PART I—LIFE AT THE ELMS. Chapter I—Annie’s Story. THE DAUGHTERS.
 PART I—LIFE AT THE ELMS.
Chapter I—Annie’s Story.
THE DAUGHTERS.
There are three of us, Fanny and Annie (that is myself) and Katy, who is our half-sister and several years our junior. Her mother, a blue-eyed, golden-haired little woman from New Orleans, lived only a year after she came to us, and just before she died she took my sister’s hand and mine, and putting one of her baby’s between them, said, “Be kind to her as I would have been kind to you had I lived. God bless you all.”
 
We were only nine years old, but we accepted the trust as something sacred, and little Katy, who inherited all of her mother’s marvelous beauty and sweetness of disposition, never missed a mother’s love and care, and was the pet and darling of our household. Fanny and I are twins,—familiarly known as “Fan-and-Ann,”—and as unlike each other as it is possible for twins to be. Fan, who always passes for the elder, is half a head taller than I am, and very beautiful, with a stateliness and imperiousness of manner which would befit a queen, while I am shy 10and reticent and small, and only one has ever called me handsome. But his opinion is more to me than all the world, and so I am content, although as a young girl, I used sometimes to envy Fan her beauty, and think I would rather be known as “the pretty and proud Miss Hathern” than “the plain and good one,” a distinction often made between us, and one which I knew made me the more popular of the two.
 
Our home, which was sometimes called “The Elms,” on account of the great number of elm trees around it, was in the part of Virginia that felt the shock of the war the most, and when the thunder of artillery was shaking the hills around Petersburg and the air was black with shot and shell and the gutters ran red with human blood, Fanny and I, with little Katy between us, sat with blanched faces listening to the distant roar,—she thinking of the cause she had so much at heart and feared was lost, and I of the thousands of homes made desolate by the dreadful war which, it seemed to me, need never to have been. As we were southern born we naturally sympathized with the south,—that is, Fanny did,—while our father, who was born under the shadow of Bunker Hill, and rarely had any very decided opinions except for peace and good will everywhere, scarcely knew on which side he did stand. Both were right and both were wrong, he said, and he opposed secession with all his might, insisting that there must be some better method of settling the difficulty than by plunging the nation into a sea of carnage.
 
He was for “peace at any price,” and held the flag as a sacred thing, and at last when war was upon us, he reverently laid away in the garret the one with which we were wont to celebrate the Fourth of July, and night and morning prayed for both sides,—not that either might be 11victorious, but that they might settle the difficulty amicably and go home.
 
My mother, whom I can scarcely remember, was a Charlestonian, who believed in slavery as a divine institution, and was the kindest and gentlest of mistresses to the few negroes she brought with her to her Virginia home. For myself I scarcely knew what I did believe, except as I was swayed by a stronger spirit than my own, and that spirit was Fan’s. She was an out and out rebel, as we were called, and lamented that instead of a girl of thirteen she was not a man to join the first company of volunteers which went from Lovering. Situated as we were, near the frontier, we were fair prey for the soldiers on both sides, and they came upon us like the locusts of Egypt and spoiled us almost as badly as the Egyptians were spoiled by the Israelites, but from neither north nor south did we ever suffer a personal indignity. This was largely owing to our father’s incomparable tact in dealing with them. It seemed to me that he was always watching for them, and when he came in from the street, or the gate where he spent a great deal of his time, I could tell to a certainty whether we were to expect a Federal or a Confederate before he spoke a word. If it were the latter he came to me and said, “Annie, there are soldiers in town and if they come here, as they may, stay in your room until they are gone.” If it were the boys in blue, he went to Fan, but did not tell her to stay in her room. He knew she would not if he did, and he would say in his most conciliatory way, “Daughter, I think there are some Federals in the woods, and if they come here as they may because the house is large and handy, try and be civil to them, and don’t be afraid.”
 
“Afraid!” Fan would answer, with a flash in her black 12eyes. “Do you think I would be afraid if the entire northern army stood at our door!”
 
Then she would hurry off to warn the blacks in the kitchen and see that the coffee and sugar and tea were hidden away, while father walked down to the gate to receive the foremost of his unwelcome guests. With a courtly wave of the hand, which he might have borrowed from kings, he would say, “What can I do for you to-day? I suppose you are hungry, but we have been visited so often that we have not much left. Still I think we can give you something; but, gentlemen, I beg of you not to annoy or frighten my daughters. They are very young and their mother is dead.”
 
Whether it was what he said, or the way he said it, or both, his wishes so far as we were concerned were respected, and neither Fanny nor I ever came near a boy in blue or a boy in grey that he did not touch his cap to us, and when Fan’s sharp tongue got the better of her, as it often did, they only laughed, and told her to “dry up,” a bit of slang she did not then understand and resented hotly as a Yankee insult. They took our poultry and eggs and fruit and flour and finally all our negroes, except Phyllis, who had her bundle made up to go, and then found that her love for “Ole Mas’r” and the young “misseses” was stronger than her love for freedom.
 
On one occasion they took Black Beauty, Fan’s riding pony, but sent it back within a few hours. This was toward the close of the war, when Virginia was full of Federal troops, and for one day and night our place was turned into a kind of barracks by a company whose leader, Col. Errington, occupied our best room and took his meals with us. He was a tall, handsome man, with a splendid physique and the most polished manners I ever saw. But 13there was a cynical look about his mouth and a cold, hard expression in his grey eyes, which I did not like, while Fan detested him. She was then a beautiful girl of nearly seventeen, with a haughty bearing and frankness of speech which amused the northern officer, to whom she expressed her mind very freely, not only with regard to his calling, but also with regard to himself. But he took it all good-humoredly, and when he went away he kissed his hand to her, while to me he simply bowed.
 
“The wretch! How dare he!” Fanny said, with a stamp of her foot.
 
But she watched him until he disappeared from sight in the woods, through which there was a short cut in the direction of Petersburg. Most of his men followed him, but a few stragglers lingered behind for the sake of whatever they could find in the shape of eatables, and when at last they departed, Phyllis, who had been doing battle with them over a quantity of butternuts which she claimed as her special property, came running to the house with the startling information that “one dem blue coats done took off Miss Fanny’s pony, who kicked and snorted jes ’s if he knowed ’twas a fetched Yank who had cotched him.”
 
Rushing to the door we saw the pony going down the lane, or rather standing in the lane, for he had planted his forefeet firmly on the ground, and with mulish obstinacy refused to move. A sharp cut from the whip, however, brought him to terms, and he went galloping off with his heels in the air quite as often as upon terra firma. I think Fan followed him bareheaded for nearly a mile, but all her calls and entreaties were in vain. Black Beauty was gone, and she cried herself into a headache which lasted until night, when, just as we were sitting down to 14supper, Phyllis came near dropping the hot corn cakes she was putting upon the table in her surprise and delight as she exclaimed, “Bress de Lord, dar’s Black Beauty now.”
 
Looking from the window we saw a soldier in blue leading him toward the house and trying hard to hold him as he minced and pranced and shook his head in his delight to be home again. In a moment he was at the open door where he often came to be fed with sugar or cookies and Fan’s arms were around his neck and she was talking to him as if he was human and could understand her, while he whinnied in reply and rubbed his head against her face.
 
“Col. Errington sent you this with his compliments,” the soldier said, handing a note to Fan, which was as follows:
 
“Dear Miss Hathern
“I have just learned of the abduction of your pony, and am very sorry for the anxiety it must have caused you. I am sure it is yours, as you ran so far after him, and for that reason I should like to keep him for myself. But honor compels me to send him back.
 
“Hoping that you will not add the sin of thieving to my other enormities and that in the near future we may meet as friends instead of foes,
 
“I am, yours very truly,
“George W. Errington.”
Fan’s first impulse, after reading this, was to tear it up, but she changed her mind, and I heard her tell Phyllis to give the soldier some supper, if he wanted it.
 
“I suppose the tramp is hungry; they always are,” she said, apologetically, as her eyes wandered across the orchard to the enclosure on the hillside where, under the 15pine trees, our boy in grey was lying, with a boy in blue beside him.
 
That night I saw Fan put Col. Errington’s note in a little box on our dressing bureau, where she kept her few trinkets, but his name was not mentioned between us until after the fall of Richmond, when Jack Fullerton, our neighbor, who had been in the war and who knew about Fan’s pony and the officer, whom he teasingly called Fan’s Yankee, brought a Washington paper in which we read that Col. Errington, who was so severely wounded at Petersburg, was recovering rapidly and would soon be able to be moved into his house on Franklin Square.
 
“I suppose you are very glad that your gallant Colonel is getting well,” Jack said, and Fan replied, “Of course I am. Do you think me a murderess that I want any man to die.”
 
“I thought at one time you would like to exterminate the entire Federal army,” Jack said, and Fan replied, “So I would, and I have no love for them now; but can’t a body change some of his views?”
 
And, truly, Fan’s views were greatly changed from what they were at the beginning of the war, to which time I must go back for a little and tell of the boy in grey and the boy in blue, who brought the change and who, though dead, have much to do with this story.
Chapter II—An Episode. THE BOY IN GREY AND THE BOY IN BLUE.

I have written of Dr. Hathern’s daughters, but have said nothing of his son, our brother Charlie, who was four years our senior and little more than a boy when the war broke out. Too young by far to join the army, father and I said. But Fan thought differently, and when the clouds of strife grew darker and denser and there were calls for more recruits she urged him on until at last he enlisted and we saw him with others march away on the Monday after the Easter of ’62. How handsome he was in his new uniform, and how proud we were of him, he was so tall and straight, with such a sunny smile on his boyish face and in his laughing blue eyes.
 
“Bress de boy; he look like Sol’mon in all his best clos’,” Phyllis said, regarding him admiringly when he put them on, “an’ though I spec’s I’se a mighty bad un seein’ I’se a nigger and one of Linkum’s folks, I hope he’ll beat ’em sho’.”
 
“Beat them! Of course we shall!” Fan said, putting her arms around Charlie’s neck and laying a hand on the shoulder of Jack Fullerton, who had also enlisted. “Of course we shall beat them. The Northerners are all cowards. One or two battles will end the matter and you will come marching home covered with glory.”
 
She was talking mostly to Jack, flashing upon him a look from her bright eyes which would have made a less brave man face the cannon’s mouth. Jack had been my hero since my earliest remembrance, although I knew 17that he preferred Fan, who was tall and fair and comely, while I was short and dark and homely. It was mainly owing to her influence that he had enlisted, and he was to dine with us that Easter Day as his father was dead and his mother, who was an invalid, was away at some springs. How bright we made the house with the lilies Charlie was so fond of, saying they made him think of his mother and the angels, and I never see one now, nor inhale its perfume, that it does not bring Charlie back to me as he was that last day at home when there were great bowls of them on the mantels and stands and dinner table, which was loaded with every delicacy Phyllis could devise. The rooms looked as if decked for a bridal, but they seemed like a funeral, we were all so sad, except Fan. She was in the wildest of spirits and talked of the next Easter when the war would be over, and Charlie with us again, wearing shoulder straps may be, or at all events covered with honor as a soldier who had done his duty.
 
“You are not going to be shot, but to shoot somebody,” she said, patting him on his back. “And we’ll trim the house up better than it is to-day, and Phyllis shall make her best plum pudding, and I shall be so proud of you,” she added, throwing her arms around his neck, and kissing him lovingly.
 
The next morning he went away and we saw him marching by to the sound of the fife and drum, while I cried as if my heart would break, but Fanny stood upon the horse block by the gate and sent kisses after him until a turn in the road hid him from our sight. We heard from him often during the summer, for many men from our county were in the same regiment, and so, from one and another and from himself word came to us that he was well and had as yet seen no actual fighting, though very 18anxious to do so. Then the tone of his letters changed a little and he was not quite so ready to fight.
 
“I tell you what, Fan-and-Ann,” he wrote, “the boys in blue are not such milksops as you think. I have seen quite a lot of ’em, and they are a pretty good sort after all, and they gave me tobacco and hard tack and a newspaper, and said they’d nothing against me personally, but they had enlisted to lick just such upstarts and were going to do it. I’d smile to see them.”
 
“And so would I,” Fan said, with the utmost scorn, “lick us indeed! I wish I were a man!”
 
She was growing more bitter every day, and when one evening Phyllis came to me privately and said there was a half-starved Federal soldier hiding in the corn-field, I did not dare tell Fan, but went to him with Phyllis after dark and carried him bread and milk and a blanket to cover him and an umbrella to shield him from the rain. The third day he went away and I never heard from him again until the war was over, when I received a badly written letter, directed wrong side up and signed James Josh, who thanked me for my kindness which he had never forgotten. I passed the letter to Fan, who surprised me by saying, “Yes, I knew all about it; I saw you steal off into the corn-field and saw you feeding that poor wretch, and only a thought of Charlie and what I’d wish someone to do for him kept me from giving notice that a Yankee was hiding in our field. I knew when he went away and saw you and Phyllis coddle him up with sandwiches and hoe-cake and father’s old coat, and you took me to task for flirting in front of the house with Jack Fullerton, who was home on a furlough, when I was really trying to keep him as long as possible so as to let your James Josh get out of the way.”
 
19Fanny was greatly softened at that time and not much like the fierce, outspoken girl who kept us up to fever heat during the second year of the war when the weeks and months dragged so slowly until at last it was winter and news came of the terrible battle of Fredericksburg, when the woods were filled with the dead and dying and the river ran red with blood. Three days after the battle they brought Charlie to us dead, with a bullet in his side and a look of perfect peace on his young face, smooth yet and fair as a girl’s. Some of his friends had found him in the woods, and rather than leave him there had at the risk of their own lives managed to have him carried across the country until at the close of the third day he lay in our best room where so many lilies had been when he went away, but which now echoed to father’s sobs and mine as we bent over our dead boy. Fan never shed a tear, but in a cold, hard voice told the men where to put the body, and then with a start, exclaimed, “What does this mean?” and she pointed to his uniform, which was not the grey he had worn away, but the blue she so hated, and which was much too small for him.
 
“Some thief exchanged with him, for see, there is no hole where the bullet struck him,” she continued, looking at the coat which was stained with blood, but whole. “Phyllis, come here,” she went on, while father and I sat dumb and helpless, “take off that garb of a dog and put his own clothes on him, his best ones, hanging in his room.”
 
Phyllis obeyed, and when the soiled and bloody garments lay upon the floor, Fan said, “give me the tongs, I am going to burn them up.”
 
Then father arose and reaching out his shaking hands saved the blue uniform from the flames.
 
20“Wait, Fan,” he said; “there may be something in the pockets which will tell us whose clothes they are. Remember there are more aching hearts than ours.”
 
He was feeling in the trousers pockets where securely pinned in the bottom of one was the half sheet of paper which we had fastened in the top of Charlie’s cap because it was too large. The paper was written over in a scrawly hand which was not Charlie’s, and Fan read it aloud with the tears streaming down her cheeks, just as mine are falling now, as I copy it verbatim:
 
“Dear Father and Fan-and-Ann:
“I am dying under a tree in the woods with a bullet in me and a boy’s cap stuffed into the wound to keep the blood back, while I tell him what to write. Lucky Fan-and-Ann thought to put that paper in my cap. The boy, who is a Yankee, found me and brought me some water and covered me with his coat when I got cold and stuffed his cap into the hole and cried over me, and I cried too, and we’ve talked it over and are as sorry as we can be—about the war, I mean. I hope I didn’t kill anybody and he hopes he didn’t, and his left hand is almost shot away and hurts him awful, but he’s going to stick to me till I’m dead. Then I’ve told him how to find his way to you and tell you about me, and you must take care of him and not let them get him. He don’t want to go to prison, and I don’t want to have him, and he’s going to change clothes with me so as to look like a confederate. We’ve said the Lord’s Prayer together, and Now I lay me, and the Creed, and dearly beloved, and everything we could think of and he knows them just as I do and I reckon I’m all right with God, only I’d like to die at home. It’s getting dark and the boy is tired and I am faint. Kiss little Katy for me. I wish I could see you all again.
 
“Good-bye, be kind to the boy. Give my respects to Phyllis.
 
“Charlie.”
21This was the letter and I need not say that the blue uniform was not burned; neither did I know what became of it until after the funeral was over and I had courage to go into my brother’s room where I found it hanging on the wall and over it the Stars and Stripes which Fan had brought from their hiding place and put above the faded blue, from which the blood stains could not be effaced, although Phyllis had washed it two or three times. Every day Fan and I went in and looked at it and cried over it and talked of The Boy and wondered who he was and when, if ever, he would come.
 
“What shall you do if he does?” I asked her once, but she only glared at me like a tiger and I was glad to escape from the scornful gleam of her eyes.
 
And thus the weeks glided into months and it was spring again and the Virginia woods were lovely in their dress of green; the robins were building their nests in the trees and the lilies we were to lay on Charlie’s grave at Easter were just breaking into bloom. Father had gone to visit a patient, Katy was at school, and Fan and I sat by the dining-room fire when Phyllis came in, and, cautiously shutting the door, said in a mysterious whisper, “He’s done come.”
 
“Who has come?” I asked, and Phyllis replied, “The Boy, to be sho’; him you’re spectin’, honey, Mas’r Charles’s boy, and oh, de Lord, such a bag of bones, and so scar’t for fear he’ll be took.”
 
“Where is he?” Fan asked, springing to her feet.
 
“In my cabin, in course. Whar should he be?” was Phyllis’s answer, and in a moment Fan and I were on our way to the cabin, the door of which we could not open.
 
“Go to the windy behine de cabin, honey,” Phyllis said, puffing after us like an engine.
 
22We went to the rear window, which was open, and through which Fan darted like a cat, while I followed almost as quickly. Against the door a most heterogenous mass of furniture was piled. A table, two wooden chairs, a wash tub, iron kettle, stewpan, skillet and billet of wood, while a large nail was driven over the latch.
 
“What upon earth is this for. I should think you were shutting out an army,” Fan said, and Phyllis, who had managed to squeeze through the window, replied, “An’ so I is, de Federate’s army, too. I’se not gwine to have him took, an’ he beggin’ of me not to; I’ll spill my heart’s blood first.”
 
She had seized a big rolling pin which she flourished energetically, looking as if she might keep a whole regiment at bay.
 
“Move those things and open that door,” Fan said authoritatively, and then we turned our attention to the boy, lying on Phyllis’s bed, a mere skeleton, with masses of light curly hair and great sunken blue eyes which looked up at us so pitifully as we bent over him.
 
“You won’t let ’em get me?” he whispered, with a faint smile, “I am so sick and my head aches so, and my hand is so bad. He said you were good, but I didn’t know there were two of you; which is Fan-an-Ann?”
 
Fan and I looked curiously at each other a moment; then, remembering that Charlie always spoke of us as Fan-an-Ann, and that it was so written in the letter, we understood his mistake. But it was Fan who answered, for I could only stand and cry over this wreck of a boy, with Charlie’s battered clothes upon him, too long and large every way, and covered with soil and blood stains. What remained of his left hand was bound in a dirty rag and quivered with pain as it lay on the coarse blanket.
 
23“What shall we do?” I asked at last, and Fan answered in her imperious way, which always made one feel small.
 
“Do! Go to the house and get Charlie’s bed ready, and bring me his dressing gown and a shirt and drawers from his trunk. This is no time to cry.”
 
I knew then that Lee’s entire army could not wrest that boy from Fan, who helped Phyllis remove his stiff garments and wash the aching limbs, scarcely larger than sticks, and who herself undid the bandage from the wounded hand which she bathed so carefully and bound up so skillfully in the lint and linen which I brought her; then, when all was done, she wrapped a blanket around him and took him in her own strong arms, not daring to trust him to Phyllis, who weighed a hundred and eighty and was apt to stumble. It was curious to see Fan, who had been so bitter against the north, carrying that Yankee boy up to the house and laying him on Charlie’s bed, at the foot of which, on the wall, his own uniform was hanging. He saw it at once, for his eyes seemed to see everything, and with a smile on his white face, he said, “Why, there’s my old clothes. They were too small for him but I managed to get them on him as he told me, and I pinned the letter in his pockets, thinking if he got to you and I didn’t, you’d know; did you find it?”
 
“Yes,” Fan answered, “and now tell me why you were so long in coming?”
 
He was very weak and could only talk at intervals in whispers, as he replied, “I lost the way and was sick in a negro’s cabin ever so long. They took as good care of me as they could and hid me away when danger was near,—sometimes under the bed, and once in the pounding barrel, and once in the meal chest, where I was nearly smothered.”
 
24“Hid you from what?” Fan asked, and he replied, with a gleam in his blue eyes, “From the rebels, of course, don’t you know I’m a Yank?”
 
“Yes; go on and tell us of Charlie,” Fan said, a little sharply, and he went on very slowly and stopping sometimes with closed eyes, as if he were asleep.
 
“I was in the battle,—Fredericksburg, you know. It was awful. ’Twas the first I had really been in, and I was so scar’t, and wanted to run away, but couldn’t; when I got over it I guess I was crazy with the roar and shouts and yells from horses and dying men. Did you ever hear a thousand men scream in mortal pain?”
 
Fan shook her head and he continued: “It’s awful, but the horses are the worst; I hear them now. I shall always hear them till I die.”
 
He stopped and there came a look upon his face which we feared was death. But Fan bathed his forehead with eau-de-cologne and moistened his lips with water until he revived, and said, “Where did I leave off. Oh, yes, I know; till I die. I got over being scar’t and fought like a bloodhound and wanted to kill them all. I am sorry now and hope I didn’t kill any one. Do you think I did?”
 
Fan did not answer, and he continued: “When it was over, I got separated from our army somehow and wandered in the woods and cried, my hand ached so, and I was so cold and hungry. Then I heard somebody crying harder than I, or groaning like, and I hunted till I found him under a tree, all bloody and white. I knew he was a boy in grey, but I didn’t care, nor he either; we was boys together, and I knelt down by him and told him I was sorry and asked what I could do.”
 
“‘Write to Fan-an-Ann,’ he said, and I wrote it on a stone, and my hand hurt me so; we said some prayers 25together, Our Father, and Now I lay me, and some more that we made up about forgiving us and going to Heaven; and he’s all right and was awfully sorry about the war, and so am I, and when he got took in his head he talked of Easter and the lilies which you have then, and said he could smell them, and he said a good deal about Fan-an-Ann. And then I took his head in my lap and kissed him and he kissed me for his father and for Fan-an-Ann, and he said I was to tell her he was not afraid, for he was going to his mother, and then he died—Oh, yes, he said something about little Katy and kissing her. Don’t cry, it makes me feel so bad,” and opening his great blue eyes he looked at Fan, down whose face the tears were running like rain, and who, stooping down, pressed her lips to those of the boy who had kissed our dying brother.
 
“Go on,” she said softly, and he went on: “I changed clothes as he told me and prayed that his folks might find him and bring him to you and that I might get here, too, and not be taken prisoner, and I have, but the way was so long and hard and I am so tired and sick and sorry. You won’t let them get me, sure?”
 
“Never!” and Fan made me think of some wild animal guarding its young, as she drew the sheet over the boy, whose mind began to wander and from whom we could extract but little more and that little was very unsatisfactory.
 
It was Fan who talked most with him and who asked him his name.
 
“My real one, or the one I had with the boys?” he said, and she replied, “your real one, so I can write to your mother.”
 
There was a look of cunning in his bright eyes, as he replied, “I hain’t no mother, except Aunt Martha, and 26she won’t care, and I don’t want her to know. I ran away from her and enlisted after a while. I was Joe with the boys, but that ain’t the name they gave me in baptism. Do you know the Apostles?”
 
“Yes.”
 
“Well, I am one of them. Now guess,” he said, and beginning with Matthew and ending with Paul Fan went over the entire list, but the expression of the boy’s face never changed in the least; nor did he give any sign when she spoke his name, if she did speak it.
 
“Joe will do,” he said. “Aunt Martha has washed her hands of me a good many times. She was always washing them. She don’t mind whether I am Joe or an Apostle.”
 
“But where is your home? Where does Aunt Martha live?” Fan asked, and he replied, “She don’t live there now.”
 
Evidently he did not care to talk of his home, which could not have been a very happy one, judging from what he did say. He called me Ann-an-Fan, while Fan was Fan-an-Ann, and his eyes brightened when she came near him, and he smiled upon her in a way which always brought the tears.
 
“You are just as good as northern folks,” he said to her once, “and I am sorry I came down to lick you; I wish I had something to give you. Where are my trousers?” Phyllis had washed and ironed the ragged greys and put back in the pocket everything she found there—a jews-harp, a ball of twine, some nails, and a pearl handled knife with three blades, two of which were broken; this with the jews-harp he gave to Fan to remember him by, he said.
 
“Carlyle gave me the knife one Christmas, and I gave him a lead pencil. I couldn’t get anything more, for I 27hadn’t any money. I’d been bad; I was always bad, and Aunt Martha wouldn’t give me any,” he said, and when Fan asked him who Carlyle was, he answered, “Oh, a boy I used to know and like. If you see him tell him so, and that I have never told that he took the cake, and wouldn’t if I lived to be a hundred. Aunt Martha whaled me for it, and my, didn’t she put it on; I was too big to be thrashed, and I ran away not long after that, and went to a grocery and then to the war, and she thinks now that I stole the cake!”
 
This was all we could possibly get from him, and we did not know how much reliance to put upon it, he was delirious so much of the time.
 
At first father thought to amputate his hand but finally gave that up. It was useless to torture him, he said, as he could not last long, and he did not. It was Monday evening when he came to us and he lingered for three days, sometimes sleeping quietly and sometimes raving about the war and Charlie and the long weary road he had traveled to reach us and Fan-an-Ann and Ann-an-Fan, clinging most to Fan, who watched him day and night as tenderly as if it had been Charlie instead of one of the race she had affected to hate. Once he seemed to be at his old home, and in fear of punishment, for he begged piteously of Aunt Martha to spare him from something, we could not tell what, and he asked us twice not to let her find him, saying he would not go back to her. Again he spoke of a little out of the way town in Maine which Fan wrote down for future reference. Everything about him was wrapped in mystery except the fact that he was there with us, the boy who had cared for our dying brother and for whom we cared to the last. When the morning of Good Friday dawned he sank into a stupor from 28which we thought he would never awaken, but when the church bell rang for service he started up and opening his eyes said to Fan, “What’s that? Is it Sunday and must I go to Sunday School? I hain’t my lesson.”
 
“It is Good Friday,” Fan replied, and he continued: “Oh, yes; Good Friday, and Easter; I know. We had ’em down in Maine, and the lilies, too, that he told me about in the woods, and I once spoke a piece. Do you want to hear it?”
 
Fan nodded, and raising himself in bed, he began:
 
Softly now the Easter sunlight
Falls on Judea’s wooded hills,
Shining redly through the tree tops,
Lighting up the running rills.
While all things in earth and heaven
Sing aloud with one acclaim
Glory in the highest, Glory,
Glory be to Jesus’ name.
“There was a lot more, but I can’t remember how it goes. Carlyle spoke a piece, too, and did first rate for a little shaver. I taught it to him, but ’twas hard work, as he’d rather play with Don,—that’s the dog. Tell him good-bye, and good-bye Fan-an-Ann, and Ann-an-Fan. Queer that there’s two of you. I don’t believe he knew, but I’ll tell him, and that they were good to me and didn’t let ’em catch me. Now say ‘Our Father,’ for I am getting sleepy, and it is growing dark.”
 
It was Fan who said it; I could not speak, for I saw the death pallor gather on the face of the boy, who repeated with Fan the familiar words.
 
“That makes it about square with me and Jesus, and I guess that he won’t turn off a poor boy like me,” he said, and then for a time he was back again at Fredericksburg, fighting like a little bear; then with Charlie in the woods 29singing a low lullaby such as mothers sing to their restless infants; then in the meal chest and under the bed and in the pounding barrel, shivering with fear, and at last with Fan-an-Ann, who he said was a brick. Then he seemed to listen intently, and whispered, “Hark. Don’t you hear the guns? how they bang away; and how red the river runs; and how fast the men go down! Oh, God, have pity on us all.”
 
For a moment he lay quiet; then, rousing again, called out triumphantly, “The war is over; the victory is won; Hurrah for——.” He meant to say “The boys in blue.” He had said it often in his delirium, but something in Fan’s eyes checked him, and after looking steadily at her an instant he raised his right arm in the air and called out in a clear, shrill voice, “Hurrah for Fan-an-Ann; three cheers and a tiger, too!” then the hand dropped upon his breast and The Boy was dead.
 
The neighbors for miles around had heard of him and many had come to us bringing delicacies and flowers and offering assistance, if it were needed. The aid Fan declined, but took the flowers and fruit to the boy, telling him who sent them.
 
“They are very kind,” he said. “I guess I’m some reconstructed, though I am a Yank yet and stick to the flag. Yes, sir!”
 
Neither Fan nor I could repress a smile at the energy with which he asserted his loyalty to his cause, and neither liked him the less for it. Fan, too, must have been “some reconstructed,” for she cared for him to the last as tenderly as if he had been her brother, and when he was dead, she with Phyllis made him ready for the grave, crying over him as she had not cried when Charlie died. Then her tears would not come, but now they fell in torrents 30as she brushed his wavy hair, which had grown rather long and lay in soft rings about his forehead, giving him the look of a young girl, rather than a boy, whose age we could not guess. We cut off two or three of his curls and put them, with the letter he had written for Charlie, into the pocket of the blue uniform which, with the grey, we left hanging on the wall in Charlie’s room.
 
We buried him on Easter day, and he had the largest funeral ever seen in the neighborhood, for everybody came, and his coffin, over which we hung the Federal flag, was heaped with lilies, which were afterwards dropped into his grave. Then we tried to find his friends, but with only Aunt Martha and Carlyle and the little town in Maine to guide us, it proved a fruitless task.
 
Fan wrote to the postmaster of the town in Maine, giving all the particulars, and after two months or more she received an answer from the postmaster’s wife, who said that during the first year of the war a company had gone from an adjoining town and in it was a boy, who gave his name as Joseph Wilde. He was a comparative stranger in town and had been for a short time in the employ of a grocer, who spoke very highly of him. But where he came from no one knew, or if he had any friends. And that was all we could learn of “The Boy,” whom we buried on the hillside beside our brother. At the head of his grave is a plain marble slab, and on it “The Boy, who died Good Friday, 1863.” This was Fan’s idea, and every Decoration Day after the war was over she used to hang the Stars and Bars over Charlie’s grave and the Stars and Stripes over the grave of The Boy, who has slept there now for many a year and will sleep there until from the North and the South, the East and the West, the boys 31in blue and the boys in grey will come together, a vast army, and what was crooked to them here will be made plain and we, who now see through a glass darkly, will then see face to face in the light of the Resurrection morning.
Chapter III. AFTER THE WAR.

We had done our best to win and had failed. We were conquered, but in Lovering at least we accepted the situation and rejoiced for the peace and quiet which came to us with the disappearance of the soldiers from our soil. Even Fan was glad to go to bed feeling sure that her sleep would not be disturbed by the tramp of horses’ feet or the clamor of hungry men for food and shelter. Our little town had been visited so often by both armies and levied on so frequently for means to carry on the war that its people were greatly impoverished. Whether it were that our house was larger and our accommodations generally more ample, or that our father’s manner of receiving an unwelcome visitor was different from our neighbors, we seemed to have suffered most. Our horses and cows and sheep were gone. Our negroes were gone with the exception of Phyllis, who, after her first attempt to leave, stood firmly by us, refusing wages after she knew she was free.
 
Only poor white truck work for pay, and she wasn’t one of them, she said.
 
Our timber was damaged for the soldiers had cut down the trees in our woods for their camp fires, and worst of all our father’s patients were mostly gone. Belonging to the old school, in which he believed as he did in his religion, he adhered strictly to his morphine and calomel, and when a young physician from Richmond opened an office 32in town, with little bottles and little pills, and prices to correspond, the people flocked to him, and father was left with only a few patients and a long list of uncollectible bills against some of the deserters. Both Fan and I inclined to homeopathy and urged him to adopt it to some extent, but he shook his head. He had sat on the fence during the war, he said, and received only kicks from either side, and now he should stick to his principles and allopathy if he starved. We did not starve, but we were at times in great straits. Fan and I made over our old dresses for ourselves and little Katy, and we brushed and mended father’s clothes, which, in spite of our care grew more and more threadbare and shabby until his dress coat was the only garment which was not shiny and had not more or less darns in it. This he always wore to dinner, partly from habit, partly to please us, and more I think to please old Phyllis, who felt that the glory of the family had not quite departed so long as the swallow tail appeared at dinner, even if it were laid aside the moment the meal was over. There was no denying the fact that grim poverty was staring us in the face, and no one felt it more keenly than Phyllis, who, although she would take nothing from us, offered to hire out for wages which she would give to us. This we would not allow, and we struggled on through the summer, raising and selling what we could from our land, which we all worked together, and living on as little as it was possible for five people to live upon. Fan suffered the most, she was so proud and so luxurious in her tastes and so averse to any thing like economy.
 
“I’d do anything for money,” she said one day to Jack Fullerton, who was helping us pick our grapes, which he was to sell for us in Petersburg.
 
33Jack had won his shoulder-straps and was a lieutenant when the war closed, but he dropped the title with his uniform and was only Jack to us,—a handsome, honest-hearted young man, whom everybody liked, whom I adored in secret, and whom Fan worried and teased and flirted with outrageously. She knew he loved her, and I believed she loved him in return. But she encouraged him one day and repelled him the next, saying often in his presence that she should never marry unless the man had money and it would be useless for one without it to offer himself to her.
 
“Then I’d better not do it,” Jack would say, jokingly, with the most intense love burning in his eyes and sounding in his voice.
 
“No, you’d better not, if you don’t want me to refuse to speak to you again,” she would answer, with a laugh and a look which only made him more in love than ever.
 
He knew she cared for him, and that it was only the barrier of poverty which stood between them. And so they joked and quarreled and made up, and he was with us every day, helping in the garden and yard and at last with the grapes, of which we had quantities that year. Father was in Boston, where he had gone on some business which he hoped might result in a little profit. While there he had, through the influence of a friend, been called to see a Mrs. Haverleigh, who was very ill. As her family physician was in Europe she had asked him to attend her until she was better. To this he had consented and had been gone from home three or four weeks. Knowing that our grapes must be picked Jack had offered his services and on a lovely September morning we were all out by the vines filling the baskets with great purple clusters of fruit which Jack sometimes cut for us and sometimes Fan, 34who was in wild spirits. She had taken her turn at cutting and was sitting half way up the step-ladder, looking very lovely and picturesque against the green background, in her old black skirt and scarlet jacket, with the bright color in her face and her hair blowing around her forehead. A handsome carriage drawn by a span of fine horses had gone by. Its occupants,—a gentleman and lady,—seemed to be scanning our house curiously. We could see the lady distinctly and felt sure she was from some city, Richmond presumably, and Fan was speculating about her and wishing she could ride in her carriage, when I heard a step on the grass, and a tall distinguished-looking man came towards us. In his citizen’s dress I did not at once recognize him; but Fan did, and, without coming from her perch, exclaimed, “Col. Errington!”
 
Then I knew the handsome officer, who had once been our guest and who now greeted us with the smile I remembered so well, because it had in it something so cold and patronizing.
 
“Good afternoon, Colonel,” Fan said to him. “You have come back to see your conquered enemies, I suppose. We heard of your promotion and of the bullet wound some of our boys gave you at Petersburg. Was it in your back?”
 
She was very saucy, and for an instant a hot color flamed into the Colonel’s face, and there came into his grey eyes a red look such as I had seen once or twice when he was quartered upon us and his men displeased him. But it quickly faded under the spell of Fan’s beauty, and the light which flashed from her eyes and belied her words.
 
Laughing good-humoredly, the colonel replied, “Rebellious as ever, I see; I hoped I might find you reconstructed.”
 
35“Not a bit of it,” Fan said, stepping down from the ladder and running her fingers through her hair, by which means she left a long mark of grape juice on her forehead. “We are just as big rebels as ever. You beat us because you had more men and money, and we were obliged to give up. It was like a big dog fighting a little dog, which has just as much courage and more, too, than the big one, but is finally worn out by strength rather than by skill. Do you see the point?”
 
“Yes, I see,” he said, “and in Constantinople I have also seen the big dog, after the fight was over, take the little one in its paws and toss it up and fondle it as if there had been no bone of contention. I hope it may be so in this case.”
 
There was no mistaking the admiration with which the Colonel regarded Fan. Jack saw it and drew a step nearer to her, while she answered hotly, “Never! We are not Turks, and only a dog would suffer itself to be fondled by the hand which had whipped it.” Then she added with a laugh: “Don’t let us quarrel over spilled milk, but let me present to you my friend, Lieut. Fullerton, Col. Errington.”
 
During the skirmish between the Colonel and Fan, I had mentally contrasted the two men, Jack and the Colonel, between whose ages there was a difference of several years. Both were tall and erect, with a bearing which comes only from military discipline. By the majority of people the Colonel would have been called the finer looking, as he was the more distingué, with his polish and air of fashion and city breeding. But to me he bore no comparison to Jack Fullerton, with his honest face and kindly smile and eyes which met yours fearlessly. His clothes were shabby and country made, it is true; his 36shoes were worn and grey, and his hands were not as soft and white as those which the Colonel had a trick of rubbing together as he talked, and on one of which a small diamond was shining. But they were helpful hands, ready always for service both to friend or foe, and in his heart no passions had ever stirred like those which at times showed themselves on Col. Errington’s face.
 
After the introduction the two men, who had fought against each other in more than one battle, shook hands as cordially as if they had been old friends and for a few moments chatted together pleasantly. Then, turning to Fan, the Colonel explained that he had come to Petersburg on business and that his sister Cornelia, who kept his house in Washington, had accompanied him. Remembering his visit to our neighborhood a little more than a year ago, and desirous to see the place again, he had suggested to his sister that they drive out from Petersburg.
 
“We started early,” he said, “and have enjoyed ourselves immensely. Cornie is delighted with your Virginia scenery. She is at the Golden Horn, and if agreeable to you I will bring her to call.”
 
Both Fan and I gasped at the thought of so great a lady, as we felt sure Miss Cornelia Errington must be, coming to call upon us. But we soon rallied and said we should be pleased to see her, and then to my amazement Fan added: “We would invite you to lunch if we were going to have anything but potatoes, green corn, hoe-cake and grapes. We don’t have very elaborate meals since you Yankees spoiled us.”
 
The Colonel took no notice of the last remark, but said: “Grapes, hoe-cake, green corn and baked potatoes, the four things I like best in all the culinary department, and 37so does Cornie; we’ll come. To say the truth I did not much like the looks of the Golden Horn. What time do you lunch?”
 
Fan told him, and then extended an invitation to Jack to lunch with us. But he declined, and I could see a shadow on his face as he walked away from the house, followed soon by the Colonel, who was going for his sister.
 
“Fanny Hathern!” I exclaimed, when we were alone, “are you crazy to ask those people here when you know we’ve nothing fit to offer them.”
 
“What is good enough for us is good enough for them,” Fan answered, proudly, starting for the kitchen and a conference with Phyllis, while I began to put our rooms in order for the expected visitors.
 
Cornelia Errington, whom her brother called Cornie, was a very handsome woman of twenty-eight or thirty, but seemingly as cold as a block of marble, except when she smiled. Then the whole expression of her face changed as completely as if she had been another person. She was born in New York, but had lived many years in Washington, where she superintended her brother’s house. She was highly accomplished, had traveled extensively, knew the best people everywhere, and was in every sense a lady. She met us very graciously, and affected to be delighted with our rambling old Virginia house; which she said was her ideal of a planter’s home, with its great airy rooms, wide hall and broad piazzas.
 
“But my papa ain’t a planter, he’s a doctor and a gentleman,” Katy said.
 
She had been greatly impressed with the lady’s manner and dress and diamond rings, and evidently wished to impress her in turn with her father’s greatness. Drawing Katy to her and stroking her golden hair Miss Errington 38replied, “I am sure he is a gentleman, whether he is a doctor or a farmer, and you are a dear little creature. Was it you I heard singing in the yard before lunch?”
 
