The Tomboy: A Pratt Portrait

BY the time Sophie Pratt had got to be twenty years of age, her father had all but given up hope of her ever getting married. This not because she was unattractive,—quite the contrary in fact, — but because he could not conceive of any man in his senses marrying an incorrigible tomboy.

The young lady herself, however, entertained no such misgivings. From childhood up she had looked forward with cheerful confidence to the married estate, to which she felt herself distinctly called by reason of her strong preference for playing with boys.

‘ As if getting married was games and stunts! ’ her brother Sandy used to argue, with much heat and no little show of reason. For Sandy, in whose mind weddings were fatally associated with velvet jackets and patent-leather pumps, cherished a deep-seated aversion to matrimony and all its attendant ceremonies. But to Aleck, their father, that sacred institution offered the only prospect of relief from a well-nigh intolerable cross.

Some there were who held that the intentions of Providence, usually so inscrutable, were never more plainly manifest than in the bestowal upon Aleck Pratt of a tomboy daughter. For while the good man would have been properly grieved had this eldest child of his developed some physical infirmity or moral twist, the circumstance could hardly have furnished that daily and hourly flagellation of spirit commonly regarded as beneficial, which was mercilessly inflicted upon him at the hands of his innocent child. The sight of a little girl — anybody’s little girl — walking fences or playing hopscotch, was an offense to his well-ordered mind. In so much that when his wife Louisa sought to placate him by the confession that she herself had been something of a tomboy in her day, he could only render thanks that he had not been earlier made aware of the circumstance, since the knowledge thereof must inevitably have deterred him from what had been on the whole a very happy marriage. This guarded admission, made in the secrecy of his own consciousness, was characteristic of Aleck. His feelings of satisfaction were habitually under better control than his sense of injury.

In this, as in nearly every particular, little Sophie formed a sprightly antithesis to her excellent father. The delights of life it was that she keenly realized, — the joy of living that sent her scampering along the decorous thoroughfares of Dunbridge, that gave her the catlike agility which made nothing of the most contumacious apple tree or the dizziest barn-loft. It was sheer bubbling spirits that set her whistling like a bobolink under the very nose of her outraged parent. Scant comfort did Aleck derive from his brother Robert s assurance that the little bobolink whistled in tune.

‘ Might as well swear grammatically,’ he would declare, in cold disgust; thereby causing Robert to rejoice mightily at thought of the salutary discipline in store for the tomboy’s father.

Nor was Robert alone in his unchastened triumph. Old Lady Pratt herself was not above breathing the pious hope that Aleck had got his come-uppance at last. And although she was forced to depart this life before the situation had fully developed, she did not do so without many a premonitory chuckle at her grandson’s expense.

‘ You’ll never fetch it over that girl of yours,’ she assured him more than once. ' You might as well try to make an India-rubber ball lie flat.’

And Aleck’s handsome, clean-shaven mouth would set itself in a straight line indicative quite as much of martyrdom as of resistance.

Little Sophie, meanwhile, who could no more help being a tomboy than she could help having curly hair and a straight back, took reprimands and chastisement in perfectly good part, all unconscious of that filial mission from which her elders hoped so much. For herself, she had but two grievances against Fate: namely, the necessity of wearing hoop-skirts, and the misfortune of having been christened Sophie, — a soft, ‘ squushy,’ chimney-corner name, ludicrously unsuited to a girl who could fire a stone like a boy. But after all, there was compensation in the fact that she could fire a stone the right way, and not toss it up like an omelette as most little girls did; while as to the hoop-skirts, whatever their iniquities (which were legion), they had never yet deterred her from any indulgence of her natural proclivities. Why, there was a tradition in the neighborhood that the first time Sophie Pratt stuck herfeet under the straps of her brother’s stilts, she had walked off on them as a calf walks about on his legs the day he is born.

