with which he left her. Perhaps if she had been "his type of girl," her
image would not have faded so quickly.

There was but one thing for which he was not grateful to her. She had
fixed the name of Herbert Strange upon him in such a way that he was
unable to shake it off. His own first name was the unobjectionable
monosyllable John--though he had always been known by his less familiar
middle name, Norrie--and as John Ford he could have faced the world with a
certain amount of bluff. He meant to begin the attempt immediately on
reaching London, but the difficulty of appearing in a hotel under one name
while everything he brought with him bore another was patent to him at
once. Similarly, he could not receive the correspondence incidental to his
outfit and his passage under the name of Ford in a house where he was
known as Strange. Having applied for his passage as Strange, he knew it
would create comment if he asked to be put down in the books as Ford. Do
what he would he was obliged to appear on the printed list of second-cabin
passengers as Herbert Strange, and he had made at least one acquaintance
who would expect to call him so after they reached land.

This was a little, clean-shaven man, in the neighborhood of sixty, always
dressed at sea as he probably dressed on shore. He wore nothing but black,
with a white shirt and a ready-made black bow-tie. He might have been a
butler, an elderly valet, or a member of some discreet religious order in
street costume. Ford had heard a flippant young Frenchman speak of him as
an "ancien curé, qui a fait quelque bêtise"; and indeed there was about
him that stamp of the ecclesiastic which is sometimes ineffaceable.

"I call myself Durand," he said to Ford, using the conveniently ambiguous
French idiom, "je m'appelle Durand."

"Et je m'appelle Strange, I call myself Strange," Ford had replied,
claiming the name for the first time without hesitation, but feeling the
irrevocable nature of the words as soon as he had uttered them.

Out of the crowd of second-rate Europeans of all races who made up the
second cabin, the man who called himself Strange had selected the man who
called himself Durand by some obscure instinct of affinity. "He looks like
an old chap who could give one information," was Strange's own way of
putting it, not caring to confess that he was feeling after a bit of
sympathy. But the give and take of information became the basis of their
friendship, and imparted the first real stimulus to the young man's
awkward efforts to use his mind.

Monsieur Durand had been thirty years in the Argentine, observing the
place and the people, native and foreign, with the impartial shrewdness
only possible to one who sought little for himself. It was a pleasure to
share the fruits of his experience with one so eager to learn, for young
men were not in the habit of showing him deference. He could tell Mr.
Strange many things that would be to his advantage--what to do--what to
avoid--what sort of place to live in--what he ought to pay--and what sort
of company to keep.

Yes, he knew the firm of Stephens and Jarrott--an excellent house. There
was no Mr. Stephens now, only a Mr. Jarrott. Mr. Stephens had belonged to
the great days of American enterprise in the southern hemisphere, to the
time of Wheelwright, and Halsey, and Hale. The Civil War had put an end to
that. Mr. Jarrott had come later--a good man, not generally understood. He
had suffered a great loss a few years ago in the death of his
brother-in-law and partner, Mr. Colfax. Mrs. Colfax, a pretty little
woman, who hadn't old age in her blood either--one could see that--had
gone back to the United States with her child--but a child!--blond as an
angel--altogether darling--_tout à fait mignonne_. Monsieur Durand thought
he remembered hearing that Mrs. Colfax had married again, but he couldn't
say for certain. What would you? One heard so many things. He knew less of
the family since the last boy died--the boy to whom he gave lessons in
Spanish and French. Death hadn't spared the household--taking the three
sons one after another and leaving father and mother alone. It was a
thousand pities Mrs. Colfax had taken the little girl away. They loved her
as if she had been their own--especially after the boys died. An excellent
house! Mr. Strange couldn't do better than seek an entry there--it is I
who tell you so--_c'est moi qui vous le dis_.

All this was said in very good English, with occasional lapses into
French, in a soft, benevolent voice, with slow benedictory movements of
the hands, more and more suggestive of an ecclesiastic _en civile_--or
under a cloud. Strange stole an occasional glance into the delicate,
clear-cut face, where the thin lips were compressed into permanent lines
of pain, and the sunken brown eyes looked out from under scholarly brows
with the kind of hopeful anguish a penitent soul might feel in the midst
of purifying flames. He remembered again that the flippant young Frenchman
had said, "Un ancien curé, qui a fait quelque bêtise." Was it possible
that some tragic sin lay under this gentle life? And was the
four-funnelled, twin-screwed _Parana_ but a ghostly ship bearing a cargo
of haunted souls into their earthly purgatory?

