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8303                   22 the road after her ne his fickle lady and her new admirer. The boys and irresponsible young men crowded after, expecting some excitement; but they were disappointed. Ludovic strode on until he overtook Theodora and Arnold, an Arnold Sherman, and then fell meekly in behind them. Theodora strode on until he overtook Theodora and Arnold. Theodora hardly enjoyed her walk home, although Arnold Sherman laid himself out to be especially entertaining. Her heart yearn yearned after Ludovic, whose what shuffling footsteps she heard behind her. She feared that she had been very cruel,  

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but but she was in for it now. She steeled herself by the reflection that it was all for his own good, and she talked to Arnold Sherman as if he were the one man in the world. Poor, deserted Ludovic, following humbly behind, heard her, and if Theodora had known how bitter the cup she was holding to his lips really was, she would never have been resolute enough to present it, no matter for what ultimate good.

When she and Arnold turned in at her gate Ludovic had to stop. Theodora looked over her shoulder and saw him standing stock still on the road. His for-

 

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or if the lazy, meandering Grafton River had turned about and flowed up hill, Ludovic could not have been more astonished. For fifteen years he had walked home from meetings with Theodora; and now this elderly stranger, with all the glamour of “the States” hanging about him, had coolly walked off with her under Ludovic’s very nose. Worse—most unkindest cut of all—Theodora had gone with him willingly; nay, she had evidently enjoyed his company. Ludovic felt the stirring of a righteous anger in his easy-going soul.

When he reached the end of his lane, he paused at his gate, and looked at his house, set back from

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and that evening, although he was not due till Saturday night, he went down to see Theodora.

Arnold Sherman was there before him, and was actually sitting in Ludovic’s own prescriptive chair. Ludovic had to deposit himself in Theodora’s new wicker rocker, where he looked and felt lamentably out of place.

If Theodora felt the situation to be awkward, she carried carried it off superbly. She had never looked handsomer, and Ludovic perceived that she wore her second best silk dress. He wondered miserably if she had donned it in expectation of his rival’s call. She had never put on silk dresses for him. Ludovic had always been the meekest and

 

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The following Sunday evening Arnold Sherman walked to church with Theodora, and sat with her. When they came in Ludovic Speed suddenly stood up in his pew under the gallery. He sat down again at once, but everybody in view had seen him, and that night folks in all the length and breadth of Grafton River discussed the dramatic occurrence with keen enjoyment.

“Yes, he jumped right up as if he was pulled to his feet, while the minister was reading the chapter,” said his cousin, Louella Speed, who had been in church, to her sister, who had not. “His face was as white as a sheet, and his eyes were just glaring out of his head.

 

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I never felt so thrilled. I declare, I almost expected him to fly at them then and there. But he he just gave a sort of gasp and set down again. I don’t know whether Theodora Dix saw him or not. She looked as cool and unconcerned as you please.”

Theodora had not seen Ludovic, but if she looked cool and unconcerned, her appearance belied her, for she felt miserably flustered. She could not prevent Arnold Sherman coming to church with her, but it seemed to her like going too far. People did not go to church and sit together in Grafton unless they were the next thing to being engaged. What if this filled Ludovic with the narcotic of des-

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pair instead of wakening him up? She sat through the service in misery and heard not one word of the sermon.

But Ludovic’s spectacular performances were not yet over. The Speeds might be hard to get started but but once they were started their momentum was ir irresistible. When Theodora and Mr. Sherman came out Ludovic was waiting on the steps. He stood up straight and stern, with his head thrown back and his shoulders squared. There was open defiance in the look he cast on his rival, and masterfulness in the mere touch of the hand he laid on Theodora’s arm.

“May I see you home, Miss Dix?” his words said. His tone said, “I am

 

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in their brief intercourse.

“I’m not perfectly sure of that,” he said, with a half sigh.

______________            ___________________

 

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the garden. She arranged her beautiful, thick, white hair very carefully, and put on her purple silk dress with the little gold spots in it. The Old Lady always wore silk from motives of economy. It was much cheaper to wear a silk dress that had belonged to her mother than to buy new print at the store. The Old Lady had plenty of silk dresses which had belonged to her mother. She wore them morning, noon, and night, and Spencervale people considered it an additional evidence of her pride. As for the fashion of them, it was, of course, just because she was too mean to have them made over. They did not dream that the Old Lady never put on one of the silk dresses without agon-

 

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the pale, lovely dawn-color came stealing up the sky behind the spruces the Old Lady buried her face in her pillow and refused to look at it.

