North of Fifty-Three.

by Bertrand W. Sinclair.

CHAPTER I

WHICH INTRODUCES A LADY AND TWO GENTLEMEN

Dressed in a plain white shirt waist and an equally plain black cloth skirt, Miss Hazel Weir, on week days, was merely a unit in the office force of Harrington & Bush, implement manufacturers. Neither in personality nor in garb would a casual glance have differentiated her from the other female units, occupied at various desks. A close observer might have noticed that she was a bit younger than the others, possessed of a clear skin and large eyes that seemed to hold all the shades between purple and gray--eyes, moreover, that had not yet begun to weaken from long application to clerical work. A business office is no place for a woman to parade her personal charms. The measure of her worth there is simply the measure of her efficiency at her machine or ledgers. So that if any member of the firm had been asked what sort of a girl Miss Hazel Weir might be, he would probably have replied--and with utmost truth--that Miss Weir was a capable stenographer.

But when Sat.u.r.day evening released Miss Hazel Weir from the plain brick office building, she became, until she donned her working clothes at seven A. M. Monday morning, quite a different sort of a person. In other words, she chucked the plain shirt waist and the plain skirt into the discard, got into such a dress as a normal girl of twenty-two delights to put on, and devoted a half hour or so to "doing" her hair.

Which naturally effected a more or less complete transformation, a transformation that was subjective as well as purely objective. For Miss Weir then became an ent.i.ty at which few persons of either s.e.x failed to take a second glance.

Upon a certain Sat.u.r.day night Miss Weir came home from an informal little party escorted by a young man. They stopped at the front gate.

"I'll be here at ten sharp," said he. "And you get a good beauty sleep to-night, Hazel. That confounded office! I hate to think of you drudging away at it. I wish we were ready to--"

"Oh, bother the office!" she replied lightly. "I don't think of it out of office hours. Anyway, I don't mind. It doesn't tire me. I _will_ be ready at ten _this_ time. Good night, dear."

"Good night, Hazie," he whispered. "Here's a kiss to dream on."

Miss Weir broke away from him laughingly, ran along the path, and up the steps, kissed her finger-tips to the lingering figure by the gate, and went in.

"Bed," she soliloquized, "is the place for me right quickly if I'm going to be up and dressed and have that lunch ready by ten o'clock. I wish I weren't such a sleepyhead--or else that I weren't a 'pore wurrkin' gurl.'"

At which last conceit she laughed softly. Because, for a "pore wurrkin' gurl," Miss Weir was fairly well content with her lot. She had no one dependent on her--a state of affairs which, if it occasionally leads to loneliness, has its compensations. Her salary as a stenographer amply covered her living expenses, and even permitted her to put by a few dollars monthly. She had grown up in Granville.

She had her own circle of friends. So that she was comfortable, even happy, in the present--and Jack Barrow proposed to settle the problem of her future; with youth's optimism, they two considered it already settled. Six months more, and there was to be a wedding, a three-weeks' honeymoon, and a final settling down in a little cottage on the West Side; everybody in Granville who amounted to anything lived on the West Side. Then she would have nothing to do but make the home nest cozy, while Jack kept pace with a real-estate business that was growing beyond his most sanguine expectations.

She threw her light wraps over the back of a chair, and, standing before her dresser, took the mult.i.tude of pins out of her hair and tumbled it, a cloudy black ma.s.s, about her shoulders. Occupying the center of the dresser, in a leaning silver frame, stood a picture of Jack Barrow. She stood looking at it a minute, smiling absently. It was spring, and her landlady's daughter had set a bunch of wild flowers in a jar beside the picture. Hazel picked out a daisy and plucked away the petals one by one.

"He loves me--he loves me not--he loves me--" Her lips formed the words inaudibly, as countless lips have formed them in love's history, and the last petal fluttered away at "not."

She smiled.

"I wonder if that's an omen?" she murmured. "Pshaw! What a silly idea! I'm going to bed. Good night, Johnny boy."

She kissed her finger-tips to him again across the rooftops all grimed with a winter's soot, and within fifteen minutes Miss Weir was sound asleep.

She gave the lie, for once, to the saying that a woman is never ready at the appointed time by being on the steps a full ten minutes before Jack Barrow appeared. They walked to the corner and caught a car, and in the span of half an hour got off at Granville Park.

The city fathers, hampered in days gone by with lack of munic.i.p.al funds, had left the two-hundred-acre square of the park pretty much as nature made it; that is to say, there was no ornate parking, no attempt at landscape gardening. Ancient maples spread their crooked arms untrimmed, standing in haphazard groves. Wherever the greensward nourished, there grew pink-tipped daisies and kindred flowers of the wild. It was gutted in the middle with a ravine, the lower end of which, dammed by an earth embankment, formed a lake with the inevitable swans and other water-fowl. But, barring the lake and a wide drive that looped and twined through the timber, Granville Park was a bit of the old Ontario woodland, and as such afforded a pleasant place to loaf in the summer months. It was full of secluded nooks, dear to the hearts of young couples. And upon a Sunday the carriages of the wealthy affected the smooth drive.

