns--if ever! My eye!" And she took another piece of Ann's generously buttered toast. 4 The Kippses spoke no more that day to one another. The squabble about cards and buttered toast was as serious to them as the most rational of differences. It was all rational to them. Their sense of wrong burnt within them; their sense of what was owing to themselves, the duty of implacability, the obstinacy of pride. In the small hours Kipps lay awake at the nadir of unhappiness and came near groaning. He saw life as an extraordinarily desolating muddle; his futile house, his social discredit, his bad behaviour to Helen, his low marriage to Ann.... He became aware of something irregular in Ann's breathing.... He listened. She was awake and quietly and privately sobbing! He hardened his heart; resolutely he hardened his heart. The stupid little tragedies of these clipped and limited lives! What is the good of keeping up the idyllic sham and pretending that ill-educated, misdirected people "get along very well," and that all this is harmlessly funny and nothing more? You think I'm going to write fat, silly, grinning novels about half-educated, under-trained people and keep it up all the time, that the whole thing's nothing but funny! As I think of them lying unhappily there in the darkness, my vision pierces the night. See what I can see! Above them, brooding over them, I tell you there is a monster, a lumpish monster, like some great, clumsy griffin thing, like the Crystal Palace labyrinthodon, like Coote, like the leaden goddess Dulness Pope Abhorred, like some fat, proud flunkey, like pride, like indolence, like all that is darkening and heavy and obstructive in life. It is matter and darkness, it is the anti-soul, Stupidity. My Kippses live in its shadow. Shalford and his apprenticeship system, the Hastings Academy, the ideas of Coote, the ideas of the old Kippses, all the ideas that have made Kipps what he is, all these are its shadow. But for that monster they might not be groping among false ideas and hurt one another so sorely and so stupidly; but for that, the glowing promise of childhood and youth might have had a happier fruition, thought might have awakened in them to meet _the_ thought of the world, the quickening sunshine of literature pierced to the substance of their souls, their lives might not have been divorced, as now they are divorced for ever, from the apprehension of beauty that we favoured ones are given--the vision of the Grail that makes life fine for ever. I have laughed, and I laugh at these two people; I have sought to make you laugh.... But I see through the darkness the souls of my Kippses, as they are, as little pink strips of living stuff, like the bodies of little, ill-nourished, ailing, ignorant children, children who feel pain, who are naughty and muddled and suffer and do not understand why. And the claw of this Beast rests upon them! CHAPTER III TERMINATIONS 1 Next morning came a remarkable telegram from Folkestone. "Please come at once, urgent, Walshingham," said the telegram, and Kipps, after an agitated but still ample breakfast, departed.... When he returned his face was very white and his countenance disordered. He let himself in with his latchkey and came into the dining-room where Ann sat, affecting to work at a little thing she called a bib. She heard his hat fall in the hall before he entered, as though he had missed the peg. "I got something to tell you, Ann," he said, disregarding their overnight quarrel, and went to the hearthrug and took hold of the mantel, and stared at Ann as though the sight of her was novel. "Well?" said Ann, not looking up and working a little faster. "'E's gone!" Ann looked up sharply and her hands stopped. "_Who's_ gone?" For the first time she perceived Kipps' pallor. "Young Walshingham--I saw 'er and she tole me." "Gone? What d'you mean?" "Cleared out! Gone off for good!" "What for?" "For 'is 'ealth," said Kipps, with sudden bitterness. "'E's been speckylating. He's speckylated our money and 'e's speckylated their money, and now 'e's took 'is 'ook. That's all about it, Ann." "You mean?" "I mean 'e's orf and our twenty-four thousand's orf, too! And 'ere we are! Smashed up! That's all about it, Ann." He panted. Ann had no vocabulary for such an occasion. "Oh, Lor'!" she said, and sat still. Kipps came about and stuck his hands deeply in his trouser pockets. "Speckylated every penny--lorst it all--and gorn." Even his lips were white. "You mean we ain't got nothin' left, Artie?" "Not a penny! Not a bloomin' penny, Ann. No!" A gust of passion whirled across the soul of Kipps. He flung out a knuckly fist. "If I 'ad 'im 'ere," he said, "I'd--I'd--I'd wring 'is neck for 'im. I'd--I'd----" His voice rose to a shout. He thought of Gwendolen in the kitchen and fell to "Ugh!" "But, Artie," said Ann, trying to grasp it, "d'you mean to say he's took our money?" "Speckylated it!" said Kipps, with an illustrative flourish of the arm, that failed to illustrate. "Bort things dear and sold 'em cheap, and played the 'ankey-pankey jackass with everything we got. That's what I mean 'e's done, Ann." He repeated this last sentence with the addition of violent adverbs. "D'you mean to say our money's _gone_, Artie?" "Ter-dash it, _Yes_, Ann!" swore Kipps, exploding in a shout. "Ain't I tellin' you?" He was immediately sorry. "I didn't mean to 'oller at you, Ann," he said, "but I'm all shook up. I don't 'ardly know what I'm sayin'. Ev'ry penny."... "But, Artie----" Kipps grunted. He went to the window and stared for a moment at a sunlit sea. "Gord!" he swore. "I mean," he said, coming back to Ann and with an air of exasperation, "that he's 'bezzled and 'ooked it. That's what I mean, Ann." Ann put down the bib. "But wot are we going to _do_, Artie?" Kipps indicated ignorance, wrath and despair with one comprehensive gesture of his hands. He caught an ornament from the mantel and replaced it. "I'm going to bang about," he said, "if I ain't precious careful." "You saw _'er_, you say?" "Yes." "What did she say 'xactly?" said Ann. "Told me to see a s'licitor--tole me to get someone to 'elp me at once. She was there in black--like she used to be--and speaking cool and careful-like. 'Elen!... She's precious 'ard, is 'Elen. She looked at me straight. 'It's my fault,' she said, 'I ought to 'ave warned you.... Only under the circumstances it was a little difficult.' Straight as anything. I didn't 'ardly say anything to 'er. I didn't seem to begin to take it in until she was showing me out. I 'adn't anything to say. Jest as well, perhaps. She talked like a call a'most. She said--what _was_ it she said about her mother? 'My mother's overcome with grief,' she said, 'so naturally everything comes on me.'" "And she told you to get someone to 'elp you?" "Yes. I been to old Bean." "O' Bean?" "Yes. What I took my business away from!" "What did he say?" "He was a bit off'and at first, but then 'e come 'round. He couldn't tell me anything till 'e knew the facts. What I know of young Walshingham, there won't be much 'elp in the facts. No!" He reflected for a space. "It's a smash-up, Ann. More likely than not, Ann, 'e's left us over'ead in debt. We got to get out of it just 'ow we can.... "We got to begin again," he went on. "_'Ow_, I don't know. All the way 'ome my 'ead's been going. We got to get a living some'ow or other. 'Aving time to ourselves, and a bit of money to spend, and no hurry and worry, it's all over for ever, Ann. We was fools, Ann. We didn't know our benefits. We been caught. Gord!... Gord!" He was on the verge of "banging about" again. They heard a jingle in the passage, the large soft impact of a servant's indoor boots. As if she were a part, a mitigatory part of Fate, came Gwendolen to lay the midday meal. Kipps displayed self-control forthwith. Ann picked up the bib again and bent over it, and the Kippses bore themselves gloomily perhaps, but not despairfully, while their dependant was in the room. She spread the cloth and put out the cutlery with a slow inaccuracy, and Kipps, after a whisper to himself, went again to the window. Ann got up and put away her work methodically in the cheffonier. "When I think," said Kipps, as soon as the door closed again behind Gwendolen, "when I think of the 'ole people and 'aving to tell 'em of it all--I want to smesh my 'ead against the nearest wall. Smesh my silly brains out! And Buggins--Buggins what I'd 'arf promised to start in a lill' outfitting shop in Rendezvous Street."... Gwendolen returned and restored dignity. The midday meal spread itself slowly before them. Gwendolen, after her custom, left the door open and Kipps closed it carefully before sitting down. He stood for a moment, regarding the meal doubtfully. "I don't feel as if I could swaller a moufful," he said. "You got to eat," said Ann.... For a time they said little, and once swallowing was achieved, ate on with a sort of melancholy appetite. Each was now busy thinking. "After all," said Kipps, presently, "whatever 'appens, they can't turn us out or sell us up before nex' quarter-day. I'm pretty sure about that." "Sell us up!" said Ann. "I dessey we're bankrup'," said Kipps, trying to say it easily and helping himself with a trembling hand to unnecessary potatoes. Then a long silence. Ann ceased to eat, and there were silent tears. "More potatoes, Artie?" choked Ann. "I couldn't," said Kipps. "No." He pushed back his plate, which was indeed replete with potatoes, got up and walked about the room. Even the dinner-table looked distraught and unusual. "What to do, I _don't_ know," he said. "Oh, _Lord_!" he ejaculated, and picked up and slapped down a book. Then his eye fell upon another postcard that had come from Chitterlow by the morning's post, and which now lay by him on the mantel-shelf. He took it up, glanced at its imperfectly legible message, and put it down. "Delayed!" he said, scornfully. "Not prodooced in the smalls. Or is it smells 'e says? 'Ow can one understand that? Any'ow 'e's 'umbugging again.... Somefing about the Strand. No! Well, 'e's 'ad all the money 'e'll ever get out of me!... I'm done." He seemed to find a momentary relief in the dramatic effect of his announcement. He came near to a swagger of despair upon the hearthrug, and then suddenly came and sat down next to Ann and rested his chin on the knuckles of his two clenched hands. "I been a fool, Ann," he said in a gloomy monotone. "I been a brasted fool. But it's 'ard on us, all the same. It's 'ard." "'Ow was you to know?" said Ann. "I ought to 'ave known. I did in a sort of way know. And 'ere we are! I wouldn't care so much if it was myself, but it's _you_, Ann! 'Ere we are! Regular smashed up! And you----" He checked at an unspeakable aggravation of their disaster. "I knew 'e wasn't to be depended upon and there I left it! And you got to pay.... What's to 'appen to us all, I don't know." He thrust out his chin and glared at fate. "'Ow do you know 'e's speckylated everything?" said Ann, after a silent survey of him. "'E 'as," said Kipps, irritably, holding firm to disaster. "She say so?" "She don't know, of course, but you depend upon it that's it. She told me she knew something was on, and when she found 'im gone and a note lef' for her she knew it was up with 'im. 'E went by the night boat. She wrote that telegram off to me straight away." Ann surveyed his features with tender, perplexed eyes; she had never seen him so white and drawn before, and her hand rested an inch or so away from his arm. The actual loss was still, as it were, afar from her. The immediate thing was his enormous distress. "'Ow do you know----?" she said and stopped. It would irritate him too much. Kipps' imagination was going headlong. "Sold up!" he emitted presently, and Ann flinched. "Going back to work, day after day--I can't stand it, Ann, I can't. And you----" "It don't do to think of it," said Ann. Presently he came upon a resolve. "I keep on thinking of it, and thinking of it, and what's to be done and what's to be done. I shan't be any good 'ome s'arfernoon. It keeps on going 'round and 'round in my 'ead, and 'round and 'round. I better go for a walk or something. I'd be no comfort to you, Ann. I should want to 'owl and 'ammer things if I 'ung about 'ome. My fingers is all atwitch. I shall keep on thinking 'ow I might 'ave stopped it and callin' myself a fool."... He looked at her between pleading and shame. It seemed like deserting her. Ann regarded him with tear-dimmed eyes. "You'd better do what's good for you, Artie," she said.... "_I'll_ be best cleaning. It's no use sending off Gwendolen before her month, and the top room wants turning out." She added with a sort of grim humour: "May as well turn it out now while I got it." "I _better_ go for a walk," said Kipps.... And presently our poor exploded Kipps was marching out to bear his sudden misery. Habit turned him up the road towards his growing house, and then suddenly he perceived his direction--"Oh, Lor'!"--and turned aside and went up the steep way to the hill crest and the Sandling Road, and over the line by that tree-embowered Junction, and athwart the wide fields towards Postling--a little, black, marching figure--and so up the Downs and over the hills, whither he had never gone before.... 2 He came back long after dark, and Ann met him in the passage. "Where you been, Artie?" she asked, with a strained note in her voice. "I been walking and walking--trying to tire myself out. All the time I been thinking what shall I do. Trying to fix something up all out of nothing." "I didn't know you meant to be out all this time." Kipps was gripped by compunction.... "I can't think what we ought to do," he said, presently. "You can't do anything much, Artie, not till you hear from Mr. Bean." "No; I can't do anything much. That's jest it. And all this time I keep feelin' if I don't do something the top of my 'ead'll bust.... Been trying to make up advertisements 'arf the time I been out--'bout finding a place, good salesman and stock-keeper, and good Manchester dresses, window-dressing--Lor'! Fancy that all beginning again!... If you went to stay with Sid a bit--if I sent every penny I got to you--I dunno! I dunno!" When they had gone to bed there was an elaborate attempt to get to sleep.... In one of their great waking pauses Kipps remarked in a muffled tone: "I didn't mean to frighten you, Ann, being out so late. I kep' on walking and walking, and some'ow it seemed to do me good. I went out to the 'illtop ever so far beyond Stanford, and sat there ever so long, and it seemed to make me better. Just looking over the marsh like, and seeing the sun set."... "Very likely," said Ann, after a long interval, "it isn't so bad as you think it is, Artie." "It's bad," said Kipps. "Very likely, after all, it isn't quite so bad. If there's only a little----" There came another long silence. "Ann," said Kipps in the quiet darkness. "Yes," said Ann. "Ann," said Kipps, and stopped as though he had hastily shut a door upon speech. "I kep' thinking," he said, trying again, "I kep' thinking--after all--I been cross to you and a fool about things--about them cards, Ann; but"--his voice shook to pieces--"we _'ave_ been 'appy, Ann ... some'ow ... togever." And with that he and then she fell into a passion of weeping. They clung very tightly together--closer than they had been since ever the first brightness of their married days turned to the grey of common life again. All the disaster in the world could not prevent their going to sleep at last with their poor little troubled heads close together on one pillow. There was nothing more to be done, there was nothing more to be thought; Time might go on with his mischiefs, but for a little while at least they still had one another. 3 Kipps returned from his second interview with Mr. Bean in a state of strange excitement. He let himself in with his latch-key and slammed the door. "Ann!" he shouted, in an unusual note; "Ann!" Ann replied distantly. "Something to tell you," said Kipps; "something noo!" Ann appeared apprehensive from the kitchen. "Ann," he said, going before her into the little dining-room, for his news was too dignified for the passage, "very likely, Ann, o' Bean says, we shall 'ave----" He decided to prolong the suspense. "Guess!" "I can't, Artie." "Think of a lot of money!" "A 'undred pounds p'raps?" He spoke with immense deliberation. "O v e r a f o u s a n d p o u n d s!" Ann stared and said nothing, only went a shade whiter. "Over, he said. A'most certainly over." He shut the dining-room door and came forward hastily, for Ann, it was clear, meant to take this mitigation of their disaster with a complete abandonment of her self-control. She came near flopping; she fell into his arms. "Artie," she got to at last and began to weep, clinging tightly to him. "Pretty near certain," said Kipps, holding her. "A fousand pounds!" "I _said_, Artie," she wailed on his shoulder with the note of accumulated wrongs, "very likely it wasn't so bad."... "There's things," he said, when presently he came to particulars, "'e couldn't touch. The noo place! It's freehold and paid for, and with the bit of building on it, there's five or six 'undred pound p'raps--say worf free 'undred, for safety. We can't be sold up to finish it, like we thought. O' Bean says we can very likely sell it and get money. 'E says you often get a chance to sell a 'ouse lessen 'arf done, 'specially free'old. _Very_ likely, 'e say. Then there's Hughenden. Hughenden 'asn't been mortgaged not for more than 'arf its value. There's a 'undred or so to be got on that, and the furniture and the rent for the summer still coming in. 'E says there's very likely other things. A fousand pounds, that's what 'e said. 'E said it might even be more."... They were sitting now at the table. "It alters everything," said Ann. "I been thinking that, Ann, all the way 'ome. I came in the motor car. First ride I've 'ad since the smash. We needn't send off Gwendolen, leastways not till _after_. You know. We needn't turn out of 'ere--not for a long time. What we been doing for the o' people we can go on doing a'most as much. And your mother!... I wanted to 'oller coming along. I pretty near run coming down the road by the hotel." "Oh, I _am_ glad we can stop 'ere and be comfortable a bit," said Ann. "I _am_ glad for that." "I pretty near told the driver on the motor--only 'e was the sort won't talk.... You see, Ann, we'll be able to start a shop, we'll be able to get _into_ something like. All about our 'aving to go back to places and that; all that doesn't matter any more." For a while they abandoned themselves to ejaculating transports. Then they fell talking to shape an idea to themselves of the new prospect that opened before them. "We must start a sort of shop," said Kipps, whose imagination had been working. "It'll 'ave to be a shop." "Drapery?" said Ann. "You want such a lot of capital for the drapery, mor'n a thousand pounds you want by a long way--to start it anything like proper." "Well, outfitting. Like Buggins was going to do." Kipps glanced at that for a moment, because the idea had not occurred to him. Then he came back to his prepossession. "Well, I thought of something else, Ann," he said. "You see, I've always thought a little book-shop. It isn't like the drapery--'aving to be learnt. I thought--even before this smash-up--'ow I'd like to 'ave something to do, instead of always 'aving 'olidays always like we 'ave been 'aving." He reflected. "You don't know _much_ about books, do you, Artie?" "You don't want to." He illustrated. "I noticed when we used to go to that Lib'ry at Folkestone, ladies weren't anything like what they was in a draper's--if you 'aven't got _just_ what they want it's 'Oh, no!' and out they go. But in a book shop it's different. One book's very like another--after all, what is it? Something to read and done with. It's not a thing that matters like print dresses or serviettes--where you either like 'em or don't, and people judge you by. They take what you give 'em in books and lib'ries, and glad to be told _what_ to. See 'ow we was--up at that lib'ry."... He paused. "You see, Ann---- "Well, I read 'n 'dvertisement the other day. I been asking Mr. Bean. It said--five 'undred pounds." "What did?" "Branches," said Kipps. Ann failed to understand. "It's a sort of thing that gets up book shops all over the country," said Kipps. "I didn't tell you, but I arst about it a bit. On'y I dropped it again. Before this smash, I mean. I'd thought I'd like to keep a shop for a lark, on'y then I thought it silly. Besides it 'ud 'ave been beneath me." He blushed vividly. "It was a sort of projek of mine, Ann. "On'y it wouldn't 'ave done," he added. It was a tortuous journey when the Kippses set out to explain anything to each other. But through a maze of fragmentary elucidations and questions, their minds did presently begin to approximate to a picture of a compact, bright, little shop, as a framework for themselves. "I thought of it one day when I was in Folkestone. I thought of it one day when I was looking in at a window. I see a chap dressin' a window and he was whistlin' reg'lar light-'arted.... I thought then I'd like to keep a bookshop, any'ow, jest for something to do. And when people weren't about, then you could sit and read the books. See? It wouldn't be 'arf bad."... They mused, each with elbows on table and knuckles to lips, looking with speculative eyes at each other. "Very likely we'll be 'appier than we should 'ave been with more money," said Kipps presently. "We wasn't 'ardly suited," reflected Ann, and left her sentence incomplete. "Fish out of water like," said Kipps.... "You won't 'ave to return that call now," said Kipps, opening a new branch of the question. "That's one good thing." "Lor'!" said Ann, visibly brightening, "no more I shan't!" "I don't s'pose they'd want you to, even if you did--with things as they are." A certain added brightness came into Ann's face. "Nobody won't be able to come leaving cards on us, Artie, now, any more. We are out of _that_!" "There isn't no necessity for us to be stuck up," said Kipps, "any more for ever! 'Ere we are, Ann, common people, with jest no position at all, as you might say, to keep up. No sev'nts, not if you don't like. No dressin' better than other people. If it wasn't we been robbed--dashed if I'd care a rap about losing that money. I b'lieve"--his face shone with the rare pleasure of paradox--"I reely b'lieve, Ann, it'll prove a savin' in the end." 4 The remarkable advertisement which had fired Kipps' imagination with this dream of a bookshop opened out in the most alluring way. It was one little facet in a comprehensive scheme of transatlantic origin, which was to make our old-world methods of book-selling "sit up," and it displayed an imaginative briskness, a lucidity and promise that aroused the profoundest scepticism in the mind of Mr. Bean. To Kipps' renewed investigations it presented itself in an expository illustrated pamphlet (far too well printed, Mr. Bean thought, for a reputable undertaking) of the most convincing sort. Mr. Bean would not let him sink his capital in shares in its projected company that was to make all things new in the world of books, but he could not prevent Kipps becoming one of their associated booksellers. And so when presently it became apparent that an epoch was not to be made, and the "Associated Booksellers' Trading Union (Limited)" receded and dissolved and liquidated (a few drops) and vanished and went away to talk about something else, Kipps remained floating undamaged in this interestingly uncertain universe as an independent bookseller. Except that it failed, the Associated Booksellers' Trading Union had all the stigmata of success. Its fault, perhaps, was that it had them all instead of only one or two. It was to buy wholesale for all

bedtime

How many times the word 'bedtime' appears in the text?

you go and slap 'em in the face!" "I didn't slap 'em in the face." "You do--practically. You slams the door in their face, and that's all we see of 'em ever. I wouldn't 'ave 'ad this 'appen not for a ten-pound note." He rounded his regrets with a grunt. For a while there was silence, save for the little stir of Ann's movements preparing the tea. "Tea, Artie," said Ann, handing him a cup. Kipps took it. "I put sugar _once_," said Ann. "Oo, dash it! Oo cares?" said Kipps, taking an extraordinarily large additional lump with fury quivering fingers, and putting his cup with a slight excess of force on the recess cupboard. "Oo cares? "I wouldn't 'ave 'ad that 'appen," he said, bidding steadily against accomplished things, "for twenty pounds." He gloomed in silence through a long minute or so. Then Ann said the fatal thing that exploded him. "Artie!" she said. "What?" "There's Buttud Toce down there! By your foot!" There was a pause, husband and wife regarded one another. "Buttud Toce!" he said. "You go and mess up them callers and then you try and stuff me up with Buttud Toce! Buttud Toce indeed! 'Ere's our first chance of knowing anyone that's at all fit to 'sociate with----. Look 'ere, Ann! Tell you what it is--you got to return that call." "Return that call!" "Yes, you got to return that call. That's what you got to do! I know----" He waved his arm vaguely towards the miscellany of books in the recess. "It's in Manners and Rools of Good S'ity. You got to find jest 'ow many cards to leave and you got to go and leave 'em. See?" Ann's face expressed terror. "But, Artie, 'ow _can_ I?" "'Ow _can_ you? 'Ow _could_ you? You got to do it, any'ow. They won't know you--not in your Bond Street 'at! If they do, they won't say nothing." His voice assumed a note of entreaty. "You mus', Ann." "I can't." "You mus'." "I can't and I won't. Anything in reason I'll do, but face those people again I can't--after what 'as 'appened." "You won't?" "No!"... "So there they go--orf! And we never see them again! And so it goes on! So it goes on! We don't know nobody and we _shan't_ know anybody! And you won't put yourself out not a little bit, or take the trouble to find out anything 'ow it ought to be done." Terrible pause. "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie, that's the troof." "Oh! _don't_ go into that." "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie. I'm not equal to the position. If you 'adn't said you'd drown yourself----" She choked. "I don' see why you shouldn't _try_, Ann. _I've_ improved. Why don't you? 'Stead of which you go sending out the servant and 'namelling floors, and then when visitors come----" "'Ow was _I_ to know about y'r old visitors?" cried Ann in a wail, and suddenly got up and fled from amidst their ruined tea, the tea of which "toce, all buttery," was to be the crown and glory. Kipps watched her with a momentary consternation. Then he hardened his heart. "Ought to 'ave known better," he said, "goin' on like that!" He remained for a space rubbing his knees and muttering. He emitted scornfully: "I carn't an' I won't." He saw her as the source of all his shames. Presently, quite mechanically, he stooped down and lifted the flowery china cover. "Ter dash 'er Buttud Toce!" he shouted at the sight of it, and clapped the cover down again hard.... When Gwendolen came back she perceived things were in a slightly unusual poise. Kipps sat by the fire in a rigid attitude reading a casually selected volume of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and Ann was upstairs and inaccessible--to reappear at a later stage with reddened eyes. Before the fire and still in a perfectly assimilable condition was what was evidently an untouched supply of richly buttered toast under a cracked cover. "They've 'ad a bit of a tiff," said Gwendolen, attending to her duties in the kitchen, with her outdoor hat still on and her mouth full. "They're rummuns--if ever! My eye!" And she took another piece of Ann's generously buttered toast. 4 The Kippses spoke no more that day to one another. The squabble about cards and buttered toast was as serious to them as the most rational of differences. It was all rational to them. Their sense of wrong burnt within them; their sense of what was owing to themselves, the duty of implacability, the obstinacy of pride. In the small hours Kipps lay awake at the nadir of unhappiness and came near groaning. He saw life as an extraordinarily desolating muddle; his futile house, his social discredit, his bad behaviour to Helen, his low marriage to Ann.... He became aware of something irregular in Ann's breathing.... He listened. She was awake and quietly and privately sobbing! He hardened his heart; resolutely he hardened his heart. The stupid little tragedies of these clipped and limited lives! What is the good of keeping up the idyllic sham and pretending that ill-educated, misdirected people "get along very well," and that all this is harmlessly funny and nothing more? You think I'm going to write fat, silly, grinning novels about half-educated, under-trained people and keep it up all the time, that the whole thing's nothing but funny! As I think of them lying unhappily there in the darkness, my vision pierces the night. See what I can see! Above them, brooding over them, I tell you there is a monster, a lumpish monster, like some great, clumsy griffin thing, like the Crystal Palace labyrinthodon, like Coote, like the leaden goddess Dulness Pope Abhorred, like some fat, proud flunkey, like pride, like indolence, like all that is darkening and heavy and obstructive in life. It is matter and darkness, it is the anti-soul, Stupidity. My Kippses live in its shadow. Shalford and his apprenticeship system, the Hastings Academy, the ideas of Coote, the ideas of the old Kippses, all the ideas that have made Kipps what he is, all these are its shadow. But for that monster they might not be groping among false ideas and hurt one another so sorely and so stupidly; but for that, the glowing promise of childhood and youth might have had a happier fruition, thought might have awakened in them to meet _the_ thought of the world, the quickening sunshine of literature pierced to the substance of their souls, their lives might not have been divorced, as now they are divorced for ever, from the apprehension of beauty that we favoured ones are given--the vision of the Grail that makes life fine for ever. I have laughed, and I laugh at these two people; I have sought to make you laugh.... But I see through the darkness the souls of my Kippses, as they are, as little pink strips of living stuff, like the bodies of little, ill-nourished, ailing, ignorant children, children who feel pain, who are naughty and muddled and suffer and do not understand why. And the claw of this Beast rests upon them! CHAPTER III TERMINATIONS 1 Next morning came a remarkable telegram from Folkestone. "Please come at once, urgent, Walshingham," said the telegram, and Kipps, after an agitated but still ample breakfast, departed.... When he returned his face was very white and his countenance disordered. He let himself in with his latchkey and came into the dining-room where Ann sat, affecting to work at a little thing she called a bib. She heard his hat fall in the hall before he entered, as though he had missed the peg. "I got something to tell you, Ann," he said, disregarding their overnight quarrel, and went to the hearthrug and took hold of the mantel, and stared at Ann as though the sight of her was novel. "Well?" said Ann, not looking up and working a little faster. "'E's gone!" Ann looked up sharply and her hands stopped. "_Who's_ gone?" For the first time she perceived Kipps' pallor. "Young Walshingham--I saw 'er and she tole me." "Gone? What d'you mean?" "Cleared out! Gone off for good!" "What for?" "For 'is 'ealth," said Kipps, with sudden bitterness. "'E's been speckylating. He's speckylated our money and 'e's speckylated their money, and now 'e's took 'is 'ook. That's all about it, Ann." "You mean?" "I mean 'e's orf and our twenty-four thousand's orf, too! And 'ere we are! Smashed up! That's all about it, Ann." He panted. Ann had no vocabulary for such an occasion. "Oh, Lor'!" she said, and sat still. Kipps came about and stuck his hands deeply in his trouser pockets. "Speckylated every penny--lorst it all--and gorn." Even his lips were white. "You mean we ain't got nothin' left, Artie?" "Not a penny! Not a bloomin' penny, Ann. No!" A gust of passion whirled across the soul of Kipps. He flung out a knuckly fist. "If I 'ad 'im 'ere," he said, "I'd--I'd--I'd wring 'is neck for 'im. I'd--I'd----" His voice rose to a shout. He thought of Gwendolen in the kitchen and fell to "Ugh!" "But, Artie," said Ann, trying to grasp it, "d'you mean to say he's took our money?" "Speckylated it!" said Kipps, with an illustrative flourish of the arm, that failed to illustrate. "Bort things dear and sold 'em cheap, and played the 'ankey-pankey jackass with everything we got. That's what I mean 'e's done, Ann." He repeated this last sentence with the addition of violent adverbs. "D'you mean to say our money's _gone_, Artie?" "Ter-dash it, _Yes_, Ann!" swore Kipps, exploding in a shout. "Ain't I tellin' you?" He was immediately sorry. "I didn't mean to 'oller at you, Ann," he said, "but I'm all shook up. I don't 'ardly know what I'm sayin'. Ev'ry penny."... "But, Artie----" Kipps grunted. He went to the window and stared for a moment at a sunlit sea. "Gord!" he swore. "I mean," he said, coming back to Ann and with an air of exasperation, "that he's 'bezzled and 'ooked it. That's what I mean, Ann." Ann put down the bib. "But wot are we going to _do_, Artie?" Kipps indicated ignorance, wrath and despair with one comprehensive gesture of his hands. He caught an ornament from the mantel and replaced it. "I'm going to bang about," he said, "if I ain't precious careful." "You saw _'er_, you say?" "Yes." "What did she say 'xactly?" said Ann. "Told me to see a s'licitor--tole me to get someone to 'elp me at once. She was there in black--like she used to be--and speaking cool and careful-like. 'Elen!... She's precious 'ard, is 'Elen. She looked at me straight. 'It's my fault,' she said, 'I ought to 'ave warned you.... Only under the circumstances it was a little difficult.' Straight as anything. I didn't 'ardly say anything to 'er. I didn't seem to begin to take it in until she was showing me out. I 'adn't anything to say. Jest as well, perhaps. She talked like a call a'most. She said--what _was_ it she said about her mother? 'My mother's overcome with grief,' she said, 'so naturally everything comes on me.'" "And she told you to get someone to 'elp you?" "Yes. I been to old Bean." "O' Bean?" "Yes. What I took my business away from!" "What did he say?" "He was a bit off'and at first, but then 'e come 'round. He couldn't tell me anything till 'e knew the facts. What I know of young Walshingham, there won't be much 'elp in the facts. No!" He reflected for a space. "It's a smash-up, Ann. More likely than not, Ann, 'e's left us over'ead in debt. We got to get out of it just 'ow we can.... "We got to begin again," he went on. "_'Ow_, I don't know. All the way 'ome my 'ead's been going. We got to get a living some'ow or other. 'Aving time to ourselves, and a bit of money to spend, and no hurry and worry, it's all over for ever, Ann. We was fools, Ann. We didn't know our benefits. We been caught. Gord!... Gord!" He was on the verge of "banging about" again. They heard a jingle in the passage, the large soft impact of a servant's indoor boots. As if she were a part, a mitigatory part of Fate, came Gwendolen to lay the midday meal. Kipps displayed self-control forthwith. Ann picked up the bib again and bent over it, and the Kippses bore themselves gloomily perhaps, but not despairfully, while their dependant was in the room. She spread the cloth and put out the cutlery with a slow inaccuracy, and Kipps, after a whisper to himself, went again to the window. Ann got up and put away her work methodically in the cheffonier. "When I think," said Kipps, as soon as the door closed again behind Gwendolen, "when I think of the 'ole people and 'aving to tell 'em of it all--I want to smesh my 'ead against the nearest wall. Smesh my silly brains out! And Buggins--Buggins what I'd 'arf promised to start in a lill' outfitting shop in Rendezvous Street."... Gwendolen returned and restored dignity. The midday meal spread itself slowly before them. Gwendolen, after her custom, left the door open and Kipps closed it carefully before sitting down. He stood for a moment, regarding the meal doubtfully. "I don't feel as if I could swaller a moufful," he said. "You got to eat," said Ann.... For a time they said little, and once swallowing was achieved, ate on with a sort of melancholy appetite. Each was now busy thinking. "After all," said Kipps, presently, "whatever 'appens, they can't turn us out or sell us up before nex' quarter-day. I'm pretty sure about that." "Sell us up!" said Ann. "I dessey we're bankrup'," said Kipps, trying to say it easily and helping himself with a trembling hand to unnecessary potatoes. Then a long silence. Ann ceased to eat, and there were silent tears. "More potatoes, Artie?" choked Ann. "I couldn't," said Kipps. "No." He pushed back his plate, which was indeed replete with potatoes, got up and walked about the room. Even the dinner-table looked distraught and unusual. "What to do, I _don't_ know," he said. "Oh, _Lord_!" he ejaculated, and picked up and slapped down a book. Then his eye fell upon another postcard that had come from Chitterlow by the morning's post, and which now lay by him on the mantel-shelf. He took it up, glanced at its imperfectly legible message, and put it down. "Delayed!" he said, scornfully. "Not prodooced in the smalls. Or is it smells 'e says? 'Ow can one understand that? Any'ow 'e's 'umbugging again.... Somefing about the Strand. No! Well, 'e's 'ad all the money 'e'll ever get out of me!... I'm done." He seemed to find a momentary relief in the dramatic effect of his announcement. He came near to a swagger of despair upon the hearthrug, and then suddenly came and sat down next to Ann and rested his chin on the knuckles of his two clenched hands. "I been a fool, Ann," he said in a gloomy monotone. "I been a brasted fool. But it's 'ard on us, all the same. It's 'ard." "'Ow was you to know?" said Ann. "I ought to 'ave known. I did in a sort of way know. And 'ere we are! I wouldn't care so much if it was myself, but it's _you_, Ann! 'Ere we are! Regular smashed up! And you----" He checked at an unspeakable aggravation of their disaster. "I knew 'e wasn't to be depended upon and there I left it! And you got to pay.... What's to 'appen to us all, I don't know." He thrust out his chin and glared at fate. "'Ow do you know 'e's speckylated everything?" said Ann, after a silent survey of him. "'E 'as," said Kipps, irritably, holding firm to disaster. "She say so?" "She don't know, of course, but you depend upon it that's it. She told me she knew something was on, and when she found 'im gone and a note lef' for her she knew it was up with 'im. 'E went by the night boat. She wrote that telegram off to me straight away." Ann surveyed his features with tender, perplexed eyes; she had never seen him so white and drawn before, and her hand rested an inch or so away from his arm. The actual loss was still, as it were, afar from her. The immediate thing was his enormous distress. "'Ow do you know----?" she said and stopped. It would irritate him too much. Kipps' imagination was going headlong. "Sold up!" he emitted presently, and Ann flinched. "Going back to work, day after day--I can't stand it, Ann, I can't. And you----" "It don't do to think of it," said Ann. Presently he came upon a resolve. "I keep on thinking of it, and thinking of it, and what's to be done and what's to be done. I shan't be any good 'ome s'arfernoon. It keeps on going 'round and 'round in my 'ead, and 'round and 'round. I better go for a walk or something. I'd be no comfort to you, Ann. I should want to 'owl and 'ammer things if I 'ung about 'ome. My fingers is all atwitch. I shall keep on thinking 'ow I might 'ave stopped it and callin' myself a fool."... He looked at her between pleading and shame. It seemed like deserting her. Ann regarded him with tear-dimmed eyes. "You'd better do what's good for you, Artie," she said.... "_I'll_ be best cleaning. It's no use sending off Gwendolen before her month, and the top room wants turning out." She added with a sort of grim humour: "May as well turn it out now while I got it." "I _better_ go for a walk," said Kipps.... And presently our poor exploded Kipps was marching out to bear his sudden misery. Habit turned him up the road towards his growing house, and then suddenly he perceived his direction--"Oh, Lor'!"--and turned aside and went up the steep way to the hill crest and the Sandling Road, and over the line by that tree-embowered Junction, and athwart the wide fields towards Postling--a little, black, marching figure--and so up the Downs and over the hills, whither he had never gone before.... 2 He came back long after dark, and Ann met him in the passage. "Where you been, Artie?" she asked, with a strained note in her voice. "I been walking and walking--trying to tire myself out. All the time I been thinking what shall I do. Trying to fix something up all out of nothing." "I didn't know you meant to be out all this time." Kipps was gripped by compunction.... "I can't think what we ought to do," he said, presently. "You can't do anything much, Artie, not till you hear from Mr. Bean." "No; I can't do anything much. That's jest it. And all this time I keep feelin' if I don't do something the top of my 'ead'll bust.... Been trying to make up advertisements 'arf the time I been out--'bout finding a place, good salesman and stock-keeper, and good Manchester dresses, window-dressing--Lor'! Fancy that all beginning again!... If you went to stay with Sid a bit--if I sent every penny I got to you--I dunno! I dunno!" When they had gone to bed there was an elaborate attempt to get to sleep.... In one of their great waking pauses Kipps remarked in a muffled tone: "I didn't mean to frighten you, Ann, being out so late. I kep' on walking and walking, and some'ow it seemed to do me good. I went out to the 'illtop ever so far beyond Stanford, and sat there ever so long, and it seemed to make me better. Just looking over the marsh like, and seeing the sun set."... "Very likely," said Ann, after a long interval, "it isn't so bad as you think it is, Artie." "It's bad," said Kipps. "Very likely, after all, it isn't quite so bad. If there's only a little----" There came another long silence. "Ann," said Kipps in the quiet darkness. "Yes," said Ann. "Ann," said Kipps, and stopped as though he had hastily shut a door upon speech. "I kep' thinking," he said, trying again, "I kep' thinking--after all--I been cross to you and a fool about things--about them cards, Ann; but"--his voice shook to pieces--"we _'ave_ been 'appy, Ann ... some'ow ... togever." And with that he and then she fell into a passion of weeping. They clung very tightly together--closer than they had been since ever the first brightness of their married days turned to the grey of common life again. All the disaster in the world could not prevent their going to sleep at last with their poor little troubled heads close together on one pillow. There was nothing more to be done, there was nothing more to be thought; Time might go on with his mischiefs, but for a little while at least they still had one another. 3 Kipps returned from his second interview with Mr. Bean in a state of strange excitement. He let himself in with his latch-key and slammed the door. "Ann!" he shouted, in an unusual note; "Ann!" Ann replied distantly. "Something to tell you," said Kipps; "something noo!" Ann appeared apprehensive from the kitchen. "Ann," he said, going before her into the little dining-room, for his news was too dignified for the passage, "very likely, Ann, o' Bean says, we shall 'ave----" He decided to prolong the suspense. "Guess!" "I can't, Artie." "Think of a lot of money!" "A 'undred pounds p'raps?" He spoke with immense deliberation. "O v e r a f o u s a n d p o u n d s!" Ann stared and said nothing, only went a shade whiter. "Over, he said. A'most certainly over." He shut the dining-room door and came forward hastily, for Ann, it was clear, meant to take this mitigation of their disaster with a complete abandonment of her self-control. She came near flopping; she fell into his arms. "Artie," she got to at last and began to weep, clinging tightly to him. "Pretty near certain," said Kipps, holding her. "A fousand pounds!" "I _said_, Artie," she wailed on his shoulder with the note of accumulated wrongs, "very likely it wasn't so bad."... "There's things," he said, when presently he came to particulars, "'e couldn't touch. The noo place! It's freehold and paid for, and with the bit of building on it, there's five or six 'undred pound p'raps--say worf free 'undred, for safety. We can't be sold up to finish it, like we thought. O' Bean says we can very likely sell it and get money. 'E says you often get a chance to sell a 'ouse lessen 'arf done, 'specially free'old. _Very_ likely, 'e say. Then there's Hughenden. Hughenden 'asn't been mortgaged not for more than 'arf its value. There's a 'undred or so to be got on that, and the furniture and the rent for the summer still coming in. 'E says there's very likely other things. A fousand pounds, that's what 'e said. 'E said it might even be more."... They were sitting now at the table. "It alters everything," said Ann. "I been thinking that, Ann, all the way 'ome. I came in the motor car. First ride I've 'ad since the smash. We needn't send off Gwendolen, leastways not till _after_. You know. We needn't turn out of 'ere--not for a long time. What we been doing for the o' people we can go on doing a'most as much. And your mother!... I wanted to 'oller coming along. I pretty near run coming down the road by the hotel." "Oh, I _am_ glad we can stop 'ere and be comfortable a bit," said Ann. "I _am_ glad for that." "I pretty near told the driver on the motor--only 'e was the sort won't talk.... You see, Ann, we'll be able to start a shop, we'll be able to get _into_ something like. All about our 'aving to go back to places and that; all that doesn't matter any more." For a while they abandoned themselves to ejaculating transports. Then they fell talking to shape an idea to themselves of the new prospect that opened before them. "We must start a sort of shop," said Kipps, whose imagination had been working. "It'll 'ave to be a shop." "Drapery?" said Ann. "You want such a lot of capital for the drapery, mor'n a thousand pounds you want by a long way--to start it anything like proper." "Well, outfitting. Like Buggins was going to do." Kipps glanced at that for a moment, because the idea had not occurred to him. Then he came back to his prepossession. "Well, I thought of something else, Ann," he said. "You see, I've always thought a little book-shop. It isn't like the drapery--'aving to be learnt. I thought--even before this smash-up--'ow I'd like to 'ave something to do, instead of always 'aving 'olidays always like we 'ave been 'aving." He reflected. "You don't know _much_ about books, do you, Artie?" "You don't want to." He illustrated. "I noticed when we used to go to that Lib'ry at Folkestone, ladies weren't anything like what they was in a draper's--if you 'aven't got _just_ what they want it's 'Oh, no!' and out they go. But in a book shop it's different. One book's very like another--after all, what is it? Something to read and done with. It's not a thing that matters like print dresses or serviettes--where you either like 'em or don't, and people judge you by. They take what you give 'em in books and lib'ries, and glad to be told _what_ to. See 'ow we was--up at that lib'ry."... He paused. "You see, Ann---- "Well, I read 'n 'dvertisement the other day. I been asking Mr. Bean. It said--five 'undred pounds." "What did?" "Branches," said Kipps. Ann failed to understand. "It's a sort of thing that gets up book shops all over the country," said Kipps. "I didn't tell you, but I arst about it a bit. On'y I dropped it again. Before this smash, I mean. I'd thought I'd like to keep a shop for a lark, on'y then I thought it silly. Besides it 'ud 'ave been beneath me." He blushed vividly. "It was a sort of projek of mine, Ann. "On'y it wouldn't 'ave done," he added. It was a tortuous journey when the Kippses set out to explain anything to each other. But through a maze of fragmentary elucidations and questions, their minds did presently begin to approximate to a picture of a compact, bright, little shop, as a framework for themselves. "I thought of it one day when I was in Folkestone. I thought of it one day when I was looking in at a window. I see a chap dressin' a window and he was whistlin' reg'lar light-'arted.... I thought then I'd like to keep a bookshop, any'ow, jest for something to do. And when people weren't about, then you could sit and read the books. See? It wouldn't be 'arf bad."... They mused, each with elbows on table and knuckles to lips, looking with speculative eyes at each other. "Very likely we'll be 'appier than we should 'ave been with more money," said Kipps presently. "We wasn't 'ardly suited," reflected Ann, and left her sentence incomplete. "Fish out of water like," said Kipps.... "You won't 'ave to return that call now," said Kipps, opening a new branch of the question. "That's one good thing." "Lor'!" said Ann, visibly brightening, "no more I shan't!" "I don't s'pose they'd want you to, even if you did--with things as they are." A certain added brightness came into Ann's face. "Nobody won't be able to come leaving cards on us, Artie, now, any more. We are out of _that_!" "There isn't no necessity for us to be stuck up," said Kipps, "any more for ever! 'Ere we are, Ann, common people, with jest no position at all, as you might say, to keep up. No sev'nts, not if you don't like. No dressin' better than other people. If it wasn't we been robbed--dashed if I'd care a rap about losing that money. I b'lieve"--his face shone with the rare pleasure of paradox--"I reely b'lieve, Ann, it'll prove a savin' in the end." 4 The remarkable advertisement which had fired Kipps' imagination with this dream of a bookshop opened out in the most alluring way. It was one little facet in a comprehensive scheme of transatlantic origin, which was to make our old-world methods of book-selling "sit up," and it displayed an imaginative briskness, a lucidity and promise that aroused the profoundest scepticism in the mind of Mr. Bean. To Kipps' renewed investigations it presented itself in an expository illustrated pamphlet (far too well printed, Mr. Bean thought, for a reputable undertaking) of the most convincing sort. Mr. Bean would not let him sink his capital in shares in its projected company that was to make all things new in the world of books, but he could not prevent Kipps becoming one of their associated booksellers. And so when presently it became apparent that an epoch was not to be made, and the "Associated Booksellers' Trading Union (Limited)" receded and dissolved and liquidated (a few drops) and vanished and went away to talk about something else, Kipps remained floating undamaged in this interestingly uncertain universe as an independent bookseller. Except that it failed, the Associated Booksellers' Trading Union had all the stigmata of success. Its fault, perhaps, was that it had them all instead of only one or two. It was to buy wholesale for all

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you go and slap 'em in the face!" "I didn't slap 'em in the face." "You do--practically. You slams the door in their face, and that's all we see of 'em ever. I wouldn't 'ave 'ad this 'appen not for a ten-pound note." He rounded his regrets with a grunt. For a while there was silence, save for the little stir of Ann's movements preparing the tea. "Tea, Artie," said Ann, handing him a cup. Kipps took it. "I put sugar _once_," said Ann. "Oo, dash it! Oo cares?" said Kipps, taking an extraordinarily large additional lump with fury quivering fingers, and putting his cup with a slight excess of force on the recess cupboard. "Oo cares? "I wouldn't 'ave 'ad that 'appen," he said, bidding steadily against accomplished things, "for twenty pounds." He gloomed in silence through a long minute or so. Then Ann said the fatal thing that exploded him. "Artie!" she said. "What?" "There's Buttud Toce down there! By your foot!" There was a pause, husband and wife regarded one another. "Buttud Toce!" he said. "You go and mess up them callers and then you try and stuff me up with Buttud Toce! Buttud Toce indeed! 'Ere's our first chance of knowing anyone that's at all fit to 'sociate with----. Look 'ere, Ann! Tell you what it is--you got to return that call." "Return that call!" "Yes, you got to return that call. That's what you got to do! I know----" He waved his arm vaguely towards the miscellany of books in the recess. "It's in Manners and Rools of Good S'ity. You got to find jest 'ow many cards to leave and you got to go and leave 'em. See?" Ann's face expressed terror. "But, Artie, 'ow _can_ I?" "'Ow _can_ you? 'Ow _could_ you? You got to do it, any'ow. They won't know you--not in your Bond Street 'at! If they do, they won't say nothing." His voice assumed a note of entreaty. "You mus', Ann." "I can't." "You mus'." "I can't and I won't. Anything in reason I'll do, but face those people again I can't--after what 'as 'appened." "You won't?" "No!"... "So there they go--orf! And we never see them again! And so it goes on! So it goes on! We don't know nobody and we _shan't_ know anybody! And you won't put yourself out not a little bit, or take the trouble to find out anything 'ow it ought to be done." Terrible pause. "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie, that's the troof." "Oh! _don't_ go into that." "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie. I'm not equal to the position. If you 'adn't said you'd drown yourself----" She choked. "I don' see why you shouldn't _try_, Ann. _I've_ improved. Why don't you? 'Stead of which you go sending out the servant and 'namelling floors, and then when visitors come----" "'Ow was _I_ to know about y'r old visitors?" cried Ann in a wail, and suddenly got up and fled from amidst their ruined tea, the tea of which "toce, all buttery," was to be the crown and glory. Kipps watched her with a momentary consternation. Then he hardened his heart. "Ought to 'ave known better," he said, "goin' on like that!" He remained for a space rubbing his knees and muttering. He emitted scornfully: "I carn't an' I won't." He saw her as the source of all his shames. Presently, quite mechanically, he stooped down and lifted the flowery china cover. "Ter dash 'er Buttud Toce!" he shouted at the sight of it, and clapped the cover down again hard.... When Gwendolen came back she perceived things were in a slightly unusual poise. Kipps sat by the fire in a rigid attitude reading a casually selected volume of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and Ann was upstairs and inaccessible--to reappear at a later stage with reddened eyes. Before the fire and still in a perfectly assimilable condition was what was evidently an untouched supply of richly buttered toast under a cracked cover. "They've 'ad a bit of a tiff," said Gwendolen, attending to her duties in the kitchen, with her outdoor hat still on and her mouth full. "They're rummuns--if ever! My eye!" And she took another piece of Ann's generously buttered toast. 4 The Kippses spoke no more that day to one another. The squabble about cards and buttered toast was as serious to them as the most rational of differences. It was all rational to them. Their sense of wrong burnt within them; their sense of what was owing to themselves, the duty of implacability, the obstinacy of pride. In the small hours Kipps lay awake at the nadir of unhappiness and came near groaning. He saw life as an extraordinarily desolating muddle; his futile house, his social discredit, his bad behaviour to Helen, his low marriage to Ann.... He became aware of something irregular in Ann's breathing.... He listened. She was awake and quietly and privately sobbing! He hardened his heart; resolutely he hardened his heart. The stupid little tragedies of these clipped and limited lives! What is the good of keeping up the idyllic sham and pretending that ill-educated, misdirected people "get along very well," and that all this is harmlessly funny and nothing more? You think I'm going to write fat, silly, grinning novels about half-educated, under-trained people and keep it up all the time, that the whole thing's nothing but funny! As I think of them lying unhappily there in the darkness, my vision pierces the night. See what I can see! Above them, brooding over them, I tell you there is a monster, a lumpish monster, like some great, clumsy griffin thing, like the Crystal Palace labyrinthodon, like Coote, like the leaden goddess Dulness Pope Abhorred, like some fat, proud flunkey, like pride, like indolence, like all that is darkening and heavy and obstructive in life. It is matter and darkness, it is the anti-soul, Stupidity. My Kippses live in its shadow. Shalford and his apprenticeship system, the Hastings Academy, the ideas of Coote, the ideas of the old Kippses, all the ideas that have made Kipps what he is, all these are its shadow. But for that monster they might not be groping among false ideas and hurt one another so sorely and so stupidly; but for that, the glowing promise of childhood and youth might have had a happier fruition, thought might have awakened in them to meet _the_ thought of the world, the quickening sunshine of literature pierced to the substance of their souls, their lives might not have been divorced, as now they are divorced for ever, from the apprehension of beauty that we favoured ones are given--the vision of the Grail that makes life fine for ever. I have laughed, and I laugh at these two people; I have sought to make you laugh.... But I see through the darkness the souls of my Kippses, as they are, as little pink strips of living stuff, like the bodies of little, ill-nourished, ailing, ignorant children, children who feel pain, who are naughty and muddled and suffer and do not understand why. And the claw of this Beast rests upon them! CHAPTER III TERMINATIONS 1 Next morning came a remarkable telegram from Folkestone. "Please come at once, urgent, Walshingham," said the telegram, and Kipps, after an agitated but still ample breakfast, departed.... When he returned his face was very white and his countenance disordered. He let himself in with his latchkey and came into the dining-room where Ann sat, affecting to work at a little thing she called a bib. She heard his hat fall in the hall before he entered, as though he had missed the peg. "I got something to tell you, Ann," he said, disregarding their overnight quarrel, and went to the hearthrug and took hold of the mantel, and stared at Ann as though the sight of her was novel. "Well?" said Ann, not looking up and working a little faster. "'E's gone!" Ann looked up sharply and her hands stopped. "_Who's_ gone?" For the first time she perceived Kipps' pallor. "Young Walshingham--I saw 'er and she tole me." "Gone? What d'you mean?" "Cleared out! Gone off for good!" "What for?" "For 'is 'ealth," said Kipps, with sudden bitterness. "'E's been speckylating. He's speckylated our money and 'e's speckylated their money, and now 'e's took 'is 'ook. That's all about it, Ann." "You mean?" "I mean 'e's orf and our twenty-four thousand's orf, too! And 'ere we are! Smashed up! That's all about it, Ann." He panted. Ann had no vocabulary for such an occasion. "Oh, Lor'!" she said, and sat still. Kipps came about and stuck his hands deeply in his trouser pockets. "Speckylated every penny--lorst it all--and gorn." Even his lips were white. "You mean we ain't got nothin' left, Artie?" "Not a penny! Not a bloomin' penny, Ann. No!" A gust of passion whirled across the soul of Kipps. He flung out a knuckly fist. "If I 'ad 'im 'ere," he said, "I'd--I'd--I'd wring 'is neck for 'im. I'd--I'd----" His voice rose to a shout. He thought of Gwendolen in the kitchen and fell to "Ugh!" "But, Artie," said Ann, trying to grasp it, "d'you mean to say he's took our money?" "Speckylated it!" said Kipps, with an illustrative flourish of the arm, that failed to illustrate. "Bort things dear and sold 'em cheap, and played the 'ankey-pankey jackass with everything we got. That's what I mean 'e's done, Ann." He repeated this last sentence with the addition of violent adverbs. "D'you mean to say our money's _gone_, Artie?" "Ter-dash it, _Yes_, Ann!" swore Kipps, exploding in a shout. "Ain't I tellin' you?" He was immediately sorry. "I didn't mean to 'oller at you, Ann," he said, "but I'm all shook up. I don't 'ardly know what I'm sayin'. Ev'ry penny."... "But, Artie----" Kipps grunted. He went to the window and stared for a moment at a sunlit sea. "Gord!" he swore. "I mean," he said, coming back to Ann and with an air of exasperation, "that he's 'bezzled and 'ooked it. That's what I mean, Ann." Ann put down the bib. "But wot are we going to _do_, Artie?" Kipps indicated ignorance, wrath and despair with one comprehensive gesture of his hands. He caught an ornament from the mantel and replaced it. "I'm going to bang about," he said, "if I ain't precious careful." "You saw _'er_, you say?" "Yes." "What did she say 'xactly?" said Ann. "Told me to see a s'licitor--tole me to get someone to 'elp me at once. She was there in black--like she used to be--and speaking cool and careful-like. 'Elen!... She's precious 'ard, is 'Elen. She looked at me straight. 'It's my fault,' she said, 'I ought to 'ave warned you.... Only under the circumstances it was a little difficult.' Straight as anything. I didn't 'ardly say anything to 'er. I didn't seem to begin to take it in until she was showing me out. I 'adn't anything to say. Jest as well, perhaps. She talked like a call a'most. She said--what _was_ it she said about her mother? 'My mother's overcome with grief,' she said, 'so naturally everything comes on me.'" "And she told you to get someone to 'elp you?" "Yes. I been to old Bean." "O' Bean?" "Yes. What I took my business away from!" "What did he say?" "He was a bit off'and at first, but then 'e come 'round. He couldn't tell me anything till 'e knew the facts. What I know of young Walshingham, there won't be much 'elp in the facts. No!" He reflected for a space. "It's a smash-up, Ann. More likely than not, Ann, 'e's left us over'ead in debt. We got to get out of it just 'ow we can.... "We got to begin again," he went on. "_'Ow_, I don't know. All the way 'ome my 'ead's been going. We got to get a living some'ow or other. 'Aving time to ourselves, and a bit of money to spend, and no hurry and worry, it's all over for ever, Ann. We was fools, Ann. We didn't know our benefits. We been caught. Gord!... Gord!" He was on the verge of "banging about" again. They heard a jingle in the passage, the large soft impact of a servant's indoor boots. As if she were a part, a mitigatory part of Fate, came Gwendolen to lay the midday meal. Kipps displayed self-control forthwith. Ann picked up the bib again and bent over it, and the Kippses bore themselves gloomily perhaps, but not despairfully, while their dependant was in the room. She spread the cloth and put out the cutlery with a slow inaccuracy, and Kipps, after a whisper to himself, went again to the window. Ann got up and put away her work methodically in the cheffonier. "When I think," said Kipps, as soon as the door closed again behind Gwendolen, "when I think of the 'ole people and 'aving to tell 'em of it all--I want to smesh my 'ead against the nearest wall. Smesh my silly brains out! And Buggins--Buggins what I'd 'arf promised to start in a lill' outfitting shop in Rendezvous Street."... Gwendolen returned and restored dignity. The midday meal spread itself slowly before them. Gwendolen, after her custom, left the door open and Kipps closed it carefully before sitting down. He stood for a moment, regarding the meal doubtfully. "I don't feel as if I could swaller a moufful," he said. "You got to eat," said Ann.... For a time they said little, and once swallowing was achieved, ate on with a sort of melancholy appetite. Each was now busy thinking. "After all," said Kipps, presently, "whatever 'appens, they can't turn us out or sell us up before nex' quarter-day. I'm pretty sure about that." "Sell us up!" said Ann. "I dessey we're bankrup'," said Kipps, trying to say it easily and helping himself with a trembling hand to unnecessary potatoes. Then a long silence. Ann ceased to eat, and there were silent tears. "More potatoes, Artie?" choked Ann. "I couldn't," said Kipps. "No." He pushed back his plate, which was indeed replete with potatoes, got up and walked about the room. Even the dinner-table looked distraught and unusual. "What to do, I _don't_ know," he said. "Oh, _Lord_!" he ejaculated, and picked up and slapped down a book. Then his eye fell upon another postcard that had come from Chitterlow by the morning's post, and which now lay by him on the mantel-shelf. He took it up, glanced at its imperfectly legible message, and put it down. "Delayed!" he said, scornfully. "Not prodooced in the smalls. Or is it smells 'e says? 'Ow can one understand that? Any'ow 'e's 'umbugging again.... Somefing about the Strand. No! Well, 'e's 'ad all the money 'e'll ever get out of me!... I'm done." He seemed to find a momentary relief in the dramatic effect of his announcement. He came near to a swagger of despair upon the hearthrug, and then suddenly came and sat down next to Ann and rested his chin on the knuckles of his two clenched hands. "I been a fool, Ann," he said in a gloomy monotone. "I been a brasted fool. But it's 'ard on us, all the same. It's 'ard." "'Ow was you to know?" said Ann. "I ought to 'ave known. I did in a sort of way know. And 'ere we are! I wouldn't care so much if it was myself, but it's _you_, Ann! 'Ere we are! Regular smashed up! And you----" He checked at an unspeakable aggravation of their disaster. "I knew 'e wasn't to be depended upon and there I left it! And you got to pay.... What's to 'appen to us all, I don't know." He thrust out his chin and glared at fate. "'Ow do you know 'e's speckylated everything?" said Ann, after a silent survey of him. "'E 'as," said Kipps, irritably, holding firm to disaster. "She say so?" "She don't know, of course, but you depend upon it that's it. She told me she knew something was on, and when she found 'im gone and a note lef' for her she knew it was up with 'im. 'E went by the night boat. She wrote that telegram off to me straight away." Ann surveyed his features with tender, perplexed eyes; she had never seen him so white and drawn before, and her hand rested an inch or so away from his arm. The actual loss was still, as it were, afar from her. The immediate thing was his enormous distress. "'Ow do you know----?" she said and stopped. It would irritate him too much. Kipps' imagination was going headlong. "Sold up!" he emitted presently, and Ann flinched. "Going back to work, day after day--I can't stand it, Ann, I can't. And you----" "It don't do to think of it," said Ann. Presently he came upon a resolve. "I keep on thinking of it, and thinking of it, and what's to be done and what's to be done. I shan't be any good 'ome s'arfernoon. It keeps on going 'round and 'round in my 'ead, and 'round and 'round. I better go for a walk or something. I'd be no comfort to you, Ann. I should want to 'owl and 'ammer things if I 'ung about 'ome. My fingers is all atwitch. I shall keep on thinking 'ow I might 'ave stopped it and callin' myself a fool."... He looked at her between pleading and shame. It seemed like deserting her. Ann regarded him with tear-dimmed eyes. "You'd better do what's good for you, Artie," she said.... "_I'll_ be best cleaning. It's no use sending off Gwendolen before her month, and the top room wants turning out." She added with a sort of grim humour: "May as well turn it out now while I got it." "I _better_ go for a walk," said Kipps.... And presently our poor exploded Kipps was marching out to bear his sudden misery. Habit turned him up the road towards his growing house, and then suddenly he perceived his direction--"Oh, Lor'!"--and turned aside and went up the steep way to the hill crest and the Sandling Road, and over the line by that tree-embowered Junction, and athwart the wide fields towards Postling--a little, black, marching figure--and so up the Downs and over the hills, whither he had never gone before.... 2 He came back long after dark, and Ann met him in the passage. "Where you been, Artie?" she asked, with a strained note in her voice. "I been walking and walking--trying to tire myself out. All the time I been thinking what shall I do. Trying to fix something up all out of nothing." "I didn't know you meant to be out all this time." Kipps was gripped by compunction.... "I can't think what we ought to do," he said, presently. "You can't do anything much, Artie, not till you hear from Mr. Bean." "No; I can't do anything much. That's jest it. And all this time I keep feelin' if I don't do something the top of my 'ead'll bust.... Been trying to make up advertisements 'arf the time I been out--'bout finding a place, good salesman and stock-keeper, and good Manchester dresses, window-dressing--Lor'! Fancy that all beginning again!... If you went to stay with Sid a bit--if I sent every penny I got to you--I dunno! I dunno!" When they had gone to bed there was an elaborate attempt to get to sleep.... In one of their great waking pauses Kipps remarked in a muffled tone: "I didn't mean to frighten you, Ann, being out so late. I kep' on walking and walking, and some'ow it seemed to do me good. I went out to the 'illtop ever so far beyond Stanford, and sat there ever so long, and it seemed to make me better. Just looking over the marsh like, and seeing the sun set."... "Very likely," said Ann, after a long interval, "it isn't so bad as you think it is, Artie." "It's bad," said Kipps. "Very likely, after all, it isn't quite so bad. If there's only a little----" There came another long silence. "Ann," said Kipps in the quiet darkness. "Yes," said Ann. "Ann," said Kipps, and stopped as though he had hastily shut a door upon speech. "I kep' thinking," he said, trying again, "I kep' thinking--after all--I been cross to you and a fool about things--about them cards, Ann; but"--his voice shook to pieces--"we _'ave_ been 'appy, Ann ... some'ow ... togever." And with that he and then she fell into a passion of weeping. They clung very tightly together--closer than they had been since ever the first brightness of their married days turned to the grey of common life again. All the disaster in the world could not prevent their going to sleep at last with their poor little troubled heads close together on one pillow. There was nothing more to be done, there was nothing more to be thought; Time might go on with his mischiefs, but for a little while at least they still had one another. 3 Kipps returned from his second interview with Mr. Bean in a state of strange excitement. He let himself in with his latch-key and slammed the door. "Ann!" he shouted, in an unusual note; "Ann!" Ann replied distantly. "Something to tell you," said Kipps; "something noo!" Ann appeared apprehensive from the kitchen. "Ann," he said, going before her into the little dining-room, for his news was too dignified for the passage, "very likely, Ann, o' Bean says, we shall 'ave----" He decided to prolong the suspense. "Guess!" "I can't, Artie." "Think of a lot of money!" "A 'undred pounds p'raps?" He spoke with immense deliberation. "O v e r a f o u s a n d p o u n d s!" Ann stared and said nothing, only went a shade whiter. "Over, he said. A'most certainly over." He shut the dining-room door and came forward hastily, for Ann, it was clear, meant to take this mitigation of their disaster with a complete abandonment of her self-control. She came near flopping; she fell into his arms. "Artie," she got to at last and began to weep, clinging tightly to him. "Pretty near certain," said Kipps, holding her. "A fousand pounds!" "I _said_, Artie," she wailed on his shoulder with the note of accumulated wrongs, "very likely it wasn't so bad."... "There's things," he said, when presently he came to particulars, "'e couldn't touch. The noo place! It's freehold and paid for, and with the bit of building on it, there's five or six 'undred pound p'raps--say worf free 'undred, for safety. We can't be sold up to finish it, like we thought. O' Bean says we can very likely sell it and get money. 'E says you often get a chance to sell a 'ouse lessen 'arf done, 'specially free'old. _Very_ likely, 'e say. Then there's Hughenden. Hughenden 'asn't been mortgaged not for more than 'arf its value. There's a 'undred or so to be got on that, and the furniture and the rent for the summer still coming in. 'E says there's very likely other things. A fousand pounds, that's what 'e said. 'E said it might even be more."... They were sitting now at the table. "It alters everything," said Ann. "I been thinking that, Ann, all the way 'ome. I came in the motor car. First ride I've 'ad since the smash. We needn't send off Gwendolen, leastways not till _after_. You know. We needn't turn out of 'ere--not for a long time. What we been doing for the o' people we can go on doing a'most as much. And your mother!... I wanted to 'oller coming along. I pretty near run coming down the road by the hotel." "Oh, I _am_ glad we can stop 'ere and be comfortable a bit," said Ann. "I _am_ glad for that." "I pretty near told the driver on the motor--only 'e was the sort won't talk.... You see, Ann, we'll be able to start a shop, we'll be able to get _into_ something like. All about our 'aving to go back to places and that; all that doesn't matter any more." For a while they abandoned themselves to ejaculating transports. Then they fell talking to shape an idea to themselves of the new prospect that opened before them. "We must start a sort of shop," said Kipps, whose imagination had been working. "It'll 'ave to be a shop." "Drapery?" said Ann. "You want such a lot of capital for the drapery, mor'n a thousand pounds you want by a long way--to start it anything like proper." "Well, outfitting. Like Buggins was going to do." Kipps glanced at that for a moment, because the idea had not occurred to him. Then he came back to his prepossession. "Well, I thought of something else, Ann," he said. "You see, I've always thought a little book-shop. It isn't like the drapery--'aving to be learnt. I thought--even before this smash-up--'ow I'd like to 'ave something to do, instead of always 'aving 'olidays always like we 'ave been 'aving." He reflected. "You don't know _much_ about books, do you, Artie?" "You don't want to." He illustrated. "I noticed when we used to go to that Lib'ry at Folkestone, ladies weren't anything like what they was in a draper's--if you 'aven't got _just_ what they want it's 'Oh, no!' and out they go. But in a book shop it's different. One book's very like another--after all, what is it? Something to read and done with. It's not a thing that matters like print dresses or serviettes--where you either like 'em or don't, and people judge you by. They take what you give 'em in books and lib'ries, and glad to be told _what_ to. See 'ow we was--up at that lib'ry."... He paused. "You see, Ann---- "Well, I read 'n 'dvertisement the other day. I been asking Mr. Bean. It said--five 'undred pounds." "What did?" "Branches," said Kipps. Ann failed to understand. "It's a sort of thing that gets up book shops all over the country," said Kipps. "I didn't tell you, but I arst about it a bit. On'y I dropped it again. Before this smash, I mean. I'd thought I'd like to keep a shop for a lark, on'y then I thought it silly. Besides it 'ud 'ave been beneath me." He blushed vividly. "It was a sort of projek of mine, Ann. "On'y it wouldn't 'ave done," he added. It was a tortuous journey when the Kippses set out to explain anything to each other. But through a maze of fragmentary elucidations and questions, their minds did presently begin to approximate to a picture of a compact, bright, little shop, as a framework for themselves. "I thought of it one day when I was in Folkestone. I thought of it one day when I was looking in at a window. I see a chap dressin' a window and he was whistlin' reg'lar light-'arted.... I thought then I'd like to keep a bookshop, any'ow, jest for something to do. And when people weren't about, then you could sit and read the books. See? It wouldn't be 'arf bad."... They mused, each with elbows on table and knuckles to lips, looking with speculative eyes at each other. "Very likely we'll be 'appier than we should 'ave been with more money," said Kipps presently. "We wasn't 'ardly suited," reflected Ann, and left her sentence incomplete. "Fish out of water like," said Kipps.... "You won't 'ave to return that call now," said Kipps, opening a new branch of the question. "That's one good thing." "Lor'!" said Ann, visibly brightening, "no more I shan't!" "I don't s'pose they'd want you to, even if you did--with things as they are." A certain added brightness came into Ann's face. "Nobody won't be able to come leaving cards on us, Artie, now, any more. We are out of _that_!" "There isn't no necessity for us to be stuck up," said Kipps, "any more for ever! 'Ere we are, Ann, common people, with jest no position at all, as you might say, to keep up. No sev'nts, not if you don't like. No dressin' better than other people. If it wasn't we been robbed--dashed if I'd care a rap about losing that money. I b'lieve"--his face shone with the rare pleasure of paradox--"I reely b'lieve, Ann, it'll prove a savin' in the end." 4 The remarkable advertisement which had fired Kipps' imagination with this dream of a bookshop opened out in the most alluring way. It was one little facet in a comprehensive scheme of transatlantic origin, which was to make our old-world methods of book-selling "sit up," and it displayed an imaginative briskness, a lucidity and promise that aroused the profoundest scepticism in the mind of Mr. Bean. To Kipps' renewed investigations it presented itself in an expository illustrated pamphlet (far too well printed, Mr. Bean thought, for a reputable undertaking) of the most convincing sort. Mr. Bean would not let him sink his capital in shares in its projected company that was to make all things new in the world of books, but he could not prevent Kipps becoming one of their associated booksellers. And so when presently it became apparent that an epoch was not to be made, and the "Associated Booksellers' Trading Union (Limited)" receded and dissolved and liquidated (a few drops) and vanished and went away to talk about something else, Kipps remained floating undamaged in this interestingly uncertain universe as an independent bookseller. Except that it failed, the Associated Booksellers' Trading Union had all the stigmata of success. Its fault, perhaps, was that it had them all instead of only one or two. It was to buy wholesale for all

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you go and slap 'em in the face!" "I didn't slap 'em in the face." "You do--practically. You slams the door in their face, and that's all we see of 'em ever. I wouldn't 'ave 'ad this 'appen not for a ten-pound note." He rounded his regrets with a grunt. For a while there was silence, save for the little stir of Ann's movements preparing the tea. "Tea, Artie," said Ann, handing him a cup. Kipps took it. "I put sugar _once_," said Ann. "Oo, dash it! Oo cares?" said Kipps, taking an extraordinarily large additional lump with fury quivering fingers, and putting his cup with a slight excess of force on the recess cupboard. "Oo cares? "I wouldn't 'ave 'ad that 'appen," he said, bidding steadily against accomplished things, "for twenty pounds." He gloomed in silence through a long minute or so. Then Ann said the fatal thing that exploded him. "Artie!" she said. "What?" "There's Buttud Toce down there! By your foot!" There was a pause, husband and wife regarded one another. "Buttud Toce!" he said. "You go and mess up them callers and then you try and stuff me up with Buttud Toce! Buttud Toce indeed! 'Ere's our first chance of knowing anyone that's at all fit to 'sociate with----. Look 'ere, Ann! Tell you what it is--you got to return that call." "Return that call!" "Yes, you got to return that call. That's what you got to do! I know----" He waved his arm vaguely towards the miscellany of books in the recess. "It's in Manners and Rools of Good S'ity. You got to find jest 'ow many cards to leave and you got to go and leave 'em. See?" Ann's face expressed terror. "But, Artie, 'ow _can_ I?" "'Ow _can_ you? 'Ow _could_ you? You got to do it, any'ow. They won't know you--not in your Bond Street 'at! If they do, they won't say nothing." His voice assumed a note of entreaty. "You mus', Ann." "I can't." "You mus'." "I can't and I won't. Anything in reason I'll do, but face those people again I can't--after what 'as 'appened." "You won't?" "No!"... "So there they go--orf! And we never see them again! And so it goes on! So it goes on! We don't know nobody and we _shan't_ know anybody! And you won't put yourself out not a little bit, or take the trouble to find out anything 'ow it ought to be done." Terrible pause. "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie, that's the troof." "Oh! _don't_ go into that." "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie. I'm not equal to the position. If you 'adn't said you'd drown yourself----" She choked. "I don' see why you shouldn't _try_, Ann. _I've_ improved. Why don't you? 'Stead of which you go sending out the servant and 'namelling floors, and then when visitors come----" "'Ow was _I_ to know about y'r old visitors?" cried Ann in a wail, and suddenly got up and fled from amidst their ruined tea, the tea of which "toce, all buttery," was to be the crown and glory. Kipps watched her with a momentary consternation. Then he hardened his heart. "Ought to 'ave known better," he said, "goin' on like that!" He remained for a space rubbing his knees and muttering. He emitted scornfully: "I carn't an' I won't." He saw her as the source of all his shames. Presently, quite mechanically, he stooped down and lifted the flowery china cover. "Ter dash 'er Buttud Toce!" he shouted at the sight of it, and clapped the cover down again hard.... When Gwendolen came back she perceived things were in a slightly unusual poise. Kipps sat by the fire in a rigid attitude reading a casually selected volume of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and Ann was upstairs and inaccessible--to reappear at a later stage with reddened eyes. Before the fire and still in a perfectly assimilable condition was what was evidently an untouched supply of richly buttered toast under a cracked cover. "They've 'ad a bit of a tiff," said Gwendolen, attending to her duties in the kitchen, with her outdoor hat still on and her mouth full. "They're rummuns--if ever! My eye!" And she took another piece of Ann's generously buttered toast. 4 The Kippses spoke no more that day to one another. The squabble about cards and buttered toast was as serious to them as the most rational of differences. It was all rational to them. Their sense of wrong burnt within them; their sense of what was owing to themselves, the duty of implacability, the obstinacy of pride. In the small hours Kipps lay awake at the nadir of unhappiness and came near groaning. He saw life as an extraordinarily desolating muddle; his futile house, his social discredit, his bad behaviour to Helen, his low marriage to Ann.... He became aware of something irregular in Ann's breathing.... He listened. She was awake and quietly and privately sobbing! He hardened his heart; resolutely he hardened his heart. The stupid little tragedies of these clipped and limited lives! What is the good of keeping up the idyllic sham and pretending that ill-educated, misdirected people "get along very well," and that all this is harmlessly funny and nothing more? You think I'm going to write fat, silly, grinning novels about half-educated, under-trained people and keep it up all the time, that the whole thing's nothing but funny! As I think of them lying unhappily there in the darkness, my vision pierces the night. See what I can see! Above them, brooding over them, I tell you there is a monster, a lumpish monster, like some great, clumsy griffin thing, like the Crystal Palace labyrinthodon, like Coote, like the leaden goddess Dulness Pope Abhorred, like some fat, proud flunkey, like pride, like indolence, like all that is darkening and heavy and obstructive in life. It is matter and darkness, it is the anti-soul, Stupidity. My Kippses live in its shadow. Shalford and his apprenticeship system, the Hastings Academy, the ideas of Coote, the ideas of the old Kippses, all the ideas that have made Kipps what he is, all these are its shadow. But for that monster they might not be groping among false ideas and hurt one another so sorely and so stupidly; but for that, the glowing promise of childhood and youth might have had a happier fruition, thought might have awakened in them to meet _the_ thought of the world, the quickening sunshine of literature pierced to the substance of their souls, their lives might not have been divorced, as now they are divorced for ever, from the apprehension of beauty that we favoured ones are given--the vision of the Grail that makes life fine for ever. I have laughed, and I laugh at these two people; I have sought to make you laugh.... But I see through the darkness the souls of my Kippses, as they are, as little pink strips of living stuff, like the bodies of little, ill-nourished, ailing, ignorant children, children who feel pain, who are naughty and muddled and suffer and do not understand why. And the claw of this Beast rests upon them! CHAPTER III TERMINATIONS 1 Next morning came a remarkable telegram from Folkestone. "Please come at once, urgent, Walshingham," said the telegram, and Kipps, after an agitated but still ample breakfast, departed.... When he returned his face was very white and his countenance disordered. He let himself in with his latchkey and came into the dining-room where Ann sat, affecting to work at a little thing she called a bib. She heard his hat fall in the hall before he entered, as though he had missed the peg. "I got something to tell you, Ann," he said, disregarding their overnight quarrel, and went to the hearthrug and took hold of the mantel, and stared at Ann as though the sight of her was novel. "Well?" said Ann, not looking up and working a little faster. "'E's gone!" Ann looked up sharply and her hands stopped. "_Who's_ gone?" For the first time she perceived Kipps' pallor. "Young Walshingham--I saw 'er and she tole me." "Gone? What d'you mean?" "Cleared out! Gone off for good!" "What for?" "For 'is 'ealth," said Kipps, with sudden bitterness. "'E's been speckylating. He's speckylated our money and 'e's speckylated their money, and now 'e's took 'is 'ook. That's all about it, Ann." "You mean?" "I mean 'e's orf and our twenty-four thousand's orf, too! And 'ere we are! Smashed up! That's all about it, Ann." He panted. Ann had no vocabulary for such an occasion. "Oh, Lor'!" she said, and sat still. Kipps came about and stuck his hands deeply in his trouser pockets. "Speckylated every penny--lorst it all--and gorn." Even his lips were white. "You mean we ain't got nothin' left, Artie?" "Not a penny! Not a bloomin' penny, Ann. No!" A gust of passion whirled across the soul of Kipps. He flung out a knuckly fist. "If I 'ad 'im 'ere," he said, "I'd--I'd--I'd wring 'is neck for 'im. I'd--I'd----" His voice rose to a shout. He thought of Gwendolen in the kitchen and fell to "Ugh!" "But, Artie," said Ann, trying to grasp it, "d'you mean to say he's took our money?" "Speckylated it!" said Kipps, with an illustrative flourish of the arm, that failed to illustrate. "Bort things dear and sold 'em cheap, and played the 'ankey-pankey jackass with everything we got. That's what I mean 'e's done, Ann." He repeated this last sentence with the addition of violent adverbs. "D'you mean to say our money's _gone_, Artie?" "Ter-dash it, _Yes_, Ann!" swore Kipps, exploding in a shout. "Ain't I tellin' you?" He was immediately sorry. "I didn't mean to 'oller at you, Ann," he said, "but I'm all shook up. I don't 'ardly know what I'm sayin'. Ev'ry penny."... "But, Artie----" Kipps grunted. He went to the window and stared for a moment at a sunlit sea. "Gord!" he swore. "I mean," he said, coming back to Ann and with an air of exasperation, "that he's 'bezzled and 'ooked it. That's what I mean, Ann." Ann put down the bib. "But wot are we going to _do_, Artie?" Kipps indicated ignorance, wrath and despair with one comprehensive gesture of his hands. He caught an ornament from the mantel and replaced it. "I'm going to bang about," he said, "if I ain't precious careful." "You saw _'er_, you say?" "Yes." "What did she say 'xactly?" said Ann. "Told me to see a s'licitor--tole me to get someone to 'elp me at once. She was there in black--like she used to be--and speaking cool and careful-like. 'Elen!... She's precious 'ard, is 'Elen. She looked at me straight. 'It's my fault,' she said, 'I ought to 'ave warned you.... Only under the circumstances it was a little difficult.' Straight as anything. I didn't 'ardly say anything to 'er. I didn't seem to begin to take it in until she was showing me out. I 'adn't anything to say. Jest as well, perhaps. She talked like a call a'most. She said--what _was_ it she said about her mother? 'My mother's overcome with grief,' she said, 'so naturally everything comes on me.'" "And she told you to get someone to 'elp you?" "Yes. I been to old Bean." "O' Bean?" "Yes. What I took my business away from!" "What did he say?" "He was a bit off'and at first, but then 'e come 'round. He couldn't tell me anything till 'e knew the facts. What I know of young Walshingham, there won't be much 'elp in the facts. No!" He reflected for a space. "It's a smash-up, Ann. More likely than not, Ann, 'e's left us over'ead in debt. We got to get out of it just 'ow we can.... "We got to begin again," he went on. "_'Ow_, I don't know. All the way 'ome my 'ead's been going. We got to get a living some'ow or other. 'Aving time to ourselves, and a bit of money to spend, and no hurry and worry, it's all over for ever, Ann. We was fools, Ann. We didn't know our benefits. We been caught. Gord!... Gord!" He was on the verge of "banging about" again. They heard a jingle in the passage, the large soft impact of a servant's indoor boots. As if she were a part, a mitigatory part of Fate, came Gwendolen to lay the midday meal. Kipps displayed self-control forthwith. Ann picked up the bib again and bent over it, and the Kippses bore themselves gloomily perhaps, but not despairfully, while their dependant was in the room. She spread the cloth and put out the cutlery with a slow inaccuracy, and Kipps, after a whisper to himself, went again to the window. Ann got up and put away her work methodically in the cheffonier. "When I think," said Kipps, as soon as the door closed again behind Gwendolen, "when I think of the 'ole people and 'aving to tell 'em of it all--I want to smesh my 'ead against the nearest wall. Smesh my silly brains out! And Buggins--Buggins what I'd 'arf promised to start in a lill' outfitting shop in Rendezvous Street."... Gwendolen returned and restored dignity. The midday meal spread itself slowly before them. Gwendolen, after her custom, left the door open and Kipps closed it carefully before sitting down. He stood for a moment, regarding the meal doubtfully. "I don't feel as if I could swaller a moufful," he said. "You got to eat," said Ann.... For a time they said little, and once swallowing was achieved, ate on with a sort of melancholy appetite. Each was now busy thinking. "After all," said Kipps, presently, "whatever 'appens, they can't turn us out or sell us up before nex' quarter-day. I'm pretty sure about that." "Sell us up!" said Ann. "I dessey we're bankrup'," said Kipps, trying to say it easily and helping himself with a trembling hand to unnecessary potatoes. Then a long silence. Ann ceased to eat, and there were silent tears. "More potatoes, Artie?" choked Ann. "I couldn't," said Kipps. "No." He pushed back his plate, which was indeed replete with potatoes, got up and walked about the room. Even the dinner-table looked distraught and unusual. "What to do, I _don't_ know," he said. "Oh, _Lord_!" he ejaculated, and picked up and slapped down a book. Then his eye fell upon another postcard that had come from Chitterlow by the morning's post, and which now lay by him on the mantel-shelf. He took it up, glanced at its imperfectly legible message, and put it down. "Delayed!" he said, scornfully. "Not prodooced in the smalls. Or is it smells 'e says? 'Ow can one understand that? Any'ow 'e's 'umbugging again.... Somefing about the Strand. No! Well, 'e's 'ad all the money 'e'll ever get out of me!... I'm done." He seemed to find a momentary relief in the dramatic effect of his announcement. He came near to a swagger of despair upon the hearthrug, and then suddenly came and sat down next to Ann and rested his chin on the knuckles of his two clenched hands. "I been a fool, Ann," he said in a gloomy monotone. "I been a brasted fool. But it's 'ard on us, all the same. It's 'ard." "'Ow was you to know?" said Ann. "I ought to 'ave known. I did in a sort of way know. And 'ere we are! I wouldn't care so much if it was myself, but it's _you_, Ann! 'Ere we are! Regular smashed up! And you----" He checked at an unspeakable aggravation of their disaster. "I knew 'e wasn't to be depended upon and there I left it! And you got to pay.... What's to 'appen to us all, I don't know." He thrust out his chin and glared at fate. "'Ow do you know 'e's speckylated everything?" said Ann, after a silent survey of him. "'E 'as," said Kipps, irritably, holding firm to disaster. "She say so?" "She don't know, of course, but you depend upon it that's it. She told me she knew something was on, and when she found 'im gone and a note lef' for her she knew it was up with 'im. 'E went by the night boat. She wrote that telegram off to me straight away." Ann surveyed his features with tender, perplexed eyes; she had never seen him so white and drawn before, and her hand rested an inch or so away from his arm. The actual loss was still, as it were, afar from her. The immediate thing was his enormous distress. "'Ow do you know----?" she said and stopped. It would irritate him too much. Kipps' imagination was going headlong. "Sold up!" he emitted presently, and Ann flinched. "Going back to work, day after day--I can't stand it, Ann, I can't. And you----" "It don't do to think of it," said Ann. Presently he came upon a resolve. "I keep on thinking of it, and thinking of it, and what's to be done and what's to be done. I shan't be any good 'ome s'arfernoon. It keeps on going 'round and 'round in my 'ead, and 'round and 'round. I better go for a walk or something. I'd be no comfort to you, Ann. I should want to 'owl and 'ammer things if I 'ung about 'ome. My fingers is all atwitch. I shall keep on thinking 'ow I might 'ave stopped it and callin' myself a fool."... He looked at her between pleading and shame. It seemed like deserting her. Ann regarded him with tear-dimmed eyes. "You'd better do what's good for you, Artie," she said.... "_I'll_ be best cleaning. It's no use sending off Gwendolen before her month, and the top room wants turning out." She added with a sort of grim humour: "May as well turn it out now while I got it." "I _better_ go for a walk," said Kipps.... And presently our poor exploded Kipps was marching out to bear his sudden misery. Habit turned him up the road towards his growing house, and then suddenly he perceived his direction--"Oh, Lor'!"--and turned aside and went up the steep way to the hill crest and the Sandling Road, and over the line by that tree-embowered Junction, and athwart the wide fields towards Postling--a little, black, marching figure--and so up the Downs and over the hills, whither he had never gone before.... 2 He came back long after dark, and Ann met him in the passage. "Where you been, Artie?" she asked, with a strained note in her voice. "I been walking and walking--trying to tire myself out. All the time I been thinking what shall I do. Trying to fix something up all out of nothing." "I didn't know you meant to be out all this time." Kipps was gripped by compunction.... "I can't think what we ought to do," he said, presently. "You can't do anything much, Artie, not till you hear from Mr. Bean." "No; I can't do anything much. That's jest it. And all this time I keep feelin' if I don't do something the top of my 'ead'll bust.... Been trying to make up advertisements 'arf the time I been out--'bout finding a place, good salesman and stock-keeper, and good Manchester dresses, window-dressing--Lor'! Fancy that all beginning again!... If you went to stay with Sid a bit--if I sent every penny I got to you--I dunno! I dunno!" When they had gone to bed there was an elaborate attempt to get to sleep.... In one of their great waking pauses Kipps remarked in a muffled tone: "I didn't mean to frighten you, Ann, being out so late. I kep' on walking and walking, and some'ow it seemed to do me good. I went out to the 'illtop ever so far beyond Stanford, and sat there ever so long, and it seemed to make me better. Just looking over the marsh like, and seeing the sun set."... "Very likely," said Ann, after a long interval, "it isn't so bad as you think it is, Artie." "It's bad," said Kipps. "Very likely, after all, it isn't quite so bad. If there's only a little----" There came another long silence. "Ann," said Kipps in the quiet darkness. "Yes," said Ann. "Ann," said Kipps, and stopped as though he had hastily shut a door upon speech. "I kep' thinking," he said, trying again, "I kep' thinking--after all--I been cross to you and a fool about things--about them cards, Ann; but"--his voice shook to pieces--"we _'ave_ been 'appy, Ann ... some'ow ... togever." And with that he and then she fell into a passion of weeping. They clung very tightly together--closer than they had been since ever the first brightness of their married days turned to the grey of common life again. All the disaster in the world could not prevent their going to sleep at last with their poor little troubled heads close together on one pillow. There was nothing more to be done, there was nothing more to be thought; Time might go on with his mischiefs, but for a little while at least they still had one another. 3 Kipps returned from his second interview with Mr. Bean in a state of strange excitement. He let himself in with his latch-key and slammed the door. "Ann!" he shouted, in an unusual note; "Ann!" Ann replied distantly. "Something to tell you," said Kipps; "something noo!" Ann appeared apprehensive from the kitchen. "Ann," he said, going before her into the little dining-room, for his news was too dignified for the passage, "very likely, Ann, o' Bean says, we shall 'ave----" He decided to prolong the suspense. "Guess!" "I can't, Artie." "Think of a lot of money!" "A 'undred pounds p'raps?" He spoke with immense deliberation. "O v e r a f o u s a n d p o u n d s!" Ann stared and said nothing, only went a shade whiter. "Over, he said. A'most certainly over." He shut the dining-room door and came forward hastily, for Ann, it was clear, meant to take this mitigation of their disaster with a complete abandonment of her self-control. She came near flopping; she fell into his arms. "Artie," she got to at last and began to weep, clinging tightly to him. "Pretty near certain," said Kipps, holding her. "A fousand pounds!" "I _said_, Artie," she wailed on his shoulder with the note of accumulated wrongs, "very likely it wasn't so bad."... "There's things," he said, when presently he came to particulars, "'e couldn't touch. The noo place! It's freehold and paid for, and with the bit of building on it, there's five or six 'undred pound p'raps--say worf free 'undred, for safety. We can't be sold up to finish it, like we thought. O' Bean says we can very likely sell it and get money. 'E says you often get a chance to sell a 'ouse lessen 'arf done, 'specially free'old. _Very_ likely, 'e say. Then there's Hughenden. Hughenden 'asn't been mortgaged not for more than 'arf its value. There's a 'undred or so to be got on that, and the furniture and the rent for the summer still coming in. 'E says there's very likely other things. A fousand pounds, that's what 'e said. 'E said it might even be more."... They were sitting now at the table. "It alters everything," said Ann. "I been thinking that, Ann, all the way 'ome. I came in the motor car. First ride I've 'ad since the smash. We needn't send off Gwendolen, leastways not till _after_. You know. We needn't turn out of 'ere--not for a long time. What we been doing for the o' people we can go on doing a'most as much. And your mother!... I wanted to 'oller coming along. I pretty near run coming down the road by the hotel." "Oh, I _am_ glad we can stop 'ere and be comfortable a bit," said Ann. "I _am_ glad for that." "I pretty near told the driver on the motor--only 'e was the sort won't talk.... You see, Ann, we'll be able to start a shop, we'll be able to get _into_ something like. All about our 'aving to go back to places and that; all that doesn't matter any more." For a while they abandoned themselves to ejaculating transports. Then they fell talking to shape an idea to themselves of the new prospect that opened before them. "We must start a sort of shop," said Kipps, whose imagination had been working. "It'll 'ave to be a shop." "Drapery?" said Ann. "You want such a lot of capital for the drapery, mor'n a thousand pounds you want by a long way--to start it anything like proper." "Well, outfitting. Like Buggins was going to do." Kipps glanced at that for a moment, because the idea had not occurred to him. Then he came back to his prepossession. "Well, I thought of something else, Ann," he said. "You see, I've always thought a little book-shop. It isn't like the drapery--'aving to be learnt. I thought--even before this smash-up--'ow I'd like to 'ave something to do, instead of always 'aving 'olidays always like we 'ave been 'aving." He reflected. "You don't know _much_ about books, do you, Artie?" "You don't want to." He illustrated. "I noticed when we used to go to that Lib'ry at Folkestone, ladies weren't anything like what they was in a draper's--if you 'aven't got _just_ what they want it's 'Oh, no!' and out they go. But in a book shop it's different. One book's very like another--after all, what is it? Something to read and done with. It's not a thing that matters like print dresses or serviettes--where you either like 'em or don't, and people judge you by. They take what you give 'em in books and lib'ries, and glad to be told _what_ to. See 'ow we was--up at that lib'ry."... He paused. "You see, Ann---- "Well, I read 'n 'dvertisement the other day. I been asking Mr. Bean. It said--five 'undred pounds." "What did?" "Branches," said Kipps. Ann failed to understand. "It's a sort of thing that gets up book shops all over the country," said Kipps. "I didn't tell you, but I arst about it a bit. On'y I dropped it again. Before this smash, I mean. I'd thought I'd like to keep a shop for a lark, on'y then I thought it silly. Besides it 'ud 'ave been beneath me." He blushed vividly. "It was a sort of projek of mine, Ann. "On'y it wouldn't 'ave done," he added. It was a tortuous journey when the Kippses set out to explain anything to each other. But through a maze of fragmentary elucidations and questions, their minds did presently begin to approximate to a picture of a compact, bright, little shop, as a framework for themselves. "I thought of it one day when I was in Folkestone. I thought of it one day when I was looking in at a window. I see a chap dressin' a window and he was whistlin' reg'lar light-'arted.... I thought then I'd like to keep a bookshop, any'ow, jest for something to do. And when people weren't about, then you could sit and read the books. See? It wouldn't be 'arf bad."... They mused, each with elbows on table and knuckles to lips, looking with speculative eyes at each other. "Very likely we'll be 'appier than we should 'ave been with more money," said Kipps presently. "We wasn't 'ardly suited," reflected Ann, and left her sentence incomplete. "Fish out of water like," said Kipps.... "You won't 'ave to return that call now," said Kipps, opening a new branch of the question. "That's one good thing." "Lor'!" said Ann, visibly brightening, "no more I shan't!" "I don't s'pose they'd want you to, even if you did--with things as they are." A certain added brightness came into Ann's face. "Nobody won't be able to come leaving cards on us, Artie, now, any more. We are out of _that_!" "There isn't no necessity for us to be stuck up," said Kipps, "any more for ever! 'Ere we are, Ann, common people, with jest no position at all, as you might say, to keep up. No sev'nts, not if you don't like. No dressin' better than other people. If it wasn't we been robbed--dashed if I'd care a rap about losing that money. I b'lieve"--his face shone with the rare pleasure of paradox--"I reely b'lieve, Ann, it'll prove a savin' in the end." 4 The remarkable advertisement which had fired Kipps' imagination with this dream of a bookshop opened out in the most alluring way. It was one little facet in a comprehensive scheme of transatlantic origin, which was to make our old-world methods of book-selling "sit up," and it displayed an imaginative briskness, a lucidity and promise that aroused the profoundest scepticism in the mind of Mr. Bean. To Kipps' renewed investigations it presented itself in an expository illustrated pamphlet (far too well printed, Mr. Bean thought, for a reputable undertaking) of the most convincing sort. Mr. Bean would not let him sink his capital in shares in its projected company that was to make all things new in the world of books, but he could not prevent Kipps becoming one of their associated booksellers. And so when presently it became apparent that an epoch was not to be made, and the "Associated Booksellers' Trading Union (Limited)" receded and dissolved and liquidated (a few drops) and vanished and went away to talk about something else, Kipps remained floating undamaged in this interestingly uncertain universe as an independent bookseller. Except that it failed, the Associated Booksellers' Trading Union had all the stigmata of success. Its fault, perhaps, was that it had them all instead of only one or two. It was to buy wholesale for all

bidding

How many times the word 'bidding' appears in the text?

you go and slap 'em in the face!" "I didn't slap 'em in the face." "You do--practically. You slams the door in their face, and that's all we see of 'em ever. I wouldn't 'ave 'ad this 'appen not for a ten-pound note." He rounded his regrets with a grunt. For a while there was silence, save for the little stir of Ann's movements preparing the tea. "Tea, Artie," said Ann, handing him a cup. Kipps took it. "I put sugar _once_," said Ann. "Oo, dash it! Oo cares?" said Kipps, taking an extraordinarily large additional lump with fury quivering fingers, and putting his cup with a slight excess of force on the recess cupboard. "Oo cares? "I wouldn't 'ave 'ad that 'appen," he said, bidding steadily against accomplished things, "for twenty pounds." He gloomed in silence through a long minute or so. Then Ann said the fatal thing that exploded him. "Artie!" she said. "What?" "There's Buttud Toce down there! By your foot!" There was a pause, husband and wife regarded one another. "Buttud Toce!" he said. "You go and mess up them callers and then you try and stuff me up with Buttud Toce! Buttud Toce indeed! 'Ere's our first chance of knowing anyone that's at all fit to 'sociate with----. Look 'ere, Ann! Tell you what it is--you got to return that call." "Return that call!" "Yes, you got to return that call. That's what you got to do! I know----" He waved his arm vaguely towards the miscellany of books in the recess. "It's in Manners and Rools of Good S'ity. You got to find jest 'ow many cards to leave and you got to go and leave 'em. See?" Ann's face expressed terror. "But, Artie, 'ow _can_ I?" "'Ow _can_ you? 'Ow _could_ you? You got to do it, any'ow. They won't know you--not in your Bond Street 'at! If they do, they won't say nothing." His voice assumed a note of entreaty. "You mus', Ann." "I can't." "You mus'." "I can't and I won't. Anything in reason I'll do, but face those people again I can't--after what 'as 'appened." "You won't?" "No!"... "So there they go--orf! And we never see them again! And so it goes on! So it goes on! We don't know nobody and we _shan't_ know anybody! And you won't put yourself out not a little bit, or take the trouble to find out anything 'ow it ought to be done." Terrible pause. "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie, that's the troof." "Oh! _don't_ go into that." "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie. I'm not equal to the position. If you 'adn't said you'd drown yourself----" She choked. "I don' see why you shouldn't _try_, Ann. _I've_ improved. Why don't you? 'Stead of which you go sending out the servant and 'namelling floors, and then when visitors come----" "'Ow was _I_ to know about y'r old visitors?" cried Ann in a wail, and suddenly got up and fled from amidst their ruined tea, the tea of which "toce, all buttery," was to be the crown and glory. Kipps watched her with a momentary consternation. Then he hardened his heart. "Ought to 'ave known better," he said, "goin' on like that!" He remained for a space rubbing his knees and muttering. He emitted scornfully: "I carn't an' I won't." He saw her as the source of all his shames. Presently, quite mechanically, he stooped down and lifted the flowery china cover. "Ter dash 'er Buttud Toce!" he shouted at the sight of it, and clapped the cover down again hard.... When Gwendolen came back she perceived things were in a slightly unusual poise. Kipps sat by the fire in a rigid attitude reading a casually selected volume of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and Ann was upstairs and inaccessible--to reappear at a later stage with reddened eyes. Before the fire and still in a perfectly assimilable condition was what was evidently an untouched supply of richly buttered toast under a cracked cover. "They've 'ad a bit of a tiff," said Gwendolen, attending to her duties in the kitchen, with her outdoor hat still on and her mouth full. "They're rummuns--if ever! My eye!" And she took another piece of Ann's generously buttered toast. 4 The Kippses spoke no more that day to one another. The squabble about cards and buttered toast was as serious to them as the most rational of differences. It was all rational to them. Their sense of wrong burnt within them; their sense of what was owing to themselves, the duty of implacability, the obstinacy of pride. In the small hours Kipps lay awake at the nadir of unhappiness and came near groaning. He saw life as an extraordinarily desolating muddle; his futile house, his social discredit, his bad behaviour to Helen, his low marriage to Ann.... He became aware of something irregular in Ann's breathing.... He listened. She was awake and quietly and privately sobbing! He hardened his heart; resolutely he hardened his heart. The stupid little tragedies of these clipped and limited lives! What is the good of keeping up the idyllic sham and pretending that ill-educated, misdirected people "get along very well," and that all this is harmlessly funny and nothing more? You think I'm going to write fat, silly, grinning novels about half-educated, under-trained people and keep it up all the time, that the whole thing's nothing but funny! As I think of them lying unhappily there in the darkness, my vision pierces the night. See what I can see! Above them, brooding over them, I tell you there is a monster, a lumpish monster, like some great, clumsy griffin thing, like the Crystal Palace labyrinthodon, like Coote, like the leaden goddess Dulness Pope Abhorred, like some fat, proud flunkey, like pride, like indolence, like all that is darkening and heavy and obstructive in life. It is matter and darkness, it is the anti-soul, Stupidity. My Kippses live in its shadow. Shalford and his apprenticeship system, the Hastings Academy, the ideas of Coote, the ideas of the old Kippses, all the ideas that have made Kipps what he is, all these are its shadow. But for that monster they might not be groping among false ideas and hurt one another so sorely and so stupidly; but for that, the glowing promise of childhood and youth might have had a happier fruition, thought might have awakened in them to meet _the_ thought of the world, the quickening sunshine of literature pierced to the substance of their souls, their lives might not have been divorced, as now they are divorced for ever, from the apprehension of beauty that we favoured ones are given--the vision of the Grail that makes life fine for ever. I have laughed, and I laugh at these two people; I have sought to make you laugh.... But I see through the darkness the souls of my Kippses, as they are, as little pink strips of living stuff, like the bodies of little, ill-nourished, ailing, ignorant children, children who feel pain, who are naughty and muddled and suffer and do not understand why. And the claw of this Beast rests upon them! CHAPTER III TERMINATIONS 1 Next morning came a remarkable telegram from Folkestone. "Please come at once, urgent, Walshingham," said the telegram, and Kipps, after an agitated but still ample breakfast, departed.... When he returned his face was very white and his countenance disordered. He let himself in with his latchkey and came into the dining-room where Ann sat, affecting to work at a little thing she called a bib. She heard his hat fall in the hall before he entered, as though he had missed the peg. "I got something to tell you, Ann," he said, disregarding their overnight quarrel, and went to the hearthrug and took hold of the mantel, and stared at Ann as though the sight of her was novel. "Well?" said Ann, not looking up and working a little faster. "'E's gone!" Ann looked up sharply and her hands stopped. "_Who's_ gone?" For the first time she perceived Kipps' pallor. "Young Walshingham--I saw 'er and she tole me." "Gone? What d'you mean?" "Cleared out! Gone off for good!" "What for?" "For 'is 'ealth," said Kipps, with sudden bitterness. "'E's been speckylating. He's speckylated our money and 'e's speckylated their money, and now 'e's took 'is 'ook. That's all about it, Ann." "You mean?" "I mean 'e's orf and our twenty-four thousand's orf, too! And 'ere we are! Smashed up! That's all about it, Ann." He panted. Ann had no vocabulary for such an occasion. "Oh, Lor'!" she said, and sat still. Kipps came about and stuck his hands deeply in his trouser pockets. "Speckylated every penny--lorst it all--and gorn." Even his lips were white. "You mean we ain't got nothin' left, Artie?" "Not a penny! Not a bloomin' penny, Ann. No!" A gust of passion whirled across the soul of Kipps. He flung out a knuckly fist. "If I 'ad 'im 'ere," he said, "I'd--I'd--I'd wring 'is neck for 'im. I'd--I'd----" His voice rose to a shout. He thought of Gwendolen in the kitchen and fell to "Ugh!" "But, Artie," said Ann, trying to grasp it, "d'you mean to say he's took our money?" "Speckylated it!" said Kipps, with an illustrative flourish of the arm, that failed to illustrate. "Bort things dear and sold 'em cheap, and played the 'ankey-pankey jackass with everything we got. That's what I mean 'e's done, Ann." He repeated this last sentence with the addition of violent adverbs. "D'you mean to say our money's _gone_, Artie?" "Ter-dash it, _Yes_, Ann!" swore Kipps, exploding in a shout. "Ain't I tellin' you?" He was immediately sorry. "I didn't mean to 'oller at you, Ann," he said, "but I'm all shook up. I don't 'ardly know what I'm sayin'. Ev'ry penny."... "But, Artie----" Kipps grunted. He went to the window and stared for a moment at a sunlit sea. "Gord!" he swore. "I mean," he said, coming back to Ann and with an air of exasperation, "that he's 'bezzled and 'ooked it. That's what I mean, Ann." Ann put down the bib. "But wot are we going to _do_, Artie?" Kipps indicated ignorance, wrath and despair with one comprehensive gesture of his hands. He caught an ornament from the mantel and replaced it. "I'm going to bang about," he said, "if I ain't precious careful." "You saw _'er_, you say?" "Yes." "What did she say 'xactly?" said Ann. "Told me to see a s'licitor--tole me to get someone to 'elp me at once. She was there in black--like she used to be--and speaking cool and careful-like. 'Elen!... She's precious 'ard, is 'Elen. She looked at me straight. 'It's my fault,' she said, 'I ought to 'ave warned you.... Only under the circumstances it was a little difficult.' Straight as anything. I didn't 'ardly say anything to 'er. I didn't seem to begin to take it in until she was showing me out. I 'adn't anything to say. Jest as well, perhaps. She talked like a call a'most. She said--what _was_ it she said about her mother? 'My mother's overcome with grief,' she said, 'so naturally everything comes on me.'" "And she told you to get someone to 'elp you?" "Yes. I been to old Bean." "O' Bean?" "Yes. What I took my business away from!" "What did he say?" "He was a bit off'and at first, but then 'e come 'round. He couldn't tell me anything till 'e knew the facts. What I know of young Walshingham, there won't be much 'elp in the facts. No!" He reflected for a space. "It's a smash-up, Ann. More likely than not, Ann, 'e's left us over'ead in debt. We got to get out of it just 'ow we can.... "We got to begin again," he went on. "_'Ow_, I don't know. All the way 'ome my 'ead's been going. We got to get a living some'ow or other. 'Aving time to ourselves, and a bit of money to spend, and no hurry and worry, it's all over for ever, Ann. We was fools, Ann. We didn't know our benefits. We been caught. Gord!... Gord!" He was on the verge of "banging about" again. They heard a jingle in the passage, the large soft impact of a servant's indoor boots. As if she were a part, a mitigatory part of Fate, came Gwendolen to lay the midday meal. Kipps displayed self-control forthwith. Ann picked up the bib again and bent over it, and the Kippses bore themselves gloomily perhaps, but not despairfully, while their dependant was in the room. She spread the cloth and put out the cutlery with a slow inaccuracy, and Kipps, after a whisper to himself, went again to the window. Ann got up and put away her work methodically in the cheffonier. "When I think," said Kipps, as soon as the door closed again behind Gwendolen, "when I think of the 'ole people and 'aving to tell 'em of it all--I want to smesh my 'ead against the nearest wall. Smesh my silly brains out! And Buggins--Buggins what I'd 'arf promised to start in a lill' outfitting shop in Rendezvous Street."... Gwendolen returned and restored dignity. The midday meal spread itself slowly before them. Gwendolen, after her custom, left the door open and Kipps closed it carefully before sitting down. He stood for a moment, regarding the meal doubtfully. "I don't feel as if I could swaller a moufful," he said. "You got to eat," said Ann.... For a time they said little, and once swallowing was achieved, ate on with a sort of melancholy appetite. Each was now busy thinking. "After all," said Kipps, presently, "whatever 'appens, they can't turn us out or sell us up before nex' quarter-day. I'm pretty sure about that." "Sell us up!" said Ann. "I dessey we're bankrup'," said Kipps, trying to say it easily and helping himself with a trembling hand to unnecessary potatoes. Then a long silence. Ann ceased to eat, and there were silent tears. "More potatoes, Artie?" choked Ann. "I couldn't," said Kipps. "No." He pushed back his plate, which was indeed replete with potatoes, got up and walked about the room. Even the dinner-table looked distraught and unusual. "What to do, I _don't_ know," he said. "Oh, _Lord_!" he ejaculated, and picked up and slapped down a book. Then his eye fell upon another postcard that had come from Chitterlow by the morning's post, and which now lay by him on the mantel-shelf. He took it up, glanced at its imperfectly legible message, and put it down. "Delayed!" he said, scornfully. "Not prodooced in the smalls. Or is it smells 'e says? 'Ow can one understand that? Any'ow 'e's 'umbugging again.... Somefing about the Strand. No! Well, 'e's 'ad all the money 'e'll ever get out of me!... I'm done." He seemed to find a momentary relief in the dramatic effect of his announcement. He came near to a swagger of despair upon the hearthrug, and then suddenly came and sat down next to Ann and rested his chin on the knuckles of his two clenched hands. "I been a fool, Ann," he said in a gloomy monotone. "I been a brasted fool. But it's 'ard on us, all the same. It's 'ard." "'Ow was you to know?" said Ann. "I ought to 'ave known. I did in a sort of way know. And 'ere we are! I wouldn't care so much if it was myself, but it's _you_, Ann! 'Ere we are! Regular smashed up! And you----" He checked at an unspeakable aggravation of their disaster. "I knew 'e wasn't to be depended upon and there I left it! And you got to pay.... What's to 'appen to us all, I don't know." He thrust out his chin and glared at fate. "'Ow do you know 'e's speckylated everything?" said Ann, after a silent survey of him. "'E 'as," said Kipps, irritably, holding firm to disaster. "She say so?" "She don't know, of course, but you depend upon it that's it. She told me she knew something was on, and when she found 'im gone and a note lef' for her she knew it was up with 'im. 'E went by the night boat. She wrote that telegram off to me straight away." Ann surveyed his features with tender, perplexed eyes; she had never seen him so white and drawn before, and her hand rested an inch or so away from his arm. The actual loss was still, as it were, afar from her. The immediate thing was his enormous distress. "'Ow do you know----?" she said and stopped. It would irritate him too much. Kipps' imagination was going headlong. "Sold up!" he emitted presently, and Ann flinched. "Going back to work, day after day--I can't stand it, Ann, I can't. And you----" "It don't do to think of it," said Ann. Presently he came upon a resolve. "I keep on thinking of it, and thinking of it, and what's to be done and what's to be done. I shan't be any good 'ome s'arfernoon. It keeps on going 'round and 'round in my 'ead, and 'round and 'round. I better go for a walk or something. I'd be no comfort to you, Ann. I should want to 'owl and 'ammer things if I 'ung about 'ome. My fingers is all atwitch. I shall keep on thinking 'ow I might 'ave stopped it and callin' myself a fool."... He looked at her between pleading and shame. It seemed like deserting her. Ann regarded him with tear-dimmed eyes. "You'd better do what's good for you, Artie," she said.... "_I'll_ be best cleaning. It's no use sending off Gwendolen before her month, and the top room wants turning out." She added with a sort of grim humour: "May as well turn it out now while I got it." "I _better_ go for a walk," said Kipps.... And presently our poor exploded Kipps was marching out to bear his sudden misery. Habit turned him up the road towards his growing house, and then suddenly he perceived his direction--"Oh, Lor'!"--and turned aside and went up the steep way to the hill crest and the Sandling Road, and over the line by that tree-embowered Junction, and athwart the wide fields towards Postling--a little, black, marching figure--and so up the Downs and over the hills, whither he had never gone before.... 2 He came back long after dark, and Ann met him in the passage. "Where you been, Artie?" she asked, with a strained note in her voice. "I been walking and walking--trying to tire myself out. All the time I been thinking what shall I do. Trying to fix something up all out of nothing." "I didn't know you meant to be out all this time." Kipps was gripped by compunction.... "I can't think what we ought to do," he said, presently. "You can't do anything much, Artie, not till you hear from Mr. Bean." "No; I can't do anything much. That's jest it. And all this time I keep feelin' if I don't do something the top of my 'ead'll bust.... Been trying to make up advertisements 'arf the time I been out--'bout finding a place, good salesman and stock-keeper, and good Manchester dresses, window-dressing--Lor'! Fancy that all beginning again!... If you went to stay with Sid a bit--if I sent every penny I got to you--I dunno! I dunno!" When they had gone to bed there was an elaborate attempt to get to sleep.... In one of their great waking pauses Kipps remarked in a muffled tone: "I didn't mean to frighten you, Ann, being out so late. I kep' on walking and walking, and some'ow it seemed to do me good. I went out to the 'illtop ever so far beyond Stanford, and sat there ever so long, and it seemed to make me better. Just looking over the marsh like, and seeing the sun set."... "Very likely," said Ann, after a long interval, "it isn't so bad as you think it is, Artie." "It's bad," said Kipps. "Very likely, after all, it isn't quite so bad. If there's only a little----" There came another long silence. "Ann," said Kipps in the quiet darkness. "Yes," said Ann. "Ann," said Kipps, and stopped as though he had hastily shut a door upon speech. "I kep' thinking," he said, trying again, "I kep' thinking--after all--I been cross to you and a fool about things--about them cards, Ann; but"--his voice shook to pieces--"we _'ave_ been 'appy, Ann ... some'ow ... togever." And with that he and then she fell into a passion of weeping. They clung very tightly together--closer than they had been since ever the first brightness of their married days turned to the grey of common life again. All the disaster in the world could not prevent their going to sleep at last with their poor little troubled heads close together on one pillow. There was nothing more to be done, there was nothing more to be thought; Time might go on with his mischiefs, but for a little while at least they still had one another. 3 Kipps returned from his second interview with Mr. Bean in a state of strange excitement. He let himself in with his latch-key and slammed the door. "Ann!" he shouted, in an unusual note; "Ann!" Ann replied distantly. "Something to tell you," said Kipps; "something noo!" Ann appeared apprehensive from the kitchen. "Ann," he said, going before her into the little dining-room, for his news was too dignified for the passage, "very likely, Ann, o' Bean says, we shall 'ave----" He decided to prolong the suspense. "Guess!" "I can't, Artie." "Think of a lot of money!" "A 'undred pounds p'raps?" He spoke with immense deliberation. "O v e r a f o u s a n d p o u n d s!" Ann stared and said nothing, only went a shade whiter. "Over, he said. A'most certainly over." He shut the dining-room door and came forward hastily, for Ann, it was clear, meant to take this mitigation of their disaster with a complete abandonment of her self-control. She came near flopping; she fell into his arms. "Artie," she got to at last and began to weep, clinging tightly to him. "Pretty near certain," said Kipps, holding her. "A fousand pounds!" "I _said_, Artie," she wailed on his shoulder with the note of accumulated wrongs, "very likely it wasn't so bad."... "There's things," he said, when presently he came to particulars, "'e couldn't touch. The noo place! It's freehold and paid for, and with the bit of building on it, there's five or six 'undred pound p'raps--say worf free 'undred, for safety. We can't be sold up to finish it, like we thought. O' Bean says we can very likely sell it and get money. 'E says you often get a chance to sell a 'ouse lessen 'arf done, 'specially free'old. _Very_ likely, 'e say. Then there's Hughenden. Hughenden 'asn't been mortgaged not for more than 'arf its value. There's a 'undred or so to be got on that, and the furniture and the rent for the summer still coming in. 'E says there's very likely other things. A fousand pounds, that's what 'e said. 'E said it might even be more."... They were sitting now at the table. "It alters everything," said Ann. "I been thinking that, Ann, all the way 'ome. I came in the motor car. First ride I've 'ad since the smash. We needn't send off Gwendolen, leastways not till _after_. You know. We needn't turn out of 'ere--not for a long time. What we been doing for the o' people we can go on doing a'most as much. And your mother!... I wanted to 'oller coming along. I pretty near run coming down the road by the hotel." "Oh, I _am_ glad we can stop 'ere and be comfortable a bit," said Ann. "I _am_ glad for that." "I pretty near told the driver on the motor--only 'e was the sort won't talk.... You see, Ann, we'll be able to start a shop, we'll be able to get _into_ something like. All about our 'aving to go back to places and that; all that doesn't matter any more." For a while they abandoned themselves to ejaculating transports. Then they fell talking to shape an idea to themselves of the new prospect that opened before them. "We must start a sort of shop," said Kipps, whose imagination had been working. "It'll 'ave to be a shop." "Drapery?" said Ann. "You want such a lot of capital for the drapery, mor'n a thousand pounds you want by a long way--to start it anything like proper." "Well, outfitting. Like Buggins was going to do." Kipps glanced at that for a moment, because the idea had not occurred to him. Then he came back to his prepossession. "Well, I thought of something else, Ann," he said. "You see, I've always thought a little book-shop. It isn't like the drapery--'aving to be learnt. I thought--even before this smash-up--'ow I'd like to 'ave something to do, instead of always 'aving 'olidays always like we 'ave been 'aving." He reflected. "You don't know _much_ about books, do you, Artie?" "You don't want to." He illustrated. "I noticed when we used to go to that Lib'ry at Folkestone, ladies weren't anything like what they was in a draper's--if you 'aven't got _just_ what they want it's 'Oh, no!' and out they go. But in a book shop it's different. One book's very like another--after all, what is it? Something to read and done with. It's not a thing that matters like print dresses or serviettes--where you either like 'em or don't, and people judge you by. They take what you give 'em in books and lib'ries, and glad to be told _what_ to. See 'ow we was--up at that lib'ry."... He paused. "You see, Ann---- "Well, I read 'n 'dvertisement the other day. I been asking Mr. Bean. It said--five 'undred pounds." "What did?" "Branches," said Kipps. Ann failed to understand. "It's a sort of thing that gets up book shops all over the country," said Kipps. "I didn't tell you, but I arst about it a bit. On'y I dropped it again. Before this smash, I mean. I'd thought I'd like to keep a shop for a lark, on'y then I thought it silly. Besides it 'ud 'ave been beneath me." He blushed vividly. "It was a sort of projek of mine, Ann. "On'y it wouldn't 'ave done," he added. It was a tortuous journey when the Kippses set out to explain anything to each other. But through a maze of fragmentary elucidations and questions, their minds did presently begin to approximate to a picture of a compact, bright, little shop, as a framework for themselves. "I thought of it one day when I was in Folkestone. I thought of it one day when I was looking in at a window. I see a chap dressin' a window and he was whistlin' reg'lar light-'arted.... I thought then I'd like to keep a bookshop, any'ow, jest for something to do. And when people weren't about, then you could sit and read the books. See? It wouldn't be 'arf bad."... They mused, each with elbows on table and knuckles to lips, looking with speculative eyes at each other. "Very likely we'll be 'appier than we should 'ave been with more money," said Kipps presently. "We wasn't 'ardly suited," reflected Ann, and left her sentence incomplete. "Fish out of water like," said Kipps.... "You won't 'ave to return that call now," said Kipps, opening a new branch of the question. "That's one good thing." "Lor'!" said Ann, visibly brightening, "no more I shan't!" "I don't s'pose they'd want you to, even if you did--with things as they are." A certain added brightness came into Ann's face. "Nobody won't be able to come leaving cards on us, Artie, now, any more. We are out of _that_!" "There isn't no necessity for us to be stuck up," said Kipps, "any more for ever! 'Ere we are, Ann, common people, with jest no position at all, as you might say, to keep up. No sev'nts, not if you don't like. No dressin' better than other people. If it wasn't we been robbed--dashed if I'd care a rap about losing that money. I b'lieve"--his face shone with the rare pleasure of paradox--"I reely b'lieve, Ann, it'll prove a savin' in the end." 4 The remarkable advertisement which had fired Kipps' imagination with this dream of a bookshop opened out in the most alluring way. It was one little facet in a comprehensive scheme of transatlantic origin, which was to make our old-world methods of book-selling "sit up," and it displayed an imaginative briskness, a lucidity and promise that aroused the profoundest scepticism in the mind of Mr. Bean. To Kipps' renewed investigations it presented itself in an expository illustrated pamphlet (far too well printed, Mr. Bean thought, for a reputable undertaking) of the most convincing sort. Mr. Bean would not let him sink his capital in shares in its projected company that was to make all things new in the world of books, but he could not prevent Kipps becoming one of their associated booksellers. And so when presently it became apparent that an epoch was not to be made, and the "Associated Booksellers' Trading Union (Limited)" receded and dissolved and liquidated (a few drops) and vanished and went away to talk about something else, Kipps remained floating undamaged in this interestingly uncertain universe as an independent bookseller. Except that it failed, the Associated Booksellers' Trading Union had all the stigmata of success. Its fault, perhaps, was that it had them all instead of only one or two. It was to buy wholesale for all

despair

How many times the word 'despair' appears in the text?

you go and slap 'em in the face!" "I didn't slap 'em in the face." "You do--practically. You slams the door in their face, and that's all we see of 'em ever. I wouldn't 'ave 'ad this 'appen not for a ten-pound note." He rounded his regrets with a grunt. For a while there was silence, save for the little stir of Ann's movements preparing the tea. "Tea, Artie," said Ann, handing him a cup. Kipps took it. "I put sugar _once_," said Ann. "Oo, dash it! Oo cares?" said Kipps, taking an extraordinarily large additional lump with fury quivering fingers, and putting his cup with a slight excess of force on the recess cupboard. "Oo cares? "I wouldn't 'ave 'ad that 'appen," he said, bidding steadily against accomplished things, "for twenty pounds." He gloomed in silence through a long minute or so. Then Ann said the fatal thing that exploded him. "Artie!" she said. "What?" "There's Buttud Toce down there! By your foot!" There was a pause, husband and wife regarded one another. "Buttud Toce!" he said. "You go and mess up them callers and then you try and stuff me up with Buttud Toce! Buttud Toce indeed! 'Ere's our first chance of knowing anyone that's at all fit to 'sociate with----. Look 'ere, Ann! Tell you what it is--you got to return that call." "Return that call!" "Yes, you got to return that call. That's what you got to do! I know----" He waved his arm vaguely towards the miscellany of books in the recess. "It's in Manners and Rools of Good S'ity. You got to find jest 'ow many cards to leave and you got to go and leave 'em. See?" Ann's face expressed terror. "But, Artie, 'ow _can_ I?" "'Ow _can_ you? 'Ow _could_ you? You got to do it, any'ow. They won't know you--not in your Bond Street 'at! If they do, they won't say nothing." His voice assumed a note of entreaty. "You mus', Ann." "I can't." "You mus'." "I can't and I won't. Anything in reason I'll do, but face those people again I can't--after what 'as 'appened." "You won't?" "No!"... "So there they go--orf! And we never see them again! And so it goes on! So it goes on! We don't know nobody and we _shan't_ know anybody! And you won't put yourself out not a little bit, or take the trouble to find out anything 'ow it ought to be done." Terrible pause. "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie, that's the troof." "Oh! _don't_ go into that." "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie. I'm not equal to the position. If you 'adn't said you'd drown yourself----" She choked. "I don' see why you shouldn't _try_, Ann. _I've_ improved. Why don't you? 'Stead of which you go sending out the servant and 'namelling floors, and then when visitors come----" "'Ow was _I_ to know about y'r old visitors?" cried Ann in a wail, and suddenly got up and fled from amidst their ruined tea, the tea of which "toce, all buttery," was to be the crown and glory. Kipps watched her with a momentary consternation. Then he hardened his heart. "Ought to 'ave known better," he said, "goin' on like that!" He remained for a space rubbing his knees and muttering. He emitted scornfully: "I carn't an' I won't." He saw her as the source of all his shames. Presently, quite mechanically, he stooped down and lifted the flowery china cover. "Ter dash 'er Buttud Toce!" he shouted at the sight of it, and clapped the cover down again hard.... When Gwendolen came back she perceived things were in a slightly unusual poise. Kipps sat by the fire in a rigid attitude reading a casually selected volume of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and Ann was upstairs and inaccessible--to reappear at a later stage with reddened eyes. Before the fire and still in a perfectly assimilable condition was what was evidently an untouched supply of richly buttered toast under a cracked cover. "They've 'ad a bit of a tiff," said Gwendolen, attending to her duties in the kitchen, with her outdoor hat still on and her mouth full. "They're rummuns--if ever! My eye!" And she took another piece of Ann's generously buttered toast. 4 The Kippses spoke no more that day to one another. The squabble about cards and buttered toast was as serious to them as the most rational of differences. It was all rational to them. Their sense of wrong burnt within them; their sense of what was owing to themselves, the duty of implacability, the obstinacy of pride. In the small hours Kipps lay awake at the nadir of unhappiness and came near groaning. He saw life as an extraordinarily desolating muddle; his futile house, his social discredit, his bad behaviour to Helen, his low marriage to Ann.... He became aware of something irregular in Ann's breathing.... He listened. She was awake and quietly and privately sobbing! He hardened his heart; resolutely he hardened his heart. The stupid little tragedies of these clipped and limited lives! What is the good of keeping up the idyllic sham and pretending that ill-educated, misdirected people "get along very well," and that all this is harmlessly funny and nothing more? You think I'm going to write fat, silly, grinning novels about half-educated, under-trained people and keep it up all the time, that the whole thing's nothing but funny! As I think of them lying unhappily there in the darkness, my vision pierces the night. See what I can see! Above them, brooding over them, I tell you there is a monster, a lumpish monster, like some great, clumsy griffin thing, like the Crystal Palace labyrinthodon, like Coote, like the leaden goddess Dulness Pope Abhorred, like some fat, proud flunkey, like pride, like indolence, like all that is darkening and heavy and obstructive in life. It is matter and darkness, it is the anti-soul, Stupidity. My Kippses live in its shadow. Shalford and his apprenticeship system, the Hastings Academy, the ideas of Coote, the ideas of the old Kippses, all the ideas that have made Kipps what he is, all these are its shadow. But for that monster they might not be groping among false ideas and hurt one another so sorely and so stupidly; but for that, the glowing promise of childhood and youth might have had a happier fruition, thought might have awakened in them to meet _the_ thought of the world, the quickening sunshine of literature pierced to the substance of their souls, their lives might not have been divorced, as now they are divorced for ever, from the apprehension of beauty that we favoured ones are given--the vision of the Grail that makes life fine for ever. I have laughed, and I laugh at these two people; I have sought to make you laugh.... But I see through the darkness the souls of my Kippses, as they are, as little pink strips of living stuff, like the bodies of little, ill-nourished, ailing, ignorant children, children who feel pain, who are naughty and muddled and suffer and do not understand why. And the claw of this Beast rests upon them! CHAPTER III TERMINATIONS 1 Next morning came a remarkable telegram from Folkestone. "Please come at once, urgent, Walshingham," said the telegram, and Kipps, after an agitated but still ample breakfast, departed.... When he returned his face was very white and his countenance disordered. He let himself in with his latchkey and came into the dining-room where Ann sat, affecting to work at a little thing she called a bib. She heard his hat fall in the hall before he entered, as though he had missed the peg. "I got something to tell you, Ann," he said, disregarding their overnight quarrel, and went to the hearthrug and took hold of the mantel, and stared at Ann as though the sight of her was novel. "Well?" said Ann, not looking up and working a little faster. "'E's gone!" Ann looked up sharply and her hands stopped. "_Who's_ gone?" For the first time she perceived Kipps' pallor. "Young Walshingham--I saw 'er and she tole me." "Gone? What d'you mean?" "Cleared out! Gone off for good!" "What for?" "For 'is 'ealth," said Kipps, with sudden bitterness. "'E's been speckylating. He's speckylated our money and 'e's speckylated their money, and now 'e's took 'is 'ook. That's all about it, Ann." "You mean?" "I mean 'e's orf and our twenty-four thousand's orf, too! And 'ere we are! Smashed up! That's all about it, Ann." He panted. Ann had no vocabulary for such an occasion. "Oh, Lor'!" she said, and sat still. Kipps came about and stuck his hands deeply in his trouser pockets. "Speckylated every penny--lorst it all--and gorn." Even his lips were white. "You mean we ain't got nothin' left, Artie?" "Not a penny! Not a bloomin' penny, Ann. No!" A gust of passion whirled across the soul of Kipps. He flung out a knuckly fist. "If I 'ad 'im 'ere," he said, "I'd--I'd--I'd wring 'is neck for 'im. I'd--I'd----" His voice rose to a shout. He thought of Gwendolen in the kitchen and fell to "Ugh!" "But, Artie," said Ann, trying to grasp it, "d'you mean to say he's took our money?" "Speckylated it!" said Kipps, with an illustrative flourish of the arm, that failed to illustrate. "Bort things dear and sold 'em cheap, and played the 'ankey-pankey jackass with everything we got. That's what I mean 'e's done, Ann." He repeated this last sentence with the addition of violent adverbs. "D'you mean to say our money's _gone_, Artie?" "Ter-dash it, _Yes_, Ann!" swore Kipps, exploding in a shout. "Ain't I tellin' you?" He was immediately sorry. "I didn't mean to 'oller at you, Ann," he said, "but I'm all shook up. I don't 'ardly know what I'm sayin'. Ev'ry penny."... "But, Artie----" Kipps grunted. He went to the window and stared for a moment at a sunlit sea. "Gord!" he swore. "I mean," he said, coming back to Ann and with an air of exasperation, "that he's 'bezzled and 'ooked it. That's what I mean, Ann." Ann put down the bib. "But wot are we going to _do_, Artie?" Kipps indicated ignorance, wrath and despair with one comprehensive gesture of his hands. He caught an ornament from the mantel and replaced it. "I'm going to bang about," he said, "if I ain't precious careful." "You saw _'er_, you say?" "Yes." "What did she say 'xactly?" said Ann. "Told me to see a s'licitor--tole me to get someone to 'elp me at once. She was there in black--like she used to be--and speaking cool and careful-like. 'Elen!... She's precious 'ard, is 'Elen. She looked at me straight. 'It's my fault,' she said, 'I ought to 'ave warned you.... Only under the circumstances it was a little difficult.' Straight as anything. I didn't 'ardly say anything to 'er. I didn't seem to begin to take it in until she was showing me out. I 'adn't anything to say. Jest as well, perhaps. She talked like a call a'most. She said--what _was_ it she said about her mother? 'My mother's overcome with grief,' she said, 'so naturally everything comes on me.'" "And she told you to get someone to 'elp you?" "Yes. I been to old Bean." "O' Bean?" "Yes. What I took my business away from!" "What did he say?" "He was a bit off'and at first, but then 'e come 'round. He couldn't tell me anything till 'e knew the facts. What I know of young Walshingham, there won't be much 'elp in the facts. No!" He reflected for a space. "It's a smash-up, Ann. More likely than not, Ann, 'e's left us over'ead in debt. We got to get out of it just 'ow we can.... "We got to begin again," he went on. "_'Ow_, I don't know. All the way 'ome my 'ead's been going. We got to get a living some'ow or other. 'Aving time to ourselves, and a bit of money to spend, and no hurry and worry, it's all over for ever, Ann. We was fools, Ann. We didn't know our benefits. We been caught. Gord!... Gord!" He was on the verge of "banging about" again. They heard a jingle in the passage, the large soft impact of a servant's indoor boots. As if she were a part, a mitigatory part of Fate, came Gwendolen to lay the midday meal. Kipps displayed self-control forthwith. Ann picked up the bib again and bent over it, and the Kippses bore themselves gloomily perhaps, but not despairfully, while their dependant was in the room. She spread the cloth and put out the cutlery with a slow inaccuracy, and Kipps, after a whisper to himself, went again to the window. Ann got up and put away her work methodically in the cheffonier. "When I think," said Kipps, as soon as the door closed again behind Gwendolen, "when I think of the 'ole people and 'aving to tell 'em of it all--I want to smesh my 'ead against the nearest wall. Smesh my silly brains out! And Buggins--Buggins what I'd 'arf promised to start in a lill' outfitting shop in Rendezvous Street."... Gwendolen returned and restored dignity. The midday meal spread itself slowly before them. Gwendolen, after her custom, left the door open and Kipps closed it carefully before sitting down. He stood for a moment, regarding the meal doubtfully. "I don't feel as if I could swaller a moufful," he said. "You got to eat," said Ann.... For a time they said little, and once swallowing was achieved, ate on with a sort of melancholy appetite. Each was now busy thinking. "After all," said Kipps, presently, "whatever 'appens, they can't turn us out or sell us up before nex' quarter-day. I'm pretty sure about that." "Sell us up!" said Ann. "I dessey we're bankrup'," said Kipps, trying to say it easily and helping himself with a trembling hand to unnecessary potatoes. Then a long silence. Ann ceased to eat, and there were silent tears. "More potatoes, Artie?" choked Ann. "I couldn't," said Kipps. "No." He pushed back his plate, which was indeed replete with potatoes, got up and walked about the room. Even the dinner-table looked distraught and unusual. "What to do, I _don't_ know," he said. "Oh, _Lord_!" he ejaculated, and picked up and slapped down a book. Then his eye fell upon another postcard that had come from Chitterlow by the morning's post, and which now lay by him on the mantel-shelf. He took it up, glanced at its imperfectly legible message, and put it down. "Delayed!" he said, scornfully. "Not prodooced in the smalls. Or is it smells 'e says? 'Ow can one understand that? Any'ow 'e's 'umbugging again.... Somefing about the Strand. No! Well, 'e's 'ad all the money 'e'll ever get out of me!... I'm done." He seemed to find a momentary relief in the dramatic effect of his announcement. He came near to a swagger of despair upon the hearthrug, and then suddenly came and sat down next to Ann and rested his chin on the knuckles of his two clenched hands. "I been a fool, Ann," he said in a gloomy monotone. "I been a brasted fool. But it's 'ard on us, all the same. It's 'ard." "'Ow was you to know?" said Ann. "I ought to 'ave known. I did in a sort of way know. And 'ere we are! I wouldn't care so much if it was myself, but it's _you_, Ann! 'Ere we are! Regular smashed up! And you----" He checked at an unspeakable aggravation of their disaster. "I knew 'e wasn't to be depended upon and there I left it! And you got to pay.... What's to 'appen to us all, I don't know." He thrust out his chin and glared at fate. "'Ow do you know 'e's speckylated everything?" said Ann, after a silent survey of him. "'E 'as," said Kipps, irritably, holding firm to disaster. "She say so?" "She don't know, of course, but you depend upon it that's it. She told me she knew something was on, and when she found 'im gone and a note lef' for her she knew it was up with 'im. 'E went by the night boat. She wrote that telegram off to me straight away." Ann surveyed his features with tender, perplexed eyes; she had never seen him so white and drawn before, and her hand rested an inch or so away from his arm. The actual loss was still, as it were, afar from her. The immediate thing was his enormous distress. "'Ow do you know----?" she said and stopped. It would irritate him too much. Kipps' imagination was going headlong. "Sold up!" he emitted presently, and Ann flinched. "Going back to work, day after day--I can't stand it, Ann, I can't. And you----" "It don't do to think of it," said Ann. Presently he came upon a resolve. "I keep on thinking of it, and thinking of it, and what's to be done and what's to be done. I shan't be any good 'ome s'arfernoon. It keeps on going 'round and 'round in my 'ead, and 'round and 'round. I better go for a walk or something. I'd be no comfort to you, Ann. I should want to 'owl and 'ammer things if I 'ung about 'ome. My fingers is all atwitch. I shall keep on thinking 'ow I might 'ave stopped it and callin' myself a fool."... He looked at her between pleading and shame. It seemed like deserting her. Ann regarded him with tear-dimmed eyes. "You'd better do what's good for you, Artie," she said.... "_I'll_ be best cleaning. It's no use sending off Gwendolen before her month, and the top room wants turning out." She added with a sort of grim humour: "May as well turn it out now while I got it." "I _better_ go for a walk," said Kipps.... And presently our poor exploded Kipps was marching out to bear his sudden misery. Habit turned him up the road towards his growing house, and then suddenly he perceived his direction--"Oh, Lor'!"--and turned aside and went up the steep way to the hill crest and the Sandling Road, and over the line by that tree-embowered Junction, and athwart the wide fields towards Postling--a little, black, marching figure--and so up the Downs and over the hills, whither he had never gone before.... 2 He came back long after dark, and Ann met him in the passage. "Where you been, Artie?" she asked, with a strained note in her voice. "I been walking and walking--trying to tire myself out. All the time I been thinking what shall I do. Trying to fix something up all out of nothing." "I didn't know you meant to be out all this time." Kipps was gripped by compunction.... "I can't think what we ought to do," he said, presently. "You can't do anything much, Artie, not till you hear from Mr. Bean." "No; I can't do anything much. That's jest it. And all this time I keep feelin' if I don't do something the top of my 'ead'll bust.... Been trying to make up advertisements 'arf the time I been out--'bout finding a place, good salesman and stock-keeper, and good Manchester dresses, window-dressing--Lor'! Fancy that all beginning again!... If you went to stay with Sid a bit--if I sent every penny I got to you--I dunno! I dunno!" When they had gone to bed there was an elaborate attempt to get to sleep.... In one of their great waking pauses Kipps remarked in a muffled tone: "I didn't mean to frighten you, Ann, being out so late. I kep' on walking and walking, and some'ow it seemed to do me good. I went out to the 'illtop ever so far beyond Stanford, and sat there ever so long, and it seemed to make me better. Just looking over the marsh like, and seeing the sun set."... "Very likely," said Ann, after a long interval, "it isn't so bad as you think it is, Artie." "It's bad," said Kipps. "Very likely, after all, it isn't quite so bad. If there's only a little----" There came another long silence. "Ann," said Kipps in the quiet darkness. "Yes," said Ann. "Ann," said Kipps, and stopped as though he had hastily shut a door upon speech. "I kep' thinking," he said, trying again, "I kep' thinking--after all--I been cross to you and a fool about things--about them cards, Ann; but"--his voice shook to pieces--"we _'ave_ been 'appy, Ann ... some'ow ... togever." And with that he and then she fell into a passion of weeping. They clung very tightly together--closer than they had been since ever the first brightness of their married days turned to the grey of common life again. All the disaster in the world could not prevent their going to sleep at last with their poor little troubled heads close together on one pillow. There was nothing more to be done, there was nothing more to be thought; Time might go on with his mischiefs, but for a little while at least they still had one another. 3 Kipps returned from his second interview with Mr. Bean in a state of strange excitement. He let himself in with his latch-key and slammed the door. "Ann!" he shouted, in an unusual note; "Ann!" Ann replied distantly. "Something to tell you," said Kipps; "something noo!" Ann appeared apprehensive from the kitchen. "Ann," he said, going before her into the little dining-room, for his news was too dignified for the passage, "very likely, Ann, o' Bean says, we shall 'ave----" He decided to prolong the suspense. "Guess!" "I can't, Artie." "Think of a lot of money!" "A 'undred pounds p'raps?" He spoke with immense deliberation. "O v e r a f o u s a n d p o u n d s!" Ann stared and said nothing, only went a shade whiter. "Over, he said. A'most certainly over." He shut the dining-room door and came forward hastily, for Ann, it was clear, meant to take this mitigation of their disaster with a complete abandonment of her self-control. She came near flopping; she fell into his arms. "Artie," she got to at last and began to weep, clinging tightly to him. "Pretty near certain," said Kipps, holding her. "A fousand pounds!" "I _said_, Artie," she wailed on his shoulder with the note of accumulated wrongs, "very likely it wasn't so bad."... "There's things," he said, when presently he came to particulars, "'e couldn't touch. The noo place! It's freehold and paid for, and with the bit of building on it, there's five or six 'undred pound p'raps--say worf free 'undred, for safety. We can't be sold up to finish it, like we thought. O' Bean says we can very likely sell it and get money. 'E says you often get a chance to sell a 'ouse lessen 'arf done, 'specially free'old. _Very_ likely, 'e say. Then there's Hughenden. Hughenden 'asn't been mortgaged not for more than 'arf its value. There's a 'undred or so to be got on that, and the furniture and the rent for the summer still coming in. 'E says there's very likely other things. A fousand pounds, that's what 'e said. 'E said it might even be more."... They were sitting now at the table. "It alters everything," said Ann. "I been thinking that, Ann, all the way 'ome. I came in the motor car. First ride I've 'ad since the smash. We needn't send off Gwendolen, leastways not till _after_. You know. We needn't turn out of 'ere--not for a long time. What we been doing for the o' people we can go on doing a'most as much. And your mother!... I wanted to 'oller coming along. I pretty near run coming down the road by the hotel." "Oh, I _am_ glad we can stop 'ere and be comfortable a bit," said Ann. "I _am_ glad for that." "I pretty near told the driver on the motor--only 'e was the sort won't talk.... You see, Ann, we'll be able to start a shop, we'll be able to get _into_ something like. All about our 'aving to go back to places and that; all that doesn't matter any more." For a while they abandoned themselves to ejaculating transports. Then they fell talking to shape an idea to themselves of the new prospect that opened before them. "We must start a sort of shop," said Kipps, whose imagination had been working. "It'll 'ave to be a shop." "Drapery?" said Ann. "You want such a lot of capital for the drapery, mor'n a thousand pounds you want by a long way--to start it anything like proper." "Well, outfitting. Like Buggins was going to do." Kipps glanced at that for a moment, because the idea had not occurred to him. Then he came back to his prepossession. "Well, I thought of something else, Ann," he said. "You see, I've always thought a little book-shop. It isn't like the drapery--'aving to be learnt. I thought--even before this smash-up--'ow I'd like to 'ave something to do, instead of always 'aving 'olidays always like we 'ave been 'aving." He reflected. "You don't know _much_ about books, do you, Artie?" "You don't want to." He illustrated. "I noticed when we used to go to that Lib'ry at Folkestone, ladies weren't anything like what they was in a draper's--if you 'aven't got _just_ what they want it's 'Oh, no!' and out they go. But in a book shop it's different. One book's very like another--after all, what is it? Something to read and done with. It's not a thing that matters like print dresses or serviettes--where you either like 'em or don't, and people judge you by. They take what you give 'em in books and lib'ries, and glad to be told _what_ to. See 'ow we was--up at that lib'ry."... He paused. "You see, Ann---- "Well, I read 'n 'dvertisement the other day. I been asking Mr. Bean. It said--five 'undred pounds." "What did?" "Branches," said Kipps. Ann failed to understand. "It's a sort of thing that gets up book shops all over the country," said Kipps. "I didn't tell you, but I arst about it a bit. On'y I dropped it again. Before this smash, I mean. I'd thought I'd like to keep a shop for a lark, on'y then I thought it silly. Besides it 'ud 'ave been beneath me." He blushed vividly. "It was a sort of projek of mine, Ann. "On'y it wouldn't 'ave done," he added. It was a tortuous journey when the Kippses set out to explain anything to each other. But through a maze of fragmentary elucidations and questions, their minds did presently begin to approximate to a picture of a compact, bright, little shop, as a framework for themselves. "I thought of it one day when I was in Folkestone. I thought of it one day when I was looking in at a window. I see a chap dressin' a window and he was whistlin' reg'lar light-'arted.... I thought then I'd like to keep a bookshop, any'ow, jest for something to do. And when people weren't about, then you could sit and read the books. See? It wouldn't be 'arf bad."... They mused, each with elbows on table and knuckles to lips, looking with speculative eyes at each other. "Very likely we'll be 'appier than we should 'ave been with more money," said Kipps presently. "We wasn't 'ardly suited," reflected Ann, and left her sentence incomplete. "Fish out of water like," said Kipps.... "You won't 'ave to return that call now," said Kipps, opening a new branch of the question. "That's one good thing." "Lor'!" said Ann, visibly brightening, "no more I shan't!" "I don't s'pose they'd want you to, even if you did--with things as they are." A certain added brightness came into Ann's face. "Nobody won't be able to come leaving cards on us, Artie, now, any more. We are out of _that_!" "There isn't no necessity for us to be stuck up," said Kipps, "any more for ever! 'Ere we are, Ann, common people, with jest no position at all, as you might say, to keep up. No sev'nts, not if you don't like. No dressin' better than other people. If it wasn't we been robbed--dashed if I'd care a rap about losing that money. I b'lieve"--his face shone with the rare pleasure of paradox--"I reely b'lieve, Ann, it'll prove a savin' in the end." 4 The remarkable advertisement which had fired Kipps' imagination with this dream of a bookshop opened out in the most alluring way. It was one little facet in a comprehensive scheme of transatlantic origin, which was to make our old-world methods of book-selling "sit up," and it displayed an imaginative briskness, a lucidity and promise that aroused the profoundest scepticism in the mind of Mr. Bean. To Kipps' renewed investigations it presented itself in an expository illustrated pamphlet (far too well printed, Mr. Bean thought, for a reputable undertaking) of the most convincing sort. Mr. Bean would not let him sink his capital in shares in its projected company that was to make all things new in the world of books, but he could not prevent Kipps becoming one of their associated booksellers. And so when presently it became apparent that an epoch was not to be made, and the "Associated Booksellers' Trading Union (Limited)" receded and dissolved and liquidated (a few drops) and vanished and went away to talk about something else, Kipps remained floating undamaged in this interestingly uncertain universe as an independent bookseller. Except that it failed, the Associated Booksellers' Trading Union had all the stigmata of success. Its fault, perhaps, was that it had them all instead of only one or two. It was to buy wholesale for all

insists

How many times the word 'insists' appears in the text?

you go and slap 'em in the face!" "I didn't slap 'em in the face." "You do--practically. You slams the door in their face, and that's all we see of 'em ever. I wouldn't 'ave 'ad this 'appen not for a ten-pound note." He rounded his regrets with a grunt. For a while there was silence, save for the little stir of Ann's movements preparing the tea. "Tea, Artie," said Ann, handing him a cup. Kipps took it. "I put sugar _once_," said Ann. "Oo, dash it! Oo cares?" said Kipps, taking an extraordinarily large additional lump with fury quivering fingers, and putting his cup with a slight excess of force on the recess cupboard. "Oo cares? "I wouldn't 'ave 'ad that 'appen," he said, bidding steadily against accomplished things, "for twenty pounds." He gloomed in silence through a long minute or so. Then Ann said the fatal thing that exploded him. "Artie!" she said. "What?" "There's Buttud Toce down there! By your foot!" There was a pause, husband and wife regarded one another. "Buttud Toce!" he said. "You go and mess up them callers and then you try and stuff me up with Buttud Toce! Buttud Toce indeed! 'Ere's our first chance of knowing anyone that's at all fit to 'sociate with----. Look 'ere, Ann! Tell you what it is--you got to return that call." "Return that call!" "Yes, you got to return that call. That's what you got to do! I know----" He waved his arm vaguely towards the miscellany of books in the recess. "It's in Manners and Rools of Good S'ity. You got to find jest 'ow many cards to leave and you got to go and leave 'em. See?" Ann's face expressed terror. "But, Artie, 'ow _can_ I?" "'Ow _can_ you? 'Ow _could_ you? You got to do it, any'ow. They won't know you--not in your Bond Street 'at! If they do, they won't say nothing." His voice assumed a note of entreaty. "You mus', Ann." "I can't." "You mus'." "I can't and I won't. Anything in reason I'll do, but face those people again I can't--after what 'as 'appened." "You won't?" "No!"... "So there they go--orf! And we never see them again! And so it goes on! So it goes on! We don't know nobody and we _shan't_ know anybody! And you won't put yourself out not a little bit, or take the trouble to find out anything 'ow it ought to be done." Terrible pause. "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie, that's the troof." "Oh! _don't_ go into that." "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie. I'm not equal to the position. If you 'adn't said you'd drown yourself----" She choked. "I don' see why you shouldn't _try_, Ann. _I've_ improved. Why don't you? 'Stead of which you go sending out the servant and 'namelling floors, and then when visitors come----" "'Ow was _I_ to know about y'r old visitors?" cried Ann in a wail, and suddenly got up and fled from amidst their ruined tea, the tea of which "toce, all buttery," was to be the crown and glory. Kipps watched her with a momentary consternation. Then he hardened his heart. "Ought to 'ave known better," he said, "goin' on like that!" He remained for a space rubbing his knees and muttering. He emitted scornfully: "I carn't an' I won't." He saw her as the source of all his shames. Presently, quite mechanically, he stooped down and lifted the flowery china cover. "Ter dash 'er Buttud Toce!" he shouted at the sight of it, and clapped the cover down again hard.... When Gwendolen came back she perceived things were in a slightly unusual poise. Kipps sat by the fire in a rigid attitude reading a casually selected volume of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and Ann was upstairs and inaccessible--to reappear at a later stage with reddened eyes. Before the fire and still in a perfectly assimilable condition was what was evidently an untouched supply of richly buttered toast under a cracked cover. "They've 'ad a bit of a tiff," said Gwendolen, attending to her duties in the kitchen, with her outdoor hat still on and her mouth full. "They're rummuns--if ever! My eye!" And she took another piece of Ann's generously buttered toast. 4 The Kippses spoke no more that day to one another. The squabble about cards and buttered toast was as serious to them as the most rational of differences. It was all rational to them. Their sense of wrong burnt within them; their sense of what was owing to themselves, the duty of implacability, the obstinacy of pride. In the small hours Kipps lay awake at the nadir of unhappiness and came near groaning. He saw life as an extraordinarily desolating muddle; his futile house, his social discredit, his bad behaviour to Helen, his low marriage to Ann.... He became aware of something irregular in Ann's breathing.... He listened. She was awake and quietly and privately sobbing! He hardened his heart; resolutely he hardened his heart. The stupid little tragedies of these clipped and limited lives! What is the good of keeping up the idyllic sham and pretending that ill-educated, misdirected people "get along very well," and that all this is harmlessly funny and nothing more? You think I'm going to write fat, silly, grinning novels about half-educated, under-trained people and keep it up all the time, that the whole thing's nothing but funny! As I think of them lying unhappily there in the darkness, my vision pierces the night. See what I can see! Above them, brooding over them, I tell you there is a monster, a lumpish monster, like some great, clumsy griffin thing, like the Crystal Palace labyrinthodon, like Coote, like the leaden goddess Dulness Pope Abhorred, like some fat, proud flunkey, like pride, like indolence, like all that is darkening and heavy and obstructive in life. It is matter and darkness, it is the anti-soul, Stupidity. My Kippses live in its shadow. Shalford and his apprenticeship system, the Hastings Academy, the ideas of Coote, the ideas of the old Kippses, all the ideas that have made Kipps what he is, all these are its shadow. But for that monster they might not be groping among false ideas and hurt one another so sorely and so stupidly; but for that, the glowing promise of childhood and youth might have had a happier fruition, thought might have awakened in them to meet _the_ thought of the world, the quickening sunshine of literature pierced to the substance of their souls, their lives might not have been divorced, as now they are divorced for ever, from the apprehension of beauty that we favoured ones are given--the vision of the Grail that makes life fine for ever. I have laughed, and I laugh at these two people; I have sought to make you laugh.... But I see through the darkness the souls of my Kippses, as they are, as little pink strips of living stuff, like the bodies of little, ill-nourished, ailing, ignorant children, children who feel pain, who are naughty and muddled and suffer and do not understand why. And the claw of this Beast rests upon them! CHAPTER III TERMINATIONS 1 Next morning came a remarkable telegram from Folkestone. "Please come at once, urgent, Walshingham," said the telegram, and Kipps, after an agitated but still ample breakfast, departed.... When he returned his face was very white and his countenance disordered. He let himself in with his latchkey and came into the dining-room where Ann sat, affecting to work at a little thing she called a bib. She heard his hat fall in the hall before he entered, as though he had missed the peg. "I got something to tell you, Ann," he said, disregarding their overnight quarrel, and went to the hearthrug and took hold of the mantel, and stared at Ann as though the sight of her was novel. "Well?" said Ann, not looking up and working a little faster. "'E's gone!" Ann looked up sharply and her hands stopped. "_Who's_ gone?" For the first time she perceived Kipps' pallor. "Young Walshingham--I saw 'er and she tole me." "Gone? What d'you mean?" "Cleared out! Gone off for good!" "What for?" "For 'is 'ealth," said Kipps, with sudden bitterness. "'E's been speckylating. He's speckylated our money and 'e's speckylated their money, and now 'e's took 'is 'ook. That's all about it, Ann." "You mean?" "I mean 'e's orf and our twenty-four thousand's orf, too! And 'ere we are! Smashed up! That's all about it, Ann." He panted. Ann had no vocabulary for such an occasion. "Oh, Lor'!" she said, and sat still. Kipps came about and stuck his hands deeply in his trouser pockets. "Speckylated every penny--lorst it all--and gorn." Even his lips were white. "You mean we ain't got nothin' left, Artie?" "Not a penny! Not a bloomin' penny, Ann. No!" A gust of passion whirled across the soul of Kipps. He flung out a knuckly fist. "If I 'ad 'im 'ere," he said, "I'd--I'd--I'd wring 'is neck for 'im. I'd--I'd----" His voice rose to a shout. He thought of Gwendolen in the kitchen and fell to "Ugh!" "But, Artie," said Ann, trying to grasp it, "d'you mean to say he's took our money?" "Speckylated it!" said Kipps, with an illustrative flourish of the arm, that failed to illustrate. "Bort things dear and sold 'em cheap, and played the 'ankey-pankey jackass with everything we got. That's what I mean 'e's done, Ann." He repeated this last sentence with the addition of violent adverbs. "D'you mean to say our money's _gone_, Artie?" "Ter-dash it, _Yes_, Ann!" swore Kipps, exploding in a shout. "Ain't I tellin' you?" He was immediately sorry. "I didn't mean to 'oller at you, Ann," he said, "but I'm all shook up. I don't 'ardly know what I'm sayin'. Ev'ry penny."... "But, Artie----" Kipps grunted. He went to the window and stared for a moment at a sunlit sea. "Gord!" he swore. "I mean," he said, coming back to Ann and with an air of exasperation, "that he's 'bezzled and 'ooked it. That's what I mean, Ann." Ann put down the bib. "But wot are we going to _do_, Artie?" Kipps indicated ignorance, wrath and despair with one comprehensive gesture of his hands. He caught an ornament from the mantel and replaced it. "I'm going to bang about," he said, "if I ain't precious careful." "You saw _'er_, you say?" "Yes." "What did she say 'xactly?" said Ann. "Told me to see a s'licitor--tole me to get someone to 'elp me at once. She was there in black--like she used to be--and speaking cool and careful-like. 'Elen!... She's precious 'ard, is 'Elen. She looked at me straight. 'It's my fault,' she said, 'I ought to 'ave warned you.... Only under the circumstances it was a little difficult.' Straight as anything. I didn't 'ardly say anything to 'er. I didn't seem to begin to take it in until she was showing me out. I 'adn't anything to say. Jest as well, perhaps. She talked like a call a'most. She said--what _was_ it she said about her mother? 'My mother's overcome with grief,' she said, 'so naturally everything comes on me.'" "And she told you to get someone to 'elp you?" "Yes. I been to old Bean." "O' Bean?" "Yes. What I took my business away from!" "What did he say?" "He was a bit off'and at first, but then 'e come 'round. He couldn't tell me anything till 'e knew the facts. What I know of young Walshingham, there won't be much 'elp in the facts. No!" He reflected for a space. "It's a smash-up, Ann. More likely than not, Ann, 'e's left us over'ead in debt. We got to get out of it just 'ow we can.... "We got to begin again," he went on. "_'Ow_, I don't know. All the way 'ome my 'ead's been going. We got to get a living some'ow or other. 'Aving time to ourselves, and a bit of money to spend, and no hurry and worry, it's all over for ever, Ann. We was fools, Ann. We didn't know our benefits. We been caught. Gord!... Gord!" He was on the verge of "banging about" again. They heard a jingle in the passage, the large soft impact of a servant's indoor boots. As if she were a part, a mitigatory part of Fate, came Gwendolen to lay the midday meal. Kipps displayed self-control forthwith. Ann picked up the bib again and bent over it, and the Kippses bore themselves gloomily perhaps, but not despairfully, while their dependant was in the room. She spread the cloth and put out the cutlery with a slow inaccuracy, and Kipps, after a whisper to himself, went again to the window. Ann got up and put away her work methodically in the cheffonier. "When I think," said Kipps, as soon as the door closed again behind Gwendolen, "when I think of the 'ole people and 'aving to tell 'em of it all--I want to smesh my 'ead against the nearest wall. Smesh my silly brains out! And Buggins--Buggins what I'd 'arf promised to start in a lill' outfitting shop in Rendezvous Street."... Gwendolen returned and restored dignity. The midday meal spread itself slowly before them. Gwendolen, after her custom, left the door open and Kipps closed it carefully before sitting down. He stood for a moment, regarding the meal doubtfully. "I don't feel as if I could swaller a moufful," he said. "You got to eat," said Ann.... For a time they said little, and once swallowing was achieved, ate on with a sort of melancholy appetite. Each was now busy thinking. "After all," said Kipps, presently, "whatever 'appens, they can't turn us out or sell us up before nex' quarter-day. I'm pretty sure about that." "Sell us up!" said Ann. "I dessey we're bankrup'," said Kipps, trying to say it easily and helping himself with a trembling hand to unnecessary potatoes. Then a long silence. Ann ceased to eat, and there were silent tears. "More potatoes, Artie?" choked Ann. "I couldn't," said Kipps. "No." He pushed back his plate, which was indeed replete with potatoes, got up and walked about the room. Even the dinner-table looked distraught and unusual. "What to do, I _don't_ know," he said. "Oh, _Lord_!" he ejaculated, and picked up and slapped down a book. Then his eye fell upon another postcard that had come from Chitterlow by the morning's post, and which now lay by him on the mantel-shelf. He took it up, glanced at its imperfectly legible message, and put it down. "Delayed!" he said, scornfully. "Not prodooced in the smalls. Or is it smells 'e says? 'Ow can one understand that? Any'ow 'e's 'umbugging again.... Somefing about the Strand. No! Well, 'e's 'ad all the money 'e'll ever get out of me!... I'm done." He seemed to find a momentary relief in the dramatic effect of his announcement. He came near to a swagger of despair upon the hearthrug, and then suddenly came and sat down next to Ann and rested his chin on the knuckles of his two clenched hands. "I been a fool, Ann," he said in a gloomy monotone. "I been a brasted fool. But it's 'ard on us, all the same. It's 'ard." "'Ow was you to know?" said Ann. "I ought to 'ave known. I did in a sort of way know. And 'ere we are! I wouldn't care so much if it was myself, but it's _you_, Ann! 'Ere we are! Regular smashed up! And you----" He checked at an unspeakable aggravation of their disaster. "I knew 'e wasn't to be depended upon and there I left it! And you got to pay.... What's to 'appen to us all, I don't know." He thrust out his chin and glared at fate. "'Ow do you know 'e's speckylated everything?" said Ann, after a silent survey of him. "'E 'as," said Kipps, irritably, holding firm to disaster. "She say so?" "She don't know, of course, but you depend upon it that's it. She told me she knew something was on, and when she found 'im gone and a note lef' for her she knew it was up with 'im. 'E went by the night boat. She wrote that telegram off to me straight away." Ann surveyed his features with tender, perplexed eyes; she had never seen him so white and drawn before, and her hand rested an inch or so away from his arm. The actual loss was still, as it were, afar from her. The immediate thing was his enormous distress. "'Ow do you know----?" she said and stopped. It would irritate him too much. Kipps' imagination was going headlong. "Sold up!" he emitted presently, and Ann flinched. "Going back to work, day after day--I can't stand it, Ann, I can't. And you----" "It don't do to think of it," said Ann. Presently he came upon a resolve. "I keep on thinking of it, and thinking of it, and what's to be done and what's to be done. I shan't be any good 'ome s'arfernoon. It keeps on going 'round and 'round in my 'ead, and 'round and 'round. I better go for a walk or something. I'd be no comfort to you, Ann. I should want to 'owl and 'ammer things if I 'ung about 'ome. My fingers is all atwitch. I shall keep on thinking 'ow I might 'ave stopped it and callin' myself a fool."... He looked at her between pleading and shame. It seemed like deserting her. Ann regarded him with tear-dimmed eyes. "You'd better do what's good for you, Artie," she said.... "_I'll_ be best cleaning. It's no use sending off Gwendolen before her month, and the top room wants turning out." She added with a sort of grim humour: "May as well turn it out now while I got it." "I _better_ go for a walk," said Kipps.... And presently our poor exploded Kipps was marching out to bear his sudden misery. Habit turned him up the road towards his growing house, and then suddenly he perceived his direction--"Oh, Lor'!"--and turned aside and went up the steep way to the hill crest and the Sandling Road, and over the line by that tree-embowered Junction, and athwart the wide fields towards Postling--a little, black, marching figure--and so up the Downs and over the hills, whither he had never gone before.... 2 He came back long after dark, and Ann met him in the passage. "Where you been, Artie?" she asked, with a strained note in her voice. "I been walking and walking--trying to tire myself out. All the time I been thinking what shall I do. Trying to fix something up all out of nothing." "I didn't know you meant to be out all this time." Kipps was gripped by compunction.... "I can't think what we ought to do," he said, presently. "You can't do anything much, Artie, not till you hear from Mr. Bean." "No; I can't do anything much. That's jest it. And all this time I keep feelin' if I don't do something the top of my 'ead'll bust.... Been trying to make up advertisements 'arf the time I been out--'bout finding a place, good salesman and stock-keeper, and good Manchester dresses, window-dressing--Lor'! Fancy that all beginning again!... If you went to stay with Sid a bit--if I sent every penny I got to you--I dunno! I dunno!" When they had gone to bed there was an elaborate attempt to get to sleep.... In one of their great waking pauses Kipps remarked in a muffled tone: "I didn't mean to frighten you, Ann, being out so late. I kep' on walking and walking, and some'ow it seemed to do me good. I went out to the 'illtop ever so far beyond Stanford, and sat there ever so long, and it seemed to make me better. Just looking over the marsh like, and seeing the sun set."... "Very likely," said Ann, after a long interval, "it isn't so bad as you think it is, Artie." "It's bad," said Kipps. "Very likely, after all, it isn't quite so bad. If there's only a little----" There came another long silence. "Ann," said Kipps in the quiet darkness. "Yes," said Ann. "Ann," said Kipps, and stopped as though he had hastily shut a door upon speech. "I kep' thinking," he said, trying again, "I kep' thinking--after all--I been cross to you and a fool about things--about them cards, Ann; but"--his voice shook to pieces--"we _'ave_ been 'appy, Ann ... some'ow ... togever." And with that he and then she fell into a passion of weeping. They clung very tightly together--closer than they had been since ever the first brightness of their married days turned to the grey of common life again. All the disaster in the world could not prevent their going to sleep at last with their poor little troubled heads close together on one pillow. There was nothing more to be done, there was nothing more to be thought; Time might go on with his mischiefs, but for a little while at least they still had one another. 3 Kipps returned from his second interview with Mr. Bean in a state of strange excitement. He let himself in with his latch-key and slammed the door. "Ann!" he shouted, in an unusual note; "Ann!" Ann replied distantly. "Something to tell you," said Kipps; "something noo!" Ann appeared apprehensive from the kitchen. "Ann," he said, going before her into the little dining-room, for his news was too dignified for the passage, "very likely, Ann, o' Bean says, we shall 'ave----" He decided to prolong the suspense. "Guess!" "I can't, Artie." "Think of a lot of money!" "A 'undred pounds p'raps?" He spoke with immense deliberation. "O v e r a f o u s a n d p o u n d s!" Ann stared and said nothing, only went a shade whiter. "Over, he said. A'most certainly over." He shut the dining-room door and came forward hastily, for Ann, it was clear, meant to take this mitigation of their disaster with a complete abandonment of her self-control. She came near flopping; she fell into his arms. "Artie," she got to at last and began to weep, clinging tightly to him. "Pretty near certain," said Kipps, holding her. "A fousand pounds!" "I _said_, Artie," she wailed on his shoulder with the note of accumulated wrongs, "very likely it wasn't so bad."... "There's things," he said, when presently he came to particulars, "'e couldn't touch. The noo place! It's freehold and paid for, and with the bit of building on it, there's five or six 'undred pound p'raps--say worf free 'undred, for safety. We can't be sold up to finish it, like we thought. O' Bean says we can very likely sell it and get money. 'E says you often get a chance to sell a 'ouse lessen 'arf done, 'specially free'old. _Very_ likely, 'e say. Then there's Hughenden. Hughenden 'asn't been mortgaged not for more than 'arf its value. There's a 'undred or so to be got on that, and the furniture and the rent for the summer still coming in. 'E says there's very likely other things. A fousand pounds, that's what 'e said. 'E said it might even be more."... They were sitting now at the table. "It alters everything," said Ann. "I been thinking that, Ann, all the way 'ome. I came in the motor car. First ride I've 'ad since the smash. We needn't send off Gwendolen, leastways not till _after_. You know. We needn't turn out of 'ere--not for a long time. What we been doing for the o' people we can go on doing a'most as much. And your mother!... I wanted to 'oller coming along. I pretty near run coming down the road by the hotel." "Oh, I _am_ glad we can stop 'ere and be comfortable a bit," said Ann. "I _am_ glad for that." "I pretty near told the driver on the motor--only 'e was the sort won't talk.... You see, Ann, we'll be able to start a shop, we'll be able to get _into_ something like. All about our 'aving to go back to places and that; all that doesn't matter any more." For a while they abandoned themselves to ejaculating transports. Then they fell talking to shape an idea to themselves of the new prospect that opened before them. "We must start a sort of shop," said Kipps, whose imagination had been working. "It'll 'ave to be a shop." "Drapery?" said Ann. "You want such a lot of capital for the drapery, mor'n a thousand pounds you want by a long way--to start it anything like proper." "Well, outfitting. Like Buggins was going to do." Kipps glanced at that for a moment, because the idea had not occurred to him. Then he came back to his prepossession. "Well, I thought of something else, Ann," he said. "You see, I've always thought a little book-shop. It isn't like the drapery--'aving to be learnt. I thought--even before this smash-up--'ow I'd like to 'ave something to do, instead of always 'aving 'olidays always like we 'ave been 'aving." He reflected. "You don't know _much_ about books, do you, Artie?" "You don't want to." He illustrated. "I noticed when we used to go to that Lib'ry at Folkestone, ladies weren't anything like what they was in a draper's--if you 'aven't got _just_ what they want it's 'Oh, no!' and out they go. But in a book shop it's different. One book's very like another--after all, what is it? Something to read and done with. It's not a thing that matters like print dresses or serviettes--where you either like 'em or don't, and people judge you by. They take what you give 'em in books and lib'ries, and glad to be told _what_ to. See 'ow we was--up at that lib'ry."... He paused. "You see, Ann---- "Well, I read 'n 'dvertisement the other day. I been asking Mr. Bean. It said--five 'undred pounds." "What did?" "Branches," said Kipps. Ann failed to understand. "It's a sort of thing that gets up book shops all over the country," said Kipps. "I didn't tell you, but I arst about it a bit. On'y I dropped it again. Before this smash, I mean. I'd thought I'd like to keep a shop for a lark, on'y then I thought it silly. Besides it 'ud 'ave been beneath me." He blushed vividly. "It was a sort of projek of mine, Ann. "On'y it wouldn't 'ave done," he added. It was a tortuous journey when the Kippses set out to explain anything to each other. But through a maze of fragmentary elucidations and questions, their minds did presently begin to approximate to a picture of a compact, bright, little shop, as a framework for themselves. "I thought of it one day when I was in Folkestone. I thought of it one day when I was looking in at a window. I see a chap dressin' a window and he was whistlin' reg'lar light-'arted.... I thought then I'd like to keep a bookshop, any'ow, jest for something to do. And when people weren't about, then you could sit and read the books. See? It wouldn't be 'arf bad."... They mused, each with elbows on table and knuckles to lips, looking with speculative eyes at each other. "Very likely we'll be 'appier than we should 'ave been with more money," said Kipps presently. "We wasn't 'ardly suited," reflected Ann, and left her sentence incomplete. "Fish out of water like," said Kipps.... "You won't 'ave to return that call now," said Kipps, opening a new branch of the question. "That's one good thing." "Lor'!" said Ann, visibly brightening, "no more I shan't!" "I don't s'pose they'd want you to, even if you did--with things as they are." A certain added brightness came into Ann's face. "Nobody won't be able to come leaving cards on us, Artie, now, any more. We are out of _that_!" "There isn't no necessity for us to be stuck up," said Kipps, "any more for ever! 'Ere we are, Ann, common people, with jest no position at all, as you might say, to keep up. No sev'nts, not if you don't like. No dressin' better than other people. If it wasn't we been robbed--dashed if I'd care a rap about losing that money. I b'lieve"--his face shone with the rare pleasure of paradox--"I reely b'lieve, Ann, it'll prove a savin' in the end." 4 The remarkable advertisement which had fired Kipps' imagination with this dream of a bookshop opened out in the most alluring way. It was one little facet in a comprehensive scheme of transatlantic origin, which was to make our old-world methods of book-selling "sit up," and it displayed an imaginative briskness, a lucidity and promise that aroused the profoundest scepticism in the mind of Mr. Bean. To Kipps' renewed investigations it presented itself in an expository illustrated pamphlet (far too well printed, Mr. Bean thought, for a reputable undertaking) of the most convincing sort. Mr. Bean would not let him sink his capital in shares in its projected company that was to make all things new in the world of books, but he could not prevent Kipps becoming one of their associated booksellers. And so when presently it became apparent that an epoch was not to be made, and the "Associated Booksellers' Trading Union (Limited)" receded and dissolved and liquidated (a few drops) and vanished and went away to talk about something else, Kipps remained floating undamaged in this interestingly uncertain universe as an independent bookseller. Except that it failed, the Associated Booksellers' Trading Union had all the stigmata of success. Its fault, perhaps, was that it had them all instead of only one or two. It was to buy wholesale for all

cranes

How many times the word 'cranes' appears in the text?

you go and slap 'em in the face!" "I didn't slap 'em in the face." "You do--practically. You slams the door in their face, and that's all we see of 'em ever. I wouldn't 'ave 'ad this 'appen not for a ten-pound note." He rounded his regrets with a grunt. For a while there was silence, save for the little stir of Ann's movements preparing the tea. "Tea, Artie," said Ann, handing him a cup. Kipps took it. "I put sugar _once_," said Ann. "Oo, dash it! Oo cares?" said Kipps, taking an extraordinarily large additional lump with fury quivering fingers, and putting his cup with a slight excess of force on the recess cupboard. "Oo cares? "I wouldn't 'ave 'ad that 'appen," he said, bidding steadily against accomplished things, "for twenty pounds." He gloomed in silence through a long minute or so. Then Ann said the fatal thing that exploded him. "Artie!" she said. "What?" "There's Buttud Toce down there! By your foot!" There was a pause, husband and wife regarded one another. "Buttud Toce!" he said. "You go and mess up them callers and then you try and stuff me up with Buttud Toce! Buttud Toce indeed! 'Ere's our first chance of knowing anyone that's at all fit to 'sociate with----. Look 'ere, Ann! Tell you what it is--you got to return that call." "Return that call!" "Yes, you got to return that call. That's what you got to do! I know----" He waved his arm vaguely towards the miscellany of books in the recess. "It's in Manners and Rools of Good S'ity. You got to find jest 'ow many cards to leave and you got to go and leave 'em. See?" Ann's face expressed terror. "But, Artie, 'ow _can_ I?" "'Ow _can_ you? 'Ow _could_ you? You got to do it, any'ow. They won't know you--not in your Bond Street 'at! If they do, they won't say nothing." His voice assumed a note of entreaty. "You mus', Ann." "I can't." "You mus'." "I can't and I won't. Anything in reason I'll do, but face those people again I can't--after what 'as 'appened." "You won't?" "No!"... "So there they go--orf! And we never see them again! And so it goes on! So it goes on! We don't know nobody and we _shan't_ know anybody! And you won't put yourself out not a little bit, or take the trouble to find out anything 'ow it ought to be done." Terrible pause. "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie, that's the troof." "Oh! _don't_ go into that." "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie. I'm not equal to the position. If you 'adn't said you'd drown yourself----" She choked. "I don' see why you shouldn't _try_, Ann. _I've_ improved. Why don't you? 'Stead of which you go sending out the servant and 'namelling floors, and then when visitors come----" "'Ow was _I_ to know about y'r old visitors?" cried Ann in a wail, and suddenly got up and fled from amidst their ruined tea, the tea of which "toce, all buttery," was to be the crown and glory. Kipps watched her with a momentary consternation. Then he hardened his heart. "Ought to 'ave known better," he said, "goin' on like that!" He remained for a space rubbing his knees and muttering. He emitted scornfully: "I carn't an' I won't." He saw her as the source of all his shames. Presently, quite mechanically, he stooped down and lifted the flowery china cover. "Ter dash 'er Buttud Toce!" he shouted at the sight of it, and clapped the cover down again hard.... When Gwendolen came back she perceived things were in a slightly unusual poise. Kipps sat by the fire in a rigid attitude reading a casually selected volume of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and Ann was upstairs and inaccessible--to reappear at a later stage with reddened eyes. Before the fire and still in a perfectly assimilable condition was what was evidently an untouched supply of richly buttered toast under a cracked cover. "They've 'ad a bit of a tiff," said Gwendolen, attending to her duties in the kitchen, with her outdoor hat still on and her mouth full. "They're rummuns--if ever! My eye!" And she took another piece of Ann's generously buttered toast. 4 The Kippses spoke no more that day to one another. The squabble about cards and buttered toast was as serious to them as the most rational of differences. It was all rational to them. Their sense of wrong burnt within them; their sense of what was owing to themselves, the duty of implacability, the obstinacy of pride. In the small hours Kipps lay awake at the nadir of unhappiness and came near groaning. He saw life as an extraordinarily desolating muddle; his futile house, his social discredit, his bad behaviour to Helen, his low marriage to Ann.... He became aware of something irregular in Ann's breathing.... He listened. She was awake and quietly and privately sobbing! He hardened his heart; resolutely he hardened his heart. The stupid little tragedies of these clipped and limited lives! What is the good of keeping up the idyllic sham and pretending that ill-educated, misdirected people "get along very well," and that all this is harmlessly funny and nothing more? You think I'm going to write fat, silly, grinning novels about half-educated, under-trained people and keep it up all the time, that the whole thing's nothing but funny! As I think of them lying unhappily there in the darkness, my vision pierces the night. See what I can see! Above them, brooding over them, I tell you there is a monster, a lumpish monster, like some great, clumsy griffin thing, like the Crystal Palace labyrinthodon, like Coote, like the leaden goddess Dulness Pope Abhorred, like some fat, proud flunkey, like pride, like indolence, like all that is darkening and heavy and obstructive in life. It is matter and darkness, it is the anti-soul, Stupidity. My Kippses live in its shadow. Shalford and his apprenticeship system, the Hastings Academy, the ideas of Coote, the ideas of the old Kippses, all the ideas that have made Kipps what he is, all these are its shadow. But for that monster they might not be groping among false ideas and hurt one another so sorely and so stupidly; but for that, the glowing promise of childhood and youth might have had a happier fruition, thought might have awakened in them to meet _the_ thought of the world, the quickening sunshine of literature pierced to the substance of their souls, their lives might not have been divorced, as now they are divorced for ever, from the apprehension of beauty that we favoured ones are given--the vision of the Grail that makes life fine for ever. I have laughed, and I laugh at these two people; I have sought to make you laugh.... But I see through the darkness the souls of my Kippses, as they are, as little pink strips of living stuff, like the bodies of little, ill-nourished, ailing, ignorant children, children who feel pain, who are naughty and muddled and suffer and do not understand why. And the claw of this Beast rests upon them! CHAPTER III TERMINATIONS 1 Next morning came a remarkable telegram from Folkestone. "Please come at once, urgent, Walshingham," said the telegram, and Kipps, after an agitated but still ample breakfast, departed.... When he returned his face was very white and his countenance disordered. He let himself in with his latchkey and came into the dining-room where Ann sat, affecting to work at a little thing she called a bib. She heard his hat fall in the hall before he entered, as though he had missed the peg. "I got something to tell you, Ann," he said, disregarding their overnight quarrel, and went to the hearthrug and took hold of the mantel, and stared at Ann as though the sight of her was novel. "Well?" said Ann, not looking up and working a little faster. "'E's gone!" Ann looked up sharply and her hands stopped. "_Who's_ gone?" For the first time she perceived Kipps' pallor. "Young Walshingham--I saw 'er and she tole me." "Gone? What d'you mean?" "Cleared out! Gone off for good!" "What for?" "For 'is 'ealth," said Kipps, with sudden bitterness. "'E's been speckylating. He's speckylated our money and 'e's speckylated their money, and now 'e's took 'is 'ook. That's all about it, Ann." "You mean?" "I mean 'e's orf and our twenty-four thousand's orf, too! And 'ere we are! Smashed up! That's all about it, Ann." He panted. Ann had no vocabulary for such an occasion. "Oh, Lor'!" she said, and sat still. Kipps came about and stuck his hands deeply in his trouser pockets. "Speckylated every penny--lorst it all--and gorn." Even his lips were white. "You mean we ain't got nothin' left, Artie?" "Not a penny! Not a bloomin' penny, Ann. No!" A gust of passion whirled across the soul of Kipps. He flung out a knuckly fist. "If I 'ad 'im 'ere," he said, "I'd--I'd--I'd wring 'is neck for 'im. I'd--I'd----" His voice rose to a shout. He thought of Gwendolen in the kitchen and fell to "Ugh!" "But, Artie," said Ann, trying to grasp it, "d'you mean to say he's took our money?" "Speckylated it!" said Kipps, with an illustrative flourish of the arm, that failed to illustrate. "Bort things dear and sold 'em cheap, and played the 'ankey-pankey jackass with everything we got. That's what I mean 'e's done, Ann." He repeated this last sentence with the addition of violent adverbs. "D'you mean to say our money's _gone_, Artie?" "Ter-dash it, _Yes_, Ann!" swore Kipps, exploding in a shout. "Ain't I tellin' you?" He was immediately sorry. "I didn't mean to 'oller at you, Ann," he said, "but I'm all shook up. I don't 'ardly know what I'm sayin'. Ev'ry penny."... "But, Artie----" Kipps grunted. He went to the window and stared for a moment at a sunlit sea. "Gord!" he swore. "I mean," he said, coming back to Ann and with an air of exasperation, "that he's 'bezzled and 'ooked it. That's what I mean, Ann." Ann put down the bib. "But wot are we going to _do_, Artie?" Kipps indicated ignorance, wrath and despair with one comprehensive gesture of his hands. He caught an ornament from the mantel and replaced it. "I'm going to bang about," he said, "if I ain't precious careful." "You saw _'er_, you say?" "Yes." "What did she say 'xactly?" said Ann. "Told me to see a s'licitor--tole me to get someone to 'elp me at once. She was there in black--like she used to be--and speaking cool and careful-like. 'Elen!... She's precious 'ard, is 'Elen. She looked at me straight. 'It's my fault,' she said, 'I ought to 'ave warned you.... Only under the circumstances it was a little difficult.' Straight as anything. I didn't 'ardly say anything to 'er. I didn't seem to begin to take it in until she was showing me out. I 'adn't anything to say. Jest as well, perhaps. She talked like a call a'most. She said--what _was_ it she said about her mother? 'My mother's overcome with grief,' she said, 'so naturally everything comes on me.'" "And she told you to get someone to 'elp you?" "Yes. I been to old Bean." "O' Bean?" "Yes. What I took my business away from!" "What did he say?" "He was a bit off'and at first, but then 'e come 'round. He couldn't tell me anything till 'e knew the facts. What I know of young Walshingham, there won't be much 'elp in the facts. No!" He reflected for a space. "It's a smash-up, Ann. More likely than not, Ann, 'e's left us over'ead in debt. We got to get out of it just 'ow we can.... "We got to begin again," he went on. "_'Ow_, I don't know. All the way 'ome my 'ead's been going. We got to get a living some'ow or other. 'Aving time to ourselves, and a bit of money to spend, and no hurry and worry, it's all over for ever, Ann. We was fools, Ann. We didn't know our benefits. We been caught. Gord!... Gord!" He was on the verge of "banging about" again. They heard a jingle in the passage, the large soft impact of a servant's indoor boots. As if she were a part, a mitigatory part of Fate, came Gwendolen to lay the midday meal. Kipps displayed self-control forthwith. Ann picked up the bib again and bent over it, and the Kippses bore themselves gloomily perhaps, but not despairfully, while their dependant was in the room. She spread the cloth and put out the cutlery with a slow inaccuracy, and Kipps, after a whisper to himself, went again to the window. Ann got up and put away her work methodically in the cheffonier. "When I think," said Kipps, as soon as the door closed again behind Gwendolen, "when I think of the 'ole people and 'aving to tell 'em of it all--I want to smesh my 'ead against the nearest wall. Smesh my silly brains out! And Buggins--Buggins what I'd 'arf promised to start in a lill' outfitting shop in Rendezvous Street."... Gwendolen returned and restored dignity. The midday meal spread itself slowly before them. Gwendolen, after her custom, left the door open and Kipps closed it carefully before sitting down. He stood for a moment, regarding the meal doubtfully. "I don't feel as if I could swaller a moufful," he said. "You got to eat," said Ann.... For a time they said little, and once swallowing was achieved, ate on with a sort of melancholy appetite. Each was now busy thinking. "After all," said Kipps, presently, "whatever 'appens, they can't turn us out or sell us up before nex' quarter-day. I'm pretty sure about that." "Sell us up!" said Ann. "I dessey we're bankrup'," said Kipps, trying to say it easily and helping himself with a trembling hand to unnecessary potatoes. Then a long silence. Ann ceased to eat, and there were silent tears. "More potatoes, Artie?" choked Ann. "I couldn't," said Kipps. "No." He pushed back his plate, which was indeed replete with potatoes, got up and walked about the room. Even the dinner-table looked distraught and unusual. "What to do, I _don't_ know," he said. "Oh, _Lord_!" he ejaculated, and picked up and slapped down a book. Then his eye fell upon another postcard that had come from Chitterlow by the morning's post, and which now lay by him on the mantel-shelf. He took it up, glanced at its imperfectly legible message, and put it down. "Delayed!" he said, scornfully. "Not prodooced in the smalls. Or is it smells 'e says? 'Ow can one understand that? Any'ow 'e's 'umbugging again.... Somefing about the Strand. No! Well, 'e's 'ad all the money 'e'll ever get out of me!... I'm done." He seemed to find a momentary relief in the dramatic effect of his announcement. He came near to a swagger of despair upon the hearthrug, and then suddenly came and sat down next to Ann and rested his chin on the knuckles of his two clenched hands. "I been a fool, Ann," he said in a gloomy monotone. "I been a brasted fool. But it's 'ard on us, all the same. It's 'ard." "'Ow was you to know?" said Ann. "I ought to 'ave known. I did in a sort of way know. And 'ere we are! I wouldn't care so much if it was myself, but it's _you_, Ann! 'Ere we are! Regular smashed up! And you----" He checked at an unspeakable aggravation of their disaster. "I knew 'e wasn't to be depended upon and there I left it! And you got to pay.... What's to 'appen to us all, I don't know." He thrust out his chin and glared at fate. "'Ow do you know 'e's speckylated everything?" said Ann, after a silent survey of him. "'E 'as," said Kipps, irritably, holding firm to disaster. "She say so?" "She don't know, of course, but you depend upon it that's it. She told me she knew something was on, and when she found 'im gone and a note lef' for her she knew it was up with 'im. 'E went by the night boat. She wrote that telegram off to me straight away." Ann surveyed his features with tender, perplexed eyes; she had never seen him so white and drawn before, and her hand rested an inch or so away from his arm. The actual loss was still, as it were, afar from her. The immediate thing was his enormous distress. "'Ow do you know----?" she said and stopped. It would irritate him too much. Kipps' imagination was going headlong. "Sold up!" he emitted presently, and Ann flinched. "Going back to work, day after day--I can't stand it, Ann, I can't. And you----" "It don't do to think of it," said Ann. Presently he came upon a resolve. "I keep on thinking of it, and thinking of it, and what's to be done and what's to be done. I shan't be any good 'ome s'arfernoon. It keeps on going 'round and 'round in my 'ead, and 'round and 'round. I better go for a walk or something. I'd be no comfort to you, Ann. I should want to 'owl and 'ammer things if I 'ung about 'ome. My fingers is all atwitch. I shall keep on thinking 'ow I might 'ave stopped it and callin' myself a fool."... He looked at her between pleading and shame. It seemed like deserting her. Ann regarded him with tear-dimmed eyes. "You'd better do what's good for you, Artie," she said.... "_I'll_ be best cleaning. It's no use sending off Gwendolen before her month, and the top room wants turning out." She added with a sort of grim humour: "May as well turn it out now while I got it." "I _better_ go for a walk," said Kipps.... And presently our poor exploded Kipps was marching out to bear his sudden misery. Habit turned him up the road towards his growing house, and then suddenly he perceived his direction--"Oh, Lor'!"--and turned aside and went up the steep way to the hill crest and the Sandling Road, and over the line by that tree-embowered Junction, and athwart the wide fields towards Postling--a little, black, marching figure--and so up the Downs and over the hills, whither he had never gone before.... 2 He came back long after dark, and Ann met him in the passage. "Where you been, Artie?" she asked, with a strained note in her voice. "I been walking and walking--trying to tire myself out. All the time I been thinking what shall I do. Trying to fix something up all out of nothing." "I didn't know you meant to be out all this time." Kipps was gripped by compunction.... "I can't think what we ought to do," he said, presently. "You can't do anything much, Artie, not till you hear from Mr. Bean." "No; I can't do anything much. That's jest it. And all this time I keep feelin' if I don't do something the top of my 'ead'll bust.... Been trying to make up advertisements 'arf the time I been out--'bout finding a place, good salesman and stock-keeper, and good Manchester dresses, window-dressing--Lor'! Fancy that all beginning again!... If you went to stay with Sid a bit--if I sent every penny I got to you--I dunno! I dunno!" When they had gone to bed there was an elaborate attempt to get to sleep.... In one of their great waking pauses Kipps remarked in a muffled tone: "I didn't mean to frighten you, Ann, being out so late. I kep' on walking and walking, and some'ow it seemed to do me good. I went out to the 'illtop ever so far beyond Stanford, and sat there ever so long, and it seemed to make me better. Just looking over the marsh like, and seeing the sun set."... "Very likely," said Ann, after a long interval, "it isn't so bad as you think it is, Artie." "It's bad," said Kipps. "Very likely, after all, it isn't quite so bad. If there's only a little----" There came another long silence. "Ann," said Kipps in the quiet darkness. "Yes," said Ann. "Ann," said Kipps, and stopped as though he had hastily shut a door upon speech. "I kep' thinking," he said, trying again, "I kep' thinking--after all--I been cross to you and a fool about things--about them cards, Ann; but"--his voice shook to pieces--"we _'ave_ been 'appy, Ann ... some'ow ... togever." And with that he and then she fell into a passion of weeping. They clung very tightly together--closer than they had been since ever the first brightness of their married days turned to the grey of common life again. All the disaster in the world could not prevent their going to sleep at last with their poor little troubled heads close together on one pillow. There was nothing more to be done, there was nothing more to be thought; Time might go on with his mischiefs, but for a little while at least they still had one another. 3 Kipps returned from his second interview with Mr. Bean in a state of strange excitement. He let himself in with his latch-key and slammed the door. "Ann!" he shouted, in an unusual note; "Ann!" Ann replied distantly. "Something to tell you," said Kipps; "something noo!" Ann appeared apprehensive from the kitchen. "Ann," he said, going before her into the little dining-room, for his news was too dignified for the passage, "very likely, Ann, o' Bean says, we shall 'ave----" He decided to prolong the suspense. "Guess!" "I can't, Artie." "Think of a lot of money!" "A 'undred pounds p'raps?" He spoke with immense deliberation. "O v e r a f o u s a n d p o u n d s!" Ann stared and said nothing, only went a shade whiter. "Over, he said. A'most certainly over." He shut the dining-room door and came forward hastily, for Ann, it was clear, meant to take this mitigation of their disaster with a complete abandonment of her self-control. She came near flopping; she fell into his arms. "Artie," she got to at last and began to weep, clinging tightly to him. "Pretty near certain," said Kipps, holding her. "A fousand pounds!" "I _said_, Artie," she wailed on his shoulder with the note of accumulated wrongs, "very likely it wasn't so bad."... "There's things," he said, when presently he came to particulars, "'e couldn't touch. The noo place! It's freehold and paid for, and with the bit of building on it, there's five or six 'undred pound p'raps--say worf free 'undred, for safety. We can't be sold up to finish it, like we thought. O' Bean says we can very likely sell it and get money. 'E says you often get a chance to sell a 'ouse lessen 'arf done, 'specially free'old. _Very_ likely, 'e say. Then there's Hughenden. Hughenden 'asn't been mortgaged not for more than 'arf its value. There's a 'undred or so to be got on that, and the furniture and the rent for the summer still coming in. 'E says there's very likely other things. A fousand pounds, that's what 'e said. 'E said it might even be more."... They were sitting now at the table. "It alters everything," said Ann. "I been thinking that, Ann, all the way 'ome. I came in the motor car. First ride I've 'ad since the smash. We needn't send off Gwendolen, leastways not till _after_. You know. We needn't turn out of 'ere--not for a long time. What we been doing for the o' people we can go on doing a'most as much. And your mother!... I wanted to 'oller coming along. I pretty near run coming down the road by the hotel." "Oh, I _am_ glad we can stop 'ere and be comfortable a bit," said Ann. "I _am_ glad for that." "I pretty near told the driver on the motor--only 'e was the sort won't talk.... You see, Ann, we'll be able to start a shop, we'll be able to get _into_ something like. All about our 'aving to go back to places and that; all that doesn't matter any more." For a while they abandoned themselves to ejaculating transports. Then they fell talking to shape an idea to themselves of the new prospect that opened before them. "We must start a sort of shop," said Kipps, whose imagination had been working. "It'll 'ave to be a shop." "Drapery?" said Ann. "You want such a lot of capital for the drapery, mor'n a thousand pounds you want by a long way--to start it anything like proper." "Well, outfitting. Like Buggins was going to do." Kipps glanced at that for a moment, because the idea had not occurred to him. Then he came back to his prepossession. "Well, I thought of something else, Ann," he said. "You see, I've always thought a little book-shop. It isn't like the drapery--'aving to be learnt. I thought--even before this smash-up--'ow I'd like to 'ave something to do, instead of always 'aving 'olidays always like we 'ave been 'aving." He reflected. "You don't know _much_ about books, do you, Artie?" "You don't want to." He illustrated. "I noticed when we used to go to that Lib'ry at Folkestone, ladies weren't anything like what they was in a draper's--if you 'aven't got _just_ what they want it's 'Oh, no!' and out they go. But in a book shop it's different. One book's very like another--after all, what is it? Something to read and done with. It's not a thing that matters like print dresses or serviettes--where you either like 'em or don't, and people judge you by. They take what you give 'em in books and lib'ries, and glad to be told _what_ to. See 'ow we was--up at that lib'ry."... He paused. "You see, Ann---- "Well, I read 'n 'dvertisement the other day. I been asking Mr. Bean. It said--five 'undred pounds." "What did?" "Branches," said Kipps. Ann failed to understand. "It's a sort of thing that gets up book shops all over the country," said Kipps. "I didn't tell you, but I arst about it a bit. On'y I dropped it again. Before this smash, I mean. I'd thought I'd like to keep a shop for a lark, on'y then I thought it silly. Besides it 'ud 'ave been beneath me." He blushed vividly. "It was a sort of projek of mine, Ann. "On'y it wouldn't 'ave done," he added. It was a tortuous journey when the Kippses set out to explain anything to each other. But through a maze of fragmentary elucidations and questions, their minds did presently begin to approximate to a picture of a compact, bright, little shop, as a framework for themselves. "I thought of it one day when I was in Folkestone. I thought of it one day when I was looking in at a window. I see a chap dressin' a window and he was whistlin' reg'lar light-'arted.... I thought then I'd like to keep a bookshop, any'ow, jest for something to do. And when people weren't about, then you could sit and read the books. See? It wouldn't be 'arf bad."... They mused, each with elbows on table and knuckles to lips, looking with speculative eyes at each other. "Very likely we'll be 'appier than we should 'ave been with more money," said Kipps presently. "We wasn't 'ardly suited," reflected Ann, and left her sentence incomplete. "Fish out of water like," said Kipps.... "You won't 'ave to return that call now," said Kipps, opening a new branch of the question. "That's one good thing." "Lor'!" said Ann, visibly brightening, "no more I shan't!" "I don't s'pose they'd want you to, even if you did--with things as they are." A certain added brightness came into Ann's face. "Nobody won't be able to come leaving cards on us, Artie, now, any more. We are out of _that_!" "There isn't no necessity for us to be stuck up," said Kipps, "any more for ever! 'Ere we are, Ann, common people, with jest no position at all, as you might say, to keep up. No sev'nts, not if you don't like. No dressin' better than other people. If it wasn't we been robbed--dashed if I'd care a rap about losing that money. I b'lieve"--his face shone with the rare pleasure of paradox--"I reely b'lieve, Ann, it'll prove a savin' in the end." 4 The remarkable advertisement which had fired Kipps' imagination with this dream of a bookshop opened out in the most alluring way. It was one little facet in a comprehensive scheme of transatlantic origin, which was to make our old-world methods of book-selling "sit up," and it displayed an imaginative briskness, a lucidity and promise that aroused the profoundest scepticism in the mind of Mr. Bean. To Kipps' renewed investigations it presented itself in an expository illustrated pamphlet (far too well printed, Mr. Bean thought, for a reputable undertaking) of the most convincing sort. Mr. Bean would not let him sink his capital in shares in its projected company that was to make all things new in the world of books, but he could not prevent Kipps becoming one of their associated booksellers. And so when presently it became apparent that an epoch was not to be made, and the "Associated Booksellers' Trading Union (Limited)" receded and dissolved and liquidated (a few drops) and vanished and went away to talk about something else, Kipps remained floating undamaged in this interestingly uncertain universe as an independent bookseller. Except that it failed, the Associated Booksellers' Trading Union had all the stigmata of success. Its fault, perhaps, was that it had them all instead of only one or two. It was to buy wholesale for all

these

How many times the word 'these' appears in the text?

you go and slap 'em in the face!" "I didn't slap 'em in the face." "You do--practically. You slams the door in their face, and that's all we see of 'em ever. I wouldn't 'ave 'ad this 'appen not for a ten-pound note." He rounded his regrets with a grunt. For a while there was silence, save for the little stir of Ann's movements preparing the tea. "Tea, Artie," said Ann, handing him a cup. Kipps took it. "I put sugar _once_," said Ann. "Oo, dash it! Oo cares?" said Kipps, taking an extraordinarily large additional lump with fury quivering fingers, and putting his cup with a slight excess of force on the recess cupboard. "Oo cares? "I wouldn't 'ave 'ad that 'appen," he said, bidding steadily against accomplished things, "for twenty pounds." He gloomed in silence through a long minute or so. Then Ann said the fatal thing that exploded him. "Artie!" she said. "What?" "There's Buttud Toce down there! By your foot!" There was a pause, husband and wife regarded one another. "Buttud Toce!" he said. "You go and mess up them callers and then you try and stuff me up with Buttud Toce! Buttud Toce indeed! 'Ere's our first chance of knowing anyone that's at all fit to 'sociate with----. Look 'ere, Ann! Tell you what it is--you got to return that call." "Return that call!" "Yes, you got to return that call. That's what you got to do! I know----" He waved his arm vaguely towards the miscellany of books in the recess. "It's in Manners and Rools of Good S'ity. You got to find jest 'ow many cards to leave and you got to go and leave 'em. See?" Ann's face expressed terror. "But, Artie, 'ow _can_ I?" "'Ow _can_ you? 'Ow _could_ you? You got to do it, any'ow. They won't know you--not in your Bond Street 'at! If they do, they won't say nothing." His voice assumed a note of entreaty. "You mus', Ann." "I can't." "You mus'." "I can't and I won't. Anything in reason I'll do, but face those people again I can't--after what 'as 'appened." "You won't?" "No!"... "So there they go--orf! And we never see them again! And so it goes on! So it goes on! We don't know nobody and we _shan't_ know anybody! And you won't put yourself out not a little bit, or take the trouble to find out anything 'ow it ought to be done." Terrible pause. "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie, that's the troof." "Oh! _don't_ go into that." "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie. I'm not equal to the position. If you 'adn't said you'd drown yourself----" She choked. "I don' see why you shouldn't _try_, Ann. _I've_ improved. Why don't you? 'Stead of which you go sending out the servant and 'namelling floors, and then when visitors come----" "'Ow was _I_ to know about y'r old visitors?" cried Ann in a wail, and suddenly got up and fled from amidst their ruined tea, the tea of which "toce, all buttery," was to be the crown and glory. Kipps watched her with a momentary consternation. Then he hardened his heart. "Ought to 'ave known better," he said, "goin' on like that!" He remained for a space rubbing his knees and muttering. He emitted scornfully: "I carn't an' I won't." He saw her as the source of all his shames. Presently, quite mechanically, he stooped down and lifted the flowery china cover. "Ter dash 'er Buttud Toce!" he shouted at the sight of it, and clapped the cover down again hard.... When Gwendolen came back she perceived things were in a slightly unusual poise. Kipps sat by the fire in a rigid attitude reading a casually selected volume of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and Ann was upstairs and inaccessible--to reappear at a later stage with reddened eyes. Before the fire and still in a perfectly assimilable condition was what was evidently an untouched supply of richly buttered toast under a cracked cover. "They've 'ad a bit of a tiff," said Gwendolen, attending to her duties in the kitchen, with her outdoor hat still on and her mouth full. "They're rummuns--if ever! My eye!" And she took another piece of Ann's generously buttered toast. 4 The Kippses spoke no more that day to one another. The squabble about cards and buttered toast was as serious to them as the most rational of differences. It was all rational to them. Their sense of wrong burnt within them; their sense of what was owing to themselves, the duty of implacability, the obstinacy of pride. In the small hours Kipps lay awake at the nadir of unhappiness and came near groaning. He saw life as an extraordinarily desolating muddle; his futile house, his social discredit, his bad behaviour to Helen, his low marriage to Ann.... He became aware of something irregular in Ann's breathing.... He listened. She was awake and quietly and privately sobbing! He hardened his heart; resolutely he hardened his heart. The stupid little tragedies of these clipped and limited lives! What is the good of keeping up the idyllic sham and pretending that ill-educated, misdirected people "get along very well," and that all this is harmlessly funny and nothing more? You think I'm going to write fat, silly, grinning novels about half-educated, under-trained people and keep it up all the time, that the whole thing's nothing but funny! As I think of them lying unhappily there in the darkness, my vision pierces the night. See what I can see! Above them, brooding over them, I tell you there is a monster, a lumpish monster, like some great, clumsy griffin thing, like the Crystal Palace labyrinthodon, like Coote, like the leaden goddess Dulness Pope Abhorred, like some fat, proud flunkey, like pride, like indolence, like all that is darkening and heavy and obstructive in life. It is matter and darkness, it is the anti-soul, Stupidity. My Kippses live in its shadow. Shalford and his apprenticeship system, the Hastings Academy, the ideas of Coote, the ideas of the old Kippses, all the ideas that have made Kipps what he is, all these are its shadow. But for that monster they might not be groping among false ideas and hurt one another so sorely and so stupidly; but for that, the glowing promise of childhood and youth might have had a happier fruition, thought might have awakened in them to meet _the_ thought of the world, the quickening sunshine of literature pierced to the substance of their souls, their lives might not have been divorced, as now they are divorced for ever, from the apprehension of beauty that we favoured ones are given--the vision of the Grail that makes life fine for ever. I have laughed, and I laugh at these two people; I have sought to make you laugh.... But I see through the darkness the souls of my Kippses, as they are, as little pink strips of living stuff, like the bodies of little, ill-nourished, ailing, ignorant children, children who feel pain, who are naughty and muddled and suffer and do not understand why. And the claw of this Beast rests upon them! CHAPTER III TERMINATIONS 1 Next morning came a remarkable telegram from Folkestone. "Please come at once, urgent, Walshingham," said the telegram, and Kipps, after an agitated but still ample breakfast, departed.... When he returned his face was very white and his countenance disordered. He let himself in with his latchkey and came into the dining-room where Ann sat, affecting to work at a little thing she called a bib. She heard his hat fall in the hall before he entered, as though he had missed the peg. "I got something to tell you, Ann," he said, disregarding their overnight quarrel, and went to the hearthrug and took hold of the mantel, and stared at Ann as though the sight of her was novel. "Well?" said Ann, not looking up and working a little faster. "'E's gone!" Ann looked up sharply and her hands stopped. "_Who's_ gone?" For the first time she perceived Kipps' pallor. "Young Walshingham--I saw 'er and she tole me." "Gone? What d'you mean?" "Cleared out! Gone off for good!" "What for?" "For 'is 'ealth," said Kipps, with sudden bitterness. "'E's been speckylating. He's speckylated our money and 'e's speckylated their money, and now 'e's took 'is 'ook. That's all about it, Ann." "You mean?" "I mean 'e's orf and our twenty-four thousand's orf, too! And 'ere we are! Smashed up! That's all about it, Ann." He panted. Ann had no vocabulary for such an occasion. "Oh, Lor'!" she said, and sat still. Kipps came about and stuck his hands deeply in his trouser pockets. "Speckylated every penny--lorst it all--and gorn." Even his lips were white. "You mean we ain't got nothin' left, Artie?" "Not a penny! Not a bloomin' penny, Ann. No!" A gust of passion whirled across the soul of Kipps. He flung out a knuckly fist. "If I 'ad 'im 'ere," he said, "I'd--I'd--I'd wring 'is neck for 'im. I'd--I'd----" His voice rose to a shout. He thought of Gwendolen in the kitchen and fell to "Ugh!" "But, Artie," said Ann, trying to grasp it, "d'you mean to say he's took our money?" "Speckylated it!" said Kipps, with an illustrative flourish of the arm, that failed to illustrate. "Bort things dear and sold 'em cheap, and played the 'ankey-pankey jackass with everything we got. That's what I mean 'e's done, Ann." He repeated this last sentence with the addition of violent adverbs. "D'you mean to say our money's _gone_, Artie?" "Ter-dash it, _Yes_, Ann!" swore Kipps, exploding in a shout. "Ain't I tellin' you?" He was immediately sorry. "I didn't mean to 'oller at you, Ann," he said, "but I'm all shook up. I don't 'ardly know what I'm sayin'. Ev'ry penny."... "But, Artie----" Kipps grunted. He went to the window and stared for a moment at a sunlit sea. "Gord!" he swore. "I mean," he said, coming back to Ann and with an air of exasperation, "that he's 'bezzled and 'ooked it. That's what I mean, Ann." Ann put down the bib. "But wot are we going to _do_, Artie?" Kipps indicated ignorance, wrath and despair with one comprehensive gesture of his hands. He caught an ornament from the mantel and replaced it. "I'm going to bang about," he said, "if I ain't precious careful." "You saw _'er_, you say?" "Yes." "What did she say 'xactly?" said Ann. "Told me to see a s'licitor--tole me to get someone to 'elp me at once. She was there in black--like she used to be--and speaking cool and careful-like. 'Elen!... She's precious 'ard, is 'Elen. She looked at me straight. 'It's my fault,' she said, 'I ought to 'ave warned you.... Only under the circumstances it was a little difficult.' Straight as anything. I didn't 'ardly say anything to 'er. I didn't seem to begin to take it in until she was showing me out. I 'adn't anything to say. Jest as well, perhaps. She talked like a call a'most. She said--what _was_ it she said about her mother? 'My mother's overcome with grief,' she said, 'so naturally everything comes on me.'" "And she told you to get someone to 'elp you?" "Yes. I been to old Bean." "O' Bean?" "Yes. What I took my business away from!" "What did he say?" "He was a bit off'and at first, but then 'e come 'round. He couldn't tell me anything till 'e knew the facts. What I know of young Walshingham, there won't be much 'elp in the facts. No!" He reflected for a space. "It's a smash-up, Ann. More likely than not, Ann, 'e's left us over'ead in debt. We got to get out of it just 'ow we can.... "We got to begin again," he went on. "_'Ow_, I don't know. All the way 'ome my 'ead's been going. We got to get a living some'ow or other. 'Aving time to ourselves, and a bit of money to spend, and no hurry and worry, it's all over for ever, Ann. We was fools, Ann. We didn't know our benefits. We been caught. Gord!... Gord!" He was on the verge of "banging about" again. They heard a jingle in the passage, the large soft impact of a servant's indoor boots. As if she were a part, a mitigatory part of Fate, came Gwendolen to lay the midday meal. Kipps displayed self-control forthwith. Ann picked up the bib again and bent over it, and the Kippses bore themselves gloomily perhaps, but not despairfully, while their dependant was in the room. She spread the cloth and put out the cutlery with a slow inaccuracy, and Kipps, after a whisper to himself, went again to the window. Ann got up and put away her work methodically in the cheffonier. "When I think," said Kipps, as soon as the door closed again behind Gwendolen, "when I think of the 'ole people and 'aving to tell 'em of it all--I want to smesh my 'ead against the nearest wall. Smesh my silly brains out! And Buggins--Buggins what I'd 'arf promised to start in a lill' outfitting shop in Rendezvous Street."... Gwendolen returned and restored dignity. The midday meal spread itself slowly before them. Gwendolen, after her custom, left the door open and Kipps closed it carefully before sitting down. He stood for a moment, regarding the meal doubtfully. "I don't feel as if I could swaller a moufful," he said. "You got to eat," said Ann.... For a time they said little, and once swallowing was achieved, ate on with a sort of melancholy appetite. Each was now busy thinking. "After all," said Kipps, presently, "whatever 'appens, they can't turn us out or sell us up before nex' quarter-day. I'm pretty sure about that." "Sell us up!" said Ann. "I dessey we're bankrup'," said Kipps, trying to say it easily and helping himself with a trembling hand to unnecessary potatoes. Then a long silence. Ann ceased to eat, and there were silent tears. "More potatoes, Artie?" choked Ann. "I couldn't," said Kipps. "No." He pushed back his plate, which was indeed replete with potatoes, got up and walked about the room. Even the dinner-table looked distraught and unusual. "What to do, I _don't_ know," he said. "Oh, _Lord_!" he ejaculated, and picked up and slapped down a book. Then his eye fell upon another postcard that had come from Chitterlow by the morning's post, and which now lay by him on the mantel-shelf. He took it up, glanced at its imperfectly legible message, and put it down. "Delayed!" he said, scornfully. "Not prodooced in the smalls. Or is it smells 'e says? 'Ow can one understand that? Any'ow 'e's 'umbugging again.... Somefing about the Strand. No! Well, 'e's 'ad all the money 'e'll ever get out of me!... I'm done." He seemed to find a momentary relief in the dramatic effect of his announcement. He came near to a swagger of despair upon the hearthrug, and then suddenly came and sat down next to Ann and rested his chin on the knuckles of his two clenched hands. "I been a fool, Ann," he said in a gloomy monotone. "I been a brasted fool. But it's 'ard on us, all the same. It's 'ard." "'Ow was you to know?" said Ann. "I ought to 'ave known. I did in a sort of way know. And 'ere we are! I wouldn't care so much if it was myself, but it's _you_, Ann! 'Ere we are! Regular smashed up! And you----" He checked at an unspeakable aggravation of their disaster. "I knew 'e wasn't to be depended upon and there I left it! And you got to pay.... What's to 'appen to us all, I don't know." He thrust out his chin and glared at fate. "'Ow do you know 'e's speckylated everything?" said Ann, after a silent survey of him. "'E 'as," said Kipps, irritably, holding firm to disaster. "She say so?" "She don't know, of course, but you depend upon it that's it. She told me she knew something was on, and when she found 'im gone and a note lef' for her she knew it was up with 'im. 'E went by the night boat. She wrote that telegram off to me straight away." Ann surveyed his features with tender, perplexed eyes; she had never seen him so white and drawn before, and her hand rested an inch or so away from his arm. The actual loss was still, as it were, afar from her. The immediate thing was his enormous distress. "'Ow do you know----?" she said and stopped. It would irritate him too much. Kipps' imagination was going headlong. "Sold up!" he emitted presently, and Ann flinched. "Going back to work, day after day--I can't stand it, Ann, I can't. And you----" "It don't do to think of it," said Ann. Presently he came upon a resolve. "I keep on thinking of it, and thinking of it, and what's to be done and what's to be done. I shan't be any good 'ome s'arfernoon. It keeps on going 'round and 'round in my 'ead, and 'round and 'round. I better go for a walk or something. I'd be no comfort to you, Ann. I should want to 'owl and 'ammer things if I 'ung about 'ome. My fingers is all atwitch. I shall keep on thinking 'ow I might 'ave stopped it and callin' myself a fool."... He looked at her between pleading and shame. It seemed like deserting her. Ann regarded him with tear-dimmed eyes. "You'd better do what's good for you, Artie," she said.... "_I'll_ be best cleaning. It's no use sending off Gwendolen before her month, and the top room wants turning out." She added with a sort of grim humour: "May as well turn it out now while I got it." "I _better_ go for a walk," said Kipps.... And presently our poor exploded Kipps was marching out to bear his sudden misery. Habit turned him up the road towards his growing house, and then suddenly he perceived his direction--"Oh, Lor'!"--and turned aside and went up the steep way to the hill crest and the Sandling Road, and over the line by that tree-embowered Junction, and athwart the wide fields towards Postling--a little, black, marching figure--and so up the Downs and over the hills, whither he had never gone before.... 2 He came back long after dark, and Ann met him in the passage. "Where you been, Artie?" she asked, with a strained note in her voice. "I been walking and walking--trying to tire myself out. All the time I been thinking what shall I do. Trying to fix something up all out of nothing." "I didn't know you meant to be out all this time." Kipps was gripped by compunction.... "I can't think what we ought to do," he said, presently. "You can't do anything much, Artie, not till you hear from Mr. Bean." "No; I can't do anything much. That's jest it. And all this time I keep feelin' if I don't do something the top of my 'ead'll bust.... Been trying to make up advertisements 'arf the time I been out--'bout finding a place, good salesman and stock-keeper, and good Manchester dresses, window-dressing--Lor'! Fancy that all beginning again!... If you went to stay with Sid a bit--if I sent every penny I got to you--I dunno! I dunno!" When they had gone to bed there was an elaborate attempt to get to sleep.... In one of their great waking pauses Kipps remarked in a muffled tone: "I didn't mean to frighten you, Ann, being out so late. I kep' on walking and walking, and some'ow it seemed to do me good. I went out to the 'illtop ever so far beyond Stanford, and sat there ever so long, and it seemed to make me better. Just looking over the marsh like, and seeing the sun set."... "Very likely," said Ann, after a long interval, "it isn't so bad as you think it is, Artie." "It's bad," said Kipps. "Very likely, after all, it isn't quite so bad. If there's only a little----" There came another long silence. "Ann," said Kipps in the quiet darkness. "Yes," said Ann. "Ann," said Kipps, and stopped as though he had hastily shut a door upon speech. "I kep' thinking," he said, trying again, "I kep' thinking--after all--I been cross to you and a fool about things--about them cards, Ann; but"--his voice shook to pieces--"we _'ave_ been 'appy, Ann ... some'ow ... togever." And with that he and then she fell into a passion of weeping. They clung very tightly together--closer than they had been since ever the first brightness of their married days turned to the grey of common life again. All the disaster in the world could not prevent their going to sleep at last with their poor little troubled heads close together on one pillow. There was nothing more to be done, there was nothing more to be thought; Time might go on with his mischiefs, but for a little while at least they still had one another. 3 Kipps returned from his second interview with Mr. Bean in a state of strange excitement. He let himself in with his latch-key and slammed the door. "Ann!" he shouted, in an unusual note; "Ann!" Ann replied distantly. "Something to tell you," said Kipps; "something noo!" Ann appeared apprehensive from the kitchen. "Ann," he said, going before her into the little dining-room, for his news was too dignified for the passage, "very likely, Ann, o' Bean says, we shall 'ave----" He decided to prolong the suspense. "Guess!" "I can't, Artie." "Think of a lot of money!" "A 'undred pounds p'raps?" He spoke with immense deliberation. "O v e r a f o u s a n d p o u n d s!" Ann stared and said nothing, only went a shade whiter. "Over, he said. A'most certainly over." He shut the dining-room door and came forward hastily, for Ann, it was clear, meant to take this mitigation of their disaster with a complete abandonment of her self-control. She came near flopping; she fell into his arms. "Artie," she got to at last and began to weep, clinging tightly to him. "Pretty near certain," said Kipps, holding her. "A fousand pounds!" "I _said_, Artie," she wailed on his shoulder with the note of accumulated wrongs, "very likely it wasn't so bad."... "There's things," he said, when presently he came to particulars, "'e couldn't touch. The noo place! It's freehold and paid for, and with the bit of building on it, there's five or six 'undred pound p'raps--say worf free 'undred, for safety. We can't be sold up to finish it, like we thought. O' Bean says we can very likely sell it and get money. 'E says you often get a chance to sell a 'ouse lessen 'arf done, 'specially free'old. _Very_ likely, 'e say. Then there's Hughenden. Hughenden 'asn't been mortgaged not for more than 'arf its value. There's a 'undred or so to be got on that, and the furniture and the rent for the summer still coming in. 'E says there's very likely other things. A fousand pounds, that's what 'e said. 'E said it might even be more."... They were sitting now at the table. "It alters everything," said Ann. "I been thinking that, Ann, all the way 'ome. I came in the motor car. First ride I've 'ad since the smash. We needn't send off Gwendolen, leastways not till _after_. You know. We needn't turn out of 'ere--not for a long time. What we been doing for the o' people we can go on doing a'most as much. And your mother!... I wanted to 'oller coming along. I pretty near run coming down the road by the hotel." "Oh, I _am_ glad we can stop 'ere and be comfortable a bit," said Ann. "I _am_ glad for that." "I pretty near told the driver on the motor--only 'e was the sort won't talk.... You see, Ann, we'll be able to start a shop, we'll be able to get _into_ something like. All about our 'aving to go back to places and that; all that doesn't matter any more." For a while they abandoned themselves to ejaculating transports. Then they fell talking to shape an idea to themselves of the new prospect that opened before them. "We must start a sort of shop," said Kipps, whose imagination had been working. "It'll 'ave to be a shop." "Drapery?" said Ann. "You want such a lot of capital for the drapery, mor'n a thousand pounds you want by a long way--to start it anything like proper." "Well, outfitting. Like Buggins was going to do." Kipps glanced at that for a moment, because the idea had not occurred to him. Then he came back to his prepossession. "Well, I thought of something else, Ann," he said. "You see, I've always thought a little book-shop. It isn't like the drapery--'aving to be learnt. I thought--even before this smash-up--'ow I'd like to 'ave something to do, instead of always 'aving 'olidays always like we 'ave been 'aving." He reflected. "You don't know _much_ about books, do you, Artie?" "You don't want to." He illustrated. "I noticed when we used to go to that Lib'ry at Folkestone, ladies weren't anything like what they was in a draper's--if you 'aven't got _just_ what they want it's 'Oh, no!' and out they go. But in a book shop it's different. One book's very like another--after all, what is it? Something to read and done with. It's not a thing that matters like print dresses or serviettes--where you either like 'em or don't, and people judge you by. They take what you give 'em in books and lib'ries, and glad to be told _what_ to. See 'ow we was--up at that lib'ry."... He paused. "You see, Ann---- "Well, I read 'n 'dvertisement the other day. I been asking Mr. Bean. It said--five 'undred pounds." "What did?" "Branches," said Kipps. Ann failed to understand. "It's a sort of thing that gets up book shops all over the country," said Kipps. "I didn't tell you, but I arst about it a bit. On'y I dropped it again. Before this smash, I mean. I'd thought I'd like to keep a shop for a lark, on'y then I thought it silly. Besides it 'ud 'ave been beneath me." He blushed vividly. "It was a sort of projek of mine, Ann. "On'y it wouldn't 'ave done," he added. It was a tortuous journey when the Kippses set out to explain anything to each other. But through a maze of fragmentary elucidations and questions, their minds did presently begin to approximate to a picture of a compact, bright, little shop, as a framework for themselves. "I thought of it one day when I was in Folkestone. I thought of it one day when I was looking in at a window. I see a chap dressin' a window and he was whistlin' reg'lar light-'arted.... I thought then I'd like to keep a bookshop, any'ow, jest for something to do. And when people weren't about, then you could sit and read the books. See? It wouldn't be 'arf bad."... They mused, each with elbows on table and knuckles to lips, looking with speculative eyes at each other. "Very likely we'll be 'appier than we should 'ave been with more money," said Kipps presently. "We wasn't 'ardly suited," reflected Ann, and left her sentence incomplete. "Fish out of water like," said Kipps.... "You won't 'ave to return that call now," said Kipps, opening a new branch of the question. "That's one good thing." "Lor'!" said Ann, visibly brightening, "no more I shan't!" "I don't s'pose they'd want you to, even if you did--with things as they are." A certain added brightness came into Ann's face. "Nobody won't be able to come leaving cards on us, Artie, now, any more. We are out of _that_!" "There isn't no necessity for us to be stuck up," said Kipps, "any more for ever! 'Ere we are, Ann, common people, with jest no position at all, as you might say, to keep up. No sev'nts, not if you don't like. No dressin' better than other people. If it wasn't we been robbed--dashed if I'd care a rap about losing that money. I b'lieve"--his face shone with the rare pleasure of paradox--"I reely b'lieve, Ann, it'll prove a savin' in the end." 4 The remarkable advertisement which had fired Kipps' imagination with this dream of a bookshop opened out in the most alluring way. It was one little facet in a comprehensive scheme of transatlantic origin, which was to make our old-world methods of book-selling "sit up," and it displayed an imaginative briskness, a lucidity and promise that aroused the profoundest scepticism in the mind of Mr. Bean. To Kipps' renewed investigations it presented itself in an expository illustrated pamphlet (far too well printed, Mr. Bean thought, for a reputable undertaking) of the most convincing sort. Mr. Bean would not let him sink his capital in shares in its projected company that was to make all things new in the world of books, but he could not prevent Kipps becoming one of their associated booksellers. And so when presently it became apparent that an epoch was not to be made, and the "Associated Booksellers' Trading Union (Limited)" receded and dissolved and liquidated (a few drops) and vanished and went away to talk about something else, Kipps remained floating undamaged in this interestingly uncertain universe as an independent bookseller. Except that it failed, the Associated Booksellers' Trading Union had all the stigmata of success. Its fault, perhaps, was that it had them all instead of only one or two. It was to buy wholesale for all

keeping

How many times the word 'keeping' appears in the text?

you go and slap 'em in the face!" "I didn't slap 'em in the face." "You do--practically. You slams the door in their face, and that's all we see of 'em ever. I wouldn't 'ave 'ad this 'appen not for a ten-pound note." He rounded his regrets with a grunt. For a while there was silence, save for the little stir of Ann's movements preparing the tea. "Tea, Artie," said Ann, handing him a cup. Kipps took it. "I put sugar _once_," said Ann. "Oo, dash it! Oo cares?" said Kipps, taking an extraordinarily large additional lump with fury quivering fingers, and putting his cup with a slight excess of force on the recess cupboard. "Oo cares? "I wouldn't 'ave 'ad that 'appen," he said, bidding steadily against accomplished things, "for twenty pounds." He gloomed in silence through a long minute or so. Then Ann said the fatal thing that exploded him. "Artie!" she said. "What?" "There's Buttud Toce down there! By your foot!" There was a pause, husband and wife regarded one another. "Buttud Toce!" he said. "You go and mess up them callers and then you try and stuff me up with Buttud Toce! Buttud Toce indeed! 'Ere's our first chance of knowing anyone that's at all fit to 'sociate with----. Look 'ere, Ann! Tell you what it is--you got to return that call." "Return that call!" "Yes, you got to return that call. That's what you got to do! I know----" He waved his arm vaguely towards the miscellany of books in the recess. "It's in Manners and Rools of Good S'ity. You got to find jest 'ow many cards to leave and you got to go and leave 'em. See?" Ann's face expressed terror. "But, Artie, 'ow _can_ I?" "'Ow _can_ you? 'Ow _could_ you? You got to do it, any'ow. They won't know you--not in your Bond Street 'at! If they do, they won't say nothing." His voice assumed a note of entreaty. "You mus', Ann." "I can't." "You mus'." "I can't and I won't. Anything in reason I'll do, but face those people again I can't--after what 'as 'appened." "You won't?" "No!"... "So there they go--orf! And we never see them again! And so it goes on! So it goes on! We don't know nobody and we _shan't_ know anybody! And you won't put yourself out not a little bit, or take the trouble to find out anything 'ow it ought to be done." Terrible pause. "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie, that's the troof." "Oh! _don't_ go into that." "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie. I'm not equal to the position. If you 'adn't said you'd drown yourself----" She choked. "I don' see why you shouldn't _try_, Ann. _I've_ improved. Why don't you? 'Stead of which you go sending out the servant and 'namelling floors, and then when visitors come----" "'Ow was _I_ to know about y'r old visitors?" cried Ann in a wail, and suddenly got up and fled from amidst their ruined tea, the tea of which "toce, all buttery," was to be the crown and glory. Kipps watched her with a momentary consternation. Then he hardened his heart. "Ought to 'ave known better," he said, "goin' on like that!" He remained for a space rubbing his knees and muttering. He emitted scornfully: "I carn't an' I won't." He saw her as the source of all his shames. Presently, quite mechanically, he stooped down and lifted the flowery china cover. "Ter dash 'er Buttud Toce!" he shouted at the sight of it, and clapped the cover down again hard.... When Gwendolen came back she perceived things were in a slightly unusual poise. Kipps sat by the fire in a rigid attitude reading a casually selected volume of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and Ann was upstairs and inaccessible--to reappear at a later stage with reddened eyes. Before the fire and still in a perfectly assimilable condition was what was evidently an untouched supply of richly buttered toast under a cracked cover. "They've 'ad a bit of a tiff," said Gwendolen, attending to her duties in the kitchen, with her outdoor hat still on and her mouth full. "They're rummuns--if ever! My eye!" And she took another piece of Ann's generously buttered toast. 4 The Kippses spoke no more that day to one another. The squabble about cards and buttered toast was as serious to them as the most rational of differences. It was all rational to them. Their sense of wrong burnt within them; their sense of what was owing to themselves, the duty of implacability, the obstinacy of pride. In the small hours Kipps lay awake at the nadir of unhappiness and came near groaning. He saw life as an extraordinarily desolating muddle; his futile house, his social discredit, his bad behaviour to Helen, his low marriage to Ann.... He became aware of something irregular in Ann's breathing.... He listened. She was awake and quietly and privately sobbing! He hardened his heart; resolutely he hardened his heart. The stupid little tragedies of these clipped and limited lives! What is the good of keeping up the idyllic sham and pretending that ill-educated, misdirected people "get along very well," and that all this is harmlessly funny and nothing more? You think I'm going to write fat, silly, grinning novels about half-educated, under-trained people and keep it up all the time, that the whole thing's nothing but funny! As I think of them lying unhappily there in the darkness, my vision pierces the night. See what I can see! Above them, brooding over them, I tell you there is a monster, a lumpish monster, like some great, clumsy griffin thing, like the Crystal Palace labyrinthodon, like Coote, like the leaden goddess Dulness Pope Abhorred, like some fat, proud flunkey, like pride, like indolence, like all that is darkening and heavy and obstructive in life. It is matter and darkness, it is the anti-soul, Stupidity. My Kippses live in its shadow. Shalford and his apprenticeship system, the Hastings Academy, the ideas of Coote, the ideas of the old Kippses, all the ideas that have made Kipps what he is, all these are its shadow. But for that monster they might not be groping among false ideas and hurt one another so sorely and so stupidly; but for that, the glowing promise of childhood and youth might have had a happier fruition, thought might have awakened in them to meet _the_ thought of the world, the quickening sunshine of literature pierced to the substance of their souls, their lives might not have been divorced, as now they are divorced for ever, from the apprehension of beauty that we favoured ones are given--the vision of the Grail that makes life fine for ever. I have laughed, and I laugh at these two people; I have sought to make you laugh.... But I see through the darkness the souls of my Kippses, as they are, as little pink strips of living stuff, like the bodies of little, ill-nourished, ailing, ignorant children, children who feel pain, who are naughty and muddled and suffer and do not understand why. And the claw of this Beast rests upon them! CHAPTER III TERMINATIONS 1 Next morning came a remarkable telegram from Folkestone. "Please come at once, urgent, Walshingham," said the telegram, and Kipps, after an agitated but still ample breakfast, departed.... When he returned his face was very white and his countenance disordered. He let himself in with his latchkey and came into the dining-room where Ann sat, affecting to work at a little thing she called a bib. She heard his hat fall in the hall before he entered, as though he had missed the peg. "I got something to tell you, Ann," he said, disregarding their overnight quarrel, and went to the hearthrug and took hold of the mantel, and stared at Ann as though the sight of her was novel. "Well?" said Ann, not looking up and working a little faster. "'E's gone!" Ann looked up sharply and her hands stopped. "_Who's_ gone?" For the first time she perceived Kipps' pallor. "Young Walshingham--I saw 'er and she tole me." "Gone? What d'you mean?" "Cleared out! Gone off for good!" "What for?" "For 'is 'ealth," said Kipps, with sudden bitterness. "'E's been speckylating. He's speckylated our money and 'e's speckylated their money, and now 'e's took 'is 'ook. That's all about it, Ann." "You mean?" "I mean 'e's orf and our twenty-four thousand's orf, too! And 'ere we are! Smashed up! That's all about it, Ann." He panted. Ann had no vocabulary for such an occasion. "Oh, Lor'!" she said, and sat still. Kipps came about and stuck his hands deeply in his trouser pockets. "Speckylated every penny--lorst it all--and gorn." Even his lips were white. "You mean we ain't got nothin' left, Artie?" "Not a penny! Not a bloomin' penny, Ann. No!" A gust of passion whirled across the soul of Kipps. He flung out a knuckly fist. "If I 'ad 'im 'ere," he said, "I'd--I'd--I'd wring 'is neck for 'im. I'd--I'd----" His voice rose to a shout. He thought of Gwendolen in the kitchen and fell to "Ugh!" "But, Artie," said Ann, trying to grasp it, "d'you mean to say he's took our money?" "Speckylated it!" said Kipps, with an illustrative flourish of the arm, that failed to illustrate. "Bort things dear and sold 'em cheap, and played the 'ankey-pankey jackass with everything we got. That's what I mean 'e's done, Ann." He repeated this last sentence with the addition of violent adverbs. "D'you mean to say our money's _gone_, Artie?" "Ter-dash it, _Yes_, Ann!" swore Kipps, exploding in a shout. "Ain't I tellin' you?" He was immediately sorry. "I didn't mean to 'oller at you, Ann," he said, "but I'm all shook up. I don't 'ardly know what I'm sayin'. Ev'ry penny."... "But, Artie----" Kipps grunted. He went to the window and stared for a moment at a sunlit sea. "Gord!" he swore. "I mean," he said, coming back to Ann and with an air of exasperation, "that he's 'bezzled and 'ooked it. That's what I mean, Ann." Ann put down the bib. "But wot are we going to _do_, Artie?" Kipps indicated ignorance, wrath and despair with one comprehensive gesture of his hands. He caught an ornament from the mantel and replaced it. "I'm going to bang about," he said, "if I ain't precious careful." "You saw _'er_, you say?" "Yes." "What did she say 'xactly?" said Ann. "Told me to see a s'licitor--tole me to get someone to 'elp me at once. She was there in black--like she used to be--and speaking cool and careful-like. 'Elen!... She's precious 'ard, is 'Elen. She looked at me straight. 'It's my fault,' she said, 'I ought to 'ave warned you.... Only under the circumstances it was a little difficult.' Straight as anything. I didn't 'ardly say anything to 'er. I didn't seem to begin to take it in until she was showing me out. I 'adn't anything to say. Jest as well, perhaps. She talked like a call a'most. She said--what _was_ it she said about her mother? 'My mother's overcome with grief,' she said, 'so naturally everything comes on me.'" "And she told you to get someone to 'elp you?" "Yes. I been to old Bean." "O' Bean?" "Yes. What I took my business away from!" "What did he say?" "He was a bit off'and at first, but then 'e come 'round. He couldn't tell me anything till 'e knew the facts. What I know of young Walshingham, there won't be much 'elp in the facts. No!" He reflected for a space. "It's a smash-up, Ann. More likely than not, Ann, 'e's left us over'ead in debt. We got to get out of it just 'ow we can.... "We got to begin again," he went on. "_'Ow_, I don't know. All the way 'ome my 'ead's been going. We got to get a living some'ow or other. 'Aving time to ourselves, and a bit of money to spend, and no hurry and worry, it's all over for ever, Ann. We was fools, Ann. We didn't know our benefits. We been caught. Gord!... Gord!" He was on the verge of "banging about" again. They heard a jingle in the passage, the large soft impact of a servant's indoor boots. As if she were a part, a mitigatory part of Fate, came Gwendolen to lay the midday meal. Kipps displayed self-control forthwith. Ann picked up the bib again and bent over it, and the Kippses bore themselves gloomily perhaps, but not despairfully, while their dependant was in the room. She spread the cloth and put out the cutlery with a slow inaccuracy, and Kipps, after a whisper to himself, went again to the window. Ann got up and put away her work methodically in the cheffonier. "When I think," said Kipps, as soon as the door closed again behind Gwendolen, "when I think of the 'ole people and 'aving to tell 'em of it all--I want to smesh my 'ead against the nearest wall. Smesh my silly brains out! And Buggins--Buggins what I'd 'arf promised to start in a lill' outfitting shop in Rendezvous Street."... Gwendolen returned and restored dignity. The midday meal spread itself slowly before them. Gwendolen, after her custom, left the door open and Kipps closed it carefully before sitting down. He stood for a moment, regarding the meal doubtfully. "I don't feel as if I could swaller a moufful," he said. "You got to eat," said Ann.... For a time they said little, and once swallowing was achieved, ate on with a sort of melancholy appetite. Each was now busy thinking. "After all," said Kipps, presently, "whatever 'appens, they can't turn us out or sell us up before nex' quarter-day. I'm pretty sure about that." "Sell us up!" said Ann. "I dessey we're bankrup'," said Kipps, trying to say it easily and helping himself with a trembling hand to unnecessary potatoes. Then a long silence. Ann ceased to eat, and there were silent tears. "More potatoes, Artie?" choked Ann. "I couldn't," said Kipps. "No." He pushed back his plate, which was indeed replete with potatoes, got up and walked about the room. Even the dinner-table looked distraught and unusual. "What to do, I _don't_ know," he said. "Oh, _Lord_!" he ejaculated, and picked up and slapped down a book. Then his eye fell upon another postcard that had come from Chitterlow by the morning's post, and which now lay by him on the mantel-shelf. He took it up, glanced at its imperfectly legible message, and put it down. "Delayed!" he said, scornfully. "Not prodooced in the smalls. Or is it smells 'e says? 'Ow can one understand that? Any'ow 'e's 'umbugging again.... Somefing about the Strand. No! Well, 'e's 'ad all the money 'e'll ever get out of me!... I'm done." He seemed to find a momentary relief in the dramatic effect of his announcement. He came near to a swagger of despair upon the hearthrug, and then suddenly came and sat down next to Ann and rested his chin on the knuckles of his two clenched hands. "I been a fool, Ann," he said in a gloomy monotone. "I been a brasted fool. But it's 'ard on us, all the same. It's 'ard." "'Ow was you to know?" said Ann. "I ought to 'ave known. I did in a sort of way know. And 'ere we are! I wouldn't care so much if it was myself, but it's _you_, Ann! 'Ere we are! Regular smashed up! And you----" He checked at an unspeakable aggravation of their disaster. "I knew 'e wasn't to be depended upon and there I left it! And you got to pay.... What's to 'appen to us all, I don't know." He thrust out his chin and glared at fate. "'Ow do you know 'e's speckylated everything?" said Ann, after a silent survey of him. "'E 'as," said Kipps, irritably, holding firm to disaster. "She say so?" "She don't know, of course, but you depend upon it that's it. She told me she knew something was on, and when she found 'im gone and a note lef' for her she knew it was up with 'im. 'E went by the night boat. She wrote that telegram off to me straight away." Ann surveyed his features with tender, perplexed eyes; she had never seen him so white and drawn before, and her hand rested an inch or so away from his arm. The actual loss was still, as it were, afar from her. The immediate thing was his enormous distress. "'Ow do you know----?" she said and stopped. It would irritate him too much. Kipps' imagination was going headlong. "Sold up!" he emitted presently, and Ann flinched. "Going back to work, day after day--I can't stand it, Ann, I can't. And you----" "It don't do to think of it," said Ann. Presently he came upon a resolve. "I keep on thinking of it, and thinking of it, and what's to be done and what's to be done. I shan't be any good 'ome s'arfernoon. It keeps on going 'round and 'round in my 'ead, and 'round and 'round. I better go for a walk or something. I'd be no comfort to you, Ann. I should want to 'owl and 'ammer things if I 'ung about 'ome. My fingers is all atwitch. I shall keep on thinking 'ow I might 'ave stopped it and callin' myself a fool."... He looked at her between pleading and shame. It seemed like deserting her. Ann regarded him with tear-dimmed eyes. "You'd better do what's good for you, Artie," she said.... "_I'll_ be best cleaning. It's no use sending off Gwendolen before her month, and the top room wants turning out." She added with a sort of grim humour: "May as well turn it out now while I got it." "I _better_ go for a walk," said Kipps.... And presently our poor exploded Kipps was marching out to bear his sudden misery. Habit turned him up the road towards his growing house, and then suddenly he perceived his direction--"Oh, Lor'!"--and turned aside and went up the steep way to the hill crest and the Sandling Road, and over the line by that tree-embowered Junction, and athwart the wide fields towards Postling--a little, black, marching figure--and so up the Downs and over the hills, whither he had never gone before.... 2 He came back long after dark, and Ann met him in the passage. "Where you been, Artie?" she asked, with a strained note in her voice. "I been walking and walking--trying to tire myself out. All the time I been thinking what shall I do. Trying to fix something up all out of nothing." "I didn't know you meant to be out all this time." Kipps was gripped by compunction.... "I can't think what we ought to do," he said, presently. "You can't do anything much, Artie, not till you hear from Mr. Bean." "No; I can't do anything much. That's jest it. And all this time I keep feelin' if I don't do something the top of my 'ead'll bust.... Been trying to make up advertisements 'arf the time I been out--'bout finding a place, good salesman and stock-keeper, and good Manchester dresses, window-dressing--Lor'! Fancy that all beginning again!... If you went to stay with Sid a bit--if I sent every penny I got to you--I dunno! I dunno!" When they had gone to bed there was an elaborate attempt to get to sleep.... In one of their great waking pauses Kipps remarked in a muffled tone: "I didn't mean to frighten you, Ann, being out so late. I kep' on walking and walking, and some'ow it seemed to do me good. I went out to the 'illtop ever so far beyond Stanford, and sat there ever so long, and it seemed to make me better. Just looking over the marsh like, and seeing the sun set."... "Very likely," said Ann, after a long interval, "it isn't so bad as you think it is, Artie." "It's bad," said Kipps. "Very likely, after all, it isn't quite so bad. If there's only a little----" There came another long silence. "Ann," said Kipps in the quiet darkness. "Yes," said Ann. "Ann," said Kipps, and stopped as though he had hastily shut a door upon speech. "I kep' thinking," he said, trying again, "I kep' thinking--after all--I been cross to you and a fool about things--about them cards, Ann; but"--his voice shook to pieces--"we _'ave_ been 'appy, Ann ... some'ow ... togever." And with that he and then she fell into a passion of weeping. They clung very tightly together--closer than they had been since ever the first brightness of their married days turned to the grey of common life again. All the disaster in the world could not prevent their going to sleep at last with their poor little troubled heads close together on one pillow. There was nothing more to be done, there was nothing more to be thought; Time might go on with his mischiefs, but for a little while at least they still had one another. 3 Kipps returned from his second interview with Mr. Bean in a state of strange excitement. He let himself in with his latch-key and slammed the door. "Ann!" he shouted, in an unusual note; "Ann!" Ann replied distantly. "Something to tell you," said Kipps; "something noo!" Ann appeared apprehensive from the kitchen. "Ann," he said, going before her into the little dining-room, for his news was too dignified for the passage, "very likely, Ann, o' Bean says, we shall 'ave----" He decided to prolong the suspense. "Guess!" "I can't, Artie." "Think of a lot of money!" "A 'undred pounds p'raps?" He spoke with immense deliberation. "O v e r a f o u s a n d p o u n d s!" Ann stared and said nothing, only went a shade whiter. "Over, he said. A'most certainly over." He shut the dining-room door and came forward hastily, for Ann, it was clear, meant to take this mitigation of their disaster with a complete abandonment of her self-control. She came near flopping; she fell into his arms. "Artie," she got to at last and began to weep, clinging tightly to him. "Pretty near certain," said Kipps, holding her. "A fousand pounds!" "I _said_, Artie," she wailed on his shoulder with the note of accumulated wrongs, "very likely it wasn't so bad."... "There's things," he said, when presently he came to particulars, "'e couldn't touch. The noo place! It's freehold and paid for, and with the bit of building on it, there's five or six 'undred pound p'raps--say worf free 'undred, for safety. We can't be sold up to finish it, like we thought. O' Bean says we can very likely sell it and get money. 'E says you often get a chance to sell a 'ouse lessen 'arf done, 'specially free'old. _Very_ likely, 'e say. Then there's Hughenden. Hughenden 'asn't been mortgaged not for more than 'arf its value. There's a 'undred or so to be got on that, and the furniture and the rent for the summer still coming in. 'E says there's very likely other things. A fousand pounds, that's what 'e said. 'E said it might even be more."... They were sitting now at the table. "It alters everything," said Ann. "I been thinking that, Ann, all the way 'ome. I came in the motor car. First ride I've 'ad since the smash. We needn't send off Gwendolen, leastways not till _after_. You know. We needn't turn out of 'ere--not for a long time. What we been doing for the o' people we can go on doing a'most as much. And your mother!... I wanted to 'oller coming along. I pretty near run coming down the road by the hotel." "Oh, I _am_ glad we can stop 'ere and be comfortable a bit," said Ann. "I _am_ glad for that." "I pretty near told the driver on the motor--only 'e was the sort won't talk.... You see, Ann, we'll be able to start a shop, we'll be able to get _into_ something like. All about our 'aving to go back to places and that; all that doesn't matter any more." For a while they abandoned themselves to ejaculating transports. Then they fell talking to shape an idea to themselves of the new prospect that opened before them. "We must start a sort of shop," said Kipps, whose imagination had been working. "It'll 'ave to be a shop." "Drapery?" said Ann. "You want such a lot of capital for the drapery, mor'n a thousand pounds you want by a long way--to start it anything like proper." "Well, outfitting. Like Buggins was going to do." Kipps glanced at that for a moment, because the idea had not occurred to him. Then he came back to his prepossession. "Well, I thought of something else, Ann," he said. "You see, I've always thought a little book-shop. It isn't like the drapery--'aving to be learnt. I thought--even before this smash-up--'ow I'd like to 'ave something to do, instead of always 'aving 'olidays always like we 'ave been 'aving." He reflected. "You don't know _much_ about books, do you, Artie?" "You don't want to." He illustrated. "I noticed when we used to go to that Lib'ry at Folkestone, ladies weren't anything like what they was in a draper's--if you 'aven't got _just_ what they want it's 'Oh, no!' and out they go. But in a book shop it's different. One book's very like another--after all, what is it? Something to read and done with. It's not a thing that matters like print dresses or serviettes--where you either like 'em or don't, and people judge you by. They take what you give 'em in books and lib'ries, and glad to be told _what_ to. See 'ow we was--up at that lib'ry."... He paused. "You see, Ann---- "Well, I read 'n 'dvertisement the other day. I been asking Mr. Bean. It said--five 'undred pounds." "What did?" "Branches," said Kipps. Ann failed to understand. "It's a sort of thing that gets up book shops all over the country," said Kipps. "I didn't tell you, but I arst about it a bit. On'y I dropped it again. Before this smash, I mean. I'd thought I'd like to keep a shop for a lark, on'y then I thought it silly. Besides it 'ud 'ave been beneath me." He blushed vividly. "It was a sort of projek of mine, Ann. "On'y it wouldn't 'ave done," he added. It was a tortuous journey when the Kippses set out to explain anything to each other. But through a maze of fragmentary elucidations and questions, their minds did presently begin to approximate to a picture of a compact, bright, little shop, as a framework for themselves. "I thought of it one day when I was in Folkestone. I thought of it one day when I was looking in at a window. I see a chap dressin' a window and he was whistlin' reg'lar light-'arted.... I thought then I'd like to keep a bookshop, any'ow, jest for something to do. And when people weren't about, then you could sit and read the books. See? It wouldn't be 'arf bad."... They mused, each with elbows on table and knuckles to lips, looking with speculative eyes at each other. "Very likely we'll be 'appier than we should 'ave been with more money," said Kipps presently. "We wasn't 'ardly suited," reflected Ann, and left her sentence incomplete. "Fish out of water like," said Kipps.... "You won't 'ave to return that call now," said Kipps, opening a new branch of the question. "That's one good thing." "Lor'!" said Ann, visibly brightening, "no more I shan't!" "I don't s'pose they'd want you to, even if you did--with things as they are." A certain added brightness came into Ann's face. "Nobody won't be able to come leaving cards on us, Artie, now, any more. We are out of _that_!" "There isn't no necessity for us to be stuck up," said Kipps, "any more for ever! 'Ere we are, Ann, common people, with jest no position at all, as you might say, to keep up. No sev'nts, not if you don't like. No dressin' better than other people. If it wasn't we been robbed--dashed if I'd care a rap about losing that money. I b'lieve"--his face shone with the rare pleasure of paradox--"I reely b'lieve, Ann, it'll prove a savin' in the end." 4 The remarkable advertisement which had fired Kipps' imagination with this dream of a bookshop opened out in the most alluring way. It was one little facet in a comprehensive scheme of transatlantic origin, which was to make our old-world methods of book-selling "sit up," and it displayed an imaginative briskness, a lucidity and promise that aroused the profoundest scepticism in the mind of Mr. Bean. To Kipps' renewed investigations it presented itself in an expository illustrated pamphlet (far too well printed, Mr. Bean thought, for a reputable undertaking) of the most convincing sort. Mr. Bean would not let him sink his capital in shares in its projected company that was to make all things new in the world of books, but he could not prevent Kipps becoming one of their associated booksellers. And so when presently it became apparent that an epoch was not to be made, and the "Associated Booksellers' Trading Union (Limited)" receded and dissolved and liquidated (a few drops) and vanished and went away to talk about something else, Kipps remained floating undamaged in this interestingly uncertain universe as an independent bookseller. Except that it failed, the Associated Booksellers' Trading Union had all the stigmata of success. Its fault, perhaps, was that it had them all instead of only one or two. It was to buy wholesale for all

miscellany

How many times the word 'miscellany' appears in the text?

you go and slap 'em in the face!" "I didn't slap 'em in the face." "You do--practically. You slams the door in their face, and that's all we see of 'em ever. I wouldn't 'ave 'ad this 'appen not for a ten-pound note." He rounded his regrets with a grunt. For a while there was silence, save for the little stir of Ann's movements preparing the tea. "Tea, Artie," said Ann, handing him a cup. Kipps took it. "I put sugar _once_," said Ann. "Oo, dash it! Oo cares?" said Kipps, taking an extraordinarily large additional lump with fury quivering fingers, and putting his cup with a slight excess of force on the recess cupboard. "Oo cares? "I wouldn't 'ave 'ad that 'appen," he said, bidding steadily against accomplished things, "for twenty pounds." He gloomed in silence through a long minute or so. Then Ann said the fatal thing that exploded him. "Artie!" she said. "What?" "There's Buttud Toce down there! By your foot!" There was a pause, husband and wife regarded one another. "Buttud Toce!" he said. "You go and mess up them callers and then you try and stuff me up with Buttud Toce! Buttud Toce indeed! 'Ere's our first chance of knowing anyone that's at all fit to 'sociate with----. Look 'ere, Ann! Tell you what it is--you got to return that call." "Return that call!" "Yes, you got to return that call. That's what you got to do! I know----" He waved his arm vaguely towards the miscellany of books in the recess. "It's in Manners and Rools of Good S'ity. You got to find jest 'ow many cards to leave and you got to go and leave 'em. See?" Ann's face expressed terror. "But, Artie, 'ow _can_ I?" "'Ow _can_ you? 'Ow _could_ you? You got to do it, any'ow. They won't know you--not in your Bond Street 'at! If they do, they won't say nothing." His voice assumed a note of entreaty. "You mus', Ann." "I can't." "You mus'." "I can't and I won't. Anything in reason I'll do, but face those people again I can't--after what 'as 'appened." "You won't?" "No!"... "So there they go--orf! And we never see them again! And so it goes on! So it goes on! We don't know nobody and we _shan't_ know anybody! And you won't put yourself out not a little bit, or take the trouble to find out anything 'ow it ought to be done." Terrible pause. "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie, that's the troof." "Oh! _don't_ go into that." "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie. I'm not equal to the position. If you 'adn't said you'd drown yourself----" She choked. "I don' see why you shouldn't _try_, Ann. _I've_ improved. Why don't you? 'Stead of which you go sending out the servant and 'namelling floors, and then when visitors come----" "'Ow was _I_ to know about y'r old visitors?" cried Ann in a wail, and suddenly got up and fled from amidst their ruined tea, the tea of which "toce, all buttery," was to be the crown and glory. Kipps watched her with a momentary consternation. Then he hardened his heart. "Ought to 'ave known better," he said, "goin' on like that!" He remained for a space rubbing his knees and muttering. He emitted scornfully: "I carn't an' I won't." He saw her as the source of all his shames. Presently, quite mechanically, he stooped down and lifted the flowery china cover. "Ter dash 'er Buttud Toce!" he shouted at the sight of it, and clapped the cover down again hard.... When Gwendolen came back she perceived things were in a slightly unusual poise. Kipps sat by the fire in a rigid attitude reading a casually selected volume of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and Ann was upstairs and inaccessible--to reappear at a later stage with reddened eyes. Before the fire and still in a perfectly assimilable condition was what was evidently an untouched supply of richly buttered toast under a cracked cover. "They've 'ad a bit of a tiff," said Gwendolen, attending to her duties in the kitchen, with her outdoor hat still on and her mouth full. "They're rummuns--if ever! My eye!" And she took another piece of Ann's generously buttered toast. 4 The Kippses spoke no more that day to one another. The squabble about cards and buttered toast was as serious to them as the most rational of differences. It was all rational to them. Their sense of wrong burnt within them; their sense of what was owing to themselves, the duty of implacability, the obstinacy of pride. In the small hours Kipps lay awake at the nadir of unhappiness and came near groaning. He saw life as an extraordinarily desolating muddle; his futile house, his social discredit, his bad behaviour to Helen, his low marriage to Ann.... He became aware of something irregular in Ann's breathing.... He listened. She was awake and quietly and privately sobbing! He hardened his heart; resolutely he hardened his heart. The stupid little tragedies of these clipped and limited lives! What is the good of keeping up the idyllic sham and pretending that ill-educated, misdirected people "get along very well," and that all this is harmlessly funny and nothing more? You think I'm going to write fat, silly, grinning novels about half-educated, under-trained people and keep it up all the time, that the whole thing's nothing but funny! As I think of them lying unhappily there in the darkness, my vision pierces the night. See what I can see! Above them, brooding over them, I tell you there is a monster, a lumpish monster, like some great, clumsy griffin thing, like the Crystal Palace labyrinthodon, like Coote, like the leaden goddess Dulness Pope Abhorred, like some fat, proud flunkey, like pride, like indolence, like all that is darkening and heavy and obstructive in life. It is matter and darkness, it is the anti-soul, Stupidity. My Kippses live in its shadow. Shalford and his apprenticeship system, the Hastings Academy, the ideas of Coote, the ideas of the old Kippses, all the ideas that have made Kipps what he is, all these are its shadow. But for that monster they might not be groping among false ideas and hurt one another so sorely and so stupidly; but for that, the glowing promise of childhood and youth might have had a happier fruition, thought might have awakened in them to meet _the_ thought of the world, the quickening sunshine of literature pierced to the substance of their souls, their lives might not have been divorced, as now they are divorced for ever, from the apprehension of beauty that we favoured ones are given--the vision of the Grail that makes life fine for ever. I have laughed, and I laugh at these two people; I have sought to make you laugh.... But I see through the darkness the souls of my Kippses, as they are, as little pink strips of living stuff, like the bodies of little, ill-nourished, ailing, ignorant children, children who feel pain, who are naughty and muddled and suffer and do not understand why. And the claw of this Beast rests upon them! CHAPTER III TERMINATIONS 1 Next morning came a remarkable telegram from Folkestone. "Please come at once, urgent, Walshingham," said the telegram, and Kipps, after an agitated but still ample breakfast, departed.... When he returned his face was very white and his countenance disordered. He let himself in with his latchkey and came into the dining-room where Ann sat, affecting to work at a little thing she called a bib. She heard his hat fall in the hall before he entered, as though he had missed the peg. "I got something to tell you, Ann," he said, disregarding their overnight quarrel, and went to the hearthrug and took hold of the mantel, and stared at Ann as though the sight of her was novel. "Well?" said Ann, not looking up and working a little faster. "'E's gone!" Ann looked up sharply and her hands stopped. "_Who's_ gone?" For the first time she perceived Kipps' pallor. "Young Walshingham--I saw 'er and she tole me." "Gone? What d'you mean?" "Cleared out! Gone off for good!" "What for?" "For 'is 'ealth," said Kipps, with sudden bitterness. "'E's been speckylating. He's speckylated our money and 'e's speckylated their money, and now 'e's took 'is 'ook. That's all about it, Ann." "You mean?" "I mean 'e's orf and our twenty-four thousand's orf, too! And 'ere we are! Smashed up! That's all about it, Ann." He panted. Ann had no vocabulary for such an occasion. "Oh, Lor'!" she said, and sat still. Kipps came about and stuck his hands deeply in his trouser pockets. "Speckylated every penny--lorst it all--and gorn." Even his lips were white. "You mean we ain't got nothin' left, Artie?" "Not a penny! Not a bloomin' penny, Ann. No!" A gust of passion whirled across the soul of Kipps. He flung out a knuckly fist. "If I 'ad 'im 'ere," he said, "I'd--I'd--I'd wring 'is neck for 'im. I'd--I'd----" His voice rose to a shout. He thought of Gwendolen in the kitchen and fell to "Ugh!" "But, Artie," said Ann, trying to grasp it, "d'you mean to say he's took our money?" "Speckylated it!" said Kipps, with an illustrative flourish of the arm, that failed to illustrate. "Bort things dear and sold 'em cheap, and played the 'ankey-pankey jackass with everything we got. That's what I mean 'e's done, Ann." He repeated this last sentence with the addition of violent adverbs. "D'you mean to say our money's _gone_, Artie?" "Ter-dash it, _Yes_, Ann!" swore Kipps, exploding in a shout. "Ain't I tellin' you?" He was immediately sorry. "I didn't mean to 'oller at you, Ann," he said, "but I'm all shook up. I don't 'ardly know what I'm sayin'. Ev'ry penny."... "But, Artie----" Kipps grunted. He went to the window and stared for a moment at a sunlit sea. "Gord!" he swore. "I mean," he said, coming back to Ann and with an air of exasperation, "that he's 'bezzled and 'ooked it. That's what I mean, Ann." Ann put down the bib. "But wot are we going to _do_, Artie?" Kipps indicated ignorance, wrath and despair with one comprehensive gesture of his hands. He caught an ornament from the mantel and replaced it. "I'm going to bang about," he said, "if I ain't precious careful." "You saw _'er_, you say?" "Yes." "What did she say 'xactly?" said Ann. "Told me to see a s'licitor--tole me to get someone to 'elp me at once. She was there in black--like she used to be--and speaking cool and careful-like. 'Elen!... She's precious 'ard, is 'Elen. She looked at me straight. 'It's my fault,' she said, 'I ought to 'ave warned you.... Only under the circumstances it was a little difficult.' Straight as anything. I didn't 'ardly say anything to 'er. I didn't seem to begin to take it in until she was showing me out. I 'adn't anything to say. Jest as well, perhaps. She talked like a call a'most. She said--what _was_ it she said about her mother? 'My mother's overcome with grief,' she said, 'so naturally everything comes on me.'" "And she told you to get someone to 'elp you?" "Yes. I been to old Bean." "O' Bean?" "Yes. What I took my business away from!" "What did he say?" "He was a bit off'and at first, but then 'e come 'round. He couldn't tell me anything till 'e knew the facts. What I know of young Walshingham, there won't be much 'elp in the facts. No!" He reflected for a space. "It's a smash-up, Ann. More likely than not, Ann, 'e's left us over'ead in debt. We got to get out of it just 'ow we can.... "We got to begin again," he went on. "_'Ow_, I don't know. All the way 'ome my 'ead's been going. We got to get a living some'ow or other. 'Aving time to ourselves, and a bit of money to spend, and no hurry and worry, it's all over for ever, Ann. We was fools, Ann. We didn't know our benefits. We been caught. Gord!... Gord!" He was on the verge of "banging about" again. They heard a jingle in the passage, the large soft impact of a servant's indoor boots. As if she were a part, a mitigatory part of Fate, came Gwendolen to lay the midday meal. Kipps displayed self-control forthwith. Ann picked up the bib again and bent over it, and the Kippses bore themselves gloomily perhaps, but not despairfully, while their dependant was in the room. She spread the cloth and put out the cutlery with a slow inaccuracy, and Kipps, after a whisper to himself, went again to the window. Ann got up and put away her work methodically in the cheffonier. "When I think," said Kipps, as soon as the door closed again behind Gwendolen, "when I think of the 'ole people and 'aving to tell 'em of it all--I want to smesh my 'ead against the nearest wall. Smesh my silly brains out! And Buggins--Buggins what I'd 'arf promised to start in a lill' outfitting shop in Rendezvous Street."... Gwendolen returned and restored dignity. The midday meal spread itself slowly before them. Gwendolen, after her custom, left the door open and Kipps closed it carefully before sitting down. He stood for a moment, regarding the meal doubtfully. "I don't feel as if I could swaller a moufful," he said. "You got to eat," said Ann.... For a time they said little, and once swallowing was achieved, ate on with a sort of melancholy appetite. Each was now busy thinking. "After all," said Kipps, presently, "whatever 'appens, they can't turn us out or sell us up before nex' quarter-day. I'm pretty sure about that." "Sell us up!" said Ann. "I dessey we're bankrup'," said Kipps, trying to say it easily and helping himself with a trembling hand to unnecessary potatoes. Then a long silence. Ann ceased to eat, and there were silent tears. "More potatoes, Artie?" choked Ann. "I couldn't," said Kipps. "No." He pushed back his plate, which was indeed replete with potatoes, got up and walked about the room. Even the dinner-table looked distraught and unusual. "What to do, I _don't_ know," he said. "Oh, _Lord_!" he ejaculated, and picked up and slapped down a book. Then his eye fell upon another postcard that had come from Chitterlow by the morning's post, and which now lay by him on the mantel-shelf. He took it up, glanced at its imperfectly legible message, and put it down. "Delayed!" he said, scornfully. "Not prodooced in the smalls. Or is it smells 'e says? 'Ow can one understand that? Any'ow 'e's 'umbugging again.... Somefing about the Strand. No! Well, 'e's 'ad all the money 'e'll ever get out of me!... I'm done." He seemed to find a momentary relief in the dramatic effect of his announcement. He came near to a swagger of despair upon the hearthrug, and then suddenly came and sat down next to Ann and rested his chin on the knuckles of his two clenched hands. "I been a fool, Ann," he said in a gloomy monotone. "I been a brasted fool. But it's 'ard on us, all the same. It's 'ard." "'Ow was you to know?" said Ann. "I ought to 'ave known. I did in a sort of way know. And 'ere we are! I wouldn't care so much if it was myself, but it's _you_, Ann! 'Ere we are! Regular smashed up! And you----" He checked at an unspeakable aggravation of their disaster. "I knew 'e wasn't to be depended upon and there I left it! And you got to pay.... What's to 'appen to us all, I don't know." He thrust out his chin and glared at fate. "'Ow do you know 'e's speckylated everything?" said Ann, after a silent survey of him. "'E 'as," said Kipps, irritably, holding firm to disaster. "She say so?" "She don't know, of course, but you depend upon it that's it. She told me she knew something was on, and when she found 'im gone and a note lef' for her she knew it was up with 'im. 'E went by the night boat. She wrote that telegram off to me straight away." Ann surveyed his features with tender, perplexed eyes; she had never seen him so white and drawn before, and her hand rested an inch or so away from his arm. The actual loss was still, as it were, afar from her. The immediate thing was his enormous distress. "'Ow do you know----?" she said and stopped. It would irritate him too much. Kipps' imagination was going headlong. "Sold up!" he emitted presently, and Ann flinched. "Going back to work, day after day--I can't stand it, Ann, I can't. And you----" "It don't do to think of it," said Ann. Presently he came upon a resolve. "I keep on thinking of it, and thinking of it, and what's to be done and what's to be done. I shan't be any good 'ome s'arfernoon. It keeps on going 'round and 'round in my 'ead, and 'round and 'round. I better go for a walk or something. I'd be no comfort to you, Ann. I should want to 'owl and 'ammer things if I 'ung about 'ome. My fingers is all atwitch. I shall keep on thinking 'ow I might 'ave stopped it and callin' myself a fool."... He looked at her between pleading and shame. It seemed like deserting her. Ann regarded him with tear-dimmed eyes. "You'd better do what's good for you, Artie," she said.... "_I'll_ be best cleaning. It's no use sending off Gwendolen before her month, and the top room wants turning out." She added with a sort of grim humour: "May as well turn it out now while I got it." "I _better_ go for a walk," said Kipps.... And presently our poor exploded Kipps was marching out to bear his sudden misery. Habit turned him up the road towards his growing house, and then suddenly he perceived his direction--"Oh, Lor'!"--and turned aside and went up the steep way to the hill crest and the Sandling Road, and over the line by that tree-embowered Junction, and athwart the wide fields towards Postling--a little, black, marching figure--and so up the Downs and over the hills, whither he had never gone before.... 2 He came back long after dark, and Ann met him in the passage. "Where you been, Artie?" she asked, with a strained note in her voice. "I been walking and walking--trying to tire myself out. All the time I been thinking what shall I do. Trying to fix something up all out of nothing." "I didn't know you meant to be out all this time." Kipps was gripped by compunction.... "I can't think what we ought to do," he said, presently. "You can't do anything much, Artie, not till you hear from Mr. Bean." "No; I can't do anything much. That's jest it. And all this time I keep feelin' if I don't do something the top of my 'ead'll bust.... Been trying to make up advertisements 'arf the time I been out--'bout finding a place, good salesman and stock-keeper, and good Manchester dresses, window-dressing--Lor'! Fancy that all beginning again!... If you went to stay with Sid a bit--if I sent every penny I got to you--I dunno! I dunno!" When they had gone to bed there was an elaborate attempt to get to sleep.... In one of their great waking pauses Kipps remarked in a muffled tone: "I didn't mean to frighten you, Ann, being out so late. I kep' on walking and walking, and some'ow it seemed to do me good. I went out to the 'illtop ever so far beyond Stanford, and sat there ever so long, and it seemed to make me better. Just looking over the marsh like, and seeing the sun set."... "Very likely," said Ann, after a long interval, "it isn't so bad as you think it is, Artie." "It's bad," said Kipps. "Very likely, after all, it isn't quite so bad. If there's only a little----" There came another long silence. "Ann," said Kipps in the quiet darkness. "Yes," said Ann. "Ann," said Kipps, and stopped as though he had hastily shut a door upon speech. "I kep' thinking," he said, trying again, "I kep' thinking--after all--I been cross to you and a fool about things--about them cards, Ann; but"--his voice shook to pieces--"we _'ave_ been 'appy, Ann ... some'ow ... togever." And with that he and then she fell into a passion of weeping. They clung very tightly together--closer than they had been since ever the first brightness of their married days turned to the grey of common life again. All the disaster in the world could not prevent their going to sleep at last with their poor little troubled heads close together on one pillow. There was nothing more to be done, there was nothing more to be thought; Time might go on with his mischiefs, but for a little while at least they still had one another. 3 Kipps returned from his second interview with Mr. Bean in a state of strange excitement. He let himself in with his latch-key and slammed the door. "Ann!" he shouted, in an unusual note; "Ann!" Ann replied distantly. "Something to tell you," said Kipps; "something noo!" Ann appeared apprehensive from the kitchen. "Ann," he said, going before her into the little dining-room, for his news was too dignified for the passage, "very likely, Ann, o' Bean says, we shall 'ave----" He decided to prolong the suspense. "Guess!" "I can't, Artie." "Think of a lot of money!" "A 'undred pounds p'raps?" He spoke with immense deliberation. "O v e r a f o u s a n d p o u n d s!" Ann stared and said nothing, only went a shade whiter. "Over, he said. A'most certainly over." He shut the dining-room door and came forward hastily, for Ann, it was clear, meant to take this mitigation of their disaster with a complete abandonment of her self-control. She came near flopping; she fell into his arms. "Artie," she got to at last and began to weep, clinging tightly to him. "Pretty near certain," said Kipps, holding her. "A fousand pounds!" "I _said_, Artie," she wailed on his shoulder with the note of accumulated wrongs, "very likely it wasn't so bad."... "There's things," he said, when presently he came to particulars, "'e couldn't touch. The noo place! It's freehold and paid for, and with the bit of building on it, there's five or six 'undred pound p'raps--say worf free 'undred, for safety. We can't be sold up to finish it, like we thought. O' Bean says we can very likely sell it and get money. 'E says you often get a chance to sell a 'ouse lessen 'arf done, 'specially free'old. _Very_ likely, 'e say. Then there's Hughenden. Hughenden 'asn't been mortgaged not for more than 'arf its value. There's a 'undred or so to be got on that, and the furniture and the rent for the summer still coming in. 'E says there's very likely other things. A fousand pounds, that's what 'e said. 'E said it might even be more."... They were sitting now at the table. "It alters everything," said Ann. "I been thinking that, Ann, all the way 'ome. I came in the motor car. First ride I've 'ad since the smash. We needn't send off Gwendolen, leastways not till _after_. You know. We needn't turn out of 'ere--not for a long time. What we been doing for the o' people we can go on doing a'most as much. And your mother!... I wanted to 'oller coming along. I pretty near run coming down the road by the hotel." "Oh, I _am_ glad we can stop 'ere and be comfortable a bit," said Ann. "I _am_ glad for that." "I pretty near told the driver on the motor--only 'e was the sort won't talk.... You see, Ann, we'll be able to start a shop, we'll be able to get _into_ something like. All about our 'aving to go back to places and that; all that doesn't matter any more." For a while they abandoned themselves to ejaculating transports. Then they fell talking to shape an idea to themselves of the new prospect that opened before them. "We must start a sort of shop," said Kipps, whose imagination had been working. "It'll 'ave to be a shop." "Drapery?" said Ann. "You want such a lot of capital for the drapery, mor'n a thousand pounds you want by a long way--to start it anything like proper." "Well, outfitting. Like Buggins was going to do." Kipps glanced at that for a moment, because the idea had not occurred to him. Then he came back to his prepossession. "Well, I thought of something else, Ann," he said. "You see, I've always thought a little book-shop. It isn't like the drapery--'aving to be learnt. I thought--even before this smash-up--'ow I'd like to 'ave something to do, instead of always 'aving 'olidays always like we 'ave been 'aving." He reflected. "You don't know _much_ about books, do you, Artie?" "You don't want to." He illustrated. "I noticed when we used to go to that Lib'ry at Folkestone, ladies weren't anything like what they was in a draper's--if you 'aven't got _just_ what they want it's 'Oh, no!' and out they go. But in a book shop it's different. One book's very like another--after all, what is it? Something to read and done with. It's not a thing that matters like print dresses or serviettes--where you either like 'em or don't, and people judge you by. They take what you give 'em in books and lib'ries, and glad to be told _what_ to. See 'ow we was--up at that lib'ry."... He paused. "You see, Ann---- "Well, I read 'n 'dvertisement the other day. I been asking Mr. Bean. It said--five 'undred pounds." "What did?" "Branches," said Kipps. Ann failed to understand. "It's a sort of thing that gets up book shops all over the country," said Kipps. "I didn't tell you, but I arst about it a bit. On'y I dropped it again. Before this smash, I mean. I'd thought I'd like to keep a shop for a lark, on'y then I thought it silly. Besides it 'ud 'ave been beneath me." He blushed vividly. "It was a sort of projek of mine, Ann. "On'y it wouldn't 'ave done," he added. It was a tortuous journey when the Kippses set out to explain anything to each other. But through a maze of fragmentary elucidations and questions, their minds did presently begin to approximate to a picture of a compact, bright, little shop, as a framework for themselves. "I thought of it one day when I was in Folkestone. I thought of it one day when I was looking in at a window. I see a chap dressin' a window and he was whistlin' reg'lar light-'arted.... I thought then I'd like to keep a bookshop, any'ow, jest for something to do. And when people weren't about, then you could sit and read the books. See? It wouldn't be 'arf bad."... They mused, each with elbows on table and knuckles to lips, looking with speculative eyes at each other. "Very likely we'll be 'appier than we should 'ave been with more money," said Kipps presently. "We wasn't 'ardly suited," reflected Ann, and left her sentence incomplete. "Fish out of water like," said Kipps.... "You won't 'ave to return that call now," said Kipps, opening a new branch of the question. "That's one good thing." "Lor'!" said Ann, visibly brightening, "no more I shan't!" "I don't s'pose they'd want you to, even if you did--with things as they are." A certain added brightness came into Ann's face. "Nobody won't be able to come leaving cards on us, Artie, now, any more. We are out of _that_!" "There isn't no necessity for us to be stuck up," said Kipps, "any more for ever! 'Ere we are, Ann, common people, with jest no position at all, as you might say, to keep up. No sev'nts, not if you don't like. No dressin' better than other people. If it wasn't we been robbed--dashed if I'd care a rap about losing that money. I b'lieve"--his face shone with the rare pleasure of paradox--"I reely b'lieve, Ann, it'll prove a savin' in the end." 4 The remarkable advertisement which had fired Kipps' imagination with this dream of a bookshop opened out in the most alluring way. It was one little facet in a comprehensive scheme of transatlantic origin, which was to make our old-world methods of book-selling "sit up," and it displayed an imaginative briskness, a lucidity and promise that aroused the profoundest scepticism in the mind of Mr. Bean. To Kipps' renewed investigations it presented itself in an expository illustrated pamphlet (far too well printed, Mr. Bean thought, for a reputable undertaking) of the most convincing sort. Mr. Bean would not let him sink his capital in shares in its projected company that was to make all things new in the world of books, but he could not prevent Kipps becoming one of their associated booksellers. And so when presently it became apparent that an epoch was not to be made, and the "Associated Booksellers' Trading Union (Limited)" receded and dissolved and liquidated (a few drops) and vanished and went away to talk about something else, Kipps remained floating undamaged in this interestingly uncertain universe as an independent bookseller. Except that it failed, the Associated Booksellers' Trading Union had all the stigmata of success. Its fault, perhaps, was that it had them all instead of only one or two. It was to buy wholesale for all

