Jewel Weed   By: Alice Ames Winter (1865-1944)

by

ALICE AMES WINTER

Author of "The Prize to the Hardy"

With Illustrations by Harrison Fisher

[Illustration: "Surely you must have read it long ago" Page 360]

Grosset & Dunlap Publishers New York

Copyright 1906 The Bobbs Merrill Company October

TO MY FATHER AND MOTHER CHARLES G. AND FANNY B. AMES

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I A Light from the Far East 1 II Mother and Son 28 III An Occidental Luminary 41 IV At Madeline's 54 V Salad Days 77 VI Jewel Weed 99 VII Lena's Progress 116 VIII The Falls 132 IX An Invitation 152 X Bitter Sweet 173 XI Politics and Play 194 XII An Engagement 210 XIII An Awakening 222 XIV The Return of Ram Juna 242 XV The Honeymoon 269 XVI Lena's Friends 298 XVII Grape Shot 324 XVIII Easter 344 XIX Oriental Rubies 365 XX A Light from the East Goes Out 391 XXI A Light in the West Goes Down 401 XXII Another Beginning 424

JEWEL WEED

CHAPTER I

A LIGHT FROM THE FAR EAST

In the mists of the infinite, events poise invisible, awaiting their opportunity to incarnate themselves. They fasten, each after his kind, on these human lives of ours, as germs find the culture soil they love; so it follows that to the commonplace comes a life of dull routine, foolish happenings seek out the sentimentalist, sordid events seek the sordid and on the mystic dawns the mysterious. Calamities wait there, too, until Fate points out a weak spot in character on which they may pounce relentless with the temptation that pierces it. As there are certain things that would scarcely dare to happen to certain people, so other greater events would hardly condescend to those whom they recognize as being their own inferiors.

Once in a while, particularly when a man is young or beginning a new phase of life, there come times when the things that are to be seem almost tangible. They press until he feels them crowd, while he waits with tense expectation for them to become visible to the crude eye of outer experience.

Perhaps it was due to a certain occultism in the atmosphere that Ellery Norris felt this pressure of the future on the afternoon of Mr. Early's reception to Ram Juna. Norris was a new young man in a new young city, and he had come West to live. However short and futile life may look to the old, it appears a big and long thing to twenty three. Here in St. Etienne he was to work and work hard; among these people, now all strangers, he was to find the friends of his lifetime; here were to come all the experiences of struggle, failure, success, perhaps of love.

He turned and glanced with a little sense of relief at Richard Percival seated beside him. Dick was the one stanch thing out of his past; Dick he had known and loved at college; Dick was even now showing himself a friend; and all these other folk were but the ghosts of things to come. Then he laughed lightly at himself for his own fantasy, and returned to the survey of his surroundings.