After which exposition of the child’s quality it is perhaps superfluous to state that she was famous for hairbreadth escapes, or that she had a way of coming out of them with a whole skin. She was indeed a living witness to the efficacy of that spontaneous order of gymnastics which is independent of rule and regimen; for, now that she was past her teens, she could recall having been so much as ill-abed only once in her life, long, long ago, on which memorable occasion the doctor came and stuck a spoon down her throat and nearly strangled her. But he was so firm about it that she never squirmed at all, and when it was over he called her a good girl. She used in thosechildish days to wish it might happen again, just so that she might hear him call her a good girl. For the doctor had a beautiful voice, low and wise, — oh, very wise, — but somehow it went straight through you, and Sophie did like things to go through her. But she was incurably healthy and got no more compliments from the doctor, who never took the least notice of her when he came to attend the interesting invalids of the family. This was of course quite natural, since the doctor, being even then an elderly widower, — going on for thirty! — with a little girl of his own to look after, could hardly be expected to bother with a small tomboy who never had anything the matter with her.

Then all of a sudden, before anybody knew what she was about, the small tomboy had grown into a big tomboy, — a gay, flashing, exuberant girl of twenty, who could out-skate and outswim the best of them, or ride bareback when she got the chance, — who could even curl up in a corner, if circumstances favored, and pore over her Shakespeare by the hour together, — but who was never to be caught sewing a seam or working cross-stitch unless upon compulsion. And Aleck wondered morosely why he of all men should have been singled out for this particular penance, and why on earth some misguided youngster did n’t come along and take the girl off his hands. Youngsters enough there were, dancing attendance upon the young hoyden, but so far as Aleck could discover, all had heretofore warily avoided committing themselves.

‘ I doubt if she ever has an offer,’ he declared impatiently, as he and Louisa were driving together behind old Rachel one day in early spring. The outburst was called forth by the sight of Sophie, tramping across-lots with Hugh Cornish, pitcher on the ’Varsity Nine.

‘ But you surely would n’t want her to marry young Cornish,’Louisa demurred, ‘ seeing how you feel about college athletics.’

‘ I should be thankful to have her marry anybody! ’Aleck insisted, treating Rachel to a sharp flick of the lash, which caused the good beast to jerk them almost off the seat.

Whereupon Louisa, in the interest, not only of corporal equilibrium, but of marital harmony as well, allowed him to have that last word which he looked upon as his inalienable prerogative.

After that they were silent for a time, while the excellent Rachel drew them at her own pace along the quiet highway. Sophie and her stalwart cavalier were long since lost to view, yet Aleck’s mind still dwelt upon the picture, harassed perhaps by a gnawing conviction that the girl had not got into that field by the legitimate ingress. And presently Louisa, divining her husband’s mood as a good wife will, cast about for a palliative.

‘In some ways,’ she remarked, ‘Sophie is a good deal like your mother, Aleck. The dear woman was perhaps not quite so domestic as some, but there never was her like for rising to an emergency.’

Here Aleck, as in duty bound, emitted a corroboratory grunt, though it must be owned that he had never more than half approved of his charming but undeniably erratic mother. And Louisa, encouraged by that, grunt of acquiescence, deemed the moment favorable for pursuing her theme.

‘Just think,’ she urged, ‘whata tower of strength the child was when little Llenry was so ill last winter. After the first week the doctor was quite willing to have her left in charge for hours at a time. That was a great compliment to pay a girl of twenty.’

‘ Hm! He did say she was a good nurse,’ Aleck admitted; for he was a just man.

‘ Well, he ought to know, for he was watching her as a cat watches a mouse. Especially that night when we were all so frightened, the night he spent with us. You remember? ’

But Aleck, not to be drawn into any more concessions, abruptly changed the subject.

‘What’s become of that girl of his?’ he inquired.

‘ Lily? Why, she has been abroad with her aunt this last year. Dear, dear! I often think how hard it was for the poor man to be left a widower so young!’

At which the talk trailed off into harmless gossip, and Aleck’s face cleared, as a man’s does, when he transfers his attention from his own perplexities to those of his neighbors.

Fate, meanwhile, was doing its best to set his wisdom at naught, and we all know Fate’s resourcefulness in such matters. For at that very moment Hugh Cornish, fresh from an intercollegiate victory, was bracing himself for that categorical proposal which Aleck, too faint-hearted by half, had prematurely despaired of.

Sophie was as usual in high spirits, none the less so, if the truth be known, because of the glory inherent in the attendance of so distinguished a personage. As they tramped along together over the broad expanse of turf, elastic with the forward pressing of a thousand hidden, mounting urgencies of spring, she was deterred from challenging her escort to a race only by the well-founded conviction that he would win. She gave him a sidelong glance, of which he appeared to be quite unconscious, — a man accustomed to the plaudits of the multitude might well be oblivious of such a little thing as that, — and she concluded that she would have liked the inarticulate giant well enough, if it had not been for his illjudged zeal in the matter of helping her over stone walls.

