T

HE playhouse door opened and shut with a bang, emitting a man and a pastebrush and a swear-word. At the same moment there went bouncing off the playhouse porch a ball composed of small, clutching hands and kicking, socked legs and bumping, shrieking little heads. Down the long, parched lawn the ball went rolling, now a white frock on top, now a green, now a pair of blue Dombey knickerbockers. A tornado of noise and movement beneath the bright mountain sun, the ball somehow avoided the scattered pine trunks, cut a clean swathe across the crimson tulip bed, and barely veered off from the forbidden fountain basin. The man came leaping and thundering down the hill. From the rear of the house on the crest a chocolate-colored nurse was flying toward the rumpus. Just then a woman parted the pendent tendrils of the arch in the ragged honeysuckle hedge. Large, white-clad, calm, Marcia Vail stooped at the same moment with Crewe Holton to disentangle his heated, tousled mass of children. She held Junior against her skirt, clasping her quiet hands across his panting but unresisting little chest. Crewe Holton was shaking his seven-year Peggy, because Peggy was plump and convenient, and you had to shake one of them, and you did not dare to shake disdainful Silvia or volcanic June. Silvia stood, as ever, a little apart, seeking to repair her white plumage from the indignity of June's assault. She was a mite of nine, a Bouvet de Monvel little girl, with dusky, square-cut hair and dusky eyes. She had a subtle little mouth, which could be razor-sharp or unctuously tactful, whichever manner Silvia deemed advisable for the management of grown-ups, her father or brown Beulah; to Miss Marcia, however, Silvia always spoke with directness, as now. "Whose fault, Silvia?"

But Marcia, stooping over June from the rear, was examining the stroke of a red pencil across his cheek.

"And who scratched June?" she asked. There was only one person before whom Silvia's head ever drooped.

Now Marcia's gaze travelled over to Peg, too glad to be near her father to care for his condemnatory clutch on her shoulder. One looped molasses braid was still held by its limp black bow, the other was scattered free; the ends of the black leather belt of her green frock flapped about her ankles. Peggy's blue eyes were reddened; she had dropped her jaw in the grotesque fashion that always irritated her father. Marcia regarded Peggy's temple.

"And who," she pursued, "scratched Peggy? And how did Peggy get into it, anyway?"

"First I was between them, and then I was trying to pull them apart." "Defending her neutrality," grinned Crewe.

But Marcia, too serious for grown-up pleasantries when a child's conscience was at stake, pressed home. "Who scratched Peggy?"

she

Collapse of Silvia, abrupt, histrionic, arranged on a green garden bench. "I think I'm a changeling,' sobbed. "I think that's why you-all don't love me."

"You think you're a what?" thundered Crewe.

"I think I'm a changeling. I think the fairies changed me. I think that's why I'm not more like-more like the rest of the family." Her face was well hidden.

Taut words broke from Junior, gazing,

hot-eyed and pitiless, toward that carefully crumpled little white form.

"I don't care if you are a shangeling! I don't like you for a sister! You never play wis me."

"Lord!" groaned Crewe. "What makes 'em hate each other so? And what devil possesses 'em the days I take off on purpose to play with 'em?”

Marcia lifted to Beulah, now arrived by the fountain-side, a quietly accusatory glance. In the midst of these three sprouting little personalities, intense, entangled, growing each day more insistent, Crewe's eyes and Marcia's met, saying simultaneously that the charge was a good deal to expect of any Beulah, white or black.

Marcia was an ample, Madonna woman with creamy pallor, bovine brown eyes, and dark hair parted and piled. Even an angel in the sky could hardly have penetrated her profound calm, to her heart, that morning in torment from her mother's talk. But, meanwhile, there were the children; because of what she had just read in Crewe's troubled, twinkling eyes, there was a world of significance in that little word meanwhile. Marcia steadied herself with the small, immediate needs.

She laid a hand on a hunched little shoulder. "Sit up, Silvia, and move over so that I can sit down." A tragic little girl raised a face of hypnotized obedience, suddenly revealing behind sly lashes, now wide, a tired and lonely baby.

"Sit between, June-boy." Marcia lifted him unresisting. She knitted his clinched fist into Silvia's cold little palm. The two hands lay unprotesting each in each, but without pressure.

"Dip your handkerchief in the fountain, Crewe, it's big enough for a facewipe all around. Old Pegtop! My lap for you! The biggest and heaviest needs a lap most, perhaps."

