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Title:      The Blue Castle (1926)
Author:     Lucy Maude Montgomery
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      The Blue Castle (1926)
Author:     Lucy Maude Montgomery




CHAPTER I


If it had not rained on a certain May morning Valancy Stirling's
whole life would have been entirely different.  She would have
gone, with the rest of her clan, to Aunt Wellington's engagement
picnic and Dr. Trent would have gone to Montreal.  But it did rain
and you shall hear what happened to her because of it.

Valency wakened early, in the lifeless, hopeless hour just
preceding dawn.  She had not slept very well.  One does not sleep
well, sometimes, when one is twenty-nine on the morrow, and
unmarried, in a community and connection where the unmarried are
simply those who have failed to get a man.

Deerwood and the Stirlings had long since relegated Valancy to
hopeless old maidenhood.  But Valancy herself had never quite
relinquished a certain pitiful, shamed, little hope that Romance
would come her way yet--never, until this wet, horrible morning,
when she wakened to the fact that she was twenty-nine and unsought
by any man.

Ay, THERE lay the sting.  Valancy did not mind so much being an old
maid.  After all, she thought, being an old maid couldn't possibly
be as dreadful as being married to an Uncle Wellington or an Uncle
Benjamin, or even an Uncle Herbert.  What hurt her was that she had
never had a chance to be anything but an old maid.  No man had ever
desired her.

The tears came into her eyes as she lay there alone in the faintly
greying darkness.  She dared not let herself cry as hard as she
wanted to, for two reasons.  She was afraid that crying might bring
on another attack of that pain around the heart.  She had had a
spell of it after she had got into bed--rather worse than any she
had had yet.  And she was afraid her mother would notice her red
eyes at breakfast and keep at her with minute, persistent,
mosquito-like questions regarding the cause thereof.

"Suppose," thought Valancy with a ghastly grin, "I answered with
the plain truth, 'I am crying because I cannot get married.'  How
horrified Mother would be--though she is ashamed every day of her
life of her old maid daughter."

But of course appearances should be kept up.  "It is not," Valancy
could hear her mother's prim, dictatorial voice asserting, "it is
not MAIDENLY to think about MEN."

The thought of her mother's expression made Valancy laugh--for she
had a sense of humour nobody in her clan suspected.  For that
matter, there were a good many things about Valancy that nobody
suspected.  But her laughter was very superficial and presently she
lay there, a huddled, futile little figure, listening to the rain
pouring down outside and watching, with a sick distaste, the chill,
merciless light creeping into her ugly, sordid room.

She knew the ugliness of that room by heart--knew it and hated it.
The yellow-painted floor, with one hideous, "hooked" rug by the
bed, with a grotesque, "hooked" dog on it, always grinning at her
when she awoke; the faded, dark-red paper; the ceiling discoloured
by old leaks and crossed by cracks; the narrow, pinched little
washstand; the brown-paper lambrequin with purple roses on it; the
spotted old looking-glass with the crack across it, propped up on
the inadequate dressing-table; the jar of ancient potpourri made by
her mother in her mythical honeymoon; the shell-covered box, with
one burst corner, which Cousin Stickles had made in her equally
mythical girlhood; the beaded pincushion with half its bead fringe
gone; the one stiff, yellow chair; the faded old motto, "Gone but
not forgotten," worked in coloured yarns about Great-grandmother
Stirling's grim old face; the old photographs of ancient relatives
long banished from the rooms below.  There were only two pictures
that were not of relatives.  One, an old chromo of a puppy sitting
on a rainy doorstep.  That picture always made Valancy unhappy.
That forlorn little dog crouched on the doorstep in the driving
rain!  Why didn't SOME ONE open the door and let him in?  The other
picture was a faded, passe-partouted engraving of Queen Louise
coming down a stairway, which Aunt Wellington had lavishly given
her on her tenth birthday.  For nineteen years she had looked at it
and hated it, beautiful, smug, self-satisfied Queen Louise.  But
she never dared destroy it or remove it.  Mother and Cousin
Stickles would have been aghast, or, as Valancy irreverently
expressed it in her thoughts, would have had a fit.

Every room in the house was ugly, of course.  But downstairs
appearances were kept up somewhat.  There was no money for rooms
nobody ever saw.  Valancy sometimes felt that she could have done
something for her room herself, even without money, if she were
permitted.  But her mother had negatived every timid suggestion and
Valancy did not persist.  Valancy never persisted.  She was afraid
to.  Her mother could not brook opposition.  Mrs. Stirling would
sulk for days if offended, with the airs of an insulted duchess.

The only thing Valancy liked about her room was that she could be
alone there at night to cry if she wanted to.

But, after all, what did it matter if a room, which you used for
nothing except sleeping and dressing in, were ugly?  Valancy was
never permitted to stay alone in her room for any other purpose.
People who wanted to be alone, so Mrs. Frederick Stirling and
Cousin Stickles believed, could only want to be alone for some
sinister purpose.  But her room in the Blue Castle was everything a
room should be.

Valancy, so cowed and subdued and overridden and snubbed in real
life, was wont to let herself go rather splendidly in her day-
dreams.  Nobody in the Stirling clan, or its ramifications,
suspected this, least of all her mother and Cousin Stickles.  They
never knew that Valancy had two homes--the ugly red brick box of a
home, on Elm Street, and the Blue Castle in Spain.  Valancy had
lived spiritually in the Blue Castle ever since she could remember.
She had been a very tiny child when she found herself possessed of
it.  Always, when she shut her eyes, she could see it plainly, with
its turrets and banners on the pine-clad mountain height, wrapped
in its faint, blue loveliness, against the sunset skies of a fair
and unknown land.  Everything wonderful and beautiful was in that
castle.  Jewels that queens might have worn; robes of moonlight and
fire; couches of roses and gold; long flights of shallow marble
steps, with great, white urns, and with slender, mist-clad maidens
going up and down them; courts, marble-pillared, where shimmering
fountains fell and nightingales sang among the myrtles; halls of
mirrors that reflected only handsome knights and lovely women--
herself the loveliest of all, for whose glance men died.  All that
supported her through the boredom of her days was the hope of going
on a dream spree at night.  Most, if not all, of the Stirlings
would have died of horror if they had known half the things Valancy
did in her Blue Castle.

For one thing she had quite a few lovers in it.  Oh, only one at a
time.  One who wooed her with all the romantic ardour of the age of
chivalry and won her after long devotion and many deeds of derring-
do, and was wedded to her with pomp and circumstance in the great,
banner-hung chapel of the Blue Castle.

At twelve, this lover was a fair lad with golden curls and heavenly
blue eyes.  At fifteen, he was tall and dark and pale, but still
necessarily handsome.  At twenty, he was ascetic, dreamy,
spiritual.  At twenty-five, he had a clean-cut jaw, slightly grim,
and a face strong and rugged rather than handsome.  Valancy never
grew older than twenty-five in her Blue Castle, but recently--very
recently--her hero had had reddish, tawny hair, a twisted smile and
a mysterious past.

I don't say Valancy deliberately murdered these lovers as she
outgrew them.  One simply faded away as another came.  Things are
very convenient in this respect in Blue Castles.

But, on this morning of her day of fate, Valancy could not find the
key of her Blue Castle.  Reality pressed on her too hardly, barking
at her heels like a maddening little dog.  She was twenty-nine,
lonely, undesired, ill-favoured--the only homely girl in a handsome
clan, with no past and no future.  As far as she could look back,
life was drab and colourless, with not one single crimson or purple
spot anywhere.  As far as she could look forward it seemed certain
to be just the same until she was nothing but a solitary, little
withered leaf clinging to a wintry bough.  The moment when a woman
realises that she has nothing to live for--neither love, duty,
purpose nor hope--holds for her the bitterness of death.

"And I just have to go on living because I can't stop.  I may have
to live eighty years," thought Valancy, in a kind of panic.  "We're
all horribly long-lived.  It sickens me to think of it."

She was glad it was raining--or rather, she was drearily satisfied
that it was raining.  There would be no picnic that day.  This
annual picnic, whereby Aunt and Uncle Wellington--one always
thought of them in that succession--inevitably celebrated their
engagement at a picnic thirty years before, had been, of late
years, a veritable nightmare to Valancy.  By an impish coincidence
it was the same day as her birthday and, after she had passed
twenty-five, nobody let her forget it.

Much as she hated going to the picnic, it would never have occurred
to her to rebel against it.  There seemed to be nothing of the
revolutionary in her nature.  And she knew exactly what every one
would say to her at the picnic.  Uncle Wellington, whom she
disliked and despised even though he had fulfilled the highest
Stirling aspiration, "marrying money," would say to her in a pig's
whisper, "Not thinking of getting married yet, my dear?" and then
go off into the bellow of laughter with which he invariably
concluded his dull remarks.  Aunt Wellington, of whom Valancy stood
in abject awe, would tell her about Olive's new chiffon dress and
Cecil's last devoted letter.  Valancy would have to look as pleased
and interested as if the dress and letter had been hers or else
Aunt Wellington would be offended.  And Valancy had long ago
decided that she would rather offend God than Aunt Wellington,
because God might forgive her but Aunt Wellington never would.

Aunt Alberta, enormously fat, with an amiable habit of always
referring to her husband as "he," as if he were the only male
creature in the world, who could never forget that she had been a
great beauty in her youth, would condole with Valancy on her sallow
skin--

"I don't know why all the girls of today are so sunburned.  When I
was a girl my skin was roses and cream.  I was counted the
prettiest girl in Canada, my dear."

Perhaps Uncle Herbert wouldn't say anything--or perhaps he would
remark jocularly, "How fat you're getting, Doss!"  And then
everybody would laugh over the excessively humorous idea of poor,
scrawny little Doss getting fat.

Handsome, solemn Uncle James, whom Valancy disliked but respected
because he was reputed to be very clever and was therefore the clan
oracle--brains being none too plentiful in the Stirling connection--
would probably remark with the owl-like sarcasm that had won him
his reputation, "I suppose you're busy with your hope-chest these
days?"

And Uncle Benjamin would ask some of his abominable conundrums,
between wheezy chuckles, and answer them himself.

"What is the difference between Doss and a mouse?

"The mouse wishes to harm the cheese and Doss wishes to charm the
he's."

Valancy had heard him ask that riddle fifty times and every time
she wanted to throw something at him.  But she never did.  In the
first place, the Stirlings simply did not throw things; in the
second place, Uncle Benjamin was a wealthy and childless old
widower and Valancy had been brought up in the fear and admonition
of his money.  If she offended him he would cut her out of his
will--supposing she were in it.  Valancy did not want to be cut out
of Uncle Benjamin's will.  She had been poor all her life and knew
the galling bitterness of it.  So she endured his riddles and even
smiled tortured little smiles over him.

Aunt Isabel, downright and disagreeable as an east wind, would
criticise her in some way--Valancy could not predict just how, for
Aunt Isabell never repeated a criticism--she found something new
with which to jab you every time.  Aunt Isabel prided herself on
saying what she thought, but didn't like it so well when other
people said what THEY thought to HER.  Valancy never said what SHE
thought.

Cousin Georgiana--named after her great-great-grandmother, who had
been named after George the Fourth--would recount dolorously the
names of all relatives and friends who had died since the last
picnic and wonder "which of us will be the first to go next."

Oppressively competent, Aunt Mildred would talk endlessly of her
husband and her odious prodigies of babies to Valancy, because
Valancy would be the only one she could find to put up with it.
For the same reason, Cousin Gladys--really First Cousin Gladys once
removed, according to the strict way in which the Stirlings
tabulated relationship--a tall, thin lady who admitted she had a
sensitive disposition, would describe minutely the tortures of her
neuritis.  And Olive, the wonder girl of the whole Stirling clan,
who had everything Valancy had not--beauty, popularity, love--would
show off her beauty and presume on her popularity and flaunt her
diamond insignia of love in Valancy's dazzled, envious eyes.

There would be none of all this today.  And there would be no
packing up of teaspoons.  The packing up was always left for
Valancy and Cousin Stickles.  And once, six years ago, a silver
teaspoon from Aunt Wellington's wedding set had been lost.  Valancy
never heard the last of that silver teaspoon.  Its ghost appeared
Banquo-like at every subsequent family feast.

Oh, yes, Valancy knew exactly what the picnic would be like and she
blessed the rain that had saved her from it.  There would be no
picnic this year.  If Aunt Wellington could not celebrate on the
sacred day itself she would have no celebration at all.  Thank
whatever gods there were for that.

Since there would be no picnic, Valancy made up her mind that, if
the rain held up in the afternoon, she would go up to the library
and get another of John Foster's books.  Valancy was never allowed
to read novels, but John Foster's books were not novels.  They were
"nature books"--so the librarian told Mrs. Frederick Stirling--"all
about the woods and birds and bugs and things like that, you know."
So Valancy was allowed to read them--under protest, for it was only
too evident that she enjoyed them too much.  It was permissible,
even laudable, to read to improve your mind and your religion, but
a book that was enjoyable was dangerous.  Valancy did not know
whether her mind was being improved or not; but she felt vaguely
that if she had come across John Foster's books years ago life
might have been a different thing for her.  They seemed to her to
yield glimpses of a world into which she might once have entered,
though the door was forever barred to her now.  It was only within
the last year that John Foster's books had been in the Deerwood
library, though the librarian told Valancy that he had been a well-
known writer for several years.

"Where does he live?" Valancy had asked.

"Nobody knows.  From his books he must be a Canadian, but no more
information can be had.  His publishers won't say a word.  Quite
likely John Foster is a nom de plume.  His books are so popular we
can't keep them in at all, though I really can't see what people
find in them to rave over."

"I think they're wonderful," said Valancy, timidly.

"Oh--well--"  Miss Clarkson smiled in a patronising fashion that
relegated Valancy's opinions to limbo, "I can't say I care much for
bugs myself.  But certainly Foster seems to know all there is to
know about them."

Valancy didn't know whether she cared much for bugs either.  It was
not John Foster's uncanny knowledge of wild creatures and insect
life that enthralled her.  She could hardly say what it was--some
tantalising lure of a mystery never revealed--some hint of a great
secret just a little further on--some faint, elusive echo of
lovely, forgotten things--John Foster's magic was indefinable.