Katy was always singing and so accustomed were we to it that we seldom paid much attention, except sometimes to wonder if it were she or the canary bird in its cage trilling so loud and clear. Now, however, we remembered to have heard her imitating a mocking bird just before Phyllis, with her red turban built up five or six inches higher than usual, announced with a low courtesy that lunch was served. There was in the room our old piano brought from Charleston by our mother and seldom used for neither Fan nor I were very musical. Going up to it Miss Errington ran her fingers up and down the keys in a way which showed that she was mistress of the instrument.
 
“Shocking!” she said, involuntarily, then apologetically to Fan, “I beg your pardon, but with such a voice in embryo as that I heard outside you ought to have a better piano;” then to Katy, “Sing to me, child, something, I don’t care what.”
 
Nothing could suit Katy better. She had often sang alone in school and Sunday school, and striking her stage attitude, as Fan called it she sang as I had never heard her sing before, soaring up and up until she touched high C without the slightest effort or break in her voice.
 
“You will be a second Patti, you sing just as I have heard she sang when a child,” Miss Errington said when Katy finished. Then, turning to us, she continued: “Do you know there is a fortune in that voice. She must have instruction; the best, too, there is to be had, and one day you will be proud when she stands before thousands and holds them spellbound as she has me, even with her simple songs.”
 
39Miss Errington was evidently an enthusiast in music, but Fan cut her short by saying scornfully, “Do you think a daughter of Dr. Hathern would ever go on the stage? Never! We have not fallen so low as that, poor as we are. I’d rather see her dead.”
 
She was greatly excited, and Miss Errington looked at her wonderingly, while Katy pulled Fan’s dress and whispered, “What is it? What did I do? Didn’t I sing well?”
 
“Yes, too well; never sing again,” Fan answered fiercely, and Katy replied, half crying, “But I must; I can’t help it; it will come; it would choke me if I didn’t.”
 
“Choke, then,” Fan said, while the Colonel, who had listened with an expression, half cynical and half amused, on his face, now spoke and said, “Quite a tempest in a teapot over nothing; Cornie is music mad, and the child certainly has a wonderful voice for one so young.”
 
Just then a robin flew down upon a sprig of honeysuckle near the window and began to trill its evening song; quick as thought Katy darted through the door, and unmindful of Fan’s injunction never to sing again, began to imitate the bird, which stopped a moment and poising itself first on one foot and then upon the other looked around for the fellow-songster it seemed to think was near it.
 
“I never heard anything like it,” Miss Errington said. “That talent must be cultivated, but she must not strain her voice while growing. I see no reason why she should not have as much a night as Patti, or if you object so to the stage, there are the churches where she could command a large salary.”
 
As she spoke her eyes wandered about the room and I felt sure they were taking an inventory of our faded carpet and worn, old-fashioned furniture. She seemed to 40me more and more like a woman accustomed to dictate and to have her own way, and I could not rid myself of a feeling that having once seen Katy she would not readily forget her. The songs outside had ceased by this time; the robin had flown away, and the child had disappeared. Col. Errington had Fan all to himself at one end of the piazza to which we had repaired, and I was listening to a dissertation from Miss Errington on the best method for removing stains and spots from old carpets and dresses and feeling sure she had seen them in ours and was taking this way to instruct me. We had heard the whistle of the mail train from the east, and twenty minutes later Black Beauty went galloping down the lane at one side of the house with Katy on his back, bareheaded, with her fair hair blowing in the wind and her face turned smilingly towards us as she passed. We were expecting a letter from father and she was going to the Postoffice, as she often did on Black Beauty, saddleless and sometimes bridleless, for she was a fearless little rider and Black Beauty the most gentle of beasts.
 
“See, Cornie, that is the pony I told you about, the one some of my rascally soldiers stole,” the Colonel said to his sister, who looked admiringly after the horse and rider, saying, “Upon my word, she sits the creature well, and without a saddle, too. She has more than one accomplishment.”
 
“You will be advising us next to train her for a circus,” Fan said sarcastically, but Miss Errington did not reply, and went on giving me good advice until Katy came cantering back, holding a letter in her hand and reining Beauty up to the side of the piazza.
 
Springing from his back and handing the letter to me she stood holding the pony by the mane, while Miss Errington 41bent forward and began to examine him with the eye of a connoisseur.
 
“Really,” she said to her brother, “he is a beauty and no mistake; I should like him for my own when we go to our place in the country. Is he yours?” and she looked at me.
 
I shook my head, and nodded towards Fan, to whom she said, “What will you take for him?”
 
“He is not for sale,” Fan answered, decidedly, stepping down by the horse and winding her arm around his neck.
 
The brother and sister, so much alike in looks, were also so far alike in disposition that opposition only increased their determination to succeed. In this instance Miss Errington was the more earnest of the two and seemed resolved to carry her point and have Black Beauty whether we were willing or not, and her brother seconded her wishes. Two hundred dollars cash down in crisp greenbacks were finally offered, and I shall never forget the look on Fan’s face as she put it down on Beauty’s neck, thinking intently, as I well knew, of the many things we needed and which two hundred dollars would buy. Of our worn furniture generally, our house, from which the paint was gone, our shutters, unhinged and loose, and more than all father’s darned and threadbare coats and shocking hat, and our own dresses, made over so many times. Two hundred dollars seemed a fortune, and Beauty was only a luxury. Father had his saddle horse for visiting the few patients who lived beyond walking distance, and Black Beauty was really more ornamental than useful to us. This was the train of thought passing through her mind, while I watched her curiously. Lifting her head at last she said proudly, with great tears 42standing on her long lashes, “Next to father, Ann and Katy, I love Black Beauty better than any living thing. You can see that we are poor enough, made so by the war,” here her voice began to break, but she steadied it and went on: “We need many things, but until poverty has a firmer foothold in our house than it has now I cannot let Black Beauty go. If a time comes when I must part with him I will let you know; I’d rather you had him than any one, for I believe you would be kind to him.”
 
Taking her arm from the horse’s neck she gave a peculiar whistle, saying, “Go, Beauty, go.”
 
He understood her and went prancing down the rear lane towards his pasture; sometimes with his heels in the air and sometimes his forefeet, as if giving vent to his delight at having escaped some threatened danger. I had thought Miss Errington cold and emotionless and was surprised at the sudden transformation in her manner after this as she talked to Fan, who was soon herself again, chatting gaily and repeating ludicrous and exaggerated stories of the Colonel when he was our unbidden guest and our place full of blue coats.
 
It was now five o’clock and Phyllis brought in the tea service for our five o’clock tea, a custom Fan, who was extravagantly fond of tea, had introduced in imitation of an English family recently come to town and with whom we were on terms of intimacy. In our low financial state this seemed to me a useless expenditure, but when I remonstrated Phyllis silenced me by saying, “Lors, honey, what’s a pinch of tea and dust of sugar, and don’t I bile de groun’s over in de mornin’ for my breakfast. Let Miss Fanny ’lone. All de quality in England does it, dat big red coat at Mass’r Harwood’s say, an’ ain’t we quality, if we is poor.”
 
43So we had our five o’clock tea, in which Jack often joined us, while other young people sometimes dropped in so that the occasion was usually a very enjoyable one. This afternoon it was especially so. With the appearance of the china and silver teapot Fan’s spirits increased. She liked to be “quality” quite as well as Phyllis, and did the honors gracefully, serving Miss Errington from a red Dresden cup which had been one of our mother’s wedding presents, and giving the colonel a royal Worcester, which belonged to Katy’s mother. Whether it was the pleasure of being waited upon by Fan, or whether he was really so fond of tea, the Colonel took so many cups that several “pinches” were added to the pot, and the next morning I saw a bowl full of grounds on Phyllis’s kitchen table, but knew by the fresh, pungent odor of old Hyson which permeated the room that she was indulging in something more than a “bilin’ over.” After our tea-drinking the carriage came for our guests who expressed themselves as delighted with their call.
 
“Come to Washington and I will show you all the sights,” Miss Errington said to us both; then to me, “Take care of Katy’s voice.”
 
Just what the Colonel said to Fan I did not hear. He was talking very low and looking at her with his cold, steely eyes, which kindled as he looked and brought a hot flush to her face.
 
“No, no. I don’t think I will,” I heard her say, and that was all.
 
After he was gone she stood watching the carriage until it was out of sight; then said to me, “That man had the effrontery to ask me to write to him, and he squeezed my hand so hard that it aches now; the old idiot! I am going to wash it.”
 
44Bouncing out of the room she ran into the arms of Jack Fullerton, who came to say that all the grape baskets at the vines were full and to ask if there were more to be filled. I am afraid we were rather a shiftless lot; at least we were told so often enough in the future—coming on apace. We were certainly thoughtless, and while visiting and tea-drinking entirely forgot that the baskets must be ready that night if they went on the early morning train to Richmond. But Jack had not forgotten, and while I talked to Miss Errington and Fan flirted with the Colonel, he worked steadily on, occasionally crushing a cluster of the ripe fruit so hard that the juice spurted over his coat as he caught the sound of Fan’s rippling laughter and the deep tones of the man whom he began to dread as his rival. But Fan more than made amends now.
 
Seizing his arm with both hands and rubbing her cheek against it, she exclaimed, “You dear old Jack, how good you are to us, doing our work, while we entertain those people for whom we don’t care a pin; and don’t you think, he asked me to correspond with him!”
 
“He did?” Jack said, indignantly, and Fan replied, “Yes, he did, and he’s forty, if he’s a day.”
 
She knew he wasn’t forty, but she was trying to appease Jack, whose brown eyes shone with delight as he looked at her, and who, when he thought I did not see him, tried to raise her hand to his lips. But she wrenched it away, and stood back from him, saying laughingly, “No, you don’t. No man has ever kissed me except father and Charlie and the boy, and never will until——”
 
She didn’t say when, but Jack did not seem at all disturbed, and that night long after I was in bed he sat upon the piazza with her, and I heard the low murmur of their voices and felt again the old pain in my heart, 45and knew that I would give years of my life for the love for which Fan cared so little.
 
Chapter IV.—Annie’s Story Continued. A SHADOW BEGINS TO FALL.
 
The letter which Katy brought us from the office was from father, who was still in Boston and attending Mrs. Haverleigh. She was better, he wrote, but unwilling he should leave her until all danger of a relapse was past, consequently we need not expect him until the end of a week when he hoped to bring us a big fee, as his patient was said to be very wealthy. He did not mention Mr. Haverleigh, but of course there was such an appendage to Mrs. Haverleigh and he would pay the bill. Then we began to speculate as to the probable amount and what we should buy with it. Fan decided upon new boots and gloves; Katy was to have a doll; while I hoped she might also have music lessons, for aside from her wonderful voice she had a great fondness for the piano and had already picked out a few simple tunes which she played with a good deal of expression. Jack, who was always included in our family councils, as if he were our brother, laughingly told us not to count our chickens until they were hatched, and the sequel proved the wisdom of his advice.
 
At the end of the week father came home, looking fresher and younger and more erect than when he went away. The trip had done him a great deal of good. He had met several old friends and made some new ones. When we inquired for Mrs. Haverleigh he did not seem 46inclined to talk much of her, but in answer to Fan’s direct question he told us the amount of his fee. He had made her so many professional visits and received the usual city price for each visit; fifty dollars in all. It was not a large sum, and it went mostly to pay the little household bills which in spite of our economy accumulated so fast. I gave up the music lessons for Katy, while Fan called Mr. Haverleigh a stingy old man, as she blacked her shabby boots and mended her worn gloves.
 
Sometime in November Jack went into an insurance office in Richmond, and life at the Elms moved in so monotonous a groove that Fan, who craved excitement, sometimes wished the war back upon us to keep us from stagnating. There were one or two letters from Miss Errington, addressed to me and full of Katy’s future.
 
Several times the Colonel sent Fan papers and magazines and once he wrote her a letter which she promptly tore up, and then cried for half a day. Every week father had a letter from Boston which he answered within a few days. Once in passing the hall stand where he had laid a letter while he went to his room for his gloves, I glanced hastily at it and read, as I supposed, “Mr. Thomas Haverleigh, No. — Beacon St., Boston, Mass.” Fan would have taken it up and made sure of the direction, but I only gave it a look and wondered why he was writing to Mr. Haverleigh. He was a good deal changed these days and he seemed silent and abstracted and I often saw him looking at us in a wistful way as if there was something on his mind which he hated to tell us.
 
“It’s money matters and the miserable bills we owe everywhere that trouble him,” Fan said, when I spoke of it to her.
 
“Oh, if I were rich, and could help him; and I can. There is a way.”
 
47“What way?” I asked, and she replied, “I can sell Black Beauty, or—myself, which is better. Isn’t it sometimes a duty to sacrifice one’s self for others? I didn’t tell you that Col. Errington proposed to me in that letter I burned up! Well, he did, in an assured kind of way, as if he thought I would be overwhelmed with the honor and say yes at once; then, as if a doubt crept into his mind, he told me to weigh the matter carefully before answering, for if a favor were once refused him he never asked for it a second time. I am weighing the matter carefully. I have not answered his letter. I keep hoping something will turn up. If it don’t I shall marry the Colonel.”
 
“And what of Jack?” I asked.
 
At the mention of his name Fan flushed a little, then replied, “I like Jack and always shall, but what can he do, hampered with an invalid mother and only an insurance clerk’s salary. I was never intended for a poor man’s wife and would rather live at home in poverty with you than in Jack’s home with his mother and old black Patsey, who was always running away during the war and only came back after it was over because she couldn’t do better.”
 
There was no use arguing with Fan when in this mood, and the subject was not mentioned again for months. I knew she did not write to Col. Errington, and she did write occasionally to Jack during the winter, which passed rather slowly, for Lovering was never very gay at its best, and the war had left too many aching hearts for us to be very hilarious. Father, however, seemed in unusually good spirits and I occasionally heard him whistling or humming softly to himself when he was alone. When March came round he surprised us one morning saying he was going to Boston again on some important business which he hoped would result favorably for us all. He did not tell 48us what the business was, but when Fan asked if it had anything to do with Mr. Haverleigh, he answered, “Not directly; no,” and we said good-bye to him with no suspicion of the truth. He had bought himself a new suit of clothes, which he greatly needed, and we were very proud of him when he put them on. We told him he looked quite the Virginia gentleman again, and Fan came near boxing Phyllis’s ears when she heard her muttering something about “ole mas’r savin’ his money to pay his debts instead of scurripen’ roun’ de country an’ makin’ a fool of hisself.”
 
“As if our father could make a fool of himself! What does Phyllis mean?”
 
“I believe he has been speculating,” Fan said to me, “I feel sure something good is going to turn up, if we wait long enough.”
Chapter V.—The Author’s Story. SOMETHING DOES TURN UP.

Dr. Hathern had been gone two weeks and in that time had written but one letter to his daughters. This was addressed to Fanny and in it he said that the business which had taken him to Boston was progressing favorably and he should soon feel at liberty to tell what it was and return home a happier and more prosperous man than when he left it. Meanwhile his daughters were to enjoy themselves and get whatever was needed for their comfort. Then he added as if it were an afterthought:
 
“By the way, I think it would be well for Phyllis to give the whole house a regular overhauling,—housecleaning they call it at the north, and I remember when I was 49a boy that every thorough housekeeper did this twice a year,—taking up and beating carpets, washing curtains and blankets and paint and floors and putting the furniture out to air. I have no doubt southern housekeepers do the same, and it seems to me there were some such upheavals which made me very uncomfortable when your mother was living; but nothing of the sort has occurred since. You were too young when your own mother and Katy’s died to know about such things, and Phyllis, who has been in charge so long, has not thought of it. Negroes are apt to be slack.
 
“Consult Mrs. Fullerton, if you don’t know what to do, and if extra help is needed for Phyllis, get it, of course. Tell her to take especial pains with my room. I think I have detected a faint musty smell in it when the air was damp. This can be remedied by beating the carpet thoroughly and letting in a great deal of sunshine. I may have kept it shut up too much. You will hear from me again in about two weeks and then I shall tell you when to expect me.
 
“Your loving father,
“Samuel Hathern.”
This letter Fanny read aloud to Annie, with running comments upon it as she read.
 
“Is father growing crazy, or what has got into him to write in such a strain. Must, indeed, in his room! It’s his old boots and shoes and saddlebags of medicines which he keeps in his closet. House cleaning twice a year, with everything turned out of the windows! Thinks we have never had one since mother died! Haven’t we?”
 
Annie didn’t think they had, and the most she could recall during her mother’s lifetime was a faint remembrance of bare floors and dirt and straw and litter, and soap and suds and discomfort generally, with a scurrying here and there of negroes with Phyllis at the helm; then a great quiet, with the fireplaces full of green boughs and 50peonies and snowballs and herself and Fanny told not to put their little soiled fingers on the window panes because they had just been washed. This was very far back, and neither Annie nor Fanny could remember any housecleaning since so extreme as that. Certainly there had been none since Katy’s mother died, and Phyllis had managed the household. In short, as they confessed to each other, they were rather easy-going young ladies, who, accustomed to many servants before the war, had fallen into the habit of leaving everything to Phyllis. And that functionary was very willing to have it left to her, and waited upon them and petted them and scolded them alternately with all the freedom of an old and trusty family servant.
 
In the days of slavery there had been no more valuable negro in Lovering than herself, and she knew it, and prided herself upon it and the respectability of her ancestors generally as proven by the fact that there was not a drop of white blood in her veins.
 
“I’d be ashamed if there was, and blush for my mother. Black is a good color, which wears well, and I thank de Lord I am as black as a Guiney nigger,” she said; but she was equally proud of the fair faces of the twins and little Katy, whom she loved as if they were her own.
 
She had nursed them when they were babies; had walked the floor with them many a night when they were teething or had the colic; had drawn them miles and miles from cabin to cabin in a baby cart—proud of her twins and proud of herself as “Mas’r Hathern’s nigger, who was worth more’n a thousand dollars, and who he wouldn’t sell for nothin’;” she had closed the eyes of both her mistresses, and prepared them for the grave. She had comforted the two little motherless girls with cake and honey and a most wonderful rag doll, and taken the new-born 51baby, Katy, to her bosom and bed. She had tried to run away with a part of the Federal army, but found that she could not, so great was her love for her master and his family. She was a part of them, or rather they were a part of her, and after she assumed the entire management of the household she owned them just as they once owned her, and sometimes ruled them more rigorously than she had ever been ruled.
 
In this condition of things it was natural that the young ladies should settle down into a state of listless dependence, allowing her to do what she pleased and when she pleased, and giving but little thought to what was done or left undone, provided they were comfortable and the general look of the house was neat and tidy. At long intervals she had her times of “clarin’ up,” when the house was full of brooms and brushes and mops and clouds of dust and the odor of soap suds. On these occasions, in a petticoat patched with many colors, which stopped half way between her knees and her feet and a knit jacket left by one of the soldiers, Phyllis would march from room to room, rating the young ladies soundly for the disorderly condition in which she found them, and wondering what their poor mother would say if she knew how they slatted their things and left them for her to pick up, when every bone in her old body ached. But if they tried to help her she spurned their offers disdainfully. She reckoned she knew what “de quality ought to do, an’ it wan’t for her young misseses to sile dar white hands, when dar was a big pair of black ones, made to soil and spin. What did cussed be Canan mean if it wan’t that the blacks was to sweat an’ slave and have der bad times in dis world an’ de whites der good, an’ in de nex’ wise wersa.”
 
Phyllis was great on theology and powerful in a prayer 52meeting, where she could be heard for nearly a quarter of a mile, when she was moved by the sperrit to let herself out. Naturally her arguments prevailed when she brought forward the Bible to prove their validity, and Annie and Fanny usually succumbed and let her have her way.
 
Occasionally when she wished to try some fancy dish Fanny made a raid upon the kitchen, greatly to the discomfiture of Phyllis, who fluttered like a hen when its brood of chickens is disturbed, while a close observer might have thought she was fearful of having something discovered which she wished to hide. But Fanny knew better, and after the time she found the nutmeg grater in Phyllis’s pocket and the rolling pin, which had been lost for two or three days, on the floor under the table, she abandoned the kitchen, and the old negress was left monarch of all she surveyed.
 
Now, however, there must be a general cleaning,—a thorough overhauling,—and Fanny was deputed to notify Phyllis, whom she found eating her dinner on a stool outside her cabin door, her turban somewhat awry and her usually good-humored face clouded over as she shoo-ed the chickens and screamed at the dog, which from an adjoining garden had strayed into her domains.
 
“A reg’lar overhaulin’, wid de carpets all up and whaled, an’ de furniture turned out of do’ to a’r, an’ his room smellin’ of musk,” she said, when Fanny told what her father had written. “Is Mas’r Hathern ’sinuatin’ that I’m dirty, an’ I sarvin’ him so long an’ faithful? I wouldn’t have ble’ved it,” and her voice trembled and her head shook till her turban was displaced and took an upward turn, as it was wont to do when she was displeased.
 
It was a saying of the young ladies that they could tell 53Phyllis’s state of mind from the height of her turban, and when Fan saw it begin to lengthen she knew there was a storm brewing, and braced herself to meet it.
 
“Who’s to take up dem carpets an’ wallop ’em, and put ’em down again I’d like to know. Last time I clar’d up I done cotched such a misery in my back and laigs that I’ve had rheumatis’ ever since, and I didn’t hist up de carpets nuther.”
 
Fanny explained that she was to have help, but this only brought out a snort from the old woman, who went on: “Extra help, as if I was an onery nigger like old Patsey. An’ for de Lord’s sake whar’s de money to come from to pay de help? Mas’r can’t pay de bills now, unless he sells me, an’ sometimes I think I’ll ’vise him to do dat an’ get out of debt.”
 
“But you are free. We can’t sell you, and wouldn’t if we could; that is all in the past,” Fanny suggested.
 
“Dat’s so; more’s de pity,” Phyllis rejoined, and went on to say that she reckoned she wan’t so old yet that she couldn’t wallop a carpet and put it down, if her knees were not too stiff and she should do it, too; and begin the next day; help indeed, when she was ’round.
 
By this time the Fullerton chickens were on the strawberry patch again and the Fullerton dog had his nose in the refuse pail, which he finally upset. But in her excitement Phyllis did not notice it. She was too intent upon the housecleaning, which was commenced the next morning with a vengeance, and without the slightest system or order. Every room and closet from cellar to garret was turned upside down, with carpets up and furniture out, and not a spot where one could sit and be comfortable. They ate on the pantry shelf and slept on the floor while the worst of the pandemonium continued. True to 54her determination Phyllis walloped the carpets herself and did it so effectually that one of them, the oldest and most tender was walloped into tatters and could not be used again. When it came to putting them down Phyllis gave out. Her knees would not bend, and her back and arms were too lame, while not a negro was to be found willing to help. Fortunately in this emergency Jack had an off day, which he spent with Fan-and-Ann, who pressed him into service. Arrayed in one of Phyllis’s clean turbans and aprons, and armed with hammer and nails, he attacked the carpets vigorously and with the help of the young ladies and with a great deal of joking and fun they were put down as few carpets were ever put down before,—crooked and puckered, and loose, while Jack had a blood blister on his thumb and Fanny a bruise on her knuckles, where she struck them with the hammer, and Annie a headache, which lasted two whole days. But they were down and seemed very fresh and clean, as did the entire house when Phyllis was through with it and free to nurse her swollen arms and hands, the result of so much lifting and carpet beating. The odor of must, if there had ever been any, had disappeared from the Doctor’s room, with his old boots and saddlebags. As it was his carpet which had been beaten to tatters, its place had been supplied with some light, pretty matting bought at a reduced rate at a forced sale.
 
“I wish we could afford a new chamber set, too,” Fan said, looking ruefully at the high post bedstead, with its canopy and valance, and at the bureau and chairs older than she was, as they had come from the south with her mother.
 
But this was out of the question. The family purse was too low. The chamber set was given up. The post 55bedstead, with its feather bed, was made high and soft, and the best white counterpane put upon it. There were clean covers upon the bureau and square stand, where the Book of Psalms, which the first Mrs. Hathern had used, was still lying, and with it a prayer-book which had belonged to Katy’s mother. Fan brought a pretty pin cushion from her room, with a slipper case and tidy, and when all was done, called Phyllis to see the effect.
 
“Mighty fine and invitin’;” Phyllis said, “’pears like you’re expectin’ a bride, te-he-he.”
 
The laugh had in it a sound of sobbing, rather than of merriment, and Phyllis’s turban was slightly elongated as she went back to her work. All her insinuations, however, were lost upon the daughters, who, with no suspicion of her meaning, sat down to enjoy the quiet and freshness of their home, daily expecting a letter telling when their father was coming to enjoy it with them.
Chapter VI.—Annie’s Story. THE SHADOWS DEEPEN.

After a ten days’ siege the housecleaning came to an end, with no worse disaster than the entire demolition of one carpet, literally beaten to death,—the breaking of one or two windows, a caster split off from a bureau, and a cupboard with dishes in it knocked flat in our attempts to move it. Phyllis had a “misery” in her back and we were all more or less afflicted with colds we had caught during the upheaval. But we had a heap of fun with Jack, who helped us out, and the house was clean, or we thought it so, and only father’s presence was needed to make us quite happy again. But he did not come and he 56didn’t write. Every morning we said “we shall hear from him to-day,” and every night a fresh disappointment awaited us, for he neither wrote nor came, and in our anxiety we were beginning to think of telegraphing to his address in Boston and inquiring if any thing had happened to him. It was Fan who suggested this one morning, about a week after the cleaning was over.
 
“Wait one more day,” I said, “and if we do not hear to-night we’ll telegraph to-morrow.”
 
It was now past the middle of April, but the day was cold and cloudy, and late in the afternoon the rain began to fall, softly at first like a gentle April shower, but gradually increasing until by the time we heard the train from the east and Fan started for the office it was a regular downpour, which beat against the windows and ran in great streams from a defective eaves-trough over the door. In all lives there are some days which so impress themselves upon our minds that the minutest detail is never forgotten, but comes to us over and over again, with the joy or the sorrow which wrote itself so indelibly upon our memories. Such a day was this, and as I write I hear again the soughing of the wind through a great pine tree which stood in a corner of the yard, and the rain sifting down upon the turf beneath it, and see the blaze from the pine knots which Phyllis had lighted on the hearth, and as the blaze leaps up, filling the room with warmth and light I see at my side Katy’s golden head bent over the picture-book she is reading, while one of her small white hands rests upon my lap. In the kitchen I hear old Phyllis crooning a well-known melody, consisting mostly of inquiries as to the whereabouts of the Hebrew children, as she prepares our evening meal.
 
During father’s absence we had dispensed with our six 57o’clock dinner and contented ourselves with lunch and our five o’clock tea, but this night I had ordered a substantial supper, with a vague presentiment that father might surprise us, and I can smell the savory dishes as I smelled them then and feel the same appetizing sensation which they brought to me. As the light and heat from the pine knot increased and the flames went rolling up the chimney in graceful curves, the faces of the dead looked at me from the blaze,—faces of the boy in grey and the boy in blue whose graves were on the hillside. That of the boy in blue was the more distinct, and I saw again the great sunken blue eyes which had turned to us so wistfully as the pale lips pleaded that we would not “let them get him,” or “let her find him.” We knew whom he meant by them, and were reasonably sure that the her was the Aunt Martha, for whom neither Fan nor myself entertained a great amount of respect.
 
Now, as I watched the fire,—half asleep it may be,—and saw alternately the faces of my brother and the boy, Aunt Martha came also and stood before me on the hearth,—a tall thin woman of the New England type, with firm-set lips and hard, unsympathetic eyes, which never softened a whit when I questioned her of “the boy,” and asked why she had never come to inquire for him before, and who was the Carlyle he had spoken of so kindly. Just as she was about to answer me Katy started up exclaiming, “There she is,” and I awoke to hear the sound of voices outside.—Fan’s voice, and with it another which always made my heart beat faster, although it never spoke to me except as a brother might speak to his sister. Jack had come home that evening and Fan had met him and brought him with her, and they came in laughing and chatting merrily, and shaking the rain drops from their umbrellas and wraps.
 
58“How perfectly delightful that fire is,” Fan said, holding one of her wet boots near it to dry, and bidding Phyllis bring a plate for Jack and hurry on the supper, as she was nearly famished. “I have a letter from father,” she continued, as we drew up to the table, “but it will keep till after tea.”
 
We were a very merry party, as we always were when Jack was with us, for he had the happy faculty of knowing how to bring out the best of everybody. He had been promoted and his salary increased, and he was in high spirits, as we all were, and not one of us dreamed of what was in store for us, when, as Jack asked me for his third cup of coffee, Fan, who had finished her supper, said, “If you are going to drink coffee all night and don’t mind, I’ll see what father has written.”
 
She took his letter from her pocket; looked at it very leisurely; opened it carefully with a knife, as if afraid of spoiling the envelope, and then began to read it. I was pouring Jack some hot coffee, which Phyllis had just brought in, and did not look at her until Jack startled me by saying, “Why, Fan, what is the matter?”
 
Then I turned to her and saw that her face was nearly as white as the letter over which her eyes were traveling with lightning speed.
 
“Fanny, Fanny,” I exclaimed; “what is it? what has happened? Is father ill, or dead?”
 
“Neither,” she answered, in a voice very unlike herself. “Neither ill nor dead, as you mean it; but dead to us. He is to be married to-night at eight o’clock.”
 
For a moment everything turned black around me, and I might have fallen from my chair if Phyllis, who was standing near me, had not put her hand upon me as she said, “Surmised it all ‘long. I done tol’ you so.”
 
59Neither Fan nor I paid any attention to her then; we were too intent upon the letter, which Fan at last read aloud and which ran thus:
 
“Boston, April —, 1866.
“My Dear Daughters:
“I am very glad that I can at last tell you something definite with regard to the business which brought me to Boston, and which will soon be happily completed. You remember the Mrs. Haverleigh whom I attended last fall through a dangerous illness? Well, the admiration I conceived for her then has since ripened into what, if I were a younger man, I should call love.”
 
“Love!” Fan repeated, scornfully. “Love! and he almost sixty years old. If he were not my father, I’d call him a fool!”
 
“No fool so big as an old fool!” came explosively from Phyllis, whose turban seemed bristling with rage as she spoke out exactly what was in my mind.
 
“You here?” Fan said, angrily. “Go away about your business.”
 
But Phyllis did not budge. She was a part of us. What concerned us concerned her, and in this crisis she meant to stand by us and learn the best or worst there was to learn.
 
“Where was I?” Fan asked, and Jack, who did not look as disturbed as I thought he ought, suggested, “Love!”
 
“Oh yes: ‘ripened into love.’ Ripened into fiddlesticks,” Fan said, and read on:
 
“When I left home I was not quite certain as to the result of my errand, but I am now. Mrs. Haverleigh has consented to marry me on Thursday evening of this week at eight o’clock, and I am writing this in the hope it may reach you that evening, and that you will send me your 60congratulations, in spirit at least. Mrs. Haverleigh is a remarkable woman,—very fine-looking, and about forty, I imagine, although she does not look it. I have never asked her age. She has traveled extensively,—is well educated, and belongs to some of the best families of New England. Indeed, I believe she traces her ancestry back in a direct line to Miles Standish of the Mayflower.”
 
“I never could bear Standish. What business had he to think of Priscilla when he had had a Rose?” Fan said, with an upward tilt of her nose. “Best families in New England! Humbug! as if that made her any better. Don’t we belong to some of the best families in the south?”
 
Then she read on:
 
“She is a member of several clubs and societies, and has most excellent ideas with regard to bringing up children. In this respect she will be invaluable in training little Katy, who I think manages herself mostly.”
 
“I don’t want to be trained,” Katy interrupted, with a whimper.
 
“And you are not going to be trained either,” Fan said, drawing the child close to her. Then she added:
 
“Let’s see what other virtue this paragon possesses. Oh, yes:”
 
“She is also, an incomparable housekeeper,—thorough in every thing, and will relieve you of all care.”
 
“Hm! I didn’t know we had any care; Phyllis takes all that,” Fan said.
 
“Dat’s so, honey,” came from Phyllis, who was standing behind her, stiff as a stake, while Fan continued:
 
“She is wealthy, too, and inclined to be very generous with me. She knows my circumstances perfectly, and how the war impoverished us, and has made over to me more than enough to pay my debts and have something left.”
 
61“Very unmanly in father to take her money. I must say I am disappointed in him in more ways than one,” was Fan’s next remark, before continuing:
 
“I do not yet understand why she is willing to leave her handsome house in Boston and come to our plain, run-down home, but she is, and as soon as possible she will have sent to us a part of her furniture, together with her cook and housemaid and probably a coachman. This will be a great help to Phyllis, who is getting old, and who, while she does well for us, can hardly meet the requirements of a Boston housekeeper.”
 
“For de Lord’s sake, has ole Mas’r done gone perfec’ly daff over dat widder? Me getting ole! who knows how ole I am? I don’t, nor Mas’r either. What for dat woman bringin’ white trash down har to boss me? I not stan’ it!” Phyllis broke in with a flourish of the knives and forks she had in her hand, one of which flew off at right angles and came near hitting Jack in the head.
 
“Got it,” he said laughingly, as he picked up the knife and replaced it on the table, while Fan turned to Phyllis and said, “You here yet? Didn’t I tell you to leave long ago?”
 
“Yes, honey, but I’s har jess de same, an’ I’s gwine to stay, too, an’ spress my ‘pinion of dis yer Massachusetts woman fotchin’ her truck whar I’s sarved this forty year, an’ never started to run away but onet, when de sojers tell me de fine stories of freedom. What does I want of freedom? Nothin’. I’d be sold down de river to-day to sarve you, but I won’t be,—what you call it,—trampled on by dem whites. No, sir!” and here she turned to Jack, shaking her fist at him. “No, sir! An’ shoo’s you bawn, ef dey tries it, dar’ll be wah! Yes, wah! Wus than t’other, an’ dis time it’ll be de Federates an’ not de Fed’s who 62beats. Bet your soul on dat. Now I’ve had my say; I’se gwine.”
 
She nearly shook off her turban, which stood up almost a foot as she marched out of the room, followed by Jack’s hearty, “Three cheers for Phyllis! Good for you!”
 
“Is there more?” I asked, as Phyllis disappeared, and Fan continued:
 
“We are going to New York and Washington, and shall reach home in ten days or two weeks at the most. Will telegraph you when to expect us. I need not ask you to receive your new mother cordially and kindly. As ladies and my daughters you can hardly do otherwise. You will love her when you know her. I should like you to call her mother, but if you feel that you cannot, I shall not insist. Katy, of course, will address her as mamma. She has never had a daughter and will take to the child at once. She has a son who is now at Andover, but who will spend his summer vacation with us. He is fifteen or sixteen,—a fine, handsome lad, with all the polish and manner of twenty-five. He seems delighted with the prospect of having sisters. He calls you that already and is especially desirous to see little Katy, whose photograph I have with me and have shown him. He is here this evening and sends his love, and says tell you he expects a great deal of pleasure with you in the summer. His name is Carl. Mrs. Haverleigh, also, wishes to be kindly remembered. If you care to write to me, direct to Ebbett House, Washington.
 
“Lovingly your father,
“Samuel Hathern.”
After the reading of the letter there was silence for a few moments, broken only by the sound of the rain which was still falling heavily, the crackling of the pine knots on the hearth and the ticking of the clock. Glancing up at it at last Fan said, “They were to be married at eight. There 63is a difference of time between Boston and Richmond. The ceremony is over, and we have lost our father.”
 
Then she began to cry and I cried with her, while Jack tried to comfort us, telling us to look on the bright side,—that it might not be so bad after all. We had had one stepmother and loved her, and we might love another.
 
“That was very different from a Boston woman, who belongs to clubs and societies and has views, and all that,” Fan said. “We did love Katy’s mother. She was like us, and didn’t want to turn the house upside down with her raging housekeeping, as this woman will. She was easy-going, and she gave us Katy.”
 
Putting her arm around the little girl, Fan drew her closely to her with a gesture as if shielding her from some threatened danger. Assured that she was not to be trained, Katy looked upon the marriage rather favorably, and smoothing Fan’s hair caressingly, she said, “Don’t cry, the new mother will be nice, and then there’s brother Carl. I am so glad for him. I’ve wanted a brother ever since Charlie died, and after you told me to pray for what I wanted, I did pray, first for a doll that shut its eyes, and I got it,—then for a hoop, and I got it,—and then for a boy-brother, and we’ve got him. I get everything I want.”
 
Katy’s faith in prayer was very strong, and Fan, who had taught her this faith, could not discourage it now, although wishing that her prayers had taken some other object than a boy-brother.
 
That night on our way to bed we stopped for a moment at father’s room, the door of which stood open. In the winter, when there was no company in the house, it was really our living room, where most of our evenings were spent. Our father liked it warm when he came in at 64night, and there was always a bright fire on the hearth, with his arm-chair and slippers on one side, and next it the stand, with his book and paper and spectacles upon it, for he often read aloud to us, with Katy’s bright head resting on his knee, while Fan and I sewed, or embroidered, sitting on the settee rocker opposite him. This was all over now. A stranger had come between us, who would sit by father’s side while his children shifted for themselves. Some such thoughts as these were in our minds when we stepped into the room which we had taken so much pains to make attractive for his home coming.
 
“I wish we had let it alone,—must and all,” Fan said. “I am glad we couldn’t buy a new chamber set. Let her bring her own, as I dare say she will. I mean to take my pink pin cushion away. I didn’t put it here for her.”
 
But she left it. I knew she would, as she always subsided into quiet after a storm. We sat up late that night talking the matter over, and decided finally to make the best of it for father’s sake and never let him, nor any one but Jack, know that the new wife was not acceptable. We couldn’t deceive Phyllis, however, nor console her either, and for two days she went about the house with the tears dropping from her nose and running down her cheeks. “It was not so much the missus she ’jected to,” she said, “though it was bad enough to be sot on and bossed around by a stranger when she had been fust so long. It was the po’ white trash comin’ down with their a’rs that she couldn’t stan’, an’ wouldn’t. She’d run away fust! an’ if they sot the dogs on her she’d drown herself in the river; then see how ole mas’r’d feel when they brought her home drownded like a rat!”
 
Notwithstanding there was nothing to run from Phyllis was always threatening to run when disturbed or displeased, 65but had never contemplated suicide before, and now, in her pity for herself and for us when she should be fished from the river, limp and dead, she forgot the new mistress in a measure, and on the second day asked if she hadn’t better wash the windows again in master’s room. The marriage was generally known by this time, but no one congratulated us and few spoke of it at all. Evidently, it did not meet with approbation. Always perverse and contradictory, this silence on the part of our friends made Fan angry, and turned the tide in favor of the stranger. “Father had a right to marry if he chose, and the neighbors were very impudent to object,” she said, and, greatly to my surprise, she began to evince a good deal of interest in the coming of Mrs. Hathern. To Katy the new mother was to be mamma, but to us, Mrs. Hathern, and it seemed to me Fan took special pains to repeat the name as often as possible.
 
“I am trying to get used to it, but oh, how I hate it all. I’ll not let people know though,” she said to me, with quivering lips, and then she broke down and sobbed hysterically, declaring that she’d run away with Phyllis and drown herself, or marry Col. Errington. She hadn’t answered his letter yet, but she would that very day.
 
Possibly she might have done so if the post had not brought us a letter mailed in Andover and directed in a large boyish hand to “The Misses Hathern.” It was from Carl, who wrote:
 
“Dear Fanny and Annie and Katy:
“I am awfully glad that you are my sisters, and I am going to tell you about the wedding. I was there and saw your father endow my mother with all his worldly goods and heard her promise to obey him. She won’t do it, though, you bet. They mostly never do, I guess, and 66mother least of all. They seem happy as clams; so I suppose old people can be in love as well as young. I shouldn’t like mother to know I said that. She’d be mad as a hornet. She thinks she’s young, but she will be forty next birthday. She is a very handsome woman though. I never wanted mother to marry. She has had offers as thick as huckleberries, and I kicked at them all until I saw your father, and then I gave in and told her that she might. I like him immensely and I’m going to like you, especially little Katy, she’s so lovely. Your father showed me her photograph, and finally gave it to me, I begged so hard. I’ve shown it to the boys, and made them green with envy by telling them of the good times I am to have next summer in the Virginia woods and hills and in the old house with you. I hate the city, and like the country, and always wanted to go south. I was sorry I was not old enough to enlist in the army;—not to shoot anybody, but to see the country. I suppose you were rebels. Well, that’s right. I should have been, too, if I had been born south; but I’m a northerner, and yelled myself hoarse when I heard our men were in Richmond. I was in the country, and I and a lot more boys stole so many dry-goods boxes and barrels and wood for a bonfire that one old copperhead, whose chicken coop we took, had us arrested. Between you and I,—you and me, I mean,—I don’t believe your father is more than half a reb, or he wouldn’t sit so quiet and hear mother rake the south. She’s peppery. I said to her it wasn’t good form, and she told me to shut up, and I shut! I generally do when she tells me to.
 
