Front matter (continued 2)

The loudly ticking clock on the kitchen mantel struck off hour after hour. A lusty cock began calling his fellows long before the fading of the stars. Rosamund, standing again at the breast-high casement of the little window, for the first time in her life watched the day break. Rosy fingers of light reached up from the eastern mountains; valley and hillsides threw off their purple and silver wrappings of night, and gradually took on their natural colors; little fitful gusts of air, sweet with night-drawn fragrance, touched her face at the window; from their nests in the near-by fruit-trees faint, sleepy twitterings soon increased to a joyful chorus of bird music; the shadows melted, it was day, and the world awoke; but it was a new world to Rosamund. She had touched the pulse of life, and with the dawn there was born in her heart a purpose, feeble and immature as yet, but as surely purpose as the newborn babe is man.

Father Cary came up the mountain early to attend to his cattle, bringing word that his daughter was not so well, and that Mother Cary could not leave her until later in the day, but that Miss Randall was to feel at home, and Yetta was to do all she could for her comfort. He had made breakfast ready by the time Rosamund came into the kitchen; and presently Yetta stumbled down the stairs, yawning and sleepy-eyed.

"Gee!" she said, by way of morning greeting, "If this place ain't the limit for sleep! When I first come up here I jist had to set up in bed an' listen to the quiet; kept me awake all night, it did. Now I want to sleep all day an' all night, too! Ain't it the limit?"

"But that's the best thing in the world for you," Rosamund said, and smiled at her. The girl must have divined a difference in the smile, for she beamed cheerfully back.

"That's what Doctor Ogilvie says," she replied. "All's the matter with me is m'eyes. Y'see I been sewin' ever since I's about as big as a peanut; first I sewed on buttons to help my mother, an' then I sewed beads. There was my mother an' me an' m'father, on'y he wasn't ever there; an' we had four boarders. Course the boarders had to set next to the light, an' I couldn't see very well. Then after my mother died, I sewed collars day-times and beads at night, till I got the job in the shirt-waist shop. Tha's where m'eyes got inspected—they don't never inspect you till you get a good job. It don't do me no good to know my eyes is bad; I could a told 'em that m'self—only thing is, that was the reason they sent me up here, so I've that much to thank 'em for, I guess. Still, I——"

But Father Cary interrupted the stream of chatter. "Now look a here," he said, "supposin' you do less talkin' an' more eatin'! Two glasses of milk, two dishes o' oatmeal, and two eggs is what you got to get away with before you get up from this table."

But Yetta's tongue was irrepressible. "You watch me!" she replied, and grinned at him, her black eyes sparkling. "That's another funny thing about the country," she informed Rosamund, nodding. It was evident that she believed Miss Randall to be as much a stranger to the country as she herself had been. "In the city all you want to eat in the mornin' is a bite o' bread an' some tea; nobody ever heard o' eatin' eggs in the mornin', nor oatmeal any other time; but here—Gee! I can stow away eggs while the band plays on, an' tea ain't in it with milk—this yere kind o' milk!"

Rosamund's strained ear caught a faint rustle from the inner room; she sprang up, followed closely by the others; the child had moved his head, and his eyes were closed; before that they had been ever so slightly open. Rosamund laid her hand upon his forehead, bent down so that his breath fanned her soft cheek. Then she looked up at Father Cary.

"I believe he is really sleeping, not unconscious," she whispered. "I think we must keep very, very quiet."

Yetta nodded, tiptoed out of the room, and presently Father Cary's large form passed the window on the way to the stable.

So again was Rosamund's vigil renewed, unbroken through several hours except by faint noises from without, the humming of a locust, the chirps of birds, the homely conversation of some chickens, who had stolen up to the little house, lonely for Mother Cary. She must have dozed, for it seemed only a short time before the kitchen clock struck eleven, and almost at the same moment the doctor stood in the doorway, with Mother Cary behind him.

The doctor's hair had been very much blown by the wind, but it would have taken more than wind to send his smile awry.

"Morning!" he threw towards Rosamund.

She was at once aware that he thought of her only as the child's nurse, oblivious of all that other men saw in her, of her beauty and grace, of the signs of wealth and well-being in her garments and bearing. It amused her, though her smile was, perhaps, a little disdainful.

The boy was better; the doctor could find no serious injuries. "I am sure the car barely touched him," Rosamund said, and the doctor nodded.

"But it sometimes takes so little to shock the life out of a little underfed, weakened body like this," he said. "There's nothing to fight with, nothing to build on."

Rosamund's hand went over her heart. "Then you think," she asked, "you think that he will not——"

"On the contrary, I am very sure that he will," the doctor smiled at her. "Mother Cary, here, will teach you how to make him well."

Mother Cary laid her wrinkled hand on the girl's arm, but Rosamund's eyes filled with tears. "Poor mite!" she said, bending over the child, "we will try to make you well—but I don't know what for!"

Then Mother Cary spoke for the first time since her return. "Don't you trouble yourself about the what for, dearie," she said. "Folks is got plenty to keep 'em busy with the 'what way' and the 'what next' without troublin' themselves with the 'what for.' Ain't it so, Doctor?"

"It most certainly is," the red-headed doctor agreed, running his fingers through his already tousled hair. When he had given her further directions for the care of the child and driven off behind his jogging old white mare, he seemed to have left with her some of his own happy energy and assurance. Quite suddenly, the fatigue of her sleepless night fell from her, and from some unsuspected inner store-house of strength there crept a serenity and determination hitherto undreamed of. The boy would sleep, the doctor had told her, until late afternoon, probably awake hungry and thirsty, and then ought to sleep again; he must be kept very quiet, nourished regularly and lightly, made clean and comfortable; such careful and ceaseless nursing should, in a week or two, bring him out with even more strength than he had had before. So, until afternoon, there would be little for her to do.

She went into the kitchen to be with the old woman, who was moving about with her queer, crab-like motion of crutches and hands, preparing their dinner; Yetta had taken herself to the fields.

"No, indeedy, you can't help me one mite," Mother Cary declared, "exceptin' by settin' in that arm cheer and puttin' your pretty head back and restin.' There's nothin' I enjoy more'n a body to talk to whilst I'm a gettin' dinner, or supper. Yetta ain't that kind of a body, though! Land! The way the child can talk, and the things she knows!" Mother Cary turned about from her biscuit board to emphasize her horror. "Honey," she said, impressively, "that child knows more o' the world, the bad side of it, than—well, than I do!"

Rosamund smiled, and the old woman shook her head at her. "Oh, I was brought up in the city, honey," she told her, "so I know more about it than you think for. That's what makes me glad the doctor brought us a girl, this time; she's the first girl we've had this summer. I wisht it might be that she could stay up here as I did, but land! they ain't but one Pap! Pap jest made me stay, and me a cripple, too! He said he couldn't be happy without somebody to look after; and whilst it was a new idea to me then, I come to see the sense of it many a long year ago! That poor little Yetta! It's her eyes is bad. They ain't so bad but what they won't do well enough for most things; but all she knows how to do is to sew beads and buttons and run a big sewin' machine in a shop. They say her eyes won't hold out for that! Land! If I was rich, I'd have her taught music, that's what I'd do! You jest ought to hear the child sing, dearie! To hear her in the evenin's settin' down on the fence an' singin', why, it's prettier 'n a whip-poor-will a-callin'. It wouldn't surprise me a mite if Yetta could be learnt to sing that well, with some new songs and such, that folks would pay money to hear her!"

"Perhaps we could find some way to help her," Miss Randall suggested. Mother Cary flashed a keen look at her.

"Do you know any rich folks, honey, that might?" she asked eagerly. "Yetta's a good little thing, for all the bad she knows. An' she jest loves an' loves whatever is pretty an' sweet!"

"I think perhaps I do know someone," Rosamund said. "But I wanted especially to ask you to let me board with you here for a while. Is there room for me?"

"Room a plenty, dearie," the old woman said, as she hobbled to the door to strike the metal hoop that swung from the over-hanging floor of the second story. "But," she added, when she had sent the summons ringing out to Pap and Yetta, and had come back and seated herself near the girl, "but there ain't any call for you to pay. Pap an' me has a plenty to share with folks that come our way; and you're helpin' with Timmy. I'd be real pleased to have you stay."

But Rosamund hesitated. "I'm afraid I cannot do that," she said, "unless you will let me pay something. I can afford it, really," she added, smiling.

For a long moment the old woman looked at her, keenly, kindly, with the faintest, tenderest, most teasing smile on her little wrinkled face that was as brown as a nut. "An' can't you really afford to visit?" she asked. "There's a plenty of folks that can afford to pay and to give; there ain't so many as can afford to take and to be done for. Ain't you forgettin' which kind you be?"

Rosamund lifted her head, and looked directly into the twinkling, faded old eyes. "No," she said, "I'm not forgetting the kind I am! I think I am only beginning to find out!"

Mother Cary laid her hand over the girl's in her usual gesture of caress before she hobbled to the dinner table. Pap and Yetta had come in and were already seating themselves.

