22867	----	Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from _The Counterfeit Man More Science Fiction Stories by Alan E. Nourse_ published in 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note. Meeting of the Board It was going to be a bad day. As he pushed his way nervously through the crowds toward the Exit Strip, Walter Towne turned the dismal prospect over and over in his mind. The potential gloominess of this particular day had descended upon him the instant the morning buzzer had gone off, making it even more tempting than usual just to roll over and forget about it all. Twenty minutes later, the water-douse came to drag him, drenched and gurgling, back to the cruel cold world. He had wolfed down his morning Koffee-Kup with one eye on the clock and one eye on his growing sense of impending crisis. And now, to make things just a trifle worse, he was going to be late again. He struggled doggedly across the rumbling Exit strip toward the plant entrance. After all, he told himself, why should he be so upset? He _was_ Vice President-in-Charge-of-Production of the Robling Titanium Corporation. What could they do to him, really? He had rehearsed _his_ part many times, squaring his thin shoulders, looking the union boss straight in the eye and saying, "Now, see here, Torkleson--" But he knew, when the showdown came, that he wouldn't say any such thing. And this was the morning that the showdown would come. Oh, not because of the _lateness_. Of course Bailey, the shop steward, would take his usual delight in bringing that up. But this seemed hardly worthy of concern this morning. The reports waiting on his desk were what worried him. The sales reports. The promotion-draw reports. The royalty reports. The anticipated dividend reports. Walter shook his head wearily. The shop steward was a goad, annoying, perhaps even infuriating, but tolerable. Torkleson was a different matter. He pulled his worn overcoat down over frayed shirt sleeves, and tried vainly to straighten the celluloid collar that kept scooting his tie up under his ear. Once off the moving strip, he started up the Robling corridor toward the plant gate. Perhaps he would be fortunate. Maybe the reports would be late. Maybe his secretary's two neurones would fail to synapse this morning, and she'd lose them altogether. And, as long as he was dreaming, maybe Bailey would break his neck on the way to work. He walked quickly past the workers' lounge, glancing in at the groups of men, arguing politics and checking the stock market reports before they changed from their neat gray business suits to their welding dungarees. Running up the stairs to the administrative wing, he paused outside the door to punch the time clock. 8:04. Damn. If only Bailey could be sick-- Bailey was not sick. The administrative offices were humming with frantic activity as Walter glanced down the rows of cubbyholes. In the middle of it all sat Bailey, in his black-and-yellow checkered tattersall, smoking a large cigar. His feet were planted on his desk top, but he hadn't started on his morning Western yet. He was busy glaring, first at the clock, then at Walter. "Late again, I see," the shop steward growled. Walter gulped. "Yes, sir. Just four minutes, this time, sir. You know those crowded strips--" "So it's _just_ four minutes now, eh?" Bailey's feet came down with a crash. "After last month's fine production record, you think four minutes doesn't matter, eh? Think just because you're a vice president it's all right to mosey in here whenever you feel like it." He glowered. "Well, this is three times this month you've been late, Towne. That's a demerit for each time, and you know what that means." "You wouldn't count four minutes as a whole demerit!" Bailey grinned. "Wouldn't I, now! You just add up your pay envelope on Friday. Ten cents an hour off for each demerit." Walter sighed and shuffled back to his desk. Oh, well. It could have been worse. They might have fired him like poor Cartwright last month. He'd just _have_ to listen to that morning buzzer. The reports were on his desk. He picked them up warily. Maybe they wouldn't be so bad. He'd had more freedom this last month than before, maybe there'd been a policy change. Maybe Torkleson was gaining confidence in him. Maybe-- The reports were worse than he had ever dreamed. "_Towne!_" Walter jumped a foot. Bailey was putting down the visiphone receiver. His grin spread unpleasantly from ear to ear. "What have you been doing lately? Sabotaging the production line?" "What's the trouble now?" Bailey jerked a thumb significantly at the ceiling. "The boss wants to see you. And you'd better have the right answers, too. The boss seems to have a lot of questions." Walter rose slowly from his seat. This was it, then. Torkleson had already seen the reports. He started for the door, his knees shaking. It hadn't always been like this, he reflected miserably. Time was when things had been very different. It had _meant_ something to be vice president of a huge industrial firm like Robling Titanium. A man could have had a fine house of his own, and a 'copter-car, and belong to the Country Club; maybe even have a cottage on a lake somewhere. Walter could almost remember those days with Robling, before the switchover, before that black day when the exchange of ten little shares of stock had thrown the Robling Titanium Corporation into the hands of strange and unnatural owners. * * * * * The door was of heavy stained oak, with bold letters edged in gold: TITANIUM WORKERS OF AMERICA Amalgamated Locals Daniel P. Torkleson, Secretary The secretary flipped down the desk switch and eyed Walter with pity. "Mr. Torkleson will see you." Walter pushed through the door into the long, handsome office. For an instant he felt a pang of nostalgia--the floor-to-ceiling windows looking out across the long buildings of the Robling plant, the pine paneling, the broad expanse of desk-- "Well? Don't just stand there. Shut the door and come over here." The man behind the desk hoisted his three hundred well-dressed pounds and glared at Walter from under flagrant eyebrows. Torkleson's whole body quivered as he slammed a sheaf of papers down on the desk. "Just what do you think you're doing with this company, Towne?" Walter swallowed. "I'm production manager of the corporation." "And just what does the production manager _do_ all day?" Walter reddened. "He organizes the work of the plant, establishes production lines, works with Promotion and Sales, integrates Research and Development, operates the planning machines." "And you think you do a pretty good job of it, eh? Even asked for a raise last year!" Torkleson's voice was dangerous. Walter spread his hands. "I do my best. I've been doing it for thirty years. I should know what I'm doing." "_Then how do you explain these reports?