Yes, she would get a new Foster book.  It was a month since she had
Thistle Harvest, so surely Mother could not object.  Valancy had
read it four times--she knew whole passages off by heart.

And--she almost thought she would go and see Dr. Trent about that
queer pain around the heart.  It had come rather often lately, and
the palpitations were becoming annoying, not to speak of an
occassional dizzy moment and a queer shortness of breath.  But
could she go to him without telling any one?  It was a most daring
thought.  None of the Stirlings ever consulted a doctor without
holding a family council and getting Uncle James' approval.  THEN,
they went to Dr. Ambrose Marsh of Port Lawrence, who had married
Second Cousin Adelaide Stirling.

But Valancy disliked Dr. Ambrose Marsh.  And, besides, she could
not get to Port Lawrence, fifteen miles away, without being taken
there.  She did not want any one to know about her heart.  There
would be such a fuss made and every member of the family would come
down and talk it over and advise her and caution her and warn her
and tell her horrible tales of great-aunts and cousins forty times
removed who had been "just like that and dropped dead without a
moment's warning, my dear."

Aunt Isabel would remember that she had always said Doss looked
like a girl who would have heart trouble--"so pinched and peaked
always"; and Uncle Wellington would take it as a personal insult,
when "no Stirling ever had heart disease before"; and Georgiana
would forebode in perfectly audible asides that "poor, dear little
Doss isn't long for this world, I'm afraid"; and Cousin Gladys
would say, "Why, MY heart has been like that for YEARS," in a tone
that implied no one else had any business even to have a heart; and
Olive--Olive would merely look beautiful and superior and
disgustingly healthy, as if to say, "Why all this fuss over a faded
superfluity like Doss when you have ME?"

Valancy felt that she couldn't tell anybody unless she had to.  She
felt quite sure there was nothing at all seriously wrong with her
heart and no need of all the pother that would ensue if she
mentioned it.  She would just slip up quietly and see Dr. Trent
that very day.  As for his bill, she had the two hundred dollars
that her father had put in the bank for her the day she was born,
but she would secretly take out enough to pay Dr. Trent.  She was
never allowed to use even the interest of this.

Dr. Trent was a gruff, outspoken, absent-minded old fellow, but he
was a recognised authority on heart-disease, even if he were only a
general practitioner in out-of-the-world Deerwood.  Dr. Trent was
over seventy and there had been rumours that he meant to retire
soon.  None of the Stirling clan had ever gone to him since he had
told Cousin Gladys, ten years before, that her neuritis was all
imaginary and that she enjoyed it.  You couldn't patronise a doctor
who insulted your first-cousin-once-removed like that--not to
mention that he was a Presbyterian when all the Stirlings went to
the Anglican church.  But Valancy, between the devil of disloyalty
to clan and the deep sea of fuss and clatter and advice, thought
she would take a chance with the devil.



CHAPTER II


When cousin Stickles knocked at her door, Valancy knew it was half-
past seven and she must get up.  As long as she could remember,
Cousin Stickles had knocked at her door at half-past seven.  Cousin
Stickles and Mrs. Frederick Stirling had been up since seven, but
Valancy was allowed to lie abed half an hour longer because of a
family tradition that she was delicate.  Valancy got up, though she
hated getting up more this morning than ever she had before.  What
was there to get up for?  Another dreary day like all the days that
had preceded it, full of meaningless little tasks, joyless and
unimportant, that benefited nobody.  But if she did not get up at
once she would not be ready for breakfast at eight o'clock.  Hard
and fast times for meals were the rule in Mrs. Stirling's
household.  Breakfast at eight, dinner at one, supper at six, year
in and year out.  No excuses for being late were ever tolerated.
So up Valancy got, shivering.

The room was bitterly cold with the raw, penetrating chill of a wet
May morning.  The house would be cold all day.  It was one of Mrs.
Frederick's rules that no fires were necessary after the twenty-
fourth of May.  Meals were cooked on the little oil-stove in the
back porch.  And though May might be icy and October frost-bitten,
no fires were lighted until the twenty-first of October by the
calendar.  On the twenty-first of October Mrs. Frederick began
cooking over the kitchen range and lighted a fire in the sitting-
room stove in the evenings.  It was whispered about in the
connection that the late Frederick Stirling had caught the cold
which resulted in his death during Valancy's first year of life
because Mrs. Frederick would not have a fire on the twentieth of
October.  She lighted it the next day--but that was a day too late
for Frederick Stirling.

Valancy took off and hung up in the closet her nightdress of
coarse, unbleached cotton, with high neck and long, tight sleeves.
She put on undergarments of a similar nature, a dress of brown
gingham, thick, black stockings and rubber-heeled boots.  Of late
years she had fallen into the habit of doing her hair with the
shade of the window by the looking-glass pulled down.  The lines on
her face did not show so plainly then.  But this morning she jerked
the shade to the very top and looked at herself in the leprous
mirror with a passionate determination to see herself as the world
saw her.

The result was rather dreadful.  Even a beauty would have found
that harsh, unsoftened side-light trying.  Valancy saw straight
black hair, short and thin, always lustreless despite the fact that
she gave it one hundred strokes of the brush, neither more nor
less, every night of her life and faithfully rubbed Redfern's Hair
Vigor into the roots, more lustreless than ever in its morning
roughness; fine, straight, black brows; a nose she had always felt
was much too small even for her small, three-cornered, white face;
a small, pale mouth that always fell open a trifle over little,
pointed white teeth; a figure thin and flat-breasted, rather below
the average height.  She had somehow escaped the family high cheek-
bones, and her dark-brown eyes, too soft and shadowy to be black,
had a slant that was almost Oriental.  Apart from her eyes she was
neither pretty nor ugly--just insignificant-looking, she concluded
bitterly.  How plain the lines around her eyes and mouth were in
that merciless light!  And never had her narrow, white face looked
so narrow and so white.

She did her hair in a pompadour.  Pompadours had long gone out of
fashion, but they had been in when Valancy first put her hair up
and Aunt Wellington had decided that she must always wear her hair
so.

"It is the ONLY way that becomes you.  Your face is so small that
you MUST add height to it by a pompadour effect," said Aunt
Wellington, who always enunciated commonplaces as if uttering
profound and important truths.

Valancy had hankered to do her hair pulled low on her forehead,
with puffs above the ears, as Olive was wearing hers.  But Aunt
Wellington's dictum had such an effect on her that she never dared
change her style of hairdressing again.  But then, there were so
many things Valancy never dared do.

All her life she had been afraid of something, she thought
bitterly.  From the very dawn of recollection, when she had been so
horribly afraid of the big black bear that lived, so Cousin
Stickles told her, in the closet under the stairs.

"And I always will be--I know it--I can't help it.  I don't know
what it would be like not to be afraid of something."

Afraid of her mother's sulky fits--afraid of offending Uncle
Benjamin--afraid of becoming a target for Aunt Wellington's
contempt--afraid of Aunt Isabel's biting comments--afraid of Uncle
James' disapproval--afraid of offending the whole clan's opinions
and prejudices--afraid of not keeping up appearances--afraid to say
what she really thought of anything--afraid of poverty in her old
age.  Fear--fear--fear--she could never escape from it.  It bound
her and enmeshed her like a spider's web of steel.  Only in her
Blue Castle could she find temporary release.  And this morning
Valancy could not believe she had a Blue Castle.  She would never
be able to find it again.  Twenty-nine, unmarried, undesired--what
had she to do with the fairy-like chatelaine of the Blue Castle?
She would cut such childish nonsense out of her life forever and
face reality unflinchingly.

She turned from her unfriendly mirror and looked out.  The ugliness
of the view always struck her like a blow; the ragged fence, the
tumble-down old carriage-shop in the next lot, plastered with
crude, violently coloured advertisements; the grimy railway station
beyond, with the awful derelicts that were always hanging around it
even at this early hour.  In the pouring rain everything looked
worse than usual, especially the beastly advertisement, "Keep that
schoolgirl complexion."  Valancy HAD kept her schoolgirl
complexion.  That was just the trouble.  There was not a gleam of
beauty anywhere--"exactly like my life," thought Valancy drearily.
Her brief bitterness had passed.  She accepted facts as resignedly
as she had always accepted them.  She was one of the people whom
life always passes by.  There was no altering that fact.

In this mood Valancy went down to breakfast.



CHAPTER III


Breakfast was always the same.  Oatmeal porridge, which Valancy
loathed, toast and tea, and one teaspoonful of marmalade.  Mrs.
Frederick thought two teaspoonfuls extravagant--but that did not
matter to Valancy, who hated marmalade, too.  The chilly, gloomy
little dining-room was chillier and gloomier than usual; the rain
streamed down outside the window; departed Stirlings, in atrocious,
gilt frames, wider than the pictures, glowered down from the walls.
And yet Cousin Stickles wished Valancy many happy returns of the
day!

"Sit up straight, Doss," was all her mother said.

Valancy sat up straight.  She talked to her mother and Cousin
Stickles of the things they always talked of.  She never wondered
what would happen if she tried to talk of something else.  She
knew.  Therefore she never did it.

Mrs. Frederick was offended with Providence for sending a rainy day
when she wanted to go to a picnic, so she ate her breakfast in a
sulky silence for which Valancy was rather grateful.  But Christine
Stickles whined endlessly on as usual, complaining about
everything--the weather, the leak in the pantry, the price of
oatmeal and butter--Valancy felt at once she had buttered her toast
too lavishly--the epidemic of mumps in Deerwood.

"Doss will be sure to ketch them," she foreboded.

"Doss must not go where she is likely to catch mumps," said Mrs.
Frederick shortly.

Valancy had never had mumps--or whooping cough--or chicken-pox--or
measles--or anything she should have had--nothing but horrible
colds every winter.  Doss' winter colds were a sort of tradition in
the family.  Nothing, it seemed, could prevent her from catching
them.  Mrs. Frederick and Cousin Stickles did their heroic best.
One winter they kept Valancy housed up from November to May, in the
warm sitting-room.  She was not even allowed to go to church.  And
Valancy took cold after cold and ended up with bronchitis in June.

"None of MY family were ever like that," said Mrs. Frederick,
implying that it must be a Stirling tendency.

"The Stirling's seldom take cold," said Cousin Stickles
resentfully.  SHE had been a Stirling.

"I think," said Mrs. Frederick, "that if a person makes up her mind
NOT to have colds she will not HAVE colds."

So that was the trouble.  It was all Valancy's own fault.

But on this particular morning Valancy's unbearable grievance was
that she was called Doss.  She had endured it for twenty-nine
years, and all at once she felt she could not endure it any longer.
Her full name was Valancy Jane.  Valancy Jane was rather terrible,
but she liked Valancy, with its odd, out-land tang.  It was always
a wonder to Valancy that the Stirlings had allowed her to be so
christened.  She had been told that her maternal grandfather, old
Amos Wansbarra, had chosen the name for her.  Her father had tacked
on the Jane by way of civilising it, and the whole connection got
out of the difficulty by nicknaming her Doss.  She never got
Valancy from any one but outsiders.

"Mother," she said timidly, "would you mind calling me Valancy
after this?  Doss seems so--so--I don't like it."

Mrs. Frederick looked at her daughter in astonishment.  She wore
glasses with enormously strong lenses that gave her eyes a
peculiarly disagreeable appearance.

"What is the matter with Doss?"

"It--seems so childish," faltered Valancy.

"Oh!"  Mrs. Frederick had been a Wansbarra and the Wansbarra smile
was not an asset.  "I see.  Well, it should suit YOU then.  You are
childish enough in all conscience, my dear child."

"I am twenty-nine," said the dear child desperately.

"I wouldn't proclaim it from the house-tops if I were you, dear,"
said Mrs. Frederick.  "Twenty-nine!  _I_ had been married nine
years when I was twenty-nine."

"_I_ was married at seventeen," said Cousin Stickles proudly.

Valancy looked at them furtively.  Mrs. Frederick, except for those
terrible glasses and the hooked nose that made her look, more like
a parrot than a parrot itself could look, was not ill-looking.  At
twenty she might have been quite pretty.  But Cousin Stickles!  And
yet Christine Stickles had once been desirable in some man's eyes.
Valancy felt that Cousin Stickles, with her broad, flat, wrinkled
face, a mole right on the end of her dumpy nose, bristling hairs on
her chin, wrinkled yellow neck, pale, protruding eyes, and thin,
puckered mouth, had yet this advantage over her--this right to look
down on her.  And even yet Cousin Stickles was necessary to Mrs.
Frederick.  Valancy wondered pitifully what it would be like to be
wanted by some one--needed by some one.  No one in the whole world
needed her, or would miss anything from life if she dropped
suddenly out of it.  She was a disappointment to her mother.  No
one loved her.  She had never so much as had a girl friend.

"I haven't even a gift for friendship," she had once admitted to
herself pitifully.

"Doss, you haven't eaten your crusts," said Mrs. Frederick
rebukingly.

It rained all the forenoon without cessation.  Valancy pieced a
quilt.  Valancy hated piecing quilts.  And there was no need of it.
The house was full of quilts.  There were three big chests, packed
with quilts, in the attic.  Mrs. Frederick had begun storing away
quilts when Valancy was seventeen and she kept on storing them,
though it did not seem likely that Valancy would ever need them.
But Valancy must be at work and fancy work materials were too
expensive.  Idleness was a cardinal sin in the Stirling household.
When Valancy had been a child she had been made to write down every
night, in a small, hated, black notebook, all the minutes she had
spent in idleness that day.  On Sundays her mother made her tot
them up and pray over them.

On this particular forenoon of this day of destiny Valancy spent
only ten minutes in idleness.  At least, Mrs. Frederick and Cousin
Stickles would have called it idleness.  She went to her room to
get a better thimble and she opened Thistle Harvest guiltily at
random.

