Part 35 (1/2)

The door had closed behind him. The president had not listened.

The president gave orders that never, for any reason, was John Holt to be admitted to his office again. He telephoned to the bonding company that John Holt had now gone crazy; that they would save trouble by refusing to admit him.

John did not try to see them. He went to the county jail. He entered the keeper's office and said quietly: ”I have stolen a lot of money, but I can't prove it. Will you put me in jail?”

The keeper shouted: ”Get out of here! You hoboes always spring that when you want a good warm lodging for the winter! Why the devil don't you go to work with a shovel in the sand pits? They're paying two-seventy-five a day.”

”Yes, sir,” said John timorously. ”Where are they?”

THE STORY VINTON HEARD AT MALLORIE

_By_ KATHARINE PRESCOTT MOSELEY From _Scribner's Magazine_ _Copyright, 1918, by Charles Scribner's Sons._ _Copyright, 1919, by Katharine Prescott Moseley._

”There is only one letter for you,” said Ware's sister, and she turned the handle of the coffee-urn as she watched him slit the envelope, for Ware had exclaimed: ”By Jove! It's from Vinton.” And then, after a moment: ”That's a nice thing. Roberts posted this last night instead of telephoning it up directly it came. He's on the _--nia_, due in New York-let me see-you have the _Herald_ there-look in the s.h.i.+pping, will you? Are they sighted?”

Abigail took up the paper. ”Docked last night at nine,” she said.

”Then he'll have caught the midnight from New York. If he's not stopping in Boston he'll be on the eight fifty-eight.”

”Is he coming here?”

”Yes, he says so. He'll have quite a bit to tell if I know him.” And an hour or so later Abigail Ware saw Vinton lift his eyes to the columns of the white porch glistening in the morning sun behind her, and as he sprang out of the motor and took her hand: ”My foot is on my native heath and my name is MacGregor!” he cried.

Abigail led the way into the dining-room. ”Come in by the fire; I've kept some coffee hot,” she said.

Vinton approached the warmth of the pine logs that were sending out sparks against the screen of the Franklin stove. ”There's something fearfully penetrating about the air over here at this time of year,” he began. ”Open fires are its saving complement.”

Abigail held out his cup.

”Warm as toast in England; perfect English spring this year.”

”Oh, no doubt of it; spring's the time for England,” Ware a.s.serted.

”Fall for New England,” said Ware's sister. ”But tell me,” she went on, ”you were talking of saving complements. What are the saving complements over there just now?”

”There aren't any.” Vinton's voice was suddenly sombre.

”I should think not!” It came from brother and sister at once.

A moment pa.s.sed before Vinton turned from the fire and let his eyes wander from the pale yellow heads of the daffodils nodding in the easterly May air outside to the cool tints of the Lowestoft bowl on which some Chinese artisan a century before had picked out the initials of a merchant-sailor grandfather in pale tints of blue and gold and which now stood in the centre of the table filled with sprays of the rhodora. ”Yes,” he said slowly, ”I suppose there are saving complements of a sort if one is heroic enough to find them, but-well, one can hardly- What shall I say? Everything over there-I mean all sorts of what you'd call merely material objects-is being charged, I believe, with some kind of spiritual essence that is going to be indefinitely active to future contact.”

He looked across the table to where Ware sat with his chair a little pushed back, and laughed. ”The intolerant old Puritan thinks I'm off again, doesn't he?” he said almost archly. Then he glanced about the room once more. ”I think,” he continued, ”that there is an extraordinary beauty of a kind about our old houses over here-a charm, too, although I've never been able to a.n.a.lyze it, for, after all, you know, there's nothing in them!”

”The Puritan,” he began to explain, ”belonged peculiarly to the race that in England had always opposed all of what one may call the sensory elements that were of such immense appeal to the race of the Cavaliers, for I believe that the two did spring from essentially different roots.

”'A primrose by a river's brim A yellow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more.'”

”What more does it need to be?” Ware protested, and ”Ah! there you are,”