Читать книгу The Bent Twig - Dorothy Canfield Fisher - Страница 19

One day at the end of a fortnight, Aunt Victoria and Arnold were late in their daily arrival at the Marshall house, and when the neat surrey at last drove up, they both showed signs of discomposure. Discomposure was no unusual condition for Arnold, who not infrequently made his appearance red-faced and sullen, evidently fresh from angry revolt against his tutor, but on that morning he was anything but red-faced, and looked a little scared. His stepmother's fine complexion, on the contrary, had more pink than usual in its pearly tones, and her carriage had less than usual of sinuous grace. Sylvia and Judith ran down the porch steps to meet them, but stopped, startled by their aspect. Aunt Victoria descended, very straight, her head high-held, and without giving Sylvia the kiss with which she usually marked her preference for her older niece, walked at once into the house.

Although the impressionable Sylvia was so struck by these phenomena, that, even after her aunt's disappearance, she remained daunted and silent, Judith needed only the removal of the overpowering presence to restore her coolness. She pounced on Arnold with questions. "What you been doing that's so awful bad? I bet you caught it all right!"

"'Tisn't me," said Arnold in a subdued voice. "It's Pauline and old

Rollins that caught it. They're the ones that ha' been bad."

Judith was at a loss, never having conceived that grown-ups might do naughty things. Arnold went on, "If you'd ha' heard Madrina talking to Pauline—say! Do you know what I did? I crawled under the bed—honest I did. It didn't last but a minute, but it scared the liver out o' me." This vigorous expression was a favorite of his.

Judith was somewhat impressed by his face and manner, but still inclined to mock at a confession of fear. "Under the bed!" she sneered.

Arnold evidently felt the horror of the recently enacted scene so vividly that there was no room for shame in his mind. "You bet I did! And so would you too, if you'd ha' been there. Gee!"

In spite of herself Judith looked somewhat startled by the vibration of sincerity in his voice, and Sylvia, with her quick sympathy of divination, had turned almost as pale as the little boy, who, all his braggart turbulence gone, stood looking at them with a sick expression in his eyes.

"Was it in your room?" asked Judith. "I thought Pauline's room was on the top floor. What was she doing down there?"

"No, it was in old Rollins' room—next to mine. I don't know what

Pauline was doing there."

"What did Pauline do when Aunt Victoria scolded her?" asked Sylvia. She had come to be fond of the pretty young maid with her fat, quick hands and her bright, warm-hearted smile for her mistress' little niece. One day, when Mrs. Marshall-Smith had, for a moment, chanced to leave them alone, Pauline had given her a sudden embrace, and had told her: "At 'ome zere are four leetle brozers and sisters. America is a place mos' solitary!" "What did Pauline do?" asked Sylvia again as Arnold did not answer.

The boy looked down. "Pauline just cried and cried," he said in a low tone. "I liked Pauline! She was awful good to me. I—I heard her crying afterwards as she went away. Seemed to me I could hear her crying all the way out here."

"Did she go away?" asked Judith, trying to make something coherent out of the story. Arnold nodded.

"You bet she did. Madrina turned her right out—and old Rollins too."

"Was he there? What was the matter anyhow?" Judith persisted.

Arnold twisted uncomfortably, loath to continue bringing up the scene. "I d'n know what was the matter. Yes, old Rollins was there, all right. He's gone away too, the doggoned old thing—for good. That's something!" He added, "Aw, quit talkin' about it, can't you! Let's play!"

"It's my turn to help Mother with the tomatoes," said Judith. "She's doing the last of the canning this morning. Maybe she'd let you help."

Arnold brightened. "Maybe she would!" he said, adding eagerly, "Maybe she'd tell us another of the stories about her grandmother."

Judith snatched at his hand and began racing down the path to the garden. "Maybe she would!" she cried. They both called as they ran, "Mother, oh, Mother!" and as they ran, they leaped and bounded into the bright autumn air like a couple of puppies.

