The President of the United States, that year, had publicly professed himself of the opinion that “the maintenance of pacific relations with all the world, the fruitful increase of the earth, the rewards accruing to honest toil throughout the land, and the nation’s happy immunity from pestilence, famine, and disastrous visitations of the elements,” deserved exceptional recognition at the hands of the people on the last Thursday in November. The Governor of the State went further, both in rhetorical exuberance and in his conception of benefits received, for he enumerated “the absence of calamitous strife between capital and labor,” “the patriotic spirit which had dominated the toilers of the mine, the forge, the factory, and the mill, in their judicious efforts to unite and organize their common interests,” and “the wise and public-spirited legislation which in the future, like a mighty bulwark, would protect the great and all-important agricultural community from the debasing competition of unworthy wares”—as among the other things for which everybody should be thankful.

There were many, no doubt, who were conscious of a kindly glow as they read beneath the formal words designating the holiday, and caught the pleasant and gracious significance of the Thanksgiving itself—strange and perverted survival as it is of a gloomy and unthankful festival. There were others, perhaps, who smiled a little at his Excellency’s shrewd effort to placate the rising and hostile workingmen’s movement and get credit from the farmers for the recent oleomargarine bill, and for the rest took the day merely as a welcome breathing spell, with an additional drink or two in the forenoon, and a more elaborate dinner than was usual.

In the Lawton household they troubled their heads neither about the text and tricks of the proclamations nor the sweet and humane meaning of the day. There were much more serious matters to think of.

The parable of the Prodigal Son has long been justly regarded as a model of terse and compact narrative; but modern commentators of the analytical sort have a quarrel with the abruptness of its ending. They would have liked to learn what the good stay-at-home son said and did after his father had for a second time explained the situation to him. Did he, at least outwardly, agree that “it was meet that we should make merry and be glad”? And if he consented to go into the house, and even to eat some of the fatted calf, did he do it with a fine, large, hearty pretence of being glad? Did he deceive the returned Prodigal, for example, into believing in the fraternal welcome? Or did he lie in wait, and, when occasion offered, quietly, and with a polite smile, rub gall and vinegar into the wayfarer’s wounds? Alas, this we can only guess.

Poor Ben Lawton had been left in no doubt as to the attitude of his family toward the prodigal daughter. A sharp note of dissent had been raised at the outset, on the receipt of her letter—a note so shrill and strenuous that for the moment it almost scared him into begging her not to come. Then his better nature asserted itself, and he contrived to mollify somewhat the wrath of his wife and daughters by inventing a tortuous system of lies about Jessica’s intentions and affairs. He first established the fiction that she meant only to pay them a flying visit. Upon this he built a rambling edifice of falsehood as to her financial prosperity, and her desire to do a good deal toward helping the family. Lastly, as a crowning superstructure of deception, he fabricated a theory that she was to bring with her a lot of trunks filled with costly and beautiful dresses, with citified bonnets and parasols and high-heeled shoes, beyond belief—all to be distributed among her sisters. Once well started, he lied so luxuriantly and with such a flowing fancy about these things, that his daughters came to partially believe him—him whom they had not believed before since they could remember—and prepared themselves to be civil to their half-sister.

There were five of these girls—the offspring of a second marriage Lawton contracted a year or so after the death of baby Jessica’s mother. The eldest, Melissa, was now about twenty, and worked out at the Fairchild farm-house some four miles from Thessaly—a dull, discontented young woman, with a heavy yet furtive face and a latent snarl in her voice. Lucinda was two years younger, and toiled in the Scotch-cap factory in the village. She also was a commonplace girl, less obviously bad-tempered than Melissa, but scarcely more engaging in manner. Next in point of age was Samantha, who deserves some notice by herself, and after her came the twins, Georgiana and Arabella, two overgrown, coarse, giggling hoydens of fifteen, who obtained intermittent employment in the button factory.

Miss Samantha, although but seventeen, had for some time been tacitly recognized as the natural leader of the family. She did no work either in factory or on farm, and the local imagination did not easily conceive a condition of things in which she could find herself reduced to the strait of manual labor. Her method, baldly stated, was to levy more or less reluctant contributions upon whatever the rest of the family brought in. There was a fiction abroad that Samantha stayed at home to help her mother. The facts were that she was only visible at the Law-ton domicile at meal-times and during inclement weather, and that her mother was rather pleased than otherwise at this being the case.

