"He seems vexed with me," said Aunt Effie with a little sigh. "I am afraid he thinks I urge him on a good deal. How ever," she added in a more cheerful tone, "it is as well that he has reached the Tapajos. That means he will have four whole months for his special work in the habitat of the macaw before he starts for home. I shall write him, I think, that if he isn't finished by September he had better stay on a month or two longer."

She seemed to take the long silence that followed this letter as a matter of course, due to the fact that Uncle Alfred was absorbed in the work for which he had taken the long journey. Equally as a matter of course did she take the letter telling that he was not coming home at the end of his year, after all.

"I have not yet found any specimens of the macaw," he wrote, "and I am sure you will understand my not being willing to leave until I have. It is a bird to be wooed, as my Indian guide quaintly puts it. In the meantime I have secured good specimens of some smaller Psittaci, notably a Conurus guianensis which I shall bring home with me."

Aunt Effie seemed greatly pleased with his letter, and that evening she spent with a stuffed conurus before her and a German monograph on the bird in her lap, content as I had not seen her in months.

I do not remember how we learned that Uncle Alfred was going to stay on a third year. That was the winter Richard Martin, whose father and mother had been my father's and mother's dearest friends in California long ago, stopped at Medford on his way to New York, then came back again and again. Life had opened up for me at last, and for a while I had no thoughts for anything but my own overwhelming happiness.

But at last I woke to the fact that all was not well with Aunt Effie. It was after Dick and I had been engaged for several months, and I had been telling Aunt Effie how he had bought my father's old ranch and wanted me to marry him in the autumn and go back there to live.

"Then you will leave me in the autumn," said Aunt Effie quietly, fussing with the buttons of her raincoat as if she wished to avoid my eyes.

"Not if you are alone still!" I blun

dered. Aunt Effie made a wry little face as if something had pricked her. "That has nothing to do with it," she retorted. "Only I was wondering," she went on, flushing a little, "if you had written your uncle of your plans. He would wish to be here for your wedding, I think!”

"Of course!" I cried, and with a pang of secret remorse that I had not thought of this myself I ran up-stairs to write the letter.

The answer came by cable from Para a month later, saying that Uncle Alfred was sailing for home.

He had given us no clew as to the date of his arrival in New York, so that we were fairly taken by surprise when he walked in one day while we were at luncheon.

"Well, Effie," he said, looking at us from the doorway with a little smile that brought back with piercing clearness my first sight of him, nearly ten years before. "And little Ynez!" He patted my head as I ran forward to meet him. Aunt Effie sat quite white and still in her chair.

There was a moment's stir while a place was made for him at the table, followed by an awkward and uncomfortable silence, during which I mentally reviewed the blessings of a demonstrative nature. In moments like this Uncle Alfred and Aunt Effie had no affectionate interchanges to soften the baldness of meeting. The best that poor Aunt Effie had to offer was: "And you found the macaw?"

"Yes," said Uncle Alfred. We waited for more, but after a moment he looked around with a nervous little frown, and abruptly changed the subject to a series of lectures Aunt Effie had been giving in his absence. Gradually the tension relaxed, and later in the afternoon Dick and I came in from a walk, to hear sounds of hammering from the laboratory. There we saw Uncle Alfred and Aunt Effie busily unpacking two large weather-beaten cases.

"These are wonderful specimens, Ynez," said Aunt Effie happily. "Just look at this monster butterfly. Isn't he perfectly preserved?"

Under her approval Uncle Alfred had become almost himself again, and I look back with comfort to the memory of the cosey hour that followed when we all sat

about the treasures of Uncle Alfred's wanderings and listened to his story of their acquisition.

"What a ripping book all this would make, Doctor Russell!" was Dick's enthusiastic comment. "I hope you are. going to write one!"

"He will have his hands full with his monograph for the present, I imagine," said Aunt Effie briskly. "I think I told you about that, Dick."

"Oh, I remember," murmured Dick. Uncle Alfred passed his hand across his forehead as if he were tired. "We'd better begin to clear this rubbish away," he said.

"But is this all you have brought?" asked Aunt Effie in sharp surprise. I knew that she was thinking of the hyacinthine macaw.

"This is all," said Uncle Alfred. Something in his voice forbade further questioning, but Aunt Effie's look was strange.

"I shall miss you, little Ynez," said Uncle Alfred, stooping to kiss me goodby as Dick and I were leaving the house after the wedding.

"But you must come out and visit me soon!" I cried, clinging to him. I realized as I had never done before how dear the gray old house and the kindly uncle and aunt had become to me. "And the monograph," I added almost in a whisper. The strained look on Aunt Effie's face seemed to be driving me to mention it. "You'll begin it soon, Uncle Alfred?"