"But listen, monsieur," the old man began next day. But listen! There
would be difficulties. Stephens and Jarrott employed only picked men, men
with some experience--except for the mere manual labor such as the
Italians could perform. Wouldn't it be well for Mr. Strange to qualify
himself a little before risking a refusal? Ah, but how? Monsieur Durand
would explain. There was first the question of Spanish. No one could get
along in the Argentine without a working knowledge of that tongue.
Monsieur Durand himself gave lessons in it--and in French--but in the
English and American colonies of Buenos Aires exclusively. There were
reasons why he did not care to teach among Catholics, though he himself
was a fervent one, and he hoped--repentant. He pronounced the last word
with some emphasis, as though to call Strange's attention to it. If his
young friend would give him the pleasure of taking a few lessons, they
could begin even now. It would while away the time on the voyage. He had
his own method of teaching, a method based on the Berlitz system, but not
borrowed from it, and, he ventured to say, possessing its own good
points. For example: _el tabaco--la pipa--los cigarillos. Que es esto?
Esto es la pipa_. Very simple. In a few weeks' time the pupil is carrying
on conversations.

It would be an incalculable advantage to Mr. Strange if he could enter on
his Argentine life with some command of the vernacular. It might even be
well to defer his search for permanent employment until he could have that
accomplishment to his credit. If he possessed a little money--even a very
little--Oh, he did? Then so much the better. He need not live on it
entirely, but it would be something to fall back on while getting the
rudiments of his education. In the mean time he could learn a little about
wool if he picked up jobs--Oh, very humble ones!--they were always to be
had by the young and able-bodied--at the Mercado Central, one of the great
wool-markets of the world. He could earn a few pesetas, acquire practical
experience, and fit himself out in Spanish, all at the same time.

And he could live with relative economy. Monsieur Durand could explain
that too. In fact, he might get board and lodging in the same house as
himself, with Mrs. Wilson who conducted a modest home for "gentlemen
only." Mrs. Wilson was a Protestant--what they called a Methodist, he
believed--but her house was clean, with a few flowers in the patio, very
different from the frightful conventillos in which the poor were obliged
to herd. If Mr. Strange thought it odd that he, Monsieur Durand, should be
living beneath a Protestant roof--well, there were reasons which were
difficult to explain.

Later on, perhaps, Mr. Strange might take a season on some great sheep
estancia out in the Camp, where there were thousands of herds that were
thousands strong. Monsieur Durand could help him in that too. He could
introduce him to wealthy proprietors whose sons he had taught. It would be
a hard life, but it need not be for long. He would live in a mud hut,
dirty, isolated, with no companionship but that of the Italian laborers
and their womenkind. But the outdoor existence would do him good; the air
over the pampas was like wine; and the food would not be as bad as he
might expect. There would be an abundance of excellent meat, chiefly
mutton, it was true, which when cooked _à_ la guacho--_carne concuero_,
they called it in the Camp--roasted in the skin so as to keep all the
juices in the meat--! A gesture of the hands, accompanied by a succulent
inspiration between the teeth, gave Strange to understand that there was
one mitigation at least to life on an Argentine estancia.

To come into actual contact with the sheep, to know Oxfords, Cheviots,
Leicesters, and Black-faced Downs, to assist at the feedings and washings
and doctorings and shearings, to follow the crossings and recrossings and
crossings again, that bred new varieties as if they were roses, to trace
the processes by which the Argentine pampas supply novel resources to the
European manufacturer, and the European manufacturer turns out the smart
young man of London or New York, with his air of wearing "the very
latest"--all this would not only give Strange a pleasing sense of being at
the root of things, but form a sort of apprenticeship to his trade.