Presently, after a somewhat prolonged silence, Sophie, at sight of a pair of horns over yonder, was so magnanimous as to own that she was afraid of cows. One must find something to talk about, and Hugh’s resources might be trusted to fall short even of the bovine level.

‘ I’m glad there’s something you are afraid of,’ he remarked, in his stolid way. Whereupon she had immediate resort to hedging.

‘Oh, well,’ she explained, ‘I’m not afraid, really. Not with my brains, you understand. Only with my elbows.’

‘ With your elbows? ’

‘ It’s only that when a cow stares at me, or waves her horns ever so little, I get the jumps in my elbows.’

‘ You mean your nerves. I’m glad you’ve got nerves.’

Hugh was apt to be repetitious, but then, he was a personage, and fairly entitled to indulgence. So,—

‘ Why are you glad? ’ she inquired, willing to humor him for the battles he had won.

‘ Because,’ he answered, standing stock still and squaring himself for the attack, ‘ a girl who’s got nerves needs a man to take care of her. And — and — Sophie, what I want is to take care of you — for always.’

And before she could get her breath he had added something fatuous about a strong arm, and Sophie, to whose selfsufficient spirit other people’s strong arms were a negligible quantity, felt herself easily mistress of the situation. Good gracious, she thought, was that the way they did it? Well, there was nothing very alarming about that! And she rashly undertook to laugh it off. Upon which the popular idol, inured only to that order of opposition which may be expressed in terms of brawn and muscle, came suddenly out of his calm stolidity as he was said to have a way of doing when the game was on.

Then Sophie sprang to her guns, and so effectual was the repulse that, next thing she knew, she was climbing a stone wall to the road, quite unassisted, while Hugh stalked in great dudgeon toward the woods. And her silly tieback skirt, lineal successor to the hoops of yore, played her one of those scurvy tricks that are in the nature of petticoats, and somehow or other a small stone tilted, and a big stone shifted, and there was her right foot caught in a kind of vise, and to save herself she could n’t wriggle loose without danger of bringing the whole thing down on her ankle. It was not doing any harm for the moment, but it was ignominious to be squatting there like a trussed fowl. She only hoped Hugh would not look round and catch her in such a plight. She shuddered to think of his triumph. But he never once turned his head, as he went stalking away toward the woods. Well, so much for Hugh!

And here were wheels on the road, — not her father and mother, she hoped! But no, it was nothing but the doctor, the very man she would have chosen for the emergency. It was not the first time he had caught her climbing stone walls; in fact he had once picked her off one and given her a ride home, telling her that he was to be put out to pasture himself in a day or two, going up with Lily to see the colored leaves. With this reassuring recollection, and reflecting also that he would understand how to get her loose without pulling her toes off, because he knew just how they were stuck into her foot, she promptly made a signal of distress.

Then the doctor drove on to the grassy border across the road, and making fast the weight, came toward her, looking exactly as he had looked years ago, when he stuck the spoon down her throat and called her a good girl, — wise and firm and very professional. Somehow, in spite of their later intercourse, much of it so important, and in which she was aware of having played a creditable part, Sophie always thought of the doctor as sticking a spoon down her throat and calling her a good girl, in a voice that went through her. How nice to be Lily and have a father like that!

The doctor meanwhile was finding it a ticklish job to lift that stone without hurting the foot. He said afterward that it was one of the most delicate operations he had ever been called upon to perform. When it was accomplished, and the foot drawn out, the impromptu patient said, ‘ Thank you, doctor,’very politely, and stood up on top of the wall to stretch herself. But as he extended a hand to help her down, she jumped lightly off to the other side.

‘Still the tomboy!’ he remarked indulgently.

‘ Yes,’ she retorted; and then, with an exultant thought of her late encounter, ‘Father says I shall die an old maid if I go on like this! ’

It was a very flighty thing to say, but Sophie was feeling flighty, as a girl does after a first offer, especially when it was based on the strong-arm plea. As if she were to be the beneficiary, indeed!