“I wish you’d write to me. I like girls immensely, and they like me, but only one has ever written to me, and that didn’t count. It was Julina Smith,—mother’s maid,—two or three years older than I am. I’m fifteen. She is rather spoony, and made me a pair of slippers and sent them to me with a letter in which she called me ‘Dear Carl,’ and ended with ‘Your loving Julina.’ The slippers were well enough, if she wanted to give them to me, but the loving Julina was a little too much. I 67tore the letter up, and when I went home and she made eyes at me I told her to dry up, and she dried. I believe mother intends taking her to Virginia, and if she does you will have to set on her, I can tell you.
 
“It is nearly class-time and I must stop. I am studying Greek and Latin and a lot more stuff, and expect to enter Harvard when I know enough. And now, in the words of the divine Julina, or Julienne as she’d like to be called, seeing there’s French blood in her,
 
“Yours lovingly,
“Carl Haverleigh.”
“P. S. I guess you’ll like me. Girls generally do, although they say I am fickle and pretend a lot I don’t mean. But I mean it at the time. I can’t always keep up to concert pitch when the concert is over, nor keep smelling a rose after its perfume is gone. Now that sounds rather poetical and neat, don’t it?
 
“Yours again, Carl.”
This letter, over which we laughed till we cried, helped to turn our thoughts from the dreaded stepmother to the bright, frank boy, whom we felt sure we should like, during the concert, at least, and while the perfume of the rose lasted. Fan read most of the letter to Phyllis, who, at its commencement, stood with her hands on her hips, her elbows elevated and her nose in the air. But before its close her nose and elbows came down and a broad smile broke over her face.
 
“Bress de boy!” she said. “‘Pears like mas’r Charlie, only in course ’taint to be ’spected he’s so peart-like seein’ he’s from de norf, whar dey’s all so onery.”
 
“But, Phyllis,” Fan said, “he is from Boston, and must have a heap of Boston culture.”
 
“What’s dat ar?” Phyllis asked, but Fan did not explain, and left Phyllis wondering if Boston culture was ‘catchin’.
Chapter VII.—Author’s Story. THE COMING OF THE BRIDE.

The two weeks which Dr. Hathern had mentioned as the longest possible time before his return were nearly up, and his daughters were daily expecting some message from him telling when he would be home. They had become somewhat accustomed to thoughts of the new mother and the new order of things she was to inaugurate, and felt that there might be some compensation.
 
“It will be rather fine to have a posse of servants,—white ones, too,” Fan said. “We shall quite outshine the Lovering people with our style. Coachman,—that means carriage and horses,—cook, maid, besides Phyllis, who, I suppose, will be the laundress. That will give us all the white skirts and dresses we want. I dote on white skirts.”
 
Fan was rather luxurious in her tastes and would have liked nothing better than fresh white skirts and linen every day, and would have had them, too, but for her compassion on Phyllis, who usually had a “fetched misery in her back” on Monday, and a worse one on ironing day, if there were too many frillicks, as she called them, in the wash. The prospect of new furniture was not, on the whole, displeasing, although they were greatly attached to the solid old-fashioned things which had belonged to their mother. Still it would not be out of place to excel their neighbors, inasmuch as they were what Phyllis termed the “fustest family in town.” On the whole, they began to feel quite reconciled to the marriage, and took a good deal of pains to make the house as attractive as possible for the bride. They had Phyllis’s word that it was as 69clean as soap and water and her two hands could make it, and as they never thought of peering into corners they contented themselves with little changes here and there, which they thought were artistic.
 
It was now May and the garden was full of early flowers, with which they meant to brighten the rooms at the last.
 
A letter had come from Miss Errington, who had noticed among the arrivals at the Ebbitt House the names of Dr. Samuel Hathern and wife, Lovering, Va., and as she knew there was but one Lovering in Virginia, and but one Dr. Samuel Hathern in Lovering, she felt sure it was their father with a new wife and had ventured to call.
 
“They received me in their private parlor,” she wrote, “and I was charmed with your father. Such a genial, courtly gentleman of the old school and so proud of his bride. She is a very handsome, well-preserved woman, and is au fait in everything pertaining to etiquette,—and knows how to dress perfectly. She has a good deal of Boston manner, and I should say decided views on most things. I imagine there may be a little Scotch blood in her, which accounts for a certain accent in her speech. She seems to be well educated, and, like myself, is very fond of music. Indeed, she is quite up in that, and, remembering little Katy’s wonderful voice, I spoke of it and said I hoped she might have every facility in the way of music. She assured me she would see to it, and what she says she means; there is no doubt of that. On the whole, you are to be congratulated on having a superior woman for a stepmother.”
 
There was a good deal more of irrelevant matter, with one or two allusions to her brother, who was about going abroad on business. But over this the sisters passed hastily. Their interest centered in the mother.
 
70“Scotch descent,—Boston manners and views. I knew she had views,” Fan said, with a toss of her head. “She is woman’s rights and runs an abolition society, I dare say, or did before the war. Fine musician; I wish Miss Errington would mind her business about Katy. I wonder what madam will think of our old rattle-trap of a piano. Very likely she will bring us a Steinway or a Chickering.”
 
This letter, instead of reassuring the sisters, made them rather uneasy with regard to the cultivated woman with views. What would she think of them, who had scarcely been outside of Lovering, and who knew so little of the world?
 
“I reckon I shall hate her, after all,” Fan thought, as she began to pull herself together and to remember sundry acts of abandon and bits of slang in which she sometimes indulged and which would be hard to give up.
 
Annie, on the contrary, who never shocked anyone, and whom her sister called a flat iron, or a flat, from her propensity to smooth matters and make the best of them, began to feel again her old dread of the new mother and to wonder how one so inferior as herself would impress so much superiority. The next day there came a telegram from their father, who was in Richmond and would be home the following evening at six o’clock. There was also a letter from Jack, who wrote hurriedly:
 
“Dear Fan-and-Ann. Veni, vidi, vici. Brush up your Latin and translate, but make it third person, with she, instead of first. To be brief: I called at the Spotswood this evening, and looking over the register, as I often do, saw in your father’s handwriting ‘Dr. Samuel Hathern and wife, Lovering, Va.’ In a jiff I sent up my card, and in another jiff I was shaking hands with Mrs. Hathern, who received me as if I were her son, or brother, and nearly looked me through with those eyes of hers which see 71everything. Whether they are black or blue, white or gray, I can’t tell, but I think they are black. You can’t get away from them; they follow you like the eyes of some portraits I have seen,—my grandmother’s for instance, which hangs in our dining-room. I never could steal a lump of sugar or poke my thumb into the honey pot because she was always looking at me. Just so with Mrs. Hathern. She lights on you and holds you and seems to be going clear down to a fellow’s boots and reading his inmost thoughts. She is handsome and stylish and had on the best fitting dress I ever saw. Looked as if she were run into it. I’ve no doubt she is a blood relation of Miles Standish and all the other chaps who came over in the Mayflower. She is very dignified but not exactly like our Southern ladies. Maybe it is her voice, which is strong and full and decided, and would make you jump if you were doing anything bad. To-morrow I am to have the honor of driving with her around the town and showing her the nakedness of the land, and I assure you it is very naked. I could shed buckets full of tears over the ruins of our once fair city, but it’s no good crying for spilt milk. Better go to work and get some more. She wishes to go first to Libby Prison. Think of it! I a Reb, and she a Fed, hob-nobbing in that place. She must have forgotten herself when she said to me with so much concern in her voice, ‘I trust you were never so unfortunate as to be a prisoner there.’
 
“I think even Fan would have been pleased with my dignified manner as I replied, ‘Madam, I had the honor to wear the grey, and there was no possibility of my being a prisoner in Libby.’
 
“‘Oh, I beg your pardon,’ she said, with a look which made me feel like a cut-throat and murderer, and as if I ought to have been in Libby, or some worse place, all my life.
 
“Then her eyes lighted up and a most wonderful smile broke out over her face, changing its expression entirely. I think that smile must have won your father. It made even me feel kind of so-so,—queer-like, you know. He 72seems very proud and fond of her. Calls her ‘Matty,’ and once when she thought I did not hear her she called him ‘Sam’!”
 
“Disgusting!” Fan exclaimed. “Sam! our father, Dr. Hathern! Sam, indeed! I knew she was vulgar, with all of her Standish blood. Sam! The idea!”
 
After this Fan had scarcely patience to finish the letter, which had but little more in it of the bride.
 
The next morning the young ladies were up betimes. As a rule they were not early risers, especially when their father was away. Nine and even ten o’clock sometimes found them in bed, while Phyllis kept their breakfast warm and made no signs of protest, unless there was a greater amount of work than usual and she was very tired. Then to herself she would call them onery and shiffless, and wonder what their poor mother would say if she knew how no-count they were, lyin’ bed hours after sun up. The morning after the receipt of the telegram, however, they were up with the sun and found Phyllis preparing the most appetizing breakfast she could think of, and occasionally wiping away a big tear before it dropped from her nose.
 
“De po’ lambs should have one more meal in peace before the missus come,” she said, as she served her cream toast and corn muffins and urged them to eat.
 
Katy was the only one who did justice to the muffins and toast. Fanny and Annie could only make a pretense of eating, and when breakfast was over Fanny said with a hysterical laugh, “I am going to the graves to tell mother and Charlie and the boy who is coming to-day. I don’t believe they know.”
 
A moment later she was walking rapidly across the field to the hillside cemetery, where she staid for a long time.
 
73What she said to the dead, if anything, no one ever knew. When she came back there were traces of tears on her face, but otherwise she was calm.
 
“Do you know,” she said to Annie, “that the boy seems very near to me this morning. I can see his great blue eyes looking wistfully at me as they did when he said ‘Don’t let her find me.’ Do as I will, they follow me as if they wanted to tell me something.”
 
Annie was accustomed to her sister’s theory that the dead are cognizant of what interests us, and only shivered a little as she replied, “I am glad I am not haunted with dead eyes. It is enough to think of the living ones which Jack says see everything, and will be sure to know if these rooms are not in order.”
 
Annie, who was more practical and more housewifely in her instincts than Fanny, was already at work and had brought from the garden and yard quantities of flowers,—roses and peonies and snowballs and lilies,—which lay heaped upon the dining-room table, with every vase and bowl and available pitcher in the house. Fan’s forte was decoration, and she at once went to work with a will, fashioning the flowers into bouquets and whistling as she worked, sometimes Dixie, and sometimes John Brown’s Body, which last she said was probably the bride’s favorite. If the boy’s eyes haunted her they acted as a stimulant, urging her on until the house was full of flowers and odorous with perfume. The last room visited was Charlie’s, where the uniforms of grey and blue were hanging, over one the stars and stripes,—over the other, the stars and bars. This was a sacred spot. Fan never whistled there, nor sung, and she stepped softly and spoke low as she put the bowl of forget-me-nots on the stand under the faded coats, where the bloodstains of Charley and the 74boy were showing. It seemed to her that many eyes were upon her now, and she began to feel nervous as she gently patted the pillow over which Charlie’s head used to lie, and where the boy’s had lain when he shouted a tiger for her and died.
 
“Poor boy!” she said to herself, as she left the room, “Had you no friends, and shall we never know who you were, or where you came from?”
 
After the early dinner they laid the table for supper, bringing out the best linen and china and glass, wondering where the mother would choose to sit that first night. It had been Annie’s prerogative to preside over the coffee urn. This must, of course, eventually be given up, and might as well be done first as last. So the Dresden plate, the one pearl handled knife and fork, both heirlooms from their grandmother, and kept mostly to look at, were put with the tea-cups and saucers, and the arm-chair their mother and Katy’s had used was wheeled to its place. For a moment both Fanny and Annie stood by it with a hand upon it, while Annie said, “I wonder if mother knows or cares.”
 
“Knows! Yes,” Fanny replied, “but does not care. In Heaven they neither marry nor are given in marriage, so, what is it to her if father brings home as many wives as the Mormons,—four at once, I have heard. It is only we that care.”
 
When everything was in readiness the sisters went all over the house, feeling a kind of pride in it, with its wide hall in the centre, its two large rooms on either side, and its broad piazza, shaded with honeysuckles, clematis and woodbine, and a beautiful wild rose or eglantine, struggling with the three and throwing out masses of color against the dark leaves of its neighbors. It was an ideal Virginia 75home, and the Boston woman, with all her culture and views and advanced ideas must find it so, the sisters thought as they finished their inspection and sat down to wait for the train. Katy, who had been as much interested in the preparations as any one, had made two small bouquets which she put on her father’s bureau, with a card under each. On one was scrawled in a child’s almost illegible hand, “For papa, from Katy;” on the other, “From Katy to Mamma.” She was happy, and in her white dress and blue sash, with her fair hair falling around her shoulders in soft curls she made a lovely picture as she flitted from room to room, now consulting the kitchen clock, now the one in the dining-room and wondering if they would never come. At last the whistle was heard in the distance coming nearer and nearer and finally ceasing as the train drew up to the station. Fifteen minutes passed, seeming to the sisters an age, and the village ‘bus stopped at the gate, followed by the express wagon on which were two huge Saratoga trunks, a large valise and a hat box.
 
“Ought we go and meet them?” Annie said, in a whisper.
 
“No,” Fan replied. “It is enough for Katy to go.”
 
She was running down the walk, and with a glad cry threw herself into her father’s arms. Then, at a word from him, she gave her hand to the lady at his side, who stooped and kissed her. It had never yet occurred to her that every body did not love her and want her, and she held tightly to the lady on one side and to her father on the other, and so went hippity-hopping up the walk, telling them that the old cat had six kittens and the speckled hen thirteen chickens; that the house was beautiful with roses and things, and she had made two bouquets herself.
 
76It was a very cold, callous heart which could withstand Katy, and Mrs. Hathern’s face wore a soft and pleased expression as she looked down at the little girl and then up at the two young ladies who had come out upon the piazza and whom the doctor presented to her as “My daughters, Fanny and Annie.”
Chapter VIII.—The Author’s Story Continued. MRS. HATHERN.

She had taught a district school in a small town in Maine,—had been preceptress in a young ladies’ seminary in Calais,—a music teacher and organist in Portland,—and the wife and widow of Thomas Haverleigh, of Bangor, whom she had married mostly for his money, and for the broader field it would give her. Some years after his death she moved to Boston, where her restless, energetic nature found full scope in the many clubs and societies of which she became an active member. Her marriage with Dr. Hathern was a surprise to her friends, who knew how unlike the two were to each other. He was gentle, refined, wholly unselfish and rather weak where decided action was necessary; she strong, determined, and self-assured, with a will which no one could bend except her son Carl, and he sometimes failed. There could scarcely have been two people more unlike and possibly this dissimilarity of disposition was what attracted each to the other until both believed they were in what the lady called a middle-aged kind of love. In a letter to a friend she likened it to the Indian summer, which is often more satisfactory than the fervid heat of the real summer days. Whether it were Indian summer or June the doctor did not stop to consider. 77He was infatuated and only knew that he was supremely happy and never more so than when he reached home and was presenting his bride to his daughters. They were nervous and constrained, but she was wholly at her ease, while her eyes, which Jack said saw everything, did not belie his statement. They were very large and black and bright and took the two girls in at a glance, from their heads to their feet, making them feel rather uncomfortable. Fanny thought with some uneasiness of two missing buttons on her boots, while Annie remembered a little rent in her underskirt and wondered if it were visible.
 
“I am glad to see you and hope we shall be friends. Which is Fanny, and which Annie?” Mrs. Hathern said, and her voice seemed to fill the whole house, it was so distinct and decided, with a tone in it which some might call an accent, but which Fan-and-Ann pronounced a brogue, when comparing notes with regard to it.
 
Had she been a public speaker she could have thrown it into the farthest corner of the largest hall, but her hearers would not have said it was a pleasant voice. It was too self-assured and too full of a conviction that the opinions it expressed were the only opinions worth expressing.
 
Like most cold impassive natures she was not at all demonstrative and although quick to see and speak of whatever was wrong, or out of place, she seldom praised or expressed herself pleased with anything. That she made no comment was, she thought, a sufficient proof that she did not disapprove. Gush was especially distasteful to her, and she was glad not to meet it in her step-daughters.
 
She knew they must be nervous, but they were ladylike and quiet and received her kindly. They told her which was Fanny and which Annie, saying laughingly, “we are better known as Fan-and-Ann.” One took her satchel, 78the other her shawl, as they led the way into the house and showed her to her room. Fan, who was watching her closely, saw how rapidly her eyes traveled from one object to another, lighting finally upon an immense spider’s web in a corner, which had probably been there a week, as there were two or three dead flies already in it, and a freshly captured fourth was making a loud protest against its capture.
 
“Can I do anything for you?” Fan asked, with a view to draw attention from the offending web.
 
“No, thanks, I can get along quite well by myself,” was the reply, and acting upon the hint the girls left her alone and went to their father, who was seeing to the baggage, and whom they nearly knocked down as they seized him around the neck and smothered him with kisses.
 
“Why—why—why; bless my soul! What’s all this whirlwind for? and crying, too,” the Doctor said, folding them in his arms and feeling his own eyes moisten a little.
 
“We didn’t half tell you how glad we are to have you home, and we don’t mean to cry,” Fan said; “and we are not going to again; but just this little minute I can’t help it.”
 
“Yes, yes; there, there,” the doctor replied, patting first one head and then the other, “there’s nothing to cry about, I assure you, except for joy. She’s a very remarkable woman, and the wonder is that she could care for an old codger like me. We are going to be very happy, all of us. She has some elegant furniture coming, which will make the old house quite like a palace. You know you have wanted new furniture a long time.”
 
“Oh, father,” Fanny cried. “We would rather have you than all the fine furniture in the world; but we are going to be good; indeed we are.”
 
79She was hugging him again with her arms around his neck on one side of him, while Annie’s were on the other, when they were startled with a call for Sam, which came echoing down the hall like the peal of a clarionet, making the four clinging arms drop suddenly, while the doctor struggled into an upright position and answered, “Yes, Matty, I am coming.”
 
Mrs. Hathern had removed her bonnet and investigated the room, deciding, with a radical woman’s quickness what changes she would make when her furniture came; deciding, too, that the windows had not been half washed and the window stools not at all, judging from the dust and dried leaves upon them. Then with her umbrella she demolished the big spider’s web and was proceeding to attack a smaller one in the vicinity of the bell rope, which she tried with no effect, when Katy came dancing into the room, her blue eyes showing the admiration she felt for her new mamma, whose grey dress and steel buttons she began to finger caressingly.
 
“I like you,” she said and moved by an impulse she could not resist Mrs. Hathern stooped and kissed the lovely face with something like a real mother feeling in her heart.
 
But nothing could change her nature, which was to discipline and mould whatever needed moulding and disciplining. So, when Katy, wishing to call attention to her gift of flowers, said to her, “Have you seen my flowers. I give ’em to you.” She answered promptly, “You mean you gave them to me. Little girls must learn to use good grammar. Yes, I see them; they are very pretty, but be careful or you will upset the vase and spill the water; better run out now, while I make my toilet.”
 
It was not so much the words as the tone with which 80they were spoken, which brought a slight shadow to Katy’s face as she started for the door, followed by Mrs. Hathern, who looked out into the hall in time to see the tableau at the farther end.
 
“Not as emotionless and impassive as I thought,” she said to herself, understanding it perfectly, and interrupting it with her call for Sam. She was given to the use of pet names; she had called her first husband Tom, and knew no reason why she should not call her second Sam. At first he rather liked it. He had been Sam when a boy, and it made him feel young again. But when he heard it in the presence of his daughters, it sounded differently, for he felt their disapproval of it.
 
“I can’t open my satchel,” she said, when he came to her. “Something is wrong with the lock, and how can I get some hot water. I have tried the bell three times with no response.”
 
In her voice there was something the doctor had not heard before, and, like Katy, he felt a passing shadow on his spirits, but he hastened to undo the lock of the satchel and said, apologetically: “Oh, yes, the bell. I knew the cord was broken. I will see to it at once, and the hot water, too. I’ll go for Phyllis to fetch it, I haven’t seen her yet.”
 
He found Phyllis in a mood which could not be described as angelic. She had spent an hour or so in clearing up her kitchen; had mopped the floor; shoved into dark corners pots, kettles, skillets and brooms, and arrayed herself in her red flowered gown and white apron, with her highest turban on her head. If her master had come alone, she would have gone with his daughters to greet him, but with a new mistress it was not to be thought of. “She reckoned she knowed her place,” she said; “whar she 81was raised niggers didn’t put on no a’rs. Marster would done fotch the new Misses to her, in course.” But as time went by and neither mistress nor master appeared, her wrath began to wax hot and to manifest itself in her own peculiar way.
 
“Whar is the use,” she reasoned, “clarin’ up an’ hidin’ things whar I can’t find ’em, if my lady is too fine to come inter de kitchen. No, sir! I’ll jess have ’em handy agin.”
 
Pots and kettles and skillets were brought from their hiding place and set down promiscuously on the hearth. The broom and mop followed next, and the duster was aimed at the door behind which it belonged, just escaping contact with the doctor’s head as he appeared. He had heard from his daughters of Phyllis’s propensity to throw things when on what they called a rampage, and concluded she was on one now.
 
“Ho, Phyllis,” he said in his cheery way. “What’s up, and why haven’t you come to welcome your new mistress?”
 
He offered her his hand, which Phyllis grasped firmly.
 
“I’se mighty glad to see you, Mas’r,” she said, “an’ I’se gwine to do my duty, but for de dear Lord’s sake whar was de sense for a new Misses. Et kind of upsots one to think of dem t’others what’s dead an’ gone.”
 
This was the first real set-back the doctor had received, and it hurt his pride that his servant should disapprove of what seemed to him so desirable. But in his usual kind way he soothed the old negress, who assured him again that she meant to do her duty and bar everything for his sake and the young misseses. Filling a pitcher with hot water, which took a few minutes to heat, she followed him to his room, where Mrs. Hathern stood 82with a hint of a cloud on her face at the long delay, and because the pitcher had a broken nose and a suspicion of pot black on the handle. She prided herself on never losing her temper to the extent of showing it in her voice or manner. In a quiet, determined way she could sting with her tongue and smile while she did it. Bowing graciously to Phyllis she said, “I thought perhaps you had forgotten the hot water, and I have washed me in cold, but you can leave the pitcher, and please wipe off that black spot which you probably did not see.”
 
Phyllis explained, as she rubbed off the pot black, that “de water bilin’ in de tea kettle was hard as rocks and not fit for ladies to wash in, an’ she had to blow up the fi’ to heat some soff.” Then, putting the pitcher down with a thump she bounced out of the room. She had taken Mrs. Hathern’s measure, and Mrs. Hathern had taken hers, and neither was very satisfactory.
 
“She ain’t no mo’ like Miss Carline or Miss Nellie than I’m like Mas’r General Lee,” she said, and there was a stormy look in her eyes when she went in at last to wait upon the table, where Mrs. Hathern presided as easily as if she had all her life sat in the arm-chair she was the third to occupy.
 
She was a woman of theories and maxims to which she adhered rigidly. Among these were, “Early to bed and early to rise,”—“An hour in the morning is worth two at night,” and so forth. Accordingly, the next morning at six o’clock she was out upon the piazza looking very cool and handsome in her gown of lavender and white, open in front to show her embroidered petticoat as was the fashion of the time. Everything about her dress and person was spotless, and she impressed one with the idea that she had just been scrubbed and ironed. Her hair was 83never out of place; her collars and cuffs never soiled, or her garments crumpled or torn. Cleanliness she held next to godliness, and shiftlessness and untidiness next to sin. Born and reared amid the thrift and energy and activity of New England, she had no idea of or sympathy with the happy-go-lucky manner of living in the Hathern family, with Phyllis at its head. Hearing no stir, and seeing no signs of life in the dining-room, except a few flies busy with some crumbs left on the cloth the night before, she found her way to the kitchen, where Phyllis was very leisurely making preparations for breakfast. Later on, before presenting herself at the table, she was intending to don her Sunday apparel, but now, as the morning was very hot, her dress might be described as decolleté. A faded calico skirt, which scarcely reached her bare ankles, and a loose, thin sacque which showed all the creases and curves of her portly figure, comprised her entire make-up as she stood with her back to the door, stirring her batter for griddle cakes, and all unconscious of the foe bearing down upon her.
 
With a warning cough Mrs. Hathern stepped across the threshold, so startling the old negress that she dropped the egg she was about to break into the batter.
 
“Oh, my Lord, how you done skeered me,” she exclaimed, lifting both hands, in one of which was the dripping spoon. “Does you want anything, honey?”
 
Phyllis was very religious, and a leader at the meetings held in some of the freedmen’s cabins, where pandemonium usually reigned and the Lord was entreated as if he were deaf, or asleep. She had attended one of these the previous night, and on her way home had told a crony whom she met how she had rassled in pra’r, and had asked others to rassel, too, that she might have grace to do her duty. 84As a result of her rassling she was in quite a conciliatory frame of mind, and the word honey came from her involuntarily.
 
“I am not one of the young ladies, I am Mrs. Hathern,” the latter said, holding up her dainty skirts as she walked around the broken egg and the pots and kettles which Phyllis had not yet put away. “What time do you usually have breakfast?” she asked, and Phyllis replied, “Oh, we ain’t perticular, mos’ any time when dey gits up,—eight, nine,—sometimes ten,—jess as happens.”
 
Mrs. Hathern looked aghast. Such habits as these she was not prepared for, and she would not allow them either.
 
“Very well,” she said, “that may have answered in the past; for the future we will have breakfast in the summer at seven, sharp,—and at eight in the winter.”
 
In Phyllis’s astonishment the second egg, which she had brought from the cupboard, was in danger of following its companion.
 
“In de Lord’s name, how’s you gwine to git de young ladies up, or marster, either so airly. Why, it’ll take a hoss team to do it,” she said, and Mrs. Hathern replied, “I shall see to that, and you will see to the breakfast until my cook comes, when she will take your place.”
 
Phyllis bridled at once and her turban began to topple on one side. But she remembered her duty, and asked, very respectfully, “When is she comin’?”
 
“Very soon, I hope, and a housemaid with her,—both capable servants, who are accustomed to keep everything in order. The sight of your kitchen would drive them crazy. Do you always cook by a fireplace? Have you no stove?”
 
Phyllis snorted,—a sure sign that she was forgetting her duty.
 
85“Stove!” she repeated. “One dem squar’ black things, a burnin’ and blisterin’ your han’s! No sir! Ole Miss Fullerton done got one before de wah, and dat fool of a Rache buil’d de fi’ in de oven, an when de smoke an’ de fi’ bust out, she screeched so dat Mas’r Hathern went over an’ put it out, an’ tole ’em whar to make de fi’. He’s from de norf, whar all such truck as stoves comes from, an’ he larf fit to split his sides when he seen de fi’ in de oven. No, sir! No stove for me!”
 
“Such shiftlessness!” was Mrs. Hathern’s mental comment, as she went back to the piazza where she found her husband, and sat down to wait for breakfast with what patience she could command and to think how she could best change the habits of this “sozzling household.”
 
That was what she called it in the first letter she wrote her son, telling him to go at once to her house and expedite the departure of Norah and Julina. He was also to order the best range in Boston and have it sent to her immediately, with all necessary furnishing.
 
“Think of a big fireplace,” she wrote, “with a crane and tin ovens and pots and kettles and spiders and the water pail, with a gourd on the top, all in a clutter, and a huge negress, weighing at least two hundred, standing in the midst, with nothing on but a short petticoat and loose sacque! That is what I found the first morning when I went to the kitchen to see if breakfast were ready. We didn’t have it until eight o’clock, and that was too early for Miss Fanny, who did not appear until we were nearly through. I have ordered it for seven hereafter. I cannot begin too soon to change the loose habits the girls have acquired from having had so many blacks to wait upon them before the war, and depending wholly upon Phyllis since. She almost breathes for them, and they let her. To do her 86justice she looks very respectable when she comes into the dining-room and she waits at table remarkably well. It is a very pleasant, roomy house, with wide verandas above and below, broad hall in the centre, with fireplace in one corner, and doors opening at either end. But it is greatly run down,—old, faded carpets and rickety furniture—and in the bedroom I intend for you a broken-legged bureau, propped up on a brick. We should call this second class at the north, but they are really among the first people in the town, and don’t seem to know how dilapidated they are, or if they do they are too proud to show it. I refer now to the girls. The Doctor admits that things are not quite as they ought to be. He is a thorough gentleman, and I am more and more convinced of the wisdom of my choice. Fanny and Annie are bright, pretty girls, especially Fanny, who is the ruling spirit and mouth-piece for her sister. Katy, the youngest, is a beauty, but spoiled. I do not think she knows what restraint is, but I must restrain her, and mould her as a child should be moulded. She will then make a splendid woman. The twins are, I fear, beyond my control. Fanny certainly is, and there is a fire in her black eyes I should not care to rouse. I forgot to tell you that there is a wide lawn in front of the house, with a long avenue leading to the street, shaded with elms and maples. The garden is full of flower beds bordered with old-fashioned box, and there are roses and honeysuckles and running vines everywhere. In the rear a grassy lane leads to the woods, which at times during the war were full of soldiers, both northern and southern. The war still broods like a plague over Virginia, although I cannot help feeling that some of the people make it an excuse for what is only the result of years of indolence and indifference to anything like thrift and energy.”
 
87Carl’s answer to this letter was prompt and characteristic. “I went to the house,” he wrote, “meeting Julina in the street. She informed me that Miss O’Rourke was giving a lunch to some of her friends, and had sent her after oil for the salad. So you see, ‘when the cat’s away the mice will play.’ Norah seemed as meek as Moses when she saw me, and if a lunch was in progress she gave no sign of it. Perhaps Julina lied; it’s like her. Miss O’Rourke informed me that after getting the house ready for the new tenant, she must visit her grandmother and ‘rest up’ before going south, and Julina will ‘rest up’ with her. So I don’t know when you will see their ladyships. What a delightful picture you give of the Elms. Double piazzas, wide hall, big rooms, avenues, gardens, roses and woods, to say nothing of pots and kettles and pans and a 200-pounder, all huddled together in the kitchen, and a bureau propped up with a brick! I like that. It reminds me of our first visit to the sea shore, with a cottage full of broken furniture, and so leaky that when it rained we had to set with washtubs over our heads. What a field you have in which to exercise your executive ability and love of change; but don’t go to bossing little Katy, or make her sit in chairs and go to bed without her supper, as you did me, and don’t introduce that new order of ‘early to bed and early to rise’ until I have had a chance to enjoy the old easy-going régime you hold in so much contempt. Let the girls sleep, if they want to. I remember how you used to snake Paul and me out of bed at the most unearthly hours until he ran away, and I got weakly and the doctor told you I must have all the sleep I could get. How I hated the early bird which caught the worm, or rather the worm for getting up to be caught. I am going to like the girls, 88and shall probably fall in love with all three; that’s my way, you know. Perhaps Katy is too young. Eight isn’t she? while the twins are eighteen. I am nearly sixteen, am five feet ten and trying to raise a beard. Not an infant, you see.”
 
This letter was not altogether satisfactory to Mrs. Hathern, whose usual smooth brow was somewhat wrinkled and whose voice and manner had an increase of energy and decision when she went back to the posse of negroes at work in different parts of the house. There was a great upheaval in progress, which Annie, who was an eye-witness to it in all its details, will describe in another chapter.
Chapter IX.—Annie’s Story. THE UPHEAVAL.

My coadjutor, the Author, has told how the new mother came home to us on a lovely May afternoon, when we had made the old house bright with flowers and schooled ourselves to receive her as our father’s wife should be received by his daughters. We had heard she was a remarkable woman and a handsome woman, and we were not disappointed. She was handsome, with the brightest and blackest eyes I ever saw,—dark, glossy hair,—not one of which ever dared get out of place,—brilliant complexion and regular features, if I except her nose, which inclined upward a little, and her chin, which receded in proportion as her nose went up. And she was remarkable, too, and so different from any type of woman we had ever seen that she took our breath away, 89and for a few days we were in a state of collapse and bewilderment. She was a highly educated woman, bristling all over with views and theories and maxims, one of which was “never to let the grass grow under her feet, if there was anything to do.” And she didn’t let it grow, but plunged at once into the midst of a domestic cyclone, which not only swept away for the time being all our comfort, but, also, the good opinions we had entertained of ourselves as housekeepers and young ladies of judgment.
 
We had never dreamed that we were as shiftless and no account and dilapidated a set as we came to believe ourselves in the new light shed upon us and our surroundings. We knew that our furniture was old and our carpets worn, but we had a pride in and an affection for them because they had belonged to our mother, and we thought the house was clean, and we told Mrs. Hathern so when she suggested a regular tear up such as was customary in New England twice a year. For answer to our assertion that we had been scrubbed from attic to cellar she smiled a pitying kind of smile at our ignorance, and rubbing her hand over the top of a door brought off an amount of black which appalled us. We had never thought of looking on the top of doors for dirt. But her eyes went everywhere, and she went with them and wrote against us “weighed in the balance and found wanting.” Everything was wrong, especially in the kitchen, where, she said, Norah O’Rourke would not stay a day. Privately, Fan and I thought she was more than half afraid of Norah O’Rourke, whom she quoted so constantly and for whom it seemed to us our hitherto quiet house was turned inside out. Two carpenters were brought into the kitchen, where an extra window was cut so that Norah O’Rourke could have more light and air; a new cupboard was built 90for Norah O’Rourke’s iron utensils, which Phyllis had kept anywhere, so that they were handy; there was a sink for Norah O’Rourke’s dish-washing, and stationary tubs for Norah O’Rourke’s laundrying. The ceiling was whitewashed; the walls painted a light drab and the floor snuff color, and when everything was in readiness for Norah O’Rourke, except the range which had not come, that lady’s quarters were certainly a great improvement upon the dark, dingy room where Phyllis had reigned supreme so long.
 
Just what her position in the household was to be when Norah O’Rourke arrived we did not know, as Mrs. Hathern was reticent on that point. That she didn’t like Phyllis, and Phyllis didn’t like her, was an assured fact, but there was as yet no open rupture between them. Mrs. Hathern was evidently trying to control her temper, while Phyllis was conscientiously striving to do her duty. I think she rassled in pra’r at the night meetings a great many times during the toss up, which extended from the kitchen to the house proper, where, as Fan wrote to Jack, “The old Harry held high carnival.” Had I then read Jane Carlyle’s life and letters, as I have since, I should have sympathized with her fully in her despair and discomposure when her lord came home full of bile and raised Cain generally. As it was with that house at No. 5 Cheyne Row, so it was with our house under the Elms. Carpets came up, curtains came down, furniture was banished to the attic to make room for the new that was coming. Paper was torn from the walls and lay in long mouldy strips upon the floor. Pails of suds, with mops and brooms and brushes and four colored women who had been pressed into service in order to expedite matters, were everywhere, together with plumbers and painters 91and upholsterers and paper-hangers brought from Richmond to assist in the mélee.
 
In her cambric dress and white apron, which never showed a particle of soil, and a dainty little cap, with a lavender bow, perched on the top of her head, Mrs. Hathern moved among her forces like a brigadier-general, urging them on as they had never been urged before in their lives. The women, however, baffled her. They were not accustomed to the Yankee quick step, and if she left one washing a window while she went to look after another, she was very apt on her return to find the window washer setting in a rocking chair or rummaging through a bureau drawer. Dire were the complaints she made about the blacks. She was a rank abolitionist during the war, she said, but if she had known what a good-for-nothing race they were, she shouldn’t have troubled herself about them, and she’d like nothing better now than to thrash them if she could. But they were free and her ekles one of them told her during a hot controversy over a window which was washed three times before it suited.
 
Had there been nothing except a battle between Boston energy and Virginia slowness, Fan and I might have enjoyed it, knowing that out of the confusion order would finally come, but a more serious matter was daily confronting us in the shape of little Katy’s misdemeanors. We never knew before that she had any, but now we found that of all children to get into mischief and tear her clothes she was the worst. She enjoyed the commotion and was always in the thickest of it. Naturally she soiled her dress and apron and hands, for which she was promptly reproved and punished. Sometimes she was made to sit for an hour or more in a high chair near the bureau in father’s bedroom. For diversion she was told 92to commit either the collect for the day, or several verses in the Bible, beginning with the sermon on the mount, the number of verses varying according to the heinousness of her offense. Sometimes, if the rent in her dress were longer and the soil worse than usual, she was sent to bed and kept there until morning supperless, unless Phyllis surreptitiously conveyed a paper parcel into her window by standing on a stool and using a pitchfork. Once, when overcome with sleep, she fell off the chair and was only saved a hard blow on her head by the open Bible which fell under it. Then Fan interfered, and holding the sobbing child in her arms appealed to her father, asking if so much discipline were necessary.
 
During the war father had never been quite sure on which side he stood, and now he was equally undecided, until Mrs. Hathern said, in that cool, rasping voice, which always irritated me, “My dear, I am sorry to be the cause of any trouble between you and your daughters, but really you must decide at once which is to take charge of Katy, Miss Fanny or myself. The child is a dear little creature, but needs restraining. Sitting in a chair, or lying in bed, does not hurt her physically. I always corrected Carl that way, and——”
 
She stopped suddenly as if she had left some name unsaid, and it seemed to me that she flushed a little.
 
Her hand was on father’s arm rubbing a speck of dirt she saw there, as she waited for his answer.
 
“Yes, certainly, certainly,” he said, hesitatingly, “Katy is our baby, and I suppose we have spoiled her; naturally it is a mother’s place to take charge of her. Be as easy with her as you can, and you, Katy, be good.”
 
So Katy was ordered back to the chair until she had committed all the Blesseds which she did not already know 93in the sermon on the mount. There was only one of these and she was soon at liberty, and as she had the sunniest nature I ever knew she was in a few minutes at her play again under the Elms, making believe she was in church singing the grand old Te Deum with that clear, wonderful voice which made the workmen stop to listen, while Mrs. Hathern said to us, “Miss Errington was right. Katy has great capabilities. I know something of music myself, and when my piano comes I shall take her in hand.”
 
“May the Lord help Katy if the madam takes her in hand more than she has already done,” Fan said to me when we were alone and she could give vent to her wrath. “I tell you what it is, father is an imbecile and she is a tyrant, and I won’t stand it. I’ll marry Col. Errington. You’ll see.”
Chapter X.—Annie’s Story Continued. A SUSPICION.
 
It was five weeks since Mrs. Hathern came home, and late June was queening it over the woods and hills of Lovering, and the lawn and the garden were full of flowers and beauty. The house, with its new coat of paint, was quite another place from the one we had known from childhood. Then it was brown and weather stained; now it was white, with green blinds, and looked very clean and fresh and cool in the summer sunlight, with the luxurious vines clinging to its sides and the huge columns of the piazzas. Inside the change was greater still. Plumbers, painters, upholsterers, carpenters and negroes had departed. The furniture had come and we 94scarcely knew ourselves with our carpets of Brussels and moquette, our sofas and chairs of brocade and rosewood, our long mirrors and lace draperies, and, more than all, the costly paintings which in their Florentine frames adorned the walls of the drawing room and hall. We were very fine, and our neighbors came in crowds to see and admire and congratulate us upon our prosperity. Mrs. Hathern had plenty of money and spent it lavishly upon us all, and there is no doubt that we were really greatly improved in every way by the introduction of Boston standards and Boston ways. But on Fan’s part and mine there was always a regret for the good old easy-going times when things were at haphazard and we did as we pleased, with no one but Phyllis to dictate to us. She was still doing her duty, but doing it in a cabin across the back yard. The range had come and had been set up, and Mrs. Hathern had done her best to initiate Phyllis into its mysteries. But either she couldn’t or wouldn’t learn, and in despair she had been allowed to carry her pots and kettles and skillets and ovens to the cabin, where there was a fireplace in which she could potter as she pleased, until the arrival of Miss Norah O’Rourke, who understood the range in all its ramifications. She was still visiting her grandmother and resting up, but she was expected in a few days, together with Julina, in whom Fan and I felt considerable interest as the girl who had made love to Carl. He, too, was expected soon and had sent on a box containing a most heterogenous collection, which he had called his Lares and Penates,—fishing tackle, bathing suits, an air-gun, a student’s cap, sporting pictures cut from sporting papers, old books and photographs, and some handkerchiefs and gloves which were never bought for him and in which there still lingered a delicate perfume,—the 95whole not worth the cost of the express, his mother said.
 