*       *       *       *       *

The men had not yet finished their hour of siesta, but Strange himself was
at work. Ten minutes were sufficient for his own snack, and he never
needed rest. Moreover, he was still too new to his position to do other
than glory in the fact that he was a free being, doing a man's work, and
earning a man's wage. Out in the Camp he had been too desolate to feel
that, but here in Buenos Aires, at the very moment when the great city was
waking to the knowledge of her queenship in the southern world--when the
commercial hordes of the north were sweeping down in thousands of ships
across the equator to outdo each other in her markets, it was an inspiring
thing merely to be alive and busy. He was as proud of Stephens and
Jarrott's long brick shed, where the sun beat pitilessly on the corrugated
iron roof, and the smell of wool nearly sickened him, as if it had been a
Rothschild's counting-house. His position there was just above the lowest;
but his enthusiasm was independent of trivial things like that. How could
he lounge about, taking siestas, when work was such a pleasure in itself?
The shed of which he had the oversight was a model of its kind, not so
much because his ambition designed to make it so, as because his ardor
could make it nothing else.

The roar of dock traffic through the open windows drowned everything but
the loudest sounds, so that busily working, he heard nothing, and paid no
attention, when some one stopped behind him. He had turned accidentally,
humming to himself in the sheer joy of his task, when the presence of the
stranger caused him to blush furiously beneath his tan. He drew himself
up, like a soldier to attention. He had never seen the head of the firm
that employed him, but he had heard a young Englishman describe him as
"looking like a wooden man just coming into life," so that he was enabled
to recognize him now. He did look something like a wooden man, in that the
long, lean face, of the tone of parchment, was marked by the few, deep,
almost perpendicular folds that give all the expression there is to a
Swiss or German medieval statue of a saint or warrior in painted oak. One
could see it was a face that rarely smiled, though there was plenty of
life in the deep-set, gray-blue eyes, together with a force of cautious,
reserved, and possibly timid, sympathy. Of the middle height and slender,
with hair just turning from iron-gray to gray, immaculate in white duck,
and wearing a dignified Panama, he stood looking at Strange--who, tall and
stalwart in his greasy overalls, held his head high in conscious pride in
his position in the shed--as Capital might look at Labor. It seemed a long
time before Mr Jarrott spoke--the natural harshness of his voice softened
by his quiet manner.

"You're in charge of this gang?"

"Yes, sir."

There was an embarrassed pause. As though not knowing what to say next,
Mr. Jarrott's gaze travelled down the length of the shed to where the
Italians, rubbing their sleepy eyes, were preparing for work again.

"You're an American, I believe?"

"Yes, sir."

"How old are you?"

"Not quite twenty-six."

"What's your name?"

"Herbert Strange!"

"Ah? One of the Stranges of Virginia?"

"No, sir."

There was another long pause, during which the older man's eyes wandered
once more over the shed and the piles of wool, coming back again to
Strange.

"You should pick up a little Spanish."

"I've been studying it. Hablo Español, pero no muy bien."

Mr. Jarrott looked at him for a minute in surprise.

"So much the better--tanto mejor," he said, after a brief pause, and
passed on.




VIII



He was again thinking how easy it had been, as he stood, more than three
years later, on the bluffs of Rosario, watching the sacks of wheat glide
down the long chute--full seventy feet--into the hold of the _Walmer
Castle_. The sturdy little Italians who carried the bags from the
warehouse in long single file might have been those he had superintended
in the wool-shed in Buenos Aires in the early stages of his rise. But he
was not superintending these. He superintended the superintendents of
those who superintended them. Tired with his long day in the office, he
had come out toward the end of the afternoon not only to get a breath of
the fresh air off the Parana, but to muse, as he often did, over the odd
spectacle of the neglected, half-forgotten Spanish settlement, that had
slumbered for two hundred years, waking to the sense of its destiny as a
factor of importance in the modern world. Wheat had created Chicago and
Winnipeg Adam-like from the ground; but it was rejuvenating Rosario de
Santa Fé Faust-like, with its golden elixir. It interested the man who
called himself Herbert Strange--resident manager of Stephens and Jarrott's
great wheat business in this outlet of the great wheat provinces--to watch
the impulse by which Decrepitude rose and shook itself into Youth. As yet
the process had scarcely advanced beyond the early stages of surprise.
The dome of the seventeenth-century Renaissance cathedral accustomed for
five or six generations to look down on low, one-storied Spanish dwellings
surrounding patios almost Moorish in their privacy, seemed to lift itself
in some astonishment over warehouses and flour-mills; while the mingling
of its sweet old bells with the creaking of cranes and the shrieks of
steam was like that chorus of the centuries in which there can be no
blending of the tones.