‘ Should you like that? ’ the doctor asked, studying the vivid young face with amused attention. She looked anything but a sick-nurse, the little fraud! A reversion to type, he told himself, complacently misusing the familiar phrase. He remembered having once stated in a moment of inspiration that a tomboy was an organism endowed with an overplus of vitality. Well, here was vitality with a vengeance! It emanated from her every feature, played in her lightest movement. It quite made the good doctor’s nerves tingle! Nor was it all a question of youth, either. One did n’t lose that sort of thing with the years. And it crossed the doctor’s mind, parenthetically, that he was himself on the sunny side of forty. He had just saved a man’s life with a quick operation. He could never have done a thing like that in his early twenties, when he was a hotheaded medical student, making a runaway match with Jennie, poor child! Oh, yes, vitality had staying power, and this little friend of his certainly possessed it to an unusual degree.

‘ And how would you like that? ’ he repeated, a quizzical look gleaming in those wise, kind eyes of his.

‘Oh, that would depend,’ Sophie answered, with a little toss.

‘ On what ? ’

‘ On Mr. Right, I suppose.’

Old Mrs. Inkley was expecting the doctor that very minute, but, after all, there was nothing really the matter with her but temper, and if he found her more spicy than usual, all the better for him. So he lingered a bit, and remarked, in his fatherly way, — at least Sophie supposed it must be fatherly, since he had a sixteen-yearold daughter of his own, — ‘I wonder what a young girl’s idea of Mr. Right is, now-a-days. A baseball hero, I suppose.’

‘ A baseball hero! ’ she flung back. ‘ Anything but that! ’

‘ You don’t, say so! ’

‘ They think they are so strong,’ she explained. ‘ They want to take care of you.’

‘ Oh, that’s it! I never understood before. I’ve got a daughter just growing up, you know, so I gather data where I can.’

Upon which, abandoning for the time being his strictly scientific investigations, he turned to regain his buggy.

But Sophie, tomboy to the last, was over the wall in a trice.

Coming up behind him, — ' Perhaps you would like to know more about Mr. Right,’ she remarked, with a saucy challenge, — ‘ on account of your daughter.’

Startled to find her so near, he turned sharp about. But the quizzical eyes met hers with an answering gleam that was entirely reassuring. So, without a misgiving, and thinking to please the kind doctor, — ‘ Do you remember sticking a spoon down my throat years ago? ’ she inquired.

‘ I’m sure I don’t,’ he laughed. ‘ I’ve stuck spoons down the throats of half the youngsters in Dunbridge.’

His calling her youngster settled it. ‘ Well,’ she observed demurely, ‘ I made up my mind that day that I should marry somebody exactly like you! ’

Exactly like him! He looked into those dancing eyes, he felt the tingling contagion of that vitality he had been philosophizing about, again he remembered that he was on the sunny side of forty, and his heart leaped.

‘ Why not marry me? ’ he cried.

And Sophie’s heart, being all unpracticed in the most primitive motions, knew no better than to stand still.

‘ Oh, — could I ? ’ she faltered.

‘Would you?’ he urged vehemently, seizing both her hands.

But she snatched them away.

‘ How ridiculous! ’ she heard herself say. And the next instant she was over the wall, and speeding across the pasture, to the tune of a heart that had caught the rhythm at last.

With a long look at the flying figure, the doctor turned away and went back to his buggy. There he picked up the weight, climbed in, and drove straight to Mrs. Inkley, who lived in a boarding-house, where he was quite likely to find other patients with nothing the matter with them. But there was something the matter with the doctor himself this time, and later on he should have to take up his own case.

His case did not lack attention, for his friends and patients took it up with great vigor. One and all declared it to be a headlong affair; quite what might have been expected of Sophie, but so unlike the doctor, who had always been accounted a model of caution and good judgment, and of touching constancy to the memory of his first love. Old Mrs. Inkley went so far as to assert, as any Mrs. Inkley, old or young, might be depended upon to do, that there was no fool like an old fool. In this case, considering that she might have been the doctor’s grandmother, the stricture savored of hyperbole.

