BY ALEXANDER HULL
From Scribner's Magazine
There may have been some benevolent force watching over Harber. In any case, that
would be a comforting belief. Certainly Harber himself so believed, and I know he had
no trouble at all convincing his wife. Yes, the Harbers believed.
But credulity, you may say, was ever the surest part in love's young golden dream: and
you, perhaps, not having your eyes befuddled with the rose-fog of romance, will see too
clearly to believe. What can I adduce for your conviction? The facts only. After all, that
is the single strength of my position.
There was, of course, the strange forehanded, subtle planning of the other girl, of Janet
Spencer. Why did she do it? Was it that, feeling her chances in Tawnleytown so few,
counting the soil there so barren, driven by an ambition beyond the imagination of staid,
stodgy, normal Tawnleytown girls, she felt she must create opportunities where none
were? She was very lovely, Harber tells me, in a fiery rose-red of the fairy-tale way;
though even without beauty it needn't have been hard for her. Young blood is prone
enough to adventure; the merest spark will set it akindle. I should like to have known that
girl. She must have been very clever. Because, of course, she couldn't have foreseen,
even by the surest instinct, the coincidence that brought Harber and Barton together. Yes,
there is a coincidence in it. It's precisely upon that, you see, that Harber hangs his belief.
I wonder, too, how many of those argosies she sent out seeking the golden fleece returned
to her? It's a fine point for speculation. If one only knew.... ah, but it's pitiful how much
one doesn't, and can't, know in this hard and complex world! Or was it merely that she
tired of them and wanted to be rid of them? Or again, do I wrong her there, and were
there no more than the two of them, and did she simply suffer a solitary revulsion of
feeling, as Harber did? But no, I'm sure I'm right in supposing Barton and Harber to have
been but two ventures out of many, two arrows out of a full quiver shot in the dark at the
bull's-eye of fortune. And, by heaven, it was splendid shooting ... even if none of the
other arrows scored!
Harber tells me he was ripe for the thing without any encouragement to speak of.
Tawnleytown was dull plodding for hot youth. Half hidden in the green of fir and oak and
maple, slumberous with midsummer heat, it lay when he left it. Thickly powdered with
the fine white dust of its own unpaven streets, dust that sent the inhabitants chronically
sneezing and weeping and red-eyed about town, or sent them north to the lakes for
exemption, dust that hung impalpably suspended in the still air and turned the sunsets to
things of glorious rose and red and gold though there wasn't a single cloud or streamer in
the sky to catch the light, dust that lay upon lawns and walks and houses in deep gray
accumulation ... precisely as if these were objects put away and never used and not
disturbed until they were white with the inevitable powdery accretion that accompanies