Strange felt himself so much a part of the rejuvenescence that the
incongruity gave him no mental nor æsthetic shock. If in his present
position he took a less naïve pride than in that of three years ago, he
was conscious none the less of a deep satisfaction in having his part,
however humble, in the exercise of the world's energies. It gave him a
sense of oneness with the great primal forces--with the river flowing
beneath him, two hundred miles to the Atlantic, with the wheat fields
stretching behind him to the confines of Brazil and the foothills of the
Andes--to be a moving element in this galvanizing of new life into the
dormant town, in this finding of new riches in the waiting earth. There
was, too, a kind of companionship in the steamers moored to the red buoys
in the river, waiting their turns to come up to the insufficient quays and
be loaded. They bore such names as _Devonshire_, _Ben Nevis_, and
_Princess of Wales_. They would go back to the countries where the speech
was English, and the ideals something like his own. They would go back,
above all, to the north, to the north that he yearned for with a yearning
to which time brought no mitigation, to the north which was coming to mean
for him what heaven means to a soul outside the scope of redemption.

It was only on occasions that this sentiment got possession of him
strongly. He was generally able to keep it down. Hard work, assisted by
his natural faculty for singleness of purpose and concentration of
attention, kept him from lifting the eyes of his heart toward the
unattainable. Moreover, he had developed an enthusiasm, genuine in its
way, for the land of his adoption. The elemental hugeness of its
characteristics--its rivers fifty to a hundred miles in width, its farms a
hundred thousand acres in extent, its sheep herds and cattle herds
thousands to the count--were of the kind to appeal to an ardent, strenuous
nature. There was an exhilarating sense of discovery in coming thus early
to one of the world's richest sources of supply at a minute when it was
only beginning to be tapped. Out in the Camp there was an impression of
fecundity, of earth and animal alike, that seem to relegate poverty and
its kindred ills to a past that would never return; while down in the Port
the growth of the city went on like the bursting of some magic, monstrous
flower. It was impossible not to share in some degree the pride of the
braggart Argentine.

It was difficult, too, not to love a country in which the way had been
made so smooth for him. While he knew that he brought to his work those
qualities most highly prized by men of business, he was astonished
nevertheless at the rapidity with which he climbed. Men of long experience
in the country had been more than once passed over, while he got the
promotion for which they had waited ten and fifteen years. He admired the
way in which for the most part they concealed their chagrin, but now and
then some one would give it utterance.

"Hello, grafter!" a little man had said to him, on the day when his
present appointment had become known among his colleagues.

The speaker was coming down the stairs of the head office in the Avenida
de Mayo as Strange was going up. His name was Green, and though he had
been twenty years in Argentine, he haled from Boston. Short and stout,
with gray hair, a gray complexion, a gray mustache, and wearing gray
flannels, with a gray felt hat, he produced a general impression of
neutrality. Strange would have gone on his way unheeding had not the
snarling tone arrested him. He had ignored this sort of insult more than
once; but he thought the time had come for ending it. He turned on an
upper step, looking down on the ashy-faced little man, to whom he had once
been subordinate and who was now subordinate to him.

"Hello--what?" he asked, with an air of quiet curiosity.

"I said, Hello, grafter," Green repeated, with bravado.

"Why?"

"I guess you know that as well as I do."

"I don't. What is it? Out with it. Fire away."

His tranquil air of strength had its effect in overawing the little man,
though the latter stood firm and began to explain.

"A grafter is a fellow with an underground pull for getting hold of what
belongs to some one else. At least that's what I understand by it--"

"It's very much what I understand by it, too. But have I ever got hold of
anything of yours?"

"Yes, confound you! You've taken my job--the job I've waited for ever
since 1885."

"Did waiting for it make it yours? If so, you would have come by it more
easily than I did. I worked for it."

"Worked for it? Haven't I worked for it, too? Haven't I been in this
office for going on seventeen years? Haven't I done what they've paid me
for--?"

"I dare say. But I've done twice what they've paid me for. That's the
secret of my pull, and I don't mind giving it away. You mayn't like
it--some fellows don't; but you'll admit it it's a pull you could have
had, as well as I. Look here, Green," he continued, in the same quiet
tone, "I'm sorry for you. If I were in your place, I dare say I should
feel as you do. But if I _were_ in your place, I'll be hanged if I
shouldn't make myself fit to get out of it. You're not fit--and that's the
only reason why you aren't going as resident manager to Rosario. You're
labelled with the year '1885,' as if you were a bottle of champagne--and
you've forgotten that champagne is a wine that gets out of date. You're a
good chap--quite as good as your position--but you're not better than your
position--and when you are you won't be left in it any longer."

