LITMIR.BIZ

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girl said it tremulously; already she was feeling the awful gulf between a person who suffers tragedy and that other who stands by longing to help. Also Sard knew a kind of shame—for it seemed treachery to her father and the equity he maintained, to say more. What could words do? It was Sard's first experience of the great naked fact of human sorrow and shame; she knew that the only person who could help Dora would be someone who had been through a wave of tragedy like hers.

      "Words," thought Sard hotly, "are disgusting. We bandy them about and pile them up like money. We exchange them like coin of the realm." The young girl, clean and defiant of emotion as a young animal, had no mature power, that amazing power borne through sorrow and sympathy, the strange power of the healing touch, else she would have touched Dora's bowed head, put a comforting hand on the heaving shoulder. She stood silent, then once more said, helplessly, "Dora, don't you believe me, that I do truly care?"

      Suddenly there was a curious half shriek, the terrible leap of human emotion through the breaking discipline of lips and eyes—"Oh, I know you care——Oh, Miss Sard—but they'll jug him just the same—for life—for life! His chanst is gorn."

      Dora's voice then sank to a kind of moaning soliloquy. "Oh, yes, that's what they all tell me; he's killed a man, or they say he has "—the woman shot a haggard look into the girl's face. "I've thought and thought and I know from reading the papers and all that almost any rich man's son would get off," she said it bitterly, "but that isn't it—it's something else, it's that he's only done wrong once, and now he's got to live and die with the worst—oh," moaned Dora passionately, "they'd ought to be laws to save them that's got wrong into them, not to smash 'em. For life, for life!"

      No great poet could have crammed into one sentence the thing that the weeping girl crammed into these words—"for life." Gently Sard closed the door and, hardly knowing what she did, tiptoed back toward the front of the house. She looked out on the late spring foliage, on the tulips and Japanese maples a-quiver with June, on the purple fleur de lis and peonies, dewy with color against the long sparkling ribbon of the morning river ... against all that virginal clean growth with its rapturous aspiration toward the sky that feeds it, the girl heard the poor human cry, "For life—for life!"

      So this was actually happening! Life, a smooth velvet delicious thing was going on in the front of Sard's home—music, pleasure, ease and beauty, while in the back part of it life was labor and anguish and shame! This was the law under which Sard's parents and their friends had lived contentedly, it was the law under which she was expected to live contentedly. "I never will," whispered the girl fiercely, "I never, never will; these are not my laws, I am not 'under' the law."

      Sard, slowly leaving the kitchen, came upon her aunt. Miss Aurelia, with the finest and lightest of dusters, was performing various rituals with the legs of table and chairs; now she moved one thin hand in swirls over the piano top. "A piano collects dust so strangely," she explained, as if the piano were a sentient thing that made dust-collecting its object. "I've always been so glad to do the dusting," remarked Miss Aurelia for the hundredth time, "he—your father, of course, never notices but she—we—not that I want to criticise your mother, that would be impossible, only she-we—at that time—that is to say—in any emergency I would naturally; of course, some servants were careful and others not. I had once," said Miss Aurelia, with the air of beginning a new subject, "I had an—an aunt," she whispered the thing mysteriously, "she—er—hated dust —— Sard, you're twisting your ring—you look—is anything wrong?"

      Sard, motioning toward the kitchen, spoke in a low voice. "Aunt Reely, that boy, Terence O'Brien, is Dora's only brother; she helped educate him; there isn't anyone but those two —— Isn't it too terrible?"