_" Torkleson threw the heap of papers into Walter's arms, and paced up and down behind the desk. "_Look_ at them! Sales at rock bottom. Receipts impossible. Big orders canceled. The worst reports in seven years, and you say you know your job!" "I've been doing everything I could," Walter snapped. "Of course the reports are bad, they couldn't help but be. We haven't met a production schedule in over two years. No plant can keep up production the way the men are working." Torkleson's face darkened. He leaned forward slowly. "So it's the _men_ now, is it? Go ahead. Tell me what's wrong with the men." "Nothing's wrong with the men--if they'd only work. But they come in when they please, and leave when they please, and spend half their time changing and the other half on Koffee-Kup. No company could survive this. But that's only half of it--" Walter searched through the reports frantically. "This International Jet Transport account--they dropped us because we haven't had a new engine in six years. Why? Because Research and Development hasn't had any money for six years. What can two starved engineers and a second rate chemist drag out of an attic laboratory for competition in the titanium market?" Walter took a deep breath. "I've warned you time and again. Robling had built up accounts over the years with fine products and new models. But since the switchover seven years ago, you and your board have forced me to play the cheap products for the quick profit in order to give your men their dividends. Now the bottom's dropped out. We couldn't turn a quick profit on the big, important accounts, so we had to cancel them. If you had let me manage the company the way it should have been run--" Torkleson had been slowly turning purple. Now he slammed his fist down on the desk. "We should just turn the company back to Management again, eh? Just let you have a free hand to rob us blind again. Well, it won't work, Towne. Not while I'm secretary of this union. We fought long and hard for control of this corporation, just the way all the other unions did. I know. I was through it all." He sat back smugly, his cheeks quivering with emotion. "You might say that I was a national leader in the movement. But I did it only for the men. The men want their dividends. They own the stock, stock is supposed to pay dividends." "But they're cutting their own throats," Walter wailed. "You can't build a company and make it grow the way I've been forced to run it." "Details!" Torkleson snorted. "I don't care _how_ the dividends come in. That's your job. My job is to report a dividend every six months to the men who own the stock, the men working on the production lines." Walter nodded bitterly. "And every year the dividend has to be higher than the last, or you and your fat friends are likely to be thrown out of your jobs--right? No more steaks every night. No more private gold-plated Buicks for you boys. No more twenty-room mansions in Westchester. No more big game hunting in the Rockies. No, you don't have to know anything but how to whip a board meeting into a frenzy so they'll vote you into office again each year." Torkleson's eyes glittered. His voice was very soft. "I've always liked you, Walter. So I'm going to pretend I didn't hear you." He paused, then continued. "But here on my desk is a small bit of white paper. Unless you have my signature on that paper on the first of next month, you are out of a job, on grounds of incompetence. And I will personally see that you go on every White list in the country." Walter felt the fight go out of him like a dying wind. He knew what the White list meant. No job, anywhere, ever, in management. No chance, ever, to join a union. No more house, no more weekly pay envelope. He spread his hands weakly. "What do you want?" he asked. "I want a production plan on my desk within twenty-four hours. A plan that will guarantee me a five per cent increase in dividends in the next six months. And you'd better move fast, because I'm not fooling." * * * * * Back in his cubbyhole downstairs, Walter stared hopelessly at the reports. He had known it would come to this sooner or later. They all knew it--Hendricks of Promotion, Pendleton of Sales, the whole managerial staff. It was wrong, all the way down the line. Walter had fought it tooth and nail since the day Torkleson had installed the moose heads in Walter's old office, and moved him down to the cubbyhole, under Bailey's watchful eye. He had argued, and battled, and pleaded, and lost. He had watched the company deteriorate day by day. Now they blamed him, and threatened his job, and he was helpless to do anything about it. He stared at the machines, clicking busily against the wall. An idea began to form in his head. Helpless? Not quite. Not if the others could see it, go along with it. It was a repugnant idea. But there was one thing they could do that even Torkleson and his fat-jowled crew would understand. They could go on strike. * * * * * "It's ridiculous," the lawyer spluttered, staring at the circle of men in the room. "How can I give you an opinion on the legality of the thing? There isn't any legal precedent that I know of." He mopped his bald head with a large white handkerchief. "There just hasn't _been_ a case of a company's management striking against its own labor. It--it isn't done. Oh, there have been lockouts, but this isn't the same thing at all." Walter nodded. "Well, we couldn't very well lock the men out, they own the plant. We were thinking more of a lock-_in_ sort of thing." He turned to Paul Hendricks and the others. "We know how the machines operate. They don't. We also know that the data we keep in the machines is essential to running the business; the machines figure production quotas, organize blueprints, prepare distribution lists, test promotion schemes. It would take an office full of managerial experts to handle even a single phase of the work without the machines." The man at the window hissed, and Pendleton quickly snapped out the lights. They sat in darkness, hardly daring to breathe. Then: "Okay. Just the man next door coming home." Pendleton sighed. "You're sure you didn't let them suspect anything, Walter? They wouldn't be watching the house?" "I don't think so. And you all came alone, at different times." He nodded to the window guard, and turned back to the lawyer. "So we can't be sure of the legal end. You'd have to be on your toes." "I still don't see how we could work it," Hendricks objected. His heavy face was wrinkled with worry. "Torkleson is no fool, and he has a lot of power in the National Association of Union Stockholders. All he'd need to do is ask for managers, and a dozen companies would throw them to him on loan. They'd be able to figure out the machine system and take over without losing a day." "Not quite." Walter was grinning. "That's why I spoke of a lock-in. Before we leave, we throw the machines into feedback, every one of them. Lock them into reverberating circuits with a code sequence key. Then all they'll do is buzz and sputter until the feedback is broken with the key. And the key is our secret. It'll tie the Robling office into granny knots, and scabs won't be able to get any more data out of the machines than Torkleson could. With a lawyer to handle injunctions, we've got them strapped." "For what?" asked the lawyer. Walter turned on him sharply. "For new contracts. Contracts to let us manage the company the way it should be managed. If they won't do it, they won't get another Titanium product off their production