I wondered somewhat that Peter did not come out of his house to fetch us. He was not even about the little yard when we went up the walk, though he knew that we must arrive but a few moments after he did. Little Child ran away to pick Bouncing Bet and Sweet Clover in the long, rank grass of the unkept garden. And Miggy and I went and stood on the porch before Peter's door, and I knew what I intended.

"Rap!" I said to Miggy.

She looked at me in surprise—I have not often commanded her like that. But I wanted to see her stand at Peter's door asking for admission. And I think that Peter had wanted it too and that this was why he had not come to the gate to fetch us. I guessed it by the light on his face when, in the middle of Miggy's knock, he caught open the door. I like to remember his face as it looked at that moment, with the little twist of mouth and lifting of brow which gave him a peculiar sweetness and[Pg 294] na?veté, curiously contradicted by the way his eyes were when they met Miggy's.

"How long it took you," he said. "Come in. Come in."

We went in, and I looked at Miggy. For I did not want her to step in that house as she would have stepped in a house that was just a house. Is it not wonderful how some front doors are Front Doors Plus? I do not know plus what—that is one of those good little in-between things which we know without always naming. But there are some front doors which are to me boards and glass and a tinkling cymbal bell; while other doors of no better architecture let me within dear depths of homes which are to houses what friends are to inhabitants. It was so that I would have had Miggy go within Peter's house,—not as within doors, but as within arms.

We entered directly from the porch into the small parlour—the kind of man's parlour that makes a woman long to take it on her lap and tend it. There were no curtains. Between the windows was a big table filled with neat piles of newspapers and weeklies till there should be time to look them over. The shelf had a lamp, not filled, a clock, not going, and a pile of seed catalogues. On two walls were three calendars with big hollyhocks and puppies and ladies in sunbonnets. The entire inner[Pg 295] wall was occupied by a map of the state—why does a man so cherish a map of something, hung up somewhere? On the organ was a row of blue books—what is it that men are always looking for in blue books? In a corner, on the floor, stood a shotgun. The wood stove had been "left up" all summer to save putting it up in the fall—this business of getting a stove on rollers and jacking it up and remembering where it stood so that the pipe will fit means, in the village, a day of annual masculine sacrifice to the feminine foolishness of wanting stoves down in summer. There was nothing disorderly about the room; but it was dressed with no sash or hair ribbon or coral beads, as a man dresses his little girl.

"We don't use this room much," Peter said. "We sit in here sometimes in summer, but I think when a man sits in his parlour he always feels like he was being buried from it, same as they're used for."

"Why—" said Miggy, and stopped. What she was going to say it was not important to know, but I was glad that she had been going to say it. Something, perhaps, about this being a very pretty room if there were somebody to give it a touch or two.

Peter was obviously eager to be in the next room, and that, he explained, would have been the dining[Pg 296] room, only he had taken it for his own, and they ate in the kitchen. I think that I had never heard him mention his father at all, and this "we" of his now was a lonelier thing than any lonely "I."

"This is my room," he said as we entered it. "It's where I live when I'm not at the works. Come and let me show you."

So Peter showed Miggy his room, and he showed it to me, too, though I do not think that he was conscious of that. It was a big room, bare of floor and, save for the inescapable flowery calendar, bare of walls. There was a shelf of books—not many, but according to Peter's nature sufficiently well-selected to plead for him: "Look at us. Who could love us and not be worth while?"—bad enough logic, in all conscience, to please any lover. Miggy hardly looked at the books. She so exasperatingly took it for granted that a man must be everything in general that it left hardly anything for him to be in particular. But Peter made her look, and he let me look too, and I supplied the comments and Miggy occasionally did her three little nods. The writing table Peter had made from a box, and by this Miggy was equally untouched. All men, it appeared, should be able to make writing tables from boxes. With the linen table cover it was a little different—this Peter's mother had once worked in cross-stitch for his room, and Miggy lifted an end and looked at it.

[Pg 297]

"She took all those stitches for you!" she said. "There's one broken," she showed him.

"I can mend that," Peter said proudly, "I'll show you my needle kit."

