Front matter (continued 4)

CHAPTER XX

SYLVIA AND LIFE

In the meanwhile Sylvia, home at Arden Hall again, slipped back very easily and naturally into the old ways and almost as easily and naturally into the new one of being engaged.

"It is really quite a comfortable state," she told Felicia. "You don't have to wonder about every new man you meet when you are all satisfactorily accounted for and checked off yourself. You can even enjoy flirting more," she added wickedly with a Sylvia twinkle, "since everybody knows you don't mean anything by it. Anyway, I'm so used to having Jack around that it isn't much different being engaged to him from not being engaged to him. I am afraid I am a hopelessly unromantic person, Felicia. I always supposed when people got engaged it was a fearsome, sublimated sort of experience like being on top of an Alp or something of the sort. But I don't feel any different from what I did before, except for the comfortable settled feeling I have already mentioned. And I'm not going to get married for a long time. I am going to make the most of the privileges and immunities of my present blissful state."

But as was perhaps natural Jack did not share his fiancée's leisurely attitude. In fact the two came more than once near to quarreling on the subject of the date of their marriage. But Sylvia's will was stronger and Sylvia would not be married for another year. That was a flat and unequivocable dictum and Jack had to put up with it as best he could. He dared not hurry his perverse lady love for it must be confessed he sometimes experienced doubts whether he had won her at all, so slight seemed the bond between them. The very tranquillizing effect of the engagement upon Sylvia was disturbing to Jack. That she could take so placidly what was the biggest thing in the universe to him was alarming and a little exasperating. Sometimes he would accuse her of not caring for him at all and then she would still further disconcert him by looking very directly and questioningly at him as if she, too, had some doubts on the subject.

Sylvia knew she had floated into the engagement from the crest of one wave of emotion to another. Her estrangement from Phil Lorrimer, her disillusionment about Jeanette's married life, the panic-stricken horror and shame with which her own affair with Porter Robinson had filled her, her generally overwrought, hysterical, nervous condition had all contributed to throw her into Jack's arms that night. He had seemed an oasis on a desert, a spar to the drowning. She had awakened soon enough to the realization that it was by no means a grand passion, a life and death affair, this placid, even affection she felt for Jack. She loved him sufficiently. She knew she could be fairly happy with him and make him happy, perhaps could even let her affection deepen into something approaching a great love in due time. They were ideal comrades already, and Sylvia had a theory that comradeship was a better basis than stormy passion for happy wedlock. Yet perhaps down in her heart there was a fear that something was lacking in it all, something that kept her stubbornly insistent on postponing the wedding for a year. Impulsively she had yielded the first redoubt. She intended to be sure of herself before she surrendered the fortress for good and all. She meant to do it in the end without reservation, for better for worse. There should be no shilly-shallying like Jeanette's in her life. That she was determined upon.

Part of the steadying effect of her engagement expressed itself in a sincere desire to stop the unsatisfactory flitting from flower to flower process, sipping honey here and there, into which she had drifted during the restless winter months past. She had had enough tasting of experience and honestly sought serious employment for her energies.

Luckily there was always plenty to occupy her on the Hill. More and more the Byrd sisters came to depend on her, especially as Julietta was now away getting acquainted with her grandson, Gloria's boy, recently arrived upon this planet. The girls at "Hester house," and Hope and Martha, also came in for a generous share of her attention. The old buoyant, radiant Sylvia seemed to have come back to them, ready to cheer and comfort and command at need. Never was her genius for happiness more in demand or more in evidence than it was that February. It seemed as if everything had been awry and sad and bad while she had been away in the city and that now she was home it must all just naturally straighten itself out.

She took up her music again with rigorous hours of practice. She fulfilled her long made threat of learning to cook, much to Aunt Mandy's pride and delight in her role as chief professor of the culinary arts. She went in, seriously, this time, into Red Cross work, organizing a unit which she kept sternly to its task of rolling bandages and all the rest of the necessary if rather prosaic labor. She also got under way a class in first aid instruction under the tuition of a young doctor whom Tom Daly had recommended, too busy himself to take on any new duties.

Doctor Tom and Sylvia saw a great deal of each other off and on but always in the comfortable, wholesome, brother and sister relation which their November interlude had interrupted but not destroyed. Sylvia was often at the cottage playing with the babies whom she adored and kept out of Lois' way as often as possible so that the latter might have time for the typing of her book which was almost ready for the publisher's hands. Marianna and Donald, too, came in for a large share of Sylvia's time. For them she spun rare tales old and new and rendered Kim and the Water Babies, the Immortal Alice and other beloved favorites of the realms of gold until she knew them nearly by heart. With the children Sylvia was happiest of all. Living in their world she almost forgot her own, which in spite of her boasted contentment did not wholly satisfy her. She had learned that the busier she was, the better life seemed, leaving fewer crannies and nooks for doubts and wonders to seep in.

Of course there was plenty of gayety both in Greendale and in the near-by city, but she steadily refused to go in for an excess of this kind of thing, though here, too, she and Jack came near to dissension. It must be admitted Jack was scarcely so assiduous a devotee of business now that he felt his assiduity no longer essential to the winning of his liege lady. He was ready now to enjoy the fruits of his labor and have a thoroughly frivolous holiday with Sylvia as mistress of the revels. But just as he wanted to cut loose Sylvia wanted to go sedately. He complained that he saw infinitely less of her now he was engaged to her than he had when he was not, and resented somewhat sharply the thousand and one claims and duties which Sylvia acknowledged. Yet the two never really quarreled. Jack was too sunny-tempered and Sylvia too tactful, and on the whole they were very happy together, Sylvia, oddly enough, happier than Jack.

Meanwhile the war went on overseas and men began to shake their heads and prophesy that we would be in it soon. But that was still nineteen hundred and fifteen and we kept out. About this time came a letter from Hilda, the first in many months. The chief item told simply and with scarcely any comment was that Bertram had been killed early in October. "I can hardly realize it or feel it," wrote Hilda. "It is getting to be an old story over here. Women see their lovers and their sons and their husbands go and they don't come back, or if they do, they come maimed and crippled, only the shadow of the men that went forth. In the meanwhile we try to heal as many as we can, though it is discouraging to heal them and send them back to be killed outright perhaps next time."

The letter and its sad news had haunted Sylvia for a long time. What a strange romance Hilda's had been--so brief it must almost have seemed a dream! She had known Bertram only a few weeks in August. By the first of September they had become engaged. A week later he had gone to the front. In October he had been overtaken by death. And that was the end. What a waste there was to it all!

Half consciously all that month Sylvia expected to hear that Barb and Phil were engaged. She had long since made up her mind that that particular consummation was natural, even desirable. She, herself, was far too sane a person to spend many moments prying among ashes to see if any sparks remained. Nor would she permit herself to regret that which had perhaps never been more than moonshine and dream stuff. She was able to persuade herself quite easily that since she was able to be so placidly happy without Phil she had never needed him overmuch. That miracle moment on Lover's Leap and that other music intoxicated moment in December came to seem to her mere magic casements through which she had looked for the briefest interval of time into another world, essentially unreal, fantastic, a sort of mirage of the soul. And mirages were not in Sylvia's line, so she did not often let herself remember those irrevocable moments.

Once in her desultory reading she came across a little poem called "Remembrance," one stanza of which particularly haunted her.

Not unto the forest--not unto the forest, O my lover!

Take me from the silence of the forest!

I will love you by the light and the beat of drums at night

And echoing of laughter in my ears,

But here in the forest

I am still, remembering a forgotten, useless thing,

And my eyelids are locked down for fear of tears--

There is memory in the forest.

She had gone to a dance with Jack that night and every now and then the music had taken words.

I will love you by the light and the beat of drums at night

And echoing of laughter in my ears.

But, afterward, in her own room, she had sat a long time by the window looking out into the white night where snows lay on her rose bushes. And perhaps she remembered a "forgotten useless thing" and her eyelids, too, were "locked down for fear of tears." And a new fear awakened in Sylvia's heart that night, a fear of Love. She, too, needed to be delivered from the memory of the forest.

CHAPTER XXI

A CHAPTER OF REVELATIONS

February passed and March came in, rough and blustering, with "noise of wind and of many waters" blowing its silver trumpets to life long dormant under winter snows. There came a few warm days and the crocuses began to run gay little races through the grass in Sylvia's garden and the jocund company of daffodils appeared. One morning a bluebird flashed out in the magnolia and the cardinals called "Pretty! Pretty! Pretty!" ecstatically all day long.

But then came frost and the frivolous crocuses in their parti-colored gowns lay flat and desolate like little dead dreams. The daffodils blackened and their stalks snapped, brittle as icicles. The bluebird disappeared, nobody knew where, and the cardinal's joy was muted. And it was all a symbol of life as it was in the world that spring of nineteen hundred and fifteen. Men had dreamed of peace and good will, of strong nations hailing each other with a "God speed" across the waters, a world of quickened life and promise and progress. And suddenly, out of a clear sky, as it seemed, had come blackening, devastating war. Men who had smiled like friendly gods snarled and hissed and rolled each other in the dust like brute beasts. Hymns of hate replaced the song of the morning stars, and the Prince of Peace was again crucified.