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you go and slap 'em in the face!" "I didn't slap 'em in the face." "You do--practically. You slams the door in their face, and that's all we see of 'em ever. I wouldn't 'ave 'ad this 'appen not for a ten-pound note." He rounded his regrets with a grunt. For a while there was silence, save for the little stir of Ann's movements preparing the tea. "Tea, Artie," said Ann, handing him a cup. Kipps took it. "I put sugar _once_," said Ann. "Oo, dash it! Oo cares?" said Kipps, taking an extraordinarily large additional lump with fury quivering fingers, and putting his cup with a slight excess of force on the recess cupboard. "Oo cares? "I wouldn't 'ave 'ad that 'appen," he said, bidding steadily against accomplished things, "for twenty pounds." He gloomed in silence through a long minute or so. Then Ann said the fatal thing that exploded him. "Artie!" she said. "What?" "There's Buttud Toce down there! By your foot!" There was a pause, husband and wife regarded one another. "Buttud Toce!" he said. "You go and mess up them callers and then you try and stuff me up with Buttud Toce! Buttud Toce indeed! 'Ere's our first chance of knowing anyone that's at all fit to 'sociate with----. Look 'ere, Ann! Tell you what it is--you got to return that call." "Return that call!" "Yes, you got to return that call. That's what you got to do! I know----" He waved his arm vaguely towards the miscellany of books in the recess. "It's in Manners and Rools of Good S'ity. You got to find jest 'ow many cards to leave and you got to go and leave 'em. See?" Ann's face expressed terror. "But, Artie, 'ow _can_ I?" "'Ow _can_ you? 'Ow _could_ you? You got to do it, any'ow. They won't know you--not in your Bond Street 'at! If they do, they won't say nothing." His voice assumed a note of entreaty. "You mus', Ann." "I can't." "You mus'." "I can't and I won't. Anything in reason I'll do, but face those people again I can't--after what 'as 'appened." "You won't?" "No!"... "So there they go--orf! And we never see them again! And so it goes on! So it goes on! We don't know nobody and we _shan't_ know anybody! And you won't put yourself out not a little bit, or take the trouble to find out anything 'ow it ought to be done." Terrible pause. "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie, that's the troof." "Oh! _don't_ go into that." "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie. I'm not equal to the position. If you 'adn't said you'd drown yourself----" She choked. "I don' see why you shouldn't _try_, Ann. _I've_ improved. Why don't you? 'Stead of which you go sending out the servant and 'namelling floors, and then when visitors come----" "'Ow was _I_ to know about y'r old visitors?" cried Ann in a wail, and suddenly got up and fled from amidst their ruined tea, the tea of which "toce, all buttery," was to be the crown and glory. Kipps watched her with a momentary consternation. Then he hardened his heart. "Ought to 'ave known better," he said, "goin' on like that!" He remained for a space rubbing his knees and muttering. He emitted scornfully: "I carn't an' I won't." He saw her as the source of all his shames. Presently, quite mechanically, he stooped down and lifted the flowery china cover. "Ter dash 'er Buttud Toce!" he shouted at the sight of it, and clapped the cover down again hard.... When Gwendolen came back she perceived things were in a slightly unusual poise. Kipps sat by the fire in a rigid attitude reading a casually selected volume of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and Ann was upstairs and inaccessible--to reappear at a later stage with reddened eyes. Before the fire and still in a perfectly assimilable condition was what was evidently an untouched supply of richly buttered toast under a cracked cover. "They've 'ad a bit of a tiff," said Gwendolen, attending to her duties in the kitchen, with her outdoor hat still on and her mouth full. "They're rummuns--if ever! My eye!" And she took another piece of Ann's generously buttered toast. 4 The Kippses spoke no more that day to one another. The squabble about cards and buttered toast was as serious to them as the most rational of differences. It was all rational to them. Their sense of wrong burnt within them; their sense of what was owing to themselves, the duty of implacability, the obstinacy of pride. In the small hours Kipps lay awake at the nadir of unhappiness and came near groaning. He saw life as an extraordinarily desolating muddle; his futile house, his social discredit, his bad behaviour to Helen, his low marriage to Ann.... He became aware of something irregular in Ann's breathing.... He listened. She was awake and quietly and privately sobbing! He hardened his heart; resolutely he hardened his heart. The stupid little tragedies of these clipped and limited lives! What is the good of keeping up the idyllic sham and pretending that ill-educated, misdirected people "get along very well," and that all this is harmlessly funny and nothing more? You think I'm going to write fat, silly, grinning novels about half-educated, under-trained people and keep it up all the time, that the whole thing's nothing but funny! As I think of them lying unhappily there in the darkness, my vision pierces the night. See what I can see! Above them, brooding over them, I tell you there is a monster, a lumpish monster, like some great, clumsy griffin thing, like the Crystal Palace labyrinthodon, like Coote, like the leaden goddess Dulness Pope Abhorred, like some fat, proud flunkey, like pride, like indolence, like all that is darkening and heavy and obstructive in life. It is matter and darkness, it is the anti-soul, Stupidity. My Kippses live in its shadow. Shalford and his apprenticeship system, the Hastings Academy, the ideas of Coote, the ideas of the old Kippses, all the ideas that have made Kipps what he is, all these are its shadow. But for that monster they might not be groping among false ideas and hurt one another so sorely and so stupidly; but for that, the glowing promise of childhood and youth might have had a happier fruition, thought might have awakened in them to meet _the_ thought of the world, the quickening sunshine of literature pierced to the substance of their souls, their lives might not have been divorced, as now they are divorced for ever, from the apprehension of beauty that we favoured ones are given--the vision of the Grail that makes life fine for ever. I have laughed, and I laugh at these two people; I have sought to make you laugh.... But I see through the darkness the souls of my Kippses, as they are, as little pink strips of living stuff, like the bodies of little, ill-nourished, ailing, ignorant children, children who feel pain, who are naughty and muddled and suffer and do not understand why. And the claw of this Beast rests upon them! CHAPTER III TERMINATIONS 1 Next morning came a remarkable telegram from Folkestone. "Please come at once, urgent, Walshingham," said the telegram, and Kipps, after an agitated but still ample breakfast, departed.... When he returned his face was very white and his countenance disordered. He let himself in with his latchkey and came into the dining-room where Ann sat, affecting to work at a little thing she called a bib. She heard his hat fall in the hall before he entered, as though he had missed the peg. "I got something to tell you, Ann," he said, disregarding their overnight quarrel, and went to the hearthrug and took hold of the mantel, and stared at Ann as though the sight of her was novel. "Well?" said Ann, not looking up and working a little faster. "'E's gone!" Ann looked up sharply and her hands stopped. "_Who's_ gone?" For the first time she perceived Kipps' pallor. "Young Walshingham--I saw 'er and she tole me." "Gone? What d'you mean?" "Cleared out! Gone off for good!" "What for?" "For 'is 'ealth," said Kipps, with sudden bitterness. "'E's been speckylating. He's speckylated our money and 'e's speckylated their money, and now 'e's took 'is 'ook. That's all about it, Ann." "You mean?" "I mean 'e's orf and our twenty-four thousand's orf, too! And 'ere we are! Smashed up! That's all about it, Ann." He panted. Ann had no vocabulary for such an occasion. "Oh, Lor'!" she said, and sat still. Kipps came about and stuck his hands deeply in his trouser pockets. "Speckylated every penny--lorst it all--and gorn." Even his lips were white. "You mean we ain't got nothin' left, Artie?" "Not a penny! Not a bloomin' penny, Ann. No!" A gust of passion whirled across the soul of Kipps. He flung out a knuckly fist. "If I 'ad 'im 'ere," he said, "I'd--I'd--I'd wring 'is neck for 'im. I'd--I'd----" His voice rose to a shout. He thought of Gwendolen in the kitchen and fell to "Ugh!" "But, Artie," said Ann, trying to grasp it, "d'you mean to say he's took our money?" "Speckylated it!" said Kipps, with an illustrative flourish of the arm, that failed to illustrate. "Bort things dear and sold 'em cheap, and played the 'ankey-pankey jackass with everything we got. That's what I mean 'e's done, Ann." He repeated this last sentence with the addition of violent adverbs. "D'you mean to say our money's _gone_, Artie?" "Ter-dash it, _Yes_, Ann!" swore Kipps, exploding in a shout. "Ain't I tellin' you?" He was immediately sorry. "I didn't mean to 'oller at you, Ann," he said, "but I'm all shook up. I don't 'ardly know what I'm sayin'. Ev'ry penny."... "But, Artie----" Kipps grunted. He went to the window and stared for a moment at a sunlit sea. "Gord!" he swore. "I mean," he said, coming back to Ann and with an air of exasperation, "that he's 'bezzled and 'ooked it. That's what I mean, Ann." Ann put down the bib. "But wot are we going to _do_, Artie?" Kipps indicated ignorance, wrath and despair with one comprehensive gesture of his hands. He caught an ornament from the mantel and replaced it. "I'm going to bang about," he said, "if I ain't precious careful." "You saw _'er_, you say?" "Yes." "What did she say 'xactly?" said Ann. "Told me to see a s'licitor--tole me to get someone to 'elp me at once. She was there in black--like she used to be--and speaking cool and careful-like. 'Elen!... She's precious 'ard, is 'Elen. She looked at me straight. 'It's my fault,' she said, 'I ought to 'ave warned you.... Only under the circumstances it was a little difficult.' Straight as anything. I didn't 'ardly say anything to 'er. I didn't seem to begin to take it in until she was showing me out. I 'adn't anything to say. Jest as well, perhaps. She talked like a call a'most. She said--what _was_ it she said about her mother? 'My mother's overcome with grief,' she said, 'so naturally everything comes on me.'" "And she told you to get someone to 'elp you?" "Yes. I been to old Bean." "O' Bean?" "Yes. What I took my business away from!" "What did he say?" "He was a bit off'and at first, but then 'e come 'round. He couldn't tell me anything till 'e knew the facts. What I know of young Walshingham, there won't be much 'elp in the facts. No!" He reflected for a space. "It's a smash-up, Ann. More likely than not, Ann, 'e's left us over'ead in debt. We got to get out of it just 'ow we can.... "We got to begin again," he went on. "_'Ow_, I don't know. All the way 'ome my 'ead's been going. We got to get a living some'ow or other. 'Aving time to ourselves, and a bit of money to spend, and no hurry and worry, it's all over for ever, Ann. We was fools, Ann. We didn't know our benefits. We been caught. Gord!... Gord!" He was on the verge of "banging about" again. They heard a jingle in the passage, the large soft impact of a servant's indoor boots. As if she were a part, a mitigatory part of Fate, came Gwendolen to lay the midday meal. Kipps displayed self-control forthwith. Ann picked up the bib again and bent over it, and the Kippses bore themselves gloomily perhaps, but not despairfully, while their dependant was in the room. She spread the cloth and put out the cutlery with a slow inaccuracy, and Kipps, after a whisper to himself, went again to the window. Ann got up and put away her work methodically in the cheffonier. "When I think," said Kipps, as soon as the door closed again behind Gwendolen, "when I think of the 'ole people and 'aving to tell 'em of it all--I want to smesh my 'ead against the nearest wall. Smesh my silly brains out! And Buggins--Buggins what I'd 'arf promised to start in a lill' outfitting shop in Rendezvous Street."... Gwendolen returned and restored dignity. The midday meal spread itself slowly before them. Gwendolen, after her custom, left the door open and Kipps closed it carefully before sitting down. He stood for a moment, regarding the meal doubtfully. "I don't feel as if I could swaller a moufful," he said. "You got to eat," said Ann.... For a time they said little, and once swallowing was achieved, ate on with a sort of melancholy appetite. Each was now busy thinking. "After all," said Kipps, presently, "whatever 'appens, they can't turn us out or sell us up before nex' quarter-day. I'm pretty sure about that." "Sell us up!" said Ann. "I dessey we're bankrup'," said Kipps, trying to say it easily and helping himself with a trembling hand to unnecessary potatoes. Then a long silence. Ann ceased to eat, and there were silent tears. "More potatoes, Artie?" choked Ann. "I couldn't," said Kipps. "No." He pushed back his plate, which was indeed replete with potatoes, got up and walked about the room. Even the dinner-table looked distraught and unusual. "What to do, I _don't_ know," he said. "Oh, _Lord_!" he ejaculated, and picked up and slapped down a book. Then his eye fell upon another postcard that had come from Chitterlow by the morning's post, and which now lay by him on the mantel-shelf. He took it up, glanced at its imperfectly legible message, and put it down. "Delayed!" he said, scornfully. "Not prodooced in the smalls. Or is it smells 'e says? 'Ow can one understand that? Any'ow 'e's 'umbugging again.... Somefing about the Strand. No! Well, 'e's 'ad all the money 'e'll ever get out of me!... I'm done." He seemed to find a momentary relief in the dramatic effect of his announcement. He came near to a swagger of despair upon the hearthrug, and then suddenly came and sat down next to Ann and rested his chin on the knuckles of his two clenched hands. "I been a fool, Ann," he said in a gloomy monotone. "I been a brasted fool. But it's 'ard on us, all the same. It's 'ard." "'Ow was you to know?" said Ann. "I ought to 'ave known. I did in a sort of way know. And 'ere we are! I wouldn't care so much if it was myself, but it's _you_, Ann! 'Ere we are! Regular smashed up! And you----" He checked at an unspeakable aggravation of their disaster. "I knew 'e wasn't to be depended upon and there I left it! And you got to pay.... What's to 'appen to us all, I don't know." He thrust out his chin and glared at fate. "'Ow do you know 'e's speckylated everything?" said Ann, after a silent survey of him. "'E 'as," said Kipps, irritably, holding firm to disaster. "She say so?" "She don't know, of course, but you depend upon it that's it. She told me she knew something was on, and when she found 'im gone and a note lef' for her she knew it was up with 'im. 'E went by the night boat. She wrote that telegram off to me straight away." Ann surveyed his features with tender, perplexed eyes; she had never seen him so white and drawn before, and her hand rested an inch or so away from his arm. The actual loss was still, as it were, afar from her. The immediate thing was his enormous distress. "'Ow do you know----?" she said and stopped. It would irritate him too much. Kipps' imagination was going headlong. "Sold up!" he emitted presently, and Ann flinched. "Going back to work, day after day--I can't stand it, Ann, I can't. And you----" "It don't do to think of it," said Ann. Presently he came upon a resolve. "I keep on thinking of it, and thinking of it, and what's to be done and what's to be done. I shan't be any good 'ome s'arfernoon. It keeps on going 'round and 'round in my 'ead, and 'round and 'round. I better go for a walk or something. I'd be no comfort to you, Ann. I should want to 'owl and 'ammer things if I 'ung about 'ome. My fingers is all atwitch. I shall keep on thinking 'ow I might 'ave stopped it and callin' myself a fool."... He looked at her between pleading and shame. It seemed like deserting her. Ann regarded him with tear-dimmed eyes. "You'd better do what's good for you, Artie," she said.... "_I'll_ be best cleaning. It's no use sending off Gwendolen before her month, and the top room wants turning out." She added with a sort of grim humour: "May as well turn it out now while I got it." "I _better_ go for a walk," said Kipps.... And presently our poor exploded Kipps was marching out to bear his sudden misery. Habit turned him up the road towards his growing house, and then suddenly he perceived his direction--"Oh, Lor'!"--and turned aside and went up the steep way to the hill crest and the Sandling Road, and over the line by that tree-embowered Junction, and athwart the wide fields towards Postling--a little, black, marching figure--and so up the Downs and over the hills, whither he had never gone before.... 2 He came back long after dark, and Ann met him in the passage. "Where you been, Artie?" she asked, with a strained note in her voice. "I been walking and walking--trying to tire myself out. All the time I been thinking what shall I do. Trying to fix something up all out of nothing." "I didn't know you meant to be out all this time." Kipps was gripped by compunction.... "I can't think what we ought to do," he said, presently. "You can't do anything much, Artie, not till you hear from Mr. Bean." "No; I can't do anything much. That's jest it. And all this time I keep feelin' if I don't do something the top of my 'ead'll bust.... Been trying to make up advertisements 'arf the time I been out--'bout finding a place, good salesman and stock-keeper, and good Manchester dresses, window-dressing--Lor'! Fancy that all beginning again!... If you went to stay with Sid a bit--if I sent every penny I got to you--I dunno! I dunno!" When they had gone to bed there was an elaborate attempt to get to sleep.... In one of their great waking pauses Kipps remarked in a muffled tone: "I didn't mean to frighten you, Ann, being out so late. I kep' on walking and walking, and some'ow it seemed to do me good. I went out to the 'illtop ever so far beyond Stanford, and sat there ever so long, and it seemed to make me better. Just looking over the marsh like, and seeing the sun set."... "Very likely," said Ann, after a long interval, "it isn't so bad as you think it is, Artie." "It's bad," said Kipps. "Very likely, after all, it isn't quite so bad. If there's only a little----" There came another long silence. "Ann," said Kipps in the quiet darkness. "Yes," said Ann. "Ann," said Kipps, and stopped as though he had hastily shut a door upon speech. "I kep' thinking," he said, trying again, "I kep' thinking--after all--I been cross to you and a fool about things--about them cards, Ann; but"--his voice shook to pieces--"we _'ave_ been 'appy, Ann ... some'ow ... togever." And with that he and then she fell into a passion of weeping. They clung very tightly together--closer than they had been since ever the first brightness of their married days turned to the grey of common life again. All the disaster in the world could not prevent their going to sleep at last with their poor little troubled heads close together on one pillow. There was nothing more to be done, there was nothing more to be thought; Time might go on with his mischiefs, but for a little while at least they still had one another. 3 Kipps returned from his second interview with Mr. Bean in a state of strange excitement. He let himself in with his latch-key and slammed the door. "Ann!" he shouted, in an unusual note; "Ann!" Ann replied distantly. "Something to tell you," said Kipps; "something noo!" Ann appeared apprehensive from the kitchen. "Ann," he said, going before her into the little dining-room, for his news was too dignified for the passage, "very likely, Ann, o' Bean says, we shall 'ave----" He decided to prolong the suspense. "Guess!" "I can't, Artie." "Think of a lot of money!" "A 'undred pounds p'raps?" He spoke with immense deliberation. "O v e r a f o u s a n d p o u n d s!" Ann stared and said nothing, only went a shade whiter. "Over, he said. A'most certainly over." He shut the dining-room door and came forward hastily, for Ann, it was clear, meant to take this mitigation of their disaster with a complete abandonment of her self-control. She came near flopping; she fell into his arms. "Artie," she got to at last and began to weep, clinging tightly to him. "Pretty near certain," said Kipps, holding her. "A fousand pounds!" "I _said_, Artie," she wailed on his shoulder with the note of accumulated wrongs, "very likely it wasn't so bad."... "There's things," he said, when presently he came to particulars, "'e couldn't touch. The noo place! It's freehold and paid for, and with the bit of building on it, there's five or six 'undred pound p'raps--say worf free 'undred, for safety. We can't be sold up to finish it, like we thought. O' Bean says we can very likely sell it and get money. 'E says you often get a chance to sell a 'ouse lessen 'arf done, 'specially free'old. _Very_ likely, 'e say. Then there's Hughenden. Hughenden 'asn't been mortgaged not for more than 'arf its value. There's a 'undred or so to be got on that, and the furniture and the rent for the summer still coming in. 'E says there's very likely other things. A fousand pounds, that's what 'e said. 'E said it might even be more."... They were sitting now at the table. "It alters everything," said Ann. "I been thinking that, Ann, all the way 'ome. I came in the motor car. First ride I've 'ad since the smash. We needn't send off Gwendolen, leastways not till _after_. You know. We needn't turn out of 'ere--not for a long time. What we been doing for the o' people we can go on doing a'most as much. And your mother!... I wanted to 'oller coming along. I pretty near run coming down the road by the hotel." "Oh, I _am_ glad we can stop 'ere and be comfortable a bit," said Ann. "I _am_ glad for that." "I pretty near told the driver on the motor--only 'e was the sort won't talk.... You see, Ann, we'll be able to start a shop, we'll be able to get _into_ something like. All about our 'aving to go back to places and that; all that doesn't matter any more." For a while they abandoned themselves to ejaculating transports. Then they fell talking to shape an idea to themselves of the new prospect that opened before them. "We must start a sort of shop," said Kipps, whose imagination had been working. "It'll 'ave to be a shop." "Drapery?" said Ann. "You want such a lot of capital for the drapery, mor'n a thousand pounds you want by a long way--to start it anything like proper." "Well, outfitting. Like Buggins was going to do." Kipps glanced at that for a moment, because the idea had not occurred to him. Then he came back to his prepossession. "Well, I thought of something else, Ann," he said. "You see, I've always thought a little book-shop. It isn't like the drapery--'aving to be learnt. I thought--even before this smash-up--'ow I'd like to 'ave something to do, instead of always 'aving 'olidays always like we 'ave been 'aving." He reflected. "You don't know _much_ about books, do you, Artie?" "You don't want to." He illustrated. "I noticed when we used to go to that Lib'ry at Folkestone, ladies weren't anything like what they was in a draper's--if you 'aven't got _just_ what they want it's 'Oh, no!' and out they go. But in a book shop it's different. One book's very like another--after all, what is it? Something to read and done with. It's not a thing that matters like print dresses or serviettes--where you either like 'em or don't, and people judge you by. They take what you give 'em in books and lib'ries, and glad to be told _what_ to. See 'ow we was--up at that lib'ry."... He paused. "You see, Ann---- "Well, I read 'n 'dvertisement the other day. I been asking Mr. Bean. It said--five 'undred pounds." "What did?" "Branches," said Kipps. Ann failed to understand. "It's a sort of thing that gets up book shops all over the country," said Kipps. "I didn't tell you, but I arst about it a bit. On'y I dropped it again. Before this smash, I mean. I'd thought I'd like to keep a shop for a lark, on'y then I thought it silly. Besides it 'ud 'ave been beneath me." He blushed vividly. "It was a sort of projek of mine, Ann. "On'y it wouldn't 'ave done," he added. It was a tortuous journey when the Kippses set out to explain anything to each other. But through a maze of fragmentary elucidations and questions, their minds did presently begin to approximate to a picture of a compact, bright, little shop, as a framework for themselves. "I thought of it one day when I was in Folkestone. I thought of it one day when I was looking in at a window. I see a chap dressin' a window and he was whistlin' reg'lar light-'arted.... I thought then I'd like to keep a bookshop, any'ow, jest for something to do. And when people weren't about, then you could sit and read the books. See? It wouldn't be 'arf bad."... They mused, each with elbows on table and knuckles to lips, looking with speculative eyes at each other. "Very likely we'll be 'appier than we should 'ave been with more money," said Kipps presently. "We wasn't 'ardly suited," reflected Ann, and left her sentence incomplete. "Fish out of water like," said Kipps.... "You won't 'ave to return that call now," said Kipps, opening a new branch of the question. "That's one good thing." "Lor'!" said Ann, visibly brightening, "no more I shan't!" "I don't s'pose they'd want you to, even if you did--with things as they are." A certain added brightness came into Ann's face. "Nobody won't be able to come leaving cards on us, Artie, now, any more. We are out of _that_!" "There isn't no necessity for us to be stuck up," said Kipps, "any more for ever! 'Ere we are, Ann, common people, with jest no position at all, as you might say, to keep up. No sev'nts, not if you don't like. No dressin' better than other people. If it wasn't we been robbed--dashed if I'd care a rap about losing that money. I b'lieve"--his face shone with the rare pleasure of paradox--"I reely b'lieve, Ann, it'll prove a savin' in the end." 4 The remarkable advertisement which had fired Kipps' imagination with this dream of a bookshop opened out in the most alluring way. It was one little facet in a comprehensive scheme of transatlantic origin, which was to make our old-world methods of book-selling "sit up," and it displayed an imaginative briskness, a lucidity and promise that aroused the profoundest scepticism in the mind of Mr. Bean. To Kipps' renewed investigations it presented itself in an expository illustrated pamphlet (far too well printed, Mr. Bean thought, for a reputable undertaking) of the most convincing sort. Mr. Bean would not let him sink his capital in shares in its projected company that was to make all things new in the world of books, but he could not prevent Kipps becoming one of their associated booksellers. And so when presently it became apparent that an epoch was not to be made, and the "Associated Booksellers' Trading Union (Limited)" receded and dissolved and liquidated (a few drops) and vanished and went away to talk about something else, Kipps remained floating undamaged in this interestingly uncertain universe as an independent bookseller. Except that it failed, the Associated Booksellers' Trading Union had all the stigmata of success. Its fault, perhaps, was that it had them all instead of only one or two. It was to buy wholesale for all

clearly

How many times the word 'clearly' appears in the text?

you go and slap 'em in the face!" "I didn't slap 'em in the face." "You do--practically. You slams the door in their face, and that's all we see of 'em ever. I wouldn't 'ave 'ad this 'appen not for a ten-pound note." He rounded his regrets with a grunt. For a while there was silence, save for the little stir of Ann's movements preparing the tea. "Tea, Artie," said Ann, handing him a cup. Kipps took it. "I put sugar _once_," said Ann. "Oo, dash it! Oo cares?" said Kipps, taking an extraordinarily large additional lump with fury quivering fingers, and putting his cup with a slight excess of force on the recess cupboard. "Oo cares? "I wouldn't 'ave 'ad that 'appen," he said, bidding steadily against accomplished things, "for twenty pounds." He gloomed in silence through a long minute or so. Then Ann said the fatal thing that exploded him. "Artie!" she said. "What?" "There's Buttud Toce down there! By your foot!" There was a pause, husband and wife regarded one another. "Buttud Toce!" he said. "You go and mess up them callers and then you try and stuff me up with Buttud Toce! Buttud Toce indeed! 'Ere's our first chance of knowing anyone that's at all fit to 'sociate with----. Look 'ere, Ann! Tell you what it is--you got to return that call." "Return that call!" "Yes, you got to return that call. That's what you got to do! I know----" He waved his arm vaguely towards the miscellany of books in the recess. "It's in Manners and Rools of Good S'ity. You got to find jest 'ow many cards to leave and you got to go and leave 'em. See?" Ann's face expressed terror. "But, Artie, 'ow _can_ I?" "'Ow _can_ you? 'Ow _could_ you? You got to do it, any'ow. They won't know you--not in your Bond Street 'at! If they do, they won't say nothing." His voice assumed a note of entreaty. "You mus', Ann." "I can't." "You mus'." "I can't and I won't. Anything in reason I'll do, but face those people again I can't--after what 'as 'appened." "You won't?" "No!"... "So there they go--orf! And we never see them again! And so it goes on! So it goes on! We don't know nobody and we _shan't_ know anybody! And you won't put yourself out not a little bit, or take the trouble to find out anything 'ow it ought to be done." Terrible pause. "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie, that's the troof." "Oh! _don't_ go into that." "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie. I'm not equal to the position. If you 'adn't said you'd drown yourself----" She choked. "I don' see why you shouldn't _try_, Ann. _I've_ improved. Why don't you? 'Stead of which you go sending out the servant and 'namelling floors, and then when visitors come----" "'Ow was _I_ to know about y'r old visitors?" cried Ann in a wail, and suddenly got up and fled from amidst their ruined tea, the tea of which "toce, all buttery," was to be the crown and glory. Kipps watched her with a momentary consternation. Then he hardened his heart. "Ought to 'ave known better," he said, "goin' on like that!" He remained for a space rubbing his knees and muttering. He emitted scornfully: "I carn't an' I won't." He saw her as the source of all his shames. Presently, quite mechanically, he stooped down and lifted the flowery china cover. "Ter dash 'er Buttud Toce!" he shouted at the sight of it, and clapped the cover down again hard.... When Gwendolen came back she perceived things were in a slightly unusual poise. Kipps sat by the fire in a rigid attitude reading a casually selected volume of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and Ann was upstairs and inaccessible--to reappear at a later stage with reddened eyes. Before the fire and still in a perfectly assimilable condition was what was evidently an untouched supply of richly buttered toast under a cracked cover. "They've 'ad a bit of a tiff," said Gwendolen, attending to her duties in the kitchen, with her outdoor hat still on and her mouth full. "They're rummuns--if ever! My eye!" And she took another piece of Ann's generously buttered toast. 4 The Kippses spoke no more that day to one another. The squabble about cards and buttered toast was as serious to them as the most rational of differences. It was all rational to them. Their sense of wrong burnt within them; their sense of what was owing to themselves, the duty of implacability, the obstinacy of pride. In the small hours Kipps lay awake at the nadir of unhappiness and came near groaning. He saw life as an extraordinarily desolating muddle; his futile house, his social discredit, his bad behaviour to Helen, his low marriage to Ann.... He became aware of something irregular in Ann's breathing.... He listened. She was awake and quietly and privately sobbing! He hardened his heart; resolutely he hardened his heart. The stupid little tragedies of these clipped and limited lives! What is the good of keeping up the idyllic sham and pretending that ill-educated, misdirected people "get along very well," and that all this is harmlessly funny and nothing more? You think I'm going to write fat, silly, grinning novels about half-educated, under-trained people and keep it up all the time, that the whole thing's nothing but funny! As I think of them lying unhappily there in the darkness, my vision pierces the night. See what I can see! Above them, brooding over them, I tell you there is a monster, a lumpish monster, like some great, clumsy griffin thing, like the Crystal Palace labyrinthodon, like Coote, like the leaden goddess Dulness Pope Abhorred, like some fat, proud flunkey, like pride, like indolence, like all that is darkening and heavy and obstructive in life. It is matter and darkness, it is the anti-soul, Stupidity. My Kippses live in its shadow. Shalford and his apprenticeship system, the Hastings Academy, the ideas of Coote, the ideas of the old Kippses, all the ideas that have made Kipps what he is, all these are its shadow. But for that monster they might not be groping among false ideas and hurt one another so sorely and so stupidly; but for that, the glowing promise of childhood and youth might have had a happier fruition, thought might have awakened in them to meet _the_ thought of the world, the quickening sunshine of literature pierced to the substance of their souls, their lives might not have been divorced, as now they are divorced for ever, from the apprehension of beauty that we favoured ones are given--the vision of the Grail that makes life fine for ever. I have laughed, and I laugh at these two people; I have sought to make you laugh.... But I see through the darkness the souls of my Kippses, as they are, as little pink strips of living stuff, like the bodies of little, ill-nourished, ailing, ignorant children, children who feel pain, who are naughty and muddled and suffer and do not understand why. And the claw of this Beast rests upon them! CHAPTER III TERMINATIONS 1 Next morning came a remarkable telegram from Folkestone. "Please come at once, urgent, Walshingham," said the telegram, and Kipps, after an agitated but still ample breakfast, departed.... When he returned his face was very white and his countenance disordered. He let himself in with his latchkey and came into the dining-room where Ann sat, affecting to work at a little thing she called a bib. She heard his hat fall in the hall before he entered, as though he had missed the peg. "I got something to tell you, Ann," he said, disregarding their overnight quarrel, and went to the hearthrug and took hold of the mantel, and stared at Ann as though the sight of her was novel. "Well?" said Ann, not looking up and working a little faster. "'E's gone!" Ann looked up sharply and her hands stopped. "_Who's_ gone?" For the first time she perceived Kipps' pallor. "Young Walshingham--I saw 'er and she tole me." "Gone? What d'you mean?" "Cleared out! Gone off for good!" "What for?" "For 'is 'ealth," said Kipps, with sudden bitterness. "'E's been speckylating. He's speckylated our money and 'e's speckylated their money, and now 'e's took 'is 'ook. That's all about it, Ann." "You mean?" "I mean 'e's orf and our twenty-four thousand's orf, too! And 'ere we are! Smashed up! That's all about it, Ann." He panted. Ann had no vocabulary for such an occasion. "Oh, Lor'!" she said, and sat still. Kipps came about and stuck his hands deeply in his trouser pockets. "Speckylated every penny--lorst it all--and gorn." Even his lips were white. "You mean we ain't got nothin' left, Artie?" "Not a penny! Not a bloomin' penny, Ann. No!" A gust of passion whirled across the soul of Kipps. He flung out a knuckly fist. "If I 'ad 'im 'ere," he said, "I'd--I'd--I'd wring 'is neck for 'im. I'd--I'd----" His voice rose to a shout. He thought of Gwendolen in the kitchen and fell to "Ugh!" "But, Artie," said Ann, trying to grasp it, "d'you mean to say he's took our money?" "Speckylated it!" said Kipps, with an illustrative flourish of the arm, that failed to illustrate. "Bort things dear and sold 'em cheap, and played the 'ankey-pankey jackass with everything we got. That's what I mean 'e's done, Ann." He repeated this last sentence with the addition of violent adverbs. "D'you mean to say our money's _gone_, Artie?" "Ter-dash it, _Yes_, Ann!" swore Kipps, exploding in a shout. "Ain't I tellin' you?" He was immediately sorry. "I didn't mean to 'oller at you, Ann," he said, "but I'm all shook up. I don't 'ardly know what I'm sayin'. Ev'ry penny."... "But, Artie----" Kipps grunted. He went to the window and stared for a moment at a sunlit sea. "Gord!" he swore. "I mean," he said, coming back to Ann and with an air of exasperation, "that he's 'bezzled and 'ooked it. That's what I mean, Ann." Ann put down the bib. "But wot are we going to _do_, Artie?" Kipps indicated ignorance, wrath and despair with one comprehensive gesture of his hands. He caught an ornament from the mantel and replaced it. "I'm going to bang about," he said, "if I ain't precious careful." "You saw _'er_, you say?" "Yes." "What did she say 'xactly?" said Ann. "Told me to see a s'licitor--tole me to get someone to 'elp me at once. She was there in black--like she used to be--and speaking cool and careful-like. 'Elen!... She's precious 'ard, is 'Elen. She looked at me straight. 'It's my fault,' she said, 'I ought to 'ave warned you.... Only under the circumstances it was a little difficult.' Straight as anything. I didn't 'ardly say anything to 'er. I didn't seem to begin to take it in until she was showing me out. I 'adn't anything to say. Jest as well, perhaps. She talked like a call a'most. She said--what _was_ it she said about her mother? 'My mother's overcome with grief,' she said, 'so naturally everything comes on me.'" "And she told you to get someone to 'elp you?" "Yes. I been to old Bean." "O' Bean?" "Yes. What I took my business away from!" "What did he say?" "He was a bit off'and at first, but then 'e come 'round. He couldn't tell me anything till 'e knew the facts. What I know of young Walshingham, there won't be much 'elp in the facts. No!" He reflected for a space. "It's a smash-up, Ann. More likely than not, Ann, 'e's left us over'ead in debt. We got to get out of it just 'ow we can.... "We got to begin again," he went on. "_'Ow_, I don't know. All the way 'ome my 'ead's been going. We got to get a living some'ow or other. 'Aving time to ourselves, and a bit of money to spend, and no hurry and worry, it's all over for ever, Ann. We was fools, Ann. We didn't know our benefits. We been caught. Gord!... Gord!" He was on the verge of "banging about" again. They heard a jingle in the passage, the large soft impact of a servant's indoor boots. As if she were a part, a mitigatory part of Fate, came Gwendolen to lay the midday meal. Kipps displayed self-control forthwith. Ann picked up the bib again and bent over it, and the Kippses bore themselves gloomily perhaps, but not despairfully, while their dependant was in the room. She spread the cloth and put out the cutlery with a slow inaccuracy, and Kipps, after a whisper to himself, went again to the window. Ann got up and put away her work methodically in the cheffonier. "When I think," said Kipps, as soon as the door closed again behind Gwendolen, "when I think of the 'ole people and 'aving to tell 'em of it all--I want to smesh my 'ead against the nearest wall. Smesh my silly brains out! And Buggins--Buggins what I'd 'arf promised to start in a lill' outfitting shop in Rendezvous Street."... Gwendolen returned and restored dignity. The midday meal spread itself slowly before them. Gwendolen, after her custom, left the door open and Kipps closed it carefully before sitting down. He stood for a moment, regarding the meal doubtfully. "I don't feel as if I could swaller a moufful," he said. "You got to eat," said Ann.... For a time they said little, and once swallowing was achieved, ate on with a sort of melancholy appetite. Each was now busy thinking. "After all," said Kipps, presently, "whatever 'appens, they can't turn us out or sell us up before nex' quarter-day. I'm pretty sure about that." "Sell us up!" said Ann. "I dessey we're bankrup'," said Kipps, trying to say it easily and helping himself with a trembling hand to unnecessary potatoes. Then a long silence. Ann ceased to eat, and there were silent tears. "More potatoes, Artie?" choked Ann. "I couldn't," said Kipps. "No." He pushed back his plate, which was indeed replete with potatoes, got up and walked about the room. Even the dinner-table looked distraught and unusual. "What to do, I _don't_ know," he said. "Oh, _Lord_!" he ejaculated, and picked up and slapped down a book. Then his eye fell upon another postcard that had come from Chitterlow by the morning's post, and which now lay by him on the mantel-shelf. He took it up, glanced at its imperfectly legible message, and put it down. "Delayed!" he said, scornfully. "Not prodooced in the smalls. Or is it smells 'e says? 'Ow can one understand that? Any'ow 'e's 'umbugging again.... Somefing about the Strand. No! Well, 'e's 'ad all the money 'e'll ever get out of me!... I'm done." He seemed to find a momentary relief in the dramatic effect of his announcement. He came near to a swagger of despair upon the hearthrug, and then suddenly came and sat down next to Ann and rested his chin on the knuckles of his two clenched hands. "I been a fool, Ann," he said in a gloomy monotone. "I been a brasted fool. But it's 'ard on us, all the same. It's 'ard." "'Ow was you to know?" said Ann. "I ought to 'ave known. I did in a sort of way know. And 'ere we are! I wouldn't care so much if it was myself, but it's _you_, Ann! 'Ere we are! Regular smashed up! And you----" He checked at an unspeakable aggravation of their disaster. "I knew 'e wasn't to be depended upon and there I left it! And you got to pay.... What's to 'appen to us all, I don't know." He thrust out his chin and glared at fate. "'Ow do you know 'e's speckylated everything?" said Ann, after a silent survey of him. "'E 'as," said Kipps, irritably, holding firm to disaster. "She say so?" "She don't know, of course, but you depend upon it that's it. She told me she knew something was on, and when she found 'im gone and a note lef' for her she knew it was up with 'im. 'E went by the night boat. She wrote that telegram off to me straight away." Ann surveyed his features with tender, perplexed eyes; she had never seen him so white and drawn before, and her hand rested an inch or so away from his arm. The actual loss was still, as it were, afar from her. The immediate thing was his enormous distress. "'Ow do you know----?" she said and stopped. It would irritate him too much. Kipps' imagination was going headlong. "Sold up!" he emitted presently, and Ann flinched. "Going back to work, day after day--I can't stand it, Ann, I can't. And you----" "It don't do to think of it," said Ann. Presently he came upon a resolve. "I keep on thinking of it, and thinking of it, and what's to be done and what's to be done. I shan't be any good 'ome s'arfernoon. It keeps on going 'round and 'round in my 'ead, and 'round and 'round. I better go for a walk or something. I'd be no comfort to you, Ann. I should want to 'owl and 'ammer things if I 'ung about 'ome. My fingers is all atwitch. I shall keep on thinking 'ow I might 'ave stopped it and callin' myself a fool."... He looked at her between pleading and shame. It seemed like deserting her. Ann regarded him with tear-dimmed eyes. "You'd better do what's good for you, Artie," she said.... "_I'll_ be best cleaning. It's no use sending off Gwendolen before her month, and the top room wants turning out." She added with a sort of grim humour: "May as well turn it out now while I got it." "I _better_ go for a walk," said Kipps.... And presently our poor exploded Kipps was marching out to bear his sudden misery. Habit turned him up the road towards his growing house, and then suddenly he perceived his direction--"Oh, Lor'!"--and turned aside and went up the steep way to the hill crest and the Sandling Road, and over the line by that tree-embowered Junction, and athwart the wide fields towards Postling--a little, black, marching figure--and so up the Downs and over the hills, whither he had never gone before.... 2 He came back long after dark, and Ann met him in the passage. "Where you been, Artie?" she asked, with a strained note in her voice. "I been walking and walking--trying to tire myself out. All the time I been thinking what shall I do. Trying to fix something up all out of nothing." "I didn't know you meant to be out all this time." Kipps was gripped by compunction.... "I can't think what we ought to do," he said, presently. "You can't do anything much, Artie, not till you hear from Mr. Bean." "No; I can't do anything much. That's jest it. And all this time I keep feelin' if I don't do something the top of my 'ead'll bust.... Been trying to make up advertisements 'arf the time I been out--'bout finding a place, good salesman and stock-keeper, and good Manchester dresses, window-dressing--Lor'! Fancy that all beginning again!... If you went to stay with Sid a bit--if I sent every penny I got to you--I dunno! I dunno!" When they had gone to bed there was an elaborate attempt to get to sleep.... In one of their great waking pauses Kipps remarked in a muffled tone: "I didn't mean to frighten you, Ann, being out so late. I kep' on walking and walking, and some'ow it seemed to do me good. I went out to the 'illtop ever so far beyond Stanford, and sat there ever so long, and it seemed to make me better. Just looking over the marsh like, and seeing the sun set."... "Very likely," said Ann, after a long interval, "it isn't so bad as you think it is, Artie." "It's bad," said Kipps. "Very likely, after all, it isn't quite so bad. If there's only a little----" There came another long silence. "Ann," said Kipps in the quiet darkness. "Yes," said Ann. "Ann," said Kipps, and stopped as though he had hastily shut a door upon speech. "I kep' thinking," he said, trying again, "I kep' thinking--after all--I been cross to you and a fool about things--about them cards, Ann; but"--his voice shook to pieces--"we _'ave_ been 'appy, Ann ... some'ow ... togever." And with that he and then she fell into a passion of weeping. They clung very tightly together--closer than they had been since ever the first brightness of their married days turned to the grey of common life again. All the disaster in the world could not prevent their going to sleep at last with their poor little troubled heads close together on one pillow. There was nothing more to be done, there was nothing more to be thought; Time might go on with his mischiefs, but for a little while at least they still had one another. 3 Kipps returned from his second interview with Mr. Bean in a state of strange excitement. He let himself in with his latch-key and slammed the door. "Ann!" he shouted, in an unusual note; "Ann!" Ann replied distantly. "Something to tell you," said Kipps; "something noo!" Ann appeared apprehensive from the kitchen. "Ann," he said, going before her into the little dining-room, for his news was too dignified for the passage, "very likely, Ann, o' Bean says, we shall 'ave----" He decided to prolong the suspense. "Guess!" "I can't, Artie." "Think of a lot of money!" "A 'undred pounds p'raps?" He spoke with immense deliberation. "O v e r a f o u s a n d p o u n d s!" Ann stared and said nothing, only went a shade whiter. "Over, he said. A'most certainly over." He shut the dining-room door and came forward hastily, for Ann, it was clear, meant to take this mitigation of their disaster with a complete abandonment of her self-control. She came near flopping; she fell into his arms. "Artie," she got to at last and began to weep, clinging tightly to him. "Pretty near certain," said Kipps, holding her. "A fousand pounds!" "I _said_, Artie," she wailed on his shoulder with the note of accumulated wrongs, "very likely it wasn't so bad."... "There's things," he said, when presently he came to particulars, "'e couldn't touch. The noo place! It's freehold and paid for, and with the bit of building on it, there's five or six 'undred pound p'raps--say worf free 'undred, for safety. We can't be sold up to finish it, like we thought. O' Bean says we can very likely sell it and get money. 'E says you often get a chance to sell a 'ouse lessen 'arf done, 'specially free'old. _Very_ likely, 'e say. Then there's Hughenden. Hughenden 'asn't been mortgaged not for more than 'arf its value. There's a 'undred or so to be got on that, and the furniture and the rent for the summer still coming in. 'E says there's very likely other things. A fousand pounds, that's what 'e said. 'E said it might even be more."... They were sitting now at the table. "It alters everything," said Ann. "I been thinking that, Ann, all the way 'ome. I came in the motor car. First ride I've 'ad since the smash. We needn't send off Gwendolen, leastways not till _after_. You know. We needn't turn out of 'ere--not for a long time. What we been doing for the o' people we can go on doing a'most as much. And your mother!... I wanted to 'oller coming along. I pretty near run coming down the road by the hotel." "Oh, I _am_ glad we can stop 'ere and be comfortable a bit," said Ann. "I _am_ glad for that." "I pretty near told the driver on the motor--only 'e was the sort won't talk.... You see, Ann, we'll be able to start a shop, we'll be able to get _into_ something like. All about our 'aving to go back to places and that; all that doesn't matter any more." For a while they abandoned themselves to ejaculating transports. Then they fell talking to shape an idea to themselves of the new prospect that opened before them. "We must start a sort of shop," said Kipps, whose imagination had been working. "It'll 'ave to be a shop." "Drapery?" said Ann. "You want such a lot of capital for the drapery, mor'n a thousand pounds you want by a long way--to start it anything like proper." "Well, outfitting. Like Buggins was going to do." Kipps glanced at that for a moment, because the idea had not occurred to him. Then he came back to his prepossession. "Well, I thought of something else, Ann," he said. "You see, I've always thought a little book-shop. It isn't like the drapery--'aving to be learnt. I thought--even before this smash-up--'ow I'd like to 'ave something to do, instead of always 'aving 'olidays always like we 'ave been 'aving." He reflected. "You don't know _much_ about books, do you, Artie?" "You don't want to." He illustrated. "I noticed when we used to go to that Lib'ry at Folkestone, ladies weren't anything like what they was in a draper's--if you 'aven't got _just_ what they want it's 'Oh, no!' and out they go. But in a book shop it's different. One book's very like another--after all, what is it? Something to read and done with. It's not a thing that matters like print dresses or serviettes--where you either like 'em or don't, and people judge you by. They take what you give 'em in books and lib'ries, and glad to be told _what_ to. See 'ow we was--up at that lib'ry."... He paused. "You see, Ann---- "Well, I read 'n 'dvertisement the other day. I been asking Mr. Bean. It said--five 'undred pounds." "What did?" "Branches," said Kipps. Ann failed to understand. "It's a sort of thing that gets up book shops all over the country," said Kipps. "I didn't tell you, but I arst about it a bit. On'y I dropped it again. Before this smash, I mean. I'd thought I'd like to keep a shop for a lark, on'y then I thought it silly. Besides it 'ud 'ave been beneath me." He blushed vividly. "It was a sort of projek of mine, Ann. "On'y it wouldn't 'ave done," he added. It was a tortuous journey when the Kippses set out to explain anything to each other. But through a maze of fragmentary elucidations and questions, their minds did presently begin to approximate to a picture of a compact, bright, little shop, as a framework for themselves. "I thought of it one day when I was in Folkestone. I thought of it one day when I was looking in at a window. I see a chap dressin' a window and he was whistlin' reg'lar light-'arted.... I thought then I'd like to keep a bookshop, any'ow, jest for something to do. And when people weren't about, then you could sit and read the books. See? It wouldn't be 'arf bad."... They mused, each with elbows on table and knuckles to lips, looking with speculative eyes at each other. "Very likely we'll be 'appier than we should 'ave been with more money," said Kipps presently. "We wasn't 'ardly suited," reflected Ann, and left her sentence incomplete. "Fish out of water like," said Kipps.... "You won't 'ave to return that call now," said Kipps, opening a new branch of the question. "That's one good thing." "Lor'!" said Ann, visibly brightening, "no more I shan't!" "I don't s'pose they'd want you to, even if you did--with things as they are." A certain added brightness came into Ann's face. "Nobody won't be able to come leaving cards on us, Artie, now, any more. We are out of _that_!" "There isn't no necessity for us to be stuck up," said Kipps, "any more for ever! 'Ere we are, Ann, common people, with jest no position at all, as you might say, to keep up. No sev'nts, not if you don't like. No dressin' better than other people. If it wasn't we been robbed--dashed if I'd care a rap about losing that money. I b'lieve"--his face shone with the rare pleasure of paradox--"I reely b'lieve, Ann, it'll prove a savin' in the end." 4 The remarkable advertisement which had fired Kipps' imagination with this dream of a bookshop opened out in the most alluring way. It was one little facet in a comprehensive scheme of transatlantic origin, which was to make our old-world methods of book-selling "sit up," and it displayed an imaginative briskness, a lucidity and promise that aroused the profoundest scepticism in the mind of Mr. Bean. To Kipps' renewed investigations it presented itself in an expository illustrated pamphlet (far too well printed, Mr. Bean thought, for a reputable undertaking) of the most convincing sort. Mr. Bean would not let him sink his capital in shares in its projected company that was to make all things new in the world of books, but he could not prevent Kipps becoming one of their associated booksellers. And so when presently it became apparent that an epoch was not to be made, and the "Associated Booksellers' Trading Union (Limited)" receded and dissolved and liquidated (a few drops) and vanished and went away to talk about something else, Kipps remained floating undamaged in this interestingly uncertain universe as an independent bookseller. Except that it failed, the Associated Booksellers' Trading Union had all the stigmata of success. Its fault, perhaps, was that it had them all instead of only one or two. It was to buy wholesale for all

house,--not

How many times the word 'house,--not' appears in the text?

you go and slap 'em in the face!" "I didn't slap 'em in the face." "You do--practically. You slams the door in their face, and that's all we see of 'em ever. I wouldn't 'ave 'ad this 'appen not for a ten-pound note." He rounded his regrets with a grunt. For a while there was silence, save for the little stir of Ann's movements preparing the tea. "Tea, Artie," said Ann, handing him a cup. Kipps took it. "I put sugar _once_," said Ann. "Oo, dash it! Oo cares?" said Kipps, taking an extraordinarily large additional lump with fury quivering fingers, and putting his cup with a slight excess of force on the recess cupboard. "Oo cares? "I wouldn't 'ave 'ad that 'appen," he said, bidding steadily against accomplished things, "for twenty pounds." He gloomed in silence through a long minute or so. Then Ann said the fatal thing that exploded him. "Artie!" she said. "What?" "There's Buttud Toce down there! By your foot!" There was a pause, husband and wife regarded one another. "Buttud Toce!" he said. "You go and mess up them callers and then you try and stuff me up with Buttud Toce! Buttud Toce indeed! 'Ere's our first chance of knowing anyone that's at all fit to 'sociate with----. Look 'ere, Ann! Tell you what it is--you got to return that call." "Return that call!" "Yes, you got to return that call. That's what you got to do! I know----" He waved his arm vaguely towards the miscellany of books in the recess. "It's in Manners and Rools of Good S'ity. You got to find jest 'ow many cards to leave and you got to go and leave 'em. See?" Ann's face expressed terror. "But, Artie, 'ow _can_ I?" "'Ow _can_ you? 'Ow _could_ you? You got to do it, any'ow. They won't know you--not in your Bond Street 'at! If they do, they won't say nothing." His voice assumed a note of entreaty. "You mus', Ann." "I can't." "You mus'." "I can't and I won't. Anything in reason I'll do, but face those people again I can't--after what 'as 'appened." "You won't?" "No!"... "So there they go--orf! And we never see them again! And so it goes on! So it goes on! We don't know nobody and we _shan't_ know anybody! And you won't put yourself out not a little bit, or take the trouble to find out anything 'ow it ought to be done." Terrible pause. "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie, that's the troof." "Oh! _don't_ go into that." "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie. I'm not equal to the position. If you 'adn't said you'd drown yourself----" She choked. "I don' see why you shouldn't _try_, Ann. _I've_ improved. Why don't you? 'Stead of which you go sending out the servant and 'namelling floors, and then when visitors come----" "'Ow was _I_ to know about y'r old visitors?" cried Ann in a wail, and suddenly got up and fled from amidst their ruined tea, the tea of which "toce, all buttery," was to be the crown and glory. Kipps watched her with a momentary consternation. Then he hardened his heart. "Ought to 'ave known better," he said, "goin' on like that!" He remained for a space rubbing his knees and muttering. He emitted scornfully: "I carn't an' I won't." He saw her as the source of all his shames. Presently, quite mechanically, he stooped down and lifted the flowery china cover. "Ter dash 'er Buttud Toce!" he shouted at the sight of it, and clapped the cover down again hard.... When Gwendolen came back she perceived things were in a slightly unusual poise. Kipps sat by the fire in a rigid attitude reading a casually selected volume of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and Ann was upstairs and inaccessible--to reappear at a later stage with reddened eyes. Before the fire and still in a perfectly assimilable condition was what was evidently an untouched supply of richly buttered toast under a cracked cover. "They've 'ad a bit of a tiff," said Gwendolen, attending to her duties in the kitchen, with her outdoor hat still on and her mouth full. "They're rummuns--if ever! My eye!" And she took another piece of Ann's generously buttered toast. 4 The Kippses spoke no more that day to one another. The squabble about cards and buttered toast was as serious to them as the most rational of differences. It was all rational to them. Their sense of wrong burnt within them; their sense of what was owing to themselves, the duty of implacability, the obstinacy of pride. In the small hours Kipps lay awake at the nadir of unhappiness and came near groaning. He saw life as an extraordinarily desolating muddle; his futile house, his social discredit, his bad behaviour to Helen, his low marriage to Ann.... He became aware of something irregular in Ann's breathing.... He listened. She was awake and quietly and privately sobbing! He hardened his heart; resolutely he hardened his heart. The stupid little tragedies of these clipped and limited lives! What is the good of keeping up the idyllic sham and pretending that ill-educated, misdirected people "get along very well," and that all this is harmlessly funny and nothing more? You think I'm going to write fat, silly, grinning novels about half-educated, under-trained people and keep it up all the time, that the whole thing's nothing but funny! As I think of them lying unhappily there in the darkness, my vision pierces the night. See what I can see! Above them, brooding over them, I tell you there is a monster, a lumpish monster, like some great, clumsy griffin thing, like the Crystal Palace labyrinthodon, like Coote, like the leaden goddess Dulness Pope Abhorred, like some fat, proud flunkey, like pride, like indolence, like all that is darkening and heavy and obstructive in life. It is matter and darkness, it is the anti-soul, Stupidity. My Kippses live in its shadow. Shalford and his apprenticeship system, the Hastings Academy, the ideas of Coote, the ideas of the old Kippses, all the ideas that have made Kipps what he is, all these are its shadow. But for that monster they might not be groping among false ideas and hurt one another so sorely and so stupidly; but for that, the glowing promise of childhood and youth might have had a happier fruition, thought might have awakened in them to meet _the_ thought of the world, the quickening sunshine of literature pierced to the substance of their souls, their lives might not have been divorced, as now they are divorced for ever, from the apprehension of beauty that we favoured ones are given--the vision of the Grail that makes life fine for ever. I have laughed, and I laugh at these two people; I have sought to make you laugh.... But I see through the darkness the souls of my Kippses, as they are, as little pink strips of living stuff, like the bodies of little, ill-nourished, ailing, ignorant children, children who feel pain, who are naughty and muddled and suffer and do not understand why. And the claw of this Beast rests upon them! CHAPTER III TERMINATIONS 1 Next morning came a remarkable telegram from Folkestone. "Please come at once, urgent, Walshingham," said the telegram, and Kipps, after an agitated but still ample breakfast, departed.... When he returned his face was very white and his countenance disordered. He let himself in with his latchkey and came into the dining-room where Ann sat, affecting to work at a little thing she called a bib. She heard his hat fall in the hall before he entered, as though he had missed the peg. "I got something to tell you, Ann," he said, disregarding their overnight quarrel, and went to the hearthrug and took hold of the mantel, and stared at Ann as though the sight of her was novel. "Well?" said Ann, not looking up and working a little faster. "'E's gone!" Ann looked up sharply and her hands stopped. "_Who's_ gone?" For the first time she perceived Kipps' pallor. "Young Walshingham--I saw 'er and she tole me." "Gone? What d'you mean?" "Cleared out! Gone off for good!" "What for?" "For 'is 'ealth," said Kipps, with sudden bitterness. "'E's been speckylating. He's speckylated our money and 'e's speckylated their money, and now 'e's took 'is 'ook. That's all about it, Ann." "You mean?" "I mean 'e's orf and our twenty-four thousand's orf, too! And 'ere we are! Smashed up! That's all about it, Ann." He panted. Ann had no vocabulary for such an occasion. "Oh, Lor'!" she said, and sat still. Kipps came about and stuck his hands deeply in his trouser pockets. "Speckylated every penny--lorst it all--and gorn." Even his lips were white. "You mean we ain't got nothin' left, Artie?" "Not a penny! Not a bloomin' penny, Ann. No!" A gust of passion whirled across the soul of Kipps. He flung out a knuckly fist. "If I 'ad 'im 'ere," he said, "I'd--I'd--I'd wring 'is neck for 'im. I'd--I'd----" His voice rose to a shout. He thought of Gwendolen in the kitchen and fell to "Ugh!" "But, Artie," said Ann, trying to grasp it, "d'you mean to say he's took our money?" "Speckylated it!" said Kipps, with an illustrative flourish of the arm, that failed to illustrate. "Bort things dear and sold 'em cheap, and played the 'ankey-pankey jackass with everything we got. That's what I mean 'e's done, Ann." He repeated this last sentence with the addition of violent adverbs. "D'you mean to say our money's _gone_, Artie?" "Ter-dash it, _Yes_, Ann!" swore Kipps, exploding in a shout. "Ain't I tellin' you?" He was immediately sorry. "I didn't mean to 'oller at you, Ann," he said, "but I'm all shook up. I don't 'ardly know what I'm sayin'. Ev'ry penny."... "But, Artie----" Kipps grunted. He went to the window and stared for a moment at a sunlit sea. "Gord!" he swore. "I mean," he said, coming back to Ann and with an air of exasperation, "that he's 'bezzled and 'ooked it. That's what I mean, Ann." Ann put down the bib. "But wot are we going to _do_, Artie?" Kipps indicated ignorance, wrath and despair with one comprehensive gesture of his hands. He caught an ornament from the mantel and replaced it. "I'm going to bang about," he said, "if I ain't precious careful." "You saw _'er_, you say?" "Yes." "What did she say 'xactly?" said Ann. "Told me to see a s'licitor--tole me to get someone to 'elp me at once. She was there in black--like she used to be--and speaking cool and careful-like. 'Elen!... She's precious 'ard, is 'Elen. She looked at me straight. 'It's my fault,' she said, 'I ought to 'ave warned you.... Only under the circumstances it was a little difficult.' Straight as anything. I didn't 'ardly say anything to 'er. I didn't seem to begin to take it in until she was showing me out. I 'adn't anything to say. Jest as well, perhaps. She talked like a call a'most. She said--what _was_ it she said about her mother? 'My mother's overcome with grief,' she said, 'so naturally everything comes on me.'" "And she told you to get someone to 'elp you?" "Yes. I been to old Bean." "O' Bean?" "Yes. What I took my business away from!" "What did he say?" "He was a bit off'and at first, but then 'e come 'round. He couldn't tell me anything till 'e knew the facts. What I know of young Walshingham, there won't be much 'elp in the facts. No!" He reflected for a space. "It's a smash-up, Ann. More likely than not, Ann, 'e's left us over'ead in debt. We got to get out of it just 'ow we can.... "We got to begin again," he went on. "_'Ow_, I don't know. All the way 'ome my 'ead's been going. We got to get a living some'ow or other. 'Aving time to ourselves, and a bit of money to spend, and no hurry and worry, it's all over for ever, Ann. We was fools, Ann. We didn't know our benefits. We been caught. Gord!... Gord!" He was on the verge of "banging about" again. They heard a jingle in the passage, the large soft impact of a servant's indoor boots. As if she were a part, a mitigatory part of Fate, came Gwendolen to lay the midday meal. Kipps displayed self-control forthwith. Ann picked up the bib again and bent over it, and the Kippses bore themselves gloomily perhaps, but not despairfully, while their dependant was in the room. She spread the cloth and put out the cutlery with a slow inaccuracy, and Kipps, after a whisper to himself, went again to the window. Ann got up and put away her work methodically in the cheffonier. "When I think," said Kipps, as soon as the door closed again behind Gwendolen, "when I think of the 'ole people and 'aving to tell 'em of it all--I want to smesh my 'ead against the nearest wall. Smesh my silly brains out! And Buggins--Buggins what I'd 'arf promised to start in a lill' outfitting shop in Rendezvous Street."... Gwendolen returned and restored dignity. The midday meal spread itself slowly before them. Gwendolen, after her custom, left the door open and Kipps closed it carefully before sitting down. He stood for a moment, regarding the meal doubtfully. "I don't feel as if I could swaller a moufful," he said. "You got to eat," said Ann.... For a time they said little, and once swallowing was achieved, ate on with a sort of melancholy appetite. Each was now busy thinking. "After all," said Kipps, presently, "whatever 'appens, they can't turn us out or sell us up before nex' quarter-day. I'm pretty sure about that." "Sell us up!" said Ann. "I dessey we're bankrup'," said Kipps, trying to say it easily and helping himself with a trembling hand to unnecessary potatoes. Then a long silence. Ann ceased to eat, and there were silent tears. "More potatoes, Artie?" choked Ann. "I couldn't," said Kipps. "No." He pushed back his plate, which was indeed replete with potatoes, got up and walked about the room. Even the dinner-table looked distraught and unusual. "What to do, I _don't_ know," he said. "Oh, _Lord_!" he ejaculated, and picked up and slapped down a book. Then his eye fell upon another postcard that had come from Chitterlow by the morning's post, and which now lay by him on the mantel-shelf. He took it up, glanced at its imperfectly legible message, and put it down. "Delayed!" he said, scornfully. "Not prodooced in the smalls. Or is it smells 'e says? 'Ow can one understand that? Any'ow 'e's 'umbugging again.... Somefing about the Strand. No! Well, 'e's 'ad all the money 'e'll ever get out of me!... I'm done." He seemed to find a momentary relief in the dramatic effect of his announcement. He came near to a swagger of despair upon the hearthrug, and then suddenly came and sat down next to Ann and rested his chin on the knuckles of his two clenched hands. "I been a fool, Ann," he said in a gloomy monotone. "I been a brasted fool. But it's 'ard on us, all the same. It's 'ard." "'Ow was you to know?" said Ann. "I ought to 'ave known. I did in a sort of way know. And 'ere we are! I wouldn't care so much if it was myself, but it's _you_, Ann! 'Ere we are! Regular smashed up! And you----" He checked at an unspeakable aggravation of their disaster. "I knew 'e wasn't to be depended upon and there I left it! And you got to pay.... What's to 'appen to us all, I don't know." He thrust out his chin and glared at fate. "'Ow do you know 'e's speckylated everything?" said Ann, after a silent survey of him. "'E 'as," said Kipps, irritably, holding firm to disaster. "She say so?" "She don't know, of course, but you depend upon it that's it. She told me she knew something was on, and when she found 'im gone and a note lef' for her she knew it was up with 'im. 'E went by the night boat. She wrote that telegram off to me straight away." Ann surveyed his features with tender, perplexed eyes; she had never seen him so white and drawn before, and her hand rested an inch or so away from his arm. The actual loss was still, as it were, afar from her. The immediate thing was his enormous distress. "'Ow do you know----?" she said and stopped. It would irritate him too much. Kipps' imagination was going headlong. "Sold up!" he emitted presently, and Ann flinched. "Going back to work, day after day--I can't stand it, Ann, I can't. And you----" "It don't do to think of it," said Ann. Presently he came upon a resolve. "I keep on thinking of it, and thinking of it, and what's to be done and what's to be done. I shan't be any good 'ome s'arfernoon. It keeps on going 'round and 'round in my 'ead, and 'round and 'round. I better go for a walk or something. I'd be no comfort to you, Ann. I should want to 'owl and 'ammer things if I 'ung about 'ome. My fingers is all atwitch. I shall keep on thinking 'ow I might 'ave stopped it and callin' myself a fool."... He looked at her between pleading and shame. It seemed like deserting her. Ann regarded him with tear-dimmed eyes. "You'd better do what's good for you, Artie," she said.... "_I'll_ be best cleaning. It's no use sending off Gwendolen before her month, and the top room wants turning out." She added with a sort of grim humour: "May as well turn it out now while I got it." "I _better_ go for a walk," said Kipps.... And presently our poor exploded Kipps was marching out to bear his sudden misery. Habit turned him up the road towards his growing house, and then suddenly he perceived his direction--"Oh, Lor'!"--and turned aside and went up the steep way to the hill crest and the Sandling Road, and over the line by that tree-embowered Junction, and athwart the wide fields towards Postling--a little, black, marching figure--and so up the Downs and over the hills, whither he had never gone before.... 2 He came back long after dark, and Ann met him in the passage. "Where you been, Artie?" she asked, with a strained note in her voice. "I been walking and walking--trying to tire myself out. All the time I been thinking what shall I do. Trying to fix something up all out of nothing." "I didn't know you meant to be out all this time." Kipps was gripped by compunction.... "I can't think what we ought to do," he said, presently. "You can't do anything much, Artie, not till you hear from Mr. Bean." "No; I can't do anything much. That's jest it. And all this time I keep feelin' if I don't do something the top of my 'ead'll bust.... Been trying to make up advertisements 'arf the time I been out--'bout finding a place, good salesman and stock-keeper, and good Manchester dresses, window-dressing--Lor'! Fancy that all beginning again!... If you went to stay with Sid a bit--if I sent every penny I got to you--I dunno! I dunno!" When they had gone to bed there was an elaborate attempt to get to sleep.... In one of their great waking pauses Kipps remarked in a muffled tone: "I didn't mean to frighten you, Ann, being out so late. I kep' on walking and walking, and some'ow it seemed to do me good. I went out to the 'illtop ever so far beyond Stanford, and sat there ever so long, and it seemed to make me better. Just looking over the marsh like, and seeing the sun set."... "Very likely," said Ann, after a long interval, "it isn't so bad as you think it is, Artie." "It's bad," said Kipps. "Very likely, after all, it isn't quite so bad. If there's only a little----" There came another long silence. "Ann," said Kipps in the quiet darkness. "Yes," said Ann. "Ann," said Kipps, and stopped as though he had hastily shut a door upon speech. "I kep' thinking," he said, trying again, "I kep' thinking--after all--I been cross to you and a fool about things--about them cards, Ann; but"--his voice shook to pieces--"we _'ave_ been 'appy, Ann ... some'ow ... togever." And with that he and then she fell into a passion of weeping. They clung very tightly together--closer than they had been since ever the first brightness of their married days turned to the grey of common life again. All the disaster in the world could not prevent their going to sleep at last with their poor little troubled heads close together on one pillow. There was nothing more to be done, there was nothing more to be thought; Time might go on with his mischiefs, but for a little while at least they still had one another. 3 Kipps returned from his second interview with Mr. Bean in a state of strange excitement. He let himself in with his latch-key and slammed the door. "Ann!" he shouted, in an unusual note; "Ann!" Ann replied distantly. "Something to tell you," said Kipps; "something noo!" Ann appeared apprehensive from the kitchen. "Ann," he said, going before her into the little dining-room, for his news was too dignified for the passage, "very likely, Ann, o' Bean says, we shall 'ave----" He decided to prolong the suspense. "Guess!" "I can't, Artie." "Think of a lot of money!" "A 'undred pounds p'raps?" He spoke with immense deliberation. "O v e r a f o u s a n d p o u n d s!" Ann stared and said nothing, only went a shade whiter. "Over, he said. A'most certainly over." He shut the dining-room door and came forward hastily, for Ann, it was clear, meant to take this mitigation of their disaster with a complete abandonment of her self-control. She came near flopping; she fell into his arms. "Artie," she got to at last and began to weep, clinging tightly to him. "Pretty near certain," said Kipps, holding her. "A fousand pounds!" "I _said_, Artie," she wailed on his shoulder with the note of accumulated wrongs, "very likely it wasn't so bad."... "There's things," he said, when presently he came to particulars, "'e couldn't touch. The noo place! It's freehold and paid for, and with the bit of building on it, there's five or six 'undred pound p'raps--say worf free 'undred, for safety. We can't be sold up to finish it, like we thought. O' Bean says we can very likely sell it and get money. 'E says you often get a chance to sell a 'ouse lessen 'arf done, 'specially free'old. _Very_ likely, 'e say. Then there's Hughenden. Hughenden 'asn't been mortgaged not for more than 'arf its value. There's a 'undred or so to be got on that, and the furniture and the rent for the summer still coming in. 'E says there's very likely other things. A fousand pounds, that's what 'e said. 'E said it might even be more."... They were sitting now at the table. "It alters everything," said Ann. "I been thinking that, Ann, all the way 'ome. I came in the motor car. First ride I've 'ad since the smash. We needn't send off Gwendolen, leastways not till _after_. You know. We needn't turn out of 'ere--not for a long time. What we been doing for the o' people we can go on doing a'most as much. And your mother!... I wanted to 'oller coming along. I pretty near run coming down the road by the hotel." "Oh, I _am_ glad we can stop 'ere and be comfortable a bit," said Ann. "I _am_ glad for that." "I pretty near told the driver on the motor--only 'e was the sort won't talk.... You see, Ann, we'll be able to start a shop, we'll be able to get _into_ something like. All about our 'aving to go back to places and that; all that doesn't matter any more." For a while they abandoned themselves to ejaculating transports. Then they fell talking to shape an idea to themselves of the new prospect that opened before them. "We must start a sort of shop," said Kipps, whose imagination had been working. "It'll 'ave to be a shop." "Drapery?" said Ann. "You want such a lot of capital for the drapery, mor'n a thousand pounds you want by a long way--to start it anything like proper." "Well, outfitting. Like Buggins was going to do." Kipps glanced at that for a moment, because the idea had not occurred to him. Then he came back to his prepossession. "Well, I thought of something else, Ann," he said. "You see, I've always thought a little book-shop. It isn't like the drapery--'aving to be learnt. I thought--even before this smash-up--'ow I'd like to 'ave something to do, instead of always 'aving 'olidays always like we 'ave been 'aving." He reflected. "You don't know _much_ about books, do you, Artie?" "You don't want to." He illustrated. "I noticed when we used to go to that Lib'ry at Folkestone, ladies weren't anything like what they was in a draper's--if you 'aven't got _just_ what they want it's 'Oh, no!' and out they go. But in a book shop it's different. One book's very like another--after all, what is it? Something to read and done with. It's not a thing that matters like print dresses or serviettes--where you either like 'em or don't, and people judge you by. They take what you give 'em in books and lib'ries, and glad to be told _what_ to. See 'ow we was--up at that lib'ry."... He paused. "You see, Ann---- "Well, I read 'n 'dvertisement the other day. I been asking Mr. Bean. It said--five 'undred pounds." "What did?" "Branches," said Kipps. Ann failed to understand. "It's a sort of thing that gets up book shops all over the country," said Kipps. "I didn't tell you, but I arst about it a bit. On'y I dropped it again. Before this smash, I mean. I'd thought I'd like to keep a shop for a lark, on'y then I thought it silly. Besides it 'ud 'ave been beneath me." He blushed vividly. "It was a sort of projek of mine, Ann. "On'y it wouldn't 'ave done," he added. It was a tortuous journey when the Kippses set out to explain anything to each other. But through a maze of fragmentary elucidations and questions, their minds did presently begin to approximate to a picture of a compact, bright, little shop, as a framework for themselves. "I thought of it one day when I was in Folkestone. I thought of it one day when I was looking in at a window. I see a chap dressin' a window and he was whistlin' reg'lar light-'arted.... I thought then I'd like to keep a bookshop, any'ow, jest for something to do. And when people weren't about, then you could sit and read the books. See? It wouldn't be 'arf bad."... They mused, each with elbows on table and knuckles to lips, looking with speculative eyes at each other. "Very likely we'll be 'appier than we should 'ave been with more money," said Kipps presently. "We wasn't 'ardly suited," reflected Ann, and left her sentence incomplete. "Fish out of water like," said Kipps.... "You won't 'ave to return that call now," said Kipps, opening a new branch of the question. "That's one good thing." "Lor'!" said Ann, visibly brightening, "no more I shan't!" "I don't s'pose they'd want you to, even if you did--with things as they are." A certain added brightness came into Ann's face. "Nobody won't be able to come leaving cards on us, Artie, now, any more. We are out of _that_!" "There isn't no necessity for us to be stuck up," said Kipps, "any more for ever! 'Ere we are, Ann, common people, with jest no position at all, as you might say, to keep up. No sev'nts, not if you don't like. No dressin' better than other people. If it wasn't we been robbed--dashed if I'd care a rap about losing that money. I b'lieve"--his face shone with the rare pleasure of paradox--"I reely b'lieve, Ann, it'll prove a savin' in the end." 4 The remarkable advertisement which had fired Kipps' imagination with this dream of a bookshop opened out in the most alluring way. It was one little facet in a comprehensive scheme of transatlantic origin, which was to make our old-world methods of book-selling "sit up," and it displayed an imaginative briskness, a lucidity and promise that aroused the profoundest scepticism in the mind of Mr. Bean. To Kipps' renewed investigations it presented itself in an expository illustrated pamphlet (far too well printed, Mr. Bean thought, for a reputable undertaking) of the most convincing sort. Mr. Bean would not let him sink his capital in shares in its projected company that was to make all things new in the world of books, but he could not prevent Kipps becoming one of their associated booksellers. And so when presently it became apparent that an epoch was not to be made, and the "Associated Booksellers' Trading Union (Limited)" receded and dissolved and liquidated (a few drops) and vanished and went away to talk about something else, Kipps remained floating undamaged in this interestingly uncertain universe as an independent bookseller. Except that it failed, the Associated Booksellers' Trading Union had all the stigmata of success. Its fault, perhaps, was that it had them all instead of only one or two. It was to buy wholesale for all

laugh

How many times the word 'laugh' appears in the text?

you go and slap 'em in the face!" "I didn't slap 'em in the face." "You do--practically. You slams the door in their face, and that's all we see of 'em ever. I wouldn't 'ave 'ad this 'appen not for a ten-pound note." He rounded his regrets with a grunt. For a while there was silence, save for the little stir of Ann's movements preparing the tea. "Tea, Artie," said Ann, handing him a cup. Kipps took it. "I put sugar _once_," said Ann. "Oo, dash it! Oo cares?" said Kipps, taking an extraordinarily large additional lump with fury quivering fingers, and putting his cup with a slight excess of force on the recess cupboard. "Oo cares? "I wouldn't 'ave 'ad that 'appen," he said, bidding steadily against accomplished things, "for twenty pounds." He gloomed in silence through a long minute or so. Then Ann said the fatal thing that exploded him. "Artie!" she said. "What?" "There's Buttud Toce down there! By your foot!" There was a pause, husband and wife regarded one another. "Buttud Toce!" he said. "You go and mess up them callers and then you try and stuff me up with Buttud Toce! Buttud Toce indeed! 'Ere's our first chance of knowing anyone that's at all fit to 'sociate with----. Look 'ere, Ann! Tell you what it is--you got to return that call." "Return that call!" "Yes, you got to return that call. That's what you got to do! I know----" He waved his arm vaguely towards the miscellany of books in the recess. "It's in Manners and Rools of Good S'ity. You got to find jest 'ow many cards to leave and you got to go and leave 'em. See?" Ann's face expressed terror. "But, Artie, 'ow _can_ I?" "'Ow _can_ you? 'Ow _could_ you? You got to do it, any'ow. They won't know you--not in your Bond Street 'at! If they do, they won't say nothing." His voice assumed a note of entreaty. "You mus', Ann." "I can't." "You mus'." "I can't and I won't. Anything in reason I'll do, but face those people again I can't--after what 'as 'appened." "You won't?" "No!"... "So there they go--orf! And we never see them again! And so it goes on! So it goes on! We don't know nobody and we _shan't_ know anybody! And you won't put yourself out not a little bit, or take the trouble to find out anything 'ow it ought to be done." Terrible pause. "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie, that's the troof." "Oh! _don't_ go into that." "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie. I'm not equal to the position. If you 'adn't said you'd drown yourself----" She choked. "I don' see why you shouldn't _try_, Ann. _I've_ improved. Why don't you? 'Stead of which you go sending out the servant and 'namelling floors, and then when visitors come----" "'Ow was _I_ to know about y'r old visitors?" cried Ann in a wail, and suddenly got up and fled from amidst their ruined tea, the tea of which "toce, all buttery," was to be the crown and glory. Kipps watched her with a momentary consternation. Then he hardened his heart. "Ought to 'ave known better," he said, "goin' on like that!" He remained for a space rubbing his knees and muttering. He emitted scornfully: "I carn't an' I won't." He saw her as the source of all his shames. Presently, quite mechanically, he stooped down and lifted the flowery china cover. "Ter dash 'er Buttud Toce!" he shouted at the sight of it, and clapped the cover down again hard.... When Gwendolen came back she perceived things were in a slightly unusual poise. Kipps sat by the fire in a rigid attitude reading a casually selected volume of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and Ann was upstairs and inaccessible--to reappear at a later stage with reddened eyes. Before the fire and still in a perfectly assimilable condition was what was evidently an untouched supply of richly buttered toast under a cracked cover. "They've 'ad a bit of a tiff," said Gwendolen, attending to her duties in the kitchen, with her outdoor hat still on and her mouth full. "They're rummuns--if ever! My eye!" And she took another piece of Ann's generously buttered toast. 4 The Kippses spoke no more that day to one another. The squabble about cards and buttered toast was as serious to them as the most rational of differences. It was all rational to them. Their sense of wrong burnt within them; their sense of what was owing to themselves, the duty of implacability, the obstinacy of pride. In the small hours Kipps lay awake at the nadir of unhappiness and came near groaning. He saw life as an extraordinarily desolating muddle; his futile house, his social discredit, his bad behaviour to Helen, his low marriage to Ann.... He became aware of something irregular in Ann's breathing.... He listened. She was awake and quietly and privately sobbing! He hardened his heart; resolutely he hardened his heart. The stupid little tragedies of these clipped and limited lives! What is the good of keeping up the idyllic sham and pretending that ill-educated, misdirected people "get along very well," and that all this is harmlessly funny and nothing more? You think I'm going to write fat, silly, grinning novels about half-educated, under-trained people and keep it up all the time, that the whole thing's nothing but funny! As I think of them lying unhappily there in the darkness, my vision pierces the night. See what I can see! Above them, brooding over them, I tell you there is a monster, a lumpish monster, like some great, clumsy griffin thing, like the Crystal Palace labyrinthodon, like Coote, like the leaden goddess Dulness Pope Abhorred, like some fat, proud flunkey, like pride, like indolence, like all that is darkening and heavy and obstructive in life. It is matter and darkness, it is the anti-soul, Stupidity. My Kippses live in its shadow. Shalford and his apprenticeship system, the Hastings Academy, the ideas of Coote, the ideas of the old Kippses, all the ideas that have made Kipps what he is, all these are its shadow. But for that monster they might not be groping among false ideas and hurt one another so sorely and so stupidly; but for that, the glowing promise of childhood and youth might have had a happier fruition, thought might have awakened in them to meet _the_ thought of the world, the quickening sunshine of literature pierced to the substance of their souls, their lives might not have been divorced, as now they are divorced for ever, from the apprehension of beauty that we favoured ones are given--the vision of the Grail that makes life fine for ever. I have laughed, and I laugh at these two people; I have sought to make you laugh.... But I see through the darkness the souls of my Kippses, as they are, as little pink strips of living stuff, like the bodies of little, ill-nourished, ailing, ignorant children, children who feel pain, who are naughty and muddled and suffer and do not understand why. And the claw of this Beast rests upon them! CHAPTER III TERMINATIONS 1 Next morning came a remarkable telegram from Folkestone. "Please come at once, urgent, Walshingham," said the telegram, and Kipps, after an agitated but still ample breakfast, departed.... When he returned his face was very white and his countenance disordered. He let himself in with his latchkey and came into the dining-room where Ann sat, affecting to work at a little thing she called a bib. She heard his hat fall in the hall before he entered, as though he had missed the peg. "I got something to tell you, Ann," he said, disregarding their overnight quarrel, and went to the hearthrug and took hold of the mantel, and stared at Ann as though the sight of her was novel. "Well?" said Ann, not looking up and working a little faster. "'E's gone!" Ann looked up sharply and her hands stopped. "_Who's_ gone?" For the first time she perceived Kipps' pallor. "Young Walshingham--I saw 'er and she tole me." "Gone? What d'you mean?" "Cleared out! Gone off for good!" "What for?" "For 'is 'ealth," said Kipps, with sudden bitterness. "'E's been speckylating. He's speckylated our money and 'e's speckylated their money, and now 'e's took 'is 'ook. That's all about it, Ann." "You mean?" "I mean 'e's orf and our twenty-four thousand's orf, too! And 'ere we are! Smashed up! That's all about it, Ann." He panted. Ann had no vocabulary for such an occasion. "Oh, Lor'!" she said, and sat still. Kipps came about and stuck his hands deeply in his trouser pockets. "Speckylated every penny--lorst it all--and gorn." Even his lips were white. "You mean we ain't got nothin' left, Artie?" "Not a penny! Not a bloomin' penny, Ann. No!" A gust of passion whirled across the soul of Kipps. He flung out a knuckly fist. "If I 'ad 'im 'ere," he said, "I'd--I'd--I'd wring 'is neck for 'im. I'd--I'd----" His voice rose to a shout. He thought of Gwendolen in the kitchen and fell to "Ugh!" "But, Artie," said Ann, trying to grasp it, "d'you mean to say he's took our money?" "Speckylated it!" said Kipps, with an illustrative flourish of the arm, that failed to illustrate. "Bort things dear and sold 'em cheap, and played the 'ankey-pankey jackass with everything we got. That's what I mean 'e's done, Ann." He repeated this last sentence with the addition of violent adverbs. "D'you mean to say our money's _gone_, Artie?" "Ter-dash it, _Yes_, Ann!" swore Kipps, exploding in a shout. "Ain't I tellin' you?" He was immediately sorry. "I didn't mean to 'oller at you, Ann," he said, "but I'm all shook up. I don't 'ardly know what I'm sayin'. Ev'ry penny."... "But, Artie----" Kipps grunted. He went to the window and stared for a moment at a sunlit sea. "Gord!" he swore. "I mean," he said, coming back to Ann and with an air of exasperation, "that he's 'bezzled and 'ooked it. That's what I mean, Ann." Ann put down the bib. "But wot are we going to _do_, Artie?" Kipps indicated ignorance, wrath and despair with one comprehensive gesture of his hands. He caught an ornament from the mantel and replaced it. "I'm going to bang about," he said, "if I ain't precious careful." "You saw _'er_, you say?" "Yes." "What did she say 'xactly?" said Ann. "Told me to see a s'licitor--tole me to get someone to 'elp me at once. She was there in black--like she used to be--and speaking cool and careful-like. 'Elen!... She's precious 'ard, is 'Elen. She looked at me straight. 'It's my fault,' she said, 'I ought to 'ave warned you.... Only under the circumstances it was a little difficult.' Straight as anything. I didn't 'ardly say anything to 'er. I didn't seem to begin to take it in until she was showing me out. I 'adn't anything to say. Jest as well, perhaps. She talked like a call a'most. She said--what _was_ it she said about her mother? 'My mother's overcome with grief,' she said, 'so naturally everything comes on me.'" "And she told you to get someone to 'elp you?" "Yes. I been to old Bean." "O' Bean?" "Yes. What I took my business away from!" "What did he say?" "He was a bit off'and at first, but then 'e come 'round. He couldn't tell me anything till 'e knew the facts. What I know of young Walshingham, there won't be much 'elp in the facts. No!" He reflected for a space. "It's a smash-up, Ann. More likely than not, Ann, 'e's left us over'ead in debt. We got to get out of it just 'ow we can.... "We got to begin again," he went on. "_'Ow_, I don't know. All the way 'ome my 'ead's been going. We got to get a living some'ow or other. 'Aving time to ourselves, and a bit of money to spend, and no hurry and worry, it's all over for ever, Ann. We was fools, Ann. We didn't know our benefits. We been caught. Gord!... Gord!" He was on the verge of "banging about" again. They heard a jingle in the passage, the large soft impact of a servant's indoor boots. As if she were a part, a mitigatory part of Fate, came Gwendolen to lay the midday meal. Kipps displayed self-control forthwith. Ann picked up the bib again and bent over it, and the Kippses bore themselves gloomily perhaps, but not despairfully, while their dependant was in the room. She spread the cloth and put out the cutlery with a slow inaccuracy, and Kipps, after a whisper to himself, went again to the window. Ann got up and put away her work methodically in the cheffonier. "When I think," said Kipps, as soon as the door closed again behind Gwendolen, "when I think of the 'ole people and 'aving to tell 'em of it all--I want to smesh my 'ead against the nearest wall. Smesh my silly brains out! And Buggins--Buggins what I'd 'arf promised to start in a lill' outfitting shop in Rendezvous Street."... Gwendolen returned and restored dignity. The midday meal spread itself slowly before them. Gwendolen, after her custom, left the door open and Kipps closed it carefully before sitting down. He stood for a moment, regarding the meal doubtfully. "I don't feel as if I could swaller a moufful," he said. "You got to eat," said Ann.... For a time they said little, and once swallowing was achieved, ate on with a sort of melancholy appetite. Each was now busy thinking. "After all," said Kipps, presently, "whatever 'appens, they can't turn us out or sell us up before nex' quarter-day. I'm pretty sure about that." "Sell us up!" said Ann. "I dessey we're bankrup'," said Kipps, trying to say it easily and helping himself with a trembling hand to unnecessary potatoes. Then a long silence. Ann ceased to eat, and there were silent tears. "More potatoes, Artie?" choked Ann. "I couldn't," said Kipps. "No." He pushed back his plate, which was indeed replete with potatoes, got up and walked about the room. Even the dinner-table looked distraught and unusual. "What to do, I _don't_ know," he said. "Oh, _Lord_!" he ejaculated, and picked up and slapped down a book. Then his eye fell upon another postcard that had come from Chitterlow by the morning's post, and which now lay by him on the mantel-shelf. He took it up, glanced at its imperfectly legible message, and put it down. "Delayed!" he said, scornfully. "Not prodooced in the smalls. Or is it smells 'e says? 'Ow can one understand that? Any'ow 'e's 'umbugging again.... Somefing about the Strand. No! Well, 'e's 'ad all the money 'e'll ever get out of me!... I'm done." He seemed to find a momentary relief in the dramatic effect of his announcement. He came near to a swagger of despair upon the hearthrug, and then suddenly came and sat down next to Ann and rested his chin on the knuckles of his two clenched hands. "I been a fool, Ann," he said in a gloomy monotone. "I been a brasted fool. But it's 'ard on us, all the same. It's 'ard." "'Ow was you to know?" said Ann. "I ought to 'ave known. I did in a sort of way know. And 'ere we are! I wouldn't care so much if it was myself, but it's _you_, Ann! 'Ere we are! Regular smashed up! And you----" He checked at an unspeakable aggravation of their disaster. "I knew 'e wasn't to be depended upon and there I left it! And you got to pay.... What's to 'appen to us all, I don't know." He thrust out his chin and glared at fate. "'Ow do you know 'e's speckylated everything?" said Ann, after a silent survey of him. "'E 'as," said Kipps, irritably, holding firm to disaster. "She say so?" "She don't know, of course, but you depend upon it that's it. She told me she knew something was on, and when she found 'im gone and a note lef' for her she knew it was up with 'im. 'E went by the night boat. She wrote that telegram off to me straight away." Ann surveyed his features with tender, perplexed eyes; she had never seen him so white and drawn before, and her hand rested an inch or so away from his arm. The actual loss was still, as it were, afar from her. The immediate thing was his enormous distress. "'Ow do you know----?" she said and stopped. It would irritate him too much. Kipps' imagination was going headlong. "Sold up!" he emitted presently, and Ann flinched. "Going back to work, day after day--I can't stand it, Ann, I can't. And you----" "It don't do to think of it," said Ann. Presently he came upon a resolve. "I keep on thinking of it, and thinking of it, and what's to be done and what's to be done. I shan't be any good 'ome s'arfernoon. It keeps on going 'round and 'round in my 'ead, and 'round and 'round. I better go for a walk or something. I'd be no comfort to you, Ann. I should want to 'owl and 'ammer things if I 'ung about 'ome. My fingers is all atwitch. I shall keep on thinking 'ow I might 'ave stopped it and callin' myself a fool."... He looked at her between pleading and shame. It seemed like deserting her. Ann regarded him with tear-dimmed eyes. "You'd better do what's good for you, Artie," she said.... "_I'll_ be best cleaning. It's no use sending off Gwendolen before her month, and the top room wants turning out." She added with a sort of grim humour: "May as well turn it out now while I got it." "I _better_ go for a walk," said Kipps.... And presently our poor exploded Kipps was marching out to bear his sudden misery. Habit turned him up the road towards his growing house, and then suddenly he perceived his direction--"Oh, Lor'!"--and turned aside and went up the steep way to the hill crest and the Sandling Road, and over the line by that tree-embowered Junction, and athwart the wide fields towards Postling--a little, black, marching figure--and so up the Downs and over the hills, whither he had never gone before.... 2 He came back long after dark, and Ann met him in the passage. "Where you been, Artie?" she asked, with a strained note in her voice. "I been walking and walking--trying to tire myself out. All the time I been thinking what shall I do. Trying to fix something up all out of nothing." "I didn't know you meant to be out all this time." Kipps was gripped by compunction.... "I can't think what we ought to do," he said, presently. "You can't do anything much, Artie, not till you hear from Mr. Bean." "No; I can't do anything much. That's jest it. And all this time I keep feelin' if I don't do something the top of my 'ead'll bust.... Been trying to make up advertisements 'arf the time I been out--'bout finding a place, good salesman and stock-keeper, and good Manchester dresses, window-dressing--Lor'! Fancy that all beginning again!... If you went to stay with Sid a bit--if I sent every penny I got to you--I dunno! I dunno!" When they had gone to bed there was an elaborate attempt to get to sleep.... In one of their great waking pauses Kipps remarked in a muffled tone: "I didn't mean to frighten you, Ann, being out so late. I kep' on walking and walking, and some'ow it seemed to do me good. I went out to the 'illtop ever so far beyond Stanford, and sat there ever so long, and it seemed to make me better. Just looking over the marsh like, and seeing the sun set."... "Very likely," said Ann, after a long interval, "it isn't so bad as you think it is, Artie." "It's bad," said Kipps. "Very likely, after all, it isn't quite so bad. If there's only a little----" There came another long silence. "Ann," said Kipps in the quiet darkness. "Yes," said Ann. "Ann," said Kipps, and stopped as though he had hastily shut a door upon speech. "I kep' thinking," he said, trying again, "I kep' thinking--after all--I been cross to you and a fool about things--about them cards, Ann; but"--his voice shook to pieces--"we _'ave_ been 'appy, Ann ... some'ow ... togever." And with that he and then she fell into a passion of weeping. They clung very tightly together--closer than they had been since ever the first brightness of their married days turned to the grey of common life again. All the disaster in the world could not prevent their going to sleep at last with their poor little troubled heads close together on one pillow. There was nothing more to be done, there was nothing more to be thought; Time might go on with his mischiefs, but for a little while at least they still had one another. 3 Kipps returned from his second interview with Mr. Bean in a state of strange excitement. He let himself in with his latch-key and slammed the door. "Ann!" he shouted, in an unusual note; "Ann!" Ann replied distantly. "Something to tell you," said Kipps; "something noo!" Ann appeared apprehensive from the kitchen. "Ann," he said, going before her into the little dining-room, for his news was too dignified for the passage, "very likely, Ann, o' Bean says, we shall 'ave----" He decided to prolong the suspense. "Guess!" "I can't, Artie." "Think of a lot of money!" "A 'undred pounds p'raps?" He spoke with immense deliberation. "O v e r a f o u s a n d p o u n d s!" Ann stared and said nothing, only went a shade whiter. "Over, he said. A'most certainly over." He shut the dining-room door and came forward hastily, for Ann, it was clear, meant to take this mitigation of their disaster with a complete abandonment of her self-control. She came near flopping; she fell into his arms. "Artie," she got to at last and began to weep, clinging tightly to him. "Pretty near certain," said Kipps, holding her. "A fousand pounds!" "I _said_, Artie," she wailed on his shoulder with the note of accumulated wrongs, "very likely it wasn't so bad."... "There's things," he said, when presently he came to particulars, "'e couldn't touch. The noo place! It's freehold and paid for, and with the bit of building on it, there's five or six 'undred pound p'raps--say worf free 'undred, for safety. We can't be sold up to finish it, like we thought. O' Bean says we can very likely sell it and get money. 'E says you often get a chance to sell a 'ouse lessen 'arf done, 'specially free'old. _Very_ likely, 'e say. Then there's Hughenden. Hughenden 'asn't been mortgaged not for more than 'arf its value. There's a 'undred or so to be got on that, and the furniture and the rent for the summer still coming in. 'E says there's very likely other things. A fousand pounds, that's what 'e said. 'E said it might even be more."... They were sitting now at the table. "It alters everything," said Ann. "I been thinking that, Ann, all the way 'ome. I came in the motor car. First ride I've 'ad since the smash. We needn't send off Gwendolen, leastways not till _after_. You know. We needn't turn out of 'ere--not for a long time. What we been doing for the o' people we can go on doing a'most as much. And your mother!... I wanted to 'oller coming along. I pretty near run coming down the road by the hotel." "Oh, I _am_ glad we can stop 'ere and be comfortable a bit," said Ann. "I _am_ glad for that." "I pretty near told the driver on the motor--only 'e was the sort won't talk.... You see, Ann, we'll be able to start a shop, we'll be able to get _into_ something like. All about our 'aving to go back to places and that; all that doesn't matter any more." For a while they abandoned themselves to ejaculating transports. Then they fell talking to shape an idea to themselves of the new prospect that opened before them. "We must start a sort of shop," said Kipps, whose imagination had been working. "It'll 'ave to be a shop." "Drapery?" said Ann. "You want such a lot of capital for the drapery, mor'n a thousand pounds you want by a long way--to start it anything like proper." "Well, outfitting. Like Buggins was going to do." Kipps glanced at that for a moment, because the idea had not occurred to him. Then he came back to his prepossession. "Well, I thought of something else, Ann," he said. "You see, I've always thought a little book-shop. It isn't like the drapery--'aving to be learnt. I thought--even before this smash-up--'ow I'd like to 'ave something to do, instead of always 'aving 'olidays always like we 'ave been 'aving." He reflected. "You don't know _much_ about books, do you, Artie?" "You don't want to." He illustrated. "I noticed when we used to go to that Lib'ry at Folkestone, ladies weren't anything like what they was in a draper's--if you 'aven't got _just_ what they want it's 'Oh, no!' and out they go. But in a book shop it's different. One book's very like another--after all, what is it? Something to read and done with. It's not a thing that matters like print dresses or serviettes--where you either like 'em or don't, and people judge you by. They take what you give 'em in books and lib'ries, and glad to be told _what_ to. See 'ow we was--up at that lib'ry."... He paused. "You see, Ann---- "Well, I read 'n 'dvertisement the other day. I been asking Mr. Bean. It said--five 'undred pounds." "What did?" "Branches," said Kipps. Ann failed to understand. "It's a sort of thing that gets up book shops all over the country," said Kipps. "I didn't tell you, but I arst about it a bit. On'y I dropped it again. Before this smash, I mean. I'd thought I'd like to keep a shop for a lark, on'y then I thought it silly. Besides it 'ud 'ave been beneath me." He blushed vividly. "It was a sort of projek of mine, Ann. "On'y it wouldn't 'ave done," he added. It was a tortuous journey when the Kippses set out to explain anything to each other. But through a maze of fragmentary elucidations and questions, their minds did presently begin to approximate to a picture of a compact, bright, little shop, as a framework for themselves. "I thought of it one day when I was in Folkestone. I thought of it one day when I was looking in at a window. I see a chap dressin' a window and he was whistlin' reg'lar light-'arted.... I thought then I'd like to keep a bookshop, any'ow, jest for something to do. And when people weren't about, then you could sit and read the books. See? It wouldn't be 'arf bad."... They mused, each with elbows on table and knuckles to lips, looking with speculative eyes at each other. "Very likely we'll be 'appier than we should 'ave been with more money," said Kipps presently. "We wasn't 'ardly suited," reflected Ann, and left her sentence incomplete. "Fish out of water like," said Kipps.... "You won't 'ave to return that call now," said Kipps, opening a new branch of the question. "That's one good thing." "Lor'!" said Ann, visibly brightening, "no more I shan't!" "I don't s'pose they'd want you to, even if you did--with things as they are." A certain added brightness came into Ann's face. "Nobody won't be able to come leaving cards on us, Artie, now, any more. We are out of _that_!" "There isn't no necessity for us to be stuck up," said Kipps, "any more for ever! 'Ere we are, Ann, common people, with jest no position at all, as you might say, to keep up. No sev'nts, not if you don't like. No dressin' better than other people. If it wasn't we been robbed--dashed if I'd care a rap about losing that money. I b'lieve"--his face shone with the rare pleasure of paradox--"I reely b'lieve, Ann, it'll prove a savin' in the end." 4 The remarkable advertisement which had fired Kipps' imagination with this dream of a bookshop opened out in the most alluring way. It was one little facet in a comprehensive scheme of transatlantic origin, which was to make our old-world methods of book-selling "sit up," and it displayed an imaginative briskness, a lucidity and promise that aroused the profoundest scepticism in the mind of Mr. Bean. To Kipps' renewed investigations it presented itself in an expository illustrated pamphlet (far too well printed, Mr. Bean thought, for a reputable undertaking) of the most convincing sort. Mr. Bean would not let him sink his capital in shares in its projected company that was to make all things new in the world of books, but he could not prevent Kipps becoming one of their associated booksellers. And so when presently it became apparent that an epoch was not to be made, and the "Associated Booksellers' Trading Union (Limited)" receded and dissolved and liquidated (a few drops) and vanished and went away to talk about something else, Kipps remained floating undamaged in this interestingly uncertain universe as an independent bookseller. Except that it failed, the Associated Booksellers' Trading Union had all the stigmata of success. Its fault, perhaps, was that it had them all instead of only one or two. It was to buy wholesale for all

sense

How many times the word 'sense' appears in the text?

you go and slap 'em in the face!" "I didn't slap 'em in the face." "You do--practically. You slams the door in their face, and that's all we see of 'em ever. I wouldn't 'ave 'ad this 'appen not for a ten-pound note." He rounded his regrets with a grunt. For a while there was silence, save for the little stir of Ann's movements preparing the tea. "Tea, Artie," said Ann, handing him a cup. Kipps took it. "I put sugar _once_," said Ann. "Oo, dash it! Oo cares?" said Kipps, taking an extraordinarily large additional lump with fury quivering fingers, and putting his cup with a slight excess of force on the recess cupboard. "Oo cares? "I wouldn't 'ave 'ad that 'appen," he said, bidding steadily against accomplished things, "for twenty pounds." He gloomed in silence through a long minute or so. Then Ann said the fatal thing that exploded him. "Artie!" she said. "What?" "There's Buttud Toce down there! By your foot!" There was a pause, husband and wife regarded one another. "Buttud Toce!" he said. "You go and mess up them callers and then you try and stuff me up with Buttud Toce! Buttud Toce indeed! 'Ere's our first chance of knowing anyone that's at all fit to 'sociate with----. Look 'ere, Ann! Tell you what it is--you got to return that call." "Return that call!" "Yes, you got to return that call. That's what you got to do! I know----" He waved his arm vaguely towards the miscellany of books in the recess. "It's in Manners and Rools of Good S'ity. You got to find jest 'ow many cards to leave and you got to go and leave 'em. See?" Ann's face expressed terror. "But, Artie, 'ow _can_ I?" "'Ow _can_ you? 'Ow _could_ you? You got to do it, any'ow. They won't know you--not in your Bond Street 'at! If they do, they won't say nothing." His voice assumed a note of entreaty. "You mus', Ann." "I can't." "You mus'." "I can't and I won't. Anything in reason I'll do, but face those people again I can't--after what 'as 'appened." "You won't?" "No!"... "So there they go--orf! And we never see them again! And so it goes on! So it goes on! We don't know nobody and we _shan't_ know anybody! And you won't put yourself out not a little bit, or take the trouble to find out anything 'ow it ought to be done." Terrible pause. "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie, that's the troof." "Oh! _don't_ go into that." "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie. I'm not equal to the position. If you 'adn't said you'd drown yourself----" She choked. "I don' see why you shouldn't _try_, Ann. _I've_ improved. Why don't you? 'Stead of which you go sending out the servant and 'namelling floors, and then when visitors come----" "'Ow was _I_ to know about y'r old visitors?" cried Ann in a wail, and suddenly got up and fled from amidst their ruined tea, the tea of which "toce, all buttery," was to be the crown and glory. Kipps watched her with a momentary consternation. Then he hardened his heart. "Ought to 'ave known better," he said, "goin' on like that!" He remained for a space rubbing his knees and muttering. He emitted scornfully: "I carn't an' I won't." He saw her as the source of all his shames. Presently, quite mechanically, he stooped down and lifted the flowery china cover. "Ter dash 'er Buttud Toce!" he shouted at the sight of it, and clapped the cover down again hard.... When Gwendolen came back she perceived things were in a slightly unusual poise. Kipps sat by the fire in a rigid attitude reading a casually selected volume of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and Ann was upstairs and inaccessible--to reappear at a later stage with reddened eyes. Before the fire and still in a perfectly assimilable condition was what was evidently an untouched supply of richly buttered toast under a cracked cover. "They've 'ad a bit of a tiff," said Gwendolen, attending to her duties in the kitchen, with her outdoor hat still on and her mouth full. "They're rummuns--if ever! My eye!" And she took another piece of Ann's generously buttered toast. 4 The Kippses spoke no more that day to one another. The squabble about cards and buttered toast was as serious to them as the most rational of differences. It was all rational to them. Their sense of wrong burnt within them; their sense of what was owing to themselves, the duty of implacability, the obstinacy of pride. In the small hours Kipps lay awake at the nadir of unhappiness and came near groaning. He saw life as an extraordinarily desolating muddle; his futile house, his social discredit, his bad behaviour to Helen, his low marriage to Ann.... He became aware of something irregular in Ann's breathing.... He listened. She was awake and quietly and privately sobbing! He hardened his heart; resolutely he hardened his heart. The stupid little tragedies of these clipped and limited lives! What is the good of keeping up the idyllic sham and pretending that ill-educated, misdirected people "get along very well," and that all this is harmlessly funny and nothing more? You think I'm going to write fat, silly, grinning novels about half-educated, under-trained people and keep it up all the time, that the whole thing's nothing but funny! As I think of them lying unhappily there in the darkness, my vision pierces the night. See what I can see! Above them, brooding over them, I tell you there is a monster, a lumpish monster, like some great, clumsy griffin thing, like the Crystal Palace labyrinthodon, like Coote, like the leaden goddess Dulness Pope Abhorred, like some fat, proud flunkey, like pride, like indolence, like all that is darkening and heavy and obstructive in life. It is matter and darkness, it is the anti-soul, Stupidity. My Kippses live in its shadow. Shalford and his apprenticeship system, the Hastings Academy, the ideas of Coote, the ideas of the old Kippses, all the ideas that have made Kipps what he is, all these are its shadow. But for that monster they might not be groping among false ideas and hurt one another so sorely and so stupidly; but for that, the glowing promise of childhood and youth might have had a happier fruition, thought might have awakened in them to meet _the_ thought of the world, the quickening sunshine of literature pierced to the substance of their souls, their lives might not have been divorced, as now they are divorced for ever, from the apprehension of beauty that we favoured ones are given--the vision of the Grail that makes life fine for ever. I have laughed, and I laugh at these two people; I have sought to make you laugh.... But I see through the darkness the souls of my Kippses, as they are, as little pink strips of living stuff, like the bodies of little, ill-nourished, ailing, ignorant children, children who feel pain, who are naughty and muddled and suffer and do not understand why. And the claw of this Beast rests upon them! CHAPTER III TERMINATIONS 1 Next morning came a remarkable telegram from Folkestone. "Please come at once, urgent, Walshingham," said the telegram, and Kipps, after an agitated but still ample breakfast, departed.... When he returned his face was very white and his countenance disordered. He let himself in with his latchkey and came into the dining-room where Ann sat, affecting to work at a little thing she called a bib. She heard his hat fall in the hall before he entered, as though he had missed the peg. "I got something to tell you, Ann," he said, disregarding their overnight quarrel, and went to the hearthrug and took hold of the mantel, and stared at Ann as though the sight of her was novel. "Well?" said Ann, not looking up and working a little faster. "'E's gone!" Ann looked up sharply and her hands stopped. "_Who's_ gone?" For the first time she perceived Kipps' pallor. "Young Walshingham--I saw 'er and she tole me." "Gone? What d'you mean?" "Cleared out! Gone off for good!" "What for?" "For 'is 'ealth," said Kipps, with sudden bitterness. "'E's been speckylating. He's speckylated our money and 'e's speckylated their money, and now 'e's took 'is 'ook. That's all about it, Ann." "You mean?" "I mean 'e's orf and our twenty-four thousand's orf, too! And 'ere we are! Smashed up! That's all about it, Ann." He panted. Ann had no vocabulary for such an occasion. "Oh, Lor'!" she said, and sat still. Kipps came about and stuck his hands deeply in his trouser pockets. "Speckylated every penny--lorst it all--and gorn." Even his lips were white. "You mean we ain't got nothin' left, Artie?" "Not a penny! Not a bloomin' penny, Ann. No!" A gust of passion whirled across the soul of Kipps. He flung out a knuckly fist. "If I 'ad 'im 'ere," he said, "I'd--I'd--I'd wring 'is neck for 'im. I'd--I'd----" His voice rose to a shout. He thought of Gwendolen in the kitchen and fell to "Ugh!" "But, Artie," said Ann, trying to grasp it, "d'you mean to say he's took our money?" "Speckylated it!" said Kipps, with an illustrative flourish of the arm, that failed to illustrate. "Bort things dear and sold 'em cheap, and played the 'ankey-pankey jackass with everything we got. That's what I mean 'e's done, Ann." He repeated this last sentence with the addition of violent adverbs. "D'you mean to say our money's _gone_, Artie?" "Ter-dash it, _Yes_, Ann!" swore Kipps, exploding in a shout. "Ain't I tellin' you?" He was immediately sorry. "I didn't mean to 'oller at you, Ann," he said, "but I'm all shook up. I don't 'ardly know what I'm sayin'. Ev'ry penny."... "But, Artie----" Kipps grunted. He went to the window and stared for a moment at a sunlit sea. "Gord!" he swore. "I mean," he said, coming back to Ann and with an air of exasperation, "that he's 'bezzled and 'ooked it. That's what I mean, Ann." Ann put down the bib. "But wot are we going to _do_, Artie?" Kipps indicated ignorance, wrath and despair with one comprehensive gesture of his hands. He caught an ornament from the mantel and replaced it. "I'm going to bang about," he said, "if I ain't precious careful." "You saw _'er_, you say?" "Yes." "What did she say 'xactly?" said Ann. "Told me to see a s'licitor--tole me to get someone to 'elp me at once. She was there in black--like she used to be--and speaking cool and careful-like. 'Elen!... She's precious 'ard, is 'Elen. She looked at me straight. 'It's my fault,' she said, 'I ought to 'ave warned you.... Only under the circumstances it was a little difficult.' Straight as anything. I didn't 'ardly say anything to 'er. I didn't seem to begin to take it in until she was showing me out. I 'adn't anything to say. Jest as well, perhaps. She talked like a call a'most. She said--what _was_ it she said about her mother? 'My mother's overcome with grief,' she said, 'so naturally everything comes on me.'" "And she told you to get someone to 'elp you?" "Yes. I been to old Bean." "O' Bean?" "Yes. What I took my business away from!" "What did he say?" "He was a bit off'and at first, but then 'e come 'round. He couldn't tell me anything till 'e knew the facts. What I know of young Walshingham, there won't be much 'elp in the facts. No!" He reflected for a space. "It's a smash-up, Ann. More likely than not, Ann, 'e's left us over'ead in debt. We got to get out of it just 'ow we can.... "We got to begin again," he went on. "_'Ow_, I don't know. All the way 'ome my 'ead's been going. We got to get a living some'ow or other. 'Aving time to ourselves, and a bit of money to spend, and no hurry and worry, it's all over for ever, Ann. We was fools, Ann. We didn't know our benefits. We been caught. Gord!... Gord!" He was on the verge of "banging about" again. They heard a jingle in the passage, the large soft impact of a servant's indoor boots. As if she were a part, a mitigatory part of Fate, came Gwendolen to lay the midday meal. Kipps displayed self-control forthwith. Ann picked up the bib again and bent over it, and the Kippses bore themselves gloomily perhaps, but not despairfully, while their dependant was in the room. She spread the cloth and put out the cutlery with a slow inaccuracy, and Kipps, after a whisper to himself, went again to the window. Ann got up and put away her work methodically in the cheffonier. "When I think," said Kipps, as soon as the door closed again behind Gwendolen, "when I think of the 'ole people and 'aving to tell 'em of it all--I want to smesh my 'ead against the nearest wall. Smesh my silly brains out! And Buggins--Buggins what I'd 'arf promised to start in a lill' outfitting shop in Rendezvous Street."... Gwendolen returned and restored dignity. The midday meal spread itself slowly before them. Gwendolen, after her custom, left the door open and Kipps closed it carefully before sitting down. He stood for a moment, regarding the meal doubtfully. "I don't feel as if I could swaller a moufful," he said. "You got to eat," said Ann.... For a time they said little, and once swallowing was achieved, ate on with a sort of melancholy appetite. Each was now busy thinking. "After all," said Kipps, presently, "whatever 'appens, they can't turn us out or sell us up before nex' quarter-day. I'm pretty sure about that." "Sell us up!" said Ann. "I dessey we're bankrup'," said Kipps, trying to say it easily and helping himself with a trembling hand to unnecessary potatoes. Then a long silence. Ann ceased to eat, and there were silent tears. "More potatoes, Artie?" choked Ann. "I couldn't," said Kipps. "No." He pushed back his plate, which was indeed replete with potatoes, got up and walked about the room. Even the dinner-table looked distraught and unusual. "What to do, I _don't_ know," he said. "Oh, _Lord_!" he ejaculated, and picked up and slapped down a book. Then his eye fell upon another postcard that had come from Chitterlow by the morning's post, and which now lay by him on the mantel-shelf. He took it up, glanced at its imperfectly legible message, and put it down. "Delayed!" he said, scornfully. "Not prodooced in the smalls. Or is it smells 'e says? 'Ow can one understand that? Any'ow 'e's 'umbugging again.... Somefing about the Strand. No! Well, 'e's 'ad all the money 'e'll ever get out of me!... I'm done." He seemed to find a momentary relief in the dramatic effect of his announcement. He came near to a swagger of despair upon the hearthrug, and then suddenly came and sat down next to Ann and rested his chin on the knuckles of his two clenched hands. "I been a fool, Ann," he said in a gloomy monotone. "I been a brasted fool. But it's 'ard on us, all the same. It's 'ard." "'Ow was you to know?" said Ann. "I ought to 'ave known. I did in a sort of way know. And 'ere we are! I wouldn't care so much if it was myself, but it's _you_, Ann! 'Ere we are! Regular smashed up! And you----" He checked at an unspeakable aggravation of their disaster. "I knew 'e wasn't to be depended upon and there I left it! And you got to pay.... What's to 'appen to us all, I don't know." He thrust out his chin and glared at fate. "'Ow do you know 'e's speckylated everything?" said Ann, after a silent survey of him. "'E 'as," said Kipps, irritably, holding firm to disaster. "She say so?" "She don't know, of course, but you depend upon it that's it. She told me she knew something was on, and when she found 'im gone and a note lef' for her she knew it was up with 'im. 'E went by the night boat. She wrote that telegram off to me straight away." Ann surveyed his features with tender, perplexed eyes; she had never seen him so white and drawn before, and her hand rested an inch or so away from his arm. The actual loss was still, as it were, afar from her. The immediate thing was his enormous distress. "'Ow do you know----?" she said and stopped. It would irritate him too much. Kipps' imagination was going headlong. "Sold up!" he emitted presently, and Ann flinched. "Going back to work, day after day--I can't stand it, Ann, I can't. And you----" "It don't do to think of it," said Ann. Presently he came upon a resolve. "I keep on thinking of it, and thinking of it, and what's to be done and what's to be done. I shan't be any good 'ome s'arfernoon. It keeps on going 'round and 'round in my 'ead, and 'round and 'round. I better go for a walk or something. I'd be no comfort to you, Ann. I should want to 'owl and 'ammer things if I 'ung about 'ome. My fingers is all atwitch. I shall keep on thinking 'ow I might 'ave stopped it and callin' myself a fool."... He looked at her between pleading and shame. It seemed like deserting her. Ann regarded him with tear-dimmed eyes. "You'd better do what's good for you, Artie," she said.... "_I'll_ be best cleaning. It's no use sending off Gwendolen before her month, and the top room wants turning out." She added with a sort of grim humour: "May as well turn it out now while I got it." "I _better_ go for a walk," said Kipps.... And presently our poor exploded Kipps was marching out to bear his sudden misery. Habit turned him up the road towards his growing house, and then suddenly he perceived his direction--"Oh, Lor'!"--and turned aside and went up the steep way to the hill crest and the Sandling Road, and over the line by that tree-embowered Junction, and athwart the wide fields towards Postling--a little, black, marching figure--and so up the Downs and over the hills, whither he had never gone before.... 2 He came back long after dark, and Ann met him in the passage. "Where you been, Artie?" she asked, with a strained note in her voice. "I been walking and walking--trying to tire myself out. All the time I been thinking what shall I do. Trying to fix something up all out of nothing." "I didn't know you meant to be out all this time." Kipps was gripped by compunction.... "I can't think what we ought to do," he said, presently. "You can't do anything much, Artie, not till you hear from Mr. Bean." "No; I can't do anything much. That's jest it. And all this time I keep feelin' if I don't do something the top of my 'ead'll bust.... Been trying to make up advertisements 'arf the time I been out--'bout finding a place, good salesman and stock-keeper, and good Manchester dresses, window-dressing--Lor'! Fancy that all beginning again!... If you went to stay with Sid a bit--if I sent every penny I got to you--I dunno! I dunno!" When they had gone to bed there was an elaborate attempt to get to sleep.... In one of their great waking pauses Kipps remarked in a muffled tone: "I didn't mean to frighten you, Ann, being out so late. I kep' on walking and walking, and some'ow it seemed to do me good. I went out to the 'illtop ever so far beyond Stanford, and sat there ever so long, and it seemed to make me better. Just looking over the marsh like, and seeing the sun set."... "Very likely," said Ann, after a long interval, "it isn't so bad as you think it is, Artie." "It's bad," said Kipps. "Very likely, after all, it isn't quite so bad. If there's only a little----" There came another long silence. "Ann," said Kipps in the quiet darkness. "Yes," said Ann. "Ann," said Kipps, and stopped as though he had hastily shut a door upon speech. "I kep' thinking," he said, trying again, "I kep' thinking--after all--I been cross to you and a fool about things--about them cards, Ann; but"--his voice shook to pieces--"we _'ave_ been 'appy, Ann ... some'ow ... togever." And with that he and then she fell into a passion of weeping. They clung very tightly together--closer than they had been since ever the first brightness of their married days turned to the grey of common life again. All the disaster in the world could not prevent their going to sleep at last with their poor little troubled heads close together on one pillow. There was nothing more to be done, there was nothing more to be thought; Time might go on with his mischiefs, but for a little while at least they still had one another. 3 Kipps returned from his second interview with Mr. Bean in a state of strange excitement. He let himself in with his latch-key and slammed the door. "Ann!" he shouted, in an unusual note; "Ann!" Ann replied distantly. "Something to tell you," said Kipps; "something noo!" Ann appeared apprehensive from the kitchen. "Ann," he said, going before her into the little dining-room, for his news was too dignified for the passage, "very likely, Ann, o' Bean says, we shall 'ave----" He decided to prolong the suspense. "Guess!" "I can't, Artie." "Think of a lot of money!" "A 'undred pounds p'raps?" He spoke with immense deliberation. "O v e r a f o u s a n d p o u n d s!" Ann stared and said nothing, only went a shade whiter. "Over, he said. A'most certainly over." He shut the dining-room door and came forward hastily, for Ann, it was clear, meant to take this mitigation of their disaster with a complete abandonment of her self-control. She came near flopping; she fell into his arms. "Artie," she got to at last and began to weep, clinging tightly to him. "Pretty near certain," said Kipps, holding her. "A fousand pounds!" "I _said_, Artie," she wailed on his shoulder with the note of accumulated wrongs, "very likely it wasn't so bad."... "There's things," he said, when presently he came to particulars, "'e couldn't touch. The noo place! It's freehold and paid for, and with the bit of building on it, there's five or six 'undred pound p'raps--say worf free 'undred, for safety. We can't be sold up to finish it, like we thought. O' Bean says we can very likely sell it and get money. 'E says you often get a chance to sell a 'ouse lessen 'arf done, 'specially free'old. _Very_ likely, 'e say. Then there's Hughenden. Hughenden 'asn't been mortgaged not for more than 'arf its value. There's a 'undred or so to be got on that, and the furniture and the rent for the summer still coming in. 'E says there's very likely other things. A fousand pounds, that's what 'e said. 'E said it might even be more."... They were sitting now at the table. "It alters everything," said Ann. "I been thinking that, Ann, all the way 'ome. I came in the motor car. First ride I've 'ad since the smash. We needn't send off Gwendolen, leastways not till _after_. You know. We needn't turn out of 'ere--not for a long time. What we been doing for the o' people we can go on doing a'most as much. And your mother!... I wanted to 'oller coming along. I pretty near run coming down the road by the hotel." "Oh, I _am_ glad we can stop 'ere and be comfortable a bit," said Ann. "I _am_ glad for that." "I pretty near told the driver on the motor--only 'e was the sort won't talk.... You see, Ann, we'll be able to start a shop, we'll be able to get _into_ something like. All about our 'aving to go back to places and that; all that doesn't matter any more." For a while they abandoned themselves to ejaculating transports. Then they fell talking to shape an idea to themselves of the new prospect that opened before them. "We must start a sort of shop," said Kipps, whose imagination had been working. "It'll 'ave to be a shop." "Drapery?" said Ann. "You want such a lot of capital for the drapery, mor'n a thousand pounds you want by a long way--to start it anything like proper." "Well, outfitting. Like Buggins was going to do." Kipps glanced at that for a moment, because the idea had not occurred to him. Then he came back to his prepossession. "Well, I thought of something else, Ann," he said. "You see, I've always thought a little book-shop. It isn't like the drapery--'aving to be learnt. I thought--even before this smash-up--'ow I'd like to 'ave something to do, instead of always 'aving 'olidays always like we 'ave been 'aving." He reflected. "You don't know _much_ about books, do you, Artie?" "You don't want to." He illustrated. "I noticed when we used to go to that Lib'ry at Folkestone, ladies weren't anything like what they was in a draper's--if you 'aven't got _just_ what they want it's 'Oh, no!' and out they go. But in a book shop it's different. One book's very like another--after all, what is it? Something to read and done with. It's not a thing that matters like print dresses or serviettes--where you either like 'em or don't, and people judge you by. They take what you give 'em in books and lib'ries, and glad to be told _what_ to. See 'ow we was--up at that lib'ry."... He paused. "You see, Ann---- "Well, I read 'n 'dvertisement the other day. I been asking Mr. Bean. It said--five 'undred pounds." "What did?" "Branches," said Kipps. Ann failed to understand. "It's a sort of thing that gets up book shops all over the country," said Kipps. "I didn't tell you, but I arst about it a bit. On'y I dropped it again. Before this smash, I mean. I'd thought I'd like to keep a shop for a lark, on'y then I thought it silly. Besides it 'ud 'ave been beneath me." He blushed vividly. "It was a sort of projek of mine, Ann. "On'y it wouldn't 'ave done," he added. It was a tortuous journey when the Kippses set out to explain anything to each other. But through a maze of fragmentary elucidations and questions, their minds did presently begin to approximate to a picture of a compact, bright, little shop, as a framework for themselves. "I thought of it one day when I was in Folkestone. I thought of it one day when I was looking in at a window. I see a chap dressin' a window and he was whistlin' reg'lar light-'arted.... I thought then I'd like to keep a bookshop, any'ow, jest for something to do. And when people weren't about, then you could sit and read the books. See? It wouldn't be 'arf bad."... They mused, each with elbows on table and knuckles to lips, looking with speculative eyes at each other. "Very likely we'll be 'appier than we should 'ave been with more money," said Kipps presently. "We wasn't 'ardly suited," reflected Ann, and left her sentence incomplete. "Fish out of water like," said Kipps.... "You won't 'ave to return that call now," said Kipps, opening a new branch of the question. "That's one good thing." "Lor'!" said Ann, visibly brightening, "no more I shan't!" "I don't s'pose they'd want you to, even if you did--with things as they are." A certain added brightness came into Ann's face. "Nobody won't be able to come leaving cards on us, Artie, now, any more. We are out of _that_!" "There isn't no necessity for us to be stuck up," said Kipps, "any more for ever! 'Ere we are, Ann, common people, with jest no position at all, as you might say, to keep up. No sev'nts, not if you don't like. No dressin' better than other people. If it wasn't we been robbed--dashed if I'd care a rap about losing that money. I b'lieve"--his face shone with the rare pleasure of paradox--"I reely b'lieve, Ann, it'll prove a savin' in the end." 4 The remarkable advertisement which had fired Kipps' imagination with this dream of a bookshop opened out in the most alluring way. It was one little facet in a comprehensive scheme of transatlantic origin, which was to make our old-world methods of book-selling "sit up," and it displayed an imaginative briskness, a lucidity and promise that aroused the profoundest scepticism in the mind of Mr. Bean. To Kipps' renewed investigations it presented itself in an expository illustrated pamphlet (far too well printed, Mr. Bean thought, for a reputable undertaking) of the most convincing sort. Mr. Bean would not let him sink his capital in shares in its projected company that was to make all things new in the world of books, but he could not prevent Kipps becoming one of their associated booksellers. And so when presently it became apparent that an epoch was not to be made, and the "Associated Booksellers' Trading Union (Limited)" receded and dissolved and liquidated (a few drops) and vanished and went away to talk about something else, Kipps remained floating undamaged in this interestingly uncertain universe as an independent bookseller. Except that it failed, the Associated Booksellers' Trading Union had all the stigmata of success. Its fault, perhaps, was that it had them all instead of only one or two. It was to buy wholesale for all

glowered

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you go and slap 'em in the face!" "I didn't slap 'em in the face." "You do--practically. You slams the door in their face, and that's all we see of 'em ever. I wouldn't 'ave 'ad this 'appen not for a ten-pound note." He rounded his regrets with a grunt. For a while there was silence, save for the little stir of Ann's movements preparing the tea. "Tea, Artie," said Ann, handing him a cup. Kipps took it. "I put sugar _once_," said Ann. "Oo, dash it! Oo cares?" said Kipps, taking an extraordinarily large additional lump with fury quivering fingers, and putting his cup with a slight excess of force on the recess cupboard. "Oo cares? "I wouldn't 'ave 'ad that 'appen," he said, bidding steadily against accomplished things, "for twenty pounds." He gloomed in silence through a long minute or so. Then Ann said the fatal thing that exploded him. "Artie!" she said. "What?" "There's Buttud Toce down there! By your foot!" There was a pause, husband and wife regarded one another. "Buttud Toce!" he said. "You go and mess up them callers and then you try and stuff me up with Buttud Toce! Buttud Toce indeed! 'Ere's our first chance of knowing anyone that's at all fit to 'sociate with----. Look 'ere, Ann! Tell you what it is--you got to return that call." "Return that call!" "Yes, you got to return that call. That's what you got to do! I know----" He waved his arm vaguely towards the miscellany of books in the recess. "It's in Manners and Rools of Good S'ity. You got to find jest 'ow many cards to leave and you got to go and leave 'em. See?" Ann's face expressed terror. "But, Artie, 'ow _can_ I?" "'Ow _can_ you? 'Ow _could_ you? You got to do it, any'ow. They won't know you--not in your Bond Street 'at! If they do, they won't say nothing." His voice assumed a note of entreaty. "You mus', Ann." "I can't." "You mus'." "I can't and I won't. Anything in reason I'll do, but face those people again I can't--after what 'as 'appened." "You won't?" "No!"... "So there they go--orf! And we never see them again! And so it goes on! So it goes on! We don't know nobody and we _shan't_ know anybody! And you won't put yourself out not a little bit, or take the trouble to find out anything 'ow it ought to be done." Terrible pause. "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie, that's the troof." "Oh! _don't_ go into that." "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie. I'm not equal to the position. If you 'adn't said you'd drown yourself----" She choked. "I don' see why you shouldn't _try_, Ann. _I've_ improved. Why don't you? 'Stead of which you go sending out the servant and 'namelling floors, and then when visitors come----" "'Ow was _I_ to know about y'r old visitors?" cried Ann in a wail, and suddenly got up and fled from amidst their ruined tea, the tea of which "toce, all buttery," was to be the crown and glory. Kipps watched her with a momentary consternation. Then he hardened his heart. "Ought to 'ave known better," he said, "goin' on like that!" He remained for a space rubbing his knees and muttering. He emitted scornfully: "I carn't an' I won't." He saw her as the source of all his shames. Presently, quite mechanically, he stooped down and lifted the flowery china cover. "Ter dash 'er Buttud Toce!" he shouted at the sight of it, and clapped the cover down again hard.... When Gwendolen came back she perceived things were in a slightly unusual poise. Kipps sat by the fire in a rigid attitude reading a casually selected volume of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and Ann was upstairs and inaccessible--to reappear at a later stage with reddened eyes. Before the fire and still in a perfectly assimilable condition was what was evidently an untouched supply of richly buttered toast under a cracked cover. "They've 'ad a bit of a tiff," said Gwendolen, attending to her duties in the kitchen, with her outdoor hat still on and her mouth full. "They're rummuns--if ever! My eye!" And she took another piece of Ann's generously buttered toast. 4 The Kippses spoke no more that day to one another. The squabble about cards and buttered toast was as serious to them as the most rational of differences. It was all rational to them. Their sense of wrong burnt within them; their sense of what was owing to themselves, the duty of implacability, the obstinacy of pride. In the small hours Kipps lay awake at the nadir of unhappiness and came near groaning. He saw life as an extraordinarily desolating muddle; his futile house, his social discredit, his bad behaviour to Helen, his low marriage to Ann.... He became aware of something irregular in Ann's breathing.... He listened. She was awake and quietly and privately sobbing! He hardened his heart; resolutely he hardened his heart. The stupid little tragedies of these clipped and limited lives! What is the good of keeping up the idyllic sham and pretending that ill-educated, misdirected people "get along very well," and that all this is harmlessly funny and nothing more? You think I'm going to write fat, silly, grinning novels about half-educated, under-trained people and keep it up all the time, that the whole thing's nothing but funny! As I think of them lying unhappily there in the darkness, my vision pierces the night. See what I can see! Above them, brooding over them, I tell you there is a monster, a lumpish monster, like some great, clumsy griffin thing, like the Crystal Palace labyrinthodon, like Coote, like the leaden goddess Dulness Pope Abhorred, like some fat, proud flunkey, like pride, like indolence, like all that is darkening and heavy and obstructive in life. It is matter and darkness, it is the anti-soul, Stupidity. My Kippses live in its shadow. Shalford and his apprenticeship system, the Hastings Academy, the ideas of Coote, the ideas of the old Kippses, all the ideas that have made Kipps what he is, all these are its shadow. But for that monster they might not be groping among false ideas and hurt one another so sorely and so stupidly; but for that, the glowing promise of childhood and youth might have had a happier fruition, thought might have awakened in them to meet _the_ thought of the world, the quickening sunshine of literature pierced to the substance of their souls, their lives might not have been divorced, as now they are divorced for ever, from the apprehension of beauty that we favoured ones are given--the vision of the Grail that makes life fine for ever. I have laughed, and I laugh at these two people; I have sought to make you laugh.... But I see through the darkness the souls of my Kippses, as they are, as little pink strips of living stuff, like the bodies of little, ill-nourished, ailing, ignorant children, children who feel pain, who are naughty and muddled and suffer and do not understand why. And the claw of this Beast rests upon them! CHAPTER III TERMINATIONS 1 Next morning came a remarkable telegram from Folkestone. "Please come at once, urgent, Walshingham," said the telegram, and Kipps, after an agitated but still ample breakfast, departed.... When he returned his face was very white and his countenance disordered. He let himself in with his latchkey and came into the dining-room where Ann sat, affecting to work at a little thing she called a bib. She heard his hat fall in the hall before he entered, as though he had missed the peg. "I got something to tell you, Ann," he said, disregarding their overnight quarrel, and went to the hearthrug and took hold of the mantel, and stared at Ann as though the sight of her was novel. "Well?" said Ann, not looking up and working a little faster. "'E's gone!" Ann looked up sharply and her hands stopped. "_Who's_ gone?" For the first time she perceived Kipps' pallor. "Young Walshingham--I saw 'er and she tole me." "Gone? What d'you mean?" "Cleared out! Gone off for good!" "What for?" "For 'is 'ealth," said Kipps, with sudden bitterness. "'E's been speckylating. He's speckylated our money and 'e's speckylated their money, and now 'e's took 'is 'ook. That's all about it, Ann." "You mean?" "I mean 'e's orf and our twenty-four thousand's orf, too! And 'ere we are! Smashed up! That's all about it, Ann." He panted. Ann had no vocabulary for such an occasion. "Oh, Lor'!" she said, and sat still. Kipps came about and stuck his hands deeply in his trouser pockets. "Speckylated every penny--lorst it all--and gorn." Even his lips were white. "You mean we ain't got nothin' left, Artie?" "Not a penny! Not a bloomin' penny, Ann. No!" A gust of passion whirled across the soul of Kipps. He flung out a knuckly fist. "If I 'ad 'im 'ere," he said, "I'd--I'd--I'd wring 'is neck for 'im. I'd--I'd----" His voice rose to a shout. He thought of Gwendolen in the kitchen and fell to "Ugh!" "But, Artie," said Ann, trying to grasp it, "d'you mean to say he's took our money?" "Speckylated it!" said Kipps, with an illustrative flourish of the arm, that failed to illustrate. "Bort things dear and sold 'em cheap, and played the 'ankey-pankey jackass with everything we got. That's what I mean 'e's done, Ann." He repeated this last sentence with the addition of violent adverbs. "D'you mean to say our money's _gone_, Artie?" "Ter-dash it, _Yes_, Ann!" swore Kipps, exploding in a shout. "Ain't I tellin' you?" He was immediately sorry. "I didn't mean to 'oller at you, Ann," he said, "but I'm all shook up. I don't 'ardly know what I'm sayin'. Ev'ry penny."... "But, Artie----" Kipps grunted. He went to the window and stared for a moment at a sunlit sea. "Gord!" he swore. "I mean," he said, coming back to Ann and with an air of exasperation, "that he's 'bezzled and 'ooked it. That's what I mean, Ann." Ann put down the bib. "But wot are we going to _do_, Artie?" Kipps indicated ignorance, wrath and despair with one comprehensive gesture of his hands. He caught an ornament from the mantel and replaced it. "I'm going to bang about," he said, "if I ain't precious careful." "You saw _'er_, you say?" "Yes." "What did she say 'xactly?" said Ann. "Told me to see a s'licitor--tole me to get someone to 'elp me at once. She was there in black--like she used to be--and speaking cool and careful-like. 'Elen!... She's precious 'ard, is 'Elen. She looked at me straight. 'It's my fault,' she said, 'I ought to 'ave warned you.... Only under the circumstances it was a little difficult.' Straight as anything. I didn't 'ardly say anything to 'er. I didn't seem to begin to take it in until she was showing me out. I 'adn't anything to say. Jest as well, perhaps. She talked like a call a'most. She said--what _was_ it she said about her mother? 'My mother's overcome with grief,' she said, 'so naturally everything comes on me.'" "And she told you to get someone to 'elp you?" "Yes. I been to old Bean." "O' Bean?" "Yes. What I took my business away from!" "What did he say?" "He was a bit off'and at first, but then 'e come 'round. He couldn't tell me anything till 'e knew the facts. What I know of young Walshingham, there won't be much 'elp in the facts. No!" He reflected for a space. "It's a smash-up, Ann. More likely than not, Ann, 'e's left us over'ead in debt. We got to get out of it just 'ow we can.... "We got to begin again," he went on. "_'Ow_, I don't know. All the way 'ome my 'ead's been going. We got to get a living some'ow or other. 'Aving time to ourselves, and a bit of money to spend, and no hurry and worry, it's all over for ever, Ann. We was fools, Ann. We didn't know our benefits. We been caught. Gord!... Gord!" He was on the verge of "banging about" again. They heard a jingle in the passage, the large soft impact of a servant's indoor boots. As if she were a part, a mitigatory part of Fate, came Gwendolen to lay the midday meal. Kipps displayed self-control forthwith. Ann picked up the bib again and bent over it, and the Kippses bore themselves gloomily perhaps, but not despairfully, while their dependant was in the room. She spread the cloth and put out the cutlery with a slow inaccuracy, and Kipps, after a whisper to himself, went again to the window. Ann got up and put away her work methodically in the cheffonier. "When I think," said Kipps, as soon as the door closed again behind Gwendolen, "when I think of the 'ole people and 'aving to tell 'em of it all--I want to smesh my 'ead against the nearest wall. Smesh my silly brains out! And Buggins--Buggins what I'd 'arf promised to start in a lill' outfitting shop in Rendezvous Street."... Gwendolen returned and restored dignity. The midday meal spread itself slowly before them. Gwendolen, after her custom, left the door open and Kipps closed it carefully before sitting down. He stood for a moment, regarding the meal doubtfully. "I don't feel as if I could swaller a moufful," he said. "You got to eat," said Ann.... For a time they said little, and once swallowing was achieved, ate on with a sort of melancholy appetite. Each was now busy thinking. "After all," said Kipps, presently, "whatever 'appens, they can't turn us out or sell us up before nex' quarter-day. I'm pretty sure about that." "Sell us up!" said Ann. "I dessey we're bankrup'," said Kipps, trying to say it easily and helping himself with a trembling hand to unnecessary potatoes. Then a long silence. Ann ceased to eat, and there were silent tears. "More potatoes, Artie?" choked Ann. "I couldn't," said Kipps. "No." He pushed back his plate, which was indeed replete with potatoes, got up and walked about the room. Even the dinner-table looked distraught and unusual. "What to do, I _don't_ know," he said. "Oh, _Lord_!" he ejaculated, and picked up and slapped down a book. Then his eye fell upon another postcard that had come from Chitterlow by the morning's post, and which now lay by him on the mantel-shelf. He took it up, glanced at its imperfectly legible message, and put it down. "Delayed!" he said, scornfully. "Not prodooced in the smalls. Or is it smells 'e says? 'Ow can one understand that? Any'ow 'e's 'umbugging again.... Somefing about the Strand. No! Well, 'e's 'ad all the money 'e'll ever get out of me!... I'm done." He seemed to find a momentary relief in the dramatic effect of his announcement. He came near to a swagger of despair upon the hearthrug, and then suddenly came and sat down next to Ann and rested his chin on the knuckles of his two clenched hands. "I been a fool, Ann," he said in a gloomy monotone. "I been a brasted fool. But it's 'ard on us, all the same. It's 'ard." "'Ow was you to know?" said Ann. "I ought to 'ave known. I did in a sort of way know. And 'ere we are! I wouldn't care so much if it was myself, but it's _you_, Ann! 'Ere we are! Regular smashed up! And you----" He checked at an unspeakable aggravation of their disaster. "I knew 'e wasn't to be depended upon and there I left it! And you got to pay.... What's to 'appen to us all, I don't know." He thrust out his chin and glared at fate. "'Ow do you know 'e's speckylated everything?" said Ann, after a silent survey of him. "'E 'as," said Kipps, irritably, holding firm to disaster. "She say so?" "She don't know, of course, but you depend upon it that's it. She told me she knew something was on, and when she found 'im gone and a note lef' for her she knew it was up with 'im. 'E went by the night boat. She wrote that telegram off to me straight away." Ann surveyed his features with tender, perplexed eyes; she had never seen him so white and drawn before, and her hand rested an inch or so away from his arm. The actual loss was still, as it were, afar from her. The immediate thing was his enormous distress. "'Ow do you know----?" she said and stopped. It would irritate him too much. Kipps' imagination was going headlong. "Sold up!" he emitted presently, and Ann flinched. "Going back to work, day after day--I can't stand it, Ann, I can't. And you----" "It don't do to think of it," said Ann. Presently he came upon a resolve. "I keep on thinking of it, and thinking of it, and what's to be done and what's to be done. I shan't be any good 'ome s'arfernoon. It keeps on going 'round and 'round in my 'ead, and 'round and 'round. I better go for a walk or something. I'd be no comfort to you, Ann. I should want to 'owl and 'ammer things if I 'ung about 'ome. My fingers is all atwitch. I shall keep on thinking 'ow I might 'ave stopped it and callin' myself a fool."... He looked at her between pleading and shame. It seemed like deserting her. Ann regarded him with tear-dimmed eyes. "You'd better do what's good for you, Artie," she said.... "_I'll_ be best cleaning. It's no use sending off Gwendolen before her month, and the top room wants turning out." She added with a sort of grim humour: "May as well turn it out now while I got it." "I _better_ go for a walk," said Kipps.... And presently our poor exploded Kipps was marching out to bear his sudden misery. Habit turned him up the road towards his growing house, and then suddenly he perceived his direction--"Oh, Lor'!"--and turned aside and went up the steep way to the hill crest and the Sandling Road, and over the line by that tree-embowered Junction, and athwart the wide fields towards Postling--a little, black, marching figure--and so up the Downs and over the hills, whither he had never gone before.... 2 He came back long after dark, and Ann met him in the passage. "Where you been, Artie?" she asked, with a strained note in her voice. "I been walking and walking--trying to tire myself out. All the time I been thinking what shall I do. Trying to fix something up all out of nothing." "I didn't know you meant to be out all this time." Kipps was gripped by compunction.... "I can't think what we ought to do," he said, presently. "You can't do anything much, Artie, not till you hear from Mr. Bean." "No; I can't do anything much. That's jest it. And all this time I keep feelin' if I don't do something the top of my 'ead'll bust.... Been trying to make up advertisements 'arf the time I been out--'bout finding a place, good salesman and stock-keeper, and good Manchester dresses, window-dressing--Lor'! Fancy that all beginning again!... If you went to stay with Sid a bit--if I sent every penny I got to you--I dunno! I dunno!" When they had gone to bed there was an elaborate attempt to get to sleep.... In one of their great waking pauses Kipps remarked in a muffled tone: "I didn't mean to frighten you, Ann, being out so late. I kep' on walking and walking, and some'ow it seemed to do me good. I went out to the 'illtop ever so far beyond Stanford, and sat there ever so long, and it seemed to make me better. Just looking over the marsh like, and seeing the sun set."... "Very likely," said Ann, after a long interval, "it isn't so bad as you think it is, Artie." "It's bad," said Kipps. "Very likely, after all, it isn't quite so bad. If there's only a little----" There came another long silence. "Ann," said Kipps in the quiet darkness. "Yes," said Ann. "Ann," said Kipps, and stopped as though he had hastily shut a door upon speech. "I kep' thinking," he said, trying again, "I kep' thinking--after all--I been cross to you and a fool about things--about them cards, Ann; but"--his voice shook to pieces--"we _'ave_ been 'appy, Ann ... some'ow ... togever." And with that he and then she fell into a passion of weeping. They clung very tightly together--closer than they had been since ever the first brightness of their married days turned to the grey of common life again. All the disaster in the world could not prevent their going to sleep at last with their poor little troubled heads close together on one pillow. There was nothing more to be done, there was nothing more to be thought; Time might go on with his mischiefs, but for a little while at least they still had one another. 3 Kipps returned from his second interview with Mr. Bean in a state of strange excitement. He let himself in with his latch-key and slammed the door. "Ann!" he shouted, in an unusual note; "Ann!" Ann replied distantly. "Something to tell you," said Kipps; "something noo!" Ann appeared apprehensive from the kitchen. "Ann," he said, going before her into the little dining-room, for his news was too dignified for the passage, "very likely, Ann, o' Bean says, we shall 'ave----" He decided to prolong the suspense. "Guess!" "I can't, Artie." "Think of a lot of money!" "A 'undred pounds p'raps?" He spoke with immense deliberation. "O v e r a f o u s a n d p o u n d s!" Ann stared and said nothing, only went a shade whiter. "Over, he said. A'most certainly over." He shut the dining-room door and came forward hastily, for Ann, it was clear, meant to take this mitigation of their disaster with a complete abandonment of her self-control. She came near flopping; she fell into his arms. "Artie," she got to at last and began to weep, clinging tightly to him. "Pretty near certain," said Kipps, holding her. "A fousand pounds!" "I _said_, Artie," she wailed on his shoulder with the note of accumulated wrongs, "very likely it wasn't so bad."... "There's things," he said, when presently he came to particulars, "'e couldn't touch. The noo place! It's freehold and paid for, and with the bit of building on it, there's five or six 'undred pound p'raps--say worf free 'undred, for safety. We can't be sold up to finish it, like we thought. O' Bean says we can very likely sell it and get money. 'E says you often get a chance to sell a 'ouse lessen 'arf done, 'specially free'old. _Very_ likely, 'e say. Then there's Hughenden. Hughenden 'asn't been mortgaged not for more than 'arf its value. There's a 'undred or so to be got on that, and the furniture and the rent for the summer still coming in. 'E says there's very likely other things. A fousand pounds, that's what 'e said. 'E said it might even be more."... They were sitting now at the table. "It alters everything," said Ann. "I been thinking that, Ann, all the way 'ome. I came in the motor car. First ride I've 'ad since the smash. We needn't send off Gwendolen, leastways not till _after_. You know. We needn't turn out of 'ere--not for a long time. What we been doing for the o' people we can go on doing a'most as much. And your mother!... I wanted to 'oller coming along. I pretty near run coming down the road by the hotel." "Oh, I _am_ glad we can stop 'ere and be comfortable a bit," said Ann. "I _am_ glad for that." "I pretty near told the driver on the motor--only 'e was the sort won't talk.... You see, Ann, we'll be able to start a shop, we'll be able to get _into_ something like. All about our 'aving to go back to places and that; all that doesn't matter any more." For a while they abandoned themselves to ejaculating transports. Then they fell talking to shape an idea to themselves of the new prospect that opened before them. "We must start a sort of shop," said Kipps, whose imagination had been working. "It'll 'ave to be a shop." "Drapery?" said Ann. "You want such a lot of capital for the drapery, mor'n a thousand pounds you want by a long way--to start it anything like proper." "Well, outfitting. Like Buggins was going to do." Kipps glanced at that for a moment, because the idea had not occurred to him. Then he came back to his prepossession. "Well, I thought of something else, Ann," he said. "You see, I've always thought a little book-shop. It isn't like the drapery--'aving to be learnt. I thought--even before this smash-up--'ow I'd like to 'ave something to do, instead of always 'aving 'olidays always like we 'ave been 'aving." He reflected. "You don't know _much_ about books, do you, Artie?" "You don't want to." He illustrated. "I noticed when we used to go to that Lib'ry at Folkestone, ladies weren't anything like what they was in a draper's--if you 'aven't got _just_ what they want it's 'Oh, no!' and out they go. But in a book shop it's different. One book's very like another--after all, what is it? Something to read and done with. It's not a thing that matters like print dresses or serviettes--where you either like 'em or don't, and people judge you by. They take what you give 'em in books and lib'ries, and glad to be told _what_ to. See 'ow we was--up at that lib'ry."... He paused. "You see, Ann---- "Well, I read 'n 'dvertisement the other day. I been asking Mr. Bean. It said--five 'undred pounds." "What did?" "Branches," said Kipps. Ann failed to understand. "It's a sort of thing that gets up book shops all over the country," said Kipps. "I didn't tell you, but I arst about it a bit. On'y I dropped it again. Before this smash, I mean. I'd thought I'd like to keep a shop for a lark, on'y then I thought it silly. Besides it 'ud 'ave been beneath me." He blushed vividly. "It was a sort of projek of mine, Ann. "On'y it wouldn't 'ave done," he added. It was a tortuous journey when the Kippses set out to explain anything to each other. But through a maze of fragmentary elucidations and questions, their minds did presently begin to approximate to a picture of a compact, bright, little shop, as a framework for themselves. "I thought of it one day when I was in Folkestone. I thought of it one day when I was looking in at a window. I see a chap dressin' a window and he was whistlin' reg'lar light-'arted.... I thought then I'd like to keep a bookshop, any'ow, jest for something to do. And when people weren't about, then you could sit and read the books. See? It wouldn't be 'arf bad."... They mused, each with elbows on table and knuckles to lips, looking with speculative eyes at each other. "Very likely we'll be 'appier than we should 'ave been with more money," said Kipps presently. "We wasn't 'ardly suited," reflected Ann, and left her sentence incomplete. "Fish out of water like," said Kipps.... "You won't 'ave to return that call now," said Kipps, opening a new branch of the question. "That's one good thing." "Lor'!" said Ann, visibly brightening, "no more I shan't!" "I don't s'pose they'd want you to, even if you did--with things as they are." A certain added brightness came into Ann's face. "Nobody won't be able to come leaving cards on us, Artie, now, any more. We are out of _that_!" "There isn't no necessity for us to be stuck up," said Kipps, "any more for ever! 'Ere we are, Ann, common people, with jest no position at all, as you might say, to keep up. No sev'nts, not if you don't like. No dressin' better than other people. If it wasn't we been robbed--dashed if I'd care a rap about losing that money. I b'lieve"--his face shone with the rare pleasure of paradox--"I reely b'lieve, Ann, it'll prove a savin' in the end." 4 The remarkable advertisement which had fired Kipps' imagination with this dream of a bookshop opened out in the most alluring way. It was one little facet in a comprehensive scheme of transatlantic origin, which was to make our old-world methods of book-selling "sit up," and it displayed an imaginative briskness, a lucidity and promise that aroused the profoundest scepticism in the mind of Mr. Bean. To Kipps' renewed investigations it presented itself in an expository illustrated pamphlet (far too well printed, Mr. Bean thought, for a reputable undertaking) of the most convincing sort. Mr. Bean would not let him sink his capital in shares in its projected company that was to make all things new in the world of books, but he could not prevent Kipps becoming one of their associated booksellers. And so when presently it became apparent that an epoch was not to be made, and the "Associated Booksellers' Trading Union (Limited)" receded and dissolved and liquidated (a few drops) and vanished and went away to talk about something else, Kipps remained floating undamaged in this interestingly uncertain universe as an independent bookseller. Except that it failed, the Associated Booksellers' Trading Union had all the stigmata of success. Its fault, perhaps, was that it had them all instead of only one or two. It was to buy wholesale for all

goes

How many times the word 'goes' appears in the text?

you go and slap 'em in the face!" "I didn't slap 'em in the face." "You do--practically. You slams the door in their face, and that's all we see of 'em ever. I wouldn't 'ave 'ad this 'appen not for a ten-pound note." He rounded his regrets with a grunt. For a while there was silence, save for the little stir of Ann's movements preparing the tea. "Tea, Artie," said Ann, handing him a cup. Kipps took it. "I put sugar _once_," said Ann. "Oo, dash it! Oo cares?" said Kipps, taking an extraordinarily large additional lump with fury quivering fingers, and putting his cup with a slight excess of force on the recess cupboard. "Oo cares? "I wouldn't 'ave 'ad that 'appen," he said, bidding steadily against accomplished things, "for twenty pounds." He gloomed in silence through a long minute or so. Then Ann said the fatal thing that exploded him. "Artie!" she said. "What?" "There's Buttud Toce down there! By your foot!" There was a pause, husband and wife regarded one another. "Buttud Toce!" he said. "You go and mess up them callers and then you try and stuff me up with Buttud Toce! Buttud Toce indeed! 'Ere's our first chance of knowing anyone that's at all fit to 'sociate with----. Look 'ere, Ann! Tell you what it is--you got to return that call." "Return that call!" "Yes, you got to return that call. That's what you got to do! I know----" He waved his arm vaguely towards the miscellany of books in the recess. "It's in Manners and Rools of Good S'ity. You got to find jest 'ow many cards to leave and you got to go and leave 'em. See?" Ann's face expressed terror. "But, Artie, 'ow _can_ I?" "'Ow _can_ you? 'Ow _could_ you? You got to do it, any'ow. They won't know you--not in your Bond Street 'at! If they do, they won't say nothing." His voice assumed a note of entreaty. "You mus', Ann." "I can't." "You mus'." "I can't and I won't. Anything in reason I'll do, but face those people again I can't--after what 'as 'appened." "You won't?" "No!"... "So there they go--orf! And we never see them again! And so it goes on! So it goes on! We don't know nobody and we _shan't_ know anybody! And you won't put yourself out not a little bit, or take the trouble to find out anything 'ow it ought to be done." Terrible pause. "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie, that's the troof." "Oh! _don't_ go into that." "I never ought to 'ave merried you, Artie. I'm not equal to the position. If you 'adn't said you'd drown yourself----" She choked. "I don' see why you shouldn't _try_, Ann. _I've_ improved. Why don't you? 'Stead of which you go sending out the servant and 'namelling floors, and then when visitors come----" "'Ow was _I_ to know about y'r old visitors?" cried Ann in a wail, and suddenly got up and fled from amidst their ruined tea, the tea of which "toce, all buttery," was to be the crown and glory. Kipps watched her with a momentary consternation. Then he hardened his heart. "Ought to 'ave known better," he said, "goin' on like that!" He remained for a space rubbing his knees and muttering. He emitted scornfully: "I carn't an' I won't." He saw her as the source of all his shames. Presently, quite mechanically, he stooped down and lifted the flowery china cover. "Ter dash 'er Buttud Toce!" he shouted at the sight of it, and clapped the cover down again hard.... When Gwendolen came back she perceived things were in a slightly unusual poise. Kipps sat by the fire in a rigid attitude reading a casually selected volume of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, and Ann was upstairs and inaccessible--to reappear at a later stage with reddened eyes. Before the fire and still in a perfectly assimilable condition was what was evidently an untouched supply of richly buttered toast under a cracked cover. "They've 'ad a bit of a tiff," said Gwendolen, attending to her duties in the kitchen, with her outdoor hat still on and her mouth full. "They're rummuns--if ever! My eye!" And she took another piece of Ann's generously buttered toast. 4 The Kippses spoke no more that day to one another. The squabble about cards and buttered toast was as serious to them as the most rational of differences. It was all rational to them. Their sense of wrong burnt within them; their sense of what was owing to themselves, the duty of implacability, the obstinacy of pride. In the small hours Kipps lay awake at the nadir of unhappiness and came near groaning. He saw life as an extraordinarily desolating muddle; his futile house, his social discredit, his bad behaviour to Helen, his low marriage to Ann.... He became aware of something irregular in Ann's breathing.... He listened. She was awake and quietly and privately sobbing! He hardened his heart; resolutely he hardened his heart. The stupid little tragedies of these clipped and limited lives! What is the good of keeping up the idyllic sham and pretending that ill-educated, misdirected people "get along very well," and that all this is harmlessly funny and nothing more? You think I'm going to write fat, silly, grinning novels about half-educated, under-trained people and keep it up all the time, that the whole thing's nothing but funny! As I think of them lying unhappily there in the darkness, my vision pierces the night. See what I can see! Above them, brooding over them, I tell you there is a monster, a lumpish monster, like some great, clumsy griffin thing, like the Crystal Palace labyrinthodon, like Coote, like the leaden goddess Dulness Pope Abhorred, like some fat, proud flunkey, like pride, like indolence, like all that is darkening and heavy and obstructive in life. It is matter and darkness, it is the anti-soul, Stupidity. My Kippses live in its shadow. Shalford and his apprenticeship system, the Hastings Academy, the ideas of Coote, the ideas of the old Kippses, all the ideas that have made Kipps what he is, all these are its shadow. But for that monster they might not be groping among false ideas and hurt one another so sorely and so stupidly; but for that, the glowing promise of childhood and youth might have had a happier fruition, thought might have awakened in them to meet _the_ thought of the world, the quickening sunshine of literature pierced to the substance of their souls, their lives might not have been divorced, as now they are divorced for ever, from the apprehension of beauty that we favoured ones are given--the vision of the Grail that makes life fine for ever. I have laughed, and I laugh at these two people; I have sought to make you laugh.... But I see through the darkness the souls of my Kippses, as they are, as little pink strips of living stuff, like the bodies of little, ill-nourished, ailing, ignorant children, children who feel pain, who are naughty and muddled and suffer and do not understand why. And the claw of this Beast rests upon them! CHAPTER III TERMINATIONS 1 Next morning came a remarkable telegram from Folkestone. "Please come at once, urgent, Walshingham," said the telegram, and Kipps, after an agitated but still ample breakfast, departed.... When he returned his face was very white and his countenance disordered. He let himself in with his latchkey and came into the dining-room where Ann sat, affecting to work at a little thing she called a bib. She heard his hat fall in the hall before he entered, as though he had missed the peg. "I got something to tell you, Ann," he said, disregarding their overnight quarrel, and went to the hearthrug and took hold of the mantel, and stared at Ann as though the sight of her was novel. "Well?" said Ann, not looking up and working a little faster. "'E's gone!" Ann looked up sharply and her hands stopped. "_Who's_ gone?" For the first time she perceived Kipps' pallor. "Young Walshingham--I saw 'er and she tole me." "Gone? What d'you mean?" "Cleared out! Gone off for good!" "What for?" "For 'is 'ealth," said Kipps, with sudden bitterness. "'E's been speckylating. He's speckylated our money and 'e's speckylated their money, and now 'e's took 'is 'ook. That's all about it, Ann." "You mean?" "I mean 'e's orf and our twenty-four thousand's orf, too! And 'ere we are! Smashed up! That's all about it, Ann." He panted. Ann had no vocabulary for such an occasion. "Oh, Lor'!" she said, and sat still. Kipps came about and stuck his hands deeply in his trouser pockets. "Speckylated every penny--lorst it all--and gorn." Even his lips were white. "You mean we ain't got nothin' left, Artie?" "Not a penny! Not a bloomin' penny, Ann. No!" A gust of passion whirled across the soul of Kipps. He flung out a knuckly fist. "If I 'ad 'im 'ere," he said, "I'd--I'd--I'd wring 'is neck for 'im. I'd--I'd----" His voice rose to a shout. He thought of Gwendolen in the kitchen and fell to "Ugh!" "But, Artie," said Ann, trying to grasp it, "d'you mean to say he's took our money?" "Speckylated it!" said Kipps, with an illustrative flourish of the arm, that failed to illustrate. "Bort things dear and sold 'em cheap, and played the 'ankey-pankey jackass with everything we got. That's what I mean 'e's done, Ann." He repeated this last sentence with the addition of violent adverbs. "D'you mean to say our money's _gone_, Artie?" "Ter-dash it, _Yes_, Ann!" swore Kipps, exploding in a shout. "Ain't I tellin' you?" He was immediately sorry. "I didn't mean to 'oller at you, Ann," he said, "but I'm all shook up. I don't 'ardly know what I'm sayin'. Ev'ry penny."... "But, Artie----" Kipps grunted. He went to the window and stared for a moment at a sunlit sea. "Gord!" he swore. "I mean," he said, coming back to Ann and with an air of exasperation, "that he's 'bezzled and 'ooked it. That's what I mean, Ann." Ann put down the bib. "But wot are we going to _do_, Artie?" Kipps indicated ignorance, wrath and despair with one comprehensive gesture of his hands. He caught an ornament from the mantel and replaced it. "I'm going to bang about," he said, "if I ain't precious careful." "You saw _'er_, you say?" "Yes." "What did she say 'xactly?" said Ann. "Told me to see a s'licitor--tole me to get someone to 'elp me at once. She was there in black--like she used to be--and speaking cool and careful-like. 'Elen!... She's precious 'ard, is 'Elen. She looked at me straight. 'It's my fault,' she said, 'I ought to 'ave warned you.... Only under the circumstances it was a little difficult.' Straight as anything. I didn't 'ardly say anything to 'er. I didn't seem to begin to take it in until she was showing me out. I 'adn't anything to say. Jest as well, perhaps. She talked like a call a'most. She said--what _was_ it she said about her mother? 'My mother's overcome with grief,' she said, 'so naturally everything comes on me.'" "And she told you to get someone to 'elp you?" "Yes. I been to old Bean." "O' Bean?" "Yes. What I took my business away from!" "What did he say?" "He was a bit off'and at first, but then 'e come 'round. He couldn't tell me anything till 'e knew the facts. What I know of young Walshingham, there won't be much 'elp in the facts. No!" He reflected for a space. "It's a smash-up, Ann. More likely than not, Ann, 'e's left us over'ead in debt. We got to get out of it just 'ow we can.... "We got to begin again," he went on. "_'Ow_, I don't know. All the way 'ome my 'ead's been going. We got to get a living some'ow or other. 'Aving time to ourselves, and a bit of money to spend, and no hurry and worry, it's all over for ever, Ann. We was fools, Ann. We didn't know our benefits. We been caught. Gord!... Gord!" He was on the verge of "banging about" again. They heard a jingle in the passage, the large soft impact of a servant's indoor boots. As if she were a part, a mitigatory part of Fate, came Gwendolen to lay the midday meal. Kipps displayed self-control forthwith. Ann picked up the bib again and bent over it, and the Kippses bore themselves gloomily perhaps, but not despairfully, while their dependant was in the room. She spread the cloth and put out the cutlery with a slow inaccuracy, and Kipps, after a whisper to himself, went again to the window. Ann got up and put away her work methodically in the cheffonier. "When I think," said Kipps, as soon as the door closed again behind Gwendolen, "when I think of the 'ole people and 'aving to tell 'em of it all--I want to smesh my 'ead against the nearest wall. Smesh my silly brains out! And Buggins--Buggins what I'd 'arf promised to start in a lill' outfitting shop in Rendezvous Street."... Gwendolen returned and restored dignity. The midday meal spread itself slowly before them. Gwendolen, after her custom, left the door open and Kipps closed it carefully before sitting down. He stood for a moment, regarding the meal doubtfully. "I don't feel as if I could swaller a moufful," he said. "You got to eat," said Ann.... For a time they said little, and once swallowing was achieved, ate on with a sort of melancholy appetite. Each was now busy thinking. "After all," said Kipps, presently, "whatever 'appens, they can't turn us out or sell us up before nex' quarter-day. I'm pretty sure about that." "Sell us up!" said Ann. "I dessey we're bankrup'," said Kipps, trying to say it easily and helping himself with a trembling hand to unnecessary potatoes. Then a long silence. Ann ceased to eat, and there were silent tears. "More potatoes, Artie?" choked Ann. "I couldn't," said Kipps. "No." He pushed back his plate, which was indeed replete with potatoes, got up and walked about the room. Even the dinner-table looked distraught and unusual. "What to do, I _don't_ know," he said. "Oh, _Lord_!" he ejaculated, and picked up and slapped down a book. Then his eye fell upon another postcard that had come from Chitterlow by the morning's post, and which now lay by him on the mantel-shelf. He took it up, glanced at its imperfectly legible message, and put it down. "Delayed!" he said, scornfully. "Not prodooced in the smalls. Or is it smells 'e says? 'Ow can one understand that? Any'ow 'e's 'umbugging again.... Somefing about the Strand. No! Well, 'e's 'ad all the money 'e'll ever get out of me!... I'm done." He seemed to find a momentary relief in the dramatic effect of his announcement. He came near to a swagger of despair upon the hearthrug, and then suddenly came and sat down next to Ann and rested his chin on the knuckles of his two clenched hands. "I been a fool, Ann," he said in a gloomy monotone. "I been a brasted fool. But it's 'ard on us, all the same. It's 'ard." "'Ow was you to know?" said Ann. "I ought to 'ave known. I did in a sort of way know. And 'ere we are! I wouldn't care so much if it was myself, but it's _you_, Ann! 'Ere we are! Regular smashed up! And you----" He checked at an unspeakable aggravation of their disaster. "I knew 'e wasn't to be depended upon and there I left it! And you got to pay.... What's to 'appen to us all, I don't know." He thrust out his chin and glared at fate. "'Ow do you know 'e's speckylated everything?" said Ann, after a silent survey of him. "'E 'as," said Kipps, irritably, holding firm to disaster. "She say so?" "She don't know, of course, but you depend upon it that's it. She told me she knew something was on, and when she found 'im gone and a note lef' for her she knew it was up with 'im. 'E went by the night boat. She wrote that telegram off to me straight away." Ann surveyed his features with tender, perplexed eyes; she had never seen him so white and drawn before, and her hand rested an inch or so away from his arm. The actual loss was still, as it were, afar from her. The immediate thing was his enormous distress. "'Ow do you know----?" she said and stopped. It would irritate him too much. Kipps' imagination was going headlong. "Sold up!" he emitted presently, and Ann flinched. "Going back to work, day after day--I can't stand it, Ann, I can't. And you----" "It don't do to think of it," said Ann. Presently he came upon a resolve. "I keep on thinking of it, and thinking of it, and what's to be done and what's to be done. I shan't be any good 'ome s'arfernoon. It keeps on going 'round and 'round in my 'ead, and 'round and 'round. I better go for a walk or something. I'd be no comfort to you, Ann. I should want to 'owl and 'ammer things if I 'ung about 'ome. My fingers is all atwitch. I shall keep on thinking 'ow I might 'ave stopped it and callin' myself a fool."... He looked at her between pleading and shame. It seemed like deserting her. Ann regarded him with tear-dimmed eyes. "You'd better do what's good for you, Artie," she said.... "_I'll_ be best cleaning. It's no use sending off Gwendolen before her month, and the top room wants turning out." She added with a sort of grim humour: "May as well turn it out now while I got it." "I _better_ go for a walk," said Kipps.... And presently our poor exploded Kipps was marching out to bear his sudden misery. Habit turned him up the road towards his growing house, and then suddenly he perceived his direction--"Oh, Lor'!"--and turned aside and went up the steep way to the hill crest and the Sandling Road, and over the line by that tree-embowered Junction, and athwart the wide fields towards Postling--a little, black, marching figure--and so up the Downs and over the hills, whither he had never gone before.... 2 He came back long after dark, and Ann met him in the passage. "Where you been, Artie?" she asked, with a strained note in her voice. "I been walking and walking--trying to tire myself out. All the time I been thinking what shall I do. Trying to fix something up all out of nothing." "I didn't know you meant to be out all this time." Kipps was gripped by compunction.... "I can't think what we ought to do," he said, presently. "You can't do anything much, Artie, not till you hear from Mr. Bean." "No; I can't do anything much. That's jest it. And all this time I keep feelin' if I don't do something the top of my 'ead'll bust.... Been trying to make up advertisements 'arf the time I been out--'bout finding a place, good salesman and stock-keeper, and good Manchester dresses, window-dressing--Lor'! Fancy that all beginning again!... If you went to stay with Sid a bit--if I sent every penny I got to you--I dunno! I dunno!" When they had gone to bed there was an elaborate attempt to get to sleep.... In one of their great waking pauses Kipps remarked in a muffled tone: "I didn't mean to frighten you, Ann, being out so late. I kep' on walking and walking, and some'ow it seemed to do me good. I went out to the 'illtop ever so far beyond Stanford, and sat there ever so long, and it seemed to make me better. Just looking over the marsh like, and seeing the sun set."... "Very likely," said Ann, after a long interval, "it isn't so bad as you think it is, Artie." "It's bad," said Kipps. "Very likely, after all, it isn't quite so bad. If there's only a little----" There came another long silence. "Ann," said Kipps in the quiet darkness. "Yes," said Ann. "Ann," said Kipps, and stopped as though he had hastily shut a door upon speech. "I kep' thinking," he said, trying again, "I kep' thinking--after all--I been cross to you and a fool about things--about them cards, Ann; but"--his voice shook to pieces--"we _'ave_ been 'appy, Ann ... some'ow ... togever." And with that he and then she fell into a passion of weeping. They clung very tightly together--closer than they had been since ever the first brightness of their married days turned to the grey of common life again. All the disaster in the world could not prevent their going to sleep at last with their poor little troubled heads close together on one pillow. There was nothing more to be done, there was nothing more to be thought; Time might go on with his mischiefs, but for a little while at least they still had one another. 3 Kipps returned from his second interview with Mr. Bean in a state of strange excitement. He let himself in with his latch-key and slammed the door. "Ann!" he shouted, in an unusual note; "Ann!" Ann replied distantly. "Something to tell you," said Kipps; "something noo!" Ann appeared apprehensive from the kitchen. "Ann," he said, going before her into the little dining-room, for his news was too dignified for the passage, "very likely, Ann, o' Bean says, we shall 'ave----" He decided to prolong the suspense. "Guess!" "I can't, Artie." "Think of a lot of money!" "A 'undred pounds p'raps?" He spoke with immense deliberation. "O v e r a f o u s a n d p o u n d s!" Ann stared and said nothing, only went a shade whiter. "Over, he said. A'most certainly over." He shut the dining-room door and came forward hastily, for Ann, it was clear, meant to take this mitigation of their disaster with a complete abandonment of her self-control. She came near flopping; she fell into his arms. "Artie," she got to at last and began to weep, clinging tightly to him. "Pretty near certain," said Kipps, holding her. "A fousand pounds!" "I _said_, Artie," she wailed on his shoulder with the note of accumulated wrongs, "very likely it wasn't so bad."... "There's things," he said, when presently he came to particulars, "'e couldn't touch. The noo place! It's freehold and paid for, and with the bit of building on it, there's five or six 'undred pound p'raps--say worf free 'undred, for safety. We can't be sold up to finish it, like we thought. O' Bean says we can very likely sell it and get money. 'E says you often get a chance to sell a 'ouse lessen 'arf done, 'specially free'old. _Very_ likely, 'e say. Then there's Hughenden. Hughenden 'asn't been mortgaged not for more than 'arf its value. There's a 'undred or so to be got on that, and the furniture and the rent for the summer still coming in. 'E says there's very likely other things. A fousand pounds, that's what 'e said. 'E said it might even be more."... They were sitting now at the table. "It alters everything," said Ann. "I been thinking that, Ann, all the way 'ome. I came in the motor car. First ride I've 'ad since the smash. We needn't send off Gwendolen, leastways not till _after_. You know. We needn't turn out of 'ere--not for a long time. What we been doing for the o' people we can go on doing a'most as much. And your mother!... I wanted to 'oller coming along. I pretty near run coming down the road by the hotel." "Oh, I _am_ glad we can stop 'ere and be comfortable a bit," said Ann. "I _am_ glad for that." "I pretty near told the driver on the motor--only 'e was the sort won't talk.... You see, Ann, we'll be able to start a shop, we'll be able to get _into_ something like. All about our 'aving to go back to places and that; all that doesn't matter any more." For a while they abandoned themselves to ejaculating transports. Then they fell talking to shape an idea to themselves of the new prospect that opened before them. "We must start a sort of shop," said Kipps, whose imagination had been working. "It'll 'ave to be a shop." "Drapery?" said Ann. "You want such a lot of capital for the drapery, mor'n a thousand pounds you want by a long way--to start it anything like proper." "Well, outfitting. Like Buggins was going to do." Kipps glanced at that for a moment, because the idea had not occurred to him. Then he came back to his prepossession. "Well, I thought of something else, Ann," he said. "You see, I've always thought a little book-shop. It isn't like the drapery--'aving to be learnt. I thought--even before this smash-up--'ow I'd like to 'ave something to do, instead of always 'aving 'olidays always like we 'ave been 'aving." He reflected. "You don't know _much_ about books, do you, Artie?" "You don't want to." He illustrated. "I noticed when we used to go to that Lib'ry at Folkestone, ladies weren't anything like what they was in a draper's--if you 'aven't got _just_ what they want it's 'Oh, no!' and out they go. But in a book shop it's different. One book's very like another--after all, what is it? Something to read and done with. It's not a thing that matters like print dresses or serviettes--where you either like 'em or don't, and people judge you by. They take what you give 'em in books and lib'ries, and glad to be told _what_ to. See 'ow we was--up at that lib'ry."... He paused. "You see, Ann---- "Well, I read 'n 'dvertisement the other day. I been asking Mr. Bean. It said--five 'undred pounds." "What did?" "Branches," said Kipps. Ann failed to understand. "It's a sort of thing that gets up book shops all over the country," said Kipps. "I didn't tell you, but I arst about it a bit. On'y I dropped it again. Before this smash, I mean. I'd thought I'd like to keep a shop for a lark, on'y then I thought it silly. Besides it 'ud 'ave been beneath me." He blushed vividly. "It was a sort of projek of mine, Ann. "On'y it wouldn't 'ave done," he added. It was a tortuous journey when the Kippses set out to explain anything to each other. But through a maze of fragmentary elucidations and questions, their minds did presently begin to approximate to a picture of a compact, bright, little shop, as a framework for themselves. "I thought of it one day when I was in Folkestone. I thought of it one day when I was looking in at a window. I see a chap dressin' a window and he was whistlin' reg'lar light-'arted.... I thought then I'd like to keep a bookshop, any'ow, jest for something to do. And when people weren't about, then you could sit and read the books. See? It wouldn't be 'arf bad."... They mused, each with elbows on table and knuckles to lips, looking with speculative eyes at each other. "Very likely we'll be 'appier than we should 'ave been with more money," said Kipps presently. "We wasn't 'ardly suited," reflected Ann, and left her sentence incomplete. "Fish out of water like," said Kipps.... "You won't 'ave to return that call now," said Kipps, opening a new branch of the question. "That's one good thing." "Lor'!" said Ann, visibly brightening, "no more I shan't!" "I don't s'pose they'd want you to, even if you did--with things as they are." A certain added brightness came into Ann's face. "Nobody won't be able to come leaving cards on us, Artie, now, any more. We are out of _that_!" "There isn't no necessity for us to be stuck up," said Kipps, "any more for ever! 'Ere we are, Ann, common people, with jest no position at all, as you might say, to keep up. No sev'nts, not if you don't like. No dressin' better than other people. If it wasn't we been robbed--dashed if I'd care a rap about losing that money. I b'lieve"--his face shone with the rare pleasure of paradox--"I reely b'lieve, Ann, it'll prove a savin' in the end." 4 The remarkable advertisement which had fired Kipps' imagination with this dream of a bookshop opened out in the most alluring way. It was one little facet in a comprehensive scheme of transatlantic origin, which was to make our old-world methods of book-selling "sit up," and it displayed an imaginative briskness, a lucidity and promise that aroused the profoundest scepticism in the mind of Mr. Bean. To Kipps' renewed investigations it presented itself in an expository illustrated pamphlet (far too well printed, Mr. Bean thought, for a reputable undertaking) of the most convincing sort. Mr. Bean would not let him sink his capital in shares in its projected company that was to make all things new in the world of books, but he could not prevent Kipps becoming one of their associated booksellers. And so when presently it became apparent that an epoch was not to be made, and the "Associated Booksellers' Trading Union (Limited)" receded and dissolved and liquidated (a few drops) and vanished and went away to talk about something else, Kipps remained floating undamaged in this interestingly uncertain universe as an independent bookseller. Except that it failed, the Associated Booksellers' Trading Union had all the stigmata of success. Its fault, perhaps, was that it had them all instead of only one or two. It was to buy wholesale for all

yes--"yes

How many times the word 'yes--"yes' appears in the text?

you happen to have any handcuffs on the Maria?" But my client was pouring out a stiff helping from the decanter, which he still held in his hand. Then he approached the Celebrity. "Don't let it worry you, old man," said he, with intense earnestness. "Don't let it worry you. You're my guest, and I'll see you safe out of it, or bust." "Fenelon," said Mrs. Cooke, gravely, "do you realize what you are saying?" "You're a clever one, Allen," my client continued, and he backed away the better to look him over; "you had nerve to stay as long as you did." The Celebrity laughed confidently. "Cooke," he replied, "I appreciate your generosity,--I really do. I know no offence is meant. The mistake is, in fact, most pardonable." In Mr. Cooke amazement and admiration were clamoring for utterance. "Damn me," he sputtered, "if you're not the coolest embezzler I ever saw." The Celebrity laughed again. Then he surveyed the circle. "My friends," he said, "this is certainly a most amazing coincidence; one which, I assure you, surprises me no less than it does you. You have no doubt remarked that I have my peculiarities. We all have. "I flatter thyself I am not entirely unknown. And the annoyances imposed upon me by a certain fame I have achieved had become such that some months ago I began to crave the pleasures of the life of a private man. I determined to go to some sequestered resort where my face was unfamiliar. The possibility of being recognized at Asquith did not occur to me. Fortunately I was. And a singular chance led me to take the name of the man who has committed this crime, and who has the misfortune to resemble me. I suppose that now," he added impressively, "I shall have to tell you who I am." He paused until these words should have gained their full effect. Then he held up the edition de luxe from which he and Miss Thorn had been reading. "You may have heard, Mrs. Cooke," said he, addressing himself to our hostess, "you may perhaps have heard of the author of this book." Mrs. Cooke was a calm woman, and she read the name on the cover. "Yes," she said, "I have. And you claim to be he?" "Ask my friend Crocker here," he answered carelessly, no doubt exulting that the scene was going off so dramatically. "I should indeed be in a tight box," he went on, "if there were not friends of mine here to help me out." They turned to me. "I am afraid I cannot," I said with what soberness I could. "What!" says he with a start. "What! you deny me?" Miss Trevor had her tongue in her cheek. I bowed. "I am powerless to speak, Mr. Allen," I replied. During this colloquy my client stood between us, looking from one to the other. I well knew that his way of thinking would be with my testimony, and that the gilt name on the edition de luxe had done little towards convincing him of Mr. Allen's innocence. To his mind there was nothing horrible or incongruous in the idea that a well-known author should be a defaulter. It was perfectly possible. He shoved the glass of Scotch towards the Celebrity, with a smile. "Take this, old man," he kindly insisted, "and you'll feel better. What's the use of bucking when you're saddled with a thing like that?" And he pointed to the paper. "Besides, they haven't caught you yet, by a damned sight." The Celebrity waved aside the proffered tumbler. "This is an infamous charge, and you know it, Crocker," he cried. "If you don't, you ought to, as a lawyer. This isn't any time to have fun with a fellow." "My dear sir," I said, "I have charged you with nothing whatever." He turned his back on me in complete disgust. And he came face to face with Miss Trevor. "Miss Trevor, too, knows something of me," he said. "You forget, Mr. Allen," she answered sweetly, "you forget that I have given you my promise not to reveal what I know." The Celebrity chafed, for this was as damaging a statement as could well be uttered against him. But Miss Thorn was his trump card, and she now came forward. "This is ridiculous, Mr. Crocker, simply ridiculous," said she. "I agree with you most heartily, Miss Thorn," I replied. "Nonsense!" exclaimed Miss Thorn, and she drew her lips together, "pure nonsense!" "Nonsense or not, Marian," Mr. Cooke interposed, "we are wasting valuable time. The police are already on the scent, I'll bet my hat." "Fenelon!" Mrs. Cooke remonstrated. "And do you mean to say in soberness, Uncle Fenelon, that you believe the author of The Sybarites to be a defaulter?" said Miss Thorn. "It is indeed hard to believe Mr. Allen a criminal," Mr. Trevor broke in for the first time. "I think it only right that he should be allowed to clear himself before he is put to further inconvenience, and perhaps injustice, by any action we may take in the matter." Mr. Cooke sniffed suspiciously at the word "action." "What action do you mean?" he demanded. "Well," replied Mr. Trevor, with some hesitation, "before we take any steps, that is, notify the police." "Notify the police!" cried my client, his face red with a generous anger. "I have never yet turned a guest over to the police," he said proudly, "and won't, not if I know it. I'm not that kind." Who shall criticise Mr. Cooke's code of morality? "Fenelon," said his wife, "you must remember you have never yet entertained a guest of a larcenous character. No embezzlers up to the present. Marian," she continued, turning to Miss Thorn, "you spoke as if you might, be able to throw some light upon this matter. Do you know whether this gentleman is Charles Wrexell Allen, or whether he is the author? In short, do you know who he is?" The Celebrity lighted a cigarette. Miss Thorn said indignantly, "Upon my word, Aunt Maria, I thought that you, at least, would know better than to credit this silly accusation. He has been a guest at your house, and I am astonished that you should doubt his word." Mrs. Cooke looked at her niece perplexedly. "You must remember, Marian," she said gently, "that I know nothing about him, where he came from, or who he is. Nor does any one at Asquith, except perhaps Miss Trevor, by her own confession. And you do not seem inclined to tell what you know, if indeed you know anything." Upon this Miss Thorn became more indignant still, and Mrs. Cooke went on "Gentlemen, as a rule, do not assume names, especially other people's. They are usually proud of their own. Mr. Allen appears among us, from the clouds, as it were, and in due time we learn from a newspaper that he has committed a defalcation. And, furthermore, the paper contains a portrait and an accurate description which put the thing beyond doubt. I ask you, is it reasonable for him to state coolly after all this that he is another man? That he is a well-known author? It's an absurdity. I was not born yesterday, my dear." "It is most reasonable under the circumstances," replied Miss Thorn, warmly. "Extraordinary? Of course it's extraordinary. And too long to explain to a prejudiced audience, who can't be expected to comprehend the character of a genius, to understand the yearning of a famous man for a little quiet." Mrs. Cooke looked grave. "Marian, you forget yourself," she said. "Oh, I am tired of it, Aunt Maria," cried Miss Thorn; "if he takes my advice, he will refuse to discuss it farther." She did not seem to be aware that she had put forth no argument whatever, save a woman's argument. And I was intensely surprised that her indignation should have got the better of her in this way, having always supposed her clear-headed in the extreme. A few words from her, such as I supposed she would have spoken, had set the Celebrity right with all except Mr. Cooke. To me it was a clear proof that the Celebrity had turned her head, and her mind with it. The silence was broken by an uncontrollable burst of laughter from Miss Trevor. She was quickly frowned down by her father, who reminded her that this was not a comedy. "And, Mr. Allen," he said, "if you have anything to say, or any evidence to bring forward, now is the time to do it." He appeared to forget that I was the district attorney. The Celebrity had seated himself on the trunk of a tree, and was blowing out the smoke in clouds. He was inclined to take Miss Thorn's advice, for he made a gesture of weariness with his cigarette, in the use of which he was singularly eloquent. "Tell me, Mr. Trevor," said he, "why I should sit before you as a tribunal? Why I should take the trouble to clear myself of a senseless charge? My respect for you inclines me to the belief that you are laboring under a momentary excitement; for when you reflect that I am a prominent, not to say famous, author, you will realize how absurd it is that I should be an embezzler, and why I decline to lower myself by an explanation." Mr. Trevor picked up the paper and struck it. "Do you refuse to say anything in the face of such evidence as that?" he cried. "It is not a matter for refusal, Mr. Trevor. It is simply that I cannot admit the possibility of having committed the crime." "Well, sir," said the senator, his black necktie working out of place as his anger got the better of him, "I am to believe, then, because you claim to be the author of a few society novels, that you are infallible? Let me tell you that the President of the United States himself is liable to impeachment, and bound to disprove any charge he may be accused of. What in Halifax do I care for your divine-right-of-authors theory? I'll continue to think you guilty until you are shown to be innocent." Suddenly the full significance of the Celebrity's tactics struck Mr. Cooke, and he reached out and caught hold of Mr. Trevor's coattails. "Hold on, old man," said he; "Allen isn't going to be ass enough to own up to it. Don't you see we'd all be jugged and fined for assisting a criminal over the border? It's out of consideration for us." Mr. Trevor looked sternly over his shoulder at Mr. Cooke. "Do you mean to say, sir, seriously," he asked, "that, for the sake of a misplaced friendship for this man, and a misplaced sense of honor, you are bound to shield a guest, though a criminal? That you intend to assist him to escape from justice? I insist, for my own protection and that of my daughter, as well as for that of the others present that, since he refuses to speak, we must presume him guilty and turn him over." Mr. Trevor turned to Mrs. Cooke, as if relying on her support. "Fenelon," said she, "I have never sought to influence your actions when your friends were concerned, and I shall not begin now. All I ask of you is to consider the consequences of your intention." These words from Mrs. Cooke had much more weight with my client than Mr. Trevor's blustering demands. "Maria, my dear," he said, with a deferential urbanity, "Mr. Allen is my guest, and a gentleman. When a gentleman gives his word that he is not a criminal, it is sufficient." The force of this, for some reason, did not overwhelm his wife; and her lip curled a little, half in contempt, half in risibility. "Pshaw, Fenelon," said she, "what a fraud you are. Why is it you wish to get Mr. Allen over the border, then?" A question which might well have staggered a worthier intellect. "Why, my dear," answered my client, "I wish to save Mr. Allen the inconvenience, not to say the humiliation, of being brought East in custody and strapped with a pair of handcuffs. Let him take a shooting trip to the great Northwest until the real criminal is caught." "Well, Fenelon," replied Mrs. Cooke, unable to repress a smile, "one might as well try to argue with a turn-stile or a weather-vane. I wash my hands of it." But Mr. Trevor, who was both a self-made man and a Western politician, was far from being satisfied. He turned to me with a sweep of the arm he had doubtless learned in the Ohio State Senate. "Mr. Crocker," he cried, "are you, as attorney of this district, going to aid and abet in the escape of a fugitive from justice?" "Mr. Trevor," said I, "I will take the course in this matter which seems fit to me, and without advice from any one." He wheeled on Farrar, repeated the question, and got a like answer. Brought to bay for a time, he glared savagely around him while groping for further arguments. But at this point the Four appeared on the scene, much the worse for thickets, and clamoring for luncheon. They had five small fish between them which they wanted Miss Thorn to cook. CHAPTER XII The Four received Mr. Cooke's plan for the Celebrity's escape to Canada with enthusiastic acclamation, and as the one thing lacking to make the Bear Island trip a complete success. The Celebrity was hailed with the reverence due to the man who puts up the ring-money in a prize-fight. He was accorded, too, a certain amount of respect as a defaulter, which the Four would have denied him as an author, for I am inclined to the belief that the discovery of his literary profession would have lowered him rather than otherwise in their eyes. My client was naturally anxious to get under way at once for the Canadian border, but was overruled in this by his henchmen, who demanded something to eat. We sat down to an impromptu meal, which was an odd affair indeed. Mrs. Cooke maintained her usual serenity, but said little, while Miss Trevor and I had many a mirthful encounter at the thought of the turn matters had taken. At the other end of the cloth were Mr. Cooke and the Four, in wonderful spirits and unimpaired appetite, and in their midst sat the Celebrity, likewise in wonderful spirits. His behavior now and again elicited a loud grunt of disapproval from Mr. Trevor, who was plying his knife and fork in a manner emblematic of his state of mind. Mr. Allen was laughing and joking airily with Mr. Cooke and the guests, denying, but not resenting, their accusations with all the sang froid of a hardened criminal. He did not care particularly to go to Canada, he said. Why should he, when he was innocent? But, if Mr. Cooke insisted, he would enjoy seeing that part of the lake and the Canadian side. Afterwards I perceived Miss Thorn down by the brookside, washing dishes. Her sleeves were drawn back to the elbow, and a dainty white apron covered her blue skirt, while the wind from the lake had disentangled errant wisps of her hair. I stood on the brink above, secure, as I thought, from observation, when she chanced to look up and spied me. "Mr. Crocker," she called, "would you like to make yourself useful?" I was decidedly embarrassed. Her manner was as frank and unconstrained as though I had not been shunning her for weeks past. "If such a thing is possible," I replied. "Do you know a dish-cloth when you see one?" I was doubtful. But I procured the cloth from Miss Trevor and returned. There was an air about Miss Thorn that was new to me. "What an uncompromising man you are, Mr. Crocker," she said to me. "Once a person is unfortunate enough to come under the ban of your disapproval you have nothing whatever to do with them. Now it seems that I have given you offence in some way. Is it not so?" "You magnify my importance," I said. "No temporizing, Mr. Crocker," she went on, as though she meant to be obeyed; "sit down there, and let's have it out. I like you too well to quarrel with you." There was no resisting such a command, and I threw myself on the pebbles at her feet. "I thought we were going to be great friends," she said. "You and Mr. Farrar were so kind to me on the night of my arrival, and we had such fun watching the dance together." "I confess I thought so, too. But you expressed opinions then that I shared. You have since changed your mind, for some unaccountable reason." She paused in her polishing, a shining dish in her hand, and looked down at me with something between a laugh and a frown. "I suppose you have never regretted speaking hastily," she said. "Many a time," I returned, warming; "but if I ever thought a judgment measured and distilled, it was your judgment of the Celebrity." "Does the study of law eliminate humanity?" she asked, with a mock curtsey. "The deliberate sentences are sometimes the unjust ones, and men who are hung by weighed wisdom are often the innocent." "That is all very well in cases of doubt. But here you have the evidences of wrong-doing directly before you." Three dishes were taken up, dried, and put down before she answered me. I threw pebbles into the brook, and wished I had held my tongue. "What evidence?" inquired she. "Well," said I, "I must finish, I suppose. I had a notion you knew of what I inferred. First, let me say that I have no desire to prejudice you against a person whom you admire." "Impossible." Something in her tone made me look up. "Very good, then," I answered. "I, for one, can have no use for a man who devotes himself to a girl long enough to win her affections, and then deserts her with as little compunction as a dog does a rat it has shaken. And that is how your Celebrity treated Miss Trevor." "But Miss Trevor has recovered, I believe," said Miss Thorn. I began to feel a deep, but helpless, insecurity. "Happily, yes," I assented. "Thanks to an excellent physician." A smile twitched the corners of her mouth, as though she enjoyed my discomfiture. I remarked for the fiftieth time how strong her face was, with its generous lines and clearly moulded features. And a suspicion entered my soul. "At any rate," I said, with a laugh, "the Celebrity has got himself into no end of a predicament now. He may go back to New York in custody." "I thought you incapable of resentment, Mr. Crocker. How mean of you to deny him!" "It can do no harm," I answered; "a little lesson in the dangers of incognito may be salutary. I wish it were a little lesson in the dangers of something else." The color mounted to her face as she resumed her occupation. "I am afraid you are a very wicked man," she said. Before I could reply there came a scuffling sound from the bank above us, and the snapping of branches and twigs. It was Mr. Cooke. His descent, the personal conduction of which he lost half-way down, was irregular and spasmodic, and a rude concussion at the bottom knocked off a choice bit of profanity which was balanced on the tip of his tongue. "Tobogganing is a little out of season," said his niece, laughing heartily. Mr. Cooke brushed himself off, picked up the glasses which he had dropped in his flight and pushed them into my hands. Then he pointed lakeward with bulging eyes. "Crocker, old man," he said in a loud whisper, "they tell me that is an Asquith cat-boat." I followed his finger and saw for the first time a sail-boat headed for the island, then about two miles off shore. I raised the glasses. "Yes," I said, "the Scimitar." "That's what Farrar said," cried he. "And what about it?" I asked. "What about it?" he ejaculated. "Why, it's a detective come for Allen. I knew sure as hell if they got as far as Asquith they wouldn't stop there. And that's the fastest sail-boat he could hire there, isn't it?" I replied that it was. He seized me by the shoulder and began dragging me up the bank. "What are you going to do?" I cried, shaking myself loose. "We've got to get on the Maria and run for it," he panted. "There is no time to be lost." He had reached the top of the bank and was running towards the group at the tents. And he actually infused me with some of his red-hot enthusiasm, for I hastened after him. "But you can't begin to get the Maria out before they will be in here," I shouted. He stopped short, gazed at the approaching boat, and then at me. "Is that so?" "Yes, of course," said I, "they will be here in ten minutes." The Celebrity stood in the midst of the excited Four. His hair was parted precisely, and he had induced a monocle to remain in his eye long enough to examine the Scimitar, his nose at the critical elevation. This unruffled exterior made a deep impression on the Four. Was the Celebrity not undergoing the crucial test of a true sport? He was an example alike to criminals and philosophers. Mr. Cooke hurried into the group, which divided respectfully for him, and grasped the Celebrity by the hand. "Something else has got to be done, old man," he said, in a voice which shook with emotion; "they'll be on us before we can get the Maria out." Farrar, who was nailing a rustic bench near by, straightened up at this, his lip curling with a desire to laugh. The Celebrity laid his hand on my client's shoulder. "Cooke," said he, "I'm deeply grateful for all the trouble you wish to take, and for the solicitude you have shown. But let things be. I'll come out of it all right." "Never," cried Cooke, looking proudly around the Four as some Highland chief might have surveyed a faithful clan. "I'd a damned sight rather go to jail myself." "A damned sight," echoed the Four in unison. "I insist, Cooke," said the Celebrity, taking out his eyeglass and tapping Mr. Cooke's purple necktie, "I insist that you drop this business. I repeat my thanks to you and these gentlemen for the friendship they have shown, but say again that I am as innocent of this crime as a baby." Mr. Cooke paid no attention to this speech. His face became radiant. "Didn't any of you fellows strike a cave, or a hollow tree, or something of that sort, knocking around this morning?" One man slapped his knee. "The very place," he cried. "I fell into it," and he showed a rent in his trousers corroboratively. "It's big enough to hold twenty of Allen, and the detective doesn't live that could find it." "Hustle him off, quick," said Mr. Cooke. The mandate was obeyed as literally as though Robin Hood himself had given it. The Celebrity disappeared into the forest, carried rather than urged towards his destined place of confinement. The commotion had brought Mr. Trevor to the spot. He caught sight of the Celebrity's back between the trees, then he looked at the cat-boat entering the cove, a man in the stern preparing to pull in the tender. He intercepted Mr. Cooke on his way to the beach. "What have you done with Mr. Allen?" he asked, in a menacing voice. "Good God," said Mr. Cooke, whose contempt for Mr. Trevor was now infinite, "you talk as if I were the governor of the state. What the devil could I do with him?" "I will have no evasion," replied Mr. Trevor, taking an imposing posture in front of him. "You are trying to defeat the ends of justice by assisting a dangerous criminal to escape. I have warned you, sir, and warn you again of the consequences of your meditated crime, and I give you my word I will do all in my power to frustrate it." Mr. Cooke dug his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. Here was a complication he had not looked for. The Scimitar lay at anchor with her sail down, and two men were coming ashore in the tender. Mr. Cooke's attitude being that of a man who reconsiders a rash resolve, Mr. Trevor was emboldened to say in a moderated tone: "You were carried away by your generosity, Mr. Cooke. I was sure when you took time to think you would see it in another light." Mr. Cooke started off for the place where the boat had grounded. I did not catch his reply, and probably should not have written it here if I had. The senator looked as if he had been sand-bagged. The two men jumped out of the boat and hauled it up. Mr. Cooke waved an easy salute to one, whom I recognized as the big boatman from Asquith, familiarly known as Captain Jay. He owned the Scimitar and several smaller boats. The captain went through the pantomime of an introduction between Mr. Cooke and the other, whom my client shook warmly by the hand, and presently all three came towards us. Mr. Cooke led them to a bar he had improvised by the brook. A pool served the office of refrigerator, and Mr. Cooke had devised an ingenious but complicated arrangement of strings and labels which enabled him to extract any bottle or set of bottles without having to bare his arm and pull out the lot. Farrar and I responded to the call he had given, and went down to assist in the entertainment. My client, with his back to us, was busy manipulating the strings. "Gentlemen," he said, "let me make you acquainted with Mr. Drew. You all know the captain." Had I not suspected Mr. Drew's profession, I think I should not have remarked that he gave each of us a keen look as he raised his head. He had reddish-brown hair, and a pair of bushy red whiskers, each of which tapered to a long point. He was broad in the shoulders, and the clothes he wore rather enhanced this breadth. His suit was gray and almost new, the trousers perceptibly bagging at the knee, and he had a felt hat, a necktie of the white and flowery pattern, and square-toed "Congress" boots. In short, he was a decidedly ordinary looking person; you would meet a hundred like him in the streets of Far Harbor and Beaverton. He might have been a prosperous business man in either of those towns,--a comfortable lumber merchant or mine owner. And he had chosen just the get-up I should have picked for detective work in that region. He had a pleasant eye and a very fetching and hearty manner. But his long whiskers troubled me especially. I kept wondering if they were real. "The captain is sailing Mr. Drew over to Far Harbor," explained Mr. Cooke, "and they have put in here for the night." Mr. Drew was plainly not an amateur, for he volunteered nothing further than this. The necessary bottles having been produced, Mr. Cooke held up his glass and turned to the stranger. "Welcome to our party, old man," said he. Mr. Drew drained his glass and complimented Mr. Cooke on the brand,--a sure key to my client's heart. Whereupon he seated himself between Mr. Drew and the captain and began a discourse on the subject of his own cellar, on which he talked for nearly an hour. His only pauses were for the worthy purpose of filling the detective's or the captain's glass, and these he watched with a hospitable solicitude. The captain had the advantage, three to one, and I made no doubt his employer bitterly regretted not having a boatman whose principles were more strict. At the end of the hour Captain Jay, who by nature was inclined to be taciturn and crabbed, waxed loquacious and even jovial. He sang us the songs he had learned in the winter lumber-camps, which Mr. Cooke never failed to encore to the echo. My client vowed he had not spent a pleasanter afternoon for years. He plied the captain with cigars, and explained to him the mystery of the strings and labels; and the captain experimented until he had broken some of the bottles. Mr. Cooke was not a person who made any great distinction between the three degrees, acquaintance, friendship, and intimacy. When a stranger pleased him, he went from one to the other with such comparative ease that a hardhearted man, and no other, could have resented his advances. Mr. Drew was anything but a hard-hearted man, and he did not object to my client's familiarity. Mr. Cooke made no secret of his admiration for Mr. Drew, and there were just two things about him that Mr. Cooke admired and wondered at, above all else,--the bushy red whiskers. But it appeared that these were the only things that Mr. Drew was really touchy about. I noticed that the detective, without being impolite, did his best to discourage these remarks; but my client knew no such word as discouragement. He was continually saying: "I think I'll grow some like that, old man," or "Have those cut," and the like,--a kind of humor in which the captain took an incredible delight. And finally, when a certain pitch of good feeling had been arrived at, Mr.

profound

How many times the word 'profound' appears in the text?

you happen to have any handcuffs on the Maria?" But my client was pouring out a stiff helping from the decanter, which he still held in his hand. Then he approached the Celebrity. "Don't let it worry you, old man," said he, with intense earnestness. "Don't let it worry you. You're my guest, and I'll see you safe out of it, or bust." "Fenelon," said Mrs. Cooke, gravely, "do you realize what you are saying?" "You're a clever one, Allen," my client continued, and he backed away the better to look him over; "you had nerve to stay as long as you did." The Celebrity laughed confidently. "Cooke," he replied, "I appreciate your generosity,--I really do. I know no offence is meant. The mistake is, in fact, most pardonable." In Mr. Cooke amazement and admiration were clamoring for utterance. "Damn me," he sputtered, "if you're not the coolest embezzler I ever saw." The Celebrity laughed again. Then he surveyed the circle. "My friends," he said, "this is certainly a most amazing coincidence; one which, I assure you, surprises me no less than it does you. You have no doubt remarked that I have my peculiarities. We all have. "I flatter thyself I am not entirely unknown. And the annoyances imposed upon me by a certain fame I have achieved had become such that some months ago I began to crave the pleasures of the life of a private man. I determined to go to some sequestered resort where my face was unfamiliar. The possibility of being recognized at Asquith did not occur to me. Fortunately I was. And a singular chance led me to take the name of the man who has committed this crime, and who has the misfortune to resemble me. I suppose that now," he added impressively, "I shall have to tell you who I am." He paused until these words should have gained their full effect. Then he held up the edition de luxe from which he and Miss Thorn had been reading. "You may have heard, Mrs. Cooke," said he, addressing himself to our hostess, "you may perhaps have heard of the author of this book." Mrs. Cooke was a calm woman, and she read the name on the cover. "Yes," she said, "I have. And you claim to be he?" "Ask my friend Crocker here," he answered carelessly, no doubt exulting that the scene was going off so dramatically. "I should indeed be in a tight box," he went on, "if there were not friends of mine here to help me out." They turned to me. "I am afraid I cannot," I said with what soberness I could. "What!" says he with a start. "What! you deny me?" Miss Trevor had her tongue in her cheek. I bowed. "I am powerless to speak, Mr. Allen," I replied. During this colloquy my client stood between us, looking from one to the other. I well knew that his way of thinking would be with my testimony, and that the gilt name on the edition de luxe had done little towards convincing him of Mr. Allen's innocence. To his mind there was nothing horrible or incongruous in the idea that a well-known author should be a defaulter. It was perfectly possible. He shoved the glass of Scotch towards the Celebrity, with a smile. "Take this, old man," he kindly insisted, "and you'll feel better. What's the use of bucking when you're saddled with a thing like that?" And he pointed to the paper. "Besides, they haven't caught you yet, by a damned sight." The Celebrity waved aside the proffered tumbler. "This is an infamous charge, and you know it, Crocker," he cried. "If you don't, you ought to, as a lawyer. This isn't any time to have fun with a fellow." "My dear sir," I said, "I have charged you with nothing whatever." He turned his back on me in complete disgust. And he came face to face with Miss Trevor. "Miss Trevor, too, knows something of me," he said. "You forget, Mr. Allen," she answered sweetly, "you forget that I have given you my promise not to reveal what I know." The Celebrity chafed, for this was as damaging a statement as could well be uttered against him. But Miss Thorn was his trump card, and she now came forward. "This is ridiculous, Mr. Crocker, simply ridiculous," said she. "I agree with you most heartily, Miss Thorn," I replied. "Nonsense!" exclaimed Miss Thorn, and she drew her lips together, "pure nonsense!" "Nonsense or not, Marian," Mr. Cooke interposed, "we are wasting valuable time. The police are already on the scent, I'll bet my hat." "Fenelon!" Mrs. Cooke remonstrated. "And do you mean to say in soberness, Uncle Fenelon, that you believe the author of The Sybarites to be a defaulter?" said Miss Thorn. "It is indeed hard to believe Mr. Allen a criminal," Mr. Trevor broke in for the first time. "I think it only right that he should be allowed to clear himself before he is put to further inconvenience, and perhaps injustice, by any action we may take in the matter." Mr. Cooke sniffed suspiciously at the word "action." "What action do you mean?" he demanded. "Well," replied Mr. Trevor, with some hesitation, "before we take any steps, that is, notify the police." "Notify the police!" cried my client, his face red with a generous anger. "I have never yet turned a guest over to the police," he said proudly, "and won't, not if I know it. I'm not that kind." Who shall criticise Mr. Cooke's code of morality? "Fenelon," said his wife, "you must remember you have never yet entertained a guest of a larcenous character. No embezzlers up to the present. Marian," she continued, turning to Miss Thorn, "you spoke as if you might, be able to throw some light upon this matter. Do you know whether this gentleman is Charles Wrexell Allen, or whether he is the author? In short, do you know who he is?" The Celebrity lighted a cigarette. Miss Thorn said indignantly, "Upon my word, Aunt Maria, I thought that you, at least, would know better than to credit this silly accusation. He has been a guest at your house, and I am astonished that you should doubt his word." Mrs. Cooke looked at her niece perplexedly. "You must remember, Marian," she said gently, "that I know nothing about him, where he came from, or who he is. Nor does any one at Asquith, except perhaps Miss Trevor, by her own confession. And you do not seem inclined to tell what you know, if indeed you know anything." Upon this Miss Thorn became more indignant still, and Mrs. Cooke went on "Gentlemen, as a rule, do not assume names, especially other people's. They are usually proud of their own. Mr. Allen appears among us, from the clouds, as it were, and in due time we learn from a newspaper that he has committed a defalcation. And, furthermore, the paper contains a portrait and an accurate description which put the thing beyond doubt. I ask you, is it reasonable for him to state coolly after all this that he is another man? That he is a well-known author? It's an absurdity. I was not born yesterday, my dear." "It is most reasonable under the circumstances," replied Miss Thorn, warmly. "Extraordinary? Of course it's extraordinary. And too long to explain to a prejudiced audience, who can't be expected to comprehend the character of a genius, to understand the yearning of a famous man for a little quiet." Mrs. Cooke looked grave. "Marian, you forget yourself," she said. "Oh, I am tired of it, Aunt Maria," cried Miss Thorn; "if he takes my advice, he will refuse to discuss it farther." She did not seem to be aware that she had put forth no argument whatever, save a woman's argument. And I was intensely surprised that her indignation should have got the better of her in this way, having always supposed her clear-headed in the extreme. A few words from her, such as I supposed she would have spoken, had set the Celebrity right with all except Mr. Cooke. To me it was a clear proof that the Celebrity had turned her head, and her mind with it. The silence was broken by an uncontrollable burst of laughter from Miss Trevor. She was quickly frowned down by her father, who reminded her that this was not a comedy. "And, Mr. Allen," he said, "if you have anything to say, or any evidence to bring forward, now is the time to do it." He appeared to forget that I was the district attorney. The Celebrity had seated himself on the trunk of a tree, and was blowing out the smoke in clouds. He was inclined to take Miss Thorn's advice, for he made a gesture of weariness with his cigarette, in the use of which he was singularly eloquent. "Tell me, Mr. Trevor," said he, "why I should sit before you as a tribunal? Why I should take the trouble to clear myself of a senseless charge? My respect for you inclines me to the belief that you are laboring under a momentary excitement; for when you reflect that I am a prominent, not to say famous, author, you will realize how absurd it is that I should be an embezzler, and why I decline to lower myself by an explanation." Mr. Trevor picked up the paper and struck it. "Do you refuse to say anything in the face of such evidence as that?" he cried. "It is not a matter for refusal, Mr. Trevor. It is simply that I cannot admit the possibility of having committed the crime." "Well, sir," said the senator, his black necktie working out of place as his anger got the better of him, "I am to believe, then, because you claim to be the author of a few society novels, that you are infallible? Let me tell you that the President of the United States himself is liable to impeachment, and bound to disprove any charge he may be accused of. What in Halifax do I care for your divine-right-of-authors theory? I'll continue to think you guilty until you are shown to be innocent." Suddenly the full significance of the Celebrity's tactics struck Mr. Cooke, and he reached out and caught hold of Mr. Trevor's coattails. "Hold on, old man," said he; "Allen isn't going to be ass enough to own up to it. Don't you see we'd all be jugged and fined for assisting a criminal over the border? It's out of consideration for us." Mr. Trevor looked sternly over his shoulder at Mr. Cooke. "Do you mean to say, sir, seriously," he asked, "that, for the sake of a misplaced friendship for this man, and a misplaced sense of honor, you are bound to shield a guest, though a criminal? That you intend to assist him to escape from justice? I insist, for my own protection and that of my daughter, as well as for that of the others present that, since he refuses to speak, we must presume him guilty and turn him over." Mr. Trevor turned to Mrs. Cooke, as if relying on her support. "Fenelon," said she, "I have never sought to influence your actions when your friends were concerned, and I shall not begin now. All I ask of you is to consider the consequences of your intention." These words from Mrs. Cooke had much more weight with my client than Mr. Trevor's blustering demands. "Maria, my dear," he said, with a deferential urbanity, "Mr. Allen is my guest, and a gentleman. When a gentleman gives his word that he is not a criminal, it is sufficient." The force of this, for some reason, did not overwhelm his wife; and her lip curled a little, half in contempt, half in risibility. "Pshaw, Fenelon," said she, "what a fraud you are. Why is it you wish to get Mr. Allen over the border, then?" A question which might well have staggered a worthier intellect. "Why, my dear," answered my client, "I wish to save Mr. Allen the inconvenience, not to say the humiliation, of being brought East in custody and strapped with a pair of handcuffs. Let him take a shooting trip to the great Northwest until the real criminal is caught." "Well, Fenelon," replied Mrs. Cooke, unable to repress a smile, "one might as well try to argue with a turn-stile or a weather-vane. I wash my hands of it." But Mr. Trevor, who was both a self-made man and a Western politician, was far from being satisfied. He turned to me with a sweep of the arm he had doubtless learned in the Ohio State Senate. "Mr. Crocker," he cried, "are you, as attorney of this district, going to aid and abet in the escape of a fugitive from justice?" "Mr. Trevor," said I, "I will take the course in this matter which seems fit to me, and without advice from any one." He wheeled on Farrar, repeated the question, and got a like answer. Brought to bay for a time, he glared savagely around him while groping for further arguments. But at this point the Four appeared on the scene, much the worse for thickets, and clamoring for luncheon. They had five small fish between them which they wanted Miss Thorn to cook. CHAPTER XII The Four received Mr. Cooke's plan for the Celebrity's escape to Canada with enthusiastic acclamation, and as the one thing lacking to make the Bear Island trip a complete success. The Celebrity was hailed with the reverence due to the man who puts up the ring-money in a prize-fight. He was accorded, too, a certain amount of respect as a defaulter, which the Four would have denied him as an author, for I am inclined to the belief that the discovery of his literary profession would have lowered him rather than otherwise in their eyes. My client was naturally anxious to get under way at once for the Canadian border, but was overruled in this by his henchmen, who demanded something to eat. We sat down to an impromptu meal, which was an odd affair indeed. Mrs. Cooke maintained her usual serenity, but said little, while Miss Trevor and I had many a mirthful encounter at the thought of the turn matters had taken. At the other end of the cloth were Mr. Cooke and the Four, in wonderful spirits and unimpaired appetite, and in their midst sat the Celebrity, likewise in wonderful spirits. His behavior now and again elicited a loud grunt of disapproval from Mr. Trevor, who was plying his knife and fork in a manner emblematic of his state of mind. Mr. Allen was laughing and joking airily with Mr. Cooke and the guests, denying, but not resenting, their accusations with all the sang froid of a hardened criminal. He did not care particularly to go to Canada, he said. Why should he, when he was innocent? But, if Mr. Cooke insisted, he would enjoy seeing that part of the lake and the Canadian side. Afterwards I perceived Miss Thorn down by the brookside, washing dishes. Her sleeves were drawn back to the elbow, and a dainty white apron covered her blue skirt, while the wind from the lake had disentangled errant wisps of her hair. I stood on the brink above, secure, as I thought, from observation, when she chanced to look up and spied me. "Mr. Crocker," she called, "would you like to make yourself useful?" I was decidedly embarrassed. Her manner was as frank and unconstrained as though I had not been shunning her for weeks past. "If such a thing is possible," I replied. "Do you know a dish-cloth when you see one?" I was doubtful. But I procured the cloth from Miss Trevor and returned. There was an air about Miss Thorn that was new to me. "What an uncompromising man you are, Mr. Crocker," she said to me. "Once a person is unfortunate enough to come under the ban of your disapproval you have nothing whatever to do with them. Now it seems that I have given you offence in some way. Is it not so?" "You magnify my importance," I said. "No temporizing, Mr. Crocker," she went on, as though she meant to be obeyed; "sit down there, and let's have it out. I like you too well to quarrel with you." There was no resisting such a command, and I threw myself on the pebbles at her feet. "I thought we were going to be great friends," she said. "You and Mr. Farrar were so kind to me on the night of my arrival, and we had such fun watching the dance together." "I confess I thought so, too. But you expressed opinions then that I shared. You have since changed your mind, for some unaccountable reason." She paused in her polishing, a shining dish in her hand, and looked down at me with something between a laugh and a frown. "I suppose you have never regretted speaking hastily," she said. "Many a time," I returned, warming; "but if I ever thought a judgment measured and distilled, it was your judgment of the Celebrity." "Does the study of law eliminate humanity?" she asked, with a mock curtsey. "The deliberate sentences are sometimes the unjust ones, and men who are hung by weighed wisdom are often the innocent." "That is all very well in cases of doubt. But here you have the evidences of wrong-doing directly before you." Three dishes were taken up, dried, and put down before she answered me. I threw pebbles into the brook, and wished I had held my tongue. "What evidence?" inquired she. "Well," said I, "I must finish, I suppose. I had a notion you knew of what I inferred. First, let me say that I have no desire to prejudice you against a person whom you admire." "Impossible." Something in her tone made me look up. "Very good, then," I answered. "I, for one, can have no use for a man who devotes himself to a girl long enough to win her affections, and then deserts her with as little compunction as a dog does a rat it has shaken. And that is how your Celebrity treated Miss Trevor." "But Miss Trevor has recovered, I believe," said Miss Thorn. I began to feel a deep, but helpless, insecurity. "Happily, yes," I assented. "Thanks to an excellent physician." A smile twitched the corners of her mouth, as though she enjoyed my discomfiture. I remarked for the fiftieth time how strong her face was, with its generous lines and clearly moulded features. And a suspicion entered my soul. "At any rate," I said, with a laugh, "the Celebrity has got himself into no end of a predicament now. He may go back to New York in custody." "I thought you incapable of resentment, Mr. Crocker. How mean of you to deny him!" "It can do no harm," I answered; "a little lesson in the dangers of incognito may be salutary. I wish it were a little lesson in the dangers of something else." The color mounted to her face as she resumed her occupation. "I am afraid you are a very wicked man," she said. Before I could reply there came a scuffling sound from the bank above us, and the snapping of branches and twigs. It was Mr. Cooke. His descent, the personal conduction of which he lost half-way down, was irregular and spasmodic, and a rude concussion at the bottom knocked off a choice bit of profanity which was balanced on the tip of his tongue. "Tobogganing is a little out of season," said his niece, laughing heartily. Mr. Cooke brushed himself off, picked up the glasses which he had dropped in his flight and pushed them into my hands. Then he pointed lakeward with bulging eyes. "Crocker, old man," he said in a loud whisper, "they tell me that is an Asquith cat-boat." I followed his finger and saw for the first time a sail-boat headed for the island, then about two miles off shore. I raised the glasses. "Yes," I said, "the Scimitar." "That's what Farrar said," cried he. "And what about it?" I asked. "What about it?" he ejaculated. "Why, it's a detective come for Allen. I knew sure as hell if they got as far as Asquith they wouldn't stop there. And that's the fastest sail-boat he could hire there, isn't it?" I replied that it was. He seized me by the shoulder and began dragging me up the bank. "What are you going to do?" I cried, shaking myself loose. "We've got to get on the Maria and run for it," he panted. "There is no time to be lost." He had reached the top of the bank and was running towards the group at the tents. And he actually infused me with some of his red-hot enthusiasm, for I hastened after him. "But you can't begin to get the Maria out before they will be in here," I shouted. He stopped short, gazed at the approaching boat, and then at me. "Is that so?" "Yes, of course," said I, "they will be here in ten minutes." The Celebrity stood in the midst of the excited Four. His hair was parted precisely, and he had induced a monocle to remain in his eye long enough to examine the Scimitar, his nose at the critical elevation. This unruffled exterior made a deep impression on the Four. Was the Celebrity not undergoing the crucial test of a true sport? He was an example alike to criminals and philosophers. Mr. Cooke hurried into the group, which divided respectfully for him, and grasped the Celebrity by the hand. "Something else has got to be done, old man," he said, in a voice which shook with emotion; "they'll be on us before we can get the Maria out." Farrar, who was nailing a rustic bench near by, straightened up at this, his lip curling with a desire to laugh. The Celebrity laid his hand on my client's shoulder. "Cooke," said he, "I'm deeply grateful for all the trouble you wish to take, and for the solicitude you have shown. But let things be. I'll come out of it all right." "Never," cried Cooke, looking proudly around the Four as some Highland chief might have surveyed a faithful clan. "I'd a damned sight rather go to jail myself." "A damned sight," echoed the Four in unison. "I insist, Cooke," said the Celebrity, taking out his eyeglass and tapping Mr. Cooke's purple necktie, "I insist that you drop this business. I repeat my thanks to you and these gentlemen for the friendship they have shown, but say again that I am as innocent of this crime as a baby." Mr. Cooke paid no attention to this speech. His face became radiant. "Didn't any of you fellows strike a cave, or a hollow tree, or something of that sort, knocking around this morning?" One man slapped his knee. "The very place," he cried. "I fell into it," and he showed a rent in his trousers corroboratively. "It's big enough to hold twenty of Allen, and the detective doesn't live that could find it." "Hustle him off, quick," said Mr. Cooke. The mandate was obeyed as literally as though Robin Hood himself had given it. The Celebrity disappeared into the forest, carried rather than urged towards his destined place of confinement. The commotion had brought Mr. Trevor to the spot. He caught sight of the Celebrity's back between the trees, then he looked at the cat-boat entering the cove, a man in the stern preparing to pull in the tender. He intercepted Mr. Cooke on his way to the beach. "What have you done with Mr. Allen?" he asked, in a menacing voice. "Good God," said Mr. Cooke, whose contempt for Mr. Trevor was now infinite, "you talk as if I were the governor of the state. What the devil could I do with him?" "I will have no evasion," replied Mr. Trevor, taking an imposing posture in front of him. "You are trying to defeat the ends of justice by assisting a dangerous criminal to escape. I have warned you, sir, and warn you again of the consequences of your meditated crime, and I give you my word I will do all in my power to frustrate it." Mr. Cooke dug his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. Here was a complication he had not looked for. The Scimitar lay at anchor with her sail down, and two men were coming ashore in the tender. Mr. Cooke's attitude being that of a man who reconsiders a rash resolve, Mr. Trevor was emboldened to say in a moderated tone: "You were carried away by your generosity, Mr. Cooke. I was sure when you took time to think you would see it in another light." Mr. Cooke started off for the place where the boat had grounded. I did not catch his reply, and probably should not have written it here if I had. The senator looked as if he had been sand-bagged. The two men jumped out of the boat and hauled it up. Mr. Cooke waved an easy salute to one, whom I recognized as the big boatman from Asquith, familiarly known as Captain Jay. He owned the Scimitar and several smaller boats. The captain went through the pantomime of an introduction between Mr. Cooke and the other, whom my client shook warmly by the hand, and presently all three came towards us. Mr. Cooke led them to a bar he had improvised by the brook. A pool served the office of refrigerator, and Mr. Cooke had devised an ingenious but complicated arrangement of strings and labels which enabled him to extract any bottle or set of bottles without having to bare his arm and pull out the lot. Farrar and I responded to the call he had given, and went down to assist in the entertainment. My client, with his back to us, was busy manipulating the strings. "Gentlemen," he said, "let me make you acquainted with Mr. Drew. You all know the captain." Had I not suspected Mr. Drew's profession, I think I should not have remarked that he gave each of us a keen look as he raised his head. He had reddish-brown hair, and a pair of bushy red whiskers, each of which tapered to a long point. He was broad in the shoulders, and the clothes he wore rather enhanced this breadth. His suit was gray and almost new, the trousers perceptibly bagging at the knee, and he had a felt hat, a necktie of the white and flowery pattern, and square-toed "Congress" boots. In short, he was a decidedly ordinary looking person; you would meet a hundred like him in the streets of Far Harbor and Beaverton. He might have been a prosperous business man in either of those towns,--a comfortable lumber merchant or mine owner. And he had chosen just the get-up I should have picked for detective work in that region. He had a pleasant eye and a very fetching and hearty manner. But his long whiskers troubled me especially. I kept wondering if they were real. "The captain is sailing Mr. Drew over to Far Harbor," explained Mr. Cooke, "and they have put in here for the night." Mr. Drew was plainly not an amateur, for he volunteered nothing further than this. The necessary bottles having been produced, Mr. Cooke held up his glass and turned to the stranger. "Welcome to our party, old man," said he. Mr. Drew drained his glass and complimented Mr. Cooke on the brand,--a sure key to my client's heart. Whereupon he seated himself between Mr. Drew and the captain and began a discourse on the subject of his own cellar, on which he talked for nearly an hour. His only pauses were for the worthy purpose of filling the detective's or the captain's glass, and these he watched with a hospitable solicitude. The captain had the advantage, three to one, and I made no doubt his employer bitterly regretted not having a boatman whose principles were more strict. At the end of the hour Captain Jay, who by nature was inclined to be taciturn and crabbed, waxed loquacious and even jovial. He sang us the songs he had learned in the winter lumber-camps, which Mr. Cooke never failed to encore to the echo. My client vowed he had not spent a pleasanter afternoon for years. He plied the captain with cigars, and explained to him the mystery of the strings and labels; and the captain experimented until he had broken some of the bottles. Mr. Cooke was not a person who made any great distinction between the three degrees, acquaintance, friendship, and intimacy. When a stranger pleased him, he went from one to the other with such comparative ease that a hardhearted man, and no other, could have resented his advances. Mr. Drew was anything but a hard-hearted man, and he did not object to my client's familiarity. Mr. Cooke made no secret of his admiration for Mr. Drew, and there were just two things about him that Mr. Cooke admired and wondered at, above all else,--the bushy red whiskers. But it appeared that these were the only things that Mr. Drew was really touchy about. I noticed that the detective, without being impolite, did his best to discourage these remarks; but my client knew no such word as discouragement. He was continually saying: "I think I'll grow some like that, old man," or "Have those cut," and the like,--a kind of humor in which the captain took an incredible delight. And finally, when a certain pitch of good feeling had been arrived at, Mr.

poured

How many times the word 'poured' appears in the text?

you happen to have any handcuffs on the Maria?" But my client was pouring out a stiff helping from the decanter, which he still held in his hand. Then he approached the Celebrity. "Don't let it worry you, old man," said he, with intense earnestness. "Don't let it worry you. You're my guest, and I'll see you safe out of it, or bust." "Fenelon," said Mrs. Cooke, gravely, "do you realize what you are saying?" "You're a clever one, Allen," my client continued, and he backed away the better to look him over; "you had nerve to stay as long as you did." The Celebrity laughed confidently. "Cooke," he replied, "I appreciate your generosity,--I really do. I know no offence is meant. The mistake is, in fact, most pardonable." In Mr. Cooke amazement and admiration were clamoring for utterance. "Damn me," he sputtered, "if you're not the coolest embezzler I ever saw." The Celebrity laughed again. Then he surveyed the circle. "My friends," he said, "this is certainly a most amazing coincidence; one which, I assure you, surprises me no less than it does you. You have no doubt remarked that I have my peculiarities. We all have. "I flatter thyself I am not entirely unknown. And the annoyances imposed upon me by a certain fame I have achieved had become such that some months ago I began to crave the pleasures of the life of a private man. I determined to go to some sequestered resort where my face was unfamiliar. The possibility of being recognized at Asquith did not occur to me. Fortunately I was. And a singular chance led me to take the name of the man who has committed this crime, and who has the misfortune to resemble me. I suppose that now," he added impressively, "I shall have to tell you who I am." He paused until these words should have gained their full effect. Then he held up the edition de luxe from which he and Miss Thorn had been reading. "You may have heard, Mrs. Cooke," said he, addressing himself to our hostess, "you may perhaps have heard of the author of this book." Mrs. Cooke was a calm woman, and she read the name on the cover. "Yes," she said, "I have. And you claim to be he?" "Ask my friend Crocker here," he answered carelessly, no doubt exulting that the scene was going off so dramatically. "I should indeed be in a tight box," he went on, "if there were not friends of mine here to help me out." They turned to me. "I am afraid I cannot," I said with what soberness I could. "What!" says he with a start. "What! you deny me?" Miss Trevor had her tongue in her cheek. I bowed. "I am powerless to speak, Mr. Allen," I replied. During this colloquy my client stood between us, looking from one to the other. I well knew that his way of thinking would be with my testimony, and that the gilt name on the edition de luxe had done little towards convincing him of Mr. Allen's innocence. To his mind there was nothing horrible or incongruous in the idea that a well-known author should be a defaulter. It was perfectly possible. He shoved the glass of Scotch towards the Celebrity, with a smile. "Take this, old man," he kindly insisted, "and you'll feel better. What's the use of bucking when you're saddled with a thing like that?" And he pointed to the paper. "Besides, they haven't caught you yet, by a damned sight." The Celebrity waved aside the proffered tumbler. "This is an infamous charge, and you know it, Crocker," he cried. "If you don't, you ought to, as a lawyer. This isn't any time to have fun with a fellow." "My dear sir," I said, "I have charged you with nothing whatever." He turned his back on me in complete disgust. And he came face to face with Miss Trevor. "Miss Trevor, too, knows something of me," he said. "You forget, Mr. Allen," she answered sweetly, "you forget that I have given you my promise not to reveal what I know." The Celebrity chafed, for this was as damaging a statement as could well be uttered against him. But Miss Thorn was his trump card, and she now came forward. "This is ridiculous, Mr. Crocker, simply ridiculous," said she. "I agree with you most heartily, Miss Thorn," I replied. "Nonsense!" exclaimed Miss Thorn, and she drew her lips together, "pure nonsense!" "Nonsense or not, Marian," Mr. Cooke interposed, "we are wasting valuable time. The police are already on the scent, I'll bet my hat." "Fenelon!" Mrs. Cooke remonstrated. "And do you mean to say in soberness, Uncle Fenelon, that you believe the author of The Sybarites to be a defaulter?" said Miss Thorn. "It is indeed hard to believe Mr. Allen a criminal," Mr. Trevor broke in for the first time. "I think it only right that he should be allowed to clear himself before he is put to further inconvenience, and perhaps injustice, by any action we may take in the matter." Mr. Cooke sniffed suspiciously at the word "action." "What action do you mean?" he demanded. "Well," replied Mr. Trevor, with some hesitation, "before we take any steps, that is, notify the police." "Notify the police!" cried my client, his face red with a generous anger. "I have never yet turned a guest over to the police," he said proudly, "and won't, not if I know it. I'm not that kind." Who shall criticise Mr. Cooke's code of morality? "Fenelon," said his wife, "you must remember you have never yet entertained a guest of a larcenous character. No embezzlers up to the present. Marian," she continued, turning to Miss Thorn, "you spoke as if you might, be able to throw some light upon this matter. Do you know whether this gentleman is Charles Wrexell Allen, or whether he is the author? In short, do you know who he is?" The Celebrity lighted a cigarette. Miss Thorn said indignantly, "Upon my word, Aunt Maria, I thought that you, at least, would know better than to credit this silly accusation. He has been a guest at your house, and I am astonished that you should doubt his word." Mrs. Cooke looked at her niece perplexedly. "You must remember, Marian," she said gently, "that I know nothing about him, where he came from, or who he is. Nor does any one at Asquith, except perhaps Miss Trevor, by her own confession. And you do not seem inclined to tell what you know, if indeed you know anything." Upon this Miss Thorn became more indignant still, and Mrs. Cooke went on "Gentlemen, as a rule, do not assume names, especially other people's. They are usually proud of their own. Mr. Allen appears among us, from the clouds, as it were, and in due time we learn from a newspaper that he has committed a defalcation. And, furthermore, the paper contains a portrait and an accurate description which put the thing beyond doubt. I ask you, is it reasonable for him to state coolly after all this that he is another man? That he is a well-known author? It's an absurdity. I was not born yesterday, my dear." "It is most reasonable under the circumstances," replied Miss Thorn, warmly. "Extraordinary? Of course it's extraordinary. And too long to explain to a prejudiced audience, who can't be expected to comprehend the character of a genius, to understand the yearning of a famous man for a little quiet." Mrs. Cooke looked grave. "Marian, you forget yourself," she said. "Oh, I am tired of it, Aunt Maria," cried Miss Thorn; "if he takes my advice, he will refuse to discuss it farther." She did not seem to be aware that she had put forth no argument whatever, save a woman's argument. And I was intensely surprised that her indignation should have got the better of her in this way, having always supposed her clear-headed in the extreme. A few words from her, such as I supposed she would have spoken, had set the Celebrity right with all except Mr. Cooke. To me it was a clear proof that the Celebrity had turned her head, and her mind with it. The silence was broken by an uncontrollable burst of laughter from Miss Trevor. She was quickly frowned down by her father, who reminded her that this was not a comedy. "And, Mr. Allen," he said, "if you have anything to say, or any evidence to bring forward, now is the time to do it." He appeared to forget that I was the district attorney. The Celebrity had seated himself on the trunk of a tree, and was blowing out the smoke in clouds. He was inclined to take Miss Thorn's advice, for he made a gesture of weariness with his cigarette, in the use of which he was singularly eloquent. "Tell me, Mr. Trevor," said he, "why I should sit before you as a tribunal? Why I should take the trouble to clear myself of a senseless charge? My respect for you inclines me to the belief that you are laboring under a momentary excitement; for when you reflect that I am a prominent, not to say famous, author, you will realize how absurd it is that I should be an embezzler, and why I decline to lower myself by an explanation." Mr. Trevor picked up the paper and struck it. "Do you refuse to say anything in the face of such evidence as that?" he cried. "It is not a matter for refusal, Mr. Trevor. It is simply that I cannot admit the possibility of having committed the crime." "Well, sir," said the senator, his black necktie working out of place as his anger got the better of him, "I am to believe, then, because you claim to be the author of a few society novels, that you are infallible? Let me tell you that the President of the United States himself is liable to impeachment, and bound to disprove any charge he may be accused of. What in Halifax do I care for your divine-right-of-authors theory? I'll continue to think you guilty until you are shown to be innocent." Suddenly the full significance of the Celebrity's tactics struck Mr. Cooke, and he reached out and caught hold of Mr. Trevor's coattails. "Hold on, old man," said he; "Allen isn't going to be ass enough to own up to it. Don't you see we'd all be jugged and fined for assisting a criminal over the border? It's out of consideration for us." Mr. Trevor looked sternly over his shoulder at Mr. Cooke. "Do you mean to say, sir, seriously," he asked, "that, for the sake of a misplaced friendship for this man, and a misplaced sense of honor, you are bound to shield a guest, though a criminal? That you intend to assist him to escape from justice? I insist, for my own protection and that of my daughter, as well as for that of the others present that, since he refuses to speak, we must presume him guilty and turn him over." Mr. Trevor turned to Mrs. Cooke, as if relying on her support. "Fenelon," said she, "I have never sought to influence your actions when your friends were concerned, and I shall not begin now. All I ask of you is to consider the consequences of your intention." These words from Mrs. Cooke had much more weight with my client than Mr. Trevor's blustering demands. "Maria, my dear," he said, with a deferential urbanity, "Mr. Allen is my guest, and a gentleman. When a gentleman gives his word that he is not a criminal, it is sufficient." The force of this, for some reason, did not overwhelm his wife; and her lip curled a little, half in contempt, half in risibility. "Pshaw, Fenelon," said she, "what a fraud you are. Why is it you wish to get Mr. Allen over the border, then?" A question which might well have staggered a worthier intellect. "Why, my dear," answered my client, "I wish to save Mr. Allen the inconvenience, not to say the humiliation, of being brought East in custody and strapped with a pair of handcuffs. Let him take a shooting trip to the great Northwest until the real criminal is caught." "Well, Fenelon," replied Mrs. Cooke, unable to repress a smile, "one might as well try to argue with a turn-stile or a weather-vane. I wash my hands of it." But Mr. Trevor, who was both a self-made man and a Western politician, was far from being satisfied. He turned to me with a sweep of the arm he had doubtless learned in the Ohio State Senate. "Mr. Crocker," he cried, "are you, as attorney of this district, going to aid and abet in the escape of a fugitive from justice?" "Mr. Trevor," said I, "I will take the course in this matter which seems fit to me, and without advice from any one." He wheeled on Farrar, repeated the question, and got a like answer. Brought to bay for a time, he glared savagely around him while groping for further arguments. But at this point the Four appeared on the scene, much the worse for thickets, and clamoring for luncheon. They had five small fish between them which they wanted Miss Thorn to cook. CHAPTER XII The Four received Mr. Cooke's plan for the Celebrity's escape to Canada with enthusiastic acclamation, and as the one thing lacking to make the Bear Island trip a complete success. The Celebrity was hailed with the reverence due to the man who puts up the ring-money in a prize-fight. He was accorded, too, a certain amount of respect as a defaulter, which the Four would have denied him as an author, for I am inclined to the belief that the discovery of his literary profession would have lowered him rather than otherwise in their eyes. My client was naturally anxious to get under way at once for the Canadian border, but was overruled in this by his henchmen, who demanded something to eat. We sat down to an impromptu meal, which was an odd affair indeed. Mrs. Cooke maintained her usual serenity, but said little, while Miss Trevor and I had many a mirthful encounter at the thought of the turn matters had taken. At the other end of the cloth were Mr. Cooke and the Four, in wonderful spirits and unimpaired appetite, and in their midst sat the Celebrity, likewise in wonderful spirits. His behavior now and again elicited a loud grunt of disapproval from Mr. Trevor, who was plying his knife and fork in a manner emblematic of his state of mind. Mr. Allen was laughing and joking airily with Mr. Cooke and the guests, denying, but not resenting, their accusations with all the sang froid of a hardened criminal. He did not care particularly to go to Canada, he said. Why should he, when he was innocent? But, if Mr. Cooke insisted, he would enjoy seeing that part of the lake and the Canadian side. Afterwards I perceived Miss Thorn down by the brookside, washing dishes. Her sleeves were drawn back to the elbow, and a dainty white apron covered her blue skirt, while the wind from the lake had disentangled errant wisps of her hair. I stood on the brink above, secure, as I thought, from observation, when she chanced to look up and spied me. "Mr. Crocker," she called, "would you like to make yourself useful?" I was decidedly embarrassed. Her manner was as frank and unconstrained as though I had not been shunning her for weeks past. "If such a thing is possible," I replied. "Do you know a dish-cloth when you see one?" I was doubtful. But I procured the cloth from Miss Trevor and returned. There was an air about Miss Thorn that was new to me. "What an uncompromising man you are, Mr. Crocker," she said to me. "Once a person is unfortunate enough to come under the ban of your disapproval you have nothing whatever to do with them. Now it seems that I have given you offence in some way. Is it not so?" "You magnify my importance," I said. "No temporizing, Mr. Crocker," she went on, as though she meant to be obeyed; "sit down there, and let's have it out. I like you too well to quarrel with you." There was no resisting such a command, and I threw myself on the pebbles at her feet. "I thought we were going to be great friends," she said. "You and Mr. Farrar were so kind to me on the night of my arrival, and we had such fun watching the dance together." "I confess I thought so, too. But you expressed opinions then that I shared. You have since changed your mind, for some unaccountable reason." She paused in her polishing, a shining dish in her hand, and looked down at me with something between a laugh and a frown. "I suppose you have never regretted speaking hastily," she said. "Many a time," I returned, warming; "but if I ever thought a judgment measured and distilled, it was your judgment of the Celebrity." "Does the study of law eliminate humanity?" she asked, with a mock curtsey. "The deliberate sentences are sometimes the unjust ones, and men who are hung by weighed wisdom are often the innocent." "That is all very well in cases of doubt. But here you have the evidences of wrong-doing directly before you." Three dishes were taken up, dried, and put down before she answered me. I threw pebbles into the brook, and wished I had held my tongue. "What evidence?" inquired she. "Well," said I, "I must finish, I suppose. I had a notion you knew of what I inferred. First, let me say that I have no desire to prejudice you against a person whom you admire." "Impossible." Something in her tone made me look up. "Very good, then," I answered. "I, for one, can have no use for a man who devotes himself to a girl long enough to win her affections, and then deserts her with as little compunction as a dog does a rat it has shaken. And that is how your Celebrity treated Miss Trevor." "But Miss Trevor has recovered, I believe," said Miss Thorn. I began to feel a deep, but helpless, insecurity. "Happily, yes," I assented. "Thanks to an excellent physician." A smile twitched the corners of her mouth, as though she enjoyed my discomfiture. I remarked for the fiftieth time how strong her face was, with its generous lines and clearly moulded features. And a suspicion entered my soul. "At any rate," I said, with a laugh, "the Celebrity has got himself into no end of a predicament now. He may go back to New York in custody." "I thought you incapable of resentment, Mr. Crocker. How mean of you to deny him!" "It can do no harm," I answered; "a little lesson in the dangers of incognito may be salutary. I wish it were a little lesson in the dangers of something else." The color mounted to her face as she resumed her occupation. "I am afraid you are a very wicked man," she said. Before I could reply there came a scuffling sound from the bank above us, and the snapping of branches and twigs. It was Mr. Cooke. His descent, the personal conduction of which he lost half-way down, was irregular and spasmodic, and a rude concussion at the bottom knocked off a choice bit of profanity which was balanced on the tip of his tongue. "Tobogganing is a little out of season," said his niece, laughing heartily. Mr. Cooke brushed himself off, picked up the glasses which he had dropped in his flight and pushed them into my hands. Then he pointed lakeward with bulging eyes. "Crocker, old man," he said in a loud whisper, "they tell me that is an Asquith cat-boat." I followed his finger and saw for the first time a sail-boat headed for the island, then about two miles off shore. I raised the glasses. "Yes," I said, "the Scimitar." "That's what Farrar said," cried he. "And what about it?" I asked. "What about it?" he ejaculated. "Why, it's a detective come for Allen. I knew sure as hell if they got as far as Asquith they wouldn't stop there. And that's the fastest sail-boat he could hire there, isn't it?" I replied that it was. He seized me by the shoulder and began dragging me up the bank. "What are you going to do?" I cried, shaking myself loose. "We've got to get on the Maria and run for it," he panted. "There is no time to be lost." He had reached the top of the bank and was running towards the group at the tents. And he actually infused me with some of his red-hot enthusiasm, for I hastened after him. "But you can't begin to get the Maria out before they will be in here," I shouted. He stopped short, gazed at the approaching boat, and then at me. "Is that so?" "Yes, of course," said I, "they will be here in ten minutes." The Celebrity stood in the midst of the excited Four. His hair was parted precisely, and he had induced a monocle to remain in his eye long enough to examine the Scimitar, his nose at the critical elevation. This unruffled exterior made a deep impression on the Four. Was the Celebrity not undergoing the crucial test of a true sport? He was an example alike to criminals and philosophers. Mr. Cooke hurried into the group, which divided respectfully for him, and grasped the Celebrity by the hand. "Something else has got to be done, old man," he said, in a voice which shook with emotion; "they'll be on us before we can get the Maria out." Farrar, who was nailing a rustic bench near by, straightened up at this, his lip curling with a desire to laugh. The Celebrity laid his hand on my client's shoulder. "Cooke," said he, "I'm deeply grateful for all the trouble you wish to take, and for the solicitude you have shown. But let things be. I'll come out of it all right." "Never," cried Cooke, looking proudly around the Four as some Highland chief might have surveyed a faithful clan. "I'd a damned sight rather go to jail myself." "A damned sight," echoed the Four in unison. "I insist, Cooke," said the Celebrity, taking out his eyeglass and tapping Mr. Cooke's purple necktie, "I insist that you drop this business. I repeat my thanks to you and these gentlemen for the friendship they have shown, but say again that I am as innocent of this crime as a baby." Mr. Cooke paid no attention to this speech. His face became radiant. "Didn't any of you fellows strike a cave, or a hollow tree, or something of that sort, knocking around this morning?" One man slapped his knee. "The very place," he cried. "I fell into it," and he showed a rent in his trousers corroboratively. "It's big enough to hold twenty of Allen, and the detective doesn't live that could find it." "Hustle him off, quick," said Mr. Cooke. The mandate was obeyed as literally as though Robin Hood himself had given it. The Celebrity disappeared into the forest, carried rather than urged towards his destined place of confinement. The commotion had brought Mr. Trevor to the spot. He caught sight of the Celebrity's back between the trees, then he looked at the cat-boat entering the cove, a man in the stern preparing to pull in the tender. He intercepted Mr. Cooke on his way to the beach. "What have you done with Mr. Allen?" he asked, in a menacing voice. "Good God," said Mr. Cooke, whose contempt for Mr. Trevor was now infinite, "you talk as if I were the governor of the state. What the devil could I do with him?" "I will have no evasion," replied Mr. Trevor, taking an imposing posture in front of him. "You are trying to defeat the ends of justice by assisting a dangerous criminal to escape. I have warned you, sir, and warn you again of the consequences of your meditated crime, and I give you my word I will do all in my power to frustrate it." Mr. Cooke dug his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. Here was a complication he had not looked for. The Scimitar lay at anchor with her sail down, and two men were coming ashore in the tender. Mr. Cooke's attitude being that of a man who reconsiders a rash resolve, Mr. Trevor was emboldened to say in a moderated tone: "You were carried away by your generosity, Mr. Cooke. I was sure when you took time to think you would see it in another light." Mr. Cooke started off for the place where the boat had grounded. I did not catch his reply, and probably should not have written it here if I had. The senator looked as if he had been sand-bagged. The two men jumped out of the boat and hauled it up. Mr. Cooke waved an easy salute to one, whom I recognized as the big boatman from Asquith, familiarly known as Captain Jay. He owned the Scimitar and several smaller boats. The captain went through the pantomime of an introduction between Mr. Cooke and the other, whom my client shook warmly by the hand, and presently all three came towards us. Mr. Cooke led them to a bar he had improvised by the brook. A pool served the office of refrigerator, and Mr. Cooke had devised an ingenious but complicated arrangement of strings and labels which enabled him to extract any bottle or set of bottles without having to bare his arm and pull out the lot. Farrar and I responded to the call he had given, and went down to assist in the entertainment. My client, with his back to us, was busy manipulating the strings. "Gentlemen," he said, "let me make you acquainted with Mr. Drew. You all know the captain." Had I not suspected Mr. Drew's profession, I think I should not have remarked that he gave each of us a keen look as he raised his head. He had reddish-brown hair, and a pair of bushy red whiskers, each of which tapered to a long point. He was broad in the shoulders, and the clothes he wore rather enhanced this breadth. His suit was gray and almost new, the trousers perceptibly bagging at the knee, and he had a felt hat, a necktie of the white and flowery pattern, and square-toed "Congress" boots. In short, he was a decidedly ordinary looking person; you would meet a hundred like him in the streets of Far Harbor and Beaverton. He might have been a prosperous business man in either of those towns,--a comfortable lumber merchant or mine owner. And he had chosen just the get-up I should have picked for detective work in that region. He had a pleasant eye and a very fetching and hearty manner. But his long whiskers troubled me especially. I kept wondering if they were real. "The captain is sailing Mr. Drew over to Far Harbor," explained Mr. Cooke, "and they have put in here for the night." Mr. Drew was plainly not an amateur, for he volunteered nothing further than this. The necessary bottles having been produced, Mr. Cooke held up his glass and turned to the stranger. "Welcome to our party, old man," said he. Mr. Drew drained his glass and complimented Mr. Cooke on the brand,--a sure key to my client's heart. Whereupon he seated himself between Mr. Drew and the captain and began a discourse on the subject of his own cellar, on which he talked for nearly an hour. His only pauses were for the worthy purpose of filling the detective's or the captain's glass, and these he watched with a hospitable solicitude. The captain had the advantage, three to one, and I made no doubt his employer bitterly regretted not having a boatman whose principles were more strict. At the end of the hour Captain Jay, who by nature was inclined to be taciturn and crabbed, waxed loquacious and even jovial. He sang us the songs he had learned in the winter lumber-camps, which Mr. Cooke never failed to encore to the echo. My client vowed he had not spent a pleasanter afternoon for years. He plied the captain with cigars, and explained to him the mystery of the strings and labels; and the captain experimented until he had broken some of the bottles. Mr. Cooke was not a person who made any great distinction between the three degrees, acquaintance, friendship, and intimacy. When a stranger pleased him, he went from one to the other with such comparative ease that a hardhearted man, and no other, could have resented his advances. Mr. Drew was anything but a hard-hearted man, and he did not object to my client's familiarity. Mr. Cooke made no secret of his admiration for Mr. Drew, and there were just two things about him that Mr. Cooke admired and wondered at, above all else,--the bushy red whiskers. But it appeared that these were the only things that Mr. Drew was really touchy about. I noticed that the detective, without being impolite, did his best to discourage these remarks; but my client knew no such word as discouragement. He was continually saying: "I think I'll grow some like that, old man," or "Have those cut," and the like,--a kind of humor in which the captain took an incredible delight. And finally, when a certain pitch of good feeling had been arrived at, Mr.

asked

How many times the word 'asked' appears in the text?

you happen to have any handcuffs on the Maria?" But my client was pouring out a stiff helping from the decanter, which he still held in his hand. Then he approached the Celebrity. "Don't let it worry you, old man," said he, with intense earnestness. "Don't let it worry you. You're my guest, and I'll see you safe out of it, or bust." "Fenelon," said Mrs. Cooke, gravely, "do you realize what you are saying?" "You're a clever one, Allen," my client continued, and he backed away the better to look him over; "you had nerve to stay as long as you did." The Celebrity laughed confidently. "Cooke," he replied, "I appreciate your generosity,--I really do. I know no offence is meant. The mistake is, in fact, most pardonable." In Mr. Cooke amazement and admiration were clamoring for utterance. "Damn me," he sputtered, "if you're not the coolest embezzler I ever saw." The Celebrity laughed again. Then he surveyed the circle. "My friends," he said, "this is certainly a most amazing coincidence; one which, I assure you, surprises me no less than it does you. You have no doubt remarked that I have my peculiarities. We all have. "I flatter thyself I am not entirely unknown. And the annoyances imposed upon me by a certain fame I have achieved had become such that some months ago I began to crave the pleasures of the life of a private man. I determined to go to some sequestered resort where my face was unfamiliar. The possibility of being recognized at Asquith did not occur to me. Fortunately I was. And a singular chance led me to take the name of the man who has committed this crime, and who has the misfortune to resemble me. I suppose that now," he added impressively, "I shall have to tell you who I am." He paused until these words should have gained their full effect. Then he held up the edition de luxe from which he and Miss Thorn had been reading. "You may have heard, Mrs. Cooke," said he, addressing himself to our hostess, "you may perhaps have heard of the author of this book." Mrs. Cooke was a calm woman, and she read the name on the cover. "Yes," she said, "I have. And you claim to be he?" "Ask my friend Crocker here," he answered carelessly, no doubt exulting that the scene was going off so dramatically. "I should indeed be in a tight box," he went on, "if there were not friends of mine here to help me out." They turned to me. "I am afraid I cannot," I said with what soberness I could. "What!" says he with a start. "What! you deny me?" Miss Trevor had her tongue in her cheek. I bowed. "I am powerless to speak, Mr. Allen," I replied. During this colloquy my client stood between us, looking from one to the other. I well knew that his way of thinking would be with my testimony, and that the gilt name on the edition de luxe had done little towards convincing him of Mr. Allen's innocence. To his mind there was nothing horrible or incongruous in the idea that a well-known author should be a defaulter. It was perfectly possible. He shoved the glass of Scotch towards the Celebrity, with a smile. "Take this, old man," he kindly insisted, "and you'll feel better. What's the use of bucking when you're saddled with a thing like that?" And he pointed to the paper. "Besides, they haven't caught you yet, by a damned sight." The Celebrity waved aside the proffered tumbler. "This is an infamous charge, and you know it, Crocker," he cried. "If you don't, you ought to, as a lawyer. This isn't any time to have fun with a fellow." "My dear sir," I said, "I have charged you with nothing whatever." He turned his back on me in complete disgust. And he came face to face with Miss Trevor. "Miss Trevor, too, knows something of me," he said. "You forget, Mr. Allen," she answered sweetly, "you forget that I have given you my promise not to reveal what I know." The Celebrity chafed, for this was as damaging a statement as could well be uttered against him. But Miss Thorn was his trump card, and she now came forward. "This is ridiculous, Mr. Crocker, simply ridiculous," said she. "I agree with you most heartily, Miss Thorn," I replied. "Nonsense!" exclaimed Miss Thorn, and she drew her lips together, "pure nonsense!" "Nonsense or not, Marian," Mr. Cooke interposed, "we are wasting valuable time. The police are already on the scent, I'll bet my hat." "Fenelon!" Mrs. Cooke remonstrated. "And do you mean to say in soberness, Uncle Fenelon, that you believe the author of The Sybarites to be a defaulter?" said Miss Thorn. "It is indeed hard to believe Mr. Allen a criminal," Mr. Trevor broke in for the first time. "I think it only right that he should be allowed to clear himself before he is put to further inconvenience, and perhaps injustice, by any action we may take in the matter." Mr. Cooke sniffed suspiciously at the word "action." "What action do you mean?" he demanded. "Well," replied Mr. Trevor, with some hesitation, "before we take any steps, that is, notify the police." "Notify the police!" cried my client, his face red with a generous anger. "I have never yet turned a guest over to the police," he said proudly, "and won't, not if I know it. I'm not that kind." Who shall criticise Mr. Cooke's code of morality? "Fenelon," said his wife, "you must remember you have never yet entertained a guest of a larcenous character. No embezzlers up to the present. Marian," she continued, turning to Miss Thorn, "you spoke as if you might, be able to throw some light upon this matter. Do you know whether this gentleman is Charles Wrexell Allen, or whether he is the author? In short, do you know who he is?" The Celebrity lighted a cigarette. Miss Thorn said indignantly, "Upon my word, Aunt Maria, I thought that you, at least, would know better than to credit this silly accusation. He has been a guest at your house, and I am astonished that you should doubt his word." Mrs. Cooke looked at her niece perplexedly. "You must remember, Marian," she said gently, "that I know nothing about him, where he came from, or who he is. Nor does any one at Asquith, except perhaps Miss Trevor, by her own confession. And you do not seem inclined to tell what you know, if indeed you know anything." Upon this Miss Thorn became more indignant still, and Mrs. Cooke went on "Gentlemen, as a rule, do not assume names, especially other people's. They are usually proud of their own. Mr. Allen appears among us, from the clouds, as it were, and in due time we learn from a newspaper that he has committed a defalcation. And, furthermore, the paper contains a portrait and an accurate description which put the thing beyond doubt. I ask you, is it reasonable for him to state coolly after all this that he is another man? That he is a well-known author? It's an absurdity. I was not born yesterday, my dear." "It is most reasonable under the circumstances," replied Miss Thorn, warmly. "Extraordinary? Of course it's extraordinary. And too long to explain to a prejudiced audience, who can't be expected to comprehend the character of a genius, to understand the yearning of a famous man for a little quiet." Mrs. Cooke looked grave. "Marian, you forget yourself," she said. "Oh, I am tired of it, Aunt Maria," cried Miss Thorn; "if he takes my advice, he will refuse to discuss it farther." She did not seem to be aware that she had put forth no argument whatever, save a woman's argument. And I was intensely surprised that her indignation should have got the better of her in this way, having always supposed her clear-headed in the extreme. A few words from her, such as I supposed she would have spoken, had set the Celebrity right with all except Mr. Cooke. To me it was a clear proof that the Celebrity had turned her head, and her mind with it. The silence was broken by an uncontrollable burst of laughter from Miss Trevor. She was quickly frowned down by her father, who reminded her that this was not a comedy. "And, Mr. Allen," he said, "if you have anything to say, or any evidence to bring forward, now is the time to do it." He appeared to forget that I was the district attorney. The Celebrity had seated himself on the trunk of a tree, and was blowing out the smoke in clouds. He was inclined to take Miss Thorn's advice, for he made a gesture of weariness with his cigarette, in the use of which he was singularly eloquent. "Tell me, Mr. Trevor," said he, "why I should sit before you as a tribunal? Why I should take the trouble to clear myself of a senseless charge? My respect for you inclines me to the belief that you are laboring under a momentary excitement; for when you reflect that I am a prominent, not to say famous, author, you will realize how absurd it is that I should be an embezzler, and why I decline to lower myself by an explanation." Mr. Trevor picked up the paper and struck it. "Do you refuse to say anything in the face of such evidence as that?" he cried. "It is not a matter for refusal, Mr. Trevor. It is simply that I cannot admit the possibility of having committed the crime." "Well, sir," said the senator, his black necktie working out of place as his anger got the better of him, "I am to believe, then, because you claim to be the author of a few society novels, that you are infallible? Let me tell you that the President of the United States himself is liable to impeachment, and bound to disprove any charge he may be accused of. What in Halifax do I care for your divine-right-of-authors theory? I'll continue to think you guilty until you are shown to be innocent." Suddenly the full significance of the Celebrity's tactics struck Mr. Cooke, and he reached out and caught hold of Mr. Trevor's coattails. "Hold on, old man," said he; "Allen isn't going to be ass enough to own up to it. Don't you see we'd all be jugged and fined for assisting a criminal over the border? It's out of consideration for us." Mr. Trevor looked sternly over his shoulder at Mr. Cooke. "Do you mean to say, sir, seriously," he asked, "that, for the sake of a misplaced friendship for this man, and a misplaced sense of honor, you are bound to shield a guest, though a criminal? That you intend to assist him to escape from justice? I insist, for my own protection and that of my daughter, as well as for that of the others present that, since he refuses to speak, we must presume him guilty and turn him over." Mr. Trevor turned to Mrs. Cooke, as if relying on her support. "Fenelon," said she, "I have never sought to influence your actions when your friends were concerned, and I shall not begin now. All I ask of you is to consider the consequences of your intention." These words from Mrs. Cooke had much more weight with my client than Mr. Trevor's blustering demands. "Maria, my dear," he said, with a deferential urbanity, "Mr. Allen is my guest, and a gentleman. When a gentleman gives his word that he is not a criminal, it is sufficient." The force of this, for some reason, did not overwhelm his wife; and her lip curled a little, half in contempt, half in risibility. "Pshaw, Fenelon," said she, "what a fraud you are. Why is it you wish to get Mr. Allen over the border, then?" A question which might well have staggered a worthier intellect. "Why, my dear," answered my client, "I wish to save Mr. Allen the inconvenience, not to say the humiliation, of being brought East in custody and strapped with a pair of handcuffs. Let him take a shooting trip to the great Northwest until the real criminal is caught." "Well, Fenelon," replied Mrs. Cooke, unable to repress a smile, "one might as well try to argue with a turn-stile or a weather-vane. I wash my hands of it." But Mr. Trevor, who was both a self-made man and a Western politician, was far from being satisfied. He turned to me with a sweep of the arm he had doubtless learned in the Ohio State Senate. "Mr. Crocker," he cried, "are you, as attorney of this district, going to aid and abet in the escape of a fugitive from justice?" "Mr. Trevor," said I, "I will take the course in this matter which seems fit to me, and without advice from any one." He wheeled on Farrar, repeated the question, and got a like answer. Brought to bay for a time, he glared savagely around him while groping for further arguments. But at this point the Four appeared on the scene, much the worse for thickets, and clamoring for luncheon. They had five small fish between them which they wanted Miss Thorn to cook. CHAPTER XII The Four received Mr. Cooke's plan for the Celebrity's escape to Canada with enthusiastic acclamation, and as the one thing lacking to make the Bear Island trip a complete success. The Celebrity was hailed with the reverence due to the man who puts up the ring-money in a prize-fight. He was accorded, too, a certain amount of respect as a defaulter, which the Four would have denied him as an author, for I am inclined to the belief that the discovery of his literary profession would have lowered him rather than otherwise in their eyes. My client was naturally anxious to get under way at once for the Canadian border, but was overruled in this by his henchmen, who demanded something to eat. We sat down to an impromptu meal, which was an odd affair indeed. Mrs. Cooke maintained her usual serenity, but said little, while Miss Trevor and I had many a mirthful encounter at the thought of the turn matters had taken. At the other end of the cloth were Mr. Cooke and the Four, in wonderful spirits and unimpaired appetite, and in their midst sat the Celebrity, likewise in wonderful spirits. His behavior now and again elicited a loud grunt of disapproval from Mr. Trevor, who was plying his knife and fork in a manner emblematic of his state of mind. Mr. Allen was laughing and joking airily with Mr. Cooke and the guests, denying, but not resenting, their accusations with all the sang froid of a hardened criminal. He did not care particularly to go to Canada, he said. Why should he, when he was innocent? But, if Mr. Cooke insisted, he would enjoy seeing that part of the lake and the Canadian side. Afterwards I perceived Miss Thorn down by the brookside, washing dishes. Her sleeves were drawn back to the elbow, and a dainty white apron covered her blue skirt, while the wind from the lake had disentangled errant wisps of her hair. I stood on the brink above, secure, as I thought, from observation, when she chanced to look up and spied me. "Mr. Crocker," she called, "would you like to make yourself useful?" I was decidedly embarrassed. Her manner was as frank and unconstrained as though I had not been shunning her for weeks past. "If such a thing is possible," I replied. "Do you know a dish-cloth when you see one?" I was doubtful. But I procured the cloth from Miss Trevor and returned. There was an air about Miss Thorn that was new to me. "What an uncompromising man you are, Mr. Crocker," she said to me. "Once a person is unfortunate enough to come under the ban of your disapproval you have nothing whatever to do with them. Now it seems that I have given you offence in some way. Is it not so?" "You magnify my importance," I said. "No temporizing, Mr. Crocker," she went on, as though she meant to be obeyed; "sit down there, and let's have it out. I like you too well to quarrel with you." There was no resisting such a command, and I threw myself on the pebbles at her feet. "I thought we were going to be great friends," she said. "You and Mr. Farrar were so kind to me on the night of my arrival, and we had such fun watching the dance together." "I confess I thought so, too. But you expressed opinions then that I shared. You have since changed your mind, for some unaccountable reason." She paused in her polishing, a shining dish in her hand, and looked down at me with something between a laugh and a frown. "I suppose you have never regretted speaking hastily," she said. "Many a time," I returned, warming; "but if I ever thought a judgment measured and distilled, it was your judgment of the Celebrity." "Does the study of law eliminate humanity?" she asked, with a mock curtsey. "The deliberate sentences are sometimes the unjust ones, and men who are hung by weighed wisdom are often the innocent." "That is all very well in cases of doubt. But here you have the evidences of wrong-doing directly before you." Three dishes were taken up, dried, and put down before she answered me. I threw pebbles into the brook, and wished I had held my tongue. "What evidence?" inquired she. "Well," said I, "I must finish, I suppose. I had a notion you knew of what I inferred. First, let me say that I have no desire to prejudice you against a person whom you admire." "Impossible." Something in her tone made me look up. "Very good, then," I answered. "I, for one, can have no use for a man who devotes himself to a girl long enough to win her affections, and then deserts her with as little compunction as a dog does a rat it has shaken. And that is how your Celebrity treated Miss Trevor." "But Miss Trevor has recovered, I believe," said Miss Thorn. I began to feel a deep, but helpless, insecurity. "Happily, yes," I assented. "Thanks to an excellent physician." A smile twitched the corners of her mouth, as though she enjoyed my discomfiture. I remarked for the fiftieth time how strong her face was, with its generous lines and clearly moulded features. And a suspicion entered my soul. "At any rate," I said, with a laugh, "the Celebrity has got himself into no end of a predicament now. He may go back to New York in custody." "I thought you incapable of resentment, Mr. Crocker. How mean of you to deny him!" "It can do no harm," I answered; "a little lesson in the dangers of incognito may be salutary. I wish it were a little lesson in the dangers of something else." The color mounted to her face as she resumed her occupation. "I am afraid you are a very wicked man," she said. Before I could reply there came a scuffling sound from the bank above us, and the snapping of branches and twigs. It was Mr. Cooke. His descent, the personal conduction of which he lost half-way down, was irregular and spasmodic, and a rude concussion at the bottom knocked off a choice bit of profanity which was balanced on the tip of his tongue. "Tobogganing is a little out of season," said his niece, laughing heartily. Mr. Cooke brushed himself off, picked up the glasses which he had dropped in his flight and pushed them into my hands. Then he pointed lakeward with bulging eyes. "Crocker, old man," he said in a loud whisper, "they tell me that is an Asquith cat-boat." I followed his finger and saw for the first time a sail-boat headed for the island, then about two miles off shore. I raised the glasses. "Yes," I said, "the Scimitar." "That's what Farrar said," cried he. "And what about it?" I asked. "What about it?" he ejaculated. "Why, it's a detective come for Allen. I knew sure as hell if they got as far as Asquith they wouldn't stop there. And that's the fastest sail-boat he could hire there, isn't it?" I replied that it was. He seized me by the shoulder and began dragging me up the bank. "What are you going to do?" I cried, shaking myself loose. "We've got to get on the Maria and run for it," he panted. "There is no time to be lost." He had reached the top of the bank and was running towards the group at the tents. And he actually infused me with some of his red-hot enthusiasm, for I hastened after him. "But you can't begin to get the Maria out before they will be in here," I shouted. He stopped short, gazed at the approaching boat, and then at me. "Is that so?" "Yes, of course," said I, "they will be here in ten minutes." The Celebrity stood in the midst of the excited Four. His hair was parted precisely, and he had induced a monocle to remain in his eye long enough to examine the Scimitar, his nose at the critical elevation. This unruffled exterior made a deep impression on the Four. Was the Celebrity not undergoing the crucial test of a true sport? He was an example alike to criminals and philosophers. Mr. Cooke hurried into the group, which divided respectfully for him, and grasped the Celebrity by the hand. "Something else has got to be done, old man," he said, in a voice which shook with emotion; "they'll be on us before we can get the Maria out." Farrar, who was nailing a rustic bench near by, straightened up at this, his lip curling with a desire to laugh. The Celebrity laid his hand on my client's shoulder. "Cooke," said he, "I'm deeply grateful for all the trouble you wish to take, and for the solicitude you have shown. But let things be. I'll come out of it all right." "Never," cried Cooke, looking proudly around the Four as some Highland chief might have surveyed a faithful clan. "I'd a damned sight rather go to jail myself." "A damned sight," echoed the Four in unison. "I insist, Cooke," said the Celebrity, taking out his eyeglass and tapping Mr. Cooke's purple necktie, "I insist that you drop this business. I repeat my thanks to you and these gentlemen for the friendship they have shown, but say again that I am as innocent of this crime as a baby." Mr. Cooke paid no attention to this speech. His face became radiant. "Didn't any of you fellows strike a cave, or a hollow tree, or something of that sort, knocking around this morning?" One man slapped his knee. "The very place," he cried. "I fell into it," and he showed a rent in his trousers corroboratively. "It's big enough to hold twenty of Allen, and the detective doesn't live that could find it." "Hustle him off, quick," said Mr. Cooke. The mandate was obeyed as literally as though Robin Hood himself had given it. The Celebrity disappeared into the forest, carried rather than urged towards his destined place of confinement. The commotion had brought Mr. Trevor to the spot. He caught sight of the Celebrity's back between the trees, then he looked at the cat-boat entering the cove, a man in the stern preparing to pull in the tender. He intercepted Mr. Cooke on his way to the beach. "What have you done with Mr. Allen?" he asked, in a menacing voice. "Good God," said Mr. Cooke, whose contempt for Mr. Trevor was now infinite, "you talk as if I were the governor of the state. What the devil could I do with him?" "I will have no evasion," replied Mr. Trevor, taking an imposing posture in front of him. "You are trying to defeat the ends of justice by assisting a dangerous criminal to escape. I have warned you, sir, and warn you again of the consequences of your meditated crime, and I give you my word I will do all in my power to frustrate it." Mr. Cooke dug his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. Here was a complication he had not looked for. The Scimitar lay at anchor with her sail down, and two men were coming ashore in the tender. Mr. Cooke's attitude being that of a man who reconsiders a rash resolve, Mr. Trevor was emboldened to say in a moderated tone: "You were carried away by your generosity, Mr. Cooke. I was sure when you took time to think you would see it in another light." Mr. Cooke started off for the place where the boat had grounded. I did not catch his reply, and probably should not have written it here if I had. The senator looked as if he had been sand-bagged. The two men jumped out of the boat and hauled it up. Mr. Cooke waved an easy salute to one, whom I recognized as the big boatman from Asquith, familiarly known as Captain Jay. He owned the Scimitar and several smaller boats. The captain went through the pantomime of an introduction between Mr. Cooke and the other, whom my client shook warmly by the hand, and presently all three came towards us. Mr. Cooke led them to a bar he had improvised by the brook. A pool served the office of refrigerator, and Mr. Cooke had devised an ingenious but complicated arrangement of strings and labels which enabled him to extract any bottle or set of bottles without having to bare his arm and pull out the lot. Farrar and I responded to the call he had given, and went down to assist in the entertainment. My client, with his back to us, was busy manipulating the strings. "Gentlemen," he said, "let me make you acquainted with Mr. Drew. You all know the captain." Had I not suspected Mr. Drew's profession, I think I should not have remarked that he gave each of us a keen look as he raised his head. He had reddish-brown hair, and a pair of bushy red whiskers, each of which tapered to a long point. He was broad in the shoulders, and the clothes he wore rather enhanced this breadth. His suit was gray and almost new, the trousers perceptibly bagging at the knee, and he had a felt hat, a necktie of the white and flowery pattern, and square-toed "Congress" boots. In short, he was a decidedly ordinary looking person; you would meet a hundred like him in the streets of Far Harbor and Beaverton. He might have been a prosperous business man in either of those towns,--a comfortable lumber merchant or mine owner. And he had chosen just the get-up I should have picked for detective work in that region. He had a pleasant eye and a very fetching and hearty manner. But his long whiskers troubled me especially. I kept wondering if they were real. "The captain is sailing Mr. Drew over to Far Harbor," explained Mr. Cooke, "and they have put in here for the night." Mr. Drew was plainly not an amateur, for he volunteered nothing further than this. The necessary bottles having been produced, Mr. Cooke held up his glass and turned to the stranger. "Welcome to our party, old man," said he. Mr. Drew drained his glass and complimented Mr. Cooke on the brand,--a sure key to my client's heart. Whereupon he seated himself between Mr. Drew and the captain and began a discourse on the subject of his own cellar, on which he talked for nearly an hour. His only pauses were for the worthy purpose of filling the detective's or the captain's glass, and these he watched with a hospitable solicitude. The captain had the advantage, three to one, and I made no doubt his employer bitterly regretted not having a boatman whose principles were more strict. At the end of the hour Captain Jay, who by nature was inclined to be taciturn and crabbed, waxed loquacious and even jovial. He sang us the songs he had learned in the winter lumber-camps, which Mr. Cooke never failed to encore to the echo. My client vowed he had not spent a pleasanter afternoon for years. He plied the captain with cigars, and explained to him the mystery of the strings and labels; and the captain experimented until he had broken some of the bottles. Mr. Cooke was not a person who made any great distinction between the three degrees, acquaintance, friendship, and intimacy. When a stranger pleased him, he went from one to the other with such comparative ease that a hardhearted man, and no other, could have resented his advances. Mr. Drew was anything but a hard-hearted man, and he did not object to my client's familiarity. Mr. Cooke made no secret of his admiration for Mr. Drew, and there were just two things about him that Mr. Cooke admired and wondered at, above all else,--the bushy red whiskers. But it appeared that these were the only things that Mr. Drew was really touchy about. I noticed that the detective, without being impolite, did his best to discourage these remarks; but my client knew no such word as discouragement. He was continually saying: "I think I'll grow some like that, old man," or "Have those cut," and the like,--a kind of humor in which the captain took an incredible delight. And finally, when a certain pitch of good feeling had been arrived at, Mr.

criminals

How many times the word 'criminals' appears in the text?

