A week had worked wonders with Grandmother Cardover. She had fallen a victim to Vi’s charm and, in that strange way that old folks have, had warmed her age at the fire of Vi’s youth. There was an unmistakable change in her; the somberness of her dress was lightened here and there with a dash of colored ribbons. As long as I could remember, the only ornaments she had permitted herself were of black jet, as befitted her widowed state. But now the woman’s instinct for self-decoration had come to life. Vi’s exquisite femininity had made her remember that she herself was a woman. She had rummaged through her jewelry and found a large gold-set cameo brooch, which she wore at her throat, and some rings, and a long gold chain, which she now wore about her neck, from which her watch was suspended.

Vi’s vivid physical beauty and intense joy in life had broadened the horizons of everyone in the house, and set them dreaming. Ruthita, coming down from London, had at once become infatuated. From day to day she had prolonged Vi’s visit, now with one excuse, now another. They had brought Dorrie down to stay with Vi at the shop—little Bee’s Knee as my Grannie called her, because she was so tiny and a bee’s knee was the smallest thing she could think of with which to compare her. It was many years since a child’s prattle had been heard about that quiet house. Vi’s comradeship with her little daughter finished the persuading of my grandmother that she was safe and good. All virtuous women believe in the virtue of a woman who is fond of children.

They were sitting down to lunch in the keeping-room when I entered.

“Why, if it isn’t Dante!”

The greeting I received was in welcome contrast to the cold, guarded reserve of the past seven days. A place was made for me at table between my grandmother and Ruthita. It was a gay little party that waited, watching me curiously across the dishes and plates, to hear my news. Just then I preferred the cosiness of my grandmother’s shop to the chilly dignity of Woadley Hall. Outside the sunshine slanted across the courtyard, leaving one half in shadow, the other golden white. The maid, coming in and out from the kitchen in her rustling print-dress, with her smiling country face, was a pleasanter sight than the butler at Woadley. From the shop came the smell of tar and rope and new-made bread. Everything was so frank and kindly, and unashamed of itself. Here in the keeping-room of the ship-chandler’s shop we were humanly intimate—“coxy-loxy” as my grandmother would have expressed it.

I told a sorrowful tale at first, which seemed to foreshadow a sorrowful ending. I spoke of the stiff formality of my reception, the garnished gentility which had marked my intercourse with Sir Charles, the withheld confidence—the fact that my mother’s name was scarcely mentioned. Ruthita’s hand sought mine beneath the table; I could feel the fingers tremble.

“This morning,” I said, “he called me into his study. He told me that I must leave within the hour and that our friendship could go no further.”

“The old rascal!” exclaimed Grandmother Cardover, bringing down her knife and fork on her plate with a clatter. “What was he a-doin’, gettin’ you there to Woadley? He must ‘a’ known what we all expected.”

I tilted back my chair, putting on an expression of long-suffering melancholy. “He wanted to see what I was like, I suppose. His chief reason was that he wanted to make a new will.”

Babel broke loose. Why hadn’t I told them earlier? Why had I harrowed up their feelings for nothing? What were the particulars? I was cruel to have kept them in suspense.

Grandmother Cardover was hysterical with joy. She wanted to run out into the streets and tell everybody. She began with the maid in the kitchen, and would have gone on to the men in the bake-house if I hadn’t stopped her by appealing to her curiosity, saying there was more to tell. As for Ruthita, she just put her arms about me and laid her head on my shoulder, crying for sheer gladness. Little Bee’s Knee looked on open-mouthed, shocked that grownups should behave so foolishly. Vi gazed at me with a far-away stare in her eyes, picturing the might-have-beens, and I gazed back at her across the gulf that widened between us.

Discretion was thrown to the wind. When Vi gathered Dorrie to her and began to excuse herself, she was told that she must stay and make one of the family. Then the story was told again with the new perspective.

With shame and self-reproach I look back and perceive how carelessly I accepted all Ruthita’s admiration. My new good fortune promised nothing for her; yet she could rejoice in it. In her shy girl’s world, had I known it, I figured as something between a faery-prince and a hero. Through me she looked out into a more generous world of glamour than any she had personally experienced.. Poor little Ruthita, with her mouse-like timidity! She had lived all her days in a walled-in garden, treading the dull monotonous round of self-sacrificing duties. No one ever credited her with a career of her own. No one stopped to think that she might have dreams and a will of her own. They told her what to do and let their gratitude be taken for granted. She humored my father when he was discouraged, did the housekeeping, and took shelter behind the superior social grace of the Snow Lady. We all loved her, but we made the mistake of not telling her—we supposed she knew. All the strong things that men and women do together, all love’s comedy and tragedy, were so much hearsay to her.

