The boy did not return, and Kenwick made his way back to the den. It was mid-afternoon now and a heavy rain had begun to fall. He made no further attempt to read, but lay on the upholstered window-seat trying to find some position that would be bearable. He cursed himself for having used the leg so much. Had he remained quiet all day he might by now have been able to get away from this uncanny place. But the woman upstairs! He couldn't throw off an absurd sense of responsibility concerning her.

From all that he could gather she was as helpless a puppet in the hands of fate as he. But of course she might have been lying to him. As he lay there on his back gazing out at the needles of rain driven aslant into the dank ground, he felt distrustful of the whole universe. Could there be any way, he wondered, of getting a message out of this house? There must be a rural delivery, and if so, at the gate would be a letterbox.

But that gate----It seemed tortuous miles away.

A search through the empty drawers of the desk revealed several loose sheets of tablet-paper and the stub of a pencil. With this equipment he wrote out a telegram to Everett. The mere wording of it seemed to reinstate him somehow in the world of affairs. The problem of getting it into the office could be solved later.

At six o'clock he forced himself to go out to the kitchen again and prepare supper. The thought of eating revolted him, but the woman upstairs, liar, decoy, or invalid, must be fed. Dangling close to the pantry window was the white-knotted towel rope with the bucket on the end. He put into it the last of the loaf of bread and some boiled eggs.

Then he called to her to pull it up. When the bucket had begun its erratic climb, he leaned out of the narrow opening and spoke with defiant triumph. "Did you hear me smash that window this afternoon? I was trying to get the attention of the gardener. And I'm going to get it too if I have to smash up everything on this place."

If she made any reply he did not catch it. The rain was falling fast now and there was the growling sound of approaching thunder. Back in the den again he turned on the reading-light, more for companionship than illumination. Could it be possible that he would have to spend another night in this ghostly house? The idea was intolerable, and yet there was no relief in sight.

Another hour pa.s.sed, and darkness enveloped the world in a shroud-like mantle. The bandage with which Kenwick's leg was wrapped was a torture now. He unwound it and began to ma.s.sage the badly swollen limb using the long firm strokes that he had learned from the athletic trainer during his university days. They seemed to ease the pain somewhat and he continued to rub until his arms ached with the effort.

Then all at once there came to his ears a sound that made him halt, every muscle tense with listening. It was a sharp incisive knocking and it seemed to come from the dining-room. He sat motionless, afraid to move lest it should stop. But it came again, a clear unmistakable knocking that had the dull resonance of metal clashing against metal. To Kenwick it was perfectly obvious now that someone was trying to gain entrance at that broken dining-room window. He tested his unbandaged foot upon the floor and drew himself stealthily to a standing position.

And then he turned himself slowly in the direction of the darkened dining-room.

CHAPTER IV

The Morgan home on Pine Street was a rambling old house; the only shingle structure in a block of modern concrete apartments. To the elder Morgans it had been the fulfilment of a dream; a home of their own in San Francisco. Clinton Morgan had lived only a year after its completion, and his widow, in spite of the pressure of hard times and the inadequacy of the income which he left, had resisted all tempting offers to sell the old place and had brought up her son and daughter with a reverence for family tradition as incongruous to their environment and generation as was the old shingle house among its businesslike neighbors.

And then, eight years after Clinton Morgan's death, oil had been discovered in his holdings over at Coalinga, and the last year of Sarah Morgan's life had been spent in affluence. But she had never parted with the old home. At the end of that year she had called Clinton, Jr., then a young instructor in chemistry at the university, to her bedside and laid a last charge upon him.

"Clint,"--Her voice held that note of unconscious tyranny that approaching death gives to last utterances. For in the moment of dissolution there is not one among us but is granted the crown and scepter of autocracy. "Clint, don't let the old place go. Fix it over any way you and Marcreta like, but keep it in the family as long as you live."

"Yes, Mother."

"And Clint, there is something else."

"I know, Mother. It's Marcreta. But you needn't worry about her."