But she unpacked them carefully and put them in his room, the pleasantest bed-chamber in the house and the one we had always used for guests. This she appropriated without consulting us. Indeed, she had never consulted us but once and that, with regard to the disposition of some of the old furniture, the piano and the pictures of our mother and Katy’s. These last had hung in father’s room, where he could see them the last thing at night and the first thing in the morning, and we had prided ourselves upon them because they were fair likenesses of the sweet-faced women who had once reigned as mistresses at the Elms and because they were our only oils.
 
“They may be good likenesses, but they are badly done,—mere daubs,” Mrs. Hathern said, when calling our attention to them by asking where we would like to have them put. The space they occupied was wanted for her own portrait, life-size, taken in Paris and gorgeous in cream satin, low neck and pearls. “Three Mrs. Hatherns in one husband’s bed-chamber are too many,” she said, and we agreed with her and removed the daubs to our own room, where we were sitting when Carl’s box was being unpacked.
 
Katy was looking on and prattling constantly, while her stepmother occasionally reproved her for being so curious and asking so many questions. Something was wanted from below stairs and Mrs. Hathern went to fetch it, leaving Katy alone. A moment after the child came running to us with two photographs which she had found in a book. One, the freshest and newest, was that of a bright, handsome boy of twelve or thirteen, with a happy, laughing expression in his brown eyes which told of a sunny disposition 96and perfect content with life as he found it. The other was the picture of a boy two or three years older, with something the same features, but a worried, anxious expression as if life were not all a holiday. That they were related we were sure, and that one was a poor relation we felt equally sure.
 
“Carl,” I said to Fan, indicating the younger face.
 
“Yes, Carl,” she answered, but her gaze was riveted upon the other,—the sad, browbeaten face,—whose great wide open blue eyes looked into ours with a wistful, pleading expression we had seen somewhere and could not recall. “Who is he, and what makes me feel as if I were looking upon some body dead?” Fan asked just as the soft swish of Mrs. Hathern’s gown was heard and she appeared at the door, saying in the low tone which always made Katy shiver and think of the high chair, “Katy, did you take two photographs from Carl’s room?”
 
“Yes, mamma. I wanted to show ’em to Fan and Ann,” Katy said, reaching her hand to us for them.
 
I gave mine up, saying as I did so, “This I am sure is Carl. He is a very handsome boy.”
 
But Fan kept hers, fascinated by the mournful eyes which held her as the Ancient Mariner held his unwilling hearer.
 
“Yes, this is Carl, and he is a handsome boy,” Mrs. Hathern replied, taking the photograph from me.
 
“And who is this?” Fan asked, surrendering hers at last.
 
I did not think of it then, but it came to me afterwards that Mrs. Hathern’s voice was not quite natural as she replied, “That is Carl’s cousin Paul, who once lived with us.”
 
“Where is he now?” was Fan’s next question, and 97Mrs. Hathern replied, “I don’t know. I think he is dead. He went to the war, and never came back.”
 
She left the room and we were alone, as Katy had already gone. We were sitting near an open window looking north, and simultaneously our eyes went across the field to the hillside cemetery where the headstones of Charlie and The Boy showed white amid the growth of flowering shrubs and fragrant evergreens; then they came back and confronted each other with a questioning look of terror and surprise. Fan was the first to speak. Leaning forward she whispered to me, “Mrs. Hathern is Aunt Martha!”
 
“Yes,” I said. “She is Aunt Martha,” and I felt myself grow faint and sick as I said it.
 
We had conceived such a contempt for the woman whose image had haunted our dying boy’s pillow that the shock was very great when we learned that she was with us, a part of us, our father’s wife. We felt more and more sure of it as we recalled the few words The Boy had dropped with regard to himself. When we asked his name he had said he was one of the Apostles, and that was Paul. He had spoken of a Carlyle as younger than himself.
 
That was Carl, and there seemed nothing wanting to complete the chain of evidence except to know Mrs. Hathern’s real name. From the window we saw father in the lane mounting his horse preparatory to visiting a patient.
 
Slipping down the back stairs Fan went up to him and after stroking the horse’s neck a moment said, “By the way, father, what is Mrs. Hathern’s real name? You call her Matty. Is it Matilda?” “No, child, Martha. I thought you knew,” was the reply, and in a moment Fan was back again, pirouetting around the room and beating the air as if she were crazy.
 
98“She is Aunt Martha!” she exclaimed. “I don’t wonder he said he would never go back to her. How long do you suppose she kept him sitting in chairs like she does Katy?”
 
“Until he was glued to them,” I answered, and she continued, “It is horrible, horrible! I think I hate her. What will she say, I wonder, when she knows that Paul died here with us? And she shall know it. Snowdon’s knight never longed more earnestly to stand face to face with Rhoderic Dhu than I long to tell her The Boy’s story.”
 
Chapter XI.—Annie’s Story Continued. AUNT MARTHA.

There were two halls on the upper floor of our house, one long and wide and running from north to south, the other, shorter and narrower, turned off at right angles, running east and west. Opening from this hall was Charlie’s room in which no change had been made since The Boy died. Three or four times a year Phyllis washed the linen and made the bed up fresh and clean, while Fan and I swept and dusted the unused chamber, which had become a kind of Bethel to us. If Mrs. Hathern had attacked it during the upheaval we were prepared to do battle. But she did not, and with no suspicion of the danger threatening it we were going down the narrow hall to an outside piazza when we saw the door open and heard voices inside, Mrs. Hathern’s and Phyllis’s, the latter pitched high as if in fierce altercation, and the former low but very determined. Crossing the threshold we 99found Phyllis, straightened back with her hands on her hips, her usual attitude of defiance, and her turban nearly off her head.
 
“You can’t have dis yer room,” she was saying. “It’s Mas’r Charlie’s, and whar the Boy died; dems de berry piller slips he died on; nobody has done slep here since and neber will till de day of judgment. Thar’s ’nuff oder rooms plenty good for July or any other white truck from de norf.”
 
“What is all this?” Fanny asked, addressing Mrs. Hathern, who replied, “I am glad you have come to teach this insolent negro her place. I am not accustomed to such opposition from a servant, and cannot allow it. I am wanting a room for Julina, who will be here in a few days. This suits me. But when I told Phyllis to clear it up and remove those old soldier clothes, which are only gathering moths, she refused outright and commenced a rigmarole about Mas’r Charlie and some Boy which I cannot comprehend. Perhaps you can enlighten me.”
 
Turning to Phyllis Fan said, “You can go. I will explain to Mrs. Hathern.” Then to the latter, “I am sorry that Phyllis should be disrespectful to you, but she is right about the room. No one can occupy it. It was my brother Charlie’s and the Boy’s, whose memory is almost as dear to us as my brother’s. These which you call old clothes were Charlie’s. You know, perhaps, that he was killed in the war.”
 
She had crossed the room and was standing by the uniforms of blue and grey, one with the stars and bars above it, the other with the stars and stripes. Mrs. Hathern bowed stiffly and said, “I have heard so, yes; but if he was a confederate how did he happen to wear the blue, too? Did he turn traitor to his cause?”
 
100Her manner was exasperating, and her words insulting, and I knew by the fire in Fan’s eyes that she would spare no detail in the story she meant to tell.
 
“Traitor! Never!” she answered, hotly. “The blue belonged to the Boy.”
 
“And who was he? the Boy is so very indefinite,” Mrs. Hathern asked in the same offensive tone, which made Fan furious.
 
“I don’t know who he was; not even his name. Let me tell you how he came to us, blood-stained and worn and frightened, and how we cared for him till he died, and then you will know why this room is doubly sacred to us,” Fan said.
 
“Certainly, if you like; it must be interesting; but please be brief as possible, as I am in a hurry,” was Mrs. Hathern’s provoking remark, and seating herself upon the bed, she prepared to listen, with a bored expression upon her face.
 
Fan’s blood was up, and the sight of the woman whom she believed to be Aunt Martha sitting so serene and unconcerned on the bed, where thoughts of her had terrorized the dying boy, roused her beyond quiet endurance.
 
“Mrs. Hathern,” she said, “please do not sit there. It hurts me as much as if you were sitting on the Boy’s grave.”
 
Mrs. Hathern smiled derisively. “I am very comfortable and not at all superstitious. So I think I’ll stay, as I am rather tired. I shall not hurt your Boy,” she said, putting the pillow under her head and leaning back against the headboard.
 
I wish I could paint a picture of Fan’s white face and dark gleaming eyes, as in words more eloquent than I can write she told the story of the Boy, beginning at Fredericksburg 101and coming down to the day when he came to Phyllis’s cabin, bedraggled and worn, with a hunted look in his eyes and pathetic entreaty in his voice as he begged us sometimes not to let the soldiers get him, and again not to let his Aunt Martha know where he was, as he could not go back to her. Fan had taken the boy’s letter from the blue coat pocket where it was kept and had read it, while Mrs. Hathern’s face softened as I did not suppose it could soften, and there was something like moisture in her eyes. But she kept her place upon the bed until Fan told of the few hints the boy had given of his antecedents.
 
“In his delirium,” she said, “he talked of Carlyle, who, I think, was his cousin,—of a dog whose name was Don,—and of an Aunt Martha, who could not have been kind to him, he seemed so afraid of her and so anxious that she should not know where he was. If you could have seen his poor wasted face and sunken eyes upon the pillow on which you are lying, you would know why this room is like a grave and why we cannot let a stranger occupy it.”
 
At the mention of the wasted face and sunken eyes which had lain upon the pillow Mrs. Hathern started as if she had been stung, or had felt the cold touch of the dead face Fan described so vividly. Crossing the room she put one hand caressingly upon the blue coat, and wiping the tears from her eyes with the other she said, “I thank you for your kindness to the northern boy, and shall not forget it. Did you never learn his name?”
 
“Never,” Fan replied. “We asked him what it was, and he said he was one of the Apostles. That is all we know for sure. We advertised and wrote to the town in Maine which he mentioned in his delirium, but nothing definite could be learned except that a strange boy calling 102himself Joseph Wilde had enlisted in that place early in the war and had not been heard of since. Charlie called him the Boy. We have called him the Boy ever since, and it is so engraved upon his tombstone. After he died Phyllis and I cut two or three curls from his head for his friends, if we ever found them, and I put them in Charlie’s letter. He had soft brown hair, with a reddish tinge in some lights, and it had grown very long for a boy. See——?” and she held up the rings of hair which twined around and clung to her fingers.
 
“Yes, I see,” Mrs. Hathern said in a trembling voice, and I fancied that she recoiled from the hair as if it had been a living thing confronting her with reproaches. “I understand now your feelings with regard to this room and respect them. It shall not be disturbed. I can find another for Julina,” she continued; “and now, if you will excuse me, I will go. I think I hear your father.”
 
She was herself again, cold, dignified and stiff, but gave no sign that she was the Aunt Martha we had been anxious to find. We were sure of it, however, and if anything had been wanting to confirm us in our suspicions we had it the next morning, which was Sunday. As was our custom on that day we went after breakfast with flowers to the cemetery, and found a small bouquet on Charlie’s grave, and on the boy’s a larger one, while the grass which was long had been trampled down by some one kneeling or sitting upon it.
 
“Aunt Martha has been here,” Fan said. “I really think she has something human about her after all, but I should like her better if she’d say square out ‘I am Aunt Martha.’ I hate concealments.”
 
On our return to the house we passed the cabin where Phyllis sat on a wash-bench in the shade, shelling peas for dinner.
 
103“Mrs. Hathern done got ahead of you,” she said, running her hands through the peas and letting them drop back into the pan. “She was out before sun up, pickin’ de flowers, and went holdin’ her white petticoats mos’ up to her knees cross de lot to de cemetry, whar she went down face fo’most on de Boy’s grave, an’ when she coined back her eyes was all red and watery. Like ’nuff she’s some of his kin.”
 
It was scarcely possible that Phyllis suspected anything. If she did, she kept it to herself. Neither did Mrs. Hathern give any sign that she knew aught of the boy, whom, to each other, we began to speak of as Paul, while she was always Aunt Martha.
Chapter XII.—Annie’s Story Continued. NORAH O’ROURKE AND JULINA.

A suitable room had been found for Julina very near Norah O’Rourke’s, and we were anxiously awaiting their arrival, when one evening as we sat at the tea-table the village ‘bus drove into the yard, loaded on the top with baggage and filled inside, it seemed to me, with big hats and feathers and ribbons. Nothing doubting that we were about to be favored with some of Mrs. Hathern’s grand Boston friends I was wondering if Phyllis would be equal to the emergency and lamenting that Norah O’Rourke and Julina were not at their posts, when Mrs. Hathern sprang up, exclaiming, as she started from the room, “Norah and Julina.” Father was not at home, and in his absence Phyllis, who was waiting on the table, felt at liberty to express herself with comparative freedom.
 
104“Oh, my Lord! I s’posed in course ’twas some quality. Look-a-dar, will you?” she said, as she nodded her high turban at the scene transpiring outside.
 
Norah O’Rourke, gorgeous in purple traveling dress, and big brown hat trimmed with green ribbons and feathers, had alighted, and Mrs. Hathern, who had never shown herself at all demonstrative, was kissing her, as she told her how glad she was to see her.
 
“My Lord, my Lord, that I should live to see Mas’r Hathern’s wife kiss a white nigger! What will de wah fotch us next!” Phyllis exclaimed, and setting down the teapot, from which she was filling my cup, she disappeared in the direction of her cabin, out of sight of what she considered a familiarity beneath the dignity of Mas’r Hathern’s family.
 
Full of curiosity Fan and I watched the group with open-eyed wonder, deciding that Norah O’Rourke was rather a formidable personage, of whom we might stand in awe, and that Julina was airy and pert, but very graceful, and dressed in much better taste than her companion. Brought up as we had been among the negroes, we had never seen a white servant in our lives and knew nothing of the relation they held to their employers. That they were more than slaves and less than equals we supposed, but we were not prepared for the familiarity with which Mrs. Hathern greeted Norah and Julina. She did not kiss the latter, but she kept hold of her hand as she conducted them into the house and up to their rooms, while Norah, in her rich Irish brogue, declared Virginia the most god-forsaken country she was ever in, and Richmond the most tumble-down hole, and herself played out generally with her long journey in cars which Boston wouldn’t put cattle in.
 
105That night they took their supper in the dining-room and Mrs. Hathern waited upon them, while Phyllis nursed her wrath in her kitchen under the dogwood trees, where later on I found a great many cooking utensils thrown around promiscuously,—flatirons, gourds, tin dippers, and brooms,—a sure sign of the tempest which had been raging in the old negress’s breast. At that time my sympathies were all with Phyllis, but in the light of later experience I came to see how unreasonable she was in her prejudice against both Norah and Julina, who were fair representatives of their class and who could no more understand the servility of a born slave like Phyllis than she could understand their assumption of equality with those they served. For some weeks I detested Norah for her unmistakable air of good-as-you. Then I began to like her so much that if she had gone away and returned to us I think I might have kissed her without any hesitancy. She had been recommended to Mrs. Hathern as honest and trusty and neat and a good cook, with a temper of her own and a strong disposition to rule the house, all of which recommendations proved true. She was most trusty and honest and a grand cook, with a temper as recommended, and she did rule the house, and ruled it so well and allowed so many privileges that Mrs. Hathern submitted to the bondage, and by making everything subservient to her wishes and raising her wages at intervals she had managed to keep her so long that she had become a part of herself and her ways, as Phyllis was a part of ourselves and our ways. I never knew before I met Norah O’Rourke that there could be so much expressed in the creak of a shoe! Hers always creaked,—sometimes more, sometimes less,—and after a little I could tell by the sound exactly the mood she was in. If 106her foot came down heavy and strong, even Mrs. Hathern avoided her; if the tread was medium she ventured to issue her orders; but when she had on her felt slippers, as we designated her softest tread, she was like clay in our hands, to be moulded at our will. We all stood a little in fear of her, and father said, laughingly, that he did not dare go into the kitchen without knocking for permission, if her shoes were noisy. Between her and Phyllis there was war from the first, and the two were only restrained from open battles by being kept apart as much as possible,—Phyllis on her premises under the dogwoods, where she washed and ironed and bemoaned the change which had come over her master’s family, and Norah in her domain, where she concocted and served the most wonderful dishes with the skill of a trained chef.
 
Once Fan ventured to remonstrate with her for her antagonism to Phyllis, whose many virtues she set forth in glowing colors. Norah’s shoes creaked ominously as she stamped around the kitchen, while her Irish dialect, which she never used unless she was excited, came in full play.
 
“An’ sure,” she said, “you don’t know what ye’s talkin’ about. When I’m riled, as I am a good part of the time in this haythenish counthry, I’m spilin’ for a fight, and if I didn’t pitch into that nagur, I should wallop you all with my shillalah of a tongue.”
 
After this we let matters take their course, trying occasionally to smooth Phyllis down, when her plumage was more than usually ruffled. If she was to be credited, she rassled a good deal in prar for grace to do her duty and not run away.
 
“Niggers and Irish wouldn’t mix more’n ile and water,” she said, and of the two she detested July more than she 107did Rory O’Rock, the name she gave to Norah. “Such a’rs,” she said, “axin me to call her Juleen ’case thar’s a French axum over her eye. What’s dat ar, I’d like to know. I can’t see nothin’ over her eyes but dem great shaggy brush heaps. Juleen, indeed! I shall call her July, with her black eyes and bar and face, too. ’Spec she’s some nigger blood in her.”
 
Julina’s father was plain Tom Smith, of Vermont, but her mother was French, and from her the girl had inherited many of the characteristics of the race. She was very slight and would have been very pretty but for her large teeth, over which her thin lips never quite closed. Dark-eyed, dark-haired and dark-faced, with a certain airy grace of speech and manner she looked the French maid fully, especially in the little caps which she wore so jauntily, but wore unwillingly. They were badges of servitude, she said, and nothing would induce her to wear them if Mrs. Hathern did not pay her extra for it. At heart she was a born anarchist, and although she performed her duties as housemaid thoroughly she hated them, and let Fan and me know that she did, talking sometimes in English and sometimes in French, which she had learned from her mother, and hurled with great volubility at both Norah and Phyllis when engaged in a spirited encounter.
 
She made no secret to us of her dislike of Mrs. Hathern, but she adored Carl, and her eyes lighted up with a strange brilliancy when she spoke of him. He was expected very soon and no one seemed more anxious for his coming than Julina, although she took good care not to express herself in the presence of his mother. Before her she was always respectful and modest and quiet, but to us she showed herself as she really was, and talked freely of what she meant to be,—“not a drudge to go and 108come at another’s bidding, but a lady, to be served as we were served.” She had it in her, if her father was a poor farmer in Vermont. She had a good common-school education. She had tact and common sense. Her mother’s family were somebody in France, where she meant to go when she had sufficient money, and then we’d see what she could do.
Chapter XIII.—Annie’s Story Continued. CARL.

Notwithstanding what he had said of his anxiety to reach the Elms, he did not seem to be in a great hurry to do so. He stopped some days in New York, and again in Washington, and it was two weeks from the time he left Boston before a telegram came to his mother saying he was in Richmond and would be with us the next evening. That same day Fan had a letter from Jack, who wrote: “I was the first to make the acquaintance of Mrs. Hathern, and am also the first to know her son Carl. He has been at the Spotswood four days, and I verily believe knows more of the city than I do. He has been everywhere and seen everything, from Libby Prison, Castle Thunder and Belle Isle to the fortifications in the country for miles around. He has the most expensive room in the hotel, and drives out with a span and a guide and coachman, and myself, whenever I can find time to go out with him. He has visited the State House and every store and shop and office in town, and talked politics and reconstruction with as much assurance as if he were a gray-haired 109veteran of fifty instead of a boy of fifteen or sixteen. Everybody knows him and everybody likes him, especially at the hotel, where he spends his money so freely. I usually go there every night and look over the register to see the new arrivals, and when I saw ‘Carlyle Haverleigh, Boston, Mass.,’ I soon had him by the hand, telling him who I was and asking what I could do for him. Do for him! Bless your soul, he does not need anyone to do for him; he is equal to anything; takes care of and patronizes me; owns the whole south generally, and Richmond and the Spotswood in particular. And yet he is not in the least offensive in his patronage. It is just his pleasant, genial, helpful way, which goes to your heart directly. We call him Boston, and laugh at his ‘I guesses’ and ‘carnts’ and ‘sharnts,’ and tell him he ought to be kept under a glass cover, with his fine clothes and white hands. But he takes it in perfect good humor and ridicules our ‘I reckons’ and ‘heaps’ and ‘right smarts,’ and says we wear baggy, ill-made clothes, and talk through our noses worse than any down-east Yankee he ever met, but admits that we are a pretty good sort, on the whole, for rebs, and much better, he presumes, for having been licked! Think of it! A Boston cub, right from the very heart of abolitionism and everything else, talking like that to old Virginia soldiers, who shake their sides over him. Truly the world moves, and we move with it, and I am glad we do. I like the boy, or, perhaps, I should say young man, for he is nearly as tall as I am, and straight as an Indian, with a proud bearing as if the world were made for him. He has a frank, ingenuous face, with clear-cut features, laughing eyes, and a mouth which, if it were a girl’s, would not be bad to kiss! I rather think it is a kissing mouth, he is so fond of the girls,—talks to everyone 110he meets in the hotel, and actually asked Mrs. Gen. Sands’ daughter Mabel, from South Carolina, to take a walk with him. She took it and a blowing up, too, from her mother, when she got home, while he took a worse one for his presumption,—I’m not sure she didn’t call it impudence,—in proposing such a thing to a southern girl and a stranger. You should have seen Carl then. I was really proud of him, he stood up so manly and dignified in the parlor half full of people and said, ‘I beg your pardon, madam; I meant no harm, I assure you. It was because she was a southern girl that I asked her. I wanted to see if she were like Boston girls; she is very much like them, except, perhaps, more charming, because not quite so stiff. I really did not intend to be impudent. I couldn’t, you know. Why, I’m a Bostonian, a Haverleigh, and a gentleman!’
 
“We all wanted to cheer, and Mrs. Sands most of all. She has been out driving with him since and taken Mabel with her. What strikes me as very remarkable about the boy is his freedom from all bad habits. I don’t believe he has one, unless it is a disposition to spend his money too freely. He says he owes everything to his mother. There was some bad blood in the family away back somewhere, and she was as afraid of it as of a mad dog and watched him as a rat would watch a mouse. When he was ten years old some college chaps got him to drink and smoke until he was so deathly sick that they feared he would die. When he got over it his mother thrashed him so soundly with a rawhide that he declares he has a mark of one of the welts on his back yet. Then she told him that for every year until he was twenty-one in which he neither drank, nor smoked, nor chewed, nor swore, nor lied, she would give him one hundred dollars over and above 111the allowance she usually made him. She wanted to tack on dancing and theatres, he said, but he kicked at that and promised the rest, and kept his promise, too, until last year, when he called a girl who lived with them a d—— fool because she would make eyes at him. Quite to his surprise his mother gave him fifty dollars, saying it was only half a swear and the girl deserved it.
 
“His father left a large fortune, the use of which is to be his mother’s during her lifetime, with the exception of twenty-five thousand dollars which are to be paid to Carl when he is twenty-one. At his mother’s death he gets the whole. So, you see, he will some day be a very rich man and a great catch. Pity he wasn’t older, or you and Annie younger. He has asked me a great many questions about you; says he always wanted some sisters, and knows he shall like you,—love, I think he said, but he is only a boy and I am not jealous. He leaves day after to-morrow and I shall miss him, for I find myself looking forward to the close of business hours when I am free to join him and hear his funny and original remarks about us and our ways which he says are a hundred years behind Boston.”
 
This letter did not in the least diminish our desire to see Carl Haverleigh, in whose coming the whole household was interested. We were running like clockwork now, with Phyllis as laundress, Norah as cook, Julina as housemaid, and Boston baked beans and brown bread on Sunday. We dressed for dinner and dined in courses at six, while father wore his swallow-tail and Julina waited upon us in her pretty white apron and cap. Mrs. Hathern’s carriage and horses had come from Boston. We had a colored coachman from Richmond, who wore a tall hat and brass buttons and went to sleep on the box while 112driving us around the neighborhood. Altogether, we were very high-toned and Bostony, and but for a few drawbacks might have enjoyed the new order of things immensely. Our house was handsomely furnished; father’s debts were paid, and had he chosen he might have dismissed his patients and lived a life of perfect ease. Mrs. Hathern was very free with her money, and more generous to Fan and me than we expected or deserved. But there was always a feeling of restraint in her presence and a hankering for the flesh-pots of Egypt, when it didn’t matter whether things were in order or not, or we on time to a minute; and then there was unfortunate Katy, who not only spent hours in the high chair and in bed for trivial things we had never dreamed of calling faults, but to whose other trials was added that of daily music lessons. Mrs. Hathern’s piano, a splendid Steinway, had come, and the old one which had been our mother’s was moved to make room for it. Then, following Miss Errington’s advice, she commenced teaching Katy, who was required to practice every day until her little arms and hands ached with fatigue. She hated the practice, but liked the singing, and every morning for half an hour or more the house was filled with melody as she went up and down the scales, clear and sweet as a bird, while I listened with pride and Fan with fear of what might be the result in the future.
 
There was to be a cessation of the lessons for a few days on account of Carl’s arrival and because of a grand picnic which was to be held in the woods near a little waterfall and a fine bit of scenery. Everybody in town who was anybody was going, and Mrs. Hathern was especially glad that it was fixed for the day after Carl’s expected arrival, as it would give her an early opportunity to show her handsome and accomplished son to her 113friends and neighbors. I think the New Englander revels in picnics. Mrs. Hathern was certainly in her element preparing for this one and for Carl, who was coming at last.
 
It was a lovely July day,—cool for the season, but with that deliciousness in the air and deep blue in the sky common to Virginia summers. Carl’s room was in readiness for him. Julina had swept and dusted and lingered over it longer than was at all necessary, and there was a light in the girl’s eyes and an airiness in her movements which irritated and disgusted us. Mrs. Hathern had hung upon the walls a few pictures we had not seen before, some of them exquisitely colored photographs of Venice and others, copies of Pompeiian dancing girls, who, it seemed to me, might have worn thicker garments and not have been uncomfortable even in the summer. But I was not up in high art and had not spent a year and a half abroad, like Mrs. Hathern, who could contemplate and discuss a Venus de Medicis or Apollo Belvidere as readily as a block of unhewn marble. There was a head of a Madonna, which Mrs. Hathern had found in Florence, in Carl’s room, and Norah hung around its neck a string of beads from Lourdes which had been blessed by the Pope; “not for keeps,” she said, “but just for a little while to show him I am glad he is coming.” Phyllis, too, had brought the only valuable article she possessed,—a handsome bowl of Royal Worcester, which a Federal soldier had given her in exchange for a peck of apples and some walnuts. It was stolen, of course, from some desecrated home, but as Phyllis didn’t know where that home was she had no compunctions in taking it, and since the war it had stood on a little table at the head of the bed with her pipes and tobacco and child’s first reader which she kept there, not because she could read,—we had tried to 114teach her and failed,—but because it looked as if she could. She had heard us talk so much of Carl that she was interested, too, and brought the bowl full of flowers and set it down by his photograph on the bureau.
 
The morning was long and the evening was longer, but five o’clock came at last and the carriage with Mrs. Hathern and father and Katy went to the station, while Fan and I waited at home upon the piazza, and Julina went once or twice to the gate and looked anxiously down the street. Suddenly there was the sound of rapid footsteps and of some one whistling Dixie at the rear of the hall, and in a moment Carl stood before us, flushed and expectant and eager. The train, which was usually late, had been ahead of time and pulled up at the station before the carriage reached it, for something had happened to the harness and detained it. Everybody knew Carl was coming, and everyone at the station knew it was he as he leaped upon the platform in his long linen duster and straw hat and northern air generally.
 
“Halloo! Is there anyone here from the Hatherns? I am Carl Haverleigh,” was his salutation to the station master, who replied that there was not yet, but undoubtedly would be soon.
 
“Well, is there a short cut to the house which I can take and surprise them?” he asked next.
 
There was one and Carl took it and brought up by Phyllis’s cabin, where she sat quietly smoking under the dogwood tree after her work was done. Jack had described us all so minutely that Carl knew in a moment who Phyllis was, and his cheery “Halloo, Aunt Phyllis. How d’ye,” nearly threw the old woman off her seat. She did drop her clay pipe, and Carl’s brown head and her red turban knocked together as both stooped to pick it up.
 
115“God bless you, Mas’r Carl! I’se jes tolable, thank ye. How d’ye you ’self?” she said, taking her pipe from him and holding his hand, white as a girl’s, in both her black horny ones.
 
“Where are the folks?” he asked, and she replied, “Ole Mas’r and Missus and Katy has done gone for you, but you’ll find de young ladies in the piazza waitin’ for you. We’s all right glad to see you, Mas’r Carl. Go right up de path dar.”
 
Following her directions he came next to the kitchen, where Norah stopped her preparations for dinner to greet him, while Julina darted out from some corner and seized him by the hand, her black eyes full of the delight she felt. But there was no answering gleam in his, and his “How are you, Julina?” was cold and formal as he hurried on to where we were sitting. Jack had written “He is nearly as tall as I am,” but in his long duster he looked taller, and there was such an air of fashion and maturity about him that for a moment we felt abashed as if in the presence of a full-grown young man of a different type from any we had known. This feeling, however, soon passed, for no one could withstand the cordiality of his manner, or the expression of his frank, handsome face.
 
“Halloo,” he cried, “here you are, Fan-and-Ann, and I am Carl.”
 
He kissed us and whirled us round and told us he was first rate, before we could say a word to him. Then, holding each of us by the hand, he looked us over curiously and critically.
 
“You look just as I thought you did. The rest of the folks have gone for me, I suppose,” he said, releasing our hands, and beginning to remove his duster, “Won’t 116mother scold though because I gave her the slip. Hallo, there they are;” and he darted down the steps to meet the carriage just entering the yard.
 
There was a slight cloud on Mrs. Hathern’s face as she alighted and asked why he did not wait for them.
 
“Oh, I couldn’t. I was in such a hurry to see my sisters, and here’s another one,” he said, lifting Katy in his arms and squeezing her until she was red in the face.
 
“You are a beauty, and no mistake!” he said, putting her down and turning to father, towards whom his manner was exceedingly polite and deferential.
 
It was strange what a change his coming made in our home. He was so bright and thoughtful and magnetic that before the evening was over we felt that we had known him years instead of hours. Jack was a gentleman, and so were all our male acquaintances, while Col. Errington represented the highest phase of polish we had ever seen. But Carl was different from them all, with a difference we felt but could not well define. He seemed to know the right thing to say and when to say it and how to bring out the best there was in one. I had never been as well satisfied with myself as I was after that first evening spent with him, his flatteries and compliments were so delicate and seemed so earnest. Fan thought him not altogether genuine and a little too familiar.
 
“He is too tall to be putting his arm around us so much,” she said when we were discussing him in the privacy of our room. “I call him a flirt, and if there was nothing to keep us in mind, he’d forget us in a week,—but, on the whole, I like him.”
 
Chapter XIV.—Annie’s Story Continued. THE PICNIC.

The picnic grounds were seven or eight miles distant, and we were to start as early as possible so as to avoid the heat of midday. Mrs. Hathern, whose ambition was to excel in everything, had made great preparations for an elaborate lunch, which was to be served by Phyllis and Julina.
 
Fan said she must have slept in her bonnet, as we found her with it on when we went down to breakfast. Katy was also ready, and so wild with excitement and anticipation that she scarcely heard Mrs. Hathern’s oft repeated warning not to soil her clothes unless she wished to stay at home. She wanted to show Carl her kittens and puppies and chickens, and finally took him down to feed the ducks in a little artificial pond or basin by the side of the lane, where they were assembled in full force, their quacks growing louder and louder when they saw the little girl approaching and knew by instinct that she was coming to feed them. It was great fun throwing them crumbs of bread and watching them as they swam after and fought over them and then craned up their necks for more. For a time everything went well and Katy’s white dress was without spot or blemish, although her boots showed marks of the soft soil around the basin. Then suddenly, neither she nor Carl knew how, she slipped and fell in the worst possible place. Her boots and stockings and dress were covered with mud, spatters of which were on her sash and face and hands, so that it was a most forlorn-looking child who came to us, crying bitterly as she held up first one foot and then the other and showed us her muddy hands.
 
118“I am so sorry! Oh, what will mamma say? and can’t I go?” was the burden of her cry as we began to wash off the dirt and tried to comfort her.
 
At that moment Mrs. Hathern, who had heard of Katy’s mishap from Carl, appeared in the doorway, her face a thunder cloud and her voice trembling with anger as she said, “You naughty, disobedient child! Why did you go to the duck pond at all? You know what I told you, and I mean it, too. I shall send for Julina at once and put you to bed where you will stay while we are gone.”
 
“Oh, mamma, mamma; please don’t make me stay at home. I want to go so much. I didn’t think the bank was so soft, and I wanted to show the big duck to Carl,” was Katy’s despairing cry, as she stretched her little hands imploringly toward her stepmother.
 
But she might as well have pleaded with a rock. Things generally had gone wrong in the household that morning. Father had been called to an old patient who lived miles away and was dangerously ill. Consequently, he could not go with us unless we waited for him an indefinite length of time. Phyllis had scorched one of the finest table-cloths. Something ailed the range, and Norah’s corn cakes were spoiled in the baking, thereby putting her in a state where collision, or even conversation, with her was not desirable. In looking about Carl’s room to see if everything was in order, Mrs. Hathern had come across a photograph which Julina had put behind some books where Carl would be sure to find it if he ever took up one to read. The girl’s admiration of her handsome son was not unknown to Mrs. Hathern, who heretofore had thought but little of it; but this was going too far, and taking the picture to Julina she tore it into shreds, asking what she meant by such presumption, and threatening her 119with instant dismissal if anything of the sort occurred again. It was in vain that Julina protested that she only wanted to put something in Carl’s room as all the rest had done,—that she meant nothing wrong. Mrs. Hathern heard her with scorn, and was so scathing and bitter that Julina declared her intention of giving up her place and going home at once. This Mrs. Hathern could not allow. It was well enough for her to threaten dismissal, but for Julina to forestall her by going voluntarily was another thing. She was too well trained and too useful to be given up lightly, and some concession had to be made before matters were adjusted. Following this came the news that Katy had fallen into the duck pond, and this was a straw too much. She could conciliate Julina, because it was for her interest to do so, but towards Katy she was inexorable, notwithstanding that Fan and I pleaded that for this once she might be forgiven.
 
“Beat her, if you will, but let her go,” Fan said. “Think what you are condemning her to,—a long day in bed, while we are enjoying ourselves; and she has anticipated it so much. Father would not allow it if he were here.”
 
“I am very glad then that he is away, as I should be sorry to have any serious disagreement with him on the subject of family discipline,” Mrs. Hathern replied, in that tone which always made us so angry.
 
With a slight inclination of her head she left the room, and the rattle of her stiff skirts as she swept down the stairs reminded us of Norah’s shoes when she was in a tantrum. In a few minutes Julina came in, sullen and red-eyed, and began to remove Katy’s soiled clothes, while the little girl cried bitterly with long-drawn, gasping sobs, hard for us to bear and know that we were powerless 120to help her. What Julina thought we could not guess. Her movements were rather jerky and spiteful as she undressed the child and put her in the little cot, which stood in one corner of our room. Katy’s tears, however, must have moved her, for, as she drew the sheet up round her, she said, “It’s awful mean, but I wouldn’t let her know I cared. Norah will come and sit with you and bring you some raspberry tarts.”
 
Then she turned to leave the room, but stopped on the threshold as if a new idea had suddenly occurred to her.
 
“Katy,” she said, going back to the cot, “I believe you’ll go yet. I am going to tell Carl.”
 
She found him in the side piazza playing with the kittens, and without softening the matter at all she acquainted him with the facts.
 
“Where’s mother?” Carl asked, and there was a look on his face like his mother as he started in quest of her.
 
She had come up to his room where he found her and as ours was directly opposite and the doors were open we could not help hearing most of the conversation.
 
“Mother,” he began, in a voice I would never have recognized as Carl’s, “what is this about Katy’s being kept at home and sent to bed because of an accident?”
 
“I suppose the young ladies have been complaining to you,” Mrs. Hathern said, and Carl replied, “I have not seen them since I came from the duck pond, but I know about Katy, and it’s a burning shame to treat a little child like that. I remember the hours,—yes, weeks, if all the time were added up,—that Paul and I were kept in bed or on chairs for trivial offenses. It’s worse than beating, for that is soon over and done with; Paul said so the time you thrashed him for nothing.”
 
“Why do you bring up Paul so often?” Mrs. Hathern asked, with what seemed a tremor in her voice.
 
121“I don’t know, unless it is that he has been in my mind all the morning, and I keep wondering if he were in this part of the country,” Carl said, his voice softening as he spoke of Paul, but hardening again as he continued, “Don’t make Katy run away as Paul did. She was no more to blame for falling into the mud than I was, nor as much, and by George if she stays home I shall stay, too, and go to bed; or, no, I’ll sit up and amuse her.”
 
Here was a family jar in earnest, and we were thinking of closing our door so as not to hear any more, when Mrs. Hathern and Carl must have changed their positions or spoken lower, as we distinguished nothing more, except disjointed sentences, such as for this once, and somebody’s sake—Carl’s, or Paul’s presumably. Then the former crossed the hall quickly and knocked at our door.
 
“Hop up, Katy!” he exclaimed, walking up to the cot where Katy had raised herself on her elbow at the sound of his voice. “You are going, if you’ll promise never to fall into a frog pond again when you have on your best clothes. Hurry! the carriage will be round in fifteen minutes. Here are your shoes; but where the deuce are your stockings?”
 
Katy was on the floor by this time and we were all helping her dress, Carl the coolest of the three and showing a deftness and knowledge of straps and buttons and hooks not common in a boy. She was ready in ten minutes, her face a little flushed and stained with tears, but shining with the light of a great and sudden joy, and as the last pin was put in its place she threw her arms around Carl’s neck and laying her cheek against his, said to him, “Oh, Carl, I love you so much, and shall love you forever and ever because you are so good.”
 
“Perhaps you’d better say something handsome to 122mother for letting you go,” Carl said, adding hastily, as he saw Katy’s look of perplexity and heard his mother on the stairs: “Tell her she’s an angel, or a brick, or an old darling, or something of that sort.”
 
Usually Katy would have known what to say without prompting, but in her excitement she seemed to have lost her wits, and running up to Mrs. Hathern she exclaimed, “I thank you so much, and you are an old darling, and an old angel and an old brick; Carl said so, didn’t you, Carl?”
 
It would be difficult to describe the expression of Mrs. Hathern’s face as she looked at her son, who, she knew was responsible for this doubtful compliment, and who laughed so long and loud that Fan and I laughed with him.
 
“I think you might refrain from teaching Katy slang,” she said, with a smile she could not repress.
 
With harmony thus restored we seated ourselves in the carriage and were driven along the pleasant road and through the shady woods to the picnic grounds, where most of our friends were already assembled and where Mrs. Hathern’s good humor soon came back to her with the attention she received. No one’s lunch was as elaborate as ours, or as daintily served, for both Phyllis and Julina did their best. Julina’s face was clouded and scowling, but she moved with a certain airiness and grace natural to her, and spoke, when she did speak, in the language of a lady rather than of a servant. Hitherto she had only been seen by our neighbors when they called and she let them in, but now she was prominent everywhere and knew she was attracting attention, and her black eyes shone and flashed, and her color came and went until I began to think her positively pretty, and said so to Fan, who was also watching her.
 
123“Dangerous,” was her reply, while Carl, who was standing near and heard her, added, “Has Satan in her as big as a barn, and intrigue enough to overthrow an empire. Thinks herself the equal of anybody and means to prove it some day, and, by George, I believe she will. I hope I shan’t be one of her victims.”
 
