a soul at all, it was the soul of a comedian. He was more prosperous than his neighbors owing to the fact that he was carefully ignored by the revenue officers and had a monopoly on the "dew" business.

This was the condition of affairs when Mary Hope became a guest at the hotel. She came from some place in the West. She was very tall, very fair. Her mouth was well drawn, impressive, as if she had made it herself and had put her whole mind upon it. Her forehead was low and broad, utterly feminine beneath waves of bronzecolored hair. Her nose was thoroughly bred, the thin nostrils slightly dilated. And there was the place still in her chin where a dimple had been, but the excessive firmness of some purpose appeared to have smoothed it out. That which distinguished her face was the thick black brows above her cool gray eyes. They overcast the fair weather of her countenance like widths of black clouds upon the horizon of a summer day, and gave color to the report that she practised law in Colorado and "voted" others besides herself. No one knew anything else about her. She evidently was more than thirty years of age. She was remarkably handsome, even austerely beautiful. She showed a kind of faded innocency. No one can mistake it, the illiterate look of an old virgin. However intelligent her expression, it lacks the mournful satisfaction, the sundown passivity, of wife-wisdom.

She did not exactly avoid the other guests, but she was obviously not interested in them nor their idle diversions. In reply to one inquisitive old lady, she admitted that she was taking a vacation "after a particularly arduous campaign." Incidentally she said she was "studying conditions in the mountain regions of the South." Later it turned out that she did not practise law, but was the secretary of a woman's suffrage league in Silver City, Colorado. If she was not in straitened circumstances she dressed as if she were, always very plainly, even in the evening.

She spent much of her time in the village. She had a book-agent's art for getting acquainted, a politician's genius for acquiring friends, and a fanatic's passion for proselyting other women. That which contributed most to her popularity in the village was her obvious indifference to men of all kinds, native or foreign. There was not a matron in Arden who had not suffered from the wiles of some peroxide lady

boarder at the hotel, women who were willing to pass the time flirting with the gallowsed husbands of the town. Mary Hope was clear of this iniquity. She attached herself to the wives and daughters. They did not know what she wanted to do— it was some time before they found out--but whatever it was, they were with her.

The longer they knew her, the more she talked to them about laws governing the property rights of women-of which they had never heard before. The more she had to say about the protection and education of children, the more they knew that she voiced what they had always felt, but had never been able to say or achieve. It is not generally known, but women in the country, living in bondage of hard labor on the farms and in the backwoods villages, are far more ready, in their deep dissatisfaction and unhappiness, to adopt the modern views of suffrage for women than the pampered daughters of privilege in society. Mary Hope made the most of this discovery in Arden and the surrounding section. She eschewed the bridge-tables at the hotel and became a sort of omnipresence in the village, scowled at and stared at by the men, which in no way disconcerted her.

One day Logan Hawk met her on the village street, passed, turned around, and stood with his hands in his pockets, his feet wide apart, staring at her. He was a man who had but one standard by which to judge a woman, the impression she made upon him as a male being. He could not understand one who ignored his sex. This was what Miss Hope did. She refused to see him, the man. He had the feeling that she bowed to him merely as a citizen, and not a proper citizen at that. He was offended. Here was a thing in petticoats. who was a dynamo-not a woman. She had the form but not the manner of a woman. He spat upon the ground as he watched her out of sight. He knew that she had cheated him of some emotion with which such a creature should have inspired him, but he was not able to define her offense.

He walked on, bristling, angry, and not able to put out of his mind the vision of her superb figure, her singularly free and graceful carriage which somehow escaped the suggestion of boldness. It was as if the Statue of Liberty had just passed him with a preoccupied air.

