The Rev. Needham awoke from his siesta wonderfully refreshed. These benign afternoon snoozes had a peculiar and sometimes quite poignant effect. The minister dimly felt it must have something to do with psychology. For he always awoke feeling so spiritual, so calm and strong. Today, of course, there was particularly traceable cause: he had gone to sleep, one must remember, in a miraculously resolute, yes, a truly masterful, mood. Did we call it Nietzschean? Well, perhaps it really was almost that. At any rate, waking was delicious. There was a largeness, a breadth about life which made one want to square one's shoulders, step out proudly. Before the dresser mirror, in the act of resuming collar and tie, the Rev. Needham actually did square his shoulders a little. He even threw out his chest somewhat. Oh, it is sweet to be master of one's own destiny!

Out on the porch he found his wife, rocking there all by herself and looking a little vacantly off at the shrubs and trees.

"Ah, Anna," he said; then perched himself in a nonchalant, really an almost rakish manner, on the[Pg 200] railing, throwing one leg over the other, and folding his arms. He yawned a little audibly, concluding that function with a kind of masterful, contented smacking of the lips—even whistled a few bars of a gay secular tune.

"Did you sleep well, Alf?" Anna Needham spoke calmly, rocked calmly. She still eyed the shrubs and trees in a spirit of almost hypnotized calm.

"I had a magnificent nap," he assured her.

Anna rocked more slowly. "Alf," she hesitated.

"Yes, Anna?"

"Alf, I wonder if I can be getting old ...?"

"Old, Anna?" He was really quite shocked at the suggestion.

"Yes—I don't know. Sometimes...."

"Nonsense!"

"I don't know ..." she continued dreamily.

"But why should you ever think such a thing?"

"Well, lately there've been times when I've felt so kind of still. I don't know, but I thought—I thought it might be...."

"Why, Anna ...!" he cried in vaguely frightened tones.

"I don't know, Alf." Her manner retained its essential dreaminess. "Sometimes when I sit alone rocking, I feel so kind of still...."

The minister laughed, then, with even an attempt at something like boisterousness; but it was plain something of his earlier flamboyancy had vanished.[Pg 201] Abruptly, right in the heyday of his most glorious mood, the shortness of life struck him with uncanny force. Life's shortness, and, though he indignantly repudiated the insinuation, its relative futility, after all. Where had one come from in the beginning; just what was it one was up to now; and where was it one would go when the breath of life ceased flowing? Oh, what a piece of work is man! These were the secret inner workings. With a thrill of genuine horror the minister found himself asking what he knew, as a fact, after all these years of preaching it, about the immortality of the soul. It was terrible, terrible! Oh, that he should be afflicted with such doubts! And not ten minutes ago the Rev. Needham had squared his shoulders and flashed so grand a defiance at his own reflection....

Curiously enough, this sudden unpleasant sense of renewed insecurity was augmented, at the moment when it was most acute, by the rippling laughter of his approaching sister-in-law. Miss Whitcom and her friend were returning from their tête-à-tête in the bower. The laugh, whatever it might mean to the minister, signified that the lady was not, so easily, to be carried off her feet, and that, however thrillingly she might talk about not being a pioneer any longer, no mere travelling man was to capture her without at least a concluding scramble.

Barrett O'Donnell knew quite well what the laugh signified. But it didn't, for all that, very greatly disturb him. Lord, he'd waited twenty years: he[Pg 202] could wait twenty more, if necessary. There is not that hot impetuosity in the affection of souls matured which characterizes youth; not that fever, that restless, exquisite rush of heady devotion. Still, there is perhaps something in being quite sure your love isn't misplaced. Yes, in a way, to be sure may be even better than to possess.

The return of Miss Whitcom and Mr. O'Donnell from one direction fell simultaneously with the return of Louise and Lynndal Barry from another. The porch became a very lively place, all at once, where a few moments before it had been so quiet, with only the minister's wife there, rocking.... Louise was greatly relieved that it should be so. To have returned to a silent and deserted house after what had passed between herself and Lynndal on the beach must have proved next to unbearable. As it was, the frantic difficulty of the situation would be lightened, if only temporarily.

Marjory pounced at once upon the westerner, turning from her ancient suitor with a careless alacrity which seemed saying: "After all, I am free, quite superbly free!" And O'Donnell muttered an "Ah!" scarce audibly; and what he meant by it was this: "I know you'll come back to me. You always have and you always will. We are not quite free, either of us, in one sense of the word." One glorious, indomitable sense of the word.

Marjory wanted to know more about the dam in Arizona, and especially she wanted to get at the[Pg 203] other side of this tragic love affair—this bit of high tragedy in humble setting. In art, she thought, tragedy has a way of being generally treated nobly and loftily; but in life, somehow, it often seems almost absurd. Yes, first it was the dam. But she did not really care two straws about the dam. She had got beyond all such things as dams in her pilgrimage.

The Rev. Needham opened up a conversation about the Point with O'Donnell. But he kept eyeing his daughter, who leaned against the railing of the porch, her hands clasped before her. Alfred, despite his calling, was a wretched reader of souls. The look in one's eyes or the line of one's lips meant next to nothing, definitely—if only because these things might mean so bafflingly much.... If you actually shed tears, then he would be reasonably sure you must be unhappy. Hearty laughter signified, of course, a state of hilarity. However, the Rev. Needham's spirit, with Milton's, took, really, no middle course. There lay an almost blank chasm between tears and laughter—although, alas, the fact of its being a chasm did not make it any less conducive to prickles in one's suspended heels.

"There's only one thing," O'Donnell was observing, "—only one thing I've got against this place."

"What's that?" asked the minister.

"There are so many signs!"

It took the Rev. Needham just a moment to comprehend what was meant. "You mean the Assembly notices?"

[Pg 204]

"I suppose that's what they are. If you'll pardon my saying so, it seems sometimes as though there's a sign on every tree. One says you mustn't peel the birch bark, and the next one announces a lecture on such and such a day."

"I'm afraid they have multiplied the last few seasons," admitted the minister. "We don't seem to notice—so used to them, I suppose. There are picnickers, you know—come from other parts—and we have to look out for the natural beauty or it will be all spoiled. As for the lecture announcements," he concluded, "the—the church, you know, has to keep pace, nowadays. Yes, it—it has to advertise a little!" He spoke almost glibly, and sighed; but quite brightly, indeed almost chirpily.

Miss Whitcom caught the confession. And she hopped down at once off Mr. Barry's fine Arizona dam—which diverted water into............