the Piscatamac. They accounted for it as well as they could by his having married a Burymouth girl; and since he had begun, most unexpectedly, to come forward in literature, such of his friends as had seen him there said it was just the place for him. Gaites had not yet seen him there, and he had a romantic curiosity, the survival of an intensified friendship of their Senior year, to do so. He got to thinking of this good fellow rather vividly, when he had cleared his mind of Miss Desmond's piano, and he did not see why he should not take an earlier train to Burymouth than he had intended to take; and so he had them call him a coupé from the restaurant, and he got into it as soon as he left the breakfast-table.
He gave the driver the authoritative address, "Sea Board Depot," and left him to take his own way, after resisting a rather silly impulse to bid him go through Charles Street.
The man drove up Beacon, and down Temple through Staniford, and naturally Gaites saw nothing of Miss Desmond's piano, which had come into his mind again in starting. He did not know the colonnaded structure, with its stately porte-cochère, where his driver proposed to leave him, instead of the formless brick box which he remembered as the Sea Board Depot, and he insisted upon that when the fellow got down to open the door.
"Ain't no Sibbod Dippo, now," the driver explained, contemptuously. "Guess Union Dippo'll do, though;" and Gaites, a little overcome with its splendor, found that it would. He faltered a moment in passing the conductor and porter at the end of the Pullman car on his train, and then decided that it would be ridiculous to take a seat in it for the short run to Burymouth. In the common coach he got a very good seat on the shady side, where he put down his hand-bag. Then he looked at his watch, and as it was still fifteen minutes before train-time, he indulged a fantastic impulse. He left the car and hurried back through the station and out through the electrics, hacks, herdics, carts, and string-teams of Causeway Street, and up the sidewalk of the street opening into it, as far as the S. B. & H. C. freight-depot. On the way he bet himself five dollars that Miss Desmond's piano would not be there, and lost; for at the moment he came up it was unloading from the end of the truck which he had seen carrying it past the window of his restaurant.
The fact amused him quite beyond the measure of anything intrinsically humorous in it, and he staid watching the exertions of the heated truckman and two silk-capped, sarcastic-faced freight-men, till the piano was well on the platform. He was so intent upon it that his interest seemed to communicate itself to a young girl coming from the other quarter, with a suburban, cloth-sided, crewel-initialed bag in her hand, as if she were going to a train. She paused in the stare she gave the piano-case, and then slowed her pace with a look over her shoulder after she got by. In this her eyes met his, and she blushed and hurried on; but not so soon that he had not time to see she had a thin face of a pathetic prettiness, gentle brown eyes with wistful brows, under ordinary brown hair. She was rather little, and was dressed with a sort of unaccented propriety, which was as far from distinction as it was from pretension.
When Gaites got back to his car, a few minutes before the train was to start, he found the seat where he had left his hand-bag and light overcoat more than half full of a bulky lady, who looked stupidly up at him, and did not move or attempt any excuse for crowding him from his place. He had to walk the whole length of the car before he came to a vacant seat. It was the last of the transverse seats, and at the moment he dropped into it, the girl who had watched the unloading of the piano with him passed him, and took the sidewise seat next the door.
She took it with a weary resignation which somehow made Gaites ashamed of the haste with which he had pushed forward to the only good place, and he felt as guilty of keeping her out of it as if he had known she was following him. He kept a remorseful eye upon her as she arranged her bag and umbrella about her, with some paper parcels which she must have had sent to her at the station. She breathed quickly, as if from final hurry, but somewhat also as if she were delicate; and tried to look as if she did not know he was watching her. She had taken off one of her gloves, and her hand, though little enough, showed an unexpected vigor with reference to her face, and had a curious air of education.
When the train pulled out of the station into the clearer light, she turned her face from him toward the forward window, and the corner of her mouth, which her half-averted profile gave him, had a kind of piteous droop which smote him to keener regret. Once it lifted in an upward curve, and a gay light came into the corner of her eye; then the mouth drooped again, and the light went out.
Gaites could bear it no longer; he rose and said, with a respectful bow: "Won't you take my seat? That seems such a very inconvenient place for you, with the door opening and shutting."
The girl turned her face promptly round and up, and answered, with a flush in her thin cheek, but no embarrassment in her tone, "No, I thank you. This will do quite well," and then she turned her face away as before.
He had not meant his politeness for an overture to her acquaintance, but he felt as justly snubbed as if he had; and he sank back into his seat in some disorder. He tried to hide his confusion behind the newspaper he opened between them; but from time to time he had a glimpse of her round the side of it, and he saw that the hand which clutched her bag all the while tightened upon it and then loosened nervously.
II
"Ah, I see what you mean," said Gaites, with a kind of finality, as his friend Birkwall walked him homeward through the loveliest of the lovely old Burymouth streets. Something equivalent had been in his mind and on his tongue at every dramatic instant of the afternoon; and, in fact, ever since he had arrived from the station at Birkwall's door, where Mrs. Birkwall met them and welcomed him. He had been sufficiently impressed with the aristocratic quiet of the vast square white old wooden house, standing behind a high white board fence, in two acres of gardened ground; but the fine hallway with its broad low stairway, the stately drawing-room with its carving, the library with its panelling and portraits, and the dining-room with its tall wainscoting, united to give him a sense of the pride of life in old Burymouth such as the raw splendors of the millionaire houses in New York had never imparted to him.
"They knew how to do it, they knew how to do it!" he exclaimed, meaning the people who had such houses built; and he said the same thing of the other Burymouth houses which Birkwall showed him, by grace of their owners, after the mid-day dinner, which Gaites kept calling luncheon.
"Be sure you get back in good time for tea," said Mrs. Birkwall for a parting charge to her husband; and she bade Gaites, "Remember that it is tea, please; not dinner;" and he was tempted to kiss his hand to her with as much courtly gallantry as he could; for, standing under the transom of the slender-pillared portal to watch them away, she looked most distinctly descended from ancestors, and not merely the daughter of a father and mother, as most women do. Gaites said as much to Birkwall, and when they got home Birkwall repeated it to his wife, without injuring Gaites with her. If he saw what Birkwall had meant in marrying her, and settling down to his literary life with her in the atmosphere of such a quiet place as Burymouth, when he might have chosen money and unrest in New York, she on her side saw what her husband meant in liking the shrewd, able fellow who had such a vein of gay romance in his practicality, and such an intelligent and respectful sympathy with her tradition and environment.
She sent and asked several of her friends to meet him at tea; and if in that New England disproportion of the sexes which at Burymouth is intensified almost to a pure gynocracy these friends were nearly all women, he found them even more agreeable than if they had been nearly all men. It seemed to him that he had never heard better talk than that of these sequestered ladies, who were so well bred and so well read, so humorous and so dignified, who loved to laugh and who loved to think. It was all like something in a pleasant book, and Gaites was not altogether to blame if it went to his head, and after the talk had been of Burymouth, in which he