It was almost dark the same day. Large drops of rain were falling when Logan Hawk rushed down the steps of the courthouse, ran to the hitching-post where his horse stood, snatched up the reins, leaped into the saddle, gave an ear-splitting yell, and started. There was a saying in Arden, "Hawk is often drunk, but his horse is always drunk." This was a powerful bay stallion. No one else could ride him, and when Logan was sober even he was sometimes afraid of him. Upon this occasion rider and horse were in perfect accord. People crowded into doorways as they passed. The guests stood with bated breath upon the veranda of the hotel. His horse was going at a thundering gallop, the man swaying in the saddle, with his feet in the stirrups braced far forward. The broad brim of his hat was flattened in front against the crown. His face glistened a fiery red. His mouth stretched in a grin; his brows gathered above the black distended pupils of his eyes. He was hilariously happy. He was a free man. Nobody owned him. He owned what he pleased. The world was his; the lightning that played above his irreverent head, the rain, the clouds that made it all were his. He did not think this, he was incapable of thinking, but he felt it.

Presently he was out of town, flying along the valley road. The boughs of the trees. were bending in the gale, their leaves turned wrong side up. Blossoms, little pink, sweetly perfumed dabs from the mimosa-trees, whirled around him. This reminded him of something. He looked about him. He was inspired to yell again. It was the shrill cry of the primordial man for a mate.

In that same instant the stallion shied

with a snort and stood stock-still, trembling. A woman stood in the middle of the road. Her rose-figured muslin dress was drenched. The folds of it clung to her, described her. The light veil she tried to hold over her head escaped behind her like a white wing in the gloom. Out of the rain her face shone mistily, with two startlingly black brows to give emphasis to the calm eyes she fixed upon rider and horse. It was all the womanhood of the world looking up out of one woman's face into one man's.

In that moment the fumes cleared from Hawk's brain. He was no longer a drunken rake. He was an honest knight, Sir Galahad going to his prayers, Bayard ready to rescue a lady in distress. He lifted his hat,

took it entirely off, shared the flood with her, bareheaded. But he could not speak. In his vocabulary he had never acquired, never needed, the kind of gold-lace language this situation seemed to demand.

"I have lost my way. The storm has confused me," came the voice of the vision. "Can you direct me to the Arden Hotel?"

He recognized Mary Hope. And he was astonished at something he could not name. It might have been the appeal of her helplessness. It was more likely the discovery of her beauty. Only a wonderful woman could achieve loveliness in such a predica

ment.

"You are on the wrong road, a good three miles from the hotel. How did you get here?" he inquired.

"I went for a walk in the valley. In which direction does the right road lie?" she demanded.

"You couldn't find it in this storm. You must get up behind me. I can get you

back to town in ten minutes." Hawk tried to coax the stallion forward. Mary advanced. He held out his foot.

"Put your foot on mine. Give me your hand. Quick! That's it! Landed?" "Yes!" she gasped.

"Hold tight. Don't be afraid!" he encouraged.

"I'm not," she answered.

Her arms were around his waist, her hands tightly clasped. She could stay on if he could. For a time this seemed doubtful. The horse, already excited by his gallop and maddened by the storm, was in no mood to bear an odd, wet, trailing burden too far back on his hindquarters. He reared, circled, stood up splendidly upon his hind legs, all in vain. The wet thing slapping against his flanks stayed on. At last he yielded, and shot through the black darkness that had now fallen, her hands still holding Hawk as a vine holds an oak.

Half an hour later Hawk had set her down at the hotel and was going back more leisurely over the same road, too much absorbed to observe that the storm had passed, that the moon was shining, that the air was fragrant with fresh night blossoms which by morning would have lost their perfume.

"Lord, what a woman!" he muttered. "If I just had her! If I could get herBut no! I don't want her! I don't want any woman. I'll never marry. I'll be my own boss, go to hell my own gait." And plunging his spurs into the lathered flanks

of the horse, he forced him up the mountain trail at a gallop.

So was begun one of the bitterest courtships ever witnessed in that section. Every courtship at bottom is a warfare, but usually it is disguised by the language of love. There was no sentiment expressed between these two. If they met on the street, Mary averted her eyes as much as to say: "I have nothing in common with you, Mr. Stiller-of-wildcat-whiskey. You are a menace to the community." And Logan replied with a stare of open animosity which conveyed with equal emphasis, "You also are a menace to the peace of this community, Miss Suffragenny!" He called suffragists by this offensive name.

