NICE NEIGHBOURS By MARY S. WATTS From Harper’s

GUIDING the possible tenant about the house, Miss Wilcox pointed out its desirable features in a dry little monotone that gave no hint, she hoped, of her inward taut anxiety. She could not have achieved the persuasive enthusiasm of the young man from the real-estate office even if she had thought it becoming to a gentlewoman. Apparently he could see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil; there was something abnormal about his incapacities; he was magnificent, but at moments Miss Martha feared that he was not strictly conscientious. And besides, to what end shutting his eyes and thereby perhaps influencing others to shut theirs against unhappy facts? Truth will out. The house was old; the floors did need refinishing: the front-parlour fireplace did smoke——

“Them ceilings sure are high!” ejaculated the possible tenant, cocking a measuring eye heavenward.

“Y-yes, they are high,” Miss Martha admitted helplessly. At this familiar—and perfectly just—criticism the agent always burst into flaming eulogies of high ceilings. Just the thing for our summer climate, our super-heated furnaces in winter! Tell you, the old-timers knew how to build for comfort! Miss Martha shrank from conjecturing what he said when ceilings were low. This whole experience illuminated depressingly the practice current in what it was the modern shibboleth to call “big business,” she thought.

“Well, eight-five per is a whole lotta money,” said the possible tenant. She gazed round indifferently as they stepped out on the little side porch; then all at once her expression altered with surprise and interest. She clutched Miss Wilcox’s arm, holding her back with an energetic whisper of warning. “Sh-h! See that bird? See him? Washing himself in that old pedestal washstand somebody’s left out there? If that ain’t the cutest thing! He’s just sloshin’ right in like a person, you ’r I ’r anybody. Like it was put there just on purpose for him!”

“Why, it was. It’s a birds’ bath, you know,” said Miss Martha, somewhat startled, fumbling for her eyeglasses; the pretty spectacle was no novelty to her, yet it never lost its charm. “Oh, that’s one of the thrushes. They must have a nest somewhere near——”

“Sh-h!” the other interrupted peremptorily. “There’s another one goin’ in!” She tiptoed to the edge of the porch and stood there entranced, following the movements of the birds, a vague smile irradiating her worn, sharpened, insignificant features. The shoving and spattering and small outcry finally subsided, the last robin hopped out, spinning the moisture from his feathers with quick wings; and she turned away reluctantly, drawing a long breath in childishly frank delight. “What d’you know about that, huh? I wouldn’ta believed they’d do that, take a bath that way. You couldn’ta made me believe it? I don’t know much about ’em, but I always have liked ’em. Birds, I mean, and—well, dogs and all kinds of regular pets, you know. I always did like ’em. Say, you got your grounds fixed up real nice, ain’t you? I like flowers, too.”

She went down the steps, and Miss Wilcox trailed after, resigned to seeing the garden butchered to make a possible tenant’s holiday; but the visitor moved about carefully, without offering to pluck or mishandle, and paused at last in the middle of the tidy plot, surveying its beds and borders with full appreciation. Then she wheeled to appraise again the mid-Victorian house whose stark tastelessness and characterlessness no garden setting could relieve; and Miss Martha’s heart sank.

“The neighbourhood’s very nice,” she murmured desperately; this ladylike insinuation went to the limits of propriety in salesmanship according to Miss Martha’s code. “So—so permanent. The church on the corner and the parsonage next door. It will always be nice. Everybody likes it so much on that account—that is——” She could get no farther, overcome by a hideous sense of disloyalty to this same neighbourhood whose select character she was exploiting. For, looking upon her, the conviction would not down that Mrs. Shields, if a possible tenant, was abysmally impossible otherwise. She must be near Miss Martha’s own age, yet was dressed, tinted, bedizened as if sixteen; there was a kind of withered pertness about her; she had a trick of glancing sidewise with her large, shadowed eyes in a style of roguish challenge and invitation combined; and her disturbingly frequent and facile smile suggested somehow a mere embellishment, obvious and inexpressive as her rouge. Such a figure in the rarefied atmosphere of Saint Luke’s was unthinkable; but here she was, Martha Wilcox, making capital out of that proximity with all its implications. Contact with “big business” had done its debasing work! “Of course, the music might be an objection,” she faltered, conscience-struck. “And sometimes one can hear Doctor Gowdy quite distinctly on Sundays in warm weather when the windows are open.”

