EVENING OF THE SAME DAY

If Mrs. Houghton could have caught a glimpse of the Schrekengust household at supper a half hour later she would have felt that, after all, rather than have her son marry into a family like this, she would infinitely prefer that he give the girl up to his Uncle George and thus lose all hope of inheriting a fortune. For the good taste manifested in the Schrekengust's parlour, which had so surprised her, did not extend beyond that room to the rest of the house. And the girl, Susan, herself, was a quite unique member of her family. She had never tried to make over her parents and her two elder sisters as she had made over the parlour. She loved her family very much as they were, though she was not above finding them embarrassing sometimes.

The large kitchen where they were gathered for their substantial evening meal of fried "ponhaus," fried potatoes, pie, and coffee, was also the family living room. It was unpapered, bare of ornament, the floor covered with a patched rag carpet, the furniture of the plainest and cheapest.

Mr. and Mrs. Schrekengust and the two elder daughters, Lizzie and Addie, women of thirty-five and thirty-two, all wore the plain garb of the Mennonite faith, and their religion obliged them to shun not only all personal adornment, but all beauty in the home, as they would have shunned the very devil himself. So that in conceding to Susan a free hand in the parlour, they had gone as near the ragged edge of perdition as they dared.

Addie and Lizzie were both natural born spinsters, tall, angular, homely, puritanic. Lizzie, like her mother, was talkative, lively, almost boisterous, and immensely energetic; her warm, generous impulses constantly outran her means of gratifying them, and her Pennsylvania Dutch prudence seemed always to be at war with her big heart.

Addie, on the contrary, was like her father, economical, minutely calculating; yet just as kind and unselfish as the less careful Lizzie. Her manner, also like her father's, was quiet and gentle, and she willingly let herself be dominated by her noisy sister Lizzie.

"What fur didn't you ast Sidney's Mom to stay and eat along, Susie?" her mother inquired in a mildly reproachful tone as she helped herself from a platter of "ponhaus" and then passed the dish to her youngest daughter. "To leave her go and set waitin' in the station fur the train to come, when it don't come till away past supper time a'ready—when she might be settin' here with us eatin' hot wittles! What'll she think anyhow?—and you bein' promised to her son yet! It don't look right—that it don't!"

It was a difficult question for Susan to meet without betraying what her parents and sisters would be quite unable to understand—that Sidney's mother didn't think her "good enough" for Sidney. For the Schrekengusts, on their side, didn't think any man living quite worthy of their wonderful Susan.

She was the child of her parents' old age, being fourteen years younger than her sister Addie, and she had always been the pet and idol of the family. They had all denied themselves, ever since her birth, to give her a chance in life such as none of them had ever had. They had never let her drudge as they had all drudged; they had sent her away to school, had kept her well-dressed, had provided her with enough pocket money to enable her to hold up her end among her schoolmates, had given her her own way always. Susan was all their happiness in life; the one warm, bright, glowing spot in their otherwise colourless existence. In the self-repression of their Mennonite faith, the affection and care they gave to her were the only outlet their hearts knew; their only personal expression.

And they thought themselves well repaid for all their sacrifices by the charming, lovable result achieved. For strangely enough, Susan was not spoiled by their devotion and indulgence. Contrary to the usual effect of such rearing, she deeply appreciated all that had been done for her and was passionately loyal and devoted to her family.

As for her engagement to Sidney Houghton, far from thinking that the young man had condescended, the Schrekengusts considered it entirely natural that a "stylish towner" should want to marry Susan, and they deemed him a lucky man to have won her; for being too simple and unsophisticated to draw subtle distinctions, they did not perceive in Sidney any of those variances from ordinary mortals which had been pointed out that day to Susan by Sidney's mother.

There was something touching to Susan about this childlike ignorance of the world's standards, in which her people lived. She had already, at eighteen years of age, seen enough of life to value, at its true and high worth, their simple goodness and kindness, their genuineness, their innocence.