lines for the rest of the year, and their dividends will _really_ take a nosedive." "That means you'll have to beat Torkleson," said Bates. "He'll never go along." "Then he'll be left behind." Hendricks stood up, brushing off his dungarees. "I'm with you, Walter. I've taken all of Torkleson that I want to. And I'm sick of the junk we've been trying to sell people." The others nodded. Walter rubbed his hands together. "All right. Tomorrow we work as usual, until the noon whistle. When we go off for lunch, we throw the machines into lock-step. Then we just don't come back. But the big thing is to keep it quiet until the noon whistle." He turned to the lawyer. "Are you with us, Jeff?" Jeff Bates shook his head sadly. "I'm with you. I don't know why, you haven't got a leg to stand on. But if you want to commit suicide, that's all right with me." He picked up his briefcase, and started for the door. "I'll have your contract demands by tomorrow," he grinned. "See you at the lynching." They got down to the details of planning. * * * * * The news hit the afternoon telecasts the following day. Headlines screamed: MANAGEMENT SABOTAGES ROBLING MACHINES OFFICE STRIKERS THREATEN LABOR ECONOMY ROBLING LOCK-IN CREATES PANDEMONIUM There was a long, indignant statement from Daniel P. Torkleson, condemning Towne and his followers for "flagrant violation of management contracts and illegal fouling of managerial processes." Ben Starkey, President of the Board of American Steel, expressed "shock and regret"; the Amalgamated Buttonhole Makers held a mass meeting in protest, demanding that "the instigators of this unprecedented crime be permanently barred from positions in American Industry." In Washington, the nation's economists were more cautious in their views. Yes, it _was_ an unprecedented action. Yes, there would undoubtedly be repercussions--many industries were having managerial troubles; but as for long term effects, it was difficult to say just at present. On the Robling production lines the workmen blinked at each other, and at their machines, and wondered vaguely what it was all about. Yet in all the upheaval, there was very little expression of surprise. Step by step, through the years, economists had been watching with wary eyes the growing movement toward union, control of industry. Even as far back as the '40's and '50's unions, finding themselves oppressed with the administration of growing sums of money--pension funds, welfare funds, medical insurance funds, accruing union dues--had begun investing in corporate stock. It was no news to them that money could make money. And what stock more logical to buy than stock in their own companies? At first it had been a quiet movement. One by one the smaller firms had tottered, bled drier and drier by increasing production costs, increasing labor demands, and an ever-dwindling margin of profit. One by one they had seen their stocks tottering as they faced bankruptcy, only to be gobbled up by the one ready buyer with plenty of funds to buy with. At first, changes had been small and insignificant: boards of directors shifted; the men were paid higher wages and worked shorter hours; there were tighter management policies; and a little less money was spent on extras like Research and Development. At first--until that fateful night when Daniel P. Torkleson of TWA and Jake Squill of Amalgamated Buttonhole Makers spent a long evening with beer and cigars in a hotel room, and floated the loan that threw steel to the unions. Oil had followed with hardly a fight, and as the unions began to feel their oats, the changes grew more radical. Walter Towne remembered those stormy days well. The gradual undercutting of the managerial salaries, the tightening up of inter-union collusion to establish the infamous White list of Recalcitrant Managers. The shift from hourly wage to annual salary for the factory workers, and the change to the other pole for the managerial staff. And then, with creeping malignancy, the hungry howling of the union bosses for more and higher dividends, year after year, moving steadily toward the inevitable crisis. Until Shop Steward Bailey suddenly found himself in charge of a dozen sputtering machines and an empty office. * * * * * Torkleson was waiting to see the shop steward when he came in next morning. The union boss's office was crowded with TV cameras, newsmen, and puzzled workmen. The floor was littered with piles of ominous-looking paper. Torkleson was shouting into a telephone, and three lawyers were shouting into Torkleson's ear. He spotted Bailey and waved him through the crowd into an inner office room. "Well? Did they get them fixed?" Bailey spread his hands nervously. "The electronics boys have been at it since yesterday afternoon. Practically had the machines apart on the floor." "I know that, stupid," Torkleson roared. "I ordered them there. Did they get the machines _fixed_?" "Uh--well, no, as a matter of fact--" "Well, _what's holding them up_?" Bailey's face was a study in misery. "The machines just go in circles. The circuits are locked. They just reverberate." "Then call American Electronics. Have them send down an expert crew." Bailey shook his head. "They won't come." "They _what_?" "They said thanks, but no thanks. They don't want their fingers in this pie at all." "Wait until I get O'Gilvy on the phone." "It won't do any good, sir. They've got their own management troubles. They're scared silly of a sympathy strike." The door burst open, and a lawyer stuck his head in. "What about those injunctions, Dan?" "Get them moving," Torkleson howled. "They'll start those machines again, or I'll have them in jail so fast--" He turned back to Bailey. "What about the production lines?" The shop steward's face lighted. "They slipped up, there. There was one program that hadn't been coded into the machines yet. Just a minor item, but it's a starter. We found it in Towne's desk, blueprints all ready, promotion all planned." "Good, good," Torkleson breathed. "I have a directors' meeting right now, have to get the workers quieted down a bit. You put the program through, and give those electronics men three more hours to unsnarl this knot, or we throw them out of the union." He started for the door. "What were the blueprints for?" "Trash cans," said Bailey. "Pure titanium-steel trash cans." It took Robling Titanium approximately two days to convert its entire production line to titanium-steel trash cans. With the total resources of the giant plant behind the effort, production was phenomenal. In two more days the available markets were glutted. Within two weeks, at a conservative estimate, there would be a titanium-steel trash can for every man, woman, child, and hound dog on the North American continent. The jet engines, structural steels, tubing, and other pre-strike products piled up in the freight yards, their routing slips and order requisitions tied up in the reverberating machines. But the machines continued to buzz and sputter. The workers grew restive. From the first day, Towne and Hendricks and all the others had been picketing the plant, until angry crowds of workers had driven them off with shotguns. Then they came back