And the more they hated each other, the faster did love bind its toils about them. Mary sometimes wept in the seclusion of her little third-story room at the hotel. Logan continually talked to himself in the language of Schopenhauer-without knowing that he did concerning woman in general, and one in particular. He made every effort to shock her. Never before had he given himself over so completely and publicly to his powers of darkness. He came down into Arden intoxicated every few days, and spent the afternoon inflaming the public sentiment against the "new woman. He organized the citizens into a secret order, the purpose of which was to "nip in the bud" any advanced notions of their womankind.

About the same time Mary Hope succeeded in organizing the Woman's Welfare League in Arden. Every woman in the village belonged to it, and they met once a week in Sally Bowman's parlor. The purpose of this league could only be inferred. from its effect upon the members. They became intractable, which was a new manifestation of the feminine in that place where women made a pathetic piety of obeying their lords.

Old Billfinger was the first man to give the alarm. He was living upon a farm which belonged to his wife. He wished to obtain money by mortgaging it, but when he desired Mrs. Billfinger to go with him to the courthouse for the purpose of "signing some papers," that fat and placid matron refused. Such a thing had never occurred before. More than one man had disposed of his wife's property without a breath of opposition from her. The women in Arden

and the country roundabout did not know anything about the law. It was not proper that they should.

Indignation against Mary Hope ran high when it was discovered that she was giving to the Woman's Welfare League lectures on Common Law, and especially on those statutes governing the property rights of women. But this was not the worst of her nefarious activities. She was stimulating furious feminine rebellion against the manufacture and sale of wildcat whiskey. It was not a sentimental white-ribbon crusade, which might have actually appealed to the citizens of Arden out of season when there were no guests to buy the stuff, but she had induced nearly every woman in the town to sign an agreement to boycott her husband in the purely domestic relation of service. After the fifteenth of August no man who bought, sold, made, or drank whiskey was to have his food cooked, his clothes made, mended, or washed.

When the story of this proposed outrage leaked out, the whole community was disrupted. Husbands railed and threatened these silent, grim-faced creatures in vain. Mary Hope, the walking delegate of this confusion, pursued the even tenor of her way. Only once, and then by the merest accident, was there a truce between her and Logan-for no more than the space of an hour.

A peripatetic singing-master had a singing-class in a little schoolhouse far down in one of the coves among the mountains. Mary was astonished one afternoon to find that this was one place where antagonism between the sexes died away in dreadful harmony. The house was half filled with men and boys, the other half with women and girls; and they sang together beneath the guiding wand of the little "professor" as if nothing in this world should or could divide them. Logan Hawk sat calm and beatific on the front bench, droning a mighty volume of sound to Sally Bowman's caroling alto. Sally had an alto spirit, high and shrill.

Mary, with puckered brows, considered the situation, but she had reached no satisfactory conclusion when the lesson was over and the "class" dismissed. They streamed from the door, a laughing company of men and women, boys and girls, drawn together by the songs they had sung.

Logan Hawk attached himself nonchalantly to Mary's party. It was not by

sider at the moment that the main company would continue the main road to the village, while he and Mary would turn off at the point where the road to the hotel intersected

this one. A man cannot think of everything. Besides, circumstances are in league with love. They prepare ambushes for the unwary. They cause maidens to meet youths quite by accident in leafy lanes. They are at pains sometimes to leave a bachelor with a last-rose-ofsummer suffragette. You absolutely cannot protect yourself from circumstances in this matter. They are controlled by illusive, softly rustling skirts.

When Logan was left alone with Mary at the fork of the road, he was as near terror as he had ever been in his life. He felt guilty of all his transgressions; not repentant, but guilty. He had lost for the moment his defense of antagonism. Heperceived that the only real difference between them was that she was good and he was not good. And good women are dangerous. You do not get them. They get you.