"Mrs. Houghton said she was not hungry, Mother, and that she wanted to take a walk about the village before train time," Susan readily improvised in reply to her mother's question, being accustomed to protect her parents thus from all the wounds and shocks that constantly threatened them from the uncomfortable differences between her and them in education and experience and social relations.

"But the train to town don't leave here till a quarter over seven o'clock a'ready, Susie; and here last night she was late a-whole hour yet, that there seven o'clock train!" replied her mother.

"I seen her when she come up the street from the station," said Lizzie (it would have taken an expert to tell whether she referred to the train or the lady), "and it wondered me that a city person would be that plain dressed."

"That's why she dresses plainly—because she's not a villager. You see, Lizzie, I'm right in not letting you tog me up," Susan pointed out.

"Even Sidney don't dress up when he comes to set up with you, Susie, like the young fellahs here dresses up to go to see their girls. Ain't, he don't?" said her mother.

"He considers himself a very well-dressed young man," smiled Susan.

"Well, he anyhow always looks becoming and wery genteel, no matter what he's got on," said Lizzie, admiringly. "I do now like his shape and the way his shoulders is so straight acrost like a sojer's yet!"

"He is an awful pretty man," agreed Mrs. Schrekengust.

This was too much for Susan, "Oh, Mother, I wouldn't marry a pretty man! Heavens! He's handsome, not pretty! He's manly looking. And he looks what he is—an aristocrat."

"Aristocrats is fur out in the old country, not fur America," protested her father. "We wouldn't stand fur havin' no sich aristocrats here. What fur do you call him an aristocrat? What's his title then?"

"I guess Susie means the nice manners he's got at him," ventured Addie, who spoke seldom. "I like so well to watch him use his manners," she blandly added.

"Yes, well, if he don't pay so much attention to 'em that he forgets his morals!" warned the Mennonite preacher gravely. "Manners is all wery well if used in moderation. A body mustn't go to excesses in 'em. Sometimes I have afraid Sidney goes a little too fur with them manners of hisn."

"Och, yes, he won't even leave our Susan open a door fur herself; or even pick up a handkerchief he's dropped!" cried Lizzie. "If I was Susie I'd keep droppin' things just to see him pick 'em up so polite!"

"He certainly is wery genteel," granted Mrs. Schrekengust.

"It's to be hoped he'll make you a good purwider, Susie, used as you are to full and plenty," said her father.

"But with the education you have given me, Father, I am provided for—I can always support myself if I need to."

"But if you had young children to look after you couldn't turn out and teach school," objected her father. "It's wery important that your husband is a good purwider; fur whiles it's awful honourable to be poor, it's wery inconwenient."

"And to live nice these days," added her mother, "it takes so much more! Ain't, Pop, the times is changed lately since a few years back a'ready?"

"Och, yes, and the young folks they want so much towards what we used to want. Ain't, Mom?"

"Yes, ain't!"

When only a few hours after Mrs. Houghton's departure Sidney unexpectedly arrived at Reifsville on his bicycle, Susan's feelings as she greeted him were a rather confusing compound of apprehension and relief.

"I came out to warn you, darling," he began as soon as they were alone together (seated on the big old davenport, his arm around her shoulders), "that my mother may swoop down upon you!"

"You came to 'warn' me? Is she dangerous?"

"Very!" he laughed uneasily, "to you and me. Harmless enough otherwise."

"But how can she be dangerous to us?"

"She has other ideas for me. She wants me to marry—well, money—and—oh, and family and all that sort of thing."

"I can't somehow associate such vulgarity with you."

"Vulgarity? But, my love! You are speaking of my mother!"

"Why, no. Of you. But how can she, your mother, imagine your doing a vulgar, sordid thing, when I can't possibly see you like that? She has known you longer."

"And perhaps better. I've always told you, Susanna" (he insisted upon the "old colonial" form of her name as being less commonplace), "that you see me through rose-coloured glasses. I'm not above marrying for money—and other things. Only, I happen to want you more than I want anything else."