"I don't believe in death-bed promises. It's not right to try to tie up anybody's future. But----You see, if she were strong and well, I wouldn't be anxious; I wouldn't say anything but----"

"You don't need to say anything, Mother. I'll always look out for her."

A white, blue-veined hand stretched across the counterpane groping for his. A moment later Marcreta was holding the other and brother and sister faced each other alone.

It was about a year after this that Clinton Morgan brought home with him to dinner one night a young college fellow, just on the eve of graduating from the University of California. The friendship between the instructor and this undergraduate, five years his junior, had begun in the fraternity-house where Clinton dined occasionally as one of the "old men." And temperamental congeniality and diversity of interests had done the rest.

"He's slated to be one of those writer freaks." Thus he introduced the guest to his sister. "But he's harmless at present and he's far from home, so I brought him along."

Roger Kenwick looked into Miss Morgan's grave blue eyes and became suddenly a man. His host, surveying him genially from across the meat-platter, found himself entertaining a stranger. The gay persiflage which he had known over at "the house" was completely submerged under a maturity which he had suspected only as potential. In vain he tried that form of social surgery known to hosts and hostesses as "drawing him out." He mentioned a clever poem in the college magazine of which Kenwick was editor. He began a discussion of the approaching track-meet in which Kenwick was to support his championship for the hundred-yard dash. He tried university politics in which his guest was a conspicuous figure. To all these leads his fraternity brother made brief, almost impatient response. And Clinton Morgan was resentfully bewildered. He experienced that cheated feeling known to any one who has brought home exultantly a clever friend, and then failed in the effort to make him show off.

But he couldn't complain that Kenwick was tongue-tied. He was talking earnestly, but it was about future, not past achievement. Inspired by Marcreta's sympathetic interest, he unfolded plans of accomplishment of which until that moment he himself had been in densest ignorance.

Clinton had seen other men change, chameleon-like, in the presence of his sister, and he found himself wondering now as he watched Kenwick take his headlong leap into the future, whether it was Marcreta's regal beauty which inspired their admiration or her physical disability which appealed to their chivalry.

Kenwick himself was scarcely conscious of the disability. He was only vaguely aware that there were cushions at Miss Morgan's back and that on the way in from the living-room she had leaned slightly upon her brother's arm. When the evening was over he left the Morgan home enveloped in a white fury.

"I've been a fool!" he told himself violently. "I've been frittering away my whole life. This college stuff is kids' play. If I wasn't just two months from the end I'd ditch it and break into the man's game of finding a place in the world."

"Great chap, Kenwick," Clinton was telling his sister. "But he wasn't quite himself to-night. I think he has some family troubles that worry him. Doesn't get on very well with his sister-in-law back East, I believe. That's why he came out here to college."

Marcreta made a random reply. She was wondering what kind of person Roger Kenwick's real self was. And she was soon to discover. For that evening marked the beginning of a new era for them both. Scarcely a week pa.s.sed that he did not spend Sat.u.r.day and Sunday evenings at the house on Pine Street. Sometimes he read aloud to her "stuff" that he had written for the local newspapers. Sometimes she read to him from her favorite books. Once she helped him plan the plot of an absorbing serial story. But often they didn't read anything at all; just sat in front of the open fire and talked.

In May Kenwick was graduated from the university, but was still living at the fraternity-house in Berkeley when there came a sudden summons from New York. He ought to come, Isabel informed him, for his brother was seriously ill. On the night before he left he made a longer call than usual at the Morgan home.

"Everett's the finest chap in the world," he told Marcreta. "He's been like a father to me. But----Lord! How I hate to tear myself away from here! And the worst of it is, I don't know how long I may have to stay.

You won't forget me if it's a long time?"

And then all at once they were not talking about his trip any more, nor of Everett. "If you could only give me some hope to go on," Kenwick was saying. "Something to live on while I'm away."

But to this entreaty Marcreta was almost coldly unresponsive. She tried evasions first; asked solicitous questions concerning his plans; showed a heart-warming interest in his anxiety concerning his brother. But, forced at length to answer his persistent question, she said simply: "No. I don't care for you--in that way. Let's not talk any more about it. Let's not spoil our last evening together."