“Music? Oh, you mean hymns?” queried Mrs. Shields. “Doctor Gowdy’s the preacher, huh? I went to Billy Sunday once. Tell you, the rev’rend’d have to go some to beat him! Well, I don’ know—eighty-five—” She hesitated, looking around the genteel landscape; then faced Miss Martha with the air of giving up argument, not without wonder and some amusement at herself. “Well, I guess them birds has got me going. I guess you’ve rented a house!”

Miss Wilcox, comprehending her expression rather than the words, stood dumb for an instant in half-incredulous relief. The thing was almost too good to be true, coming to pass with this uncanny suddenness. Eighty-five dollars a month and the hopeless old place off her hands at last! All the dreams which even in the act of dreaming she had stigmatized as rank folly, revisited her in flashing procession: having her hair “permanented,” going to Atlantic City, buying a fur coat—how often had she spent that rainbow gold! This time it was real. There would be only the pleasing care of letting it accumulate for a while. She awoke to new apprehensions. “I—I suppose there will be things to do? Changes? I mean you will want——?”

Mrs. Shields applied the decorative smile to her face. “Oh, my, no, I don’t want nothin’. The house is just swell, and anyways I never was one to keep running to people for new wallpaper, and ever’ little thing that needs fixing. I like to keep things up my own self. I’m awful easy to get along with,” she assured her prospective landlady eagerly. Miss Martha, who had been recalling terrifying tales she had had from more than one earnest friend about the misdemeanours and the tyrannous exactions of the average tenant, breathed freely again. It began to seem a leisurely, congenial, and singularly profitable occupation to rent houses as the patient waiting and many disappointments of the last six months retired to the background of her memories. Mrs. Shields, meanwhile, fluttered up and down the garden, already assuming innocent airs of proprietorship.

“You gotta tell me where at you get a bird bath like that, ’cause that’s what I’m gonna have the first thing!” she proclaimed with enthusiasm. “Never you mind! It’ll all be took good care of, and I won’t change a thing. It’s so nice the way it is, all clean and quiet and kinda restful. I got the same old-style notions as you. I’m crazy about having a real refined home.”

Miss Wilcox, not for the first time, wished that the questionably adaptable young man from the real-estate office were there; he would know what to say. “You’re a stranger here?” she ventured at length.

“Oh, I’ve lived lotsa places,” said the other, smiling blankly. “Is that as far as the yard goes to, that fence, with the vines on? My, they grow thick, don’t they?”

They did indeed, forming a broad, tangled breastwork of honeysuckle and rambler roses valued by Miss Martha for being comely to the view in blooming time and all the year round an impregnable defence against boys and other animals. Mrs. Shields, craning slightly to peer over it, inspected the adjoining territory with her naïvely open curiosity; she gave an exclamation. “For Pete’s sake! Didn’t you tell me that’s where the preacher lives?”

“Doctor Gowdy. Yes,” said Miss Martha, a little uncomfortable.

“Keeps it lovely, don’t he? Just like this side!”

Miss Martha perceived that this was to be taken in an ironic sense; making every allowance for the other’s idiosyncrasies of speech and manner, it was impossible that she could be in earnest. Even the most stalwart members of his congregation had been overheard to express themselves unfavourably about Doctor Gowdy’s yard. “Well—a clergyman, you know—he’s so busy. Besides, one really ought not to expect him—— And Mrs. Gowdy—— They have quite a family. It’s almost impossible for her to keep a servant. Even coloured——”

“They got a coon in the kitchen now. I can see her,” said Mrs. Shields.

“Er—yes—but often there isn’t anybody. It makes a great deal of work for poor Mrs. Gowdy. She can’t see to everything outside as well as in,” said Miss Wilcox, nervously, conscious that her explanations amounted to an apology; it annoyed her. And now the coon in the kitchen unwittingly added to the embarrassments of the situation by shoving up the window-screen and flinging an over-ripe tomato in the general direction of the ministerial garbage can; it fell short, spattering seeds and pulp; the coon—she was a strapping, coffee-coloured slattern—regarded it absently a moment while she wrung out a leprous-looking rag, sent a sharp glance toward the audience on the other side of the fence, and slammed down the screen, slouching back to her labours at a sink full of dishes.