"Will my feet make grass-stains on you?" hesitated Peggy, but her hot cheek was against the cool linen shoulder. Marcia was braiding the syrup-shaded hair, rebuckling the belt. She rolled the handkerchief into a wad and tossed it back to Daddy, who had dropped on the grass beside the fountain but was gazing with transient annoyance into its depths.

How often had he told that nigger Dan to clean out the basin! What matter! There were worse worries to think about than dirty fountains; but even these worse worries specifically speaking, three in number, and aged respectively, nine, seven, and five-could be put out of a man's mind on a May morning, so long, that is, as Marcia stayed. The comfort of her flowed over Crewe as the water over the motionless goldfish.

Softly Marcia slipped Peggy from her lap to the bench at her side and drew Junior up to stand at her knee facing her. With imperceptible little shovings Silvia pressed into the unoccupied space close to Marcia's elbow. Crewe gazed at Marcia's calm brown head above his children. Marcia smiled at Junior's tousled earnestness. June had a flying mop of yellow, Dutch-cut hair, his father's clear, square-cut features, and Jean's elfin eyes, of chameleon color, brown-gold in the sunshine, black when he was sad or angry. Marcia's cool hand clasped tightly the hot little fists.

"Why are you always slapping Silvia, June?"

His eyes were wide and deep, upraised. "Why won't Silvia ever play wis me, Miss Mah'sa?"

"I'd play with him," murmured Peggy. "You can't," he answered cruelly. "Peggy never understands when I make up a new play in the middle. Silvia could."

"I'd try," whispered Peggy to the comforting arm that, wrapped about her, healed all the heartaches of a little girl clumsy with great love.

"And you think slapping Silvia is the way to make her play with you?”

Slowly June's intense face relaxed until a shy twinkle showed, and a dimple, and his head ducked in a sheepish chuckle of self-amusement. "There," said Marcia, turning him about with a little push. "Run and play, you silly little boy. Go and play jacks with the pebbles there; and Peggy will play, too. I know she'll beat."

But June stood still, bargaining. “If I play, will you stay sitting there?" "Yes, run along, you two."

"I'm too old to play," remarked Silvia.

"Certainly," agreed Marcia briskly, "but not too old to amuse a lonely little brother. Can't you see he only teases you because he loves you so and wants some attention?"

"One might expect Silvia to be a little kind to him!" broke forth Crewe.

Rebuke from the father she idolized always summoned a sombre demon to Silvia's eyes. Icily she remarked: "I don't believe I love June very much." "You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" cried Crewe, but Marcia's clear laugh rang.

"You foolish child to talk like that! Who'd be the first to pull June out, suppose he dropped into the fountain this minute?"

Silvia looked up at her, cloudy. "Would I?" she asked doubtfully.

"Run and prove it to Daddy by playing with June now."

Silvia stood up. She turned on Marcia a whimsical face, on whose keen little lips a smile quivered, then she darted off on feet that were fairy-free when they could be beguiled from self-consciousness. "There goes the biggest handful of the lot," remarked Silvia's father gloomily.

"I am not sure," answered Marcia comfortably, "which one is the biggest handful. They're all right, all of them, really." "With you, yes!"

as

The children were with Beulah on the other side of the fountain now. Crewe drew himself up and took a loping stride toward Marcia's bench. Why should Why should Marcia draw to its farthest end, as if Crewe had not sat down beside her a thousand times? Leaning back and stretching forth his long legs in ease, Crewe seemed to expect, as confidently did June, that Marcia was going to spend the morning. Yet it was to seek a quiet talk with Beulah that Marcia had come. But what was Beulah doing? Slowly, imperceptibly, decoying her charges away from the fountain, up the hill, farther, farther, until they reached the croquetground terraced into the slope. She halted them there for a game, the three youngsters well in sight and well out of hearing.

For the first time in three years Marcia was afraid to be alone with Crewe. It was because she perceived it was the first time Crewe had been afraid of silence.

They did not look at each other; they looked at three children playing croquet, and that in no calm fashion, but with shrill protests sometimes, and stampings, and once with an uplifted mallet that had to be cowed by Beulah's firm hand.

"They don't mean to be so naughty, Crewe."

"Don't they?" asked their father ironically; then, meditatively: "I must say, you seem to be the only person who has the clew to their meaning, or ever did have. They puzzled Jean as they puzzle me, in spite of all the larks she used to have with them."

Then down pressed the silence again, a sunny May silence that talked unbearably, rustle of honeysuckle, chirp of bird and insect, iterant plash of the fountain, and through it all, insistent, unescapable, the click of children's croquet-balls. Every word of her mother's talk was ringing, beating, in Marcia's head. A placid, stay-at-home woman of thirty obeys a mother like Marcia's, aging, exquisite, frail as a flower. And perhaps, after all, Crewe would take it quietly, what Marcia had come to say. She said it as casually as she would have mentioned a day's shopping jaunt.