Samantha was of small and slight figure, with a shrewd, prematurely-sapient face that was interesting rather than pretty, and with an eye which, when it was not all demure innocence, twinkled coldly like that of a rodent of prey. She had several qualities of mind and deportment which marked her as distinct from the mass of village girls; that which was most noticeable, perhaps, was her ability to invent and say sharp, comical, and cuttingly sarcastic things without herself laughing at them. This was felt to be a rare attainment indeed in Thessaly, and its possession gave her much prestige among the young people of both sexes, who were conscious of an insufficient command alike over their tongues and their boisterous tendencies. Samantha could have counted her friends, in the true, human sense of the word, upon her thumbs; but of admirers and toadies she swayed a regiment. Her own elder sisters, Melissa and Lucinda, alternated between sulky fear of her and clumsy efforts at propitiation; the junior twins had never as yet emerged from a plastic state of subordination akin to reverence. Samantha’s attitude toward them all was one of lofty yet observant criticism, relieved by lapses into half-satirical, half-jocose amiability as their pay-days approached. On infrequent occasions she developed a certain softness of demeanor toward her father, but to her mother she had been uniformly and contemptuously uncivil for years.

Of this mother, the second Mrs. Lawton, there is little enough to say. She was a pallid, ignorant, helpless slattern, gaunt of frame, narrow of forehead, and bowed and wrinkled before her time. Like her husband, she came of an ancestry of lake and canal boatmen; and though twenty odd years had passed since increasing railroad competition forced her parents to abandon their over-mortgaged scow and seek a living in the farm country, and she married the young widower Ben Lawton in preference to following them, her notions of housekeeping and of existence generally had never expanded beyond the limits of a canal-boat cabin. She rose at a certain hour, maundered along wearily through such tasks of the day as forced themselves upon her, and got to bed again as early as might be, inertly thankful that the day was done. She rarely went out upon the street, and still more rarely had any clothes fit to go out in. She had a vague pride in her daughter Samantha, who seemed to her to resemble the heroines of the continued stories which she assiduously followed in the Fireside Weekly, and sometimes she harbored a formless kind of theory that if her baby boy Alonzo had lived, things would have been different; but her interest in the rest of the family was of the dimmest and most spasmodic sort. In England she would have taken to drink, and been beaten for it, and thus at least extracted from life’s pilgrimage some definite sensations. As it was, she lazily contributed vile cooking, a foully-kept house, and a grotesque waste of the pittances which came into her hands, to the general squalor which hung like an atmosphere over the Lawtons.

The house to which Jessica had come with her father the previous afternoon was to her a strange abode. At the time of her flight, five years before, the family had lived on a cross-road some miles away; at present they were encamped, so to speak, in an old and battered structure which had been a country house in its time, but was now in the centre of a new part of Thessaly built up since war. The building, with its dingy appearance and poverty-stricken character, was an eyesore to the neighborhood, and everybody looked hopefully forward to the day when the hollow in which it stood should be filled up, and the house and its inhabitants cleared away out of sight.

Jessica upon her arrival had been greeted with constrained coolness by her stepmother, who did not even offer to kiss her, but shook hands limply instead, and had been ushered up to her room by her father. It was a low and sprawling chamber, with three sides plastered, and the fourth presenting a time-worn surface of naked lathing. In it were a bed, an old chest of drawers, a wooden chair, and a square piece of rag carpet just large enough to emphasize the bareness of the surrounding floor. This was the company bedroom; and after Ben had brought up all her belongings and set them at the foot of the bed, and tiptoed his way down-stairs again, Jessica threw herself into the chair in the centre of its cold desolation, and wept vehemently.

There came after a time, while she still sat sobbing in solitude, a soft rap at her door. When it was repeated, a moment later, she hastily attempted to dry her eyes, and answered, “Come in.” Then the door opened, and the figure of Samantha appeared. She was smartly dressed, and she had a half-smile on her face. She advanced readily toward the chair.

“Don’t you know me?” she said, as Jessica rose and looked at her doubtfully in the fading light. “I’m Samantha. Of course, I’ve grown a good deal; but Lord! I’d have known you anywhere. I’m glad to see you.”

Her tone betrayed no extravagance of heated enthusiasm, but still it was a welcome in its way; and as the two girls kissed each other, Jessica choked down the last of her sobs, and was even able to smile a little.

“Yes, I think I should have known you,” she replied. “Oh, now I look at you, of course I should. Yes, you’ve grown into a fine girl. I’ve thought of you very, very often.”

“I’ll bet not half as often as I’ve thought of you,” Samantha made answer, cheerfully. “You’ve been living in a big city, where there’s plenty to take up your time; but it gets all-fired slow down here sometimes, and then there’s nothing to do but to envy them that’s been able to get out.”