And still America looked on, dismayed, awed, shaking herself like a great dog, but not yet ready to leap at the throat of the enemy of democracy, not yet ready to believe such an enemy could really live and move and have his mighty being in this day and generation of enlightenment. Not yet was Beowulf dedicated to Heorot's cause, not yet did he fully realize the hatefulness of Grendel, who bore God's wrath. Aloof from it all, America's great pulse beat on almost steadily. Men and women loved and sinned and suffered and bartered and sacrificed as they had been doing from the beginning, more or less unmindful of the whirlwind sowing not so far off, with only an ocean between it and themselves. And what is an ocean nowadays?

In the stuffy little town of Norton, Pa., Suzanne took a deep draught of life that March; a deeper draught, indeed, than New York, or for that matter all the cities of America could have held to her lips. Day by day, as she sat by her mother's bed, she learned lessons no college could have taught her. Suzanne's spirit had been "stabb'd broad awake." She saw the Suzanne of the past, blind, arrogant, selfish, deeming herself wise and self-sufficient, yet really knowing neither life nor herself. Here in the quiet room where the angels of life and death wrestled she saw things very clearly and was made humble.

But it was willed that she be spared the last drops of the cup of sorrow and remorse. In those early March days her mother drifted back slowly from the Hinterland. It was almost as if Suzanne's need and Suzanne's prayer and Suzanne's love had brought her back. Little by little, as the mother grew better, she and her daughter came into the grace of mutual understanding and sympathy and forgiveness, knowing at last the whole story of Suzanne's light-hearted vagabondage. Mrs. Morrison was able to smile and sigh over "Melissa on the Road," the first installment of which appeared in the April issue of the magazine whose editor had "come to life" in season to recognize a live human document when it came into his hands.

As for the play, Suzanne received a letter in March from the great manager informing her he had kept in touch with her affairs through Miss Murray, congratulating her on her mother's recovery and begging for an interview at her earliest convenience. His confidence in the Star's judgment had, it seemed, been justified. The play was as good as Suzanne had promised, so he admitted.

Accordingly, one day, when her mother was able to spare her, Suzanne went up to New York to sign contracts and discuss royalties with a glibness which scarcely betrayed her recent complete inexperience of such pleasing commodities. The play was to be tried out in early September and if it was successful would be given a chance on Broadway later.

"Of course, that is on the knees of the gods," the manager had warned. "You can't tell what the public will do. The public is a spoiled child. The thing may go. It may not. The whole thing's a devilish lottery, you understand."

Oh, yes, Suzanne understood. All life was pretty much of a devilish lottery she thought, but that made it more rather than less interesting. Long ago she had taken for her motto, "Believe and venture, as for pledges the gods give none." It was enough for her at the time that the play was to be given a trial. More would have slain her with joy she thought.

Of course she ran straight to Barb with this bucketful of delightful certainties and enchanting possibilities. And Barb was as happy as Suzanne over it all. She was an artist at rejoicing with those that rejoice as well as mourning with those that mourned. Sometimes she seemed to herself to be nothing at all but an agglomeration of sympathies for the rest of the world. Her own selfhood seemed drowned in the sea of humanity. She was not unhappy. Indeed she was quietly, humbly content. To some women to love itself is the main thing. In such the waters of affection returning back to their springs, fill them indeed full of refreshment. There was no bitterness in Barb. Gladly and freely she had broken her alabaster box of precious ointment not counting the cost, nor deeming the performance any sort of waste, rather a privilege.

As for the Cause, her dedication to it held no more scruples. Suzanne had been right in her prophecy. She was "white hot" in her faith, in her mission, the whiter-hot, perhaps, because she had managed to get "martyrized" along the way.

In March Lois Daly's book was accepted by the publishers, with hearty congratulations on her return to the field of literature after her sojourn elsewhere. The terms of her contract were generous and Lois smiled, well pleased. She took the letter at once to her husband, and when he had expressed his delight and pride in her success she had explained why she had done the thing.

"I didn't want to write a bit, Tom," she said. "I dreaded to go into it again. Of course when I once got in it I loved it just as I always have. It is exhilarating--soul-possessing. But I was happy without it, perfectly happy. I don't know whether you understand that, Tom. I was afraid sometimes it worried you that I had given it up. It needn't have. You and the home and the children were enough to fill every need."

"Then why did you do it?" He surveyed her, puzzled. It occurred to him as no doubt it occurs to many wise men at times how little he knew his wife. Do men ever really know their wives? Tom Daly thought of that little episode with Sylvia and wondered if it had had anything to do with sending Lois back to her writing.

"Why? Because I wanted to make some money--quite a lot of money--and that was the only way I knew of doing it--my only wage earning asset," she smiled.

But Tom still looked bewildered. Just why should Lois have suddenly acquired her zeal for money? She had never been luxurious in her tastes, turning always preferably to simplicity of living, as those of the aristocracy of brains usually do. Therefore he awaited enlightenment. It was twilight and they were sitting together in the dusk, but he could see her eyes shining with a sort of wistful tenderness as they lifted themselves to his.

"You don't ask why I wanted the money? Is it because you know that I wanted it to give to you?" She pushed the publisher's letter across the table to him. "It is yours, dear,--my gift to the hospital. I haven't been able to show I cared for what you were working for. Perhaps I haven't really cared, though I think I have learned a little about it this winter, while I've been working myself. I've had a little light--a crack of it, anyway." She smiled at him in the grayness. "But I've always cared for you, Tom, even when maybe I haven't shown it, and I want to give this--piece of me to your hospital because I do love you and your big vision. Will you take it? It isn't much, but it comes straight from my heart."

"Not much!" cried Tom Daly. "Lois, it is everything."

And in a moment his arms were around her and there was nothing else in all the world but they two, mystically one in the fullness of their love each for the other.

So Spring brought with it quickened life and love to Tom Daly and Lois as it had done to Suzanne Morrison and her mother.

Spring, too, brought back Gus Nichols from his concert tour, a little thinner and tired looking as if the fire of his music had burned rather deep but with a new poise and dignity and manhood, along with his old boyish charm.

Mr. McIntosh was as happy as a child with a new toy at having the boy back, or rather as a child with an old toy, beloved and rediscovered. It was pleasant to see the two together, old man and lad, so different racially and temperamentally, yet so bound together by the ties of affection.

"Best job you ever did in your life, Sylvia Arden," Mr. McIntosh had observed one Sunday when he and Gus were taking dinner at the Hall. "Best job you ever did, when you persuaded me to adopt the boy. I can see you now, impertinent little witch that you were, sitting up and giving me advice like a grandmother. But it was good advice. I grant you that. You knew what you were talking about and talked to some purpose. See here, Sylvia--" The old man lowered his voice a little, though the others--Gus and Felicia and Doctor Daly--were engaged in conversation and could not hear, "do you think there is anything the matter with the lad? He doesn't look just happy to me. You don't think there can be a girl or any nonsense like that?"

Romance had always seemed more or less nonsense to Angus McIntosh, probably would unto the end, though years and affection had somewhat tempered his aversion for sentiment.

Sylvia looked up a little startled, remembering suddenly what she had almost forgotten--that unspoken thing she had read in the boy's eyes that night after his first concert. Gus, too, looked up at the moment, and as their gaze met Sylvia saw that the boy's had the fire and dew of a Galahad in them, the look of one who sees the Grail afar off. Her own eyes fell. She could not bear that shining, reverent look. It blinded her, shook her, quickened her, filled her with humility and compassion and envy. She perceived that Gus had found this thing which she herself seemed forever seeking with vain quest. In giving he had gained, in losing he had found.

"Well?" challenged Angus McIntosh at her side.

Sylvia shook her head.

"No, Gus looks to me--very happy," she said.

"I'm glad you think so." The old man's tone was relieved, as if a burden had been lifted from his mind. He had the greatest respect for Sylvia's judgment and understanding. "Glad you think so. He seems all right, but I wasn't sure. Thought I'd see what you thought, that's all."

Later Sylvia played accompaniments for her guest's violin. And if his eyes had not already conveyed the truth to her, his violin would have done so. Sylvia could hardly keep the tears out of her eyes as she played. Not that the music was sad. It was jubilant, at times almost triumphant. It throbbed and welled and exulted. It disdained pity as a crowned monarch might have disclaimed it. It proclaimed itself inviolate, consecrate, perfected. "I rejoice! I conquer! I love!" it sang.

As Sylvia rose from the piano she almost feared to meet the gaze of the listeners. She thought they must all have heard the message of the violin as she had heard it. But no one seemed to have done so. They had felt the power and the beauty of the thing, but its soul had been concealed from them all except Sylvia herself.

And then Sylvia saw that Jack was in the room. He had come in while they had been playing and stood silent, waiting until the violin ceased. She went to him, her eyes still full of the music, and noticed that he was a little white and very grave, with something of his boyishness stricken out of him.