you happen to have any handcuffs on the Maria?" But my client was pouring out a stiff helping from the decanter, which he still held in his hand. Then he approached the Celebrity. "Don't let it worry you, old man," said he, with intense earnestness. "Don't let it worry you. You're my guest, and I'll see you safe out of it, or bust." "Fenelon," said Mrs. Cooke, gravely, "do you realize what you are saying?" "You're a clever one, Allen," my client continued, and he backed away the better to look him over; "you had nerve to stay as long as you did." The Celebrity laughed confidently. "Cooke," he replied, "I appreciate your generosity,--I really do. I know no offence is meant. The mistake is, in fact, most pardonable." In Mr. Cooke amazement and admiration were clamoring for utterance. "Damn me," he sputtered, "if you're not the coolest embezzler I ever saw." The Celebrity laughed again. Then he surveyed the circle. "My friends," he said, "this is certainly a most amazing coincidence; one which, I assure you, surprises me no less than it does you. You have no doubt remarked that I have my peculiarities. We all have. "I flatter thyself I am not entirely unknown. And the annoyances imposed upon me by a certain fame I have achieved had become such that some months ago I began to crave the pleasures of the life of a private man. I determined to go to some sequestered resort where my face was unfamiliar. The possibility of being recognized at Asquith did not occur to me. Fortunately I was. And a singular chance led me to take the name of the man who has committed this crime, and who has the misfortune to resemble me. I suppose that now," he added impressively, "I shall have to tell you who I am." He paused until these words should have gained their full effect. Then he held up the edition de luxe from which he and Miss Thorn had been reading. "You may have heard, Mrs. Cooke," said he, addressing himself to our hostess, "you may perhaps have heard of the author of this book." Mrs. Cooke was a calm woman, and she read the name on the cover. "Yes," she said, "I have. And you claim to be he?" "Ask my friend Crocker here," he answered carelessly, no doubt exulting that the scene was going off so dramatically. "I should indeed be in a tight box," he went on, "if there were not friends of mine here to help me out." They turned to me. "I am afraid I cannot," I said with what soberness I could. "What!" says he with a start. "What! you deny me?" Miss Trevor had her tongue in her cheek. I bowed. "I am powerless to speak, Mr. Allen," I replied. During this colloquy my client stood between us, looking from one to the other. I well knew that his way of thinking would be with my testimony, and that the gilt name on the edition de luxe had done little towards convincing him of Mr. Allen's innocence. To his mind there was nothing horrible or incongruous in the idea that a well-known author should be a defaulter. It was perfectly possible. He shoved the glass of Scotch towards the Celebrity, with a smile. "Take this, old man," he kindly insisted, "and you'll feel better. What's the use of bucking when you're saddled with a thing like that?" And he pointed to the paper. "Besides, they haven't caught you yet, by a damned sight." The Celebrity waved aside the proffered tumbler. "This is an infamous charge, and you know it, Crocker," he cried. "If you don't, you ought to, as a lawyer. This isn't any time to have fun with a fellow." "My dear sir," I said, "I have charged you with nothing whatever." He turned his back on me in complete disgust. And he came face to face with Miss Trevor. "Miss Trevor, too, knows something of me," he said. "You forget, Mr. Allen," she answered sweetly, "you forget that I have given you my promise not to reveal what I know." The Celebrity chafed, for this was as damaging a statement as could well be uttered against him. But Miss Thorn was his trump card, and she now came forward. "This is ridiculous, Mr. Crocker, simply ridiculous," said she. "I agree with you most heartily, Miss Thorn," I replied. "Nonsense!" exclaimed Miss Thorn, and she drew her lips together, "pure nonsense!" "Nonsense or not, Marian," Mr. Cooke interposed, "we are wasting valuable time. The police are already on the scent, I'll bet my hat." "Fenelon!" Mrs. Cooke remonstrated. "And do you mean to say in soberness, Uncle Fenelon, that you believe the author of The Sybarites to be a defaulter?" said Miss Thorn. "It is indeed hard to believe Mr. Allen a criminal," Mr. Trevor broke in for the first time. "I think it only right that he should be allowed to clear himself before he is put to further inconvenience, and perhaps injustice, by any action we may take in the matter." Mr. Cooke sniffed suspiciously at the word "action." "What action do you mean?" he demanded. "Well," replied Mr. Trevor, with some hesitation, "before we take any steps, that is, notify the police." "Notify the police!" cried my client, his face red with a generous anger. "I have never yet turned a guest over to the police," he said proudly, "and won't, not if I know it. I'm not that kind." Who shall criticise Mr. Cooke's code of morality? "Fenelon," said his wife, "you must remember you have never yet entertained a guest of a larcenous character. No embezzlers up to the present. Marian," she continued, turning to Miss Thorn, "you spoke as if you might, be able to throw some light upon this matter. Do you know whether this gentleman is Charles Wrexell Allen, or whether he is the author? In short, do you know who he is?" The Celebrity lighted a cigarette. Miss Thorn said indignantly, "Upon my word, Aunt Maria, I thought that you, at least, would know better than to credit this silly accusation. He has been a guest at your house, and I am astonished that you should doubt his word." Mrs. Cooke looked at her niece perplexedly. "You must remember, Marian," she said gently, "that I know nothing about him, where he came from, or who he is. Nor does any one at Asquith, except perhaps Miss Trevor, by her own confession. And you do not seem inclined to tell what you know, if indeed you know anything." Upon this Miss Thorn became more indignant still, and Mrs. Cooke went on "Gentlemen, as a rule, do not assume names, especially other people's. They are usually proud of their own. Mr. Allen appears among us, from the clouds, as it were, and in due time we learn from a newspaper that he has committed a defalcation. And, furthermore, the paper contains a portrait and an accurate description which put the thing beyond doubt. I ask you, is it reasonable for him to state coolly after all this that he is another man? That he is a well-known author? It's an absurdity. I was not born yesterday, my dear." "It is most reasonable under the circumstances," replied Miss Thorn, warmly. "Extraordinary? Of course it's extraordinary. And too long to explain to a prejudiced audience, who can't be expected to comprehend the character of a genius, to understand the yearning of a famous man for a little quiet." Mrs. Cooke looked grave. "Marian, you forget yourself," she said. "Oh, I am tired of it, Aunt Maria," cried Miss Thorn; "if he takes my advice, he will refuse to discuss it farther." She did not seem to be aware that she had put forth no argument whatever, save a woman's argument. And I was intensely surprised that her indignation should have got the better of her in this way, having always supposed her clear-headed in the extreme. A few words from her, such as I supposed she would have spoken, had set the Celebrity right with all except Mr. Cooke. To me it was a clear proof that the Celebrity had turned her head, and her mind with it. The silence was broken by an uncontrollable burst of laughter from Miss Trevor. She was quickly frowned down by her father, who reminded her that this was not a comedy. "And, Mr. Allen," he said, "if you have anything to say, or any evidence to bring forward, now is the time to do it." He appeared to forget that I was the district attorney. The Celebrity had seated himself on the trunk of a tree, and was blowing out the smoke in clouds. He was inclined to take Miss Thorn's advice, for he made a gesture of weariness with his cigarette, in the use of which he was singularly eloquent. "Tell me, Mr. Trevor," said he, "why I should sit before you as a tribunal? Why I should take the trouble to clear myself of a senseless charge? My respect for you inclines me to the belief that you are laboring under a momentary excitement; for when you reflect that I am a prominent, not to say famous, author, you will realize how absurd it is that I should be an embezzler, and why I decline to lower myself by an explanation." Mr. Trevor picked up the paper and struck it. "Do you refuse to say anything in the face of such evidence as that?" he cried. "It is not a matter for refusal, Mr. Trevor. It is simply that I cannot admit the possibility of having committed the crime." "Well, sir," said the senator, his black necktie working out of place as his anger got the better of him, "I am to believe, then, because you claim to be the author of a few society novels, that you are infallible? Let me tell you that the President of the United States himself is liable to impeachment, and bound to disprove any charge he may be accused of. What in Halifax do I care for your divine-right-of-authors theory? I'll continue to think you guilty until you are shown to be innocent." Suddenly the full significance of the Celebrity's tactics struck Mr. Cooke, and he reached out and caught hold of Mr. Trevor's coattails. "Hold on, old man," said he; "Allen isn't going to be ass enough to own up to it. Don't you see we'd all be jugged and fined for assisting a criminal over the border? It's out of consideration for us." Mr. Trevor looked sternly over his shoulder at Mr. Cooke. "Do you mean to say, sir, seriously," he asked, "that, for the sake of a misplaced friendship for this man, and a misplaced sense of honor, you are bound to shield a guest, though a criminal? That you intend to assist him to escape from justice? I insist, for my own protection and that of my daughter, as well as for that of the others present that, since he refuses to speak, we must presume him guilty and turn him over." Mr. Trevor turned to Mrs. Cooke, as if relying on her support. "Fenelon," said she, "I have never sought to influence your actions when your friends were concerned, and I shall not begin now. All I ask of you is to consider the consequences of your intention." These words from Mrs. Cooke had much more weight with my client than Mr. Trevor's blustering demands. "Maria, my dear," he said, with a deferential urbanity, "Mr. Allen is my guest, and a gentleman. When a gentleman gives his word that he is not a criminal, it is sufficient." The force of this, for some reason, did not overwhelm his wife; and her lip curled a little, half in contempt, half in risibility. "Pshaw, Fenelon," said she, "what a fraud you are. Why is it you wish to get Mr. Allen over the border, then?" A question which might well have staggered a worthier intellect. "Why, my dear," answered my client, "I wish to save Mr. Allen the inconvenience, not to say the humiliation, of being brought East in custody and strapped with a pair of handcuffs. Let him take a shooting trip to the great Northwest until the real criminal is caught." "Well, Fenelon," replied Mrs. Cooke, unable to repress a smile, "one might as well try to argue with a turn-stile or a weather-vane. I wash my hands of it." But Mr. Trevor, who was both a self-made man and a Western politician, was far from being satisfied. He turned to me with a sweep of the arm he had doubtless learned in the Ohio State Senate. "Mr. Crocker," he cried, "are you, as attorney of this district, going to aid and abet in the escape of a fugitive from justice?" "Mr. Trevor," said I, "I will take the course in this matter which seems fit to me, and without advice from any one." He wheeled on Farrar, repeated the question, and got a like answer. Brought to bay for a time, he glared savagely around him while groping for further arguments. But at this point the Four appeared on the scene, much the worse for thickets, and clamoring for luncheon. They had five small fish between them which they wanted Miss Thorn to cook. CHAPTER XII The Four received Mr. Cooke's plan for the Celebrity's escape to Canada with enthusiastic acclamation, and as the one thing lacking to make the Bear Island trip a complete success. The Celebrity was hailed with the reverence due to the man who puts up the ring-money in a prize-fight. He was accorded, too, a certain amount of respect as a defaulter, which the Four would have denied him as an author, for I am inclined to the belief that the discovery of his literary profession would have lowered him rather than otherwise in their eyes. My client was naturally anxious to get under way at once for the Canadian border, but was overruled in this by his henchmen, who demanded something to eat. We sat down to an impromptu meal, which was an odd affair indeed. Mrs. Cooke maintained her usual serenity, but said little, while Miss Trevor and I had many a mirthful encounter at the thought of the turn matters had taken. At the other end of the cloth were Mr. Cooke and the Four, in wonderful spirits and unimpaired appetite, and in their midst sat the Celebrity, likewise in wonderful spirits. His behavior now and again elicited a loud grunt of disapproval from Mr. Trevor, who was plying his knife and fork in a manner emblematic of his state of mind. Mr. Allen was laughing and joking airily with Mr. Cooke and the guests, denying, but not resenting, their accusations with all the sang froid of a hardened criminal. He did not care particularly to go to Canada, he said. Why should he, when he was innocent? But, if Mr. Cooke insisted, he would enjoy seeing that part of the lake and the Canadian side. Afterwards I perceived Miss Thorn down by the brookside, washing dishes. Her sleeves were drawn back to the elbow, and a dainty white apron covered her blue skirt, while the wind from the lake had disentangled errant wisps of her hair. I stood on the brink above, secure, as I thought, from observation, when she chanced to look up and spied me. "Mr. Crocker," she called, "would you like to make yourself useful?" I was decidedly embarrassed. Her manner was as frank and unconstrained as though I had not been shunning her for weeks past. "If such a thing is possible," I replied. "Do you know a dish-cloth when you see one?" I was doubtful. But I procured the cloth from Miss Trevor and returned. There was an air about Miss Thorn that was new to me. "What an uncompromising man you are, Mr. Crocker," she said to me. "Once a person is unfortunate enough to come under the ban of your disapproval you have nothing whatever to do with them. Now it seems that I have given you offence in some way. Is it not so?" "You magnify my importance," I said. "No temporizing, Mr. Crocker," she went on, as though she meant to be obeyed; "sit down there, and let's have it out. I like you too well to quarrel with you." There was no resisting such a command, and I threw myself on the pebbles at her feet. "I thought we were going to be great friends," she said. "You and Mr. Farrar were so kind to me on the night of my arrival, and we had such fun watching the dance together." "I confess I thought so, too. But you expressed opinions then that I shared. You have since changed your mind, for some unaccountable reason." She paused in her polishing, a shining dish in her hand, and looked down at me with something between a laugh and a frown. "I suppose you have never regretted speaking hastily," she said. "Many a time," I returned, warming; "but if I ever thought a judgment measured and distilled, it was your judgment of the Celebrity." "Does the study of law eliminate humanity?" she asked, with a mock curtsey. "The deliberate sentences are sometimes the unjust ones, and men who are hung by weighed wisdom are often the innocent." "That is all very well in cases of doubt. But here you have the evidences of wrong-doing directly before you." Three dishes were taken up, dried, and put down before she answered me. I threw pebbles into the brook, and wished I had held my tongue. "What evidence?" inquired she. "Well," said I, "I must finish, I suppose. I had a notion you knew of what I inferred. First, let me say that I have no desire to prejudice you against a person whom you admire." "Impossible." Something in her tone made me look up. "Very good, then," I answered. "I, for one, can have no use for a man who devotes himself to a girl long enough to win her affections, and then deserts her with as little compunction as a dog does a rat it has shaken. And that is how your Celebrity treated Miss Trevor." "But Miss Trevor has recovered, I believe," said Miss Thorn. I began to feel a deep, but helpless, insecurity. "Happily, yes," I assented. "Thanks to an excellent physician." A smile twitched the corners of her mouth, as though she enjoyed my discomfiture. I remarked for the fiftieth time how strong her face was, with its generous lines and clearly moulded features. And a suspicion entered my soul. "At any rate," I said, with a laugh, "the Celebrity has got himself into no end of a predicament now. He may go back to New York in custody." "I thought you incapable of resentment, Mr. Crocker. How mean of you to deny him!" "It can do no harm," I answered; "a little lesson in the dangers of incognito may be salutary. I wish it were a little lesson in the dangers of something else." The color mounted to her face as she resumed her occupation. "I am afraid you are a very wicked man," she said. Before I could reply there came a scuffling sound from the bank above us, and the snapping of branches and twigs. It was Mr. Cooke. His descent, the personal conduction of which he lost half-way down, was irregular and spasmodic, and a rude concussion at the bottom knocked off a choice bit of profanity which was balanced on the tip of his tongue. "Tobogganing is a little out of season," said his niece, laughing heartily. Mr. Cooke brushed himself off, picked up the glasses which he had dropped in his flight and pushed them into my hands. Then he pointed lakeward with bulging eyes. "Crocker, old man," he said in a loud whisper, "they tell me that is an Asquith cat-boat." I followed his finger and saw for the first time a sail-boat headed for the island, then about two miles off shore. I raised the glasses. "Yes," I said, "the Scimitar." "That's what Farrar said," cried he. "And what about it?" I asked. "What about it?" he ejaculated. "Why, it's a detective come for Allen. I knew sure as hell if they got as far as Asquith they wouldn't stop there. And that's the fastest sail-boat he could hire there, isn't it?" I replied that it was. He seized me by the shoulder and began dragging me up the bank. "What are you going to do?" I cried, shaking myself loose. "We've got to get on the Maria and run for it," he panted. "There is no time to be lost." He had reached the top of the bank and was running towards the group at the tents. And he actually infused me with some of his red-hot enthusiasm, for I hastened after him. "But you can't begin to get the Maria out before they will be in here," I shouted. He stopped short, gazed at the approaching boat, and then at me. "Is that so?" "Yes, of course," said I, "they will be here in ten minutes." The Celebrity stood in the midst of the excited Four. His hair was parted precisely, and he had induced a monocle to remain in his eye long enough to examine the Scimitar, his nose at the critical elevation. This unruffled exterior made a deep impression on the Four. Was the Celebrity not undergoing the crucial test of a true sport? He was an example alike to criminals and philosophers. Mr. Cooke hurried into the group, which divided respectfully for him, and grasped the Celebrity by the hand. "Something else has got to be done, old man," he said, in a voice which shook with emotion; "they'll be on us before we can get the Maria out." Farrar, who was nailing a rustic bench near by, straightened up at this, his lip curling with a desire to laugh. The Celebrity laid his hand on my client's shoulder. "Cooke," said he, "I'm deeply grateful for all the trouble you wish to take, and for the solicitude you have shown. But let things be. I'll come out of it all right." "Never," cried Cooke, looking proudly around the Four as some Highland chief might have surveyed a faithful clan. "I'd a damned sight rather go to jail myself." "A damned sight," echoed the Four in unison. "I insist, Cooke," said the Celebrity, taking out his eyeglass and tapping Mr. Cooke's purple necktie, "I insist that you drop this business. I repeat my thanks to you and these gentlemen for the friendship they have shown, but say again that I am as innocent of this crime as a baby." Mr. Cooke paid no attention to this speech. His face became radiant. "Didn't any of you fellows strike a cave, or a hollow tree, or something of that sort, knocking around this morning?" One man slapped his knee. "The very place," he cried. "I fell into it," and he showed a rent in his trousers corroboratively. "It's big enough to hold twenty of Allen, and the detective doesn't live that could find it." "Hustle him off, quick," said Mr. Cooke. The mandate was obeyed as literally as though Robin Hood himself had given it. The Celebrity disappeared into the forest, carried rather than urged towards his destined place of confinement. The commotion had brought Mr. Trevor to the spot. He caught sight of the Celebrity's back between the trees, then he looked at the cat-boat entering the cove, a man in the stern preparing to pull in the tender. He intercepted Mr. Cooke on his way to the beach. "What have you done with Mr. Allen?" he asked, in a menacing voice. "Good God," said Mr. Cooke, whose contempt for Mr. Trevor was now infinite, "you talk as if I were the governor of the state. What the devil could I do with him?" "I will have no evasion," replied Mr. Trevor, taking an imposing posture in front of him. "You are trying to defeat the ends of justice by assisting a dangerous criminal to escape. I have warned you, sir, and warn you again of the consequences of your meditated crime, and I give you my word I will do all in my power to frustrate it." Mr. Cooke dug his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. Here was a complication he had not looked for. The Scimitar lay at anchor with her sail down, and two men were coming ashore in the tender. Mr. Cooke's attitude being that of a man who reconsiders a rash resolve, Mr. Trevor was emboldened to say in a moderated tone: "You were carried away by your generosity, Mr. Cooke. I was sure when you took time to think you would see it in another light." Mr. Cooke started off for the place where the boat had grounded. I did not catch his reply, and probably should not have written it here if I had. The senator looked as if he had been sand-bagged. The two men jumped out of the boat and hauled it up. Mr. Cooke waved an easy salute to one, whom I recognized as the big boatman from Asquith, familiarly known as Captain Jay. He owned the Scimitar and several smaller boats. The captain went through the pantomime of an introduction between Mr. Cooke and the other, whom my client shook warmly by the hand, and presently all three came towards us. Mr. Cooke led them to a bar he had improvised by the brook. A pool served the office of refrigerator, and Mr. Cooke had devised an ingenious but complicated arrangement of strings and labels which enabled him to extract any bottle or set of bottles without having to bare his arm and pull out the lot. Farrar and I responded to the call he had given, and went down to assist in the entertainment. My client, with his back to us, was busy manipulating the strings. "Gentlemen," he said, "let me make you acquainted with Mr. Drew. You all know the captain." Had I not suspected Mr. Drew's profession, I think I should not have remarked that he gave each of us a keen look as he raised his head. He had reddish-brown hair, and a pair of bushy red whiskers, each of which tapered to a long point. He was broad in the shoulders, and the clothes he wore rather enhanced this breadth. His suit was gray and almost new, the trousers perceptibly bagging at the knee, and he had a felt hat, a necktie of the white and flowery pattern, and square-toed "Congress" boots. In short, he was a decidedly ordinary looking person; you would meet a hundred like him in the streets of Far Harbor and Beaverton. He might have been a prosperous business man in either of those towns,--a comfortable lumber merchant or mine owner. And he had chosen just the get-up I should have picked for detective work in that region. He had a pleasant eye and a very fetching and hearty manner. But his long whiskers troubled me especially. I kept wondering if they were real. "The captain is sailing Mr. Drew over to Far Harbor," explained Mr. Cooke, "and they have put in here for the night." Mr. Drew was plainly not an amateur, for he volunteered nothing further than this. The necessary bottles having been produced, Mr. Cooke held up his glass and turned to the stranger. "Welcome to our party, old man," said he. Mr. Drew drained his glass and complimented Mr. Cooke on the brand,--a sure key to my client's heart. Whereupon he seated himself between Mr. Drew and the captain and began a discourse on the subject of his own cellar, on which he talked for nearly an hour. His only pauses were for the worthy purpose of filling the detective's or the captain's glass, and these he watched with a hospitable solicitude. The captain had the advantage, three to one, and I made no doubt his employer bitterly regretted not having a boatman whose principles were more strict. At the end of the hour Captain Jay, who by nature was inclined to be taciturn and crabbed, waxed loquacious and even jovial. He sang us the songs he had learned in the winter lumber-camps, which Mr. Cooke never failed to encore to the echo. My client vowed he had not spent a pleasanter afternoon for years. He plied the captain with cigars, and explained to him the mystery of the strings and labels; and the captain experimented until he had broken some of the bottles. Mr. Cooke was not a person who made any great distinction between the three degrees, acquaintance, friendship, and intimacy. When a stranger pleased him, he went from one to the other with such comparative ease that a hardhearted man, and no other, could have resented his advances. Mr. Drew was anything but a hard-hearted man, and he did not object to my client's familiarity. Mr. Cooke made no secret of his admiration for Mr. Drew, and there were just two things about him that Mr. Cooke admired and wondered at, above all else,--the bushy red whiskers. But it appeared that these were the only things that Mr. Drew was really touchy about. I noticed that the detective, without being impolite, did his best to discourage these remarks; but my client knew no such word as discouragement. He was continually saying: "I think I'll grow some like that, old man," or "Have those cut," and the like,--a kind of humor in which the captain took an incredible delight. And finally, when a certain pitch of good feeling had been arrived at, Mr.

insist

How many times the word 'insist' appears in the text?

you happen to have any handcuffs on the Maria?" But my client was pouring out a stiff helping from the decanter, which he still held in his hand. Then he approached the Celebrity. "Don't let it worry you, old man," said he, with intense earnestness. "Don't let it worry you. You're my guest, and I'll see you safe out of it, or bust." "Fenelon," said Mrs. Cooke, gravely, "do you realize what you are saying?" "You're a clever one, Allen," my client continued, and he backed away the better to look him over; "you had nerve to stay as long as you did." The Celebrity laughed confidently. "Cooke," he replied, "I appreciate your generosity,--I really do. I know no offence is meant. The mistake is, in fact, most pardonable." In Mr. Cooke amazement and admiration were clamoring for utterance. "Damn me," he sputtered, "if you're not the coolest embezzler I ever saw." The Celebrity laughed again. Then he surveyed the circle. "My friends," he said, "this is certainly a most amazing coincidence; one which, I assure you, surprises me no less than it does you. You have no doubt remarked that I have my peculiarities. We all have. "I flatter thyself I am not entirely unknown. And the annoyances imposed upon me by a certain fame I have achieved had become such that some months ago I began to crave the pleasures of the life of a private man. I determined to go to some sequestered resort where my face was unfamiliar. The possibility of being recognized at Asquith did not occur to me. Fortunately I was. And a singular chance led me to take the name of the man who has committed this crime, and who has the misfortune to resemble me. I suppose that now," he added impressively, "I shall have to tell you who I am." He paused until these words should have gained their full effect. Then he held up the edition de luxe from which he and Miss Thorn had been reading. "You may have heard, Mrs. Cooke," said he, addressing himself to our hostess, "you may perhaps have heard of the author of this book." Mrs. Cooke was a calm woman, and she read the name on the cover. "Yes," she said, "I have. And you claim to be he?" "Ask my friend Crocker here," he answered carelessly, no doubt exulting that the scene was going off so dramatically. "I should indeed be in a tight box," he went on, "if there were not friends of mine here to help me out." They turned to me. "I am afraid I cannot," I said with what soberness I could. "What!" says he with a start. "What! you deny me?" Miss Trevor had her tongue in her cheek. I bowed. "I am powerless to speak, Mr. Allen," I replied. During this colloquy my client stood between us, looking from one to the other. I well knew that his way of thinking would be with my testimony, and that the gilt name on the edition de luxe had done little towards convincing him of Mr. Allen's innocence. To his mind there was nothing horrible or incongruous in the idea that a well-known author should be a defaulter. It was perfectly possible. He shoved the glass of Scotch towards the Celebrity, with a smile. "Take this, old man," he kindly insisted, "and you'll feel better. What's the use of bucking when you're saddled with a thing like that?" And he pointed to the paper. "Besides, they haven't caught you yet, by a damned sight." The Celebrity waved aside the proffered tumbler. "This is an infamous charge, and you know it, Crocker," he cried. "If you don't, you ought to, as a lawyer. This isn't any time to have fun with a fellow." "My dear sir," I said, "I have charged you with nothing whatever." He turned his back on me in complete disgust. And he came face to face with Miss Trevor. "Miss Trevor, too, knows something of me," he said. "You forget, Mr. Allen," she answered sweetly, "you forget that I have given you my promise not to reveal what I know." The Celebrity chafed, for this was as damaging a statement as could well be uttered against him. But Miss Thorn was his trump card, and she now came forward. "This is ridiculous, Mr. Crocker, simply ridiculous," said she. "I agree with you most heartily, Miss Thorn," I replied. "Nonsense!" exclaimed Miss Thorn, and she drew her lips together, "pure nonsense!" "Nonsense or not, Marian," Mr. Cooke interposed, "we are wasting valuable time. The police are already on the scent, I'll bet my hat." "Fenelon!" Mrs. Cooke remonstrated. "And do you mean to say in soberness, Uncle Fenelon, that you believe the author of The Sybarites to be a defaulter?" said Miss Thorn. "It is indeed hard to believe Mr. Allen a criminal," Mr. Trevor broke in for the first time. "I think it only right that he should be allowed to clear himself before he is put to further inconvenience, and perhaps injustice, by any action we may take in the matter." Mr. Cooke sniffed suspiciously at the word "action." "What action do you mean?" he demanded. "Well," replied Mr. Trevor, with some hesitation, "before we take any steps, that is, notify the police." "Notify the police!" cried my client, his face red with a generous anger. "I have never yet turned a guest over to the police," he said proudly, "and won't, not if I know it. I'm not that kind." Who shall criticise Mr. Cooke's code of morality? "Fenelon," said his wife, "you must remember you have never yet entertained a guest of a larcenous character. No embezzlers up to the present. Marian," she continued, turning to Miss Thorn, "you spoke as if you might, be able to throw some light upon this matter. Do you know whether this gentleman is Charles Wrexell Allen, or whether he is the author? In short, do you know who he is?" The Celebrity lighted a cigarette. Miss Thorn said indignantly, "Upon my word, Aunt Maria, I thought that you, at least, would know better than to credit this silly accusation. He has been a guest at your house, and I am astonished that you should doubt his word." Mrs. Cooke looked at her niece perplexedly. "You must remember, Marian," she said gently, "that I know nothing about him, where he came from, or who he is. Nor does any one at Asquith, except perhaps Miss Trevor, by her own confession. And you do not seem inclined to tell what you know, if indeed you know anything." Upon this Miss Thorn became more indignant still, and Mrs. Cooke went on "Gentlemen, as a rule, do not assume names, especially other people's. They are usually proud of their own. Mr. Allen appears among us, from the clouds, as it were, and in due time we learn from a newspaper that he has committed a defalcation. And, furthermore, the paper contains a portrait and an accurate description which put the thing beyond doubt. I ask you, is it reasonable for him to state coolly after all this that he is another man? That he is a well-known author? It's an absurdity. I was not born yesterday, my dear." "It is most reasonable under the circumstances," replied Miss Thorn, warmly. "Extraordinary? Of course it's extraordinary. And too long to explain to a prejudiced audience, who can't be expected to comprehend the character of a genius, to understand the yearning of a famous man for a little quiet." Mrs. Cooke looked grave. "Marian, you forget yourself," she said. "Oh, I am tired of it, Aunt Maria," cried Miss Thorn; "if he takes my advice, he will refuse to discuss it farther." She did not seem to be aware that she had put forth no argument whatever, save a woman's argument. And I was intensely surprised that her indignation should have got the better of her in this way, having always supposed her clear-headed in the extreme. A few words from her, such as I supposed she would have spoken, had set the Celebrity right with all except Mr. Cooke. To me it was a clear proof that the Celebrity had turned her head, and her mind with it. The silence was broken by an uncontrollable burst of laughter from Miss Trevor. She was quickly frowned down by her father, who reminded her that this was not a comedy. "And, Mr. Allen," he said, "if you have anything to say, or any evidence to bring forward, now is the time to do it." He appeared to forget that I was the district attorney. The Celebrity had seated himself on the trunk of a tree, and was blowing out the smoke in clouds. He was inclined to take Miss Thorn's advice, for he made a gesture of weariness with his cigarette, in the use of which he was singularly eloquent. "Tell me, Mr. Trevor," said he, "why I should sit before you as a tribunal? Why I should take the trouble to clear myself of a senseless charge? My respect for you inclines me to the belief that you are laboring under a momentary excitement; for when you reflect that I am a prominent, not to say famous, author, you will realize how absurd it is that I should be an embezzler, and why I decline to lower myself by an explanation." Mr. Trevor picked up the paper and struck it. "Do you refuse to say anything in the face of such evidence as that?" he cried. "It is not a matter for refusal, Mr. Trevor. It is simply that I cannot admit the possibility of having committed the crime." "Well, sir," said the senator, his black necktie working out of place as his anger got the better of him, "I am to believe, then, because you claim to be the author of a few society novels, that you are infallible? Let me tell you that the President of the United States himself is liable to impeachment, and bound to disprove any charge he may be accused of. What in Halifax do I care for your divine-right-of-authors theory? I'll continue to think you guilty until you are shown to be innocent." Suddenly the full significance of the Celebrity's tactics struck Mr. Cooke, and he reached out and caught hold of Mr. Trevor's coattails. "Hold on, old man," said he; "Allen isn't going to be ass enough to own up to it. Don't you see we'd all be jugged and fined for assisting a criminal over the border? It's out of consideration for us." Mr. Trevor looked sternly over his shoulder at Mr. Cooke. "Do you mean to say, sir, seriously," he asked, "that, for the sake of a misplaced friendship for this man, and a misplaced sense of honor, you are bound to shield a guest, though a criminal? That you intend to assist him to escape from justice? I insist, for my own protection and that of my daughter, as well as for that of the others present that, since he refuses to speak, we must presume him guilty and turn him over." Mr. Trevor turned to Mrs. Cooke, as if relying on her support. "Fenelon," said she, "I have never sought to influence your actions when your friends were concerned, and I shall not begin now. All I ask of you is to consider the consequences of your intention." These words from Mrs. Cooke had much more weight with my client than Mr. Trevor's blustering demands. "Maria, my dear," he said, with a deferential urbanity, "Mr. Allen is my guest, and a gentleman. When a gentleman gives his word that he is not a criminal, it is sufficient." The force of this, for some reason, did not overwhelm his wife; and her lip curled a little, half in contempt, half in risibility. "Pshaw, Fenelon," said she, "what a fraud you are. Why is it you wish to get Mr. Allen over the border, then?" A question which might well have staggered a worthier intellect. "Why, my dear," answered my client, "I wish to save Mr. Allen the inconvenience, not to say the humiliation, of being brought East in custody and strapped with a pair of handcuffs. Let him take a shooting trip to the great Northwest until the real criminal is caught." "Well, Fenelon," replied Mrs. Cooke, unable to repress a smile, "one might as well try to argue with a turn-stile or a weather-vane. I wash my hands of it." But Mr. Trevor, who was both a self-made man and a Western politician, was far from being satisfied. He turned to me with a sweep of the arm he had doubtless learned in the Ohio State Senate. "Mr. Crocker," he cried, "are you, as attorney of this district, going to aid and abet in the escape of a fugitive from justice?" "Mr. Trevor," said I, "I will take the course in this matter which seems fit to me, and without advice from any one." He wheeled on Farrar, repeated the question, and got a like answer. Brought to bay for a time, he glared savagely around him while groping for further arguments. But at this point the Four appeared on the scene, much the worse for thickets, and clamoring for luncheon. They had five small fish between them which they wanted Miss Thorn to cook. CHAPTER XII The Four received Mr. Cooke's plan for the Celebrity's escape to Canada with enthusiastic acclamation, and as the one thing lacking to make the Bear Island trip a complete success. The Celebrity was hailed with the reverence due to the man who puts up the ring-money in a prize-fight. He was accorded, too, a certain amount of respect as a defaulter, which the Four would have denied him as an author, for I am inclined to the belief that the discovery of his literary profession would have lowered him rather than otherwise in their eyes. My client was naturally anxious to get under way at once for the Canadian border, but was overruled in this by his henchmen, who demanded something to eat. We sat down to an impromptu meal, which was an odd affair indeed. Mrs. Cooke maintained her usual serenity, but said little, while Miss Trevor and I had many a mirthful encounter at the thought of the turn matters had taken. At the other end of the cloth were Mr. Cooke and the Four, in wonderful spirits and unimpaired appetite, and in their midst sat the Celebrity, likewise in wonderful spirits. His behavior now and again elicited a loud grunt of disapproval from Mr. Trevor, who was plying his knife and fork in a manner emblematic of his state of mind. Mr. Allen was laughing and joking airily with Mr. Cooke and the guests, denying, but not resenting, their accusations with all the sang froid of a hardened criminal. He did not care particularly to go to Canada, he said. Why should he, when he was innocent? But, if Mr. Cooke insisted, he would enjoy seeing that part of the lake and the Canadian side. Afterwards I perceived Miss Thorn down by the brookside, washing dishes. Her sleeves were drawn back to the elbow, and a dainty white apron covered her blue skirt, while the wind from the lake had disentangled errant wisps of her hair. I stood on the brink above, secure, as I thought, from observation, when she chanced to look up and spied me. "Mr. Crocker," she called, "would you like to make yourself useful?" I was decidedly embarrassed. Her manner was as frank and unconstrained as though I had not been shunning her for weeks past. "If such a thing is possible," I replied. "Do you know a dish-cloth when you see one?" I was doubtful. But I procured the cloth from Miss Trevor and returned. There was an air about Miss Thorn that was new to me. "What an uncompromising man you are, Mr. Crocker," she said to me. "Once a person is unfortunate enough to come under the ban of your disapproval you have nothing whatever to do with them. Now it seems that I have given you offence in some way. Is it not so?" "You magnify my importance," I said. "No temporizing, Mr. Crocker," she went on, as though she meant to be obeyed; "sit down there, and let's have it out. I like you too well to quarrel with you." There was no resisting such a command, and I threw myself on the pebbles at her feet. "I thought we were going to be great friends," she said. "You and Mr. Farrar were so kind to me on the night of my arrival, and we had such fun watching the dance together." "I confess I thought so, too. But you expressed opinions then that I shared. You have since changed your mind, for some unaccountable reason." She paused in her polishing, a shining dish in her hand, and looked down at me with something between a laugh and a frown. "I suppose you have never regretted speaking hastily," she said. "Many a time," I returned, warming; "but if I ever thought a judgment measured and distilled, it was your judgment of the Celebrity." "Does the study of law eliminate humanity?" she asked, with a mock curtsey. "The deliberate sentences are sometimes the unjust ones, and men who are hung by weighed wisdom are often the innocent." "That is all very well in cases of doubt. But here you have the evidences of wrong-doing directly before you." Three dishes were taken up, dried, and put down before she answered me. I threw pebbles into the brook, and wished I had held my tongue. "What evidence?" inquired she. "Well," said I, "I must finish, I suppose. I had a notion you knew of what I inferred. First, let me say that I have no desire to prejudice you against a person whom you admire." "Impossible." Something in her tone made me look up. "Very good, then," I answered. "I, for one, can have no use for a man who devotes himself to a girl long enough to win her affections, and then deserts her with as little compunction as a dog does a rat it has shaken. And that is how your Celebrity treated Miss Trevor." "But Miss Trevor has recovered, I believe," said Miss Thorn. I began to feel a deep, but helpless, insecurity. "Happily, yes," I assented. "Thanks to an excellent physician." A smile twitched the corners of her mouth, as though she enjoyed my discomfiture. I remarked for the fiftieth time how strong her face was, with its generous lines and clearly moulded features. And a suspicion entered my soul. "At any rate," I said, with a laugh, "the Celebrity has got himself into no end of a predicament now. He may go back to New York in custody." "I thought you incapable of resentment, Mr. Crocker. How mean of you to deny him!" "It can do no harm," I answered; "a little lesson in the dangers of incognito may be salutary. I wish it were a little lesson in the dangers of something else." The color mounted to her face as she resumed her occupation. "I am afraid you are a very wicked man," she said. Before I could reply there came a scuffling sound from the bank above us, and the snapping of branches and twigs. It was Mr. Cooke. His descent, the personal conduction of which he lost half-way down, was irregular and spasmodic, and a rude concussion at the bottom knocked off a choice bit of profanity which was balanced on the tip of his tongue. "Tobogganing is a little out of season," said his niece, laughing heartily. Mr. Cooke brushed himself off, picked up the glasses which he had dropped in his flight and pushed them into my hands. Then he pointed lakeward with bulging eyes. "Crocker, old man," he said in a loud whisper, "they tell me that is an Asquith cat-boat." I followed his finger and saw for the first time a sail-boat headed for the island, then about two miles off shore. I raised the glasses. "Yes," I said, "the Scimitar." "That's what Farrar said," cried he. "And what about it?" I asked. "What about it?" he ejaculated. "Why, it's a detective come for Allen. I knew sure as hell if they got as far as Asquith they wouldn't stop there. And that's the fastest sail-boat he could hire there, isn't it?" I replied that it was. He seized me by the shoulder and began dragging me up the bank. "What are you going to do?" I cried, shaking myself loose. "We've got to get on the Maria and run for it," he panted. "There is no time to be lost." He had reached the top of the bank and was running towards the group at the tents. And he actually infused me with some of his red-hot enthusiasm, for I hastened after him. "But you can't begin to get the Maria out before they will be in here," I shouted. He stopped short, gazed at the approaching boat, and then at me. "Is that so?" "Yes, of course," said I, "they will be here in ten minutes." The Celebrity stood in the midst of the excited Four. His hair was parted precisely, and he had induced a monocle to remain in his eye long enough to examine the Scimitar, his nose at the critical elevation. This unruffled exterior made a deep impression on the Four. Was the Celebrity not undergoing the crucial test of a true sport? He was an example alike to criminals and philosophers. Mr. Cooke hurried into the group, which divided respectfully for him, and grasped the Celebrity by the hand. "Something else has got to be done, old man," he said, in a voice which shook with emotion; "they'll be on us before we can get the Maria out." Farrar, who was nailing a rustic bench near by, straightened up at this, his lip curling with a desire to laugh. The Celebrity laid his hand on my client's shoulder. "Cooke," said he, "I'm deeply grateful for all the trouble you wish to take, and for the solicitude you have shown. But let things be. I'll come out of it all right." "Never," cried Cooke, looking proudly around the Four as some Highland chief might have surveyed a faithful clan. "I'd a damned sight rather go to jail myself." "A damned sight," echoed the Four in unison. "I insist, Cooke," said the Celebrity, taking out his eyeglass and tapping Mr. Cooke's purple necktie, "I insist that you drop this business. I repeat my thanks to you and these gentlemen for the friendship they have shown, but say again that I am as innocent of this crime as a baby." Mr. Cooke paid no attention to this speech. His face became radiant. "Didn't any of you fellows strike a cave, or a hollow tree, or something of that sort, knocking around this morning?" One man slapped his knee. "The very place," he cried. "I fell into it," and he showed a rent in his trousers corroboratively. "It's big enough to hold twenty of Allen, and the detective doesn't live that could find it." "Hustle him off, quick," said Mr. Cooke. The mandate was obeyed as literally as though Robin Hood himself had given it. The Celebrity disappeared into the forest, carried rather than urged towards his destined place of confinement. The commotion had brought Mr. Trevor to the spot. He caught sight of the Celebrity's back between the trees, then he looked at the cat-boat entering the cove, a man in the stern preparing to pull in the tender. He intercepted Mr. Cooke on his way to the beach. "What have you done with Mr. Allen?" he asked, in a menacing voice. "Good God," said Mr. Cooke, whose contempt for Mr. Trevor was now infinite, "you talk as if I were the governor of the state. What the devil could I do with him?" "I will have no evasion," replied Mr. Trevor, taking an imposing posture in front of him. "You are trying to defeat the ends of justice by assisting a dangerous criminal to escape. I have warned you, sir, and warn you again of the consequences of your meditated crime, and I give you my word I will do all in my power to frustrate it." Mr. Cooke dug his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. Here was a complication he had not looked for. The Scimitar lay at anchor with her sail down, and two men were coming ashore in the tender. Mr. Cooke's attitude being that of a man who reconsiders a rash resolve, Mr. Trevor was emboldened to say in a moderated tone: "You were carried away by your generosity, Mr. Cooke. I was sure when you took time to think you would see it in another light." Mr. Cooke started off for the place where the boat had grounded. I did not catch his reply, and probably should not have written it here if I had. The senator looked as if he had been sand-bagged. The two men jumped out of the boat and hauled it up. Mr. Cooke waved an easy salute to one, whom I recognized as the big boatman from Asquith, familiarly known as Captain Jay. He owned the Scimitar and several smaller boats. The captain went through the pantomime of an introduction between Mr. Cooke and the other, whom my client shook warmly by the hand, and presently all three came towards us. Mr. Cooke led them to a bar he had improvised by the brook. A pool served the office of refrigerator, and Mr. Cooke had devised an ingenious but complicated arrangement of strings and labels which enabled him to extract any bottle or set of bottles without having to bare his arm and pull out the lot. Farrar and I responded to the call he had given, and went down to assist in the entertainment. My client, with his back to us, was busy manipulating the strings. "Gentlemen," he said, "let me make you acquainted with Mr. Drew. You all know the captain." Had I not suspected Mr. Drew's profession, I think I should not have remarked that he gave each of us a keen look as he raised his head. He had reddish-brown hair, and a pair of bushy red whiskers, each of which tapered to a long point. He was broad in the shoulders, and the clothes he wore rather enhanced this breadth. His suit was gray and almost new, the trousers perceptibly bagging at the knee, and he had a felt hat, a necktie of the white and flowery pattern, and square-toed "Congress" boots. In short, he was a decidedly ordinary looking person; you would meet a hundred like him in the streets of Far Harbor and Beaverton. He might have been a prosperous business man in either of those towns,--a comfortable lumber merchant or mine owner. And he had chosen just the get-up I should have picked for detective work in that region. He had a pleasant eye and a very fetching and hearty manner. But his long whiskers troubled me especially. I kept wondering if they were real. "The captain is sailing Mr. Drew over to Far Harbor," explained Mr. Cooke, "and they have put in here for the night." Mr. Drew was plainly not an amateur, for he volunteered nothing further than this. The necessary bottles having been produced, Mr. Cooke held up his glass and turned to the stranger. "Welcome to our party, old man," said he. Mr. Drew drained his glass and complimented Mr. Cooke on the brand,--a sure key to my client's heart. Whereupon he seated himself between Mr. Drew and the captain and began a discourse on the subject of his own cellar, on which he talked for nearly an hour. His only pauses were for the worthy purpose of filling the detective's or the captain's glass, and these he watched with a hospitable solicitude. The captain had the advantage, three to one, and I made no doubt his employer bitterly regretted not having a boatman whose principles were more strict. At the end of the hour Captain Jay, who by nature was inclined to be taciturn and crabbed, waxed loquacious and even jovial. He sang us the songs he had learned in the winter lumber-camps, which Mr. Cooke never failed to encore to the echo. My client vowed he had not spent a pleasanter afternoon for years. He plied the captain with cigars, and explained to him the mystery of the strings and labels; and the captain experimented until he had broken some of the bottles. Mr. Cooke was not a person who made any great distinction between the three degrees, acquaintance, friendship, and intimacy. When a stranger pleased him, he went from one to the other with such comparative ease that a hardhearted man, and no other, could have resented his advances. Mr. Drew was anything but a hard-hearted man, and he did not object to my client's familiarity. Mr. Cooke made no secret of his admiration for Mr. Drew, and there were just two things about him that Mr. Cooke admired and wondered at, above all else,--the bushy red whiskers. But it appeared that these were the only things that Mr. Drew was really touchy about. I noticed that the detective, without being impolite, did his best to discourage these remarks; but my client knew no such word as discouragement. He was continually saying: "I think I'll grow some like that, old man," or "Have those cut," and the like,--a kind of humor in which the captain took an incredible delight. And finally, when a certain pitch of good feeling had been arrived at, Mr.

wife

How many times the word 'wife' appears in the text?

you happen to have any handcuffs on the Maria?" But my client was pouring out a stiff helping from the decanter, which he still held in his hand. Then he approached the Celebrity. "Don't let it worry you, old man," said he, with intense earnestness. "Don't let it worry you. You're my guest, and I'll see you safe out of it, or bust." "Fenelon," said Mrs. Cooke, gravely, "do you realize what you are saying?" "You're a clever one, Allen," my client continued, and he backed away the better to look him over; "you had nerve to stay as long as you did." The Celebrity laughed confidently. "Cooke," he replied, "I appreciate your generosity,--I really do. I know no offence is meant. The mistake is, in fact, most pardonable." In Mr. Cooke amazement and admiration were clamoring for utterance. "Damn me," he sputtered, "if you're not the coolest embezzler I ever saw." The Celebrity laughed again. Then he surveyed the circle. "My friends," he said, "this is certainly a most amazing coincidence; one which, I assure you, surprises me no less than it does you. You have no doubt remarked that I have my peculiarities. We all have. "I flatter thyself I am not entirely unknown. And the annoyances imposed upon me by a certain fame I have achieved had become such that some months ago I began to crave the pleasures of the life of a private man. I determined to go to some sequestered resort where my face was unfamiliar. The possibility of being recognized at Asquith did not occur to me. Fortunately I was. And a singular chance led me to take the name of the man who has committed this crime, and who has the misfortune to resemble me. I suppose that now," he added impressively, "I shall have to tell you who I am." He paused until these words should have gained their full effect. Then he held up the edition de luxe from which he and Miss Thorn had been reading. "You may have heard, Mrs. Cooke," said he, addressing himself to our hostess, "you may perhaps have heard of the author of this book." Mrs. Cooke was a calm woman, and she read the name on the cover. "Yes," she said, "I have. And you claim to be he?" "Ask my friend Crocker here," he answered carelessly, no doubt exulting that the scene was going off so dramatically. "I should indeed be in a tight box," he went on, "if there were not friends of mine here to help me out." They turned to me. "I am afraid I cannot," I said with what soberness I could. "What!" says he with a start. "What! you deny me?" Miss Trevor had her tongue in her cheek. I bowed. "I am powerless to speak, Mr. Allen," I replied. During this colloquy my client stood between us, looking from one to the other. I well knew that his way of thinking would be with my testimony, and that the gilt name on the edition de luxe had done little towards convincing him of Mr. Allen's innocence. To his mind there was nothing horrible or incongruous in the idea that a well-known author should be a defaulter. It was perfectly possible. He shoved the glass of Scotch towards the Celebrity, with a smile. "Take this, old man," he kindly insisted, "and you'll feel better. What's the use of bucking when you're saddled with a thing like that?" And he pointed to the paper. "Besides, they haven't caught you yet, by a damned sight." The Celebrity waved aside the proffered tumbler. "This is an infamous charge, and you know it, Crocker," he cried. "If you don't, you ought to, as a lawyer. This isn't any time to have fun with a fellow." "My dear sir," I said, "I have charged you with nothing whatever." He turned his back on me in complete disgust. And he came face to face with Miss Trevor. "Miss Trevor, too, knows something of me," he said. "You forget, Mr. Allen," she answered sweetly, "you forget that I have given you my promise not to reveal what I know." The Celebrity chafed, for this was as damaging a statement as could well be uttered against him. But Miss Thorn was his trump card, and she now came forward. "This is ridiculous, Mr. Crocker, simply ridiculous," said she. "I agree with you most heartily, Miss Thorn," I replied. "Nonsense!" exclaimed Miss Thorn, and she drew her lips together, "pure nonsense!" "Nonsense or not, Marian," Mr. Cooke interposed, "we are wasting valuable time. The police are already on the scent, I'll bet my hat." "Fenelon!" Mrs. Cooke remonstrated. "And do you mean to say in soberness, Uncle Fenelon, that you believe the author of The Sybarites to be a defaulter?" said Miss Thorn. "It is indeed hard to believe Mr. Allen a criminal," Mr. Trevor broke in for the first time. "I think it only right that he should be allowed to clear himself before he is put to further inconvenience, and perhaps injustice, by any action we may take in the matter." Mr. Cooke sniffed suspiciously at the word "action." "What action do you mean?" he demanded. "Well," replied Mr. Trevor, with some hesitation, "before we take any steps, that is, notify the police." "Notify the police!" cried my client, his face red with a generous anger. "I have never yet turned a guest over to the police," he said proudly, "and won't, not if I know it. I'm not that kind." Who shall criticise Mr. Cooke's code of morality? "Fenelon," said his wife, "you must remember you have never yet entertained a guest of a larcenous character. No embezzlers up to the present. Marian," she continued, turning to Miss Thorn, "you spoke as if you might, be able to throw some light upon this matter. Do you know whether this gentleman is Charles Wrexell Allen, or whether he is the author? In short, do you know who he is?" The Celebrity lighted a cigarette. Miss Thorn said indignantly, "Upon my word, Aunt Maria, I thought that you, at least, would know better than to credit this silly accusation. He has been a guest at your house, and I am astonished that you should doubt his word." Mrs. Cooke looked at her niece perplexedly. "You must remember, Marian," she said gently, "that I know nothing about him, where he came from, or who he is. Nor does any one at Asquith, except perhaps Miss Trevor, by her own confession. And you do not seem inclined to tell what you know, if indeed you know anything." Upon this Miss Thorn became more indignant still, and Mrs. Cooke went on "Gentlemen, as a rule, do not assume names, especially other people's. They are usually proud of their own. Mr. Allen appears among us, from the clouds, as it were, and in due time we learn from a newspaper that he has committed a defalcation. And, furthermore, the paper contains a portrait and an accurate description which put the thing beyond doubt. I ask you, is it reasonable for him to state coolly after all this that he is another man? That he is a well-known author? It's an absurdity. I was not born yesterday, my dear." "It is most reasonable under the circumstances," replied Miss Thorn, warmly. "Extraordinary? Of course it's extraordinary. And too long to explain to a prejudiced audience, who can't be expected to comprehend the character of a genius, to understand the yearning of a famous man for a little quiet." Mrs. Cooke looked grave. "Marian, you forget yourself," she said. "Oh, I am tired of it, Aunt Maria," cried Miss Thorn; "if he takes my advice, he will refuse to discuss it farther." She did not seem to be aware that she had put forth no argument whatever, save a woman's argument. And I was intensely surprised that her indignation should have got the better of her in this way, having always supposed her clear-headed in the extreme. A few words from her, such as I supposed she would have spoken, had set the Celebrity right with all except Mr. Cooke. To me it was a clear proof that the Celebrity had turned her head, and her mind with it. The silence was broken by an uncontrollable burst of laughter from Miss Trevor. She was quickly frowned down by her father, who reminded her that this was not a comedy. "And, Mr. Allen," he said, "if you have anything to say, or any evidence to bring forward, now is the time to do it." He appeared to forget that I was the district attorney. The Celebrity had seated himself on the trunk of a tree, and was blowing out the smoke in clouds. He was inclined to take Miss Thorn's advice, for he made a gesture of weariness with his cigarette, in the use of which he was singularly eloquent. "Tell me, Mr. Trevor," said he, "why I should sit before you as a tribunal? Why I should take the trouble to clear myself of a senseless charge? My respect for you inclines me to the belief that you are laboring under a momentary excitement; for when you reflect that I am a prominent, not to say famous, author, you will realize how absurd it is that I should be an embezzler, and why I decline to lower myself by an explanation." Mr. Trevor picked up the paper and struck it. "Do you refuse to say anything in the face of such evidence as that?" he cried. "It is not a matter for refusal, Mr. Trevor. It is simply that I cannot admit the possibility of having committed the crime." "Well, sir," said the senator, his black necktie working out of place as his anger got the better of him, "I am to believe, then, because you claim to be the author of a few society novels, that you are infallible? Let me tell you that the President of the United States himself is liable to impeachment, and bound to disprove any charge he may be accused of. What in Halifax do I care for your divine-right-of-authors theory? I'll continue to think you guilty until you are shown to be innocent." Suddenly the full significance of the Celebrity's tactics struck Mr. Cooke, and he reached out and caught hold of Mr. Trevor's coattails. "Hold on, old man," said he; "Allen isn't going to be ass enough to own up to it. Don't you see we'd all be jugged and fined for assisting a criminal over the border? It's out of consideration for us." Mr. Trevor looked sternly over his shoulder at Mr. Cooke. "Do you mean to say, sir, seriously," he asked, "that, for the sake of a misplaced friendship for this man, and a misplaced sense of honor, you are bound to shield a guest, though a criminal? That you intend to assist him to escape from justice? I insist, for my own protection and that of my daughter, as well as for that of the others present that, since he refuses to speak, we must presume him guilty and turn him over." Mr. Trevor turned to Mrs. Cooke, as if relying on her support. "Fenelon," said she, "I have never sought to influence your actions when your friends were concerned, and I shall not begin now. All I ask of you is to consider the consequences of your intention." These words from Mrs. Cooke had much more weight with my client than Mr. Trevor's blustering demands. "Maria, my dear," he said, with a deferential urbanity, "Mr. Allen is my guest, and a gentleman. When a gentleman gives his word that he is not a criminal, it is sufficient." The force of this, for some reason, did not overwhelm his wife; and her lip curled a little, half in contempt, half in risibility. "Pshaw, Fenelon," said she, "what a fraud you are. Why is it you wish to get Mr. Allen over the border, then?" A question which might well have staggered a worthier intellect. "Why, my dear," answered my client, "I wish to save Mr. Allen the inconvenience, not to say the humiliation, of being brought East in custody and strapped with a pair of handcuffs. Let him take a shooting trip to the great Northwest until the real criminal is caught." "Well, Fenelon," replied Mrs. Cooke, unable to repress a smile, "one might as well try to argue with a turn-stile or a weather-vane. I wash my hands of it." But Mr. Trevor, who was both a self-made man and a Western politician, was far from being satisfied. He turned to me with a sweep of the arm he had doubtless learned in the Ohio State Senate. "Mr. Crocker," he cried, "are you, as attorney of this district, going to aid and abet in the escape of a fugitive from justice?" "Mr. Trevor," said I, "I will take the course in this matter which seems fit to me, and without advice from any one." He wheeled on Farrar, repeated the question, and got a like answer. Brought to bay for a time, he glared savagely around him while groping for further arguments. But at this point the Four appeared on the scene, much the worse for thickets, and clamoring for luncheon. They had five small fish between them which they wanted Miss Thorn to cook. CHAPTER XII The Four received Mr. Cooke's plan for the Celebrity's escape to Canada with enthusiastic acclamation, and as the one thing lacking to make the Bear Island trip a complete success. The Celebrity was hailed with the reverence due to the man who puts up the ring-money in a prize-fight. He was accorded, too, a certain amount of respect as a defaulter, which the Four would have denied him as an author, for I am inclined to the belief that the discovery of his literary profession would have lowered him rather than otherwise in their eyes. My client was naturally anxious to get under way at once for the Canadian border, but was overruled in this by his henchmen, who demanded something to eat. We sat down to an impromptu meal, which was an odd affair indeed. Mrs. Cooke maintained her usual serenity, but said little, while Miss Trevor and I had many a mirthful encounter at the thought of the turn matters had taken. At the other end of the cloth were Mr. Cooke and the Four, in wonderful spirits and unimpaired appetite, and in their midst sat the Celebrity, likewise in wonderful spirits. His behavior now and again elicited a loud grunt of disapproval from Mr. Trevor, who was plying his knife and fork in a manner emblematic of his state of mind. Mr. Allen was laughing and joking airily with Mr. Cooke and the guests, denying, but not resenting, their accusations with all the sang froid of a hardened criminal. He did not care particularly to go to Canada, he said. Why should he, when he was innocent? But, if Mr. Cooke insisted, he would enjoy seeing that part of the lake and the Canadian side. Afterwards I perceived Miss Thorn down by the brookside, washing dishes. Her sleeves were drawn back to the elbow, and a dainty white apron covered her blue skirt, while the wind from the lake had disentangled errant wisps of her hair. I stood on the brink above, secure, as I thought, from observation, when she chanced to look up and spied me. "Mr. Crocker," she called, "would you like to make yourself useful?" I was decidedly embarrassed. Her manner was as frank and unconstrained as though I had not been shunning her for weeks past. "If such a thing is possible," I replied. "Do you know a dish-cloth when you see one?" I was doubtful. But I procured the cloth from Miss Trevor and returned. There was an air about Miss Thorn that was new to me. "What an uncompromising man you are, Mr. Crocker," she said to me. "Once a person is unfortunate enough to come under the ban of your disapproval you have nothing whatever to do with them. Now it seems that I have given you offence in some way. Is it not so?" "You magnify my importance," I said. "No temporizing, Mr. Crocker," she went on, as though she meant to be obeyed; "sit down there, and let's have it out. I like you too well to quarrel with you." There was no resisting such a command, and I threw myself on the pebbles at her feet. "I thought we were going to be great friends," she said. "You and Mr. Farrar were so kind to me on the night of my arrival, and we had such fun watching the dance together." "I confess I thought so, too. But you expressed opinions then that I shared. You have since changed your mind, for some unaccountable reason." She paused in her polishing, a shining dish in her hand, and looked down at me with something between a laugh and a frown. "I suppose you have never regretted speaking hastily," she said. "Many a time," I returned, warming; "but if I ever thought a judgment measured and distilled, it was your judgment of the Celebrity." "Does the study of law eliminate humanity?" she asked, with a mock curtsey. "The deliberate sentences are sometimes the unjust ones, and men who are hung by weighed wisdom are often the innocent." "That is all very well in cases of doubt. But here you have the evidences of wrong-doing directly before you." Three dishes were taken up, dried, and put down before she answered me. I threw pebbles into the brook, and wished I had held my tongue. "What evidence?" inquired she. "Well," said I, "I must finish, I suppose. I had a notion you knew of what I inferred. First, let me say that I have no desire to prejudice you against a person whom you admire." "Impossible." Something in her tone made me look up. "Very good, then," I answered. "I, for one, can have no use for a man who devotes himself to a girl long enough to win her affections, and then deserts her with as little compunction as a dog does a rat it has shaken. And that is how your Celebrity treated Miss Trevor." "But Miss Trevor has recovered, I believe," said Miss Thorn. I began to feel a deep, but helpless, insecurity. "Happily, yes," I assented. "Thanks to an excellent physician." A smile twitched the corners of her mouth, as though she enjoyed my discomfiture. I remarked for the fiftieth time how strong her face was, with its generous lines and clearly moulded features. And a suspicion entered my soul. "At any rate," I said, with a laugh, "the Celebrity has got himself into no end of a predicament now. He may go back to New York in custody." "I thought you incapable of resentment, Mr. Crocker. How mean of you to deny him!" "It can do no harm," I answered; "a little lesson in the dangers of incognito may be salutary. I wish it were a little lesson in the dangers of something else." The color mounted to her face as she resumed her occupation. "I am afraid you are a very wicked man," she said. Before I could reply there came a scuffling sound from the bank above us, and the snapping of branches and twigs. It was Mr. Cooke. His descent, the personal conduction of which he lost half-way down, was irregular and spasmodic, and a rude concussion at the bottom knocked off a choice bit of profanity which was balanced on the tip of his tongue. "Tobogganing is a little out of season," said his niece, laughing heartily. Mr. Cooke brushed himself off, picked up the glasses which he had dropped in his flight and pushed them into my hands. Then he pointed lakeward with bulging eyes. "Crocker, old man," he said in a loud whisper, "they tell me that is an Asquith cat-boat." I followed his finger and saw for the first time a sail-boat headed for the island, then about two miles off shore. I raised the glasses. "Yes," I said, "the Scimitar." "That's what Farrar said," cried he. "And what about it?" I asked. "What about it?" he ejaculated. "Why, it's a detective come for Allen. I knew sure as hell if they got as far as Asquith they wouldn't stop there. And that's the fastest sail-boat he could hire there, isn't it?" I replied that it was. He seized me by the shoulder and began dragging me up the bank. "What are you going to do?" I cried, shaking myself loose. "We've got to get on the Maria and run for it," he panted. "There is no time to be lost." He had reached the top of the bank and was running towards the group at the tents. And he actually infused me with some of his red-hot enthusiasm, for I hastened after him. "But you can't begin to get the Maria out before they will be in here," I shouted. He stopped short, gazed at the approaching boat, and then at me. "Is that so?" "Yes, of course," said I, "they will be here in ten minutes." The Celebrity stood in the midst of the excited Four. His hair was parted precisely, and he had induced a monocle to remain in his eye long enough to examine the Scimitar, his nose at the critical elevation. This unruffled exterior made a deep impression on the Four. Was the Celebrity not undergoing the crucial test of a true sport? He was an example alike to criminals and philosophers. Mr. Cooke hurried into the group, which divided respectfully for him, and grasped the Celebrity by the hand. "Something else has got to be done, old man," he said, in a voice which shook with emotion; "they'll be on us before we can get the Maria out." Farrar, who was nailing a rustic bench near by, straightened up at this, his lip curling with a desire to laugh. The Celebrity laid his hand on my client's shoulder. "Cooke," said he, "I'm deeply grateful for all the trouble you wish to take, and for the solicitude you have shown. But let things be. I'll come out of it all right." "Never," cried Cooke, looking proudly around the Four as some Highland chief might have surveyed a faithful clan. "I'd a damned sight rather go to jail myself." "A damned sight," echoed the Four in unison. "I insist, Cooke," said the Celebrity, taking out his eyeglass and tapping Mr. Cooke's purple necktie, "I insist that you drop this business. I repeat my thanks to you and these gentlemen for the friendship they have shown, but say again that I am as innocent of this crime as a baby." Mr. Cooke paid no attention to this speech. His face became radiant. "Didn't any of you fellows strike a cave, or a hollow tree, or something of that sort, knocking around this morning?" One man slapped his knee. "The very place," he cried. "I fell into it," and he showed a rent in his trousers corroboratively. "It's big enough to hold twenty of Allen, and the detective doesn't live that could find it." "Hustle him off, quick," said Mr. Cooke. The mandate was obeyed as literally as though Robin Hood himself had given it. The Celebrity disappeared into the forest, carried rather than urged towards his destined place of confinement. The commotion had brought Mr. Trevor to the spot. He caught sight of the Celebrity's back between the trees, then he looked at the cat-boat entering the cove, a man in the stern preparing to pull in the tender. He intercepted Mr. Cooke on his way to the beach. "What have you done with Mr. Allen?" he asked, in a menacing voice. "Good God," said Mr. Cooke, whose contempt for Mr. Trevor was now infinite, "you talk as if I were the governor of the state. What the devil could I do with him?" "I will have no evasion," replied Mr. Trevor, taking an imposing posture in front of him. "You are trying to defeat the ends of justice by assisting a dangerous criminal to escape. I have warned you, sir, and warn you again of the consequences of your meditated crime, and I give you my word I will do all in my power to frustrate it." Mr. Cooke dug his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. Here was a complication he had not looked for. The Scimitar lay at anchor with her sail down, and two men were coming ashore in the tender. Mr. Cooke's attitude being that of a man who reconsiders a rash resolve, Mr. Trevor was emboldened to say in a moderated tone: "You were carried away by your generosity, Mr. Cooke. I was sure when you took time to think you would see it in another light." Mr. Cooke started off for the place where the boat had grounded. I did not catch his reply, and probably should not have written it here if I had. The senator looked as if he had been sand-bagged. The two men jumped out of the boat and hauled it up. Mr. Cooke waved an easy salute to one, whom I recognized as the big boatman from Asquith, familiarly known as Captain Jay. He owned the Scimitar and several smaller boats. The captain went through the pantomime of an introduction between Mr. Cooke and the other, whom my client shook warmly by the hand, and presently all three came towards us. Mr. Cooke led them to a bar he had improvised by the brook. A pool served the office of refrigerator, and Mr. Cooke had devised an ingenious but complicated arrangement of strings and labels which enabled him to extract any bottle or set of bottles without having to bare his arm and pull out the lot. Farrar and I responded to the call he had given, and went down to assist in the entertainment. My client, with his back to us, was busy manipulating the strings. "Gentlemen," he said, "let me make you acquainted with Mr. Drew. You all know the captain." Had I not suspected Mr. Drew's profession, I think I should not have remarked that he gave each of us a keen look as he raised his head. He had reddish-brown hair, and a pair of bushy red whiskers, each of which tapered to a long point. He was broad in the shoulders, and the clothes he wore rather enhanced this breadth. His suit was gray and almost new, the trousers perceptibly bagging at the knee, and he had a felt hat, a necktie of the white and flowery pattern, and square-toed "Congress" boots. In short, he was a decidedly ordinary looking person; you would meet a hundred like him in the streets of Far Harbor and Beaverton. He might have been a prosperous business man in either of those towns,--a comfortable lumber merchant or mine owner. And he had chosen just the get-up I should have picked for detective work in that region. He had a pleasant eye and a very fetching and hearty manner. But his long whiskers troubled me especially. I kept wondering if they were real. "The captain is sailing Mr. Drew over to Far Harbor," explained Mr. Cooke, "and they have put in here for the night." Mr. Drew was plainly not an amateur, for he volunteered nothing further than this. The necessary bottles having been produced, Mr. Cooke held up his glass and turned to the stranger. "Welcome to our party, old man," said he. Mr. Drew drained his glass and complimented Mr. Cooke on the brand,--a sure key to my client's heart. Whereupon he seated himself between Mr. Drew and the captain and began a discourse on the subject of his own cellar, on which he talked for nearly an hour. His only pauses were for the worthy purpose of filling the detective's or the captain's glass, and these he watched with a hospitable solicitude. The captain had the advantage, three to one, and I made no doubt his employer bitterly regretted not having a boatman whose principles were more strict. At the end of the hour Captain Jay, who by nature was inclined to be taciturn and crabbed, waxed loquacious and even jovial. He sang us the songs he had learned in the winter lumber-camps, which Mr. Cooke never failed to encore to the echo. My client vowed he had not spent a pleasanter afternoon for years. He plied the captain with cigars, and explained to him the mystery of the strings and labels; and the captain experimented until he had broken some of the bottles. Mr. Cooke was not a person who made any great distinction between the three degrees, acquaintance, friendship, and intimacy. When a stranger pleased him, he went from one to the other with such comparative ease that a hardhearted man, and no other, could have resented his advances. Mr. Drew was anything but a hard-hearted man, and he did not object to my client's familiarity. Mr. Cooke made no secret of his admiration for Mr. Drew, and there were just two things about him that Mr. Cooke admired and wondered at, above all else,--the bushy red whiskers. But it appeared that these were the only things that Mr. Drew was really touchy about. I noticed that the detective, without being impolite, did his best to discourage these remarks; but my client knew no such word as discouragement. He was continually saying: "I think I'll grow some like that, old man," or "Have those cut," and the like,--a kind of humor in which the captain took an incredible delight. And finally, when a certain pitch of good feeling had been arrived at, Mr.

grandpop

How many times the word 'grandpop' appears in the text?

you happen to have any handcuffs on the Maria?" But my client was pouring out a stiff helping from the decanter, which he still held in his hand. Then he approached the Celebrity. "Don't let it worry you, old man," said he, with intense earnestness. "Don't let it worry you. You're my guest, and I'll see you safe out of it, or bust." "Fenelon," said Mrs. Cooke, gravely, "do you realize what you are saying?" "You're a clever one, Allen," my client continued, and he backed away the better to look him over; "you had nerve to stay as long as you did." The Celebrity laughed confidently. "Cooke," he replied, "I appreciate your generosity,--I really do. I know no offence is meant. The mistake is, in fact, most pardonable." In Mr. Cooke amazement and admiration were clamoring for utterance. "Damn me," he sputtered, "if you're not the coolest embezzler I ever saw." The Celebrity laughed again. Then he surveyed the circle. "My friends," he said, "this is certainly a most amazing coincidence; one which, I assure you, surprises me no less than it does you. You have no doubt remarked that I have my peculiarities. We all have. "I flatter thyself I am not entirely unknown. And the annoyances imposed upon me by a certain fame I have achieved had become such that some months ago I began to crave the pleasures of the life of a private man. I determined to go to some sequestered resort where my face was unfamiliar. The possibility of being recognized at Asquith did not occur to me. Fortunately I was. And a singular chance led me to take the name of the man who has committed this crime, and who has the misfortune to resemble me. I suppose that now," he added impressively, "I shall have to tell you who I am." He paused until these words should have gained their full effect. Then he held up the edition de luxe from which he and Miss Thorn had been reading. "You may have heard, Mrs. Cooke," said he, addressing himself to our hostess, "you may perhaps have heard of the author of this book." Mrs. Cooke was a calm woman, and she read the name on the cover. "Yes," she said, "I have. And you claim to be he?" "Ask my friend Crocker here," he answered carelessly, no doubt exulting that the scene was going off so dramatically. "I should indeed be in a tight box," he went on, "if there were not friends of mine here to help me out." They turned to me. "I am afraid I cannot," I said with what soberness I could. "What!" says he with a start. "What! you deny me?" Miss Trevor had her tongue in her cheek. I bowed. "I am powerless to speak, Mr. Allen," I replied. During this colloquy my client stood between us, looking from one to the other. I well knew that his way of thinking would be with my testimony, and that the gilt name on the edition de luxe had done little towards convincing him of Mr. Allen's innocence. To his mind there was nothing horrible or incongruous in the idea that a well-known author should be a defaulter. It was perfectly possible. He shoved the glass of Scotch towards the Celebrity, with a smile. "Take this, old man," he kindly insisted, "and you'll feel better. What's the use of bucking when you're saddled with a thing like that?" And he pointed to the paper. "Besides, they haven't caught you yet, by a damned sight." The Celebrity waved aside the proffered tumbler. "This is an infamous charge, and you know it, Crocker," he cried. "If you don't, you ought to, as a lawyer. This isn't any time to have fun with a fellow." "My dear sir," I said, "I have charged you with nothing whatever." He turned his back on me in complete disgust. And he came face to face with Miss Trevor. "Miss Trevor, too, knows something of me," he said. "You forget, Mr. Allen," she answered sweetly, "you forget that I have given you my promise not to reveal what I know." The Celebrity chafed, for this was as damaging a statement as could well be uttered against him. But Miss Thorn was his trump card, and she now came forward. "This is ridiculous, Mr. Crocker, simply ridiculous," said she. "I agree with you most heartily, Miss Thorn," I replied. "Nonsense!" exclaimed Miss Thorn, and she drew her lips together, "pure nonsense!" "Nonsense or not, Marian," Mr. Cooke interposed, "we are wasting valuable time. The police are already on the scent, I'll bet my hat." "Fenelon!" Mrs. Cooke remonstrated. "And do you mean to say in soberness, Uncle Fenelon, that you believe the author of The Sybarites to be a defaulter?" said Miss Thorn. "It is indeed hard to believe Mr. Allen a criminal," Mr. Trevor broke in for the first time. "I think it only right that he should be allowed to clear himself before he is put to further inconvenience, and perhaps injustice, by any action we may take in the matter." Mr. Cooke sniffed suspiciously at the word "action." "What action do you mean?" he demanded. "Well," replied Mr. Trevor, with some hesitation, "before we take any steps, that is, notify the police." "Notify the police!" cried my client, his face red with a generous anger. "I have never yet turned a guest over to the police," he said proudly, "and won't, not if I know it. I'm not that kind." Who shall criticise Mr. Cooke's code of morality? "Fenelon," said his wife, "you must remember you have never yet entertained a guest of a larcenous character. No embezzlers up to the present. Marian," she continued, turning to Miss Thorn, "you spoke as if you might, be able to throw some light upon this matter. Do you know whether this gentleman is Charles Wrexell Allen, or whether he is the author? In short, do you know who he is?" The Celebrity lighted a cigarette. Miss Thorn said indignantly, "Upon my word, Aunt Maria, I thought that you, at least, would know better than to credit this silly accusation. He has been a guest at your house, and I am astonished that you should doubt his word." Mrs. Cooke looked at her niece perplexedly. "You must remember, Marian," she said gently, "that I know nothing about him, where he came from, or who he is. Nor does any one at Asquith, except perhaps Miss Trevor, by her own confession. And you do not seem inclined to tell what you know, if indeed you know anything." Upon this Miss Thorn became more indignant still, and Mrs. Cooke went on "Gentlemen, as a rule, do not assume names, especially other people's. They are usually proud of their own. Mr. Allen appears among us, from the clouds, as it were, and in due time we learn from a newspaper that he has committed a defalcation. And, furthermore, the paper contains a portrait and an accurate description which put the thing beyond doubt. I ask you, is it reasonable for him to state coolly after all this that he is another man? That he is a well-known author? It's an absurdity. I was not born yesterday, my dear." "It is most reasonable under the circumstances," replied Miss Thorn, warmly. "Extraordinary? Of course it's extraordinary. And too long to explain to a prejudiced audience, who can't be expected to comprehend the character of a genius, to understand the yearning of a famous man for a little quiet." Mrs. Cooke looked grave. "Marian, you forget yourself," she said. "Oh, I am tired of it, Aunt Maria," cried Miss Thorn; "if he takes my advice, he will refuse to discuss it farther." She did not seem to be aware that she had put forth no argument whatever, save a woman's argument. And I was intensely surprised that her indignation should have got the better of her in this way, having always supposed her clear-headed in the extreme. A few words from her, such as I supposed she would have spoken, had set the Celebrity right with all except Mr. Cooke. To me it was a clear proof that the Celebrity had turned her head, and her mind with it. The silence was broken by an uncontrollable burst of laughter from Miss Trevor. She was quickly frowned down by her father, who reminded her that this was not a comedy. "And, Mr. Allen," he said, "if you have anything to say, or any evidence to bring forward, now is the time to do it." He appeared to forget that I was the district attorney. The Celebrity had seated himself on the trunk of a tree, and was blowing out the smoke in clouds. He was inclined to take Miss Thorn's advice, for he made a gesture of weariness with his cigarette, in the use of which he was singularly eloquent. "Tell me, Mr. Trevor," said he, "why I should sit before you as a tribunal? Why I should take the trouble to clear myself of a senseless charge? My respect for you inclines me to the belief that you are laboring under a momentary excitement; for when you reflect that I am a prominent, not to say famous, author, you will realize how absurd it is that I should be an embezzler, and why I decline to lower myself by an explanation." Mr. Trevor picked up the paper and struck it. "Do you refuse to say anything in the face of such evidence as that?" he cried. "It is not a matter for refusal, Mr. Trevor. It is simply that I cannot admit the possibility of having committed the crime." "Well, sir," said the senator, his black necktie working out of place as his anger got the better of him, "I am to believe, then, because you claim to be the author of a few society novels, that you are infallible? Let me tell you that the President of the United States himself is liable to impeachment, and bound to disprove any charge he may be accused of. What in Halifax do I care for your divine-right-of-authors theory? I'll continue to think you guilty until you are shown to be innocent." Suddenly the full significance of the Celebrity's tactics struck Mr. Cooke, and he reached out and caught hold of Mr. Trevor's coattails. "Hold on, old man," said he; "Allen isn't going to be ass enough to own up to it. Don't you see we'd all be jugged and fined for assisting a criminal over the border? It's out of consideration for us." Mr. Trevor looked sternly over his shoulder at Mr. Cooke. "Do you mean to say, sir, seriously," he asked, "that, for the sake of a misplaced friendship for this man, and a misplaced sense of honor, you are bound to shield a guest, though a criminal? That you intend to assist him to escape from justice? I insist, for my own protection and that of my daughter, as well as for that of the others present that, since he refuses to speak, we must presume him guilty and turn him over." Mr. Trevor turned to Mrs. Cooke, as if relying on her support. "Fenelon," said she, "I have never sought to influence your actions when your friends were concerned, and I shall not begin now. All I ask of you is to consider the consequences of your intention." These words from Mrs. Cooke had much more weight with my client than Mr. Trevor's blustering demands. "Maria, my dear," he said, with a deferential urbanity, "Mr. Allen is my guest, and a gentleman. When a gentleman gives his word that he is not a criminal, it is sufficient." The force of this, for some reason, did not overwhelm his wife; and her lip curled a little, half in contempt, half in risibility. "Pshaw, Fenelon," said she, "what a fraud you are. Why is it you wish to get Mr. Allen over the border, then?" A question which might well have staggered a worthier intellect. "Why, my dear," answered my client, "I wish to save Mr. Allen the inconvenience, not to say the humiliation, of being brought East in custody and strapped with a pair of handcuffs. Let him take a shooting trip to the great Northwest until the real criminal is caught." "Well, Fenelon," replied Mrs. Cooke, unable to repress a smile, "one might as well try to argue with a turn-stile or a weather-vane. I wash my hands of it." But Mr. Trevor, who was both a self-made man and a Western politician, was far from being satisfied. He turned to me with a sweep of the arm he had doubtless learned in the Ohio State Senate. "Mr. Crocker," he cried, "are you, as attorney of this district, going to aid and abet in the escape of a fugitive from justice?" "Mr. Trevor," said I, "I will take the course in this matter which seems fit to me, and without advice from any one." He wheeled on Farrar, repeated the question, and got a like answer. Brought to bay for a time, he glared savagely around him while groping for further arguments. But at this point the Four appeared on the scene, much the worse for thickets, and clamoring for luncheon. They had five small fish between them which they wanted Miss Thorn to cook. CHAPTER XII The Four received Mr. Cooke's plan for the Celebrity's escape to Canada with enthusiastic acclamation, and as the one thing lacking to make the Bear Island trip a complete success. The Celebrity was hailed with the reverence due to the man who puts up the ring-money in a prize-fight. He was accorded, too, a certain amount of respect as a defaulter, which the Four would have denied him as an author, for I am inclined to the belief that the discovery of his literary profession would have lowered him rather than otherwise in their eyes. My client was naturally anxious to get under way at once for the Canadian border, but was overruled in this by his henchmen, who demanded something to eat. We sat down to an impromptu meal, which was an odd affair indeed. Mrs. Cooke maintained her usual serenity, but said little, while Miss Trevor and I had many a mirthful encounter at the thought of the turn matters had taken. At the other end of the cloth were Mr. Cooke and the Four, in wonderful spirits and unimpaired appetite, and in their midst sat the Celebrity, likewise in wonderful spirits. His behavior now and again elicited a loud grunt of disapproval from Mr. Trevor, who was plying his knife and fork in a manner emblematic of his state of mind. Mr. Allen was laughing and joking airily with Mr. Cooke and the guests, denying, but not resenting, their accusations with all the sang froid of a hardened criminal. He did not care particularly to go to Canada, he said. Why should he, when he was innocent? But, if Mr. Cooke insisted, he would enjoy seeing that part of the lake and the Canadian side. Afterwards I perceived Miss Thorn down by the brookside, washing dishes. Her sleeves were drawn back to the elbow, and a dainty white apron covered her blue skirt, while the wind from the lake had disentangled errant wisps of her hair. I stood on the brink above, secure, as I thought, from observation, when she chanced to look up and spied me. "Mr. Crocker," she called, "would you like to make yourself useful?" I was decidedly embarrassed. Her manner was as frank and unconstrained as though I had not been shunning her for weeks past. "If such a thing is possible," I replied. "Do you know a dish-cloth when you see one?" I was doubtful. But I procured the cloth from Miss Trevor and returned. There was an air about Miss Thorn that was new to me. "What an uncompromising man you are, Mr. Crocker," she said to me. "Once a person is unfortunate enough to come under the ban of your disapproval you have nothing whatever to do with them. Now it seems that I have given you offence in some way. Is it not so?" "You magnify my importance," I said. "No temporizing, Mr. Crocker," she went on, as though she meant to be obeyed; "sit down there, and let's have it out. I like you too well to quarrel with you." There was no resisting such a command, and I threw myself on the pebbles at her feet. "I thought we were going to be great friends," she said. "You and Mr. Farrar were so kind to me on the night of my arrival, and we had such fun watching the dance together." "I confess I thought so, too. But you expressed opinions then that I shared. You have since changed your mind, for some unaccountable reason." She paused in her polishing, a shining dish in her hand, and looked down at me with something between a laugh and a frown. "I suppose you have never regretted speaking hastily," she said. "Many a time," I returned, warming; "but if I ever thought a judgment measured and distilled, it was your judgment of the Celebrity." "Does the study of law eliminate humanity?" she asked, with a mock curtsey. "The deliberate sentences are sometimes the unjust ones, and men who are hung by weighed wisdom are often the innocent." "That is all very well in cases of doubt. But here you have the evidences of wrong-doing directly before you." Three dishes were taken up, dried, and put down before she answered me. I threw pebbles into the brook, and wished I had held my tongue. "What evidence?" inquired she. "Well," said I, "I must finish, I suppose. I had a notion you knew of what I inferred. First, let me say that I have no desire to prejudice you against a person whom you admire." "Impossible." Something in her tone made me look up. "Very good, then," I answered. "I, for one, can have no use for a man who devotes himself to a girl long enough to win her affections, and then deserts her with as little compunction as a dog does a rat it has shaken. And that is how your Celebrity treated Miss Trevor." "But Miss Trevor has recovered, I believe," said Miss Thorn. I began to feel a deep, but helpless, insecurity. "Happily, yes," I assented. "Thanks to an excellent physician." A smile twitched the corners of her mouth, as though she enjoyed my discomfiture. I remarked for the fiftieth time how strong her face was, with its generous lines and clearly moulded features. And a suspicion entered my soul. "At any rate," I said, with a laugh, "the Celebrity has got himself into no end of a predicament now. He may go back to New York in custody." "I thought you incapable of resentment, Mr. Crocker. How mean of you to deny him!" "It can do no harm," I answered; "a little lesson in the dangers of incognito may be salutary. I wish it were a little lesson in the dangers of something else." The color mounted to her face as she resumed her occupation. "I am afraid you are a very wicked man," she said. Before I could reply there came a scuffling sound from the bank above us, and the snapping of branches and twigs. It was Mr. Cooke. His descent, the personal conduction of which he lost half-way down, was irregular and spasmodic, and a rude concussion at the bottom knocked off a choice bit of profanity which was balanced on the tip of his tongue. "Tobogganing is a little out of season," said his niece, laughing heartily. Mr. Cooke brushed himself off, picked up the glasses which he had dropped in his flight and pushed them into my hands. Then he pointed lakeward with bulging eyes. "Crocker, old man," he said in a loud whisper, "they tell me that is an Asquith cat-boat." I followed his finger and saw for the first time a sail-boat headed for the island, then about two miles off shore. I raised the glasses. "Yes," I said, "the Scimitar." "That's what Farrar said," cried he. "And what about it?" I asked. "What about it?" he ejaculated. "Why, it's a detective come for Allen. I knew sure as hell if they got as far as Asquith they wouldn't stop there. And that's the fastest sail-boat he could hire there, isn't it?" I replied that it was. He seized me by the shoulder and began dragging me up the bank. "What are you going to do?" I cried, shaking myself loose. "We've got to get on the Maria and run for it," he panted. "There is no time to be lost." He had reached the top of the bank and was running towards the group at the tents. And he actually infused me with some of his red-hot enthusiasm, for I hastened after him. "But you can't begin to get the Maria out before they will be in here," I shouted. He stopped short, gazed at the approaching boat, and then at me. "Is that so?" "Yes, of course," said I, "they will be here in ten minutes." The Celebrity stood in the midst of the excited Four. His hair was parted precisely, and he had induced a monocle to remain in his eye long enough to examine the Scimitar, his nose at the critical elevation. This unruffled exterior made a deep impression on the Four. Was the Celebrity not undergoing the crucial test of a true sport? He was an example alike to criminals and philosophers. Mr. Cooke hurried into the group, which divided respectfully for him, and grasped the Celebrity by the hand. "Something else has got to be done, old man," he said, in a voice which shook with emotion; "they'll be on us before we can get the Maria out." Farrar, who was nailing a rustic bench near by, straightened up at this, his lip curling with a desire to laugh. The Celebrity laid his hand on my client's shoulder. "Cooke," said he, "I'm deeply grateful for all the trouble you wish to take, and for the solicitude you have shown. But let things be. I'll come out of it all right." "Never," cried Cooke, looking proudly around the Four as some Highland chief might have surveyed a faithful clan. "I'd a damned sight rather go to jail myself." "A damned sight," echoed the Four in unison. "I insist, Cooke," said the Celebrity, taking out his eyeglass and tapping Mr. Cooke's purple necktie, "I insist that you drop this business. I repeat my thanks to you and these gentlemen for the friendship they have shown, but say again that I am as innocent of this crime as a baby." Mr. Cooke paid no attention to this speech. His face became radiant. "Didn't any of you fellows strike a cave, or a hollow tree, or something of that sort, knocking around this morning?" One man slapped his knee. "The very place," he cried. "I fell into it," and he showed a rent in his trousers corroboratively. "It's big enough to hold twenty of Allen, and the detective doesn't live that could find it." "Hustle him off, quick," said Mr. Cooke. The mandate was obeyed as literally as though Robin Hood himself had given it. The Celebrity disappeared into the forest, carried rather than urged towards his destined place of confinement. The commotion had brought Mr. Trevor to the spot. He caught sight of the Celebrity's back between the trees, then he looked at the cat-boat entering the cove, a man in the stern preparing to pull in the tender. He intercepted Mr. Cooke on his way to the beach. "What have you done with Mr. Allen?" he asked, in a menacing voice. "Good God," said Mr. Cooke, whose contempt for Mr. Trevor was now infinite, "you talk as if I were the governor of the state. What the devil could I do with him?" "I will have no evasion," replied Mr. Trevor, taking an imposing posture in front of him. "You are trying to defeat the ends of justice by assisting a dangerous criminal to escape. I have warned you, sir, and warn you again of the consequences of your meditated crime, and I give you my word I will do all in my power to frustrate it." Mr. Cooke dug his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. Here was a complication he had not looked for. The Scimitar lay at anchor with her sail down, and two men were coming ashore in the tender. Mr. Cooke's attitude being that of a man who reconsiders a rash resolve, Mr. Trevor was emboldened to say in a moderated tone: "You were carried away by your generosity, Mr. Cooke. I was sure when you took time to think you would see it in another light." Mr. Cooke started off for the place where the boat had grounded. I did not catch his reply, and probably should not have written it here if I had. The senator looked as if he had been sand-bagged. The two men jumped out of the boat and hauled it up. Mr. Cooke waved an easy salute to one, whom I recognized as the big boatman from Asquith, familiarly known as Captain Jay. He owned the Scimitar and several smaller boats. The captain went through the pantomime of an introduction between Mr. Cooke and the other, whom my client shook warmly by the hand, and presently all three came towards us. Mr. Cooke led them to a bar he had improvised by the brook. A pool served the office of refrigerator, and Mr. Cooke had devised an ingenious but complicated arrangement of strings and labels which enabled him to extract any bottle or set of bottles without having to bare his arm and pull out the lot. Farrar and I responded to the call he had given, and went down to assist in the entertainment. My client, with his back to us, was busy manipulating the strings. "Gentlemen," he said, "let me make you acquainted with Mr. Drew. You all know the captain." Had I not suspected Mr. Drew's profession, I think I should not have remarked that he gave each of us a keen look as he raised his head. He had reddish-brown hair, and a pair of bushy red whiskers, each of which tapered to a long point. He was broad in the shoulders, and the clothes he wore rather enhanced this breadth. His suit was gray and almost new, the trousers perceptibly bagging at the knee, and he had a felt hat, a necktie of the white and flowery pattern, and square-toed "Congress" boots. In short, he was a decidedly ordinary looking person; you would meet a hundred like him in the streets of Far Harbor and Beaverton. He might have been a prosperous business man in either of those towns,--a comfortable lumber merchant or mine owner. And he had chosen just the get-up I should have picked for detective work in that region. He had a pleasant eye and a very fetching and hearty manner. But his long whiskers troubled me especially. I kept wondering if they were real. "The captain is sailing Mr. Drew over to Far Harbor," explained Mr. Cooke, "and they have put in here for the night." Mr. Drew was plainly not an amateur, for he volunteered nothing further than this. The necessary bottles having been produced, Mr. Cooke held up his glass and turned to the stranger. "Welcome to our party, old man," said he. Mr. Drew drained his glass and complimented Mr. Cooke on the brand,--a sure key to my client's heart. Whereupon he seated himself between Mr. Drew and the captain and began a discourse on the subject of his own cellar, on which he talked for nearly an hour. His only pauses were for the worthy purpose of filling the detective's or the captain's glass, and these he watched with a hospitable solicitude. The captain had the advantage, three to one, and I made no doubt his employer bitterly regretted not having a boatman whose principles were more strict. At the end of the hour Captain Jay, who by nature was inclined to be taciturn and crabbed, waxed loquacious and even jovial. He sang us the songs he had learned in the winter lumber-camps, which Mr. Cooke never failed to encore to the echo. My client vowed he had not spent a pleasanter afternoon for years. He plied the captain with cigars, and explained to him the mystery of the strings and labels; and the captain experimented until he had broken some of the bottles. Mr. Cooke was not a person who made any great distinction between the three degrees, acquaintance, friendship, and intimacy. When a stranger pleased him, he went from one to the other with such comparative ease that a hardhearted man, and no other, could have resented his advances. Mr. Drew was anything but a hard-hearted man, and he did not object to my client's familiarity. Mr. Cooke made no secret of his admiration for Mr. Drew, and there were just two things about him that Mr. Cooke admired and wondered at, above all else,--the bushy red whiskers. But it appeared that these were the only things that Mr. Drew was really touchy about. I noticed that the detective, without being impolite, did his best to discourage these remarks; but my client knew no such word as discouragement. He was continually saying: "I think I'll grow some like that, old man," or "Have those cut," and the like,--a kind of humor in which the captain took an incredible delight. And finally, when a certain pitch of good feeling had been arrived at, Mr.

dealing

How many times the word 'dealing' appears in the text?

you happen to have any handcuffs on the Maria?" But my client was pouring out a stiff helping from the decanter, which he still held in his hand. Then he approached the Celebrity. "Don't let it worry you, old man," said he, with intense earnestness. "Don't let it worry you. You're my guest, and I'll see you safe out of it, or bust." "Fenelon," said Mrs. Cooke, gravely, "do you realize what you are saying?" "You're a clever one, Allen," my client continued, and he backed away the better to look him over; "you had nerve to stay as long as you did." The Celebrity laughed confidently. "Cooke," he replied, "I appreciate your generosity,--I really do. I know no offence is meant. The mistake is, in fact, most pardonable." In Mr. Cooke amazement and admiration were clamoring for utterance. "Damn me," he sputtered, "if you're not the coolest embezzler I ever saw." The Celebrity laughed again. Then he surveyed the circle. "My friends," he said, "this is certainly a most amazing coincidence; one which, I assure you, surprises me no less than it does you. You have no doubt remarked that I have my peculiarities. We all have. "I flatter thyself I am not entirely unknown. And the annoyances imposed upon me by a certain fame I have achieved had become such that some months ago I began to crave the pleasures of the life of a private man. I determined to go to some sequestered resort where my face was unfamiliar. The possibility of being recognized at Asquith did not occur to me. Fortunately I was. And a singular chance led me to take the name of the man who has committed this crime, and who has the misfortune to resemble me. I suppose that now," he added impressively, "I shall have to tell you who I am." He paused until these words should have gained their full effect. Then he held up the edition de luxe from which he and Miss Thorn had been reading. "You may have heard, Mrs. Cooke," said he, addressing himself to our hostess, "you may perhaps have heard of the author of this book." Mrs. Cooke was a calm woman, and she read the name on the cover. "Yes," she said, "I have. And you claim to be he?" "Ask my friend Crocker here," he answered carelessly, no doubt exulting that the scene was going off so dramatically. "I should indeed be in a tight box," he went on, "if there were not friends of mine here to help me out." They turned to me. "I am afraid I cannot," I said with what soberness I could. "What!" says he with a start. "What! you deny me?" Miss Trevor had her tongue in her cheek. I bowed. "I am powerless to speak, Mr. Allen," I replied. During this colloquy my client stood between us, looking from one to the other. I well knew that his way of thinking would be with my testimony, and that the gilt name on the edition de luxe had done little towards convincing him of Mr. Allen's innocence. To his mind there was nothing horrible or incongruous in the idea that a well-known author should be a defaulter. It was perfectly possible. He shoved the glass of Scotch towards the Celebrity, with a smile. "Take this, old man," he kindly insisted, "and you'll feel better. What's the use of bucking when you're saddled with a thing like that?" And he pointed to the paper. "Besides, they haven't caught you yet, by a damned sight." The Celebrity waved aside the proffered tumbler. "This is an infamous charge, and you know it, Crocker," he cried. "If you don't, you ought to, as a lawyer. This isn't any time to have fun with a fellow." "My dear sir," I said, "I have charged you with nothing whatever." He turned his back on me in complete disgust. And he came face to face with Miss Trevor. "Miss Trevor, too, knows something of me," he said. "You forget, Mr. Allen," she answered sweetly, "you forget that I have given you my promise not to reveal what I know." The Celebrity chafed, for this was as damaging a statement as could well be uttered against him. But Miss Thorn was his trump card, and she now came forward. "This is ridiculous, Mr. Crocker, simply ridiculous," said she. "I agree with you most heartily, Miss Thorn," I replied. "Nonsense!" exclaimed Miss Thorn, and she drew her lips together, "pure nonsense!" "Nonsense or not, Marian," Mr. Cooke interposed, "we are wasting valuable time. The police are already on the scent, I'll bet my hat." "Fenelon!" Mrs. Cooke remonstrated. "And do you mean to say in soberness, Uncle Fenelon, that you believe the author of The Sybarites to be a defaulter?" said Miss Thorn. "It is indeed hard to believe Mr. Allen a criminal," Mr. Trevor broke in for the first time. "I think it only right that he should be allowed to clear himself before he is put to further inconvenience, and perhaps injustice, by any action we may take in the matter." Mr. Cooke sniffed suspiciously at the word "action." "What action do you mean?" he demanded. "Well," replied Mr. Trevor, with some hesitation, "before we take any steps, that is, notify the police." "Notify the police!" cried my client, his face red with a generous anger. "I have never yet turned a guest over to the police," he said proudly, "and won't, not if I know it. I'm not that kind." Who shall criticise Mr. Cooke's code of morality? "Fenelon," said his wife, "you must remember you have never yet entertained a guest of a larcenous character. No embezzlers up to the present. Marian," she continued, turning to Miss Thorn, "you spoke as if you might, be able to throw some light upon this matter. Do you know whether this gentleman is Charles Wrexell Allen, or whether he is the author? In short, do you know who he is?" The Celebrity lighted a cigarette. Miss Thorn said indignantly, "Upon my word, Aunt Maria, I thought that you, at least, would know better than to credit this silly accusation. He has been a guest at your house, and I am astonished that you should doubt his word." Mrs. Cooke looked at her niece perplexedly. "You must remember, Marian," she said gently, "that I know nothing about him, where he came from, or who he is. Nor does any one at Asquith, except perhaps Miss Trevor, by her own confession. And you do not seem inclined to tell what you know, if indeed you know anything." Upon this Miss Thorn became more indignant still, and Mrs. Cooke went on "Gentlemen, as a rule, do not assume names, especially other people's. They are usually proud of their own. Mr. Allen appears among us, from the clouds, as it were, and in due time we learn from a newspaper that he has committed a defalcation. And, furthermore, the paper contains a portrait and an accurate description which put the thing beyond doubt. I ask you, is it reasonable for him to state coolly after all this that he is another man? That he is a well-known author? It's an absurdity. I was not born yesterday, my dear." "It is most reasonable under the circumstances," replied Miss Thorn, warmly. "Extraordinary? Of course it's extraordinary. And too long to explain to a prejudiced audience, who can't be expected to comprehend the character of a genius, to understand the yearning of a famous man for a little quiet." Mrs. Cooke looked grave. "Marian, you forget yourself," she said. "Oh, I am tired of it, Aunt Maria," cried Miss Thorn; "if he takes my advice, he will refuse to discuss it farther." She did not seem to be aware that she had put forth no argument whatever, save a woman's argument. And I was intensely surprised that her indignation should have got the better of her in this way, having always supposed her clear-headed in the extreme. A few words from her, such as I supposed she would have spoken, had set the Celebrity right with all except Mr. Cooke. To me it was a clear proof that the Celebrity had turned her head, and her mind with it. The silence was broken by an uncontrollable burst of laughter from Miss Trevor. She was quickly frowned down by her father, who reminded her that this was not a comedy. "And, Mr. Allen," he said, "if you have anything to say, or any evidence to bring forward, now is the time to do it." He appeared to forget that I was the district attorney. The Celebrity had seated himself on the trunk of a tree, and was blowing out the smoke in clouds. He was inclined to take Miss Thorn's advice, for he made a gesture of weariness with his cigarette, in the use of which he was singularly eloquent. "Tell me, Mr. Trevor," said he, "why I should sit before you as a tribunal? Why I should take the trouble to clear myself of a senseless charge? My respect for you inclines me to the belief that you are laboring under a momentary excitement; for when you reflect that I am a prominent, not to say famous, author, you will realize how absurd it is that I should be an embezzler, and why I decline to lower myself by an explanation." Mr. Trevor picked up the paper and struck it. "Do you refuse to say anything in the face of such evidence as that?" he cried. "It is not a matter for refusal, Mr. Trevor. It is simply that I cannot admit the possibility of having committed the crime." "Well, sir," said the senator, his black necktie working out of place as his anger got the better of him, "I am to believe, then, because you claim to be the author of a few society novels, that you are infallible? Let me tell you that the President of the United States himself is liable to impeachment, and bound to disprove any charge he may be accused of. What in Halifax do I care for your divine-right-of-authors theory? I'll continue to think you guilty until you are shown to be innocent." Suddenly the full significance of the Celebrity's tactics struck Mr. Cooke, and he reached out and caught hold of Mr. Trevor's coattails. "Hold on, old man," said he; "Allen isn't going to be ass enough to own up to it. Don't you see we'd all be jugged and fined for assisting a criminal over the border? It's out of consideration for us." Mr. Trevor looked sternly over his shoulder at Mr. Cooke. "Do you mean to say, sir, seriously," he asked, "that, for the sake of a misplaced friendship for this man, and a misplaced sense of honor, you are bound to shield a guest, though a criminal? That you intend to assist him to escape from justice? I insist, for my own protection and that of my daughter, as well as for that of the others present that, since he refuses to speak, we must presume him guilty and turn him over." Mr. Trevor turned to Mrs. Cooke, as if relying on her support. "Fenelon," said she, "I have never sought to influence your actions when your friends were concerned, and I shall not begin now. All I ask of you is to consider the consequences of your intention." These words from Mrs. Cooke had much more weight with my client than Mr. Trevor's blustering demands. "Maria, my dear," he said, with a deferential urbanity, "Mr. Allen is my guest, and a gentleman. When a gentleman gives his word that he is not a criminal, it is sufficient." The force of this, for some reason, did not overwhelm his wife; and her lip curled a little, half in contempt, half in risibility. "Pshaw, Fenelon," said she, "what a fraud you are. Why is it you wish to get Mr. Allen over the border, then?" A question which might well have staggered a worthier intellect. "Why, my dear," answered my client, "I wish to save Mr. Allen the inconvenience, not to say the humiliation, of being brought East in custody and strapped with a pair of handcuffs. Let him take a shooting trip to the great Northwest until the real criminal is caught." "Well, Fenelon," replied Mrs. Cooke, unable to repress a smile, "one might as well try to argue with a turn-stile or a weather-vane. I wash my hands of it." But Mr. Trevor, who was both a self-made man and a Western politician, was far from being satisfied. He turned to me with a sweep of the arm he had doubtless learned in the Ohio State Senate. "Mr. Crocker," he cried, "are you, as attorney of this district, going to aid and abet in the escape of a fugitive from justice?" "Mr. Trevor," said I, "I will take the course in this matter which seems fit to me, and without advice from any one." He wheeled on Farrar, repeated the question, and got a like answer. Brought to bay for a time, he glared savagely around him while groping for further arguments. But at this point the Four appeared on the scene, much the worse for thickets, and clamoring for luncheon. They had five small fish between them which they wanted Miss Thorn to cook. CHAPTER XII The Four received Mr. Cooke's plan for the Celebrity's escape to Canada with enthusiastic acclamation, and as the one thing lacking to make the Bear Island trip a complete success. The Celebrity was hailed with the reverence due to the man who puts up the ring-money in a prize-fight. He was accorded, too, a certain amount of respect as a defaulter, which the Four would have denied him as an author, for I am inclined to the belief that the discovery of his literary profession would have lowered him rather than otherwise in their eyes. My client was naturally anxious to get under way at once for the Canadian border, but was overruled in this by his henchmen, who demanded something to eat. We sat down to an impromptu meal, which was an odd affair indeed. Mrs. Cooke maintained her usual serenity, but said little, while Miss Trevor and I had many a mirthful encounter at the thought of the turn matters had taken. At the other end of the cloth were Mr. Cooke and the Four, in wonderful spirits and unimpaired appetite, and in their midst sat the Celebrity, likewise in wonderful spirits. His behavior now and again elicited a loud grunt of disapproval from Mr. Trevor, who was plying his knife and fork in a manner emblematic of his state of mind. Mr. Allen was laughing and joking airily with Mr. Cooke and the guests, denying, but not resenting, their accusations with all the sang froid of a hardened criminal. He did not care particularly to go to Canada, he said. Why should he, when he was innocent? But, if Mr. Cooke insisted, he would enjoy seeing that part of the lake and the Canadian side. Afterwards I perceived Miss Thorn down by the brookside, washing dishes. Her sleeves were drawn back to the elbow, and a dainty white apron covered her blue skirt, while the wind from the lake had disentangled errant wisps of her hair. I stood on the brink above, secure, as I thought, from observation, when she chanced to look up and spied me. "Mr. Crocker," she called, "would you like to make yourself useful?" I was decidedly embarrassed. Her manner was as frank and unconstrained as though I had not been shunning her for weeks past. "If such a thing is possible," I replied. "Do you know a dish-cloth when you see one?" I was doubtful. But I procured the cloth from Miss Trevor and returned. There was an air about Miss Thorn that was new to me. "What an uncompromising man you are, Mr. Crocker," she said to me. "Once a person is unfortunate enough to come under the ban of your disapproval you have nothing whatever to do with them. Now it seems that I have given you offence in some way. Is it not so?" "You magnify my importance," I said. "No temporizing, Mr. Crocker," she went on, as though she meant to be obeyed; "sit down there, and let's have it out. I like you too well to quarrel with you." There was no resisting such a command, and I threw myself on the pebbles at her feet. "I thought we were going to be great friends," she said. "You and Mr. Farrar were so kind to me on the night of my arrival, and we had such fun watching the dance together." "I confess I thought so, too. But you expressed opinions then that I shared. You have since changed your mind, for some unaccountable reason." She paused in her polishing, a shining dish in her hand, and looked down at me with something between a laugh and a frown. "I suppose you have never regretted speaking hastily," she said. "Many a time," I returned, warming; "but if I ever thought a judgment measured and distilled, it was your judgment of the Celebrity." "Does the study of law eliminate humanity?" she asked, with a mock curtsey. "The deliberate sentences are sometimes the unjust ones, and men who are hung by weighed wisdom are often the innocent." "That is all very well in cases of doubt. But here you have the evidences of wrong-doing directly before you." Three dishes were taken up, dried, and put down before she answered me. I threw pebbles into the brook, and wished I had held my tongue. "What evidence?" inquired she. "Well," said I, "I must finish, I suppose. I had a notion you knew of what I inferred. First, let me say that I have no desire to prejudice you against a person whom you admire." "Impossible." Something in her tone made me look up. "Very good, then," I answered. "I, for one, can have no use for a man who devotes himself to a girl long enough to win her affections, and then deserts her with as little compunction as a dog does a rat it has shaken. And that is how your Celebrity treated Miss Trevor." "But Miss Trevor has recovered, I believe," said Miss Thorn. I began to feel a deep, but helpless, insecurity. "Happily, yes," I assented. "Thanks to an excellent physician." A smile twitched the corners of her mouth, as though she enjoyed my discomfiture. I remarked for the fiftieth time how strong her face was, with its generous lines and clearly moulded features. And a suspicion entered my soul. "At any rate," I said, with a laugh, "the Celebrity has got himself into no end of a predicament now. He may go back to New York in custody." "I thought you incapable of resentment, Mr. Crocker. How mean of you to deny him!" "It can do no harm," I answered; "a little lesson in the dangers of incognito may be salutary. I wish it were a little lesson in the dangers of something else." The color mounted to her face as she resumed her occupation. "I am afraid you are a very wicked man," she said. Before I could reply there came a scuffling sound from the bank above us, and the snapping of branches and twigs. It was Mr. Cooke. His descent, the personal conduction of which he lost half-way down, was irregular and spasmodic, and a rude concussion at the bottom knocked off a choice bit of profanity which was balanced on the tip of his tongue. "Tobogganing is a little out of season," said his niece, laughing heartily. Mr. Cooke brushed himself off, picked up the glasses which he had dropped in his flight and pushed them into my hands. Then he pointed lakeward with bulging eyes. "Crocker, old man," he said in a loud whisper, "they tell me that is an Asquith cat-boat." I followed his finger and saw for the first time a sail-boat headed for the island, then about two miles off shore. I raised the glasses. "Yes," I said, "the Scimitar." "That's what Farrar said," cried he. "And what about it?" I asked. "What about it?" he ejaculated. "Why, it's a detective come for Allen. I knew sure as hell if they got as far as Asquith they wouldn't stop there. And that's the fastest sail-boat he could hire there, isn't it?" I replied that it was. He seized me by the shoulder and began dragging me up the bank. "What are you going to do?" I cried, shaking myself loose. "We've got to get on the Maria and run for it," he panted. "There is no time to be lost." He had reached the top of the bank and was running towards the group at the tents. And he actually infused me with some of his red-hot enthusiasm, for I hastened after him. "But you can't begin to get the Maria out before they will be in here," I shouted. He stopped short, gazed at the approaching boat, and then at me. "Is that so?" "Yes, of course," said I, "they will be here in ten minutes." The Celebrity stood in the midst of the excited Four. His hair was parted precisely, and he had induced a monocle to remain in his eye long enough to examine the Scimitar, his nose at the critical elevation. This unruffled exterior made a deep impression on the Four. Was the Celebrity not undergoing the crucial test of a true sport? He was an example alike to criminals and philosophers. Mr. Cooke hurried into the group, which divided respectfully for him, and grasped the Celebrity by the hand. "Something else has got to be done, old man," he said, in a voice which shook with emotion; "they'll be on us before we can get the Maria out." Farrar, who was nailing a rustic bench near by, straightened up at this, his lip curling with a desire to laugh. The Celebrity laid his hand on my client's shoulder. "Cooke," said he, "I'm deeply grateful for all the trouble you wish to take, and for the solicitude you have shown. But let things be. I'll come out of it all right." "Never," cried Cooke, looking proudly around the Four as some Highland chief might have surveyed a faithful clan. "I'd a damned sight rather go to jail myself." "A damned sight," echoed the Four in unison. "I insist, Cooke," said the Celebrity, taking out his eyeglass and tapping Mr. Cooke's purple necktie, "I insist that you drop this business. I repeat my thanks to you and these gentlemen for the friendship they have shown, but say again that I am as innocent of this crime as a baby." Mr. Cooke paid no attention to this speech. His face became radiant. "Didn't any of you fellows strike a cave, or a hollow tree, or something of that sort, knocking around this morning?" One man slapped his knee. "The very place," he cried. "I fell into it," and he showed a rent in his trousers corroboratively. "It's big enough to hold twenty of Allen, and the detective doesn't live that could find it." "Hustle him off, quick," said Mr. Cooke. The mandate was obeyed as literally as though Robin Hood himself had given it. The Celebrity disappeared into the forest, carried rather than urged towards his destined place of confinement. The commotion had brought Mr. Trevor to the spot. He caught sight of the Celebrity's back between the trees, then he looked at the cat-boat entering the cove, a man in the stern preparing to pull in the tender. He intercepted Mr. Cooke on his way to the beach. "What have you done with Mr. Allen?" he asked, in a menacing voice. "Good God," said Mr. Cooke, whose contempt for Mr. Trevor was now infinite, "you talk as if I were the governor of the state. What the devil could I do with him?" "I will have no evasion," replied Mr. Trevor, taking an imposing posture in front of him. "You are trying to defeat the ends of justice by assisting a dangerous criminal to escape. I have warned you, sir, and warn you again of the consequences of your meditated crime, and I give you my word I will do all in my power to frustrate it." Mr. Cooke dug his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. Here was a complication he had not looked for. The Scimitar lay at anchor with her sail down, and two men were coming ashore in the tender. Mr. Cooke's attitude being that of a man who reconsiders a rash resolve, Mr. Trevor was emboldened to say in a moderated tone: "You were carried away by your generosity, Mr. Cooke. I was sure when you took time to think you would see it in another light." Mr. Cooke started off for the place where the boat had grounded. I did not catch his reply, and probably should not have written it here if I had. The senator looked as if he had been sand-bagged. The two men jumped out of the boat and hauled it up. Mr. Cooke waved an easy salute to one, whom I recognized as the big boatman from Asquith, familiarly known as Captain Jay. He owned the Scimitar and several smaller boats. The captain went through the pantomime of an introduction between Mr. Cooke and the other, whom my client shook warmly by the hand, and presently all three came towards us. Mr. Cooke led them to a bar he had improvised by the brook. A pool served the office of refrigerator, and Mr. Cooke had devised an ingenious but complicated arrangement of strings and labels which enabled him to extract any bottle or set of bottles without having to bare his arm and pull out the lot. Farrar and I responded to the call he had given, and went down to assist in the entertainment. My client, with his back to us, was busy manipulating the strings. "Gentlemen," he said, "let me make you acquainted with Mr. Drew. You all know the captain." Had I not suspected Mr. Drew's profession, I think I should not have remarked that he gave each of us a keen look as he raised his head. He had reddish-brown hair, and a pair of bushy red whiskers, each of which tapered to a long point. He was broad in the shoulders, and the clothes he wore rather enhanced this breadth. His suit was gray and almost new, the trousers perceptibly bagging at the knee, and he had a felt hat, a necktie of the white and flowery pattern, and square-toed "Congress" boots. In short, he was a decidedly ordinary looking person; you would meet a hundred like him in the streets of Far Harbor and Beaverton. He might have been a prosperous business man in either of those towns,--a comfortable lumber merchant or mine owner. And he had chosen just the get-up I should have picked for detective work in that region. He had a pleasant eye and a very fetching and hearty manner. But his long whiskers troubled me especially. I kept wondering if they were real. "The captain is sailing Mr. Drew over to Far Harbor," explained Mr. Cooke, "and they have put in here for the night." Mr. Drew was plainly not an amateur, for he volunteered nothing further than this. The necessary bottles having been produced, Mr. Cooke held up his glass and turned to the stranger. "Welcome to our party, old man," said he. Mr. Drew drained his glass and complimented Mr. Cooke on the brand,--a sure key to my client's heart. Whereupon he seated himself between Mr. Drew and the captain and began a discourse on the subject of his own cellar, on which he talked for nearly an hour. His only pauses were for the worthy purpose of filling the detective's or the captain's glass, and these he watched with a hospitable solicitude. The captain had the advantage, three to one, and I made no doubt his employer bitterly regretted not having a boatman whose principles were more strict. At the end of the hour Captain Jay, who by nature was inclined to be taciturn and crabbed, waxed loquacious and even jovial. He sang us the songs he had learned in the winter lumber-camps, which Mr. Cooke never failed to encore to the echo. My client vowed he had not spent a pleasanter afternoon for years. He plied the captain with cigars, and explained to him the mystery of the strings and labels; and the captain experimented until he had broken some of the bottles. Mr. Cooke was not a person who made any great distinction between the three degrees, acquaintance, friendship, and intimacy. When a stranger pleased him, he went from one to the other with such comparative ease that a hardhearted man, and no other, could have resented his advances. Mr. Drew was anything but a hard-hearted man, and he did not object to my client's familiarity. Mr. Cooke made no secret of his admiration for Mr. Drew, and there were just two things about him that Mr. Cooke admired and wondered at, above all else,--the bushy red whiskers. But it appeared that these were the only things that Mr. Drew was really touchy about. I noticed that the detective, without being impolite, did his best to discourage these remarks; but my client knew no such word as discouragement. He was continually saying: "I think I'll grow some like that, old man," or "Have those cut," and the like,--a kind of humor in which the captain took an incredible delight. And finally, when a certain pitch of good feeling had been arrived at, Mr.

suppose

How many times the word 'suppose' appears in the text?

you happen to have any handcuffs on the Maria?" But my client was pouring out a stiff helping from the decanter, which he still held in his hand. Then he approached the Celebrity. "Don't let it worry you, old man," said he, with intense earnestness. "Don't let it worry you. You're my guest, and I'll see you safe out of it, or bust." "Fenelon," said Mrs. Cooke, gravely, "do you realize what you are saying?" "You're a clever one, Allen," my client continued, and he backed away the better to look him over; "you had nerve to stay as long as you did." The Celebrity laughed confidently. "Cooke," he replied, "I appreciate your generosity,--I really do. I know no offence is meant. The mistake is, in fact, most pardonable." In Mr. Cooke amazement and admiration were clamoring for utterance. "Damn me," he sputtered, "if you're not the coolest embezzler I ever saw." The Celebrity laughed again. Then he surveyed the circle. "My friends," he said, "this is certainly a most amazing coincidence; one which, I assure you, surprises me no less than it does you. You have no doubt remarked that I have my peculiarities. We all have. "I flatter thyself I am not entirely unknown. And the annoyances imposed upon me by a certain fame I have achieved had become such that some months ago I began to crave the pleasures of the life of a private man. I determined to go to some sequestered resort where my face was unfamiliar. The possibility of being recognized at Asquith did not occur to me. Fortunately I was. And a singular chance led me to take the name of the man who has committed this crime, and who has the misfortune to resemble me. I suppose that now," he added impressively, "I shall have to tell you who I am." He paused until these words should have gained their full effect. Then he held up the edition de luxe from which he and Miss Thorn had been reading. "You may have heard, Mrs. Cooke," said he, addressing himself to our hostess, "you may perhaps have heard of the author of this book." Mrs. Cooke was a calm woman, and she read the name on the cover. "Yes," she said, "I have. And you claim to be he?" "Ask my friend Crocker here," he answered carelessly, no doubt exulting that the scene was going off so dramatically. "I should indeed be in a tight box," he went on, "if there were not friends of mine here to help me out." They turned to me. "I am afraid I cannot," I said with what soberness I could. "What!" says he with a start. "What! you deny me?" Miss Trevor had her tongue in her cheek. I bowed. "I am powerless to speak, Mr. Allen," I replied. During this colloquy my client stood between us, looking from one to the other. I well knew that his way of thinking would be with my testimony, and that the gilt name on the edition de luxe had done little towards convincing him of Mr. Allen's innocence. To his mind there was nothing horrible or incongruous in the idea that a well-known author should be a defaulter. It was perfectly possible. He shoved the glass of Scotch towards the Celebrity, with a smile. "Take this, old man," he kindly insisted, "and you'll feel better. What's the use of bucking when you're saddled with a thing like that?" And he pointed to the paper. "Besides, they haven't caught you yet, by a damned sight." The Celebrity waved aside the proffered tumbler. "This is an infamous charge, and you know it, Crocker," he cried. "If you don't, you ought to, as a lawyer. This isn't any time to have fun with a fellow." "My dear sir," I said, "I have charged you with nothing whatever." He turned his back on me in complete disgust. And he came face to face with Miss Trevor. "Miss Trevor, too, knows something of me," he said. "You forget, Mr. Allen," she answered sweetly, "you forget that I have given you my promise not to reveal what I know." The Celebrity chafed, for this was as damaging a statement as could well be uttered against him. But Miss Thorn was his trump card, and she now came forward. "This is ridiculous, Mr. Crocker, simply ridiculous," said she. "I agree with you most heartily, Miss Thorn," I replied. "Nonsense!" exclaimed Miss Thorn, and she drew her lips together, "pure nonsense!" "Nonsense or not, Marian," Mr. Cooke interposed, "we are wasting valuable time. The police are already on the scent, I'll bet my hat." "Fenelon!" Mrs. Cooke remonstrated. "And do you mean to say in soberness, Uncle Fenelon, that you believe the author of The Sybarites to be a defaulter?" said Miss Thorn. "It is indeed hard to believe Mr. Allen a criminal," Mr. Trevor broke in for the first time. "I think it only right that he should be allowed to clear himself before he is put to further inconvenience, and perhaps injustice, by any action we may take in the matter." Mr. Cooke sniffed suspiciously at the word "action." "What action do you mean?" he demanded. "Well," replied Mr. Trevor, with some hesitation, "before we take any steps, that is, notify the police." "Notify the police!" cried my client, his face red with a generous anger. "I have never yet turned a guest over to the police," he said proudly, "and won't, not if I know it. I'm not that kind." Who shall criticise Mr. Cooke's code of morality? "Fenelon," said his wife, "you must remember you have never yet entertained a guest of a larcenous character. No embezzlers up to the present. Marian," she continued, turning to Miss Thorn, "you spoke as if you might, be able to throw some light upon this matter. Do you know whether this gentleman is Charles Wrexell Allen, or whether he is the author? In short, do you know who he is?" The Celebrity lighted a cigarette. Miss Thorn said indignantly, "Upon my word, Aunt Maria, I thought that you, at least, would know better than to credit this silly accusation. He has been a guest at your house, and I am astonished that you should doubt his word." Mrs. Cooke looked at her niece perplexedly. "You must remember, Marian," she said gently, "that I know nothing about him, where he came from, or who he is. Nor does any one at Asquith, except perhaps Miss Trevor, by her own confession. And you do not seem inclined to tell what you know, if indeed you know anything." Upon this Miss Thorn became more indignant still, and Mrs. Cooke went on "Gentlemen, as a rule, do not assume names, especially other people's. They are usually proud of their own. Mr. Allen appears among us, from the clouds, as it were, and in due time we learn from a newspaper that he has committed a defalcation. And, furthermore, the paper contains a portrait and an accurate description which put the thing beyond doubt. I ask you, is it reasonable for him to state coolly after all this that he is another man? That he is a well-known author? It's an absurdity. I was not born yesterday, my dear." "It is most reasonable under the circumstances," replied Miss Thorn, warmly. "Extraordinary? Of course it's extraordinary. And too long to explain to a prejudiced audience, who can't be expected to comprehend the character of a genius, to understand the yearning of a famous man for a little quiet." Mrs. Cooke looked grave. "Marian, you forget yourself," she said. "Oh, I am tired of it, Aunt Maria," cried Miss Thorn; "if he takes my advice, he will refuse to discuss it farther." She did not seem to be aware that she had put forth no argument whatever, save a woman's argument. And I was intensely surprised that her indignation should have got the better of her in this way, having always supposed her clear-headed in the extreme. A few words from her, such as I supposed she would have spoken, had set the Celebrity right with all except Mr. Cooke. To me it was a clear proof that the Celebrity had turned her head, and her mind with it. The silence was broken by an uncontrollable burst of laughter from Miss Trevor. She was quickly frowned down by her father, who reminded her that this was not a comedy. "And, Mr. Allen," he said, "if you have anything to say, or any evidence to bring forward, now is the time to do it." He appeared to forget that I was the district attorney. The Celebrity had seated himself on the trunk of a tree, and was blowing out the smoke in clouds. He was inclined to take Miss Thorn's advice, for he made a gesture of weariness with his cigarette, in the use of which he was singularly eloquent. "Tell me, Mr. Trevor," said he, "why I should sit before you as a tribunal? Why I should take the trouble to clear myself of a senseless charge? My respect for you inclines me to the belief that you are laboring under a momentary excitement; for when you reflect that I am a prominent, not to say famous, author, you will realize how absurd it is that I should be an embezzler, and why I decline to lower myself by an explanation." Mr. Trevor picked up the paper and struck it. "Do you refuse to say anything in the face of such evidence as that?" he cried. "It is not a matter for refusal, Mr. Trevor. It is simply that I cannot admit the possibility of having committed the crime." "Well, sir," said the senator, his black necktie working out of place as his anger got the better of him, "I am to believe, then, because you claim to be the author of a few society novels, that you are infallible? Let me tell you that the President of the United States himself is liable to impeachment, and bound to disprove any charge he may be accused of. What in Halifax do I care for your divine-right-of-authors theory? I'll continue to think you guilty until you are shown to be innocent." Suddenly the full significance of the Celebrity's tactics struck Mr. Cooke, and he reached out and caught hold of Mr. Trevor's coattails. "Hold on, old man," said he; "Allen isn't going to be ass enough to own up to it. Don't you see we'd all be jugged and fined for assisting a criminal over the border? It's out of consideration for us." Mr. Trevor looked sternly over his shoulder at Mr. Cooke. "Do you mean to say, sir, seriously," he asked, "that, for the sake of a misplaced friendship for this man, and a misplaced sense of honor, you are bound to shield a guest, though a criminal? That you intend to assist him to escape from justice? I insist, for my own protection and that of my daughter, as well as for that of the others present that, since he refuses to speak, we must presume him guilty and turn him over." Mr. Trevor turned to Mrs. Cooke, as if relying on her support. "Fenelon," said she, "I have never sought to influence your actions when your friends were concerned, and I shall not begin now. All I ask of you is to consider the consequences of your intention." These words from Mrs. Cooke had much more weight with my client than Mr. Trevor's blustering demands. "Maria, my dear," he said, with a deferential urbanity, "Mr. Allen is my guest, and a gentleman. When a gentleman gives his word that he is not a criminal, it is sufficient." The force of this, for some reason, did not overwhelm his wife; and her lip curled a little, half in contempt, half in risibility. "Pshaw, Fenelon," said she, "what a fraud you are. Why is it you wish to get Mr. Allen over the border, then?" A question which might well have staggered a worthier intellect. "Why, my dear," answered my client, "I wish to save Mr. Allen the inconvenience, not to say the humiliation, of being brought East in custody and strapped with a pair of handcuffs. Let him take a shooting trip to the great Northwest until the real criminal is caught." "Well, Fenelon," replied Mrs. Cooke, unable to repress a smile, "one might as well try to argue with a turn-stile or a weather-vane. I wash my hands of it." But Mr. Trevor, who was both a self-made man and a Western politician, was far from being satisfied. He turned to me with a sweep of the arm he had doubtless learned in the Ohio State Senate. "Mr. Crocker," he cried, "are you, as attorney of this district, going to aid and abet in the escape of a fugitive from justice?" "Mr. Trevor," said I, "I will take the course in this matter which seems fit to me, and without advice from any one." He wheeled on Farrar, repeated the question, and got a like answer. Brought to bay for a time, he glared savagely around him while groping for further arguments. But at this point the Four appeared on the scene, much the worse for thickets, and clamoring for luncheon. They had five small fish between them which they wanted Miss Thorn to cook. CHAPTER XII The Four received Mr. Cooke's plan for the Celebrity's escape to Canada with enthusiastic acclamation, and as the one thing lacking to make the Bear Island trip a complete success. The Celebrity was hailed with the reverence due to the man who puts up the ring-money in a prize-fight. He was accorded, too, a certain amount of respect as a defaulter, which the Four would have denied him as an author, for I am inclined to the belief that the discovery of his literary profession would have lowered him rather than otherwise in their eyes. My client was naturally anxious to get under way at once for the Canadian border, but was overruled in this by his henchmen, who demanded something to eat. We sat down to an impromptu meal, which was an odd affair indeed. Mrs. Cooke maintained her usual serenity, but said little, while Miss Trevor and I had many a mirthful encounter at the thought of the turn matters had taken. At the other end of the cloth were Mr. Cooke and the Four, in wonderful spirits and unimpaired appetite, and in their midst sat the Celebrity, likewise in wonderful spirits. His behavior now and again elicited a loud grunt of disapproval from Mr. Trevor, who was plying his knife and fork in a manner emblematic of his state of mind. Mr. Allen was laughing and joking airily with Mr. Cooke and the guests, denying, but not resenting, their accusations with all the sang froid of a hardened criminal. He did not care particularly to go to Canada, he said. Why should he, when he was innocent? But, if Mr. Cooke insisted, he would enjoy seeing that part of the lake and the Canadian side. Afterwards I perceived Miss Thorn down by the brookside, washing dishes. Her sleeves were drawn back to the elbow, and a dainty white apron covered her blue skirt, while the wind from the lake had disentangled errant wisps of her hair. I stood on the brink above, secure, as I thought, from observation, when she chanced to look up and spied me. "Mr. Crocker," she called, "would you like to make yourself useful?" I was decidedly embarrassed. Her manner was as frank and unconstrained as though I had not been shunning her for weeks past. "If such a thing is possible," I replied. "Do you know a dish-cloth when you see one?" I was doubtful. But I procured the cloth from Miss Trevor and returned. There was an air about Miss Thorn that was new to me. "What an uncompromising man you are, Mr. Crocker," she said to me. "Once a person is unfortunate enough to come under the ban of your disapproval you have nothing whatever to do with them. Now it seems that I have given you offence in some way. Is it not so?" "You magnify my importance," I said. "No temporizing, Mr. Crocker," she went on, as though she meant to be obeyed; "sit down there, and let's have it out. I like you too well to quarrel with you." There was no resisting such a command, and I threw myself on the pebbles at her feet. "I thought we were going to be great friends," she said. "You and Mr. Farrar were so kind to me on the night of my arrival, and we had such fun watching the dance together." "I confess I thought so, too. But you expressed opinions then that I shared. You have since changed your mind, for some unaccountable reason." She paused in her polishing, a shining dish in her hand, and looked down at me with something between a laugh and a frown. "I suppose you have never regretted speaking hastily," she said. "Many a time," I returned, warming; "but if I ever thought a judgment measured and distilled, it was your judgment of the Celebrity." "Does the study of law eliminate humanity?" she asked, with a mock curtsey. "The deliberate sentences are sometimes the unjust ones, and men who are hung by weighed wisdom are often the innocent." "That is all very well in cases of doubt. But here you have the evidences of wrong-doing directly before you." Three dishes were taken up, dried, and put down before she answered me. I threw pebbles into the brook, and wished I had held my tongue. "What evidence?" inquired she. "Well," said I, "I must finish, I suppose. I had a notion you knew of what I inferred. First, let me say that I have no desire to prejudice you against a person whom you admire." "Impossible." Something in her tone made me look up. "Very good, then," I answered. "I, for one, can have no use for a man who devotes himself to a girl long enough to win her affections, and then deserts her with as little compunction as a dog does a rat it has shaken. And that is how your Celebrity treated Miss Trevor." "But Miss Trevor has recovered, I believe," said Miss Thorn. I began to feel a deep, but helpless, insecurity. "Happily, yes," I assented. "Thanks to an excellent physician." A smile twitched the corners of her mouth, as though she enjoyed my discomfiture. I remarked for the fiftieth time how strong her face was, with its generous lines and clearly moulded features. And a suspicion entered my soul. "At any rate," I said, with a laugh, "the Celebrity has got himself into no end of a predicament now. He may go back to New York in custody." "I thought you incapable of resentment, Mr. Crocker. How mean of you to deny him!" "It can do no harm," I answered; "a little lesson in the dangers of incognito may be salutary. I wish it were a little lesson in the dangers of something else." The color mounted to her face as she resumed her occupation. "I am afraid you are a very wicked man," she said. Before I could reply there came a scuffling sound from the bank above us, and the snapping of branches and twigs. It was Mr. Cooke. His descent, the personal conduction of which he lost half-way down, was irregular and spasmodic, and a rude concussion at the bottom knocked off a choice bit of profanity which was balanced on the tip of his tongue. "Tobogganing is a little out of season," said his niece, laughing heartily. Mr. Cooke brushed himself off, picked up the glasses which he had dropped in his flight and pushed them into my hands. Then he pointed lakeward with bulging eyes. "Crocker, old man," he said in a loud whisper, "they tell me that is an Asquith cat-boat." I followed his finger and saw for the first time a sail-boat headed for the island, then about two miles off shore. I raised the glasses. "Yes," I said, "the Scimitar." "That's what Farrar said," cried he. "And what about it?" I asked. "What about it?" he ejaculated. "Why, it's a detective come for Allen. I knew sure as hell if they got as far as Asquith they wouldn't stop there. And that's the fastest sail-boat he could hire there, isn't it?" I replied that it was. He seized me by the shoulder and began dragging me up the bank. "What are you going to do?" I cried, shaking myself loose. "We've got to get on the Maria and run for it," he panted. "There is no time to be lost." He had reached the top of the bank and was running towards the group at the tents. And he actually infused me with some of his red-hot enthusiasm, for I hastened after him. "But you can't begin to get the Maria out before they will be in here," I shouted. He stopped short, gazed at the approaching boat, and then at me. "Is that so?" "Yes, of course," said I, "they will be here in ten minutes." The Celebrity stood in the midst of the excited Four. His hair was parted precisely, and he had induced a monocle to remain in his eye long enough to examine the Scimitar, his nose at the critical elevation. This unruffled exterior made a deep impression on the Four. Was the Celebrity not undergoing the crucial test of a true sport? He was an example alike to criminals and philosophers. Mr. Cooke hurried into the group, which divided respectfully for him, and grasped the Celebrity by the hand. "Something else has got to be done, old man," he said, in a voice which shook with emotion; "they'll be on us before we can get the Maria out." Farrar, who was nailing a rustic bench near by, straightened up at this, his lip curling with a desire to laugh. The Celebrity laid his hand on my client's shoulder. "Cooke," said he, "I'm deeply grateful for all the trouble you wish to take, and for the solicitude you have shown. But let things be. I'll come out of it all right." "Never," cried Cooke, looking proudly around the Four as some Highland chief might have surveyed a faithful clan. "I'd a damned sight rather go to jail myself." "A damned sight," echoed the Four in unison. "I insist, Cooke," said the Celebrity, taking out his eyeglass and tapping Mr. Cooke's purple necktie, "I insist that you drop this business. I repeat my thanks to you and these gentlemen for the friendship they have shown, but say again that I am as innocent of this crime as a baby." Mr. Cooke paid no attention to this speech. His face became radiant. "Didn't any of you fellows strike a cave, or a hollow tree, or something of that sort, knocking around this morning?" One man slapped his knee. "The very place," he cried. "I fell into it," and he showed a rent in his trousers corroboratively. "It's big enough to hold twenty of Allen, and the detective doesn't live that could find it." "Hustle him off, quick," said Mr. Cooke. The mandate was obeyed as literally as though Robin Hood himself had given it. The Celebrity disappeared into the forest, carried rather than urged towards his destined place of confinement. The commotion had brought Mr. Trevor to the spot. He caught sight of the Celebrity's back between the trees, then he looked at the cat-boat entering the cove, a man in the stern preparing to pull in the tender. He intercepted Mr. Cooke on his way to the beach. "What have you done with Mr. Allen?" he asked, in a menacing voice. "Good God," said Mr. Cooke, whose contempt for Mr. Trevor was now infinite, "you talk as if I were the governor of the state. What the devil could I do with him?" "I will have no evasion," replied Mr. Trevor, taking an imposing posture in front of him. "You are trying to defeat the ends of justice by assisting a dangerous criminal to escape. I have warned you, sir, and warn you again of the consequences of your meditated crime, and I give you my word I will do all in my power to frustrate it." Mr. Cooke dug his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. Here was a complication he had not looked for. The Scimitar lay at anchor with her sail down, and two men were coming ashore in the tender. Mr. Cooke's attitude being that of a man who reconsiders a rash resolve, Mr. Trevor was emboldened to say in a moderated tone: "You were carried away by your generosity, Mr. Cooke. I was sure when you took time to think you would see it in another light." Mr. Cooke started off for the place where the boat had grounded. I did not catch his reply, and probably should not have written it here if I had. The senator looked as if he had been sand-bagged. The two men jumped out of the boat and hauled it up. Mr. Cooke waved an easy salute to one, whom I recognized as the big boatman from Asquith, familiarly known as Captain Jay. He owned the Scimitar and several smaller boats. The captain went through the pantomime of an introduction between Mr. Cooke and the other, whom my client shook warmly by the hand, and presently all three came towards us. Mr. Cooke led them to a bar he had improvised by the brook. A pool served the office of refrigerator, and Mr. Cooke had devised an ingenious but complicated arrangement of strings and labels which enabled him to extract any bottle or set of bottles without having to bare his arm and pull out the lot. Farrar and I responded to the call he had given, and went down to assist in the entertainment. My client, with his back to us, was busy manipulating the strings. "Gentlemen," he said, "let me make you acquainted with Mr. Drew. You all know the captain." Had I not suspected Mr. Drew's profession, I think I should not have remarked that he gave each of us a keen look as he raised his head. He had reddish-brown hair, and a pair of bushy red whiskers, each of which tapered to a long point. He was broad in the shoulders, and the clothes he wore rather enhanced this breadth. His suit was gray and almost new, the trousers perceptibly bagging at the knee, and he had a felt hat, a necktie of the white and flowery pattern, and square-toed "Congress" boots. In short, he was a decidedly ordinary looking person; you would meet a hundred like him in the streets of Far Harbor and Beaverton. He might have been a prosperous business man in either of those towns,--a comfortable lumber merchant or mine owner. And he had chosen just the get-up I should have picked for detective work in that region. He had a pleasant eye and a very fetching and hearty manner. But his long whiskers troubled me especially. I kept wondering if they were real. "The captain is sailing Mr. Drew over to Far Harbor," explained Mr. Cooke, "and they have put in here for the night." Mr. Drew was plainly not an amateur, for he volunteered nothing further than this. The necessary bottles having been produced, Mr. Cooke held up his glass and turned to the stranger. "Welcome to our party, old man," said he. Mr. Drew drained his glass and complimented Mr. Cooke on the brand,--a sure key to my client's heart. Whereupon he seated himself between Mr. Drew and the captain and began a discourse on the subject of his own cellar, on which he talked for nearly an hour. His only pauses were for the worthy purpose of filling the detective's or the captain's glass, and these he watched with a hospitable solicitude. The captain had the advantage, three to one, and I made no doubt his employer bitterly regretted not having a boatman whose principles were more strict. At the end of the hour Captain Jay, who by nature was inclined to be taciturn and crabbed, waxed loquacious and even jovial. He sang us the songs he had learned in the winter lumber-camps, which Mr. Cooke never failed to encore to the echo. My client vowed he had not spent a pleasanter afternoon for years. He plied the captain with cigars, and explained to him the mystery of the strings and labels; and the captain experimented until he had broken some of the bottles. Mr. Cooke was not a person who made any great distinction between the three degrees, acquaintance, friendship, and intimacy. When a stranger pleased him, he went from one to the other with such comparative ease that a hardhearted man, and no other, could have resented his advances. Mr. Drew was anything but a hard-hearted man, and he did not object to my client's familiarity. Mr. Cooke made no secret of his admiration for Mr. Drew, and there were just two things about him that Mr. Cooke admired and wondered at, above all else,--the bushy red whiskers. But it appeared that these were the only things that Mr. Drew was really touchy about. I noticed that the detective, without being impolite, did his best to discourage these remarks; but my client knew no such word as discouragement. He was continually saying: "I think I'll grow some like that, old man," or "Have those cut," and the like,--a kind of humor in which the captain took an incredible delight. And finally, when a certain pitch of good feeling had been arrived at, Mr.

here

How many times the word 'here' appears in the text?

you happen to have any handcuffs on the Maria?" But my client was pouring out a stiff helping from the decanter, which he still held in his hand. Then he approached the Celebrity. "Don't let it worry you, old man," said he, with intense earnestness. "Don't let it worry you. You're my guest, and I'll see you safe out of it, or bust." "Fenelon," said Mrs. Cooke, gravely, "do you realize what you are saying?" "You're a clever one, Allen," my client continued, and he backed away the better to look him over; "you had nerve to stay as long as you did." The Celebrity laughed confidently. "Cooke," he replied, "I appreciate your generosity,--I really do. I know no offence is meant. The mistake is, in fact, most pardonable." In Mr. Cooke amazement and admiration were clamoring for utterance. "Damn me," he sputtered, "if you're not the coolest embezzler I ever saw." The Celebrity laughed again. Then he surveyed the circle. "My friends," he said, "this is certainly a most amazing coincidence; one which, I assure you, surprises me no less than it does you. You have no doubt remarked that I have my peculiarities. We all have. "I flatter thyself I am not entirely unknown. And the annoyances imposed upon me by a certain fame I have achieved had become such that some months ago I began to crave the pleasures of the life of a private man. I determined to go to some sequestered resort where my face was unfamiliar. The possibility of being recognized at Asquith did not occur to me. Fortunately I was. And a singular chance led me to take the name of the man who has committed this crime, and who has the misfortune to resemble me. I suppose that now," he added impressively, "I shall have to tell you who I am." He paused until these words should have gained their full effect. Then he held up the edition de luxe from which he and Miss Thorn had been reading. "You may have heard, Mrs. Cooke," said he, addressing himself to our hostess, "you may perhaps have heard of the author of this book." Mrs. Cooke was a calm woman, and she read the name on the cover. "Yes," she said, "I have. And you claim to be he?" "Ask my friend Crocker here," he answered carelessly, no doubt exulting that the scene was going off so dramatically. "I should indeed be in a tight box," he went on, "if there were not friends of mine here to help me out." They turned to me. "I am afraid I cannot," I said with what soberness I could. "What!" says he with a start. "What! you deny me?" Miss Trevor had her tongue in her cheek. I bowed. "I am powerless to speak, Mr. Allen," I replied. During this colloquy my client stood between us, looking from one to the other. I well knew that his way of thinking would be with my testimony, and that the gilt name on the edition de luxe had done little towards convincing him of Mr. Allen's innocence. To his mind there was nothing horrible or incongruous in the idea that a well-known author should be a defaulter. It was perfectly possible. He shoved the glass of Scotch towards the Celebrity, with a smile. "Take this, old man," he kindly insisted, "and you'll feel better. What's the use of bucking when you're saddled with a thing like that?" And he pointed to the paper. "Besides, they haven't caught you yet, by a damned sight." The Celebrity waved aside the proffered tumbler. "This is an infamous charge, and you know it, Crocker," he cried. "If you don't, you ought to, as a lawyer. This isn't any time to have fun with a fellow." "My dear sir," I said, "I have charged you with nothing whatever." He turned his back on me in complete disgust. And he came face to face with Miss Trevor. "Miss Trevor, too, knows something of me," he said. "You forget, Mr. Allen," she answered sweetly, "you forget that I have given you my promise not to reveal what I know." The Celebrity chafed, for this was as damaging a statement as could well be uttered against him. But Miss Thorn was his trump card, and she now came forward. "This is ridiculous, Mr. Crocker, simply ridiculous," said she. "I agree with you most heartily, Miss Thorn," I replied. "Nonsense!" exclaimed Miss Thorn, and she drew her lips together, "pure nonsense!" "Nonsense or not, Marian," Mr. Cooke interposed, "we are wasting valuable time. The police are already on the scent, I'll bet my hat." "Fenelon!" Mrs. Cooke remonstrated. "And do you mean to say in soberness, Uncle Fenelon, that you believe the author of The Sybarites to be a defaulter?" said Miss Thorn. "It is indeed hard to believe Mr. Allen a criminal," Mr. Trevor broke in for the first time. "I think it only right that he should be allowed to clear himself before he is put to further inconvenience, and perhaps injustice, by any action we may take in the matter." Mr. Cooke sniffed suspiciously at the word "action." "What action do you mean?" he demanded. "Well," replied Mr. Trevor, with some hesitation, "before we take any steps, that is, notify the police." "Notify the police!" cried my client, his face red with a generous anger. "I have never yet turned a guest over to the police," he said proudly, "and won't, not if I know it. I'm not that kind." Who shall criticise Mr. Cooke's code of morality? "Fenelon," said his wife, "you must remember you have never yet entertained a guest of a larcenous character. No embezzlers up to the present. Marian," she continued, turning to Miss Thorn, "you spoke as if you might, be able to throw some light upon this matter. Do you know whether this gentleman is Charles Wrexell Allen, or whether he is the author? In short, do you know who he is?" The Celebrity lighted a cigarette. Miss Thorn said indignantly, "Upon my word, Aunt Maria, I thought that you, at least, would know better than to credit this silly accusation. He has been a guest at your house, and I am astonished that you should doubt his word." Mrs. Cooke looked at her niece perplexedly. "You must remember, Marian," she said gently, "that I know nothing about him, where he came from, or who he is. Nor does any one at Asquith, except perhaps Miss Trevor, by her own confession. And you do not seem inclined to tell what you know, if indeed you know anything." Upon this Miss Thorn became more indignant still, and Mrs. Cooke went on "Gentlemen, as a rule, do not assume names, especially other people's. They are usually proud of their own. Mr. Allen appears among us, from the clouds, as it were, and in due time we learn from a newspaper that he has committed a defalcation. And, furthermore, the paper contains a portrait and an accurate description which put the thing beyond doubt. I ask you, is it reasonable for him to state coolly after all this that he is another man? That he is a well-known author? It's an absurdity. I was not born yesterday, my dear." "It is most reasonable under the circumstances," replied Miss Thorn, warmly. "Extraordinary? Of course it's extraordinary. And too long to explain to a prejudiced audience, who can't be expected to comprehend the character of a genius, to understand the yearning of a famous man for a little quiet." Mrs. Cooke looked grave. "Marian, you forget yourself," she said. "Oh, I am tired of it, Aunt Maria," cried Miss Thorn; "if he takes my advice, he will refuse to discuss it farther." She did not seem to be aware that she had put forth no argument whatever, save a woman's argument. And I was intensely surprised that her indignation should have got the better of her in this way, having always supposed her clear-headed in the extreme. A few words from her, such as I supposed she would have spoken, had set the Celebrity right with all except Mr. Cooke. To me it was a clear proof that the Celebrity had turned her head, and her mind with it. The silence was broken by an uncontrollable burst of laughter from Miss Trevor. She was quickly frowned down by her father, who reminded her that this was not a comedy. "And, Mr. Allen," he said, "if you have anything to say, or any evidence to bring forward, now is the time to do it." He appeared to forget that I was the district attorney. The Celebrity had seated himself on the trunk of a tree, and was blowing out the smoke in clouds. He was inclined to take Miss Thorn's advice, for he made a gesture of weariness with his cigarette, in the use of which he was singularly eloquent. "Tell me, Mr. Trevor," said he, "why I should sit before you as a tribunal? Why I should take the trouble to clear myself of a senseless charge? My respect for you inclines me to the belief that you are laboring under a momentary excitement; for when you reflect that I am a prominent, not to say famous, author, you will realize how absurd it is that I should be an embezzler, and why I decline to lower myself by an explanation." Mr. Trevor picked up the paper and struck it. "Do you refuse to say anything in the face of such evidence as that?" he cried. "It is not a matter for refusal, Mr. Trevor. It is simply that I cannot admit the possibility of having committed the crime." "Well, sir," said the senator, his black necktie working out of place as his anger got the better of him, "I am to believe, then, because you claim to be the author of a few society novels, that you are infallible? Let me tell you that the President of the United States himself is liable to impeachment, and bound to disprove any charge he may be accused of. What in Halifax do I care for your divine-right-of-authors theory? I'll continue to think you guilty until you are shown to be innocent." Suddenly the full significance of the Celebrity's tactics struck Mr. Cooke, and he reached out and caught hold of Mr. Trevor's coattails. "Hold on, old man," said he; "Allen isn't going to be ass enough to own up to it. Don't you see we'd all be jugged and fined for assisting a criminal over the border? It's out of consideration for us." Mr. Trevor looked sternly over his shoulder at Mr. Cooke. "Do you mean to say, sir, seriously," he asked, "that, for the sake of a misplaced friendship for this man, and a misplaced sense of honor, you are bound to shield a guest, though a criminal? That you intend to assist him to escape from justice? I insist, for my own protection and that of my daughter, as well as for that of the others present that, since he refuses to speak, we must presume him guilty and turn him over." Mr. Trevor turned to Mrs. Cooke, as if relying on her support. "Fenelon," said she, "I have never sought to influence your actions when your friends were concerned, and I shall not begin now. All I ask of you is to consider the consequences of your intention." These words from Mrs. Cooke had much more weight with my client than Mr. Trevor's blustering demands. "Maria, my dear," he said, with a deferential urbanity, "Mr. Allen is my guest, and a gentleman. When a gentleman gives his word that he is not a criminal, it is sufficient." The force of this, for some reason, did not overwhelm his wife; and her lip curled a little, half in contempt, half in risibility. "Pshaw, Fenelon," said she, "what a fraud you are. Why is it you wish to get Mr. Allen over the border, then?" A question which might well have staggered a worthier intellect. "Why, my dear," answered my client, "I wish to save Mr. Allen the inconvenience, not to say the humiliation, of being brought East in custody and strapped with a pair of handcuffs. Let him take a shooting trip to the great Northwest until the real criminal is caught." "Well, Fenelon," replied Mrs. Cooke, unable to repress a smile, "one might as well try to argue with a turn-stile or a weather-vane. I wash my hands of it." But Mr. Trevor, who was both a self-made man and a Western politician, was far from being satisfied. He turned to me with a sweep of the arm he had doubtless learned in the Ohio State Senate. "Mr. Crocker," he cried, "are you, as attorney of this district, going to aid and abet in the escape of a fugitive from justice?" "Mr. Trevor," said I, "I will take the course in this matter which seems fit to me, and without advice from any one." He wheeled on Farrar, repeated the question, and got a like answer. Brought to bay for a time, he glared savagely around him while groping for further arguments. But at this point the Four appeared on the scene, much the worse for thickets, and clamoring for luncheon. They had five small fish between them which they wanted Miss Thorn to cook. CHAPTER XII The Four received Mr. Cooke's plan for the Celebrity's escape to Canada with enthusiastic acclamation, and as the one thing lacking to make the Bear Island trip a complete success. The Celebrity was hailed with the reverence due to the man who puts up the ring-money in a prize-fight. He was accorded, too, a certain amount of respect as a defaulter, which the Four would have denied him as an author, for I am inclined to the belief that the discovery of his literary profession would have lowered him rather than otherwise in their eyes. My client was naturally anxious to get under way at once for the Canadian border, but was overruled in this by his henchmen, who demanded something to eat. We sat down to an impromptu meal, which was an odd affair indeed. Mrs. Cooke maintained her usual serenity, but said little, while Miss Trevor and I had many a mirthful encounter at the thought of the turn matters had taken. At the other end of the cloth were Mr. Cooke and the Four, in wonderful spirits and unimpaired appetite, and in their midst sat the Celebrity, likewise in wonderful spirits. His behavior now and again elicited a loud grunt of disapproval from Mr. Trevor, who was plying his knife and fork in a manner emblematic of his state of mind. Mr. Allen was laughing and joking airily with Mr. Cooke and the guests, denying, but not resenting, their accusations with all the sang froid of a hardened criminal. He did not care particularly to go to Canada, he said. Why should he, when he was innocent? But, if Mr. Cooke insisted, he would enjoy seeing that part of the lake and the Canadian side. Afterwards I perceived Miss Thorn down by the brookside, washing dishes. Her sleeves were drawn back to the elbow, and a dainty white apron covered her blue skirt, while the wind from the lake had disentangled errant wisps of her hair. I stood on the brink above, secure, as I thought, from observation, when she chanced to look up and spied me. "Mr. Crocker," she called, "would you like to make yourself useful?" I was decidedly embarrassed. Her manner was as frank and unconstrained as though I had not been shunning her for weeks past. "If such a thing is possible," I replied. "Do you know a dish-cloth when you see one?" I was doubtful. But I procured the cloth from Miss Trevor and returned. There was an air about Miss Thorn that was new to me. "What an uncompromising man you are, Mr. Crocker," she said to me. "Once a person is unfortunate enough to come under the ban of your disapproval you have nothing whatever to do with them. Now it seems that I have given you offence in some way. Is it not so?" "You magnify my importance," I said. "No temporizing, Mr. Crocker," she went on, as though she meant to be obeyed; "sit down there, and let's have it out. I like you too well to quarrel with you." There was no resisting such a command, and I threw myself on the pebbles at her feet. "I thought we were going to be great friends," she said. "You and Mr. Farrar were so kind to me on the night of my arrival, and we had such fun watching the dance together." "I confess I thought so, too. But you expressed opinions then that I shared. You have since changed your mind, for some unaccountable reason." She paused in her polishing, a shining dish in her hand, and looked down at me with something between a laugh and a frown. "I suppose you have never regretted speaking hastily," she said. "Many a time," I returned, warming; "but if I ever thought a judgment measured and distilled, it was your judgment of the Celebrity." "Does the study of law eliminate humanity?" she asked, with a mock curtsey. "The deliberate sentences are sometimes the unjust ones, and men who are hung by weighed wisdom are often the innocent." "That is all very well in cases of doubt. But here you have the evidences of wrong-doing directly before you." Three dishes were taken up, dried, and put down before she answered me. I threw pebbles into the brook, and wished I had held my tongue. "What evidence?" inquired she. "Well," said I, "I must finish, I suppose. I had a notion you knew of what I inferred. First, let me say that I have no desire to prejudice you against a person whom you admire." "Impossible." Something in her tone made me look up. "Very good, then," I answered. "I, for one, can have no use for a man who devotes himself to a girl long enough to win her affections, and then deserts her with as little compunction as a dog does a rat it has shaken. And that is how your Celebrity treated Miss Trevor." "But Miss Trevor has recovered, I believe," said Miss Thorn. I began to feel a deep, but helpless, insecurity. "Happily, yes," I assented. "Thanks to an excellent physician." A smile twitched the corners of her mouth, as though she enjoyed my discomfiture. I remarked for the fiftieth time how strong her face was, with its generous lines and clearly moulded features. And a suspicion entered my soul. "At any rate," I said, with a laugh, "the Celebrity has got himself into no end of a predicament now. He may go back to New York in custody." "I thought you incapable of resentment, Mr. Crocker. How mean of you to deny him!" "It can do no harm," I answered; "a little lesson in the dangers of incognito may be salutary. I wish it were a little lesson in the dangers of something else." The color mounted to her face as she resumed her occupation. "I am afraid you are a very wicked man," she said. Before I could reply there came a scuffling sound from the bank above us, and the snapping of branches and twigs. It was Mr. Cooke. His descent, the personal conduction of which he lost half-way down, was irregular and spasmodic, and a rude concussion at the bottom knocked off a choice bit of profanity which was balanced on the tip of his tongue. "Tobogganing is a little out of season," said his niece, laughing heartily. Mr. Cooke brushed himself off, picked up the glasses which he had dropped in his flight and pushed them into my hands. Then he pointed lakeward with bulging eyes. "Crocker, old man," he said in a loud whisper, "they tell me that is an Asquith cat-boat." I followed his finger and saw for the first time a sail-boat headed for the island, then about two miles off shore. I raised the glasses. "Yes," I said, "the Scimitar." "That's what Farrar said," cried he. "And what about it?" I asked. "What about it?" he ejaculated. "Why, it's a detective come for Allen. I knew sure as hell if they got as far as Asquith they wouldn't stop there. And that's the fastest sail-boat he could hire there, isn't it?" I replied that it was. He seized me by the shoulder and began dragging me up the bank. "What are you going to do?" I cried, shaking myself loose. "We've got to get on the Maria and run for it," he panted. "There is no time to be lost." He had reached the top of the bank and was running towards the group at the tents. And he actually infused me with some of his red-hot enthusiasm, for I hastened after him. "But you can't begin to get the Maria out before they will be in here," I shouted. He stopped short, gazed at the approaching boat, and then at me. "Is that so?" "Yes, of course," said I, "they will be here in ten minutes." The Celebrity stood in the midst of the excited Four. His hair was parted precisely, and he had induced a monocle to remain in his eye long enough to examine the Scimitar, his nose at the critical elevation. This unruffled exterior made a deep impression on the Four. Was the Celebrity not undergoing the crucial test of a true sport? He was an example alike to criminals and philosophers. Mr. Cooke hurried into the group, which divided respectfully for him, and grasped the Celebrity by the hand. "Something else has got to be done, old man," he said, in a voice which shook with emotion; "they'll be on us before we can get the Maria out." Farrar, who was nailing a rustic bench near by, straightened up at this, his lip curling with a desire to laugh. The Celebrity laid his hand on my client's shoulder. "Cooke," said he, "I'm deeply grateful for all the trouble you wish to take, and for the solicitude you have shown. But let things be. I'll come out of it all right." "Never," cried Cooke, looking proudly around the Four as some Highland chief might have surveyed a faithful clan. "I'd a damned sight rather go to jail myself." "A damned sight," echoed the Four in unison. "I insist, Cooke," said the Celebrity, taking out his eyeglass and tapping Mr. Cooke's purple necktie, "I insist that you drop this business. I repeat my thanks to you and these gentlemen for the friendship they have shown, but say again that I am as innocent of this crime as a baby." Mr. Cooke paid no attention to this speech. His face became radiant. "Didn't any of you fellows strike a cave, or a hollow tree, or something of that sort, knocking around this morning?" One man slapped his knee. "The very place," he cried. "I fell into it," and he showed a rent in his trousers corroboratively. "It's big enough to hold twenty of Allen, and the detective doesn't live that could find it." "Hustle him off, quick," said Mr. Cooke. The mandate was obeyed as literally as though Robin Hood himself had given it. The Celebrity disappeared into the forest, carried rather than urged towards his destined place of confinement. The commotion had brought Mr. Trevor to the spot. He caught sight of the Celebrity's back between the trees, then he looked at the cat-boat entering the cove, a man in the stern preparing to pull in the tender. He intercepted Mr. Cooke on his way to the beach. "What have you done with Mr. Allen?" he asked, in a menacing voice. "Good God," said Mr. Cooke, whose contempt for Mr. Trevor was now infinite, "you talk as if I were the governor of the state. What the devil could I do with him?" "I will have no evasion," replied Mr. Trevor, taking an imposing posture in front of him. "You are trying to defeat the ends of justice by assisting a dangerous criminal to escape. I have warned you, sir, and warn you again of the consequences of your meditated crime, and I give you my word I will do all in my power to frustrate it." Mr. Cooke dug his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. Here was a complication he had not looked for. The Scimitar lay at anchor with her sail down, and two men were coming ashore in the tender. Mr. Cooke's attitude being that of a man who reconsiders a rash resolve, Mr. Trevor was emboldened to say in a moderated tone: "You were carried away by your generosity, Mr. Cooke. I was sure when you took time to think you would see it in another light." Mr. Cooke started off for the place where the boat had grounded. I did not catch his reply, and probably should not have written it here if I had. The senator looked as if he had been sand-bagged. The two men jumped out of the boat and hauled it up. Mr. Cooke waved an easy salute to one, whom I recognized as the big boatman from Asquith, familiarly known as Captain Jay. He owned the Scimitar and several smaller boats. The captain went through the pantomime of an introduction between Mr. Cooke and the other, whom my client shook warmly by the hand, and presently all three came towards us. Mr. Cooke led them to a bar he had improvised by the brook. A pool served the office of refrigerator, and Mr. Cooke had devised an ingenious but complicated arrangement of strings and labels which enabled him to extract any bottle or set of bottles without having to bare his arm and pull out the lot. Farrar and I responded to the call he had given, and went down to assist in the entertainment. My client, with his back to us, was busy manipulating the strings. "Gentlemen," he said, "let me make you acquainted with Mr. Drew. You all know the captain." Had I not suspected Mr. Drew's profession, I think I should not have remarked that he gave each of us a keen look as he raised his head. He had reddish-brown hair, and a pair of bushy red whiskers, each of which tapered to a long point. He was broad in the shoulders, and the clothes he wore rather enhanced this breadth. His suit was gray and almost new, the trousers perceptibly bagging at the knee, and he had a felt hat, a necktie of the white and flowery pattern, and square-toed "Congress" boots. In short, he was a decidedly ordinary looking person; you would meet a hundred like him in the streets of Far Harbor and Beaverton. He might have been a prosperous business man in either of those towns,--a comfortable lumber merchant or mine owner. And he had chosen just the get-up I should have picked for detective work in that region. He had a pleasant eye and a very fetching and hearty manner. But his long whiskers troubled me especially. I kept wondering if they were real. "The captain is sailing Mr. Drew over to Far Harbor," explained Mr. Cooke, "and they have put in here for the night." Mr. Drew was plainly not an amateur, for he volunteered nothing further than this. The necessary bottles having been produced, Mr. Cooke held up his glass and turned to the stranger. "Welcome to our party, old man," said he. Mr. Drew drained his glass and complimented Mr. Cooke on the brand,--a sure key to my client's heart. Whereupon he seated himself between Mr. Drew and the captain and began a discourse on the subject of his own cellar, on which he talked for nearly an hour. His only pauses were for the worthy purpose of filling the detective's or the captain's glass, and these he watched with a hospitable solicitude. The captain had the advantage, three to one, and I made no doubt his employer bitterly regretted not having a boatman whose principles were more strict. At the end of the hour Captain Jay, who by nature was inclined to be taciturn and crabbed, waxed loquacious and even jovial. He sang us the songs he had learned in the winter lumber-camps, which Mr. Cooke never failed to encore to the echo. My client vowed he had not spent a pleasanter afternoon for years. He plied the captain with cigars, and explained to him the mystery of the strings and labels; and the captain experimented until he had broken some of the bottles. Mr. Cooke was not a person who made any great distinction between the three degrees, acquaintance, friendship, and intimacy. When a stranger pleased him, he went from one to the other with such comparative ease that a hardhearted man, and no other, could have resented his advances. Mr. Drew was anything but a hard-hearted man, and he did not object to my client's familiarity. Mr. Cooke made no secret of his admiration for Mr. Drew, and there were just two things about him that Mr. Cooke admired and wondered at, above all else,--the bushy red whiskers. But it appeared that these were the only things that Mr. Drew was really touchy about. I noticed that the detective, without being impolite, did his best to discourage these remarks; but my client knew no such word as discouragement. He was continually saying: "I think I'll grow some like that, old man," or "Have those cut," and the like,--a kind of humor in which the captain took an incredible delight. And finally, when a certain pitch of good feeling had been arrived at, Mr.

tongue

How many times the word 'tongue' appears in the text?

you happen to have any handcuffs on the Maria?" But my client was pouring out a stiff helping from the decanter, which he still held in his hand. Then he approached the Celebrity. "Don't let it worry you, old man," said he, with intense earnestness. "Don't let it worry you. You're my guest, and I'll see you safe out of it, or bust." "Fenelon," said Mrs. Cooke, gravely, "do you realize what you are saying?" "You're a clever one, Allen," my client continued, and he backed away the better to look him over; "you had nerve to stay as long as you did." The Celebrity laughed confidently. "Cooke," he replied, "I appreciate your generosity,--I really do. I know no offence is meant. The mistake is, in fact, most pardonable." In Mr. Cooke amazement and admiration were clamoring for utterance. "Damn me," he sputtered, "if you're not the coolest embezzler I ever saw." The Celebrity laughed again. Then he surveyed the circle. "My friends," he said, "this is certainly a most amazing coincidence; one which, I assure you, surprises me no less than it does you. You have no doubt remarked that I have my peculiarities. We all have. "I flatter thyself I am not entirely unknown. And the annoyances imposed upon me by a certain fame I have achieved had become such that some months ago I began to crave the pleasures of the life of a private man. I determined to go to some sequestered resort where my face was unfamiliar. The possibility of being recognized at Asquith did not occur to me. Fortunately I was. And a singular chance led me to take the name of the man who has committed this crime, and who has the misfortune to resemble me. I suppose that now," he added impressively, "I shall have to tell you who I am." He paused until these words should have gained their full effect. Then he held up the edition de luxe from which he and Miss Thorn had been reading. "You may have heard, Mrs. Cooke," said he, addressing himself to our hostess, "you may perhaps have heard of the author of this book." Mrs. Cooke was a calm woman, and she read the name on the cover. "Yes," she said, "I have. And you claim to be he?" "Ask my friend Crocker here," he answered carelessly, no doubt exulting that the scene was going off so dramatically. "I should indeed be in a tight box," he went on, "if there were not friends of mine here to help me out." They turned to me. "I am afraid I cannot," I said with what soberness I could. "What!" says he with a start. "What! you deny me?" Miss Trevor had her tongue in her cheek. I bowed. "I am powerless to speak, Mr. Allen," I replied. During this colloquy my client stood between us, looking from one to the other. I well knew that his way of thinking would be with my testimony, and that the gilt name on the edition de luxe had done little towards convincing him of Mr. Allen's innocence. To his mind there was nothing horrible or incongruous in the idea that a well-known author should be a defaulter. It was perfectly possible. He shoved the glass of Scotch towards the Celebrity, with a smile. "Take this, old man," he kindly insisted, "and you'll feel better. What's the use of bucking when you're saddled with a thing like that?" And he pointed to the paper. "Besides, they haven't caught you yet, by a damned sight." The Celebrity waved aside the proffered tumbler. "This is an infamous charge, and you know it, Crocker," he cried. "If you don't, you ought to, as a lawyer. This isn't any time to have fun with a fellow." "My dear sir," I said, "I have charged you with nothing whatever." He turned his back on me in complete disgust. And he came face to face with Miss Trevor. "Miss Trevor, too, knows something of me," he said. "You forget, Mr. Allen," she answered sweetly, "you forget that I have given you my promise not to reveal what I know." The Celebrity chafed, for this was as damaging a statement as could well be uttered against him. But Miss Thorn was his trump card, and she now came forward. "This is ridiculous, Mr. Crocker, simply ridiculous," said she. "I agree with you most heartily, Miss Thorn," I replied. "Nonsense!" exclaimed Miss Thorn, and she drew her lips together, "pure nonsense!" "Nonsense or not, Marian," Mr. Cooke interposed, "we are wasting valuable time. The police are already on the scent, I'll bet my hat." "Fenelon!" Mrs. Cooke remonstrated. "And do you mean to say in soberness, Uncle Fenelon, that you believe the author of The Sybarites to be a defaulter?" said Miss Thorn. "It is indeed hard to believe Mr. Allen a criminal," Mr. Trevor broke in for the first time. "I think it only right that he should be allowed to clear himself before he is put to further inconvenience, and perhaps injustice, by any action we may take in the matter." Mr. Cooke sniffed suspiciously at the word "action." "What action do you mean?" he demanded. "Well," replied Mr. Trevor, with some hesitation, "before we take any steps, that is, notify the police." "Notify the police!" cried my client, his face red with a generous anger. "I have never yet turned a guest over to the police," he said proudly, "and won't, not if I know it. I'm not that kind." Who shall criticise Mr. Cooke's code of morality? "Fenelon," said his wife, "you must remember you have never yet entertained a guest of a larcenous character. No embezzlers up to the present. Marian," she continued, turning to Miss Thorn, "you spoke as if you might, be able to throw some light upon this matter. Do you know whether this gentleman is Charles Wrexell Allen, or whether he is the author? In short, do you know who he is?" The Celebrity lighted a cigarette. Miss Thorn said indignantly, "Upon my word, Aunt Maria, I thought that you, at least, would know better than to credit this silly accusation. He has been a guest at your house, and I am astonished that you should doubt his word." Mrs. Cooke looked at her niece perplexedly. "You must remember, Marian," she said gently, "that I know nothing about him, where he came from, or who he is. Nor does any one at Asquith, except perhaps Miss Trevor, by her own confession. And you do not seem inclined to tell what you know, if indeed you know anything." Upon this Miss Thorn became more indignant still, and Mrs. Cooke went on "Gentlemen, as a rule, do not assume names, especially other people's. They are usually proud of their own. Mr. Allen appears among us, from the clouds, as it were, and in due time we learn from a newspaper that he has committed a defalcation. And, furthermore, the paper contains a portrait and an accurate description which put the thing beyond doubt. I ask you, is it reasonable for him to state coolly after all this that he is another man? That he is a well-known author? It's an absurdity. I was not born yesterday, my dear." "It is most reasonable under the circumstances," replied Miss Thorn, warmly. "Extraordinary? Of course it's extraordinary. And too long to explain to a prejudiced audience, who can't be expected to comprehend the character of a genius, to understand the yearning of a famous man for a little quiet." Mrs. Cooke looked grave. "Marian, you forget yourself," she said. "Oh, I am tired of it, Aunt Maria," cried Miss Thorn; "if he takes my advice, he will refuse to discuss it farther." She did not seem to be aware that she had put forth no argument whatever, save a woman's argument. And I was intensely surprised that her indignation should have got the better of her in this way, having always supposed her clear-headed in the extreme. A few words from her, such as I supposed she would have spoken, had set the Celebrity right with all except Mr. Cooke. To me it was a clear proof that the Celebrity had turned her head, and her mind with it. The silence was broken by an uncontrollable burst of laughter from Miss Trevor. She was quickly frowned down by her father, who reminded her that this was not a comedy. "And, Mr. Allen," he said, "if you have anything to say, or any evidence to bring forward, now is the time to do it." He appeared to forget that I was the district attorney. The Celebrity had seated himself on the trunk of a tree, and was blowing out the smoke in clouds. He was inclined to take Miss Thorn's advice, for he made a gesture of weariness with his cigarette, in the use of which he was singularly eloquent. "Tell me, Mr. Trevor," said he, "why I should sit before you as a tribunal? Why I should take the trouble to clear myself of a senseless charge? My respect for you inclines me to the belief that you are laboring under a momentary excitement; for when you reflect that I am a prominent, not to say famous, author, you will realize how absurd it is that I should be an embezzler, and why I decline to lower myself by an explanation." Mr. Trevor picked up the paper and struck it. "Do you refuse to say anything in the face of such evidence as that?" he cried. "It is not a matter for refusal, Mr. Trevor. It is simply that I cannot admit the possibility of having committed the crime." "Well, sir," said the senator, his black necktie working out of place as his anger got the better of him, "I am to believe, then, because you claim to be the author of a few society novels, that you are infallible? Let me tell you that the President of the United States himself is liable to impeachment, and bound to disprove any charge he may be accused of. What in Halifax do I care for your divine-right-of-authors theory? I'll continue to think you guilty until you are shown to be innocent." Suddenly the full significance of the Celebrity's tactics struck Mr. Cooke, and he reached out and caught hold of Mr. Trevor's coattails. "Hold on, old man," said he; "Allen isn't going to be ass enough to own up to it. Don't you see we'd all be jugged and fined for assisting a criminal over the border? It's out of consideration for us." Mr. Trevor looked sternly over his shoulder at Mr. Cooke. "Do you mean to say, sir, seriously," he asked, "that, for the sake of a misplaced friendship for this man, and a misplaced sense of honor, you are bound to shield a guest, though a criminal? That you intend to assist him to escape from justice? I insist, for my own protection and that of my daughter, as well as for that of the others present that, since he refuses to speak, we must presume him guilty and turn him over." Mr. Trevor turned to Mrs. Cooke, as if relying on her support. "Fenelon," said she, "I have never sought to influence your actions when your friends were concerned, and I shall not begin now. All I ask of you is to consider the consequences of your intention." These words from Mrs. Cooke had much more weight with my client than Mr. Trevor's blustering demands. "Maria, my dear," he said, with a deferential urbanity, "Mr. Allen is my guest, and a gentleman. When a gentleman gives his word that he is not a criminal, it is sufficient." The force of this, for some reason, did not overwhelm his wife; and her lip curled a little, half in contempt, half in risibility. "Pshaw, Fenelon," said she, "what a fraud you are. Why is it you wish to get Mr. Allen over the border, then?" A question which might well have staggered a worthier intellect. "Why, my dear," answered my client, "I wish to save Mr. Allen the inconvenience, not to say the humiliation, of being brought East in custody and strapped with a pair of handcuffs. Let him take a shooting trip to the great Northwest until the real criminal is caught." "Well, Fenelon," replied Mrs. Cooke, unable to repress a smile, "one might as well try to argue with a turn-stile or a weather-vane. I wash my hands of it." But Mr. Trevor, who was both a self-made man and a Western politician, was far from being satisfied. He turned to me with a sweep of the arm he had doubtless learned in the Ohio State Senate. "Mr. Crocker," he cried, "are you, as attorney of this district, going to aid and abet in the escape of a fugitive from justice?" "Mr. Trevor," said I, "I will take the course in this matter which seems fit to me, and without advice from any one." He wheeled on Farrar, repeated the question, and got a like answer. Brought to bay for a time, he glared savagely around him while groping for further arguments. But at this point the Four appeared on the scene, much the worse for thickets, and clamoring for luncheon. They had five small fish between them which they wanted Miss Thorn to cook. CHAPTER XII The Four received Mr. Cooke's plan for the Celebrity's escape to Canada with enthusiastic acclamation, and as the one thing lacking to make the Bear Island trip a complete success. The Celebrity was hailed with the reverence due to the man who puts up the ring-money in a prize-fight. He was accorded, too, a certain amount of respect as a defaulter, which the Four would have denied him as an author, for I am inclined to the belief that the discovery of his literary profession would have lowered him rather than otherwise in their eyes. My client was naturally anxious to get under way at once for the Canadian border, but was overruled in this by his henchmen, who demanded something to eat. We sat down to an impromptu meal, which was an odd affair indeed. Mrs. Cooke maintained her usual serenity, but said little, while Miss Trevor and I had many a mirthful encounter at the thought of the turn matters had taken. At the other end of the cloth were Mr. Cooke and the Four, in wonderful spirits and unimpaired appetite, and in their midst sat the Celebrity, likewise in wonderful spirits. His behavior now and again elicited a loud grunt of disapproval from Mr. Trevor, who was plying his knife and fork in a manner emblematic of his state of mind. Mr. Allen was laughing and joking airily with Mr. Cooke and the guests, denying, but not resenting, their accusations with all the sang froid of a hardened criminal. He did not care particularly to go to Canada, he said. Why should he, when he was innocent? But, if Mr. Cooke insisted, he would enjoy seeing that part of the lake and the Canadian side. Afterwards I perceived Miss Thorn down by the brookside, washing dishes. Her sleeves were drawn back to the elbow, and a dainty white apron covered her blue skirt, while the wind from the lake had disentangled errant wisps of her hair. I stood on the brink above, secure, as I thought, from observation, when she chanced to look up and spied me. "Mr. Crocker," she called, "would you like to make yourself useful?" I was decidedly embarrassed. Her manner was as frank and unconstrained as though I had not been shunning her for weeks past. "If such a thing is possible," I replied. "Do you know a dish-cloth when you see one?" I was doubtful. But I procured the cloth from Miss Trevor and returned. There was an air about Miss Thorn that was new to me. "What an uncompromising man you are, Mr. Crocker," she said to me. "Once a person is unfortunate enough to come under the ban of your disapproval you have nothing whatever to do with them. Now it seems that I have given you offence in some way. Is it not so?" "You magnify my importance," I said. "No temporizing, Mr. Crocker," she went on, as though she meant to be obeyed; "sit down there, and let's have it out. I like you too well to quarrel with you." There was no resisting such a command, and I threw myself on the pebbles at her feet. "I thought we were going to be great friends," she said. "You and Mr. Farrar were so kind to me on the night of my arrival, and we had such fun watching the dance together." "I confess I thought so, too. But you expressed opinions then that I shared. You have since changed your mind, for some unaccountable reason." She paused in her polishing, a shining dish in her hand, and looked down at me with something between a laugh and a frown. "I suppose you have never regretted speaking hastily," she said. "Many a time," I returned, warming; "but if I ever thought a judgment measured and distilled, it was your judgment of the Celebrity." "Does the study of law eliminate humanity?" she asked, with a mock curtsey. "The deliberate sentences are sometimes the unjust ones, and men who are hung by weighed wisdom are often the innocent." "That is all very well in cases of doubt. But here you have the evidences of wrong-doing directly before you." Three dishes were taken up, dried, and put down before she answered me. I threw pebbles into the brook, and wished I had held my tongue. "What evidence?" inquired she. "Well," said I, "I must finish, I suppose. I had a notion you knew of what I inferred. First, let me say that I have no desire to prejudice you against a person whom you admire." "Impossible." Something in her tone made me look up. "Very good, then," I answered. "I, for one, can have no use for a man who devotes himself to a girl long enough to win her affections, and then deserts her with as little compunction as a dog does a rat it has shaken. And that is how your Celebrity treated Miss Trevor." "But Miss Trevor has recovered, I believe," said Miss Thorn. I began to feel a deep, but helpless, insecurity. "Happily, yes," I assented. "Thanks to an excellent physician." A smile twitched the corners of her mouth, as though she enjoyed my discomfiture. I remarked for the fiftieth time how strong her face was, with its generous lines and clearly moulded features. And a suspicion entered my soul. "At any rate," I said, with a laugh, "the Celebrity has got himself into no end of a predicament now. He may go back to New York in custody." "I thought you incapable of resentment, Mr. Crocker. How mean of you to deny him!" "It can do no harm," I answered; "a little lesson in the dangers of incognito may be salutary. I wish it were a little lesson in the dangers of something else." The color mounted to her face as she resumed her occupation. "I am afraid you are a very wicked man," she said. Before I could reply there came a scuffling sound from the bank above us, and the snapping of branches and twigs. It was Mr. Cooke. His descent, the personal conduction of which he lost half-way down, was irregular and spasmodic, and a rude concussion at the bottom knocked off a choice bit of profanity which was balanced on the tip of his tongue. "Tobogganing is a little out of season," said his niece, laughing heartily. Mr. Cooke brushed himself off, picked up the glasses which he had dropped in his flight and pushed them into my hands. Then he pointed lakeward with bulging eyes. "Crocker, old man," he said in a loud whisper, "they tell me that is an Asquith cat-boat." I followed his finger and saw for the first time a sail-boat headed for the island, then about two miles off shore. I raised the glasses. "Yes," I said, "the Scimitar." "That's what Farrar said," cried he. "And what about it?" I asked. "What about it?" he ejaculated. "Why, it's a detective come for Allen. I knew sure as hell if they got as far as Asquith they wouldn't stop there. And that's the fastest sail-boat he could hire there, isn't it?" I replied that it was. He seized me by the shoulder and began dragging me up the bank. "What are you going to do?" I cried, shaking myself loose. "We've got to get on the Maria and run for it," he panted. "There is no time to be lost." He had reached the top of the bank and was running towards the group at the tents. And he actually infused me with some of his red-hot enthusiasm, for I hastened after him. "But you can't begin to get the Maria out before they will be in here," I shouted. He stopped short, gazed at the approaching boat, and then at me. "Is that so?" "Yes, of course," said I, "they will be here in ten minutes." The Celebrity stood in the midst of the excited Four. His hair was parted precisely, and he had induced a monocle to remain in his eye long enough to examine the Scimitar, his nose at the critical elevation. This unruffled exterior made a deep impression on the Four. Was the Celebrity not undergoing the crucial test of a true sport? He was an example alike to criminals and philosophers. Mr. Cooke hurried into the group, which divided respectfully for him, and grasped the Celebrity by the hand. "Something else has got to be done, old man," he said, in a voice which shook with emotion; "they'll be on us before we can get the Maria out." Farrar, who was nailing a rustic bench near by, straightened up at this, his lip curling with a desire to laugh. The Celebrity laid his hand on my client's shoulder. "Cooke," said he, "I'm deeply grateful for all the trouble you wish to take, and for the solicitude you have shown. But let things be. I'll come out of it all right." "Never," cried Cooke, looking proudly around the Four as some Highland chief might have surveyed a faithful clan. "I'd a damned sight rather go to jail myself." "A damned sight," echoed the Four in unison. "I insist, Cooke," said the Celebrity, taking out his eyeglass and tapping Mr. Cooke's purple necktie, "I insist that you drop this business. I repeat my thanks to you and these gentlemen for the friendship they have shown, but say again that I am as innocent of this crime as a baby." Mr. Cooke paid no attention to this speech. His face became radiant. "Didn't any of you fellows strike a cave, or a hollow tree, or something of that sort, knocking around this morning?" One man slapped his knee. "The very place," he cried. "I fell into it," and he showed a rent in his trousers corroboratively. "It's big enough to hold twenty of Allen, and the detective doesn't live that could find it." "Hustle him off, quick," said Mr. Cooke. The mandate was obeyed as literally as though Robin Hood himself had given it. The Celebrity disappeared into the forest, carried rather than urged towards his destined place of confinement. The commotion had brought Mr. Trevor to the spot. He caught sight of the Celebrity's back between the trees, then he looked at the cat-boat entering the cove, a man in the stern preparing to pull in the tender. He intercepted Mr. Cooke on his way to the beach. "What have you done with Mr. Allen?" he asked, in a menacing voice. "Good God," said Mr. Cooke, whose contempt for Mr. Trevor was now infinite, "you talk as if I were the governor of the state. What the devil could I do with him?" "I will have no evasion," replied Mr. Trevor, taking an imposing posture in front of him. "You are trying to defeat the ends of justice by assisting a dangerous criminal to escape. I have warned you, sir, and warn you again of the consequences of your meditated crime, and I give you my word I will do all in my power to frustrate it." Mr. Cooke dug his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. Here was a complication he had not looked for. The Scimitar lay at anchor with her sail down, and two men were coming ashore in the tender. Mr. Cooke's attitude being that of a man who reconsiders a rash resolve, Mr. Trevor was emboldened to say in a moderated tone: "You were carried away by your generosity, Mr. Cooke. I was sure when you took time to think you would see it in another light." Mr. Cooke started off for the place where the boat had grounded. I did not catch his reply, and probably should not have written it here if I had. The senator looked as if he had been sand-bagged. The two men jumped out of the boat and hauled it up. Mr. Cooke waved an easy salute to one, whom I recognized as the big boatman from Asquith, familiarly known as Captain Jay. He owned the Scimitar and several smaller boats. The captain went through the pantomime of an introduction between Mr. Cooke and the other, whom my client shook warmly by the hand, and presently all three came towards us. Mr. Cooke led them to a bar he had improvised by the brook. A pool served the office of refrigerator, and Mr. Cooke had devised an ingenious but complicated arrangement of strings and labels which enabled him to extract any bottle or set of bottles without having to bare his arm and pull out the lot. Farrar and I responded to the call he had given, and went down to assist in the entertainment. My client, with his back to us, was busy manipulating the strings. "Gentlemen," he said, "let me make you acquainted with Mr. Drew. You all know the captain." Had I not suspected Mr. Drew's profession, I think I should not have remarked that he gave each of us a keen look as he raised his head. He had reddish-brown hair, and a pair of bushy red whiskers, each of which tapered to a long point. He was broad in the shoulders, and the clothes he wore rather enhanced this breadth. His suit was gray and almost new, the trousers perceptibly bagging at the knee, and he had a felt hat, a necktie of the white and flowery pattern, and square-toed "Congress" boots. In short, he was a decidedly ordinary looking person; you would meet a hundred like him in the streets of Far Harbor and Beaverton. He might have been a prosperous business man in either of those towns,--a comfortable lumber merchant or mine owner. And he had chosen just the get-up I should have picked for detective work in that region. He had a pleasant eye and a very fetching and hearty manner. But his long whiskers troubled me especially. I kept wondering if they were real. "The captain is sailing Mr. Drew over to Far Harbor," explained Mr. Cooke, "and they have put in here for the night." Mr. Drew was plainly not an amateur, for he volunteered nothing further than this. The necessary bottles having been produced, Mr. Cooke held up his glass and turned to the stranger. "Welcome to our party, old man," said he. Mr. Drew drained his glass and complimented Mr. Cooke on the brand,--a sure key to my client's heart. Whereupon he seated himself between Mr. Drew and the captain and began a discourse on the subject of his own cellar, on which he talked for nearly an hour. His only pauses were for the worthy purpose of filling the detective's or the captain's glass, and these he watched with a hospitable solicitude. The captain had the advantage, three to one, and I made no doubt his employer bitterly regretted not having a boatman whose principles were more strict. At the end of the hour Captain Jay, who by nature was inclined to be taciturn and crabbed, waxed loquacious and even jovial. He sang us the songs he had learned in the winter lumber-camps, which Mr. Cooke never failed to encore to the echo. My client vowed he had not spent a pleasanter afternoon for years. He plied the captain with cigars, and explained to him the mystery of the strings and labels; and the captain experimented until he had broken some of the bottles. Mr. Cooke was not a person who made any great distinction between the three degrees, acquaintance, friendship, and intimacy. When a stranger pleased him, he went from one to the other with such comparative ease that a hardhearted man, and no other, could have resented his advances. Mr. Drew was anything but a hard-hearted man, and he did not object to my client's familiarity. Mr. Cooke made no secret of his admiration for Mr. Drew, and there were just two things about him that Mr. Cooke admired and wondered at, above all else,--the bushy red whiskers. But it appeared that these were the only things that Mr. Drew was really touchy about. I noticed that the detective, without being impolite, did his best to discourage these remarks; but my client knew no such word as discouragement. He was continually saying: "I think I'll grow some like that, old man," or "Have those cut," and the like,--a kind of humor in which the captain took an incredible delight. And finally, when a certain pitch of good feeling had been arrived at, Mr.

word

How many times the word 'word' appears in the text?

you happen to have any handcuffs on the Maria?" But my client was pouring out a stiff helping from the decanter, which he still held in his hand. Then he approached the Celebrity. "Don't let it worry you, old man," said he, with intense earnestness. "Don't let it worry you. You're my guest, and I'll see you safe out of it, or bust." "Fenelon," said Mrs. Cooke, gravely, "do you realize what you are saying?" "You're a clever one, Allen," my client continued, and he backed away the better to look him over; "you had nerve to stay as long as you did." The Celebrity laughed confidently. "Cooke," he replied, "I appreciate your generosity,--I really do. I know no offence is meant. The mistake is, in fact, most pardonable." In Mr. Cooke amazement and admiration were clamoring for utterance. "Damn me," he sputtered, "if you're not the coolest embezzler I ever saw." The Celebrity laughed again. Then he surveyed the circle. "My friends," he said, "this is certainly a most amazing coincidence; one which, I assure you, surprises me no less than it does you. You have no doubt remarked that I have my peculiarities. We all have. "I flatter thyself I am not entirely unknown. And the annoyances imposed upon me by a certain fame I have achieved had become such that some months ago I began to crave the pleasures of the life of a private man. I determined to go to some sequestered resort where my face was unfamiliar. The possibility of being recognized at Asquith did not occur to me. Fortunately I was. And a singular chance led me to take the name of the man who has committed this crime, and who has the misfortune to resemble me. I suppose that now," he added impressively, "I shall have to tell you who I am." He paused until these words should have gained their full effect. Then he held up the edition de luxe from which he and Miss Thorn had been reading. "You may have heard, Mrs. Cooke," said he, addressing himself to our hostess, "you may perhaps have heard of the author of this book." Mrs. Cooke was a calm woman, and she read the name on the cover. "Yes," she said, "I have. And you claim to be he?" "Ask my friend Crocker here," he answered carelessly, no doubt exulting that the scene was going off so dramatically. "I should indeed be in a tight box," he went on, "if there were not friends of mine here to help me out." They turned to me. "I am afraid I cannot," I said with what soberness I could. "What!" says he with a start. "What! you deny me?" Miss Trevor had her tongue in her cheek. I bowed. "I am powerless to speak, Mr. Allen," I replied. During this colloquy my client stood between us, looking from one to the other. I well knew that his way of thinking would be with my testimony, and that the gilt name on the edition de luxe had done little towards convincing him of Mr. Allen's innocence. To his mind there was nothing horrible or incongruous in the idea that a well-known author should be a defaulter. It was perfectly possible. He shoved the glass of Scotch towards the Celebrity, with a smile. "Take this, old man," he kindly insisted, "and you'll feel better. What's the use of bucking when you're saddled with a thing like that?" And he pointed to the paper. "Besides, they haven't caught you yet, by a damned sight." The Celebrity waved aside the proffered tumbler. "This is an infamous charge, and you know it, Crocker," he cried. "If you don't, you ought to, as a lawyer. This isn't any time to have fun with a fellow." "My dear sir," I said, "I have charged you with nothing whatever." He turned his back on me in complete disgust. And he came face to face with Miss Trevor. "Miss Trevor, too, knows something of me," he said. "You forget, Mr. Allen," she answered sweetly, "you forget that I have given you my promise not to reveal what I know." The Celebrity chafed, for this was as damaging a statement as could well be uttered against him. But Miss Thorn was his trump card, and she now came forward. "This is ridiculous, Mr. Crocker, simply ridiculous," said she. "I agree with you most heartily, Miss Thorn," I replied. "Nonsense!" exclaimed Miss Thorn, and she drew her lips together, "pure nonsense!" "Nonsense or not, Marian," Mr. Cooke interposed, "we are wasting valuable time. The police are already on the scent, I'll bet my hat." "Fenelon!" Mrs. Cooke remonstrated. "And do you mean to say in soberness, Uncle Fenelon, that you believe the author of The Sybarites to be a defaulter?" said Miss Thorn. "It is indeed hard to believe Mr. Allen a criminal," Mr. Trevor broke in for the first time. "I think it only right that he should be allowed to clear himself before he is put to further inconvenience, and perhaps injustice, by any action we may take in the matter." Mr. Cooke sniffed suspiciously at the word "action." "What action do you mean?" he demanded. "Well," replied Mr. Trevor, with some hesitation, "before we take any steps, that is, notify the police." "Notify the police!" cried my client, his face red with a generous anger. "I have never yet turned a guest over to the police," he said proudly, "and won't, not if I know it. I'm not that kind." Who shall criticise Mr. Cooke's code of morality? "Fenelon," said his wife, "you must remember you have never yet entertained a guest of a larcenous character. No embezzlers up to the present. Marian," she continued, turning to Miss Thorn, "you spoke as if you might, be able to throw some light upon this matter. Do you know whether this gentleman is Charles Wrexell Allen, or whether he is the author? In short, do you know who he is?" The Celebrity lighted a cigarette. Miss Thorn said indignantly, "Upon my word, Aunt Maria, I thought that you, at least, would know better than to credit this silly accusation. He has been a guest at your house, and I am astonished that you should doubt his word." Mrs. Cooke looked at her niece perplexedly. "You must remember, Marian," she said gently, "that I know nothing about him, where he came from, or who he is. Nor does any one at Asquith, except perhaps Miss Trevor, by her own confession. And you do not seem inclined to tell what you know, if indeed you know anything." Upon this Miss Thorn became more indignant still, and Mrs. Cooke went on "Gentlemen, as a rule, do not assume names, especially other people's. They are usually proud of their own. Mr. Allen appears among us, from the clouds, as it were, and in due time we learn from a newspaper that he has committed a defalcation. And, furthermore, the paper contains a portrait and an accurate description which put the thing beyond doubt. I ask you, is it reasonable for him to state coolly after all this that he is another man? That he is a well-known author? It's an absurdity. I was not born yesterday, my dear." "It is most reasonable under the circumstances," replied Miss Thorn, warmly. "Extraordinary? Of course it's extraordinary. And too long to explain to a prejudiced audience, who can't be expected to comprehend the character of a genius, to understand the yearning of a famous man for a little quiet." Mrs. Cooke looked grave. "Marian, you forget yourself," she said. "Oh, I am tired of it, Aunt Maria," cried Miss Thorn; "if he takes my advice, he will refuse to discuss it farther." She did not seem to be aware that she had put forth no argument whatever, save a woman's argument. And I was intensely surprised that her indignation should have got the better of her in this way, having always supposed her clear-headed in the extreme. A few words from her, such as I supposed she would have spoken, had set the Celebrity right with all except Mr. Cooke. To me it was a clear proof that the Celebrity had turned her head, and her mind with it. The silence was broken by an uncontrollable burst of laughter from Miss Trevor. She was quickly frowned down by her father, who reminded her that this was not a comedy. "And, Mr. Allen," he said, "if you have anything to say, or any evidence to bring forward, now is the time to do it." He appeared to forget that I was the district attorney. The Celebrity had seated himself on the trunk of a tree, and was blowing out the smoke in clouds. He was inclined to take Miss Thorn's advice, for he made a gesture of weariness with his cigarette, in the use of which he was singularly eloquent. "Tell me, Mr. Trevor," said he, "why I should sit before you as a tribunal? Why I should take the trouble to clear myself of a senseless charge? My respect for you inclines me to the belief that you are laboring under a momentary excitement; for when you reflect that I am a prominent, not to say famous, author, you will realize how absurd it is that I should be an embezzler, and why I decline to lower myself by an explanation." Mr. Trevor picked up the paper and struck it. "Do you refuse to say anything in the face of such evidence as that?" he cried. "It is not a matter for refusal, Mr. Trevor. It is simply that I cannot admit the possibility of having committed the crime." "Well, sir," said the senator, his black necktie working out of place as his anger got the better of him, "I am to believe, then, because you claim to be the author of a few society novels, that you are infallible? Let me tell you that the President of the United States himself is liable to impeachment, and bound to disprove any charge he may be accused of. What in Halifax do I care for your divine-right-of-authors theory? I'll continue to think you guilty until you are shown to be innocent." Suddenly the full significance of the Celebrity's tactics struck Mr. Cooke, and he reached out and caught hold of Mr. Trevor's coattails. "Hold on, old man," said he; "Allen isn't going to be ass enough to own up to it. Don't you see we'd all be jugged and fined for assisting a criminal over the border? It's out of consideration for us." Mr. Trevor looked sternly over his shoulder at Mr. Cooke. "Do you mean to say, sir, seriously," he asked, "that, for the sake of a misplaced friendship for this man, and a misplaced sense of honor, you are bound to shield a guest, though a criminal? That you intend to assist him to escape from justice? I insist, for my own protection and that of my daughter, as well as for that of the others present that, since he refuses to speak, we must presume him guilty and turn him over." Mr. Trevor turned to Mrs. Cooke, as if relying on her support. "Fenelon," said she, "I have never sought to influence your actions when your friends were concerned, and I shall not begin now. All I ask of you is to consider the consequences of your intention." These words from Mrs. Cooke had much more weight with my client than Mr. Trevor's blustering demands. "Maria, my dear," he said, with a deferential urbanity, "Mr. Allen is my guest, and a gentleman. When a gentleman gives his word that he is not a criminal, it is sufficient." The force of this, for some reason, did not overwhelm his wife; and her lip curled a little, half in contempt, half in risibility. "Pshaw, Fenelon," said she, "what a fraud you are. Why is it you wish to get Mr. Allen over the border, then?" A question which might well have staggered a worthier intellect. "Why, my dear," answered my client, "I wish to save Mr. Allen the inconvenience, not to say the humiliation, of being brought East in custody and strapped with a pair of handcuffs. Let him take a shooting trip to the great Northwest until the real criminal is caught." "Well, Fenelon," replied Mrs. Cooke, unable to repress a smile, "one might as well try to argue with a turn-stile or a weather-vane. I wash my hands of it." But Mr. Trevor, who was both a self-made man and a Western politician, was far from being satisfied. He turned to me with a sweep of the arm he had doubtless learned in the Ohio State Senate. "Mr. Crocker," he cried, "are you, as attorney of this district, going to aid and abet in the escape of a fugitive from justice?" "Mr. Trevor," said I, "I will take the course in this matter which seems fit to me, and without advice from any one." He wheeled on Farrar, repeated the question, and got a like answer. Brought to bay for a time, he glared savagely around him while groping for further arguments. But at this point the Four appeared on the scene, much the worse for thickets, and clamoring for luncheon. They had five small fish between them which they wanted Miss Thorn to cook. CHAPTER XII The Four received Mr. Cooke's plan for the Celebrity's escape to Canada with enthusiastic acclamation, and as the one thing lacking to make the Bear Island trip a complete success. The Celebrity was hailed with the reverence due to the man who puts up the ring-money in a prize-fight. He was accorded, too, a certain amount of respect as a defaulter, which the Four would have denied him as an author, for I am inclined to the belief that the discovery of his literary profession would have lowered him rather than otherwise in their eyes. My client was naturally anxious to get under way at once for the Canadian border, but was overruled in this by his henchmen, who demanded something to eat. We sat down to an impromptu meal, which was an odd affair indeed. Mrs. Cooke maintained her usual serenity, but said little, while Miss Trevor and I had many a mirthful encounter at the thought of the turn matters had taken. At the other end of the cloth were Mr. Cooke and the Four, in wonderful spirits and unimpaired appetite, and in their midst sat the Celebrity, likewise in wonderful spirits. His behavior now and again elicited a loud grunt of disapproval from Mr. Trevor, who was plying his knife and fork in a manner emblematic of his state of mind. Mr. Allen was laughing and joking airily with Mr. Cooke and the guests, denying, but not resenting, their accusations with all the sang froid of a hardened criminal. He did not care particularly to go to Canada, he said. Why should he, when he was innocent? But, if Mr. Cooke insisted, he would enjoy seeing that part of the lake and the Canadian side. Afterwards I perceived Miss Thorn down by the brookside, washing dishes. Her sleeves were drawn back to the elbow, and a dainty white apron covered her blue skirt, while the wind from the lake had disentangled errant wisps of her hair. I stood on the brink above, secure, as I thought, from observation, when she chanced to look up and spied me. "Mr. Crocker," she called, "would you like to make yourself useful?" I was decidedly embarrassed. Her manner was as frank and unconstrained as though I had not been shunning her for weeks past. "If such a thing is possible," I replied. "Do you know a dish-cloth when you see one?" I was doubtful. But I procured the cloth from Miss Trevor and returned. There was an air about Miss Thorn that was new to me. "What an uncompromising man you are, Mr. Crocker," she said to me. "Once a person is unfortunate enough to come under the ban of your disapproval you have nothing whatever to do with them. Now it seems that I have given you offence in some way. Is it not so?" "You magnify my importance," I said. "No temporizing, Mr. Crocker," she went on, as though she meant to be obeyed; "sit down there, and let's have it out. I like you too well to quarrel with you." There was no resisting such a command, and I threw myself on the pebbles at her feet. "I thought we were going to be great friends," she said. "You and Mr. Farrar were so kind to me on the night of my arrival, and we had such fun watching the dance together." "I confess I thought so, too. But you expressed opinions then that I shared. You have since changed your mind, for some unaccountable reason." She paused in her polishing, a shining dish in her hand, and looked down at me with something between a laugh and a frown. "I suppose you have never regretted speaking hastily," she said. "Many a time," I returned, warming; "but if I ever thought a judgment measured and distilled, it was your judgment of the Celebrity." "Does the study of law eliminate humanity?" she asked, with a mock curtsey. "The deliberate sentences are sometimes the unjust ones, and men who are hung by weighed wisdom are often the innocent." "That is all very well in cases of doubt. But here you have the evidences of wrong-doing directly before you." Three dishes were taken up, dried, and put down before she answered me. I threw pebbles into the brook, and wished I had held my tongue. "What evidence?" inquired she. "Well," said I, "I must finish, I suppose. I had a notion you knew of what I inferred. First, let me say that I have no desire to prejudice you against a person whom you admire." "Impossible." Something in her tone made me look up. "Very good, then," I answered. "I, for one, can have no use for a man who devotes himself to a girl long enough to win her affections, and then deserts her with as little compunction as a dog does a rat it has shaken. And that is how your Celebrity treated Miss Trevor." "But Miss Trevor has recovered, I believe," said Miss Thorn. I began to feel a deep, but helpless, insecurity. "Happily, yes," I assented. "Thanks to an excellent physician." A smile twitched the corners of her mouth, as though she enjoyed my discomfiture. I remarked for the fiftieth time how strong her face was, with its generous lines and clearly moulded features. And a suspicion entered my soul. "At any rate," I said, with a laugh, "the Celebrity has got himself into no end of a predicament now. He may go back to New York in custody." "I thought you incapable of resentment, Mr. Crocker. How mean of you to deny him!" "It can do no harm," I answered; "a little lesson in the dangers of incognito may be salutary. I wish it were a little lesson in the dangers of something else." The color mounted to her face as she resumed her occupation. "I am afraid you are a very wicked man," she said. Before I could reply there came a scuffling sound from the bank above us, and the snapping of branches and twigs. It was Mr. Cooke. His descent, the personal conduction of which he lost half-way down, was irregular and spasmodic, and a rude concussion at the bottom knocked off a choice bit of profanity which was balanced on the tip of his tongue. "Tobogganing is a little out of season," said his niece, laughing heartily. Mr. Cooke brushed himself off, picked up the glasses which he had dropped in his flight and pushed them into my hands. Then he pointed lakeward with bulging eyes. "Crocker, old man," he said in a loud whisper, "they tell me that is an Asquith cat-boat." I followed his finger and saw for the first time a sail-boat headed for the island, then about two miles off shore. I raised the glasses. "Yes," I said, "the Scimitar." "That's what Farrar said," cried he. "And what about it?" I asked. "What about it?" he ejaculated. "Why, it's a detective come for Allen. I knew sure as hell if they got as far as Asquith they wouldn't stop there. And that's the fastest sail-boat he could hire there, isn't it?" I replied that it was. He seized me by the shoulder and began dragging me up the bank. "What are you going to do?" I cried, shaking myself loose. "We've got to get on the Maria and run for it," he panted. "There is no time to be lost." He had reached the top of the bank and was running towards the group at the tents. And he actually infused me with some of his red-hot enthusiasm, for I hastened after him. "But you can't begin to get the Maria out before they will be in here," I shouted. He stopped short, gazed at the approaching boat, and then at me. "Is that so?" "Yes, of course," said I, "they will be here in ten minutes." The Celebrity stood in the midst of the excited Four. His hair was parted precisely, and he had induced a monocle to remain in his eye long enough to examine the Scimitar, his nose at the critical elevation. This unruffled exterior made a deep impression on the Four. Was the Celebrity not undergoing the crucial test of a true sport? He was an example alike to criminals and philosophers. Mr. Cooke hurried into the group, which divided respectfully for him, and grasped the Celebrity by the hand. "Something else has got to be done, old man," he said, in a voice which shook with emotion; "they'll be on us before we can get the Maria out." Farrar, who was nailing a rustic bench near by, straightened up at this, his lip curling with a desire to laugh. The Celebrity laid his hand on my client's shoulder. "Cooke," said he, "I'm deeply grateful for all the trouble you wish to take, and for the solicitude you have shown. But let things be. I'll come out of it all right." "Never," cried Cooke, looking proudly around the Four as some Highland chief might have surveyed a faithful clan. "I'd a damned sight rather go to jail myself." "A damned sight," echoed the Four in unison. "I insist, Cooke," said the Celebrity, taking out his eyeglass and tapping Mr. Cooke's purple necktie, "I insist that you drop this business. I repeat my thanks to you and these gentlemen for the friendship they have shown, but say again that I am as innocent of this crime as a baby." Mr. Cooke paid no attention to this speech. His face became radiant. "Didn't any of you fellows strike a cave, or a hollow tree, or something of that sort, knocking around this morning?" One man slapped his knee. "The very place," he cried. "I fell into it," and he showed a rent in his trousers corroboratively. "It's big enough to hold twenty of Allen, and the detective doesn't live that could find it." "Hustle him off, quick," said Mr. Cooke. The mandate was obeyed as literally as though Robin Hood himself had given it. The Celebrity disappeared into the forest, carried rather than urged towards his destined place of confinement. The commotion had brought Mr. Trevor to the spot. He caught sight of the Celebrity's back between the trees, then he looked at the cat-boat entering the cove, a man in the stern preparing to pull in the tender. He intercepted Mr. Cooke on his way to the beach. "What have you done with Mr. Allen?" he asked, in a menacing voice. "Good God," said Mr. Cooke, whose contempt for Mr. Trevor was now infinite, "you talk as if I were the governor of the state. What the devil could I do with him?" "I will have no evasion," replied Mr. Trevor, taking an imposing posture in front of him. "You are trying to defeat the ends of justice by assisting a dangerous criminal to escape. I have warned you, sir, and warn you again of the consequences of your meditated crime, and I give you my word I will do all in my power to frustrate it." Mr. Cooke dug his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. Here was a complication he had not looked for. The Scimitar lay at anchor with her sail down, and two men were coming ashore in the tender. Mr. Cooke's attitude being that of a man who reconsiders a rash resolve, Mr. Trevor was emboldened to say in a moderated tone: "You were carried away by your generosity, Mr. Cooke. I was sure when you took time to think you would see it in another light." Mr. Cooke started off for the place where the boat had grounded. I did not catch his reply, and probably should not have written it here if I had. The senator looked as if he had been sand-bagged. The two men jumped out of the boat and hauled it up. Mr. Cooke waved an easy salute to one, whom I recognized as the big boatman from Asquith, familiarly known as Captain Jay. He owned the Scimitar and several smaller boats. The captain went through the pantomime of an introduction between Mr. Cooke and the other, whom my client shook warmly by the hand, and presently all three came towards us. Mr. Cooke led them to a bar he had improvised by the brook. A pool served the office of refrigerator, and Mr. Cooke had devised an ingenious but complicated arrangement of strings and labels which enabled him to extract any bottle or set of bottles without having to bare his arm and pull out the lot. Farrar and I responded to the call he had given, and went down to assist in the entertainment. My client, with his back to us, was busy manipulating the strings. "Gentlemen," he said, "let me make you acquainted with Mr. Drew. You all know the captain." Had I not suspected Mr. Drew's profession, I think I should not have remarked that he gave each of us a keen look as he raised his head. He had reddish-brown hair, and a pair of bushy red whiskers, each of which tapered to a long point. He was broad in the shoulders, and the clothes he wore rather enhanced this breadth. His suit was gray and almost new, the trousers perceptibly bagging at the knee, and he had a felt hat, a necktie of the white and flowery pattern, and square-toed "Congress" boots. In short, he was a decidedly ordinary looking person; you would meet a hundred like him in the streets of Far Harbor and Beaverton. He might have been a prosperous business man in either of those towns,--a comfortable lumber merchant or mine owner. And he had chosen just the get-up I should have picked for detective work in that region. He had a pleasant eye and a very fetching and hearty manner. But his long whiskers troubled me especially. I kept wondering if they were real. "The captain is sailing Mr. Drew over to Far Harbor," explained Mr. Cooke, "and they have put in here for the night." Mr. Drew was plainly not an amateur, for he volunteered nothing further than this. The necessary bottles having been produced, Mr. Cooke held up his glass and turned to the stranger. "Welcome to our party, old man," said he. Mr. Drew drained his glass and complimented Mr. Cooke on the brand,--a sure key to my client's heart. Whereupon he seated himself between Mr. Drew and the captain and began a discourse on the subject of his own cellar, on which he talked for nearly an hour. His only pauses were for the worthy purpose of filling the detective's or the captain's glass, and these he watched with a hospitable solicitude. The captain had the advantage, three to one, and I made no doubt his employer bitterly regretted not having a boatman whose principles were more strict. At the end of the hour Captain Jay, who by nature was inclined to be taciturn and crabbed, waxed loquacious and even jovial. He sang us the songs he had learned in the winter lumber-camps, which Mr. Cooke never failed to encore to the echo. My client vowed he had not spent a pleasanter afternoon for years. He plied the captain with cigars, and explained to him the mystery of the strings and labels; and the captain experimented until he had broken some of the bottles. Mr. Cooke was not a person who made any great distinction between the three degrees, acquaintance, friendship, and intimacy. When a stranger pleased him, he went from one to the other with such comparative ease that a hardhearted man, and no other, could have resented his advances. Mr. Drew was anything but a hard-hearted man, and he did not object to my client's familiarity. Mr. Cooke made no secret of his admiration for Mr. Drew, and there were just two things about him that Mr. Cooke admired and wondered at, above all else,--the bushy red whiskers. But it appeared that these were the only things that Mr. Drew was really touchy about. I noticed that the detective, without being impolite, did his best to discourage these remarks; but my client knew no such word as discouragement. He was continually saying: "I think I'll grow some like that, old man," or "Have those cut," and the like,--a kind of humor in which the captain took an incredible delight. And finally, when a certain pitch of good feeling had been arrived at, Mr.

fun

How many times the word 'fun' appears in the text?

you happen to have any handcuffs on the Maria?" But my client was pouring out a stiff helping from the decanter, which he still held in his hand. Then he approached the Celebrity. "Don't let it worry you, old man," said he, with intense earnestness. "Don't let it worry you. You're my guest, and I'll see you safe out of it, or bust." "Fenelon," said Mrs. Cooke, gravely, "do you realize what you are saying?" "You're a clever one, Allen," my client continued, and he backed away the better to look him over; "you had nerve to stay as long as you did." The Celebrity laughed confidently. "Cooke," he replied, "I appreciate your generosity,--I really do. I know no offence is meant. The mistake is, in fact, most pardonable." In Mr. Cooke amazement and admiration were clamoring for utterance. "Damn me," he sputtered, "if you're not the coolest embezzler I ever saw." The Celebrity laughed again. Then he surveyed the circle. "My friends," he said, "this is certainly a most amazing coincidence; one which, I assure you, surprises me no less than it does you. You have no doubt remarked that I have my peculiarities. We all have. "I flatter thyself I am not entirely unknown. And the annoyances imposed upon me by a certain fame I have achieved had become such that some months ago I began to crave the pleasures of the life of a private man. I determined to go to some sequestered resort where my face was unfamiliar. The possibility of being recognized at Asquith did not occur to me. Fortunately I was. And a singular chance led me to take the name of the man who has committed this crime, and who has the misfortune to resemble me. I suppose that now," he added impressively, "I shall have to tell you who I am." He paused until these words should have gained their full effect. Then he held up the edition de luxe from which he and Miss Thorn had been reading. "You may have heard, Mrs. Cooke," said he, addressing himself to our hostess, "you may perhaps have heard of the author of this book." Mrs. Cooke was a calm woman, and she read the name on the cover. "Yes," she said, "I have. And you claim to be he?" "Ask my friend Crocker here," he answered carelessly, no doubt exulting that the scene was going off so dramatically. "I should indeed be in a tight box," he went on, "if there were not friends of mine here to help me out." They turned to me. "I am afraid I cannot," I said with what soberness I could. "What!" says he with a start. "What! you deny me?" Miss Trevor had her tongue in her cheek. I bowed. "I am powerless to speak, Mr. Allen," I replied. During this colloquy my client stood between us, looking from one to the other. I well knew that his way of thinking would be with my testimony, and that the gilt name on the edition de luxe had done little towards convincing him of Mr. Allen's innocence. To his mind there was nothing horrible or incongruous in the idea that a well-known author should be a defaulter. It was perfectly possible. He shoved the glass of Scotch towards the Celebrity, with a smile. "Take this, old man," he kindly insisted, "and you'll feel better. What's the use of bucking when you're saddled with a thing like that?" And he pointed to the paper. "Besides, they haven't caught you yet, by a damned sight." The Celebrity waved aside the proffered tumbler. "This is an infamous charge, and you know it, Crocker," he cried. "If you don't, you ought to, as a lawyer. This isn't any time to have fun with a fellow." "My dear sir," I said, "I have charged you with nothing whatever." He turned his back on me in complete disgust. And he came face to face with Miss Trevor. "Miss Trevor, too, knows something of me," he said. "You forget, Mr. Allen," she answered sweetly, "you forget that I have given you my promise not to reveal what I know." The Celebrity chafed, for this was as damaging a statement as could well be uttered against him. But Miss Thorn was his trump card, and she now came forward. "This is ridiculous, Mr. Crocker, simply ridiculous," said she. "I agree with you most heartily, Miss Thorn," I replied. "Nonsense!" exclaimed Miss Thorn, and she drew her lips together, "pure nonsense!" "Nonsense or not, Marian," Mr. Cooke interposed, "we are wasting valuable time. The police are already on the scent, I'll bet my hat." "Fenelon!" Mrs. Cooke remonstrated. "And do you mean to say in soberness, Uncle Fenelon, that you believe the author of The Sybarites to be a defaulter?" said Miss Thorn. "It is indeed hard to believe Mr. Allen a criminal," Mr. Trevor broke in for the first time. "I think it only right that he should be allowed to clear himself before he is put to further inconvenience, and perhaps injustice, by any action we may take in the matter." Mr. Cooke sniffed suspiciously at the word "action." "What action do you mean?" he demanded. "Well," replied Mr. Trevor, with some hesitation, "before we take any steps, that is, notify the police." "Notify the police!" cried my client, his face red with a generous anger. "I have never yet turned a guest over to the police," he said proudly, "and won't, not if I know it. I'm not that kind." Who shall criticise Mr. Cooke's code of morality? "Fenelon," said his wife, "you must remember you have never yet entertained a guest of a larcenous character. No embezzlers up to the present. Marian," she continued, turning to Miss Thorn, "you spoke as if you might, be able to throw some light upon this matter. Do you know whether this gentleman is Charles Wrexell Allen, or whether he is the author? In short, do you know who he is?" The Celebrity lighted a cigarette. Miss Thorn said indignantly, "Upon my word, Aunt Maria, I thought that you, at least, would know better than to credit this silly accusation. He has been a guest at your house, and I am astonished that you should doubt his word." Mrs. Cooke looked at her niece perplexedly. "You must remember, Marian," she said gently, "that I know nothing about him, where he came from, or who he is. Nor does any one at Asquith, except perhaps Miss Trevor, by her own confession. And you do not seem inclined to tell what you know, if indeed you know anything." Upon this Miss Thorn became more indignant still, and Mrs. Cooke went on "Gentlemen, as a rule, do not assume names, especially other people's. They are usually proud of their own. Mr. Allen appears among us, from the clouds, as it were, and in due time we learn from a newspaper that he has committed a defalcation. And, furthermore, the paper contains a portrait and an accurate description which put the thing beyond doubt. I ask you, is it reasonable for him to state coolly after all this that he is another man? That he is a well-known author? It's an absurdity. I was not born yesterday, my dear." "It is most reasonable under the circumstances," replied Miss Thorn, warmly. "Extraordinary? Of course it's extraordinary. And too long to explain to a prejudiced audience, who can't be expected to comprehend the character of a genius, to understand the yearning of a famous man for a little quiet." Mrs. Cooke looked grave. "Marian, you forget yourself," she said. "Oh, I am tired of it, Aunt Maria," cried Miss Thorn; "if he takes my advice, he will refuse to discuss it farther." She did not seem to be aware that she had put forth no argument whatever, save a woman's argument. And I was intensely surprised that her indignation should have got the better of her in this way, having always supposed her clear-headed in the extreme. A few words from her, such as I supposed she would have spoken, had set the Celebrity right with all except Mr. Cooke. To me it was a clear proof that the Celebrity had turned her head, and her mind with it. The silence was broken by an uncontrollable burst of laughter from Miss Trevor. She was quickly frowned down by her father, who reminded her that this was not a comedy. "And, Mr. Allen," he said, "if you have anything to say, or any evidence to bring forward, now is the time to do it." He appeared to forget that I was the district attorney. The Celebrity had seated himself on the trunk of a tree, and was blowing out the smoke in clouds. He was inclined to take Miss Thorn's advice, for he made a gesture of weariness with his cigarette, in the use of which he was singularly eloquent. "Tell me, Mr. Trevor," said he, "why I should sit before you as a tribunal? Why I should take the trouble to clear myself of a senseless charge? My respect for you inclines me to the belief that you are laboring under a momentary excitement; for when you reflect that I am a prominent, not to say famous, author, you will realize how absurd it is that I should be an embezzler, and why I decline to lower myself by an explanation." Mr. Trevor picked up the paper and struck it. "Do you refuse to say anything in the face of such evidence as that?" he cried. "It is not a matter for refusal, Mr. Trevor. It is simply that I cannot admit the possibility of having committed the crime." "Well, sir," said the senator, his black necktie working out of place as his anger got the better of him, "I am to believe, then, because you claim to be the author of a few society novels, that you are infallible? Let me tell you that the President of the United States himself is liable to impeachment, and bound to disprove any charge he may be accused of. What in Halifax do I care for your divine-right-of-authors theory? I'll continue to think you guilty until you are shown to be innocent." Suddenly the full significance of the Celebrity's tactics struck Mr. Cooke, and he reached out and caught hold of Mr. Trevor's coattails. "Hold on, old man," said he; "Allen isn't going to be ass enough to own up to it. Don't you see we'd all be jugged and fined for assisting a criminal over the border? It's out of consideration for us." Mr. Trevor looked sternly over his shoulder at Mr. Cooke. "Do you mean to say, sir, seriously," he asked, "that, for the sake of a misplaced friendship for this man, and a misplaced sense of honor, you are bound to shield a guest, though a criminal? That you intend to assist him to escape from justice? I insist, for my own protection and that of my daughter, as well as for that of the others present that, since he refuses to speak, we must presume him guilty and turn him over." Mr. Trevor turned to Mrs. Cooke, as if relying on her support. "Fenelon," said she, "I have never sought to influence your actions when your friends were concerned, and I shall not begin now. All I ask of you is to consider the consequences of your intention." These words from Mrs. Cooke had much more weight with my client than Mr. Trevor's blustering demands. "Maria, my dear," he said, with a deferential urbanity, "Mr. Allen is my guest, and a gentleman. When a gentleman gives his word that he is not a criminal, it is sufficient." The force of this, for some reason, did not overwhelm his wife; and her lip curled a little, half in contempt, half in risibility. "Pshaw, Fenelon," said she, "what a fraud you are. Why is it you wish to get Mr. Allen over the border, then?" A question which might well have staggered a worthier intellect. "Why, my dear," answered my client, "I wish to save Mr. Allen the inconvenience, not to say the humiliation, of being brought East in custody and strapped with a pair of handcuffs. Let him take a shooting trip to the great Northwest until the real criminal is caught." "Well, Fenelon," replied Mrs. Cooke, unable to repress a smile, "one might as well try to argue with a turn-stile or a weather-vane. I wash my hands of it." But Mr. Trevor, who was both a self-made man and a Western politician, was far from being satisfied. He turned to me with a sweep of the arm he had doubtless learned in the Ohio State Senate. "Mr. Crocker," he cried, "are you, as attorney of this district, going to aid and abet in the escape of a fugitive from justice?" "Mr. Trevor," said I, "I will take the course in this matter which seems fit to me, and without advice from any one." He wheeled on Farrar, repeated the question, and got a like answer. Brought to bay for a time, he glared savagely around him while groping for further arguments. But at this point the Four appeared on the scene, much the worse for thickets, and clamoring for luncheon. They had five small fish between them which they wanted Miss Thorn to cook. CHAPTER XII The Four received Mr. Cooke's plan for the Celebrity's escape to Canada with enthusiastic acclamation, and as the one thing lacking to make the Bear Island trip a complete success. The Celebrity was hailed with the reverence due to the man who puts up the ring-money in a prize-fight. He was accorded, too, a certain amount of respect as a defaulter, which the Four would have denied him as an author, for I am inclined to the belief that the discovery of his literary profession would have lowered him rather than otherwise in their eyes. My client was naturally anxious to get under way at once for the Canadian border, but was overruled in this by his henchmen, who demanded something to eat. We sat down to an impromptu meal, which was an odd affair indeed. Mrs. Cooke maintained her usual serenity, but said little, while Miss Trevor and I had many a mirthful encounter at the thought of the turn matters had taken. At the other end of the cloth were Mr. Cooke and the Four, in wonderful spirits and unimpaired appetite, and in their midst sat the Celebrity, likewise in wonderful spirits. His behavior now and again elicited a loud grunt of disapproval from Mr. Trevor, who was plying his knife and fork in a manner emblematic of his state of mind. Mr. Allen was laughing and joking airily with Mr. Cooke and the guests, denying, but not resenting, their accusations with all the sang froid of a hardened criminal. He did not care particularly to go to Canada, he said. Why should he, when he was innocent? But, if Mr. Cooke insisted, he would enjoy seeing that part of the lake and the Canadian side. Afterwards I perceived Miss Thorn down by the brookside, washing dishes. Her sleeves were drawn back to the elbow, and a dainty white apron covered her blue skirt, while the wind from the lake had disentangled errant wisps of her hair. I stood on the brink above, secure, as I thought, from observation, when she chanced to look up and spied me. "Mr. Crocker," she called, "would you like to make yourself useful?" I was decidedly embarrassed. Her manner was as frank and unconstrained as though I had not been shunning her for weeks past. "If such a thing is possible," I replied. "Do you know a dish-cloth when you see one?" I was doubtful. But I procured the cloth from Miss Trevor and returned. There was an air about Miss Thorn that was new to me. "What an uncompromising man you are, Mr. Crocker," she said to me. "Once a person is unfortunate enough to come under the ban of your disapproval you have nothing whatever to do with them. Now it seems that I have given you offence in some way. Is it not so?" "You magnify my importance," I said. "No temporizing, Mr. Crocker," she went on, as though she meant to be obeyed; "sit down there, and let's have it out. I like you too well to quarrel with you." There was no resisting such a command, and I threw myself on the pebbles at her feet. "I thought we were going to be great friends," she said. "You and Mr. Farrar were so kind to me on the night of my arrival, and we had such fun watching the dance together." "I confess I thought so, too. But you expressed opinions then that I shared. You have since changed your mind, for some unaccountable reason." She paused in her polishing, a shining dish in her hand, and looked down at me with something between a laugh and a frown. "I suppose you have never regretted speaking hastily," she said. "Many a time," I returned, warming; "but if I ever thought a judgment measured and distilled, it was your judgment of the Celebrity." "Does the study of law eliminate humanity?" she asked, with a mock curtsey. "The deliberate sentences are sometimes the unjust ones, and men who are hung by weighed wisdom are often the innocent." "That is all very well in cases of doubt. But here you have the evidences of wrong-doing directly before you." Three dishes were taken up, dried, and put down before she answered me. I threw pebbles into the brook, and wished I had held my tongue. "What evidence?" inquired she. "Well," said I, "I must finish, I suppose. I had a notion you knew of what I inferred. First, let me say that I have no desire to prejudice you against a person whom you admire." "Impossible." Something in her tone made me look up. "Very good, then," I answered. "I, for one, can have no use for a man who devotes himself to a girl long enough to win her affections, and then deserts her with as little compunction as a dog does a rat it has shaken. And that is how your Celebrity treated Miss Trevor." "But Miss Trevor has recovered, I believe," said Miss Thorn. I began to feel a deep, but helpless, insecurity. "Happily, yes," I assented. "Thanks to an excellent physician." A smile twitched the corners of her mouth, as though she enjoyed my discomfiture. I remarked for the fiftieth time how strong her face was, with its generous lines and clearly moulded features. And a suspicion entered my soul. "At any rate," I said, with a laugh, "the Celebrity has got himself into no end of a predicament now. He may go back to New York in custody." "I thought you incapable of resentment, Mr. Crocker. How mean of you to deny him!" "It can do no harm," I answered; "a little lesson in the dangers of incognito may be salutary. I wish it were a little lesson in the dangers of something else." The color mounted to her face as she resumed her occupation. "I am afraid you are a very wicked man," she said. Before I could reply there came a scuffling sound from the bank above us, and the snapping of branches and twigs. It was Mr. Cooke. His descent, the personal conduction of which he lost half-way down, was irregular and spasmodic, and a rude concussion at the bottom knocked off a choice bit of profanity which was balanced on the tip of his tongue. "Tobogganing is a little out of season," said his niece, laughing heartily. Mr. Cooke brushed himself off, picked up the glasses which he had dropped in his flight and pushed them into my hands. Then he pointed lakeward with bulging eyes. "Crocker, old man," he said in a loud whisper, "they tell me that is an Asquith cat-boat." I followed his finger and saw for the first time a sail-boat headed for the island, then about two miles off shore. I raised the glasses. "Yes," I said, "the Scimitar." "That's what Farrar said," cried he. "And what about it?" I asked. "What about it?" he ejaculated. "Why, it's a detective come for Allen. I knew sure as hell if they got as far as Asquith they wouldn't stop there. And that's the fastest sail-boat he could hire there, isn't it?" I replied that it was. He seized me by the shoulder and began dragging me up the bank. "What are you going to do?" I cried, shaking myself loose. "We've got to get on the Maria and run for it," he panted. "There is no time to be lost." He had reached the top of the bank and was running towards the group at the tents. And he actually infused me with some of his red-hot enthusiasm, for I hastened after him. "But you can't begin to get the Maria out before they will be in here," I shouted. He stopped short, gazed at the approaching boat, and then at me. "Is that so?" "Yes, of course," said I, "they will be here in ten minutes." The Celebrity stood in the midst of the excited Four. His hair was parted precisely, and he had induced a monocle to remain in his eye long enough to examine the Scimitar, his nose at the critical elevation. This unruffled exterior made a deep impression on the Four. Was the Celebrity not undergoing the crucial test of a true sport? He was an example alike to criminals and philosophers. Mr. Cooke hurried into the group, which divided respectfully for him, and grasped the Celebrity by the hand. "Something else has got to be done, old man," he said, in a voice which shook with emotion; "they'll be on us before we can get the Maria out." Farrar, who was nailing a rustic bench near by, straightened up at this, his lip curling with a desire to laugh. The Celebrity laid his hand on my client's shoulder. "Cooke," said he, "I'm deeply grateful for all the trouble you wish to take, and for the solicitude you have shown. But let things be. I'll come out of it all right." "Never," cried Cooke, looking proudly around the Four as some Highland chief might have surveyed a faithful clan. "I'd a damned sight rather go to jail myself." "A damned sight," echoed the Four in unison. "I insist, Cooke," said the Celebrity, taking out his eyeglass and tapping Mr. Cooke's purple necktie, "I insist that you drop this business. I repeat my thanks to you and these gentlemen for the friendship they have shown, but say again that I am as innocent of this crime as a baby." Mr. Cooke paid no attention to this speech. His face became radiant. "Didn't any of you fellows strike a cave, or a hollow tree, or something of that sort, knocking around this morning?" One man slapped his knee. "The very place," he cried. "I fell into it," and he showed a rent in his trousers corroboratively. "It's big enough to hold twenty of Allen, and the detective doesn't live that could find it." "Hustle him off, quick," said Mr. Cooke. The mandate was obeyed as literally as though Robin Hood himself had given it. The Celebrity disappeared into the forest, carried rather than urged towards his destined place of confinement. The commotion had brought Mr. Trevor to the spot. He caught sight of the Celebrity's back between the trees, then he looked at the cat-boat entering the cove, a man in the stern preparing to pull in the tender. He intercepted Mr. Cooke on his way to the beach. "What have you done with Mr. Allen?" he asked, in a menacing voice. "Good God," said Mr. Cooke, whose contempt for Mr. Trevor was now infinite, "you talk as if I were the governor of the state. What the devil could I do with him?" "I will have no evasion," replied Mr. Trevor, taking an imposing posture in front of him. "You are trying to defeat the ends of justice by assisting a dangerous criminal to escape. I have warned you, sir, and warn you again of the consequences of your meditated crime, and I give you my word I will do all in my power to frustrate it." Mr. Cooke dug his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. Here was a complication he had not looked for. The Scimitar lay at anchor with her sail down, and two men were coming ashore in the tender. Mr. Cooke's attitude being that of a man who reconsiders a rash resolve, Mr. Trevor was emboldened to say in a moderated tone: "You were carried away by your generosity, Mr. Cooke. I was sure when you took time to think you would see it in another light." Mr. Cooke started off for the place where the boat had grounded. I did not catch his reply, and probably should not have written it here if I had. The senator looked as if he had been sand-bagged. The two men jumped out of the boat and hauled it up. Mr. Cooke waved an easy salute to one, whom I recognized as the big boatman from Asquith, familiarly known as Captain Jay. He owned the Scimitar and several smaller boats. The captain went through the pantomime of an introduction between Mr. Cooke and the other, whom my client shook warmly by the hand, and presently all three came towards us. Mr. Cooke led them to a bar he had improvised by the brook. A pool served the office of refrigerator, and Mr. Cooke had devised an ingenious but complicated arrangement of strings and labels which enabled him to extract any bottle or set of bottles without having to bare his arm and pull out the lot. Farrar and I responded to the call he had given, and went down to assist in the entertainment. My client, with his back to us, was busy manipulating the strings. "Gentlemen," he said, "let me make you acquainted with Mr. Drew. You all know the captain." Had I not suspected Mr. Drew's profession, I think I should not have remarked that he gave each of us a keen look as he raised his head. He had reddish-brown hair, and a pair of bushy red whiskers, each of which tapered to a long point. He was broad in the shoulders, and the clothes he wore rather enhanced this breadth. His suit was gray and almost new, the trousers perceptibly bagging at the knee, and he had a felt hat, a necktie of the white and flowery pattern, and square-toed "Congress" boots. In short, he was a decidedly ordinary looking person; you would meet a hundred like him in the streets of Far Harbor and Beaverton. He might have been a prosperous business man in either of those towns,--a comfortable lumber merchant or mine owner. And he had chosen just the get-up I should have picked for detective work in that region. He had a pleasant eye and a very fetching and hearty manner. But his long whiskers troubled me especially. I kept wondering if they were real. "The captain is sailing Mr. Drew over to Far Harbor," explained Mr. Cooke, "and they have put in here for the night." Mr. Drew was plainly not an amateur, for he volunteered nothing further than this. The necessary bottles having been produced, Mr. Cooke held up his glass and turned to the stranger. "Welcome to our party, old man," said he. Mr. Drew drained his glass and complimented Mr. Cooke on the brand,--a sure key to my client's heart. Whereupon he seated himself between Mr. Drew and the captain and began a discourse on the subject of his own cellar, on which he talked for nearly an hour. His only pauses were for the worthy purpose of filling the detective's or the captain's glass, and these he watched with a hospitable solicitude. The captain had the advantage, three to one, and I made no doubt his employer bitterly regretted not having a boatman whose principles were more strict. At the end of the hour Captain Jay, who by nature was inclined to be taciturn and crabbed, waxed loquacious and even jovial. He sang us the songs he had learned in the winter lumber-camps, which Mr. Cooke never failed to encore to the echo. My client vowed he had not spent a pleasanter afternoon for years. He plied the captain with cigars, and explained to him the mystery of the strings and labels; and the captain experimented until he had broken some of the bottles. Mr. Cooke was not a person who made any great distinction between the three degrees, acquaintance, friendship, and intimacy. When a stranger pleased him, he went from one to the other with such comparative ease that a hardhearted man, and no other, could have resented his advances. Mr. Drew was anything but a hard-hearted man, and he did not object to my client's familiarity. Mr. Cooke made no secret of his admiration for Mr. Drew, and there were just two things about him that Mr. Cooke admired and wondered at, above all else,--the bushy red whiskers. But it appeared that these were the only things that Mr. Drew was really touchy about. I noticed that the detective, without being impolite, did his best to discourage these remarks; but my client knew no such word as discouragement. He was continually saying: "I think I'll grow some like that, old man," or "Have those cut," and the like,--a kind of humor in which the captain took an incredible delight. And finally, when a certain pitch of good feeling had been arrived at, Mr.

advice

How many times the word 'advice' appears in the text?

you happen to have any handcuffs on the Maria?" But my client was pouring out a stiff helping from the decanter, which he still held in his hand. Then he approached the Celebrity. "Don't let it worry you, old man," said he, with intense earnestness. "Don't let it worry you. You're my guest, and I'll see you safe out of it, or bust." "Fenelon," said Mrs. Cooke, gravely, "do you realize what you are saying?" "You're a clever one, Allen," my client continued, and he backed away the better to look him over; "you had nerve to stay as long as you did." The Celebrity laughed confidently. "Cooke," he replied, "I appreciate your generosity,--I really do. I know no offence is meant. The mistake is, in fact, most pardonable." In Mr. Cooke amazement and admiration were clamoring for utterance. "Damn me," he sputtered, "if you're not the coolest embezzler I ever saw." The Celebrity laughed again. Then he surveyed the circle. "My friends," he said, "this is certainly a most amazing coincidence; one which, I assure you, surprises me no less than it does you. You have no doubt remarked that I have my peculiarities. We all have. "I flatter thyself I am not entirely unknown. And the annoyances imposed upon me by a certain fame I have achieved had become such that some months ago I began to crave the pleasures of the life of a private man. I determined to go to some sequestered resort where my face was unfamiliar. The possibility of being recognized at Asquith did not occur to me. Fortunately I was. And a singular chance led me to take the name of the man who has committed this crime, and who has the misfortune to resemble me. I suppose that now," he added impressively, "I shall have to tell you who I am." He paused until these words should have gained their full effect. Then he held up the edition de luxe from which he and Miss Thorn had been reading. "You may have heard, Mrs. Cooke," said he, addressing himself to our hostess, "you may perhaps have heard of the author of this book." Mrs. Cooke was a calm woman, and she read the name on the cover. "Yes," she said, "I have. And you claim to be he?" "Ask my friend Crocker here," he answered carelessly, no doubt exulting that the scene was going off so dramatically. "I should indeed be in a tight box," he went on, "if there were not friends of mine here to help me out." They turned to me. "I am afraid I cannot," I said with what soberness I could. "What!" says he with a start. "What! you deny me?" Miss Trevor had her tongue in her cheek. I bowed. "I am powerless to speak, Mr. Allen," I replied. During this colloquy my client stood between us, looking from one to the other. I well knew that his way of thinking would be with my testimony, and that the gilt name on the edition de luxe had done little towards convincing him of Mr. Allen's innocence. To his mind there was nothing horrible or incongruous in the idea that a well-known author should be a defaulter. It was perfectly possible. He shoved the glass of Scotch towards the Celebrity, with a smile. "Take this, old man," he kindly insisted, "and you'll feel better. What's the use of bucking when you're saddled with a thing like that?" And he pointed to the paper. "Besides, they haven't caught you yet, by a damned sight." The Celebrity waved aside the proffered tumbler. "This is an infamous charge, and you know it, Crocker," he cried. "If you don't, you ought to, as a lawyer. This isn't any time to have fun with a fellow." "My dear sir," I said, "I have charged you with nothing whatever." He turned his back on me in complete disgust. And he came face to face with Miss Trevor. "Miss Trevor, too, knows something of me," he said. "You forget, Mr. Allen," she answered sweetly, "you forget that I have given you my promise not to reveal what I know." The Celebrity chafed, for this was as damaging a statement as could well be uttered against him. But Miss Thorn was his trump card, and she now came forward. "This is ridiculous, Mr. Crocker, simply ridiculous," said she. "I agree with you most heartily, Miss Thorn," I replied. "Nonsense!" exclaimed Miss Thorn, and she drew her lips together, "pure nonsense!" "Nonsense or not, Marian," Mr. Cooke interposed, "we are wasting valuable time. The police are already on the scent, I'll bet my hat." "Fenelon!" Mrs. Cooke remonstrated. "And do you mean to say in soberness, Uncle Fenelon, that you believe the author of The Sybarites to be a defaulter?" said Miss Thorn. "It is indeed hard to believe Mr. Allen a criminal," Mr. Trevor broke in for the first time. "I think it only right that he should be allowed to clear himself before he is put to further inconvenience, and perhaps injustice, by any action we may take in the matter." Mr. Cooke sniffed suspiciously at the word "action." "What action do you mean?" he demanded. "Well," replied Mr. Trevor, with some hesitation, "before we take any steps, that is, notify the police." "Notify the police!" cried my client, his face red with a generous anger. "I have never yet turned a guest over to the police," he said proudly, "and won't, not if I know it. I'm not that kind." Who shall criticise Mr. Cooke's code of morality? "Fenelon," said his wife, "you must remember you have never yet entertained a guest of a larcenous character. No embezzlers up to the present. Marian," she continued, turning to Miss Thorn, "you spoke as if you might, be able to throw some light upon this matter. Do you know whether this gentleman is Charles Wrexell Allen, or whether he is the author? In short, do you know who he is?" The Celebrity lighted a cigarette. Miss Thorn said indignantly, "Upon my word, Aunt Maria, I thought that you, at least, would know better than to credit this silly accusation. He has been a guest at your house, and I am astonished that you should doubt his word." Mrs. Cooke looked at her niece perplexedly. "You must remember, Marian," she said gently, "that I know nothing about him, where he came from, or who he is. Nor does any one at Asquith, except perhaps Miss Trevor, by her own confession. And you do not seem inclined to tell what you know, if indeed you know anything." Upon this Miss Thorn became more indignant still, and Mrs. Cooke went on "Gentlemen, as a rule, do not assume names, especially other people's. They are usually proud of their own. Mr. Allen appears among us, from the clouds, as it were, and in due time we learn from a newspaper that he has committed a defalcation. And, furthermore, the paper contains a portrait and an accurate description which put the thing beyond doubt. I ask you, is it reasonable for him to state coolly after all this that he is another man? That he is a well-known author? It's an absurdity. I was not born yesterday, my dear." "It is most reasonable under the circumstances," replied Miss Thorn, warmly. "Extraordinary? Of course it's extraordinary. And too long to explain to a prejudiced audience, who can't be expected to comprehend the character of a genius, to understand the yearning of a famous man for a little quiet." Mrs. Cooke looked grave. "Marian, you forget yourself," she said. "Oh, I am tired of it, Aunt Maria," cried Miss Thorn; "if he takes my advice, he will refuse to discuss it farther." She did not seem to be aware that she had put forth no argument whatever, save a woman's argument. And I was intensely surprised that her indignation should have got the better of her in this way, having always supposed her clear-headed in the extreme. A few words from her, such as I supposed she would have spoken, had set the Celebrity right with all except Mr. Cooke. To me it was a clear proof that the Celebrity had turned her head, and her mind with it. The silence was broken by an uncontrollable burst of laughter from Miss Trevor. She was quickly frowned down by her father, who reminded her that this was not a comedy. "And, Mr. Allen," he said, "if you have anything to say, or any evidence to bring forward, now is the time to do it." He appeared to forget that I was the district attorney. The Celebrity had seated himself on the trunk of a tree, and was blowing out the smoke in clouds. He was inclined to take Miss Thorn's advice, for he made a gesture of weariness with his cigarette, in the use of which he was singularly eloquent. "Tell me, Mr. Trevor," said he, "why I should sit before you as a tribunal? Why I should take the trouble to clear myself of a senseless charge? My respect for you inclines me to the belief that you are laboring under a momentary excitement; for when you reflect that I am a prominent, not to say famous, author, you will realize how absurd it is that I should be an embezzler, and why I decline to lower myself by an explanation." Mr. Trevor picked up the paper and struck it. "Do you refuse to say anything in the face of such evidence as that?" he cried. "It is not a matter for refusal, Mr. Trevor. It is simply that I cannot admit the possibility of having committed the crime." "Well, sir," said the senator, his black necktie working out of place as his anger got the better of him, "I am to believe, then, because you claim to be the author of a few society novels, that you are infallible? Let me tell you that the President of the United States himself is liable to impeachment, and bound to disprove any charge he may be accused of. What in Halifax do I care for your divine-right-of-authors theory? I'll continue to think you guilty until you are shown to be innocent." Suddenly the full significance of the Celebrity's tactics struck Mr. Cooke, and he reached out and caught hold of Mr. Trevor's coattails. "Hold on, old man," said he; "Allen isn't going to be ass enough to own up to it. Don't you see we'd all be jugged and fined for assisting a criminal over the border? It's out of consideration for us." Mr. Trevor looked sternly over his shoulder at Mr. Cooke. "Do you mean to say, sir, seriously," he asked, "that, for the sake of a misplaced friendship for this man, and a misplaced sense of honor, you are bound to shield a guest, though a criminal? That you intend to assist him to escape from justice? I insist, for my own protection and that of my daughter, as well as for that of the others present that, since he refuses to speak, we must presume him guilty and turn him over." Mr. Trevor turned to Mrs. Cooke, as if relying on her support. "Fenelon," said she, "I have never sought to influence your actions when your friends were concerned, and I shall not begin now. All I ask of you is to consider the consequences of your intention." These words from Mrs. Cooke had much more weight with my client than Mr. Trevor's blustering demands. "Maria, my dear," he said, with a deferential urbanity, "Mr. Allen is my guest, and a gentleman. When a gentleman gives his word that he is not a criminal, it is sufficient." The force of this, for some reason, did not overwhelm his wife; and her lip curled a little, half in contempt, half in risibility. "Pshaw, Fenelon," said she, "what a fraud you are. Why is it you wish to get Mr. Allen over the border, then?" A question which might well have staggered a worthier intellect. "Why, my dear," answered my client, "I wish to save Mr. Allen the inconvenience, not to say the humiliation, of being brought East in custody and strapped with a pair of handcuffs. Let him take a shooting trip to the great Northwest until the real criminal is caught." "Well, Fenelon," replied Mrs. Cooke, unable to repress a smile, "one might as well try to argue with a turn-stile or a weather-vane. I wash my hands of it." But Mr. Trevor, who was both a self-made man and a Western politician, was far from being satisfied. He turned to me with a sweep of the arm he had doubtless learned in the Ohio State Senate. "Mr. Crocker," he cried, "are you, as attorney of this district, going to aid and abet in the escape of a fugitive from justice?" "Mr. Trevor," said I, "I will take the course in this matter which seems fit to me, and without advice from any one." He wheeled on Farrar, repeated the question, and got a like answer. Brought to bay for a time, he glared savagely around him while groping for further arguments. But at this point the Four appeared on the scene, much the worse for thickets, and clamoring for luncheon. They had five small fish between them which they wanted Miss Thorn to cook. CHAPTER XII The Four received Mr. Cooke's plan for the Celebrity's escape to Canada with enthusiastic acclamation, and as the one thing lacking to make the Bear Island trip a complete success. The Celebrity was hailed with the reverence due to the man who puts up the ring-money in a prize-fight. He was accorded, too, a certain amount of respect as a defaulter, which the Four would have denied him as an author, for I am inclined to the belief that the discovery of his literary profession would have lowered him rather than otherwise in their eyes. My client was naturally anxious to get under way at once for the Canadian border, but was overruled in this by his henchmen, who demanded something to eat. We sat down to an impromptu meal, which was an odd affair indeed. Mrs. Cooke maintained her usual serenity, but said little, while Miss Trevor and I had many a mirthful encounter at the thought of the turn matters had taken. At the other end of the cloth were Mr. Cooke and the Four, in wonderful spirits and unimpaired appetite, and in their midst sat the Celebrity, likewise in wonderful spirits. His behavior now and again elicited a loud grunt of disapproval from Mr. Trevor, who was plying his knife and fork in a manner emblematic of his state of mind. Mr. Allen was laughing and joking airily with Mr. Cooke and the guests, denying, but not resenting, their accusations with all the sang froid of a hardened criminal. He did not care particularly to go to Canada, he said. Why should he, when he was innocent? But, if Mr. Cooke insisted, he would enjoy seeing that part of the lake and the Canadian side. Afterwards I perceived Miss Thorn down by the brookside, washing dishes. Her sleeves were drawn back to the elbow, and a dainty white apron covered her blue skirt, while the wind from the lake had disentangled errant wisps of her hair. I stood on the brink above, secure, as I thought, from observation, when she chanced to look up and spied me. "Mr. Crocker," she called, "would you like to make yourself useful?" I was decidedly embarrassed. Her manner was as frank and unconstrained as though I had not been shunning her for weeks past. "If such a thing is possible," I replied. "Do you know a dish-cloth when you see one?" I was doubtful. But I procured the cloth from Miss Trevor and returned. There was an air about Miss Thorn that was new to me. "What an uncompromising man you are, Mr. Crocker," she said to me. "Once a person is unfortunate enough to come under the ban of your disapproval you have nothing whatever to do with them. Now it seems that I have given you offence in some way. Is it not so?" "You magnify my importance," I said. "No temporizing, Mr. Crocker," she went on, as though she meant to be obeyed; "sit down there, and let's have it out. I like you too well to quarrel with you." There was no resisting such a command, and I threw myself on the pebbles at her feet. "I thought we were going to be great friends," she said. "You and Mr. Farrar were so kind to me on the night of my arrival, and we had such fun watching the dance together." "I confess I thought so, too. But you expressed opinions then that I shared. You have since changed your mind, for some unaccountable reason." She paused in her polishing, a shining dish in her hand, and looked down at me with something between a laugh and a frown. "I suppose you have never regretted speaking hastily," she said. "Many a time," I returned, warming; "but if I ever thought a judgment measured and distilled, it was your judgment of the Celebrity." "Does the study of law eliminate humanity?" she asked, with a mock curtsey. "The deliberate sentences are sometimes the unjust ones, and men who are hung by weighed wisdom are often the innocent." "That is all very well in cases of doubt. But here you have the evidences of wrong-doing directly before you." Three dishes were taken up, dried, and put down before she answered me. I threw pebbles into the brook, and wished I had held my tongue. "What evidence?" inquired she. "Well," said I, "I must finish, I suppose. I had a notion you knew of what I inferred. First, let me say that I have no desire to prejudice you against a person whom you admire." "Impossible." Something in her tone made me look up. "Very good, then," I answered. "I, for one, can have no use for a man who devotes himself to a girl long enough to win her affections, and then deserts her with as little compunction as a dog does a rat it has shaken. And that is how your Celebrity treated Miss Trevor." "But Miss Trevor has recovered, I believe," said Miss Thorn. I began to feel a deep, but helpless, insecurity. "Happily, yes," I assented. "Thanks to an excellent physician." A smile twitched the corners of her mouth, as though she enjoyed my discomfiture. I remarked for the fiftieth time how strong her face was, with its generous lines and clearly moulded features. And a suspicion entered my soul. "At any rate," I said, with a laugh, "the Celebrity has got himself into no end of a predicament now. He may go back to New York in custody." "I thought you incapable of resentment, Mr. Crocker. How mean of you to deny him!" "It can do no harm," I answered; "a little lesson in the dangers of incognito may be salutary. I wish it were a little lesson in the dangers of something else." The color mounted to her face as she resumed her occupation. "I am afraid you are a very wicked man," she said. Before I could reply there came a scuffling sound from the bank above us, and the snapping of branches and twigs. It was Mr. Cooke. His descent, the personal conduction of which he lost half-way down, was irregular and spasmodic, and a rude concussion at the bottom knocked off a choice bit of profanity which was balanced on the tip of his tongue. "Tobogganing is a little out of season," said his niece, laughing heartily. Mr. Cooke brushed himself off, picked up the glasses which he had dropped in his flight and pushed them into my hands. Then he pointed lakeward with bulging eyes. "Crocker, old man," he said in a loud whisper, "they tell me that is an Asquith cat-boat." I followed his finger and saw for the first time a sail-boat headed for the island, then about two miles off shore. I raised the glasses. "Yes," I said, "the Scimitar." "That's what Farrar said," cried he. "And what about it?" I asked. "What about it?" he ejaculated. "Why, it's a detective come for Allen. I knew sure as hell if they got as far as Asquith they wouldn't stop there. And that's the fastest sail-boat he could hire there, isn't it?" I replied that it was. He seized me by the shoulder and began dragging me up the bank. "What are you going to do?" I cried, shaking myself loose. "We've got to get on the Maria and run for it," he panted. "There is no time to be lost." He had reached the top of the bank and was running towards the group at the tents. And he actually infused me with some of his red-hot enthusiasm, for I hastened after him. "But you can't begin to get the Maria out before they will be in here," I shouted. He stopped short, gazed at the approaching boat, and then at me. "Is that so?" "Yes, of course," said I, "they will be here in ten minutes." The Celebrity stood in the midst of the excited Four. His hair was parted precisely, and he had induced a monocle to remain in his eye long enough to examine the Scimitar, his nose at the critical elevation. This unruffled exterior made a deep impression on the Four. Was the Celebrity not undergoing the crucial test of a true sport? He was an example alike to criminals and philosophers. Mr. Cooke hurried into the group, which divided respectfully for him, and grasped the Celebrity by the hand. "Something else has got to be done, old man," he said, in a voice which shook with emotion; "they'll be on us before we can get the Maria out." Farrar, who was nailing a rustic bench near by, straightened up at this, his lip curling with a desire to laugh. The Celebrity laid his hand on my client's shoulder. "Cooke," said he, "I'm deeply grateful for all the trouble you wish to take, and for the solicitude you have shown. But let things be. I'll come out of it all right." "Never," cried Cooke, looking proudly around the Four as some Highland chief might have surveyed a faithful clan. "I'd a damned sight rather go to jail myself." "A damned sight," echoed the Four in unison. "I insist, Cooke," said the Celebrity, taking out his eyeglass and tapping Mr. Cooke's purple necktie, "I insist that you drop this business. I repeat my thanks to you and these gentlemen for the friendship they have shown, but say again that I am as innocent of this crime as a baby." Mr. Cooke paid no attention to this speech. His face became radiant. "Didn't any of you fellows strike a cave, or a hollow tree, or something of that sort, knocking around this morning?" One man slapped his knee. "The very place," he cried. "I fell into it," and he showed a rent in his trousers corroboratively. "It's big enough to hold twenty of Allen, and the detective doesn't live that could find it." "Hustle him off, quick," said Mr. Cooke. The mandate was obeyed as literally as though Robin Hood himself had given it. The Celebrity disappeared into the forest, carried rather than urged towards his destined place of confinement. The commotion had brought Mr. Trevor to the spot. He caught sight of the Celebrity's back between the trees, then he looked at the cat-boat entering the cove, a man in the stern preparing to pull in the tender. He intercepted Mr. Cooke on his way to the beach. "What have you done with Mr. Allen?" he asked, in a menacing voice. "Good God," said Mr. Cooke, whose contempt for Mr. Trevor was now infinite, "you talk as if I were the governor of the state. What the devil could I do with him?" "I will have no evasion," replied Mr. Trevor, taking an imposing posture in front of him. "You are trying to defeat the ends of justice by assisting a dangerous criminal to escape. I have warned you, sir, and warn you again of the consequences of your meditated crime, and I give you my word I will do all in my power to frustrate it." Mr. Cooke dug his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. Here was a complication he had not looked for. The Scimitar lay at anchor with her sail down, and two men were coming ashore in the tender. Mr. Cooke's attitude being that of a man who reconsiders a rash resolve, Mr. Trevor was emboldened to say in a moderated tone: "You were carried away by your generosity, Mr. Cooke. I was sure when you took time to think you would see it in another light." Mr. Cooke started off for the place where the boat had grounded. I did not catch his reply, and probably should not have written it here if I had. The senator looked as if he had been sand-bagged. The two men jumped out of the boat and hauled it up. Mr. Cooke waved an easy salute to one, whom I recognized as the big boatman from Asquith, familiarly known as Captain Jay. He owned the Scimitar and several smaller boats. The captain went through the pantomime of an introduction between Mr. Cooke and the other, whom my client shook warmly by the hand, and presently all three came towards us. Mr. Cooke led them to a bar he had improvised by the brook. A pool served the office of refrigerator, and Mr. Cooke had devised an ingenious but complicated arrangement of strings and labels which enabled him to extract any bottle or set of bottles without having to bare his arm and pull out the lot. Farrar and I responded to the call he had given, and went down to assist in the entertainment. My client, with his back to us, was busy manipulating the strings. "Gentlemen," he said, "let me make you acquainted with Mr. Drew. You all know the captain." Had I not suspected Mr. Drew's profession, I think I should not have remarked that he gave each of us a keen look as he raised his head. He had reddish-brown hair, and a pair of bushy red whiskers, each of which tapered to a long point. He was broad in the shoulders, and the clothes he wore rather enhanced this breadth. His suit was gray and almost new, the trousers perceptibly bagging at the knee, and he had a felt hat, a necktie of the white and flowery pattern, and square-toed "Congress" boots. In short, he was a decidedly ordinary looking person; you would meet a hundred like him in the streets of Far Harbor and Beaverton. He might have been a prosperous business man in either of those towns,--a comfortable lumber merchant or mine owner. And he had chosen just the get-up I should have picked for detective work in that region. He had a pleasant eye and a very fetching and hearty manner. But his long whiskers troubled me especially. I kept wondering if they were real. "The captain is sailing Mr. Drew over to Far Harbor," explained Mr. Cooke, "and they have put in here for the night." Mr. Drew was plainly not an amateur, for he volunteered nothing further than this. The necessary bottles having been produced, Mr. Cooke held up his glass and turned to the stranger. "Welcome to our party, old man," said he. Mr. Drew drained his glass and complimented Mr. Cooke on the brand,--a sure key to my client's heart. Whereupon he seated himself between Mr. Drew and the captain and began a discourse on the subject of his own cellar, on which he talked for nearly an hour. His only pauses were for the worthy purpose of filling the detective's or the captain's glass, and these he watched with a hospitable solicitude. The captain had the advantage, three to one, and I made no doubt his employer bitterly regretted not having a boatman whose principles were more strict. At the end of the hour Captain Jay, who by nature was inclined to be taciturn and crabbed, waxed loquacious and even jovial. He sang us the songs he had learned in the winter lumber-camps, which Mr. Cooke never failed to encore to the echo. My client vowed he had not spent a pleasanter afternoon for years. He plied the captain with cigars, and explained to him the mystery of the strings and labels; and the captain experimented until he had broken some of the bottles. Mr. Cooke was not a person who made any great distinction between the three degrees, acquaintance, friendship, and intimacy. When a stranger pleased him, he went from one to the other with such comparative ease that a hardhearted man, and no other, could have resented his advances. Mr. Drew was anything but a hard-hearted man, and he did not object to my client's familiarity. Mr. Cooke made no secret of his admiration for Mr. Drew, and there were just two things about him that Mr. Cooke admired and wondered at, above all else,--the bushy red whiskers. But it appeared that these were the only things that Mr. Drew was really touchy about. I noticed that the detective, without being impolite, did his best to discourage these remarks; but my client knew no such word as discouragement. He was continually saying: "I think I'll grow some like that, old man," or "Have those cut," and the like,--a kind of humor in which the captain took an incredible delight. And finally, when a certain pitch of good feeling had been arrived at, Mr.

mary

How many times the word 'mary' appears in the text?

you happen to have any handcuffs on the Maria?" But my client was pouring out a stiff helping from the decanter, which he still held in his hand. Then he approached the Celebrity. "Don't let it worry you, old man," said he, with intense earnestness. "Don't let it worry you. You're my guest, and I'll see you safe out of it, or bust." "Fenelon," said Mrs. Cooke, gravely, "do you realize what you are saying?" "You're a clever one, Allen," my client continued, and he backed away the better to look him over; "you had nerve to stay as long as you did." The Celebrity laughed confidently. "Cooke," he replied, "I appreciate your generosity,--I really do. I know no offence is meant. The mistake is, in fact, most pardonable." In Mr. Cooke amazement and admiration were clamoring for utterance. "Damn me," he sputtered, "if you're not the coolest embezzler I ever saw." The Celebrity laughed again. Then he surveyed the circle. "My friends," he said, "this is certainly a most amazing coincidence; one which, I assure you, surprises me no less than it does you. You have no doubt remarked that I have my peculiarities. We all have. "I flatter thyself I am not entirely unknown. And the annoyances imposed upon me by a certain fame I have achieved had become such that some months ago I began to crave the pleasures of the life of a private man. I determined to go to some sequestered resort where my face was unfamiliar. The possibility of being recognized at Asquith did not occur to me. Fortunately I was. And a singular chance led me to take the name of the man who has committed this crime, and who has the misfortune to resemble me. I suppose that now," he added impressively, "I shall have to tell you who I am." He paused until these words should have gained their full effect. Then he held up the edition de luxe from which he and Miss Thorn had been reading. "You may have heard, Mrs. Cooke," said he, addressing himself to our hostess, "you may perhaps have heard of the author of this book." Mrs. Cooke was a calm woman, and she read the name on the cover. "Yes," she said, "I have. And you claim to be he?" "Ask my friend Crocker here," he answered carelessly, no doubt exulting that the scene was going off so dramatically. "I should indeed be in a tight box," he went on, "if there were not friends of mine here to help me out." They turned to me. "I am afraid I cannot," I said with what soberness I could. "What!" says he with a start. "What! you deny me?" Miss Trevor had her tongue in her cheek. I bowed. "I am powerless to speak, Mr. Allen," I replied. During this colloquy my client stood between us, looking from one to the other. I well knew that his way of thinking would be with my testimony, and that the gilt name on the edition de luxe had done little towards convincing him of Mr. Allen's innocence. To his mind there was nothing horrible or incongruous in the idea that a well-known author should be a defaulter. It was perfectly possible. He shoved the glass of Scotch towards the Celebrity, with a smile. "Take this, old man," he kindly insisted, "and you'll feel better. What's the use of bucking when you're saddled with a thing like that?" And he pointed to the paper. "Besides, they haven't caught you yet, by a damned sight." The Celebrity waved aside the proffered tumbler. "This is an infamous charge, and you know it, Crocker," he cried. "If you don't, you ought to, as a lawyer. This isn't any time to have fun with a fellow." "My dear sir," I said, "I have charged you with nothing whatever." He turned his back on me in complete disgust. And he came face to face with Miss Trevor. "Miss Trevor, too, knows something of me," he said. "You forget, Mr. Allen," she answered sweetly, "you forget that I have given you my promise not to reveal what I know." The Celebrity chafed, for this was as damaging a statement as could well be uttered against him. But Miss Thorn was his trump card, and she now came forward. "This is ridiculous, Mr. Crocker, simply ridiculous," said she. "I agree with you most heartily, Miss Thorn," I replied. "Nonsense!" exclaimed Miss Thorn, and she drew her lips together, "pure nonsense!" "Nonsense or not, Marian," Mr. Cooke interposed, "we are wasting valuable time. The police are already on the scent, I'll bet my hat." "Fenelon!" Mrs. Cooke remonstrated. "And do you mean to say in soberness, Uncle Fenelon, that you believe the author of The Sybarites to be a defaulter?" said Miss Thorn. "It is indeed hard to believe Mr. Allen a criminal," Mr. Trevor broke in for the first time. "I think it only right that he should be allowed to clear himself before he is put to further inconvenience, and perhaps injustice, by any action we may take in the matter." Mr. Cooke sniffed suspiciously at the word "action." "What action do you mean?" he demanded. "Well," replied Mr. Trevor, with some hesitation, "before we take any steps, that is, notify the police." "Notify the police!" cried my client, his face red with a generous anger. "I have never yet turned a guest over to the police," he said proudly, "and won't, not if I know it. I'm not that kind." Who shall criticise Mr. Cooke's code of morality? "Fenelon," said his wife, "you must remember you have never yet entertained a guest of a larcenous character. No embezzlers up to the present. Marian," she continued, turning to Miss Thorn, "you spoke as if you might, be able to throw some light upon this matter. Do you know whether this gentleman is Charles Wrexell Allen, or whether he is the author? In short, do you know who he is?" The Celebrity lighted a cigarette. Miss Thorn said indignantly, "Upon my word, Aunt Maria, I thought that you, at least, would know better than to credit this silly accusation. He has been a guest at your house, and I am astonished that you should doubt his word." Mrs. Cooke looked at her niece perplexedly. "You must remember, Marian," she said gently, "that I know nothing about him, where he came from, or who he is. Nor does any one at Asquith, except perhaps Miss Trevor, by her own confession. And you do not seem inclined to tell what you know, if indeed you know anything." Upon this Miss Thorn became more indignant still, and Mrs. Cooke went on "Gentlemen, as a rule, do not assume names, especially other people's. They are usually proud of their own. Mr. Allen appears among us, from the clouds, as it were, and in due time we learn from a newspaper that he has committed a defalcation. And, furthermore, the paper contains a portrait and an accurate description which put the thing beyond doubt. I ask you, is it reasonable for him to state coolly after all this that he is another man? That he is a well-known author? It's an absurdity. I was not born yesterday, my dear." "It is most reasonable under the circumstances," replied Miss Thorn, warmly. "Extraordinary? Of course it's extraordinary. And too long to explain to a prejudiced audience, who can't be expected to comprehend the character of a genius, to understand the yearning of a famous man for a little quiet." Mrs. Cooke looked grave. "Marian, you forget yourself," she said. "Oh, I am tired of it, Aunt Maria," cried Miss Thorn; "if he takes my advice, he will refuse to discuss it farther." She did not seem to be aware that she had put forth no argument whatever, save a woman's argument. And I was intensely surprised that her indignation should have got the better of her in this way, having always supposed her clear-headed in the extreme. A few words from her, such as I supposed she would have spoken, had set the Celebrity right with all except Mr. Cooke. To me it was a clear proof that the Celebrity had turned her head, and her mind with it. The silence was broken by an uncontrollable burst of laughter from Miss Trevor. She was quickly frowned down by her father, who reminded her that this was not a comedy. "And, Mr. Allen," he said, "if you have anything to say, or any evidence to bring forward, now is the time to do it." He appeared to forget that I was the district attorney. The Celebrity had seated himself on the trunk of a tree, and was blowing out the smoke in clouds. He was inclined to take Miss Thorn's advice, for he made a gesture of weariness with his cigarette, in the use of which he was singularly eloquent. "Tell me, Mr. Trevor," said he, "why I should sit before you as a tribunal? Why I should take the trouble to clear myself of a senseless charge? My respect for you inclines me to the belief that you are laboring under a momentary excitement; for when you reflect that I am a prominent, not to say famous, author, you will realize how absurd it is that I should be an embezzler, and why I decline to lower myself by an explanation." Mr. Trevor picked up the paper and struck it. "Do you refuse to say anything in the face of such evidence as that?" he cried. "It is not a matter for refusal, Mr. Trevor. It is simply that I cannot admit the possibility of having committed the crime." "Well, sir," said the senator, his black necktie working out of place as his anger got the better of him, "I am to believe, then, because you claim to be the author of a few society novels, that you are infallible? Let me tell you that the President of the United States himself is liable to impeachment, and bound to disprove any charge he may be accused of. What in Halifax do I care for your divine-right-of-authors theory? I'll continue to think you guilty until you are shown to be innocent." Suddenly the full significance of the Celebrity's tactics struck Mr. Cooke, and he reached out and caught hold of Mr. Trevor's coattails. "Hold on, old man," said he; "Allen isn't going to be ass enough to own up to it. Don't you see we'd all be jugged and fined for assisting a criminal over the border? It's out of consideration for us." Mr. Trevor looked sternly over his shoulder at Mr. Cooke. "Do you mean to say, sir, seriously," he asked, "that, for the sake of a misplaced friendship for this man, and a misplaced sense of honor, you are bound to shield a guest, though a criminal? That you intend to assist him to escape from justice? I insist, for my own protection and that of my daughter, as well as for that of the others present that, since he refuses to speak, we must presume him guilty and turn him over." Mr. Trevor turned to Mrs. Cooke, as if relying on her support. "Fenelon," said she, "I have never sought to influence your actions when your friends were concerned, and I shall not begin now. All I ask of you is to consider the consequences of your intention." These words from Mrs. Cooke had much more weight with my client than Mr. Trevor's blustering demands. "Maria, my dear," he said, with a deferential urbanity, "Mr. Allen is my guest, and a gentleman. When a gentleman gives his word that he is not a criminal, it is sufficient." The force of this, for some reason, did not overwhelm his wife; and her lip curled a little, half in contempt, half in risibility. "Pshaw, Fenelon," said she, "what a fraud you are. Why is it you wish to get Mr. Allen over the border, then?" A question which might well have staggered a worthier intellect. "Why, my dear," answered my client, "I wish to save Mr. Allen the inconvenience, not to say the humiliation, of being brought East in custody and strapped with a pair of handcuffs. Let him take a shooting trip to the great Northwest until the real criminal is caught." "Well, Fenelon," replied Mrs. Cooke, unable to repress a smile, "one might as well try to argue with a turn-stile or a weather-vane. I wash my hands of it." But Mr. Trevor, who was both a self-made man and a Western politician, was far from being satisfied. He turned to me with a sweep of the arm he had doubtless learned in the Ohio State Senate. "Mr. Crocker," he cried, "are you, as attorney of this district, going to aid and abet in the escape of a fugitive from justice?" "Mr. Trevor," said I, "I will take the course in this matter which seems fit to me, and without advice from any one." He wheeled on Farrar, repeated the question, and got a like answer. Brought to bay for a time, he glared savagely around him while groping for further arguments. But at this point the Four appeared on the scene, much the worse for thickets, and clamoring for luncheon. They had five small fish between them which they wanted Miss Thorn to cook. CHAPTER XII The Four received Mr. Cooke's plan for the Celebrity's escape to Canada with enthusiastic acclamation, and as the one thing lacking to make the Bear Island trip a complete success. The Celebrity was hailed with the reverence due to the man who puts up the ring-money in a prize-fight. He was accorded, too, a certain amount of respect as a defaulter, which the Four would have denied him as an author, for I am inclined to the belief that the discovery of his literary profession would have lowered him rather than otherwise in their eyes. My client was naturally anxious to get under way at once for the Canadian border, but was overruled in this by his henchmen, who demanded something to eat. We sat down to an impromptu meal, which was an odd affair indeed. Mrs. Cooke maintained her usual serenity, but said little, while Miss Trevor and I had many a mirthful encounter at the thought of the turn matters had taken. At the other end of the cloth were Mr. Cooke and the Four, in wonderful spirits and unimpaired appetite, and in their midst sat the Celebrity, likewise in wonderful spirits. His behavior now and again elicited a loud grunt of disapproval from Mr. Trevor, who was plying his knife and fork in a manner emblematic of his state of mind. Mr. Allen was laughing and joking airily with Mr. Cooke and the guests, denying, but not resenting, their accusations with all the sang froid of a hardened criminal. He did not care particularly to go to Canada, he said. Why should he, when he was innocent? But, if Mr. Cooke insisted, he would enjoy seeing that part of the lake and the Canadian side. Afterwards I perceived Miss Thorn down by the brookside, washing dishes. Her sleeves were drawn back to the elbow, and a dainty white apron covered her blue skirt, while the wind from the lake had disentangled errant wisps of her hair. I stood on the brink above, secure, as I thought, from observation, when she chanced to look up and spied me. "Mr. Crocker," she called, "would you like to make yourself useful?" I was decidedly embarrassed. Her manner was as frank and unconstrained as though I had not been shunning her for weeks past. "If such a thing is possible," I replied. "Do you know a dish-cloth when you see one?" I was doubtful. But I procured the cloth from Miss Trevor and returned. There was an air about Miss Thorn that was new to me. "What an uncompromising man you are, Mr. Crocker," she said to me. "Once a person is unfortunate enough to come under the ban of your disapproval you have nothing whatever to do with them. Now it seems that I have given you offence in some way. Is it not so?" "You magnify my importance," I said. "No temporizing, Mr. Crocker," she went on, as though she meant to be obeyed; "sit down there, and let's have it out. I like you too well to quarrel with you." There was no resisting such a command, and I threw myself on the pebbles at her feet. "I thought we were going to be great friends," she said. "You and Mr. Farrar were so kind to me on the night of my arrival, and we had such fun watching the dance together." "I confess I thought so, too. But you expressed opinions then that I shared. You have since changed your mind, for some unaccountable reason." She paused in her polishing, a shining dish in her hand, and looked down at me with something between a laugh and a frown. "I suppose you have never regretted speaking hastily," she said. "Many a time," I returned, warming; "but if I ever thought a judgment measured and distilled, it was your judgment of the Celebrity." "Does the study of law eliminate humanity?" she asked, with a mock curtsey. "The deliberate sentences are sometimes the unjust ones, and men who are hung by weighed wisdom are often the innocent." "That is all very well in cases of doubt. But here you have the evidences of wrong-doing directly before you." Three dishes were taken up, dried, and put down before she answered me. I threw pebbles into the brook, and wished I had held my tongue. "What evidence?" inquired she. "Well," said I, "I must finish, I suppose. I had a notion you knew of what I inferred. First, let me say that I have no desire to prejudice you against a person whom you admire." "Impossible." Something in her tone made me look up. "Very good, then," I answered. "I, for one, can have no use for a man who devotes himself to a girl long enough to win her affections, and then deserts her with as little compunction as a dog does a rat it has shaken. And that is how your Celebrity treated Miss Trevor." "But Miss Trevor has recovered, I believe," said Miss Thorn. I began to feel a deep, but helpless, insecurity. "Happily, yes," I assented. "Thanks to an excellent physician." A smile twitched the corners of her mouth, as though she enjoyed my discomfiture. I remarked for the fiftieth time how strong her face was, with its generous lines and clearly moulded features. And a suspicion entered my soul. "At any rate," I said, with a laugh, "the Celebrity has got himself into no end of a predicament now. He may go back to New York in custody." "I thought you incapable of resentment, Mr. Crocker. How mean of you to deny him!" "It can do no harm," I answered; "a little lesson in the dangers of incognito may be salutary. I wish it were a little lesson in the dangers of something else." The color mounted to her face as she resumed her occupation. "I am afraid you are a very wicked man," she said. Before I could reply there came a scuffling sound from the bank above us, and the snapping of branches and twigs. It was Mr. Cooke. His descent, the personal conduction of which he lost half-way down, was irregular and spasmodic, and a rude concussion at the bottom knocked off a choice bit of profanity which was balanced on the tip of his tongue. "Tobogganing is a little out of season," said his niece, laughing heartily. Mr. Cooke brushed himself off, picked up the glasses which he had dropped in his flight and pushed them into my hands. Then he pointed lakeward with bulging eyes. "Crocker, old man," he said in a loud whisper, "they tell me that is an Asquith cat-boat." I followed his finger and saw for the first time a sail-boat headed for the island, then about two miles off shore. I raised the glasses. "Yes," I said, "the Scimitar." "That's what Farrar said," cried he. "And what about it?" I asked. "What about it?" he ejaculated. "Why, it's a detective come for Allen. I knew sure as hell if they got as far as Asquith they wouldn't stop there. And that's the fastest sail-boat he could hire there, isn't it?" I replied that it was. He seized me by the shoulder and began dragging me up the bank. "What are you going to do?" I cried, shaking myself loose. "We've got to get on the Maria and run for it," he panted. "There is no time to be lost." He had reached the top of the bank and was running towards the group at the tents. And he actually infused me with some of his red-hot enthusiasm, for I hastened after him. "But you can't begin to get the Maria out before they will be in here," I shouted. He stopped short, gazed at the approaching boat, and then at me. "Is that so?" "Yes, of course," said I, "they will be here in ten minutes." The Celebrity stood in the midst of the excited Four. His hair was parted precisely, and he had induced a monocle to remain in his eye long enough to examine the Scimitar, his nose at the critical elevation. This unruffled exterior made a deep impression on the Four. Was the Celebrity not undergoing the crucial test of a true sport? He was an example alike to criminals and philosophers. Mr. Cooke hurried into the group, which divided respectfully for him, and grasped the Celebrity by the hand. "Something else has got to be done, old man," he said, in a voice which shook with emotion; "they'll be on us before we can get the Maria out." Farrar, who was nailing a rustic bench near by, straightened up at this, his lip curling with a desire to laugh. The Celebrity laid his hand on my client's shoulder. "Cooke," said he, "I'm deeply grateful for all the trouble you wish to take, and for the solicitude you have shown. But let things be. I'll come out of it all right." "Never," cried Cooke, looking proudly around the Four as some Highland chief might have surveyed a faithful clan. "I'd a damned sight rather go to jail myself." "A damned sight," echoed the Four in unison. "I insist, Cooke," said the Celebrity, taking out his eyeglass and tapping Mr. Cooke's purple necktie, "I insist that you drop this business. I repeat my thanks to you and these gentlemen for the friendship they have shown, but say again that I am as innocent of this crime as a baby." Mr. Cooke paid no attention to this speech. His face became radiant. "Didn't any of you fellows strike a cave, or a hollow tree, or something of that sort, knocking around this morning?" One man slapped his knee. "The very place," he cried. "I fell into it," and he showed a rent in his trousers corroboratively. "It's big enough to hold twenty of Allen, and the detective doesn't live that could find it." "Hustle him off, quick," said Mr. Cooke. The mandate was obeyed as literally as though Robin Hood himself had given it. The Celebrity disappeared into the forest, carried rather than urged towards his destined place of confinement. The commotion had brought Mr. Trevor to the spot. He caught sight of the Celebrity's back between the trees, then he looked at the cat-boat entering the cove, a man in the stern preparing to pull in the tender. He intercepted Mr. Cooke on his way to the beach. "What have you done with Mr. Allen?" he asked, in a menacing voice. "Good God," said Mr. Cooke, whose contempt for Mr. Trevor was now infinite, "you talk as if I were the governor of the state. What the devil could I do with him?" "I will have no evasion," replied Mr. Trevor, taking an imposing posture in front of him. "You are trying to defeat the ends of justice by assisting a dangerous criminal to escape. I have warned you, sir, and warn you again of the consequences of your meditated crime, and I give you my word I will do all in my power to frustrate it." Mr. Cooke dug his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. Here was a complication he had not looked for. The Scimitar lay at anchor with her sail down, and two men were coming ashore in the tender. Mr. Cooke's attitude being that of a man who reconsiders a rash resolve, Mr. Trevor was emboldened to say in a moderated tone: "You were carried away by your generosity, Mr. Cooke. I was sure when you took time to think you would see it in another light." Mr. Cooke started off for the place where the boat had grounded. I did not catch his reply, and probably should not have written it here if I had. The senator looked as if he had been sand-bagged. The two men jumped out of the boat and hauled it up. Mr. Cooke waved an easy salute to one, whom I recognized as the big boatman from Asquith, familiarly known as Captain Jay. He owned the Scimitar and several smaller boats. The captain went through the pantomime of an introduction between Mr. Cooke and the other, whom my client shook warmly by the hand, and presently all three came towards us. Mr. Cooke led them to a bar he had improvised by the brook. A pool served the office of refrigerator, and Mr. Cooke had devised an ingenious but complicated arrangement of strings and labels which enabled him to extract any bottle or set of bottles without having to bare his arm and pull out the lot. Farrar and I responded to the call he had given, and went down to assist in the entertainment. My client, with his back to us, was busy manipulating the strings. "Gentlemen," he said, "let me make you acquainted with Mr. Drew. You all know the captain." Had I not suspected Mr. Drew's profession, I think I should not have remarked that he gave each of us a keen look as he raised his head. He had reddish-brown hair, and a pair of bushy red whiskers, each of which tapered to a long point. He was broad in the shoulders, and the clothes he wore rather enhanced this breadth. His suit was gray and almost new, the trousers perceptibly bagging at the knee, and he had a felt hat, a necktie of the white and flowery pattern, and square-toed "Congress" boots. In short, he was a decidedly ordinary looking person; you would meet a hundred like him in the streets of Far Harbor and Beaverton. He might have been a prosperous business man in either of those towns,--a comfortable lumber merchant or mine owner. And he had chosen just the get-up I should have picked for detective work in that region. He had a pleasant eye and a very fetching and hearty manner. But his long whiskers troubled me especially. I kept wondering if they were real. "The captain is sailing Mr. Drew over to Far Harbor," explained Mr. Cooke, "and they have put in here for the night." Mr. Drew was plainly not an amateur, for he volunteered nothing further than this. The necessary bottles having been produced, Mr. Cooke held up his glass and turned to the stranger. "Welcome to our party, old man," said he. Mr. Drew drained his glass and complimented Mr. Cooke on the brand,--a sure key to my client's heart. Whereupon he seated himself between Mr. Drew and the captain and began a discourse on the subject of his own cellar, on which he talked for nearly an hour. His only pauses were for the worthy purpose of filling the detective's or the captain's glass, and these he watched with a hospitable solicitude. The captain had the advantage, three to one, and I made no doubt his employer bitterly regretted not having a boatman whose principles were more strict. At the end of the hour Captain Jay, who by nature was inclined to be taciturn and crabbed, waxed loquacious and even jovial. He sang us the songs he had learned in the winter lumber-camps, which Mr. Cooke never failed to encore to the echo. My client vowed he had not spent a pleasanter afternoon for years. He plied the captain with cigars, and explained to him the mystery of the strings and labels; and the captain experimented until he had broken some of the bottles. Mr. Cooke was not a person who made any great distinction between the three degrees, acquaintance, friendship, and intimacy. When a stranger pleased him, he went from one to the other with such comparative ease that a hardhearted man, and no other, could have resented his advances. Mr. Drew was anything but a hard-hearted man, and he did not object to my client's familiarity. Mr. Cooke made no secret of his admiration for Mr. Drew, and there were just two things about him that Mr. Cooke admired and wondered at, above all else,--the bushy red whiskers. But it appeared that these were the only things that Mr. Drew was really touchy about. I noticed that the detective, without being impolite, did his best to discourage these remarks; but my client knew no such word as discouragement. He was continually saying: "I think I'll grow some like that, old man," or "Have those cut," and the like,--a kind of humor in which the captain took an incredible delight. And finally, when a certain pitch of good feeling had been arrived at, Mr.