It brought him to his feet white and shaken. "Spoil my last evening with you!" he cried. "Spoil my whole life! That's what it will do if I can't have you in it." His fingers sought an inside pocket of his coat. "I've got your picture," he told her fiercely. "I got it down at Stafford's studio the other day. And I'm going to carry it with me always--until you give me something better."

A month after his arrival in New York he wrote her that his brother had recovered and that he would soon be coming back to find a position in a newspaper office in San Francisco. But he didn't come back. For it was just at this time that men began to hear strange new voices calling to them from out of the world-chaos. Day by day they grew in volume and in authority luring youth out of the isolation of personal ambition into the din and horrible carnage of war. Just before he left for a Southern training-camp Kenwick wrote her a long letter. In it there was neither past nor future tense. It concerned itself solely, almost stubbornly, with the present.

On the evening that she received it Marcreta held conference with her brother in the dignified old drawing-room. "Clinton, I want to make the old house take a part in the war. I've been talking it over with Dr.

Reynolds. He says it would make an ideal sanitarium. I want to use it for the families of enlisted men; the women and children, you know, who are too proud for charity and who, for just a nominal sum, could come here and get the best treatment. If you were at the front, wouldn't it relieve your mind to know that somebody you loved, I for instance, was getting the proper care when I was ill, even though you couldn't provide it for me? I'll do all this out of my own money, of course, and keep your room and mine, so that this will still be home to you when--you come back from training-camp."

He stared at her incredulously. "Why, how did you----What makes you think that--I'm going away?"

"I saw Captain Evans's name on that envelope the other day, so I wrote to him and asked if you had quizzed him about war work," she told him shamelessly. "I couldn't help it, Clint. I had to know. I really knew anyway. Knowing you, how could I help seeing that you were mad to get away and help. Every _man_ must be. But you've been afraid to broach it to me."

In his first moment of wild relief, he didn't dare trust himself to speak. When he at last ventured a response he plunged, manlike, into the least vital of the two topics. "But you don't quite realize what it would mean, Crete, tearing the whole house up that way. And the incessant confusion of having all those people around would be a frightful strain. With that spine of yours apt to go back on you at any time----It isn't as if you were a well woman."

The instant the words were out he regretted them. He saw his sister wince, but her voice was steady and eager with entreaty. "That's just it, dear. It isn't as if I were well and could do any work myself. But I can do this. I know what sick people need to make them comfortable. Oh, let me do it, Clinton."

He reached over and patted her shoulder. "I don't want to stand in the way of anything that would give you any happiness. But if it should be too much for you--and I so far away from you----"

"Even if it should be, you would come to see some day that I was right to do it. I have a right to take that chance. I have just as much right as a soldier has to stake my life against a great cause."

In the end he yielded, and together they planned the readjustment of their lives and the old home. Of the rooms on the lower floor, only the big library remained unchanged. But there were invalid-chairs ranged about the great room now and little tables holding bottles and trays.

On the Sunday evening before he left Clinton found his sister up in her room sorting over a pile of letters. "Well, your dreams are coming true, Crete," he told her. "Dr. Reynolds is delighted with this place and--you're sending a man to the service."

She looked up at him with a smile, and it flashed across him suddenly that she had done more than this. A silence fell between them, the tense throbbing silence that precedes a last farewell. He felt that he ought to say something; something comforting and cheerful. But the Morgans were reserved people, and they found confidences incredibly difficult.

So he stood there looking down at her, thinking that she always ought to wear that soft blue-gray color that seemed to melt into her eyes and bring out all the richness of the dark curves of hair. It was so that he would think of her in the days that were to come--a fragile but gallant figure sitting at the old mahogany desk sorting out letters.

Suddenly she pushed them aside and rose to her full splendid queenly height. She knew that the moment of farewell had come and was not grudging it its crucial moment of life. He came toward her and put his two hands lightly on her shoulders. But words failed him utterly. For his glance had fallen upon the pile of letters which she had tied with a narrow bit of white ribbon. And he noticed for the first time that they were all addressed in the same handwriting.