“Mrs. Gowdy simply can’t see to everything,” Miss Martha repeated feebly. She awaited the other’s further comment in something of a panic; but Mrs. Shields had none to make. Her gaze, as it roved round the unkempt enclosure, was one of complete detachment. She was turning away when melodious, preluding chords on the piano sounded from within the parsonage, and Mrs. Gowdy’s pleasant soprano uplifted in “Angels ever bright and fair.” She sang with taste and feeling, but Miss Martha uneasily wished that she had not begun just at this moment; it was inopportune, somehow.

“That’s some of that music you was scairt I wouldn’t like, huh? Why, it ain’t so bad!” said Mrs. Shields tolerantly. “Anyway, I never let nothing the neighbours does worry me much,” she added, glancing again, perhaps involuntarily, at the Gowdy premises. “Live and let live, I always say. Oh, say, look what’s coming!”

It was a little procession of the Gowdy children round the corner of the house, Thomas junior in the lead, shouldering a spade and issuing bluff words of command; Florence came next, with a black silk petticoat, evidently borrowed from some much more mature wardrobe than her own, solemnly draped upon her; the twins were hauling the catafalque, that is, their Irish-Mail wagon, a shoe-box disposed upon it and covered with an unbelievably dirty towel; and Wilbur, straddling his kiddie-car, theoretically brought up the rear. In reality, he tooled along to suit himself, with erratic swoops and circles, carrying on an inarticulate, one-sided conversation the while. They halted, after some shrill disagreements, at one of the bare, hard-trodden spots occurring sporadically among the weeds of the parsonage back yard, and Tommie was about to attack it with the spade when all hands simultaneously became aware of the uninvited witnesses. There was an interval of silent staring broken by Wilbur, who, as has been seen, was a sociable soul, without sufficient field for the exercise of his gift.

“’O,’ady!” said he, steering up to the fence.

“My, my, ain’t you little folks busy, though!” said Mrs. Shields genially. “Watch out, buddy, you’ll get a sticker in your eye. What’s he say?”

“’O,’ady!” cried Wilbur with vehemence.

Tom authoritatively advised him to shut up. “‘Hello, lady!’ that’s what he’s trying to say. He can’t talk plain yet, he’s only two and a half. We’ve got to be after him the whole time. It’s fierce!” he explained gloomily.

“Well, now, I think that’s real nice, taking care of your little brother——”

“Icky eye!” interrupted Wilbur urgently. “Icky eye!”

Florence undertook the translation. “He’s saying the kitty died.”

“Oh, ain’t that too bad! Poor kitty! What was the matter with her?”

“I don’t know. She just died,” said Florence indifferently. “We’re having a funeral with her.”

“You are? Well, I declare! And I s’pose Mommer’s singing that lovely hymn for you.”

They eyed her in the wary fashion of children suspicious of the false interest of grown-ups. “No, she isn’t. She’s just singing.” Tom said curtly. “I don’t b’lieve she knows about the kitty even.”

Here the auburn-haired twin precipitately entered the conversation with the information that the bird died, too. “It was a canary. It sang and sang, and then it stopped singing and died.”

“Oh, my, you musta felt bad!”

“Ho, that ain’t anything!” said the blue-eyed twin in a superior manner. “We’ve had lots of things die. Just lots!” He launched into large statements. “Everything we get dies! We had some white mice and they died, and we had a dog and it died, and we had——”

“Aw, shut up, we didn’t any such thing!”

“We did so! Don’t we, Flo, have everything die? Don’t we, Reddy?”

“Aw, you’re lying! Shut up, I tell you!”

Mrs. Shields intervened on the side of peace and propriety. “Now, now, don’t you kids get to scrapping. You go ahead and have your funeral, and play nice and pretty. First thing you know you’ll have Mommer out here, scairt to death for fear some of you has got their neck broke, hollerin’ like that.”

“Aw, she won’t hear, she never does,” growled Thomas junior. And in fact, the voice and piano, now sweetly rilling arpeggios throughout all the keys in ardent practice, kept on undisturbed. Mrs. Shields retreated, joining Miss Martha with confidences uttered in a voice of polite caution.

“I expect them young ones are right nice-looking when they’re washed up. They’re all right, only I don’t know as I’m keen for ’em to come over on my side of the fence. Of course, Mrs. Rev’rend, she’s used to the racket and muss.”