But, for the culprits themselves, they were chiefly concerned to make excuses to each other, — Sophie declaring that she had not been headlong, for she had been in love with him ever since he stuck that spoon down her throat, — only she did n’t know it. While the doctor, for his part, strenuously maintained that he had never given her a thought until the very moment that she offered herself to him! Naturally he declined to admit, even to himself, that he had been thinking about anything but his patient during those long hours of the night when it had been professionally incumbent upon him to keep a close watch upon the interesting young creature whose overplus of vitality was standing them in such good stead. It had certainly been a revelation of the girl’s character, in which he had taken a keen psychological interest, — but purely psychological, he would have himself understand. A pretty state of things it would be if a doctor were to go about falling in love with his nurses while they were on duty! He hoped he was old enough to know better than that!

And after all, the one thing that really mattered was to get the consent of Aleck and his wife to hurry up the wedding so that they might have a chance to get sobered down before Lily got back. For really, the situation was too surprisingly delightful just at present for reasonable behavior. The doctor was so far gone in recklessness that more than once he caught himself smiling at the way he had stolen a march on Lily. Lucky that she was the kind of girl she was, by the way, for if she had been a less vigilant guardian all these years, who could say what might have befallen him before ever Sophie thought of proposing! And that admission, that there might perhaps be other marriageable young women in the world than Sophie, if he had but chanced to observe them, was the only indication the doctor gave of having passed his first youth.

They had their way, of course. For when Aleck tried to conceal his satisfaction under cover of the perfunctory argument that a man who had once made a runaway match could not be very dependable, Sophie retorted that she thought that was the way such things should always be managed, and she did n’t know but she and the doctor might decide upon it themselves. At which Aleck was so scandalized that he felt, and not for the first time, as we know, that he should be lucky to get her married off on any terms. And when her mother asked how she could ever expect to cope with a grown-up stepdaughter, she said she was glad of the chance to show that a stepmother could be a real mother to a girl! And she said it with such ingenuous good faith that Louisa did n’t know whether to laugh or cry.

And so the doctor and Sophie were married, and lived happily ever after, — until Lily came home.

Sophie had essayed a correspondence with her stepdaughter, but she had made little headway, though the letters were punctiliously answered.

One morning in early September, as she sat behind the coffee-urn, doing her prettiest, and very pretty it was, to look matronly, she glanced across the table and observed doubtfully, ‘I’ve just had a letter from Lily. Would you like to read it? ’

‘ Oh, I know Lily’s letters pretty well,’ was the lazy response. ‘ Can’t you tell me about it? ’

‘ Well, there’s not much to tell. That’s just the trouble. I wonder — do you think it possible that she may be afraid of me? ’

And the doctor, who knew his Lily quite as well as he knew her letters, replied, with a somewhat artificial cheerfulness,—for the day of reckoning was at hand, — ‘Oh, that will pass off. Just you see if it does n’t. Shall you feel like driving me round this morning?’

' Feel like it!' the formidable stepmother cried, falling joyfully into his little trap; and straightway she forgot all about Lily.

This driving the doctor round was in itself a delectable function, and it was astonishing how quickly the rounds were made, and how often the busy practitioner found time for a spin out into the open country. He said it was because Sophie was a so much better whip than he, and also because he did n’t have to bother with the weight. But it must be confessed that those of his patients who had nothing the matter with them were inclined to feel neglected. Old Mrs. Inkley said that she had half a mind to send him about his business, only that nobody else understood her case!

And then, by the time these two young people — for they certainly felt near enough of an age to be twins — had ceased to be an object of interest to the community at large, and were settling down into that state of homespun content which is about the best weave there is, — especially when shot through with flashes of something keener and more stimulating which a youthful dynamo of Sophie’s stamp may be trusted to set in motion, — the inevitable occurred, as the inevitable is forever doing, and Lily arrived.

Her father met her at the dock and brought her home, and Sophie was at the open door, her hands outstretched in eager welcome. And Lily was so polite, and so disconcertingly self-possessed, that Sophie instantly experienced that fatal sensation in the elbows which theretofore only one created thing had had the power to induce, and would no more have dared kiss her than — well, it would not be respectful to the doctor’s daughter to pursue the comparison.

