* * * *
*
Mary Cochran’s visits to the Walker household
came to an end very abruptly. One evening when
Hugh was in his room she came up the stairway with
the two boys. She had dined with the family and
was putting the two boys into their beds. It
was a privilege she claimed when she dined with the
Walkers.
Hugh had hurried upstairs immediately after dining.
He knew where his wife was. She was downstairs,
sitting under a lamp, reading one of the books of
Robert Louis Stevenson.
For a long time Hugh could hear the voices of his
children on the floor above. Then the thing happened.
Mary Cochran came down the stairway that led past
the door of his room. She stopped, turned back
and climbed the stairs again to the room above.
Hugh arose and stepped into the hallway. The schoolgirl
had returned to the children’s room because
she had been suddenly overtaken with a hunger to kiss
Hugh’s oldest boy, now a lad of nine. She
crept into the room and stood for a long time looking
at the two boys, who unaware of her presence had gone
to sleep. Then she stole forward and kissed the
boy lightly. When she went out of the room Hugh
stood in the darkness waiting for her. He took
hold of her hand and led her down the stairs to his
own room.
She was terribly afraid and her fright in an odd way
pleased him. “Well,” he whispered,
“you can’t understand now what’s
going to happen here but some day you will. I’m
going to kiss you and then I’m going to ask
you to go out of this house and never come back.”
He held the girl against his body and kissed her upon
the cheeks and lips. When he led her to the door
she was so weak with fright and with new, strange,
trembling desires that she could with difficulty make
her way down the stair and into his wife’s presence.
“She will lie now,” he thought, and heard
her voice coming up the stairs like an echo to his
thoughts. “I have a terrible headache.
I must hurry home,” he heard her voice saying.
The voice was dull and heavy. It was not the voice
of a young girl.
“She is no longer like a young tree,”
he thought. He was glad and proud of what he
had done. When he heard the door at the back of
the house close softly his heart jumped. A strange
quivering light came into his eyes. “She
will be imprisoned but I will have nothing to do with
it. She will never belong to me. My hands
will never build a prison for her,” he thought
with grim pleasure.
Her name was Elsie Leander and her girlhood was spent
on her father’s farm in Vermont. For several
generations the Leanders had all lived on the same
farm and had all married thin women, and so she was
thin. The farm lay in the shadow of a mountain
and the soil was not very rich. From the beginning
and for several generations there had been a great
many sons and few daughters in the family. The
sons had gone west or to New York City and the daughters
had stayed at home and thought such thoughts as come
to New England women who see the sons of their fathers’
neighbors slipping away, one by one, into the West.