In speaking in this way the man who had been Norrie Ford was consciously
doing violence to himself. His natural tendency was to be on friendly
terms with those around him, and he had no prompting stronger than the
liking to be liked. In normal conditions he was always glad to do a
kindness; and when he hurt any one's feelings he hurt his own still more.
Even now, though he felt justified in giving little Green to understand
his intoleration of impertinence, he was obliged to fortify himself by
appealing to his creed that he owed no consideration to any one. Little
Green was protected by a whole world organized in his defence; Norrie Ford
had been ruined by that world, while Herbert Strange had been born outside
it. With a temperament like that of a quiet mastiff, he was forced to turn
himself into something like a wolf.

In spite of the fact that little Green's account of the brief meeting on
the stairs presented it in the light of the castigation he had
administered to "that confounded upstart from nobody knows where," Strange
noticed that it made the clerks in the office, most of whom had been his
superiors as Green had been, less inclined to bark at his heels. He got
respect from them, even if he could not win popularity--and from
popularity, in any case, he had been shut out from the first. No man can
be popular who works harder than anybody else, shuns companionship, and
takes his rare amusements alone. He had been obliged to do all three,
knowing in advance that it would create for him a reputation of an "ugly
brute" in quarters whence he would have been glad to get good-will.

Finding the lack of popularity a safeguard not only against prying
curiosity, but against inadvertent self-betrayal, it was with some
misgiving that he saw his hermit-like seclusion threatened, as he rose
higher in the business and consequently in the social--scale. In the
English-speaking colony of Buenos Aires the one advance is likely to bring
about the other--especially in the case of a good-looking young man,
evidently bound to make his mark, and apparently of respectable
antecedents. The first menace of danger had come from Mr. Jarrott himself,
who had unexpectedly invited his intelligent employee to lunch with him at
a club, in order to talk over a commission with which Strange was to be
intrusted. On this occasion he was able to stammer his way out of the
invitation; but when later, Mr. Skinner, the second partner, made a like
proposal, he was caught without an excuse, being obliged, with some
confusion, to eat his meal in a fashionable restaurant in the Calle
Florida. Oddly enough, both his refusal on the one occasion and his
acceptance on the other obtained him credit with his elders and superiors,
as a modest young fellow, too shy to seize an honor, and embarrassed when
it was thrust upon him.

To Strange both occurrences were so alarming that he put himself into a
daily attitude of defence, fearing similar attack from Mr. Martin, the
third member of the firm. He, however, made no sign; and the bomb was
thrown by his wife. It came in the shape of a card informing Mr. Strange
that on a certain evening, a few weeks hence, Mrs. Martin would be at
home, at her residence in Hurlingham. It was briefly indicated that there
would be dancing, and he was requested to answer if he pleased. The
general information being engraved, his particular name was written in a
free bold hand, which he took to be that of one of the daughters of the
family.

Though he did his best to keep his head, there was everything in that bit
of pasteboard to throw him into a state of something like excitement. Not
only were the doors of the world Norrie Ford had known being thrown open
to Herbert Strange, but the one was being moved by the same thrill--the
thrill of the feminine--that had been so powerful with the other. He was
growing more susceptible to it in proportion as it seemed forbidden--just
as a man in a desert island may dream of the delights of wine.

He had looked at the Misses Martin, but had never supposed they could
fling a glance at him. He had seen them at the public gathering-places--in
their box at the opera, in the grand stand at the Jockey Club, in their
carriage at Palermo or in the Florida. They were handsome girls--blonde
and dashing--whose New York air was in pleasant contrast to the graceful
indolence or stolid repose of the dark-eyed ladies of the Argentine, too
heavily bejewelled and too consciously dressed according to the Paris
mode. Strange said of the Misses Martin, as he had said of Wild Olive,
that they were "not his type of girl"--but they were girls--they were
American girls--they were bright, lively girls, representing the very
poetry and romance of the world that had turned him out.