Samantha had been moving the small pieces of luggage at the foot of the bed with her feet as she spoke. With her eyes still on them she asked, in a casual way:

“Father gone for the rest of your things? It’s like him to make two jobs of it.”

“This is all I have brought; there is nothing more,” said Jessica.

“What!”

Samantha was eying her sister with open-mouthed incredulity. She stammered forth, after a prolonged pause of mental confusion:

“You mean to say you ain’t brought any swell dresses, or fancy bonnets, or silk wrappers, or sealskins, or—or anything? Why, dad swore you was bringing whole loads of that sort of truck with you!” She added, as if in angry quest for consolation: “Well, there’s one comfort, he always was a liar!”

“I’m sorry if you’re disappointed,” said Jessica, stiffly; “but this is all I’ve brought, and I can’t help it.”

“But you must have had no end of swell things,” retorted the younger girl. “It stands to reason you must. I know that much. And what have you done with ’em?” She broke out in loud satire: “Oh, yes! A precious lot you thought about me and the rest of us! I daresay it kept you awake nights, thinking about us so much!”

Jessica gazed in painful astonishment at this stripling girl, who had regarded her melancholy home-coming merely in the light of a chance to enjoy some cast-off finery. All the answers that came into her head were too bitter and disagreeable. She did not trust herself to reply, but, still wearing her hat and jacket, walked to the window and looked out down the snowy road. The impulse was strong within her to leave the house on the instant.

Samantha had gone away, slamming the door viciously behind her, and Jessica stood for a long time at the window, her mind revolving in irregular and violent sequence a score of conflicting plans and passionate notions. There were moments in this gloomy struggle of thought when she was tempted to throw everything to the winds—her loyalty to pure-souled Annie Fairchild, her own pledges to herself, her hopes and resolves for the future, everything—and not try any more. And when she had put these evil promptings behind her, that which remained was only less sinister.

As she stood thus, frowning down through the unwashed panes at the white, cheerless prospect, and tearing her heart in the tumultuous revery of revolt, the form of a man advancing up the road came suddenly under her view. He stopped when he was in front of the Lawton house, and looked inquiringly about him. The glance which he directed upwards fell full upon her at the window. The recognition was mutual, and he turned abruptly from the road and came toward the house. Jessica hurriedly took off her hat and cloak. Reuben Tracy had come to see her!

It was her stepmother who climbed the stairs to notify her, looking more lank and slatternly than ever, holding the bedroom door wide open, and saying sourly: “There’s a man down-stairs to see you already,” as if the visit were an offence, and Jessica could not pretend to be surprised. “Yes, I saw him,” she answered, and hurried past Mrs. Lawton, and down to the gaunt, dingy front room, with its bare walls, scant furniture, and stoveless discomfort, which not even Samantha dared call a parlor.

She could remember afterward that Reuben stood waiting for her with his hat in his left hand, and that he had taken the glove from his right to shake hands with her; and this she recalled more distinctly than anything else. He had greeted her with grave kindness, had mentioned receiving notice from the Fairchilds of her coming, and had said that of course whatever he could do to help her he desired to do. Then there had been a pause, during which she vaguely wavered between a wish that he had not come, and a wild, childish longing to hide her flushed face against his overcoat, and weep out her misery. What she did do was to point to a chair, and say, “Won’t you take a seat?”

“It is very kind of you to come,” she went on, “but—” She broke off suddenly and looked away from him, and through the window at the snow-banks outside. “How early the winter has closed in,” she added, with nervous inconsequence.

Reuben did not even glance out at the snow. “I’m bound to say that it isn’t very clear to me what use I can be to you,” he said. “Of course, I’m all in the dark as to what you intend to do. Mr. Fairchild did not mention that you had any definite plans.”

“I had thought some of starting a milliner’s shop, of course very small, by myself. You know I have been working in one for some months at Tecumseh, ever since Mrs. Fairchild—ever since she—”

The girl did not finish the sentence, for Reuben nodded gravely, as if he understood, and that seemed to be all that was needed.

“That might do,” he said, after a moment’s thought, and speaking even more deliberately than usual. “I suppose I ought to tell you this doesn’t seem to me a specially wise thing, your coming back here. Don’t misunderstand me; I wouldn’t say anything to discourage you, for the world. And since you have come, it wasn’t of much use, perhaps, to say that. Still, I wanted to be frank with you, and I don’t understand why you did come. It doesn’t appear that the Fairchilds thought it was wise, either.”