She asked whether she was to pay in advance, briskly announcing that she would while Miss Martha was still hanging in timorous indecision. The maiden lady moved in a haze of doubt and awe in what she considered the business world; out-of-hand offers to pay rent in advance might be one of its pitfalls for what Miss Martha knew. But in due time the check arrived, and though intrinsically an unhandsome document executed in weak, loosely flowing figures and handwriting with the signature “Tillie Shields” sidling downhill into the corner, it was negotiable like any other check. Eighty-five dollars! The dream had come true! Miss Martha was thriftily resolved not to spend it this first time, but it gave her a solid foundation on which to erect more dreams. Moreover, she took an almost equally solid satisfaction in replying coolly and competently to all inquirers, yes, the house was rented; yes, very advantageously, thank you! Hitherto she had had to endure their discouraging sympathy; and now detected, in spite of the felicitations, the great fundamental truth that nobody is really glad when somebody else gets a house rented! Eliza Seabury was the one exception; Eliza was too blunt-minded and blunt-spoken for civil pretenses. She rushed up on the street one day, and opened the subject, or in a manner of speaking, committed assault and battery on it with: “Martha Wilcox, where on earth did you pick up that weird woman you’ve got in your house?”

“I didn’t pick her up at all. She saw the advertisement,” said Miss Martha, a trifle stiffly.

“Well, she’s positively weird. I saw her the other day, and when somebody said she was in your house I nearly passed away. Her clothes! And those eyes rolling around like two buckeyes in a pan of milk! It’s simply weird! Who is she, anyhow, and where did she come from?”

“She’s a Mrs. Matilda Shields,” said Miss Martha, sagely correcting that too informal “Tillie.” “I don’t know where her home was originally. I understood she’d travelled about a good deal.”

“Mercy, Martha, I hope you didn’t take her without a reference. It would be awful if she didn’t pay you.”

“The bank said she was all right,” said Miss Martha triumphantly. The bank’s endorsement was her trump card; it left criticism without a leg to stand on. She was prompted to testify to Mrs. Shields’s credit on other grounds. “She’s been very nice about the house, not finding fault and not asking for anything, you know.”

“What, not a thing?” Mrs. Seabury exclaimed on a high note of astonishment. “That old rookery! Well, of course, I don’t mean it’s not a lovely house,” she amended hastily. “Only naturally, you’ve never spent any more on it than you could help, I suppose. It’s weird her not wanting some repairs. She can’t be much of a housekeeper. Maybe that’s just as well, though. She won’t mind living next door to the Gowdys. Has she ever said anything about them?”

“I haven’t inquired,” said Miss Martha, stiffening again.

“Oh, well, she probably will later on,” Mrs. Seabury prophesied blithely; she was not a member of Saint Luke’s congregation. “Unless she’s a saint, she’ll have trouble over the ashes or the garbage or the children or something.”

Mrs. Shields, however, was apparently bent on justifying her claim to being “awful easy to get along with,” if that phrase connotes living quietly and seeking no one’s acquaintance. She went about domestic duties with an extraordinary zest, cooked, cleaned, ran up and down stairs endlessly; and spent hours in the garden applying her patently unskilled energies to weeding and trimming it, or motionless in some coign of vantage, watching the birds. Except for these robins and jays and an occasional squirrel, she had no visitors, and defeated expectations by never publicly falling foul of the Gowdy ash-heap, the Gowdy garbage, or the Gowdy children, whatever her private attitude toward them. Mrs. Gowdy, with characteristic sweet thoughtfulness—everybody acclaimed her as the ideal wife for a clergyman—introduced herself over the hedge after a few days with a smiling word or two about the other’s courage in coming to live alongside such a houseful. “We used to be afraid our youngsters were a good deal of a trial to Miss Wilcox.”

“I don’t mind ’em, only when it sounds like somebody was getting hurt,” said Mrs. Shields, whereat the experienced mother began to laugh.

“Oh, children are always getting hurt, you know. Mine seem to be made of steel and india-rubber. They stand everything. Luella—that’s the maid I have now—worries over them more than I do! She’s so good with them, and perfectly devoted to Wilbur, especially.”

Mrs. Shields looked at her uncertainly.

“Well, Luella ain’t always on the job, is she? I don’t see how she can be.”

“Oh, yes, she’s very efficient. I hardly ever give an order. Sometimes coloured people are like that, wonderful with children and about the housework too.” With other agreeable generalities, she moved away; and Mrs. Shields, after a speculative stare at the retreating back, shook her own overdressed head soberly, and moved away, too.

