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“Of coarse I’ll pay for the telegram,” Mrs. Maze interpolated.

“It ain’t that exactly,” said the station-master. “It might look as if I was meddling myself. I rather not, Mrs. Maze.”

She took fire. “Then I’ll meddle myself!” she blazed. “There’s nothing to hinder my telegraphing, I suppose!”

“I can’t hinder you,” the station-master admitted.

“Well, then!” She pulled a bunch of yellow telegraph blanks toward her, and consumed three of them in her comprehensive despatch:

Miss Phyllis Desmond,

Lower Merritt, N. H.

Piano left Boston Monday P. M. Broke down on way to
Burymouth, where delayed four days. Sent by mistake
to Kent Harbor from Mewers Junction. Forwarded to
Lower Merritt Monday.

“There! How will that do?” she asked Gaites, submitting the telegram to him.

“That seems to cover the ground,” he said, not so wholly hiding the misgiving he began to feel but that she demanded,

“It explains everything, doesn’t it?”

“Yes–“

“Very well; sign it, then!”

“I?”

“Certainly. She doesn’t know me.”

“She doesn’t know me, either,” said Gaites. He added: “And a man’s name–“

“To be sure! Why didn’t I think of that?” and she affixed a signature in which the baptismal name gave away her romantic and impulsive generation–Elaine W. Maze. “Now,” she triumphed, as Gaites helped her into her trap–“now I shall have a little peace of my life!”

IV.

Mrs. Maze had no great trouble in making Gaites stay over Sunday. The argument she used was, “No freight out till Monday, you know.” The inducement was June Alber, whom she said she had already engaged to go canoeing with Gaites Sunday afternoon.

That afternoon was exquisite. The sky was cloudless, and of one blue with the river and the girl’s eyes, as Gaites noted while she sat facing him from the bow of the canoe. But the day was of the treacherous serenity of a weather-breeder, and the next morning brought a storm of such violence that Mrs. Maze declared it would be a foolhardy risk of his life for Gaites to go; and again she enforced her logic with Miss Alber, whom she said she had asked to one-o’clock dinner, with a few other friends.

Gaites stayed, of course, but he atoned for his weakness by starting early Tuesday morning, so as to get the first Hill Country train from Boston at Burymouth. He had decided that to get in as much change of air as possible he had better go to Craybrooks for the rest of his vacation.

His course lay through Lower Merritt, and perhaps he would have time to run out from the train and ask the station-master (known to him from his former sojourn) who Miss Phyllis Desmond was. His mind was not so full of Miss June Alber but that he wished to know.

It was still raining heavily, and on the first cut beyond Porchester Junction his train was stopped by a flagman, sent back from a freight-train. There was a wash-out just ahead, and the way would be blocked for several hours yet, if not longer. The express backed down to Porchester, and there seemed no choice for Gaites, if he insisted upon going to Craybrooks, but to take the first train up the old Boston and Montreal line to Wells River and across by the Wing Road through Fabyans; and this was what he did, arriving very late, but quite in time for all he had to do at Craybrooks.

The next day the weather cleared up cold, after the storm, and the fat old ladies, who outnumber everybody but the thin young girls at summer hotels, made the landlord put the steam on in the corridors, and toasted themselves before the log fires on the spectacular hall hearth. Gaites walked all day, and at night he lounged by the lamp, trying to read, and wished himself at Kent Harbor. The blue eyes of June Alber made themselves one with the sky and the river again, and all three laughed at him for his folly in leaving the certain delight they embodied for the vague good of a whim fulfilled. Was this the change he had come to the mountains for? He could throw his hat into the clouds that hung so low in the defile where the hotel lurked, and that was something; but it was not so much to the purpose, now that he had it, as June Alber and the sky and the river, which he had no longer. As he drowsed by the fire in a break of the semicircle of old ladies before it, he suddenly ceased to think of June Alber and the Kent sky and river, and found himself as it were visually confronted with that pale, delicate girl in thread gloves; she was facing him from the bow of a canoe in the train at Boston, where he had first met her, and some one was saying, “Oh, she’s a Desmond, through and through.”