THE HUNGRY HEART

THE HUNGRY HEART

I

Courtship and honeymoon of Richard Vaughan and Courtney Benedict are told accurately enough by a thousand chroniclers of love's fairy tales and dreams. Where such romances end in a rosily vague "And they lived happily ever after," there this history begins. Richard and Courtney have returned from Arcady to reality, to central Indiana and the Vaughan homestead, across the narrow width of Wenona the lake from Wenona the town.

The homecoming was late in a June evening, with a perfumed coolness descending upon the young lovers from the grand old trees, round the Vaughan house like his bodyguard round a king. Next morning toward eight Courtney, still half asleep, reached out hazily. Her hand met only the rumpled linen on Richard's side of the huge fourposter. She started up, brushed back the heavy wave of auburn hair fallen over her brow, gazed down at his pillow. The dent of his head, but not he. Her eyes searched the dimness. The big room contained only a few large pieces of old mahogany; at a glance she saw into every corner. Alone in the room. Her eyes, large and anxious now, regarded the half-open door of the dressing room to the rear.

"Dick!" she called hopefully.

No answer.

"Dick!" she repeated, a note of doubt in her voice.

Silence.

"Dick!" she repeated reproachfully. It was the first morning she had awakened without the sense of his nearness that had become so dear, so necessary. It was the first morning in this house strange to her—in this now life they were to make beautiful and happy together. She gave a forlorn sigh like a disappointed child, drew up her knees, rested her elbows upon them, and her small head upon her hands. Sitting there in the midst of that bed big enough for half a dozen as small as she, she suggested a butterfly poised motionless with folded wings. A moment and she lifted her drooped head. How considerate of him not to wake her when the three days and nights on train had been so wearing!

Swift and light as a butterfly she sprang from the bed, flung open the shutters of the lake-front windows. In poured summer like gay cavalcade through breach in gloomy walls—summer in full panoply of perfume and soft air and sparkling sunshine. She almost laughed aloud for joy at this timely rescue. She gazed away across the lake to the town where she was born and bred! "Home!" she cried. "And so happy—so utterly happy!" Her expression, her whole manner, her quick movements gave the impression of the impulsive self-unconsciousness of a child.

It was a radiant figure, small and perfect like a sun sprite, that issued from the room three quarters of an hour later to flit along the polished oak hall, to descend a stairway glistening like hall above and wider and loftier hall below. With hair piled high on her small head, with tail of matinee over her arm and tall heels clicking merrily on the steps, she whistled as she went. Some people—women—criticised that laughter-loving mouth of hers as too wide for so small a face. It certainly did not suggest a button-hole. But no one could have found fault with the shape of the mouth or with the coloring, whether of the lips or within, or with her teeth, pearl white and seeming the whiter for the rose bronze of her skin—the shade that seems to be of the essence of youth, health, and summer. Her nose was rather large, but slender and well shaped. It was the nose of mobility, of sensitiveness, of intelligence, not at all of repose. And there were her eyes, of a strange soft emerald, with long dark lashes; the brows long also and only slightly curved, and slender yet distinct. These eyes were her greatest beauty—greater even than her skin. It would have been difficult to say whether in them or in her mouth lay her greatest charm, for charm is not always beauty, and beauty often wholly lacks charm.

But woman feels that figure determines the woman—"the woman" meaning, of course, efficiency as a man catcher. It was upon Courtney's flawless figure that the sour glance of old Nanny, the head servant, rested—old Nanny, whose puritanism aggravated for her by suppression all the damned charms of "the flesh." Nanny had reigned supreme in that house ever since Dick Vaughan was left alone; so from the first news of the engagement she had been hating Courtney, whom she regarded as her supplanter. As Courtney entered the dining room, stiff and dim and chilly, like all the rooms in that house, old Nanny was superintending fat, subdued Mazie at work at the breakfast table. It occupied the exact center of the room, formal as for a state banquet.

"Good morning," cried Courtney in her charming manner of bright friendliness. "Good morning, Mazie. Am I late? Where's Richard?" Her voice was deeper than one would have expected, but low and musical.

Mazie smiled a welcome, then cast a frightened glance of apology at Nanny, who did not smile. "Mr. Richard's down to the Smoke House," said she.

The Smoke House was the laboratory Dick's grandfather, Achilles Vaughan, had built for him on the site of the smoke house of the pioneer Vaughan, settler there when Wenona was a trading post in New France. "Of course!" said Courtney. "I might have known. He wanted to go last night, but I wouldn't let him."

Nanny scowled at this innocent, laughing "I wouldn't let him." She turned on Mazie, who was gazing open-mouthed at Courtney's simple, fresh finery. "What'r ye gawkin' here fur, with your mouth hangin' like a chicken with the gaps?" she demanded in a fierce aside. Mazie lumbered through the door into the kitchen. "As I was saying," continued Nanny to her new mistress, "he's put in most nigh all his time down to that there smoke house day and night—ever since his aunt, Miss Eudosia, died. Yes, an' before that, while Colonel 'Kill, his grandfather, was still alive. He's got sleeping rooms and everything in the upstairs. He often don't come here even to meals for weeks. Mazie or Jimmie carry 'em to him."

Courtney nodded. "A regular hermit. It was the merest chance that we happened to meet."

"You was the first young woman he'd laid an eye on in a long time."

Nanny's tone was colorless. Only a very stupid woman puts both barb and poison on