It was the sweetest meal that Rosamund had ever tasted; but she had still to find out more about herself. They had not risen from the table when a musical view-halloo sounded up from the road below the stretch of woods, and in a moment Flood and Pendleton sprang out of the big red car and came briskly up the little walk. Rosamund went forward to meet them.

"Why, I say," said Flood, beaming at her, "you're looking right as a trivet, you know!"

Pendleton drawled: "Ah, fair knight-errantess! Miss Nightingale! Also Rose o' the World! You wouldn't be smiling like that if you knew Cecilia's state of mind!"

Rosamund laughed, and held out her hand to them. "I can imagine it," she said. "It's plain that I had better keep out of her way for a time!"

"I'm at your service," cried Flood bowing low: with mock servility, delighted at her merry mood, at her smiles which included even himself.

But Pendleton understood her better. "Now, what are you up to, Rosy?" he asked, severely, uneasily. She came directly to the point.

"I am going to stay here," she announced.

Both men stared at her. "How d'ye mean?" asked Flood weakly.

"The deuce you are!" cried Pendleton.

"Oh! With Mrs. Reeves!" Flood beamed, as if he had found an answer even while asking.

"Is that it? Why didn't you say so? Where is Eleanor, anyway?" Pendleton asked.

Rosamund laughed again. "I'm sure I don't know!" she said. "She is at Bluemont, and that's miles away, isn't it? I haven't even asked. No, Marshall, no, Mr. Flood, I am going to stay here, right here, here in this house, or this valley, or this mountain, but here, here as long as I like—forever, if I want to! That's what I mean—or part of it!"

It was evident that her laughter carried more conviction than any amount of seriousness would have done. Poor Flood's face got redder, and he suddenly, after a stare, turned on his heel, and walked rather slowly down the path to his car, standing beside it with his arms folded, looking across at the strip of woods, but seeing nothing. Pendleton, however, felt it incumbent upon him to remonstrate.

"Of course, we all know you can afford any whim you like, Rosamund," he said, in the tone of the old friend who dares, "but I think I ought to warn you that this sort of thing is not—not in the best of taste, you know! It is not done, really—in—in—among our sort, you know!"

Rosamund openly showed her amusement. "That is undoubtedly true, my dear Marshall," she said, "but this time it is going to be done! I am going to do it! You think it is a freak, and I'm sure I can say it isn't, because I don't in the least know what it is!"

"I think you're mad. If I had not been an unwilling observer of the accident, I should believe it was you had got concussion, and not the infant."

"My dear Marshall, your diagnosis is wrong! I may have a—a disease, but it is not madness. Did you ever hear of people who had suffered from loss of memory for years and years and quite suddenly recovered it? Perhaps I'm one of those—I feel as if I had only just come to my senses!"

"I don't know what you're talking about!" said Pendleton.

"Don't you? I thought you wouldn't!" Again she laughed, and at the sound Flood started, looked back towards the house where she stood, radiant and lovely, framed in the doorway, and then got into his car.

But Pendleton had one further protest. "You can't stay in this—this hovel, alone, Rosamund! You can't think of doing it! Please remember I have got to go back to Cecilia! What on earth am I going to say to her?"

"Poor Marshall! Tell Cecilia, with my love, that I am going to stay here for the present. She may send me some clothes by express, or not, as she likes. Please give her my love, and tell her that I hope she will have a pleasant visit with the Whartons—she had better go there to-morrow. And try, my dear Marshall, to assure her of my sanity! Good-by! Don't let me keep you waiting!"

Pendleton pushed back his hat, thrust his hands deep into his pockets, and looked at her. Then he drew a long breath and delivered himself, oracularly. "Rosamund," he said, "you're a fool! You can't, you really can't, do this sort of thing, you know. Why, my dear girl, it—it is not done, you know, in—"

But Rosamund ran back into the house, turned a flashing, smiling look upon him over her shoulder, cried, "Good-by, Marshall! Give my love to Cecilia!" and was gone, leaving him there agape. There was really nothing for him to do but rejoin Flood.

Cecilia, however, remained for a time inconsolable. Flood and Pendleton motored back across the mountain, told Mrs. Maxwell of Rosamund's decision to remain indefinitely in the little cottage on the mountain, and forthwith avoided the presence of the irate lady as much as possible. Fortunately, the newly arriving week-end guests had to be entertained. They were very good and very stupid; but, as Pendleton said, anything was better than Cecilia in a temper.

Left to herself, Cecilia's mind was occupied with a veritable jack-straw puzzle of events, motives, contingencies. She had had good reason, before this, to know that Rosamund enjoyed unforeseen departures; but that anyone should deliberately choose to forego the luxuries of Oakleigh, to stay, instead, in what Mrs. Maxwell considered a peasant's cottage—such conduct, such a choice, were beyond the lady's imagination and experience. Rosamund must be wild; for surely not even pique at Cecilia's generalship, not even annoyance at Flood's attentions, not even the desire to be near that tiresome Eleanor Reeves, could have determined her to such a move. As for the accident, anyone could have cared for the child. Rosamund could have paid a dozen nurses to stay there, if she was charitably inclined; and certainly Mr. Flood had shown that he wanted to do what was right. Cecilia could not understand it.

VII

After the retreat of Pendleton and Flood, Rosamund went back to the little boy's room, smiling. Mother Cary looked up at her with a face slightly troubled.

"Seems like your friends ain't willing to have you stay here," she said. "Is there anything calling you home, honey, anything that needs you?"

The girl shook her head. "I think I have never been needed anywhere in all my life, until now," she said. Then, perhaps because of Flood's words, she remembered Eleanor. "Well, perhaps there is one person who has needed me, from time to time; and, dear Mother Cary, she is somewhere near here. She came to Bluemont to be near Doctor Ogilvie."

"There's a many a one that does," said Mother Cary.

"My friend is Mrs. Reeves. Do you know her?"

"Land, honey, rich city folks don't bother to become acquainted with the likes of me!" the old woman said, smiling.

"Mrs. Reeves is not 'rich city folks.' She is working for her living all the while she is here in the mountains; she is companion for another of the doctor's patients, Mrs. Hetherbee."

"Oh, I know!" Yetta exclaimed. "I saw her in the post-office one day askin' for the mail, while the old one waited outside in the automobile. Gee! That old one looked cross!"

Rosamund laughed. "And do you know where they live?"

"Sure! Want me to show you?"

"I should like it ever and ever so much if you would take a note there for me. Could you do that? Is it too far?"

Mother Cary patted Yetta's dark hair. "She can go over with Pap, when he goes to the store," she said. "She'll be real glad to; won't you, Yetta?"

So it came to pass that in the late afternoon Eleanor came in Mrs. Hetherbee's car. The boy Tim was resting so quietly that Rosamund had gone outside; she went swiftly down the little red path to the gate, and the two met, arms entwining, cheek to cheek, with little laughs and questions and soft cries.

"Your note said there was an accident!" These were Eleanor's first words. "Darling, that is not why you are here? You are not hurt?"

"Why I am here; but it was not I—I was not hurt! Look at me—feel me!"

"Nor Cecilia?"

"Nor anyone, you precious, that you know! A tiny mite of a boy, Eleanor, and I stayed to take care of him."

"You?"

"Oh, don't say it like that! And yet I don't wonder!"

Eleanor's arm was about her at once. "Sweet, I was only wondering that Cecilia let you!"

"Cecilia did not let me; and you were wondering, too, why I stayed, what really kept me. You are quite right; of my own accord I shouldn't have stayed. My own impulse would not have moved that way. I should have taken the easy, the obvious course, if I had been left to choose. But I wasn't, you see."

Eleanor looked at her keenly. This note of bitterness was quite new. Suddenly she remembered Ogilvie; but almost on the instant Rosamund spoke again.

"What manner of man do you find this red-headed doctor of yours?"

Eleanor laughed. "He gets his own way with people!" She looked at her friend, but Rosamund's face was turned from her. "I have never met anyone else like him. I thought at first that he was two people—a man of heart and a man of science; you know his reputation, and yet he stays up here mainly, I am told, to be near these mountain people. He says that they trust him, and seems to think that excuse enough for staying."

"I thought he stayed for the air or something?"

"He did, but now he is perfectly well again. And his character is not dual; nothing so romantic. He is a man of science just because he is a man of heart. He is one of the simplest people I have ever known."

"You seem to know him pretty well."

"Oh, he is the first object of interest to all his patients; we talk of nothing else! I am only a case to him."

Rosamund laughed. "Very likely, dear! And what does he think of you, as a case?"

Eleanor's face took on its shadow of sadness. "He—he does not know," she said; and Rosamund drew a swift breath of pain.

Eleanor came daily after that, Mrs. Hetherbee, a worn, eager little woman with restless eyes, showing herself entirely complaisant when it seemed likely that the very well known Miss Randall would return Eleanor's visits. Her attitude towards her companion had been pleasant enough before, but it certainly took on a new warmth after Rosamund's arrival in the neighborhood, and when she learned that Mrs. Reeves was one of Miss Randall's lifelong friends.

"You will have to drive over and call on Mrs. Hetherbee, Rose," Eleanor assured her. "If you don't I shall feel that I'm using her car under false pretenses!"