This scarcely seemed possible, but there swept over me suddenly a most unaccountable feeling that in some way that dark, slim girl with the French blood in her veins and the fierce ambition in her heart, might be a blot on the life of the handsome boy, who was the lion of the picnic as his mother was the queen. I had never seen her as gracious as she was that day when she moved among the people as if she had been the hostess instead of one of them. I think it was Carl’s presence which made her so different from the cold, precise woman we knew at home. She was very proud of him and of the attention he received. Everybody wished to know him and he wanted to know everybody, and before the day was over had said so many pleasant things and done so many little courteous acts to both old and young that we were congratulated on all sides for our good fortune in possessing so delightful a step-brother. Carl was a success.
Chapter XV.—Annie’s Story Continued. PAUL.

The next day was Sunday, and after our one o’clock dinner Fan and I started for the cemetery on the hillside, accompanied by Carl. We had omitted taking flowers early in the morning, but we had them with us now, and Carl carried them for us and asked many questions about our brother as we went slowly across the fields.
 
“Shot at Fredericksburg,” he said. “That’s where a cousin of mine was killed, if he were killed at all. We tracked him to that battle, or thought we did, and have never heard of him since.”
 
Neither Fan nor I made any reply, and he went on: “He was several years older than I, but too young to go to the war. He lived with us and I loved him like a brother, and when I really made up my mind that he was dead I cried myself sick, and now I am sometimes so lonesome for Paul that I want to cry just as I did then. It is hard to believe he is dead, with no proof of it, and every night I pray that he may come back to us, or that we may know for sure what became of him. You pray, don’t you? I heard Annie in church this morning, but not a peep from you. I don’t believe you said the creed.”
 
He was speaking to Fan, who answered rather shortly, “I prayed so much for the success of the south during the war, and we failed so utterly that I have about lost faith in prayer, and have come to think that what is to be will be, and we can’t help ourselves; so what is the use of praying? Didn’t the north pray with all their might that their army might be victors, and didn’t we do the same, 125and wern’t we just as much in earnest as you were, and which did the Lord hear?”
 
“Our side, of course, because we were right, and had the most men and money. You shouldn’t have been a Reb if you wanted the Lord to hear you. What could you do against the Lord and such hordes as we had to fight you with?” Carl said, while Fan tossed her head high in the air, but did not continue the conversation.
 
We were in the enclosure now under the pine trees and were laying the flowers we had brought upon the four graves, our mother’s, Katy’s mother’s, Charlie’s and The Boy’s. Carl was reading the inscriptions on the tombstones, first mother’s, then Katy’s mother’s, then Charlie’s, over which he lingered. “Only nineteen; he would be twenty-three now, that’s a little older than Paul, if he were living. Halloo! what does this mean, ‘The Boy, who died Good Friday, 1863.’ That’s a queer inscription. Who was The Boy?”
 
“We don’t know,” Fan said, sitting down on an iron chair near the grave and clasping her hands at the back of her head.
 
Carl looked at her mystified and curious.
 
“He was one of your people,” she continued, “and I hated you all, until he came to us and died, with his hand in mine, hurrahing for me. I haven’t hated anybody since. Would you like to hear his story?”
 
“Yes,” Carl said, and leaning upon the stone he listened while Fan told the story in all its details as only she could tell it.
 
At its close Carl was down upon the grassy mound, crushing the flowers we had put there, and sobbing bitterly, “Paul, Paul,—it was Paul! I have found him at last dead, and I had hoped he might come back to me alive. Oh, Paul, I am so sorry for everything.”
 
126We were all crying now, and surely over no soldier’s grave, north or south, east or west, was sadder moan ever made than over that of The Boy that summer afternoon years and years ago. Whatever of wrong there had been in Carl’s treatment of Paul it was atoned for, if tears can atone for a wrong done to the dead. I had never seen a man or boy cry as Carl cried, with his face upon the grass.
 
“Don’t,” Fan said at last. “Don’t you remember that he bade us tell you he liked you?”
 
“Yes, I know, and it’s that which hurts, and the knowing for sure that he is dead,” Carl answered, lifting up his head and wiping away his tears. “I have dreamed so often that he came back that I have almost made myself believe that he would, and I have planned so many things to do when he came. Strange, too, that he has been so often in my mind since I came here. You told me that your woods were often full of Federal troops, and many times at the picnic I was saying to myself, ‘Was Paul ever here? Did he see this waterfall, or sleep under that big tree near which they said camp fires were built?’ and now I am by his grave, and you cared for him when he died. Tell me more, if there is more to tell.”
 
There was not much, except to show the letter dictated by Charlie and written by The Boy. This, with the lock of hair and the knife and jews-harp Fan had purposely brought with her, meaning to tell the story to Carl just as she had told it. The writing was a scrawl, for the hand which wrote it was throbbing with pain, but Carl identified it as Paul’s by the capitals and the formation of some of the letters. The hair and jews-harp and knife he remembered perfectly, and cried again as he held them in his hand.
 
“If I had been beaten in his place, as I ought to have 127been he might not have run away, but I was a coward and a sneak,” he said referring to a theft of cake which had been charged to Paul and not denied because he wished to shield his cousin.
 
The memory of this seemed to hurt Carl the most, and he went over the incident again and again, ending always with the cry, “If I could only take it back.” Then he told us briefly what there was to tell of Paul, whose last name was also Haverleigh, as their fathers had been brothers. Both Paul’s parents had died when he was young, and he had been, in a way, adopted by his Aunt Martha, who was very fond of him until the birth of Carl, when there came a change.
 
“I suppose my being her own naturally made a difference,” Carl said, “and I know now there was a difference, although mother might not have intended any. I was a spoiled child, and Paul was a lively, wide-awake boy, who, with nothing bad about him, was constantly getting me and himself into scrapes, which mother, with her strict notions, thought awful. Sometimes we were sent to bed or set on hard chairs until they must have ached; I am sure we did. She never inflicted corporal punishment upon Paul but once, and that was about the cake which she thought he stole and lied about. So she thrashed him, and he was nearly as old as I am now. ‘Too big to be licked,’ he said, and ran away. Where he went at first I do not know, and shall never know now, but after the war broke out we traced him, or thought we did, to the army as a drummer boy. Then mother went to Europe for two years, leaving me at school. When she came home she did try to find him and was almost sure he was at Fredericksburg, and that is all. Does mother know?” he asked, and Fan replied, “I have 128told her the story just as I told it to you. She could draw her own conclusions.”
 
For a moment Carl was silent, and then he asked, “Did she give no sign that she understood?”
 
“She cried and has put flowers on his grave every Sunday since,” was Fan’s answer, and Carl continued: “Yes, she knows, and she is sorry,—more sorry than you think. Mother is a good woman, who means to do right, but, unfortunately, her ideas run in a groove too narrow and deep for her to get them out easily. She is Puritanical all through,—great, great, great and double great something of Miles Standish and the Mayflower. I don’t care a fig for either, but I love my mother, and I want you to love her, too. It will be better all round. She is quick to reciprocate, and isn’t a bad sort by a long shot,—a little stiff, that’s all; and if she didn’t own up about Paul, it was a kind of pride which kept her silent. If you told the Aunt Martha part with half the vim you told it to me, she could have no doubt of your opinion of her, and it required a good deal of pluck for her to say ‘I am that woman.’ But she will do it. She’ll tell me Paul is here, and she’ll tell you that she is Aunt Martha, and propose a big monument for Paul and Charlie.”
 
“No, no,” Fan interposed. “We knew your cousin as The Boy, and as such he must remain. We can have no tall monument here.”
 
On our return to the house we found Mrs. Hathern sitting on the piazza. Katy, to whom she had been teaching her duty towards her neighbor, had fallen asleep with her head on her stepmother’s lap, while Mrs. Hathern’s hand was lying lightly on the child’s yellow curls. It was a very pretty picture of domestic happiness, and I began to think that, as Carl had said, his mother was not a bad sort 129after all. There was an anxious, worried look on her face as we came up the steps, on which we all sat down, as the day was very hot.
 
“Carl,” she began, with a lump in her throat, “you have been to Paul’s grave and have heard how kindly he was cared for by Fanny and Annie?”
 
Carl nodded, and she went on: “It was a shock to me to know that he was here. You told your sisters, I hope, how we tried to trace him?”
 
“Yes, I told them everything,” Carl answered, and she continued: “I am glad you did. I couldn’t tell them when I first knew about it. I simply couldn’t, and I waited for you to come. I would give a great deal to have Paul back alive, but as that cannot be, I am glad to know where he is lying; and if you think best we will have him removed to our family lot in Mt. Auburn.”
 
“Never, no, never,” and Fan sprang to her feet. “He is our Boy. He died with us; we buried him; we loved him. He was ours, and we must keep him here with Charlie.”
 
“You shall, if you feel like that,” Mrs. Hathern said, “and both Carl and I are more thankful than we can express for the kindness he received from you all. I told your father while you were at his grave, and it affected him greatly. It is strange that our families should be thus brought together, and I hope that the memory of Paul may be a bond of sympathy and kindly feeling between us.”
 
She held out her hand first to Fanny and then to me, and as we took it we felt that there had already commenced a better understanding between us than had existed before.
 
“I told you she would face the music, and for her she 130did it handsomely,” Carl said, when we were alone with him. “She knows she was to blame, and if I were you, I wouldn’t nag her about him any more.”
 
This he said to Fan, who only answered with a flash of her black eyes. But we understood what he meant, and Paul was never mentioned by us in her presence unless she spoke of him first, which she seldom did. A monument, which should have both his and Charlie’s name upon it, was suggested by her and vetoed by us all. He came to us as the Boy; he died the Boy, and the Boy he must always be to us, a sacred memory, which united the Hatherns and Haverleighs more closely and proved a bond of sympathy and friendship between us and our stepmother.
 
Looking back through a vista of years and turning some blotted pages of Carl’s life, when temptation got the better of him, I cannot recall a pleasanter summer than that which he spent with us at the Elms. He was so bright and suggestive and thoughtful for every one, and so anxious to please and make the best of everything that he carried sunshine wherever he went. It was a rare gift he possessed of winning all hearts to him, and Fan and I learned more than one lesson of forbearance and toleration from him, although we laughed at him as a prig and should have called him a dude, had the word then been invented.
 
With the townspeople he was very popular, especially with the young girls, who seemed suddenly to have grown very fond of Fan and myself, and who came to our house at all hours of the day. We had not supposed that Mrs. Hathern cared much for young people, but she was very gracious to Carl’s friends. She gave us teas on the lawn and lunches on the piazza, and played for us to dance in the drawing room and planned excursions for us so 131that the summer was one long holiday, with Carl as the central figure.
 
It was September when he left us for Andover, and there were nearly as many people at the station to see him off as there used to be when our soldiers left us for the war. Naturally, after so much pleasant intercourse we expected a great deal of pleasure from his letters. But here we were disappointed. He wrote to us often at first, telling us of his life at Andover, but evincing little interest in the people of Lovering, who remembered him so kindly and spoke of him so often. Then his letters grew shorter and less frequent, and when Fan berated him for it, he gave as an excuse that he was very busy with his studies, trying to fit himself to enter Harvard the next year.
 
“But whether I write often, or not at all, you may be sure that you are always in my mind and that I love you dearly,” he wrote, and signed himself, “Your loving brother, Carl.”
 
“Nonsense,” Fan said. “It is a clear case of ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ He was pleased with us when here, but now we are like names written on the sands of the sea which the first wave washes away. Carl is nice, but fickle.”
Chapter XVI.—Annie’s Story Continued. LITTLE PAUL.

The autumn following Carl’s visit to us passed with little to break the monotony of our lives. Miss Errington wrote occasionally, full of solicitude with regard to Katy’s music, which was progressing so rapidly as to astonish both Fan and myself, and even Mrs. Hathern, who was a thorough and exacting teacher. Jack wrote often and Fan answered when she felt like it. She had not yet made up her mind to be the wife of a poor man, and until she did she could not encourage Jack in his foolishness. Col. Errington did not write again and his proposal of marriage remained unanswered.
 
“I am very well as I am, and quite chummy with Mrs. Hathern, who has really contributed a great deal to our bodily comfort. I do not want a change as much as I did, and as long as I have two strings to my bow and can choose either at any moment, I am content,” she said, and took the good the gods had provided and laughed over Jack’s love-letters, which were becoming importunate and impatient as he longed for something to work for and hope for and keep his courage up.
 
As for the household, it moved on with a regularity which no one but Mrs. Hathern could have achieved.
 
One or two jars there were when Phyllis’s turban was frightfully awry and Norah’s shoes could be heard all over the house; but, for the most part, they were on amicable terms and both united in their antipathy to Julina, who was growing more airy and important every day, and more disinclined to believe in that portion of the catechism which bade her to be content with the condition of life to which 133it had pleased God to call her. “Who would ever get on in the world if they followed that injunction?” she said, and what was our democratic government good for if it didn’t give everyone an equal chance to rise if he had the brain and will to do so? And she meant to rise. She had once had her fortune told by a clairvoyant in Boston who predicted that she would some day be a great lady, with money and influence at her command. This she communicated confidentially to Fan and me as the secret of her ambition and belief in the future. And at last there came a rift in the clouds,—an opening through which she caught a glimpse of the future she felt so sure of. Her father died suddenly, and the letter which brought the news enclosed one from an aunt in France inviting Julina, who was her namesake, to visit her for as long a time as she chose to stay. Here was her opportunity, and she took it and left us at once, so full of her aunt’s chateau, which, she said, was not far from Fontainebleau, that she came near forgetting to mourn for her father, who had never been much to her.
 
Two or three weeks later Carl wrote that he had seen her in Boston and that she was to sail for Havre in a few days. Afterwards he sent us a list of passengers on a French steamer, and among them was the name Mademoiselle Julina Smythe, who for years passed completely out of our knowledge and then reappeared in a most unexpected manner.
 
Christmas came and went, and the winter glided into spring and spring into the first days of June, when the world,—or, at least, that part which Lovering represented,—was full of the beauty and brightness and fragrance of early summer. Never before had our grounds and garden been as lovely and attractive as they were now. Money 134and taste can do almost everything, and Mrs. Hathern had both, and had expended them freely upon The Elms, which she meant to make the show place in the county. It was exceedingly pretty now, with its grassy lawn, its urns and baskets of various designs and sizes, its rustic chairs and stands for books or work or tea, and its garden full of flowers. After all, it was not a bad thing that father did when he married Mrs. Haverleigh, who had brought us so much luxury and to whom we were getting quite reconciled. She had been so much softer and more companionable since Carl’s visit and our talk with her of The Boy that I began to like her; while Fan, who was slow to change her mind, admitted that things might be worse, and if——. There is nearly always an “if” in every cup of happiness, and ours was so unlooked-for and seemed so undesirable that for a time we refused to accept it as dutiful daughters ought to have done. But there was no alternative; we could not run away, for there was no place to run to, and after a while we made up our minds to submit as gracefully as we could to the inevitable.
 
In due time a trained nurse arrived from Boston, and a few days later father went in and out of his bed-chamber with an anxious look and frequent demands on Phyllis, who, in her excitement, forgot to put on her turban and seemed like one distraught as she hovered between the kitchen and the sick-room; while Fan and I, with Katy between us, sat under an elm in the farthest part of the grounds and waited, wondering what Carl would say when he heard the news. Norah brought us our lunch, which we ate on the little willow table where we had often had our tea. Her face was cloudy and her shoes creaked even on the grass, showing us her opinion of the matter. I remember so well every incident of that long day,—the 135glints of sunshine through the trees, the scent of the flowers, the blue of the sky, the twitter and almost human talk of two robins teaching their young ones to fly, and, at last, as the evening wore on and we heard the town clock strike two, Phyllis coming to us across the lawn, her face all aglow with the news she had to tell.
 
“You’ve done got a little brudder,” she said, “an’ oh! my Lord, he’s dat small. I reckon he could wear one of Miss Katy’s doll dresses. Will you come to the house and I’ll fotch him to you?”
 
“No, thank you,” Fan said, with a disdainful toss of her head. “I am in no hurry to see my little brother.”
 
What Fan did, I generally did, and against my better judgment I, too, sat still, but asked, “How is Mrs. Hathern?”
 
“Mighty bad, I s’pecs, by the way old Mas’r looks and that Boston nuss. She hasn’t seen her baby at all an’ she’s as white as a piece of paper, and keeps moanin’ like.”
 
“Do you think she will die?” Fan asked, with a ring in her voice which reminded me of the days when we were watching by The Boy.
 
“Oh, de good Lord forbid!” was Phyllis’s ejaculation. “What could we do with a new bawn baby and the mother dead?”
 
What, indeed, and why was he sent to us, we asked ourselves, as we sat watching Phyllis going swiftly across the lawn with Katy in advance. Katy was happy, and her first exclamation as she sped away from us was, “Oh, I am so glad, and can I see him now?”
 
I don’t know how long Fan and I sat discussing the situation, she threatening to answer Col. Errington’s letter and I proposing to make the best of what could not be 136helped. Perhaps it was an hour, perhaps it was more, when Phyllis appeared again, holding her apron to her eyes with one hand and beckoning us wildly with the other.
 
“Mrs. Hathern is done took wus, and has as’t for you,” she said.
 
In an instant we were on our feet, flying towards the house, Fan, as usual, outstripping me and thinking with remorse of the bitter things she had said of the innocent baby, whose plaintive wail we heard as we entered the hall. In every woman’s heart, be she ever so bad and hard, there is a motherly instinct which, under certain conditions, will assert itself. We were neither very hard nor very bad. We were only rebelling as grown-up daughters sometimes do against the introduction in their midst of a baby, and especially when that baby is the offspring of a stepmother. We had not wanted the stepmother, and we didn’t want the baby; but when its faint cry came to us Fan clutched my arm and whispered, “Oh, Ann, hear the poor little thing. I hope its mother won’t die.”
 
It seemed to me very probable that she would, when I entered her room and saw her lying there so motionless upon her pillows, with every particle of her bright color gone from her face, which looked pinched and haggard and old for a woman of only forty. She had never seemed more than thirty-five. Her eyes were closed and we might have thought her asleep, but for a fluttering of the lids and a movement of her hand as the rustle of our dresses broke the stillness of the room. Katy, who had been fondling the baby, which a negro woman was caring for in an adjoining room, had joined us, and when she saw the white face so changed from what it had been the previous night, when it looked the picture of health, she 137ran up to father, who was sitting at the side of the bed, and cried out, “Oh, papa, what is it? What makes her look so? Is she very sick?”
 
A warning sh—— came from the nurse, who was moistening the patient’s lips with some stimulant; but at the sound of Katy’s voice, Mrs. Hathern moved slightly and opened the great black eyes of which we had stood so much in awe. There was nothing to fear from them now, and it seemed to me there was in them a look of wonderful tenderness and love as they rested upon the little girl who was bending close to her.
 
“Katy,” she said, putting her hand upon the curly head which nestled down beside her as Katy asked again, “Are you very sick, mamma, and do you know about the baby? We’ve got one in the other room. Old Chloe brought him this morning, with a heap of clothes. I’m so glad.”
 
A faint smile showed around Mrs. Hathern’s mouth and her hand pressed more heavily upon the golden curls.
 
“Yes, Katy,” she said, very low as if talking were an effort, “I know about the baby, and I want you to love him and care for him if I should go away. Will you, Katy?”
 
Just so, ten years before, Katy’s mother, in that very room, had spoken to Fan and me, and the scene came back to us so vividly,—the young mother dying and commending to us the little life which had just begun and had since grown to be a part of our whole being. Now it was another mother, and Katy to whom the charge was given, and for a moment I think we both felt chagrined that we should be forgotten; but only for a moment. Turning her eyes towards us, they shone with a strange light of satisfaction as she said, in detached sentences, “Fanny 138and Annie, I am glad you have come. I want to tell you it was my way that was in fault, not my heart, and I am sorry for all that has gone wrong. You like Carl; try and like my little baby. I know he is not welcome, and when I am gone he may be still less so; he is not to blame. Perhaps God will take him with me; if not, be kind to him, for his father’s sake, and—” She stopped a few moments as if tired out and then resumed, as her eyes wandered around the room, “Where is Fanny?”
 
“Here I am,” Fan answered, sitting down upon the edge of the bed and taking in hers the cold, clammy hand which was moving restlessly. “Here I am; do you want to tell me something?”
 
“Yes. About the little baby. Would you object to calling him Paul Haverleigh, after The Boy?”
 
“No, no; I’d like it,” Fan answered with a choking voice, for, with that subtle intuition which we cannot define, she felt the dark shadow stealing into the room and settling upon the features of our stepmother.
 
“In my wish to do right, I went wrong with Paul. I know it now, and am sorry. I shall tell him when I see him, and tell him of you. Keep Carl straight. He has fine instincts, but is easily influenced and may be led astray if the temptation comes in pleasant guise. If he falls it will be a woman who lures him on. Keep him as much as possible under your influence and Annie’s. I wish I might see him again, but—” Here her mind began to wander. “It’s getting late. Katy ought to go to bed. Good-night, Katy. I have loved you more than you know.”
 
She lifted herself up and kissed the bright face bent down to hers, and then lay back upon her pillow as if utterly exhausted.
 
139“Must I go to bed before the sun is down?” Katy whispered to her father, who shook his head and held her closely to him.
 
It was hours yet before the sun would set, and as they dragged slowly on we watched the dying woman who talked of many things strange to us. Of her first husband and her early home in Maine, and the school-house under the hill with the girls and boys she had known and played with there. They were old men and women now, she said, and their faces were tired and worn as if life had been hard to bear, and she had so much wanted to help them in some way. Then she spoke of Paul and we learned more of him from her ravings than we had known before, and saw more of the motives and principles which had actuated her conduct. Neither were bad, but strict almost to severity. Then she talked of Carl and Katy and father and ourselves, who, she said, did not understand her, but she never mentioned the little baby so soon to be left motherless. He had come into her life so recently and his coming had brought her so low that she seemed to have forgotten him entirely. She grew very quiet at last and fell asleep, while Fan, who always rose to the occasion, took her post at the bedside, bidding the nurse take the rest she needed so much. It was not a long vigil we kept, for as the sun was setting Mrs. Hathern awoke and began to move her hands over the bedclothes as if in quest of something.
 
“Where is it? Do you know?” she said to Fan, who, divining her meaning, went to the next room where the baby was sleeping in Phyllis’s lap.
 
Fan had not seen it yet and she scarcely glanced at it now, but she lifted it very carefully in her arms and brought it to its mother.
 
140“Look,” she said. “It’s the baby.”
 
Very curiously the sick woman looked first at Fan and then at the child, but the mist of death had gathered too thickly on her brain for her to realize the truth. The baby was a puzzle she could not solve.
 
“Whose is it? Yours?” she asked, putting her hand upon its head.
 
“No,” Fan answered very gently. “It is your baby,—little Paul. Don’t you remember?”
 
There was a struggle between reason and delirium, but the soul was drifting away too far for any real consciousness or memory. Only the name of Paul arrested and held it for a moment.
 
“Little Paul,” she whispered, with a smile. “Yes, he was a pretty boy when I took him; bigger than this one. Whose did you say it is? And who are you?”
 
Her hand still lay on the baby’s head, but her eyes were closed. She was going fast and Fan knew it, and in an ecstasy of grief and terror held the baby face close to the white lips and said, “Mother, mother, it is your baby. Kiss him once, that I may tell him. It is little Paul.”
 
She had never before called Mrs. Hathern mother, and now it came from her involuntarily, born of her pity for the dying woman and helpless child. But it produced a wonderful effect. Quickly the eyes unclosed and were illumined with a strange light as they beamed upon Fan.
 
“You called me mother,” she said, “and it brings things back to me and makes me glad. Thank you, Fanny. Hold the baby nearer while I kiss him for the first and last time. Little Paul, my little Paul.”
 
She put her arms around the boy, kissed him twice and never spoke again, although she lived until the early 141dawn of the next day, and then died as peacefully as if going to sleep.
 
It was I who went with father on the long, sad journey to Mt. Auburn, where the costly monuments and signs of grandeur everywhere were in striking contrast to the simple cemetery on the hillside where she had expressed a wish not to be buried; but when the ceremony of interment was over and we turned away, leaving our dead there alone, I felt that when my time should come I should far rather lie down under the whispering pines, within sight of the lights of home, than be left in that “beautiful city of the dead.” The family monument was tall and grand, and beside the husband’s name was that of “Paul Haverleigh, who died in Lovering, Va., March, 1863, aged 18 years.” I did not know before that it was there, and when I saw it I was conscious of an added feeling of respect and regret for the woman whose real worth I had, perhaps, not fully appreciated.
 
Carl had met us in Albany, so stunned by the shock of his mother’s death that he scarcely spoke at all, and never asked a question until after the burial and I was alone with him at the Revere, where we stopped, as his mother’s house was rented. I do not think he had shed a tear, but his face was very pale and there were dark circles under his eyes as he sat down by me and said: “Now, Annie, tell me about it. Why did mother die? What was the matter?”
 
I looked at him in some surprise and asked, “Do you really know nothing?”
 
“Nothing,” he answered, “except the telegram saying she was dead. I supposed her perfectly well. She wrote to me last week as usual. It must have been terribly sudden.”
 
142“It was sudden,” I said. “It was almost like well to-day and dead to-morrow.”
 
“But what was it?” he asked, a little impatiently, and I replied, “Carl, don’t you know there is a little baby at The Elms, your brother and mine, who cost your mother her life?”
 
“A baby? Your brother and mine? It is not true,” he exclaimed, springing to his feet and staring at me as if in some way I were to blame.
 
“It is true,” I said. “There is a baby at The Elms, born a few hours before your mother died, and Fan is caring for it. That’s why she didn’t come. She held it for your mother to kiss before she died. ‘My little Paul,’ she called it, and those were the last words she ever spoke. ‘My little Paul.’”
 
Whether it was the memory of the Paul whose grave was under the Virginia pines, or the thought of his dying mother kissing her little boy, or both, I cannot tell; but something unlocked the flood-gates of Carl’s tears, and laying his head on my shoulder he sobbed bitterly, while I tried to comfort him.
 
“Don’t, Annie,” he said, “don’t speak to me; don’t try to stop me. I must cry. I am so glad to cry. I couldn’t at first for the something that choked me so, when I heard mother was dead.”
 
He grew calm at last, and began to talk naturally, inquiring after Fan and Katy, and Norah and Phyllis, but saying nothing of the baby. Nor during the few days we stayed in Boston did he ever speak of it of his own accord. He evinced, however, a good deal of interest in, as well as knowledge of, business matters, which were necessarily discussed by my father. By the conditions of the Haverleigh will Carl was now sole heir of his father’s 143fortune, which was larger than we had supposed. Knowing that he had inherited her love for luxury and expenditure, his mother had purposely kept from him the exact amount of his father’s estate, which, now that he knew it, filled his mind more than the very small amount which little Paul was to have by will from his mother. From the income of her husband’s money Mrs. Hathern had only saved a few thousands, which were hers to do with as she pleased, and these, by a will made a few weeks before her death, she had left equally to my father and their child, should he live; so, while Carl counted his money by hundreds of thousands, little Paul had scarcely three. My father had the same and all the furniture which had been taken to The Elms. I do not think the discrepancy between his fortune and that of his brother occurred to Carl.
 
The baby was something wholly unexpected and whose existence he could not realize. The money was his father’s, not little Paul’s, and he accepted it as a matter of course, assuming, as it seemed to me, a slight air of importance as the heir to so much wealth. He was very kind to us, and very generous during our stay in Boston, paying all our bills and insisting upon taking us everywhere, or, rather, taking me. Father had no heart to go, but I was young, and the sights of Boston were new and wonderful, and I went wherever Carl took me. Sometimes he spoke of his mother and always with great affection, but he never mentioned Paul until the day we left when he brought me a silver rattle, which he said was for “the little shaver,” who, he presumed, would be a lot of bother to us.
 
“Indeed, he will not,” I answered, rather hotly, for I was irritated by his indifference. “He is a dear little thing, and so you will think when you come to us in July.”
 
144“I don’t believe I shall come,” he said, hesitatingly, and without looking directly at me.
 
“Not come!” I repeated. “Oh, Carl, we have anticipated your visit so much that you must not disappoint us. Your mother wanted us to see a great deal of you, and Fan and I will do all we can to make you happy. You said you liked Virginia and us.”
 
“So I do,” he answered. “I like you immensely, but you see mother’s not being there will make it so sad, and then a lot of the boys are going to camp out in the Adirondacks and want me to go with them. It will not take all summer, though, and, perhaps, I’ll run down for a week or two at the last; so don’t look so gloomy, sister mine. I do love you and Fan and Katy dearly, and I did have a grand time at The Elms; but you see mother is gone, and I like change and new faces,—a new one for every day of the year, if I could have it. Bad in me, I know; but I was born that way, and can’t help it.”
 
He didn’t seem quite like the Carl of the previous year. He was older,—more mature, more like a young man of twenty-one than a boy of seventeen. But he kissed me very affectionately at parting, and sent his love, with a shell comb, to Fanny, a doll for Katy, a red silk handkerchief for a turban for Phyllis, and a new gown to Norah.
 
These, with the silver rattle, I brought to our home, which seemed very desolate without the ruling spirit which had kept us at so high pressure that, although we had not at first liked it, we missed it, now it was gone, more than we had thought possible.
 
“I really don’t know when to go to bed, or get up, or what I ought to do when I am up,” Fan said, with a half sob as we talked matters over the night after my return.
 
She had dismissed the nurse as too expensive an article 145to keep. She knew that the money which had been spent so lavishly for us all must cease with Mrs. Hathern’s death, and when I told her what had been left to father, she said, “For his sake I wish it might have been more; he is growing old and his practice is nothing. For ourselves I don’t care. We learned a good many useful lessons from Mrs. Hathern, and I hope we shall not fall back into our old slipshod ways. We have certainly gained something by her coming here,—orderly habits, and our baby.”
 
There was a world of tenderness in her voice as she said “our baby” and bent over the cradle where he was sleeping. He was so small that I was half afraid to touch him lest he should break in my hands like some brittle toy; but Fan took to him naturally, constituting herself his nurse and exulting over every sign of growing intellect or physical strength as if she had been his mother. What Carl would think of him was a question we often asked ourselves as we counted the weeks he was to spend in the Adirondacks, and then began to look for his coming. But we looked in vain. Following the Adirondacks was an excursion to the White Mountains, which lasted so long that at its close only a few days remained in which to visit us before returning to Andover, and he hardly thought it would pay to take the long journey for so short a time. He wrote to us often long chatty letters full of affection and promises to spend the whole of the next long vacation with us. But the long vacation came and went and was succeeded by another and another, and still Carl did not come.
 
PART II.—FANNY AND JACK. Chapter I.—Annie’s Story Continued. AFTER FIVE YEARS.

It is a question whether one can truly love more than once. I do not think a woman can. But men are different and seem capable of many loves. If anyone doubts this let him recall the number of widows and widowers among his acquaintance, and see if there are not fifty per cent. more of the former than of the latter. Three women had called my father husband and I believe he had loved them all devotedly, but whether it was the suddenness of the blow, or because he missed the force and energy which had kept him going, the death of the last Mrs. Hathern crushed him completely, and made him an old man at once.
 
“I don’t know what ails me, girls, but since your mother died I don’t seem to have any life or ambition left. I am like a clock which has run down and can’t be wound up again,” he would say to us when he came in from a walk into town or country where he still had a few patients of the old school.
 
He had never spoken to us of Mrs. Hathern as our mother while she lived; but now that she was dead he always mentioned her in that way, and we humored him, and sometimes called her so ourselves, and petted and made much of him, and felt that, like him, we were ships without rudders and didn’t know how to run ourselves. Especially was this the case with Phyllis, who needed whip and spur to keep her in the harness.
 
“I ’clars to goodness I don’t know nothin’ now the missus isn’t here to boss,” she said, as she sat on the 147bench outside the cabin door, her feet stretched out in front of her, her hands idly folded on her lap, her ironing neglected and her irons cooling on the hearth.
 
Only Norah kept her balance and went steadily on her way, her shoes creaking a good deal and her sharp tongue often lashing Phyllis when she got too far out of line. For three or four months Norah staid with us and then, as it was impossible for us to pay her the wages she had been receiving, she left us for Boston. But not until she had everything in what she called “apple pie order,” an expression which, I think, must belong exclusively to the east, as it was a favorite with Mrs. Hathern, and I have never heard it elsewhere. Owing to her delicate health Mrs. Hathern had deferred the spring cleaning, which she intended to take in hand as soon as her illness was over. But death snatched her away and it was left for Norah to carry out her plans, which she did with a vengeance. Everything was turned topsy-turvey, as it had been the year before when Mrs. Hathern was the presiding genius of brush and broom and soap suds. There was, however, this difference, there were no carpenters and masons and plumbers blocking the way, or hired negroes either. Knowing the low state of our finances Norah did everything herself with the little help she could extort from Phyllis. That functionary had taken to violent fits of short breath when there was more than usual to do. “Physicy,” she called it, and she had it badly now and wheezingly protested against so much useless cleaning. A little dirt was healthy, she said, and privately we sympathized with her, and were glad when Norah told us that we needn’t go through with quite so much in the fall. Boston folks didn’t as a rule.
 
“Wash the windows; wipe the fly-specks from the 148paint; air everything, and give the rest a lick and a promise and let it go till spring, when mabby I’ll visit you and see to the annual clean myself,” she said. Then, as a happy inspiration seized her, she added: “There are a few things you must see to every day, and as I know you won’t remember ’em all I’ll write ’em down.”
 
The result of this was a long document so full of what we were to do and not to do that I felt dizzy and bewildered as I read it, and then passed it on to Fan, who, with no fancy for housekeeping, threw it aside. This morning while looking over a trunk of old papers I came across that sheet of foolscap, written nearly thirty years ago, yellow with age, blurred and blotted and wonderful for composition and orthography. There were tear stains upon it, too, as I re-read it and thought of all which had happened since the autumnal day when Norah first brought it to me and asked me to nail it up in the pantry where it could be seen every day. I will give a few extracts: “Fust and fornenst, don’t let Phyllis make a pig-sty of my kitchen. I’ve kept it so clane that I can need bred in it anywhere; don’t let her get pot black all over the table, and greese on the floor; don’t let her leave the kittles on the range till they bile dry, specially the Te kittle. Ittle leek, and hev to be mended, an’t costs money; an’ there an’t no Miss Hathern to pay the bills now; don’t let her put the wash biler away till she’s wiped it and the cover dry, or the close will be all iron rust; don’t let her open all the draffs and pile the cole on till the griddles is red hot, an’ the fire all going up the chimly. Ittle warp ’em an’ spile the range. Make her hang up the broom, or stand it on end. Ittle last longer. An’ ef I’se you, I wouldn’t use gilt ege chany every day as Miss Hathern did. You’se them tothers. An’ don’t let 149Phyllis jab her big black thum into that mended place on the vegetable dish. Ittle break sure. An’ don’t let her slat her things round everywhere in my nice kitchen. Tell her Miss Hathern will appear to her some nite if she does. That’ll fetch her. She’s afraid of spooks.”
 
All this, and much more, Norah wrote, and I promised to follow her instructions as well as I could. Then one morning in October the ‘bus which had brought her to us came to take her away. Lifting the baby from his cradle she cried over and kissed him and, assuring us that he was not long for this world, he looked so pimpin, she put him back and said good-bye and went away, while we watched her as far as we could see her with swelling hearts and tearful eyes, wondering how we should get on without her.
 
The next morning I read her instructions to Phyllis. She had moved her belongings from her cabin into the kitchen, which already began to show signs of a new administration. Seated upon an inverted wash tub she listened to my reading with sundry snorts and shakes of her head until her turban fell off and lay upon the floor.
 
“For de Lord’s sake, chile, is you that soft to think I can ‘member all dem things. No, sor; but nebber you mind, honey, I’se no fool, if I is a brack nigger. I’se kep’ my eyes open more’n you thinks an’ learned a heap of dem Boston ways. You’ll see; don’t you worry, nor come speerin’ ’round de kitchen. Jess stay in de parlor whar ladies belong, an’ I’ll run de ranch! I’se cap’n now.”
 
She adjusted her turban, picked up the mop and the broom, put them together behind the door, where Norah’s sunbonnet used to hang, and began to bustle about with the activity of a young girl. Norah’s instructions I 150pinned up, as I said I should, but they were all lost on Phyllis except the possibility of Mrs. Hathern’s return if things were too much mixed; that troubled her. For several nights when we were up with our baby we saw a light in the cabin where she slept. When questioned about it she owned to keeping a candle burning “So as to see de missus if she comes. I’se not gwine to be took unawares, nor be so unmanneredly as to let her stumble roun’ in de dark.”
 
“But, Phyllis,” Fan said, “if it is dark she can’t see the litter.”
 
“Dat’s so, honey, I hain’t thought of dat,” was Phyllis’s rejoinder, and that night there was no candle burning in Phyllis’s room, but the door we knew was barricaded and the window nailed down to keep out Norah quite as much as Mrs. Hathern.
 
The superstitious old woman had been detected so often by the former in her little attempts to deceive that she had come to look upon her with a kind of awe as one gifted with second sight, who might pounce upon her in bodily shape quite as readily as Mrs. Hathern in ghostly form. With Norah’s departure the last link was severed which bound us to the new life, and I am ashamed to confess how quickly and unconsciously we took up the old one. It was so easy to do it, with Phyllis anticipating all our wants and encouraging us in our indolence. We breakfasted when we felt like it; had dinner and supper at all hours, while the kitchen gradually came to look like anything but a place where Norah could knead her bread on the floor. Phyllis’s handiwork was everywhere. There was pot black on the sink, and grease on the floor. Her big black thumb had jabbed out the broken piece in the vegetable dish, and the hot tomatoes had been spilled, 151some on the carpet and some down Fan’s back. The wash boiler had been discarded for an iron kettle, and was filled with a variety of articles, conspicuous among which were father’s boot-jack and blacking brush. The griddles on the range were red most of the time and began to warp and crack; the kettles burned dry; the tea kettle leaked and was mended so often that father at last mildly protested, saying it was cheaper to get a new one, which he could ill afford as his bill at the hardware store was already a large one. Then I tried to take the helm. There were a good many battles with Phyllis, who, however, succumbed so far as to have one day in each week for clarin up, “and the Lord himself couldn’t ax more’n that ef she was workin’ for him,” she said.
 
In the midst of all our difficulties our baby was never for a moment forgotten or neglected. Norah had called him pimpin, by which she meant delicate, and so he was. But he was a beautiful child, with wavy hair, and eyes a cross between blue and gray, a complexion like wax and the prettiest ways, which made us all his slaves. It was Fan who devoted herself to him, while I wrestled with the house. When he began to talk, her name, or an attempt at it, was the first word he tried to speak. He had often heard us spoken of as “Fan-and-Ann,” and with a quickness and persistence for which he was remarkable, he caught it and applied it to her alone. “Fan-er-nan” he always called her, while, for some reason known only to himself, I was Annie-mother, although I didn’t take half the care of him that she did. As soon as we thought he could understand we told him of his mother, and when he asked us where she was Fan answered “In Paradise,” and tried to make him repeat the word after her.
 
“Oh, my lan!” came derisively from Phyllis, who was 152within hearing. She didn’t “b’lieve in ‘dat ar pair-o’-dice,’” she said, and when next she was alone with the little fellow she took him in her lap, gave him a lump of sugar and said to him, “Don’t you let ’em fool you about dat ar pair-o’-dice. Dar ain’t no sich place. Your mar’s sperrit is in heaven, and her body in Boston.”
 
After that he always insisted that his mother had gone to heaven in Boston. He knew that Carl was in Boston, and saw no reason why his mother should not be there too. We told him a great deal of Carl, who became to him a kind of imaginary hero, and whom he always remembered in his prayers, asking that God would bless “brother Tarl, make him a good boy, and keep him straight.” Mrs. Hathern’s dying injunction had been “Keep Carl straight,” and as we never saw him Fan hoped a baby’s prayers might accomplish what we had no means of doing, and taught the words to Paul. Carl was in Harvard, doing fairly well for a young man of his means and tastes. He had plenty of money, and was fond of luxury and “larks,” and sometimes wrote us letters which made our hair stand on end. It was usually Fan who took up the cudgels and berated him for what she called his “goings on.” He always answered good-humoredly, telling her she was too prudish and knew nothing of the world, living as she did in that out of the way place.
 