They walked in silence, each aware of the issue between them, which was not a matter of suffrage or the sale of liquor. Love has invented more different kinds of silence than the Creator himself, who has made none at all that has not in it the chirruping of a cricket, the tittering of

Logan Hawk was as near terror as he had ever been in his life. He perceived that the difference between them was that she was good and he was not good. And good women are dangerous. You do not get them. They get you

a bird, the whispering of leaves, the sighing of the wind, or the music of the spheres.

As they moved along the darkened road, Logan felt that he was in the presence, almost within the grasp, of the everlasting enemy of man-woman. This is the first alarm of a man in love. He recognizes her as the foe of his liberty and his own peculiar peace. And he is right. Women behold in a lover a possible protector and provider for their helplessness. They are drawn by their very fears to this superior being. It is not so with him. He knows that this beautiful creature who regards him with softened eyes is waiting to offer merely herself for all he has and all he can earn for the rest of his life.

Logan took off his hat and wiped his face. He felt of his tie, gave it a jerk to make sure it was staying down around his collar. His eyes were startlingly bright. Now and then he rolled them sidewise and observed his companion. She was a part of the moonlight. She was remote. She was not there. She was somewhere in the future. He wished she would say something. What was she thinking? Well, so help him God and all his familiar devils, she should not know what he was thinking! At the same time he desired above everything to discover something to say. It was the opportunity of his life. How go about complimenting this woman to whom he longed to declare his love? In what terms was he to make his declaration? His mind worked furiously to get down to those golden words of love that lay below everything else he had ever thought or known of women.

They came to a little giggling stream that crossed the road. There was no bridge, only a few large stones to step upon. Logan held out his hand, clasped hers, led her across. He knew every finger by heart in that instant. Yet he was compelled to drop her hand the moment they were on the other side. Why? He could not have told. Your good woman wears an armor. She is the vow that knights made long ago to keep without fear, without reproach. Logan, who knew none of this, felt it as he relinquished Mary's hand-a thing that happens every day between men and women, and is as much a miracle as restoring sight to the blind or causing the lame to leap and run.

The trouble with Mary Hope was that besides being this marvelous thing, a good

woman, she had a terrible and devastating common sense. She had destroyed the poetic rhythm of femininity by acquiring an acquisitive intelligence and an energetic theory of life which she was seeking to practise. She was her own anti-climax, one of those women common to our times who destroy the illusions nature casts over them and do horrible violence to the adoring faculty in men, which is easily injured.

While Logan was still tingling with that hand-clasp across the stream, Mary committed sacrilege.

"Mr. Hawk, do you keep a still?" She asked this monstrous question as calmly as if she had asked him if he kept a cow.

If she had suddenly leaped up and rent the summer night with screams, he could not have been more confounded or disgusted. The only feminine quality he recognized was that she had placed him in a position where he must lie, which is where women keep men much of the time.

"No, I do not," he answered, with indignation that was far from virtuous. "Who accuses me of keeping a still?”

"If there is not a still up there, that mountain is a volcano. Many times this summer I have seen smoke issuing from it!" She waved her hand toward the lofty peak which stood out in the moonlight.

"Better keep away from it, then. I've heard it is dangerous to go too near a smoking volcano," he said. He could talk now. She had brushed the honey-dew from the leaves of silence. She stood stripped of her sweet glory, a meddlesome woman, bent upon mischief and reforms that would destroy the order of things in that valley if she succeeded. He was resolved that she should not succeed. He was no longer the lover. He was that abler being, a man bent upon maintaining his liberty to do as he chooses, right or wrong.

They came up the terrace to the hotel, walking in silence, bereaved of each other. "Good night," she said, dismissing him coolly.

“Good night!" he returned sullenly, and passed on up the trail to that place where smoke issued from the innocent green breast of the hill.

The fifteenth of August drew near. Every man in the town and valley had received notice that the still must be destroyed or they must suffer the consequences. They laughed at the "consequences." When wives have obeyed their