So Rosamund called, and Mrs. Hetherbee basked in the distinction of being the only person at the Summit whom Miss Randall cared to know. Thereafter Eleanor came daily across the valley, tenderly sweet as only she knew how to be, almost at once becoming fast friends with Mother Cary, and hanging over the boy with aching heart and arms weary of their emptiness. Rosamund always felt as if a hand of pain clutched at her heart as she watched them.

"Who is he?" Eleanor had asked the first day she saw him. "Is he the child of these people?"

"He is a waif," Rosamund said, and told how Mother Cary made of the little white house a refuge of love for the needy ones of the city. "And this tiny boy, Doctor Ogilvie says, needs love more than most of them. The Charities have tried to have him adopted; but most people do not want boys—not homely little boys, whose fathers were not at all good and whose mothers died very young and very forlorn. Timmy has gone begging—and he will have to go back after his summer here is over. The most to be hoped for is that he will go back stronger; then perhaps he will be prettier, and some one may want him. It is really unspeakably pathetic."

So Eleanor hung over the child, and gradually there grew up in Rosamund's heart and mind a plan, which, as it matured, was to alter the course of life for all of them.

But that was not until later; and while to her on the mountain the days passed uneventfully enough, they were days of distressful change for her sister. During the first week or two, Cecilia sent her four letters and eleven telegrams—the telegrams being duly delivered with the letters, whenever Father Cary drove across the valley to the store. Rosamund read them all, pondered, smiled, and then sent off a reassuring telegram by Eleanor. Later she wrote two letters; the first was to her banker, and in the second she said:

DEAREST CISSY:

Don't be too cross! You've always been an angel to me, and I love you; but I am tired, tired, tired of the sort of life we lead; and the other day, when Mr. Flood's man so obligingly bumped into the poor little boy, I was wondering how on earth I could get out of it for a time, get some sort of change. Then, the people here seemed to take it for granted that I would stay to nurse the child. It was the first time in my life that anyone had ever taken for granted that I would do the right thing if it meant personal discomfort. Before, I had always been praised and applauded if I merely happened to do it. I don't suppose I can make you understand, dearest Cissy; but just that made all the difference in the world to me. And now I am going to stay here—for how long, I do not know. Until I get tired of it, perhaps, or until I can think up something else. The mountains are so big, Cecilia, and the stars so bright, and the sun does such good work!

I have put some money to your credit; I think there will be enough to last you for a while. You can even get the motor car, if you want to. And if I were you, I should stop in town and get a few linens and perhaps a hat or two and a parasol at Lucille's. You will need a lot of things at Bar Harbor. I suppose you will go right up to the Whartons'.

You say I have broken up Mr. Flood's plans. I'm afraid I don't altogether agree to that. There was only another week-end left in June, and we were not going to stay any longer than that. I do not choose to think that you referred to other plans of his. If you do, please understand that I have no interest in them.

Give my love to the Whartons; they have always thought me queer, anyway, so you will not have to account to them for me. And don't be too cross!

Cecilia's reply, which the doctor brought up the mountain a week later, was dated from Bar Harbor. It read:

DEAR ROSAMUND:

It's no use saying what I think. But you are exceedingly disagreeable about Mr. Flood, and the mountains were just as big at Oakleigh, and the sun is just as hot in one place as another at this time of year, and it is very selfish of you to break up everybody's plans. But at least I can say that I am glad you remain sane upon some subjects. I hope you got the trunks I sent over to Bluemont Summit; and I took your advice about the linens. There was a white serge, too, that was unusually good for the price. I haven't decided about the car. We play bridge here twice a day, and my game seems rather uncertain, since the shock you gave me. And Minnie has invited Benson Flood for two weeks, and a good many things may happen. I may not buy the car after all. I told Minnie that you were camping in the mountains, and she only raised her eyebrows. Well—all I can say is that poor dear Mamma always admitted Colonel Randall was peculiar. If you are not going to wear your opals this summer, you may as well let me have them.

Rosamund laughed aloud at the letter. Doctor Ogilvie was sitting on the side of Timmy's bed, and she had gone to the window to read it. At her laugh he looked up.

"Good news?" he asked, cheerfully. He was always cheerful, as cheerful as a half-grown puppy.

"Neither good nor bad," she replied, "only amusing."

"But whatever is amusing is good," he asserted.

She looked up from folding her letter, to see whether he was in earnest. "That," she said, slowly, "is rather a unique point of view!"

He ran his fingers through his hair, and came towards her. "Unique? I hope not," he replied. "Oh, I see what you mean—you're taking issue with my word 'amusing'! I'm not thinking of passing the time, as a definition of that word; I'm thinking of fun, mirth, that kind of amusement—nothing to do with chorus ladies and things to eat and drink and that sort of thing, you know!"

She was learning to watch his smile as one watches a barometer; to-day the signs were certainly propitious. There was something of indulgence in her look as she replied to him, the indulgence one feels towards the young and inexperienced.

"So you think it is a good thing to be amused—in your way?" she asked.

He nodded. "Most assuredly. Nothing like it. And the most amusing thing I know is the way we can cheat disease and dirt and a few other nice little things like them—turn the joke on them! Now, there's Master Tim—eh, youngster? Life will seem like a good deal of a joke to you, when you get over that ache in your hip, won't it? Think you'll find fun in life then, don't you, old chap? And there's a girl down in the valley—by the way, how'd you like to go down with me and make a call? Do you a lot of good!"

He cocked his head on one side and looked at Rosamund inquiringly, persuasively.

She had seen him every day for two weeks, and this was the first moment he had looked at her with the least shadow of personal interest. Until now, she had felt that she was no more to him than an article of furniture, certainly less of a personage than Mother Cary or Yetta or the sick child. She had a feeling that he tolerated her solely as an aid, that she had not even the virtue of being a 'case'; and she told herself in secret disgust that while she did not possess the last virtue, she at least shared the patients' fault, or absurdity; she had to admit that he piqued her interest, and she resented his doing so, blaming him even while disgusted at herself.

But, to-day, with the charming woman's intuition, she knew that he was seeing her with different eyes, as if she had only just now come within his range of vision; yet she knew that his was a look that she had not encountered from other men.

Hitherto, the men she knew had been quite evidently aware of her beauty. She had always accepted, quite calmly, the fact that there was enough of that to be of first consideration, over and beyond anything else that she might possess. This country doctor was the first man who had ever appeared unconscious of the excellence of her femininity; but the same pride which had led her to repel Flood's admiration forbade her making any conscious appeal for Ogilvie's. There was, after all, very little of the coquette in her. The amusement that his obliviousness caused her, or the interest it excited in her, was only increased by his suggestion that she should accompany him on a visit to some mountaineer's cottage; he had offered it as likely to do her good, and not, as she might not unreasonably have expected, that her going would brighten or benefit or honor the mountain girl. It was a new experience, surely, for Rosamund Randall!

On their way down the mountain, which White Rosy knew so well that to guide her would have been entirely superfluous, he talked cheerfully, as always, of many things—of White Rosy herself, of the mountain people, of the view across the valley, of roadside shrubs and flowers. It was the first of their drives together, and the woman they went to see that day became a most important factor in their destinies.

At first she listened to him with scarcely more interest than she would have felt towards the amiable volubility of any of the countrymen; but his talk soon rose above the commonplace. Insensibly he became aware that the girl beside him could understand, could sympathize, respond.

"I know you can't put ropes on the world and try to pull back against its turning round," the doctor said when at a bend of the road they could look down almost upon the roof of a cottage below, a cottage with a sadly neglected garden patch at one side and a tumbled-down chimney. "It's a good deal better to stand behind and push, or to get in front and pull. I'm fond of pulling, myself! But when it comes to the individual instance, it's sometimes more merciful to stand in the way of what we're pleased to call progress. Now that girl down there—daughter of a horse-dealer, the owner of a little store at one of the crossroads in the other valley—it would really have been better if she had never gone to school, never been away from home, never learned of anything beyond what she has. She has been taught enough to make her know how badly off she is. Her father was ambitious, and sent his daughter to board in town and go to the high school. She stayed there two years, and absorbed about as much as she could; then she came back home, but her education had taught her something finer and better than what she came back to. She did just what any restless young thing would do. Inside of a year she eloped with the handsomest rascal in the mountains. And Tobet's a moonshiner!"

"Moonshiner! But I thought the Government had done away with all that sort of thing? I heard a man say, at a place where I was staying before I came here, that there was really no more of it left, in these mountains. The men are intimidated, the stills discovered and broken up. Isn't that so?"

A wry smile from the doctor answered her. "Then there must be some natural springs of it about here," he said. He pointed back over his shoulder with his whip. "See that big pine up there on the left? Well, if an empty bottle be left there, at the foot of the tree, at night, with a fifty-cent piece under it, the bottle will be filled in the morning, and the coin gone. I don't ask any questions, and I suppose she would not answer any; but if she would, Grace Tobet could explain how that sort of thing happens."

Rosamund was not greatly impressed. "Well, there probably is not very much of it," she said, "and they must be quite used to it. I don't suppose it does them much harm, does it?"