“Not that Lovering isn’t lovely,” he added, “and I’d like nothing better than to live with you in the charming old home I remember with so much pleasure.”
 
He always addressed us as “My dear sisters,” and signed himself, “Your loving brother.”
 
“Words,—nothing but words, which are so cheap,” Fan would say derisively. “If we are so dear, and the old house so charming, why does he never come near us. 153I tell you there is something wrong about Carl. He is fickle and fast.”
 
I feared so, too; but there was a very warm spot in my heart for Carl, whom I always defended, while Katy would never hear a word of censure against him. He was her hero as well as Paul’s, and she would rather he would be fast than stupid, she said. Just before he was graduated he sent a most cordial invitation for us all to come east and see him take his degree.
 
“I have been in a good many scrapes,” he wrote, “but have managed to slip out. I always have my lessons and shall come off with some honor, and I want you here to share it. So, pack up your best clothes. I shall want my sisters to look well, and some of the Boston girls are stunners. Bring Phyllis and the baby, and I will quarter you all in my house in Boston, with Norah to superintend. Did I tell you that I took the house when the last tenant’s lease expired, and had it refurnished from top to toe, and put Norah there to keep it for me? Quite a comfortable bachelor’s home you will find it.”
 
“Oh, how I’d like to go,” I exclaimed, remembering the pleasant house looking out upon the Common, and feeling a great desire to see Boston and Carl again.
 
But the thing was impossible. It was five years now since Mrs. Hathern died, and every year we had been growing poorer. Father’s practice was gone, or nearly so, and the few thousands left him by his wife had been drawn upon so many times that there was not much now to draw from. The trip to Boston was not to be thought of, and Fan answered the letter, declining the invitation.
 
He was sorry, he wrote in reply, adding that as we were not coming he should give a swell dinner in his house to his classmates and have a “high old time.”
 
154As it chanced Jack was in Boston on business and meeting Carl accidentally was persuaded to be present at the dinner, which surpassed anything he had ever seen.
 
“The flowers alone and decorations must have cost hundreds of dollars,” he wrote to Fan; “and there were dishes whose name I never heard before and which I never care to taste again. Everyone was in evening dress but myself, who felt rather countryfied and out of place in my business clothes. But Carl was the same old kind-hearted boy, and made me feel perfectly at home and treated me as his honored guest. We sat down at nine and did not get up till two in the morning. Even then some of them did not get up at all for they were under the table, and lying round loose anywhere, and I shouldn’t like to tell Fan how many empty wine bottles were carried out by the waiters; but this I will say, I turned my glass down every time, although I know I was thought a milksop for doing it.”
 
This was at the time the great temperance crusade was beginning to sweep over the land, and Fan was head and front of the movement in Lovering. She had led a band of women into some of the lowest saloons and been threatened with eggs and brickbats, but had held her own bravely and won respect and attention where, at first, she met with coarse language and derisive jeers. Jack’s letter roused her to a pitch of white heat and she wrote to Carl, asking what his mother would say could she have looked upon the drunken revel, and if he didn’t think himself about as mean and low as he well could be for acting so entirely at variance with his mother’s wishes.
 
Carl’s reply was good-humored and apologetic. He was a cad, he said, to break his promise to his mother, but he positively had never been tipsy.
 
155“I suppose, though, I can drink more than most fellows and not be affected by it,” he wrote. “But that is no excuse, and to prove that I am in earnest I have taken the pledge and shall keep it, too, as bravely as Jack Fullerton did that night. I never respected a man more in my life than I did him, even while chaffing him a little and calling him an old maid. He is the right kind of stuff, and I don’t see why you don’t marry him.”
 
“Carl’s advice is good,” I said. “Why don’t you marry Jack?”
 
There was an upward turn of Fan’s chin as she answered me—
 
“Poor, too poor. I can struggle with poverty at home but when I have one of my own I must have some luxuries. So I’ll wait awhile. I am only twenty-five, if old Granny Baker did say at the sewing society that ‘it was time them Hathern girls were married, as they are gettin’ to be old maids.’ Old maids, indeed! Do I look like one?”
 
She had never been more beautiful and attractive than she was then in the full bloom of her womanhood. Jack thought so, too, and often asked her to be his wife, while she as often answered him in a manner which, while it did not mean yes, certainly was not a decided no.
Chapter II.—Annie’s Story Continued. THE FEVER.

That summer our town was visited with typhoid fever in its most malignant form. Jack’s mother was among the first to take it, and in their fear of the disease her servants forsook her, and as nurses were scarce Jack was left alone with her until Fan joined him and together they cared for her until she died. A week later our father was smitten with the terrible scourge, which found him an easy prey. He had never been himself since Mrs. Hathern died, and now it seemed to me as if he gladly lay down upon the bed from which he was never to rise again.
 
“I am so tired,—so tired!” he said, as he folded his thin hands like a child going to sleep, and scarcely moved or spoke again until toward the last when he asked that we send for Carl. “I want to see him,” he said; “there’s something very winsome about Carl, and I must talk to him about the little boy!”
 
Jack, who had been with us all the time, hiding his own pain to comfort us, telegraphed to Carl’s address in Boston. It was Norah who replied, and her answer was so like her that we could not repress a smile as we read it: “He is scurripin’ around the country, the Lord only knows where, but I’ll find him,—sure.”
 
When we told father he said very faintly, “I shall not be here when he comes, but tell him that I have loved him like a son, and he must avoid temptation. He is easily lead. Tell him, too, about the boy.”
 
All the next day and the next we watched for some message from Carl, but none came. The third day, however, a telegram reached us from Norah saying, “I’ve 157run him down at last in Canada.” That evening there was another from Carl, saying, “Shall start to-morrow morning.”
 
Oh, how hard our father tried to live until Carl reached us. It was a fierce struggle between death and an indomitable will, and it was a question which would conquer. Jack kept up his courage and ours.
 
“If he left Boston at nine, as he probably did, he is in New York by this time,” he would say; and, later on, “He is in Washington now, and will be in Richmond to-morrow morning;” then the line of prevision was broken and we knew no more until the next day at noon, when there came a message from Richmond: “Train late. Have just arrived. Will be with you at four. Carl.”
 
Fan read it to our father, whose eyes shone for a moment with an eager light, while his paralyzed tongue tried to speak. But he had drifted too far away for anything to hold him longer, and when the old clock in the church tower struck one he was dead. I cannot describe our anguish as we kissed his cold, white face in the last good-bye, while his eyes, to the very last, looked so lovingly at us and his pale lips tried to whisper his farewell. Even now, after many years, my heart throbs with pain as every incident of that day comes back to me. The warm sunshine, the scent of the flowers, the song of the robin, the hum of the bees, the low murmur of voices in the room where the undertaker and his assistants were at work, Jack going in and out, occasionally consulting us but mostly doing what he thought best, and later on going with the phaeton and Black Beauty to meet Carl, while Fan and I sat on the piazza waiting for him just as we waited years before when he surprised us by coming on foot across the field and in at the rear door. Now he 158came more decorously, with Paul in his lap, one arm around his neck and his curly head nestling on Carl’s shoulder, while he talked continually. Paul had gone with Jack to the station, eager to meet his brother; but when a tall young man, dressed in the height of fashion, stepped upon the platform and came briskly towards him, he drew back, until Jack said, “That’s he that’s your brother; go and speak to him.”
 
Then he ran forward and looking shyly up at the stranger, said, “Is you my brother Carl? I’m Paul, and papa’s dead and Fan-er-Nan and Annie-mother and Katy has cried themselves sick.”
 
With the exception of a few presents at Christmas and an occasional mention of him in his letters Carl had never evinced any interest in Paul. But no one could withstand that upturned face and the little hands held out in welcome, and lifting the child in his arms Carl kissed him lovingly.
 
“Yes, I’m Carl,” he said, “and your brother, if you are really Paul; but, zounds! how you have grown. I have imagined you still a baby. What a stupid I must be.”
 
After that the acquaintance progressed rapidly, and the two were on the best of terms by the time the phaeton drew up to the door and Carl sprang out to meet us. The same Carl in some respects we had known as a boy, and in others so very different. Broad-shouldered, perfectly formed, six feet tall, with a heavy mustache, and an unmistakable air distingué, he impressed us for a moment as he had little Paul, and I felt half afraid of him. That feeling, however, vanished the moment I heard his voice, full of sympathy, as he kissed us and said, “I am sorry that I did not get here sooner. I’d give so much 159to see him alive once more. He was the best man I ever knew.”
 
I was crying and could not answer him. Just what Fan said I do not know, until I heard her exclaim, “Katy Hathern, why are you here? I told you not to get up.” Aside from the grief at the loss of our father there was a terrible fear haunting us lest Katy was coming down with the fever. For two or three days she had complained of her head, and just after father died she had been seized with a nervous chill. The doctor, whom we called at once, had ordered her to bed, and his face was very grave as he prescribed for her. She had refused to go to bed, saying she was only tired; but we persuaded her to lie down upon the couch in her room where I supposed she was until I saw her standing in the doorway, her eyes unusually bright and a deep flush upon her cheeks. She had been very small as a child, seeming younger than she really was; but within the last two or three years she had shot up rapidly, until at fifteen she was taller than either Fan or myself, with the loveliest face I have ever seen. Fan was beautiful, with a brilliant, glowing beauty like the gorgeous flowers of autumn, while Katy was fair as a lily, with a complexion like the pink-and-white shells fresh from the sea. Her eyes were large and blue as a bit of summer sky, the heavy brows and long lashes making them seem darker than they really were. Her hair, once almost yellow, was now a golden brown, with auburn tints upon it when seen in certain lights, and fell in curls upon her neck. No stranger ever looked at Katy once that did not look again, and now, as she appeared in the doorway, the purity of her complexion heightened by the black dress she wore, and her lips parted with a smile of welcome to Carl, it was not surprising that he sprang to 160his feet exclaiming, “Great Scott! This can’t be Katy! Why, I’ve always thought of you as a little girl in pantelets tumbling into the frog pond, and by Jove! I’ve brought you a doll.”
 
He had both her hands in his and was looking at her with eyes which seemed to take in every point of beauty and gloat over it as over some rare treasure found unexpectedly. He had kissed Fan and me, but he did not kiss Katy. Possibly she saw the glowing fire in his eyes which I saw, and did not like it, or it might have been the mention of the doll which put her upon her dignity, and when he stooped as if to kiss her she drew her head back with a sideways movement natural to her when surprised or displeased. She was very gracious to him, however, and let him lead her to a seat while he sat down beside her and talked, to us, still looking at her as if he would never tire of her fair girlish beauty. Then suddenly the color left her face, her head began to droop, and finally rested on his shoulder. She had fainted from her weakness and over-exertion. It was Carl who carried her up stairs and laid her upon the bed, from which she did not rise again until the summer was on the wane and there was a foreshadowing of the September haze upon the hills and woods of Lovering.
 
What passed during the next few days after Katy’s faint was very vague and misty. I seemed like one in a horrible nightmare, my heart torn with anguish for the living and sorrow for the dead. The latter we buried with as little ceremony as possible. Letters of sympathy we had in abundance, but many of our friends were ill and others were too much afraid of the terrible scourge to come near us when they heard there was a fresh case in our midst. So, only the clergyman, the bearers, Jack, Paul, Fan and 161myself and Phyllis went across the field to the hillside where, under the pines, we buried our father beside Charlie and The Boy. Even Carl was not with us. Katy had been delirious from the first and clung to him as if he were her mother. She knew the moment he left the room and was only quiet when he sat by her, as he did almost constantly, scarcely giving himself time to eat or sleep.
 
“We can’t let Katy die,” he said, and everything which could be done to save the life so dear to us was done.
 
We had a trained nurse from Richmond and a physician who came every other day, while the doctor from Lovering came almost every hour, it seemed to me. This was Carl’s idea. He had taken the matter in charge and was spending his money like water. We had a colored woman in the kitchen to help Phyllis and he would have hired another if we had let him. Incidentally, we learned that a party of friends were waiting for him to join them in Montreal. But he telegraphed to them, “My sister is very ill and I cannot come.” He called her his sister, but his manner towards her was that of the tenderest of lovers. Many times I saw him kiss her forehead when she was more than usually restless, and once he pressed his lips to hers, from which the feverish breath came scorchingly.
 
“Are you not afraid?” I asked, and he answered promptly, “Afraid? No. Nothing about Katy can be infectious, and I would kiss her if I knew I should have the fever a hundred times.”
 
We tried in vain to keep Paul from the room. He was perfectly infatuated with Carl, who, in his absorption, paid little attention to the child. But that did not matter. 162Paul was not to be repressed. He would put his little hands into Carl’s and hold it fast until the young man was compelled to notice him. By some means unknown to us he had unearthed the high chair in which Katy had done penance so many times, and dragging it into the sick-room placed it where it would be most out of the way. Here he would sit in spite of us, watching Carl as he bent over the fever-stained face and restless head upon the pillow.
 
“Does you sink God will let Katy die?” he once asked, as the disease progressed and the hope in our hearts was nearly gone.
 
“No, she shall not die!” Carl answered, fiercely, and Paul continued, “I prays every night and morning that God will make her well. Does you pray, broder Carl?”
 
“Oh, Paul, I am too wicked to pray. God wouldn’t hear me, but he will you. Keep on, and if she lives I’ll give you a much prettier riding pony than Black Beauty ever was,” Carl said.
 
After that, when Paul was not in the sick-room, we found him on his knees at all hours of the day praying that Katy might live.
 
“And she will, you bet,” he horrified me by saying, as he came from a dark corner where he had been earning his pony.
 
“Oh, Paul! Where did you get that dreadful word?” I asked.
 
It was Fan who explained. That morning as she was entering Katy’s room, she saw Carl stoop to kiss the sick girl and heard Paul, who was as usual seated in his high chair, ask “Does you love her very much?”
 
“You bet,” was the answer inadvertently given; then, as he met Fan’s eyes full of reproach, Carl hastened to 163say, “I beg your pardon. You see we fellows use a lot of slang when alone, and it came from me unawares. I hope that you will excuse me, and that no harm is done.”
 
He was looking at Paul, who had caught the expression, as he caught everything out of the common, and who, in spite of our remonstrances, used it continually until Fan shut him up in the meal room, from which he emerged penitent and cured.
 
For weeks Katy hovered between life and death and went so far down the dark valley that we once thought she had left us forever. But she came back again, and after a few days it became evident that the crisis was past and she would live if her strength was sufficient for the struggle. For days she lay perfectly still with her eyes closed and her face as white as the pillow her shorn head rested upon. We had cut off her hair when her fever and delirium were at their height, for it seemed to trouble her, and she looked like a little child again, with her thin face and short curls clustering around her forehead. Suddenly one evening when we thought her sleeping, she opened her eyes and looked wonderingly at us. Then in a voice so low that we could scarcely hear her, she said, “What has happened, and why are you all in here, and why am I in bed? Am I very ill?” Then as her eyes fell upon Carl they lighted up with something of their old brilliancy, and her voice was steadier as she said, “Oh, Carl, you here? Yes, I remember now; but it seems so long ago.”
 
“Yes, darling, I am here,” Carl said, laying his hand on her white cheeks, which flushed quickly.
 
They were scarlet a moment later when Paul, who had climbed upon the bed, chimed in: “He’s been here ever so long and tissed you, oh so many times, I seen him, and 164once he cried when he so’t you was dead, and he’s goin’ to div me an ittle pony ’cause I prayed so much for God to make you well. I love Carl, don’t you?”
 
He had blurted out everything, and I glanced nervously at Carl to see how he would take it. He only laughed and said something about “Little pitchers telling all they knew,” and adding, “Why shouldn’t a fellow kiss his sister if he wants to?”
 
Instantly Katy’s eyes looked searchingly into his with an expression which told me that for her had commenced the old, old story, which has gone on since Adam and Eve first dwelt in Eden, and will go on as long as there is a tongue to tell it, or an ear to listen to it. But how was it with Carl, the young man of the world, with unbounded wealth at his command and his choice of any fair girl in the set to which he belonged? Did he really care for Katy, except as a brother might care for a sister as lovely as she was? and if he cared now, was he not of too fickle a nature to carry her image with him until time had developed her from a girl of fifteen into a full-grown woman?
 
Rumors had come to us in various ways of numerous flirtations which meant nothing to him and were dropped as soon as the first glamour was worn away and there were fresh fields to glean. From what we had seen of him we could understand how with his face and voice and manner he had only to stretch out his hand and gather almost any flower, just to inhale its sweetness for an hour and then drop it for another. Would he trifle with our Katy, or was it really only a brother’s affection he was giving to her? These questions Fan and I asked ourselves many times during the days of Katy’s convalescence, when Carl was with her so constantly, and we saw the brightness in her eyes when he came into her room, bringing fruit 165and flowers and books to read, but, most of all, bringing himself. There were drives in the leafy woods as she grew stronger, and walks to the cemetery on the hill side, where we often saw them sitting side by side upon the seat under the pines, his arm sometimes around her waist and her head upon his shoulder.
 
“Is he making love to her, and shall we let it go on? She is too young,” Fan would say, and calling Paul she would give him some flowers for the graves and tell him he might stay as long as he chose.
 
The chances were that Paul, who always wanted to go where Carl and Katy went, had already been there and been gotten rid of in some way, but delighted with his commission he would start across the field to execute it.
 
“Halloo, youngster, who told you to come here after I sent you back?” Carl said to him once, when Katy’s hand lay in his and her eyes were shining like diamonds.
 
“Fan-er-Nan send me,” Paul replied. “I’ve bringed flowers for papa’s grave an’ Charlie’s an’ The Boy’s, an’ my two first mammas, an’ I’m goin’ to stay.”
 
A few incidents like this broke up the walks to the cemetery, and, as if divining our suspicions, Carl’s manner to Katy changed a little and was more like that of a brother than of a lover. Katy was not one who carried her thoughts on her face, or talked much of her inner feelings. She was more reticent and self-contained than either Fan or myself, and if she noticed a change in Carl she gave no sign of it. But when about the middle of September he told us one morning at breakfast that he had letters from Boston requiring his immediate presence there, and that he must start the next day, her checks where the roses were beginning to bloom again became a shade paler, and there was a troubled look in her eyes 166whenever they rested on Carl. He seemed very cheerful and went whistling about the house as he made his preparations for his departure. He had paid every bill contracted during Katy’s illness, had bought a pretty white pony for Paul as a reward for his prayers, and done many things for our comfort.
 
That night,—the last he was to spend with us,—Fan found an opportunity to speak to him alone, reminding him of his mother’s dying message and what our father had said of his being easily influenced. With a laugh in which there was some bitterness, he replied, “Oh, bother, don’t you fear for me. I’m all right. Lots of us fellows have sprees but we do nothing bad. I shall sow my wild oats early and settle into a model married man. You’ll see!”
 
There was a thought of Katy in Fan’s mind, and she replied, “Not for years yet; and, Carl, be careful what kind of girls you consort with. Choose the purest and best. Remember that your mother said, ‘If Carl falls, it will be a woman that tempts him.’”
 
Then for the first time Carl showed real irritation.
 
“Who has been talking to you?” he said. “Has that old cat, Miss Errington, of Washington, been writing things to you? She was in Boston last winter and I met her several times. She was visiting in a house where I often called; there were three pretty girls there and once they chaffed me before her about a French grisette with whom they said I corresponded. It was just this way; you remember Julina?”
 
“Yes,” Fan said.
 
“Well,” Carl continued, “she wrote me a letter in French. She has been in Paris five years and must be perfect in the language. She was with her aunt, Madame 167Du Bois, who keeps a pension. She addressed me as ‘My dear Carl,’ and signed herself ‘Your devoted Julina.’ I am so poor a French scholar that I couldn’t make it all out, and got a fellow to help me, and by Jove he told of it to these girls as a joke on me, and I was hectored until I almost hated the name Julina. I didn’t answer her letter; upon my word I didn’t.”
 
“I know nothing about Julina and care less,” Fan replied, “but Miss Errington did write me that you were something of a flirt, and I should know that if she had not written it.”
 
Again Carl seemed irritated and answered warmly, “I don’t know what you mean. Can’t a fellow enjoy himself with a pretty girl who enjoys herself with him? I like them all, and the one I am with last I like the best. It is my nature. I can’t help it; but I’d burn my hands to the bone before I would wrong any girl, or knowingly deceive her. I have given no woman reason to think my attentions more than those of a friend, and if she thought so it was her own fault and because she did not understand me.”
 
At this moment Katy entered the room. She had heard his last words, and there was a look of surprise in her eyes for a moment; then they suddenly hardened and her manner was more like that of a Grande Duchesse than our simple-hearted Katy as she took the chair he brought her, and bending over her with his hand on her shoulder stroked her hair and said, “You look pale, are you tired?”
 
Leaning her head against the back of the chair Katy closed her eyes as if she were tired, but really to repress the tears which in her weak state came so easily. Months after, when Carl’s letters, at first so long and 168frequent, had become like angel’s visits, “short and far between,” she said to me, hesitatingly, “I thought Carl liked me just as Jack likes Fanny. He never said so, it is true, but he acted it, and I was pleased and happy. There is something about him which wins you in spite of yourself. Hypnotism, perhaps. But I am over it now. I know he does not care for me as I did for him.”
 
She spoke sadly, and I felt a throb of indignation against Carl, who had, unwittingly, perhaps, thrown a shadow on Katy’s life. She was young in years, but old in much which makes mature womanhood, and the attentions of a man like Carl could not fail to impress her with a deeper feeling than sisters feel for brothers. He still wrote her occasionally,—bright, chatty letters, full of protestations of affection for herself and all of us, and telling her of a life of which she knew nothing. But he didn’t come again, and he seemed at last to have passed out of our lives, into which another exciting interest had entered.
Chapter III.—Annie’s Story Continued. THE ENGAGEMENT.

The winter succeeding father’s death was a hard one for us. Our effort to economize and still not seem to do so was a struggle, and probably did not deceive anyone. Jack understood all our needs and straits and helped us wherever he could,—not in money, but in many ways where a man’s advice and assistance are invaluable. He was now agent for a large firm which paid him well, and 169as he was traveling only a part of the time we saw a great deal of him, and the evenings when he was not with us seemed monotonous and long. Sometimes when the days were fine and he had leisure for it he took long walks with Fan in the woods, and when they came back I used to notice a brightness in his manner and a look in Fan’s eyes which I had not seen there before. Christmas week and the one following he was in town, negotiating a sale for his mother’s house. When he left it was early on the morning train, and that night, when Fan and I were alone in our room and she was brushing her glossy hair, she turned suddenly to me and said, “I have promised to marry Jack. Didn’t you notice that he looked more like an idiot than usual?”
 
I was standing by my dressing bureau with my back to her, so that she could not see the whiteness of my face as I put my hand upon my heart, where for a moment there was the sharpest pain I had ever known or ever shall again. I had expected this would come sometime and I thought I was prepared, but now that it had come, I found myself a weak, wicked woman, loving a man who was to marry my sister, and who, under no circumstances, could ever have cared for me. Rallying in a moment and laughing at her likening him to an idiot, I replied, “You forget I have not seen him since I left you with him last night in the parlor and went to bed with a headache. I suppose it was after I came up stairs.”
 
“Yes,” she nodded, and after a moment went on; “What a great awkward baby of a fellow he is. Why he almost cried when I consented to marry him, and went off into a tantrum which frightened me and made me half wish I hadn’t said yes. I do believe if I were to go back on him now it would kill him.”
 
170“Go back on him!” I said. “You could never do that. Go back on Jack; the best and noblest man that ever lived!”
 
She had drawn her long hair across her face, and through it her black eyes looked curiously at me as she said, “I believe you are in love with Jack, or could easily be, and I wish it were you instead of me. Don’t stare at me as if you thought me a fiend. I like him; sometimes I think I love him. I dare say I should love him desperately if there were any danger of losing him, but I can’t help wishing he had more style, and more money. He is a gentleman, of course, but he has not the manner of Carl or Col. Errington. Half a dozen times I have been on the point of accepting the latter. You know his letter is still unanswered; but, you don’t know that in his letter of sympathy after father died there was a slip I did not show you. Just four words, “Are you still considering?” That shows he has remembered all these years, and since we have had so hard a struggle with poverty my thoughts have more than once turned to him, or rather to what he could give me.”
 
“Fan Hathern!” I exclaimed, indignantly. “You are not worthy the love of a good man like Jack, and I am half tempted to tell him so.”
 
“I wish you would; but you needn’t knock things over before you do it,” she answered, with the utmost unconcern, as in my excitement I ran against the table on which the lamp was standing. “You know the plateau on the hill where the Ponsonby mansion stood before it was burned?” she continued. “Well, it is for sale, and Jack is going to buy it and build a pretty cottage on it with all the modern improvements. He was just like a boy talking about it. He has more money than I supposed, 171or will have, when his mother’s estate is settled, and his salary is good. So we shall begin housekeeping in fine style for Lovering, but—bah, nothing to what I would like.”
 
I was never so angry with Fan in my life as I was that night when she showed me the heartless side of her, and I staid angry for two or three days until Jack came with a plan for the cottage he was going to build on the Ponsonby plateau. Then I forgave her when I saw her eyes light up as she lifted her face to be kissed and sat down close to him, while with one arm around her waist he explained the plan to us both. It was as nearly perfect as could be, especially the square hall with the fireplace, the deep window seats and the broad staircase, with the landing where his mother’s tall clock was to stand. There were to be bay windows and alcoves and verandas, above and below, and a room for Katy, and Paul, and myself whenever we chose to stay there, which he hoped would be very often. He was like a boy in his enthusiasm and Fan caught the spirit, too, and began to furnish the different rooms in a manner which took my breath away. Jack had thought to use some of his mother’s furniture, but Fan promptly vetoed the idea. It was too old fashioned, she said. She must have everything fresh and new, and she fitted up room after room, one with pink, one with blue, one with red. Her own, with the bay window overlooking the town and the valley and hills beyond, was to be of white enameled wood, with touches of gold here and there, while the window itself was bewildering with its white silk canopy and fringe of gold, its fleecy curtains and soft cushioned window stools and chairs.
 
If Jack had known Fan as well as I did he would have 172understood that much of her talk was for effect, that she never expected to have a house furnished as she was furnishing it in fancy. Unfortunately, he was apt to take things literally, and as he saw his pocket-book emptied and himself heavily in debt if he carried out her plans, he gasped a little and said, “That would be lovely, but I am afraid I can’t afford it all at first. Sometime we will have it, but now we must cut the garment according to the cloth.”
 
Instantly Fan’s face clouded. She lost her interest in the plan, and nearly lost it in Jack, who was, however, too supremely happy to notice it. She had promised to be his wife the next Christmas, when the house which was now on paper would be ready for her, and knowing that he would sooner die than break his word to her, he believed in and trusted her, and I never saw any human being more happy than he seemed on the nights when he used to come to us, bringing so much sunshine with his kindness and thoughtfulness that the winter did not seem half as long and dreary as we thought it would be with our father gone. We missed him everywhere, it is true; but as far as possible Jack filled his place, planning for us, transacting all our business, and collecting many a dollar which but for him we could never have recovered. Occasionally we heard from Carl, who wrote that he was studying law and was as steady as an old clock. Once Norah wrote asking if Phyllis had done this and that and presuming she hadn’t. Then she spoke of Carl, of whom she was very proud. “About the firstest young man in Boston,” she said, “with all the girls after him. But he don’t seem to hanker in particular for none of ’em. He has a way, though, of makin’ ’em all b’lieve she’s the one. But, good land, ’taint wuth no girl’s while to set 173her heart on him. He’s like a wind-mill, turnin’ and turnin’. He’s stiddy, though, and keeps middlin’ good hours—for Boston.”
 
This was encouraging so far as Carl was concerned, but there was a shadow on Katy’s face, and for several days we missed the music of her voice as she moved rather dejectedly around the house, apparently pondering Norah’s words, “Tain’t wuth no girl’s while to set her heart on Carl.”
Chapter IV.—Annie’s Story Continued. THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT.

Owing to some defect found in the title to the Ponsonby plateau after Jack had bargained for it, there was a delay of two or three months and it was the first of June before the way was clear for him to begin his new house. As he meant to superintend it himself and work with his own hands as much as possible there was ample time to finish it before Christmas, the day appointed for the wedding. After many consultations and a great deal of walking around the plateau to get the very best point for views in every direction, it was decided to build the cottage a little to the north of the spot where the Ponsonby house had stood. This necessitated a new cellar, and on the morning when the work was to commence Jack came to us and said, “I wish you’d all come up and see the first furrow turned. It will be something like laying the corner stone.”
 
As the day was one of Phyllis’s “clarin’ up” days we 174were glad to escape from the discomfort of it, and deciding to have a kind of picnic we took our lunch with us, and sitting down on a bit of broken wall in the shadow of a dogwood tree Katy, Paul and I looked on while Fan and Jack steadied the plow and drove the horses around the ground staked out for the cellar.
 
“Don’t this make you think of Romulus and Remus building Rome? I don’t believe, though, that Jack will kill me if I jump over the wall,” Fan said, laughingly, as she let go the plow and bounding over the furrow came up to where we were sitting, flushed with exercise and seemingly very happy.
 
When the horses had done all they could and the workmen had taken the cellar in hand we sat down to our lunch, which was nearly finished when we heard the sound of voices coming up the hill and a moment after a gentleman and lady came into view, walking very leisurely, but quickening their steps when they saw us.
 
“Colonel and Miss Errington,” Fan exclaimed. “What evil genius sent them here to-day!”
 
Was it an evil genius, or good, or was it fate which sent them there? I often asked myself afterwards, when a great happiness and a great sorrow followed as the result of their coming.
 
“Here you are! What a climb, and how tired and hot I am,” Miss Errington said, as, after shaking hands with us, she dropped down upon the nearest big stone and began to fan herself.
 
It was years since we had seen either the Colonel or his sister, but it did not seem to me that they had changed much. Both were a little stouter, perhaps, and there were a few white hairs in the Colonel’s side-whiskers, worn after the English fashion. Otherwise he was the same tall, 175elegant man, with a military look and air, and the same cold, hard expression in his eyes which, as they had always done, softened when they rested on Fan. Every color became her, but to me she had never been as handsome as since she had worn black. It toned down her brilliant color, and made her look more womanly and lovable. That day her dress was a thin muslin, which showed her white neck and arms, and she had pinned some white roses at her throat and fastened some in her hair “to scratch Jack when he tries to kiss me,” she said, but really because she inwardly chafed against black and wanted some color to relieve it.
 
The Colonel was very polite to me, and said to Katy, “Upon my soul, how you have grown!” and “What little shaver is this?” to Paul. Then he took Fan’s hand and held it much longer than he had held mine, and looked at her until she shrank from him and moved nearer to Jack. Miss Errington was explaining that, as they were in Richmond and had not seen us in years, they had decided to surprise us with a call.
 
“We drove from the station to the house,” she said, “and found your factotum, Phyllis, asleep on the front piazza with mop and pails and broom at her side. It was a work of time to rouse her, but when she was fairly awake she was profuse in her excuses, saying she was that tired in her bones that she “had done drapped asleep arsidentally,” and also that you were all digging the cellar for Mas’r Jack’s and Miss Fanny’s new house, from which I infer that congratulations are en règle, or are you already married?”
 
“No, oh no!” Fan exclaimed, while Jack put his hand on her shoulder with an air of proud ownership and said, “Not yet, but I invite you to our wedding next Christmas.”
 
176“Christmas! That’s a long way off,” the Colonel rejoined, his manner changing at once from one of indifference, or disappointment, or both, to one almost hilarious. I was told that I looked younger than when he last saw me. Katy was delicately complimented on her wonderful beauty. Paul was taken up and set upon the highest bit of wall, which he made believe was a horse, and Fan was reminded of the saucy things she said to him when he first invaded our house as a Federal officer with his soldiers, and asked if she hated them all now as much as she did then.
 
“I should if they came on the same errand,” was her reply, and then walking slowly around the broken ground the Colonel asked if that was to be the size of the house?
 
“Yes, and you’d be surprised to know how much room there will be in it,” Jack said, beginning eagerly to explain that here was the hall, there the dining-room, there the library and sitting-room, and “upstairs, right here, with the bay window, where we get the finest view, our room,” he added, with a world of love and tenderness on the words our room.
 
“Ah, yes, I see; all very fine,” the Colonel rejoined, with a look I did not like, it seemed so like the look a snake might give the bird it meant to destroy. “And what do you intend to call this Paradise? You Southerners, like the English, usually have names for your places,” was his next question, to which Jack replied, “We haven’t thought so far as that. The people who used to live here called the place The Plateau, but I’d like something else. Suppose you name it.”
 
“How would ‘The House that Jack built’ do?” the Colonel said, in an ironical tone which irritated me, but which was lost sight of by the rest because of Paul, who, catching the words “The House that Jack built,” began at once to repeat the rhyme which he knew by heart.
 
177“Bravo, young man!” the Colonel said, patting the child’s head, while Fan suggested that we return to The Elms, where we could offer a cup of tea to our guests.
 
Jack excused himself, as he must stay with his men, and the rest of us went slowly down the hill, Miss Errington, Katy, Paul and myself in advance, the Colonel and Fan in the rear, walking very slowly and engaged in what seemed a very animated conversation. Phyllis had finished her “clarin’ up,” donned her Sunday dress and turban, and in anticipation of our return was moulding biscuits for tea. It was served on the rear porch, where the clematis and honeysuckle shielded us from the heat of the June sun, and after it was over Miss Errington asked Katy to sing for her. The song was followed by another and another, during which the Colonel, who cared little for music, walked up and down the long piazza with Fan, whose cheeks were very red when she at last joined us at my call.
 
Miss Errington was going to Saratoga in August and would like to take Katy with her if Fan and I were willing. As all important decisions were usually left to Fan I beckoned her to us. Before she could reply to the proposition, which Miss Errington repeated, the Colonel interposed, “That’s a capital idea, but why not invite Miss Fanny also? You can chaperon two young ladies as well as one, and I am sure she would like to see something of the north she affects to hate.”
 
This suggestion was warmly seconded by Miss Errington, while Fan stood irresolute. I did not think she would accept without seeing Jack, and was surprised when she said at last, “I should like it so much if Miss Errington really wants me.”
 
Miss Errington did want her, and as I was not consulted 178it was arranged that Fan and Katy should go to Washington the last week in July and from there to Saratoga in company with Miss Errington. Nothing had been said of the Colonel’s going, and when I asked what he meant to do, he replied, “Oh, stay at home; Saratoga is not to my taste.”
 
It was later than usual that night when Jack came to us, more tired than I had ever seen him. He had worked harder than any of his men, he said, as he leaned back in his chair and asked where Fan was. She was putting Paul to bed, and it was Katy who told him of the proposed trip.
 
“Fanny going!” he repeated, his face flushing for a moment, and then turning paler than before. She had just come in, and going up to him began to smooth his hair and forehead, saying, “You poor boy, you are all tired out. You ought not to work so hard. Let those lazy negroes do it. Yes, I thought I’d go; it is a good chance to see a little of the world before I settle down into a Joan. You don’t care, do you?”
 
She was still manipulating his hair, with her face very near to his and something so coaxing in her voice that a man less in love than Jack would have yielded to it and granted what she wished.
 
“I am glad to have you go, if it pleases you,” he said. “Only I thought you might like to be here and watch the house as it progresses. But you’ll be back before we get to the rooms.”
 
“Oh, yes,” she answered very promptly. “I shall be back before you reach the rooms. It is only for August, and I have always wanted to see Saratoga.”
 
“Is the Colonel going?” Jack asked and Fan answered, “No, indeed, and I’m glad; I think him horrid and so patronizing.”
 
The fact that the Colonel was not to make one of the 179party reconciled Jack to Fan’s absence more than anything else, and in spite of his fatigue he grew very cheerful and quite like himself as the evening wore on. That night in our room there was a spirited discussion between Fan and myself with regard to her proposed trip, I arguing that for Jack’s sake she should stay at home, and she declaring she would not. It was the only bit of life she’d ever see, she said, and she meant to take it. She’d never been beyond the smoke of our chimney, and after she was married she should of course settle down, just as all the Lovering women did, into a domestic drudge. Poverty was hateful, and she was glad she was for once going to know how rich people lived and play rich herself.
 
The next morning she was very pliable and sweet, and spent half the day at The Plateau with Jack whom she brought home with her to supper, and then sat with him alone on the piazza until the clock struck eleven and old Phyllis appeared on the scene in wonderful night-gear, with a tallow dip in her hand, saying she “had done hearn sunthin’, and thought mebby thar was burgles in the house.”
Chapter V.—Annie’s Story Continued. SEEING THE WORLD.

It was the last week in July when Fan and Katy left us for Washington. Jack, Paul and I went to the station with them, waving and kissing our hands to them as long as we could see them standing upon the rear platform and waving to us. How often now do I recall Fanny as she was then starting out to see the world. Although twenty-six she scarcely looked more than twenty, so lightly had the years touched her bright face and starry eyes, which tears made softer and lovelier as she said good-bye to us. With wonderful skill and some help from the fashion plates she had remodeled her wardrobe, adding a little to it as we could afford, but refusing the money Jack offered her, saying he knew she must need it and he wanted her to hold her own among the fashionables she was to meet.
 
“No, Jackey, dear,” she said, “I can’t take money from you now; but when I am your wife, it will not be safe to offer it to me. And don’t you worry, I shall hold my own.”
 
At first she wrote three times a week to Jack, and her letters were very satisfactory, judging from his manner after receiving them. To me she wrote once a week, but it was from Katy that I had the most reliable information. They had reached Washington safely, and been met by Colonel and Miss Errington in a superb turnout, with coachman and footman in livery. The house was more elegant than anything Katy had ever imagined, and all its appointments of service and servants were perfect, and Fan adapted herself to everything with the air of a duchess born to the purple. Both the Colonel and his sister were 181very kind and had taken them everywhere in and around Washington, which was a beautiful city, but so hot that after a week’s sojourn they were glad to leave it for Saratoga. At the very last moment the Colonel had decided to go with them. He had said he couldn’t be hired to spend a month in that frivolous place, but when in the morning they came down to breakfast there was his baggage with theirs in the hall waiting for the expressman, and he was in his light traveling suit giving directions. They were stopping at the United States, where they had a suite of rooms on the second floor, parlor, three bedrooms, dressing-rooms and bath-rooms, and were quite the distinguished guests of the house. After she had been in Saratoga two or three weeks Katy wrote again.
 
“We know everybody worth knowing and everybody knows us and are very polite and attentive, notwithstanding our plain black gowns, which contrast so strongly with the elegant dresses worn morning, noon and night, any one of which must have cost more than all our simple wardrobe. There is a story going the rounds that we were very wealthy before the war,—that being on the frontier we were overrun by both armies, our house burned, our negroes stolen, and that we lost all we had. Fan, they say, was a fierce rebel, and with a revolver once kept Col. Errington and his whole regiment at bay when he tried to quarter his men upon us. All this fiction seems to make the people think more of us. Funny, isn’t it? Fan is the belle of the season and more flattered and complimented and sought after than any young lady here. And you don’t know how beautiful she is even in her simple black lawn and linen collar, with her brilliant complexion, her eyes like diamonds and her smile which brings every man to her feet. You ought to see her sitting 182in one of the big chairs on the piazza, or in the hall, surrounded by half a dozen admirers of all ages from sixteen to sixty. She knows the right word to say to each one, and keeps them all on the qui vive, while the Colonel, who is always very near, looks on with an expression which says as plain as words can say, ‘Don’t go too far, gentlemen. It will do no good.’ His attentions are constant and so delicate and marked that people begin to associate their names together, and I have been asked if they were not engaged. I said no, decidedly, and told them about Jack, whom she is to marry at Christmas. In less than twenty-four hours, so fast does gossip travel here, I overheard one lady tell another that the eldest Miss Hathern was engaged to a wealthy Virginia planter who lived near Richmond.
 
“‘That splendid girl engaged to a farmer,’ the second lady exclaimed, and her friend replied, ‘No, a planter.’
 
“‘Oh, that will do,’ the other said, in a satisfied tone, ‘as if there were any difference between a planter and a farmer except the spelling.’ Do you see any?
 
