Touch of Providence

Carefully locking the door of his little gable bedroom, Alec Stoker put down the cup of hot water he carried, and peered into the mirror above his wash-stand. Then, although he had come up-stairs fully determined to attempt his first shave, he stood irresolute, stroking the almost imperceptible down on his boyish lip and chin.

"It does make me look older, that's a fact," he muttered to his reflection in the glass. "Maybe I'd better not cut it off until I've had my interview with the agent. The older I look, the more likely he'll be to trust me with a responsible position. Still," he continued, surveying himself critically, "I might make a more favourable impression if I had that 'well-groomed' look the papers lay so much stress on nowadays, and I could mention in a careless, offhand way something about having just shaved."

It was not yet dark out-of-doors, but after a few minutes of further deliberation, Alec pulled down the blind over his window and lighted the lamp. Then, opening a box that he took from his bureau, he drew out his Grandfather Macklin's razor and ivory-handled shaving-brush.

"I'm sure the old gentleman never dreamed, when they made me his namesake, that this was all of his property I would fall heir to," he thought, bitterly.

The moody expression that settled on his face at the thought had become almost habitual in the last four weeks. The happy-go-lucky boy of seventeen seemed to have changed in that time to a morose man. June had left him the jolliest boy in the high school graduating class. September found him a morbid cynic.

It had been nine years since his mother, just before her death, had brought him back to the old home for her sister Eunice to take care of-Alec and the little five-year-old Philippa and the baby Macklin. Their Aunt Eunice had made a happy home for them, and although she rarely laughed herself, and her hair had whitened long before its time, she had allowed no part of her burdens to touch their thoughtless young lives. It was only lately that Alec had been aroused to the fact that she had any burdens. He was rehearsing them all now, as he rubbed the lather over his chin, so busily that he did not hear Philippa's light step on the back stairs. Philippa could step very lightly when she chose, despite the fact that she was long and awkward, with that temporary awkwardness of a growing girl who finds it hard to adjust herself and her skirts to her constantly increasing height.

Alec almost dropped his brush as she suddenly banged on his door. "Is that you, Flip?" he called, although he knew no one but Philippa ever beat such thundering tattoos on his door.

"Yes! Let me in! I want to ask you something."

He knew just how her sharp gray eyes would scan him, and he hesitated an instant, divided between a desire to let her see him in the manly act of shaving himself and the certain knowledge that she would tease him if he did.

Finally he threw open the door and turned to the glass in his most indifferent manner, as if it were an every-day occurrence with him. "Come in," he said; "I'm only shaving. I'm going out this evening."

If he had thought she would be impressed by his lordly air, he was mistaken, for, after one prolonged stare, she threw herself on the bed, shrieking with laughter. Long practice in bandying words with her brother had made her an expert tease. Usually they both enjoyed such combats, but now, to her surprise, he seemed indifferent to her most provoking comments, and scraped away at his chin in dignified silence.

"I believe you said you had something to say to me, Philippa," he said presently, in a stern tone that made her stare. Never, except when he was very angry, did he call her anything but Flip.

Suddenly sobered, she took her face out of the pillows and peered at him curiously, twisting one of the long plaits of hair that hung over her shoulder.

"I have," she said. "I want to know what's the matter with you. What has come over you lately? You've been as sullen as a brown bear for days and days. I asked Aunt Eunice just now, while we were washing the supper dishes, what had changed you so. You used to be whistling and joking whenever you came near the house. Now you never open your lips except to make some sarcastic speech.

"She said that it was probably because you were so disappointed about not getting that position in the bank that you had set your heart on, and she was afraid that you were growing discouraged about ever finding any position worth while in this sleepy little village. She didn't know that I saw it, but while she was talking a tear splashed right down in the dish-water, and I made up my mind that it must be something lots worse than just plain disappointment or discouragement, and that I was going to ask you. Now, you needn't snap your mouth shut that way, like a clam. You've got to tell me!"

"Aunt Eunice doesn't want you to know," he said, turning away from the glass, razor in hand, to look at her intently. "But you're a big girl, Flip-nearly as tall as she is, if you are only fifteen. You're bound to hear it sometime, and in my opinion it would be better for you to hear it from me than to have it knock you flat coming unexpectedly from a stranger, as I heard it.'

"'YOU'RE BOUND TO HEAR IT SOMETIME.'"

"Tell me," she urged, her curiosity aroused.

"Can you stand a pretty tough knock?"

"As well as you," she answered, meeting his gaze steadily, yet with a queer kind of chill creeping over her at his mysterious manner.

"Well, what do you suppose you and Mack and I have been living on all these years that we have been living with Aunt Eunice?"

"Why-I-I don't know! Mother's share of Grandfather Macklin's property, I suppose. He divided it equally between her and Aunt Eunice."

"Well, we just haven't!" Alec exclaimed. "That was spent before we came here, and nearly all of Aunt Eunice's share, too. She's been drawing right out of the principal the last two years so that she could keep us in school, and there's hardly anything left but this old house and the ground it stands on. She never told me until this summer. That's why I took the first job that offered, and drove Murray's delivery wagon till the regular driver was well. It wasn't particularly good pay, but it paid for my board and kept me from feeling that I was a burden on Aunt Eunice.

"I was sure of getting that position in the bank. One of the directors had as good as promised it to me. While it wouldn't have paid much at first, it would have been an entering wedge, and have put me in the direct line of promotion. And you know that from the time I was Macklin's age it has been my ambition to be a banker like grandfather. Since I failed to get that, nobody, not even Aunt Eunice, knows how hard I've tried to get into some steady, good-paying job. I've been to every business man in the village, and done everything a fellow could do, seems to me, but in a little place like this there's absolutely no opening unless somebody dies. The good places are already filled by reliable, middle-aged men who have grown up in them. There's no use trying any longer. Every time I get my hopes up it's only to have them dashed to pieces-shipwrecked, you might say."

He paused a minute, ostensibly to give his chin a fresh coating of lather, but in reality to gather courage for the words he found so difficult to say. In the silence, Macklin's voice came floating up to them from the porch below. Sitting on the steps in the twilight, with his bare feet doubled under him, he was reciting something to his Aunt Eunice in a high, sturdy voice. It came in shrilly through the open window of Alec's room, where the brown shade and overhanging muslin curtains flapped back and forth in the evening breeze.

Philippa smiled as she listened. He was reciting a poem that Aunt Eunice had taught each of them in turn, after the Creed and the Commandments and the Catechism. It was Whittier's hymn-"The Eternal Goodness." She had paid them a penny a stanza for learning it, and as there are twenty-two stanzas in all, Philippa remembered how rich she felt the day she dropped the last copper down the chimney of her little red savings-bank.

It had been seven years since Alec learned it, but the words were as familiar still as the letters of the alphabet. As Macklin's high-pitched voice reached them, Philippa joined in in a singsong undertone, and even Alec found himself unconsciously following the well-remembered lines in his thought:

"I know not where His islands lift

Their fronded palms in air;

I only know I cannot drift

Beyond His love and care."

"There!" said Philippa, stopping abruptly, "you were talking about shipwrecks. According to that hymn, there's always some island ready for you to be washed up on. How do you know but that you're going to land some place where you'll be lots better off than if you'd stayed here in Ridgeville?"