in an old, weatherbeaten 'copter which hovered over the plant entrance carrying a banner with a plaintive message: ROBLING TITANIUM UNFAIR TO MANAGEMENT. Tomatoes were hurled, fists were shaken, but the 'copter remained. The third day, Jeff Bates was served with an injunction ordering Towne to return to work. It was duly appealed, legal machinery began tying itself in knots, and the strikers still struck. By the fifth day there was a more serious note. "You're going to have to appear, Walter. We can't dodge this one." "When?" "Tomorrow morning. And before a labor-rigged judge, too." The little lawyer paced his office nervously. "I don't like it. Torkleson's getting desperate. The workers are putting pressure on him." Walter grinned. "Then Pendleton is doing a good job of selling." "But you haven't got _time_," the lawyer wailed. "They'll have you in jail if you don't start the machines again. They may have you in jail if you _do_ start them, too, but that's another bridge. Right now they want those machines going again." "We'll see," said Walter. "What time tomorrow?" "Ten o'clock." Bates looked up. "And don't try to skip. You be there, because _I_ don't know what to tell them." Walter was there a half hour early. Torkleson's legal staff glowered from across the room. The judge glowered from the bench. Walter closed his eyes with a little smile as the charges were read: "--breach of contract, malicious mischief, sabotage of the company's machines, conspiring to destroy the livelihood of ten thousand workers. Your Honor, we are preparing briefs to prove further that these men have formed a conspiracy to undermine the economy of the entire nation. We appeal to the spirit of orderly justice--" Walter yawned as the words went on. "Of course, if the defendant will waive his appeals against the previous injunctions, and will release the machines that were sabotaged, we will be happy to formally withdraw these charges." There was a rustle of sound through the courtroom. His Honor turned to Jeff Bates. "Are you counsel for the defendant?" "Yes, sir." Bates mopped his bald scalp. "The defendant pleads guilty to all counts." The union lawyer dropped his glasses on the table with a crash. The judge stared. "Mr. Bates, if you plead guilty, you leave me no alternative--" "--but to send me to jail," said Walter Towne. "Go ahead. Send me to jail. In fact, I _insist_ upon going to jail." The union lawyer's jaw sagged. There was a hurried conference. A recess was pleaded. Telephones buzzed. Then: "Your Honor, the plaintiff desires to withdraw all charges at this time." "Objection," Bates exclaimed. "We've already pleaded." "--feel sure that a settlement can be effected out of court--" The case was thrown out on its ear. And still the machines sputtered. * * * * * Back at the plant rumor had it that the machines were permanently gutted, and that the plant could never go back into production. Conflicting scuttlebutt suggested that persons high in uniondom had perpetrated the crisis deliberately, bullying Management into the strike for the sole purpose of cutting current dividends and selling stock to themselves cheaply. The rumors grew easier and easier to believe. The workers came to the plants in business suits, it was true, and lounged in the finest of lounges, and read the _Wall Street Journal_, and felt like stockholders. But to face facts, their salaries were not the highest. Deduct union dues, pension fees, medical insurance fees, and sundry other little items which had formerly been paid by well-to-do managements, and very little was left but the semi-annual dividend checks. And now the dividends were tottering. Production lines slowed. There were daily brawls on the plant floor, in the lounge and locker rooms. Workers began joking about the trash cans; then the humor grew more and more remote. Finally, late in the afternoon of the eighth day, Bailey was once again in Torkleson's office. "Well? Speak up! What's the beef this time?" "Sir--the men--I mean, there's been some nasty talk. They're tired of making trash cans. No challenge in it. Anyway, the stock room is full, and the freight yard is full, and the last run of orders we sent out came back because nobody wants any more trash cans." Bailey shook his head. "The men won't swallow it any more. There's--well, there's been talk about having a board meeting." Torkleson's ruddy cheeks paled. "Board meeting, huh?" He licked his heavy lips. "Now look, Bailey, we've always worked well together. I consider you a good friend of mine. You've got to get things under control. Tell the men we're making progress. Tell them Management is beginning to weaken from its original stand. Tell them we expect to have the strike broken in another few hours. Tell them anything." He waited until Bailey was gone. Then, with a trembling hand he lifted the visiphone receiver. "Get me Walter Towne," he said. * * * * * "I'm not an unreasonable man," Torkleson was saying miserably, waving his fat paws in the air as he paced back and forth in front of the spokesmen for the striking managers. "Perhaps we were a little demanding, I concede it! Overenthusiastic with our ownership, and all that. But I'm sure we can come to some agreement. A hike in wage scale is certainly within reason. Perhaps we can even arrange for better company houses." Walter Towne stifled a yawn. "Perhaps you didn't understand us. The men are agitating for a meeting of the board of directors. We want to be at that meeting. That's the only thing we're interested in right now." "But there wasn't anything about a board meeting in the contract your lawyer presented." "I know, but you rejected that contract. So we tore it up. Anyway, we've changed our minds." Torkleson sat down, his heavy cheeks quivering. "Gentlemen, be reasonable! I can guarantee you your jobs, even give you a free hand with the management. So the dividends won't be so large--the men will have to get used to that. That's it, we'll put it through at the next executive conference, give you--" "The board meeting," Walter said gently. "That'll be enough for us." The union boss swore and slammed his fist on the desk. "Walk out in front of those men after what you've done? You're fools! Well, I've given you your chance. You'll get your board meeting. But you'd better come armed. Because I know how to handle this kind of board meeting, and if I have anything to say about it, this one will end with a massacre." * * * * * The meeting was held in a huge auditorium in the Robling administration building. Since every member of the union owned stock in the company, every member had the right to vote for members of the board of directors. But in the early days of the switchover, the idea of a board of directors smacked too strongly of the old system of corporate organization to suit the men. The solution had been simple, if a trifle ungainly. Everyone who owned stock in Robling Titanium was automatically a member of the board of directors, with Torkleson as chairman of the board. The stockholders numbered over ten thousand. They were all present. They were packed in from the wall to the stage, and hanging from the rafters. They overflowed into the