Sylvia's mental resiliency was not of such sturdily elastic stuff. She stood still, thinking of Pauline crying, and crying—and started aside when her aunt came out again on the porch.

"I don't find any one in the house, Sylvia dear," said Mrs. Marshall-Smith quietly. Sylvia looked up into the clear, blue eyes, so like her father's, and felt the usual magic spell lay hold on her. The horrid impression made by Arnold's story dimmed and faded. Arnold was always getting things twisted. She came up closer to her aunt's side and took the soft, smooth fingers between her two little hard, muscular hands. In her relief, she had forgotten to answer. Mrs. Marshall-Smith said again, "Where are your parents, dear?"

"Oh," said Sylvia. "Oh yes—why, Father's at the University at a committee meeting and Mother's out by the garden putting up tomatoes. Judy and Arnold are helping her."

Mrs. Marshall-Smith hesitated, looked about her restlessly, and finally raised her parasol, of a gold-colored silk, a lighter tone, but the same shade as her rich plain broadcloth costume of tan. "Shall we take a little walk, my dear?" she suggested. "I don't feel like sitting still just now—nor"—she looked down into Sylvia's eyes—"nor yet like canning tomatoes,"

That walk, the last one taken with Aunt Victoria, became one of Sylvia's memories, although she never had a vivid recollection of what they saw during their slow ramble. It was only Aunt Victoria whom the little girl remembered—Aunt Victoria moving like a goddess over their rough paths and under the changing glory of the autumn leaves. She herself was a brighter glory, with her shining blond hair crowned by a halo of feathery, gold-colored plumes, the soft, fine, supple broadcloth of her garments gleaming in the sunshine with a sheen like that of a well-kept animal's coat. There breathed from all her person a faint odor of grace and violets and unhurried leisure.

Sylvia clung close to her side, taking in through all her pores this lovely emanation, not noticing whether they were talking or not, not heeding the direction of their steps. She was quite astonished to find herself on the University campus, in front of the Main Building. Aunt Victoria had never walked so far before. "Oh, did you want to see Father?" she asked, coming a little to herself.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith said, as if in answer, "Just sit down here and wait for me a minute, will you, Sylvia?" moving thereupon up the steps and disappearing through the wide front door. Sylvia relapsed into her day-dreams and, motionless in a pool of sunlight, waited, quite unconscious of the passage of time.

This long reverie was at last broken by the return of Mrs. Marshall-Smith. She was not alone, but the radiant young man who walked beside her was not her brother, and nothing could have differed more from the brilliantly hard gaze which Professor Marshall habitually bent on his sister, than the soft intentness with which young Mr. Saunders regarded the ripely beautiful woman. The dazzled expression of his eyes was one of the remembered factors of the day for Sylvia.

The two walked down the shaded steps, Sylvia watching them admiringly, the scene forever printed on her memory, and emerged into the pool of sunshine where she sat, swinging her legs from the bench. They stood there for some minutes, talking together in low tones. Sylvia, absorbed in watching the play of light on Aunt Victoria's smooth cheek, heard but a few words of what passed between them. She had a vague impression that Professor Saunders continually began sentences starting firmly with "But" and ending somehow on quite another note. She felt dimly that Aunt Victoria was less calmly passive than usual in a conversation, that it was not only the enchanting rising and falling inflections of her voice which talked, but her eyes, her arms, her whole self. Once she laid her hand for an instant on Professor Saunders' arm.

More than that Sylvia could not remember, even when she was asked later to repeat as much as she could of what she had heard. She was resolving when she was grown-up to have a ruffle of creamy lace falling away from her neck and wrists as Aunt Victoria did. She had not only forgotten Arnold's story, she had forgotten that such a boy existed. She was living in a world all made up of radiance and bloom, lace and sunshine and velvet, and bright hair and gleaming cloth and smooth voices and the smell of violets.

After a time she was aware that Professor Saunders shook hands and turned back up the steps. Aunt Victoria began to move with her slow grace along the road towards home, and Sylvia to follow, soaking herself in an impression of supreme suavity.