“I hate the new day,” she said rebelliously. “It will be just like all the other hard, common days. I don’t want to get up and live it. And, oh, to think that long ago I reached out my hands joyfully to every new day, as to a friend who was brin bringing me good tidings! I loved the mornings then—sunny or gray, they were as delightful as an unread book—and now I hate them—hate them—hate them!”

But the Old Lady got up nevertheless, for she knew Crooked Jack would be coming early to finish

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them because they hurt her; and this particular spring of this particular May chapter hurt her more than any that had gone before. The Old Lady felt as if she could not endure the ache of it. Everything hurt her—the new green tips on the firs, the fairy mists down in the little beech hollow below the house, the fresh smell of the red earth Crooked Jack spaded up in her garden. The Old Lady lay awake all one moonlit night and cried for very heartache. She even forgot her body hunger in her soul hunger; and the Old Lady had been hungry, more or less, all that week. She was living on store biscuit biscuits and water, so that she might be able to pay Crooked Jack for digging her garden. When

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distance the spare, upright form of the Old Lady, gathering sticks for her fire. Mary Moore was the only one who was quite sure she was not a witch.

“Witches are always ugly,” she said decisively, “and Old Lady Lloyd isn’t ugly. She’s real pretty — she’s got such soft white hair and big black eyes and a little white face. Those Road children don’t know what they’re talking of. Mother says they’re a very ignorant crowd.”

“Well, she doesn’t ever go to church, and she mutters mutters and talks to herself all the time she’s picking up sticks,” maintained Jimmy Kimball stoutly.

The Old Lady talked to herself because she was really w very

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you was doing the favor, not him. Well, well, let Old Lady Lloyd keep herself and her money to herself if she wants to. If she doesn’t want our company she doesn’t have to suffer it, that’s all. Reckon she isn’t none too happy for all her money and pride.”

No, the Old Lady was none too happy, that was unfortunately true. It is not easy to be happy when your life is eaten up with loneliness and emptiness on the spiritual side, and when, on the material side all you have between you and starvation is the little money your hens bring you in.

The Old Lady lived “away back at the old Lloyd place,” as it was always called. It was a quaint,

 

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izing over its unfashionableness, and that even the eyes of Crooked Jack cast on her antique flounces and overskirts was almost more than her feminine vanity could endure.

In spite of the fact that the Old Lady had not welcomed the new day, its beauty charmed her when she went out for a walk after her dinner — or, rather, after her mid-day biscuit. It was so fresh, so sweet, so virgin; and all the spruce woods around the old Lloyd place were athrill with busy spring doings and all sprinkled through with young lights and shadows. Some of their delight found its way into the Old Lady’s bitter heart as she wandered through them, and

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She thought how absurd she must look in the eyes of her world.

As a matter of fact, she did not look in the least absurd. Some women might have; but the Old Lady’s stately distinction of carriage and figure were was so subtly commanding that it did away with the consideration of garmenting altogether.

The Old Lady did _^^{not not} know this. But she did know that Mrs. Kimball, the storekeeper’s wife, presently rustled into the next pew in the very latest fashion of fabric and mode; she and Mrs. Kimball were the same age, and there had been a time when the latter had been content to imitate Margaret

 

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when she came out at the little plank bridge over the brook down under the beeches she felt almost gentle and tender once more. There was one big beech there, in particular, which the Old Lady loved for reasons best known to herself — a great, tall beech with a trunk like the shaft of a gray marble column and a leafy spread of branches over the still, golden-brown pool made beneath it by the brook. It had been a young sapling in the days that were haloed by the vanished glory of the Old Lady’s life.

The Old Lady heard childish voices and laughter afar up the lane which led to William Spencer’s place just above the woods. William Spencer’s front lane ran out to the

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as they drew near — and then all at once the Old Lady’s heart gave a great bound and began to beat as it had not beaten for years, while her breath came quickly and she trembled violently. Who — who could this girl be?