"The woods are so human," wrote John Foster, "that to know them one
must live with them.  An occasional saunter through them, keeping
to the well-trodden paths, will never admit us to their intimacy.
If we wish to be friends we must seek them out and win them by
frequent, reverent visits at all hours; by morning, by noon, and by
night; and at all seasons, in spring, in summer, in autumn, in
winter.  Otherwise we can never really know them and any pretence
we may make to the contrary will never impose on them.  They have
their own effective way of keeping aliens at a distance and
shutting their hearts to mere casual sightseers.  It is of no use
to seek the woods from any motive except sheer love of them; they
will find us out at once and hide all their sweet, old-world
secrets from us.  But if they know we come to them because we love
them they will be very kind to us and give us such treasures of
beauty and delight as are not bought or sold in any market-place.
For the woods, when they give at all, give unstintedly and hold
nothing back from their true worshippers.  We must go to them
lovingly, humbly, patiently, watchfully, and we shall learn what
poignant loveliness lurks in the wild places and silent intervales,
lying under starshine and sunset, what cadences of unearthly music
are harped on aged pine boughs or crooned in copses of fir, what
delicate savours exhale from mosses and ferns in sunny corners or
on damp brooklands, what dreams and myths and legends of an older
time haunt them.  Then the immortal heart of the woods will beat
against ours and its subtle life will steal into our veins and make
us its own forever, so that no matter where we go or how widely we
wander we shall yet be drawn back to the forest to find our most
enduring kinship."

"Doss," called her mother from the hall below, "what are you doing
all by yourself in that room?"

Valancy dropped Thistle Harvest like a hot coal and fled downstairs
to her patches; but she felt the strange exhilaration of spirit
that always came momentarily to her when she dipped into one of
John Foster's books.  Valancy did not know much about woods--except
the haunted groves of oak and pine around her Blue Castle.  But she
had always secretly hankered after them and a Foster book about
woods was the next best thing to the woods themselves.

At noon it stopped raining, but the sun did not come out until
three.  Then Valancy timidly said she thought she would go uptown.

"What do you want to go uptown for?" demanded her mother.

"I want to get a book from the library."

"You got a book from the library only last week."

"No, it was four weeks."

"Four weeks.  Nonsense!"

"Really it was, Mother."

"You are mistaken.  It cannot possibly have been more than two
weeks.  I dislike contradiction.  And I do not see what you want to
get a book for, anyhow.  You waste too much time reading."

"Of what value is my time?" asked Valancy bitterly.

"Doss!  Don't speak in that tone to ME."

"We need some tea," said Cousin Stickles.  "She might go and get
that if she wants a walk--though this damp weather is bad for
colds."

They argued the matter for ten minutes longer and finally Mrs.
Frederick agreed rather grudgingly that Valancy might go.



CHAPTER IV


"Got your rubbers on?" called Cousin Stickles, as Valancy left the
house.

Christine Stickles had never once forgotten to ask that question
when Valancy went out on a damp day.

"Yes."

"Have you got your flannel petticoat on?" asked Mrs. Frederick.

"No."

"Doss, I really do not understand you.  Do you want to catch your
death of cold AGAIN?"  Her voice implied that Valancy had died of a
cold several times already.  "Go upstairs this minute and put it
on!"

"Mother, I don't NEED a flannel petticoat.  My sateen one is warm
enough."

"Doss, remember you had bronchitis two years ago.  Go and do as you
are told!"

Valancy went, though nobody will ever know just how near she came
to hurling the rubber-plant into the street before she went.  She
hated that grey flannel petticoat more than any other garment she
owned.  Olive never had to wear flannel petticoats.  Olive wore
ruffled silk and sheer lawn and filmy laced flounces.  But Olive's
father had "married money" and Olive never had bronchitis.  So
there you were.

"Are you sure you didn't leave the soap in the water?" demanded
Mrs. Frederick.  But Valancy was gone.  She turned at the corner
and looked back down the ugly, prim, respectable street where she
lived.  The Stirling house was the ugliest on it--more like a red
brick box than anything else.  Too high for its breadth, and made
still higher by a bulbous glass cupola on top.  About it was the
desolate, barren peace of an old house whose life is lived.

There was a very pretty house, with leaded casements and dubbed
gables, just around the corner--a new house, one of those houses
you love the minute you see them.  Clayton Markley had built it for
his bride.  He was to be married to Jennie Lloyd in June.  The
little house, it was said, was furnished from attic to cellar, in
complete readiness for its mistress.

"I don't envy Jennie the man," thought Valancy sincerely--Clayton
Markley was not one of her many ideals--"but I DO envy her the
house.  It's such a nice young house.  Oh, if I could only have a
house of my own--ever so poor, so tiny--but my own!  But then," she
added bitterly, "there is no use in yowling for the moon when you
can't even get a tallow candle."

In dreamland nothing would do Valancy but a castle of pale
sapphire.  In real life she would have been fully satisfied with a
little house of her own.  She envied Jennie Lloyd more fiercely
than ever today.  Jennie was not so much better looking than she
was, and not so very much younger.  Yet she was to have this
delightful house.  And the nicest little Wedgwood teacups--Valancy
had seen them; an open fireplace, and monogrammed linen;
hemstitched tablecloths, and china-closets.  Why did EVERYTHING
come to some girls and NOTHING to others?  It wasn't fair.

Valancy was once more seething with rebellion as she walked along,
a prim, dowdy little figure in her shabby raincoat and three-year-
old hat, splashed occasionally by the mud of a passing motor with
its insulting shrieks.  Motors were still rather a novelty in
Deerwood, though they were common in Port Lawrence, and most of the
summer residents up at Muskoka had them.  In Deerwood only some of
the smart set had them; for even Deerwood was divided into sets.
There was the smart set--the intellectual set--the old-family set--
of which the Stirlings were members--the common run, and a few
pariahs.  Not one of the Stirling clan had as yet condescended to a
motor, though Olive was teasing her father to have one.  Valancy
had never even been in a motorcar.  But she did not hanker after
this.  In truth, she felt rather afraid of motorcars, especially at
night.  They seemed to be too much like big purring beasts that
might turn and crush you--or make some terrible savage leap
somewhere.  On the steep mountain trails around her Blue Castle
only gaily caparisoned steeds might proudly pace; in real life
Valancy would have been quite contented to drive in a buggy behind
a nice horse.  She got a buggy drive only when some uncle or cousin
remembered to fling her "a chance," like a bone to a dog.



CHAPTER V


Of course she must buy the tea in Uncle Benjamin's grocery-store.
To buy it anywhere else was unthinkable.  Yet Valancy hated to go
to Uncle Benjamin's store on her twenty-ninth birthday.  There was
no hope that he would not remember it.

"Why," demanded Uncle Benjamin, leeringly, as he tied up her tea,
"are young ladies like bad grammarians?"

Valancy, with Uncle Benjamin's will in the background of her mind,
said meekly, "I don't know.  Why?"

"Because," chuckled Uncle Benjamin, "they can't decline matrimony."

The two clerks, Joe Hammond and Claude Bertram, chuckled also, and
Valancy disliked them a little more than ever.  On the first day
Claude Bertram had seen her in the store she had heard him whisper
to Joe, "Who is that?"  And Joe had said, "Valancy Stirling--one of
the Deerwood old maids."  "Curable or incurable?" Claude had asked
with a snicker, evidently thinking the question very clever.
Valancy smarted anew with the sting of that old recollection.

"Twenty-nine," Uncle Benjamin was saying.  "Dear me, Doss, you're
dangerously near the second corner and not even thinking of getting
married yet.  Twenty-nine.  It seems impossible."

Then Uncle Benjamin said an original thing.  Uncle Benjamin said,
"How time does fly!"

"_I_ think it CRAWLS," said Valancy passionately.  Passion was so
alien to Uncle Benjamin's conception of Valancy that he didn't know
what to make of her.  To cover his confusion, he asked another
conundrum as he tied up her beans--Cousin Stickles had remembered
at the last moment that they must have beans.  Beans were cheap and
filling.

"What two ages are apt to prove illusory?" asked Uncle Benjamin;
and, not waiting for Valancy to "give it up," he added, "Mir-age
and marri-age."

"M-i-r-a-g-e is pronounced MIRAZH," said Valancy shortly, picking
up her tea and her beans.  For the moment she did not care whether
Uncle Benjamin cut her out of his will or not.  She walked out of
the store while Uncle Benjamin stared after her with his mouth
open.  Then he shook his head.

"Poor Doss is taking it hard," he said.

Valancy was sorry by the time she reached the next crossing.  Why
had she lost her patience like that?  Uncle Benjamin would be
annoyed and would likely tell her mother that Doss had been
impertinent--"to ME!"--and her mother would lecture her for a week.

"I've held my tongue for twenty years," thought Valancy.  "Why
couldn't I have held it once more?"

Yes, it was just twenty, Valancy reflected, since she had first
been twitted with her loverless condition.  She remembered the
bitter moment perfectly.  She was just nine years old and she was
standing alone on the school playground while the other little
girls of her class were playing a game in which you must be chosen
by a boy as his partner before you could play.  Nobody had chosen
Valancy--little, pale, black-haired Valancy, with her prim, long-
sleeved apron and odd, slanted eyes.

"Oh," said a pretty little girl to her, "I'm so sorry for you.  You
haven't got a beau."

Valancy had said defiantly, as she continued to say for twenty
years, "I don't WANT a beau."  But this afternoon Valancy once and
for all stopped saying that.

"I'm going to be honest with myself anyhow," she thought savagely.
"Uncle Benjamin's riddles hurt me because they are true.  I DO want
to be married.  I want a house of my own--I want a husband of my
own--I want sweet, little fat BABIES of my own--"  Valancy stopped
suddenly aghast at her own recklessness.  She felt sure that Rev.
Dr. Stalling, who passed her at this moment, read her thoughts and
disapproved of them thoroughly.  Valancy was afraid of Dr.
Stalling--had been afraid of him ever since the Sunday, twenty-
three years before, when he had first come to St. Albans'.  Valancy
had been too late for Sunday School that day and she had gone into
the church timidly and sat in their pew.  No one else was in the
church--nobody except the new rector, Dr. Stalling.  Dr. Stalling
stood up in front of the choir door, beckoned to her, and said
sternly, "Little boy, come up here."

Valancy had stared around her.  There was no little boy--there was
no one in all the huge church but herself.  This strange man with
the blue glasses couldn't mean her.  She was not a boy.

"Little boy," repeated Dr. Stalling, more sternly still, shaking
his forefinger fiercely at her, "come up here at once!"

Valancy arose as if hypnotised and walked up the aisle.  She was
too terrified to do anything else.  What dreadful thing was going
to happen to her?  What HAD happened to her?  Had she actually
turned into a boy?  She came to a stop in front of Dr. Stalling.
Dr. Stalling shook his forefinger--such a long, knuckly forefinger--
at her and said:

"Little boy, take off your hat."

Valancy took off her hat.  She had a scrawny little pigtail hanging
down her back, but Dr. Stalling was shortsighted and did not
perceive it.

"Little boy, go back to your seat and ALWAYS take off your hat in
church.  REMEMBER!"

Valancy went back to her seat carrying her hat like an automaton.
Presently her mother came in.

"Doss," said Mrs. Stirling, "what do you mean by taking off your
hat?  Put it on instantly!"

Valancy put it on instantly.  She was cold with fear lest Dr.
Stalling should immediately summon her up front again.  She would
have to go, of course--it never occurred to her that one could
disobey the rector--and the church was full of people now.  Oh,
what would she do if that horrible, stabbing forefinger were shaken
at her again before all those people?  Valancy sat through the
whole service in an agony of dread and was sick for a week
afterwards.  Nobody knew why--Mrs. Frederick again bemoaned herself
of her delicate child.

Dr. Stalling found out his mistake and laughed over it to Valancy--
who did not laugh.  She never got over her dread of Dr. Stalling.
And now to be caught by him on the street corner, thinking such
things!

Valancy got her John Foster book--Magic of Wings.  "His latest--all
about birds," said Miss Clarkson.  She had almost decided that she
would go home, instead of going to see Dr. Trent.  Her courage had
failed her.  She was afraid of offending Uncle James--afraid of
angering her mother--afraid of facing gruff, shaggy-browed old Dr.
Trent, who would probably tell her, as he had told Cousin Gladys,
that her trouble was entirely imaginary and that she only had it
because she liked to have it.  No, she would not go; she would get
a bottle of Redfern's Purple Pills instead.  Redfern's Purple Pills
were the standard medicine of the Stirling clan.  Had they not
cured Second Cousin Geraldine when five doctors had given her up?
Valancy always felt very sceptical concerning the virtues of the
Purple Pills; but there MIGHT be something in them; and it was
easier to take them than to face Dr. Trent alone.  She would glance
over the magazines in the reading-room a few minutes and then go
home.

Valancy tried to read a story, but it made her furious.  On every
page was a picture of the heroine surrounded by adoring men.  And
here was she, Valancy Stirling, who could not get a solitary beau!
Valancy slammed the magazine shut; she opened Magic of Wings.  Her
eyes fell on the paragraph that changed her life.

"Fear is the original sin," wrote John Foster.  "Almost all the
evil in the world has its origin in the fact that some one is
afraid of something.  It is a cold, slimy serpent coiling about
you.  It is horrible to live with fear; and it is of all things
degrading."

Valancy shut Magic of Wings and stood up.  She would go and see Dr.
Trent.



CHAPTER VI


The ordeal was not so dreadful, after all.  Dr. Trent was as gruff
and abrupt as usual, but he did not tell her her ailment was
imaginary.  After he had listened to her symptoms and asked a few
questions and made a quick examination, he sat for a moment looking
at her quite intently.  Valancy thought he looked as if he were
sorry for her.  She caught her breath for a moment.  Was the
trouble serious?  Oh, it couldn't be, surely--it really hadn't
bothered her MUCH--only lately it had got a little worse.

Dr. Trent opened his mouth--but before he could speak the telephone
at his elbow rang sharply.  He picked up the receiver.  Valancy,
watching him, saw his face change suddenly as he listened, "'Lo--
yes--yes--WHAT?--yes--yes"--a brief interval--"My God!"

Dr. Trent dropped the receiver, dashed out of the room and upstairs
without even a glance at Valancy.  She heard him rushing madly
about overhead, barking out a few remarks to somebody--presumably
his housekeeper.  Then he came tearing downstairs with a club bag
in his hand, snatched his hat and coat from the rack, jerked open
the street door and rushed down the street in the direction of the
station.