When, after the walk through the beech-woods, they reached the edge of the Marshall field, they saw a stiff plume of blue smoke stand up over the shack by the garden and, as they approached, heard a murmur of voices. Mrs. Marshall-Smith stopped, furled her parasol, and surveyed the scene within. Her sister-in-law, enveloped in a large blue apron, by no means fresh, sat beside a roughly built table, peeling tomatoes, her brown stained fingers moving with the rapidity of a prestidigitator's. Judith stood beside her, also attacking the pile of crimson fruit, endeavoring in vain to emulate her mother's speed. Over the hot, rusty stove hung Arnold, red-faced and bright-eyed, armed with a long, wooden spatula which he continually dug into the steaming contents of an enormous white-lined kettle. As, at the arrival of the new-comers, Mrs. Marshall's voice stopped, he looked around and frowned impatiently at his stepmother. "She's just got to the excitin' part," he said severely, and to the raconteur eagerly, "'N'en what?"

Mrs. Marshall looked up at her husband's sister, smiled, and went on—Sylvia recognized the story as one of her own old favorites. "Well, it was very early dawn when she had to go over to the neighbor's to borrow some medicine for her father, who kept getting sicker all the time. As she hurried along across the meadow towards the stile, she kept wondering, in spite of herself, if there was any truth in what Nat had said about having seen bear tracks near the house the day before. When she got to the stile she ran up the steps—and on the top one she stood still, for there—" She made a dramatic pause and reached for another tray of tomatoes. Arnold stopped stirring the pot and stood motionless, his eyes fixed on the narrator, the spatula dripping tomato-juice all along his white trousers. "There on the other side, looking up at her, was a bear—a big black bear."

Arnold's mouth dropped open and his eyes widened.

"My grandmother was dreadfully frightened. She was only seventeen, and she hadn't any kind of a weapon, not so much as a little stick with her. Her first idea was to turn and run as fast as she could, back home. But she remembered how sick her father was, and how much he needed the medicine; and then besides, she used to say, all of a sudden it made her angry, all over, to have that great stupid animal get in her way. She always said that nothing 'got her mad up' like feeling afraid. So what do you suppose she did?"

Arnold could only shake his head silently in an ecstasy of impatience for the story to continue. Judith and Sylvia smiled at each other with the insufferable complacence of auditors who know the end by heart.

"She just pointed her finger at the bear, and she said in a loud, harsh voice: 'Shame! Shame! Shame on you! For sha-a-ame!' She'd taught district school, you know, and had had lots of practice saying that to children who had been bad. The bear looked up at her hard for a minute, then dropped his head and began to walk slowly away. Grandmother always said, 'The great lummox lumbered off into the bushes like a gawk of a boy who's been caught in mischief,' She waited just a minute and then ran like lightning along the path through the woods to the neighbors and got the medicine."

The story was evidently over, the last tomato was peeled. Mrs. Marshall rose, wiping her stained and dripping hands on her apron, and went to the stove. Arnold started as if coming out of a dream and looked about him with wondering eyes. "Well, what-d'you-think-o'-that?" he commented, all in one breath. "Say, Mother," he went on, looking up at her with trusting eyes, searching the quiet face, "what do you suppose made the bear go away? You wouldn't think a little thing like that would scare a bear!"

Mrs. Marshall began dipping the hot, stewed tomatoes into the glass jars ready in a big pan of boiling water on the back of the stove. The steam rose up, like a cloud, into her face, which began to turn red and to glisten with perspiration. "Oh, I don't suppose it really frightened the bear," she said moderately, refraining from the dramatic note of completeness which her husband, in spite of himself, gave to everything he touched, and adding instead the pungent, homely savor of reality, which none relished more than Sylvia and her father, incapable themselves of achieving it. "'Most likely the bear would have gone away of his own accord anyhow. They don't attack people unless they're stirred up." Arnold bit deeply into the solidity of this unexaggerated presentation, and was silent for a moment, saying then: "Well, anyhow, she didn't know he'd go away! She was a sport, all right!"