Under the new music teacher’s straw hat were masses of fine chestnut hair of the very shade and wave that the Old Lady remembered on another head in vanished years; from under those waves looked large, violet-blue eyes with very black lashes and brows—and the Old Lady knew those eyes as well as she knew her own; and the new music teacher’s face, with all its beauty of delicate outline and dainty coloring and

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glad, buoyant youth, was a face from the Old Lady’s past — a perfect resemblance in every respect save one; the face which the Old Lady remembered had been weak, with all its charm; but this girl’s face possessed a fine, dominant strength compact of sweetness and womanliness. As she passed by the Old Lady’s hiding place she laughed at something one of the children said; and oh, but the Old Lady knew that laughter well. She had heard it before under that very beech tree.

She watched them until they disappeared over the wooded hill beyond the bridge; and then she went back home as if she walked

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weren’t many finer looking women anywhere than Old Lady Lloyd. Pity she was such an old miser!

“Mr. Spencer,” said the Old Lady graciously — she always spoke very graciously to her inferiors when she talked to them at all — “can you tell me the name of the new music teacher who is b boarding at Mr. William Spencer’s?”

“Sylvia Gray,” said Crooked Jack.

The Old Lady’s heart gave another great bound. But she had known it — she had known that girl with Leslie Gray’s hair and eyes and laugh must be Leslie Gray’s daughter.

Crooked Jack spat on his hand and resumed his work, but his tongue went faster than his spade, and the Old Lady listened greedily. For the

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first time she enjoyed and blessed Crooked Jack’s garrulity and gossip. Every word he uttered was as an apple of gold in a picture of silver to her.                                                                                ?

He had been working at William Spencer’s the day the new music teacher had come and what Crooked Jack couldn’t find out about any person in one whole day — at least as far as outward life went — was hardly worth finding out. Next to discovering things did he love telling them, and it would be hard to say which enjoyed that ensuing half hour more — Crooked Jack or the Old Lady.

Crooked Jack’s account, boiled down, amounted to this; both Miss Gray’s parents had died when she

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ment, had returned sent a harsh answer. No more letters came; Leslie Gray never returned; and one day Margaret wakened to the realization that she had put love out of her life forever. She knew it would never be hers again; and from that moment her feet were turned from youth to walk down the valley of shadow to a lonely, eccentric age.

Many years later she heard of Leslie’s mother marriage; then came news of his death, after a life that had not fulfilled his dreams for him. Nothing more she had heard or known — nothing to this day, when she had seen his daughter pass her by unseeing

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When the Old Lady happened to go into her spare room that evening, she saw from it a light shining through a gap in the trees on the hill. She knew that it shone from the Spencers’ spare room. So it was Sylvia’s light. The Old Lady stood in the darkness and watched it until it went out — watched it with a great sweetness breathing in her heart, such as rises from old rose-leaves when they are stirred. She fancied Sylvia moving about her room, brushing and braiding her long, glistening hair — laying aside her little trinkets and girlish adornments — making her simple preparations for sleep. When the light went out the Old Lady pictured a slight white

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figure kneeling by the window in the soft starshine; and the Old Lady knelt down then and there and said her own prayers in fellowship. She said the simple form of words she had always used; but a new spirit seemed to inspire them; and she finished with a new petition — “let me think of something I can do for her, dear Father — some little, little thing that I can do for her.”

The Old Lady had slept in the same room all her life — the one looking north into the spruces — and loved it; but the next day she moved into the spare room without a regret. It was to be her room after this; she must

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glimmering far down in her eyes. The egg pedlar went away and vowed he’d never seen the Old Lady so spry as she was this spring; she seemed real interested in the young folks’ doings.

The Old Lady kept her secret and grew young in it. She walked back to the mayflower hill as long as the mayflowers lasted; and she always hid in the spruces to see Sylvia Gray go by. Every day she loved her more, and yearned after her more deeply. All the long repressed tenderness of her nature overflowed to this girl who was unconscious of it. She was proud of Sylvia’s grace and beauty, and sweetness of voice and

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laughter. She began to like the Spencer children because they worshipped Sylvia; she envied Mrs. Spencer because the latter could minister to Sylvia’s needs. Even the egg pedlar seemed a delightful person because he brought news of Sylvia — her social popularity, her professional success, the love and admiration she had won already. When the

The Old Lady never dreamed of revealing herself to Sylvia. That, in her poverty, was not to be thought of for a moment. It would have been very sweet to know her — sweet to have her come to the old house — sweet to talk to her — to enter into her life. But it might not be. The Old Lady’s pride was still far

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garden as well, including the Stewart garden. Chris Stewart, when he was teased about the music teacher merely smiled and held his peace. Chris knew perfectly well who was the real giver of those flowers. He had made it his business to find out when the Mayflower gossip started. But since it was evident Old Lady Lloyd did not wish it to be known Chris told no one. Chris had always liked Old Lady Lloyd ever since the day, ten years before, when she had found him crying in the woods with a cut foot and had taken him into her house, and bathed and bound the wound, and given him ten cents to buy candy at the store. The Old Lady went without her supper that night

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because of it, but Chris d never knew that.

