Joyce of the North Woods. Harriet T. Comstock

      Billy accepted the coin, but turned a calculating eye on the others. If his news had had power to rouse Jude, how would it act now? Billy, freckled and sharp-eyed, was a born tragedian.

      "'Tain't Ma," he said. "No more was it Pa; it was that Jude what beat me most to a jelly."

      This was startling enough to awaken a new interest. Jude was too lazy on general principles to reduce any one to jelly unless the provocation had been great.

      "What divilment was you up to?" Filmer asked with a leer.

      "I didn't do nothing! 'Pon my soul, I didn't. I swear!"

      This Billy did, fervently and fluently. The children of St. Angé swore with a guileless eloquence quite outside the sphere of wickedness. The matter was in them. It must, of course, come out. So Billy swore now with only an occasional hitch where his indignation muddled pronunciation.

      "Billy's got a fine flow of language," Birkdale put in amusedly. "For a youngster, I don't think I ever heard it equalled." Birkdale was about to urge Billy to renewed effort, when something the boy was wedging in among his evil words caught his attention.

      "I was just a-telling him—" more lurid expressions—"'bout Joyce and Mr. Gaston. It didn't seem like nothing; just them two being beaux like all girls and fellers, but Jude he did me dirt, he did!" Billy stopped rubbing his eyes.

      He was interested, himself, in the effect his words now had. For a moment he feared all the men were going to rise up against him as Jude had done. A silence fell upon the group. Filmer gave one keen glance at the imp on the doorstep, and then refilled his pipe and leaned back in his wooden chair.

      Tom Smith, the ticket agent of the Station, looked as if some one had dashed water in his face, so startled was he; and Jared Birkdale simply stared open-mouthed at the spy in their midst. Then Tate, the proprietor, with the tact for which he was noted, went to the bar and began filling glasses.

      St. Angé had received a shock; but St. Angé took its shocks in a peculiar way. It reserved its opinion until it had drunk on them.

      Soon after the revelation Birkdale went home without a word having been spoken by any one on the subject so suddenly thrust upon their notice.

      Jared had gone home to assure himself that Joyce had actually grown up to the extent of making Billy Falstar's remarks possible.

      The afternoon's contemplation had caused him some astonishment.

      Joyce was grown up! Then he had slept on the knowledge, and dreamed of other days—a life apart, and beyond St. Angé.

      St. Angé was a young place; it had no antiquity; almost all who lived there had had a setting in some other time and environment.

      Jared recalled, in his thoughts that night, the beginnings of things in his life. Joyce's mother, and the babies who had come and gone like little ghosts, each one taking more of the wife's and mother's beauty and power.

      Then that flight to the St. Angé lumber camp—it was really that, nothing less—the attending discomfort and paralyzing reality of what lay before!

      Joyce was born the year after the settlement in the rough forest home, and then poor Mrs. Birkdale gave up the struggle.

      She told Isa Tate that had the baby been a boy she would not have felt the way she did, but to face the life of another woman in her own life was more than she could bear.

      Isa had tried to hold her to her responsibility: Isa had more than her own share of trouble—but Jane Birkdale had slipped away in the middle of the severest winter St. Angé had known for many a year and Isa had been obliged to have "an eye" to the baby Joyce. The small girl responded in health and joyousness, and Jared, when he was himself, had had the grace to be grateful.

      As the years slipped by the fire of Jared's own little private hell aroused him to a consciousness that he deserved anything but a happy future.

      He hoped, in due season, that he would forget the wrongs he had done his wife, but they gathered strength with time. His sins walked with him through the sober lumber season; their memory drove him to the Black Cat; but his keener wit evolved a desire to "make good," as he termed it, in his relations with his daughter.

      He would so conduct himself with her that she, at least, should have nothing against him; and when age, sickness or accident befell him, he might turn to her and find refuge. Jared had always had some kind of sanctuary to flee to when overtaken by the results of his own evil nature.

      And now, by the impish words of Falstar's Billy, he was brought face to face with a possibility that staggered and unnerved him.

      Joyce and Jude, or Joyce and Jock Filmer, had been possibilities in Jared's distant future. But Joyce, already a woman, and that silent man Gaston who had come from a Past that he rigidly reserved for his own contemplation—Gaston, who lived among them as a traveller who might depart with the day into a Future Birkdale instinctively knew would hold no possible connection with St. Angé—Joyce and Gaston! Here was a situation indeed.

      Astonishment, anger, a dull fear and a determination to grip something out of it all for himself, swayed Jared as he sat tilted back, eyeing his daughter after the night's travail.

      He had come from his troubled thought imbued with a forced strength and singleness of purpose that made themselves felt by the quiet girl at the window.

      Joyce had brought no strength from her disturbed night. She was ill-fitted for the encounter.

      "By Jove," Jared suddenly ejaculated, "it's just struck me all of a heap, Joyce, that you're more than ordinary handsome."

      The girl raised her eyes with a dull show of surprise, then went on with her sewing.

      "With the learning I've given you over and above the other girls of the place, you ought to do pretty good for yourself—and me—and no mistake. You always was a real grateful child, and you ain't one ever to forget the fifth commandment, Joyce—the only one with a promise."

      "The only one needing it," Joyce returned, with a bitterness for which she was sorry the moment after. But when Jared turned to quoting Scripture the girl grew rebellious. It was always distasteful to her to see, or hear, her father parade his superior knowledge. For some reason she always felt more ashamed of him then than at any other time.

      "You've got a nasty bit of a temper, Joyce." Jared's eye gleamed. "I hope you ain't going to take the first chance you get to shirk your duty to me."

      "I guess not, father, but I hate to be dragged to my duty; and I have a headache."

      "What give you that, Joyce?"

      "I don't know." Again the fair head bent above the coarse sewing in the trembling hands.

      She had seen the light in the chinks of Gaston's shutter. She had felt his nearness, but rigid aloofness. The memory of these things had tortured her and left their trace in worn-out nerves and hurt pride. She felt that she hated Gaston and in revolt her thought now clung to Jude. She forgot her father.

      "Joyce!"

      "Oh, yes, father." How the insistent invasion of paternal intimacy jarred.

      "I've been thinking lately how you and me might do better than stick here in St. Angé."

      A sudden illumination flashed into the pale face. Was there a possibility of escape that did not include Jude?

      "Where could we go, father?" Joyce was all attention.

      "Oh! there are several places. I wasn't always here by a long shot. I've always meant to tell you some day, Joyce. It has sometimes struck me as singular that you never asked."

      "I never cared. I was here—and the rest didn't matter—or it never did, until now."

      "Well I was a handsome young buck once, my girl." Jared glanced at the mirror hanging over Joyce's head, and smirked. "I ain't a bad looking feller now. A little trimming