Valancy sat alone in the little office, feeling more absolutely
foolish than she had ever felt before in her life.  Foolish--and
humiliated.  So this was all that had come of her heroic
determination to live up to John Foster and cast fear aside.  Not
only was she a failure as a relative and non-existent as a
sweetheart or friend, but she was not even of any importance as a
patient.  Dr. Trent had forgotten her very presence in his
excitement over whatever message had come by the telephone.  She
had gained nothing by ignoring Uncle James and flying in the face
of family tradition.

For a moment she was afraid she was going to cry.  It WAS all so--
ridiculous.  Then she heard Dr. Trent's housekeeper coming down the
stairs.  Valancy rose and went to the office door.

"The doctor forgot all about me," she said with a twisted smile.

"Well, that's too bad," said Mrs. Patterson sympathetically.  "But
it wasn't much wonder, poor man.  That was a telegram they 'phoned
over from the Port.  His son has been terribly injured in an auto
accident in Montreal.  The doctor had just ten minutes to catch the
train.  I don't know what he'll do if anything happens to Ned--he's
just bound up in the boy.  You'll have to come again, Miss
Stirling.  I hope it's nothing serious."

"Oh, no, nothing serious," agreed Valancy.  She felt a little less
humiliated.  It was no wonder poor Dr. Trent had forgotten her at
such a moment.  Nevertheless, she felt very flat and discouraged as
she went down the street.

Valancy went home by the short-cut of Lover's Lane.  She did not
often go through Lover's Lane--but it was getting near supper-time
and it would never do to be late.  Lover's Lane wound back of the
village, under great elms and maples, and deserved its name.  It
was hard to go there at any time and not find some canoodling
couple--or young girls in pairs, arms intertwined, earnestly
talking over their secrets.  Valancy didn't know which made her
feel more self-conscious and uncomfortable.

This evening she encountered both.  She met Connie Hale and Kate
Bayley, in new pink organdy dresses with flowers stuck coquettishly
in their glossy, bare hair.  Valancy had never had a pink dress or
worn flowers in her hair.  Then she passed a young couple she
didn't know, dandering along, oblivious to everything but
themselves.  The young man's arm was around the girl's waist quite
shamelessly.  Valancy had never walked with a man's arm about her.
She felt that she ought to be shocked--they might leave that sort
of thing for the screening twilight, at least--but she wasn't
shocked.  In another flash of desperate, stark honesty she owned to
herself that she was merely envious.  When she passed them she felt
quite sure they were laughing at her--pitying her--"there's that
queer little old maid, Valancy Stirling.  They say she never had a
beau in her whole life"--Valancy fairly ran to get out of Lover's
Lane.  Never had she felt so utterly colourless and skinny and
insignificant.

Just where Lover's Lane debouched on the street, an old car was
parked.  Valancy knew that car well--by sound, at least--and
everybody in Deerwood knew it.  This was before the phrase "tin
Lizzie" had come into circulation--in Deerwood, at least; but if it
had been known, this car was the tinniest of Lizzies--though it was
not a Ford but an old Grey Slosson.  Nothing more battered and
disreputable could be imagined.

It was Barney Snaith's car and Barney himself was just scrambling
up from under it, in overalls plastered with mud.  Valancy gave him
a swift, furtive look as she hurried by.  This was only the second
time she had ever seen the notorious Barney Snaith, though she had
heard enough about him in the five years that he had been living
"up back" in Muskoka.  The first time had been nearly a year ago,
on the Muskoka road.  He had been crawling out from under his car
then, too, and he had given her a cheerful grin as she went by--a
little, whimsical grin that gave him the look of an amused gnome.
He didn't look bad--she didn't believe he was bad, in spite of the
wild yarns that were always being told of him.  Of course he went
tearing in that terrible old Grey Slosson through Deerwood at hours
when all decent people were in bed--often with old "Roaring Abel,"
who made the night hideous with his howls--"both of them dead
drunk, my dear."  And every one knew that he was an escaped convict
and a defaulting bank clerk and a murderer in hiding and an infidel
and an illegitimate son of old Roaring Abel Gay and the father of
Roaring Abel's illegitimate grandchild and a counterfeiter and a
forger and a few other awful things.  But still Valancy didn't
believe he was bad.  Nobody with a smile like that could be bad, no
matter what he had done.

It was that night the Prince of the Blue Castle changed from a
being of grim jaw and hair with a dash of premature grey to a
rakish individual with overlong, tawny hair, dashed with red, dark-
brown eyes, and ears that stuck out just enough to give him an
alert look but not enough to be called flying jibs.  But he still
retained something a little grim about the jaw.

Barney Snaith looked even more disreputable than usual just now.
It was very evident that he hadn't shaved for days, and his hands
and arms, bare to the shoulders, were black with grease.  But he
was whistling gleefully to himself and he seemed so happy that
Valancy envied him.  She envied him his light-heartedness and his
irresponsibility and his mysterious little cabin up on an island in
Lake Mistawis--even his rackety old Grey Slosson.  Neither he nor
his car had to be respectable and live up to traditions.  When he
rattled past her a few minutes later, bareheaded, leaning back in
his Lizzie at a rakish angle, his longish hair blowing in the wind,
a villainous-looking old black pipe in his mouth, she envied him
again.  Men had the best of it, no doubt about that.  This outlaw
was happy, whatever he was or wasn't.  She, Valancy Stirling,
respectable, well-behaved to the last degree, was unhappy and had
always been unhappy.  So there you were.

Valancy was just in time for supper.  The sun had clouded over, and
a dismal, drizzling rain was falling again.  Cousin Stickles had
the neuralgia.  Valancy had to do the family darning and there was
no time for Magic of Wings.

"Can't the darning wait till tomorrow?" she pleaded.

"Tomorrow will bring its own duties," said Mrs. Frederick
inexorably.

Valancy darned all the evening and listened to Mrs. Frederick and
Cousin Stickles talking the eternal, niggling gossip of the clan,
as they knitted drearily at interminable black stockings.  They
discussed Second Cousin Lilian's approaching wedding in all its
bearings.  On the whole, they approved.  Second Cousin Lilian was
doing well for herself.

"Though she hasn't hurried," said Cousin Stickles.  "She must be
twenty-five."

"There have not--fortunately--been many old maids in our
connection," said Mrs. Frederick bitterly.

Valancy flinched.  She had run the darning needle into her finger.

Third Cousin Aaron Gray had been scratched by a cat and had blood-
poisoning in his finger.  "Cats are most dangerous animals," said
Mrs. Frederick.  "I would never have a cat about the house."

She glared significantly at Valancy through her terrible glasses.
Once, five years ago, Valancy had asked if she might have a cat.
She had never referred to it since, but Mrs. Frederick still
suspected her of harbouring the unlawful desire in her heart of
hearts.

Once Valancy sneezed.  Now, in the Stirling code, it was very bad
form to sneeze in public.

"You can always repress a sneeze by pressing your finger on your
upper lip" said Mrs. Frederick rebukingly.

Half-past nine o'clock and so, as Mr. Pepys would say, to bed.  But
First Cousin Stickles' neuralgic back must be rubbed with Redfern's
Liniment.  Valancy did that.  Valancy always had to do it.  She
hated the smell of Redfern's Liniment--she hated the smug, beaming,
portly, be-whiskered, be-spectacled picture of Dr. Redfern on the
bottle.  Her fingers smelled of the horrible stuff after she got
into bed, in spite of all the scrubbing she gave them.

Valancy's day of destiny had come and gone.  She ended it as she
had begun it, in tears.



CHAPTER VII


There was a rosebush on the little Stirling lawn, growing beside
the gate.  It was called "Doss's rosebush."  Cousin Georgiana had
given it to Valancy five years ago and Valancy had planted it
joyfully.  She loved roses.  But--of course--the rosebush never
bloomed.  That was her luck.  Valancy did everything she could
think of and took the advice of everybody in the clan, but still
the rosebush would not bloom.  It throve and grew luxuriantly, with
great leafy branches untouched of rust or spider; but not even a
bud had ever appeared on it.  Valancy, looking at it two days after
her birthday, was filled with a sudden, overwhelming hatred for it.
The thing wouldn't bloom: very well, then, she would cut it down.
She marched to the tool-room in the barn for her garden knife and
she went at the rosebush viciously.  A few minutes later horrified
Mrs. Frederick came out to the verandah and beheld her daughter
slashing insanely among the rosebush boughs.  Half of them were
already strewn on the walk.  The bush looked sadly dismantled.

"Doss, what on earth are you doing?  Have you gone crazy?"

"No," said Valancy.  She meant to say it defiantly, but habit was
too strong for her.  She said it deprecatingly.  "I--I just made up
my mind to cut this bush down.  It is no good.  It never blooms--
never will bloom."

"That is no reason for destroying it," said Mrs. Frederick sternly.
"It was a beautiful bush and quite ornamental.  You have made a
sorry-looking thing of it."

"Rose trees should BLOOM," said Valancy a little obstinately.

"Don't argue with ME, Doss.  Clear up that mess and leave the bush
alone.  I don't know what Georgiana will say when she sees how you
have hacked it to pieces.  Really, I'm surprised at you.  And to do
it without consulting ME!"

"The bush is mine," muttered Valancy.

"What's that?  What did you say, Doss?"

"I only said the bush was mine," repeated Valancy humbly.

Mrs. Frederick turned without a word and marched back into the
house.  The mischief was done now.  Valancy knew she had offended
her mother deeply and would not be spoken to or noticed in any way
for two or three days.  Cousin Stickles would see to Valancy's
bringing-up but Mrs. Frederick would preserve the stony silence of
outraged majesty.

Valancy sighed and put away her garden knife, hanging it precisely
on its precise nail in the tool-shop.  She cleared away the several
branches and swept up the leaves.  Her lips twitched as she looked
at the straggling bush.  It had an odd resemblance to its shaken,
scrawny donor, little Cousin Georgiana herself.

"I certainly have made an awful-looking thing of it," thought
Valancy.

But she did not feel repentant--only sorry she had offended her
mother.  Things would be so uncomfortable until she was forgiven.
Mrs. Frederick was one of those women who can make their anger felt
all over a house.  Walls and doors are no protection from it.

"You'd better go uptown and git the mail," said Cousin Stickles,
when Valancy went in.  "_I_ can't go--I feel all sorter peaky and
piny this spring.  I want you to stop at the drugstore and git me a
bottle of Redfern's Blood Bitters.  There's nothing like Redfern's
Bitters for building a body up.  Cousin James says the Purple Pills
are the best, but I know better.  My poor dear husband took
Redfern's Bitters right up to the day he died.  Don't let them
charge you more'n ninety cents.  I kin git it for that at the Port.
And what HAVE you been saying to your poor mother?  Do you ever
stop to think, Doss, that you kin only have one mother?"

"One is enough for me," thought Valancy undutifully, as she went
uptown.

She got Cousin Stickles' bottle of bitters and then she went to the
post-office and asked for her mail at the General Delivery.  Her
mother did not have a box.  They got too little mail to bother with
it.  Valancy did not expect any mail, except the Christian Times,
which was the only paper they took.  They hardly ever got any
letters.  But Valancy rather liked to stand in the office and watch
Mr. Carewe, the grey-bearded, Santa-Clausy old clerk, handing out
letters to the lucky people who did get them.  He did it with such
a detached, impersonal, Jove-like air, as if it did not matter in
the least to him what supernal joys or shattering horrors might be
in those letters for the people to whom they were addressed.
Letters had a fascination for Valancy, perhaps because she so
seldom got any.  In her Blue Castle exciting epistles, bound with
silk and sealed with crimson, were always being brought to her by
pages in livery of gold and blue, but in real life her only letters
were occasional perfunctory notes from relatives or an advertising
circular.

Consequently she was immensely surprised when Mr. Carewe, looking
even more Jovian than usual, poked a letter out to her.  Yes, it
was addressed to her plainly, in a fierce, black hand:  "Miss
Valancy Stirling, Elm Street, Deerwood"--and the postmark was
Montreal.  Valancy picked it up with a little quickening of her
breath.  Montreal!  It must be from Doctor Trent.  He had
remembered her, after all.

Valancy met Uncle Benjamin coming in as she was going out and was
glad the letter was safely in her bag.

"What," said Uncle Benjamin, "is the difference between a donkey
and a postage-stamp?"

"I don't know.  What?" answered Valancy dutifully.

"One you lick with a stick and the other you stick with a lick.
Ha, ha!"

Uncle Benjamin passed in, tremendously pleased with himself.

Cousin Stickles pounced on the Times when Valancy got home, but it
did not occur to her to ask if there were any letters.  Mrs.
Frederick would have asked it, but Mrs. Frederick's lips at present
were sealed.  Valancy was glad of this.  If her mother had asked if
there were any letters Valancy would have had to admit there was.
Then she would have had to let her mother and Cousin Stickles read
the letter and all would be discovered.

Her heart acted strangely on the way upstairs, and she sat down by
her window for a few minutes before opening her letter.  She felt
very guilty and deceitful.  She had never before kept a letter
secret from her mother.  Every letter she had ever written or
received had been read by Mrs. Frederick.  That had never mattered.
Valancy had never had anything to hide.  But this DID matter.  She
could not have any one see this letter.  But her fingers trembled
with a consciousness of wickedness and unfilial conduct as she
opened it--trembled a little, too, perhaps, with apprehension.  She
felt quite sure there was nothing seriously wrong with her heart
but--one never knew.

Dr. Trent's letter was like himself--blunt, abrupt, concise,
wasting no words.  Dr. Trent never beat about the bush.  "Dear Miss
Sterling"--and then a page of black, positive writing.  Valancy
seemed to read it at a glance; she dropped it on her lap, her face
ghost-white.

Dr. Trent told her that she had a very dangerous and fatal form of
heart disease--angina pectoris--evidently complicated with an
aneurism--whatever that was--and in the last stages.  He said,
without mincing matters, that nothing could be done for her.  If
she took great care of herself she might live a year--but she might
also die at any moment--Dr. Trent never troubled himself about
euphemisms.  She must be careful to avoid all excitement and all
severe muscular efforts.  She must eat and drink moderately, she
must never run, she must go upstairs and uphill with great care.
Any sudden jolt or shock might be fatal.  She was to get the
prescription he enclosed filled and carry it with her always,
taking a dose whenever her attacks came on.  And he was hers truly,
H. B. Trent.