corridors. They jammed the lobby. Ten thousand men rose with a howl of anger when Walter Towne walked out on the stage. But they quieted down again as Dan Torkleson started to speak. It was a masterful display of rabble-rousing. Torkleson paced the stage, his fat body shaking with agitation, pointing a chubby finger again and again at Walter Towne. He pranced and he ranted. He paused at just the right times for thunderous peals of applause. "This morning in my office we offered to compromise with these jackals," he cried, "and they rejected compromise. Even at the cost of lowering dividends, of taking food from the mouths of your wives and children, we made our generous offers. They were rejected with scorn. These thieves have one desire in mind, my friends, to starve you all, and to destroy your company and your jobs. To every appeal they heartlessly refused to divulge the key to the lock-in. And now this man--the ringleader who keeps the key word buried in secrecy--has the temerity to ask an audience with you. You're angry men; you want to know the man to blame for our hardship." He pointed to Towne with a flourish. "I give you your man. Do what you want with him." The hall exploded in angry thunder. The first wave of men rushed onto the stage as Walter stood up. A tomato whizzed past his ear and splattered against the wall. More men clambered up on the stage, shouting and shaking their fists. Then somebody appeared with a rope. Walter gave a sharp nod to the side of the stage. Abruptly the roar of the men was drowned in another sound--a soul-rending, teeth-grating, bone-rattling screech. The men froze, jaws sagging, eyes wide, hardly believing their ears. In the instant of silence as the factory whistle died away, Walter grabbed the microphone. "You want the code word to start the machines again? I'll give it to you before I sit down!" The men stared at him, shuffling, a murmur rising. Torkleson burst to his feet. "It's a trick!" he howled. "Wait 'til you hear their price." "We have no price, and no demands," said Walter Towne. "We will _give_ you the code word, and we ask nothing in return but that you listen for sixty seconds." He glanced back at Torkleson, and then out to the crowd. "You men here are an electing body--right? You own this great plant and company, top to bottom--right? _You should all be rich_, because Robling could make you rich. But not one of you out there is rich. Only the fat ones on this stage are. But I'll tell you how _you_ can be rich." They listened. Not a peep came from the huge hall. Suddenly, Walter Towne was talking their language. "You think that since you own the company, times have changed. Well, have they? Are you any better off than you were? Of course not. Because you haven't learned yet that oppression by either side leads to misery for both. You haven't learned moderation. And you never will, until you throw out the ones who have fought moderation right down to the last ditch. You know whom I mean. You know who's grown richer and richer since the switchover. Throw him out, and you too can be rich." He paused for a deep breath. "You want the code word to unlock the machines? All right, I'll give it to you." He swung around to point a long finger at the fat man sitting there. "The code word is TORKLESON!" * * * * * Much later, Walter Towne and Jeff Bates pried the trophies off the wall of the big office. The lawyer shook his head sadly. "Pity about Dan Torkleson. Gruesome affair." Walter nodded as he struggled down with a moose head. "Yes, a pity, but you know the boys when they get upset." "I suppose so." The lawyer stopped to rest, panting. "Anyway, with the newly elected board of directors, things will be different for everybody. You took a long gamble." "Not so long. Not when you knew what they wanted to hear. It just took a little timing." "Still, I didn't think they'd elect you secretary of the union. It just doesn't figure." Walter Towne chuckled. "Doesn't it? I don't know. Everything's been a little screwy since the switchover. And in a screwy world like this--" He shrugged, and tossed down the moose head. "_Anything_ figures." 
40970	----	EXPLOITER'S END _by James Causey_ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Orbit volume 1 number 2, 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] [Sidenote: _PEOPLE OR TERMITES, IT'S ALL THE SAME._ _THERE'S A LIMIT TO HOW FAR YOU CAN DRIVE THEM!_] [Illustration] We time-studied the Term. It moved with a pliant, liquid grace, its four arms flickering over the instrument panel, installing studs, tightening screws, its antennae glowing with the lambent yellow that denoted an agony of effort. "See?" Harvey's freckled face was smug. "He rates an easy hundred and ten. Whoever took that first study--" "I took it," I said, squinting at the stop watch. You could hear him bite his lip. After only two weeks on the job, on a strange planet ninety light-years from home, you don't tell your boss he's cockeyed. The Term hurried. Its faceted termite eyes were expressionless diamonds, but the antennae gleamed a desperate saffron. _If bugs could sweat_, I thought wryly. Now the quartz panel installation. Those four arms moved in a blinding frenzy. But the stop watch was faster. The second hand caught up with the Term. It passed him. Rating: Seventy-four per cent. I tucked the clipboard under my arm, squeezed through the airlock, and down the ramp. Harvey followed sullenly. The conveyor groaned on, bringing up the next unit, a sleek little cruiser. The Term seized a fifty-pound air wrench, fled up the ramp to the airlock. "A dozen feet back to the operation," I pointed out. "After the next job he'll have to return forty feet. Then sixty. He's in the hole." Harvey looked at his shoes. John Barry, the trim superintendent, came puffing down the line, his jowled face anxious about direct labor cost, the way every good super should be. "Anything wrong, Jake?" "He can't cut it," I said. Barry frowned up through the airlock at the Term. Those antennae now shone the soft sad purple of despair. We walked past the body jigs. The air was a haze of blue smoke, punctuated with yellow splashes of flame from the electronic welding guns. Terms scuttled like gigantic spiders over the great silver hulls, their antennae glowing in a pattern of swift bright harmony, right on standard, good cost. Harvey's face was rapt as he watched them. I said harshly: "Give me your third Production Axiom." Harvey's shoulders squared. He said stiffly: "Beauty is functional. The quintessence of grace is the clean, soaring beauty of a spaceship's hull--" "Extrapolate, Harvey." His lips were tight. "What I see is ugly. Terms must be taught individuality. What I see is a fascinating, deadly beauty--deadly because it's useless. We must sublimate it, grind it down, hammer it out into a useful pattern. Waste motion is a sin...." "Excellent." We turned into the administration lift, leaving the iron roar behind us, and on the way up Harvey didn't say a word. I listened for the tinkle of shattering ideals, and said patiently, "You're here to build spaceships. To build them better and cheaper than Consolidated or Solar. Hell, we've even set up a