“That night Fan and I quarrelled for the first time in our lives. She said that I had no business to tell that she was engaged and spoil her fun, and I said she had no business to flirt so outrageously with everybody, and that if she didn’t quit it I’d write to Jack. Then she began to cry and wish she was dead. She didn’t see why when a glimpse of the world was given her to enjoy she couldn’t be allowed to enjoy it in her own way, and if she chose to have a taste of the world, the flesh and the devil, meaning the Colonel, she didn’t know why I should interfere. She intended to marry Jack, but she meant to have a good time first before settling down in dull old Lovering, which she hated. Then her mood changed and she 183acknowledged that she was wrong, and that night she wrote Jack the longest letter she has written since we came here, and the most loving, I dare say. The next day she was as shy and demure as a nun, which sent the whole pack after her fiercer than ever, but she cut them dead and kept close to the Colonel as if for protection, and drove with him to the lake and didn’t get back until ten o’clock. She was gone with him again this afternoon, and the people crowded on to the piazza to see them off in his stylish turnout,—the finest here by far.”
 
This letter troubled me greatly, and I wondered what Jack would think of it. I remembered the long letter he had received and how happy he had looked after it. I had seen him reading it at least three different times, until I felt sure he must know it by heart. After that her letters were very short, both to him and to me. She had not time to write much, she said, she was kept in such a whirl, which grew dizzier as the season drew near its close. She never mentioned the Colonel, or any other gentleman in particular, but was loud in her praise of Katy, whose flowerlike beauty, she said, had turned the heads of half the men in Saratoga.
 
“And her voice,” she wrote; “people rave about it as if she were Patti herself. It seems the Diva sang here once years ago, when she was about Katy’s age, and a woman who heard her says she likes Katy’s voice better and that she is far prettier, she is so fair and sweet and unconscious of her great gift. I have let her sing twice in public for some charities; they are always getting up something of that sort and levying on any talent there may be here. Prejudiced as I am against the stage I was proud of Katy, she was so modest and unaffected, and received the applause of the people so shyly and sweetly. 184Miss Errington has a plan in her mind for keeping Katy in Washington and giving her lessons. She will probably write you about it. I shall oppose it if there is a career behind it. I have not yet reached a point where I want my sister a public character, with her photographs in the shop windows, and horrid wood-cuts of her in the papers. I intend to have her at The Plateau a good deal of the time to keep me from stagnating. Just think of it! Only Jack and me, sitting there alone, admiring each other! Well, nothing can blot out the remembrance of the good time I am having now seeing the world, and there is so much to see and enjoy, if one only had money.
 
“I hoped at one time Carl might join us. Katy has had a few lines from him; did she tell you? He has gone with a party to some outlandish place beyond the Rockies. There are some people here from Boston who know him well and speak highly of him. They say, however, that he is a little too much inclined to forget the friends of yesterday for those of to-day. We know that, don’t we? An uncle on his father’s side has recently died and left him what we should think a fortune. So he is richer now than ever. I wish we had an uncle to die and leave us some money. But, alas! if we ever had an uncle he was dry as dust long ago.
 
“Miss Errington came in just here and proposed that, instead of going back to Washington, we take a trip to Quebec and Montreal and Chicago, returning by way of the Falls and New York, where, she says, I can buy my wedding trousseau. That last sounds fine, don’t it? I wonder if she suspects how poor we really are and how little there is for a trousseau. I don’t believe that, all told, we can get together a hundred dollars without drawing on the small sum we have in the bank in Richmond, or 185selling Black Beauty. It may come to that yet. And what do you think of the plan? Katy is crazy to go, and I am just as anxious. I see no reason why we should not, and I have virtually said we would, provided you do not object too strenuously, and you are too unselfish an old darling to do that. And so is Jack. How is the dear boy? ‘Working like an ox to get the nest ready for his bird,’ he wrote me. Oh, Jack, Jack! How good he is; far too good for me! His letters always make me cry. I feel my unworthiness so after reading them. I really mean to settle down into the best and most domestic of wives after I have seen the world.
 
“A gentleman has sent up for me to drive with him, so good-bye. We shall leave here within a week.
 
“Lovingly, Fan.”
Chapter VI.—Annie’s Story Continued. FURNISHING THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT.

It was no use to protest against the journey which would keep Fan and Katy from home four or five weeks longer, and all Jack and I could do was to make the best of it. Jack looked very sober when we talked it over together.
 
“I am glad for her to enjoy herself and see the world, as she calls it,” he said, smiling sadly; “but I miss her so much. I am always wanting to ask her advice and know if what I am doing suits her. You will have to take her place in that respect.”
 
He was looking so tired and pale that night that even 186Phyllis noticed it and asked, “What has done happened to Mas’r Jack; he don’t look so peart-like as he did? Is he frettin’ for Miss Fanny? She don’t or’to go to the ends of the airth an’ her the same as merried. No man would bar it.”
 
Phyllis and I were thrown so much together for companionship that she usually told me what she thought.
 
“‘Pears mos’ like she was never comin’ back,” she said more than once, and in spite of myself I was haunted by a similar presentiment, which followed me everywhere, and made me very kind and pitiful towards Jack.
 
He was working very hard, and with his labor and under his supervision the house was going up faster than ever a house went up before in Lovering. The walls were all enclosed and the rooms divided off according to the plan, which Jack often brought to me, asking if I could suggest any change. I could not. It was perfect as it was. New houses were not common in Lovering. This was the first since the war, and to me it seemed the quintessence of all that was pretty and desirable. Nearly every day all through September and on into October I went with Paul to The Plateau to watch the work as it progressed, and to please Jack, who said that he got on better when I was there,—that I seemed a part of Fan herself, and if he couldn’t have her I was next best. This might be called a questionable compliment, but I was grateful for crumbs. I doubt if Fan on her western tour, which finally extended as far as Colorado and Salt Lake City, was much happier than I was those long autumn days, when I sat in a niche in the wall and watched Jack busy with his men, of whom there were at least a dozen, so anxious was he to surprise Fan when she came home. How kind and attentive he was, coming often to 187me and trying to shield me from the sun if it were too warm, or from the wind if it blew cold from the woods or hills.
 
“You don’t know what a comfort it is to have you here,” he said to me one cool morning in October as he sat down beside me, pulling my shawl over my shoulder and unconsciously letting his hand rest there a moment as a brother might have done. “I wish you were going to live with Fanny and me. We need you to balance our nervousness and excitement, you are so quiet and self-contained. It will be a happy man who gets you, Annie.”
 
“Oh, Jack,” was all I said, as I drew away from him and turned my head that he might not see the waves of crimson on my face, or hear the loud beating of my heart as I could hear it.
 
Not for worlds would I have let him know that the girl he thought so self-contained and quiet loved him with a love far more enduring than any which Fan had ever given to him. It was a sin, I knew, or soon would be, and I fought against it with all my might, only to find it growing stronger as the days went by and the time drew near when he would be the husband of my sister. My only resource when his spell was over me was to talk to him of Fan,—where she was, what she was doing, what she was seeing, and when she would be home. To all this he responded readily, especially the coming home, and how he meant to surprise her.
 
One day in October when I went with Paul to The Plateau he met me with a beaming face. Some land of his near Richmond, which he had scarcely thought worth anything, had been bought by a gentleman from the north, who was going to put two or three houses upon it.
 
188“I feel rich,” he said,—“so rich that I am going to commit the extravagance of buying lace curtains, the real sort, not shams, a moquette carpet and upright Steinway for the parlor. That will please Fanny. She likes moquettes, they tread so softly, and I know she will like a piano. I heard her say that no house was furnished without one. Don’t you approve?” he continued, as I did not answer.
 
A moquette, at the prices they then brought with us, was an extravagance, while the Steinway was a superfluity. Fan had taken a few lessons and could play simple music. But she didn’t care for it and seldom tried the superb instrument which Mrs. Hathern had brought from Boston. Under these circumstances it seemed to me that the money he must pay for a Steinway could be better expended, and I said so, giving as a reason that Fan was not much of a musician.
 
“Yes, she is,” Jack answered quickly; “I’ve heard her sing Bonny Doon when she actually brought tears, I was so sorry for the chap who wrote it. Burns, wasn’t it? That’s my favorite, words and all. And the way Fanny sang it. I want to hear it again in this room; and Dixie. How she can rattle that off; and Fisher’s Hornpipe, and Money Musk. They are worth all the classics in the world, and Bonny Doon is a hundred times better than the hifalutin things you hear at concerts, when the singer almost turns black in the face, and wiggles and twists and stands on tiptoe as if she were going up bodily with her voice, which, when it gets up as far as it can go ends with a screech like she was in a fit. No, sir! Give me the good, old-fashioned tunes such as Fan can play.”
 
Evidently Jack’s taste for music was not cultivated, 189and I laughed merrily at his tirade against fashionable singing, and then watched him as he drummed on the window stool in imitation of playing a piano, and whistled the air of Bonny Doon. I knew he would buy the moquette and the Steinway, and said no more to discourage him.
 
“Now come up to our room,” he said, after he had finished Bonny Doon and tried a few notes of Suwanee River, another of his favorites.
 
I followed him up to what was to be his sleeping-room, and which he never entered without removing his hat as reverently as if it had been a church. It was a sacred place to him, and the one he meant to make the most attractive in the house.
 
“Fanny will sit here a great deal,” he said, “because the view is so fine, and then she can see me coming up the hill on my way home. I know just how she will look and can see her now, watching and waiting, and throwing me kisses. What is that they sing in the prayer meetings?” and he began to hum,
 
“Will anyone then at the beautiful gate,
Be watching and waiting for me.”
He was very musical that afternoon because he was so happy, and Fan was very real to him watching by the window as he came up the hill to what would be Paradise because she was in it. Do the hearts of men like Jack break more easily when betrayed? I do not know, but I remember thinking that God would hardly forgive the woman who played false to one who trusted her as Jack trusted Fan.
 
“She spoke of having this room all white and gold,” he said, “and I am going to finish it up in white wood, polished to look like marble with faint lines of gilt in it. 190There’s a chamber set in Richmond, part willow work and part white wood, with scrolls of gold here and there, and on the headboard a medallion, with the figure of a little girl in crimson cloak, with the hood brought over her head and looking just as Fanny looked years ago when a child and I drew her to school on my sled that winter we had so much snow. The eyes of the girl in the medallion smile at me just as Fanny’s did when I looked back at her to see how she liked it. Don’t you remember? You were there, too.”
 
I did remember very well the day when Fanny had her first sled ride, and in her new cloak, which was scarlet instead of crimson, looked like a little queen as she sat on the sled, while I trudged at her side in the snow, proud of that privilege, and especially proud when, on going up a hill which was nearly bare, Jack let me help him pull her, and told me I made a very nice little filly. He had asked Fan to get off in the steepest place, where the snow had melted and made it muddy, and she had stormed and kicked and said she wouldn’t, telling him he was her slave and was to do her bidding. He had been her slave ever since, and I had trudged beside them and was trudging still, with, God knows, no envy or bitterness in my heart because of the drudgery, or that Fan was always preferred before me, but often with the thought of the joy it would be to be loved by a man like Jack Fullerton.
 
“Yes, I remember it,” I said, and he continued, “I do want to buy that set, but if I get the moquette and the Steinway it is beyond my pile at present, unless—”
 
He stopped and his face beamed as with a sudden inspiration. He had taken his watch from his pocket to see what time it was, and was looking at it intently. It was a stem-winder and very handsome, and Jack was very 191proud of it. I suspected what was in his mind, but said nothing, lest I might be mistaken. As it was getting late and growing rather cool I left him settling in his mind where the different pieces of furniture would stand provided he bought the coveted set. Outside in the yard I found Paul, who had preferred to stay with the workmen while I went through the rooms with Jack. In climbing over the broken wall he had fallen upon his back or side and was crying, saying it hurt him to walk. No bones were broken, nor were any of his limbs sprained that I could find, and after a while he signified his readiness to go home, limping a little but utterly refusing the poultice which Phyllis made that night and which was big enough to encircle his entire body. The next morning he seemed all right, except for an occasional halt in walking, and I forgot the incident entirely in the greater interest of house-furnishing.
 
A week later Jack, who had been to Richmond, came to me one night and told me the moquette and piano and lace curtains and chamber set were bought and paid for, and would be at The Plateau in a few days. Glancing at his vest I saw that the gold chain was gone, and in its place was a black ribbon, and then I knew what he had done.
 
“What time is it, please?” I asked.
 
Flushing and hesitating he finally drew out a plain silver watch and held it up to me.
 
“Yes, I’ve gone and done done it, as Phyllis would say,” he said, laughingly. “I’ve sold my gold watch and bought me a silver one, which keeps just as good time. Fan always told me I was too fond of jewelry,—that my big chain looked flashy. She’ll be pleased with the black ribbon, and that child in the medallion is so like 192her. Seems as if she would speak to me and say ‘Get up, old nigger,’ just as Fan did the day I drew her on my sled.”
 
There was no use in protesting, now that the deed was done. So I said nothing, and after a moment Jack exclaimed, as he put his hand in his pocket, “By Jove I came near forgetting it; I have a letter for you, which I found in the office as I came down. It is addressed in Fanny’s handwriting and mailed in New York. They are so far on their way home, and must be here soon. I wonder she didn’t write to me, too. What does she say? It’s a fat one, any way; there’s something in it from Katy probably,” he continued, as he saw me take out a note and glance at it before commencing to read the letter.
 
I knew it was not always safe to read Fan’s letters aloud, and I ran my eyes hastily over this one, while Jack waited impatiently. The travelers were in New York at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and Fanny was wild over what she had seen and was seeing, especially on Broadway, where she had done a little shopping.
 
“Such lovely things,” she wrote, “but so expensive, and my purse is so very small. Why, one suit, such as I want, will take my entire fund. I have set my heart on a cloth dress, tailor made, which is awfully stylish, and will do to wear all winter, to mill and to meeting,—to call in and to receptions,—only there will not be any in Lovering, where the people have as much as they can do to get enough to eat without throwing away their money on frivolities. More’s the pity; and how stupid I shall find it after seeing the world. Don’t be surprised if some day, when you come up to The Plateau, you find me dangling from a beam in the cellar. If so, put on my headstone 193‘Died of a broken neck, caused by ennui.’ But what nonsense. Let’s come to business, at once. I must have more money, and this is what you are to do, ‘Sell Black Beauty.’
 
“Oh,” I gasped, with a feeling similar to what I might have felt if she had said “Sell Phyllis.”
 
“What is it? What’s the matter?” Jack asked, and without stopping to think, I replied, “She wants to sell Black Beauty to buy her a tailor-made gown.” “Sell Black Beauty, her pony! Never!” Jack exclaimed, while I read on:
 
“I don’t ride him very often now, and when I am married I shall have less use for him. He is getting old any way, seventeen or eighteen, and eating his head off. I am very fond of him, and there’s a big lump in my throat when I think of parting with him, but that gown is so ravishingly pretty and so becoming, and I want it so much. Old Mrs. Arthur has asked me for Black Beauty a number of times. He is just right to amble around the neighborhood with her on his back or in the phaeton behind him. She will take good care of him and pet him more than I do. Go and see her, Annie, and if she’ll give a hundred dollars,—that’s what she offered last summer,—take it, and send at once before the gown is gone. You don’t know how swell I feel driving to Arnold’s and Stewart’s and Lord and Taylor’s in Miss Errington’s handsome carriage, with two black men in livery, nor how obsequious they are at these places to those who come in carriages. Do you remember a copy which a Yankee schoolmaster set for me years ago, and which we thought so funny, ‘Money makes the mare go?’ It is true, and the more money you have the faster the mare goes. ‘Fan is an idiot!’ I think I hear you say. Perhaps 194I am, but idiot or not, sell Black Beauty and send me the money.
 
“When am I coming home? I really don’t know for sure. In time to be married, I suppose. Miss Errington suggests that whatever dress-making I have to do be done in Washington under her supervision and by her dressmaker, who comes to the house. If I do this I shall, of course, stay longer than I at first intended. Tell Jack not to fret. He will have enough of me after we are married. How is the house progressing? And how is Paul’s lameness? Better, I hope. Miss Errington, to whom I read your letter, made me very nervous by suggesting that his fall might result in hip disease. That would be dreadful. Paul a cripple! It can’t be; Miss Errington is always seeing scare-crows. She is exceedingly kind, however, and will send a note in this letter asking if she can keep Katy during the winter and give her every advantage for musical instruction. I have consented, and you may as well. Katy will of course go home for Thanksgiving, and Miss Errington has invited herself to accompany her,—or rather us,—when we come.
 
“Did I tell you the Colonel was to sail for Europe the 3d of November in the Celtic? As she will wish to see him off you may expect us the 25th,—three days before Thanksgiving. That is Miss Errington’s plan. She just came in to give me her note.
 
“Lovingly,
“Fan.”
“P. S. I shall write Jack to-morrow.”
 
I read parts of this letter to Jack, skipping what I thought he ought not to hear. He looked very grave when I finished it, and said, “She is putting off her coming as long as she can. It is three weeks to the 25th. Does dress-making take so long?”
 
195It took a good while, I told him, although Fan could not have a great deal to do. Then I spoke of Black Beauty, lamenting that he must be sold. We have had him so long that he seemed like one of us, with human instincts and affections.
 
“Isn’t there some other way of getting that tailor gown, if she must have it?” I said, looking up at Jack, whose face wore an expression different from any I had ever seen there.
 
I thought he consigned the tailor-made gown to perdition, but was not sure, he spoke so low. What I did understand was that Black Beauty would not be sold to Mrs. Arthur, and that I was to do nothing about it until I saw him again. Then he went away, seeming a good deal excited for Jack, and banged the door so hard behind him that Paul, who had been sitting very quietly in his high chair, asked “Is Jack mad?”
 
This reminded me of what Fanny had said of possible hip disease, and I remembered with a pang that Paul had not played horse on father’s cane quite as much, or run quite as fast since that fall on The Plateau. When I questioned him, however, he said he had no pain except once in a while when he was tired and then “something hurts me here,” and he put his hand low down on his back. I was not quite reassured, and determined to consult the village doctor the next time I saw him. Then I read Fan’s letter again, feeling as if an incubus had dropped from me because the Colonel was going abroad. Fan had never mentioned him before, but there had always been in my mind an undefinable feeling of uneasiness as if he were a dark shadow falling between her and Jack.
 
It was two days before I saw the latter again and when he came he was in a very different mood. He had received 196Fan’s letter of four pages crossed and so full of love and pretty sayings that if he could he would have bought her ten tailor-made gowns.
 
“I was a brute the last time I was here,” he said, “I was so disappointed that Fanny was not coming sooner. Old Mrs. Arthur can’t have Black Beauty, for I’ve bought him myself. I can’t part with him. I’ve had too many plans of riding through the woods and around the country with Fanny at my side. She never looks better than when on Beauty’s back. Here is the money.”
 
He held out a hundred dollar bill, which I was to send at once and ask no questions as to where he got it. I think he borrowed it and at first refused to take it, but he overruled my objections, and that night it was on its way to New York. Four days later an answer came to Jack and to me. The gown was bought, and Jack was the dearest, most indulgent fellow in the world, and she was beginning to be very impatient to see him and all of us. They were going to Washington the next day and in two weeks were coming home. It was the nicest letter she had written in some time, and Jack went off whistling to The Plateau, where the house was nearly completed, so far as masons, carpenters and painters were concerned. The plastering was dry and the paint nearly so. Phyllis had cleared up the rubbish, and cleaned the windows and floors, which were ready for the carpets, which, with the furniture, were standing about everywhere in boxes and bales. Nearly all Lovering had been over the house, pronouncing it perfect.
 
“Wait till it is furnished and we give a house-warming; then see what you think,” Jack said, as he piloted party after party through all the rooms but the one which was too sacred for common eyes to see and comment upon. 197“Our room,” where the bedstead with the medallion was to be set up, and Fanny was to be waiting and watching for him as he came over the hill.
 
“Alas, alas, for the dreams which come,
And alas for the dreams which go;
Leaving only an aching heart
Crushed with a sudden blow.”
Chapter VII.—Annie’s Story Continued. THE 25TH OF NOVEMBER.

The beginning of the day was bright and fair, with no cloud in the blue sky, and the warmth of the Indian summer filled the hazy air. The close was dark and cold and rainy, and left me a half-crazed woman, scarcely knowing what I did or said, while Jack was as broken and blighted as some tall tree which the storm has torn up by the roots and cast helpless upon the ground. During the last two weeks only short letters had come to Jack from Fanny, while to me she had written at length, telling me how glad she was at the prospect of coming home.
 
“I reckon too much sight-seeing and dissipation have made me nervous, or bilious, or both,” she wrote. “I am not myself at all, either waking or sleeping. In fact I don’t sleep. I, who used to drop off the moment my head touched the pillow, now toss for hours without losing consciousness, thinking—thinking—of everything, of the past, the present, and the future, until my brain seems actually broiling. Oh, the future! Don’t ever get married, Annie. It’s dreadful,—not being quite certain of anything except that you are not half good enough 198for the man who loves and trusts you so fully. I wish Jack were not so good. Wish he were more like me. There would then be something like equality. But now,—Annie, did you ever have a horrid nightmare in which you were more awake than asleep, because you could see and hear and feel, but had no power to move, although you knew there was something creeping towards you slowly, surely, with its arms stretched out to enfold you? If you could cry out the spell would be broken, but you can’t, and you lie there dead, as it were, waiting for the end you cannot ward off. That is my condition, and will be until I am under our Virginia skies and breathing Virginia air at home with you.
 
“We have fixed upon Monday the 25th for starting, and as we do not reach Richmond until night you will not see us until Tuesday morning. Shall I be awake then, I wonder; or, will the creeping shadow have me in its embrace? Pray for me, Annie. I need it more than you know; why, I actually feel like asking Phyllis to rassle in prar for me, I am in such a state. I wish we were coming sooner, but Miss Errington wants to see her brother off. You know he sails the 23d, and she is going to New York with him on Friday. If I could, I’d start for Lovering to-morrow.”
 
This was a part of Fan’s letter. The rest was full of fun and jokes and anticipations of the Thanksgiving dinner she was to eat at home, with some directions to Phyllis how to cook it, and one or two allusions to “the house that Jack built,” and which she knew she should like. She closed with: “Your wretched sister, who knows how Paul felt when he wrote to the Romans, chap. 7, verse 15, ‘What I would, that I do not; but what I hate, that do I.’ If as good a man as Paul whiffled round like that, 199what can you expect of a weak, wicked girl like Fan Hathern?”
 
This letter troubled me a great deal at first. What did it mean? What could it mean except that as the time drew near Fan shrank from giving up her girlish life and becoming the wife of Jack Fullerton. If this were so I had no patience with her. After a little reflection, however, I concluded that, as she had hinted, too much sight-seeing and dissipation had unsettled her mind and liver, making her both bilious and morbid. She would be all right again when once in the quiet, healthful atmosphere of home; and dismissing all anxiety from my mind, I began to make preparations for the Thanksgiving dinner at which Miss Errington and Jack were to be present. In this Phyllis was quite as much interested as myself. For weeks she had had a turkey fattening in a little pen, and every time she fed it she informed it how many days more it had to live before she cut off its head, and how many hours it would probably take to roast it, information which must have been very exhilarating to the bird, if it could have understood it. After her fashion she had cleaned the house, which, borrowing a term which she had heard from Mrs. Hathern and Norah O’Rourke, was in apple pie order. “Yankee apple pie, too,” she said, when telling me how much soap and water she had used. “I only give the kitchen a lick and a promise, as nobody ’ll meddle thar but myself,” she said.
 
I expressed my approbation of the cleaning, although I knew that in all human probability she had not raised a window when she washed it, and that if Mrs. Hathern could have walked in to investigate she would have found the dust piled high on the top of the doors where Phyllis had not thought to look. But Mrs. Hathern was where neither moth nor rust corrupt, nor dust gathers on the 200golden walls, and Phyllis was mistress of the kitchen. The room which father had occupied had not been slept in since he died, but we arranged it now for Jack, who was to spend the night of Thanksgiving with us. Carl’s room was to be given to Miss Errington, and both were in readiness, as was everything else so far as I knew, and I was looking forward anxiously to the coming Tuesday, when our house would be filled with the sound of laughter and happy voices.
 
I had not been feeling very well and was, besides, so busy with my own affairs that I had not been to The Plateau for a week. I knew Jack was there early and late, with men and women both, pushing matters as fast as possible, and that some of the rooms were settled. Sunday he was out of town, but Monday morning he came to The Elms on his way to The Plateau, figuratively walking upon air, he was so elated. I think I never saw a happier light in any eyes than shone in Jack’s, or heard a more joyful ring in any human voice than there was in his as he bade me good morning, and added, “They will soon be on their way. Hurrah!”
 
Catching up Paul he swung him on his shoulder and carried him two or three times across the wide hall. Then, putting him down and rubbing his hands together, he continued: “I tell you, Annie, the house is a daisy, and so she will think. Four of the rooms are settled,—square hall, dining-room, parlor and our room,—and I am coming round in my buggy this afternoon to take you up there. I’ve had fires in all the grates to dry out any dampness, and everything is perfect. The bedrooms and kitchen and such like are not settled, but they soon will be. I have ordered a range just like yours and expect it every day, and,—do you know who is to be the high cockolorum in the kitchen?”
 
201I could not guess, and he continued: “No darkies for me, but the real article from Yankee land,—Miss Norah O’Rourke! What do you think of that?”
 
“Norah,” I exclaimed; “Norah!”
 
“Yes, Norah,” he replied. “We have had quite a brisk correspondence, Norah and I. She wrote me three or four weeks ago, confidentially, saying Carl was tired of keeping up his big establishment in Boston,—that he was going to rent it and travel. That would throw her out of a home. Next to Boston she liked The Elms, and would come back, provided that lazy, sozzlin’ nigger wasn’t here. I think that’s the way she put it. She couldn’t abide the blacks, with their shiftlessness, she said, and it wasn’t healthy to be with them. Her temper was never the sweetest at its best, and they riled her so, slattin’ things round, and het her blood so hot that she was apt to break out all over with a kind of rash. I am using her vernacular as far as possible; but to come to the point. If you hadn’t Phyllis and would dispose of any colored gentry you might have and wanted her, she would come for a price within your means. She could afford it, as she had recently got a pension of eight dollars a month on account of her brother Mike, who was killed at Gettysburg. I don’t believe she was ever really dependent upon him for support, and don’t quite understand how she got it. Somebody did some tall swearing. But that’s not my matter. If I were to swear a blue streak from here to Washington, I couldn’t get a pension. Was on the wrong side of the fence. But to proceed. If you had Phyllis, I was to say nothing. If you hadn’t, I was to ask you if you wanted her. You had Phyllis. I said nothing, but remembering to have heard Fan say that she would give more for Norah’s little finger than for Phyllis’s whole body, so far as order and neatness 202were concerned, I wrote to Norah, telling her my prospects and asking her how she would like to live with us. ‘Tip-top,’ she said, and she will be here within a week,—go right into the house and have it all in readiness from stem to stern by Christmas. For once I am in luck, and Fan is coming to-morrow. Do you realize it? To-morrow we shall see her. I can hardly wait. Be ready this afternoon at two sharp. Au revoir.”
 
As he went down the steps two at a time he was singing:
 
“Never morning dawned so gaily,
Never sky such radiance wore.”
Alas, alas! I don’t know why I have written these two words, and so anticipated the denouement. I should not have done it had I not been nearing the almost tragedy with which the day, which dawned so gaily, closed.
Chapter VIII.—Annie’s Story Continued. AT THE PLATEAU.

Precisely at two o’clock Jack was at the door, and a few minutes after we were driving rapidly through the town toward The Plateau. Jack had put on his best clothes, as it was a half holiday with him, he said, and he looked very handsome and animated as he talked constantly of Fanny, recalling many incidents of her childhood, and trying to decide just when he made up his mind that she was the one girl in all the world for him.
 
“I reckon,” he said, “it was the first time I went off to the war with my company, and she stood on the horse block throwing kisses to us and waving a red shawl she 203had tied to a broom handle. Most of the boys were in love with her, and I think it was her fierce patriotism which kept our courage up, when it might otherwise have cooled. I remember once when we were waiting for a battle to begin, a comrade who stood beside me said, ‘What are you thinking of, Jack?’ I was thinking of Fan, but I replied, ‘Nothing; what are you thinking of?’ ‘Nothing,’ was his answer. Just then there came the opening roar of cannon, with the order for our company to move on. Simultaneously we both shouted, ‘Hurrah for the South, and Fanny Hathern.’ The comrade was poor Tom Allen, who was killed in that battle, and Fan’s name was the last upon his lips. I never told her, and never shall. I don’t think she cared for him, and I have sometimes been afraid she did not care for me as I do for her. But she will. I shall be so kind to her and try to make her so happy that she must love me after awhile, if she does not at first. I am a sort of country clown, I suppose, and not at all like the high-toned chaps she has been consorting with; but I do believe my heart is in the right place,—that is, my intentions are good.”
 
He was silent a moment,—then turning towards me he continued: “You know the best and the worst of me, if anybody does, and I feel like making you a kind of confessor, or rather confidant, as to how I feel and what I mean to do. Shall I, Annie-mother?”
 
This name by which Paul called me Jack had taken up since he had been so much at The Elms, saying it suited me, I was such a motherly little woman, with a manner which made everyone confide in and trust me. I liked the name as used by Paul, to whom I was a kind of mother, but I did not quite like to have Jack call me thus. It made me feel so much older than I really was,—older 204than he, and a great deal older than Fan, who, Phyllis said, was really my senior by half an hour. I had never given any sign that it was distasteful to me, nor did I now. I merely said, “I am sure you have nothing to confess.”
 
“Well, not exactly that. It is more a confidence as to what I mean to do,” he said. “I am all strung up to a pitch of nervousness or exhilaration, and must talk to somebody. This morning when I woke up, and the sun was just rising over the woods, and I felt so light and airy, I asked myself what it was? What had happened, or what was going to happen? Then I remembered that Fanny was coming to-morrow, and that in just a month she would be my wife. I was so thankful and happy that I wanted to do something. You know I’m not very religious, like you and Fan, and I’m not a praying man. I say the prayers in church with the rest of the people, but half the time I’m thinking of something else, and once in a while I go to sleep during the Litany. But I am going to turn over a new leaf, and this morning I went down on my knees and thanked God for Fanny, and asked that I might make her happy, and that she might come safely home to me, and I promised to be a better man and join the church and have family prayers just as your father did, and ask a blessing at the table as mother did. Fanny will like that, I am sure. You don’t know how peaceful and quiet I felt after that. Why, it seemed as if I really had been talking to some one who heard and answered me, and the future looks so bright that if I were in one of Phyllis’s pra’r meetings I believe I should shout. I can readily understand how she works herself up to having the power. I could have it in a little while.”
 
We were going up the hill to The Plateau by this time, 205and in Jack’s face there was the rapt expression of one who had talked with God as friend talks with friend, and been made the better for it. The sky, which in the morning had been so clear, had gradually been growing grey and overcast, until the sun was hidden from view, and in the west a bank of clouds was rising rapidly and threatening rain. It was growing chilly, too, and as a cold breeze came down the hill, Jack urged his horse on until we came upon the house which looked so pretty and attractive, with all the debris cleared away and the grounds brought up somewhat to their former condition when it was the show place of the town.
 
“Isn’t it lovely?” Jack said, helping me to alight, and then marching me round to look at a view we had both seen a thousand times, but which was always new to him because Fanny’s eyes were to see it daily.
 
He pointed out the tops of the Blue Ridge in the distance, the valley through which the river ran, and the opening in the woods through which the first Federal soldiers who appeared in our midst came marching, years ago, throwing our little town into wild excitement and alarm.
 
“I heard you were so frightened that you ran to the attic and hid behind the chimney, while Fan armed herself with the poker and went into the street ready to fight, if necessary,” he said.
 
He frequently made comparisons between Fan and myself, and usually to my disadvantage. But I did not care, and now I laughed merrily as I recalled the day when I first heard the Yankees were coming and crawled behind the chimney, half expecting to be shot. I had not then learned that there was very little difference between the conduct of the Yankees and the rebels, and not much to 206be feared from either. After the view was exhausted I was taken to see the bit of sodding which had been done where the ground was torn up,—the shrubs which had been planted and the flower beds which had been marked out ready for spring. Noticing at last that I shivered as a gust of wind, damp with coming rain, swept across The Plateau, Jack said, “Why, you are cold, aren’t you? I do believe it’s going to rain right away. Go into the house where there is a fire. I will be there in a few minutes.”
 
He went whistling to the stable with his horse, while I made my way alone into the house. Passing through the kitchen I came first to the dining-room, with its crimson carpet and curtains, its polished oak table and carved chairs of the same wood, upholstered in dark-green leather,—its handsome sideboard standing in the niche made for it,—its china and glass and fancy cups hanging on hooks,—a fashion beginning to prevail at the north and which Jack had seen in Richmond. There was no grate in this room, but a deep fireplace, ornamented with the brass andirons and fender which had belonged to Jack’s mother. On the hearth some pine knots were laid ready for a fire on the morrow, when the real mistress came to see her new home. On one side of the room was a pretty conservatory half full of plants with a hanging basket before two of the windows. Fanny was fond of flowers and Jack had remembered everything.
 
“Well, what do you think of it? Have I been too extravagant to suit my little economical Annie-mother?” he said, coming in just as I had finished inspecting the room.
 
I told him it was lovely, but said nothing about extravagance, although I did wonder where all the money came from. I kept on wondering as I went from room to room, stopping next in the square hall with its broad landing, 207in an angle of which the tall clock was ticking, with a stained glass window on one side of it and Mrs. Fullerton’s portrait on the other. The polished floor in this room was bare with the exception of a few rugs here and there. The deep window seats were cushioned, and a bright fire was burning in the grate. This had been my favorite room from the first, it was so unlike in its construction any room I had then seen, and I was disposed to linger there in the easy chair before the warm fire. But Jack hurried me on to the parlor,—the great room he laughingly called it, as he threw open the door. The moquette carpet was down and so thick and soft that my feet nearly went out of sight as I trod upon it. Nothing could have been in better taste than the whole arrangement of the room, from the lace draperies at the windows to the Steinway in the corner. I had not seen it since it was unpacked, and anxious to hear its tone I stepped up to open it when Jack laid his hand on my shoulder and said, “Excuse me, please, but it is a fad of mine that Fanny’s fingers must be the first to touch the keys. I’ve had it tuned and know it is in good shape, and to-morrow afternoon, when I bring Fanny up here, I am going to have her sing and play Home, Sweet Home, and Bonny Doon, and then, little woman, you may drum away on it all you please. Of course the room is not quite finished. It looks a little stiff yet,” he continued, glancing around. “It wants some jim-cracks and things, which Fanny will see to. An old shawl of hers, thrown on the back of a chair will change it wonderfully. By George, it begins to rain. I didn’t think it would come so soon. I am glad I put Robin in the stable,” he exclaimed, as a few drops pattered against the windows, “Let’s go now to our room.”
 
208This I knew was the pièce de résistance, the grand reserve kept for the last, and it seemed to me as I followed Jack up the stairs as if he stepped softly, reverently, as we go to look at the dead. But it was not much like a death chamber,—that bright room, with its wide bay window, from which fluted muslin curtains were artistically draped back so as not to obstruct the view. By the centre window a pretty work-table stood, with an inlaid work-box on the top ready for use. On one side of the table a large easy chair, with head and foot rest. On the other side a low rocker, where Fan was to sit and watch for Jack, and later on sew and listen while, in the chair opposite, he talked or read to her, or smoked a little, if she would let him, and he reckoned she would. All this he explained to me, making me try first Fanny’s chair to get the view on one side; then his to get the view on the other side, and then calling my attention to the carpet, a light, pretty ingrain, with a delicate pattern of roses.
 
“I wanted to get Brussels,” he said, “but couldn’t quite afford it yet. We can put down some matting in the summer. Mrs. Maney of Richmond says that is the correct thing. She helped me a lot. Couldn’t have got along without her. What do you think of the furniture?”
 
I said it was prettier than anything I had ever seen, especially the bedstead, with the medallion and the young girl in the crimson cloak and hood, looking at me with Fanny’s eyes and Fanny’s smile as I remembered it when she was a child.
 
“It is very much like Fanny, and looks as if it could speak to us,” I said, and Jack, who was regarding it with all his heart in his eyes replied, “She is speaking to me, and saying, ‘I am coming. I shall be with you to-morrow,’ God bless her.”
 
209He was almost childish in his happiness, and more like an expectant boy than a man, and I am glad to remember that for a brief space of time he was as perfectly happy as it is often given us to be; glad, too, that in that supreme moment, when all his mighty love was showing in his face and voice, I had no pang of regret or pain because it was another and not myself to whom his love was given. Was there, I wonder, no influence emanating from that room strong enough to reach the girl of whom we both were thinking so intently, and tell her that this was her hour,—the last in which she would ever be loved by a man as good and true as Jack Fullerton?
 
For a moment we stood looking at the picture, and then Jack, who had spied a bit of dust on a table, took his handkerchief from his pocket to wipe it off. In doing so his hand came in contact with a letter for me which he had found in the office and forgotten until this moment.
 
“I don’t know why I was so stupid. If it had been from Fanny I should have remembered it, but it is from New York,” he said, as he handed me the rather bulky letter, which was postmarked New York and directed in a handwriting I did not at first recognize.
 
“Who is writing me from New York?” I said, examining the writing minutely, with a feeling that I had seen it before. Suddenly it came to me, and I exclaimed “Col. Errington. He was to sail Saturday and this is mailed Saturday. What can he have written to me, and so much, too?”
 
Just then word came up that the new range had arrived, and Mr. Fullerton was wanted to superintend the placing it.
 
“All right,” he said. “I’ll be there directly;” then to me, “you will excuse me a moment.”
 
210Then he was gone, and I sat looking at the letter and hesitating to break the seal.
Chapter IX.—Annie’s Story Continued. THE LETTER.

There certainly are times in one’s life when there comes a presentiment of impending evil, and such a time was that when something told me that the reading of the letter in my lap would not leave me just as it found me. But there was no thought of Fanny in my mind until I opened it, and saw that it contained a note directed to Jack in her handwriting, a little unsteady and crooked, but unmistakably hers. There was a trembling in my hands, a weakness in my wrists and back, and I felt my eyes growing hot and dim, as, putting the note on the table, I resolutely turned to the beginning of the letter and read:
 
“Washington, November 21st, 18—. Thursday
Evening, after 11 o’clock, with my
trunk packed for the journey, and everybody
in the house asleep but myself, who
feel as if I should never sleep again.
“Dear Annie,
“I am writing to you for the last time as Fanny Hathern. When this reaches you I shall be on the sea,—going to Europe with Col. Errington as his wife!”
 
If some one had written to me that Fanny was dead, the shock would not have been so great, although different. Consciousness did not forsake me, but for a brief space hearing and seeing did, except that rings of fire 211danced before my eyes, and in my ears there was a roaring, far-off noise, as if some one were repeating over and over again “with Col. Errington as his wife.” I have been told that when one is near drowning, all the incidents of his life are unrolled before him. I was neither drowning, nor dying, but I seemed to see at a glance all Fan’s past as connected with Jack, and her present as connected with Col. Errington, and I scarcely needed to read her letter to know how it had happened. When sight and sound came back, I was conscious of a feeling of intense heat as if I was smothering. I must have air, and dragging myself to the window I opened it, and with the rain beating upon me, although I did not feel it, I read the letter through. It was written half in badinage, half in extenuation, and had in it a ring of pain which told me that there was enough of the old Fan left to torture the new one with remorse when she had time to realize what she had done, and to learn the difference between a heart which beat for her alone, and one which cared for her only as she ministered to its selfishness and pride.
 