shall

How many times the word 'shall' appears in the text?

you happen to have any handcuffs on the Maria?" But my client was pouring out a stiff helping from the decanter, which he still held in his hand. Then he approached the Celebrity. "Don't let it worry you, old man," said he, with intense earnestness. "Don't let it worry you. You're my guest, and I'll see you safe out of it, or bust." "Fenelon," said Mrs. Cooke, gravely, "do you realize what you are saying?" "You're a clever one, Allen," my client continued, and he backed away the better to look him over; "you had nerve to stay as long as you did." The Celebrity laughed confidently. "Cooke," he replied, "I appreciate your generosity,--I really do. I know no offence is meant. The mistake is, in fact, most pardonable." In Mr. Cooke amazement and admiration were clamoring for utterance. "Damn me," he sputtered, "if you're not the coolest embezzler I ever saw." The Celebrity laughed again. Then he surveyed the circle. "My friends," he said, "this is certainly a most amazing coincidence; one which, I assure you, surprises me no less than it does you. You have no doubt remarked that I have my peculiarities. We all have. "I flatter thyself I am not entirely unknown. And the annoyances imposed upon me by a certain fame I have achieved had become such that some months ago I began to crave the pleasures of the life of a private man. I determined to go to some sequestered resort where my face was unfamiliar. The possibility of being recognized at Asquith did not occur to me. Fortunately I was. And a singular chance led me to take the name of the man who has committed this crime, and who has the misfortune to resemble me. I suppose that now," he added impressively, "I shall have to tell you who I am." He paused until these words should have gained their full effect. Then he held up the edition de luxe from which he and Miss Thorn had been reading. "You may have heard, Mrs. Cooke," said he, addressing himself to our hostess, "you may perhaps have heard of the author of this book." Mrs. Cooke was a calm woman, and she read the name on the cover. "Yes," she said, "I have. And you claim to be he?" "Ask my friend Crocker here," he answered carelessly, no doubt exulting that the scene was going off so dramatically. "I should indeed be in a tight box," he went on, "if there were not friends of mine here to help me out." They turned to me. "I am afraid I cannot," I said with what soberness I could. "What!" says he with a start. "What! you deny me?" Miss Trevor had her tongue in her cheek. I bowed. "I am powerless to speak, Mr. Allen," I replied. During this colloquy my client stood between us, looking from one to the other. I well knew that his way of thinking would be with my testimony, and that the gilt name on the edition de luxe had done little towards convincing him of Mr. Allen's innocence. To his mind there was nothing horrible or incongruous in the idea that a well-known author should be a defaulter. It was perfectly possible. He shoved the glass of Scotch towards the Celebrity, with a smile. "Take this, old man," he kindly insisted, "and you'll feel better. What's the use of bucking when you're saddled with a thing like that?" And he pointed to the paper. "Besides, they haven't caught you yet, by a damned sight." The Celebrity waved aside the proffered tumbler. "This is an infamous charge, and you know it, Crocker," he cried. "If you don't, you ought to, as a lawyer. This isn't any time to have fun with a fellow." "My dear sir," I said, "I have charged you with nothing whatever." He turned his back on me in complete disgust. And he came face to face with Miss Trevor. "Miss Trevor, too, knows something of me," he said. "You forget, Mr. Allen," she answered sweetly, "you forget that I have given you my promise not to reveal what I know." The Celebrity chafed, for this was as damaging a statement as could well be uttered against him. But Miss Thorn was his trump card, and she now came forward. "This is ridiculous, Mr. Crocker, simply ridiculous," said she. "I agree with you most heartily, Miss Thorn," I replied. "Nonsense!" exclaimed Miss Thorn, and she drew her lips together, "pure nonsense!" "Nonsense or not, Marian," Mr. Cooke interposed, "we are wasting valuable time. The police are already on the scent, I'll bet my hat." "Fenelon!" Mrs. Cooke remonstrated. "And do you mean to say in soberness, Uncle Fenelon, that you believe the author of The Sybarites to be a defaulter?" said Miss Thorn. "It is indeed hard to believe Mr. Allen a criminal," Mr. Trevor broke in for the first time. "I think it only right that he should be allowed to clear himself before he is put to further inconvenience, and perhaps injustice, by any action we may take in the matter." Mr. Cooke sniffed suspiciously at the word "action." "What action do you mean?" he demanded. "Well," replied Mr. Trevor, with some hesitation, "before we take any steps, that is, notify the police." "Notify the police!" cried my client, his face red with a generous anger. "I have never yet turned a guest over to the police," he said proudly, "and won't, not if I know it. I'm not that kind." Who shall criticise Mr. Cooke's code of morality? "Fenelon," said his wife, "you must remember you have never yet entertained a guest of a larcenous character. No embezzlers up to the present. Marian," she continued, turning to Miss Thorn, "you spoke as if you might, be able to throw some light upon this matter. Do you know whether this gentleman is Charles Wrexell Allen, or whether he is the author? In short, do you know who he is?" The Celebrity lighted a cigarette. Miss Thorn said indignantly, "Upon my word, Aunt Maria, I thought that you, at least, would know better than to credit this silly accusation. He has been a guest at your house, and I am astonished that you should doubt his word." Mrs. Cooke looked at her niece perplexedly. "You must remember, Marian," she said gently, "that I know nothing about him, where he came from, or who he is. Nor does any one at Asquith, except perhaps Miss Trevor, by her own confession. And you do not seem inclined to tell what you know, if indeed you know anything." Upon this Miss Thorn became more indignant still, and Mrs. Cooke went on "Gentlemen, as a rule, do not assume names, especially other people's. They are usually proud of their own. Mr. Allen appears among us, from the clouds, as it were, and in due time we learn from a newspaper that he has committed a defalcation. And, furthermore, the paper contains a portrait and an accurate description which put the thing beyond doubt. I ask you, is it reasonable for him to state coolly after all this that he is another man? That he is a well-known author? It's an absurdity. I was not born yesterday, my dear." "It is most reasonable under the circumstances," replied Miss Thorn, warmly. "Extraordinary? Of course it's extraordinary. And too long to explain to a prejudiced audience, who can't be expected to comprehend the character of a genius, to understand the yearning of a famous man for a little quiet." Mrs. Cooke looked grave. "Marian, you forget yourself," she said. "Oh, I am tired of it, Aunt Maria," cried Miss Thorn; "if he takes my advice, he will refuse to discuss it farther." She did not seem to be aware that she had put forth no argument whatever, save a woman's argument. And I was intensely surprised that her indignation should have got the better of her in this way, having always supposed her clear-headed in the extreme. A few words from her, such as I supposed she would have spoken, had set the Celebrity right with all except Mr. Cooke. To me it was a clear proof that the Celebrity had turned her head, and her mind with it. The silence was broken by an uncontrollable burst of laughter from Miss Trevor. She was quickly frowned down by her father, who reminded her that this was not a comedy. "And, Mr. Allen," he said, "if you have anything to say, or any evidence to bring forward, now is the time to do it." He appeared to forget that I was the district attorney. The Celebrity had seated himself on the trunk of a tree, and was blowing out the smoke in clouds. He was inclined to take Miss Thorn's advice, for he made a gesture of weariness with his cigarette, in the use of which he was singularly eloquent. "Tell me, Mr. Trevor," said he, "why I should sit before you as a tribunal? Why I should take the trouble to clear myself of a senseless charge? My respect for you inclines me to the belief that you are laboring under a momentary excitement; for when you reflect that I am a prominent, not to say famous, author, you will realize how absurd it is that I should be an embezzler, and why I decline to lower myself by an explanation." Mr. Trevor picked up the paper and struck it. "Do you refuse to say anything in the face of such evidence as that?" he cried. "It is not a matter for refusal, Mr. Trevor. It is simply that I cannot admit the possibility of having committed the crime." "Well, sir," said the senator, his black necktie working out of place as his anger got the better of him, "I am to believe, then, because you claim to be the author of a few society novels, that you are infallible? Let me tell you that the President of the United States himself is liable to impeachment, and bound to disprove any charge he may be accused of. What in Halifax do I care for your divine-right-of-authors theory? I'll continue to think you guilty until you are shown to be innocent." Suddenly the full significance of the Celebrity's tactics struck Mr. Cooke, and he reached out and caught hold of Mr. Trevor's coattails. "Hold on, old man," said he; "Allen isn't going to be ass enough to own up to it. Don't you see we'd all be jugged and fined for assisting a criminal over the border? It's out of consideration for us." Mr. Trevor looked sternly over his shoulder at Mr. Cooke. "Do you mean to say, sir, seriously," he asked, "that, for the sake of a misplaced friendship for this man, and a misplaced sense of honor, you are bound to shield a guest, though a criminal? That you intend to assist him to escape from justice? I insist, for my own protection and that of my daughter, as well as for that of the others present that, since he refuses to speak, we must presume him guilty and turn him over." Mr. Trevor turned to Mrs. Cooke, as if relying on her support. "Fenelon," said she, "I have never sought to influence your actions when your friends were concerned, and I shall not begin now. All I ask of you is to consider the consequences of your intention." These words from Mrs. Cooke had much more weight with my client than Mr. Trevor's blustering demands. "Maria, my dear," he said, with a deferential urbanity, "Mr. Allen is my guest, and a gentleman. When a gentleman gives his word that he is not a criminal, it is sufficient." The force of this, for some reason, did not overwhelm his wife; and her lip curled a little, half in contempt, half in risibility. "Pshaw, Fenelon," said she, "what a fraud you are. Why is it you wish to get Mr. Allen over the border, then?" A question which might well have staggered a worthier intellect. "Why, my dear," answered my client, "I wish to save Mr. Allen the inconvenience, not to say the humiliation, of being brought East in custody and strapped with a pair of handcuffs. Let him take a shooting trip to the great Northwest until the real criminal is caught." "Well, Fenelon," replied Mrs. Cooke, unable to repress a smile, "one might as well try to argue with a turn-stile or a weather-vane. I wash my hands of it." But Mr. Trevor, who was both a self-made man and a Western politician, was far from being satisfied. He turned to me with a sweep of the arm he had doubtless learned in the Ohio State Senate. "Mr. Crocker," he cried, "are you, as attorney of this district, going to aid and abet in the escape of a fugitive from justice?" "Mr. Trevor," said I, "I will take the course in this matter which seems fit to me, and without advice from any one." He wheeled on Farrar, repeated the question, and got a like answer. Brought to bay for a time, he glared savagely around him while groping for further arguments. But at this point the Four appeared on the scene, much the worse for thickets, and clamoring for luncheon. They had five small fish between them which they wanted Miss Thorn to cook. CHAPTER XII The Four received Mr. Cooke's plan for the Celebrity's escape to Canada with enthusiastic acclamation, and as the one thing lacking to make the Bear Island trip a complete success. The Celebrity was hailed with the reverence due to the man who puts up the ring-money in a prize-fight. He was accorded, too, a certain amount of respect as a defaulter, which the Four would have denied him as an author, for I am inclined to the belief that the discovery of his literary profession would have lowered him rather than otherwise in their eyes. My client was naturally anxious to get under way at once for the Canadian border, but was overruled in this by his henchmen, who demanded something to eat. We sat down to an impromptu meal, which was an odd affair indeed. Mrs. Cooke maintained her usual serenity, but said little, while Miss Trevor and I had many a mirthful encounter at the thought of the turn matters had taken. At the other end of the cloth were Mr. Cooke and the Four, in wonderful spirits and unimpaired appetite, and in their midst sat the Celebrity, likewise in wonderful spirits. His behavior now and again elicited a loud grunt of disapproval from Mr. Trevor, who was plying his knife and fork in a manner emblematic of his state of mind. Mr. Allen was laughing and joking airily with Mr. Cooke and the guests, denying, but not resenting, their accusations with all the sang froid of a hardened criminal. He did not care particularly to go to Canada, he said. Why should he, when he was innocent? But, if Mr. Cooke insisted, he would enjoy seeing that part of the lake and the Canadian side. Afterwards I perceived Miss Thorn down by the brookside, washing dishes. Her sleeves were drawn back to the elbow, and a dainty white apron covered her blue skirt, while the wind from the lake had disentangled errant wisps of her hair. I stood on the brink above, secure, as I thought, from observation, when she chanced to look up and spied me. "Mr. Crocker," she called, "would you like to make yourself useful?" I was decidedly embarrassed. Her manner was as frank and unconstrained as though I had not been shunning her for weeks past. "If such a thing is possible," I replied. "Do you know a dish-cloth when you see one?" I was doubtful. But I procured the cloth from Miss Trevor and returned. There was an air about Miss Thorn that was new to me. "What an uncompromising man you are, Mr. Crocker," she said to me. "Once a person is unfortunate enough to come under the ban of your disapproval you have nothing whatever to do with them. Now it seems that I have given you offence in some way. Is it not so?" "You magnify my importance," I said. "No temporizing, Mr. Crocker," she went on, as though she meant to be obeyed; "sit down there, and let's have it out. I like you too well to quarrel with you." There was no resisting such a command, and I threw myself on the pebbles at her feet. "I thought we were going to be great friends," she said. "You and Mr. Farrar were so kind to me on the night of my arrival, and we had such fun watching the dance together." "I confess I thought so, too. But you expressed opinions then that I shared. You have since changed your mind, for some unaccountable reason." She paused in her polishing, a shining dish in her hand, and looked down at me with something between a laugh and a frown. "I suppose you have never regretted speaking hastily," she said. "Many a time," I returned, warming; "but if I ever thought a judgment measured and distilled, it was your judgment of the Celebrity." "Does the study of law eliminate humanity?" she asked, with a mock curtsey. "The deliberate sentences are sometimes the unjust ones, and men who are hung by weighed wisdom are often the innocent." "That is all very well in cases of doubt. But here you have the evidences of wrong-doing directly before you." Three dishes were taken up, dried, and put down before she answered me. I threw pebbles into the brook, and wished I had held my tongue. "What evidence?" inquired she. "Well," said I, "I must finish, I suppose. I had a notion you knew of what I inferred. First, let me say that I have no desire to prejudice you against a person whom you admire." "Impossible." Something in her tone made me look up. "Very good, then," I answered. "I, for one, can have no use for a man who devotes himself to a girl long enough to win her affections, and then deserts her with as little compunction as a dog does a rat it has shaken. And that is how your Celebrity treated Miss Trevor." "But Miss Trevor has recovered, I believe," said Miss Thorn. I began to feel a deep, but helpless, insecurity. "Happily, yes," I assented. "Thanks to an excellent physician." A smile twitched the corners of her mouth, as though she enjoyed my discomfiture. I remarked for the fiftieth time how strong her face was, with its generous lines and clearly moulded features. And a suspicion entered my soul. "At any rate," I said, with a laugh, "the Celebrity has got himself into no end of a predicament now. He may go back to New York in custody." "I thought you incapable of resentment, Mr. Crocker. How mean of you to deny him!" "It can do no harm," I answered; "a little lesson in the dangers of incognito may be salutary. I wish it were a little lesson in the dangers of something else." The color mounted to her face as she resumed her occupation. "I am afraid you are a very wicked man," she said. Before I could reply there came a scuffling sound from the bank above us, and the snapping of branches and twigs. It was Mr. Cooke. His descent, the personal conduction of which he lost half-way down, was irregular and spasmodic, and a rude concussion at the bottom knocked off a choice bit of profanity which was balanced on the tip of his tongue. "Tobogganing is a little out of season," said his niece, laughing heartily. Mr. Cooke brushed himself off, picked up the glasses which he had dropped in his flight and pushed them into my hands. Then he pointed lakeward with bulging eyes. "Crocker, old man," he said in a loud whisper, "they tell me that is an Asquith cat-boat." I followed his finger and saw for the first time a sail-boat headed for the island, then about two miles off shore. I raised the glasses. "Yes," I said, "the Scimitar." "That's what Farrar said," cried he. "And what about it?" I asked. "What about it?" he ejaculated. "Why, it's a detective come for Allen. I knew sure as hell if they got as far as Asquith they wouldn't stop there. And that's the fastest sail-boat he could hire there, isn't it?" I replied that it was. He seized me by the shoulder and began dragging me up the bank. "What are you going to do?" I cried, shaking myself loose. "We've got to get on the Maria and run for it," he panted. "There is no time to be lost." He had reached the top of the bank and was running towards the group at the tents. And he actually infused me with some of his red-hot enthusiasm, for I hastened after him. "But you can't begin to get the Maria out before they will be in here," I shouted. He stopped short, gazed at the approaching boat, and then at me. "Is that so?" "Yes, of course," said I, "they will be here in ten minutes." The Celebrity stood in the midst of the excited Four. His hair was parted precisely, and he had induced a monocle to remain in his eye long enough to examine the Scimitar, his nose at the critical elevation. This unruffled exterior made a deep impression on the Four. Was the Celebrity not undergoing the crucial test of a true sport? He was an example alike to criminals and philosophers. Mr. Cooke hurried into the group, which divided respectfully for him, and grasped the Celebrity by the hand. "Something else has got to be done, old man," he said, in a voice which shook with emotion; "they'll be on us before we can get the Maria out." Farrar, who was nailing a rustic bench near by, straightened up at this, his lip curling with a desire to laugh. The Celebrity laid his hand on my client's shoulder. "Cooke," said he, "I'm deeply grateful for all the trouble you wish to take, and for the solicitude you have shown. But let things be. I'll come out of it all right." "Never," cried Cooke, looking proudly around the Four as some Highland chief might have surveyed a faithful clan. "I'd a damned sight rather go to jail myself." "A damned sight," echoed the Four in unison. "I insist, Cooke," said the Celebrity, taking out his eyeglass and tapping Mr. Cooke's purple necktie, "I insist that you drop this business. I repeat my thanks to you and these gentlemen for the friendship they have shown, but say again that I am as innocent of this crime as a baby." Mr. Cooke paid no attention to this speech. His face became radiant. "Didn't any of you fellows strike a cave, or a hollow tree, or something of that sort, knocking around this morning?" One man slapped his knee. "The very place," he cried. "I fell into it," and he showed a rent in his trousers corroboratively. "It's big enough to hold twenty of Allen, and the detective doesn't live that could find it." "Hustle him off, quick," said Mr. Cooke. The mandate was obeyed as literally as though Robin Hood himself had given it. The Celebrity disappeared into the forest, carried rather than urged towards his destined place of confinement. The commotion had brought Mr. Trevor to the spot. He caught sight of the Celebrity's back between the trees, then he looked at the cat-boat entering the cove, a man in the stern preparing to pull in the tender. He intercepted Mr. Cooke on his way to the beach. "What have you done with Mr. Allen?" he asked, in a menacing voice. "Good God," said Mr. Cooke, whose contempt for Mr. Trevor was now infinite, "you talk as if I were the governor of the state. What the devil could I do with him?" "I will have no evasion," replied Mr. Trevor, taking an imposing posture in front of him. "You are trying to defeat the ends of justice by assisting a dangerous criminal to escape. I have warned you, sir, and warn you again of the consequences of your meditated crime, and I give you my word I will do all in my power to frustrate it." Mr. Cooke dug his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. Here was a complication he had not looked for. The Scimitar lay at anchor with her sail down, and two men were coming ashore in the tender. Mr. Cooke's attitude being that of a man who reconsiders a rash resolve, Mr. Trevor was emboldened to say in a moderated tone: "You were carried away by your generosity, Mr. Cooke. I was sure when you took time to think you would see it in another light." Mr. Cooke started off for the place where the boat had grounded. I did not catch his reply, and probably should not have written it here if I had. The senator looked as if he had been sand-bagged. The two men jumped out of the boat and hauled it up. Mr. Cooke waved an easy salute to one, whom I recognized as the big boatman from Asquith, familiarly known as Captain Jay. He owned the Scimitar and several smaller boats. The captain went through the pantomime of an introduction between Mr. Cooke and the other, whom my client shook warmly by the hand, and presently all three came towards us. Mr. Cooke led them to a bar he had improvised by the brook. A pool served the office of refrigerator, and Mr. Cooke had devised an ingenious but complicated arrangement of strings and labels which enabled him to extract any bottle or set of bottles without having to bare his arm and pull out the lot. Farrar and I responded to the call he had given, and went down to assist in the entertainment. My client, with his back to us, was busy manipulating the strings. "Gentlemen," he said, "let me make you acquainted with Mr. Drew. You all know the captain." Had I not suspected Mr. Drew's profession, I think I should not have remarked that he gave each of us a keen look as he raised his head. He had reddish-brown hair, and a pair of bushy red whiskers, each of which tapered to a long point. He was broad in the shoulders, and the clothes he wore rather enhanced this breadth. His suit was gray and almost new, the trousers perceptibly bagging at the knee, and he had a felt hat, a necktie of the white and flowery pattern, and square-toed "Congress" boots. In short, he was a decidedly ordinary looking person; you would meet a hundred like him in the streets of Far Harbor and Beaverton. He might have been a prosperous business man in either of those towns,--a comfortable lumber merchant or mine owner. And he had chosen just the get-up I should have picked for detective work in that region. He had a pleasant eye and a very fetching and hearty manner. But his long whiskers troubled me especially. I kept wondering if they were real. "The captain is sailing Mr. Drew over to Far Harbor," explained Mr. Cooke, "and they have put in here for the night." Mr. Drew was plainly not an amateur, for he volunteered nothing further than this. The necessary bottles having been produced, Mr. Cooke held up his glass and turned to the stranger. "Welcome to our party, old man," said he. Mr. Drew drained his glass and complimented Mr. Cooke on the brand,--a sure key to my client's heart. Whereupon he seated himself between Mr. Drew and the captain and began a discourse on the subject of his own cellar, on which he talked for nearly an hour. His only pauses were for the worthy purpose of filling the detective's or the captain's glass, and these he watched with a hospitable solicitude. The captain had the advantage, three to one, and I made no doubt his employer bitterly regretted not having a boatman whose principles were more strict. At the end of the hour Captain Jay, who by nature was inclined to be taciturn and crabbed, waxed loquacious and even jovial. He sang us the songs he had learned in the winter lumber-camps, which Mr. Cooke never failed to encore to the echo. My client vowed he had not spent a pleasanter afternoon for years. He plied the captain with cigars, and explained to him the mystery of the strings and labels; and the captain experimented until he had broken some of the bottles. Mr. Cooke was not a person who made any great distinction between the three degrees, acquaintance, friendship, and intimacy. When a stranger pleased him, he went from one to the other with such comparative ease that a hardhearted man, and no other, could have resented his advances. Mr. Drew was anything but a hard-hearted man, and he did not object to my client's familiarity. Mr. Cooke made no secret of his admiration for Mr. Drew, and there were just two things about him that Mr. Cooke admired and wondered at, above all else,--the bushy red whiskers. But it appeared that these were the only things that Mr. Drew was really touchy about. I noticed that the detective, without being impolite, did his best to discourage these remarks; but my client knew no such word as discouragement. He was continually saying: "I think I'll grow some like that, old man," or "Have those cut," and the like,--a kind of humor in which the captain took an incredible delight. And finally, when a certain pitch of good feeling had been arrived at, Mr.

half

How many times the word 'half' appears in the text?

you happen to have any handcuffs on the Maria?" But my client was pouring out a stiff helping from the decanter, which he still held in his hand. Then he approached the Celebrity. "Don't let it worry you, old man," said he, with intense earnestness. "Don't let it worry you. You're my guest, and I'll see you safe out of it, or bust." "Fenelon," said Mrs. Cooke, gravely, "do you realize what you are saying?" "You're a clever one, Allen," my client continued, and he backed away the better to look him over; "you had nerve to stay as long as you did." The Celebrity laughed confidently. "Cooke," he replied, "I appreciate your generosity,--I really do. I know no offence is meant. The mistake is, in fact, most pardonable." In Mr. Cooke amazement and admiration were clamoring for utterance. "Damn me," he sputtered, "if you're not the coolest embezzler I ever saw." The Celebrity laughed again. Then he surveyed the circle. "My friends," he said, "this is certainly a most amazing coincidence; one which, I assure you, surprises me no less than it does you. You have no doubt remarked that I have my peculiarities. We all have. "I flatter thyself I am not entirely unknown. And the annoyances imposed upon me by a certain fame I have achieved had become such that some months ago I began to crave the pleasures of the life of a private man. I determined to go to some sequestered resort where my face was unfamiliar. The possibility of being recognized at Asquith did not occur to me. Fortunately I was. And a singular chance led me to take the name of the man who has committed this crime, and who has the misfortune to resemble me. I suppose that now," he added impressively, "I shall have to tell you who I am." He paused until these words should have gained their full effect. Then he held up the edition de luxe from which he and Miss Thorn had been reading. "You may have heard, Mrs. Cooke," said he, addressing himself to our hostess, "you may perhaps have heard of the author of this book." Mrs. Cooke was a calm woman, and she read the name on the cover. "Yes," she said, "I have. And you claim to be he?" "Ask my friend Crocker here," he answered carelessly, no doubt exulting that the scene was going off so dramatically. "I should indeed be in a tight box," he went on, "if there were not friends of mine here to help me out." They turned to me. "I am afraid I cannot," I said with what soberness I could. "What!" says he with a start. "What! you deny me?" Miss Trevor had her tongue in her cheek. I bowed. "I am powerless to speak, Mr. Allen," I replied. During this colloquy my client stood between us, looking from one to the other. I well knew that his way of thinking would be with my testimony, and that the gilt name on the edition de luxe had done little towards convincing him of Mr. Allen's innocence. To his mind there was nothing horrible or incongruous in the idea that a well-known author should be a defaulter. It was perfectly possible. He shoved the glass of Scotch towards the Celebrity, with a smile. "Take this, old man," he kindly insisted, "and you'll feel better. What's the use of bucking when you're saddled with a thing like that?" And he pointed to the paper. "Besides, they haven't caught you yet, by a damned sight." The Celebrity waved aside the proffered tumbler. "This is an infamous charge, and you know it, Crocker," he cried. "If you don't, you ought to, as a lawyer. This isn't any time to have fun with a fellow." "My dear sir," I said, "I have charged you with nothing whatever." He turned his back on me in complete disgust. And he came face to face with Miss Trevor. "Miss Trevor, too, knows something of me," he said. "You forget, Mr. Allen," she answered sweetly, "you forget that I have given you my promise not to reveal what I know." The Celebrity chafed, for this was as damaging a statement as could well be uttered against him. But Miss Thorn was his trump card, and she now came forward. "This is ridiculous, Mr. Crocker, simply ridiculous," said she. "I agree with you most heartily, Miss Thorn," I replied. "Nonsense!" exclaimed Miss Thorn, and she drew her lips together, "pure nonsense!" "Nonsense or not, Marian," Mr. Cooke interposed, "we are wasting valuable time. The police are already on the scent, I'll bet my hat." "Fenelon!" Mrs. Cooke remonstrated. "And do you mean to say in soberness, Uncle Fenelon, that you believe the author of The Sybarites to be a defaulter?" said Miss Thorn. "It is indeed hard to believe Mr. Allen a criminal," Mr. Trevor broke in for the first time. "I think it only right that he should be allowed to clear himself before he is put to further inconvenience, and perhaps injustice, by any action we may take in the matter." Mr. Cooke sniffed suspiciously at the word "action." "What action do you mean?" he demanded. "Well," replied Mr. Trevor, with some hesitation, "before we take any steps, that is, notify the police." "Notify the police!" cried my client, his face red with a generous anger. "I have never yet turned a guest over to the police," he said proudly, "and won't, not if I know it. I'm not that kind." Who shall criticise Mr. Cooke's code of morality? "Fenelon," said his wife, "you must remember you have never yet entertained a guest of a larcenous character. No embezzlers up to the present. Marian," she continued, turning to Miss Thorn, "you spoke as if you might, be able to throw some light upon this matter. Do you know whether this gentleman is Charles Wrexell Allen, or whether he is the author? In short, do you know who he is?" The Celebrity lighted a cigarette. Miss Thorn said indignantly, "Upon my word, Aunt Maria, I thought that you, at least, would know better than to credit this silly accusation. He has been a guest at your house, and I am astonished that you should doubt his word." Mrs. Cooke looked at her niece perplexedly. "You must remember, Marian," she said gently, "that I know nothing about him, where he came from, or who he is. Nor does any one at Asquith, except perhaps Miss Trevor, by her own confession. And you do not seem inclined to tell what you know, if indeed you know anything." Upon this Miss Thorn became more indignant still, and Mrs. Cooke went on "Gentlemen, as a rule, do not assume names, especially other people's. They are usually proud of their own. Mr. Allen appears among us, from the clouds, as it were, and in due time we learn from a newspaper that he has committed a defalcation. And, furthermore, the paper contains a portrait and an accurate description which put the thing beyond doubt. I ask you, is it reasonable for him to state coolly after all this that he is another man? That he is a well-known author? It's an absurdity. I was not born yesterday, my dear." "It is most reasonable under the circumstances," replied Miss Thorn, warmly. "Extraordinary? Of course it's extraordinary. And too long to explain to a prejudiced audience, who can't be expected to comprehend the character of a genius, to understand the yearning of a famous man for a little quiet." Mrs. Cooke looked grave. "Marian, you forget yourself," she said. "Oh, I am tired of it, Aunt Maria," cried Miss Thorn; "if he takes my advice, he will refuse to discuss it farther." She did not seem to be aware that she had put forth no argument whatever, save a woman's argument. And I was intensely surprised that her indignation should have got the better of her in this way, having always supposed her clear-headed in the extreme. A few words from her, such as I supposed she would have spoken, had set the Celebrity right with all except Mr. Cooke. To me it was a clear proof that the Celebrity had turned her head, and her mind with it. The silence was broken by an uncontrollable burst of laughter from Miss Trevor. She was quickly frowned down by her father, who reminded her that this was not a comedy. "And, Mr. Allen," he said, "if you have anything to say, or any evidence to bring forward, now is the time to do it." He appeared to forget that I was the district attorney. The Celebrity had seated himself on the trunk of a tree, and was blowing out the smoke in clouds. He was inclined to take Miss Thorn's advice, for he made a gesture of weariness with his cigarette, in the use of which he was singularly eloquent. "Tell me, Mr. Trevor," said he, "why I should sit before you as a tribunal? Why I should take the trouble to clear myself of a senseless charge? My respect for you inclines me to the belief that you are laboring under a momentary excitement; for when you reflect that I am a prominent, not to say famous, author, you will realize how absurd it is that I should be an embezzler, and why I decline to lower myself by an explanation." Mr. Trevor picked up the paper and struck it. "Do you refuse to say anything in the face of such evidence as that?" he cried. "It is not a matter for refusal, Mr. Trevor. It is simply that I cannot admit the possibility of having committed the crime." "Well, sir," said the senator, his black necktie working out of place as his anger got the better of him, "I am to believe, then, because you claim to be the author of a few society novels, that you are infallible? Let me tell you that the President of the United States himself is liable to impeachment, and bound to disprove any charge he may be accused of. What in Halifax do I care for your divine-right-of-authors theory? I'll continue to think you guilty until you are shown to be innocent." Suddenly the full significance of the Celebrity's tactics struck Mr. Cooke, and he reached out and caught hold of Mr. Trevor's coattails. "Hold on, old man," said he; "Allen isn't going to be ass enough to own up to it. Don't you see we'd all be jugged and fined for assisting a criminal over the border? It's out of consideration for us." Mr. Trevor looked sternly over his shoulder at Mr. Cooke. "Do you mean to say, sir, seriously," he asked, "that, for the sake of a misplaced friendship for this man, and a misplaced sense of honor, you are bound to shield a guest, though a criminal? That you intend to assist him to escape from justice? I insist, for my own protection and that of my daughter, as well as for that of the others present that, since he refuses to speak, we must presume him guilty and turn him over." Mr. Trevor turned to Mrs. Cooke, as if relying on her support. "Fenelon," said she, "I have never sought to influence your actions when your friends were concerned, and I shall not begin now. All I ask of you is to consider the consequences of your intention." These words from Mrs. Cooke had much more weight with my client than Mr. Trevor's blustering demands. "Maria, my dear," he said, with a deferential urbanity, "Mr. Allen is my guest, and a gentleman. When a gentleman gives his word that he is not a criminal, it is sufficient." The force of this, for some reason, did not overwhelm his wife; and her lip curled a little, half in contempt, half in risibility. "Pshaw, Fenelon," said she, "what a fraud you are. Why is it you wish to get Mr. Allen over the border, then?" A question which might well have staggered a worthier intellect. "Why, my dear," answered my client, "I wish to save Mr. Allen the inconvenience, not to say the humiliation, of being brought East in custody and strapped with a pair of handcuffs. Let him take a shooting trip to the great Northwest until the real criminal is caught." "Well, Fenelon," replied Mrs. Cooke, unable to repress a smile, "one might as well try to argue with a turn-stile or a weather-vane. I wash my hands of it." But Mr. Trevor, who was both a self-made man and a Western politician, was far from being satisfied. He turned to me with a sweep of the arm he had doubtless learned in the Ohio State Senate. "Mr. Crocker," he cried, "are you, as attorney of this district, going to aid and abet in the escape of a fugitive from justice?" "Mr. Trevor," said I, "I will take the course in this matter which seems fit to me, and without advice from any one." He wheeled on Farrar, repeated the question, and got a like answer. Brought to bay for a time, he glared savagely around him while groping for further arguments. But at this point the Four appeared on the scene, much the worse for thickets, and clamoring for luncheon. They had five small fish between them which they wanted Miss Thorn to cook. CHAPTER XII The Four received Mr. Cooke's plan for the Celebrity's escape to Canada with enthusiastic acclamation, and as the one thing lacking to make the Bear Island trip a complete success. The Celebrity was hailed with the reverence due to the man who puts up the ring-money in a prize-fight. He was accorded, too, a certain amount of respect as a defaulter, which the Four would have denied him as an author, for I am inclined to the belief that the discovery of his literary profession would have lowered him rather than otherwise in their eyes. My client was naturally anxious to get under way at once for the Canadian border, but was overruled in this by his henchmen, who demanded something to eat. We sat down to an impromptu meal, which was an odd affair indeed. Mrs. Cooke maintained her usual serenity, but said little, while Miss Trevor and I had many a mirthful encounter at the thought of the turn matters had taken. At the other end of the cloth were Mr. Cooke and the Four, in wonderful spirits and unimpaired appetite, and in their midst sat the Celebrity, likewise in wonderful spirits. His behavior now and again elicited a loud grunt of disapproval from Mr. Trevor, who was plying his knife and fork in a manner emblematic of his state of mind. Mr. Allen was laughing and joking airily with Mr. Cooke and the guests, denying, but not resenting, their accusations with all the sang froid of a hardened criminal. He did not care particularly to go to Canada, he said. Why should he, when he was innocent? But, if Mr. Cooke insisted, he would enjoy seeing that part of the lake and the Canadian side. Afterwards I perceived Miss Thorn down by the brookside, washing dishes. Her sleeves were drawn back to the elbow, and a dainty white apron covered her blue skirt, while the wind from the lake had disentangled errant wisps of her hair. I stood on the brink above, secure, as I thought, from observation, when she chanced to look up and spied me. "Mr. Crocker," she called, "would you like to make yourself useful?" I was decidedly embarrassed. Her manner was as frank and unconstrained as though I had not been shunning her for weeks past. "If such a thing is possible," I replied. "Do you know a dish-cloth when you see one?" I was doubtful. But I procured the cloth from Miss Trevor and returned. There was an air about Miss Thorn that was new to me. "What an uncompromising man you are, Mr. Crocker," she said to me. "Once a person is unfortunate enough to come under the ban of your disapproval you have nothing whatever to do with them. Now it seems that I have given you offence in some way. Is it not so?" "You magnify my importance," I said. "No temporizing, Mr. Crocker," she went on, as though she meant to be obeyed; "sit down there, and let's have it out. I like you too well to quarrel with you." There was no resisting such a command, and I threw myself on the pebbles at her feet. "I thought we were going to be great friends," she said. "You and Mr. Farrar were so kind to me on the night of my arrival, and we had such fun watching the dance together." "I confess I thought so, too. But you expressed opinions then that I shared. You have since changed your mind, for some unaccountable reason." She paused in her polishing, a shining dish in her hand, and looked down at me with something between a laugh and a frown. "I suppose you have never regretted speaking hastily," she said. "Many a time," I returned, warming; "but if I ever thought a judgment measured and distilled, it was your judgment of the Celebrity." "Does the study of law eliminate humanity?" she asked, with a mock curtsey. "The deliberate sentences are sometimes the unjust ones, and men who are hung by weighed wisdom are often the innocent." "That is all very well in cases of doubt. But here you have the evidences of wrong-doing directly before you." Three dishes were taken up, dried, and put down before she answered me. I threw pebbles into the brook, and wished I had held my tongue. "What evidence?" inquired she. "Well," said I, "I must finish, I suppose. I had a notion you knew of what I inferred. First, let me say that I have no desire to prejudice you against a person whom you admire." "Impossible." Something in her tone made me look up. "Very good, then," I answered. "I, for one, can have no use for a man who devotes himself to a girl long enough to win her affections, and then deserts her with as little compunction as a dog does a rat it has shaken. And that is how your Celebrity treated Miss Trevor." "But Miss Trevor has recovered, I believe," said Miss Thorn. I began to feel a deep, but helpless, insecurity. "Happily, yes," I assented. "Thanks to an excellent physician." A smile twitched the corners of her mouth, as though she enjoyed my discomfiture. I remarked for the fiftieth time how strong her face was, with its generous lines and clearly moulded features. And a suspicion entered my soul. "At any rate," I said, with a laugh, "the Celebrity has got himself into no end of a predicament now. He may go back to New York in custody." "I thought you incapable of resentment, Mr. Crocker. How mean of you to deny him!" "It can do no harm," I answered; "a little lesson in the dangers of incognito may be salutary. I wish it were a little lesson in the dangers of something else." The color mounted to her face as she resumed her occupation. "I am afraid you are a very wicked man," she said. Before I could reply there came a scuffling sound from the bank above us, and the snapping of branches and twigs. It was Mr. Cooke. His descent, the personal conduction of which he lost half-way down, was irregular and spasmodic, and a rude concussion at the bottom knocked off a choice bit of profanity which was balanced on the tip of his tongue. "Tobogganing is a little out of season," said his niece, laughing heartily. Mr. Cooke brushed himself off, picked up the glasses which he had dropped in his flight and pushed them into my hands. Then he pointed lakeward with bulging eyes. "Crocker, old man," he said in a loud whisper, "they tell me that is an Asquith cat-boat." I followed his finger and saw for the first time a sail-boat headed for the island, then about two miles off shore. I raised the glasses. "Yes," I said, "the Scimitar." "That's what Farrar said," cried he. "And what about it?" I asked. "What about it?" he ejaculated. "Why, it's a detective come for Allen. I knew sure as hell if they got as far as Asquith they wouldn't stop there. And that's the fastest sail-boat he could hire there, isn't it?" I replied that it was. He seized me by the shoulder and began dragging me up the bank. "What are you going to do?" I cried, shaking myself loose. "We've got to get on the Maria and run for it," he panted. "There is no time to be lost." He had reached the top of the bank and was running towards the group at the tents. And he actually infused me with some of his red-hot enthusiasm, for I hastened after him. "But you can't begin to get the Maria out before they will be in here," I shouted. He stopped short, gazed at the approaching boat, and then at me. "Is that so?" "Yes, of course," said I, "they will be here in ten minutes." The Celebrity stood in the midst of the excited Four. His hair was parted precisely, and he had induced a monocle to remain in his eye long enough to examine the Scimitar, his nose at the critical elevation. This unruffled exterior made a deep impression on the Four. Was the Celebrity not undergoing the crucial test of a true sport? He was an example alike to criminals and philosophers. Mr. Cooke hurried into the group, which divided respectfully for him, and grasped the Celebrity by the hand. "Something else has got to be done, old man," he said, in a voice which shook with emotion; "they'll be on us before we can get the Maria out." Farrar, who was nailing a rustic bench near by, straightened up at this, his lip curling with a desire to laugh. The Celebrity laid his hand on my client's shoulder. "Cooke," said he, "I'm deeply grateful for all the trouble you wish to take, and for the solicitude you have shown. But let things be. I'll come out of it all right." "Never," cried Cooke, looking proudly around the Four as some Highland chief might have surveyed a faithful clan. "I'd a damned sight rather go to jail myself." "A damned sight," echoed the Four in unison. "I insist, Cooke," said the Celebrity, taking out his eyeglass and tapping Mr. Cooke's purple necktie, "I insist that you drop this business. I repeat my thanks to you and these gentlemen for the friendship they have shown, but say again that I am as innocent of this crime as a baby." Mr. Cooke paid no attention to this speech. His face became radiant. "Didn't any of you fellows strike a cave, or a hollow tree, or something of that sort, knocking around this morning?" One man slapped his knee. "The very place," he cried. "I fell into it," and he showed a rent in his trousers corroboratively. "It's big enough to hold twenty of Allen, and the detective doesn't live that could find it." "Hustle him off, quick," said Mr. Cooke. The mandate was obeyed as literally as though Robin Hood himself had given it. The Celebrity disappeared into the forest, carried rather than urged towards his destined place of confinement. The commotion had brought Mr. Trevor to the spot. He caught sight of the Celebrity's back between the trees, then he looked at the cat-boat entering the cove, a man in the stern preparing to pull in the tender. He intercepted Mr. Cooke on his way to the beach. "What have you done with Mr. Allen?" he asked, in a menacing voice. "Good God," said Mr. Cooke, whose contempt for Mr. Trevor was now infinite, "you talk as if I were the governor of the state. What the devil could I do with him?" "I will have no evasion," replied Mr. Trevor, taking an imposing posture in front of him. "You are trying to defeat the ends of justice by assisting a dangerous criminal to escape. I have warned you, sir, and warn you again of the consequences of your meditated crime, and I give you my word I will do all in my power to frustrate it." Mr. Cooke dug his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. Here was a complication he had not looked for. The Scimitar lay at anchor with her sail down, and two men were coming ashore in the tender. Mr. Cooke's attitude being that of a man who reconsiders a rash resolve, Mr. Trevor was emboldened to say in a moderated tone: "You were carried away by your generosity, Mr. Cooke. I was sure when you took time to think you would see it in another light." Mr. Cooke started off for the place where the boat had grounded. I did not catch his reply, and probably should not have written it here if I had. The senator looked as if he had been sand-bagged. The two men jumped out of the boat and hauled it up. Mr. Cooke waved an easy salute to one, whom I recognized as the big boatman from Asquith, familiarly known as Captain Jay. He owned the Scimitar and several smaller boats. The captain went through the pantomime of an introduction between Mr. Cooke and the other, whom my client shook warmly by the hand, and presently all three came towards us. Mr. Cooke led them to a bar he had improvised by the brook. A pool served the office of refrigerator, and Mr. Cooke had devised an ingenious but complicated arrangement of strings and labels which enabled him to extract any bottle or set of bottles without having to bare his arm and pull out the lot. Farrar and I responded to the call he had given, and went down to assist in the entertainment. My client, with his back to us, was busy manipulating the strings. "Gentlemen," he said, "let me make you acquainted with Mr. Drew. You all know the captain." Had I not suspected Mr. Drew's profession, I think I should not have remarked that he gave each of us a keen look as he raised his head. He had reddish-brown hair, and a pair of bushy red whiskers, each of which tapered to a long point. He was broad in the shoulders, and the clothes he wore rather enhanced this breadth. His suit was gray and almost new, the trousers perceptibly bagging at the knee, and he had a felt hat, a necktie of the white and flowery pattern, and square-toed "Congress" boots. In short, he was a decidedly ordinary looking person; you would meet a hundred like him in the streets of Far Harbor and Beaverton. He might have been a prosperous business man in either of those towns,--a comfortable lumber merchant or mine owner. And he had chosen just the get-up I should have picked for detective work in that region. He had a pleasant eye and a very fetching and hearty manner. But his long whiskers troubled me especially. I kept wondering if they were real. "The captain is sailing Mr. Drew over to Far Harbor," explained Mr. Cooke, "and they have put in here for the night." Mr. Drew was plainly not an amateur, for he volunteered nothing further than this. The necessary bottles having been produced, Mr. Cooke held up his glass and turned to the stranger. "Welcome to our party, old man," said he. Mr. Drew drained his glass and complimented Mr. Cooke on the brand,--a sure key to my client's heart. Whereupon he seated himself between Mr. Drew and the captain and began a discourse on the subject of his own cellar, on which he talked for nearly an hour. His only pauses were for the worthy purpose of filling the detective's or the captain's glass, and these he watched with a hospitable solicitude. The captain had the advantage, three to one, and I made no doubt his employer bitterly regretted not having a boatman whose principles were more strict. At the end of the hour Captain Jay, who by nature was inclined to be taciturn and crabbed, waxed loquacious and even jovial. He sang us the songs he had learned in the winter lumber-camps, which Mr. Cooke never failed to encore to the echo. My client vowed he had not spent a pleasanter afternoon for years. He plied the captain with cigars, and explained to him the mystery of the strings and labels; and the captain experimented until he had broken some of the bottles. Mr. Cooke was not a person who made any great distinction between the three degrees, acquaintance, friendship, and intimacy. When a stranger pleased him, he went from one to the other with such comparative ease that a hardhearted man, and no other, could have resented his advances. Mr. Drew was anything but a hard-hearted man, and he did not object to my client's familiarity. Mr. Cooke made no secret of his admiration for Mr. Drew, and there were just two things about him that Mr. Cooke admired and wondered at, above all else,--the bushy red whiskers. But it appeared that these were the only things that Mr. Drew was really touchy about. I noticed that the detective, without being impolite, did his best to discourage these remarks; but my client knew no such word as discouragement. He was continually saying: "I think I'll grow some like that, old man," or "Have those cut," and the like,--a kind of humor in which the captain took an incredible delight. And finally, when a certain pitch of good feeling had been arrived at, Mr.

very

How many times the word 'very' appears in the text?

you happen to have any handcuffs on the Maria?" But my client was pouring out a stiff helping from the decanter, which he still held in his hand. Then he approached the Celebrity. "Don't let it worry you, old man," said he, with intense earnestness. "Don't let it worry you. You're my guest, and I'll see you safe out of it, or bust." "Fenelon," said Mrs. Cooke, gravely, "do you realize what you are saying?" "You're a clever one, Allen," my client continued, and he backed away the better to look him over; "you had nerve to stay as long as you did." The Celebrity laughed confidently. "Cooke," he replied, "I appreciate your generosity,--I really do. I know no offence is meant. The mistake is, in fact, most pardonable." In Mr. Cooke amazement and admiration were clamoring for utterance. "Damn me," he sputtered, "if you're not the coolest embezzler I ever saw." The Celebrity laughed again. Then he surveyed the circle. "My friends," he said, "this is certainly a most amazing coincidence; one which, I assure you, surprises me no less than it does you. You have no doubt remarked that I have my peculiarities. We all have. "I flatter thyself I am not entirely unknown. And the annoyances imposed upon me by a certain fame I have achieved had become such that some months ago I began to crave the pleasures of the life of a private man. I determined to go to some sequestered resort where my face was unfamiliar. The possibility of being recognized at Asquith did not occur to me. Fortunately I was. And a singular chance led me to take the name of the man who has committed this crime, and who has the misfortune to resemble me. I suppose that now," he added impressively, "I shall have to tell you who I am." He paused until these words should have gained their full effect. Then he held up the edition de luxe from which he and Miss Thorn had been reading. "You may have heard, Mrs. Cooke," said he, addressing himself to our hostess, "you may perhaps have heard of the author of this book." Mrs. Cooke was a calm woman, and she read the name on the cover. "Yes," she said, "I have. And you claim to be he?" "Ask my friend Crocker here," he answered carelessly, no doubt exulting that the scene was going off so dramatically. "I should indeed be in a tight box," he went on, "if there were not friends of mine here to help me out." They turned to me. "I am afraid I cannot," I said with what soberness I could. "What!" says he with a start. "What! you deny me?" Miss Trevor had her tongue in her cheek. I bowed. "I am powerless to speak, Mr. Allen," I replied. During this colloquy my client stood between us, looking from one to the other. I well knew that his way of thinking would be with my testimony, and that the gilt name on the edition de luxe had done little towards convincing him of Mr. Allen's innocence. To his mind there was nothing horrible or incongruous in the idea that a well-known author should be a defaulter. It was perfectly possible. He shoved the glass of Scotch towards the Celebrity, with a smile. "Take this, old man," he kindly insisted, "and you'll feel better. What's the use of bucking when you're saddled with a thing like that?" And he pointed to the paper. "Besides, they haven't caught you yet, by a damned sight." The Celebrity waved aside the proffered tumbler. "This is an infamous charge, and you know it, Crocker," he cried. "If you don't, you ought to, as a lawyer. This isn't any time to have fun with a fellow." "My dear sir," I said, "I have charged you with nothing whatever." He turned his back on me in complete disgust. And he came face to face with Miss Trevor. "Miss Trevor, too, knows something of me," he said. "You forget, Mr. Allen," she answered sweetly, "you forget that I have given you my promise not to reveal what I know." The Celebrity chafed, for this was as damaging a statement as could well be uttered against him. But Miss Thorn was his trump card, and she now came forward. "This is ridiculous, Mr. Crocker, simply ridiculous," said she. "I agree with you most heartily, Miss Thorn," I replied. "Nonsense!" exclaimed Miss Thorn, and she drew her lips together, "pure nonsense!" "Nonsense or not, Marian," Mr. Cooke interposed, "we are wasting valuable time. The police are already on the scent, I'll bet my hat." "Fenelon!" Mrs. Cooke remonstrated. "And do you mean to say in soberness, Uncle Fenelon, that you believe the author of The Sybarites to be a defaulter?" said Miss Thorn. "It is indeed hard to believe Mr. Allen a criminal," Mr. Trevor broke in for the first time. "I think it only right that he should be allowed to clear himself before he is put to further inconvenience, and perhaps injustice, by any action we may take in the matter." Mr. Cooke sniffed suspiciously at the word "action." "What action do you mean?" he demanded. "Well," replied Mr. Trevor, with some hesitation, "before we take any steps, that is, notify the police." "Notify the police!" cried my client, his face red with a generous anger. "I have never yet turned a guest over to the police," he said proudly, "and won't, not if I know it. I'm not that kind." Who shall criticise Mr. Cooke's code of morality? "Fenelon," said his wife, "you must remember you have never yet entertained a guest of a larcenous character. No embezzlers up to the present. Marian," she continued, turning to Miss Thorn, "you spoke as if you might, be able to throw some light upon this matter. Do you know whether this gentleman is Charles Wrexell Allen, or whether he is the author? In short, do you know who he is?" The Celebrity lighted a cigarette. Miss Thorn said indignantly, "Upon my word, Aunt Maria, I thought that you, at least, would know better than to credit this silly accusation. He has been a guest at your house, and I am astonished that you should doubt his word." Mrs. Cooke looked at her niece perplexedly. "You must remember, Marian," she said gently, "that I know nothing about him, where he came from, or who he is. Nor does any one at Asquith, except perhaps Miss Trevor, by her own confession. And you do not seem inclined to tell what you know, if indeed you know anything." Upon this Miss Thorn became more indignant still, and Mrs. Cooke went on "Gentlemen, as a rule, do not assume names, especially other people's. They are usually proud of their own. Mr. Allen appears among us, from the clouds, as it were, and in due time we learn from a newspaper that he has committed a defalcation. And, furthermore, the paper contains a portrait and an accurate description which put the thing beyond doubt. I ask you, is it reasonable for him to state coolly after all this that he is another man? That he is a well-known author? It's an absurdity. I was not born yesterday, my dear." "It is most reasonable under the circumstances," replied Miss Thorn, warmly. "Extraordinary? Of course it's extraordinary. And too long to explain to a prejudiced audience, who can't be expected to comprehend the character of a genius, to understand the yearning of a famous man for a little quiet." Mrs. Cooke looked grave. "Marian, you forget yourself," she said. "Oh, I am tired of it, Aunt Maria," cried Miss Thorn; "if he takes my advice, he will refuse to discuss it farther." She did not seem to be aware that she had put forth no argument whatever, save a woman's argument. And I was intensely surprised that her indignation should have got the better of her in this way, having always supposed her clear-headed in the extreme. A few words from her, such as I supposed she would have spoken, had set the Celebrity right with all except Mr. Cooke. To me it was a clear proof that the Celebrity had turned her head, and her mind with it. The silence was broken by an uncontrollable burst of laughter from Miss Trevor. She was quickly frowned down by her father, who reminded her that this was not a comedy. "And, Mr. Allen," he said, "if you have anything to say, or any evidence to bring forward, now is the time to do it." He appeared to forget that I was the district attorney. The Celebrity had seated himself on the trunk of a tree, and was blowing out the smoke in clouds. He was inclined to take Miss Thorn's advice, for he made a gesture of weariness with his cigarette, in the use of which he was singularly eloquent. "Tell me, Mr. Trevor," said he, "why I should sit before you as a tribunal? Why I should take the trouble to clear myself of a senseless charge? My respect for you inclines me to the belief that you are laboring under a momentary excitement; for when you reflect that I am a prominent, not to say famous, author, you will realize how absurd it is that I should be an embezzler, and why I decline to lower myself by an explanation." Mr. Trevor picked up the paper and struck it. "Do you refuse to say anything in the face of such evidence as that?" he cried. "It is not a matter for refusal, Mr. Trevor. It is simply that I cannot admit the possibility of having committed the crime." "Well, sir," said the senator, his black necktie working out of place as his anger got the better of him, "I am to believe, then, because you claim to be the author of a few society novels, that you are infallible? Let me tell you that the President of the United States himself is liable to impeachment, and bound to disprove any charge he may be accused of. What in Halifax do I care for your divine-right-of-authors theory? I'll continue to think you guilty until you are shown to be innocent." Suddenly the full significance of the Celebrity's tactics struck Mr. Cooke, and he reached out and caught hold of Mr. Trevor's coattails. "Hold on, old man," said he; "Allen isn't going to be ass enough to own up to it. Don't you see we'd all be jugged and fined for assisting a criminal over the border? It's out of consideration for us." Mr. Trevor looked sternly over his shoulder at Mr. Cooke. "Do you mean to say, sir, seriously," he asked, "that, for the sake of a misplaced friendship for this man, and a misplaced sense of honor, you are bound to shield a guest, though a criminal? That you intend to assist him to escape from justice? I insist, for my own protection and that of my daughter, as well as for that of the others present that, since he refuses to speak, we must presume him guilty and turn him over." Mr. Trevor turned to Mrs. Cooke, as if relying on her support. "Fenelon," said she, "I have never sought to influence your actions when your friends were concerned, and I shall not begin now. All I ask of you is to consider the consequences of your intention." These words from Mrs. Cooke had much more weight with my client than Mr. Trevor's blustering demands. "Maria, my dear," he said, with a deferential urbanity, "Mr. Allen is my guest, and a gentleman. When a gentleman gives his word that he is not a criminal, it is sufficient." The force of this, for some reason, did not overwhelm his wife; and her lip curled a little, half in contempt, half in risibility. "Pshaw, Fenelon," said she, "what a fraud you are. Why is it you wish to get Mr. Allen over the border, then?" A question which might well have staggered a worthier intellect. "Why, my dear," answered my client, "I wish to save Mr. Allen the inconvenience, not to say the humiliation, of being brought East in custody and strapped with a pair of handcuffs. Let him take a shooting trip to the great Northwest until the real criminal is caught." "Well, Fenelon," replied Mrs. Cooke, unable to repress a smile, "one might as well try to argue with a turn-stile or a weather-vane. I wash my hands of it." But Mr. Trevor, who was both a self-made man and a Western politician, was far from being satisfied. He turned to me with a sweep of the arm he had doubtless learned in the Ohio State Senate. "Mr. Crocker," he cried, "are you, as attorney of this district, going to aid and abet in the escape of a fugitive from justice?" "Mr. Trevor," said I, "I will take the course in this matter which seems fit to me, and without advice from any one." He wheeled on Farrar, repeated the question, and got a like answer. Brought to bay for a time, he glared savagely around him while groping for further arguments. But at this point the Four appeared on the scene, much the worse for thickets, and clamoring for luncheon. They had five small fish between them which they wanted Miss Thorn to cook. CHAPTER XII The Four received Mr. Cooke's plan for the Celebrity's escape to Canada with enthusiastic acclamation, and as the one thing lacking to make the Bear Island trip a complete success. The Celebrity was hailed with the reverence due to the man who puts up the ring-money in a prize-fight. He was accorded, too, a certain amount of respect as a defaulter, which the Four would have denied him as an author, for I am inclined to the belief that the discovery of his literary profession would have lowered him rather than otherwise in their eyes. My client was naturally anxious to get under way at once for the Canadian border, but was overruled in this by his henchmen, who demanded something to eat. We sat down to an impromptu meal, which was an odd affair indeed. Mrs. Cooke maintained her usual serenity, but said little, while Miss Trevor and I had many a mirthful encounter at the thought of the turn matters had taken. At the other end of the cloth were Mr. Cooke and the Four, in wonderful spirits and unimpaired appetite, and in their midst sat the Celebrity, likewise in wonderful spirits. His behavior now and again elicited a loud grunt of disapproval from Mr. Trevor, who was plying his knife and fork in a manner emblematic of his state of mind. Mr. Allen was laughing and joking airily with Mr. Cooke and the guests, denying, but not resenting, their accusations with all the sang froid of a hardened criminal. He did not care particularly to go to Canada, he said. Why should he, when he was innocent? But, if Mr. Cooke insisted, he would enjoy seeing that part of the lake and the Canadian side. Afterwards I perceived Miss Thorn down by the brookside, washing dishes. Her sleeves were drawn back to the elbow, and a dainty white apron covered her blue skirt, while the wind from the lake had disentangled errant wisps of her hair. I stood on the brink above, secure, as I thought, from observation, when she chanced to look up and spied me. "Mr. Crocker," she called, "would you like to make yourself useful?" I was decidedly embarrassed. Her manner was as frank and unconstrained as though I had not been shunning her for weeks past. "If such a thing is possible," I replied. "Do you know a dish-cloth when you see one?" I was doubtful. But I procured the cloth from Miss Trevor and returned. There was an air about Miss Thorn that was new to me. "What an uncompromising man you are, Mr. Crocker," she said to me. "Once a person is unfortunate enough to come under the ban of your disapproval you have nothing whatever to do with them. Now it seems that I have given you offence in some way. Is it not so?" "You magnify my importance," I said. "No temporizing, Mr. Crocker," she went on, as though she meant to be obeyed; "sit down there, and let's have it out. I like you too well to quarrel with you." There was no resisting such a command, and I threw myself on the pebbles at her feet. "I thought we were going to be great friends," she said. "You and Mr. Farrar were so kind to me on the night of my arrival, and we had such fun watching the dance together." "I confess I thought so, too. But you expressed opinions then that I shared. You have since changed your mind, for some unaccountable reason." She paused in her polishing, a shining dish in her hand, and looked down at me with something between a laugh and a frown. "I suppose you have never regretted speaking hastily," she said. "Many a time," I returned, warming; "but if I ever thought a judgment measured and distilled, it was your judgment of the Celebrity." "Does the study of law eliminate humanity?" she asked, with a mock curtsey. "The deliberate sentences are sometimes the unjust ones, and men who are hung by weighed wisdom are often the innocent." "That is all very well in cases of doubt. But here you have the evidences of wrong-doing directly before you." Three dishes were taken up, dried, and put down before she answered me. I threw pebbles into the brook, and wished I had held my tongue. "What evidence?" inquired she. "Well," said I, "I must finish, I suppose. I had a notion you knew of what I inferred. First, let me say that I have no desire to prejudice you against a person whom you admire." "Impossible." Something in her tone made me look up. "Very good, then," I answered. "I, for one, can have no use for a man who devotes himself to a girl long enough to win her affections, and then deserts her with as little compunction as a dog does a rat it has shaken. And that is how your Celebrity treated Miss Trevor." "But Miss Trevor has recovered, I believe," said Miss Thorn. I began to feel a deep, but helpless, insecurity. "Happily, yes," I assented. "Thanks to an excellent physician." A smile twitched the corners of her mouth, as though she enjoyed my discomfiture. I remarked for the fiftieth time how strong her face was, with its generous lines and clearly moulded features. And a suspicion entered my soul. "At any rate," I said, with a laugh, "the Celebrity has got himself into no end of a predicament now. He may go back to New York in custody." "I thought you incapable of resentment, Mr. Crocker. How mean of you to deny him!" "It can do no harm," I answered; "a little lesson in the dangers of incognito may be salutary. I wish it were a little lesson in the dangers of something else." The color mounted to her face as she resumed her occupation. "I am afraid you are a very wicked man," she said. Before I could reply there came a scuffling sound from the bank above us, and the snapping of branches and twigs. It was Mr. Cooke. His descent, the personal conduction of which he lost half-way down, was irregular and spasmodic, and a rude concussion at the bottom knocked off a choice bit of profanity which was balanced on the tip of his tongue. "Tobogganing is a little out of season," said his niece, laughing heartily. Mr. Cooke brushed himself off, picked up the glasses which he had dropped in his flight and pushed them into my hands. Then he pointed lakeward with bulging eyes. "Crocker, old man," he said in a loud whisper, "they tell me that is an Asquith cat-boat." I followed his finger and saw for the first time a sail-boat headed for the island, then about two miles off shore. I raised the glasses. "Yes," I said, "the Scimitar." "That's what Farrar said," cried he. "And what about it?" I asked. "What about it?" he ejaculated. "Why, it's a detective come for Allen. I knew sure as hell if they got as far as Asquith they wouldn't stop there. And that's the fastest sail-boat he could hire there, isn't it?" I replied that it was. He seized me by the shoulder and began dragging me up the bank. "What are you going to do?" I cried, shaking myself loose. "We've got to get on the Maria and run for it," he panted. "There is no time to be lost." He had reached the top of the bank and was running towards the group at the tents. And he actually infused me with some of his red-hot enthusiasm, for I hastened after him. "But you can't begin to get the Maria out before they will be in here," I shouted. He stopped short, gazed at the approaching boat, and then at me. "Is that so?" "Yes, of course," said I, "they will be here in ten minutes." The Celebrity stood in the midst of the excited Four. His hair was parted precisely, and he had induced a monocle to remain in his eye long enough to examine the Scimitar, his nose at the critical elevation. This unruffled exterior made a deep impression on the Four. Was the Celebrity not undergoing the crucial test of a true sport? He was an example alike to criminals and philosophers. Mr. Cooke hurried into the group, which divided respectfully for him, and grasped the Celebrity by the hand. "Something else has got to be done, old man," he said, in a voice which shook with emotion; "they'll be on us before we can get the Maria out." Farrar, who was nailing a rustic bench near by, straightened up at this, his lip curling with a desire to laugh. The Celebrity laid his hand on my client's shoulder. "Cooke," said he, "I'm deeply grateful for all the trouble you wish to take, and for the solicitude you have shown. But let things be. I'll come out of it all right." "Never," cried Cooke, looking proudly around the Four as some Highland chief might have surveyed a faithful clan. "I'd a damned sight rather go to jail myself." "A damned sight," echoed the Four in unison. "I insist, Cooke," said the Celebrity, taking out his eyeglass and tapping Mr. Cooke's purple necktie, "I insist that you drop this business. I repeat my thanks to you and these gentlemen for the friendship they have shown, but say again that I am as innocent of this crime as a baby." Mr. Cooke paid no attention to this speech. His face became radiant. "Didn't any of you fellows strike a cave, or a hollow tree, or something of that sort, knocking around this morning?" One man slapped his knee. "The very place," he cried. "I fell into it," and he showed a rent in his trousers corroboratively. "It's big enough to hold twenty of Allen, and the detective doesn't live that could find it." "Hustle him off, quick," said Mr. Cooke. The mandate was obeyed as literally as though Robin Hood himself had given it. The Celebrity disappeared into the forest, carried rather than urged towards his destined place of confinement. The commotion had brought Mr. Trevor to the spot. He caught sight of the Celebrity's back between the trees, then he looked at the cat-boat entering the cove, a man in the stern preparing to pull in the tender. He intercepted Mr. Cooke on his way to the beach. "What have you done with Mr. Allen?" he asked, in a menacing voice. "Good God," said Mr. Cooke, whose contempt for Mr. Trevor was now infinite, "you talk as if I were the governor of the state. What the devil could I do with him?" "I will have no evasion," replied Mr. Trevor, taking an imposing posture in front of him. "You are trying to defeat the ends of justice by assisting a dangerous criminal to escape. I have warned you, sir, and warn you again of the consequences of your meditated crime, and I give you my word I will do all in my power to frustrate it." Mr. Cooke dug his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. Here was a complication he had not looked for. The Scimitar lay at anchor with her sail down, and two men were coming ashore in the tender. Mr. Cooke's attitude being that of a man who reconsiders a rash resolve, Mr. Trevor was emboldened to say in a moderated tone: "You were carried away by your generosity, Mr. Cooke. I was sure when you took time to think you would see it in another light." Mr. Cooke started off for the place where the boat had grounded. I did not catch his reply, and probably should not have written it here if I had. The senator looked as if he had been sand-bagged. The two men jumped out of the boat and hauled it up. Mr. Cooke waved an easy salute to one, whom I recognized as the big boatman from Asquith, familiarly known as Captain Jay. He owned the Scimitar and several smaller boats. The captain went through the pantomime of an introduction between Mr. Cooke and the other, whom my client shook warmly by the hand, and presently all three came towards us. Mr. Cooke led them to a bar he had improvised by the brook. A pool served the office of refrigerator, and Mr. Cooke had devised an ingenious but complicated arrangement of strings and labels which enabled him to extract any bottle or set of bottles without having to bare his arm and pull out the lot. Farrar and I responded to the call he had given, and went down to assist in the entertainment. My client, with his back to us, was busy manipulating the strings. "Gentlemen," he said, "let me make you acquainted with Mr. Drew. You all know the captain." Had I not suspected Mr. Drew's profession, I think I should not have remarked that he gave each of us a keen look as he raised his head. He had reddish-brown hair, and a pair of bushy red whiskers, each of which tapered to a long point. He was broad in the shoulders, and the clothes he wore rather enhanced this breadth. His suit was gray and almost new, the trousers perceptibly bagging at the knee, and he had a felt hat, a necktie of the white and flowery pattern, and square-toed "Congress" boots. In short, he was a decidedly ordinary looking person; you would meet a hundred like him in the streets of Far Harbor and Beaverton. He might have been a prosperous business man in either of those towns,--a comfortable lumber merchant or mine owner. And he had chosen just the get-up I should have picked for detective work in that region. He had a pleasant eye and a very fetching and hearty manner. But his long whiskers troubled me especially. I kept wondering if they were real. "The captain is sailing Mr. Drew over to Far Harbor," explained Mr. Cooke, "and they have put in here for the night." Mr. Drew was plainly not an amateur, for he volunteered nothing further than this. The necessary bottles having been produced, Mr. Cooke held up his glass and turned to the stranger. "Welcome to our party, old man," said he. Mr. Drew drained his glass and complimented Mr. Cooke on the brand,--a sure key to my client's heart. Whereupon he seated himself between Mr. Drew and the captain and began a discourse on the subject of his own cellar, on which he talked for nearly an hour. His only pauses were for the worthy purpose of filling the detective's or the captain's glass, and these he watched with a hospitable solicitude. The captain had the advantage, three to one, and I made no doubt his employer bitterly regretted not having a boatman whose principles were more strict. At the end of the hour Captain Jay, who by nature was inclined to be taciturn and crabbed, waxed loquacious and even jovial. He sang us the songs he had learned in the winter lumber-camps, which Mr. Cooke never failed to encore to the echo. My client vowed he had not spent a pleasanter afternoon for years. He plied the captain with cigars, and explained to him the mystery of the strings and labels; and the captain experimented until he had broken some of the bottles. Mr. Cooke was not a person who made any great distinction between the three degrees, acquaintance, friendship, and intimacy. When a stranger pleased him, he went from one to the other with such comparative ease that a hardhearted man, and no other, could have resented his advances. Mr. Drew was anything but a hard-hearted man, and he did not object to my client's familiarity. Mr. Cooke made no secret of his admiration for Mr. Drew, and there were just two things about him that Mr. Cooke admired and wondered at, above all else,--the bushy red whiskers. But it appeared that these were the only things that Mr. Drew was really touchy about. I noticed that the detective, without being impolite, did his best to discourage these remarks; but my client knew no such word as discouragement. He was continually saying: "I think I'll grow some like that, old man," or "Have those cut," and the like,--a kind of humor in which the captain took an incredible delight. And finally, when a certain pitch of good feeling had been arrived at, Mr.

old

How many times the word 'old' appears in the text?

you happen to have any handcuffs on the Maria?" But my client was pouring out a stiff helping from the decanter, which he still held in his hand. Then he approached the Celebrity. "Don't let it worry you, old man," said he, with intense earnestness. "Don't let it worry you. You're my guest, and I'll see you safe out of it, or bust." "Fenelon," said Mrs. Cooke, gravely, "do you realize what you are saying?" "You're a clever one, Allen," my client continued, and he backed away the better to look him over; "you had nerve to stay as long as you did." The Celebrity laughed confidently. "Cooke," he replied, "I appreciate your generosity,--I really do. I know no offence is meant. The mistake is, in fact, most pardonable." In Mr. Cooke amazement and admiration were clamoring for utterance. "Damn me," he sputtered, "if you're not the coolest embezzler I ever saw." The Celebrity laughed again. Then he surveyed the circle. "My friends," he said, "this is certainly a most amazing coincidence; one which, I assure you, surprises me no less than it does you. You have no doubt remarked that I have my peculiarities. We all have. "I flatter thyself I am not entirely unknown. And the annoyances imposed upon me by a certain fame I have achieved had become such that some months ago I began to crave the pleasures of the life of a private man. I determined to go to some sequestered resort where my face was unfamiliar. The possibility of being recognized at Asquith did not occur to me. Fortunately I was. And a singular chance led me to take the name of the man who has committed this crime, and who has the misfortune to resemble me. I suppose that now," he added impressively, "I shall have to tell you who I am." He paused until these words should have gained their full effect. Then he held up the edition de luxe from which he and Miss Thorn had been reading. "You may have heard, Mrs. Cooke," said he, addressing himself to our hostess, "you may perhaps have heard of the author of this book." Mrs. Cooke was a calm woman, and she read the name on the cover. "Yes," she said, "I have. And you claim to be he?" "Ask my friend Crocker here," he answered carelessly, no doubt exulting that the scene was going off so dramatically. "I should indeed be in a tight box," he went on, "if there were not friends of mine here to help me out." They turned to me. "I am afraid I cannot," I said with what soberness I could. "What!" says he with a start. "What! you deny me?" Miss Trevor had her tongue in her cheek. I bowed. "I am powerless to speak, Mr. Allen," I replied. During this colloquy my client stood between us, looking from one to the other. I well knew that his way of thinking would be with my testimony, and that the gilt name on the edition de luxe had done little towards convincing him of Mr. Allen's innocence. To his mind there was nothing horrible or incongruous in the idea that a well-known author should be a defaulter. It was perfectly possible. He shoved the glass of Scotch towards the Celebrity, with a smile. "Take this, old man," he kindly insisted, "and you'll feel better. What's the use of bucking when you're saddled with a thing like that?" And he pointed to the paper. "Besides, they haven't caught you yet, by a damned sight." The Celebrity waved aside the proffered tumbler. "This is an infamous charge, and you know it, Crocker," he cried. "If you don't, you ought to, as a lawyer. This isn't any time to have fun with a fellow." "My dear sir," I said, "I have charged you with nothing whatever." He turned his back on me in complete disgust. And he came face to face with Miss Trevor. "Miss Trevor, too, knows something of me," he said. "You forget, Mr. Allen," she answered sweetly, "you forget that I have given you my promise not to reveal what I know." The Celebrity chafed, for this was as damaging a statement as could well be uttered against him. But Miss Thorn was his trump card, and she now came forward. "This is ridiculous, Mr. Crocker, simply ridiculous," said she. "I agree with you most heartily, Miss Thorn," I replied. "Nonsense!" exclaimed Miss Thorn, and she drew her lips together, "pure nonsense!" "Nonsense or not, Marian," Mr. Cooke interposed, "we are wasting valuable time. The police are already on the scent, I'll bet my hat." "Fenelon!" Mrs. Cooke remonstrated. "And do you mean to say in soberness, Uncle Fenelon, that you believe the author of The Sybarites to be a defaulter?" said Miss Thorn. "It is indeed hard to believe Mr. Allen a criminal," Mr. Trevor broke in for the first time. "I think it only right that he should be allowed to clear himself before he is put to further inconvenience, and perhaps injustice, by any action we may take in the matter." Mr. Cooke sniffed suspiciously at the word "action." "What action do you mean?" he demanded. "Well," replied Mr. Trevor, with some hesitation, "before we take any steps, that is, notify the police." "Notify the police!" cried my client, his face red with a generous anger. "I have never yet turned a guest over to the police," he said proudly, "and won't, not if I know it. I'm not that kind." Who shall criticise Mr. Cooke's code of morality? "Fenelon," said his wife, "you must remember you have never yet entertained a guest of a larcenous character. No embezzlers up to the present. Marian," she continued, turning to Miss Thorn, "you spoke as if you might, be able to throw some light upon this matter. Do you know whether this gentleman is Charles Wrexell Allen, or whether he is the author? In short, do you know who he is?" The Celebrity lighted a cigarette. Miss Thorn said indignantly, "Upon my word, Aunt Maria, I thought that you, at least, would know better than to credit this silly accusation. He has been a guest at your house, and I am astonished that you should doubt his word." Mrs. Cooke looked at her niece perplexedly. "You must remember, Marian," she said gently, "that I know nothing about him, where he came from, or who he is. Nor does any one at Asquith, except perhaps Miss Trevor, by her own confession. And you do not seem inclined to tell what you know, if indeed you know anything." Upon this Miss Thorn became more indignant still, and Mrs. Cooke went on "Gentlemen, as a rule, do not assume names, especially other people's. They are usually proud of their own. Mr. Allen appears among us, from the clouds, as it were, and in due time we learn from a newspaper that he has committed a defalcation. And, furthermore, the paper contains a portrait and an accurate description which put the thing beyond doubt. I ask you, is it reasonable for him to state coolly after all this that he is another man? That he is a well-known author? It's an absurdity. I was not born yesterday, my dear." "It is most reasonable under the circumstances," replied Miss Thorn, warmly. "Extraordinary? Of course it's extraordinary. And too long to explain to a prejudiced audience, who can't be expected to comprehend the character of a genius, to understand the yearning of a famous man for a little quiet." Mrs. Cooke looked grave. "Marian, you forget yourself," she said. "Oh, I am tired of it, Aunt Maria," cried Miss Thorn; "if he takes my advice, he will refuse to discuss it farther." She did not seem to be aware that she had put forth no argument whatever, save a woman's argument. And I was intensely surprised that her indignation should have got the better of her in this way, having always supposed her clear-headed in the extreme. A few words from her, such as I supposed she would have spoken, had set the Celebrity right with all except Mr. Cooke. To me it was a clear proof that the Celebrity had turned her head, and her mind with it. The silence was broken by an uncontrollable burst of laughter from Miss Trevor. She was quickly frowned down by her father, who reminded her that this was not a comedy. "And, Mr. Allen," he said, "if you have anything to say, or any evidence to bring forward, now is the time to do it." He appeared to forget that I was the district attorney. The Celebrity had seated himself on the trunk of a tree, and was blowing out the smoke in clouds. He was inclined to take Miss Thorn's advice, for he made a gesture of weariness with his cigarette, in the use of which he was singularly eloquent. "Tell me, Mr. Trevor," said he, "why I should sit before you as a tribunal? Why I should take the trouble to clear myself of a senseless charge? My respect for you inclines me to the belief that you are laboring under a momentary excitement; for when you reflect that I am a prominent, not to say famous, author, you will realize how absurd it is that I should be an embezzler, and why I decline to lower myself by an explanation." Mr. Trevor picked up the paper and struck it. "Do you refuse to say anything in the face of such evidence as that?" he cried. "It is not a matter for refusal, Mr. Trevor. It is simply that I cannot admit the possibility of having committed the crime." "Well, sir," said the senator, his black necktie working out of place as his anger got the better of him, "I am to believe, then, because you claim to be the author of a few society novels, that you are infallible? Let me tell you that the President of the United States himself is liable to impeachment, and bound to disprove any charge he may be accused of. What in Halifax do I care for your divine-right-of-authors theory? I'll continue to think you guilty until you are shown to be innocent." Suddenly the full significance of the Celebrity's tactics struck Mr. Cooke, and he reached out and caught hold of Mr. Trevor's coattails. "Hold on, old man," said he; "Allen isn't going to be ass enough to own up to it. Don't you see we'd all be jugged and fined for assisting a criminal over the border? It's out of consideration for us." Mr. Trevor looked sternly over his shoulder at Mr. Cooke. "Do you mean to say, sir, seriously," he asked, "that, for the sake of a misplaced friendship for this man, and a misplaced sense of honor, you are bound to shield a guest, though a criminal? That you intend to assist him to escape from justice? I insist, for my own protection and that of my daughter, as well as for that of the others present that, since he refuses to speak, we must presume him guilty and turn him over." Mr. Trevor turned to Mrs. Cooke, as if relying on her support. "Fenelon," said she, "I have never sought to influence your actions when your friends were concerned, and I shall not begin now. All I ask of you is to consider the consequences of your intention." These words from Mrs. Cooke had much more weight with my client than Mr. Trevor's blustering demands. "Maria, my dear," he said, with a deferential urbanity, "Mr. Allen is my guest, and a gentleman. When a gentleman gives his word that he is not a criminal, it is sufficient." The force of this, for some reason, did not overwhelm his wife; and her lip curled a little, half in contempt, half in risibility. "Pshaw, Fenelon," said she, "what a fraud you are. Why is it you wish to get Mr. Allen over the border, then?" A question which might well have staggered a worthier intellect. "Why, my dear," answered my client, "I wish to save Mr. Allen the inconvenience, not to say the humiliation, of being brought East in custody and strapped with a pair of handcuffs. Let him take a shooting trip to the great Northwest until the real criminal is caught." "Well, Fenelon," replied Mrs. Cooke, unable to repress a smile, "one might as well try to argue with a turn-stile or a weather-vane. I wash my hands of it." But Mr. Trevor, who was both a self-made man and a Western politician, was far from being satisfied. He turned to me with a sweep of the arm he had doubtless learned in the Ohio State Senate. "Mr. Crocker," he cried, "are you, as attorney of this district, going to aid and abet in the escape of a fugitive from justice?" "Mr. Trevor," said I, "I will take the course in this matter which seems fit to me, and without advice from any one." He wheeled on Farrar, repeated the question, and got a like answer. Brought to bay for a time, he glared savagely around him while groping for further arguments. But at this point the Four appeared on the scene, much the worse for thickets, and clamoring for luncheon. They had five small fish between them which they wanted Miss Thorn to cook. CHAPTER XII The Four received Mr. Cooke's plan for the Celebrity's escape to Canada with enthusiastic acclamation, and as the one thing lacking to make the Bear Island trip a complete success. The Celebrity was hailed with the reverence due to the man who puts up the ring-money in a prize-fight. He was accorded, too, a certain amount of respect as a defaulter, which the Four would have denied him as an author, for I am inclined to the belief that the discovery of his literary profession would have lowered him rather than otherwise in their eyes. My client was naturally anxious to get under way at once for the Canadian border, but was overruled in this by his henchmen, who demanded something to eat. We sat down to an impromptu meal, which was an odd affair indeed. Mrs. Cooke maintained her usual serenity, but said little, while Miss Trevor and I had many a mirthful encounter at the thought of the turn matters had taken. At the other end of the cloth were Mr. Cooke and the Four, in wonderful spirits and unimpaired appetite, and in their midst sat the Celebrity, likewise in wonderful spirits. His behavior now and again elicited a loud grunt of disapproval from Mr. Trevor, who was plying his knife and fork in a manner emblematic of his state of mind. Mr. Allen was laughing and joking airily with Mr. Cooke and the guests, denying, but not resenting, their accusations with all the sang froid of a hardened criminal. He did not care particularly to go to Canada, he said. Why should he, when he was innocent? But, if Mr. Cooke insisted, he would enjoy seeing that part of the lake and the Canadian side. Afterwards I perceived Miss Thorn down by the brookside, washing dishes. Her sleeves were drawn back to the elbow, and a dainty white apron covered her blue skirt, while the wind from the lake had disentangled errant wisps of her hair. I stood on the brink above, secure, as I thought, from observation, when she chanced to look up and spied me. "Mr. Crocker," she called, "would you like to make yourself useful?" I was decidedly embarrassed. Her manner was as frank and unconstrained as though I had not been shunning her for weeks past. "If such a thing is possible," I replied. "Do you know a dish-cloth when you see one?" I was doubtful. But I procured the cloth from Miss Trevor and returned. There was an air about Miss Thorn that was new to me. "What an uncompromising man you are, Mr. Crocker," she said to me. "Once a person is unfortunate enough to come under the ban of your disapproval you have nothing whatever to do with them. Now it seems that I have given you offence in some way. Is it not so?" "You magnify my importance," I said. "No temporizing, Mr. Crocker," she went on, as though she meant to be obeyed; "sit down there, and let's have it out. I like you too well to quarrel with you." There was no resisting such a command, and I threw myself on the pebbles at her feet. "I thought we were going to be great friends," she said. "You and Mr. Farrar were so kind to me on the night of my arrival, and we had such fun watching the dance together." "I confess I thought so, too. But you expressed opinions then that I shared. You have since changed your mind, for some unaccountable reason." She paused in her polishing, a shining dish in her hand, and looked down at me with something between a laugh and a frown. "I suppose you have never regretted speaking hastily," she said. "Many a time," I returned, warming; "but if I ever thought a judgment measured and distilled, it was your judgment of the Celebrity." "Does the study of law eliminate humanity?" she asked, with a mock curtsey. "The deliberate sentences are sometimes the unjust ones, and men who are hung by weighed wisdom are often the innocent." "That is all very well in cases of doubt. But here you have the evidences of wrong-doing directly before you." Three dishes were taken up, dried, and put down before she answered me. I threw pebbles into the brook, and wished I had held my tongue. "What evidence?" inquired she. "Well," said I, "I must finish, I suppose. I had a notion you knew of what I inferred. First, let me say that I have no desire to prejudice you against a person whom you admire." "Impossible." Something in her tone made me look up. "Very good, then," I answered. "I, for one, can have no use for a man who devotes himself to a girl long enough to win her affections, and then deserts her with as little compunction as a dog does a rat it has shaken. And that is how your Celebrity treated Miss Trevor." "But Miss Trevor has recovered, I believe," said Miss Thorn. I began to feel a deep, but helpless, insecurity. "Happily, yes," I assented. "Thanks to an excellent physician." A smile twitched the corners of her mouth, as though she enjoyed my discomfiture. I remarked for the fiftieth time how strong her face was, with its generous lines and clearly moulded features. And a suspicion entered my soul. "At any rate," I said, with a laugh, "the Celebrity has got himself into no end of a predicament now. He may go back to New York in custody." "I thought you incapable of resentment, Mr. Crocker. How mean of you to deny him!" "It can do no harm," I answered; "a little lesson in the dangers of incognito may be salutary. I wish it were a little lesson in the dangers of something else." The color mounted to her face as she resumed her occupation. "I am afraid you are a very wicked man," she said. Before I could reply there came a scuffling sound from the bank above us, and the snapping of branches and twigs. It was Mr. Cooke. His descent, the personal conduction of which he lost half-way down, was irregular and spasmodic, and a rude concussion at the bottom knocked off a choice bit of profanity which was balanced on the tip of his tongue. "Tobogganing is a little out of season," said his niece, laughing heartily. Mr. Cooke brushed himself off, picked up the glasses which he had dropped in his flight and pushed them into my hands. Then he pointed lakeward with bulging eyes. "Crocker, old man," he said in a loud whisper, "they tell me that is an Asquith cat-boat." I followed his finger and saw for the first time a sail-boat headed for the island, then about two miles off shore. I raised the glasses. "Yes," I said, "the Scimitar." "That's what Farrar said," cried he. "And what about it?" I asked. "What about it?" he ejaculated. "Why, it's a detective come for Allen. I knew sure as hell if they got as far as Asquith they wouldn't stop there. And that's the fastest sail-boat he could hire there, isn't it?" I replied that it was. He seized me by the shoulder and began dragging me up the bank. "What are you going to do?" I cried, shaking myself loose. "We've got to get on the Maria and run for it," he panted. "There is no time to be lost." He had reached the top of the bank and was running towards the group at the tents. And he actually infused me with some of his red-hot enthusiasm, for I hastened after him. "But you can't begin to get the Maria out before they will be in here," I shouted. He stopped short, gazed at the approaching boat, and then at me. "Is that so?" "Yes, of course," said I, "they will be here in ten minutes." The Celebrity stood in the midst of the excited Four. His hair was parted precisely, and he had induced a monocle to remain in his eye long enough to examine the Scimitar, his nose at the critical elevation. This unruffled exterior made a deep impression on the Four. Was the Celebrity not undergoing the crucial test of a true sport? He was an example alike to criminals and philosophers. Mr. Cooke hurried into the group, which divided respectfully for him, and grasped the Celebrity by the hand. "Something else has got to be done, old man," he said, in a voice which shook with emotion; "they'll be on us before we can get the Maria out." Farrar, who was nailing a rustic bench near by, straightened up at this, his lip curling with a desire to laugh. The Celebrity laid his hand on my client's shoulder. "Cooke," said he, "I'm deeply grateful for all the trouble you wish to take, and for the solicitude you have shown. But let things be. I'll come out of it all right." "Never," cried Cooke, looking proudly around the Four as some Highland chief might have surveyed a faithful clan. "I'd a damned sight rather go to jail myself." "A damned sight," echoed the Four in unison. "I insist, Cooke," said the Celebrity, taking out his eyeglass and tapping Mr. Cooke's purple necktie, "I insist that you drop this business. I repeat my thanks to you and these gentlemen for the friendship they have shown, but say again that I am as innocent of this crime as a baby." Mr. Cooke paid no attention to this speech. His face became radiant. "Didn't any of you fellows strike a cave, or a hollow tree, or something of that sort, knocking around this morning?" One man slapped his knee. "The very place," he cried. "I fell into it," and he showed a rent in his trousers corroboratively. "It's big enough to hold twenty of Allen, and the detective doesn't live that could find it." "Hustle him off, quick," said Mr. Cooke. The mandate was obeyed as literally as though Robin Hood himself had given it. The Celebrity disappeared into the forest, carried rather than urged towards his destined place of confinement. The commotion had brought Mr. Trevor to the spot. He caught sight of the Celebrity's back between the trees, then he looked at the cat-boat entering the cove, a man in the stern preparing to pull in the tender. He intercepted Mr. Cooke on his way to the beach. "What have you done with Mr. Allen?" he asked, in a menacing voice. "Good God," said Mr. Cooke, whose contempt for Mr. Trevor was now infinite, "you talk as if I were the governor of the state. What the devil could I do with him?" "I will have no evasion," replied Mr. Trevor, taking an imposing posture in front of him. "You are trying to defeat the ends of justice by assisting a dangerous criminal to escape. I have warned you, sir, and warn you again of the consequences of your meditated crime, and I give you my word I will do all in my power to frustrate it." Mr. Cooke dug his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. Here was a complication he had not looked for. The Scimitar lay at anchor with her sail down, and two men were coming ashore in the tender. Mr. Cooke's attitude being that of a man who reconsiders a rash resolve, Mr. Trevor was emboldened to say in a moderated tone: "You were carried away by your generosity, Mr. Cooke. I was sure when you took time to think you would see it in another light." Mr. Cooke started off for the place where the boat had grounded. I did not catch his reply, and probably should not have written it here if I had. The senator looked as if he had been sand-bagged. The two men jumped out of the boat and hauled it up. Mr. Cooke waved an easy salute to one, whom I recognized as the big boatman from Asquith, familiarly known as Captain Jay. He owned the Scimitar and several smaller boats. The captain went through the pantomime of an introduction between Mr. Cooke and the other, whom my client shook warmly by the hand, and presently all three came towards us. Mr. Cooke led them to a bar he had improvised by the brook. A pool served the office of refrigerator, and Mr. Cooke had devised an ingenious but complicated arrangement of strings and labels which enabled him to extract any bottle or set of bottles without having to bare his arm and pull out the lot. Farrar and I responded to the call he had given, and went down to assist in the entertainment. My client, with his back to us, was busy manipulating the strings. "Gentlemen," he said, "let me make you acquainted with Mr. Drew. You all know the captain." Had I not suspected Mr. Drew's profession, I think I should not have remarked that he gave each of us a keen look as he raised his head. He had reddish-brown hair, and a pair of bushy red whiskers, each of which tapered to a long point. He was broad in the shoulders, and the clothes he wore rather enhanced this breadth. His suit was gray and almost new, the trousers perceptibly bagging at the knee, and he had a felt hat, a necktie of the white and flowery pattern, and square-toed "Congress" boots. In short, he was a decidedly ordinary looking person; you would meet a hundred like him in the streets of Far Harbor and Beaverton. He might have been a prosperous business man in either of those towns,--a comfortable lumber merchant or mine owner. And he had chosen just the get-up I should have picked for detective work in that region. He had a pleasant eye and a very fetching and hearty manner. But his long whiskers troubled me especially. I kept wondering if they were real. "The captain is sailing Mr. Drew over to Far Harbor," explained Mr. Cooke, "and they have put in here for the night." Mr. Drew was plainly not an amateur, for he volunteered nothing further than this. The necessary bottles having been produced, Mr. Cooke held up his glass and turned to the stranger. "Welcome to our party, old man," said he. Mr. Drew drained his glass and complimented Mr. Cooke on the brand,--a sure key to my client's heart. Whereupon he seated himself between Mr. Drew and the captain and began a discourse on the subject of his own cellar, on which he talked for nearly an hour. His only pauses were for the worthy purpose of filling the detective's or the captain's glass, and these he watched with a hospitable solicitude. The captain had the advantage, three to one, and I made no doubt his employer bitterly regretted not having a boatman whose principles were more strict. At the end of the hour Captain Jay, who by nature was inclined to be taciturn and crabbed, waxed loquacious and even jovial. He sang us the songs he had learned in the winter lumber-camps, which Mr. Cooke never failed to encore to the echo. My client vowed he had not spent a pleasanter afternoon for years. He plied the captain with cigars, and explained to him the mystery of the strings and labels; and the captain experimented until he had broken some of the bottles. Mr. Cooke was not a person who made any great distinction between the three degrees, acquaintance, friendship, and intimacy. When a stranger pleased him, he went from one to the other with such comparative ease that a hardhearted man, and no other, could have resented his advances. Mr. Drew was anything but a hard-hearted man, and he did not object to my client's familiarity. Mr. Cooke made no secret of his admiration for Mr. Drew, and there were just two things about him that Mr. Cooke admired and wondered at, above all else,--the bushy red whiskers. But it appeared that these were the only things that Mr. Drew was really touchy about. I noticed that the detective, without being impolite, did his best to discourage these remarks; but my client knew no such word as discouragement. He was continually saying: "I think I'll grow some like that, old man," or "Have those cut," and the like,--a kind of humor in which the captain took an incredible delight. And finally, when a certain pitch of good feeling had been arrived at, Mr.

admit

How many times the word 'admit' appears in the text?

you must know that this made the fifth or sixth time that the worthy Baron had started the animal in question, but never once had he been able to get within gun-shot of him or to run him down. Yes, Marcotte went on, but the damned beast has employed himself so well all night crossing his track and doubling, that after having traced him over half the forest, I found myself at the place from which I started. You think then, Marcotte, that there is no chance of getting near him. I am afraid not. By all the devils in hell! exclaimed the Lord of Vez, who had not had his equal in swearing since the mighty Nimrod, however, I am not feeling well to-day, and I must have a burst of some kind, to get rid of these bad humours. What do you think we can hunt, Marcotte, in place of this damned black wolf? Well, having been so taken up with the wolf, answered Marcotte, I have not traced any other animal. Will my Lord uncouple at random and hunt the first animal that we come across? The Baron was about to express his willingness to agree to this proposal when he caught sight of little Engoulevent coming towards them cap in hand. Wait a moment, he said, here comes Engoulevent, who, I fancy, has some advice to give us. I have no advice to give to a noble Lord like yourself, replied Engoulevent, assuming an expression of humility on his sly and crafty face; it is, however, my duty to inform you that there is a splendid buck in the neighbourhood. Let us see your buck, Engoulevent, replied the chief wolf-hunter, and if you are not mistaken about it, there will be a new crown for you. Where is this buck of yours? asked Marcotte, but look to your skin, if you make us uncouple to no purpose. Let me have Matador and Jupiter, and then we shall see. Matador and Jupiter were the finest among the hounds belonging to the Lord of Vez. And indeed, Engoulevent had not gone a hundred paces with them through the thicket, before, by the lashing of their tails, and their repeated yelping, he knew that they were on the right scent. In another minute or two a magnificent ten-tined stag came into view. Marcotte cried Tally-ho, sounded his horn, and the hunt began, to the great satisfaction of the Lord of Vez, who, although regretting the black wolf, was willing to make the best of a fine buck in its stead. The hunt had lasted two hours, and the quarry still held on. It had first led its pursuers from the little wood of Haramont to the Chemin du Pendu, and thence straight to the back of Oigny, and it still showed no sign of fatigue; for it was not one of those poor animals of the flat country who get their tails pulled by every wretched terrier. As it neared the low grounds of Bourg-fontaine, however, it evidently decided that it was being run rather hard, for it gave up the bolder measures which had hitherto enabled it to keep ahead, and began to double. Its first man uvre was to go down to the brook which joins the ponds of Baisemont and Bourg, then to walk against stream with the water up to its haunches, for nearly half a mile; it then sprang on to the right bank, back again into the bed of the stream, made another leap to the left, and with a succession of bounds, as vigorous as its failing strength allowed, continued to out-distance its pursuers. But the dogs of my lord Baron were not animals to be put out by such trifles as these. Being both sagacious and well-bred, they, of their own accord, divided the task between themselves, half going up stream, and half down, these hunting on the right those on the left, and so effectually that they ere long put the animal off its changes, for they soon recovered the scent, rallying at the first cry given by one of the pack, and starting afresh on the chase, as ready and eager as if the deer had been only twenty paces in front of them. And so with galloping of horses, with cry of hounds and blare of horn, the Baron and his huntsmen reached the ponds of Saint Antoine, a hundred paces or so from the Confines of Oigny. Between these and the Osier-beds stood the hut of Thibault, the sabot-maker. We must pause to give some description of this Thibault, the shoe-maker, the real hero of the tale. You will ask why I, who have summoned kings to appear upon the stage, who have obliged princes, dukes, and barons to play secondary parts in my romances, should take a simple shoe-maker for the hero of this tale. First, I will reply by saying that, in my dear home country of Villers-Cotterets, there are more sabot-makers than barons, dukes and princes, and that, as soon as I decided to make the forest the scene of the events I am about to record, I was obliged to choose one of the actual inhabitants of this forest as hero, unless I had wished to represent such fantastic persons as the _Incas_ of Marmontel or the _Abencerrages_ of M. de Florian. More than that, it is not the author who decides on the subject, but the subject which takes possession of the author, and, good or bad, this particular subject has taken possession of me. I will therefore endeavour to draw Thibault s portrait for you, plain shoe-maker as he was, as exactly as the artist paints the portrait which a prince desires to send to his lady-love. Thibault was a man between twenty-five and twenty-seven years of age, tall, well made, physically robust, but by nature melancholy and sad of heart. This depression of spirits arose from a little grain of envy, which, in spite of himself, perhaps unconsciously to himself, he harboured towards all such of his neighbours as had been more favoured by fortune than himself. His father had committed a fault, a serious one at all times, but more especially in those days of absolutism, when a man was not able to rise above his station as now-a-days, when with sufficient capacity he may attain to any rank. Thibault had been educated above his position; he had been at school under the Abb Fortier, at Villers-Cotterets, and had learnt to read, write, and cypher; moreover he knew a little Latin, which made him inordinately proud of himself. Thibault had spent a great part of his time in reading, and his books had been chiefly those which were in vogue at the close of the preceding century. But he had not been a sufficiently clever analyst to know how to separate the good from the bad, or rather he _had_ separated what was bad, and swallowed it in large doses, leaving the good to precipitate itself at the bottom of the glass. At twenty years of age Thibault had certainly had dreams of being something other than a sabot-maker. He had, for instance, for a very little while, cast his eyes towards the army. But his comrades who had worn the double livery of king and country, had left the service as they entered it, mere soldiers of the ranks, having failed during five or six years of slavery to obtain promotion, even to the not very exalted grade of corporal. Thibault had also thought of becoming a sailor. But a career in the navy was as much forbidden to the plebeian as one in the army. Possibly after enduring danger, and storm and battle for fifteen or twenty years, he might be made a boatswain s mate, that was all, and then! besides, it was by no means Thibault s ambition to wear a short vest and sail-cloth trousers, but the blue uniform of the king with red vest and gold epaulettes. He had moreover known of no single case in which the son of a mere shoe-maker had become Master of a Frigate, or even Lieutenant. So he was forced to give up all idea of joining the King s Navy. Thibault would not have minded being a Notary, and at one time thought of apprenticing himself to the Royal Scrivener, Ma tre Niquet, as a stepping-stone, and of making his way up on the strength of his own legs and with the help of his pen. But supposing him to have risen to the position of head clerk with a salary of a hundred crowns, where was he to find the thirty thousand francs which would be required for the purchase of the smallest village practice. There was, therefore, no better chance of his becoming a scrivener than of becoming an officer on sea or land. Meanwhile, Thibault s father died, leaving very little ready money. There was about enough to bury him, so he was buried, and this done, there remained some thirty or forty francs over for Thibault. Thibault knew his trade well; indeed, he was a first-rate workman; but he had no inclination to handle either auger or parer. It ended, therefore, by his leaving all his father s tools in the care of a friend, a remnant of prudence still remaining to him, and selling every vestige of furniture; having thus realised a sum of five hundred and forty livres, he determined to make what was then called the tour of France. Thibault spent three years in travelling; he did not make his fortune during that time, but he learnt a great many things in the course of his journey of which he was previously ignorant, and acquired certain accomplishments which he had previously been without. He learned amongst other things that, although it was as well to keep one s word on matters of business with a man, it was no use whatever keeping love vows made to a woman. So much for his character and habits of mind. As to his external accomplishments, he could dance a jig beautifully, could hold his own at quarter-staff against four men, and could handle the boar-spear as cleverly as the best huntsman going. All these things had not a little served to increase Thibault s natural self-esteem, and, seeing himself handsomer, stronger, and cleverer than many of the nobles, he would exclaim against Providence, crying, Why was I not nobly born? why was not that nobleman yonder born a peasant? But as Providence took care not to make any answer to these apostroph s, and as Thibault found that dancing, playing at quarter-staff, and throwing the boar-spear only fatigued the body, without procuring him any material advantage, he began to turn his thoughts towards his ancient trade, humble though it was, saying to himself, if it enabled the father to live, it would also enable the son. So Thibault went and fetched away his tools; and then, tools in hand, he went to ask permission of the Steward of his Royal Highness Louis Philippe of Orleans, to build a hut in the forest, in which to carry on his trade. He had no difficulty in obtaining this, for the steward knew by experience that his master was a very kind-hearted man, expending as much as two hundred and forty thousand francs a year on the poor; he felt sure, therefore, that one who gave away a sum like this, would be willing to let an honest workman who wished to ply his trade, have thirty or forty feet of ground. As he had leave to establish himself in whatever part of the forest he liked best, Thibault chose the spot near the osier-beds, where the roads crossed, one of the most beautiful parts of the woods, less than a mile from Oigny and about three times that distance from Villers-Cotterets. The shoe-maker put up his work-shop, built partly of old planks given him by M. Panisis, who had been having a sale in the neighbourhood, and partly of the branches which the steward gave him leave to cut in the forest. When the building of the hut, which consisted of a bedroom, cosily shut in, where he could work during the winter, and of a lean-to, open to the air, where he could work in the summer, was completed, Thibault began to think of making himself a bed. At first, a layer of fern had to serve for this purpose; but after he had made a hundred pairs of wooden shoes and had sold these to Bedeau, who kept a general shop at Villers-Cotterets, he was able to pay a sufficient deposit to get a mattress, to be paid for in full by the end of three months. The framework of the bed was not difficult to make; Thibault was not the shoe-maker he was without being a bit of a carpenter into the bargain, and when this was finished he plaited osiers to take the place of sacking, laid the mattress upon them, and found himself at last with a bed to lie upon. Little by little came the sheets, and then in their turn the coverlids; the next purchase was a chafing-dish, and earthenware pots to cook in, and finally some plates and dishes. Before the year was out Thibault had also made additions to his furniture of a fine oak chest and a fine walnut-wood cupboard, both, like the bed, his own handiwork. All the while he was driving a brisk trade, for none could beat Thibault in turning a block of beech into a pair of shoes, and in converting the odd chips into spoons, salt-cellars and natty little bowls. He had now been settled in his work-shop for three years, that is, ever since his return after the completion of his tour round France, and there was nothing for which anyone could have reproached him during this interval except the failing we have already mentioned--that he was rather more envious of the good fortune of his neighbour than was altogether conducive to the welfare of his soul. But this feeling was as yet so inoffensive, that his confessor had no need to do more than awaken in him a sense of shame for harbouring thoughts which had, so far, not resulted in any active crime. CHAPTER II THE SEIGNEUR JEAN AND THE SABOT-MAKER As already said, the buck began to dodge and double on reaching Oigny, turning and twisting round Thibault s hut, and the weather being fine although the autumn was well advanced, the shoe-maker was sitting at his work in his open lean-to. Looking up, he suddenly espied the trembling animal, quivering in every limb, standing a few paces in front of him, gazing at him with intelligent and terrified eyes. Thibault had been for a long time aware that the hunt was circling around Oigny, at one time drawing near to the village, and then receding, only to draw near again. There was nothing therefore very surprising to him in the sight of the buck, yet he stayed his hand, although he was busy at work, and contemplated the animal. Saint Sabot! he exclaimed--I should explain, that the festival of Saint Sabot is the wooden-shoe f te-- Saint Sabot! but that is a dainty morsel and would taste as fine, I warrant, as the chamois I ate at Vienne once at the grand banquet of the Jolly Shoe-makers of Dauphin . Lucky folk who can dine on the like every day. I tasted such once, it is now nearly four years ago, and my mouth waters now when I think of it. Oh! these lords! these lords! with their fresh meats and their old wines at every meal, while I have to be satisfied with potatoes to eat and water to drink from one week s end to the other; and it is a chance if even on Sunday, I can feast myself with a lump of rusty bacon and an old cabbage, and a glass of _pignolet_ fit to make my old goat stand on her head. It need scarcely be said, that as soon as Thibault began this monologue, the buck had turned and disappeared. Thibault had finished rounding his periods, and had just declaimed his peroration, when he heard himself roughly accosted in forcible terms: Ho, there, you scoundrel! answer me. It was the Baron, who seeing his dogs wavering, was anxious to make sure that they were not on the wrong scent. Ho, there, you scoundrel! repeated the wolf-hunter, have you seen the beast? There was evidently something in the manner of the Baron s questioning which did not please our philosophical shoe-maker, for although he was perfectly aware what was the matter, he answered: what beast? Curse you! why, the buck we are hunting! He must have passed close by here, and standing gaping as you do, you must have seen him. It was a fine stag of ten, was it not? Which way did he go? Speak up, you blackguard, or you shall have a taste of my stirrup-leather! The black plague take him, cub of a wolf! muttered the shoe-maker to himself. Then, aloud, with a fine air of pretended simplicity, Ah, yes! he said, I did see him. A buck, was it not? a ten-tiner, eh? with great horns. Ah, yes to be sure, a buck, with great horns,--or great corns, was it? yes, I saw him as plain as I see you, my Lord. But there, I can t say if he had any corns, for I did not look at his feet, anyhow, he added, with the air of a perfect simpleton, if he had corns, they did not prevent him running. At any other time the Baron would have laughed at what he might have taken for genuine stupidity; but the doublings of the animal were beginning to put him into a regular huntsman s fever. Now, then, you scoundrel, a truce to this jesting! If you are in a humour for jokes, it is more than I am! I will be in whatever humour it may please your Lordship I should be. Well, then, answer me. Your Lordship has asked me nothing as yet. Did the deer seem tired? Not very. Which way did he come? He did not come, he was standing still. Well, but he must have come from one side or the other. Ah! very likely, but I did not see him come. Which way did he go? I would tell you directly; only I did not see him go. The Lord of Vez cast an angry look at Thibault. Is it some while ago the buck passed this way, Master Simpleton? Not so very long, my Lord. About how long ago? Thibault made as if trying to remember; at last he replied: It was, I think, the day before yesterday, but in saying this, the shoe-maker, unfortunately, could not suppress a grin. This grin did not escape the Baron, who, spurring his horse, rode down on Thibault with lifted whip. Thibault was agile, and with a single bound he reached the shelter of his lean-to, whither the wolf-hunter could not follow, as long as he remained mounted; Thibault was therefore in momentary safety. You are only bantering and lying! cried the huntsman, for there is Marcassino, my best hound, giving cry not twenty yards off, and if the deer passed by where Marcassino is, he must have come over the hedge, and it is impossible, therefore, that you did not see him. Pardon, my Lord, but according to our good priest, no one but the Pope is infallible, and Monsieur Marcassino may be mistaken. Marcassino is never mistaken, do you hear, you rascal! and in proof of it I can see from here the marks where the animal scratched up the ground. Nevertheless, my Lord, I assure you, I swear.... said Thibault, who saw the Baron s eyebrows contracting in a way that made him feel uneasy. Silence, and come here, blackguard! cried my lord. Thibault hesitated a moment, but the black look on the sportsman s face became more and more threatening, and fearing to increase his exasperation by disobeying his command, he thought he had better go forward, hoping that the Baron merely wished to ask a service of him. But it was an unlucky move on his part, for scarcely had he emerged from the protection of the shed, before the horse of the Lord of Vez, urged by bit and spur, gave a leap, which brought his rider swooping down upon Thibault, while at the same moment a furious blow from the butt end of the Baron s whip fell upon his head. The shoe-maker, stunned by the blow, tottered a moment, lost his balance and was about to fall face downwards, when the Baron, drawing his foot out of the stirrup, with a violent kick in the chest, not only straightened him again, but sent the poor wretch flying in an opposite direction, where he fell with his back against the door of his hut. Take that! said the Baron, as he first felled Thibault with his whip, and then kicked him, take that for your lie, and that for your banter! And then, without troubling himself any further about the man, whom he left lying on his back, the Lord of Vez, seeing that the hounds had rallied on hearing Marcassino s cry, gave them a cheery note on his horn, and cantered away. Thibault lifted himself up, feeling bruised all over, and began feeling himself from head to foot to make sure that no bones were broken. Having carefully passed his hand over each limb in succession, that s all right, he said, there is nothing broken either above or below, I am glad to find. So, my Lord Baron, that is how you treat people, because you happen to have married a Prince s bastard daughter! But let me tell you, my fine fellow, it is not you who will eat the buck you are hunting to-day; it will be this blackguard, this scoundrel, this simpleton of a Thibault who will eat it. Yes, it shall be I who eat it, that I vow! cried Thibault, confirming himself more and more in his bold resolution, and it is no use being a man if having once made a vow, one fails to keep it. So without further delay, Thibault thrust his bill-hook into his belt, seized his boar-spear, and after listening for a moment to the cry of the hounds to ascertain in which direction the hunt had gone, he ran off with all the speed of which a man s legs are capable to get the start of them, guessing by the curve which the stag and its pursuers were following what would be the straight line to take so as to intercept them. There were two ways of doing his deed open to Thibault; either to hide himself beside the path which the buck must take and kill him with his boar-spear, or else to surprise the animal just as he was being hunted down by the dogs, and collar him there and then. And as he ran, the desire to revenge himself on the Baron for the latter s brutality, was not so uppermost in Thibault s mind as the thoughts of the sumptuous manner in which he would fare for the next month, on the shoulders, the back, and the haunches of the deer, either salted to a turn, roasted on the spit, or cut in slices and done in the pan. And these two ideas, moreover, of vengeance and gluttony, were so jumbled up in his brain, that while still running at the top of his speed he laughed in his sleeve, as he pictured the dejected mien of the Baron and his men returning to the castle after their fruitless day s hunt, and at the same time saw himself seated at table, the door securely fastened, and a pint of wine beside him, t te- -t te with a haunch of the deer, the rich and delicious gravy escaping as the knife returned for a third or fourth cut. The deer, as far as Thibault could calculate, was making for the bridge which crosses the Ourcq, between Noroy and Troesne. At the time of which we are now speaking there was a bridge spanning the river, formed of two joists and a few planks. As the river was very high and very rapid, Thibault decided that the deer would not attempt to ford it; so he hid himself behind a rock, within reach of the bridge, and waited. It was not long before he saw the graceful head of the deer appear above the rock at some ten paces distance; the animal was bending its ears to the wind, in the endeavour to catch the sound of the enemy s approach as it was borne along the breeze. Thibault, excited by this sudden appearance, rose from behind the rock, poised his boar-spear and sent it flying towards the animal. The buck, with a single bound, reached the middle of the bridge, a second carried him on to the opposite bank, and a third bore him out of sight. The boar-spear had passed within a foot of the animal, and had buried itself in the grass fifteen paces from where Thibault was standing. Never before had he been known to make such an unskilful throw; he, Thibault, of all the company who made the tour of France, the one known to be surest of his aim! Enraged with himself, therefore, he picked up his weapon, and bounded across the bridge with an agility equal to that of the deer. Thibault knew the country quite as well as the animal he was pursuing, and so got ahead of the deer and once more concealed himself, this time behind a beech-tree, half-way up, and not too far from a little footpath. The deer now passed so close to him, that Thibault hesitated as to whether it would not be better to knock the animal down with his boar-spear than to throw the weapon at it; but his hesitation did not last longer than a flash of lightning, for no lightning could be quicker than the animal itself, which was already twenty paces off when Thibault threw his boar-spear, but without better luck than the time before. And now the baying of the hounds was drawing nearer and nearer; another few minutes, and it would, he felt, be impossible for him to carry out his design. But in honour to his spirit of persistence, be it said, that in proportion as the difficulty increased, the greater became Thibault s desire to get possession of the deer. I must have it, come what will, he cried, I must! and if there is a God who cares for the poor, I shall have satisfaction of this confounded Baron, who beat me as if I were a dog, but I am a man notwithstanding, and I am quite ready to prove the same to him. And Thibault picked up his boar-spear and once more set off running. But it would appear that the good God whom he had just invoked, either had not heard him, or wished to drive him to extremities, for his third attempt had no greater success than the previous ones. By Heaven! exclaimed Thibault, God Almighty is assuredly deaf, it seems Let the Devil then open his ears and hear me! In the name of God or of the Devil, I want you and I will have you, cursed animal! Thibault had hardly finished this double blasphemy when the buck, doubling back, passed close to him for the fourth time, and disappeared among the bushes, but so quickly and unexpectedly, that Thibault had not even time to lift his boar-spear. At that moment he heard the dogs so near him, that he deemed it would be imprudent to continue his pursuit. He looked round him, saw a thickly-leaved oak tree, threw his boar-spear into a bush, swarmed up the trunk, and hid himself among the foliage. He imagined, and with good reason, that since the deer had gone ahead again, the hunt would only pass by following on its track. The dogs had not lost the scent, in spite of the quarry s doublings, and they were not likely to lose it now. Thibault had not been seated among the branches for above five minutes, when first the hounds came into sight, then the Baron, who in spite of his fifty-five years, headed the chase as if he had been a man of twenty. It must be added that the Lord of Vez was in a state of rage that we will not even endeavour to describe. To lose four hours over a wretched deer and still to be running behind it! Such a thing had never happened to him before. He stormed at his men, he whipped his dogs, and had so ploughed his horse s sides with his spurs, that the thick coating of mud which covered his gaiters was reddened with blood. On reaching the bridge over the Ourcq, however, there had been an interval of alleviation for the Baron, for the hounds had so unanimously taken up the scent, that the cloak which the wolf-hunter carried behind him would have sufficed to cover the whole pack as they crossed the bridge. Indeed the Baron was so pleased, that he was not satisfied with humming a tirra-la, but, unslinging his hunting-horn he sounded it with his full lung-power, a thing which he only did on great occasions. But, unfortunately, the joy of my Lord of Vez was destined to be short lived. All of

neighbours

How many times the word 'neighbours' appears in the text?

you must know that this made the fifth or sixth time that the worthy Baron had started the animal in question, but never once had he been able to get within gun-shot of him or to run him down. Yes, Marcotte went on, but the damned beast has employed himself so well all night crossing his track and doubling, that after having traced him over half the forest, I found myself at the place from which I started. You think then, Marcotte, that there is no chance of getting near him. I am afraid not. By all the devils in hell! exclaimed the Lord of Vez, who had not had his equal in swearing since the mighty Nimrod, however, I am not feeling well to-day, and I must have a burst of some kind, to get rid of these bad humours. What do you think we can hunt, Marcotte, in place of this damned black wolf? Well, having been so taken up with the wolf, answered Marcotte, I have not traced any other animal. Will my Lord uncouple at random and hunt the first animal that we come across? The Baron was about to express his willingness to agree to this proposal when he caught sight of little Engoulevent coming towards them cap in hand. Wait a moment, he said, here comes Engoulevent, who, I fancy, has some advice to give us. I have no advice to give to a noble Lord like yourself, replied Engoulevent, assuming an expression of humility on his sly and crafty face; it is, however, my duty to inform you that there is a splendid buck in the neighbourhood. Let us see your buck, Engoulevent, replied the chief wolf-hunter, and if you are not mistaken about it, there will be a new crown for you. Where is this buck of yours? asked Marcotte, but look to your skin, if you make us uncouple to no purpose. Let me have Matador and Jupiter, and then we shall see. Matador and Jupiter were the finest among the hounds belonging to the Lord of Vez. And indeed, Engoulevent had not gone a hundred paces with them through the thicket, before, by the lashing of their tails, and their repeated yelping, he knew that they were on the right scent. In another minute or two a magnificent ten-tined stag came into view. Marcotte cried Tally-ho, sounded his horn, and the hunt began, to the great satisfaction of the Lord of Vez, who, although regretting the black wolf, was willing to make the best of a fine buck in its stead. The hunt had lasted two hours, and the quarry still held on. It had first led its pursuers from the little wood of Haramont to the Chemin du Pendu, and thence straight to the back of Oigny, and it still showed no sign of fatigue; for it was not one of those poor animals of the flat country who get their tails pulled by every wretched terrier. As it neared the low grounds of Bourg-fontaine, however, it evidently decided that it was being run rather hard, for it gave up the bolder measures which had hitherto enabled it to keep ahead, and began to double. Its first man uvre was to go down to the brook which joins the ponds of Baisemont and Bourg, then to walk against stream with the water up to its haunches, for nearly half a mile; it then sprang on to the right bank, back again into the bed of the stream, made another leap to the left, and with a succession of bounds, as vigorous as its failing strength allowed, continued to out-distance its pursuers. But the dogs of my lord Baron were not animals to be put out by such trifles as these. Being both sagacious and well-bred, they, of their own accord, divided the task between themselves, half going up stream, and half down, these hunting on the right those on the left, and so effectually that they ere long put the animal off its changes, for they soon recovered the scent, rallying at the first cry given by one of the pack, and starting afresh on the chase, as ready and eager as if the deer had been only twenty paces in front of them. And so with galloping of horses, with cry of hounds and blare of horn, the Baron and his huntsmen reached the ponds of Saint Antoine, a hundred paces or so from the Confines of Oigny. Between these and the Osier-beds stood the hut of Thibault, the sabot-maker. We must pause to give some description of this Thibault, the shoe-maker, the real hero of the tale. You will ask why I, who have summoned kings to appear upon the stage, who have obliged princes, dukes, and barons to play secondary parts in my romances, should take a simple shoe-maker for the hero of this tale. First, I will reply by saying that, in my dear home country of Villers-Cotterets, there are more sabot-makers than barons, dukes and princes, and that, as soon as I decided to make the forest the scene of the events I am about to record, I was obliged to choose one of the actual inhabitants of this forest as hero, unless I had wished to represent such fantastic persons as the _Incas_ of Marmontel or the _Abencerrages_ of M. de Florian. More than that, it is not the author who decides on the subject, but the subject which takes possession of the author, and, good or bad, this particular subject has taken possession of me. I will therefore endeavour to draw Thibault s portrait for you, plain shoe-maker as he was, as exactly as the artist paints the portrait which a prince desires to send to his lady-love. Thibault was a man between twenty-five and twenty-seven years of age, tall, well made, physically robust, but by nature melancholy and sad of heart. This depression of spirits arose from a little grain of envy, which, in spite of himself, perhaps unconsciously to himself, he harboured towards all such of his neighbours as had been more favoured by fortune than himself. His father had committed a fault, a serious one at all times, but more especially in those days of absolutism, when a man was not able to rise above his station as now-a-days, when with sufficient capacity he may attain to any rank. Thibault had been educated above his position; he had been at school under the Abb Fortier, at Villers-Cotterets, and had learnt to read, write, and cypher; moreover he knew a little Latin, which made him inordinately proud of himself. Thibault had spent a great part of his time in reading, and his books had been chiefly those which were in vogue at the close of the preceding century. But he had not been a sufficiently clever analyst to know how to separate the good from the bad, or rather he _had_ separated what was bad, and swallowed it in large doses, leaving the good to precipitate itself at the bottom of the glass. At twenty years of age Thibault had certainly had dreams of being something other than a sabot-maker. He had, for instance, for a very little while, cast his eyes towards the army. But his comrades who had worn the double livery of king and country, had left the service as they entered it, mere soldiers of the ranks, having failed during five or six years of slavery to obtain promotion, even to the not very exalted grade of corporal. Thibault had also thought of becoming a sailor. But a career in the navy was as much forbidden to the plebeian as one in the army. Possibly after enduring danger, and storm and battle for fifteen or twenty years, he might be made a boatswain s mate, that was all, and then! besides, it was by no means Thibault s ambition to wear a short vest and sail-cloth trousers, but the blue uniform of the king with red vest and gold epaulettes. He had moreover known of no single case in which the son of a mere shoe-maker had become Master of a Frigate, or even Lieutenant. So he was forced to give up all idea of joining the King s Navy. Thibault would not have minded being a Notary, and at one time thought of apprenticing himself to the Royal Scrivener, Ma tre Niquet, as a stepping-stone, and of making his way up on the strength of his own legs and with the help of his pen. But supposing him to have risen to the position of head clerk with a salary of a hundred crowns, where was he to find the thirty thousand francs which would be required for the purchase of the smallest village practice. There was, therefore, no better chance of his becoming a scrivener than of becoming an officer on sea or land. Meanwhile, Thibault s father died, leaving very little ready money. There was about enough to bury him, so he was buried, and this done, there remained some thirty or forty francs over for Thibault. Thibault knew his trade well; indeed, he was a first-rate workman; but he had no inclination to handle either auger or parer. It ended, therefore, by his leaving all his father s tools in the care of a friend, a remnant of prudence still remaining to him, and selling every vestige of furniture; having thus realised a sum of five hundred and forty livres, he determined to make what was then called the tour of France. Thibault spent three years in travelling; he did not make his fortune during that time, but he learnt a great many things in the course of his journey of which he was previously ignorant, and acquired certain accomplishments which he had previously been without. He learned amongst other things that, although it was as well to keep one s word on matters of business with a man, it was no use whatever keeping love vows made to a woman. So much for his character and habits of mind. As to his external accomplishments, he could dance a jig beautifully, could hold his own at quarter-staff against four men, and could handle the boar-spear as cleverly as the best huntsman going. All these things had not a little served to increase Thibault s natural self-esteem, and, seeing himself handsomer, stronger, and cleverer than many of the nobles, he would exclaim against Providence, crying, Why was I not nobly born? why was not that nobleman yonder born a peasant? But as Providence took care not to make any answer to these apostroph s, and as Thibault found that dancing, playing at quarter-staff, and throwing the boar-spear only fatigued the body, without procuring him any material advantage, he began to turn his thoughts towards his ancient trade, humble though it was, saying to himself, if it enabled the father to live, it would also enable the son. So Thibault went and fetched away his tools; and then, tools in hand, he went to ask permission of the Steward of his Royal Highness Louis Philippe of Orleans, to build a hut in the forest, in which to carry on his trade. He had no difficulty in obtaining this, for the steward knew by experience that his master was a very kind-hearted man, expending as much as two hundred and forty thousand francs a year on the poor; he felt sure, therefore, that one who gave away a sum like this, would be willing to let an honest workman who wished to ply his trade, have thirty or forty feet of ground. As he had leave to establish himself in whatever part of the forest he liked best, Thibault chose the spot near the osier-beds, where the roads crossed, one of the most beautiful parts of the woods, less than a mile from Oigny and about three times that distance from Villers-Cotterets. The shoe-maker put up his work-shop, built partly of old planks given him by M. Panisis, who had been having a sale in the neighbourhood, and partly of the branches which the steward gave him leave to cut in the forest. When the building of the hut, which consisted of a bedroom, cosily shut in, where he could work during the winter, and of a lean-to, open to the air, where he could work in the summer, was completed, Thibault began to think of making himself a bed. At first, a layer of fern had to serve for this purpose; but after he had made a hundred pairs of wooden shoes and had sold these to Bedeau, who kept a general shop at Villers-Cotterets, he was able to pay a sufficient deposit to get a mattress, to be paid for in full by the end of three months. The framework of the bed was not difficult to make; Thibault was not the shoe-maker he was without being a bit of a carpenter into the bargain, and when this was finished he plaited osiers to take the place of sacking, laid the mattress upon them, and found himself at last with a bed to lie upon. Little by little came the sheets, and then in their turn the coverlids; the next purchase was a chafing-dish, and earthenware pots to cook in, and finally some plates and dishes. Before the year was out Thibault had also made additions to his furniture of a fine oak chest and a fine walnut-wood cupboard, both, like the bed, his own handiwork. All the while he was driving a brisk trade, for none could beat Thibault in turning a block of beech into a pair of shoes, and in converting the odd chips into spoons, salt-cellars and natty little bowls. He had now been settled in his work-shop for three years, that is, ever since his return after the completion of his tour round France, and there was nothing for which anyone could have reproached him during this interval except the failing we have already mentioned--that he was rather more envious of the good fortune of his neighbour than was altogether conducive to the welfare of his soul. But this feeling was as yet so inoffensive, that his confessor had no need to do more than awaken in him a sense of shame for harbouring thoughts which had, so far, not resulted in any active crime. CHAPTER II THE SEIGNEUR JEAN AND THE SABOT-MAKER As already said, the buck began to dodge and double on reaching Oigny, turning and twisting round Thibault s hut, and the weather being fine although the autumn was well advanced, the shoe-maker was sitting at his work in his open lean-to. Looking up, he suddenly espied the trembling animal, quivering in every limb, standing a few paces in front of him, gazing at him with intelligent and terrified eyes. Thibault had been for a long time aware that the hunt was circling around Oigny, at one time drawing near to the village, and then receding, only to draw near again. There was nothing therefore very surprising to him in the sight of the buck, yet he stayed his hand, although he was busy at work, and contemplated the animal. Saint Sabot! he exclaimed--I should explain, that the festival of Saint Sabot is the wooden-shoe f te-- Saint Sabot! but that is a dainty morsel and would taste as fine, I warrant, as the chamois I ate at Vienne once at the grand banquet of the Jolly Shoe-makers of Dauphin . Lucky folk who can dine on the like every day. I tasted such once, it is now nearly four years ago, and my mouth waters now when I think of it. Oh! these lords! these lords! with their fresh meats and their old wines at every meal, while I have to be satisfied with potatoes to eat and water to drink from one week s end to the other; and it is a chance if even on Sunday, I can feast myself with a lump of rusty bacon and an old cabbage, and a glass of _pignolet_ fit to make my old goat stand on her head. It need scarcely be said, that as soon as Thibault began this monologue, the buck had turned and disappeared. Thibault had finished rounding his periods, and had just declaimed his peroration, when he heard himself roughly accosted in forcible terms: Ho, there, you scoundrel! answer me. It was the Baron, who seeing his dogs wavering, was anxious to make sure that they were not on the wrong scent. Ho, there, you scoundrel! repeated the wolf-hunter, have you seen the beast? There was evidently something in the manner of the Baron s questioning which did not please our philosophical shoe-maker, for although he was perfectly aware what was the matter, he answered: what beast? Curse you! why, the buck we are hunting! He must have passed close by here, and standing gaping as you do, you must have seen him. It was a fine stag of ten, was it not? Which way did he go? Speak up, you blackguard, or you shall have a taste of my stirrup-leather! The black plague take him, cub of a wolf! muttered the shoe-maker to himself. Then, aloud, with a fine air of pretended simplicity, Ah, yes! he said, I did see him. A buck, was it not? a ten-tiner, eh? with great horns. Ah, yes to be sure, a buck, with great horns,--or great corns, was it? yes, I saw him as plain as I see you, my Lord. But there, I can t say if he had any corns, for I did not look at his feet, anyhow, he added, with the air of a perfect simpleton, if he had corns, they did not prevent him running. At any other time the Baron would have laughed at what he might have taken for genuine stupidity; but the doublings of the animal were beginning to put him into a regular huntsman s fever. Now, then, you scoundrel, a truce to this jesting! If you are in a humour for jokes, it is more than I am! I will be in whatever humour it may please your Lordship I should be. Well, then, answer me. Your Lordship has asked me nothing as yet. Did the deer seem tired? Not very. Which way did he come? He did not come, he was standing still. Well, but he must have come from one side or the other. Ah! very likely, but I did not see him come. Which way did he go? I would tell you directly; only I did not see him go. The Lord of Vez cast an angry look at Thibault. Is it some while ago the buck passed this way, Master Simpleton? Not so very long, my Lord. About how long ago? Thibault made as if trying to remember; at last he replied: It was, I think, the day before yesterday, but in saying this, the shoe-maker, unfortunately, could not suppress a grin. This grin did not escape the Baron, who, spurring his horse, rode down on Thibault with lifted whip. Thibault was agile, and with a single bound he reached the shelter of his lean-to, whither the wolf-hunter could not follow, as long as he remained mounted; Thibault was therefore in momentary safety. You are only bantering and lying! cried the huntsman, for there is Marcassino, my best hound, giving cry not twenty yards off, and if the deer passed by where Marcassino is, he must have come over the hedge, and it is impossible, therefore, that you did not see him. Pardon, my Lord, but according to our good priest, no one but the Pope is infallible, and Monsieur Marcassino may be mistaken. Marcassino is never mistaken, do you hear, you rascal! and in proof of it I can see from here the marks where the animal scratched up the ground. Nevertheless, my Lord, I assure you, I swear.... said Thibault, who saw the Baron s eyebrows contracting in a way that made him feel uneasy. Silence, and come here, blackguard! cried my lord. Thibault hesitated a moment, but the black look on the sportsman s face became more and more threatening, and fearing to increase his exasperation by disobeying his command, he thought he had better go forward, hoping that the Baron merely wished to ask a service of him. But it was an unlucky move on his part, for scarcely had he emerged from the protection of the shed, before the horse of the Lord of Vez, urged by bit and spur, gave a leap, which brought his rider swooping down upon Thibault, while at the same moment a furious blow from the butt end of the Baron s whip fell upon his head. The shoe-maker, stunned by the blow, tottered a moment, lost his balance and was about to fall face downwards, when the Baron, drawing his foot out of the stirrup, with a violent kick in the chest, not only straightened him again, but sent the poor wretch flying in an opposite direction, where he fell with his back against the door of his hut. Take that! said the Baron, as he first felled Thibault with his whip, and then kicked him, take that for your lie, and that for your banter! And then, without troubling himself any further about the man, whom he left lying on his back, the Lord of Vez, seeing that the hounds had rallied on hearing Marcassino s cry, gave them a cheery note on his horn, and cantered away. Thibault lifted himself up, feeling bruised all over, and began feeling himself from head to foot to make sure that no bones were broken. Having carefully passed his hand over each limb in succession, that s all right, he said, there is nothing broken either above or below, I am glad to find. So, my Lord Baron, that is how you treat people, because you happen to have married a Prince s bastard daughter! But let me tell you, my fine fellow, it is not you who will eat the buck you are hunting to-day; it will be this blackguard, this scoundrel, this simpleton of a Thibault who will eat it. Yes, it shall be I who eat it, that I vow! cried Thibault, confirming himself more and more in his bold resolution, and it is no use being a man if having once made a vow, one fails to keep it. So without further delay, Thibault thrust his bill-hook into his belt, seized his boar-spear, and after listening for a moment to the cry of the hounds to ascertain in which direction the hunt had gone, he ran off with all the speed of which a man s legs are capable to get the start of them, guessing by the curve which the stag and its pursuers were following what would be the straight line to take so as to intercept them. There were two ways of doing his deed open to Thibault; either to hide himself beside the path which the buck must take and kill him with his boar-spear, or else to surprise the animal just as he was being hunted down by the dogs, and collar him there and then. And as he ran, the desire to revenge himself on the Baron for the latter s brutality, was not so uppermost in Thibault s mind as the thoughts of the sumptuous manner in which he would fare for the next month, on the shoulders, the back, and the haunches of the deer, either salted to a turn, roasted on the spit, or cut in slices and done in the pan. And these two ideas, moreover, of vengeance and gluttony, were so jumbled up in his brain, that while still running at the top of his speed he laughed in his sleeve, as he pictured the dejected mien of the Baron and his men returning to the castle after their fruitless day s hunt, and at the same time saw himself seated at table, the door securely fastened, and a pint of wine beside him, t te- -t te with a haunch of the deer, the rich and delicious gravy escaping as the knife returned for a third or fourth cut. The deer, as far as Thibault could calculate, was making for the bridge which crosses the Ourcq, between Noroy and Troesne. At the time of which we are now speaking there was a bridge spanning the river, formed of two joists and a few planks. As the river was very high and very rapid, Thibault decided that the deer would not attempt to ford it; so he hid himself behind a rock, within reach of the bridge, and waited. It was not long before he saw the graceful head of the deer appear above the rock at some ten paces distance; the animal was bending its ears to the wind, in the endeavour to catch the sound of the enemy s approach as it was borne along the breeze. Thibault, excited by this sudden appearance, rose from behind the rock, poised his boar-spear and sent it flying towards the animal. The buck, with a single bound, reached the middle of the bridge, a second carried him on to the opposite bank, and a third bore him out of sight. The boar-spear had passed within a foot of the animal, and had buried itself in the grass fifteen paces from where Thibault was standing. Never before had he been known to make such an unskilful throw; he, Thibault, of all the company who made the tour of France, the one known to be surest of his aim! Enraged with himself, therefore, he picked up his weapon, and bounded across the bridge with an agility equal to that of the deer. Thibault knew the country quite as well as the animal he was pursuing, and so got ahead of the deer and once more concealed himself, this time behind a beech-tree, half-way up, and not too far from a little footpath. The deer now passed so close to him, that Thibault hesitated as to whether it would not be better to knock the animal down with his boar-spear than to throw the weapon at it; but his hesitation did not last longer than a flash of lightning, for no lightning could be quicker than the animal itself, which was already twenty paces off when Thibault threw his boar-spear, but without better luck than the time before. And now the baying of the hounds was drawing nearer and nearer; another few minutes, and it would, he felt, be impossible for him to carry out his design. But in honour to his spirit of persistence, be it said, that in proportion as the difficulty increased, the greater became Thibault s desire to get possession of the deer. I must have it, come what will, he cried, I must! and if there is a God who cares for the poor, I shall have satisfaction of this confounded Baron, who beat me as if I were a dog, but I am a man notwithstanding, and I am quite ready to prove the same to him. And Thibault picked up his boar-spear and once more set off running. But it would appear that the good God whom he had just invoked, either had not heard him, or wished to drive him to extremities, for his third attempt had no greater success than the previous ones. By Heaven! exclaimed Thibault, God Almighty is assuredly deaf, it seems Let the Devil then open his ears and hear me! In the name of God or of the Devil, I want you and I will have you, cursed animal! Thibault had hardly finished this double blasphemy when the buck, doubling back, passed close to him for the fourth time, and disappeared among the bushes, but so quickly and unexpectedly, that Thibault had not even time to lift his boar-spear. At that moment he heard the dogs so near him, that he deemed it would be imprudent to continue his pursuit. He looked round him, saw a thickly-leaved oak tree, threw his boar-spear into a bush, swarmed up the trunk, and hid himself among the foliage. He imagined, and with good reason, that since the deer had gone ahead again, the hunt would only pass by following on its track. The dogs had not lost the scent, in spite of the quarry s doublings, and they were not likely to lose it now. Thibault had not been seated among the branches for above five minutes, when first the hounds came into sight, then the Baron, who in spite of his fifty-five years, headed the chase as if he had been a man of twenty. It must be added that the Lord of Vez was in a state of rage that we will not even endeavour to describe. To lose four hours over a wretched deer and still to be running behind it! Such a thing had never happened to him before. He stormed at his men, he whipped his dogs, and had so ploughed his horse s sides with his spurs, that the thick coating of mud which covered his gaiters was reddened with blood. On reaching the bridge over the Ourcq, however, there had been an interval of alleviation for the Baron, for the hounds had so unanimously taken up the scent, that the cloak which the wolf-hunter carried behind him would have sufficed to cover the whole pack as they crossed the bridge. Indeed the Baron was so pleased, that he was not satisfied with humming a tirra-la, but, unslinging his hunting-horn he sounded it with his full lung-power, a thing which he only did on great occasions. But, unfortunately, the joy of my Lord of Vez was destined to be short lived. All of

am

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you must know that this made the fifth or sixth time that the worthy Baron had started the animal in question, but never once had he been able to get within gun-shot of him or to run him down. Yes, Marcotte went on, but the damned beast has employed himself so well all night crossing his track and doubling, that after having traced him over half the forest, I found myself at the place from which I started. You think then, Marcotte, that there is no chance of getting near him. I am afraid not. By all the devils in hell! exclaimed the Lord of Vez, who had not had his equal in swearing since the mighty Nimrod, however, I am not feeling well to-day, and I must have a burst of some kind, to get rid of these bad humours. What do you think we can hunt, Marcotte, in place of this damned black wolf? Well, having been so taken up with the wolf, answered Marcotte, I have not traced any other animal. Will my Lord uncouple at random and hunt the first animal that we come across? The Baron was about to express his willingness to agree to this proposal when he caught sight of little Engoulevent coming towards them cap in hand. Wait a moment, he said, here comes Engoulevent, who, I fancy, has some advice to give us. I have no advice to give to a noble Lord like yourself, replied Engoulevent, assuming an expression of humility on his sly and crafty face; it is, however, my duty to inform you that there is a splendid buck in the neighbourhood. Let us see your buck, Engoulevent, replied the chief wolf-hunter, and if you are not mistaken about it, there will be a new crown for you. Where is this buck of yours? asked Marcotte, but look to your skin, if you make us uncouple to no purpose. Let me have Matador and Jupiter, and then we shall see. Matador and Jupiter were the finest among the hounds belonging to the Lord of Vez. And indeed, Engoulevent had not gone a hundred paces with them through the thicket, before, by the lashing of their tails, and their repeated yelping, he knew that they were on the right scent. In another minute or two a magnificent ten-tined stag came into view. Marcotte cried Tally-ho, sounded his horn, and the hunt began, to the great satisfaction of the Lord of Vez, who, although regretting the black wolf, was willing to make the best of a fine buck in its stead. The hunt had lasted two hours, and the quarry still held on. It had first led its pursuers from the little wood of Haramont to the Chemin du Pendu, and thence straight to the back of Oigny, and it still showed no sign of fatigue; for it was not one of those poor animals of the flat country who get their tails pulled by every wretched terrier. As it neared the low grounds of Bourg-fontaine, however, it evidently decided that it was being run rather hard, for it gave up the bolder measures which had hitherto enabled it to keep ahead, and began to double. Its first man uvre was to go down to the brook which joins the ponds of Baisemont and Bourg, then to walk against stream with the water up to its haunches, for nearly half a mile; it then sprang on to the right bank, back again into the bed of the stream, made another leap to the left, and with a succession of bounds, as vigorous as its failing strength allowed, continued to out-distance its pursuers. But the dogs of my lord Baron were not animals to be put out by such trifles as these. Being both sagacious and well-bred, they, of their own accord, divided the task between themselves, half going up stream, and half down, these hunting on the right those on the left, and so effectually that they ere long put the animal off its changes, for they soon recovered the scent, rallying at the first cry given by one of the pack, and starting afresh on the chase, as ready and eager as if the deer had been only twenty paces in front of them. And so with galloping of horses, with cry of hounds and blare of horn, the Baron and his huntsmen reached the ponds of Saint Antoine, a hundred paces or so from the Confines of Oigny. Between these and the Osier-beds stood the hut of Thibault, the sabot-maker. We must pause to give some description of this Thibault, the shoe-maker, the real hero of the tale. You will ask why I, who have summoned kings to appear upon the stage, who have obliged princes, dukes, and barons to play secondary parts in my romances, should take a simple shoe-maker for the hero of this tale. First, I will reply by saying that, in my dear home country of Villers-Cotterets, there are more sabot-makers than barons, dukes and princes, and that, as soon as I decided to make the forest the scene of the events I am about to record, I was obliged to choose one of the actual inhabitants of this forest as hero, unless I had wished to represent such fantastic persons as the _Incas_ of Marmontel or the _Abencerrages_ of M. de Florian. More than that, it is not the author who decides on the subject, but the subject which takes possession of the author, and, good or bad, this particular subject has taken possession of me. I will therefore endeavour to draw Thibault s portrait for you, plain shoe-maker as he was, as exactly as the artist paints the portrait which a prince desires to send to his lady-love. Thibault was a man between twenty-five and twenty-seven years of age, tall, well made, physically robust, but by nature melancholy and sad of heart. This depression of spirits arose from a little grain of envy, which, in spite of himself, perhaps unconsciously to himself, he harboured towards all such of his neighbours as had been more favoured by fortune than himself. His father had committed a fault, a serious one at all times, but more especially in those days of absolutism, when a man was not able to rise above his station as now-a-days, when with sufficient capacity he may attain to any rank. Thibault had been educated above his position; he had been at school under the Abb Fortier, at Villers-Cotterets, and had learnt to read, write, and cypher; moreover he knew a little Latin, which made him inordinately proud of himself. Thibault had spent a great part of his time in reading, and his books had been chiefly those which were in vogue at the close of the preceding century. But he had not been a sufficiently clever analyst to know how to separate the good from the bad, or rather he _had_ separated what was bad, and swallowed it in large doses, leaving the good to precipitate itself at the bottom of the glass. At twenty years of age Thibault had certainly had dreams of being something other than a sabot-maker. He had, for instance, for a very little while, cast his eyes towards the army. But his comrades who had worn the double livery of king and country, had left the service as they entered it, mere soldiers of the ranks, having failed during five or six years of slavery to obtain promotion, even to the not very exalted grade of corporal. Thibault had also thought of becoming a sailor. But a career in the navy was as much forbidden to the plebeian as one in the army. Possibly after enduring danger, and storm and battle for fifteen or twenty years, he might be made a boatswain s mate, that was all, and then! besides, it was by no means Thibault s ambition to wear a short vest and sail-cloth trousers, but the blue uniform of the king with red vest and gold epaulettes. He had moreover known of no single case in which the son of a mere shoe-maker had become Master of a Frigate, or even Lieutenant. So he was forced to give up all idea of joining the King s Navy. Thibault would not have minded being a Notary, and at one time thought of apprenticing himself to the Royal Scrivener, Ma tre Niquet, as a stepping-stone, and of making his way up on the strength of his own legs and with the help of his pen. But supposing him to have risen to the position of head clerk with a salary of a hundred crowns, where was he to find the thirty thousand francs which would be required for the purchase of the smallest village practice. There was, therefore, no better chance of his becoming a scrivener than of becoming an officer on sea or land. Meanwhile, Thibault s father died, leaving very little ready money. There was about enough to bury him, so he was buried, and this done, there remained some thirty or forty francs over for Thibault. Thibault knew his trade well; indeed, he was a first-rate workman; but he had no inclination to handle either auger or parer. It ended, therefore, by his leaving all his father s tools in the care of a friend, a remnant of prudence still remaining to him, and selling every vestige of furniture; having thus realised a sum of five hundred and forty livres, he determined to make what was then called the tour of France. Thibault spent three years in travelling; he did not make his fortune during that time, but he learnt a great many things in the course of his journey of which he was previously ignorant, and acquired certain accomplishments which he had previously been without. He learned amongst other things that, although it was as well to keep one s word on matters of business with a man, it was no use whatever keeping love vows made to a woman. So much for his character and habits of mind. As to his external accomplishments, he could dance a jig beautifully, could hold his own at quarter-staff against four men, and could handle the boar-spear as cleverly as the best huntsman going. All these things had not a little served to increase Thibault s natural self-esteem, and, seeing himself handsomer, stronger, and cleverer than many of the nobles, he would exclaim against Providence, crying, Why was I not nobly born? why was not that nobleman yonder born a peasant? But as Providence took care not to make any answer to these apostroph s, and as Thibault found that dancing, playing at quarter-staff, and throwing the boar-spear only fatigued the body, without procuring him any material advantage, he began to turn his thoughts towards his ancient trade, humble though it was, saying to himself, if it enabled the father to live, it would also enable the son. So Thibault went and fetched away his tools; and then, tools in hand, he went to ask permission of the Steward of his Royal Highness Louis Philippe of Orleans, to build a hut in the forest, in which to carry on his trade. He had no difficulty in obtaining this, for the steward knew by experience that his master was a very kind-hearted man, expending as much as two hundred and forty thousand francs a year on the poor; he felt sure, therefore, that one who gave away a sum like this, would be willing to let an honest workman who wished to ply his trade, have thirty or forty feet of ground. As he had leave to establish himself in whatever part of the forest he liked best, Thibault chose the spot near the osier-beds, where the roads crossed, one of the most beautiful parts of the woods, less than a mile from Oigny and about three times that distance from Villers-Cotterets. The shoe-maker put up his work-shop, built partly of old planks given him by M. Panisis, who had been having a sale in the neighbourhood, and partly of the branches which the steward gave him leave to cut in the forest. When the building of the hut, which consisted of a bedroom, cosily shut in, where he could work during the winter, and of a lean-to, open to the air, where he could work in the summer, was completed, Thibault began to think of making himself a bed. At first, a layer of fern had to serve for this purpose; but after he had made a hundred pairs of wooden shoes and had sold these to Bedeau, who kept a general shop at Villers-Cotterets, he was able to pay a sufficient deposit to get a mattress, to be paid for in full by the end of three months. The framework of the bed was not difficult to make; Thibault was not the shoe-maker he was without being a bit of a carpenter into the bargain, and when this was finished he plaited osiers to take the place of sacking, laid the mattress upon them, and found himself at last with a bed to lie upon. Little by little came the sheets, and then in their turn the coverlids; the next purchase was a chafing-dish, and earthenware pots to cook in, and finally some plates and dishes. Before the year was out Thibault had also made additions to his furniture of a fine oak chest and a fine walnut-wood cupboard, both, like the bed, his own handiwork. All the while he was driving a brisk trade, for none could beat Thibault in turning a block of beech into a pair of shoes, and in converting the odd chips into spoons, salt-cellars and natty little bowls. He had now been settled in his work-shop for three years, that is, ever since his return after the completion of his tour round France, and there was nothing for which anyone could have reproached him during this interval except the failing we have already mentioned--that he was rather more envious of the good fortune of his neighbour than was altogether conducive to the welfare of his soul. But this feeling was as yet so inoffensive, that his confessor had no need to do more than awaken in him a sense of shame for harbouring thoughts which had, so far, not resulted in any active crime. CHAPTER II THE SEIGNEUR JEAN AND THE SABOT-MAKER As already said, the buck began to dodge and double on reaching Oigny, turning and twisting round Thibault s hut, and the weather being fine although the autumn was well advanced, the shoe-maker was sitting at his work in his open lean-to. Looking up, he suddenly espied the trembling animal, quivering in every limb, standing a few paces in front of him, gazing at him with intelligent and terrified eyes. Thibault had been for a long time aware that the hunt was circling around Oigny, at one time drawing near to the village, and then receding, only to draw near again. There was nothing therefore very surprising to him in the sight of the buck, yet he stayed his hand, although he was busy at work, and contemplated the animal. Saint Sabot! he exclaimed--I should explain, that the festival of Saint Sabot is the wooden-shoe f te-- Saint Sabot! but that is a dainty morsel and would taste as fine, I warrant, as the chamois I ate at Vienne once at the grand banquet of the Jolly Shoe-makers of Dauphin . Lucky folk who can dine on the like every day. I tasted such once, it is now nearly four years ago, and my mouth waters now when I think of it. Oh! these lords! these lords! with their fresh meats and their old wines at every meal, while I have to be satisfied with potatoes to eat and water to drink from one week s end to the other; and it is a chance if even on Sunday, I can feast myself with a lump of rusty bacon and an old cabbage, and a glass of _pignolet_ fit to make my old goat stand on her head. It need scarcely be said, that as soon as Thibault began this monologue, the buck had turned and disappeared. Thibault had finished rounding his periods, and had just declaimed his peroration, when he heard himself roughly accosted in forcible terms: Ho, there, you scoundrel! answer me. It was the Baron, who seeing his dogs wavering, was anxious to make sure that they were not on the wrong scent. Ho, there, you scoundrel! repeated the wolf-hunter, have you seen the beast? There was evidently something in the manner of the Baron s questioning which did not please our philosophical shoe-maker, for although he was perfectly aware what was the matter, he answered: what beast? Curse you! why, the buck we are hunting! He must have passed close by here, and standing gaping as you do, you must have seen him. It was a fine stag of ten, was it not? Which way did he go? Speak up, you blackguard, or you shall have a taste of my stirrup-leather! The black plague take him, cub of a wolf! muttered the shoe-maker to himself. Then, aloud, with a fine air of pretended simplicity, Ah, yes! he said, I did see him. A buck, was it not? a ten-tiner, eh? with great horns. Ah, yes to be sure, a buck, with great horns,--or great corns, was it? yes, I saw him as plain as I see you, my Lord. But there, I can t say if he had any corns, for I did not look at his feet, anyhow, he added, with the air of a perfect simpleton, if he had corns, they did not prevent him running. At any other time the Baron would have laughed at what he might have taken for genuine stupidity; but the doublings of the animal were beginning to put him into a regular huntsman s fever. Now, then, you scoundrel, a truce to this jesting! If you are in a humour for jokes, it is more than I am! I will be in whatever humour it may please your Lordship I should be. Well, then, answer me. Your Lordship has asked me nothing as yet. Did the deer seem tired? Not very. Which way did he come? He did not come, he was standing still. Well, but he must have come from one side or the other. Ah! very likely, but I did not see him come. Which way did he go? I would tell you directly; only I did not see him go. The Lord of Vez cast an angry look at Thibault. Is it some while ago the buck passed this way, Master Simpleton? Not so very long, my Lord. About how long ago? Thibault made as if trying to remember; at last he replied: It was, I think, the day before yesterday, but in saying this, the shoe-maker, unfortunately, could not suppress a grin. This grin did not escape the Baron, who, spurring his horse, rode down on Thibault with lifted whip. Thibault was agile, and with a single bound he reached the shelter of his lean-to, whither the wolf-hunter could not follow, as long as he remained mounted; Thibault was therefore in momentary safety. You are only bantering and lying! cried the huntsman, for there is Marcassino, my best hound, giving cry not twenty yards off, and if the deer passed by where Marcassino is, he must have come over the hedge, and it is impossible, therefore, that you did not see him. Pardon, my Lord, but according to our good priest, no one but the Pope is infallible, and Monsieur Marcassino may be mistaken. Marcassino is never mistaken, do you hear, you rascal! and in proof of it I can see from here the marks where the animal scratched up the ground. Nevertheless, my Lord, I assure you, I swear.... said Thibault, who saw the Baron s eyebrows contracting in a way that made him feel uneasy. Silence, and come here, blackguard! cried my lord. Thibault hesitated a moment, but the black look on the sportsman s face became more and more threatening, and fearing to increase his exasperation by disobeying his command, he thought he had better go forward, hoping that the Baron merely wished to ask a service of him. But it was an unlucky move on his part, for scarcely had he emerged from the protection of the shed, before the horse of the Lord of Vez, urged by bit and spur, gave a leap, which brought his rider swooping down upon Thibault, while at the same moment a furious blow from the butt end of the Baron s whip fell upon his head. The shoe-maker, stunned by the blow, tottered a moment, lost his balance and was about to fall face downwards, when the Baron, drawing his foot out of the stirrup, with a violent kick in the chest, not only straightened him again, but sent the poor wretch flying in an opposite direction, where he fell with his back against the door of his hut. Take that! said the Baron, as he first felled Thibault with his whip, and then kicked him, take that for your lie, and that for your banter! And then, without troubling himself any further about the man, whom he left lying on his back, the Lord of Vez, seeing that the hounds had rallied on hearing Marcassino s cry, gave them a cheery note on his horn, and cantered away. Thibault lifted himself up, feeling bruised all over, and began feeling himself from head to foot to make sure that no bones were broken. Having carefully passed his hand over each limb in succession, that s all right, he said, there is nothing broken either above or below, I am glad to find. So, my Lord Baron, that is how you treat people, because you happen to have married a Prince s bastard daughter! But let me tell you, my fine fellow, it is not you who will eat the buck you are hunting to-day; it will be this blackguard, this scoundrel, this simpleton of a Thibault who will eat it. Yes, it shall be I who eat it, that I vow! cried Thibault, confirming himself more and more in his bold resolution, and it is no use being a man if having once made a vow, one fails to keep it. So without further delay, Thibault thrust his bill-hook into his belt, seized his boar-spear, and after listening for a moment to the cry of the hounds to ascertain in which direction the hunt had gone, he ran off with all the speed of which a man s legs are capable to get the start of them, guessing by the curve which the stag and its pursuers were following what would be the straight line to take so as to intercept them. There were two ways of doing his deed open to Thibault; either to hide himself beside the path which the buck must take and kill him with his boar-spear, or else to surprise the animal just as he was being hunted down by the dogs, and collar him there and then. And as he ran, the desire to revenge himself on the Baron for the latter s brutality, was not so uppermost in Thibault s mind as the thoughts of the sumptuous manner in which he would fare for the next month, on the shoulders, the back, and the haunches of the deer, either salted to a turn, roasted on the spit, or cut in slices and done in the pan. And these two ideas, moreover, of vengeance and gluttony, were so jumbled up in his brain, that while still running at the top of his speed he laughed in his sleeve, as he pictured the dejected mien of the Baron and his men returning to the castle after their fruitless day s hunt, and at the same time saw himself seated at table, the door securely fastened, and a pint of wine beside him, t te- -t te with a haunch of the deer, the rich and delicious gravy escaping as the knife returned for a third or fourth cut. The deer, as far as Thibault could calculate, was making for the bridge which crosses the Ourcq, between Noroy and Troesne. At the time of which we are now speaking there was a bridge spanning the river, formed of two joists and a few planks. As the river was very high and very rapid, Thibault decided that the deer would not attempt to ford it; so he hid himself behind a rock, within reach of the bridge, and waited. It was not long before he saw the graceful head of the deer appear above the rock at some ten paces distance; the animal was bending its ears to the wind, in the endeavour to catch the sound of the enemy s approach as it was borne along the breeze. Thibault, excited by this sudden appearance, rose from behind the rock, poised his boar-spear and sent it flying towards the animal. The buck, with a single bound, reached the middle of the bridge, a second carried him on to the opposite bank, and a third bore him out of sight. The boar-spear had passed within a foot of the animal, and had buried itself in the grass fifteen paces from where Thibault was standing. Never before had he been known to make such an unskilful throw; he, Thibault, of all the company who made the tour of France, the one known to be surest of his aim! Enraged with himself, therefore, he picked up his weapon, and bounded across the bridge with an agility equal to that of the deer. Thibault knew the country quite as well as the animal he was pursuing, and so got ahead of the deer and once more concealed himself, this time behind a beech-tree, half-way up, and not too far from a little footpath. The deer now passed so close to him, that Thibault hesitated as to whether it would not be better to knock the animal down with his boar-spear than to throw the weapon at it; but his hesitation did not last longer than a flash of lightning, for no lightning could be quicker than the animal itself, which was already twenty paces off when Thibault threw his boar-spear, but without better luck than the time before. And now the baying of the hounds was drawing nearer and nearer; another few minutes, and it would, he felt, be impossible for him to carry out his design. But in honour to his spirit of persistence, be it said, that in proportion as the difficulty increased, the greater became Thibault s desire to get possession of the deer. I must have it, come what will, he cried, I must! and if there is a God who cares for the poor, I shall have satisfaction of this confounded Baron, who beat me as if I were a dog, but I am a man notwithstanding, and I am quite ready to prove the same to him. And Thibault picked up his boar-spear and once more set off running. But it would appear that the good God whom he had just invoked, either had not heard him, or wished to drive him to extremities, for his third attempt had no greater success than the previous ones. By Heaven! exclaimed Thibault, God Almighty is assuredly deaf, it seems Let the Devil then open his ears and hear me! In the name of God or of the Devil, I want you and I will have you, cursed animal! Thibault had hardly finished this double blasphemy when the buck, doubling back, passed close to him for the fourth time, and disappeared among the bushes, but so quickly and unexpectedly, that Thibault had not even time to lift his boar-spear. At that moment he heard the dogs so near him, that he deemed it would be imprudent to continue his pursuit. He looked round him, saw a thickly-leaved oak tree, threw his boar-spear into a bush, swarmed up the trunk, and hid himself among the foliage. He imagined, and with good reason, that since the deer had gone ahead again, the hunt would only pass by following on its track. The dogs had not lost the scent, in spite of the quarry s doublings, and they were not likely to lose it now. Thibault had not been seated among the branches for above five minutes, when first the hounds came into sight, then the Baron, who in spite of his fifty-five years, headed the chase as if he had been a man of twenty. It must be added that the Lord of Vez was in a state of rage that we will not even endeavour to describe. To lose four hours over a wretched deer and still to be running behind it! Such a thing had never happened to him before. He stormed at his men, he whipped his dogs, and had so ploughed his horse s sides with his spurs, that the thick coating of mud which covered his gaiters was reddened with blood. On reaching the bridge over the Ourcq, however, there had been an interval of alleviation for the Baron, for the hounds had so unanimously taken up the scent, that the cloak which the wolf-hunter carried behind him would have sufficed to cover the whole pack as they crossed the bridge. Indeed the Baron was so pleased, that he was not satisfied with humming a tirra-la, but, unslinging his hunting-horn he sounded it with his full lung-power, a thing which he only did on great occasions. But, unfortunately, the joy of my Lord of Vez was destined to be short lived. All of

affairs

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you must know that this made the fifth or sixth time that the worthy Baron had started the animal in question, but never once had he been able to get within gun-shot of him or to run him down. Yes, Marcotte went on, but the damned beast has employed himself so well all night crossing his track and doubling, that after having traced him over half the forest, I found myself at the place from which I started. You think then, Marcotte, that there is no chance of getting near him. I am afraid not. By all the devils in hell! exclaimed the Lord of Vez, who had not had his equal in swearing since the mighty Nimrod, however, I am not feeling well to-day, and I must have a burst of some kind, to get rid of these bad humours. What do you think we can hunt, Marcotte, in place of this damned black wolf? Well, having been so taken up with the wolf, answered Marcotte, I have not traced any other animal. Will my Lord uncouple at random and hunt the first animal that we come across? The Baron was about to express his willingness to agree to this proposal when he caught sight of little Engoulevent coming towards them cap in hand. Wait a moment, he said, here comes Engoulevent, who, I fancy, has some advice to give us. I have no advice to give to a noble Lord like yourself, replied Engoulevent, assuming an expression of humility on his sly and crafty face; it is, however, my duty to inform you that there is a splendid buck in the neighbourhood. Let us see your buck, Engoulevent, replied the chief wolf-hunter, and if you are not mistaken about it, there will be a new crown for you. Where is this buck of yours? asked Marcotte, but look to your skin, if you make us uncouple to no purpose. Let me have Matador and Jupiter, and then we shall see. Matador and Jupiter were the finest among the hounds belonging to the Lord of Vez. And indeed, Engoulevent had not gone a hundred paces with them through the thicket, before, by the lashing of their tails, and their repeated yelping, he knew that they were on the right scent. In another minute or two a magnificent ten-tined stag came into view. Marcotte cried Tally-ho, sounded his horn, and the hunt began, to the great satisfaction of the Lord of Vez, who, although regretting the black wolf, was willing to make the best of a fine buck in its stead. The hunt had lasted two hours, and the quarry still held on. It had first led its pursuers from the little wood of Haramont to the Chemin du Pendu, and thence straight to the back of Oigny, and it still showed no sign of fatigue; for it was not one of those poor animals of the flat country who get their tails pulled by every wretched terrier. As it neared the low grounds of Bourg-fontaine, however, it evidently decided that it was being run rather hard, for it gave up the bolder measures which had hitherto enabled it to keep ahead, and began to double. Its first man uvre was to go down to the brook which joins the ponds of Baisemont and Bourg, then to walk against stream with the water up to its haunches, for nearly half a mile; it then sprang on to the right bank, back again into the bed of the stream, made another leap to the left, and with a succession of bounds, as vigorous as its failing strength allowed, continued to out-distance its pursuers. But the dogs of my lord Baron were not animals to be put out by such trifles as these. Being both sagacious and well-bred, they, of their own accord, divided the task between themselves, half going up stream, and half down, these hunting on the right those on the left, and so effectually that they ere long put the animal off its changes, for they soon recovered the scent, rallying at the first cry given by one of the pack, and starting afresh on the chase, as ready and eager as if the deer had been only twenty paces in front of them. And so with galloping of horses, with cry of hounds and blare of horn, the Baron and his huntsmen reached the ponds of Saint Antoine, a hundred paces or so from the Confines of Oigny. Between these and the Osier-beds stood the hut of Thibault, the sabot-maker. We must pause to give some description of this Thibault, the shoe-maker, the real hero of the tale. You will ask why I, who have summoned kings to appear upon the stage, who have obliged princes, dukes, and barons to play secondary parts in my romances, should take a simple shoe-maker for the hero of this tale. First, I will reply by saying that, in my dear home country of Villers-Cotterets, there are more sabot-makers than barons, dukes and princes, and that, as soon as I decided to make the forest the scene of the events I am about to record, I was obliged to choose one of the actual inhabitants of this forest as hero, unless I had wished to represent such fantastic persons as the _Incas_ of Marmontel or the _Abencerrages_ of M. de Florian. More than that, it is not the author who decides on the subject, but the subject which takes possession of the author, and, good or bad, this particular subject has taken possession of me. I will therefore endeavour to draw Thibault s portrait for you, plain shoe-maker as he was, as exactly as the artist paints the portrait which a prince desires to send to his lady-love. Thibault was a man between twenty-five and twenty-seven years of age, tall, well made, physically robust, but by nature melancholy and sad of heart. This depression of spirits arose from a little grain of envy, which, in spite of himself, perhaps unconsciously to himself, he harboured towards all such of his neighbours as had been more favoured by fortune than himself. His father had committed a fault, a serious one at all times, but more especially in those days of absolutism, when a man was not able to rise above his station as now-a-days, when with sufficient capacity he may attain to any rank. Thibault had been educated above his position; he had been at school under the Abb Fortier, at Villers-Cotterets, and had learnt to read, write, and cypher; moreover he knew a little Latin, which made him inordinately proud of himself. Thibault had spent a great part of his time in reading, and his books had been chiefly those which were in vogue at the close of the preceding century. But he had not been a sufficiently clever analyst to know how to separate the good from the bad, or rather he _had_ separated what was bad, and swallowed it in large doses, leaving the good to precipitate itself at the bottom of the glass. At twenty years of age Thibault had certainly had dreams of being something other than a sabot-maker. He had, for instance, for a very little while, cast his eyes towards the army. But his comrades who had worn the double livery of king and country, had left the service as they entered it, mere soldiers of the ranks, having failed during five or six years of slavery to obtain promotion, even to the not very exalted grade of corporal. Thibault had also thought of becoming a sailor. But a career in the navy was as much forbidden to the plebeian as one in the army. Possibly after enduring danger, and storm and battle for fifteen or twenty years, he might be made a boatswain s mate, that was all, and then! besides, it was by no means Thibault s ambition to wear a short vest and sail-cloth trousers, but the blue uniform of the king with red vest and gold epaulettes. He had moreover known of no single case in which the son of a mere shoe-maker had become Master of a Frigate, or even Lieutenant. So he was forced to give up all idea of joining the King s Navy. Thibault would not have minded being a Notary, and at one time thought of apprenticing himself to the Royal Scrivener, Ma tre Niquet, as a stepping-stone, and of making his way up on the strength of his own legs and with the help of his pen. But supposing him to have risen to the position of head clerk with a salary of a hundred crowns, where was he to find the thirty thousand francs which would be required for the purchase of the smallest village practice. There was, therefore, no better chance of his becoming a scrivener than of becoming an officer on sea or land. Meanwhile, Thibault s father died, leaving very little ready money. There was about enough to bury him, so he was buried, and this done, there remained some thirty or forty francs over for Thibault. Thibault knew his trade well; indeed, he was a first-rate workman; but he had no inclination to handle either auger or parer. It ended, therefore, by his leaving all his father s tools in the care of a friend, a remnant of prudence still remaining to him, and selling every vestige of furniture; having thus realised a sum of five hundred and forty livres, he determined to make what was then called the tour of France. Thibault spent three years in travelling; he did not make his fortune during that time, but he learnt a great many things in the course of his journey of which he was previously ignorant, and acquired certain accomplishments which he had previously been without. He learned amongst other things that, although it was as well to keep one s word on matters of business with a man, it was no use whatever keeping love vows made to a woman. So much for his character and habits of mind. As to his external accomplishments, he could dance a jig beautifully, could hold his own at quarter-staff against four men, and could handle the boar-spear as cleverly as the best huntsman going. All these things had not a little served to increase Thibault s natural self-esteem, and, seeing himself handsomer, stronger, and cleverer than many of the nobles, he would exclaim against Providence, crying, Why was I not nobly born? why was not that nobleman yonder born a peasant? But as Providence took care not to make any answer to these apostroph s, and as Thibault found that dancing, playing at quarter-staff, and throwing the boar-spear only fatigued the body, without procuring him any material advantage, he began to turn his thoughts towards his ancient trade, humble though it was, saying to himself, if it enabled the father to live, it would also enable the son. So Thibault went and fetched away his tools; and then, tools in hand, he went to ask permission of the Steward of his Royal Highness Louis Philippe of Orleans, to build a hut in the forest, in which to carry on his trade. He had no difficulty in obtaining this, for the steward knew by experience that his master was a very kind-hearted man, expending as much as two hundred and forty thousand francs a year on the poor; he felt sure, therefore, that one who gave away a sum like this, would be willing to let an honest workman who wished to ply his trade, have thirty or forty feet of ground. As he had leave to establish himself in whatever part of the forest he liked best, Thibault chose the spot near the osier-beds, where the roads crossed, one of the most beautiful parts of the woods, less than a mile from Oigny and about three times that distance from Villers-Cotterets. The shoe-maker put up his work-shop, built partly of old planks given him by M. Panisis, who had been having a sale in the neighbourhood, and partly of the branches which the steward gave him leave to cut in the forest. When the building of the hut, which consisted of a bedroom, cosily shut in, where he could work during the winter, and of a lean-to, open to the air, where he could work in the summer, was completed, Thibault began to think of making himself a bed. At first, a layer of fern had to serve for this purpose; but after he had made a hundred pairs of wooden shoes and had sold these to Bedeau, who kept a general shop at Villers-Cotterets, he was able to pay a sufficient deposit to get a mattress, to be paid for in full by the end of three months. The framework of the bed was not difficult to make; Thibault was not the shoe-maker he was without being a bit of a carpenter into the bargain, and when this was finished he plaited osiers to take the place of sacking, laid the mattress upon them, and found himself at last with a bed to lie upon. Little by little came the sheets, and then in their turn the coverlids; the next purchase was a chafing-dish, and earthenware pots to cook in, and finally some plates and dishes. Before the year was out Thibault had also made additions to his furniture of a fine oak chest and a fine walnut-wood cupboard, both, like the bed, his own handiwork. All the while he was driving a brisk trade, for none could beat Thibault in turning a block of beech into a pair of shoes, and in converting the odd chips into spoons, salt-cellars and natty little bowls. He had now been settled in his work-shop for three years, that is, ever since his return after the completion of his tour round France, and there was nothing for which anyone could have reproached him during this interval except the failing we have already mentioned--that he was rather more envious of the good fortune of his neighbour than was altogether conducive to the welfare of his soul. But this feeling was as yet so inoffensive, that his confessor had no need to do more than awaken in him a sense of shame for harbouring thoughts which had, so far, not resulted in any active crime. CHAPTER II THE SEIGNEUR JEAN AND THE SABOT-MAKER As already said, the buck began to dodge and double on reaching Oigny, turning and twisting round Thibault s hut, and the weather being fine although the autumn was well advanced, the shoe-maker was sitting at his work in his open lean-to. Looking up, he suddenly espied the trembling animal, quivering in every limb, standing a few paces in front of him, gazing at him with intelligent and terrified eyes. Thibault had been for a long time aware that the hunt was circling around Oigny, at one time drawing near to the village, and then receding, only to draw near again. There was nothing therefore very surprising to him in the sight of the buck, yet he stayed his hand, although he was busy at work, and contemplated the animal. Saint Sabot! he exclaimed--I should explain, that the festival of Saint Sabot is the wooden-shoe f te-- Saint Sabot! but that is a dainty morsel and would taste as fine, I warrant, as the chamois I ate at Vienne once at the grand banquet of the Jolly Shoe-makers of Dauphin . Lucky folk who can dine on the like every day. I tasted such once, it is now nearly four years ago, and my mouth waters now when I think of it. Oh! these lords! these lords! with their fresh meats and their old wines at every meal, while I have to be satisfied with potatoes to eat and water to drink from one week s end to the other; and it is a chance if even on Sunday, I can feast myself with a lump of rusty bacon and an old cabbage, and a glass of _pignolet_ fit to make my old goat stand on her head. It need scarcely be said, that as soon as Thibault began this monologue, the buck had turned and disappeared. Thibault had finished rounding his periods, and had just declaimed his peroration, when he heard himself roughly accosted in forcible terms: Ho, there, you scoundrel! answer me. It was the Baron, who seeing his dogs wavering, was anxious to make sure that they were not on the wrong scent. Ho, there, you scoundrel! repeated the wolf-hunter, have you seen the beast? There was evidently something in the manner of the Baron s questioning which did not please our philosophical shoe-maker, for although he was perfectly aware what was the matter, he answered: what beast? Curse you! why, the buck we are hunting! He must have passed close by here, and standing gaping as you do, you must have seen him. It was a fine stag of ten, was it not? Which way did he go? Speak up, you blackguard, or you shall have a taste of my stirrup-leather! The black plague take him, cub of a wolf! muttered the shoe-maker to himself. Then, aloud, with a fine air of pretended simplicity, Ah, yes! he said, I did see him. A buck, was it not? a ten-tiner, eh? with great horns. Ah, yes to be sure, a buck, with great horns,--or great corns, was it? yes, I saw him as plain as I see you, my Lord. But there, I can t say if he had any corns, for I did not look at his feet, anyhow, he added, with the air of a perfect simpleton, if he had corns, they did not prevent him running. At any other time the Baron would have laughed at what he might have taken for genuine stupidity; but the doublings of the animal were beginning to put him into a regular huntsman s fever. Now, then, you scoundrel, a truce to this jesting! If you are in a humour for jokes, it is more than I am! I will be in whatever humour it may please your Lordship I should be. Well, then, answer me. Your Lordship has asked me nothing as yet. Did the deer seem tired? Not very. Which way did he come? He did not come, he was standing still. Well, but he must have come from one side or the other. Ah! very likely, but I did not see him come. Which way did he go? I would tell you directly; only I did not see him go. The Lord of Vez cast an angry look at Thibault. Is it some while ago the buck passed this way, Master Simpleton? Not so very long, my Lord. About how long ago? Thibault made as if trying to remember; at last he replied: It was, I think, the day before yesterday, but in saying this, the shoe-maker, unfortunately, could not suppress a grin. This grin did not escape the Baron, who, spurring his horse, rode down on Thibault with lifted whip. Thibault was agile, and with a single bound he reached the shelter of his lean-to, whither the wolf-hunter could not follow, as long as he remained mounted; Thibault was therefore in momentary safety. You are only bantering and lying! cried the huntsman, for there is Marcassino, my best hound, giving cry not twenty yards off, and if the deer passed by where Marcassino is, he must have come over the hedge, and it is impossible, therefore, that you did not see him. Pardon, my Lord, but according to our good priest, no one but the Pope is infallible, and Monsieur Marcassino may be mistaken. Marcassino is never mistaken, do you hear, you rascal! and in proof of it I can see from here the marks where the animal scratched up the ground. Nevertheless, my Lord, I assure you, I swear.... said Thibault, who saw the Baron s eyebrows contracting in a way that made him feel uneasy. Silence, and come here, blackguard! cried my lord. Thibault hesitated a moment, but the black look on the sportsman s face became more and more threatening, and fearing to increase his exasperation by disobeying his command, he thought he had better go forward, hoping that the Baron merely wished to ask a service of him. But it was an unlucky move on his part, for scarcely had he emerged from the protection of the shed, before the horse of the Lord of Vez, urged by bit and spur, gave a leap, which brought his rider swooping down upon Thibault, while at the same moment a furious blow from the butt end of the Baron s whip fell upon his head. The shoe-maker, stunned by the blow, tottered a moment, lost his balance and was about to fall face downwards, when the Baron, drawing his foot out of the stirrup, with a violent kick in the chest, not only straightened him again, but sent the poor wretch flying in an opposite direction, where he fell with his back against the door of his hut. Take that! said the Baron, as he first felled Thibault with his whip, and then kicked him, take that for your lie, and that for your banter! And then, without troubling himself any further about the man, whom he left lying on his back, the Lord of Vez, seeing that the hounds had rallied on hearing Marcassino s cry, gave them a cheery note on his horn, and cantered away. Thibault lifted himself up, feeling bruised all over, and began feeling himself from head to foot to make sure that no bones were broken. Having carefully passed his hand over each limb in succession, that s all right, he said, there is nothing broken either above or below, I am glad to find. So, my Lord Baron, that is how you treat people, because you happen to have married a Prince s bastard daughter! But let me tell you, my fine fellow, it is not you who will eat the buck you are hunting to-day; it will be this blackguard, this scoundrel, this simpleton of a Thibault who will eat it. Yes, it shall be I who eat it, that I vow! cried Thibault, confirming himself more and more in his bold resolution, and it is no use being a man if having once made a vow, one fails to keep it. So without further delay, Thibault thrust his bill-hook into his belt, seized his boar-spear, and after listening for a moment to the cry of the hounds to ascertain in which direction the hunt had gone, he ran off with all the speed of which a man s legs are capable to get the start of them, guessing by the curve which the stag and its pursuers were following what would be the straight line to take so as to intercept them. There were two ways of doing his deed open to Thibault; either to hide himself beside the path which the buck must take and kill him with his boar-spear, or else to surprise the animal just as he was being hunted down by the dogs, and collar him there and then. And as he ran, the desire to revenge himself on the Baron for the latter s brutality, was not so uppermost in Thibault s mind as the thoughts of the sumptuous manner in which he would fare for the next month, on the shoulders, the back, and the haunches of the deer, either salted to a turn, roasted on the spit, or cut in slices and done in the pan. And these two ideas, moreover, of vengeance and gluttony, were so jumbled up in his brain, that while still running at the top of his speed he laughed in his sleeve, as he pictured the dejected mien of the Baron and his men returning to the castle after their fruitless day s hunt, and at the same time saw himself seated at table, the door securely fastened, and a pint of wine beside him, t te- -t te with a haunch of the deer, the rich and delicious gravy escaping as the knife returned for a third or fourth cut. The deer, as far as Thibault could calculate, was making for the bridge which crosses the Ourcq, between Noroy and Troesne. At the time of which we are now speaking there was a bridge spanning the river, formed of two joists and a few planks. As the river was very high and very rapid, Thibault decided that the deer would not attempt to ford it; so he hid himself behind a rock, within reach of the bridge, and waited. It was not long before he saw the graceful head of the deer appear above the rock at some ten paces distance; the animal was bending its ears to the wind, in the endeavour to catch the sound of the enemy s approach as it was borne along the breeze. Thibault, excited by this sudden appearance, rose from behind the rock, poised his boar-spear and sent it flying towards the animal. The buck, with a single bound, reached the middle of the bridge, a second carried him on to the opposite bank, and a third bore him out of sight. The boar-spear had passed within a foot of the animal, and had buried itself in the grass fifteen paces from where Thibault was standing. Never before had he been known to make such an unskilful throw; he, Thibault, of all the company who made the tour of France, the one known to be surest of his aim! Enraged with himself, therefore, he picked up his weapon, and bounded across the bridge with an agility equal to that of the deer. Thibault knew the country quite as well as the animal he was pursuing, and so got ahead of the deer and once more concealed himself, this time behind a beech-tree, half-way up, and not too far from a little footpath. The deer now passed so close to him, that Thibault hesitated as to whether it would not be better to knock the animal down with his boar-spear than to throw the weapon at it; but his hesitation did not last longer than a flash of lightning, for no lightning could be quicker than the animal itself, which was already twenty paces off when Thibault threw his boar-spear, but without better luck than the time before. And now the baying of the hounds was drawing nearer and nearer; another few minutes, and it would, he felt, be impossible for him to carry out his design. But in honour to his spirit of persistence, be it said, that in proportion as the difficulty increased, the greater became Thibault s desire to get possession of the deer. I must have it, come what will, he cried, I must! and if there is a God who cares for the poor, I shall have satisfaction of this confounded Baron, who beat me as if I were a dog, but I am a man notwithstanding, and I am quite ready to prove the same to him. And Thibault picked up his boar-spear and once more set off running. But it would appear that the good God whom he had just invoked, either had not heard him, or wished to drive him to extremities, for his third attempt had no greater success than the previous ones. By Heaven! exclaimed Thibault, God Almighty is assuredly deaf, it seems Let the Devil then open his ears and hear me! In the name of God or of the Devil, I want you and I will have you, cursed animal! Thibault had hardly finished this double blasphemy when the buck, doubling back, passed close to him for the fourth time, and disappeared among the bushes, but so quickly and unexpectedly, that Thibault had not even time to lift his boar-spear. At that moment he heard the dogs so near him, that he deemed it would be imprudent to continue his pursuit. He looked round him, saw a thickly-leaved oak tree, threw his boar-spear into a bush, swarmed up the trunk, and hid himself among the foliage. He imagined, and with good reason, that since the deer had gone ahead again, the hunt would only pass by following on its track. The dogs had not lost the scent, in spite of the quarry s doublings, and they were not likely to lose it now. Thibault had not been seated among the branches for above five minutes, when first the hounds came into sight, then the Baron, who in spite of his fifty-five years, headed the chase as if he had been a man of twenty. It must be added that the Lord of Vez was in a state of rage that we will not even endeavour to describe. To lose four hours over a wretched deer and still to be running behind it! Such a thing had never happened to him before. He stormed at his men, he whipped his dogs, and had so ploughed his horse s sides with his spurs, that the thick coating of mud which covered his gaiters was reddened with blood. On reaching the bridge over the Ourcq, however, there had been an interval of alleviation for the Baron, for the hounds had so unanimously taken up the scent, that the cloak which the wolf-hunter carried behind him would have sufficed to cover the whole pack as they crossed the bridge. Indeed the Baron was so pleased, that he was not satisfied with humming a tirra-la, but, unslinging his hunting-horn he sounded it with his full lung-power, a thing which he only did on great occasions. But, unfortunately, the joy of my Lord of Vez was destined to be short lived. All of

ah

How many times the word 'ah' appears in the text?

you must know that this made the fifth or sixth time that the worthy Baron had started the animal in question, but never once had he been able to get within gun-shot of him or to run him down. Yes, Marcotte went on, but the damned beast has employed himself so well all night crossing his track and doubling, that after having traced him over half the forest, I found myself at the place from which I started. You think then, Marcotte, that there is no chance of getting near him. I am afraid not. By all the devils in hell! exclaimed the Lord of Vez, who had not had his equal in swearing since the mighty Nimrod, however, I am not feeling well to-day, and I must have a burst of some kind, to get rid of these bad humours. What do you think we can hunt, Marcotte, in place of this damned black wolf? Well, having been so taken up with the wolf, answered Marcotte, I have not traced any other animal. Will my Lord uncouple at random and hunt the first animal that we come across? The Baron was about to express his willingness to agree to this proposal when he caught sight of little Engoulevent coming towards them cap in hand. Wait a moment, he said, here comes Engoulevent, who, I fancy, has some advice to give us. I have no advice to give to a noble Lord like yourself, replied Engoulevent, assuming an expression of humility on his sly and crafty face; it is, however, my duty to inform you that there is a splendid buck in the neighbourhood. Let us see your buck, Engoulevent, replied the chief wolf-hunter, and if you are not mistaken about it, there will be a new crown for you. Where is this buck of yours? asked Marcotte, but look to your skin, if you make us uncouple to no purpose. Let me have Matador and Jupiter, and then we shall see. Matador and Jupiter were the finest among the hounds belonging to the Lord of Vez. And indeed, Engoulevent had not gone a hundred paces with them through the thicket, before, by the lashing of their tails, and their repeated yelping, he knew that they were on the right scent. In another minute or two a magnificent ten-tined stag came into view. Marcotte cried Tally-ho, sounded his horn, and the hunt began, to the great satisfaction of the Lord of Vez, who, although regretting the black wolf, was willing to make the best of a fine buck in its stead. The hunt had lasted two hours, and the quarry still held on. It had first led its pursuers from the little wood of Haramont to the Chemin du Pendu, and thence straight to the back of Oigny, and it still showed no sign of fatigue; for it was not one of those poor animals of the flat country who get their tails pulled by every wretched terrier. As it neared the low grounds of Bourg-fontaine, however, it evidently decided that it was being run rather hard, for it gave up the bolder measures which had hitherto enabled it to keep ahead, and began to double. Its first man uvre was to go down to the brook which joins the ponds of Baisemont and Bourg, then to walk against stream with the water up to its haunches, for nearly half a mile; it then sprang on to the right bank, back again into the bed of the stream, made another leap to the left, and with a succession of bounds, as vigorous as its failing strength allowed, continued to out-distance its pursuers. But the dogs of my lord Baron were not animals to be put out by such trifles as these. Being both sagacious and well-bred, they, of their own accord, divided the task between themselves, half going up stream, and half down, these hunting on the right those on the left, and so effectually that they ere long put the animal off its changes, for they soon recovered the scent, rallying at the first cry given by one of the pack, and starting afresh on the chase, as ready and eager as if the deer had been only twenty paces in front of them. And so with galloping of horses, with cry of hounds and blare of horn, the Baron and his huntsmen reached the ponds of Saint Antoine, a hundred paces or so from the Confines of Oigny. Between these and the Osier-beds stood the hut of Thibault, the sabot-maker. We must pause to give some description of this Thibault, the shoe-maker, the real hero of the tale. You will ask why I, who have summoned kings to appear upon the stage, who have obliged princes, dukes, and barons to play secondary parts in my romances, should take a simple shoe-maker for the hero of this tale. First, I will reply by saying that, in my dear home country of Villers-Cotterets, there are more sabot-makers than barons, dukes and princes, and that, as soon as I decided to make the forest the scene of the events I am about to record, I was obliged to choose one of the actual inhabitants of this forest as hero, unless I had wished to represent such fantastic persons as the _Incas_ of Marmontel or the _Abencerrages_ of M. de Florian. More than that, it is not the author who decides on the subject, but the subject which takes possession of the author, and, good or bad, this particular subject has taken possession of me. I will therefore endeavour to draw Thibault s portrait for you, plain shoe-maker as he was, as exactly as the artist paints the portrait which a prince desires to send to his lady-love. Thibault was a man between twenty-five and twenty-seven years of age, tall, well made, physically robust, but by nature melancholy and sad of heart. This depression of spirits arose from a little grain of envy, which, in spite of himself, perhaps unconsciously to himself, he harboured towards all such of his neighbours as had been more favoured by fortune than himself. His father had committed a fault, a serious one at all times, but more especially in those days of absolutism, when a man was not able to rise above his station as now-a-days, when with sufficient capacity he may attain to any rank. Thibault had been educated above his position; he had been at school under the Abb Fortier, at Villers-Cotterets, and had learnt to read, write, and cypher; moreover he knew a little Latin, which made him inordinately proud of himself. Thibault had spent a great part of his time in reading, and his books had been chiefly those which were in vogue at the close of the preceding century. But he had not been a sufficiently clever analyst to know how to separate the good from the bad, or rather he _had_ separated what was bad, and swallowed it in large doses, leaving the good to precipitate itself at the bottom of the glass. At twenty years of age Thibault had certainly had dreams of being something other than a sabot-maker. He had, for instance, for a very little while, cast his eyes towards the army. But his comrades who had worn the double livery of king and country, had left the service as they entered it, mere soldiers of the ranks, having failed during five or six years of slavery to obtain promotion, even to the not very exalted grade of corporal. Thibault had also thought of becoming a sailor. But a career in the navy was as much forbidden to the plebeian as one in the army. Possibly after enduring danger, and storm and battle for fifteen or twenty years, he might be made a boatswain s mate, that was all, and then! besides, it was by no means Thibault s ambition to wear a short vest and sail-cloth trousers, but the blue uniform of the king with red vest and gold epaulettes. He had moreover known of no single case in which the son of a mere shoe-maker had become Master of a Frigate, or even Lieutenant. So he was forced to give up all idea of joining the King s Navy. Thibault would not have minded being a Notary, and at one time thought of apprenticing himself to the Royal Scrivener, Ma tre Niquet, as a stepping-stone, and of making his way up on the strength of his own legs and with the help of his pen. But supposing him to have risen to the position of head clerk with a salary of a hundred crowns, where was he to find the thirty thousand francs which would be required for the purchase of the smallest village practice. There was, therefore, no better chance of his becoming a scrivener than of becoming an officer on sea or land. Meanwhile, Thibault s father died, leaving very little ready money. There was about enough to bury him, so he was buried, and this done, there remained some thirty or forty francs over for Thibault. Thibault knew his trade well; indeed, he was a first-rate workman; but he had no inclination to handle either auger or parer. It ended, therefore, by his leaving all his father s tools in the care of a friend, a remnant of prudence still remaining to him, and selling every vestige of furniture; having thus realised a sum of five hundred and forty livres, he determined to make what was then called the tour of France. Thibault spent three years in travelling; he did not make his fortune during that time, but he learnt a great many things in the course of his journey of which he was previously ignorant, and acquired certain accomplishments which he had previously been without. He learned amongst other things that, although it was as well to keep one s word on matters of business with a man, it was no use whatever keeping love vows made to a woman. So much for his character and habits of mind. As to his external accomplishments, he could dance a jig beautifully, could hold his own at quarter-staff against four men, and could handle the boar-spear as cleverly as the best huntsman going. All these things had not a little served to increase Thibault s natural self-esteem, and, seeing himself handsomer, stronger, and cleverer than many of the nobles, he would exclaim against Providence, crying, Why was I not nobly born? why was not that nobleman yonder born a peasant? But as Providence took care not to make any answer to these apostroph s, and as Thibault found that dancing, playing at quarter-staff, and throwing the boar-spear only fatigued the body, without procuring him any material advantage, he began to turn his thoughts towards his ancient trade, humble though it was, saying to himself, if it enabled the father to live, it would also enable the son. So Thibault went and fetched away his tools; and then, tools in hand, he went to ask permission of the Steward of his Royal Highness Louis Philippe of Orleans, to build a hut in the forest, in which to carry on his trade. He had no difficulty in obtaining this, for the steward knew by experience that his master was a very kind-hearted man, expending as much as two hundred and forty thousand francs a year on the poor; he felt sure, therefore, that one who gave away a sum like this, would be willing to let an honest workman who wished to ply his trade, have thirty or forty feet of ground. As he had leave to establish himself in whatever part of the forest he liked best, Thibault chose the spot near the osier-beds, where the roads crossed, one of the most beautiful parts of the woods, less than a mile from Oigny and about three times that distance from Villers-Cotterets. The shoe-maker put up his work-shop, built partly of old planks given him by M. Panisis, who had been having a sale in the neighbourhood, and partly of the branches which the steward gave him leave to cut in the forest. When the building of the hut, which consisted of a bedroom, cosily shut in, where he could work during the winter, and of a lean-to, open to the air, where he could work in the summer, was completed, Thibault began to think of making himself a bed. At first, a layer of fern had to serve for this purpose; but after he had made a hundred pairs of wooden shoes and had sold these to Bedeau, who kept a general shop at Villers-Cotterets, he was able to pay a sufficient deposit to get a mattress, to be paid for in full by the end of three months. The framework of the bed was not difficult to make; Thibault was not the shoe-maker he was without being a bit of a carpenter into the bargain, and when this was finished he plaited osiers to take the place of sacking, laid the mattress upon them, and found himself at last with a bed to lie upon. Little by little came the sheets, and then in their turn the coverlids; the next purchase was a chafing-dish, and earthenware pots to cook in, and finally some plates and dishes. Before the year was out Thibault had also made additions to his furniture of a fine oak chest and a fine walnut-wood cupboard, both, like the bed, his own handiwork. All the while he was driving a brisk trade, for none could beat Thibault in turning a block of beech into a pair of shoes, and in converting the odd chips into spoons, salt-cellars and natty little bowls. He had now been settled in his work-shop for three years, that is, ever since his return after the completion of his tour round France, and there was nothing for which anyone could have reproached him during this interval except the failing we have already mentioned--that he was rather more envious of the good fortune of his neighbour than was altogether conducive to the welfare of his soul. But this feeling was as yet so inoffensive, that his confessor had no need to do more than awaken in him a sense of shame for harbouring thoughts which had, so far, not resulted in any active crime. CHAPTER II THE SEIGNEUR JEAN AND THE SABOT-MAKER As already said, the buck began to dodge and double on reaching Oigny, turning and twisting round Thibault s hut, and the weather being fine although the autumn was well advanced, the shoe-maker was sitting at his work in his open lean-to. Looking up, he suddenly espied the trembling animal, quivering in every limb, standing a few paces in front of him, gazing at him with intelligent and terrified eyes. Thibault had been for a long time aware that the hunt was circling around Oigny, at one time drawing near to the village, and then receding, only to draw near again. There was nothing therefore very surprising to him in the sight of the buck, yet he stayed his hand, although he was busy at work, and contemplated the animal. Saint Sabot! he exclaimed--I should explain, that the festival of Saint Sabot is the wooden-shoe f te-- Saint Sabot! but that is a dainty morsel and would taste as fine, I warrant, as the chamois I ate at Vienne once at the grand banquet of the Jolly Shoe-makers of Dauphin . Lucky folk who can dine on the like every day. I tasted such once, it is now nearly four years ago, and my mouth waters now when I think of it. Oh! these lords! these lords! with their fresh meats and their old wines at every meal, while I have to be satisfied with potatoes to eat and water to drink from one week s end to the other; and it is a chance if even on Sunday, I can feast myself with a lump of rusty bacon and an old cabbage, and a glass of _pignolet_ fit to make my old goat stand on her head. It need scarcely be said, that as soon as Thibault began this monologue, the buck had turned and disappeared. Thibault had finished rounding his periods, and had just declaimed his peroration, when he heard himself roughly accosted in forcible terms: Ho, there, you scoundrel! answer me. It was the Baron, who seeing his dogs wavering, was anxious to make sure that they were not on the wrong scent. Ho, there, you scoundrel! repeated the wolf-hunter, have you seen the beast? There was evidently something in the manner of the Baron s questioning which did not please our philosophical shoe-maker, for although he was perfectly aware what was the matter, he answered: what beast? Curse you! why, the buck we are hunting! He must have passed close by here, and standing gaping as you do, you must have seen him. It was a fine stag of ten, was it not? Which way did he go? Speak up, you blackguard, or you shall have a taste of my stirrup-leather! The black plague take him, cub of a wolf! muttered the shoe-maker to himself. Then, aloud, with a fine air of pretended simplicity, Ah, yes! he said, I did see him. A buck, was it not? a ten-tiner, eh? with great horns. Ah, yes to be sure, a buck, with great horns,--or great corns, was it? yes, I saw him as plain as I see you, my Lord. But there, I can t say if he had any corns, for I did not look at his feet, anyhow, he added, with the air of a perfect simpleton, if he had corns, they did not prevent him running. At any other time the Baron would have laughed at what he might have taken for genuine stupidity; but the doublings of the animal were beginning to put him into a regular huntsman s fever. Now, then, you scoundrel, a truce to this jesting! If you are in a humour for jokes, it is more than I am! I will be in whatever humour it may please your Lordship I should be. Well, then, answer me. Your Lordship has asked me nothing as yet. Did the deer seem tired? Not very. Which way did he come? He did not come, he was standing still. Well, but he must have come from one side or the other. Ah! very likely, but I did not see him come. Which way did he go? I would tell you directly; only I did not see him go. The Lord of Vez cast an angry look at Thibault. Is it some while ago the buck passed this way, Master Simpleton? Not so very long, my Lord. About how long ago? Thibault made as if trying to remember; at last he replied: It was, I think, the day before yesterday, but in saying this, the shoe-maker, unfortunately, could not suppress a grin. This grin did not escape the Baron, who, spurring his horse, rode down on Thibault with lifted whip. Thibault was agile, and with a single bound he reached the shelter of his lean-to, whither the wolf-hunter could not follow, as long as he remained mounted; Thibault was therefore in momentary safety. You are only bantering and lying! cried the huntsman, for there is Marcassino, my best hound, giving cry not twenty yards off, and if the deer passed by where Marcassino is, he must have come over the hedge, and it is impossible, therefore, that you did not see him. Pardon, my Lord, but according to our good priest, no one but the Pope is infallible, and Monsieur Marcassino may be mistaken. Marcassino is never mistaken, do you hear, you rascal! and in proof of it I can see from here the marks where the animal scratched up the ground. Nevertheless, my Lord, I assure you, I swear.... said Thibault, who saw the Baron s eyebrows contracting in a way that made him feel uneasy. Silence, and come here, blackguard! cried my lord. Thibault hesitated a moment, but the black look on the sportsman s face became more and more threatening, and fearing to increase his exasperation by disobeying his command, he thought he had better go forward, hoping that the Baron merely wished to ask a service of him. But it was an unlucky move on his part, for scarcely had he emerged from the protection of the shed, before the horse of the Lord of Vez, urged by bit and spur, gave a leap, which brought his rider swooping down upon Thibault, while at the same moment a furious blow from the butt end of the Baron s whip fell upon his head. The shoe-maker, stunned by the blow, tottered a moment, lost his balance and was about to fall face downwards, when the Baron, drawing his foot out of the stirrup, with a violent kick in the chest, not only straightened him again, but sent the poor wretch flying in an opposite direction, where he fell with his back against the door of his hut. Take that! said the Baron, as he first felled Thibault with his whip, and then kicked him, take that for your lie, and that for your banter! And then, without troubling himself any further about the man, whom he left lying on his back, the Lord of Vez, seeing that the hounds had rallied on hearing Marcassino s cry, gave them a cheery note on his horn, and cantered away. Thibault lifted himself up, feeling bruised all over, and began feeling himself from head to foot to make sure that no bones were broken. Having carefully passed his hand over each limb in succession, that s all right, he said, there is nothing broken either above or below, I am glad to find. So, my Lord Baron, that is how you treat people, because you happen to have married a Prince s bastard daughter! But let me tell you, my fine fellow, it is not you who will eat the buck you are hunting to-day; it will be this blackguard, this scoundrel, this simpleton of a Thibault who will eat it. Yes, it shall be I who eat it, that I vow! cried Thibault, confirming himself more and more in his bold resolution, and it is no use being a man if having once made a vow, one fails to keep it. So without further delay, Thibault thrust his bill-hook into his belt, seized his boar-spear, and after listening for a moment to the cry of the hounds to ascertain in which direction the hunt had gone, he ran off with all the speed of which a man s legs are capable to get the start of them, guessing by the curve which the stag and its pursuers were following what would be the straight line to take so as to intercept them. There were two ways of doing his deed open to Thibault; either to hide himself beside the path which the buck must take and kill him with his boar-spear, or else to surprise the animal just as he was being hunted down by the dogs, and collar him there and then. And as he ran, the desire to revenge himself on the Baron for the latter s brutality, was not so uppermost in Thibault s mind as the thoughts of the sumptuous manner in which he would fare for the next month, on the shoulders, the back, and the haunches of the deer, either salted to a turn, roasted on the spit, or cut in slices and done in the pan. And these two ideas, moreover, of vengeance and gluttony, were so jumbled up in his brain, that while still running at the top of his speed he laughed in his sleeve, as he pictured the dejected mien of the Baron and his men returning to the castle after their fruitless day s hunt, and at the same time saw himself seated at table, the door securely fastened, and a pint of wine beside him, t te- -t te with a haunch of the deer, the rich and delicious gravy escaping as the knife returned for a third or fourth cut. The deer, as far as Thibault could calculate, was making for the bridge which crosses the Ourcq, between Noroy and Troesne. At the time of which we are now speaking there was a bridge spanning the river, formed of two joists and a few planks. As the river was very high and very rapid, Thibault decided that the deer would not attempt to ford it; so he hid himself behind a rock, within reach of the bridge, and waited. It was not long before he saw the graceful head of the deer appear above the rock at some ten paces distance; the animal was bending its ears to the wind, in the endeavour to catch the sound of the enemy s approach as it was borne along the breeze. Thibault, excited by this sudden appearance, rose from behind the rock, poised his boar-spear and sent it flying towards the animal. The buck, with a single bound, reached the middle of the bridge, a second carried him on to the opposite bank, and a third bore him out of sight. The boar-spear had passed within a foot of the animal, and had buried itself in the grass fifteen paces from where Thibault was standing. Never before had he been known to make such an unskilful throw; he, Thibault, of all the company who made the tour of France, the one known to be surest of his aim! Enraged with himself, therefore, he picked up his weapon, and bounded across the bridge with an agility equal to that of the deer. Thibault knew the country quite as well as the animal he was pursuing, and so got ahead of the deer and once more concealed himself, this time behind a beech-tree, half-way up, and not too far from a little footpath. The deer now passed so close to him, that Thibault hesitated as to whether it would not be better to knock the animal down with his boar-spear than to throw the weapon at it; but his hesitation did not last longer than a flash of lightning, for no lightning could be quicker than the animal itself, which was already twenty paces off when Thibault threw his boar-spear, but without better luck than the time before. And now the baying of the hounds was drawing nearer and nearer; another few minutes, and it would, he felt, be impossible for him to carry out his design. But in honour to his spirit of persistence, be it said, that in proportion as the difficulty increased, the greater became Thibault s desire to get possession of the deer. I must have it, come what will, he cried, I must! and if there is a God who cares for the poor, I shall have satisfaction of this confounded Baron, who beat me as if I were a dog, but I am a man notwithstanding, and I am quite ready to prove the same to him. And Thibault picked up his boar-spear and once more set off running. But it would appear that the good God whom he had just invoked, either had not heard him, or wished to drive him to extremities, for his third attempt had no greater success than the previous ones. By Heaven! exclaimed Thibault, God Almighty is assuredly deaf, it seems Let the Devil then open his ears and hear me! In the name of God or of the Devil, I want you and I will have you, cursed animal! Thibault had hardly finished this double blasphemy when the buck, doubling back, passed close to him for the fourth time, and disappeared among the bushes, but so quickly and unexpectedly, that Thibault had not even time to lift his boar-spear. At that moment he heard the dogs so near him, that he deemed it would be imprudent to continue his pursuit. He looked round him, saw a thickly-leaved oak tree, threw his boar-spear into a bush, swarmed up the trunk, and hid himself among the foliage. He imagined, and with good reason, that since the deer had gone ahead again, the hunt would only pass by following on its track. The dogs had not lost the scent, in spite of the quarry s doublings, and they were not likely to lose it now. Thibault had not been seated among the branches for above five minutes, when first the hounds came into sight, then the Baron, who in spite of his fifty-five years, headed the chase as if he had been a man of twenty. It must be added that the Lord of Vez was in a state of rage that we will not even endeavour to describe. To lose four hours over a wretched deer and still to be running behind it! Such a thing had never happened to him before. He stormed at his men, he whipped his dogs, and had so ploughed his horse s sides with his spurs, that the thick coating of mud which covered his gaiters was reddened with blood. On reaching the bridge over the Ourcq, however, there had been an interval of alleviation for the Baron, for the hounds had so unanimously taken up the scent, that the cloak which the wolf-hunter carried behind him would have sufficed to cover the whole pack as they crossed the bridge. Indeed the Baron was so pleased, that he was not satisfied with humming a tirra-la, but, unslinging his hunting-horn he sounded it with his full lung-power, a thing which he only did on great occasions. But, unfortunately, the joy of my Lord of Vez was destined to be short lived. All of

rights

How many times the word 'rights' appears in the text?

you must know that this made the fifth or sixth time that the worthy Baron had started the animal in question, but never once had he been able to get within gun-shot of him or to run him down. Yes, Marcotte went on, but the damned beast has employed himself so well all night crossing his track and doubling, that after having traced him over half the forest, I found myself at the place from which I started. You think then, Marcotte, that there is no chance of getting near him. I am afraid not. By all the devils in hell! exclaimed the Lord of Vez, who had not had his equal in swearing since the mighty Nimrod, however, I am not feeling well to-day, and I must have a burst of some kind, to get rid of these bad humours. What do you think we can hunt, Marcotte, in place of this damned black wolf? Well, having been so taken up with the wolf, answered Marcotte, I have not traced any other animal. Will my Lord uncouple at random and hunt the first animal that we come across? The Baron was about to express his willingness to agree to this proposal when he caught sight of little Engoulevent coming towards them cap in hand. Wait a moment, he said, here comes Engoulevent, who, I fancy, has some advice to give us. I have no advice to give to a noble Lord like yourself, replied Engoulevent, assuming an expression of humility on his sly and crafty face; it is, however, my duty to inform you that there is a splendid buck in the neighbourhood. Let us see your buck, Engoulevent, replied the chief wolf-hunter, and if you are not mistaken about it, there will be a new crown for you. Where is this buck of yours? asked Marcotte, but look to your skin, if you make us uncouple to no purpose. Let me have Matador and Jupiter, and then we shall see. Matador and Jupiter were the finest among the hounds belonging to the Lord of Vez. And indeed, Engoulevent had not gone a hundred paces with them through the thicket, before, by the lashing of their tails, and their repeated yelping, he knew that they were on the right scent. In another minute or two a magnificent ten-tined stag came into view. Marcotte cried Tally-ho, sounded his horn, and the hunt began, to the great satisfaction of the Lord of Vez, who, although regretting the black wolf, was willing to make the best of a fine buck in its stead. The hunt had lasted two hours, and the quarry still held on. It had first led its pursuers from the little wood of Haramont to the Chemin du Pendu, and thence straight to the back of Oigny, and it still showed no sign of fatigue; for it was not one of those poor animals of the flat country who get their tails pulled by every wretched terrier. As it neared the low grounds of Bourg-fontaine, however, it evidently decided that it was being run rather hard, for it gave up the bolder measures which had hitherto enabled it to keep ahead, and began to double. Its first man uvre was to go down to the brook which joins the ponds of Baisemont and Bourg, then to walk against stream with the water up to its haunches, for nearly half a mile; it then sprang on to the right bank, back again into the bed of the stream, made another leap to the left, and with a succession of bounds, as vigorous as its failing strength allowed, continued to out-distance its pursuers. But the dogs of my lord Baron were not animals to be put out by such trifles as these. Being both sagacious and well-bred, they, of their own accord, divided the task between themselves, half going up stream, and half down, these hunting on the right those on the left, and so effectually that they ere long put the animal off its changes, for they soon recovered the scent, rallying at the first cry given by one of the pack, and starting afresh on the chase, as ready and eager as if the deer had been only twenty paces in front of them. And so with galloping of horses, with cry of hounds and blare of horn, the Baron and his huntsmen reached the ponds of Saint Antoine, a hundred paces or so from the Confines of Oigny. Between these and the Osier-beds stood the hut of Thibault, the sabot-maker. We must pause to give some description of this Thibault, the shoe-maker, the real hero of the tale. You will ask why I, who have summoned kings to appear upon the stage, who have obliged princes, dukes, and barons to play secondary parts in my romances, should take a simple shoe-maker for the hero of this tale. First, I will reply by saying that, in my dear home country of Villers-Cotterets, there are more sabot-makers than barons, dukes and princes, and that, as soon as I decided to make the forest the scene of the events I am about to record, I was obliged to choose one of the actual inhabitants of this forest as hero, unless I had wished to represent such fantastic persons as the _Incas_ of Marmontel or the _Abencerrages_ of M. de Florian. More than that, it is not the author who decides on the subject, but the subject which takes possession of the author, and, good or bad, this particular subject has taken possession of me. I will therefore endeavour to draw Thibault s portrait for you, plain shoe-maker as he was, as exactly as the artist paints the portrait which a prince desires to send to his lady-love. Thibault was a man between twenty-five and twenty-seven years of age, tall, well made, physically robust, but by nature melancholy and sad of heart. This depression of spirits arose from a little grain of envy, which, in spite of himself, perhaps unconsciously to himself, he harboured towards all such of his neighbours as had been more favoured by fortune than himself. His father had committed a fault, a serious one at all times, but more especially in those days of absolutism, when a man was not able to rise above his station as now-a-days, when with sufficient capacity he may attain to any rank. Thibault had been educated above his position; he had been at school under the Abb Fortier, at Villers-Cotterets, and had learnt to read, write, and cypher; moreover he knew a little Latin, which made him inordinately proud of himself. Thibault had spent a great part of his time in reading, and his books had been chiefly those which were in vogue at the close of the preceding century. But he had not been a sufficiently clever analyst to know how to separate the good from the bad, or rather he _had_ separated what was bad, and swallowed it in large doses, leaving the good to precipitate itself at the bottom of the glass. At twenty years of age Thibault had certainly had dreams of being something other than a sabot-maker. He had, for instance, for a very little while, cast his eyes towards the army. But his comrades who had worn the double livery of king and country, had left the service as they entered it, mere soldiers of the ranks, having failed during five or six years of slavery to obtain promotion, even to the not very exalted grade of corporal. Thibault had also thought of becoming a sailor. But a career in the navy was as much forbidden to the plebeian as one in the army. Possibly after enduring danger, and storm and battle for fifteen or twenty years, he might be made a boatswain s mate, that was all, and then! besides, it was by no means Thibault s ambition to wear a short vest and sail-cloth trousers, but the blue uniform of the king with red vest and gold epaulettes. He had moreover known of no single case in which the son of a mere shoe-maker had become Master of a Frigate, or even Lieutenant. So he was forced to give up all idea of joining the King s Navy. Thibault would not have minded being a Notary, and at one time thought of apprenticing himself to the Royal Scrivener, Ma tre Niquet, as a stepping-stone, and of making his way up on the strength of his own legs and with the help of his pen. But supposing him to have risen to the position of head clerk with a salary of a hundred crowns, where was he to find the thirty thousand francs which would be required for the purchase of the smallest village practice. There was, therefore, no better chance of his becoming a scrivener than of becoming an officer on sea or land. Meanwhile, Thibault s father died, leaving very little ready money. There was about enough to bury him, so he was buried, and this done, there remained some thirty or forty francs over for Thibault. Thibault knew his trade well; indeed, he was a first-rate workman; but he had no inclination to handle either auger or parer. It ended, therefore, by his leaving all his father s tools in the care of a friend, a remnant of prudence still remaining to him, and selling every vestige of furniture; having thus realised a sum of five hundred and forty livres, he determined to make what was then called the tour of France. Thibault spent three years in travelling; he did not make his fortune during that time, but he learnt a great many things in the course of his journey of which he was previously ignorant, and acquired certain accomplishments which he had previously been without. He learned amongst other things that, although it was as well to keep one s word on matters of business with a man, it was no use whatever keeping love vows made to a woman. So much for his character and habits of mind. As to his external accomplishments, he could dance a jig beautifully, could hold his own at quarter-staff against four men, and could handle the boar-spear as cleverly as the best huntsman going. All these things had not a little served to increase Thibault s natural self-esteem, and, seeing himself handsomer, stronger, and cleverer than many of the nobles, he would exclaim against Providence, crying, Why was I not nobly born? why was not that nobleman yonder born a peasant? But as Providence took care not to make any answer to these apostroph s, and as Thibault found that dancing, playing at quarter-staff, and throwing the boar-spear only fatigued the body, without procuring him any material advantage, he began to turn his thoughts towards his ancient trade, humble though it was, saying to himself, if it enabled the father to live, it would also enable the son. So Thibault went and fetched away his tools; and then, tools in hand, he went to ask permission of the Steward of his Royal Highness Louis Philippe of Orleans, to build a hut in the forest, in which to carry on his trade. He had no difficulty in obtaining this, for the steward knew by experience that his master was a very kind-hearted man, expending as much as two hundred and forty thousand francs a year on the poor; he felt sure, therefore, that one who gave away a sum like this, would be willing to let an honest workman who wished to ply his trade, have thirty or forty feet of ground. As he had leave to establish himself in whatever part of the forest he liked best, Thibault chose the spot near the osier-beds, where the roads crossed, one of the most beautiful parts of the woods, less than a mile from Oigny and about three times that distance from Villers-Cotterets. The shoe-maker put up his work-shop, built partly of old planks given him by M. Panisis, who had been having a sale in the neighbourhood, and partly of the branches which the steward gave him leave to cut in the forest. When the building of the hut, which consisted of a bedroom, cosily shut in, where he could work during the winter, and of a lean-to, open to the air, where he could work in the summer, was completed, Thibault began to think of making himself a bed. At first, a layer of fern had to serve for this purpose; but after he had made a hundred pairs of wooden shoes and had sold these to Bedeau, who kept a general shop at Villers-Cotterets, he was able to pay a sufficient deposit to get a mattress, to be paid for in full by the end of three months. The framework of the bed was not difficult to make; Thibault was not the shoe-maker he was without being a bit of a carpenter into the bargain, and when this was finished he plaited osiers to take the place of sacking, laid the mattress upon them, and found himself at last with a bed to lie upon. Little by little came the sheets, and then in their turn the coverlids; the next purchase was a chafing-dish, and earthenware pots to cook in, and finally some plates and dishes. Before the year was out Thibault had also made additions to his furniture of a fine oak chest and a fine walnut-wood cupboard, both, like the bed, his own handiwork. All the while he was driving a brisk trade, for none could beat Thibault in turning a block of beech into a pair of shoes, and in converting the odd chips into spoons, salt-cellars and natty little bowls. He had now been settled in his work-shop for three years, that is, ever since his return after the completion of his tour round France, and there was nothing for which anyone could have reproached him during this interval except the failing we have already mentioned--that he was rather more envious of the good fortune of his neighbour than was altogether conducive to the welfare of his soul. But this feeling was as yet so inoffensive, that his confessor had no need to do more than awaken in him a sense of shame for harbouring thoughts which had, so far, not resulted in any active crime. CHAPTER II THE SEIGNEUR JEAN AND THE SABOT-MAKER As already said, the buck began to dodge and double on reaching Oigny, turning and twisting round Thibault s hut, and the weather being fine although the autumn was well advanced, the shoe-maker was sitting at his work in his open lean-to. Looking up, he suddenly espied the trembling animal, quivering in every limb, standing a few paces in front of him, gazing at him with intelligent and terrified eyes. Thibault had been for a long time aware that the hunt was circling around Oigny, at one time drawing near to the village, and then receding, only to draw near again. There was nothing therefore very surprising to him in the sight of the buck, yet he stayed his hand, although he was busy at work, and contemplated the animal. Saint Sabot! he exclaimed--I should explain, that the festival of Saint Sabot is the wooden-shoe f te-- Saint Sabot! but that is a dainty morsel and would taste as fine, I warrant, as the chamois I ate at Vienne once at the grand banquet of the Jolly Shoe-makers of Dauphin . Lucky folk who can dine on the like every day. I tasted such once, it is now nearly four years ago, and my mouth waters now when I think of it. Oh! these lords! these lords! with their fresh meats and their old wines at every meal, while I have to be satisfied with potatoes to eat and water to drink from one week s end to the other; and it is a chance if even on Sunday, I can feast myself with a lump of rusty bacon and an old cabbage, and a glass of _pignolet_ fit to make my old goat stand on her head. It need scarcely be said, that as soon as Thibault began this monologue, the buck had turned and disappeared. Thibault had finished rounding his periods, and had just declaimed his peroration, when he heard himself roughly accosted in forcible terms: Ho, there, you scoundrel! answer me. It was the Baron, who seeing his dogs wavering, was anxious to make sure that they were not on the wrong scent. Ho, there, you scoundrel! repeated the wolf-hunter, have you seen the beast? There was evidently something in the manner of the Baron s questioning which did not please our philosophical shoe-maker, for although he was perfectly aware what was the matter, he answered: what beast? Curse you! why, the buck we are hunting! He must have passed close by here, and standing gaping as you do, you must have seen him. It was a fine stag of ten, was it not? Which way did he go? Speak up, you blackguard, or you shall have a taste of my stirrup-leather! The black plague take him, cub of a wolf! muttered the shoe-maker to himself. Then, aloud, with a fine air of pretended simplicity, Ah, yes! he said, I did see him. A buck, was it not? a ten-tiner, eh? with great horns. Ah, yes to be sure, a buck, with great horns,--or great corns, was it? yes, I saw him as plain as I see you, my Lord. But there, I can t say if he had any corns, for I did not look at his feet, anyhow, he added, with the air of a perfect simpleton, if he had corns, they did not prevent him running. At any other time the Baron would have laughed at what he might have taken for genuine stupidity; but the doublings of the animal were beginning to put him into a regular huntsman s fever. Now, then, you scoundrel, a truce to this jesting! If you are in a humour for jokes, it is more than I am! I will be in whatever humour it may please your Lordship I should be. Well, then, answer me. Your Lordship has asked me nothing as yet. Did the deer seem tired? Not very. Which way did he come? He did not come, he was standing still. Well, but he must have come from one side or the other. Ah! very likely, but I did not see him come. Which way did he go? I would tell you directly; only I did not see him go. The Lord of Vez cast an angry look at Thibault. Is it some while ago the buck passed this way, Master Simpleton? Not so very long, my Lord. About how long ago? Thibault made as if trying to remember; at last he replied: It was, I think, the day before yesterday, but in saying this, the shoe-maker, unfortunately, could not suppress a grin. This grin did not escape the Baron, who, spurring his horse, rode down on Thibault with lifted whip. Thibault was agile, and with a single bound he reached the shelter of his lean-to, whither the wolf-hunter could not follow, as long as he remained mounted; Thibault was therefore in momentary safety. You are only bantering and lying! cried the huntsman, for there is Marcassino, my best hound, giving cry not twenty yards off, and if the deer passed by where Marcassino is, he must have come over the hedge, and it is impossible, therefore, that you did not see him. Pardon, my Lord, but according to our good priest, no one but the Pope is infallible, and Monsieur Marcassino may be mistaken. Marcassino is never mistaken, do you hear, you rascal! and in proof of it I can see from here the marks where the animal scratched up the ground. Nevertheless, my Lord, I assure you, I swear.... said Thibault, who saw the Baron s eyebrows contracting in a way that made him feel uneasy. Silence, and come here, blackguard! cried my lord. Thibault hesitated a moment, but the black look on the sportsman s face became more and more threatening, and fearing to increase his exasperation by disobeying his command, he thought he had better go forward, hoping that the Baron merely wished to ask a service of him. But it was an unlucky move on his part, for scarcely had he emerged from the protection of the shed, before the horse of the Lord of Vez, urged by bit and spur, gave a leap, which brought his rider swooping down upon Thibault, while at the same moment a furious blow from the butt end of the Baron s whip fell upon his head. The shoe-maker, stunned by the blow, tottered a moment, lost his balance and was about to fall face downwards, when the Baron, drawing his foot out of the stirrup, with a violent kick in the chest, not only straightened him again, but sent the poor wretch flying in an opposite direction, where he fell with his back against the door of his hut. Take that! said the Baron, as he first felled Thibault with his whip, and then kicked him, take that for your lie, and that for your banter! And then, without troubling himself any further about the man, whom he left lying on his back, the Lord of Vez, seeing that the hounds had rallied on hearing Marcassino s cry, gave them a cheery note on his horn, and cantered away. Thibault lifted himself up, feeling bruised all over, and began feeling himself from head to foot to make sure that no bones were broken. Having carefully passed his hand over each limb in succession, that s all right, he said, there is nothing broken either above or below, I am glad to find. So, my Lord Baron, that is how you treat people, because you happen to have married a Prince s bastard daughter! But let me tell you, my fine fellow, it is not you who will eat the buck you are hunting to-day; it will be this blackguard, this scoundrel, this simpleton of a Thibault who will eat it. Yes, it shall be I who eat it, that I vow! cried Thibault, confirming himself more and more in his bold resolution, and it is no use being a man if having once made a vow, one fails to keep it. So without further delay, Thibault thrust his bill-hook into his belt, seized his boar-spear, and after listening for a moment to the cry of the hounds to ascertain in which direction the hunt had gone, he ran off with all the speed of which a man s legs are capable to get the start of them, guessing by the curve which the stag and its pursuers were following what would be the straight line to take so as to intercept them. There were two ways of doing his deed open to Thibault; either to hide himself beside the path which the buck must take and kill him with his boar-spear, or else to surprise the animal just as he was being hunted down by the dogs, and collar him there and then. And as he ran, the desire to revenge himself on the Baron for the latter s brutality, was not so uppermost in Thibault s mind as the thoughts of the sumptuous manner in which he would fare for the next month, on the shoulders, the back, and the haunches of the deer, either salted to a turn, roasted on the spit, or cut in slices and done in the pan. And these two ideas, moreover, of vengeance and gluttony, were so jumbled up in his brain, that while still running at the top of his speed he laughed in his sleeve, as he pictured the dejected mien of the Baron and his men returning to the castle after their fruitless day s hunt, and at the same time saw himself seated at table, the door securely fastened, and a pint of wine beside him, t te- -t te with a haunch of the deer, the rich and delicious gravy escaping as the knife returned for a third or fourth cut. The deer, as far as Thibault could calculate, was making for the bridge which crosses the Ourcq, between Noroy and Troesne. At the time of which we are now speaking there was a bridge spanning the river, formed of two joists and a few planks. As the river was very high and very rapid, Thibault decided that the deer would not attempt to ford it; so he hid himself behind a rock, within reach of the bridge, and waited. It was not long before he saw the graceful head of the deer appear above the rock at some ten paces distance; the animal was bending its ears to the wind, in the endeavour to catch the sound of the enemy s approach as it was borne along the breeze. Thibault, excited by this sudden appearance, rose from behind the rock, poised his boar-spear and sent it flying towards the animal. The buck, with a single bound, reached the middle of the bridge, a second carried him on to the opposite bank, and a third bore him out of sight. The boar-spear had passed within a foot of the animal, and had buried itself in the grass fifteen paces from where Thibault was standing. Never before had he been known to make such an unskilful throw; he, Thibault, of all the company who made the tour of France, the one known to be surest of his aim! Enraged with himself, therefore, he picked up his weapon, and bounded across the bridge with an agility equal to that of the deer. Thibault knew the country quite as well as the animal he was pursuing, and so got ahead of the deer and once more concealed himself, this time behind a beech-tree, half-way up, and not too far from a little footpath. The deer now passed so close to him, that Thibault hesitated as to whether it would not be better to knock the animal down with his boar-spear than to throw the weapon at it; but his hesitation did not last longer than a flash of lightning, for no lightning could be quicker than the animal itself, which was already twenty paces off when Thibault threw his boar-spear, but without better luck than the time before. And now the baying of the hounds was drawing nearer and nearer; another few minutes, and it would, he felt, be impossible for him to carry out his design. But in honour to his spirit of persistence, be it said, that in proportion as the difficulty increased, the greater became Thibault s desire to get possession of the deer. I must have it, come what will, he cried, I must! and if there is a God who cares for the poor, I shall have satisfaction of this confounded Baron, who beat me as if I were a dog, but I am a man notwithstanding, and I am quite ready to prove the same to him. And Thibault picked up his boar-spear and once more set off running. But it would appear that the good God whom he had just invoked, either had not heard him, or wished to drive him to extremities, for his third attempt had no greater success than the previous ones. By Heaven! exclaimed Thibault, God Almighty is assuredly deaf, it seems Let the Devil then open his ears and hear me! In the name of God or of the Devil, I want you and I will have you, cursed animal! Thibault had hardly finished this double blasphemy when the buck, doubling back, passed close to him for the fourth time, and disappeared among the bushes, but so quickly and unexpectedly, that Thibault had not even time to lift his boar-spear. At that moment he heard the dogs so near him, that he deemed it would be imprudent to continue his pursuit. He looked round him, saw a thickly-leaved oak tree, threw his boar-spear into a bush, swarmed up the trunk, and hid himself among the foliage. He imagined, and with good reason, that since the deer had gone ahead again, the hunt would only pass by following on its track. The dogs had not lost the scent, in spite of the quarry s doublings, and they were not likely to lose it now. Thibault had not been seated among the branches for above five minutes, when first the hounds came into sight, then the Baron, who in spite of his fifty-five years, headed the chase as if he had been a man of twenty. It must be added that the Lord of Vez was in a state of rage that we will not even endeavour to describe. To lose four hours over a wretched deer and still to be running behind it! Such a thing had never happened to him before. He stormed at his men, he whipped his dogs, and had so ploughed his horse s sides with his spurs, that the thick coating of mud which covered his gaiters was reddened with blood. On reaching the bridge over the Ourcq, however, there had been an interval of alleviation for the Baron, for the hounds had so unanimously taken up the scent, that the cloak which the wolf-hunter carried behind him would have sufficed to cover the whole pack as they crossed the bridge. Indeed the Baron was so pleased, that he was not satisfied with humming a tirra-la, but, unslinging his hunting-horn he sounded it with his full lung-power, a thing which he only did on great occasions. But, unfortunately, the joy of my Lord of Vez was destined to be short lived. All of

week

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you must know that this made the fifth or sixth time that the worthy Baron had started the animal in question, but never once had he been able to get within gun-shot of him or to run him down. Yes, Marcotte went on, but the damned beast has employed himself so well all night crossing his track and doubling, that after having traced him over half the forest, I found myself at the place from which I started. You think then, Marcotte, that there is no chance of getting near him. I am afraid not. By all the devils in hell! exclaimed the Lord of Vez, who had not had his equal in swearing since the mighty Nimrod, however, I am not feeling well to-day, and I must have a burst of some kind, to get rid of these bad humours. What do you think we can hunt, Marcotte, in place of this damned black wolf? Well, having been so taken up with the wolf, answered Marcotte, I have not traced any other animal. Will my Lord uncouple at random and hunt the first animal that we come across? The Baron was about to express his willingness to agree to this proposal when he caught sight of little Engoulevent coming towards them cap in hand. Wait a moment, he said, here comes Engoulevent, who, I fancy, has some advice to give us. I have no advice to give to a noble Lord like yourself, replied Engoulevent, assuming an expression of humility on his sly and crafty face; it is, however, my duty to inform you that there is a splendid buck in the neighbourhood. Let us see your buck, Engoulevent, replied the chief wolf-hunter, and if you are not mistaken about it, there will be a new crown for you. Where is this buck of yours? asked Marcotte, but look to your skin, if you make us uncouple to no purpose. Let me have Matador and Jupiter, and then we shall see. Matador and Jupiter were the finest among the hounds belonging to the Lord of Vez. And indeed, Engoulevent had not gone a hundred paces with them through the thicket, before, by the lashing of their tails, and their repeated yelping, he knew that they were on the right scent. In another minute or two a magnificent ten-tined stag came into view. Marcotte cried Tally-ho, sounded his horn, and the hunt began, to the great satisfaction of the Lord of Vez, who, although regretting the black wolf, was willing to make the best of a fine buck in its stead. The hunt had lasted two hours, and the quarry still held on. It had first led its pursuers from the little wood of Haramont to the Chemin du Pendu, and thence straight to the back of Oigny, and it still showed no sign of fatigue; for it was not one of those poor animals of the flat country who get their tails pulled by every wretched terrier. As it neared the low grounds of Bourg-fontaine, however, it evidently decided that it was being run rather hard, for it gave up the bolder measures which had hitherto enabled it to keep ahead, and began to double. Its first man uvre was to go down to the brook which joins the ponds of Baisemont and Bourg, then to walk against stream with the water up to its haunches, for nearly half a mile; it then sprang on to the right bank, back again into the bed of the stream, made another leap to the left, and with a succession of bounds, as vigorous as its failing strength allowed, continued to out-distance its pursuers. But the dogs of my lord Baron were not animals to be put out by such trifles as these. Being both sagacious and well-bred, they, of their own accord, divided the task between themselves, half going up stream, and half down, these hunting on the right those on the left, and so effectually that they ere long put the animal off its changes, for they soon recovered the scent, rallying at the first cry given by one of the pack, and starting afresh on the chase, as ready and eager as if the deer had been only twenty paces in front of them. And so with galloping of horses, with cry of hounds and blare of horn, the Baron and his huntsmen reached the ponds of Saint Antoine, a hundred paces or so from the Confines of Oigny. Between these and the Osier-beds stood the hut of Thibault, the sabot-maker. We must pause to give some description of this Thibault, the shoe-maker, the real hero of the tale. You will ask why I, who have summoned kings to appear upon the stage, who have obliged princes, dukes, and barons to play secondary parts in my romances, should take a simple shoe-maker for the hero of this tale. First, I will reply by saying that, in my dear home country of Villers-Cotterets, there are more sabot-makers than barons, dukes and princes, and that, as soon as I decided to make the forest the scene of the events I am about to record, I was obliged to choose one of the actual inhabitants of this forest as hero, unless I had wished to represent such fantastic persons as the _Incas_ of Marmontel or the _Abencerrages_ of M. de Florian. More than that, it is not the author who decides on the subject, but the subject which takes possession of the author, and, good or bad, this particular subject has taken possession of me. I will therefore endeavour to draw Thibault s portrait for you, plain shoe-maker as he was, as exactly as the artist paints the portrait which a prince desires to send to his lady-love. Thibault was a man between twenty-five and twenty-seven years of age, tall, well made, physically robust, but by nature melancholy and sad of heart. This depression of spirits arose from a little grain of envy, which, in spite of himself, perhaps unconsciously to himself, he harboured towards all such of his neighbours as had been more favoured by fortune than himself. His father had committed a fault, a serious one at all times, but more especially in those days of absolutism, when a man was not able to rise above his station as now-a-days, when with sufficient capacity he may attain to any rank. Thibault had been educated above his position; he had been at school under the Abb Fortier, at Villers-Cotterets, and had learnt to read, write, and cypher; moreover he knew a little Latin, which made him inordinately proud of himself. Thibault had spent a great part of his time in reading, and his books had been chiefly those which were in vogue at the close of the preceding century. But he had not been a sufficiently clever analyst to know how to separate the good from the bad, or rather he _had_ separated what was bad, and swallowed it in large doses, leaving the good to precipitate itself at the bottom of the glass. At twenty years of age Thibault had certainly had dreams of being something other than a sabot-maker. He had, for instance, for a very little while, cast his eyes towards the army. But his comrades who had worn the double livery of king and country, had left the service as they entered it, mere soldiers of the ranks, having failed during five or six years of slavery to obtain promotion, even to the not very exalted grade of corporal. Thibault had also thought of becoming a sailor. But a career in the navy was as much forbidden to the plebeian as one in the army. Possibly after enduring danger, and storm and battle for fifteen or twenty years, he might be made a boatswain s mate, that was all, and then! besides, it was by no means Thibault s ambition to wear a short vest and sail-cloth trousers, but the blue uniform of the king with red vest and gold epaulettes. He had moreover known of no single case in which the son of a mere shoe-maker had become Master of a Frigate, or even Lieutenant. So he was forced to give up all idea of joining the King s Navy. Thibault would not have minded being a Notary, and at one time thought of apprenticing himself to the Royal Scrivener, Ma tre Niquet, as a stepping-stone, and of making his way up on the strength of his own legs and with the help of his pen. But supposing him to have risen to the position of head clerk with a salary of a hundred crowns, where was he to find the thirty thousand francs which would be required for the purchase of the smallest village practice. There was, therefore, no better chance of his becoming a scrivener than of becoming an officer on sea or land. Meanwhile, Thibault s father died, leaving very little ready money. There was about enough to bury him, so he was buried, and this done, there remained some thirty or forty francs over for Thibault. Thibault knew his trade well; indeed, he was a first-rate workman; but he had no inclination to handle either auger or parer. It ended, therefore, by his leaving all his father s tools in the care of a friend, a remnant of prudence still remaining to him, and selling every vestige of furniture; having thus realised a sum of five hundred and forty livres, he determined to make what was then called the tour of France. Thibault spent three years in travelling; he did not make his fortune during that time, but he learnt a great many things in the course of his journey of which he was previously ignorant, and acquired certain accomplishments which he had previously been without. He learned amongst other things that, although it was as well to keep one s word on matters of business with a man, it was no use whatever keeping love vows made to a woman. So much for his character and habits of mind. As to his external accomplishments, he could dance a jig beautifully, could hold his own at quarter-staff against four men, and could handle the boar-spear as cleverly as the best huntsman going. All these things had not a little served to increase Thibault s natural self-esteem, and, seeing himself handsomer, stronger, and cleverer than many of the nobles, he would exclaim against Providence, crying, Why was I not nobly born? why was not that nobleman yonder born a peasant? But as Providence took care not to make any answer to these apostroph s, and as Thibault found that dancing, playing at quarter-staff, and throwing the boar-spear only fatigued the body, without procuring him any material advantage, he began to turn his thoughts towards his ancient trade, humble though it was, saying to himself, if it enabled the father to live, it would also enable the son. So Thibault went and fetched away his tools; and then, tools in hand, he went to ask permission of the Steward of his Royal Highness Louis Philippe of Orleans, to build a hut in the forest, in which to carry on his trade. He had no difficulty in obtaining this, for the steward knew by experience that his master was a very kind-hearted man, expending as much as two hundred and forty thousand francs a year on the poor; he felt sure, therefore, that one who gave away a sum like this, would be willing to let an honest workman who wished to ply his trade, have thirty or forty feet of ground. As he had leave to establish himself in whatever part of the forest he liked best, Thibault chose the spot near the osier-beds, where the roads crossed, one of the most beautiful parts of the woods, less than a mile from Oigny and about three times that distance from Villers-Cotterets. The shoe-maker put up his work-shop, built partly of old planks given him by M. Panisis, who had been having a sale in the neighbourhood, and partly of the branches which the steward gave him leave to cut in the forest. When the building of the hut, which consisted of a bedroom, cosily shut in, where he could work during the winter, and of a lean-to, open to the air, where he could work in the summer, was completed, Thibault began to think of making himself a bed. At first, a layer of fern had to serve for this purpose; but after he had made a hundred pairs of wooden shoes and had sold these to Bedeau, who kept a general shop at Villers-Cotterets, he was able to pay a sufficient deposit to get a mattress, to be paid for in full by the end of three months. The framework of the bed was not difficult to make; Thibault was not the shoe-maker he was without being a bit of a carpenter into the bargain, and when this was finished he plaited osiers to take the place of sacking, laid the mattress upon them, and found himself at last with a bed to lie upon. Little by little came the sheets, and then in their turn the coverlids; the next purchase was a chafing-dish, and earthenware pots to cook in, and finally some plates and dishes. Before the year was out Thibault had also made additions to his furniture of a fine oak chest and a fine walnut-wood cupboard, both, like the bed, his own handiwork. All the while he was driving a brisk trade, for none could beat Thibault in turning a block of beech into a pair of shoes, and in converting the odd chips into spoons, salt-cellars and natty little bowls. He had now been settled in his work-shop for three years, that is, ever since his return after the completion of his tour round France, and there was nothing for which anyone could have reproached him during this interval except the failing we have already mentioned--that he was rather more envious of the good fortune of his neighbour than was altogether conducive to the welfare of his soul. But this feeling was as yet so inoffensive, that his confessor had no need to do more than awaken in him a sense of shame for harbouring thoughts which had, so far, not resulted in any active crime. CHAPTER II THE SEIGNEUR JEAN AND THE SABOT-MAKER As already said, the buck began to dodge and double on reaching Oigny, turning and twisting round Thibault s hut, and the weather being fine although the autumn was well advanced, the shoe-maker was sitting at his work in his open lean-to. Looking up, he suddenly espied the trembling animal, quivering in every limb, standing a few paces in front of him, gazing at him with intelligent and terrified eyes. Thibault had been for a long time aware that the hunt was circling around Oigny, at one time drawing near to the village, and then receding, only to draw near again. There was nothing therefore very surprising to him in the sight of the buck, yet he stayed his hand, although he was busy at work, and contemplated the animal. Saint Sabot! he exclaimed--I should explain, that the festival of Saint Sabot is the wooden-shoe f te-- Saint Sabot! but that is a dainty morsel and would taste as fine, I warrant, as the chamois I ate at Vienne once at the grand banquet of the Jolly Shoe-makers of Dauphin . Lucky folk who can dine on the like every day. I tasted such once, it is now nearly four years ago, and my mouth waters now when I think of it. Oh! these lords! these lords! with their fresh meats and their old wines at every meal, while I have to be satisfied with potatoes to eat and water to drink from one week s end to the other; and it is a chance if even on Sunday, I can feast myself with a lump of rusty bacon and an old cabbage, and a glass of _pignolet_ fit to make my old goat stand on her head. It need scarcely be said, that as soon as Thibault began this monologue, the buck had turned and disappeared. Thibault had finished rounding his periods, and had just declaimed his peroration, when he heard himself roughly accosted in forcible terms: Ho, there, you scoundrel! answer me. It was the Baron, who seeing his dogs wavering, was anxious to make sure that they were not on the wrong scent. Ho, there, you scoundrel! repeated the wolf-hunter, have you seen the beast? There was evidently something in the manner of the Baron s questioning which did not please our philosophical shoe-maker, for although he was perfectly aware what was the matter, he answered: what beast? Curse you! why, the buck we are hunting! He must have passed close by here, and standing gaping as you do, you must have seen him. It was a fine stag of ten, was it not? Which way did he go? Speak up, you blackguard, or you shall have a taste of my stirrup-leather! The black plague take him, cub of a wolf! muttered the shoe-maker to himself. Then, aloud, with a fine air of pretended simplicity, Ah, yes! he said, I did see him. A buck, was it not? a ten-tiner, eh? with great horns. Ah, yes to be sure, a buck, with great horns,--or great corns, was it? yes, I saw him as plain as I see you, my Lord. But there, I can t say if he had any corns, for I did not look at his feet, anyhow, he added, with the air of a perfect simpleton, if he had corns, they did not prevent him running. At any other time the Baron would have laughed at what he might have taken for genuine stupidity; but the doublings of the animal were beginning to put him into a regular huntsman s fever. Now, then, you scoundrel, a truce to this jesting! If you are in a humour for jokes, it is more than I am! I will be in whatever humour it may please your Lordship I should be. Well, then, answer me. Your Lordship has asked me nothing as yet. Did the deer seem tired? Not very. Which way did he come? He did not come, he was standing still. Well, but he must have come from one side or the other. Ah! very likely, but I did not see him come. Which way did he go? I would tell you directly; only I did not see him go. The Lord of Vez cast an angry look at Thibault. Is it some while ago the buck passed this way, Master Simpleton? Not so very long, my Lord. About how long ago? Thibault made as if trying to remember; at last he replied: It was, I think, the day before yesterday, but in saying this, the shoe-maker, unfortunately, could not suppress a grin. This grin did not escape the Baron, who, spurring his horse, rode down on Thibault with lifted whip. Thibault was agile, and with a single bound he reached the shelter of his lean-to, whither the wolf-hunter could not follow, as long as he remained mounted; Thibault was therefore in momentary safety. You are only bantering and lying! cried the huntsman, for there is Marcassino, my best hound, giving cry not twenty yards off, and if the deer passed by where Marcassino is, he must have come over the hedge, and it is impossible, therefore, that you did not see him. Pardon, my Lord, but according to our good priest, no one but the Pope is infallible, and Monsieur Marcassino may be mistaken. Marcassino is never mistaken, do you hear, you rascal! and in proof of it I can see from here the marks where the animal scratched up the ground. Nevertheless, my Lord, I assure you, I swear.... said Thibault, who saw the Baron s eyebrows contracting in a way that made him feel uneasy. Silence, and come here, blackguard! cried my lord. Thibault hesitated a moment, but the black look on the sportsman s face became more and more threatening, and fearing to increase his exasperation by disobeying his command, he thought he had better go forward, hoping that the Baron merely wished to ask a service of him. But it was an unlucky move on his part, for scarcely had he emerged from the protection of the shed, before the horse of the Lord of Vez, urged by bit and spur, gave a leap, which brought his rider swooping down upon Thibault, while at the same moment a furious blow from the butt end of the Baron s whip fell upon his head. The shoe-maker, stunned by the blow, tottered a moment, lost his balance and was about to fall face downwards, when the Baron, drawing his foot out of the stirrup, with a violent kick in the chest, not only straightened him again, but sent the poor wretch flying in an opposite direction, where he fell with his back against the door of his hut. Take that! said the Baron, as he first felled Thibault with his whip, and then kicked him, take that for your lie, and that for your banter! And then, without troubling himself any further about the man, whom he left lying on his back, the Lord of Vez, seeing that the hounds had rallied on hearing Marcassino s cry, gave them a cheery note on his horn, and cantered away. Thibault lifted himself up, feeling bruised all over, and began feeling himself from head to foot to make sure that no bones were broken. Having carefully passed his hand over each limb in succession, that s all right, he said, there is nothing broken either above or below, I am glad to find. So, my Lord Baron, that is how you treat people, because you happen to have married a Prince s bastard daughter! But let me tell you, my fine fellow, it is not you who will eat the buck you are hunting to-day; it will be this blackguard, this scoundrel, this simpleton of a Thibault who will eat it. Yes, it shall be I who eat it, that I vow! cried Thibault, confirming himself more and more in his bold resolution, and it is no use being a man if having once made a vow, one fails to keep it. So without further delay, Thibault thrust his bill-hook into his belt, seized his boar-spear, and after listening for a moment to the cry of the hounds to ascertain in which direction the hunt had gone, he ran off with all the speed of which a man s legs are capable to get the start of them, guessing by the curve which the stag and its pursuers were following what would be the straight line to take so as to intercept them. There were two ways of doing his deed open to Thibault; either to hide himself beside the path which the buck must take and kill him with his boar-spear, or else to surprise the animal just as he was being hunted down by the dogs, and collar him there and then. And as he ran, the desire to revenge himself on the Baron for the latter s brutality, was not so uppermost in Thibault s mind as the thoughts of the sumptuous manner in which he would fare for the next month, on the shoulders, the back, and the haunches of the deer, either salted to a turn, roasted on the spit, or cut in slices and done in the pan. And these two ideas, moreover, of vengeance and gluttony, were so jumbled up in his brain, that while still running at the top of his speed he laughed in his sleeve, as he pictured the dejected mien of the Baron and his men returning to the castle after their fruitless day s hunt, and at the same time saw himself seated at table, the door securely fastened, and a pint of wine beside him, t te- -t te with a haunch of the deer, the rich and delicious gravy escaping as the knife returned for a third or fourth cut. The deer, as far as Thibault could calculate, was making for the bridge which crosses the Ourcq, between Noroy and Troesne. At the time of which we are now speaking there was a bridge spanning the river, formed of two joists and a few planks. As the river was very high and very rapid, Thibault decided that the deer would not attempt to ford it; so he hid himself behind a rock, within reach of the bridge, and waited. It was not long before he saw the graceful head of the deer appear above the rock at some ten paces distance; the animal was bending its ears to the wind, in the endeavour to catch the sound of the enemy s approach as it was borne along the breeze. Thibault, excited by this sudden appearance, rose from behind the rock, poised his boar-spear and sent it flying towards the animal. The buck, with a single bound, reached the middle of the bridge, a second carried him on to the opposite bank, and a third bore him out of sight. The boar-spear had passed within a foot of the animal, and had buried itself in the grass fifteen paces from where Thibault was standing. Never before had he been known to make such an unskilful throw; he, Thibault, of all the company who made the tour of France, the one known to be surest of his aim! Enraged with himself, therefore, he picked up his weapon, and bounded across the bridge with an agility equal to that of the deer. Thibault knew the country quite as well as the animal he was pursuing, and so got ahead of the deer and once more concealed himself, this time behind a beech-tree, half-way up, and not too far from a little footpath. The deer now passed so close to him, that Thibault hesitated as to whether it would not be better to knock the animal down with his boar-spear than to throw the weapon at it; but his hesitation did not last longer than a flash of lightning, for no lightning could be quicker than the animal itself, which was already twenty paces off when Thibault threw his boar-spear, but without better luck than the time before. And now the baying of the hounds was drawing nearer and nearer; another few minutes, and it would, he felt, be impossible for him to carry out his design. But in honour to his spirit of persistence, be it said, that in proportion as the difficulty increased, the greater became Thibault s desire to get possession of the deer. I must have it, come what will, he cried, I must! and if there is a God who cares for the poor, I shall have satisfaction of this confounded Baron, who beat me as if I were a dog, but I am a man notwithstanding, and I am quite ready to prove the same to him. And Thibault picked up his boar-spear and once more set off running. But it would appear that the good God whom he had just invoked, either had not heard him, or wished to drive him to extremities, for his third attempt had no greater success than the previous ones. By Heaven! exclaimed Thibault, God Almighty is assuredly deaf, it seems Let the Devil then open his ears and hear me! In the name of God or of the Devil, I want you and I will have you, cursed animal! Thibault had hardly finished this double blasphemy when the buck, doubling back, passed close to him for the fourth time, and disappeared among the bushes, but so quickly and unexpectedly, that Thibault had not even time to lift his boar-spear. At that moment he heard the dogs so near him, that he deemed it would be imprudent to continue his pursuit. He looked round him, saw a thickly-leaved oak tree, threw his boar-spear into a bush, swarmed up the trunk, and hid himself among the foliage. He imagined, and with good reason, that since the deer had gone ahead again, the hunt would only pass by following on its track. The dogs had not lost the scent, in spite of the quarry s doublings, and they were not likely to lose it now. Thibault had not been seated among the branches for above five minutes, when first the hounds came into sight, then the Baron, who in spite of his fifty-five years, headed the chase as if he had been a man of twenty. It must be added that the Lord of Vez was in a state of rage that we will not even endeavour to describe. To lose four hours over a wretched deer and still to be running behind it! Such a thing had never happened to him before. He stormed at his men, he whipped his dogs, and had so ploughed his horse s sides with his spurs, that the thick coating of mud which covered his gaiters was reddened with blood. On reaching the bridge over the Ourcq, however, there had been an interval of alleviation for the Baron, for the hounds had so unanimously taken up the scent, that the cloak which the wolf-hunter carried behind him would have sufficed to cover the whole pack as they crossed the bridge. Indeed the Baron was so pleased, that he was not satisfied with humming a tirra-la, but, unslinging his hunting-horn he sounded it with his full lung-power, a thing which he only did on great occasions. But, unfortunately, the joy of my Lord of Vez was destined to be short lived. All of

lying

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you must know that this made the fifth or sixth time that the worthy Baron had started the animal in question, but never once had he been able to get within gun-shot of him or to run him down. Yes, Marcotte went on, but the damned beast has employed himself so well all night crossing his track and doubling, that after having traced him over half the forest, I found myself at the place from which I started. You think then, Marcotte, that there is no chance of getting near him. I am afraid not. By all the devils in hell! exclaimed the Lord of Vez, who had not had his equal in swearing since the mighty Nimrod, however, I am not feeling well to-day, and I must have a burst of some kind, to get rid of these bad humours. What do you think we can hunt, Marcotte, in place of this damned black wolf? Well, having been so taken up with the wolf, answered Marcotte, I have not traced any other animal. Will my Lord uncouple at random and hunt the first animal that we come across? The Baron was about to express his willingness to agree to this proposal when he caught sight of little Engoulevent coming towards them cap in hand. Wait a moment, he said, here comes Engoulevent, who, I fancy, has some advice to give us. I have no advice to give to a noble Lord like yourself, replied Engoulevent, assuming an expression of humility on his sly and crafty face; it is, however, my duty to inform you that there is a splendid buck in the neighbourhood. Let us see your buck, Engoulevent, replied the chief wolf-hunter, and if you are not mistaken about it, there will be a new crown for you. Where is this buck of yours? asked Marcotte, but look to your skin, if you make us uncouple to no purpose. Let me have Matador and Jupiter, and then we shall see. Matador and Jupiter were the finest among the hounds belonging to the Lord of Vez. And indeed, Engoulevent had not gone a hundred paces with them through the thicket, before, by the lashing of their tails, and their repeated yelping, he knew that they were on the right scent. In another minute or two a magnificent ten-tined stag came into view. Marcotte cried Tally-ho, sounded his horn, and the hunt began, to the great satisfaction of the Lord of Vez, who, although regretting the black wolf, was willing to make the best of a fine buck in its stead. The hunt had lasted two hours, and the quarry still held on. It had first led its pursuers from the little wood of Haramont to the Chemin du Pendu, and thence straight to the back of Oigny, and it still showed no sign of fatigue; for it was not one of those poor animals of the flat country who get their tails pulled by every wretched terrier. As it neared the low grounds of Bourg-fontaine, however, it evidently decided that it was being run rather hard, for it gave up the bolder measures which had hitherto enabled it to keep ahead, and began to double. Its first man uvre was to go down to the brook which joins the ponds of Baisemont and Bourg, then to walk against stream with the water up to its haunches, for nearly half a mile; it then sprang on to the right bank, back again into the bed of the stream, made another leap to the left, and with a succession of bounds, as vigorous as its failing strength allowed, continued to out-distance its pursuers. But the dogs of my lord Baron were not animals to be put out by such trifles as these. Being both sagacious and well-bred, they, of their own accord, divided the task between themselves, half going up stream, and half down, these hunting on the right those on the left, and so effectually that they ere long put the animal off its changes, for they soon recovered the scent, rallying at the first cry given by one of the pack, and starting afresh on the chase, as ready and eager as if the deer had been only twenty paces in front of them. And so with galloping of horses, with cry of hounds and blare of horn, the Baron and his huntsmen reached the ponds of Saint Antoine, a hundred paces or so from the Confines of Oigny. Between these and the Osier-beds stood the hut of Thibault, the sabot-maker. We must pause to give some description of this Thibault, the shoe-maker, the real hero of the tale. You will ask why I, who have summoned kings to appear upon the stage, who have obliged princes, dukes, and barons to play secondary parts in my romances, should take a simple shoe-maker for the hero of this tale. First, I will reply by saying that, in my dear home country of Villers-Cotterets, there are more sabot-makers than barons, dukes and princes, and that, as soon as I decided to make the forest the scene of the events I am about to record, I was obliged to choose one of the actual inhabitants of this forest as hero, unless I had wished to represent such fantastic persons as the _Incas_ of Marmontel or the _Abencerrages_ of M. de Florian. More than that, it is not the author who decides on the subject, but the subject which takes possession of the author, and, good or bad, this particular subject has taken possession of me. I will therefore endeavour to draw Thibault s portrait for you, plain shoe-maker as he was, as exactly as the artist paints the portrait which a prince desires to send to his lady-love. Thibault was a man between twenty-five and twenty-seven years of age, tall, well made, physically robust, but by nature melancholy and sad of heart. This depression of spirits arose from a little grain of envy, which, in spite of himself, perhaps unconsciously to himself, he harboured towards all such of his neighbours as had been more favoured by fortune than himself. His father had committed a fault, a serious one at all times, but more especially in those days of absolutism, when a man was not able to rise above his station as now-a-days, when with sufficient capacity he may attain to any rank. Thibault had been educated above his position; he had been at school under the Abb Fortier, at Villers-Cotterets, and had learnt to read, write, and cypher; moreover he knew a little Latin, which made him inordinately proud of himself. Thibault had spent a great part of his time in reading, and his books had been chiefly those which were in vogue at the close of the preceding century. But he had not been a sufficiently clever analyst to know how to separate the good from the bad, or rather he _had_ separated what was bad, and swallowed it in large doses, leaving the good to precipitate itself at the bottom of the glass. At twenty years of age Thibault had certainly had dreams of being something other than a sabot-maker. He had, for instance, for a very little while, cast his eyes towards the army. But his comrades who had worn the double livery of king and country, had left the service as they entered it, mere soldiers of the ranks, having failed during five or six years of slavery to obtain promotion, even to the not very exalted grade of corporal. Thibault had also thought of becoming a sailor. But a career in the navy was as much forbidden to the plebeian as one in the army. Possibly after enduring danger, and storm and battle for fifteen or twenty years, he might be made a boatswain s mate, that was all, and then! besides, it was by no means Thibault s ambition to wear a short vest and sail-cloth trousers, but the blue uniform of the king with red vest and gold epaulettes. He had moreover known of no single case in which the son of a mere shoe-maker had become Master of a Frigate, or even Lieutenant. So he was forced to give up all idea of joining the King s Navy. Thibault would not have minded being a Notary, and at one time thought of apprenticing himself to the Royal Scrivener, Ma tre Niquet, as a stepping-stone, and of making his way up on the strength of his own legs and with the help of his pen. But supposing him to have risen to the position of head clerk with a salary of a hundred crowns, where was he to find the thirty thousand francs which would be required for the purchase of the smallest village practice. There was, therefore, no better chance of his becoming a scrivener than of becoming an officer on sea or land. Meanwhile, Thibault s father died, leaving very little ready money. There was about enough to bury him, so he was buried, and this done, there remained some thirty or forty francs over for Thibault. Thibault knew his trade well; indeed, he was a first-rate workman; but he had no inclination to handle either auger or parer. It ended, therefore, by his leaving all his father s tools in the care of a friend, a remnant of prudence still remaining to him, and selling every vestige of furniture; having thus realised a sum of five hundred and forty livres, he determined to make what was then called the tour of France. Thibault spent three years in travelling; he did not make his fortune during that time, but he learnt a great many things in the course of his journey of which he was previously ignorant, and acquired certain accomplishments which he had previously been without. He learned amongst other things that, although it was as well to keep one s word on matters of business with a man, it was no use whatever keeping love vows made to a woman. So much for his character and habits of mind. As to his external accomplishments, he could dance a jig beautifully, could hold his own at quarter-staff against four men, and could handle the boar-spear as cleverly as the best huntsman going. All these things had not a little served to increase Thibault s natural self-esteem, and, seeing himself handsomer, stronger, and cleverer than many of the nobles, he would exclaim against Providence, crying, Why was I not nobly born? why was not that nobleman yonder born a peasant? But as Providence took care not to make any answer to these apostroph s, and as Thibault found that dancing, playing at quarter-staff, and throwing the boar-spear only fatigued the body, without procuring him any material advantage, he began to turn his thoughts towards his ancient trade, humble though it was, saying to himself, if it enabled the father to live, it would also enable the son. So Thibault went and fetched away his tools; and then, tools in hand, he went to ask permission of the Steward of his Royal Highness Louis Philippe of Orleans, to build a hut in the forest, in which to carry on his trade. He had no difficulty in obtaining this, for the steward knew by experience that his master was a very kind-hearted man, expending as much as two hundred and forty thousand francs a year on the poor; he felt sure, therefore, that one who gave away a sum like this, would be willing to let an honest workman who wished to ply his trade, have thirty or forty feet of ground. As he had leave to establish himself in whatever part of the forest he liked best, Thibault chose the spot near the osier-beds, where the roads crossed, one of the most beautiful parts of the woods, less than a mile from Oigny and about three times that distance from Villers-Cotterets. The shoe-maker put up his work-shop, built partly of old planks given him by M. Panisis, who had been having a sale in the neighbourhood, and partly of the branches which the steward gave him leave to cut in the forest. When the building of the hut, which consisted of a bedroom, cosily shut in, where he could work during the winter, and of a lean-to, open to the air, where he could work in the summer, was completed, Thibault began to think of making himself a bed. At first, a layer of fern had to serve for this purpose; but after he had made a hundred pairs of wooden shoes and had sold these to Bedeau, who kept a general shop at Villers-Cotterets, he was able to pay a sufficient deposit to get a mattress, to be paid for in full by the end of three months. The framework of the bed was not difficult to make; Thibault was not the shoe-maker he was without being a bit of a carpenter into the bargain, and when this was finished he plaited osiers to take the place of sacking, laid the mattress upon them, and found himself at last with a bed to lie upon. Little by little came the sheets, and then in their turn the coverlids; the next purchase was a chafing-dish, and earthenware pots to cook in, and finally some plates and dishes. Before the year was out Thibault had also made additions to his furniture of a fine oak chest and a fine walnut-wood cupboard, both, like the bed, his own handiwork. All the while he was driving a brisk trade, for none could beat Thibault in turning a block of beech into a pair of shoes, and in converting the odd chips into spoons, salt-cellars and natty little bowls. He had now been settled in his work-shop for three years, that is, ever since his return after the completion of his tour round France, and there was nothing for which anyone could have reproached him during this interval except the failing we have already mentioned--that he was rather more envious of the good fortune of his neighbour than was altogether conducive to the welfare of his soul. But this feeling was as yet so inoffensive, that his confessor had no need to do more than awaken in him a sense of shame for harbouring thoughts which had, so far, not resulted in any active crime. CHAPTER II THE SEIGNEUR JEAN AND THE SABOT-MAKER As already said, the buck began to dodge and double on reaching Oigny, turning and twisting round Thibault s hut, and the weather being fine although the autumn was well advanced, the shoe-maker was sitting at his work in his open lean-to. Looking up, he suddenly espied the trembling animal, quivering in every limb, standing a few paces in front of him, gazing at him with intelligent and terrified eyes. Thibault had been for a long time aware that the hunt was circling around Oigny, at one time drawing near to the village, and then receding, only to draw near again. There was nothing therefore very surprising to him in the sight of the buck, yet he stayed his hand, although he was busy at work, and contemplated the animal. Saint Sabot! he exclaimed--I should explain, that the festival of Saint Sabot is the wooden-shoe f te-- Saint Sabot! but that is a dainty morsel and would taste as fine, I warrant, as the chamois I ate at Vienne once at the grand banquet of the Jolly Shoe-makers of Dauphin . Lucky folk who can dine on the like every day. I tasted such once, it is now nearly four years ago, and my mouth waters now when I think of it. Oh! these lords! these lords! with their fresh meats and their old wines at every meal, while I have to be satisfied with potatoes to eat and water to drink from one week s end to the other; and it is a chance if even on Sunday, I can feast myself with a lump of rusty bacon and an old cabbage, and a glass of _pignolet_ fit to make my old goat stand on her head. It need scarcely be said, that as soon as Thibault began this monologue, the buck had turned and disappeared. Thibault had finished rounding his periods, and had just declaimed his peroration, when he heard himself roughly accosted in forcible terms: Ho, there, you scoundrel! answer me. It was the Baron, who seeing his dogs wavering, was anxious to make sure that they were not on the wrong scent. Ho, there, you scoundrel! repeated the wolf-hunter, have you seen the beast? There was evidently something in the manner of the Baron s questioning which did not please our philosophical shoe-maker, for although he was perfectly aware what was the matter, he answered: what beast? Curse you! why, the buck we are hunting! He must have passed close by here, and standing gaping as you do, you must have seen him. It was a fine stag of ten, was it not? Which way did he go? Speak up, you blackguard, or you shall have a taste of my stirrup-leather! The black plague take him, cub of a wolf! muttered the shoe-maker to himself. Then, aloud, with a fine air of pretended simplicity, Ah, yes! he said, I did see him. A buck, was it not? a ten-tiner, eh? with great horns. Ah, yes to be sure, a buck, with great horns,--or great corns, was it? yes, I saw him as plain as I see you, my Lord. But there, I can t say if he had any corns, for I did not look at his feet, anyhow, he added, with the air of a perfect simpleton, if he had corns, they did not prevent him running. At any other time the Baron would have laughed at what he might have taken for genuine stupidity; but the doublings of the animal were beginning to put him into a regular huntsman s fever. Now, then, you scoundrel, a truce to this jesting! If you are in a humour for jokes, it is more than I am! I will be in whatever humour it may please your Lordship I should be. Well, then, answer me. Your Lordship has asked me nothing as yet. Did the deer seem tired? Not very. Which way did he come? He did not come, he was standing still. Well, but he must have come from one side or the other. Ah! very likely, but I did not see him come. Which way did he go? I would tell you directly; only I did not see him go. The Lord of Vez cast an angry look at Thibault. Is it some while ago the buck passed this way, Master Simpleton? Not so very long, my Lord. About how long ago? Thibault made as if trying to remember; at last he replied: It was, I think, the day before yesterday, but in saying this, the shoe-maker, unfortunately, could not suppress a grin. This grin did not escape the Baron, who, spurring his horse, rode down on Thibault with lifted whip. Thibault was agile, and with a single bound he reached the shelter of his lean-to, whither the wolf-hunter could not follow, as long as he remained mounted; Thibault was therefore in momentary safety. You are only bantering and lying! cried the huntsman, for there is Marcassino, my best hound, giving cry not twenty yards off, and if the deer passed by where Marcassino is, he must have come over the hedge, and it is impossible, therefore, that you did not see him. Pardon, my Lord, but according to our good priest, no one but the Pope is infallible, and Monsieur Marcassino may be mistaken. Marcassino is never mistaken, do you hear, you rascal! and in proof of it I can see from here the marks where the animal scratched up the ground. Nevertheless, my Lord, I assure you, I swear.... said Thibault, who saw the Baron s eyebrows contracting in a way that made him feel uneasy. Silence, and come here, blackguard! cried my lord. Thibault hesitated a moment, but the black look on the sportsman s face became more and more threatening, and fearing to increase his exasperation by disobeying his command, he thought he had better go forward, hoping that the Baron merely wished to ask a service of him. But it was an unlucky move on his part, for scarcely had he emerged from the protection of the shed, before the horse of the Lord of Vez, urged by bit and spur, gave a leap, which brought his rider swooping down upon Thibault, while at the same moment a furious blow from the butt end of the Baron s whip fell upon his head. The shoe-maker, stunned by the blow, tottered a moment, lost his balance and was about to fall face downwards, when the Baron, drawing his foot out of the stirrup, with a violent kick in the chest, not only straightened him again, but sent the poor wretch flying in an opposite direction, where he fell with his back against the door of his hut. Take that! said the Baron, as he first felled Thibault with his whip, and then kicked him, take that for your lie, and that for your banter! And then, without troubling himself any further about the man, whom he left lying on his back, the Lord of Vez, seeing that the hounds had rallied on hearing Marcassino s cry, gave them a cheery note on his horn, and cantered away. Thibault lifted himself up, feeling bruised all over, and began feeling himself from head to foot to make sure that no bones were broken. Having carefully passed his hand over each limb in succession, that s all right, he said, there is nothing broken either above or below, I am glad to find. So, my Lord Baron, that is how you treat people, because you happen to have married a Prince s bastard daughter! But let me tell you, my fine fellow, it is not you who will eat the buck you are hunting to-day; it will be this blackguard, this scoundrel, this simpleton of a Thibault who will eat it. Yes, it shall be I who eat it, that I vow! cried Thibault, confirming himself more and more in his bold resolution, and it is no use being a man if having once made a vow, one fails to keep it. So without further delay, Thibault thrust his bill-hook into his belt, seized his boar-spear, and after listening for a moment to the cry of the hounds to ascertain in which direction the hunt had gone, he ran off with all the speed of which a man s legs are capable to get the start of them, guessing by the curve which the stag and its pursuers were following what would be the straight line to take so as to intercept them. There were two ways of doing his deed open to Thibault; either to hide himself beside the path which the buck must take and kill him with his boar-spear, or else to surprise the animal just as he was being hunted down by the dogs, and collar him there and then. And as he ran, the desire to revenge himself on the Baron for the latter s brutality, was not so uppermost in Thibault s mind as the thoughts of the sumptuous manner in which he would fare for the next month, on the shoulders, the back, and the haunches of the deer, either salted to a turn, roasted on the spit, or cut in slices and done in the pan. And these two ideas, moreover, of vengeance and gluttony, were so jumbled up in his brain, that while still running at the top of his speed he laughed in his sleeve, as he pictured the dejected mien of the Baron and his men returning to the castle after their fruitless day s hunt, and at the same time saw himself seated at table, the door securely fastened, and a pint of wine beside him, t te- -t te with a haunch of the deer, the rich and delicious gravy escaping as the knife returned for a third or fourth cut. The deer, as far as Thibault could calculate, was making for the bridge which crosses the Ourcq, between Noroy and Troesne. At the time of which we are now speaking there was a bridge spanning the river, formed of two joists and a few planks. As the river was very high and very rapid, Thibault decided that the deer would not attempt to ford it; so he hid himself behind a rock, within reach of the bridge, and waited. It was not long before he saw the graceful head of the deer appear above the rock at some ten paces distance; the animal was bending its ears to the wind, in the endeavour to catch the sound of the enemy s approach as it was borne along the breeze. Thibault, excited by this sudden appearance, rose from behind the rock, poised his boar-spear and sent it flying towards the animal. The buck, with a single bound, reached the middle of the bridge, a second carried him on to the opposite bank, and a third bore him out of sight. The boar-spear had passed within a foot of the animal, and had buried itself in the grass fifteen paces from where Thibault was standing. Never before had he been known to make such an unskilful throw; he, Thibault, of all the company who made the tour of France, the one known to be surest of his aim! Enraged with himself, therefore, he picked up his weapon, and bounded across the bridge with an agility equal to that of the deer. Thibault knew the country quite as well as the animal he was pursuing, and so got ahead of the deer and once more concealed himself, this time behind a beech-tree, half-way up, and not too far from a little footpath. The deer now passed so close to him, that Thibault hesitated as to whether it would not be better to knock the animal down with his boar-spear than to throw the weapon at it; but his hesitation did not last longer than a flash of lightning, for no lightning could be quicker than the animal itself, which was already twenty paces off when Thibault threw his boar-spear, but without better luck than the time before. And now the baying of the hounds was drawing nearer and nearer; another few minutes, and it would, he felt, be impossible for him to carry out his design. But in honour to his spirit of persistence, be it said, that in proportion as the difficulty increased, the greater became Thibault s desire to get possession of the deer. I must have it, come what will, he cried, I must! and if there is a God who cares for the poor, I shall have satisfaction of this confounded Baron, who beat me as if I were a dog, but I am a man notwithstanding, and I am quite ready to prove the same to him. And Thibault picked up his boar-spear and once more set off running. But it would appear that the good God whom he had just invoked, either had not heard him, or wished to drive him to extremities, for his third attempt had no greater success than the previous ones. By Heaven! exclaimed Thibault, God Almighty is assuredly deaf, it seems Let the Devil then open his ears and hear me! In the name of God or of the Devil, I want you and I will have you, cursed animal! Thibault had hardly finished this double blasphemy when the buck, doubling back, passed close to him for the fourth time, and disappeared among the bushes, but so quickly and unexpectedly, that Thibault had not even time to lift his boar-spear. At that moment he heard the dogs so near him, that he deemed it would be imprudent to continue his pursuit. He looked round him, saw a thickly-leaved oak tree, threw his boar-spear into a bush, swarmed up the trunk, and hid himself among the foliage. He imagined, and with good reason, that since the deer had gone ahead again, the hunt would only pass by following on its track. The dogs had not lost the scent, in spite of the quarry s doublings, and they were not likely to lose it now. Thibault had not been seated among the branches for above five minutes, when first the hounds came into sight, then the Baron, who in spite of his fifty-five years, headed the chase as if he had been a man of twenty. It must be added that the Lord of Vez was in a state of rage that we will not even endeavour to describe. To lose four hours over a wretched deer and still to be running behind it! Such a thing had never happened to him before. He stormed at his men, he whipped his dogs, and had so ploughed his horse s sides with his spurs, that the thick coating of mud which covered his gaiters was reddened with blood. On reaching the bridge over the Ourcq, however, there had been an interval of alleviation for the Baron, for the hounds had so unanimously taken up the scent, that the cloak which the wolf-hunter carried behind him would have sufficed to cover the whole pack as they crossed the bridge. Indeed the Baron was so pleased, that he was not satisfied with humming a tirra-la, but, unslinging his hunting-horn he sounded it with his full lung-power, a thing which he only did on great occasions. But, unfortunately, the joy of my Lord of Vez was destined to be short lived. All of