The doctor was silent for a moment. Then he said, and his voice was very low, "Grace Tobet has lately lost her baby, her little girl. Joe came in one morning, struck by white lightning, as they say around here. He fell on the baby, and Grace came in from the garden too late. She told Mother Cary that perhaps it was just as well."

Rosamund paled. Presently the doctor went on, "And you see, poor Grace knows better things; she remembers that town and the school, and the little pleasures and gayeties there."

Neither spoke again until White Rosy drew up before the Tobet cottage. The front windows and door were closed, but on the sill of the back door a woman crouched, a woman in faded brown calico, whose face, when she raised it from her arms, showed a dark bruise on one side. She rose and smiled wanly.

"I've brought a lady to see you, Mrs. Tobet," the doctor said. He introduced them as formally as if Grace Tobet had been a duchess. Then he said, "Now you two talk, while I hunt up Joe. Where is he?"

The woman nodded towards the front of the house, and the doctor went indoors. Rosamund and Mrs. Tobet looked at each other.

To the mountain woman this stranger was a being from another sphere, who could not touch her own at any point of intercourse; while Rosamund was too deeply moved by the woman's story, by the livid mark on her temple, by the squalor of her dress and surroundings contrasting so strongly with the intelligence of her face, to find words. It was Mrs. Tobet who first remembered one of those phrases of common coin which are the medium of conversation the world over.

"Stranger about here?" she asked.

"I am staying with Mrs. Cary on the mountain," Rosamund replied; and, as, in a flash, the other woman's face was lit by a smile scarcely less radiant than Mother Cary's own.

"A friend o' Mother Cary's, be ye? I'm glad to see ye! I can't ask you into the front room, but there's a seat in my spring-house, real pleasant and cool; won't ye come try it?"

She led the way through the neglected garden to the little spring-house that was built of the rough stone of the hillsides, roofed over with sod. In front of the door-space was a wooden bench, where Rosamund sat down, while Grace drew a glass of sparkling water from the cool spring inside. It was a delicious draught.

"My baby could jest pull herself up by that bench," Grace Tobet said, as she took the empty glass. "She used to play here while I tended to the milk. Joe's sold the cow now; but that didn't make any difference; there wasn't any reason for keeping her."

The woman's deep-set dark eyes strained out towards the mountain-tops. Rosamund felt herself suddenly brought face to face with some primal force of which she had hitherto known nothing; for the first time in her life she looked upon the agony of bereft mother-love laid bare. She had been with Eleanor through her loss, but Eleanor's grief had seemed to turn her to white stone; this other mother's was a fiercely scorching, consuming flame of anguish before which Rosamund shrank away as from the blast of a furnace. Before she dared to speak, however, Grace Tobet's face was smiling again.

"I know you must like it up there," she said. "I do miss the mountains so, livin' down here in the valley. I don't know what I'd do ef it wasn't for Mother Cary's light. I look up there for it every night of my life, an' it's always there. An' I ain't the only one it talks to, neither."

"It has its message for everyone who sees it, I think," Rosamund agreed. "I know, because I am living under it!"

Grace looked into her eyes, and nodded. "Ain't it so?" she replied. "Why, there's never been a night when I was in trouble that her little lamp hasn't said to me, 'Here I am, honey, an' I know all about it. When it gets so bad you can't stand it, you jest send for me; I'll come!' An' she does come, too!"

There was silence between them for a moment; then Rosamund said, only wondering at herself long afterwards, "It says more than that! It is telling me that there is something in life worth while, that there's courage and goodness in many a dark corner where we'd never think of looking for them; oh, it is teaching me a great deal!"

"Yes," Grace Tobet agreed, and all barriers between them were gone.

They found so much to say that the hour the doctor spent with Joe passed like a moment. When at last he came out of the house and back to the spring for a drink of the pure water, the two women walked together to the buggy; and before she took her place Rosamund, yielding to a sudden impulse of which she knew she would have been incapable a fortnight earlier, turned and clasped both of the older woman's hands, and looked into her face.

"Will you be friends with me?" she asked simply.

Grace Tobet's eyes widened. It seemed long before she spoke. Then, "Yes," she said, and both knew that there was something sealed between them.

"May I bring a friend of mine to see you? She lost her baby boy last year, and—and we are afraid she is going to be—blind. Perhaps you can comfort her, in some way. She needs friends. May I bring her?"

"Pray do," Grace said, in the quaint mountain speech.

When they were slowly climbing the mountain, the doctor turned to Rosamund with a quizzical smile. "You and Grace seemed to progress somewhat!" he said.

For a few moments Rosamund pondered; then she met his look, but there was no smile on her face.

"Do you know," she said, "I have always thought that the people I lived among were the only ones who really knew life, the only ones who felt, or thought, or lived! Lately I seem to have come into a new world."

The doctor's smile faded, and he ran his fingers through his hair. "No," he said, "it's the same old world! Human nature's pretty much the same, wherever you find it. Human experience is bounded by life, and the boundaries are not very wide, either. It's the different combinations that make things interesting, although the basic elements remain the same!"

"Then I almost think there are more basic elements among these people than among—my kind!"

"Oh, no! The difference is that with your kind the surface is rounded and polished, and the points of possible contact therefore fewer; with the other kind the rougher surfaces offer more points of contact, more chances of combinations, that's all. And," he added, "even that's only partly true!"

Afterwards, when she went over in her mind the events of the whole afternoon, she wondered how Flood or Pendleton would have expressed themselves on the subject; but at the moment she was too deeply concerned with her problems to form any mental digression. For a while neither spoke; then she said:

"Reserve seems to have no place here! I find myself saying what I think, describing what I feel, opening my heart to Mother Cary, to Mrs. Tobet, to you—to anyone! I do not know myself!"

The doctor's face changed from one expression to another and another; he was about to speak, but her look was intense, rapt, uplifted, and very serious; he evidently changed his mind. Neither spoke again until they stopped before the little green gate. Then, he passed his hand over his head as if suddenly missing something.

"Lord bless my soul!" he exclaimed. "I believe I left my hat at Grace's!"

VIII

Eleanor was most free to motor across the valley—where now a double magnet drew her—while Mrs. Hetherbee still slumbered in the mornings. Since the first day when Tim's little hand had reached up to touch her cheek, she had yearned towards the boy. Rosamund laughingly accused her of coming to see him instead of herself; Eleanor, in reply, held the mite to her heart, smiling over his curls through gathering tears, at Rosamund.

The summer had done much for Timmy. The pain in his hip was disappearing, and by the end of August there were pink baby curves where the skin had been white and drawn over his little bones. There were times, when he was cuddling against Eleanor or tumbling about in the sun, that he was almost pretty. He was glad enough of ministrations from Rosamund or Mother Cary, but Eleanor was the bright lady of his adoration.

"My White Lady," he called her, taking great pains always to pronounce every consonant of the beloved name, though he usually discarded most of them as not at all necessary to intelligent conversation. With the inquisitiveness of childhood, he soon discovered that she had once had a little boy of her own.

"Where is your little boy?" he asked one day with infantile directness.

"He is gone away," she told him.

But that was not enough. "Did somebody 'dopt your little boy?" he persisted.

Eleanor looked at Rosamund; the same thought was in the minds of both. How many times had little Tim been offered for inspection to would-be adopters, and refused? How much of it had he understood? What had it all meant, to his poor little lonely heart? Eleanor drew him more closely to her.

"W'y don't you tell Timmy? Did somebody 'dopt your little boy?"

She gave him the simplest answer. "Yes, dear," she said.

Timmy was thoughtful for a moment. Then he said, "I guess he must have been a pretty little boy!"

Neither Eleanor nor Rosamund could speak, but Tim was oblivious of their emotion. A new idea, an entrancing one, had presented itself. He climbed upon Eleanor's lap, took her face between his palms, and said, smiling divinely,

"If I was a great big man, White Lady, I would 'dopt you!"

It seemed to Rosamund that Eleanor, while reaching out with all the ardor of her loneliness, was being daily wrung by seeing him; she spoke of it to Ogilvie, after Eleanor herself had denied it. But he was inclined to agree with Mrs. Reeves that it could not harm her.

"Women find comfort in strange things," he said. "Let her have her own way."

Rosamund sighed. "It does not seem to me that her summer here has helped her at all," she said. "She is more a 'White Lady' than ever. I wish you would tell me what you think of her, Doctor Ogilvie!"

"I cannot tell you any more than I have," he replied. "There is no incurable fault of vision, no defect of the eye itself. If I could prescribe a large dose of happiness for her, she would get well. As it is—nerves have very elusive freaks sometimes, you know!"

"Then she will—she will be—oh! Don't say that! Not my Eleanor!"

"Now you are taking too much for granted. I do not say it. Her eyes are no worse than when she came here. If she were strong they would recover; if she were happy she would quickly become strong! As it is—who can say?"

"Oh, how helpless you all are!" she cried.

He ran his fingers through his hair—his cap was apt to be anywhere but on his head. "Helpless! Good Lord, yes!"

