You know I've always stood in awe of clergymen. At first this one seemed fully as dignified and reverend as all the others, and I nearly fell off my perch with embarra.s.sment when he looked up and saw me hanging there like a monkey on a stick. But the next moment we both laughed, and he seemed almost as young and boyish as Jack.

"I scuttled down in a hurry, I a.s.sure you. He only stayed a minute, just long enough to deliver the basket and his wife's message, but you've no idea how that little incident changed the whole atmosphere. I'd been looking down the white road that leads from our place into the town, thinking how lonely and foreign everything was, and how hard it would be to live all winter in a place where n.o.body wanted to be neighborly, and where the only people we knew were slightly old like the Barnabys or awfully old like the Metzes, and then Mr. Rochester appeared, young and so nice-looking and with a jolly twinkle in his eyes that makes you forget the clerical cut of his clothes.

"His wife must be young, too, or she couldn't be married to him, and she must be dear or she wouldn't have sent such a dainty, altogether charming basket with her message of greeting. You've no idea how their cordial welcome changed everything. Now as I look through the open door at the same road leading to the town, it doesn't look lonely and foreign any more. It makes me think of a verse that dear old Grandmother Ware taught me once. You remember how she used to take us up in her lap and make us spell the words out to her from her big Bible with the terrible pictures. '_The crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways shall be made smooth!_'

"Well, grandmother's verse is coming true. It was all so crooked and uncertain and rough yesterday. But now everything is being smoothed out for us so beautifully. I have just looked out to see if Norman is coming. I can hear him whistling away down the road.

"I wish you, with your artist's eye for effect, could see the little town now, spread out below the hills in the twilight, with the windmills silhouetted against the sky. At one end is the little stone belfry of St. Peter's, at the other the square gray tower of the Academy of the Holy Angels; and just between, swinging low over the hills in the faint afterglow, the pale golden crescent of the new moon. After all, it's a good old world, Joyce, and I 'feel it in my bones' that little old Bauer is going to bring us some great good that shall make us thankful always for having come. In some way, I am sure, all our '_rough ways shall be made smooth_.'"

CHAPTER IV

MARY FINDS GAY

THE day before Thanksgiving saw the Ware family fully settled in their new home. The trunks had been unpacked and their contents disposed of to make the little cottage look as homelike as possible. Even the preparations for their Thanksgiving dinner were all made. They had been simplified by Mrs. Barnaby's gift of a jar of mince-meat, and the plump hen, which was to take the place of a turkey, had been bought already dressed.

Now at only nine o'clock the morning work was all done, and Mrs. Ware sat sewing on the south gallery where Jack had wheeled himself into the sunshine. Mary came and stood in the doorway.

"Things stay so clean here," she grumbled in a laughing way. "I could do everything there is to be done with one hand and not half try, and when you all help we get through so fast it makes me dizzy. Then there's nothing left to do but sit in the sun and wait till time to get the next meal ready. I wish I hadn't been in such a hurry to put everything in order. I wouldn't be so restless and idle now. It makes me fidgety to have nothing to do."

"Take the basket and dishes back to the rectory," suggested Mrs. Ware, after Jack had proposed several occupations to no purpose.

"But I've never met Mrs. Rochester yet," objected Mary, "and it would be sort of awkward, going in and introducing myself."

"No more awkward than it was for Mr. Rochester to come here and introduce himself," said Jack. "You can tell her for me that that charlotte russe was perfection."

"I wonder what she is like," mused Mary, half persuaded to go and see.

"If I thought she'd be approachable and easy to talk to--but--"

"Oh, you know she's all right," urged Jack, "or she never would have been so good to a family of strangers. I'll bet she's a dear, motherly old soul, in a checked ap.r.o.n, with gray hair and a double chin."

"Why, she couldn't be!" cried Mary. "Not and be Mr. Rochester's wife. He doesn't look much older than you do, and for all he's so dignified there's something so boyish and likable about him that I felt chummy with him right away."

"Well, the things she cooked tasted as if she were the kind of woman I said," persisted Jack, "and I shall keep on thinking of her as that kind until it's proved that my guess is wrong. I should think that anybody with as much curiosity as you have would go just to satisfy it."

"You mean you want yours satisfied," retorted Mary. "Well, she'll do it herself in a few days. She sent word that she'd call soon, so I believe that I'll wait."

Coming out she stood leaning idly against one of the gallery posts, a restless, dissatisfied little figure. Then she strolled out to the front gate and stood there awhile, looking down the deserted road. Jack's gaze followed her sympathetically, and he said to his mother in a low tone, "Poor little kid, it's going to be a dull winter for her I'm afraid. She was never cut out for solitude. She'd 'rather dwell in the midst of alarms,' and this place isn't much more diverting than a country graveyard."

Mrs. Ware's glance followed his, then she replied confidently as she looked down to thread her needle, "Oh, she'll soon adjust herself.

She'll find something that will not only keep her busy but will amuse all the rest of us."

Jack picked up the magazine from which he had been reading aloud the evening before and resumed the story, but he was conscious all the time of the little figure at the gate, and saw her without seeming to notice when she slipped around the corner of the house presently to the back yard. Then he looked up with a smile when he heard the creaking of the windmill crank at the back of the house.

"She's stopping the wheel," said Mrs. Ware, "so that she can climb to the top of the tower again. It seems to have some sort of fascination for her."