"I didn't know you were back from New York," she said, though that wasn't at all what she seemed to care about saying. The ordinary, conventional words rise to our lips when the real things hide unsaid.

"Let's get out of here a moment," he whispered, under cover of greeting, "I've something to tell you."

Sylvia stepped out into the hall and he followed.

"Sylvia, there's been an accident. Phil's hurt--dying, maybe."

He put out his arm quickly, for Sylvia swayed toward him with eyes that told him what perhaps he had known in his heart all the time.

CHAPTER XXII

UNTO THE FOREST

Sylvia did not faint. Indeed it seemed to her as if she had never in all her life been so quick in every fiber as she was at the moment she heard Jack's voice saying those fearful illuminating words, "Phil--dying, they think." It was as if a great clean wave swept over her leaving her purged of misunderstanding and doubt and weakness and compromise. With one blinding flash of light she saw clear. She drew away from Jack's arms.

"Tell me about it. No, I am all right. Tell me."

There was little to tell. A crowded street, a heedless chauffeur, a toddling Italian baby escaped from its mother's fruit stand. These were the details. There was nothing unusual about them. Such accidents happen daily in great cities. One scarcely hears of them they are so frequent of occurrence. The wonder is there are not more of them when human life teems so thick and is held so cheap. But, unfortunately, clear-witted, quick-moving, strong-limbed young ex-football heroes are not always at hand as in this case. The baby was happily unhurt, but Phil Lorrimer lay in the hospital at the point of death.

Instead of keeping a luncheon engagement with his friend, Jack Amidon had been called upon to take charge of a grave situation. Finally, there being nothing left to do, he had come back to Greendale to tell Mrs. Lorrimer--Mrs. Lorrimer and Sylvia.

"I thought it would be better to tell his mother myself," he said to Sylvia. "Telegrams knock you out so. She is a wonder, though. Not a whimper. She's going up on the five o'clock from Baltimore. I'm taking her in, in the car."

"I am going, too," said Sylvia.

For a moment the two stared at each other, then Jack understood and acquiesced.

"All right. That is for you to say," he responded quietly. "Go and get ready. I'll tell the rest."

Even in her distress, Sylvia smiled wanly at Jack. It was so like him to understand, to spare her, to see at a flash the helpful, kindly thing to do. Jack was always so "dear." She tried to express her gratitude but he cut her short by stooping to kiss her, not on the lips as usual, but on the forehead.

"Don't bother about me, sweetheart. I don't count," and he strode away from her toward the living-room where he had promised to "tell the rest."

Sylvia ran up the stairs to her own room, dazed and dry-eyed, with a strange lightness about her, as if she had suddenly shed her body and become all spirit. In a few moments Felicia joined her, quiet, helpful, unquestioning. There was never any need of explaining things to Felicia. She did not ask why Sylvia, engaged to one man, should be rushing with anguish-stricken eyes to the sick-bed of another. Perhaps she understood that better than she had understood the engagement in the first place.

It was a strange journey--first, the swift almost silent automobile ride to the city; Jack's stern, white face as he kissed her good-by so unlike the sunny lover she was used to, whom she had loved "by the light and beat of drums," a look so different it had haunted her all the way to New York; beside her the quiet countenance and grief-filled eyes of Phil's mother. Feeling scarcely worthy to dwell in the sanctuary of her own grief, Sylvia's heart went out to the older woman in her silent agony. Perhaps never in her life before had the girl realized what it meant to be a mother--how mothers gave and gave and gave, and suffered and suffered and suffered, and loved and loved and loved, unto the end. What was going on in the mind and heart of the other woman she could only conjecture. Dimly she perceived that the mother loved the son for the baby he had been, the boy and youth he had been, the man he was, the man he was to be--all in one. How could she bear it? Sylvia wondered.

Then the vision widened. How could all those women over in Europe bear it? To give up their sons--the very fruit of their bodies, those for whom they had undergone the agonies of death! It was horrible. Phil was only one, and he had offered life for life. That was natural. But those other strong young men, over there--they were giving life for more death. That was the unthinkable, hideous part of it. The sorrows of all the world seemed pressing down upon her, crystallized, made real by her own poignant, personal grief. Phil became the mangled young life of the world.

Suddenly Sylvia felt she could bear it no longer alone. She put out her hand and let it rest upon the hand of Phil's mother. Mrs. Lorrimer turned with a faint little smile.

"Pray, Sylvia, pray," she said softly. "Try to help me say 'Thy will be done.' I am trying to say it. But it is hard--so very hard."

"I can't," Sylvia's young voice flung back, hard, almost fierce, in its hurt. "I can only keep saying, 'Don't take him. Don't take him. I can't bear it.'"

But Mrs. Lorrimer shook her head and pressed the girl's hand.

"We can bear anything, Sylvia--anything. We are never asked to bear too much."

"I am," cried Sylvia passionately. "I can't bear his dying--without knowing. He must know."

"He will know, dear."

Sylvia took comfort from the quiet assurance. She believed Mrs. Lorrimer meant she felt sure that Phil was still living, would live. She did not know the mother meant that her son might already be where there could be no misunderstanding, no longer any seeing as through a glass darkly, but face to face with infinite realities. Alice Lorrimer was not young like Sylvia. She knew from sad experience how many paths of human life lead straight to the Garden of Gethsemane.'

Presently Sylvia spoke again.

"Mrs. Lorrimer, how do you suppose I could have been so blind--not to know--I cared--this way?" Sylvia's phrases came out in quick, uneven gasps, as if every word hurt. "I didn't know--I never knew until Jack told me just now--about Phil. I didn't know," she moaned.

"Maybe Phil was blind too, dear. I think he was. He put an unreal thing ahead of a real one, I am afraid, just because he cared so much. You needn't look surprised, child. Mothers know so much more than any one ever tells them. Of course I don't know what happened in New York, but I have always suspected my boy hurt you, and it was the hurt which made you shut your eyes so tight."

"It was something like that," admitted Sylvia. "It is so horribly easy to get all muddled and twisted up in life."

"It is," agreed Mrs. Lorrimer. "Sometimes it takes a great grief to remove the bandages from our eyes."

"I know. When Jack told me--first everything went black and then it was all white and shining. I felt as if I had never really seen clear in all my life before, except maybe just once, last September out in the woods at sunset. I think Phil and I both knew then. Oh, Mrs. Lorrimer, why didn't he speak? What difference could my money possibly make? Money and love haven't anything to do with each other. They are in different kingdoms like animal, vegetable, mineral, only there must be a fourth kingdom--the love kingdom." Sylvia's eyes smiled a little, like stars through mist.

"Men do not always understand, little daughter. Perhaps they never understand quite. You must not blame Philip too much."

"Blame! Oh, I don't. The blame was mine. I shouldn't have rushed like a mad thing into the fire to save my pride. I wasn't true to love or Phil or myself or Jack. Maybe I was untruest of all to Jack. He will never tell me, but I know I have hurt him dreadfully. Sometimes I think women are the cruellest things in the world. We don't mean to be but we are."

"I am afraid we are sometimes."

"I didn't mean to be cruel. I've always wanted to be kind. Maybe that is the trouble. I've been too kind. I let myself believe I loved Jack because it pleased me to make him happy. And I haven't made him happy. That is the worst of it. I believe he has been miserable all along because he knew I was giving him counterfeit gold instead of the real thing. It was only I who did not know, and even I suspected, sometimes. That was why I wanted to keep so dreadfully busy all the time, so I wouldn't have time to think. Mother Lorrimer," in sudden contrition, "you are so tired and I have chattered and chattered until I almost feel better because I've talked. As if I mattered--beside you."

Mrs. Lorrimer pressed the girl's hand again.

"Nothing matters very much just now," she said, "except God."

"But God is so far off."

"Oh, no, He isn't, Sylvia.

"'Closer is He than breathing

And nearer than hands and feet.'

Haven't you ever felt how near He is?"

"Yes," said Sylvia, remembering again that night when she and Phil and the "shadowy third" had been so close to each other that there had not been a breath between them. And then she fell silent, led at last unto the forest where she had not dared to go for many months. And in the forest Sylvia sought God.

It seemed an endless time before they reached the great station in New York but at last they did arrive. There was no one to meet them. It was a very different arrival from the one Sylvia remembered in December. Jeanette had been there then to greet her and Barb and Phil. She had been breathless, exhilarated with happiness. She remembered how almost intoxicated with sheer delight of living she had felt when Phil had helped her into the limousine and recalled also what a queer, deserted, almost lonely feeling she had experienced, immediately after, when she leaned out of the car to wave good-by to Barb and Phil on the curb.

The thought of Barb brought a new current of reflection. For all she knew it was Barb and not herself who had the right to be with Phil now. How did she know but he might have learned to care for Barb in all those months? Wasn't it probable, natural, that he should have done so? Why should she expect him to keep on caring for her while she had given herself to Jack? A panic seized her. All the way to the hospital even Phil's desperate illness, which she had never seemed able to sense, loomed less important than this new specter which had arisen. What if Barb should be there with him? What if they should say "Who is this young person? The woman he loves is there already with him. There is no room for another."

