her voice itself. One could talk with her about the most trivial things, and go away with a high sense of elation. The secret of it, he supposed, was that she could n't help being interested in people, even very commonplace people. If Mr. Ogden or Mr. Dalzell were not there to tell their best stories for her, then she could be amused by Ivy Peters's ruffianly manners, or by the soft compliments of old man Elliott when he sold her a pair of winter shoes. She had a fascinating gift of mimicry. When she mentioned the fat iceman, Thad Grimes at his meat block, or the Blum boys with their dead rabbits, by a subtle suggestion of their manner she made them seem more individual and vivid than they were in their own person. She often caricatured people to their faces, and they were not offended, but greatly flattered. Nothing pleased you more than to provoke her laughter; then you felt you were getting on with her. It was her form of commenting, of agreeing with you and appreciating you when you said something interesting, and often it told you a great deal that was both too direct and too elusive for words.

Long, long afterward, when Neil did not know whether Mrs. Forrester was living or dead, if her image flashed into his mind, it came with a brightness of dark eyes, her pale, triangular cheeks with long ear-rings, and her manycolored laugh. When he was dull, dull and tired of everything, he used to think that if he could hear that long-lost lady laugh again, he could be gay.

The big storm of the winter came late that year; swept down over Sweet Water the first day of March and beat upon the town for three days and nights. Thirty inches of snow fell, and

the cutting wind blew it into curling drifts. The Forresters were snowed in. Ben Keezer, their man of all work, did not attempt to break a road or even to come over to the town himself. On the third day Neil went to the postoffice, got the captain's leather mailsack, with its accumulation, and set off across the creek, plunging into drifts up to his middle, sometimes up to his armpits. The fences along the lane were covered, but he broke his trail by keeping between the two lines of poplars. When at last he reached the front porch, Captain Forrester came to the door and let him in.

"Glad to see you, my boy, very glad. It's been a little lonesome for

us.

You must have had hard work getting over. I certainly appreciate it. Come to the sitting-room fire and dry yourself. We will talk quietly. Mrs. Forrester has gone up-stairs to lie down; she's been complaining of a headache."

Neil stood before the fire in his rubber boots, drying his trousers. The captain did not sit down, but opened the glass door into his little conservatory.

"I've something pretty to show you, Neil. All my hyacinths are coming along at once, every color of the rainbow. The Roman hyacinths, I say, are Mrs. Forrester's. They seem to suit her."

Neil went to the door and looked with keen pleasure at the fresh, watery blossoms.

"I was afraid you might lose them this bitter weather, Captain."

"No, these things can stand a good deal of cold. They 've been company for us." He stood looking out through the glass at the drifted shrubbery. Neil liked to see him look out over his

Curiously enough, it was as Captain Forrester's wife that she most interested Neil, and it was in her relation to her husband that he most admired her. Given her other charming attributes, her comprehension of a man like the railroad-builder, her loyalty to him, stamped her more than anything else. That, he felt, was quality; something that could never become worn or shabby; steel of Damascus. His admiration of Mrs. Forrester went back to that, just as, he felt, she herself went back to it. He rather liked the stories, even the spiteful ones, about the gay life she led in Colorado, and the young men she kept dangling about her every winter. He sometimes thought of the life she might have been living ever since he had known her, and the one she had chosen to live. From that disparity, he believed, came the subtlest thrill of her fascination. She mocked outrageously at the proprieties she observed, and inherited the magic of contradictions.