Valancy sat for a long while by her window.  Outside was a world
drowned in the light of a spring afternoon--skies entrancingly
blue, winds perfumed and free, lovely, soft, blue hazes at the end
of every street.  Over at the railway station a group of young
girls was waiting for a train; she heard their gay laughter as they
chattered and joked.  The train roared in and roared out again.
But none of these things had any reality.  Nothing had any reality
except the fact that she had only another year to live.

When she was tired of sitting at the window she went over and lay
down on her bed, staring at the cracked, discoloured ceiling.  The
curious numbness that follows on a staggering blow possessed her.
She did not feel anything except a boundless surprise and
incredulity--behind which was the conviction that Dr. Trent knew
his business and that she, Valancy Stirling, who had never lived,
was about to die.

When the gong rang for supper Valancy got up and went downstairs
mechanically, from force of habit.  She wondered that she had been
let alone so long.  But of course her mother would not pay any
attention to her just now.  Valancy was thankful for this.  She
thought the quarrel over the rose-bush had been really, as Mrs.
Frederick herself might have said, Providential.  She could not eat
anything, but both Mrs. Frederick and Cousin Stickles thought this
was because she was deservedly unhappy over her mother's attitude,
and her lack of appetite was not commented on.  Valancy forced
herself to swallow a cup of tea and then sat and watched the others
eat, with an odd feeling that years had passed since she had sat
with them at the dinner-table.  She found herself smiling inwardly
to think what a commotion she could make if she chose.  Let her
merely tell them what was in Dr. Trent's letter and there would be
as much fuss made as if--Valancy thought bitterly--they really
cared two straws about her.

"Dr. Trent's housekeeper got word from him today," said Cousin
Stickles, so suddenly that Valancy jumped guiltily.  Was there
anything in thought waves?  "Mrs. Judd was talking to her uptown.
They think his son will recover, but Dr. Trent wrote that if he did
he was going to take him abroad as soon as he was able to travel
and wouldn't be back here for a year at least."

"That will not matter much to US," said Mrs. Frederick
majestically.  "He is not OUR doctor.  I would not"--here she
looked or seemed to look accusingly right through Valancy--"have
HIM to doctor a sick cat."

"May I go upstairs and lie down?" said Valancy faintly.  "I--I have
a headache."

"What has given you a headache?" asked Cousin Stickles, since Mrs.
Frederick would not.  The question has to be asked.  Valancy could
not be allowed to have headaches without interference.

"You ain't in the habit of having headaches.  I hope you're not
taking the mumps.  Here, try a spoonful of vinegar."

"Piffle!" said Valancy rudely, getting up from the table.  She did
not care just then if she were rude.  She had had to be so polite
all her life.

If it had been possible for Cousin Stickles to turn pale she would
have.  As it was not, she turned yellower.

"Are you sure you ain't feverish, Doss?  You sound like it.  You go
and get right into bed," said Cousin Stickles, thoroughly alarmed,
"and I'll come up and rub your forehead and the back of your neck
with Redfern's Liniment."

Valency had reached the door, but she turned.  "I won't be rubbed
with Redfern's Liniment!" she said.

Cousin Stickles stared and gasped.  "What--what do you mean?"

"I said I wouldn't be rubbed with Redfern's Liniment," repeated
Valancy.  "Horrid, sticky stuff!  And it has the vilest smell of
any liniment I ever saw.  It's no good.  I want to be left alone,
that's all."

Valancy went out, leaving Cousin Stickles aghast.

"She's feverish--she MUST be feverish," ejaculated Cousin Stickles.

Mrs. Frederick went on eating her supper.  It did not matter
whether Valancy was or was not feverish.  Valancy had been guilty
of impertinence to HER.



CHAPTER VIII


Valancy did not sleep that night.  She lay awake all through the
long dark, hours--thinking--thinking.  She made a discovery that
surprised her: she, who had been afraid of almost everything in
life, was not afraid of death.  It did not seem in the least
terrible to her.  And she need not now be afraid of anything else.
Why had she been afraid of things?  Because of life.  Afraid of
Uncle Benjamin because of the menace of poverty in old age.  But
now she would never be old--neglected--tolerated.  Afraid of being
an old maid all her life.  But now she would not be an old maid
very long.  Afraid of offending her mother and her clan because she
had to live with and among them and couldn't live peaceably if she
didn't give in to them.  But now she hadn't.  Valancy felt a
curious freedom.

But she was still horribly afraid of one thing--the fuss the whole
jamfry of them would make when she told them.  Valancy shuddered at
the thought of it.  She couldn't endure it.  Oh, she knew so well
how it would be.  First there would be indignation--yes,
indignation on the part of Uncle James because she had gone to a
doctor--any doctor--without consulting HIM.  Indignation on the
part of her mother for being so sly and deceitful--"to your own
mother, Doss."  Indignation on the part of the whole clan because
she had not gone to Dr. Marsh.

Then would come the solicitude.  She would be taken to Dr. Marsh,
and when Dr. Marsh confirmed Dr. Trent's diagnosis she would be
taken to specialists in Toronto and Montreal.  Uncle Benjamin would
foot the bill with a splendid gesture of munificence in thus
assisting the widow and orphan, and talk forever after of the
shocking fees specialists charged for looking wise and saying they
couldn't do anything.  And when the specialists could do nothing
for her Uncle James would insist on her taking Purple Pills--"I've
known them to effect a cure when ALL the doctors had given up"--and
her mother would insist on Redfern's Blood Bitters, and Cousin
Stickles would insist on rubbing her over the heart every night
with Redfern's Liniment on the grounds that it MIGHT do good and
COULDN'T do harm; and everybody else would have some pet dope for
her to take.  Dr. Stalling would come to her and say solemnly, "You
are very ill.  Are you prepared for what may be before you?"--
almost as if he were going to shake his forefinger at her, the
forefinger that had not grown any shorter or less knobbly with age.
And she would be watched and checked like a baby and never let do
anything or go anywhere alone.  Perhaps she would not even be
allowed to sleep alone lest she die in her sleep.  Cousin Stickles
or her mother would insist on sharing her room and bed.  Yes,
undoubtedly they would.

It was this last thought that really decided Valancy.  She could
not put up with it and she wouldn't.  As the clock in the hall
below struck twelve Valancy suddenly and definitely made up her
mind that she would not tell anybody.  She had always been told,
ever since she could remember, that she must hide her feelings.
"It is not ladylike to have feelings," Cousin Stickles had once
told her disapprovingly.  Well, she would hide them with a
vengeance.

But though she was not afraid of death she was not indifferent to
it.  She found that she RESENTED it; it was not fair that she
should have to die when she had never lived.  Rebellion flamed up
in her soul as the dark hours passed by--not because she had no
future but because she had no past.

"I'm poor--I'm ugly--I'm a failure--and I'm near death," she
thought.  She could see her own obituary notice in the Deerwood
Weekly Times, copied into the Port Lawrence Journal.  "A deep gloom
was cast over Deerwood, etc., etc."--"leaves a large circle of
friends to mourn, etc., etc., etc."--lies, all lies.  Gloom,
forsooth!  Nobody would miss her.  Her death would not matter a
straw to anybody.  Not even her mother loved her--her mother who
had been so disappointed that she was not a boy--or at least, a
pretty girl.

Valancy reviewed her whole life between midnight and the early
spring dawn.  It was a very drab existence, but here and there an
incident loomed out with a significance out of all proportion to
its real importance.  These incidents were all unpleasant in one
way or another.  Nothing really pleasant had every happened to
Valancy.

"I've never had one wholly happy hour in my life--not one," she
thought.  "I've just been a colourless nonentity.  I remember
reading somewhere once that there is an hour in which a woman might
be happy all her life if she could but find it.  I've never found
my hour--never, never.  And I never will now.  If I could only have
had that hour I'd be willing to die."

Those significant incidents kept bobbing up in her mind like
unbidden ghosts, without any sequence of time or place.  For
instance, that time when, at sixteen, she had blued a tubful of
clothes too deeply.  And the time when, at eight, she had "stolen"
some raspberry jam from Aunt Wellington's pantry.  Valancy never
heard the last of those two misdemeanours.  At almost every clan
gathering they were raked up against her as jokes.  Uncle Benjamin
hardly ever missed re-telling the raspberry jam incident--he had
been the one to catch her, her face all stained and streaked.

"I have really done so few bad things that they have to keep
harping on the old ones," thought Valancy.  "Why, I've never even
had a quarrel with any one.  I haven't an enemy.  What a spineless
thing I must be not to have even one enemy!"

There was that incident of the dust-pile at school when she was
seven.  Valancy always recalled it when Dr. Stalling referred to
the text, "To him that hath shall be given and from him that hath
not shall be taken even that which he hath."  Other people might
puzzle over that text but it never puzzled Valancy.  The whole
relationship between herself and Olive, dating from the day of the
dust-pile, was a commentary on it.

She had been going to school a year, but Olive, who was a year
younger, had just begun and had about her all the glamour of "a new
girl" and an exceedingly pretty girl at that.  It was at recess and
all the girls, big and little, were out on the road in front of the
school making dust-piles.  The aim of each girl was to have the
biggest pile.  Valancy was good at making dust-piles--there was an
art in it--and she had secret hopes of leading.  But Olive, working
off by herself, was suddenly discovered to have a larger dust-pile
than anybody.  Valancy felt no jealousy.  Her dust-pile was quite
big enough to please her.  Then one of the older girls had an
inspiration.

"Let's put all our dust on Olive's pile and make a tremendous one,"
she exclaimed.

A frenzy seemed to seize the girls.  They swooped down on the dust-
piles with pails and shovels and in a few seconds Olive's pile was
a veritable pyramid.  In vain Valancy, with scrawny, outstretched
little arms, tried to protect hers.  She was ruthlessly swept
aside, her dust-pile scooped up and poured on Olive's.  Valancy
turned away resolutely and began building another dust-pile.  Again
a bigger girl pounced on it.  Valancy stood before it, flushed,
indignant, arms outspread.

"Don't take it," she pleaded.  "Please don't take it."

"But WHY?" demanded the older girl.  "Why won't you help to build
Olives bigger?"

"I want my own little dust-pile," said Valancy piteously.

Her plea went unheeded.  While she argued with one girl another
scraped up her dust-pile.  Valancy turned away, her heart swelling,
her eyes full of tears.

"Jealous--you're jealous!" said the girls mockingly.

"You were very selfish," said her mother coldly, when Valancy told
her about it at night.  That was the first and last time Valancy
had ever taken any of her troubles to her mother.

Valancy was neither jealous nor selfish.  It was only that she
wanted a dust-pile of her own--small or big mattered not.  A team
of horses came down the street--Olive's dust pile was scattered
over the roadway--the bell rang--the girls trooped into school and
had forgotten the whole affair before they reached their seats.
Valancy never forgot it.  To this day she resented it in her secret
soul.  But was it not symbolical of her life?

"I've never been able to have my own dust-pile," thought Valancy.

The enormous red moon she had seen rising right at the end of the
street one autumn evening of her sixth year.  She had been sick and
cold with the awful, uncanny horror of it.  So near to her.  So
big.  She had run in trembling to her mother and her mother had
laughed at her.  She had gone to bed and hidden her face under the
clothes in terror lest she might look at the window and see that
horrible moon glaring in at her through it.

The boy who had tried to kiss her at a party when she was fifteen.
She had not let him--she had evaded him and run.  He was the only
boy who had ever tried to kiss her.  Now, fourteen years later,
Valancy found herself wishing that she had let him.

The time she had been made to apologise to Olive for something she
hadn't done.  Olive had said that Valancy had pushed her into the
mud and spoiled her new shoes ON PURPOSE.  Valency knew she hadn't.
It had been an accident--and even that wasn't her fault--but nobody
would believe her.  She had to apologise--and kiss Olive to "make
up."  The injustice of it burned in her soul tonight.

That summer when Olive had the most beautiful hat, trimmed with
creamy yellow net, with a wreath of red roses and little ribbon
bows under the chin.  Valancy had wanted a hat like that more than
she had ever wanted anything.  She pleaded for one and had been
laughed at--all summer she had to wear a horrid little brown sailor
with elastic that cut behind her ears.  None of the girls would go
around with her because she was so shabby--nobody but Olive.
People had thought Olive so sweet and unselfish.

"I was an excellent foil for her," thought Valancy.  "Even then she
knew that."

Valancy had tried to win a prize for attendance in Sunday School
once.  But Olive won it.  There were so many Sundays Valancy had to
stay home because she had colds.  She had once tried to "say a
piece" in school one Friday afternoon and had broken down in it.
Olive was a good reciter and never got stuck.

The night she had spent in Port Lawrence with Aunt Isabel when she
was ten.  Byron Stirling was there; from Montreal, twelve years
old, conceited, clever.  At family prayers in the morning Byron had
reached across and given Valancy's thin arm such a savage pinch
that she screamed out with pain.  After prayers were over she was
summoned to Aunt Isabel's bar of judgment.  But when she said Byron
had pinched her Byron denied it.  He said she cried out because the
kitten scratched her.  He said she had put the kitten up on her
chair and was playing with it when she should have been listening
to Uncle David's prayer.  He was BELIEVED.  In the Stirling clan
the boys were always believed before the girls.  Valancy was sent
home in disgrace because of her exceeding bad behavior during
family prayers and she was not asked to Aunt Isabel's again for
many moons.

The time Cousin Betty Stirling was married.  Somehow Valancy got
wind of the fact that Betty was going to ask her to be one of her
bridesmaids.  Valancy was secretly uplifted.  It would be a
delightful thing to be a bridesmaid.  And of course she would have
to have a new dress for it--a pretty new dress--a pink dress.
Betty wanted her bridesmaids to dress in pink.

But Betty had never asked her, after all.  Valancy couldn't guess
why, but long after her secret tears of disappointment had been
dried Olive told her.  Betty, after much consultation and
reflection, had decided that Valancy was too insignificant--she
would "spoil the effect."  That was nine years ago.  But tonight
Valancy caught her breath with the old pain and sting of it.

