M

ARTHA ENDICOTT sat sewing under the heavy blossoming horse-chestnut at the farthest corner of the garden. Not that the farthest corner of the garden was very far from the house, but it was the one point of view from which the red brick plainness of 36 Beaver Street was not visible, by reason of the merciful interposition of a thicket of gnarled old lilac bushes, glorious now with a prodigal extravagance of lavender and white flowers.

Perhaps I should not have said that Martha was sewing. Her strong brown hands were indeed busily running a fine needle in and out of a bewildering mass of white ruffles, which should some day take form as a sunbonnet, and so intent were her eyes on these same ruffles that a sunbeam dodging the jealous foliage above, flew down unnoticed and gilded the heavy coil of her pale gold hair, that in her deepest thoughts the girl piteously styled blond cendré, but that passed in the family for mud-color. So much of Martha was sewing. But the real Martha paid no heed to sun or ruffles. She was rambling joyously in a far country, an ever-widening, ever-fascinating land of fancy, wherein she was no longer a tall, rather thin, plain-faced girl of twenty, with straight hair and uncompromising, wideset blue eyes, but a dimpled, hesitating little woman, with softly drooping lashes, redbrown, wavy locks, and passionate, impulsive nature—a creature of quick, thunderous tears and glorious smiles, whom all mankind were instantly moved to shelter, protect, and love. Martha had no practical experience of lovers, but that in no wise hampered the spirited actions of her daydream suitors. Whether she poured out her thoughts into the one safety-valve she knew, writing for hours, crystallizing into story form or poetry the strong, individual workings of her active brain, or whether she dreamed dreams as ethereal as sunshine, as soon as she opened the gates of her imagination she was no longer bound, but glori

ously free. Just now her heart was revelling in sentiment. The hero pro tem., a tall, quiet man, whose iron reserve had broken and melted into a flood of tenderness at sight of her, bruised and helpless, but still plucky at the foot of a fifteen-foot cliff, had just dropped upon his knee beside her, crying, "Good God, Pattie! My darling, my poor little darling!" and had laid her dishevelled, copper-shadowed curls against his breast, after the manner of the man one dreams of, when the warm, sweet-scented air was pierced by a cheery shout.

"Martha! Where are you? Violet is here."

"Will you ask her to come out, please, mother?" Martha answered promptly, relegating the perturbed hero to his own especial niche in her brain. She would have liked to believe that she had come back slowly to mundane consciousness, that her eyes were still filled with the dream-light, but she knew it was not so. She knew that at a moment's notice she could pigeon-hole her glorious illusions, drop her dream name, the quaint, sweet, diminutive "Pattie," that no one had ever thought of applying to her in real life—and be just herself. And suddenly her wide, well-shaped mouth broke into a most infectious, merry smile, as it occurred to her that scientists twenty years hence, when cerebral localization had been thoroughly grasped, would no doubt be able to determine the position, and excavate the cell, allotted in her brain to each. buried hero as easily as they had unearthed the gods of ancient Troy. The smile was still there when Violet appeared around the lilac bushes, a radiant little being in white, with a big white parasol behind her white hat, and an appealing air of weariness.

"O Violet, how nice! Won't you sit down, dear?" Martha said, picking up her neat work-basket from the other end of the bench. No one knew how Martha longed to be untidy-impulsively, attractively careless! She was cursed with a soul the very quintessence of system and order, and she loathed it.

"You angel, to be working already!" Violet dropped in an unconsciously graceful heap on the bench; her dark hair and brown fawn-eyes finding an ideal foil in the Saxon fairness and plainness of her friend. Then she threw an arm about Martha's unbending neck and kissed her. "I know you hate it, but I simply had to. O, honey, I could not wait until this afternoon to come, I had to see you." Her eyes were not tired now; they were shining, and her little mouth was curved in a happy smile.

"What has happened?" demanded Martha, and braced herself. She did not particularly like confidences, because she hated to feel jealous, and she knew she should feel so if it was anything especially nice.

"Oh, it was very little, and I don't suppose he meant it." Violet's tales all began that way, and every after-word was a denial of this first humble suggestion. "He came yesterday afternoon."

"He?" said the other unsympathetically, and hated herself for the hypocrisy, for Violet's "hes" each held undisputed sway for the moment, and there was no doubt which "he" this was.

"Jim Armitage," Violet answered with unruffled sweetness. "Martha, I suppose you can't understand, but somehow when the bell rang, I-I knew that it was he." Martha was conscious of a queer dull pain in her throat, and she only said a little blankly, "And it was?"