village for the Terms! Electricity, plumbing, luxuries they wouldn't normally enjoy for the next million years--" "Will they fire him?" Harvey's voice was flat. My temper was shredding. "Four-day layoff. His third this month. Terms kick in most of their salary for village maintenance. They can't afford a part-time producer." I could see that Term read out of the gang, leaving the company village, stoically, while his fellows played a wailing dirge of color on their antennae. The farewell song. I could see him trudging over the windswept peak of Cobalt Mountain, staring down at his native village, and shaking with the impact of the _Stammverstand_, the tribe-mind, the ache and the longing. A wheel, shaken out of orbit. The lonely cog, searching for its lost slot. I could see that Term returning to his tribe. And how they'd tear him to pieces because he was a thing apart, now, an alien. We walked down the gray corridor, past Psych, past the conference hall, to the silver door marked _Methods and Standards_. Harvey's blue eyes were remote, stubborn. I clapped him paternally on the shoulder. "Anyone can call one wrong, lad. Forget it." Harvey slumped down at a computor, and I walked into my private office and shut the door. Harvey's personnel dossier was in my desk. I.Q. 178, fair. Stability quotient two point eight, very bad. Adaptability rating point seven, borderline. Those idiots in Psych! Couldn't they indoctrinate a new man properly? I waited. In a moment Harvey came in without knocking and said, "Mr. Eagan, I want to quit." I took my time lighting a cigar, not raising my head. His defiant, pleading look. I blew smoke rings at the visicom and finally said, "Since you were sixteen, you've dreamed of this. Elimination tests, the weeding out, ten thousand other smart, hungry kids fighting you for this job." I tasted the words. "When your contract's up you can write your own ticket anywhere in the system." He blurted: "I came here full of ideas about the wonderful work Amalgamated was doing to advance backward civilizations. Sure, the Terms have a union. They're paid at standard galactic rates for spacecraft assembly. But you make them live in that village. It costs to run that village. You give it to them with one hand and take it back with the other. All the time you're holding out the promise of racial advancement, individuality, some day the Terms will reach the stars. Nuts!" "That's Guild propaganda," I said softly. "The Guild is just a bogey you created to keep the Intersolar Spacecrafters Union in line. There's a Venusport liner due in next week. When it leaves I'll be on it!" I played Dutch Uncle. I told him he wasn't used to Terminorb's one-and-a-half gravs, that this was just a hangover from the three to five oxygen ratio he wasn't used to. But he said no. Finally I shrugged, scribbled something on an AVO and handed it to him. "All right, Harvey," I said mildly. "Take this down to Carmody, in Psych. He'll give you a clearance." Harvey's face went white. "Since when do you go to Psych for a clearance?" I pressed a stud under the desk and two Analysts came in. I told them what to do and Harvey screamed; he fought and bit and clawed, he mouthed unutterable things about what we were doing to the Terms until I chopped him mercifully behind the ear. "Poor devil," panted one of the Analysts. "Obviously insufficient indoctrination, sir. Would you mind if I spent an hour in Psych for reorientation? He--he upset me." My eyes stung with pride. Sam had loyalty plus. "Sure thing, Sam. You'd better go too, Barney. He said some pretty ugly things." [Illustration] They dragged Harvey out and I went over to the visicom, punched a button. I was trembling with an icy rage as Carmody's lean hawk face swam into view. "Hello, Jake," he said languidly. "How's Cost?" I told him curtly about Harvey. "Another weak sister," I rasped. "Can't you screen them any more? Didn't you note his stability index? I'm going to report this to Starza, Don." "Relax," Carmody smiled. "Those things happen, Jake. We'll do a few gentle things with scalpel and narcosynthesis, and he'll be back in a week, real eager, the perfect cost analyst." I'd never liked Carmody. He was so smug; he didn't realize the _sacredness_ of his position. I said coldly, "Put Miss Davis on." Carmody's grin was knowing. The screen flickered, and Fern's face came into focus. Her moist red lips parted, and I shivered, looking at her, even on a visicom screen. The shining glory of her hair, those cool green eyes. Three months hadn't made a difference. "How was little old Earth?" I said awkwardly. "Wonderful!" She was radiant. "I'll see you for lunch." "Today's grievance day. Dinner?" "I promised Don," she said demurely. I swallowed hard. "How about the Term festival tomorrow night?" "Well, Don sort of asked--" I tried to laugh it off and Fern said she'd see me later and the screen went blank and I sat there shaking. The screen flickered again. Starza's great moon face smiled at me and said sweetly, "We're ready to start grieving." I picked up the time studies that were death sentences for two Terms, and went down the hall to ulcer gulch, the conference room. Lure a termite away from his tribe. Promise him the stars. Make him bust his thorax on an assembly line. He makes a wonderful worker, with reflexes twice as fast as a human's, but he still isn't an individual. Even when putting a spaceship together, he's still part of the tribe, part of a glowing symphony of color and motion. That's bad for production. Accent on individuality, that was the keynote. The Terms and their union representatives could argue a grievance right to the letter of the contract, but when it came to production standards we had them. Terminorb IV was ninety light-years from the system, and the Terms couldn't afford a home office time and motion analyst. It wasn't worth it. Terms were expendable. Los Tichnat was committeeman at large for the Term local. He sat regally at the head of the conference table, seven gleaming chitinous feet of him, with his softly pulsating antennae and faceted eyes, and said in a clicking, humorless voice, "The first item is a second-stage grievance. Brother Nadkek, in final assembly, was laid off for one day. Reason: He missed an operation. The grievance, of course, is a mere formality. You will deny it." Dave Starza winked at me from behind horn-rimmed glasses. He sat like some great bland Buddha, Director of Industrial Relations, genius in outer psychology, ruthless, soft-spoken, anticipator of alien trends. He said in that beautiful velvet voice, "Ordinarily, yes. In this case Nadkek wished to ask his foreman about omitting a welding phase of the operation. While the suggestion was declined, Nadkek showed unmistakable initiative." Starza stressed the word. "We appreciate his interest in the job. He will receive pay for the lost day." Around the table, antennae flashed amazed colors. A precedent had been set. Interest in the job transcended even the Contract. "Management _sustains_ the grievance?" Tichnat droned incredulously. "Of course," Starza said. Nadkek left the conference room, his antennae a puzzled mauve. "Next," Starza said pontifically. The next grievance was simply that a foreman had spoken harshly to a Term. The Term resented it. In his tribe he had been a fighter, prime guardian of the Queen-Mother. Fighters could not be reprimanded as could spinners or workers. Starza and Tichnat split hairs while I dozed and thought about Fern. Starza finally promised to reprimand the foreman. It was lovely, the way he thumped on the table, aflame with righteousness, his voice golden thunder, the martyr, hurt by Tichnat's unfairness, yet so eager to compromise, to be fair. The next grievance was work standards. Starza looked at me. This one mattered. This was cost. I pulled out my study proofs, said, "Radnor, in final assembly. Consistently in the hole. Rating, seventy-four percent--" "_The operation was too tight, Jake. Admit it!