Thoroughly unnerved, and for the first time too in a career that had not been wanting in adventure, Sophie dropped the neatly gloved hand and took refuge in a conventional observation which smacked so strongly of her father that it gave the doctor quite a turn. To his intense relief, however, this proved but a passing seizure, and before the day was out, Sophie was her own spontaneous, irresistible self. Irresistible that is, to Lily’s father, — a fact which Lily was quick to perceive and to resent. That there was something seriously amiss, Sophie became aware to her cost, if not to her complete enlightenment when rash enough to venture upon non-debatable ground.

Coming into Lily’s room next morning, — ‘ Won’t you let me help you unpack? ’ she had the temerity to ask.

‘ No, thank you,’ was the crisp reply. ‘ I don’t like to have a stranger handling my things.’

And Sophie, rarely at a loss for a retort, bethought herself just in time of the peculiar obligations of her position, the which she so misconceived as to rejoin, with preternatural good humor, ‘ I hope we sha’n’t be strangers long, Lily.’

‘ In a way, I suppose not,’ Lily parried, while she measured her stepmother with a hostile eye, ’since we’ve got to live in the same house.’

Whereat Sophie, still rather new to the exercise of angelic virtues, made as dignified an exit as circumstances would permit.

‘ And I meant to be kind to her! ’ she gasped. ‘ I meant to be such a good stepmother! And I will be, too,’ — this with an accession of high resolve, materially reinforced by a pinch of the Old Adam. ‘I’ll be a good stepmother, whether or no! ’

Now Sophie was a young woman of strong will, unschooled to reverses,— had not everything always come her way, even to the most adorable of husbands that she had got just for the asking? — and she certainly had no mind to be thwarted by a snip of a girl like Lily. And thus put upon her mettle, and erroneously concluding that Lily’s hostility was but an instance of that oft-incurred disapprobation of which her father was exponent-in-chief, she unhesitatingly launched out upon the doubtful emprise of changing her nature. She would be a tomboy no longer, but, mindful at last of her father’s admonitions, she would immediately institute a thoroughgoing reform, in deference not, alas, to her own filial obligations, but to those parental responsibilities which she herself had so confidently assumed. Above all, she would be invariably kind to Lily. And it never once dawned upon her that nothing in the world could have been so exasperating to the little rebel as this conciliatory attitude. She had come home armed to the teeth against a tomboy stepmother, and here she was confronted with a pattern of good manners and good temper, in face of which the poor child, at her wit’s end, relapsed into a smouldering suspiciousness which found its account in the most pertinacious chaperoning ever administered to a pair of properly accredited lovers.

The doctor meanwhile had been not unprepared for trouble; for, young as he claimed to be, and as he firmly intended to remain, he had seen something of human nature in his day. If he was rather taken aback to find his daughter turning the tables on him in this highly original fashion, he was too fair-minded to begrudge the child any small indemnification she could devise for herself. What did bother him was the unlooked-for transformation in his wife, which he was inclined to regard as a violation of contract. He took her point, however, for he had had his misgivings touching the effect of her innocent but spirited lawlessness upon the discreet Lily. And he also entertained the hope that so precipitate a reform might prove short-lived.

‘ Could n’t you relax a bit? ’ he inquired, at last, with a whimsical supplication difficult to withstand.

‘ But I simply must win Lily over,’ was the ardent, not to say obdurate, protest.

‘ And how about Lily’s father? ’

That expressive voice of his could be perilously appealing. But the young enthusiast was on her guard.

‘ Oh, he’s too dead easy!' she retorted wickedly.

In which lapse from grace the doctor was obliged to find what consolation he could.

It was but a week after the reign of decorum had set in that they repaired to the mountains for the doctor’s autumn holiday, Lily in assiduous attendance. The self-constituted chaperon had heroically sacrificed a seashore invitation, with all its allurements, to a sense of duty second only to Sophie’s own; and this although she had been urgently admonished not to take the others into consideration at all. And so it came about that the proverbial three, almost as abhorrent to Nature in certain contingencies as the vacuum she more consistently repudiates, went to see the colored leaves. These latter did all that could be reasonably expected of them. They glowed and they gleamed and they shimmered; they splashed the mountain-sides with bronze and carmine; they spread a gold-embroidered canopy overhead and a Persian carpet under foot; and Sophie, who had never seen their like, found it difficult to refrain from an unbridled expression of delight.