"Of course, dear, I told you," gently remonstrated Miss Andrews. "But that isn't the point. It's the knowing beforehand that's so wonderful.”

"There wouldn't be much point if he didn't come, though, after you'd had that feeling."

"O Martha, dear, don't. You're so awfully clever, and I'm not. But he doesn't seem to mind about that, does he?" She smiled reminiscently, all unconscious of the double edge to her simple remark. Martha was not unconscious of it. For a moment something surged up in her and longed to cry out that it was not her fault if she had no beauty and only that despised attribute of cleverness, that she also was a woman, that it was not fair for the world to take for granted that men could not care for her. Such great possibilities of loving womanhood were struggling toward the light!

And that she alone should appreciate them in herself! Violet talked on of the "He said and I said" of yesterday, but Martha forgot her, and only caught a word here and there. She was going over and over the oft-thought tale of her first meeting with Jim Armitage, and all that had followed. For he was her friend-hers-before ever he came to Attica. The day on which they had met was forever stamped on her memory. It was her one and only hour of adventure. To begin with, last spring she had gone to Washington to be bridesmaid to her cousin, Mary Denis, and for the first time in her life had been exquisitely dressed; for Mrs. Denis had spent, it seemed to Martha, as much time over the fluffy pale-blue India silk the girl was to wear as though she were the bride herself. Her aunt's efforts were rewarded. An absurdly flattering and obsequious hairdresser had “coiffé mademoiselle à merveille"; and when, two hours before church time, Martha had looked at her distinguished image in the long mirror, and had seen the low-dressed shining coils on her neck and the sweeping grace of her blue gown, matched by the forget-me-not chiffon of her hat, a sudden agony of self-consciousness had seized her, and she had fled from the sight of even the maid, and had hidden her unnaturally gorgeous self in the little flower-filled conservatory, which was hardly more than an after-thought to the white drawing room. There she sat some ten minutes, trying to nerve herself for the coming ordeal. Suddenly a voice afar off cried, "You're all dressed, aren't you, Jim?" And, oh, horror, from the white drawingroom beyond the screen of hydrangias stentorian tones replied: “As dressed as I'm going to be, old man. If you don't like me this way, you'll have to get another best man."

"All right," came the distant bridegroom's answer, "I'm on my way to my frock coat now!"

She was trapped. There in the next room sat the best man, Mr. Armitage, whom she had not even met the night before, when he returned from a hurried journey to New York. He must have come in just after her embarrassed flight to the conservatory, and she would have to pass him if she wanted to escape. For an instant "Pattie" thrilled with pleasurable excitement at the thought. It was almost romantic! Then Martha's

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bewildered terror absolutely overwhelmed the joys possible drama and its appeal to her imagination. What could she do? The question came with tragic force, and was answered after an instant by a dawning smile, and at last by an almost audible laugh. "Why, nothing at all, but sit still till the man goes," thought Martha, and folded her hands. For half an hour there silence in the alcove, and only the us rustle of turning leaves in the "He is reading," murmured the girl. "But there isn't a book in the place. They have all been carried upstairs. It's not noisy enough for a newspaper. What canHere an awful thought paralyzed articulate speech. Her manuscript, her study in satire, her story, into which she had written her very self,-her ironical sketches of the little folk of her native Attica, her longing for wider, better proportioned life-so much, so much of her inmost being where had she left it this morning, when Aunt Caroline had called her away so absurdly early to dress? She had been correcting and rereading, dissatisfied with her own ignorance and clumsiness in the use of the wonderful weapon of language; then her aunt had called her. She was usually so terribly orderly, but just to-day-it must have been the infectious wedding excitement in the air! She must have left the manuscript downstairs, for she could not remember carrying it up. She must have left it in the drawing-room! And that man! A sudden rustle of many pages came from the next room-"By George, that's good!"

The words acted as an electric shock, and Martha sprang to life.

James Armitage, still chuckling over the spicy satire in his hands, looked up, startled at a tall vision in blue, who, stammering with excitement, demanded her manuscript. "Is it yours?" He rose instantly. "I beg your pardon for reading it, but it was lying here half open, you know. Did you write it, really?"

Martha was too angry to know what she w. 3 saying. "Of course I wrote it. I'm sorry. It isn't meant to be horrid about about the people at home, but-but they are funny, and they don't know it. And-and the rest is is just what I do think," she flung out defiantly. The man stared at her an instant, and then threw back his brown head and roared.

"My dear child," he gasped at last, unchecked by the fact that the girl before him had suddenly frozen into her usual glacial condition of repression, and was horrified at her explosion of a minute ago. "Don't be sorry for a word of it. It's heavenly! And besides it's deuced clever! I beg your pardon, but-you write like a man, and I forgot you weren't one."