It was a foregone conclusion that he should decline their invitation, and
he did so; but the mere occasion for doing it gave his mind an impetus in
the direction in which he had been able hitherto to check it. He began
again to think of the feminine, to dream of it, to long for it. For the
time being it was the feminine in the abstract--without features or
personality. As far as it took form at all it was with the dainty,
nestling seductiveness that belonged to what he called his "type"--a charm
that had nothing in common with the forest grace of the Wild Olive or the
dash of the Misses Martin.

Now and then he caught glimpses of it, but it was generally out of reach.
Soft eyes, of the velvety kind that smote him most deliciously, would lift
their light upon him through the casement of some old Spanish residence,
or from the daily procession of carriages moving slowly along the palm
avenue at Palermo or in the Florida. When this happened he would have a
day or two of acting foolishly, in the manner of the Bonarense bucks. He
would stand for hours of his leisure time--if he could get away from the
office at the minute of the fashionable promenade--on the pavement of the
Florida, or under a palm-tree in the park, waiting for a particular
carriage to drive round again and again and again, while he returned the
sweet gaze which the manners of the country allow an unknown lady to
bestow, as a rose is allowed to shed its beauty. This being done, he
would go away, and realize that he had been making himself ridiculous.

Once the incarnation of his dreams came so near him that it was actually
within his grasp. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil dangled its
fruit right before his eyes in the person of Mademoiselle Hortense, who
sang at the Café Florian, while the clients, of whom he was sometimes one,
smoked and partook of refreshments. She was just the little round, soft,
dimpling, downy bundle of youth and love he so often saw in his mind's
eye, and so rarely in reality, and he was ready to fall in love with any
one. The mutual acquaintance was formed, as a matter of course, over the
piece of gold he threw into the tambourine, from which, as she passed from
table to table, she was able to measure her hearer's appreciation of art.
Those were the days in which he first began to be able to dress well, and
to have a little money to throw away. For ten days or a fortnight he threw
it away in considerable sums, being either in love or in a condition like
it. He respected Mademoiselle Hortense, and had sympathy with her in her
trials. She was desperately sick of her roving life as he was of Mrs.
Wilson's boarding-house. She was as eager to marry and settle down as he
to have a home. The subject was not exactly broached between them, but
they certainly talked round it. The decisive moment came on the night when
her troupe was to sail for Montevideo. In the most delicate way in the
world she gave him to understand that she would remain even at the
eleventh hour if he were to say the word. She might be on the deck, she
might be in her berth, and it still would not be too late. He left her at
nine, and she was to sail at eleven. During the two intervening hours he
paced the town, a prey to hopes, fears, temptations, distresses. To do him
justice, it was her broken heart he thought of, not his own. To him she
was only one of many possibilities; to her, he was the chance of a
lifetime. She might never, he said to himself, "fall into the clutches of
so decent a chap again." It was a wild wrestle between common sense and
folly--so wild that he was relieved to hear a clock strike eleven, and to
know she must have sailed.

The incident sobered him by showing him how near and how easily he could
come to a certain form of madness. After that he worked harder than ever,
and in the course of time got his appointment at Rosario. It was a great
"rise," not only in position and salary, but also in expectations. Mr.
Martin had been resident manager at Rosario before he was taken into
partnership--so who could tell what might happen next?

The first intimation of the change was conveyed by Mr. Jarrott in a manner
characteristically casual. Strange, being about to leave the private
office one day, after a consultation on some matter of secondary import,
was already half-way to the door, while Mr. Jarrott himself was stooping
to replace a book in the revolving bookcase that stood beside his chair.

"By-the-way," he said, without looking up, "Jenkins is going to represent
the house in New York. We think you had better take his place at Rosario."

Strange drew himself up to attention. He knew the old man liked his
subordinates to receive momentous orders as if they came in the routine of
the day.

"Very well, sir," he said, quietly, betraying no sign of his excitement
within. Raising himself, Mr. Jarrott looked about uneasily, as if trying
to find something else to say, while Strange began again to move toward
the door.

"And Mrs. Jarrott--"

Strange stopped so still that the senior partner paused with that air of
gentlemanly awkwardness--something like an Englishman's--which he took on
when he had firmly made up his mind.

"Mrs. Jarrott," he continued, "begs me to say she hopes you will--a--come
and lunch with us on Sunday next."