But when they reached the hospital no such questions were raised. Mrs. Lorrimer swept everything aside with her quiet dignity. "I am his mother," she had said. "And this is Miss Arden," quite as if the authorities knew and understood why Miss Arden must be admitted. Perhaps they did understand. The doctor who challenged them shot a quick questioning look at Sylvia and bowed acquiescence. Possibly Sylvia's eyes were the password. The doctor was used to reading human faces. He had admitted many another white-cheeked, tortured-eyed young woman into the chamber of the Shadow ere this. He was gravely sympathetic. He did not expect the young man in there to live twenty-four hours. It would be a miracle, he thought, if he got well.

And so the mother and the girl who loved Philip Lorrimer sat beside him all that still night though he did not know them. Sylvia lived a thousand lives and died a thousand deaths before the gray dawn came to the quiet room. And who knows what new agonies the mother who bore the lad suffered during those long silent hours? To Sylvia at least, there was something beautiful even in the unspeakable anguish of it all. Even in death Phil would be hers and she his. Love had crowned her as it had crowned Gus. She no longer envied the young musician his Grail ecstasy. She, too, had been anointed.

Sylvia never knew whether she consciously prayed that night. It was rather that she talked with God and He in His beneficence let her share some of His eternal secrets.

And underneath it all she was crying out to Phil, "Don't die. Don't die. Don't die. I love you. I love you. Come back. Come back." And she did not seem to be saying it to the inert form on the high, narrow bed. That was not Phil at all. Phil was all strength and energy and vitality. That was a mere husk of something--what, she did not care. It had nothing to do with Phil or with herself. She was sending out her cry, not from her body to his, but from her spirit to his, wherever the latter was faring. She knew that wherever he was he would hear and almost she knew he would come back.

The strange part of it was he did come back, as if Sylvia's voice had arrested him and brought him back from those far fields to which he had been journeying. Perhaps not so strange, after all. The wisest men of all the ages have not been able to mark the metes and bounds of the power of love. At any rate, whether Sylvia's call had anything to do with it or not, Phil Lorrimer came back. The miracle was achieved.

It was early morning when Phil opened his eyes, blue as ever, though dark-circled and heavy, and the first thing he saw was Sylvia, who had just turned from the window where she had been watching the dawn come up over the city with strange unearthly light and shadow. Something of the same light was on Phil's face as he recognized Sylvia. With one swift light step she was beside him, her face bent over his, her heart in her eyes.

"Sylvia." The voice was faint as if the speaker had come back from other worlds, but distinct, wondering, happy.

"Phil!" And as he felt Sylvia's kiss on his cheek, Phil closed his eyes again as if there were now no other bliss to attain in this world or the next.

CHAPTER XXIII

AFTERMATH

Three weeks later and April had surprised even the city and taken it by storm. Buds were beginning to burst in the trees in the park, hyacinths rainbowed here and there, the fountains were released from their winter bondage. The river took on a bluer hue to match the sky, or was it at the hint of the bird who arrived just before Easter giving advance notice of the latest colors in Nature's fashion house, bearing samples on his own back?

In Miss Josephine Murray's little apartment Suzanne and Barb and Sylvia were assembled, one blue and gold afternoon, with tongues flying fast as of old.

"When is Phil going to be able to be moved?" Suzanne was demanding of Sylvia. "And where is he going to move to?"

"Next week, we hope. And he is coming to Arden Hall."

"Bless us! how modern!" teased Suzanne.

Sylvia flushed and shook her head.

"It isn't so specially modern. It is just natural. The doctors say he has to get out of the city. His mother thinks she has to get back to the girls, and she also thinks there is no doctor in the world equal to Doctor Tom and wants him to set his eye on Phil. Of course, he can't go to 'Hester house.' That would be too absurd and he'd hate it anyway--with all those sympathetic females in attendance. There is always plenty of room at the Hall, and it is lovely there in April. So he's coming," she concluded.

"Reasons as plenty as blackberries," jeered Suzanne. "Perfectly well explained. What do you happen to be doing with your fiancé in the meantime?"

Sylvia looked up at that, meeting Suzanne's eyes squarely.

"I haven't any," she announced quietly. "Jack has known for three weeks I wasn't going to marry him. In fact, he suggested it himself."

"More and more modern," approved Suzanne. "It is indeed well to be off with the old love before you are on with the new. When are you going to announce your next engagement?"

"Maybe never," said Sylvia so soberly that Suzanne relented and obligingly turned the fire on herself.

"Speaking of being off with the old love, it seems to be the one thing I can't manage. Roger and I have decided we miss quarreling so much when we are separated that it's simpler and more agreeable to get married and quarrel in peace."

At which last Suzannesque paradox Sylvia and Barb laughed and proffered congratulations.

"Better offer Roger condolences instead," advised Suzanne. "I shall lead him a life."

"Is he coming to New York to live?" inquired Barb, remembering her friend's urban preferences.

"He is not. He is having far too much fun stirring things up in Norton, Pa. We are going in for politics. I think I shall let him run for mayor. There will be a lovely row, for all the crocks are afraid of him now, and it isn't a circumstance to what they'll be if they suspect he wants to raise that particular tempest in their cozy, grafty teapot." Suzanne chuckled, scenting battle afar off. A "scrap" was as the elixir of life to her. "I don't want to live in New York, anyway," she continued. "I couldn't bear to be very far off from mother, and it's much more distinguished to draw my royalties and breath on some sacred Parnassian Hill in Norton, Pa. Likewise it is less expensive. I shall come up often, however, if only to see that they do not murder my precious play. Vengeance is mine if they touch one hair--that is, one line--of its blessed substance. Remember my prophecy, sweet friends? I-did-write-a-play." And, lacking a cushion, Suzanne thumped the tea table with her fist until the cups rattled ominously.

"You did," agreed Sylvia. "And here is Barbie here, an ornament to the Cause. Wait until you see her marching in the parade next fall! Wait till you know what she did to the legislators when she bearded them at Albany! She is so modest she will hide her light under a bushel, but I'm all the time hearing things about her. Phil says she's a wonderful speechifier. To the victor--in her own colors!" And Sylvia dropped the yellow jonquils she was wearing in her friend's lap and bent over her to press a butterfly kiss on her forehead.

Sylvia and Barb had come very close to each other during the latter's recent stay in the city. Phil Lorrimer's accident had been a fiery ordeal for Barbara as well as Sylvia, and Sylvia, guessing this, felt very tender toward the other girl. Never once did they reach the point of putting things into words. But words were not essential to mutual understanding. Barb and Sylvia knew all there was to know, each about the other, without communication on the subject and their love was the stronger for knowing. Perhaps the closest Barbara ever came to a confession was when she said to Sylvia once that she didn't believe there was a single woman who was a really inspired worker in the Cause who hadn't a hurt of her own somewhere underneath to make her pitiful of scars other women carried. "I guess maybe they are even thankful for their hurts when they have healed a little," she had added with Barb-like naïveté. "It makes them understand so much more. You've got to understand to care."

And Sylvia had understood and cared so much for Barbara's hurt that she would not offer her the last spear thrust--the word of spoken compassion. And, after all, Sylvia could hardly help seeing that Barb scarcely needed compassion. She, too, had her Grail fire to follow and it took her to high places.

"Oh, Barb is some little wonder!" Suzanne had agreed. "Isn't it funny how much we've all been through since September and yet we aren't any of us so cock-sure about things as we were then? I was the worst--the most Sophomoric of the three--and maybe I've come the worst croppers just because I had to have the cock-sureness forcibly if not painlessly extracted. Anyway, I don't want to go back and be the Suzanne of September, nineteen hundred and fourteen again. What about the rest of you? Would you like old Time to turn back in his flight?"

"No," said Sylvia and Barb in emphatic chorus. Then they all laughed and grew sober.

"It is a vote," declared Suzanne.

When Sylvia got back to her hotel she found a message from Jeanette Latham inviting her to dinner. A little reluctantly she telephoned acceptance. She was not very anxious to see Jeanette, not only because she had rather distasteful memories of her recent visit but because she dreaded meeting any of Jack's people just now. It seemed to her they must dislike and despise her for her treatment of Jack. Not that she blamed them for that. No one could judge her more harshly than she judged herself on that score.

Arrived at the great house on the drive, Sylvia was informed that Mrs. Latham was in her own room and begged that Miss Arden would come up. The two kissed and then drew back each surveying the other woman fashion, out of the tail of her eye.

Jeanette was a little pale, Sylvia thought, but somehow prettier than she had been in December, her rich brunette glow softened and subdued a little. She was wearing an exquisite rose-colored robe above which her lovely full throat gleamed white and her eyes looked darker and more brilliant than ever.

"Sylvia, it is good to see you," she murmured. "Take off your wraps. We are going to have dinner up here if you don't mind. Francis is dining out. We can have a cozy gossip all to ourselves."

As the dainty little dinner was being served the two talked about everything in general and nothing in particular, taking pains to avoid anything that could possibly interest either. It was only after the meal was cleared away and the maid banished that they came to the really important things.