"I am not one," Martha said, simply because it seemed necessary for her to speak, and words were always scarce with her.

The man smiled and bit his lip a little, glancing down at the pages in his hand. The girl stood implacable before him, an iceberg in pale blue. But the instincts of a born critic were in him, and even the stiff coldness of her manner could not crush them. "You won't mind if I say something, will you? You ought to have given yourself freer rein," he said abruptly. "You don't let go enough in the places where you want to strike straight out from the shoulder. The thoughts are there, but the language is cramped."

Martha collapsed suddenly. Her heart stretched out hungry hands for just this understanding criticism. "Is that the trouble?" she asked eagerly, coming a step nearer. She forgot that he was a man, a stranger. For the moment "Pattie," the creature of impulse, the woman of vivid imagination and graphic pen, was to the fore. The touch of sympathy, the comprehension that no one had ever given her, drew her out of her unlovely shell. Martha was free of her limitations.

"Well, here, for instance." He found the place, and made room for her on the sofa. Without an atom of self-consciousness or of her usual primness, Martha sat down beside him. "You have given a full description of the girl's utter lack of humor, you make her out perfectly uninteresting, and yet you interest one in her by the delicious sarcasm. Now, the emergency comes, the real she is called on, all her forces spring into action, and then you shy at the result. Instead of sketching her in a few bold strokes, letting her stand out firmly against the petty background of the other people, you are afraid of the strong words, and you utterly miss your picture. Do you see?"

"Yes," the girl said earnestly, "that's it, but I didn't know what was the matter." At the end of an hour, Mrs. Denis found

them still absorbed, and hurried them off to the carriages. Martha stood up bewildered, looked straight into a pair of very kind gray eyes, and suddenly stiffened. She did not want to be different. Heaven knew she longed to keep that new, glorious comradeship, but it was gone. She could only say primly, all her old chrysalis hardening about her, "Thank you very much. I am afraid I have kept you too long."

She thought the Fates had sent her one unrepeatable, meteor-like hour of pleasure, but for once the Fates were kind. In the six weeks that followed he was often at her aunt's house, and they worked together over her stories and sketches. Left to herself, Martha would never have asked for another word of criticism; but James Armitage had caught one vivid glimpse of a strong personality, and the more formal and proper Martha became, the more he insisted on her showing him her work, the more he sought the woman underneath. And though she never forgot herself as on that first day, yet in those weeks Martha was often almost pleasant. She was drawn toward the man by a strong tie, for with him she was at her better at least, and that meant much to her, who knew that she was only at her best on a lonely mountain top or in the locked silence of her own room. Many a day "Pattie," with quickened heart-beats, planned that she would tell him this or that, that she would speak to him of herself, her life, her hopes and ambitions. But the greatest result of her joyous scheming was perhaps an awkward silence, after which Martha would blurt out, "Attica is all hills, you know," or "The lilacs are in bloom now at home." She was utterly tongue-tied as soon as she even thought of herself. And meanwhile James Armitage, who came to know and understand the woman under the writings, was dazed and puzzled by the action of circumstance and loveless environment on the shy girl he saw, and puzzled hourly over her rigid, painful propriety till she was gone, after her own strange, awkward way, without a word of warning or farewell. Then, with a gleam of very unmannish intuition, he suddenly understood that, whatever the reason might be, Martha simply could not be herself! He worried about it no more, but cast over her whole unbending plainness a tender mantle of pity for the struggling character that needed something

as yet unfound to draw it from its repellant covering. It would be a fascinating work, he thought, to bring such a woman to herself. "She is all Martha now, hard and unlovely," he said, "but I will make her to be Pattie instead, womanly and bright and full of sweetness." And he smiled at the quaint conceit.

So Martha had gone. All that hour with Mr. Armitage, that she only knew to be the last, "Pattie" within her was aching for a friend's farewell. But because of the very strength of her longing she had no words to tell him that she was going. And at last she let him leave her with only the formal little "Good-by"-that means "till we next meet"-instead of the words of strong feeling and hope that "Pattie" struggled to utter, and so James Armitage passed out of Martha Endicott's life. She had not mentioned him to Violet when she came home. Violet did not expect such heart histories from Martha; for it never occurred to her that plain, commonplace Martha had a heart. Only there was a curious scene in the third-story room overlooking the garden when the traveller returned to the familiar repressive atmosphere of her native town. (In black and white Attica called itself city, but not even its oldest inhabitant dignified it by the title.)