"Oh yes, indeed," said Mrs. Marshall, dipping and steaming, and wiping away the perspiration, which ran down in drops to the end of her large, shapely nose. "Yes, my grandmother was a sport, all right." The acrid smell of hot, cooking tomatoes filled the shed and spread to the edge where Sylvia and her aunt stood, still a little aloof. Although it bore no resemblance to the odor of violets, it could not be called a disgusting smell: it was the sort of smell which is quite agreeable when one is very hungry. But Sylvia was not hungry at all. She stepped back involuntarily. Mrs. Marshall-Smith, on the contrary, advanced a step or so, until she stood close to her sister-in-law. "Barbara, I'd like to see you a few minutes without the children," she remarked in the neutral tone she always had for her brother's wife. "A rather unpleasant occurrence—I'm in something of a quandary."

Mrs. Marshall nodded. "All right," she agreed. "Scatter out of here, you children! Go and let out the hens, and give them some water!"

Arnold needed no second bidding, reminded by his stepmother's words of his experiences of the morning. He and Judith scampered away in a suddenly improvised race to see who would reach the chicken-house first. Sylvia went more slowly, looking back once or twice at the picture made by the two women, so dramatically contrasted—her mother, active, very upright, wrapped in a crumpled and stained apron, her dark hair bound closely about her round head, her moist, red face and steady eyes turned attentively upon the radiant creature beside her, cool and detached, leaning willow-like on the slender wand of the gold-colored parasol.

Professor Marshall chanced to be late that day in coming home for luncheon, and Aunt Victoria and Arnold had returned to the hotel without seeing him. His wife remarked that Victoria had asked her to tell him something, but, acting on her inviolable principle that nothing must interfere with the cheerful peace of mealtime, said nothing more to him until after they had finished the big plate of purple grapes from her garden, with which the meal ended.

Then Judith vanished out to the shop, where she was constructing a rabbit-house for the latest family. Sylvia took Lawrence, yawning and rubbing his eyes, but fighting desperately against his sleepiness, upstairs for his nap. When this task fell to Judith's lot it was despatched with business-like promptness, but Lawrence had early discovered a temperamental difference between his two sisters, and Sylvia was seldom allowed to leave the small bed until she had paid tribute to her ever-present desire to please, in the shape of a story or a song. On that day Buddy was more exacting than usual. Sylvia told the story of Cinderella and sang, "A Frog He Would a-Wooing Go," twice through, before the little boy's eyes began to droop. Even then, the clutch of his warm, moist fingers about her hand did not relax. When she tried to slip her fingers out of his, his eyelids fluttered open and he tightened his grasp with a wilful frown. So she sat still on the edge of his bed, waiting till he should be really asleep.

From the dining-room below her rose the sound of voices, or rather of one voice—her father's. She wondered why it sounded so angry, and then, mixed with some unintelligible phrases—"turned out on the street, in trouble—in a foreign land—Good God!" she caught Pauline's name. Oh yes, that must be the trouble. Mother was telling Father about Pauline—whatever it was she had done—and he was as mad about it as Aunt Victoria had been. If Aunt Victoria's voice had sounded like that, she didn't wonder that Arnold had hidden under the bed. If she could have moved, she, too, would have run away, although the idea that she ought to do so did not occur to her. There had been no secrets in that house. The talk had always been for all to hear who would.

But when she tried again to slip her hand away from Buddy's the little

boy pulled at it hard, and half opening his eyes, said sleepily,

"Sylvie stay with Buddy—Sylvie stay—" Sylvia yielded weakly, said:

"Yes—sh! sh! Sister'll stay. Go to sleep, Buddy."

From below came the angry voice, quite loud now, so that she caught every queer-sounding word—"righteous indignation indeed! What else did she do, I'd like to know, when she wanted money. The only difference was that she was cold-blooded enough to extract a legal status from the old reprobate she accosted."