"And much, much more than you want to keep in your Uncle George's good graces?"

"I don't mean to lose his favour. I need it too much. He's only got to meet you to be won over. He must meet you before he learns of our engagement, so that he will judge you without prejudice. You yourself will be all the argument I shall need to convince him."

"To convince him of what?"

"That you are not my equal, but my superior."

"But if he wants you to marry money and—and family—and other things that have nothing to do with my superiority?"

"You'll make him realize, as you've made me, that you're a prize worth more than all those things, my love!"

"What do you understand by family, Sidney? And do you care a lot about family?"

"Yes, I do. I do care for family and money and prestige and all the things I've been brought up to consider of value."

"None of which I bring to you!"

"You know what you bring to me!" he said, holding her close and kissing her.

"And you are quite sure it makes up to you for losing some of those other things?"

"I don't intend to lose any of them."

"But if you did have to?"

"But I shan't have to!"

"Suppose, Sidney," she plunged in astonishingly, "that your Uncle George wanted to marry me himself—would you think me very heroic for refusing him and cleaving unto you until death us do part?"

Sidney, startled, took his arm from her shoulder, tilted up her chin and looked into her eyes.

"What are you driving at, imp of Satan?"

"You see, Mr. George Houghton can't possibly live very long—he's over seventy; I'd soon be a rich widow."

"Do you know him?" exclaimed Sidney, amazed.

"Tell me—would I be proving myself quite worthy of you, a Houghton, if I refused to marry Uncle George?"

"You'd be too damned unlike any Houghton I ever knew! Excuse me! What's it all about, anyway?"

"Sidney, I have charming news for you! Your mother is quite reconciled to me; she consents to our marriage!"

"You've seen her? She's been here?" he cried, agitatedly.

"This afternoon. And when I pointed out to her that it might injure your financial prospects much more for me to marry Uncle George and become your Aunt Susan than to marry you, she saw that I was so noble as to be worthy to be her daughter-in-law."

Sidney gaped at her quite idiotically for an instant; then suddenly, his hand dropping from her chin, he threw himself back upon the cushions of the couch and roared with laughing. "You made her believe that?" he shouted. "You little devil! By Jove, you have nerve!"

"She will tell you all about it. I'm glad I've seen you first. What would you have thought about it if you had heard your mother first?"

"I suppose I should have been as gullible as she was and believed it!" he said, still laughing. "I did for a moment! You see I have such a large faith in your power to charm that I could even find it credible that a confirmed old bachelor like Uncle George had succumbed to you!"

"The amazing part of it all to your mother was that he could so have forgotten his snobbery——"

"Snobbery? Oh, I don't know that I'd call Uncle George a snob, exactly."

"I know I would; a man who has remained a bachelor for seventy years because he couldn't find a wife worthy of a Houghton! What is a snob if that isn't?"

"Well, he's a mighty fine old chap, anyway," insisted Sidney, growing sober as he wondered, with a sinking of his heart, how much his mother had seen of the household here. If she had not gotten beyond this room and Susan, she had yet much to learn!

"Tell me all about Mother's visit, dearest," he urged, leaning back and again slipping his arm to its comfortable and delightful resting place on her shoulders.

Throughout her dramatic and graphic report of her afternoon's experience, Sidney's mingled amusement and anxiety made him alternately chuckle and frown—until she came to repeat his mother's views as to the bad influence Susan had had upon his character, when the frown remained fixed.

"I tried to make her see how she misjudged you," said Susan; "how the furniture you are using is just some of our aus tire——"

"Our which?" exclaimed Sidney.

"Pennsylvania Dutch for household furnishings. She told me I was undermining those fine instincts which all gentlemen of your class possess by inheritance; and that if your fineness was united to my coarse lack of sensibility, we'd be more like Kilkenny cats than turtle doves; and it was just then that I had the happy inspiration to have Uncle George crazy to marry me. It worked. I'm quite worthy of you, Sidney."

