AZURE and white shone the liveries of heaven. The sun, that gold-tabarded trumpeter, had pealed out the brazen clarion-cry of summer. The pavilions were spread in the woods. The fields bristled their myriad spears, still green and virgin with desirous sap. Rose had clasped rose. The meadows had unfurled their cloth of gold. The red may had bloomed and the lilac had kissed the yew.

A punctilious regularity ordered the daily details of the domestic régime. No stranger ever ventured through the rusty gates to disturb the sordid asceticism of Zeus Gildersedge’s privacy. A neighborly anathema had long ago gone forth against the house. Nor had its master troubled to appease the orthodox wrath of a society that he despised. There is a species of vanity of disfavor, and Zeus Gildersedge was a man who could chuckle over public obloquy with a heathenish pride.

The miser sat in the garden under the shadow of two yews, whose sculptured boughs arched a natural recess. A table stood before him bearing claret, a phial of opium, a ledger, and a jar of tobacco. The grass grew in feathery rankness wellnigh to Zeus Gildersedge’s knees. Foxgloves purpled the lawns. Roses ran adventurously in red riot over a rotting trellis that was half smothered in the grass. It was a tranquil refuge enough, full of greenness and the calm, clamorless quiet of the trees.

Zeus Gildersedge set his pipe aside, gulped down half a glass of claret, covered his face with a red handkerchief, and prepared for sleep. Every afternoon between two and six he would doze away the hours, his brain drugged to a sensuous slumber. Even for this miser opulent visions gleamed through the portals of sleep. His dreams partook of opiated poetry. Mountains of gold poured torrents of jacinth, chrysolite, and sardonyx into an emerald sea. Great trees bore gems for fruit, purple, vermilion, and green. Fountains tossed diamonds like spray to a glittering zenith. Each flower of the field had a pearl or a ruby betwixt its lips.

A streak of scarlet showed suddenly between the trees. A woman’s figure threaded through the green, passing the lawns knee-deep in grass, brushing the foxgloves with the swing of her coarse, black skirt. The loose strings of her lilac sun-bonnet trailed upon her shoulders. She moved slouchingly, yet with a certain loose-jointed vigor that suggested strength.

Coming to the fringe of the lawn where an old dial stood in the sun, she scanned the stretch of grass under a coarse, red hand. Zeus Gildersedge was asleep with his handkerchief over his eyes. She moved silently towards the yews and stood by the table, watching with a grin the man dozing in the chair. As he snored on obliviously she reached for the claret jug, put it to her lips, took a long draught, wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. She returned the jug noiselessly to its place, plucked a long spear of grass, and tickled the sleeping man’s chin.

Zeus Gildersedge grunted, smote the air, and clawed the handkerchief from his face. He stared about him, saw Rebecca laughing by the table, and promptly swore at her.

“What the devil do you want now?”

“Tuppence.”

“What for?”

“The tinker.”

“Let him wait for it.”

“He ain’t here yet; he’ll call this evening with a saucepan he’s been soldering. Thought I’d get the money while there was a chance of you being sober.”

Zeus Gildersedge straightened in his chair, fumbled in his pocket, and produced two coins. He laid them on the table with a melancholy and grudging deliberation as though he were disbursing thousands.

“Damn your insolence,” he said.

“Be civil yourself, master.”

The man’s eyes scanned the glass jug. He gripped it with one claw of a hand and stared at the woman blurred in the sunlight.

“You’ve been at the claret.”

The girl laughed a loud, quaking laugh of coarse merriment. She jerked forward, subsided on the man’s knees, poked her face into his.

“Taste my breath—now.”

“Get up with you.”

“Sha’n’t.”

He pushed her away from him, and she slid to the grass at his feet and lay there giggling, with her sun-bonnet fallen back from her hair. Zeus Gildersedge eyed her with mingled approbation and disfavor. He had bartered his dignity long ago, for the woman had made him her equal in dragging him to her own level. They understood each other in a coarse, abusive fashion, and were comrades of a common cult.