At this she laughed out suddenly with, "Needle kit! What a real regular old bachelor you are, aren't you?"

"I can't help that," said Peter, with "and the same cannot be said for you" sticking from the sentence.

On the table lay the cannery account books, and one was open at a full page of weary little figures.

"Is this where you sit nights and do your work and read?" Miggy demanded.

"Right here," Peter told her, "every night of the year, 'most. Except when I come to see you."

Miggy stood looking at the table and the wooden chair.

"That's funny," she remarked finally, with an air of meditative surprise; "they know you so much better than I do, don't they?"

"Well," Peter said gravely, "they haven't been thought about as much as you have, Miggy—that's one thing."

"Thinking's nothing," said Miggy, merrily; "sometimes you get a tune in your head and you can't get it out."

"Sit down at the table," said Peter, abruptly.[Pg 298] "Sit down!" he repeated, when her look questioned him. "I want to see you there."

She obeyed him, laughing a little, and quite in the woman's way of pretending that obedience is a choice. Peter looked at her. It is true that he had been doing nothing else all the while, but now that she sat at the table—his table—he looked more than before.

"Well," he said, "well, well." As a man says when he has a present and has no idea what to say about it.

Peter's photographs were on the wall above the table, and Peter suddenly leaned past Miggy and took down the picture of his mother and put it in her hand, without saying anything. For the first time Miggy met his eyes.

"Your mother," she said, "why, Peter. She looked—oh, Peter, she looked like you!"

Peter nodded. "Yes, I do look like she did," he said; "I'm always so glad."

"She knew you when you were a little bit of a baby, Peter," Miggy advanced suddenly.

Peter admitted it gravely. She had.

"Well," said Miggy, as Peter had said it. "Well."

There was a picture of Peter's father as a young man,—black, curly-haired, black-moustached, the cheeks slightly tinted in the picture, his hands laid trimly along his knees. The face was weak, empty,[Pg 299] but it held that mere confidence of youth which always gives a special sting to the grief of unfulfilment. Over this they passed, saying nothing. It struck me that in the delicacy of that silence it was almost as if Miggy shared something with Peter. Also, it struck me pleasantly that Miggy's indifference to the personalities of divers aunts in straight bangs and long basques was slightly exaggerated, especially when, "I never thought about your having any aunts," she observed.

And then Peter took down a tiny picture of the sort we call in the village "card size," and gave it to her.

"Guess who," he said.

It was a little boy of not more than five, in a straight black coat dress, buttoned in the front and trimmed with broad black velvet strips, and having a white scalloped collar and white cuffs. One hand was resting on the back of a camp-chair and the other held a black helmet cap. The shoes had double rows of buttons, and for some secret reason the photographer had had the child laboriously cross one foot negligently over the other. The fine head, light-curled, was resting in the horns of that ex-device that steadied one out of all semblance to self. But in spite of the man who had made the picture, the little boy was so wholly adorable that you wanted to say so.

[Pg 300]

"Peter!" Miggy said, "It's you."

I do not know how she knew. I think that I would not have known. But Miggy knew, and her knowing made me understand something which evidently she herself did not understand. For she looked at the picture and looked at it, a strange, surprised smile on her face. And,

"Well, well, well," she said again. "I never thought about that before. I mean about you. Then."

"Would—would you want that picture, Miggy?" Peter asked; "you can have it if you do."

"Can I really?" said Miggy. "Well, I do want it. Goodness...."

"I always kind of thought," Peter said slowly, "that when I have a son he'll look something like that. He might, you know."

Peter was leaning beside her, elbows on the table, and Miggy looked up at him over the picture of the child, and made her three little nods.

"Yes," she said, "you would want your little boy to look like you."

"And I'd want him named Peter. It's a homely old name, but I'd want him to have it."

"Peter isn't a homely name," said Miggy, in a manner of surprise. "Yes, of course you'd want him—"

The sentence fell between them unfinished. And[Pg 301] I thought that Miggy's face, still somewhat saddened by the little Kenneth and now tender with its look for the picture, was lightly touched with a glowing of colour. But then I saw that this woul............