As the weeks passed, they had become very good friends, spending many hours together, driving about the countryside as he made his rounds. Knowing Eleanor to be there in the mornings, Ogilvie fell into the way of making Mother Cary's his first house of visitation in the afternoon. They were always waiting for him at the gate—the now inseparable three; and if Rosamund left all show of eager greeting to Yetta and little Tim, the doctor seemed never to notice the omission. It was enough to find her there.

Hitherto, John Ogilvie had passed his life, first, in study, and later in investigation and service. Women had appeared as people who cooked his meals, or as nurses trained to careful obedience, or as those who, more or less ill, were apt to be more or less querulous. There were one or two who had seemed to possess different characteristics, especially here in the mountains. There was Mother Cary, who had helped him on more than one occasion when more trained assistance, if not assistance more experienced, was not to be had; he warmly loved Mother Cary, whose indulgent affection persisted in regarding him as a boy—a clever boy, to be sure, but not by any means one who had outgrown the need of maternal attention. And there were Grace Tobet, and a few other of the mountaineers' wives, who stood out from the mass of women as he had known them.

Miss Randall was of still another sort, already beginning to inspire him with emotions new and different. But he was too far past the introspective phase that is a part of early youth to analyze his emotions. He was less concerned with the phenomenon of his own heart throbs than with the happily recurring hours of their being together, and the increasingly dreary intervals when his duties carried him away from her.

He knew very well to what world she belonged. He had had enough experience of it among his patients, the overfed, overwrought women who came to Bluemont in the summer to be near him—near the young doctor of high scientific attainments, who remained in this out-of-the-way place of his own choice, "Who can be just as disagreeable and firm, my dear, as if his sign hung two doors from Fifth Avenue, and whose fees are only one-fifth as high as Dr. Blake's," as one of them wrote home. Even if she had not come into the valley as one of Flood's guests, he would have known of what class she was a part. Mrs. Hetherbee, in her overflowing complaisance after Rosamund's call, had poured out to his bored and impatient ears, in a torrent that was not to be stemmed, the facts of the girl's inheritance and position.

"Witherspoon Randall's only daughter! He made all his money, millions, they say, in Georgia pine—only had to go out on the land he had inherited and cut down trees! Think of it! And left every penny to this girl, nothing to the mother, nothing to the mother's daughter by her first marriage, nothing to charity—everything, everything to this girl! And you know she is just the smartest of the smart, in town; thanks to her sister's marriage, in the very heart of the most exclusive——"

So he had, in spite of himself, been told what she was, given some idea of what she possessed; yet so wholly did he discard as immaterial the material things, and measure her only by the weight of personality, that Rosamund was deceived into thinking that he knew nothing about her.

The friends she made while at Mother Cary's had not questioned her; she had dropped among them from an automobile, and later her sister had sent her some clothes of deceptive simplicity. Their seeming to accept her as she tried to appear deceived her into believing that they were not curious; as a matter of fact their code of good manners forbade their showing curiosity; nothing could prevent their having it. She believed that Ogilvie, also, had been deceived in like manner. During their drives together she carefully avoided any reference to her possessions; it amused her to imagine how surprised he would be when he knew.

Yet she found herself becoming more and more contented that he did not know. In her own world she had been unable to ignore her wealth; she could read knowledge of it on every face, deference to it in every courtesy, and the very fact that it had set her apart was largely the cause of her old discontent. She would not voluntarily have discarded it, but she would have welcomed an escape from all but its agreeable consequences.

The other men she had known might have been able to command riches larger than her own, or possessed that which weighed equally in the social scales; yet they remained conscious of what her very name signified, and invariably showed it. Even Mr. Flood, or so she believed, although he could have bought all she owned without missing what it cost him, showed her the usual deference.

Therefore, there was something fresh and unaccustomed in her growing friendship with Ogilvie. It amused and piqued her; in her ignorance of his real state of mind it even touched her. She found herself eager to be real with him, to show him depths of heart and mind which she herself had scarcely suspected. Other men saw only the social glaze which hid her real self and reflected themselves; Ogilvie had a way of looking at her which pierced the surface, although, because of his obvious sincerity, it caused her no resentment. So, during the glowing summer, while the hot noons ripened the corn in the valley and the cold nights left early beacons of flame in the young maples on the mountains, they grew to know each other; she serene in her belief in his unsuspecting simplicity, he ignoring in her what other men would so greatly have valued. As far as the things of the world affected them, they might, on their drives, have been alone in a deserted land, or at least in one peopled only by aborigines.

For always he had as an objective point some mountain cottage where his aid was needed. At first she was inclined to be curious about the mountaineers; theoretically they ought to have been interesting, quaint, amusing. But in reality she scarcely saw them; when she did, she found nothing appealing in their lank figures, and faces hidden in the depths of slat bonnets or under large straw hats pulled down over their eyes.

"They all seem to avoid me," she told Ogilvie one day when he had come out of a house with a tiny child in his arms, which had slid down and run away at sight of her. "Do they think I'm the bogey-man or the plague?"

He laughed aloud at her petulance. "They don't stop to think," he said. "They are as timid as chipmunks, or as any other hunted woodland creatures."

"Oh, hunted!" she cried, as if to repudiate what he implied. "I've heard you talk like that before! Do you still believe in that nonsense about the secret stills and the Government spies, and all that?"

"Yes, I believe in it."

"I have been here eight weeks, and I have not heard another soul speak of it!"

"How many of the 'natives,' as you call them, have you met?"

She pursed her lips. "I don't believe there are many to see!"

"Allow me to remind you again of my feeble simile of the chipmunks!" he laughed. "And believe me, it is more apt than you think. For instance, have you seen the little Allen children?"

"What, the queer little animals that bend their arms over their eyes when you meet them, and live in that shanty back of Father Cary's pasture?"

He smiled at her description. "Precisely! The Carys' nearest neighbors, scarcely a mile away. And have you seen their mother?"

She seemed to be trying to remember.

"Come now," he teased, "don't tell me you don't believe they have a mother! The eldest child is not yet six, and the youngest of the five is two months old!"

She laughed and gave in. "No, I have not seen the mother, nor the father, nor the aunts, nor any of the rest of the family! But that is only one instance."

"There are many; you really may take my word for it, if it interests you to. But if you were to be here after the summer people go, then you'd see. They come out into the open then."

She still looked skeptical, and he pointed up the mountain. "Do you see that path?" he asked.

"No. Where?"

He laughed. "Caught, Miss Randall! A path is there, invisible though it is to you—to us. All through these woods there are paths, often little more than trails, well known to the mountaineers and often used. Sometimes they run for a mile or more beside the road, screened by the undergrowth; sometimes they keep higher up, or cross where a road could not, or follow the courses of the streams; but they are there. It is only one of the evidences of the mountaineers' secretiveness."

"Your simile was a good one! What animals they are!"

"So are we all."

"Oh, of course, you are the doctor, saying that! But you could scarcely class these creatures with ourselves!"

He turned on the seat to look at her, and she met his gaze a little defiantly, on the defensive, for she knew him well enough by now to guess what his reply would be. For the first time she encountered in his eyes a look of appraisement as if he were weighing her value, even questioning it. Suddenly there arose between them the antagonism of their opposite points of view, of those differences in their minds and characters which must always arise between a man and a woman, and be settled by conquest or compromise, before happiness can be secure between them.

As he looked at her, more beautiful in her sudden proud defiance than he had ever before seen her, it flashed upon him who and what she was, and that what he had chosen to ignore might be none the less placing her beyond him. In his inexperience he was unprepared for the swift pain of the idea; instinctively defending himself, his defense was cruelly sharp.

The irony of his words stung her cheeks to a quick crimson.

"I am not capable of judging of your class, Miss Randall!" he said.

She might have understood, from the tremor in his voice, but she heard nothing but the meaning of the words. As she still looked into his eyes her own widened, and with the widening of their pupils seemed to grow black. For an instant they looked at one another so; but the moment was too tense to be one of revelation. Then she drew a gasping breath so sharp that it almost seemed to be a wordless cry of pain, and turned away.

Instantly he was filled with shame of having hurt her, and greater shame of having doubted her.

"Oh, forgive me," he cried. "Forgive me! Won't you forgive me?"

She lifted her head a little, still turned from him, but did not speak.

"Rosamund!" he cried. "Forgive me!"

It was now unmistakably a cry of pain, appealing and revealing; it steadied her, as a woman is always steadied by that tone in a man's voice, until the moment when she is prepared to welcome it. On the instant, she was no longer the woman of the past weeks, simple, companionable, revealing herself as naturally as a child; she was once more the Miss Randall the world knew, haughty, reserved, aloof. Even her eyes, as she turned to smile at him, were not those he had known.

"There is nothing in the world to forgive! I think we have been a little absurd!"

It was his turn to feel how words could lash.

"I am glad you see it so," he said, and wondered, during the rest of their drive, filled as it was with the commonplace of small talk, how he could have forgotten her likeness to the vapid, futile, fashionable women at the Summit; while she, hurt and bewildered, was wondering what he had meant, whether he had known her all along for the person she was, Colonel Randall's daughter and only heir, and in the stupidity of a countryman had failed in the observance due to her position.