That day in her eleventh year when her mother had badgered her into
confessing something she had never done.  Valancy had denied it for
a long time but eventually for peace' sake she had given in and
pleaded guilty.  Mrs. Frederick was always making people lie by
pushing them into situations where they HAD to lie.  Then her
mother had made her kneel down on parlour floor, between herself
and Cousin Stickles, and say, "O God, please forgive me for not
speaking the truth."  Valency had said it, but as she rose from her
knees she muttered, "But O God, YOU know I did speak the truth."
Valancy had not then heard of Galileo but her fate was similar to
his.  She was punished just as severely as if she hadn't confessed
and prayed.

The winter she went to dancing-school.  Uncle James had decreed she
should go and had paid for her lessons.  How she had looked forward
to it!  And how she had hated it!  She had never had a voluntary
partner.  The teacher always had to tell some boy to dance with
her, and generally he had been sulky about it.  Yet Valancy was a
good dancer, as light on her feet as thistledown.  Olive, who never
lacked eager partners, was heavy.

The affair of the button-string, when she was ten.  All the girls
in school had button-strings.  Olive had a very long one with a
great many beautiful buttons.  Valancy had one.  Most of the
buttons on it were very commonplace, but she had six beauties that
had come off Grandmother Stirling's wedding-gown--sparkling buttons
of gold and glass, much more beautiful than any Olive had.  Their
possession conferred a certain distinction on Valancy.  She knew
every little girl in school envied her the exclusive possession of
those beautiful buttons.  When Olive saw them on the button-string
she had looked at them narrowly but said nothing--then.  The next
day Aunt Wellington had come to Elm Street and told Mrs. Frederick
that she thought Olive should have some of those buttons--
Grandmother Stirling was just as much Wellington's mother as
Frederick's.  Mrs. Frederick had agreed amiably.  She could not
afford to fall out with Aunt Wellington.  Moreover, the matter was
of no importance whatever.  Aunt Wellington carried off four of the
buttons, generously leaving two for Valancy.  Valancy had torn
these from her string and flung them on the floor--she had not yet
learned that it was unladylike to have feelings--and had been sent
supperless to bed for the exhibition.

The night of Margaret Blunt's party.  She had made such pathetic
efforts to be pretty that night.  Rob Walker was to be there; and
two nights before, on the moonlit verandah of Uncle Herbert's
cottage at Mistawis, Rob had really seemed attracted to her.  At
Margaret's party Rob never even asked her to dance--did not notice
her at all.  She was a wallflower, as usual.  That, of course, was
years ago.  People in Deerwood had long since given up inviting
Valancy to dances.  But to Valancy its humiliation and disappointment
were of the other day.  Her face burned in the darkness as she
recalled herself, sitting there with her pitifully crimped, thin
hair and the cheeks she had pinched for an hour before coming, in an
effort to make them red.  All that came of it was a wild story that
Valancy Stirling was rouged at Margaret Blunt's party.  In those
days in Deerwood that was enough to wreck your character forever.
It did not wreck Valancy's, or even damage it.  People knew SHE
couldn't be fast if she tried.  They only laughed at her.

"I've had nothing but a second-hand existence," decided Valancy.
"All the great emotions of life have passed me by.  I've never even
had a grief.  And have I ever really loved anybody?  Do I really
love Mother?  No, I don't.  That's the truth, whether it is
disgraceful or not.  I don't love her--I've never loved her.
What's worse, I don't even like her.  So I don't know anything
about any kind of love.  My life has been empty--empty.  Nothing is
worse than emptiness.  Nothing!"  Valancy ejaculated the last
"nothing" aloud passionately.  Then she moaned and stopped thinking
about anything for a while.  One of her attacks of pain had come
on.

When it was over something had happened to Valancy--perhaps the
culmination of the process that had been going on in her mind ever
since she had read Dr. Trent's letter.  It was three o'clock in the
morning--the wisest and most accursed hour of the clock.  But
sometimes it sets us free.

"I've been trying to please other people all my life and failed,"
she said.  "After this I shall please myself.  I shall never
pretend anything again.  I've breathed an atmosphere of fibs and
pretences and evasions all my life.  What a luxury it will be to
tell the truth!  I may not be able to do much that I want to do but
I won't do another thing that I don't want to do.  Mother can pout
for weeks--I shan't worry over it.  'Despair is a free man--hope is
a slave.'"

Valancy got up and dressed, with a deepening of that curious sense
of freedom.  When she had finished with her hair she opened the
window and hurled the jar of potpourri over into the next lot.  It
smashed gloriously against the schoolgirl complexion on the old
carriage-shop.

"I'm sick of fragrance of dead things," said Valancy.



CHAPTER IX


Uncle Herbert and Aunt Alberta's silver wedding was delicately
referred to among the Stirlings during the following weeks as "the
time we first noticed poor Valancy was--a little--YOU understand?"

Not for words would any of the Stirlings have said out and out at
first that Valancy had gone mildly insane or even that her mind was
slightly deranged.  Uncle Benjamin was considered to have gone
entirely too far when he had ejaculated, "She's dippy--I tell you,
she's dippy," and was only excused because of the outrageousness of
Valancy's conduct at the aforsaid wedding dinner.

But Mrs. Frederick and Cousin Stickles had noticed a few things
that made them uneasy BEFORE the dinner.  It had begun with the
rosebush, of course; and Valancy never was really "quite right"
again.  She did not seem to worry in the least over the fact that
her mother was not speaking to her.  You would never suppose she
noticed it at all.  She had flatly refused to take either Purple
Pills or Redfern's Bitters.  She had announced coolly that she did
not intend to answer to the name of "Doss" any longer.  She had
told Cousin Stickles that she wished she would give up wearing that
brooch with Cousin Artemas Stickles' hair in it.  She had moved her
bed in her room to the opposite corner.  She had read Magic of
Wings Sunday afternoon.  When Cousin Stickles had rebuked her
Valancy had said indifferently, "Oh, I forgot it was Sunday"--and
HAD GONE ON READING IT.

Cousin Stickles had seen a terrible thing--she had caught Valancy
sliding down the bannister.  Cousin Stickles did not tell Mrs.
Frederick this--poor Amelia was worried enough as it was.  But it
was Valancy's announcement on Saturday night that she was not going
to go to the Anglican church any more that broke through Mrs.
Frederick's stony silence.

"Not going to church any more!  Doss, have you absolutely taken
leave--"

"Oh, I'm going to church," said Valancy airily.  "I'm going to the
Presbyterian church.  But to the Anglican church I will not go."

This was even worse.  Mrs. Frederick had recourse to tears, having
found outraged majesty had ceased to be effective.

"What have you got against the Anglican church?" she sobbed.

"Nothing--only just that you've always made me go there.  If you'd
made me go to the Presbyterian church I'd want to go to the
Anglican."

"Is that a nice thing to say to your mother?  Oh, how true it is
that it is sharper than a serpent's tooth to have a thankless
child."

"Is that a nice thing to say to your daughter?" said unrepentant
Valancy.

So Valancy's behaviour at the silver wedding was not quite the
surprise to Mrs. Frederick and Christine Stickles that it was to
the rest.  They were doubtful about the wisdom of taking her, but
concluded it would "make talk" if they didn't.  Perhaps she would
behave herself, and so far no outsider suspected there was anything
queer about her.  By a special mercy of Providence it had poured
torrents Sunday morning, so Valancy had not carried out her hideous
threat of going to the Presbyterian church.

Valancy would not have cared in the least if they had left her at
home.  These family celebrations were all hopelessly dull.  But the
Stirlings always celebrated everything.  It was a long-established
custom.  Even Mrs. Frederick gave a dinner party on her wedding
anniversary and Cousin Stickles had friends in to supper on her
birthday.  Valancy hated these entertainments because they had to
pinch and save and contrive for weeks afterwards to pay for them.
But she wanted to go to the silver wedding.  It would hurt Uncle
Herbert's feelings if she stayed away, and she rather liked Uncle
Herbert.  Besides, she wanted to look over all her relatives from
her new angle.  It would be an excellent place to make public her
declaration of independence if occasion offered.

"Put on your brown silk dress," said Mrs. Stirling.

As if there were anything else to put on!  Valancy had only the one
festive dress--that snuffy-brown silk Aunt Isabel had given her.
Aunt Isabel had decreed that Valancy should never wear colours.
They did not become her.  When she was young they allowed her to
wear white, but that had been tacitly dropped for some years.
Valancy put on the brown silk.  It had a high collar and long
sleeves.  She had never had a dress with low neck and elbow
sleeves, although they had been worn, even in Deerwood, for over a
year.  But she did not do her hair pompadour.  She knotted it on
her neck and pulled it out over her ears.  She thought it became
her--only the little knot was so absurdly small.  Mrs. Frederick
resented the hair but decided it was wisest to say nothing on the
eve of the party.  It was so important that Valancy should be kept
in good humour, if possible, until it was over.  Mrs. Frederick did
not reflect that this was the first time in her life that she had
thought it necessary to consider Valancy's humours.  But then
Valancy had never been "queer" before.

On their way to Uncle Herbert's--Mrs. Frederick and Cousin Stickles
walking in front, Valancy trotting meekly along behind--Roaring
Abel drove past them.  Drunk as usual but not in the roaring stage.
Just drunk enough to be excessively polite.  He raised his
disreputable old tartan cap with the air of a monarch saluting his
subjects and swept them a grand bow, Mrs. Frederick and Cousin
Stickles dared not cut Roaring Abel altogether.  He was the only
person in Deerwood who could be got to do odd jobs of carpentering
and repairing when they needed to be done, so it would not do to
offend him.  But they responded with only the stiffest, slightest
of bows.  Roaring Abel must be kept in his place.

Valancy, behind them, did a thing they were fortunately spared
seeing.  She smiled gaily and waved her hand to Roaring Abel.  Why
not?  She had always liked the old sinner.  He was such a jolly,
picturesque, unashamed reprobate and stood out against the drab
respectability of Deerwood and its customs like a flame-red flag of
revolt and protest.  Only a few nights ago Abel had gone through
Deerwood in the wee sma's, shouting oaths at the top of his
stentorian voice which could be heard for miles, and lashing his
horse into a furious gallop as he tore along prim, proper Elm
Street.

"Yelling and blaspheming like a fiend," shuddered Cousin Stickles
at the breakfast-table.

"I cannot understand why the judgment of the Lord has not fallen
upon that man long ere this," said Mrs. Frederick petulantly, as if
she thought Providence was very dilatory and ought to have a gentle
reminder.

"He'll be picked up dead some morning--he'll fall under his horse's
hoofs and be trampled to death," said Cousin Stickles reassuringly.

Valancy had said nothing, of course; but she wondered to herself if
Roaring Abel's periodical sprees were not his futile protest
against the poverty and drudgery and monotony of his existence.
SHE went on dream sprees in her Blue Castle.  Roaring Abel, having
no imagination, could not do that.  HIS escapes from reality had to
be concrete.  So she waved at him today with a sudden fellow
feeling, and Roaring Abel, not too drunk to be astonished, nearly
fell off his seat in his amazement.

By this time they had reached Maple Avenue and Uncle Herbert's
house, a large, pretentious structure peppered with meaningless bay
windows and excrescent porches.  A house that always looked like a
stupid, prosperous, self-satisfied man with warts on his face.

"A house like that," said Valancy solemnly, "is a blasphemy."

Mrs. Frederick was shaken to her soul.  What had Valancy said?  Was
it profane?  Or only just queer?  Mrs. Frederick took off her hat
in Aunt Alberta's spare-room with trembling hands.  She made one
more feeble attempt to avert disaster.  She held Valancy back on
the landing as Cousin Stickles went downstairs.

"Won't you try to remember you're a lady?" she pleaded.

"Oh, if there were only any hope of being able to forget it!" said
Valancy wearily.

Mrs. Frederick felt that she had not deserved this from Providence.



CHAPTER X


"Bless this food to our use and consecrate our lives to Thy
service," said Uncle Herbert briskly.

Aunt Wellington frowned.  She always considered Herbert's graces
entirely too short and "flippant."  A grace, to be a grace in Aunt
Wellington's eyes, had to be at least three minutes long and
uttered in an unearthly tone, between a groan and a chant.  As a
protest she kept her head bent a perceptible time after all the
rest had been lifted.  When she permitted herself to sit upright
she found Valancy looking at her.  Ever afterwards Aunt Wellington
averred that she had known from that moment that there was
something wrong with Valancy.  In those queer, slanted eyes of
hers--"we should always have known she was not entirely RIGHT with
eyes like that"--there was an odd gleam of mockery and amusement--
as if Valancy were laughing at HER.  Such a thing was unthinkable,
of course.  Aunt Wellington at once ceased to think it.

Valancy was enjoying herself.  She had never enjoyed herself at a
"family reunion" before.  In social functions, as in childish
games, she had only "filled in."  Her clan had always considered
her very dull.  She had no parlour tricks.  And she had been in the
habit of taking refuge from the boredom of family parties in her
Blue Castle, which resulted in an absent-mindedness that increased
her reputation for dullness and vacuity.

"She has no social presence whatever," Aunt Wellington had decreed
once and for all.  Nobody dreamed that Valancy was dumb in their
presence merely because she was afraid of them.  Now she was no
longer afraid of them.  The shackles had been stricken off her
soul.  She was quite prepared to talk if occasion offered.
Meanwhile she was giving herself such freedom of thought as she had
never dared to take before.  She let herself go with a wild, inner
exultation, as Uncle Herbert carved the turkey.  Uncle Herbert gave
Valancy a second look that day.  Being a man, he didn't know what
she had done to her hair, but he thought surprisedly that Doss was
not such a bad-looking girl, after all; and he put an extra piece
of white meat on her plate.

"What herb is most injurious to a young lady's beauty?" propounded
Uncle Benjamin by way of starting conversation--"loosening things
up a bit," as he would have said.

Valancy, whose duty it was to say, "What?" did not say it.  Nobody
else said it, so Uncle Benjamin, after an expectant pause, had to
answer, "Thyme," and felt that his riddle had fallen flat.  He
looked resentfully at Valancy, who had never failed him before, but
Valancy did not seem even to be aware of him.  She was gazing
around the table, examining relentlessly every one in this
depressing assembly of sensible people and watching their little
squirms with a detached, amused smile.