There was a long pause, during which the young man searched wildly for
some formula that would soften his point-blank refusal.

"Mrs. Jarrott is awfully kind," he began at last to stammer, "but if she
would excuse me--"

"She will expect you on Sunday at half-past twelve."

The words were uttered with that barely perceptible emphasis which, as the
whole house knew, implied that all had been said.

*       *       *       *       *

In the end the luncheon was no formidable affair. Except for his fear,
lest it should be the thin edge of the wedge of that American social life
which it would be perilous for him to enter, he would have enjoyed this
peep into a comfortable home, after his long exile from anything of the
sort. In building his house at Palermo, Mr. Jarrott had kept, in the
outlines at least, to the old Spanish style of architecture, as being most
suited to the history and climate of the country, though the wealthy
Argentines themselves preferred to have their residences look--like their
dresses, jewels, and carriages--as if they had come from Paris. The
interior patio was spacious, shaded with vines, and gay with flowers,
while birds, caged or free, were singing everywhere. The rooms
surrounding it were airy and cool, and adapted to American standards of
comfort. In the dining-room mahogany, damask, crystal, and silver gave
Strange an odd feeling of having been wafted back to the days and usages
of the boyhood of Norrie Ford.

As the only guest he found himself seated on Mrs. Jarrott's right, and
opposite Miss Queenie Jarrott, the sister of the head of the house. The
host, as his manner was, spoke little. Miss Jarrott, too, only looked at
Strange across the table, smiling at him with her large, thin,
upward-curving smile, comic in spite of itself, and with a certain pathos,
since she meant it to be charged with sentiment. Over the party at table,
over the elderly men-servants who waited on them, over the room, over the
patio, there was--except for the singing of the birds--the hush that
belongs to a household that never hears the noise or the laughter of
youth.

Mrs. Jarrott took the brunt of the conversation on herself She was a
beautiful woman, faded now with the pallor that comes to northern people
after a long residence in the sub-tropical south, and languid from the
same cause. Her handsome hazel eyes looked as if they had been used to
weeping, though they conserved a brightness that imparted animation to her
face. A white frill round her throat gave the only relief to her plain
black dress, but she wore many handsome rings, after the Argentine fashion
as well as a brooch and earrings of black pearls.

She began by asking her guest if it was true, as Mr. Jarrott had informed
her, that he was not one of the Stranges of Virginia. She thought he must
be. It would be so odd if he wasn't. There _were_ Stranges in Virginia,
and had been for a great many generations. In fact, her own family, the
Colfaxes, had almost intermarried with them. When she said almost, she
meant that they had intermarried with the same families--the Yorkes, the
Endsleighs and the Poles. If Mr. Strange did belong to the Virginia
Stranges, she was sure they could find relatives in common. Oh, he didn't?
Well, it seemed really as if he must. If Mr. Strange came from New York,
he probably knew the Wrenns. Her own mother was a Wrenn. She had been Miss
Wrenn before she was Mrs. Colfax. He thought he had heard of them? Oh,
probably. They were well-known people--at least they had been in the old
days--though New York was so very much changed. She rarely went back there
now, the voyage was so long, but when she did she was quite bewildered.
Her own family used to be so conservative, keeping to a little circle of
relatives and friends that rarely went north of Boston or south of
Philadelphia; but now when she made them a visit she found them surrounded
by a lot of people who had never been heard of before. She thought it a
pity that in a country where there were so few distinctions, those which
existed shouldn't be observed.

It was a relief to Strange when the sweet, languorous monologue,
punctuated from time to time by a response from himself, or an
interjectory remark from one of the others, came to an end, and they
proceeded to the patio for coffee.

It was served in a corner shaded by flowering vines, and presided over by
a huge green and gray parrot in a cage. The host and hostess being denied
this form of refreshment took advantage of the moment to stroll arm in arm
around the court, leaving Miss Jarrott in tête-à-tête with Strange. He
noticed that as this lady led the way her figure was as lithe as a young
girl's and her walk singularly graceful. "No one is ever old with a
carriage like yours," Miss Jarrott had been told, and she believed it. She
dressed and talked according to her figure, and, had it not been for
features too heavily accentuated in nose and chin, she might have produced
an impression of eternal spring-tide. As it was, the comic papers would
have found her cruelly easy to caricature, had she been a statesman. The
parrot screamed at her approach, croaking out an air, slightly off the
key:

/P
"Up and down the ba-by goes,
Turning out its lit-tle ..."
P/

Tempted to lapse into prose, it proceeded to cry:

"Wa-al, Polly, how are you to-day? Wa-al, pretty well for an old gal,"
after which there was a minute of inarticulate grumbling. When coffee was
poured, and the young man's cigarette alight, Miss Jarrott seized the
opportunity which her sister-in-law's soft murmur at the table had not
allowed her.

