Flint smiled.

"Every man, you know, must be either a fool or a physician when he reaches maturity. Some may be both. However, since you were kind enough to come to my a.s.sistance last night, I cannot be induced to quarrel with you this morning, and you ought to be the last man to find fault with me for feeling the benefit of your medicine sooner than you expected."

Dr. Cricket was as easy to be placated as to be stirred to anger; and when Flint urged him to come into the stuffy little office and partake of a lemonade with the addition of a stronger fluid from a bottle in Flint's room, he forgot his wrath or drowned it in the cooling drink, and at length parted in kindliness, only bidding his patient wear cabbage-leaves in his hat, and be sure to take wraps in case of a change in the weather, not forgetting to put on his "gums" if he walked on the wet beach.

When he had gone, Flint found the Doctor's gold-bowed spectacles in a chair. "Brady and I will walk up with them this evening," he said to himself. "Perhaps I was not as civil to the old gentleman as I might have been."

When Marsden learned that Flint was planning an expedition to South East, he suggested that he would "take it kindly" if Flint could make it convenient to bring down a few packages of groceries, as some of the store supplies had run out, and the relays were not expected until the next day.

Flint reproached himself for weakness in complying, and growled still further when he saw the length of the list which Marsden handed to him as he took his seat in the carryall.

"What a cursed fool I am," he muttered as he drove off, "to hire this man's beast for the privilege of doing his errands!"

The three-o'clock train puffed into the station at South East nearly an hour behind time. The period of waiting in the intense mid-day heat had not improved Flint's temper. For all his hearty greeting to Brady, he could not shake off a sense of irritation, intensified by the fact that he had no one on whom to wreak it.

Brady's trunk was strapped onto the carryall, the various bottles, jugs, and packages which Flint, with such unusual urbanity, had consented to bring down to the Beach for Marsden, were stowed away under the seat, and nothing remained but the mail. To get this Flint drew up at the post-office. The postmaster was a grouty old store-keeper who, through political influence, retained his position in spite of the efforts of the town's-folk to oust him. This afternoon a line of wagons stood at the door, and a line of men stood at the little window within. Seeing his own name in the list of those for whom there were letters, Flint waited for the window to open, and took his place in the line. When he reached the window, he asked for his letter.

"No letter for you," growled the postmaster.

Flint stepped out of line and consulted the list. There was no mistake. Again he presented himself before the window.

"What cher want?"

"My letter."

"Ain't no letter, I told cher."

"Perhaps you will be kind enough to look at the list."

The postman, in the worst of humors, went to a drawer of his desk, and, after much hunting about and turning over of parcels, he found a letter which he threw out at Flint without a remark. Flint took it also in silence, turned away and resumed his place at the end of the line. Again he returned to his old post before the little window. This time the postman grew purple with rage.

"Get out o' this you! What cher want now?"

"I simply wish," answered Flint, in his low, clear, gentlemanly voice, "to tell you that you have behaved like an insolent blackguard, and deserve to be removed from office."

Flint's words were the signal for a storm of applause from the loiterers, and he walked out a hero. He was in a more amiable frame of mind when he climbed into the carryall. The old horse, feeling his head turned homeward, needed less urging than usual, and the young men lolled back, talking busily of old times and new.

Brady was a typical business-man of the West,--cheerful, practical, a bit boastful, square-shouldered, clear-eyed and ruddy-faced, confident of himself, proud of his surroundings, sure that there were no problems of earth or Heaven with which America in general, and Philip Brady in particular, were not fitted to cope.

Before he had uttered a dozen sentences, Flint began to realize how far apart they had drifted in the ten years since they had met. He experienced a vaguely hopeless sense of complexity in the presence of his friend's bustling frankness. He felt almost a hypocrite, and yet it seemed to him that any attempt at self-revelation would be useless, because the relative value, the _chiaro-oscuro_ of life, was so different to each. He took refuge, as we all do under such circ.u.mstances, in objectivity--asked heartily for the health of each member of Brady's family, listened with polite interest to the statistics of the growth of Bison, and then began to wonder what he should talk about next. As he cast his eye downward, a very practical subject suggested itself, for he saw with dismay that the cork was out of the mola.s.ses jug, from which the sticky fluid had already oozed forth, and was rapidly spreading itself over the floor of the carryall.

"This is what comes of being obliging. Just look at this mess! What in time are we going to do about it, Brady?"

Brady, being a man of action, wasted no energy in discussion. He jumped to the ground, pulled out first his overcoat and gripsack, fortunately unharmed, then the paper parcels of oatmeal and hominy, sticky and dripping. Swiftly corking the jug, he lifted it out of the carryall, together with the oilcloth strip, and deftly stood both against a fence by the roadside. Flint watched him with admiration. He felt himself supremely helpless in the presence of the direful calamity. How was he ever to get these bundles into condition to be put back into the wagon? How cleanse the oilcloth and the fatal jug?

No house was in sight.

