"I can't let you alone," she said brightly. "I've come to stay with you till you feel quieter.... Would you rather I talked to you, or kept quiet?"

"Oh, do your wifely duty, whatever it is," he said.... "It was a mistake, the whole thing. You've done more than your duty, child, but--oh, you'd better go away."

Phyllis's heart turned over. Was it as bad as this? Was he as sick of her as this?

"You mean--you think," she faltered, "it was a mistake--our marriage?"

"Yes," he said restlessly. "Yes.... It wasn't fair."

She had no means of knowing that he meant it was unfair to her. She held on to herself, though she felt her face turning cold with the sudden pallor of fright.

"I think it can be annulled," she said steadily. "No, I suppose it wasn't fair."

She stopped to get her breath and catch at the only things that mattered--steadiness, quietness, ability to soothe Allan!

"It can be annulled," she said again evenly. "But listen to me now, Allan. It will take quite a while. It can't be done to-night, or before you are stronger. So for your own sake you must try to rest now.

Everything shall come right. I promise you it shall be annulled. But forget it now, please. I am going to hold your wrists and talk to you, recite things for you, till you go back to sleep."

She wondered afterwards how she could have spoken with that hard serenity, how she could have gone steadily on with story after story, poem after poem, till Allan's grip on her hands relaxed, and he fell into a heavy, tired sleep.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "BUT YOU SEE--HE'S--ALL I HAVE ... GOOD-NIGHT, WALLIS"]

She sat on the side of the bed and looked at him, lying still against his white pillows. She looked and looked, and presently the tears began to slide silently down her cheeks. She did not lift her hands to wipe them away. She sat and cried silently, openly, like a desolate, unkindly treated child.

"Mrs. Allan! Mrs. Allan, ma'am!" came Wallis's concerned whisper from the doorway. "Don't take it as hard as that. It's just a little relapse.

He was overtired. I shouldn't have called you, but you always quiet him so."

Phyllis brushed off her tears, and smiled. You seemed to have to do so much smiling in this house!

"I know," she said. "I worry about his condition too much. But you see--he's--all I have.... Good-night, Wallis."

Once out of Allan's room, she ran at full speed till she gained her own bed, where she could cry in peace till morning if she wanted to, with no one to interrupt. That was all right. The trouble was going to be next morning.

But somehow, when morning came, the old routine was dragged through with. Directions had to be given the servants as usual, Allan's comfort and amus.e.m.e.nt seen to, just as if nothing had happened. It was a perfect day, golden and perfumed, with just that little tang of fresh windiness that June days have in the northern states. And Allan must not lose it--he must be wheeled out into the garden.

She came out to him, in the place where they usually sat, and sank for a moment in the hammock, that afternoon. She had avoided him all the morning.

"I just came to see if everything was all right," she said, leaning toward him in that childlike, earnest way he knew so well. "I don't need to stay here if I worry you."

"I'd rather you'd stay, if you don't mind," he answered. Phyllis looked at him intently. He was white and dispirited, and his voice was listless. Oh, Phyllis thought, if Louise Frey had only been kind enough to die in babyhood, instead of under Allan's automobile! What could there have been about her to hold Allan so long? She glanced at his weary face again. This would never do! What had come to be her dominant instinct, keeping Allan's spirits up, emboldened her to bend forward, and even laugh a little.

"Come, Allan!" she said. "Even if we're not going to stay together always, we might as well be cheerful till we do part. We used to be good friends enough. Can't we be so a little longer?" It sounded heartless to her after she had said it, but it seemed the only way to speak. She smiled at him bravely.

Allan looked at her mutely for a moment, as if she had hurt him.

"You're right," he said suddenly. "There's no time but the present, after all. Come over here, closer to me, Phyllis. You've been awfully good to me, child--isn't there anything--_anything_ I could do for you--something you could remember afterwards, and say, 'Well, he did that for me, any way?'"

Phyllis's eyes filled with tears. "You have given me everything already," she said, catching her breath. She didn't feel as if she could stand much more of this.

"Everything!" he said bitterly. "No, I haven't. I can't give you what every girl wants--a well, strong man to be her husband--the health and strength that any man in the street has."

"Oh, don't speak that way, Allan!"

She bent over him sympathetically, moved by his words. In another moment the misunderstanding might have been straightened out, if it had not been for his reply.

"I wish I never had to see you at all!" he said involuntarily. In her sensitive state of mind the hurt was all she felt--not the deeper meaning that lay behind the words.

"I'll relieve you of my presence for awhile," she flashed back. Before she gave herself time to think, she had left the garden, with something which might be called a flounce. "When people say things like that to you," she said as she walked away from him, "it's carrying being an invalid a little _too_ far!"