"Are you aware, dear," he asked, gravely, "that you are making fun of my mother?"

"I'm stating facts. If the facts are funny—well, they'd better be funny than sad. I might be as bad as your mother evidently expected to find me: talking Pennsylvania Dutch and chewing gum and wearing my hair in a weird design—instead of the simple, sweet Maud Muller I am! Be thankful!"

"I am! Did Mother—stay long?"

He had started to say, "see any of the rest of the family?"—but checked himself in time.

"About an hour. My mother thought it dreadful that I didn't ask her to stop and have supper with us, since her train wasn't due until long after she left here. But you see, Sidney," said Susan, her voice falling a note, "I couldn't explain to Mother why she had come; and that her reason for coming made it rather impossible for me to ask her to break bread with us! We, too, have our pride."

"Susan, dear!" he said, gently, kissing her again, even while feeling very glad in his heart that his mother had escaped a meal at the Schrekengusts'—the effect of which would have been tragic! "It's all such nonsense, dear! Don't let us allow it to disturb our happiness and our love!"

"I shan't," she promised, nestling into his embrace. "For of course it is all nonsense, Sidney. And our love isn't, is it?"

"I'm very curious, Susanna," he remarked after a moment's palpitating silence in each other's arms, "to hear Mother's account of your love affair with Uncle George! You are a rascal!"

"When I was a child, Sidney, I used to have a little way of entertaining myself by experimenting upon my playmates or my family to note the effect upon them of sudden surprising announcements—announcements of purely imaginary adventures I had had or discoveries I had made. I would say to a mob of children, 'I was a waif left on Mr. Schrekengust's doorstep; I am not his child at all; my rich aunt is coming to fetch me this after, with a coach and four.' 'Four what?' some wretchedly literal child would inquire. I didn't know. Or I would personally conduct a group of children up into the attic of our house to point out to them the signs of a buried treasure under the floor—a blood stain in the shape of an arrow pointing to a certain spot in the boards. This particular invention became so real to me that I once persuaded Lizzie to help me tear up the flooring. So to-day, while your mother was trying in vain to convince me of my total unworthiness of you, it suddenly struck me that it would be an interestingly complicated situation if rich old bachelor Uncle George who must be placated were (unsuspected by the Houghton family) in love with me and wanting to marry me. 'Now,' I said to myself adventurously, 'I'll give dear Mother-in-law something to worry about! It was not that I bore her any ill will, Sidney, dear, but only that I was curious to see how such an unlooked-for complication would strike her."

"But what's going to happen when she finds you out?—that's the question!" exclaimed Sidney, rather ruefully.

"Perhaps you'd better take me to New York right away and let me beguile Uncle George into proposing to me. You seem to think I'd be a good bait for big fish."

"I can't let you tamper with his young affections! But I do think we shall have to get married before Mother finds you out. I'll take you to New York and contrive to introduce Uncle George to you quite casually; and you'll be your charmingest; and while his impression of you is still fresh and delightful we'll run around the corner and get married and then run back and get his blessing. How does it strike you?"

Susan shook her head. "We can't think of getting married until you are earning enough to be independent of your mother."

"Oh, Susanna, I can't wait that long before I take you unto myself for better, for worse!"

"It would be exclusively 'for worse' if we married with nothing to live on. I couldn't consent to such recklessness. The Pennsylvania Dutch were ever a prudent race, you know."

Sidney controlled his inclination to wince at her reference to her objectionable Pennsylvania Dutch blood. He did not like it a bit better than his mother did.

"I wonder, Susanna," he said, "what Mother really thought of you!"

"All too soon you'll know!"

"No, I shan't; that's the rub. Of course I do know already that she thinks you charming. But she will be slow to admit it to me."

"Why, Sidney?"

"She was so prejudiced!—because you see, dear, she so hated your having loaned me money; and my secrecy about you—and all the rest of it."

"I never did understand why you would never tell her about me. Were you only trying to spare my feelings when you said she would be opposed to your being engaged until you were self-supporting? Was your real reason my—my family?"