"Sylvia, I know you think I am going to be disagreeable about Jack. I'm not. I'm glad. No, don't speak yet. I want to tell you why I am glad. I knew you didn't care for Jack, at least not enough. You sort of half way cared just as I did for Francis. You thought it would be suitable and agreeable and easy and please everybody all round especially Jack. And you thought that the rest would come in time, didn't you?"

Sylvia nodded in shamed silence.

"On the whole, your reasons for getting engaged were quite as creditable as mine for getting engaged to Francis, certainly more so than Isabel's for getting engaged to her miserable count. But, even so, they weren't good enough. There is only one reason for getting engaged to a man, anyway, only one for marrying him, and that is just plain old-fashioned love. I found that out in a very expensive course of lessons. You didn't love Jack. I knew it that night. I had just sent Charlton away and I knew the real thing--what it was. I care more for Jack than almost anybody in the world and I didn't want him to be unhappy any more than you did, but he is going to be more unhappy now than if you had said no last December."

Sylvia winced at that.

"I know it, Jeanette. I am as sorry about that as you can possibly be."

"I know. I didn't mean to reproach you. I just wanted to tell you I know it was better this way, hard as it is for Jack. He'll get over it now. At least, I hope he will, but if you had married him he wouldn't have gotten over it. He would have been like Francis. Francis knows I don't care. At least he knows I didn't use to care. It has hurt him pretty badly sometimes, I'm afraid. Maybe now he'll understand. I'm not so bad as I might have been. I--Sylvia, do you know why I sent Charlton away?"

Sylvia shook her head.

"I had just found out--something--about myself. I am not much good but I couldn't go on with that kind of thing when I knew-- Sylvia, please understand. It is harder to say than I thought."

And suddenly Sylvia did understand, and came and put her arms around the other woman with real joy and affection.

"If it will only be a boy," sighed Jeanette. "It is dreadful to be a woman in this world, and Dad would like it so, and so would Francis."

When she returned to the hotel again there was a letter from Jack waiting for Sylvia, the second only since she had come to New York. The first had been in response to her telegram announcing that Phil was surely out of danger. It had been a very brief letter, expressing his relief and pleasure at the good news of Phil's recovery. "And Sylvia, Belovedest," it had added, "don't forget I meant just what I said that day. Don't bother about me. I don't count. Nothing counts except your being happy. I believe I have always known it was Phil you really cared for. Anyway, I know it now. You have always been an angel of goodness to me and I am grateful. It has been just Jack and Jill going up the hill. Jack fell down and broke his crown all right, but there is no reason in the world why Jill should come tumbling after. And in order to prevent such a disaster the best thing Jack can say is good-by."

Sylvia had written back a long, affectionate and remorseful letter blaming herself wholly and severely and accepting his proffered release from their engagement. She had not heard from him again until now. Consequently she tore open the letter with some trepidation.

"Dear Sylvia,"--So it ran--

"I am sailing to-morrow to join the American Ambulance Field Service in France. It isn't a new notion. It has been in the back of my brain a long time. I should have gone in December if you had refused me then. I am not much good at anything but driving a car. I stuck to the business because you wanted me to but my heart wasn't in it. Dad understands, and is perfectly willing I should go. Don't misunderstand me, please, sweetheart. I am not doing this for gallery play or to work on your feelings. And I'm not going to talk any tommyrot about my life being spoiled and wanting to throw it away. I don't want to throw it away. I want to find it if I can over there. It seems to me France ought to drive whip and spur into any chap and make a man of him. Anyway, I'm going to have a try at it. Of course there is a little danger--not much. You must not worry. Danger agrees with me, and I'm a lucky chap in everything but love. Best wishes to old Phil. Remember that means in everything.

"I would have come to say good-by in person, but it took a little more nerve than I have just now. It was easier for both of us for me to make a quiet getaway. Wish me luck, Sylvia.

"Yours, as always,

"JACK."

Sylvia read the letter, dazed, troubled but by no means surprised. It was like Jack to do the gallant, generous, splendid, impulsive thing. As she finished she made a rapid calculation. "I sail to-morrow." That must mean to-day. He was already gone. Somewhere out beyond the harbor his ship was plowing its way toward France. The tears came into her eyes. Jack was very dear to her. Why, oh why had she driven him to this unnecessary danger, this fearful carnage field overseas? And yet was he not right? Would he not find something worth the risk in the stern realities of that glorious and tragic country he went to aid? That he had not gone into it lightly she saw. He had counted the possible cost as any man who was not a fool must count it. But he had not gone in bravado or in bitterness. He had taken pains to show her that. He had gone simply, in quiet earnest to prove himself, not to throw away his life recklessly but to find it as he said. Dear Jack! No wonder Sylvia's eyes were wet as she folded his letter and put it back in its envelope.

CHAPTER XXIV

HIGH TIDE

For weeks after his injury Phil Lorrimer had been too sick to care very much about anything except the agreeable fact that his mother and Sylvia hovered over him like seraphim as he assured them later. It had mattered very little to him where he was nor how he got there so long as Sylvia was there too. It might be Heaven for all he knew. For a while it had seemed quite probable it was Heaven, for he remembered quite distinctly that Sylvia had kissed him and she had never done that on earth he was quite certain.

But presently his mind had cleared and things had been explained. He heard how he had been hurt and how his mother had come at once. Neither of these things seemed hard to grasp. But why was Sylvia here? Sylvia was engaged to Jack. Why was she here spending long hours by his bedside? Sylvia was always kind. It must have been sheer kindness that brought her he concluded. But somehow there appeared to be more than kindness in Sylvia's eyes, though after that heavenly dream she had not kissed him again.

It was not until he was almost able to travel that Sylvia told him that she and Jack were no longer engaged, that they had decided it had all been a mistake and that Jack had gone to France. Phil took the news in silence and sobriety. He had very little to say on that subject or any other for the rest of the day. And Sylvia, suddenly self-conscious, had kept away from the hospital on the next day. But on the next, the day before the cavalcade was to start for Greendale, she came. Phil was sitting by the window looking somewhat like his old self though gaunt and lean as a wintered wolf.

"You weren't here yesterday," he accused sternly.

"No. What a spoiled invalid you are getting to be! You don't expect to see me every day, do you? Those carnations need fresh water. I'll get some." Sylvia turned, flowers in hand, but Phil had waxed suddenly, unexpectedly imperious.

"Put 'em down," he ordered so stentoriously that Sylvia obeyed without really intending to.

"Come here," he still further ordered. Sylvia did not come nearer but she did stand perfectly still looking at him.

"I missed you like the devil yesterday," he observed.

"You flatter me," said Sylvia.

He ignored her irony.

"I say, are you really not engaged any more?"

Sylvia admitted that she really was not.

"Why did you end it?"

"I told you. We decided that it was a mistake."

"When?"

"A few weeks ago."

"Precisely when?"

"The night I knew you were hurt." Sylvia faced him steadily now. If he wanted facts he should have them.

"Was that why you broke it off?"

"I didn't break it off. Jack did."

"You mean he didn't like your coming here to me?"

"No. It wasn't that. He just knew--well, he knew I couldn't marry him. Jack is a dear. He always sees things without being told."

"And I don't see things until they are rammed into my darn fool eyes. Is that it?"

Sylvia acknowledged that that seemed to be a fair statement of the case.

"You tried to show me a thing or two last winter?"

"Yes."

"And when I wouldn't look, you cut me good and proper as I deserved and got engaged to Jack?"

Sylvia nodded.

"Sylvia!"

"Well?"

"Barb opened my eyes as to what an idiot I'd been about the money business. She did it one night, too late though. I rushed out to see you the next day, first minute I had, and Jeanette told me you were engaged to Jack and had gone home. That cooked my goose, all right."

"Well, the silly fowl ought to have been cooked." There was a faint twinkle in Sylvia's eyes.

"Granted," agreed Phil heartily. "See here, Sylvia, I've a whole lot of things to say to you but a man in a bath robe doesn't cut a very impressive figure saying the things I've got to say and--"

"Don't say them then. I insist on being impressed. Besides, it is time you went back to bed. I'm going, anyway."

"Sylvia!"

Sylvia paused in the doorway.

"Did you kiss me that night or did I dream it?"

"The idea!" But Sylvia's cheeks were less ambiguous in their answer than her lips as she fled into the corridor.

"Bless her!" grunted Phil. "Just wait until I get on my feet. I wouldn't care if she were Miss Midas herself, I'd run off with her. I wish she'd kiss me again."

But it was May now and Sylvia had not kissed him again. Though she took very good care of her guest that particular attention did not seem to be included in the list. Up to this time, too, Phil had not been sufficiently "on his feet" either to run off with his hostess or even to have the presumption to ask her to marry him.

May in Maryland! Is there anything lovelier the world over? Roses in the gardens, wistaria dripping purple trails from the balconies, waxen, fragrant magnolia bloom! Red bud and dogwood on the hills! Green fire everywhere!