When White Rosy stopped at the little red gate, willingly, as always, the two children were there to welcome them. Ogilvie, in spite of Timmy's beseeching arms, would not stay to supper, as he often did.

Tim sat down on the brick path and lifted his voice in a wail. "Oh, ev'rybody's gonin' away!" he cried; and his anguish increased by his own words, he further declared, "Ev'rybody has went away!"

Rosamund picked up the boy, but he wriggled down from her arms. In spite of her care for him, and the good-fellowship there was between her and both the children, who were ordinarily devoted enough, nothing of the maternal had as yet been aroused in her; and in the moments when he needs the only comfort that satisfies childhood, a child knows instinctively whether there is aught of the mother in the arms that hold him.

But Rosamund was in need of love to-day. "Why, Timmy," she cried, still holding him to her, "I am here! I have not gone away!"

"I don't want my White Lady to go away! I want my White Lady!" was Timmy's cry. "Ev'rybody's gonin' away!"

Now Yetta became voluble in explanation of his cry. "She is going away! She came over while you were gone, 'cause she said maybe she won't be able to come to-morrow. She says she's got to pack, 'cause the old one's going back to town. Lots o' people have gone already, it's so cold; and the old one thinks it's going to set in to rain, so she's going home, an' Mis' Reeves has got to go with her."

"My White Lady's gonin' away!" Tim wailed again, with a concentration of thought that might have been admirable under other circumstances. "Ev'rybody's gonin' away!"

Rosamund had been overwrought on the drive, and the boy's persistent cry was rasping her nerves. "Oh, for goodness' sake, Timmy, don't say that again! It is not true, Tim! I am here, and Yetta's here, and Mother Cary's here. Aren't we enough!"

"No, she ain't," Yetta cried, still informing. "She's gone down to her daughter's, 'cause the baby's sick. Pap took her, and maybe he'll stay all night, if it rains, an' he says it's going to for sure. And I know what to get for supper, and it's corn puddin' and jam!"

At last they had found the silencing note for Timmy. "'Ikes jam!" he announced. Then, apparently warming towards Rosamund, he encircled her knees with his arms. "'Ikes you, too!" he declared. '"Ikes ev'rybody!"

Rosamund was glad to laugh, to carry him, with swings and bounces and kisses stolen from the tangle of his curls, into the house, glad to make a 'party' out of the simple supper and a ceremony out of the lighting of Mother Cary's nightly beacon, glad to hold him up to the window to see the trees bend under the wind that came with Father Cary's predicted rain, and glad to hold his little warm body to her while she undressed him, and to hear him repeat after her, in unison with Yetta, the prayer that she was, somewhat shyly, teaching them. She was glad when Yetta claimed the privilege of her fifteen years to sit up a while longer; glad of anything that might postpone the moments when she should be alone with her own thoughts.

The storm was increasing; each gust of wind shrieked louder than the last, sending the rain against the little house in sheets that broke with a sound as of waves on a shore. Rosamund, answering Yetta's demand for a story, regaled her with the tale of Rip Van Winkle, and then, somewhat unwisely, with the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, so that when the girl's bed-time could no longer be put off she pleaded to stay downstairs with Timmy and herself.

But at last Rosamund must be alone with herself and the storm. At first she could not think of Eleanor's message, and what it might mean to her. She had forgotten that the summer was almost over, forgotten that Eleanor's inevitable departure must leave her alone, as far as old friends were concerned, in the mountains. She had even forgotten that she herself must return; and now she had to remember that Cecilia's clamor might begin again with any letter. The summer was over. It had warmed into growth some part of her which had laid dormant before; but, after this afternoon, she was in no mood to dwell upon that. She thought again of Eleanor, of her parting with the boy. There must, of course, be something provided for the poor little waif, and for Yetta; that would be easy enough; she had only to write a check or two. Yet, in spite of the obviousness of that way, something else, quite different, seemed to be struggling to formulate itself in her mind; for once the writing of a check did not appear to be an adequate solution.

But the sum of it all, for her, seemed to be that she was just where she had left her old self, two months before. The old restlessness, the old discontent, swept back upon her with accumulated force, only increased by her life here. The summer had taught her something, given her something; how much she was unwilling to admit.

Suddenly there came back to her the sound of Ogilvie's voice, when he had called her by name, out of his shame and pain; and with the memory there came the reality of his voice, only now it was muffled by the storm, and by the sound of his knocking on the door.

Startled though she was at its coming in apparent answer to her thoughts, she sprang to the door and opened it. Then, in a quick heat of shame, she realized that he was far from calling upon her.

He stood under the overhang of the upper story, water dripping from him onto the brick paving, hatless as usual, tossing the rain from his eyes. He was exceedingly far from being a beautiful figure as he stood there; rather, he seemed a creature of the storm, wind-swept, rain-soaked, forceful, insistent.

"Mother Cary!" he demanded almost before Rosamund had opened the door. "Mother Cary! Where is she?"

Rosamund drew back, as if repelled from the dripping figure. Unconsciously she had, expected something else.

"Mother Cary is not here," she said, coldly.

"Not here?" he cried. Then, like a man who finds himself suddenly stopped, repeating, "Not here? To-night?"

"She went to her daughter's, before the storm broke. The baby is sick."

"Then Father Cary—I must have someone!"

"He is with her," said Rosamund, and made as though she would close the door, although, if truth be told, no power on earth would have made her do so. But Ogilvie stepped, still dripping, across the threshold, while she stood before him in her dress of thin blue, silhouetted against the lamp-light.

For a moment they faced each other, again, as earlier on that day, their natures and all the difference in their training and traditions ranged in opposing forces.

The appeal of her beauty, the memory of their hours together, swept over him like the breath of a dream; but the doctor in him was uppermost.

"It's the Allen woman," he said. "That boy, six years old, came all the way to my house to tell me. Jim Allen is in the woods, and there's no telling how long she's been that way. The baby is starving; and if I don't operate now she will die, and the baby, too."

The words had poured out. He barely paused, hesitated only to give her a glance more piercing. Yet when he spoke again he voiced a new insistence.

"I have got to have help. Get on your things," he commanded.

"I?" she gasped.

"Yes, you! And quickly. I have no time to lose."

The haste of his words only made her own seem slower. "Then you will certainly have to go for someone else. You are losing time waiting for me."

He came a step or two closer. "You have got to come," he said, clearly, speaking his words very distinctly, as if trying to make himself understood beyond question. "There is no time to go for someone else. And I have got to operate on that woman at once, at once, or she will die." As Rosamund still stood, head up, eyes upon him coldly, he repeated: "Don't you understand? The woman will die, and then the baby will starve...."

Her eyes seemed to darken; Cecilia would have recognized the sign of wrath. "Certainly I understand," she said. "But you must see that it is perfectly impossible for me—me—to help you! I don't know what you can be thinking of!"

"Impossible? I say you have got to help me! I can't wait for anyone else!"

"I? Help you—help you—operate—cut—oh!"

She shrank farther back towards the table. "Oh, I think you are perfectly brutal!"

He watched her in silence for a moment, a silence that burned, so charged with meaning was it. Then he said,

"I am asking you to help me save a woman's life!"

"It would kill me to see it!"

He threw his hand out towards her. "Then live!" he cried. "Live on, and shield your pretty eyes from the beautiful works of the Almighty, draw your dainty skirts aside from the contamination of suffering humanity, cover your ears against the cries of those little children whose mother is dying. Dance with your friends, laugh your life away; live for yourself—yourself! My God! What kind of a thing are you? Do you call yourself a woman?"

He did not wait to see what effect his words would have upon her. He rushed across the door sill, and the door, which he drew behind him, was slammed by the wind as from the force of a blow.

For a moment she stood watching the door, lips parted, eyes opened wide in horror. It seemed as if the blood pulsing in her throat would choke her; or was it the wild hammering of her heart?

She looked around Mother Cary's little room as if she had never seen it before. Was the whole world different, or was it only herself? Was she still dreaming, or was she awake? Had he come at all, had he called her, had he—had he thrown his bitter scorn at her——?

Was that the wind? Her hand rose from her heart to her white cheek. Was that the voice of the storm, or the voice of children, children—calling—crying for——

From her frozen horror she sprang to life. She ran to the room where Tim and Yetta were. Yetta was sitting up in bed, wide-eyed.

"What went off?" she demanded, excitedly.

Rosamund was already getting into her rain-coat. "Doctor Ogilvie has been here, Yetta, and I have got to help him. Mrs. Allen is sick, and I have got to go."

Yetta interrupted. "Was that him slammed the door? Gee! He must a been mad about somethin'!"

But Rosamund would not be interrupted. "Hush, Yetta! Listen to me! I have got to go to Mrs. Allen's. Do you hear?"

"My land! If you was to meet one o' the goberlins or one o' them fellers with their heads under their arms, Miss Rose, you'd drop down dead with fright!"

Rosamond remembered the absurdity of it afterwards, but there was no time to laugh. "Yetta! Oh, hush! Listen to me! You will not be afraid, here with Timmy, will you?"