Uncle Alfred looked down at me with an inscrutable little smile. "It will be so immensely important to you now, of course," he observed with gentle sar

casm.

"It will!" I protested earnestly; and Dick added, wringing his hand: "And to me, too. Ynez is going to read your book to me and explain the parts I can't understand."

"Ah," said Uncle Alfred with an odd intonation. "Then you are sure to enjoy it."

It was a relief to find that after a time Aunt Effie's letters began to breathe her usual spirit of serenity again. "Your uncle and I have been busy in the laboratory," she wrote, and again: "Your uncle

sits by, hard at work on his notes." Toward the winter came a more definite tone. "I think your Uncle Alfred's trip was a wise thing after all, Ynez," she wrote. "He is writing a larger work than he intended, merely incorporating his data on the hyacinthine macaw in one chapter. It is not what I would have advised, but he is set on having it so. I have seen none of the book yet, as I have a fancy he wishes to work it out by himself first."

Later came a hasty scrawl in pencil. "On my way up to the laboratory to hear your uncle's book. Ynez, I think you alone know what it will mean to me to have him take his place in the world of accurate science at last. This is a generation afflicted with nature sentimentalists!"

I waited anxiously for some account of the book from Aunt Effie, but none came. Yet in due time press notices in all the magazines informed us that it was being received enthusiastically by the scientific world, and was even read by laymen with the deepest interest.

"Your uncle is going to be a best-seller if he doesn't look out," said Dick, as we sat over our tea one afternoon on the shady veranda. "Listen! It is reported as the fourth most popular book in a Chicago library for the past month. Your Aunt Effie will hate that!"

"Why?" I asked, startled by this unexpected subtlety in my straightforward husband.

"Proves it's not pure science," said Dick, waving his teacup. "Some human interest must have crept in somewhere, and that's death to science. I know that, if I didn't board for ten years with stuffed Psittaci!"

"But Aunt Effie wouldn't have been so pleased if it hadn't been up to the mark scientifically," I objected.

"Have you heard from her since she read the book? I thought not! You see, your Aunt Effie cannot tell a lie, so, being disappointed, she says nothing."

"But that review by Sir Alfred Sickles. He's one of the greatest ornithologists in the world, and he says it's an epoch-making book!"

"Well, I'm sure I'm right," said Dick doggedly. "I wish they'd hurry along

our copy. I feel in my bones that even I could enjoy the book."

When it finally came I saw how true a prophet Dick had been. It was a record any scientist might have been proud of, with its minute and varied observations on tropical life. Yet there was in the book something more, something so unconsciously revealed, yet so delicate, so poignant, as to make it a classic for all time-the story of a man's wakening hunger after life. Perhaps if I had never known Dick I would not have understood so well. It comforted me to think that the real meaning of the book would probably pass Aunt Effie by, yet at the same time my heart ached for poor, blind, clever Aunt Effie.

A little more than a year after the book came out Uncle Alfred died of some obscure heart-disease. He had been dead two weeks when I got a telegram from Aunt Effie, asking me to come. Disturbed by all sorts of conjectures as to what could make her need of me so great, I packed hastily and started East by the next evening's train.

Aunt Effie did not meet me at the train, but I hardly expected her to, as she had once expressed her hatred of such meetings. She was sitting idle by the drawingroom window as I reached the house, however, and before I was up the steps she had the door open and was waiting for me. "I am so glad you are here!" she said huskily. "It has been terrible here alone!" I kissed her soberly and with something of her old embarrassment under a caress of any kind she began un fastening my coat with awkward fingers, while the dreary hallway repeated an almost forgotten story of change and death to my heart.

"We'll come up to the laboratory if you don't mind," said Aunt Effie. "I cannot talk down here. It is so strange."

But when we reached the laboratory she seemed no more able to begin. I sat down in the little red rocker and looked about me, longing to fling myself in Aunt Effie's arms and have a good cry, yet withheld by that old, ridiculous barrier of shyness that she wore about her like armor. The laboratory was as if I had left it yesterday, except that the Psittaci were thick with dust.

"They wouldn't like that," I said involuntarily, and taking out my handkerchief I began wiping off the tiny cockatoo in the corner.

"Who wouldn't like what?" asked Aunt Effie almost irritably. "Sit down, Ynez," she added, fumbling a moment in one of the drawers. "I have something to show you."

After a moment she put a large portfolio in my hands, and as she did so a picture slipped from one of its pages and fell to the floor. As I picked it up Aunt Effie's hand reached for it and then drew back.