In Sylvia's garden Phil Lorrimer lay stretched at ease in a canopied hammock watching a pair of red birds carry on a lively courtship in the magnolia tree. He was getting on famously it was declared. Certainly he felt too much energy to be willing to stay recumbent much longer. He was beginning to be restless. It was a wonder he had not begun before. It was not so long ago that if any one had told him he would stay contentedly for nearly two months away from his beloved clinic he would have thought them mad and no doubt told them so. But sickness is a powerful leveller and Phil had other things on his mind beside medicine and surgery these May days.

"Enter egg nogg," announced Sylvia suddenly arriving, Hebe like, with a tray and a tall glass of foaming yellow deliciousness.

Phil sat up.

"Gee! What business has a great hulking idiot like me to loaf around and let an angel like you wait on him hand and foot?"

"Angels aren't conspicuous for their hands and feet. They are all wings like that mosquito there. Don't let him bite. He'll disfigure your beauty. And don't stop to concoct highfaluting speeches. Your business is to drink."

"All right I will, if you'll sit down too." He patted the hammock beside him and Sylvia accepted the invitation.

When he had disposed of the egg nogg he set the empty glass on the tray on the grass where Sylvia had deposited it. Then he turned to look at his companion. Sylvia was well worth looking at these days. Her old rose bloom and "moonshininess" were back again. She had returned close to the "jubilant springs" from which she had journeyed afar during the troublous winter past, though perhaps the little girl Sylvia had disappeared forever in the course of her devious wayfaring. At any rate, the new womanliness was very becoming.

"Is this a good time to propose?" demanded Phil so suddenly that Sylvia blushed like a schoolgirl and drooped her head, but her lips twitched roguishly as she averred that it was as good a time as any.

"Very well. Remember I'm scared to death. I never proposed to a girl before in my life and I'm never going to do it again. One, two, three! Sylvia, will you marry me?"

Sylvia lifted her head then and her eyes met Phil's straight and brave with the fine surrender of a proud woman.

"Yes," she said quietly.

"Thank the Lord!" Phil mopped his perspiring brow. "If you don't mind kissing me again I'd feel a little more as if it were real. I've lived a dreadfully long time on that heavenly kiss. I'd like an earth one, please."

An hour later they were still in the hammock as blissful and mutually self-absorbed as the redbirds.

"Sylvia, do you realize that I haven't any money, thanks to this heavenly-infernal smash up of mine, that even my job is knocked galley westward by all this business? If I weren't too jolly happy to think at all I should think I was an idiot and an ass if nothing worse to ask a girl to marry me under the circumstances."

"Don't think," said Sylvia. "What is the use? You will get caught up quick enough when you are well again. Don't talk about money. It leaves a bad taste in your mouth."

"All right, I won't. But, Sylvia, there is another thing." Phil's eyes strayed over the beautiful May sweet garden, on to the great red brick house whose open doors suggested hospitality and affluence and home happiness on a bountiful scale. "Have you thought you will have to give this up and come and live in a little airtight compartment in New York?"

For a moment Sylvia was startled out of her new content. Her eyes, too, followed Phil's. Never had Arden Hall seemed so dear, so infinitely desirable as now in the ripe hour of her happiness. Somehow she had never thought of that particular complication though it was obvious enough. To lose the Hall now that she had just come into the very heart of it, or to have it again for brief holidays only, snatched "on the wing" as she had said once before! A redbird flashed like a flame before her in the sunshine. The redbirds would soon be nesting. Mechanically the thought crossed her mind. Nesting! That was it. She, too, would be nesting in the heart of the man she loved. She looked back to Phil who was watching her with troubled eyes.

"I shan't care, if I have you," she said.

And it was true, would always be true for Sylvia Arden. She had been like the empty marshes, waiting for the tide to come in. The tide had come, full flood, sweeping every inlet and lagoon. There were no vacant places in her whole being. Love filled it all. Nothing mattered any more except this big, strange, beautiful, engulfing thing which had come to her and taken possession. Felicia's prophecy had come true. Sylvia had found the real thing at last, and knew the difference between it and the specious substitute with which she had striven to be content.

CHAPTER XXV

WARP AND WOOF

Early in June, Sylvia and her little circle were shocked and saddened by the sudden death of Angus McIntosh. He had gone to the office as usual but had come in early in the afternoon, and in the dusk Gus had found him sitting in the big chair beneath his mother's picture looking as serene as if he had just fallen asleep. It seemed there had been for quite a while past the probability that the very thing which had happened would happen. This Gus had known and had been in a measure prepared, though we are never fully armed against such loss. When our dear ones leave us there is always a sad surprise about it. We can never quite believe they can really go, however we think our minds are fortified.

Silent in his grief as in his love, Gus went quietly about the grave duties which his foster-father's death imposed upon him, but no one could have seen the lad and not known he was suffering acutely. To Sylvia alone he seemed able to voice the grief that possessed him and to her he turned with natural impulse to seek solace from one who knew what the dead man had meant to the lonely boy. Sylvia gave him all the comfort and friending she could in his hour of need. She felt very pitiful for him not only because of this sorrow but because she knew he had another scarcely healed hurt, though this new grief had driven it into the background.

When the old man's will was read many were surprised to learn that aside from some bequests to servants and old friends and a small annuity to "my beloved son, Augustus Nichols," the bulk of Angus McIntosh's hard earned and considerable property was left to Thomas Daly in trusteeship to found a hospital for Greendale. When people tried to commiserate Gus on his rather meager sharings he had rejected their condolences. It appeared he had for some time known of the disposition Angus McIntosh had made of his estate. It had, indeed, been by the lad's own wish that he was not burdened by the management and responsibility of a great property.

"What would I want with all that money?" he asked Sylvia. "I should have hated it. I don't want money. I've never wanted it. I've had more than my share already in my musical training. Thanks to his generosity, my violin will bring me all the income I can stand. I couldn't tend to a big property and keep on playing. I've got to play. It is all I'm fit for. He understood. We talked it over so often. And he didn't want to fritter away his money in little driblets in small charities. He wanted to leave it in a lump sum where it would really do some good. The hospital seemed to be the best. His mother died because she didn't have proper medical care. It always hurt him to think about it. He wants a room named after her. Oh, he knew exactly what he was doing. I wish people would stop sympathizing with me. I don't want their sympathy."

So surprisingly it came about that Tom Daly's castle in the air suddenly appeared convertible to brick and mortar. And the beauty of having it so minutely and perfectly planned in advance was that there need not be the slightest delay in getting the substance of things hoped for under way. Thanks to Doctor Tom's unflagging effort other bequests to the hospital were already forthcoming, including Lois Daly's gift of love, but the big unhampered lump sum provided by Angus McIntosh's will made it possible to carry out the doctor's dreams on a scale which he had hardly dared hope to contemplate hitherto.

One day Phil Lorrimer, up in New York, had a letter from Tom Daly. The latter had for some time been considering the advisability, even the necessity, of taking to himself a professional partner. His hands had been already full before the hospital project had matured. Now they were overflowing. All of which was preliminary to asking the younger man if he would consider moving to Greendale to become Tom Daly's associate.

Phil's breath came hard as he read. It was of all things the one he would have liked best if he had chosen. Tom Daly had long been a boyish idol of his, and since the boy had attained his own manhood he had seen even more clearly the bigness of the other man's vision, the scope of the service he was rendering Greendale. Nothing could have pleased or flattered the young doctor more than that Tom Daly should consider him worthy of the proffered post.

Moreover, Phil's sickness had taken heavy toll even of his abundant young vitality. It would be a year at least before he would be perfectly strong again, and he had been warned since he had been back that it was extremely doubtful whether he would be able to stand the city work and city life. Here was his release in dignified, desirable form.

There were other considerations, too. It was no small inducement that he could be near his mother in Greendale. He had realized more than ever of late how hard it was for her to have her loved ones so scattered. His father was in China, his sister in Constantinople, he himself might just as well be at the uttermost parts of the earth for all she saw of him under normal conditions. And his going to Greendale would put an end to that source of regret and anxiety.

But, chief of all naturally, was the knowledge that the arrangement would bring joy to Sylvia. In spite of her sincere willingness to go anywhere with him he knew it was hard for her to leave the beloved home of her heart. And now there would be no need of such a sacrifice. The cottage and the Hall were but a stone throw apart, an admirable proximity so far as the professional partnership was concerned.

So Phil wired, "Accept gladly, if Sylvia approves," and had hardly sent the message before an enthusiastic letter arrived from Sylvia imploring him to say yes to Doctor Tom's proposition if it were not in any way contrary to his wishes and ambitions.

"Of course it is just too heavenly to think of our living at Arden Hall," she had written, "but, Phil, don't let any thought of me influence your decision. Whatever you want, I want. You know I'd be happy going to sea in a sieve with you if you elected to be a sieve pilot. But, oh Phil, I can't help hoping you will want to come to Greendale."

All of which made Sylvia's approval fairly evident.

Soon after this Phil went to call on the Huntleys, who had been kindness itself to him and to his mother during the latter's stay in the city. The doctor was not at home but Mrs. Huntley was delighted to see him and hovered over him with tea and sandwiches and cakes as a fond female bird hovers over its offspring with juicy worms.

