Under the Law. Edwina Stanton Babcock

"I heard the kitchen door bang; she's back. 'Tis well; ring for hot muffins." With a curious glint of the brown eyes, Dunstan looked back into the cold gaze fixed upon him. But pure animal joy cannot long survive the mortal ice of the glacial human spirit. The dark eyes fell and the youth murmured thoughtfully, "and be hanged by the neck till you are dead".

      Then the Judge rose and after they had heard the whine of his car swinging out of the drive, Sard and her brother looked at each other. Together they had noted the red eyes of the maid who, high-heeled of shoe and extravagant of dark hair, had replenished the muffins and brought back the coffee-urn.

      "I don't envy you your job, Sard," Dunstan rose, went to the glass and settled his tie. "You were a gump not to go on with college and get a 'kayrear' like the other flappers. 'Father needs you'—poof! He needs nothing but that ice-box he calls himself. By heck!" Dunstan turned suddenly. "Do you know I believe it is sentencing people to death and the Can that makes him like that? It—it does something to him, don't you see?" But from his interest in the idea Dunstan went to concern for his sister. "Aunt Reely could run this joint. You go in for a career, Sard, and get out from under."

      His sister laughed. "After all, he's the only father we've got, Dunce. Maybe after I've been around home a bit—it seemed dreadful when Father wanted me here not to come—for him to have nothing that belonged to him." Sard frowned a little. "Don't you think parents do an awful lot for us, and what do we do for them? Look at poor little mother. I used to visit for months at a time and leave her. She must have been lonely—she never said so—and then those two years at college and then—she went——" Sard's eyes widened with the sense of what those lonely months had been—of the companionship she herself had lost.

      "Well," Dunstan loomed over her gloomily, "you'll turn into an old maid, a wall flower, a sort of solemn crow." He stood on his heels, hands in his pockets, surveying her. "It's all of a piece," he said fretfully. "You took down those bally chromos of Paw's and you got pretty chintz for the chairs and put around bright candles—and he hated it. You begged him to let you cut windows into the hall and he squashed you. You can't get sun and joy into this house, and you can't get sun and human warmth into that jellyfish." With a sudden squirm Dunstan struck a match. "Oh, he's so plaguy sure," he growled. "Law? law?—a lot of stuff in books brought down from the funny old bigwigs in England—all scared of their king; all hanging on to rotten things they called 'precedents' for fear somebody would get something away from them; charters, burning of witches, dungeons, strait-jackets, ducking-stools; Father belongs to those days! Well," the young fellow turned upon his sister fiercely, "they know no better, but you and I do know better. We belong to a different age, and we sit here comfortable and happy while our smug parent does for a young fellow, a young blood-and-bone man, full of grit and sap and dreams, a fellow that could sail a boat and cut down a tree! We send him to a filthy, smelly hell of a prison with a lot of awful men!" Dunstan stopped. "I went through State prison once, and the smell of it alone would rot a man's soul—keep him hating good forever—you realize it? A curly-headed fellow, a man younger than I!"

      The girl sitting soberly behind the silver coffee-urn looked wistfully at her brother. Dunstan's brown face was long, and his ears just a trifle pointed like a faun's; his voice was young and crackling, like a tongue of young flame trying to push up through heaped-up brush. He smoked silently, staring down at his sister. "It's good-bye for him," he said slowly, "good-bye to green trees and swimming in the pools and climbing mountains and hearing a girl's voice. Oh! to just being a man! Good-bye forever to everything but smells and rats and the minds of decayed men and we—you, Sard, and my father are doing this thing."

      Dunstan suddenly pushed back a chair. "Drat parents!" he said fiercely, "drat law, drat the system," then he laughed. "Aunt Reely, don't shudder; if a man on the stage talked that way, you'd think it was lovely. Did you see my tennis racket?" demanded Dunstan in his usual voice. "Oh, I guess I jammed it in the rack of the car. Well, so long; don't grieve for me if I don't turn up for lunch. I guess I'll mess with Prudy Anterp and her bunch."