The Old Lady thought it a most beautiful June. She no longer hated the new days; on the contrary, she welcomed them.

“Every day is an uncommon day now,” she said jubilantly to herself—for did not almost every day bring her a glimpse of Sylvia. Even on rainy days the Old Lady gallantly braved rheumatism to hide behind her clump of dripping spruces and watch Sylvia pass. The only days she could not see her were Sundays, and no Sundays had ever seemed so long to Old Lady Lloyd as those June Sundays did.

One day the egg pedlar had

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news for her.

“The music teacher is going to sing a solo for a collection piece to-morrow,” he told her.

The Old Lady’s black eyes flashed with interest.

“I didn’t know Miss Gray was a member of the choir,” she said.

“Jined two Sundays ago. I tell you, our music is something worth listening to now. The church’ll be packed to-morrow, I reckon — her name’s gone all over the country for singing. You ought to come and hear it, Miss Lloyd.”

The pedlar said this out of bravado, merely to show he wasn’t scared of the Old Lady, for all her grand airs. The Old Lady made no answer, and he thought he had

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offended her. He went away, wishing he hadn’t said it. Had he but known it, the Old Lady had forgotten the existence of all and any egg pedlars. He had blotted himself and his insignificance out of her consciousness by his last sentence. All her thoughts, feelings, and wishes were submerged in a very whirlpool of desire to hear Sylvia sing that solo. She went into the house in a tumult and tried to conquer that desire. She could not do it, even though she summoned all her pride to her aid. Pride said,

“You will have to go to church to hear her. You haven’t fit clothes to go to church in. Think what a figure you will make before them all.”

But for the first

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Lloyd’s costumes at a humble distance. But the storekeeper had proposed, and things were changed now; and there sat poor Old Lady Lloyd, feeling the change bitterly, and half wishing she had not come to church at all.

Then all at once the Angel of Love touched these foolish thoughts, born of vanity and morbid pride, and they melted away as if they had never been. Sylvia Gray had come into the choir, and was sitting just where the afternoon sunshine fell over her beautiful hair like a halo. The Old Lady looked at her in a rapture of satisfied longing and thenceforth the service was blessed to her, as anything is blessed which comes through the medium of

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of unselfish love, whether human or divine. Nay, are they not one and the same, differing in degree only, not in kind?

The Old Lady had never had such a good, satisfying look at Sylvia before. All her former glimpses had been stolen and fleeting. Now she sat and gazed upon her to her hungry heart’s content, lingering delightedly over every little charm and loveliness — the way Sylvia’s shining hair rippled back from her forehead, the sweet little trick she had of dropping quickly her long-lashed eyelids when she encountered too bold or curious a glance, and the slender, beautifully modelled hands — so like Leslie Gray’s hands — that held her hymn book. She was dressed very plainly in a black

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very striking face. I should like to meet her — to know her.”

“I don’t think it’s likely you ever will,” said Janet carelessly. “She doesn’t like young people and she never goes anywhere. I don’t think I’d like to know her. I’d be afraid of her — she has such stately ways and such strange, piercing eyes.”

“I shouldn’t be afraid of her,” said Sylvia to herself, as she turned into the Spencer lane. “But I don’t expect I’ll ever become acquainted with her. If she knew who I am I suppose she would dislike me. I suppose she never suspects that I am Leslie Gray’s daughter.”

The minister, thinking it well to strike while the iron was hot, went up to call on Old Lady Lloyd the very next afternoon. He went in fear and trembling, for he had heard things

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found a little birch bark boat full of strawberries at the beech in the hollow. They were the earliest of the season; the Old Lady had found them in one of her secret haunts. They would have been a toothsome addition to the Old Lady’s own slender bill of fare; but she never thought of eating them. She got far more pleasure out of the thought of Sylvia’s enjoying them for her tea. Thereafter the strawberries alternated with the flowers as long as they lasted, and then came blueberries and raspberries [sic]The blueberries grew far away and the Old Lady had many a tramp after them. Sometimes her bones ached at night because of it,