      Miss Aurelia lifted a lamp off the table, dusted where it had been and put it back again; in doing so the silk shade toppled and fell. Miss Aurelia, frowning and gasping, treated the incident like a catastrophe, something to be met with firmness and an intake of breath. When she had solemnly adjusted all as it had been again, she took up the subject of dust. "It's the open fires," she remarked gloomily; "sometimes I think we should never have—a land where there is no dust, that is how I always think of Heaven! Yes, Sard, I know that—er—she—he, of course, it was a regular murder, such as you read about, he is, you see, a criminal, my dear, and that, of course, makes you—me—us feel a natural revulsion." Miss Aurelia stood up; the sunlight fell upon her gown of a rather sentimental blue with white ruffles, her fair white skin was noticeable even in the bald morning light, her rabbity mouth somehow too full of teeth, paused unctuously, with drama on the subject in hand.

      Sard, strumming a few chords on the piano, looked thoughtfully at her aunt. "Shall I bring in some of those big Japanese iris?" she asked. "Minga's coming to-night, did I tell you? I want things to look jolly. The old dear hasn't been here since that holiday week before Mother" —Sard never could finish the sentence— "Mother died. Do you suppose Father will let us have the small sedan altogether? Minga is used to her own car; she fusses with any machine they've got."

      Something that had been hanging on Miss Aurelia's mind hung there still; this slangy sort of talk, the planning for Minga Gerould's visit Aunt Aurelia hailed with delight. This was more as it should be, better than Sard's behavior since she had remained home from college after her mother's death. It was the kind of thing, some of it, that Miss Aurelia had grown to believe in while she deprecated it. American young girls, of course, came of a nobly material race, everyone avowed that America was very great and the fact of the young people having no manners and no respect for age and no morals and no loyalty to life—well, Miss Aurelia thought it was only the other countries who were jealous who said such things. American young girls came of a nobly material race. Americans were so practical, so anxious to get ahead—everyone seemed so anxious that the young people shouldn't be high-brow. But then Sard had a queer, Miss Aurelia thought almost common, way of noticing servants and poor people, their troubles and all that. It wasn't good or even religious to think too much. For instance, the new man on the place. Miss Aurelia didn't think it quite nice or "young" to be interested in him. Miss Aurelia had often spoken to a fat, calm friend, Mrs. Spoyd, about these things, and Mrs. Spoyd had sighed, "I know what you mean, dear. Did you hear about the little Gringlon girl? Well, of course, it may not be true. I heard it from their dressmaker, but it seems she noticed everything and—er—was crazy for all kinds of information. No, dear, of course, Sard ought not to be noticing anything but a good time at her age. Girls should only be interested in a good time. They shouldn't be interested in—er—unpleasant things."

      So Miss Aurelia overlooked the slang. It was all right for Sard to be a little slangy; so much better than sitting up in that tower room and thinking about murderers. It would make her more "popular" to have Minga Gerould go to dances and such things with her. "America is a wonderful country," said Miss Aurelia to herself, "and I think it is our 'popularity.' Have you ever noticed," to Mrs. Spoyd, "how awful it is for an American girl or man not to be popular? Don't you think that our great men like Theodore Roosevelt and—er—Barnum, are just as popular in Heaven as here?

      "I think God meant us to be—er—popular, don't you? Just see," added Miss Aurelia with a flash of insight, "how unpopular all of our statesmen have been who have been in any way unique or—er—unusual. Americans, the good, patriotic kind, have always been very popular."

      "Yes, I always feel so sorry for a young girl who isn't popular," purred Mrs. Spoyd.

      "I wouldn't worry about that boy, dear, now," advised Miss Aurelia, with all the mature effects of voice and manner of the person who is not truly grown up. "We do all we can to make the prisoners what they should be, and I have heard that many tramps—er—like to go to prison." She stood up, sighing. "There—this room at last looks respectable;" her narrow, rather smoky-dull eyes roved over Sard. "Why don't you put on your turquoise sweater and tam, the pretty one with the blue pompom? I will look after everything. No, dear, I don't think you'd better use the car without asking Brother."

      "Will you ask him?" said Sard shyly.

      "I ask?" Miss Aurelia said nervously. "Why—you—he—I—don't you think, Sard,"—with a kind of reproachful righteousness—"don't you think it ought to come from you, his daughter? Now I must see

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