o a Decision 258
XVII The Great Alternative 270
XVIII Love Triumphant 290

THE WALL BETWEEN

CHAPTER I

A MODERN RICHELIEU

The Howe and Webster farms adjoined, lying on a sun-flooded, gently
sloping New Hampshire hillside. Between them loomed The Wall. It was not a
high wall. On the contrary, its formidableness was the result of tradition
rather than of fact. For more than a century it had been an estranging
barrier to neighborliness, to courtesy, to broad-mindedness; a barrier to
friendship, to Christian charity, to peace.

The builder of the rambling line of gray stone had long since passed away,
and had he not acquired a warped importance with the years, his memory
would doubtless have perished with him. All unwittingly, alas, he had
become a celebrity. His was the fame of omission, however, rather than of
commission. Had he, like artist or sculptor, but affixed his signature to
his handiwork, then might he have sunk serenely into oblivion, "unwept,
unhonored, and unsung." But unfortunately he was a modest creature.
Instead, he had stepped nameless into the silence of the Hereafter,
leaving to those who came after him not only the sinister boundary his
hands had reared, but also a feud that had seethed hotly for generations.

If within the narrow confines of his last resting place he had ever been
conscious of the dissension for which he was responsible and had been
haunted by a desire to utter the magic word he had neglected to speak in
life, he at least gave no sign. His lips remained sealed in death, and his
spirit was never seen to walk abroad. Possibly he retired into his shroud
with this finality because he never found it imperative, as did Hamlet's
ghost, to admonish posterity to remember him.

Only too well was he remembered!

The Howes and Websters who followed him hurled against the sounding board
of heaven the repeated questions of who built the wall, and whose duty was
it to repair it. Great-grandfather Jabez Howe quibbled with
Great-grandfather Abiatha Webster for a lifetime, and both went down into
the tomb still quibbling over the enigma. Afterward Grandfather Nathan
Howe and Grandfather Ebenezer Webster took up the dispute, and they, too,
were gathered into the Beyond without ever reaching a conclusion. Their
children then wrangled and argued and slandered one another, and, like
their forbears, retired from the field in impotent rage, leaving