It happened that she did not encounter Doctor Gowdy until some time later, on an occasion which turned out to be more or less momentous. Pottering about among the flower beds, she heard without heeding a piping excitement in the other back yard, and only looked across at last when a heavier voice was added to the children’s. “Now, we must have a coop, you know, boys. They have to be kept in a coop,” Doctor Gowdy was expounding. “Let’s see! What shall we do? Oh, I’ll tell you! There’s that old peach crate over there; you get that, Robbie, and I shouldn’t wonder if Tom could nail some strips up the sides. Everybody must help, that’s the only way to get along——” he kept on fluently in his trained, carrying voice, while the boys circled about, squabbling over his directions. Then, as he caught Mrs. Shields’s eye, smiled with a gesture toward the basket in his hands.

“Day-old chicks. Wouldn’t you like to see them?” And in the direct, hearty way which everybody so liked, without any ado of formalities, he came over, the children hanging on and hampering him. The basket was full of soft cheepings and movement; looking down into it, one got an impression of little round, animated, cuddling patches of brown velvet, striped with yellow, of little yellow heads and eyes with the bright fixity of beads. Mrs. Shields exclaimed delightedly.

“Aren’t they cunning?” said the minister in sympathetic pleasure. “The kiddies and I—we’re great pals, all of us together, you know—we’re going to make a coop and raise them. First thing you know, we’ll have a regular chicken farm!”

Mrs. Shields looked at his kind, eager face, at the basket of chickens, at the surging children, at the littered yard, and spoke diffidently. “Well, they’re awful cute, but—I guess it’s kinda work to bring up chickens, ain’t it? I mean I thought people got all fixed for it, and didn’t do nothing else.”

“Oh, no, you just feed and water them,” said Doctor Gowdy buoyantly. “They ‘do the rest’—hey? Ha, ha!” He dropped to a confidential tone. “It will be good for the children. Teaches them practical humanity—Joe, Florence, stop it! You can’t both of you play with the same chicken!”

Mrs. Shields returned to her gardening with an oddly dubious expression. Judging by what she could hear, the coop was finally erected to everybody’s satisfaction, and after an hour or so of vociferous children and chickens, the latter appeared to lose their charm of novelty temporarily, at least. There was quiet in both back yards; she was trowelling industriously around the roots of a rosebush when Wilbur was brought downstairs from his nap, and released from the house; and directly his voice arose in gleeful squealings. “Chicky! Chicky!”

Mrs. Shields straightened up, listened a second, looked over the hedge. What she saw caused her to drop the trowel and fly around to the alley, bursting through the tumbledown gate into the parsonage grounds without ceremony. “Wilbur! Wilbur! Don’t do that! Don’t grab the chickies, dearie! No, no! Mustn’t touch!”

“Make chicky go!” shouted Wilbur happily, squeezing a limp bit of brown velvet between his sturdy little hands. The coop was upset; he danced with joyful impatience among splintered slats and chickens. “Chicky go!” He threw it down and kicked it. “Go!”

The chicken made a difficult movement, then settled down motionless with filming eyes. “There now, see what you done! You’ve broke the chicky, Wilbur. Poor chicky, now it won’t ever go any more!” said Mrs. Shields, instinctively adapting her words to the child’s comprehension. “No, no, Wilbur mustn’t play with chickies!”

“Chicky go!” screamed Wilbur. He was too quick for her; the chicken that he aimed a lusty kick at escaped, but losing his balance and recovering, he came down vigorously with his whole weight on another. “Make chicky go!”

All at once with dynamic suddenness, Mrs. Shield’s aspect underwent an appalling transformation. Red spots flamed through the rouge on her meagre cheeks; her eyes ceased to languish; they glared balefully. In a twinkle she became years older, a formidable virago, a hag! She darted out a tentacle of an arm, and whirled Wilbur away from his pastime with a couple of stinging slaps. “You let them chickens alone, young one, you hear me? You won’t, won’t you? I’ll learn you!”

Wilbur raised a long howl of protest, exerting fists and feet impotently; Luella appeared at the kitchen door alarmed and inquiring, and after one look, charged to the rescue. “Wha’ you doin’ t’ that chile? Don’t you dare tech that chile!”