Flint stood gloomily gazing down at his boots covered with the oozy brown fluid. "Jupiter aid us!" he exclaimed; and as if in answer to his call, "a daughter of the G.o.ds, divinely tall," rose on their sight, coming towards them from over the ridge of the hill. She came on swiftly, yet without hurry. She walked (a process little understood by the feminine half of the world, hampered as they are by their stays and tenpenny heels). This woman neither hobbled, nor waddled, nor tripped. With the leg swinging out from the hip (no awkward knee-movement, yet no stride), she swept down the hill as serenely as though she were indeed a messenger sent by Jupiter to their a.s.sistance. Beside her trotted a large dog who now and again excursionized in search of tempting adventure, but as constantly returned to rub his head lovingly against his mistress's skirt, and lick her hand, as if to a.s.sure her that, in spite of his wandering propensities, his heart remained faithful.

"The hoodoo!" muttered Flint.

"What a pretty girl!" exclaimed Brady.

The object of these widely differing criticisms moved steadily nearer.

She wore a white gown. A basket was on her arm, and her wide-brimmed straw hat was pulled low over her eyes to shield them from the sun.

She was close upon the scene of accident before she discerned it.

Catching at the same moment a look of annoyance on Flint's face, she swerved a little, as if with intent to pa.s.s by, like the priest and the Levite, on the other side; then, rea.s.sured by Brady's look of half-comic despair, she set down her basket and paused.

"You have met with an accident, I see," she observed, as casually as though she had never before heard of any catastrophe in connection with Flint. "The mola.s.ses worked, I suppose. It will, sometimes, if it is not tightly corked. It was stupid in the grocer not to warn you."

"It is kind of you," said Brady, "to lay the accusation of stupidity so far off; but, wherever it lies, the results are the same, and we are in a bad way."

"What can we find to wipe these things off with?" the good Samaritan asked, making common cause in the misfortune.

"Nothing," answered Flint, with extravagant gloom, striving as he spoke to cleanse his shoes by rubbing them against the gra.s.s-grown bank.

The girl put her finger to her lips,--a characteristic gesture when she was puzzled. Then, unfastening her basket with sudden energy, she exclaimed: "Why won't this do? Here is some sea-moss which I was taking to an old woman who lives a little further down the road. She makes some stuff which she calls farina out of it, and grieves bitterly that she is no longer young and spry enough to gather it for herself along the sh.o.r.e. My basket is full of this moss, and if we could wet it in the brook down yonder, we might sponge off the things with it, and then dry them with big leaves, backed up by those newspapers which I see you have in your parcel of mail."

"What a clever notion!" Brady said, as he plunged down to the brook, and came up again with the dripping moss. He and the Samaritan scrubbed merrily away, while Flint stood by with an uncomfortable sense that he was out of it all, and that no one but himself knew or cared.

When comparative cleanliness was restored, and the bundles returned to the bottom of the wagon, the girl scrambled down to the brook, and, pushing back her wide cuffs, knelt by the water, where she washed the traces of sticky substance from her long slender fingers.

"You have relieved us from a very awkward situation," said Flint, as she rose; "but your basket of moss is spoiled and your long walk rendered futile. Surely you will permit us at least to drive you home."

"Thank you, no. Mrs. Davitt will like to talk a while, and to know that I have not forgotten her and her farina. So I will bid you 'good afternoon.'"

"That is the most charming girl I ever met," observed Brady, as he stood watching her disappear around the turn of the road.

"Did you ever meet one who was not?" asked Flint.

"The way she took hold was magnificent," continued Brady, unmoved by his companion's raillery. "And then when it was all over she was so unself-conscious; and the best of all was her politeness in never laughing at us, for really, you know, we must have looked rather ridiculous, standing gawking there like two escaped imbeciles."

This allusion irritated Flint, as he remembered the last two occasions, when she had borne herself less seriously. The recollection colored his first remark, after they had clambered into the carryall, and persuaded Dobbin to resume his leisurely trot.

"I am afraid myself, inconsistent as it seems, I should have liked her better if she had not taken hold in such a capable, mannish fashion.

There is a certain appealing dependence which is rather becoming to a woman--to my thinking, that is--it is an old-fashioned notion, I admit."

"Well, I must say I don't think an att.i.tude of appealing dependence would have been very serviceable to us to-day; and as an habitual state of mind, while it may be very attractive, it seems to imply having some one at hand to appealingly depend upon. Our s.e.x must have reciprocal duties; but I don't notice that you have offered yourself as a support for any of these clinging natures."

"Nevertheless," answered Flint, "if I ever did fall in love, it would be with a woman of the clinging kind. But don't let us get to talking like a couple of sentimental schoolgirls! Here we are, anyway, at the last turn of the road, and there is Nepaug Beach. How does it strike you?"

"It reminds me," said Brady, smiling, "of the Walrus and the Carpenter:--

"'They wept like anything to see Such quant.i.ties of sand.

If this were only cleared away They said it would be grand.'"

"Brady, you are a sentimentalist! You sigh for brooks and willows and, for all I know, _people_."