When Jack Barrow and Hazel had finished their lunch under the trees, in company with a little group of their acquaintances, Hazel gathered sc.r.a.ps of bread and cake into a paper bag.

Barrow whispered to her: "Let's go down and feed the swans. I'd just as soon be away from the crowd."

She nodded a.s.sent, and they departed hastily lest some of the others should volunteer their company. It took but a short time to reach the pond. They found a log close to the water's edge, and, taking a seat there, tossed morsels to the birds and chattered to each other.

"Look," said Barrow suddenly; "that's us ten years from now."

A carriage pa.s.sed slowly, a solemn, liveried coachman on the box, a handsome, smooth-shaven man of thirty-five and a richly gowned woman leaning back and looking out over the pond with bored eyes. And that last, the half-cynical, half-contemptuous expression on the two faces, impressed Hazel Weir far more than the showy equipage, the outward manifestation of wealth.

"I hope not," she returned impulsively.

"Hope not!" Barrow echoed. "Those people are worth a barrel of money.

Wouldn't you like your own carriage, and servants, and income enough to have everything you wanted?"

"Of course," Hazel answered. "But they don't look as if they really enjoyed it."

"Fiddlesticks!" Barrow smilingly retorted. "Everybody enjoys luxury."

"Well, one should," Hazel admitted. But she still held to the impression that the couple pa.s.sing got no such pleasure out of their material possessions as Jack seemed to think. It was merely an intuitive divination. She could not have found any basis from which to argue the point. But she was very sure that she would not have changed places with the woman in the carriage, and her hand stole out and gave his a shy little squeeze.

"Look," she murmured; "here's another of the plutocrats. One of my esteemed employers, if you please. You'll notice that he's walking and looking at things just like us ordinary, everyday mortals."

Barrow glanced past her, and saw a rather tall, middle-aged man, his hair tinged with gray, a fine-looking man, dressed with exceeding nicety, even to a flower in his coat lapel, walking slowly along the path that bordered the pond. He stopped a few yards beyond them, and stood idly glancing over the smooth stretch of water, his gloved hands resting on the k.n.o.b of a silver-mounted cane.

Presently his gaze wandered to them, and the cool, well-bred stare gradually gave way to a slightly puzzled expression. He moved a step or two and seated himself on a bench. Miss Weir became aware that he was looking at her most of the time as she sat casting the bits of bread to the swans and ducks. It made her self-conscious. She did not know why she should be of any particular interest.

"Let's walk around a little," she suggested. The last of the crumbs were gone.

"All right," Barrow a.s.sented. "Let's go up the ravine."

They left the log. Their course up the ravine took them directly past the gentleman on the bench. And when they came abreast of him, he rose and lifted his hat at the very slight inclination of Miss Weir's head.

"How do you do, Miss Weir?" said he. "Quite a pleasant afternoon."

To the best of Hazel's knowledge, Mr. Andrew Bush was little given to friendly recognition of his employees, particularly in public. But he seemed inclined to be talkative; and, as she caught a slightly inquiring glance at her escort, she made the necessary introduction.

So for a minute or two the three of them stood there exchanging polite ba.n.a.lities. Then Mr. Bush bowed and pa.s.sed on.

"He's one of the biggest guns in Granville, they say," Jack observed.

"I wouldn't mind having some of his business to handle. He started with nothing, too, according to all accounts. Now, that's what I call success."

"Oh, yes, in a business way he's a success," Hazel responded. "But he's awfully curt most of the time around the office. I wonder what made him thaw out so to-day?"

And that question recurred to her mind again in the evening, when Jack had gone home and she was sitting in her own room. She wheeled her chair around and took a steady look at herself in the mirror. A woman may never admit extreme plainness of feature, and she may deprecate her own fairness, if she be possessed of fairness, but she seldom has any illusions about one or the other. She knows. Hazel Weir knew that she was far above the average in point of looks. If she had never taken stock of herself before, the reflection facing her now was sufficient to leave no room for doubt on the score of beauty. Her skin was smooth, delicate in texture, and as delicately tinted. The tan pongee dress she wore set off her dark hair and expressive, bluish-gray eyes.

She was smiling at herself just as she had been smiling at Jack Barrow while they sat on the log and fed the swans. And she made an amiable grin at the reflection in the gla.s.s. But even though Miss Weir was twenty-two and far from unsophisticated, it did not strike her that the transition of herself from a demure, business-like office person in sober black and white to a radiant creature with the potent influences of love and spring brightening her eyes and lending a veiled caress to her every supple movement, satisfactorily accounted for the sudden friendliness of Mr. Andrew Bush.

CHAPTER II

HEART, HAND--AND POCKETBOOK

Miss Weir was unprepared for what subsequently transpired as a result of that casual encounter with the managing partner of the firm. By the time she went to work on Monday morning she had almost forgotten the meeting in Granville Park. And she was only reminded of it when, at nine o'clock, Mr. Andrew Bush walked through the office, greeting the force with his usual curt nod and inclusive "good morning" before he disappeared behind the ground-gla.s.s door lettered "Private." With the weekday he had apparently resumed his business manner.