Mrs. Shields hurled at her an epithet foreign to the vocabularies of real refined homes; the mulatto woman, in a fury, screeched a retort as flavoursome; linguistically it was a battle of giants. Wilbur bawled between them; what chickens survived scattered, peeping wildly, the conflict assailed the very vault of heaven. At that pitch it actually brought Mrs. Gowdy from the piano and “Hark, the herald angels sing”; the rest of the children arrived in a scurry; the postman halted on his round, petrified; a stray delivery boy, lingering, impartially contributed his mite, “Yah-de-dah! Yee-i! Yee-i!” he yelped ecstatically, and drifted on, a ship that passed in the night.

Wilbur fled to his mother, bellowing more in fright and anger than pain; she received him with bewildered tenderness. “What is it? What has happened? Tell Mother where it hurts, darling!” She gazed round distractedly, seeking to interpret the blubbering and unintelligible references to ady and chicky. “What is he trying to say? Luella——?”

Luella plunged into dramatic recital with an effect of being all eyeballs and incredibly rapid jaws. “—An’ Mis’ Gowdy, nex’ thing Ah heah’d Wilbuh hollerin’ an’ Ah come runnin’ an’ heah she was lammin’ him lak he was her own chile! An’ Ah ain’t gwine tek no talk lak she done give me offa no white lady!”

“Hush, Luella, please——!”

“I’m real sorry I smacked the little fella,” said Mrs. Shields. Her ire had flickered out as suddenly as it exploded; she spoke in visible distress and remorse. “I didn’t go to hurt him, just to make him mind. I only wanted to stop him stompin’ and slammin’ them chickens. I—I just plumb couldn’t stand it. You look what he done, Mis’ Gowdy, you just look. You wouldn’ta left him do that yourself if you’d been here.”

Mrs. Gowdy clicked regretfully, viewing the massacre.

“Tst! Tst! Why, Wilbur, did you hurt the chickies? Did mother’s little boy do that? Don’t you remember mother’s often told you you mustn’t hurt anything?”

“Make chicky go?” Wilbur suggested with reviving spirits. “Make go, mamma?”

“No, Wilbur, can’t. My little boy must be kind to dumb animals,” said Mrs. Gowdy in gentle reproof.

“He’s too little, he can’t understand, he don’t know any better. It ain’t any use telling him; there’d oughta be somebody after him,” argued Mrs. Shields desperately. “I’m awful sorry, but I just had to make him quit it. I know I hadn’t no right to, but——”

“Yes? Yes!” said Mrs. Gowdy vaguely but forgivingly. The older children stood around in a silence that conveyed a certain clannish hostility toward Mrs. Shields, yet no very lively sympathy for Wilbur. Luella retired sulkily, and Mrs. Gowdy looked after her with something as near anxiety as her placid countenance could express. “I do hope she won’t leave!”

“Mis’ Gowdy, I wouldn’ta done it, only there wasn’t none of you round, and somebody had to!”

“Yes? Well, perhaps it would have been better to telephone in and tell me first. But never mind!” said Mrs. Gowdy kindly.

This episode resulted in a species of armed peace between the two households, or on Mrs. Shields’s side at any rate. The others were either too magnanimous or too irresponsible to hold a grudge; they forgave and forgot even before the last of the chickens had come to its end one way or another, that is, within the next twenty-four hours. Mrs. Shields resolutely ignored their fate; she cleaned, gardened, spread meals for the birds with her back carefully turned on the church premises, and it was only by accident that from an upper window she caught a glimpse one day of another slatted box not far from where the wreckage of the first still lay, and of the family gathered around, peering in, reaching down into it, exclaiming. “Bunny! Bunny!” they chorused. Plainly, another course in humanity was being inaugurated. “My God!” said Mrs. Shields aloud, and turned away with a despairing philosophical shrug. At intervals for a week thereafter, escaping rabbits scudded through her yard, or housed under the shrubbery, proceedings which she unaccountably never witnessed. “Your bunnies? No, I ain’t seen none round here,” she would assure the pursuing children with her meaningless smile; and when the animals were recaptured, exhibited none of the relief that might have been expected. But in a little while the incursions ceased; the rabbits were apparently disciplined to their prison. It stood in the same place, rain or shine, day after day, and the “Bunny, bunny” was heard with less and less frequency.