_" The thought uncoiled darkly, thundering and reverberating in the horrified caverns of my brain. A thoughtcaster. So the Guild had thoughtcasters now. The Guild had finally come. I sat in the dank silence, shaking. A drop of ice crawled slowly down my temple. I stared around the conference table at Starza's frown, at those Term faces, the great faceted eyes. "We gave this worker every chance," I said, licking my lips. "We put him on another operation. He still couldn't cut it. Even though we've got production to meet, we still give as many chances--" The thought slashed. It grew into a soundless roar. "_Stop it, Jake! Tell them how Amalgamated, under the cloak of liberation, is strangling the Terms with an alien culture. Tell them what a mockery their contract really is! Tell them about that Term you condemned this morning!_" I fought it. Feeling the blood run from my lip, I fought it. I'd seen strong men driven insane by a thoughtcaster within seconds. My stability index was six point three. Damned high. I fought it. I got to my feet. The room reeled. Those damned Term faces. The shining antennae. I stumbled towards the door. The thought became a whiplash of molten fury. "_Uphold that grievance, Jake! Tell them the truth. Admit the standard was impossible to meet--_" I slammed the door. The voice stopped. My skull was a shattered fly-wheel, a sunburst of agony. I was retching. I stumbled down the corridor to Psych. Fern was there. I was screaming at her. The Guild was here. They had thoughtcasters. My brain was melting. Fern was white-faced. She had a hypo. I didn't feel it. The last thing I saw was the glimmer of tears in her green eyes. * * * * * "... the neuron flow." Starza's voice. "No two alike. Like fingerprints. What a pity they can't refine the transmittal waves." I tried to open my eyes. "The Guild atomized Solar's plant on Proycon," Carmody's voice said quietly. "It's just a question of time, Dave." "No," Starza said thoughtfully. "Proycon was a sweatshop. I think maybe they're hinting that our production standards are a trifle rough. Look, his eyelids fluttered. Bet you he takes refuge in amnesia." "You lose." My voice was an iron groan. We were in Starza's office. Carmody peered at me with a clinical eye. "I took the liberty of narcosynthesis while you were out, Jake. You told us all about it. How do you feel?" I told them how I felt, in spades. "I want my vacation now," I said. "I've accrued seven months. I'm going to Venus," I said. "Now, now," Starza said. "Mustn't desert the sinking ship, Jake." I shut my eyes. His voice was soothing oil. "Jake, the Guild as a whole doesn't know of this plant. Guild agents are free-lancers, in the full sense of the word. They exercise their own initiative, and only report to Guild HQ when the job is done." "Then," Carmody said, "if we can find out who--" "Precisely." Starza's eyes were veiled. "Incidentally, Don, you've been gone the last four days. Why?" Carmody regarded him steadily. "Recruiting. You knew that." "Yet you brought back only a dozen Terms." Carmody drew a slow deep breath. "Word's gotten around, Dave. The tribes have finally forgotten their petty wars and united against a common enemy. Us! Any Term that exhibits undesirable traits of individuality is now destroyed. I think a dozen was a good haul." "You had the whole planet." Carmody's grin was diamond hard. "You think maybe I spent a few hours under a Guild mind-control? Is that it?" Starza said, "On your way out, send Los Tichnat in." Carmody flushed. "Tichnat's the one and you know it! But if he's not--if you haven't run down the spy by tomorrow--you can accept my resignation. I saw what they left of Proycon." The door slammed behind him. Starza smiled at me. "What do you think, Jake?" "Tichnat. The second I got out of there, the thoughtcaster stopped." "Doesn't mean a thing. They can beam through solid rock. Hundred-foot radius." "No exploitation," I mused. "Fanatics," Starza said. "They'd impede the progress of man. Sacrifice man's rightful place in the cosmos for the sake of--crawling things! We'll fight them, Jake!" Tichnat entered. He stood stiffly before Starza's desk, his antennae a cheerful emerald. Starza said carefully, "What do you know about the Guild?" "Impractical visionaries," Tichnat clicked. "Lovers of statis, well-meaning fools. They approached me yesterday." A vein throbbed purple in Starza's forehead. Yet he kept his voice soft. "And you didn't report it?" "And precipitate a crisis?" Tichnat sounded amused. "I was asked if my people were being persecuted. Had I answered in the affirmative there might have been repercussions, perhaps a sequel to Proycon. Oh yes, we know of Proycon. Your foremen are sometimes indiscreet." "Who was the agent?" Starza breathed. "Should I tell you, and disrupt the status quo? You would destroy the agent. In retaliation, the Guild might destroy this plant." "Impossible! Guild agents have no such authority--" "A chance I cannot afford to take." Tichnat was adamant. "Amalgamated," Starza prodded, "offers a standing reward of one hundred thousand solar credits for apprehension of any Guild agent. Your village could use those credits. You could equip an atomic lab. You could maintain your own research staff--" "Stop it." The antennae throbbed brilliantly. "We are your friends, Tichnat." "Symbiosis, I believe is the word," Tichnat clicked dryly. "You need us. We need your science. We need your terrifying concept of individuality. We need to lose our old ways. The dance of harvest time. The Queen-Mother. One by one the rituals drop away. The old life, the good tribal life, is dying. You sift out us misfits who chafe at tribal oneness, you offer us the planets!" The antennae flashed an angry scarlet. "You think to keep us chained a millennium. A hundred years will suffice. We will leave you. We exiles you have made, we who would be destroyed if we dared return to the tribe, we shall rule this world! You aliens drive a hard bargain, but the dream is worth it!" Prometheus, in a bug's body. The shining strength, and the dark terrible pride. "It is no dream," Starza said gently. "But perhaps you go about achieving it the wrong way. You still refuse to divulge the spy?" "I am sorry. Good day." Starza brooded after him. "He's a fool. But he's grasping mankind's concepts, Jake. I'd give my right eye for a good semanticist! Basic English does