“Where’s Joan?” said the man, fingering his chin, while his colorless eyes shone out from his bloodless face.

“Don’t know. ’Tain’t no business of mine, though you let her gad over the country like a gypsy. You’re a fool, Zeus Gildersedge. Nice sort of father you make.”

“Joan can look after herself.”

“So can every woman till she lights on a man.”

Zeus Gildersedge shifted in his chair.

“Balderdash!” he said, with tightened lips. “The girl has pride enough to choke most men. She’s no bib-and-tucker baby.”

“A woman’s a woman, bib or no bib,” retorted the servant.

Zeus Gildersedge took ten drops of opium in a tumbler of claret, frowning as he sipped it down.

“You’re a nice bit of goods to lecture me on education.”

Rebecca plucked up a handful of grass and threw it into the man’s lap.

“There’s hay for you,” she said, grimacing. “Miss Joan’s worth twenty of me and you. Pity you don’t treat her better. I wouldn’t stand all the grubbing she stands—no, not for nothing. I wouldn’t be your daughter, neither; a fine girl like she is shut up with an old goat to feed on thistles in a tumble-down shanty. You’re too mean to have a daughter. There’s the truth for you.”

She laughed a reckless, barbaric expression of superabundant vigor, a challenge to the thin, sallow being squatting under the yews. Zeus Gildersedge regarded her with his small, calculating eyes. A slight color had crept into his cheeks. The fingers of his right hand fidgeted the buttons of his coat.

“I should like to know why I don’t pack you out of my house with an hour’s notice,” he observed, in tones that were whimsically contemplative.

The girl’s eyes glistened; her full lips parted over her large, strong teeth. She was handsome in a coarse, physical fashion. Her hair was black as a raven’s wing, her cheeks red as sun-mellowed apples, her figure profusely Rubenesque in outline. She made a broad furrow in the tall grass where she lay, supporting herself on one arm, with the sunlight glancing on her hair.

“Say the word—I’m off,” she said.

“Pack your box, then.”

“Six months’ wages.”

“And a deuced fine character.”

They both laughed. The girl gave a pouting smile, reached up, and gripped the man’s knee. Zeus Gildersedge stared into her eyes with a glance that was half critical, half human. They remained so for half a minute before the man swore and dropped back into his chair with a contemptuous chuckle.

“Threescore years and yet a fool,” he said.

“The carrier will pass at eight.”

“Shut up.”

The girl wriggled nearer in the grass, looking in the man’s face with a mischievous simper.

“I want two new dresses, and—”

“You bet.”

“I’m going to Rilchester market-day.”

“Who’s to stop you?”

“And in that little cash-box in the cupboard—”

“Hist!”

“What’s wrong?”

“Get up; she’s coming.”

“Who?”

“Joan.”

The girl Rebecca bit her lip, scrambled up, and started away some paces.

“I’ll give the tinker tuppence for mending that pan,” she said, with an intentional strenuousness. “Mutton and potatoes at eight, sharp.”

Joan Gildersedge drew near under the snow-starred vaults of a tall acacia. Her hair flashed about her shoulders magic gold; her face shone white under the dense, green boughs. A pillar of pure womanliness, pearl-bright and lovely, she moved through the deep ecstasy of the summer silence. Her eyes shone large and lucid as fine glass. An infinite wistfulness dwelt upon her mouth like moonlight on a rose. Divinely human, radiant with an incomprehensible mystery of soul, she stood before her father.

Zeus Gildersedge regarded her with a species of unwilling awe. He was man enough to realize the strange charm of this rare being who called him father. To him she was in large measure unintelligible, a denizen of an atmosphere impenetrable to his meagre, goatish vision. Her very unapproachableness, her serene temper, often created in him a rough and petulant antagonism, a strong sense of inferiority that nudged his starved and decrepit pride. She was of him, yet not his, an elusive and scintillant soul, who suffered his interdictions and his barbarisms in silence, retaining beyond his ken a species of intangible freedom that defied his power.

“You’re late,” quoth the man in the chair, filling a long, clay pipe and preparing to smoke.