“Don’t condemn me utterly,” she wrote, “until you read my letter and know how it has come about, if indeed I can tell you. I believe it has been coming ever since that day when Col. Errington came to The Elms with his sister and found us picking grapes. He says it began when he raided our house with his troops and I talked so saucily to him. I could have killed him then in my hatred of everything wearing the Federal uniform. I have at times almost wished I had done so, when I have felt his meshes closing round me until I had no power to resist. Do you remember the old geography we studied years ago, when Mr. Allen from the north was our teacher? There was in it a picture of the so-called Maelstrom on 212the coast of Norway, with a ship which had got into the whirl going down, the faces and hands of the ill-fated passengers upturned and imploring help, which could not reach them. That picture had a great fascination for me, especially after Mr. Allen explained it to us so vividly that I felt my hair prickle at the roots, and could see it all so distinctly. The pleasure boat full of giddy young people skirting around the edge of the whirlpool into whose circle they were being gradually drawn;—sailing pleasantly and smoothly round and round, each time swifter than before until at last the line was crossed over which there was no return. Human skill was of no avail. Human aid could not reach them, and they were drawn on and on, nearer and nearer to the roaring mass of angry waters into which they entered at last and went down to the depths below, where, according to his statement the sea floor is strewed with the wrecks of boats and white with human bones. This picture was bad enough, but it was worse still when he drew a moral lesson from it and told us how our little faults, if not overcome would grow until we could not control them and they would drag us on to the great Maelstrom of sin into which we would plunge, head first, I think he said, and go down, down, down,—not to the bottom of the sea,—but to hell,—and he emphasized the last word with a blow on the table with his big ruler which made me nearly jump out of my skin. I was scared almost to death, and began to think of all the bad things I had done, putting beech nuts in Charlie’s bed, and a little mud-turtle in the pocket of Phyllis’s Sunday gown, calling you a fool, and spitting at Jack, when he tried to kiss me. I could not sleep for thinking about it, and finally made Phyllis my confessor and told her of my fear of the Maelstrom of sin.
 
213“‘Laws, honey,’ she said, stroking my hair, ‘don’t you worry. What’s you got to do any way with Moll Stroon’s sin? Let her take keer of it herself. You’se nothin’ to do with it. What was it any way? And who was Moll Stroon?’
 
“I laughed till I cried at her mistake, and called her an old idiot, and didn’t worry any more about Moll Stroon’s sin. I have since read that the Maelstrom, as we regarded it, is a myth, or at the most a very narrow strait on the coast of Norway through which the sea pours rapidly four times a day with the ebb and flow of the tide,—that when it meets a strong wind from the opposite direction, the water bubbles and boils and seethes like a cauldron, but nothing is ever drawn into it except foolish whales who are too big to turn round and go back. Why have I dwelt so long on this Maelstrom? I don’t know, unless it is to show you how, ever since I left home, I have been hanging on the verge of a moral whirlpool, sliding over one circular wave after another until I grew dizzy and have finally tumbled in. To use a slang phrase, ‘that is about the size of it.’ Col. Errington says that he never forgot me for a day after the first time he saw me, and I stood up so bravely and told him what I thought of him; that when he saw me the second time on the ladder with grape stains on my face and I as unconcerned about my personal appearance as if I had been a queen and he my subject, he registered a vow that if possible he would make me his wife. You know he did write, offering me his hand. I never answered his letter, and that cooled his ardor, until he came the third time and found us at The Plateau. The knowledge that I was engaged to Jack dampened him a little, but he did not despair, and when he succeeded in getting me to Washington 214and under his influence he felt tolerably sure of success, seeing as he did how fond I was of everything which riches can give. He has never said a word against Jack. That would have defeated his plan, but in a thousand ways I cannot describe he has made me feel how wholly unfitted I am to be the wife of a poor man, and how eminently fitted to shine in a society different from anything in Lovering. He has made me feel, too, that Jack is countrified and that after a while I should grow away from him and perhaps be ashamed of him,—a state of things which would make me wretched. I know there is more real goodness in Jack’s little finger than in the Colonel’s whole body and told him so. He only laughed and said he had no doubt of it, but he believed I would be happier with his whole body bad as it was than with Jack’s good little finger. If he has never said anything derogatory of Jack he has of Lovering, which seen with his eyes and my recent experience of something better seems to me the dullest place on earth, and one in which I couldn’t possibly live again. You don’t know anything about it Annie; you who have never been anywhere except to Boston. Then it was a funeral at which you could not be very gay. You only saw the usual sights of the city with Carl. You know nothing of grand hotels, with suites of rooms and obsequious waiters, who come at your nod, because you belong to the Errington party,—of fine turnouts with coachmen and footmen in livery, and people looking admiringly after you;—of elegant houses, such as there are in New York and Washington, and especially Col. Errington’s, where everything is the most expensive kind, with hosts of servants to do your bidding;—of splendid dresses and jewels such as ladies wear to dinners and receptions; boxes at the opera, 215and all the pleasant gossip, a knowledge of these things brings to those who are in the swim. This is society, and I like it and it has been offered me a good many times in return for myself, and a good many times I have refused it, but when I thought the matter settled the Colonel has changed his base of operations and commenced the siege again. His love-making has never been open and impetuous like Jack’s, but done persistently and in that delicate, persuasive way so hard to resist. Neither Miss Errington nor Katy have a suspicion of it. Indeed, his sister expects to go with him to New York to-morrow and see him off on Saturday, and she has asked Katy and me to accompany her. I declined, but I believe Katy intends to go. I hardly think she will, and I dread the scene in the morning when they must know the truth.
 
“I did not decide until this afternoon. I drove with the Colonel this morning far out into the country. We were gone two or three hours, and he improved his opportunity, urging every possible reason why I should not marry Jack and should marry him. In Lovering I would be a nonentity, darning my husband’s socks and looking after the kitchen to see things were not wasted. In Washington I would be a leader in society, quoted and admired, with every wish gratified, and the finest establishment in the city. He would build a house for me, he said, much handsomer than the one he now occupies, and he took me around to see the site on one of the pleasantest and most fashionable avenues. He would have two or three plans sent to us for approval in Europe, and it could be commenced at once. As soon as we had the measurements of the rooms I could, if I liked, order the carpets and rugs, together with the furniture. There were to be draperies from Paris, pictures and statuary from Rome 216and Florence, china and linen from Dresden and England, and bric-a-brac from everywhere. There was to be a cottage at Newport in the summer,—trips to Florida in the winter, where, if I liked, he would build a pretty villa near some one of the many lakes which abound in the southern part of the state. He knows a spot which will just suit me in Orange County. I think it was this villa, which he described so vividly, with its broad piazza,—vine covered and cool,—its palms and magnolias and orange trees and roses, and fanciful rowboat on the lake, which moved me the most. I can have you and Paul there. The place will suit you better than the gayeties of Washington, or Newport, and in imagination I have already filled the wide piazza of Palmetto Villa with chairs and stools, and a little round table for books or work, or afternoon tea, and I have put Paul into a hammock and you into an easy chair, and have with you looked across the road to Lake Hathern sparkling in the sunlight, and have inhaled the perfume of orange blossoms and the delicious Florida air, freighted with the odor of many flowers. And by and by carriages come out from Orlando, a pretty town close by, with people to call upon us, English and Americans, and our grounds are bright with the flutter of gay dresses, and the house is filled with the chatter of small talk,—admiration of the place, and implied compliments of the beautiful hostess,—that is I, who carries herself like a duchess, and says to herself, ‘This is life; I did well not to refuse it.’ Isn’t that a charming picture? I thought so and began to waver.
 
“On our return to the house the Colonel found a telegram from the White Star office, asking if he still wished them to reserve the staterooms he had looked at when in the city last week. If so, he must let them know at once, 217as another party wanted them. He had been so sure that I would go with him, he said, that he had partially engaged the rooms, and now I must decide.
 
“‘Give me an hour,’ I said, and after my lunch I went directly to my room, pleading a headache, which would keep me from going out with Miss Errington and Katy, who were to make some purchases for Lovering. I locked the door, took off my dress, put on a wrapper, let down my hair, unbuttoned my boots, looked in the glass, and then sat down to weigh the pro’s and con’s of the situation.
 
“Do you remember that queer little thing which I once recited at school, ‘The Philosopher’s Scales,’ which were not made to weigh sugar and tea, but qualities, feelings, thoughts and sense. The first thing he tried, we are told, was the head of Voltaire pitted against the prayer of the penitent thief, with the result that the head flew up and the prayer down. Then
 
‘A lord and a lady went up at full sail,
When a bee chanced to light in the opposite scale.’
Then at last,
 
‘The whole world was bowled in at the grate,
With the soul of a beggar to serve for a weight,
When the scale with the soul in’t so mightily fell,
That it jerked the philosopher out of his cell!’
“All this recurred to me so vividly this afternoon and keeps repeating itself over and over in my brain as I sit writing this to you. I am a little girl again in the old school-house at Lovering. It is Wednesday afternoon, and outside under the trees several horses are tied, with here and there a negro in attendance. Inside, the western sun comes through the windows and lies in great splashes of light on the floor. On his little perch of a platform Mr. Allen, of Maelstrom notoriety, sits calling 218the names of those who are to recite or declaim, his voice sounding like thunder when he says ‘Fanny Hathern: The Philosopher’s Scales.’ In her red merino gown and white apron Fanny Hathern walks from her seat to the platform, the distance seeming a mile, and her heart thumping like a trip-hammer, as she tries to remember whether it was the prayer of Voltaire and the skull of the thief, or vice versa. There is company in school that afternoon, the Trustees, of whom the girl’s father is one, and hence her anxiety to acquit herself creditably with her scales. You are there and Charlie, and Jack is in the corner just where the little girl can see him, as she curtsies straight down and begins, with her eyes fixed on him, for she knows his lips will try to form the words if she wavers. He has helped her learn the piece and heard her rehearse it many times, telling her how to manage her voice, for Jack is a natural orator. The little girl acquits herself very creditably and goes back to her seat, passing so near to Jack that she hears distinctly his whispered words, ‘You did it tip-top.’
 
“Dear old Jack, who always thought I did everything ‘tip-top,’ and who brought me the biggest apples he could find in the bin, who put so many sugar hearts and raisins into my desk, and carried me in his arms across the puddles of water, when I was afraid of spoiling my new shoes. What will he think of me now, I wonder? Believe me, Annie, my face is wet with tears as I recall those far-off days and think of Jack, who would never serve me as I am serving him. It is raining heavily to-night and the wind howls at my window with a sound in it like a human sob or moan,—like Jack’s voice calling to me through the storm, and saying it is not too late to draw back. There it comes again, the moan,—making me 219creep all over, there is something so uncanny in the sound at this hour of the night. It is not too late to draw back, and I’ll do it, too. If the Colonel is still up,—if there is a light over or under his door, I will knock and tell him I have changed my mind, that I cannot break Jack’s heart—I have been out into the hall and the whole length of it, treading very cautiously lest Miss Errington or Katy should hear me. There was no light over or under the Colonel’s door. He was fast asleep, snoring horribly at intervals, and it was these snores which I mistook for Jack’s moaning in the wind. I cannot draw back. It is too late. I believe I am half crazed and don’t know what I am writing, or have written. I remember I had reached the ‘Philosopher’s Scales’ when I digressed so widely, so I will return to that point and the time this afternoon when I sat down to weigh the pro’s and con’s,—the pro’s for my marrying the Colonel, and the con’s against it. Into the con I put Jack, young, handsome, true as steel, good every way, with no fault whatever except that he is poor, knows but little of fashionable society and cares less, wears old-fashioned coats and slouch hats, with his trousers in his boots when the roads are muddy. That was Jack, and of course the con went down with a whack as there was nothing to balance it. Then I took the Colonel, years older than I am, growing bald on the top of his head and a little deaf in one ear, with some grey in his hair and whiskers, and no power to thrill or quicken my pulse when he touches my hand, as Jack has. Good habits, distinguished looking, remarkably well preserved, polished manners, perfect knowledge of the world and every shade of etiquette, and always habited in the last style from his collar to his boots. That was the Colonel, and I put him into the pro scale, 220which was up in the air and swung and teetered, but did not make Jack, who was down, budge an inch. The con was ahead, and I was glad, but I meant to be fair, and took up Lovering next, asking what besides Jack and you and Paul it had to offer me in exchange for the world of society I liked so much. Two or three picnics in the summer when the people eat their lunch on the ground in the woods, with bugs and ants crawling over them, and pretend they like it. A few tea parties, where the talk is mostly of the good times before the war and the bad times since. Possibly a circus. (By the way, I hear Buffalo Bill is going to Richmond next spring. If he does, sell your best bonnet and go and see him and take Paul.) So much for summer dissipation. In the winter it is a little better. A singing school, amateur theatricals for the churches, or Y. M. C. A.’s, or W. C. T. U.’s, of which half the people approve and the other half disapprove. Occasionally a lecture and concert and travelling play actors, who are second class, or they would not come to Lovering. The negro revival, which is lively, and the Sewing Society or Guild once a month, with tea, one kind of cake, no napkins, and gossip. As Mrs. Jack Fullerton I might in time become President of the Guild and walk miles to find a place for it to meet; that would perhaps be some compensation for the dullness of the place, and relieve the ennui of living alone at The Plateau, with you at the other end of the town. Think how bored I should be after the novelty of counting my silver and dishes had worn off. There would be nothing left me to do but to hob-a-nob with the cook and watch for Jack, who would in time be as bored as I. That is Lovering life and I put it in the scale with Jack, expecting that, like the lord and the lady, he would go up at full 221sail. He only stirred a very little and looked at me so steadfastly with his honest, trusting eyes, that I still hoped he would win.
 
“I must, however, be fair to the Colonel, and I piled on top of him the trip to Europe, jewels and dresses and travel and a French maid. The new house and grounds in Washington, the cottage at Newport, Palmetto Villa in Florida, a box at the opera, horses and carriages, and all the money I want to spend, with nothing to do except to enjoy it. This settled the matter and the pro’s went down so fast and the con went up so swiftly, that Jack and Lovering were thrown out and vanished entirely. The die was cast, and without a moment’s hesitation I made myself presentable and went to the library, where I found the Colonel, calm and cool and polishing his thumb nail with one of those little brushes which come for that purpose: He has a full set. Rather effeminate, I think. I did not stop a minute lest my courage should fail, for something was tugging at my heart, which felt like a lump of ice.
 
“‘I am going with you to Europe,’ I said, the words half choking me.
 
“He stopped polishing his thumb nail, and drawing me to him——Well, no matter what he did, except that it was all very dignified and circumspect, and not at all like Jack, who nearly ate me up when I promised to marry him. Poor Jack! I have said that to myself many times since my interview with the Colonel, which did not last long. I was in a hurry to get away from him, his hands were so cold and clammy, not at all like Jack’s. But then he is a man of an entirely different temperament, and may be just as kind. He was very glad for my decision, he said, and he trusted I would never regret it; he should certainly try to make me happy. I didn’t tell him 222I was regretting it even then. Disengaging myself from him I went to my room and cried as if my heart would break. I heard him go out and knew that in a few moments there would flash across the electric wires to the White Star office in New York the message ‘Keep the staterooms, Nos. —— and —— for me. G. Errington.’ The deed was done, and when about five o’clock Miss Errington and Katy came in from their shopping I was lying on the couch in my room with a headache which was not feigned. Katy was full of purchases made for you and Paul and Phyllis and Jack, while Miss Errington had been busy collecting a few things for her brother’s comfort on the sea. You know she was intending to go with him to New York and take Katy with her, and my conscience smote me as I heard her talking about it and planning that I should not be lonely during her absence. The Colonel told me to have my trunk packed to-night, taking as little as possible. I was to say nothing to anyone, but leave it for him to tell his sister in the morning before I came down to breakfast. Ah me, how I dread the scorn in her eyes and the surprise in Katy’s when they know all. Miss Errington is a splendid woman; rather peculiar in some respects and nearly as determined as her brother when once her mind is made up. She has been most kind and generous to me and seems to like me very much. But Katy is her favorite. She has spoken of taking her abroad. If she is still of this mind, don’t oppose it, although it will leave you very lonely. Let Katy see the world. She is exceedingly beautiful, with a face and voice like an angel. She ought to make a brilliant match, and with Miss Errington to chaperone her, I think she will, and forget her foolishness about the stage. There is no one in Lovering for her, but with Miss Errington her 223chances are many. I suspect she has a fancy for Carl, but that will never amount to anything. He scatters too much. I hear of him here and there and everywhere, sipping sweets from many flowers and caring particularly for none.
 
“It is one o’clock in the morning. I have still my note to write to Jack, a harder task than writing to you, so I will leave this letter and finish it in New York after the deed is done and I can tell you of the manner with which the news was received by Miss Errington and Katy.
 
“Saturday, Nov. 23d, 5th Avenue Hotel,
10 o’clock in the morning.
“Dear Annie,
“I have on my traveling gown and jacket,—the tailor-made one, which is very becoming, with gilt buttons and braid. On the table is a fur lined cloak, with shawls and wraps enough to have warmed even Harry Gill, if anything could have thawed that chattering wretch. I feel some like him, for my hands and feet are icy cold. But I must finish my letter commenced in Washington and tell you of the row we had when it was known that I was to marry the Colonel. He told his sister in the library before breakfast, when she came in ready for the journey she expected to take. At first she refused to believe it, and I was sent for to confirm the news. I went with my knees shaking under me and in a condition more like Harry Gill than ever. She was white to her lips, and her eyes burned like coals of fire as she demanded if what she had heard was true.
 
“‘Answer her, Fanny. She does not believe me,’ the Colonel said.
 
“I was never afraid to speak before, but something in Miss Errington’s manner and attitude cowed me completely and I hesitated before stammering out that it was true, and I was going to marry her brother.
 
“‘If you will excuse me I will leave you to settle it 224between yourselves, as I have something to see to. But don’t be long, there is not much time to lose,’ the Colonel said, in his usual suave manner.
 
“Bowing politely he disappeared, while his sister stood clutching the back of a chair, tall and erect and confronting me like some dreadful Nemesis. I knew I deserved the worst that she could say or think of me, and cowered before her while she regarded me with unutterable disdain.
 
“‘Miss Hathern,’ she began, ‘If there were no reason why it should not be, I might be glad to receive you as my brother’s wife, but to break your engagement with another man so suddenly is monstrous. Have you weighed the subject well?’
 
“I thought of the Scales, but knew she would not understand that, or the Maelstrom either. She was matter of fact and I must answer her in the same spirit. As well as I could I tried to explain till she had a tolerably fair insight as to the real motives which actuated me.
 
“‘I see,’ she said, sarcastically. ‘Because the man is poor you are throwing him over and selling yourself for money and freedom. I pity you when you waken to know what you have done. My brother is dear to me, of course, but I know him, and he will not be a pleasant man for a woman of your spirit to live with. Everything in his power must bend to his will or break. He may not beat you, although he does his horses and dogs, when they disobey, but he will bend you until you have no free will of your own, and the time will come when you will long with inexpressible longing for the love and tenderness and consideration of the man you are discarding.’
 
“At this moment Katy came rushing in. She had heard the news from the Colonel, and throwing her arms around my neck sobbed hysterically, begging me to give it up for all our sakes,—Jack’s, your’s, Paul’s, Phyllis’s, father’s and Charlie’s, and I think she mentioned The Boy, but am not sure. It was a sin to Jack, she said, and a disgrace to our family, and would make me a by-word with every decent person in Lovering.
 
“Between Katy’s tears and Miss Errington’s scorn I 225was so limp and crushed that I might have given it up if the Colonel had not come to my rescue.
 
“‘There has been enough of this,’ he said, sternly, ‘come to breakfast, time is passing.’
 
“He put his arm around me and led me to the dining-room, where we breakfasted alone. Katy was upstairs crying and Miss Errington was ordering her valise to be taken to her room, as she would not need it now. Her brother, who had recovered his composure and was as quiet and calm and cool as ever, suggested that she still go with us and take Katy. But she declined. Katy, I think, wished to go, and clung to me at parting in a way which wholly upset me.
 
“‘Remember Jack,’ she whispered to me, ‘have pity on him and give it up. It is not too late, and will not be till the very last.’
 
“Was there ever a girl more wretched on her wedding day than I was, I wonder? Of the journey to New York I can recall very little, except that the Colonel was unremitting in his care for my comfort, and that once when he spread his rug across my lap I smiled on him and said ‘You are very kind.’ Aside from that I hardly spoke, but sat leaning back in my chair with my eyes closed, sometimes asleep, for I was perfectly exhausted, and sometimes thinking, always the same thought, ‘It is not too late yet.’ The words were whispered into my ears continually by something which seemed to be sitting on my shoulder and croaking, until I was nearly mad. There was, however, a comfort in knowing that I could still draw back, and I counted how many hours probation were left me before it would be too late. Jack will hardly suffer more than I did during that rapid journey, when to everything else, was added homesickness for The Elms, and you and the dear old life I was throwing away. It was a kind of nightmare, I think, and by the time our train was nearing Jersey City I had made up my mind to jump from the car the moment we stopped and lose myself in the crowd; in short, to run away! The bustle and excitement at the station and the hurrying to the boat revived me. The 226thing on my shoulder stopped its croaking, and the Colonel had my arm in his and held my hand tightly as if he divined my thoughts. So the newspapers lost an exciting paragraph headed ‘Strange disappearance of a bride on her wedding day.’
 
“When we reached the hotel and were ushered into the suite of rooms the Colonel had ordered for us I felt better, and when Mr. and Mrs. Darcy, friends of the Colonel, who board at the hotel and whom I had met when I stopped there with Miss Errington, came in to see me and made much of me as the future Mrs. Errington, I was quite myself, and all through dinner, which they took with us and which was served in our private parlor, I was in high spirits, too high, I fear, as I saw them look curiously at me once or twice, as if wondering whether I were quite sane. After dinner the three conferred in low tones, while I stood with my back to them looking into the busy street below and vaguely wondering if it would break one’s neck to jump from the second story to the sidewalk, and if one could so manage as not to land on the head of some pedestrian. I heard the Colonel say, ‘As soon as possible now. I have dispatched a messenger boy.’ I knew what he meant and grew hot and cold again in a minute, while the creature on my shoulder began its warning cry, ‘Not too late yet,’ and pressed so close to my ears that I fancied it touched my hair with its wings. In the car I had thought of Poe’s raven, but now I said to myself, ‘It is a bat.’ I have a mortal terror of bats and put up my hand to brush it away. But it stayed and clamored louder and louder, while I kept trying to brush it off, until Mrs. Darcy came to me and said, ‘There is a lock of hair loose on your neck. I think that is what annoys you. Let me fix it.’
 
“She took out a hairpin and fastened the refractory lock, while I wondered if she would see the thing on my shoulder. She didn’t, and I began to fear I was losing my mind, and made a great effort to pull myself together. There was a knock at the door and the Rev. Mr. Gillson came in, book in hand, ready for business. I was presented 227to him, and the Colonel explained as a reason for this seemingly sudden marriage that I could not decide to brave the ocean in the winter until the night before. The clergyman bowed and looked very searchingly at me as I stood in the corner with a face white as a corpse. If Mr. and Mrs. Darcy had not been his parishioners he might have questioned me, thinking me an unwilling bride. But they were my vouchers and Col. Errington was well known to him by reputation. It was all right and the ceremony began, while the bat, if bat it were, shrieked and fluttered and flapped, until it seemed to me they must all hear it. But when the Colonel took the ring, it gave one despairing cry, ‘Too late, too late!’ and flew away, leaving me calm and quiet, with a strange hallucination of the brain. It was Jack putting the ring on my finger,—Jack’s voice, which said, ‘With this ring I thee wed, with all my worldly goods I thee endow.’ I smiled as I thought how few were his worldly goods, compared to what might have been mine, but I was glad that the nightmare was over, the horrid dream passed, and I awake again in the old spare room at home with Jack at my side. I was very much awake when Mr. and Mrs. Darcy kissed me and called me ‘Mrs. Errington,’ while somebody, who was not Jack, kissed me and called me his wife. The room at The Elms resolved itself into the parlor at the hotel, and Jack was lost to me forever by my own act, and I felt like a block of stone as I received the congratulations of the clergyman and felt that the Colonel’s eyes were upon me.
 
“I have read somewhere that in the great crises of one’s life the most ridiculous thoughts will sometimes intrude, and there came to me a saying I have heard father use so often when I was fretting over some disaster, ‘Never cry for spilled milk!’ It helped me wonderfully. I had spilled all mine,—a brimming pail, and drowned my heart in doing it. I could never undo what I had done, but I could make the best of it, and I mean to. I have written you thus fully because I wanted you to know that I am not altogether callous, and that I did struggle against my 228fate. A stronger will than mine conquered me. I am Col. Errington’s wife and shall be faithful to him, and however my heart may ache for the might have been, no one, not even you, shall know it. My husband——. I have written the word, and feel better,—is very kind and generous. He knows I did not marry him for love, and I think he means me to have my price,—all the money I want. His wedding present is $10,000, to do with as I please. Half of it I shall send to you, as I know how low our finances are. He does not object. He thought I would do it, he said, and has made arrangements to send it before we sail. He has bought me a lovely fur cloak for the voyage, and given me two one hundred dollar bills for pin money. More than I ever had in all my life. One of the bills I am sending to Jack in payment for what he sent me on the pretense of buying Black Beauty. I bought the tailor-made gown with it, my wedding gown, which I am wearing now, and which I can not bear to think was bought with Jack’s money. Make him take it. Tell him it is to buy Black Beauty back, and don’t let him hate me. Tell him I did love him dearly and am afraid I do now when to do so is a sin. I am another man’s wife, and my husband has come in and says I have but little more time, as he wishes to get settled in our staterooms before the ship sails. I wonder if I shall throw myself into the sea. Perhaps. If you hear of an ‘accidental drowning of the lovely young bride of the Hon. George W. Errington,’—that’s the way they will word it,—you will know it was not accidental, but keep it to yourself.
 
“I have not time to read what I have written. If I had I probably should not send it. I think I have told you everything in a wild, disconnected and perhaps contradictory way, and I have felt disconnected and wild as I told it. You may show this letter to Miss Errington, who still intends going to The Elms with Katy. Perhaps she will feel less hard towards me. You may also tell Jack some things that are in it and which I could not write to him. Oh, Jack, oh Annie! Good-bye, Good-bye! I put my arms around your necks and kiss you both. God bless 229you. Write to me and tell me about Jack. The Colonel will cable from Queenstown. He is getting impatient and to save time has directed the envelope for me. Good-bye, again.
 
“Fanny Hathern Errington. Ah me!”
Chapter X.—Annie’s Story Continued. THE EFFECT.

Fanny’s handwriting was never very legible, and now it was worse than usual, while her letter was so long and my eyes so blurred with tears that it took me a long time to read it, and after it was read I leaned back in my chair shaking from head to foot, with a sense of loss and shame and pity for us all who must bear the disgrace, for such I felt Fan’s conduct to be. I pitied her, but not as I did Jack, who was so full of anticipations of the morrow and so little prepared for the blow awaiting him. I heard him come whistling up the stairs, two at a time, and involuntarily put up my hands to ward him off,—to keep him a little longer from what I knew would be worse than death.
 
“Hallo!” he said, as he came in. “I didn’t expect to be gone so long, but those stupid men didn’t seem to understand the range at all, and I’ll be hanged if I know much more than they do. Mother always used a fireplace, you know. But I reckon we have got it into shipshape. If not, Norah can fix it when she comes. Why, Annie, Annie!” he exclaimed suddenly, struck by my attitude and the expression of my face, “Are you ill? What has happened? You are as white as a ghost, and the rain beating in upon you, too.”
 
230He shut the window and continued, as the letter in my lap rustled a little. “You have had bad news. Is it Carl? Is he ill? Is he dead?”
 
I shook my head, and he went on: “What is it then? What has happened?”
 
As he stepped back his eye fell upon the note directed to him, which lay upon the table. He recognized his name, and the handwriting, and catching it up, he said, “From Fanny; how did it get here? Did it come in that letter from New York, which you said was from Col. Errington?”
 
I nodded and managed to gasp, “Oh Jack, oh Jack! How will you bear it!”
 
“Bear what?” he asked. “Tell me; the suspense is torture to me. Has anything happened to Fanny? She isn’t dead or she could not write to me.”
 
Summoning all my strength, I answered. “No, Jack, Fanny is not dead. It is worse than that. She is married to Col. Errington and gone with him to Europe.”
 
I have heard Jack tell with a shudder of men at his side in battle dropping instantly when a ball struck them, but surely no man in the fiercest battle which ever raged could have fallen more suddenly than Jack did into the chair nearest to him, where he sat huddled together like an old man, his mouth open and his glazed eyes looking at me in dumb despair.
 
“N-n-no, Annie,” he began at last, with quivering lips and chin and in a voice I would never have known as his. “N-n-no, Annie. Say it again. I didn’t hear you right. There’s a roaring in my ears. Fanny—isn’t—married! My—Fanny, who was to have this room, and watch for me. N-n-no, Annie, N-no.”
 
There was a huskiness in his voice which frightened me, 231and a moan like one in mortal pain, which made me forget myself in my desire to comfort him.
 
“Don’t Jack,” I said, going up to him and rubbing his cold hands and face, which was not pale but of a greenish hue. “Don’t take it so hard. She is my sister, but if she were ten times that I should say she is not worth the anguish you are enduring. She has sold herself for money. She was married Friday evening in New York and sailed in the Celtic Saturday afternoon. She had a hard struggle before she decided to do what she has done. I think she loves you still.”
 
As I talked the greenish hue left his face and was succeeded by a deathly pallor, as, reaching out his hand, he said, “Give me her letter.”
 
“Yours, you mean,” I said, offering him the note addressed to him.
 
“No,—yours. I have a right to know all she can say,” he answered, and his voice was not like the Jack of an hour ago. There was a ring in it like one who would be obeyed. “I don’t care what she has written to me; to you she would tell the truth. Give me her letter,” he continued.
 
I gave it to him and then watched him as he read it rapidly in the waning light of that dreary November afternoon, with the rain beating against the windows, and the wind which was beginning to rise howling around the house, as Fanny said it howled the night she wrote the letter. It was curious to watch the different expressions of Jack’s face as his eyes went over the pages. Sometimes his breath came heavily, his teeth shut tightly together and there were great ridges in his forehead between his eyes. Again his face softened and his lips quivered and I knew he was reading the parts where Fan spoke of 232him. I knew, too, when he reached the Scales and the weighing process by the throwing up of his head and the flaring of his nostrils like one under strong excitement. Once he brought his hand down heavily upon the arm of his chair, and if I had ever heard him swear I should have suspected that something like an oath escaped him. Then he read on until he came to the marriage scene in the hotel, when his whole aspect changed. The hardness was gone and he shook like one in a chill, although he asked me to open the window again, saying he could not breathe.
 
“Oh, Fanny; Fanny, how could you do this to me, who loved and trusted you so!” he said, and letting the letter drop to the floor and covering his face with his hands he rocked to and fro and cried as I had never seen any one cry before, and pray I never may again. And yet he shed no tears, but sobbed and moaned so pitifully that I went to him again and laying my arm across his shoulder drew his hot head down upon it as I would if he had been my brother.
 
There was then no thought of the love I had borne him so long; it was only intense pity for the man whose heart I knew was breaking, and whom I tried to comfort.
 
“Don’t, Jack; don’t,” I said, brushing back his hair, which was wet with the great drops of sweat which stood under it and upon his forehead. “I wish I could comfort you. Oh, I wish I could, but only God can do that.”
 
Then he started, and looking at me fiercely exclaimed, “Don’t speak to me of God. I have lost all faith in everything. Didn’t I trust Him, and wasn’t my heart so full of gratitude this morning for all the good I thought He had given me! And didn’t I make resolutions for a better life? Tell me that. And what has come of it? When I was on my knees thanking Him for Fanny and asking that I might 233be worthy, she was another man’s wife, and He gave me no sign, but let me go on in my fool’s paradise. How could God do that? How could Fanny do it? Oh, Fanny, Fanny! If you were lying dead here in what was to have been our bridal chamber it would be happiness compared to this. Don’t speak to me, Annie. Don’t touch me,” and he pushed me from him. “It seems to bring Fanny near to me, and I can’t bear it now, when my love for her is dying so hard. Shut the window, please. I am shivering again.”
 
I closed the window and then stood looking at him writhing in pain, as if he were indeed enduring the throes of death. It was growing late and I roused him at last, pointing to the darkness outside and telling him that Paul and Phyllis would be waiting anxiously for us.
 
“Can you get your horse, or shall I?” I asked.
 
“I’ll go,” he said, getting up and tottering as if he were an old man.
 
On the table where he had lain it without reading was Fanny’s note to him, and I put it in my purse with the bill which had been in my letter and which I had not given him. I heard the buggy at the door, and going out got in beside him and we started down the hill. It was raining fast and had grown very dark. If the horse had not been perfectly gentle and known every turn of the road, we might have met with some disaster, for the reins hung loosely in Jack’s hands and he seemed to notice nothing. Once we met a carriage which passed so close to us that the wheels grazed each other, but Jack paid no attention. Then I took the lines from him and drove myself, while he sat with his head bent so low that his chin must have rested upon his chest. Once I spoke to him, but he did not answer, and when we reached the town I called to a 234boy on the walk bidding him to go for a physician and tell him to come at once to The Elms, adding that Mr. Fullerton had been taken suddenly ill. I had no intention of having Jack in his present condition go to his boardinghouse that night. He would be better at The Elms, and after speaking to the boy I drove rapidly home. There was a bright light in the dining-room and Paul’s face was pressed against the window pane watching for me. At the sound of wheels Phyllis hurried to the door, peering out into the darkness and shading her eyes with her hand.
 
“For de Lord’s sake, Miss Annie and Mas’r Jack,” she began. “Whar has you been, and what has happened you? De muffins is all fell flat, an’ de coffee biled till it’s spiled.”
 
“Sh-sh,” I said warningly. “Bring a light, and come and help me; Mr. Fullerton is ill,—very ill, I am afraid.”
 
She had a candle at the door in a minute and was at my side, as I sprang to the ground after giving Jack a vigorous shake which roused him a little.
 
“Yes. Where are we? At home? All right. I’ll see you to-morrow before she comes,” he said, putting out his hand and feeling for the lines.
 
“Jack, you are to stay at The Elms with me,” I said, wondering how I was to make him get out if he were disposed not to do so.
 
Just then I heard the tramp of horses’ feet in the avenue and the doctor came riding up rapidly. He was just starting to visit a patient in the country when he received my message and came at once to know what had happened. Between him and Phyllis Jack was gotten into the house, his weakness and silence so alarming that I was relieved when, as he felt the warmth of the dining-room, he stretched his hands toward the light-wood fire and said, “Ah-h, 235that feels good. I think I must have taken cold. I am so chilly. I wish somebody would cover up Robin,” referring to his horse, of which he was very fond. Sinking into the chair which Phyllis drew close to the hearth, he gave a long sigh, leaned his head back and closed his eyes, while the doctor looked curiously at him and then at me.
 
“He is in a high fever,” he said, “although he seems so cold. How did the attack come on and what caused it?”
 
I could not explain then, and answered evasively. “He must stay here to-night, in father’s room, and the sooner you get him in there the better,” I said, telling Phyllis to kindle a fire and get the bed ready. I knew the condition of things better than the doctor, who, for a time, acted under my orders. At first Jack resisted, saying he must go home as his landlady would not like it if he kept supper waiting. Then he began to talk of Scales and Maelstroms, and Fanny, who was coming to-morrow. We got him quiet at last and into bed where he lay perfectly still, with his hands folded, his eyes closed and his face white as the pillow it rested upon.
 
“I can’t make it out,” the doctor said. “It is not often a young and strong man like him comes down so suddenly and so fast. Why, there is no more life in him than in a piece of paper. Looks to me as if he had received some great mental shock. Can’t account for it in any other way.”
 
Reflecting that on the morrow when Miss Errington and Katy came without Fanny the truth must be told, I replied, “He has had a shock. You know he was to have been married on Christmas day.”
 
The doctor nodded, and I went on slowly, with a feeling that my tongue was very thick.
 
236“This evening I had a letter from Fanny, who has married Col. Errington and gone to Europe with him.”
 
The doctor dropped into the chair nearest him almost as quickly as Jack had dropped when I told the news to him. But he did not speak, for Fanny was my sister and he would not say what was in his mind. I, however, relieved him from all embarrassment by saying, “It has quite unnerved me. It came like a thunderclap. I had no suspicion of it. I think it a cruel, wicked act.”
 
“Yes, yes, all of that,” he answered, “and may have serious results. There are symptoms about Mr. Fullerton which I do not like. He is strong in everything pertaining to his manhood, but in his nature gentle and tender and trustful as a woman. The blow has struck him hard. See that he has his medicine regularly. I will be here early in the morning. Now, I must go, as I have a patient waiting for me three miles in the country.”
 
He went out and I followed him, meeting in the hall with Phyllis, who was eager in her inquiries for Mas’r Jack and what had “done took him so suddently.” I told her the truth, and if a negro can turn pale she certainly did. Throwing up her hands and dropping the cup of milk she was taking to Paul, who was clamoring for his supper, she staggered against the door, exclaiming, “Lor’ a ’mighty! What for has Miss Fanny gone done dat ar mean trick to Mas’r Jack, an’ a disgracin’ de whole of us. No weddin’,—no nothin’,—an’ sich gossip in de town. Gone to Europe has she in de big ship?” I nodded and she continued, “May de Lord s——.” She was going to say “sink de ship,” but changed her mind and added, “may he make her so sick she’ll heave up Jonah an’ that Cunnel too. I ’members him well fust time he was here, orderin’ dem soldiers roun’ as if dey was dirt. 237Jess so he’ll done order Miss Fanny, and sarve her right.”
 
A moan from Jack and an imperative call from Paul brought the interview to an end, and while Phyllis went to the one I hastened to the other, who was talking rather wildly. This did not greatly surprise me as I remembered having heard his mother say that whenever anything ailed him, if it were only the earache, to which as a boy he was subject, it made him delirious. It was more than earache now, and I tried to quiet him as he talked disconnectedly of several things, but mostly of Fanny and the house on The Plateau, and our room, wondering if she would like it, and the medallion on the bedstead which looked so much like her.
 
“I love her so! I love her so! How can I give her up!” he suddenly exclaimed, throwing his arms down with great force upon the spread, while the perspiration rolled down his face, and his eyes glared at me questioningly and then wandered swiftly around the room.
 
He wanted to go home, he said; this was no place for him, and Fanny coming to-morrow. Once he tried to get up, but I kept him back, telling him to wait till to-morrow, when I hoped he would be better.
 
“What little dark-faced woman are you, I’d like to know, trying to boss me?” he said, looking curiously at me, as I kept my arm across his chest. “You can’t hold a candle to Fanny. Where is she? You go away and send her here.”
 
I knew he was not conscious of what he was saying, but in my nervous condition his words hurt me, and my voice shook as I replied, “Fanny has not come yet. You didn’t expect her till to-morrow. I am Annie. Don’t you know me Jack?”
 
Something in my voice arrested his attention, and looking 238fixedly at me he said, “You want to cry, don’t you? Put your head down here and have it out.” With one hand he drew my head down upon his other hand and kept it there, while I cried like a child. It was his part to comfort me now, and he tried to do so, asking why I cried and what had happened.
 
“Something has, I know; but I can’t remember what it is,” he said. “But never mind. We’ll meet it bravely together, little Annie-mother, and Fanny will be here to-morrow.”
 
That thought comforted him, and many times during the night as I sat by him he asked if it were to-morrow yet.
 
“The to-morrow, you know, when she is coming,” he would add, and to this I could truthfully answer no, even when it was the dawn of the to-morrow he had anticipated so much and the grey morning was looking in at the windows.
 
At an early hour Phyllis came to relieve me, and shivering in every limb and with my head aching as if it would burst, I crept up to my bed, where I fell at once into a heavy sleep which lasted for hours. When I awoke both Phyllis and the doctor were with me. The latter held a telegram from Katy, saying that she and Miss Errington would come that day as they had arranged. My first inquiry was for Jack.
 
“I am afraid he is in for brain fever,” the doctor said. “He has been working very hard lately, and this, with the wetting he got last night and the terrible blow have proved more than he can bear. He is apt to be flighty from pain anyway and is crazy as a loon this morning and is asking first if it is to-morrow, then for Fanny and then for Annie-mother. That I reckon is you, but you are better where you are for a day or so, or I shall have 239two on my hands, and I fancy Jack will be about as much as I can manage.”
 
“Oh, I must get up,” I said, trying to rise, when a sharp pain in the back of my head pulled me back.
 
“I told you so,” the doctor said. “You’ve got neuralgia in your neck. You never changed your wet clothes at all last night, Phyllis says, and if you don’t look out you’ll have pneumonia and the Lord knows what else. You must keep quiet.”
 
I had no choice but to obey, the pain in my neck was so severe, and were I to try I could not narrate what came with and followed that to-morrow of which Jack had talked so much and which was ushered in so sadly. This task devolves upon another.