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you must know that this made the fifth or sixth time that the worthy Baron had started the animal in question, but never once had he been able to get within gun-shot of him or to run him down. Yes, Marcotte went on, but the damned beast has employed himself so well all night crossing his track and doubling, that after having traced him over half the forest, I found myself at the place from which I started. You think then, Marcotte, that there is no chance of getting near him. I am afraid not. By all the devils in hell! exclaimed the Lord of Vez, who had not had his equal in swearing since the mighty Nimrod, however, I am not feeling well to-day, and I must have a burst of some kind, to get rid of these bad humours. What do you think we can hunt, Marcotte, in place of this damned black wolf? Well, having been so taken up with the wolf, answered Marcotte, I have not traced any other animal. Will my Lord uncouple at random and hunt the first animal that we come across? The Baron was about to express his willingness to agree to this proposal when he caught sight of little Engoulevent coming towards them cap in hand. Wait a moment, he said, here comes Engoulevent, who, I fancy, has some advice to give us. I have no advice to give to a noble Lord like yourself, replied Engoulevent, assuming an expression of humility on his sly and crafty face; it is, however, my duty to inform you that there is a splendid buck in the neighbourhood. Let us see your buck, Engoulevent, replied the chief wolf-hunter, and if you are not mistaken about it, there will be a new crown for you. Where is this buck of yours? asked Marcotte, but look to your skin, if you make us uncouple to no purpose. Let me have Matador and Jupiter, and then we shall see. Matador and Jupiter were the finest among the hounds belonging to the Lord of Vez. And indeed, Engoulevent had not gone a hundred paces with them through the thicket, before, by the lashing of their tails, and their repeated yelping, he knew that they were on the right scent. In another minute or two a magnificent ten-tined stag came into view. Marcotte cried Tally-ho, sounded his horn, and the hunt began, to the great satisfaction of the Lord of Vez, who, although regretting the black wolf, was willing to make the best of a fine buck in its stead. The hunt had lasted two hours, and the quarry still held on. It had first led its pursuers from the little wood of Haramont to the Chemin du Pendu, and thence straight to the back of Oigny, and it still showed no sign of fatigue; for it was not one of those poor animals of the flat country who get their tails pulled by every wretched terrier. As it neared the low grounds of Bourg-fontaine, however, it evidently decided that it was being run rather hard, for it gave up the bolder measures which had hitherto enabled it to keep ahead, and began to double. Its first man uvre was to go down to the brook which joins the ponds of Baisemont and Bourg, then to walk against stream with the water up to its haunches, for nearly half a mile; it then sprang on to the right bank, back again into the bed of the stream, made another leap to the left, and with a succession of bounds, as vigorous as its failing strength allowed, continued to out-distance its pursuers. But the dogs of my lord Baron were not animals to be put out by such trifles as these. Being both sagacious and well-bred, they, of their own accord, divided the task between themselves, half going up stream, and half down, these hunting on the right those on the left, and so effectually that they ere long put the animal off its changes, for they soon recovered the scent, rallying at the first cry given by one of the pack, and starting afresh on the chase, as ready and eager as if the deer had been only twenty paces in front of them. And so with galloping of horses, with cry of hounds and blare of horn, the Baron and his huntsmen reached the ponds of Saint Antoine, a hundred paces or so from the Confines of Oigny. Between these and the Osier-beds stood the hut of Thibault, the sabot-maker. We must pause to give some description of this Thibault, the shoe-maker, the real hero of the tale. You will ask why I, who have summoned kings to appear upon the stage, who have obliged princes, dukes, and barons to play secondary parts in my romances, should take a simple shoe-maker for the hero of this tale. First, I will reply by saying that, in my dear home country of Villers-Cotterets, there are more sabot-makers than barons, dukes and princes, and that, as soon as I decided to make the forest the scene of the events I am about to record, I was obliged to choose one of the actual inhabitants of this forest as hero, unless I had wished to represent such fantastic persons as the _Incas_ of Marmontel or the _Abencerrages_ of M. de Florian. More than that, it is not the author who decides on the subject, but the subject which takes possession of the author, and, good or bad, this particular subject has taken possession of me. I will therefore endeavour to draw Thibault s portrait for you, plain shoe-maker as he was, as exactly as the artist paints the portrait which a prince desires to send to his lady-love. Thibault was a man between twenty-five and twenty-seven years of age, tall, well made, physically robust, but by nature melancholy and sad of heart. This depression of spirits arose from a little grain of envy, which, in spite of himself, perhaps unconsciously to himself, he harboured towards all such of his neighbours as had been more favoured by fortune than himself. His father had committed a fault, a serious one at all times, but more especially in those days of absolutism, when a man was not able to rise above his station as now-a-days, when with sufficient capacity he may attain to any rank. Thibault had been educated above his position; he had been at school under the Abb Fortier, at Villers-Cotterets, and had learnt to read, write, and cypher; moreover he knew a little Latin, which made him inordinately proud of himself. Thibault had spent a great part of his time in reading, and his books had been chiefly those which were in vogue at the close of the preceding century. But he had not been a sufficiently clever analyst to know how to separate the good from the bad, or rather he _had_ separated what was bad, and swallowed it in large doses, leaving the good to precipitate itself at the bottom of the glass. At twenty years of age Thibault had certainly had dreams of being something other than a sabot-maker. He had, for instance, for a very little while, cast his eyes towards the army. But his comrades who had worn the double livery of king and country, had left the service as they entered it, mere soldiers of the ranks, having failed during five or six years of slavery to obtain promotion, even to the not very exalted grade of corporal. Thibault had also thought of becoming a sailor. But a career in the navy was as much forbidden to the plebeian as one in the army. Possibly after enduring danger, and storm and battle for fifteen or twenty years, he might be made a boatswain s mate, that was all, and then! besides, it was by no means Thibault s ambition to wear a short vest and sail-cloth trousers, but the blue uniform of the king with red vest and gold epaulettes. He had moreover known of no single case in which the son of a mere shoe-maker had become Master of a Frigate, or even Lieutenant. So he was forced to give up all idea of joining the King s Navy. Thibault would not have minded being a Notary, and at one time thought of apprenticing himself to the Royal Scrivener, Ma tre Niquet, as a stepping-stone, and of making his way up on the strength of his own legs and with the help of his pen. But supposing him to have risen to the position of head clerk with a salary of a hundred crowns, where was he to find the thirty thousand francs which would be required for the purchase of the smallest village practice. There was, therefore, no better chance of his becoming a scrivener than of becoming an officer on sea or land. Meanwhile, Thibault s father died, leaving very little ready money. There was about enough to bury him, so he was buried, and this done, there remained some thirty or forty francs over for Thibault. Thibault knew his trade well; indeed, he was a first-rate workman; but he had no inclination to handle either auger or parer. It ended, therefore, by his leaving all his father s tools in the care of a friend, a remnant of prudence still remaining to him, and selling every vestige of furniture; having thus realised a sum of five hundred and forty livres, he determined to make what was then called the tour of France. Thibault spent three years in travelling; he did not make his fortune during that time, but he learnt a great many things in the course of his journey of which he was previously ignorant, and acquired certain accomplishments which he had previously been without. He learned amongst other things that, although it was as well to keep one s word on matters of business with a man, it was no use whatever keeping love vows made to a woman. So much for his character and habits of mind. As to his external accomplishments, he could dance a jig beautifully, could hold his own at quarter-staff against four men, and could handle the boar-spear as cleverly as the best huntsman going. All these things had not a little served to increase Thibault s natural self-esteem, and, seeing himself handsomer, stronger, and cleverer than many of the nobles, he would exclaim against Providence, crying, Why was I not nobly born? why was not that nobleman yonder born a peasant? But as Providence took care not to make any answer to these apostroph s, and as Thibault found that dancing, playing at quarter-staff, and throwing the boar-spear only fatigued the body, without procuring him any material advantage, he began to turn his thoughts towards his ancient trade, humble though it was, saying to himself, if it enabled the father to live, it would also enable the son. So Thibault went and fetched away his tools; and then, tools in hand, he went to ask permission of the Steward of his Royal Highness Louis Philippe of Orleans, to build a hut in the forest, in which to carry on his trade. He had no difficulty in obtaining this, for the steward knew by experience that his master was a very kind-hearted man, expending as much as two hundred and forty thousand francs a year on the poor; he felt sure, therefore, that one who gave away a sum like this, would be willing to let an honest workman who wished to ply his trade, have thirty or forty feet of ground. As he had leave to establish himself in whatever part of the forest he liked best, Thibault chose the spot near the osier-beds, where the roads crossed, one of the most beautiful parts of the woods, less than a mile from Oigny and about three times that distance from Villers-Cotterets. The shoe-maker put up his work-shop, built partly of old planks given him by M. Panisis, who had been having a sale in the neighbourhood, and partly of the branches which the steward gave him leave to cut in the forest. When the building of the hut, which consisted of a bedroom, cosily shut in, where he could work during the winter, and of a lean-to, open to the air, where he could work in the summer, was completed, Thibault began to think of making himself a bed. At first, a layer of fern had to serve for this purpose; but after he had made a hundred pairs of wooden shoes and had sold these to Bedeau, who kept a general shop at Villers-Cotterets, he was able to pay a sufficient deposit to get a mattress, to be paid for in full by the end of three months. The framework of the bed was not difficult to make; Thibault was not the shoe-maker he was without being a bit of a carpenter into the bargain, and when this was finished he plaited osiers to take the place of sacking, laid the mattress upon them, and found himself at last with a bed to lie upon. Little by little came the sheets, and then in their turn the coverlids; the next purchase was a chafing-dish, and earthenware pots to cook in, and finally some plates and dishes. Before the year was out Thibault had also made additions to his furniture of a fine oak chest and a fine walnut-wood cupboard, both, like the bed, his own handiwork. All the while he was driving a brisk trade, for none could beat Thibault in turning a block of beech into a pair of shoes, and in converting the odd chips into spoons, salt-cellars and natty little bowls. He had now been settled in his work-shop for three years, that is, ever since his return after the completion of his tour round France, and there was nothing for which anyone could have reproached him during this interval except the failing we have already mentioned--that he was rather more envious of the good fortune of his neighbour than was altogether conducive to the welfare of his soul. But this feeling was as yet so inoffensive, that his confessor had no need to do more than awaken in him a sense of shame for harbouring thoughts which had, so far, not resulted in any active crime. CHAPTER II THE SEIGNEUR JEAN AND THE SABOT-MAKER As already said, the buck began to dodge and double on reaching Oigny, turning and twisting round Thibault s hut, and the weather being fine although the autumn was well advanced, the shoe-maker was sitting at his work in his open lean-to. Looking up, he suddenly espied the trembling animal, quivering in every limb, standing a few paces in front of him, gazing at him with intelligent and terrified eyes. Thibault had been for a long time aware that the hunt was circling around Oigny, at one time drawing near to the village, and then receding, only to draw near again. There was nothing therefore very surprising to him in the sight of the buck, yet he stayed his hand, although he was busy at work, and contemplated the animal. Saint Sabot! he exclaimed--I should explain, that the festival of Saint Sabot is the wooden-shoe f te-- Saint Sabot! but that is a dainty morsel and would taste as fine, I warrant, as the chamois I ate at Vienne once at the grand banquet of the Jolly Shoe-makers of Dauphin . Lucky folk who can dine on the like every day. I tasted such once, it is now nearly four years ago, and my mouth waters now when I think of it. Oh! these lords! these lords! with their fresh meats and their old wines at every meal, while I have to be satisfied with potatoes to eat and water to drink from one week s end to the other; and it is a chance if even on Sunday, I can feast myself with a lump of rusty bacon and an old cabbage, and a glass of _pignolet_ fit to make my old goat stand on her head. It need scarcely be said, that as soon as Thibault began this monologue, the buck had turned and disappeared. Thibault had finished rounding his periods, and had just declaimed his peroration, when he heard himself roughly accosted in forcible terms: Ho, there, you scoundrel! answer me. It was the Baron, who seeing his dogs wavering, was anxious to make sure that they were not on the wrong scent. Ho, there, you scoundrel! repeated the wolf-hunter, have you seen the beast? There was evidently something in the manner of the Baron s questioning which did not please our philosophical shoe-maker, for although he was perfectly aware what was the matter, he answered: what beast? Curse you! why, the buck we are hunting! He must have passed close by here, and standing gaping as you do, you must have seen him. It was a fine stag of ten, was it not? Which way did he go? Speak up, you blackguard, or you shall have a taste of my stirrup-leather! The black plague take him, cub of a wolf! muttered the shoe-maker to himself. Then, aloud, with a fine air of pretended simplicity, Ah, yes! he said, I did see him. A buck, was it not? a ten-tiner, eh? with great horns. Ah, yes to be sure, a buck, with great horns,--or great corns, was it? yes, I saw him as plain as I see you, my Lord. But there, I can t say if he had any corns, for I did not look at his feet, anyhow, he added, with the air of a perfect simpleton, if he had corns, they did not prevent him running. At any other time the Baron would have laughed at what he might have taken for genuine stupidity; but the doublings of the animal were beginning to put him into a regular huntsman s fever. Now, then, you scoundrel, a truce to this jesting! If you are in a humour for jokes, it is more than I am! I will be in whatever humour it may please your Lordship I should be. Well, then, answer me. Your Lordship has asked me nothing as yet. Did the deer seem tired? Not very. Which way did he come? He did not come, he was standing still. Well, but he must have come from one side or the other. Ah! very likely, but I did not see him come. Which way did he go? I would tell you directly; only I did not see him go. The Lord of Vez cast an angry look at Thibault. Is it some while ago the buck passed this way, Master Simpleton? Not so very long, my Lord. About how long ago? Thibault made as if trying to remember; at last he replied: It was, I think, the day before yesterday, but in saying this, the shoe-maker, unfortunately, could not suppress a grin. This grin did not escape the Baron, who, spurring his horse, rode down on Thibault with lifted whip. Thibault was agile, and with a single bound he reached the shelter of his lean-to, whither the wolf-hunter could not follow, as long as he remained mounted; Thibault was therefore in momentary safety. You are only bantering and lying! cried the huntsman, for there is Marcassino, my best hound, giving cry not twenty yards off, and if the deer passed by where Marcassino is, he must have come over the hedge, and it is impossible, therefore, that you did not see him. Pardon, my Lord, but according to our good priest, no one but the Pope is infallible, and Monsieur Marcassino may be mistaken. Marcassino is never mistaken, do you hear, you rascal! and in proof of it I can see from here the marks where the animal scratched up the ground. Nevertheless, my Lord, I assure you, I swear.... said Thibault, who saw the Baron s eyebrows contracting in a way that made him feel uneasy. Silence, and come here, blackguard! cried my lord. Thibault hesitated a moment, but the black look on the sportsman s face became more and more threatening, and fearing to increase his exasperation by disobeying his command, he thought he had better go forward, hoping that the Baron merely wished to ask a service of him. But it was an unlucky move on his part, for scarcely had he emerged from the protection of the shed, before the horse of the Lord of Vez, urged by bit and spur, gave a leap, which brought his rider swooping down upon Thibault, while at the same moment a furious blow from the butt end of the Baron s whip fell upon his head. The shoe-maker, stunned by the blow, tottered a moment, lost his balance and was about to fall face downwards, when the Baron, drawing his foot out of the stirrup, with a violent kick in the chest, not only straightened him again, but sent the poor wretch flying in an opposite direction, where he fell with his back against the door of his hut. Take that! said the Baron, as he first felled Thibault with his whip, and then kicked him, take that for your lie, and that for your banter! And then, without troubling himself any further about the man, whom he left lying on his back, the Lord of Vez, seeing that the hounds had rallied on hearing Marcassino s cry, gave them a cheery note on his horn, and cantered away. Thibault lifted himself up, feeling bruised all over, and began feeling himself from head to foot to make sure that no bones were broken. Having carefully passed his hand over each limb in succession, that s all right, he said, there is nothing broken either above or below, I am glad to find. So, my Lord Baron, that is how you treat people, because you happen to have married a Prince s bastard daughter! But let me tell you, my fine fellow, it is not you who will eat the buck you are hunting to-day; it will be this blackguard, this scoundrel, this simpleton of a Thibault who will eat it. Yes, it shall be I who eat it, that I vow! cried Thibault, confirming himself more and more in his bold resolution, and it is no use being a man if having once made a vow, one fails to keep it. So without further delay, Thibault thrust his bill-hook into his belt, seized his boar-spear, and after listening for a moment to the cry of the hounds to ascertain in which direction the hunt had gone, he ran off with all the speed of which a man s legs are capable to get the start of them, guessing by the curve which the stag and its pursuers were following what would be the straight line to take so as to intercept them. There were two ways of doing his deed open to Thibault; either to hide himself beside the path which the buck must take and kill him with his boar-spear, or else to surprise the animal just as he was being hunted down by the dogs, and collar him there and then. And as he ran, the desire to revenge himself on the Baron for the latter s brutality, was not so uppermost in Thibault s mind as the thoughts of the sumptuous manner in which he would fare for the next month, on the shoulders, the back, and the haunches of the deer, either salted to a turn, roasted on the spit, or cut in slices and done in the pan. And these two ideas, moreover, of vengeance and gluttony, were so jumbled up in his brain, that while still running at the top of his speed he laughed in his sleeve, as he pictured the dejected mien of the Baron and his men returning to the castle after their fruitless day s hunt, and at the same time saw himself seated at table, the door securely fastened, and a pint of wine beside him, t te- -t te with a haunch of the deer, the rich and delicious gravy escaping as the knife returned for a third or fourth cut. The deer, as far as Thibault could calculate, was making for the bridge which crosses the Ourcq, between Noroy and Troesne. At the time of which we are now speaking there was a bridge spanning the river, formed of two joists and a few planks. As the river was very high and very rapid, Thibault decided that the deer would not attempt to ford it; so he hid himself behind a rock, within reach of the bridge, and waited. It was not long before he saw the graceful head of the deer appear above the rock at some ten paces distance; the animal was bending its ears to the wind, in the endeavour to catch the sound of the enemy s approach as it was borne along the breeze. Thibault, excited by this sudden appearance, rose from behind the rock, poised his boar-spear and sent it flying towards the animal. The buck, with a single bound, reached the middle of the bridge, a second carried him on to the opposite bank, and a third bore him out of sight. The boar-spear had passed within a foot of the animal, and had buried itself in the grass fifteen paces from where Thibault was standing. Never before had he been known to make such an unskilful throw; he, Thibault, of all the company who made the tour of France, the one known to be surest of his aim! Enraged with himself, therefore, he picked up his weapon, and bounded across the bridge with an agility equal to that of the deer. Thibault knew the country quite as well as the animal he was pursuing, and so got ahead of the deer and once more concealed himself, this time behind a beech-tree, half-way up, and not too far from a little footpath. The deer now passed so close to him, that Thibault hesitated as to whether it would not be better to knock the animal down with his boar-spear than to throw the weapon at it; but his hesitation did not last longer than a flash of lightning, for no lightning could be quicker than the animal itself, which was already twenty paces off when Thibault threw his boar-spear, but without better luck than the time before. And now the baying of the hounds was drawing nearer and nearer; another few minutes, and it would, he felt, be impossible for him to carry out his design. But in honour to his spirit of persistence, be it said, that in proportion as the difficulty increased, the greater became Thibault s desire to get possession of the deer. I must have it, come what will, he cried, I must! and if there is a God who cares for the poor, I shall have satisfaction of this confounded Baron, who beat me as if I were a dog, but I am a man notwithstanding, and I am quite ready to prove the same to him. And Thibault picked up his boar-spear and once more set off running. But it would appear that the good God whom he had just invoked, either had not heard him, or wished to drive him to extremities, for his third attempt had no greater success than the previous ones. By Heaven! exclaimed Thibault, God Almighty is assuredly deaf, it seems Let the Devil then open his ears and hear me! In the name of God or of the Devil, I want you and I will have you, cursed animal! Thibault had hardly finished this double blasphemy when the buck, doubling back, passed close to him for the fourth time, and disappeared among the bushes, but so quickly and unexpectedly, that Thibault had not even time to lift his boar-spear. At that moment he heard the dogs so near him, that he deemed it would be imprudent to continue his pursuit. He looked round him, saw a thickly-leaved oak tree, threw his boar-spear into a bush, swarmed up the trunk, and hid himself among the foliage. He imagined, and with good reason, that since the deer had gone ahead again, the hunt would only pass by following on its track. The dogs had not lost the scent, in spite of the quarry s doublings, and they were not likely to lose it now. Thibault had not been seated among the branches for above five minutes, when first the hounds came into sight, then the Baron, who in spite of his fifty-five years, headed the chase as if he had been a man of twenty. It must be added that the Lord of Vez was in a state of rage that we will not even endeavour to describe. To lose four hours over a wretched deer and still to be running behind it! Such a thing had never happened to him before. He stormed at his men, he whipped his dogs, and had so ploughed his horse s sides with his spurs, that the thick coating of mud which covered his gaiters was reddened with blood. On reaching the bridge over the Ourcq, however, there had been an interval of alleviation for the Baron, for the hounds had so unanimously taken up the scent, that the cloak which the wolf-hunter carried behind him would have sufficed to cover the whole pack as they crossed the bridge. Indeed the Baron was so pleased, that he was not satisfied with humming a tirra-la, but, unslinging his hunting-horn he sounded it with his full lung-power, a thing which he only did on great occasions. But, unfortunately, the joy of my Lord of Vez was destined to be short lived. All of

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you must know that this made the fifth or sixth time that the worthy Baron had started the animal in question, but never once had he been able to get within gun-shot of him or to run him down. Yes, Marcotte went on, but the damned beast has employed himself so well all night crossing his track and doubling, that after having traced him over half the forest, I found myself at the place from which I started. You think then, Marcotte, that there is no chance of getting near him. I am afraid not. By all the devils in hell! exclaimed the Lord of Vez, who had not had his equal in swearing since the mighty Nimrod, however, I am not feeling well to-day, and I must have a burst of some kind, to get rid of these bad humours. What do you think we can hunt, Marcotte, in place of this damned black wolf? Well, having been so taken up with the wolf, answered Marcotte, I have not traced any other animal. Will my Lord uncouple at random and hunt the first animal that we come across? The Baron was about to express his willingness to agree to this proposal when he caught sight of little Engoulevent coming towards them cap in hand. Wait a moment, he said, here comes Engoulevent, who, I fancy, has some advice to give us. I have no advice to give to a noble Lord like yourself, replied Engoulevent, assuming an expression of humility on his sly and crafty face; it is, however, my duty to inform you that there is a splendid buck in the neighbourhood. Let us see your buck, Engoulevent, replied the chief wolf-hunter, and if you are not mistaken about it, there will be a new crown for you. Where is this buck of yours? asked Marcotte, but look to your skin, if you make us uncouple to no purpose. Let me have Matador and Jupiter, and then we shall see. Matador and Jupiter were the finest among the hounds belonging to the Lord of Vez. And indeed, Engoulevent had not gone a hundred paces with them through the thicket, before, by the lashing of their tails, and their repeated yelping, he knew that they were on the right scent. In another minute or two a magnificent ten-tined stag came into view. Marcotte cried Tally-ho, sounded his horn, and the hunt began, to the great satisfaction of the Lord of Vez, who, although regretting the black wolf, was willing to make the best of a fine buck in its stead. The hunt had lasted two hours, and the quarry still held on. It had first led its pursuers from the little wood of Haramont to the Chemin du Pendu, and thence straight to the back of Oigny, and it still showed no sign of fatigue; for it was not one of those poor animals of the flat country who get their tails pulled by every wretched terrier. As it neared the low grounds of Bourg-fontaine, however, it evidently decided that it was being run rather hard, for it gave up the bolder measures which had hitherto enabled it to keep ahead, and began to double. Its first man uvre was to go down to the brook which joins the ponds of Baisemont and Bourg, then to walk against stream with the water up to its haunches, for nearly half a mile; it then sprang on to the right bank, back again into the bed of the stream, made another leap to the left, and with a succession of bounds, as vigorous as its failing strength allowed, continued to out-distance its pursuers. But the dogs of my lord Baron were not animals to be put out by such trifles as these. Being both sagacious and well-bred, they, of their own accord, divided the task between themselves, half going up stream, and half down, these hunting on the right those on the left, and so effectually that they ere long put the animal off its changes, for they soon recovered the scent, rallying at the first cry given by one of the pack, and starting afresh on the chase, as ready and eager as if the deer had been only twenty paces in front of them. And so with galloping of horses, with cry of hounds and blare of horn, the Baron and his huntsmen reached the ponds of Saint Antoine, a hundred paces or so from the Confines of Oigny. Between these and the Osier-beds stood the hut of Thibault, the sabot-maker. We must pause to give some description of this Thibault, the shoe-maker, the real hero of the tale. You will ask why I, who have summoned kings to appear upon the stage, who have obliged princes, dukes, and barons to play secondary parts in my romances, should take a simple shoe-maker for the hero of this tale. First, I will reply by saying that, in my dear home country of Villers-Cotterets, there are more sabot-makers than barons, dukes and princes, and that, as soon as I decided to make the forest the scene of the events I am about to record, I was obliged to choose one of the actual inhabitants of this forest as hero, unless I had wished to represent such fantastic persons as the _Incas_ of Marmontel or the _Abencerrages_ of M. de Florian. More than that, it is not the author who decides on the subject, but the subject which takes possession of the author, and, good or bad, this particular subject has taken possession of me. I will therefore endeavour to draw Thibault s portrait for you, plain shoe-maker as he was, as exactly as the artist paints the portrait which a prince desires to send to his lady-love. Thibault was a man between twenty-five and twenty-seven years of age, tall, well made, physically robust, but by nature melancholy and sad of heart. This depression of spirits arose from a little grain of envy, which, in spite of himself, perhaps unconsciously to himself, he harboured towards all such of his neighbours as had been more favoured by fortune than himself. His father had committed a fault, a serious one at all times, but more especially in those days of absolutism, when a man was not able to rise above his station as now-a-days, when with sufficient capacity he may attain to any rank. Thibault had been educated above his position; he had been at school under the Abb Fortier, at Villers-Cotterets, and had learnt to read, write, and cypher; moreover he knew a little Latin, which made him inordinately proud of himself. Thibault had spent a great part of his time in reading, and his books had been chiefly those which were in vogue at the close of the preceding century. But he had not been a sufficiently clever analyst to know how to separate the good from the bad, or rather he _had_ separated what was bad, and swallowed it in large doses, leaving the good to precipitate itself at the bottom of the glass. At twenty years of age Thibault had certainly had dreams of being something other than a sabot-maker. He had, for instance, for a very little while, cast his eyes towards the army. But his comrades who had worn the double livery of king and country, had left the service as they entered it, mere soldiers of the ranks, having failed during five or six years of slavery to obtain promotion, even to the not very exalted grade of corporal. Thibault had also thought of becoming a sailor. But a career in the navy was as much forbidden to the plebeian as one in the army. Possibly after enduring danger, and storm and battle for fifteen or twenty years, he might be made a boatswain s mate, that was all, and then! besides, it was by no means Thibault s ambition to wear a short vest and sail-cloth trousers, but the blue uniform of the king with red vest and gold epaulettes. He had moreover known of no single case in which the son of a mere shoe-maker had become Master of a Frigate, or even Lieutenant. So he was forced to give up all idea of joining the King s Navy. Thibault would not have minded being a Notary, and at one time thought of apprenticing himself to the Royal Scrivener, Ma tre Niquet, as a stepping-stone, and of making his way up on the strength of his own legs and with the help of his pen. But supposing him to have risen to the position of head clerk with a salary of a hundred crowns, where was he to find the thirty thousand francs which would be required for the purchase of the smallest village practice. There was, therefore, no better chance of his becoming a scrivener than of becoming an officer on sea or land. Meanwhile, Thibault s father died, leaving very little ready money. There was about enough to bury him, so he was buried, and this done, there remained some thirty or forty francs over for Thibault. Thibault knew his trade well; indeed, he was a first-rate workman; but he had no inclination to handle either auger or parer. It ended, therefore, by his leaving all his father s tools in the care of a friend, a remnant of prudence still remaining to him, and selling every vestige of furniture; having thus realised a sum of five hundred and forty livres, he determined to make what was then called the tour of France. Thibault spent three years in travelling; he did not make his fortune during that time, but he learnt a great many things in the course of his journey of which he was previously ignorant, and acquired certain accomplishments which he had previously been without. He learned amongst other things that, although it was as well to keep one s word on matters of business with a man, it was no use whatever keeping love vows made to a woman. So much for his character and habits of mind. As to his external accomplishments, he could dance a jig beautifully, could hold his own at quarter-staff against four men, and could handle the boar-spear as cleverly as the best huntsman going. All these things had not a little served to increase Thibault s natural self-esteem, and, seeing himself handsomer, stronger, and cleverer than many of the nobles, he would exclaim against Providence, crying, Why was I not nobly born? why was not that nobleman yonder born a peasant? But as Providence took care not to make any answer to these apostroph s, and as Thibault found that dancing, playing at quarter-staff, and throwing the boar-spear only fatigued the body, without procuring him any material advantage, he began to turn his thoughts towards his ancient trade, humble though it was, saying to himself, if it enabled the father to live, it would also enable the son. So Thibault went and fetched away his tools; and then, tools in hand, he went to ask permission of the Steward of his Royal Highness Louis Philippe of Orleans, to build a hut in the forest, in which to carry on his trade. He had no difficulty in obtaining this, for the steward knew by experience that his master was a very kind-hearted man, expending as much as two hundred and forty thousand francs a year on the poor; he felt sure, therefore, that one who gave away a sum like this, would be willing to let an honest workman who wished to ply his trade, have thirty or forty feet of ground. As he had leave to establish himself in whatever part of the forest he liked best, Thibault chose the spot near the osier-beds, where the roads crossed, one of the most beautiful parts of the woods, less than a mile from Oigny and about three times that distance from Villers-Cotterets. The shoe-maker put up his work-shop, built partly of old planks given him by M. Panisis, who had been having a sale in the neighbourhood, and partly of the branches which the steward gave him leave to cut in the forest. When the building of the hut, which consisted of a bedroom, cosily shut in, where he could work during the winter, and of a lean-to, open to the air, where he could work in the summer, was completed, Thibault began to think of making himself a bed. At first, a layer of fern had to serve for this purpose; but after he had made a hundred pairs of wooden shoes and had sold these to Bedeau, who kept a general shop at Villers-Cotterets, he was able to pay a sufficient deposit to get a mattress, to be paid for in full by the end of three months. The framework of the bed was not difficult to make; Thibault was not the shoe-maker he was without being a bit of a carpenter into the bargain, and when this was finished he plaited osiers to take the place of sacking, laid the mattress upon them, and found himself at last with a bed to lie upon. Little by little came the sheets, and then in their turn the coverlids; the next purchase was a chafing-dish, and earthenware pots to cook in, and finally some plates and dishes. Before the year was out Thibault had also made additions to his furniture of a fine oak chest and a fine walnut-wood cupboard, both, like the bed, his own handiwork. All the while he was driving a brisk trade, for none could beat Thibault in turning a block of beech into a pair of shoes, and in converting the odd chips into spoons, salt-cellars and natty little bowls. He had now been settled in his work-shop for three years, that is, ever since his return after the completion of his tour round France, and there was nothing for which anyone could have reproached him during this interval except the failing we have already mentioned--that he was rather more envious of the good fortune of his neighbour than was altogether conducive to the welfare of his soul. But this feeling was as yet so inoffensive, that his confessor had no need to do more than awaken in him a sense of shame for harbouring thoughts which had, so far, not resulted in any active crime. CHAPTER II THE SEIGNEUR JEAN AND THE SABOT-MAKER As already said, the buck began to dodge and double on reaching Oigny, turning and twisting round Thibault s hut, and the weather being fine although the autumn was well advanced, the shoe-maker was sitting at his work in his open lean-to. Looking up, he suddenly espied the trembling animal, quivering in every limb, standing a few paces in front of him, gazing at him with intelligent and terrified eyes. Thibault had been for a long time aware that the hunt was circling around Oigny, at one time drawing near to the village, and then receding, only to draw near again. There was nothing therefore very surprising to him in the sight of the buck, yet he stayed his hand, although he was busy at work, and contemplated the animal. Saint Sabot! he exclaimed--I should explain, that the festival of Saint Sabot is the wooden-shoe f te-- Saint Sabot! but that is a dainty morsel and would taste as fine, I warrant, as the chamois I ate at Vienne once at the grand banquet of the Jolly Shoe-makers of Dauphin . Lucky folk who can dine on the like every day. I tasted such once, it is now nearly four years ago, and my mouth waters now when I think of it. Oh! these lords! these lords! with their fresh meats and their old wines at every meal, while I have to be satisfied with potatoes to eat and water to drink from one week s end to the other; and it is a chance if even on Sunday, I can feast myself with a lump of rusty bacon and an old cabbage, and a glass of _pignolet_ fit to make my old goat stand on her head. It need scarcely be said, that as soon as Thibault began this monologue, the buck had turned and disappeared. Thibault had finished rounding his periods, and had just declaimed his peroration, when he heard himself roughly accosted in forcible terms: Ho, there, you scoundrel! answer me. It was the Baron, who seeing his dogs wavering, was anxious to make sure that they were not on the wrong scent. Ho, there, you scoundrel! repeated the wolf-hunter, have you seen the beast? There was evidently something in the manner of the Baron s questioning which did not please our philosophical shoe-maker, for although he was perfectly aware what was the matter, he answered: what beast? Curse you! why, the buck we are hunting! He must have passed close by here, and standing gaping as you do, you must have seen him. It was a fine stag of ten, was it not? Which way did he go? Speak up, you blackguard, or you shall have a taste of my stirrup-leather! The black plague take him, cub of a wolf! muttered the shoe-maker to himself. Then, aloud, with a fine air of pretended simplicity, Ah, yes! he said, I did see him. A buck, was it not? a ten-tiner, eh? with great horns. Ah, yes to be sure, a buck, with great horns,--or great corns, was it? yes, I saw him as plain as I see you, my Lord. But there, I can t say if he had any corns, for I did not look at his feet, anyhow, he added, with the air of a perfect simpleton, if he had corns, they did not prevent him running. At any other time the Baron would have laughed at what he might have taken for genuine stupidity; but the doublings of the animal were beginning to put him into a regular huntsman s fever. Now, then, you scoundrel, a truce to this jesting! If you are in a humour for jokes, it is more than I am! I will be in whatever humour it may please your Lordship I should be. Well, then, answer me. Your Lordship has asked me nothing as yet. Did the deer seem tired? Not very. Which way did he come? He did not come, he was standing still. Well, but he must have come from one side or the other. Ah! very likely, but I did not see him come. Which way did he go? I would tell you directly; only I did not see him go. The Lord of Vez cast an angry look at Thibault. Is it some while ago the buck passed this way, Master Simpleton? Not so very long, my Lord. About how long ago? Thibault made as if trying to remember; at last he replied: It was, I think, the day before yesterday, but in saying this, the shoe-maker, unfortunately, could not suppress a grin. This grin did not escape the Baron, who, spurring his horse, rode down on Thibault with lifted whip. Thibault was agile, and with a single bound he reached the shelter of his lean-to, whither the wolf-hunter could not follow, as long as he remained mounted; Thibault was therefore in momentary safety. You are only bantering and lying! cried the huntsman, for there is Marcassino, my best hound, giving cry not twenty yards off, and if the deer passed by where Marcassino is, he must have come over the hedge, and it is impossible, therefore, that you did not see him. Pardon, my Lord, but according to our good priest, no one but the Pope is infallible, and Monsieur Marcassino may be mistaken. Marcassino is never mistaken, do you hear, you rascal! and in proof of it I can see from here the marks where the animal scratched up the ground. Nevertheless, my Lord, I assure you, I swear.... said Thibault, who saw the Baron s eyebrows contracting in a way that made him feel uneasy. Silence, and come here, blackguard! cried my lord. Thibault hesitated a moment, but the black look on the sportsman s face became more and more threatening, and fearing to increase his exasperation by disobeying his command, he thought he had better go forward, hoping that the Baron merely wished to ask a service of him. But it was an unlucky move on his part, for scarcely had he emerged from the protection of the shed, before the horse of the Lord of Vez, urged by bit and spur, gave a leap, which brought his rider swooping down upon Thibault, while at the same moment a furious blow from the butt end of the Baron s whip fell upon his head. The shoe-maker, stunned by the blow, tottered a moment, lost his balance and was about to fall face downwards, when the Baron, drawing his foot out of the stirrup, with a violent kick in the chest, not only straightened him again, but sent the poor wretch flying in an opposite direction, where he fell with his back against the door of his hut. Take that! said the Baron, as he first felled Thibault with his whip, and then kicked him, take that for your lie, and that for your banter! And then, without troubling himself any further about the man, whom he left lying on his back, the Lord of Vez, seeing that the hounds had rallied on hearing Marcassino s cry, gave them a cheery note on his horn, and cantered away. Thibault lifted himself up, feeling bruised all over, and began feeling himself from head to foot to make sure that no bones were broken. Having carefully passed his hand over each limb in succession, that s all right, he said, there is nothing broken either above or below, I am glad to find. So, my Lord Baron, that is how you treat people, because you happen to have married a Prince s bastard daughter! But let me tell you, my fine fellow, it is not you who will eat the buck you are hunting to-day; it will be this blackguard, this scoundrel, this simpleton of a Thibault who will eat it. Yes, it shall be I who eat it, that I vow! cried Thibault, confirming himself more and more in his bold resolution, and it is no use being a man if having once made a vow, one fails to keep it. So without further delay, Thibault thrust his bill-hook into his belt, seized his boar-spear, and after listening for a moment to the cry of the hounds to ascertain in which direction the hunt had gone, he ran off with all the speed of which a man s legs are capable to get the start of them, guessing by the curve which the stag and its pursuers were following what would be the straight line to take so as to intercept them. There were two ways of doing his deed open to Thibault; either to hide himself beside the path which the buck must take and kill him with his boar-spear, or else to surprise the animal just as he was being hunted down by the dogs, and collar him there and then. And as he ran, the desire to revenge himself on the Baron for the latter s brutality, was not so uppermost in Thibault s mind as the thoughts of the sumptuous manner in which he would fare for the next month, on the shoulders, the back, and the haunches of the deer, either salted to a turn, roasted on the spit, or cut in slices and done in the pan. And these two ideas, moreover, of vengeance and gluttony, were so jumbled up in his brain, that while still running at the top of his speed he laughed in his sleeve, as he pictured the dejected mien of the Baron and his men returning to the castle after their fruitless day s hunt, and at the same time saw himself seated at table, the door securely fastened, and a pint of wine beside him, t te- -t te with a haunch of the deer, the rich and delicious gravy escaping as the knife returned for a third or fourth cut. The deer, as far as Thibault could calculate, was making for the bridge which crosses the Ourcq, between Noroy and Troesne. At the time of which we are now speaking there was a bridge spanning the river, formed of two joists and a few planks. As the river was very high and very rapid, Thibault decided that the deer would not attempt to ford it; so he hid himself behind a rock, within reach of the bridge, and waited. It was not long before he saw the graceful head of the deer appear above the rock at some ten paces distance; the animal was bending its ears to the wind, in the endeavour to catch the sound of the enemy s approach as it was borne along the breeze. Thibault, excited by this sudden appearance, rose from behind the rock, poised his boar-spear and sent it flying towards the animal. The buck, with a single bound, reached the middle of the bridge, a second carried him on to the opposite bank, and a third bore him out of sight. The boar-spear had passed within a foot of the animal, and had buried itself in the grass fifteen paces from where Thibault was standing. Never before had he been known to make such an unskilful throw; he, Thibault, of all the company who made the tour of France, the one known to be surest of his aim! Enraged with himself, therefore, he picked up his weapon, and bounded across the bridge with an agility equal to that of the deer. Thibault knew the country quite as well as the animal he was pursuing, and so got ahead of the deer and once more concealed himself, this time behind a beech-tree, half-way up, and not too far from a little footpath. The deer now passed so close to him, that Thibault hesitated as to whether it would not be better to knock the animal down with his boar-spear than to throw the weapon at it; but his hesitation did not last longer than a flash of lightning, for no lightning could be quicker than the animal itself, which was already twenty paces off when Thibault threw his boar-spear, but without better luck than the time before. And now the baying of the hounds was drawing nearer and nearer; another few minutes, and it would, he felt, be impossible for him to carry out his design. But in honour to his spirit of persistence, be it said, that in proportion as the difficulty increased, the greater became Thibault s desire to get possession of the deer. I must have it, come what will, he cried, I must! and if there is a God who cares for the poor, I shall have satisfaction of this confounded Baron, who beat me as if I were a dog, but I am a man notwithstanding, and I am quite ready to prove the same to him. And Thibault picked up his boar-spear and once more set off running. But it would appear that the good God whom he had just invoked, either had not heard him, or wished to drive him to extremities, for his third attempt had no greater success than the previous ones. By Heaven! exclaimed Thibault, God Almighty is assuredly deaf, it seems Let the Devil then open his ears and hear me! In the name of God or of the Devil, I want you and I will have you, cursed animal! Thibault had hardly finished this double blasphemy when the buck, doubling back, passed close to him for the fourth time, and disappeared among the bushes, but so quickly and unexpectedly, that Thibault had not even time to lift his boar-spear. At that moment he heard the dogs so near him, that he deemed it would be imprudent to continue his pursuit. He looked round him, saw a thickly-leaved oak tree, threw his boar-spear into a bush, swarmed up the trunk, and hid himself among the foliage. He imagined, and with good reason, that since the deer had gone ahead again, the hunt would only pass by following on its track. The dogs had not lost the scent, in spite of the quarry s doublings, and they were not likely to lose it now. Thibault had not been seated among the branches for above five minutes, when first the hounds came into sight, then the Baron, who in spite of his fifty-five years, headed the chase as if he had been a man of twenty. It must be added that the Lord of Vez was in a state of rage that we will not even endeavour to describe. To lose four hours over a wretched deer and still to be running behind it! Such a thing had never happened to him before. He stormed at his men, he whipped his dogs, and had so ploughed his horse s sides with his spurs, that the thick coating of mud which covered his gaiters was reddened with blood. On reaching the bridge over the Ourcq, however, there had been an interval of alleviation for the Baron, for the hounds had so unanimously taken up the scent, that the cloak which the wolf-hunter carried behind him would have sufficed to cover the whole pack as they crossed the bridge. Indeed the Baron was so pleased, that he was not satisfied with humming a tirra-la, but, unslinging his hunting-horn he sounded it with his full lung-power, a thing which he only did on great occasions. But, unfortunately, the joy of my Lord of Vez was destined to be short lived. All of

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you must know that this made the fifth or sixth time that the worthy Baron had started the animal in question, but never once had he been able to get within gun-shot of him or to run him down. Yes, Marcotte went on, but the damned beast has employed himself so well all night crossing his track and doubling, that after having traced him over half the forest, I found myself at the place from which I started. You think then, Marcotte, that there is no chance of getting near him. I am afraid not. By all the devils in hell! exclaimed the Lord of Vez, who had not had his equal in swearing since the mighty Nimrod, however, I am not feeling well to-day, and I must have a burst of some kind, to get rid of these bad humours. What do you think we can hunt, Marcotte, in place of this damned black wolf? Well, having been so taken up with the wolf, answered Marcotte, I have not traced any other animal. Will my Lord uncouple at random and hunt the first animal that we come across? The Baron was about to express his willingness to agree to this proposal when he caught sight of little Engoulevent coming towards them cap in hand. Wait a moment, he said, here comes Engoulevent, who, I fancy, has some advice to give us. I have no advice to give to a noble Lord like yourself, replied Engoulevent, assuming an expression of humility on his sly and crafty face; it is, however, my duty to inform you that there is a splendid buck in the neighbourhood. Let us see your buck, Engoulevent, replied the chief wolf-hunter, and if you are not mistaken about it, there will be a new crown for you. Where is this buck of yours? asked Marcotte, but look to your skin, if you make us uncouple to no purpose. Let me have Matador and Jupiter, and then we shall see. Matador and Jupiter were the finest among the hounds belonging to the Lord of Vez. And indeed, Engoulevent had not gone a hundred paces with them through the thicket, before, by the lashing of their tails, and their repeated yelping, he knew that they were on the right scent. In another minute or two a magnificent ten-tined stag came into view. Marcotte cried Tally-ho, sounded his horn, and the hunt began, to the great satisfaction of the Lord of Vez, who, although regretting the black wolf, was willing to make the best of a fine buck in its stead. The hunt had lasted two hours, and the quarry still held on. It had first led its pursuers from the little wood of Haramont to the Chemin du Pendu, and thence straight to the back of Oigny, and it still showed no sign of fatigue; for it was not one of those poor animals of the flat country who get their tails pulled by every wretched terrier. As it neared the low grounds of Bourg-fontaine, however, it evidently decided that it was being run rather hard, for it gave up the bolder measures which had hitherto enabled it to keep ahead, and began to double. Its first man uvre was to go down to the brook which joins the ponds of Baisemont and Bourg, then to walk against stream with the water up to its haunches, for nearly half a mile; it then sprang on to the right bank, back again into the bed of the stream, made another leap to the left, and with a succession of bounds, as vigorous as its failing strength allowed, continued to out-distance its pursuers. But the dogs of my lord Baron were not animals to be put out by such trifles as these. Being both sagacious and well-bred, they, of their own accord, divided the task between themselves, half going up stream, and half down, these hunting on the right those on the left, and so effectually that they ere long put the animal off its changes, for they soon recovered the scent, rallying at the first cry given by one of the pack, and starting afresh on the chase, as ready and eager as if the deer had been only twenty paces in front of them. And so with galloping of horses, with cry of hounds and blare of horn, the Baron and his huntsmen reached the ponds of Saint Antoine, a hundred paces or so from the Confines of Oigny. Between these and the Osier-beds stood the hut of Thibault, the sabot-maker. We must pause to give some description of this Thibault, the shoe-maker, the real hero of the tale. You will ask why I, who have summoned kings to appear upon the stage, who have obliged princes, dukes, and barons to play secondary parts in my romances, should take a simple shoe-maker for the hero of this tale. First, I will reply by saying that, in my dear home country of Villers-Cotterets, there are more sabot-makers than barons, dukes and princes, and that, as soon as I decided to make the forest the scene of the events I am about to record, I was obliged to choose one of the actual inhabitants of this forest as hero, unless I had wished to represent such fantastic persons as the _Incas_ of Marmontel or the _Abencerrages_ of M. de Florian. More than that, it is not the author who decides on the subject, but the subject which takes possession of the author, and, good or bad, this particular subject has taken possession of me. I will therefore endeavour to draw Thibault s portrait for you, plain shoe-maker as he was, as exactly as the artist paints the portrait which a prince desires to send to his lady-love. Thibault was a man between twenty-five and twenty-seven years of age, tall, well made, physically robust, but by nature melancholy and sad of heart. This depression of spirits arose from a little grain of envy, which, in spite of himself, perhaps unconsciously to himself, he harboured towards all such of his neighbours as had been more favoured by fortune than himself. His father had committed a fault, a serious one at all times, but more especially in those days of absolutism, when a man was not able to rise above his station as now-a-days, when with sufficient capacity he may attain to any rank. Thibault had been educated above his position; he had been at school under the Abb Fortier, at Villers-Cotterets, and had learnt to read, write, and cypher; moreover he knew a little Latin, which made him inordinately proud of himself. Thibault had spent a great part of his time in reading, and his books had been chiefly those which were in vogue at the close of the preceding century. But he had not been a sufficiently clever analyst to know how to separate the good from the bad, or rather he _had_ separated what was bad, and swallowed it in large doses, leaving the good to precipitate itself at the bottom of the glass. At twenty years of age Thibault had certainly had dreams of being something other than a sabot-maker. He had, for instance, for a very little while, cast his eyes towards the army. But his comrades who had worn the double livery of king and country, had left the service as they entered it, mere soldiers of the ranks, having failed during five or six years of slavery to obtain promotion, even to the not very exalted grade of corporal. Thibault had also thought of becoming a sailor. But a career in the navy was as much forbidden to the plebeian as one in the army. Possibly after enduring danger, and storm and battle for fifteen or twenty years, he might be made a boatswain s mate, that was all, and then! besides, it was by no means Thibault s ambition to wear a short vest and sail-cloth trousers, but the blue uniform of the king with red vest and gold epaulettes. He had moreover known of no single case in which the son of a mere shoe-maker had become Master of a Frigate, or even Lieutenant. So he was forced to give up all idea of joining the King s Navy. Thibault would not have minded being a Notary, and at one time thought of apprenticing himself to the Royal Scrivener, Ma tre Niquet, as a stepping-stone, and of making his way up on the strength of his own legs and with the help of his pen. But supposing him to have risen to the position of head clerk with a salary of a hundred crowns, where was he to find the thirty thousand francs which would be required for the purchase of the smallest village practice. There was, therefore, no better chance of his becoming a scrivener than of becoming an officer on sea or land. Meanwhile, Thibault s father died, leaving very little ready money. There was about enough to bury him, so he was buried, and this done, there remained some thirty or forty francs over for Thibault. Thibault knew his trade well; indeed, he was a first-rate workman; but he had no inclination to handle either auger or parer. It ended, therefore, by his leaving all his father s tools in the care of a friend, a remnant of prudence still remaining to him, and selling every vestige of furniture; having thus realised a sum of five hundred and forty livres, he determined to make what was then called the tour of France. Thibault spent three years in travelling; he did not make his fortune during that time, but he learnt a great many things in the course of his journey of which he was previously ignorant, and acquired certain accomplishments which he had previously been without. He learned amongst other things that, although it was as well to keep one s word on matters of business with a man, it was no use whatever keeping love vows made to a woman. So much for his character and habits of mind. As to his external accomplishments, he could dance a jig beautifully, could hold his own at quarter-staff against four men, and could handle the boar-spear as cleverly as the best huntsman going. All these things had not a little served to increase Thibault s natural self-esteem, and, seeing himself handsomer, stronger, and cleverer than many of the nobles, he would exclaim against Providence, crying, Why was I not nobly born? why was not that nobleman yonder born a peasant? But as Providence took care not to make any answer to these apostroph s, and as Thibault found that dancing, playing at quarter-staff, and throwing the boar-spear only fatigued the body, without procuring him any material advantage, he began to turn his thoughts towards his ancient trade, humble though it was, saying to himself, if it enabled the father to live, it would also enable the son. So Thibault went and fetched away his tools; and then, tools in hand, he went to ask permission of the Steward of his Royal Highness Louis Philippe of Orleans, to build a hut in the forest, in which to carry on his trade. He had no difficulty in obtaining this, for the steward knew by experience that his master was a very kind-hearted man, expending as much as two hundred and forty thousand francs a year on the poor; he felt sure, therefore, that one who gave away a sum like this, would be willing to let an honest workman who wished to ply his trade, have thirty or forty feet of ground. As he had leave to establish himself in whatever part of the forest he liked best, Thibault chose the spot near the osier-beds, where the roads crossed, one of the most beautiful parts of the woods, less than a mile from Oigny and about three times that distance from Villers-Cotterets. The shoe-maker put up his work-shop, built partly of old planks given him by M. Panisis, who had been having a sale in the neighbourhood, and partly of the branches which the steward gave him leave to cut in the forest. When the building of the hut, which consisted of a bedroom, cosily shut in, where he could work during the winter, and of a lean-to, open to the air, where he could work in the summer, was completed, Thibault began to think of making himself a bed. At first, a layer of fern had to serve for this purpose; but after he had made a hundred pairs of wooden shoes and had sold these to Bedeau, who kept a general shop at Villers-Cotterets, he was able to pay a sufficient deposit to get a mattress, to be paid for in full by the end of three months. The framework of the bed was not difficult to make; Thibault was not the shoe-maker he was without being a bit of a carpenter into the bargain, and when this was finished he plaited osiers to take the place of sacking, laid the mattress upon them, and found himself at last with a bed to lie upon. Little by little came the sheets, and then in their turn the coverlids; the next purchase was a chafing-dish, and earthenware pots to cook in, and finally some plates and dishes. Before the year was out Thibault had also made additions to his furniture of a fine oak chest and a fine walnut-wood cupboard, both, like the bed, his own handiwork. All the while he was driving a brisk trade, for none could beat Thibault in turning a block of beech into a pair of shoes, and in converting the odd chips into spoons, salt-cellars and natty little bowls. He had now been settled in his work-shop for three years, that is, ever since his return after the completion of his tour round France, and there was nothing for which anyone could have reproached him during this interval except the failing we have already mentioned--that he was rather more envious of the good fortune of his neighbour than was altogether conducive to the welfare of his soul. But this feeling was as yet so inoffensive, that his confessor had no need to do more than awaken in him a sense of shame for harbouring thoughts which had, so far, not resulted in any active crime. CHAPTER II THE SEIGNEUR JEAN AND THE SABOT-MAKER As already said, the buck began to dodge and double on reaching Oigny, turning and twisting round Thibault s hut, and the weather being fine although the autumn was well advanced, the shoe-maker was sitting at his work in his open lean-to. Looking up, he suddenly espied the trembling animal, quivering in every limb, standing a few paces in front of him, gazing at him with intelligent and terrified eyes. Thibault had been for a long time aware that the hunt was circling around Oigny, at one time drawing near to the village, and then receding, only to draw near again. There was nothing therefore very surprising to him in the sight of the buck, yet he stayed his hand, although he was busy at work, and contemplated the animal. Saint Sabot! he exclaimed--I should explain, that the festival of Saint Sabot is the wooden-shoe f te-- Saint Sabot! but that is a dainty morsel and would taste as fine, I warrant, as the chamois I ate at Vienne once at the grand banquet of the Jolly Shoe-makers of Dauphin . Lucky folk who can dine on the like every day. I tasted such once, it is now nearly four years ago, and my mouth waters now when I think of it. Oh! these lords! these lords! with their fresh meats and their old wines at every meal, while I have to be satisfied with potatoes to eat and water to drink from one week s end to the other; and it is a chance if even on Sunday, I can feast myself with a lump of rusty bacon and an old cabbage, and a glass of _pignolet_ fit to make my old goat stand on her head. It need scarcely be said, that as soon as Thibault began this monologue, the buck had turned and disappeared. Thibault had finished rounding his periods, and had just declaimed his peroration, when he heard himself roughly accosted in forcible terms: Ho, there, you scoundrel! answer me. It was the Baron, who seeing his dogs wavering, was anxious to make sure that they were not on the wrong scent. Ho, there, you scoundrel! repeated the wolf-hunter, have you seen the beast? There was evidently something in the manner of the Baron s questioning which did not please our philosophical shoe-maker, for although he was perfectly aware what was the matter, he answered: what beast? Curse you! why, the buck we are hunting! He must have passed close by here, and standing gaping as you do, you must have seen him. It was a fine stag of ten, was it not? Which way did he go? Speak up, you blackguard, or you shall have a taste of my stirrup-leather! The black plague take him, cub of a wolf! muttered the shoe-maker to himself. Then, aloud, with a fine air of pretended simplicity, Ah, yes! he said, I did see him. A buck, was it not? a ten-tiner, eh? with great horns. Ah, yes to be sure, a buck, with great horns,--or great corns, was it? yes, I saw him as plain as I see you, my Lord. But there, I can t say if he had any corns, for I did not look at his feet, anyhow, he added, with the air of a perfect simpleton, if he had corns, they did not prevent him running. At any other time the Baron would have laughed at what he might have taken for genuine stupidity; but the doublings of the animal were beginning to put him into a regular huntsman s fever. Now, then, you scoundrel, a truce to this jesting! If you are in a humour for jokes, it is more than I am! I will be in whatever humour it may please your Lordship I should be. Well, then, answer me. Your Lordship has asked me nothing as yet. Did the deer seem tired? Not very. Which way did he come? He did not come, he was standing still. Well, but he must have come from one side or the other. Ah! very likely, but I did not see him come. Which way did he go? I would tell you directly; only I did not see him go. The Lord of Vez cast an angry look at Thibault. Is it some while ago the buck passed this way, Master Simpleton? Not so very long, my Lord. About how long ago? Thibault made as if trying to remember; at last he replied: It was, I think, the day before yesterday, but in saying this, the shoe-maker, unfortunately, could not suppress a grin. This grin did not escape the Baron, who, spurring his horse, rode down on Thibault with lifted whip. Thibault was agile, and with a single bound he reached the shelter of his lean-to, whither the wolf-hunter could not follow, as long as he remained mounted; Thibault was therefore in momentary safety. You are only bantering and lying! cried the huntsman, for there is Marcassino, my best hound, giving cry not twenty yards off, and if the deer passed by where Marcassino is, he must have come over the hedge, and it is impossible, therefore, that you did not see him. Pardon, my Lord, but according to our good priest, no one but the Pope is infallible, and Monsieur Marcassino may be mistaken. Marcassino is never mistaken, do you hear, you rascal! and in proof of it I can see from here the marks where the animal scratched up the ground. Nevertheless, my Lord, I assure you, I swear.... said Thibault, who saw the Baron s eyebrows contracting in a way that made him feel uneasy. Silence, and come here, blackguard! cried my lord. Thibault hesitated a moment, but the black look on the sportsman s face became more and more threatening, and fearing to increase his exasperation by disobeying his command, he thought he had better go forward, hoping that the Baron merely wished to ask a service of him. But it was an unlucky move on his part, for scarcely had he emerged from the protection of the shed, before the horse of the Lord of Vez, urged by bit and spur, gave a leap, which brought his rider swooping down upon Thibault, while at the same moment a furious blow from the butt end of the Baron s whip fell upon his head. The shoe-maker, stunned by the blow, tottered a moment, lost his balance and was about to fall face downwards, when the Baron, drawing his foot out of the stirrup, with a violent kick in the chest, not only straightened him again, but sent the poor wretch flying in an opposite direction, where he fell with his back against the door of his hut. Take that! said the Baron, as he first felled Thibault with his whip, and then kicked him, take that for your lie, and that for your banter! And then, without troubling himself any further about the man, whom he left lying on his back, the Lord of Vez, seeing that the hounds had rallied on hearing Marcassino s cry, gave them a cheery note on his horn, and cantered away. Thibault lifted himself up, feeling bruised all over, and began feeling himself from head to foot to make sure that no bones were broken. Having carefully passed his hand over each limb in succession, that s all right, he said, there is nothing broken either above or below, I am glad to find. So, my Lord Baron, that is how you treat people, because you happen to have married a Prince s bastard daughter! But let me tell you, my fine fellow, it is not you who will eat the buck you are hunting to-day; it will be this blackguard, this scoundrel, this simpleton of a Thibault who will eat it. Yes, it shall be I who eat it, that I vow! cried Thibault, confirming himself more and more in his bold resolution, and it is no use being a man if having once made a vow, one fails to keep it. So without further delay, Thibault thrust his bill-hook into his belt, seized his boar-spear, and after listening for a moment to the cry of the hounds to ascertain in which direction the hunt had gone, he ran off with all the speed of which a man s legs are capable to get the start of them, guessing by the curve which the stag and its pursuers were following what would be the straight line to take so as to intercept them. There were two ways of doing his deed open to Thibault; either to hide himself beside the path which the buck must take and kill him with his boar-spear, or else to surprise the animal just as he was being hunted down by the dogs, and collar him there and then. And as he ran, the desire to revenge himself on the Baron for the latter s brutality, was not so uppermost in Thibault s mind as the thoughts of the sumptuous manner in which he would fare for the next month, on the shoulders, the back, and the haunches of the deer, either salted to a turn, roasted on the spit, or cut in slices and done in the pan. And these two ideas, moreover, of vengeance and gluttony, were so jumbled up in his brain, that while still running at the top of his speed he laughed in his sleeve, as he pictured the dejected mien of the Baron and his men returning to the castle after their fruitless day s hunt, and at the same time saw himself seated at table, the door securely fastened, and a pint of wine beside him, t te- -t te with a haunch of the deer, the rich and delicious gravy escaping as the knife returned for a third or fourth cut. The deer, as far as Thibault could calculate, was making for the bridge which crosses the Ourcq, between Noroy and Troesne. At the time of which we are now speaking there was a bridge spanning the river, formed of two joists and a few planks. As the river was very high and very rapid, Thibault decided that the deer would not attempt to ford it; so he hid himself behind a rock, within reach of the bridge, and waited. It was not long before he saw the graceful head of the deer appear above the rock at some ten paces distance; the animal was bending its ears to the wind, in the endeavour to catch the sound of the enemy s approach as it was borne along the breeze. Thibault, excited by this sudden appearance, rose from behind the rock, poised his boar-spear and sent it flying towards the animal. The buck, with a single bound, reached the middle of the bridge, a second carried him on to the opposite bank, and a third bore him out of sight. The boar-spear had passed within a foot of the animal, and had buried itself in the grass fifteen paces from where Thibault was standing. Never before had he been known to make such an unskilful throw; he, Thibault, of all the company who made the tour of France, the one known to be surest of his aim! Enraged with himself, therefore, he picked up his weapon, and bounded across the bridge with an agility equal to that of the deer. Thibault knew the country quite as well as the animal he was pursuing, and so got ahead of the deer and once more concealed himself, this time behind a beech-tree, half-way up, and not too far from a little footpath. The deer now passed so close to him, that Thibault hesitated as to whether it would not be better to knock the animal down with his boar-spear than to throw the weapon at it; but his hesitation did not last longer than a flash of lightning, for no lightning could be quicker than the animal itself, which was already twenty paces off when Thibault threw his boar-spear, but without better luck than the time before. And now the baying of the hounds was drawing nearer and nearer; another few minutes, and it would, he felt, be impossible for him to carry out his design. But in honour to his spirit of persistence, be it said, that in proportion as the difficulty increased, the greater became Thibault s desire to get possession of the deer. I must have it, come what will, he cried, I must! and if there is a God who cares for the poor, I shall have satisfaction of this confounded Baron, who beat me as if I were a dog, but I am a man notwithstanding, and I am quite ready to prove the same to him. And Thibault picked up his boar-spear and once more set off running. But it would appear that the good God whom he had just invoked, either had not heard him, or wished to drive him to extremities, for his third attempt had no greater success than the previous ones. By Heaven! exclaimed Thibault, God Almighty is assuredly deaf, it seems Let the Devil then open his ears and hear me! In the name of God or of the Devil, I want you and I will have you, cursed animal! Thibault had hardly finished this double blasphemy when the buck, doubling back, passed close to him for the fourth time, and disappeared among the bushes, but so quickly and unexpectedly, that Thibault had not even time to lift his boar-spear. At that moment he heard the dogs so near him, that he deemed it would be imprudent to continue his pursuit. He looked round him, saw a thickly-leaved oak tree, threw his boar-spear into a bush, swarmed up the trunk, and hid himself among the foliage. He imagined, and with good reason, that since the deer had gone ahead again, the hunt would only pass by following on its track. The dogs had not lost the scent, in spite of the quarry s doublings, and they were not likely to lose it now. Thibault had not been seated among the branches for above five minutes, when first the hounds came into sight, then the Baron, who in spite of his fifty-five years, headed the chase as if he had been a man of twenty. It must be added that the Lord of Vez was in a state of rage that we will not even endeavour to describe. To lose four hours over a wretched deer and still to be running behind it! Such a thing had never happened to him before. He stormed at his men, he whipped his dogs, and had so ploughed his horse s sides with his spurs, that the thick coating of mud which covered his gaiters was reddened with blood. On reaching the bridge over the Ourcq, however, there had been an interval of alleviation for the Baron, for the hounds had so unanimously taken up the scent, that the cloak which the wolf-hunter carried behind him would have sufficed to cover the whole pack as they crossed the bridge. Indeed the Baron was so pleased, that he was not satisfied with humming a tirra-la, but, unslinging his hunting-horn he sounded it with his full lung-power, a thing which he only did on great occasions. But, unfortunately, the joy of my Lord of Vez was destined to be short lived. All of

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you must know that this made the fifth or sixth time that the worthy Baron had started the animal in question, but never once had he been able to get within gun-shot of him or to run him down. Yes, Marcotte went on, but the damned beast has employed himself so well all night crossing his track and doubling, that after having traced him over half the forest, I found myself at the place from which I started. You think then, Marcotte, that there is no chance of getting near him. I am afraid not. By all the devils in hell! exclaimed the Lord of Vez, who had not had his equal in swearing since the mighty Nimrod, however, I am not feeling well to-day, and I must have a burst of some kind, to get rid of these bad humours. What do you think we can hunt, Marcotte, in place of this damned black wolf? Well, having been so taken up with the wolf, answered Marcotte, I have not traced any other animal. Will my Lord uncouple at random and hunt the first animal that we come across? The Baron was about to express his willingness to agree to this proposal when he caught sight of little Engoulevent coming towards them cap in hand. Wait a moment, he said, here comes Engoulevent, who, I fancy, has some advice to give us. I have no advice to give to a noble Lord like yourself, replied Engoulevent, assuming an expression of humility on his sly and crafty face; it is, however, my duty to inform you that there is a splendid buck in the neighbourhood. Let us see your buck, Engoulevent, replied the chief wolf-hunter, and if you are not mistaken about it, there will be a new crown for you. Where is this buck of yours? asked Marcotte, but look to your skin, if you make us uncouple to no purpose. Let me have Matador and Jupiter, and then we shall see. Matador and Jupiter were the finest among the hounds belonging to the Lord of Vez. And indeed, Engoulevent had not gone a hundred paces with them through the thicket, before, by the lashing of their tails, and their repeated yelping, he knew that they were on the right scent. In another minute or two a magnificent ten-tined stag came into view. Marcotte cried Tally-ho, sounded his horn, and the hunt began, to the great satisfaction of the Lord of Vez, who, although regretting the black wolf, was willing to make the best of a fine buck in its stead. The hunt had lasted two hours, and the quarry still held on. It had first led its pursuers from the little wood of Haramont to the Chemin du Pendu, and thence straight to the back of Oigny, and it still showed no sign of fatigue; for it was not one of those poor animals of the flat country who get their tails pulled by every wretched terrier. As it neared the low grounds of Bourg-fontaine, however, it evidently decided that it was being run rather hard, for it gave up the bolder measures which had hitherto enabled it to keep ahead, and began to double. Its first man uvre was to go down to the brook which joins the ponds of Baisemont and Bourg, then to walk against stream with the water up to its haunches, for nearly half a mile; it then sprang on to the right bank, back again into the bed of the stream, made another leap to the left, and with a succession of bounds, as vigorous as its failing strength allowed, continued to out-distance its pursuers. But the dogs of my lord Baron were not animals to be put out by such trifles as these. Being both sagacious and well-bred, they, of their own accord, divided the task between themselves, half going up stream, and half down, these hunting on the right those on the left, and so effectually that they ere long put the animal off its changes, for they soon recovered the scent, rallying at the first cry given by one of the pack, and starting afresh on the chase, as ready and eager as if the deer had been only twenty paces in front of them. And so with galloping of horses, with cry of hounds and blare of horn, the Baron and his huntsmen reached the ponds of Saint Antoine, a hundred paces or so from the Confines of Oigny. Between these and the Osier-beds stood the hut of Thibault, the sabot-maker. We must pause to give some description of this Thibault, the shoe-maker, the real hero of the tale. You will ask why I, who have summoned kings to appear upon the stage, who have obliged princes, dukes, and barons to play secondary parts in my romances, should take a simple shoe-maker for the hero of this tale. First, I will reply by saying that, in my dear home country of Villers-Cotterets, there are more sabot-makers than barons, dukes and princes, and that, as soon as I decided to make the forest the scene of the events I am about to record, I was obliged to choose one of the actual inhabitants of this forest as hero, unless I had wished to represent such fantastic persons as the _Incas_ of Marmontel or the _Abencerrages_ of M. de Florian. More than that, it is not the author who decides on the subject, but the subject which takes possession of the author, and, good or bad, this particular subject has taken possession of me. I will therefore endeavour to draw Thibault s portrait for you, plain shoe-maker as he was, as exactly as the artist paints the portrait which a prince desires to send to his lady-love. Thibault was a man between twenty-five and twenty-seven years of age, tall, well made, physically robust, but by nature melancholy and sad of heart. This depression of spirits arose from a little grain of envy, which, in spite of himself, perhaps unconsciously to himself, he harboured towards all such of his neighbours as had been more favoured by fortune than himself. His father had committed a fault, a serious one at all times, but more especially in those days of absolutism, when a man was not able to rise above his station as now-a-days, when with sufficient capacity he may attain to any rank. Thibault had been educated above his position; he had been at school under the Abb Fortier, at Villers-Cotterets, and had learnt to read, write, and cypher; moreover he knew a little Latin, which made him inordinately proud of himself. Thibault had spent a great part of his time in reading, and his books had been chiefly those which were in vogue at the close of the preceding century. But he had not been a sufficiently clever analyst to know how to separate the good from the bad, or rather he _had_ separated what was bad, and swallowed it in large doses, leaving the good to precipitate itself at the bottom of the glass. At twenty years of age Thibault had certainly had dreams of being something other than a sabot-maker. He had, for instance, for a very little while, cast his eyes towards the army. But his comrades who had worn the double livery of king and country, had left the service as they entered it, mere soldiers of the ranks, having failed during five or six years of slavery to obtain promotion, even to the not very exalted grade of corporal. Thibault had also thought of becoming a sailor. But a career in the navy was as much forbidden to the plebeian as one in the army. Possibly after enduring danger, and storm and battle for fifteen or twenty years, he might be made a boatswain s mate, that was all, and then! besides, it was by no means Thibault s ambition to wear a short vest and sail-cloth trousers, but the blue uniform of the king with red vest and gold epaulettes. He had moreover known of no single case in which the son of a mere shoe-maker had become Master of a Frigate, or even Lieutenant. So he was forced to give up all idea of joining the King s Navy. Thibault would not have minded being a Notary, and at one time thought of apprenticing himself to the Royal Scrivener, Ma tre Niquet, as a stepping-stone, and of making his way up on the strength of his own legs and with the help of his pen. But supposing him to have risen to the position of head clerk with a salary of a hundred crowns, where was he to find the thirty thousand francs which would be required for the purchase of the smallest village practice. There was, therefore, no better chance of his becoming a scrivener than of becoming an officer on sea or land. Meanwhile, Thibault s father died, leaving very little ready money. There was about enough to bury him, so he was buried, and this done, there remained some thirty or forty francs over for Thibault. Thibault knew his trade well; indeed, he was a first-rate workman; but he had no inclination to handle either auger or parer. It ended, therefore, by his leaving all his father s tools in the care of a friend, a remnant of prudence still remaining to him, and selling every vestige of furniture; having thus realised a sum of five hundred and forty livres, he determined to make what was then called the tour of France. Thibault spent three years in travelling; he did not make his fortune during that time, but he learnt a great many things in the course of his journey of which he was previously ignorant, and acquired certain accomplishments which he had previously been without. He learned amongst other things that, although it was as well to keep one s word on matters of business with a man, it was no use whatever keeping love vows made to a woman. So much for his character and habits of mind. As to his external accomplishments, he could dance a jig beautifully, could hold his own at quarter-staff against four men, and could handle the boar-spear as cleverly as the best huntsman going. All these things had not a little served to increase Thibault s natural self-esteem, and, seeing himself handsomer, stronger, and cleverer than many of the nobles, he would exclaim against Providence, crying, Why was I not nobly born? why was not that nobleman yonder born a peasant? But as Providence took care not to make any answer to these apostroph s, and as Thibault found that dancing, playing at quarter-staff, and throwing the boar-spear only fatigued the body, without procuring him any material advantage, he began to turn his thoughts towards his ancient trade, humble though it was, saying to himself, if it enabled the father to live, it would also enable the son. So Thibault went and fetched away his tools; and then, tools in hand, he went to ask permission of the Steward of his Royal Highness Louis Philippe of Orleans, to build a hut in the forest, in which to carry on his trade. He had no difficulty in obtaining this, for the steward knew by experience that his master was a very kind-hearted man, expending as much as two hundred and forty thousand francs a year on the poor; he felt sure, therefore, that one who gave away a sum like this, would be willing to let an honest workman who wished to ply his trade, have thirty or forty feet of ground. As he had leave to establish himself in whatever part of the forest he liked best, Thibault chose the spot near the osier-beds, where the roads crossed, one of the most beautiful parts of the woods, less than a mile from Oigny and about three times that distance from Villers-Cotterets. The shoe-maker put up his work-shop, built partly of old planks given him by M. Panisis, who had been having a sale in the neighbourhood, and partly of the branches which the steward gave him leave to cut in the forest. When the building of the hut, which consisted of a bedroom, cosily shut in, where he could work during the winter, and of a lean-to, open to the air, where he could work in the summer, was completed, Thibault began to think of making himself a bed. At first, a layer of fern had to serve for this purpose; but after he had made a hundred pairs of wooden shoes and had sold these to Bedeau, who kept a general shop at Villers-Cotterets, he was able to pay a sufficient deposit to get a mattress, to be paid for in full by the end of three months. The framework of the bed was not difficult to make; Thibault was not the shoe-maker he was without being a bit of a carpenter into the bargain, and when this was finished he plaited osiers to take the place of sacking, laid the mattress upon them, and found himself at last with a bed to lie upon. Little by little came the sheets, and then in their turn the coverlids; the next purchase was a chafing-dish, and earthenware pots to cook in, and finally some plates and dishes. Before the year was out Thibault had also made additions to his furniture of a fine oak chest and a fine walnut-wood cupboard, both, like the bed, his own handiwork. All the while he was driving a brisk trade, for none could beat Thibault in turning a block of beech into a pair of shoes, and in converting the odd chips into spoons, salt-cellars and natty little bowls. He had now been settled in his work-shop for three years, that is, ever since his return after the completion of his tour round France, and there was nothing for which anyone could have reproached him during this interval except the failing we have already mentioned--that he was rather more envious of the good fortune of his neighbour than was altogether conducive to the welfare of his soul. But this feeling was as yet so inoffensive, that his confessor had no need to do more than awaken in him a sense of shame for harbouring thoughts which had, so far, not resulted in any active crime. CHAPTER II THE SEIGNEUR JEAN AND THE SABOT-MAKER As already said, the buck began to dodge and double on reaching Oigny, turning and twisting round Thibault s hut, and the weather being fine although the autumn was well advanced, the shoe-maker was sitting at his work in his open lean-to. Looking up, he suddenly espied the trembling animal, quivering in every limb, standing a few paces in front of him, gazing at him with intelligent and terrified eyes. Thibault had been for a long time aware that the hunt was circling around Oigny, at one time drawing near to the village, and then receding, only to draw near again. There was nothing therefore very surprising to him in the sight of the buck, yet he stayed his hand, although he was busy at work, and contemplated the animal. Saint Sabot! he exclaimed--I should explain, that the festival of Saint Sabot is the wooden-shoe f te-- Saint Sabot! but that is a dainty morsel and would taste as fine, I warrant, as the chamois I ate at Vienne once at the grand banquet of the Jolly Shoe-makers of Dauphin . Lucky folk who can dine on the like every day. I tasted such once, it is now nearly four years ago, and my mouth waters now when I think of it. Oh! these lords! these lords! with their fresh meats and their old wines at every meal, while I have to be satisfied with potatoes to eat and water to drink from one week s end to the other; and it is a chance if even on Sunday, I can feast myself with a lump of rusty bacon and an old cabbage, and a glass of _pignolet_ fit to make my old goat stand on her head. It need scarcely be said, that as soon as Thibault began this monologue, the buck had turned and disappeared. Thibault had finished rounding his periods, and had just declaimed his peroration, when he heard himself roughly accosted in forcible terms: Ho, there, you scoundrel! answer me. It was the Baron, who seeing his dogs wavering, was anxious to make sure that they were not on the wrong scent. Ho, there, you scoundrel! repeated the wolf-hunter, have you seen the beast? There was evidently something in the manner of the Baron s questioning which did not please our philosophical shoe-maker, for although he was perfectly aware what was the matter, he answered: what beast? Curse you! why, the buck we are hunting! He must have passed close by here, and standing gaping as you do, you must have seen him. It was a fine stag of ten, was it not? Which way did he go? Speak up, you blackguard, or you shall have a taste of my stirrup-leather! The black plague take him, cub of a wolf! muttered the shoe-maker to himself. Then, aloud, with a fine air of pretended simplicity, Ah, yes! he said, I did see him. A buck, was it not? a ten-tiner, eh? with great horns. Ah, yes to be sure, a buck, with great horns,--or great corns, was it? yes, I saw him as plain as I see you, my Lord. But there, I can t say if he had any corns, for I did not look at his feet, anyhow, he added, with the air of a perfect simpleton, if he had corns, they did not prevent him running. At any other time the Baron would have laughed at what he might have taken for genuine stupidity; but the doublings of the animal were beginning to put him into a regular huntsman s fever. Now, then, you scoundrel, a truce to this jesting! If you are in a humour for jokes, it is more than I am! I will be in whatever humour it may please your Lordship I should be. Well, then, answer me. Your Lordship has asked me nothing as yet. Did the deer seem tired? Not very. Which way did he come? He did not come, he was standing still. Well, but he must have come from one side or the other. Ah! very likely, but I did not see him come. Which way did he go? I would tell you directly; only I did not see him go. The Lord of Vez cast an angry look at Thibault. Is it some while ago the buck passed this way, Master Simpleton? Not so very long, my Lord. About how long ago? Thibault made as if trying to remember; at last he replied: It was, I think, the day before yesterday, but in saying this, the shoe-maker, unfortunately, could not suppress a grin. This grin did not escape the Baron, who, spurring his horse, rode down on Thibault with lifted whip. Thibault was agile, and with a single bound he reached the shelter of his lean-to, whither the wolf-hunter could not follow, as long as he remained mounted; Thibault was therefore in momentary safety. You are only bantering and lying! cried the huntsman, for there is Marcassino, my best hound, giving cry not twenty yards off, and if the deer passed by where Marcassino is, he must have come over the hedge, and it is impossible, therefore, that you did not see him. Pardon, my Lord, but according to our good priest, no one but the Pope is infallible, and Monsieur Marcassino may be mistaken. Marcassino is never mistaken, do you hear, you rascal! and in proof of it I can see from here the marks where the animal scratched up the ground. Nevertheless, my Lord, I assure you, I swear.... said Thibault, who saw the Baron s eyebrows contracting in a way that made him feel uneasy. Silence, and come here, blackguard! cried my lord. Thibault hesitated a moment, but the black look on the sportsman s face became more and more threatening, and fearing to increase his exasperation by disobeying his command, he thought he had better go forward, hoping that the Baron merely wished to ask a service of him. But it was an unlucky move on his part, for scarcely had he emerged from the protection of the shed, before the horse of the Lord of Vez, urged by bit and spur, gave a leap, which brought his rider swooping down upon Thibault, while at the same moment a furious blow from the butt end of the Baron s whip fell upon his head. The shoe-maker, stunned by the blow, tottered a moment, lost his balance and was about to fall face downwards, when the Baron, drawing his foot out of the stirrup, with a violent kick in the chest, not only straightened him again, but sent the poor wretch flying in an opposite direction, where he fell with his back against the door of his hut. Take that! said the Baron, as he first felled Thibault with his whip, and then kicked him, take that for your lie, and that for your banter! And then, without troubling himself any further about the man, whom he left lying on his back, the Lord of Vez, seeing that the hounds had rallied on hearing Marcassino s cry, gave them a cheery note on his horn, and cantered away. Thibault lifted himself up, feeling bruised all over, and began feeling himself from head to foot to make sure that no bones were broken. Having carefully passed his hand over each limb in succession, that s all right, he said, there is nothing broken either above or below, I am glad to find. So, my Lord Baron, that is how you treat people, because you happen to have married a Prince s bastard daughter! But let me tell you, my fine fellow, it is not you who will eat the buck you are hunting to-day; it will be this blackguard, this scoundrel, this simpleton of a Thibault who will eat it. Yes, it shall be I who eat it, that I vow! cried Thibault, confirming himself more and more in his bold resolution, and it is no use being a man if having once made a vow, one fails to keep it. So without further delay, Thibault thrust his bill-hook into his belt, seized his boar-spear, and after listening for a moment to the cry of the hounds to ascertain in which direction the hunt had gone, he ran off with all the speed of which a man s legs are capable to get the start of them, guessing by the curve which the stag and its pursuers were following what would be the straight line to take so as to intercept them. There were two ways of doing his deed open to Thibault; either to hide himself beside the path which the buck must take and kill him with his boar-spear, or else to surprise the animal just as he was being hunted down by the dogs, and collar him there and then. And as he ran, the desire to revenge himself on the Baron for the latter s brutality, was not so uppermost in Thibault s mind as the thoughts of the sumptuous manner in which he would fare for the next month, on the shoulders, the back, and the haunches of the deer, either salted to a turn, roasted on the spit, or cut in slices and done in the pan. And these two ideas, moreover, of vengeance and gluttony, were so jumbled up in his brain, that while still running at the top of his speed he laughed in his sleeve, as he pictured the dejected mien of the Baron and his men returning to the castle after their fruitless day s hunt, and at the same time saw himself seated at table, the door securely fastened, and a pint of wine beside him, t te- -t te with a haunch of the deer, the rich and delicious gravy escaping as the knife returned for a third or fourth cut. The deer, as far as Thibault could calculate, was making for the bridge which crosses the Ourcq, between Noroy and Troesne. At the time of which we are now speaking there was a bridge spanning the river, formed of two joists and a few planks. As the river was very high and very rapid, Thibault decided that the deer would not attempt to ford it; so he hid himself behind a rock, within reach of the bridge, and waited. It was not long before he saw the graceful head of the deer appear above the rock at some ten paces distance; the animal was bending its ears to the wind, in the endeavour to catch the sound of the enemy s approach as it was borne along the breeze. Thibault, excited by this sudden appearance, rose from behind the rock, poised his boar-spear and sent it flying towards the animal. The buck, with a single bound, reached the middle of the bridge, a second carried him on to the opposite bank, and a third bore him out of sight. The boar-spear had passed within a foot of the animal, and had buried itself in the grass fifteen paces from where Thibault was standing. Never before had he been known to make such an unskilful throw; he, Thibault, of all the company who made the tour of France, the one known to be surest of his aim! Enraged with himself, therefore, he picked up his weapon, and bounded across the bridge with an agility equal to that of the deer. Thibault knew the country quite as well as the animal he was pursuing, and so got ahead of the deer and once more concealed himself, this time behind a beech-tree, half-way up, and not too far from a little footpath. The deer now passed so close to him, that Thibault hesitated as to whether it would not be better to knock the animal down with his boar-spear than to throw the weapon at it; but his hesitation did not last longer than a flash of lightning, for no lightning could be quicker than the animal itself, which was already twenty paces off when Thibault threw his boar-spear, but without better luck than the time before. And now the baying of the hounds was drawing nearer and nearer; another few minutes, and it would, he felt, be impossible for him to carry out his design. But in honour to his spirit of persistence, be it said, that in proportion as the difficulty increased, the greater became Thibault s desire to get possession of the deer. I must have it, come what will, he cried, I must! and if there is a God who cares for the poor, I shall have satisfaction of this confounded Baron, who beat me as if I were a dog, but I am a man notwithstanding, and I am quite ready to prove the same to him. And Thibault picked up his boar-spear and once more set off running. But it would appear that the good God whom he had just invoked, either had not heard him, or wished to drive him to extremities, for his third attempt had no greater success than the previous ones. By Heaven! exclaimed Thibault, God Almighty is assuredly deaf, it seems Let the Devil then open his ears and hear me! In the name of God or of the Devil, I want you and I will have you, cursed animal! Thibault had hardly finished this double blasphemy when the buck, doubling back, passed close to him for the fourth time, and disappeared among the bushes, but so quickly and unexpectedly, that Thibault had not even time to lift his boar-spear. At that moment he heard the dogs so near him, that he deemed it would be imprudent to continue his pursuit. He looked round him, saw a thickly-leaved oak tree, threw his boar-spear into a bush, swarmed up the trunk, and hid himself among the foliage. He imagined, and with good reason, that since the deer had gone ahead again, the hunt would only pass by following on its track. The dogs had not lost the scent, in spite of the quarry s doublings, and they were not likely to lose it now. Thibault had not been seated among the branches for above five minutes, when first the hounds came into sight, then the Baron, who in spite of his fifty-five years, headed the chase as if he had been a man of twenty. It must be added that the Lord of Vez was in a state of rage that we will not even endeavour to describe. To lose four hours over a wretched deer and still to be running behind it! Such a thing had never happened to him before. He stormed at his men, he whipped his dogs, and had so ploughed his horse s sides with his spurs, that the thick coating of mud which covered his gaiters was reddened with blood. On reaching the bridge over the Ourcq, however, there had been an interval of alleviation for the Baron, for the hounds had so unanimously taken up the scent, that the cloak which the wolf-hunter carried behind him would have sufficed to cover the whole pack as they crossed the bridge. Indeed the Baron was so pleased, that he was not satisfied with humming a tirra-la, but, unslinging his hunting-horn he sounded it with his full lung-power, a thing which he only did on great occasions. But, unfortunately, the joy of my Lord of Vez was destined to be short lived. All of

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you must know that this made the fifth or sixth time that the worthy Baron had started the animal in question, but never once had he been able to get within gun-shot of him or to run him down. Yes, Marcotte went on, but the damned beast has employed himself so well all night crossing his track and doubling, that after having traced him over half the forest, I found myself at the place from which I started. You think then, Marcotte, that there is no chance of getting near him. I am afraid not. By all the devils in hell! exclaimed the Lord of Vez, who had not had his equal in swearing since the mighty Nimrod, however, I am not feeling well to-day, and I must have a burst of some kind, to get rid of these bad humours. What do you think we can hunt, Marcotte, in place of this damned black wolf? Well, having been so taken up with the wolf, answered Marcotte, I have not traced any other animal. Will my Lord uncouple at random and hunt the first animal that we come across? The Baron was about to express his willingness to agree to this proposal when he caught sight of little Engoulevent coming towards them cap in hand. Wait a moment, he said, here comes Engoulevent, who, I fancy, has some advice to give us. I have no advice to give to a noble Lord like yourself, replied Engoulevent, assuming an expression of humility on his sly and crafty face; it is, however, my duty to inform you that there is a splendid buck in the neighbourhood. Let us see your buck, Engoulevent, replied the chief wolf-hunter, and if you are not mistaken about it, there will be a new crown for you. Where is this buck of yours? asked Marcotte, but look to your skin, if you make us uncouple to no purpose. Let me have Matador and Jupiter, and then we shall see. Matador and Jupiter were the finest among the hounds belonging to the Lord of Vez. And indeed, Engoulevent had not gone a hundred paces with them through the thicket, before, by the lashing of their tails, and their repeated yelping, he knew that they were on the right scent. In another minute or two a magnificent ten-tined stag came into view. Marcotte cried Tally-ho, sounded his horn, and the hunt began, to the great satisfaction of the Lord of Vez, who, although regretting the black wolf, was willing to make the best of a fine buck in its stead. The hunt had lasted two hours, and the quarry still held on. It had first led its pursuers from the little wood of Haramont to the Chemin du Pendu, and thence straight to the back of Oigny, and it still showed no sign of fatigue; for it was not one of those poor animals of the flat country who get their tails pulled by every wretched terrier. As it neared the low grounds of Bourg-fontaine, however, it evidently decided that it was being run rather hard, for it gave up the bolder measures which had hitherto enabled it to keep ahead, and began to double. Its first man uvre was to go down to the brook which joins the ponds of Baisemont and Bourg, then to walk against stream with the water up to its haunches, for nearly half a mile; it then sprang on to the right bank, back again into the bed of the stream, made another leap to the left, and with a succession of bounds, as vigorous as its failing strength allowed, continued to out-distance its pursuers. But the dogs of my lord Baron were not animals to be put out by such trifles as these. Being both sagacious and well-bred, they, of their own accord, divided the task between themselves, half going up stream, and half down, these hunting on the right those on the left, and so effectually that they ere long put the animal off its changes, for they soon recovered the scent, rallying at the first cry given by one of the pack, and starting afresh on the chase, as ready and eager as if the deer had been only twenty paces in front of them. And so with galloping of horses, with cry of hounds and blare of horn, the Baron and his huntsmen reached the ponds of Saint Antoine, a hundred paces or so from the Confines of Oigny. Between these and the Osier-beds stood the hut of Thibault, the sabot-maker. We must pause to give some description of this Thibault, the shoe-maker, the real hero of the tale. You will ask why I, who have summoned kings to appear upon the stage, who have obliged princes, dukes, and barons to play secondary parts in my romances, should take a simple shoe-maker for the hero of this tale. First, I will reply by saying that, in my dear home country of Villers-Cotterets, there are more sabot-makers than barons, dukes and princes, and that, as soon as I decided to make the forest the scene of the events I am about to record, I was obliged to choose one of the actual inhabitants of this forest as hero, unless I had wished to represent such fantastic persons as the _Incas_ of Marmontel or the _Abencerrages_ of M. de Florian. More than that, it is not the author who decides on the subject, but the subject which takes possession of the author, and, good or bad, this particular subject has taken possession of me. I will therefore endeavour to draw Thibault s portrait for you, plain shoe-maker as he was, as exactly as the artist paints the portrait which a prince desires to send to his lady-love. Thibault was a man between twenty-five and twenty-seven years of age, tall, well made, physically robust, but by nature melancholy and sad of heart. This depression of spirits arose from a little grain of envy, which, in spite of himself, perhaps unconsciously to himself, he harboured towards all such of his neighbours as had been more favoured by fortune than himself. His father had committed a fault, a serious one at all times, but more especially in those days of absolutism, when a man was not able to rise above his station as now-a-days, when with sufficient capacity he may attain to any rank. Thibault had been educated above his position; he had been at school under the Abb Fortier, at Villers-Cotterets, and had learnt to read, write, and cypher; moreover he knew a little Latin, which made him inordinately proud of himself. Thibault had spent a great part of his time in reading, and his books had been chiefly those which were in vogue at the close of the preceding century. But he had not been a sufficiently clever analyst to know how to separate the good from the bad, or rather he _had_ separated what was bad, and swallowed it in large doses, leaving the good to precipitate itself at the bottom of the glass. At twenty years of age Thibault had certainly had dreams of being something other than a sabot-maker. He had, for instance, for a very little while, cast his eyes towards the army. But his comrades who had worn the double livery of king and country, had left the service as they entered it, mere soldiers of the ranks, having failed during five or six years of slavery to obtain promotion, even to the not very exalted grade of corporal. Thibault had also thought of becoming a sailor. But a career in the navy was as much forbidden to the plebeian as one in the army. Possibly after enduring danger, and storm and battle for fifteen or twenty years, he might be made a boatswain s mate, that was all, and then! besides, it was by no means Thibault s ambition to wear a short vest and sail-cloth trousers, but the blue uniform of the king with red vest and gold epaulettes. He had moreover known of no single case in which the son of a mere shoe-maker had become Master of a Frigate, or even Lieutenant. So he was forced to give up all idea of joining the King s Navy. Thibault would not have minded being a Notary, and at one time thought of apprenticing himself to the Royal Scrivener, Ma tre Niquet, as a stepping-stone, and of making his way up on the strength of his own legs and with the help of his pen. But supposing him to have risen to the position of head clerk with a salary of a hundred crowns, where was he to find the thirty thousand francs which would be required for the purchase of the smallest village practice. There was, therefore, no better chance of his becoming a scrivener than of becoming an officer on sea or land. Meanwhile, Thibault s father died, leaving very little ready money. There was about enough to bury him, so he was buried, and this done, there remained some thirty or forty francs over for Thibault. Thibault knew his trade well; indeed, he was a first-rate workman; but he had no inclination to handle either auger or parer. It ended, therefore, by his leaving all his father s tools in the care of a friend, a remnant of prudence still remaining to him, and selling every vestige of furniture; having thus realised a sum of five hundred and forty livres, he determined to make what was then called the tour of France. Thibault spent three years in travelling; he did not make his fortune during that time, but he learnt a great many things in the course of his journey of which he was previously ignorant, and acquired certain accomplishments which he had previously been without. He learned amongst other things that, although it was as well to keep one s word on matters of business with a man, it was no use whatever keeping love vows made to a woman. So much for his character and habits of mind. As to his external accomplishments, he could dance a jig beautifully, could hold his own at quarter-staff against four men, and could handle the boar-spear as cleverly as the best huntsman going. All these things had not a little served to increase Thibault s natural self-esteem, and, seeing himself handsomer, stronger, and cleverer than many of the nobles, he would exclaim against Providence, crying, Why was I not nobly born? why was not that nobleman yonder born a peasant? But as Providence took care not to make any answer to these apostroph s, and as Thibault found that dancing, playing at quarter-staff, and throwing the boar-spear only fatigued the body, without procuring him any material advantage, he began to turn his thoughts towards his ancient trade, humble though it was, saying to himself, if it enabled the father to live, it would also enable the son. So Thibault went and fetched away his tools; and then, tools in hand, he went to ask permission of the Steward of his Royal Highness Louis Philippe of Orleans, to build a hut in the forest, in which to carry on his trade. He had no difficulty in obtaining this, for the steward knew by experience that his master was a very kind-hearted man, expending as much as two hundred and forty thousand francs a year on the poor; he felt sure, therefore, that one who gave away a sum like this, would be willing to let an honest workman who wished to ply his trade, have thirty or forty feet of ground. As he had leave to establish himself in whatever part of the forest he liked best, Thibault chose the spot near the osier-beds, where the roads crossed, one of the most beautiful parts of the woods, less than a mile from Oigny and about three times that distance from Villers-Cotterets. The shoe-maker put up his work-shop, built partly of old planks given him by M. Panisis, who had been having a sale in the neighbourhood, and partly of the branches which the steward gave him leave to cut in the forest. When the building of the hut, which consisted of a bedroom, cosily shut in, where he could work during the winter, and of a lean-to, open to the air, where he could work in the summer, was completed, Thibault began to think of making himself a bed. At first, a layer of fern had to serve for this purpose; but after he had made a hundred pairs of wooden shoes and had sold these to Bedeau, who kept a general shop at Villers-Cotterets, he was able to pay a sufficient deposit to get a mattress, to be paid for in full by the end of three months. The framework of the bed was not difficult to make; Thibault was not the shoe-maker he was without being a bit of a carpenter into the bargain, and when this was finished he plaited osiers to take the place of sacking, laid the mattress upon them, and found himself at last with a bed to lie upon. Little by little came the sheets, and then in their turn the coverlids; the next purchase was a chafing-dish, and earthenware pots to cook in, and finally some plates and dishes. Before the year was out Thibault had also made additions to his furniture of a fine oak chest and a fine walnut-wood cupboard, both, like the bed, his own handiwork. All the while he was driving a brisk trade, for none could beat Thibault in turning a block of beech into a pair of shoes, and in converting the odd chips into spoons, salt-cellars and natty little bowls. He had now been settled in his work-shop for three years, that is, ever since his return after the completion of his tour round France, and there was nothing for which anyone could have reproached him during this interval except the failing we have already mentioned--that he was rather more envious of the good fortune of his neighbour than was altogether conducive to the welfare of his soul. But this feeling was as yet so inoffensive, that his confessor had no need to do more than awaken in him a sense of shame for harbouring thoughts which had, so far, not resulted in any active crime. CHAPTER II THE SEIGNEUR JEAN AND THE SABOT-MAKER As already said, the buck began to dodge and double on reaching Oigny, turning and twisting round Thibault s hut, and the weather being fine although the autumn was well advanced, the shoe-maker was sitting at his work in his open lean-to. Looking up, he suddenly espied the trembling animal, quivering in every limb, standing a few paces in front of him, gazing at him with intelligent and terrified eyes. Thibault had been for a long time aware that the hunt was circling around Oigny, at one time drawing near to the village, and then receding, only to draw near again. There was nothing therefore very surprising to him in the sight of the buck, yet he stayed his hand, although he was busy at work, and contemplated the animal. Saint Sabot! he exclaimed--I should explain, that the festival of Saint Sabot is the wooden-shoe f te-- Saint Sabot! but that is a dainty morsel and would taste as fine, I warrant, as the chamois I ate at Vienne once at the grand banquet of the Jolly Shoe-makers of Dauphin . Lucky folk who can dine on the like every day. I tasted such once, it is now nearly four years ago, and my mouth waters now when I think of it. Oh! these lords! these lords! with their fresh meats and their old wines at every meal, while I have to be satisfied with potatoes to eat and water to drink from one week s end to the other; and it is a chance if even on Sunday, I can feast myself with a lump of rusty bacon and an old cabbage, and a glass of _pignolet_ fit to make my old goat stand on her head. It need scarcely be said, that as soon as Thibault began this monologue, the buck had turned and disappeared. Thibault had finished rounding his periods, and had just declaimed his peroration, when he heard himself roughly accosted in forcible terms: Ho, there, you scoundrel! answer me. It was the Baron, who seeing his dogs wavering, was anxious to make sure that they were not on the wrong scent. Ho, there, you scoundrel! repeated the wolf-hunter, have you seen the beast? There was evidently something in the manner of the Baron s questioning which did not please our philosophical shoe-maker, for although he was perfectly aware what was the matter, he answered: what beast? Curse you! why, the buck we are hunting! He must have passed close by here, and standing gaping as you do, you must have seen him. It was a fine stag of ten, was it not? Which way did he go? Speak up, you blackguard, or you shall have a taste of my stirrup-leather! The black plague take him, cub of a wolf! muttered the shoe-maker to himself. Then, aloud, with a fine air of pretended simplicity, Ah, yes! he said, I did see him. A buck, was it not? a ten-tiner, eh? with great horns. Ah, yes to be sure, a buck, with great horns,--or great corns, was it? yes, I saw him as plain as I see you, my Lord. But there, I can t say if he had any corns, for I did not look at his feet, anyhow, he added, with the air of a perfect simpleton, if he had corns, they did not prevent him running. At any other time the Baron would have laughed at what he might have taken for genuine stupidity; but the doublings of the animal were beginning to put him into a regular huntsman s fever. Now, then, you scoundrel, a truce to this jesting! If you are in a humour for jokes, it is more than I am! I will be in whatever humour it may please your Lordship I should be. Well, then, answer me. Your Lordship has asked me nothing as yet. Did the deer seem tired? Not very. Which way did he come? He did not come, he was standing still. Well, but he must have come from one side or the other. Ah! very likely, but I did not see him come. Which way did he go? I would tell you directly; only I did not see him go. The Lord of Vez cast an angry look at Thibault. Is it some while ago the buck passed this way, Master Simpleton? Not so very long, my Lord. About how long ago? Thibault made as if trying to remember; at last he replied: It was, I think, the day before yesterday, but in saying this, the shoe-maker, unfortunately, could not suppress a grin. This grin did not escape the Baron, who, spurring his horse, rode down on Thibault with lifted whip. Thibault was agile, and with a single bound he reached the shelter of his lean-to, whither the wolf-hunter could not follow, as long as he remained mounted; Thibault was therefore in momentary safety. You are only bantering and lying! cried the huntsman, for there is Marcassino, my best hound, giving cry not twenty yards off, and if the deer passed by where Marcassino is, he must have come over the hedge, and it is impossible, therefore, that you did not see him. Pardon, my Lord, but according to our good priest, no one but the Pope is infallible, and Monsieur Marcassino may be mistaken. Marcassino is never mistaken, do you hear, you rascal! and in proof of it I can see from here the marks where the animal scratched up the ground. Nevertheless, my Lord, I assure you, I swear.... said Thibault, who saw the Baron s eyebrows contracting in a way that made him feel uneasy. Silence, and come here, blackguard! cried my lord. Thibault hesitated a moment, but the black look on the sportsman s face became more and more threatening, and fearing to increase his exasperation by disobeying his command, he thought he had better go forward, hoping that the Baron merely wished to ask a service of him. But it was an unlucky move on his part, for scarcely had he emerged from the protection of the shed, before the horse of the Lord of Vez, urged by bit and spur, gave a leap, which brought his rider swooping down upon Thibault, while at the same moment a furious blow from the butt end of the Baron s whip fell upon his head. The shoe-maker, stunned by the blow, tottered a moment, lost his balance and was about to fall face downwards, when the Baron, drawing his foot out of the stirrup, with a violent kick in the chest, not only straightened him again, but sent the poor wretch flying in an opposite direction, where he fell with his back against the door of his hut. Take that! said the Baron, as he first felled Thibault with his whip, and then kicked him, take that for your lie, and that for your banter! And then, without troubling himself any further about the man, whom he left lying on his back, the Lord of Vez, seeing that the hounds had rallied on hearing Marcassino s cry, gave them a cheery note on his horn, and cantered away. Thibault lifted himself up, feeling bruised all over, and began feeling himself from head to foot to make sure that no bones were broken. Having carefully passed his hand over each limb in succession, that s all right, he said, there is nothing broken either above or below, I am glad to find. So, my Lord Baron, that is how you treat people, because you happen to have married a Prince s bastard daughter! But let me tell you, my fine fellow, it is not you who will eat the buck you are hunting to-day; it will be this blackguard, this scoundrel, this simpleton of a Thibault who will eat it. Yes, it shall be I who eat it, that I vow! cried Thibault, confirming himself more and more in his bold resolution, and it is no use being a man if having once made a vow, one fails to keep it. So without further delay, Thibault thrust his bill-hook into his belt, seized his boar-spear, and after listening for a moment to the cry of the hounds to ascertain in which direction the hunt had gone, he ran off with all the speed of which a man s legs are capable to get the start of them, guessing by the curve which the stag and its pursuers were following what would be the straight line to take so as to intercept them. There were two ways of doing his deed open to Thibault; either to hide himself beside the path which the buck must take and kill him with his boar-spear, or else to surprise the animal just as he was being hunted down by the dogs, and collar him there and then. And as he ran, the desire to revenge himself on the Baron for the latter s brutality, was not so uppermost in Thibault s mind as the thoughts of the sumptuous manner in which he would fare for the next month, on the shoulders, the back, and the haunches of the deer, either salted to a turn, roasted on the spit, or cut in slices and done in the pan. And these two ideas, moreover, of vengeance and gluttony, were so jumbled up in his brain, that while still running at the top of his speed he laughed in his sleeve, as he pictured the dejected mien of the Baron and his men returning to the castle after their fruitless day s hunt, and at the same time saw himself seated at table, the door securely fastened, and a pint of wine beside him, t te- -t te with a haunch of the deer, the rich and delicious gravy escaping as the knife returned for a third or fourth cut. The deer, as far as Thibault could calculate, was making for the bridge which crosses the Ourcq, between Noroy and Troesne. At the time of which we are now speaking there was a bridge spanning the river, formed of two joists and a few planks. As the river was very high and very rapid, Thibault decided that the deer would not attempt to ford it; so he hid himself behind a rock, within reach of the bridge, and waited. It was not long before he saw the graceful head of the deer appear above the rock at some ten paces distance; the animal was bending its ears to the wind, in the endeavour to catch the sound of the enemy s approach as it was borne along the breeze. Thibault, excited by this sudden appearance, rose from behind the rock, poised his boar-spear and sent it flying towards the animal. The buck, with a single bound, reached the middle of the bridge, a second carried him on to the opposite bank, and a third bore him out of sight. The boar-spear had passed within a foot of the animal, and had buried itself in the grass fifteen paces from where Thibault was standing. Never before had he been known to make such an unskilful throw; he, Thibault, of all the company who made the tour of France, the one known to be surest of his aim! Enraged with himself, therefore, he picked up his weapon, and bounded across the bridge with an agility equal to that of the deer. Thibault knew the country quite as well as the animal he was pursuing, and so got ahead of the deer and once more concealed himself, this time behind a beech-tree, half-way up, and not too far from a little footpath. The deer now passed so close to him, that Thibault hesitated as to whether it would not be better to knock the animal down with his boar-spear than to throw the weapon at it; but his hesitation did not last longer than a flash of lightning, for no lightning could be quicker than the animal itself, which was already twenty paces off when Thibault threw his boar-spear, but without better luck than the time before. And now the baying of the hounds was drawing nearer and nearer; another few minutes, and it would, he felt, be impossible for him to carry out his design. But in honour to his spirit of persistence, be it said, that in proportion as the difficulty increased, the greater became Thibault s desire to get possession of the deer. I must have it, come what will, he cried, I must! and if there is a God who cares for the poor, I shall have satisfaction of this confounded Baron, who beat me as if I were a dog, but I am a man notwithstanding, and I am quite ready to prove the same to him. And Thibault picked up his boar-spear and once more set off running. But it would appear that the good God whom he had just invoked, either had not heard him, or wished to drive him to extremities, for his third attempt had no greater success than the previous ones. By Heaven! exclaimed Thibault, God Almighty is assuredly deaf, it seems Let the Devil then open his ears and hear me! In the name of God or of the Devil, I want you and I will have you, cursed animal! Thibault had hardly finished this double blasphemy when the buck, doubling back, passed close to him for the fourth time, and disappeared among the bushes, but so quickly and unexpectedly, that Thibault had not even time to lift his boar-spear. At that moment he heard the dogs so near him, that he deemed it would be imprudent to continue his pursuit. He looked round him, saw a thickly-leaved oak tree, threw his boar-spear into a bush, swarmed up the trunk, and hid himself among the foliage. He imagined, and with good reason, that since the deer had gone ahead again, the hunt would only pass by following on its track. The dogs had not lost the scent, in spite of the quarry s doublings, and they were not likely to lose it now. Thibault had not been seated among the branches for above five minutes, when first the hounds came into sight, then the Baron, who in spite of his fifty-five years, headed the chase as if he had been a man of twenty. It must be added that the Lord of Vez was in a state of rage that we will not even endeavour to describe. To lose four hours over a wretched deer and still to be running behind it! Such a thing had never happened to him before. He stormed at his men, he whipped his dogs, and had so ploughed his horse s sides with his spurs, that the thick coating of mud which covered his gaiters was reddened with blood. On reaching the bridge over the Ourcq, however, there had been an interval of alleviation for the Baron, for the hounds had so unanimously taken up the scent, that the cloak which the wolf-hunter carried behind him would have sufficed to cover the whole pack as they crossed the bridge. Indeed the Baron was so pleased, that he was not satisfied with humming a tirra-la, but, unslinging his hunting-horn he sounded it with his full lung-power, a thing which he only did on great occasions. But, unfortunately, the joy of my Lord of Vez was destined to be short lived. All of

country

How many times the word 'country' appears in the text?

you must know that this made the fifth or sixth time that the worthy Baron had started the animal in question, but never once had he been able to get within gun-shot of him or to run him down. Yes, Marcotte went on, but the damned beast has employed himself so well all night crossing his track and doubling, that after having traced him over half the forest, I found myself at the place from which I started. You think then, Marcotte, that there is no chance of getting near him. I am afraid not. By all the devils in hell! exclaimed the Lord of Vez, who had not had his equal in swearing since the mighty Nimrod, however, I am not feeling well to-day, and I must have a burst of some kind, to get rid of these bad humours. What do you think we can hunt, Marcotte, in place of this damned black wolf? Well, having been so taken up with the wolf, answered Marcotte, I have not traced any other animal. Will my Lord uncouple at random and hunt the first animal that we come across? The Baron was about to express his willingness to agree to this proposal when he caught sight of little Engoulevent coming towards them cap in hand. Wait a moment, he said, here comes Engoulevent, who, I fancy, has some advice to give us. I have no advice to give to a noble Lord like yourself, replied Engoulevent, assuming an expression of humility on his sly and crafty face; it is, however, my duty to inform you that there is a splendid buck in the neighbourhood. Let us see your buck, Engoulevent, replied the chief wolf-hunter, and if you are not mistaken about it, there will be a new crown for you. Where is this buck of yours? asked Marcotte, but look to your skin, if you make us uncouple to no purpose. Let me have Matador and Jupiter, and then we shall see. Matador and Jupiter were the finest among the hounds belonging to the Lord of Vez. And indeed, Engoulevent had not gone a hundred paces with them through the thicket, before, by the lashing of their tails, and their repeated yelping, he knew that they were on the right scent. In another minute or two a magnificent ten-tined stag came into view. Marcotte cried Tally-ho, sounded his horn, and the hunt began, to the great satisfaction of the Lord of Vez, who, although regretting the black wolf, was willing to make the best of a fine buck in its stead. The hunt had lasted two hours, and the quarry still held on. It had first led its pursuers from the little wood of Haramont to the Chemin du Pendu, and thence straight to the back of Oigny, and it still showed no sign of fatigue; for it was not one of those poor animals of the flat country who get their tails pulled by every wretched terrier. As it neared the low grounds of Bourg-fontaine, however, it evidently decided that it was being run rather hard, for it gave up the bolder measures which had hitherto enabled it to keep ahead, and began to double. Its first man uvre was to go down to the brook which joins the ponds of Baisemont and Bourg, then to walk against stream with the water up to its haunches, for nearly half a mile; it then sprang on to the right bank, back again into the bed of the stream, made another leap to the left, and with a succession of bounds, as vigorous as its failing strength allowed, continued to out-distance its pursuers. But the dogs of my lord Baron were not animals to be put out by such trifles as these. Being both sagacious and well-bred, they, of their own accord, divided the task between themselves, half going up stream, and half down, these hunting on the right those on the left, and so effectually that they ere long put the animal off its changes, for they soon recovered the scent, rallying at the first cry given by one of the pack, and starting afresh on the chase, as ready and eager as if the deer had been only twenty paces in front of them. And so with galloping of horses, with cry of hounds and blare of horn, the Baron and his huntsmen reached the ponds of Saint Antoine, a hundred paces or so from the Confines of Oigny. Between these and the Osier-beds stood the hut of Thibault, the sabot-maker. We must pause to give some description of this Thibault, the shoe-maker, the real hero of the tale. You will ask why I, who have summoned kings to appear upon the stage, who have obliged princes, dukes, and barons to play secondary parts in my romances, should take a simple shoe-maker for the hero of this tale. First, I will reply by saying that, in my dear home country of Villers-Cotterets, there are more sabot-makers than barons, dukes and princes, and that, as soon as I decided to make the forest the scene of the events I am about to record, I was obliged to choose one of the actual inhabitants of this forest as hero, unless I had wished to represent such fantastic persons as the _Incas_ of Marmontel or the _Abencerrages_ of M. de Florian. More than that, it is not the author who decides on the subject, but the subject which takes possession of the author, and, good or bad, this particular subject has taken possession of me. I will therefore endeavour to draw Thibault s portrait for you, plain shoe-maker as he was, as exactly as the artist paints the portrait which a prince desires to send to his lady-love. Thibault was a man between twenty-five and twenty-seven years of age, tall, well made, physically robust, but by nature melancholy and sad of heart. This depression of spirits arose from a little grain of envy, which, in spite of himself, perhaps unconsciously to himself, he harboured towards all such of his neighbours as had been more favoured by fortune than himself. His father had committed a fault, a serious one at all times, but more especially in those days of absolutism, when a man was not able to rise above his station as now-a-days, when with sufficient capacity he may attain to any rank. Thibault had been educated above his position; he had been at school under the Abb Fortier, at Villers-Cotterets, and had learnt to read, write, and cypher; moreover he knew a little Latin, which made him inordinately proud of himself. Thibault had spent a great part of his time in reading, and his books had been chiefly those which were in vogue at the close of the preceding century. But he had not been a sufficiently clever analyst to know how to separate the good from the bad, or rather he _had_ separated what was bad, and swallowed it in large doses, leaving the good to precipitate itself at the bottom of the glass. At twenty years of age Thibault had certainly had dreams of being something other than a sabot-maker. He had, for instance, for a very little while, cast his eyes towards the army. But his comrades who had worn the double livery of king and country, had left the service as they entered it, mere soldiers of the ranks, having failed during five or six years of slavery to obtain promotion, even to the not very exalted grade of corporal. Thibault had also thought of becoming a sailor. But a career in the navy was as much forbidden to the plebeian as one in the army. Possibly after enduring danger, and storm and battle for fifteen or twenty years, he might be made a boatswain s mate, that was all, and then! besides, it was by no means Thibault s ambition to wear a short vest and sail-cloth trousers, but the blue uniform of the king with red vest and gold epaulettes. He had moreover known of no single case in which the son of a mere shoe-maker had become Master of a Frigate, or even Lieutenant. So he was forced to give up all idea of joining the King s Navy. Thibault would not have minded being a Notary, and at one time thought of apprenticing himself to the Royal Scrivener, Ma tre Niquet, as a stepping-stone, and of making his way up on the strength of his own legs and with the help of his pen. But supposing him to have risen to the position of head clerk with a salary of a hundred crowns, where was he to find the thirty thousand francs which would be required for the purchase of the smallest village practice. There was, therefore, no better chance of his becoming a scrivener than of becoming an officer on sea or land. Meanwhile, Thibault s father died, leaving very little ready money. There was about enough to bury him, so he was buried, and this done, there remained some thirty or forty francs over for Thibault. Thibault knew his trade well; indeed, he was a first-rate workman; but he had no inclination to handle either auger or parer. It ended, therefore, by his leaving all his father s tools in the care of a friend, a remnant of prudence still remaining to him, and selling every vestige of furniture; having thus realised a sum of five hundred and forty livres, he determined to make what was then called the tour of France. Thibault spent three years in travelling; he did not make his fortune during that time, but he learnt a great many things in the course of his journey of which he was previously ignorant, and acquired certain accomplishments which he had previously been without. He learned amongst other things that, although it was as well to keep one s word on matters of business with a man, it was no use whatever keeping love vows made to a woman. So much for his character and habits of mind. As to his external accomplishments, he could dance a jig beautifully, could hold his own at quarter-staff against four men, and could handle the boar-spear as cleverly as the best huntsman going. All these things had not a little served to increase Thibault s natural self-esteem, and, seeing himself handsomer, stronger, and cleverer than many of the nobles, he would exclaim against Providence, crying, Why was I not nobly born? why was not that nobleman yonder born a peasant? But as Providence took care not to make any answer to these apostroph s, and as Thibault found that dancing, playing at quarter-staff, and throwing the boar-spear only fatigued the body, without procuring him any material advantage, he began to turn his thoughts towards his ancient trade, humble though it was, saying to himself, if it enabled the father to live, it would also enable the son. So Thibault went and fetched away his tools; and then, tools in hand, he went to ask permission of the Steward of his Royal Highness Louis Philippe of Orleans, to build a hut in the forest, in which to carry on his trade. He had no difficulty in obtaining this, for the steward knew by experience that his master was a very kind-hearted man, expending as much as two hundred and forty thousand francs a year on the poor; he felt sure, therefore, that one who gave away a sum like this, would be willing to let an honest workman who wished to ply his trade, have thirty or forty feet of ground. As he had leave to establish himself in whatever part of the forest he liked best, Thibault chose the spot near the osier-beds, where the roads crossed, one of the most beautiful parts of the woods, less than a mile from Oigny and about three times that distance from Villers-Cotterets. The shoe-maker put up his work-shop, built partly of old planks given him by M. Panisis, who had been having a sale in the neighbourhood, and partly of the branches which the steward gave him leave to cut in the forest. When the building of the hut, which consisted of a bedroom, cosily shut in, where he could work during the winter, and of a lean-to, open to the air, where he could work in the summer, was completed, Thibault began to think of making himself a bed. At first, a layer of fern had to serve for this purpose; but after he had made a hundred pairs of wooden shoes and had sold these to Bedeau, who kept a general shop at Villers-Cotterets, he was able to pay a sufficient deposit to get a mattress, to be paid for in full by the end of three months. The framework of the bed was not difficult to make; Thibault was not the shoe-maker he was without being a bit of a carpenter into the bargain, and when this was finished he plaited osiers to take the place of sacking, laid the mattress upon them, and found himself at last with a bed to lie upon. Little by little came the sheets, and then in their turn the coverlids; the next purchase was a chafing-dish, and earthenware pots to cook in, and finally some plates and dishes. Before the year was out Thibault had also made additions to his furniture of a fine oak chest and a fine walnut-wood cupboard, both, like the bed, his own handiwork. All the while he was driving a brisk trade, for none could beat Thibault in turning a block of beech into a pair of shoes, and in converting the odd chips into spoons, salt-cellars and natty little bowls. He had now been settled in his work-shop for three years, that is, ever since his return after the completion of his tour round France, and there was nothing for which anyone could have reproached him during this interval except the failing we have already mentioned--that he was rather more envious of the good fortune of his neighbour than was altogether conducive to the welfare of his soul. But this feeling was as yet so inoffensive, that his confessor had no need to do more than awaken in him a sense of shame for harbouring thoughts which had, so far, not resulted in any active crime. CHAPTER II THE SEIGNEUR JEAN AND THE SABOT-MAKER As already said, the buck began to dodge and double on reaching Oigny, turning and twisting round Thibault s hut, and the weather being fine although the autumn was well advanced, the shoe-maker was sitting at his work in his open lean-to. Looking up, he suddenly espied the trembling animal, quivering in every limb, standing a few paces in front of him, gazing at him with intelligent and terrified eyes. Thibault had been for a long time aware that the hunt was circling around Oigny, at one time drawing near to the village, and then receding, only to draw near again. There was nothing therefore very surprising to him in the sight of the buck, yet he stayed his hand, although he was busy at work, and contemplated the animal. Saint Sabot! he exclaimed--I should explain, that the festival of Saint Sabot is the wooden-shoe f te-- Saint Sabot! but that is a dainty morsel and would taste as fine, I warrant, as the chamois I ate at Vienne once at the grand banquet of the Jolly Shoe-makers of Dauphin . Lucky folk who can dine on the like every day. I tasted such once, it is now nearly four years ago, and my mouth waters now when I think of it. Oh! these lords! these lords! with their fresh meats and their old wines at every meal, while I have to be satisfied with potatoes to eat and water to drink from one week s end to the other; and it is a chance if even on Sunday, I can feast myself with a lump of rusty bacon and an old cabbage, and a glass of _pignolet_ fit to make my old goat stand on her head. It need scarcely be said, that as soon as Thibault began this monologue, the buck had turned and disappeared. Thibault had finished rounding his periods, and had just declaimed his peroration, when he heard himself roughly accosted in forcible terms: Ho, there, you scoundrel! answer me. It was the Baron, who seeing his dogs wavering, was anxious to make sure that they were not on the wrong scent. Ho, there, you scoundrel! repeated the wolf-hunter, have you seen the beast? There was evidently something in the manner of the Baron s questioning which did not please our philosophical shoe-maker, for although he was perfectly aware what was the matter, he answered: what beast? Curse you! why, the buck we are hunting! He must have passed close by here, and standing gaping as you do, you must have seen him. It was a fine stag of ten, was it not? Which way did he go? Speak up, you blackguard, or you shall have a taste of my stirrup-leather! The black plague take him, cub of a wolf! muttered the shoe-maker to himself. Then, aloud, with a fine air of pretended simplicity, Ah, yes! he said, I did see him. A buck, was it not? a ten-tiner, eh? with great horns. Ah, yes to be sure, a buck, with great horns,--or great corns, was it? yes, I saw him as plain as I see you, my Lord. But there, I can t say if he had any corns, for I did not look at his feet, anyhow, he added, with the air of a perfect simpleton, if he had corns, they did not prevent him running. At any other time the Baron would have laughed at what he might have taken for genuine stupidity; but the doublings of the animal were beginning to put him into a regular huntsman s fever. Now, then, you scoundrel, a truce to this jesting! If you are in a humour for jokes, it is more than I am! I will be in whatever humour it may please your Lordship I should be. Well, then, answer me. Your Lordship has asked me nothing as yet. Did the deer seem tired? Not very. Which way did he come? He did not come, he was standing still. Well, but he must have come from one side or the other. Ah! very likely, but I did not see him come. Which way did he go? I would tell you directly; only I did not see him go. The Lord of Vez cast an angry look at Thibault. Is it some while ago the buck passed this way, Master Simpleton? Not so very long, my Lord. About how long ago? Thibault made as if trying to remember; at last he replied: It was, I think, the day before yesterday, but in saying this, the shoe-maker, unfortunately, could not suppress a grin. This grin did not escape the Baron, who, spurring his horse, rode down on Thibault with lifted whip. Thibault was agile, and with a single bound he reached the shelter of his lean-to, whither the wolf-hunter could not follow, as long as he remained mounted; Thibault was therefore in momentary safety. You are only bantering and lying! cried the huntsman, for there is Marcassino, my best hound, giving cry not twenty yards off, and if the deer passed by where Marcassino is, he must have come over the hedge, and it is impossible, therefore, that you did not see him. Pardon, my Lord, but according to our good priest, no one but the Pope is infallible, and Monsieur Marcassino may be mistaken. Marcassino is never mistaken, do you hear, you rascal! and in proof of it I can see from here the marks where the animal scratched up the ground. Nevertheless, my Lord, I assure you, I swear.... said Thibault, who saw the Baron s eyebrows contracting in a way that made him feel uneasy. Silence, and come here, blackguard! cried my lord. Thibault hesitated a moment, but the black look on the sportsman s face became more and more threatening, and fearing to increase his exasperation by disobeying his command, he thought he had better go forward, hoping that the Baron merely wished to ask a service of him. But it was an unlucky move on his part, for scarcely had he emerged from the protection of the shed, before the horse of the Lord of Vez, urged by bit and spur, gave a leap, which brought his rider swooping down upon Thibault, while at the same moment a furious blow from the butt end of the Baron s whip fell upon his head. The shoe-maker, stunned by the blow, tottered a moment, lost his balance and was about to fall face downwards, when the Baron, drawing his foot out of the stirrup, with a violent kick in the chest, not only straightened him again, but sent the poor wretch flying in an opposite direction, where he fell with his back against the door of his hut. Take that! said the Baron, as he first felled Thibault with his whip, and then kicked him, take that for your lie, and that for your banter! And then, without troubling himself any further about the man, whom he left lying on his back, the Lord of Vez, seeing that the hounds had rallied on hearing Marcassino s cry, gave them a cheery note on his horn, and cantered away. Thibault lifted himself up, feeling bruised all over, and began feeling himself from head to foot to make sure that no bones were broken. Having carefully passed his hand over each limb in succession, that s all right, he said, there is nothing broken either above or below, I am glad to find. So, my Lord Baron, that is how you treat people, because you happen to have married a Prince s bastard daughter! But let me tell you, my fine fellow, it is not you who will eat the buck you are hunting to-day; it will be this blackguard, this scoundrel, this simpleton of a Thibault who will eat it. Yes, it shall be I who eat it, that I vow! cried Thibault, confirming himself more and more in his bold resolution, and it is no use being a man if having once made a vow, one fails to keep it. So without further delay, Thibault thrust his bill-hook into his belt, seized his boar-spear, and after listening for a moment to the cry of the hounds to ascertain in which direction the hunt had gone, he ran off with all the speed of which a man s legs are capable to get the start of them, guessing by the curve which the stag and its pursuers were following what would be the straight line to take so as to intercept them. There were two ways of doing his deed open to Thibault; either to hide himself beside the path which the buck must take and kill him with his boar-spear, or else to surprise the animal just as he was being hunted down by the dogs, and collar him there and then. And as he ran, the desire to revenge himself on the Baron for the latter s brutality, was not so uppermost in Thibault s mind as the thoughts of the sumptuous manner in which he would fare for the next month, on the shoulders, the back, and the haunches of the deer, either salted to a turn, roasted on the spit, or cut in slices and done in the pan. And these two ideas, moreover, of vengeance and gluttony, were so jumbled up in his brain, that while still running at the top of his speed he laughed in his sleeve, as he pictured the dejected mien of the Baron and his men returning to the castle after their fruitless day s hunt, and at the same time saw himself seated at table, the door securely fastened, and a pint of wine beside him, t te- -t te with a haunch of the deer, the rich and delicious gravy escaping as the knife returned for a third or fourth cut. The deer, as far as Thibault could calculate, was making for the bridge which crosses the Ourcq, between Noroy and Troesne. At the time of which we are now speaking there was a bridge spanning the river, formed of two joists and a few planks. As the river was very high and very rapid, Thibault decided that the deer would not attempt to ford it; so he hid himself behind a rock, within reach of the bridge, and waited. It was not long before he saw the graceful head of the deer appear above the rock at some ten paces distance; the animal was bending its ears to the wind, in the endeavour to catch the sound of the enemy s approach as it was borne along the breeze. Thibault, excited by this sudden appearance, rose from behind the rock, poised his boar-spear and sent it flying towards the animal. The buck, with a single bound, reached the middle of the bridge, a second carried him on to the opposite bank, and a third bore him out of sight. The boar-spear had passed within a foot of the animal, and had buried itself in the grass fifteen paces from where Thibault was standing. Never before had he been known to make such an unskilful throw; he, Thibault, of all the company who made the tour of France, the one known to be surest of his aim! Enraged with himself, therefore, he picked up his weapon, and bounded across the bridge with an agility equal to that of the deer. Thibault knew the country quite as well as the animal he was pursuing, and so got ahead of the deer and once more concealed himself, this time behind a beech-tree, half-way up, and not too far from a little footpath. The deer now passed so close to him, that Thibault hesitated as to whether it would not be better to knock the animal down with his boar-spear than to throw the weapon at it; but his hesitation did not last longer than a flash of lightning, for no lightning could be quicker than the animal itself, which was already twenty paces off when Thibault threw his boar-spear, but without better luck than the time before. And now the baying of the hounds was drawing nearer and nearer; another few minutes, and it would, he felt, be impossible for him to carry out his design. But in honour to his spirit of persistence, be it said, that in proportion as the difficulty increased, the greater became Thibault s desire to get possession of the deer. I must have it, come what will, he cried, I must! and if there is a God who cares for the poor, I shall have satisfaction of this confounded Baron, who beat me as if I were a dog, but I am a man notwithstanding, and I am quite ready to prove the same to him. And Thibault picked up his boar-spear and once more set off running. But it would appear that the good God whom he had just invoked, either had not heard him, or wished to drive him to extremities, for his third attempt had no greater success than the previous ones. By Heaven! exclaimed Thibault, God Almighty is assuredly deaf, it seems Let the Devil then open his ears and hear me! In the name of God or of the Devil, I want you and I will have you, cursed animal! Thibault had hardly finished this double blasphemy when the buck, doubling back, passed close to him for the fourth time, and disappeared among the bushes, but so quickly and unexpectedly, that Thibault had not even time to lift his boar-spear. At that moment he heard the dogs so near him, that he deemed it would be imprudent to continue his pursuit. He looked round him, saw a thickly-leaved oak tree, threw his boar-spear into a bush, swarmed up the trunk, and hid himself among the foliage. He imagined, and with good reason, that since the deer had gone ahead again, the hunt would only pass by following on its track. The dogs had not lost the scent, in spite of the quarry s doublings, and they were not likely to lose it now. Thibault had not been seated among the branches for above five minutes, when first the hounds came into sight, then the Baron, who in spite of his fifty-five years, headed the chase as if he had been a man of twenty. It must be added that the Lord of Vez was in a state of rage that we will not even endeavour to describe. To lose four hours over a wretched deer and still to be running behind it! Such a thing had never happened to him before. He stormed at his men, he whipped his dogs, and had so ploughed his horse s sides with his spurs, that the thick coating of mud which covered his gaiters was reddened with blood. On reaching the bridge over the Ourcq, however, there had been an interval of alleviation for the Baron, for the hounds had so unanimously taken up the scent, that the cloak which the wolf-hunter carried behind him would have sufficed to cover the whole pack as they crossed the bridge. Indeed the Baron was so pleased, that he was not satisfied with humming a tirra-la, but, unslinging his hunting-horn he sounded it with his full lung-power, a thing which he only did on great occasions. But, unfortunately, the joy of my Lord of Vez was destined to be short lived. All of

spur

How many times the word 'spur' appears in the text?

you must know that this made the fifth or sixth time that the worthy Baron had started the animal in question, but never once had he been able to get within gun-shot of him or to run him down. Yes, Marcotte went on, but the damned beast has employed himself so well all night crossing his track and doubling, that after having traced him over half the forest, I found myself at the place from which I started. You think then, Marcotte, that there is no chance of getting near him. I am afraid not. By all the devils in hell! exclaimed the Lord of Vez, who had not had his equal in swearing since the mighty Nimrod, however, I am not feeling well to-day, and I must have a burst of some kind, to get rid of these bad humours. What do you think we can hunt, Marcotte, in place of this damned black wolf? Well, having been so taken up with the wolf, answered Marcotte, I have not traced any other animal. Will my Lord uncouple at random and hunt the first animal that we come across? The Baron was about to express his willingness to agree to this proposal when he caught sight of little Engoulevent coming towards them cap in hand. Wait a moment, he said, here comes Engoulevent, who, I fancy, has some advice to give us. I have no advice to give to a noble Lord like yourself, replied Engoulevent, assuming an expression of humility on his sly and crafty face; it is, however, my duty to inform you that there is a splendid buck in the neighbourhood. Let us see your buck, Engoulevent, replied the chief wolf-hunter, and if you are not mistaken about it, there will be a new crown for you. Where is this buck of yours? asked Marcotte, but look to your skin, if you make us uncouple to no purpose. Let me have Matador and Jupiter, and then we shall see. Matador and Jupiter were the finest among the hounds belonging to the Lord of Vez. And indeed, Engoulevent had not gone a hundred paces with them through the thicket, before, by the lashing of their tails, and their repeated yelping, he knew that they were on the right scent. In another minute or two a magnificent ten-tined stag came into view. Marcotte cried Tally-ho, sounded his horn, and the hunt began, to the great satisfaction of the Lord of Vez, who, although regretting the black wolf, was willing to make the best of a fine buck in its stead. The hunt had lasted two hours, and the quarry still held on. It had first led its pursuers from the little wood of Haramont to the Chemin du Pendu, and thence straight to the back of Oigny, and it still showed no sign of fatigue; for it was not one of those poor animals of the flat country who get their tails pulled by every wretched terrier. As it neared the low grounds of Bourg-fontaine, however, it evidently decided that it was being run rather hard, for it gave up the bolder measures which had hitherto enabled it to keep ahead, and began to double. Its first man uvre was to go down to the brook which joins the ponds of Baisemont and Bourg, then to walk against stream with the water up to its haunches, for nearly half a mile; it then sprang on to the right bank, back again into the bed of the stream, made another leap to the left, and with a succession of bounds, as vigorous as its failing strength allowed, continued to out-distance its pursuers. But the dogs of my lord Baron were not animals to be put out by such trifles as these. Being both sagacious and well-bred, they, of their own accord, divided the task between themselves, half going up stream, and half down, these hunting on the right those on the left, and so effectually that they ere long put the animal off its changes, for they soon recovered the scent, rallying at the first cry given by one of the pack, and starting afresh on the chase, as ready and eager as if the deer had been only twenty paces in front of them. And so with galloping of horses, with cry of hounds and blare of horn, the Baron and his huntsmen reached the ponds of Saint Antoine, a hundred paces or so from the Confines of Oigny. Between these and the Osier-beds stood the hut of Thibault, the sabot-maker. We must pause to give some description of this Thibault, the shoe-maker, the real hero of the tale. You will ask why I, who have summoned kings to appear upon the stage, who have obliged princes, dukes, and barons to play secondary parts in my romances, should take a simple shoe-maker for the hero of this tale. First, I will reply by saying that, in my dear home country of Villers-Cotterets, there are more sabot-makers than barons, dukes and princes, and that, as soon as I decided to make the forest the scene of the events I am about to record, I was obliged to choose one of the actual inhabitants of this forest as hero, unless I had wished to represent such fantastic persons as the _Incas_ of Marmontel or the _Abencerrages_ of M. de Florian. More than that, it is not the author who decides on the subject, but the subject which takes possession of the author, and, good or bad, this particular subject has taken possession of me. I will therefore endeavour to draw Thibault s portrait for you, plain shoe-maker as he was, as exactly as the artist paints the portrait which a prince desires to send to his lady-love. Thibault was a man between twenty-five and twenty-seven years of age, tall, well made, physically robust, but by nature melancholy and sad of heart. This depression of spirits arose from a little grain of envy, which, in spite of himself, perhaps unconsciously to himself, he harboured towards all such of his neighbours as had been more favoured by fortune than himself. His father had committed a fault, a serious one at all times, but more especially in those days of absolutism, when a man was not able to rise above his station as now-a-days, when with sufficient capacity he may attain to any rank. Thibault had been educated above his position; he had been at school under the Abb Fortier, at Villers-Cotterets, and had learnt to read, write, and cypher; moreover he knew a little Latin, which made him inordinately proud of himself. Thibault had spent a great part of his time in reading, and his books had been chiefly those which were in vogue at the close of the preceding century. But he had not been a sufficiently clever analyst to know how to separate the good from the bad, or rather he _had_ separated what was bad, and swallowed it in large doses, leaving the good to precipitate itself at the bottom of the glass. At twenty years of age Thibault had certainly had dreams of being something other than a sabot-maker. He had, for instance, for a very little while, cast his eyes towards the army. But his comrades who had worn the double livery of king and country, had left the service as they entered it, mere soldiers of the ranks, having failed during five or six years of slavery to obtain promotion, even to the not very exalted grade of corporal. Thibault had also thought of becoming a sailor. But a career in the navy was as much forbidden to the plebeian as one in the army. Possibly after enduring danger, and storm and battle for fifteen or twenty years, he might be made a boatswain s mate, that was all, and then! besides, it was by no means Thibault s ambition to wear a short vest and sail-cloth trousers, but the blue uniform of the king with red vest and gold epaulettes. He had moreover known of no single case in which the son of a mere shoe-maker had become Master of a Frigate, or even Lieutenant. So he was forced to give up all idea of joining the King s Navy. Thibault would not have minded being a Notary, and at one time thought of apprenticing himself to the Royal Scrivener, Ma tre Niquet, as a stepping-stone, and of making his way up on the strength of his own legs and with the help of his pen. But supposing him to have risen to the position of head clerk with a salary of a hundred crowns, where was he to find the thirty thousand francs which would be required for the purchase of the smallest village practice. There was, therefore, no better chance of his becoming a scrivener than of becoming an officer on sea or land. Meanwhile, Thibault s father died, leaving very little ready money. There was about enough to bury him, so he was buried, and this done, there remained some thirty or forty francs over for Thibault. Thibault knew his trade well; indeed, he was a first-rate workman; but he had no inclination to handle either auger or parer. It ended, therefore, by his leaving all his father s tools in the care of a friend, a remnant of prudence still remaining to him, and selling every vestige of furniture; having thus realised a sum of five hundred and forty livres, he determined to make what was then called the tour of France. Thibault spent three years in travelling; he did not make his fortune during that time, but he learnt a great many things in the course of his journey of which he was previously ignorant, and acquired certain accomplishments which he had previously been without. He learned amongst other things that, although it was as well to keep one s word on matters of business with a man, it was no use whatever keeping love vows made to a woman. So much for his character and habits of mind. As to his external accomplishments, he could dance a jig beautifully, could hold his own at quarter-staff against four men, and could handle the boar-spear as cleverly as the best huntsman going. All these things had not a little served to increase Thibault s natural self-esteem, and, seeing himself handsomer, stronger, and cleverer than many of the nobles, he would exclaim against Providence, crying, Why was I not nobly born? why was not that nobleman yonder born a peasant? But as Providence took care not to make any answer to these apostroph s, and as Thibault found that dancing, playing at quarter-staff, and throwing the boar-spear only fatigued the body, without procuring him any material advantage, he began to turn his thoughts towards his ancient trade, humble though it was, saying to himself, if it enabled the father to live, it would also enable the son. So Thibault went and fetched away his tools; and then, tools in hand, he went to ask permission of the Steward of his Royal Highness Louis Philippe of Orleans, to build a hut in the forest, in which to carry on his trade. He had no difficulty in obtaining this, for the steward knew by experience that his master was a very kind-hearted man, expending as much as two hundred and forty thousand francs a year on the poor; he felt sure, therefore, that one who gave away a sum like this, would be willing to let an honest workman who wished to ply his trade, have thirty or forty feet of ground. As he had leave to establish himself in whatever part of the forest he liked best, Thibault chose the spot near the osier-beds, where the roads crossed, one of the most beautiful parts of the woods, less than a mile from Oigny and about three times that distance from Villers-Cotterets. The shoe-maker put up his work-shop, built partly of old planks given him by M. Panisis, who had been having a sale in the neighbourhood, and partly of the branches which the steward gave him leave to cut in the forest. When the building of the hut, which consisted of a bedroom, cosily shut in, where he could work during the winter, and of a lean-to, open to the air, where he could work in the summer, was completed, Thibault began to think of making himself a bed. At first, a layer of fern had to serve for this purpose; but after he had made a hundred pairs of wooden shoes and had sold these to Bedeau, who kept a general shop at Villers-Cotterets, he was able to pay a sufficient deposit to get a mattress, to be paid for in full by the end of three months. The framework of the bed was not difficult to make; Thibault was not the shoe-maker he was without being a bit of a carpenter into the bargain, and when this was finished he plaited osiers to take the place of sacking, laid the mattress upon them, and found himself at last with a bed to lie upon. Little by little came the sheets, and then in their turn the coverlids; the next purchase was a chafing-dish, and earthenware pots to cook in, and finally some plates and dishes. Before the year was out Thibault had also made additions to his furniture of a fine oak chest and a fine walnut-wood cupboard, both, like the bed, his own handiwork. All the while he was driving a brisk trade, for none could beat Thibault in turning a block of beech into a pair of shoes, and in converting the odd chips into spoons, salt-cellars and natty little bowls. He had now been settled in his work-shop for three years, that is, ever since his return after the completion of his tour round France, and there was nothing for which anyone could have reproached him during this interval except the failing we have already mentioned--that he was rather more envious of the good fortune of his neighbour than was altogether conducive to the welfare of his soul. But this feeling was as yet so inoffensive, that his confessor had no need to do more than awaken in him a sense of shame for harbouring thoughts which had, so far, not resulted in any active crime. CHAPTER II THE SEIGNEUR JEAN AND THE SABOT-MAKER As already said, the buck began to dodge and double on reaching Oigny, turning and twisting round Thibault s hut, and the weather being fine although the autumn was well advanced, the shoe-maker was sitting at his work in his open lean-to. Looking up, he suddenly espied the trembling animal, quivering in every limb, standing a few paces in front of him, gazing at him with intelligent and terrified eyes. Thibault had been for a long time aware that the hunt was circling around Oigny, at one time drawing near to the village, and then receding, only to draw near again. There was nothing therefore very surprising to him in the sight of the buck, yet he stayed his hand, although he was busy at work, and contemplated the animal. Saint Sabot! he exclaimed--I should explain, that the festival of Saint Sabot is the wooden-shoe f te-- Saint Sabot! but that is a dainty morsel and would taste as fine, I warrant, as the chamois I ate at Vienne once at the grand banquet of the Jolly Shoe-makers of Dauphin . Lucky folk who can dine on the like every day. I tasted such once, it is now nearly four years ago, and my mouth waters now when I think of it. Oh! these lords! these lords! with their fresh meats and their old wines at every meal, while I have to be satisfied with potatoes to eat and water to drink from one week s end to the other; and it is a chance if even on Sunday, I can feast myself with a lump of rusty bacon and an old cabbage, and a glass of _pignolet_ fit to make my old goat stand on her head. It need scarcely be said, that as soon as Thibault began this monologue, the buck had turned and disappeared. Thibault had finished rounding his periods, and had just declaimed his peroration, when he heard himself roughly accosted in forcible terms: Ho, there, you scoundrel! answer me. It was the Baron, who seeing his dogs wavering, was anxious to make sure that they were not on the wrong scent. Ho, there, you scoundrel! repeated the wolf-hunter, have you seen the beast? There was evidently something in the manner of the Baron s questioning which did not please our philosophical shoe-maker, for although he was perfectly aware what was the matter, he answered: what beast? Curse you! why, the buck we are hunting! He must have passed close by here, and standing gaping as you do, you must have seen him. It was a fine stag of ten, was it not? Which way did he go? Speak up, you blackguard, or you shall have a taste of my stirrup-leather! The black plague take him, cub of a wolf! muttered the shoe-maker to himself. Then, aloud, with a fine air of pretended simplicity, Ah, yes! he said, I did see him. A buck, was it not? a ten-tiner, eh? with great horns. Ah, yes to be sure, a buck, with great horns,--or great corns, was it? yes, I saw him as plain as I see you, my Lord. But there, I can t say if he had any corns, for I did not look at his feet, anyhow, he added, with the air of a perfect simpleton, if he had corns, they did not prevent him running. At any other time the Baron would have laughed at what he might have taken for genuine stupidity; but the doublings of the animal were beginning to put him into a regular huntsman s fever. Now, then, you scoundrel, a truce to this jesting! If you are in a humour for jokes, it is more than I am! I will be in whatever humour it may please your Lordship I should be. Well, then, answer me. Your Lordship has asked me nothing as yet. Did the deer seem tired? Not very. Which way did he come? He did not come, he was standing still. Well, but he must have come from one side or the other. Ah! very likely, but I did not see him come. Which way did he go? I would tell you directly; only I did not see him go. The Lord of Vez cast an angry look at Thibault. Is it some while ago the buck passed this way, Master Simpleton? Not so very long, my Lord. About how long ago? Thibault made as if trying to remember; at last he replied: It was, I think, the day before yesterday, but in saying this, the shoe-maker, unfortunately, could not suppress a grin. This grin did not escape the Baron, who, spurring his horse, rode down on Thibault with lifted whip. Thibault was agile, and with a single bound he reached the shelter of his lean-to, whither the wolf-hunter could not follow, as long as he remained mounted; Thibault was therefore in momentary safety. You are only bantering and lying! cried the huntsman, for there is Marcassino, my best hound, giving cry not twenty yards off, and if the deer passed by where Marcassino is, he must have come over the hedge, and it is impossible, therefore, that you did not see him. Pardon, my Lord, but according to our good priest, no one but the Pope is infallible, and Monsieur Marcassino may be mistaken. Marcassino is never mistaken, do you hear, you rascal! and in proof of it I can see from here the marks where the animal scratched up the ground. Nevertheless, my Lord, I assure you, I swear.... said Thibault, who saw the Baron s eyebrows contracting in a way that made him feel uneasy. Silence, and come here, blackguard! cried my lord. Thibault hesitated a moment, but the black look on the sportsman s face became more and more threatening, and fearing to increase his exasperation by disobeying his command, he thought he had better go forward, hoping that the Baron merely wished to ask a service of him. But it was an unlucky move on his part, for scarcely had he emerged from the protection of the shed, before the horse of the Lord of Vez, urged by bit and spur, gave a leap, which brought his rider swooping down upon Thibault, while at the same moment a furious blow from the butt end of the Baron s whip fell upon his head. The shoe-maker, stunned by the blow, tottered a moment, lost his balance and was about to fall face downwards, when the Baron, drawing his foot out of the stirrup, with a violent kick in the chest, not only straightened him again, but sent the poor wretch flying in an opposite direction, where he fell with his back against the door of his hut. Take that! said the Baron, as he first felled Thibault with his whip, and then kicked him, take that for your lie, and that for your banter! And then, without troubling himself any further about the man, whom he left lying on his back, the Lord of Vez, seeing that the hounds had rallied on hearing Marcassino s cry, gave them a cheery note on his horn, and cantered away. Thibault lifted himself up, feeling bruised all over, and began feeling himself from head to foot to make sure that no bones were broken. Having carefully passed his hand over each limb in succession, that s all right, he said, there is nothing broken either above or below, I am glad to find. So, my Lord Baron, that is how you treat people, because you happen to have married a Prince s bastard daughter! But let me tell you, my fine fellow, it is not you who will eat the buck you are hunting to-day; it will be this blackguard, this scoundrel, this simpleton of a Thibault who will eat it. Yes, it shall be I who eat it, that I vow! cried Thibault, confirming himself more and more in his bold resolution, and it is no use being a man if having once made a vow, one fails to keep it. So without further delay, Thibault thrust his bill-hook into his belt, seized his boar-spear, and after listening for a moment to the cry of the hounds to ascertain in which direction the hunt had gone, he ran off with all the speed of which a man s legs are capable to get the start of them, guessing by the curve which the stag and its pursuers were following what would be the straight line to take so as to intercept them. There were two ways of doing his deed open to Thibault; either to hide himself beside the path which the buck must take and kill him with his boar-spear, or else to surprise the animal just as he was being hunted down by the dogs, and collar him there and then. And as he ran, the desire to revenge himself on the Baron for the latter s brutality, was not so uppermost in Thibault s mind as the thoughts of the sumptuous manner in which he would fare for the next month, on the shoulders, the back, and the haunches of the deer, either salted to a turn, roasted on the spit, or cut in slices and done in the pan. And these two ideas, moreover, of vengeance and gluttony, were so jumbled up in his brain, that while still running at the top of his speed he laughed in his sleeve, as he pictured the dejected mien of the Baron and his men returning to the castle after their fruitless day s hunt, and at the same time saw himself seated at table, the door securely fastened, and a pint of wine beside him, t te- -t te with a haunch of the deer, the rich and delicious gravy escaping as the knife returned for a third or fourth cut. The deer, as far as Thibault could calculate, was making for the bridge which crosses the Ourcq, between Noroy and Troesne. At the time of which we are now speaking there was a bridge spanning the river, formed of two joists and a few planks. As the river was very high and very rapid, Thibault decided that the deer would not attempt to ford it; so he hid himself behind a rock, within reach of the bridge, and waited. It was not long before he saw the graceful head of the deer appear above the rock at some ten paces distance; the animal was bending its ears to the wind, in the endeavour to catch the sound of the enemy s approach as it was borne along the breeze. Thibault, excited by this sudden appearance, rose from behind the rock, poised his boar-spear and sent it flying towards the animal. The buck, with a single bound, reached the middle of the bridge, a second carried him on to the opposite bank, and a third bore him out of sight. The boar-spear had passed within a foot of the animal, and had buried itself in the grass fifteen paces from where Thibault was standing. Never before had he been known to make such an unskilful throw; he, Thibault, of all the company who made the tour of France, the one known to be surest of his aim! Enraged with himself, therefore, he picked up his weapon, and bounded across the bridge with an agility equal to that of the deer. Thibault knew the country quite as well as the animal he was pursuing, and so got ahead of the deer and once more concealed himself, this time behind a beech-tree, half-way up, and not too far from a little footpath. The deer now passed so close to him, that Thibault hesitated as to whether it would not be better to knock the animal down with his boar-spear than to throw the weapon at it; but his hesitation did not last longer than a flash of lightning, for no lightning could be quicker than the animal itself, which was already twenty paces off when Thibault threw his boar-spear, but without better luck than the time before. And now the baying of the hounds was drawing nearer and nearer; another few minutes, and it would, he felt, be impossible for him to carry out his design. But in honour to his spirit of persistence, be it said, that in proportion as the difficulty increased, the greater became Thibault s desire to get possession of the deer. I must have it, come what will, he cried, I must! and if there is a God who cares for the poor, I shall have satisfaction of this confounded Baron, who beat me as if I were a dog, but I am a man notwithstanding, and I am quite ready to prove the same to him. And Thibault picked up his boar-spear and once more set off running. But it would appear that the good God whom he had just invoked, either had not heard him, or wished to drive him to extremities, for his third attempt had no greater success than the previous ones. By Heaven! exclaimed Thibault, God Almighty is assuredly deaf, it seems Let the Devil then open his ears and hear me! In the name of God or of the Devil, I want you and I will have you, cursed animal! Thibault had hardly finished this double blasphemy when the buck, doubling back, passed close to him for the fourth time, and disappeared among the bushes, but so quickly and unexpectedly, that Thibault had not even time to lift his boar-spear. At that moment he heard the dogs so near him, that he deemed it would be imprudent to continue his pursuit. He looked round him, saw a thickly-leaved oak tree, threw his boar-spear into a bush, swarmed up the trunk, and hid himself among the foliage. He imagined, and with good reason, that since the deer had gone ahead again, the hunt would only pass by following on its track. The dogs had not lost the scent, in spite of the quarry s doublings, and they were not likely to lose it now. Thibault had not been seated among the branches for above five minutes, when first the hounds came into sight, then the Baron, who in spite of his fifty-five years, headed the chase as if he had been a man of twenty. It must be added that the Lord of Vez was in a state of rage that we will not even endeavour to describe. To lose four hours over a wretched deer and still to be running behind it! Such a thing had never happened to him before. He stormed at his men, he whipped his dogs, and had so ploughed his horse s sides with his spurs, that the thick coating of mud which covered his gaiters was reddened with blood. On reaching the bridge over the Ourcq, however, there had been an interval of alleviation for the Baron, for the hounds had so unanimously taken up the scent, that the cloak which the wolf-hunter carried behind him would have sufficed to cover the whole pack as they crossed the bridge. Indeed the Baron was so pleased, that he was not satisfied with humming a tirra-la, but, unslinging his hunting-horn he sounded it with his full lung-power, a thing which he only did on great occasions. But, unfortunately, the joy of my Lord of Vez was destined to be short lived. All of

awed

How many times the word 'awed' appears in the text?

you must know that this made the fifth or sixth time that the worthy Baron had started the animal in question, but never once had he been able to get within gun-shot of him or to run him down. Yes, Marcotte went on, but the damned beast has employed himself so well all night crossing his track and doubling, that after having traced him over half the forest, I found myself at the place from which I started. You think then, Marcotte, that there is no chance of getting near him. I am afraid not. By all the devils in hell! exclaimed the Lord of Vez, who had not had his equal in swearing since the mighty Nimrod, however, I am not feeling well to-day, and I must have a burst of some kind, to get rid of these bad humours. What do you think we can hunt, Marcotte, in place of this damned black wolf? Well, having been so taken up with the wolf, answered Marcotte, I have not traced any other animal. Will my Lord uncouple at random and hunt the first animal that we come across? The Baron was about to express his willingness to agree to this proposal when he caught sight of little Engoulevent coming towards them cap in hand. Wait a moment, he said, here comes Engoulevent, who, I fancy, has some advice to give us. I have no advice to give to a noble Lord like yourself, replied Engoulevent, assuming an expression of humility on his sly and crafty face; it is, however, my duty to inform you that there is a splendid buck in the neighbourhood. Let us see your buck, Engoulevent, replied the chief wolf-hunter, and if you are not mistaken about it, there will be a new crown for you. Where is this buck of yours? asked Marcotte, but look to your skin, if you make us uncouple to no purpose. Let me have Matador and Jupiter, and then we shall see. Matador and Jupiter were the finest among the hounds belonging to the Lord of Vez. And indeed, Engoulevent had not gone a hundred paces with them through the thicket, before, by the lashing of their tails, and their repeated yelping, he knew that they were on the right scent. In another minute or two a magnificent ten-tined stag came into view. Marcotte cried Tally-ho, sounded his horn, and the hunt began, to the great satisfaction of the Lord of Vez, who, although regretting the black wolf, was willing to make the best of a fine buck in its stead. The hunt had lasted two hours, and the quarry still held on. It had first led its pursuers from the little wood of Haramont to the Chemin du Pendu, and thence straight to the back of Oigny, and it still showed no sign of fatigue; for it was not one of those poor animals of the flat country who get their tails pulled by every wretched terrier. As it neared the low grounds of Bourg-fontaine, however, it evidently decided that it was being run rather hard, for it gave up the bolder measures which had hitherto enabled it to keep ahead, and began to double. Its first man uvre was to go down to the brook which joins the ponds of Baisemont and Bourg, then to walk against stream with the water up to its haunches, for nearly half a mile; it then sprang on to the right bank, back again into the bed of the stream, made another leap to the left, and with a succession of bounds, as vigorous as its failing strength allowed, continued to out-distance its pursuers. But the dogs of my lord Baron were not animals to be put out by such trifles as these. Being both sagacious and well-bred, they, of their own accord, divided the task between themselves, half going up stream, and half down, these hunting on the right those on the left, and so effectually that they ere long put the animal off its changes, for they soon recovered the scent, rallying at the first cry given by one of the pack, and starting afresh on the chase, as ready and eager as if the deer had been only twenty paces in front of them. And so with galloping of horses, with cry of hounds and blare of horn, the Baron and his huntsmen reached the ponds of Saint Antoine, a hundred paces or so from the Confines of Oigny. Between these and the Osier-beds stood the hut of Thibault, the sabot-maker. We must pause to give some description of this Thibault, the shoe-maker, the real hero of the tale. You will ask why I, who have summoned kings to appear upon the stage, who have obliged princes, dukes, and barons to play secondary parts in my romances, should take a simple shoe-maker for the hero of this tale. First, I will reply by saying that, in my dear home country of Villers-Cotterets, there are more sabot-makers than barons, dukes and princes, and that, as soon as I decided to make the forest the scene of the events I am about to record, I was obliged to choose one of the actual inhabitants of this forest as hero, unless I had wished to represent such fantastic persons as the _Incas_ of Marmontel or the _Abencerrages_ of M. de Florian. More than that, it is not the author who decides on the subject, but the subject which takes possession of the author, and, good or bad, this particular subject has taken possession of me. I will therefore endeavour to draw Thibault s portrait for you, plain shoe-maker as he was, as exactly as the artist paints the portrait which a prince desires to send to his lady-love. Thibault was a man between twenty-five and twenty-seven years of age, tall, well made, physically robust, but by nature melancholy and sad of heart. This depression of spirits arose from a little grain of envy, which, in spite of himself, perhaps unconsciously to himself, he harboured towards all such of his neighbours as had been more favoured by fortune than himself. His father had committed a fault, a serious one at all times, but more especially in those days of absolutism, when a man was not able to rise above his station as now-a-days, when with sufficient capacity he may attain to any rank. Thibault had been educated above his position; he had been at school under the Abb Fortier, at Villers-Cotterets, and had learnt to read, write, and cypher; moreover he knew a little Latin, which made him inordinately proud of himself. Thibault had spent a great part of his time in reading, and his books had been chiefly those which were in vogue at the close of the preceding century. But he had not been a sufficiently clever analyst to know how to separate the good from the bad, or rather he _had_ separated what was bad, and swallowed it in large doses, leaving the good to precipitate itself at the bottom of the glass. At twenty years of age Thibault had certainly had dreams of being something other than a sabot-maker. He had, for instance, for a very little while, cast his eyes towards the army. But his comrades who had worn the double livery of king and country, had left the service as they entered it, mere soldiers of the ranks, having failed during five or six years of slavery to obtain promotion, even to the not very exalted grade of corporal. Thibault had also thought of becoming a sailor. But a career in the navy was as much forbidden to the plebeian as one in the army. Possibly after enduring danger, and storm and battle for fifteen or twenty years, he might be made a boatswain s mate, that was all, and then! besides, it was by no means Thibault s ambition to wear a short vest and sail-cloth trousers, but the blue uniform of the king with red vest and gold epaulettes. He had moreover known of no single case in which the son of a mere shoe-maker had become Master of a Frigate, or even Lieutenant. So he was forced to give up all idea of joining the King s Navy. Thibault would not have minded being a Notary, and at one time thought of apprenticing himself to the Royal Scrivener, Ma tre Niquet, as a stepping-stone, and of making his way up on the strength of his own legs and with the help of his pen. But supposing him to have risen to the position of head clerk with a salary of a hundred crowns, where was he to find the thirty thousand francs which would be required for the purchase of the smallest village practice. There was, therefore, no better chance of his becoming a scrivener than of becoming an officer on sea or land. Meanwhile, Thibault s father died, leaving very little ready money. There was about enough to bury him, so he was buried, and this done, there remained some thirty or forty francs over for Thibault. Thibault knew his trade well; indeed, he was a first-rate workman; but he had no inclination to handle either auger or parer. It ended, therefore, by his leaving all his father s tools in the care of a friend, a remnant of prudence still remaining to him, and selling every vestige of furniture; having thus realised a sum of five hundred and forty livres, he determined to make what was then called the tour of France. Thibault spent three years in travelling; he did not make his fortune during that time, but he learnt a great many things in the course of his journey of which he was previously ignorant, and acquired certain accomplishments which he had previously been without. He learned amongst other things that, although it was as well to keep one s word on matters of business with a man, it was no use whatever keeping love vows made to a woman. So much for his character and habits of mind. As to his external accomplishments, he could dance a jig beautifully, could hold his own at quarter-staff against four men, and could handle the boar-spear as cleverly as the best huntsman going. All these things had not a little served to increase Thibault s natural self-esteem, and, seeing himself handsomer, stronger, and cleverer than many of the nobles, he would exclaim against Providence, crying, Why was I not nobly born? why was not that nobleman yonder born a peasant? But as Providence took care not to make any answer to these apostroph s, and as Thibault found that dancing, playing at quarter-staff, and throwing the boar-spear only fatigued the body, without procuring him any material advantage, he began to turn his thoughts towards his ancient trade, humble though it was, saying to himself, if it enabled the father to live, it would also enable the son. So Thibault went and fetched away his tools; and then, tools in hand, he went to ask permission of the Steward of his Royal Highness Louis Philippe of Orleans, to build a hut in the forest, in which to carry on his trade. He had no difficulty in obtaining this, for the steward knew by experience that his master was a very kind-hearted man, expending as much as two hundred and forty thousand francs a year on the poor; he felt sure, therefore, that one who gave away a sum like this, would be willing to let an honest workman who wished to ply his trade, have thirty or forty feet of ground. As he had leave to establish himself in whatever part of the forest he liked best, Thibault chose the spot near the osier-beds, where the roads crossed, one of the most beautiful parts of the woods, less than a mile from Oigny and about three times that distance from Villers-Cotterets. The shoe-maker put up his work-shop, built partly of old planks given him by M. Panisis, who had been having a sale in the neighbourhood, and partly of the branches which the steward gave him leave to cut in the forest. When the building of the hut, which consisted of a bedroom, cosily shut in, where he could work during the winter, and of a lean-to, open to the air, where he could work in the summer, was completed, Thibault began to think of making himself a bed. At first, a layer of fern had to serve for this purpose; but after he had made a hundred pairs of wooden shoes and had sold these to Bedeau, who kept a general shop at Villers-Cotterets, he was able to pay a sufficient deposit to get a mattress, to be paid for in full by the end of three months. The framework of the bed was not difficult to make; Thibault was not the shoe-maker he was without being a bit of a carpenter into the bargain, and when this was finished he plaited osiers to take the place of sacking, laid the mattress upon them, and found himself at last with a bed to lie upon. Little by little came the sheets, and then in their turn the coverlids; the next purchase was a chafing-dish, and earthenware pots to cook in, and finally some plates and dishes. Before the year was out Thibault had also made additions to his furniture of a fine oak chest and a fine walnut-wood cupboard, both, like the bed, his own handiwork. All the while he was driving a brisk trade, for none could beat Thibault in turning a block of beech into a pair of shoes, and in converting the odd chips into spoons, salt-cellars and natty little bowls. He had now been settled in his work-shop for three years, that is, ever since his return after the completion of his tour round France, and there was nothing for which anyone could have reproached him during this interval except the failing we have already mentioned--that he was rather more envious of the good fortune of his neighbour than was altogether conducive to the welfare of his soul. But this feeling was as yet so inoffensive, that his confessor had no need to do more than awaken in him a sense of shame for harbouring thoughts which had, so far, not resulted in any active crime. CHAPTER II THE SEIGNEUR JEAN AND THE SABOT-MAKER As already said, the buck began to dodge and double on reaching Oigny, turning and twisting round Thibault s hut, and the weather being fine although the autumn was well advanced, the shoe-maker was sitting at his work in his open lean-to. Looking up, he suddenly espied the trembling animal, quivering in every limb, standing a few paces in front of him, gazing at him with intelligent and terrified eyes. Thibault had been for a long time aware that the hunt was circling around Oigny, at one time drawing near to the village, and then receding, only to draw near again. There was nothing therefore very surprising to him in the sight of the buck, yet he stayed his hand, although he was busy at work, and contemplated the animal. Saint Sabot! he exclaimed--I should explain, that the festival of Saint Sabot is the wooden-shoe f te-- Saint Sabot! but that is a dainty morsel and would taste as fine, I warrant, as the chamois I ate at Vienne once at the grand banquet of the Jolly Shoe-makers of Dauphin . Lucky folk who can dine on the like every day. I tasted such once, it is now nearly four years ago, and my mouth waters now when I think of it. Oh! these lords! these lords! with their fresh meats and their old wines at every meal, while I have to be satisfied with potatoes to eat and water to drink from one week s end to the other; and it is a chance if even on Sunday, I can feast myself with a lump of rusty bacon and an old cabbage, and a glass of _pignolet_ fit to make my old goat stand on her head. It need scarcely be said, that as soon as Thibault began this monologue, the buck had turned and disappeared. Thibault had finished rounding his periods, and had just declaimed his peroration, when he heard himself roughly accosted in forcible terms: Ho, there, you scoundrel! answer me. It was the Baron, who seeing his dogs wavering, was anxious to make sure that they were not on the wrong scent. Ho, there, you scoundrel! repeated the wolf-hunter, have you seen the beast? There was evidently something in the manner of the Baron s questioning which did not please our philosophical shoe-maker, for although he was perfectly aware what was the matter, he answered: what beast? Curse you! why, the buck we are hunting! He must have passed close by here, and standing gaping as you do, you must have seen him. It was a fine stag of ten, was it not? Which way did he go? Speak up, you blackguard, or you shall have a taste of my stirrup-leather! The black plague take him, cub of a wolf! muttered the shoe-maker to himself. Then, aloud, with a fine air of pretended simplicity, Ah, yes! he said, I did see him. A buck, was it not? a ten-tiner, eh? with great horns. Ah, yes to be sure, a buck, with great horns,--or great corns, was it? yes, I saw him as plain as I see you, my Lord. But there, I can t say if he had any corns, for I did not look at his feet, anyhow, he added, with the air of a perfect simpleton, if he had corns, they did not prevent him running. At any other time the Baron would have laughed at what he might have taken for genuine stupidity; but the doublings of the animal were beginning to put him into a regular huntsman s fever. Now, then, you scoundrel, a truce to this jesting! If you are in a humour for jokes, it is more than I am! I will be in whatever humour it may please your Lordship I should be. Well, then, answer me. Your Lordship has asked me nothing as yet. Did the deer seem tired? Not very. Which way did he come? He did not come, he was standing still. Well, but he must have come from one side or the other. Ah! very likely, but I did not see him come. Which way did he go? I would tell you directly; only I did not see him go. The Lord of Vez cast an angry look at Thibault. Is it some while ago the buck passed this way, Master Simpleton? Not so very long, my Lord. About how long ago? Thibault made as if trying to remember; at last he replied: It was, I think, the day before yesterday, but in saying this, the shoe-maker, unfortunately, could not suppress a grin. This grin did not escape the Baron, who, spurring his horse, rode down on Thibault with lifted whip. Thibault was agile, and with a single bound he reached the shelter of his lean-to, whither the wolf-hunter could not follow, as long as he remained mounted; Thibault was therefore in momentary safety. You are only bantering and lying! cried the huntsman, for there is Marcassino, my best hound, giving cry not twenty yards off, and if the deer passed by where Marcassino is, he must have come over the hedge, and it is impossible, therefore, that you did not see him. Pardon, my Lord, but according to our good priest, no one but the Pope is infallible, and Monsieur Marcassino may be mistaken. Marcassino is never mistaken, do you hear, you rascal! and in proof of it I can see from here the marks where the animal scratched up the ground. Nevertheless, my Lord, I assure you, I swear.... said Thibault, who saw the Baron s eyebrows contracting in a way that made him feel uneasy. Silence, and come here, blackguard! cried my lord. Thibault hesitated a moment, but the black look on the sportsman s face became more and more threatening, and fearing to increase his exasperation by disobeying his command, he thought he had better go forward, hoping that the Baron merely wished to ask a service of him. But it was an unlucky move on his part, for scarcely had he emerged from the protection of the shed, before the horse of the Lord of Vez, urged by bit and spur, gave a leap, which brought his rider swooping down upon Thibault, while at the same moment a furious blow from the butt end of the Baron s whip fell upon his head. The shoe-maker, stunned by the blow, tottered a moment, lost his balance and was about to fall face downwards, when the Baron, drawing his foot out of the stirrup, with a violent kick in the chest, not only straightened him again, but sent the poor wretch flying in an opposite direction, where he fell with his back against the door of his hut. Take that! said the Baron, as he first felled Thibault with his whip, and then kicked him, take that for your lie, and that for your banter! And then, without troubling himself any further about the man, whom he left lying on his back, the Lord of Vez, seeing that the hounds had rallied on hearing Marcassino s cry, gave them a cheery note on his horn, and cantered away. Thibault lifted himself up, feeling bruised all over, and began feeling himself from head to foot to make sure that no bones were broken. Having carefully passed his hand over each limb in succession, that s all right, he said, there is nothing broken either above or below, I am glad to find. So, my Lord Baron, that is how you treat people, because you happen to have married a Prince s bastard daughter! But let me tell you, my fine fellow, it is not you who will eat the buck you are hunting to-day; it will be this blackguard, this scoundrel, this simpleton of a Thibault who will eat it. Yes, it shall be I who eat it, that I vow! cried Thibault, confirming himself more and more in his bold resolution, and it is no use being a man if having once made a vow, one fails to keep it. So without further delay, Thibault thrust his bill-hook into his belt, seized his boar-spear, and after listening for a moment to the cry of the hounds to ascertain in which direction the hunt had gone, he ran off with all the speed of which a man s legs are capable to get the start of them, guessing by the curve which the stag and its pursuers were following what would be the straight line to take so as to intercept them. There were two ways of doing his deed open to Thibault; either to hide himself beside the path which the buck must take and kill him with his boar-spear, or else to surprise the animal just as he was being hunted down by the dogs, and collar him there and then. And as he ran, the desire to revenge himself on the Baron for the latter s brutality, was not so uppermost in Thibault s mind as the thoughts of the sumptuous manner in which he would fare for the next month, on the shoulders, the back, and the haunches of the deer, either salted to a turn, roasted on the spit, or cut in slices and done in the pan. And these two ideas, moreover, of vengeance and gluttony, were so jumbled up in his brain, that while still running at the top of his speed he laughed in his sleeve, as he pictured the dejected mien of the Baron and his men returning to the castle after their fruitless day s hunt, and at the same time saw himself seated at table, the door securely fastened, and a pint of wine beside him, t te- -t te with a haunch of the deer, the rich and delicious gravy escaping as the knife returned for a third or fourth cut. The deer, as far as Thibault could calculate, was making for the bridge which crosses the Ourcq, between Noroy and Troesne. At the time of which we are now speaking there was a bridge spanning the river, formed of two joists and a few planks. As the river was very high and very rapid, Thibault decided that the deer would not attempt to ford it; so he hid himself behind a rock, within reach of the bridge, and waited. It was not long before he saw the graceful head of the deer appear above the rock at some ten paces distance; the animal was bending its ears to the wind, in the endeavour to catch the sound of the enemy s approach as it was borne along the breeze. Thibault, excited by this sudden appearance, rose from behind the rock, poised his boar-spear and sent it flying towards the animal. The buck, with a single bound, reached the middle of the bridge, a second carried him on to the opposite bank, and a third bore him out of sight. The boar-spear had passed within a foot of the animal, and had buried itself in the grass fifteen paces from where Thibault was standing. Never before had he been known to make such an unskilful throw; he, Thibault, of all the company who made the tour of France, the one known to be surest of his aim! Enraged with himself, therefore, he picked up his weapon, and bounded across the bridge with an agility equal to that of the deer. Thibault knew the country quite as well as the animal he was pursuing, and so got ahead of the deer and once more concealed himself, this time behind a beech-tree, half-way up, and not too far from a little footpath. The deer now passed so close to him, that Thibault hesitated as to whether it would not be better to knock the animal down with his boar-spear than to throw the weapon at it; but his hesitation did not last longer than a flash of lightning, for no lightning could be quicker than the animal itself, which was already twenty paces off when Thibault threw his boar-spear, but without better luck than the time before. And now the baying of the hounds was drawing nearer and nearer; another few minutes, and it would, he felt, be impossible for him to carry out his design. But in honour to his spirit of persistence, be it said, that in proportion as the difficulty increased, the greater became Thibault s desire to get possession of the deer. I must have it, come what will, he cried, I must! and if there is a God who cares for the poor, I shall have satisfaction of this confounded Baron, who beat me as if I were a dog, but I am a man notwithstanding, and I am quite ready to prove the same to him. And Thibault picked up his boar-spear and once more set off running. But it would appear that the good God whom he had just invoked, either had not heard him, or wished to drive him to extremities, for his third attempt had no greater success than the previous ones. By Heaven! exclaimed Thibault, God Almighty is assuredly deaf, it seems Let the Devil then open his ears and hear me! In the name of God or of the Devil, I want you and I will have you, cursed animal! Thibault had hardly finished this double blasphemy when the buck, doubling back, passed close to him for the fourth time, and disappeared among the bushes, but so quickly and unexpectedly, that Thibault had not even time to lift his boar-spear. At that moment he heard the dogs so near him, that he deemed it would be imprudent to continue his pursuit. He looked round him, saw a thickly-leaved oak tree, threw his boar-spear into a bush, swarmed up the trunk, and hid himself among the foliage. He imagined, and with good reason, that since the deer had gone ahead again, the hunt would only pass by following on its track. The dogs had not lost the scent, in spite of the quarry s doublings, and they were not likely to lose it now. Thibault had not been seated among the branches for above five minutes, when first the hounds came into sight, then the Baron, who in spite of his fifty-five years, headed the chase as if he had been a man of twenty. It must be added that the Lord of Vez was in a state of rage that we will not even endeavour to describe. To lose four hours over a wretched deer and still to be running behind it! Such a thing had never happened to him before. He stormed at his men, he whipped his dogs, and had so ploughed his horse s sides with his spurs, that the thick coating of mud which covered his gaiters was reddened with blood. On reaching the bridge over the Ourcq, however, there had been an interval of alleviation for the Baron, for the hounds had so unanimously taken up the scent, that the cloak which the wolf-hunter carried behind him would have sufficed to cover the whole pack as they crossed the bridge. Indeed the Baron was so pleased, that he was not satisfied with humming a tirra-la, but, unslinging his hunting-horn he sounded it with his full lung-power, a thing which he only did on great occasions. But, unfortunately, the joy of my Lord of Vez was destined to be short lived. All of

obliged

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you must know that this made the fifth or sixth time that the worthy Baron had started the animal in question, but never once had he been able to get within gun-shot of him or to run him down. Yes, Marcotte went on, but the damned beast has employed himself so well all night crossing his track and doubling, that after having traced him over half the forest, I found myself at the place from which I started. You think then, Marcotte, that there is no chance of getting near him. I am afraid not. By all the devils in hell! exclaimed the Lord of Vez, who had not had his equal in swearing since the mighty Nimrod, however, I am not feeling well to-day, and I must have a burst of some kind, to get rid of these bad humours. What do you think we can hunt, Marcotte, in place of this damned black wolf? Well, having been so taken up with the wolf, answered Marcotte, I have not traced any other animal. Will my Lord uncouple at random and hunt the first animal that we come across? The Baron was about to express his willingness to agree to this proposal when he caught sight of little Engoulevent coming towards them cap in hand. Wait a moment, he said, here comes Engoulevent, who, I fancy, has some advice to give us. I have no advice to give to a noble Lord like yourself, replied Engoulevent, assuming an expression of humility on his sly and crafty face; it is, however, my duty to inform you that there is a splendid buck in the neighbourhood. Let us see your buck, Engoulevent, replied the chief wolf-hunter, and if you are not mistaken about it, there will be a new crown for you. Where is this buck of yours? asked Marcotte, but look to your skin, if you make us uncouple to no purpose. Let me have Matador and Jupiter, and then we shall see. Matador and Jupiter were the finest among the hounds belonging to the Lord of Vez. And indeed, Engoulevent had not gone a hundred paces with them through the thicket, before, by the lashing of their tails, and their repeated yelping, he knew that they were on the right scent. In another minute or two a magnificent ten-tined stag came into view. Marcotte cried Tally-ho, sounded his horn, and the hunt began, to the great satisfaction of the Lord of Vez, who, although regretting the black wolf, was willing to make the best of a fine buck in its stead. The hunt had lasted two hours, and the quarry still held on. It had first led its pursuers from the little wood of Haramont to the Chemin du Pendu, and thence straight to the back of Oigny, and it still showed no sign of fatigue; for it was not one of those poor animals of the flat country who get their tails pulled by every wretched terrier. As it neared the low grounds of Bourg-fontaine, however, it evidently decided that it was being run rather hard, for it gave up the bolder measures which had hitherto enabled it to keep ahead, and began to double. Its first man uvre was to go down to the brook which joins the ponds of Baisemont and Bourg, then to walk against stream with the water up to its haunches, for nearly half a mile; it then sprang on to the right bank, back again into the bed of the stream, made another leap to the left, and with a succession of bounds, as vigorous as its failing strength allowed, continued to out-distance its pursuers. But the dogs of my lord Baron were not animals to be put out by such trifles as these. Being both sagacious and well-bred, they, of their own accord, divided the task between themselves, half going up stream, and half down, these hunting on the right those on the left, and so effectually that they ere long put the animal off its changes, for they soon recovered the scent, rallying at the first cry given by one of the pack, and starting afresh on the chase, as ready and eager as if the deer had been only twenty paces in front of them. And so with galloping of horses, with cry of hounds and blare of horn, the Baron and his huntsmen reached the ponds of Saint Antoine, a hundred paces or so from the Confines of Oigny. Between these and the Osier-beds stood the hut of Thibault, the sabot-maker. We must pause to give some description of this Thibault, the shoe-maker, the real hero of the tale. You will ask why I, who have summoned kings to appear upon the stage, who have obliged princes, dukes, and barons to play secondary parts in my romances, should take a simple shoe-maker for the hero of this tale. First, I will reply by saying that, in my dear home country of Villers-Cotterets, there are more sabot-makers than barons, dukes and princes, and that, as soon as I decided to make the forest the scene of the events I am about to record, I was obliged to choose one of the actual inhabitants of this forest as hero, unless I had wished to represent such fantastic persons as the _Incas_ of Marmontel or the _Abencerrages_ of M. de Florian. More than that, it is not the author who decides on the subject, but the subject which takes possession of the author, and, good or bad, this particular subject has taken possession of me. I will therefore endeavour to draw Thibault s portrait for you, plain shoe-maker as he was, as exactly as the artist paints the portrait which a prince desires to send to his lady-love. Thibault was a man between twenty-five and twenty-seven years of age, tall, well made, physically robust, but by nature melancholy and sad of heart. This depression of spirits arose from a little grain of envy, which, in spite of himself, perhaps unconsciously to himself, he harboured towards all such of his neighbours as had been more favoured by fortune than himself. His father had committed a fault, a serious one at all times, but more especially in those days of absolutism, when a man was not able to rise above his station as now-a-days, when with sufficient capacity he may attain to any rank. Thibault had been educated above his position; he had been at school under the Abb Fortier, at Villers-Cotterets, and had learnt to read, write, and cypher; moreover he knew a little Latin, which made him inordinately proud of himself. Thibault had spent a great part of his time in reading, and his books had been chiefly those which were in vogue at the close of the preceding century. But he had not been a sufficiently clever analyst to know how to separate the good from the bad, or rather he _had_ separated what was bad, and swallowed it in large doses, leaving the good to precipitate itself at the bottom of the glass. At twenty years of age Thibault had certainly had dreams of being something other than a sabot-maker. He had, for instance, for a very little while, cast his eyes towards the army. But his comrades who had worn the double livery of king and country, had left the service as they entered it, mere soldiers of the ranks, having failed during five or six years of slavery to obtain promotion, even to the not very exalted grade of corporal. Thibault had also thought of becoming a sailor. But a career in the navy was as much forbidden to the plebeian as one in the army. Possibly after enduring danger, and storm and battle for fifteen or twenty years, he might be made a boatswain s mate, that was all, and then! besides, it was by no means Thibault s ambition to wear a short vest and sail-cloth trousers, but the blue uniform of the king with red vest and gold epaulettes. He had moreover known of no single case in which the son of a mere shoe-maker had become Master of a Frigate, or even Lieutenant. So he was forced to give up all idea of joining the King s Navy. Thibault would not have minded being a Notary, and at one time thought of apprenticing himself to the Royal Scrivener, Ma tre Niquet, as a stepping-stone, and of making his way up on the strength of his own legs and with the help of his pen. But supposing him to have risen to the position of head clerk with a salary of a hundred crowns, where was he to find the thirty thousand francs which would be required for the purchase of the smallest village practice. There was, therefore, no better chance of his becoming a scrivener than of becoming an officer on sea or land. Meanwhile, Thibault s father died, leaving very little ready money. There was about enough to bury him, so he was buried, and this done, there remained some thirty or forty francs over for Thibault. Thibault knew his trade well; indeed, he was a first-rate workman; but he had no inclination to handle either auger or parer. It ended, therefore, by his leaving all his father s tools in the care of a friend, a remnant of prudence still remaining to him, and selling every vestige of furniture; having thus realised a sum of five hundred and forty livres, he determined to make what was then called the tour of France. Thibault spent three years in travelling; he did not make his fortune during that time, but he learnt a great many things in the course of his journey of which he was previously ignorant, and acquired certain accomplishments which he had previously been without. He learned amongst other things that, although it was as well to keep one s word on matters of business with a man, it was no use whatever keeping love vows made to a woman. So much for his character and habits of mind. As to his external accomplishments, he could dance a jig beautifully, could hold his own at quarter-staff against four men, and could handle the boar-spear as cleverly as the best huntsman going. All these things had not a little served to increase Thibault s natural self-esteem, and, seeing himself handsomer, stronger, and cleverer than many of the nobles, he would exclaim against Providence, crying, Why was I not nobly born? why was not that nobleman yonder born a peasant? But as Providence took care not to make any answer to these apostroph s, and as Thibault found that dancing, playing at quarter-staff, and throwing the boar-spear only fatigued the body, without procuring him any material advantage, he began to turn his thoughts towards his ancient trade, humble though it was, saying to himself, if it enabled the father to live, it would also enable the son. So Thibault went and fetched away his tools; and then, tools in hand, he went to ask permission of the Steward of his Royal Highness Louis Philippe of Orleans, to build a hut in the forest, in which to carry on his trade. He had no difficulty in obtaining this, for the steward knew by experience that his master was a very kind-hearted man, expending as much as two hundred and forty thousand francs a year on the poor; he felt sure, therefore, that one who gave away a sum like this, would be willing to let an honest workman who wished to ply his trade, have thirty or forty feet of ground. As he had leave to establish himself in whatever part of the forest he liked best, Thibault chose the spot near the osier-beds, where the roads crossed, one of the most beautiful parts of the woods, less than a mile from Oigny and about three times that distance from Villers-Cotterets. The shoe-maker put up his work-shop, built partly of old planks given him by M. Panisis, who had been having a sale in the neighbourhood, and partly of the branches which the steward gave him leave to cut in the forest. When the building of the hut, which consisted of a bedroom, cosily shut in, where he could work during the winter, and of a lean-to, open to the air, where he could work in the summer, was completed, Thibault began to think of making himself a bed. At first, a layer of fern had to serve for this purpose; but after he had made a hundred pairs of wooden shoes and had sold these to Bedeau, who kept a general shop at Villers-Cotterets, he was able to pay a sufficient deposit to get a mattress, to be paid for in full by the end of three months. The framework of the bed was not difficult to make; Thibault was not the shoe-maker he was without being a bit of a carpenter into the bargain, and when this was finished he plaited osiers to take the place of sacking, laid the mattress upon them, and found himself at last with a bed to lie upon. Little by little came the sheets, and then in their turn the coverlids; the next purchase was a chafing-dish, and earthenware pots to cook in, and finally some plates and dishes. Before the year was out Thibault had also made additions to his furniture of a fine oak chest and a fine walnut-wood cupboard, both, like the bed, his own handiwork. All the while he was driving a brisk trade, for none could beat Thibault in turning a block of beech into a pair of shoes, and in converting the odd chips into spoons, salt-cellars and natty little bowls. He had now been settled in his work-shop for three years, that is, ever since his return after the completion of his tour round France, and there was nothing for which anyone could have reproached him during this interval except the failing we have already mentioned--that he was rather more envious of the good fortune of his neighbour than was altogether conducive to the welfare of his soul. But this feeling was as yet so inoffensive, that his confessor had no need to do more than awaken in him a sense of shame for harbouring thoughts which had, so far, not resulted in any active crime. CHAPTER II THE SEIGNEUR JEAN AND THE SABOT-MAKER As already said, the buck began to dodge and double on reaching Oigny, turning and twisting round Thibault s hut, and the weather being fine although the autumn was well advanced, the shoe-maker was sitting at his work in his open lean-to. Looking up, he suddenly espied the trembling animal, quivering in every limb, standing a few paces in front of him, gazing at him with intelligent and terrified eyes. Thibault had been for a long time aware that the hunt was circling around Oigny, at one time drawing near to the village, and then receding, only to draw near again. There was nothing therefore very surprising to him in the sight of the buck, yet he stayed his hand, although he was busy at work, and contemplated the animal. Saint Sabot! he exclaimed--I should explain, that the festival of Saint Sabot is the wooden-shoe f te-- Saint Sabot! but that is a dainty morsel and would taste as fine, I warrant, as the chamois I ate at Vienne once at the grand banquet of the Jolly Shoe-makers of Dauphin . Lucky folk who can dine on the like every day. I tasted such once, it is now nearly four years ago, and my mouth waters now when I think of it. Oh! these lords! these lords! with their fresh meats and their old wines at every meal, while I have to be satisfied with potatoes to eat and water to drink from one week s end to the other; and it is a chance if even on Sunday, I can feast myself with a lump of rusty bacon and an old cabbage, and a glass of _pignolet_ fit to make my old goat stand on her head. It need scarcely be said, that as soon as Thibault began this monologue, the buck had turned and disappeared. Thibault had finished rounding his periods, and had just declaimed his peroration, when he heard himself roughly accosted in forcible terms: Ho, there, you scoundrel! answer me. It was the Baron, who seeing his dogs wavering, was anxious to make sure that they were not on the wrong scent. Ho, there, you scoundrel! repeated the wolf-hunter, have you seen the beast? There was evidently something in the manner of the Baron s questioning which did not please our philosophical shoe-maker, for although he was perfectly aware what was the matter, he answered: what beast? Curse you! why, the buck we are hunting! He must have passed close by here, and standing gaping as you do, you must have seen him. It was a fine stag of ten, was it not? Which way did he go? Speak up, you blackguard, or you shall have a taste of my stirrup-leather! The black plague take him, cub of a wolf! muttered the shoe-maker to himself. Then, aloud, with a fine air of pretended simplicity, Ah, yes! he said, I did see him. A buck, was it not? a ten-tiner, eh? with great horns. Ah, yes to be sure, a buck, with great horns,--or great corns, was it? yes, I saw him as plain as I see you, my Lord. But there, I can t say if he had any corns, for I did not look at his feet, anyhow, he added, with the air of a perfect simpleton, if he had corns, they did not prevent him running. At any other time the Baron would have laughed at what he might have taken for genuine stupidity; but the doublings of the animal were beginning to put him into a regular huntsman s fever. Now, then, you scoundrel, a truce to this jesting! If you are in a humour for jokes, it is more than I am! I will be in whatever humour it may please your Lordship I should be. Well, then, answer me. Your Lordship has asked me nothing as yet. Did the deer seem tired? Not very. Which way did he come? He did not come, he was standing still. Well, but he must have come from one side or the other. Ah! very likely, but I did not see him come. Which way did he go? I would tell you directly; only I did not see him go. The Lord of Vez cast an angry look at Thibault. Is it some while ago the buck passed this way, Master Simpleton? Not so very long, my Lord. About how long ago? Thibault made as if trying to remember; at last he replied: It was, I think, the day before yesterday, but in saying this, the shoe-maker, unfortunately, could not suppress a grin. This grin did not escape the Baron, who, spurring his horse, rode down on Thibault with lifted whip. Thibault was agile, and with a single bound he reached the shelter of his lean-to, whither the wolf-hunter could not follow, as long as he remained mounted; Thibault was therefore in momentary safety. You are only bantering and lying! cried the huntsman, for there is Marcassino, my best hound, giving cry not twenty yards off, and if the deer passed by where Marcassino is, he must have come over the hedge, and it is impossible, therefore, that you did not see him. Pardon, my Lord, but according to our good priest, no one but the Pope is infallible, and Monsieur Marcassino may be mistaken. Marcassino is never mistaken, do you hear, you rascal! and in proof of it I can see from here the marks where the animal scratched up the ground. Nevertheless, my Lord, I assure you, I swear.... said Thibault, who saw the Baron s eyebrows contracting in a way that made him feel uneasy. Silence, and come here, blackguard! cried my lord. Thibault hesitated a moment, but the black look on the sportsman s face became more and more threatening, and fearing to increase his exasperation by disobeying his command, he thought he had better go forward, hoping that the Baron merely wished to ask a service of him. But it was an unlucky move on his part, for scarcely had he emerged from the protection of the shed, before the horse of the Lord of Vez, urged by bit and spur, gave a leap, which brought his rider swooping down upon Thibault, while at the same moment a furious blow from the butt end of the Baron s whip fell upon his head. The shoe-maker, stunned by the blow, tottered a moment, lost his balance and was about to fall face downwards, when the Baron, drawing his foot out of the stirrup, with a violent kick in the chest, not only straightened him again, but sent the poor wretch flying in an opposite direction, where he fell with his back against the door of his hut. Take that! said the Baron, as he first felled Thibault with his whip, and then kicked him, take that for your lie, and that for your banter! And then, without troubling himself any further about the man, whom he left lying on his back, the Lord of Vez, seeing that the hounds had rallied on hearing Marcassino s cry, gave them a cheery note on his horn, and cantered away. Thibault lifted himself up, feeling bruised all over, and began feeling himself from head to foot to make sure that no bones were broken. Having carefully passed his hand over each limb in succession, that s all right, he said, there is nothing broken either above or below, I am glad to find. So, my Lord Baron, that is how you treat people, because you happen to have married a Prince s bastard daughter! But let me tell you, my fine fellow, it is not you who will eat the buck you are hunting to-day; it will be this blackguard, this scoundrel, this simpleton of a Thibault who will eat it. Yes, it shall be I who eat it, that I vow! cried Thibault, confirming himself more and more in his bold resolution, and it is no use being a man if having once made a vow, one fails to keep it. So without further delay, Thibault thrust his bill-hook into his belt, seized his boar-spear, and after listening for a moment to the cry of the hounds to ascertain in which direction the hunt had gone, he ran off with all the speed of which a man s legs are capable to get the start of them, guessing by the curve which the stag and its pursuers were following what would be the straight line to take so as to intercept them. There were two ways of doing his deed open to Thibault; either to hide himself beside the path which the buck must take and kill him with his boar-spear, or else to surprise the animal just as he was being hunted down by the dogs, and collar him there and then. And as he ran, the desire to revenge himself on the Baron for the latter s brutality, was not so uppermost in Thibault s mind as the thoughts of the sumptuous manner in which he would fare for the next month, on the shoulders, the back, and the haunches of the deer, either salted to a turn, roasted on the spit, or cut in slices and done in the pan. And these two ideas, moreover, of vengeance and gluttony, were so jumbled up in his brain, that while still running at the top of his speed he laughed in his sleeve, as he pictured the dejected mien of the Baron and his men returning to the castle after their fruitless day s hunt, and at the same time saw himself seated at table, the door securely fastened, and a pint of wine beside him, t te- -t te with a haunch of the deer, the rich and delicious gravy escaping as the knife returned for a third or fourth cut. The deer, as far as Thibault could calculate, was making for the bridge which crosses the Ourcq, between Noroy and Troesne. At the time of which we are now speaking there was a bridge spanning the river, formed of two joists and a few planks. As the river was very high and very rapid, Thibault decided that the deer would not attempt to ford it; so he hid himself behind a rock, within reach of the bridge, and waited. It was not long before he saw the graceful head of the deer appear above the rock at some ten paces distance; the animal was bending its ears to the wind, in the endeavour to catch the sound of the enemy s approach as it was borne along the breeze. Thibault, excited by this sudden appearance, rose from behind the rock, poised his boar-spear and sent it flying towards the animal. The buck, with a single bound, reached the middle of the bridge, a second carried him on to the opposite bank, and a third bore him out of sight. The boar-spear had passed within a foot of the animal, and had buried itself in the grass fifteen paces from where Thibault was standing. Never before had he been known to make such an unskilful throw; he, Thibault, of all the company who made the tour of France, the one known to be surest of his aim! Enraged with himself, therefore, he picked up his weapon, and bounded across the bridge with an agility equal to that of the deer. Thibault knew the country quite as well as the animal he was pursuing, and so got ahead of the deer and once more concealed himself, this time behind a beech-tree, half-way up, and not too far from a little footpath. The deer now passed so close to him, that Thibault hesitated as to whether it would not be better to knock the animal down with his boar-spear than to throw the weapon at it; but his hesitation did not last longer than a flash of lightning, for no lightning could be quicker than the animal itself, which was already twenty paces off when Thibault threw his boar-spear, but without better luck than the time before. And now the baying of the hounds was drawing nearer and nearer; another few minutes, and it would, he felt, be impossible for him to carry out his design. But in honour to his spirit of persistence, be it said, that in proportion as the difficulty increased, the greater became Thibault s desire to get possession of the deer. I must have it, come what will, he cried, I must! and if there is a God who cares for the poor, I shall have satisfaction of this confounded Baron, who beat me as if I were a dog, but I am a man notwithstanding, and I am quite ready to prove the same to him. And Thibault picked up his boar-spear and once more set off running. But it would appear that the good God whom he had just invoked, either had not heard him, or wished to drive him to extremities, for his third attempt had no greater success than the previous ones. By Heaven! exclaimed Thibault, God Almighty is assuredly deaf, it seems Let the Devil then open his ears and hear me! In the name of God or of the Devil, I want you and I will have you, cursed animal! Thibault had hardly finished this double blasphemy when the buck, doubling back, passed close to him for the fourth time, and disappeared among the bushes, but so quickly and unexpectedly, that Thibault had not even time to lift his boar-spear. At that moment he heard the dogs so near him, that he deemed it would be imprudent to continue his pursuit. He looked round him, saw a thickly-leaved oak tree, threw his boar-spear into a bush, swarmed up the trunk, and hid himself among the foliage. He imagined, and with good reason, that since the deer had gone ahead again, the hunt would only pass by following on its track. The dogs had not lost the scent, in spite of the quarry s doublings, and they were not likely to lose it now. Thibault had not been seated among the branches for above five minutes, when first the hounds came into sight, then the Baron, who in spite of his fifty-five years, headed the chase as if he had been a man of twenty. It must be added that the Lord of Vez was in a state of rage that we will not even endeavour to describe. To lose four hours over a wretched deer and still to be running behind it! Such a thing had never happened to him before. He stormed at his men, he whipped his dogs, and had so ploughed his horse s sides with his spurs, that the thick coating of mud which covered his gaiters was reddened with blood. On reaching the bridge over the Ourcq, however, there had been an interval of alleviation for the Baron, for the hounds had so unanimously taken up the scent, that the cloak which the wolf-hunter carried behind him would have sufficed to cover the whole pack as they crossed the bridge. Indeed the Baron was so pleased, that he was not satisfied with humming a tirra-la, but, unslinging his hunting-horn he sounded it with his full lung-power, a thing which he only did on great occasions. But, unfortunately, the joy of my Lord of Vez was destined to be short lived. All of

garments

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you must know that this made the fifth or sixth time that the worthy Baron had started the animal in question, but never once had he been able to get within gun-shot of him or to run him down. Yes, Marcotte went on, but the damned beast has employed himself so well all night crossing his track and doubling, that after having traced him over half the forest, I found myself at the place from which I started. You think then, Marcotte, that there is no chance of getting near him. I am afraid not. By all the devils in hell! exclaimed the Lord of Vez, who had not had his equal in swearing since the mighty Nimrod, however, I am not feeling well to-day, and I must have a burst of some kind, to get rid of these bad humours. What do you think we can hunt, Marcotte, in place of this damned black wolf? Well, having been so taken up with the wolf, answered Marcotte, I have not traced any other animal. Will my Lord uncouple at random and hunt the first animal that we come across? The Baron was about to express his willingness to agree to this proposal when he caught sight of little Engoulevent coming towards them cap in hand. Wait a moment, he said, here comes Engoulevent, who, I fancy, has some advice to give us. I have no advice to give to a noble Lord like yourself, replied Engoulevent, assuming an expression of humility on his sly and crafty face; it is, however, my duty to inform you that there is a splendid buck in the neighbourhood. Let us see your buck, Engoulevent, replied the chief wolf-hunter, and if you are not mistaken about it, there will be a new crown for you. Where is this buck of yours? asked Marcotte, but look to your skin, if you make us uncouple to no purpose. Let me have Matador and Jupiter, and then we shall see. Matador and Jupiter were the finest among the hounds belonging to the Lord of Vez. And indeed, Engoulevent had not gone a hundred paces with them through the thicket, before, by the lashing of their tails, and their repeated yelping, he knew that they were on the right scent. In another minute or two a magnificent ten-tined stag came into view. Marcotte cried Tally-ho, sounded his horn, and the hunt began, to the great satisfaction of the Lord of Vez, who, although regretting the black wolf, was willing to make the best of a fine buck in its stead. The hunt had lasted two hours, and the quarry still held on. It had first led its pursuers from the little wood of Haramont to the Chemin du Pendu, and thence straight to the back of Oigny, and it still showed no sign of fatigue; for it was not one of those poor animals of the flat country who get their tails pulled by every wretched terrier. As it neared the low grounds of Bourg-fontaine, however, it evidently decided that it was being run rather hard, for it gave up the bolder measures which had hitherto enabled it to keep ahead, and began to double. Its first man uvre was to go down to the brook which joins the ponds of Baisemont and Bourg, then to walk against stream with the water up to its haunches, for nearly half a mile; it then sprang on to the right bank, back again into the bed of the stream, made another leap to the left, and with a succession of bounds, as vigorous as its failing strength allowed, continued to out-distance its pursuers. But the dogs of my lord Baron were not animals to be put out by such trifles as these. Being both sagacious and well-bred, they, of their own accord, divided the task between themselves, half going up stream, and half down, these hunting on the right those on the left, and so effectually that they ere long put the animal off its changes, for they soon recovered the scent, rallying at the first cry given by one of the pack, and starting afresh on the chase, as ready and eager as if the deer had been only twenty paces in front of them. And so with galloping of horses, with cry of hounds and blare of horn, the Baron and his huntsmen reached the ponds of Saint Antoine, a hundred paces or so from the Confines of Oigny. Between these and the Osier-beds stood the hut of Thibault, the sabot-maker. We must pause to give some description of this Thibault, the shoe-maker, the real hero of the tale. You will ask why I, who have summoned kings to appear upon the stage, who have obliged princes, dukes, and barons to play secondary parts in my romances, should take a simple shoe-maker for the hero of this tale. First, I will reply by saying that, in my dear home country of Villers-Cotterets, there are more sabot-makers than barons, dukes and princes, and that, as soon as I decided to make the forest the scene of the events I am about to record, I was obliged to choose one of the actual inhabitants of this forest as hero, unless I had wished to represent such fantastic persons as the _Incas_ of Marmontel or the _Abencerrages_ of M. de Florian. More than that, it is not the author who decides on the subject, but the subject which takes possession of the author, and, good or bad, this particular subject has taken possession of me. I will therefore endeavour to draw Thibault s portrait for you, plain shoe-maker as he was, as exactly as the artist paints the portrait which a prince desires to send to his lady-love. Thibault was a man between twenty-five and twenty-seven years of age, tall, well made, physically robust, but by nature melancholy and sad of heart. This depression of spirits arose from a little grain of envy, which, in spite of himself, perhaps unconsciously to himself, he harboured towards all such of his neighbours as had been more favoured by fortune than himself. His father had committed a fault, a serious one at all times, but more especially in those days of absolutism, when a man was not able to rise above his station as now-a-days, when with sufficient capacity he may attain to any rank. Thibault had been educated above his position; he had been at school under the Abb Fortier, at Villers-Cotterets, and had learnt to read, write, and cypher; moreover he knew a little Latin, which made him inordinately proud of himself. Thibault had spent a great part of his time in reading, and his books had been chiefly those which were in vogue at the close of the preceding century. But he had not been a sufficiently clever analyst to know how to separate the good from the bad, or rather he _had_ separated what was bad, and swallowed it in large doses, leaving the good to precipitate itself at the bottom of the glass. At twenty years of age Thibault had certainly had dreams of being something other than a sabot-maker. He had, for instance, for a very little while, cast his eyes towards the army. But his comrades who had worn the double livery of king and country, had left the service as they entered it, mere soldiers of the ranks, having failed during five or six years of slavery to obtain promotion, even to the not very exalted grade of corporal. Thibault had also thought of becoming a sailor. But a career in the navy was as much forbidden to the plebeian as one in the army. Possibly after enduring danger, and storm and battle for fifteen or twenty years, he might be made a boatswain s mate, that was all, and then! besides, it was by no means Thibault s ambition to wear a short vest and sail-cloth trousers, but the blue uniform of the king with red vest and gold epaulettes. He had moreover known of no single case in which the son of a mere shoe-maker had become Master of a Frigate, or even Lieutenant. So he was forced to give up all idea of joining the King s Navy. Thibault would not have minded being a Notary, and at one time thought of apprenticing himself to the Royal Scrivener, Ma tre Niquet, as a stepping-stone, and of making his way up on the strength of his own legs and with the help of his pen. But supposing him to have risen to the position of head clerk with a salary of a hundred crowns, where was he to find the thirty thousand francs which would be required for the purchase of the smallest village practice. There was, therefore, no better chance of his becoming a scrivener than of becoming an officer on sea or land. Meanwhile, Thibault s father died, leaving very little ready money. There was about enough to bury him, so he was buried, and this done, there remained some thirty or forty francs over for Thibault. Thibault knew his trade well; indeed, he was a first-rate workman; but he had no inclination to handle either auger or parer. It ended, therefore, by his leaving all his father s tools in the care of a friend, a remnant of prudence still remaining to him, and selling every vestige of furniture; having thus realised a sum of five hundred and forty livres, he determined to make what was then called the tour of France. Thibault spent three years in travelling; he did not make his fortune during that time, but he learnt a great many things in the course of his journey of which he was previously ignorant, and acquired certain accomplishments which he had previously been without. He learned amongst other things that, although it was as well to keep one s word on matters of business with a man, it was no use whatever keeping love vows made to a woman. So much for his character and habits of mind. As to his external accomplishments, he could dance a jig beautifully, could hold his own at quarter-staff against four men, and could handle the boar-spear as cleverly as the best huntsman going. All these things had not a little served to increase Thibault s natural self-esteem, and, seeing himself handsomer, stronger, and cleverer than many of the nobles, he would exclaim against Providence, crying, Why was I not nobly born? why was not that nobleman yonder born a peasant? But as Providence took care not to make any answer to these apostroph s, and as Thibault found that dancing, playing at quarter-staff, and throwing the boar-spear only fatigued the body, without procuring him any material advantage, he began to turn his thoughts towards his ancient trade, humble though it was, saying to himself, if it enabled the father to live, it would also enable the son. So Thibault went and fetched away his tools; and then, tools in hand, he went to ask permission of the Steward of his Royal Highness Louis Philippe of Orleans, to build a hut in the forest, in which to carry on his trade. He had no difficulty in obtaining this, for the steward knew by experience that his master was a very kind-hearted man, expending as much as two hundred and forty thousand francs a year on the poor; he felt sure, therefore, that one who gave away a sum like this, would be willing to let an honest workman who wished to ply his trade, have thirty or forty feet of ground. As he had leave to establish himself in whatever part of the forest he liked best, Thibault chose the spot near the osier-beds, where the roads crossed, one of the most beautiful parts of the woods, less than a mile from Oigny and about three times that distance from Villers-Cotterets. The shoe-maker put up his work-shop, built partly of old planks given him by M. Panisis, who had been having a sale in the neighbourhood, and partly of the branches which the steward gave him leave to cut in the forest. When the building of the hut, which consisted of a bedroom, cosily shut in, where he could work during the winter, and of a lean-to, open to the air, where he could work in the summer, was completed, Thibault began to think of making himself a bed. At first, a layer of fern had to serve for this purpose; but after he had made a hundred pairs of wooden shoes and had sold these to Bedeau, who kept a general shop at Villers-Cotterets, he was able to pay a sufficient deposit to get a mattress, to be paid for in full by the end of three months. The framework of the bed was not difficult to make; Thibault was not the shoe-maker he was without being a bit of a carpenter into the bargain, and when this was finished he plaited osiers to take the place of sacking, laid the mattress upon them, and found himself at last with a bed to lie upon. Little by little came the sheets, and then in their turn the coverlids; the next purchase was a chafing-dish, and earthenware pots to cook in, and finally some plates and dishes. Before the year was out Thibault had also made additions to his furniture of a fine oak chest and a fine walnut-wood cupboard, both, like the bed, his own handiwork. All the while he was driving a brisk trade, for none could beat Thibault in turning a block of beech into a pair of shoes, and in converting the odd chips into spoons, salt-cellars and natty little bowls. He had now been settled in his work-shop for three years, that is, ever since his return after the completion of his tour round France, and there was nothing for which anyone could have reproached him during this interval except the failing we have already mentioned--that he was rather more envious of the good fortune of his neighbour than was altogether conducive to the welfare of his soul. But this feeling was as yet so inoffensive, that his confessor had no need to do more than awaken in him a sense of shame for harbouring thoughts which had, so far, not resulted in any active crime. CHAPTER II THE SEIGNEUR JEAN AND THE SABOT-MAKER As already said, the buck began to dodge and double on reaching Oigny, turning and twisting round Thibault s hut, and the weather being fine although the autumn was well advanced, the shoe-maker was sitting at his work in his open lean-to. Looking up, he suddenly espied the trembling animal, quivering in every limb, standing a few paces in front of him, gazing at him with intelligent and terrified eyes. Thibault had been for a long time aware that the hunt was circling around Oigny, at one time drawing near to the village, and then receding, only to draw near again. There was nothing therefore very surprising to him in the sight of the buck, yet he stayed his hand, although he was busy at work, and contemplated the animal. Saint Sabot! he exclaimed--I should explain, that the festival of Saint Sabot is the wooden-shoe f te-- Saint Sabot! but that is a dainty morsel and would taste as fine, I warrant, as the chamois I ate at Vienne once at the grand banquet of the Jolly Shoe-makers of Dauphin . Lucky folk who can dine on the like every day. I tasted such once, it is now nearly four years ago, and my mouth waters now when I think of it. Oh! these lords! these lords! with their fresh meats and their old wines at every meal, while I have to be satisfied with potatoes to eat and water to drink from one week s end to the other; and it is a chance if even on Sunday, I can feast myself with a lump of rusty bacon and an old cabbage, and a glass of _pignolet_ fit to make my old goat stand on her head. It need scarcely be said, that as soon as Thibault began this monologue, the buck had turned and disappeared. Thibault had finished rounding his periods, and had just declaimed his peroration, when he heard himself roughly accosted in forcible terms: Ho, there, you scoundrel! answer me. It was the Baron, who seeing his dogs wavering, was anxious to make sure that they were not on the wrong scent. Ho, there, you scoundrel! repeated the wolf-hunter, have you seen the beast? There was evidently something in the manner of the Baron s questioning which did not please our philosophical shoe-maker, for although he was perfectly aware what was the matter, he answered: what beast? Curse you! why, the buck we are hunting! He must have passed close by here, and standing gaping as you do, you must have seen him. It was a fine stag of ten, was it not? Which way did he go? Speak up, you blackguard, or you shall have a taste of my stirrup-leather! The black plague take him, cub of a wolf! muttered the shoe-maker to himself. Then, aloud, with a fine air of pretended simplicity, Ah, yes! he said, I did see him. A buck, was it not? a ten-tiner, eh? with great horns. Ah, yes to be sure, a buck, with great horns,--or great corns, was it? yes, I saw him as plain as I see you, my Lord. But there, I can t say if he had any corns, for I did not look at his feet, anyhow, he added, with the air of a perfect simpleton, if he had corns, they did not prevent him running. At any other time the Baron would have laughed at what he might have taken for genuine stupidity; but the doublings of the animal were beginning to put him into a regular huntsman s fever. Now, then, you scoundrel, a truce to this jesting! If you are in a humour for jokes, it is more than I am! I will be in whatever humour it may please your Lordship I should be. Well, then, answer me. Your Lordship has asked me nothing as yet. Did the deer seem tired? Not very. Which way did he come? He did not come, he was standing still. Well, but he must have come from one side or the other. Ah! very likely, but I did not see him come. Which way did he go? I would tell you directly; only I did not see him go. The Lord of Vez cast an angry look at Thibault. Is it some while ago the buck passed this way, Master Simpleton? Not so very long, my Lord. About how long ago? Thibault made as if trying to remember; at last he replied: It was, I think, the day before yesterday, but in saying this, the shoe-maker, unfortunately, could not suppress a grin. This grin did not escape the Baron, who, spurring his horse, rode down on Thibault with lifted whip. Thibault was agile, and with a single bound he reached the shelter of his lean-to, whither the wolf-hunter could not follow, as long as he remained mounted; Thibault was therefore in momentary safety. You are only bantering and lying! cried the huntsman, for there is Marcassino, my best hound, giving cry not twenty yards off, and if the deer passed by where Marcassino is, he must have come over the hedge, and it is impossible, therefore, that you did not see him. Pardon, my Lord, but according to our good priest, no one but the Pope is infallible, and Monsieur Marcassino may be mistaken. Marcassino is never mistaken, do you hear, you rascal! and in proof of it I can see from here the marks where the animal scratched up the ground. Nevertheless, my Lord, I assure you, I swear.... said Thibault, who saw the Baron s eyebrows contracting in a way that made him feel uneasy. Silence, and come here, blackguard! cried my lord. Thibault hesitated a moment, but the black look on the sportsman s face became more and more threatening, and fearing to increase his exasperation by disobeying his command, he thought he had better go forward, hoping that the Baron merely wished to ask a service of him. But it was an unlucky move on his part, for scarcely had he emerged from the protection of the shed, before the horse of the Lord of Vez, urged by bit and spur, gave a leap, which brought his rider swooping down upon Thibault, while at the same moment a furious blow from the butt end of the Baron s whip fell upon his head. The shoe-maker, stunned by the blow, tottered a moment, lost his balance and was about to fall face downwards, when the Baron, drawing his foot out of the stirrup, with a violent kick in the chest, not only straightened him again, but sent the poor wretch flying in an opposite direction, where he fell with his back against the door of his hut. Take that! said the Baron, as he first felled Thibault with his whip, and then kicked him, take that for your lie, and that for your banter! And then, without troubling himself any further about the man, whom he left lying on his back, the Lord of Vez, seeing that the hounds had rallied on hearing Marcassino s cry, gave them a cheery note on his horn, and cantered away. Thibault lifted himself up, feeling bruised all over, and began feeling himself from head to foot to make sure that no bones were broken. Having carefully passed his hand over each limb in succession, that s all right, he said, there is nothing broken either above or below, I am glad to find. So, my Lord Baron, that is how you treat people, because you happen to have married a Prince s bastard daughter! But let me tell you, my fine fellow, it is not you who will eat the buck you are hunting to-day; it will be this blackguard, this scoundrel, this simpleton of a Thibault who will eat it. Yes, it shall be I who eat it, that I vow! cried Thibault, confirming himself more and more in his bold resolution, and it is no use being a man if having once made a vow, one fails to keep it. So without further delay, Thibault thrust his bill-hook into his belt, seized his boar-spear, and after listening for a moment to the cry of the hounds to ascertain in which direction the hunt had gone, he ran off with all the speed of which a man s legs are capable to get the start of them, guessing by the curve which the stag and its pursuers were following what would be the straight line to take so as to intercept them. There were two ways of doing his deed open to Thibault; either to hide himself beside the path which the buck must take and kill him with his boar-spear, or else to surprise the animal just as he was being hunted down by the dogs, and collar him there and then. And as he ran, the desire to revenge himself on the Baron for the latter s brutality, was not so uppermost in Thibault s mind as the thoughts of the sumptuous manner in which he would fare for the next month, on the shoulders, the back, and the haunches of the deer, either salted to a turn, roasted on the spit, or cut in slices and done in the pan. And these two ideas, moreover, of vengeance and gluttony, were so jumbled up in his brain, that while still running at the top of his speed he laughed in his sleeve, as he pictured the dejected mien of the Baron and his men returning to the castle after their fruitless day s hunt, and at the same time saw himself seated at table, the door securely fastened, and a pint of wine beside him, t te- -t te with a haunch of the deer, the rich and delicious gravy escaping as the knife returned for a third or fourth cut. The deer, as far as Thibault could calculate, was making for the bridge which crosses the Ourcq, between Noroy and Troesne. At the time of which we are now speaking there was a bridge spanning the river, formed of two joists and a few planks. As the river was very high and very rapid, Thibault decided that the deer would not attempt to ford it; so he hid himself behind a rock, within reach of the bridge, and waited. It was not long before he saw the graceful head of the deer appear above the rock at some ten paces distance; the animal was bending its ears to the wind, in the endeavour to catch the sound of the enemy s approach as it was borne along the breeze. Thibault, excited by this sudden appearance, rose from behind the rock, poised his boar-spear and sent it flying towards the animal. The buck, with a single bound, reached the middle of the bridge, a second carried him on to the opposite bank, and a third bore him out of sight. The boar-spear had passed within a foot of the animal, and had buried itself in the grass fifteen paces from where Thibault was standing. Never before had he been known to make such an unskilful throw; he, Thibault, of all the company who made the tour of France, the one known to be surest of his aim! Enraged with himself, therefore, he picked up his weapon, and bounded across the bridge with an agility equal to that of the deer. Thibault knew the country quite as well as the animal he was pursuing, and so got ahead of the deer and once more concealed himself, this time behind a beech-tree, half-way up, and not too far from a little footpath. The deer now passed so close to him, that Thibault hesitated as to whether it would not be better to knock the animal down with his boar-spear than to throw the weapon at it; but his hesitation did not last longer than a flash of lightning, for no lightning could be quicker than the animal itself, which was already twenty paces off when Thibault threw his boar-spear, but without better luck than the time before. And now the baying of the hounds was drawing nearer and nearer; another few minutes, and it would, he felt, be impossible for him to carry out his design. But in honour to his spirit of persistence, be it said, that in proportion as the difficulty increased, the greater became Thibault s desire to get possession of the deer. I must have it, come what will, he cried, I must! and if there is a God who cares for the poor, I shall have satisfaction of this confounded Baron, who beat me as if I were a dog, but I am a man notwithstanding, and I am quite ready to prove the same to him. And Thibault picked up his boar-spear and once more set off running. But it would appear that the good God whom he had just invoked, either had not heard him, or wished to drive him to extremities, for his third attempt had no greater success than the previous ones. By Heaven! exclaimed Thibault, God Almighty is assuredly deaf, it seems Let the Devil then open his ears and hear me! In the name of God or of the Devil, I want you and I will have you, cursed animal! Thibault had hardly finished this double blasphemy when the buck, doubling back, passed close to him for the fourth time, and disappeared among the bushes, but so quickly and unexpectedly, that Thibault had not even time to lift his boar-spear. At that moment he heard the dogs so near him, that he deemed it would be imprudent to continue his pursuit. He looked round him, saw a thickly-leaved oak tree, threw his boar-spear into a bush, swarmed up the trunk, and hid himself among the foliage. He imagined, and with good reason, that since the deer had gone ahead again, the hunt would only pass by following on its track. The dogs had not lost the scent, in spite of the quarry s doublings, and they were not likely to lose it now. Thibault had not been seated among the branches for above five minutes, when first the hounds came into sight, then the Baron, who in spite of his fifty-five years, headed the chase as if he had been a man of twenty. It must be added that the Lord of Vez was in a state of rage that we will not even endeavour to describe. To lose four hours over a wretched deer and still to be running behind it! Such a thing had never happened to him before. He stormed at his men, he whipped his dogs, and had so ploughed his horse s sides with his spurs, that the thick coating of mud which covered his gaiters was reddened with blood. On reaching the bridge over the Ourcq, however, there had been an interval of alleviation for the Baron, for the hounds had so unanimously taken up the scent, that the cloak which the wolf-hunter carried behind him would have sufficed to cover the whole pack as they crossed the bridge. Indeed the Baron was so pleased, that he was not satisfied with humming a tirra-la, but, unslinging his hunting-horn he sounded it with his full lung-power, a thing which he only did on great occasions. But, unfortunately, the joy of my Lord of Vez was destined to be short lived. All of

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How many times the word 'afresh' appears in the text?

you must know that this made the fifth or sixth time that the worthy Baron had started the animal in question, but never once had he been able to get within gun-shot of him or to run him down. Yes, Marcotte went on, but the damned beast has employed himself so well all night crossing his track and doubling, that after having traced him over half the forest, I found myself at the place from which I started. You think then, Marcotte, that there is no chance of getting near him. I am afraid not. By all the devils in hell! exclaimed the Lord of Vez, who had not had his equal in swearing since the mighty Nimrod, however, I am not feeling well to-day, and I must have a burst of some kind, to get rid of these bad humours. What do you think we can hunt, Marcotte, in place of this damned black wolf? Well, having been so taken up with the wolf, answered Marcotte, I have not traced any other animal. Will my Lord uncouple at random and hunt the first animal that we come across? The Baron was about to express his willingness to agree to this proposal when he caught sight of little Engoulevent coming towards them cap in hand. Wait a moment, he said, here comes Engoulevent, who, I fancy, has some advice to give us. I have no advice to give to a noble Lord like yourself, replied Engoulevent, assuming an expression of humility on his sly and crafty face; it is, however, my duty to inform you that there is a splendid buck in the neighbourhood. Let us see your buck, Engoulevent, replied the chief wolf-hunter, and if you are not mistaken about it, there will be a new crown for you. Where is this buck of yours? asked Marcotte, but look to your skin, if you make us uncouple to no purpose. Let me have Matador and Jupiter, and then we shall see. Matador and Jupiter were the finest among the hounds belonging to the Lord of Vez. And indeed, Engoulevent had not gone a hundred paces with them through the thicket, before, by the lashing of their tails, and their repeated yelping, he knew that they were on the right scent. In another minute or two a magnificent ten-tined stag came into view. Marcotte cried Tally-ho, sounded his horn, and the hunt began, to the great satisfaction of the Lord of Vez, who, although regretting the black wolf, was willing to make the best of a fine buck in its stead. The hunt had lasted two hours, and the quarry still held on. It had first led its pursuers from the little wood of Haramont to the Chemin du Pendu, and thence straight to the back of Oigny, and it still showed no sign of fatigue; for it was not one of those poor animals of the flat country who get their tails pulled by every wretched terrier. As it neared the low grounds of Bourg-fontaine, however, it evidently decided that it was being run rather hard, for it gave up the bolder measures which had hitherto enabled it to keep ahead, and began to double. Its first man uvre was to go down to the brook which joins the ponds of Baisemont and Bourg, then to walk against stream with the water up to its haunches, for nearly half a mile; it then sprang on to the right bank, back again into the bed of the stream, made another leap to the left, and with a succession of bounds, as vigorous as its failing strength allowed, continued to out-distance its pursuers. But the dogs of my lord Baron were not animals to be put out by such trifles as these. Being both sagacious and well-bred, they, of their own accord, divided the task between themselves, half going up stream, and half down, these hunting on the right those on the left, and so effectually that they ere long put the animal off its changes, for they soon recovered the scent, rallying at the first cry given by one of the pack, and starting afresh on the chase, as ready and eager as if the deer had been only twenty paces in front of them. And so with galloping of horses, with cry of hounds and blare of horn, the Baron and his huntsmen reached the ponds of Saint Antoine, a hundred paces or so from the Confines of Oigny. Between these and the Osier-beds stood the hut of Thibault, the sabot-maker. We must pause to give some description of this Thibault, the shoe-maker, the real hero of the tale. You will ask why I, who have summoned kings to appear upon the stage, who have obliged princes, dukes, and barons to play secondary parts in my romances, should take a simple shoe-maker for the hero of this tale. First, I will reply by saying that, in my dear home country of Villers-Cotterets, there are more sabot-makers than barons, dukes and princes, and that, as soon as I decided to make the forest the scene of the events I am about to record, I was obliged to choose one of the actual inhabitants of this forest as hero, unless I had wished to represent such fantastic persons as the _Incas_ of Marmontel or the _Abencerrages_ of M. de Florian. More than that, it is not the author who decides on the subject, but the subject which takes possession of the author, and, good or bad, this particular subject has taken possession of me. I will therefore endeavour to draw Thibault s portrait for you, plain shoe-maker as he was, as exactly as the artist paints the portrait which a prince desires to send to his lady-love. Thibault was a man between twenty-five and twenty-seven years of age, tall, well made, physically robust, but by nature melancholy and sad of heart. This depression of spirits arose from a little grain of envy, which, in spite of himself, perhaps unconsciously to himself, he harboured towards all such of his neighbours as had been more favoured by fortune than himself. His father had committed a fault, a serious one at all times, but more especially in those days of absolutism, when a man was not able to rise above his station as now-a-days, when with sufficient capacity he may attain to any rank. Thibault had been educated above his position; he had been at school under the Abb Fortier, at Villers-Cotterets, and had learnt to read, write, and cypher; moreover he knew a little Latin, which made him inordinately proud of himself. Thibault had spent a great part of his time in reading, and his books had been chiefly those which were in vogue at the close of the preceding century. But he had not been a sufficiently clever analyst to know how to separate the good from the bad, or rather he _had_ separated what was bad, and swallowed it in large doses, leaving the good to precipitate itself at the bottom of the glass. At twenty years of age Thibault had certainly had dreams of being something other than a sabot-maker. He had, for instance, for a very little while, cast his eyes towards the army. But his comrades who had worn the double livery of king and country, had left the service as they entered it, mere soldiers of the ranks, having failed during five or six years of slavery to obtain promotion, even to the not very exalted grade of corporal. Thibault had also thought of becoming a sailor. But a career in the navy was as much forbidden to the plebeian as one in the army. Possibly after enduring danger, and storm and battle for fifteen or twenty years, he might be made a boatswain s mate, that was all, and then! besides, it was by no means Thibault s ambition to wear a short vest and sail-cloth trousers, but the blue uniform of the king with red vest and gold epaulettes. He had moreover known of no single case in which the son of a mere shoe-maker had become Master of a Frigate, or even Lieutenant. So he was forced to give up all idea of joining the King s Navy. Thibault would not have minded being a Notary, and at one time thought of apprenticing himself to the Royal Scrivener, Ma tre Niquet, as a stepping-stone, and of making his way up on the strength of his own legs and with the help of his pen. But supposing him to have risen to the position of head clerk with a salary of a hundred crowns, where was he to find the thirty thousand francs which would be required for the purchase of the smallest village practice. There was, therefore, no better chance of his becoming a scrivener than of becoming an officer on sea or land. Meanwhile, Thibault s father died, leaving very little ready money. There was about enough to bury him, so he was buried, and this done, there remained some thirty or forty francs over for Thibault. Thibault knew his trade well; indeed, he was a first-rate workman; but he had no inclination to handle either auger or parer. It ended, therefore, by his leaving all his father s tools in the care of a friend, a remnant of prudence still remaining to him, and selling every vestige of furniture; having thus realised a sum of five hundred and forty livres, he determined to make what was then called the tour of France. Thibault spent three years in travelling; he did not make his fortune during that time, but he learnt a great many things in the course of his journey of which he was previously ignorant, and acquired certain accomplishments which he had previously been without. He learned amongst other things that, although it was as well to keep one s word on matters of business with a man, it was no use whatever keeping love vows made to a woman. So much for his character and habits of mind. As to his external accomplishments, he could dance a jig beautifully, could hold his own at quarter-staff against four men, and could handle the boar-spear as cleverly as the best huntsman going. All these things had not a little served to increase Thibault s natural self-esteem, and, seeing himself handsomer, stronger, and cleverer than many of the nobles, he would exclaim against Providence, crying, Why was I not nobly born? why was not that nobleman yonder born a peasant? But as Providence took care not to make any answer to these apostroph s, and as Thibault found that dancing, playing at quarter-staff, and throwing the boar-spear only fatigued the body, without procuring him any material advantage, he began to turn his thoughts towards his ancient trade, humble though it was, saying to himself, if it enabled the father to live, it would also enable the son. So Thibault went and fetched away his tools; and then, tools in hand, he went to ask permission of the Steward of his Royal Highness Louis Philippe of Orleans, to build a hut in the forest, in which to carry on his trade. He had no difficulty in obtaining this, for the steward knew by experience that his master was a very kind-hearted man, expending as much as two hundred and forty thousand francs a year on the poor; he felt sure, therefore, that one who gave away a sum like this, would be willing to let an honest workman who wished to ply his trade, have thirty or forty feet of ground. As he had leave to establish himself in whatever part of the forest he liked best, Thibault chose the spot near the osier-beds, where the roads crossed, one of the most beautiful parts of the woods, less than a mile from Oigny and about three times that distance from Villers-Cotterets. The shoe-maker put up his work-shop, built partly of old planks given him by M. Panisis, who had been having a sale in the neighbourhood, and partly of the branches which the steward gave him leave to cut in the forest. When the building of the hut, which consisted of a bedroom, cosily shut in, where he could work during the winter, and of a lean-to, open to the air, where he could work in the summer, was completed, Thibault began to think of making himself a bed. At first, a layer of fern had to serve for this purpose; but after he had made a hundred pairs of wooden shoes and had sold these to Bedeau, who kept a general shop at Villers-Cotterets, he was able to pay a sufficient deposit to get a mattress, to be paid for in full by the end of three months. The framework of the bed was not difficult to make; Thibault was not the shoe-maker he was without being a bit of a carpenter into the bargain, and when this was finished he plaited osiers to take the place of sacking, laid the mattress upon them, and found himself at last with a bed to lie upon. Little by little came the sheets, and then in their turn the coverlids; the next purchase was a chafing-dish, and earthenware pots to cook in, and finally some plates and dishes. Before the year was out Thibault had also made additions to his furniture of a fine oak chest and a fine walnut-wood cupboard, both, like the bed, his own handiwork. All the while he was driving a brisk trade, for none could beat Thibault in turning a block of beech into a pair of shoes, and in converting the odd chips into spoons, salt-cellars and natty little bowls. He had now been settled in his work-shop for three years, that is, ever since his return after the completion of his tour round France, and there was nothing for which anyone could have reproached him during this interval except the failing we have already mentioned--that he was rather more envious of the good fortune of his neighbour than was altogether conducive to the welfare of his soul. But this feeling was as yet so inoffensive, that his confessor had no need to do more than awaken in him a sense of shame for harbouring thoughts which had, so far, not resulted in any active crime. CHAPTER II THE SEIGNEUR JEAN AND THE SABOT-MAKER As already said, the buck began to dodge and double on reaching Oigny, turning and twisting round Thibault s hut, and the weather being fine although the autumn was well advanced, the shoe-maker was sitting at his work in his open lean-to. Looking up, he suddenly espied the trembling animal, quivering in every limb, standing a few paces in front of him, gazing at him with intelligent and terrified eyes. Thibault had been for a long time aware that the hunt was circling around Oigny, at one time drawing near to the village, and then receding, only to draw near again. There was nothing therefore very surprising to him in the sight of the buck, yet he stayed his hand, although he was busy at work, and contemplated the animal. Saint Sabot! he exclaimed--I should explain, that the festival of Saint Sabot is the wooden-shoe f te-- Saint Sabot! but that is a dainty morsel and would taste as fine, I warrant, as the chamois I ate at Vienne once at the grand banquet of the Jolly Shoe-makers of Dauphin . Lucky folk who can dine on the like every day. I tasted such once, it is now nearly four years ago, and my mouth waters now when I think of it. Oh! these lords! these lords! with their fresh meats and their old wines at every meal, while I have to be satisfied with potatoes to eat and water to drink from one week s end to the other; and it is a chance if even on Sunday, I can feast myself with a lump of rusty bacon and an old cabbage, and a glass of _pignolet_ fit to make my old goat stand on her head. It need scarcely be said, that as soon as Thibault began this monologue, the buck had turned and disappeared. Thibault had finished rounding his periods, and had just declaimed his peroration, when he heard himself roughly accosted in forcible terms: Ho, there, you scoundrel! answer me. It was the Baron, who seeing his dogs wavering, was anxious to make sure that they were not on the wrong scent. Ho, there, you scoundrel! repeated the wolf-hunter, have you seen the beast? There was evidently something in the manner of the Baron s questioning which did not please our philosophical shoe-maker, for although he was perfectly aware what was the matter, he answered: what beast? Curse you! why, the buck we are hunting! He must have passed close by here, and standing gaping as you do, you must have seen him. It was a fine stag of ten, was it not? Which way did he go? Speak up, you blackguard, or you shall have a taste of my stirrup-leather! The black plague take him, cub of a wolf! muttered the shoe-maker to himself. Then, aloud, with a fine air of pretended simplicity, Ah, yes! he said, I did see him. A buck, was it not? a ten-tiner, eh? with great horns. Ah, yes to be sure, a buck, with great horns,--or great corns, was it? yes, I saw him as plain as I see you, my Lord. But there, I can t say if he had any corns, for I did not look at his feet, anyhow, he added, with the air of a perfect simpleton, if he had corns, they did not prevent him running. At any other time the Baron would have laughed at what he might have taken for genuine stupidity; but the doublings of the animal were beginning to put him into a regular huntsman s fever. Now, then, you scoundrel, a truce to this jesting! If you are in a humour for jokes, it is more than I am! I will be in whatever humour it may please your Lordship I should be. Well, then, answer me. Your Lordship has asked me nothing as yet. Did the deer seem tired? Not very. Which way did he come? He did not come, he was standing still. Well, but he must have come from one side or the other. Ah! very likely, but I did not see him come. Which way did he go? I would tell you directly; only I did not see him go. The Lord of Vez cast an angry look at Thibault. Is it some while ago the buck passed this way, Master Simpleton? Not so very long, my Lord. About how long ago? Thibault made as if trying to remember; at last he replied: It was, I think, the day before yesterday, but in saying this, the shoe-maker, unfortunately, could not suppress a grin. This grin did not escape the Baron, who, spurring his horse, rode down on Thibault with lifted whip. Thibault was agile, and with a single bound he reached the shelter of his lean-to, whither the wolf-hunter could not follow, as long as he remained mounted; Thibault was therefore in momentary safety. You are only bantering and lying! cried the huntsman, for there is Marcassino, my best hound, giving cry not twenty yards off, and if the deer passed by where Marcassino is, he must have come over the hedge, and it is impossible, therefore, that you did not see him. Pardon, my Lord, but according to our good priest, no one but the Pope is infallible, and Monsieur Marcassino may be mistaken. Marcassino is never mistaken, do you hear, you rascal! and in proof of it I can see from here the marks where the animal scratched up the ground. Nevertheless, my Lord, I assure you, I swear.... said Thibault, who saw the Baron s eyebrows contracting in a way that made him feel uneasy. Silence, and come here, blackguard! cried my lord. Thibault hesitated a moment, but the black look on the sportsman s face became more and more threatening, and fearing to increase his exasperation by disobeying his command, he thought he had better go forward, hoping that the Baron merely wished to ask a service of him. But it was an unlucky move on his part, for scarcely had he emerged from the protection of the shed, before the horse of the Lord of Vez, urged by bit and spur, gave a leap, which brought his rider swooping down upon Thibault, while at the same moment a furious blow from the butt end of the Baron s whip fell upon his head. The shoe-maker, stunned by the blow, tottered a moment, lost his balance and was about to fall face downwards, when the Baron, drawing his foot out of the stirrup, with a violent kick in the chest, not only straightened him again, but sent the poor wretch flying in an opposite direction, where he fell with his back against the door of his hut. Take that! said the Baron, as he first felled Thibault with his whip, and then kicked him, take that for your lie, and that for your banter! And then, without troubling himself any further about the man, whom he left lying on his back, the Lord of Vez, seeing that the hounds had rallied on hearing Marcassino s cry, gave them a cheery note on his horn, and cantered away. Thibault lifted himself up, feeling bruised all over, and began feeling himself from head to foot to make sure that no bones were broken. Having carefully passed his hand over each limb in succession, that s all right, he said, there is nothing broken either above or below, I am glad to find. So, my Lord Baron, that is how you treat people, because you happen to have married a Prince s bastard daughter! But let me tell you, my fine fellow, it is not you who will eat the buck you are hunting to-day; it will be this blackguard, this scoundrel, this simpleton of a Thibault who will eat it. Yes, it shall be I who eat it, that I vow! cried Thibault, confirming himself more and more in his bold resolution, and it is no use being a man if having once made a vow, one fails to keep it. So without further delay, Thibault thrust his bill-hook into his belt, seized his boar-spear, and after listening for a moment to the cry of the hounds to ascertain in which direction the hunt had gone, he ran off with all the speed of which a man s legs are capable to get the start of them, guessing by the curve which the stag and its pursuers were following what would be the straight line to take so as to intercept them. There were two ways of doing his deed open to Thibault; either to hide himself beside the path which the buck must take and kill him with his boar-spear, or else to surprise the animal just as he was being hunted down by the dogs, and collar him there and then. And as he ran, the desire to revenge himself on the Baron for the latter s brutality, was not so uppermost in Thibault s mind as the thoughts of the sumptuous manner in which he would fare for the next month, on the shoulders, the back, and the haunches of the deer, either salted to a turn, roasted on the spit, or cut in slices and done in the pan. And these two ideas, moreover, of vengeance and gluttony, were so jumbled up in his brain, that while still running at the top of his speed he laughed in his sleeve, as he pictured the dejected mien of the Baron and his men returning to the castle after their fruitless day s hunt, and at the same time saw himself seated at table, the door securely fastened, and a pint of wine beside him, t te- -t te with a haunch of the deer, the rich and delicious gravy escaping as the knife returned for a third or fourth cut. The deer, as far as Thibault could calculate, was making for the bridge which crosses the Ourcq, between Noroy and Troesne. At the time of which we are now speaking there was a bridge spanning the river, formed of two joists and a few planks. As the river was very high and very rapid, Thibault decided that the deer would not attempt to ford it; so he hid himself behind a rock, within reach of the bridge, and waited. It was not long before he saw the graceful head of the deer appear above the rock at some ten paces distance; the animal was bending its ears to the wind, in the endeavour to catch the sound of the enemy s approach as it was borne along the breeze. Thibault, excited by this sudden appearance, rose from behind the rock, poised his boar-spear and sent it flying towards the animal. The buck, with a single bound, reached the middle of the bridge, a second carried him on to the opposite bank, and a third bore him out of sight. The boar-spear had passed within a foot of the animal, and had buried itself in the grass fifteen paces from where Thibault was standing. Never before had he been known to make such an unskilful throw; he, Thibault, of all the company who made the tour of France, the one known to be surest of his aim! Enraged with himself, therefore, he picked up his weapon, and bounded across the bridge with an agility equal to that of the deer. Thibault knew the country quite as well as the animal he was pursuing, and so got ahead of the deer and once more concealed himself, this time behind a beech-tree, half-way up, and not too far from a little footpath. The deer now passed so close to him, that Thibault hesitated as to whether it would not be better to knock the animal down with his boar-spear than to throw the weapon at it; but his hesitation did not last longer than a flash of lightning, for no lightning could be quicker than the animal itself, which was already twenty paces off when Thibault threw his boar-spear, but without better luck than the time before. And now the baying of the hounds was drawing nearer and nearer; another few minutes, and it would, he felt, be impossible for him to carry out his design. But in honour to his spirit of persistence, be it said, that in proportion as the difficulty increased, the greater became Thibault s desire to get possession of the deer. I must have it, come what will, he cried, I must! and if there is a God who cares for the poor, I shall have satisfaction of this confounded Baron, who beat me as if I were a dog, but I am a man notwithstanding, and I am quite ready to prove the same to him. And Thibault picked up his boar-spear and once more set off running. But it would appear that the good God whom he had just invoked, either had not heard him, or wished to drive him to extremities, for his third attempt had no greater success than the previous ones. By Heaven! exclaimed Thibault, God Almighty is assuredly deaf, it seems Let the Devil then open his ears and hear me! In the name of God or of the Devil, I want you and I will have you, cursed animal! Thibault had hardly finished this double blasphemy when the buck, doubling back, passed close to him for the fourth time, and disappeared among the bushes, but so quickly and unexpectedly, that Thibault had not even time to lift his boar-spear. At that moment he heard the dogs so near him, that he deemed it would be imprudent to continue his pursuit. He looked round him, saw a thickly-leaved oak tree, threw his boar-spear into a bush, swarmed up the trunk, and hid himself among the foliage. He imagined, and with good reason, that since the deer had gone ahead again, the hunt would only pass by following on its track. The dogs had not lost the scent, in spite of the quarry s doublings, and they were not likely to lose it now. Thibault had not been seated among the branches for above five minutes, when first the hounds came into sight, then the Baron, who in spite of his fifty-five years, headed the chase as if he had been a man of twenty. It must be added that the Lord of Vez was in a state of rage that we will not even endeavour to describe. To lose four hours over a wretched deer and still to be running behind it! Such a thing had never happened to him before. He stormed at his men, he whipped his dogs, and had so ploughed his horse s sides with his spurs, that the thick coating of mud which covered his gaiters was reddened with blood. On reaching the bridge over the Ourcq, however, there had been an interval of alleviation for the Baron, for the hounds had so unanimously taken up the scent, that the cloak which the wolf-hunter carried behind him would have sufficed to cover the whole pack as they crossed the bridge. Indeed the Baron was so pleased, that he was not satisfied with humming a tirra-la, but, unslinging his hunting-horn he sounded it with his full lung-power, a thing which he only did on great occasions. But, unfortunately, the joy of my Lord of Vez was destined to be short lived. All of

regardless

How many times the word 'regardless' appears in the text?

you must know that this made the fifth or sixth time that the worthy Baron had started the animal in question, but never once had he been able to get within gun-shot of him or to run him down. Yes, Marcotte went on, but the damned beast has employed himself so well all night crossing his track and doubling, that after having traced him over half the forest, I found myself at the place from which I started. You think then, Marcotte, that there is no chance of getting near him. I am afraid not. By all the devils in hell! exclaimed the Lord of Vez, who had not had his equal in swearing since the mighty Nimrod, however, I am not feeling well to-day, and I must have a burst of some kind, to get rid of these bad humours. What do you think we can hunt, Marcotte, in place of this damned black wolf? Well, having been so taken up with the wolf, answered Marcotte, I have not traced any other animal. Will my Lord uncouple at random and hunt the first animal that we come across? The Baron was about to express his willingness to agree to this proposal when he caught sight of little Engoulevent coming towards them cap in hand. Wait a moment, he said, here comes Engoulevent, who, I fancy, has some advice to give us. I have no advice to give to a noble Lord like yourself, replied Engoulevent, assuming an expression of humility on his sly and crafty face; it is, however, my duty to inform you that there is a splendid buck in the neighbourhood. Let us see your buck, Engoulevent, replied the chief wolf-hunter, and if you are not mistaken about it, there will be a new crown for you. Where is this buck of yours? asked Marcotte, but look to your skin, if you make us uncouple to no purpose. Let me have Matador and Jupiter, and then we shall see. Matador and Jupiter were the finest among the hounds belonging to the Lord of Vez. And indeed, Engoulevent had not gone a hundred paces with them through the thicket, before, by the lashing of their tails, and their repeated yelping, he knew that they were on the right scent. In another minute or two a magnificent ten-tined stag came into view. Marcotte cried Tally-ho, sounded his horn, and the hunt began, to the great satisfaction of the Lord of Vez, who, although regretting the black wolf, was willing to make the best of a fine buck in its stead. The hunt had lasted two hours, and the quarry still held on. It had first led its pursuers from the little wood of Haramont to the Chemin du Pendu, and thence straight to the back of Oigny, and it still showed no sign of fatigue; for it was not one of those poor animals of the flat country who get their tails pulled by every wretched terrier. As it neared the low grounds of Bourg-fontaine, however, it evidently decided that it was being run rather hard, for it gave up the bolder measures which had hitherto enabled it to keep ahead, and began to double. Its first man uvre was to go down to the brook which joins the ponds of Baisemont and Bourg, then to walk against stream with the water up to its haunches, for nearly half a mile; it then sprang on to the right bank, back again into the bed of the stream, made another leap to the left, and with a succession of bounds, as vigorous as its failing strength allowed, continued to out-distance its pursuers. But the dogs of my lord Baron were not animals to be put out by such trifles as these. Being both sagacious and well-bred, they, of their own accord, divided the task between themselves, half going up stream, and half down, these hunting on the right those on the left, and so effectually that they ere long put the animal off its changes, for they soon recovered the scent, rallying at the first cry given by one of the pack, and starting afresh on the chase, as ready and eager as if the deer had been only twenty paces in front of them. And so with galloping of horses, with cry of hounds and blare of horn, the Baron and his huntsmen reached the ponds of Saint Antoine, a hundred paces or so from the Confines of Oigny. Between these and the Osier-beds stood the hut of Thibault, the sabot-maker. We must pause to give some description of this Thibault, the shoe-maker, the real hero of the tale. You will ask why I, who have summoned kings to appear upon the stage, who have obliged princes, dukes, and barons to play secondary parts in my romances, should take a simple shoe-maker for the hero of this tale. First, I will reply by saying that, in my dear home country of Villers-Cotterets, there are more sabot-makers than barons, dukes and princes, and that, as soon as I decided to make the forest the scene of the events I am about to record, I was obliged to choose one of the actual inhabitants of this forest as hero, unless I had wished to represent such fantastic persons as the _Incas_ of Marmontel or the _Abencerrages_ of M. de Florian. More than that, it is not the author who decides on the subject, but the subject which takes possession of the author, and, good or bad, this particular subject has taken possession of me. I will therefore endeavour to draw Thibault s portrait for you, plain shoe-maker as he was, as exactly as the artist paints the portrait which a prince desires to send to his lady-love. Thibault was a man between twenty-five and twenty-seven years of age, tall, well made, physically robust, but by nature melancholy and sad of heart. This depression of spirits arose from a little grain of envy, which, in spite of himself, perhaps unconsciously to himself, he harboured towards all such of his neighbours as had been more favoured by fortune than himself. His father had committed a fault, a serious one at all times, but more especially in those days of absolutism, when a man was not able to rise above his station as now-a-days, when with sufficient capacity he may attain to any rank. Thibault had been educated above his position; he had been at school under the Abb Fortier, at Villers-Cotterets, and had learnt to read, write, and cypher; moreover he knew a little Latin, which made him inordinately proud of himself. Thibault had spent a great part of his time in reading, and his books had been chiefly those which were in vogue at the close of the preceding century. But he had not been a sufficiently clever analyst to know how to separate the good from the bad, or rather he _had_ separated what was bad, and swallowed it in large doses, leaving the good to precipitate itself at the bottom of the glass. At twenty years of age Thibault had certainly had dreams of being something other than a sabot-maker. He had, for instance, for a very little while, cast his eyes towards the army. But his comrades who had worn the double livery of king and country, had left the service as they entered it, mere soldiers of the ranks, having failed during five or six years of slavery to obtain promotion, even to the not very exalted grade of corporal. Thibault had also thought of becoming a sailor. But a career in the navy was as much forbidden to the plebeian as one in the army. Possibly after enduring danger, and storm and battle for fifteen or twenty years, he might be made a boatswain s mate, that was all, and then! besides, it was by no means Thibault s ambition to wear a short vest and sail-cloth trousers, but the blue uniform of the king with red vest and gold epaulettes. He had moreover known of no single case in which the son of a mere shoe-maker had become Master of a Frigate, or even Lieutenant. So he was forced to give up all idea of joining the King s Navy. Thibault would not have minded being a Notary, and at one time thought of apprenticing himself to the Royal Scrivener, Ma tre Niquet, as a stepping-stone, and of making his way up on the strength of his own legs and with the help of his pen. But supposing him to have risen to the position of head clerk with a salary of a hundred crowns, where was he to find the thirty thousand francs which would be required for the purchase of the smallest village practice. There was, therefore, no better chance of his becoming a scrivener than of becoming an officer on sea or land. Meanwhile, Thibault s father died, leaving very little ready money. There was about enough to bury him, so he was buried, and this done, there remained some thirty or forty francs over for Thibault. Thibault knew his trade well; indeed, he was a first-rate workman; but he had no inclination to handle either auger or parer. It ended, therefore, by his leaving all his father s tools in the care of a friend, a remnant of prudence still remaining to him, and selling every vestige of furniture; having thus realised a sum of five hundred and forty livres, he determined to make what was then called the tour of France. Thibault spent three years in travelling; he did not make his fortune during that time, but he learnt a great many things in the course of his journey of which he was previously ignorant, and acquired certain accomplishments which he had previously been without. He learned amongst other things that, although it was as well to keep one s word on matters of business with a man, it was no use whatever keeping love vows made to a woman. So much for his character and habits of mind. As to his external accomplishments, he could dance a jig beautifully, could hold his own at quarter-staff against four men, and could handle the boar-spear as cleverly as the best huntsman going. All these things had not a little served to increase Thibault s natural self-esteem, and, seeing himself handsomer, stronger, and cleverer than many of the nobles, he would exclaim against Providence, crying, Why was I not nobly born? why was not that nobleman yonder born a peasant? But as Providence took care not to make any answer to these apostroph s, and as Thibault found that dancing, playing at quarter-staff, and throwing the boar-spear only fatigued the body, without procuring him any material advantage, he began to turn his thoughts towards his ancient trade, humble though it was, saying to himself, if it enabled the father to live, it would also enable the son. So Thibault went and fetched away his tools; and then, tools in hand, he went to ask permission of the Steward of his Royal Highness Louis Philippe of Orleans, to build a hut in the forest, in which to carry on his trade. He had no difficulty in obtaining this, for the steward knew by experience that his master was a very kind-hearted man, expending as much as two hundred and forty thousand francs a year on the poor; he felt sure, therefore, that one who gave away a sum like this, would be willing to let an honest workman who wished to ply his trade, have thirty or forty feet of ground. As he had leave to establish himself in whatever part of the forest he liked best, Thibault chose the spot near the osier-beds, where the roads crossed, one of the most beautiful parts of the woods, less than a mile from Oigny and about three times that distance from Villers-Cotterets. The shoe-maker put up his work-shop, built partly of old planks given him by M. Panisis, who had been having a sale in the neighbourhood, and partly of the branches which the steward gave him leave to cut in the forest. When the building of the hut, which consisted of a bedroom, cosily shut in, where he could work during the winter, and of a lean-to, open to the air, where he could work in the summer, was completed, Thibault began to think of making himself a bed. At first, a layer of fern had to serve for this purpose; but after he had made a hundred pairs of wooden shoes and had sold these to Bedeau, who kept a general shop at Villers-Cotterets, he was able to pay a sufficient deposit to get a mattress, to be paid for in full by the end of three months. The framework of the bed was not difficult to make; Thibault was not the shoe-maker he was without being a bit of a carpenter into the bargain, and when this was finished he plaited osiers to take the place of sacking, laid the mattress upon them, and found himself at last with a bed to lie upon. Little by little came the sheets, and then in their turn the coverlids; the next purchase was a chafing-dish, and earthenware pots to cook in, and finally some plates and dishes. Before the year was out Thibault had also made additions to his furniture of a fine oak chest and a fine walnut-wood cupboard, both, like the bed, his own handiwork. All the while he was driving a brisk trade, for none could beat Thibault in turning a block of beech into a pair of shoes, and in converting the odd chips into spoons, salt-cellars and natty little bowls. He had now been settled in his work-shop for three years, that is, ever since his return after the completion of his tour round France, and there was nothing for which anyone could have reproached him during this interval except the failing we have already mentioned--that he was rather more envious of the good fortune of his neighbour than was altogether conducive to the welfare of his soul. But this feeling was as yet so inoffensive, that his confessor had no need to do more than awaken in him a sense of shame for harbouring thoughts which had, so far, not resulted in any active crime. CHAPTER II THE SEIGNEUR JEAN AND THE SABOT-MAKER As already said, the buck began to dodge and double on reaching Oigny, turning and twisting round Thibault s hut, and the weather being fine although the autumn was well advanced, the shoe-maker was sitting at his work in his open lean-to. Looking up, he suddenly espied the trembling animal, quivering in every limb, standing a few paces in front of him, gazing at him with intelligent and terrified eyes. Thibault had been for a long time aware that the hunt was circling around Oigny, at one time drawing near to the village, and then receding, only to draw near again. There was nothing therefore very surprising to him in the sight of the buck, yet he stayed his hand, although he was busy at work, and contemplated the animal. Saint Sabot! he exclaimed--I should explain, that the festival of Saint Sabot is the wooden-shoe f te-- Saint Sabot! but that is a dainty morsel and would taste as fine, I warrant, as the chamois I ate at Vienne once at the grand banquet of the Jolly Shoe-makers of Dauphin . Lucky folk who can dine on the like every day. I tasted such once, it is now nearly four years ago, and my mouth waters now when I think of it. Oh! these lords! these lords! with their fresh meats and their old wines at every meal, while I have to be satisfied with potatoes to eat and water to drink from one week s end to the other; and it is a chance if even on Sunday, I can feast myself with a lump of rusty bacon and an old cabbage, and a glass of _pignolet_ fit to make my old goat stand on her head. It need scarcely be said, that as soon as Thibault began this monologue, the buck had turned and disappeared. Thibault had finished rounding his periods, and had just declaimed his peroration, when he heard himself roughly accosted in forcible terms: Ho, there, you scoundrel! answer me. It was the Baron, who seeing his dogs wavering, was anxious to make sure that they were not on the wrong scent. Ho, there, you scoundrel! repeated the wolf-hunter, have you seen the beast? There was evidently something in the manner of the Baron s questioning which did not please our philosophical shoe-maker, for although he was perfectly aware what was the matter, he answered: what beast? Curse you! why, the buck we are hunting! He must have passed close by here, and standing gaping as you do, you must have seen him. It was a fine stag of ten, was it not? Which way did he go? Speak up, you blackguard, or you shall have a taste of my stirrup-leather! The black plague take him, cub of a wolf! muttered the shoe-maker to himself. Then, aloud, with a fine air of pretended simplicity, Ah, yes! he said, I did see him. A buck, was it not? a ten-tiner, eh? with great horns. Ah, yes to be sure, a buck, with great horns,--or great corns, was it? yes, I saw him as plain as I see you, my Lord. But there, I can t say if he had any corns, for I did not look at his feet, anyhow, he added, with the air of a perfect simpleton, if he had corns, they did not prevent him running. At any other time the Baron would have laughed at what he might have taken for genuine stupidity; but the doublings of the animal were beginning to put him into a regular huntsman s fever. Now, then, you scoundrel, a truce to this jesting! If you are in a humour for jokes, it is more than I am! I will be in whatever humour it may please your Lordship I should be. Well, then, answer me. Your Lordship has asked me nothing as yet. Did the deer seem tired? Not very. Which way did he come? He did not come, he was standing still. Well, but he must have come from one side or the other. Ah! very likely, but I did not see him come. Which way did he go? I would tell you directly; only I did not see him go. The Lord of Vez cast an angry look at Thibault. Is it some while ago the buck passed this way, Master Simpleton? Not so very long, my Lord. About how long ago? Thibault made as if trying to remember; at last he replied: It was, I think, the day before yesterday, but in saying this, the shoe-maker, unfortunately, could not suppress a grin. This grin did not escape the Baron, who, spurring his horse, rode down on Thibault with lifted whip. Thibault was agile, and with a single bound he reached the shelter of his lean-to, whither the wolf-hunter could not follow, as long as he remained mounted; Thibault was therefore in momentary safety. You are only bantering and lying! cried the huntsman, for there is Marcassino, my best hound, giving cry not twenty yards off, and if the deer passed by where Marcassino is, he must have come over the hedge, and it is impossible, therefore, that you did not see him. Pardon, my Lord, but according to our good priest, no one but the Pope is infallible, and Monsieur Marcassino may be mistaken. Marcassino is never mistaken, do you hear, you rascal! and in proof of it I can see from here the marks where the animal scratched up the ground. Nevertheless, my Lord, I assure you, I swear.... said Thibault, who saw the Baron s eyebrows contracting in a way that made him feel uneasy. Silence, and come here, blackguard! cried my lord. Thibault hesitated a moment, but the black look on the sportsman s face became more and more threatening, and fearing to increase his exasperation by disobeying his command, he thought he had better go forward, hoping that the Baron merely wished to ask a service of him. But it was an unlucky move on his part, for scarcely had he emerged from the protection of the shed, before the horse of the Lord of Vez, urged by bit and spur, gave a leap, which brought his rider swooping down upon Thibault, while at the same moment a furious blow from the butt end of the Baron s whip fell upon his head. The shoe-maker, stunned by the blow, tottered a moment, lost his balance and was about to fall face downwards, when the Baron, drawing his foot out of the stirrup, with a violent kick in the chest, not only straightened him again, but sent the poor wretch flying in an opposite direction, where he fell with his back against the door of his hut. Take that! said the Baron, as he first felled Thibault with his whip, and then kicked him, take that for your lie, and that for your banter! And then, without troubling himself any further about the man, whom he left lying on his back, the Lord of Vez, seeing that the hounds had rallied on hearing Marcassino s cry, gave them a cheery note on his horn, and cantered away. Thibault lifted himself up, feeling bruised all over, and began feeling himself from head to foot to make sure that no bones were broken. Having carefully passed his hand over each limb in succession, that s all right, he said, there is nothing broken either above or below, I am glad to find. So, my Lord Baron, that is how you treat people, because you happen to have married a Prince s bastard daughter! But let me tell you, my fine fellow, it is not you who will eat the buck you are hunting to-day; it will be this blackguard, this scoundrel, this simpleton of a Thibault who will eat it. Yes, it shall be I who eat it, that I vow! cried Thibault, confirming himself more and more in his bold resolution, and it is no use being a man if having once made a vow, one fails to keep it. So without further delay, Thibault thrust his bill-hook into his belt, seized his boar-spear, and after listening for a moment to the cry of the hounds to ascertain in which direction the hunt had gone, he ran off with all the speed of which a man s legs are capable to get the start of them, guessing by the curve which the stag and its pursuers were following what would be the straight line to take so as to intercept them. There were two ways of doing his deed open to Thibault; either to hide himself beside the path which the buck must take and kill him with his boar-spear, or else to surprise the animal just as he was being hunted down by the dogs, and collar him there and then. And as he ran, the desire to revenge himself on the Baron for the latter s brutality, was not so uppermost in Thibault s mind as the thoughts of the sumptuous manner in which he would fare for the next month, on the shoulders, the back, and the haunches of the deer, either salted to a turn, roasted on the spit, or cut in slices and done in the pan. And these two ideas, moreover, of vengeance and gluttony, were so jumbled up in his brain, that while still running at the top of his speed he laughed in his sleeve, as he pictured the dejected mien of the Baron and his men returning to the castle after their fruitless day s hunt, and at the same time saw himself seated at table, the door securely fastened, and a pint of wine beside him, t te- -t te with a haunch of the deer, the rich and delicious gravy escaping as the knife returned for a third or fourth cut. The deer, as far as Thibault could calculate, was making for the bridge which crosses the Ourcq, between Noroy and Troesne. At the time of which we are now speaking there was a bridge spanning the river, formed of two joists and a few planks. As the river was very high and very rapid, Thibault decided that the deer would not attempt to ford it; so he hid himself behind a rock, within reach of the bridge, and waited. It was not long before he saw the graceful head of the deer appear above the rock at some ten paces distance; the animal was bending its ears to the wind, in the endeavour to catch the sound of the enemy s approach as it was borne along the breeze. Thibault, excited by this sudden appearance, rose from behind the rock, poised his boar-spear and sent it flying towards the animal. The buck, with a single bound, reached the middle of the bridge, a second carried him on to the opposite bank, and a third bore him out of sight. The boar-spear had passed within a foot of the animal, and had buried itself in the grass fifteen paces from where Thibault was standing. Never before had he been known to make such an unskilful throw; he, Thibault, of all the company who made the tour of France, the one known to be surest of his aim! Enraged with himself, therefore, he picked up his weapon, and bounded across the bridge with an agility equal to that of the deer. Thibault knew the country quite as well as the animal he was pursuing, and so got ahead of the deer and once more concealed himself, this time behind a beech-tree, half-way up, and not too far from a little footpath. The deer now passed so close to him, that Thibault hesitated as to whether it would not be better to knock the animal down with his boar-spear than to throw the weapon at it; but his hesitation did not last longer than a flash of lightning, for no lightning could be quicker than the animal itself, which was already twenty paces off when Thibault threw his boar-spear, but without better luck than the time before. And now the baying of the hounds was drawing nearer and nearer; another few minutes, and it would, he felt, be impossible for him to carry out his design. But in honour to his spirit of persistence, be it said, that in proportion as the difficulty increased, the greater became Thibault s desire to get possession of the deer. I must have it, come what will, he cried, I must! and if there is a God who cares for the poor, I shall have satisfaction of this confounded Baron, who beat me as if I were a dog, but I am a man notwithstanding, and I am quite ready to prove the same to him. And Thibault picked up his boar-spear and once more set off running. But it would appear that the good God whom he had just invoked, either had not heard him, or wished to drive him to extremities, for his third attempt had no greater success than the previous ones. By Heaven! exclaimed Thibault, God Almighty is assuredly deaf, it seems Let the Devil then open his ears and hear me! In the name of God or of the Devil, I want you and I will have you, cursed animal! Thibault had hardly finished this double blasphemy when the buck, doubling back, passed close to him for the fourth time, and disappeared among the bushes, but so quickly and unexpectedly, that Thibault had not even time to lift his boar-spear. At that moment he heard the dogs so near him, that he deemed it would be imprudent to continue his pursuit. He looked round him, saw a thickly-leaved oak tree, threw his boar-spear into a bush, swarmed up the trunk, and hid himself among the foliage. He imagined, and with good reason, that since the deer had gone ahead again, the hunt would only pass by following on its track. The dogs had not lost the scent, in spite of the quarry s doublings, and they were not likely to lose it now. Thibault had not been seated among the branches for above five minutes, when first the hounds came into sight, then the Baron, who in spite of his fifty-five years, headed the chase as if he had been a man of twenty. It must be added that the Lord of Vez was in a state of rage that we will not even endeavour to describe. To lose four hours over a wretched deer and still to be running behind it! Such a thing had never happened to him before. He stormed at his men, he whipped his dogs, and had so ploughed his horse s sides with his spurs, that the thick coating of mud which covered his gaiters was reddened with blood. On reaching the bridge over the Ourcq, however, there had been an interval of alleviation for the Baron, for the hounds had so unanimously taken up the scent, that the cloak which the wolf-hunter carried behind him would have sufficed to cover the whole pack as they crossed the bridge. Indeed the Baron was so pleased, that he was not satisfied with humming a tirra-la, but, unslinging his hunting-horn he sounded it with his full lung-power, a thing which he only did on great occasions. But, unfortunately, the joy of my Lord of Vez was destined to be short lived. All of

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you to-morrow--there's no question of ten years!" cried Mrs. Rooth with a comicality of plainness. Miriam smiled at Nick, deprecating his horror of such talk. "Isn't it droll, the way she can't get it out of her head?" Then turning almost coaxingly to the old woman: "_Voyons_, look about you: they don't marry us like that." "But they do--_cela se voit tous les jours_. Ask Mr. Dormer." "Oh never! It would be as if I asked him to give us a practical proof." "I shall never prove anything by marrying any one," Nick said. "For me that question's over." Miriam rested kind eyes on him. "Dear me, how you must hate me!" And before he had time to reply she went on to her mother: "People marry them to make them leave the stage; which proves exactly what I say." "Ah they offer them the finest positions," reasoned Mrs. Rooth. "Do you want me to leave it then?" "Oh you can manage if you will!" "The only managing I know anything about is to do my work. If I manage that decently I shall pull through." "But, dearest, may our work not be of many sorts?" "I only know one," said Miriam. At this her mother got up with a sigh. "I see you do wish to drive me into the street." "Mamma's bewildered--there are so many paths she wants to follow, there are so many bundles of hay. As I told you, she wishes to gobble them all," the girl pursued. Then she added: "Yes, go and take the carriage; take a turn round the Park--you always delight in that--and come back for me in an hour." "I'm too vexed with you; the air will do me good," said Mrs. Rooth. But before she went she addressed Nick: "I've your assurance that you'll bring him then to-night?" "Bring Peter? I don't think I shall have to drag him," Nick returned. "But you must do me the justice to remember that if I should resort to force I should do something that's not particularly in my interest--I should be magnanimous." "We must always be that, mustn't we?" moralised Mrs. Rooth. "How could it affect your interest?" Miriam asked less abstractedly. "Yes, as you say," her mother mused at their host, "the question of marriage has ceased to exist for you." "Mamma goes straight at it!" laughed the girl, getting up while Nick rubbed his canvas before answering. Miriam went to mamma and settled her bonnet and mantle in preparation for her drive, then stood a moment with a filial arm about her and as if waiting for their friend's explanation. This, however, when it came halted visibly. "Why you said a while ago that if Peter was there you wouldn't act." "I'll act for _him_," smiled Miriam, inconsequently caressing her mother. "It doesn't matter whom it's for!" Mrs. Rooth declared sagaciously. "Take your drive and relax your mind," said the girl, kissing her. "Come for me in an hour; not later--but not sooner." She went with her to the door, bundled her out, closed it behind her and came back to the position she had quitted. "_This_ is the peace I want!" she gratefully cried as she settled into it. XLV Peter Sherringham said so little during the performance that his companion was struck by his dumbness, especially as Miriam's acting seemed to Nick magnificent. He held his breath while she was on the stage--she gave the whole thing, including the spectator's emotion, such a lift. She had not carried out her fantastic menace of not exerting herself, and, as Mrs. Rooth had said, it little mattered for whom she acted. Nick was conscious in watching her that she went through it all for herself, for the idea that possessed her and that she rendered with extraordinary breadth. She couldn't open the door a part of the way to it and let it simply peep in; if it entered at all it must enter in full procession and occupy the premises in state. This was what had happened on an occasion which, as the less tormented of our young men felt in his stall, grew larger with each throb of the responsive house; till by the time the play was half over it appeared to stretch out wide arms to the future. Nick had often heard more applause, but had never heard more attention, since they were all charmed and hushed together and success seemed to be sitting down with them. There had been of course plenty of announcement--the newspapers had abounded and the arts of the manager had taken the freest license; but it was easy to feel a fine, universal consensus and to recognise everywhere the light spring of hope. People snatched their eyes from the stage an instant to look at each other, all eager to hand on the torch passed to them by the actress over the footlights. It was a part of the impression that she was now only showing to the full, for this time she had verse to deal with and she made it unexpectedly exquisite. She was beauty, melody, truth; she was passion and persuasion and tenderness. She caught up the obstreperous play in soothing, entwining arms and, seeming to tread the air in the flutter of her robe, carried it into the high places of poetry, of art, of style. And she had such tones of nature, such concealments of art, such effusions of life, that the whole scene glowed with the colour she communicated, and the house, pervaded with rosy fire, glowed back at the scene. Nick looked round in the intervals; he felt excited and flushed--the night had turned to a feast of fraternity and he expected to see people embrace each other. The crowd, the agitation, the triumph, the surprise, the signals and rumours, the heated air, his associates, near him, pointing out other figures who presumably were celebrated but whom he had never heard of, all amused him and banished every impulse to question or to compare. Miriam was as happy as some right sensation--she would have fed the memory with deep draughts. One of the things that amused him or at least helped to fill his attention was Peter's attitude, which apparently didn't exclude criticism--rather indeed mainly implied it. This admirer never took his eyes off the actress, but he made no remark about her and never stirred out of his chair. Nick had had from the first a plan of going round to speak to her, but as his companion evidently meant not to move he scrupled at being more forward. During their brief dinner together--they were determined not to be late--Peter had been silent, quite recklessly grave, but also, his kinsman judged, full of the wish to make it clear he was calm. In his seat he was calmer than ever and had an air even of trying to suggest that his attendance, preoccupied as he was with deeper solemnities, was more or less mechanical, the result of a conception of duty, a habit of courtesy. When during a scene in the second act--a scene from which Miriam was absent--Nick observed to him that one might judge from his reserve that he wasn't pleased he replied after a moment: "I've been looking for her mistakes." And when Nick made answer to this that he certainly wouldn't find them he said again in an odd tone: "No, I shan't find them--I shan't find them." It might have seemed that since the girl's performance was a dazzling success he regarded his evening as rather a failure. After the third act Nick said candidly: "My dear fellow, how can you sit here? Aren't you going to speak to her?" To which Peter replied inscrutably: "Lord, no, never again. I bade her good-bye yesterday. She knows what I think of her form. It's very good, but she carries it a little too far. Besides, she didn't want me to come, and it's therefore more discreet to keep away from her." "Surely it isn't an hour for discretion!" Nick cried. "Excuse me at any rate for five minutes." He went behind and reappeared only as the curtain was rising on the fourth act; and in the interval between the fourth and the fifth he went again for a shorter time. Peter was personally detached, but he consented to listen to his companion's vivid account of the state of things on the stage, where the elation of victory had lighted up the place. The strain was over, the ship in port--they were all wiping their faces and grinning. Miriam--yes, positively--was grinning too, and she hadn't asked a question about Peter nor sent him a message. They were kissing all round and dancing for joy. They were on the eve, worse luck, of a tremendous run. Peter groaned irrepressibly for this; it was, save for a slight sign a moment later, the only vibration caused in him by his cousin's report. There was but one voice of regret that they hadn't put on the piece earlier, as the end of the season would interrupt the run. There was but one voice too about the fourth act--it was believed all London would rush to see the fourth act. The crowd about her was a dozen deep and Miriam in the midst of it all charming; she was receiving in the ugly place after the fashion of royalty, almost as hedged with the famous "divinity," yet with a smile and a word for each. She was really like a young queen on her accession. When she saw him, Nick, she had kissed her hand to him over the heads of the courtiers. Nick's artless comment on this was that she had such pretty manners. It made Peter laugh--apparently at his friend's conception of the manners of a young queen. Mrs. Rooth, with a dozen shawls on her arm, was as red as the kitchen-fire, but you couldn't tell if Miriam were red or pale: she was so cleverly, finely made up--perhaps a little too much. Dashwood of course was greatly to the fore, but you hadn't to mention his own performance to him: he took it all handsomely and wouldn't hear of anything but that _her_ fortune was made. He didn't say much indeed, but evidently had ideas about her fortune; he nodded significant things and whistled inimitable sounds--"Heuh, heuh!" He was perfectly satisfied; moreover, he looked further ahead than any one. It was on coming back to his place after the fourth act that Nick put in, for his companion's benefit, most of these touches in his sketch of the situation. If Peter had continued to look for Miriam's mistakes he hadn't yet found them: the fourth act, bristling with dangers, putting a premium on every sort of cheap effect, had rounded itself without a flaw. Sitting there alone while Nick was away he had leisure to meditate on the wonder of this--on the art with which the girl had separated passion from violence, filling the whole place and never screaming; for it had often seemed to him in London of old that the yell of theatrical emotion rang through the shrinking night like the voice of the Sunday newsboy. Miriam had never been more present to him than at this hour; but she was inextricably transmuted--present essentially as the romantic heroine she represented. His state of mind was of the strangest and he was conscious of its strangeness, just as he was conscious in his very person of a lapse of resistance which likened itself absurdly to liberation. He felt weak at the same time that he felt inspired, and he felt inspired at the same time that he knew, or believed he knew, that his face was a blank. He saw things as a shining confusion, and yet somehow something monstrously definite kept surging out of them. Miriam was a beautiful, actual, fictive, impossible young woman of a past age, an undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one's own affairs. But that reality was a part of her spectator's joy, and she was not changed back to the common by his perception of the magnificent trick of art with which it was connected. Before his kinsman rejoined him Peter, taking a visiting-card from his pocket, had written on it in pencil a few words in a foreign tongue; but as at that moment he saw Nick coming in he immediately put it out of view. The last thing before the curtain rose on the fifth act that young man mentioned his having brought a message from Basil Dashwood, who hoped they both, on leaving the theatre, would come to supper with him in company with Miriam and her mother and several others: he had prepared a little informal banquet in honour of so famous a night. At this, while the curtain was about to rise, Peter immediately took out his card again and added something--he wrote the finest small hand you could see. Nick asked him what he was doing, and he waited but an instant. "It's a word to say I can't come." "To Dashwood? Oh I shall go," said Nick. "Well, I hope you'll enjoy it!" his companion replied in a tone which came back to him afterwards. When the curtain fell on the last act the people stayed, standing up in their places for acclamation. The applause shook the house--the recall became a clamour, the relief from a long tension. This was in any performance a moment Peter detested, but he stood for an instant beside Nick, who clapped, to his cousin's diplomatic sense, after the fashion of a school-boy at the pantomime. There was a veritable roar while the curtain drew back at the side most removed from our pair. Peter could see Basil Dashwood holding it, making a passage for the male "juvenile lead," who had Miriam in tow. Nick redoubled his efforts; heard the plaudits swell; saw the bows of the leading gentleman, who was hot and fat; saw Miriam, personally conducted and closer to the footlights, grow brighter and bigger and more swaying; and then became aware that his own comrade had with extreme agility slipped out of the stalls. Nick had already lost sight of him--he had apparently taken but a minute to escape from the house; and wondered at his quitting him without a farewell if he was to leave England on the morrow and they were not to meet at the hospitable Dashwood's. He wondered even what Peter was "up to," since, as he had assured him, there was no question of his going round to Miriam. He waited to see this young lady reappear three times, dragging Dashwood behind her at the second with a friendly arm, to whom, in turn, was hooked Miss Fanny Rover, the actress entrusted in the piece with the inevitable comic relief. He went out slowly with the crowd and at the door looked again for Peter, who struck him as deficient for once in finish. He couldn't know that in another direction and while he was helping the house to "rise" at its heroine, his kinsman had been particularly explicit. On reaching the lobby Peter had pounced on a small boy in buttons, who seemed superfluously connected with a desolate refreshment-room and, from the tips of his toes, was peeping at the stage through the glazed hole in the door of a box. Into one of the child's hands he thrust the card he had drawn again from his waistcoat and into the other the largest silver coin he could find in the same receptacle, while he bent over him with words of adjuration--words the little page tried to help himself to apprehend by instantly attempting to peruse the other words written on the card. "That's no use--it's Italian," said Peter; "only carry it round to Miss Rooth without a minute's delay. Place it in her hand and she'll give you some object--a bracelet, a glove, or a flower--to bring me back as a sign that she has received it. I shall be outside; bring me there what she gives you and you shall have another shilling--only fly!" His small messenger sounded him a moment with the sharp face of London wage-earning, and still more of London tip-earning, infancy, and vanished as swiftly as a slave of the Arabian Nights. While he waited in the lobby the audience began to pour out, and before the urchin had come back to him he was clapped on the shoulder by Nick. "I'm glad I haven't lost you, but why didn't you stay to give her a hand?" "Give her a hand? I hated it." "My dear man, I don't follow you," Nick said. "If you won't come to Dashwood's supper I fear our ways don't lie together." "Thank him very much; say I've to get up at an unnatural hour." To this Peter added: "I think I ought to tell you she may not be there." "Miss Rooth? Why it's all _for_ her." "I'm waiting for a word from her--she may change her mind." Nick showed his interest. "For you? What then have you proposed?" "I've proposed marriage," said Peter in a strange voice. "I say--!" Nick broke out; and at the same moment Peter's messenger squeezed through the press and stood before him. "She has given me nothing, sir," the boy announced; "but she says I'm to say 'All right!'" Nick's stare widened. "You've proposed through _him_?" "Aye, and she accepts. Good-night!"--on which, turning away, Peter bounded into a hansom. He said something to the driver through the roof, and Nick's eyes followed the cab as it started off. This young man was mystified, was even amused; especially when the youth in buttons, planted there and wondering too, brought forth: "Please sir, he told me he'd give me a shilling and he've forgot it." "Oh I can't pay you for _that_!" Nick laughed. But he fished out a dole, though he was vexed at the injury to the supper. XLVI Peter meanwhile rolled away through the summer night to Saint John's Wood. He had put the pressure of strong words on his young friend, entreating her to drive home immediately, return there without any one, without even her mother. He wished to see her alone and for a purpose he would fully and satisfactorily explain--couldn't she trust him? He besought her to remember his own situation and throw over her supper, throw over everything. He would wait for her with unspeakable impatience in Balaklava Place. He did so, when he got there, but it had taken half an hour. Interminable seemed his lonely vigil in Miss Lumley's drawing-room, where the character of the original proprietress came out to him more than ever before in a kind of afterglow of old sociabilities, a vulgar, ghostly reference. The numerous candles had been lighted for him, and Mrs. Rooth's familiar fictions lay about; but his nerves forbade him the solace of a chair and a book. He walked up and down, thinking and listening, and as the long window, the balmy air permitting, stood open to the garden, he passed several times in and out. A carriage appeared to stop at the gate--then there was nothing; he heard the rare rattle of wheels and the far-off hum of London. His impatience was overwrought, and though he knew this it persisted; it would have been no easy matter for Miriam to break away from the flock of her felicitators. Still less simple was it doubtless for her to leave poor Dashwood with his supper on his hands. Perhaps she would bring Dashwood with her, bring him to time her; she was capable of playing him--that is, of playing Her Majesty's new representative to the small far-off State, or even of playing them both--that trick. Perhaps the little wretch in buttons--Peter remembered now the neglected shilling--only pretending to go round with his card, had come back with an invented answer. But how could he know, since presumably he couldn't read Italian, that his answer would fit the message? Peter was sorry now that he himself had not gone round, not snatched Miriam bodily away, made sure of her and of what he wanted of her. When forty minutes had elapsed he regarded it as proved that she wouldn't come, and, asking himself what he should do, determined to drive off again and seize her at her comrade's feast. Then he remembered how Nick had mentioned that this entertainment was not to be held at the young actor's lodgings but at some tavern or restaurant the name of which he had not heeded. Suddenly, however, Peter became aware with joy that this name didn't matter, for there was something at the garden door at last. He rushed out before she had had time to ring, and saw as she stepped from the carriage that she was alone. Now that she was there, that he had this evidence she had listened to him and trusted him, all his impatience and bitterness gave way and a flood of pleading tenderness took their place in the first words he spoke to her. It was far "dearer" of her than he had any right to dream, but she was the best and kindest creature--this showed it--as well as the most wonderful. He was really not off his head with his contradictory ways; no, before heaven he wasn't, and he would explain, he would make everything clear. Everything was changed. She stopped short in the little dusky garden, looking at him in the light of the open window. Then she called back to the coachman--they had left the garden door open--"Wait for me, mind; I shall want you again." "What's the matter--won't you stay?" Peter asked. "Are you going out again at this absurd hour? I won't hurt you," he gently urged. And he went back and closed the garden door. He wanted to say to the coachman, "It's no matter--please drive away." At the same time he wouldn't for the world have done anything offensive to her. "I've come because I thought it better to-night, as things have turned out, to do the thing you ask me, whatever it may be," she had already begun. "That's probably what you calculated I would think, eh? What this evening has been you've seen, and I must allow that your hand's in it. That you know for yourself--that you doubtless felt as you sat there. But I confess I don't imagine what you want of me here now," she added. She had remained standing in the path. Peter felt the irony of her "now" and how it made a fool of him, but he had been prepared for this and for much worse. He had begged her not to think him a fool, but in truth at present he cared little if she did. Very likely he was--in spite of his plea that everything was changed: he cared little even himself. However, he spoke in the tone of intense reason and of the fullest disposition to satisfy her. This lucidity only took still more from the dignity of his change of front: his separation from her the day before had had such pretensions to being lucid. But the explanation and the justification were in the very fact, the fact that had complete possession of him. He named it when he replied to her: "I've simply overrated my strength." "Oh I knew--I knew! That's why I entreated you not to come!" Miriam groaned. She turned away lamenting, and for a moment he thought she would retreat to her carriage. But he passed his hand into her arm, to draw her forward, and after an instant felt her yield. "The fact is we must have this thing out," he said. Then he added as he made her go into the house, bending over her, "The failure of my strength--that was just the reason of my coming." She broke into her laugh at these words, as she entered the drawing-room, and it made them sound pompous in their false wisdom. She flung off, as a good-natured tribute to the image of their having the thing out, a white shawl that had been wrapped round her. She was still painted and bedizened, in the splendid dress of her climax, so that she seemed protected and alienated by the character she had been acting. "Whatever it is you want--when I understand--you'll be very brief, won't you? Do you know I've given up a charming supper for you? Mamma has gone there. I've promised to go back to them." "You're an angel not to have let her come with you. I'm sure she wanted to," Peter made reply. "Oh she's all right, but she's nervous." Then the girl added: "Couldn't she keep you away after all?" "Whom are you talking about?" Biddy Dormer was as absent from his mind as if she had never existed. "The charming thing you were with this morning. Is she so afraid of obliging me? Oh she'd be so good for you!" "Don't speak of that," Peter gravely said. "I was in perfect good faith yesterday when I took leave of you. I was--I was. But I can't--I can't: you're too unutterably dear to me." "Oh don't--_please_ don't!" Miriam wailed at this. She stood before the fireless chimney-piece with one of her hands on it. "If it's only to say that, don't you know, what's the use?" "It isn't only to say that. I've a plan, a perfect plan: the whole thing lies clear before me." "And what's the whole thing?" He had to make an effort. "You say your mother's nervous. Ah if you knew how nervous I am!" "Well, I'm not. Go on." "Give it up--give it up!" Peter stammered. "Give it up?" She fixed him like a mild Medusa. "I'll marry you to-morrow if you'll renounce; and in return for the sacrifice you make for me I'll do more for you than ever was done for a woman before." "Renounce after to-night? Do you call that a plan?" she asked. "Those are old words and very foolish ones--you wanted something of that sort a year ago." "Oh I fluttered round the idea at that time; we were talking in the air. I didn't really believe I could make you see it then, and certainly you didn't see it. My own future, moreover, wasn't definite to me. I didn't know what I could offer you. But these last months have made a difference--I do know now. Now what I say is deliberate--It's deeply meditated. I simply can't live without you, and I hold that together we may do great things." She seemed to wonder. "What sort of things?" "The things of my profession, of my life, the things one does for one's country, the responsibility and the honour of great affairs; deeply fascinating when one's immersed in them, and more exciting really--put them even at that--than the excitements of the theatre. Care for me only a little and you'll see what they are, they'll take hold of you. Believe me, believe me," Peter pleaded; "every fibre of my being trembles in what I say to you." "You admitted yesterday it wouldn't do," she made answer. "Where were the fibres of your being then?" "They throbbed in me even more than now, and I was trying, like an ass, not to feel them. Where was this evening yesterday--where were the maddening hours I've just spent? Ah you're the perfection of perfections, and as I sat there to-night you taught me what I really want." "The perfection of perfections?" the girl echoed with the strangest smile. "I needn't try to tell you: you must have felt to-night with such rapture what you are, what you can do. How can I give that up?" he piteously went on. "How can _I_, my poor friend? I like your plans and your responsibilities and your great affairs, as you call them. _Voyons_, they're infantile. I've just shown that I'm a perfection of perfections: therefore it's just the moment to 'renounce,' as you gracefully say? Oh I was sure, I was sure!" And Miriam paused, resting eyes at once lighted and troubled on him as in the effort to think of some arrangement that would help him out of his absurdity. "I was sure, I mean, that if you did come your poor, dear, doting brain would be quite confused," she presently pursued. "I can't be a muff in public just for you, _pourtant_. Dear me, why do you like us so much?" "Like you? I loathe you!" "_Je le vois parbleu bien_!" she lightly returned. "I mean why do you feel us, judge us, understand us so well? I please you because you see, because you know; and then for that very reason of my pleasing you must adapt me to your convenience, you must take me over, as they say. You admire me as an artist and therefore want to put me into a box in which the artist will breathe her last. Ah be reasonable; you must let her live!" "Let her live? As if I could prevent her living!" Peter cried with unmistakable conviction. "Even if I did wish how could I prevent a spirit like yours from expressing itself? Don't talk about my putting you in a box, for, dearest child, I'm taking you out of one," he all persuasively explained. "The artist is irrepressible, eternal; she'll be in everything you are and in everything you do, and you'll go about with her triumphantly exerting your powers, charming the world, carrying everything before you." Miriam's colour rose, through all her artificial surfaces, at this all but convincing appeal, and she asked whimsically: "Shall you

john

How many times the word 'john' appears in the text?

