but tom lupton was not articulate. he walked beside mary vanton, sat at her table, declined cigars and apologetically lit his pipe instead, looked at his hostess and old friend with something kindling in his countenance, talked—the casual talk that there was to exchange in cheerful barter—and said nothing of what was in his heart. yet mary vanton knew what was there.

the same thing was there that had been in the heart of the youngster, the boy, tommy lupton, she had known. it would be there always. but his attitude was different from richard hand’s. in spite of an existence that gave him plenty of opportunity for thinking things out there were things that tommy never would think out. he would only dumbly feel.

if he couldn’t think them out he certainly couldn’t utter them in words. without doubt he thought it wrong to feel them. all his life he had loved mary vanton just as, in a boyish way, he had loved the girl mermaid. but he did not realize it; would have thought it a wicked thing in him if he had realized it.

his attitude was simple. mary developed it one day[258] and defined it for her own satisfaction—developed and defined it for his unconscious satisfaction, too. he would feel the better for it, she knew, though he would not know why.

“what,” she asked him as they were walking along the ocean shore together, “are you going to do—eventually?”

tom lupton considered.

“oh, i suppose i shall just stick along here,” he confessed. “it isn’t much. it’s all i have to look forward to.

“other men,” he said, a moment later, “haven’t any special thing to look forward to, either. take the fellows at the station. all the older ones are married and expect to retire on their pensions some day and take it easy. they’ve children. they can watch them grow up. i’m not married. i’ll probably stay in the harness as long as i’m able and then i’ll have to quit, i suppose, whether i want to or not. i can watch other people’s children growing up. i can occupy myself some way. that’s what it comes to mostly—occupying yourself some way—doesn’t it?”

“why don’t you marry?” if it was a cruelty he was mercifully unconscious of it.

he looked straight at her and replied: “i’ve never thought of marrying.”

it was literal truth. mary vanton understood that instantly. he had, from boyhood, always put her clean[259] above him. he had fought for her, a boyish battle, and been defeated; and after that, while he continued to feel the same way about her, while he continued to love her, the fancy of adolescence maturing into the devotion of the grown man, he had never figured himself in the running. she had stepped outside of the circle of his life, and when she re?ntered it, it was as the wife of another man—which was the whole story.

“of course,” he was saying, with his admirable simplicity and acceptance of the facts—so far as he recognized them. “of course i wish i might have married. it would have been pleasanter. i should either have been much happier or very much unhappier.”

again he looked at her with his smile in which the boy he had been was so clearly visible. when he smiled the little wrinkles at the comers of his eyes, got from much seaward gazing, made him look younger.

“i’m worried about you,” he told her, with the directness that was to be expected of him. “do you think you ought to stay here this winter?”

“i think i must,” she answered. “it’s not from any idea of shunning people but because i have got to arrive at some way of living. if guy were dead i could make an unalterable decision. with guy alive i have to consider the possibility of his return, the probability of it.”

“you feel sure he will return?”

“quite sure. if i thought he were never to return i[260] would reconcile myself to it as best i could, make my plans, and go ahead. even then i should have to provide for the fact that he might come back. but believing as i do that he is sure to come back, and feeling as i do utterly uncertain how long he will be away, i am very badly perplexed.”

“why do anything?” he asked, wonderingly. “it is not as if you had to earn your bread.”

“it is more difficult,” she explained. “when you have to earn your bread, and your children’s bread, you are spared the necessity of any decision. you just set about earning it the best way you can, and puzzle over nothing except how more advantageously to earn it. or how to earn more.

“those are not my problems and i have everything to be thankful for, no doubt, that they aren’t. and yet—i wonder if it isn’t easier to deal with difficulties under the pressure of necessity? do you realize that i have no necessity, immediate or remote, pressing upon me to compel me to address myself to my problem, to solve it?”

this was not so subtle but that tom lupton saw it and said so.

“you’d be better off, in a way, if you had to make up your mind to something,” he agreed. “but what i can’t see is what you need to make up your mind to.”

mary vanton permitted herself a slight gesture of spreading hands.

[261]“if guy were to be gone but a short time, if i knew that, could feel certain of it, i would simply stay here and keep things as they are,” she declared. “the children come first in any calculation i may make. but if i knew he were to be gone for a period of years i’d do quite differently. i’d go into something, something where i could have them with me and where we’d all be pretty constantly at work together. a big farm, i think. i don’t know anything about farming, but i dare say i could learn something about it, and surely a boy like john could learn it from the ground up—or perhaps farming is learned from the ground down,” she finished, smilingly.

“what i am getting at is this,” she went on. “i feel the need of productive labour. i am not a theorist and i have no set of passionate political or economic interests. but i count it a real misfortune that at this crisis in my life i do not have to work for my living and my children’s living. it would be better for me if i had to, and it will be better for them if they are trained to. under the trust left by guy i can’t impoverish myself and the children if i wished to; and certainly i don’t wish to. money is an obligation, just as much as any other form of property, and more than most. the obligation is to use it as rightly as you know how, as productively as you can. and that obligation certainly isn’t discharged by filling our five mouths with food and putting clothes on the five of us. it is rather[262] more fitly discharged by educating ourselves, but it can only be fully discharged in the end by productive labour. that’s the conscientious and dutiful view i take of it; from the purely selfish view there is a good deal also to be said for a big farm. we need a new set of interests and healthful occupation. it needn’t be a farm, except that i can’t think of any other productive occupation where the children could healthfully bear their share. i couldn’t,” she added, humorously, “organize a factory for the five of us nor set up a factory in which we would be much use to the world or to ourselves.”

“you could carry out this idea, anyway,” tom lupton meditated aloud.

“i shouldn’t feel that i could embark on anything of the sort if i felt certain of guy’s return within a comparatively short time,” she corrected. “if he comes back and approves of my idea we ought to execute it together. that would be as it should be. if i knew he were not going to return for five or ten years i would go ahead. because five or ten years would change all of us so much that an absolutely new adjustment would be necessary, anyway. and it would be as easily made in an entirely different setting as in the old one but a little altered—more easily, i have no doubt. you must remember, tommy, that after years of any absence we always return to make rediscoveries. the delight is in finding something essential and unchanged in what is superficial and very much changed. if things[263] are outwardly the same we are disappointed and stop there with our disappointment—we never do get beneath the surface again.”

big tom lupton, with his simple way of viewing everything about him, felt himself beyond his depth.

“how will you decide what to do?” he asked, finally.

“this winter will tell me,” mary vanton asserted. “i can do nothing about it before spring—i won’t, at least. if by spring i have received no word, if there is then no indication, nothing to guide me, i shall have to go ahead in my own fashion, take all our lives in my own hands, run my own risks, make my own mistakes, stand or fall by what i do and the way i do it.”