"Oh, my dear, Mother is so full of the prejudices of her class! This room must have surprised her," he hastily changed the subject. "You'll admit that it's not just what one would expect to find in a little village like this. Did you tell her how you and I collected this old furniture from old farmhouses about here and had it done up?—and that it, too, is part of our—what do you call it? 'Aus tire?'"

"Dear me, no! She took it for my natural setting. Sidney, you never told me you had a brother."

"A half-brother. Did Mother speak of him? Joe and I never felt in the least like brothers. He never lived at home after I was born. Mother told you, I suppose, how Uncle George cut him when he married a farmhouse servant girl?"

"No, she only told me that if you married me your brother would probably inherit your half of your uncle's money."

"When Joe's wife died two months ago, leaving a baby a week old, Uncle George relented and took him back into favour."

"Did that console Joe?"

"Well, I think it did a little. Joe loves money more than he loves anything in the world. Not as I do, for what I can get out of it. He loves to hoard it. He's a miser. When Uncle George told him, after his marriage, that he'd not leave him a cent, I think Joe had an attack of yellow jaundice!"

"And do you think he wouldn't have married the girl if he had known that would happen?"

"I really can't say. I've never been intimate with Joe."

"What an exciting family you belong to, Sidney!—with your misers and rich uncles and backgrounds and traditions and standards and getting disinherited for marrying persons your distant relatives don't approve! I didn't know such romantic things happened in the U.S.A. It sounds so early Victorian."

"Well, of course Uncle George is a gentleman of the old school."

"A good thing it's an old school and passing out!"

"But it was picturesque, Susanna."

"But nothing else very useful."

"Of course I couldn't expect you to see these things just as I do."

"Please, Sidney, don't talk like that; it sounds so like——"

"Well?" he asked as she checked herself.

"Surely you feel that in the fundamental things of life we are in sympathy, don't you?" she pleaded.

"Naturally," he responded with a kiss. "Else I shouldn't be here, holding you in my arms!"

His answer satisfied her completely.

"Sidney," she said after a moment, "tell me some more about your brother Joe. I'm so surprised to discover him! It seems so queer you never told me of him. Tell me where he lives, what's his business, who takes care of the motherless baby, why he's a miser when you're a spendthrift (for you are, you know). Go ahead—talk!" urged Susan with the breathless interest of a child demanding the continuance of a story.

Sidney told off the answers to her questions on his fingers. "Joe's a farmer; lives at White Oak Farm, the old Houghton homestead between here and Middleburg; Uncle George owns it; Joe works it on shares, and hoards every dollar he earns; the housekeeper he now employs takes care of his baby. Anything more you want to know, Miss Question-Box?"

"Is it a nice baby?"

"I'm no judge. Anyway, I've never seen it."

"Is Joe, then, so very dreadful?"

"He's a grouch and a screw. I fancy his wife didn't mind dying—after living a whole year with Joe."

"Was Joe grown up when you were born?—since you say he didn't live at home after you were born."

"He's only ten years older than I am. His mother died at his birth. He claims that Father left him entirely to servants and that he was awfully neglected always. So at the age of nine, when he acquired a step-mother who tried to take him in hand and make something of him, she could not do a thing with him. He was a hopeless little tough. A cub! Mother simply couldn't have him about. When I was born her dread of Joe's contaminating me made Father send him off to boarding school. He was expelled from three schools in five years, for insubordination. Then Father died bankrupt, leaving Mother nothing but his life insurance. She had some income of her own, so we've worried along. Joe was fifteen when Father died and had gone to school so little that he could scarcely read and write! So he hired himself out to learn farming. Lived at a Pennsylvania Dutch farm as one of the family for eight years and married their maid servant; so that now you couldn't tell him from a born Pennsylvania Dutchman. Talks and thinks and acts like one. Even his ideas about women are 'Dutch': a woman is a breeder and a beast of burden! But he likes farming, and he's done awfully well, though he works like a dog and never spends a cent—just hoards and hoards!"