$ 4

On the evenings when there was no whist at the Forresters', Neil usually read, but not law, as he was supposed to do. The winter before, when the Forresters were away and one dull day dragged after another, he had come upon a copious diversion, an almost inexhaustible resource. The high, narrow book-case in the back office, between the double doors and the wall, was filled from top to bottom with rows of solemn-looking volumes bound in dark cloth, which were kept apart from the law library; an almost complete set of the Bohn classics, which Judge Pomeroy had bought long ago when he was a student at

the University of Virginia. He had brought them West with him not because he read them a great deal, but because, in his day, a gentleman had such books in his library, just as he had claret in his cellar. Among them was a set of Byron in three volumes, and last winter, apropos of a quotation which Neil did n't recognize, his uncle advised him to read Byron-all except "Don Juan." That, the judge remarked, with a deep smile, he "could save until later." Neil, of course, began with "Don Juan." Now he was curious about these fat volumes; he read "Tom Jones" and "Wilhelm Meister," and raced on until he came to Montaigne and a complete translation of Ovid. He had n't finished yet with these; always went back to them after other experiments. The authors seemed to him to know their business. Even in "Don Juan" there was a little "fooling," but with these gentle

men none.

There were philosophical works in the collection, but he did no more than open and glance at them. He had no curiosity about what men had thought; but about what they had felt and lived he had a great deal. If any one had told him that these were classics and represented the wisdom of the ages, he would doubtless have let them alone; but ever since he had found them for himself, he had been living a double life, with all its guilty enjoyments. He read the "Heroides" over and over, and thought them the most glowing love-stories he had ever come upon. He did not regard them as books, something invented to beguile the idle hour, but as living creatures, caught in the very behavior of living, surprised behind their misleading severity of form and phrase. He was

eavesdropping upon the past, being let into the great world that had plunged and glittered and sumptuously sinned long before little Western towns were dreamed of. Those rapt evenings beside the lamp gave him a long perspective, influenced his conception of the people about him, made him decide just what he wished his own relations with these people to be. For some reason his reading made him wish to become an architect. If the judge had left these books behind him in Kentucky, his nephew's life might have turned out differently.

Spring came at last, and the Forrester place had never been so lovely. The captain spent long happy days among his flowering shrubs, and his wife used to say to visitors, "Yes, you can see Mr. Forrester in a moment; I will send the English gardener to call him."

Early in June, when the captain's roses were just coming on, his pleasant labors were interrupted. One morning an alarming telegram reached him. He cut it open with his garden shears, came into the house, and asked his wife to telephone for Judge Pomeroy. A savings-bank, one in which he was. largely interested, had failed in Denver. That evening the captain and his lawyer went west on the express. The judge, when he was giving Neil final instructions about the office business, told him he was afraid the captain was bound to lose a good deal of money.

Mrs. Forrester seemed unaware of any danger; she went to the station to see her husband off, spoke of his errand merely as a "business trip." Neil, however, felt a foreboding gloom. He dreaded poverty for her. She was one of the people who ought always to have money; any retrenchment of

their generous way of living would be a hardship for her, would be unfitting. She would not be herself in straitened circumstances.

Neil took his meals at the town hotel. On the third day after Captain Forrester's departure he was annoyed to find Frank Ellinger's name on the hotel register. Ellinger did not appear at supper, which meant, of course, that he was dining with Mrs. Forrester, and that the lady herself would get his dinner. She had taken the occasion of the captain's absence to let Bohemian Mary go to visit her mother on the farm for a week. Neil thought it very bad taste in Ellinger to come to Sweet Water when Captain Forrester was away. He must know that it would stir up the gossips.

Neil had meant to call on Mrs. Forrester that evening, but now he went back to the office instead. He read late, went to bed, and slept lightly. He was awakened before dawn by the puffing of the switch engine down at the roundhouse. He tried to muffle his ears in the sheet and go to sleep again, but the sound of escaping steam for some reason excited him. He could not shut out the feeling that it was summer, and that the dawn would soon be flaming gloriously over the Forresters' marsh. He had awakened with that intense, blissful realization of summer which sometimes comes to children in their beds. He rose and dressed quickly. He would get over to the hill before Frank Ellinger could intrude his unwelcome presence, while he was still asleep in the best bedroom of the Wimbleton Hotel.

An impulse of affection and guardianship drew Neil up the poplarbordered road in the early light, though he did not go near the house