So these were the people she had always held in reverence and fear.
She seemed to see them with new eyes.

Big, capable, patronising, voluble Aunt Mildred, who thought
herself the cleverest woman in the clan, her husband a little lower
than the angels and her children wonders.  Had not her son, Howard,
been all through teething at eleven months?  And could she not tell
you the best way to do everything, from cooking mushrooms to
picking up a snake?  What a bore she was!  What ugly moles she had
on her face!

Cousin Gladys, who was always praising her son, who had died young,
and always fighting with her living one.  She had neuritis--or what
she called neuritis.  It jumped about from one part of her body to
another.  It was a convenient thing.  If anybody wanted her to go
somewhere she didn't want to go she had neuritis in her legs.  And
always if any mental effort was required she could have neuritis in
her head.  You can't THINK with neuritis in your head, my dear.

"What an old humbug you are!" thought Valancy impiously.

Aunt Isabel.  Valancy counted her chins.  Aunt Isabel was the
critic of the clan.  She had always gone about squashing people
flat.  More members of it than Valancy were afraid of her.  She
had, it was conceded, a biting tongue.

"I wonder what would happen to your face if you ever smiled,"
speculated Valancy, unblushingly.

Second Cousin Sarah Taylor, with her great, pale, expressionless
eyes, who was noted for the variety of her pickle recipes and for
nothing else.  So afraid of saying something indiscreet that she
never said anything worth listening to.  So proper that she blushed
when she saw the advertisement picture of a corset and had put a
dress on her Venus de Milo statuette which made it look "real
tasty."

Little Cousin Georgiana.  Not such a bad little soul.  But dreary--
very.  Always looking as if she had just been starched and ironed.
Always afraid to let herself go.  The only thing she really enjoyed
was a funeral.  You knew where you were with a corpse.  Nothing
more could happen to IT.  But while there was life there was fear.

Uncle James.  Handsome, black, with his sarcastic, trap-like mouth
and iron-grey side-burns, whose favourite amusement was to write
controversial letters to the Christian Times, attacking Modernism.
Valancy always wondered if he looked as solemn when he was asleep
as he did when awake.  No wonder his wife had died young.  Valancy
remembered her.  A pretty, sensitive thing.  Uncle James had denied
her everything she wanted and showered on her everything she didn't
want.  He had killed her--quite legally.  She had been smothered
and starved.

Uncle Benjamin, wheezy, pussy-mouthed.  With great pouches under
eyes that held nothing in reverence.

Uncle Wellington.  Long, pallid face, thin, pale-yellow hair--"one
of the fair Stirlings"--thin, stooping body, abominably high
forehead with such ugly wrinkles, and "eyes about as intelligent as
a fish's," thought Valancy.  "Looks like a cartoon of himself."

Aunt Wellington.  Named Mary but called by her husband's name to
distinguish her from Great-aunt Mary.  A massive, dignified,
permanent lady.  Splendidly arranged, iron-grey hair.  Rich,
fashionable beaded dress.  Had HER moles removed by electrolysis--
which Aunt Mildred thought was a wicked evasion of the purposes of
God.

Uncle Herbert, with his spiky grey hair.  Aunt Alberta, who twisted
her mouth so unpleasantly in talking and had a great reputation for
unselfishness because she was always giving up a lot of things she
didn't want.  Valancy let them off easily in her judgment because
she liked them, even if they were in Milton's expressive phrase,
"stupidly good."  But she wondered for what inscrutable reason Aunt
Alberta had seen fit to tie a black velvet ribbon around each of
her chubby arms above the elbow.

Then she looked across the table at Olive.  Olive, who had been
held up to her as a paragon of beauty, behaviour and success as
long as she could remember.  "Why can't you hold yourself like
Olive, Doss?  Why can't you stand correctly like Olive, Doss?  Why
can't you speak prettily like Olive, Doss?  Why can't you make an
effort, Doss?"

Valancy's elfin eyes lost their mocking glitter and became pensive
and sorrowful.  You could not ignore or disdain Olive.  It was
quite impossible to deny that she was beautiful and effective and
sometimes she was a little intelligent.  Her mouth might be a
trifle heavy--she might show her fine, white, regular teeth rather
too lavishly when she smiled.  But when all was said and done,
Olive justified Uncle Benjamin's summing up--"a stunning girl."
Yes, Valancy agreed in her heart, Olive was stunning.

Rich, golden-brown hair, elaborately dressed, with a sparkling
bandeau holding its glossy puffs in place; large, brilliant blue
eyes and thick silken lashes; face of rose and bare neck of snow,
rising above her gown; great pearl bubbles in her ears; the blue-
white diamond flame on her long, smooth, waxen finger with its
rosy, pointed nail.  Arms of marble, gleaming through green chiffon
and shadow lace.  Valancy felt suddenly thankful that her own
scrawny arms were decently swathed in brown silk.  Then she resumed
her tabulation of Olive's charms.

Tall.  Queenly.  Confident.  Everything that Valancy was NOT.
Dimples, too, in cheeks and chin.  "A woman with dimples always
gets her own way," thought Valancy, in a recurring spasm of
bitterness at the fate which had denied her even one dimple.

Olive was only a year younger than Valancy, though a stranger would
have thought that there was at least ten years between them.  But
nobody ever dreaded old maidenhood for her.  Olive had been
surrounded by a crowd of eager beaus since her early teens, just as
her mirror was always surrounded by a fringe of cards, photographs,
programmes and invitations.  At eighteen, when she had graduated
from Havergal College, Olive had been engaged to Will Desmond,
lawyer in embryo.  Will Desmond had died and Olive had mourned for
him properly for two years.  When she was twenty-three she had a
hectic affair with Donald Jackson.  But Aunt and Uncle Wellington
disapproved of that and in the end Olive dutifully gave him up.
Nobody in the Stirling clan--whatever outsiders might say--hinted
that she did so because Donald himself was cooling off.  However
that might be, Olive's third venture met with everybody's approval.
Cecil Price was clever and handsome and "one of the Port Lawrence
Prices."  Olive had been engaged to him for three years.  He had
just graduated in civil engineering and they were to be married as
soon as he landed a contract.  Olive's hope chest was full to
overflowing with exquisite things and Olive had already confided to
Valancy what her wedding-dress was to be.  Ivory silk draped with
lace, white satin court train, lined with pale green georgette,
heirloom veil of Brussels lace.  Valancy knew also--though Olive
had not told her--that the bridesmaids were selected and that she
was not among them.

Valancy had, after a fashion, always been Olive's confidante--
perhaps because she was the only girl in the connection who could
not bore Olive with return confidences.  Olive always told Valancy
all the details of her love affairs, from the days when the little
boys in school used to "persecute" her with love letters.  Valancy
could not comfort herself by thinking these affairs mythical.
Olive really had them.  Many men had gone mad over her besides the
three fortunate ones.

"I don't know what the poor idiots see in me, that drives them to
make such double idiots of themselves," Olive was wont to say.
Valancy would have liked to say, "I don't either," but truth and
diplomacy both restrained her.  She DID know, perfectly well.
Olive Stirling was one of the girls about whom men do go mad just
as indubitably as she, Valancy, was one of the girls at whom no man
ever looked twice.

"And yet," thought Valancy, summing her up with a new and merciless
conclusiveness, "she's like a dewless morning.  There's SOMETHING
lacking."



CHAPTER XI


Meanwhile the dinner in its earlier stages was dragging its slow
length along true to Stirling form.  The room was chilly, in spite
of the calendar, and Aunt Alberta had the gas-logs lighted.
Everybody in the clan envied her those gas-logs except Valancy.
Glorious open fires blazed in every room of her Blue Castle when
autumnal nights were cool, but she would have frozen to death in it
before she would have committed the sacrilege of a gas-log.  Uncle
Herbert made his hardy perennial joke when he helped Aunt
Wellington to the cold meat--"Mary, will you have a little lamb?"
Aunt Mildred told the same old story of once finding a lost ring in
a turkey's crop.  Uncle Benjamin told HIS favourite prosy tale of
how he had once chased and punished a now famous man for stealing
apples.  Second Cousin Jane described all her sufferings with an
ulcerating tooth.  Aunt Wellington admired the pattern of Aunt
Alberta's silver teaspoons and lamented the fact that one of her
own had been lost.

"It spoiled the set.  I could never get it matched.  And it was my
wedding-present from dear old Aunt Matilda."

Aunt Isabel thought the seasons were changing and couldn't imagine
what had become of our good, old-fashioned springs.  Cousin
Georgiana, as usual, discussed the last funeral and wondered,
audibly, "which of us will be the next to pass away."  Cousin
Georgiana could never say anything as blunt as "die."  Valancy
thought she could tell her, but didn't.  Cousin Gladys, likewise as
usual, had a grievance.  Her visiting nephews had nipped all the
buds off her house-plants and chivied her brood of fancy chickens--
"squeezed some of them actually to death, my dear."

"Boys will be boys," reminded Uncle Herbert tolerantly.

"But they needn't be ramping, rampageous animals," retorted Cousin
Gladys, looking round the table for appreciation of her wit.
Everybody smiled except Valancy.  Cousin Gladys remembered that.  A
few minutes later, when Ellen Hamilton was being discussed, Cousin
Gladys spoke of her as "one of those shy, plain girls who can't get
husbands," and glanced significantly at Valancy.

Uncle James thought the conversation was sagging to a rather low
plane of personal gossip.  He tried to elevate it by starting an
abstract discussion on "the greatest happiness."  Everybody was
asked to state his or her idea of "the greatest happiness."

Aunt Mildred thought the greatest happiness--for a woman--was to be
"a loving and beloved wife and mother."  Aunt Wellington thought it
would be to travel in Europe.  Olive thought it would be to be a
great singer like Tetrazzini.  Cousin Gladys remarked mournfully
that HER greatest happiness would be to be free--absolutely free--
from neuritis.  Cousin Georgiana's greatest happiness would be "to
have her dear, dead brother Richard back."  Aunt Alberta remarked
vaguely that the greatest happiness was to be found in "the poetry
of life" and hastily gave some directions to her maid to prevent
any one asking her what she meant.  Mrs. Frederick said the
greatest happiness was to spend your life in loving service for
others, and Cousin Stickles and Aunt Isabel agreed with her--Aunt
Isabel with a resentful air, as if she thought Mrs. Frederick had
taken the wind out of her sails by saying it first.  "We are all
too prone," continued Mrs. Frederick, determined not to lose so
good an opportunity, "to live in selfishness, worldliness and sin."
The other women all felt rebuked for their low ideals, and Uncle
James had a conviction that the conversation had been uplifted with
a vengeance.

"The greatest happiness," said Valancy suddenly and distinctly, "is
to sneeze when you want to."

Everybody stared.  Nobody felt it safe to say anything.  Was
Valancy trying to be funny?  It was incredible.  Mrs. Frederick,
who had been breathing easier since the dinner had progressed so
far without any outbreak on the part of Valancy began to tremble
again.  But she deemed it the part of prudence to say nothing.
Uncle Benjamin was not so prudent.  He rashly rushed in where Mrs.
Frederick feared to tread.

"Doss," he chuckled, "what is the difference between a young girl
and an old maid?"

"One is happy and careless and the other is cappy and hairless,"
said Valancy.  "You have asked that riddle at least fifty times in
my recollection, Uncle Ben.  Why don't you hunt up some new riddles
if riddle you MUST?  It is such a fatal mistake to try to be funny
if you don't succeed."

Uncle Benjamin stared foolishly.  Never in his life had he,
Benjamin Stirling, of Stirling and Frost, been spoken to so.  And
by Valancy of all people!  He looked feebly around the table to see
what the others thought of it.  Everybody was looking rather blank.
Poor Mrs. Frederick had shut her eyes.  And her lips moved
tremblingly--as if she were praying.  Perhaps she was.  The
situation was so unprecedented that nobody knew how to meet it.
Valancy went on calmly eating her salad as if nothing out of the
usual had occurred.

Aunt Alberta, to save her dinner, plunged into an account of how a
dog had bitten her recently.  Uncle James, to back her up, asked
where the dog had bitten her.

"Just a little below the Catholic church," said Aunt Alberta.

At that point Valancy laughed.  Nobody else laughed.  What was
there to laugh at?

"Is that a vital part?" asked Valancy.

"What do you mean?" said bewildered Aunt Alberta, and Mrs.
Frederick was almost driven to believe that she had served God all
her years for naught.

Aunt Isabel concluded that it was up to her to suppress Valancy.

"Doss, you are horribly thin," she said.  "You are ALL corners.  Do
you EVER try to fatten up a little?"

"No."  Valancy was not asking quarter or giving it.  "But I can
tell you where you'll find a beauty parlour in Port Lawrence where
they can reduce the number of your chins."

"Val-an-cy!"  The protest was wrung from Mrs. Frederick.  She meant
her tone to be stately and majestic, as usual, but it sounded more
like an imploring whine.  And she did not say "Doss."

"She's feverish," said Cousin Stickles to Uncle Benjamin in an
agonised whisper.  "We've thought she's seemed feverish for several
days."

"She's gone dippy, in my opinion," growled Uncle Benjamin.  "If
not, she ought to be spanked.  Yes, spanked."

"You can't spank her."  Cousin Stickles was much agitated.  "She's
twenty-nine years old."

"So there is that advantage, at least, in being twenty-nine," said
Valancy, whose ears had caught this aside.

"Doss," said Uncle Benjamin, "when I am dead you may say what you
please.  As long as I am alive I demand to be treated with
respect."

"Oh, but you know we're all dead," said Valancy, "the whole
Stirling clan.  Some of us are buried and some aren't--yet.  That
is the only difference."

"Doss," said Uncle Benjamin, thinking it might cow Valancy, "do you
remember the time you stole the raspberry jam?"

Valancy flushed scarlet--with suppressed laughter, not shame.  She
had been sure Uncle Benjamin would drag that jam in somehow.

"Of course I do," she said.  "It was good jam.  I've always been
sorry I hadn't time to eat more of it before you found me.  Oh,
LOOK at Aunt Isabel's profile on the wall.  Did you ever see
anything so funny?"