      Sard and her aunt watched the light reedy figure swing around the little footpath to the garage, and in a few minutes Dunstan's car had glided out of sight.

CHAPTER IV

       Table of Contents

      OTHER LAWS

      Two years of college had done little to affect Sard Bogart's life. True, those two years she had trodden the athletic-social paths of the American academic experience gaily, then the death of her mother called her home. Her father's appeal made on the stark, lonely night after the funeral had created circumstances she had met four-square. From that time on, Sard, with youthful heroism, had seen her life cut out for her. She was to run the home and "keep things bright" for her father.

      There was also the Judge's sister, Miss Aurelia, of the age always in conjecture, and of a curious beauty that made poetry of an otherwise ineffective personality. Miss Aurelia's small head was covered with swathes of vital auburn hair, her delicate skin had porcelain pinks and whites, and her soft eyes and slim frame were of a curious suggestive quality that only needed force and will to make her a vibrant, seductive human creature. But this force and will were lacking. Miss Aurelia had been reared altogether on the "ladylike" plan. So while there was no look of wear and tear on her, no wrinkles on her face, no gray in her hair, and while her teeth were even, with the effect of crowding her pursy mouth, yet all these signs and colors of her spoke of untried, untested things; there was an eternal insecurity in her rabbity chin, her soft apologetic voice, the tentatives of her conversational method.

      It was said in the village that Miss Aurelia "presided" over her brother's house, and that Sard "ran" it. However, there was no friction between the two. Sard accepted Miss Aurelia with the same devotion that she tended her mother's giant fuchsia, an unnecessary trellised crime of thousands of purple and red flowers, and refrained from sending away the chromos that her father loved.

      "The—er—telephone, my dear," Miss Aurelia came softly up to Sard's tower room, "sorry to call you but the—er—person—long distance—don't you ever find it confusing?—I—they—she—the operator."

      "Did you get the name?" asked Sard. "Is it Minga Gerould?"

      Miss Aurelia wondered if it was, paused, hesitated, then, "Your curtains certainly do need freshening. I never noticed it before. Yes, I think it may be Minga. She—it—sounded husky, long distance, perhaps, I—they seldom speak distinctly; the—er—operator was extraordinarily uncivil,"—Miss Reely pursed her rabbity mouth, "She—I——"

      "Thanks, Aunt Reely, yes, the curtains do need laundering." Sard was out of the room and down the stairs, the receiver at her ear. "Minga! you rascal! Well, I am glad! Why didn't you write me, you little trimmer—— No, ma'am, I did not—did you? Was it nice? No, but I saw Cynthia and Gertrude, they're back, bobbed hair and golf-sticks, bloom of youth is their line this year. What are you laughing at? No—is he?—to Cora Bland? Wasn't that like Cora—she's going to finish? I wish I were—why? Oh, that'll keep! Well, Cora is a good all 'round sport, don't you think? She'll make Alpha, you see if she doesn't—— What? Oh, Minga, don't ring off! That's so, of course you have to pack; all right then—see you to-night—so glad you are coming, don't forget to sit on the right-hand side of the train coming up, the river's wonderful as you come over the hill. Bye-bye."

      Sard, smiling, hung up the receiver. Not until this, the first visit of a college pal since her mother's death, had she felt her hunger for real companionship. Now as she had done the first day she had left off her simple mourning, she looked up at the portrait of her mother hanging in the hall. She kissed her hand to that curly, ear-ringed little lady. "Dear little dead Mother," said Sard tenderly. "Dear little dead Mother!" Instinctively she thought about the mothers of the other girls of the town. Mrs. Bradon, Cynthia's mother, fat, stupid and conventional. Gertrude's mother, a hard practical woman with ambitions, the other mothers as Sard knew them seemed too girlish, crude, trivial, beside the little soft, curly, ear-ringed lady that Sard had only just begun to look at with woman eyes. "Would we have gotten on, Mother dear,