"And you and your mother have nothing to do with him?"

"Not more than we must. We have to borrow money from him occasionally when we're short. But he never lends us a nickel without security and interest. Tells us he doesn't see why he should provide us with luxuries that he denies himself; that he's slaved like a Chinese coolie for every dollar he has and he doesn't propose to hand it out to people who don't work at all and who despise him. He's a quite impossible grouch, you see!"

"Did you know his wife at all?"

"Never saw her. I never could see why Uncle George resented Joe's marrying a farmer's servant girl—no lady would have married him! But you see, what Uncle George hated was that no sooner had he employed Joe to manage White Oak Farm than Joe up and married that common girl and took her to live at that lovely old, historic, ancestral home made sacred by seven generations of Houghtons having lived there. To desecrate it by putting such a mistress there! Uncle George was all for kicking him out. I suppose, however, Joe was too valuable to him, for it seems that Joe's a quite exceptionally good farmer. But anyway, Uncle George wouldn't let him and his Dutch wife use the front of the house at all. He made Joe keep the front rooms locked up—the beautiful drawing room and library and portrait parlour and some of the gorgeous old bedrooms. Some day I want to show you the place, Susanna: the tapestries, the old rugs, the colonial beds, the old sideboard. I hope Uncle George wills it to me! Joe and his wife preferred living in their kitchen. They were used to it. It was the only place in that house where they'd feel at home!"

Susan was silent for a while when Sidney paused, thinking how different had been the lives of these two boys born of the same father.

"Most men are not fit to be fathers," she presently remarked. "I wonder whether Joe will do as badly by his child as your father did by him."

"Probably worse, Father having been a gentleman and Joe being a boor. Joe hates respectability as an owl hates daylight; as much as I hate toughness. He says Mother drove him to hating 'gentility' even more than he naturally hated it."

Susan felt that she could quite understand that. But before she could reply they were interrupted by the entrance of her mother.

Mrs. Schrekengust, wearing the black hood and shawl prescribed by the Mennonite faith for outdoor apparel, carried into the parlour a tray bearing two bottles of ginger ale, two glasses, and a plate of molasses cake.

Sidney, rising to relieve her of it and place it on a table, so embarrassed and confused her by his gallantry that she almost dropped the tray before he could take it.

"I can't used myself to your so polite manners, Sidney!" she said, apologetically. "I wasn't never used to 'em. It wonders me how you kin remember 'em still."

Susan was intensely sensitive to Sidney's invariable wincing from her mother and father and sisters. Try as he would he could not conceal it from her, and though she strove to make excuses for him to herself and to understand, yet she knew that deep down in her heart she resented it.

"Where are you going, Mother?" she asked in surprise at sight of the hood and shawl Mrs. Schrekengust was wearing at this hour when she was usually in bed asleep. Suddenly she noticed that her mother was looking white and frightened. "What is it, Mother?" she exclaimed, rising and going to her side. "What's the matter?"

"Och, Susie, an awful thing happened out in our backyard whiles you and Sidney was settin' in here keepin' company! Hogenbach's Missus come runnin' over just at supper time to ketch one of her chickens that jumped the fence over and she fell down in one of them fits she gets and smothered to death! Yes, anyhow!"

"Oh!" exclaimed Susan, "Mrs. Hogenbach is dead?"

"Och, yes, three hours ago she died! Out in our backyard yet! And now they are got a jury settin' up at Hogenbach's to see what she died of and I got to go fur such a witness."