That afternoon and evening she sat beside me holding my hand with frank affection, making me feel that in loving Vi I was stealing something that belonged to her. More than that, I was feeling for this woman, who had been nothing to me a few weeks ago, a quality of kindness and consideration that I had always withheld from the child-friend who had tiptoed her way up to womanhood beside me.

After tea we mounted to the drawing-room, which was over the shop and faced the street. It was usually occupied only on Sundays and feast-days, or when a visiting Methodist minister had been apportioned to my grandmother for entertainment. Faded engravings of sacred subjects and simpering females elaborately framed, hung upon the walls. On the mantelshelf stood some quaint specimens of Ransby china—red-roofed cottages with grapes ripening above the porch, and a lover coming up the path while his lady watched him from the window. The chairs were upholstered in woolwork on canvas, which my grandmother had done in her youth. In one corner stood a heavy rosewood piano on which all the family portraits were arranged. In this room comfort was sacrificed to appearance—the furniture was sedate rather than genial. Nothing was haphazard or awry. The mats and antimacassars never budged an inch from their places. No smell of beer, or cheese, or baking bread vulgarized the sacred respectability of its atmosphere.

Here, as we sat together talking, the light began to fade. Heavy footsteps of sailors in their sea-boots, passing down the street from the harbor to the cottages, only emphasized the quiet. We watched the sky grow pink behind the masts of shipping, then green, then gray. Cordage and rigging were etched distinctly against the gloom of the oncoming night. At the top of the street a light sprang up, then another, then another. The lamp-lighter with his long pole and ladder passed by. Now with the heavy tread of men’s feet the tip-a-tap of girls’ footsteps began to mingle. Sometimes a snatch of laughter would reach us; then, as if afraid of the sound it made, it died abruptly away. While we talked in subdued voices, it seemed to me that all the sailor-lovers with their lassies had conspired to steal by the house that night. I fell to wondering what it felt like to slip your arm about the waist of a woman you loved, feel her warmth and trust and nearness, feel her head droop back against your shoulder, see her face flash up in the starlight and know that, while your lips were trembling against hers, she was abandoning herself soul and body to you in the summer dusk.

Dorrie had crept into her mother’s lap. Her soft breathing told that she was sleeping. One small hand, with fingers crumpled, rested against her mother’s throat. Someone had called to see Grandmother Cardover, so Vi, Ruth-ita, and I were left alone together. Sitting back in our chairs out of reach of the street-lamp, we could not see the expression on one another’s faces.

“I would give all the world to be you, Mrs. Carpenter,” Ruthita whispered.

“To be me! Why? I sometimes get very tired of it.”

“If I were you I should have Dorrie. It must be very sweet to be a mother. Why is it that she always calls you Vi and never mother?”

“She picked that up from her father. I never corrected her because—well, because somehow I like it. It makes me seem younger.”

“You don’t need to seem young,” I interrupted.

“How old do you think I am?”

“About the same age as myself and Ruthita.”

She laughed. “That couldn’t be; Dorrie is eight.”

“Then I give up guessing.”

“I’m twenty-seven. I was little more than a child, you see, when I married.”

“Mother married early,” said Ruthita, “and my papa was only twenty at the time. She says that early marriages turn out happiest.”

Vi made no answer. The silence grew awkward. We could almost hear one another’s thoughts trying to hide. Why had she explained in that tone of half-apology, “I was little more than a child; you see, when I married.” Why didn’t she say something now? Was it because an early marriage had proved for her disastrous? Then, if it had, what moral obligation separated us? Who was this husband who could dispense with her for a year, and yet had the power to stretch out his arm across the Atlantic and thrust me aside?

She leant forward. The light from the street-lamp kindled her face and smoldered in her hair. She had the wistful, rapt expression of a young girl, ignorant as yet of the bitter-sweet of love, who dreams of an ideal lover. I felt then that her soul was virgin; it had never been a man’s possession. It was almost mine.

Ruthita’s remark about the happiness of early marriages was forgotten, when Vi returned to the subject. “They may be sometimes,” she said, speaking doubtfully.

She caught my eye resting on her. Conscious that her qualification had divulged a secret, she hurried into an implied defense of her husband.