Allan heard the side-door slam. He had never suspected before that Phyllis had a temper. And yet, what could he have said? But she gave him no opportunity to find out. In just about the time it might take to find gloves and a parasol, another door clanged in the distance. The street door. Phyllis had evidently gone out.

Phyllis, on her swift way down the street, grew angrier and angrier. She tried to persuade herself to make allowances for Allan, but they refused to be made. She felt more bitterly toward him than she ever had toward any one in her life. If she only hadn't leaned over him and been sorry for him, just before she got a slap in the face like that!

She walked rapidly down the main street of the little village. She hardly knew where she was going. She had been called on by most of the local people, but she did not feel like being agreeable, or making formal calls, just now. And what was the use of making friends, any way, when she was going back to her rags, poor little Cinderella that she was! Below and around and above everything else came the stinging thought that she had given Allan so much--that she had taken so much for granted.

Her quick steps finally took her to the outskirts of the village, to a little green stretch of woods. There she walked up and down for awhile, trying to think more quietly. She found the tide of her anger ebbing suddenly, and her mind forming all sorts of excuses for Allan. But that was not the way to get quiet--thinking of Allan! She tried to put him resolutely from her mind, and think about her own future plans. The first thing to do, she decided, was to rub up her library work a little.

It was with an unexpected feeling of having returned to her own place that she crossed the marble floor of the village library. She felt as if she ought to hurry down to the cloak-room, instead of waiting leisurely at the desk for her card. It all seemed uncannily like home--there was even a girl inside the desk who looked like Anna Black of her own Greenway Branch. Phyllis could hear, with a faint amus.e.m.e.nt, that the girl was scolding energetically in Anna Black's own way. The words struck on her quick ears, though they were not intended to carry.

"That's what comes of trusting to volunteer help. Telephones at the last moment 'she has a headache,' and not a single soul to look after the story-hour! And the children are almost all here already."

"We'll just have to send them home," said the other girl, looking up from her trayful of cards. "It's too late to get anybody else, and goodness knows _we_ can't get it in!"

"They ought to have another librarian," fretted the girl who looked like Anna. "They could afford it well enough, with their Soldiers' Monuments and all."

Phyllis smiled to herself from where she was investigating the card-catalogue. It all sounded so exceedingly natural. Then that swift instinct of hers to help caught her over to the desk, and she heard herself saying:

"I've had some experience in story telling; maybe I could help you with the story-hour. I couldn't help hearing that your story-teller has disappointed you."

The girl like Anna fell on her with rapture.

"Heaven must have sent you," she said. The other one, evidently slower and more cautious by nature, rose too, and came toward her. "You have a card here, haven't you?" she said. "I think I've seen you."

"Yes," Phyllis said, with a pang at speaking the name she had grown to love bearing; "I'm Mrs. Harrington--Phyllis Harrington. We live at the other end of the village."

"Oh, in the house with the garden all shut off from the lane!" said the girl like Anna, delightedly. "That lovely old house that used to belong to the Jamesons. Oh, yes, I know. You're here for the summer, aren't you, and your husband has been very ill?"

"Exactly," said Phyllis, smiling, though she wished people wouldn't talk about Allan! They seemed possessed to mention him!

"We'll be obliged forever if you'll do it," said the other girl, evidently the head librarian. "Can you do it now? The children are waiting."

"Certainly," said Phyllis, and followed the younger girl straightway to the bas.e.m.e.nt, where, it seemed, the story-hour was held. She wondered, as they went, if the girl envied her her expensively perishable summer organdie, with its flying sashes and costly accessories; if the girl thought about her swinging jewelries and endless leisure with a wish to have them for herself. She had wanted such things, she knew, when she was being happy on fifty dollars a month. And perhaps some of the women she had watched then had had heartaches under their furs....

The children, already sitting in a decorous ring on their low chairs, seemed after the first surprise to approve of Phyllis. The librarian lingered for a little by way of keeping order if it should be necessary, watched the competent sweep with which Phyllis gathered the children around her, heard the opening of the story, and left with an air of astonished approval. Phyllis, late best story-teller of the Greenway Branch, watched her go with a bit of professional triumph in her heart.

She told the children stories till the time was up, and then "just one story more." She had not forgotten how, she found. But she never told them the story of "How the Elephant Got His Trunk," that foolish, fascinating story-hour cla.s.sic that she had told Allan the night his mother had died; the story that had sent him to sleep quietly for the first time in years.... Oh, dear, was everything in the world connected with Allan in some way or other?