It was late that evening before Tom found an opportunity to ask Miss Padley, who kept what the inn-club knew as the office, the name of the guest who had questioned him so closely. Miss Padley was a red-haired, freckled girl, putting herself through Radcliffe. Unused to clerical work, she was tired. When Tom put his query she gazed up at him vacantly, before she could collect her wits.
"The name of the gentleman who left this afternoon?" She called to Ella, one of the waitresses, in her second year at Wellesley. "What was it, Ella? I forget."
As the house was closing for the night some informality was possible. Ella sauntered up.
"What was what?"
Tom's question was repeated.
"Oh, that was the great Henry T. Whitelaw. Big banker. Partner in Meek and Brokenshire's. They say that he and a few other bankers could stop the war if they liked, by holding back the cash. Don't believe it. War's too big. And, say! He was the father of that Whitelaw baby there used to be all the talk about."
Miss Padley looked up, her cheek resting on her hand. "You don't say! Gee, I wish I'd known that. I'd 'a looked at him a little closer." She turned her
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 tired greenish eyes toward Tom. "Your name is Whitelaw, too, isn't it?"
He grinned nervously. "My name is Whitelaw, too, only, like the lady's maid whose name was Shakespeare but was no relation to the play-actor of that name, I don't belong to the banking branch of the family."
Ella exclaimed, as one who makes a discovery. "But, Siegfried, you look as if you did. Doesn't he, Blanche? Look at his eyebrows. They're just like the banker man's."
"Oh, I've looked at them often enough," Miss Padley returned, wearily. "Got his mustaches stuck on in the wrong place. I'm off."
Yawning, she shut her ledger, closed an open drawer, and rose. But Ella, a dark little thing, kept her snappy black eyes on Tom.
"You do look like him, Siegfried. I'd put in a claim if I were you. I'm single, you know, and I've always admired you. Think of the romance it would make if the Whitelaw baby took home as his bride a poor but honest working girl!"
Dodging Ella's chaff, Tom escaped to the garage. It was queer how the Whitelaw baby haunted him. Honey!—Ella!—and the Whitelaw baby's own father!
But the haunting stopped. Neither Ella nor Miss Padley took it as more than a passing pleasantry, forgotten with the morning. The tall man who had asked him questions never came back again. The rest of the summer went by with but one little incident to remain in his memory.
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It was a very little incident. Walking one day in the road that ran round the lake he came face to face with Hildred Ansley. She had grown since the previous winter, a little in height, and more in an indefinable development. She was fifteen now; but, always older than her age, she was more like seventeen or eighteen. Her formal manner, her decided mind, her "grown-up" choice of words, made her already something of that finished entity for which we have only the word lady. Ella had said of her that at twenty she would look like forty, and at forty continue to look like twenty. Tom thought that this might be true—an early fullness of womanhood, but a long one.
She had been playing tennis, and swung her racket as she came along. He was sorry for this direct encounter, since she might find it awkward; but when she waved her racket to him, it was clear that she did not. She felt perhaps the more independent, released from her mother's supervision and the inn. Her smile, something in her way of pausing in the road, an ease of manner beyond analysis, put them both on the plane on which their acquaintance had begun. The slanting yellowish-brown eyes together with the faint glimmer of a smile heightened that air of mystery which had always made her different from other girls.
"How have you been getting along?"
He said he had been doing very well.
"How have you liked the job?"
"Fine! Everybody's been nice to me—"
"Everybody likes you. All the same, I hope, if they ask you to come back next year, that—you won't."
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"Why not?"
"Oh, just—because!"
Slipping away, she left him with the summer's second memory. She hoped he wouldn't take the place again—because! Because—what? Could she have meant what he thought she must have meant? Was it possible that she didn't like to see him in a situation something like a servant's? Though he never again, during all the rest of the summer, had so much speech with her alone, it gave him a hint to turn over in his mind.
Driving the car back to Boston, after the inn-club had closed, he saw Maisie for the last time that year. Uncertain of his hours, he had been unable to arrange to have her meet him, and so looked her up in her home. A small wooden house, once stained a dark red, weather-worn now to a reddish-dun, it stood on the outskirts of the town. In a weedy back-yard, redeemed from ugliness by the flaming of a maple tree, Maisie was pinning newly washed clothes to a clothes-line stretched between the back door and a post. Two children, a boy of six and a girl of eight, were tumbling about with a pup. At sound of the stopping of the car in the roadway in front of the house Maisie turned, a clothes-pin held lengthwise in her mouth. Even with her sleeves rolled up and her hair in wisps, she couldn't be anything but pretty.
She came and sat beside him in the car, the children and the pup staring up at them in wonder.
"Gee, I wish he'd get married; but I daresay he won't for ever so long. Married to the bottle, that's what he is. It was six years after my mother died
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 before he took on the last one. That's what makes me so much older than the four kids. All the same I'd beat it if you'd take a shofer's job and settle down. I'm not bound to stay here and make myself a slave."
It was the burden of all Maisie's reasoning, and he had to admit its justice. He was asking her to wait a long four years before he could give her a home. It would have been more preposterous than it was if among poor people, among poor young people especially, a long courtship, with marriage as a vague fulfillment, was not general. Any such man as she was likely to get would have to toil and save, and save and toil, before he could pay for the few sticks of furniture they would need to set up housekeeping. Never having thought of anything else, she was the more patient now; but patient with a strain of rebellion against Tom's whim for education.
She cried when he left her; he almost cried himself, from a sense of his impotence to take her at once from a life of drudgery. The degree to which he loved her seemed to be secondary now to her helpless need of him. True, he could get a job as chauffeur and make a hundred dollars a month to begin with. To Maisie that would be riches; but a hundred and fifty a month would then become his lifelong limit and ambition. Even to save Maisie now he couldn't bring himself to sacrifice not merely his future but her own. Once he was "through college," it seemed to him that the treasures of the world would lie open.
Arrived in Grove Street, he found one new condition which made his return easier. Honey, who, for the sake of economy, had occupied a hall-bedroom
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 through the summer, had reserved another, on the floor above, for Tom. The relief from the sharing of one big room amou............