Thanks, however, to Lily’s repressive influence, she succeeded in keeping her spirits in check, — to such good purpose indeed that, when one day the doctor was summoned in consultation to a remote farmhouse, no child delivered into the hands of an unscrupulous stepmother could have felt the sense of utter abandonment that overwhelmed poor Sophie, as she turned from bidding him good-by and confronted the coldly critical eye of Lily. True to her colors, however, she made a valiant rally.

' Shall we go for a walk later on? ’ she asked, with unflinching affability.

‘ Whatever you wish,’ was the crushing response.

And accordingly just at the perfect hour of the day, they started on one of Lily’s conventional promenades. Thus they circumspectly followed the dusty highway, though fields and woods were beckoning; and very rough going it would have been for Sophie, only that she was walking in step to that trumpet-call of color, and her thoughts were not of Lily, but of Lily’s father.

Perhaps Lily suspected as much, and it may have been with a view to discountenancing the indiscretion that she remarked brusquely, ' I wish you would n’t race so.’

' I beg your pardon,’ said Sophie, bringing herself up short in more senses than one. ' I was n’t thinking.’

' You appeared to be,’ observed Lily, with veiled satire. After which brief dialogue, conversation became if anything less animated than before.

Presently Lily announced, as if she had really come to the end of her endurance, ‘ I’m going back across the fields. It’s shorter.’

‘Good! ’ cried Sophie, literally jumping at the chance. 4 Llere’s a gate.’

A gate, indeed! Did Lily know how to estimate the concession?

' Oh, you’ll not care to come,’ she demurred, with a too palpable satisfaction in the circumstance. ' You ’re afraid of cows, you know, and there are sure to be some over the hill.’

And Sophie, yielding to the spirit rather than to the letter of the argument, meekly acquiesced.

‘I’ll meet you on the lower road,’ she said. And then, having taken down the bars and put them up again, — for Lily was peculiarly liable to splinters, — she stood a moment, watching the slender figure as it progressed, straight and stiff, across the field, the silk skirts swishing audibly from side to side.

Poor Lily! It was hard upon her, very hard, to be possessor of an incomparable father like the doctor, and then to have another girl, a perfect outsider, come along and insist upon going snacks. She only wondered that Lily bore it as well as she did. And, speaking of fathers, — what a pity that her own was not there to see how she was beginning to profit by his excellent bringing-up. He would certainly have had to approve of her at last. And somehow that reflection, which should only have confirmed her in well-doing, worked just the other way about, and in a flash she was all tomboy again.

Lily had disappeared in a hollow, and the general public seemed to be represented for the moment by one old plough-horse, temporarily out of business, and a vociferous flock of crows. Perceiving which, and shaking her head in a characteristic way she had, as if her mane of hair were loose and flying, the model stepmother caught at the chance for a run.

Then off came the scarlet jacket that the doctor thought so becoming, up went the tie-back skirt to her very boottops, and away went Sophie down the road. Oh, but it was good to run, — it was good! As she raced along the road, — really raced this time, — the swift motion going to her head like wine, she felt herself purged of alien virtues, as irresponsible as any young animal, bounding over the good friendly earth for the sheer joy of it. If only she might run like this forever! If only she need never arrive anywhere! If only —

She had rounded the great rolling pasture, and as she approached the lower gate, she slackened her pace. There were cattle as Lily had predicted, scattered about the field, grazing quietly, or standing here and there under an apple tree, switching at belated flies. It was all very peaceful and rural, save for the intensely dramatic setting of the autumn foliage, and Sophie smiled to think that she could ever have imagined herself afraid of an innocuous cow. She did not know much about real life when she thought that!

And there was Lily now, a natural sequence in her train of thought. As she watched the sedate figure, appearing at the crest of the slope, she only hoped that there was nothing in her own aspect to suggest that she had been guilty of anything so undignified as a run, with skirts picked up and hat on the back of her head.

And still Lily came sedately on. Already Sophie could hear the swish of silk skirt and overskirt. She would never have ventured to question their appropriateness for a cross-country stroll, — so had the day of the stepmother waned, — but she was glad that she herself knew the comfort of jersey and corduroy. And Lily, giving no more sign of recognition than as if the waiting figure had been clad in a garment of invisibility, came sedately on, while the skirts swished from side to side, and — What was that?