you to-morrow--there's no question of ten years!" cried Mrs. Rooth with a comicality of plainness. Miriam smiled at Nick, deprecating his horror of such talk. "Isn't it droll, the way she can't get it out of her head?" Then turning almost coaxingly to the old woman: "_Voyons_, look about you: they don't marry us like that." "But they do--_cela se voit tous les jours_. Ask Mr. Dormer." "Oh never! It would be as if I asked him to give us a practical proof." "I shall never prove anything by marrying any one," Nick said. "For me that question's over." Miriam rested kind eyes on him. "Dear me, how you must hate me!" And before he had time to reply she went on to her mother: "People marry them to make them leave the stage; which proves exactly what I say." "Ah they offer them the finest positions," reasoned Mrs. Rooth. "Do you want me to leave it then?" "Oh you can manage if you will!" "The only managing I know anything about is to do my work. If I manage that decently I shall pull through." "But, dearest, may our work not be of many sorts?" "I only know one," said Miriam. At this her mother got up with a sigh. "I see you do wish to drive me into the street." "Mamma's bewildered--there are so many paths she wants to follow, there are so many bundles of hay. As I told you, she wishes to gobble them all," the girl pursued. Then she added: "Yes, go and take the carriage; take a turn round the Park--you always delight in that--and come back for me in an hour." "I'm too vexed with you; the air will do me good," said Mrs. Rooth. But before she went she addressed Nick: "I've your assurance that you'll bring him then to-night?" "Bring Peter? I don't think I shall have to drag him," Nick returned. "But you must do me the justice to remember that if I should resort to force I should do something that's not particularly in my interest--I should be magnanimous." "We must always be that, mustn't we?" moralised Mrs. Rooth. "How could it affect your interest?" Miriam asked less abstractedly. "Yes, as you say," her mother mused at their host, "the question of marriage has ceased to exist for you." "Mamma goes straight at it!" laughed the girl, getting up while Nick rubbed his canvas before answering. Miriam went to mamma and settled her bonnet and mantle in preparation for her drive, then stood a moment with a filial arm about her and as if waiting for their friend's explanation. This, however, when it came halted visibly. "Why you said a while ago that if Peter was there you wouldn't act." "I'll act for _him_," smiled Miriam, inconsequently caressing her mother. "It doesn't matter whom it's for!" Mrs. Rooth declared sagaciously. "Take your drive and relax your mind," said the girl, kissing her. "Come for me in an hour; not later--but not sooner." She went with her to the door, bundled her out, closed it behind her and came back to the position she had quitted. "_This_ is the peace I want!" she gratefully cried as she settled into it. XLV Peter Sherringham said so little during the performance that his companion was struck by his dumbness, especially as Miriam's acting seemed to Nick magnificent. He held his breath while she was on the stage--she gave the whole thing, including the spectator's emotion, such a lift. She had not carried out her fantastic menace of not exerting herself, and, as Mrs. Rooth had said, it little mattered for whom she acted. Nick was conscious in watching her that she went through it all for herself, for the idea that possessed her and that she rendered with extraordinary breadth. She couldn't open the door a part of the way to it and let it simply peep in; if it entered at all it must enter in full procession and occupy the premises in state. This was what had happened on an occasion which, as the less tormented of our young men felt in his stall, grew larger with each throb of the responsive house; till by the time the play was half over it appeared to stretch out wide arms to the future. Nick had often heard more applause, but had never heard more attention, since they were all charmed and hushed together and success seemed to be sitting down with them. There had been of course plenty of announcement--the newspapers had abounded and the arts of the manager had taken the freest license; but it was easy to feel a fine, universal consensus and to recognise everywhere the light spring of hope. People snatched their eyes from the stage an instant to look at each other, all eager to hand on the torch passed to them by the actress over the footlights. It was a part of the impression that she was now only showing to the full, for this time she had verse to deal with and she made it unexpectedly exquisite. She was beauty, melody, truth; she was passion and persuasion and tenderness. She caught up the obstreperous play in soothing, entwining arms and, seeming to tread the air in the flutter of her robe, carried it into the high places of poetry, of art, of style. And she had such tones of nature, such concealments of art, such effusions of life, that the whole scene glowed with the colour she communicated, and the house, pervaded with rosy fire, glowed back at the scene. Nick looked round in the intervals; he felt excited and flushed--the night had turned to a feast of fraternity and he expected to see people embrace each other. The crowd, the agitation, the triumph, the surprise, the signals and rumours, the heated air, his associates, near him, pointing out other figures who presumably were celebrated but whom he had never heard of, all amused him and banished every impulse to question or to compare. Miriam was as happy as some right sensation--she would have fed the memory with deep draughts. One of the things that amused him or at least helped to fill his attention was Peter's attitude, which apparently didn't exclude criticism--rather indeed mainly implied it. This admirer never took his eyes off the actress, but he made no remark about her and never stirred out of his chair. Nick had had from the first a plan of going round to speak to her, but as his companion evidently meant not to move he scrupled at being more forward. During their brief dinner together--they were determined not to be late--Peter had been silent, quite recklessly grave, but also, his kinsman judged, full of the wish to make it clear he was calm. In his seat he was calmer than ever and had an air even of trying to suggest that his attendance, preoccupied as he was with deeper solemnities, was more or less mechanical, the result of a conception of duty, a habit of courtesy. When during a scene in the second act--a scene from which Miriam was absent--Nick observed to him that one might judge from his reserve that he wasn't pleased he replied after a moment: "I've been looking for her mistakes." And when Nick made answer to this that he certainly wouldn't find them he said again in an odd tone: "No, I shan't find them--I shan't find them." It might have seemed that since the girl's performance was a dazzling success he regarded his evening as rather a failure. After the third act Nick said candidly: "My dear fellow, how can you sit here? Aren't you going to speak to her?" To which Peter replied inscrutably: "Lord, no, never again. I bade her good-bye yesterday. She knows what I think of her form. It's very good, but she carries it a little too far. Besides, she didn't want me to come, and it's therefore more discreet to keep away from her." "Surely it isn't an hour for discretion!" Nick cried. "Excuse me at any rate for five minutes." He went behind and reappeared only as the curtain was rising on the fourth act; and in the interval between the fourth and the fifth he went again for a shorter time. Peter was personally detached, but he consented to listen to his companion's vivid account of the state of things on the stage, where the elation of victory had lighted up the place. The strain was over, the ship in port--they were all wiping their faces and grinning. Miriam--yes, positively--was grinning too, and she hadn't asked a question about Peter nor sent him a message. They were kissing all round and dancing for joy. They were on the eve, worse luck, of a tremendous run. Peter groaned irrepressibly for this; it was, save for a slight sign a moment later, the only vibration caused in him by his cousin's report. There was but one voice of regret that they hadn't put on the piece earlier, as the end of the season would interrupt the run. There was but one voice too about the fourth act--it was believed all London would rush to see the fourth act. The crowd about her was a dozen deep and Miriam in the midst of it all charming; she was receiving in the ugly place after the fashion of royalty, almost as hedged with the famous "divinity," yet with a smile and a word for each. She was really like a young queen on her accession. When she saw him, Nick, she had kissed her hand to him over the heads of the courtiers. Nick's artless comment on this was that she had such pretty manners. It made Peter laugh--apparently at his friend's conception of the manners of a young queen. Mrs. Rooth, with a dozen shawls on her arm, was as red as the kitchen-fire, but you couldn't tell if Miriam were red or pale: she was so cleverly, finely made up--perhaps a little too much. Dashwood of course was greatly to the fore, but you hadn't to mention his own performance to him: he took it all handsomely and wouldn't hear of anything but that _her_ fortune was made. He didn't say much indeed, but evidently had ideas about her fortune; he nodded significant things and whistled inimitable sounds--"Heuh, heuh!" He was perfectly satisfied; moreover, he looked further ahead than any one. It was on coming back to his place after the fourth act that Nick put in, for his companion's benefit, most of these touches in his sketch of the situation. If Peter had continued to look for Miriam's mistakes he hadn't yet found them: the fourth act, bristling with dangers, putting a premium on every sort of cheap effect, had rounded itself without a flaw. Sitting there alone while Nick was away he had leisure to meditate on the wonder of this--on the art with which the girl had separated passion from violence, filling the whole place and never screaming; for it had often seemed to him in London of old that the yell of theatrical emotion rang through the shrinking night like the voice of the Sunday newsboy. Miriam had never been more present to him than at this hour; but she was inextricably transmuted--present essentially as the romantic heroine she represented. His state of mind was of the strangest and he was conscious of its strangeness, just as he was conscious in his very person of a lapse of resistance which likened itself absurdly to liberation. He felt weak at the same time that he felt inspired, and he felt inspired at the same time that he knew, or believed he knew, that his face was a blank. He saw things as a shining confusion, and yet somehow something monstrously definite kept surging out of them. Miriam was a beautiful, actual, fictive, impossible young woman of a past age, an undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one's own affairs. But that reality was a part of her spectator's joy, and she was not changed back to the common by his perception of the magnificent trick of art with which it was connected. Before his kinsman rejoined him Peter, taking a visiting-card from his pocket, had written on it in pencil a few words in a foreign tongue; but as at that moment he saw Nick coming in he immediately put it out of view. The last thing before the curtain rose on the fifth act that young man mentioned his having brought a message from Basil Dashwood, who hoped they both, on leaving the theatre, would come to supper with him in company with Miriam and her mother and several others: he had prepared a little informal banquet in honour of so famous a night. At this, while the curtain was about to rise, Peter immediately took out his card again and added something--he wrote the finest small hand you could see. Nick asked him what he was doing, and he waited but an instant. "It's a word to say I can't come." "To Dashwood? Oh I shall go," said Nick. "Well, I hope you'll enjoy it!" his companion replied in a tone which came back to him afterwards. When the curtain fell on the last act the people stayed, standing up in their places for acclamation. The applause shook the house--the recall became a clamour, the relief from a long tension. This was in any performance a moment Peter detested, but he stood for an instant beside Nick, who clapped, to his cousin's diplomatic sense, after the fashion of a school-boy at the pantomime. There was a veritable roar while the curtain drew back at the side most removed from our pair. Peter could see Basil Dashwood holding it, making a passage for the male "juvenile lead," who had Miriam in tow. Nick redoubled his efforts; heard the plaudits swell; saw the bows of the leading gentleman, who was hot and fat; saw Miriam, personally conducted and closer to the footlights, grow brighter and bigger and more swaying; and then became aware that his own comrade had with extreme agility slipped out of the stalls. Nick had already lost sight of him--he had apparently taken but a minute to escape from the house; and wondered at his quitting him without a farewell if he was to leave England on the morrow and they were not to meet at the hospitable Dashwood's. He wondered even what Peter was "up to," since, as he had assured him, there was no question of his going round to Miriam. He waited to see this young lady reappear three times, dragging Dashwood behind her at the second with a friendly arm, to whom, in turn, was hooked Miss Fanny Rover, the actress entrusted in the piece with the inevitable comic relief. He went out slowly with the crowd and at the door looked again for Peter, who struck him as deficient for once in finish. He couldn't know that in another direction and while he was helping the house to "rise" at its heroine, his kinsman had been particularly explicit. On reaching the lobby Peter had pounced on a small boy in buttons, who seemed superfluously connected with a desolate refreshment-room and, from the tips of his toes, was peeping at the stage through the glazed hole in the door of a box. Into one of the child's hands he thrust the card he had drawn again from his waistcoat and into the other the largest silver coin he could find in the same receptacle, while he bent over him with words of adjuration--words the little page tried to help himself to apprehend by instantly attempting to peruse the other words written on the card. "That's no use--it's Italian," said Peter; "only carry it round to Miss Rooth without a minute's delay. Place it in her hand and she'll give you some object--a bracelet, a glove, or a flower--to bring me back as a sign that she has received it. I shall be outside; bring me there what she gives you and you shall have another shilling--only fly!" His small messenger sounded him a moment with the sharp face of London wage-earning, and still more of London tip-earning, infancy, and vanished as swiftly as a slave of the Arabian Nights. While he waited in the lobby the audience began to pour out, and before the urchin had come back to him he was clapped on the shoulder by Nick. "I'm glad I haven't lost you, but why didn't you stay to give her a hand?" "Give her a hand? I hated it." "My dear man, I don't follow you," Nick said. "If you won't come to Dashwood's supper I fear our ways don't lie together." "Thank him very much; say I've to get up at an unnatural hour." To this Peter added: "I think I ought to tell you she may not be there." "Miss Rooth? Why it's all _for_ her." "I'm waiting for a word from her--she may change her mind." Nick showed his interest. "For you? What then have you proposed?" "I've proposed marriage," said Peter in a strange voice. "I say--!" Nick broke out; and at the same moment Peter's messenger squeezed through the press and stood before him. "She has given me nothing, sir," the boy announced; "but she says I'm to say 'All right!'" Nick's stare widened. "You've proposed through _him_?" "Aye, and she accepts. Good-night!"--on which, turning away, Peter bounded into a hansom. He said something to the driver through the roof, and Nick's eyes followed the cab as it started off. This young man was mystified, was even amused; especially when the youth in buttons, planted there and wondering too, brought forth: "Please sir, he told me he'd give me a shilling and he've forgot it." "Oh I can't pay you for _that_!" Nick laughed. But he fished out a dole, though he was vexed at the injury to the supper. XLVI Peter meanwhile rolled away through the summer night to Saint John's Wood. He had put the pressure of strong words on his young friend, entreating her to drive home immediately, return there without any one, without even her mother. He wished to see her alone and for a purpose he would fully and satisfactorily explain--couldn't she trust him? He besought her to remember his own situation and throw over her supper, throw over everything. He would wait for her with unspeakable impatience in Balaklava Place. He did so, when he got there, but it had taken half an hour. Interminable seemed his lonely vigil in Miss Lumley's drawing-room, where the character of the original proprietress came out to him more than ever before in a kind of afterglow of old sociabilities, a vulgar, ghostly reference. The numerous candles had been lighted for him, and Mrs. Rooth's familiar fictions lay about; but his nerves forbade him the solace of a chair and a book. He walked up and down, thinking and listening, and as the long window, the balmy air permitting, stood open to the garden, he passed several times in and out. A carriage appeared to stop at the gate--then there was nothing; he heard the rare rattle of wheels and the far-off hum of London. His impatience was overwrought, and though he knew this it persisted; it would have been no easy matter for Miriam to break away from the flock of her felicitators. Still less simple was it doubtless for her to leave poor Dashwood with his supper on his hands. Perhaps she would bring Dashwood with her, bring him to time her; she was capable of playing him--that is, of playing Her Majesty's new representative to the small far-off State, or even of playing them both--that trick. Perhaps the little wretch in buttons--Peter remembered now the neglected shilling--only pretending to go round with his card, had come back with an invented answer. But how could he know, since presumably he couldn't read Italian, that his answer would fit the message? Peter was sorry now that he himself had not gone round, not snatched Miriam bodily away, made sure of her and of what he wanted of her. When forty minutes had elapsed he regarded it as proved that she wouldn't come, and, asking himself what he should do, determined to drive off again and seize her at her comrade's feast. Then he remembered how Nick had mentioned that this entertainment was not to be held at the young actor's lodgings but at some tavern or restaurant the name of which he had not heeded. Suddenly, however, Peter became aware with joy that this name didn't matter, for there was something at the garden door at last. He rushed out before she had had time to ring, and saw as she stepped from the carriage that she was alone. Now that she was there, that he had this evidence she had listened to him and trusted him, all his impatience and bitterness gave way and a flood of pleading tenderness took their place in the first words he spoke to her. It was far "dearer" of her than he had any right to dream, but she was the best and kindest creature--this showed it--as well as the most wonderful. He was really not off his head with his contradictory ways; no, before heaven he wasn't, and he would explain, he would make everything clear. Everything was changed. She stopped short in the little dusky garden, looking at him in the light of the open window. Then she called back to the coachman--they had left the garden door open--"Wait for me, mind; I shall want you again." "What's the matter--won't you stay?" Peter asked. "Are you going out again at this absurd hour? I won't hurt you," he gently urged. And he went back and closed the garden door. He wanted to say to the coachman, "It's no matter--please drive away." At the same time he wouldn't for the world have done anything offensive to her. "I've come because I thought it better to-night, as things have turned out, to do the thing you ask me, whatever it may be," she had already begun. "That's probably what you calculated I would think, eh? What this evening has been you've seen, and I must allow that your hand's in it. That you know for yourself--that you doubtless felt as you sat there. But I confess I don't imagine what you want of me here now," she added. She had remained standing in the path. Peter felt the irony of her "now" and how it made a fool of him, but he had been prepared for this and for much worse. He had begged her not to think him a fool, but in truth at present he cared little if she did. Very likely he was--in spite of his plea that everything was changed: he cared little even himself. However, he spoke in the tone of intense reason and of the fullest disposition to satisfy her. This lucidity only took still more from the dignity of his change of front: his separation from her the day before had had such pretensions to being lucid. But the explanation and the justification were in the very fact, the fact that had complete possession of him. He named it when he replied to her: "I've simply overrated my strength." "Oh I knew--I knew! That's why I entreated you not to come!" Miriam groaned. She turned away lamenting, and for a moment he thought she would retreat to her carriage. But he passed his hand into her arm, to draw her forward, and after an instant felt her yield. "The fact is we must have this thing out," he said. Then he added as he made her go into the house, bending over her, "The failure of my strength--that was just the reason of my coming." She broke into her laugh at these words, as she entered the drawing-room, and it made them sound pompous in their false wisdom. She flung off, as a good-natured tribute to the image of their having the thing out, a white shawl that had been wrapped round her. She was still painted and bedizened, in the splendid dress of her climax, so that she seemed protected and alienated by the character she had been acting. "Whatever it is you want--when I understand--you'll be very brief, won't you? Do you know I've given up a charming supper for you? Mamma has gone there. I've promised to go back to them." "You're an angel not to have let her come with you. I'm sure she wanted to," Peter made reply. "Oh she's all right, but she's nervous." Then the girl added: "Couldn't she keep you away after all?" "Whom are you talking about?" Biddy Dormer was as absent from his mind as if she had never existed. "The charming thing you were with this morning. Is she so afraid of obliging me? Oh she'd be so good for you!" "Don't speak of that," Peter gravely said. "I was in perfect good faith yesterday when I took leave of you. I was--I was. But I can't--I can't: you're too unutterably dear to me." "Oh don't--_please_ don't!" Miriam wailed at this. She stood before the fireless chimney-piece with one of her hands on it. "If it's only to say that, don't you know, what's the use?" "It isn't only to say that. I've a plan, a perfect plan: the whole thing lies clear before me." "And what's the whole thing?" He had to make an effort. "You say your mother's nervous. Ah if you knew how nervous I am!" "Well, I'm not. Go on." "Give it up--give it up!" Peter stammered. "Give it up?" She fixed him like a mild Medusa. "I'll marry you to-morrow if you'll renounce; and in return for the sacrifice you make for me I'll do more for you than ever was done for a woman before." "Renounce after to-night? Do you call that a plan?" she asked. "Those are old words and very foolish ones--you wanted something of that sort a year ago." "Oh I fluttered round the idea at that time; we were talking in the air. I didn't really believe I could make you see it then, and certainly you didn't see it. My own future, moreover, wasn't definite to me. I didn't know what I could offer you. But these last months have made a difference--I do know now. Now what I say is deliberate--It's deeply meditated. I simply can't live without you, and I hold that together we may do great things." She seemed to wonder. "What sort of things?" "The things of my profession, of my life, the things one does for one's country, the responsibility and the honour of great affairs; deeply fascinating when one's immersed in them, and more exciting really--put them even at that--than the excitements of the theatre. Care for me only a little and you'll see what they are, they'll take hold of you. Believe me, believe me," Peter pleaded; "every fibre of my being trembles in what I say to you." "You admitted yesterday it wouldn't do," she made answer. "Where were the fibres of your being then?" "They throbbed in me even more than now, and I was trying, like an ass, not to feel them. Where was this evening yesterday--where were the maddening hours I've just spent? Ah you're the perfection of perfections, and as I sat there to-night you taught me what I really want." "The perfection of perfections?" the girl echoed with the strangest smile. "I needn't try to tell you: you must have felt to-night with such rapture what you are, what you can do. How can I give that up?" he piteously went on. "How can _I_, my poor friend? I like your plans and your responsibilities and your great affairs, as you call them. _Voyons_, they're infantile. I've just shown that I'm a perfection of perfections: therefore it's just the moment to 'renounce,' as you gracefully say? Oh I was sure, I was sure!" And Miriam paused, resting eyes at once lighted and troubled on him as in the effort to think of some arrangement that would help him out of his absurdity. "I was sure, I mean, that if you did come your poor, dear, doting brain would be quite confused," she presently pursued. "I can't be a muff in public just for you, _pourtant_. Dear me, why do you like us so much?" "Like you? I loathe you!" "_Je le vois parbleu bien_!" she lightly returned. "I mean why do you feel us, judge us, understand us so well? I please you because you see, because you know; and then for that very reason of my pleasing you must adapt me to your convenience, you must take me over, as they say. You admire me as an artist and therefore want to put me into a box in which the artist will breathe her last. Ah be reasonable; you must let her live!" "Let her live? As if I could prevent her living!" Peter cried with unmistakable conviction. "Even if I did wish how could I prevent a spirit like yours from expressing itself? Don't talk about my putting you in a box, for, dearest child, I'm taking you out of one," he all persuasively explained. "The artist is irrepressible, eternal; she'll be in everything you are and in everything you do, and you'll go about with her triumphantly exerting your powers, charming the world, carrying everything before you." Miriam's colour rose, through all her artificial surfaces, at this all but convincing appeal, and she asked whimsically: "Shall you

own

How many times the word 'own' appears in the text?

you to-morrow--there's no question of ten years!" cried Mrs. Rooth with a comicality of plainness. Miriam smiled at Nick, deprecating his horror of such talk. "Isn't it droll, the way she can't get it out of her head?" Then turning almost coaxingly to the old woman: "_Voyons_, look about you: they don't marry us like that." "But they do--_cela se voit tous les jours_. Ask Mr. Dormer." "Oh never! It would be as if I asked him to give us a practical proof." "I shall never prove anything by marrying any one," Nick said. "For me that question's over." Miriam rested kind eyes on him. "Dear me, how you must hate me!" And before he had time to reply she went on to her mother: "People marry them to make them leave the stage; which proves exactly what I say." "Ah they offer them the finest positions," reasoned Mrs. Rooth. "Do you want me to leave it then?" "Oh you can manage if you will!" "The only managing I know anything about is to do my work. If I manage that decently I shall pull through." "But, dearest, may our work not be of many sorts?" "I only know one," said Miriam. At this her mother got up with a sigh. "I see you do wish to drive me into the street." "Mamma's bewildered--there are so many paths she wants to follow, there are so many bundles of hay. As I told you, she wishes to gobble them all," the girl pursued. Then she added: "Yes, go and take the carriage; take a turn round the Park--you always delight in that--and come back for me in an hour." "I'm too vexed with you; the air will do me good," said Mrs. Rooth. But before she went she addressed Nick: "I've your assurance that you'll bring him then to-night?" "Bring Peter? I don't think I shall have to drag him," Nick returned. "But you must do me the justice to remember that if I should resort to force I should do something that's not particularly in my interest--I should be magnanimous." "We must always be that, mustn't we?" moralised Mrs. Rooth. "How could it affect your interest?" Miriam asked less abstractedly. "Yes, as you say," her mother mused at their host, "the question of marriage has ceased to exist for you." "Mamma goes straight at it!" laughed the girl, getting up while Nick rubbed his canvas before answering. Miriam went to mamma and settled her bonnet and mantle in preparation for her drive, then stood a moment with a filial arm about her and as if waiting for their friend's explanation. This, however, when it came halted visibly. "Why you said a while ago that if Peter was there you wouldn't act." "I'll act for _him_," smiled Miriam, inconsequently caressing her mother. "It doesn't matter whom it's for!" Mrs. Rooth declared sagaciously. "Take your drive and relax your mind," said the girl, kissing her. "Come for me in an hour; not later--but not sooner." She went with her to the door, bundled her out, closed it behind her and came back to the position she had quitted. "_This_ is the peace I want!" she gratefully cried as she settled into it. XLV Peter Sherringham said so little during the performance that his companion was struck by his dumbness, especially as Miriam's acting seemed to Nick magnificent. He held his breath while she was on the stage--she gave the whole thing, including the spectator's emotion, such a lift. She had not carried out her fantastic menace of not exerting herself, and, as Mrs. Rooth had said, it little mattered for whom she acted. Nick was conscious in watching her that she went through it all for herself, for the idea that possessed her and that she rendered with extraordinary breadth. She couldn't open the door a part of the way to it and let it simply peep in; if it entered at all it must enter in full procession and occupy the premises in state. This was what had happened on an occasion which, as the less tormented of our young men felt in his stall, grew larger with each throb of the responsive house; till by the time the play was half over it appeared to stretch out wide arms to the future. Nick had often heard more applause, but had never heard more attention, since they were all charmed and hushed together and success seemed to be sitting down with them. There had been of course plenty of announcement--the newspapers had abounded and the arts of the manager had taken the freest license; but it was easy to feel a fine, universal consensus and to recognise everywhere the light spring of hope. People snatched their eyes from the stage an instant to look at each other, all eager to hand on the torch passed to them by the actress over the footlights. It was a part of the impression that she was now only showing to the full, for this time she had verse to deal with and she made it unexpectedly exquisite. She was beauty, melody, truth; she was passion and persuasion and tenderness. She caught up the obstreperous play in soothing, entwining arms and, seeming to tread the air in the flutter of her robe, carried it into the high places of poetry, of art, of style. And she had such tones of nature, such concealments of art, such effusions of life, that the whole scene glowed with the colour she communicated, and the house, pervaded with rosy fire, glowed back at the scene. Nick looked round in the intervals; he felt excited and flushed--the night had turned to a feast of fraternity and he expected to see people embrace each other. The crowd, the agitation, the triumph, the surprise, the signals and rumours, the heated air, his associates, near him, pointing out other figures who presumably were celebrated but whom he had never heard of, all amused him and banished every impulse to question or to compare. Miriam was as happy as some right sensation--she would have fed the memory with deep draughts. One of the things that amused him or at least helped to fill his attention was Peter's attitude, which apparently didn't exclude criticism--rather indeed mainly implied it. This admirer never took his eyes off the actress, but he made no remark about her and never stirred out of his chair. Nick had had from the first a plan of going round to speak to her, but as his companion evidently meant not to move he scrupled at being more forward. During their brief dinner together--they were determined not to be late--Peter had been silent, quite recklessly grave, but also, his kinsman judged, full of the wish to make it clear he was calm. In his seat he was calmer than ever and had an air even of trying to suggest that his attendance, preoccupied as he was with deeper solemnities, was more or less mechanical, the result of a conception of duty, a habit of courtesy. When during a scene in the second act--a scene from which Miriam was absent--Nick observed to him that one might judge from his reserve that he wasn't pleased he replied after a moment: "I've been looking for her mistakes." And when Nick made answer to this that he certainly wouldn't find them he said again in an odd tone: "No, I shan't find them--I shan't find them." It might have seemed that since the girl's performance was a dazzling success he regarded his evening as rather a failure. After the third act Nick said candidly: "My dear fellow, how can you sit here? Aren't you going to speak to her?" To which Peter replied inscrutably: "Lord, no, never again. I bade her good-bye yesterday. She knows what I think of her form. It's very good, but she carries it a little too far. Besides, she didn't want me to come, and it's therefore more discreet to keep away from her." "Surely it isn't an hour for discretion!" Nick cried. "Excuse me at any rate for five minutes." He went behind and reappeared only as the curtain was rising on the fourth act; and in the interval between the fourth and the fifth he went again for a shorter time. Peter was personally detached, but he consented to listen to his companion's vivid account of the state of things on the stage, where the elation of victory had lighted up the place. The strain was over, the ship in port--they were all wiping their faces and grinning. Miriam--yes, positively--was grinning too, and she hadn't asked a question about Peter nor sent him a message. They were kissing all round and dancing for joy. They were on the eve, worse luck, of a tremendous run. Peter groaned irrepressibly for this; it was, save for a slight sign a moment later, the only vibration caused in him by his cousin's report. There was but one voice of regret that they hadn't put on the piece earlier, as the end of the season would interrupt the run. There was but one voice too about the fourth act--it was believed all London would rush to see the fourth act. The crowd about her was a dozen deep and Miriam in the midst of it all charming; she was receiving in the ugly place after the fashion of royalty, almost as hedged with the famous "divinity," yet with a smile and a word for each. She was really like a young queen on her accession. When she saw him, Nick, she had kissed her hand to him over the heads of the courtiers. Nick's artless comment on this was that she had such pretty manners. It made Peter laugh--apparently at his friend's conception of the manners of a young queen. Mrs. Rooth, with a dozen shawls on her arm, was as red as the kitchen-fire, but you couldn't tell if Miriam were red or pale: she was so cleverly, finely made up--perhaps a little too much. Dashwood of course was greatly to the fore, but you hadn't to mention his own performance to him: he took it all handsomely and wouldn't hear of anything but that _her_ fortune was made. He didn't say much indeed, but evidently had ideas about her fortune; he nodded significant things and whistled inimitable sounds--"Heuh, heuh!" He was perfectly satisfied; moreover, he looked further ahead than any one. It was on coming back to his place after the fourth act that Nick put in, for his companion's benefit, most of these touches in his sketch of the situation. If Peter had continued to look for Miriam's mistakes he hadn't yet found them: the fourth act, bristling with dangers, putting a premium on every sort of cheap effect, had rounded itself without a flaw. Sitting there alone while Nick was away he had leisure to meditate on the wonder of this--on the art with which the girl had separated passion from violence, filling the whole place and never screaming; for it had often seemed to him in London of old that the yell of theatrical emotion rang through the shrinking night like the voice of the Sunday newsboy. Miriam had never been more present to him than at this hour; but she was inextricably transmuted--present essentially as the romantic heroine she represented. His state of mind was of the strangest and he was conscious of its strangeness, just as he was conscious in his very person of a lapse of resistance which likened itself absurdly to liberation. He felt weak at the same time that he felt inspired, and he felt inspired at the same time that he knew, or believed he knew, that his face was a blank. He saw things as a shining confusion, and yet somehow something monstrously definite kept surging out of them. Miriam was a beautiful, actual, fictive, impossible young woman of a past age, an undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one's own affairs. But that reality was a part of her spectator's joy, and she was not changed back to the common by his perception of the magnificent trick of art with which it was connected. Before his kinsman rejoined him Peter, taking a visiting-card from his pocket, had written on it in pencil a few words in a foreign tongue; but as at that moment he saw Nick coming in he immediately put it out of view. The last thing before the curtain rose on the fifth act that young man mentioned his having brought a message from Basil Dashwood, who hoped they both, on leaving the theatre, would come to supper with him in company with Miriam and her mother and several others: he had prepared a little informal banquet in honour of so famous a night. At this, while the curtain was about to rise, Peter immediately took out his card again and added something--he wrote the finest small hand you could see. Nick asked him what he was doing, and he waited but an instant. "It's a word to say I can't come." "To Dashwood? Oh I shall go," said Nick. "Well, I hope you'll enjoy it!" his companion replied in a tone which came back to him afterwards. When the curtain fell on the last act the people stayed, standing up in their places for acclamation. The applause shook the house--the recall became a clamour, the relief from a long tension. This was in any performance a moment Peter detested, but he stood for an instant beside Nick, who clapped, to his cousin's diplomatic sense, after the fashion of a school-boy at the pantomime. There was a veritable roar while the curtain drew back at the side most removed from our pair. Peter could see Basil Dashwood holding it, making a passage for the male "juvenile lead," who had Miriam in tow. Nick redoubled his efforts; heard the plaudits swell; saw the bows of the leading gentleman, who was hot and fat; saw Miriam, personally conducted and closer to the footlights, grow brighter and bigger and more swaying; and then became aware that his own comrade had with extreme agility slipped out of the stalls. Nick had already lost sight of him--he had apparently taken but a minute to escape from the house; and wondered at his quitting him without a farewell if he was to leave England on the morrow and they were not to meet at the hospitable Dashwood's. He wondered even what Peter was "up to," since, as he had assured him, there was no question of his going round to Miriam. He waited to see this young lady reappear three times, dragging Dashwood behind her at the second with a friendly arm, to whom, in turn, was hooked Miss Fanny Rover, the actress entrusted in the piece with the inevitable comic relief. He went out slowly with the crowd and at the door looked again for Peter, who struck him as deficient for once in finish. He couldn't know that in another direction and while he was helping the house to "rise" at its heroine, his kinsman had been particularly explicit. On reaching the lobby Peter had pounced on a small boy in buttons, who seemed superfluously connected with a desolate refreshment-room and, from the tips of his toes, was peeping at the stage through the glazed hole in the door of a box. Into one of the child's hands he thrust the card he had drawn again from his waistcoat and into the other the largest silver coin he could find in the same receptacle, while he bent over him with words of adjuration--words the little page tried to help himself to apprehend by instantly attempting to peruse the other words written on the card. "That's no use--it's Italian," said Peter; "only carry it round to Miss Rooth without a minute's delay. Place it in her hand and she'll give you some object--a bracelet, a glove, or a flower--to bring me back as a sign that she has received it. I shall be outside; bring me there what she gives you and you shall have another shilling--only fly!" His small messenger sounded him a moment with the sharp face of London wage-earning, and still more of London tip-earning, infancy, and vanished as swiftly as a slave of the Arabian Nights. While he waited in the lobby the audience began to pour out, and before the urchin had come back to him he was clapped on the shoulder by Nick. "I'm glad I haven't lost you, but why didn't you stay to give her a hand?" "Give her a hand? I hated it." "My dear man, I don't follow you," Nick said. "If you won't come to Dashwood's supper I fear our ways don't lie together." "Thank him very much; say I've to get up at an unnatural hour." To this Peter added: "I think I ought to tell you she may not be there." "Miss Rooth? Why it's all _for_ her." "I'm waiting for a word from her--she may change her mind." Nick showed his interest. "For you? What then have you proposed?" "I've proposed marriage," said Peter in a strange voice. "I say--!" Nick broke out; and at the same moment Peter's messenger squeezed through the press and stood before him. "She has given me nothing, sir," the boy announced; "but she says I'm to say 'All right!'" Nick's stare widened. "You've proposed through _him_?" "Aye, and she accepts. Good-night!"--on which, turning away, Peter bounded into a hansom. He said something to the driver through the roof, and Nick's eyes followed the cab as it started off. This young man was mystified, was even amused; especially when the youth in buttons, planted there and wondering too, brought forth: "Please sir, he told me he'd give me a shilling and he've forgot it." "Oh I can't pay you for _that_!" Nick laughed. But he fished out a dole, though he was vexed at the injury to the supper. XLVI Peter meanwhile rolled away through the summer night to Saint John's Wood. He had put the pressure of strong words on his young friend, entreating her to drive home immediately, return there without any one, without even her mother. He wished to see her alone and for a purpose he would fully and satisfactorily explain--couldn't she trust him? He besought her to remember his own situation and throw over her supper, throw over everything. He would wait for her with unspeakable impatience in Balaklava Place. He did so, when he got there, but it had taken half an hour. Interminable seemed his lonely vigil in Miss Lumley's drawing-room, where the character of the original proprietress came out to him more than ever before in a kind of afterglow of old sociabilities, a vulgar, ghostly reference. The numerous candles had been lighted for him, and Mrs. Rooth's familiar fictions lay about; but his nerves forbade him the solace of a chair and a book. He walked up and down, thinking and listening, and as the long window, the balmy air permitting, stood open to the garden, he passed several times in and out. A carriage appeared to stop at the gate--then there was nothing; he heard the rare rattle of wheels and the far-off hum of London. His impatience was overwrought, and though he knew this it persisted; it would have been no easy matter for Miriam to break away from the flock of her felicitators. Still less simple was it doubtless for her to leave poor Dashwood with his supper on his hands. Perhaps she would bring Dashwood with her, bring him to time her; she was capable of playing him--that is, of playing Her Majesty's new representative to the small far-off State, or even of playing them both--that trick. Perhaps the little wretch in buttons--Peter remembered now the neglected shilling--only pretending to go round with his card, had come back with an invented answer. But how could he know, since presumably he couldn't read Italian, that his answer would fit the message? Peter was sorry now that he himself had not gone round, not snatched Miriam bodily away, made sure of her and of what he wanted of her. When forty minutes had elapsed he regarded it as proved that she wouldn't come, and, asking himself what he should do, determined to drive off again and seize her at her comrade's feast. Then he remembered how Nick had mentioned that this entertainment was not to be held at the young actor's lodgings but at some tavern or restaurant the name of which he had not heeded. Suddenly, however, Peter became aware with joy that this name didn't matter, for there was something at the garden door at last. He rushed out before she had had time to ring, and saw as she stepped from the carriage that she was alone. Now that she was there, that he had this evidence she had listened to him and trusted him, all his impatience and bitterness gave way and a flood of pleading tenderness took their place in the first words he spoke to her. It was far "dearer" of her than he had any right to dream, but she was the best and kindest creature--this showed it--as well as the most wonderful. He was really not off his head with his contradictory ways; no, before heaven he wasn't, and he would explain, he would make everything clear. Everything was changed. She stopped short in the little dusky garden, looking at him in the light of the open window. Then she called back to the coachman--they had left the garden door open--"Wait for me, mind; I shall want you again." "What's the matter--won't you stay?" Peter asked. "Are you going out again at this absurd hour? I won't hurt you," he gently urged. And he went back and closed the garden door. He wanted to say to the coachman, "It's no matter--please drive away." At the same time he wouldn't for the world have done anything offensive to her. "I've come because I thought it better to-night, as things have turned out, to do the thing you ask me, whatever it may be," she had already begun. "That's probably what you calculated I would think, eh? What this evening has been you've seen, and I must allow that your hand's in it. That you know for yourself--that you doubtless felt as you sat there. But I confess I don't imagine what you want of me here now," she added. She had remained standing in the path. Peter felt the irony of her "now" and how it made a fool of him, but he had been prepared for this and for much worse. He had begged her not to think him a fool, but in truth at present he cared little if she did. Very likely he was--in spite of his plea that everything was changed: he cared little even himself. However, he spoke in the tone of intense reason and of the fullest disposition to satisfy her. This lucidity only took still more from the dignity of his change of front: his separation from her the day before had had such pretensions to being lucid. But the explanation and the justification were in the very fact, the fact that had complete possession of him. He named it when he replied to her: "I've simply overrated my strength." "Oh I knew--I knew! That's why I entreated you not to come!" Miriam groaned. She turned away lamenting, and for a moment he thought she would retreat to her carriage. But he passed his hand into her arm, to draw her forward, and after an instant felt her yield. "The fact is we must have this thing out," he said. Then he added as he made her go into the house, bending over her, "The failure of my strength--that was just the reason of my coming." She broke into her laugh at these words, as she entered the drawing-room, and it made them sound pompous in their false wisdom. She flung off, as a good-natured tribute to the image of their having the thing out, a white shawl that had been wrapped round her. She was still painted and bedizened, in the splendid dress of her climax, so that she seemed protected and alienated by the character she had been acting. "Whatever it is you want--when I understand--you'll be very brief, won't you? Do you know I've given up a charming supper for you? Mamma has gone there. I've promised to go back to them." "You're an angel not to have let her come with you. I'm sure she wanted to," Peter made reply. "Oh she's all right, but she's nervous." Then the girl added: "Couldn't she keep you away after all?" "Whom are you talking about?" Biddy Dormer was as absent from his mind as if she had never existed. "The charming thing you were with this morning. Is she so afraid of obliging me? Oh she'd be so good for you!" "Don't speak of that," Peter gravely said. "I was in perfect good faith yesterday when I took leave of you. I was--I was. But I can't--I can't: you're too unutterably dear to me." "Oh don't--_please_ don't!" Miriam wailed at this. She stood before the fireless chimney-piece with one of her hands on it. "If it's only to say that, don't you know, what's the use?" "It isn't only to say that. I've a plan, a perfect plan: the whole thing lies clear before me." "And what's the whole thing?" He had to make an effort. "You say your mother's nervous. Ah if you knew how nervous I am!" "Well, I'm not. Go on." "Give it up--give it up!" Peter stammered. "Give it up?" She fixed him like a mild Medusa. "I'll marry you to-morrow if you'll renounce; and in return for the sacrifice you make for me I'll do more for you than ever was done for a woman before." "Renounce after to-night? Do you call that a plan?" she asked. "Those are old words and very foolish ones--you wanted something of that sort a year ago." "Oh I fluttered round the idea at that time; we were talking in the air. I didn't really believe I could make you see it then, and certainly you didn't see it. My own future, moreover, wasn't definite to me. I didn't know what I could offer you. But these last months have made a difference--I do know now. Now what I say is deliberate--It's deeply meditated. I simply can't live without you, and I hold that together we may do great things." She seemed to wonder. "What sort of things?" "The things of my profession, of my life, the things one does for one's country, the responsibility and the honour of great affairs; deeply fascinating when one's immersed in them, and more exciting really--put them even at that--than the excitements of the theatre. Care for me only a little and you'll see what they are, they'll take hold of you. Believe me, believe me," Peter pleaded; "every fibre of my being trembles in what I say to you." "You admitted yesterday it wouldn't do," she made answer. "Where were the fibres of your being then?" "They throbbed in me even more than now, and I was trying, like an ass, not to feel them. Where was this evening yesterday--where were the maddening hours I've just spent? Ah you're the perfection of perfections, and as I sat there to-night you taught me what I really want." "The perfection of perfections?" the girl echoed with the strangest smile. "I needn't try to tell you: you must have felt to-night with such rapture what you are, what you can do. How can I give that up?" he piteously went on. "How can _I_, my poor friend? I like your plans and your responsibilities and your great affairs, as you call them. _Voyons_, they're infantile. I've just shown that I'm a perfection of perfections: therefore it's just the moment to 'renounce,' as you gracefully say? Oh I was sure, I was sure!" And Miriam paused, resting eyes at once lighted and troubled on him as in the effort to think of some arrangement that would help him out of his absurdity. "I was sure, I mean, that if you did come your poor, dear, doting brain would be quite confused," she presently pursued. "I can't be a muff in public just for you, _pourtant_. Dear me, why do you like us so much?" "Like you? I loathe you!" "_Je le vois parbleu bien_!" she lightly returned. "I mean why do you feel us, judge us, understand us so well? I please you because you see, because you know; and then for that very reason of my pleasing you must adapt me to your convenience, you must take me over, as they say. You admire me as an artist and therefore want to put me into a box in which the artist will breathe her last. Ah be reasonable; you must let her live!" "Let her live? As if I could prevent her living!" Peter cried with unmistakable conviction. "Even if I did wish how could I prevent a spirit like yours from expressing itself? Don't talk about my putting you in a box, for, dearest child, I'm taking you out of one," he all persuasively explained. "The artist is irrepressible, eternal; she'll be in everything you are and in everything you do, and you'll go about with her triumphantly exerting your powers, charming the world, carrying everything before you." Miriam's colour rose, through all her artificial surfaces, at this all but convincing appeal, and she asked whimsically: "Shall you

believed

How many times the word 'believed' appears in the text?

you to-morrow--there's no question of ten years!" cried Mrs. Rooth with a comicality of plainness. Miriam smiled at Nick, deprecating his horror of such talk. "Isn't it droll, the way she can't get it out of her head?" Then turning almost coaxingly to the old woman: "_Voyons_, look about you: they don't marry us like that." "But they do--_cela se voit tous les jours_. Ask Mr. Dormer." "Oh never! It would be as if I asked him to give us a practical proof." "I shall never prove anything by marrying any one," Nick said. "For me that question's over." Miriam rested kind eyes on him. "Dear me, how you must hate me!" And before he had time to reply she went on to her mother: "People marry them to make them leave the stage; which proves exactly what I say." "Ah they offer them the finest positions," reasoned Mrs. Rooth. "Do you want me to leave it then?" "Oh you can manage if you will!" "The only managing I know anything about is to do my work. If I manage that decently I shall pull through." "But, dearest, may our work not be of many sorts?" "I only know one," said Miriam. At this her mother got up with a sigh. "I see you do wish to drive me into the street." "Mamma's bewildered--there are so many paths she wants to follow, there are so many bundles of hay. As I told you, she wishes to gobble them all," the girl pursued. Then she added: "Yes, go and take the carriage; take a turn round the Park--you always delight in that--and come back for me in an hour." "I'm too vexed with you; the air will do me good," said Mrs. Rooth. But before she went she addressed Nick: "I've your assurance that you'll bring him then to-night?" "Bring Peter? I don't think I shall have to drag him," Nick returned. "But you must do me the justice to remember that if I should resort to force I should do something that's not particularly in my interest--I should be magnanimous." "We must always be that, mustn't we?" moralised Mrs. Rooth. "How could it affect your interest?" Miriam asked less abstractedly. "Yes, as you say," her mother mused at their host, "the question of marriage has ceased to exist for you." "Mamma goes straight at it!" laughed the girl, getting up while Nick rubbed his canvas before answering. Miriam went to mamma and settled her bonnet and mantle in preparation for her drive, then stood a moment with a filial arm about her and as if waiting for their friend's explanation. This, however, when it came halted visibly. "Why you said a while ago that if Peter was there you wouldn't act." "I'll act for _him_," smiled Miriam, inconsequently caressing her mother. "It doesn't matter whom it's for!" Mrs. Rooth declared sagaciously. "Take your drive and relax your mind," said the girl, kissing her. "Come for me in an hour; not later--but not sooner." She went with her to the door, bundled her out, closed it behind her and came back to the position she had quitted. "_This_ is the peace I want!" she gratefully cried as she settled into it. XLV Peter Sherringham said so little during the performance that his companion was struck by his dumbness, especially as Miriam's acting seemed to Nick magnificent. He held his breath while she was on the stage--she gave the whole thing, including the spectator's emotion, such a lift. She had not carried out her fantastic menace of not exerting herself, and, as Mrs. Rooth had said, it little mattered for whom she acted. Nick was conscious in watching her that she went through it all for herself, for the idea that possessed her and that she rendered with extraordinary breadth. She couldn't open the door a part of the way to it and let it simply peep in; if it entered at all it must enter in full procession and occupy the premises in state. This was what had happened on an occasion which, as the less tormented of our young men felt in his stall, grew larger with each throb of the responsive house; till by the time the play was half over it appeared to stretch out wide arms to the future. Nick had often heard more applause, but had never heard more attention, since they were all charmed and hushed together and success seemed to be sitting down with them. There had been of course plenty of announcement--the newspapers had abounded and the arts of the manager had taken the freest license; but it was easy to feel a fine, universal consensus and to recognise everywhere the light spring of hope. People snatched their eyes from the stage an instant to look at each other, all eager to hand on the torch passed to them by the actress over the footlights. It was a part of the impression that she was now only showing to the full, for this time she had verse to deal with and she made it unexpectedly exquisite. She was beauty, melody, truth; she was passion and persuasion and tenderness. She caught up the obstreperous play in soothing, entwining arms and, seeming to tread the air in the flutter of her robe, carried it into the high places of poetry, of art, of style. And she had such tones of nature, such concealments of art, such effusions of life, that the whole scene glowed with the colour she communicated, and the house, pervaded with rosy fire, glowed back at the scene. Nick looked round in the intervals; he felt excited and flushed--the night had turned to a feast of fraternity and he expected to see people embrace each other. The crowd, the agitation, the triumph, the surprise, the signals and rumours, the heated air, his associates, near him, pointing out other figures who presumably were celebrated but whom he had never heard of, all amused him and banished every impulse to question or to compare. Miriam was as happy as some right sensation--she would have fed the memory with deep draughts. One of the things that amused him or at least helped to fill his attention was Peter's attitude, which apparently didn't exclude criticism--rather indeed mainly implied it. This admirer never took his eyes off the actress, but he made no remark about her and never stirred out of his chair. Nick had had from the first a plan of going round to speak to her, but as his companion evidently meant not to move he scrupled at being more forward. During their brief dinner together--they were determined not to be late--Peter had been silent, quite recklessly grave, but also, his kinsman judged, full of the wish to make it clear he was calm. In his seat he was calmer than ever and had an air even of trying to suggest that his attendance, preoccupied as he was with deeper solemnities, was more or less mechanical, the result of a conception of duty, a habit of courtesy. When during a scene in the second act--a scene from which Miriam was absent--Nick observed to him that one might judge from his reserve that he wasn't pleased he replied after a moment: "I've been looking for her mistakes." And when Nick made answer to this that he certainly wouldn't find them he said again in an odd tone: "No, I shan't find them--I shan't find them." It might have seemed that since the girl's performance was a dazzling success he regarded his evening as rather a failure. After the third act Nick said candidly: "My dear fellow, how can you sit here? Aren't you going to speak to her?" To which Peter replied inscrutably: "Lord, no, never again. I bade her good-bye yesterday. She knows what I think of her form. It's very good, but she carries it a little too far. Besides, she didn't want me to come, and it's therefore more discreet to keep away from her." "Surely it isn't an hour for discretion!" Nick cried. "Excuse me at any rate for five minutes." He went behind and reappeared only as the curtain was rising on the fourth act; and in the interval between the fourth and the fifth he went again for a shorter time. Peter was personally detached, but he consented to listen to his companion's vivid account of the state of things on the stage, where the elation of victory had lighted up the place. The strain was over, the ship in port--they were all wiping their faces and grinning. Miriam--yes, positively--was grinning too, and she hadn't asked a question about Peter nor sent him a message. They were kissing all round and dancing for joy. They were on the eve, worse luck, of a tremendous run. Peter groaned irrepressibly for this; it was, save for a slight sign a moment later, the only vibration caused in him by his cousin's report. There was but one voice of regret that they hadn't put on the piece earlier, as the end of the season would interrupt the run. There was but one voice too about the fourth act--it was believed all London would rush to see the fourth act. The crowd about her was a dozen deep and Miriam in the midst of it all charming; she was receiving in the ugly place after the fashion of royalty, almost as hedged with the famous "divinity," yet with a smile and a word for each. She was really like a young queen on her accession. When she saw him, Nick, she had kissed her hand to him over the heads of the courtiers. Nick's artless comment on this was that she had such pretty manners. It made Peter laugh--apparently at his friend's conception of the manners of a young queen. Mrs. Rooth, with a dozen shawls on her arm, was as red as the kitchen-fire, but you couldn't tell if Miriam were red or pale: she was so cleverly, finely made up--perhaps a little too much. Dashwood of course was greatly to the fore, but you hadn't to mention his own performance to him: he took it all handsomely and wouldn't hear of anything but that _her_ fortune was made. He didn't say much indeed, but evidently had ideas about her fortune; he nodded significant things and whistled inimitable sounds--"Heuh, heuh!" He was perfectly satisfied; moreover, he looked further ahead than any one. It was on coming back to his place after the fourth act that Nick put in, for his companion's benefit, most of these touches in his sketch of the situation. If Peter had continued to look for Miriam's mistakes he hadn't yet found them: the fourth act, bristling with dangers, putting a premium on every sort of cheap effect, had rounded itself without a flaw. Sitting there alone while Nick was away he had leisure to meditate on the wonder of this--on the art with which the girl had separated passion from violence, filling the whole place and never screaming; for it had often seemed to him in London of old that the yell of theatrical emotion rang through the shrinking night like the voice of the Sunday newsboy. Miriam had never been more present to him than at this hour; but she was inextricably transmuted--present essentially as the romantic heroine she represented. His state of mind was of the strangest and he was conscious of its strangeness, just as he was conscious in his very person of a lapse of resistance which likened itself absurdly to liberation. He felt weak at the same time that he felt inspired, and he felt inspired at the same time that he knew, or believed he knew, that his face was a blank. He saw things as a shining confusion, and yet somehow something monstrously definite kept surging out of them. Miriam was a beautiful, actual, fictive, impossible young woman of a past age, an undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one's own affairs. But that reality was a part of her spectator's joy, and she was not changed back to the common by his perception of the magnificent trick of art with which it was connected. Before his kinsman rejoined him Peter, taking a visiting-card from his pocket, had written on it in pencil a few words in a foreign tongue; but as at that moment he saw Nick coming in he immediately put it out of view. The last thing before the curtain rose on the fifth act that young man mentioned his having brought a message from Basil Dashwood, who hoped they both, on leaving the theatre, would come to supper with him in company with Miriam and her mother and several others: he had prepared a little informal banquet in honour of so famous a night. At this, while the curtain was about to rise, Peter immediately took out his card again and added something--he wrote the finest small hand you could see. Nick asked him what he was doing, and he waited but an instant. "It's a word to say I can't come." "To Dashwood? Oh I shall go," said Nick. "Well, I hope you'll enjoy it!" his companion replied in a tone which came back to him afterwards. When the curtain fell on the last act the people stayed, standing up in their places for acclamation. The applause shook the house--the recall became a clamour, the relief from a long tension. This was in any performance a moment Peter detested, but he stood for an instant beside Nick, who clapped, to his cousin's diplomatic sense, after the fashion of a school-boy at the pantomime. There was a veritable roar while the curtain drew back at the side most removed from our pair. Peter could see Basil Dashwood holding it, making a passage for the male "juvenile lead," who had Miriam in tow. Nick redoubled his efforts; heard the plaudits swell; saw the bows of the leading gentleman, who was hot and fat; saw Miriam, personally conducted and closer to the footlights, grow brighter and bigger and more swaying; and then became aware that his own comrade had with extreme agility slipped out of the stalls. Nick had already lost sight of him--he had apparently taken but a minute to escape from the house; and wondered at his quitting him without a farewell if he was to leave England on the morrow and they were not to meet at the hospitable Dashwood's. He wondered even what Peter was "up to," since, as he had assured him, there was no question of his going round to Miriam. He waited to see this young lady reappear three times, dragging Dashwood behind her at the second with a friendly arm, to whom, in turn, was hooked Miss Fanny Rover, the actress entrusted in the piece with the inevitable comic relief. He went out slowly with the crowd and at the door looked again for Peter, who struck him as deficient for once in finish. He couldn't know that in another direction and while he was helping the house to "rise" at its heroine, his kinsman had been particularly explicit. On reaching the lobby Peter had pounced on a small boy in buttons, who seemed superfluously connected with a desolate refreshment-room and, from the tips of his toes, was peeping at the stage through the glazed hole in the door of a box. Into one of the child's hands he thrust the card he had drawn again from his waistcoat and into the other the largest silver coin he could find in the same receptacle, while he bent over him with words of adjuration--words the little page tried to help himself to apprehend by instantly attempting to peruse the other words written on the card. "That's no use--it's Italian," said Peter; "only carry it round to Miss Rooth without a minute's delay. Place it in her hand and she'll give you some object--a bracelet, a glove, or a flower--to bring me back as a sign that she has received it. I shall be outside; bring me there what she gives you and you shall have another shilling--only fly!" His small messenger sounded him a moment with the sharp face of London wage-earning, and still more of London tip-earning, infancy, and vanished as swiftly as a slave of the Arabian Nights. While he waited in the lobby the audience began to pour out, and before the urchin had come back to him he was clapped on the shoulder by Nick. "I'm glad I haven't lost you, but why didn't you stay to give her a hand?" "Give her a hand? I hated it." "My dear man, I don't follow you," Nick said. "If you won't come to Dashwood's supper I fear our ways don't lie together." "Thank him very much; say I've to get up at an unnatural hour." To this Peter added: "I think I ought to tell you she may not be there." "Miss Rooth? Why it's all _for_ her." "I'm waiting for a word from her--she may change her mind." Nick showed his interest. "For you? What then have you proposed?" "I've proposed marriage," said Peter in a strange voice. "I say--!" Nick broke out; and at the same moment Peter's messenger squeezed through the press and stood before him. "She has given me nothing, sir," the boy announced; "but she says I'm to say 'All right!'" Nick's stare widened. "You've proposed through _him_?" "Aye, and she accepts. Good-night!"--on which, turning away, Peter bounded into a hansom. He said something to the driver through the roof, and Nick's eyes followed the cab as it started off. This young man was mystified, was even amused; especially when the youth in buttons, planted there and wondering too, brought forth: "Please sir, he told me he'd give me a shilling and he've forgot it." "Oh I can't pay you for _that_!" Nick laughed. But he fished out a dole, though he was vexed at the injury to the supper. XLVI Peter meanwhile rolled away through the summer night to Saint John's Wood. He had put the pressure of strong words on his young friend, entreating her to drive home immediately, return there without any one, without even her mother. He wished to see her alone and for a purpose he would fully and satisfactorily explain--couldn't she trust him? He besought her to remember his own situation and throw over her supper, throw over everything. He would wait for her with unspeakable impatience in Balaklava Place. He did so, when he got there, but it had taken half an hour. Interminable seemed his lonely vigil in Miss Lumley's drawing-room, where the character of the original proprietress came out to him more than ever before in a kind of afterglow of old sociabilities, a vulgar, ghostly reference. The numerous candles had been lighted for him, and Mrs. Rooth's familiar fictions lay about; but his nerves forbade him the solace of a chair and a book. He walked up and down, thinking and listening, and as the long window, the balmy air permitting, stood open to the garden, he passed several times in and out. A carriage appeared to stop at the gate--then there was nothing; he heard the rare rattle of wheels and the far-off hum of London. His impatience was overwrought, and though he knew this it persisted; it would have been no easy matter for Miriam to break away from the flock of her felicitators. Still less simple was it doubtless for her to leave poor Dashwood with his supper on his hands. Perhaps she would bring Dashwood with her, bring him to time her; she was capable of playing him--that is, of playing Her Majesty's new representative to the small far-off State, or even of playing them both--that trick. Perhaps the little wretch in buttons--Peter remembered now the neglected shilling--only pretending to go round with his card, had come back with an invented answer. But how could he know, since presumably he couldn't read Italian, that his answer would fit the message? Peter was sorry now that he himself had not gone round, not snatched Miriam bodily away, made sure of her and of what he wanted of her. When forty minutes had elapsed he regarded it as proved that she wouldn't come, and, asking himself what he should do, determined to drive off again and seize her at her comrade's feast. Then he remembered how Nick had mentioned that this entertainment was not to be held at the young actor's lodgings but at some tavern or restaurant the name of which he had not heeded. Suddenly, however, Peter became aware with joy that this name didn't matter, for there was something at the garden door at last. He rushed out before she had had time to ring, and saw as she stepped from the carriage that she was alone. Now that she was there, that he had this evidence she had listened to him and trusted him, all his impatience and bitterness gave way and a flood of pleading tenderness took their place in the first words he spoke to her. It was far "dearer" of her than he had any right to dream, but she was the best and kindest creature--this showed it--as well as the most wonderful. He was really not off his head with his contradictory ways; no, before heaven he wasn't, and he would explain, he would make everything clear. Everything was changed. She stopped short in the little dusky garden, looking at him in the light of the open window. Then she called back to the coachman--they had left the garden door open--"Wait for me, mind; I shall want you again." "What's the matter--won't you stay?" Peter asked. "Are you going out again at this absurd hour? I won't hurt you," he gently urged. And he went back and closed the garden door. He wanted to say to the coachman, "It's no matter--please drive away." At the same time he wouldn't for the world have done anything offensive to her. "I've come because I thought it better to-night, as things have turned out, to do the thing you ask me, whatever it may be," she had already begun. "That's probably what you calculated I would think, eh? What this evening has been you've seen, and I must allow that your hand's in it. That you know for yourself--that you doubtless felt as you sat there. But I confess I don't imagine what you want of me here now," she added. She had remained standing in the path. Peter felt the irony of her "now" and how it made a fool of him, but he had been prepared for this and for much worse. He had begged her not to think him a fool, but in truth at present he cared little if she did. Very likely he was--in spite of his plea that everything was changed: he cared little even himself. However, he spoke in the tone of intense reason and of the fullest disposition to satisfy her. This lucidity only took still more from the dignity of his change of front: his separation from her the day before had had such pretensions to being lucid. But the explanation and the justification were in the very fact, the fact that had complete possession of him. He named it when he replied to her: "I've simply overrated my strength." "Oh I knew--I knew! That's why I entreated you not to come!" Miriam groaned. She turned away lamenting, and for a moment he thought she would retreat to her carriage. But he passed his hand into her arm, to draw her forward, and after an instant felt her yield. "The fact is we must have this thing out," he said. Then he added as he made her go into the house, bending over her, "The failure of my strength--that was just the reason of my coming." She broke into her laugh at these words, as she entered the drawing-room, and it made them sound pompous in their false wisdom. She flung off, as a good-natured tribute to the image of their having the thing out, a white shawl that had been wrapped round her. She was still painted and bedizened, in the splendid dress of her climax, so that she seemed protected and alienated by the character she had been acting. "Whatever it is you want--when I understand--you'll be very brief, won't you? Do you know I've given up a charming supper for you? Mamma has gone there. I've promised to go back to them." "You're an angel not to have let her come with you. I'm sure she wanted to," Peter made reply. "Oh she's all right, but she's nervous." Then the girl added: "Couldn't she keep you away after all?" "Whom are you talking about?" Biddy Dormer was as absent from his mind as if she had never existed. "The charming thing you were with this morning. Is she so afraid of obliging me? Oh she'd be so good for you!" "Don't speak of that," Peter gravely said. "I was in perfect good faith yesterday when I took leave of you. I was--I was. But I can't--I can't: you're too unutterably dear to me." "Oh don't--_please_ don't!" Miriam wailed at this. She stood before the fireless chimney-piece with one of her hands on it. "If it's only to say that, don't you know, what's the use?" "It isn't only to say that. I've a plan, a perfect plan: the whole thing lies clear before me." "And what's the whole thing?" He had to make an effort. "You say your mother's nervous. Ah if you knew how nervous I am!" "Well, I'm not. Go on." "Give it up--give it up!" Peter stammered. "Give it up?" She fixed him like a mild Medusa. "I'll marry you to-morrow if you'll renounce; and in return for the sacrifice you make for me I'll do more for you than ever was done for a woman before." "Renounce after to-night? Do you call that a plan?" she asked. "Those are old words and very foolish ones--you wanted something of that sort a year ago." "Oh I fluttered round the idea at that time; we were talking in the air. I didn't really believe I could make you see it then, and certainly you didn't see it. My own future, moreover, wasn't definite to me. I didn't know what I could offer you. But these last months have made a difference--I do know now. Now what I say is deliberate--It's deeply meditated. I simply can't live without you, and I hold that together we may do great things." She seemed to wonder. "What sort of things?" "The things of my profession, of my life, the things one does for one's country, the responsibility and the honour of great affairs; deeply fascinating when one's immersed in them, and more exciting really--put them even at that--than the excitements of the theatre. Care for me only a little and you'll see what they are, they'll take hold of you. Believe me, believe me," Peter pleaded; "every fibre of my being trembles in what I say to you." "You admitted yesterday it wouldn't do," she made answer. "Where were the fibres of your being then?" "They throbbed in me even more than now, and I was trying, like an ass, not to feel them. Where was this evening yesterday--where were the maddening hours I've just spent? Ah you're the perfection of perfections, and as I sat there to-night you taught me what I really want." "The perfection of perfections?" the girl echoed with the strangest smile. "I needn't try to tell you: you must have felt to-night with such rapture what you are, what you can do. How can I give that up?" he piteously went on. "How can _I_, my poor friend? I like your plans and your responsibilities and your great affairs, as you call them. _Voyons_, they're infantile. I've just shown that I'm a perfection of perfections: therefore it's just the moment to 'renounce,' as you gracefully say? Oh I was sure, I was sure!" And Miriam paused, resting eyes at once lighted and troubled on him as in the effort to think of some arrangement that would help him out of his absurdity. "I was sure, I mean, that if you did come your poor, dear, doting brain would be quite confused," she presently pursued. "I can't be a muff in public just for you, _pourtant_. Dear me, why do you like us so much?" "Like you? I loathe you!" "_Je le vois parbleu bien_!" she lightly returned. "I mean why do you feel us, judge us, understand us so well? I please you because you see, because you know; and then for that very reason of my pleasing you must adapt me to your convenience, you must take me over, as they say. You admire me as an artist and therefore want to put me into a box in which the artist will breathe her last. Ah be reasonable; you must let her live!" "Let her live? As if I could prevent her living!" Peter cried with unmistakable conviction. "Even if I did wish how could I prevent a spirit like yours from expressing itself? Don't talk about my putting you in a box, for, dearest child, I'm taking you out of one," he all persuasively explained. "The artist is irrepressible, eternal; she'll be in everything you are and in everything you do, and you'll go about with her triumphantly exerting your powers, charming the world, carrying everything before you." Miriam's colour rose, through all her artificial surfaces, at this all but convincing appeal, and she asked whimsically: "Shall you

alone

How many times the word 'alone' appears in the text?

you to-morrow--there's no question of ten years!" cried Mrs. Rooth with a comicality of plainness. Miriam smiled at Nick, deprecating his horror of such talk. "Isn't it droll, the way she can't get it out of her head?" Then turning almost coaxingly to the old woman: "_Voyons_, look about you: they don't marry us like that." "But they do--_cela se voit tous les jours_. Ask Mr. Dormer." "Oh never! It would be as if I asked him to give us a practical proof." "I shall never prove anything by marrying any one," Nick said. "For me that question's over." Miriam rested kind eyes on him. "Dear me, how you must hate me!" And before he had time to reply she went on to her mother: "People marry them to make them leave the stage; which proves exactly what I say." "Ah they offer them the finest positions," reasoned Mrs. Rooth. "Do you want me to leave it then?" "Oh you can manage if you will!" "The only managing I know anything about is to do my work. If I manage that decently I shall pull through." "But, dearest, may our work not be of many sorts?" "I only know one," said Miriam. At this her mother got up with a sigh. "I see you do wish to drive me into the street." "Mamma's bewildered--there are so many paths she wants to follow, there are so many bundles of hay. As I told you, she wishes to gobble them all," the girl pursued. Then she added: "Yes, go and take the carriage; take a turn round the Park--you always delight in that--and come back for me in an hour." "I'm too vexed with you; the air will do me good," said Mrs. Rooth. But before she went she addressed Nick: "I've your assurance that you'll bring him then to-night?" "Bring Peter? I don't think I shall have to drag him," Nick returned. "But you must do me the justice to remember that if I should resort to force I should do something that's not particularly in my interest--I should be magnanimous." "We must always be that, mustn't we?" moralised Mrs. Rooth. "How could it affect your interest?" Miriam asked less abstractedly. "Yes, as you say," her mother mused at their host, "the question of marriage has ceased to exist for you." "Mamma goes straight at it!" laughed the girl, getting up while Nick rubbed his canvas before answering. Miriam went to mamma and settled her bonnet and mantle in preparation for her drive, then stood a moment with a filial arm about her and as if waiting for their friend's explanation. This, however, when it came halted visibly. "Why you said a while ago that if Peter was there you wouldn't act." "I'll act for _him_," smiled Miriam, inconsequently caressing her mother. "It doesn't matter whom it's for!" Mrs. Rooth declared sagaciously. "Take your drive and relax your mind," said the girl, kissing her. "Come for me in an hour; not later--but not sooner." She went with her to the door, bundled her out, closed it behind her and came back to the position she had quitted. "_This_ is the peace I want!" she gratefully cried as she settled into it. XLV Peter Sherringham said so little during the performance that his companion was struck by his dumbness, especially as Miriam's acting seemed to Nick magnificent. He held his breath while she was on the stage--she gave the whole thing, including the spectator's emotion, such a lift. She had not carried out her fantastic menace of not exerting herself, and, as Mrs. Rooth had said, it little mattered for whom she acted. Nick was conscious in watching her that she went through it all for herself, for the idea that possessed her and that she rendered with extraordinary breadth. She couldn't open the door a part of the way to it and let it simply peep in; if it entered at all it must enter in full procession and occupy the premises in state. This was what had happened on an occasion which, as the less tormented of our young men felt in his stall, grew larger with each throb of the responsive house; till by the time the play was half over it appeared to stretch out wide arms to the future. Nick had often heard more applause, but had never heard more attention, since they were all charmed and hushed together and success seemed to be sitting down with them. There had been of course plenty of announcement--the newspapers had abounded and the arts of the manager had taken the freest license; but it was easy to feel a fine, universal consensus and to recognise everywhere the light spring of hope. People snatched their eyes from the stage an instant to look at each other, all eager to hand on the torch passed to them by the actress over the footlights. It was a part of the impression that she was now only showing to the full, for this time she had verse to deal with and she made it unexpectedly exquisite. She was beauty, melody, truth; she was passion and persuasion and tenderness. She caught up the obstreperous play in soothing, entwining arms and, seeming to tread the air in the flutter of her robe, carried it into the high places of poetry, of art, of style. And she had such tones of nature, such concealments of art, such effusions of life, that the whole scene glowed with the colour she communicated, and the house, pervaded with rosy fire, glowed back at the scene. Nick looked round in the intervals; he felt excited and flushed--the night had turned to a feast of fraternity and he expected to see people embrace each other. The crowd, the agitation, the triumph, the surprise, the signals and rumours, the heated air, his associates, near him, pointing out other figures who presumably were celebrated but whom he had never heard of, all amused him and banished every impulse to question or to compare. Miriam was as happy as some right sensation--she would have fed the memory with deep draughts. One of the things that amused him or at least helped to fill his attention was Peter's attitude, which apparently didn't exclude criticism--rather indeed mainly implied it. This admirer never took his eyes off the actress, but he made no remark about her and never stirred out of his chair. Nick had had from the first a plan of going round to speak to her, but as his companion evidently meant not to move he scrupled at being more forward. During their brief dinner together--they were determined not to be late--Peter had been silent, quite recklessly grave, but also, his kinsman judged, full of the wish to make it clear he was calm. In his seat he was calmer than ever and had an air even of trying to suggest that his attendance, preoccupied as he was with deeper solemnities, was more or less mechanical, the result of a conception of duty, a habit of courtesy. When during a scene in the second act--a scene from which Miriam was absent--Nick observed to him that one might judge from his reserve that he wasn't pleased he replied after a moment: "I've been looking for her mistakes." And when Nick made answer to this that he certainly wouldn't find them he said again in an odd tone: "No, I shan't find them--I shan't find them." It might have seemed that since the girl's performance was a dazzling success he regarded his evening as rather a failure. After the third act Nick said candidly: "My dear fellow, how can you sit here? Aren't you going to speak to her?" To which Peter replied inscrutably: "Lord, no, never again. I bade her good-bye yesterday. She knows what I think of her form. It's very good, but she carries it a little too far. Besides, she didn't want me to come, and it's therefore more discreet to keep away from her." "Surely it isn't an hour for discretion!" Nick cried. "Excuse me at any rate for five minutes." He went behind and reappeared only as the curtain was rising on the fourth act; and in the interval between the fourth and the fifth he went again for a shorter time. Peter was personally detached, but he consented to listen to his companion's vivid account of the state of things on the stage, where the elation of victory had lighted up the place. The strain was over, the ship in port--they were all wiping their faces and grinning. Miriam--yes, positively--was grinning too, and she hadn't asked a question about Peter nor sent him a message. They were kissing all round and dancing for joy. They were on the eve, worse luck, of a tremendous run. Peter groaned irrepressibly for this; it was, save for a slight sign a moment later, the only vibration caused in him by his cousin's report. There was but one voice of regret that they hadn't put on the piece earlier, as the end of the season would interrupt the run. There was but one voice too about the fourth act--it was believed all London would rush to see the fourth act. The crowd about her was a dozen deep and Miriam in the midst of it all charming; she was receiving in the ugly place after the fashion of royalty, almost as hedged with the famous "divinity," yet with a smile and a word for each. She was really like a young queen on her accession. When she saw him, Nick, she had kissed her hand to him over the heads of the courtiers. Nick's artless comment on this was that she had such pretty manners. It made Peter laugh--apparently at his friend's conception of the manners of a young queen. Mrs. Rooth, with a dozen shawls on her arm, was as red as the kitchen-fire, but you couldn't tell if Miriam were red or pale: she was so cleverly, finely made up--perhaps a little too much. Dashwood of course was greatly to the fore, but you hadn't to mention his own performance to him: he took it all handsomely and wouldn't hear of anything but that _her_ fortune was made. He didn't say much indeed, but evidently had ideas about her fortune; he nodded significant things and whistled inimitable sounds--"Heuh, heuh!" He was perfectly satisfied; moreover, he looked further ahead than any one. It was on coming back to his place after the fourth act that Nick put in, for his companion's benefit, most of these touches in his sketch of the situation. If Peter had continued to look for Miriam's mistakes he hadn't yet found them: the fourth act, bristling with dangers, putting a premium on every sort of cheap effect, had rounded itself without a flaw. Sitting there alone while Nick was away he had leisure to meditate on the wonder of this--on the art with which the girl had separated passion from violence, filling the whole place and never screaming; for it had often seemed to him in London of old that the yell of theatrical emotion rang through the shrinking night like the voice of the Sunday newsboy. Miriam had never been more present to him than at this hour; but she was inextricably transmuted--present essentially as the romantic heroine she represented. His state of mind was of the strangest and he was conscious of its strangeness, just as he was conscious in his very person of a lapse of resistance which likened itself absurdly to liberation. He felt weak at the same time that he felt inspired, and he felt inspired at the same time that he knew, or believed he knew, that his face was a blank. He saw things as a shining confusion, and yet somehow something monstrously definite kept surging out of them. Miriam was a beautiful, actual, fictive, impossible young woman of a past age, an undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one's own affairs. But that reality was a part of her spectator's joy, and she was not changed back to the common by his perception of the magnificent trick of art with which it was connected. Before his kinsman rejoined him Peter, taking a visiting-card from his pocket, had written on it in pencil a few words in a foreign tongue; but as at that moment he saw Nick coming in he immediately put it out of view. The last thing before the curtain rose on the fifth act that young man mentioned his having brought a message from Basil Dashwood, who hoped they both, on leaving the theatre, would come to supper with him in company with Miriam and her mother and several others: he had prepared a little informal banquet in honour of so famous a night. At this, while the curtain was about to rise, Peter immediately took out his card again and added something--he wrote the finest small hand you could see. Nick asked him what he was doing, and he waited but an instant. "It's a word to say I can't come." "To Dashwood? Oh I shall go," said Nick. "Well, I hope you'll enjoy it!" his companion replied in a tone which came back to him afterwards. When the curtain fell on the last act the people stayed, standing up in their places for acclamation. The applause shook the house--the recall became a clamour, the relief from a long tension. This was in any performance a moment Peter detested, but he stood for an instant beside Nick, who clapped, to his cousin's diplomatic sense, after the fashion of a school-boy at the pantomime. There was a veritable roar while the curtain drew back at the side most removed from our pair. Peter could see Basil Dashwood holding it, making a passage for the male "juvenile lead," who had Miriam in tow. Nick redoubled his efforts; heard the plaudits swell; saw the bows of the leading gentleman, who was hot and fat; saw Miriam, personally conducted and closer to the footlights, grow brighter and bigger and more swaying; and then became aware that his own comrade had with extreme agility slipped out of the stalls. Nick had already lost sight of him--he had apparently taken but a minute to escape from the house; and wondered at his quitting him without a farewell if he was to leave England on the morrow and they were not to meet at the hospitable Dashwood's. He wondered even what Peter was "up to," since, as he had assured him, there was no question of his going round to Miriam. He waited to see this young lady reappear three times, dragging Dashwood behind her at the second with a friendly arm, to whom, in turn, was hooked Miss Fanny Rover, the actress entrusted in the piece with the inevitable comic relief. He went out slowly with the crowd and at the door looked again for Peter, who struck him as deficient for once in finish. He couldn't know that in another direction and while he was helping the house to "rise" at its heroine, his kinsman had been particularly explicit. On reaching the lobby Peter had pounced on a small boy in buttons, who seemed superfluously connected with a desolate refreshment-room and, from the tips of his toes, was peeping at the stage through the glazed hole in the door of a box. Into one of the child's hands he thrust the card he had drawn again from his waistcoat and into the other the largest silver coin he could find in the same receptacle, while he bent over him with words of adjuration--words the little page tried to help himself to apprehend by instantly attempting to peruse the other words written on the card. "That's no use--it's Italian," said Peter; "only carry it round to Miss Rooth without a minute's delay. Place it in her hand and she'll give you some object--a bracelet, a glove, or a flower--to bring me back as a sign that she has received it. I shall be outside; bring me there what she gives you and you shall have another shilling--only fly!" His small messenger sounded him a moment with the sharp face of London wage-earning, and still more of London tip-earning, infancy, and vanished as swiftly as a slave of the Arabian Nights. While he waited in the lobby the audience began to pour out, and before the urchin had come back to him he was clapped on the shoulder by Nick. "I'm glad I haven't lost you, but why didn't you stay to give her a hand?" "Give her a hand? I hated it." "My dear man, I don't follow you," Nick said. "If you won't come to Dashwood's supper I fear our ways don't lie together." "Thank him very much; say I've to get up at an unnatural hour." To this Peter added: "I think I ought to tell you she may not be there." "Miss Rooth? Why it's all _for_ her." "I'm waiting for a word from her--she may change her mind." Nick showed his interest. "For you? What then have you proposed?" "I've proposed marriage," said Peter in a strange voice. "I say--!" Nick broke out; and at the same moment Peter's messenger squeezed through the press and stood before him. "She has given me nothing, sir," the boy announced; "but she says I'm to say 'All right!'" Nick's stare widened. "You've proposed through _him_?" "Aye, and she accepts. Good-night!"--on which, turning away, Peter bounded into a hansom. He said something to the driver through the roof, and Nick's eyes followed the cab as it started off. This young man was mystified, was even amused; especially when the youth in buttons, planted there and wondering too, brought forth: "Please sir, he told me he'd give me a shilling and he've forgot it." "Oh I can't pay you for _that_!" Nick laughed. But he fished out a dole, though he was vexed at the injury to the supper. XLVI Peter meanwhile rolled away through the summer night to Saint John's Wood. He had put the pressure of strong words on his young friend, entreating her to drive home immediately, return there without any one, without even her mother. He wished to see her alone and for a purpose he would fully and satisfactorily explain--couldn't she trust him? He besought her to remember his own situation and throw over her supper, throw over everything. He would wait for her with unspeakable impatience in Balaklava Place. He did so, when he got there, but it had taken half an hour. Interminable seemed his lonely vigil in Miss Lumley's drawing-room, where the character of the original proprietress came out to him more than ever before in a kind of afterglow of old sociabilities, a vulgar, ghostly reference. The numerous candles had been lighted for him, and Mrs. Rooth's familiar fictions lay about; but his nerves forbade him the solace of a chair and a book. He walked up and down, thinking and listening, and as the long window, the balmy air permitting, stood open to the garden, he passed several times in and out. A carriage appeared to stop at the gate--then there was nothing; he heard the rare rattle of wheels and the far-off hum of London. His impatience was overwrought, and though he knew this it persisted; it would have been no easy matter for Miriam to break away from the flock of her felicitators. Still less simple was it doubtless for her to leave poor Dashwood with his supper on his hands. Perhaps she would bring Dashwood with her, bring him to time her; she was capable of playing him--that is, of playing Her Majesty's new representative to the small far-off State, or even of playing them both--that trick. Perhaps the little wretch in buttons--Peter remembered now the neglected shilling--only pretending to go round with his card, had come back with an invented answer. But how could he know, since presumably he couldn't read Italian, that his answer would fit the message? Peter was sorry now that he himself had not gone round, not snatched Miriam bodily away, made sure of her and of what he wanted of her. When forty minutes had elapsed he regarded it as proved that she wouldn't come, and, asking himself what he should do, determined to drive off again and seize her at her comrade's feast. Then he remembered how Nick had mentioned that this entertainment was not to be held at the young actor's lodgings but at some tavern or restaurant the name of which he had not heeded. Suddenly, however, Peter became aware with joy that this name didn't matter, for there was something at the garden door at last. He rushed out before she had had time to ring, and saw as she stepped from the carriage that she was alone. Now that she was there, that he had this evidence she had listened to him and trusted him, all his impatience and bitterness gave way and a flood of pleading tenderness took their place in the first words he spoke to her. It was far "dearer" of her than he had any right to dream, but she was the best and kindest creature--this showed it--as well as the most wonderful. He was really not off his head with his contradictory ways; no, before heaven he wasn't, and he would explain, he would make everything clear. Everything was changed. She stopped short in the little dusky garden, looking at him in the light of the open window. Then she called back to the coachman--they had left the garden door open--"Wait for me, mind; I shall want you again." "What's the matter--won't you stay?" Peter asked. "Are you going out again at this absurd hour? I won't hurt you," he gently urged. And he went back and closed the garden door. He wanted to say to the coachman, "It's no matter--please drive away." At the same time he wouldn't for the world have done anything offensive to her. "I've come because I thought it better to-night, as things have turned out, to do the thing you ask me, whatever it may be," she had already begun. "That's probably what you calculated I would think, eh? What this evening has been you've seen, and I must allow that your hand's in it. That you know for yourself--that you doubtless felt as you sat there. But I confess I don't imagine what you want of me here now," she added. She had remained standing in the path. Peter felt the irony of her "now" and how it made a fool of him, but he had been prepared for this and for much worse. He had begged her not to think him a fool, but in truth at present he cared little if she did. Very likely he was--in spite of his plea that everything was changed: he cared little even himself. However, he spoke in the tone of intense reason and of the fullest disposition to satisfy her. This lucidity only took still more from the dignity of his change of front: his separation from her the day before had had such pretensions to being lucid. But the explanation and the justification were in the very fact, the fact that had complete possession of him. He named it when he replied to her: "I've simply overrated my strength." "Oh I knew--I knew! That's why I entreated you not to come!" Miriam groaned. She turned away lamenting, and for a moment he thought she would retreat to her carriage. But he passed his hand into her arm, to draw her forward, and after an instant felt her yield. "The fact is we must have this thing out," he said. Then he added as he made her go into the house, bending over her, "The failure of my strength--that was just the reason of my coming." She broke into her laugh at these words, as she entered the drawing-room, and it made them sound pompous in their false wisdom. She flung off, as a good-natured tribute to the image of their having the thing out, a white shawl that had been wrapped round her. She was still painted and bedizened, in the splendid dress of her climax, so that she seemed protected and alienated by the character she had been acting. "Whatever it is you want--when I understand--you'll be very brief, won't you? Do you know I've given up a charming supper for you? Mamma has gone there. I've promised to go back to them." "You're an angel not to have let her come with you. I'm sure she wanted to," Peter made reply. "Oh she's all right, but she's nervous." Then the girl added: "Couldn't she keep you away after all?" "Whom are you talking about?" Biddy Dormer was as absent from his mind as if she had never existed. "The charming thing you were with this morning. Is she so afraid of obliging me? Oh she'd be so good for you!" "Don't speak of that," Peter gravely said. "I was in perfect good faith yesterday when I took leave of you. I was--I was. But I can't--I can't: you're too unutterably dear to me." "Oh don't--_please_ don't!" Miriam wailed at this. She stood before the fireless chimney-piece with one of her hands on it. "If it's only to say that, don't you know, what's the use?" "It isn't only to say that. I've a plan, a perfect plan: the whole thing lies clear before me." "And what's the whole thing?" He had to make an effort. "You say your mother's nervous. Ah if you knew how nervous I am!" "Well, I'm not. Go on." "Give it up--give it up!" Peter stammered. "Give it up?" She fixed him like a mild Medusa. "I'll marry you to-morrow if you'll renounce; and in return for the sacrifice you make for me I'll do more for you than ever was done for a woman before." "Renounce after to-night? Do you call that a plan?" she asked. "Those are old words and very foolish ones--you wanted something of that sort a year ago." "Oh I fluttered round the idea at that time; we were talking in the air. I didn't really believe I could make you see it then, and certainly you didn't see it. My own future, moreover, wasn't definite to me. I didn't know what I could offer you. But these last months have made a difference--I do know now. Now what I say is deliberate--It's deeply meditated. I simply can't live without you, and I hold that together we may do great things." She seemed to wonder. "What sort of things?" "The things of my profession, of my life, the things one does for one's country, the responsibility and the honour of great affairs; deeply fascinating when one's immersed in them, and more exciting really--put them even at that--than the excitements of the theatre. Care for me only a little and you'll see what they are, they'll take hold of you. Believe me, believe me," Peter pleaded; "every fibre of my being trembles in what I say to you." "You admitted yesterday it wouldn't do," she made answer. "Where were the fibres of your being then?" "They throbbed in me even more than now, and I was trying, like an ass, not to feel them. Where was this evening yesterday--where were the maddening hours I've just spent? Ah you're the perfection of perfections, and as I sat there to-night you taught me what I really want." "The perfection of perfections?" the girl echoed with the strangest smile. "I needn't try to tell you: you must have felt to-night with such rapture what you are, what you can do. How can I give that up?" he piteously went on. "How can _I_, my poor friend? I like your plans and your responsibilities and your great affairs, as you call them. _Voyons_, they're infantile. I've just shown that I'm a perfection of perfections: therefore it's just the moment to 'renounce,' as you gracefully say? Oh I was sure, I was sure!" And Miriam paused, resting eyes at once lighted and troubled on him as in the effort to think of some arrangement that would help him out of his absurdity. "I was sure, I mean, that if you did come your poor, dear, doting brain would be quite confused," she presently pursued. "I can't be a muff in public just for you, _pourtant_. Dear me, why do you like us so much?" "Like you? I loathe you!" "_Je le vois parbleu bien_!" she lightly returned. "I mean why do you feel us, judge us, understand us so well? I please you because you see, because you know; and then for that very reason of my pleasing you must adapt me to your convenience, you must take me over, as they say. You admire me as an artist and therefore want to put me into a box in which the artist will breathe her last. Ah be reasonable; you must let her live!" "Let her live? As if I could prevent her living!" Peter cried with unmistakable conviction. "Even if I did wish how could I prevent a spirit like yours from expressing itself? Don't talk about my putting you in a box, for, dearest child, I'm taking you out of one," he all persuasively explained. "The artist is irrepressible, eternal; she'll be in everything you are and in everything you do, and you'll go about with her triumphantly exerting your powers, charming the world, carrying everything before you." Miriam's colour rose, through all her artificial surfaces, at this all but convincing appeal, and she asked whimsically: "Shall you

fortune

How many times the word 'fortune' appears in the text?

you to-morrow--there's no question of ten years!" cried Mrs. Rooth with a comicality of plainness. Miriam smiled at Nick, deprecating his horror of such talk. "Isn't it droll, the way she can't get it out of her head?" Then turning almost coaxingly to the old woman: "_Voyons_, look about you: they don't marry us like that." "But they do--_cela se voit tous les jours_. Ask Mr. Dormer." "Oh never! It would be as if I asked him to give us a practical proof." "I shall never prove anything by marrying any one," Nick said. "For me that question's over." Miriam rested kind eyes on him. "Dear me, how you must hate me!" And before he had time to reply she went on to her mother: "People marry them to make them leave the stage; which proves exactly what I say." "Ah they offer them the finest positions," reasoned Mrs. Rooth. "Do you want me to leave it then?" "Oh you can manage if you will!" "The only managing I know anything about is to do my work. If I manage that decently I shall pull through." "But, dearest, may our work not be of many sorts?" "I only know one," said Miriam. At this her mother got up with a sigh. "I see you do wish to drive me into the street." "Mamma's bewildered--there are so many paths she wants to follow, there are so many bundles of hay. As I told you, she wishes to gobble them all," the girl pursued. Then she added: "Yes, go and take the carriage; take a turn round the Park--you always delight in that--and come back for me in an hour." "I'm too vexed with you; the air will do me good," said Mrs. Rooth. But before she went she addressed Nick: "I've your assurance that you'll bring him then to-night?" "Bring Peter? I don't think I shall have to drag him," Nick returned. "But you must do me the justice to remember that if I should resort to force I should do something that's not particularly in my interest--I should be magnanimous." "We must always be that, mustn't we?" moralised Mrs. Rooth. "How could it affect your interest?" Miriam asked less abstractedly. "Yes, as you say," her mother mused at their host, "the question of marriage has ceased to exist for you." "Mamma goes straight at it!" laughed the girl, getting up while Nick rubbed his canvas before answering. Miriam went to mamma and settled her bonnet and mantle in preparation for her drive, then stood a moment with a filial arm about her and as if waiting for their friend's explanation. This, however, when it came halted visibly. "Why you said a while ago that if Peter was there you wouldn't act." "I'll act for _him_," smiled Miriam, inconsequently caressing her mother. "It doesn't matter whom it's for!" Mrs. Rooth declared sagaciously. "Take your drive and relax your mind," said the girl, kissing her. "Come for me in an hour; not later--but not sooner." She went with her to the door, bundled her out, closed it behind her and came back to the position she had quitted. "_This_ is the peace I want!" she gratefully cried as she settled into it. XLV Peter Sherringham said so little during the performance that his companion was struck by his dumbness, especially as Miriam's acting seemed to Nick magnificent. He held his breath while she was on the stage--she gave the whole thing, including the spectator's emotion, such a lift. She had not carried out her fantastic menace of not exerting herself, and, as Mrs. Rooth had said, it little mattered for whom she acted. Nick was conscious in watching her that she went through it all for herself, for the idea that possessed her and that she rendered with extraordinary breadth. She couldn't open the door a part of the way to it and let it simply peep in; if it entered at all it must enter in full procession and occupy the premises in state. This was what had happened on an occasion which, as the less tormented of our young men felt in his stall, grew larger with each throb of the responsive house; till by the time the play was half over it appeared to stretch out wide arms to the future. Nick had often heard more applause, but had never heard more attention, since they were all charmed and hushed together and success seemed to be sitting down with them. There had been of course plenty of announcement--the newspapers had abounded and the arts of the manager had taken the freest license; but it was easy to feel a fine, universal consensus and to recognise everywhere the light spring of hope. People snatched their eyes from the stage an instant to look at each other, all eager to hand on the torch passed to them by the actress over the footlights. It was a part of the impression that she was now only showing to the full, for this time she had verse to deal with and she made it unexpectedly exquisite. She was beauty, melody, truth; she was passion and persuasion and tenderness. She caught up the obstreperous play in soothing, entwining arms and, seeming to tread the air in the flutter of her robe, carried it into the high places of poetry, of art, of style. And she had such tones of nature, such concealments of art, such effusions of life, that the whole scene glowed with the colour she communicated, and the house, pervaded with rosy fire, glowed back at the scene. Nick looked round in the intervals; he felt excited and flushed--the night had turned to a feast of fraternity and he expected to see people embrace each other. The crowd, the agitation, the triumph, the surprise, the signals and rumours, the heated air, his associates, near him, pointing out other figures who presumably were celebrated but whom he had never heard of, all amused him and banished every impulse to question or to compare. Miriam was as happy as some right sensation--she would have fed the memory with deep draughts. One of the things that amused him or at least helped to fill his attention was Peter's attitude, which apparently didn't exclude criticism--rather indeed mainly implied it. This admirer never took his eyes off the actress, but he made no remark about her and never stirred out of his chair. Nick had had from the first a plan of going round to speak to her, but as his companion evidently meant not to move he scrupled at being more forward. During their brief dinner together--they were determined not to be late--Peter had been silent, quite recklessly grave, but also, his kinsman judged, full of the wish to make it clear he was calm. In his seat he was calmer than ever and had an air even of trying to suggest that his attendance, preoccupied as he was with deeper solemnities, was more or less mechanical, the result of a conception of duty, a habit of courtesy. When during a scene in the second act--a scene from which Miriam was absent--Nick observed to him that one might judge from his reserve that he wasn't pleased he replied after a moment: "I've been looking for her mistakes." And when Nick made answer to this that he certainly wouldn't find them he said again in an odd tone: "No, I shan't find them--I shan't find them." It might have seemed that since the girl's performance was a dazzling success he regarded his evening as rather a failure. After the third act Nick said candidly: "My dear fellow, how can you sit here? Aren't you going to speak to her?" To which Peter replied inscrutably: "Lord, no, never again. I bade her good-bye yesterday. She knows what I think of her form. It's very good, but she carries it a little too far. Besides, she didn't want me to come, and it's therefore more discreet to keep away from her." "Surely it isn't an hour for discretion!" Nick cried. "Excuse me at any rate for five minutes." He went behind and reappeared only as the curtain was rising on the fourth act; and in the interval between the fourth and the fifth he went again for a shorter time. Peter was personally detached, but he consented to listen to his companion's vivid account of the state of things on the stage, where the elation of victory had lighted up the place. The strain was over, the ship in port--they were all wiping their faces and grinning. Miriam--yes, positively--was grinning too, and she hadn't asked a question about Peter nor sent him a message. They were kissing all round and dancing for joy. They were on the eve, worse luck, of a tremendous run. Peter groaned irrepressibly for this; it was, save for a slight sign a moment later, the only vibration caused in him by his cousin's report. There was but one voice of regret that they hadn't put on the piece earlier, as the end of the season would interrupt the run. There was but one voice too about the fourth act--it was believed all London would rush to see the fourth act. The crowd about her was a dozen deep and Miriam in the midst of it all charming; she was receiving in the ugly place after the fashion of royalty, almost as hedged with the famous "divinity," yet with a smile and a word for each. She was really like a young queen on her accession. When she saw him, Nick, she had kissed her hand to him over the heads of the courtiers. Nick's artless comment on this was that she had such pretty manners. It made Peter laugh--apparently at his friend's conception of the manners of a young queen. Mrs. Rooth, with a dozen shawls on her arm, was as red as the kitchen-fire, but you couldn't tell if Miriam were red or pale: she was so cleverly, finely made up--perhaps a little too much. Dashwood of course was greatly to the fore, but you hadn't to mention his own performance to him: he took it all handsomely and wouldn't hear of anything but that _her_ fortune was made. He didn't say much indeed, but evidently had ideas about her fortune; he nodded significant things and whistled inimitable sounds--"Heuh, heuh!" He was perfectly satisfied; moreover, he looked further ahead than any one. It was on coming back to his place after the fourth act that Nick put in, for his companion's benefit, most of these touches in his sketch of the situation. If Peter had continued to look for Miriam's mistakes he hadn't yet found them: the fourth act, bristling with dangers, putting a premium on every sort of cheap effect, had rounded itself without a flaw. Sitting there alone while Nick was away he had leisure to meditate on the wonder of this--on the art with which the girl had separated passion from violence, filling the whole place and never screaming; for it had often seemed to him in London of old that the yell of theatrical emotion rang through the shrinking night like the voice of the Sunday newsboy. Miriam had never been more present to him than at this hour; but she was inextricably transmuted--present essentially as the romantic heroine she represented. His state of mind was of the strangest and he was conscious of its strangeness, just as he was conscious in his very person of a lapse of resistance which likened itself absurdly to liberation. He felt weak at the same time that he felt inspired, and he felt inspired at the same time that he knew, or believed he knew, that his face was a blank. He saw things as a shining confusion, and yet somehow something monstrously definite kept surging out of them. Miriam was a beautiful, actual, fictive, impossible young woman of a past age, an undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one's own affairs. But that reality was a part of her spectator's joy, and she was not changed back to the common by his perception of the magnificent trick of art with which it was connected. Before his kinsman rejoined him Peter, taking a visiting-card from his pocket, had written on it in pencil a few words in a foreign tongue; but as at that moment he saw Nick coming in he immediately put it out of view. The last thing before the curtain rose on the fifth act that young man mentioned his having brought a message from Basil Dashwood, who hoped they both, on leaving the theatre, would come to supper with him in company with Miriam and her mother and several others: he had prepared a little informal banquet in honour of so famous a night. At this, while the curtain was about to rise, Peter immediately took out his card again and added something--he wrote the finest small hand you could see. Nick asked him what he was doing, and he waited but an instant. "It's a word to say I can't come." "To Dashwood? Oh I shall go," said Nick. "Well, I hope you'll enjoy it!" his companion replied in a tone which came back to him afterwards. When the curtain fell on the last act the people stayed, standing up in their places for acclamation. The applause shook the house--the recall became a clamour, the relief from a long tension. This was in any performance a moment Peter detested, but he stood for an instant beside Nick, who clapped, to his cousin's diplomatic sense, after the fashion of a school-boy at the pantomime. There was a veritable roar while the curtain drew back at the side most removed from our pair. Peter could see Basil Dashwood holding it, making a passage for the male "juvenile lead," who had Miriam in tow. Nick redoubled his efforts; heard the plaudits swell; saw the bows of the leading gentleman, who was hot and fat; saw Miriam, personally conducted and closer to the footlights, grow brighter and bigger and more swaying; and then became aware that his own comrade had with extreme agility slipped out of the stalls. Nick had already lost sight of him--he had apparently taken but a minute to escape from the house; and wondered at his quitting him without a farewell if he was to leave England on the morrow and they were not to meet at the hospitable Dashwood's. He wondered even what Peter was "up to," since, as he had assured him, there was no question of his going round to Miriam. He waited to see this young lady reappear three times, dragging Dashwood behind her at the second with a friendly arm, to whom, in turn, was hooked Miss Fanny Rover, the actress entrusted in the piece with the inevitable comic relief. He went out slowly with the crowd and at the door looked again for Peter, who struck him as deficient for once in finish. He couldn't know that in another direction and while he was helping the house to "rise" at its heroine, his kinsman had been particularly explicit. On reaching the lobby Peter had pounced on a small boy in buttons, who seemed superfluously connected with a desolate refreshment-room and, from the tips of his toes, was peeping at the stage through the glazed hole in the door of a box. Into one of the child's hands he thrust the card he had drawn again from his waistcoat and into the other the largest silver coin he could find in the same receptacle, while he bent over him with words of adjuration--words the little page tried to help himself to apprehend by instantly attempting to peruse the other words written on the card. "That's no use--it's Italian," said Peter; "only carry it round to Miss Rooth without a minute's delay. Place it in her hand and she'll give you some object--a bracelet, a glove, or a flower--to bring me back as a sign that she has received it. I shall be outside; bring me there what she gives you and you shall have another shilling--only fly!" His small messenger sounded him a moment with the sharp face of London wage-earning, and still more of London tip-earning, infancy, and vanished as swiftly as a slave of the Arabian Nights. While he waited in the lobby the audience began to pour out, and before the urchin had come back to him he was clapped on the shoulder by Nick. "I'm glad I haven't lost you, but why didn't you stay to give her a hand?" "Give her a hand? I hated it." "My dear man, I don't follow you," Nick said. "If you won't come to Dashwood's supper I fear our ways don't lie together." "Thank him very much; say I've to get up at an unnatural hour." To this Peter added: "I think I ought to tell you she may not be there." "Miss Rooth? Why it's all _for_ her." "I'm waiting for a word from her--she may change her mind." Nick showed his interest. "For you? What then have you proposed?" "I've proposed marriage," said Peter in a strange voice. "I say--!" Nick broke out; and at the same moment Peter's messenger squeezed through the press and stood before him. "She has given me nothing, sir," the boy announced; "but she says I'm to say 'All right!'" Nick's stare widened. "You've proposed through _him_?" "Aye, and she accepts. Good-night!"--on which, turning away, Peter bounded into a hansom. He said something to the driver through the roof, and Nick's eyes followed the cab as it started off. This young man was mystified, was even amused; especially when the youth in buttons, planted there and wondering too, brought forth: "Please sir, he told me he'd give me a shilling and he've forgot it." "Oh I can't pay you for _that_!" Nick laughed. But he fished out a dole, though he was vexed at the injury to the supper. XLVI Peter meanwhile rolled away through the summer night to Saint John's Wood. He had put the pressure of strong words on his young friend, entreating her to drive home immediately, return there without any one, without even her mother. He wished to see her alone and for a purpose he would fully and satisfactorily explain--couldn't she trust him? He besought her to remember his own situation and throw over her supper, throw over everything. He would wait for her with unspeakable impatience in Balaklava Place. He did so, when he got there, but it had taken half an hour. Interminable seemed his lonely vigil in Miss Lumley's drawing-room, where the character of the original proprietress came out to him more than ever before in a kind of afterglow of old sociabilities, a vulgar, ghostly reference. The numerous candles had been lighted for him, and Mrs. Rooth's familiar fictions lay about; but his nerves forbade him the solace of a chair and a book. He walked up and down, thinking and listening, and as the long window, the balmy air permitting, stood open to the garden, he passed several times in and out. A carriage appeared to stop at the gate--then there was nothing; he heard the rare rattle of wheels and the far-off hum of London. His impatience was overwrought, and though he knew this it persisted; it would have been no easy matter for Miriam to break away from the flock of her felicitators. Still less simple was it doubtless for her to leave poor Dashwood with his supper on his hands. Perhaps she would bring Dashwood with her, bring him to time her; she was capable of playing him--that is, of playing Her Majesty's new representative to the small far-off State, or even of playing them both--that trick. Perhaps the little wretch in buttons--Peter remembered now the neglected shilling--only pretending to go round with his card, had come back with an invented answer. But how could he know, since presumably he couldn't read Italian, that his answer would fit the message? Peter was sorry now that he himself had not gone round, not snatched Miriam bodily away, made sure of her and of what he wanted of her. When forty minutes had elapsed he regarded it as proved that she wouldn't come, and, asking himself what he should do, determined to drive off again and seize her at her comrade's feast. Then he remembered how Nick had mentioned that this entertainment was not to be held at the young actor's lodgings but at some tavern or restaurant the name of which he had not heeded. Suddenly, however, Peter became aware with joy that this name didn't matter, for there was something at the garden door at last. He rushed out before she had had time to ring, and saw as she stepped from the carriage that she was alone. Now that she was there, that he had this evidence she had listened to him and trusted him, all his impatience and bitterness gave way and a flood of pleading tenderness took their place in the first words he spoke to her. It was far "dearer" of her than he had any right to dream, but she was the best and kindest creature--this showed it--as well as the most wonderful. He was really not off his head with his contradictory ways; no, before heaven he wasn't, and he would explain, he would make everything clear. Everything was changed. She stopped short in the little dusky garden, looking at him in the light of the open window. Then she called back to the coachman--they had left the garden door open--"Wait for me, mind; I shall want you again." "What's the matter--won't you stay?" Peter asked. "Are you going out again at this absurd hour? I won't hurt you," he gently urged. And he went back and closed the garden door. He wanted to say to the coachman, "It's no matter--please drive away." At the same time he wouldn't for the world have done anything offensive to her. "I've come because I thought it better to-night, as things have turned out, to do the thing you ask me, whatever it may be," she had already begun. "That's probably what you calculated I would think, eh? What this evening has been you've seen, and I must allow that your hand's in it. That you know for yourself--that you doubtless felt as you sat there. But I confess I don't imagine what you want of me here now," she added. She had remained standing in the path. Peter felt the irony of her "now" and how it made a fool of him, but he had been prepared for this and for much worse. He had begged her not to think him a fool, but in truth at present he cared little if she did. Very likely he was--in spite of his plea that everything was changed: he cared little even himself. However, he spoke in the tone of intense reason and of the fullest disposition to satisfy her. This lucidity only took still more from the dignity of his change of front: his separation from her the day before had had such pretensions to being lucid. But the explanation and the justification were in the very fact, the fact that had complete possession of him. He named it when he replied to her: "I've simply overrated my strength." "Oh I knew--I knew! That's why I entreated you not to come!" Miriam groaned. She turned away lamenting, and for a moment he thought she would retreat to her carriage. But he passed his hand into her arm, to draw her forward, and after an instant felt her yield. "The fact is we must have this thing out," he said. Then he added as he made her go into the house, bending over her, "The failure of my strength--that was just the reason of my coming." She broke into her laugh at these words, as she entered the drawing-room, and it made them sound pompous in their false wisdom. She flung off, as a good-natured tribute to the image of their having the thing out, a white shawl that had been wrapped round her. She was still painted and bedizened, in the splendid dress of her climax, so that she seemed protected and alienated by the character she had been acting. "Whatever it is you want--when I understand--you'll be very brief, won't you? Do you know I've given up a charming supper for you? Mamma has gone there. I've promised to go back to them." "You're an angel not to have let her come with you. I'm sure she wanted to," Peter made reply. "Oh she's all right, but she's nervous." Then the girl added: "Couldn't she keep you away after all?" "Whom are you talking about?" Biddy Dormer was as absent from his mind as if she had never existed. "The charming thing you were with this morning. Is she so afraid of obliging me? Oh she'd be so good for you!" "Don't speak of that," Peter gravely said. "I was in perfect good faith yesterday when I took leave of you. I was--I was. But I can't--I can't: you're too unutterably dear to me." "Oh don't--_please_ don't!" Miriam wailed at this. She stood before the fireless chimney-piece with one of her hands on it. "If it's only to say that, don't you know, what's the use?" "It isn't only to say that. I've a plan, a perfect plan: the whole thing lies clear before me." "And what's the whole thing?" He had to make an effort. "You say your mother's nervous. Ah if you knew how nervous I am!" "Well, I'm not. Go on." "Give it up--give it up!" Peter stammered. "Give it up?" She fixed him like a mild Medusa. "I'll marry you to-morrow if you'll renounce; and in return for the sacrifice you make for me I'll do more for you than ever was done for a woman before." "Renounce after to-night? Do you call that a plan?" she asked. "Those are old words and very foolish ones--you wanted something of that sort a year ago." "Oh I fluttered round the idea at that time; we were talking in the air. I didn't really believe I could make you see it then, and certainly you didn't see it. My own future, moreover, wasn't definite to me. I didn't know what I could offer you. But these last months have made a difference--I do know now. Now what I say is deliberate--It's deeply meditated. I simply can't live without you, and I hold that together we may do great things." She seemed to wonder. "What sort of things?" "The things of my profession, of my life, the things one does for one's country, the responsibility and the honour of great affairs; deeply fascinating when one's immersed in them, and more exciting really--put them even at that--than the excitements of the theatre. Care for me only a little and you'll see what they are, they'll take hold of you. Believe me, believe me," Peter pleaded; "every fibre of my being trembles in what I say to you." "You admitted yesterday it wouldn't do," she made answer. "Where were the fibres of your being then?" "They throbbed in me even more than now, and I was trying, like an ass, not to feel them. Where was this evening yesterday--where were the maddening hours I've just spent? Ah you're the perfection of perfections, and as I sat there to-night you taught me what I really want." "The perfection of perfections?" the girl echoed with the strangest smile. "I needn't try to tell you: you must have felt to-night with such rapture what you are, what you can do. How can I give that up?" he piteously went on. "How can _I_, my poor friend? I like your plans and your responsibilities and your great affairs, as you call them. _Voyons_, they're infantile. I've just shown that I'm a perfection of perfections: therefore it's just the moment to 'renounce,' as you gracefully say? Oh I was sure, I was sure!" And Miriam paused, resting eyes at once lighted and troubled on him as in the effort to think of some arrangement that would help him out of his absurdity. "I was sure, I mean, that if you did come your poor, dear, doting brain would be quite confused," she presently pursued. "I can't be a muff in public just for you, _pourtant_. Dear me, why do you like us so much?" "Like you? I loathe you!" "_Je le vois parbleu bien_!" she lightly returned. "I mean why do you feel us, judge us, understand us so well? I please you because you see, because you know; and then for that very reason of my pleasing you must adapt me to your convenience, you must take me over, as they say. You admire me as an artist and therefore want to put me into a box in which the artist will breathe her last. Ah be reasonable; you must let her live!" "Let her live? As if I could prevent her living!" Peter cried with unmistakable conviction. "Even if I did wish how could I prevent a spirit like yours from expressing itself? Don't talk about my putting you in a box, for, dearest child, I'm taking you out of one," he all persuasively explained. "The artist is irrepressible, eternal; she'll be in everything you are and in everything you do, and you'll go about with her triumphantly exerting your powers, charming the world, carrying everything before you." Miriam's colour rose, through all her artificial surfaces, at this all but convincing appeal, and she asked whimsically: "Shall you

yes

How many times the word 'yes' appears in the text?

you to-morrow--there's no question of ten years!" cried Mrs. Rooth with a comicality of plainness. Miriam smiled at Nick, deprecating his horror of such talk. "Isn't it droll, the way she can't get it out of her head?" Then turning almost coaxingly to the old woman: "_Voyons_, look about you: they don't marry us like that." "But they do--_cela se voit tous les jours_. Ask Mr. Dormer." "Oh never! It would be as if I asked him to give us a practical proof." "I shall never prove anything by marrying any one," Nick said. "For me that question's over." Miriam rested kind eyes on him. "Dear me, how you must hate me!" And before he had time to reply she went on to her mother: "People marry them to make them leave the stage; which proves exactly what I say." "Ah they offer them the finest positions," reasoned Mrs. Rooth. "Do you want me to leave it then?" "Oh you can manage if you will!" "The only managing I know anything about is to do my work. If I manage that decently I shall pull through." "But, dearest, may our work not be of many sorts?" "I only know one," said Miriam. At this her mother got up with a sigh. "I see you do wish to drive me into the street." "Mamma's bewildered--there are so many paths she wants to follow, there are so many bundles of hay. As I told you, she wishes to gobble them all," the girl pursued. Then she added: "Yes, go and take the carriage; take a turn round the Park--you always delight in that--and come back for me in an hour." "I'm too vexed with you; the air will do me good," said Mrs. Rooth. But before she went she addressed Nick: "I've your assurance that you'll bring him then to-night?" "Bring Peter? I don't think I shall have to drag him," Nick returned. "But you must do me the justice to remember that if I should resort to force I should do something that's not particularly in my interest--I should be magnanimous." "We must always be that, mustn't we?" moralised Mrs. Rooth. "How could it affect your interest?" Miriam asked less abstractedly. "Yes, as you say," her mother mused at their host, "the question of marriage has ceased to exist for you." "Mamma goes straight at it!" laughed the girl, getting up while Nick rubbed his canvas before answering. Miriam went to mamma and settled her bonnet and mantle in preparation for her drive, then stood a moment with a filial arm about her and as if waiting for their friend's explanation. This, however, when it came halted visibly. "Why you said a while ago that if Peter was there you wouldn't act." "I'll act for _him_," smiled Miriam, inconsequently caressing her mother. "It doesn't matter whom it's for!" Mrs. Rooth declared sagaciously. "Take your drive and relax your mind," said the girl, kissing her. "Come for me in an hour; not later--but not sooner." She went with her to the door, bundled her out, closed it behind her and came back to the position she had quitted. "_This_ is the peace I want!" she gratefully cried as she settled into it. XLV Peter Sherringham said so little during the performance that his companion was struck by his dumbness, especially as Miriam's acting seemed to Nick magnificent. He held his breath while she was on the stage--she gave the whole thing, including the spectator's emotion, such a lift. She had not carried out her fantastic menace of not exerting herself, and, as Mrs. Rooth had said, it little mattered for whom she acted. Nick was conscious in watching her that she went through it all for herself, for the idea that possessed her and that she rendered with extraordinary breadth. She couldn't open the door a part of the way to it and let it simply peep in; if it entered at all it must enter in full procession and occupy the premises in state. This was what had happened on an occasion which, as the less tormented of our young men felt in his stall, grew larger with each throb of the responsive house; till by the time the play was half over it appeared to stretch out wide arms to the future. Nick had often heard more applause, but had never heard more attention, since they were all charmed and hushed together and success seemed to be sitting down with them. There had been of course plenty of announcement--the newspapers had abounded and the arts of the manager had taken the freest license; but it was easy to feel a fine, universal consensus and to recognise everywhere the light spring of hope. People snatched their eyes from the stage an instant to look at each other, all eager to hand on the torch passed to them by the actress over the footlights. It was a part of the impression that she was now only showing to the full, for this time she had verse to deal with and she made it unexpectedly exquisite. She was beauty, melody, truth; she was passion and persuasion and tenderness. She caught up the obstreperous play in soothing, entwining arms and, seeming to tread the air in the flutter of her robe, carried it into the high places of poetry, of art, of style. And she had such tones of nature, such concealments of art, such effusions of life, that the whole scene glowed with the colour she communicated, and the house, pervaded with rosy fire, glowed back at the scene. Nick looked round in the intervals; he felt excited and flushed--the night had turned to a feast of fraternity and he expected to see people embrace each other. The crowd, the agitation, the triumph, the surprise, the signals and rumours, the heated air, his associates, near him, pointing out other figures who presumably were celebrated but whom he had never heard of, all amused him and banished every impulse to question or to compare. Miriam was as happy as some right sensation--she would have fed the memory with deep draughts. One of the things that amused him or at least helped to fill his attention was Peter's attitude, which apparently didn't exclude criticism--rather indeed mainly implied it. This admirer never took his eyes off the actress, but he made no remark about her and never stirred out of his chair. Nick had had from the first a plan of going round to speak to her, but as his companion evidently meant not to move he scrupled at being more forward. During their brief dinner together--they were determined not to be late--Peter had been silent, quite recklessly grave, but also, his kinsman judged, full of the wish to make it clear he was calm. In his seat he was calmer than ever and had an air even of trying to suggest that his attendance, preoccupied as he was with deeper solemnities, was more or less mechanical, the result of a conception of duty, a habit of courtesy. When during a scene in the second act--a scene from which Miriam was absent--Nick observed to him that one might judge from his reserve that he wasn't pleased he replied after a moment: "I've been looking for her mistakes." And when Nick made answer to this that he certainly wouldn't find them he said again in an odd tone: "No, I shan't find them--I shan't find them." It might have seemed that since the girl's performance was a dazzling success he regarded his evening as rather a failure. After the third act Nick said candidly: "My dear fellow, how can you sit here? Aren't you going to speak to her?" To which Peter replied inscrutably: "Lord, no, never again. I bade her good-bye yesterday. She knows what I think of her form. It's very good, but she carries it a little too far. Besides, she didn't want me to come, and it's therefore more discreet to keep away from her." "Surely it isn't an hour for discretion!" Nick cried. "Excuse me at any rate for five minutes." He went behind and reappeared only as the curtain was rising on the fourth act; and in the interval between the fourth and the fifth he went again for a shorter time. Peter was personally detached, but he consented to listen to his companion's vivid account of the state of things on the stage, where the elation of victory had lighted up the place. The strain was over, the ship in port--they were all wiping their faces and grinning. Miriam--yes, positively--was grinning too, and she hadn't asked a question about Peter nor sent him a message. They were kissing all round and dancing for joy. They were on the eve, worse luck, of a tremendous run. Peter groaned irrepressibly for this; it was, save for a slight sign a moment later, the only vibration caused in him by his cousin's report. There was but one voice of regret that they hadn't put on the piece earlier, as the end of the season would interrupt the run. There was but one voice too about the fourth act--it was believed all London would rush to see the fourth act. The crowd about her was a dozen deep and Miriam in the midst of it all charming; she was receiving in the ugly place after the fashion of royalty, almost as hedged with the famous "divinity," yet with a smile and a word for each. She was really like a young queen on her accession. When she saw him, Nick, she had kissed her hand to him over the heads of the courtiers. Nick's artless comment on this was that she had such pretty manners. It made Peter laugh--apparently at his friend's conception of the manners of a young queen. Mrs. Rooth, with a dozen shawls on her arm, was as red as the kitchen-fire, but you couldn't tell if Miriam were red or pale: she was so cleverly, finely made up--perhaps a little too much. Dashwood of course was greatly to the fore, but you hadn't to mention his own performance to him: he took it all handsomely and wouldn't hear of anything but that _her_ fortune was made. He didn't say much indeed, but evidently had ideas about her fortune; he nodded significant things and whistled inimitable sounds--"Heuh, heuh!" He was perfectly satisfied; moreover, he looked further ahead than any one. It was on coming back to his place after the fourth act that Nick put in, for his companion's benefit, most of these touches in his sketch of the situation. If Peter had continued to look for Miriam's mistakes he hadn't yet found them: the fourth act, bristling with dangers, putting a premium on every sort of cheap effect, had rounded itself without a flaw. Sitting there alone while Nick was away he had leisure to meditate on the wonder of this--on the art with which the girl had separated passion from violence, filling the whole place and never screaming; for it had often seemed to him in London of old that the yell of theatrical emotion rang through the shrinking night like the voice of the Sunday newsboy. Miriam had never been more present to him than at this hour; but she was inextricably transmuted--present essentially as the romantic heroine she represented. His state of mind was of the strangest and he was conscious of its strangeness, just as he was conscious in his very person of a lapse of resistance which likened itself absurdly to liberation. He felt weak at the same time that he felt inspired, and he felt inspired at the same time that he knew, or believed he knew, that his face was a blank. He saw things as a shining confusion, and yet somehow something monstrously definite kept surging out of them. Miriam was a beautiful, actual, fictive, impossible young woman of a past age, an undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one's own affairs. But that reality was a part of her spectator's joy, and she was not changed back to the common by his perception of the magnificent trick of art with which it was connected. Before his kinsman rejoined him Peter, taking a visiting-card from his pocket, had written on it in pencil a few words in a foreign tongue; but as at that moment he saw Nick coming in he immediately put it out of view. The last thing before the curtain rose on the fifth act that young man mentioned his having brought a message from Basil Dashwood, who hoped they both, on leaving the theatre, would come to supper with him in company with Miriam and her mother and several others: he had prepared a little informal banquet in honour of so famous a night. At this, while the curtain was about to rise, Peter immediately took out his card again and added something--he wrote the finest small hand you could see. Nick asked him what he was doing, and he waited but an instant. "It's a word to say I can't come." "To Dashwood? Oh I shall go," said Nick. "Well, I hope you'll enjoy it!" his companion replied in a tone which came back to him afterwards. When the curtain fell on the last act the people stayed, standing up in their places for acclamation. The applause shook the house--the recall became a clamour, the relief from a long tension. This was in any performance a moment Peter detested, but he stood for an instant beside Nick, who clapped, to his cousin's diplomatic sense, after the fashion of a school-boy at the pantomime. There was a veritable roar while the curtain drew back at the side most removed from our pair. Peter could see Basil Dashwood holding it, making a passage for the male "juvenile lead," who had Miriam in tow. Nick redoubled his efforts; heard the plaudits swell; saw the bows of the leading gentleman, who was hot and fat; saw Miriam, personally conducted and closer to the footlights, grow brighter and bigger and more swaying; and then became aware that his own comrade had with extreme agility slipped out of the stalls. Nick had already lost sight of him--he had apparently taken but a minute to escape from the house; and wondered at his quitting him without a farewell if he was to leave England on the morrow and they were not to meet at the hospitable Dashwood's. He wondered even what Peter was "up to," since, as he had assured him, there was no question of his going round to Miriam. He waited to see this young lady reappear three times, dragging Dashwood behind her at the second with a friendly arm, to whom, in turn, was hooked Miss Fanny Rover, the actress entrusted in the piece with the inevitable comic relief. He went out slowly with the crowd and at the door looked again for Peter, who struck him as deficient for once in finish. He couldn't know that in another direction and while he was helping the house to "rise" at its heroine, his kinsman had been particularly explicit. On reaching the lobby Peter had pounced on a small boy in buttons, who seemed superfluously connected with a desolate refreshment-room and, from the tips of his toes, was peeping at the stage through the glazed hole in the door of a box. Into one of the child's hands he thrust the card he had drawn again from his waistcoat and into the other the largest silver coin he could find in the same receptacle, while he bent over him with words of adjuration--words the little page tried to help himself to apprehend by instantly attempting to peruse the other words written on the card. "That's no use--it's Italian," said Peter; "only carry it round to Miss Rooth without a minute's delay. Place it in her hand and she'll give you some object--a bracelet, a glove, or a flower--to bring me back as a sign that she has received it. I shall be outside; bring me there what she gives you and you shall have another shilling--only fly!" His small messenger sounded him a moment with the sharp face of London wage-earning, and still more of London tip-earning, infancy, and vanished as swiftly as a slave of the Arabian Nights. While he waited in the lobby the audience began to pour out, and before the urchin had come back to him he was clapped on the shoulder by Nick. "I'm glad I haven't lost you, but why didn't you stay to give her a hand?" "Give her a hand? I hated it." "My dear man, I don't follow you," Nick said. "If you won't come to Dashwood's supper I fear our ways don't lie together." "Thank him very much; say I've to get up at an unnatural hour." To this Peter added: "I think I ought to tell you she may not be there." "Miss Rooth? Why it's all _for_ her." "I'm waiting for a word from her--she may change her mind." Nick showed his interest. "For you? What then have you proposed?" "I've proposed marriage," said Peter in a strange voice. "I say--!" Nick broke out; and at the same moment Peter's messenger squeezed through the press and stood before him. "She has given me nothing, sir," the boy announced; "but she says I'm to say 'All right!'" Nick's stare widened. "You've proposed through _him_?" "Aye, and she accepts. Good-night!"--on which, turning away, Peter bounded into a hansom. He said something to the driver through the roof, and Nick's eyes followed the cab as it started off. This young man was mystified, was even amused; especially when the youth in buttons, planted there and wondering too, brought forth: "Please sir, he told me he'd give me a shilling and he've forgot it." "Oh I can't pay you for _that_!" Nick laughed. But he fished out a dole, though he was vexed at the injury to the supper. XLVI Peter meanwhile rolled away through the summer night to Saint John's Wood. He had put the pressure of strong words on his young friend, entreating her to drive home immediately, return there without any one, without even her mother. He wished to see her alone and for a purpose he would fully and satisfactorily explain--couldn't she trust him? He besought her to remember his own situation and throw over her supper, throw over everything. He would wait for her with unspeakable impatience in Balaklava Place. He did so, when he got there, but it had taken half an hour. Interminable seemed his lonely vigil in Miss Lumley's drawing-room, where the character of the original proprietress came out to him more than ever before in a kind of afterglow of old sociabilities, a vulgar, ghostly reference. The numerous candles had been lighted for him, and Mrs. Rooth's familiar fictions lay about; but his nerves forbade him the solace of a chair and a book. He walked up and down, thinking and listening, and as the long window, the balmy air permitting, stood open to the garden, he passed several times in and out. A carriage appeared to stop at the gate--then there was nothing; he heard the rare rattle of wheels and the far-off hum of London. His impatience was overwrought, and though he knew this it persisted; it would have been no easy matter for Miriam to break away from the flock of her felicitators. Still less simple was it doubtless for her to leave poor Dashwood with his supper on his hands. Perhaps she would bring Dashwood with her, bring him to time her; she was capable of playing him--that is, of playing Her Majesty's new representative to the small far-off State, or even of playing them both--that trick. Perhaps the little wretch in buttons--Peter remembered now the neglected shilling--only pretending to go round with his card, had come back with an invented answer. But how could he know, since presumably he couldn't read Italian, that his answer would fit the message? Peter was sorry now that he himself had not gone round, not snatched Miriam bodily away, made sure of her and of what he wanted of her. When forty minutes had elapsed he regarded it as proved that she wouldn't come, and, asking himself what he should do, determined to drive off again and seize her at her comrade's feast. Then he remembered how Nick had mentioned that this entertainment was not to be held at the young actor's lodgings but at some tavern or restaurant the name of which he had not heeded. Suddenly, however, Peter became aware with joy that this name didn't matter, for there was something at the garden door at last. He rushed out before she had had time to ring, and saw as she stepped from the carriage that she was alone. Now that she was there, that he had this evidence she had listened to him and trusted him, all his impatience and bitterness gave way and a flood of pleading tenderness took their place in the first words he spoke to her. It was far "dearer" of her than he had any right to dream, but she was the best and kindest creature--this showed it--as well as the most wonderful. He was really not off his head with his contradictory ways; no, before heaven he wasn't, and he would explain, he would make everything clear. Everything was changed. She stopped short in the little dusky garden, looking at him in the light of the open window. Then she called back to the coachman--they had left the garden door open--"Wait for me, mind; I shall want you again." "What's the matter--won't you stay?" Peter asked. "Are you going out again at this absurd hour? I won't hurt you," he gently urged. And he went back and closed the garden door. He wanted to say to the coachman, "It's no matter--please drive away." At the same time he wouldn't for the world have done anything offensive to her. "I've come because I thought it better to-night, as things have turned out, to do the thing you ask me, whatever it may be," she had already begun. "That's probably what you calculated I would think, eh? What this evening has been you've seen, and I must allow that your hand's in it. That you know for yourself--that you doubtless felt as you sat there. But I confess I don't imagine what you want of me here now," she added. She had remained standing in the path. Peter felt the irony of her "now" and how it made a fool of him, but he had been prepared for this and for much worse. He had begged her not to think him a fool, but in truth at present he cared little if she did. Very likely he was--in spite of his plea that everything was changed: he cared little even himself. However, he spoke in the tone of intense reason and of the fullest disposition to satisfy her. This lucidity only took still more from the dignity of his change of front: his separation from her the day before had had such pretensions to being lucid. But the explanation and the justification were in the very fact, the fact that had complete possession of him. He named it when he replied to her: "I've simply overrated my strength." "Oh I knew--I knew! That's why I entreated you not to come!" Miriam groaned. She turned away lamenting, and for a moment he thought she would retreat to her carriage. But he passed his hand into her arm, to draw her forward, and after an instant felt her yield. "The fact is we must have this thing out," he said. Then he added as he made her go into the house, bending over her, "The failure of my strength--that was just the reason of my coming." She broke into her laugh at these words, as she entered the drawing-room, and it made them sound pompous in their false wisdom. She flung off, as a good-natured tribute to the image of their having the thing out, a white shawl that had been wrapped round her. She was still painted and bedizened, in the splendid dress of her climax, so that she seemed protected and alienated by the character she had been acting. "Whatever it is you want--when I understand--you'll be very brief, won't you? Do you know I've given up a charming supper for you? Mamma has gone there. I've promised to go back to them." "You're an angel not to have let her come with you. I'm sure she wanted to," Peter made reply. "Oh she's all right, but she's nervous." Then the girl added: "Couldn't she keep you away after all?" "Whom are you talking about?" Biddy Dormer was as absent from his mind as if she had never existed. "The charming thing you were with this morning. Is she so afraid of obliging me? Oh she'd be so good for you!" "Don't speak of that," Peter gravely said. "I was in perfect good faith yesterday when I took leave of you. I was--I was. But I can't--I can't: you're too unutterably dear to me." "Oh don't--_please_ don't!" Miriam wailed at this. She stood before the fireless chimney-piece with one of her hands on it. "If it's only to say that, don't you know, what's the use?" "It isn't only to say that. I've a plan, a perfect plan: the whole thing lies clear before me." "And what's the whole thing?" He had to make an effort. "You say your mother's nervous. Ah if you knew how nervous I am!" "Well, I'm not. Go on." "Give it up--give it up!" Peter stammered. "Give it up?" She fixed him like a mild Medusa. "I'll marry you to-morrow if you'll renounce; and in return for the sacrifice you make for me I'll do more for you than ever was done for a woman before." "Renounce after to-night? Do you call that a plan?" she asked. "Those are old words and very foolish ones--you wanted something of that sort a year ago." "Oh I fluttered round the idea at that time; we were talking in the air. I didn't really believe I could make you see it then, and certainly you didn't see it. My own future, moreover, wasn't definite to me. I didn't know what I could offer you. But these last months have made a difference--I do know now. Now what I say is deliberate--It's deeply meditated. I simply can't live without you, and I hold that together we may do great things." She seemed to wonder. "What sort of things?" "The things of my profession, of my life, the things one does for one's country, the responsibility and the honour of great affairs; deeply fascinating when one's immersed in them, and more exciting really--put them even at that--than the excitements of the theatre. Care for me only a little and you'll see what they are, they'll take hold of you. Believe me, believe me," Peter pleaded; "every fibre of my being trembles in what I say to you." "You admitted yesterday it wouldn't do," she made answer. "Where were the fibres of your being then?" "They throbbed in me even more than now, and I was trying, like an ass, not to feel them. Where was this evening yesterday--where were the maddening hours I've just spent? Ah you're the perfection of perfections, and as I sat there to-night you taught me what I really want." "The perfection of perfections?" the girl echoed with the strangest smile. "I needn't try to tell you: you must have felt to-night with such rapture what you are, what you can do. How can I give that up?" he piteously went on. "How can _I_, my poor friend? I like your plans and your responsibilities and your great affairs, as you call them. _Voyons_, they're infantile. I've just shown that I'm a perfection of perfections: therefore it's just the moment to 'renounce,' as you gracefully say? Oh I was sure, I was sure!" And Miriam paused, resting eyes at once lighted and troubled on him as in the effort to think of some arrangement that would help him out of his absurdity. "I was sure, I mean, that if you did come your poor, dear, doting brain would be quite confused," she presently pursued. "I can't be a muff in public just for you, _pourtant_. Dear me, why do you like us so much?" "Like you? I loathe you!" "_Je le vois parbleu bien_!" she lightly returned. "I mean why do you feel us, judge us, understand us so well? I please you because you see, because you know; and then for that very reason of my pleasing you must adapt me to your convenience, you must take me over, as they say. You admire me as an artist and therefore want to put me into a box in which the artist will breathe her last. Ah be reasonable; you must let her live!" "Let her live? As if I could prevent her living!" Peter cried with unmistakable conviction. "Even if I did wish how could I prevent a spirit like yours from expressing itself? Don't talk about my putting you in a box, for, dearest child, I'm taking you out of one," he all persuasively explained. "The artist is irrepressible, eternal; she'll be in everything you are and in everything you do, and you'll go about with her triumphantly exerting your powers, charming the world, carrying everything before you." Miriam's colour rose, through all her artificial surfaces, at this all but convincing appeal, and she asked whimsically: "Shall you

satisfaction

How many times the word 'satisfaction' appears in the text?

you to-morrow--there's no question of ten years!" cried Mrs. Rooth with a comicality of plainness. Miriam smiled at Nick, deprecating his horror of such talk. "Isn't it droll, the way she can't get it out of her head?" Then turning almost coaxingly to the old woman: "_Voyons_, look about you: they don't marry us like that." "But they do--_cela se voit tous les jours_. Ask Mr. Dormer." "Oh never! It would be as if I asked him to give us a practical proof." "I shall never prove anything by marrying any one," Nick said. "For me that question's over." Miriam rested kind eyes on him. "Dear me, how you must hate me!" And before he had time to reply she went on to her mother: "People marry them to make them leave the stage; which proves exactly what I say." "Ah they offer them the finest positions," reasoned Mrs. Rooth. "Do you want me to leave it then?" "Oh you can manage if you will!" "The only managing I know anything about is to do my work. If I manage that decently I shall pull through." "But, dearest, may our work not be of many sorts?" "I only know one," said Miriam. At this her mother got up with a sigh. "I see you do wish to drive me into the street." "Mamma's bewildered--there are so many paths she wants to follow, there are so many bundles of hay. As I told you, she wishes to gobble them all," the girl pursued. Then she added: "Yes, go and take the carriage; take a turn round the Park--you always delight in that--and come back for me in an hour." "I'm too vexed with you; the air will do me good," said Mrs. Rooth. But before she went she addressed Nick: "I've your assurance that you'll bring him then to-night?" "Bring Peter? I don't think I shall have to drag him," Nick returned. "But you must do me the justice to remember that if I should resort to force I should do something that's not particularly in my interest--I should be magnanimous." "We must always be that, mustn't we?" moralised Mrs. Rooth. "How could it affect your interest?" Miriam asked less abstractedly. "Yes, as you say," her mother mused at their host, "the question of marriage has ceased to exist for you." "Mamma goes straight at it!" laughed the girl, getting up while Nick rubbed his canvas before answering. Miriam went to mamma and settled her bonnet and mantle in preparation for her drive, then stood a moment with a filial arm about her and as if waiting for their friend's explanation. This, however, when it came halted visibly. "Why you said a while ago that if Peter was there you wouldn't act." "I'll act for _him_," smiled Miriam, inconsequently caressing her mother. "It doesn't matter whom it's for!" Mrs. Rooth declared sagaciously. "Take your drive and relax your mind," said the girl, kissing her. "Come for me in an hour; not later--but not sooner." She went with her to the door, bundled her out, closed it behind her and came back to the position she had quitted. "_This_ is the peace I want!" she gratefully cried as she settled into it. XLV Peter Sherringham said so little during the performance that his companion was struck by his dumbness, especially as Miriam's acting seemed to Nick magnificent. He held his breath while she was on the stage--she gave the whole thing, including the spectator's emotion, such a lift. She had not carried out her fantastic menace of not exerting herself, and, as Mrs. Rooth had said, it little mattered for whom she acted. Nick was conscious in watching her that she went through it all for herself, for the idea that possessed her and that she rendered with extraordinary breadth. She couldn't open the door a part of the way to it and let it simply peep in; if it entered at all it must enter in full procession and occupy the premises in state. This was what had happened on an occasion which, as the less tormented of our young men felt in his stall, grew larger with each throb of the responsive house; till by the time the play was half over it appeared to stretch out wide arms to the future. Nick had often heard more applause, but had never heard more attention, since they were all charmed and hushed together and success seemed to be sitting down with them. There had been of course plenty of announcement--the newspapers had abounded and the arts of the manager had taken the freest license; but it was easy to feel a fine, universal consensus and to recognise everywhere the light spring of hope. People snatched their eyes from the stage an instant to look at each other, all eager to hand on the torch passed to them by the actress over the footlights. It was a part of the impression that she was now only showing to the full, for this time she had verse to deal with and she made it unexpectedly exquisite. She was beauty, melody, truth; she was passion and persuasion and tenderness. She caught up the obstreperous play in soothing, entwining arms and, seeming to tread the air in the flutter of her robe, carried it into the high places of poetry, of art, of style. And she had such tones of nature, such concealments of art, such effusions of life, that the whole scene glowed with the colour she communicated, and the house, pervaded with rosy fire, glowed back at the scene. Nick looked round in the intervals; he felt excited and flushed--the night had turned to a feast of fraternity and he expected to see people embrace each other. The crowd, the agitation, the triumph, the surprise, the signals and rumours, the heated air, his associates, near him, pointing out other figures who presumably were celebrated but whom he had never heard of, all amused him and banished every impulse to question or to compare. Miriam was as happy as some right sensation--she would have fed the memory with deep draughts. One of the things that amused him or at least helped to fill his attention was Peter's attitude, which apparently didn't exclude criticism--rather indeed mainly implied it. This admirer never took his eyes off the actress, but he made no remark about her and never stirred out of his chair. Nick had had from the first a plan of going round to speak to her, but as his companion evidently meant not to move he scrupled at being more forward. During their brief dinner together--they were determined not to be late--Peter had been silent, quite recklessly grave, but also, his kinsman judged, full of the wish to make it clear he was calm. In his seat he was calmer than ever and had an air even of trying to suggest that his attendance, preoccupied as he was with deeper solemnities, was more or less mechanical, the result of a conception of duty, a habit of courtesy. When during a scene in the second act--a scene from which Miriam was absent--Nick observed to him that one might judge from his reserve that he wasn't pleased he replied after a moment: "I've been looking for her mistakes." And when Nick made answer to this that he certainly wouldn't find them he said again in an odd tone: "No, I shan't find them--I shan't find them." It might have seemed that since the girl's performance was a dazzling success he regarded his evening as rather a failure. After the third act Nick said candidly: "My dear fellow, how can you sit here? Aren't you going to speak to her?" To which Peter replied inscrutably: "Lord, no, never again. I bade her good-bye yesterday. She knows what I think of her form. It's very good, but she carries it a little too far. Besides, she didn't want me to come, and it's therefore more discreet to keep away from her." "Surely it isn't an hour for discretion!" Nick cried. "Excuse me at any rate for five minutes." He went behind and reappeared only as the curtain was rising on the fourth act; and in the interval between the fourth and the fifth he went again for a shorter time. Peter was personally detached, but he consented to listen to his companion's vivid account of the state of things on the stage, where the elation of victory had lighted up the place. The strain was over, the ship in port--they were all wiping their faces and grinning. Miriam--yes, positively--was grinning too, and she hadn't asked a question about Peter nor sent him a message. They were kissing all round and dancing for joy. They were on the eve, worse luck, of a tremendous run. Peter groaned irrepressibly for this; it was, save for a slight sign a moment later, the only vibration caused in him by his cousin's report. There was but one voice of regret that they hadn't put on the piece earlier, as the end of the season would interrupt the run. There was but one voice too about the fourth act--it was believed all London would rush to see the fourth act. The crowd about her was a dozen deep and Miriam in the midst of it all charming; she was receiving in the ugly place after the fashion of royalty, almost as hedged with the famous "divinity," yet with a smile and a word for each. She was really like a young queen on her accession. When she saw him, Nick, she had kissed her hand to him over the heads of the courtiers. Nick's artless comment on this was that she had such pretty manners. It made Peter laugh--apparently at his friend's conception of the manners of a young queen. Mrs. Rooth, with a dozen shawls on her arm, was as red as the kitchen-fire, but you couldn't tell if Miriam were red or pale: she was so cleverly, finely made up--perhaps a little too much. Dashwood of course was greatly to the fore, but you hadn't to mention his own performance to him: he took it all handsomely and wouldn't hear of anything but that _her_ fortune was made. He didn't say much indeed, but evidently had ideas about her fortune; he nodded significant things and whistled inimitable sounds--"Heuh, heuh!" He was perfectly satisfied; moreover, he looked further ahead than any one. It was on coming back to his place after the fourth act that Nick put in, for his companion's benefit, most of these touches in his sketch of the situation. If Peter had continued to look for Miriam's mistakes he hadn't yet found them: the fourth act, bristling with dangers, putting a premium on every sort of cheap effect, had rounded itself without a flaw. Sitting there alone while Nick was away he had leisure to meditate on the wonder of this--on the art with which the girl had separated passion from violence, filling the whole place and never screaming; for it had often seemed to him in London of old that the yell of theatrical emotion rang through the shrinking night like the voice of the Sunday newsboy. Miriam had never been more present to him than at this hour; but she was inextricably transmuted--present essentially as the romantic heroine she represented. His state of mind was of the strangest and he was conscious of its strangeness, just as he was conscious in his very person of a lapse of resistance which likened itself absurdly to liberation. He felt weak at the same time that he felt inspired, and he felt inspired at the same time that he knew, or believed he knew, that his face was a blank. He saw things as a shining confusion, and yet somehow something monstrously definite kept surging out of them. Miriam was a beautiful, actual, fictive, impossible young woman of a past age, an undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one's own affairs. But that reality was a part of her spectator's joy, and she was not changed back to the common by his perception of the magnificent trick of art with which it was connected. Before his kinsman rejoined him Peter, taking a visiting-card from his pocket, had written on it in pencil a few words in a foreign tongue; but as at that moment he saw Nick coming in he immediately put it out of view. The last thing before the curtain rose on the fifth act that young man mentioned his having brought a message from Basil Dashwood, who hoped they both, on leaving the theatre, would come to supper with him in company with Miriam and her mother and several others: he had prepared a little informal banquet in honour of so famous a night. At this, while the curtain was about to rise, Peter immediately took out his card again and added something--he wrote the finest small hand you could see. Nick asked him what he was doing, and he waited but an instant. "It's a word to say I can't come." "To Dashwood? Oh I shall go," said Nick. "Well, I hope you'll enjoy it!" his companion replied in a tone which came back to him afterwards. When the curtain fell on the last act the people stayed, standing up in their places for acclamation. The applause shook the house--the recall became a clamour, the relief from a long tension. This was in any performance a moment Peter detested, but he stood for an instant beside Nick, who clapped, to his cousin's diplomatic sense, after the fashion of a school-boy at the pantomime. There was a veritable roar while the curtain drew back at the side most removed from our pair. Peter could see Basil Dashwood holding it, making a passage for the male "juvenile lead," who had Miriam in tow. Nick redoubled his efforts; heard the plaudits swell; saw the bows of the leading gentleman, who was hot and fat; saw Miriam, personally conducted and closer to the footlights, grow brighter and bigger and more swaying; and then became aware that his own comrade had with extreme agility slipped out of the stalls. Nick had already lost sight of him--he had apparently taken but a minute to escape from the house; and wondered at his quitting him without a farewell if he was to leave England on the morrow and they were not to meet at the hospitable Dashwood's. He wondered even what Peter was "up to," since, as he had assured him, there was no question of his going round to Miriam. He waited to see this young lady reappear three times, dragging Dashwood behind her at the second with a friendly arm, to whom, in turn, was hooked Miss Fanny Rover, the actress entrusted in the piece with the inevitable comic relief. He went out slowly with the crowd and at the door looked again for Peter, who struck him as deficient for once in finish. He couldn't know that in another direction and while he was helping the house to "rise" at its heroine, his kinsman had been particularly explicit. On reaching the lobby Peter had pounced on a small boy in buttons, who seemed superfluously connected with a desolate refreshment-room and, from the tips of his toes, was peeping at the stage through the glazed hole in the door of a box. Into one of the child's hands he thrust the card he had drawn again from his waistcoat and into the other the largest silver coin he could find in the same receptacle, while he bent over him with words of adjuration--words the little page tried to help himself to apprehend by instantly attempting to peruse the other words written on the card. "That's no use--it's Italian," said Peter; "only carry it round to Miss Rooth without a minute's delay. Place it in her hand and she'll give you some object--a bracelet, a glove, or a flower--to bring me back as a sign that she has received it. I shall be outside; bring me there what she gives you and you shall have another shilling--only fly!" His small messenger sounded him a moment with the sharp face of London wage-earning, and still more of London tip-earning, infancy, and vanished as swiftly as a slave of the Arabian Nights. While he waited in the lobby the audience began to pour out, and before the urchin had come back to him he was clapped on the shoulder by Nick. "I'm glad I haven't lost you, but why didn't you stay to give her a hand?" "Give her a hand? I hated it." "My dear man, I don't follow you," Nick said. "If you won't come to Dashwood's supper I fear our ways don't lie together." "Thank him very much; say I've to get up at an unnatural hour." To this Peter added: "I think I ought to tell you she may not be there." "Miss Rooth? Why it's all _for_ her." "I'm waiting for a word from her--she may change her mind." Nick showed his interest. "For you? What then have you proposed?" "I've proposed marriage," said Peter in a strange voice. "I say--!" Nick broke out; and at the same moment Peter's messenger squeezed through the press and stood before him. "She has given me nothing, sir," the boy announced; "but she says I'm to say 'All right!'" Nick's stare widened. "You've proposed through _him_?" "Aye, and she accepts. Good-night!"--on which, turning away, Peter bounded into a hansom. He said something to the driver through the roof, and Nick's eyes followed the cab as it started off. This young man was mystified, was even amused; especially when the youth in buttons, planted there and wondering too, brought forth: "Please sir, he told me he'd give me a shilling and he've forgot it." "Oh I can't pay you for _that_!" Nick laughed. But he fished out a dole, though he was vexed at the injury to the supper. XLVI Peter meanwhile rolled away through the summer night to Saint John's Wood. He had put the pressure of strong words on his young friend, entreating her to drive home immediately, return there without any one, without even her mother. He wished to see her alone and for a purpose he would fully and satisfactorily explain--couldn't she trust him? He besought her to remember his own situation and throw over her supper, throw over everything. He would wait for her with unspeakable impatience in Balaklava Place. He did so, when he got there, but it had taken half an hour. Interminable seemed his lonely vigil in Miss Lumley's drawing-room, where the character of the original proprietress came out to him more than ever before in a kind of afterglow of old sociabilities, a vulgar, ghostly reference. The numerous candles had been lighted for him, and Mrs. Rooth's familiar fictions lay about; but his nerves forbade him the solace of a chair and a book. He walked up and down, thinking and listening, and as the long window, the balmy air permitting, stood open to the garden, he passed several times in and out. A carriage appeared to stop at the gate--then there was nothing; he heard the rare rattle of wheels and the far-off hum of London. His impatience was overwrought, and though he knew this it persisted; it would have been no easy matter for Miriam to break away from the flock of her felicitators. Still less simple was it doubtless for her to leave poor Dashwood with his supper on his hands. Perhaps she would bring Dashwood with her, bring him to time her; she was capable of playing him--that is, of playing Her Majesty's new representative to the small far-off State, or even of playing them both--that trick. Perhaps the little wretch in buttons--Peter remembered now the neglected shilling--only pretending to go round with his card, had come back with an invented answer. But how could he know, since presumably he couldn't read Italian, that his answer would fit the message? Peter was sorry now that he himself had not gone round, not snatched Miriam bodily away, made sure of her and of what he wanted of her. When forty minutes had elapsed he regarded it as proved that she wouldn't come, and, asking himself what he should do, determined to drive off again and seize her at her comrade's feast. Then he remembered how Nick had mentioned that this entertainment was not to be held at the young actor's lodgings but at some tavern or restaurant the name of which he had not heeded. Suddenly, however, Peter became aware with joy that this name didn't matter, for there was something at the garden door at last. He rushed out before she had had time to ring, and saw as she stepped from the carriage that she was alone. Now that she was there, that he had this evidence she had listened to him and trusted him, all his impatience and bitterness gave way and a flood of pleading tenderness took their place in the first words he spoke to her. It was far "dearer" of her than he had any right to dream, but she was the best and kindest creature--this showed it--as well as the most wonderful. He was really not off his head with his contradictory ways; no, before heaven he wasn't, and he would explain, he would make everything clear. Everything was changed. She stopped short in the little dusky garden, looking at him in the light of the open window. Then she called back to the coachman--they had left the garden door open--"Wait for me, mind; I shall want you again." "What's the matter--won't you stay?" Peter asked. "Are you going out again at this absurd hour? I won't hurt you," he gently urged. And he went back and closed the garden door. He wanted to say to the coachman, "It's no matter--please drive away." At the same time he wouldn't for the world have done anything offensive to her. "I've come because I thought it better to-night, as things have turned out, to do the thing you ask me, whatever it may be," she had already begun. "That's probably what you calculated I would think, eh? What this evening has been you've seen, and I must allow that your hand's in it. That you know for yourself--that you doubtless felt as you sat there. But I confess I don't imagine what you want of me here now," she added. She had remained standing in the path. Peter felt the irony of her "now" and how it made a fool of him, but he had been prepared for this and for much worse. He had begged her not to think him a fool, but in truth at present he cared little if she did. Very likely he was--in spite of his plea that everything was changed: he cared little even himself. However, he spoke in the tone of intense reason and of the fullest disposition to satisfy her. This lucidity only took still more from the dignity of his change of front: his separation from her the day before had had such pretensions to being lucid. But the explanation and the justification were in the very fact, the fact that had complete possession of him. He named it when he replied to her: "I've simply overrated my strength." "Oh I knew--I knew! That's why I entreated you not to come!" Miriam groaned. She turned away lamenting, and for a moment he thought she would retreat to her carriage. But he passed his hand into her arm, to draw her forward, and after an instant felt her yield. "The fact is we must have this thing out," he said. Then he added as he made her go into the house, bending over her, "The failure of my strength--that was just the reason of my coming." She broke into her laugh at these words, as she entered the drawing-room, and it made them sound pompous in their false wisdom. She flung off, as a good-natured tribute to the image of their having the thing out, a white shawl that had been wrapped round her. She was still painted and bedizened, in the splendid dress of her climax, so that she seemed protected and alienated by the character she had been acting. "Whatever it is you want--when I understand--you'll be very brief, won't you? Do you know I've given up a charming supper for you? Mamma has gone there. I've promised to go back to them." "You're an angel not to have let her come with you. I'm sure she wanted to," Peter made reply. "Oh she's all right, but she's nervous." Then the girl added: "Couldn't she keep you away after all?" "Whom are you talking about?" Biddy Dormer was as absent from his mind as if she had never existed. "The charming thing you were with this morning. Is she so afraid of obliging me? Oh she'd be so good for you!" "Don't speak of that," Peter gravely said. "I was in perfect good faith yesterday when I took leave of you. I was--I was. But I can't--I can't: you're too unutterably dear to me." "Oh don't--_please_ don't!" Miriam wailed at this. She stood before the fireless chimney-piece with one of her hands on it. "If it's only to say that, don't you know, what's the use?" "It isn't only to say that. I've a plan, a perfect plan: the whole thing lies clear before me." "And what's the whole thing?" He had to make an effort. "You say your mother's nervous. Ah if you knew how nervous I am!" "Well, I'm not. Go on." "Give it up--give it up!" Peter stammered. "Give it up?" She fixed him like a mild Medusa. "I'll marry you to-morrow if you'll renounce; and in return for the sacrifice you make for me I'll do more for you than ever was done for a woman before." "Renounce after to-night? Do you call that a plan?" she asked. "Those are old words and very foolish ones--you wanted something of that sort a year ago." "Oh I fluttered round the idea at that time; we were talking in the air. I didn't really believe I could make you see it then, and certainly you didn't see it. My own future, moreover, wasn't definite to me. I didn't know what I could offer you. But these last months have made a difference--I do know now. Now what I say is deliberate--It's deeply meditated. I simply can't live without you, and I hold that together we may do great things." She seemed to wonder. "What sort of things?" "The things of my profession, of my life, the things one does for one's country, the responsibility and the honour of great affairs; deeply fascinating when one's immersed in them, and more exciting really--put them even at that--than the excitements of the theatre. Care for me only a little and you'll see what they are, they'll take hold of you. Believe me, believe me," Peter pleaded; "every fibre of my being trembles in what I say to you." "You admitted yesterday it wouldn't do," she made answer. "Where were the fibres of your being then?" "They throbbed in me even more than now, and I was trying, like an ass, not to feel them. Where was this evening yesterday--where were the maddening hours I've just spent? Ah you're the perfection of perfections, and as I sat there to-night you taught me what I really want." "The perfection of perfections?" the girl echoed with the strangest smile. "I needn't try to tell you: you must have felt to-night with such rapture what you are, what you can do. How can I give that up?" he piteously went on. "How can _I_, my poor friend? I like your plans and your responsibilities and your great affairs, as you call them. _Voyons_, they're infantile. I've just shown that I'm a perfection of perfections: therefore it's just the moment to 'renounce,' as you gracefully say? Oh I was sure, I was sure!" And Miriam paused, resting eyes at once lighted and troubled on him as in the effort to think of some arrangement that would help him out of his absurdity. "I was sure, I mean, that if you did come your poor, dear, doting brain would be quite confused," she presently pursued. "I can't be a muff in public just for you, _pourtant_. Dear me, why do you like us so much?" "Like you? I loathe you!" "_Je le vois parbleu bien_!" she lightly returned. "I mean why do you feel us, judge us, understand us so well? I please you because you see, because you know; and then for that very reason of my pleasing you must adapt me to your convenience, you must take me over, as they say. You admire me as an artist and therefore want to put me into a box in which the artist will breathe her last. Ah be reasonable; you must let her live!" "Let her live? As if I could prevent her living!" Peter cried with unmistakable conviction. "Even if I did wish how could I prevent a spirit like yours from expressing itself? Don't talk about my putting you in a box, for, dearest child, I'm taking you out of one," he all persuasively explained. "The artist is irrepressible, eternal; she'll be in everything you are and in everything you do, and you'll go about with her triumphantly exerting your powers, charming the world, carrying everything before you." Miriam's colour rose, through all her artificial surfaces, at this all but convincing appeal, and she asked whimsically: "Shall you

man

How many times the word 'man' appears in the text?

you to-morrow--there's no question of ten years!" cried Mrs. Rooth with a comicality of plainness. Miriam smiled at Nick, deprecating his horror of such talk. "Isn't it droll, the way she can't get it out of her head?" Then turning almost coaxingly to the old woman: "_Voyons_, look about you: they don't marry us like that." "But they do--_cela se voit tous les jours_. Ask Mr. Dormer." "Oh never! It would be as if I asked him to give us a practical proof." "I shall never prove anything by marrying any one," Nick said. "For me that question's over." Miriam rested kind eyes on him. "Dear me, how you must hate me!" And before he had time to reply she went on to her mother: "People marry them to make them leave the stage; which proves exactly what I say." "Ah they offer them the finest positions," reasoned Mrs. Rooth. "Do you want me to leave it then?" "Oh you can manage if you will!" "The only managing I know anything about is to do my work. If I manage that decently I shall pull through." "But, dearest, may our work not be of many sorts?" "I only know one," said Miriam. At this her mother got up with a sigh. "I see you do wish to drive me into the street." "Mamma's bewildered--there are so many paths she wants to follow, there are so many bundles of hay. As I told you, she wishes to gobble them all," the girl pursued. Then she added: "Yes, go and take the carriage; take a turn round the Park--you always delight in that--and come back for me in an hour." "I'm too vexed with you; the air will do me good," said Mrs. Rooth. But before she went she addressed Nick: "I've your assurance that you'll bring him then to-night?" "Bring Peter? I don't think I shall have to drag him," Nick returned. "But you must do me the justice to remember that if I should resort to force I should do something that's not particularly in my interest--I should be magnanimous." "We must always be that, mustn't we?" moralised Mrs. Rooth. "How could it affect your interest?" Miriam asked less abstractedly. "Yes, as you say," her mother mused at their host, "the question of marriage has ceased to exist for you." "Mamma goes straight at it!" laughed the girl, getting up while Nick rubbed his canvas before answering. Miriam went to mamma and settled her bonnet and mantle in preparation for her drive, then stood a moment with a filial arm about her and as if waiting for their friend's explanation. This, however, when it came halted visibly. "Why you said a while ago that if Peter was there you wouldn't act." "I'll act for _him_," smiled Miriam, inconsequently caressing her mother. "It doesn't matter whom it's for!" Mrs. Rooth declared sagaciously. "Take your drive and relax your mind," said the girl, kissing her. "Come for me in an hour; not later--but not sooner." She went with her to the door, bundled her out, closed it behind her and came back to the position she had quitted. "_This_ is the peace I want!" she gratefully cried as she settled into it. XLV Peter Sherringham said so little during the performance that his companion was struck by his dumbness, especially as Miriam's acting seemed to Nick magnificent. He held his breath while she was on the stage--she gave the whole thing, including the spectator's emotion, such a lift. She had not carried out her fantastic menace of not exerting herself, and, as Mrs. Rooth had said, it little mattered for whom she acted. Nick was conscious in watching her that she went through it all for herself, for the idea that possessed her and that she rendered with extraordinary breadth. She couldn't open the door a part of the way to it and let it simply peep in; if it entered at all it must enter in full procession and occupy the premises in state. This was what had happened on an occasion which, as the less tormented of our young men felt in his stall, grew larger with each throb of the responsive house; till by the time the play was half over it appeared to stretch out wide arms to the future. Nick had often heard more applause, but had never heard more attention, since they were all charmed and hushed together and success seemed to be sitting down with them. There had been of course plenty of announcement--the newspapers had abounded and the arts of the manager had taken the freest license; but it was easy to feel a fine, universal consensus and to recognise everywhere the light spring of hope. People snatched their eyes from the stage an instant to look at each other, all eager to hand on the torch passed to them by the actress over the footlights. It was a part of the impression that she was now only showing to the full, for this time she had verse to deal with and she made it unexpectedly exquisite. She was beauty, melody, truth; she was passion and persuasion and tenderness. She caught up the obstreperous play in soothing, entwining arms and, seeming to tread the air in the flutter of her robe, carried it into the high places of poetry, of art, of style. And she had such tones of nature, such concealments of art, such effusions of life, that the whole scene glowed with the colour she communicated, and the house, pervaded with rosy fire, glowed back at the scene. Nick looked round in the intervals; he felt excited and flushed--the night had turned to a feast of fraternity and he expected to see people embrace each other. The crowd, the agitation, the triumph, the surprise, the signals and rumours, the heated air, his associates, near him, pointing out other figures who presumably were celebrated but whom he had never heard of, all amused him and banished every impulse to question or to compare. Miriam was as happy as some right sensation--she would have fed the memory with deep draughts. One of the things that amused him or at least helped to fill his attention was Peter's attitude, which apparently didn't exclude criticism--rather indeed mainly implied it. This admirer never took his eyes off the actress, but he made no remark about her and never stirred out of his chair. Nick had had from the first a plan of going round to speak to her, but as his companion evidently meant not to move he scrupled at being more forward. During their brief dinner together--they were determined not to be late--Peter had been silent, quite recklessly grave, but also, his kinsman judged, full of the wish to make it clear he was calm. In his seat he was calmer than ever and had an air even of trying to suggest that his attendance, preoccupied as he was with deeper solemnities, was more or less mechanical, the result of a conception of duty, a habit of courtesy. When during a scene in the second act--a scene from which Miriam was absent--Nick observed to him that one might judge from his reserve that he wasn't pleased he replied after a moment: "I've been looking for her mistakes." And when Nick made answer to this that he certainly wouldn't find them he said again in an odd tone: "No, I shan't find them--I shan't find them." It might have seemed that since the girl's performance was a dazzling success he regarded his evening as rather a failure. After the third act Nick said candidly: "My dear fellow, how can you sit here? Aren't you going to speak to her?" To which Peter replied inscrutably: "Lord, no, never again. I bade her good-bye yesterday. She knows what I think of her form. It's very good, but she carries it a little too far. Besides, she didn't want me to come, and it's therefore more discreet to keep away from her." "Surely it isn't an hour for discretion!" Nick cried. "Excuse me at any rate for five minutes." He went behind and reappeared only as the curtain was rising on the fourth act; and in the interval between the fourth and the fifth he went again for a shorter time. Peter was personally detached, but he consented to listen to his companion's vivid account of the state of things on the stage, where the elation of victory had lighted up the place. The strain was over, the ship in port--they were all wiping their faces and grinning. Miriam--yes, positively--was grinning too, and she hadn't asked a question about Peter nor sent him a message. They were kissing all round and dancing for joy. They were on the eve, worse luck, of a tremendous run. Peter groaned irrepressibly for this; it was, save for a slight sign a moment later, the only vibration caused in him by his cousin's report. There was but one voice of regret that they hadn't put on the piece earlier, as the end of the season would interrupt the run. There was but one voice too about the fourth act--it was believed all London would rush to see the fourth act. The crowd about her was a dozen deep and Miriam in the midst of it all charming; she was receiving in the ugly place after the fashion of royalty, almost as hedged with the famous "divinity," yet with a smile and a word for each. She was really like a young queen on her accession. When she saw him, Nick, she had kissed her hand to him over the heads of the courtiers. Nick's artless comment on this was that she had such pretty manners. It made Peter laugh--apparently at his friend's conception of the manners of a young queen. Mrs. Rooth, with a dozen shawls on her arm, was as red as the kitchen-fire, but you couldn't tell if Miriam were red or pale: she was so cleverly, finely made up--perhaps a little too much. Dashwood of course was greatly to the fore, but you hadn't to mention his own performance to him: he took it all handsomely and wouldn't hear of anything but that _her_ fortune was made. He didn't say much indeed, but evidently had ideas about her fortune; he nodded significant things and whistled inimitable sounds--"Heuh, heuh!" He was perfectly satisfied; moreover, he looked further ahead than any one. It was on coming back to his place after the fourth act that Nick put in, for his companion's benefit, most of these touches in his sketch of the situation. If Peter had continued to look for Miriam's mistakes he hadn't yet found them: the fourth act, bristling with dangers, putting a premium on every sort of cheap effect, had rounded itself without a flaw. Sitting there alone while Nick was away he had leisure to meditate on the wonder of this--on the art with which the girl had separated passion from violence, filling the whole place and never screaming; for it had often seemed to him in London of old that the yell of theatrical emotion rang through the shrinking night like the voice of the Sunday newsboy. Miriam had never been more present to him than at this hour; but she was inextricably transmuted--present essentially as the romantic heroine she represented. His state of mind was of the strangest and he was conscious of its strangeness, just as he was conscious in his very person of a lapse of resistance which likened itself absurdly to liberation. He felt weak at the same time that he felt inspired, and he felt inspired at the same time that he knew, or believed he knew, that his face was a blank. He saw things as a shining confusion, and yet somehow something monstrously definite kept surging out of them. Miriam was a beautiful, actual, fictive, impossible young woman of a past age, an undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one's own affairs. But that reality was a part of her spectator's joy, and she was not changed back to the common by his perception of the magnificent trick of art with which it was connected. Before his kinsman rejoined him Peter, taking a visiting-card from his pocket, had written on it in pencil a few words in a foreign tongue; but as at that moment he saw Nick coming in he immediately put it out of view. The last thing before the curtain rose on the fifth act that young man mentioned his having brought a message from Basil Dashwood, who hoped they both, on leaving the theatre, would come to supper with him in company with Miriam and her mother and several others: he had prepared a little informal banquet in honour of so famous a night. At this, while the curtain was about to rise, Peter immediately took out his card again and added something--he wrote the finest small hand you could see. Nick asked him what he was doing, and he waited but an instant. "It's a word to say I can't come." "To Dashwood? Oh I shall go," said Nick. "Well, I hope you'll enjoy it!" his companion replied in a tone which came back to him afterwards. When the curtain fell on the last act the people stayed, standing up in their places for acclamation. The applause shook the house--the recall became a clamour, the relief from a long tension. This was in any performance a moment Peter detested, but he stood for an instant beside Nick, who clapped, to his cousin's diplomatic sense, after the fashion of a school-boy at the pantomime. There was a veritable roar while the curtain drew back at the side most removed from our pair. Peter could see Basil Dashwood holding it, making a passage for the male "juvenile lead," who had Miriam in tow. Nick redoubled his efforts; heard the plaudits swell; saw the bows of the leading gentleman, who was hot and fat; saw Miriam, personally conducted and closer to the footlights, grow brighter and bigger and more swaying; and then became aware that his own comrade had with extreme agility slipped out of the stalls. Nick had already lost sight of him--he had apparently taken but a minute to escape from the house; and wondered at his quitting him without a farewell if he was to leave England on the morrow and they were not to meet at the hospitable Dashwood's. He wondered even what Peter was "up to," since, as he had assured him, there was no question of his going round to Miriam. He waited to see this young lady reappear three times, dragging Dashwood behind her at the second with a friendly arm, to whom, in turn, was hooked Miss Fanny Rover, the actress entrusted in the piece with the inevitable comic relief. He went out slowly with the crowd and at the door looked again for Peter, who struck him as deficient for once in finish. He couldn't know that in another direction and while he was helping the house to "rise" at its heroine, his kinsman had been particularly explicit. On reaching the lobby Peter had pounced on a small boy in buttons, who seemed superfluously connected with a desolate refreshment-room and, from the tips of his toes, was peeping at the stage through the glazed hole in the door of a box. Into one of the child's hands he thrust the card he had drawn again from his waistcoat and into the other the largest silver coin he could find in the same receptacle, while he bent over him with words of adjuration--words the little page tried to help himself to apprehend by instantly attempting to peruse the other words written on the card. "That's no use--it's Italian," said Peter; "only carry it round to Miss Rooth without a minute's delay. Place it in her hand and she'll give you some object--a bracelet, a glove, or a flower--to bring me back as a sign that she has received it. I shall be outside; bring me there what she gives you and you shall have another shilling--only fly!" His small messenger sounded him a moment with the sharp face of London wage-earning, and still more of London tip-earning, infancy, and vanished as swiftly as a slave of the Arabian Nights. While he waited in the lobby the audience began to pour out, and before the urchin had come back to him he was clapped on the shoulder by Nick. "I'm glad I haven't lost you, but why didn't you stay to give her a hand?" "Give her a hand? I hated it." "My dear man, I don't follow you," Nick said. "If you won't come to Dashwood's supper I fear our ways don't lie together." "Thank him very much; say I've to get up at an unnatural hour." To this Peter added: "I think I ought to tell you she may not be there." "Miss Rooth? Why it's all _for_ her." "I'm waiting for a word from her--she may change her mind." Nick showed his interest. "For you? What then have you proposed?" "I've proposed marriage," said Peter in a strange voice. "I say--!" Nick broke out; and at the same moment Peter's messenger squeezed through the press and stood before him. "She has given me nothing, sir," the boy announced; "but she says I'm to say 'All right!'" Nick's stare widened. "You've proposed through _him_?" "Aye, and she accepts. Good-night!"--on which, turning away, Peter bounded into a hansom. He said something to the driver through the roof, and Nick's eyes followed the cab as it started off. This young man was mystified, was even amused; especially when the youth in buttons, planted there and wondering too, brought forth: "Please sir, he told me he'd give me a shilling and he've forgot it." "Oh I can't pay you for _that_!" Nick laughed. But he fished out a dole, though he was vexed at the injury to the supper. XLVI Peter meanwhile rolled away through the summer night to Saint John's Wood. He had put the pressure of strong words on his young friend, entreating her to drive home immediately, return there without any one, without even her mother. He wished to see her alone and for a purpose he would fully and satisfactorily explain--couldn't she trust him? He besought her to remember his own situation and throw over her supper, throw over everything. He would wait for her with unspeakable impatience in Balaklava Place. He did so, when he got there, but it had taken half an hour. Interminable seemed his lonely vigil in Miss Lumley's drawing-room, where the character of the original proprietress came out to him more than ever before in a kind of afterglow of old sociabilities, a vulgar, ghostly reference. The numerous candles had been lighted for him, and Mrs. Rooth's familiar fictions lay about; but his nerves forbade him the solace of a chair and a book. He walked up and down, thinking and listening, and as the long window, the balmy air permitting, stood open to the garden, he passed several times in and out. A carriage appeared to stop at the gate--then there was nothing; he heard the rare rattle of wheels and the far-off hum of London. His impatience was overwrought, and though he knew this it persisted; it would have been no easy matter for Miriam to break away from the flock of her felicitators. Still less simple was it doubtless for her to leave poor Dashwood with his supper on his hands. Perhaps she would bring Dashwood with her, bring him to time her; she was capable of playing him--that is, of playing Her Majesty's new representative to the small far-off State, or even of playing them both--that trick. Perhaps the little wretch in buttons--Peter remembered now the neglected shilling--only pretending to go round with his card, had come back with an invented answer. But how could he know, since presumably he couldn't read Italian, that his answer would fit the message? Peter was sorry now that he himself had not gone round, not snatched Miriam bodily away, made sure of her and of what he wanted of her. When forty minutes had elapsed he regarded it as proved that she wouldn't come, and, asking himself what he should do, determined to drive off again and seize her at her comrade's feast. Then he remembered how Nick had mentioned that this entertainment was not to be held at the young actor's lodgings but at some tavern or restaurant the name of which he had not heeded. Suddenly, however, Peter became aware with joy that this name didn't matter, for there was something at the garden door at last. He rushed out before she had had time to ring, and saw as she stepped from the carriage that she was alone. Now that she was there, that he had this evidence she had listened to him and trusted him, all his impatience and bitterness gave way and a flood of pleading tenderness took their place in the first words he spoke to her. It was far "dearer" of her than he had any right to dream, but she was the best and kindest creature--this showed it--as well as the most wonderful. He was really not off his head with his contradictory ways; no, before heaven he wasn't, and he would explain, he would make everything clear. Everything was changed. She stopped short in the little dusky garden, looking at him in the light of the open window. Then she called back to the coachman--they had left the garden door open--"Wait for me, mind; I shall want you again." "What's the matter--won't you stay?" Peter asked. "Are you going out again at this absurd hour? I won't hurt you," he gently urged. And he went back and closed the garden door. He wanted to say to the coachman, "It's no matter--please drive away." At the same time he wouldn't for the world have done anything offensive to her. "I've come because I thought it better to-night, as things have turned out, to do the thing you ask me, whatever it may be," she had already begun. "That's probably what you calculated I would think, eh? What this evening has been you've seen, and I must allow that your hand's in it. That you know for yourself--that you doubtless felt as you sat there. But I confess I don't imagine what you want of me here now," she added. She had remained standing in the path. Peter felt the irony of her "now" and how it made a fool of him, but he had been prepared for this and for much worse. He had begged her not to think him a fool, but in truth at present he cared little if she did. Very likely he was--in spite of his plea that everything was changed: he cared little even himself. However, he spoke in the tone of intense reason and of the fullest disposition to satisfy her. This lucidity only took still more from the dignity of his change of front: his separation from her the day before had had such pretensions to being lucid. But the explanation and the justification were in the very fact, the fact that had complete possession of him. He named it when he replied to her: "I've simply overrated my strength." "Oh I knew--I knew! That's why I entreated you not to come!" Miriam groaned. She turned away lamenting, and for a moment he thought she would retreat to her carriage. But he passed his hand into her arm, to draw her forward, and after an instant felt her yield. "The fact is we must have this thing out," he said. Then he added as he made her go into the house, bending over her, "The failure of my strength--that was just the reason of my coming." She broke into her laugh at these words, as she entered the drawing-room, and it made them sound pompous in their false wisdom. She flung off, as a good-natured tribute to the image of their having the thing out, a white shawl that had been wrapped round her. She was still painted and bedizened, in the splendid dress of her climax, so that she seemed protected and alienated by the character she had been acting. "Whatever it is you want--when I understand--you'll be very brief, won't you? Do you know I've given up a charming supper for you? Mamma has gone there. I've promised to go back to them." "You're an angel not to have let her come with you. I'm sure she wanted to," Peter made reply. "Oh she's all right, but she's nervous." Then the girl added: "Couldn't she keep you away after all?" "Whom are you talking about?" Biddy Dormer was as absent from his mind as if she had never existed. "The charming thing you were with this morning. Is she so afraid of obliging me? Oh she'd be so good for you!" "Don't speak of that," Peter gravely said. "I was in perfect good faith yesterday when I took leave of you. I was--I was. But I can't--I can't: you're too unutterably dear to me." "Oh don't--_please_ don't!" Miriam wailed at this. She stood before the fireless chimney-piece with one of her hands on it. "If it's only to say that, don't you know, what's the use?" "It isn't only to say that. I've a plan, a perfect plan: the whole thing lies clear before me." "And what's the whole thing?" He had to make an effort. "You say your mother's nervous. Ah if you knew how nervous I am!" "Well, I'm not. Go on." "Give it up--give it up!" Peter stammered. "Give it up?" She fixed him like a mild Medusa. "I'll marry you to-morrow if you'll renounce; and in return for the sacrifice you make for me I'll do more for you than ever was done for a woman before." "Renounce after to-night? Do you call that a plan?" she asked. "Those are old words and very foolish ones--you wanted something of that sort a year ago." "Oh I fluttered round the idea at that time; we were talking in the air. I didn't really believe I could make you see it then, and certainly you didn't see it. My own future, moreover, wasn't definite to me. I didn't know what I could offer you. But these last months have made a difference--I do know now. Now what I say is deliberate--It's deeply meditated. I simply can't live without you, and I hold that together we may do great things." She seemed to wonder. "What sort of things?" "The things of my profession, of my life, the things one does for one's country, the responsibility and the honour of great affairs; deeply fascinating when one's immersed in them, and more exciting really--put them even at that--than the excitements of the theatre. Care for me only a little and you'll see what they are, they'll take hold of you. Believe me, believe me," Peter pleaded; "every fibre of my being trembles in what I say to you." "You admitted yesterday it wouldn't do," she made answer. "Where were the fibres of your being then?" "They throbbed in me even more than now, and I was trying, like an ass, not to feel them. Where was this evening yesterday--where were the maddening hours I've just spent? Ah you're the perfection of perfections, and as I sat there to-night you taught me what I really want." "The perfection of perfections?" the girl echoed with the strangest smile. "I needn't try to tell you: you must have felt to-night with such rapture what you are, what you can do. How can I give that up?" he piteously went on. "How can _I_, my poor friend? I like your plans and your responsibilities and your great affairs, as you call them. _Voyons_, they're infantile. I've just shown that I'm a perfection of perfections: therefore it's just the moment to 'renounce,' as you gracefully say? Oh I was sure, I was sure!" And Miriam paused, resting eyes at once lighted and troubled on him as in the effort to think of some arrangement that would help him out of his absurdity. "I was sure, I mean, that if you did come your poor, dear, doting brain would be quite confused," she presently pursued. "I can't be a muff in public just for you, _pourtant_. Dear me, why do you like us so much?" "Like you? I loathe you!" "_Je le vois parbleu bien_!" she lightly returned. "I mean why do you feel us, judge us, understand us so well? I please you because you see, because you know; and then for that very reason of my pleasing you must adapt me to your convenience, you must take me over, as they say. You admire me as an artist and therefore want to put me into a box in which the artist will breathe her last. Ah be reasonable; you must let her live!" "Let her live? As if I could prevent her living!" Peter cried with unmistakable conviction. "Even if I did wish how could I prevent a spirit like yours from expressing itself? Don't talk about my putting you in a box, for, dearest child, I'm taking you out of one," he all persuasively explained. "The artist is irrepressible, eternal; she'll be in everything you are and in everything you do, and you'll go about with her triumphantly exerting your powers, charming the world, carrying everything before you." Miriam's colour rose, through all her artificial surfaces, at this all but convincing appeal, and she asked whimsically: "Shall you

sitting

How many times the word 'sitting' appears in the text?

you to-morrow--there's no question of ten years!" cried Mrs. Rooth with a comicality of plainness. Miriam smiled at Nick, deprecating his horror of such talk. "Isn't it droll, the way she can't get it out of her head?" Then turning almost coaxingly to the old woman: "_Voyons_, look about you: they don't marry us like that." "But they do--_cela se voit tous les jours_. Ask Mr. Dormer." "Oh never! It would be as if I asked him to give us a practical proof." "I shall never prove anything by marrying any one," Nick said. "For me that question's over." Miriam rested kind eyes on him. "Dear me, how you must hate me!" And before he had time to reply she went on to her mother: "People marry them to make them leave the stage; which proves exactly what I say." "Ah they offer them the finest positions," reasoned Mrs. Rooth. "Do you want me to leave it then?" "Oh you can manage if you will!" "The only managing I know anything about is to do my work. If I manage that decently I shall pull through." "But, dearest, may our work not be of many sorts?" "I only know one," said Miriam. At this her mother got up with a sigh. "I see you do wish to drive me into the street." "Mamma's bewildered--there are so many paths she wants to follow, there are so many bundles of hay. As I told you, she wishes to gobble them all," the girl pursued. Then she added: "Yes, go and take the carriage; take a turn round the Park--you always delight in that--and come back for me in an hour." "I'm too vexed with you; the air will do me good," said Mrs. Rooth. But before she went she addressed Nick: "I've your assurance that you'll bring him then to-night?" "Bring Peter? I don't think I shall have to drag him," Nick returned. "But you must do me the justice to remember that if I should resort to force I should do something that's not particularly in my interest--I should be magnanimous." "We must always be that, mustn't we?" moralised Mrs. Rooth. "How could it affect your interest?" Miriam asked less abstractedly. "Yes, as you say," her mother mused at their host, "the question of marriage has ceased to exist for you." "Mamma goes straight at it!" laughed the girl, getting up while Nick rubbed his canvas before answering. Miriam went to mamma and settled her bonnet and mantle in preparation for her drive, then stood a moment with a filial arm about her and as if waiting for their friend's explanation. This, however, when it came halted visibly. "Why you said a while ago that if Peter was there you wouldn't act." "I'll act for _him_," smiled Miriam, inconsequently caressing her mother. "It doesn't matter whom it's for!" Mrs. Rooth declared sagaciously. "Take your drive and relax your mind," said the girl, kissing her. "Come for me in an hour; not later--but not sooner." She went with her to the door, bundled her out, closed it behind her and came back to the position she had quitted. "_This_ is the peace I want!" she gratefully cried as she settled into it. XLV Peter Sherringham said so little during the performance that his companion was struck by his dumbness, especially as Miriam's acting seemed to Nick magnificent. He held his breath while she was on the stage--she gave the whole thing, including the spectator's emotion, such a lift. She had not carried out her fantastic menace of not exerting herself, and, as Mrs. Rooth had said, it little mattered for whom she acted. Nick was conscious in watching her that she went through it all for herself, for the idea that possessed her and that she rendered with extraordinary breadth. She couldn't open the door a part of the way to it and let it simply peep in; if it entered at all it must enter in full procession and occupy the premises in state. This was what had happened on an occasion which, as the less tormented of our young men felt in his stall, grew larger with each throb of the responsive house; till by the time the play was half over it appeared to stretch out wide arms to the future. Nick had often heard more applause, but had never heard more attention, since they were all charmed and hushed together and success seemed to be sitting down with them. There had been of course plenty of announcement--the newspapers had abounded and the arts of the manager had taken the freest license; but it was easy to feel a fine, universal consensus and to recognise everywhere the light spring of hope. People snatched their eyes from the stage an instant to look at each other, all eager to hand on the torch passed to them by the actress over the footlights. It was a part of the impression that she was now only showing to the full, for this time she had verse to deal with and she made it unexpectedly exquisite. She was beauty, melody, truth; she was passion and persuasion and tenderness. She caught up the obstreperous play in soothing, entwining arms and, seeming to tread the air in the flutter of her robe, carried it into the high places of poetry, of art, of style. And she had such tones of nature, such concealments of art, such effusions of life, that the whole scene glowed with the colour she communicated, and the house, pervaded with rosy fire, glowed back at the scene. Nick looked round in the intervals; he felt excited and flushed--the night had turned to a feast of fraternity and he expected to see people embrace each other. The crowd, the agitation, the triumph, the surprise, the signals and rumours, the heated air, his associates, near him, pointing out other figures who presumably were celebrated but whom he had never heard of, all amused him and banished every impulse to question or to compare. Miriam was as happy as some right sensation--she would have fed the memory with deep draughts. One of the things that amused him or at least helped to fill his attention was Peter's attitude, which apparently didn't exclude criticism--rather indeed mainly implied it. This admirer never took his eyes off the actress, but he made no remark about her and never stirred out of his chair. Nick had had from the first a plan of going round to speak to her, but as his companion evidently meant not to move he scrupled at being more forward. During their brief dinner together--they were determined not to be late--Peter had been silent, quite recklessly grave, but also, his kinsman judged, full of the wish to make it clear he was calm. In his seat he was calmer than ever and had an air even of trying to suggest that his attendance, preoccupied as he was with deeper solemnities, was more or less mechanical, the result of a conception of duty, a habit of courtesy. When during a scene in the second act--a scene from which Miriam was absent--Nick observed to him that one might judge from his reserve that he wasn't pleased he replied after a moment: "I've been looking for her mistakes." And when Nick made answer to this that he certainly wouldn't find them he said again in an odd tone: "No, I shan't find them--I shan't find them." It might have seemed that since the girl's performance was a dazzling success he regarded his evening as rather a failure. After the third act Nick said candidly: "My dear fellow, how can you sit here? Aren't you going to speak to her?" To which Peter replied inscrutably: "Lord, no, never again. I bade her good-bye yesterday. She knows what I think of her form. It's very good, but she carries it a little too far. Besides, she didn't want me to come, and it's therefore more discreet to keep away from her." "Surely it isn't an hour for discretion!" Nick cried. "Excuse me at any rate for five minutes." He went behind and reappeared only as the curtain was rising on the fourth act; and in the interval between the fourth and the fifth he went again for a shorter time. Peter was personally detached, but he consented to listen to his companion's vivid account of the state of things on the stage, where the elation of victory had lighted up the place. The strain was over, the ship in port--they were all wiping their faces and grinning. Miriam--yes, positively--was grinning too, and she hadn't asked a question about Peter nor sent him a message. They were kissing all round and dancing for joy. They were on the eve, worse luck, of a tremendous run. Peter groaned irrepressibly for this; it was, save for a slight sign a moment later, the only vibration caused in him by his cousin's report. There was but one voice of regret that they hadn't put on the piece earlier, as the end of the season would interrupt the run. There was but one voice too about the fourth act--it was believed all London would rush to see the fourth act. The crowd about her was a dozen deep and Miriam in the midst of it all charming; she was receiving in the ugly place after the fashion of royalty, almost as hedged with the famous "divinity," yet with a smile and a word for each. She was really like a young queen on her accession. When she saw him, Nick, she had kissed her hand to him over the heads of the courtiers. Nick's artless comment on this was that she had such pretty manners. It made Peter laugh--apparently at his friend's conception of the manners of a young queen. Mrs. Rooth, with a dozen shawls on her arm, was as red as the kitchen-fire, but you couldn't tell if Miriam were red or pale: she was so cleverly, finely made up--perhaps a little too much. Dashwood of course was greatly to the fore, but you hadn't to mention his own performance to him: he took it all handsomely and wouldn't hear of anything but that _her_ fortune was made. He didn't say much indeed, but evidently had ideas about her fortune; he nodded significant things and whistled inimitable sounds--"Heuh, heuh!" He was perfectly satisfied; moreover, he looked further ahead than any one. It was on coming back to his place after the fourth act that Nick put in, for his companion's benefit, most of these touches in his sketch of the situation. If Peter had continued to look for Miriam's mistakes he hadn't yet found them: the fourth act, bristling with dangers, putting a premium on every sort of cheap effect, had rounded itself without a flaw. Sitting there alone while Nick was away he had leisure to meditate on the wonder of this--on the art with which the girl had separated passion from violence, filling the whole place and never screaming; for it had often seemed to him in London of old that the yell of theatrical emotion rang through the shrinking night like the voice of the Sunday newsboy. Miriam had never been more present to him than at this hour; but she was inextricably transmuted--present essentially as the romantic heroine she represented. His state of mind was of the strangest and he was conscious of its strangeness, just as he was conscious in his very person of a lapse of resistance which likened itself absurdly to liberation. He felt weak at the same time that he felt inspired, and he felt inspired at the same time that he knew, or believed he knew, that his face was a blank. He saw things as a shining confusion, and yet somehow something monstrously definite kept surging out of them. Miriam was a beautiful, actual, fictive, impossible young woman of a past age, an undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one's own affairs. But that reality was a part of her spectator's joy, and she was not changed back to the common by his perception of the magnificent trick of art with which it was connected. Before his kinsman rejoined him Peter, taking a visiting-card from his pocket, had written on it in pencil a few words in a foreign tongue; but as at that moment he saw Nick coming in he immediately put it out of view. The last thing before the curtain rose on the fifth act that young man mentioned his having brought a message from Basil Dashwood, who hoped they both, on leaving the theatre, would come to supper with him in company with Miriam and her mother and several others: he had prepared a little informal banquet in honour of so famous a night. At this, while the curtain was about to rise, Peter immediately took out his card again and added something--he wrote the finest small hand you could see. Nick asked him what he was doing, and he waited but an instant. "It's a word to say I can't come." "To Dashwood? Oh I shall go," said Nick. "Well, I hope you'll enjoy it!" his companion replied in a tone which came back to him afterwards. When the curtain fell on the last act the people stayed, standing up in their places for acclamation. The applause shook the house--the recall became a clamour, the relief from a long tension. This was in any performance a moment Peter detested, but he stood for an instant beside Nick, who clapped, to his cousin's diplomatic sense, after the fashion of a school-boy at the pantomime. There was a veritable roar while the curtain drew back at the side most removed from our pair. Peter could see Basil Dashwood holding it, making a passage for the male "juvenile lead," who had Miriam in tow. Nick redoubled his efforts; heard the plaudits swell; saw the bows of the leading gentleman, who was hot and fat; saw Miriam, personally conducted and closer to the footlights, grow brighter and bigger and more swaying; and then became aware that his own comrade had with extreme agility slipped out of the stalls. Nick had already lost sight of him--he had apparently taken but a minute to escape from the house; and wondered at his quitting him without a farewell if he was to leave England on the morrow and they were not to meet at the hospitable Dashwood's. He wondered even what Peter was "up to," since, as he had assured him, there was no question of his going round to Miriam. He waited to see this young lady reappear three times, dragging Dashwood behind her at the second with a friendly arm, to whom, in turn, was hooked Miss Fanny Rover, the actress entrusted in the piece with the inevitable comic relief. He went out slowly with the crowd and at the door looked again for Peter, who struck him as deficient for once in finish. He couldn't know that in another direction and while he was helping the house to "rise" at its heroine, his kinsman had been particularly explicit. On reaching the lobby Peter had pounced on a small boy in buttons, who seemed superfluously connected with a desolate refreshment-room and, from the tips of his toes, was peeping at the stage through the glazed hole in the door of a box. Into one of the child's hands he thrust the card he had drawn again from his waistcoat and into the other the largest silver coin he could find in the same receptacle, while he bent over him with words of adjuration--words the little page tried to help himself to apprehend by instantly attempting to peruse the other words written on the card. "That's no use--it's Italian," said Peter; "only carry it round to Miss Rooth without a minute's delay. Place it in her hand and she'll give you some object--a bracelet, a glove, or a flower--to bring me back as a sign that she has received it. I shall be outside; bring me there what she gives you and you shall have another shilling--only fly!" His small messenger sounded him a moment with the sharp face of London wage-earning, and still more of London tip-earning, infancy, and vanished as swiftly as a slave of the Arabian Nights. While he waited in the lobby the audience began to pour out, and before the urchin had come back to him he was clapped on the shoulder by Nick. "I'm glad I haven't lost you, but why didn't you stay to give her a hand?" "Give her a hand? I hated it." "My dear man, I don't follow you," Nick said. "If you won't come to Dashwood's supper I fear our ways don't lie together." "Thank him very much; say I've to get up at an unnatural hour." To this Peter added: "I think I ought to tell you she may not be there." "Miss Rooth? Why it's all _for_ her." "I'm waiting for a word from her--she may change her mind." Nick showed his interest. "For you? What then have you proposed?" "I've proposed marriage," said Peter in a strange voice. "I say--!" Nick broke out; and at the same moment Peter's messenger squeezed through the press and stood before him. "She has given me nothing, sir," the boy announced; "but she says I'm to say 'All right!'" Nick's stare widened. "You've proposed through _him_?" "Aye, and she accepts. Good-night!"--on which, turning away, Peter bounded into a hansom. He said something to the driver through the roof, and Nick's eyes followed the cab as it started off. This young man was mystified, was even amused; especially when the youth in buttons, planted there and wondering too, brought forth: "Please sir, he told me he'd give me a shilling and he've forgot it." "Oh I can't pay you for _that_!" Nick laughed. But he fished out a dole, though he was vexed at the injury to the supper. XLVI Peter meanwhile rolled away through the summer night to Saint John's Wood. He had put the pressure of strong words on his young friend, entreating her to drive home immediately, return there without any one, without even her mother. He wished to see her alone and for a purpose he would fully and satisfactorily explain--couldn't she trust him? He besought her to remember his own situation and throw over her supper, throw over everything. He would wait for her with unspeakable impatience in Balaklava Place. He did so, when he got there, but it had taken half an hour. Interminable seemed his lonely vigil in Miss Lumley's drawing-room, where the character of the original proprietress came out to him more than ever before in a kind of afterglow of old sociabilities, a vulgar, ghostly reference. The numerous candles had been lighted for him, and Mrs. Rooth's familiar fictions lay about; but his nerves forbade him the solace of a chair and a book. He walked up and down, thinking and listening, and as the long window, the balmy air permitting, stood open to the garden, he passed several times in and out. A carriage appeared to stop at the gate--then there was nothing; he heard the rare rattle of wheels and the far-off hum of London. His impatience was overwrought, and though he knew this it persisted; it would have been no easy matter for Miriam to break away from the flock of her felicitators. Still less simple was it doubtless for her to leave poor Dashwood with his supper on his hands. Perhaps she would bring Dashwood with her, bring him to time her; she was capable of playing him--that is, of playing Her Majesty's new representative to the small far-off State, or even of playing them both--that trick. Perhaps the little wretch in buttons--Peter remembered now the neglected shilling--only pretending to go round with his card, had come back with an invented answer. But how could he know, since presumably he couldn't read Italian, that his answer would fit the message? Peter was sorry now that he himself had not gone round, not snatched Miriam bodily away, made sure of her and of what he wanted of her. When forty minutes had elapsed he regarded it as proved that she wouldn't come, and, asking himself what he should do, determined to drive off again and seize her at her comrade's feast. Then he remembered how Nick had mentioned that this entertainment was not to be held at the young actor's lodgings but at some tavern or restaurant the name of which he had not heeded. Suddenly, however, Peter became aware with joy that this name didn't matter, for there was something at the garden door at last. He rushed out before she had had time to ring, and saw as she stepped from the carriage that she was alone. Now that she was there, that he had this evidence she had listened to him and trusted him, all his impatience and bitterness gave way and a flood of pleading tenderness took their place in the first words he spoke to her. It was far "dearer" of her than he had any right to dream, but she was the best and kindest creature--this showed it--as well as the most wonderful. He was really not off his head with his contradictory ways; no, before heaven he wasn't, and he would explain, he would make everything clear. Everything was changed. She stopped short in the little dusky garden, looking at him in the light of the open window. Then she called back to the coachman--they had left the garden door open--"Wait for me, mind; I shall want you again." "What's the matter--won't you stay?" Peter asked. "Are you going out again at this absurd hour? I won't hurt you," he gently urged. And he went back and closed the garden door. He wanted to say to the coachman, "It's no matter--please drive away." At the same time he wouldn't for the world have done anything offensive to her. "I've come because I thought it better to-night, as things have turned out, to do the thing you ask me, whatever it may be," she had already begun. "That's probably what you calculated I would think, eh? What this evening has been you've seen, and I must allow that your hand's in it. That you know for yourself--that you doubtless felt as you sat there. But I confess I don't imagine what you want of me here now," she added. She had remained standing in the path. Peter felt the irony of her "now" and how it made a fool of him, but he had been prepared for this and for much worse. He had begged her not to think him a fool, but in truth at present he cared little if she did. Very likely he was--in spite of his plea that everything was changed: he cared little even himself. However, he spoke in the tone of intense reason and of the fullest disposition to satisfy her. This lucidity only took still more from the dignity of his change of front: his separation from her the day before had had such pretensions to being lucid. But the explanation and the justification were in the very fact, the fact that had complete possession of him. He named it when he replied to her: "I've simply overrated my strength." "Oh I knew--I knew! That's why I entreated you not to come!" Miriam groaned. She turned away lamenting, and for a moment he thought she would retreat to her carriage. But he passed his hand into her arm, to draw her forward, and after an instant felt her yield. "The fact is we must have this thing out," he said. Then he added as he made her go into the house, bending over her, "The failure of my strength--that was just the reason of my coming." She broke into her laugh at these words, as she entered the drawing-room, and it made them sound pompous in their false wisdom. She flung off, as a good-natured tribute to the image of their having the thing out, a white shawl that had been wrapped round her. She was still painted and bedizened, in the splendid dress of her climax, so that she seemed protected and alienated by the character she had been acting. "Whatever it is you want--when I understand--you'll be very brief, won't you? Do you know I've given up a charming supper for you? Mamma has gone there. I've promised to go back to them." "You're an angel not to have let her come with you. I'm sure she wanted to," Peter made reply. "Oh she's all right, but she's nervous." Then the girl added: "Couldn't she keep you away after all?" "Whom are you talking about?" Biddy Dormer was as absent from his mind as if she had never existed. "The charming thing you were with this morning. Is she so afraid of obliging me? Oh she'd be so good for you!" "Don't speak of that," Peter gravely said. "I was in perfect good faith yesterday when I took leave of you. I was--I was. But I can't--I can't: you're too unutterably dear to me." "Oh don't--_please_ don't!" Miriam wailed at this. She stood before the fireless chimney-piece with one of her hands on it. "If it's only to say that, don't you know, what's the use?" "It isn't only to say that. I've a plan, a perfect plan: the whole thing lies clear before me." "And what's the whole thing?" He had to make an effort. "You say your mother's nervous. Ah if you knew how nervous I am!" "Well, I'm not. Go on." "Give it up--give it up!" Peter stammered. "Give it up?" She fixed him like a mild Medusa. "I'll marry you to-morrow if you'll renounce; and in return for the sacrifice you make for me I'll do more for you than ever was done for a woman before." "Renounce after to-night? Do you call that a plan?" she asked. "Those are old words and very foolish ones--you wanted something of that sort a year ago." "Oh I fluttered round the idea at that time; we were talking in the air. I didn't really believe I could make you see it then, and certainly you didn't see it. My own future, moreover, wasn't definite to me. I didn't know what I could offer you. But these last months have made a difference--I do know now. Now what I say is deliberate--It's deeply meditated. I simply can't live without you, and I hold that together we may do great things." She seemed to wonder. "What sort of things?" "The things of my profession, of my life, the things one does for one's country, the responsibility and the honour of great affairs; deeply fascinating when one's immersed in them, and more exciting really--put them even at that--than the excitements of the theatre. Care for me only a little and you'll see what they are, they'll take hold of you. Believe me, believe me," Peter pleaded; "every fibre of my being trembles in what I say to you." "You admitted yesterday it wouldn't do," she made answer. "Where were the fibres of your being then?" "They throbbed in me even more than now, and I was trying, like an ass, not to feel them. Where was this evening yesterday--where were the maddening hours I've just spent? Ah you're the perfection of perfections, and as I sat there to-night you taught me what I really want." "The perfection of perfections?" the girl echoed with the strangest smile. "I needn't try to tell you: you must have felt to-night with such rapture what you are, what you can do. How can I give that up?" he piteously went on. "How can _I_, my poor friend? I like your plans and your responsibilities and your great affairs, as you call them. _Voyons_, they're infantile. I've just shown that I'm a perfection of perfections: therefore it's just the moment to 'renounce,' as you gracefully say? Oh I was sure, I was sure!" And Miriam paused, resting eyes at once lighted and troubled on him as in the effort to think of some arrangement that would help him out of his absurdity. "I was sure, I mean, that if you did come your poor, dear, doting brain would be quite confused," she presently pursued. "I can't be a muff in public just for you, _pourtant_. Dear me, why do you like us so much?" "Like you? I loathe you!" "_Je le vois parbleu bien_!" she lightly returned. "I mean why do you feel us, judge us, understand us so well? I please you because you see, because you know; and then for that very reason of my pleasing you must adapt me to your convenience, you must take me over, as they say. You admire me as an artist and therefore want to put me into a box in which the artist will breathe her last. Ah be reasonable; you must let her live!" "Let her live? As if I could prevent her living!" Peter cried with unmistakable conviction. "Even if I did wish how could I prevent a spirit like yours from expressing itself? Don't talk about my putting you in a box, for, dearest child, I'm taking you out of one," he all persuasively explained. "The artist is irrepressible, eternal; she'll be in everything you are and in everything you do, and you'll go about with her triumphantly exerting your powers, charming the world, carrying everything before you." Miriam's colour rose, through all her artificial surfaces, at this all but convincing appeal, and she asked whimsically: "Shall you

swell

How many times the word 'swell' appears in the text?

you to-morrow--there's no question of ten years!" cried Mrs. Rooth with a comicality of plainness. Miriam smiled at Nick, deprecating his horror of such talk. "Isn't it droll, the way she can't get it out of her head?" Then turning almost coaxingly to the old woman: "_Voyons_, look about you: they don't marry us like that." "But they do--_cela se voit tous les jours_. Ask Mr. Dormer." "Oh never! It would be as if I asked him to give us a practical proof." "I shall never prove anything by marrying any one," Nick said. "For me that question's over." Miriam rested kind eyes on him. "Dear me, how you must hate me!" And before he had time to reply she went on to her mother: "People marry them to make them leave the stage; which proves exactly what I say." "Ah they offer them the finest positions," reasoned Mrs. Rooth. "Do you want me to leave it then?" "Oh you can manage if you will!" "The only managing I know anything about is to do my work. If I manage that decently I shall pull through." "But, dearest, may our work not be of many sorts?" "I only know one," said Miriam. At this her mother got up with a sigh. "I see you do wish to drive me into the street." "Mamma's bewildered--there are so many paths she wants to follow, there are so many bundles of hay. As I told you, she wishes to gobble them all," the girl pursued. Then she added: "Yes, go and take the carriage; take a turn round the Park--you always delight in that--and come back for me in an hour." "I'm too vexed with you; the air will do me good," said Mrs. Rooth. But before she went she addressed Nick: "I've your assurance that you'll bring him then to-night?" "Bring Peter? I don't think I shall have to drag him," Nick returned. "But you must do me the justice to remember that if I should resort to force I should do something that's not particularly in my interest--I should be magnanimous." "We must always be that, mustn't we?" moralised Mrs. Rooth. "How could it affect your interest?" Miriam asked less abstractedly. "Yes, as you say," her mother mused at their host, "the question of marriage has ceased to exist for you." "Mamma goes straight at it!" laughed the girl, getting up while Nick rubbed his canvas before answering. Miriam went to mamma and settled her bonnet and mantle in preparation for her drive, then stood a moment with a filial arm about her and as if waiting for their friend's explanation. This, however, when it came halted visibly. "Why you said a while ago that if Peter was there you wouldn't act." "I'll act for _him_," smiled Miriam, inconsequently caressing her mother. "It doesn't matter whom it's for!" Mrs. Rooth declared sagaciously. "Take your drive and relax your mind," said the girl, kissing her. "Come for me in an hour; not later--but not sooner." She went with her to the door, bundled her out, closed it behind her and came back to the position she had quitted. "_This_ is the peace I want!" she gratefully cried as she settled into it. XLV Peter Sherringham said so little during the performance that his companion was struck by his dumbness, especially as Miriam's acting seemed to Nick magnificent. He held his breath while she was on the stage--she gave the whole thing, including the spectator's emotion, such a lift. She had not carried out her fantastic menace of not exerting herself, and, as Mrs. Rooth had said, it little mattered for whom she acted. Nick was conscious in watching her that she went through it all for herself, for the idea that possessed her and that she rendered with extraordinary breadth. She couldn't open the door a part of the way to it and let it simply peep in; if it entered at all it must enter in full procession and occupy the premises in state. This was what had happened on an occasion which, as the less tormented of our young men felt in his stall, grew larger with each throb of the responsive house; till by the time the play was half over it appeared to stretch out wide arms to the future. Nick had often heard more applause, but had never heard more attention, since they were all charmed and hushed together and success seemed to be sitting down with them. There had been of course plenty of announcement--the newspapers had abounded and the arts of the manager had taken the freest license; but it was easy to feel a fine, universal consensus and to recognise everywhere the light spring of hope. People snatched their eyes from the stage an instant to look at each other, all eager to hand on the torch passed to them by the actress over the footlights. It was a part of the impression that she was now only showing to the full, for this time she had verse to deal with and she made it unexpectedly exquisite. She was beauty, melody, truth; she was passion and persuasion and tenderness. She caught up the obstreperous play in soothing, entwining arms and, seeming to tread the air in the flutter of her robe, carried it into the high places of poetry, of art, of style. And she had such tones of nature, such concealments of art, such effusions of life, that the whole scene glowed with the colour she communicated, and the house, pervaded with rosy fire, glowed back at the scene. Nick looked round in the intervals; he felt excited and flushed--the night had turned to a feast of fraternity and he expected to see people embrace each other. The crowd, the agitation, the triumph, the surprise, the signals and rumours, the heated air, his associates, near him, pointing out other figures who presumably were celebrated but whom he had never heard of, all amused him and banished every impulse to question or to compare. Miriam was as happy as some right sensation--she would have fed the memory with deep draughts. One of the things that amused him or at least helped to fill his attention was Peter's attitude, which apparently didn't exclude criticism--rather indeed mainly implied it. This admirer never took his eyes off the actress, but he made no remark about her and never stirred out of his chair. Nick had had from the first a plan of going round to speak to her, but as his companion evidently meant not to move he scrupled at being more forward. During their brief dinner together--they were determined not to be late--Peter had been silent, quite recklessly grave, but also, his kinsman judged, full of the wish to make it clear he was calm. In his seat he was calmer than ever and had an air even of trying to suggest that his attendance, preoccupied as he was with deeper solemnities, was more or less mechanical, the result of a conception of duty, a habit of courtesy. When during a scene in the second act--a scene from which Miriam was absent--Nick observed to him that one might judge from his reserve that he wasn't pleased he replied after a moment: "I've been looking for her mistakes." And when Nick made answer to this that he certainly wouldn't find them he said again in an odd tone: "No, I shan't find them--I shan't find them." It might have seemed that since the girl's performance was a dazzling success he regarded his evening as rather a failure. After the third act Nick said candidly: "My dear fellow, how can you sit here? Aren't you going to speak to her?" To which Peter replied inscrutably: "Lord, no, never again. I bade her good-bye yesterday. She knows what I think of her form. It's very good, but she carries it a little too far. Besides, she didn't want me to come, and it's therefore more discreet to keep away from her." "Surely it isn't an hour for discretion!" Nick cried. "Excuse me at any rate for five minutes." He went behind and reappeared only as the curtain was rising on the fourth act; and in the interval between the fourth and the fifth he went again for a shorter time. Peter was personally detached, but he consented to listen to his companion's vivid account of the state of things on the stage, where the elation of victory had lighted up the place. The strain was over, the ship in port--they were all wiping their faces and grinning. Miriam--yes, positively--was grinning too, and she hadn't asked a question about Peter nor sent him a message. They were kissing all round and dancing for joy. They were on the eve, worse luck, of a tremendous run. Peter groaned irrepressibly for this; it was, save for a slight sign a moment later, the only vibration caused in him by his cousin's report. There was but one voice of regret that they hadn't put on the piece earlier, as the end of the season would interrupt the run. There was but one voice too about the fourth act--it was believed all London would rush to see the fourth act. The crowd about her was a dozen deep and Miriam in the midst of it all charming; she was receiving in the ugly place after the fashion of royalty, almost as hedged with the famous "divinity," yet with a smile and a word for each. She was really like a young queen on her accession. When she saw him, Nick, she had kissed her hand to him over the heads of the courtiers. Nick's artless comment on this was that she had such pretty manners. It made Peter laugh--apparently at his friend's conception of the manners of a young queen. Mrs. Rooth, with a dozen shawls on her arm, was as red as the kitchen-fire, but you couldn't tell if Miriam were red or pale: she was so cleverly, finely made up--perhaps a little too much. Dashwood of course was greatly to the fore, but you hadn't to mention his own performance to him: he took it all handsomely and wouldn't hear of anything but that _her_ fortune was made. He didn't say much indeed, but evidently had ideas about her fortune; he nodded significant things and whistled inimitable sounds--"Heuh, heuh!" He was perfectly satisfied; moreover, he looked further ahead than any one. It was on coming back to his place after the fourth act that Nick put in, for his companion's benefit, most of these touches in his sketch of the situation. If Peter had continued to look for Miriam's mistakes he hadn't yet found them: the fourth act, bristling with dangers, putting a premium on every sort of cheap effect, had rounded itself without a flaw. Sitting there alone while Nick was away he had leisure to meditate on the wonder of this--on the art with which the girl had separated passion from violence, filling the whole place and never screaming; for it had often seemed to him in London of old that the yell of theatrical emotion rang through the shrinking night like the voice of the Sunday newsboy. Miriam had never been more present to him than at this hour; but she was inextricably transmuted--present essentially as the romantic heroine she represented. His state of mind was of the strangest and he was conscious of its strangeness, just as he was conscious in his very person of a lapse of resistance which likened itself absurdly to liberation. He felt weak at the same time that he felt inspired, and he felt inspired at the same time that he knew, or believed he knew, that his face was a blank. He saw things as a shining confusion, and yet somehow something monstrously definite kept surging out of them. Miriam was a beautiful, actual, fictive, impossible young woman of a past age, an undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one's own affairs. But that reality was a part of her spectator's joy, and she was not changed back to the common by his perception of the magnificent trick of art with which it was connected. Before his kinsman rejoined him Peter, taking a visiting-card from his pocket, had written on it in pencil a few words in a foreign tongue; but as at that moment he saw Nick coming in he immediately put it out of view. The last thing before the curtain rose on the fifth act that young man mentioned his having brought a message from Basil Dashwood, who hoped they both, on leaving the theatre, would come to supper with him in company with Miriam and her mother and several others: he had prepared a little informal banquet in honour of so famous a night. At this, while the curtain was about to rise, Peter immediately took out his card again and added something--he wrote the finest small hand you could see. Nick asked him what he was doing, and he waited but an instant. "It's a word to say I can't come." "To Dashwood? Oh I shall go," said Nick. "Well, I hope you'll enjoy it!" his companion replied in a tone which came back to him afterwards. When the curtain fell on the last act the people stayed, standing up in their places for acclamation. The applause shook the house--the recall became a clamour, the relief from a long tension. This was in any performance a moment Peter detested, but he stood for an instant beside Nick, who clapped, to his cousin's diplomatic sense, after the fashion of a school-boy at the pantomime. There was a veritable roar while the curtain drew back at the side most removed from our pair. Peter could see Basil Dashwood holding it, making a passage for the male "juvenile lead," who had Miriam in tow. Nick redoubled his efforts; heard the plaudits swell; saw the bows of the leading gentleman, who was hot and fat; saw Miriam, personally conducted and closer to the footlights, grow brighter and bigger and more swaying; and then became aware that his own comrade had with extreme agility slipped out of the stalls. Nick had already lost sight of him--he had apparently taken but a minute to escape from the house; and wondered at his quitting him without a farewell if he was to leave England on the morrow and they were not to meet at the hospitable Dashwood's. He wondered even what Peter was "up to," since, as he had assured him, there was no question of his going round to Miriam. He waited to see this young lady reappear three times, dragging Dashwood behind her at the second with a friendly arm, to whom, in turn, was hooked Miss Fanny Rover, the actress entrusted in the piece with the inevitable comic relief. He went out slowly with the crowd and at the door looked again for Peter, who struck him as deficient for once in finish. He couldn't know that in another direction and while he was helping the house to "rise" at its heroine, his kinsman had been particularly explicit. On reaching the lobby Peter had pounced on a small boy in buttons, who seemed superfluously connected with a desolate refreshment-room and, from the tips of his toes, was peeping at the stage through the glazed hole in the door of a box. Into one of the child's hands he thrust the card he had drawn again from his waistcoat and into the other the largest silver coin he could find in the same receptacle, while he bent over him with words of adjuration--words the little page tried to help himself to apprehend by instantly attempting to peruse the other words written on the card. "That's no use--it's Italian," said Peter; "only carry it round to Miss Rooth without a minute's delay. Place it in her hand and she'll give you some object--a bracelet, a glove, or a flower--to bring me back as a sign that she has received it. I shall be outside; bring me there what she gives you and you shall have another shilling--only fly!" His small messenger sounded him a moment with the sharp face of London wage-earning, and still more of London tip-earning, infancy, and vanished as swiftly as a slave of the Arabian Nights. While he waited in the lobby the audience began to pour out, and before the urchin had come back to him he was clapped on the shoulder by Nick. "I'm glad I haven't lost you, but why didn't you stay to give her a hand?" "Give her a hand? I hated it." "My dear man, I don't follow you," Nick said. "If you won't come to Dashwood's supper I fear our ways don't lie together." "Thank him very much; say I've to get up at an unnatural hour." To this Peter added: "I think I ought to tell you she may not be there." "Miss Rooth? Why it's all _for_ her." "I'm waiting for a word from her--she may change her mind." Nick showed his interest. "For you? What then have you proposed?" "I've proposed marriage," said Peter in a strange voice. "I say--!" Nick broke out; and at the same moment Peter's messenger squeezed through the press and stood before him. "She has given me nothing, sir," the boy announced; "but she says I'm to say 'All right!'" Nick's stare widened. "You've proposed through _him_?" "Aye, and she accepts. Good-night!"--on which, turning away, Peter bounded into a hansom. He said something to the driver through the roof, and Nick's eyes followed the cab as it started off. This young man was mystified, was even amused; especially when the youth in buttons, planted there and wondering too, brought forth: "Please sir, he told me he'd give me a shilling and he've forgot it." "Oh I can't pay you for _that_!" Nick laughed. But he fished out a dole, though he was vexed at the injury to the supper. XLVI Peter meanwhile rolled away through the summer night to Saint John's Wood. He had put the pressure of strong words on his young friend, entreating her to drive home immediately, return there without any one, without even her mother. He wished to see her alone and for a purpose he would fully and satisfactorily explain--couldn't she trust him? He besought her to remember his own situation and throw over her supper, throw over everything. He would wait for her with unspeakable impatience in Balaklava Place. He did so, when he got there, but it had taken half an hour. Interminable seemed his lonely vigil in Miss Lumley's drawing-room, where the character of the original proprietress came out to him more than ever before in a kind of afterglow of old sociabilities, a vulgar, ghostly reference. The numerous candles had been lighted for him, and Mrs. Rooth's familiar fictions lay about; but his nerves forbade him the solace of a chair and a book. He walked up and down, thinking and listening, and as the long window, the balmy air permitting, stood open to the garden, he passed several times in and out. A carriage appeared to stop at the gate--then there was nothing; he heard the rare rattle of wheels and the far-off hum of London. His impatience was overwrought, and though he knew this it persisted; it would have been no easy matter for Miriam to break away from the flock of her felicitators. Still less simple was it doubtless for her to leave poor Dashwood with his supper on his hands. Perhaps she would bring Dashwood with her, bring him to time her; she was capable of playing him--that is, of playing Her Majesty's new representative to the small far-off State, or even of playing them both--that trick. Perhaps the little wretch in buttons--Peter remembered now the neglected shilling--only pretending to go round with his card, had come back with an invented answer. But how could he know, since presumably he couldn't read Italian, that his answer would fit the message? Peter was sorry now that he himself had not gone round, not snatched Miriam bodily away, made sure of her and of what he wanted of her. When forty minutes had elapsed he regarded it as proved that she wouldn't come, and, asking himself what he should do, determined to drive off again and seize her at her comrade's feast. Then he remembered how Nick had mentioned that this entertainment was not to be held at the young actor's lodgings but at some tavern or restaurant the name of which he had not heeded. Suddenly, however, Peter became aware with joy that this name didn't matter, for there was something at the garden door at last. He rushed out before she had had time to ring, and saw as she stepped from the carriage that she was alone. Now that she was there, that he had this evidence she had listened to him and trusted him, all his impatience and bitterness gave way and a flood of pleading tenderness took their place in the first words he spoke to her. It was far "dearer" of her than he had any right to dream, but she was the best and kindest creature--this showed it--as well as the most wonderful. He was really not off his head with his contradictory ways; no, before heaven he wasn't, and he would explain, he would make everything clear. Everything was changed. She stopped short in the little dusky garden, looking at him in the light of the open window. Then she called back to the coachman--they had left the garden door open--"Wait for me, mind; I shall want you again." "What's the matter--won't you stay?" Peter asked. "Are you going out again at this absurd hour? I won't hurt you," he gently urged. And he went back and closed the garden door. He wanted to say to the coachman, "It's no matter--please drive away." At the same time he wouldn't for the world have done anything offensive to her. "I've come because I thought it better to-night, as things have turned out, to do the thing you ask me, whatever it may be," she had already begun. "That's probably what you calculated I would think, eh? What this evening has been you've seen, and I must allow that your hand's in it. That you know for yourself--that you doubtless felt as you sat there. But I confess I don't imagine what you want of me here now," she added. She had remained standing in the path. Peter felt the irony of her "now" and how it made a fool of him, but he had been prepared for this and for much worse. He had begged her not to think him a fool, but in truth at present he cared little if she did. Very likely he was--in spite of his plea that everything was changed: he cared little even himself. However, he spoke in the tone of intense reason and of the fullest disposition to satisfy her. This lucidity only took still more from the dignity of his change of front: his separation from her the day before had had such pretensions to being lucid. But the explanation and the justification were in the very fact, the fact that had complete possession of him. He named it when he replied to her: "I've simply overrated my strength." "Oh I knew--I knew! That's why I entreated you not to come!" Miriam groaned. She turned away lamenting, and for a moment he thought she would retreat to her carriage. But he passed his hand into her arm, to draw her forward, and after an instant felt her yield. "The fact is we must have this thing out," he said. Then he added as he made her go into the house, bending over her, "The failure of my strength--that was just the reason of my coming." She broke into her laugh at these words, as she entered the drawing-room, and it made them sound pompous in their false wisdom. She flung off, as a good-natured tribute to the image of their having the thing out, a white shawl that had been wrapped round her. She was still painted and bedizened, in the splendid dress of her climax, so that she seemed protected and alienated by the character she had been acting. "Whatever it is you want--when I understand--you'll be very brief, won't you? Do you know I've given up a charming supper for you? Mamma has gone there. I've promised to go back to them." "You're an angel not to have let her come with you. I'm sure she wanted to," Peter made reply. "Oh she's all right, but she's nervous." Then the girl added: "Couldn't she keep you away after all?" "Whom are you talking about?" Biddy Dormer was as absent from his mind as if she had never existed. "The charming thing you were with this morning. Is she so afraid of obliging me? Oh she'd be so good for you!" "Don't speak of that," Peter gravely said. "I was in perfect good faith yesterday when I took leave of you. I was--I was. But I can't--I can't: you're too unutterably dear to me." "Oh don't--_please_ don't!" Miriam wailed at this. She stood before the fireless chimney-piece with one of her hands on it. "If it's only to say that, don't you know, what's the use?" "It isn't only to say that. I've a plan, a perfect plan: the whole thing lies clear before me." "And what's the whole thing?" He had to make an effort. "You say your mother's nervous. Ah if you knew how nervous I am!" "Well, I'm not. Go on." "Give it up--give it up!" Peter stammered. "Give it up?" She fixed him like a mild Medusa. "I'll marry you to-morrow if you'll renounce; and in return for the sacrifice you make for me I'll do more for you than ever was done for a woman before." "Renounce after to-night? Do you call that a plan?" she asked. "Those are old words and very foolish ones--you wanted something of that sort a year ago." "Oh I fluttered round the idea at that time; we were talking in the air. I didn't really believe I could make you see it then, and certainly you didn't see it. My own future, moreover, wasn't definite to me. I didn't know what I could offer you. But these last months have made a difference--I do know now. Now what I say is deliberate--It's deeply meditated. I simply can't live without you, and I hold that together we may do great things." She seemed to wonder. "What sort of things?" "The things of my profession, of my life, the things one does for one's country, the responsibility and the honour of great affairs; deeply fascinating when one's immersed in them, and more exciting really--put them even at that--than the excitements of the theatre. Care for me only a little and you'll see what they are, they'll take hold of you. Believe me, believe me," Peter pleaded; "every fibre of my being trembles in what I say to you." "You admitted yesterday it wouldn't do," she made answer. "Where were the fibres of your being then?" "They throbbed in me even more than now, and I was trying, like an ass, not to feel them. Where was this evening yesterday--where were the maddening hours I've just spent? Ah you're the perfection of perfections, and as I sat there to-night you taught me what I really want." "The perfection of perfections?" the girl echoed with the strangest smile. "I needn't try to tell you: you must have felt to-night with such rapture what you are, what you can do. How can I give that up?" he piteously went on. "How can _I_, my poor friend? I like your plans and your responsibilities and your great affairs, as you call them. _Voyons_, they're infantile. I've just shown that I'm a perfection of perfections: therefore it's just the moment to 'renounce,' as you gracefully say? Oh I was sure, I was sure!" And Miriam paused, resting eyes at once lighted and troubled on him as in the effort to think of some arrangement that would help him out of his absurdity. "I was sure, I mean, that if you did come your poor, dear, doting brain would be quite confused," she presently pursued. "I can't be a muff in public just for you, _pourtant_. Dear me, why do you like us so much?" "Like you? I loathe you!" "_Je le vois parbleu bien_!" she lightly returned. "I mean why do you feel us, judge us, understand us so well? I please you because you see, because you know; and then for that very reason of my pleasing you must adapt me to your convenience, you must take me over, as they say. You admire me as an artist and therefore want to put me into a box in which the artist will breathe her last. Ah be reasonable; you must let her live!" "Let her live? As if I could prevent her living!" Peter cried with unmistakable conviction. "Even if I did wish how could I prevent a spirit like yours from expressing itself? Don't talk about my putting you in a box, for, dearest child, I'm taking you out of one," he all persuasively explained. "The artist is irrepressible, eternal; she'll be in everything you are and in everything you do, and you'll go about with her triumphantly exerting your powers, charming the world, carrying everything before you." Miriam's colour rose, through all her artificial surfaces, at this all but convincing appeal, and she asked whimsically: "Shall you

apparently

How many times the word 'apparently' appears in the text?

you to-morrow--there's no question of ten years!" cried Mrs. Rooth with a comicality of plainness. Miriam smiled at Nick, deprecating his horror of such talk. "Isn't it droll, the way she can't get it out of her head?" Then turning almost coaxingly to the old woman: "_Voyons_, look about you: they don't marry us like that." "But they do--_cela se voit tous les jours_. Ask Mr. Dormer." "Oh never! It would be as if I asked him to give us a practical proof." "I shall never prove anything by marrying any one," Nick said. "For me that question's over." Miriam rested kind eyes on him. "Dear me, how you must hate me!" And before he had time to reply she went on to her mother: "People marry them to make them leave the stage; which proves exactly what I say." "Ah they offer them the finest positions," reasoned Mrs. Rooth. "Do you want me to leave it then?" "Oh you can manage if you will!" "The only managing I know anything about is to do my work. If I manage that decently I shall pull through." "But, dearest, may our work not be of many sorts?" "I only know one," said Miriam. At this her mother got up with a sigh. "I see you do wish to drive me into the street." "Mamma's bewildered--there are so many paths she wants to follow, there are so many bundles of hay. As I told you, she wishes to gobble them all," the girl pursued. Then she added: "Yes, go and take the carriage; take a turn round the Park--you always delight in that--and come back for me in an hour." "I'm too vexed with you; the air will do me good," said Mrs. Rooth. But before she went she addressed Nick: "I've your assurance that you'll bring him then to-night?" "Bring Peter? I don't think I shall have to drag him," Nick returned. "But you must do me the justice to remember that if I should resort to force I should do something that's not particularly in my interest--I should be magnanimous." "We must always be that, mustn't we?" moralised Mrs. Rooth. "How could it affect your interest?" Miriam asked less abstractedly. "Yes, as you say," her mother mused at their host, "the question of marriage has ceased to exist for you." "Mamma goes straight at it!" laughed the girl, getting up while Nick rubbed his canvas before answering. Miriam went to mamma and settled her bonnet and mantle in preparation for her drive, then stood a moment with a filial arm about her and as if waiting for their friend's explanation. This, however, when it came halted visibly. "Why you said a while ago that if Peter was there you wouldn't act." "I'll act for _him_," smiled Miriam, inconsequently caressing her mother. "It doesn't matter whom it's for!" Mrs. Rooth declared sagaciously. "Take your drive and relax your mind," said the girl, kissing her. "Come for me in an hour; not later--but not sooner." She went with her to the door, bundled her out, closed it behind her and came back to the position she had quitted. "_This_ is the peace I want!" she gratefully cried as she settled into it. XLV Peter Sherringham said so little during the performance that his companion was struck by his dumbness, especially as Miriam's acting seemed to Nick magnificent. He held his breath while she was on the stage--she gave the whole thing, including the spectator's emotion, such a lift. She had not carried out her fantastic menace of not exerting herself, and, as Mrs. Rooth had said, it little mattered for whom she acted. Nick was conscious in watching her that she went through it all for herself, for the idea that possessed her and that she rendered with extraordinary breadth. She couldn't open the door a part of the way to it and let it simply peep in; if it entered at all it must enter in full procession and occupy the premises in state. This was what had happened on an occasion which, as the less tormented of our young men felt in his stall, grew larger with each throb of the responsive house; till by the time the play was half over it appeared to stretch out wide arms to the future. Nick had often heard more applause, but had never heard more attention, since they were all charmed and hushed together and success seemed to be sitting down with them. There had been of course plenty of announcement--the newspapers had abounded and the arts of the manager had taken the freest license; but it was easy to feel a fine, universal consensus and to recognise everywhere the light spring of hope. People snatched their eyes from the stage an instant to look at each other, all eager to hand on the torch passed to them by the actress over the footlights. It was a part of the impression that she was now only showing to the full, for this time she had verse to deal with and she made it unexpectedly exquisite. She was beauty, melody, truth; she was passion and persuasion and tenderness. She caught up the obstreperous play in soothing, entwining arms and, seeming to tread the air in the flutter of her robe, carried it into the high places of poetry, of art, of style. And she had such tones of nature, such concealments of art, such effusions of life, that the whole scene glowed with the colour she communicated, and the house, pervaded with rosy fire, glowed back at the scene. Nick looked round in the intervals; he felt excited and flushed--the night had turned to a feast of fraternity and he expected to see people embrace each other. The crowd, the agitation, the triumph, the surprise, the signals and rumours, the heated air, his associates, near him, pointing out other figures who presumably were celebrated but whom he had never heard of, all amused him and banished every impulse to question or to compare. Miriam was as happy as some right sensation--she would have fed the memory with deep draughts. One of the things that amused him or at least helped to fill his attention was Peter's attitude, which apparently didn't exclude criticism--rather indeed mainly implied it. This admirer never took his eyes off the actress, but he made no remark about her and never stirred out of his chair. Nick had had from the first a plan of going round to speak to her, but as his companion evidently meant not to move he scrupled at being more forward. During their brief dinner together--they were determined not to be late--Peter had been silent, quite recklessly grave, but also, his kinsman judged, full of the wish to make it clear he was calm. In his seat he was calmer than ever and had an air even of trying to suggest that his attendance, preoccupied as he was with deeper solemnities, was more or less mechanical, the result of a conception of duty, a habit of courtesy. When during a scene in the second act--a scene from which Miriam was absent--Nick observed to him that one might judge from his reserve that he wasn't pleased he replied after a moment: "I've been looking for her mistakes." And when Nick made answer to this that he certainly wouldn't find them he said again in an odd tone: "No, I shan't find them--I shan't find them." It might have seemed that since the girl's performance was a dazzling success he regarded his evening as rather a failure. After the third act Nick said candidly: "My dear fellow, how can you sit here? Aren't you going to speak to her?" To which Peter replied inscrutably: "Lord, no, never again. I bade her good-bye yesterday. She knows what I think of her form. It's very good, but she carries it a little too far. Besides, she didn't want me to come, and it's therefore more discreet to keep away from her." "Surely it isn't an hour for discretion!" Nick cried. "Excuse me at any rate for five minutes." He went behind and reappeared only as the curtain was rising on the fourth act; and in the interval between the fourth and the fifth he went again for a shorter time. Peter was personally detached, but he consented to listen to his companion's vivid account of the state of things on the stage, where the elation of victory had lighted up the place. The strain was over, the ship in port--they were all wiping their faces and grinning. Miriam--yes, positively--was grinning too, and she hadn't asked a question about Peter nor sent him a message. They were kissing all round and dancing for joy. They were on the eve, worse luck, of a tremendous run. Peter groaned irrepressibly for this; it was, save for a slight sign a moment later, the only vibration caused in him by his cousin's report. There was but one voice of regret that they hadn't put on the piece earlier, as the end of the season would interrupt the run. There was but one voice too about the fourth act--it was believed all London would rush to see the fourth act. The crowd about her was a dozen deep and Miriam in the midst of it all charming; she was receiving in the ugly place after the fashion of royalty, almost as hedged with the famous "divinity," yet with a smile and a word for each. She was really like a young queen on her accession. When she saw him, Nick, she had kissed her hand to him over the heads of the courtiers. Nick's artless comment on this was that she had such pretty manners. It made Peter laugh--apparently at his friend's conception of the manners of a young queen. Mrs. Rooth, with a dozen shawls on her arm, was as red as the kitchen-fire, but you couldn't tell if Miriam were red or pale: she was so cleverly, finely made up--perhaps a little too much. Dashwood of course was greatly to the fore, but you hadn't to mention his own performance to him: he took it all handsomely and wouldn't hear of anything but that _her_ fortune was made. He didn't say much indeed, but evidently had ideas about her fortune; he nodded significant things and whistled inimitable sounds--"Heuh, heuh!" He was perfectly satisfied; moreover, he looked further ahead than any one. It was on coming back to his place after the fourth act that Nick put in, for his companion's benefit, most of these touches in his sketch of the situation. If Peter had continued to look for Miriam's mistakes he hadn't yet found them: the fourth act, bristling with dangers, putting a premium on every sort of cheap effect, had rounded itself without a flaw. Sitting there alone while Nick was away he had leisure to meditate on the wonder of this--on the art with which the girl had separated passion from violence, filling the whole place and never screaming; for it had often seemed to him in London of old that the yell of theatrical emotion rang through the shrinking night like the voice of the Sunday newsboy. Miriam had never been more present to him than at this hour; but she was inextricably transmuted--present essentially as the romantic heroine she represented. His state of mind was of the strangest and he was conscious of its strangeness, just as he was conscious in his very person of a lapse of resistance which likened itself absurdly to liberation. He felt weak at the same time that he felt inspired, and he felt inspired at the same time that he knew, or believed he knew, that his face was a blank. He saw things as a shining confusion, and yet somehow something monstrously definite kept surging out of them. Miriam was a beautiful, actual, fictive, impossible young woman of a past age, an undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one's own affairs. But that reality was a part of her spectator's joy, and she was not changed back to the common by his perception of the magnificent trick of art with which it was connected. Before his kinsman rejoined him Peter, taking a visiting-card from his pocket, had written on it in pencil a few words in a foreign tongue; but as at that moment he saw Nick coming in he immediately put it out of view. The last thing before the curtain rose on the fifth act that young man mentioned his having brought a message from Basil Dashwood, who hoped they both, on leaving the theatre, would come to supper with him in company with Miriam and her mother and several others: he had prepared a little informal banquet in honour of so famous a night. At this, while the curtain was about to rise, Peter immediately took out his card again and added something--he wrote the finest small hand you could see. Nick asked him what he was doing, and he waited but an instant. "It's a word to say I can't come." "To Dashwood? Oh I shall go," said Nick. "Well, I hope you'll enjoy it!" his companion replied in a tone which came back to him afterwards. When the curtain fell on the last act the people stayed, standing up in their places for acclamation. The applause shook the house--the recall became a clamour, the relief from a long tension. This was in any performance a moment Peter detested, but he stood for an instant beside Nick, who clapped, to his cousin's diplomatic sense, after the fashion of a school-boy at the pantomime. There was a veritable roar while the curtain drew back at the side most removed from our pair. Peter could see Basil Dashwood holding it, making a passage for the male "juvenile lead," who had Miriam in tow. Nick redoubled his efforts; heard the plaudits swell; saw the bows of the leading gentleman, who was hot and fat; saw Miriam, personally conducted and closer to the footlights, grow brighter and bigger and more swaying; and then became aware that his own comrade had with extreme agility slipped out of the stalls. Nick had already lost sight of him--he had apparently taken but a minute to escape from the house; and wondered at his quitting him without a farewell if he was to leave England on the morrow and they were not to meet at the hospitable Dashwood's. He wondered even what Peter was "up to," since, as he had assured him, there was no question of his going round to Miriam. He waited to see this young lady reappear three times, dragging Dashwood behind her at the second with a friendly arm, to whom, in turn, was hooked Miss Fanny Rover, the actress entrusted in the piece with the inevitable comic relief. He went out slowly with the crowd and at the door looked again for Peter, who struck him as deficient for once in finish. He couldn't know that in another direction and while he was helping the house to "rise" at its heroine, his kinsman had been particularly explicit. On reaching the lobby Peter had pounced on a small boy in buttons, who seemed superfluously connected with a desolate refreshment-room and, from the tips of his toes, was peeping at the stage through the glazed hole in the door of a box. Into one of the child's hands he thrust the card he had drawn again from his waistcoat and into the other the largest silver coin he could find in the same receptacle, while he bent over him with words of adjuration--words the little page tried to help himself to apprehend by instantly attempting to peruse the other words written on the card. "That's no use--it's Italian," said Peter; "only carry it round to Miss Rooth without a minute's delay. Place it in her hand and she'll give you some object--a bracelet, a glove, or a flower--to bring me back as a sign that she has received it. I shall be outside; bring me there what she gives you and you shall have another shilling--only fly!" His small messenger sounded him a moment with the sharp face of London wage-earning, and still more of London tip-earning, infancy, and vanished as swiftly as a slave of the Arabian Nights. While he waited in the lobby the audience began to pour out, and before the urchin had come back to him he was clapped on the shoulder by Nick. "I'm glad I haven't lost you, but why didn't you stay to give her a hand?" "Give her a hand? I hated it." "My dear man, I don't follow you," Nick said. "If you won't come to Dashwood's supper I fear our ways don't lie together." "Thank him very much; say I've to get up at an unnatural hour." To this Peter added: "I think I ought to tell you she may not be there." "Miss Rooth? Why it's all _for_ her." "I'm waiting for a word from her--she may change her mind." Nick showed his interest. "For you? What then have you proposed?" "I've proposed marriage," said Peter in a strange voice. "I say--!" Nick broke out; and at the same moment Peter's messenger squeezed through the press and stood before him. "She has given me nothing, sir," the boy announced; "but she says I'm to say 'All right!'" Nick's stare widened. "You've proposed through _him_?" "Aye, and she accepts. Good-night!"--on which, turning away, Peter bounded into a hansom. He said something to the driver through the roof, and Nick's eyes followed the cab as it started off. This young man was mystified, was even amused; especially when the youth in buttons, planted there and wondering too, brought forth: "Please sir, he told me he'd give me a shilling and he've forgot it." "Oh I can't pay you for _that_!" Nick laughed. But he fished out a dole, though he was vexed at the injury to the supper. XLVI Peter meanwhile rolled away through the summer night to Saint John's Wood. He had put the pressure of strong words on his young friend, entreating her to drive home immediately, return there without any one, without even her mother. He wished to see her alone and for a purpose he would fully and satisfactorily explain--couldn't she trust him? He besought her to remember his own situation and throw over her supper, throw over everything. He would wait for her with unspeakable impatience in Balaklava Place. He did so, when he got there, but it had taken half an hour. Interminable seemed his lonely vigil in Miss Lumley's drawing-room, where the character of the original proprietress came out to him more than ever before in a kind of afterglow of old sociabilities, a vulgar, ghostly reference. The numerous candles had been lighted for him, and Mrs. Rooth's familiar fictions lay about; but his nerves forbade him the solace of a chair and a book. He walked up and down, thinking and listening, and as the long window, the balmy air permitting, stood open to the garden, he passed several times in and out. A carriage appeared to stop at the gate--then there was nothing; he heard the rare rattle of wheels and the far-off hum of London. His impatience was overwrought, and though he knew this it persisted; it would have been no easy matter for Miriam to break away from the flock of her felicitators. Still less simple was it doubtless for her to leave poor Dashwood with his supper on his hands. Perhaps she would bring Dashwood with her, bring him to time her; she was capable of playing him--that is, of playing Her Majesty's new representative to the small far-off State, or even of playing them both--that trick. Perhaps the little wretch in buttons--Peter remembered now the neglected shilling--only pretending to go round with his card, had come back with an invented answer. But how could he know, since presumably he couldn't read Italian, that his answer would fit the message? Peter was sorry now that he himself had not gone round, not snatched Miriam bodily away, made sure of her and of what he wanted of her. When forty minutes had elapsed he regarded it as proved that she wouldn't come, and, asking himself what he should do, determined to drive off again and seize her at her comrade's feast. Then he remembered how Nick had mentioned that this entertainment was not to be held at the young actor's lodgings but at some tavern or restaurant the name of which he had not heeded. Suddenly, however, Peter became aware with joy that this name didn't matter, for there was something at the garden door at last. He rushed out before she had had time to ring, and saw as she stepped from the carriage that she was alone. Now that she was there, that he had this evidence she had listened to him and trusted him, all his impatience and bitterness gave way and a flood of pleading tenderness took their place in the first words he spoke to her. It was far "dearer" of her than he had any right to dream, but she was the best and kindest creature--this showed it--as well as the most wonderful. He was really not off his head with his contradictory ways; no, before heaven he wasn't, and he would explain, he would make everything clear. Everything was changed. She stopped short in the little dusky garden, looking at him in the light of the open window. Then she called back to the coachman--they had left the garden door open--"Wait for me, mind; I shall want you again." "What's the matter--won't you stay?" Peter asked. "Are you going out again at this absurd hour? I won't hurt you," he gently urged. And he went back and closed the garden door. He wanted to say to the coachman, "It's no matter--please drive away." At the same time he wouldn't for the world have done anything offensive to her. "I've come because I thought it better to-night, as things have turned out, to do the thing you ask me, whatever it may be," she had already begun. "That's probably what you calculated I would think, eh? What this evening has been you've seen, and I must allow that your hand's in it. That you know for yourself--that you doubtless felt as you sat there. But I confess I don't imagine what you want of me here now," she added. She had remained standing in the path. Peter felt the irony of her "now" and how it made a fool of him, but he had been prepared for this and for much worse. He had begged her not to think him a fool, but in truth at present he cared little if she did. Very likely he was--in spite of his plea that everything was changed: he cared little even himself. However, he spoke in the tone of intense reason and of the fullest disposition to satisfy her. This lucidity only took still more from the dignity of his change of front: his separation from her the day before had had such pretensions to being lucid. But the explanation and the justification were in the very fact, the fact that had complete possession of him. He named it when he replied to her: "I've simply overrated my strength." "Oh I knew--I knew! That's why I entreated you not to come!" Miriam groaned. She turned away lamenting, and for a moment he thought she would retreat to her carriage. But he passed his hand into her arm, to draw her forward, and after an instant felt her yield. "The fact is we must have this thing out," he said. Then he added as he made her go into the house, bending over her, "The failure of my strength--that was just the reason of my coming." She broke into her laugh at these words, as she entered the drawing-room, and it made them sound pompous in their false wisdom. She flung off, as a good-natured tribute to the image of their having the thing out, a white shawl that had been wrapped round her. She was still painted and bedizened, in the splendid dress of her climax, so that she seemed protected and alienated by the character she had been acting. "Whatever it is you want--when I understand--you'll be very brief, won't you? Do you know I've given up a charming supper for you? Mamma has gone there. I've promised to go back to them." "You're an angel not to have let her come with you. I'm sure she wanted to," Peter made reply. "Oh she's all right, but she's nervous." Then the girl added: "Couldn't she keep you away after all?" "Whom are you talking about?" Biddy Dormer was as absent from his mind as if she had never existed. "The charming thing you were with this morning. Is she so afraid of obliging me? Oh she'd be so good for you!" "Don't speak of that," Peter gravely said. "I was in perfect good faith yesterday when I took leave of you. I was--I was. But I can't--I can't: you're too unutterably dear to me." "Oh don't--_please_ don't!" Miriam wailed at this. She stood before the fireless chimney-piece with one of her hands on it. "If it's only to say that, don't you know, what's the use?" "It isn't only to say that. I've a plan, a perfect plan: the whole thing lies clear before me." "And what's the whole thing?" He had to make an effort. "You say your mother's nervous. Ah if you knew how nervous I am!" "Well, I'm not. Go on." "Give it up--give it up!" Peter stammered. "Give it up?" She fixed him like a mild Medusa. "I'll marry you to-morrow if you'll renounce; and in return for the sacrifice you make for me I'll do more for you than ever was done for a woman before." "Renounce after to-night? Do you call that a plan?" she asked. "Those are old words and very foolish ones--you wanted something of that sort a year ago." "Oh I fluttered round the idea at that time; we were talking in the air. I didn't really believe I could make you see it then, and certainly you didn't see it. My own future, moreover, wasn't definite to me. I didn't know what I could offer you. But these last months have made a difference--I do know now. Now what I say is deliberate--It's deeply meditated. I simply can't live without you, and I hold that together we may do great things." She seemed to wonder. "What sort of things?" "The things of my profession, of my life, the things one does for one's country, the responsibility and the honour of great affairs; deeply fascinating when one's immersed in them, and more exciting really--put them even at that--than the excitements of the theatre. Care for me only a little and you'll see what they are, they'll take hold of you. Believe me, believe me," Peter pleaded; "every fibre of my being trembles in what I say to you." "You admitted yesterday it wouldn't do," she made answer. "Where were the fibres of your being then?" "They throbbed in me even more than now, and I was trying, like an ass, not to feel them. Where was this evening yesterday--where were the maddening hours I've just spent? Ah you're the perfection of perfections, and as I sat there to-night you taught me what I really want." "The perfection of perfections?" the girl echoed with the strangest smile. "I needn't try to tell you: you must have felt to-night with such rapture what you are, what you can do. How can I give that up?" he piteously went on. "How can _I_, my poor friend? I like your plans and your responsibilities and your great affairs, as you call them. _Voyons_, they're infantile. I've just shown that I'm a perfection of perfections: therefore it's just the moment to 'renounce,' as you gracefully say? Oh I was sure, I was sure!" And Miriam paused, resting eyes at once lighted and troubled on him as in the effort to think of some arrangement that would help him out of his absurdity. "I was sure, I mean, that if you did come your poor, dear, doting brain would be quite confused," she presently pursued. "I can't be a muff in public just for you, _pourtant_. Dear me, why do you like us so much?" "Like you? I loathe you!" "_Je le vois parbleu bien_!" she lightly returned. "I mean why do you feel us, judge us, understand us so well? I please you because you see, because you know; and then for that very reason of my pleasing you must adapt me to your convenience, you must take me over, as they say. You admire me as an artist and therefore want to put me into a box in which the artist will breathe her last. Ah be reasonable; you must let her live!" "Let her live? As if I could prevent her living!" Peter cried with unmistakable conviction. "Even if I did wish how could I prevent a spirit like yours from expressing itself? Don't talk about my putting you in a box, for, dearest child, I'm taking you out of one," he all persuasively explained. "The artist is irrepressible, eternal; she'll be in everything you are and in everything you do, and you'll go about with her triumphantly exerting your powers, charming the world, carrying everything before you." Miriam's colour rose, through all her artificial surfaces, at this all but convincing appeal, and she asked whimsically: "Shall you

good

How many times the word 'good' appears in the text?

you to-morrow--there's no question of ten years!" cried Mrs. Rooth with a comicality of plainness. Miriam smiled at Nick, deprecating his horror of such talk. "Isn't it droll, the way she can't get it out of her head?" Then turning almost coaxingly to the old woman: "_Voyons_, look about you: they don't marry us like that." "But they do--_cela se voit tous les jours_. Ask Mr. Dormer." "Oh never! It would be as if I asked him to give us a practical proof." "I shall never prove anything by marrying any one," Nick said. "For me that question's over." Miriam rested kind eyes on him. "Dear me, how you must hate me!" And before he had time to reply she went on to her mother: "People marry them to make them leave the stage; which proves exactly what I say." "Ah they offer them the finest positions," reasoned Mrs. Rooth. "Do you want me to leave it then?" "Oh you can manage if you will!" "The only managing I know anything about is to do my work. If I manage that decently I shall pull through." "But, dearest, may our work not be of many sorts?" "I only know one," said Miriam. At this her mother got up with a sigh. "I see you do wish to drive me into the street." "Mamma's bewildered--there are so many paths she wants to follow, there are so many bundles of hay. As I told you, she wishes to gobble them all," the girl pursued. Then she added: "Yes, go and take the carriage; take a turn round the Park--you always delight in that--and come back for me in an hour." "I'm too vexed with you; the air will do me good," said Mrs. Rooth. But before she went she addressed Nick: "I've your assurance that you'll bring him then to-night?" "Bring Peter? I don't think I shall have to drag him," Nick returned. "But you must do me the justice to remember that if I should resort to force I should do something that's not particularly in my interest--I should be magnanimous." "We must always be that, mustn't we?" moralised Mrs. Rooth. "How could it affect your interest?" Miriam asked less abstractedly. "Yes, as you say," her mother mused at their host, "the question of marriage has ceased to exist for you." "Mamma goes straight at it!" laughed the girl, getting up while Nick rubbed his canvas before answering. Miriam went to mamma and settled her bonnet and mantle in preparation for her drive, then stood a moment with a filial arm about her and as if waiting for their friend's explanation. This, however, when it came halted visibly. "Why you said a while ago that if Peter was there you wouldn't act." "I'll act for _him_," smiled Miriam, inconsequently caressing her mother. "It doesn't matter whom it's for!" Mrs. Rooth declared sagaciously. "Take your drive and relax your mind," said the girl, kissing her. "Come for me in an hour; not later--but not sooner." She went with her to the door, bundled her out, closed it behind her and came back to the position she had quitted. "_This_ is the peace I want!" she gratefully cried as she settled into it. XLV Peter Sherringham said so little during the performance that his companion was struck by his dumbness, especially as Miriam's acting seemed to Nick magnificent. He held his breath while she was on the stage--she gave the whole thing, including the spectator's emotion, such a lift. She had not carried out her fantastic menace of not exerting herself, and, as Mrs. Rooth had said, it little mattered for whom she acted. Nick was conscious in watching her that she went through it all for herself, for the idea that possessed her and that she rendered with extraordinary breadth. She couldn't open the door a part of the way to it and let it simply peep in; if it entered at all it must enter in full procession and occupy the premises in state. This was what had happened on an occasion which, as the less tormented of our young men felt in his stall, grew larger with each throb of the responsive house; till by the time the play was half over it appeared to stretch out wide arms to the future. Nick had often heard more applause, but had never heard more attention, since they were all charmed and hushed together and success seemed to be sitting down with them. There had been of course plenty of announcement--the newspapers had abounded and the arts of the manager had taken the freest license; but it was easy to feel a fine, universal consensus and to recognise everywhere the light spring of hope. People snatched their eyes from the stage an instant to look at each other, all eager to hand on the torch passed to them by the actress over the footlights. It was a part of the impression that she was now only showing to the full, for this time she had verse to deal with and she made it unexpectedly exquisite. She was beauty, melody, truth; she was passion and persuasion and tenderness. She caught up the obstreperous play in soothing, entwining arms and, seeming to tread the air in the flutter of her robe, carried it into the high places of poetry, of art, of style. And she had such tones of nature, such concealments of art, such effusions of life, that the whole scene glowed with the colour she communicated, and the house, pervaded with rosy fire, glowed back at the scene. Nick looked round in the intervals; he felt excited and flushed--the night had turned to a feast of fraternity and he expected to see people embrace each other. The crowd, the agitation, the triumph, the surprise, the signals and rumours, the heated air, his associates, near him, pointing out other figures who presumably were celebrated but whom he had never heard of, all amused him and banished every impulse to question or to compare. Miriam was as happy as some right sensation--she would have fed the memory with deep draughts. One of the things that amused him or at least helped to fill his attention was Peter's attitude, which apparently didn't exclude criticism--rather indeed mainly implied it. This admirer never took his eyes off the actress, but he made no remark about her and never stirred out of his chair. Nick had had from the first a plan of going round to speak to her, but as his companion evidently meant not to move he scrupled at being more forward. During their brief dinner together--they were determined not to be late--Peter had been silent, quite recklessly grave, but also, his kinsman judged, full of the wish to make it clear he was calm. In his seat he was calmer than ever and had an air even of trying to suggest that his attendance, preoccupied as he was with deeper solemnities, was more or less mechanical, the result of a conception of duty, a habit of courtesy. When during a scene in the second act--a scene from which Miriam was absent--Nick observed to him that one might judge from his reserve that he wasn't pleased he replied after a moment: "I've been looking for her mistakes." And when Nick made answer to this that he certainly wouldn't find them he said again in an odd tone: "No, I shan't find them--I shan't find them." It might have seemed that since the girl's performance was a dazzling success he regarded his evening as rather a failure. After the third act Nick said candidly: "My dear fellow, how can you sit here? Aren't you going to speak to her?" To which Peter replied inscrutably: "Lord, no, never again. I bade her good-bye yesterday. She knows what I think of her form. It's very good, but she carries it a little too far. Besides, she didn't want me to come, and it's therefore more discreet to keep away from her." "Surely it isn't an hour for discretion!" Nick cried. "Excuse me at any rate for five minutes." He went behind and reappeared only as the curtain was rising on the fourth act; and in the interval between the fourth and the fifth he went again for a shorter time. Peter was personally detached, but he consented to listen to his companion's vivid account of the state of things on the stage, where the elation of victory had lighted up the place. The strain was over, the ship in port--they were all wiping their faces and grinning. Miriam--yes, positively--was grinning too, and she hadn't asked a question about Peter nor sent him a message. They were kissing all round and dancing for joy. They were on the eve, worse luck, of a tremendous run. Peter groaned irrepressibly for this; it was, save for a slight sign a moment later, the only vibration caused in him by his cousin's report. There was but one voice of regret that they hadn't put on the piece earlier, as the end of the season would interrupt the run. There was but one voice too about the fourth act--it was believed all London would rush to see the fourth act. The crowd about her was a dozen deep and Miriam in the midst of it all charming; she was receiving in the ugly place after the fashion of royalty, almost as hedged with the famous "divinity," yet with a smile and a word for each. She was really like a young queen on her accession. When she saw him, Nick, she had kissed her hand to him over the heads of the courtiers. Nick's artless comment on this was that she had such pretty manners. It made Peter laugh--apparently at his friend's conception of the manners of a young queen. Mrs. Rooth, with a dozen shawls on her arm, was as red as the kitchen-fire, but you couldn't tell if Miriam were red or pale: she was so cleverly, finely made up--perhaps a little too much. Dashwood of course was greatly to the fore, but you hadn't to mention his own performance to him: he took it all handsomely and wouldn't hear of anything but that _her_ fortune was made. He didn't say much indeed, but evidently had ideas about her fortune; he nodded significant things and whistled inimitable sounds--"Heuh, heuh!" He was perfectly satisfied; moreover, he looked further ahead than any one. It was on coming back to his place after the fourth act that Nick put in, for his companion's benefit, most of these touches in his sketch of the situation. If Peter had continued to look for Miriam's mistakes he hadn't yet found them: the fourth act, bristling with dangers, putting a premium on every sort of cheap effect, had rounded itself without a flaw. Sitting there alone while Nick was away he had leisure to meditate on the wonder of this--on the art with which the girl had separated passion from violence, filling the whole place and never screaming; for it had often seemed to him in London of old that the yell of theatrical emotion rang through the shrinking night like the voice of the Sunday newsboy. Miriam had never been more present to him than at this hour; but she was inextricably transmuted--present essentially as the romantic heroine she represented. His state of mind was of the strangest and he was conscious of its strangeness, just as he was conscious in his very person of a lapse of resistance which likened itself absurdly to liberation. He felt weak at the same time that he felt inspired, and he felt inspired at the same time that he knew, or believed he knew, that his face was a blank. He saw things as a shining confusion, and yet somehow something monstrously definite kept surging out of them. Miriam was a beautiful, actual, fictive, impossible young woman of a past age, an undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one's own affairs. But that reality was a part of her spectator's joy, and she was not changed back to the common by his perception of the magnificent trick of art with which it was connected. Before his kinsman rejoined him Peter, taking a visiting-card from his pocket, had written on it in pencil a few words in a foreign tongue; but as at that moment he saw Nick coming in he immediately put it out of view. The last thing before the curtain rose on the fifth act that young man mentioned his having brought a message from Basil Dashwood, who hoped they both, on leaving the theatre, would come to supper with him in company with Miriam and her mother and several others: he had prepared a little informal banquet in honour of so famous a night. At this, while the curtain was about to rise, Peter immediately took out his card again and added something--he wrote the finest small hand you could see. Nick asked him what he was doing, and he waited but an instant. "It's a word to say I can't come." "To Dashwood? Oh I shall go," said Nick. "Well, I hope you'll enjoy it!" his companion replied in a tone which came back to him afterwards. When the curtain fell on the last act the people stayed, standing up in their places for acclamation. The applause shook the house--the recall became a clamour, the relief from a long tension. This was in any performance a moment Peter detested, but he stood for an instant beside Nick, who clapped, to his cousin's diplomatic sense, after the fashion of a school-boy at the pantomime. There was a veritable roar while the curtain drew back at the side most removed from our pair. Peter could see Basil Dashwood holding it, making a passage for the male "juvenile lead," who had Miriam in tow. Nick redoubled his efforts; heard the plaudits swell; saw the bows of the leading gentleman, who was hot and fat; saw Miriam, personally conducted and closer to the footlights, grow brighter and bigger and more swaying; and then became aware that his own comrade had with extreme agility slipped out of the stalls. Nick had already lost sight of him--he had apparently taken but a minute to escape from the house; and wondered at his quitting him without a farewell if he was to leave England on the morrow and they were not to meet at the hospitable Dashwood's. He wondered even what Peter was "up to," since, as he had assured him, there was no question of his going round to Miriam. He waited to see this young lady reappear three times, dragging Dashwood behind her at the second with a friendly arm, to whom, in turn, was hooked Miss Fanny Rover, the actress entrusted in the piece with the inevitable comic relief. He went out slowly with the crowd and at the door looked again for Peter, who struck him as deficient for once in finish. He couldn't know that in another direction and while he was helping the house to "rise" at its heroine, his kinsman had been particularly explicit. On reaching the lobby Peter had pounced on a small boy in buttons, who seemed superfluously connected with a desolate refreshment-room and, from the tips of his toes, was peeping at the stage through the glazed hole in the door of a box. Into one of the child's hands he thrust the card he had drawn again from his waistcoat and into the other the largest silver coin he could find in the same receptacle, while he bent over him with words of adjuration--words the little page tried to help himself to apprehend by instantly attempting to peruse the other words written on the card. "That's no use--it's Italian," said Peter; "only carry it round to Miss Rooth without a minute's delay. Place it in her hand and she'll give you some object--a bracelet, a glove, or a flower--to bring me back as a sign that she has received it. I shall be outside; bring me there what she gives you and you shall have another shilling--only fly!" His small messenger sounded him a moment with the sharp face of London wage-earning, and still more of London tip-earning, infancy, and vanished as swiftly as a slave of the Arabian Nights. While he waited in the lobby the audience began to pour out, and before the urchin had come back to him he was clapped on the shoulder by Nick. "I'm glad I haven't lost you, but why didn't you stay to give her a hand?" "Give her a hand? I hated it." "My dear man, I don't follow you," Nick said. "If you won't come to Dashwood's supper I fear our ways don't lie together." "Thank him very much; say I've to get up at an unnatural hour." To this Peter added: "I think I ought to tell you she may not be there." "Miss Rooth? Why it's all _for_ her." "I'm waiting for a word from her--she may change her mind." Nick showed his interest. "For you? What then have you proposed?" "I've proposed marriage," said Peter in a strange voice. "I say--!" Nick broke out; and at the same moment Peter's messenger squeezed through the press and stood before him. "She has given me nothing, sir," the boy announced; "but she says I'm to say 'All right!'" Nick's stare widened. "You've proposed through _him_?" "Aye, and she accepts. Good-night!"--on which, turning away, Peter bounded into a hansom. He said something to the driver through the roof, and Nick's eyes followed the cab as it started off. This young man was mystified, was even amused; especially when the youth in buttons, planted there and wondering too, brought forth: "Please sir, he told me he'd give me a shilling and he've forgot it." "Oh I can't pay you for _that_!" Nick laughed. But he fished out a dole, though he was vexed at the injury to the supper. XLVI Peter meanwhile rolled away through the summer night to Saint John's Wood. He had put the pressure of strong words on his young friend, entreating her to drive home immediately, return there without any one, without even her mother. He wished to see her alone and for a purpose he would fully and satisfactorily explain--couldn't she trust him? He besought her to remember his own situation and throw over her supper, throw over everything. He would wait for her with unspeakable impatience in Balaklava Place. He did so, when he got there, but it had taken half an hour. Interminable seemed his lonely vigil in Miss Lumley's drawing-room, where the character of the original proprietress came out to him more than ever before in a kind of afterglow of old sociabilities, a vulgar, ghostly reference. The numerous candles had been lighted for him, and Mrs. Rooth's familiar fictions lay about; but his nerves forbade him the solace of a chair and a book. He walked up and down, thinking and listening, and as the long window, the balmy air permitting, stood open to the garden, he passed several times in and out. A carriage appeared to stop at the gate--then there was nothing; he heard the rare rattle of wheels and the far-off hum of London. His impatience was overwrought, and though he knew this it persisted; it would have been no easy matter for Miriam to break away from the flock of her felicitators. Still less simple was it doubtless for her to leave poor Dashwood with his supper on his hands. Perhaps she would bring Dashwood with her, bring him to time her; she was capable of playing him--that is, of playing Her Majesty's new representative to the small far-off State, or even of playing them both--that trick. Perhaps the little wretch in buttons--Peter remembered now the neglected shilling--only pretending to go round with his card, had come back with an invented answer. But how could he know, since presumably he couldn't read Italian, that his answer would fit the message? Peter was sorry now that he himself had not gone round, not snatched Miriam bodily away, made sure of her and of what he wanted of her. When forty minutes had elapsed he regarded it as proved that she wouldn't come, and, asking himself what he should do, determined to drive off again and seize her at her comrade's feast. Then he remembered how Nick had mentioned that this entertainment was not to be held at the young actor's lodgings but at some tavern or restaurant the name of which he had not heeded. Suddenly, however, Peter became aware with joy that this name didn't matter, for there was something at the garden door at last. He rushed out before she had had time to ring, and saw as she stepped from the carriage that she was alone. Now that she was there, that he had this evidence she had listened to him and trusted him, all his impatience and bitterness gave way and a flood of pleading tenderness took their place in the first words he spoke to her. It was far "dearer" of her than he had any right to dream, but she was the best and kindest creature--this showed it--as well as the most wonderful. He was really not off his head with his contradictory ways; no, before heaven he wasn't, and he would explain, he would make everything clear. Everything was changed. She stopped short in the little dusky garden, looking at him in the light of the open window. Then she called back to the coachman--they had left the garden door open--"Wait for me, mind; I shall want you again." "What's the matter--won't you stay?" Peter asked. "Are you going out again at this absurd hour? I won't hurt you," he gently urged. And he went back and closed the garden door. He wanted to say to the coachman, "It's no matter--please drive away." At the same time he wouldn't for the world have done anything offensive to her. "I've come because I thought it better to-night, as things have turned out, to do the thing you ask me, whatever it may be," she had already begun. "That's probably what you calculated I would think, eh? What this evening has been you've seen, and I must allow that your hand's in it. That you know for yourself--that you doubtless felt as you sat there. But I confess I don't imagine what you want of me here now," she added. She had remained standing in the path. Peter felt the irony of her "now" and how it made a fool of him, but he had been prepared for this and for much worse. He had begged her not to think him a fool, but in truth at present he cared little if she did. Very likely he was--in spite of his plea that everything was changed: he cared little even himself. However, he spoke in the tone of intense reason and of the fullest disposition to satisfy her. This lucidity only took still more from the dignity of his change of front: his separation from her the day before had had such pretensions to being lucid. But the explanation and the justification were in the very fact, the fact that had complete possession of him. He named it when he replied to her: "I've simply overrated my strength." "Oh I knew--I knew! That's why I entreated you not to come!" Miriam groaned. She turned away lamenting, and for a moment he thought she would retreat to her carriage. But he passed his hand into her arm, to draw her forward, and after an instant felt her yield. "The fact is we must have this thing out," he said. Then he added as he made her go into the house, bending over her, "The failure of my strength--that was just the reason of my coming." She broke into her laugh at these words, as she entered the drawing-room, and it made them sound pompous in their false wisdom. She flung off, as a good-natured tribute to the image of their having the thing out, a white shawl that had been wrapped round her. She was still painted and bedizened, in the splendid dress of her climax, so that she seemed protected and alienated by the character she had been acting. "Whatever it is you want--when I understand--you'll be very brief, won't you? Do you know I've given up a charming supper for you? Mamma has gone there. I've promised to go back to them." "You're an angel not to have let her come with you. I'm sure she wanted to," Peter made reply. "Oh she's all right, but she's nervous." Then the girl added: "Couldn't she keep you away after all?" "Whom are you talking about?" Biddy Dormer was as absent from his mind as if she had never existed. "The charming thing you were with this morning. Is she so afraid of obliging me? Oh she'd be so good for you!" "Don't speak of that," Peter gravely said. "I was in perfect good faith yesterday when I took leave of you. I was--I was. But I can't--I can't: you're too unutterably dear to me." "Oh don't--_please_ don't!" Miriam wailed at this. She stood before the fireless chimney-piece with one of her hands on it. "If it's only to say that, don't you know, what's the use?" "It isn't only to say that. I've a plan, a perfect plan: the whole thing lies clear before me." "And what's the whole thing?" He had to make an effort. "You say your mother's nervous. Ah if you knew how nervous I am!" "Well, I'm not. Go on." "Give it up--give it up!" Peter stammered. "Give it up?" She fixed him like a mild Medusa. "I'll marry you to-morrow if you'll renounce; and in return for the sacrifice you make for me I'll do more for you than ever was done for a woman before." "Renounce after to-night? Do you call that a plan?" she asked. "Those are old words and very foolish ones--you wanted something of that sort a year ago." "Oh I fluttered round the idea at that time; we were talking in the air. I didn't really believe I could make you see it then, and certainly you didn't see it. My own future, moreover, wasn't definite to me. I didn't know what I could offer you. But these last months have made a difference--I do know now. Now what I say is deliberate--It's deeply meditated. I simply can't live without you, and I hold that together we may do great things." She seemed to wonder. "What sort of things?" "The things of my profession, of my life, the things one does for one's country, the responsibility and the honour of great affairs; deeply fascinating when one's immersed in them, and more exciting really--put them even at that--than the excitements of the theatre. Care for me only a little and you'll see what they are, they'll take hold of you. Believe me, believe me," Peter pleaded; "every fibre of my being trembles in what I say to you." "You admitted yesterday it wouldn't do," she made answer. "Where were the fibres of your being then?" "They throbbed in me even more than now, and I was trying, like an ass, not to feel them. Where was this evening yesterday--where were the maddening hours I've just spent? Ah you're the perfection of perfections, and as I sat there to-night you taught me what I really want." "The perfection of perfections?" the girl echoed with the strangest smile. "I needn't try to tell you: you must have felt to-night with such rapture what you are, what you can do. How can I give that up?" he piteously went on. "How can _I_, my poor friend? I like your plans and your responsibilities and your great affairs, as you call them. _Voyons_, they're infantile. I've just shown that I'm a perfection of perfections: therefore it's just the moment to 'renounce,' as you gracefully say? Oh I was sure, I was sure!" And Miriam paused, resting eyes at once lighted and troubled on him as in the effort to think of some arrangement that would help him out of his absurdity. "I was sure, I mean, that if you did come your poor, dear, doting brain would be quite confused," she presently pursued. "I can't be a muff in public just for you, _pourtant_. Dear me, why do you like us so much?" "Like you? I loathe you!" "_Je le vois parbleu bien_!" she lightly returned. "I mean why do you feel us, judge us, understand us so well? I please you because you see, because you know; and then for that very reason of my pleasing you must adapt me to your convenience, you must take me over, as they say. You admire me as an artist and therefore want to put me into a box in which the artist will breathe her last. Ah be reasonable; you must let her live!" "Let her live? As if I could prevent her living!" Peter cried with unmistakable conviction. "Even if I did wish how could I prevent a spirit like yours from expressing itself? Don't talk about my putting you in a box, for, dearest child, I'm taking you out of one," he all persuasively explained. "The artist is irrepressible, eternal; she'll be in everything you are and in everything you do, and you'll go about with her triumphantly exerting your powers, charming the world, carrying everything before you." Miriam's colour rose, through all her artificial surfaces, at this all but convincing appeal, and she asked whimsically: "Shall you

reins

How many times the word 'reins' appears in the text?