"Land! No! I ain't afraid of anything when a door's between me an' it!"

"Father Cary will be up the mountain early!" She turned in the door of the bed-room to look back at the two her care had made comfortable; then she closed it, and went out of the other door into the storm.

IX

She never forgot that night. When the door of Mother Cary's house closed behind her, and she faced the wind and blinding rain, she awoke. That was the way she always thought of it—as an awakening.

The Allen house lay beyond Father Cary's pasture; she knew the way by day—down through the garden, then through the woods to the rock-ribbed clearing where the cattle were, then up, into woods again; but in the dark it was for her but a wild, instinctive rush, a stumbling over rock-broken ground, a splashing through pools of water; on through the darkness, on from one darkness to another, turning from time to time to look back at Mother Cary's light as a guide to direction. Yet on she flew, impelled by a conquering fear that drove out all lesser fears, over rough places, through woods, up the ascent of hills, running as much of the way as she could, bending against the wind that seemed trying to force her back, praying that she might find the way, praying that she might be in time.

At last, though she could never tell how she had come to it, a light gleamed faintly through the dark and the rain. At last—the Allen house! She tumbled to the door, paused a moment for breath, and opened it.

It was the usual one-room cabin of the mountaineer; there were strange, shelf-like beds against the farthest wall, and in a corner a wooden bedstead. It was from there that John Ogilvie looked up as she opened the door.

"Quick! That largest bottle—saturate something—anything—and hold it over her face!"

She worked with him, obeying blindly, while he struggled through the night for a woman's life, while the poor hungry baby awoke at intervals to wail its complaint from the other bed, while the storm shook the house and the rain swept down unceasingly. Once he bade her get more light. There were no more lamps; she knelt down on the hearth to blow into the flame the scraps she had gathered up in her bare hands from the wood-box; those lighted, and lacking more, somehow she broke the box itself—a task ordinarily as far beyond her strength as her imagination. It was by the light of that blaze that he finished his work, leaving Rosamund free to do what she could for the baby.

But, when at last there was time for speech, neither found anything to say. He remembered too well the brutal words he had thrown at her a few hours before; he could not but fear that her silence meant that she, too, was recalling them. He saw her there beside the hearth, the baby on her knees; but he saw her also in the doorway, her hair wind-blown and wet, and her eyes wide with fear and dread, determination and hope. He could have grovelled at her feet, had not her silence held him back; but speak he could not; great emotion was always to leave him inarticulate.

But as for Rosamund, she was unaware of his silence or her own. She was like a woman after her travail, who is content to lie in silence, because the purpose of the world has been revealed to her. Life—that was it—to further life, to prolong it, to minister to it! How futile was all else! How valueless were the things she had been taught to value most! Her shielded ignorance, her—her refinement—of what use were they, when they could not face such an emergency as last night's? Her money, that could have bought a hospital—what had it bought last night, when only the service of her own two hands could help to save a woman's life? The pursuits of her kind—she smiled, remembering Ogilvie's orderly haste, as unerringly he cut, and tied and sewed, while she as unfalteringly watched him, even assisted. No! For her there was nothing to say; she knew now what life was for. It was not the empty, useless existence she had known. It had a deeper meaning, a purpose worthier its Maker. It was wonderful beyond words. She had nothing to say.

Neither of them was aware that the dawn had come, until someone knocked on the door. Then Ogilvie opened it to Father Cary, and to the grayness of a still driving rain.

The stalwart old man stepped inside and looked about the cabin, at the quietly breathing woman on the bed, at Ogilvie, at Rosamund beside the fire trying to persuade the baby to take something warm from a spoon.

"So!" he said. "And where's Jim Allen?"

Ogilvie threw up both his hands, hopelessly. "Where he always is—back in the woods at one of the stills, dead drunk, like as not."

"More'n likely," Father Cary acquiesced. Then, nodding towards the bed, he asked, "What's the matter with her?"

"Nothing now. She would have been dead, though, if I had operated half an hour later. Lord knows how long she's been lying there. The baby's nearly dead, too—half-starved and half-poisoned by his mother's illness."

"How'd you happen to come?" the old man asked.

"The oldest boy came for me—all the way over to the Summit, and he's not six. He's at my house in bed now."

Then Father Cary crossed the room, and stood beside Rosamund, looking down at her. She met his look with a quiet smile.

"New work for you, ain't it?" he asked. "Ma Cary'll be real proud o' ye!"

And answering the question in her eyes, he went on, "Oh, she'll be home again in time to get dinner. Wasn't nothin' the matter with the baby; but Nancy's that nervous, an' so's Ma Cary." He chuckled. "I reckon it takes some experience and a right smart o' ca'm to be a real successful granny."

The doctor was becoming impatient. "Will you stay here with Miss Randall, Cary? I must get someone to come; she"—nodding towards the bed—"will need watching until we can find Allen."

So for an hour or so Pa Cary sat opposite Rosamund or busied himself preparing for breakfast the little food to be found in the house. The other children awoke, tumbling down backwards from the high box-bed, looking across at their mother with scared faces, and distrustfully at Rosamund.

At last Ogilvie returned, bringing Grace Tobet with him, and Rosamund was free to go home with Father Cary.

But there must first be the inevitable moment when she and Ogilvie should stand face to face. It happened simply enough. Grace had taken Rosamund's place beside the fire, replenished now through Father Cary's efforts in the outer shed; the old man had gone out for a last armful of wood, and Rosamund was about to take down her coat from its nail on the door.

Then, somehow, Ogilvie was standing before her. He looked at her with trembling lips; he did not dare to trust himself to speak. He could only hold out his hands.

She turned her tired face up to him, looking, searchingly, it seemed, into his eyes. Then, smiling, she laid her hands for the breath of a moment in his, and with a little gasp reached for her coat and ran out to join Father Cary.

She was glad that Eleanor's departure, and the rain, kept them apart for a few days after that. She dreaded the restraint that she thought they both must feel when they should meet; but, when the meeting came at last, there was no embarrassment at all.

Father Cary had left her at the Summit and she meant to walk back to the house on the mountain, to make the most of the first clear day after the rain. There was a little brown house, set on the brow of the hill overlooking the valley, almost opposite the mountain whence Mother Cary's light shone every night. Rosamund had often noticed the little place, and to-day, at the store, she had heard the men talking about it. The man who owned it had come from the city a year or so before, with his wife, to be near Doctor Ogilvie. They were young, and the young do not see very far ahead. It had seemed to them in their distress that they would have to stay there forever; they had done many things to the little house, and put into it many of the comforts they had been used to. Now the man was well, and they were going back to the city.

"Want to sell out," the postmaster had told her. "Humph! Wouldn't mind sellin' out myself! Like to know who's going to buy prop'ty up here, this time o' year!"

So, as she approached the little house on her way home, Rosamund was busily thinking about it. Perhaps, subconsciously, the idea had been a long time growing in her mind; but when she turned the last bend in the road that hid the house from her view, a plan seemed to burst upon her with all the novelty of a revelation. She stood still, looking first at the house, then across the valley towards the place which had sheltered her all summer. She was not aware that a vehicle drawn by a familiar white horse was just turning out of a wood-road into the highway, scarcely ten yards behind her.

But Ogilvie, in the sudden gladness of thus unexpectedly coming upon her, called out.

"Oh, good luck! Let me give you a lift, won't you?"

The embarrassment that she had been dreading was not there! They were as simply glad to see each other as two children; laughing, she took the place beside him in the buggy.

He had never looked more cheerful. "So I caught you staring into the Marvens' windows!" he accused her.

She laughed again. "I am tempted to buy that little house," she told him.

"Why don't you?" he asked, lightly. "And go there to live, and take Timmy and Yetta with you!" He smiled down at her, indulgently, as at the fancies of a child.

"That was just precisely what I was thinking of doing," she replied. "We could be perfectly comfortable there during the winter. I don't want to go back to town one bit!"

"So you could," he agreed, still in his bantering tone. "And I wouldn't stop with Tim and Yetta. I'd take in a few more. You might borrow some little Allens, or get someone to lend you an orphan asylum."

Rosamund put her head back and laughed aloud, merrily. "But I am perfectly in earnest!" she cried; and was, from that moment.

But if the doctor refused to take the idea seriously, it was quite otherwise with Mother Cary. When Rosamund disclosed to her the half-formed plan—she had come to discuss nearly everything with that fount of human wisdom—the dear soul did not seem surprised at all, but at once made a thoroughly feminine mental leap into the very middle of arrangements.

"Why, of course, dearie, it will be just splendid! And you won't need so very many furnishin's. There's some cheers up in our loft you might take, and you can have things up from the city. Yetta's learned a good deal this summer. I can bake for you for a while, till the child gets more used to the work, and I reckon you can manage the rest of it betwixt you."

"Do you suppose," Rosamund asked, "that Grace Tobet would come, too?"

