Here, within two minutes from the shutting of the door, her mother found her.

* * * * *

So the beginning at the Beach touched its farther end.  It touched with the shocks of cataclysm, whose echoes did not soon cease to reverberate.  The word of the Lord came to Jack Dalhousie’s father, and he would not suffer in silence.  Mr. Heth arrived at the House at ten o’clock that night; it was the best he had been able to do, but it was too late for a family reunion by an hour.  The two women had fled away to New York, probably on the very same train that bore back Hugo Canning.  And behind them Rumor of the triple head had already risen, roaring an astonishment and a proverb.

     XXII

One summer in the Old Hotel; of the World’s wagging on, Kern Garland, and Prince Serge Suits; of how Kern leaves the Works for Good and has a Dream about Mr. V.V.’s Beautiful Lady; of how Mr. V.V. came to sit in the still Watches and think again of John the Baptist.

And still the world wagged on.

Calamity befell one House out of many, and the natural cycles did not stir a hair’s breadth.  The evening and the morning were another day, and another and another.  May ran indifferent out, with blue skies and a maddening sequence of “Continued Heat.”  Then presently the long days had reached their length, loitered awhile, turned slowly backward.  And June had become July, and midsummer lay fast over the half-empty town.

It was a summer that broke records for heat, and those fled from it who could.  But in the industrious backwaters of towns, where steady work means steady bread, it is the custom of men to take the climate as it comes to them, freezing or sweating at the weather-man’s desire.  Mountain and ocean, awninged gardens and breeze-swept deck:  those solaces are not for these.  Ninety Fahrenheit it ran and over, day after day, half of June, half of July.  But in the old Dabney House Mrs. Garland stood on by the steaming wash-tubs, and Kern fared daily to the bunching-room at Heth’s and its air like the breath of a new bake-oven, and Vivian, the doctor, was never “on his vacation” when his sick called, and stout Mr. Goldnagel, week on week, mopped his bald Hebraic head and repaired while you waited, with all work strictly guaranteed.

Of these four it was the young physician who kept the busiest, for his work never ended.  Falling back from his brief appearance in the upper world, he had been speedily swallowed again by his own environment.  Routine flattened him out as never before; the problem of life was to find time to sleep.

For one thing, there was a mild epidemic of typhoid this summer, breaking out in those quarters of the town where moderate conveniences (as Mrs. Garland called them) were matters of hearsay only, and the efficient and undermanned Health Department, fighting hard, did not have the law to drive home orders where they would do the most good.  But the doctor of the Dabney House needed no epidemic to keep him occupied, so acceptable was his no-bill custom—­still maintained—­to the unwell laity of the vicinage.  Through the dingy waiting-room, old state bedchamber, there rolled a waxing stream, and the visiting rounds of V. Vivian, M.D., ran long and overlong.