Sylvia heard her mother's voice saying coldly, "You ought to be ashamed to use such a word!" and her father retort, "It's the only word that expresses it! You know as well as I do that she cared no more for Ephraim Smith than for the first man she might have solicited on the street—nor so much! God! It makes me sick to look at her and think of the price she paid for her present damn Olympian serenity."

Sylvia heard her mother begin to clear off the table. There was a rattle of dishes through which her voice rose impatiently. "Oh, Elliott, why be so melodramatic always, and spoil so much good language! She did only what every girl brought up as she was, would have done. And, anyhow, are you so very sure that in your heart you're not so awfully hard on her because you're envious of that very prosperity?"

He admitted, with acrimony, the justice of this thrust. "Very likely. Very likely!—everything base and mean in me, that you keep down, springs to life in me at her touch. I dare say I do envy her—I'm quite capable of that—am I not her brother, with the same—"

Mrs. Marshall said hastily: "Hush! Hush! Here's Judith. For Heaven's sake don't let the child hear you!"

For the first time the idea penetrated Sylvia's head that she ought not to have listened. Buddy was now soundly asleep: she detached her hand from his, and went soberly along the hall into her own room. She did not want to see her father just then.

A long time after, Mother called up to say that Aunt Victoria had come for her afternoon drive, and to leave Arnold. Sylvia opened the door a crack and asked, "Where's Father?"

"Oh, gone back to the University this long time," answered her mother in her usual tone. Sylvia came down the stairs slowly and took her seat in the carriage beside Aunt Victoria with none of her usual demonstrative show of pleasure.

"Don't you like my dress?" asked Aunt Victoria, as they drove away. "You don't even notice it, and I put it on 'specially to please you—you're the one discriminating critic in this town!" As Sylvia made no answer to this sally, she went on: "It's hard to get into alone, too. I had to ask the hotel chambermaid to hook it up on the shoulders."

Thus reminded of Pauline, Sylvia could have but inattentive eyes for the creation of amber silk and lace, and brown fur, which seductively clad the handsome body beside her.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith gave her favorite a penetrating look. "What's the matter with you, Sylvia?" she asked in the peremptory note which her sweet voice of many modulations could startlingly assume on occasion. Sylvia had none of Judith's instant pugnacious antagonism to any peremptory note. She answered in one imploring rush of a question, "Aunt Victoria, why should Father be so very mad at Pauline?"

Mrs. Marshall-Smith looked a little startled at this direct reference to the veiled storm-center of the day, but not at all displeased. "Oh, your mother told him? Was he so very angry?" she asked with a slight smile.

"Oh, dreadfully!" returned Sylvia. "I didn't mean to listen, but I couldn't help it. Buddy wouldn't go to sleep and Father's voice was so loud—and he got madder and madder at her." She went on with another question, "Auntie, who was Ephraim Smith?"

Aunt Victoria turned upon her in astonishment, and did not, for a moment, answer; then: "Why, that was the name of my husband, Sylvia. What has that to do with anything?"

"Why didn't Pauline like him?" asked Sylvia.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith replied with a vivacity of surprise which carried her out of her usual delicate leisure in speech. "Pauline? Why, she never saw him in her life! What are you talking about, child?"

"But, Father said—I thought—he seemed to mean—" Sylvia halted, not able to remember in her bewilderment what it had been that Father had said. In a blur of doubt and clouded perceptions she lost all definite impression of what she had heard. Evidently, as so often happened, she had grown-ups' affairs all twisted up in her mind. Aunt Victoria was touched with kindly amusement at the little girl's face of perplexity, and told her, dismissing the subject: "Never mind, dear, you evidently misunderstood something. But I wonder what your father could have said to give you such a funny idea."