"By the way, Crewe, mother is after me again to make a trip North, a long lot of visits. It's years since I've been off for any length of time. I'm supposed to need a change."

Crewe's lounging back shot up straight. straight. "But you can't! You know you can't!"

Marcia laughed. "Why, of course I can, Crewe. There is really nothing to prevent my going, and Mother insists."

"Your mother!" He bit his wrath off sharp. "How about my children?"

"Beulah is devoted to them."

"Beulah," he answered, "is wearing mighty thin! You can't expect to get the whole world from a coon! And without you to keep an eye on her-and on the youngsters! This morning's a fair sample of what we'd be without you!"

"You'd all get along." Marcia shook her head. "People always get along, as Mother says, without other people. Mother somehow makes me feel that I'm not a very important person, after all."

"What? What's that? Why, even with you right next door it's all bad

day alone with the children. All day they teased and fretted. Desperate, Crewe dashed over to Marcia once, but her mother was in the room and would not go away. Never had life seemed so petulant, never had the children seemed so unescapable. Oh, to drop it all, as in the old, exquisite years he had dropped it all, and run off for a tramp with Jean! Slowly the sultry day wore itself out.

There was one spot where the children never came. Silvia, who remembered, had impressed its inviolability on the other two. The circle about "Mother's Seat" remained, as in Jean's lifetime, cut off, as if by necromancy. The great pine had spreading, flat branches like the pines of a Japanese picture. It stood on the hill crest, a stone's throw from the dusky, shingled house. On one of the middle boughs a rude seat had been built, unobtrusive as a bird's nest. There Jean, free as a squirrel with all trees and trails, used to climb and sit, gazing with her glowing eyes out upon the mountains. Not even Crewe had ever followed to "Mother's Seat" in the old days. Now he often climbed to it in the late afternoon. From a window the children used sometimes to watch him there, silently, never sharing with each other their thoughts about "Mother's Seat." Beulah, if she came on them, would drive them sharply from the window back to playing.

Crewe leaned against the pine trunk, motionless. The wind sang its ceaseless murmur through the branches. It was cooler now. Amethyst shades were upon the mountains, lights of faerie. There was not a mountain there that he had not climbed with Jean-Square Top, Barnaby, Piper's Peak, Man Alone. They had known how to scramble up, up the steep est trails, with the clear brown water dripping down mossed walls of gray boulder, up to the sky-line beyond the tallest tree-tops. They had known how to come scrambling down, Jean laughing out melodious as brook water as she caught a sapling to save her from the precipice, and they gazed down, undizzied, at the buzzards wheeling far below them and at lesser mountain-peaks pricking up out of the rich green coves. The taste of mountain springs! The relish of VOL. LXX.-39

bacon from a pine-cone fire! The flame of azalea flaring out beneath the bare brown branches of the mountain springtide! The big, sleek chestnuts of the autumn-time! And always Jean, laughing, singing, darting, always ahead of him, so that there was exhaustless zest in following her. He had never quite caught up with Jean, with those untamable wild feet of hers in their stout little boots.

Crewe, remembering, caught at a projecting twig and clinched it with a groan, for they should have had more sense, they should have had more sense! Always, in the few months of freedom between her babies, Jean had climbed in the old fashion, more madly, perhaps, in the surging liberty that was reaction from the fitfully conscientious care she gave her children. Their mountain days had grown more rare but more intoxicated through the seven years. June had been a toddler before they realized what he had cost. Jean had been so gay that when she coughed you could not tell whether it was the choke of laughter or of disease. She had climbed until the mountains had brought that thin blood stream to her lips, and then in the few weeks left had seemed to toss away her body in a merry impatience of its brittleness. Crewe seemed always to see her climbing still, mysterious peaks that touched the stars, always ahead of him, farther and farther ahead. If Jean had stayed with him, could he have kept up with her? Sometimes he wondered. Yet how gaily he and she had always run away from dulness, never speaking what each guilty twinkle, each shared chuckle of freedom, confessed, how afraid they were of life and of the children. Life had caught them squarely, tossing Jean out to death, tossing him back to earth, leaving him alone with Jean's children. Out on the mountains Jean and Crewe had never talked about the children, although they had always come back to them for the supper-hour, come back, with the mountain wind still blowing through them, to find small, hungry faces pressed to a darkening pane or small, socked legs dangling in a gate-post vigil.

Jean had always put her children to bed herself. For a while afterward Crewe