“She did,” answered Jessica, quickly, “because she understood what I meant—what I had in mind to do when I got here. But I’m sure he laughed at it when she explained it to him; she didn’t say so, but I know he did. He is a man, and men don’t understand.”

Reuben smiled a little, but still compassionately. “Then perhaps I would better give it up in advance, without having it explained at all,” he said.

“No; when I saw your name on the sign, down on Main Street, this afternoon, I knew that you would see what I meant. I felt sure you would: you are different from the others. You were kind to me when I was a girl, when nobody else was. You know the miserable childhood I had, and how everybody was against me—all but you.”

Jessica had begun calmly enough, but she finished with something very like a sob, and, rising abruptly, went to the window.

Reuben sat still, thinking over his reply. The suggestion that he differed from the general run of men was not precisely new to his mind, but it had never been put to him in this form before, and he was at a loss to see its exact bearings. Perhaps, too, men are more nearly alike in the presence of a tearful young woman than under most other conditions. At all events, it took him a long time to resolve his answer—until, in fact, the silence had grown awkward.

“I’m glad you have a pleasant recollection of me,” he said at last. “I remember you very well, and I was very sorry when you left the school.” He had touched the painful subject rather bluntly, but she did not turn or stir from her post near the window, and he forced himself forward. “I was truly much grieved when I heard of it, and I wished that I could have talked with you, or could have known the circumstances in time, or—that is to say—that I could have helped you. Nothing in all my teacher experience pained me more. I—”

“Don’t let us talk of it,” she broke in. Then she turned and came close beside him, and lifted her hand as if to place it on his shoulder by a frank gesture of friendship. The hand paused in mid-air, and then sank to her side. “I know you were always as good as good could be. You don’t need to tell me that.”

“And I wasn’t telling you that, I hope,” he rejoined, speaking more freely now. “But you have never answered my question. What is it that Seth Fairchild failed to understand, yet which you are sure I will comprehend? Perhaps it is a part of your estimate of me that I should see without being told; but I don’t.”

“My reason for coming back? I hardly know how to explain it to you.”

Reuben made no comment upon this, and after a moment she went on:

“It sounds unlikely and self-conceited, but for months back I have been full of the idea. It was her talk that gave me the notion. I want to be a friend to other girls placed as I was when I went to your school, with miserable homes and miserable company, and hating the whole thing as I hated it, and aching to get away from it, no matter how; and I want to try and keep them from the pitch-hole I fell into. That’s what I want—only I can’t explain it to you as I could to her; and you think it’s silly, don’t you? And I—begin to think—so—myself.”

Reuben had risen now and stood beside her, and put his hand lightly on her shoulder as she finished with this doleful confession. He spoke with grave softness:

“No, not silly: it seems to me a very notable kind of wisdom. I had been thinking only of you, and that you could live more comfortably and happily elsewhere. But it seems that you were thinking of matters much greater than your own. And that surprises me, and pleases me, and makes me ashamed of my own view. Think you silly? My dear child, I think you are superb. Only”—he spoke more slowly, and in a less confident tone—“unfortunately, though it is wisdom to do the right thing, it doesn’t always follow that it is easy, or successful for that matter. You will need to be very strong, in order to stand up straight under the big task you have undertaken—very strong and resolute indeed.”

The touch of his hand upon her shoulder had been more to Jessica than his words, the line of which, in truth, she had not clearly followed. And when he ended with his exhortation to robust bravery, she was conscious of feeling weaker than for months before. The woman’s nature that was in her softened under the gentle pressure of that strong hand, and all the nameless feminine yearnings for wardenship and shelter from life’s battle took voice and pleaded in her heart. Ah, yes! he spoke of her being strong, and the very sound of his voice unnerved her. She could not think; there was no answer to be made to his words, for she had scarcely heard them. No reply of any kind would come to her lips. In place of a mind, she seemed to have only a single sense—vast, overpowering, glorious—and that was of his hand upon her shoulder. And enwrapped, swallowed up in this sense, she stood silent.

Then lo! the hand was gone, and with a start her wits came back. The lawyer was buttoning his overcoat, and saying that he must be going.

She shook hands with him mechanically, in confused apprehension lest she should think of nothing more to say to him before he departed. She followed him to the hall, and opened the front door for him. On the threshold the words she wanted came to her.

“I will try to be strong,” she said, “and I thank you a thousand times for coming.”

“Now, you will let me help you; you will come to me freely, won’t you?” Reuben said as he lifted his hat.

“Good-by,” answered Jessica, slowly, as she closed the door.