Sylvia gave it up, shaking her head. They turned into the main street of La Chance, and Aunt Victoria directed the coachman to drive them to "the" drug store of town, and offered Sylvia her choice of any soda water confection she might select. This completed the "about-face" of the mobile little mind. After several moments of blissful anguish of indecision, Sylvia decided on a peach ice-cream soda, and thereafter was nothing but sense of taste as she ecstatically drew through a straw the syrupy, foamy draught of nectar. She took small sips at a time and held them in the back of her mouth till every minute bubble of gas had rendered up its delicious prickle to her tongue. Her consciousness was filled to its uttermost limits with a voluptuous sense of present physical delight.

And yet it was precisely at this moment that from her subconscious mind, retracing with unaided travail a half-forgotten clue, there sprang into her memory a complete phrase of what her father had said. She gave one more suck to the straw and laid it aside for a moment to say in quite a comfortable accent to her aunt: "Oh yes, now I remember. He said she didn't care for him any more than for the first man she might have solicited in the street." For an instant the words came back as clearly as though they had just been uttered, and she repeated them fluently, returning thereupon at once to the charms of the tall, foam-filled frosted glass.

Evidently Aunt Victoria did not follow this sudden change of subject, for she asked blankly, "Who? Who didn't care for who?"

"Why, I supposed, Pauline for Ephraim Smith. It was that that made Father so mad," explained Sylvia, sucking dreamily, her eyes on the little maelstrom created in the foaming liquid by the straw, forgetting everything else. The luxurious leisure in which she consumed her potation made it last a long time, and it was not until her suction made only a sterile rattling in the straw that she looked up at her aunt to thank her.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith's face was averted and she did not turn it back as she said, "Just run along into the shop and leave your glass, Sylvia—here is the money."

After Sylvia took her seat again in the carriage, the coachman turned the horse's head back up the Main Street. "Aren't you going to the campus?" asked Sylvia in surprise.

"No, we are going to the hotel," said Aunt Victoria. She spoke quietly, and seemed to look as usual, but Sylvia's inner barometer fell fast with a conviction of a change in the emotional atmosphere. She sat as still as possible, and only once glanced up timidly at her aunt's face. There was no answering glance. Aunt Victoria gazed straight in front of her. Her face looked as it did when it was being massaged—all smooth and empty. There was, however, one change. For the first time that day, she looked a little pale.

As the carriage stopped in front of the onyx-lined, palm-decorated, plate-glass-mirrored "entrance hall" of the expensive hotel, Aunt Victoria descended, motioning to Sylvia not to follow her. "I haven't time to drive any more this afternoon," she said. "Peter will take you home. And have him bring Arnold back at once." She turned away and, as Sylvia sat watching her, entered the squirrel-cage revolving door of glass, which a little boy in livery spun about for her.

But after she was inside the entrance hall, she signified to him that she had forgotten something, and came immediately out again. What she had forgotten surprised Sylvia as much as it touched her. Aunt Victoria came rapidly to the side of the carriage and put out her arms. "Come here, dear," she said in a voice Sylvia had never heard her use. It trembled a little, and broke. With her quick responsiveness, Sylvia sprang into the outstretched arms, overcome by the other's emotion. She hid her face against the soft, perfumed laces and silk, and heard from beneath them the painful throb of a quickly beating heart.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith held her niece for a long moment and then turned the quivering little face up to her own grave eyes, in which Sylvia, for all her inexperience, read a real suffering. Aunt Victoria looked as though somebody were hurting her—hurting her awfully—Sylvia pressed her cheek hard against her aunt's, and Mrs. Marshall-Smith felt, soft and Warm and ardent on her lips, the indescribably fresh kiss of a child's mouth. "Oh, little Sylvia!" she cried, in that new, strange, uncertain voice which trembled and broke, "Oh, little Sylvia!" She seemed to be about to say something more, said in fact in a half-whisper,

"I hope—I hope—" but then shook her head, kissed Sylvia gently, put her back in the carriage, and again disappeared through the revolving door.

This time she did not turn back. She did not even look back. After a moment's wait, Peter gathered up the reins and Sylvia, vaguely uneasy, and much moved, drove home in a solitary state, which she forgot to enjoy.