you to-morrow--there's no question of ten years!" cried Mrs. Rooth with a comicality of plainness. Miriam smiled at Nick, deprecating his horror of such talk. "Isn't it droll, the way she can't get it out of her head?" Then turning almost coaxingly to the old woman: "_Voyons_, look about you: they don't marry us like that." "But they do--_cela se voit tous les jours_. Ask Mr. Dormer." "Oh never! It would be as if I asked him to give us a practical proof." "I shall never prove anything by marrying any one," Nick said. "For me that question's over." Miriam rested kind eyes on him. "Dear me, how you must hate me!" And before he had time to reply she went on to her mother: "People marry them to make them leave the stage; which proves exactly what I say." "Ah they offer them the finest positions," reasoned Mrs. Rooth. "Do you want me to leave it then?" "Oh you can manage if you will!" "The only managing I know anything about is to do my work. If I manage that decently I shall pull through." "But, dearest, may our work not be of many sorts?" "I only know one," said Miriam. At this her mother got up with a sigh. "I see you do wish to drive me into the street." "Mamma's bewildered--there are so many paths she wants to follow, there are so many bundles of hay. As I told you, she wishes to gobble them all," the girl pursued. Then she added: "Yes, go and take the carriage; take a turn round the Park--you always delight in that--and come back for me in an hour." "I'm too vexed with you; the air will do me good," said Mrs. Rooth. But before she went she addressed Nick: "I've your assurance that you'll bring him then to-night?" "Bring Peter? I don't think I shall have to drag him," Nick returned. "But you must do me the justice to remember that if I should resort to force I should do something that's not particularly in my interest--I should be magnanimous." "We must always be that, mustn't we?" moralised Mrs. Rooth. "How could it affect your interest?" Miriam asked less abstractedly. "Yes, as you say," her mother mused at their host, "the question of marriage has ceased to exist for you." "Mamma goes straight at it!" laughed the girl, getting up while Nick rubbed his canvas before answering. Miriam went to mamma and settled her bonnet and mantle in preparation for her drive, then stood a moment with a filial arm about her and as if waiting for their friend's explanation. This, however, when it came halted visibly. "Why you said a while ago that if Peter was there you wouldn't act." "I'll act for _him_," smiled Miriam, inconsequently caressing her mother. "It doesn't matter whom it's for!" Mrs. Rooth declared sagaciously. "Take your drive and relax your mind," said the girl, kissing her. "Come for me in an hour; not later--but not sooner." She went with her to the door, bundled her out, closed it behind her and came back to the position she had quitted. "_This_ is the peace I want!" she gratefully cried as she settled into it. XLV Peter Sherringham said so little during the performance that his companion was struck by his dumbness, especially as Miriam's acting seemed to Nick magnificent. He held his breath while she was on the stage--she gave the whole thing, including the spectator's emotion, such a lift. She had not carried out her fantastic menace of not exerting herself, and, as Mrs. Rooth had said, it little mattered for whom she acted. Nick was conscious in watching her that she went through it all for herself, for the idea that possessed her and that she rendered with extraordinary breadth. She couldn't open the door a part of the way to it and let it simply peep in; if it entered at all it must enter in full procession and occupy the premises in state. This was what had happened on an occasion which, as the less tormented of our young men felt in his stall, grew larger with each throb of the responsive house; till by the time the play was half over it appeared to stretch out wide arms to the future. Nick had often heard more applause, but had never heard more attention, since they were all charmed and hushed together and success seemed to be sitting down with them. There had been of course plenty of announcement--the newspapers had abounded and the arts of the manager had taken the freest license; but it was easy to feel a fine, universal consensus and to recognise everywhere the light spring of hope. People snatched their eyes from the stage an instant to look at each other, all eager to hand on the torch passed to them by the actress over the footlights. It was a part of the impression that she was now only showing to the full, for this time she had verse to deal with and she made it unexpectedly exquisite. She was beauty, melody, truth; she was passion and persuasion and tenderness. She caught up the obstreperous play in soothing, entwining arms and, seeming to tread the air in the flutter of her robe, carried it into the high places of poetry, of art, of style. And she had such tones of nature, such concealments of art, such effusions of life, that the whole scene glowed with the colour she communicated, and the house, pervaded with rosy fire, glowed back at the scene. Nick looked round in the intervals; he felt excited and flushed--the night had turned to a feast of fraternity and he expected to see people embrace each other. The crowd, the agitation, the triumph, the surprise, the signals and rumours, the heated air, his associates, near him, pointing out other figures who presumably were celebrated but whom he had never heard of, all amused him and banished every impulse to question or to compare. Miriam was as happy as some right sensation--she would have fed the memory with deep draughts. One of the things that amused him or at least helped to fill his attention was Peter's attitude, which apparently didn't exclude criticism--rather indeed mainly implied it. This admirer never took his eyes off the actress, but he made no remark about her and never stirred out of his chair. Nick had had from the first a plan of going round to speak to her, but as his companion evidently meant not to move he scrupled at being more forward. During their brief dinner together--they were determined not to be late--Peter had been silent, quite recklessly grave, but also, his kinsman judged, full of the wish to make it clear he was calm. In his seat he was calmer than ever and had an air even of trying to suggest that his attendance, preoccupied as he was with deeper solemnities, was more or less mechanical, the result of a conception of duty, a habit of courtesy. When during a scene in the second act--a scene from which Miriam was absent--Nick observed to him that one might judge from his reserve that he wasn't pleased he replied after a moment: "I've been looking for her mistakes." And when Nick made answer to this that he certainly wouldn't find them he said again in an odd tone: "No, I shan't find them--I shan't find them." It might have seemed that since the girl's performance was a dazzling success he regarded his evening as rather a failure. After the third act Nick said candidly: "My dear fellow, how can you sit here? Aren't you going to speak to her?" To which Peter replied inscrutably: "Lord, no, never again. I bade her good-bye yesterday. She knows what I think of her form. It's very good, but she carries it a little too far. Besides, she didn't want me to come, and it's therefore more discreet to keep away from her." "Surely it isn't an hour for discretion!" Nick cried. "Excuse me at any rate for five minutes." He went behind and reappeared only as the curtain was rising on the fourth act; and in the interval between the fourth and the fifth he went again for a shorter time. Peter was personally detached, but he consented to listen to his companion's vivid account of the state of things on the stage, where the elation of victory had lighted up the place. The strain was over, the ship in port--they were all wiping their faces and grinning. Miriam--yes, positively--was grinning too, and she hadn't asked a question about Peter nor sent him a message. They were kissing all round and dancing for joy. They were on the eve, worse luck, of a tremendous run. Peter groaned irrepressibly for this; it was, save for a slight sign a moment later, the only vibration caused in him by his cousin's report. There was but one voice of regret that they hadn't put on the piece earlier, as the end of the season would interrupt the run. There was but one voice too about the fourth act--it was believed all London would rush to see the fourth act. The crowd about her was a dozen deep and Miriam in the midst of it all charming; she was receiving in the ugly place after the fashion of royalty, almost as hedged with the famous "divinity," yet with a smile and a word for each. She was really like a young queen on her accession. When she saw him, Nick, she had kissed her hand to him over the heads of the courtiers. Nick's artless comment on this was that she had such pretty manners. It made Peter laugh--apparently at his friend's conception of the manners of a young queen. Mrs. Rooth, with a dozen shawls on her arm, was as red as the kitchen-fire, but you couldn't tell if Miriam were red or pale: she was so cleverly, finely made up--perhaps a little too much. Dashwood of course was greatly to the fore, but you hadn't to mention his own performance to him: he took it all handsomely and wouldn't hear of anything but that _her_ fortune was made. He didn't say much indeed, but evidently had ideas about her fortune; he nodded significant things and whistled inimitable sounds--"Heuh, heuh!" He was perfectly satisfied; moreover, he looked further ahead than any one. It was on coming back to his place after the fourth act that Nick put in, for his companion's benefit, most of these touches in his sketch of the situation. If Peter had continued to look for Miriam's mistakes he hadn't yet found them: the fourth act, bristling with dangers, putting a premium on every sort of cheap effect, had rounded itself without a flaw. Sitting there alone while Nick was away he had leisure to meditate on the wonder of this--on the art with which the girl had separated passion from violence, filling the whole place and never screaming; for it had often seemed to him in London of old that the yell of theatrical emotion rang through the shrinking night like the voice of the Sunday newsboy. Miriam had never been more present to him than at this hour; but she was inextricably transmuted--present essentially as the romantic heroine she represented. His state of mind was of the strangest and he was conscious of its strangeness, just as he was conscious in his very person of a lapse of resistance which likened itself absurdly to liberation. He felt weak at the same time that he felt inspired, and he felt inspired at the same time that he knew, or believed he knew, that his face was a blank. He saw things as a shining confusion, and yet somehow something monstrously definite kept surging out of them. Miriam was a beautiful, actual, fictive, impossible young woman of a past age, an undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one's own affairs. But that reality was a part of her spectator's joy, and she was not changed back to the common by his perception of the magnificent trick of art with which it was connected. Before his kinsman rejoined him Peter, taking a visiting-card from his pocket, had written on it in pencil a few words in a foreign tongue; but as at that moment he saw Nick coming in he immediately put it out of view. The last thing before the curtain rose on the fifth act that young man mentioned his having brought a message from Basil Dashwood, who hoped they both, on leaving the theatre, would come to supper with him in company with Miriam and her mother and several others: he had prepared a little informal banquet in honour of so famous a night. At this, while the curtain was about to rise, Peter immediately took out his card again and added something--he wrote the finest small hand you could see. Nick asked him what he was doing, and he waited but an instant. "It's a word to say I can't come." "To Dashwood? Oh I shall go," said Nick. "Well, I hope you'll enjoy it!" his companion replied in a tone which came back to him afterwards. When the curtain fell on the last act the people stayed, standing up in their places for acclamation. The applause shook the house--the recall became a clamour, the relief from a long tension. This was in any performance a moment Peter detested, but he stood for an instant beside Nick, who clapped, to his cousin's diplomatic sense, after the fashion of a school-boy at the pantomime. There was a veritable roar while the curtain drew back at the side most removed from our pair. Peter could see Basil Dashwood holding it, making a passage for the male "juvenile lead," who had Miriam in tow. Nick redoubled his efforts; heard the plaudits swell; saw the bows of the leading gentleman, who was hot and fat; saw Miriam, personally conducted and closer to the footlights, grow brighter and bigger and more swaying; and then became aware that his own comrade had with extreme agility slipped out of the stalls. Nick had already lost sight of him--he had apparently taken but a minute to escape from the house; and wondered at his quitting him without a farewell if he was to leave England on the morrow and they were not to meet at the hospitable Dashwood's. He wondered even what Peter was "up to," since, as he had assured him, there was no question of his going round to Miriam. He waited to see this young lady reappear three times, dragging Dashwood behind her at the second with a friendly arm, to whom, in turn, was hooked Miss Fanny Rover, the actress entrusted in the piece with the inevitable comic relief. He went out slowly with the crowd and at the door looked again for Peter, who struck him as deficient for once in finish. He couldn't know that in another direction and while he was helping the house to "rise" at its heroine, his kinsman had been particularly explicit. On reaching the lobby Peter had pounced on a small boy in buttons, who seemed superfluously connected with a desolate refreshment-room and, from the tips of his toes, was peeping at the stage through the glazed hole in the door of a box. Into one of the child's hands he thrust the card he had drawn again from his waistcoat and into the other the largest silver coin he could find in the same receptacle, while he bent over him with words of adjuration--words the little page tried to help himself to apprehend by instantly attempting to peruse the other words written on the card. "That's no use--it's Italian," said Peter; "only carry it round to Miss Rooth without a minute's delay. Place it in her hand and she'll give you some object--a bracelet, a glove, or a flower--to bring me back as a sign that she has received it. I shall be outside; bring me there what she gives you and you shall have another shilling--only fly!" His small messenger sounded him a moment with the sharp face of London wage-earning, and still more of London tip-earning, infancy, and vanished as swiftly as a slave of the Arabian Nights. While he waited in the lobby the audience began to pour out, and before the urchin had come back to him he was clapped on the shoulder by Nick. "I'm glad I haven't lost you, but why didn't you stay to give her a hand?" "Give her a hand? I hated it." "My dear man, I don't follow you," Nick said. "If you won't come to Dashwood's supper I fear our ways don't lie together." "Thank him very much; say I've to get up at an unnatural hour." To this Peter added: "I think I ought to tell you she may not be there." "Miss Rooth? Why it's all _for_ her." "I'm waiting for a word from her--she may change her mind." Nick showed his interest. "For you? What then have you proposed?" "I've proposed marriage," said Peter in a strange voice. "I say--!" Nick broke out; and at the same moment Peter's messenger squeezed through the press and stood before him. "She has given me nothing, sir," the boy announced; "but she says I'm to say 'All right!'" Nick's stare widened. "You've proposed through _him_?" "Aye, and she accepts. Good-night!"--on which, turning away, Peter bounded into a hansom. He said something to the driver through the roof, and Nick's eyes followed the cab as it started off. This young man was mystified, was even amused; especially when the youth in buttons, planted there and wondering too, brought forth: "Please sir, he told me he'd give me a shilling and he've forgot it." "Oh I can't pay you for _that_!" Nick laughed. But he fished out a dole, though he was vexed at the injury to the supper. XLVI Peter meanwhile rolled away through the summer night to Saint John's Wood. He had put the pressure of strong words on his young friend, entreating her to drive home immediately, return there without any one, without even her mother. He wished to see her alone and for a purpose he would fully and satisfactorily explain--couldn't she trust him? He besought her to remember his own situation and throw over her supper, throw over everything. He would wait for her with unspeakable impatience in Balaklava Place. He did so, when he got there, but it had taken half an hour. Interminable seemed his lonely vigil in Miss Lumley's drawing-room, where the character of the original proprietress came out to him more than ever before in a kind of afterglow of old sociabilities, a vulgar, ghostly reference. The numerous candles had been lighted for him, and Mrs. Rooth's familiar fictions lay about; but his nerves forbade him the solace of a chair and a book. He walked up and down, thinking and listening, and as the long window, the balmy air permitting, stood open to the garden, he passed several times in and out. A carriage appeared to stop at the gate--then there was nothing; he heard the rare rattle of wheels and the far-off hum of London. His impatience was overwrought, and though he knew this it persisted; it would have been no easy matter for Miriam to break away from the flock of her felicitators. Still less simple was it doubtless for her to leave poor Dashwood with his supper on his hands. Perhaps she would bring Dashwood with her, bring him to time her; she was capable of playing him--that is, of playing Her Majesty's new representative to the small far-off State, or even of playing them both--that trick. Perhaps the little wretch in buttons--Peter remembered now the neglected shilling--only pretending to go round with his card, had come back with an invented answer. But how could he know, since presumably he couldn't read Italian, that his answer would fit the message? Peter was sorry now that he himself had not gone round, not snatched Miriam bodily away, made sure of her and of what he wanted of her. When forty minutes had elapsed he regarded it as proved that she wouldn't come, and, asking himself what he should do, determined to drive off again and seize her at her comrade's feast. Then he remembered how Nick had mentioned that this entertainment was not to be held at the young actor's lodgings but at some tavern or restaurant the name of which he had not heeded. Suddenly, however, Peter became aware with joy that this name didn't matter, for there was something at the garden door at last. He rushed out before she had had time to ring, and saw as she stepped from the carriage that she was alone. Now that she was there, that he had this evidence she had listened to him and trusted him, all his impatience and bitterness gave way and a flood of pleading tenderness took their place in the first words he spoke to her. It was far "dearer" of her than he had any right to dream, but she was the best and kindest creature--this showed it--as well as the most wonderful. He was really not off his head with his contradictory ways; no, before heaven he wasn't, and he would explain, he would make everything clear. Everything was changed. She stopped short in the little dusky garden, looking at him in the light of the open window. Then she called back to the coachman--they had left the garden door open--"Wait for me, mind; I shall want you again." "What's the matter--won't you stay?" Peter asked. "Are you going out again at this absurd hour? I won't hurt you," he gently urged. And he went back and closed the garden door. He wanted to say to the coachman, "It's no matter--please drive away." At the same time he wouldn't for the world have done anything offensive to her. "I've come because I thought it better to-night, as things have turned out, to do the thing you ask me, whatever it may be," she had already begun. "That's probably what you calculated I would think, eh? What this evening has been you've seen, and I must allow that your hand's in it. That you know for yourself--that you doubtless felt as you sat there. But I confess I don't imagine what you want of me here now," she added. She had remained standing in the path. Peter felt the irony of her "now" and how it made a fool of him, but he had been prepared for this and for much worse. He had begged her not to think him a fool, but in truth at present he cared little if she did. Very likely he was--in spite of his plea that everything was changed: he cared little even himself. However, he spoke in the tone of intense reason and of the fullest disposition to satisfy her. This lucidity only took still more from the dignity of his change of front: his separation from her the day before had had such pretensions to being lucid. But the explanation and the justification were in the very fact, the fact that had complete possession of him. He named it when he replied to her: "I've simply overrated my strength." "Oh I knew--I knew! That's why I entreated you not to come!" Miriam groaned. She turned away lamenting, and for a moment he thought she would retreat to her carriage. But he passed his hand into her arm, to draw her forward, and after an instant felt her yield. "The fact is we must have this thing out," he said. Then he added as he made her go into the house, bending over her, "The failure of my strength--that was just the reason of my coming." She broke into her laugh at these words, as she entered the drawing-room, and it made them sound pompous in their false wisdom. She flung off, as a good-natured tribute to the image of their having the thing out, a white shawl that had been wrapped round her. She was still painted and bedizened, in the splendid dress of her climax, so that she seemed protected and alienated by the character she had been acting. "Whatever it is you want--when I understand--you'll be very brief, won't you? Do you know I've given up a charming supper for you? Mamma has gone there. I've promised to go back to them." "You're an angel not to have let her come with you. I'm sure she wanted to," Peter made reply. "Oh she's all right, but she's nervous." Then the girl added: "Couldn't she keep you away after all?" "Whom are you talking about?" Biddy Dormer was as absent from his mind as if she had never existed. "The charming thing you were with this morning. Is she so afraid of obliging me? Oh she'd be so good for you!" "Don't speak of that," Peter gravely said. "I was in perfect good faith yesterday when I took leave of you. I was--I was. But I can't--I can't: you're too unutterably dear to me." "Oh don't--_please_ don't!" Miriam wailed at this. She stood before the fireless chimney-piece with one of her hands on it. "If it's only to say that, don't you know, what's the use?" "It isn't only to say that. I've a plan, a perfect plan: the whole thing lies clear before me." "And what's the whole thing?" He had to make an effort. "You say your mother's nervous. Ah if you knew how nervous I am!" "Well, I'm not. Go on." "Give it up--give it up!" Peter stammered. "Give it up?" She fixed him like a mild Medusa. "I'll marry you to-morrow if you'll renounce; and in return for the sacrifice you make for me I'll do more for you than ever was done for a woman before." "Renounce after to-night? Do you call that a plan?" she asked. "Those are old words and very foolish ones--you wanted something of that sort a year ago." "Oh I fluttered round the idea at that time; we were talking in the air. I didn't really believe I could make you see it then, and certainly you didn't see it. My own future, moreover, wasn't definite to me. I didn't know what I could offer you. But these last months have made a difference--I do know now. Now what I say is deliberate--It's deeply meditated. I simply can't live without you, and I hold that together we may do great things." She seemed to wonder. "What sort of things?" "The things of my profession, of my life, the things one does for one's country, the responsibility and the honour of great affairs; deeply fascinating when one's immersed in them, and more exciting really--put them even at that--than the excitements of the theatre. Care for me only a little and you'll see what they are, they'll take hold of you. Believe me, believe me," Peter pleaded; "every fibre of my being trembles in what I say to you." "You admitted yesterday it wouldn't do," she made answer. "Where were the fibres of your being then?" "They throbbed in me even more than now, and I was trying, like an ass, not to feel them. Where was this evening yesterday--where were the maddening hours I've just spent? Ah you're the perfection of perfections, and as I sat there to-night you taught me what I really want." "The perfection of perfections?" the girl echoed with the strangest smile. "I needn't try to tell you: you must have felt to-night with such rapture what you are, what you can do. How can I give that up?" he piteously went on. "How can _I_, my poor friend? I like your plans and your responsibilities and your great affairs, as you call them. _Voyons_, they're infantile. I've just shown that I'm a perfection of perfections: therefore it's just the moment to 'renounce,' as you gracefully say? Oh I was sure, I was sure!" And Miriam paused, resting eyes at once lighted and troubled on him as in the effort to think of some arrangement that would help him out of his absurdity. "I was sure, I mean, that if you did come your poor, dear, doting brain would be quite confused," she presently pursued. "I can't be a muff in public just for you, _pourtant_. Dear me, why do you like us so much?" "Like you? I loathe you!" "_Je le vois parbleu bien_!" she lightly returned. "I mean why do you feel us, judge us, understand us so well? I please you because you see, because you know; and then for that very reason of my pleasing you must adapt me to your convenience, you must take me over, as they say. You admire me as an artist and therefore want to put me into a box in which the artist will breathe her last. Ah be reasonable; you must let her live!" "Let her live? As if I could prevent her living!" Peter cried with unmistakable conviction. "Even if I did wish how could I prevent a spirit like yours from expressing itself? Don't talk about my putting you in a box, for, dearest child, I'm taking you out of one," he all persuasively explained. "The artist is irrepressible, eternal; she'll be in everything you are and in everything you do, and you'll go about with her triumphantly exerting your powers, charming the world, carrying everything before you." Miriam's colour rose, through all her artificial surfaces, at this all but convincing appeal, and she asked whimsically: "Shall you

magnificent

How many times the word 'magnificent' appears in the text?

you to-morrow--there's no question of ten years!" cried Mrs. Rooth with a comicality of plainness. Miriam smiled at Nick, deprecating his horror of such talk. "Isn't it droll, the way she can't get it out of her head?" Then turning almost coaxingly to the old woman: "_Voyons_, look about you: they don't marry us like that." "But they do--_cela se voit tous les jours_. Ask Mr. Dormer." "Oh never! It would be as if I asked him to give us a practical proof." "I shall never prove anything by marrying any one," Nick said. "For me that question's over." Miriam rested kind eyes on him. "Dear me, how you must hate me!" And before he had time to reply she went on to her mother: "People marry them to make them leave the stage; which proves exactly what I say." "Ah they offer them the finest positions," reasoned Mrs. Rooth. "Do you want me to leave it then?" "Oh you can manage if you will!" "The only managing I know anything about is to do my work. If I manage that decently I shall pull through." "But, dearest, may our work not be of many sorts?" "I only know one," said Miriam. At this her mother got up with a sigh. "I see you do wish to drive me into the street." "Mamma's bewildered--there are so many paths she wants to follow, there are so many bundles of hay. As I told you, she wishes to gobble them all," the girl pursued. Then she added: "Yes, go and take the carriage; take a turn round the Park--you always delight in that--and come back for me in an hour." "I'm too vexed with you; the air will do me good," said Mrs. Rooth. But before she went she addressed Nick: "I've your assurance that you'll bring him then to-night?" "Bring Peter? I don't think I shall have to drag him," Nick returned. "But you must do me the justice to remember that if I should resort to force I should do something that's not particularly in my interest--I should be magnanimous." "We must always be that, mustn't we?" moralised Mrs. Rooth. "How could it affect your interest?" Miriam asked less abstractedly. "Yes, as you say," her mother mused at their host, "the question of marriage has ceased to exist for you." "Mamma goes straight at it!" laughed the girl, getting up while Nick rubbed his canvas before answering. Miriam went to mamma and settled her bonnet and mantle in preparation for her drive, then stood a moment with a filial arm about her and as if waiting for their friend's explanation. This, however, when it came halted visibly. "Why you said a while ago that if Peter was there you wouldn't act." "I'll act for _him_," smiled Miriam, inconsequently caressing her mother. "It doesn't matter whom it's for!" Mrs. Rooth declared sagaciously. "Take your drive and relax your mind," said the girl, kissing her. "Come for me in an hour; not later--but not sooner." She went with her to the door, bundled her out, closed it behind her and came back to the position she had quitted. "_This_ is the peace I want!" she gratefully cried as she settled into it. XLV Peter Sherringham said so little during the performance that his companion was struck by his dumbness, especially as Miriam's acting seemed to Nick magnificent. He held his breath while she was on the stage--she gave the whole thing, including the spectator's emotion, such a lift. She had not carried out her fantastic menace of not exerting herself, and, as Mrs. Rooth had said, it little mattered for whom she acted. Nick was conscious in watching her that she went through it all for herself, for the idea that possessed her and that she rendered with extraordinary breadth. She couldn't open the door a part of the way to it and let it simply peep in; if it entered at all it must enter in full procession and occupy the premises in state. This was what had happened on an occasion which, as the less tormented of our young men felt in his stall, grew larger with each throb of the responsive house; till by the time the play was half over it appeared to stretch out wide arms to the future. Nick had often heard more applause, but had never heard more attention, since they were all charmed and hushed together and success seemed to be sitting down with them. There had been of course plenty of announcement--the newspapers had abounded and the arts of the manager had taken the freest license; but it was easy to feel a fine, universal consensus and to recognise everywhere the light spring of hope. People snatched their eyes from the stage an instant to look at each other, all eager to hand on the torch passed to them by the actress over the footlights. It was a part of the impression that she was now only showing to the full, for this time she had verse to deal with and she made it unexpectedly exquisite. She was beauty, melody, truth; she was passion and persuasion and tenderness. She caught up the obstreperous play in soothing, entwining arms and, seeming to tread the air in the flutter of her robe, carried it into the high places of poetry, of art, of style. And she had such tones of nature, such concealments of art, such effusions of life, that the whole scene glowed with the colour she communicated, and the house, pervaded with rosy fire, glowed back at the scene. Nick looked round in the intervals; he felt excited and flushed--the night had turned to a feast of fraternity and he expected to see people embrace each other. The crowd, the agitation, the triumph, the surprise, the signals and rumours, the heated air, his associates, near him, pointing out other figures who presumably were celebrated but whom he had never heard of, all amused him and banished every impulse to question or to compare. Miriam was as happy as some right sensation--she would have fed the memory with deep draughts. One of the things that amused him or at least helped to fill his attention was Peter's attitude, which apparently didn't exclude criticism--rather indeed mainly implied it. This admirer never took his eyes off the actress, but he made no remark about her and never stirred out of his chair. Nick had had from the first a plan of going round to speak to her, but as his companion evidently meant not to move he scrupled at being more forward. During their brief dinner together--they were determined not to be late--Peter had been silent, quite recklessly grave, but also, his kinsman judged, full of the wish to make it clear he was calm. In his seat he was calmer than ever and had an air even of trying to suggest that his attendance, preoccupied as he was with deeper solemnities, was more or less mechanical, the result of a conception of duty, a habit of courtesy. When during a scene in the second act--a scene from which Miriam was absent--Nick observed to him that one might judge from his reserve that he wasn't pleased he replied after a moment: "I've been looking for her mistakes." And when Nick made answer to this that he certainly wouldn't find them he said again in an odd tone: "No, I shan't find them--I shan't find them." It might have seemed that since the girl's performance was a dazzling success he regarded his evening as rather a failure. After the third act Nick said candidly: "My dear fellow, how can you sit here? Aren't you going to speak to her?" To which Peter replied inscrutably: "Lord, no, never again. I bade her good-bye yesterday. She knows what I think of her form. It's very good, but she carries it a little too far. Besides, she didn't want me to come, and it's therefore more discreet to keep away from her." "Surely it isn't an hour for discretion!" Nick cried. "Excuse me at any rate for five minutes." He went behind and reappeared only as the curtain was rising on the fourth act; and in the interval between the fourth and the fifth he went again for a shorter time. Peter was personally detached, but he consented to listen to his companion's vivid account of the state of things on the stage, where the elation of victory had lighted up the place. The strain was over, the ship in port--they were all wiping their faces and grinning. Miriam--yes, positively--was grinning too, and she hadn't asked a question about Peter nor sent him a message. They were kissing all round and dancing for joy. They were on the eve, worse luck, of a tremendous run. Peter groaned irrepressibly for this; it was, save for a slight sign a moment later, the only vibration caused in him by his cousin's report. There was but one voice of regret that they hadn't put on the piece earlier, as the end of the season would interrupt the run. There was but one voice too about the fourth act--it was believed all London would rush to see the fourth act. The crowd about her was a dozen deep and Miriam in the midst of it all charming; she was receiving in the ugly place after the fashion of royalty, almost as hedged with the famous "divinity," yet with a smile and a word for each. She was really like a young queen on her accession. When she saw him, Nick, she had kissed her hand to him over the heads of the courtiers. Nick's artless comment on this was that she had such pretty manners. It made Peter laugh--apparently at his friend's conception of the manners of a young queen. Mrs. Rooth, with a dozen shawls on her arm, was as red as the kitchen-fire, but you couldn't tell if Miriam were red or pale: she was so cleverly, finely made up--perhaps a little too much. Dashwood of course was greatly to the fore, but you hadn't to mention his own performance to him: he took it all handsomely and wouldn't hear of anything but that _her_ fortune was made. He didn't say much indeed, but evidently had ideas about her fortune; he nodded significant things and whistled inimitable sounds--"Heuh, heuh!" He was perfectly satisfied; moreover, he looked further ahead than any one. It was on coming back to his place after the fourth act that Nick put in, for his companion's benefit, most of these touches in his sketch of the situation. If Peter had continued to look for Miriam's mistakes he hadn't yet found them: the fourth act, bristling with dangers, putting a premium on every sort of cheap effect, had rounded itself without a flaw. Sitting there alone while Nick was away he had leisure to meditate on the wonder of this--on the art with which the girl had separated passion from violence, filling the whole place and never screaming; for it had often seemed to him in London of old that the yell of theatrical emotion rang through the shrinking night like the voice of the Sunday newsboy. Miriam had never been more present to him than at this hour; but she was inextricably transmuted--present essentially as the romantic heroine she represented. His state of mind was of the strangest and he was conscious of its strangeness, just as he was conscious in his very person of a lapse of resistance which likened itself absurdly to liberation. He felt weak at the same time that he felt inspired, and he felt inspired at the same time that he knew, or believed he knew, that his face was a blank. He saw things as a shining confusion, and yet somehow something monstrously definite kept surging out of them. Miriam was a beautiful, actual, fictive, impossible young woman of a past age, an undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one's own affairs. But that reality was a part of her spectator's joy, and she was not changed back to the common by his perception of the magnificent trick of art with which it was connected. Before his kinsman rejoined him Peter, taking a visiting-card from his pocket, had written on it in pencil a few words in a foreign tongue; but as at that moment he saw Nick coming in he immediately put it out of view. The last thing before the curtain rose on the fifth act that young man mentioned his having brought a message from Basil Dashwood, who hoped they both, on leaving the theatre, would come to supper with him in company with Miriam and her mother and several others: he had prepared a little informal banquet in honour of so famous a night. At this, while the curtain was about to rise, Peter immediately took out his card again and added something--he wrote the finest small hand you could see. Nick asked him what he was doing, and he waited but an instant. "It's a word to say I can't come." "To Dashwood? Oh I shall go," said Nick. "Well, I hope you'll enjoy it!" his companion replied in a tone which came back to him afterwards. When the curtain fell on the last act the people stayed, standing up in their places for acclamation. The applause shook the house--the recall became a clamour, the relief from a long tension. This was in any performance a moment Peter detested, but he stood for an instant beside Nick, who clapped, to his cousin's diplomatic sense, after the fashion of a school-boy at the pantomime. There was a veritable roar while the curtain drew back at the side most removed from our pair. Peter could see Basil Dashwood holding it, making a passage for the male "juvenile lead," who had Miriam in tow. Nick redoubled his efforts; heard the plaudits swell; saw the bows of the leading gentleman, who was hot and fat; saw Miriam, personally conducted and closer to the footlights, grow brighter and bigger and more swaying; and then became aware that his own comrade had with extreme agility slipped out of the stalls. Nick had already lost sight of him--he had apparently taken but a minute to escape from the house; and wondered at his quitting him without a farewell if he was to leave England on the morrow and they were not to meet at the hospitable Dashwood's. He wondered even what Peter was "up to," since, as he had assured him, there was no question of his going round to Miriam. He waited to see this young lady reappear three times, dragging Dashwood behind her at the second with a friendly arm, to whom, in turn, was hooked Miss Fanny Rover, the actress entrusted in the piece with the inevitable comic relief. He went out slowly with the crowd and at the door looked again for Peter, who struck him as deficient for once in finish. He couldn't know that in another direction and while he was helping the house to "rise" at its heroine, his kinsman had been particularly explicit. On reaching the lobby Peter had pounced on a small boy in buttons, who seemed superfluously connected with a desolate refreshment-room and, from the tips of his toes, was peeping at the stage through the glazed hole in the door of a box. Into one of the child's hands he thrust the card he had drawn again from his waistcoat and into the other the largest silver coin he could find in the same receptacle, while he bent over him with words of adjuration--words the little page tried to help himself to apprehend by instantly attempting to peruse the other words written on the card. "That's no use--it's Italian," said Peter; "only carry it round to Miss Rooth without a minute's delay. Place it in her hand and she'll give you some object--a bracelet, a glove, or a flower--to bring me back as a sign that she has received it. I shall be outside; bring me there what she gives you and you shall have another shilling--only fly!" His small messenger sounded him a moment with the sharp face of London wage-earning, and still more of London tip-earning, infancy, and vanished as swiftly as a slave of the Arabian Nights. While he waited in the lobby the audience began to pour out, and before the urchin had come back to him he was clapped on the shoulder by Nick. "I'm glad I haven't lost you, but why didn't you stay to give her a hand?" "Give her a hand? I hated it." "My dear man, I don't follow you," Nick said. "If you won't come to Dashwood's supper I fear our ways don't lie together." "Thank him very much; say I've to get up at an unnatural hour." To this Peter added: "I think I ought to tell you she may not be there." "Miss Rooth? Why it's all _for_ her." "I'm waiting for a word from her--she may change her mind." Nick showed his interest. "For you? What then have you proposed?" "I've proposed marriage," said Peter in a strange voice. "I say--!" Nick broke out; and at the same moment Peter's messenger squeezed through the press and stood before him. "She has given me nothing, sir," the boy announced; "but she says I'm to say 'All right!'" Nick's stare widened. "You've proposed through _him_?" "Aye, and she accepts. Good-night!"--on which, turning away, Peter bounded into a hansom. He said something to the driver through the roof, and Nick's eyes followed the cab as it started off. This young man was mystified, was even amused; especially when the youth in buttons, planted there and wondering too, brought forth: "Please sir, he told me he'd give me a shilling and he've forgot it." "Oh I can't pay you for _that_!" Nick laughed. But he fished out a dole, though he was vexed at the injury to the supper. XLVI Peter meanwhile rolled away through the summer night to Saint John's Wood. He had put the pressure of strong words on his young friend, entreating her to drive home immediately, return there without any one, without even her mother. He wished to see her alone and for a purpose he would fully and satisfactorily explain--couldn't she trust him? He besought her to remember his own situation and throw over her supper, throw over everything. He would wait for her with unspeakable impatience in Balaklava Place. He did so, when he got there, but it had taken half an hour. Interminable seemed his lonely vigil in Miss Lumley's drawing-room, where the character of the original proprietress came out to him more than ever before in a kind of afterglow of old sociabilities, a vulgar, ghostly reference. The numerous candles had been lighted for him, and Mrs. Rooth's familiar fictions lay about; but his nerves forbade him the solace of a chair and a book. He walked up and down, thinking and listening, and as the long window, the balmy air permitting, stood open to the garden, he passed several times in and out. A carriage appeared to stop at the gate--then there was nothing; he heard the rare rattle of wheels and the far-off hum of London. His impatience was overwrought, and though he knew this it persisted; it would have been no easy matter for Miriam to break away from the flock of her felicitators. Still less simple was it doubtless for her to leave poor Dashwood with his supper on his hands. Perhaps she would bring Dashwood with her, bring him to time her; she was capable of playing him--that is, of playing Her Majesty's new representative to the small far-off State, or even of playing them both--that trick. Perhaps the little wretch in buttons--Peter remembered now the neglected shilling--only pretending to go round with his card, had come back with an invented answer. But how could he know, since presumably he couldn't read Italian, that his answer would fit the message? Peter was sorry now that he himself had not gone round, not snatched Miriam bodily away, made sure of her and of what he wanted of her. When forty minutes had elapsed he regarded it as proved that she wouldn't come, and, asking himself what he should do, determined to drive off again and seize her at her comrade's feast. Then he remembered how Nick had mentioned that this entertainment was not to be held at the young actor's lodgings but at some tavern or restaurant the name of which he had not heeded. Suddenly, however, Peter became aware with joy that this name didn't matter, for there was something at the garden door at last. He rushed out before she had had time to ring, and saw as she stepped from the carriage that she was alone. Now that she was there, that he had this evidence she had listened to him and trusted him, all his impatience and bitterness gave way and a flood of pleading tenderness took their place in the first words he spoke to her. It was far "dearer" of her than he had any right to dream, but she was the best and kindest creature--this showed it--as well as the most wonderful. He was really not off his head with his contradictory ways; no, before heaven he wasn't, and he would explain, he would make everything clear. Everything was changed. She stopped short in the little dusky garden, looking at him in the light of the open window. Then she called back to the coachman--they had left the garden door open--"Wait for me, mind; I shall want you again." "What's the matter--won't you stay?" Peter asked. "Are you going out again at this absurd hour? I won't hurt you," he gently urged. And he went back and closed the garden door. He wanted to say to the coachman, "It's no matter--please drive away." At the same time he wouldn't for the world have done anything offensive to her. "I've come because I thought it better to-night, as things have turned out, to do the thing you ask me, whatever it may be," she had already begun. "That's probably what you calculated I would think, eh? What this evening has been you've seen, and I must allow that your hand's in it. That you know for yourself--that you doubtless felt as you sat there. But I confess I don't imagine what you want of me here now," she added. She had remained standing in the path. Peter felt the irony of her "now" and how it made a fool of him, but he had been prepared for this and for much worse. He had begged her not to think him a fool, but in truth at present he cared little if she did. Very likely he was--in spite of his plea that everything was changed: he cared little even himself. However, he spoke in the tone of intense reason and of the fullest disposition to satisfy her. This lucidity only took still more from the dignity of his change of front: his separation from her the day before had had such pretensions to being lucid. But the explanation and the justification were in the very fact, the fact that had complete possession of him. He named it when he replied to her: "I've simply overrated my strength." "Oh I knew--I knew! That's why I entreated you not to come!" Miriam groaned. She turned away lamenting, and for a moment he thought she would retreat to her carriage. But he passed his hand into her arm, to draw her forward, and after an instant felt her yield. "The fact is we must have this thing out," he said. Then he added as he made her go into the house, bending over her, "The failure of my strength--that was just the reason of my coming." She broke into her laugh at these words, as she entered the drawing-room, and it made them sound pompous in their false wisdom. She flung off, as a good-natured tribute to the image of their having the thing out, a white shawl that had been wrapped round her. She was still painted and bedizened, in the splendid dress of her climax, so that she seemed protected and alienated by the character she had been acting. "Whatever it is you want--when I understand--you'll be very brief, won't you? Do you know I've given up a charming supper for you? Mamma has gone there. I've promised to go back to them." "You're an angel not to have let her come with you. I'm sure she wanted to," Peter made reply. "Oh she's all right, but she's nervous." Then the girl added: "Couldn't she keep you away after all?" "Whom are you talking about?" Biddy Dormer was as absent from his mind as if she had never existed. "The charming thing you were with this morning. Is she so afraid of obliging me? Oh she'd be so good for you!" "Don't speak of that," Peter gravely said. "I was in perfect good faith yesterday when I took leave of you. I was--I was. But I can't--I can't: you're too unutterably dear to me." "Oh don't--_please_ don't!" Miriam wailed at this. She stood before the fireless chimney-piece with one of her hands on it. "If it's only to say that, don't you know, what's the use?" "It isn't only to say that. I've a plan, a perfect plan: the whole thing lies clear before me." "And what's the whole thing?" He had to make an effort. "You say your mother's nervous. Ah if you knew how nervous I am!" "Well, I'm not. Go on." "Give it up--give it up!" Peter stammered. "Give it up?" She fixed him like a mild Medusa. "I'll marry you to-morrow if you'll renounce; and in return for the sacrifice you make for me I'll do more for you than ever was done for a woman before." "Renounce after to-night? Do you call that a plan?" she asked. "Those are old words and very foolish ones--you wanted something of that sort a year ago." "Oh I fluttered round the idea at that time; we were talking in the air. I didn't really believe I could make you see it then, and certainly you didn't see it. My own future, moreover, wasn't definite to me. I didn't know what I could offer you. But these last months have made a difference--I do know now. Now what I say is deliberate--It's deeply meditated. I simply can't live without you, and I hold that together we may do great things." She seemed to wonder. "What sort of things?" "The things of my profession, of my life, the things one does for one's country, the responsibility and the honour of great affairs; deeply fascinating when one's immersed in them, and more exciting really--put them even at that--than the excitements of the theatre. Care for me only a little and you'll see what they are, they'll take hold of you. Believe me, believe me," Peter pleaded; "every fibre of my being trembles in what I say to you." "You admitted yesterday it wouldn't do," she made answer. "Where were the fibres of your being then?" "They throbbed in me even more than now, and I was trying, like an ass, not to feel them. Where was this evening yesterday--where were the maddening hours I've just spent? Ah you're the perfection of perfections, and as I sat there to-night you taught me what I really want." "The perfection of perfections?" the girl echoed with the strangest smile. "I needn't try to tell you: you must have felt to-night with such rapture what you are, what you can do. How can I give that up?" he piteously went on. "How can _I_, my poor friend? I like your plans and your responsibilities and your great affairs, as you call them. _Voyons_, they're infantile. I've just shown that I'm a perfection of perfections: therefore it's just the moment to 'renounce,' as you gracefully say? Oh I was sure, I was sure!" And Miriam paused, resting eyes at once lighted and troubled on him as in the effort to think of some arrangement that would help him out of his absurdity. "I was sure, I mean, that if you did come your poor, dear, doting brain would be quite confused," she presently pursued. "I can't be a muff in public just for you, _pourtant_. Dear me, why do you like us so much?" "Like you? I loathe you!" "_Je le vois parbleu bien_!" she lightly returned. "I mean why do you feel us, judge us, understand us so well? I please you because you see, because you know; and then for that very reason of my pleasing you must adapt me to your convenience, you must take me over, as they say. You admire me as an artist and therefore want to put me into a box in which the artist will breathe her last. Ah be reasonable; you must let her live!" "Let her live? As if I could prevent her living!" Peter cried with unmistakable conviction. "Even if I did wish how could I prevent a spirit like yours from expressing itself? Don't talk about my putting you in a box, for, dearest child, I'm taking you out of one," he all persuasively explained. "The artist is irrepressible, eternal; she'll be in everything you are and in everything you do, and you'll go about with her triumphantly exerting your powers, charming the world, carrying everything before you." Miriam's colour rose, through all her artificial surfaces, at this all but convincing appeal, and she asked whimsically: "Shall you

spoke

How many times the word 'spoke' appears in the text?

you to-morrow--there's no question of ten years!" cried Mrs. Rooth with a comicality of plainness. Miriam smiled at Nick, deprecating his horror of such talk. "Isn't it droll, the way she can't get it out of her head?" Then turning almost coaxingly to the old woman: "_Voyons_, look about you: they don't marry us like that." "But they do--_cela se voit tous les jours_. Ask Mr. Dormer." "Oh never! It would be as if I asked him to give us a practical proof." "I shall never prove anything by marrying any one," Nick said. "For me that question's over." Miriam rested kind eyes on him. "Dear me, how you must hate me!" And before he had time to reply she went on to her mother: "People marry them to make them leave the stage; which proves exactly what I say." "Ah they offer them the finest positions," reasoned Mrs. Rooth. "Do you want me to leave it then?" "Oh you can manage if you will!" "The only managing I know anything about is to do my work. If I manage that decently I shall pull through." "But, dearest, may our work not be of many sorts?" "I only know one," said Miriam. At this her mother got up with a sigh. "I see you do wish to drive me into the street." "Mamma's bewildered--there are so many paths she wants to follow, there are so many bundles of hay. As I told you, she wishes to gobble them all," the girl pursued. Then she added: "Yes, go and take the carriage; take a turn round the Park--you always delight in that--and come back for me in an hour." "I'm too vexed with you; the air will do me good," said Mrs. Rooth. But before she went she addressed Nick: "I've your assurance that you'll bring him then to-night?" "Bring Peter? I don't think I shall have to drag him," Nick returned. "But you must do me the justice to remember that if I should resort to force I should do something that's not particularly in my interest--I should be magnanimous." "We must always be that, mustn't we?" moralised Mrs. Rooth. "How could it affect your interest?" Miriam asked less abstractedly. "Yes, as you say," her mother mused at their host, "the question of marriage has ceased to exist for you." "Mamma goes straight at it!" laughed the girl, getting up while Nick rubbed his canvas before answering. Miriam went to mamma and settled her bonnet and mantle in preparation for her drive, then stood a moment with a filial arm about her and as if waiting for their friend's explanation. This, however, when it came halted visibly. "Why you said a while ago that if Peter was there you wouldn't act." "I'll act for _him_," smiled Miriam, inconsequently caressing her mother. "It doesn't matter whom it's for!" Mrs. Rooth declared sagaciously. "Take your drive and relax your mind," said the girl, kissing her. "Come for me in an hour; not later--but not sooner." She went with her to the door, bundled her out, closed it behind her and came back to the position she had quitted. "_This_ is the peace I want!" she gratefully cried as she settled into it. XLV Peter Sherringham said so little during the performance that his companion was struck by his dumbness, especially as Miriam's acting seemed to Nick magnificent. He held his breath while she was on the stage--she gave the whole thing, including the spectator's emotion, such a lift. She had not carried out her fantastic menace of not exerting herself, and, as Mrs. Rooth had said, it little mattered for whom she acted. Nick was conscious in watching her that she went through it all for herself, for the idea that possessed her and that she rendered with extraordinary breadth. She couldn't open the door a part of the way to it and let it simply peep in; if it entered at all it must enter in full procession and occupy the premises in state. This was what had happened on an occasion which, as the less tormented of our young men felt in his stall, grew larger with each throb of the responsive house; till by the time the play was half over it appeared to stretch out wide arms to the future. Nick had often heard more applause, but had never heard more attention, since they were all charmed and hushed together and success seemed to be sitting down with them. There had been of course plenty of announcement--the newspapers had abounded and the arts of the manager had taken the freest license; but it was easy to feel a fine, universal consensus and to recognise everywhere the light spring of hope. People snatched their eyes from the stage an instant to look at each other, all eager to hand on the torch passed to them by the actress over the footlights. It was a part of the impression that she was now only showing to the full, for this time she had verse to deal with and she made it unexpectedly exquisite. She was beauty, melody, truth; she was passion and persuasion and tenderness. She caught up the obstreperous play in soothing, entwining arms and, seeming to tread the air in the flutter of her robe, carried it into the high places of poetry, of art, of style. And she had such tones of nature, such concealments of art, such effusions of life, that the whole scene glowed with the colour she communicated, and the house, pervaded with rosy fire, glowed back at the scene. Nick looked round in the intervals; he felt excited and flushed--the night had turned to a feast of fraternity and he expected to see people embrace each other. The crowd, the agitation, the triumph, the surprise, the signals and rumours, the heated air, his associates, near him, pointing out other figures who presumably were celebrated but whom he had never heard of, all amused him and banished every impulse to question or to compare. Miriam was as happy as some right sensation--she would have fed the memory with deep draughts. One of the things that amused him or at least helped to fill his attention was Peter's attitude, which apparently didn't exclude criticism--rather indeed mainly implied it. This admirer never took his eyes off the actress, but he made no remark about her and never stirred out of his chair. Nick had had from the first a plan of going round to speak to her, but as his companion evidently meant not to move he scrupled at being more forward. During their brief dinner together--they were determined not to be late--Peter had been silent, quite recklessly grave, but also, his kinsman judged, full of the wish to make it clear he was calm. In his seat he was calmer than ever and had an air even of trying to suggest that his attendance, preoccupied as he was with deeper solemnities, was more or less mechanical, the result of a conception of duty, a habit of courtesy. When during a scene in the second act--a scene from which Miriam was absent--Nick observed to him that one might judge from his reserve that he wasn't pleased he replied after a moment: "I've been looking for her mistakes." And when Nick made answer to this that he certainly wouldn't find them he said again in an odd tone: "No, I shan't find them--I shan't find them." It might have seemed that since the girl's performance was a dazzling success he regarded his evening as rather a failure. After the third act Nick said candidly: "My dear fellow, how can you sit here? Aren't you going to speak to her?" To which Peter replied inscrutably: "Lord, no, never again. I bade her good-bye yesterday. She knows what I think of her form. It's very good, but she carries it a little too far. Besides, she didn't want me to come, and it's therefore more discreet to keep away from her." "Surely it isn't an hour for discretion!" Nick cried. "Excuse me at any rate for five minutes." He went behind and reappeared only as the curtain was rising on the fourth act; and in the interval between the fourth and the fifth he went again for a shorter time. Peter was personally detached, but he consented to listen to his companion's vivid account of the state of things on the stage, where the elation of victory had lighted up the place. The strain was over, the ship in port--they were all wiping their faces and grinning. Miriam--yes, positively--was grinning too, and she hadn't asked a question about Peter nor sent him a message. They were kissing all round and dancing for joy. They were on the eve, worse luck, of a tremendous run. Peter groaned irrepressibly for this; it was, save for a slight sign a moment later, the only vibration caused in him by his cousin's report. There was but one voice of regret that they hadn't put on the piece earlier, as the end of the season would interrupt the run. There was but one voice too about the fourth act--it was believed all London would rush to see the fourth act. The crowd about her was a dozen deep and Miriam in the midst of it all charming; she was receiving in the ugly place after the fashion of royalty, almost as hedged with the famous "divinity," yet with a smile and a word for each. She was really like a young queen on her accession. When she saw him, Nick, she had kissed her hand to him over the heads of the courtiers. Nick's artless comment on this was that she had such pretty manners. It made Peter laugh--apparently at his friend's conception of the manners of a young queen. Mrs. Rooth, with a dozen shawls on her arm, was as red as the kitchen-fire, but you couldn't tell if Miriam were red or pale: she was so cleverly, finely made up--perhaps a little too much. Dashwood of course was greatly to the fore, but you hadn't to mention his own performance to him: he took it all handsomely and wouldn't hear of anything but that _her_ fortune was made. He didn't say much indeed, but evidently had ideas about her fortune; he nodded significant things and whistled inimitable sounds--"Heuh, heuh!" He was perfectly satisfied; moreover, he looked further ahead than any one. It was on coming back to his place after the fourth act that Nick put in, for his companion's benefit, most of these touches in his sketch of the situation. If Peter had continued to look for Miriam's mistakes he hadn't yet found them: the fourth act, bristling with dangers, putting a premium on every sort of cheap effect, had rounded itself without a flaw. Sitting there alone while Nick was away he had leisure to meditate on the wonder of this--on the art with which the girl had separated passion from violence, filling the whole place and never screaming; for it had often seemed to him in London of old that the yell of theatrical emotion rang through the shrinking night like the voice of the Sunday newsboy. Miriam had never been more present to him than at this hour; but she was inextricably transmuted--present essentially as the romantic heroine she represented. His state of mind was of the strangest and he was conscious of its strangeness, just as he was conscious in his very person of a lapse of resistance which likened itself absurdly to liberation. He felt weak at the same time that he felt inspired, and he felt inspired at the same time that he knew, or believed he knew, that his face was a blank. He saw things as a shining confusion, and yet somehow something monstrously definite kept surging out of them. Miriam was a beautiful, actual, fictive, impossible young woman of a past age, an undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one's own affairs. But that reality was a part of her spectator's joy, and she was not changed back to the common by his perception of the magnificent trick of art with which it was connected. Before his kinsman rejoined him Peter, taking a visiting-card from his pocket, had written on it in pencil a few words in a foreign tongue; but as at that moment he saw Nick coming in he immediately put it out of view. The last thing before the curtain rose on the fifth act that young man mentioned his having brought a message from Basil Dashwood, who hoped they both, on leaving the theatre, would come to supper with him in company with Miriam and her mother and several others: he had prepared a little informal banquet in honour of so famous a night. At this, while the curtain was about to rise, Peter immediately took out his card again and added something--he wrote the finest small hand you could see. Nick asked him what he was doing, and he waited but an instant. "It's a word to say I can't come." "To Dashwood? Oh I shall go," said Nick. "Well, I hope you'll enjoy it!" his companion replied in a tone which came back to him afterwards. When the curtain fell on the last act the people stayed, standing up in their places for acclamation. The applause shook the house--the recall became a clamour, the relief from a long tension. This was in any performance a moment Peter detested, but he stood for an instant beside Nick, who clapped, to his cousin's diplomatic sense, after the fashion of a school-boy at the pantomime. There was a veritable roar while the curtain drew back at the side most removed from our pair. Peter could see Basil Dashwood holding it, making a passage for the male "juvenile lead," who had Miriam in tow. Nick redoubled his efforts; heard the plaudits swell; saw the bows of the leading gentleman, who was hot and fat; saw Miriam, personally conducted and closer to the footlights, grow brighter and bigger and more swaying; and then became aware that his own comrade had with extreme agility slipped out of the stalls. Nick had already lost sight of him--he had apparently taken but a minute to escape from the house; and wondered at his quitting him without a farewell if he was to leave England on the morrow and they were not to meet at the hospitable Dashwood's. He wondered even what Peter was "up to," since, as he had assured him, there was no question of his going round to Miriam. He waited to see this young lady reappear three times, dragging Dashwood behind her at the second with a friendly arm, to whom, in turn, was hooked Miss Fanny Rover, the actress entrusted in the piece with the inevitable comic relief. He went out slowly with the crowd and at the door looked again for Peter, who struck him as deficient for once in finish. He couldn't know that in another direction and while he was helping the house to "rise" at its heroine, his kinsman had been particularly explicit. On reaching the lobby Peter had pounced on a small boy in buttons, who seemed superfluously connected with a desolate refreshment-room and, from the tips of his toes, was peeping at the stage through the glazed hole in the door of a box. Into one of the child's hands he thrust the card he had drawn again from his waistcoat and into the other the largest silver coin he could find in the same receptacle, while he bent over him with words of adjuration--words the little page tried to help himself to apprehend by instantly attempting to peruse the other words written on the card. "That's no use--it's Italian," said Peter; "only carry it round to Miss Rooth without a minute's delay. Place it in her hand and she'll give you some object--a bracelet, a glove, or a flower--to bring me back as a sign that she has received it. I shall be outside; bring me there what she gives you and you shall have another shilling--only fly!" His small messenger sounded him a moment with the sharp face of London wage-earning, and still more of London tip-earning, infancy, and vanished as swiftly as a slave of the Arabian Nights. While he waited in the lobby the audience began to pour out, and before the urchin had come back to him he was clapped on the shoulder by Nick. "I'm glad I haven't lost you, but why didn't you stay to give her a hand?" "Give her a hand? I hated it." "My dear man, I don't follow you," Nick said. "If you won't come to Dashwood's supper I fear our ways don't lie together." "Thank him very much; say I've to get up at an unnatural hour." To this Peter added: "I think I ought to tell you she may not be there." "Miss Rooth? Why it's all _for_ her." "I'm waiting for a word from her--she may change her mind." Nick showed his interest. "For you? What then have you proposed?" "I've proposed marriage," said Peter in a strange voice. "I say--!" Nick broke out; and at the same moment Peter's messenger squeezed through the press and stood before him. "She has given me nothing, sir," the boy announced; "but she says I'm to say 'All right!'" Nick's stare widened. "You've proposed through _him_?" "Aye, and she accepts. Good-night!"--on which, turning away, Peter bounded into a hansom. He said something to the driver through the roof, and Nick's eyes followed the cab as it started off. This young man was mystified, was even amused; especially when the youth in buttons, planted there and wondering too, brought forth: "Please sir, he told me he'd give me a shilling and he've forgot it." "Oh I can't pay you for _that_!" Nick laughed. But he fished out a dole, though he was vexed at the injury to the supper. XLVI Peter meanwhile rolled away through the summer night to Saint John's Wood. He had put the pressure of strong words on his young friend, entreating her to drive home immediately, return there without any one, without even her mother. He wished to see her alone and for a purpose he would fully and satisfactorily explain--couldn't she trust him? He besought her to remember his own situation and throw over her supper, throw over everything. He would wait for her with unspeakable impatience in Balaklava Place. He did so, when he got there, but it had taken half an hour. Interminable seemed his lonely vigil in Miss Lumley's drawing-room, where the character of the original proprietress came out to him more than ever before in a kind of afterglow of old sociabilities, a vulgar, ghostly reference. The numerous candles had been lighted for him, and Mrs. Rooth's familiar fictions lay about; but his nerves forbade him the solace of a chair and a book. He walked up and down, thinking and listening, and as the long window, the balmy air permitting, stood open to the garden, he passed several times in and out. A carriage appeared to stop at the gate--then there was nothing; he heard the rare rattle of wheels and the far-off hum of London. His impatience was overwrought, and though he knew this it persisted; it would have been no easy matter for Miriam to break away from the flock of her felicitators. Still less simple was it doubtless for her to leave poor Dashwood with his supper on his hands. Perhaps she would bring Dashwood with her, bring him to time her; she was capable of playing him--that is, of playing Her Majesty's new representative to the small far-off State, or even of playing them both--that trick. Perhaps the little wretch in buttons--Peter remembered now the neglected shilling--only pretending to go round with his card, had come back with an invented answer. But how could he know, since presumably he couldn't read Italian, that his answer would fit the message? Peter was sorry now that he himself had not gone round, not snatched Miriam bodily away, made sure of her and of what he wanted of her. When forty minutes had elapsed he regarded it as proved that she wouldn't come, and, asking himself what he should do, determined to drive off again and seize her at her comrade's feast. Then he remembered how Nick had mentioned that this entertainment was not to be held at the young actor's lodgings but at some tavern or restaurant the name of which he had not heeded. Suddenly, however, Peter became aware with joy that this name didn't matter, for there was something at the garden door at last. He rushed out before she had had time to ring, and saw as she stepped from the carriage that she was alone. Now that she was there, that he had this evidence she had listened to him and trusted him, all his impatience and bitterness gave way and a flood of pleading tenderness took their place in the first words he spoke to her. It was far "dearer" of her than he had any right to dream, but she was the best and kindest creature--this showed it--as well as the most wonderful. He was really not off his head with his contradictory ways; no, before heaven he wasn't, and he would explain, he would make everything clear. Everything was changed. She stopped short in the little dusky garden, looking at him in the light of the open window. Then she called back to the coachman--they had left the garden door open--"Wait for me, mind; I shall want you again." "What's the matter--won't you stay?" Peter asked. "Are you going out again at this absurd hour? I won't hurt you," he gently urged. And he went back and closed the garden door. He wanted to say to the coachman, "It's no matter--please drive away." At the same time he wouldn't for the world have done anything offensive to her. "I've come because I thought it better to-night, as things have turned out, to do the thing you ask me, whatever it may be," she had already begun. "That's probably what you calculated I would think, eh? What this evening has been you've seen, and I must allow that your hand's in it. That you know for yourself--that you doubtless felt as you sat there. But I confess I don't imagine what you want of me here now," she added. She had remained standing in the path. Peter felt the irony of her "now" and how it made a fool of him, but he had been prepared for this and for much worse. He had begged her not to think him a fool, but in truth at present he cared little if she did. Very likely he was--in spite of his plea that everything was changed: he cared little even himself. However, he spoke in the tone of intense reason and of the fullest disposition to satisfy her. This lucidity only took still more from the dignity of his change of front: his separation from her the day before had had such pretensions to being lucid. But the explanation and the justification were in the very fact, the fact that had complete possession of him. He named it when he replied to her: "I've simply overrated my strength." "Oh I knew--I knew! That's why I entreated you not to come!" Miriam groaned. She turned away lamenting, and for a moment he thought she would retreat to her carriage. But he passed his hand into her arm, to draw her forward, and after an instant felt her yield. "The fact is we must have this thing out," he said. Then he added as he made her go into the house, bending over her, "The failure of my strength--that was just the reason of my coming." She broke into her laugh at these words, as she entered the drawing-room, and it made them sound pompous in their false wisdom. She flung off, as a good-natured tribute to the image of their having the thing out, a white shawl that had been wrapped round her. She was still painted and bedizened, in the splendid dress of her climax, so that she seemed protected and alienated by the character she had been acting. "Whatever it is you want--when I understand--you'll be very brief, won't you? Do you know I've given up a charming supper for you? Mamma has gone there. I've promised to go back to them." "You're an angel not to have let her come with you. I'm sure she wanted to," Peter made reply. "Oh she's all right, but she's nervous." Then the girl added: "Couldn't she keep you away after all?" "Whom are you talking about?" Biddy Dormer was as absent from his mind as if she had never existed. "The charming thing you were with this morning. Is she so afraid of obliging me? Oh she'd be so good for you!" "Don't speak of that," Peter gravely said. "I was in perfect good faith yesterday when I took leave of you. I was--I was. But I can't--I can't: you're too unutterably dear to me." "Oh don't--_please_ don't!" Miriam wailed at this. She stood before the fireless chimney-piece with one of her hands on it. "If it's only to say that, don't you know, what's the use?" "It isn't only to say that. I've a plan, a perfect plan: the whole thing lies clear before me." "And what's the whole thing?" He had to make an effort. "You say your mother's nervous. Ah if you knew how nervous I am!" "Well, I'm not. Go on." "Give it up--give it up!" Peter stammered. "Give it up?" She fixed him like a mild Medusa. "I'll marry you to-morrow if you'll renounce; and in return for the sacrifice you make for me I'll do more for you than ever was done for a woman before." "Renounce after to-night? Do you call that a plan?" she asked. "Those are old words and very foolish ones--you wanted something of that sort a year ago." "Oh I fluttered round the idea at that time; we were talking in the air. I didn't really believe I could make you see it then, and certainly you didn't see it. My own future, moreover, wasn't definite to me. I didn't know what I could offer you. But these last months have made a difference--I do know now. Now what I say is deliberate--It's deeply meditated. I simply can't live without you, and I hold that together we may do great things." She seemed to wonder. "What sort of things?" "The things of my profession, of my life, the things one does for one's country, the responsibility and the honour of great affairs; deeply fascinating when one's immersed in them, and more exciting really--put them even at that--than the excitements of the theatre. Care for me only a little and you'll see what they are, they'll take hold of you. Believe me, believe me," Peter pleaded; "every fibre of my being trembles in what I say to you." "You admitted yesterday it wouldn't do," she made answer. "Where were the fibres of your being then?" "They throbbed in me even more than now, and I was trying, like an ass, not to feel them. Where was this evening yesterday--where were the maddening hours I've just spent? Ah you're the perfection of perfections, and as I sat there to-night you taught me what I really want." "The perfection of perfections?" the girl echoed with the strangest smile. "I needn't try to tell you: you must have felt to-night with such rapture what you are, what you can do. How can I give that up?" he piteously went on. "How can _I_, my poor friend? I like your plans and your responsibilities and your great affairs, as you call them. _Voyons_, they're infantile. I've just shown that I'm a perfection of perfections: therefore it's just the moment to 'renounce,' as you gracefully say? Oh I was sure, I was sure!" And Miriam paused, resting eyes at once lighted and troubled on him as in the effort to think of some arrangement that would help him out of his absurdity. "I was sure, I mean, that if you did come your poor, dear, doting brain would be quite confused," she presently pursued. "I can't be a muff in public just for you, _pourtant_. Dear me, why do you like us so much?" "Like you? I loathe you!" "_Je le vois parbleu bien_!" she lightly returned. "I mean why do you feel us, judge us, understand us so well? I please you because you see, because you know; and then for that very reason of my pleasing you must adapt me to your convenience, you must take me over, as they say. You admire me as an artist and therefore want to put me into a box in which the artist will breathe her last. Ah be reasonable; you must let her live!" "Let her live? As if I could prevent her living!" Peter cried with unmistakable conviction. "Even if I did wish how could I prevent a spirit like yours from expressing itself? Don't talk about my putting you in a box, for, dearest child, I'm taking you out of one," he all persuasively explained. "The artist is irrepressible, eternal; she'll be in everything you are and in everything you do, and you'll go about with her triumphantly exerting your powers, charming the world, carrying everything before you." Miriam's colour rose, through all her artificial surfaces, at this all but convincing appeal, and she asked whimsically: "Shall you

actress

How many times the word 'actress' appears in the text?

you to-morrow--there's no question of ten years!" cried Mrs. Rooth with a comicality of plainness. Miriam smiled at Nick, deprecating his horror of such talk. "Isn't it droll, the way she can't get it out of her head?" Then turning almost coaxingly to the old woman: "_Voyons_, look about you: they don't marry us like that." "But they do--_cela se voit tous les jours_. Ask Mr. Dormer." "Oh never! It would be as if I asked him to give us a practical proof." "I shall never prove anything by marrying any one," Nick said. "For me that question's over." Miriam rested kind eyes on him. "Dear me, how you must hate me!" And before he had time to reply she went on to her mother: "People marry them to make them leave the stage; which proves exactly what I say." "Ah they offer them the finest positions," reasoned Mrs. Rooth. "Do you want me to leave it then?" "Oh you can manage if you will!" "The only managing I know anything about is to do my work. If I manage that decently I shall pull through." "But, dearest, may our work not be of many sorts?" "I only know one," said Miriam. At this her mother got up with a sigh. "I see you do wish to drive me into the street." "Mamma's bewildered--there are so many paths she wants to follow, there are so many bundles of hay. As I told you, she wishes to gobble them all," the girl pursued. Then she added: "Yes, go and take the carriage; take a turn round the Park--you always delight in that--and come back for me in an hour." "I'm too vexed with you; the air will do me good," said Mrs. Rooth. But before she went she addressed Nick: "I've your assurance that you'll bring him then to-night?" "Bring Peter? I don't think I shall have to drag him," Nick returned. "But you must do me the justice to remember that if I should resort to force I should do something that's not particularly in my interest--I should be magnanimous." "We must always be that, mustn't we?" moralised Mrs. Rooth. "How could it affect your interest?" Miriam asked less abstractedly. "Yes, as you say," her mother mused at their host, "the question of marriage has ceased to exist for you." "Mamma goes straight at it!" laughed the girl, getting up while Nick rubbed his canvas before answering. Miriam went to mamma and settled her bonnet and mantle in preparation for her drive, then stood a moment with a filial arm about her and as if waiting for their friend's explanation. This, however, when it came halted visibly. "Why you said a while ago that if Peter was there you wouldn't act." "I'll act for _him_," smiled Miriam, inconsequently caressing her mother. "It doesn't matter whom it's for!" Mrs. Rooth declared sagaciously. "Take your drive and relax your mind," said the girl, kissing her. "Come for me in an hour; not later--but not sooner." She went with her to the door, bundled her out, closed it behind her and came back to the position she had quitted. "_This_ is the peace I want!" she gratefully cried as she settled into it. XLV Peter Sherringham said so little during the performance that his companion was struck by his dumbness, especially as Miriam's acting seemed to Nick magnificent. He held his breath while she was on the stage--she gave the whole thing, including the spectator's emotion, such a lift. She had not carried out her fantastic menace of not exerting herself, and, as Mrs. Rooth had said, it little mattered for whom she acted. Nick was conscious in watching her that she went through it all for herself, for the idea that possessed her and that she rendered with extraordinary breadth. She couldn't open the door a part of the way to it and let it simply peep in; if it entered at all it must enter in full procession and occupy the premises in state. This was what had happened on an occasion which, as the less tormented of our young men felt in his stall, grew larger with each throb of the responsive house; till by the time the play was half over it appeared to stretch out wide arms to the future. Nick had often heard more applause, but had never heard more attention, since they were all charmed and hushed together and success seemed to be sitting down with them. There had been of course plenty of announcement--the newspapers had abounded and the arts of the manager had taken the freest license; but it was easy to feel a fine, universal consensus and to recognise everywhere the light spring of hope. People snatched their eyes from the stage an instant to look at each other, all eager to hand on the torch passed to them by the actress over the footlights. It was a part of the impression that she was now only showing to the full, for this time she had verse to deal with and she made it unexpectedly exquisite. She was beauty, melody, truth; she was passion and persuasion and tenderness. She caught up the obstreperous play in soothing, entwining arms and, seeming to tread the air in the flutter of her robe, carried it into the high places of poetry, of art, of style. And she had such tones of nature, such concealments of art, such effusions of life, that the whole scene glowed with the colour she communicated, and the house, pervaded with rosy fire, glowed back at the scene. Nick looked round in the intervals; he felt excited and flushed--the night had turned to a feast of fraternity and he expected to see people embrace each other. The crowd, the agitation, the triumph, the surprise, the signals and rumours, the heated air, his associates, near him, pointing out other figures who presumably were celebrated but whom he had never heard of, all amused him and banished every impulse to question or to compare. Miriam was as happy as some right sensation--she would have fed the memory with deep draughts. One of the things that amused him or at least helped to fill his attention was Peter's attitude, which apparently didn't exclude criticism--rather indeed mainly implied it. This admirer never took his eyes off the actress, but he made no remark about her and never stirred out of his chair. Nick had had from the first a plan of going round to speak to her, but as his companion evidently meant not to move he scrupled at being more forward. During their brief dinner together--they were determined not to be late--Peter had been silent, quite recklessly grave, but also, his kinsman judged, full of the wish to make it clear he was calm. In his seat he was calmer than ever and had an air even of trying to suggest that his attendance, preoccupied as he was with deeper solemnities, was more or less mechanical, the result of a conception of duty, a habit of courtesy. When during a scene in the second act--a scene from which Miriam was absent--Nick observed to him that one might judge from his reserve that he wasn't pleased he replied after a moment: "I've been looking for her mistakes." And when Nick made answer to this that he certainly wouldn't find them he said again in an odd tone: "No, I shan't find them--I shan't find them." It might have seemed that since the girl's performance was a dazzling success he regarded his evening as rather a failure. After the third act Nick said candidly: "My dear fellow, how can you sit here? Aren't you going to speak to her?" To which Peter replied inscrutably: "Lord, no, never again. I bade her good-bye yesterday. She knows what I think of her form. It's very good, but she carries it a little too far. Besides, she didn't want me to come, and it's therefore more discreet to keep away from her." "Surely it isn't an hour for discretion!" Nick cried. "Excuse me at any rate for five minutes." He went behind and reappeared only as the curtain was rising on the fourth act; and in the interval between the fourth and the fifth he went again for a shorter time. Peter was personally detached, but he consented to listen to his companion's vivid account of the state of things on the stage, where the elation of victory had lighted up the place. The strain was over, the ship in port--they were all wiping their faces and grinning. Miriam--yes, positively--was grinning too, and she hadn't asked a question about Peter nor sent him a message. They were kissing all round and dancing for joy. They were on the eve, worse luck, of a tremendous run. Peter groaned irrepressibly for this; it was, save for a slight sign a moment later, the only vibration caused in him by his cousin's report. There was but one voice of regret that they hadn't put on the piece earlier, as the end of the season would interrupt the run. There was but one voice too about the fourth act--it was believed all London would rush to see the fourth act. The crowd about her was a dozen deep and Miriam in the midst of it all charming; she was receiving in the ugly place after the fashion of royalty, almost as hedged with the famous "divinity," yet with a smile and a word for each. She was really like a young queen on her accession. When she saw him, Nick, she had kissed her hand to him over the heads of the courtiers. Nick's artless comment on this was that she had such pretty manners. It made Peter laugh--apparently at his friend's conception of the manners of a young queen. Mrs. Rooth, with a dozen shawls on her arm, was as red as the kitchen-fire, but you couldn't tell if Miriam were red or pale: she was so cleverly, finely made up--perhaps a little too much. Dashwood of course was greatly to the fore, but you hadn't to mention his own performance to him: he took it all handsomely and wouldn't hear of anything but that _her_ fortune was made. He didn't say much indeed, but evidently had ideas about her fortune; he nodded significant things and whistled inimitable sounds--"Heuh, heuh!" He was perfectly satisfied; moreover, he looked further ahead than any one. It was on coming back to his place after the fourth act that Nick put in, for his companion's benefit, most of these touches in his sketch of the situation. If Peter had continued to look for Miriam's mistakes he hadn't yet found them: the fourth act, bristling with dangers, putting a premium on every sort of cheap effect, had rounded itself without a flaw. Sitting there alone while Nick was away he had leisure to meditate on the wonder of this--on the art with which the girl had separated passion from violence, filling the whole place and never screaming; for it had often seemed to him in London of old that the yell of theatrical emotion rang through the shrinking night like the voice of the Sunday newsboy. Miriam had never been more present to him than at this hour; but she was inextricably transmuted--present essentially as the romantic heroine she represented. His state of mind was of the strangest and he was conscious of its strangeness, just as he was conscious in his very person of a lapse of resistance which likened itself absurdly to liberation. He felt weak at the same time that he felt inspired, and he felt inspired at the same time that he knew, or believed he knew, that his face was a blank. He saw things as a shining confusion, and yet somehow something monstrously definite kept surging out of them. Miriam was a beautiful, actual, fictive, impossible young woman of a past age, an undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one's own affairs. But that reality was a part of her spectator's joy, and she was not changed back to the common by his perception of the magnificent trick of art with which it was connected. Before his kinsman rejoined him Peter, taking a visiting-card from his pocket, had written on it in pencil a few words in a foreign tongue; but as at that moment he saw Nick coming in he immediately put it out of view. The last thing before the curtain rose on the fifth act that young man mentioned his having brought a message from Basil Dashwood, who hoped they both, on leaving the theatre, would come to supper with him in company with Miriam and her mother and several others: he had prepared a little informal banquet in honour of so famous a night. At this, while the curtain was about to rise, Peter immediately took out his card again and added something--he wrote the finest small hand you could see. Nick asked him what he was doing, and he waited but an instant. "It's a word to say I can't come." "To Dashwood? Oh I shall go," said Nick. "Well, I hope you'll enjoy it!" his companion replied in a tone which came back to him afterwards. When the curtain fell on the last act the people stayed, standing up in their places for acclamation. The applause shook the house--the recall became a clamour, the relief from a long tension. This was in any performance a moment Peter detested, but he stood for an instant beside Nick, who clapped, to his cousin's diplomatic sense, after the fashion of a school-boy at the pantomime. There was a veritable roar while the curtain drew back at the side most removed from our pair. Peter could see Basil Dashwood holding it, making a passage for the male "juvenile lead," who had Miriam in tow. Nick redoubled his efforts; heard the plaudits swell; saw the bows of the leading gentleman, who was hot and fat; saw Miriam, personally conducted and closer to the footlights, grow brighter and bigger and more swaying; and then became aware that his own comrade had with extreme agility slipped out of the stalls. Nick had already lost sight of him--he had apparently taken but a minute to escape from the house; and wondered at his quitting him without a farewell if he was to leave England on the morrow and they were not to meet at the hospitable Dashwood's. He wondered even what Peter was "up to," since, as he had assured him, there was no question of his going round to Miriam. He waited to see this young lady reappear three times, dragging Dashwood behind her at the second with a friendly arm, to whom, in turn, was hooked Miss Fanny Rover, the actress entrusted in the piece with the inevitable comic relief. He went out slowly with the crowd and at the door looked again for Peter, who struck him as deficient for once in finish. He couldn't know that in another direction and while he was helping the house to "rise" at its heroine, his kinsman had been particularly explicit. On reaching the lobby Peter had pounced on a small boy in buttons, who seemed superfluously connected with a desolate refreshment-room and, from the tips of his toes, was peeping at the stage through the glazed hole in the door of a box. Into one of the child's hands he thrust the card he had drawn again from his waistcoat and into the other the largest silver coin he could find in the same receptacle, while he bent over him with words of adjuration--words the little page tried to help himself to apprehend by instantly attempting to peruse the other words written on the card. "That's no use--it's Italian," said Peter; "only carry it round to Miss Rooth without a minute's delay. Place it in her hand and she'll give you some object--a bracelet, a glove, or a flower--to bring me back as a sign that she has received it. I shall be outside; bring me there what she gives you and you shall have another shilling--only fly!" His small messenger sounded him a moment with the sharp face of London wage-earning, and still more of London tip-earning, infancy, and vanished as swiftly as a slave of the Arabian Nights. While he waited in the lobby the audience began to pour out, and before the urchin had come back to him he was clapped on the shoulder by Nick. "I'm glad I haven't lost you, but why didn't you stay to give her a hand?" "Give her a hand? I hated it." "My dear man, I don't follow you," Nick said. "If you won't come to Dashwood's supper I fear our ways don't lie together." "Thank him very much; say I've to get up at an unnatural hour." To this Peter added: "I think I ought to tell you she may not be there." "Miss Rooth? Why it's all _for_ her." "I'm waiting for a word from her--she may change her mind." Nick showed his interest. "For you? What then have you proposed?" "I've proposed marriage," said Peter in a strange voice. "I say--!" Nick broke out; and at the same moment Peter's messenger squeezed through the press and stood before him. "She has given me nothing, sir," the boy announced; "but she says I'm to say 'All right!'" Nick's stare widened. "You've proposed through _him_?" "Aye, and she accepts. Good-night!"--on which, turning away, Peter bounded into a hansom. He said something to the driver through the roof, and Nick's eyes followed the cab as it started off. This young man was mystified, was even amused; especially when the youth in buttons, planted there and wondering too, brought forth: "Please sir, he told me he'd give me a shilling and he've forgot it." "Oh I can't pay you for _that_!" Nick laughed. But he fished out a dole, though he was vexed at the injury to the supper. XLVI Peter meanwhile rolled away through the summer night to Saint John's Wood. He had put the pressure of strong words on his young friend, entreating her to drive home immediately, return there without any one, without even her mother. He wished to see her alone and for a purpose he would fully and satisfactorily explain--couldn't she trust him? He besought her to remember his own situation and throw over her supper, throw over everything. He would wait for her with unspeakable impatience in Balaklava Place. He did so, when he got there, but it had taken half an hour. Interminable seemed his lonely vigil in Miss Lumley's drawing-room, where the character of the original proprietress came out to him more than ever before in a kind of afterglow of old sociabilities, a vulgar, ghostly reference. The numerous candles had been lighted for him, and Mrs. Rooth's familiar fictions lay about; but his nerves forbade him the solace of a chair and a book. He walked up and down, thinking and listening, and as the long window, the balmy air permitting, stood open to the garden, he passed several times in and out. A carriage appeared to stop at the gate--then there was nothing; he heard the rare rattle of wheels and the far-off hum of London. His impatience was overwrought, and though he knew this it persisted; it would have been no easy matter for Miriam to break away from the flock of her felicitators. Still less simple was it doubtless for her to leave poor Dashwood with his supper on his hands. Perhaps she would bring Dashwood with her, bring him to time her; she was capable of playing him--that is, of playing Her Majesty's new representative to the small far-off State, or even of playing them both--that trick. Perhaps the little wretch in buttons--Peter remembered now the neglected shilling--only pretending to go round with his card, had come back with an invented answer. But how could he know, since presumably he couldn't read Italian, that his answer would fit the message? Peter was sorry now that he himself had not gone round, not snatched Miriam bodily away, made sure of her and of what he wanted of her. When forty minutes had elapsed he regarded it as proved that she wouldn't come, and, asking himself what he should do, determined to drive off again and seize her at her comrade's feast. Then he remembered how Nick had mentioned that this entertainment was not to be held at the young actor's lodgings but at some tavern or restaurant the name of which he had not heeded. Suddenly, however, Peter became aware with joy that this name didn't matter, for there was something at the garden door at last. He rushed out before she had had time to ring, and saw as she stepped from the carriage that she was alone. Now that she was there, that he had this evidence she had listened to him and trusted him, all his impatience and bitterness gave way and a flood of pleading tenderness took their place in the first words he spoke to her. It was far "dearer" of her than he had any right to dream, but she was the best and kindest creature--this showed it--as well as the most wonderful. He was really not off his head with his contradictory ways; no, before heaven he wasn't, and he would explain, he would make everything clear. Everything was changed. She stopped short in the little dusky garden, looking at him in the light of the open window. Then she called back to the coachman--they had left the garden door open--"Wait for me, mind; I shall want you again." "What's the matter--won't you stay?" Peter asked. "Are you going out again at this absurd hour? I won't hurt you," he gently urged. And he went back and closed the garden door. He wanted to say to the coachman, "It's no matter--please drive away." At the same time he wouldn't for the world have done anything offensive to her. "I've come because I thought it better to-night, as things have turned out, to do the thing you ask me, whatever it may be," she had already begun. "That's probably what you calculated I would think, eh? What this evening has been you've seen, and I must allow that your hand's in it. That you know for yourself--that you doubtless felt as you sat there. But I confess I don't imagine what you want of me here now," she added. She had remained standing in the path. Peter felt the irony of her "now" and how it made a fool of him, but he had been prepared for this and for much worse. He had begged her not to think him a fool, but in truth at present he cared little if she did. Very likely he was--in spite of his plea that everything was changed: he cared little even himself. However, he spoke in the tone of intense reason and of the fullest disposition to satisfy her. This lucidity only took still more from the dignity of his change of front: his separation from her the day before had had such pretensions to being lucid. But the explanation and the justification were in the very fact, the fact that had complete possession of him. He named it when he replied to her: "I've simply overrated my strength." "Oh I knew--I knew! That's why I entreated you not to come!" Miriam groaned. She turned away lamenting, and for a moment he thought she would retreat to her carriage. But he passed his hand into her arm, to draw her forward, and after an instant felt her yield. "The fact is we must have this thing out," he said. Then he added as he made her go into the house, bending over her, "The failure of my strength--that was just the reason of my coming." She broke into her laugh at these words, as she entered the drawing-room, and it made them sound pompous in their false wisdom. She flung off, as a good-natured tribute to the image of their having the thing out, a white shawl that had been wrapped round her. She was still painted and bedizened, in the splendid dress of her climax, so that she seemed protected and alienated by the character she had been acting. "Whatever it is you want--when I understand--you'll be very brief, won't you? Do you know I've given up a charming supper for you? Mamma has gone there. I've promised to go back to them." "You're an angel not to have let her come with you. I'm sure she wanted to," Peter made reply. "Oh she's all right, but she's nervous." Then the girl added: "Couldn't she keep you away after all?" "Whom are you talking about?" Biddy Dormer was as absent from his mind as if she had never existed. "The charming thing you were with this morning. Is she so afraid of obliging me? Oh she'd be so good for you!" "Don't speak of that," Peter gravely said. "I was in perfect good faith yesterday when I took leave of you. I was--I was. But I can't--I can't: you're too unutterably dear to me." "Oh don't--_please_ don't!" Miriam wailed at this. She stood before the fireless chimney-piece with one of her hands on it. "If it's only to say that, don't you know, what's the use?" "It isn't only to say that. I've a plan, a perfect plan: the whole thing lies clear before me." "And what's the whole thing?" He had to make an effort. "You say your mother's nervous. Ah if you knew how nervous I am!" "Well, I'm not. Go on." "Give it up--give it up!" Peter stammered. "Give it up?" She fixed him like a mild Medusa. "I'll marry you to-morrow if you'll renounce; and in return for the sacrifice you make for me I'll do more for you than ever was done for a woman before." "Renounce after to-night? Do you call that a plan?" she asked. "Those are old words and very foolish ones--you wanted something of that sort a year ago." "Oh I fluttered round the idea at that time; we were talking in the air. I didn't really believe I could make you see it then, and certainly you didn't see it. My own future, moreover, wasn't definite to me. I didn't know what I could offer you. But these last months have made a difference--I do know now. Now what I say is deliberate--It's deeply meditated. I simply can't live without you, and I hold that together we may do great things." She seemed to wonder. "What sort of things?" "The things of my profession, of my life, the things one does for one's country, the responsibility and the honour of great affairs; deeply fascinating when one's immersed in them, and more exciting really--put them even at that--than the excitements of the theatre. Care for me only a little and you'll see what they are, they'll take hold of you. Believe me, believe me," Peter pleaded; "every fibre of my being trembles in what I say to you." "You admitted yesterday it wouldn't do," she made answer. "Where were the fibres of your being then?" "They throbbed in me even more than now, and I was trying, like an ass, not to feel them. Where was this evening yesterday--where were the maddening hours I've just spent? Ah you're the perfection of perfections, and as I sat there to-night you taught me what I really want." "The perfection of perfections?" the girl echoed with the strangest smile. "I needn't try to tell you: you must have felt to-night with such rapture what you are, what you can do. How can I give that up?" he piteously went on. "How can _I_, my poor friend? I like your plans and your responsibilities and your great affairs, as you call them. _Voyons_, they're infantile. I've just shown that I'm a perfection of perfections: therefore it's just the moment to 'renounce,' as you gracefully say? Oh I was sure, I was sure!" And Miriam paused, resting eyes at once lighted and troubled on him as in the effort to think of some arrangement that would help him out of his absurdity. "I was sure, I mean, that if you did come your poor, dear, doting brain would be quite confused," she presently pursued. "I can't be a muff in public just for you, _pourtant_. Dear me, why do you like us so much?" "Like you? I loathe you!" "_Je le vois parbleu bien_!" she lightly returned. "I mean why do you feel us, judge us, understand us so well? I please you because you see, because you know; and then for that very reason of my pleasing you must adapt me to your convenience, you must take me over, as they say. You admire me as an artist and therefore want to put me into a box in which the artist will breathe her last. Ah be reasonable; you must let her live!" "Let her live? As if I could prevent her living!" Peter cried with unmistakable conviction. "Even if I did wish how could I prevent a spirit like yours from expressing itself? Don't talk about my putting you in a box, for, dearest child, I'm taking you out of one," he all persuasively explained. "The artist is irrepressible, eternal; she'll be in everything you are and in everything you do, and you'll go about with her triumphantly exerting your powers, charming the world, carrying everything before you." Miriam's colour rose, through all her artificial surfaces, at this all but convincing appeal, and she asked whimsically: "Shall you

evidently

How many times the word 'evidently' appears in the text?

you to-morrow--there's no question of ten years!" cried Mrs. Rooth with a comicality of plainness. Miriam smiled at Nick, deprecating his horror of such talk. "Isn't it droll, the way she can't get it out of her head?" Then turning almost coaxingly to the old woman: "_Voyons_, look about you: they don't marry us like that." "But they do--_cela se voit tous les jours_. Ask Mr. Dormer." "Oh never! It would be as if I asked him to give us a practical proof." "I shall never prove anything by marrying any one," Nick said. "For me that question's over." Miriam rested kind eyes on him. "Dear me, how you must hate me!" And before he had time to reply she went on to her mother: "People marry them to make them leave the stage; which proves exactly what I say." "Ah they offer them the finest positions," reasoned Mrs. Rooth. "Do you want me to leave it then?" "Oh you can manage if you will!" "The only managing I know anything about is to do my work. If I manage that decently I shall pull through." "But, dearest, may our work not be of many sorts?" "I only know one," said Miriam. At this her mother got up with a sigh. "I see you do wish to drive me into the street." "Mamma's bewildered--there are so many paths she wants to follow, there are so many bundles of hay. As I told you, she wishes to gobble them all," the girl pursued. Then she added: "Yes, go and take the carriage; take a turn round the Park--you always delight in that--and come back for me in an hour." "I'm too vexed with you; the air will do me good," said Mrs. Rooth. But before she went she addressed Nick: "I've your assurance that you'll bring him then to-night?" "Bring Peter? I don't think I shall have to drag him," Nick returned. "But you must do me the justice to remember that if I should resort to force I should do something that's not particularly in my interest--I should be magnanimous." "We must always be that, mustn't we?" moralised Mrs. Rooth. "How could it affect your interest?" Miriam asked less abstractedly. "Yes, as you say," her mother mused at their host, "the question of marriage has ceased to exist for you." "Mamma goes straight at it!" laughed the girl, getting up while Nick rubbed his canvas before answering. Miriam went to mamma and settled her bonnet and mantle in preparation for her drive, then stood a moment with a filial arm about her and as if waiting for their friend's explanation. This, however, when it came halted visibly. "Why you said a while ago that if Peter was there you wouldn't act." "I'll act for _him_," smiled Miriam, inconsequently caressing her mother. "It doesn't matter whom it's for!" Mrs. Rooth declared sagaciously. "Take your drive and relax your mind," said the girl, kissing her. "Come for me in an hour; not later--but not sooner." She went with her to the door, bundled her out, closed it behind her and came back to the position she had quitted. "_This_ is the peace I want!" she gratefully cried as she settled into it. XLV Peter Sherringham said so little during the performance that his companion was struck by his dumbness, especially as Miriam's acting seemed to Nick magnificent. He held his breath while she was on the stage--she gave the whole thing, including the spectator's emotion, such a lift. She had not carried out her fantastic menace of not exerting herself, and, as Mrs. Rooth had said, it little mattered for whom she acted. Nick was conscious in watching her that she went through it all for herself, for the idea that possessed her and that she rendered with extraordinary breadth. She couldn't open the door a part of the way to it and let it simply peep in; if it entered at all it must enter in full procession and occupy the premises in state. This was what had happened on an occasion which, as the less tormented of our young men felt in his stall, grew larger with each throb of the responsive house; till by the time the play was half over it appeared to stretch out wide arms to the future. Nick had often heard more applause, but had never heard more attention, since they were all charmed and hushed together and success seemed to be sitting down with them. There had been of course plenty of announcement--the newspapers had abounded and the arts of the manager had taken the freest license; but it was easy to feel a fine, universal consensus and to recognise everywhere the light spring of hope. People snatched their eyes from the stage an instant to look at each other, all eager to hand on the torch passed to them by the actress over the footlights. It was a part of the impression that she was now only showing to the full, for this time she had verse to deal with and she made it unexpectedly exquisite. She was beauty, melody, truth; she was passion and persuasion and tenderness. She caught up the obstreperous play in soothing, entwining arms and, seeming to tread the air in the flutter of her robe, carried it into the high places of poetry, of art, of style. And she had such tones of nature, such concealments of art, such effusions of life, that the whole scene glowed with the colour she communicated, and the house, pervaded with rosy fire, glowed back at the scene. Nick looked round in the intervals; he felt excited and flushed--the night had turned to a feast of fraternity and he expected to see people embrace each other. The crowd, the agitation, the triumph, the surprise, the signals and rumours, the heated air, his associates, near him, pointing out other figures who presumably were celebrated but whom he had never heard of, all amused him and banished every impulse to question or to compare. Miriam was as happy as some right sensation--she would have fed the memory with deep draughts. One of the things that amused him or at least helped to fill his attention was Peter's attitude, which apparently didn't exclude criticism--rather indeed mainly implied it. This admirer never took his eyes off the actress, but he made no remark about her and never stirred out of his chair. Nick had had from the first a plan of going round to speak to her, but as his companion evidently meant not to move he scrupled at being more forward. During their brief dinner together--they were determined not to be late--Peter had been silent, quite recklessly grave, but also, his kinsman judged, full of the wish to make it clear he was calm. In his seat he was calmer than ever and had an air even of trying to suggest that his attendance, preoccupied as he was with deeper solemnities, was more or less mechanical, the result of a conception of duty, a habit of courtesy. When during a scene in the second act--a scene from which Miriam was absent--Nick observed to him that one might judge from his reserve that he wasn't pleased he replied after a moment: "I've been looking for her mistakes." And when Nick made answer to this that he certainly wouldn't find them he said again in an odd tone: "No, I shan't find them--I shan't find them." It might have seemed that since the girl's performance was a dazzling success he regarded his evening as rather a failure. After the third act Nick said candidly: "My dear fellow, how can you sit here? Aren't you going to speak to her?" To which Peter replied inscrutably: "Lord, no, never again. I bade her good-bye yesterday. She knows what I think of her form. It's very good, but she carries it a little too far. Besides, she didn't want me to come, and it's therefore more discreet to keep away from her." "Surely it isn't an hour for discretion!" Nick cried. "Excuse me at any rate for five minutes." He went behind and reappeared only as the curtain was rising on the fourth act; and in the interval between the fourth and the fifth he went again for a shorter time. Peter was personally detached, but he consented to listen to his companion's vivid account of the state of things on the stage, where the elation of victory had lighted up the place. The strain was over, the ship in port--they were all wiping their faces and grinning. Miriam--yes, positively--was grinning too, and she hadn't asked a question about Peter nor sent him a message. They were kissing all round and dancing for joy. They were on the eve, worse luck, of a tremendous run. Peter groaned irrepressibly for this; it was, save for a slight sign a moment later, the only vibration caused in him by his cousin's report. There was but one voice of regret that they hadn't put on the piece earlier, as the end of the season would interrupt the run. There was but one voice too about the fourth act--it was believed all London would rush to see the fourth act. The crowd about her was a dozen deep and Miriam in the midst of it all charming; she was receiving in the ugly place after the fashion of royalty, almost as hedged with the famous "divinity," yet with a smile and a word for each. She was really like a young queen on her accession. When she saw him, Nick, she had kissed her hand to him over the heads of the courtiers. Nick's artless comment on this was that she had such pretty manners. It made Peter laugh--apparently at his friend's conception of the manners of a young queen. Mrs. Rooth, with a dozen shawls on her arm, was as red as the kitchen-fire, but you couldn't tell if Miriam were red or pale: she was so cleverly, finely made up--perhaps a little too much. Dashwood of course was greatly to the fore, but you hadn't to mention his own performance to him: he took it all handsomely and wouldn't hear of anything but that _her_ fortune was made. He didn't say much indeed, but evidently had ideas about her fortune; he nodded significant things and whistled inimitable sounds--"Heuh, heuh!" He was perfectly satisfied; moreover, he looked further ahead than any one. It was on coming back to his place after the fourth act that Nick put in, for his companion's benefit, most of these touches in his sketch of the situation. If Peter had continued to look for Miriam's mistakes he hadn't yet found them: the fourth act, bristling with dangers, putting a premium on every sort of cheap effect, had rounded itself without a flaw. Sitting there alone while Nick was away he had leisure to meditate on the wonder of this--on the art with which the girl had separated passion from violence, filling the whole place and never screaming; for it had often seemed to him in London of old that the yell of theatrical emotion rang through the shrinking night like the voice of the Sunday newsboy. Miriam had never been more present to him than at this hour; but she was inextricably transmuted--present essentially as the romantic heroine she represented. His state of mind was of the strangest and he was conscious of its strangeness, just as he was conscious in his very person of a lapse of resistance which likened itself absurdly to liberation. He felt weak at the same time that he felt inspired, and he felt inspired at the same time that he knew, or believed he knew, that his face was a blank. He saw things as a shining confusion, and yet somehow something monstrously definite kept surging out of them. Miriam was a beautiful, actual, fictive, impossible young woman of a past age, an undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one's own affairs. But that reality was a part of her spectator's joy, and she was not changed back to the common by his perception of the magnificent trick of art with which it was connected. Before his kinsman rejoined him Peter, taking a visiting-card from his pocket, had written on it in pencil a few words in a foreign tongue; but as at that moment he saw Nick coming in he immediately put it out of view. The last thing before the curtain rose on the fifth act that young man mentioned his having brought a message from Basil Dashwood, who hoped they both, on leaving the theatre, would come to supper with him in company with Miriam and her mother and several others: he had prepared a little informal banquet in honour of so famous a night. At this, while the curtain was about to rise, Peter immediately took out his card again and added something--he wrote the finest small hand you could see. Nick asked him what he was doing, and he waited but an instant. "It's a word to say I can't come." "To Dashwood? Oh I shall go," said Nick. "Well, I hope you'll enjoy it!" his companion replied in a tone which came back to him afterwards. When the curtain fell on the last act the people stayed, standing up in their places for acclamation. The applause shook the house--the recall became a clamour, the relief from a long tension. This was in any performance a moment Peter detested, but he stood for an instant beside Nick, who clapped, to his cousin's diplomatic sense, after the fashion of a school-boy at the pantomime. There was a veritable roar while the curtain drew back at the side most removed from our pair. Peter could see Basil Dashwood holding it, making a passage for the male "juvenile lead," who had Miriam in tow. Nick redoubled his efforts; heard the plaudits swell; saw the bows of the leading gentleman, who was hot and fat; saw Miriam, personally conducted and closer to the footlights, grow brighter and bigger and more swaying; and then became aware that his own comrade had with extreme agility slipped out of the stalls. Nick had already lost sight of him--he had apparently taken but a minute to escape from the house; and wondered at his quitting him without a farewell if he was to leave England on the morrow and they were not to meet at the hospitable Dashwood's. He wondered even what Peter was "up to," since, as he had assured him, there was no question of his going round to Miriam. He waited to see this young lady reappear three times, dragging Dashwood behind her at the second with a friendly arm, to whom, in turn, was hooked Miss Fanny Rover, the actress entrusted in the piece with the inevitable comic relief. He went out slowly with the crowd and at the door looked again for Peter, who struck him as deficient for once in finish. He couldn't know that in another direction and while he was helping the house to "rise" at its heroine, his kinsman had been particularly explicit. On reaching the lobby Peter had pounced on a small boy in buttons, who seemed superfluously connected with a desolate refreshment-room and, from the tips of his toes, was peeping at the stage through the glazed hole in the door of a box. Into one of the child's hands he thrust the card he had drawn again from his waistcoat and into the other the largest silver coin he could find in the same receptacle, while he bent over him with words of adjuration--words the little page tried to help himself to apprehend by instantly attempting to peruse the other words written on the card. "That's no use--it's Italian," said Peter; "only carry it round to Miss Rooth without a minute's delay. Place it in her hand and she'll give you some object--a bracelet, a glove, or a flower--to bring me back as a sign that she has received it. I shall be outside; bring me there what she gives you and you shall have another shilling--only fly!" His small messenger sounded him a moment with the sharp face of London wage-earning, and still more of London tip-earning, infancy, and vanished as swiftly as a slave of the Arabian Nights. While he waited in the lobby the audience began to pour out, and before the urchin had come back to him he was clapped on the shoulder by Nick. "I'm glad I haven't lost you, but why didn't you stay to give her a hand?" "Give her a hand? I hated it." "My dear man, I don't follow you," Nick said. "If you won't come to Dashwood's supper I fear our ways don't lie together." "Thank him very much; say I've to get up at an unnatural hour." To this Peter added: "I think I ought to tell you she may not be there." "Miss Rooth? Why it's all _for_ her." "I'm waiting for a word from her--she may change her mind." Nick showed his interest. "For you? What then have you proposed?" "I've proposed marriage," said Peter in a strange voice. "I say--!" Nick broke out; and at the same moment Peter's messenger squeezed through the press and stood before him. "She has given me nothing, sir," the boy announced; "but she says I'm to say 'All right!'" Nick's stare widened. "You've proposed through _him_?" "Aye, and she accepts. Good-night!"--on which, turning away, Peter bounded into a hansom. He said something to the driver through the roof, and Nick's eyes followed the cab as it started off. This young man was mystified, was even amused; especially when the youth in buttons, planted there and wondering too, brought forth: "Please sir, he told me he'd give me a shilling and he've forgot it." "Oh I can't pay you for _that_!" Nick laughed. But he fished out a dole, though he was vexed at the injury to the supper. XLVI Peter meanwhile rolled away through the summer night to Saint John's Wood. He had put the pressure of strong words on his young friend, entreating her to drive home immediately, return there without any one, without even her mother. He wished to see her alone and for a purpose he would fully and satisfactorily explain--couldn't she trust him? He besought her to remember his own situation and throw over her supper, throw over everything. He would wait for her with unspeakable impatience in Balaklava Place. He did so, when he got there, but it had taken half an hour. Interminable seemed his lonely vigil in Miss Lumley's drawing-room, where the character of the original proprietress came out to him more than ever before in a kind of afterglow of old sociabilities, a vulgar, ghostly reference. The numerous candles had been lighted for him, and Mrs. Rooth's familiar fictions lay about; but his nerves forbade him the solace of a chair and a book. He walked up and down, thinking and listening, and as the long window, the balmy air permitting, stood open to the garden, he passed several times in and out. A carriage appeared to stop at the gate--then there was nothing; he heard the rare rattle of wheels and the far-off hum of London. His impatience was overwrought, and though he knew this it persisted; it would have been no easy matter for Miriam to break away from the flock of her felicitators. Still less simple was it doubtless for her to leave poor Dashwood with his supper on his hands. Perhaps she would bring Dashwood with her, bring him to time her; she was capable of playing him--that is, of playing Her Majesty's new representative to the small far-off State, or even of playing them both--that trick. Perhaps the little wretch in buttons--Peter remembered now the neglected shilling--only pretending to go round with his card, had come back with an invented answer. But how could he know, since presumably he couldn't read Italian, that his answer would fit the message? Peter was sorry now that he himself had not gone round, not snatched Miriam bodily away, made sure of her and of what he wanted of her. When forty minutes had elapsed he regarded it as proved that she wouldn't come, and, asking himself what he should do, determined to drive off again and seize her at her comrade's feast. Then he remembered how Nick had mentioned that this entertainment was not to be held at the young actor's lodgings but at some tavern or restaurant the name of which he had not heeded. Suddenly, however, Peter became aware with joy that this name didn't matter, for there was something at the garden door at last. He rushed out before she had had time to ring, and saw as she stepped from the carriage that she was alone. Now that she was there, that he had this evidence she had listened to him and trusted him, all his impatience and bitterness gave way and a flood of pleading tenderness took their place in the first words he spoke to her. It was far "dearer" of her than he had any right to dream, but she was the best and kindest creature--this showed it--as well as the most wonderful. He was really not off his head with his contradictory ways; no, before heaven he wasn't, and he would explain, he would make everything clear. Everything was changed. She stopped short in the little dusky garden, looking at him in the light of the open window. Then she called back to the coachman--they had left the garden door open--"Wait for me, mind; I shall want you again." "What's the matter--won't you stay?" Peter asked. "Are you going out again at this absurd hour? I won't hurt you," he gently urged. And he went back and closed the garden door. He wanted to say to the coachman, "It's no matter--please drive away." At the same time he wouldn't for the world have done anything offensive to her. "I've come because I thought it better to-night, as things have turned out, to do the thing you ask me, whatever it may be," she had already begun. "That's probably what you calculated I would think, eh? What this evening has been you've seen, and I must allow that your hand's in it. That you know for yourself--that you doubtless felt as you sat there. But I confess I don't imagine what you want of me here now," she added. She had remained standing in the path. Peter felt the irony of her "now" and how it made a fool of him, but he had been prepared for this and for much worse. He had begged her not to think him a fool, but in truth at present he cared little if she did. Very likely he was--in spite of his plea that everything was changed: he cared little even himself. However, he spoke in the tone of intense reason and of the fullest disposition to satisfy her. This lucidity only took still more from the dignity of his change of front: his separation from her the day before had had such pretensions to being lucid. But the explanation and the justification were in the very fact, the fact that had complete possession of him. He named it when he replied to her: "I've simply overrated my strength." "Oh I knew--I knew! That's why I entreated you not to come!" Miriam groaned. She turned away lamenting, and for a moment he thought she would retreat to her carriage. But he passed his hand into her arm, to draw her forward, and after an instant felt her yield. "The fact is we must have this thing out," he said. Then he added as he made her go into the house, bending over her, "The failure of my strength--that was just the reason of my coming." She broke into her laugh at these words, as she entered the drawing-room, and it made them sound pompous in their false wisdom. She flung off, as a good-natured tribute to the image of their having the thing out, a white shawl that had been wrapped round her. She was still painted and bedizened, in the splendid dress of her climax, so that she seemed protected and alienated by the character she had been acting. "Whatever it is you want--when I understand--you'll be very brief, won't you? Do you know I've given up a charming supper for you? Mamma has gone there. I've promised to go back to them." "You're an angel not to have let her come with you. I'm sure she wanted to," Peter made reply. "Oh she's all right, but she's nervous." Then the girl added: "Couldn't she keep you away after all?" "Whom are you talking about?" Biddy Dormer was as absent from his mind as if she had never existed. "The charming thing you were with this morning. Is she so afraid of obliging me? Oh she'd be so good for you!" "Don't speak of that," Peter gravely said. "I was in perfect good faith yesterday when I took leave of you. I was--I was. But I can't--I can't: you're too unutterably dear to me." "Oh don't--_please_ don't!" Miriam wailed at this. She stood before the fireless chimney-piece with one of her hands on it. "If it's only to say that, don't you know, what's the use?" "It isn't only to say that. I've a plan, a perfect plan: the whole thing lies clear before me." "And what's the whole thing?" He had to make an effort. "You say your mother's nervous. Ah if you knew how nervous I am!" "Well, I'm not. Go on." "Give it up--give it up!" Peter stammered. "Give it up?" She fixed him like a mild Medusa. "I'll marry you to-morrow if you'll renounce; and in return for the sacrifice you make for me I'll do more for you than ever was done for a woman before." "Renounce after to-night? Do you call that a plan?" she asked. "Those are old words and very foolish ones--you wanted something of that sort a year ago." "Oh I fluttered round the idea at that time; we were talking in the air. I didn't really believe I could make you see it then, and certainly you didn't see it. My own future, moreover, wasn't definite to me. I didn't know what I could offer you. But these last months have made a difference--I do know now. Now what I say is deliberate--It's deeply meditated. I simply can't live without you, and I hold that together we may do great things." She seemed to wonder. "What sort of things?" "The things of my profession, of my life, the things one does for one's country, the responsibility and the honour of great affairs; deeply fascinating when one's immersed in them, and more exciting really--put them even at that--than the excitements of the theatre. Care for me only a little and you'll see what they are, they'll take hold of you. Believe me, believe me," Peter pleaded; "every fibre of my being trembles in what I say to you." "You admitted yesterday it wouldn't do," she made answer. "Where were the fibres of your being then?" "They throbbed in me even more than now, and I was trying, like an ass, not to feel them. Where was this evening yesterday--where were the maddening hours I've just spent? Ah you're the perfection of perfections, and as I sat there to-night you taught me what I really want." "The perfection of perfections?" the girl echoed with the strangest smile. "I needn't try to tell you: you must have felt to-night with such rapture what you are, what you can do. How can I give that up?" he piteously went on. "How can _I_, my poor friend? I like your plans and your responsibilities and your great affairs, as you call them. _Voyons_, they're infantile. I've just shown that I'm a perfection of perfections: therefore it's just the moment to 'renounce,' as you gracefully say? Oh I was sure, I was sure!" And Miriam paused, resting eyes at once lighted and troubled on him as in the effort to think of some arrangement that would help him out of his absurdity. "I was sure, I mean, that if you did come your poor, dear, doting brain would be quite confused," she presently pursued. "I can't be a muff in public just for you, _pourtant_. Dear me, why do you like us so much?" "Like you? I loathe you!" "_Je le vois parbleu bien_!" she lightly returned. "I mean why do you feel us, judge us, understand us so well? I please you because you see, because you know; and then for that very reason of my pleasing you must adapt me to your convenience, you must take me over, as they say. You admire me as an artist and therefore want to put me into a box in which the artist will breathe her last. Ah be reasonable; you must let her live!" "Let her live? As if I could prevent her living!" Peter cried with unmistakable conviction. "Even if I did wish how could I prevent a spirit like yours from expressing itself? Don't talk about my putting you in a box, for, dearest child, I'm taking you out of one," he all persuasively explained. "The artist is irrepressible, eternal; she'll be in everything you are and in everything you do, and you'll go about with her triumphantly exerting your powers, charming the world, carrying everything before you." Miriam's colour rose, through all her artificial surfaces, at this all but convincing appeal, and she asked whimsically: "Shall you

almost

How many times the word 'almost' appears in the text?

you to-morrow--there's no question of ten years!" cried Mrs. Rooth with a comicality of plainness. Miriam smiled at Nick, deprecating his horror of such talk. "Isn't it droll, the way she can't get it out of her head?" Then turning almost coaxingly to the old woman: "_Voyons_, look about you: they don't marry us like that." "But they do--_cela se voit tous les jours_. Ask Mr. Dormer." "Oh never! It would be as if I asked him to give us a practical proof." "I shall never prove anything by marrying any one," Nick said. "For me that question's over." Miriam rested kind eyes on him. "Dear me, how you must hate me!" And before he had time to reply she went on to her mother: "People marry them to make them leave the stage; which proves exactly what I say." "Ah they offer them the finest positions," reasoned Mrs. Rooth. "Do you want me to leave it then?" "Oh you can manage if you will!" "The only managing I know anything about is to do my work. If I manage that decently I shall pull through." "But, dearest, may our work not be of many sorts?" "I only know one," said Miriam. At this her mother got up with a sigh. "I see you do wish to drive me into the street." "Mamma's bewildered--there are so many paths she wants to follow, there are so many bundles of hay. As I told you, she wishes to gobble them all," the girl pursued. Then she added: "Yes, go and take the carriage; take a turn round the Park--you always delight in that--and come back for me in an hour." "I'm too vexed with you; the air will do me good," said Mrs. Rooth. But before she went she addressed Nick: "I've your assurance that you'll bring him then to-night?" "Bring Peter? I don't think I shall have to drag him," Nick returned. "But you must do me the justice to remember that if I should resort to force I should do something that's not particularly in my interest--I should be magnanimous." "We must always be that, mustn't we?" moralised Mrs. Rooth. "How could it affect your interest?" Miriam asked less abstractedly. "Yes, as you say," her mother mused at their host, "the question of marriage has ceased to exist for you." "Mamma goes straight at it!" laughed the girl, getting up while Nick rubbed his canvas before answering. Miriam went to mamma and settled her bonnet and mantle in preparation for her drive, then stood a moment with a filial arm about her and as if waiting for their friend's explanation. This, however, when it came halted visibly. "Why you said a while ago that if Peter was there you wouldn't act." "I'll act for _him_," smiled Miriam, inconsequently caressing her mother. "It doesn't matter whom it's for!" Mrs. Rooth declared sagaciously. "Take your drive and relax your mind," said the girl, kissing her. "Come for me in an hour; not later--but not sooner." She went with her to the door, bundled her out, closed it behind her and came back to the position she had quitted. "_This_ is the peace I want!" she gratefully cried as she settled into it. XLV Peter Sherringham said so little during the performance that his companion was struck by his dumbness, especially as Miriam's acting seemed to Nick magnificent. He held his breath while she was on the stage--she gave the whole thing, including the spectator's emotion, such a lift. She had not carried out her fantastic menace of not exerting herself, and, as Mrs. Rooth had said, it little mattered for whom she acted. Nick was conscious in watching her that she went through it all for herself, for the idea that possessed her and that she rendered with extraordinary breadth. She couldn't open the door a part of the way to it and let it simply peep in; if it entered at all it must enter in full procession and occupy the premises in state. This was what had happened on an occasion which, as the less tormented of our young men felt in his stall, grew larger with each throb of the responsive house; till by the time the play was half over it appeared to stretch out wide arms to the future. Nick had often heard more applause, but had never heard more attention, since they were all charmed and hushed together and success seemed to be sitting down with them. There had been of course plenty of announcement--the newspapers had abounded and the arts of the manager had taken the freest license; but it was easy to feel a fine, universal consensus and to recognise everywhere the light spring of hope. People snatched their eyes from the stage an instant to look at each other, all eager to hand on the torch passed to them by the actress over the footlights. It was a part of the impression that she was now only showing to the full, for this time she had verse to deal with and she made it unexpectedly exquisite. She was beauty, melody, truth; she was passion and persuasion and tenderness. She caught up the obstreperous play in soothing, entwining arms and, seeming to tread the air in the flutter of her robe, carried it into the high places of poetry, of art, of style. And she had such tones of nature, such concealments of art, such effusions of life, that the whole scene glowed with the colour she communicated, and the house, pervaded with rosy fire, glowed back at the scene. Nick looked round in the intervals; he felt excited and flushed--the night had turned to a feast of fraternity and he expected to see people embrace each other. The crowd, the agitation, the triumph, the surprise, the signals and rumours, the heated air, his associates, near him, pointing out other figures who presumably were celebrated but whom he had never heard of, all amused him and banished every impulse to question or to compare. Miriam was as happy as some right sensation--she would have fed the memory with deep draughts. One of the things that amused him or at least helped to fill his attention was Peter's attitude, which apparently didn't exclude criticism--rather indeed mainly implied it. This admirer never took his eyes off the actress, but he made no remark about her and never stirred out of his chair. Nick had had from the first a plan of going round to speak to her, but as his companion evidently meant not to move he scrupled at being more forward. During their brief dinner together--they were determined not to be late--Peter had been silent, quite recklessly grave, but also, his kinsman judged, full of the wish to make it clear he was calm. In his seat he was calmer than ever and had an air even of trying to suggest that his attendance, preoccupied as he was with deeper solemnities, was more or less mechanical, the result of a conception of duty, a habit of courtesy. When during a scene in the second act--a scene from which Miriam was absent--Nick observed to him that one might judge from his reserve that he wasn't pleased he replied after a moment: "I've been looking for her mistakes." And when Nick made answer to this that he certainly wouldn't find them he said again in an odd tone: "No, I shan't find them--I shan't find them." It might have seemed that since the girl's performance was a dazzling success he regarded his evening as rather a failure. After the third act Nick said candidly: "My dear fellow, how can you sit here? Aren't you going to speak to her?" To which Peter replied inscrutably: "Lord, no, never again. I bade her good-bye yesterday. She knows what I think of her form. It's very good, but she carries it a little too far. Besides, she didn't want me to come, and it's therefore more discreet to keep away from her." "Surely it isn't an hour for discretion!" Nick cried. "Excuse me at any rate for five minutes." He went behind and reappeared only as the curtain was rising on the fourth act; and in the interval between the fourth and the fifth he went again for a shorter time. Peter was personally detached, but he consented to listen to his companion's vivid account of the state of things on the stage, where the elation of victory had lighted up the place. The strain was over, the ship in port--they were all wiping their faces and grinning. Miriam--yes, positively--was grinning too, and she hadn't asked a question about Peter nor sent him a message. They were kissing all round and dancing for joy. They were on the eve, worse luck, of a tremendous run. Peter groaned irrepressibly for this; it was, save for a slight sign a moment later, the only vibration caused in him by his cousin's report. There was but one voice of regret that they hadn't put on the piece earlier, as the end of the season would interrupt the run. There was but one voice too about the fourth act--it was believed all London would rush to see the fourth act. The crowd about her was a dozen deep and Miriam in the midst of it all charming; she was receiving in the ugly place after the fashion of royalty, almost as hedged with the famous "divinity," yet with a smile and a word for each. She was really like a young queen on her accession. When she saw him, Nick, she had kissed her hand to him over the heads of the courtiers. Nick's artless comment on this was that she had such pretty manners. It made Peter laugh--apparently at his friend's conception of the manners of a young queen. Mrs. Rooth, with a dozen shawls on her arm, was as red as the kitchen-fire, but you couldn't tell if Miriam were red or pale: she was so cleverly, finely made up--perhaps a little too much. Dashwood of course was greatly to the fore, but you hadn't to mention his own performance to him: he took it all handsomely and wouldn't hear of anything but that _her_ fortune was made. He didn't say much indeed, but evidently had ideas about her fortune; he nodded significant things and whistled inimitable sounds--"Heuh, heuh!" He was perfectly satisfied; moreover, he looked further ahead than any one. It was on coming back to his place after the fourth act that Nick put in, for his companion's benefit, most of these touches in his sketch of the situation. If Peter had continued to look for Miriam's mistakes he hadn't yet found them: the fourth act, bristling with dangers, putting a premium on every sort of cheap effect, had rounded itself without a flaw. Sitting there alone while Nick was away he had leisure to meditate on the wonder of this--on the art with which the girl had separated passion from violence, filling the whole place and never screaming; for it had often seemed to him in London of old that the yell of theatrical emotion rang through the shrinking night like the voice of the Sunday newsboy. Miriam had never been more present to him than at this hour; but she was inextricably transmuted--present essentially as the romantic heroine she represented. His state of mind was of the strangest and he was conscious of its strangeness, just as he was conscious in his very person of a lapse of resistance which likened itself absurdly to liberation. He felt weak at the same time that he felt inspired, and he felt inspired at the same time that he knew, or believed he knew, that his face was a blank. He saw things as a shining confusion, and yet somehow something monstrously definite kept surging out of them. Miriam was a beautiful, actual, fictive, impossible young woman of a past age, an undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one's own affairs. But that reality was a part of her spectator's joy, and she was not changed back to the common by his perception of the magnificent trick of art with which it was connected. Before his kinsman rejoined him Peter, taking a visiting-card from his pocket, had written on it in pencil a few words in a foreign tongue; but as at that moment he saw Nick coming in he immediately put it out of view. The last thing before the curtain rose on the fifth act that young man mentioned his having brought a message from Basil Dashwood, who hoped they both, on leaving the theatre, would come to supper with him in company with Miriam and her mother and several others: he had prepared a little informal banquet in honour of so famous a night. At this, while the curtain was about to rise, Peter immediately took out his card again and added something--he wrote the finest small hand you could see. Nick asked him what he was doing, and he waited but an instant. "It's a word to say I can't come." "To Dashwood? Oh I shall go," said Nick. "Well, I hope you'll enjoy it!" his companion replied in a tone which came back to him afterwards. When the curtain fell on the last act the people stayed, standing up in their places for acclamation. The applause shook the house--the recall became a clamour, the relief from a long tension. This was in any performance a moment Peter detested, but he stood for an instant beside Nick, who clapped, to his cousin's diplomatic sense, after the fashion of a school-boy at the pantomime. There was a veritable roar while the curtain drew back at the side most removed from our pair. Peter could see Basil Dashwood holding it, making a passage for the male "juvenile lead," who had Miriam in tow. Nick redoubled his efforts; heard the plaudits swell; saw the bows of the leading gentleman, who was hot and fat; saw Miriam, personally conducted and closer to the footlights, grow brighter and bigger and more swaying; and then became aware that his own comrade had with extreme agility slipped out of the stalls. Nick had already lost sight of him--he had apparently taken but a minute to escape from the house; and wondered at his quitting him without a farewell if he was to leave England on the morrow and they were not to meet at the hospitable Dashwood's. He wondered even what Peter was "up to," since, as he had assured him, there was no question of his going round to Miriam. He waited to see this young lady reappear three times, dragging Dashwood behind her at the second with a friendly arm, to whom, in turn, was hooked Miss Fanny Rover, the actress entrusted in the piece with the inevitable comic relief. He went out slowly with the crowd and at the door looked again for Peter, who struck him as deficient for once in finish. He couldn't know that in another direction and while he was helping the house to "rise" at its heroine, his kinsman had been particularly explicit. On reaching the lobby Peter had pounced on a small boy in buttons, who seemed superfluously connected with a desolate refreshment-room and, from the tips of his toes, was peeping at the stage through the glazed hole in the door of a box. Into one of the child's hands he thrust the card he had drawn again from his waistcoat and into the other the largest silver coin he could find in the same receptacle, while he bent over him with words of adjuration--words the little page tried to help himself to apprehend by instantly attempting to peruse the other words written on the card. "That's no use--it's Italian," said Peter; "only carry it round to Miss Rooth without a minute's delay. Place it in her hand and she'll give you some object--a bracelet, a glove, or a flower--to bring me back as a sign that she has received it. I shall be outside; bring me there what she gives you and you shall have another shilling--only fly!" His small messenger sounded him a moment with the sharp face of London wage-earning, and still more of London tip-earning, infancy, and vanished as swiftly as a slave of the Arabian Nights. While he waited in the lobby the audience began to pour out, and before the urchin had come back to him he was clapped on the shoulder by Nick. "I'm glad I haven't lost you, but why didn't you stay to give her a hand?" "Give her a hand? I hated it." "My dear man, I don't follow you," Nick said. "If you won't come to Dashwood's supper I fear our ways don't lie together." "Thank him very much; say I've to get up at an unnatural hour." To this Peter added: "I think I ought to tell you she may not be there." "Miss Rooth? Why it's all _for_ her." "I'm waiting for a word from her--she may change her mind." Nick showed his interest. "For you? What then have you proposed?" "I've proposed marriage," said Peter in a strange voice. "I say--!" Nick broke out; and at the same moment Peter's messenger squeezed through the press and stood before him. "She has given me nothing, sir," the boy announced; "but she says I'm to say 'All right!'" Nick's stare widened. "You've proposed through _him_?" "Aye, and she accepts. Good-night!"--on which, turning away, Peter bounded into a hansom. He said something to the driver through the roof, and Nick's eyes followed the cab as it started off. This young man was mystified, was even amused; especially when the youth in buttons, planted there and wondering too, brought forth: "Please sir, he told me he'd give me a shilling and he've forgot it." "Oh I can't pay you for _that_!" Nick laughed. But he fished out a dole, though he was vexed at the injury to the supper. XLVI Peter meanwhile rolled away through the summer night to Saint John's Wood. He had put the pressure of strong words on his young friend, entreating her to drive home immediately, return there without any one, without even her mother. He wished to see her alone and for a purpose he would fully and satisfactorily explain--couldn't she trust him? He besought her to remember his own situation and throw over her supper, throw over everything. He would wait for her with unspeakable impatience in Balaklava Place. He did so, when he got there, but it had taken half an hour. Interminable seemed his lonely vigil in Miss Lumley's drawing-room, where the character of the original proprietress came out to him more than ever before in a kind of afterglow of old sociabilities, a vulgar, ghostly reference. The numerous candles had been lighted for him, and Mrs. Rooth's familiar fictions lay about; but his nerves forbade him the solace of a chair and a book. He walked up and down, thinking and listening, and as the long window, the balmy air permitting, stood open to the garden, he passed several times in and out. A carriage appeared to stop at the gate--then there was nothing; he heard the rare rattle of wheels and the far-off hum of London. His impatience was overwrought, and though he knew this it persisted; it would have been no easy matter for Miriam to break away from the flock of her felicitators. Still less simple was it doubtless for her to leave poor Dashwood with his supper on his hands. Perhaps she would bring Dashwood with her, bring him to time her; she was capable of playing him--that is, of playing Her Majesty's new representative to the small far-off State, or even of playing them both--that trick. Perhaps the little wretch in buttons--Peter remembered now the neglected shilling--only pretending to go round with his card, had come back with an invented answer. But how could he know, since presumably he couldn't read Italian, that his answer would fit the message? Peter was sorry now that he himself had not gone round, not snatched Miriam bodily away, made sure of her and of what he wanted of her. When forty minutes had elapsed he regarded it as proved that she wouldn't come, and, asking himself what he should do, determined to drive off again and seize her at her comrade's feast. Then he remembered how Nick had mentioned that this entertainment was not to be held at the young actor's lodgings but at some tavern or restaurant the name of which he had not heeded. Suddenly, however, Peter became aware with joy that this name didn't matter, for there was something at the garden door at last. He rushed out before she had had time to ring, and saw as she stepped from the carriage that she was alone. Now that she was there, that he had this evidence she had listened to him and trusted him, all his impatience and bitterness gave way and a flood of pleading tenderness took their place in the first words he spoke to her. It was far "dearer" of her than he had any right to dream, but she was the best and kindest creature--this showed it--as well as the most wonderful. He was really not off his head with his contradictory ways; no, before heaven he wasn't, and he would explain, he would make everything clear. Everything was changed. She stopped short in the little dusky garden, looking at him in the light of the open window. Then she called back to the coachman--they had left the garden door open--"Wait for me, mind; I shall want you again." "What's the matter--won't you stay?" Peter asked. "Are you going out again at this absurd hour? I won't hurt you," he gently urged. And he went back and closed the garden door. He wanted to say to the coachman, "It's no matter--please drive away." At the same time he wouldn't for the world have done anything offensive to her. "I've come because I thought it better to-night, as things have turned out, to do the thing you ask me, whatever it may be," she had already begun. "That's probably what you calculated I would think, eh? What this evening has been you've seen, and I must allow that your hand's in it. That you know for yourself--that you doubtless felt as you sat there. But I confess I don't imagine what you want of me here now," she added. She had remained standing in the path. Peter felt the irony of her "now" and how it made a fool of him, but he had been prepared for this and for much worse. He had begged her not to think him a fool, but in truth at present he cared little if she did. Very likely he was--in spite of his plea that everything was changed: he cared little even himself. However, he spoke in the tone of intense reason and of the fullest disposition to satisfy her. This lucidity only took still more from the dignity of his change of front: his separation from her the day before had had such pretensions to being lucid. But the explanation and the justification were in the very fact, the fact that had complete possession of him. He named it when he replied to her: "I've simply overrated my strength." "Oh I knew--I knew! That's why I entreated you not to come!" Miriam groaned. She turned away lamenting, and for a moment he thought she would retreat to her carriage. But he passed his hand into her arm, to draw her forward, and after an instant felt her yield. "The fact is we must have this thing out," he said. Then he added as he made her go into the house, bending over her, "The failure of my strength--that was just the reason of my coming." She broke into her laugh at these words, as she entered the drawing-room, and it made them sound pompous in their false wisdom. She flung off, as a good-natured tribute to the image of their having the thing out, a white shawl that had been wrapped round her. She was still painted and bedizened, in the splendid dress of her climax, so that she seemed protected and alienated by the character she had been acting. "Whatever it is you want--when I understand--you'll be very brief, won't you? Do you know I've given up a charming supper for you? Mamma has gone there. I've promised to go back to them." "You're an angel not to have let her come with you. I'm sure she wanted to," Peter made reply. "Oh she's all right, but she's nervous." Then the girl added: "Couldn't she keep you away after all?" "Whom are you talking about?" Biddy Dormer was as absent from his mind as if she had never existed. "The charming thing you were with this morning. Is she so afraid of obliging me? Oh she'd be so good for you!" "Don't speak of that," Peter gravely said. "I was in perfect good faith yesterday when I took leave of you. I was--I was. But I can't--I can't: you're too unutterably dear to me." "Oh don't--_please_ don't!" Miriam wailed at this. She stood before the fireless chimney-piece with one of her hands on it. "If it's only to say that, don't you know, what's the use?" "It isn't only to say that. I've a plan, a perfect plan: the whole thing lies clear before me." "And what's the whole thing?" He had to make an effort. "You say your mother's nervous. Ah if you knew how nervous I am!" "Well, I'm not. Go on." "Give it up--give it up!" Peter stammered. "Give it up?" She fixed him like a mild Medusa. "I'll marry you to-morrow if you'll renounce; and in return for the sacrifice you make for me I'll do more for you than ever was done for a woman before." "Renounce after to-night? Do you call that a plan?" she asked. "Those are old words and very foolish ones--you wanted something of that sort a year ago." "Oh I fluttered round the idea at that time; we were talking in the air. I didn't really believe I could make you see it then, and certainly you didn't see it. My own future, moreover, wasn't definite to me. I didn't know what I could offer you. But these last months have made a difference--I do know now. Now what I say is deliberate--It's deeply meditated. I simply can't live without you, and I hold that together we may do great things." She seemed to wonder. "What sort of things?" "The things of my profession, of my life, the things one does for one's country, the responsibility and the honour of great affairs; deeply fascinating when one's immersed in them, and more exciting really--put them even at that--than the excitements of the theatre. Care for me only a little and you'll see what they are, they'll take hold of you. Believe me, believe me," Peter pleaded; "every fibre of my being trembles in what I say to you." "You admitted yesterday it wouldn't do," she made answer. "Where were the fibres of your being then?" "They throbbed in me even more than now, and I was trying, like an ass, not to feel them. Where was this evening yesterday--where were the maddening hours I've just spent? Ah you're the perfection of perfections, and as I sat there to-night you taught me what I really want." "The perfection of perfections?" the girl echoed with the strangest smile. "I needn't try to tell you: you must have felt to-night with such rapture what you are, what you can do. How can I give that up?" he piteously went on. "How can _I_, my poor friend? I like your plans and your responsibilities and your great affairs, as you call them. _Voyons_, they're infantile. I've just shown that I'm a perfection of perfections: therefore it's just the moment to 'renounce,' as you gracefully say? Oh I was sure, I was sure!" And Miriam paused, resting eyes at once lighted and troubled on him as in the effort to think of some arrangement that would help him out of his absurdity. "I was sure, I mean, that if you did come your poor, dear, doting brain would be quite confused," she presently pursued. "I can't be a muff in public just for you, _pourtant_. Dear me, why do you like us so much?" "Like you? I loathe you!" "_Je le vois parbleu bien_!" she lightly returned. "I mean why do you feel us, judge us, understand us so well? I please you because you see, because you know; and then for that very reason of my pleasing you must adapt me to your convenience, you must take me over, as they say. You admire me as an artist and therefore want to put me into a box in which the artist will breathe her last. Ah be reasonable; you must let her live!" "Let her live? As if I could prevent her living!" Peter cried with unmistakable conviction. "Even if I did wish how could I prevent a spirit like yours from expressing itself? Don't talk about my putting you in a box, for, dearest child, I'm taking you out of one," he all persuasively explained. "The artist is irrepressible, eternal; she'll be in everything you are and in everything you do, and you'll go about with her triumphantly exerting your powers, charming the world, carrying everything before you." Miriam's colour rose, through all her artificial surfaces, at this all but convincing appeal, and she asked whimsically: "Shall you

crowd

How many times the word 'crowd' appears in the text?

you to-morrow--there's no question of ten years!" cried Mrs. Rooth with a comicality of plainness. Miriam smiled at Nick, deprecating his horror of such talk. "Isn't it droll, the way she can't get it out of her head?" Then turning almost coaxingly to the old woman: "_Voyons_, look about you: they don't marry us like that." "But they do--_cela se voit tous les jours_. Ask Mr. Dormer." "Oh never! It would be as if I asked him to give us a practical proof." "I shall never prove anything by marrying any one," Nick said. "For me that question's over." Miriam rested kind eyes on him. "Dear me, how you must hate me!" And before he had time to reply she went on to her mother: "People marry them to make them leave the stage; which proves exactly what I say." "Ah they offer them the finest positions," reasoned Mrs. Rooth. "Do you want me to leave it then?" "Oh you can manage if you will!" "The only managing I know anything about is to do my work. If I manage that decently I shall pull through." "But, dearest, may our work not be of many sorts?" "I only know one," said Miriam. At this her mother got up with a sigh. "I see you do wish to drive me into the street." "Mamma's bewildered--there are so many paths she wants to follow, there are so many bundles of hay. As I told you, she wishes to gobble them all," the girl pursued. Then she added: "Yes, go and take the carriage; take a turn round the Park--you always delight in that--and come back for me in an hour." "I'm too vexed with you; the air will do me good," said Mrs. Rooth. But before she went she addressed Nick: "I've your assurance that you'll bring him then to-night?" "Bring Peter? I don't think I shall have to drag him," Nick returned. "But you must do me the justice to remember that if I should resort to force I should do something that's not particularly in my interest--I should be magnanimous." "We must always be that, mustn't we?" moralised Mrs. Rooth. "How could it affect your interest?" Miriam asked less abstractedly. "Yes, as you say," her mother mused at their host, "the question of marriage has ceased to exist for you." "Mamma goes straight at it!" laughed the girl, getting up while Nick rubbed his canvas before answering. Miriam went to mamma and settled her bonnet and mantle in preparation for her drive, then stood a moment with a filial arm about her and as if waiting for their friend's explanation. This, however, when it came halted visibly. "Why you said a while ago that if Peter was there you wouldn't act." "I'll act for _him_," smiled Miriam, inconsequently caressing her mother. "It doesn't matter whom it's for!" Mrs. Rooth declared sagaciously. "Take your drive and relax your mind," said the girl, kissing her. "Come for me in an hour; not later--but not sooner." She went with her to the door, bundled her out, closed it behind her and came back to the position she had quitted. "_This_ is the peace I want!" she gratefully cried as she settled into it. XLV Peter Sherringham said so little during the performance that his companion was struck by his dumbness, especially as Miriam's acting seemed to Nick magnificent. He held his breath while she was on the stage--she gave the whole thing, including the spectator's emotion, such a lift. She had not carried out her fantastic menace of not exerting herself, and, as Mrs. Rooth had said, it little mattered for whom she acted. Nick was conscious in watching her that she went through it all for herself, for the idea that possessed her and that she rendered with extraordinary breadth. She couldn't open the door a part of the way to it and let it simply peep in; if it entered at all it must enter in full procession and occupy the premises in state. This was what had happened on an occasion which, as the less tormented of our young men felt in his stall, grew larger with each throb of the responsive house; till by the time the play was half over it appeared to stretch out wide arms to the future. Nick had often heard more applause, but had never heard more attention, since they were all charmed and hushed together and success seemed to be sitting down with them. There had been of course plenty of announcement--the newspapers had abounded and the arts of the manager had taken the freest license; but it was easy to feel a fine, universal consensus and to recognise everywhere the light spring of hope. People snatched their eyes from the stage an instant to look at each other, all eager to hand on the torch passed to them by the actress over the footlights. It was a part of the impression that she was now only showing to the full, for this time she had verse to deal with and she made it unexpectedly exquisite. She was beauty, melody, truth; she was passion and persuasion and tenderness. She caught up the obstreperous play in soothing, entwining arms and, seeming to tread the air in the flutter of her robe, carried it into the high places of poetry, of art, of style. And she had such tones of nature, such concealments of art, such effusions of life, that the whole scene glowed with the colour she communicated, and the house, pervaded with rosy fire, glowed back at the scene. Nick looked round in the intervals; he felt excited and flushed--the night had turned to a feast of fraternity and he expected to see people embrace each other. The crowd, the agitation, the triumph, the surprise, the signals and rumours, the heated air, his associates, near him, pointing out other figures who presumably were celebrated but whom he had never heard of, all amused him and banished every impulse to question or to compare. Miriam was as happy as some right sensation--she would have fed the memory with deep draughts. One of the things that amused him or at least helped to fill his attention was Peter's attitude, which apparently didn't exclude criticism--rather indeed mainly implied it. This admirer never took his eyes off the actress, but he made no remark about her and never stirred out of his chair. Nick had had from the first a plan of going round to speak to her, but as his companion evidently meant not to move he scrupled at being more forward. During their brief dinner together--they were determined not to be late--Peter had been silent, quite recklessly grave, but also, his kinsman judged, full of the wish to make it clear he was calm. In his seat he was calmer than ever and had an air even of trying to suggest that his attendance, preoccupied as he was with deeper solemnities, was more or less mechanical, the result of a conception of duty, a habit of courtesy. When during a scene in the second act--a scene from which Miriam was absent--Nick observed to him that one might judge from his reserve that he wasn't pleased he replied after a moment: "I've been looking for her mistakes." And when Nick made answer to this that he certainly wouldn't find them he said again in an odd tone: "No, I shan't find them--I shan't find them." It might have seemed that since the girl's performance was a dazzling success he regarded his evening as rather a failure. After the third act Nick said candidly: "My dear fellow, how can you sit here? Aren't you going to speak to her?" To which Peter replied inscrutably: "Lord, no, never again. I bade her good-bye yesterday. She knows what I think of her form. It's very good, but she carries it a little too far. Besides, she didn't want me to come, and it's therefore more discreet to keep away from her." "Surely it isn't an hour for discretion!" Nick cried. "Excuse me at any rate for five minutes." He went behind and reappeared only as the curtain was rising on the fourth act; and in the interval between the fourth and the fifth he went again for a shorter time. Peter was personally detached, but he consented to listen to his companion's vivid account of the state of things on the stage, where the elation of victory had lighted up the place. The strain was over, the ship in port--they were all wiping their faces and grinning. Miriam--yes, positively--was grinning too, and she hadn't asked a question about Peter nor sent him a message. They were kissing all round and dancing for joy. They were on the eve, worse luck, of a tremendous run. Peter groaned irrepressibly for this; it was, save for a slight sign a moment later, the only vibration caused in him by his cousin's report. There was but one voice of regret that they hadn't put on the piece earlier, as the end of the season would interrupt the run. There was but one voice too about the fourth act--it was believed all London would rush to see the fourth act. The crowd about her was a dozen deep and Miriam in the midst of it all charming; she was receiving in the ugly place after the fashion of royalty, almost as hedged with the famous "divinity," yet with a smile and a word for each. She was really like a young queen on her accession. When she saw him, Nick, she had kissed her hand to him over the heads of the courtiers. Nick's artless comment on this was that she had such pretty manners. It made Peter laugh--apparently at his friend's conception of the manners of a young queen. Mrs. Rooth, with a dozen shawls on her arm, was as red as the kitchen-fire, but you couldn't tell if Miriam were red or pale: she was so cleverly, finely made up--perhaps a little too much. Dashwood of course was greatly to the fore, but you hadn't to mention his own performance to him: he took it all handsomely and wouldn't hear of anything but that _her_ fortune was made. He didn't say much indeed, but evidently had ideas about her fortune; he nodded significant things and whistled inimitable sounds--"Heuh, heuh!" He was perfectly satisfied; moreover, he looked further ahead than any one. It was on coming back to his place after the fourth act that Nick put in, for his companion's benefit, most of these touches in his sketch of the situation. If Peter had continued to look for Miriam's mistakes he hadn't yet found them: the fourth act, bristling with dangers, putting a premium on every sort of cheap effect, had rounded itself without a flaw. Sitting there alone while Nick was away he had leisure to meditate on the wonder of this--on the art with which the girl had separated passion from violence, filling the whole place and never screaming; for it had often seemed to him in London of old that the yell of theatrical emotion rang through the shrinking night like the voice of the Sunday newsboy. Miriam had never been more present to him than at this hour; but she was inextricably transmuted--present essentially as the romantic heroine she represented. His state of mind was of the strangest and he was conscious of its strangeness, just as he was conscious in his very person of a lapse of resistance which likened itself absurdly to liberation. He felt weak at the same time that he felt inspired, and he felt inspired at the same time that he knew, or believed he knew, that his face was a blank. He saw things as a shining confusion, and yet somehow something monstrously definite kept surging out of them. Miriam was a beautiful, actual, fictive, impossible young woman of a past age, an undiscoverable country, who spoke in blank verse and overflowed with metaphor, who was exalted and heroic beyond all human convenience and who yet was irresistibly real and related to one's own affairs. But that reality was a part of her spectator's joy, and she was not changed back to the common by his perception of the magnificent trick of art with which it was connected. Before his kinsman rejoined him Peter, taking a visiting-card from his pocket, had written on it in pencil a few words in a foreign tongue; but as at that moment he saw Nick coming in he immediately put it out of view. The last thing before the curtain rose on the fifth act that young man mentioned his having brought a message from Basil Dashwood, who hoped they both, on leaving the theatre, would come to supper with him in company with Miriam and her mother and several others: he had prepared a little informal banquet in honour of so famous a night. At this, while the curtain was about to rise, Peter immediately took out his card again and added something--he wrote the finest small hand you could see. Nick asked him what he was doing, and he waited but an instant. "It's a word to say I can't come." "To Dashwood? Oh I shall go," said Nick. "Well, I hope you'll enjoy it!" his companion replied in a tone which came back to him afterwards. When the curtain fell on the last act the people stayed, standing up in their places for acclamation. The applause shook the house--the recall became a clamour, the relief from a long tension. This was in any performance a moment Peter detested, but he stood for an instant beside Nick, who clapped, to his cousin's diplomatic sense, after the fashion of a school-boy at the pantomime. There was a veritable roar while the curtain drew back at the side most removed from our pair. Peter could see Basil Dashwood holding it, making a passage for the male "juvenile lead," who had Miriam in tow. Nick redoubled his efforts; heard the plaudits swell; saw the bows of the leading gentleman, who was hot and fat; saw Miriam, personally conducted and closer to the footlights, grow brighter and bigger and more swaying; and then became aware that his own comrade had with extreme agility slipped out of the stalls. Nick had already lost sight of him--he had apparently taken but a minute to escape from the house; and wondered at his quitting him without a farewell if he was to leave England on the morrow and they were not to meet at the hospitable Dashwood's. He wondered even what Peter was "up to," since, as he had assured him, there was no question of his going round to Miriam. He waited to see this young lady reappear three times, dragging Dashwood behind her at the second with a friendly arm, to whom, in turn, was hooked Miss Fanny Rover, the actress entrusted in the piece with the inevitable comic relief. He went out slowly with the crowd and at the door looked again for Peter, who struck him as deficient for once in finish. He couldn't know that in another direction and while he was helping the house to "rise" at its heroine, his kinsman had been particularly explicit. On reaching the lobby Peter had pounced on a small boy in buttons, who seemed superfluously connected with a desolate refreshment-room and, from the tips of his toes, was peeping at the stage through the glazed hole in the door of a box. Into one of the child's hands he thrust the card he had drawn again from his waistcoat and into the other the largest silver coin he could find in the same receptacle, while he bent over him with words of adjuration--words the little page tried to help himself to apprehend by instantly attempting to peruse the other words written on the card. "That's no use--it's Italian," said Peter; "only carry it round to Miss Rooth without a minute's delay. Place it in her hand and she'll give you some object--a bracelet, a glove, or a flower--to bring me back as a sign that she has received it. I shall be outside; bring me there what she gives you and you shall have another shilling--only fly!" His small messenger sounded him a moment with the sharp face of London wage-earning, and still more of London tip-earning, infancy, and vanished as swiftly as a slave of the Arabian Nights. While he waited in the lobby the audience began to pour out, and before the urchin had come back to him he was clapped on the shoulder by Nick. "I'm glad I haven't lost you, but why didn't you stay to give her a hand?" "Give her a hand? I hated it." "My dear man, I don't follow you," Nick said. "If you won't come to Dashwood's supper I fear our ways don't lie together." "Thank him very much; say I've to get up at an unnatural hour." To this Peter added: "I think I ought to tell you she may not be there." "Miss Rooth? Why it's all _for_ her." "I'm waiting for a word from her--she may change her mind." Nick showed his interest. "For you? What then have you proposed?" "I've proposed marriage," said Peter in a strange voice. "I say--!" Nick broke out; and at the same moment Peter's messenger squeezed through the press and stood before him. "She has given me nothing, sir," the boy announced; "but she says I'm to say 'All right!'" Nick's stare widened. "You've proposed through _him_?" "Aye, and she accepts. Good-night!"--on which, turning away, Peter bounded into a hansom. He said something to the driver through the roof, and Nick's eyes followed the cab as it started off. This young man was mystified, was even amused; especially when the youth in buttons, planted there and wondering too, brought forth: "Please sir, he told me he'd give me a shilling and he've forgot it." "Oh I can't pay you for _that_!" Nick laughed. But he fished out a dole, though he was vexed at the injury to the supper. XLVI Peter meanwhile rolled away through the summer night to Saint John's Wood. He had put the pressure of strong words on his young friend, entreating her to drive home immediately, return there without any one, without even her mother. He wished to see her alone and for a purpose he would fully and satisfactorily explain--couldn't she trust him? He besought her to remember his own situation and throw over her supper, throw over everything. He would wait for her with unspeakable impatience in Balaklava Place. He did so, when he got there, but it had taken half an hour. Interminable seemed his lonely vigil in Miss Lumley's drawing-room, where the character of the original proprietress came out to him more than ever before in a kind of afterglow of old sociabilities, a vulgar, ghostly reference. The numerous candles had been lighted for him, and Mrs. Rooth's familiar fictions lay about; but his nerves forbade him the solace of a chair and a book. He walked up and down, thinking and listening, and as the long window, the balmy air permitting, stood open to the garden, he passed several times in and out. A carriage appeared to stop at the gate--then there was nothing; he heard the rare rattle of wheels and the far-off hum of London. His impatience was overwrought, and though he knew this it persisted; it would have been no easy matter for Miriam to break away from the flock of her felicitators. Still less simple was it doubtless for her to leave poor Dashwood with his supper on his hands. Perhaps she would bring Dashwood with her, bring him to time her; she was capable of playing him--that is, of playing Her Majesty's new representative to the small far-off State, or even of playing them both--that trick. Perhaps the little wretch in buttons--Peter remembered now the neglected shilling--only pretending to go round with his card, had come back with an invented answer. But how could he know, since presumably he couldn't read Italian, that his answer would fit the message? Peter was sorry now that he himself had not gone round, not snatched Miriam bodily away, made sure of her and of what he wanted of her. When forty minutes had elapsed he regarded it as proved that she wouldn't come, and, asking himself what he should do, determined to drive off again and seize her at her comrade's feast. Then he remembered how Nick had mentioned that this entertainment was not to be held at the young actor's lodgings but at some tavern or restaurant the name of which he had not heeded. Suddenly, however, Peter became aware with joy that this name didn't matter, for there was something at the garden door at last. He rushed out before she had had time to ring, and saw as she stepped from the carriage that she was alone. Now that she was there, that he had this evidence she had listened to him and trusted him, all his impatience and bitterness gave way and a flood of pleading tenderness took their place in the first words he spoke to her. It was far "dearer" of her than he had any right to dream, but she was the best and kindest creature--this showed it--as well as the most wonderful. He was really not off his head with his contradictory ways; no, before heaven he wasn't, and he would explain, he would make everything clear. Everything was changed. She stopped short in the little dusky garden, looking at him in the light of the open window. Then she called back to the coachman--they had left the garden door open--"Wait for me, mind; I shall want you again." "What's the matter--won't you stay?" Peter asked. "Are you going out again at this absurd hour? I won't hurt you," he gently urged. And he went back and closed the garden door. He wanted to say to the coachman, "It's no matter--please drive away." At the same time he wouldn't for the world have done anything offensive to her. "I've come because I thought it better to-night, as things have turned out, to do the thing you ask me, whatever it may be," she had already begun. "That's probably what you calculated I would think, eh? What this evening has been you've seen, and I must allow that your hand's in it. That you know for yourself--that you doubtless felt as you sat there. But I confess I don't imagine what you want of me here now," she added. She had remained standing in the path. Peter felt the irony of her "now" and how it made a fool of him, but he had been prepared for this and for much worse. He had begged her not to think him a fool, but in truth at present he cared little if she did. Very likely he was--in spite of his plea that everything was changed: he cared little even himself. However, he spoke in the tone of intense reason and of the fullest disposition to satisfy her. This lucidity only took still more from the dignity of his change of front: his separation from her the day before had had such pretensions to being lucid. But the explanation and the justification were in the very fact, the fact that had complete possession of him. He named it when he replied to her: "I've simply overrated my strength." "Oh I knew--I knew! That's why I entreated you not to come!" Miriam groaned. She turned away lamenting, and for a moment he thought she would retreat to her carriage. But he passed his hand into her arm, to draw her forward, and after an instant felt her yield. "The fact is we must have this thing out," he said. Then he added as he made her go into the house, bending over her, "The failure of my strength--that was just the reason of my coming." She broke into her laugh at these words, as she entered the drawing-room, and it made them sound pompous in their false wisdom. She flung off, as a good-natured tribute to the image of their having the thing out, a white shawl that had been wrapped round her. She was still painted and bedizened, in the splendid dress of her climax, so that she seemed protected and alienated by the character she had been acting. "Whatever it is you want--when I understand--you'll be very brief, won't you? Do you know I've given up a charming supper for you? Mamma has gone there. I've promised to go back to them." "You're an angel not to have let her come with you. I'm sure she wanted to," Peter made reply. "Oh she's all right, but she's nervous." Then the girl added: "Couldn't she keep you away after all?" "Whom are you talking about?" Biddy Dormer was as absent from his mind as if she had never existed. "The charming thing you were with this morning. Is she so afraid of obliging me? Oh she'd be so good for you!" "Don't speak of that," Peter gravely said. "I was in perfect good faith yesterday when I took leave of you. I was--I was. But I can't--I can't: you're too unutterably dear to me." "Oh don't--_please_ don't!" Miriam wailed at this. She stood before the fireless chimney-piece with one of her hands on it. "If it's only to say that, don't you know, what's the use?" "It isn't only to say that. I've a plan, a perfect plan: the whole thing lies clear before me." "And what's the whole thing?" He had to make an effort. "You say your mother's nervous. Ah if you knew how nervous I am!" "Well, I'm not. Go on." "Give it up--give it up!" Peter stammered. "Give it up?" She fixed him like a mild Medusa. "I'll marry you to-morrow if you'll renounce; and in return for the sacrifice you make for me I'll do more for you than ever was done for a woman before." "Renounce after to-night? Do you call that a plan?" she asked. "Those are old words and very foolish ones--you wanted something of that sort a year ago." "Oh I fluttered round the idea at that time; we were talking in the air. I didn't really believe I could make you see it then, and certainly you didn't see it. My own future, moreover, wasn't definite to me. I didn't know what I could offer you. But these last months have made a difference--I do know now. Now what I say is deliberate--It's deeply meditated. I simply can't live without you, and I hold that together we may do great things." She seemed to wonder. "What sort of things?" "The things of my profession, of my life, the things one does for one's country, the responsibility and the honour of great affairs; deeply fascinating when one's immersed in them, and more exciting really--put them even at that--than the excitements of the theatre. Care for me only a little and you'll see what they are, they'll take hold of you. Believe me, believe me," Peter pleaded; "every fibre of my being trembles in what I say to you." "You admitted yesterday it wouldn't do," she made answer. "Where were the fibres of your being then?" "They throbbed in me even more than now, and I was trying, like an ass, not to feel them. Where was this evening yesterday--where were the maddening hours I've just spent? Ah you're the perfection of perfections, and as I sat there to-night you taught me what I really want." "The perfection of perfections?" the girl echoed with the strangest smile. "I needn't try to tell you: you must have felt to-night with such rapture what you are, what you can do. How can I give that up?" he piteously went on. "How can _I_, my poor friend? I like your plans and your responsibilities and your great affairs, as you call them. _Voyons_, they're infantile. I've just shown that I'm a perfection of perfections: therefore it's just the moment to 'renounce,' as you gracefully say? Oh I was sure, I was sure!" And Miriam paused, resting eyes at once lighted and troubled on him as in the effort to think of some arrangement that would help him out of his absurdity. "I was sure, I mean, that if you did come your poor, dear, doting brain would be quite confused," she presently pursued. "I can't be a muff in public just for you, _pourtant_. Dear me, why do you like us so much?" "Like you? I loathe you!" "_Je le vois parbleu bien_!" she lightly returned. "I mean why do you feel us, judge us, understand us so well? I please you because you see, because you know; and then for that very reason of my pleasing you must adapt me to your convenience, you must take me over, as they say. You admire me as an artist and therefore want to put me into a box in which the artist will breathe her last. Ah be reasonable; you must let her live!" "Let her live? As if I could prevent her living!" Peter cried with unmistakable conviction. "Even if I did wish how could I prevent a spirit like yours from expressing itself? Don't talk about my putting you in a box, for, dearest child, I'm taking you out of one," he all persuasively explained. "The artist is irrepressible, eternal; she'll be in everything you are and in everything you do, and you'll go about with her triumphantly exerting your powers, charming the world, carrying everything before you." Miriam's colour rose, through all her artificial surfaces, at this all but convincing appeal, and she asked whimsically: "Shall you

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you what I thought of her. I believe now that the whole trouble with her is simply that she isn't a Southern lady. She means well, I am sure, but she isn't what I should call exactly refined. There's something "horsey" about her--I can't think of any other way to express it--something that reminds me just a little bit of Abby--and, you remember, we always said Abby got that from being educated in the North. Tell dearest Susan I really think it is fortunate that she did not go to one of their colleges. Mrs. Payson is a college woman and it seems to me that she is always trying to appear as clever as a man. She talks in a way sometimes that sounds as if she believed in woman's rights and all that sort of thing. I told Oliver about it, and he laughed and said that men hated talk like that. He says all a man admires in a woman is her power of loving, and that when she begins to ape a man she loses her charm for him. I can't understand why Mr. Payson married his wife. He said such nice things to me the other day about my being so domestic and such a home lover, that I really felt sorry for him. When I told him that I was so fond of staying indoors that I would never cross my threshold if Oliver didn't make me, he laughed and said that he wished I'd convert his wife to my way of thinking. Yet he seems to have the greatest admiration for her, and, do you know, I believe he even admires that red feather, though he doesn't approve of it. He never turns his eyes away from her when they are together, which isn't very much, as she goes about just as she pleases without him. Can you understand how a person can both admire and disapprove of a thing? Oliver says he knows how it is, but I must say that I don't. I hope and pray that our marriage will always be different from theirs. Oliver and I are never apart for a single minute except when he is at work in the office. He hasn't written a line since we came here, but he is going to begin as soon as we get settled, and then he says that I may sit in the room and sew if I want to. I can't believe that people really love each other unless they want to be together every instant, no matter what they are doing. Why, if Oliver went out to men's dinners without me as Mr. Payson does (though she doesn't seem to mind it) I should just sit at home by myself and cry my eyes out. I think love, if it is love, ought to be all in all. I am perfectly sure that if I live to be a hundred I shall never want any society but Oliver's. He is the whole world to me, and when he is not here I spend my time, unless I am at work, just sitting and thinking about him. My one idea is to make him as happy as I can, and when a woman does this for a man I don't think she has time to run around by herself as Mrs. Payson does. Tell dearest father that I so often think of his sermons and the beautiful things he said about women. The rector here doesn't compare with him as a preacher. This is such a long letter it will take two stamps. I've just let myself run on without thinking what I was writing, so if I have made any mistakes in grammar or in spelling, please don't let father see them but read my letter aloud to him. I can shut my eyes and see you sitting at dinner, with Docia bringing in the plum pudding, and I know you will talk of me while you help to it. Write me who comes to dinner with you. I wonder if Miss Priscilla and John Henry are there as usual. Do you know whether John Henry ever goes to the Treadwell's or not? I wish you would ask him to take Susan to see his old mammy in Pink Alley. Now that I am not there to go to see her occasionally, I am afraid she will get lonesome. Good-bye, dearest mother. I will write to you before New Year. I am so busy that I don't have time to write every day, but you will understand and so will father. With my heart's fondest love to you both, Your VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 6, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: The little patterns were exactly what I wanted--thank you a thousand times. I knew you would be overjoyed at the news, and you are the only person I've breathed it to--except, of course, dear Oliver, who is frightened to death already. He has made me stop everything at once, and whenever he sees me lift my hand, he begins to get nervous and begs me not to do it. Oh, mother, he loves me so that it is really pathetic to see his anxiety. And--can you believe it--he doesn't appear to be the least bit glad about it. When I told him, he looked amazed--as if he had never thought of its happening--and said, "Oh, Virginia, not so soon!" He told me afterwards that, of course, he'd always thought we'd have children after a while, before we were middle-aged, but that he had wanted to stay like this for at least five or ten years. When the baby comes, he says he supposes he'll like it, but that he can't honestly say he is glad. It's funny how frightened he is, because I am not the least bit so. All women must expect to have children when they marry, and if God makes them suffer for it, it must be because it is best that they should. Perhaps they wouldn't love their babies so much if they got them easily. I never think of the pain a minute. It all seems so beautiful and sacred to me that I can't understand why Oliver isn't enraptured just as I am. To think of a new life starting into the world from me--a life that is half mine and half Oliver's, and one that would never be at all except for our love. The baby will seem from the very first minute to be our love made into flesh. I don't see how a woman who feels this could waste a thought on what she has to suffer. I am so glad you are going to send me a nurse from Dinwiddie, because I'm afraid I could never get one here that I could trust. The servant Oliver got me is no earthly account, and I still do as much of the cooking as I can. The house doesn't look nearly so nice as it used to, but the doctor tells me that I mustn't sweep, so I only do the light dusting. I sew almost all the time, and I've already finished the little slips. To-day I'm going to cut out the petticoats. I couldn't tell from the pattern you sent whether they fasten in front or in the back. There are no places for buttonholes. Do you use safety pins to fasten them with? The embroidery is perfectly lovely, and will make the sweetest trimming. I am using pink for the basket because Oliver and I both hope the baby will be a girl. If it is, I shall name her after you, of course, and I want her to be just exactly like you. Oliver says he can't understand why anybody ever wants a boy--girls are so much nicer. But then he insists that if she isn't born with blue eyes, he will send her to the orphanage. I am trying to do just as you tell me to, and to be as careful as I possibly can. The doctor thinks I've stayed indoors too much since I came here, so I go out for a little walk with Oliver every night. I am so afraid that somebody will see me that I really hate to go out at all, and always choose the darkest streets I can find. Last night I had a bad stumble, and Oliver says he doesn't care if the whole town discovers us, he's not going to take me down any more unlighted alleys. It has been terribly hot all day--not a breath of air stirring--and I never felt the heat so much in my life. The doctor says it's because of my condition--and last night, after Oliver went to sleep, I got up and sat by the window until daybreak. At first I was dreadfully frightened, and thought I was going to stifle--but poor Oliver had come home so tired that I made up my mind I wasn't going to wake him if I could possibly help it. This morning I didn't tell him a word about it, and he hasn't the least idea that I didn't sleep soundly all night. I suppose that's why I feel so dragged and worn out to-day, just as if somebody had given me a good beating. I was obliged to lie down most of the afternoon, but I am going to take a bath in a few minutes and try to make myself look nice and fresh before Oliver comes home. I have let out that flowered organdie--the one you liked so much--and I wear it almost every evening. I know I look dreadfully, but Oliver says I am more beautiful than ever. It seems to me sometimes that men are born blind where women are concerned, but perhaps God made it that way on purpose. Do you know Oliver really admires Mrs. Payson, and he thinks that red feather very becoming to her. He says she's much too good for her husband, but I have been obliged to disagree with him about that. Even if Mr. Payson does drink a little, I am sure it is only because he gets lonesome when he is left by himself, and that she could prevent it if she tried. Oliver and I never talk about these things because he sees that I feel so strongly about them. Oh, darling mother, I shall be so glad to see you! I hope and pray that father will be well enough for you to come a whole month ahead. In that case you will be here in less than two months, won't you? If the baby comes on the twelfth of August, she (I am perfectly sure it will be a girl) and father will have the same birthday. I am so anxious that she shall be born on that day. Well, I must stop now, though I could run on forever. I never see a living soul from one day to another--Mrs. Payson is out of town--so when Oliver stays late at the office, and I am too tired to work, I get a little--just a little bit lonesome. Mr. Payson sent me a pile of novels by Oliver the other night--but I haven't looked into them. I always feel that it is a waste of time to read when there are things about the house that ought to be done. I wish everything didn't cost so much here. Money doesn't go half as far as it does in Dinwiddie. The price of meat is almost three times as much as it is at home, and chickens are so expensive that we have them only twice a week. It is hard to housekeep on a small allowance, and now that we have to save for the baby's coming, I have to count every penny. I have bought a little book like yours, and I put down all that I spend during the day, and then add it up at night before going to bed. Oliver says I'm dreadfully frugal, but I am always so terribly afraid of running over my allowance (which is every cent that we can afford) and not having the money to pay the doctor's bills when they are due. Nobody could be more generous with money than Oliver is--I couldn't endure being married to a stingy man like Mr. Treadwell--and the other day when one of the men in the office died, he sent the most beautiful wreath that cost ten dollars. I am trying to save enough out of the housekeeping balance to pay for it, for Oliver always runs out of his pocket money before the middle of the month. I haven't bought anything for the baby because you sent me all the materials I needed, and I have been sewing on those ever since they came. Of course my own clothes are still as good as new, so the only expense will be the doctor and the nurse and the extra things I shall be obliged to have to eat when I am sick. Give dear father a dozen kisses from me, and tell him to hurry and get well so he can christen his granddaughter. Your devoted and ever grateful VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 11, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: Just a line to say that I am so, so sorry you can't come, but that you mustn't worry a minute, because everything is going beautifully, and I am not the least bit afraid. The doctor says he never saw any one in a better frame of mind or so little nervous. Give my dear love to father. I am so distressed that he should suffer as he does. Rheumatism must be such terrible pain, and I don't wonder that you are frightened lest it should go to his heart. I shall send you a telegram as soon as the baby comes. Your devoted daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 29, 1885. MY PRECIOUS MOTHER: This is the first time I have sat up in bed, and I am trying to write a little note to you on a pillow instead of a desk. My hand shakes so that I'm afraid you won't be able to read it, but I felt that I wanted to send you a few words of my very own, not dictated to the nurse or to Mrs. Payson. I can't tell you how perfectly lovely Mrs. Payson has been to me. She was here all that dreadful night, and I believe I should have died without her. The doctor said I had such a hard time because I'd let myself get run down and stayed indoors too much. But I'm getting all right now--and the rest is over and doesn't matter. As soon as I am strong again I shall be perfectly happy. Oh, mother, aren't you delighted that the baby is a girl, after all? It was the first question I asked when I came back to consciousness the next morning, and when they told me it was, I said, "Her name is Lucy Pendleton," and that was all. I was so weak they wouldn't let me open my lips again, and Oliver was kept out of the room for almost ten days because I would talk to him. Poor fellow, it almost killed him. He is as white as a sheet still, and looks as if he had been through tortures. It must have been terrible for him, because I was really very, very ill at one time. But it is all over now, and the baby is the sweetest thing you ever imagined. I believe she knows me already, and Mrs. Payson says she is exactly like me, though I can see the strongest resemblance to Oliver, even if she has blue eyes and he hasn't. Wasn't it lovely how everything came just as we wanted it to--a girl, born on father's birthday, with blue eyes, and named Lucy? But, mother, darling, the most wonderful thing of all was that you seemed to be with me all through it. The whole time I was unconscious I thought you were here, and the nurse tells me that I was calling "Mother! Mother!" all that night. Nothing ever made me feel as close to you as having a baby of my own. I never knew before what you were to me, and how dearly, dearly I love you. The nurse is taking the pencil away from me. Your loving VIRGINIA. Isn't it funny that Oliver won't take any interest in the baby at all? He says she caused more trouble than she is worth. Was father like that? * * * * * MATOACA CITY. April 3, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: My last letter was written an age ago, but I have been so busy since Marthy left that I've hardly had a moment in which to draw breath. It was a blow to me that she wouldn't stay for she was really an excellent nurse and the baby got on so well with her, but there aren't any coloured people of her kind here, and she got so homesick for Dinwiddie that I thought she would lose her mind if she stayed. You know how dependent they are upon company, and going out on Sunday afternoon and all that kind of thing, and there really wasn't any amusement for her except taking the baby out in the morning. She got so low spirited that it was almost a relief when she went, but of course I feel her loss dreadfully. I haven't let the baby out of my sight because I wouldn't trust Daisy with her for anything in the world. She is so terribly flighty. I have the crib brought into my room (though Oliver hates it) and I take entire charge of her night and day. I should love to do it if only Oliver didn't mind it so much. He says I think more of the baby now than I do of him. Isn't that absurd? But of course she does take every single minute of my time, and I can't dress myself for him every evening as carefully as I used to do and look after all the housekeeping arrangements. Daisy is a very poor cook and she simply throws the things on the table, but it seems to me that my first duty is to the baby, so I try to put up with the discomforts as well as I can. It is hard to eat what she cooks since everything tastes exactly alike, but I try to swallow as much as I can because the doctor says that if I don't keep up my strength I shall have to stop nursing the baby. Wouldn't that be dreadful? It almost breaks my heart to think of it, and I am sure we'd never get any artificial food to agree with her. She is perfectly well now, the sweetest, fattest thing you ever saw, and a real beauty, and she is so devoted to me that she cries whenever I go out of her sight. I am never tired of watching her, and even when she is asleep I sit sometimes for an hour by her crib just thinking how pretty she looks with her eyes closed and wishing you could see her. Oliver says I spoil her to death, but how can a baby of seven months be spoiled. He doesn't enjoy her half as much as I do, and sometimes I almost think that he gets impatient of seeing her always in my arms. At first he absolutely refused to have her crib brought into our room, but when I cried, he gave in and was very sweet about it. I feel so ashamed sometimes of the way the house looks, but there doesn't seem to be any help for it because the doctor says if I let myself get tired it will be bad for the baby. Of course I wouldn't put my own health before his comfort, but I am obliged to think first of the baby, am I not? Last night, for instance, the poor little thing was ill with colic and I was up and down with her until daybreak. Then this morning she woke early and I had to nurse her and give her her bath, and, added to everything else, Daisy's cousin died and she sent word she couldn't come. I slipped on a wrapper before taking a bath or fixing my hair and ran down to try and get Oliver's breakfast, but the baby began to cry and he came after me and said he wanted to make the coffee himself. Then he brought a cup upstairs to me, but I was so tired and nervous that I couldn't drink it. He didn't seem to understand why, feeling as badly as I did, I wouldn't just put the baby back into her crib and make her stay there until I got some rest, but the little thing was so wide awake that I hadn't the heart to do it. Besides, it is so important to keep regular hours with her, isn't it? I don't suppose a man ever realizes how a woman looks at these things, but you will understand, won't you, mother? I am all alone in the house to-night because a play is in town that Oliver wanted to see and I made him go to it. He wanted to ask Mrs. Midden to sit downstairs (she has offered over and over again to do it) so that I might go too, but of course I wouldn't let him. I really couldn't have enjoyed it a minute for thinking of the baby, and besides I never cared for the theatre. Then, too, he doesn't know (for I never tell him) how very tired I am by the time night comes. Sometimes when Oliver comes home and we sit in the dining-room (we never use the drawing-room, because it is across the hall and I'm afraid I shouldn't hear the baby cry) it is as much as I can do to keep my eyes open. I try not to let him notice it, but one night when he read me the first act of a play he is writing, I went to sleep, and though he didn't say anything, I could see that he was very much hurt. He worries a good deal about my health, too, and he even went out one day and engaged a nurse without saying anything to me about it. After I had talked to her though, I saw that she would never do, so I sent her away before he came home. I wish I could get really strong and feel well again, but the doctor insists I never will until I get out of doors and use my muscles. But you stay in the house all the time and so did grandmother, so I don't believe there's a word of truth in what he says. Anyway, I go out every day now with the baby. Thank you so much for the little bands. They are just what I wanted. With dearest love, Your devoted VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 10, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Daisy left a week ago and we couldn't find another servant until to-day. I must say that I prefer coloured servants. They are so much more dependable. I didn't know until the evening before Daisy left that she was going, and I had to send Oliver straight out to see if he could find somebody to come in and help me. There wasn't a soul to be had until to-day, however, so for a week I was obliged to make Oliver get his dinner at the boarding-house. It doesn't make any difference what I have because I haven't a particle of appetite, and I'd just as soon eat tea and toast as anything else. Of course, but for the baby I could have managed perfectly well--but she has been so fretful of late that she doesn't let me put her down a minute. The doctor says her teeth are beginning to hurt her, and that I must expect to have trouble the first summer. She has been so well until now that he thinks it has been really remarkable. He tells me he never knew a healthier baby, but of course I am terribly anxious about her teething in the hot weather. If she grows much more fretful I'm afraid I shall have to take her to the country for July and August. It seems dreadful to leave Oliver all alone, but I don't see how I can help it if the doctor advises me to go. Oliver has gone to some musical comedy at the Academy to-night, and I am so tired that I am going to bed just as soon as I finish this letter. I hope and pray that the baby will have a quiet night. Don't you think that Daisy treated me very badly considering how kind I had been to her? Only a week ago when she was taken with pain in the night, I got up and made her a mustard plaster and sat by her bed until she felt easier. The next day I did all of her work, and yet she has so little gratitude that she could leave me this way when she knows perfectly well that I am worried to death about the baby's first summer. I'd give anything if I could go home in July as you suggest, but it is such a long trip, and the heat will probably be quite as bad in Dinwiddie as here. Of course, it would make all the difference in the world to me to be where I could have you to advise me about the baby, and I'd go to-morrow if it only wasn't so far. Mrs. Midden has told me of a boarding-house in the country not more than twenty miles from here where Oliver could come down every evening, and we may decide to go there for a month or two. I can't help feeling very anxious, especially as Mrs. Scott's little boy--he is just the age of baby--was taken ill the other night, and they thought he would die before they could get a doctor. This letter is full of my worries, but in spite of them I am the happiest woman that ever lived. Oliver is the best thing to me you can imagine, and the baby is so fascinating that I enjoy every minute I am with her. It is the greatest fun to watch her in her bath. I know you would simply go into raptures over her--and she is so bright that she already understands every word that I say. She grows more like Oliver all the time, and the other day while I was watching her playing with her rubber doll, she looked so beautiful that it almost frightened me. I am so glad dear father is well, and what you wrote me about John Henry's admiration for Susan interested me so much that I sat straight down and wrote to him. Why do you think that it is only friendship and that he isn't in love with her? If he really thinks her the "finest girl in the world," I should imagine he was beginning to be pretty serious. I am delighted to hear that he is going to take her to the festival. Tell Susan from me that I shall never be satisfied until she is as happy as I am. Mr. Treadwell was right, I believe, not to let her go to college, though of course I want dear Susan to have whatever she sets her heart on. But, when all is said, you were wise in teaching me that nothing matters to a woman except love. More and more I am learning that if we only love unselfishly enough, everything else will work out for good to us. My little worries can't keep me from being so blissfully happy that I want to sing all the time. Work is a joy to me because I feel that I am doing it for Oliver and the baby. And with two such treasures to live for I should be the most ungrateful creature alive if I ever complained. Your ever loving daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY, July 1, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: We are leaving suddenly for the country, and I'll send our address just as soon as we get there. The doctor thinks I ought to take the baby away from town, so I am going to the boarding-house I wrote you about. Oliver will come down every evening--it's only an hour's trip. I am so tired from packing that I can't write any more. Lovingly, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. September 15, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Here we are back again in our home, and I was never so thankful in my life to get away from any place. I wrote you how dreadfully inconvenient it was, but it would take pages to tell you all of my experiences in the last few days. Such people you never saw in your life! And the food got so uneatable that I lived on crackers for the last fortnight. Fortunately, I was still nursing the baby, but the doctor has just told me that I must stop. I am so distressed about it. Do you think it will go hard with her after the first year? She is as fat and well as she can be now, but I live in hourly terror of her getting sick. If anything should happen

sweetest

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you what I thought of her. I believe now that the whole trouble with her is simply that she isn't a Southern lady. She means well, I am sure, but she isn't what I should call exactly refined. There's something "horsey" about her--I can't think of any other way to express it--something that reminds me just a little bit of Abby--and, you remember, we always said Abby got that from being educated in the North. Tell dearest Susan I really think it is fortunate that she did not go to one of their colleges. Mrs. Payson is a college woman and it seems to me that she is always trying to appear as clever as a man. She talks in a way sometimes that sounds as if she believed in woman's rights and all that sort of thing. I told Oliver about it, and he laughed and said that men hated talk like that. He says all a man admires in a woman is her power of loving, and that when she begins to ape a man she loses her charm for him. I can't understand why Mr. Payson married his wife. He said such nice things to me the other day about my being so domestic and such a home lover, that I really felt sorry for him. When I told him that I was so fond of staying indoors that I would never cross my threshold if Oliver didn't make me, he laughed and said that he wished I'd convert his wife to my way of thinking. Yet he seems to have the greatest admiration for her, and, do you know, I believe he even admires that red feather, though he doesn't approve of it. He never turns his eyes away from her when they are together, which isn't very much, as she goes about just as she pleases without him. Can you understand how a person can both admire and disapprove of a thing? Oliver says he knows how it is, but I must say that I don't. I hope and pray that our marriage will always be different from theirs. Oliver and I are never apart for a single minute except when he is at work in the office. He hasn't written a line since we came here, but he is going to begin as soon as we get settled, and then he says that I may sit in the room and sew if I want to. I can't believe that people really love each other unless they want to be together every instant, no matter what they are doing. Why, if Oliver went out to men's dinners without me as Mr. Payson does (though she doesn't seem to mind it) I should just sit at home by myself and cry my eyes out. I think love, if it is love, ought to be all in all. I am perfectly sure that if I live to be a hundred I shall never want any society but Oliver's. He is the whole world to me, and when he is not here I spend my time, unless I am at work, just sitting and thinking about him. My one idea is to make him as happy as I can, and when a woman does this for a man I don't think she has time to run around by herself as Mrs. Payson does. Tell dearest father that I so often think of his sermons and the beautiful things he said about women. The rector here doesn't compare with him as a preacher. This is such a long letter it will take two stamps. I've just let myself run on without thinking what I was writing, so if I have made any mistakes in grammar or in spelling, please don't let father see them but read my letter aloud to him. I can shut my eyes and see you sitting at dinner, with Docia bringing in the plum pudding, and I know you will talk of me while you help to it. Write me who comes to dinner with you. I wonder if Miss Priscilla and John Henry are there as usual. Do you know whether John Henry ever goes to the Treadwell's or not? I wish you would ask him to take Susan to see his old mammy in Pink Alley. Now that I am not there to go to see her occasionally, I am afraid she will get lonesome. Good-bye, dearest mother. I will write to you before New Year. I am so busy that I don't have time to write every day, but you will understand and so will father. With my heart's fondest love to you both, Your VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 6, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: The little patterns were exactly what I wanted--thank you a thousand times. I knew you would be overjoyed at the news, and you are the only person I've breathed it to--except, of course, dear Oliver, who is frightened to death already. He has made me stop everything at once, and whenever he sees me lift my hand, he begins to get nervous and begs me not to do it. Oh, mother, he loves me so that it is really pathetic to see his anxiety. And--can you believe it--he doesn't appear to be the least bit glad about it. When I told him, he looked amazed--as if he had never thought of its happening--and said, "Oh, Virginia, not so soon!" He told me afterwards that, of course, he'd always thought we'd have children after a while, before we were middle-aged, but that he had wanted to stay like this for at least five or ten years. When the baby comes, he says he supposes he'll like it, but that he can't honestly say he is glad. It's funny how frightened he is, because I am not the least bit so. All women must expect to have children when they marry, and if God makes them suffer for it, it must be because it is best that they should. Perhaps they wouldn't love their babies so much if they got them easily. I never think of the pain a minute. It all seems so beautiful and sacred to me that I can't understand why Oliver isn't enraptured just as I am. To think of a new life starting into the world from me--a life that is half mine and half Oliver's, and one that would never be at all except for our love. The baby will seem from the very first minute to be our love made into flesh. I don't see how a woman who feels this could waste a thought on what she has to suffer. I am so glad you are going to send me a nurse from Dinwiddie, because I'm afraid I could never get one here that I could trust. The servant Oliver got me is no earthly account, and I still do as much of the cooking as I can. The house doesn't look nearly so nice as it used to, but the doctor tells me that I mustn't sweep, so I only do the light dusting. I sew almost all the time, and I've already finished the little slips. To-day I'm going to cut out the petticoats. I couldn't tell from the pattern you sent whether they fasten in front or in the back. There are no places for buttonholes. Do you use safety pins to fasten them with? The embroidery is perfectly lovely, and will make the sweetest trimming. I am using pink for the basket because Oliver and I both hope the baby will be a girl. If it is, I shall name her after you, of course, and I want her to be just exactly like you. Oliver says he can't understand why anybody ever wants a boy--girls are so much nicer. But then he insists that if she isn't born with blue eyes, he will send her to the orphanage. I am trying to do just as you tell me to, and to be as careful as I possibly can. The doctor thinks I've stayed indoors too much since I came here, so I go out for a little walk with Oliver every night. I am so afraid that somebody will see me that I really hate to go out at all, and always choose the darkest streets I can find. Last night I had a bad stumble, and Oliver says he doesn't care if the whole town discovers us, he's not going to take me down any more unlighted alleys. It has been terribly hot all day--not a breath of air stirring--and I never felt the heat so much in my life. The doctor says it's because of my condition--and last night, after Oliver went to sleep, I got up and sat by the window until daybreak. At first I was dreadfully frightened, and thought I was going to stifle--but poor Oliver had come home so tired that I made up my mind I wasn't going to wake him if I could possibly help it. This morning I didn't tell him a word about it, and he hasn't the least idea that I didn't sleep soundly all night. I suppose that's why I feel so dragged and worn out to-day, just as if somebody had given me a good beating. I was obliged to lie down most of the afternoon, but I am going to take a bath in a few minutes and try to make myself look nice and fresh before Oliver comes home. I have let out that flowered organdie--the one you liked so much--and I wear it almost every evening. I know I look dreadfully, but Oliver says I am more beautiful than ever. It seems to me sometimes that men are born blind where women are concerned, but perhaps God made it that way on purpose. Do you know Oliver really admires Mrs. Payson, and he thinks that red feather very becoming to her. He says she's much too good for her husband, but I have been obliged to disagree with him about that. Even if Mr. Payson does drink a little, I am sure it is only because he gets lonesome when he is left by himself, and that she could prevent it if she tried. Oliver and I never talk about these things because he sees that I feel so strongly about them. Oh, darling mother, I shall be so glad to see you! I hope and pray that father will be well enough for you to come a whole month ahead. In that case you will be here in less than two months, won't you? If the baby comes on the twelfth of August, she (I am perfectly sure it will be a girl) and father will have the same birthday. I am so anxious that she shall be born on that day. Well, I must stop now, though I could run on forever. I never see a living soul from one day to another--Mrs. Payson is out of town--so when Oliver stays late at the office, and I am too tired to work, I get a little--just a little bit lonesome. Mr. Payson sent me a pile of novels by Oliver the other night--but I haven't looked into them. I always feel that it is a waste of time to read when there are things about the house that ought to be done. I wish everything didn't cost so much here. Money doesn't go half as far as it does in Dinwiddie. The price of meat is almost three times as much as it is at home, and chickens are so expensive that we have them only twice a week. It is hard to housekeep on a small allowance, and now that we have to save for the baby's coming, I have to count every penny. I have bought a little book like yours, and I put down all that I spend during the day, and then add it up at night before going to bed. Oliver says I'm dreadfully frugal, but I am always so terribly afraid of running over my allowance (which is every cent that we can afford) and not having the money to pay the doctor's bills when they are due. Nobody could be more generous with money than Oliver is--I couldn't endure being married to a stingy man like Mr. Treadwell--and the other day when one of the men in the office died, he sent the most beautiful wreath that cost ten dollars. I am trying to save enough out of the housekeeping balance to pay for it, for Oliver always runs out of his pocket money before the middle of the month. I haven't bought anything for the baby because you sent me all the materials I needed, and I have been sewing on those ever since they came. Of course my own clothes are still as good as new, so the only expense will be the doctor and the nurse and the extra things I shall be obliged to have to eat when I am sick. Give dear father a dozen kisses from me, and tell him to hurry and get well so he can christen his granddaughter. Your devoted and ever grateful VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 11, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: Just a line to say that I am so, so sorry you can't come, but that you mustn't worry a minute, because everything is going beautifully, and I am not the least bit afraid. The doctor says he never saw any one in a better frame of mind or so little nervous. Give my dear love to father. I am so distressed that he should suffer as he does. Rheumatism must be such terrible pain, and I don't wonder that you are frightened lest it should go to his heart. I shall send you a telegram as soon as the baby comes. Your devoted daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 29, 1885. MY PRECIOUS MOTHER: This is the first time I have sat up in bed, and I am trying to write a little note to you on a pillow instead of a desk. My hand shakes so that I'm afraid you won't be able to read it, but I felt that I wanted to send you a few words of my very own, not dictated to the nurse or to Mrs. Payson. I can't tell you how perfectly lovely Mrs. Payson has been to me. She was here all that dreadful night, and I believe I should have died without her. The doctor said I had such a hard time because I'd let myself get run down and stayed indoors too much. But I'm getting all right now--and the rest is over and doesn't matter. As soon as I am strong again I shall be perfectly happy. Oh, mother, aren't you delighted that the baby is a girl, after all? It was the first question I asked when I came back to consciousness the next morning, and when they told me it was, I said, "Her name is Lucy Pendleton," and that was all. I was so weak they wouldn't let me open my lips again, and Oliver was kept out of the room for almost ten days because I would talk to him. Poor fellow, it almost killed him. He is as white as a sheet still, and looks as if he had been through tortures. It must have been terrible for him, because I was really very, very ill at one time. But it is all over now, and the baby is the sweetest thing you ever imagined. I believe she knows me already, and Mrs. Payson says she is exactly like me, though I can see the strongest resemblance to Oliver, even if she has blue eyes and he hasn't. Wasn't it lovely how everything came just as we wanted it to--a girl, born on father's birthday, with blue eyes, and named Lucy? But, mother, darling, the most wonderful thing of all was that you seemed to be with me all through it. The whole time I was unconscious I thought you were here, and the nurse tells me that I was calling "Mother! Mother!" all that night. Nothing ever made me feel as close to you as having a baby of my own. I never knew before what you were to me, and how dearly, dearly I love you. The nurse is taking the pencil away from me. Your loving VIRGINIA. Isn't it funny that Oliver won't take any interest in the baby at all? He says she caused more trouble than she is worth. Was father like that? * * * * * MATOACA CITY. April 3, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: My last letter was written an age ago, but I have been so busy since Marthy left that I've hardly had a moment in which to draw breath. It was a blow to me that she wouldn't stay for she was really an excellent nurse and the baby got on so well with her, but there aren't any coloured people of her kind here, and she got so homesick for Dinwiddie that I thought she would lose her mind if she stayed. You know how dependent they are upon company, and going out on Sunday afternoon and all that kind of thing, and there really wasn't any amusement for her except taking the baby out in the morning. She got so low spirited that it was almost a relief when she went, but of course I feel her loss dreadfully. I haven't let the baby out of my sight because I wouldn't trust Daisy with her for anything in the world. She is so terribly flighty. I have the crib brought into my room (though Oliver hates it) and I take entire charge of her night and day. I should love to do it if only Oliver didn't mind it so much. He says I think more of the baby now than I do of him. Isn't that absurd? But of course she does take every single minute of my time, and I can't dress myself for him every evening as carefully as I used to do and look after all the housekeeping arrangements. Daisy is a very poor cook and she simply throws the things on the table, but it seems to me that my first duty is to the baby, so I try to put up with the discomforts as well as I can. It is hard to eat what she cooks since everything tastes exactly alike, but I try to swallow as much as I can because the doctor says that if I don't keep up my strength I shall have to stop nursing the baby. Wouldn't that be dreadful? It almost breaks my heart to think of it, and I am sure we'd never get any artificial food to agree with her. She is perfectly well now, the sweetest, fattest thing you ever saw, and a real beauty, and she is so devoted to me that she cries whenever I go out of her sight. I am never tired of watching her, and even when she is asleep I sit sometimes for an hour by her crib just thinking how pretty she looks with her eyes closed and wishing you could see her. Oliver says I spoil her to death, but how can a baby of seven months be spoiled. He doesn't enjoy her half as much as I do, and sometimes I almost think that he gets impatient of seeing her always in my arms. At first he absolutely refused to have her crib brought into our room, but when I cried, he gave in and was very sweet about it. I feel so ashamed sometimes of the way the house looks, but there doesn't seem to be any help for it because the doctor says if I let myself get tired it will be bad for the baby. Of course I wouldn't put my own health before his comfort, but I am obliged to think first of the baby, am I not? Last night, for instance, the poor little thing was ill with colic and I was up and down with her until daybreak. Then this morning she woke early and I had to nurse her and give her her bath, and, added to everything else, Daisy's cousin died and she sent word she couldn't come. I slipped on a wrapper before taking a bath or fixing my hair and ran down to try and get Oliver's breakfast, but the baby began to cry and he came after me and said he wanted to make the coffee himself. Then he brought a cup upstairs to me, but I was so tired and nervous that I couldn't drink it. He didn't seem to understand why, feeling as badly as I did, I wouldn't just put the baby back into her crib and make her stay there until I got some rest, but the little thing was so wide awake that I hadn't the heart to do it. Besides, it is so important to keep regular hours with her, isn't it? I don't suppose a man ever realizes how a woman looks at these things, but you will understand, won't you, mother? I am all alone in the house to-night because a play is in town that Oliver wanted to see and I made him go to it. He wanted to ask Mrs. Midden to sit downstairs (she has offered over and over again to do it) so that I might go too, but of course I wouldn't let him. I really couldn't have enjoyed it a minute for thinking of the baby, and besides I never cared for the theatre. Then, too, he doesn't know (for I never tell him) how very tired I am by the time night comes. Sometimes when Oliver comes home and we sit in the dining-room (we never use the drawing-room, because it is across the hall and I'm afraid I shouldn't hear the baby cry) it is as much as I can do to keep my eyes open. I try not to let him notice it, but one night when he read me the first act of a play he is writing, I went to sleep, and though he didn't say anything, I could see that he was very much hurt. He worries a good deal about my health, too, and he even went out one day and engaged a nurse without saying anything to me about it. After I had talked to her though, I saw that she would never do, so I sent her away before he came home. I wish I could get really strong and feel well again, but the doctor insists I never will until I get out of doors and use my muscles. But you stay in the house all the time and so did grandmother, so I don't believe there's a word of truth in what he says. Anyway, I go out every day now with the baby. Thank you so much for the little bands. They are just what I wanted. With dearest love, Your devoted VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 10, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Daisy left a week ago and we couldn't find another servant until to-day. I must say that I prefer coloured servants. They are so much more dependable. I didn't know until the evening before Daisy left that she was going, and I had to send Oliver straight out to see if he could find somebody to come in and help me. There wasn't a soul to be had until to-day, however, so for a week I was obliged to make Oliver get his dinner at the boarding-house. It doesn't make any difference what I have because I haven't a particle of appetite, and I'd just as soon eat tea and toast as anything else. Of course, but for the baby I could have managed perfectly well--but she has been so fretful of late that she doesn't let me put her down a minute. The doctor says her teeth are beginning to hurt her, and that I must expect to have trouble the first summer. She has been so well until now that he thinks it has been really remarkable. He tells me he never knew a healthier baby, but of course I am terribly anxious about her teething in the hot weather. If she grows much more fretful I'm afraid I shall have to take her to the country for July and August. It seems dreadful to leave Oliver all alone, but I don't see how I can help it if the doctor advises me to go. Oliver has gone to some musical comedy at the Academy to-night, and I am so tired that I am going to bed just as soon as I finish this letter. I hope and pray that the baby will have a quiet night. Don't you think that Daisy treated me very badly considering how kind I had been to her? Only a week ago when she was taken with pain in the night, I got up and made her a mustard plaster and sat by her bed until she felt easier. The next day I did all of her work, and yet she has so little gratitude that she could leave me this way when she knows perfectly well that I am worried to death about the baby's first summer. I'd give anything if I could go home in July as you suggest, but it is such a long trip, and the heat will probably be quite as bad in Dinwiddie as here. Of course, it would make all the difference in the world to me to be where I could have you to advise me about the baby, and I'd go to-morrow if it only wasn't so far. Mrs. Midden has told me of a boarding-house in the country not more than twenty miles from here where Oliver could come down every evening, and we may decide to go there for a month or two. I can't help feeling very anxious, especially as Mrs. Scott's little boy--he is just the age of baby--was taken ill the other night, and they thought he would die before they could get a doctor. This letter is full of my worries, but in spite of them I am the happiest woman that ever lived. Oliver is the best thing to me you can imagine, and the baby is so fascinating that I enjoy every minute I am with her. It is the greatest fun to watch her in her bath. I know you would simply go into raptures over her--and she is so bright that she already understands every word that I say. She grows more like Oliver all the time, and the other day while I was watching her playing with her rubber doll, she looked so beautiful that it almost frightened me. I am so glad dear father is well, and what you wrote me about John Henry's admiration for Susan interested me so much that I sat straight down and wrote to him. Why do you think that it is only friendship and that he isn't in love with her? If he really thinks her the "finest girl in the world," I should imagine he was beginning to be pretty serious. I am delighted to hear that he is going to take her to the festival. Tell Susan from me that I shall never be satisfied until she is as happy as I am. Mr. Treadwell was right, I believe, not to let her go to college, though of course I want dear Susan to have whatever she sets her heart on. But, when all is said, you were wise in teaching me that nothing matters to a woman except love. More and more I am learning that if we only love unselfishly enough, everything else will work out for good to us. My little worries can't keep me from being so blissfully happy that I want to sing all the time. Work is a joy to me because I feel that I am doing it for Oliver and the baby. And with two such treasures to live for I should be the most ungrateful creature alive if I ever complained. Your ever loving daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY, July 1, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: We are leaving suddenly for the country, and I'll send our address just as soon as we get there. The doctor thinks I ought to take the baby away from town, so I am going to the boarding-house I wrote you about. Oliver will come down every evening--it's only an hour's trip. I am so tired from packing that I can't write any more. Lovingly, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. September 15, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Here we are back again in our home, and I was never so thankful in my life to get away from any place. I wrote you how dreadfully inconvenient it was, but it would take pages to tell you all of my experiences in the last few days. Such people you never saw in your life! And the food got so uneatable that I lived on crackers for the last fortnight. Fortunately, I was still nursing the baby, but the doctor has just told me that I must stop. I am so distressed about it. Do you think it will go hard with her after the first year? She is as fat and well as she can be now, but I live in hourly terror of her getting sick. If anything should happen

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you what I thought of her. I believe now that the whole trouble with her is simply that she isn't a Southern lady. She means well, I am sure, but she isn't what I should call exactly refined. There's something "horsey" about her--I can't think of any other way to express it--something that reminds me just a little bit of Abby--and, you remember, we always said Abby got that from being educated in the North. Tell dearest Susan I really think it is fortunate that she did not go to one of their colleges. Mrs. Payson is a college woman and it seems to me that she is always trying to appear as clever as a man. She talks in a way sometimes that sounds as if she believed in woman's rights and all that sort of thing. I told Oliver about it, and he laughed and said that men hated talk like that. He says all a man admires in a woman is her power of loving, and that when she begins to ape a man she loses her charm for him. I can't understand why Mr. Payson married his wife. He said such nice things to me the other day about my being so domestic and such a home lover, that I really felt sorry for him. When I told him that I was so fond of staying indoors that I would never cross my threshold if Oliver didn't make me, he laughed and said that he wished I'd convert his wife to my way of thinking. Yet he seems to have the greatest admiration for her, and, do you know, I believe he even admires that red feather, though he doesn't approve of it. He never turns his eyes away from her when they are together, which isn't very much, as she goes about just as she pleases without him. Can you understand how a person can both admire and disapprove of a thing? Oliver says he knows how it is, but I must say that I don't. I hope and pray that our marriage will always be different from theirs. Oliver and I are never apart for a single minute except when he is at work in the office. He hasn't written a line since we came here, but he is going to begin as soon as we get settled, and then he says that I may sit in the room and sew if I want to. I can't believe that people really love each other unless they want to be together every instant, no matter what they are doing. Why, if Oliver went out to men's dinners without me as Mr. Payson does (though she doesn't seem to mind it) I should just sit at home by myself and cry my eyes out. I think love, if it is love, ought to be all in all. I am perfectly sure that if I live to be a hundred I shall never want any society but Oliver's. He is the whole world to me, and when he is not here I spend my time, unless I am at work, just sitting and thinking about him. My one idea is to make him as happy as I can, and when a woman does this for a man I don't think she has time to run around by herself as Mrs. Payson does. Tell dearest father that I so often think of his sermons and the beautiful things he said about women. The rector here doesn't compare with him as a preacher. This is such a long letter it will take two stamps. I've just let myself run on without thinking what I was writing, so if I have made any mistakes in grammar or in spelling, please don't let father see them but read my letter aloud to him. I can shut my eyes and see you sitting at dinner, with Docia bringing in the plum pudding, and I know you will talk of me while you help to it. Write me who comes to dinner with you. I wonder if Miss Priscilla and John Henry are there as usual. Do you know whether John Henry ever goes to the Treadwell's or not? I wish you would ask him to take Susan to see his old mammy in Pink Alley. Now that I am not there to go to see her occasionally, I am afraid she will get lonesome. Good-bye, dearest mother. I will write to you before New Year. I am so busy that I don't have time to write every day, but you will understand and so will father. With my heart's fondest love to you both, Your VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 6, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: The little patterns were exactly what I wanted--thank you a thousand times. I knew you would be overjoyed at the news, and you are the only person I've breathed it to--except, of course, dear Oliver, who is frightened to death already. He has made me stop everything at once, and whenever he sees me lift my hand, he begins to get nervous and begs me not to do it. Oh, mother, he loves me so that it is really pathetic to see his anxiety. And--can you believe it--he doesn't appear to be the least bit glad about it. When I told him, he looked amazed--as if he had never thought of its happening--and said, "Oh, Virginia, not so soon!" He told me afterwards that, of course, he'd always thought we'd have children after a while, before we were middle-aged, but that he had wanted to stay like this for at least five or ten years. When the baby comes, he says he supposes he'll like it, but that he can't honestly say he is glad. It's funny how frightened he is, because I am not the least bit so. All women must expect to have children when they marry, and if God makes them suffer for it, it must be because it is best that they should. Perhaps they wouldn't love their babies so much if they got them easily. I never think of the pain a minute. It all seems so beautiful and sacred to me that I can't understand why Oliver isn't enraptured just as I am. To think of a new life starting into the world from me--a life that is half mine and half Oliver's, and one that would never be at all except for our love. The baby will seem from the very first minute to be our love made into flesh. I don't see how a woman who feels this could waste a thought on what she has to suffer. I am so glad you are going to send me a nurse from Dinwiddie, because I'm afraid I could never get one here that I could trust. The servant Oliver got me is no earthly account, and I still do as much of the cooking as I can. The house doesn't look nearly so nice as it used to, but the doctor tells me that I mustn't sweep, so I only do the light dusting. I sew almost all the time, and I've already finished the little slips. To-day I'm going to cut out the petticoats. I couldn't tell from the pattern you sent whether they fasten in front or in the back. There are no places for buttonholes. Do you use safety pins to fasten them with? The embroidery is perfectly lovely, and will make the sweetest trimming. I am using pink for the basket because Oliver and I both hope the baby will be a girl. If it is, I shall name her after you, of course, and I want her to be just exactly like you. Oliver says he can't understand why anybody ever wants a boy--girls are so much nicer. But then he insists that if she isn't born with blue eyes, he will send her to the orphanage. I am trying to do just as you tell me to, and to be as careful as I possibly can. The doctor thinks I've stayed indoors too much since I came here, so I go out for a little walk with Oliver every night. I am so afraid that somebody will see me that I really hate to go out at all, and always choose the darkest streets I can find. Last night I had a bad stumble, and Oliver says he doesn't care if the whole town discovers us, he's not going to take me down any more unlighted alleys. It has been terribly hot all day--not a breath of air stirring--and I never felt the heat so much in my life. The doctor says it's because of my condition--and last night, after Oliver went to sleep, I got up and sat by the window until daybreak. At first I was dreadfully frightened, and thought I was going to stifle--but poor Oliver had come home so tired that I made up my mind I wasn't going to wake him if I could possibly help it. This morning I didn't tell him a word about it, and he hasn't the least idea that I didn't sleep soundly all night. I suppose that's why I feel so dragged and worn out to-day, just as if somebody had given me a good beating. I was obliged to lie down most of the afternoon, but I am going to take a bath in a few minutes and try to make myself look nice and fresh before Oliver comes home. I have let out that flowered organdie--the one you liked so much--and I wear it almost every evening. I know I look dreadfully, but Oliver says I am more beautiful than ever. It seems to me sometimes that men are born blind where women are concerned, but perhaps God made it that way on purpose. Do you know Oliver really admires Mrs. Payson, and he thinks that red feather very becoming to her. He says she's much too good for her husband, but I have been obliged to disagree with him about that. Even if Mr. Payson does drink a little, I am sure it is only because he gets lonesome when he is left by himself, and that she could prevent it if she tried. Oliver and I never talk about these things because he sees that I feel so strongly about them. Oh, darling mother, I shall be so glad to see you! I hope and pray that father will be well enough for you to come a whole month ahead. In that case you will be here in less than two months, won't you? If the baby comes on the twelfth of August, she (I am perfectly sure it will be a girl) and father will have the same birthday. I am so anxious that she shall be born on that day. Well, I must stop now, though I could run on forever. I never see a living soul from one day to another--Mrs. Payson is out of town--so when Oliver stays late at the office, and I am too tired to work, I get a little--just a little bit lonesome. Mr. Payson sent me a pile of novels by Oliver the other night--but I haven't looked into them. I always feel that it is a waste of time to read when there are things about the house that ought to be done. I wish everything didn't cost so much here. Money doesn't go half as far as it does in Dinwiddie. The price of meat is almost three times as much as it is at home, and chickens are so expensive that we have them only twice a week. It is hard to housekeep on a small allowance, and now that we have to save for the baby's coming, I have to count every penny. I have bought a little book like yours, and I put down all that I spend during the day, and then add it up at night before going to bed. Oliver says I'm dreadfully frugal, but I am always so terribly afraid of running over my allowance (which is every cent that we can afford) and not having the money to pay the doctor's bills when they are due. Nobody could be more generous with money than Oliver is--I couldn't endure being married to a stingy man like Mr. Treadwell--and the other day when one of the men in the office died, he sent the most beautiful wreath that cost ten dollars. I am trying to save enough out of the housekeeping balance to pay for it, for Oliver always runs out of his pocket money before the middle of the month. I haven't bought anything for the baby because you sent me all the materials I needed, and I have been sewing on those ever since they came. Of course my own clothes are still as good as new, so the only expense will be the doctor and the nurse and the extra things I shall be obliged to have to eat when I am sick. Give dear father a dozen kisses from me, and tell him to hurry and get well so he can christen his granddaughter. Your devoted and ever grateful VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 11, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: Just a line to say that I am so, so sorry you can't come, but that you mustn't worry a minute, because everything is going beautifully, and I am not the least bit afraid. The doctor says he never saw any one in a better frame of mind or so little nervous. Give my dear love to father. I am so distressed that he should suffer as he does. Rheumatism must be such terrible pain, and I don't wonder that you are frightened lest it should go to his heart. I shall send you a telegram as soon as the baby comes. Your devoted daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 29, 1885. MY PRECIOUS MOTHER: This is the first time I have sat up in bed, and I am trying to write a little note to you on a pillow instead of a desk. My hand shakes so that I'm afraid you won't be able to read it, but I felt that I wanted to send you a few words of my very own, not dictated to the nurse or to Mrs. Payson. I can't tell you how perfectly lovely Mrs. Payson has been to me. She was here all that dreadful night, and I believe I should have died without her. The doctor said I had such a hard time because I'd let myself get run down and stayed indoors too much. But I'm getting all right now--and the rest is over and doesn't matter. As soon as I am strong again I shall be perfectly happy. Oh, mother, aren't you delighted that the baby is a girl, after all? It was the first question I asked when I came back to consciousness the next morning, and when they told me it was, I said, "Her name is Lucy Pendleton," and that was all. I was so weak they wouldn't let me open my lips again, and Oliver was kept out of the room for almost ten days because I would talk to him. Poor fellow, it almost killed him. He is as white as a sheet still, and looks as if he had been through tortures. It must have been terrible for him, because I was really very, very ill at one time. But it is all over now, and the baby is the sweetest thing you ever imagined. I believe she knows me already, and Mrs. Payson says she is exactly like me, though I can see the strongest resemblance to Oliver, even if she has blue eyes and he hasn't. Wasn't it lovely how everything came just as we wanted it to--a girl, born on father's birthday, with blue eyes, and named Lucy? But, mother, darling, the most wonderful thing of all was that you seemed to be with me all through it. The whole time I was unconscious I thought you were here, and the nurse tells me that I was calling "Mother! Mother!" all that night. Nothing ever made me feel as close to you as having a baby of my own. I never knew before what you were to me, and how dearly, dearly I love you. The nurse is taking the pencil away from me. Your loving VIRGINIA. Isn't it funny that Oliver won't take any interest in the baby at all? He says she caused more trouble than she is worth. Was father like that? * * * * * MATOACA CITY. April 3, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: My last letter was written an age ago, but I have been so busy since Marthy left that I've hardly had a moment in which to draw breath. It was a blow to me that she wouldn't stay for she was really an excellent nurse and the baby got on so well with her, but there aren't any coloured people of her kind here, and she got so homesick for Dinwiddie that I thought she would lose her mind if she stayed. You know how dependent they are upon company, and going out on Sunday afternoon and all that kind of thing, and there really wasn't any amusement for her except taking the baby out in the morning. She got so low spirited that it was almost a relief when she went, but of course I feel her loss dreadfully. I haven't let the baby out of my sight because I wouldn't trust Daisy with her for anything in the world. She is so terribly flighty. I have the crib brought into my room (though Oliver hates it) and I take entire charge of her night and day. I should love to do it if only Oliver didn't mind it so much. He says I think more of the baby now than I do of him. Isn't that absurd? But of course she does take every single minute of my time, and I can't dress myself for him every evening as carefully as I used to do and look after all the housekeeping arrangements. Daisy is a very poor cook and she simply throws the things on the table, but it seems to me that my first duty is to the baby, so I try to put up with the discomforts as well as I can. It is hard to eat what she cooks since everything tastes exactly alike, but I try to swallow as much as I can because the doctor says that if I don't keep up my strength I shall have to stop nursing the baby. Wouldn't that be dreadful? It almost breaks my heart to think of it, and I am sure we'd never get any artificial food to agree with her. She is perfectly well now, the sweetest, fattest thing you ever saw, and a real beauty, and she is so devoted to me that she cries whenever I go out of her sight. I am never tired of watching her, and even when she is asleep I sit sometimes for an hour by her crib just thinking how pretty she looks with her eyes closed and wishing you could see her. Oliver says I spoil her to death, but how can a baby of seven months be spoiled. He doesn't enjoy her half as much as I do, and sometimes I almost think that he gets impatient of seeing her always in my arms. At first he absolutely refused to have her crib brought into our room, but when I cried, he gave in and was very sweet about it. I feel so ashamed sometimes of the way the house looks, but there doesn't seem to be any help for it because the doctor says if I let myself get tired it will be bad for the baby. Of course I wouldn't put my own health before his comfort, but I am obliged to think first of the baby, am I not? Last night, for instance, the poor little thing was ill with colic and I was up and down with her until daybreak. Then this morning she woke early and I had to nurse her and give her her bath, and, added to everything else, Daisy's cousin died and she sent word she couldn't come. I slipped on a wrapper before taking a bath or fixing my hair and ran down to try and get Oliver's breakfast, but the baby began to cry and he came after me and said he wanted to make the coffee himself. Then he brought a cup upstairs to me, but I was so tired and nervous that I couldn't drink it. He didn't seem to understand why, feeling as badly as I did, I wouldn't just put the baby back into her crib and make her stay there until I got some rest, but the little thing was so wide awake that I hadn't the heart to do it. Besides, it is so important to keep regular hours with her, isn't it? I don't suppose a man ever realizes how a woman looks at these things, but you will understand, won't you, mother? I am all alone in the house to-night because a play is in town that Oliver wanted to see and I made him go to it. He wanted to ask Mrs. Midden to sit downstairs (she has offered over and over again to do it) so that I might go too, but of course I wouldn't let him. I really couldn't have enjoyed it a minute for thinking of the baby, and besides I never cared for the theatre. Then, too, he doesn't know (for I never tell him) how very tired I am by the time night comes. Sometimes when Oliver comes home and we sit in the dining-room (we never use the drawing-room, because it is across the hall and I'm afraid I shouldn't hear the baby cry) it is as much as I can do to keep my eyes open. I try not to let him notice it, but one night when he read me the first act of a play he is writing, I went to sleep, and though he didn't say anything, I could see that he was very much hurt. He worries a good deal about my health, too, and he even went out one day and engaged a nurse without saying anything to me about it. After I had talked to her though, I saw that she would never do, so I sent her away before he came home. I wish I could get really strong and feel well again, but the doctor insists I never will until I get out of doors and use my muscles. But you stay in the house all the time and so did grandmother, so I don't believe there's a word of truth in what he says. Anyway, I go out every day now with the baby. Thank you so much for the little bands. They are just what I wanted. With dearest love, Your devoted VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 10, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Daisy left a week ago and we couldn't find another servant until to-day. I must say that I prefer coloured servants. They are so much more dependable. I didn't know until the evening before Daisy left that she was going, and I had to send Oliver straight out to see if he could find somebody to come in and help me. There wasn't a soul to be had until to-day, however, so for a week I was obliged to make Oliver get his dinner at the boarding-house. It doesn't make any difference what I have because I haven't a particle of appetite, and I'd just as soon eat tea and toast as anything else. Of course, but for the baby I could have managed perfectly well--but she has been so fretful of late that she doesn't let me put her down a minute. The doctor says her teeth are beginning to hurt her, and that I must expect to have trouble the first summer. She has been so well until now that he thinks it has been really remarkable. He tells me he never knew a healthier baby, but of course I am terribly anxious about her teething in the hot weather. If she grows much more fretful I'm afraid I shall have to take her to the country for July and August. It seems dreadful to leave Oliver all alone, but I don't see how I can help it if the doctor advises me to go. Oliver has gone to some musical comedy at the Academy to-night, and I am so tired that I am going to bed just as soon as I finish this letter. I hope and pray that the baby will have a quiet night. Don't you think that Daisy treated me very badly considering how kind I had been to her? Only a week ago when she was taken with pain in the night, I got up and made her a mustard plaster and sat by her bed until she felt easier. The next day I did all of her work, and yet she has so little gratitude that she could leave me this way when she knows perfectly well that I am worried to death about the baby's first summer. I'd give anything if I could go home in July as you suggest, but it is such a long trip, and the heat will probably be quite as bad in Dinwiddie as here. Of course, it would make all the difference in the world to me to be where I could have you to advise me about the baby, and I'd go to-morrow if it only wasn't so far. Mrs. Midden has told me of a boarding-house in the country not more than twenty miles from here where Oliver could come down every evening, and we may decide to go there for a month or two. I can't help feeling very anxious, especially as Mrs. Scott's little boy--he is just the age of baby--was taken ill the other night, and they thought he would die before they could get a doctor. This letter is full of my worries, but in spite of them I am the happiest woman that ever lived. Oliver is the best thing to me you can imagine, and the baby is so fascinating that I enjoy every minute I am with her. It is the greatest fun to watch her in her bath. I know you would simply go into raptures over her--and she is so bright that she already understands every word that I say. She grows more like Oliver all the time, and the other day while I was watching her playing with her rubber doll, she looked so beautiful that it almost frightened me. I am so glad dear father is well, and what you wrote me about John Henry's admiration for Susan interested me so much that I sat straight down and wrote to him. Why do you think that it is only friendship and that he isn't in love with her? If he really thinks her the "finest girl in the world," I should imagine he was beginning to be pretty serious. I am delighted to hear that he is going to take her to the festival. Tell Susan from me that I shall never be satisfied until she is as happy as I am. Mr. Treadwell was right, I believe, not to let her go to college, though of course I want dear Susan to have whatever she sets her heart on. But, when all is said, you were wise in teaching me that nothing matters to a woman except love. More and more I am learning that if we only love unselfishly enough, everything else will work out for good to us. My little worries can't keep me from being so blissfully happy that I want to sing all the time. Work is a joy to me because I feel that I am doing it for Oliver and the baby. And with two such treasures to live for I should be the most ungrateful creature alive if I ever complained. Your ever loving daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY, July 1, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: We are leaving suddenly for the country, and I'll send our address just as soon as we get there. The doctor thinks I ought to take the baby away from town, so I am going to the boarding-house I wrote you about. Oliver will come down every evening--it's only an hour's trip. I am so tired from packing that I can't write any more. Lovingly, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. September 15, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Here we are back again in our home, and I was never so thankful in my life to get away from any place. I wrote you how dreadfully inconvenient it was, but it would take pages to tell you all of my experiences in the last few days. Such people you never saw in your life! And the food got so uneatable that I lived on crackers for the last fortnight. Fortunately, I was still nursing the baby, but the doctor has just told me that I must stop. I am so distressed about it. Do you think it will go hard with her after the first year? She is as fat and well as she can be now, but I live in hourly terror of her getting sick. If anything should happen

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you what I thought of her. I believe now that the whole trouble with her is simply that she isn't a Southern lady. She means well, I am sure, but she isn't what I should call exactly refined. There's something "horsey" about her--I can't think of any other way to express it--something that reminds me just a little bit of Abby--and, you remember, we always said Abby got that from being educated in the North. Tell dearest Susan I really think it is fortunate that she did not go to one of their colleges. Mrs. Payson is a college woman and it seems to me that she is always trying to appear as clever as a man. She talks in a way sometimes that sounds as if she believed in woman's rights and all that sort of thing. I told Oliver about it, and he laughed and said that men hated talk like that. He says all a man admires in a woman is her power of loving, and that when she begins to ape a man she loses her charm for him. I can't understand why Mr. Payson married his wife. He said such nice things to me the other day about my being so domestic and such a home lover, that I really felt sorry for him. When I told him that I was so fond of staying indoors that I would never cross my threshold if Oliver didn't make me, he laughed and said that he wished I'd convert his wife to my way of thinking. Yet he seems to have the greatest admiration for her, and, do you know, I believe he even admires that red feather, though he doesn't approve of it. He never turns his eyes away from her when they are together, which isn't very much, as she goes about just as she pleases without him. Can you understand how a person can both admire and disapprove of a thing? Oliver says he knows how it is, but I must say that I don't. I hope and pray that our marriage will always be different from theirs. Oliver and I are never apart for a single minute except when he is at work in the office. He hasn't written a line since we came here, but he is going to begin as soon as we get settled, and then he says that I may sit in the room and sew if I want to. I can't believe that people really love each other unless they want to be together every instant, no matter what they are doing. Why, if Oliver went out to men's dinners without me as Mr. Payson does (though she doesn't seem to mind it) I should just sit at home by myself and cry my eyes out. I think love, if it is love, ought to be all in all. I am perfectly sure that if I live to be a hundred I shall never want any society but Oliver's. He is the whole world to me, and when he is not here I spend my time, unless I am at work, just sitting and thinking about him. My one idea is to make him as happy as I can, and when a woman does this for a man I don't think she has time to run around by herself as Mrs. Payson does. Tell dearest father that I so often think of his sermons and the beautiful things he said about women. The rector here doesn't compare with him as a preacher. This is such a long letter it will take two stamps. I've just let myself run on without thinking what I was writing, so if I have made any mistakes in grammar or in spelling, please don't let father see them but read my letter aloud to him. I can shut my eyes and see you sitting at dinner, with Docia bringing in the plum pudding, and I know you will talk of me while you help to it. Write me who comes to dinner with you. I wonder if Miss Priscilla and John Henry are there as usual. Do you know whether John Henry ever goes to the Treadwell's or not? I wish you would ask him to take Susan to see his old mammy in Pink Alley. Now that I am not there to go to see her occasionally, I am afraid she will get lonesome. Good-bye, dearest mother. I will write to you before New Year. I am so busy that I don't have time to write every day, but you will understand and so will father. With my heart's fondest love to you both, Your VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 6, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: The little patterns were exactly what I wanted--thank you a thousand times. I knew you would be overjoyed at the news, and you are the only person I've breathed it to--except, of course, dear Oliver, who is frightened to death already. He has made me stop everything at once, and whenever he sees me lift my hand, he begins to get nervous and begs me not to do it. Oh, mother, he loves me so that it is really pathetic to see his anxiety. And--can you believe it--he doesn't appear to be the least bit glad about it. When I told him, he looked amazed--as if he had never thought of its happening--and said, "Oh, Virginia, not so soon!" He told me afterwards that, of course, he'd always thought we'd have children after a while, before we were middle-aged, but that he had wanted to stay like this for at least five or ten years. When the baby comes, he says he supposes he'll like it, but that he can't honestly say he is glad. It's funny how frightened he is, because I am not the least bit so. All women must expect to have children when they marry, and if God makes them suffer for it, it must be because it is best that they should. Perhaps they wouldn't love their babies so much if they got them easily. I never think of the pain a minute. It all seems so beautiful and sacred to me that I can't understand why Oliver isn't enraptured just as I am. To think of a new life starting into the world from me--a life that is half mine and half Oliver's, and one that would never be at all except for our love. The baby will seem from the very first minute to be our love made into flesh. I don't see how a woman who feels this could waste a thought on what she has to suffer. I am so glad you are going to send me a nurse from Dinwiddie, because I'm afraid I could never get one here that I could trust. The servant Oliver got me is no earthly account, and I still do as much of the cooking as I can. The house doesn't look nearly so nice as it used to, but the doctor tells me that I mustn't sweep, so I only do the light dusting. I sew almost all the time, and I've already finished the little slips. To-day I'm going to cut out the petticoats. I couldn't tell from the pattern you sent whether they fasten in front or in the back. There are no places for buttonholes. Do you use safety pins to fasten them with? The embroidery is perfectly lovely, and will make the sweetest trimming. I am using pink for the basket because Oliver and I both hope the baby will be a girl. If it is, I shall name her after you, of course, and I want her to be just exactly like you. Oliver says he can't understand why anybody ever wants a boy--girls are so much nicer. But then he insists that if she isn't born with blue eyes, he will send her to the orphanage. I am trying to do just as you tell me to, and to be as careful as I possibly can. The doctor thinks I've stayed indoors too much since I came here, so I go out for a little walk with Oliver every night. I am so afraid that somebody will see me that I really hate to go out at all, and always choose the darkest streets I can find. Last night I had a bad stumble, and Oliver says he doesn't care if the whole town discovers us, he's not going to take me down any more unlighted alleys. It has been terribly hot all day--not a breath of air stirring--and I never felt the heat so much in my life. The doctor says it's because of my condition--and last night, after Oliver went to sleep, I got up and sat by the window until daybreak. At first I was dreadfully frightened, and thought I was going to stifle--but poor Oliver had come home so tired that I made up my mind I wasn't going to wake him if I could possibly help it. This morning I didn't tell him a word about it, and he hasn't the least idea that I didn't sleep soundly all night. I suppose that's why I feel so dragged and worn out to-day, just as if somebody had given me a good beating. I was obliged to lie down most of the afternoon, but I am going to take a bath in a few minutes and try to make myself look nice and fresh before Oliver comes home. I have let out that flowered organdie--the one you liked so much--and I wear it almost every evening. I know I look dreadfully, but Oliver says I am more beautiful than ever. It seems to me sometimes that men are born blind where women are concerned, but perhaps God made it that way on purpose. Do you know Oliver really admires Mrs. Payson, and he thinks that red feather very becoming to her. He says she's much too good for her husband, but I have been obliged to disagree with him about that. Even if Mr. Payson does drink a little, I am sure it is only because he gets lonesome when he is left by himself, and that she could prevent it if she tried. Oliver and I never talk about these things because he sees that I feel so strongly about them. Oh, darling mother, I shall be so glad to see you! I hope and pray that father will be well enough for you to come a whole month ahead. In that case you will be here in less than two months, won't you? If the baby comes on the twelfth of August, she (I am perfectly sure it will be a girl) and father will have the same birthday. I am so anxious that she shall be born on that day. Well, I must stop now, though I could run on forever. I never see a living soul from one day to another--Mrs. Payson is out of town--so when Oliver stays late at the office, and I am too tired to work, I get a little--just a little bit lonesome. Mr. Payson sent me a pile of novels by Oliver the other night--but I haven't looked into them. I always feel that it is a waste of time to read when there are things about the house that ought to be done. I wish everything didn't cost so much here. Money doesn't go half as far as it does in Dinwiddie. The price of meat is almost three times as much as it is at home, and chickens are so expensive that we have them only twice a week. It is hard to housekeep on a small allowance, and now that we have to save for the baby's coming, I have to count every penny. I have bought a little book like yours, and I put down all that I spend during the day, and then add it up at night before going to bed. Oliver says I'm dreadfully frugal, but I am always so terribly afraid of running over my allowance (which is every cent that we can afford) and not having the money to pay the doctor's bills when they are due. Nobody could be more generous with money than Oliver is--I couldn't endure being married to a stingy man like Mr. Treadwell--and the other day when one of the men in the office died, he sent the most beautiful wreath that cost ten dollars. I am trying to save enough out of the housekeeping balance to pay for it, for Oliver always runs out of his pocket money before the middle of the month. I haven't bought anything for the baby because you sent me all the materials I needed, and I have been sewing on those ever since they came. Of course my own clothes are still as good as new, so the only expense will be the doctor and the nurse and the extra things I shall be obliged to have to eat when I am sick. Give dear father a dozen kisses from me, and tell him to hurry and get well so he can christen his granddaughter. Your devoted and ever grateful VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 11, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: Just a line to say that I am so, so sorry you can't come, but that you mustn't worry a minute, because everything is going beautifully, and I am not the least bit afraid. The doctor says he never saw any one in a better frame of mind or so little nervous. Give my dear love to father. I am so distressed that he should suffer as he does. Rheumatism must be such terrible pain, and I don't wonder that you are frightened lest it should go to his heart. I shall send you a telegram as soon as the baby comes. Your devoted daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 29, 1885. MY PRECIOUS MOTHER: This is the first time I have sat up in bed, and I am trying to write a little note to you on a pillow instead of a desk. My hand shakes so that I'm afraid you won't be able to read it, but I felt that I wanted to send you a few words of my very own, not dictated to the nurse or to Mrs. Payson. I can't tell you how perfectly lovely Mrs. Payson has been to me. She was here all that dreadful night, and I believe I should have died without her. The doctor said I had such a hard time because I'd let myself get run down and stayed indoors too much. But I'm getting all right now--and the rest is over and doesn't matter. As soon as I am strong again I shall be perfectly happy. Oh, mother, aren't you delighted that the baby is a girl, after all? It was the first question I asked when I came back to consciousness the next morning, and when they told me it was, I said, "Her name is Lucy Pendleton," and that was all. I was so weak they wouldn't let me open my lips again, and Oliver was kept out of the room for almost ten days because I would talk to him. Poor fellow, it almost killed him. He is as white as a sheet still, and looks as if he had been through tortures. It must have been terrible for him, because I was really very, very ill at one time. But it is all over now, and the baby is the sweetest thing you ever imagined. I believe she knows me already, and Mrs. Payson says she is exactly like me, though I can see the strongest resemblance to Oliver, even if she has blue eyes and he hasn't. Wasn't it lovely how everything came just as we wanted it to--a girl, born on father's birthday, with blue eyes, and named Lucy? But, mother, darling, the most wonderful thing of all was that you seemed to be with me all through it. The whole time I was unconscious I thought you were here, and the nurse tells me that I was calling "Mother! Mother!" all that night. Nothing ever made me feel as close to you as having a baby of my own. I never knew before what you were to me, and how dearly, dearly I love you. The nurse is taking the pencil away from me. Your loving VIRGINIA. Isn't it funny that Oliver won't take any interest in the baby at all? He says she caused more trouble than she is worth. Was father like that? * * * * * MATOACA CITY. April 3, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: My last letter was written an age ago, but I have been so busy since Marthy left that I've hardly had a moment in which to draw breath. It was a blow to me that she wouldn't stay for she was really an excellent nurse and the baby got on so well with her, but there aren't any coloured people of her kind here, and she got so homesick for Dinwiddie that I thought she would lose her mind if she stayed. You know how dependent they are upon company, and going out on Sunday afternoon and all that kind of thing, and there really wasn't any amusement for her except taking the baby out in the morning. She got so low spirited that it was almost a relief when she went, but of course I feel her loss dreadfully. I haven't let the baby out of my sight because I wouldn't trust Daisy with her for anything in the world. She is so terribly flighty. I have the crib brought into my room (though Oliver hates it) and I take entire charge of her night and day. I should love to do it if only Oliver didn't mind it so much. He says I think more of the baby now than I do of him. Isn't that absurd? But of course she does take every single minute of my time, and I can't dress myself for him every evening as carefully as I used to do and look after all the housekeeping arrangements. Daisy is a very poor cook and she simply throws the things on the table, but it seems to me that my first duty is to the baby, so I try to put up with the discomforts as well as I can. It is hard to eat what she cooks since everything tastes exactly alike, but I try to swallow as much as I can because the doctor says that if I don't keep up my strength I shall have to stop nursing the baby. Wouldn't that be dreadful? It almost breaks my heart to think of it, and I am sure we'd never get any artificial food to agree with her. She is perfectly well now, the sweetest, fattest thing you ever saw, and a real beauty, and she is so devoted to me that she cries whenever I go out of her sight. I am never tired of watching her, and even when she is asleep I sit sometimes for an hour by her crib just thinking how pretty she looks with her eyes closed and wishing you could see her. Oliver says I spoil her to death, but how can a baby of seven months be spoiled. He doesn't enjoy her half as much as I do, and sometimes I almost think that he gets impatient of seeing her always in my arms. At first he absolutely refused to have her crib brought into our room, but when I cried, he gave in and was very sweet about it. I feel so ashamed sometimes of the way the house looks, but there doesn't seem to be any help for it because the doctor says if I let myself get tired it will be bad for the baby. Of course I wouldn't put my own health before his comfort, but I am obliged to think first of the baby, am I not? Last night, for instance, the poor little thing was ill with colic and I was up and down with her until daybreak. Then this morning she woke early and I had to nurse her and give her her bath, and, added to everything else, Daisy's cousin died and she sent word she couldn't come. I slipped on a wrapper before taking a bath or fixing my hair and ran down to try and get Oliver's breakfast, but the baby began to cry and he came after me and said he wanted to make the coffee himself. Then he brought a cup upstairs to me, but I was so tired and nervous that I couldn't drink it. He didn't seem to understand why, feeling as badly as I did, I wouldn't just put the baby back into her crib and make her stay there until I got some rest, but the little thing was so wide awake that I hadn't the heart to do it. Besides, it is so important to keep regular hours with her, isn't it? I don't suppose a man ever realizes how a woman looks at these things, but you will understand, won't you, mother? I am all alone in the house to-night because a play is in town that Oliver wanted to see and I made him go to it. He wanted to ask Mrs. Midden to sit downstairs (she has offered over and over again to do it) so that I might go too, but of course I wouldn't let him. I really couldn't have enjoyed it a minute for thinking of the baby, and besides I never cared for the theatre. Then, too, he doesn't know (for I never tell him) how very tired I am by the time night comes. Sometimes when Oliver comes home and we sit in the dining-room (we never use the drawing-room, because it is across the hall and I'm afraid I shouldn't hear the baby cry) it is as much as I can do to keep my eyes open. I try not to let him notice it, but one night when he read me the first act of a play he is writing, I went to sleep, and though he didn't say anything, I could see that he was very much hurt. He worries a good deal about my health, too, and he even went out one day and engaged a nurse without saying anything to me about it. After I had talked to her though, I saw that she would never do, so I sent her away before he came home. I wish I could get really strong and feel well again, but the doctor insists I never will until I get out of doors and use my muscles. But you stay in the house all the time and so did grandmother, so I don't believe there's a word of truth in what he says. Anyway, I go out every day now with the baby. Thank you so much for the little bands. They are just what I wanted. With dearest love, Your devoted VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 10, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Daisy left a week ago and we couldn't find another servant until to-day. I must say that I prefer coloured servants. They are so much more dependable. I didn't know until the evening before Daisy left that she was going, and I had to send Oliver straight out to see if he could find somebody to come in and help me. There wasn't a soul to be had until to-day, however, so for a week I was obliged to make Oliver get his dinner at the boarding-house. It doesn't make any difference what I have because I haven't a particle of appetite, and I'd just as soon eat tea and toast as anything else. Of course, but for the baby I could have managed perfectly well--but she has been so fretful of late that she doesn't let me put her down a minute. The doctor says her teeth are beginning to hurt her, and that I must expect to have trouble the first summer. She has been so well until now that he thinks it has been really remarkable. He tells me he never knew a healthier baby, but of course I am terribly anxious about her teething in the hot weather. If she grows much more fretful I'm afraid I shall have to take her to the country for July and August. It seems dreadful to leave Oliver all alone, but I don't see how I can help it if the doctor advises me to go. Oliver has gone to some musical comedy at the Academy to-night, and I am so tired that I am going to bed just as soon as I finish this letter. I hope and pray that the baby will have a quiet night. Don't you think that Daisy treated me very badly considering how kind I had been to her? Only a week ago when she was taken with pain in the night, I got up and made her a mustard plaster and sat by her bed until she felt easier. The next day I did all of her work, and yet she has so little gratitude that she could leave me this way when she knows perfectly well that I am worried to death about the baby's first summer. I'd give anything if I could go home in July as you suggest, but it is such a long trip, and the heat will probably be quite as bad in Dinwiddie as here. Of course, it would make all the difference in the world to me to be where I could have you to advise me about the baby, and I'd go to-morrow if it only wasn't so far. Mrs. Midden has told me of a boarding-house in the country not more than twenty miles from here where Oliver could come down every evening, and we may decide to go there for a month or two. I can't help feeling very anxious, especially as Mrs. Scott's little boy--he is just the age of baby--was taken ill the other night, and they thought he would die before they could get a doctor. This letter is full of my worries, but in spite of them I am the happiest woman that ever lived. Oliver is the best thing to me you can imagine, and the baby is so fascinating that I enjoy every minute I am with her. It is the greatest fun to watch her in her bath. I know you would simply go into raptures over her--and she is so bright that she already understands every word that I say. She grows more like Oliver all the time, and the other day while I was watching her playing with her rubber doll, she looked so beautiful that it almost frightened me. I am so glad dear father is well, and what you wrote me about John Henry's admiration for Susan interested me so much that I sat straight down and wrote to him. Why do you think that it is only friendship and that he isn't in love with her? If he really thinks her the "finest girl in the world," I should imagine he was beginning to be pretty serious. I am delighted to hear that he is going to take her to the festival. Tell Susan from me that I shall never be satisfied until she is as happy as I am. Mr. Treadwell was right, I believe, not to let her go to college, though of course I want dear Susan to have whatever she sets her heart on. But, when all is said, you were wise in teaching me that nothing matters to a woman except love. More and more I am learning that if we only love unselfishly enough, everything else will work out for good to us. My little worries can't keep me from being so blissfully happy that I want to sing all the time. Work is a joy to me because I feel that I am doing it for Oliver and the baby. And with two such treasures to live for I should be the most ungrateful creature alive if I ever complained. Your ever loving daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY, July 1, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: We are leaving suddenly for the country, and I'll send our address just as soon as we get there. The doctor thinks I ought to take the baby away from town, so I am going to the boarding-house I wrote you about. Oliver will come down every evening--it's only an hour's trip. I am so tired from packing that I can't write any more. Lovingly, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. September 15, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Here we are back again in our home, and I was never so thankful in my life to get away from any place. I wrote you how dreadfully inconvenient it was, but it would take pages to tell you all of my experiences in the last few days. Such people you never saw in your life! And the food got so uneatable that I lived on crackers for the last fortnight. Fortunately, I was still nursing the baby, but the doctor has just told me that I must stop. I am so distressed about it. Do you think it will go hard with her after the first year? She is as fat and well as she can be now, but I live in hourly terror of her getting sick. If anything should happen

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you what I thought of her. I believe now that the whole trouble with her is simply that she isn't a Southern lady. She means well, I am sure, but she isn't what I should call exactly refined. There's something "horsey" about her--I can't think of any other way to express it--something that reminds me just a little bit of Abby--and, you remember, we always said Abby got that from being educated in the North. Tell dearest Susan I really think it is fortunate that she did not go to one of their colleges. Mrs. Payson is a college woman and it seems to me that she is always trying to appear as clever as a man. She talks in a way sometimes that sounds as if she believed in woman's rights and all that sort of thing. I told Oliver about it, and he laughed and said that men hated talk like that. He says all a man admires in a woman is her power of loving, and that when she begins to ape a man she loses her charm for him. I can't understand why Mr. Payson married his wife. He said such nice things to me the other day about my being so domestic and such a home lover, that I really felt sorry for him. When I told him that I was so fond of staying indoors that I would never cross my threshold if Oliver didn't make me, he laughed and said that he wished I'd convert his wife to my way of thinking. Yet he seems to have the greatest admiration for her, and, do you know, I believe he even admires that red feather, though he doesn't approve of it. He never turns his eyes away from her when they are together, which isn't very much, as she goes about just as she pleases without him. Can you understand how a person can both admire and disapprove of a thing? Oliver says he knows how it is, but I must say that I don't. I hope and pray that our marriage will always be different from theirs. Oliver and I are never apart for a single minute except when he is at work in the office. He hasn't written a line since we came here, but he is going to begin as soon as we get settled, and then he says that I may sit in the room and sew if I want to. I can't believe that people really love each other unless they want to be together every instant, no matter what they are doing. Why, if Oliver went out to men's dinners without me as Mr. Payson does (though she doesn't seem to mind it) I should just sit at home by myself and cry my eyes out. I think love, if it is love, ought to be all in all. I am perfectly sure that if I live to be a hundred I shall never want any society but Oliver's. He is the whole world to me, and when he is not here I spend my time, unless I am at work, just sitting and thinking about him. My one idea is to make him as happy as I can, and when a woman does this for a man I don't think she has time to run around by herself as Mrs. Payson does. Tell dearest father that I so often think of his sermons and the beautiful things he said about women. The rector here doesn't compare with him as a preacher. This is such a long letter it will take two stamps. I've just let myself run on without thinking what I was writing, so if I have made any mistakes in grammar or in spelling, please don't let father see them but read my letter aloud to him. I can shut my eyes and see you sitting at dinner, with Docia bringing in the plum pudding, and I know you will talk of me while you help to it. Write me who comes to dinner with you. I wonder if Miss Priscilla and John Henry are there as usual. Do you know whether John Henry ever goes to the Treadwell's or not? I wish you would ask him to take Susan to see his old mammy in Pink Alley. Now that I am not there to go to see her occasionally, I am afraid she will get lonesome. Good-bye, dearest mother. I will write to you before New Year. I am so busy that I don't have time to write every day, but you will understand and so will father. With my heart's fondest love to you both, Your VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 6, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: The little patterns were exactly what I wanted--thank you a thousand times. I knew you would be overjoyed at the news, and you are the only person I've breathed it to--except, of course, dear Oliver, who is frightened to death already. He has made me stop everything at once, and whenever he sees me lift my hand, he begins to get nervous and begs me not to do it. Oh, mother, he loves me so that it is really pathetic to see his anxiety. And--can you believe it--he doesn't appear to be the least bit glad about it. When I told him, he looked amazed--as if he had never thought of its happening--and said, "Oh, Virginia, not so soon!" He told me afterwards that, of course, he'd always thought we'd have children after a while, before we were middle-aged, but that he had wanted to stay like this for at least five or ten years. When the baby comes, he says he supposes he'll like it, but that he can't honestly say he is glad. It's funny how frightened he is, because I am not the least bit so. All women must expect to have children when they marry, and if God makes them suffer for it, it must be because it is best that they should. Perhaps they wouldn't love their babies so much if they got them easily. I never think of the pain a minute. It all seems so beautiful and sacred to me that I can't understand why Oliver isn't enraptured just as I am. To think of a new life starting into the world from me--a life that is half mine and half Oliver's, and one that would never be at all except for our love. The baby will seem from the very first minute to be our love made into flesh. I don't see how a woman who feels this could waste a thought on what she has to suffer. I am so glad you are going to send me a nurse from Dinwiddie, because I'm afraid I could never get one here that I could trust. The servant Oliver got me is no earthly account, and I still do as much of the cooking as I can. The house doesn't look nearly so nice as it used to, but the doctor tells me that I mustn't sweep, so I only do the light dusting. I sew almost all the time, and I've already finished the little slips. To-day I'm going to cut out the petticoats. I couldn't tell from the pattern you sent whether they fasten in front or in the back. There are no places for buttonholes. Do you use safety pins to fasten them with? The embroidery is perfectly lovely, and will make the sweetest trimming. I am using pink for the basket because Oliver and I both hope the baby will be a girl. If it is, I shall name her after you, of course, and I want her to be just exactly like you. Oliver says he can't understand why anybody ever wants a boy--girls are so much nicer. But then he insists that if she isn't born with blue eyes, he will send her to the orphanage. I am trying to do just as you tell me to, and to be as careful as I possibly can. The doctor thinks I've stayed indoors too much since I came here, so I go out for a little walk with Oliver every night. I am so afraid that somebody will see me that I really hate to go out at all, and always choose the darkest streets I can find. Last night I had a bad stumble, and Oliver says he doesn't care if the whole town discovers us, he's not going to take me down any more unlighted alleys. It has been terribly hot all day--not a breath of air stirring--and I never felt the heat so much in my life. The doctor says it's because of my condition--and last night, after Oliver went to sleep, I got up and sat by the window until daybreak. At first I was dreadfully frightened, and thought I was going to stifle--but poor Oliver had come home so tired that I made up my mind I wasn't going to wake him if I could possibly help it. This morning I didn't tell him a word about it, and he hasn't the least idea that I didn't sleep soundly all night. I suppose that's why I feel so dragged and worn out to-day, just as if somebody had given me a good beating. I was obliged to lie down most of the afternoon, but I am going to take a bath in a few minutes and try to make myself look nice and fresh before Oliver comes home. I have let out that flowered organdie--the one you liked so much--and I wear it almost every evening. I know I look dreadfully, but Oliver says I am more beautiful than ever. It seems to me sometimes that men are born blind where women are concerned, but perhaps God made it that way on purpose. Do you know Oliver really admires Mrs. Payson, and he thinks that red feather very becoming to her. He says she's much too good for her husband, but I have been obliged to disagree with him about that. Even if Mr. Payson does drink a little, I am sure it is only because he gets lonesome when he is left by himself, and that she could prevent it if she tried. Oliver and I never talk about these things because he sees that I feel so strongly about them. Oh, darling mother, I shall be so glad to see you! I hope and pray that father will be well enough for you to come a whole month ahead. In that case you will be here in less than two months, won't you? If the baby comes on the twelfth of August, she (I am perfectly sure it will be a girl) and father will have the same birthday. I am so anxious that she shall be born on that day. Well, I must stop now, though I could run on forever. I never see a living soul from one day to another--Mrs. Payson is out of town--so when Oliver stays late at the office, and I am too tired to work, I get a little--just a little bit lonesome. Mr. Payson sent me a pile of novels by Oliver the other night--but I haven't looked into them. I always feel that it is a waste of time to read when there are things about the house that ought to be done. I wish everything didn't cost so much here. Money doesn't go half as far as it does in Dinwiddie. The price of meat is almost three times as much as it is at home, and chickens are so expensive that we have them only twice a week. It is hard to housekeep on a small allowance, and now that we have to save for the baby's coming, I have to count every penny. I have bought a little book like yours, and I put down all that I spend during the day, and then add it up at night before going to bed. Oliver says I'm dreadfully frugal, but I am always so terribly afraid of running over my allowance (which is every cent that we can afford) and not having the money to pay the doctor's bills when they are due. Nobody could be more generous with money than Oliver is--I couldn't endure being married to a stingy man like Mr. Treadwell--and the other day when one of the men in the office died, he sent the most beautiful wreath that cost ten dollars. I am trying to save enough out of the housekeeping balance to pay for it, for Oliver always runs out of his pocket money before the middle of the month. I haven't bought anything for the baby because you sent me all the materials I needed, and I have been sewing on those ever since they came. Of course my own clothes are still as good as new, so the only expense will be the doctor and the nurse and the extra things I shall be obliged to have to eat when I am sick. Give dear father a dozen kisses from me, and tell him to hurry and get well so he can christen his granddaughter. Your devoted and ever grateful VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 11, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: Just a line to say that I am so, so sorry you can't come, but that you mustn't worry a minute, because everything is going beautifully, and I am not the least bit afraid. The doctor says he never saw any one in a better frame of mind or so little nervous. Give my dear love to father. I am so distressed that he should suffer as he does. Rheumatism must be such terrible pain, and I don't wonder that you are frightened lest it should go to his heart. I shall send you a telegram as soon as the baby comes. Your devoted daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 29, 1885. MY PRECIOUS MOTHER: This is the first time I have sat up in bed, and I am trying to write a little note to you on a pillow instead of a desk. My hand shakes so that I'm afraid you won't be able to read it, but I felt that I wanted to send you a few words of my very own, not dictated to the nurse or to Mrs. Payson. I can't tell you how perfectly lovely Mrs. Payson has been to me. She was here all that dreadful night, and I believe I should have died without her. The doctor said I had such a hard time because I'd let myself get run down and stayed indoors too much. But I'm getting all right now--and the rest is over and doesn't matter. As soon as I am strong again I shall be perfectly happy. Oh, mother, aren't you delighted that the baby is a girl, after all? It was the first question I asked when I came back to consciousness the next morning, and when they told me it was, I said, "Her name is Lucy Pendleton," and that was all. I was so weak they wouldn't let me open my lips again, and Oliver was kept out of the room for almost ten days because I would talk to him. Poor fellow, it almost killed him. He is as white as a sheet still, and looks as if he had been through tortures. It must have been terrible for him, because I was really very, very ill at one time. But it is all over now, and the baby is the sweetest thing you ever imagined. I believe she knows me already, and Mrs. Payson says she is exactly like me, though I can see the strongest resemblance to Oliver, even if she has blue eyes and he hasn't. Wasn't it lovely how everything came just as we wanted it to--a girl, born on father's birthday, with blue eyes, and named Lucy? But, mother, darling, the most wonderful thing of all was that you seemed to be with me all through it. The whole time I was unconscious I thought you were here, and the nurse tells me that I was calling "Mother! Mother!" all that night. Nothing ever made me feel as close to you as having a baby of my own. I never knew before what you were to me, and how dearly, dearly I love you. The nurse is taking the pencil away from me. Your loving VIRGINIA. Isn't it funny that Oliver won't take any interest in the baby at all? He says she caused more trouble than she is worth. Was father like that? * * * * * MATOACA CITY. April 3, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: My last letter was written an age ago, but I have been so busy since Marthy left that I've hardly had a moment in which to draw breath. It was a blow to me that she wouldn't stay for she was really an excellent nurse and the baby got on so well with her, but there aren't any coloured people of her kind here, and she got so homesick for Dinwiddie that I thought she would lose her mind if she stayed. You know how dependent they are upon company, and going out on Sunday afternoon and all that kind of thing, and there really wasn't any amusement for her except taking the baby out in the morning. She got so low spirited that it was almost a relief when she went, but of course I feel her loss dreadfully. I haven't let the baby out of my sight because I wouldn't trust Daisy with her for anything in the world. She is so terribly flighty. I have the crib brought into my room (though Oliver hates it) and I take entire charge of her night and day. I should love to do it if only Oliver didn't mind it so much. He says I think more of the baby now than I do of him. Isn't that absurd? But of course she does take every single minute of my time, and I can't dress myself for him every evening as carefully as I used to do and look after all the housekeeping arrangements. Daisy is a very poor cook and she simply throws the things on the table, but it seems to me that my first duty is to the baby, so I try to put up with the discomforts as well as I can. It is hard to eat what she cooks since everything tastes exactly alike, but I try to swallow as much as I can because the doctor says that if I don't keep up my strength I shall have to stop nursing the baby. Wouldn't that be dreadful? It almost breaks my heart to think of it, and I am sure we'd never get any artificial food to agree with her. She is perfectly well now, the sweetest, fattest thing you ever saw, and a real beauty, and she is so devoted to me that she cries whenever I go out of her sight. I am never tired of watching her, and even when she is asleep I sit sometimes for an hour by her crib just thinking how pretty she looks with her eyes closed and wishing you could see her. Oliver says I spoil her to death, but how can a baby of seven months be spoiled. He doesn't enjoy her half as much as I do, and sometimes I almost think that he gets impatient of seeing her always in my arms. At first he absolutely refused to have her crib brought into our room, but when I cried, he gave in and was very sweet about it. I feel so ashamed sometimes of the way the house looks, but there doesn't seem to be any help for it because the doctor says if I let myself get tired it will be bad for the baby. Of course I wouldn't put my own health before his comfort, but I am obliged to think first of the baby, am I not? Last night, for instance, the poor little thing was ill with colic and I was up and down with her until daybreak. Then this morning she woke early and I had to nurse her and give her her bath, and, added to everything else, Daisy's cousin died and she sent word she couldn't come. I slipped on a wrapper before taking a bath or fixing my hair and ran down to try and get Oliver's breakfast, but the baby began to cry and he came after me and said he wanted to make the coffee himself. Then he brought a cup upstairs to me, but I was so tired and nervous that I couldn't drink it. He didn't seem to understand why, feeling as badly as I did, I wouldn't just put the baby back into her crib and make her stay there until I got some rest, but the little thing was so wide awake that I hadn't the heart to do it. Besides, it is so important to keep regular hours with her, isn't it? I don't suppose a man ever realizes how a woman looks at these things, but you will understand, won't you, mother? I am all alone in the house to-night because a play is in town that Oliver wanted to see and I made him go to it. He wanted to ask Mrs. Midden to sit downstairs (she has offered over and over again to do it) so that I might go too, but of course I wouldn't let him. I really couldn't have enjoyed it a minute for thinking of the baby, and besides I never cared for the theatre. Then, too, he doesn't know (for I never tell him) how very tired I am by the time night comes. Sometimes when Oliver comes home and we sit in the dining-room (we never use the drawing-room, because it is across the hall and I'm afraid I shouldn't hear the baby cry) it is as much as I can do to keep my eyes open. I try not to let him notice it, but one night when he read me the first act of a play he is writing, I went to sleep, and though he didn't say anything, I could see that he was very much hurt. He worries a good deal about my health, too, and he even went out one day and engaged a nurse without saying anything to me about it. After I had talked to her though, I saw that she would never do, so I sent her away before he came home. I wish I could get really strong and feel well again, but the doctor insists I never will until I get out of doors and use my muscles. But you stay in the house all the time and so did grandmother, so I don't believe there's a word of truth in what he says. Anyway, I go out every day now with the baby. Thank you so much for the little bands. They are just what I wanted. With dearest love, Your devoted VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 10, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Daisy left a week ago and we couldn't find another servant until to-day. I must say that I prefer coloured servants. They are so much more dependable. I didn't know until the evening before Daisy left that she was going, and I had to send Oliver straight out to see if he could find somebody to come in and help me. There wasn't a soul to be had until to-day, however, so for a week I was obliged to make Oliver get his dinner at the boarding-house. It doesn't make any difference what I have because I haven't a particle of appetite, and I'd just as soon eat tea and toast as anything else. Of course, but for the baby I could have managed perfectly well--but she has been so fretful of late that she doesn't let me put her down a minute. The doctor says her teeth are beginning to hurt her, and that I must expect to have trouble the first summer. She has been so well until now that he thinks it has been really remarkable. He tells me he never knew a healthier baby, but of course I am terribly anxious about her teething in the hot weather. If she grows much more fretful I'm afraid I shall have to take her to the country for July and August. It seems dreadful to leave Oliver all alone, but I don't see how I can help it if the doctor advises me to go. Oliver has gone to some musical comedy at the Academy to-night, and I am so tired that I am going to bed just as soon as I finish this letter. I hope and pray that the baby will have a quiet night. Don't you think that Daisy treated me very badly considering how kind I had been to her? Only a week ago when she was taken with pain in the night, I got up and made her a mustard plaster and sat by her bed until she felt easier. The next day I did all of her work, and yet she has so little gratitude that she could leave me this way when she knows perfectly well that I am worried to death about the baby's first summer. I'd give anything if I could go home in July as you suggest, but it is such a long trip, and the heat will probably be quite as bad in Dinwiddie as here. Of course, it would make all the difference in the world to me to be where I could have you to advise me about the baby, and I'd go to-morrow if it only wasn't so far. Mrs. Midden has told me of a boarding-house in the country not more than twenty miles from here where Oliver could come down every evening, and we may decide to go there for a month or two. I can't help feeling very anxious, especially as Mrs. Scott's little boy--he is just the age of baby--was taken ill the other night, and they thought he would die before they could get a doctor. This letter is full of my worries, but in spite of them I am the happiest woman that ever lived. Oliver is the best thing to me you can imagine, and the baby is so fascinating that I enjoy every minute I am with her. It is the greatest fun to watch her in her bath. I know you would simply go into raptures over her--and she is so bright that she already understands every word that I say. She grows more like Oliver all the time, and the other day while I was watching her playing with her rubber doll, she looked so beautiful that it almost frightened me. I am so glad dear father is well, and what you wrote me about John Henry's admiration for Susan interested me so much that I sat straight down and wrote to him. Why do you think that it is only friendship and that he isn't in love with her? If he really thinks her the "finest girl in the world," I should imagine he was beginning to be pretty serious. I am delighted to hear that he is going to take her to the festival. Tell Susan from me that I shall never be satisfied until she is as happy as I am. Mr. Treadwell was right, I believe, not to let her go to college, though of course I want dear Susan to have whatever she sets her heart on. But, when all is said, you were wise in teaching me that nothing matters to a woman except love. More and more I am learning that if we only love unselfishly enough, everything else will work out for good to us. My little worries can't keep me from being so blissfully happy that I want to sing all the time. Work is a joy to me because I feel that I am doing it for Oliver and the baby. And with two such treasures to live for I should be the most ungrateful creature alive if I ever complained. Your ever loving daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY, July 1, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: We are leaving suddenly for the country, and I'll send our address just as soon as we get there. The doctor thinks I ought to take the baby away from town, so I am going to the boarding-house I wrote you about. Oliver will come down every evening--it's only an hour's trip. I am so tired from packing that I can't write any more. Lovingly, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. September 15, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Here we are back again in our home, and I was never so thankful in my life to get away from any place. I wrote you how dreadfully inconvenient it was, but it would take pages to tell you all of my experiences in the last few days. Such people you never saw in your life! And the food got so uneatable that I lived on crackers for the last fortnight. Fortunately, I was still nursing the baby, but the doctor has just told me that I must stop. I am so distressed about it. Do you think it will go hard with her after the first year? She is as fat and well as she can be now, but I live in hourly terror of her getting sick. If anything should happen

housekeeping

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you what I thought of her. I believe now that the whole trouble with her is simply that she isn't a Southern lady. She means well, I am sure, but she isn't what I should call exactly refined. There's something "horsey" about her--I can't think of any other way to express it--something that reminds me just a little bit of Abby--and, you remember, we always said Abby got that from being educated in the North. Tell dearest Susan I really think it is fortunate that she did not go to one of their colleges. Mrs. Payson is a college woman and it seems to me that she is always trying to appear as clever as a man. She talks in a way sometimes that sounds as if she believed in woman's rights and all that sort of thing. I told Oliver about it, and he laughed and said that men hated talk like that. He says all a man admires in a woman is her power of loving, and that when she begins to ape a man she loses her charm for him. I can't understand why Mr. Payson married his wife. He said such nice things to me the other day about my being so domestic and such a home lover, that I really felt sorry for him. When I told him that I was so fond of staying indoors that I would never cross my threshold if Oliver didn't make me, he laughed and said that he wished I'd convert his wife to my way of thinking. Yet he seems to have the greatest admiration for her, and, do you know, I believe he even admires that red feather, though he doesn't approve of it. He never turns his eyes away from her when they are together, which isn't very much, as she goes about just as she pleases without him. Can you understand how a person can both admire and disapprove of a thing? Oliver says he knows how it is, but I must say that I don't. I hope and pray that our marriage will always be different from theirs. Oliver and I are never apart for a single minute except when he is at work in the office. He hasn't written a line since we came here, but he is going to begin as soon as we get settled, and then he says that I may sit in the room and sew if I want to. I can't believe that people really love each other unless they want to be together every instant, no matter what they are doing. Why, if Oliver went out to men's dinners without me as Mr. Payson does (though she doesn't seem to mind it) I should just sit at home by myself and cry my eyes out. I think love, if it is love, ought to be all in all. I am perfectly sure that if I live to be a hundred I shall never want any society but Oliver's. He is the whole world to me, and when he is not here I spend my time, unless I am at work, just sitting and thinking about him. My one idea is to make him as happy as I can, and when a woman does this for a man I don't think she has time to run around by herself as Mrs. Payson does. Tell dearest father that I so often think of his sermons and the beautiful things he said about women. The rector here doesn't compare with him as a preacher. This is such a long letter it will take two stamps. I've just let myself run on without thinking what I was writing, so if I have made any mistakes in grammar or in spelling, please don't let father see them but read my letter aloud to him. I can shut my eyes and see you sitting at dinner, with Docia bringing in the plum pudding, and I know you will talk of me while you help to it. Write me who comes to dinner with you. I wonder if Miss Priscilla and John Henry are there as usual. Do you know whether John Henry ever goes to the Treadwell's or not? I wish you would ask him to take Susan to see his old mammy in Pink Alley. Now that I am not there to go to see her occasionally, I am afraid she will get lonesome. Good-bye, dearest mother. I will write to you before New Year. I am so busy that I don't have time to write every day, but you will understand and so will father. With my heart's fondest love to you both, Your VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 6, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: The little patterns were exactly what I wanted--thank you a thousand times. I knew you would be overjoyed at the news, and you are the only person I've breathed it to--except, of course, dear Oliver, who is frightened to death already. He has made me stop everything at once, and whenever he sees me lift my hand, he begins to get nervous and begs me not to do it. Oh, mother, he loves me so that it is really pathetic to see his anxiety. And--can you believe it--he doesn't appear to be the least bit glad about it. When I told him, he looked amazed--as if he had never thought of its happening--and said, "Oh, Virginia, not so soon!" He told me afterwards that, of course, he'd always thought we'd have children after a while, before we were middle-aged, but that he had wanted to stay like this for at least five or ten years. When the baby comes, he says he supposes he'll like it, but that he can't honestly say he is glad. It's funny how frightened he is, because I am not the least bit so. All women must expect to have children when they marry, and if God makes them suffer for it, it must be because it is best that they should. Perhaps they wouldn't love their babies so much if they got them easily. I never think of the pain a minute. It all seems so beautiful and sacred to me that I can't understand why Oliver isn't enraptured just as I am. To think of a new life starting into the world from me--a life that is half mine and half Oliver's, and one that would never be at all except for our love. The baby will seem from the very first minute to be our love made into flesh. I don't see how a woman who feels this could waste a thought on what she has to suffer. I am so glad you are going to send me a nurse from Dinwiddie, because I'm afraid I could never get one here that I could trust. The servant Oliver got me is no earthly account, and I still do as much of the cooking as I can. The house doesn't look nearly so nice as it used to, but the doctor tells me that I mustn't sweep, so I only do the light dusting. I sew almost all the time, and I've already finished the little slips. To-day I'm going to cut out the petticoats. I couldn't tell from the pattern you sent whether they fasten in front or in the back. There are no places for buttonholes. Do you use safety pins to fasten them with? The embroidery is perfectly lovely, and will make the sweetest trimming. I am using pink for the basket because Oliver and I both hope the baby will be a girl. If it is, I shall name her after you, of course, and I want her to be just exactly like you. Oliver says he can't understand why anybody ever wants a boy--girls are so much nicer. But then he insists that if she isn't born with blue eyes, he will send her to the orphanage. I am trying to do just as you tell me to, and to be as careful as I possibly can. The doctor thinks I've stayed indoors too much since I came here, so I go out for a little walk with Oliver every night. I am so afraid that somebody will see me that I really hate to go out at all, and always choose the darkest streets I can find. Last night I had a bad stumble, and Oliver says he doesn't care if the whole town discovers us, he's not going to take me down any more unlighted alleys. It has been terribly hot all day--not a breath of air stirring--and I never felt the heat so much in my life. The doctor says it's because of my condition--and last night, after Oliver went to sleep, I got up and sat by the window until daybreak. At first I was dreadfully frightened, and thought I was going to stifle--but poor Oliver had come home so tired that I made up my mind I wasn't going to wake him if I could possibly help it. This morning I didn't tell him a word about it, and he hasn't the least idea that I didn't sleep soundly all night. I suppose that's why I feel so dragged and worn out to-day, just as if somebody had given me a good beating. I was obliged to lie down most of the afternoon, but I am going to take a bath in a few minutes and try to make myself look nice and fresh before Oliver comes home. I have let out that flowered organdie--the one you liked so much--and I wear it almost every evening. I know I look dreadfully, but Oliver says I am more beautiful than ever. It seems to me sometimes that men are born blind where women are concerned, but perhaps God made it that way on purpose. Do you know Oliver really admires Mrs. Payson, and he thinks that red feather very becoming to her. He says she's much too good for her husband, but I have been obliged to disagree with him about that. Even if Mr. Payson does drink a little, I am sure it is only because he gets lonesome when he is left by himself, and that she could prevent it if she tried. Oliver and I never talk about these things because he sees that I feel so strongly about them. Oh, darling mother, I shall be so glad to see you! I hope and pray that father will be well enough for you to come a whole month ahead. In that case you will be here in less than two months, won't you? If the baby comes on the twelfth of August, she (I am perfectly sure it will be a girl) and father will have the same birthday. I am so anxious that she shall be born on that day. Well, I must stop now, though I could run on forever. I never see a living soul from one day to another--Mrs. Payson is out of town--so when Oliver stays late at the office, and I am too tired to work, I get a little--just a little bit lonesome. Mr. Payson sent me a pile of novels by Oliver the other night--but I haven't looked into them. I always feel that it is a waste of time to read when there are things about the house that ought to be done. I wish everything didn't cost so much here. Money doesn't go half as far as it does in Dinwiddie. The price of meat is almost three times as much as it is at home, and chickens are so expensive that we have them only twice a week. It is hard to housekeep on a small allowance, and now that we have to save for the baby's coming, I have to count every penny. I have bought a little book like yours, and I put down all that I spend during the day, and then add it up at night before going to bed. Oliver says I'm dreadfully frugal, but I am always so terribly afraid of running over my allowance (which is every cent that we can afford) and not having the money to pay the doctor's bills when they are due. Nobody could be more generous with money than Oliver is--I couldn't endure being married to a stingy man like Mr. Treadwell--and the other day when one of the men in the office died, he sent the most beautiful wreath that cost ten dollars. I am trying to save enough out of the housekeeping balance to pay for it, for Oliver always runs out of his pocket money before the middle of the month. I haven't bought anything for the baby because you sent me all the materials I needed, and I have been sewing on those ever since they came. Of course my own clothes are still as good as new, so the only expense will be the doctor and the nurse and the extra things I shall be obliged to have to eat when I am sick. Give dear father a dozen kisses from me, and tell him to hurry and get well so he can christen his granddaughter. Your devoted and ever grateful VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 11, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: Just a line to say that I am so, so sorry you can't come, but that you mustn't worry a minute, because everything is going beautifully, and I am not the least bit afraid. The doctor says he never saw any one in a better frame of mind or so little nervous. Give my dear love to father. I am so distressed that he should suffer as he does. Rheumatism must be such terrible pain, and I don't wonder that you are frightened lest it should go to his heart. I shall send you a telegram as soon as the baby comes. Your devoted daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 29, 1885. MY PRECIOUS MOTHER: This is the first time I have sat up in bed, and I am trying to write a little note to you on a pillow instead of a desk. My hand shakes so that I'm afraid you won't be able to read it, but I felt that I wanted to send you a few words of my very own, not dictated to the nurse or to Mrs. Payson. I can't tell you how perfectly lovely Mrs. Payson has been to me. She was here all that dreadful night, and I believe I should have died without her. The doctor said I had such a hard time because I'd let myself get run down and stayed indoors too much. But I'm getting all right now--and the rest is over and doesn't matter. As soon as I am strong again I shall be perfectly happy. Oh, mother, aren't you delighted that the baby is a girl, after all? It was the first question I asked when I came back to consciousness the next morning, and when they told me it was, I said, "Her name is Lucy Pendleton," and that was all. I was so weak they wouldn't let me open my lips again, and Oliver was kept out of the room for almost ten days because I would talk to him. Poor fellow, it almost killed him. He is as white as a sheet still, and looks as if he had been through tortures. It must have been terrible for him, because I was really very, very ill at one time. But it is all over now, and the baby is the sweetest thing you ever imagined. I believe she knows me already, and Mrs. Payson says she is exactly like me, though I can see the strongest resemblance to Oliver, even if she has blue eyes and he hasn't. Wasn't it lovely how everything came just as we wanted it to--a girl, born on father's birthday, with blue eyes, and named Lucy? But, mother, darling, the most wonderful thing of all was that you seemed to be with me all through it. The whole time I was unconscious I thought you were here, and the nurse tells me that I was calling "Mother! Mother!" all that night. Nothing ever made me feel as close to you as having a baby of my own. I never knew before what you were to me, and how dearly, dearly I love you. The nurse is taking the pencil away from me. Your loving VIRGINIA. Isn't it funny that Oliver won't take any interest in the baby at all? He says she caused more trouble than she is worth. Was father like that? * * * * * MATOACA CITY. April 3, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: My last letter was written an age ago, but I have been so busy since Marthy left that I've hardly had a moment in which to draw breath. It was a blow to me that she wouldn't stay for she was really an excellent nurse and the baby got on so well with her, but there aren't any coloured people of her kind here, and she got so homesick for Dinwiddie that I thought she would lose her mind if she stayed. You know how dependent they are upon company, and going out on Sunday afternoon and all that kind of thing, and there really wasn't any amusement for her except taking the baby out in the morning. She got so low spirited that it was almost a relief when she went, but of course I feel her loss dreadfully. I haven't let the baby out of my sight because I wouldn't trust Daisy with her for anything in the world. She is so terribly flighty. I have the crib brought into my room (though Oliver hates it) and I take entire charge of her night and day. I should love to do it if only Oliver didn't mind it so much. He says I think more of the baby now than I do of him. Isn't that absurd? But of course she does take every single minute of my time, and I can't dress myself for him every evening as carefully as I used to do and look after all the housekeeping arrangements. Daisy is a very poor cook and she simply throws the things on the table, but it seems to me that my first duty is to the baby, so I try to put up with the discomforts as well as I can. It is hard to eat what she cooks since everything tastes exactly alike, but I try to swallow as much as I can because the doctor says that if I don't keep up my strength I shall have to stop nursing the baby. Wouldn't that be dreadful? It almost breaks my heart to think of it, and I am sure we'd never get any artificial food to agree with her. She is perfectly well now, the sweetest, fattest thing you ever saw, and a real beauty, and she is so devoted to me that she cries whenever I go out of her sight. I am never tired of watching her, and even when she is asleep I sit sometimes for an hour by her crib just thinking how pretty she looks with her eyes closed and wishing you could see her. Oliver says I spoil her to death, but how can a baby of seven months be spoiled. He doesn't enjoy her half as much as I do, and sometimes I almost think that he gets impatient of seeing her always in my arms. At first he absolutely refused to have her crib brought into our room, but when I cried, he gave in and was very sweet about it. I feel so ashamed sometimes of the way the house looks, but there doesn't seem to be any help for it because the doctor says if I let myself get tired it will be bad for the baby. Of course I wouldn't put my own health before his comfort, but I am obliged to think first of the baby, am I not? Last night, for instance, the poor little thing was ill with colic and I was up and down with her until daybreak. Then this morning she woke early and I had to nurse her and give her her bath, and, added to everything else, Daisy's cousin died and she sent word she couldn't come. I slipped on a wrapper before taking a bath or fixing my hair and ran down to try and get Oliver's breakfast, but the baby began to cry and he came after me and said he wanted to make the coffee himself. Then he brought a cup upstairs to me, but I was so tired and nervous that I couldn't drink it. He didn't seem to understand why, feeling as badly as I did, I wouldn't just put the baby back into her crib and make her stay there until I got some rest, but the little thing was so wide awake that I hadn't the heart to do it. Besides, it is so important to keep regular hours with her, isn't it? I don't suppose a man ever realizes how a woman looks at these things, but you will understand, won't you, mother? I am all alone in the house to-night because a play is in town that Oliver wanted to see and I made him go to it. He wanted to ask Mrs. Midden to sit downstairs (she has offered over and over again to do it) so that I might go too, but of course I wouldn't let him. I really couldn't have enjoyed it a minute for thinking of the baby, and besides I never cared for the theatre. Then, too, he doesn't know (for I never tell him) how very tired I am by the time night comes. Sometimes when Oliver comes home and we sit in the dining-room (we never use the drawing-room, because it is across the hall and I'm afraid I shouldn't hear the baby cry) it is as much as I can do to keep my eyes open. I try not to let him notice it, but one night when he read me the first act of a play he is writing, I went to sleep, and though he didn't say anything, I could see that he was very much hurt. He worries a good deal about my health, too, and he even went out one day and engaged a nurse without saying anything to me about it. After I had talked to her though, I saw that she would never do, so I sent her away before he came home. I wish I could get really strong and feel well again, but the doctor insists I never will until I get out of doors and use my muscles. But you stay in the house all the time and so did grandmother, so I don't believe there's a word of truth in what he says. Anyway, I go out every day now with the baby. Thank you so much for the little bands. They are just what I wanted. With dearest love, Your devoted VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 10, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Daisy left a week ago and we couldn't find another servant until to-day. I must say that I prefer coloured servants. They are so much more dependable. I didn't know until the evening before Daisy left that she was going, and I had to send Oliver straight out to see if he could find somebody to come in and help me. There wasn't a soul to be had until to-day, however, so for a week I was obliged to make Oliver get his dinner at the boarding-house. It doesn't make any difference what I have because I haven't a particle of appetite, and I'd just as soon eat tea and toast as anything else. Of course, but for the baby I could have managed perfectly well--but she has been so fretful of late that she doesn't let me put her down a minute. The doctor says her teeth are beginning to hurt her, and that I must expect to have trouble the first summer. She has been so well until now that he thinks it has been really remarkable. He tells me he never knew a healthier baby, but of course I am terribly anxious about her teething in the hot weather. If she grows much more fretful I'm afraid I shall have to take her to the country for July and August. It seems dreadful to leave Oliver all alone, but I don't see how I can help it if the doctor advises me to go. Oliver has gone to some musical comedy at the Academy to-night, and I am so tired that I am going to bed just as soon as I finish this letter. I hope and pray that the baby will have a quiet night. Don't you think that Daisy treated me very badly considering how kind I had been to her? Only a week ago when she was taken with pain in the night, I got up and made her a mustard plaster and sat by her bed until she felt easier. The next day I did all of her work, and yet she has so little gratitude that she could leave me this way when she knows perfectly well that I am worried to death about the baby's first summer. I'd give anything if I could go home in July as you suggest, but it is such a long trip, and the heat will probably be quite as bad in Dinwiddie as here. Of course, it would make all the difference in the world to me to be where I could have you to advise me about the baby, and I'd go to-morrow if it only wasn't so far. Mrs. Midden has told me of a boarding-house in the country not more than twenty miles from here where Oliver could come down every evening, and we may decide to go there for a month or two. I can't help feeling very anxious, especially as Mrs. Scott's little boy--he is just the age of baby--was taken ill the other night, and they thought he would die before they could get a doctor. This letter is full of my worries, but in spite of them I am the happiest woman that ever lived. Oliver is the best thing to me you can imagine, and the baby is so fascinating that I enjoy every minute I am with her. It is the greatest fun to watch her in her bath. I know you would simply go into raptures over her--and she is so bright that she already understands every word that I say. She grows more like Oliver all the time, and the other day while I was watching her playing with her rubber doll, she looked so beautiful that it almost frightened me. I am so glad dear father is well, and what you wrote me about John Henry's admiration for Susan interested me so much that I sat straight down and wrote to him. Why do you think that it is only friendship and that he isn't in love with her? If he really thinks her the "finest girl in the world," I should imagine he was beginning to be pretty serious. I am delighted to hear that he is going to take her to the festival. Tell Susan from me that I shall never be satisfied until she is as happy as I am. Mr. Treadwell was right, I believe, not to let her go to college, though of course I want dear Susan to have whatever she sets her heart on. But, when all is said, you were wise in teaching me that nothing matters to a woman except love. More and more I am learning that if we only love unselfishly enough, everything else will work out for good to us. My little worries can't keep me from being so blissfully happy that I want to sing all the time. Work is a joy to me because I feel that I am doing it for Oliver and the baby. And with two such treasures to live for I should be the most ungrateful creature alive if I ever complained. Your ever loving daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY, July 1, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: We are leaving suddenly for the country, and I'll send our address just as soon as we get there. The doctor thinks I ought to take the baby away from town, so I am going to the boarding-house I wrote you about. Oliver will come down every evening--it's only an hour's trip. I am so tired from packing that I can't write any more. Lovingly, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. September 15, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Here we are back again in our home, and I was never so thankful in my life to get away from any place. I wrote you how dreadfully inconvenient it was, but it would take pages to tell you all of my experiences in the last few days. Such people you never saw in your life! And the food got so uneatable that I lived on crackers for the last fortnight. Fortunately, I was still nursing the baby, but the doctor has just told me that I must stop. I am so distressed about it. Do you think it will go hard with her after the first year? She is as fat and well as she can be now, but I live in hourly terror of her getting sick. If anything should happen

