Part 4

"Why does he treat me--treat you--like two naughty little children?" said Pauline, impatiently tossing the book on the table.

"Pauline!" Her mother's voice was sharp in reproof. "How can you place any one before your father!"

Pauline was silent--she had dropped the veil over herself. "I--I--where did you place father--when--when--" Her eyes were laughing again.

"You know he'd never oppose your happiness, Polly." Mrs. Gardiner was smoothing her daughter's turbulent red-brown hair. "You'll only have to wait under a little more trying circumstances. And if he's right, the truth will come out. And if he's mistaken and John's all you think him, then that will come out."

Pauline knew her father was not opposing her through tyranny or pride of opinion or sheer prejudice; but she felt that this was another case of age's lack of sympathy with youth, felt it with all the intensity of infatuated seventeen made doubly determined by opposition and concealment. The next evening he and she were walking together in the garden. He suddenly put his arm round her and drew her close to him and kissed her.

"You know I shouldn't if I didn't think it the only course--don't you, Pauline?" he said in a broken voice that went straight to her heart.

"Yes, father." Then, after a silence: "But--we--we've been sweethearts since we were children. And--I--father, I MUST stand by him."

"Won't you trust me, child? Won't you believe ME rather than him?"

Pauline's only answer was a sigh. They loved each the other; he adored her, she reverenced him. But between them, thick and high, rose the barrier of custom and training. Comradeship, confidence were impossible.

II.

OLIVIA TO THE RESCUE.

With the first glance into Olivia's dark gray eyes Pauline ceased to resent her as an intruder. And soon she was feeling that some sort of dawn was assailing her night.

Olivia was the older by three years. She seemed--and for her years, was--serious and wise because, as the eldest of a large family, she was lieutenant-general to her mother. Further, she had always had her own way--when it was the right way and did not conflict with justice to her brothers and sisters. And often her parents let her have her own way when it was the wrong way, nor did they spoil the lesson by mitigating disagreeable consequences.

"Do as you please," her mother used to say, when doing as she pleased would involve less of mischief than of valuable experience, "and perhaps you'll learn to please to do sensibly." Again, her father would restrain her mother from interference--"Oh, let the girl alone. She's got to teach herself how to behave, and she can't begin a minute too young." This training had produced a self-reliant and self-governing Olivia.

She wondered at the change in Pauline--Pauline, the light-hearted, the effervescent of laughter and life, now silent and almost somber. It was two weeks before she, not easily won to the confiding mood for all her frankness, let Olivia into her secret. Of course, it was at night; of course, they were in the same bed. And when Olivia had heard she came nearer to the truth about Dumont than had Pauline's mother. But, while she felt sure there was a way to cure Pauline, she knew that way was not the one which had been pursued. "They've only made her obstinate," she thought, as she, lying with hands clasped behind her head, watched Pauline, propped upon an elbow, staring with dreamful determination into the moonlight.

"It'll come out all right," she said; her voice always suggested that she knew what she was talking about. "Your father'll give in sooner or later--if YOU don't change."

"But he's so bitter against Jack," replied Pauline. "He won't listen to his side--to our side--of it."

"Anyhow, what's the use of anticipating trouble? You wouldn't get married yet. And if he's worthwhile he'll wait."

Pauline had been even gentler than her own judgment in painting her lover for her cousin's inspection. So, she could not explain to her why there was necessity for haste, could not confess her conviction that every month he lived away from her was a month of peril to him.

"We want it settled," she said evasively.

"I haven't seen him around anywhere," went on Olivia. "Is he here now?"

"He's in Chicago--in charge of his father's office there. He may stay all winter."

"No, there's no hurry," went on Olivia. "Besides, you ought to meet other men. It isn't a good idea for a girl to marry the man she's been brought up with before she's had a chance to get acquainted with other men." Olivia drew this maxim from experience--she had been engaged to a school-days lover when she went away to Battle Field to college; she broke it off when, going home on vacation, she saw him again from the point of wider view.

But Pauline scorned this theory; if Olivia had confessed the broken engagement she would have thought her shallow and untrustworthy. She was confident, with inexperience's sublime incapacity for self-doubt, that in all the wide world there was only one man whom she could have loved or could love.

"Oh, I shan't change," she said in a tone that warned her cousin against discussion.

"At any rate," replied Olivia, "a little experience would do you no harm." She suddenly sat up in bed. "A splendid idea!" she exclaimed. "Why not come to Battle Field with me?"

"I'd like it," said Pauline, always eager for self-improvement and roused by Olivia's stories of her college experiences. "But father'd never let me go to Battle Field College."

"Battle Field UNIVERSITY," corrected Olivia. "It has classical courses and scientific courses and a preparatory school--and a military department for men and a music department for women. And it's going to have lots and lots of real university schools--when it gets the money. And there's a healthy, middle-aged wagon-maker who's said to be thinking of leaving it a million or so--if he should ever die and if they should change its name to his."