Everybody looked, including Aunt Isabel herself which of course,
destroyed it.  But Uncle Herbert said kindly, "I--I wouldn't eat
any more if I were you, Doss.  It isn't that I grudge it--but don't
you think it would be better for yourself?  Your--your stomach
seems a little out of order."

"Don't worry about my stomach, old dear," said Valancy.  "It is all
right.  I'm going to keep right on eating.  It's so seldom I get
the chance of a satisfying meal."

It was the first time any one had been called "old dear" in
Deerwood.  The Stirlings thought Valancy had invented the phrase
and they were afraid of her from that moment.  There was something
so uncanny about such an expression.  But in poor Mrs. Frederick's
opinion the reference to a satisfying meal was the worst thing
Valancy had said yet.  Valancy had always been a disappointment to
her.  Now she was a disgrace.  She thought she would have to get up
and go away from the table.  Yet she dared not leave Valancy there.

Aunt Alberta's maid came in to remove the salad plates and bring in
the dessert.  It was a welcome diversion.  Everybody brightened up
with a determination to ignore Valancy and talk as if she wasn't
there.  Uncle Wellington mentioned Barney Snaith.  Eventually
somebody did mention Barney Snaith at every Stirling function,
Valancy reflected.  Whatever he was, he was an individual that
could not be ignored.  She resigned herself to listen.  There was a
subtle fascination in the subject for her, though she had not yet
faced this fact.  She could feel her pulses beating to her finger-
tips.

Of course they abused him.  Nobody ever had a good word to say of
Barney Snaith.  All the old, wild tales were canvassed--the
defaulting cashier-counterfeiter-infidel-murderer-in-hiding legends
were thrashed out.  Uncle Wellington was very indignant that such a
creature should be allowed to exist at all in the neighbourhood of
Deerwood.  He didn't know what the police at Port Lawrence were
thinking of.  Everybody would be murdered in their beds some night.
It was a shame that he should be allowed to be at large after all
that he had done.

"What HAS he done?" asked Valancy suddenly.

Uncle Wellington stared at her, forgetting that she was to be
ignored.

"Done!  Done!  He's done EVERYTHING."

"WHAT has he done?" repeated Valancy inexorably.  "What do you KNOW
that he has done?  You're always running him down.  And what has
ever been proved against him?"

"I don't argue with women," said Uncle Wellington.  "And I don't
need proof.  When a man hides himself up there on an island in
Muskoka, year in and year out, and nobody can find out where he
came from or how he lives, or what he does there, THAT'S proof
enough.  Find a mystery and you find a crime."

"The very idea of a man named Snaith!" said Second Cousin Sarah.
"Why, the name itself is enough to condemn him!"

"I wouldn't like to meet him in a dark lane," shivered Cousin
Georgiana.

"What do you suppose he would do to you?" asked Valancy.

"Murder me," said Cousin Georgiana solemnly.

"Just for the fun of it?" suggested Valancy.

"Exactly," said Cousin Georgiana unsuspiciously.  "When there is so
much smoke there must be some fire.  I was afraid he was a criminal
when he came here first.  I FELT he had something to hide.  I am
not often mistaken in my intuitions."

"Criminal!  Oh course he's a criminal," said Uncle Wellington.
"Nobody doubts it"--glaring at Valancy.  "Why, they say he served a
term in the penitentiary for embezzlement.  I don't doubt it.  And
they say he's in with that gang that are perpetrating all those
bank robberies round the country."

"WHO say?" asked Valancy.

Uncle Wellington knotted his ugly forehead at her.  What had got
into this confounded girl, anyway?  He ignored the question.

"He has the identical look of a jail-bird," snapped Uncle Benjamin.
"I noticed it the first time I saw him."



     "'A fellow by the hand of nature marked,
       Quoted and sighed to do a deed of shame',"


declaimed Uncle James.  He looked enormously pleased over the
managing to work that quotation in at last.  He had been waiting
all his life for the chance.

"One of his eyebrows is an arch and the other is a triangle," said
Valancy.  "Is THAT why you think him so villainous?"

Uncle James lifted HIS eyebrows.  Generally when Uncle James lifted
his eyebrows the world came to an end.  This time it continued to
function.

"How do YOU know his eyebrows so well, Doss?" asked Olive, a trifle
maliciously.  Such a remark would have covered Valancy with
confusion two weeks ago, and Olive knew it.

"Yes, how?" demanded Aunt Wellington.

"I've seen him twice and I looked at him closely," said Valancy
composedly.  "I thought his face the most interesting one I ever
saw."

"There is no doubt there is something fishy in the creature's past
life," said Olive, who began to think she was decidedly out of the
conversation, which had centred so amazingly around Valancy.  "But
he can hardly be guilty of EVERYTHING he's accused of, you know."

Valancy felt annoyed with Olive.  Why should SHE speak up in even
this qualified defence of Barney Snaith?  What had she to do with
him?  For that matter, what had Valancy?  But Valancy did not ask
herself this question.

"They say he keeps dozens of cats in that hut up back on Mistawis,"
said Second Cousin Sarah Taylor, by way of appearing not entirely
ignorant of him.

Cats.  It sounded quite alluring to Valancy, in the plural.  She
pictured an island in Muskoka haunted by pussies.

"That alone shows there is something wrong with him," decreed Aunt
Isabel.

"People who don't like cats," said Valancy, attacking her dessert
with a relish, "always seem to think that there is some peculiar
virtue in not liking them."

"The man hasn't a friend except Roaring Abel," said Uncle
Wellington.  "And if Roaring Abel had kept away from him, as
everybody else did, it would have been better for--for some members
of his family."

Uncle Wellington's rather lame conclusion was due to a marital
glance from Aunt Wellington reminding him of what he had almost
forgotten--that there were girls at the table.

"If you mean," said Valancy passionately, "that Barney Snaith is
the father of Cecily Gay's child, he ISN'T.  It's a wicked lie."

In spite of her indignation Valancy was hugely amused at the
expression of the faces around that festal table.  She had not seen
anything like it since the day, seventeen years ago, when at Cousin
Gladys' thimble party, they discovered that she had got--SOMETHING--
in her head at school.  LICE in her head!  Valancy was done with
euphemisms.

Poor Mrs. Frederick was almost in a state of collapse.  She had
believed--or pretended to believe--the Valancy still supposed that
children were found in parsley beds.

"Hush--hush!" implored Cousin Stickles.

"I don't mean to hush," said Valancy perversely.  "I've hush-hushed
all my life.  I'll scream if I want to.  Don't make me want to.
And stop talking nonsense about Barney Snaith."

Valancy didn't exactly understand her own indignation.  What did
Barney Snaith's imputed crimes and misdemeanours matter to her?
And why, out of them all, did it seem most intolerable that he
should have been poor, pitiful little Cecily Gay's false lover?
For it DID seem intolerable to her.  She did not mind when they
called him a thief and a counterfeiter and jail-bird; but she could
not endure to think that he had loved and ruined Cecily Gay.  She
recalled his face on the two occasions of their chance meetings--
his twisted, enigmatic, engaging smile, his twinkle, his thin,
sensitive, almost ascetic lips, his general air of frank
daredeviltry.  A man with such a smile and lips might have murdered
or stolen but he could not have betrayed.  She suddenly hated every
one who said it or believed it of him.

"When _I_ was a young girl I never thought or spoke about such
matters, Doss," said Aunt Wellington, crushingly.

"But I'm not a young girl," retorted Valancy, uncrushed.  "Aren't
you always rubbing that into me?  And you are all evil-minded,
senseless gossips.  Can't you leave poor Cissy Gay alone?  She's
dying.  Whatever she did, God or the Devil has punished her enough
for it.  You needn't take a hand, too.  As for Barney Snaith, the
only crime he has been guilty of is living to himself and minding
his own business.  He can, it seems, get along without you.  Which
IS an unpardonable sin, of course, in your little snobocracy."
Valancy coined that concluding word suddenly and felt that it was
an inspiration.  That was exactly what they were and not one of
them was fit to mend another.

"Valancy, your poor father would turn over in his grave if he could
hear you," said Mrs. Frederick.

"I dare say he would like that for a change," said Valancy
brazenly.

"Doss," said Uncle James heavily, "the Ten Commandments are fairly
up to date still--especially the fifth.  Have you forgotten that?"

"No," said Valancy, "but I thought YOU had--especially the ninth.
Have you ever thought, Uncle James, how dull life would be without
the Ten Commandments?  It is only when things are forbidden that
they become fascinating."

But her excitement had been too much for her.  She knew, by certain
unmistakable warnings, that one of her attacks of pain was coming
on.  It must not find her there.  She rose from her chair.

"I am going home now.  I only came for the dinner.  It was very
good, Aunt Alberta, although your salad-dressing is not salt enough
and a dash of cayenne would improve it."

None of the flabbergasted silver wedding guests could think of
anything to say until the lawn gate clanged behind Valancy in the
dusk.  Then--

"She's feverish--I've said right along she was feverish," moaned
Cousin Stickles.

Uncle Benjamin punished his pudgy left hand fiercely with his pudgy
right.

"She's dippy--I tell you she's gone dippy," he snorted angrily.
"That's all there is about it.  Clean dippy."

"Oh, Benjamin," said Cousin Georgiana soothingly, "don't condemn
her too rashly.  We MUST remember what dear old Shakespeare says--
that charity thinketh no evil."

"Charity!  Poppy-cock!" snorted Uncle Benjamin.  "I never heard a
young woman talk such stuff in my life as she just did.  Talking
about things she ought to be ashamed to think of, much less
mention.  Blaspheming!  Insulting US!  What she wants is a generous
dose of spank-weed and I'd like to be the one to administer it.  H-
uh-h-h-h!"  Uncle Benjamin gulped down the half of a scalding cup
of coffee.

"Do you suppose that the mumps could work on a person that way?"
wailed Cousin Stickles.

"I opened an umbrella in the house yesterday," sniffed Cousin
Georgiana.  "I KNEW it betokened some misfortune."

"Have you tried to find out if she has a temperature?" asked Cousin
Mildred.

"She wouldn't let Amelia put the thermometer under her tongue,"
whimpered Cousin Stickles.

Mrs. Frederick was openly in tears.  All her defences were down.

"I must tell you," she sobbed, "that Valancy has been acting very
strangely for over two weeks now.  She hasn't been a bit like
herself--Christine could tell you.  I have hoped against hope that
it was only one of her colds coming on.  But it is--it must be
something worse."

"This is bringing on my neuritis again," said Cousin Gladys,
putting her hand to her head.

"Don't cry, Amelia," said Herbert kindly, pulling nervously at his
spiky grey hair.  He hated "family ructions."  Very inconsiderate
of Doss to start one at HIS silver wedding.  Who could have
supposed she had it in her?  "You'll have to take her to a doctor.
This may be only a--er--a brainstorm.  There are such things as
brainstorms nowadays, aren't there?"

"I--I suggested consulting a doctor to her yesterday," moaned Mrs.
Frederick.  "And she said she wouldn't go to a doctor--wouldn't.
Oh, surely I have had trouble enough!"

"And she WON'T take Redfern's Bitters," said Cousin Stickles.

"Or ANYTHING,' said Mrs. Frederick.  "And she's determined to go to
the Presbyterian church," said Cousin Stickles--repressing,
however, to her credit be it said, the story of the bannister.

"That proves she's dippy," growled Uncle Benjamin.  "I noticed
something strange about her the minute she came in today.  I
noticed it BEFORE today."  (Uncle Benjamin was thinking of "m-i-r-
a-z-h.")  "Everything she said today showed an unbalanced mind.
That question--'Was it a vital part?'  Was there any sense at all
in that remark?  None whatever!  There never was anything like that
in the Stirlings.  It must be from the Wansbarras."

Poor Mrs. Frederick was too crushed to be indignant.  "I never
heard of anything like that in the Wansbarras," she sobbed,

"Your father was odd enough," said Uncle Benjamin.

"Poor Pa was--peculiar," admitted Mrs. Frederick tearfully, "but
his mind was never affected."

"He talked all his life exactly as Valancy did today," retorted
Uncle Benjamin.  "And he believed he was his own great-great
grandfather born over again.  I've heard him say it.  Don't tell ME
that a man who believed a thing like THAT was ever in his right
senses.  Come, come, Amelia, stop sniffling.  Of course Doss has
made a terrible exhibition of herself today, but she's not
responsible.  Old maids are apt to fly off at a tangent like that.
If she had been married when she should have been she wouldn't have
got like this."

"Nobody wanted to marry her," said Mrs. Frederick, who felt that,
somehow, Uncle Benjamin was blaming her.

"Well, fortunately there's no outsider here," snapped Uncle
Benjamin.  "We may keep it in the family yet.  I'll take her over
to see Dr. Marsh tomorrow.  _I_ know how to deal with pig-headed
people.  Won't that be best, James?"

"We must have medical advice certainly," agreed Uncle James.

"Well, that's settled.  In the meantime, Amelia, act as if nothing
had happened and keep an eye on her.  Don't let her be alone.
Above all, don't let her sleep alone."

Renewed whimpers from Mrs. Frederick.

"I can't help it.  Night before last I suggested she'd better have
Christine sleep with her.  She positively refused--AND LOCKED HER
DOOR.  Oh, you don't know how she's changed.  She won't work.  At
least, she won't sew.  She does her usual housework, of course.
But she wouldn't sweep the parlour yesterday morning, though we
ALWAYS sweep it on Thursdays.  She said she'd wait till it was
dirty.  'Would you rather sweep a dirty room than a clean one?' I
asked her.  She said, 'Of course.  I'd see something for my labour
then.'  Think of it!"

Uncle Benjamin thought of it.

"The jar of potpourri"--Cousin Stickles pronounced it as spelled--
"has disappeared from her room.  I found the pieces in the next
lot.  She won't tell us what happened to it."

"I should never have dreamed it of Doss," said Uncle Herbert.  "She
has always seemed such a quiet, sensible girl.  A bit backward--but
sensible."

"The only thing you can be sure of in this world is the
multiplication table," said Uncle James, feeling cleverer than
ever.

"Well, let's cheer up," suggested Uncle Benjamin.  "Why are chorus
girls like fine stock raisers?"

"Why?" asked Cousi