In the cobwebby coach-house of the old stable she found the man-of~all-work, Jacob, who was chauffeur when he was not gardener and dairyman, lying on the floor with his head under the car. He emerged at her call, and said he guessed there was something wrong again, because Mr. Lorry had had trouble getting her up the hill, and maybe he’d better take her to pieces while he was about it.

“Not on your life. I’m going down to Paul’s Landing in her this minute.”

Jacob stared, but without protesting. “You won’t get back, very likely,” he merely observed, and Halo scrambled into the motor with a laugh and a shrug. The motor, she said to herself, was like life in general at Eaglewood: it was always breaking down, but it always managed to keep on going. “Tied together with string and patched up with court plaster: that’s been the way with everything in the family ever since I can remember.” She gave a little sigh as she slipped down the overgrown drive, heading for the stone pillars of the gateway. The motor, she knew, would be all right going down the hill to Paul’s Landing — and after that, at the moment, she didn’t particularly care. If she and Lewis Tarrant had to walk back to Eaglewood in the dark — well, Lewis wouldn’t mind, she imagined. But meanwhile she had to catch up somehow with her forgotten engagement.

In a few minutes the winding road down the mountain brought her to the sad outskirts of Paul’s Landing, and thence to the Tracys’ house. She jumped out, ran up the steps and knocked, looking about her curiously as she did so. She seldom went to the Tracys’, and had forgotten how shabby and humble the place was. The discovery increased her sense of compunction and self-disapproval. How could she have forgotten that clever boy there for so long! If he had been one of her own group it would never have happened. “If there’s anything I hate,” she reflected, “it’s seeming casual to people who live like this.” And instantly she decided that one ought to devote one’s whole life to the Tracys and their kind, and that to enjoy the world’s goods, even in the limited and precarious way in which they were enjoyed at Eaglewood, while other lives like these were being lived at one’s door, denoted a vulgarity of soul which was the last fault she would have cared to confess to. What made it worse, too, in the particular case, was the Tracys’ far-off cousinship with the Lorburn family; the fact that two or three generations ago a foolish (and elderly) Lorburn virgin had run away with farmer Tracy’s son, who worked in the cement factory down on the river, and being cast off by her family had dropped to the level of her husband’s, with whom affairs had not gone well, and who had left his widow and children in poverty. Nowadays all this would have signified much less, as far as the family’s social situation went; but in the compact life of sixty years ago it was a hopeless fall to lapse from the height of Eaglewood to the depth in which the small shopkeepers and farmers of Paul’s Landing had their being. It was all wrong, Halo mused, wrinkling her young brows like her mother’s in the effort to think out, then and there, while she waited for her ring to be answered, the quickest way of putting an end to such injustice.

The development of her plan was interrupted by the appearance of young Upton, who looked at her with such surprise that she felt more acutely than ever her suddenly discovered obligation toward his family.

“Oh, Upton, how are you? I know I’ve interrupted you at supper! I hope your mother won’t be very angry with me.”

“Angry —?” young Tracy echoed, bewildered. He passed the back of his hand over his mouth in the effort to conceal the fact that she had rightly suspected him of coming from supper. “I thought mebbe there was something wrong at the Willows,” he said.

“The Willows! No. Or rather, yes, it is about the Willows — ” She burst out laughing. “Don’t look so frightened, poor Upton! The wrongdoing’s mine, all mine. I believe I promised to meet your cousin there this afternoon, to let him take a look at the books . . . .” She looked interrogatively at Upton, and caught his motion of assent. “Didn’t I? Yes. Well — and I didn’t go. It was all my fault. The fact is I was . . . prevented . . . at the last minute. I should so like to see him and explain . . . .”

“Oh,” said Upton, with evident relief. He glanced about him timidly, away from her sweeping searching eyes: “If you’ll step into the parlour, Miss Halo — ”

She shook her head. “No, I won’t do that, or your mother’ll feel she ought to leave her supper to receive me. And I’ve only got a minute — I’m meeting a friend at the station,” she reminded herself with a start, for that also she had been near forgetting. “So if you’ll just ask your cousin — Vance, that’s his name, isn’t it? — ask him to come out here and say two words to me . . .”

“Oh, certainly,” Upton agreed. He turned back into the house, but the visitor caught him by the sleeve. “Upton! Listen. Don’t mention my name; don’t tell Vance I’m here. Just say it’s somebody with a message — SOMEBODY WITH A MESSAGE,” she repeated, trying with her sharp italics to bore the fact into the youth’s brain.

“Oh, certainly,” Upton repeated. He walked away to the back of the house, and Hélo?se, already partly rid of her burden of self~reproach, as she always tended to be the moment she had given it expression, stood looking absently over the garden, the broken-down fence, and the darkness already gathering in the folds of the hills.

She heard another step, and saw Vance Weston. He stood gazing at her with wide open eyes, his face small and drawn from his recent illness. In the twilight of the library at the Willows he had not looked so boyish; now she was struck by his frailness and immaturity, and felt sorrier than ever that she had failed to keep her promise.

“It’s me, Vance. I’ve come to apologize about this afternoon.”

“Oh — ” he began, as awkwardly as Upton.

“You went to the Willows after lunch, and waited for me?” He nodded without speaking.

“Waited HOURS?”

“I didn’t mind. I sat in the porch. I liked it.”

“Well, it was hideous of me — hideous! I don’t know how . . .”

He looked at her in surprise. “How could you help it? Upton said something prevented you — ”

“Ah — then he told you I was here?” She laughed with amusement, and relapsed into self-accusal. “It was worse, much worse! What I told Upton wasn’t true. Nothing prevented me — and nobody. I simply forgot. The day was so heavenly — wasn’t it? I went off alone, up the mountain, to bathe in a pool in the woods; and I took some books and the dogs; and I forgot everything. . . . Can you ever forgive me?” She stretched her hands out, but he stood and looked at them, bewildered, as if not believing such a gift could be meant for him, even for the space of a touch.

“A pool in the woods . . . is it anywhere near here? Could I get to it?” he questioned eagerly.

“Of course you could. I’ll take you. It’s the divinest place! In weather like this it’s better even than books. . . . But you shall see the books too,” she added, suffusing him in her sudden smile.

He reddened slightly, with the flush of convalescence, which leaves the face paler when it goes. “I— that’s awfully kind . . .”

“No. I’m never kind. But I like to share my treasures — sometimes.” She continued to look at him, noting with a sort of detached appreciation, as characteristic of her as the outward glow, the good............