“I had a letter from Mr. Carpenter this morning. He’s lonely. He says he can’t bear to be without me any longer. He wants me to return home at once. He’s not seen Dorrie for nearly a year. He’s afraid she’ll forget him entirely. If I don’t go to him, he says he’ll come and fetch me. It’s been horrid of me to stay away so long. When we left, we only intended to be gone for three months. Somehow the time lengthened. I wanted to see so much. He’s been too easy with me. He’s been awfully kind. He always has been kind. He treats me like a spoilt child.”

She had been speaking so eagerly and hurriedly that she had not heard the creaking of the stairs. Through the darkness I could see my grandmother standing in the doorway. Vi turned to Ruthita with a pretense of gaiety, “No wonder you English don’t understand us. Don’t you think that American husbands are very patient?”

“I’m sure I do,” said Ruthita. “What makes them so different from English husbands?”

“They love their wives.”

It was impossible to tell from the bantering tone in Vi’s voice, whether she spoke the last words in cynicism or sincerity.

Grandmother Cardover took her literally. Her national pride was touched. She believed that an aspersion had been cast on the affection of all married Englishmen. She advanced into the room with suspicions aroused, bristling with morality. “If that’s what they call love in America,” she snorted, “then it’s glad I am that I was born in Ransby. ‘They shall be one flesh’—that’s what the Holy Book says about marriage. And ’ow can you be one flesh if you stay away from one another a twelvemonth at a time? Why, when my Will’am was alive, I never slept a night away from ’im, from the day we was married to the day he died.”

The darkness about her seemed to quiver with indignation. I could see her gray curls bobbing, and hear the keys hanging from her waist jangle, as she trembled. Ruthita cowered close to me, shocked and frightened. Dorrie woke and began to whimper to be taken to bed. We all waited for a natural expression of anger from Vi.

She set Dorrie on to her feet very gently, whispering to her mothering words, telling her not to cry. Drawing herself up, she faced into the darkness. When she spoke there was a sweet, low pleading in her voice.

“Mrs. Cardover, you took me too seriously. I’m sorry. You misunderstood me. I believe all that you have said—a wife ought to be her husband’s companion. There have been reasons for my long absence, which I cannot explain; if I did, you might not understand them. But I want you always to believe well of me. I have never had such kindness from any woman as you have given me.”

I heard my Grannie sniffle. Vi must have heard Her, She left Dorrie and, running across the room, put her arms about her. I heard them blaming themselves, and taking everything back, the way women do when they ask forgiveness. I lifted Dorrie into my arms, and Ruthita and I tiptoed from the room.

Presently they came down to us. Grandmother Cardover was smiling comically, as though she was rather pleased at what had happened. Vi said that she must be going. Ruthita and I volunteered to accompany her back to her lodgings. So the storm in the tea-cup ended, leaving me with new materials for conjecture and reflection.

On the way up the High Street we chatted volubly, trying to overlay what had occurred with a new impression. We talked against time and without sincerity. When we had reached the black flint house and the door had shut, Ruthita snuggled close to me with a relieved little sigh. Ever since my return from Woadley she had been waiting for this moment of privacy. With a sweet sisterly air of proprietorship she slipped her arm through mine. We turned down a score and struck out across the denes to the north beach, where we could be quiet. A wet wind from the sea pattered about our faces, giving Ruthita an excuse to cling yet more closely.

You would not have called Ruthita beautiful in those days. She lacked the fire that goes with beauty. She was too humble in her self-esteem, too self-effacing. But one who had looked closely would have discerned something more lasting than mere physical beauty—the loveliness of a pure spirit looking out from her quiet eyes. She was one of those domestic saints, unaware of their own goodness, that one sometimes finds in middle-class families; women who are never heard of, who live only through their influence on their menfolk’s lives.

Her features were small, but perfect. Her figure slight, and buoyant in its carriage. Her complexion white, but ready to suffuse with color at the least sign of appreciation. Her glory was in her hair, which was black and abundant as night. From a child I had always thought that her feet and hands were most beautiful in their fragile tininess. I never told her any of these flattering observations, which would have meant so much if put into words. Brothers don’t—and I was as good as her brother.

“Don’t you think,” said Ruthita, “that there’s something awfully queer about Mrs. Carpenter’s marriage? I’ve been with her nearly a week now, and I’ve never heard her mention her husband until to-night.”

“And Dorrie doesn’t speak of him either.”

“No, I’ve noticed that.”

Then Ruthita surprised me. “Do you know, Dante, I think to marry the wrong man must be purgatory.”

I was amused at the note of seriousness in her voice.

“Ruthie, to hear you speak one’d suppose you’d been in love. Hav............