She turned to explain to Sidney: "Missus she used to have spells—sich fits, you mind; she'd throw a fit most any time; and I often says to her Mister, 'You don't watch Missus good enough. Some day she'll smother fur you in one of them spells!' But he didn't listen on me. So here this evening when she didn't get home from chasin' her chicken, he come schnaufflin' over to our place after a whiles to see why she didn't come home. She'd been away a full hour. And I tol' him, I says, 'If Missus was off that long, Hen Hogenbach, then this time you carry her in dead.' 'Och,' he says, 'how often'll you tell me that—that I'll carry her in dead? She never dies in them spells!' 'But this time, Hen, it is!' I says. 'If it's went a whole hour since she didn't get home a'ready, Hen, then you mind, this time it is!' And it was! Hen he went out with a lantern and found her by the pig sty with her face down, smothered to death. She looked awful! So Pop he fetched the coroner. And the coroner he says he must now send fur a jury to set on her and find out what she died of. 'But it ain't necessary,' I argued him, 'to have no jury set; I kin tell you what she died of.' So I tol' him how Missus she gets spells fur ten years back a'ready and this evening she smothered in one of 'em. 'That's what she died of—now you know,' I says. But would you believe it, that there stubborn-headed coroner he wouldn't have it no other way but that a jury must set to find out what she died of. 'But I did tell you a'ready what she died of,' I argued him. 'She has spells! Fur ten years she has 'em! And to-night she smothered in one of 'em!' I says. But no, a jury must come and set on her to find out what she died of! Ain't, Susie, it's awful dumb of that there coroner to have a jury set to see what she died of when I tol' him what—she had spells and smothered."

"Would you like me to go with you?" Sidney politely inquired. "Can I be of any help?"

"Och, no, you stay settin' with Susie and enjoy yourself pickin' a piece," replied Mrs. Schrekengust, indicating the tray—"picking a piece" meaning a light luncheon.

When a few moments later Susan and Sidney were again alone, partaking of the ginger ale and cake, Susan said with a sigh, "This death will be the only thing talked of in Reifsville for the next six months! Oh, how they'll revel in every gruesome detail! I foresee that it's going to drive me to commit a crime, to give them something else to talk about!"

"How glad you'll be, dear, when I take you away into another world!"

"Oh, but, Sidney, dear, I am very much a part of this world, too. I discovered something about myself when I went away to school: I found out how dependent I am upon affection. I've always had so much of it lavished on me here. So even if I do have interests that my parents and sisters don't share, they do fill the biggest part of me—and that's my heart!"

"That's awfully sweet of you, dear. You are a loyal little soul!"

"More than that! My heart is so tenacious where once it has been given!" she sighed. "I can't seem to wrench it loose!"

"Why that sigh?" he quickly asked. "You wish you could stop loving me, but you can't—is that it? Doesn't that prove," he argued, renewing a discussion which for weeks had kept them both on the rack, and which now suddenly drove the colour from their faces, "that I am right and you are wrong, dearest? If I were in the wrong about this matter, wouldn't it have killed your love for me, Susanna, dear?"

"Oh, Sidney!" pleaded Susan, piteously, "don't! Please, please, don't let us talk of that again!"

"But, dearest, you don't understand," he persisted, his voice quivering. "You're so obsessed with the conventional view of love and marriage that you won't look at it simply and naturally, as the spontaneous, emotional relation that God ordained it to be!"

"You surely don't believe that it is right, Sidney, to bring a child into the world handicapped from the start with illegitimacy!"

"Of course I don't! That need not happen—must not! I only mean that the union of natural rather than legalized love is higher, finer, purer! You and I, Susanna, will never love more hotly, more humanly than we do now! Why, then, deny ourselves the full expression of our love for so material a consideration as an insufficient income on which to legalize our union? We are losing weeks and months of our precious youth!—of the ecstasy of youth! How can a broad-minded girl like you think that a few ceremonial words can alter the great eternal fact of Love? Why shouldn't you give yourself to me now as well as after the marriage ceremony?"

"But why should I? My love for you, Sidney, is something so far above a mere appetite!"

Sidney winced. Susan did sometimes offend his taste. "You speak of our love as 'a mere appetite'!"

She so often found him, in any discussion between them that tended to get out of his hands, twisting her statements out of their obvious meaning; condemning her candid recognition of what he himself had suggested or implied.