Mother Cary sat down in her little low rocking chair, and laid her crutch on the brick floor of the front walk, always a sign of her settling down for a real talk. Things had been going worse and worse with the Tobets; Rosamund and Yetta went down almost daily, but beyond their friendly visits there seemed little they could do. The Government's suspicions were centering on Joe, the big, born leader of rough elements, and on his band of four or five other men, who would follow him to death or worse. Jim Allen was one; but now, repentant and sobered by the baby's death, he was at home nursing his wife. Grace had sped through the woods in the night to warn Joe and his followers more than once; yet even to Ogilvie she denied any knowledge of Joe's business.

"It's squirrels he's after," she said, "and sometimes drink; all this talk of moonshine's jest foolishness. I'd know it ef 'twas so. It ain't so!"

"Well, Mrs. Tobet," the doctor replied, "your squirrel stew would not be to my liking! Better keep the lid on the pot while it's cooking!"

He saw too many evidences of the moonshine's work to believe her; but he had seen Joe Tobet come home, and he honored Grace, too familiar with human nature to marvel at her faithfulness. Mother Cary alone knew all that Grace Tobet knew; all secrets were safe in her kind old heart, and even from Pap she hid this one, for Father Cary was not one of those who hold councils of compromise with the Evil One. Therefore, when Rosamund suggested Grace Tobet, Mother Cary sat down to think it out.

After a few minutes' silent pondering, she said, "Honey, I've never been one to advise the partin' of husband and wife! Howsomever, if there's any good left in Joe Tobet, it may be the surest way o' bringin' him back to straight ways o' livin', ef we can coax Grace to leave him for a while."

"I'm afraid I can't give a thought to Joe's salvation," Rosamund declared. "But Grace—oh, she's too fine to be left there! I should like to give her one winter of comfort!"

"Well, you haven't got a holt of her yet," Mother Cary reminded her, "an' it wouldn't be but half comfort for her, the outside half, anyways, away from her man. But I can't see what anybody could do better than to keep little Tim and Yetta up here out o' harm's way, and maybe save Grace Tobet an' Joe, too. Land's sake, dearie, you must be quite well off!"

It seemed to come to Mother Cary suddenly, and was the first spark of curiosity Rosamund had ever known her to show. Until now her wisdom had seemed all-embracing; but that a young woman, that Rosamund, who had lived so quietly in her house all summer, could carry out a suddenly formed plan of buying a house and sheltering three people—this was evidently quite outside of her experience. She looked up with unwonted surprise in her face. Rosamund bent and kissed the wrinkled pink cheek.

"Dear, dear Mother Cary," she said, "I am so well off that I could probably buy every house at the Summit, and build as many more! I am so well off that I have never in all my life, until this summer, had a chance to find out how well off I am! I am so well off that I did not know how poor I have been, nor how much people can need the wretched mere money, nor how very, very little it can really do! I have only begun to find out what life is made of, and so I'm not well off at all!"

Tears came into her eyes as she spoke, and she turned her head away; but Mother Cary's hand was stretched towards her, instantly. Presently she said, in the low tone which was the tenderest and sweetest of all:

"Dearie child, when the young folks come an' tell me things like you're tellin' me now, I reckon there ain't anybody in the world as well off as me! An' I'll tell you jest what it is makes you do it—it's because I'm so happy! An' I'll tell you jest what makes me so happy. I let Pap take keer o' me, an' I try to take keer o' him an' jest as many other folks as I can! That's the whole of it!" After a pause she added, "You're goin' to do jest the same as me, both in keering for someone, an' in bein' took keer of!"

Rosamund's eyes opened wide; she paled a little and pressed her hand against her trembling lips. "I don't know," she whispered. "I'm afraid! Oh, I'm afraid!"

Mother Cary patted the hand she held, and knew too much to speak. Their thoughts, in the silence, wandered far; came back and dwelt upon the things that were, the things to be; there is no way of knowing whether they went hand in hand, but after a while Mother Cary said:

"Dearie, I wouldn't tell him, if I was you, about—about all you have, the money an'—you know!—I wouldn't tell the doctor yet a while!"

Rosamund drew her breath sharply, and her face flamed; she was too startled to answer, but in a moment she left her place on the bench and knelt beside the old woman, hiding her face on the knees where so many had found comfort. Mother Cary smoothed her hair, and after a while began to talk, almost as if to herself.

"There's a friend o' mine sometimes spends her summers up around here; she's married to a eye doctor—that's how come Yetta got sent up here to me. Her husband knew Doctor Ogilvie down in the city. She told me there never was one they thought more of, down there; they said he found out more about nerves than anybody else in the world, and he used to work day and night and in between times, trying to discover more. They said there never was such a one with little child'en; he could almost make 'em over new, seemed like. They said he never cared whether folks could pay him or not for what he did—all he cared for was the curin' of 'em. I can well believe it, too, for many's the time I see him almost starved without knowin' what's the matter with him, and he ain't a mite particler about his clo'es. Well, he worked an' he worked; and one day my friend's husband, that was one o' his friends, went into his little room where he kept his bottles and things, and found him layin' on the floor. They thought he surely would die, but praise the Lord, that wasn't to be; only, he had to give up his work down in the big horspital. I often think on what that must 'a' been to him. I reckon it must 'a' been worse than it would be for Pap to give up a raisin' them white hogs o' his he's so proud of. Anyway, he come up here, an' he got well! And now he says he hasn't got time to go back there again—there's too much for him to do up here all the time. So he jest rides around the country with that Rosy horse. Somebody asked him once why he didn't buy an automobile. He said for one thing he hadn't the money for it; and for another, he needed White Rosy to remind him where he was going!"

Mother Cary stopped to laugh; Rosamund raised her head, with an answering smile that was half tears.

"Land sakes," Mother Cary went on, "I do believe if it wasn't for Rosy he'd sometimes forget to come home! When they get to one o' the houses where he visits, Rosy stops and turns her head around; ef he don't say anything to her, there she stands; but if he tells her he don't have to get out there that day, Rosy jogs along to the next place! I'm real fond o' humans, but sometimes I do wish't they all knew as much as the doctor's Rosy!"

This time Rosamund joined in the laugh. But the old woman had more to tell. "Time was when I might 'a' wondered how come he stays on here, him bein' the great doctor he is; but I'm so old now that I know too much to wonder about anything any more! There's folks in this world that never can find any work to do, and there's folks that makes work for themselves, and then again there's folks that are so busy with the work right at hand that they never get time to find out whether they're workin' or not. That's Doctor Ogilvie's kind. He's so busy workin' up here in the mountings, that he never stops to think about whether he is doing the work he likes best or not; it's just work he has to do, because it's here to be done, and that's all there is to it for him. He works so hard at it, inside his own head, that he forgets most everything else. Land, I remember the time he sat up with me all night long, workin' over Milly Grate's baby that had the membranious croup—dipthery, he called it. Come mornin', an' he told Milly the baby'd get well, he suddenly went out and sat right down on the doorstep; come to find out, he'd brought two babies into the world the day before and driven twenty-two miles and walked about a dozen—and forgotten to take a bite to eat! Another time, somebody sent a little boy over the mounting for him in a hurry; he was at a house where a man had broke his leg, and White Rosy was waitin' for him at the gate; but when he heard how bad off the little girl was he'd been sent for, didn't he jest set out and run all the way there, forgettin' that there was such a thing as a wagon to ride in, and White Rosy still a waitin'!

"And he boards with the Widder Speers, where it ain't likely she can make him very comfortable, she bein' well past eighty; but he found out soon after he come up here that she would have to be moved to—the place where nobody likes to go!—she not having any support; so he boards there, an' she doesn't have to leave her home, that her husband built for her when they was married, and where her only son died. You might hunt the world over, honey-bird, without findin' any better man than Doctor Ogilvie! But, somehow or other, ef I was you, I wouldn't let on to him that I had as much money as you say you have. Money's a dreadful stumblin'-block to some people! And you never can tell which way men folks'll jump!"

It had been long since Rosamund, trained in self-control as she had been, was so keenly aware of intense embarrassment. Her first impulse was to feel affront at Mother Cary's taking so much for granted in her relations with the doctor; but no one could really be angry with Mother Cary. She was abashed that the old woman had divined more than she herself had been aware of; and then there arose the doubt that she had so often felt of the doctor's personal interest in herself or her affairs. She yielded to the maiden's inevitable longing for reassurance.

"What makes you think," she whispered, her cheek against Mother Cary's hand, "what makes you think that he—would be—interested?"

"Darlin'!" Mother Cary cried, "John Ogilvie thinks a heap o' you—but he ain't got hardly a suspicion of it yet—any more than you know how much you're goin' to care for him!"

Then, with the usual coincidence, the object of their talk came into view, driving White Rosy toward the little green gate, Yetta on one side of him and Tim on the other; they waved to the two in front of the house, but Rosamund sprang to her feet and fled indoors.

X

Rosamund awoke the next morning with her mind joyously full of her new plans; but it was little Tim who suggested that which crowned them. Tim was always the first member of the household, after Father Cary, to go out of doors in the mornings; to-day he brought back a tight handful of stemless blossoms to present to Rosamund. Dewy and rosy-cheeked, he had never before appeared as much the baby as on this morning, standing in front of her with his feet apart, holding up his floral offering.