"It's really funny you should be Mr. Strange, because I've known a young
lady of the same name. That is, I haven't known her exactly, but I've
known about her."

Not to show his irritation at the renewal of the subject, Strange presumed
she was one of the Stranges of Virginia, with right and title to be so
called.

"She is and she isn't," Miss Jarrot replied. "I know you'll think it funny
to hear me speak so; but I can't explain I'm like that. I can't always
explain. I say lots and lots of things that people just have to interpret
for themselves It's funny I should be like that, isn't it? I wonder why?
Can you tell me why? And this Miss Strange--I never knew her really--not
really--but I feel as if I had. I always feel that way about friends of
friends of mine. I feel as if they were my friends, too. I'd go through
fire and water for them. Of course that's just an expression but you know
what I mean, now don't you?"

Having been assured on that point, she continued:

"I'm afraid you'll find us a very quiet household, Mr. Strange, but we're
in mourning. That is, Mrs. Jarrott is in mourning; and when those dear to
me are in mourning I always feel that I'm in mourning, too. I'm like that.
I never can tell why it is, but--I'm like that. My sister-in-law has just
lost her sister-in-law. Of course that's no relation to me, is it? And yet
I feel as if it was. I've always called Mrs. Colfax my sister-in-law, and
I've taught her little girl to call me Aunt Queenie. They lived here once.
Mr. Colfax was Mrs. Jarrott's brother and Mr. Jarrott's partner. The
little girl was born here. It was a great loss to my brother when Mr.
Colfax died. Mrs. Colfax went back to New York and married again. That was
a blow, too; so we haven't been on the same friendly terms of late years.
But now I hope it will be different. I'm like that. I always hope. It's
funny, isn't it? No matter what happens, I always think there's a silver
lining to the cloud. Now, why should I be like that? Why shouldn't I
despair, like other people?"

Strange ventured the suggestion that she had been born with a joyous
temperament.

"Wa-al, pretty well for an old gal!" screamed the parrot ending in a
croaking laugh.

"I'm sure I don't know," Miss Jarrott mused. "Everybody is different,
don't you think? And yet it sometimes seems to me that no one can be so
different as I am. I always hope and hope; and you see, in this case I've
been justified. We're going to have our little girl again. She's coming to
make us a long, long visit. Her name is Evelyn; and once we get her here
we hope she'll stay. Who knows? There may be something to keep her here.
You never can tell about that. She's an orphan, with no one in the world
but a stepfather, and he's blind. So who has a better right to her? I
always think that people who have a right to other people should have
them, don't you? Besides, he's going to Wiesbaden, to a great oculist
there, so that Evelyn will come to us as her natural protectors. She's
nearly eighteen now, and she wasn't eight when she left us. Oh yes, of
course we've seen her since then--when we've gone to New York--but that
hasn't been often. She will have changed; she'll have her hair up, and be
wearing her dresses long; but I shall know her. Oh, you couldn't deceive
me. I never forget a face. I'm like that. No, nor names either. I should
remember you, Mr. Strange, if I met you fifty years from now. I noticed
you when you first began to work for Stephens and Jarrott. So did my
sister-in-law, but I noticed you first. We've often spoken of you,
especially after we knew your name was Strange. It seemed to us so
strange. That's a pun, isn't it? I often make them. We both thought you
were like what Henry--that's Mr. Jarrott's oldest son--might have grown
to, if he had been spared to us. We've had a great deal of sorrow--Oh, a
great deal! It's weaned my sister-in-law away from the world altogether.
She's like that. My brother, too--he isn't the same man. So when Evelyn
comes we hope we shall see you often, Mr. Strange. You must begin to look
on this house as your second home. Indeed, you must. It'll please my
brother. I've never heard him speak of any young man as he's spoken of
you. I think he sees the likeness to Henry. That'll be next year when