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you what I thought of her. I believe now that the whole trouble with her is simply that she isn't a Southern lady. She means well, I am sure, but she isn't what I should call exactly refined. There's something "horsey" about her--I can't think of any other way to express it--something that reminds me just a little bit of Abby--and, you remember, we always said Abby got that from being educated in the North. Tell dearest Susan I really think it is fortunate that she did not go to one of their colleges. Mrs. Payson is a college woman and it seems to me that she is always trying to appear as clever as a man. She talks in a way sometimes that sounds as if she believed in woman's rights and all that sort of thing. I told Oliver about it, and he laughed and said that men hated talk like that. He says all a man admires in a woman is her power of loving, and that when she begins to ape a man she loses her charm for him. I can't understand why Mr. Payson married his wife. He said such nice things to me the other day about my being so domestic and such a home lover, that I really felt sorry for him. When I told him that I was so fond of staying indoors that I would never cross my threshold if Oliver didn't make me, he laughed and said that he wished I'd convert his wife to my way of thinking. Yet he seems to have the greatest admiration for her, and, do you know, I believe he even admires that red feather, though he doesn't approve of it. He never turns his eyes away from her when they are together, which isn't very much, as she goes about just as she pleases without him. Can you understand how a person can both admire and disapprove of a thing? Oliver says he knows how it is, but I must say that I don't. I hope and pray that our marriage will always be different from theirs. Oliver and I are never apart for a single minute except when he is at work in the office. He hasn't written a line since we came here, but he is going to begin as soon as we get settled, and then he says that I may sit in the room and sew if I want to. I can't believe that people really love each other unless they want to be together every instant, no matter what they are doing. Why, if Oliver went out to men's dinners without me as Mr. Payson does (though she doesn't seem to mind it) I should just sit at home by myself and cry my eyes out. I think love, if it is love, ought to be all in all. I am perfectly sure that if I live to be a hundred I shall never want any society but Oliver's. He is the whole world to me, and when he is not here I spend my time, unless I am at work, just sitting and thinking about him. My one idea is to make him as happy as I can, and when a woman does this for a man I don't think she has time to run around by herself as Mrs. Payson does. Tell dearest father that I so often think of his sermons and the beautiful things he said about women. The rector here doesn't compare with him as a preacher. This is such a long letter it will take two stamps. I've just let myself run on without thinking what I was writing, so if I have made any mistakes in grammar or in spelling, please don't let father see them but read my letter aloud to him. I can shut my eyes and see you sitting at dinner, with Docia bringing in the plum pudding, and I know you will talk of me while you help to it. Write me who comes to dinner with you. I wonder if Miss Priscilla and John Henry are there as usual. Do you know whether John Henry ever goes to the Treadwell's or not? I wish you would ask him to take Susan to see his old mammy in Pink Alley. Now that I am not there to go to see her occasionally, I am afraid she will get lonesome. Good-bye, dearest mother. I will write to you before New Year. I am so busy that I don't have time to write every day, but you will understand and so will father. With my heart's fondest love to you both, Your VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 6, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: The little patterns were exactly what I wanted--thank you a thousand times. I knew you would be overjoyed at the news, and you are the only person I've breathed it to--except, of course, dear Oliver, who is frightened to death already. He has made me stop everything at once, and whenever he sees me lift my hand, he begins to get nervous and begs me not to do it. Oh, mother, he loves me so that it is really pathetic to see his anxiety. And--can you believe it--he doesn't appear to be the least bit glad about it. When I told him, he looked amazed--as if he had never thought of its happening--and said, "Oh, Virginia, not so soon!" He told me afterwards that, of course, he'd always thought we'd have children after a while, before we were middle-aged, but that he had wanted to stay like this for at least five or ten years. When the baby comes, he says he supposes he'll like it, but that he can't honestly say he is glad. It's funny how frightened he is, because I am not the least bit so. All women must expect to have children when they marry, and if God makes them suffer for it, it must be because it is best that they should. Perhaps they wouldn't love their babies so much if they got them easily. I never think of the pain a minute. It all seems so beautiful and sacred to me that I can't understand why Oliver isn't enraptured just as I am. To think of a new life starting into the world from me--a life that is half mine and half Oliver's, and one that would never be at all except for our love. The baby will seem from the very first minute to be our love made into flesh. I don't see how a woman who feels this could waste a thought on what she has to suffer. I am so glad you are going to send me a nurse from Dinwiddie, because I'm afraid I could never get one here that I could trust. The servant Oliver got me is no earthly account, and I still do as much of the cooking as I can. The house doesn't look nearly so nice as it used to, but the doctor tells me that I mustn't sweep, so I only do the light dusting. I sew almost all the time, and I've already finished the little slips. To-day I'm going to cut out the petticoats. I couldn't tell from the pattern you sent whether they fasten in front or in the back. There are no places for buttonholes. Do you use safety pins to fasten them with? The embroidery is perfectly lovely, and will make the sweetest trimming. I am using pink for the basket because Oliver and I both hope the baby will be a girl. If it is, I shall name her after you, of course, and I want her to be just exactly like you. Oliver says he can't understand why anybody ever wants a boy--girls are so much nicer. But then he insists that if she isn't born with blue eyes, he will send her to the orphanage. I am trying to do just as you tell me to, and to be as careful as I possibly can. The doctor thinks I've stayed indoors too much since I came here, so I go out for a little walk with Oliver every night. I am so afraid that somebody will see me that I really hate to go out at all, and always choose the darkest streets I can find. Last night I had a bad stumble, and Oliver says he doesn't care if the whole town discovers us, he's not going to take me down any more unlighted alleys. It has been terribly hot all day--not a breath of air stirring--and I never felt the heat so much in my life. The doctor says it's because of my condition--and last night, after Oliver went to sleep, I got up and sat by the window until daybreak. At first I was dreadfully frightened, and thought I was going to stifle--but poor Oliver had come home so tired that I made up my mind I wasn't going to wake him if I could possibly help it. This morning I didn't tell him a word about it, and he hasn't the least idea that I didn't sleep soundly all night. I suppose that's why I feel so dragged and worn out to-day, just as if somebody had given me a good beating. I was obliged to lie down most of the afternoon, but I am going to take a bath in a few minutes and try to make myself look nice and fresh before Oliver comes home. I have let out that flowered organdie--the one you liked so much--and I wear it almost every evening. I know I look dreadfully, but Oliver says I am more beautiful than ever. It seems to me sometimes that men are born blind where women are concerned, but perhaps God made it that way on purpose. Do you know Oliver really admires Mrs. Payson, and he thinks that red feather very becoming to her. He says she's much too good for her husband, but I have been obliged to disagree with him about that. Even if Mr. Payson does drink a little, I am sure it is only because he gets lonesome when he is left by himself, and that she could prevent it if she tried. Oliver and I never talk about these things because he sees that I feel so strongly about them. Oh, darling mother, I shall be so glad to see you! I hope and pray that father will be well enough for you to come a whole month ahead. In that case you will be here in less than two months, won't you? If the baby comes on the twelfth of August, she (I am perfectly sure it will be a girl) and father will have the same birthday. I am so anxious that she shall be born on that day. Well, I must stop now, though I could run on forever. I never see a living soul from one day to another--Mrs. Payson is out of town--so when Oliver stays late at the office, and I am too tired to work, I get a little--just a little bit lonesome. Mr. Payson sent me a pile of novels by Oliver the other night--but I haven't looked into them. I always feel that it is a waste of time to read when there are things about the house that ought to be done. I wish everything didn't cost so much here. Money doesn't go half as far as it does in Dinwiddie. The price of meat is almost three times as much as it is at home, and chickens are so expensive that we have them only twice a week. It is hard to housekeep on a small allowance, and now that we have to save for the baby's coming, I have to count every penny. I have bought a little book like yours, and I put down all that I spend during the day, and then add it up at night before going to bed. Oliver says I'm dreadfully frugal, but I am always so terribly afraid of running over my allowance (which is every cent that we can afford) and not having the money to pay the doctor's bills when they are due. Nobody could be more generous with money than Oliver is--I couldn't endure being married to a stingy man like Mr. Treadwell--and the other day when one of the men in the office died, he sent the most beautiful wreath that cost ten dollars. I am trying to save enough out of the housekeeping balance to pay for it, for Oliver always runs out of his pocket money before the middle of the month. I haven't bought anything for the baby because you sent me all the materials I needed, and I have been sewing on those ever since they came. Of course my own clothes are still as good as new, so the only expense will be the doctor and the nurse and the extra things I shall be obliged to have to eat when I am sick. Give dear father a dozen kisses from me, and tell him to hurry and get well so he can christen his granddaughter. Your devoted and ever grateful VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 11, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: Just a line to say that I am so, so sorry you can't come, but that you mustn't worry a minute, because everything is going beautifully, and I am not the least bit afraid. The doctor says he never saw any one in a better frame of mind or so little nervous. Give my dear love to father. I am so distressed that he should suffer as he does. Rheumatism must be such terrible pain, and I don't wonder that you are frightened lest it should go to his heart. I shall send you a telegram as soon as the baby comes. Your devoted daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 29, 1885. MY PRECIOUS MOTHER: This is the first time I have sat up in bed, and I am trying to write a little note to you on a pillow instead of a desk. My hand shakes so that I'm afraid you won't be able to read it, but I felt that I wanted to send you a few words of my very own, not dictated to the nurse or to Mrs. Payson. I can't tell you how perfectly lovely Mrs. Payson has been to me. She was here all that dreadful night, and I believe I should have died without her. The doctor said I had such a hard time because I'd let myself get run down and stayed indoors too much. But I'm getting all right now--and the rest is over and doesn't matter. As soon as I am strong again I shall be perfectly happy. Oh, mother, aren't you delighted that the baby is a girl, after all? It was the first question I asked when I came back to consciousness the next morning, and when they told me it was, I said, "Her name is Lucy Pendleton," and that was all. I was so weak they wouldn't let me open my lips again, and Oliver was kept out of the room for almost ten days because I would talk to him. Poor fellow, it almost killed him. He is as white as a sheet still, and looks as if he had been through tortures. It must have been terrible for him, because I was really very, very ill at one time. But it is all over now, and the baby is the sweetest thing you ever imagined. I believe she knows me already, and Mrs. Payson says she is exactly like me, though I can see the strongest resemblance to Oliver, even if she has blue eyes and he hasn't. Wasn't it lovely how everything came just as we wanted it to--a girl, born on father's birthday, with blue eyes, and named Lucy? But, mother, darling, the most wonderful thing of all was that you seemed to be with me all through it. The whole time I was unconscious I thought you were here, and the nurse tells me that I was calling "Mother! Mother!" all that night. Nothing ever made me feel as close to you as having a baby of my own. I never knew before what you were to me, and how dearly, dearly I love you. The nurse is taking the pencil away from me. Your loving VIRGINIA. Isn't it funny that Oliver won't take any interest in the baby at all? He says she caused more trouble than she is worth. Was father like that? * * * * * MATOACA CITY. April 3, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: My last letter was written an age ago, but I have been so busy since Marthy left that I've hardly had a moment in which to draw breath. It was a blow to me that she wouldn't stay for she was really an excellent nurse and the baby got on so well with her, but there aren't any coloured people of her kind here, and she got so homesick for Dinwiddie that I thought she would lose her mind if she stayed. You know how dependent they are upon company, and going out on Sunday afternoon and all that kind of thing, and there really wasn't any amusement for her except taking the baby out in the morning. She got so low spirited that it was almost a relief when she went, but of course I feel her loss dreadfully. I haven't let the baby out of my sight because I wouldn't trust Daisy with her for anything in the world. She is so terribly flighty. I have the crib brought into my room (though Oliver hates it) and I take entire charge of her night and day. I should love to do it if only Oliver didn't mind it so much. He says I think more of the baby now than I do of him. Isn't that absurd? But of course she does take every single minute of my time, and I can't dress myself for him every evening as carefully as I used to do and look after all the housekeeping arrangements. Daisy is a very poor cook and she simply throws the things on the table, but it seems to me that my first duty is to the baby, so I try to put up with the discomforts as well as I can. It is hard to eat what she cooks since everything tastes exactly alike, but I try to swallow as much as I can because the doctor says that if I don't keep up my strength I shall have to stop nursing the baby. Wouldn't that be dreadful? It almost breaks my heart to think of it, and I am sure we'd never get any artificial food to agree with her. She is perfectly well now, the sweetest, fattest thing you ever saw, and a real beauty, and she is so devoted to me that she cries whenever I go out of her sight. I am never tired of watching her, and even when she is asleep I sit sometimes for an hour by her crib just thinking how pretty she looks with her eyes closed and wishing you could see her. Oliver says I spoil her to death, but how can a baby of seven months be spoiled. He doesn't enjoy her half as much as I do, and sometimes I almost think that he gets impatient of seeing her always in my arms. At first he absolutely refused to have her crib brought into our room, but when I cried, he gave in and was very sweet about it. I feel so ashamed sometimes of the way the house looks, but there doesn't seem to be any help for it because the doctor says if I let myself get tired it will be bad for the baby. Of course I wouldn't put my own health before his comfort, but I am obliged to think first of the baby, am I not? Last night, for instance, the poor little thing was ill with colic and I was up and down with her until daybreak. Then this morning she woke early and I had to nurse her and give her her bath, and, added to everything else, Daisy's cousin died and she sent word she couldn't come. I slipped on a wrapper before taking a bath or fixing my hair and ran down to try and get Oliver's breakfast, but the baby began to cry and he came after me and said he wanted to make the coffee himself. Then he brought a cup upstairs to me, but I was so tired and nervous that I couldn't drink it. He didn't seem to understand why, feeling as badly as I did, I wouldn't just put the baby back into her crib and make her stay there until I got some rest, but the little thing was so wide awake that I hadn't the heart to do it. Besides, it is so important to keep regular hours with her, isn't it? I don't suppose a man ever realizes how a woman looks at these things, but you will understand, won't you, mother? I am all alone in the house to-night because a play is in town that Oliver wanted to see and I made him go to it. He wanted to ask Mrs. Midden to sit downstairs (she has offered over and over again to do it) so that I might go too, but of course I wouldn't let him. I really couldn't have enjoyed it a minute for thinking of the baby, and besides I never cared for the theatre. Then, too, he doesn't know (for I never tell him) how very tired I am by the time night comes. Sometimes when Oliver comes home and we sit in the dining-room (we never use the drawing-room, because it is across the hall and I'm afraid I shouldn't hear the baby cry) it is as much as I can do to keep my eyes open. I try not to let him notice it, but one night when he read me the first act of a play he is writing, I went to sleep, and though he didn't say anything, I could see that he was very much hurt. He worries a good deal about my health, too, and he even went out one day and engaged a nurse without saying anything to me about it. After I had talked to her though, I saw that she would never do, so I sent her away before he came home. I wish I could get really strong and feel well again, but the doctor insists I never will until I get out of doors and use my muscles. But you stay in the house all the time and so did grandmother, so I don't believe there's a word of truth in what he says. Anyway, I go out every day now with the baby. Thank you so much for the little bands. They are just what I wanted. With dearest love, Your devoted VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 10, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Daisy left a week ago and we couldn't find another servant until to-day. I must say that I prefer coloured servants. They are so much more dependable. I didn't know until the evening before Daisy left that she was going, and I had to send Oliver straight out to see if he could find somebody to come in and help me. There wasn't a soul to be had until to-day, however, so for a week I was obliged to make Oliver get his dinner at the boarding-house. It doesn't make any difference what I have because I haven't a particle of appetite, and I'd just as soon eat tea and toast as anything else. Of course, but for the baby I could have managed perfectly well--but she has been so fretful of late that she doesn't let me put her down a minute. The doctor says her teeth are beginning to hurt her, and that I must expect to have trouble the first summer. She has been so well until now that he thinks it has been really remarkable. He tells me he never knew a healthier baby, but of course I am terribly anxious about her teething in the hot weather. If she grows much more fretful I'm afraid I shall have to take her to the country for July and August. It seems dreadful to leave Oliver all alone, but I don't see how I can help it if the doctor advises me to go. Oliver has gone to some musical comedy at the Academy to-night, and I am so tired that I am going to bed just as soon as I finish this letter. I hope and pray that the baby will have a quiet night. Don't you think that Daisy treated me very badly considering how kind I had been to her? Only a week ago when she was taken with pain in the night, I got up and made her a mustard plaster and sat by her bed until she felt easier. The next day I did all of her work, and yet she has so little gratitude that she could leave me this way when she knows perfectly well that I am worried to death about the baby's first summer. I'd give anything if I could go home in July as you suggest, but it is such a long trip, and the heat will probably be quite as bad in Dinwiddie as here. Of course, it would make all the difference in the world to me to be where I could have you to advise me about the baby, and I'd go to-morrow if it only wasn't so far. Mrs. Midden has told me of a boarding-house in the country not more than twenty miles from here where Oliver could come down every evening, and we may decide to go there for a month or two. I can't help feeling very anxious, especially as Mrs. Scott's little boy--he is just the age of baby--was taken ill the other night, and they thought he would die before they could get a doctor. This letter is full of my worries, but in spite of them I am the happiest woman that ever lived. Oliver is the best thing to me you can imagine, and the baby is so fascinating that I enjoy every minute I am with her. It is the greatest fun to watch her in her bath. I know you would simply go into raptures over her--and she is so bright that she already understands every word that I say. She grows more like Oliver all the time, and the other day while I was watching her playing with her rubber doll, she looked so beautiful that it almost frightened me. I am so glad dear father is well, and what you wrote me about John Henry's admiration for Susan interested me so much that I sat straight down and wrote to him. Why do you think that it is only friendship and that he isn't in love with her? If he really thinks her the "finest girl in the world," I should imagine he was beginning to be pretty serious. I am delighted to hear that he is going to take her to the festival. Tell Susan from me that I shall never be satisfied until she is as happy as I am. Mr. Treadwell was right, I believe, not to let her go to college, though of course I want dear Susan to have whatever she sets her heart on. But, when all is said, you were wise in teaching me that nothing matters to a woman except love. More and more I am learning that if we only love unselfishly enough, everything else will work out for good to us. My little worries can't keep me from being so blissfully happy that I want to sing all the time. Work is a joy to me because I feel that I am doing it for Oliver and the baby. And with two such treasures to live for I should be the most ungrateful creature alive if I ever complained. Your ever loving daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY, July 1, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: We are leaving suddenly for the country, and I'll send our address just as soon as we get there. The doctor thinks I ought to take the baby away from town, so I am going to the boarding-house I wrote you about. Oliver will come down every evening--it's only an hour's trip. I am so tired from packing that I can't write any more. Lovingly, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. September 15, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Here we are back again in our home, and I was never so thankful in my life to get away from any place. I wrote you how dreadfully inconvenient it was, but it would take pages to tell you all of my experiences in the last few days. Such people you never saw in your life! And the food got so uneatable that I lived on crackers for the last fortnight. Fortunately, I was still nursing the baby, but the doctor has just told me that I must stop. I am so distressed about it. Do you think it will go hard with her after the first year? She is as fat and well as she can be now, but I live in hourly terror of her getting sick. If anything should happen

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you what I thought of her. I believe now that the whole trouble with her is simply that she isn't a Southern lady. She means well, I am sure, but she isn't what I should call exactly refined. There's something "horsey" about her--I can't think of any other way to express it--something that reminds me just a little bit of Abby--and, you remember, we always said Abby got that from being educated in the North. Tell dearest Susan I really think it is fortunate that she did not go to one of their colleges. Mrs. Payson is a college woman and it seems to me that she is always trying to appear as clever as a man. She talks in a way sometimes that sounds as if she believed in woman's rights and all that sort of thing. I told Oliver about it, and he laughed and said that men hated talk like that. He says all a man admires in a woman is her power of loving, and that when she begins to ape a man she loses her charm for him. I can't understand why Mr. Payson married his wife. He said such nice things to me the other day about my being so domestic and such a home lover, that I really felt sorry for him. When I told him that I was so fond of staying indoors that I would never cross my threshold if Oliver didn't make me, he laughed and said that he wished I'd convert his wife to my way of thinking. Yet he seems to have the greatest admiration for her, and, do you know, I believe he even admires that red feather, though he doesn't approve of it. He never turns his eyes away from her when they are together, which isn't very much, as she goes about just as she pleases without him. Can you understand how a person can both admire and disapprove of a thing? Oliver says he knows how it is, but I must say that I don't. I hope and pray that our marriage will always be different from theirs. Oliver and I are never apart for a single minute except when he is at work in the office. He hasn't written a line since we came here, but he is going to begin as soon as we get settled, and then he says that I may sit in the room and sew if I want to. I can't believe that people really love each other unless they want to be together every instant, no matter what they are doing. Why, if Oliver went out to men's dinners without me as Mr. Payson does (though she doesn't seem to mind it) I should just sit at home by myself and cry my eyes out. I think love, if it is love, ought to be all in all. I am perfectly sure that if I live to be a hundred I shall never want any society but Oliver's. He is the whole world to me, and when he is not here I spend my time, unless I am at work, just sitting and thinking about him. My one idea is to make him as happy as I can, and when a woman does this for a man I don't think she has time to run around by herself as Mrs. Payson does. Tell dearest father that I so often think of his sermons and the beautiful things he said about women. The rector here doesn't compare with him as a preacher. This is such a long letter it will take two stamps. I've just let myself run on without thinking what I was writing, so if I have made any mistakes in grammar or in spelling, please don't let father see them but read my letter aloud to him. I can shut my eyes and see you sitting at dinner, with Docia bringing in the plum pudding, and I know you will talk of me while you help to it. Write me who comes to dinner with you. I wonder if Miss Priscilla and John Henry are there as usual. Do you know whether John Henry ever goes to the Treadwell's or not? I wish you would ask him to take Susan to see his old mammy in Pink Alley. Now that I am not there to go to see her occasionally, I am afraid she will get lonesome. Good-bye, dearest mother. I will write to you before New Year. I am so busy that I don't have time to write every day, but you will understand and so will father. With my heart's fondest love to you both, Your VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 6, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: The little patterns were exactly what I wanted--thank you a thousand times. I knew you would be overjoyed at the news, and you are the only person I've breathed it to--except, of course, dear Oliver, who is frightened to death already. He has made me stop everything at once, and whenever he sees me lift my hand, he begins to get nervous and begs me not to do it. Oh, mother, he loves me so that it is really pathetic to see his anxiety. And--can you believe it--he doesn't appear to be the least bit glad about it. When I told him, he looked amazed--as if he had never thought of its happening--and said, "Oh, Virginia, not so soon!" He told me afterwards that, of course, he'd always thought we'd have children after a while, before we were middle-aged, but that he had wanted to stay like this for at least five or ten years. When the baby comes, he says he supposes he'll like it, but that he can't honestly say he is glad. It's funny how frightened he is, because I am not the least bit so. All women must expect to have children when they marry, and if God makes them suffer for it, it must be because it is best that they should. Perhaps they wouldn't love their babies so much if they got them easily. I never think of the pain a minute. It all seems so beautiful and sacred to me that I can't understand why Oliver isn't enraptured just as I am. To think of a new life starting into the world from me--a life that is half mine and half Oliver's, and one that would never be at all except for our love. The baby will seem from the very first minute to be our love made into flesh. I don't see how a woman who feels this could waste a thought on what she has to suffer. I am so glad you are going to send me a nurse from Dinwiddie, because I'm afraid I could never get one here that I could trust. The servant Oliver got me is no earthly account, and I still do as much of the cooking as I can. The house doesn't look nearly so nice as it used to, but the doctor tells me that I mustn't sweep, so I only do the light dusting. I sew almost all the time, and I've already finished the little slips. To-day I'm going to cut out the petticoats. I couldn't tell from the pattern you sent whether they fasten in front or in the back. There are no places for buttonholes. Do you use safety pins to fasten them with? The embroidery is perfectly lovely, and will make the sweetest trimming. I am using pink for the basket because Oliver and I both hope the baby will be a girl. If it is, I shall name her after you, of course, and I want her to be just exactly like you. Oliver says he can't understand why anybody ever wants a boy--girls are so much nicer. But then he insists that if she isn't born with blue eyes, he will send her to the orphanage. I am trying to do just as you tell me to, and to be as careful as I possibly can. The doctor thinks I've stayed indoors too much since I came here, so I go out for a little walk with Oliver every night. I am so afraid that somebody will see me that I really hate to go out at all, and always choose the darkest streets I can find. Last night I had a bad stumble, and Oliver says he doesn't care if the whole town discovers us, he's not going to take me down any more unlighted alleys. It has been terribly hot all day--not a breath of air stirring--and I never felt the heat so much in my life. The doctor says it's because of my condition--and last night, after Oliver went to sleep, I got up and sat by the window until daybreak. At first I was dreadfully frightened, and thought I was going to stifle--but poor Oliver had come home so tired that I made up my mind I wasn't going to wake him if I could possibly help it. This morning I didn't tell him a word about it, and he hasn't the least idea that I didn't sleep soundly all night. I suppose that's why I feel so dragged and worn out to-day, just as if somebody had given me a good beating. I was obliged to lie down most of the afternoon, but I am going to take a bath in a few minutes and try to make myself look nice and fresh before Oliver comes home. I have let out that flowered organdie--the one you liked so much--and I wear it almost every evening. I know I look dreadfully, but Oliver says I am more beautiful than ever. It seems to me sometimes that men are born blind where women are concerned, but perhaps God made it that way on purpose. Do you know Oliver really admires Mrs. Payson, and he thinks that red feather very becoming to her. He says she's much too good for her husband, but I have been obliged to disagree with him about that. Even if Mr. Payson does drink a little, I am sure it is only because he gets lonesome when he is left by himself, and that she could prevent it if she tried. Oliver and I never talk about these things because he sees that I feel so strongly about them. Oh, darling mother, I shall be so glad to see you! I hope and pray that father will be well enough for you to come a whole month ahead. In that case you will be here in less than two months, won't you? If the baby comes on the twelfth of August, she (I am perfectly sure it will be a girl) and father will have the same birthday. I am so anxious that she shall be born on that day. Well, I must stop now, though I could run on forever. I never see a living soul from one day to another--Mrs. Payson is out of town--so when Oliver stays late at the office, and I am too tired to work, I get a little--just a little bit lonesome. Mr. Payson sent me a pile of novels by Oliver the other night--but I haven't looked into them. I always feel that it is a waste of time to read when there are things about the house that ought to be done. I wish everything didn't cost so much here. Money doesn't go half as far as it does in Dinwiddie. The price of meat is almost three times as much as it is at home, and chickens are so expensive that we have them only twice a week. It is hard to housekeep on a small allowance, and now that we have to save for the baby's coming, I have to count every penny. I have bought a little book like yours, and I put down all that I spend during the day, and then add it up at night before going to bed. Oliver says I'm dreadfully frugal, but I am always so terribly afraid of running over my allowance (which is every cent that we can afford) and not having the money to pay the doctor's bills when they are due. Nobody could be more generous with money than Oliver is--I couldn't endure being married to a stingy man like Mr. Treadwell--and the other day when one of the men in the office died, he sent the most beautiful wreath that cost ten dollars. I am trying to save enough out of the housekeeping balance to pay for it, for Oliver always runs out of his pocket money before the middle of the month. I haven't bought anything for the baby because you sent me all the materials I needed, and I have been sewing on those ever since they came. Of course my own clothes are still as good as new, so the only expense will be the doctor and the nurse and the extra things I shall be obliged to have to eat when I am sick. Give dear father a dozen kisses from me, and tell him to hurry and get well so he can christen his granddaughter. Your devoted and ever grateful VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 11, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: Just a line to say that I am so, so sorry you can't come, but that you mustn't worry a minute, because everything is going beautifully, and I am not the least bit afraid. The doctor says he never saw any one in a better frame of mind or so little nervous. Give my dear love to father. I am so distressed that he should suffer as he does. Rheumatism must be such terrible pain, and I don't wonder that you are frightened lest it should go to his heart. I shall send you a telegram as soon as the baby comes. Your devoted daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 29, 1885. MY PRECIOUS MOTHER: This is the first time I have sat up in bed, and I am trying to write a little note to you on a pillow instead of a desk. My hand shakes so that I'm afraid you won't be able to read it, but I felt that I wanted to send you a few words of my very own, not dictated to the nurse or to Mrs. Payson. I can't tell you how perfectly lovely Mrs. Payson has been to me. She was here all that dreadful night, and I believe I should have died without her. The doctor said I had such a hard time because I'd let myself get run down and stayed indoors too much. But I'm getting all right now--and the rest is over and doesn't matter. As soon as I am strong again I shall be perfectly happy. Oh, mother, aren't you delighted that the baby is a girl, after all? It was the first question I asked when I came back to consciousness the next morning, and when they told me it was, I said, "Her name is Lucy Pendleton," and that was all. I was so weak they wouldn't let me open my lips again, and Oliver was kept out of the room for almost ten days because I would talk to him. Poor fellow, it almost killed him. He is as white as a sheet still, and looks as if he had been through tortures. It must have been terrible for him, because I was really very, very ill at one time. But it is all over now, and the baby is the sweetest thing you ever imagined. I believe she knows me already, and Mrs. Payson says she is exactly like me, though I can see the strongest resemblance to Oliver, even if she has blue eyes and he hasn't. Wasn't it lovely how everything came just as we wanted it to--a girl, born on father's birthday, with blue eyes, and named Lucy? But, mother, darling, the most wonderful thing of all was that you seemed to be with me all through it. The whole time I was unconscious I thought you were here, and the nurse tells me that I was calling "Mother! Mother!" all that night. Nothing ever made me feel as close to you as having a baby of my own. I never knew before what you were to me, and how dearly, dearly I love you. The nurse is taking the pencil away from me. Your loving VIRGINIA. Isn't it funny that Oliver won't take any interest in the baby at all? He says she caused more trouble than she is worth. Was father like that? * * * * * MATOACA CITY. April 3, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: My last letter was written an age ago, but I have been so busy since Marthy left that I've hardly had a moment in which to draw breath. It was a blow to me that she wouldn't stay for she was really an excellent nurse and the baby got on so well with her, but there aren't any coloured people of her kind here, and she got so homesick for Dinwiddie that I thought she would lose her mind if she stayed. You know how dependent they are upon company, and going out on Sunday afternoon and all that kind of thing, and there really wasn't any amusement for her except taking the baby out in the morning. She got so low spirited that it was almost a relief when she went, but of course I feel her loss dreadfully. I haven't let the baby out of my sight because I wouldn't trust Daisy with her for anything in the world. She is so terribly flighty. I have the crib brought into my room (though Oliver hates it) and I take entire charge of her night and day. I should love to do it if only Oliver didn't mind it so much. He says I think more of the baby now than I do of him. Isn't that absurd? But of course she does take every single minute of my time, and I can't dress myself for him every evening as carefully as I used to do and look after all the housekeeping arrangements. Daisy is a very poor cook and she simply throws the things on the table, but it seems to me that my first duty is to the baby, so I try to put up with the discomforts as well as I can. It is hard to eat what she cooks since everything tastes exactly alike, but I try to swallow as much as I can because the doctor says that if I don't keep up my strength I shall have to stop nursing the baby. Wouldn't that be dreadful? It almost breaks my heart to think of it, and I am sure we'd never get any artificial food to agree with her. She is perfectly well now, the sweetest, fattest thing you ever saw, and a real beauty, and she is so devoted to me that she cries whenever I go out of her sight. I am never tired of watching her, and even when she is asleep I sit sometimes for an hour by her crib just thinking how pretty she looks with her eyes closed and wishing you could see her. Oliver says I spoil her to death, but how can a baby of seven months be spoiled. He doesn't enjoy her half as much as I do, and sometimes I almost think that he gets impatient of seeing her always in my arms. At first he absolutely refused to have her crib brought into our room, but when I cried, he gave in and was very sweet about it. I feel so ashamed sometimes of the way the house looks, but there doesn't seem to be any help for it because the doctor says if I let myself get tired it will be bad for the baby. Of course I wouldn't put my own health before his comfort, but I am obliged to think first of the baby, am I not? Last night, for instance, the poor little thing was ill with colic and I was up and down with her until daybreak. Then this morning she woke early and I had to nurse her and give her her bath, and, added to everything else, Daisy's cousin died and she sent word she couldn't come. I slipped on a wrapper before taking a bath or fixing my hair and ran down to try and get Oliver's breakfast, but the baby began to cry and he came after me and said he wanted to make the coffee himself. Then he brought a cup upstairs to me, but I was so tired and nervous that I couldn't drink it. He didn't seem to understand why, feeling as badly as I did, I wouldn't just put the baby back into her crib and make her stay there until I got some rest, but the little thing was so wide awake that I hadn't the heart to do it. Besides, it is so important to keep regular hours with her, isn't it? I don't suppose a man ever realizes how a woman looks at these things, but you will understand, won't you, mother? I am all alone in the house to-night because a play is in town that Oliver wanted to see and I made him go to it. He wanted to ask Mrs. Midden to sit downstairs (she has offered over and over again to do it) so that I might go too, but of course I wouldn't let him. I really couldn't have enjoyed it a minute for thinking of the baby, and besides I never cared for the theatre. Then, too, he doesn't know (for I never tell him) how very tired I am by the time night comes. Sometimes when Oliver comes home and we sit in the dining-room (we never use the drawing-room, because it is across the hall and I'm afraid I shouldn't hear the baby cry) it is as much as I can do to keep my eyes open. I try not to let him notice it, but one night when he read me the first act of a play he is writing, I went to sleep, and though he didn't say anything, I could see that he was very much hurt. He worries a good deal about my health, too, and he even went out one day and engaged a nurse without saying anything to me about it. After I had talked to her though, I saw that she would never do, so I sent her away before he came home. I wish I could get really strong and feel well again, but the doctor insists I never will until I get out of doors and use my muscles. But you stay in the house all the time and so did grandmother, so I don't believe there's a word of truth in what he says. Anyway, I go out every day now with the baby. Thank you so much for the little bands. They are just what I wanted. With dearest love, Your devoted VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 10, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Daisy left a week ago and we couldn't find another servant until to-day. I must say that I prefer coloured servants. They are so much more dependable. I didn't know until the evening before Daisy left that she was going, and I had to send Oliver straight out to see if he could find somebody to come in and help me. There wasn't a soul to be had until to-day, however, so for a week I was obliged to make Oliver get his dinner at the boarding-house. It doesn't make any difference what I have because I haven't a particle of appetite, and I'd just as soon eat tea and toast as anything else. Of course, but for the baby I could have managed perfectly well--but she has been so fretful of late that she doesn't let me put her down a minute. The doctor says her teeth are beginning to hurt her, and that I must expect to have trouble the first summer. She has been so well until now that he thinks it has been really remarkable. He tells me he never knew a healthier baby, but of course I am terribly anxious about her teething in the hot weather. If she grows much more fretful I'm afraid I shall have to take her to the country for July and August. It seems dreadful to leave Oliver all alone, but I don't see how I can help it if the doctor advises me to go. Oliver has gone to some musical comedy at the Academy to-night, and I am so tired that I am going to bed just as soon as I finish this letter. I hope and pray that the baby will have a quiet night. Don't you think that Daisy treated me very badly considering how kind I had been to her? Only a week ago when she was taken with pain in the night, I got up and made her a mustard plaster and sat by her bed until she felt easier. The next day I did all of her work, and yet she has so little gratitude that she could leave me this way when she knows perfectly well that I am worried to death about the baby's first summer. I'd give anything if I could go home in July as you suggest, but it is such a long trip, and the heat will probably be quite as bad in Dinwiddie as here. Of course, it would make all the difference in the world to me to be where I could have you to advise me about the baby, and I'd go to-morrow if it only wasn't so far. Mrs. Midden has told me of a boarding-house in the country not more than twenty miles from here where Oliver could come down every evening, and we may decide to go there for a month or two. I can't help feeling very anxious, especially as Mrs. Scott's little boy--he is just the age of baby--was taken ill the other night, and they thought he would die before they could get a doctor. This letter is full of my worries, but in spite of them I am the happiest woman that ever lived. Oliver is the best thing to me you can imagine, and the baby is so fascinating that I enjoy every minute I am with her. It is the greatest fun to watch her in her bath. I know you would simply go into raptures over her--and she is so bright that she already understands every word that I say. She grows more like Oliver all the time, and the other day while I was watching her playing with her rubber doll, she looked so beautiful that it almost frightened me. I am so glad dear father is well, and what you wrote me about John Henry's admiration for Susan interested me so much that I sat straight down and wrote to him. Why do you think that it is only friendship and that he isn't in love with her? If he really thinks her the "finest girl in the world," I should imagine he was beginning to be pretty serious. I am delighted to hear that he is going to take her to the festival. Tell Susan from me that I shall never be satisfied until she is as happy as I am. Mr. Treadwell was right, I believe, not to let her go to college, though of course I want dear Susan to have whatever she sets her heart on. But, when all is said, you were wise in teaching me that nothing matters to a woman except love. More and more I am learning that if we only love unselfishly enough, everything else will work out for good to us. My little worries can't keep me from being so blissfully happy that I want to sing all the time. Work is a joy to me because I feel that I am doing it for Oliver and the baby. And with two such treasures to live for I should be the most ungrateful creature alive if I ever complained. Your ever loving daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY, July 1, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: We are leaving suddenly for the country, and I'll send our address just as soon as we get there. The doctor thinks I ought to take the baby away from town, so I am going to the boarding-house I wrote you about. Oliver will come down every evening--it's only an hour's trip. I am so tired from packing that I can't write any more. Lovingly, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. September 15, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Here we are back again in our home, and I was never so thankful in my life to get away from any place. I wrote you how dreadfully inconvenient it was, but it would take pages to tell you all of my experiences in the last few days. Such people you never saw in your life! And the food got so uneatable that I lived on crackers for the last fortnight. Fortunately, I was still nursing the baby, but the doctor has just told me that I must stop. I am so distressed about it. Do you think it will go hard with her after the first year? She is as fat and well as she can be now, but I live in hourly terror of her getting sick. If anything should happen

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you what I thought of her. I believe now that the whole trouble with her is simply that she isn't a Southern lady. She means well, I am sure, but she isn't what I should call exactly refined. There's something "horsey" about her--I can't think of any other way to express it--something that reminds me just a little bit of Abby--and, you remember, we always said Abby got that from being educated in the North. Tell dearest Susan I really think it is fortunate that she did not go to one of their colleges. Mrs. Payson is a college woman and it seems to me that she is always trying to appear as clever as a man. She talks in a way sometimes that sounds as if she believed in woman's rights and all that sort of thing. I told Oliver about it, and he laughed and said that men hated talk like that. He says all a man admires in a woman is her power of loving, and that when she begins to ape a man she loses her charm for him. I can't understand why Mr. Payson married his wife. He said such nice things to me the other day about my being so domestic and such a home lover, that I really felt sorry for him. When I told him that I was so fond of staying indoors that I would never cross my threshold if Oliver didn't make me, he laughed and said that he wished I'd convert his wife to my way of thinking. Yet he seems to have the greatest admiration for her, and, do you know, I believe he even admires that red feather, though he doesn't approve of it. He never turns his eyes away from her when they are together, which isn't very much, as she goes about just as she pleases without him. Can you understand how a person can both admire and disapprove of a thing? Oliver says he knows how it is, but I must say that I don't. I hope and pray that our marriage will always be different from theirs. Oliver and I are never apart for a single minute except when he is at work in the office. He hasn't written a line since we came here, but he is going to begin as soon as we get settled, and then he says that I may sit in the room and sew if I want to. I can't believe that people really love each other unless they want to be together every instant, no matter what they are doing. Why, if Oliver went out to men's dinners without me as Mr. Payson does (though she doesn't seem to mind it) I should just sit at home by myself and cry my eyes out. I think love, if it is love, ought to be all in all. I am perfectly sure that if I live to be a hundred I shall never want any society but Oliver's. He is the whole world to me, and when he is not here I spend my time, unless I am at work, just sitting and thinking about him. My one idea is to make him as happy as I can, and when a woman does this for a man I don't think she has time to run around by herself as Mrs. Payson does. Tell dearest father that I so often think of his sermons and the beautiful things he said about women. The rector here doesn't compare with him as a preacher. This is such a long letter it will take two stamps. I've just let myself run on without thinking what I was writing, so if I have made any mistakes in grammar or in spelling, please don't let father see them but read my letter aloud to him. I can shut my eyes and see you sitting at dinner, with Docia bringing in the plum pudding, and I know you will talk of me while you help to it. Write me who comes to dinner with you. I wonder if Miss Priscilla and John Henry are there as usual. Do you know whether John Henry ever goes to the Treadwell's or not? I wish you would ask him to take Susan to see his old mammy in Pink Alley. Now that I am not there to go to see her occasionally, I am afraid she will get lonesome. Good-bye, dearest mother. I will write to you before New Year. I am so busy that I don't have time to write every day, but you will understand and so will father. With my heart's fondest love to you both, Your VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 6, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: The little patterns were exactly what I wanted--thank you a thousand times. I knew you would be overjoyed at the news, and you are the only person I've breathed it to--except, of course, dear Oliver, who is frightened to death already. He has made me stop everything at once, and whenever he sees me lift my hand, he begins to get nervous and begs me not to do it. Oh, mother, he loves me so that it is really pathetic to see his anxiety. And--can you believe it--he doesn't appear to be the least bit glad about it. When I told him, he looked amazed--as if he had never thought of its happening--and said, "Oh, Virginia, not so soon!" He told me afterwards that, of course, he'd always thought we'd have children after a while, before we were middle-aged, but that he had wanted to stay like this for at least five or ten years. When the baby comes, he says he supposes he'll like it, but that he can't honestly say he is glad. It's funny how frightened he is, because I am not the least bit so. All women must expect to have children when they marry, and if God makes them suffer for it, it must be because it is best that they should. Perhaps they wouldn't love their babies so much if they got them easily. I never think of the pain a minute. It all seems so beautiful and sacred to me that I can't understand why Oliver isn't enraptured just as I am. To think of a new life starting into the world from me--a life that is half mine and half Oliver's, and one that would never be at all except for our love. The baby will seem from the very first minute to be our love made into flesh. I don't see how a woman who feels this could waste a thought on what she has to suffer. I am so glad you are going to send me a nurse from Dinwiddie, because I'm afraid I could never get one here that I could trust. The servant Oliver got me is no earthly account, and I still do as much of the cooking as I can. The house doesn't look nearly so nice as it used to, but the doctor tells me that I mustn't sweep, so I only do the light dusting. I sew almost all the time, and I've already finished the little slips. To-day I'm going to cut out the petticoats. I couldn't tell from the pattern you sent whether they fasten in front or in the back. There are no places for buttonholes. Do you use safety pins to fasten them with? The embroidery is perfectly lovely, and will make the sweetest trimming. I am using pink for the basket because Oliver and I both hope the baby will be a girl. If it is, I shall name her after you, of course, and I want her to be just exactly like you. Oliver says he can't understand why anybody ever wants a boy--girls are so much nicer. But then he insists that if she isn't born with blue eyes, he will send her to the orphanage. I am trying to do just as you tell me to, and to be as careful as I possibly can. The doctor thinks I've stayed indoors too much since I came here, so I go out for a little walk with Oliver every night. I am so afraid that somebody will see me that I really hate to go out at all, and always choose the darkest streets I can find. Last night I had a bad stumble, and Oliver says he doesn't care if the whole town discovers us, he's not going to take me down any more unlighted alleys. It has been terribly hot all day--not a breath of air stirring--and I never felt the heat so much in my life. The doctor says it's because of my condition--and last night, after Oliver went to sleep, I got up and sat by the window until daybreak. At first I was dreadfully frightened, and thought I was going to stifle--but poor Oliver had come home so tired that I made up my mind I wasn't going to wake him if I could possibly help it. This morning I didn't tell him a word about it, and he hasn't the least idea that I didn't sleep soundly all night. I suppose that's why I feel so dragged and worn out to-day, just as if somebody had given me a good beating. I was obliged to lie down most of the afternoon, but I am going to take a bath in a few minutes and try to make myself look nice and fresh before Oliver comes home. I have let out that flowered organdie--the one you liked so much--and I wear it almost every evening. I know I look dreadfully, but Oliver says I am more beautiful than ever. It seems to me sometimes that men are born blind where women are concerned, but perhaps God made it that way on purpose. Do you know Oliver really admires Mrs. Payson, and he thinks that red feather very becoming to her. He says she's much too good for her husband, but I have been obliged to disagree with him about that. Even if Mr. Payson does drink a little, I am sure it is only because he gets lonesome when he is left by himself, and that she could prevent it if she tried. Oliver and I never talk about these things because he sees that I feel so strongly about them. Oh, darling mother, I shall be so glad to see you! I hope and pray that father will be well enough for you to come a whole month ahead. In that case you will be here in less than two months, won't you? If the baby comes on the twelfth of August, she (I am perfectly sure it will be a girl) and father will have the same birthday. I am so anxious that she shall be born on that day. Well, I must stop now, though I could run on forever. I never see a living soul from one day to another--Mrs. Payson is out of town--so when Oliver stays late at the office, and I am too tired to work, I get a little--just a little bit lonesome. Mr. Payson sent me a pile of novels by Oliver the other night--but I haven't looked into them. I always feel that it is a waste of time to read when there are things about the house that ought to be done. I wish everything didn't cost so much here. Money doesn't go half as far as it does in Dinwiddie. The price of meat is almost three times as much as it is at home, and chickens are so expensive that we have them only twice a week. It is hard to housekeep on a small allowance, and now that we have to save for the baby's coming, I have to count every penny. I have bought a little book like yours, and I put down all that I spend during the day, and then add it up at night before going to bed. Oliver says I'm dreadfully frugal, but I am always so terribly afraid of running over my allowance (which is every cent that we can afford) and not having the money to pay the doctor's bills when they are due. Nobody could be more generous with money than Oliver is--I couldn't endure being married to a stingy man like Mr. Treadwell--and the other day when one of the men in the office died, he sent the most beautiful wreath that cost ten dollars. I am trying to save enough out of the housekeeping balance to pay for it, for Oliver always runs out of his pocket money before the middle of the month. I haven't bought anything for the baby because you sent me all the materials I needed, and I have been sewing on those ever since they came. Of course my own clothes are still as good as new, so the only expense will be the doctor and the nurse and the extra things I shall be obliged to have to eat when I am sick. Give dear father a dozen kisses from me, and tell him to hurry and get well so he can christen his granddaughter. Your devoted and ever grateful VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 11, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: Just a line to say that I am so, so sorry you can't come, but that you mustn't worry a minute, because everything is going beautifully, and I am not the least bit afraid. The doctor says he never saw any one in a better frame of mind or so little nervous. Give my dear love to father. I am so distressed that he should suffer as he does. Rheumatism must be such terrible pain, and I don't wonder that you are frightened lest it should go to his heart. I shall send you a telegram as soon as the baby comes. Your devoted daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 29, 1885. MY PRECIOUS MOTHER: This is the first time I have sat up in bed, and I am trying to write a little note to you on a pillow instead of a desk. My hand shakes so that I'm afraid you won't be able to read it, but I felt that I wanted to send you a few words of my very own, not dictated to the nurse or to Mrs. Payson. I can't tell you how perfectly lovely Mrs. Payson has been to me. She was here all that dreadful night, and I believe I should have died without her. The doctor said I had such a hard time because I'd let myself get run down and stayed indoors too much. But I'm getting all right now--and the rest is over and doesn't matter. As soon as I am strong again I shall be perfectly happy. Oh, mother, aren't you delighted that the baby is a girl, after all? It was the first question I asked when I came back to consciousness the next morning, and when they told me it was, I said, "Her name is Lucy Pendleton," and that was all. I was so weak they wouldn't let me open my lips again, and Oliver was kept out of the room for almost ten days because I would talk to him. Poor fellow, it almost killed him. He is as white as a sheet still, and looks as if he had been through tortures. It must have been terrible for him, because I was really very, very ill at one time. But it is all over now, and the baby is the sweetest thing you ever imagined. I believe she knows me already, and Mrs. Payson says she is exactly like me, though I can see the strongest resemblance to Oliver, even if she has blue eyes and he hasn't. Wasn't it lovely how everything came just as we wanted it to--a girl, born on father's birthday, with blue eyes, and named Lucy? But, mother, darling, the most wonderful thing of all was that you seemed to be with me all through it. The whole time I was unconscious I thought you were here, and the nurse tells me that I was calling "Mother! Mother!" all that night. Nothing ever made me feel as close to you as having a baby of my own. I never knew before what you were to me, and how dearly, dearly I love you. The nurse is taking the pencil away from me. Your loving VIRGINIA. Isn't it funny that Oliver won't take any interest in the baby at all? He says she caused more trouble than she is worth. Was father like that? * * * * * MATOACA CITY. April 3, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: My last letter was written an age ago, but I have been so busy since Marthy left that I've hardly had a moment in which to draw breath. It was a blow to me that she wouldn't stay for she was really an excellent nurse and the baby got on so well with her, but there aren't any coloured people of her kind here, and she got so homesick for Dinwiddie that I thought she would lose her mind if she stayed. You know how dependent they are upon company, and going out on Sunday afternoon and all that kind of thing, and there really wasn't any amusement for her except taking the baby out in the morning. She got so low spirited that it was almost a relief when she went, but of course I feel her loss dreadfully. I haven't let the baby out of my sight because I wouldn't trust Daisy with her for anything in the world. She is so terribly flighty. I have the crib brought into my room (though Oliver hates it) and I take entire charge of her night and day. I should love to do it if only Oliver didn't mind it so much. He says I think more of the baby now than I do of him. Isn't that absurd? But of course she does take every single minute of my time, and I can't dress myself for him every evening as carefully as I used to do and look after all the housekeeping arrangements. Daisy is a very poor cook and she simply throws the things on the table, but it seems to me that my first duty is to the baby, so I try to put up with the discomforts as well as I can. It is hard to eat what she cooks since everything tastes exactly alike, but I try to swallow as much as I can because the doctor says that if I don't keep up my strength I shall have to stop nursing the baby. Wouldn't that be dreadful? It almost breaks my heart to think of it, and I am sure we'd never get any artificial food to agree with her. She is perfectly well now, the sweetest, fattest thing you ever saw, and a real beauty, and she is so devoted to me that she cries whenever I go out of her sight. I am never tired of watching her, and even when she is asleep I sit sometimes for an hour by her crib just thinking how pretty she looks with her eyes closed and wishing you could see her. Oliver says I spoil her to death, but how can a baby of seven months be spoiled. He doesn't enjoy her half as much as I do, and sometimes I almost think that he gets impatient of seeing her always in my arms. At first he absolutely refused to have her crib brought into our room, but when I cried, he gave in and was very sweet about it. I feel so ashamed sometimes of the way the house looks, but there doesn't seem to be any help for it because the doctor says if I let myself get tired it will be bad for the baby. Of course I wouldn't put my own health before his comfort, but I am obliged to think first of the baby, am I not? Last night, for instance, the poor little thing was ill with colic and I was up and down with her until daybreak. Then this morning she woke early and I had to nurse her and give her her bath, and, added to everything else, Daisy's cousin died and she sent word she couldn't come. I slipped on a wrapper before taking a bath or fixing my hair and ran down to try and get Oliver's breakfast, but the baby began to cry and he came after me and said he wanted to make the coffee himself. Then he brought a cup upstairs to me, but I was so tired and nervous that I couldn't drink it. He didn't seem to understand why, feeling as badly as I did, I wouldn't just put the baby back into her crib and make her stay there until I got some rest, but the little thing was so wide awake that I hadn't the heart to do it. Besides, it is so important to keep regular hours with her, isn't it? I don't suppose a man ever realizes how a woman looks at these things, but you will understand, won't you, mother? I am all alone in the house to-night because a play is in town that Oliver wanted to see and I made him go to it. He wanted to ask Mrs. Midden to sit downstairs (she has offered over and over again to do it) so that I might go too, but of course I wouldn't let him. I really couldn't have enjoyed it a minute for thinking of the baby, and besides I never cared for the theatre. Then, too, he doesn't know (for I never tell him) how very tired I am by the time night comes. Sometimes when Oliver comes home and we sit in the dining-room (we never use the drawing-room, because it is across the hall and I'm afraid I shouldn't hear the baby cry) it is as much as I can do to keep my eyes open. I try not to let him notice it, but one night when he read me the first act of a play he is writing, I went to sleep, and though he didn't say anything, I could see that he was very much hurt. He worries a good deal about my health, too, and he even went out one day and engaged a nurse without saying anything to me about it. After I had talked to her though, I saw that she would never do, so I sent her away before he came home. I wish I could get really strong and feel well again, but the doctor insists I never will until I get out of doors and use my muscles. But you stay in the house all the time and so did grandmother, so I don't believe there's a word of truth in what he says. Anyway, I go out every day now with the baby. Thank you so much for the little bands. They are just what I wanted. With dearest love, Your devoted VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 10, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Daisy left a week ago and we couldn't find another servant until to-day. I must say that I prefer coloured servants. They are so much more dependable. I didn't know until the evening before Daisy left that she was going, and I had to send Oliver straight out to see if he could find somebody to come in and help me. There wasn't a soul to be had until to-day, however, so for a week I was obliged to make Oliver get his dinner at the boarding-house. It doesn't make any difference what I have because I haven't a particle of appetite, and I'd just as soon eat tea and toast as anything else. Of course, but for the baby I could have managed perfectly well--but she has been so fretful of late that she doesn't let me put her down a minute. The doctor says her teeth are beginning to hurt her, and that I must expect to have trouble the first summer. She has been so well until now that he thinks it has been really remarkable. He tells me he never knew a healthier baby, but of course I am terribly anxious about her teething in the hot weather. If she grows much more fretful I'm afraid I shall have to take her to the country for July and August. It seems dreadful to leave Oliver all alone, but I don't see how I can help it if the doctor advises me to go. Oliver has gone to some musical comedy at the Academy to-night, and I am so tired that I am going to bed just as soon as I finish this letter. I hope and pray that the baby will have a quiet night. Don't you think that Daisy treated me very badly considering how kind I had been to her? Only a week ago when she was taken with pain in the night, I got up and made her a mustard plaster and sat by her bed until she felt easier. The next day I did all of her work, and yet she has so little gratitude that she could leave me this way when she knows perfectly well that I am worried to death about the baby's first summer. I'd give anything if I could go home in July as you suggest, but it is such a long trip, and the heat will probably be quite as bad in Dinwiddie as here. Of course, it would make all the difference in the world to me to be where I could have you to advise me about the baby, and I'd go to-morrow if it only wasn't so far. Mrs. Midden has told me of a boarding-house in the country not more than twenty miles from here where Oliver could come down every evening, and we may decide to go there for a month or two. I can't help feeling very anxious, especially as Mrs. Scott's little boy--he is just the age of baby--was taken ill the other night, and they thought he would die before they could get a doctor. This letter is full of my worries, but in spite of them I am the happiest woman that ever lived. Oliver is the best thing to me you can imagine, and the baby is so fascinating that I enjoy every minute I am with her. It is the greatest fun to watch her in her bath. I know you would simply go into raptures over her--and she is so bright that she already understands every word that I say. She grows more like Oliver all the time, and the other day while I was watching her playing with her rubber doll, she looked so beautiful that it almost frightened me. I am so glad dear father is well, and what you wrote me about John Henry's admiration for Susan interested me so much that I sat straight down and wrote to him. Why do you think that it is only friendship and that he isn't in love with her? If he really thinks her the "finest girl in the world," I should imagine he was beginning to be pretty serious. I am delighted to hear that he is going to take her to the festival. Tell Susan from me that I shall never be satisfied until she is as happy as I am. Mr. Treadwell was right, I believe, not to let her go to college, though of course I want dear Susan to have whatever she sets her heart on. But, when all is said, you were wise in teaching me that nothing matters to a woman except love. More and more I am learning that if we only love unselfishly enough, everything else will work out for good to us. My little worries can't keep me from being so blissfully happy that I want to sing all the time. Work is a joy to me because I feel that I am doing it for Oliver and the baby. And with two such treasures to live for I should be the most ungrateful creature alive if I ever complained. Your ever loving daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY, July 1, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: We are leaving suddenly for the country, and I'll send our address just as soon as we get there. The doctor thinks I ought to take the baby away from town, so I am going to the boarding-house I wrote you about. Oliver will come down every evening--it's only an hour's trip. I am so tired from packing that I can't write any more. Lovingly, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. September 15, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Here we are back again in our home, and I was never so thankful in my life to get away from any place. I wrote you how dreadfully inconvenient it was, but it would take pages to tell you all of my experiences in the last few days. Such people you never saw in your life! And the food got so uneatable that I lived on crackers for the last fortnight. Fortunately, I was still nursing the baby, but the doctor has just told me that I must stop. I am so distressed about it. Do you think it will go hard with her after the first year? She is as fat and well as she can be now, but I live in hourly terror of her getting sick. If anything should happen

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you what I thought of her. I believe now that the whole trouble with her is simply that she isn't a Southern lady. She means well, I am sure, but she isn't what I should call exactly refined. There's something "horsey" about her--I can't think of any other way to express it--something that reminds me just a little bit of Abby--and, you remember, we always said Abby got that from being educated in the North. Tell dearest Susan I really think it is fortunate that she did not go to one of their colleges. Mrs. Payson is a college woman and it seems to me that she is always trying to appear as clever as a man. She talks in a way sometimes that sounds as if she believed in woman's rights and all that sort of thing. I told Oliver about it, and he laughed and said that men hated talk like that. He says all a man admires in a woman is her power of loving, and that when she begins to ape a man she loses her charm for him. I can't understand why Mr. Payson married his wife. He said such nice things to me the other day about my being so domestic and such a home lover, that I really felt sorry for him. When I told him that I was so fond of staying indoors that I would never cross my threshold if Oliver didn't make me, he laughed and said that he wished I'd convert his wife to my way of thinking. Yet he seems to have the greatest admiration for her, and, do you know, I believe he even admires that red feather, though he doesn't approve of it. He never turns his eyes away from her when they are together, which isn't very much, as she goes about just as she pleases without him. Can you understand how a person can both admire and disapprove of a thing? Oliver says he knows how it is, but I must say that I don't. I hope and pray that our marriage will always be different from theirs. Oliver and I are never apart for a single minute except when he is at work in the office. He hasn't written a line since we came here, but he is going to begin as soon as we get settled, and then he says that I may sit in the room and sew if I want to. I can't believe that people really love each other unless they want to be together every instant, no matter what they are doing. Why, if Oliver went out to men's dinners without me as Mr. Payson does (though she doesn't seem to mind it) I should just sit at home by myself and cry my eyes out. I think love, if it is love, ought to be all in all. I am perfectly sure that if I live to be a hundred I shall never want any society but Oliver's. He is the whole world to me, and when he is not here I spend my time, unless I am at work, just sitting and thinking about him. My one idea is to make him as happy as I can, and when a woman does this for a man I don't think she has time to run around by herself as Mrs. Payson does. Tell dearest father that I so often think of his sermons and the beautiful things he said about women. The rector here doesn't compare with him as a preacher. This is such a long letter it will take two stamps. I've just let myself run on without thinking what I was writing, so if I have made any mistakes in grammar or in spelling, please don't let father see them but read my letter aloud to him. I can shut my eyes and see you sitting at dinner, with Docia bringing in the plum pudding, and I know you will talk of me while you help to it. Write me who comes to dinner with you. I wonder if Miss Priscilla and John Henry are there as usual. Do you know whether John Henry ever goes to the Treadwell's or not? I wish you would ask him to take Susan to see his old mammy in Pink Alley. Now that I am not there to go to see her occasionally, I am afraid she will get lonesome. Good-bye, dearest mother. I will write to you before New Year. I am so busy that I don't have time to write every day, but you will understand and so will father. With my heart's fondest love to you both, Your VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 6, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: The little patterns were exactly what I wanted--thank you a thousand times. I knew you would be overjoyed at the news, and you are the only person I've breathed it to--except, of course, dear Oliver, who is frightened to death already. He has made me stop everything at once, and whenever he sees me lift my hand, he begins to get nervous and begs me not to do it. Oh, mother, he loves me so that it is really pathetic to see his anxiety. And--can you believe it--he doesn't appear to be the least bit glad about it. When I told him, he looked amazed--as if he had never thought of its happening--and said, "Oh, Virginia, not so soon!" He told me afterwards that, of course, he'd always thought we'd have children after a while, before we were middle-aged, but that he had wanted to stay like this for at least five or ten years. When the baby comes, he says he supposes he'll like it, but that he can't honestly say he is glad. It's funny how frightened he is, because I am not the least bit so. All women must expect to have children when they marry, and if God makes them suffer for it, it must be because it is best that they should. Perhaps they wouldn't love their babies so much if they got them easily. I never think of the pain a minute. It all seems so beautiful and sacred to me that I can't understand why Oliver isn't enraptured just as I am. To think of a new life starting into the world from me--a life that is half mine and half Oliver's, and one that would never be at all except for our love. The baby will seem from the very first minute to be our love made into flesh. I don't see how a woman who feels this could waste a thought on what she has to suffer. I am so glad you are going to send me a nurse from Dinwiddie, because I'm afraid I could never get one here that I could trust. The servant Oliver got me is no earthly account, and I still do as much of the cooking as I can. The house doesn't look nearly so nice as it used to, but the doctor tells me that I mustn't sweep, so I only do the light dusting. I sew almost all the time, and I've already finished the little slips. To-day I'm going to cut out the petticoats. I couldn't tell from the pattern you sent whether they fasten in front or in the back. There are no places for buttonholes. Do you use safety pins to fasten them with? The embroidery is perfectly lovely, and will make the sweetest trimming. I am using pink for the basket because Oliver and I both hope the baby will be a girl. If it is, I shall name her after you, of course, and I want her to be just exactly like you. Oliver says he can't understand why anybody ever wants a boy--girls are so much nicer. But then he insists that if she isn't born with blue eyes, he will send her to the orphanage. I am trying to do just as you tell me to, and to be as careful as I possibly can. The doctor thinks I've stayed indoors too much since I came here, so I go out for a little walk with Oliver every night. I am so afraid that somebody will see me that I really hate to go out at all, and always choose the darkest streets I can find. Last night I had a bad stumble, and Oliver says he doesn't care if the whole town discovers us, he's not going to take me down any more unlighted alleys. It has been terribly hot all day--not a breath of air stirring--and I never felt the heat so much in my life. The doctor says it's because of my condition--and last night, after Oliver went to sleep, I got up and sat by the window until daybreak. At first I was dreadfully frightened, and thought I was going to stifle--but poor Oliver had come home so tired that I made up my mind I wasn't going to wake him if I could possibly help it. This morning I didn't tell him a word about it, and he hasn't the least idea that I didn't sleep soundly all night. I suppose that's why I feel so dragged and worn out to-day, just as if somebody had given me a good beating. I was obliged to lie down most of the afternoon, but I am going to take a bath in a few minutes and try to make myself look nice and fresh before Oliver comes home. I have let out that flowered organdie--the one you liked so much--and I wear it almost every evening. I know I look dreadfully, but Oliver says I am more beautiful than ever. It seems to me sometimes that men are born blind where women are concerned, but perhaps God made it that way on purpose. Do you know Oliver really admires Mrs. Payson, and he thinks that red feather very becoming to her. He says she's much too good for her husband, but I have been obliged to disagree with him about that. Even if Mr. Payson does drink a little, I am sure it is only because he gets lonesome when he is left by himself, and that she could prevent it if she tried. Oliver and I never talk about these things because he sees that I feel so strongly about them. Oh, darling mother, I shall be so glad to see you! I hope and pray that father will be well enough for you to come a whole month ahead. In that case you will be here in less than two months, won't you? If the baby comes on the twelfth of August, she (I am perfectly sure it will be a girl) and father will have the same birthday. I am so anxious that she shall be born on that day. Well, I must stop now, though I could run on forever. I never see a living soul from one day to another--Mrs. Payson is out of town--so when Oliver stays late at the office, and I am too tired to work, I get a little--just a little bit lonesome. Mr. Payson sent me a pile of novels by Oliver the other night--but I haven't looked into them. I always feel that it is a waste of time to read when there are things about the house that ought to be done. I wish everything didn't cost so much here. Money doesn't go half as far as it does in Dinwiddie. The price of meat is almost three times as much as it is at home, and chickens are so expensive that we have them only twice a week. It is hard to housekeep on a small allowance, and now that we have to save for the baby's coming, I have to count every penny. I have bought a little book like yours, and I put down all that I spend during the day, and then add it up at night before going to bed. Oliver says I'm dreadfully frugal, but I am always so terribly afraid of running over my allowance (which is every cent that we can afford) and not having the money to pay the doctor's bills when they are due. Nobody could be more generous with money than Oliver is--I couldn't endure being married to a stingy man like Mr. Treadwell--and the other day when one of the men in the office died, he sent the most beautiful wreath that cost ten dollars. I am trying to save enough out of the housekeeping balance to pay for it, for Oliver always runs out of his pocket money before the middle of the month. I haven't bought anything for the baby because you sent me all the materials I needed, and I have been sewing on those ever since they came. Of course my own clothes are still as good as new, so the only expense will be the doctor and the nurse and the extra things I shall be obliged to have to eat when I am sick. Give dear father a dozen kisses from me, and tell him to hurry and get well so he can christen his granddaughter. Your devoted and ever grateful VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 11, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: Just a line to say that I am so, so sorry you can't come, but that you mustn't worry a minute, because everything is going beautifully, and I am not the least bit afraid. The doctor says he never saw any one in a better frame of mind or so little nervous. Give my dear love to father. I am so distressed that he should suffer as he does. Rheumatism must be such terrible pain, and I don't wonder that you are frightened lest it should go to his heart. I shall send you a telegram as soon as the baby comes. Your devoted daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 29, 1885. MY PRECIOUS MOTHER: This is the first time I have sat up in bed, and I am trying to write a little note to you on a pillow instead of a desk. My hand shakes so that I'm afraid you won't be able to read it, but I felt that I wanted to send you a few words of my very own, not dictated to the nurse or to Mrs. Payson. I can't tell you how perfectly lovely Mrs. Payson has been to me. She was here all that dreadful night, and I believe I should have died without her. The doctor said I had such a hard time because I'd let myself get run down and stayed indoors too much. But I'm getting all right now--and the rest is over and doesn't matter. As soon as I am strong again I shall be perfectly happy. Oh, mother, aren't you delighted that the baby is a girl, after all? It was the first question I asked when I came back to consciousness the next morning, and when they told me it was, I said, "Her name is Lucy Pendleton," and that was all. I was so weak they wouldn't let me open my lips again, and Oliver was kept out of the room for almost ten days because I would talk to him. Poor fellow, it almost killed him. He is as white as a sheet still, and looks as if he had been through tortures. It must have been terrible for him, because I was really very, very ill at one time. But it is all over now, and the baby is the sweetest thing you ever imagined. I believe she knows me already, and Mrs. Payson says she is exactly like me, though I can see the strongest resemblance to Oliver, even if she has blue eyes and he hasn't. Wasn't it lovely how everything came just as we wanted it to--a girl, born on father's birthday, with blue eyes, and named Lucy? But, mother, darling, the most wonderful thing of all was that you seemed to be with me all through it. The whole time I was unconscious I thought you were here, and the nurse tells me that I was calling "Mother! Mother!" all that night. Nothing ever made me feel as close to you as having a baby of my own. I never knew before what you were to me, and how dearly, dearly I love you. The nurse is taking the pencil away from me. Your loving VIRGINIA. Isn't it funny that Oliver won't take any interest in the baby at all? He says she caused more trouble than she is worth. Was father like that? * * * * * MATOACA CITY. April 3, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: My last letter was written an age ago, but I have been so busy since Marthy left that I've hardly had a moment in which to draw breath. It was a blow to me that she wouldn't stay for she was really an excellent nurse and the baby got on so well with her, but there aren't any coloured people of her kind here, and she got so homesick for Dinwiddie that I thought she would lose her mind if she stayed. You know how dependent they are upon company, and going out on Sunday afternoon and all that kind of thing, and there really wasn't any amusement for her except taking the baby out in the morning. She got so low spirited that it was almost a relief when she went, but of course I feel her loss dreadfully. I haven't let the baby out of my sight because I wouldn't trust Daisy with her for anything in the world. She is so terribly flighty. I have the crib brought into my room (though Oliver hates it) and I take entire charge of her night and day. I should love to do it if only Oliver didn't mind it so much. He says I think more of the baby now than I do of him. Isn't that absurd? But of course she does take every single minute of my time, and I can't dress myself for him every evening as carefully as I used to do and look after all the housekeeping arrangements. Daisy is a very poor cook and she simply throws the things on the table, but it seems to me that my first duty is to the baby, so I try to put up with the discomforts as well as I can. It is hard to eat what she cooks since everything tastes exactly alike, but I try to swallow as much as I can because the doctor says that if I don't keep up my strength I shall have to stop nursing the baby. Wouldn't that be dreadful? It almost breaks my heart to think of it, and I am sure we'd never get any artificial food to agree with her. She is perfectly well now, the sweetest, fattest thing you ever saw, and a real beauty, and she is so devoted to me that she cries whenever I go out of her sight. I am never tired of watching her, and even when she is asleep I sit sometimes for an hour by her crib just thinking how pretty she looks with her eyes closed and wishing you could see her. Oliver says I spoil her to death, but how can a baby of seven months be spoiled. He doesn't enjoy her half as much as I do, and sometimes I almost think that he gets impatient of seeing her always in my arms. At first he absolutely refused to have her crib brought into our room, but when I cried, he gave in and was very sweet about it. I feel so ashamed sometimes of the way the house looks, but there doesn't seem to be any help for it because the doctor says if I let myself get tired it will be bad for the baby. Of course I wouldn't put my own health before his comfort, but I am obliged to think first of the baby, am I not? Last night, for instance, the poor little thing was ill with colic and I was up and down with her until daybreak. Then this morning she woke early and I had to nurse her and give her her bath, and, added to everything else, Daisy's cousin died and she sent word she couldn't come. I slipped on a wrapper before taking a bath or fixing my hair and ran down to try and get Oliver's breakfast, but the baby began to cry and he came after me and said he wanted to make the coffee himself. Then he brought a cup upstairs to me, but I was so tired and nervous that I couldn't drink it. He didn't seem to understand why, feeling as badly as I did, I wouldn't just put the baby back into her crib and make her stay there until I got some rest, but the little thing was so wide awake that I hadn't the heart to do it. Besides, it is so important to keep regular hours with her, isn't it? I don't suppose a man ever realizes how a woman looks at these things, but you will understand, won't you, mother? I am all alone in the house to-night because a play is in town that Oliver wanted to see and I made him go to it. He wanted to ask Mrs. Midden to sit downstairs (she has offered over and over again to do it) so that I might go too, but of course I wouldn't let him. I really couldn't have enjoyed it a minute for thinking of the baby, and besides I never cared for the theatre. Then, too, he doesn't know (for I never tell him) how very tired I am by the time night comes. Sometimes when Oliver comes home and we sit in the dining-room (we never use the drawing-room, because it is across the hall and I'm afraid I shouldn't hear the baby cry) it is as much as I can do to keep my eyes open. I try not to let him notice it, but one night when he read me the first act of a play he is writing, I went to sleep, and though he didn't say anything, I could see that he was very much hurt. He worries a good deal about my health, too, and he even went out one day and engaged a nurse without saying anything to me about it. After I had talked to her though, I saw that she would never do, so I sent her away before he came home. I wish I could get really strong and feel well again, but the doctor insists I never will until I get out of doors and use my muscles. But you stay in the house all the time and so did grandmother, so I don't believe there's a word of truth in what he says. Anyway, I go out every day now with the baby. Thank you so much for the little bands. They are just what I wanted. With dearest love, Your devoted VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 10, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Daisy left a week ago and we couldn't find another servant until to-day. I must say that I prefer coloured servants. They are so much more dependable. I didn't know until the evening before Daisy left that she was going, and I had to send Oliver straight out to see if he could find somebody to come in and help me. There wasn't a soul to be had until to-day, however, so for a week I was obliged to make Oliver get his dinner at the boarding-house. It doesn't make any difference what I have because I haven't a particle of appetite, and I'd just as soon eat tea and toast as anything else. Of course, but for the baby I could have managed perfectly well--but she has been so fretful of late that she doesn't let me put her down a minute. The doctor says her teeth are beginning to hurt her, and that I must expect to have trouble the first summer. She has been so well until now that he thinks it has been really remarkable. He tells me he never knew a healthier baby, but of course I am terribly anxious about her teething in the hot weather. If she grows much more fretful I'm afraid I shall have to take her to the country for July and August. It seems dreadful to leave Oliver all alone, but I don't see how I can help it if the doctor advises me to go. Oliver has gone to some musical comedy at the Academy to-night, and I am so tired that I am going to bed just as soon as I finish this letter. I hope and pray that the baby will have a quiet night. Don't you think that Daisy treated me very badly considering how kind I had been to her? Only a week ago when she was taken with pain in the night, I got up and made her a mustard plaster and sat by her bed until she felt easier. The next day I did all of her work, and yet she has so little gratitude that she could leave me this way when she knows perfectly well that I am worried to death about the baby's first summer. I'd give anything if I could go home in July as you suggest, but it is such a long trip, and the heat will probably be quite as bad in Dinwiddie as here. Of course, it would make all the difference in the world to me to be where I could have you to advise me about the baby, and I'd go to-morrow if it only wasn't so far. Mrs. Midden has told me of a boarding-house in the country not more than twenty miles from here where Oliver could come down every evening, and we may decide to go there for a month or two. I can't help feeling very anxious, especially as Mrs. Scott's little boy--he is just the age of baby--was taken ill the other night, and they thought he would die before they could get a doctor. This letter is full of my worries, but in spite of them I am the happiest woman that ever lived. Oliver is the best thing to me you can imagine, and the baby is so fascinating that I enjoy every minute I am with her. It is the greatest fun to watch her in her bath. I know you would simply go into raptures over her--and she is so bright that she already understands every word that I say. She grows more like Oliver all the time, and the other day while I was watching her playing with her rubber doll, she looked so beautiful that it almost frightened me. I am so glad dear father is well, and what you wrote me about John Henry's admiration for Susan interested me so much that I sat straight down and wrote to him. Why do you think that it is only friendship and that he isn't in love with her? If he really thinks her the "finest girl in the world," I should imagine he was beginning to be pretty serious. I am delighted to hear that he is going to take her to the festival. Tell Susan from me that I shall never be satisfied until she is as happy as I am. Mr. Treadwell was right, I believe, not to let her go to college, though of course I want dear Susan to have whatever she sets her heart on. But, when all is said, you were wise in teaching me that nothing matters to a woman except love. More and more I am learning that if we only love unselfishly enough, everything else will work out for good to us. My little worries can't keep me from being so blissfully happy that I want to sing all the time. Work is a joy to me because I feel that I am doing it for Oliver and the baby. And with two such treasures to live for I should be the most ungrateful creature alive if I ever complained. Your ever loving daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY, July 1, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: We are leaving suddenly for the country, and I'll send our address just as soon as we get there. The doctor thinks I ought to take the baby away from town, so I am going to the boarding-house I wrote you about. Oliver will come down every evening--it's only an hour's trip. I am so tired from packing that I can't write any more. Lovingly, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. September 15, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Here we are back again in our home, and I was never so thankful in my life to get away from any place. I wrote you how dreadfully inconvenient it was, but it would take pages to tell you all of my experiences in the last few days. Such people you never saw in your life! And the food got so uneatable that I lived on crackers for the last fortnight. Fortunately, I was still nursing the baby, but the doctor has just told me that I must stop. I am so distressed about it. Do you think it will go hard with her after the first year? She is as fat and well as she can be now, but I live in hourly terror of her getting sick. If anything should happen

kind

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you what I thought of her. I believe now that the whole trouble with her is simply that she isn't a Southern lady. She means well, I am sure, but she isn't what I should call exactly refined. There's something "horsey" about her--I can't think of any other way to express it--something that reminds me just a little bit of Abby--and, you remember, we always said Abby got that from being educated in the North. Tell dearest Susan I really think it is fortunate that she did not go to one of their colleges. Mrs. Payson is a college woman and it seems to me that she is always trying to appear as clever as a man. She talks in a way sometimes that sounds as if she believed in woman's rights and all that sort of thing. I told Oliver about it, and he laughed and said that men hated talk like that. He says all a man admires in a woman is her power of loving, and that when she begins to ape a man she loses her charm for him. I can't understand why Mr. Payson married his wife. He said such nice things to me the other day about my being so domestic and such a home lover, that I really felt sorry for him. When I told him that I was so fond of staying indoors that I would never cross my threshold if Oliver didn't make me, he laughed and said that he wished I'd convert his wife to my way of thinking. Yet he seems to have the greatest admiration for her, and, do you know, I believe he even admires that red feather, though he doesn't approve of it. He never turns his eyes away from her when they are together, which isn't very much, as she goes about just as she pleases without him. Can you understand how a person can both admire and disapprove of a thing? Oliver says he knows how it is, but I must say that I don't. I hope and pray that our marriage will always be different from theirs. Oliver and I are never apart for a single minute except when he is at work in the office. He hasn't written a line since we came here, but he is going to begin as soon as we get settled, and then he says that I may sit in the room and sew if I want to. I can't believe that people really love each other unless they want to be together every instant, no matter what they are doing. Why, if Oliver went out to men's dinners without me as Mr. Payson does (though she doesn't seem to mind it) I should just sit at home by myself and cry my eyes out. I think love, if it is love, ought to be all in all. I am perfectly sure that if I live to be a hundred I shall never want any society but Oliver's. He is the whole world to me, and when he is not here I spend my time, unless I am at work, just sitting and thinking about him. My one idea is to make him as happy as I can, and when a woman does this for a man I don't think she has time to run around by herself as Mrs. Payson does. Tell dearest father that I so often think of his sermons and the beautiful things he said about women. The rector here doesn't compare with him as a preacher. This is such a long letter it will take two stamps. I've just let myself run on without thinking what I was writing, so if I have made any mistakes in grammar or in spelling, please don't let father see them but read my letter aloud to him. I can shut my eyes and see you sitting at dinner, with Docia bringing in the plum pudding, and I know you will talk of me while you help to it. Write me who comes to dinner with you. I wonder if Miss Priscilla and John Henry are there as usual. Do you know whether John Henry ever goes to the Treadwell's or not? I wish you would ask him to take Susan to see his old mammy in Pink Alley. Now that I am not there to go to see her occasionally, I am afraid she will get lonesome. Good-bye, dearest mother. I will write to you before New Year. I am so busy that I don't have time to write every day, but you will understand and so will father. With my heart's fondest love to you both, Your VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 6, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: The little patterns were exactly what I wanted--thank you a thousand times. I knew you would be overjoyed at the news, and you are the only person I've breathed it to--except, of course, dear Oliver, who is frightened to death already. He has made me stop everything at once, and whenever he sees me lift my hand, he begins to get nervous and begs me not to do it. Oh, mother, he loves me so that it is really pathetic to see his anxiety. And--can you believe it--he doesn't appear to be the least bit glad about it. When I told him, he looked amazed--as if he had never thought of its happening--and said, "Oh, Virginia, not so soon!" He told me afterwards that, of course, he'd always thought we'd have children after a while, before we were middle-aged, but that he had wanted to stay like this for at least five or ten years. When the baby comes, he says he supposes he'll like it, but that he can't honestly say he is glad. It's funny how frightened he is, because I am not the least bit so. All women must expect to have children when they marry, and if God makes them suffer for it, it must be because it is best that they should. Perhaps they wouldn't love their babies so much if they got them easily. I never think of the pain a minute. It all seems so beautiful and sacred to me that I can't understand why Oliver isn't enraptured just as I am. To think of a new life starting into the world from me--a life that is half mine and half Oliver's, and one that would never be at all except for our love. The baby will seem from the very first minute to be our love made into flesh. I don't see how a woman who feels this could waste a thought on what she has to suffer. I am so glad you are going to send me a nurse from Dinwiddie, because I'm afraid I could never get one here that I could trust. The servant Oliver got me is no earthly account, and I still do as much of the cooking as I can. The house doesn't look nearly so nice as it used to, but the doctor tells me that I mustn't sweep, so I only do the light dusting. I sew almost all the time, and I've already finished the little slips. To-day I'm going to cut out the petticoats. I couldn't tell from the pattern you sent whether they fasten in front or in the back. There are no places for buttonholes. Do you use safety pins to fasten them with? The embroidery is perfectly lovely, and will make the sweetest trimming. I am using pink for the basket because Oliver and I both hope the baby will be a girl. If it is, I shall name her after you, of course, and I want her to be just exactly like you. Oliver says he can't understand why anybody ever wants a boy--girls are so much nicer. But then he insists that if she isn't born with blue eyes, he will send her to the orphanage. I am trying to do just as you tell me to, and to be as careful as I possibly can. The doctor thinks I've stayed indoors too much since I came here, so I go out for a little walk with Oliver every night. I am so afraid that somebody will see me that I really hate to go out at all, and always choose the darkest streets I can find. Last night I had a bad stumble, and Oliver says he doesn't care if the whole town discovers us, he's not going to take me down any more unlighted alleys. It has been terribly hot all day--not a breath of air stirring--and I never felt the heat so much in my life. The doctor says it's because of my condition--and last night, after Oliver went to sleep, I got up and sat by the window until daybreak. At first I was dreadfully frightened, and thought I was going to stifle--but poor Oliver had come home so tired that I made up my mind I wasn't going to wake him if I could possibly help it. This morning I didn't tell him a word about it, and he hasn't the least idea that I didn't sleep soundly all night. I suppose that's why I feel so dragged and worn out to-day, just as if somebody had given me a good beating. I was obliged to lie down most of the afternoon, but I am going to take a bath in a few minutes and try to make myself look nice and fresh before Oliver comes home. I have let out that flowered organdie--the one you liked so much--and I wear it almost every evening. I know I look dreadfully, but Oliver says I am more beautiful than ever. It seems to me sometimes that men are born blind where women are concerned, but perhaps God made it that way on purpose. Do you know Oliver really admires Mrs. Payson, and he thinks that red feather very becoming to her. He says she's much too good for her husband, but I have been obliged to disagree with him about that. Even if Mr. Payson does drink a little, I am sure it is only because he gets lonesome when he is left by himself, and that she could prevent it if she tried. Oliver and I never talk about these things because he sees that I feel so strongly about them. Oh, darling mother, I shall be so glad to see you! I hope and pray that father will be well enough for you to come a whole month ahead. In that case you will be here in less than two months, won't you? If the baby comes on the twelfth of August, she (I am perfectly sure it will be a girl) and father will have the same birthday. I am so anxious that she shall be born on that day. Well, I must stop now, though I could run on forever. I never see a living soul from one day to another--Mrs. Payson is out of town--so when Oliver stays late at the office, and I am too tired to work, I get a little--just a little bit lonesome. Mr. Payson sent me a pile of novels by Oliver the other night--but I haven't looked into them. I always feel that it is a waste of time to read when there are things about the house that ought to be done. I wish everything didn't cost so much here. Money doesn't go half as far as it does in Dinwiddie. The price of meat is almost three times as much as it is at home, and chickens are so expensive that we have them only twice a week. It is hard to housekeep on a small allowance, and now that we have to save for the baby's coming, I have to count every penny. I have bought a little book like yours, and I put down all that I spend during the day, and then add it up at night before going to bed. Oliver says I'm dreadfully frugal, but I am always so terribly afraid of running over my allowance (which is every cent that we can afford) and not having the money to pay the doctor's bills when they are due. Nobody could be more generous with money than Oliver is--I couldn't endure being married to a stingy man like Mr. Treadwell--and the other day when one of the men in the office died, he sent the most beautiful wreath that cost ten dollars. I am trying to save enough out of the housekeeping balance to pay for it, for Oliver always runs out of his pocket money before the middle of the month. I haven't bought anything for the baby because you sent me all the materials I needed, and I have been sewing on those ever since they came. Of course my own clothes are still as good as new, so the only expense will be the doctor and the nurse and the extra things I shall be obliged to have to eat when I am sick. Give dear father a dozen kisses from me, and tell him to hurry and get well so he can christen his granddaughter. Your devoted and ever grateful VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 11, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: Just a line to say that I am so, so sorry you can't come, but that you mustn't worry a minute, because everything is going beautifully, and I am not the least bit afraid. The doctor says he never saw any one in a better frame of mind or so little nervous. Give my dear love to father. I am so distressed that he should suffer as he does. Rheumatism must be such terrible pain, and I don't wonder that you are frightened lest it should go to his heart. I shall send you a telegram as soon as the baby comes. Your devoted daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 29, 1885. MY PRECIOUS MOTHER: This is the first time I have sat up in bed, and I am trying to write a little note to you on a pillow instead of a desk. My hand shakes so that I'm afraid you won't be able to read it, but I felt that I wanted to send you a few words of my very own, not dictated to the nurse or to Mrs. Payson. I can't tell you how perfectly lovely Mrs. Payson has been to me. She was here all that dreadful night, and I believe I should have died without her. The doctor said I had such a hard time because I'd let myself get run down and stayed indoors too much. But I'm getting all right now--and the rest is over and doesn't matter. As soon as I am strong again I shall be perfectly happy. Oh, mother, aren't you delighted that the baby is a girl, after all? It was the first question I asked when I came back to consciousness the next morning, and when they told me it was, I said, "Her name is Lucy Pendleton," and that was all. I was so weak they wouldn't let me open my lips again, and Oliver was kept out of the room for almost ten days because I would talk to him. Poor fellow, it almost killed him. He is as white as a sheet still, and looks as if he had been through tortures. It must have been terrible for him, because I was really very, very ill at one time. But it is all over now, and the baby is the sweetest thing you ever imagined. I believe she knows me already, and Mrs. Payson says she is exactly like me, though I can see the strongest resemblance to Oliver, even if she has blue eyes and he hasn't. Wasn't it lovely how everything came just as we wanted it to--a girl, born on father's birthday, with blue eyes, and named Lucy? But, mother, darling, the most wonderful thing of all was that you seemed to be with me all through it. The whole time I was unconscious I thought you were here, and the nurse tells me that I was calling "Mother! Mother!" all that night. Nothing ever made me feel as close to you as having a baby of my own. I never knew before what you were to me, and how dearly, dearly I love you. The nurse is taking the pencil away from me. Your loving VIRGINIA. Isn't it funny that Oliver won't take any interest in the baby at all? He says she caused more trouble than she is worth. Was father like that? * * * * * MATOACA CITY. April 3, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: My last letter was written an age ago, but I have been so busy since Marthy left that I've hardly had a moment in which to draw breath. It was a blow to me that she wouldn't stay for she was really an excellent nurse and the baby got on so well with her, but there aren't any coloured people of her kind here, and she got so homesick for Dinwiddie that I thought she would lose her mind if she stayed. You know how dependent they are upon company, and going out on Sunday afternoon and all that kind of thing, and there really wasn't any amusement for her except taking the baby out in the morning. She got so low spirited that it was almost a relief when she went, but of course I feel her loss dreadfully. I haven't let the baby out of my sight because I wouldn't trust Daisy with her for anything in the world. She is so terribly flighty. I have the crib brought into my room (though Oliver hates it) and I take entire charge of her night and day. I should love to do it if only Oliver didn't mind it so much. He says I think more of the baby now than I do of him. Isn't that absurd? But of course she does take every single minute of my time, and I can't dress myself for him every evening as carefully as I used to do and look after all the housekeeping arrangements. Daisy is a very poor cook and she simply throws the things on the table, but it seems to me that my first duty is to the baby, so I try to put up with the discomforts as well as I can. It is hard to eat what she cooks since everything tastes exactly alike, but I try to swallow as much as I can because the doctor says that if I don't keep up my strength I shall have to stop nursing the baby. Wouldn't that be dreadful? It almost breaks my heart to think of it, and I am sure we'd never get any artificial food to agree with her. She is perfectly well now, the sweetest, fattest thing you ever saw, and a real beauty, and she is so devoted to me that she cries whenever I go out of her sight. I am never tired of watching her, and even when she is asleep I sit sometimes for an hour by her crib just thinking how pretty she looks with her eyes closed and wishing you could see her. Oliver says I spoil her to death, but how can a baby of seven months be spoiled. He doesn't enjoy her half as much as I do, and sometimes I almost think that he gets impatient of seeing her always in my arms. At first he absolutely refused to have her crib brought into our room, but when I cried, he gave in and was very sweet about it. I feel so ashamed sometimes of the way the house looks, but there doesn't seem to be any help for it because the doctor says if I let myself get tired it will be bad for the baby. Of course I wouldn't put my own health before his comfort, but I am obliged to think first of the baby, am I not? Last night, for instance, the poor little thing was ill with colic and I was up and down with her until daybreak. Then this morning she woke early and I had to nurse her and give her her bath, and, added to everything else, Daisy's cousin died and she sent word she couldn't come. I slipped on a wrapper before taking a bath or fixing my hair and ran down to try and get Oliver's breakfast, but the baby began to cry and he came after me and said he wanted to make the coffee himself. Then he brought a cup upstairs to me, but I was so tired and nervous that I couldn't drink it. He didn't seem to understand why, feeling as badly as I did, I wouldn't just put the baby back into her crib and make her stay there until I got some rest, but the little thing was so wide awake that I hadn't the heart to do it. Besides, it is so important to keep regular hours with her, isn't it? I don't suppose a man ever realizes how a woman looks at these things, but you will understand, won't you, mother? I am all alone in the house to-night because a play is in town that Oliver wanted to see and I made him go to it. He wanted to ask Mrs. Midden to sit downstairs (she has offered over and over again to do it) so that I might go too, but of course I wouldn't let him. I really couldn't have enjoyed it a minute for thinking of the baby, and besides I never cared for the theatre. Then, too, he doesn't know (for I never tell him) how very tired I am by the time night comes. Sometimes when Oliver comes home and we sit in the dining-room (we never use the drawing-room, because it is across the hall and I'm afraid I shouldn't hear the baby cry) it is as much as I can do to keep my eyes open. I try not to let him notice it, but one night when he read me the first act of a play he is writing, I went to sleep, and though he didn't say anything, I could see that he was very much hurt. He worries a good deal about my health, too, and he even went out one day and engaged a nurse without saying anything to me about it. After I had talked to her though, I saw that she would never do, so I sent her away before he came home. I wish I could get really strong and feel well again, but the doctor insists I never will until I get out of doors and use my muscles. But you stay in the house all the time and so did grandmother, so I don't believe there's a word of truth in what he says. Anyway, I go out every day now with the baby. Thank you so much for the little bands. They are just what I wanted. With dearest love, Your devoted VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 10, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Daisy left a week ago and we couldn't find another servant until to-day. I must say that I prefer coloured servants. They are so much more dependable. I didn't know until the evening before Daisy left that she was going, and I had to send Oliver straight out to see if he could find somebody to come in and help me. There wasn't a soul to be had until to-day, however, so for a week I was obliged to make Oliver get his dinner at the boarding-house. It doesn't make any difference what I have because I haven't a particle of appetite, and I'd just as soon eat tea and toast as anything else. Of course, but for the baby I could have managed perfectly well--but she has been so fretful of late that she doesn't let me put her down a minute. The doctor says her teeth are beginning to hurt her, and that I must expect to have trouble the first summer. She has been so well until now that he thinks it has been really remarkable. He tells me he never knew a healthier baby, but of course I am terribly anxious about her teething in the hot weather. If she grows much more fretful I'm afraid I shall have to take her to the country for July and August. It seems dreadful to leave Oliver all alone, but I don't see how I can help it if the doctor advises me to go. Oliver has gone to some musical comedy at the Academy to-night, and I am so tired that I am going to bed just as soon as I finish this letter. I hope and pray that the baby will have a quiet night. Don't you think that Daisy treated me very badly considering how kind I had been to her? Only a week ago when she was taken with pain in the night, I got up and made her a mustard plaster and sat by her bed until she felt easier. The next day I did all of her work, and yet she has so little gratitude that she could leave me this way when she knows perfectly well that I am worried to death about the baby's first summer. I'd give anything if I could go home in July as you suggest, but it is such a long trip, and the heat will probably be quite as bad in Dinwiddie as here. Of course, it would make all the difference in the world to me to be where I could have you to advise me about the baby, and I'd go to-morrow if it only wasn't so far. Mrs. Midden has told me of a boarding-house in the country not more than twenty miles from here where Oliver could come down every evening, and we may decide to go there for a month or two. I can't help feeling very anxious, especially as Mrs. Scott's little boy--he is just the age of baby--was taken ill the other night, and they thought he would die before they could get a doctor. This letter is full of my worries, but in spite of them I am the happiest woman that ever lived. Oliver is the best thing to me you can imagine, and the baby is so fascinating that I enjoy every minute I am with her. It is the greatest fun to watch her in her bath. I know you would simply go into raptures over her--and she is so bright that she already understands every word that I say. She grows more like Oliver all the time, and the other day while I was watching her playing with her rubber doll, she looked so beautiful that it almost frightened me. I am so glad dear father is well, and what you wrote me about John Henry's admiration for Susan interested me so much that I sat straight down and wrote to him. Why do you think that it is only friendship and that he isn't in love with her? If he really thinks her the "finest girl in the world," I should imagine he was beginning to be pretty serious. I am delighted to hear that he is going to take her to the festival. Tell Susan from me that I shall never be satisfied until she is as happy as I am. Mr. Treadwell was right, I believe, not to let her go to college, though of course I want dear Susan to have whatever she sets her heart on. But, when all is said, you were wise in teaching me that nothing matters to a woman except love. More and more I am learning that if we only love unselfishly enough, everything else will work out for good to us. My little worries can't keep me from being so blissfully happy that I want to sing all the time. Work is a joy to me because I feel that I am doing it for Oliver and the baby. And with two such treasures to live for I should be the most ungrateful creature alive if I ever complained. Your ever loving daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY, July 1, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: We are leaving suddenly for the country, and I'll send our address just as soon as we get there. The doctor thinks I ought to take the baby away from town, so I am going to the boarding-house I wrote you about. Oliver will come down every evening--it's only an hour's trip. I am so tired from packing that I can't write any more. Lovingly, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. September 15, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Here we are back again in our home, and I was never so thankful in my life to get away from any place. I wrote you how dreadfully inconvenient it was, but it would take pages to tell you all of my experiences in the last few days. Such people you never saw in your life! And the food got so uneatable that I lived on crackers for the last fortnight. Fortunately, I was still nursing the baby, but the doctor has just told me that I must stop. I am so distressed about it. Do you think it will go hard with her after the first year? She is as fat and well as she can be now, but I live in hourly terror of her getting sick. If anything should happen

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you what I thought of her. I believe now that the whole trouble with her is simply that she isn't a Southern lady. She means well, I am sure, but she isn't what I should call exactly refined. There's something "horsey" about her--I can't think of any other way to express it--something that reminds me just a little bit of Abby--and, you remember, we always said Abby got that from being educated in the North. Tell dearest Susan I really think it is fortunate that she did not go to one of their colleges. Mrs. Payson is a college woman and it seems to me that she is always trying to appear as clever as a man. She talks in a way sometimes that sounds as if she believed in woman's rights and all that sort of thing. I told Oliver about it, and he laughed and said that men hated talk like that. He says all a man admires in a woman is her power of loving, and that when she begins to ape a man she loses her charm for him. I can't understand why Mr. Payson married his wife. He said such nice things to me the other day about my being so domestic and such a home lover, that I really felt sorry for him. When I told him that I was so fond of staying indoors that I would never cross my threshold if Oliver didn't make me, he laughed and said that he wished I'd convert his wife to my way of thinking. Yet he seems to have the greatest admiration for her, and, do you know, I believe he even admires that red feather, though he doesn't approve of it. He never turns his eyes away from her when they are together, which isn't very much, as she goes about just as she pleases without him. Can you understand how a person can both admire and disapprove of a thing? Oliver says he knows how it is, but I must say that I don't. I hope and pray that our marriage will always be different from theirs. Oliver and I are never apart for a single minute except when he is at work in the office. He hasn't written a line since we came here, but he is going to begin as soon as we get settled, and then he says that I may sit in the room and sew if I want to. I can't believe that people really love each other unless they want to be together every instant, no matter what they are doing. Why, if Oliver went out to men's dinners without me as Mr. Payson does (though she doesn't seem to mind it) I should just sit at home by myself and cry my eyes out. I think love, if it is love, ought to be all in all. I am perfectly sure that if I live to be a hundred I shall never want any society but Oliver's. He is the whole world to me, and when he is not here I spend my time, unless I am at work, just sitting and thinking about him. My one idea is to make him as happy as I can, and when a woman does this for a man I don't think she has time to run around by herself as Mrs. Payson does. Tell dearest father that I so often think of his sermons and the beautiful things he said about women. The rector here doesn't compare with him as a preacher. This is such a long letter it will take two stamps. I've just let myself run on without thinking what I was writing, so if I have made any mistakes in grammar or in spelling, please don't let father see them but read my letter aloud to him. I can shut my eyes and see you sitting at dinner, with Docia bringing in the plum pudding, and I know you will talk of me while you help to it. Write me who comes to dinner with you. I wonder if Miss Priscilla and John Henry are there as usual. Do you know whether John Henry ever goes to the Treadwell's or not? I wish you would ask him to take Susan to see his old mammy in Pink Alley. Now that I am not there to go to see her occasionally, I am afraid she will get lonesome. Good-bye, dearest mother. I will write to you before New Year. I am so busy that I don't have time to write every day, but you will understand and so will father. With my heart's fondest love to you both, Your VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 6, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: The little patterns were exactly what I wanted--thank you a thousand times. I knew you would be overjoyed at the news, and you are the only person I've breathed it to--except, of course, dear Oliver, who is frightened to death already. He has made me stop everything at once, and whenever he sees me lift my hand, he begins to get nervous and begs me not to do it. Oh, mother, he loves me so that it is really pathetic to see his anxiety. And--can you believe it--he doesn't appear to be the least bit glad about it. When I told him, he looked amazed--as if he had never thought of its happening--and said, "Oh, Virginia, not so soon!" He told me afterwards that, of course, he'd always thought we'd have children after a while, before we were middle-aged, but that he had wanted to stay like this for at least five or ten years. When the baby comes, he says he supposes he'll like it, but that he can't honestly say he is glad. It's funny how frightened he is, because I am not the least bit so. All women must expect to have children when they marry, and if God makes them suffer for it, it must be because it is best that they should. Perhaps they wouldn't love their babies so much if they got them easily. I never think of the pain a minute. It all seems so beautiful and sacred to me that I can't understand why Oliver isn't enraptured just as I am. To think of a new life starting into the world from me--a life that is half mine and half Oliver's, and one that would never be at all except for our love. The baby will seem from the very first minute to be our love made into flesh. I don't see how a woman who feels this could waste a thought on what she has to suffer. I am so glad you are going to send me a nurse from Dinwiddie, because I'm afraid I could never get one here that I could trust. The servant Oliver got me is no earthly account, and I still do as much of the cooking as I can. The house doesn't look nearly so nice as it used to, but the doctor tells me that I mustn't sweep, so I only do the light dusting. I sew almost all the time, and I've already finished the little slips. To-day I'm going to cut out the petticoats. I couldn't tell from the pattern you sent whether they fasten in front or in the back. There are no places for buttonholes. Do you use safety pins to fasten them with? The embroidery is perfectly lovely, and will make the sweetest trimming. I am using pink for the basket because Oliver and I both hope the baby will be a girl. If it is, I shall name her after you, of course, and I want her to be just exactly like you. Oliver says he can't understand why anybody ever wants a boy--girls are so much nicer. But then he insists that if she isn't born with blue eyes, he will send her to the orphanage. I am trying to do just as you tell me to, and to be as careful as I possibly can. The doctor thinks I've stayed indoors too much since I came here, so I go out for a little walk with Oliver every night. I am so afraid that somebody will see me that I really hate to go out at all, and always choose the darkest streets I can find. Last night I had a bad stumble, and Oliver says he doesn't care if the whole town discovers us, he's not going to take me down any more unlighted alleys. It has been terribly hot all day--not a breath of air stirring--and I never felt the heat so much in my life. The doctor says it's because of my condition--and last night, after Oliver went to sleep, I got up and sat by the window until daybreak. At first I was dreadfully frightened, and thought I was going to stifle--but poor Oliver had come home so tired that I made up my mind I wasn't going to wake him if I could possibly help it. This morning I didn't tell him a word about it, and he hasn't the least idea that I didn't sleep soundly all night. I suppose that's why I feel so dragged and worn out to-day, just as if somebody had given me a good beating. I was obliged to lie down most of the afternoon, but I am going to take a bath in a few minutes and try to make myself look nice and fresh before Oliver comes home. I have let out that flowered organdie--the one you liked so much--and I wear it almost every evening. I know I look dreadfully, but Oliver says I am more beautiful than ever. It seems to me sometimes that men are born blind where women are concerned, but perhaps God made it that way on purpose. Do you know Oliver really admires Mrs. Payson, and he thinks that red feather very becoming to her. He says she's much too good for her husband, but I have been obliged to disagree with him about that. Even if Mr. Payson does drink a little, I am sure it is only because he gets lonesome when he is left by himself, and that she could prevent it if she tried. Oliver and I never talk about these things because he sees that I feel so strongly about them. Oh, darling mother, I shall be so glad to see you! I hope and pray that father will be well enough for you to come a whole month ahead. In that case you will be here in less than two months, won't you? If the baby comes on the twelfth of August, she (I am perfectly sure it will be a girl) and father will have the same birthday. I am so anxious that she shall be born on that day. Well, I must stop now, though I could run on forever. I never see a living soul from one day to another--Mrs. Payson is out of town--so when Oliver stays late at the office, and I am too tired to work, I get a little--just a little bit lonesome. Mr. Payson sent me a pile of novels by Oliver the other night--but I haven't looked into them. I always feel that it is a waste of time to read when there are things about the house that ought to be done. I wish everything didn't cost so much here. Money doesn't go half as far as it does in Dinwiddie. The price of meat is almost three times as much as it is at home, and chickens are so expensive that we have them only twice a week. It is hard to housekeep on a small allowance, and now that we have to save for the baby's coming, I have to count every penny. I have bought a little book like yours, and I put down all that I spend during the day, and then add it up at night before going to bed. Oliver says I'm dreadfully frugal, but I am always so terribly afraid of running over my allowance (which is every cent that we can afford) and not having the money to pay the doctor's bills when they are due. Nobody could be more generous with money than Oliver is--I couldn't endure being married to a stingy man like Mr. Treadwell--and the other day when one of the men in the office died, he sent the most beautiful wreath that cost ten dollars. I am trying to save enough out of the housekeeping balance to pay for it, for Oliver always runs out of his pocket money before the middle of the month. I haven't bought anything for the baby because you sent me all the materials I needed, and I have been sewing on those ever since they came. Of course my own clothes are still as good as new, so the only expense will be the doctor and the nurse and the extra things I shall be obliged to have to eat when I am sick. Give dear father a dozen kisses from me, and tell him to hurry and get well so he can christen his granddaughter. Your devoted and ever grateful VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 11, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: Just a line to say that I am so, so sorry you can't come, but that you mustn't worry a minute, because everything is going beautifully, and I am not the least bit afraid. The doctor says he never saw any one in a better frame of mind or so little nervous. Give my dear love to father. I am so distressed that he should suffer as he does. Rheumatism must be such terrible pain, and I don't wonder that you are frightened lest it should go to his heart. I shall send you a telegram as soon as the baby comes. Your devoted daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 29, 1885. MY PRECIOUS MOTHER: This is the first time I have sat up in bed, and I am trying to write a little note to you on a pillow instead of a desk. My hand shakes so that I'm afraid you won't be able to read it, but I felt that I wanted to send you a few words of my very own, not dictated to the nurse or to Mrs. Payson. I can't tell you how perfectly lovely Mrs. Payson has been to me. She was here all that dreadful night, and I believe I should have died without her. The doctor said I had such a hard time because I'd let myself get run down and stayed indoors too much. But I'm getting all right now--and the rest is over and doesn't matter. As soon as I am strong again I shall be perfectly happy. Oh, mother, aren't you delighted that the baby is a girl, after all? It was the first question I asked when I came back to consciousness the next morning, and when they told me it was, I said, "Her name is Lucy Pendleton," and that was all. I was so weak they wouldn't let me open my lips again, and Oliver was kept out of the room for almost ten days because I would talk to him. Poor fellow, it almost killed him. He is as white as a sheet still, and looks as if he had been through tortures. It must have been terrible for him, because I was really very, very ill at one time. But it is all over now, and the baby is the sweetest thing you ever imagined. I believe she knows me already, and Mrs. Payson says she is exactly like me, though I can see the strongest resemblance to Oliver, even if she has blue eyes and he hasn't. Wasn't it lovely how everything came just as we wanted it to--a girl, born on father's birthday, with blue eyes, and named Lucy? But, mother, darling, the most wonderful thing of all was that you seemed to be with me all through it. The whole time I was unconscious I thought you were here, and the nurse tells me that I was calling "Mother! Mother!" all that night. Nothing ever made me feel as close to you as having a baby of my own. I never knew before what you were to me, and how dearly, dearly I love you. The nurse is taking the pencil away from me. Your loving VIRGINIA. Isn't it funny that Oliver won't take any interest in the baby at all? He says she caused more trouble than she is worth. Was father like that? * * * * * MATOACA CITY. April 3, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: My last letter was written an age ago, but I have been so busy since Marthy left that I've hardly had a moment in which to draw breath. It was a blow to me that she wouldn't stay for she was really an excellent nurse and the baby got on so well with her, but there aren't any coloured people of her kind here, and she got so homesick for Dinwiddie that I thought she would lose her mind if she stayed. You know how dependent they are upon company, and going out on Sunday afternoon and all that kind of thing, and there really wasn't any amusement for her except taking the baby out in the morning. She got so low spirited that it was almost a relief when she went, but of course I feel her loss dreadfully. I haven't let the baby out of my sight because I wouldn't trust Daisy with her for anything in the world. She is so terribly flighty. I have the crib brought into my room (though Oliver hates it) and I take entire charge of her night and day. I should love to do it if only Oliver didn't mind it so much. He says I think more of the baby now than I do of him. Isn't that absurd? But of course she does take every single minute of my time, and I can't dress myself for him every evening as carefully as I used to do and look after all the housekeeping arrangements. Daisy is a very poor cook and she simply throws the things on the table, but it seems to me that my first duty is to the baby, so I try to put up with the discomforts as well as I can. It is hard to eat what she cooks since everything tastes exactly alike, but I try to swallow as much as I can because the doctor says that if I don't keep up my strength I shall have to stop nursing the baby. Wouldn't that be dreadful? It almost breaks my heart to think of it, and I am sure we'd never get any artificial food to agree with her. She is perfectly well now, the sweetest, fattest thing you ever saw, and a real beauty, and she is so devoted to me that she cries whenever I go out of her sight. I am never tired of watching her, and even when she is asleep I sit sometimes for an hour by her crib just thinking how pretty she looks with her eyes closed and wishing you could see her. Oliver says I spoil her to death, but how can a baby of seven months be spoiled. He doesn't enjoy her half as much as I do, and sometimes I almost think that he gets impatient of seeing her always in my arms. At first he absolutely refused to have her crib brought into our room, but when I cried, he gave in and was very sweet about it. I feel so ashamed sometimes of the way the house looks, but there doesn't seem to be any help for it because the doctor says if I let myself get tired it will be bad for the baby. Of course I wouldn't put my own health before his comfort, but I am obliged to think first of the baby, am I not? Last night, for instance, the poor little thing was ill with colic and I was up and down with her until daybreak. Then this morning she woke early and I had to nurse her and give her her bath, and, added to everything else, Daisy's cousin died and she sent word she couldn't come. I slipped on a wrapper before taking a bath or fixing my hair and ran down to try and get Oliver's breakfast, but the baby began to cry and he came after me and said he wanted to make the coffee himself. Then he brought a cup upstairs to me, but I was so tired and nervous that I couldn't drink it. He didn't seem to understand why, feeling as badly as I did, I wouldn't just put the baby back into her crib and make her stay there until I got some rest, but the little thing was so wide awake that I hadn't the heart to do it. Besides, it is so important to keep regular hours with her, isn't it? I don't suppose a man ever realizes how a woman looks at these things, but you will understand, won't you, mother? I am all alone in the house to-night because a play is in town that Oliver wanted to see and I made him go to it. He wanted to ask Mrs. Midden to sit downstairs (she has offered over and over again to do it) so that I might go too, but of course I wouldn't let him. I really couldn't have enjoyed it a minute for thinking of the baby, and besides I never cared for the theatre. Then, too, he doesn't know (for I never tell him) how very tired I am by the time night comes. Sometimes when Oliver comes home and we sit in the dining-room (we never use the drawing-room, because it is across the hall and I'm afraid I shouldn't hear the baby cry) it is as much as I can do to keep my eyes open. I try not to let him notice it, but one night when he read me the first act of a play he is writing, I went to sleep, and though he didn't say anything, I could see that he was very much hurt. He worries a good deal about my health, too, and he even went out one day and engaged a nurse without saying anything to me about it. After I had talked to her though, I saw that she would never do, so I sent her away before he came home. I wish I could get really strong and feel well again, but the doctor insists I never will until I get out of doors and use my muscles. But you stay in the house all the time and so did grandmother, so I don't believe there's a word of truth in what he says. Anyway, I go out every day now with the baby. Thank you so much for the little bands. They are just what I wanted. With dearest love, Your devoted VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 10, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Daisy left a week ago and we couldn't find another servant until to-day. I must say that I prefer coloured servants. They are so much more dependable. I didn't know until the evening before Daisy left that she was going, and I had to send Oliver straight out to see if he could find somebody to come in and help me. There wasn't a soul to be had until to-day, however, so for a week I was obliged to make Oliver get his dinner at the boarding-house. It doesn't make any difference what I have because I haven't a particle of appetite, and I'd just as soon eat tea and toast as anything else. Of course, but for the baby I could have managed perfectly well--but she has been so fretful of late that she doesn't let me put her down a minute. The doctor says her teeth are beginning to hurt her, and that I must expect to have trouble the first summer. She has been so well until now that he thinks it has been really remarkable. He tells me he never knew a healthier baby, but of course I am terribly anxious about her teething in the hot weather. If she grows much more fretful I'm afraid I shall have to take her to the country for July and August. It seems dreadful to leave Oliver all alone, but I don't see how I can help it if the doctor advises me to go. Oliver has gone to some musical comedy at the Academy to-night, and I am so tired that I am going to bed just as soon as I finish this letter. I hope and pray that the baby will have a quiet night. Don't you think that Daisy treated me very badly considering how kind I had been to her? Only a week ago when she was taken with pain in the night, I got up and made her a mustard plaster and sat by her bed until she felt easier. The next day I did all of her work, and yet she has so little gratitude that she could leave me this way when she knows perfectly well that I am worried to death about the baby's first summer. I'd give anything if I could go home in July as you suggest, but it is such a long trip, and the heat will probably be quite as bad in Dinwiddie as here. Of course, it would make all the difference in the world to me to be where I could have you to advise me about the baby, and I'd go to-morrow if it only wasn't so far. Mrs. Midden has told me of a boarding-house in the country not more than twenty miles from here where Oliver could come down every evening, and we may decide to go there for a month or two. I can't help feeling very anxious, especially as Mrs. Scott's little boy--he is just the age of baby--was taken ill the other night, and they thought he would die before they could get a doctor. This letter is full of my worries, but in spite of them I am the happiest woman that ever lived. Oliver is the best thing to me you can imagine, and the baby is so fascinating that I enjoy every minute I am with her. It is the greatest fun to watch her in her bath. I know you would simply go into raptures over her--and she is so bright that she already understands every word that I say. She grows more like Oliver all the time, and the other day while I was watching her playing with her rubber doll, she looked so beautiful that it almost frightened me. I am so glad dear father is well, and what you wrote me about John Henry's admiration for Susan interested me so much that I sat straight down and wrote to him. Why do you think that it is only friendship and that he isn't in love with her? If he really thinks her the "finest girl in the world," I should imagine he was beginning to be pretty serious. I am delighted to hear that he is going to take her to the festival. Tell Susan from me that I shall never be satisfied until she is as happy as I am. Mr. Treadwell was right, I believe, not to let her go to college, though of course I want dear Susan to have whatever she sets her heart on. But, when all is said, you were wise in teaching me that nothing matters to a woman except love. More and more I am learning that if we only love unselfishly enough, everything else will work out for good to us. My little worries can't keep me from being so blissfully happy that I want to sing all the time. Work is a joy to me because I feel that I am doing it for Oliver and the baby. And with two such treasures to live for I should be the most ungrateful creature alive if I ever complained. Your ever loving daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY, July 1, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: We are leaving suddenly for the country, and I'll send our address just as soon as we get there. The doctor thinks I ought to take the baby away from town, so I am going to the boarding-house I wrote you about. Oliver will come down every evening--it's only an hour's trip. I am so tired from packing that I can't write any more. Lovingly, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. September 15, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Here we are back again in our home, and I was never so thankful in my life to get away from any place. I wrote you how dreadfully inconvenient it was, but it would take pages to tell you all of my experiences in the last few days. Such people you never saw in your life! And the food got so uneatable that I lived on crackers for the last fortnight. Fortunately, I was still nursing the baby, but the doctor has just told me that I must stop. I am so distressed about it. Do you think it will go hard with her after the first year? She is as fat and well as she can be now, but I live in hourly terror of her getting sick. If anything should happen

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you what I thought of her. I believe now that the whole trouble with her is simply that she isn't a Southern lady. She means well, I am sure, but she isn't what I should call exactly refined. There's something "horsey" about her--I can't think of any other way to express it--something that reminds me just a little bit of Abby--and, you remember, we always said Abby got that from being educated in the North. Tell dearest Susan I really think it is fortunate that she did not go to one of their colleges. Mrs. Payson is a college woman and it seems to me that she is always trying to appear as clever as a man. She talks in a way sometimes that sounds as if she believed in woman's rights and all that sort of thing. I told Oliver about it, and he laughed and said that men hated talk like that. He says all a man admires in a woman is her power of loving, and that when she begins to ape a man she loses her charm for him. I can't understand why Mr. Payson married his wife. He said such nice things to me the other day about my being so domestic and such a home lover, that I really felt sorry for him. When I told him that I was so fond of staying indoors that I would never cross my threshold if Oliver didn't make me, he laughed and said that he wished I'd convert his wife to my way of thinking. Yet he seems to have the greatest admiration for her, and, do you know, I believe he even admires that red feather, though he doesn't approve of it. He never turns his eyes away from her when they are together, which isn't very much, as she goes about just as she pleases without him. Can you understand how a person can both admire and disapprove of a thing? Oliver says he knows how it is, but I must say that I don't. I hope and pray that our marriage will always be different from theirs. Oliver and I are never apart for a single minute except when he is at work in the office. He hasn't written a line since we came here, but he is going to begin as soon as we get settled, and then he says that I may sit in the room and sew if I want to. I can't believe that people really love each other unless they want to be together every instant, no matter what they are doing. Why, if Oliver went out to men's dinners without me as Mr. Payson does (though she doesn't seem to mind it) I should just sit at home by myself and cry my eyes out. I think love, if it is love, ought to be all in all. I am perfectly sure that if I live to be a hundred I shall never want any society but Oliver's. He is the whole world to me, and when he is not here I spend my time, unless I am at work, just sitting and thinking about him. My one idea is to make him as happy as I can, and when a woman does this for a man I don't think she has time to run around by herself as Mrs. Payson does. Tell dearest father that I so often think of his sermons and the beautiful things he said about women. The rector here doesn't compare with him as a preacher. This is such a long letter it will take two stamps. I've just let myself run on without thinking what I was writing, so if I have made any mistakes in grammar or in spelling, please don't let father see them but read my letter aloud to him. I can shut my eyes and see you sitting at dinner, with Docia bringing in the plum pudding, and I know you will talk of me while you help to it. Write me who comes to dinner with you. I wonder if Miss Priscilla and John Henry are there as usual. Do you know whether John Henry ever goes to the Treadwell's or not? I wish you would ask him to take Susan to see his old mammy in Pink Alley. Now that I am not there to go to see her occasionally, I am afraid she will get lonesome. Good-bye, dearest mother. I will write to you before New Year. I am so busy that I don't have time to write every day, but you will understand and so will father. With my heart's fondest love to you both, Your VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 6, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: The little patterns were exactly what I wanted--thank you a thousand times. I knew you would be overjoyed at the news, and you are the only person I've breathed it to--except, of course, dear Oliver, who is frightened to death already. He has made me stop everything at once, and whenever he sees me lift my hand, he begins to get nervous and begs me not to do it. Oh, mother, he loves me so that it is really pathetic to see his anxiety. And--can you believe it--he doesn't appear to be the least bit glad about it. When I told him, he looked amazed--as if he had never thought of its happening--and said, "Oh, Virginia, not so soon!" He told me afterwards that, of course, he'd always thought we'd have children after a while, before we were middle-aged, but that he had wanted to stay like this for at least five or ten years. When the baby comes, he says he supposes he'll like it, but that he can't honestly say he is glad. It's funny how frightened he is, because I am not the least bit so. All women must expect to have children when they marry, and if God makes them suffer for it, it must be because it is best that they should. Perhaps they wouldn't love their babies so much if they got them easily. I never think of the pain a minute. It all seems so beautiful and sacred to me that I can't understand why Oliver isn't enraptured just as I am. To think of a new life starting into the world from me--a life that is half mine and half Oliver's, and one that would never be at all except for our love. The baby will seem from the very first minute to be our love made into flesh. I don't see how a woman who feels this could waste a thought on what she has to suffer. I am so glad you are going to send me a nurse from Dinwiddie, because I'm afraid I could never get one here that I could trust. The servant Oliver got me is no earthly account, and I still do as much of the cooking as I can. The house doesn't look nearly so nice as it used to, but the doctor tells me that I mustn't sweep, so I only do the light dusting. I sew almost all the time, and I've already finished the little slips. To-day I'm going to cut out the petticoats. I couldn't tell from the pattern you sent whether they fasten in front or in the back. There are no places for buttonholes. Do you use safety pins to fasten them with? The embroidery is perfectly lovely, and will make the sweetest trimming. I am using pink for the basket because Oliver and I both hope the baby will be a girl. If it is, I shall name her after you, of course, and I want her to be just exactly like you. Oliver says he can't understand why anybody ever wants a boy--girls are so much nicer. But then he insists that if she isn't born with blue eyes, he will send her to the orphanage. I am trying to do just as you tell me to, and to be as careful as I possibly can. The doctor thinks I've stayed indoors too much since I came here, so I go out for a little walk with Oliver every night. I am so afraid that somebody will see me that I really hate to go out at all, and always choose the darkest streets I can find. Last night I had a bad stumble, and Oliver says he doesn't care if the whole town discovers us, he's not going to take me down any more unlighted alleys. It has been terribly hot all day--not a breath of air stirring--and I never felt the heat so much in my life. The doctor says it's because of my condition--and last night, after Oliver went to sleep, I got up and sat by the window until daybreak. At first I was dreadfully frightened, and thought I was going to stifle--but poor Oliver had come home so tired that I made up my mind I wasn't going to wake him if I could possibly help it. This morning I didn't tell him a word about it, and he hasn't the least idea that I didn't sleep soundly all night. I suppose that's why I feel so dragged and worn out to-day, just as if somebody had given me a good beating. I was obliged to lie down most of the afternoon, but I am going to take a bath in a few minutes and try to make myself look nice and fresh before Oliver comes home. I have let out that flowered organdie--the one you liked so much--and I wear it almost every evening. I know I look dreadfully, but Oliver says I am more beautiful than ever. It seems to me sometimes that men are born blind where women are concerned, but perhaps God made it that way on purpose. Do you know Oliver really admires Mrs. Payson, and he thinks that red feather very becoming to her. He says she's much too good for her husband, but I have been obliged to disagree with him about that. Even if Mr. Payson does drink a little, I am sure it is only because he gets lonesome when he is left by himself, and that she could prevent it if she tried. Oliver and I never talk about these things because he sees that I feel so strongly about them. Oh, darling mother, I shall be so glad to see you! I hope and pray that father will be well enough for you to come a whole month ahead. In that case you will be here in less than two months, won't you? If the baby comes on the twelfth of August, she (I am perfectly sure it will be a girl) and father will have the same birthday. I am so anxious that she shall be born on that day. Well, I must stop now, though I could run on forever. I never see a living soul from one day to another--Mrs. Payson is out of town--so when Oliver stays late at the office, and I am too tired to work, I get a little--just a little bit lonesome. Mr. Payson sent me a pile of novels by Oliver the other night--but I haven't looked into them. I always feel that it is a waste of time to read when there are things about the house that ought to be done. I wish everything didn't cost so much here. Money doesn't go half as far as it does in Dinwiddie. The price of meat is almost three times as much as it is at home, and chickens are so expensive that we have them only twice a week. It is hard to housekeep on a small allowance, and now that we have to save for the baby's coming, I have to count every penny. I have bought a little book like yours, and I put down all that I spend during the day, and then add it up at night before going to bed. Oliver says I'm dreadfully frugal, but I am always so terribly afraid of running over my allowance (which is every cent that we can afford) and not having the money to pay the doctor's bills when they are due. Nobody could be more generous with money than Oliver is--I couldn't endure being married to a stingy man like Mr. Treadwell--and the other day when one of the men in the office died, he sent the most beautiful wreath that cost ten dollars. I am trying to save enough out of the housekeeping balance to pay for it, for Oliver always runs out of his pocket money before the middle of the month. I haven't bought anything for the baby because you sent me all the materials I needed, and I have been sewing on those ever since they came. Of course my own clothes are still as good as new, so the only expense will be the doctor and the nurse and the extra things I shall be obliged to have to eat when I am sick. Give dear father a dozen kisses from me, and tell him to hurry and get well so he can christen his granddaughter. Your devoted and ever grateful VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 11, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: Just a line to say that I am so, so sorry you can't come, but that you mustn't worry a minute, because everything is going beautifully, and I am not the least bit afraid. The doctor says he never saw any one in a better frame of mind or so little nervous. Give my dear love to father. I am so distressed that he should suffer as he does. Rheumatism must be such terrible pain, and I don't wonder that you are frightened lest it should go to his heart. I shall send you a telegram as soon as the baby comes. Your devoted daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 29, 1885. MY PRECIOUS MOTHER: This is the first time I have sat up in bed, and I am trying to write a little note to you on a pillow instead of a desk. My hand shakes so that I'm afraid you won't be able to read it, but I felt that I wanted to send you a few words of my very own, not dictated to the nurse or to Mrs. Payson. I can't tell you how perfectly lovely Mrs. Payson has been to me. She was here all that dreadful night, and I believe I should have died without her. The doctor said I had such a hard time because I'd let myself get run down and stayed indoors too much. But I'm getting all right now--and the rest is over and doesn't matter. As soon as I am strong again I shall be perfectly happy. Oh, mother, aren't you delighted that the baby is a girl, after all? It was the first question I asked when I came back to consciousness the next morning, and when they told me it was, I said, "Her name is Lucy Pendleton," and that was all. I was so weak they wouldn't let me open my lips again, and Oliver was kept out of the room for almost ten days because I would talk to him. Poor fellow, it almost killed him. He is as white as a sheet still, and looks as if he had been through tortures. It must have been terrible for him, because I was really very, very ill at one time. But it is all over now, and the baby is the sweetest thing you ever imagined. I believe she knows me already, and Mrs. Payson says she is exactly like me, though I can see the strongest resemblance to Oliver, even if she has blue eyes and he hasn't. Wasn't it lovely how everything came just as we wanted it to--a girl, born on father's birthday, with blue eyes, and named Lucy? But, mother, darling, the most wonderful thing of all was that you seemed to be with me all through it. The whole time I was unconscious I thought you were here, and the nurse tells me that I was calling "Mother! Mother!" all that night. Nothing ever made me feel as close to you as having a baby of my own. I never knew before what you were to me, and how dearly, dearly I love you. The nurse is taking the pencil away from me. Your loving VIRGINIA. Isn't it funny that Oliver won't take any interest in the baby at all? He says she caused more trouble than she is worth. Was father like that? * * * * * MATOACA CITY. April 3, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: My last letter was written an age ago, but I have been so busy since Marthy left that I've hardly had a moment in which to draw breath. It was a blow to me that she wouldn't stay for she was really an excellent nurse and the baby got on so well with her, but there aren't any coloured people of her kind here, and she got so homesick for Dinwiddie that I thought she would lose her mind if she stayed. You know how dependent they are upon company, and going out on Sunday afternoon and all that kind of thing, and there really wasn't any amusement for her except taking the baby out in the morning. She got so low spirited that it was almost a relief when she went, but of course I feel her loss dreadfully. I haven't let the baby out of my sight because I wouldn't trust Daisy with her for anything in the world. She is so terribly flighty. I have the crib brought into my room (though Oliver hates it) and I take entire charge of her night and day. I should love to do it if only Oliver didn't mind it so much. He says I think more of the baby now than I do of him. Isn't that absurd? But of course she does take every single minute of my time, and I can't dress myself for him every evening as carefully as I used to do and look after all the housekeeping arrangements. Daisy is a very poor cook and she simply throws the things on the table, but it seems to me that my first duty is to the baby, so I try to put up with the discomforts as well as I can. It is hard to eat what she cooks since everything tastes exactly alike, but I try to swallow as much as I can because the doctor says that if I don't keep up my strength I shall have to stop nursing the baby. Wouldn't that be dreadful? It almost breaks my heart to think of it, and I am sure we'd never get any artificial food to agree with her. She is perfectly well now, the sweetest, fattest thing you ever saw, and a real beauty, and she is so devoted to me that she cries whenever I go out of her sight. I am never tired of watching her, and even when she is asleep I sit sometimes for an hour by her crib just thinking how pretty she looks with her eyes closed and wishing you could see her. Oliver says I spoil her to death, but how can a baby of seven months be spoiled. He doesn't enjoy her half as much as I do, and sometimes I almost think that he gets impatient of seeing her always in my arms. At first he absolutely refused to have her crib brought into our room, but when I cried, he gave in and was very sweet about it. I feel so ashamed sometimes of the way the house looks, but there doesn't seem to be any help for it because the doctor says if I let myself get tired it will be bad for the baby. Of course I wouldn't put my own health before his comfort, but I am obliged to think first of the baby, am I not? Last night, for instance, the poor little thing was ill with colic and I was up and down with her until daybreak. Then this morning she woke early and I had to nurse her and give her her bath, and, added to everything else, Daisy's cousin died and she sent word she couldn't come. I slipped on a wrapper before taking a bath or fixing my hair and ran down to try and get Oliver's breakfast, but the baby began to cry and he came after me and said he wanted to make the coffee himself. Then he brought a cup upstairs to me, but I was so tired and nervous that I couldn't drink it. He didn't seem to understand why, feeling as badly as I did, I wouldn't just put the baby back into her crib and make her stay there until I got some rest, but the little thing was so wide awake that I hadn't the heart to do it. Besides, it is so important to keep regular hours with her, isn't it? I don't suppose a man ever realizes how a woman looks at these things, but you will understand, won't you, mother? I am all alone in the house to-night because a play is in town that Oliver wanted to see and I made him go to it. He wanted to ask Mrs. Midden to sit downstairs (she has offered over and over again to do it) so that I might go too, but of course I wouldn't let him. I really couldn't have enjoyed it a minute for thinking of the baby, and besides I never cared for the theatre. Then, too, he doesn't know (for I never tell him) how very tired I am by the time night comes. Sometimes when Oliver comes home and we sit in the dining-room (we never use the drawing-room, because it is across the hall and I'm afraid I shouldn't hear the baby cry) it is as much as I can do to keep my eyes open. I try not to let him notice it, but one night when he read me the first act of a play he is writing, I went to sleep, and though he didn't say anything, I could see that he was very much hurt. He worries a good deal about my health, too, and he even went out one day and engaged a nurse without saying anything to me about it. After I had talked to her though, I saw that she would never do, so I sent her away before he came home. I wish I could get really strong and feel well again, but the doctor insists I never will until I get out of doors and use my muscles. But you stay in the house all the time and so did grandmother, so I don't believe there's a word of truth in what he says. Anyway, I go out every day now with the baby. Thank you so much for the little bands. They are just what I wanted. With dearest love, Your devoted VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 10, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Daisy left a week ago and we couldn't find another servant until to-day. I must say that I prefer coloured servants. They are so much more dependable. I didn't know until the evening before Daisy left that she was going, and I had to send Oliver straight out to see if he could find somebody to come in and help me. There wasn't a soul to be had until to-day, however, so for a week I was obliged to make Oliver get his dinner at the boarding-house. It doesn't make any difference what I have because I haven't a particle of appetite, and I'd just as soon eat tea and toast as anything else. Of course, but for the baby I could have managed perfectly well--but she has been so fretful of late that she doesn't let me put her down a minute. The doctor says her teeth are beginning to hurt her, and that I must expect to have trouble the first summer. She has been so well until now that he thinks it has been really remarkable. He tells me he never knew a healthier baby, but of course I am terribly anxious about her teething in the hot weather. If she grows much more fretful I'm afraid I shall have to take her to the country for July and August. It seems dreadful to leave Oliver all alone, but I don't see how I can help it if the doctor advises me to go. Oliver has gone to some musical comedy at the Academy to-night, and I am so tired that I am going to bed just as soon as I finish this letter. I hope and pray that the baby will have a quiet night. Don't you think that Daisy treated me very badly considering how kind I had been to her? Only a week ago when she was taken with pain in the night, I got up and made her a mustard plaster and sat by her bed until she felt easier. The next day I did all of her work, and yet she has so little gratitude that she could leave me this way when she knows perfectly well that I am worried to death about the baby's first summer. I'd give anything if I could go home in July as you suggest, but it is such a long trip, and the heat will probably be quite as bad in Dinwiddie as here. Of course, it would make all the difference in the world to me to be where I could have you to advise me about the baby, and I'd go to-morrow if it only wasn't so far. Mrs. Midden has told me of a boarding-house in the country not more than twenty miles from here where Oliver could come down every evening, and we may decide to go there for a month or two. I can't help feeling very anxious, especially as Mrs. Scott's little boy--he is just the age of baby--was taken ill the other night, and they thought he would die before they could get a doctor. This letter is full of my worries, but in spite of them I am the happiest woman that ever lived. Oliver is the best thing to me you can imagine, and the baby is so fascinating that I enjoy every minute I am with her. It is the greatest fun to watch her in her bath. I know you would simply go into raptures over her--and she is so bright that she already understands every word that I say. She grows more like Oliver all the time, and the other day while I was watching her playing with her rubber doll, she looked so beautiful that it almost frightened me. I am so glad dear father is well, and what you wrote me about John Henry's admiration for Susan interested me so much that I sat straight down and wrote to him. Why do you think that it is only friendship and that he isn't in love with her? If he really thinks her the "finest girl in the world," I should imagine he was beginning to be pretty serious. I am delighted to hear that he is going to take her to the festival. Tell Susan from me that I shall never be satisfied until she is as happy as I am. Mr. Treadwell was right, I believe, not to let her go to college, though of course I want dear Susan to have whatever she sets her heart on. But, when all is said, you were wise in teaching me that nothing matters to a woman except love. More and more I am learning that if we only love unselfishly enough, everything else will work out for good to us. My little worries can't keep me from being so blissfully happy that I want to sing all the time. Work is a joy to me because I feel that I am doing it for Oliver and the baby. And with two such treasures to live for I should be the most ungrateful creature alive if I ever complained. Your ever loving daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY, July 1, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: We are leaving suddenly for the country, and I'll send our address just as soon as we get there. The doctor thinks I ought to take the baby away from town, so I am going to the boarding-house I wrote you about. Oliver will come down every evening--it's only an hour's trip. I am so tired from packing that I can't write any more. Lovingly, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. September 15, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Here we are back again in our home, and I was never so thankful in my life to get away from any place. I wrote you how dreadfully inconvenient it was, but it would take pages to tell you all of my experiences in the last few days. Such people you never saw in your life! And the food got so uneatable that I lived on crackers for the last fortnight. Fortunately, I was still nursing the baby, but the doctor has just told me that I must stop. I am so distressed about it. Do you think it will go hard with her after the first year? She is as fat and well as she can be now, but I live in hourly terror of her getting sick. If anything should happen

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you what I thought of her. I believe now that the whole trouble with her is simply that she isn't a Southern lady. She means well, I am sure, but she isn't what I should call exactly refined. There's something "horsey" about her--I can't think of any other way to express it--something that reminds me just a little bit of Abby--and, you remember, we always said Abby got that from being educated in the North. Tell dearest Susan I really think it is fortunate that she did not go to one of their colleges. Mrs. Payson is a college woman and it seems to me that she is always trying to appear as clever as a man. She talks in a way sometimes that sounds as if she believed in woman's rights and all that sort of thing. I told Oliver about it, and he laughed and said that men hated talk like that. He says all a man admires in a woman is her power of loving, and that when she begins to ape a man she loses her charm for him. I can't understand why Mr. Payson married his wife. He said such nice things to me the other day about my being so domestic and such a home lover, that I really felt sorry for him. When I told him that I was so fond of staying indoors that I would never cross my threshold if Oliver didn't make me, he laughed and said that he wished I'd convert his wife to my way of thinking. Yet he seems to have the greatest admiration for her, and, do you know, I believe he even admires that red feather, though he doesn't approve of it. He never turns his eyes away from her when they are together, which isn't very much, as she goes about just as she pleases without him. Can you understand how a person can both admire and disapprove of a thing? Oliver says he knows how it is, but I must say that I don't. I hope and pray that our marriage will always be different from theirs. Oliver and I are never apart for a single minute except when he is at work in the office. He hasn't written a line since we came here, but he is going to begin as soon as we get settled, and then he says that I may sit in the room and sew if I want to. I can't believe that people really love each other unless they want to be together every instant, no matter what they are doing. Why, if Oliver went out to men's dinners without me as Mr. Payson does (though she doesn't seem to mind it) I should just sit at home by myself and cry my eyes out. I think love, if it is love, ought to be all in all. I am perfectly sure that if I live to be a hundred I shall never want any society but Oliver's. He is the whole world to me, and when he is not here I spend my time, unless I am at work, just sitting and thinking about him. My one idea is to make him as happy as I can, and when a woman does this for a man I don't think she has time to run around by herself as Mrs. Payson does. Tell dearest father that I so often think of his sermons and the beautiful things he said about women. The rector here doesn't compare with him as a preacher. This is such a long letter it will take two stamps. I've just let myself run on without thinking what I was writing, so if I have made any mistakes in grammar or in spelling, please don't let father see them but read my letter aloud to him. I can shut my eyes and see you sitting at dinner, with Docia bringing in the plum pudding, and I know you will talk of me while you help to it. Write me who comes to dinner with you. I wonder if Miss Priscilla and John Henry are there as usual. Do you know whether John Henry ever goes to the Treadwell's or not? I wish you would ask him to take Susan to see his old mammy in Pink Alley. Now that I am not there to go to see her occasionally, I am afraid she will get lonesome. Good-bye, dearest mother. I will write to you before New Year. I am so busy that I don't have time to write every day, but you will understand and so will father. With my heart's fondest love to you both, Your VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 6, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: The little patterns were exactly what I wanted--thank you a thousand times. I knew you would be overjoyed at the news, and you are the only person I've breathed it to--except, of course, dear Oliver, who is frightened to death already. He has made me stop everything at once, and whenever he sees me lift my hand, he begins to get nervous and begs me not to do it. Oh, mother, he loves me so that it is really pathetic to see his anxiety. And--can you believe it--he doesn't appear to be the least bit glad about it. When I told him, he looked amazed--as if he had never thought of its happening--and said, "Oh, Virginia, not so soon!" He told me afterwards that, of course, he'd always thought we'd have children after a while, before we were middle-aged, but that he had wanted to stay like this for at least five or ten years. When the baby comes, he says he supposes he'll like it, but that he can't honestly say he is glad. It's funny how frightened he is, because I am not the least bit so. All women must expect to have children when they marry, and if God makes them suffer for it, it must be because it is best that they should. Perhaps they wouldn't love their babies so much if they got them easily. I never think of the pain a minute. It all seems so beautiful and sacred to me that I can't understand why Oliver isn't enraptured just as I am. To think of a new life starting into the world from me--a life that is half mine and half Oliver's, and one that would never be at all except for our love. The baby will seem from the very first minute to be our love made into flesh. I don't see how a woman who feels this could waste a thought on what she has to suffer. I am so glad you are going to send me a nurse from Dinwiddie, because I'm afraid I could never get one here that I could trust. The servant Oliver got me is no earthly account, and I still do as much of the cooking as I can. The house doesn't look nearly so nice as it used to, but the doctor tells me that I mustn't sweep, so I only do the light dusting. I sew almost all the time, and I've already finished the little slips. To-day I'm going to cut out the petticoats. I couldn't tell from the pattern you sent whether they fasten in front or in the back. There are no places for buttonholes. Do you use safety pins to fasten them with? The embroidery is perfectly lovely, and will make the sweetest trimming. I am using pink for the basket because Oliver and I both hope the baby will be a girl. If it is, I shall name her after you, of course, and I want her to be just exactly like you. Oliver says he can't understand why anybody ever wants a boy--girls are so much nicer. But then he insists that if she isn't born with blue eyes, he will send her to the orphanage. I am trying to do just as you tell me to, and to be as careful as I possibly can. The doctor thinks I've stayed indoors too much since I came here, so I go out for a little walk with Oliver every night. I am so afraid that somebody will see me that I really hate to go out at all, and always choose the darkest streets I can find. Last night I had a bad stumble, and Oliver says he doesn't care if the whole town discovers us, he's not going to take me down any more unlighted alleys. It has been terribly hot all day--not a breath of air stirring--and I never felt the heat so much in my life. The doctor says it's because of my condition--and last night, after Oliver went to sleep, I got up and sat by the window until daybreak. At first I was dreadfully frightened, and thought I was going to stifle--but poor Oliver had come home so tired that I made up my mind I wasn't going to wake him if I could possibly help it. This morning I didn't tell him a word about it, and he hasn't the least idea that I didn't sleep soundly all night. I suppose that's why I feel so dragged and worn out to-day, just as if somebody had given me a good beating. I was obliged to lie down most of the afternoon, but I am going to take a bath in a few minutes and try to make myself look nice and fresh before Oliver comes home. I have let out that flowered organdie--the one you liked so much--and I wear it almost every evening. I know I look dreadfully, but Oliver says I am more beautiful than ever. It seems to me sometimes that men are born blind where women are concerned, but perhaps God made it that way on purpose. Do you know Oliver really admires Mrs. Payson, and he thinks that red feather very becoming to her. He says she's much too good for her husband, but I have been obliged to disagree with him about that. Even if Mr. Payson does drink a little, I am sure it is only because he gets lonesome when he is left by himself, and that she could prevent it if she tried. Oliver and I never talk about these things because he sees that I feel so strongly about them. Oh, darling mother, I shall be so glad to see you! I hope and pray that father will be well enough for you to come a whole month ahead. In that case you will be here in less than two months, won't you? If the baby comes on the twelfth of August, she (I am perfectly sure it will be a girl) and father will have the same birthday. I am so anxious that she shall be born on that day. Well, I must stop now, though I could run on forever. I never see a living soul from one day to another--Mrs. Payson is out of town--so when Oliver stays late at the office, and I am too tired to work, I get a little--just a little bit lonesome. Mr. Payson sent me a pile of novels by Oliver the other night--but I haven't looked into them. I always feel that it is a waste of time to read when there are things about the house that ought to be done. I wish everything didn't cost so much here. Money doesn't go half as far as it does in Dinwiddie. The price of meat is almost three times as much as it is at home, and chickens are so expensive that we have them only twice a week. It is hard to housekeep on a small allowance, and now that we have to save for the baby's coming, I have to count every penny. I have bought a little book like yours, and I put down all that I spend during the day, and then add it up at night before going to bed. Oliver says I'm dreadfully frugal, but I am always so terribly afraid of running over my allowance (which is every cent that we can afford) and not having the money to pay the doctor's bills when they are due. Nobody could be more generous with money than Oliver is--I couldn't endure being married to a stingy man like Mr. Treadwell--and the other day when one of the men in the office died, he sent the most beautiful wreath that cost ten dollars. I am trying to save enough out of the housekeeping balance to pay for it, for Oliver always runs out of his pocket money before the middle of the month. I haven't bought anything for the baby because you sent me all the materials I needed, and I have been sewing on those ever since they came. Of course my own clothes are still as good as new, so the only expense will be the doctor and the nurse and the extra things I shall be obliged to have to eat when I am sick. Give dear father a dozen kisses from me, and tell him to hurry and get well so he can christen his granddaughter. Your devoted and ever grateful VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 11, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: Just a line to say that I am so, so sorry you can't come, but that you mustn't worry a minute, because everything is going beautifully, and I am not the least bit afraid. The doctor says he never saw any one in a better frame of mind or so little nervous. Give my dear love to father. I am so distressed that he should suffer as he does. Rheumatism must be such terrible pain, and I don't wonder that you are frightened lest it should go to his heart. I shall send you a telegram as soon as the baby comes. Your devoted daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 29, 1885. MY PRECIOUS MOTHER: This is the first time I have sat up in bed, and I am trying to write a little note to you on a pillow instead of a desk. My hand shakes so that I'm afraid you won't be able to read it, but I felt that I wanted to send you a few words of my very own, not dictated to the nurse or to Mrs. Payson. I can't tell you how perfectly lovely Mrs. Payson has been to me. She was here all that dreadful night, and I believe I should have died without her. The doctor said I had such a hard time because I'd let myself get run down and stayed indoors too much. But I'm getting all right now--and the rest is over and doesn't matter. As soon as I am strong again I shall be perfectly happy. Oh, mother, aren't you delighted that the baby is a girl, after all? It was the first question I asked when I came back to consciousness the next morning, and when they told me it was, I said, "Her name is Lucy Pendleton," and that was all. I was so weak they wouldn't let me open my lips again, and Oliver was kept out of the room for almost ten days because I would talk to him. Poor fellow, it almost killed him. He is as white as a sheet still, and looks as if he had been through tortures. It must have been terrible for him, because I was really very, very ill at one time. But it is all over now, and the baby is the sweetest thing you ever imagined. I believe she knows me already, and Mrs. Payson says she is exactly like me, though I can see the strongest resemblance to Oliver, even if she has blue eyes and he hasn't. Wasn't it lovely how everything came just as we wanted it to--a girl, born on father's birthday, with blue eyes, and named Lucy? But, mother, darling, the most wonderful thing of all was that you seemed to be with me all through it. The whole time I was unconscious I thought you were here, and the nurse tells me that I was calling "Mother! Mother!" all that night. Nothing ever made me feel as close to you as having a baby of my own. I never knew before what you were to me, and how dearly, dearly I love you. The nurse is taking the pencil away from me. Your loving VIRGINIA. Isn't it funny that Oliver won't take any interest in the baby at all? He says she caused more trouble than she is worth. Was father like that? * * * * * MATOACA CITY. April 3, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: My last letter was written an age ago, but I have been so busy since Marthy left that I've hardly had a moment in which to draw breath. It was a blow to me that she wouldn't stay for she was really an excellent nurse and the baby got on so well with her, but there aren't any coloured people of her kind here, and she got so homesick for Dinwiddie that I thought she would lose her mind if she stayed. You know how dependent they are upon company, and going out on Sunday afternoon and all that kind of thing, and there really wasn't any amusement for her except taking the baby out in the morning. She got so low spirited that it was almost a relief when she went, but of course I feel her loss dreadfully. I haven't let the baby out of my sight because I wouldn't trust Daisy with her for anything in the world. She is so terribly flighty. I have the crib brought into my room (though Oliver hates it) and I take entire charge of her night and day. I should love to do it if only Oliver didn't mind it so much. He says I think more of the baby now than I do of him. Isn't that absurd? But of course she does take every single minute of my time, and I can't dress myself for him every evening as carefully as I used to do and look after all the housekeeping arrangements. Daisy is a very poor cook and she simply throws the things on the table, but it seems to me that my first duty is to the baby, so I try to put up with the discomforts as well as I can. It is hard to eat what she cooks since everything tastes exactly alike, but I try to swallow as much as I can because the doctor says that if I don't keep up my strength I shall have to stop nursing the baby. Wouldn't that be dreadful? It almost breaks my heart to think of it, and I am sure we'd never get any artificial food to agree with her. She is perfectly well now, the sweetest, fattest thing you ever saw, and a real beauty, and she is so devoted to me that she cries whenever I go out of her sight. I am never tired of watching her, and even when she is asleep I sit sometimes for an hour by her crib just thinking how pretty she looks with her eyes closed and wishing you could see her. Oliver says I spoil her to death, but how can a baby of seven months be spoiled. He doesn't enjoy her half as much as I do, and sometimes I almost think that he gets impatient of seeing her always in my arms. At first he absolutely refused to have her crib brought into our room, but when I cried, he gave in and was very sweet about it. I feel so ashamed sometimes of the way the house looks, but there doesn't seem to be any help for it because the doctor says if I let myself get tired it will be bad for the baby. Of course I wouldn't put my own health before his comfort, but I am obliged to think first of the baby, am I not? Last night, for instance, the poor little thing was ill with colic and I was up and down with her until daybreak. Then this morning she woke early and I had to nurse her and give her her bath, and, added to everything else, Daisy's cousin died and she sent word she couldn't come. I slipped on a wrapper before taking a bath or fixing my hair and ran down to try and get Oliver's breakfast, but the baby began to cry and he came after me and said he wanted to make the coffee himself. Then he brought a cup upstairs to me, but I was so tired and nervous that I couldn't drink it. He didn't seem to understand why, feeling as badly as I did, I wouldn't just put the baby back into her crib and make her stay there until I got some rest, but the little thing was so wide awake that I hadn't the heart to do it. Besides, it is so important to keep regular hours with her, isn't it? I don't suppose a man ever realizes how a woman looks at these things, but you will understand, won't you, mother? I am all alone in the house to-night because a play is in town that Oliver wanted to see and I made him go to it. He wanted to ask Mrs. Midden to sit downstairs (she has offered over and over again to do it) so that I might go too, but of course I wouldn't let him. I really couldn't have enjoyed it a minute for thinking of the baby, and besides I never cared for the theatre. Then, too, he doesn't know (for I never tell him) how very tired I am by the time night comes. Sometimes when Oliver comes home and we sit in the dining-room (we never use the drawing-room, because it is across the hall and I'm afraid I shouldn't hear the baby cry) it is as much as I can do to keep my eyes open. I try not to let him notice it, but one night when he read me the first act of a play he is writing, I went to sleep, and though he didn't say anything, I could see that he was very much hurt. He worries a good deal about my health, too, and he even went out one day and engaged a nurse without saying anything to me about it. After I had talked to her though, I saw that she would never do, so I sent her away before he came home. I wish I could get really strong and feel well again, but the doctor insists I never will until I get out of doors and use my muscles. But you stay in the house all the time and so did grandmother, so I don't believe there's a word of truth in what he says. Anyway, I go out every day now with the baby. Thank you so much for the little bands. They are just what I wanted. With dearest love, Your devoted VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 10, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Daisy left a week ago and we couldn't find another servant until to-day. I must say that I prefer coloured servants. They are so much more dependable. I didn't know until the evening before Daisy left that she was going, and I had to send Oliver straight out to see if he could find somebody to come in and help me. There wasn't a soul to be had until to-day, however, so for a week I was obliged to make Oliver get his dinner at the boarding-house. It doesn't make any difference what I have because I haven't a particle of appetite, and I'd just as soon eat tea and toast as anything else. Of course, but for the baby I could have managed perfectly well--but she has been so fretful of late that she doesn't let me put her down a minute. The doctor says her teeth are beginning to hurt her, and that I must expect to have trouble the first summer. She has been so well until now that he thinks it has been really remarkable. He tells me he never knew a healthier baby, but of course I am terribly anxious about her teething in the hot weather. If she grows much more fretful I'm afraid I shall have to take her to the country for July and August. It seems dreadful to leave Oliver all alone, but I don't see how I can help it if the doctor advises me to go. Oliver has gone to some musical comedy at the Academy to-night, and I am so tired that I am going to bed just as soon as I finish this letter. I hope and pray that the baby will have a quiet night. Don't you think that Daisy treated me very badly considering how kind I had been to her? Only a week ago when she was taken with pain in the night, I got up and made her a mustard plaster and sat by her bed until she felt easier. The next day I did all of her work, and yet she has so little gratitude that she could leave me this way when she knows perfectly well that I am worried to death about the baby's first summer. I'd give anything if I could go home in July as you suggest, but it is such a long trip, and the heat will probably be quite as bad in Dinwiddie as here. Of course, it would make all the difference in the world to me to be where I could have you to advise me about the baby, and I'd go to-morrow if it only wasn't so far. Mrs. Midden has told me of a boarding-house in the country not more than twenty miles from here where Oliver could come down every evening, and we may decide to go there for a month or two. I can't help feeling very anxious, especially as Mrs. Scott's little boy--he is just the age of baby--was taken ill the other night, and they thought he would die before they could get a doctor. This letter is full of my worries, but in spite of them I am the happiest woman that ever lived. Oliver is the best thing to me you can imagine, and the baby is so fascinating that I enjoy every minute I am with her. It is the greatest fun to watch her in her bath. I know you would simply go into raptures over her--and she is so bright that she already understands every word that I say. She grows more like Oliver all the time, and the other day while I was watching her playing with her rubber doll, she looked so beautiful that it almost frightened me. I am so glad dear father is well, and what you wrote me about John Henry's admiration for Susan interested me so much that I sat straight down and wrote to him. Why do you think that it is only friendship and that he isn't in love with her? If he really thinks her the "finest girl in the world," I should imagine he was beginning to be pretty serious. I am delighted to hear that he is going to take her to the festival. Tell Susan from me that I shall never be satisfied until she is as happy as I am. Mr. Treadwell was right, I believe, not to let her go to college, though of course I want dear Susan to have whatever she sets her heart on. But, when all is said, you were wise in teaching me that nothing matters to a woman except love. More and more I am learning that if we only love unselfishly enough, everything else will work out for good to us. My little worries can't keep me from being so blissfully happy that I want to sing all the time. Work is a joy to me because I feel that I am doing it for Oliver and the baby. And with two such treasures to live for I should be the most ungrateful creature alive if I ever complained. Your ever loving daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY, July 1, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: We are leaving suddenly for the country, and I'll send our address just as soon as we get there. The doctor thinks I ought to take the baby away from town, so I am going to the boarding-house I wrote you about. Oliver will come down every evening--it's only an hour's trip. I am so tired from packing that I can't write any more. Lovingly, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. September 15, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Here we are back again in our home, and I was never so thankful in my life to get away from any place. I wrote you how dreadfully inconvenient it was, but it would take pages to tell you all of my experiences in the last few days. Such people you never saw in your life! And the food got so uneatable that I lived on crackers for the last fortnight. Fortunately, I was still nursing the baby, but the doctor has just told me that I must stop. I am so distressed about it. Do you think it will go hard with her after the first year? She is as fat and well as she can be now, but I live in hourly terror of her getting sick. If anything should happen

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you what I thought of her. I believe now that the whole trouble with her is simply that she isn't a Southern lady. She means well, I am sure, but she isn't what I should call exactly refined. There's something "horsey" about her--I can't think of any other way to express it--something that reminds me just a little bit of Abby--and, you remember, we always said Abby got that from being educated in the North. Tell dearest Susan I really think it is fortunate that she did not go to one of their colleges. Mrs. Payson is a college woman and it seems to me that she is always trying to appear as clever as a man. She talks in a way sometimes that sounds as if she believed in woman's rights and all that sort of thing. I told Oliver about it, and he laughed and said that men hated talk like that. He says all a man admires in a woman is her power of loving, and that when she begins to ape a man she loses her charm for him. I can't understand why Mr. Payson married his wife. He said such nice things to me the other day about my being so domestic and such a home lover, that I really felt sorry for him. When I told him that I was so fond of staying indoors that I would never cross my threshold if Oliver didn't make me, he laughed and said that he wished I'd convert his wife to my way of thinking. Yet he seems to have the greatest admiration for her, and, do you know, I believe he even admires that red feather, though he doesn't approve of it. He never turns his eyes away from her when they are together, which isn't very much, as she goes about just as she pleases without him. Can you understand how a person can both admire and disapprove of a thing? Oliver says he knows how it is, but I must say that I don't. I hope and pray that our marriage will always be different from theirs. Oliver and I are never apart for a single minute except when he is at work in the office. He hasn't written a line since we came here, but he is going to begin as soon as we get settled, and then he says that I may sit in the room and sew if I want to. I can't believe that people really love each other unless they want to be together every instant, no matter what they are doing. Why, if Oliver went out to men's dinners without me as Mr. Payson does (though she doesn't seem to mind it) I should just sit at home by myself and cry my eyes out. I think love, if it is love, ought to be all in all. I am perfectly sure that if I live to be a hundred I shall never want any society but Oliver's. He is the whole world to me, and when he is not here I spend my time, unless I am at work, just sitting and thinking about him. My one idea is to make him as happy as I can, and when a woman does this for a man I don't think she has time to run around by herself as Mrs. Payson does. Tell dearest father that I so often think of his sermons and the beautiful things he said about women. The rector here doesn't compare with him as a preacher. This is such a long letter it will take two stamps. I've just let myself run on without thinking what I was writing, so if I have made any mistakes in grammar or in spelling, please don't let father see them but read my letter aloud to him. I can shut my eyes and see you sitting at dinner, with Docia bringing in the plum pudding, and I know you will talk of me while you help to it. Write me who comes to dinner with you. I wonder if Miss Priscilla and John Henry are there as usual. Do you know whether John Henry ever goes to the Treadwell's or not? I wish you would ask him to take Susan to see his old mammy in Pink Alley. Now that I am not there to go to see her occasionally, I am afraid she will get lonesome. Good-bye, dearest mother. I will write to you before New Year. I am so busy that I don't have time to write every day, but you will understand and so will father. With my heart's fondest love to you both, Your VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 6, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: The little patterns were exactly what I wanted--thank you a thousand times. I knew you would be overjoyed at the news, and you are the only person I've breathed it to--except, of course, dear Oliver, who is frightened to death already. He has made me stop everything at once, and whenever he sees me lift my hand, he begins to get nervous and begs me not to do it. Oh, mother, he loves me so that it is really pathetic to see his anxiety. And--can you believe it--he doesn't appear to be the least bit glad about it. When I told him, he looked amazed--as if he had never thought of its happening--and said, "Oh, Virginia, not so soon!" He told me afterwards that, of course, he'd always thought we'd have children after a while, before we were middle-aged, but that he had wanted to stay like this for at least five or ten years. When the baby comes, he says he supposes he'll like it, but that he can't honestly say he is glad. It's funny how frightened he is, because I am not the least bit so. All women must expect to have children when they marry, and if God makes them suffer for it, it must be because it is best that they should. Perhaps they wouldn't love their babies so much if they got them easily. I never think of the pain a minute. It all seems so beautiful and sacred to me that I can't understand why Oliver isn't enraptured just as I am. To think of a new life starting into the world from me--a life that is half mine and half Oliver's, and one that would never be at all except for our love. The baby will seem from the very first minute to be our love made into flesh. I don't see how a woman who feels this could waste a thought on what she has to suffer. I am so glad you are going to send me a nurse from Dinwiddie, because I'm afraid I could never get one here that I could trust. The servant Oliver got me is no earthly account, and I still do as much of the cooking as I can. The house doesn't look nearly so nice as it used to, but the doctor tells me that I mustn't sweep, so I only do the light dusting. I sew almost all the time, and I've already finished the little slips. To-day I'm going to cut out the petticoats. I couldn't tell from the pattern you sent whether they fasten in front or in the back. There are no places for buttonholes. Do you use safety pins to fasten them with? The embroidery is perfectly lovely, and will make the sweetest trimming. I am using pink for the basket because Oliver and I both hope the baby will be a girl. If it is, I shall name her after you, of course, and I want her to be just exactly like you. Oliver says he can't understand why anybody ever wants a boy--girls are so much nicer. But then he insists that if she isn't born with blue eyes, he will send her to the orphanage. I am trying to do just as you tell me to, and to be as careful as I possibly can. The doctor thinks I've stayed indoors too much since I came here, so I go out for a little walk with Oliver every night. I am so afraid that somebody will see me that I really hate to go out at all, and always choose the darkest streets I can find. Last night I had a bad stumble, and Oliver says he doesn't care if the whole town discovers us, he's not going to take me down any more unlighted alleys. It has been terribly hot all day--not a breath of air stirring--and I never felt the heat so much in my life. The doctor says it's because of my condition--and last night, after Oliver went to sleep, I got up and sat by the window until daybreak. At first I was dreadfully frightened, and thought I was going to stifle--but poor Oliver had come home so tired that I made up my mind I wasn't going to wake him if I could possibly help it. This morning I didn't tell him a word about it, and he hasn't the least idea that I didn't sleep soundly all night. I suppose that's why I feel so dragged and worn out to-day, just as if somebody had given me a good beating. I was obliged to lie down most of the afternoon, but I am going to take a bath in a few minutes and try to make myself look nice and fresh before Oliver comes home. I have let out that flowered organdie--the one you liked so much--and I wear it almost every evening. I know I look dreadfully, but Oliver says I am more beautiful than ever. It seems to me sometimes that men are born blind where women are concerned, but perhaps God made it that way on purpose. Do you know Oliver really admires Mrs. Payson, and he thinks that red feather very becoming to her. He says she's much too good for her husband, but I have been obliged to disagree with him about that. Even if Mr. Payson does drink a little, I am sure it is only because he gets lonesome when he is left by himself, and that she could prevent it if she tried. Oliver and I never talk about these things because he sees that I feel so strongly about them. Oh, darling mother, I shall be so glad to see you! I hope and pray that father will be well enough for you to come a whole month ahead. In that case you will be here in less than two months, won't you? If the baby comes on the twelfth of August, she (I am perfectly sure it will be a girl) and father will have the same birthday. I am so anxious that she shall be born on that day. Well, I must stop now, though I could run on forever. I never see a living soul from one day to another--Mrs. Payson is out of town--so when Oliver stays late at the office, and I am too tired to work, I get a little--just a little bit lonesome. Mr. Payson sent me a pile of novels by Oliver the other night--but I haven't looked into them. I always feel that it is a waste of time to read when there are things about the house that ought to be done. I wish everything didn't cost so much here. Money doesn't go half as far as it does in Dinwiddie. The price of meat is almost three times as much as it is at home, and chickens are so expensive that we have them only twice a week. It is hard to housekeep on a small allowance, and now that we have to save for the baby's coming, I have to count every penny. I have bought a little book like yours, and I put down all that I spend during the day, and then add it up at night before going to bed. Oliver says I'm dreadfully frugal, but I am always so terribly afraid of running over my allowance (which is every cent that we can afford) and not having the money to pay the doctor's bills when they are due. Nobody could be more generous with money than Oliver is--I couldn't endure being married to a stingy man like Mr. Treadwell--and the other day when one of the men in the office died, he sent the most beautiful wreath that cost ten dollars. I am trying to save enough out of the housekeeping balance to pay for it, for Oliver always runs out of his pocket money before the middle of the month. I haven't bought anything for the baby because you sent me all the materials I needed, and I have been sewing on those ever since they came. Of course my own clothes are still as good as new, so the only expense will be the doctor and the nurse and the extra things I shall be obliged to have to eat when I am sick. Give dear father a dozen kisses from me, and tell him to hurry and get well so he can christen his granddaughter. Your devoted and ever grateful VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 11, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: Just a line to say that I am so, so sorry you can't come, but that you mustn't worry a minute, because everything is going beautifully, and I am not the least bit afraid. The doctor says he never saw any one in a better frame of mind or so little nervous. Give my dear love to father. I am so distressed that he should suffer as he does. Rheumatism must be such terrible pain, and I don't wonder that you are frightened lest it should go to his heart. I shall send you a telegram as soon as the baby comes. Your devoted daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 29, 1885. MY PRECIOUS MOTHER: This is the first time I have sat up in bed, and I am trying to write a little note to you on a pillow instead of a desk. My hand shakes so that I'm afraid you won't be able to read it, but I felt that I wanted to send you a few words of my very own, not dictated to the nurse or to Mrs. Payson. I can't tell you how perfectly lovely Mrs. Payson has been to me. She was here all that dreadful night, and I believe I should have died without her. The doctor said I had such a hard time because I'd let myself get run down and stayed indoors too much. But I'm getting all right now--and the rest is over and doesn't matter. As soon as I am strong again I shall be perfectly happy. Oh, mother, aren't you delighted that the baby is a girl, after all? It was the first question I asked when I came back to consciousness the next morning, and when they told me it was, I said, "Her name is Lucy Pendleton," and that was all. I was so weak they wouldn't let me open my lips again, and Oliver was kept out of the room for almost ten days because I would talk to him. Poor fellow, it almost killed him. He is as white as a sheet still, and looks as if he had been through tortures. It must have been terrible for him, because I was really very, very ill at one time. But it is all over now, and the baby is the sweetest thing you ever imagined. I believe she knows me already, and Mrs. Payson says she is exactly like me, though I can see the strongest resemblance to Oliver, even if she has blue eyes and he hasn't. Wasn't it lovely how everything came just as we wanted it to--a girl, born on father's birthday, with blue eyes, and named Lucy? But, mother, darling, the most wonderful thing of all was that you seemed to be with me all through it. The whole time I was unconscious I thought you were here, and the nurse tells me that I was calling "Mother! Mother!" all that night. Nothing ever made me feel as close to you as having a baby of my own. I never knew before what you were to me, and how dearly, dearly I love you. The nurse is taking the pencil away from me. Your loving VIRGINIA. Isn't it funny that Oliver won't take any interest in the baby at all? He says she caused more trouble than she is worth. Was father like that? * * * * * MATOACA CITY. April 3, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: My last letter was written an age ago, but I have been so busy since Marthy left that I've hardly had a moment in which to draw breath. It was a blow to me that she wouldn't stay for she was really an excellent nurse and the baby got on so well with her, but there aren't any coloured people of her kind here, and she got so homesick for Dinwiddie that I thought she would lose her mind if she stayed. You know how dependent they are upon company, and going out on Sunday afternoon and all that kind of thing, and there really wasn't any amusement for her except taking the baby out in the morning. She got so low spirited that it was almost a relief when she went, but of course I feel her loss dreadfully. I haven't let the baby out of my sight because I wouldn't trust Daisy with her for anything in the world. She is so terribly flighty. I have the crib brought into my room (though Oliver hates it) and I take entire charge of her night and day. I should love to do it if only Oliver didn't mind it so much. He says I think more of the baby now than I do of him. Isn't that absurd? But of course she does take every single minute of my time, and I can't dress myself for him every evening as carefully as I used to do and look after all the housekeeping arrangements. Daisy is a very poor cook and she simply throws the things on the table, but it seems to me that my first duty is to the baby, so I try to put up with the discomforts as well as I can. It is hard to eat what she cooks since everything tastes exactly alike, but I try to swallow as much as I can because the doctor says that if I don't keep up my strength I shall have to stop nursing the baby. Wouldn't that be dreadful? It almost breaks my heart to think of it, and I am sure we'd never get any artificial food to agree with her. She is perfectly well now, the sweetest, fattest thing you ever saw, and a real beauty, and she is so devoted to me that she cries whenever I go out of her sight. I am never tired of watching her, and even when she is asleep I sit sometimes for an hour by her crib just thinking how pretty she looks with her eyes closed and wishing you could see her. Oliver says I spoil her to death, but how can a baby of seven months be spoiled. He doesn't enjoy her half as much as I do, and sometimes I almost think that he gets impatient of seeing her always in my arms. At first he absolutely refused to have her crib brought into our room, but when I cried, he gave in and was very sweet about it. I feel so ashamed sometimes of the way the house looks, but there doesn't seem to be any help for it because the doctor says if I let myself get tired it will be bad for the baby. Of course I wouldn't put my own health before his comfort, but I am obliged to think first of the baby, am I not? Last night, for instance, the poor little thing was ill with colic and I was up and down with her until daybreak. Then this morning she woke early and I had to nurse her and give her her bath, and, added to everything else, Daisy's cousin died and she sent word she couldn't come. I slipped on a wrapper before taking a bath or fixing my hair and ran down to try and get Oliver's breakfast, but the baby began to cry and he came after me and said he wanted to make the coffee himself. Then he brought a cup upstairs to me, but I was so tired and nervous that I couldn't drink it. He didn't seem to understand why, feeling as badly as I did, I wouldn't just put the baby back into her crib and make her stay there until I got some rest, but the little thing was so wide awake that I hadn't the heart to do it. Besides, it is so important to keep regular hours with her, isn't it? I don't suppose a man ever realizes how a woman looks at these things, but you will understand, won't you, mother? I am all alone in the house to-night because a play is in town that Oliver wanted to see and I made him go to it. He wanted to ask Mrs. Midden to sit downstairs (she has offered over and over again to do it) so that I might go too, but of course I wouldn't let him. I really couldn't have enjoyed it a minute for thinking of the baby, and besides I never cared for the theatre. Then, too, he doesn't know (for I never tell him) how very tired I am by the time night comes. Sometimes when Oliver comes home and we sit in the dining-room (we never use the drawing-room, because it is across the hall and I'm afraid I shouldn't hear the baby cry) it is as much as I can do to keep my eyes open. I try not to let him notice it, but one night when he read me the first act of a play he is writing, I went to sleep, and though he didn't say anything, I could see that he was very much hurt. He worries a good deal about my health, too, and he even went out one day and engaged a nurse without saying anything to me about it. After I had talked to her though, I saw that she would never do, so I sent her away before he came home. I wish I could get really strong and feel well again, but the doctor insists I never will until I get out of doors and use my muscles. But you stay in the house all the time and so did grandmother, so I don't believe there's a word of truth in what he says. Anyway, I go out every day now with the baby. Thank you so much for the little bands. They are just what I wanted. With dearest love, Your devoted VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 10, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Daisy left a week ago and we couldn't find another servant until to-day. I must say that I prefer coloured servants. They are so much more dependable. I didn't know until the evening before Daisy left that she was going, and I had to send Oliver straight out to see if he could find somebody to come in and help me. There wasn't a soul to be had until to-day, however, so for a week I was obliged to make Oliver get his dinner at the boarding-house. It doesn't make any difference what I have because I haven't a particle of appetite, and I'd just as soon eat tea and toast as anything else. Of course, but for the baby I could have managed perfectly well--but she has been so fretful of late that she doesn't let me put her down a minute. The doctor says her teeth are beginning to hurt her, and that I must expect to have trouble the first summer. She has been so well until now that he thinks it has been really remarkable. He tells me he never knew a healthier baby, but of course I am terribly anxious about her teething in the hot weather. If she grows much more fretful I'm afraid I shall have to take her to the country for July and August. It seems dreadful to leave Oliver all alone, but I don't see how I can help it if the doctor advises me to go. Oliver has gone to some musical comedy at the Academy to-night, and I am so tired that I am going to bed just as soon as I finish this letter. I hope and pray that the baby will have a quiet night. Don't you think that Daisy treated me very badly considering how kind I had been to her? Only a week ago when she was taken with pain in the night, I got up and made her a mustard plaster and sat by her bed until she felt easier. The next day I did all of her work, and yet she has so little gratitude that she could leave me this way when she knows perfectly well that I am worried to death about the baby's first summer. I'd give anything if I could go home in July as you suggest, but it is such a long trip, and the heat will probably be quite as bad in Dinwiddie as here. Of course, it would make all the difference in the world to me to be where I could have you to advise me about the baby, and I'd go to-morrow if it only wasn't so far. Mrs. Midden has told me of a boarding-house in the country not more than twenty miles from here where Oliver could come down every evening, and we may decide to go there for a month or two. I can't help feeling very anxious, especially as Mrs. Scott's little boy--he is just the age of baby--was taken ill the other night, and they thought he would die before they could get a doctor. This letter is full of my worries, but in spite of them I am the happiest woman that ever lived. Oliver is the best thing to me you can imagine, and the baby is so fascinating that I enjoy every minute I am with her. It is the greatest fun to watch her in her bath. I know you would simply go into raptures over her--and she is so bright that she already understands every word that I say. She grows more like Oliver all the time, and the other day while I was watching her playing with her rubber doll, she looked so beautiful that it almost frightened me. I am so glad dear father is well, and what you wrote me about John Henry's admiration for Susan interested me so much that I sat straight down and wrote to him. Why do you think that it is only friendship and that he isn't in love with her? If he really thinks her the "finest girl in the world," I should imagine he was beginning to be pretty serious. I am delighted to hear that he is going to take her to the festival. Tell Susan from me that I shall never be satisfied until she is as happy as I am. Mr. Treadwell was right, I believe, not to let her go to college, though of course I want dear Susan to have whatever she sets her heart on. But, when all is said, you were wise in teaching me that nothing matters to a woman except love. More and more I am learning that if we only love unselfishly enough, everything else will work out for good to us. My little worries can't keep me from being so blissfully happy that I want to sing all the time. Work is a joy to me because I feel that I am doing it for Oliver and the baby. And with two such treasures to live for I should be the most ungrateful creature alive if I ever complained. Your ever loving daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY, July 1, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: We are leaving suddenly for the country, and I'll send our address just as soon as we get there. The doctor thinks I ought to take the baby away from town, so I am going to the boarding-house I wrote you about. Oliver will come down every evening--it's only an hour's trip. I am so tired from packing that I can't write any more. Lovingly, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. September 15, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Here we are back again in our home, and I was never so thankful in my life to get away from any place. I wrote you how dreadfully inconvenient it was, but it would take pages to tell you all of my experiences in the last few days. Such people you never saw in your life! And the food got so uneatable that I lived on crackers for the last fortnight. Fortunately, I was still nursing the baby, but the doctor has just told me that I must stop. I am so distressed about it. Do you think it will go hard with her after the first year? She is as fat and well as she can be now, but I live in hourly terror of her getting sick. If anything should happen

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you what I thought of her. I believe now that the whole trouble with her is simply that she isn't a Southern lady. She means well, I am sure, but she isn't what I should call exactly refined. There's something "horsey" about her--I can't think of any other way to express it--something that reminds me just a little bit of Abby--and, you remember, we always said Abby got that from being educated in the North. Tell dearest Susan I really think it is fortunate that she did not go to one of their colleges. Mrs. Payson is a college woman and it seems to me that she is always trying to appear as clever as a man. She talks in a way sometimes that sounds as if she believed in woman's rights and all that sort of thing. I told Oliver about it, and he laughed and said that men hated talk like that. He says all a man admires in a woman is her power of loving, and that when she begins to ape a man she loses her charm for him. I can't understand why Mr. Payson married his wife. He said such nice things to me the other day about my being so domestic and such a home lover, that I really felt sorry for him. When I told him that I was so fond of staying indoors that I would never cross my threshold if Oliver didn't make me, he laughed and said that he wished I'd convert his wife to my way of thinking. Yet he seems to have the greatest admiration for her, and, do you know, I believe he even admires that red feather, though he doesn't approve of it. He never turns his eyes away from her when they are together, which isn't very much, as she goes about just as she pleases without him. Can you understand how a person can both admire and disapprove of a thing? Oliver says he knows how it is, but I must say that I don't. I hope and pray that our marriage will always be different from theirs. Oliver and I are never apart for a single minute except when he is at work in the office. He hasn't written a line since we came here, but he is going to begin as soon as we get settled, and then he says that I may sit in the room and sew if I want to. I can't believe that people really love each other unless they want to be together every instant, no matter what they are doing. Why, if Oliver went out to men's dinners without me as Mr. Payson does (though she doesn't seem to mind it) I should just sit at home by myself and cry my eyes out. I think love, if it is love, ought to be all in all. I am perfectly sure that if I live to be a hundred I shall never want any society but Oliver's. He is the whole world to me, and when he is not here I spend my time, unless I am at work, just sitting and thinking about him. My one idea is to make him as happy as I can, and when a woman does this for a man I don't think she has time to run around by herself as Mrs. Payson does. Tell dearest father that I so often think of his sermons and the beautiful things he said about women. The rector here doesn't compare with him as a preacher. This is such a long letter it will take two stamps. I've just let myself run on without thinking what I was writing, so if I have made any mistakes in grammar or in spelling, please don't let father see them but read my letter aloud to him. I can shut my eyes and see you sitting at dinner, with Docia bringing in the plum pudding, and I know you will talk of me while you help to it. Write me who comes to dinner with you. I wonder if Miss Priscilla and John Henry are there as usual. Do you know whether John Henry ever goes to the Treadwell's or not? I wish you would ask him to take Susan to see his old mammy in Pink Alley. Now that I am not there to go to see her occasionally, I am afraid she will get lonesome. Good-bye, dearest mother. I will write to you before New Year. I am so busy that I don't have time to write every day, but you will understand and so will father. With my heart's fondest love to you both, Your VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 6, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: The little patterns were exactly what I wanted--thank you a thousand times. I knew you would be overjoyed at the news, and you are the only person I've breathed it to--except, of course, dear Oliver, who is frightened to death already. He has made me stop everything at once, and whenever he sees me lift my hand, he begins to get nervous and begs me not to do it. Oh, mother, he loves me so that it is really pathetic to see his anxiety. And--can you believe it--he doesn't appear to be the least bit glad about it. When I told him, he looked amazed--as if he had never thought of its happening--and said, "Oh, Virginia, not so soon!" He told me afterwards that, of course, he'd always thought we'd have children after a while, before we were middle-aged, but that he had wanted to stay like this for at least five or ten years. When the baby comes, he says he supposes he'll like it, but that he can't honestly say he is glad. It's funny how frightened he is, because I am not the least bit so. All women must expect to have children when they marry, and if God makes them suffer for it, it must be because it is best that they should. Perhaps they wouldn't love their babies so much if they got them easily. I never think of the pain a minute. It all seems so beautiful and sacred to me that I can't understand why Oliver isn't enraptured just as I am. To think of a new life starting into the world from me--a life that is half mine and half Oliver's, and one that would never be at all except for our love. The baby will seem from the very first minute to be our love made into flesh. I don't see how a woman who feels this could waste a thought on what she has to suffer. I am so glad you are going to send me a nurse from Dinwiddie, because I'm afraid I could never get one here that I could trust. The servant Oliver got me is no earthly account, and I still do as much of the cooking as I can. The house doesn't look nearly so nice as it used to, but the doctor tells me that I mustn't sweep, so I only do the light dusting. I sew almost all the time, and I've already finished the little slips. To-day I'm going to cut out the petticoats. I couldn't tell from the pattern you sent whether they fasten in front or in the back. There are no places for buttonholes. Do you use safety pins to fasten them with? The embroidery is perfectly lovely, and will make the sweetest trimming. I am using pink for the basket because Oliver and I both hope the baby will be a girl. If it is, I shall name her after you, of course, and I want her to be just exactly like you. Oliver says he can't understand why anybody ever wants a boy--girls are so much nicer. But then he insists that if she isn't born with blue eyes, he will send her to the orphanage. I am trying to do just as you tell me to, and to be as careful as I possibly can. The doctor thinks I've stayed indoors too much since I came here, so I go out for a little walk with Oliver every night. I am so afraid that somebody will see me that I really hate to go out at all, and always choose the darkest streets I can find. Last night I had a bad stumble, and Oliver says he doesn't care if the whole town discovers us, he's not going to take me down any more unlighted alleys. It has been terribly hot all day--not a breath of air stirring--and I never felt the heat so much in my life. The doctor says it's because of my condition--and last night, after Oliver went to sleep, I got up and sat by the window until daybreak. At first I was dreadfully frightened, and thought I was going to stifle--but poor Oliver had come home so tired that I made up my mind I wasn't going to wake him if I could possibly help it. This morning I didn't tell him a word about it, and he hasn't the least idea that I didn't sleep soundly all night. I suppose that's why I feel so dragged and worn out to-day, just as if somebody had given me a good beating. I was obliged to lie down most of the afternoon, but I am going to take a bath in a few minutes and try to make myself look nice and fresh before Oliver comes home. I have let out that flowered organdie--the one you liked so much--and I wear it almost every evening. I know I look dreadfully, but Oliver says I am more beautiful than ever. It seems to me sometimes that men are born blind where women are concerned, but perhaps God made it that way on purpose. Do you know Oliver really admires Mrs. Payson, and he thinks that red feather very becoming to her. He says she's much too good for her husband, but I have been obliged to disagree with him about that. Even if Mr. Payson does drink a little, I am sure it is only because he gets lonesome when he is left by himself, and that she could prevent it if she tried. Oliver and I never talk about these things because he sees that I feel so strongly about them. Oh, darling mother, I shall be so glad to see you! I hope and pray that father will be well enough for you to come a whole month ahead. In that case you will be here in less than two months, won't you? If the baby comes on the twelfth of August, she (I am perfectly sure it will be a girl) and father will have the same birthday. I am so anxious that she shall be born on that day. Well, I must stop now, though I could run on forever. I never see a living soul from one day to another--Mrs. Payson is out of town--so when Oliver stays late at the office, and I am too tired to work, I get a little--just a little bit lonesome. Mr. Payson sent me a pile of novels by Oliver the other night--but I haven't looked into them. I always feel that it is a waste of time to read when there are things about the house that ought to be done. I wish everything didn't cost so much here. Money doesn't go half as far as it does in Dinwiddie. The price of meat is almost three times as much as it is at home, and chickens are so expensive that we have them only twice a week. It is hard to housekeep on a small allowance, and now that we have to save for the baby's coming, I have to count every penny. I have bought a little book like yours, and I put down all that I spend during the day, and then add it up at night before going to bed. Oliver says I'm dreadfully frugal, but I am always so terribly afraid of running over my allowance (which is every cent that we can afford) and not having the money to pay the doctor's bills when they are due. Nobody could be more generous with money than Oliver is--I couldn't endure being married to a stingy man like Mr. Treadwell--and the other day when one of the men in the office died, he sent the most beautiful wreath that cost ten dollars. I am trying to save enough out of the housekeeping balance to pay for it, for Oliver always runs out of his pocket money before the middle of the month. I haven't bought anything for the baby because you sent me all the materials I needed, and I have been sewing on those ever since they came. Of course my own clothes are still as good as new, so the only expense will be the doctor and the nurse and the extra things I shall be obliged to have to eat when I am sick. Give dear father a dozen kisses from me, and tell him to hurry and get well so he can christen his granddaughter. Your devoted and ever grateful VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 11, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: Just a line to say that I am so, so sorry you can't come, but that you mustn't worry a minute, because everything is going beautifully, and I am not the least bit afraid. The doctor says he never saw any one in a better frame of mind or so little nervous. Give my dear love to father. I am so distressed that he should suffer as he does. Rheumatism must be such terrible pain, and I don't wonder that you are frightened lest it should go to his heart. I shall send you a telegram as soon as the baby comes. Your devoted daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 29, 1885. MY PRECIOUS MOTHER: This is the first time I have sat up in bed, and I am trying to write a little note to you on a pillow instead of a desk. My hand shakes so that I'm afraid you won't be able to read it, but I felt that I wanted to send you a few words of my very own, not dictated to the nurse or to Mrs. Payson. I can't tell you how perfectly lovely Mrs. Payson has been to me. She was here all that dreadful night, and I believe I should have died without her. The doctor said I had such a hard time because I'd let myself get run down and stayed indoors too much. But I'm getting all right now--and the rest is over and doesn't matter. As soon as I am strong again I shall be perfectly happy. Oh, mother, aren't you delighted that the baby is a girl, after all? It was the first question I asked when I came back to consciousness the next morning, and when they told me it was, I said, "Her name is Lucy Pendleton," and that was all. I was so weak they wouldn't let me open my lips again, and Oliver was kept out of the room for almost ten days because I would talk to him. Poor fellow, it almost killed him. He is as white as a sheet still, and looks as if he had been through tortures. It must have been terrible for him, because I was really very, very ill at one time. But it is all over now, and the baby is the sweetest thing you ever imagined. I believe she knows me already, and Mrs. Payson says she is exactly like me, though I can see the strongest resemblance to Oliver, even if she has blue eyes and he hasn't. Wasn't it lovely how everything came just as we wanted it to--a girl, born on father's birthday, with blue eyes, and named Lucy? But, mother, darling, the most wonderful thing of all was that you seemed to be with me all through it. The whole time I was unconscious I thought you were here, and the nurse tells me that I was calling "Mother! Mother!" all that night. Nothing ever made me feel as close to you as having a baby of my own. I never knew before what you were to me, and how dearly, dearly I love you. The nurse is taking the pencil away from me. Your loving VIRGINIA. Isn't it funny that Oliver won't take any interest in the baby at all? He says she caused more trouble than she is worth. Was father like that? * * * * * MATOACA CITY. April 3, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: My last letter was written an age ago, but I have been so busy since Marthy left that I've hardly had a moment in which to draw breath. It was a blow to me that she wouldn't stay for she was really an excellent nurse and the baby got on so well with her, but there aren't any coloured people of her kind here, and she got so homesick for Dinwiddie that I thought she would lose her mind if she stayed. You know how dependent they are upon company, and going out on Sunday afternoon and all that kind of thing, and there really wasn't any amusement for her except taking the baby out in the morning. She got so low spirited that it was almost a relief when she went, but of course I feel her loss dreadfully. I haven't let the baby out of my sight because I wouldn't trust Daisy with her for anything in the world. She is so terribly flighty. I have the crib brought into my room (though Oliver hates it) and I take entire charge of her night and day. I should love to do it if only Oliver didn't mind it so much. He says I think more of the baby now than I do of him. Isn't that absurd? But of course she does take every single minute of my time, and I can't dress myself for him every evening as carefully as I used to do and look after all the housekeeping arrangements. Daisy is a very poor cook and she simply throws the things on the table, but it seems to me that my first duty is to the baby, so I try to put up with the discomforts as well as I can. It is hard to eat what she cooks since everything tastes exactly alike, but I try to swallow as much as I can because the doctor says that if I don't keep up my strength I shall have to stop nursing the baby. Wouldn't that be dreadful? It almost breaks my heart to think of it, and I am sure we'd never get any artificial food to agree with her. She is perfectly well now, the sweetest, fattest thing you ever saw, and a real beauty, and she is so devoted to me that she cries whenever I go out of her sight. I am never tired of watching her, and even when she is asleep I sit sometimes for an hour by her crib just thinking how pretty she looks with her eyes closed and wishing you could see her. Oliver says I spoil her to death, but how can a baby of seven months be spoiled. He doesn't enjoy her half as much as I do, and sometimes I almost think that he gets impatient of seeing her always in my arms. At first he absolutely refused to have her crib brought into our room, but when I cried, he gave in and was very sweet about it. I feel so ashamed sometimes of the way the house looks, but there doesn't seem to be any help for it because the doctor says if I let myself get tired it will be bad for the baby. Of course I wouldn't put my own health before his comfort, but I am obliged to think first of the baby, am I not? Last night, for instance, the poor little thing was ill with colic and I was up and down with her until daybreak. Then this morning she woke early and I had to nurse her and give her her bath, and, added to everything else, Daisy's cousin died and she sent word she couldn't come. I slipped on a wrapper before taking a bath or fixing my hair and ran down to try and get Oliver's breakfast, but the baby began to cry and he came after me and said he wanted to make the coffee himself. Then he brought a cup upstairs to me, but I was so tired and nervous that I couldn't drink it. He didn't seem to understand why, feeling as badly as I did, I wouldn't just put the baby back into her crib and make her stay there until I got some rest, but the little thing was so wide awake that I hadn't the heart to do it. Besides, it is so important to keep regular hours with her, isn't it? I don't suppose a man ever realizes how a woman looks at these things, but you will understand, won't you, mother? I am all alone in the house to-night because a play is in town that Oliver wanted to see and I made him go to it. He wanted to ask Mrs. Midden to sit downstairs (she has offered over and over again to do it) so that I might go too, but of course I wouldn't let him. I really couldn't have enjoyed it a minute for thinking of the baby, and besides I never cared for the theatre. Then, too, he doesn't know (for I never tell him) how very tired I am by the time night comes. Sometimes when Oliver comes home and we sit in the dining-room (we never use the drawing-room, because it is across the hall and I'm afraid I shouldn't hear the baby cry) it is as much as I can do to keep my eyes open. I try not to let him notice it, but one night when he read me the first act of a play he is writing, I went to sleep, and though he didn't say anything, I could see that he was very much hurt. He worries a good deal about my health, too, and he even went out one day and engaged a nurse without saying anything to me about it. After I had talked to her though, I saw that she would never do, so I sent her away before he came home. I wish I could get really strong and feel well again, but the doctor insists I never will until I get out of doors and use my muscles. But you stay in the house all the time and so did grandmother, so I don't believe there's a word of truth in what he says. Anyway, I go out every day now with the baby. Thank you so much for the little bands. They are just what I wanted. With dearest love, Your devoted VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 10, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Daisy left a week ago and we couldn't find another servant until to-day. I must say that I prefer coloured servants. They are so much more dependable. I didn't know until the evening before Daisy left that she was going, and I had to send Oliver straight out to see if he could find somebody to come in and help me. There wasn't a soul to be had until to-day, however, so for a week I was obliged to make Oliver get his dinner at the boarding-house. It doesn't make any difference what I have because I haven't a particle of appetite, and I'd just as soon eat tea and toast as anything else. Of course, but for the baby I could have managed perfectly well--but she has been so fretful of late that she doesn't let me put her down a minute. The doctor says her teeth are beginning to hurt her, and that I must expect to have trouble the first summer. She has been so well until now that he thinks it has been really remarkable. He tells me he never knew a healthier baby, but of course I am terribly anxious about her teething in the hot weather. If she grows much more fretful I'm afraid I shall have to take her to the country for July and August. It seems dreadful to leave Oliver all alone, but I don't see how I can help it if the doctor advises me to go. Oliver has gone to some musical comedy at the Academy to-night, and I am so tired that I am going to bed just as soon as I finish this letter. I hope and pray that the baby will have a quiet night. Don't you think that Daisy treated me very badly considering how kind I had been to her? Only a week ago when she was taken with pain in the night, I got up and made her a mustard plaster and sat by her bed until she felt easier. The next day I did all of her work, and yet she has so little gratitude that she could leave me this way when she knows perfectly well that I am worried to death about the baby's first summer. I'd give anything if I could go home in July as you suggest, but it is such a long trip, and the heat will probably be quite as bad in Dinwiddie as here. Of course, it would make all the difference in the world to me to be where I could have you to advise me about the baby, and I'd go to-morrow if it only wasn't so far. Mrs. Midden has told me of a boarding-house in the country not more than twenty miles from here where Oliver could come down every evening, and we may decide to go there for a month or two. I can't help feeling very anxious, especially as Mrs. Scott's little boy--he is just the age of baby--was taken ill the other night, and they thought he would die before they could get a doctor. This letter is full of my worries, but in spite of them I am the happiest woman that ever lived. Oliver is the best thing to me you can imagine, and the baby is so fascinating that I enjoy every minute I am with her. It is the greatest fun to watch her in her bath. I know you would simply go into raptures over her--and she is so bright that she already understands every word that I say. She grows more like Oliver all the time, and the other day while I was watching her playing with her rubber doll, she looked so beautiful that it almost frightened me. I am so glad dear father is well, and what you wrote me about John Henry's admiration for Susan interested me so much that I sat straight down and wrote to him. Why do you think that it is only friendship and that he isn't in love with her? If he really thinks her the "finest girl in the world," I should imagine he was beginning to be pretty serious. I am delighted to hear that he is going to take her to the festival. Tell Susan from me that I shall never be satisfied until she is as happy as I am. Mr. Treadwell was right, I believe, not to let her go to college, though of course I want dear Susan to have whatever she sets her heart on. But, when all is said, you were wise in teaching me that nothing matters to a woman except love. More and more I am learning that if we only love unselfishly enough, everything else will work out for good to us. My little worries can't keep me from being so blissfully happy that I want to sing all the time. Work is a joy to me because I feel that I am doing it for Oliver and the baby. And with two such treasures to live for I should be the most ungrateful creature alive if I ever complained. Your ever loving daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY, July 1, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: We are leaving suddenly for the country, and I'll send our address just as soon as we get there. The doctor thinks I ought to take the baby away from town, so I am going to the boarding-house I wrote you about. Oliver will come down every evening--it's only an hour's trip. I am so tired from packing that I can't write any more. Lovingly, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. September 15, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Here we are back again in our home, and I was never so thankful in my life to get away from any place. I wrote you how dreadfully inconvenient it was, but it would take pages to tell you all of my experiences in the last few days. Such people you never saw in your life! And the food got so uneatable that I lived on crackers for the last fortnight. Fortunately, I was still nursing the baby, but the doctor has just told me that I must stop. I am so distressed about it. Do you think it will go hard with her after the first year? She is as fat and well as she can be now, but I live in hourly terror of her getting sick. If anything should happen

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you what I thought of her. I believe now that the whole trouble with her is simply that she isn't a Southern lady. She means well, I am sure, but she isn't what I should call exactly refined. There's something "horsey" about her--I can't think of any other way to express it--something that reminds me just a little bit of Abby--and, you remember, we always said Abby got that from being educated in the North. Tell dearest Susan I really think it is fortunate that she did not go to one of their colleges. Mrs. Payson is a college woman and it seems to me that she is always trying to appear as clever as a man. She talks in a way sometimes that sounds as if she believed in woman's rights and all that sort of thing. I told Oliver about it, and he laughed and said that men hated talk like that. He says all a man admires in a woman is her power of loving, and that when she begins to ape a man she loses her charm for him. I can't understand why Mr. Payson married his wife. He said such nice things to me the other day about my being so domestic and such a home lover, that I really felt sorry for him. When I told him that I was so fond of staying indoors that I would never cross my threshold if Oliver didn't make me, he laughed and said that he wished I'd convert his wife to my way of thinking. Yet he seems to have the greatest admiration for her, and, do you know, I believe he even admires that red feather, though he doesn't approve of it. He never turns his eyes away from her when they are together, which isn't very much, as she goes about just as she pleases without him. Can you understand how a person can both admire and disapprove of a thing? Oliver says he knows how it is, but I must say that I don't. I hope and pray that our marriage will always be different from theirs. Oliver and I are never apart for a single minute except when he is at work in the office. He hasn't written a line since we came here, but he is going to begin as soon as we get settled, and then he says that I may sit in the room and sew if I want to. I can't believe that people really love each other unless they want to be together every instant, no matter what they are doing. Why, if Oliver went out to men's dinners without me as Mr. Payson does (though she doesn't seem to mind it) I should just sit at home by myself and cry my eyes out. I think love, if it is love, ought to be all in all. I am perfectly sure that if I live to be a hundred I shall never want any society but Oliver's. He is the whole world to me, and when he is not here I spend my time, unless I am at work, just sitting and thinking about him. My one idea is to make him as happy as I can, and when a woman does this for a man I don't think she has time to run around by herself as Mrs. Payson does. Tell dearest father that I so often think of his sermons and the beautiful things he said about women. The rector here doesn't compare with him as a preacher. This is such a long letter it will take two stamps. I've just let myself run on without thinking what I was writing, so if I have made any mistakes in grammar or in spelling, please don't let father see them but read my letter aloud to him. I can shut my eyes and see you sitting at dinner, with Docia bringing in the plum pudding, and I know you will talk of me while you help to it. Write me who comes to dinner with you. I wonder if Miss Priscilla and John Henry are there as usual. Do you know whether John Henry ever goes to the Treadwell's or not? I wish you would ask him to take Susan to see his old mammy in Pink Alley. Now that I am not there to go to see her occasionally, I am afraid she will get lonesome. Good-bye, dearest mother. I will write to you before New Year. I am so busy that I don't have time to write every day, but you will understand and so will father. With my heart's fondest love to you both, Your VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 6, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: The little patterns were exactly what I wanted--thank you a thousand times. I knew you would be overjoyed at the news, and you are the only person I've breathed it to--except, of course, dear Oliver, who is frightened to death already. He has made me stop everything at once, and whenever he sees me lift my hand, he begins to get nervous and begs me not to do it. Oh, mother, he loves me so that it is really pathetic to see his anxiety. And--can you believe it--he doesn't appear to be the least bit glad about it. When I told him, he looked amazed--as if he had never thought of its happening--and said, "Oh, Virginia, not so soon!" He told me afterwards that, of course, he'd always thought we'd have children after a while, before we were middle-aged, but that he had wanted to stay like this for at least five or ten years. When the baby comes, he says he supposes he'll like it, but that he can't honestly say he is glad. It's funny how frightened he is, because I am not the least bit so. All women must expect to have children when they marry, and if God makes them suffer for it, it must be because it is best that they should. Perhaps they wouldn't love their babies so much if they got them easily. I never think of the pain a minute. It all seems so beautiful and sacred to me that I can't understand why Oliver isn't enraptured just as I am. To think of a new life starting into the world from me--a life that is half mine and half Oliver's, and one that would never be at all except for our love. The baby will seem from the very first minute to be our love made into flesh. I don't see how a woman who feels this could waste a thought on what she has to suffer. I am so glad you are going to send me a nurse from Dinwiddie, because I'm afraid I could never get one here that I could trust. The servant Oliver got me is no earthly account, and I still do as much of the cooking as I can. The house doesn't look nearly so nice as it used to, but the doctor tells me that I mustn't sweep, so I only do the light dusting. I sew almost all the time, and I've already finished the little slips. To-day I'm going to cut out the petticoats. I couldn't tell from the pattern you sent whether they fasten in front or in the back. There are no places for buttonholes. Do you use safety pins to fasten them with? The embroidery is perfectly lovely, and will make the sweetest trimming. I am using pink for the basket because Oliver and I both hope the baby will be a girl. If it is, I shall name her after you, of course, and I want her to be just exactly like you. Oliver says he can't understand why anybody ever wants a boy--girls are so much nicer. But then he insists that if she isn't born with blue eyes, he will send her to the orphanage. I am trying to do just as you tell me to, and to be as careful as I possibly can. The doctor thinks I've stayed indoors too much since I came here, so I go out for a little walk with Oliver every night. I am so afraid that somebody will see me that I really hate to go out at all, and always choose the darkest streets I can find. Last night I had a bad stumble, and Oliver says he doesn't care if the whole town discovers us, he's not going to take me down any more unlighted alleys. It has been terribly hot all day--not a breath of air stirring--and I never felt the heat so much in my life. The doctor says it's because of my condition--and last night, after Oliver went to sleep, I got up and sat by the window until daybreak. At first I was dreadfully frightened, and thought I was going to stifle--but poor Oliver had come home so tired that I made up my mind I wasn't going to wake him if I could possibly help it. This morning I didn't tell him a word about it, and he hasn't the least idea that I didn't sleep soundly all night. I suppose that's why I feel so dragged and worn out to-day, just as if somebody had given me a good beating. I was obliged to lie down most of the afternoon, but I am going to take a bath in a few minutes and try to make myself look nice and fresh before Oliver comes home. I have let out that flowered organdie--the one you liked so much--and I wear it almost every evening. I know I look dreadfully, but Oliver says I am more beautiful than ever. It seems to me sometimes that men are born blind where women are concerned, but perhaps God made it that way on purpose. Do you know Oliver really admires Mrs. Payson, and he thinks that red feather very becoming to her. He says she's much too good for her husband, but I have been obliged to disagree with him about that. Even if Mr. Payson does drink a little, I am sure it is only because he gets lonesome when he is left by himself, and that she could prevent it if she tried. Oliver and I never talk about these things because he sees that I feel so strongly about them. Oh, darling mother, I shall be so glad to see you! I hope and pray that father will be well enough for you to come a whole month ahead. In that case you will be here in less than two months, won't you? If the baby comes on the twelfth of August, she (I am perfectly sure it will be a girl) and father will have the same birthday. I am so anxious that she shall be born on that day. Well, I must stop now, though I could run on forever. I never see a living soul from one day to another--Mrs. Payson is out of town--so when Oliver stays late at the office, and I am too tired to work, I get a little--just a little bit lonesome. Mr. Payson sent me a pile of novels by Oliver the other night--but I haven't looked into them. I always feel that it is a waste of time to read when there are things about the house that ought to be done. I wish everything didn't cost so much here. Money doesn't go half as far as it does in Dinwiddie. The price of meat is almost three times as much as it is at home, and chickens are so expensive that we have them only twice a week. It is hard to housekeep on a small allowance, and now that we have to save for the baby's coming, I have to count every penny. I have bought a little book like yours, and I put down all that I spend during the day, and then add it up at night before going to bed. Oliver says I'm dreadfully frugal, but I am always so terribly afraid of running over my allowance (which is every cent that we can afford) and not having the money to pay the doctor's bills when they are due. Nobody could be more generous with money than Oliver is--I couldn't endure being married to a stingy man like Mr. Treadwell--and the other day when one of the men in the office died, he sent the most beautiful wreath that cost ten dollars. I am trying to save enough out of the housekeeping balance to pay for it, for Oliver always runs out of his pocket money before the middle of the month. I haven't bought anything for the baby because you sent me all the materials I needed, and I have been sewing on those ever since they came. Of course my own clothes are still as good as new, so the only expense will be the doctor and the nurse and the extra things I shall be obliged to have to eat when I am sick. Give dear father a dozen kisses from me, and tell him to hurry and get well so he can christen his granddaughter. Your devoted and ever grateful VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 11, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: Just a line to say that I am so, so sorry you can't come, but that you mustn't worry a minute, because everything is going beautifully, and I am not the least bit afraid. The doctor says he never saw any one in a better frame of mind or so little nervous. Give my dear love to father. I am so distressed that he should suffer as he does. Rheumatism must be such terrible pain, and I don't wonder that you are frightened lest it should go to his heart. I shall send you a telegram as soon as the baby comes. Your devoted daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 29, 1885. MY PRECIOUS MOTHER: This is the first time I have sat up in bed, and I am trying to write a little note to you on a pillow instead of a desk. My hand shakes so that I'm afraid you won't be able to read it, but I felt that I wanted to send you a few words of my very own, not dictated to the nurse or to Mrs. Payson. I can't tell you how perfectly lovely Mrs. Payson has been to me. She was here all that dreadful night, and I believe I should have died without her. The doctor said I had such a hard time because I'd let myself get run down and stayed indoors too much. But I'm getting all right now--and the rest is over and doesn't matter. As soon as I am strong again I shall be perfectly happy. Oh, mother, aren't you delighted that the baby is a girl, after all? It was the first question I asked when I came back to consciousness the next morning, and when they told me it was, I said, "Her name is Lucy Pendleton," and that was all. I was so weak they wouldn't let me open my lips again, and Oliver was kept out of the room for almost ten days because I would talk to him. Poor fellow, it almost killed him. He is as white as a sheet still, and looks as if he had been through tortures. It must have been terrible for him, because I was really very, very ill at one time. But it is all over now, and the baby is the sweetest thing you ever imagined. I believe she knows me already, and Mrs. Payson says she is exactly like me, though I can see the strongest resemblance to Oliver, even if she has blue eyes and he hasn't. Wasn't it lovely how everything came just as we wanted it to--a girl, born on father's birthday, with blue eyes, and named Lucy? But, mother, darling, the most wonderful thing of all was that you seemed to be with me all through it. The whole time I was unconscious I thought you were here, and the nurse tells me that I was calling "Mother! Mother!" all that night. Nothing ever made me feel as close to you as having a baby of my own. I never knew before what you were to me, and how dearly, dearly I love you. The nurse is taking the pencil away from me. Your loving VIRGINIA. Isn't it funny that Oliver won't take any interest in the baby at all? He says she caused more trouble than she is worth. Was father like that? * * * * * MATOACA CITY. April 3, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: My last letter was written an age ago, but I have been so busy since Marthy left that I've hardly had a moment in which to draw breath. It was a blow to me that she wouldn't stay for she was really an excellent nurse and the baby got on so well with her, but there aren't any coloured people of her kind here, and she got so homesick for Dinwiddie that I thought she would lose her mind if she stayed. You know how dependent they are upon company, and going out on Sunday afternoon and all that kind of thing, and there really wasn't any amusement for her except taking the baby out in the morning. She got so low spirited that it was almost a relief when she went, but of course I feel her loss dreadfully. I haven't let the baby out of my sight because I wouldn't trust Daisy with her for anything in the world. She is so terribly flighty. I have the crib brought into my room (though Oliver hates it) and I take entire charge of her night and day. I should love to do it if only Oliver didn't mind it so much. He says I think more of the baby now than I do of him. Isn't that absurd? But of course she does take every single minute of my time, and I can't dress myself for him every evening as carefully as I used to do and look after all the housekeeping arrangements. Daisy is a very poor cook and she simply throws the things on the table, but it seems to me that my first duty is to the baby, so I try to put up with the discomforts as well as I can. It is hard to eat what she cooks since everything tastes exactly alike, but I try to swallow as much as I can because the doctor says that if I don't keep up my strength I shall have to stop nursing the baby. Wouldn't that be dreadful? It almost breaks my heart to think of it, and I am sure we'd never get any artificial food to agree with her. She is perfectly well now, the sweetest, fattest thing you ever saw, and a real beauty, and she is so devoted to me that she cries whenever I go out of her sight. I am never tired of watching her, and even when she is asleep I sit sometimes for an hour by her crib just thinking how pretty she looks with her eyes closed and wishing you could see her. Oliver says I spoil her to death, but how can a baby of seven months be spoiled. He doesn't enjoy her half as much as I do, and sometimes I almost think that he gets impatient of seeing her always in my arms. At first he absolutely refused to have her crib brought into our room, but when I cried, he gave in and was very sweet about it. I feel so ashamed sometimes of the way the house looks, but there doesn't seem to be any help for it because the doctor says if I let myself get tired it will be bad for the baby. Of course I wouldn't put my own health before his comfort, but I am obliged to think first of the baby, am I not? Last night, for instance, the poor little thing was ill with colic and I was up and down with her until daybreak. Then this morning she woke early and I had to nurse her and give her her bath, and, added to everything else, Daisy's cousin died and she sent word she couldn't come. I slipped on a wrapper before taking a bath or fixing my hair and ran down to try and get Oliver's breakfast, but the baby began to cry and he came after me and said he wanted to make the coffee himself. Then he brought a cup upstairs to me, but I was so tired and nervous that I couldn't drink it. He didn't seem to understand why, feeling as badly as I did, I wouldn't just put the baby back into her crib and make her stay there until I got some rest, but the little thing was so wide awake that I hadn't the heart to do it. Besides, it is so important to keep regular hours with her, isn't it? I don't suppose a man ever realizes how a woman looks at these things, but you will understand, won't you, mother? I am all alone in the house to-night because a play is in town that Oliver wanted to see and I made him go to it. He wanted to ask Mrs. Midden to sit downstairs (she has offered over and over again to do it) so that I might go too, but of course I wouldn't let him. I really couldn't have enjoyed it a minute for thinking of the baby, and besides I never cared for the theatre. Then, too, he doesn't know (for I never tell him) how very tired I am by the time night comes. Sometimes when Oliver comes home and we sit in the dining-room (we never use the drawing-room, because it is across the hall and I'm afraid I shouldn't hear the baby cry) it is as much as I can do to keep my eyes open. I try not to let him notice it, but one night when he read me the first act of a play he is writing, I went to sleep, and though he didn't say anything, I could see that he was very much hurt. He worries a good deal about my health, too, and he even went out one day and engaged a nurse without saying anything to me about it. After I had talked to her though, I saw that she would never do, so I sent her away before he came home. I wish I could get really strong and feel well again, but the doctor insists I never will until I get out of doors and use my muscles. But you stay in the house all the time and so did grandmother, so I don't believe there's a word of truth in what he says. Anyway, I go out every day now with the baby. Thank you so much for the little bands. They are just what I wanted. With dearest love, Your devoted VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 10, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Daisy left a week ago and we couldn't find another servant until to-day. I must say that I prefer coloured servants. They are so much more dependable. I didn't know until the evening before Daisy left that she was going, and I had to send Oliver straight out to see if he could find somebody to come in and help me. There wasn't a soul to be had until to-day, however, so for a week I was obliged to make Oliver get his dinner at the boarding-house. It doesn't make any difference what I have because I haven't a particle of appetite, and I'd just as soon eat tea and toast as anything else. Of course, but for the baby I could have managed perfectly well--but she has been so fretful of late that she doesn't let me put her down a minute. The doctor says her teeth are beginning to hurt her, and that I must expect to have trouble the first summer. She has been so well until now that he thinks it has been really remarkable. He tells me he never knew a healthier baby, but of course I am terribly anxious about her teething in the hot weather. If she grows much more fretful I'm afraid I shall have to take her to the country for July and August. It seems dreadful to leave Oliver all alone, but I don't see how I can help it if the doctor advises me to go. Oliver has gone to some musical comedy at the Academy to-night, and I am so tired that I am going to bed just as soon as I finish this letter. I hope and pray that the baby will have a quiet night. Don't you think that Daisy treated me very badly considering how kind I had been to her? Only a week ago when she was taken with pain in the night, I got up and made her a mustard plaster and sat by her bed until she felt easier. The next day I did all of her work, and yet she has so little gratitude that she could leave me this way when she knows perfectly well that I am worried to death about the baby's first summer. I'd give anything if I could go home in July as you suggest, but it is such a long trip, and the heat will probably be quite as bad in Dinwiddie as here. Of course, it would make all the difference in the world to me to be where I could have you to advise me about the baby, and I'd go to-morrow if it only wasn't so far. Mrs. Midden has told me of a boarding-house in the country not more than twenty miles from here where Oliver could come down every evening, and we may decide to go there for a month or two. I can't help feeling very anxious, especially as Mrs. Scott's little boy--he is just the age of baby--was taken ill the other night, and they thought he would die before they could get a doctor. This letter is full of my worries, but in spite of them I am the happiest woman that ever lived. Oliver is the best thing to me you can imagine, and the baby is so fascinating that I enjoy every minute I am with her. It is the greatest fun to watch her in her bath. I know you would simply go into raptures over her--and she is so bright that she already understands every word that I say. She grows more like Oliver all the time, and the other day while I was watching her playing with her rubber doll, she looked so beautiful that it almost frightened me. I am so glad dear father is well, and what you wrote me about John Henry's admiration for Susan interested me so much that I sat straight down and wrote to him. Why do you think that it is only friendship and that he isn't in love with her? If he really thinks her the "finest girl in the world," I should imagine he was beginning to be pretty serious. I am delighted to hear that he is going to take her to the festival. Tell Susan from me that I shall never be satisfied until she is as happy as I am. Mr. Treadwell was right, I believe, not to let her go to college, though of course I want dear Susan to have whatever she sets her heart on. But, when all is said, you were wise in teaching me that nothing matters to a woman except love. More and more I am learning that if we only love unselfishly enough, everything else will work out for good to us. My little worries can't keep me from being so blissfully happy that I want to sing all the time. Work is a joy to me because I feel that I am doing it for Oliver and the baby. And with two such treasures to live for I should be the most ungrateful creature alive if I ever complained. Your ever loving daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY, July 1, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: We are leaving suddenly for the country, and I'll send our address just as soon as we get there. The doctor thinks I ought to take the baby away from town, so I am going to the boarding-house I wrote you about. Oliver will come down every evening--it's only an hour's trip. I am so tired from packing that I can't write any more. Lovingly, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. September 15, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Here we are back again in our home, and I was never so thankful in my life to get away from any place. I wrote you how dreadfully inconvenient it was, but it would take pages to tell you all of my experiences in the last few days. Such people you never saw in your life! And the food got so uneatable that I lived on crackers for the last fortnight. Fortunately, I was still nursing the baby, but the doctor has just told me that I must stop. I am so distressed about it. Do you think it will go hard with her after the first year? She is as fat and well as she can be now, but I live in hourly terror of her getting sick. If anything should happen

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you what I thought of her. I believe now that the whole trouble with her is simply that she isn't a Southern lady. She means well, I am sure, but she isn't what I should call exactly refined. There's something "horsey" about her--I can't think of any other way to express it--something that reminds me just a little bit of Abby--and, you remember, we always said Abby got that from being educated in the North. Tell dearest Susan I really think it is fortunate that she did not go to one of their colleges. Mrs. Payson is a college woman and it seems to me that she is always trying to appear as clever as a man. She talks in a way sometimes that sounds as if she believed in woman's rights and all that sort of thing. I told Oliver about it, and he laughed and said that men hated talk like that. He says all a man admires in a woman is her power of loving, and that when she begins to ape a man she loses her charm for him. I can't understand why Mr. Payson married his wife. He said such nice things to me the other day about my being so domestic and such a home lover, that I really felt sorry for him. When I told him that I was so fond of staying indoors that I would never cross my threshold if Oliver didn't make me, he laughed and said that he wished I'd convert his wife to my way of thinking. Yet he seems to have the greatest admiration for her, and, do you know, I believe he even admires that red feather, though he doesn't approve of it. He never turns his eyes away from her when they are together, which isn't very much, as she goes about just as she pleases without him. Can you understand how a person can both admire and disapprove of a thing? Oliver says he knows how it is, but I must say that I don't. I hope and pray that our marriage will always be different from theirs. Oliver and I are never apart for a single minute except when he is at work in the office. He hasn't written a line since we came here, but he is going to begin as soon as we get settled, and then he says that I may sit in the room and sew if I want to. I can't believe that people really love each other unless they want to be together every instant, no matter what they are doing. Why, if Oliver went out to men's dinners without me as Mr. Payson does (though she doesn't seem to mind it) I should just sit at home by myself and cry my eyes out. I think love, if it is love, ought to be all in all. I am perfectly sure that if I live to be a hundred I shall never want any society but Oliver's. He is the whole world to me, and when he is not here I spend my time, unless I am at work, just sitting and thinking about him. My one idea is to make him as happy as I can, and when a woman does this for a man I don't think she has time to run around by herself as Mrs. Payson does. Tell dearest father that I so often think of his sermons and the beautiful things he said about women. The rector here doesn't compare with him as a preacher. This is such a long letter it will take two stamps. I've just let myself run on without thinking what I was writing, so if I have made any mistakes in grammar or in spelling, please don't let father see them but read my letter aloud to him. I can shut my eyes and see you sitting at dinner, with Docia bringing in the plum pudding, and I know you will talk of me while you help to it. Write me who comes to dinner with you. I wonder if Miss Priscilla and John Henry are there as usual. Do you know whether John Henry ever goes to the Treadwell's or not? I wish you would ask him to take Susan to see his old mammy in Pink Alley. Now that I am not there to go to see her occasionally, I am afraid she will get lonesome. Good-bye, dearest mother. I will write to you before New Year. I am so busy that I don't have time to write every day, but you will understand and so will father. With my heart's fondest love to you both, Your VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 6, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: The little patterns were exactly what I wanted--thank you a thousand times. I knew you would be overjoyed at the news, and you are the only person I've breathed it to--except, of course, dear Oliver, who is frightened to death already. He has made me stop everything at once, and whenever he sees me lift my hand, he begins to get nervous and begs me not to do it. Oh, mother, he loves me so that it is really pathetic to see his anxiety. And--can you believe it--he doesn't appear to be the least bit glad about it. When I told him, he looked amazed--as if he had never thought of its happening--and said, "Oh, Virginia, not so soon!" He told me afterwards that, of course, he'd always thought we'd have children after a while, before we were middle-aged, but that he had wanted to stay like this for at least five or ten years. When the baby comes, he says he supposes he'll like it, but that he can't honestly say he is glad. It's funny how frightened he is, because I am not the least bit so. All women must expect to have children when they marry, and if God makes them suffer for it, it must be because it is best that they should. Perhaps they wouldn't love their babies so much if they got them easily. I never think of the pain a minute. It all seems so beautiful and sacred to me that I can't understand why Oliver isn't enraptured just as I am. To think of a new life starting into the world from me--a life that is half mine and half Oliver's, and one that would never be at all except for our love. The baby will seem from the very first minute to be our love made into flesh. I don't see how a woman who feels this could waste a thought on what she has to suffer. I am so glad you are going to send me a nurse from Dinwiddie, because I'm afraid I could never get one here that I could trust. The servant Oliver got me is no earthly account, and I still do as much of the cooking as I can. The house doesn't look nearly so nice as it used to, but the doctor tells me that I mustn't sweep, so I only do the light dusting. I sew almost all the time, and I've already finished the little slips. To-day I'm going to cut out the petticoats. I couldn't tell from the pattern you sent whether they fasten in front or in the back. There are no places for buttonholes. Do you use safety pins to fasten them with? The embroidery is perfectly lovely, and will make the sweetest trimming. I am using pink for the basket because Oliver and I both hope the baby will be a girl. If it is, I shall name her after you, of course, and I want her to be just exactly like you. Oliver says he can't understand why anybody ever wants a boy--girls are so much nicer. But then he insists that if she isn't born with blue eyes, he will send her to the orphanage. I am trying to do just as you tell me to, and to be as careful as I possibly can. The doctor thinks I've stayed indoors too much since I came here, so I go out for a little walk with Oliver every night. I am so afraid that somebody will see me that I really hate to go out at all, and always choose the darkest streets I can find. Last night I had a bad stumble, and Oliver says he doesn't care if the whole town discovers us, he's not going to take me down any more unlighted alleys. It has been terribly hot all day--not a breath of air stirring--and I never felt the heat so much in my life. The doctor says it's because of my condition--and last night, after Oliver went to sleep, I got up and sat by the window until daybreak. At first I was dreadfully frightened, and thought I was going to stifle--but poor Oliver had come home so tired that I made up my mind I wasn't going to wake him if I could possibly help it. This morning I didn't tell him a word about it, and he hasn't the least idea that I didn't sleep soundly all night. I suppose that's why I feel so dragged and worn out to-day, just as if somebody had given me a good beating. I was obliged to lie down most of the afternoon, but I am going to take a bath in a few minutes and try to make myself look nice and fresh before Oliver comes home. I have let out that flowered organdie--the one you liked so much--and I wear it almost every evening. I know I look dreadfully, but Oliver says I am more beautiful than ever. It seems to me sometimes that men are born blind where women are concerned, but perhaps God made it that way on purpose. Do you know Oliver really admires Mrs. Payson, and he thinks that red feather very becoming to her. He says she's much too good for her husband, but I have been obliged to disagree with him about that. Even if Mr. Payson does drink a little, I am sure it is only because he gets lonesome when he is left by himself, and that she could prevent it if she tried. Oliver and I never talk about these things because he sees that I feel so strongly about them. Oh, darling mother, I shall be so glad to see you! I hope and pray that father will be well enough for you to come a whole month ahead. In that case you will be here in less than two months, won't you? If the baby comes on the twelfth of August, she (I am perfectly sure it will be a girl) and father will have the same birthday. I am so anxious that she shall be born on that day. Well, I must stop now, though I could run on forever. I never see a living soul from one day to another--Mrs. Payson is out of town--so when Oliver stays late at the office, and I am too tired to work, I get a little--just a little bit lonesome. Mr. Payson sent me a pile of novels by Oliver the other night--but I haven't looked into them. I always feel that it is a waste of time to read when there are things about the house that ought to be done. I wish everything didn't cost so much here. Money doesn't go half as far as it does in Dinwiddie. The price of meat is almost three times as much as it is at home, and chickens are so expensive that we have them only twice a week. It is hard to housekeep on a small allowance, and now that we have to save for the baby's coming, I have to count every penny. I have bought a little book like yours, and I put down all that I spend during the day, and then add it up at night before going to bed. Oliver says I'm dreadfully frugal, but I am always so terribly afraid of running over my allowance (which is every cent that we can afford) and not having the money to pay the doctor's bills when they are due. Nobody could be more generous with money than Oliver is--I couldn't endure being married to a stingy man like Mr. Treadwell--and the other day when one of the men in the office died, he sent the most beautiful wreath that cost ten dollars. I am trying to save enough out of the housekeeping balance to pay for it, for Oliver always runs out of his pocket money before the middle of the month. I haven't bought anything for the baby because you sent me all the materials I needed, and I have been sewing on those ever since they came. Of course my own clothes are still as good as new, so the only expense will be the doctor and the nurse and the extra things I shall be obliged to have to eat when I am sick. Give dear father a dozen kisses from me, and tell him to hurry and get well so he can christen his granddaughter. Your devoted and ever grateful VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 11, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: Just a line to say that I am so, so sorry you can't come, but that you mustn't worry a minute, because everything is going beautifully, and I am not the least bit afraid. The doctor says he never saw any one in a better frame of mind or so little nervous. Give my dear love to father. I am so distressed that he should suffer as he does. Rheumatism must be such terrible pain, and I don't wonder that you are frightened lest it should go to his heart. I shall send you a telegram as soon as the baby comes. Your devoted daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 29, 1885. MY PRECIOUS MOTHER: This is the first time I have sat up in bed, and I am trying to write a little note to you on a pillow instead of a desk. My hand shakes so that I'm afraid you won't be able to read it, but I felt that I wanted to send you a few words of my very own, not dictated to the nurse or to Mrs. Payson. I can't tell you how perfectly lovely Mrs. Payson has been to me. She was here all that dreadful night, and I believe I should have died without her. The doctor said I had such a hard time because I'd let myself get run down and stayed indoors too much. But I'm getting all right now--and the rest is over and doesn't matter. As soon as I am strong again I shall be perfectly happy. Oh, mother, aren't you delighted that the baby is a girl, after all? It was the first question I asked when I came back to consciousness the next morning, and when they told me it was, I said, "Her name is Lucy Pendleton," and that was all. I was so weak they wouldn't let me open my lips again, and Oliver was kept out of the room for almost ten days because I would talk to him. Poor fellow, it almost killed him. He is as white as a sheet still, and looks as if he had been through tortures. It must have been terrible for him, because I was really very, very ill at one time. But it is all over now, and the baby is the sweetest thing you ever imagined. I believe she knows me already, and Mrs. Payson says she is exactly like me, though I can see the strongest resemblance to Oliver, even if she has blue eyes and he hasn't. Wasn't it lovely how everything came just as we wanted it to--a girl, born on father's birthday, with blue eyes, and named Lucy? But, mother, darling, the most wonderful thing of all was that you seemed to be with me all through it. The whole time I was unconscious I thought you were here, and the nurse tells me that I was calling "Mother! Mother!" all that night. Nothing ever made me feel as close to you as having a baby of my own. I never knew before what you were to me, and how dearly, dearly I love you. The nurse is taking the pencil away from me. Your loving VIRGINIA. Isn't it funny that Oliver won't take any interest in the baby at all? He says she caused more trouble than she is worth. Was father like that? * * * * * MATOACA CITY. April 3, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: My last letter was written an age ago, but I have been so busy since Marthy left that I've hardly had a moment in which to draw breath. It was a blow to me that she wouldn't stay for she was really an excellent nurse and the baby got on so well with her, but there aren't any coloured people of her kind here, and she got so homesick for Dinwiddie that I thought she would lose her mind if she stayed. You know how dependent they are upon company, and going out on Sunday afternoon and all that kind of thing, and there really wasn't any amusement for her except taking the baby out in the morning. She got so low spirited that it was almost a relief when she went, but of course I feel her loss dreadfully. I haven't let the baby out of my sight because I wouldn't trust Daisy with her for anything in the world. She is so terribly flighty. I have the crib brought into my room (though Oliver hates it) and I take entire charge of her night and day. I should love to do it if only Oliver didn't mind it so much. He says I think more of the baby now than I do of him. Isn't that absurd? But of course she does take every single minute of my time, and I can't dress myself for him every evening as carefully as I used to do and look after all the housekeeping arrangements. Daisy is a very poor cook and she simply throws the things on the table, but it seems to me that my first duty is to the baby, so I try to put up with the discomforts as well as I can. It is hard to eat what she cooks since everything tastes exactly alike, but I try to swallow as much as I can because the doctor says that if I don't keep up my strength I shall have to stop nursing the baby. Wouldn't that be dreadful? It almost breaks my heart to think of it, and I am sure we'd never get any artificial food to agree with her. She is perfectly well now, the sweetest, fattest thing you ever saw, and a real beauty, and she is so devoted to me that she cries whenever I go out of her sight. I am never tired of watching her, and even when she is asleep I sit sometimes for an hour by her crib just thinking how pretty she looks with her eyes closed and wishing you could see her. Oliver says I spoil her to death, but how can a baby of seven months be spoiled. He doesn't enjoy her half as much as I do, and sometimes I almost think that he gets impatient of seeing her always in my arms. At first he absolutely refused to have her crib brought into our room, but when I cried, he gave in and was very sweet about it. I feel so ashamed sometimes of the way the house looks, but there doesn't seem to be any help for it because the doctor says if I let myself get tired it will be bad for the baby. Of course I wouldn't put my own health before his comfort, but I am obliged to think first of the baby, am I not? Last night, for instance, the poor little thing was ill with colic and I was up and down with her until daybreak. Then this morning she woke early and I had to nurse her and give her her bath, and, added to everything else, Daisy's cousin died and she sent word she couldn't come. I slipped on a wrapper before taking a bath or fixing my hair and ran down to try and get Oliver's breakfast, but the baby began to cry and he came after me and said he wanted to make the coffee himself. Then he brought a cup upstairs to me, but I was so tired and nervous that I couldn't drink it. He didn't seem to understand why, feeling as badly as I did, I wouldn't just put the baby back into her crib and make her stay there until I got some rest, but the little thing was so wide awake that I hadn't the heart to do it. Besides, it is so important to keep regular hours with her, isn't it? I don't suppose a man ever realizes how a woman looks at these things, but you will understand, won't you, mother? I am all alone in the house to-night because a play is in town that Oliver wanted to see and I made him go to it. He wanted to ask Mrs. Midden to sit downstairs (she has offered over and over again to do it) so that I might go too, but of course I wouldn't let him. I really couldn't have enjoyed it a minute for thinking of the baby, and besides I never cared for the theatre. Then, too, he doesn't know (for I never tell him) how very tired I am by the time night comes. Sometimes when Oliver comes home and we sit in the dining-room (we never use the drawing-room, because it is across the hall and I'm afraid I shouldn't hear the baby cry) it is as much as I can do to keep my eyes open. I try not to let him notice it, but one night when he read me the first act of a play he is writing, I went to sleep, and though he didn't say anything, I could see that he was very much hurt. He worries a good deal about my health, too, and he even went out one day and engaged a nurse without saying anything to me about it. After I had talked to her though, I saw that she would never do, so I sent her away before he came home. I wish I could get really strong and feel well again, but the doctor insists I never will until I get out of doors and use my muscles. But you stay in the house all the time and so did grandmother, so I don't believe there's a word of truth in what he says. Anyway, I go out every day now with the baby. Thank you so much for the little bands. They are just what I wanted. With dearest love, Your devoted VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 10, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Daisy left a week ago and we couldn't find another servant until to-day. I must say that I prefer coloured servants. They are so much more dependable. I didn't know until the evening before Daisy left that she was going, and I had to send Oliver straight out to see if he could find somebody to come in and help me. There wasn't a soul to be had until to-day, however, so for a week I was obliged to make Oliver get his dinner at the boarding-house. It doesn't make any difference what I have because I haven't a particle of appetite, and I'd just as soon eat tea and toast as anything else. Of course, but for the baby I could have managed perfectly well--but she has been so fretful of late that she doesn't let me put her down a minute. The doctor says her teeth are beginning to hurt her, and that I must expect to have trouble the first summer. She has been so well until now that he thinks it has been really remarkable. He tells me he never knew a healthier baby, but of course I am terribly anxious about her teething in the hot weather. If she grows much more fretful I'm afraid I shall have to take her to the country for July and August. It seems dreadful to leave Oliver all alone, but I don't see how I can help it if the doctor advises me to go. Oliver has gone to some musical comedy at the Academy to-night, and I am so tired that I am going to bed just as soon as I finish this letter. I hope and pray that the baby will have a quiet night. Don't you think that Daisy treated me very badly considering how kind I had been to her? Only a week ago when she was taken with pain in the night, I got up and made her a mustard plaster and sat by her bed until she felt easier. The next day I did all of her work, and yet she has so little gratitude that she could leave me this way when she knows perfectly well that I am worried to death about the baby's first summer. I'd give anything if I could go home in July as you suggest, but it is such a long trip, and the heat will probably be quite as bad in Dinwiddie as here. Of course, it would make all the difference in the world to me to be where I could have you to advise me about the baby, and I'd go to-morrow if it only wasn't so far. Mrs. Midden has told me of a boarding-house in the country not more than twenty miles from here where Oliver could come down every evening, and we may decide to go there for a month or two. I can't help feeling very anxious, especially as Mrs. Scott's little boy--he is just the age of baby--was taken ill the other night, and they thought he would die before they could get a doctor. This letter is full of my worries, but in spite of them I am the happiest woman that ever lived. Oliver is the best thing to me you can imagine, and the baby is so fascinating that I enjoy every minute I am with her. It is the greatest fun to watch her in her bath. I know you would simply go into raptures over her--and she is so bright that she already understands every word that I say. She grows more like Oliver all the time, and the other day while I was watching her playing with her rubber doll, she looked so beautiful that it almost frightened me. I am so glad dear father is well, and what you wrote me about John Henry's admiration for Susan interested me so much that I sat straight down and wrote to him. Why do you think that it is only friendship and that he isn't in love with her? If he really thinks her the "finest girl in the world," I should imagine he was beginning to be pretty serious. I am delighted to hear that he is going to take her to the festival. Tell Susan from me that I shall never be satisfied until she is as happy as I am. Mr. Treadwell was right, I believe, not to let her go to college, though of course I want dear Susan to have whatever she sets her heart on. But, when all is said, you were wise in teaching me that nothing matters to a woman except love. More and more I am learning that if we only love unselfishly enough, everything else will work out for good to us. My little worries can't keep me from being so blissfully happy that I want to sing all the time. Work is a joy to me because I feel that I am doing it for Oliver and the baby. And with two such treasures to live for I should be the most ungrateful creature alive if I ever complained. Your ever loving daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY, July 1, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: We are leaving suddenly for the country, and I'll send our address just as soon as we get there. The doctor thinks I ought to take the baby away from town, so I am going to the boarding-house I wrote you about. Oliver will come down every evening--it's only an hour's trip. I am so tired from packing that I can't write any more. Lovingly, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. September 15, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Here we are back again in our home, and I was never so thankful in my life to get away from any place. I wrote you how dreadfully inconvenient it was, but it would take pages to tell you all of my experiences in the last few days. Such people you never saw in your life! And the food got so uneatable that I lived on crackers for the last fortnight. Fortunately, I was still nursing the baby, but the doctor has just told me that I must stop. I am so distressed about it. Do you think it will go hard with her after the first year? She is as fat and well as she can be now, but I live in hourly terror of her getting sick. If anything should happen

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you what I thought of her. I believe now that the whole trouble with her is simply that she isn't a Southern lady. She means well, I am sure, but she isn't what I should call exactly refined. There's something "horsey" about her--I can't think of any other way to express it--something that reminds me just a little bit of Abby--and, you remember, we always said Abby got that from being educated in the North. Tell dearest Susan I really think it is fortunate that she did not go to one of their colleges. Mrs. Payson is a college woman and it seems to me that she is always trying to appear as clever as a man. She talks in a way sometimes that sounds as if she believed in woman's rights and all that sort of thing. I told Oliver about it, and he laughed and said that men hated talk like that. He says all a man admires in a woman is her power of loving, and that when she begins to ape a man she loses her charm for him. I can't understand why Mr. Payson married his wife. He said such nice things to me the other day about my being so domestic and such a home lover, that I really felt sorry for him. When I told him that I was so fond of staying indoors that I would never cross my threshold if Oliver didn't make me, he laughed and said that he wished I'd convert his wife to my way of thinking. Yet he seems to have the greatest admiration for her, and, do you know, I believe he even admires that red feather, though he doesn't approve of it. He never turns his eyes away from her when they are together, which isn't very much, as she goes about just as she pleases without him. Can you understand how a person can both admire and disapprove of a thing? Oliver says he knows how it is, but I must say that I don't. I hope and pray that our marriage will always be different from theirs. Oliver and I are never apart for a single minute except when he is at work in the office. He hasn't written a line since we came here, but he is going to begin as soon as we get settled, and then he says that I may sit in the room and sew if I want to. I can't believe that people really love each other unless they want to be together every instant, no matter what they are doing. Why, if Oliver went out to men's dinners without me as Mr. Payson does (though she doesn't seem to mind it) I should just sit at home by myself and cry my eyes out. I think love, if it is love, ought to be all in all. I am perfectly sure that if I live to be a hundred I shall never want any society but Oliver's. He is the whole world to me, and when he is not here I spend my time, unless I am at work, just sitting and thinking about him. My one idea is to make him as happy as I can, and when a woman does this for a man I don't think she has time to run around by herself as Mrs. Payson does. Tell dearest father that I so often think of his sermons and the beautiful things he said about women. The rector here doesn't compare with him as a preacher. This is such a long letter it will take two stamps. I've just let myself run on without thinking what I was writing, so if I have made any mistakes in grammar or in spelling, please don't let father see them but read my letter aloud to him. I can shut my eyes and see you sitting at dinner, with Docia bringing in the plum pudding, and I know you will talk of me while you help to it. Write me who comes to dinner with you. I wonder if Miss Priscilla and John Henry are there as usual. Do you know whether John Henry ever goes to the Treadwell's or not? I wish you would ask him to take Susan to see his old mammy in Pink Alley. Now that I am not there to go to see her occasionally, I am afraid she will get lonesome. Good-bye, dearest mother. I will write to you before New Year. I am so busy that I don't have time to write every day, but you will understand and so will father. With my heart's fondest love to you both, Your VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 6, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: The little patterns were exactly what I wanted--thank you a thousand times. I knew you would be overjoyed at the news, and you are the only person I've breathed it to--except, of course, dear Oliver, who is frightened to death already. He has made me stop everything at once, and whenever he sees me lift my hand, he begins to get nervous and begs me not to do it. Oh, mother, he loves me so that it is really pathetic to see his anxiety. And--can you believe it--he doesn't appear to be the least bit glad about it. When I told him, he looked amazed--as if he had never thought of its happening--and said, "Oh, Virginia, not so soon!" He told me afterwards that, of course, he'd always thought we'd have children after a while, before we were middle-aged, but that he had wanted to stay like this for at least five or ten years. When the baby comes, he says he supposes he'll like it, but that he can't honestly say he is glad. It's funny how frightened he is, because I am not the least bit so. All women must expect to have children when they marry, and if God makes them suffer for it, it must be because it is best that they should. Perhaps they wouldn't love their babies so much if they got them easily. I never think of the pain a minute. It all seems so beautiful and sacred to me that I can't understand why Oliver isn't enraptured just as I am. To think of a new life starting into the world from me--a life that is half mine and half Oliver's, and one that would never be at all except for our love. The baby will seem from the very first minute to be our love made into flesh. I don't see how a woman who feels this could waste a thought on what she has to suffer. I am so glad you are going to send me a nurse from Dinwiddie, because I'm afraid I could never get one here that I could trust. The servant Oliver got me is no earthly account, and I still do as much of the cooking as I can. The house doesn't look nearly so nice as it used to, but the doctor tells me that I mustn't sweep, so I only do the light dusting. I sew almost all the time, and I've already finished the little slips. To-day I'm going to cut out the petticoats. I couldn't tell from the pattern you sent whether they fasten in front or in the back. There are no places for buttonholes. Do you use safety pins to fasten them with? The embroidery is perfectly lovely, and will make the sweetest trimming. I am using pink for the basket because Oliver and I both hope the baby will be a girl. If it is, I shall name her after you, of course, and I want her to be just exactly like you. Oliver says he can't understand why anybody ever wants a boy--girls are so much nicer. But then he insists that if she isn't born with blue eyes, he will send her to the orphanage. I am trying to do just as you tell me to, and to be as careful as I possibly can. The doctor thinks I've stayed indoors too much since I came here, so I go out for a little walk with Oliver every night. I am so afraid that somebody will see me that I really hate to go out at all, and always choose the darkest streets I can find. Last night I had a bad stumble, and Oliver says he doesn't care if the whole town discovers us, he's not going to take me down any more unlighted alleys. It has been terribly hot all day--not a breath of air stirring--and I never felt the heat so much in my life. The doctor says it's because of my condition--and last night, after Oliver went to sleep, I got up and sat by the window until daybreak. At first I was dreadfully frightened, and thought I was going to stifle--but poor Oliver had come home so tired that I made up my mind I wasn't going to wake him if I could possibly help it. This morning I didn't tell him a word about it, and he hasn't the least idea that I didn't sleep soundly all night. I suppose that's why I feel so dragged and worn out to-day, just as if somebody had given me a good beating. I was obliged to lie down most of the afternoon, but I am going to take a bath in a few minutes and try to make myself look nice and fresh before Oliver comes home. I have let out that flowered organdie--the one you liked so much--and I wear it almost every evening. I know I look dreadfully, but Oliver says I am more beautiful than ever. It seems to me sometimes that men are born blind where women are concerned, but perhaps God made it that way on purpose. Do you know Oliver really admires Mrs. Payson, and he thinks that red feather very becoming to her. He says she's much too good for her husband, but I have been obliged to disagree with him about that. Even if Mr. Payson does drink a little, I am sure it is only because he gets lonesome when he is left by himself, and that she could prevent it if she tried. Oliver and I never talk about these things because he sees that I feel so strongly about them. Oh, darling mother, I shall be so glad to see you! I hope and pray that father will be well enough for you to come a whole month ahead. In that case you will be here in less than two months, won't you? If the baby comes on the twelfth of August, she (I am perfectly sure it will be a girl) and father will have the same birthday. I am so anxious that she shall be born on that day. Well, I must stop now, though I could run on forever. I never see a living soul from one day to another--Mrs. Payson is out of town--so when Oliver stays late at the office, and I am too tired to work, I get a little--just a little bit lonesome. Mr. Payson sent me a pile of novels by Oliver the other night--but I haven't looked into them. I always feel that it is a waste of time to read when there are things about the house that ought to be done. I wish everything didn't cost so much here. Money doesn't go half as far as it does in Dinwiddie. The price of meat is almost three times as much as it is at home, and chickens are so expensive that we have them only twice a week. It is hard to housekeep on a small allowance, and now that we have to save for the baby's coming, I have to count every penny. I have bought a little book like yours, and I put down all that I spend during the day, and then add it up at night before going to bed. Oliver says I'm dreadfully frugal, but I am always so terribly afraid of running over my allowance (which is every cent that we can afford) and not having the money to pay the doctor's bills when they are due. Nobody could be more generous with money than Oliver is--I couldn't endure being married to a stingy man like Mr. Treadwell--and the other day when one of the men in the office died, he sent the most beautiful wreath that cost ten dollars. I am trying to save enough out of the housekeeping balance to pay for it, for Oliver always runs out of his pocket money before the middle of the month. I haven't bought anything for the baby because you sent me all the materials I needed, and I have been sewing on those ever since they came. Of course my own clothes are still as good as new, so the only expense will be the doctor and the nurse and the extra things I shall be obliged to have to eat when I am sick. Give dear father a dozen kisses from me, and tell him to hurry and get well so he can christen his granddaughter. Your devoted and ever grateful VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 11, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: Just a line to say that I am so, so sorry you can't come, but that you mustn't worry a minute, because everything is going beautifully, and I am not the least bit afraid. The doctor says he never saw any one in a better frame of mind or so little nervous. Give my dear love to father. I am so distressed that he should suffer as he does. Rheumatism must be such terrible pain, and I don't wonder that you are frightened lest it should go to his heart. I shall send you a telegram as soon as the baby comes. Your devoted daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 29, 1885. MY PRECIOUS MOTHER: This is the first time I have sat up in bed, and I am trying to write a little note to you on a pillow instead of a desk. My hand shakes so that I'm afraid you won't be able to read it, but I felt that I wanted to send you a few words of my very own, not dictated to the nurse or to Mrs. Payson. I can't tell you how perfectly lovely Mrs. Payson has been to me. She was here all that dreadful night, and I believe I should have died without her. The doctor said I had such a hard time because I'd let myself get run down and stayed indoors too much. But I'm getting all right now--and the rest is over and doesn't matter. As soon as I am strong again I shall be perfectly happy. Oh, mother, aren't you delighted that the baby is a girl, after all? It was the first question I asked when I came back to consciousness the next morning, and when they told me it was, I said, "Her name is Lucy Pendleton," and that was all. I was so weak they wouldn't let me open my lips again, and Oliver was kept out of the room for almost ten days because I would talk to him. Poor fellow, it almost killed him. He is as white as a sheet still, and looks as if he had been through tortures. It must have been terrible for him, because I was really very, very ill at one time. But it is all over now, and the baby is the sweetest thing you ever imagined. I believe she knows me already, and Mrs. Payson says she is exactly like me, though I can see the strongest resemblance to Oliver, even if she has blue eyes and he hasn't. Wasn't it lovely how everything came just as we wanted it to--a girl, born on father's birthday, with blue eyes, and named Lucy? But, mother, darling, the most wonderful thing of all was that you seemed to be with me all through it. The whole time I was unconscious I thought you were here, and the nurse tells me that I was calling "Mother! Mother!" all that night. Nothing ever made me feel as close to you as having a baby of my own. I never knew before what you were to me, and how dearly, dearly I love you. The nurse is taking the pencil away from me. Your loving VIRGINIA. Isn't it funny that Oliver won't take any interest in the baby at all? He says she caused more trouble than she is worth. Was father like that? * * * * * MATOACA CITY. April 3, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: My last letter was written an age ago, but I have been so busy since Marthy left that I've hardly had a moment in which to draw breath. It was a blow to me that she wouldn't stay for she was really an excellent nurse and the baby got on so well with her, but there aren't any coloured people of her kind here, and she got so homesick for Dinwiddie that I thought she would lose her mind if she stayed. You know how dependent they are upon company, and going out on Sunday afternoon and all that kind of thing, and there really wasn't any amusement for her except taking the baby out in the morning. She got so low spirited that it was almost a relief when she went, but of course I feel her loss dreadfully. I haven't let the baby out of my sight because I wouldn't trust Daisy with her for anything in the world. She is so terribly flighty. I have the crib brought into my room (though Oliver hates it) and I take entire charge of her night and day. I should love to do it if only Oliver didn't mind it so much. He says I think more of the baby now than I do of him. Isn't that absurd? But of course she does take every single minute of my time, and I can't dress myself for him every evening as carefully as I used to do and look after all the housekeeping arrangements. Daisy is a very poor cook and she simply throws the things on the table, but it seems to me that my first duty is to the baby, so I try to put up with the discomforts as well as I can. It is hard to eat what she cooks since everything tastes exactly alike, but I try to swallow as much as I can because the doctor says that if I don't keep up my strength I shall have to stop nursing the baby. Wouldn't that be dreadful? It almost breaks my heart to think of it, and I am sure we'd never get any artificial food to agree with her. She is perfectly well now, the sweetest, fattest thing you ever saw, and a real beauty, and she is so devoted to me that she cries whenever I go out of her sight. I am never tired of watching her, and even when she is asleep I sit sometimes for an hour by her crib just thinking how pretty she looks with her eyes closed and wishing you could see her. Oliver says I spoil her to death, but how can a baby of seven months be spoiled. He doesn't enjoy her half as much as I do, and sometimes I almost think that he gets impatient of seeing her always in my arms. At first he absolutely refused to have her crib brought into our room, but when I cried, he gave in and was very sweet about it. I feel so ashamed sometimes of the way the house looks, but there doesn't seem to be any help for it because the doctor says if I let myself get tired it will be bad for the baby. Of course I wouldn't put my own health before his comfort, but I am obliged to think first of the baby, am I not? Last night, for instance, the poor little thing was ill with colic and I was up and down with her until daybreak. Then this morning she woke early and I had to nurse her and give her her bath, and, added to everything else, Daisy's cousin died and she sent word she couldn't come. I slipped on a wrapper before taking a bath or fixing my hair and ran down to try and get Oliver's breakfast, but the baby began to cry and he came after me and said he wanted to make the coffee himself. Then he brought a cup upstairs to me, but I was so tired and nervous that I couldn't drink it. He didn't seem to understand why, feeling as badly as I did, I wouldn't just put the baby back into her crib and make her stay there until I got some rest, but the little thing was so wide awake that I hadn't the heart to do it. Besides, it is so important to keep regular hours with her, isn't it? I don't suppose a man ever realizes how a woman looks at these things, but you will understand, won't you, mother? I am all alone in the house to-night because a play is in town that Oliver wanted to see and I made him go to it. He wanted to ask Mrs. Midden to sit downstairs (she has offered over and over again to do it) so that I might go too, but of course I wouldn't let him. I really couldn't have enjoyed it a minute for thinking of the baby, and besides I never cared for the theatre. Then, too, he doesn't know (for I never tell him) how very tired I am by the time night comes. Sometimes when Oliver comes home and we sit in the dining-room (we never use the drawing-room, because it is across the hall and I'm afraid I shouldn't hear the baby cry) it is as much as I can do to keep my eyes open. I try not to let him notice it, but one night when he read me the first act of a play he is writing, I went to sleep, and though he didn't say anything, I could see that he was very much hurt. He worries a good deal about my health, too, and he even went out one day and engaged a nurse without saying anything to me about it. After I had talked to her though, I saw that she would never do, so I sent her away before he came home. I wish I could get really strong and feel well again, but the doctor insists I never will until I get out of doors and use my muscles. But you stay in the house all the time and so did grandmother, so I don't believe there's a word of truth in what he says. Anyway, I go out every day now with the baby. Thank you so much for the little bands. They are just what I wanted. With dearest love, Your devoted VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 10, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Daisy left a week ago and we couldn't find another servant until to-day. I must say that I prefer coloured servants. They are so much more dependable. I didn't know until the evening before Daisy left that she was going, and I had to send Oliver straight out to see if he could find somebody to come in and help me. There wasn't a soul to be had until to-day, however, so for a week I was obliged to make Oliver get his dinner at the boarding-house. It doesn't make any difference what I have because I haven't a particle of appetite, and I'd just as soon eat tea and toast as anything else. Of course, but for the baby I could have managed perfectly well--but she has been so fretful of late that she doesn't let me put her down a minute. The doctor says her teeth are beginning to hurt her, and that I must expect to have trouble the first summer. She has been so well until now that he thinks it has been really remarkable. He tells me he never knew a healthier baby, but of course I am terribly anxious about her teething in the hot weather. If she grows much more fretful I'm afraid I shall have to take her to the country for July and August. It seems dreadful to leave Oliver all alone, but I don't see how I can help it if the doctor advises me to go. Oliver has gone to some musical comedy at the Academy to-night, and I am so tired that I am going to bed just as soon as I finish this letter. I hope and pray that the baby will have a quiet night. Don't you think that Daisy treated me very badly considering how kind I had been to her? Only a week ago when she was taken with pain in the night, I got up and made her a mustard plaster and sat by her bed until she felt easier. The next day I did all of her work, and yet she has so little gratitude that she could leave me this way when she knows perfectly well that I am worried to death about the baby's first summer. I'd give anything if I could go home in July as you suggest, but it is such a long trip, and the heat will probably be quite as bad in Dinwiddie as here. Of course, it would make all the difference in the world to me to be where I could have you to advise me about the baby, and I'd go to-morrow if it only wasn't so far. Mrs. Midden has told me of a boarding-house in the country not more than twenty miles from here where Oliver could come down every evening, and we may decide to go there for a month or two. I can't help feeling very anxious, especially as Mrs. Scott's little boy--he is just the age of baby--was taken ill the other night, and they thought he would die before they could get a doctor. This letter is full of my worries, but in spite of them I am the happiest woman that ever lived. Oliver is the best thing to me you can imagine, and the baby is so fascinating that I enjoy every minute I am with her. It is the greatest fun to watch her in her bath. I know you would simply go into raptures over her--and she is so bright that she already understands every word that I say. She grows more like Oliver all the time, and the other day while I was watching her playing with her rubber doll, she looked so beautiful that it almost frightened me. I am so glad dear father is well, and what you wrote me about John Henry's admiration for Susan interested me so much that I sat straight down and wrote to him. Why do you think that it is only friendship and that he isn't in love with her? If he really thinks her the "finest girl in the world," I should imagine he was beginning to be pretty serious. I am delighted to hear that he is going to take her to the festival. Tell Susan from me that I shall never be satisfied until she is as happy as I am. Mr. Treadwell was right, I believe, not to let her go to college, though of course I want dear Susan to have whatever she sets her heart on. But, when all is said, you were wise in teaching me that nothing matters to a woman except love. More and more I am learning that if we only love unselfishly enough, everything else will work out for good to us. My little worries can't keep me from being so blissfully happy that I want to sing all the time. Work is a joy to me because I feel that I am doing it for Oliver and the baby. And with two such treasures to live for I should be the most ungrateful creature alive if I ever complained. Your ever loving daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY, July 1, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: We are leaving suddenly for the country, and I'll send our address just as soon as we get there. The doctor thinks I ought to take the baby away from town, so I am going to the boarding-house I wrote you about. Oliver will come down every evening--it's only an hour's trip. I am so tired from packing that I can't write any more. Lovingly, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. September 15, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Here we are back again in our home, and I was never so thankful in my life to get away from any place. I wrote you how dreadfully inconvenient it was, but it would take pages to tell you all of my experiences in the last few days. Such people you never saw in your life! And the food got so uneatable that I lived on crackers for the last fortnight. Fortunately, I was still nursing the baby, but the doctor has just told me that I must stop. I am so distressed about it. Do you think it will go hard with her after the first year? She is as fat and well as she can be now, but I live in hourly terror of her getting sick. If anything should happen

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you what I thought of her. I believe now that the whole trouble with her is simply that she isn't a Southern lady. She means well, I am sure, but she isn't what I should call exactly refined. There's something "horsey" about her--I can't think of any other way to express it--something that reminds me just a little bit of Abby--and, you remember, we always said Abby got that from being educated in the North. Tell dearest Susan I really think it is fortunate that she did not go to one of their colleges. Mrs. Payson is a college woman and it seems to me that she is always trying to appear as clever as a man. She talks in a way sometimes that sounds as if she believed in woman's rights and all that sort of thing. I told Oliver about it, and he laughed and said that men hated talk like that. He says all a man admires in a woman is her power of loving, and that when she begins to ape a man she loses her charm for him. I can't understand why Mr. Payson married his wife. He said such nice things to me the other day about my being so domestic and such a home lover, that I really felt sorry for him. When I told him that I was so fond of staying indoors that I would never cross my threshold if Oliver didn't make me, he laughed and said that he wished I'd convert his wife to my way of thinking. Yet he seems to have the greatest admiration for her, and, do you know, I believe he even admires that red feather, though he doesn't approve of it. He never turns his eyes away from her when they are together, which isn't very much, as she goes about just as she pleases without him. Can you understand how a person can both admire and disapprove of a thing? Oliver says he knows how it is, but I must say that I don't. I hope and pray that our marriage will always be different from theirs. Oliver and I are never apart for a single minute except when he is at work in the office. He hasn't written a line since we came here, but he is going to begin as soon as we get settled, and then he says that I may sit in the room and sew if I want to. I can't believe that people really love each other unless they want to be together every instant, no matter what they are doing. Why, if Oliver went out to men's dinners without me as Mr. Payson does (though she doesn't seem to mind it) I should just sit at home by myself and cry my eyes out. I think love, if it is love, ought to be all in all. I am perfectly sure that if I live to be a hundred I shall never want any society but Oliver's. He is the whole world to me, and when he is not here I spend my time, unless I am at work, just sitting and thinking about him. My one idea is to make him as happy as I can, and when a woman does this for a man I don't think she has time to run around by herself as Mrs. Payson does. Tell dearest father that I so often think of his sermons and the beautiful things he said about women. The rector here doesn't compare with him as a preacher. This is such a long letter it will take two stamps. I've just let myself run on without thinking what I was writing, so if I have made any mistakes in grammar or in spelling, please don't let father see them but read my letter aloud to him. I can shut my eyes and see you sitting at dinner, with Docia bringing in the plum pudding, and I know you will talk of me while you help to it. Write me who comes to dinner with you. I wonder if Miss Priscilla and John Henry are there as usual. Do you know whether John Henry ever goes to the Treadwell's or not? I wish you would ask him to take Susan to see his old mammy in Pink Alley. Now that I am not there to go to see her occasionally, I am afraid she will get lonesome. Good-bye, dearest mother. I will write to you before New Year. I am so busy that I don't have time to write every day, but you will understand and so will father. With my heart's fondest love to you both, Your VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 6, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: The little patterns were exactly what I wanted--thank you a thousand times. I knew you would be overjoyed at the news, and you are the only person I've breathed it to--except, of course, dear Oliver, who is frightened to death already. He has made me stop everything at once, and whenever he sees me lift my hand, he begins to get nervous and begs me not to do it. Oh, mother, he loves me so that it is really pathetic to see his anxiety. And--can you believe it--he doesn't appear to be the least bit glad about it. When I told him, he looked amazed--as if he had never thought of its happening--and said, "Oh, Virginia, not so soon!" He told me afterwards that, of course, he'd always thought we'd have children after a while, before we were middle-aged, but that he had wanted to stay like this for at least five or ten years. When the baby comes, he says he supposes he'll like it, but that he can't honestly say he is glad. It's funny how frightened he is, because I am not the least bit so. All women must expect to have children when they marry, and if God makes them suffer for it, it must be because it is best that they should. Perhaps they wouldn't love their babies so much if they got them easily. I never think of the pain a minute. It all seems so beautiful and sacred to me that I can't understand why Oliver isn't enraptured just as I am. To think of a new life starting into the world from me--a life that is half mine and half Oliver's, and one that would never be at all except for our love. The baby will seem from the very first minute to be our love made into flesh. I don't see how a woman who feels this could waste a thought on what she has to suffer. I am so glad you are going to send me a nurse from Dinwiddie, because I'm afraid I could never get one here that I could trust. The servant Oliver got me is no earthly account, and I still do as much of the cooking as I can. The house doesn't look nearly so nice as it used to, but the doctor tells me that I mustn't sweep, so I only do the light dusting. I sew almost all the time, and I've already finished the little slips. To-day I'm going to cut out the petticoats. I couldn't tell from the pattern you sent whether they fasten in front or in the back. There are no places for buttonholes. Do you use safety pins to fasten them with? The embroidery is perfectly lovely, and will make the sweetest trimming. I am using pink for the basket because Oliver and I both hope the baby will be a girl. If it is, I shall name her after you, of course, and I want her to be just exactly like you. Oliver says he can't understand why anybody ever wants a boy--girls are so much nicer. But then he insists that if she isn't born with blue eyes, he will send her to the orphanage. I am trying to do just as you tell me to, and to be as careful as I possibly can. The doctor thinks I've stayed indoors too much since I came here, so I go out for a little walk with Oliver every night. I am so afraid that somebody will see me that I really hate to go out at all, and always choose the darkest streets I can find. Last night I had a bad stumble, and Oliver says he doesn't care if the whole town discovers us, he's not going to take me down any more unlighted alleys. It has been terribly hot all day--not a breath of air stirring--and I never felt the heat so much in my life. The doctor says it's because of my condition--and last night, after Oliver went to sleep, I got up and sat by the window until daybreak. At first I was dreadfully frightened, and thought I was going to stifle--but poor Oliver had come home so tired that I made up my mind I wasn't going to wake him if I could possibly help it. This morning I didn't tell him a word about it, and he hasn't the least idea that I didn't sleep soundly all night. I suppose that's why I feel so dragged and worn out to-day, just as if somebody had given me a good beating. I was obliged to lie down most of the afternoon, but I am going to take a bath in a few minutes and try to make myself look nice and fresh before Oliver comes home. I have let out that flowered organdie--the one you liked so much--and I wear it almost every evening. I know I look dreadfully, but Oliver says I am more beautiful than ever. It seems to me sometimes that men are born blind where women are concerned, but perhaps God made it that way on purpose. Do you know Oliver really admires Mrs. Payson, and he thinks that red feather very becoming to her. He says she's much too good for her husband, but I have been obliged to disagree with him about that. Even if Mr. Payson does drink a little, I am sure it is only because he gets lonesome when he is left by himself, and that she could prevent it if she tried. Oliver and I never talk about these things because he sees that I feel so strongly about them. Oh, darling mother, I shall be so glad to see you! I hope and pray that father will be well enough for you to come a whole month ahead. In that case you will be here in less than two months, won't you? If the baby comes on the twelfth of August, she (I am perfectly sure it will be a girl) and father will have the same birthday. I am so anxious that she shall be born on that day. Well, I must stop now, though I could run on forever. I never see a living soul from one day to another--Mrs. Payson is out of town--so when Oliver stays late at the office, and I am too tired to work, I get a little--just a little bit lonesome. Mr. Payson sent me a pile of novels by Oliver the other night--but I haven't looked into them. I always feel that it is a waste of time to read when there are things about the house that ought to be done. I wish everything didn't cost so much here. Money doesn't go half as far as it does in Dinwiddie. The price of meat is almost three times as much as it is at home, and chickens are so expensive that we have them only twice a week. It is hard to housekeep on a small allowance, and now that we have to save for the baby's coming, I have to count every penny. I have bought a little book like yours, and I put down all that I spend during the day, and then add it up at night before going to bed. Oliver says I'm dreadfully frugal, but I am always so terribly afraid of running over my allowance (which is every cent that we can afford) and not having the money to pay the doctor's bills when they are due. Nobody could be more generous with money than Oliver is--I couldn't endure being married to a stingy man like Mr. Treadwell--and the other day when one of the men in the office died, he sent the most beautiful wreath that cost ten dollars. I am trying to save enough out of the housekeeping balance to pay for it, for Oliver always runs out of his pocket money before the middle of the month. I haven't bought anything for the baby because you sent me all the materials I needed, and I have been sewing on those ever since they came. Of course my own clothes are still as good as new, so the only expense will be the doctor and the nurse and the extra things I shall be obliged to have to eat when I am sick. Give dear father a dozen kisses from me, and tell him to hurry and get well so he can christen his granddaughter. Your devoted and ever grateful VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 11, 1885. DARLING MOTHER: Just a line to say that I am so, so sorry you can't come, but that you mustn't worry a minute, because everything is going beautifully, and I am not the least bit afraid. The doctor says he never saw any one in a better frame of mind or so little nervous. Give my dear love to father. I am so distressed that he should suffer as he does. Rheumatism must be such terrible pain, and I don't wonder that you are frightened lest it should go to his heart. I shall send you a telegram as soon as the baby comes. Your devoted daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. August 29, 1885. MY PRECIOUS MOTHER: This is the first time I have sat up in bed, and I am trying to write a little note to you on a pillow instead of a desk. My hand shakes so that I'm afraid you won't be able to read it, but I felt that I wanted to send you a few words of my very own, not dictated to the nurse or to Mrs. Payson. I can't tell you how perfectly lovely Mrs. Payson has been to me. She was here all that dreadful night, and I believe I should have died without her. The doctor said I had such a hard time because I'd let myself get run down and stayed indoors too much. But I'm getting all right now--and the rest is over and doesn't matter. As soon as I am strong again I shall be perfectly happy. Oh, mother, aren't you delighted that the baby is a girl, after all? It was the first question I asked when I came back to consciousness the next morning, and when they told me it was, I said, "Her name is Lucy Pendleton," and that was all. I was so weak they wouldn't let me open my lips again, and Oliver was kept out of the room for almost ten days because I would talk to him. Poor fellow, it almost killed him. He is as white as a sheet still, and looks as if he had been through tortures. It must have been terrible for him, because I was really very, very ill at one time. But it is all over now, and the baby is the sweetest thing you ever imagined. I believe she knows me already, and Mrs. Payson says she is exactly like me, though I can see the strongest resemblance to Oliver, even if she has blue eyes and he hasn't. Wasn't it lovely how everything came just as we wanted it to--a girl, born on father's birthday, with blue eyes, and named Lucy? But, mother, darling, the most wonderful thing of all was that you seemed to be with me all through it. The whole time I was unconscious I thought you were here, and the nurse tells me that I was calling "Mother! Mother!" all that night. Nothing ever made me feel as close to you as having a baby of my own. I never knew before what you were to me, and how dearly, dearly I love you. The nurse is taking the pencil away from me. Your loving VIRGINIA. Isn't it funny that Oliver won't take any interest in the baby at all? He says she caused more trouble than she is worth. Was father like that? * * * * * MATOACA CITY. April 3, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: My last letter was written an age ago, but I have been so busy since Marthy left that I've hardly had a moment in which to draw breath. It was a blow to me that she wouldn't stay for she was really an excellent nurse and the baby got on so well with her, but there aren't any coloured people of her kind here, and she got so homesick for Dinwiddie that I thought she would lose her mind if she stayed. You know how dependent they are upon company, and going out on Sunday afternoon and all that kind of thing, and there really wasn't any amusement for her except taking the baby out in the morning. She got so low spirited that it was almost a relief when she went, but of course I feel her loss dreadfully. I haven't let the baby out of my sight because I wouldn't trust Daisy with her for anything in the world. She is so terribly flighty. I have the crib brought into my room (though Oliver hates it) and I take entire charge of her night and day. I should love to do it if only Oliver didn't mind it so much. He says I think more of the baby now than I do of him. Isn't that absurd? But of course she does take every single minute of my time, and I can't dress myself for him every evening as carefully as I used to do and look after all the housekeeping arrangements. Daisy is a very poor cook and she simply throws the things on the table, but it seems to me that my first duty is to the baby, so I try to put up with the discomforts as well as I can. It is hard to eat what she cooks since everything tastes exactly alike, but I try to swallow as much as I can because the doctor says that if I don't keep up my strength I shall have to stop nursing the baby. Wouldn't that be dreadful? It almost breaks my heart to think of it, and I am sure we'd never get any artificial food to agree with her. She is perfectly well now, the sweetest, fattest thing you ever saw, and a real beauty, and she is so devoted to me that she cries whenever I go out of her sight. I am never tired of watching her, and even when she is asleep I sit sometimes for an hour by her crib just thinking how pretty she looks with her eyes closed and wishing you could see her. Oliver says I spoil her to death, but how can a baby of seven months be spoiled. He doesn't enjoy her half as much as I do, and sometimes I almost think that he gets impatient of seeing her always in my arms. At first he absolutely refused to have her crib brought into our room, but when I cried, he gave in and was very sweet about it. I feel so ashamed sometimes of the way the house looks, but there doesn't seem to be any help for it because the doctor says if I let myself get tired it will be bad for the baby. Of course I wouldn't put my own health before his comfort, but I am obliged to think first of the baby, am I not? Last night, for instance, the poor little thing was ill with colic and I was up and down with her until daybreak. Then this morning she woke early and I had to nurse her and give her her bath, and, added to everything else, Daisy's cousin died and she sent word she couldn't come. I slipped on a wrapper before taking a bath or fixing my hair and ran down to try and get Oliver's breakfast, but the baby began to cry and he came after me and said he wanted to make the coffee himself. Then he brought a cup upstairs to me, but I was so tired and nervous that I couldn't drink it. He didn't seem to understand why, feeling as badly as I did, I wouldn't just put the baby back into her crib and make her stay there until I got some rest, but the little thing was so wide awake that I hadn't the heart to do it. Besides, it is so important to keep regular hours with her, isn't it? I don't suppose a man ever realizes how a woman looks at these things, but you will understand, won't you, mother? I am all alone in the house to-night because a play is in town that Oliver wanted to see and I made him go to it. He wanted to ask Mrs. Midden to sit downstairs (she has offered over and over again to do it) so that I might go too, but of course I wouldn't let him. I really couldn't have enjoyed it a minute for thinking of the baby, and besides I never cared for the theatre. Then, too, he doesn't know (for I never tell him) how very tired I am by the time night comes. Sometimes when Oliver comes home and we sit in the dining-room (we never use the drawing-room, because it is across the hall and I'm afraid I shouldn't hear the baby cry) it is as much as I can do to keep my eyes open. I try not to let him notice it, but one night when he read me the first act of a play he is writing, I went to sleep, and though he didn't say anything, I could see that he was very much hurt. He worries a good deal about my health, too, and he even went out one day and engaged a nurse without saying anything to me about it. After I had talked to her though, I saw that she would never do, so I sent her away before he came home. I wish I could get really strong and feel well again, but the doctor insists I never will until I get out of doors and use my muscles. But you stay in the house all the time and so did grandmother, so I don't believe there's a word of truth in what he says. Anyway, I go out every day now with the baby. Thank you so much for the little bands. They are just what I wanted. With dearest love, Your devoted VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. June 10, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Daisy left a week ago and we couldn't find another servant until to-day. I must say that I prefer coloured servants. They are so much more dependable. I didn't know until the evening before Daisy left that she was going, and I had to send Oliver straight out to see if he could find somebody to come in and help me. There wasn't a soul to be had until to-day, however, so for a week I was obliged to make Oliver get his dinner at the boarding-house. It doesn't make any difference what I have because I haven't a particle of appetite, and I'd just as soon eat tea and toast as anything else. Of course, but for the baby I could have managed perfectly well--but she has been so fretful of late that she doesn't let me put her down a minute. The doctor says her teeth are beginning to hurt her, and that I must expect to have trouble the first summer. She has been so well until now that he thinks it has been really remarkable. He tells me he never knew a healthier baby, but of course I am terribly anxious about her teething in the hot weather. If she grows much more fretful I'm afraid I shall have to take her to the country for July and August. It seems dreadful to leave Oliver all alone, but I don't see how I can help it if the doctor advises me to go. Oliver has gone to some musical comedy at the Academy to-night, and I am so tired that I am going to bed just as soon as I finish this letter. I hope and pray that the baby will have a quiet night. Don't you think that Daisy treated me very badly considering how kind I had been to her? Only a week ago when she was taken with pain in the night, I got up and made her a mustard plaster and sat by her bed until she felt easier. The next day I did all of her work, and yet she has so little gratitude that she could leave me this way when she knows perfectly well that I am worried to death about the baby's first summer. I'd give anything if I could go home in July as you suggest, but it is such a long trip, and the heat will probably be quite as bad in Dinwiddie as here. Of course, it would make all the difference in the world to me to be where I could have you to advise me about the baby, and I'd go to-morrow if it only wasn't so far. Mrs. Midden has told me of a boarding-house in the country not more than twenty miles from here where Oliver could come down every evening, and we may decide to go there for a month or two. I can't help feeling very anxious, especially as Mrs. Scott's little boy--he is just the age of baby--was taken ill the other night, and they thought he would die before they could get a doctor. This letter is full of my worries, but in spite of them I am the happiest woman that ever lived. Oliver is the best thing to me you can imagine, and the baby is so fascinating that I enjoy every minute I am with her. It is the greatest fun to watch her in her bath. I know you would simply go into raptures over her--and she is so bright that she already understands every word that I say. She grows more like Oliver all the time, and the other day while I was watching her playing with her rubber doll, she looked so beautiful that it almost frightened me. I am so glad dear father is well, and what you wrote me about John Henry's admiration for Susan interested me so much that I sat straight down and wrote to him. Why do you think that it is only friendship and that he isn't in love with her? If he really thinks her the "finest girl in the world," I should imagine he was beginning to be pretty serious. I am delighted to hear that he is going to take her to the festival. Tell Susan from me that I shall never be satisfied until she is as happy as I am. Mr. Treadwell was right, I believe, not to let her go to college, though of course I want dear Susan to have whatever she sets her heart on. But, when all is said, you were wise in teaching me that nothing matters to a woman except love. More and more I am learning that if we only love unselfishly enough, everything else will work out for good to us. My little worries can't keep me from being so blissfully happy that I want to sing all the time. Work is a joy to me because I feel that I am doing it for Oliver and the baby. And with two such treasures to live for I should be the most ungrateful creature alive if I ever complained. Your ever loving daughter, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY, July 1, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: We are leaving suddenly for the country, and I'll send our address just as soon as we get there. The doctor thinks I ought to take the baby away from town, so I am going to the boarding-house I wrote you about. Oliver will come down every evening--it's only an hour's trip. I am so tired from packing that I can't write any more. Lovingly, VIRGINIA. * * * * * MATOACA CITY. September 15, 1886. DEAREST MOTHER: Here we are back again in our home, and I was never so thankful in my life to get away from any place. I wrote you how dreadfully inconvenient it was, but it would take pages to tell you all of my experiences in the last few days. Such people you never saw in your life! And the food got so uneatable that I lived on crackers for the last fortnight. Fortunately, I was still nursing the baby, but the doctor has just told me that I must stop. I am so distressed about it. Do you think it will go hard with her after the first year? She is as fat and well as she can be now, but I live in hourly terror of her getting sick. If anything should happen

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