Jack went on with his story, and Mary, perched on her watch-tower, clung to the bar above and looked down over the town. The currents of air were stronger up at the height to which she had climbed. Down below scarcely a breath was stirring, but here a fresh breeze blew the hair into her eyes and began to blow the discontent out of her mind. Her wish that Jack could see the view was followed instantly by the thought that he could never, never have any other outlook than the one the wheeled chair afforded.

"It's wicked of me to be discontented one single minute," she thought remorsefully. "There I was fussing right before him about having nothing to do, when he'd give worlds just to be foot loose--to climb up here and walk about the place. And he was so dear and considerate, never once reminded me how much harder it is for him than me, and that he has nothing else to look forward to as long as he lives."

The yellow walls of the rectory gleamed through the trees at the north end of the little hamlet, reminding her of Jack's laughing wish to know what Mrs. Rochester was like.

"It's as little as I can do to go and find out for him," she thought, "even if he did ask it in a joke. I ought to be willing to do anything in the world he expresses a wish for, poor boy. There's little enough here to amuse him."

A few minutes later, in her travelling suit and hat, with Mrs.

Rochester's basket on her arm, she interrupted the reading on the gallery.

"I'm going to see your motherly friend," she announced--"to find out if she is gray-haired and double-chinned. Maybe I'll tell her how you described her."

"Don't you dare," warned Jack, laughingly. "I'll get even with you if you do."

"You've already done that on a dozen old scores," answered Mary gaily.

"Good-bye, my friends and kinsmen dear! As the story books say, 'we shall see what we shall see.'"

What she saw when she rang the bell at the rectory was the exact opposite of the motherly creature whom Jack had pictured; for Mrs.

Rochester, who came to the door herself, was tall and slim and very young, with the delicate, spirituelle kind of beauty that had always been plump little Mary's greatest admiration and desire. One part of Jack's guess was correct, however. She wore a big checked ap.r.o.n, for she was making cake, and she invited Mary into the dining-room where the materials were all spread out on the table.

With the girlish cordiality that had won her so many friends even in unsociable Bauer, she made Mary feel so much at home, that in a few moments she was insisting on helping with the cake. It seemed a matter of course that Mrs. Rochester should hand her the egg-beater, and before the eggs were whipped into a stiff white mountain of snow, they were exchanging experiences like old friends. Mrs. Rochester had found Bauer a lonely place too, at first.

"Jack says there was some great mix-up made when I alighted on this planet," said Mary. "I should have dropped down some place where 'the breaking waves dashed high on a stern and rock-bound coast.' He says I wasn't meant for a quiet fish-pond existence."

"I know," laughed her hostess. "You feel as if you were bound into the wrong book. You'd be perfectly satisfied to find yourself in one of Scott's novels, in a jumble of knights and tourneys and border wars, but you would be bored beyond endurance to have to be one of the characters in Jane Austen's stories."

"Oh, you _do_ know," cried Mary eagerly, emphasizing her pleasure with a harder bang of the egg-beater. "You understand exactly. There's nothing tamer than Miss Austen's stories. Why, there's pages and pages taken up with just discussing the weather and each other's health; and they do such trivial, inane things and go around and around in such a deadly monotonous circle that sometimes I've been so out of patience with them that I wanted to throw the book into a corner."

"But you never did throw it down," answered Mrs. Rochester, "you read on to the end and in spite of yourself you were interested in those same commonplace happenings and conversations, just as readers before you have been interested in them and always will be as long as those books live. And I'll tell you why. You read them to the end because they are true pictures of the lives of average people. The majority of us have to put up with the humdrum, no matter how much we long for the heroic, and it's a good thing to read such books as 'Emma' and 'Pride and Prejudice'

every now and then, as a sort of spirit-level. We're more satisfied to amble along the road if everybody else drives a slow nag too."

"I'm not," declared Mary. "I want to whizz past everything in sight that is poky and slow. I know it would be lots easier for me if I could only make up my mind to the fact that nothing exciting and important is ever going to happen to me, but I can't break myself of the habit of expecting it. I've felt that way as far back as I can remember. I'm always looking for something grand and unexpected, and every morning when I wake up it gives me a sort of thrill to think, maybe it will come to-day."

"Well, if you're going to stay in Bauer for awhile you certainly do need another dose of 'Emma,'" answered Mrs. Rochester, nodding to the shelves in the adjoining library, where stood a well thumbed edition of Miss Austen's works. "Take her home with you, and any of the books you think your brother would like. We are glad to make our library a circulating one."

Mary's face showed her pleasure quite as much as her words, as she left her seat by the table to slip into the great book-lined room and glance around it.

"You've made up for one of my disappointments," she called back. "I had counted so much on having the library in San Antonio to draw on this winter, and this is even better, for I'm sure that they haven't all these rare old prints and first editions that I see here."

Her five minutes' call stretched into an hour, when she found that Mrs.

Rochester had been brought up in Washington and had spent her school days there. Then it stretched into two, for some one drove in from the country with a carriage load of autumn leaves, and Mary stayed to help arrange them in the little church for the Thanksgiving service next day.

It was nearly noon when she finally started home with several books under her arm, her usual hopefulness and buoyancy of spirits quite restored.

"Mamma and I can't both be away from Jack at the same time," she said in response to Mrs. Rochester's invitation to attend the service next day.

"I want her to come. I've already had my share of Thanksgiving. I've been thankful every minute while I've been here that I discovered you.

It's been a beautiful morning."

"Come over often," urged Mrs. Rochester cordially. "I can always find something for you to do, and I'd love to have you come."