When Phil came to revealing his future plans he did so a little warily remembering how he had refused Justin Huntley's generous offer. But Mrs. Huntley seemed genuinely pleased.

"How lovely for you! Now you can marry that sweet girl and everything will be quite all right, will it not?"

Phil explained that everything would have been quite all right in any case since the "sweet girl" had been willing to come to him if he had not been able to come to her.

"Quite as it should be," Mrs. Huntley had declared approvingly. "But I am glad it has come out as it has just the same. Do you know, Philip, I've always been a little glad you didn't take Justin's offer, dearly as I should have loved to have you with us."

Phil hesitated to speak, not being quite certain of his hostess' course of reasoning. But she soon enlightened him.

"It isn't the kind of work for a young man," she went on. "It is too disillusioning. Don't you think so? It might have made you a little--just a little--cynical, you know. Mightn't it? It is hard to keep your faith in human nature when you have a practice like Justin's." She paused a moment then continued with unusual affirmatives. "Justin was a country practitioner in a little town once. He took his father's place. Wonderful old man--Justin's father! As much of a priest as a doctor Justin used to say. He lived among kind, simple, hard-working people and they loved him like a father. You should have seen them flocking in from the farms and mountains to his funeral. There was a kind of personal relation you don't get in cities."

"No," agreed Phil. "Anyway, you don't get it in Dr. Huntley's kind of practice. I get some few chunks of personality at the clinic."

"Sometimes I've wished Justin had stayed in the country and followed his father's steps. But I suppose it had to be this way. Justin wasn't satisfied until he had worked his way to the top, though sometimes one wonders what the top really is," she sighed. "But, anyway, I am glad your father's son is going to have a different outlook. Justin will be glad, too. He liked your refusal, though it disappointed him. He understood."

"He has been very good to me, and you, too," said Phil, warmly. "I hope you don't think I don't appreciate his kindness and was ungrateful. It was a big thing to offer a young man. But I couldn't take it. I had to hold tight for my kind of a job. And, thanks to luck and Doctor Daly, I have it."

Watching the fine, earnest, young face, with its clear, honest, blue eyes, and that firm, strong chin, Mrs. Huntley thought Phil Lorrimer owed his opportunity chiefly to his own intrinsic worth, clear head, and fine ideals, which was true. But perhaps almost more was he beholden to a big-souled missionary out in China who had set him a standard of manhood to follow and a gentle, low-voiced woman who lived at the foot of Sylvia's Hill and had a gift for mothering.

July brought Stephen Kinnard back to Greendale after much wandering, from Alaska to Mexico, from Mexico to Quebec, and finally to Maryland. He had written charming desultory letters from time to time to Felicia and had been especially rejoiced over her having won the competition as he had prophesied. But never in any of the letters had he pressed again the question he had asked in September. Among other arts Stephen Kinnard possessed the art of long patience and the power of biding his time.

Occasionally jolly, friendly, brotherly epistles had come for Hope, too. At first Hope had blushed delightfully over them and read and reread them until she fairly knew them by heart. But as the letters came less frequently she gradually ceased to watch for them. Youth needs something more substantial than a chimera to feed upon. Moreover, in June, a young architect had come to Greendale to build Doctor Tom's hospital, a rather clever young man with some Beaux Arts letters after his name and a good eye for a pretty girl. Passing up the Hill and down it as he did frequently in his interviews with the Doctor, he had occasion to go by the Oriole Inn and it took him remarkably little time to discover that it was agreeable to drop in afternoons for a cup of tea in the quaint dining-room or out under the trees which the orioles still haunted. Perhaps not the least of the charms of the place was the presence of the fair-haired, slender lily of a girl who hovered about with a pleasing anxiety that he be well served and often took the task of ministration upon herself in her zeal.

Out of the corner of her eye Martha watched this too, even as she had watched Hope and Stephen the previous summer. It had for some time been evident to Martha's astute vision that so long as Hope remained unclaimed there would always be honey seekers about her sweet rose. Much as she dreaded to have Hope marry she thought she would prefer the sad certainty of such a contingency to the eternal worrying lest Hope be somehow hurt and her white flower-likeness be made to droop in the dust. The young architect apparently meant business. By July he was spending most of his free hours in Hope's society. Martha had almost settled down to acquiesce in the idea of Hope's surrender when she heard that Stephen Kinnard was back in Greendale, news which brought the anxious pucker back to her forehead.

But she need not have worried. Hope was pleased to see Stephen as a younger sister might have been glad to welcome back a long absent brother. She had all but forgotten she had ever had any dreams about him. The real love which was daily more engrossing made the pale little phantom love so insignificant as to be scarcely a thing to be recalled. It had been love and not the lover that Hope had hungered for from the first.

As for Stephen himself, Hope had never dwelt except upon the outer margins of his consciousness. He had admired her as the artist in him always paid tribute to beauty wherever he found it. He had a fatal gift of kindness always and gave careless largess easily to lovely women whenever they had the luck to cross his path. That Hope had invested him, even temporarily, with the glamour of her sweet, shy, little dreams he had no manner of idea. He had, from the beginning, paid homage to a higher court.

Shrewdly perceiving that the chief obstacle to his suit was Sylvia, Stephen did not blunder into a premature insistence. Sylvia's wedding was set for early September. He could afford to wait a little, though he took pains to make himself very useful and desirable in little ways to the household on the Hill while he waited.

During the summer Sylvia had a few brief letters from Jack. He was well, intensely thrilled by the experience he was undergoing, rejoicing endlessly, apparently, in his luck at having at last found a genuine task which he could pursue with all the zest of play. Physical courage had always been an inherent characteristic with him. Danger agreed with him as he had said to Sylvia. In deeds of daring he had always delighted, simply, with no fuss about it. Jack was never spectacular. It was merely that being a good gambler he liked hazards. This game of life and death made an excellent substitute for the game of love in which he had gallantly lost. In fact it seemed he found even greater satisfaction in it. At any rate, he was in it, as he had been in love, with all his might and main and with all his heart.

Sylvia's engagement, expected as it had been, had appeared to disturb little less than the surface of his exultant, new found joy of service. Perhaps the larger issues swallowed up his private grief even as they had swallowed Hilda Jensen's. Certainly he had little time for thought or brooding. Life crowded thick around him. He was in the same unit with John Armstrong and that in itself was a satisfaction, for the two had long been staunch friends. Hilda, also, he saw occasionally as she was working in the hospital at Neuilly, not far from the front.

It was Hilda who wrote in August that Jack had been wounded and was in the hospital in her care. The injury, though painful, was not serious and Jack made light of it as well he might, for he had been "cité" for "distinguished service under fire" and won the Croix de Guerre.

"The men all say he has a charmed life," wrote Hilda. "The Poilus are quite superstitious about him. He goes anywhere, everywhere with his car, in the most unheard of, impossible places with the utmost disregard of it and himself. John says he never saw anything like him. He keeps them all, French and American alike, in an uproar of mirth, too. Even in the hospital it is the same. He tells his funniest stories and makes his absurdest jokes and has everybody in a good humor without trying. He is the sunniest fellow I ever knew. You can't down him. You needn't worry about him as far as you are concerned, Sylvia. I don't mean he doesn't care. He does care tremendously. He deserves the Croix de Guerre, in love, too. He has been under fire. You can see that. But what I mean is, he is so thoroughly wholesome and happy-hearted he will come out all right. He can't help it. John says it is making a man of him over here, and I believe it is true, though I think you started that process.

"But, oh, Sylvia, it is dreadful! If ever it ends I shall fly back to safe, peaceful, happy America and try to forget all the agonies I've seen and lived over here. We all hope America will manage to keep out of war, but it seems as if she could not long do so with safety and honor. It is hard to forget the Lusitania, and for us it is almost harder to forget Belgium. Americans at home will never fully understand Belgium. For us it has been stamped with red hot irons upon our minds and memories. We cannot forget."

As Sylvia eagerly read this letter she couldn't help hoping that somehow or other this terrible experience Hilda and Jack were going through together might, in time, bring them still nearer. Women are incorrigible matchmakers where their old lovers are concerned, and Jack and Hilda had long been good friends. They were both too essentially sane and too young to let their lives be wrecked by the hapless experiences with which they had started out. If only they might find consolation and happiness in each other Sylvia thought she would have nothing left to wish for.

And so summer days came and went, with their joys and their sorrows, their dreams and their despairs, their losses and their gains, woven all into the common web of life. And finally again came September.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE END AND THE BEGINNING

Cloudless September afternoon! The same blue space of sky beyond the shining-leaved magnolia; the same pink and white riot of cosmos; the same dial dedicating itself to none but sunny hours! And again Barb and Suzanne and Sylvia on the porch at Arden Hall. Externally everything was much as it had been a twelve month ago. But the year had brought its changes and left its traces as years will. As the shell's growth is marked by its increasing number of circles so spiritual development stamps its impress upon human faces and even more on human souls. Barb and Suzanne and Sylvia were less unchanged than the outer world. All three had grown in the grace of wisdom, each according to her way and measure.