The big, brown trunk, that had from long association acquired a look of its staid, serious mistress, was unlocked, and the neatly folded dresses were neatly unpacked and neatly laid away again. Then Martha looked around her room. Her heart was full to bursting. A tragic feeling of staring at the drop-curtain and knowing that play and actors were gone forever came over her. But the cosmic law of her being, the unbreakable law of order, the systematic order of common things, held her still-held her now more than ever, since she had come home to an unbroken régime of orderly trifles. If she were the girl that her dreams made her, she would cry, she thought, and found herself arranging her collars with mathematical precision in her top bureau drawer. It occurred to her that it would be untold joy to put both hands into that tidy drawer and muss it hopelessly. So she shut it, carefully lifting it to prevent its sticking, and turned to her trunk again. A small bundle of notes and the red ribbon that had once bound a candy box, all

fastened together, not by the pale-blue band of romance, but by a broad elastic strap, met her eye. She knelt down and lifted it carefully out, staring at the strong, small handwriting on the topmost envelope. Something she did not give it a name― made her head swim and her hands tremble for a minute. It was over, over, all over! She would never see him again, because she had been nothing in his busy, much-befriended existence; but he in her empty life, he who had taken the trouble to make her talk, who had listened patiently while she struggled against the inborn repression of her nature, for how much he counted! "Pattie" would have caught the packet to her breast and sobbed out to the budding garden her passionate, forsaken loneliness. Martha could see how she would fling herself face downward on the floor, pressing the letters against her lips, and how the strange smell of the ink-the ink that had dried under his blotter-would comfort her. Then in a supreme instant, renouncing the scorching memory of a flame now forever extinguished she would set the letters on the window-sill and send up a pitiful little burnt offering to the implacable gods. Then Martha looked down critically and saw her big, brown hands trembling. She laughed, a slow-coming, patient laugh, full of tolerance and utterly devoid of pity for the awkward, shaking things-a laugh that started about the sweet, large mouth and ended by crinkling the nondescript, plain nose, that was not even picturesquely ugly. Then she rose and laid the packet carefully in the lowest drawer of her desk, dusting the edges as she drew out the drawer. "Pattie" within was acting out a concentrated tragedy; Martha without had not dramatic abandon enough to lock the drawer. She never locked drawers. It would entail the keeping of many keys, and to what purpose? No one would suspect her of having any secrets.

That was all. She had not looked at the package since that morning. Why should she? The notes were perfectly commonplace little social epistles that she did not want to read over. Her memory was better. Unhampered by mere facts, it made a true shrine of the lower drawer, and "Pattie" revelled in sad memories for a while. orderly readjustment, absolute proportion, was Martha's existence, and though for a

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while her dreaming was tinged with melancholy, and all her heroes were broadshouldered, simple men, unconscious of their own charm, with gray eyes, firm mouths, and a grave, kind smile, yet she grew no thinner nor paler as the summer waxed and waned-and only once, one cool September evening in the mountains, did she let "Jim" bend over "Pattie" in the shadow of an old stranded wreck on the moonlit shore of a still dream sea and whisper: "Darling, are you never going to let me come to you? Must I always seem to force myself upon you? Pattie, my little Pattie, I love you so." That experiment was cut short, for Martha suddenly interfered. Straight, mud-colored hair, tall figure, big brown hands and all, she stumbled into "Pattie's" fairy-land and blindly tore away all the tinsel and the pretty paper flowers. "Nonsense," she muttered fiercely, aloud, to the stars. Then surprised and shocked at this unwonted violence, she did a foolish thing in the darkness. She blushed, and had to wait till her cheeks were cool before slipping indoors and up to bed. It was a strange fact that, large as she was, Martha was very light on her well-shaped, well-proportioned feet; but she had not the comfort of it, for no one had ever told her that, nor had anyone ever let her know that her physique was superb, her carriage unusually fine, and her figure symmetrical. And how should she know? She thought she was hopelessly ungainly, and took refuge in "Pattie's" evanescent charms.

That blush troubled her and resulted in the abandonment of all brown-haired, grayeyed heroes. Martha did not try to understand why the dynasty of dark, compelling men who followed them never really filled "Pattie's" tropic soul with the old fervor. She remembered incidentally that she, Martha Endicott, had only blushed once before. (Of course "Pattie" was often suffused with throbbing color, etc.) Long ago, in the little chapel among the mountains, a dear old bishop had preached. It was a missionary sermon full of zeal and strength. The lanky fourteen-year-old girl in the front seat, outwardly prim and placid, had been stirred inwardly to white heat of excitement. Already she had seen herself working among the poor, soul-starved Indians, fighting through filth, pestilence, and sin to bring them nearer God. The