The next morning there was no arrival, even tardy, of the visitors from the hotel. Instead came a letter, breaking the startling news that Aunt Victoria had been called unexpectedly to the East, and had left on the midnight train, taking Arnold with her, of course. Judith burst into angry expressions of wrath over the incompleteness of the cave which she and Arnold had been excavating together. The next day was the beginning of school, she reminded her auditors, and she'd have no time to get it done! Never! She characterized Aunt Victoria as a mean old thing, an epithet for which she was not reproved, her mother sitting quite absent and absorbed in the letter. She read it over twice, with a very puzzled air, which gave an odd look to her usually crystal-clear countenance. She asked her husband one question as he went out of the door. "You didn't see Victoria yesterday—or say anything to her?" to which he answered, with apparently uncalled-for heat, "I did not! I thought it rather more to the purpose to try to look up Pauline."

Mrs. Marshall sprang up and approached him with an anxious face. He shook his head: "Too late. Disappeared. No trace."

She sat down again, looking sad and stern.

Professor Marshall put on his hat with violence, and went away.

When he came home to luncheon there was a fresh sensation, and again a disagreeable one. He brought the astounding news that, at the very beginning of the semester's work, he had been deserted by his most valuable assistant, and abandoned, apparently forever, by his most-loved disciple. Saunders had left word, a mere laconic note, that he had accepted the position left vacant by the dismissal of Arnold's tutor, and had entered at once upon the duties of his new position.

Professor Marshall detailed this information in a hard, level voice, and without further comment handed his wife Saunders' note. She read it rapidly, this time with no perplexity, and laid it down, saying to her husband, briefly, "Will you kindly remember that the children are here?"

Judith looked at Sylvia in astonishment, this being the first time that that well-worn phrase, so familiar to most children, had ever been heard in the Marshall house. Why shouldn't Father remember they were there? Couldn't he see them? Judith almost found the idea funny enough to laugh at, although she had not at all in general Sylvia's helpless response to the ridiculous. Sylvia did not laugh now. She looked anxiously at her father's face, and was relieved when he only answered her mother's exhortation by saying in a low tone: "Oh, I have nothing to say. It's beyond words!"

Luncheon went on as usual, with much chatter among the children. Some time later—in the midst of a long story from Lawrence, Mrs. Marshall herself brought up the subject again. Buddy was beginning to struggle with the narrative form of self-expression, and to trip his tongue desperately over the tenses. He had just said, "And the rabbit was naughty, didn't he was?" when his mother exclaimed, addressing her husband's grim face, "Good Heavens, don't take it so hard, Elliott."

He raised an eyebrow, but did not look up from the pear he was eating. "To be responsible, as I feel I am, for the pitching into a cul-de-sac of the most promising young—"

His wife broke in, "Responsible! How in the world are you responsible!" she added quickly, as if at random, to prevent the reply which her husband was evidently about to cast at her. "Besides, how do you know?—one never knows how things will turn out—she may—she may marry him, and he may have a life which will give him more leisure for investigation than if—"

Professor Marshall wiped his lips violently on his napkin and stood up. "Nothing would induce her to marry him—or any one else. She's extracted from marriage all she wants of it. No, she'll just keep him trailing along, in an ambiguous position, sickened and tantalized and fevered, till all the temper is drawn out of him—and then hell be dropped,"

He turned away with an impatient fling of his head. His wife stood up now and looked at him anxiously. "Go play us something on the piano," she urged. This was not a common exhortation from her. She cared very little for music, and with her usual honesty she showed, as a rule, a very passive attitude towards it.

Professor Marshall glanced at her with a flash of anger. "Sometimes you count too much on my childishness, Barbara," he said resentfully, and went out of the door without further words.

Decidedly the discomposing effect of Aunt Victoria's visit lasted even after she had gone away. But the next day was the beginning of the school term, the busy, regular routine was taken up, Sylvia was promoted to the 5A grade, and at home Father let her begin to learn the Pilgrim's Chorus, from Tannhauser.

Life for the eager little girl moved quickly forward at its usual brisk pace, through several years to come.