then leaned back on the pillows again. I pretended not to notice it--but
I was sorry I'd said anything about it."

"She didn't say anything?"

"Not a word."

"Didn't you know that, before the strike, she was Ditmar's private
stenographer?"

"No!" Augusta Maturin exclaimed. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"It never occurred to me to tell you," Insall replied.

"That must have something to do with it!" said Mrs. Maturin.

Insall got up and walked to the end of the terrace, gazing at a bluebird
on the edge of the lawn.

"Well, not necessarily," he said, after a while. "Did you ever find out
anything about her family?"

"Oh, yes, I met the father once, he's been out two or three times, on
Sunday, and came over here to thank me for what I'd done. The mother
doesn't come--she has some trouble, I don't know exactly what. Brooks, I
wish you could see the father, he's so typically unique--if one may use
the expression. A gatekeeper at the Chippering Mills!"

"A gatekeeper?"

"Yes, and I'm quite sure he doesn't understand to this day how he became
one, or why. He's delightfully naive on the subject of genealogy, and I
had the Bumpus family by heart before he left. That's the form his
remnant of the intellectual curiosity of his ancestors takes. He was born
in Dolton, which was settled by the original Bumpus, back in the Plymouth
Colony days, and if he were rich he'd have a library stuffed with gritty,
yellow-backed books and be a leading light in the Historical Society. He
speaks with that nicety of pronunciation of the old New Englander, never
slurring his syllables, and he has a really fine face, the kind of face
one doesn't often see nowadays. I kept looking at it, wondering what was
the matter with it, and at last I realized what it lacked--will, desire,
ambition,--it was what a second-rate sculptor might have made of
Bradford, for instance. But there is a remnant of fire in him. Once, when
he spoke of the strike, of the foreigners, he grew quite indignant."

"He didn't tell you why his daughter had joined the strikers?" Insall
asked.

"He was just as much at sea about that as you and I are. Of course I
didn't ask him--he asked me if I knew. It's only another proof of her
amazing reticence. And I can imagine an utter absence of sympathy between
them. He accounts for her, of course; he's probably the unconscious
transmitter of qualities the Puritans possessed and tried to smother.
Certainly the fires are alight in