The house was not quite definite enough in type to be quaint; it presented three much-ornamented gables to the lane, its windows were narrow, shuttered inside with dark brown wood. At the back-between the house and the little river, and shut away from the garden by a fence—were a little barn, decorated like the house in scalloped wood, and various small sheds and out-houses and their occupants.
Here lived the red cow, the old white mare, the chickens and pigeons, the rabbits and bees that had made the place fascinating to Monroe children for many years. Martie said to herself to-day that she always felt like a child when she came to Dr. Ben's, shut once more into childhood's world of sunshine and flowers and happy companionship with animals and the good earth.
To-day the old man, with his setter Sandy, was busy with his bookshelves when the girls went in. Two of the narrow low bay windows that looked directly out on the level of the kitchen path were in this room; the third, the girls knew, was a bedroom. Upstairs were several unused rooms full of old furniture and piles of magazines, and back of the long, narrow sitting room were a little dining room with Crimson Rambler roses plastered against its one window, and a large kitchen in which old Mis' Penny reigned supreme.
Here in the living room were lamps, shabby chairs, an air-tight stove, shells, empty birds' nests, specimens of ore, blown eggs, snakeskins, moccasins, wampum, spongy dry bees' nests, Indian baskets and rugs, ropes and pottery, an enormous Spanish hat of yellow straw with a gaudy band, and everywhere, in disorderly cascades and tumbled heaps, were books and pamphlets and magazines.
Dr. Ben welcomed them eagerly and sent Martie promptly to the kitchen to interview Mis' Penny on the subject of tea. The girls were quite at home here, for the old doctor was Rose Ransome's mother's cousin, and through their childhood the little gabled house had been the favourite object of their walks. Sally, alone with her host, began to help him in his hopeless attempt to get his library in order.
"The point is this, Sally," said Dr. Ben suddenly, after a few innocuous comments on the weather and the health of the Monroe family had been exchanged. "Have you and Joe Hawkes come to care for each other?"
Sally flushed scarlet. She had been thinking hard—for Sally, who was not given to thought—in the hours since the party for Grandma Kelly. Now she began readily, with a great air of frankness.
"I'll tell you, Dr. Ben. I know you feel as if I was trying to hide something from Ma and Pa, and it's worried me a good deal, too. But the truth is, I've known Joe all my life, and he's only a boy, of course—ever so much younger than I am—and he has just gotten this notion into his head. Of course, it's perfectly ridiculous—because naturally I am not going to throw my life away in any such fashion as that! But Joe thinks now that he will never smile again—"
Thus Sally, kneeling among the books, her earnest, pretty, young face turned toward the doctor, her eyes widely opened, as the extraordinary jumble of words poured forth. The unpleasant sensation of their last meeting, the confusing feeling that she was not saying what Dr. Ben wanted her to say, beset her. She felt a sudden, dreadful inclination toward tears, although with no clear sense of a reason for crying.
"I suppose all boys go through their silly stages like measles," said Sally rapidly. "And it's only my misfortune and Joe's that his first love affair had to be me. One reason why I haven't mentioned it at home is—"
"Then you don't care for Joe?" the old man asked with his serious smile.
"Oh, Dr. Ben! Of course, I like Joe enormously, he's a dear sweet boy," Sally answered smoothly. "But you know as well as I do how my father feels toward the village people in Monroe, and while the Hawkeses are just as nice as they can be in their way—" again Sally's flow of eloquence was strangely shaken; she felt as a child might, caught up in the arm of a much larger person and rushed along helplessly with only an occasional heartening touch of her feet to the ground—"after all, that isn't quite our way, is it?" she asked. If only, thought the nervous little girl who was Sally, if only she knew what Dr. Ben wanted her to say!
"Why can't ye be honest with me, Sally?" said the doctor. "Ye love Joe, don't ye?"
Sally's head dropped, the colour rose in her cheeks, and the tears came. She nodded, and through all her body ran a delicious thrill at the acknowledged passion.
"Ye've found each other out, in spite of them all!" said the old man musingly. "And what does his age or yours, or his place or yours, matter beside that? They've tried to fill you with lies, and you've found that the lies don't hold water. Well—"
He straightened up suddenly, and began to march about the room. Sally, kneeling still over the books, tears drying on her cheeks, watched him.
"Sally," said the doctor, "God made you and Joe Hawkes and your love for each other. I don't know who made the social laws by which women govern these little towns, but I suspect it was the devil. You've been brought up to feel that if you marry a man Mrs. Cy Frost doesn't ask to her house, you'll be unhappy ever after. But I ask you, Sally—I ask you as a man old enough to be your father—if you had your home, your husband, your health, your garden, and your children, wouldn't you be a far happier woman than—than Lydia say, or Florence Frost, or all the other girls who sit about this town waiting for a man with position enough—position, BAH!—to marry?"
Sally's face was glowing.
"Oh, Dr. Ben, I don't care anything about position!" she said, all her honest innocence in her face.
"Then why do you act as if you did?" he said, well pleased.
"And would you advise me to marry Joe?" she asked radiantly.
"Joe—Tom—Billy, whomever you please!" he answered impatiently. "But don't be afraid because he doesn't wear silk socks, Sally, or smoke a monogrammed cigarette. Why, my child, that little polish, that little fineness, is the woman's gift to her man! These Frosts and Parkers: it was the coarse strength of their grandfathers that got them across the plains; it was the women who packed the books in the horsehair trunks, that read the Bibles and cleaned and sewed and prayed in the old home way. You don't suppose those old miners and grocers, who came later to be the city fathers, ever had as much education as Joe Hawkes, or half as much!"
"I wish my father felt as you do, Doc' Ben," Sally said presently, the brightness dying from her face. "But Pa will never, never—And even if there were no other reason, why Joe hasn't a steady job—"
"That brings me to what I really want to say to you to-day, Sally," the old man interrupted her briskly. He opened a desk drawer and took from it a small, old-fashioned photograph. Sally saw a young woman's form, disguised under the scallops, ruffles, and pleats of the early seventies, a bright face under a cascade of ringlets, and a little oval bonnet set coquettishly awry. "D'ye know who that is?" asked Dr. Ben.
"I—well, yes; I suppose?" murmured Sally sympathetically.
"Yes, it's my wife," he answered. "Mary—Our boy would be thirty. They went away together—poor girl, poor girl! We wanted a big family, Sally; we hoped for a houseful of children. And I had her for only fifteen months—only fifteen months to remember for thirty years!"
Sally was deeply impressed. She thought it strangely flattering in Dr. Ben to take her into his confidence in this way, and that she would tell Martie about it as they walked home.
"No," he said musingly. "I never had a child! And Sally, if I had it all to do over again, I'd marry again. I'd have sons. That's the citizen's duty. Some day we'll