"Look at it," she said quietly. "It is your Uncle Alfred as I first knew him." And as I stared down at the photograph of my uncle in his youth, his glorious beauty unmarred by the beard that had always obscured it since I had known him, Aunt Effie went on talking in low, disjointed sentences.

I-I

"He was more beautiful than any other man I ever saw," she said. "It was really a drawback to his career, for women everywhere fell in love with him. Not foolish young girls, but beautiful and gracious women of the world, who would have showered all their possessions and social advantages on him gladly. But he was fond of his work, and I suppose having so many in love with him-I never quite understood it. Then I came to Medford as assistant instructor in biology. fancy it was because I didn't try to attract him that he first became interested in me. He used to laugh at me from the very first for my lack of sentiment. 'But it is refreshing,' he would say. 'You inspire a man instead of hampering him.' And when he asked me to marry him he told me he realized that I didn't love him, but he thought that together we could do great things. He kept saying that I was so much cleverer than he, and there, of course, he was mistaken. He was mistaken in one other thing," she went on after a pause. "I loved him from the first day I saw him standing in my lecture-room doorway with the sun in his hair. But I wasn't going to let him know. It was my companionship and inspiration he married me for, and that was all he ever asked of me. Do you wonder, Ynez, that I felt our marriage would be futile if

I did not help him to some really great achievement?"

She got up and moved about the room, straightening an object here and there, and after a little she came back to the fireplace.

"The portfolio I gave you has his complete manuscript in it," she said in a quiet voice. "There is a place in the last chapter, the place where he describes his finding of the hyacinthine macaw-I want you to read it to me, Ynez."

I found the place without difficulty, and something told me that hands had turned to that page many and many a time before. Then in the gray afternoon light I read it aloud to Aunt Effie.

"It was through my host and hostess in the little village that I found the hyacinthine macaw at last," wrote Uncle Alfred. "João Perez was a tall, magnificent young half-breed and his wife a slender, dark-eyed Indian girl whose grace made one think of the nymphs of old that sent youths mad with longing and baffled delight. They told me the bird was often to be found by a forest pool where they were fond of going, so one morning we three set out on the search together."

There followed a pretty description of the walk through the forest, a rest in the noon heat with luncheon eaten off cool banana-leaves, then the arrival in the late afternoon at the forest pool.

"An evening coolness was already wandering down the dim aisles of the forest. Somewhere in the silence a plaintive bird note sounded and died upon the air. And all at once the path in front of us opened out into a lovely grassy glade in whose centre was a great pool with its bottom of silver sand. In the middle of the pool stood a snow-white heron, and macaws as brilliantly blue as the tropical skies flitted back and forth over the still water, flashed about among the palms, or swung on the long grasses, the most shining, gladdest things I have ever seen. There were hundreds of them, and the Indian girl clapped her hands with delight over their beauty. João had his blow-gun with him and asked me in a whisper if he should shoot. I said no, that it seemed a pity to kill so beautiful a creature.

"That is good,' said João. 'I would not

gladly kill these birds, for they are good to lovers.'

"While I crept nearer and took notes on the macaws João and the flitting little maiden bathed on the other side of the pool, so quietly that they did not even disturb the heron at his dreams. And as we started home through the dusk they swung hands together and sang in their young voices:

666
"As sete estrellas estao chorando'
('The seven stars are weeping,
Mother, mother!')

"If I could have one wish granted in this world, where wishes seem so vain, it would be for one hour of youth like theirs, so that I too could have the key to life and love and gladness such as dwelt beside that forest pool!"

Aunt Effie drew a sharp breath as I had finished. "You read it well, Ynez," she said in a strained voice. Then there was silence so long that I began to wonder if I should ever know what impulse had made her send for me. I closed the book and began to tie the tapes about it again. "It is yours now," she said at last. "But I can't take it from you, Aunt Effie!" I exclaimed.

"He wished it so," she said. “And, after all, there is nothing in it of the work he and I planned together."

"But it is wonderful!" I protested eagerly. "This very chapter is the one Sir Alfred spoke of as-as an epoch-making chapter. And if the greatest ornithologist in the world could say that!"

Then Aunt Effie turned upon me with the last word we were ever to have on the subject.

"I am not blind, Ynez," she said. "I too see what will make the book live, but it is not the valuable contribution it offers to science. Lies! What does the chapter on the hyacinthine macaw amount to from a scientific point of view? It is the picture of youth and life and love— youth and love-" She stared out with dreary eyes at the tops of the leafless maples.

"Your Uncle Alfred never suspected that I understood," she said softly. "But I want you to know that I am, after all, a woman!"