Barb was still quiet and humble of heart, but the year had given her the poise which comes from increasing self dependence and even more from depths and widths of experience. Barbara was learning to base life broad on the roots of things and faced the world serenely content if a little gravely, going the "softlier all her days for the dream's sake" as so many women do.

Suzanne was, on the surface, the least changed. She still flashed out conversational audacities and delighted in "taking a shot at the idols" as she put it. But underneath the jewel-like hardness and brilliance of the exterior there was a difference. Her theories of life were not so polished and compact and perfected. She had undergone more than one seismic upheaval of emotion during the year and her "cock-sureness" was shattered if not annihilated. But the greatest difference lay in her deepened power of human sympathy and understanding. The success of "Melissa on the Road" had not been mere accident but a logical outgrowth of its author's surer insight into life, and the play was an even more certain indication that Suzanne in finding herself had found something universal at the same time.

As for Sylvia--but let Sylvia speak for herself. Suzanne, lolling as before in Sylvia's hammock, again pronounced judgment.

"I never knew a person for whom the whole universe seemed to be working the way it does for you, Sylvia Arden. Now, if I had wanted to live in a certain place Roger would have been called to Kamchatka or Kalamazoo or some other God forgotten spot. But just because you had your heart set on living at Arden Hall the fates come galloping up to present Phil a choice professional opening on a charger."

"Do you know whether a charger is a horse or a platter?" laughed Sylvia. "I should never know from your phrasing."

"It is both, of course. Don't criticize my diction. Diction is my business. And don't crab. Honest, Sylvia, don't you think your luck is altogether out of proportion to your deserts?"

"'In the course of justice which of us should see salvation?'" quoted Sylvia. "Oh, I know, Suzanne. It is almost too good to be true that Phil can find the right kind of work in Greendale and we can live here at Arden Hall. But you are mistaken about my having set my heart on living here. I love it better than any place on earth but I would have gone anywhere with Phil. Even the Hall wanes in comparison with him." And Sylvia blushed charmingly as she made the admission.

"Of course you think so. Quite the proper sentiment to express twenty-four hours before your wedding. May the Lord give me grace to feel the same next December when I follow your lead to the altar. But, Sylvia, you don't really know what you are talking about. I can't imagine you in a little apartment. You're too--spacious."

Sylvia smiled.

"Oh, I believe I could have adjusted my spaciousness if necessary. But I'm rather glad I don't have to. I'd rather--spread."

"You will spread, too," put in Barb. "You and Phil will have a wonderful opportunity to really live here, more than you could ever have done in the city."

"I hope so." Sylvia's eyes were thoughtful as she looked out across the lawn, past the magnolia to the blue sky, just as she had a year ago. She looked as if she saw visions. Perhaps she did. The "home trust" which she and Felicia had formed years ago was still an integral part of her scheme of things. She meant her home to be a home in the truest sense, not just a house beneath whose roof she could shelter herself and her loved ones. She wanted her doors to stand open wide to the world--especially the lonely people. "The lonely people" were always very close to Sylvia's heart perhaps because her own lonely girlhood had given her the clew to the yearning that nearly all the world knows at times.

"You are going to keep on being viciously contented," accused Suzanne.

"I hope so," said Sylvia again. "I feel that way at present, anyway. I am afraid I'll never do anything very big, Suzanne. You and Barb are going to leave me way behind, I know. I haven't any special ambition except to be happy myself and to make other people within my range happy, too."

"You are a genius at that. Remember what Mr. Kinnard said. Don't let Suzanne tease you, Sylvia. You have the secret of living. If all the people in the world wanted to be happy themselves and tried to see that other people near them were happy, why--"

"The millennium would have come," finished Suzanne. "You are blooming sentimentalists both of you, though I don't deny there is a little solid sense behind your sentiment. Anyway, I have a sneaking notion I shall have a sort of satisfaction knowing that down here on your Hill things are going to be a little more the way they ought to be than is customary in this cranky old world."

"Why, Suzanne! That is just what I was thinking," cried Barb. "I see so much sin and sordidness and misery and things so snarled and twisted that it seems as if they never would smooth out. I'm going to see even more this year if I go in for the probation work. And it is wonderful to me to be able to think that it is all clean and sweet and happy and kind in Sylvia's world. It is kindness somehow that is important. If we would all be kind the way Christ taught us there wouldn't be any war and hate and competition and oppression. We'd all be just brothers and sisters."

"Maybe that is what we are growing into," said Sylvia soberly. "Thank you, Barb. I like that--what you said just now. Remember, if you want to send anybody down to my--our garden-- It is Phil's, too--we shall be glad to take her--or him--in. We want to help."

"We want to help." That is the keynote of the new democracy. And Barb and Suzanne and Sylvia, each in her own way, had enlisted in the shining army which is none other than the army of love.

And indoors, while the three girls were thus philosophizing about the universe at large, Felicia and Stephen had suddenly concentrated upon themselves.

"Felicia," Stephen was saying, "I have waited very patiently. Haven't you a different answer for me this time? I am not going to pretend I shall go away broken-hearted if it is no. My heart is a little too old to break, but if you could make it yes it will make all the difference in the world. Couldn't you say it, dear? Sylvia won't need you after to-morrow. And you know the kiddies won't be the losers. We'll see to that. Those reasons of yours aren't operative any more, you know."

"But there is still Sydney," she reminded him gravely, her face averted.

"There is," he admitted. "Ah, but, Felicia, you can't live all your days on a memory--even so vital a one. I don't expect to take Syd's place. I don't even want to. But, Felicia, look at me. Haven't I somewhere a place all my own in your heart?"

And then Felicia lifted her eyes, still forget-me-not blue like Marianna's.

"Yes, Stephen, I believe you have--a big place. If you want me as I am, the best of me gone, the rest is all yours."

Night and stillness of night on Arden Hall and Sylvia's garden! Suddenly out of the darkness Sylvia stole down the broad staircase, candle in hand, like a vestal virgin, in her white silk robe, her dark hair unbound, lying loose upon her shoulders.

On the wall, near the foot of the stairs hung two portraits; one, of a dark-eyed young man, the other a lovely young girl, looking out with wistful, wondering gaze upon the world.

Straight to the portraits went Sylvia, holding her candle high. For a moment she stood there with uplifted face and rapt gaze, trying to speak to these two, to bespeak their blessing this night on the daughter who was to follow in their footsteps to-morrow in giving herself in marriage to the mate she loved.

"If only you were here," she sighed. "I do want you so, Father! Mother! Please try to know and be glad I am so happy. Please be glad. I want you to be glad."

In the flickering light of the uplifted candle it seemed to Sylvia as if her father's dark eyes smiled down into hers as if he understood and was glad as she desired.

"The truest and the kindest," she whispered. "That was what Doctor Tom said, and I know you must have been. Phil is like that, too, Father. I'm glad you know. Good night."

Then she turned to the fair girl whom it had always been a little hard to think of as a mother, she was so tiny and sweet and girlish herself and her eyes looked so incredibly young and innocent.

"Little Mother!" crooned Sylvia. "Little, little Mother! I wonder if you were afraid at all. Did you ever feel like running away even from him? This marrying is such a big, solemn business. Didn't you feel a teeny little bit scared about it all? It isn't that you are afraid of him. It is rather yourself you don't trust, as if you weren't quite tall enough to reach up to marriage. Marriage is so high, so dreadfully high. But it is all right, isn't it, little Mother? You just have to trust love, don't you? Good night, little Mother. Please love me up there where you are."

This rite over, Sylvia turned to go back upstairs. But the moonlight fell in bright patines across the floor from the latticed windows, beside the front door, and Sylvia had never been able to resist moonlight. Hastily she set down her candle and snatched up a black velvet cloak from the rack and throwing it about her shoulders, covering her thin silken draperies, she unbolted the rear door which led out into the garden and ran down the steps into the enchanted world outside.

Even as she reached the path she uttered a half startled exclamation. A tall form was pacing up and down under the willow-trees, silhouetted against the whiteness of the garden space. She did not retreat however but stood motionless as a statue with the moonlight full upon her. In a moment the silhouetted figure turned and came swiftly toward her.

"Sylvia!"

"Phil!"

For a second she was swept into Phil's arms, his kiss on her lips. Then they stood apart, looking at each other as if all at once they had discovered some new, sacred thing which all their love up to now had not taught them.

"Phil, I'm glad--glad it is you," breathed Sylvia. "Glad I'm going to be yours."

"Forever and ever, amen," said Phil Lorrimer, as solemnly as if he were pronouncing his own wedding service.

The actual ceremony took place the next day in the gray stone Gothic church where Sylvia's father and mother had been made man and wife. But to Sylvia, and perhaps to Phil, too, it always seemed as if the real wedding had been the night before in the white moonlight of Sylvia's own garden. There it was at least that Sylvia lost forever her fear of not being able to reach up to marriage however high it was. Love, she knew, would show her the way.

THE END

* * * * * * * *

CHARMING BOOKS FOR GIRLS

May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list