"I'm protesting, dear," she answered, "against your having that idea of love. To me it is something so different!"

"Sometimes I think, Susanna, dear, that you don't know what real love is, when you can say a—yes, a really coarse thing about it like what you just said! Love is no more an experience wholly of the spirit than it is wholly of the senses. It is a full expression of the entire being!"

"But, Sidney, dear, if the thing you wish is what you keep saying in your letters it is—'a holy expression of love'—why is secrecy necessary?" asked Susan, her voice so pained, her eyes so strained and tortured, that Sidney involuntarily took her hand reassuringly in his. "Why," she continued, "not proclaim such a Gospel to all the world, if it is so true and beautiful?"

"You know the price we'd have to pay for acting openly, dearest!"

"If it's not worth that price, it's not what you claim for it!"

"It's the highest, the most exquisite thing in life, Susanna!"

"Then don't let us desecrate it! To lose our self-control is not high or beautiful or holy!—whatever fine phrases you may use about it, dear!"

"Yet you think a legal marriage is all that!" exclaimed Sidney.

"I still believe in the 'institution of the family'—at least until some better plan for rearing children is suggested. I've never heard of any that would not be much worse for the children than being brought up in families—faulty as family life may be."

"We're talking about love, dear; not about family life and children!"

"But children happen to be the fruit of love, dear; so we can't leave them out of this."

"If you have no higher idea of love than to believe that it is merely for the begetting of children——"

"But that's what Nature uses it for. And, dear, you who have such inordinate family pride—what do you mean by 'family pride'? What becomes of it in a relation such as you wish? You are proud of a line of well-born ancestors!"

"Damn my ancestors! When you and I, Susanna, dearest, are yearning for the fullest, the most exquisite expression of ourselves, why should we deny ourselves? Why, why? I love you with every part of me—with all my heart and all my mind and all my senses!"

"Oh, my dear, my dear," she tremulously protested, "I cannot, cannot believe that what you want is so essential to any demand of our spirits that we can't wait! There is nothing I would refuse to go through for the sake of our love; there is nothing in all my life I would count too high a price to pay for it. But to me love is so much more than mere possession. It is a life shared in the open!—our work, our ideals, our ambitions lived out together harmoniously. That's what marriage means to me. And you would lead me into secrecy, hiding, shame!—leading to nothing—nothing but satiety and disgust!"

"Susanna, dearest! How can you sit there and philosophize about a thing that consumes one like a living fire! I want you, Susanna!" he whispered, drawing her into his arms. "You are mine and I am yours—and nothing, nothing else matters! Nothing! Nothing!"

But she forced herself out of his embrace. "Tell me this, Sidney," she said, her face a deathly white, "would you ask this thing of me if I were a girl of your mother's choosing? Of your own social world? Would you?"

"Perhaps I shouldn't have to plead so hard," he said, chokingly, "with a more worldly girl! Dearest! Don't be so cruel to me! Come to me! Love me!" he begged, taking her again to his heart. "How can you deny me when——"

A voice in the hall without made them draw apart guiltily.

Mrs. Schrekengust opened the door and stood on the threshold. "The jury's still settin'," she announced; and Susan, with a sense of deep relief at the interruption, thanked heaven in her heart for Mrs. Hogenbach's timely death. "They're gettin' along, though—that there jury is. They're got it settled that Missus is anyhow dead. They ain't got it made out, though, what she died of. They're still arguin' that—for all I tol' 'em a'ready how she had spells and smothered. But it seems my word fur it ain't enough. They have to set awhile till they know oncet what she died of—that dumb they are——"

Mrs. Schrekengust seemed suddenly to sense the fact that she was interrupting a lover's tête-à-tête. She stopped with embarrassing abruptness, closed the door sharply, and they heard her walk away down the hall.

Neither of them moved or spoke until the sound of her step had passed on to the back of the house and was lost.

Soon the deep silence of the house, penetrating even to this room apart, proclaimed that all the family slept.

But Sidney stayed on.