Perhaps sheer curiosity, perhaps some more creditable feeling at last overcame Mrs. Shield’s self-enforced inhibitions; for one sultry afternoon when the family were all out on a swimming and picnicking expedition, conveyed in a parishioner’s automobile, she guiltily slipped around through the alley into the other yard. There was one rabbit left of the pair; it lay on its side in one corner of the stifling pen, breathing hurriedly. Mrs. Shields cleaned out the pan in another corner and filled it with fresh water; she put a little store of lettuce leaves alongside. The creature turned a lack-lustre eye on her, without stirring. She stood awhile contemplating it, or it might be some purpose slowly forming in her mind. “For two cents I’d let you out,” she remarked finally. “Only you’re so sick and weak you can’t get away. So that wouldn’t be any use!” She pondered awhile longer, then with an air of decision, marched back into her own house and sat down to the telephone. With her hand on the instrument, she seemed to waver, reconsidering; then with a defiant gesture, snatched the receiver off the hook.

A complacent patriot would have looked upon succeeding events as demonstrating conclusively an efficiency in public office which some other patriots are prone to question. Bright and early the next morning there presented himself at the parsonage front door a massive, elderly, decent, badged official, and incontinently agitated rumours filled the air. Luella might be heard declaiming violently; Doctor Gowdy, Mrs. Gowdy uplifted mild, startled argument; everybody united in silencing the children. A caucus was held in the back yard; and then the officer departed. It was most melodramatic and intriguing; there were communicants of Saint Luke’s, not to mention innumerable outsiders, who would have envied Mrs. Shields her proscenium-box location, but she herself took no advantage of it, and it was without alacrity that she answered the doorbell when the officer visited her in turn.

He touched his hat. “Good morning! Is this where the lady telephoned for the Humane S’ciety——?” He stopped short abruptly, staring, seeming to labour vainly with some stupendous fact well-nigh beyond his grasp. “Well, well, well! Look who’s here!” he managed to get out, after a long minute.

Mrs. Shields did not answer; she stood before him, her bearing sullen, hostile, a little frightened.

“Look who’s here!” the officer ejaculated again, apostrophizing the ceiling; then he brought his gaze down, and sent it everywhere, alertly exploring. “You living here?”

“Yeh. What’s matter my living here? I gotta live somewhere. I ain’t doin’ nothing.”

“Naw, I guess you ain’t, Tillie, or everybody’s heard before this,” the other agreed amiably. “But say, was it you called the S’ciety, honest?”

“Yeh. What of it?”

“Why, nothin’. Nothin’ ’t all,” said the official soothingly; a grin slowly worked its way across his features. “Only, it’s kinda funny when you think about it, ain’t it? Don’t it strike you kinda funny?”

“It strikes me you was needed,” said Mrs. Shields, glowering at him. “It strikes me you’n your old S’ciety better get busy.”

“Sure, sure! We’re going to. Only the rev’rend next door, and you sickin’ the authorities onta him——” Some obscurely humorous aspect of the situation overcame him; he propped himself against the doorpost, shaken with chuckles.

“When you’re through——?” said Mrs. Shields with chilly venom.

“Oh, all right! All right, Tillie!” He wiped his eyes, saluted her with burlesque obsequiousness, and went off down the walk; at the street another convulsion overtook him.

Miss Martha Wilcox, meanwhile, in contented ignorance of all these happenings, dreamed on, spending the rent, recounting it and spending it over again, Alnaschar-wise; with apologies to herself, she did actually spend some of it, here and there. It fairly burned a hole in her pocket, and there seemed no harm in a few small indulgences; she had gone without so long! But now Mrs. Seabury descended on her, headlong as usual, this time with a face of portentous gloom.

“Martha, have you heard? Oh, well, I know you haven’t heard! That’s the reason I’m here. It just got around to me, and I didn’t wait a minute. I’ve come right over to tell you; it’s the part of kindness. I mean about that woman you’ve got in your house. You haven’t heard?”

Miss Martha anticipated battle, murder, and sudden death. “No. What is it? Is she——?”

“Oh, nothing’s happened to her! Goodness, it’s a great deal worse than that!” She lowered her voice with cautious glances right and left, though they were alone. “Martha, it’s just got out who she is! You know everybody thought there was something the matter, she was so weird looking. Well, she’s notorious! The notorious Tillie Shields, that’s what they call her. You said her name was Matilda. Well, that’s who she is!” Mrs. Seabury concluded, leaning back in triumph.

For an instant Miss Martha was conscious only of acute vexation. “Notorious how, Eliza? What way?” she stammered, groping for objections, refutations.