“I had forgotten how the hours passed.”

Zeus Gildersedge stretched himself in his chair and yawned. He habitually felt ill at ease in his daughter’s presence. She had a queer knack of upsetting the equanimity of his avarice and jarring the mean structure he called his soul. They had nothing in common. Even on the tritest subjects they were out of sympathy.

“You seem to be away a good deal,” said the man, remembering the words Rebecca had thrown up at him from the grass.

“Am I?”

“What do you do with yourself all day?”

“Wander in the woods, watch the birds, collect flowers, bathe in the sea.”

“Bathe—do you!”

“Every day.”

“Beginning to find your father a dull dog, eh? We don’t do a vast amount of entertaining. Rather a quiet place this,” and he laughed.

Joan dangled her hat by the strings and watched her father with a supreme and unconscious gravity. She was ever attempting to understand his mental condition; she had never yet succeeded.

“I often wonder why we have no friends,” she said.

Zeus Gildersedge enveloped himself in an atmosphere of smoke. He distrusted in particular the developing instincts of this queen, realizing that she had little cause to recompense his authority with any great degree of gratitude. He had begotten and reared her, given her the fundamental necessities of life, but little else. She never displayed discontent in his presence, never reproached his niggard régime. Zeus Gildersedge did not expect love from her, seeing that he was barren of that sentiment himself.

“Friendship is an expensive commodity,” he observed, with a sullen yet hypocritical earnestness. “We have to pay for affection in this world; one can get plenty of sympathy by giving dinner-parties. Spend money and people will welcome you. Poverty means isolation and contempt.”

The girl’s eyes were still fixed imperturbably upon his face. She seemed to weigh his words upon the balance of a virgin intuition and to find them inadequate.

“Are we so poor?” she asked.

Zeus Gildersedge grunted.

“Pretty much so.”

“You find it a miserable experience?”

“You think so, eh?”

“If loneliness and poverty go together, you must be very poor.”

“You’re growing too clever with that tongue of yours.”

Joan leaned against the trunk of the acacia and smiled at the clouds. A cataract of golden light poured through the delicate foliage, smiting the shadowy grass with green splendor, painting quivering fleur-de-lis upon the girl’s dark dress.

“Father,” she said, gently enough, “I often wonder what you live for.”

The man in the chair bit his pipe-stem and frowned.

“You do, do you!”

“I am young, you are old. What pleasures can you find in life?”

Zeus Gildersedge eyed her keenly under his drooping lids.

“What do most men live for?” he asked her.

“How should I know?” she answered him.

“Money, gold bags, beer, and bed. You will understand it all well enough some day.”

She looked at him with her large, gray eyes, calm and incredulous.

“And what, then, of death,” she asked, “if we live for nothing more than this?”

The man straightened in his chair.

“What’s that?”

“Death.”

“What’s death to you?”

“The falling of leaves and a silence as of snow under a winter sky. I often think of death; nor is it strange to me. Do you fear the grave?”

“Stop this nonsense,” said the man, with some symptoms of rebellion.

“Are you happy?”

Zeus Gildersedge wriggled in his chair.

“When I want your sympathy I’ll ask for it,” he said. “You’re a little too forward for your years, my dear. Don’t worry your head about my future. Keep your sentimentalities for the birds and the bees and the twaddling rubbish you read in books. Damn sentiment. Supper at eight.”

When the girl had gone Zeus Gildersedge clutched his ledger to him, his brows knitted into a scowl of thought. His hands strained at the book with a tremulous intensity, while his eyes stared into space. Overhead a blackbird was pouring a deep torrent of song to join the sunlight. A slight breeze made the boughs oracular with sudden mysterious mutterings. The beneficent eyes of the universe seemed to watch with a scornful pity the vague dreads of infidelity and greed.

As though waking from some unflattering dream, Zeus Gildersedge’s hands relaxed and suffered the book to slip slowly into his lap. He breathed an oath under his breath, gulped down a mouthful of claret, and lay back in his chair chuckling.