A low rumble as of distant thunder, — then louder, and louder still. Good heavens! There was somebody disapproving of those swishing skirts who was not afraid to say so! One of the cows, her horns lowered, — no, no! — a cow did n’t do that! It was a bull! And look, he was charging, head down, tail up, straight across the field at the unconscious Lily!

' Run, Lily, run!’ Sophie screamed, vaulting over the bars, and tearing across the field in the general direction of the bull, who, fortunately, had yet much ground to cover. ' Run! Run!

And Lily gave one glance over her shoulder, saw the awful brute bearing down upon her, and stood rooted to the ground, stiff with horror. Run? She could no more have run than she could have flown!

And Sophie, wildly waving her scarlet jacket, and yelling with all her might dashed straight for the bull. Perplexed, not to say annoyed, he halted an instant. Which should it be? That meanspirited blue thing just in his path, that was showing no fight at all ? or that maddening red thing over there, flourishing defiance in his very eyes, and daring him, with vociferous insults, to come on? With a blood-curdling bellow he announced his choice, and as Sophie turned and fled before him, — ‘ Run, Lily, run! ’ she found breath to scream.

Then Lily looked again, and the horror lifted, — the horror that was paralyzing her. But in its place came another horror that lent wings to her feet; and, espying a passing team, she picked up her swishing skirts, higher than Sophie’s had ever gone, and flew over the ground, shrieking, ‘Help! Help!’ But in her heart was a deadly fear, and she did not dare look back.

The men were at the gate, and making her a clear passage. And as she stumbled over the lowered bars aslant, ' Save her, save her! ’ she choked. ‘Oh, save her! ’

Then one of the men laughed. Was he mad? Was all the world mad? Or was she mad herself?

' I reckon she don’t need no savin’,’ he opined, with slow deliberation fitting the bars back again, — for he was himself not over-anxious for an encounter with a bull on the rampage. ' Look, Sissy; she’s up in the gallery, ’n’ he’s doin’ the bull-fight act for her, all by himself. Ain’t that pretty, now? ’

Then Lily looked; and there among the higher branches of a low-spreading apple tree, sat her pattern stepmother, quite at ease, while the bull, with deep growlings and mutterings, trampled and tore the offending jacket into flinders.

Such was the bucolic scene that met the doctor’s startled eyes as he came driving home along the quiet country road, discussing congenital errors of circulation with his professional colleague.

‘It was really great fun,’ Sophie declared, with easy nonchalance when, the bull having been subjugated and led away, she found herself at liberty to resume communication with her agitated family. ‘ For I had my eye on that apple tree from the start, so that I knew there was n’t the least danger.'

This with a tentative glance at the doctor, who struck her as looking not quite himself.

‘ But you are afraid of cows! ’ Lily stammered, still rather white and breathless. ‘ You said you were.’

‘ Yes; but you never heard me say I was afraid of a bull! ’

With which gallant disclaimer, the heroine of the hour took on an air of buoyant unregeneracy, which proved so reanimating to the doctor that he was able to observe, with only a slightly exaggerated composure, that the tomboy had won out at last.

And yet, — was it then the tomboy, he asked himself that same evening, when, coming out on the moonlit piazza, he caught sight of two girlish figures on the steps over yonder, leaning close, in earnest talk,—Sophie’s voice low and caressing, Lily’s subdued to a key of blissful surrender. Was it indeed the tomboy that had won out? Or was it that other Sophie, — the Sophie he had seen brooding over her little patient, mothering him so tirelessly through the long night-watches, — the Sophie whom the doctor had made such a point of not having fallen in love with?

A vagrant whiff of cigar smoke betrayed his presence, and instantly the two were on their feet and coming toward him, —Lily a bit shame-faced and disposed to reticence. But Sophie could brook no secrets from the doctor.

As they came up to him, — ' Only think,’ she announced cheerfully, yet with a just perceptible vibration of feeling, ‘ Lily says she will have me for a mother after all. And, do you know,’ — the shy note of feeling hurrying to cover, — ‘ I did n’t have to offer myself, either! ’

But there was no trace of banter in the doctor’s tone, as he drew Lily to him and said, with a look that Sophie put away in her heart to keep there forever, ‘It’s what we’ve been in want of all our life; eh, little one? ’

And at the word, that primal and essential three which Nature in her wisdom prefers above all others, came quietly into its own.