“Oh, for mercy’s sake, the way they all are!” Mrs. Seabury rejoined in sharp impatience. “Well, to be sure, you’ve never been married,” she added more leniently, and followed up this apparently irrelevant statement with others very much to the point. “She had a place—one of those places—in the red-light district, you know. It was a good while ago—I don’t suppose she’s really notorious any more, she’s too old. But that’s who she is, the notorious Tillie Shields.”

Miss Martha, envisaging calamity, averted her mind in desperate unwillingness, desperate hope. “But how do you know? Who told you?”

“Why, Martha, it’s all over! Everybody’s heard! It seems she had a fuss with the Gowdy’s cook over their cat or the birds or something——” Mrs. Seabury entered into graphic and approximately accurate details, winding up with: “And the officer used to be on the police force, so, of course, he recognized her right away! I told you you oughtn’t to have taken her without a reference.”

“But the bank said——”

“Oh, the bank!” said Mrs. Seabury scornfully. “She probably keeps a big account there, and that’s all they care about. It’s awful to think how that money was made, but that’s nothing to a bank.—Oh, nobody suspects you of knowing, Martha,” she interrupted herself quickly, misreading her friend’s silence. “Nobody would believe that of you for a minute. We all know you didn’t know.”

Poor Miss Wilcox, in horror, found herself for a moment wishing vehemently that nobody knew. All her castles lay in ruins; and there were those bills that had seemed so trifling, looming monumentally now! She must undertake the abhorrent duty of putting Mrs. Shields out; and where or when would she get another tenant? She went to the house, flinching in expectation of the encounter with this person whom she now classified with formless dread as one of those women; to be sure, previous experience had revealed nothing alarming about her, but now that Mrs. Shields knew herself discovered, it would undoubtedly be different. She did not answer the bell, and Miss Martha, worriedly investigating, at length came upon her in the back yard where she had just finished scrubbing and refilling the bird-bath. Leaning on the broom, she was awaiting the approach of a robin; she saw Miss Wilcox out of the corner of her eye, and made a slight arresting gesture. The bird came on, with a kind of wary confidence, his bright, sidewise glance fixed on her.

“He’s just playing scairt. He knows me,” Mrs. Shields whispered. “But you better keep back a second.”

Miss Wilcox received a definite and most disconcerting shock. She had come prepared as conscious Virtue—and her logical opponent, conscious Vice, failed her! The notorious Tillie Shields did not look in the least notorious; she looked like an ignorant, dull, good-hearted woman, old and alone, cheaply pathetic with her paint and her terrific trade simper. It was with reluctance and difficulty that Miss Martha began to state her errand, but before she was halfway through, the other understood.

“I s’pose Pete Maguire’s been talking,” she said with a flash of resentful conviction. “Anyhow, I had a hunch I’d get in bad, right when I was settin’ there at the ’phone. I don’t care! I’m glad I done it. I’d done it, even ’f I’d known for certain!”

“I’m sorry I have to ask you to—to move,” Miss Martha began again, with miserable diffidence. “But I—I——”

“Oh, it’s all right,” said Tillie Shields, submissively. “I’ll find some other place to go. I always find a place, for a while, anyhow.” Obviously she spoke in no intention of enlisting sympathy; it was a mere statement of fact. Yet Miss Martha was remotely perturbed; and now, to her dismay, she saw the other’s chin quiver and two tears tracking down the paint.

“I—I liked it awful well here. Them birds——” She swallowed hard, bringing her features under control with an effort. “Ever’thing’s been took good care of. If it hadn’t been for next door——” She began to talk impetuously; it was a childishly incoherent, confident outpouring. “Miss Wilcox, you know how they do! Miss Wilcox, I can’t see how folks can do that way! That rabbit had a great sore on its side! And Doctor Gowdy’s a preacher!” Her voice rose in rebellious bewilderment. “He—why, he talks beautiful in church—I’ve heard him——”

So had Miss Martha. Fragments of the doctor’s noble and touching utterances on the text: “Inasmuch as ye do it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” inconveniently returned to her.

“I can’t see——” Mrs. Shields reiterated helplessly. And neither could Martha Wilcox. The puzzle was too much for her. Nobody, not even the notorious Tillie Shields, had intentionally done any wrong, yet the cumulative result of all their acts seemed to be heartbreakingly wrong, somehow; she herself, were it not for needing the income, could have let Mrs. Shields live there for nothing—but she could not let her live there for eighty-five dollars a month!

“I’m so sorry——!” was all that she could say.