it. _Self_, _want_, _mine_, selfish ego-words, the cornerstones of grasping humanity. Sure, we'll raise hell with their esthetic sense, but in the end they'll thank us." I sat, worrying about a secret fanatic somewhere in the plant who, in the holy interests of Mars-for-the-Martians, Terminorb-for-the-Terms, might soon plant an atomic warhead in our body shop. I finally said, "What are we going to _do_?" "Do?" Starza chuckled. "Why, slacken line speeds, lower production standards, fifty percent at least. By tomorrow we'll be down to forty jobs an hour. They want loose standards, we'll give it to them." "But my _cost_?" "Obscenity your cost. Look, Jake, no matter how you set an operation up, the Terms manage to work in some glittering little ritual. They _have_ to create beauty. Their esthetic sense must be fed. They can't adjust to quick change. Supposing you cut line speeds by ten per cent. They adjust, but it almost kills them. Then drop thirty per cent. Their ritual loses timing, becomes discordant. What happens?" I blinked. "They go mad." "And our little Guild saboteur will be guilty of a few Term deaths. He'll have violated a basic Guild tenet. He'll go home with his tail between his legs. Catch?" I caught. By midafternoon we had the conveyor speeds down thirty per cent. The red line on my cost chart soared precariously. The entire production line slowed to a crawl. We waited. At five o'clock it happened. Three Terms in the body shop went mad. It started a chain reaction throughout the trim line. Six more Terms ran amuck and had to be destroyed. Final assembly became a shambles. Starza called me on the visicom, delighted. "Our Guild agent played right into our hands, Jake. In forcing a production slump he's harming the workers. His next move will probably be a bluff." I wasn't so sure. That evening the executive dining room was choked with a tight, gnawing tension. Department heads spoke in hushed whispers, eyes darting. The man across the table could be a mindless-controlled, a Guild pawn. Smile at him politely and keep your mouth shut. I ordered _thar_, a Terminorb arthapod that was usually more delicious than Venusian lobster, but tonight it tasted like broiled leather. It was like eating in a morgue. I saw Carmody, at the next table. I nodded coolly to him and he hitched his chair over and said, "By the way, Jake, I'm sorry about Harvey. He's going back to Earth next week." "Why?" "His stability index was too low," Carmody said smoothly. "Sure, we could have given him the works, but you didn't want a robot." I said deliberately, "I needed that boy, Don." Carmody got up, his smile infinitely contemptuous. "We don't all have your stability index, Jake." I stared after him, and the thought suddenly struck me that not once had _I_ considered quitting, ever. Somehow, the thought disturbed me. Abruptly the public address speaker boomed. "Attention," Starza's voice crackled. "To the Guild agent, wherever he may be. Today you murdered thirty-seven Terms. Is this your altruism? Is this your vaunted justice?" He went on, his voice like organ music, sweeping away all doubt, making you proud and glad to be a part of Amalgamated, part of Production, when quite suddenly his voice choked off. Simultaneously another voice ripped through the hall. A cold ironic whisper, lashing at the mind. "_Altruism, yes. But not as you conceive it. Today you passed your own judgment. You have twenty-four hours to evacuate before this Plant is destroyed. The verdict is final._" The dining hall echoed with moans. Hands leaned to agonized temples. The thoughtcaster again, on a wide band frequency. Through the pain I was conscious of Starza's voice. The Guild was trying to bluff us. We wouldn't let them. I stumbled out of the hall, my teeth chattering, took the lift down to the first level, and got outside, to walk free in the park. Here was Eden. Giant conifers and ferns wove a cool green pattern of delight, and the laughter of the crystal fountains soothed. Terms had fashioned this garden, had created a poem in living green, a quiet fugue of _oneness_, each leaf blending exquisitely with the next, the unity, the perfect whole. For one weak moment I let the pattern seep insidiously into me, and then, ashamed, focused my eyes on that jarring splash of white in the center of the garden. The ten-foot model of the Amalgamated X-3M, squat with power, lifting on her stern jets. A symbol of Amalgamated's strength, the indomitable spirit of mankind, beauty born of pure utility. Oddly, a half-remembered poem of the Ancients flitted through my brain: _Dirty British Coaster with her salt-caked smokestack, Butting through the Channel on the mad March days--_ That was man. On an infinity of planets he had met resistance, through force, through guile--even through beauty. And he had conquered. I drew a slow deep breath and sat on one of the benches, staring up at the gigantic horseshoe of the factory, hearing the muted hum of the atomics. Twenty-four hours. I tried to run through my axioms, and I was suddenly terrified. I couldn't remember them! That damned thoughtcaster. Twice in one day. Perhaps there was some gradual neural disintegration. My head hurt terribly. Tomorrow I'd go to Psych for a checkup. I thought about that marble villa in Venusport, and about my bank account. Not enough. Another year, just one more year, and I could retire, at thirty-four. I thought about the Venusian twilights, and the turquoise mists off the Deeps, and wondered dully if I'd ever see Venus or the Earth again. I saw Fern, walking among the conifers, her face a pale mask of strain. "You heard it, Jake?" I nodded. We sat in the aquamarine twilight, and Fern was shivering, and I put my arm around her. "Looks like altruism is a relative thing," I said. "What _do_ they want?" "Uncontaminated Terms," she said bitterly. "No science, no stars, no wars and no progress. A big beautiful planet-mind, the Term mind, forever static, forever dead." "It's a bluff," I said. "Our little fanatic's stalling for time, hoping to stampede us while he finds another way." "For example?" "Why do you think we insist on basic English for all Terms? Supposing a foreman should start jabbering Terminese during an operation. The Terms would revert, we'd have a line shutdown. They can't adjust--say!" A random thought was nibbling at my brain. "Where was Carmody this morning? Just before I reeled in?" Her fine brows knitted. "Why, he went--oh, Jake, surely you don't think--?" "Went where?" "Down the hall. Towards Personnel." "Towards the conference hall, you mean. He never even examined Harvey!" "It wasn't necessary," she said uncomfortably. "Don just wanted to verify his stability index." "Sure! So he stood outside the conference hall and put a whammy on me--" Fern was smiling. I scowled. "It fits. It has to be him." "Or Tichnat," she said. "Or Starza. Or me." I stared at her. "You'd do." My voice shook. "You were gone three months. They could have got to you." Her rich, warm laughter sifted through the twilight, and I wanted to hit her. "They did," she gurgled, "but I've decided to relent, Jake. I'll spare the plant on one condition--that you take me to the Term festival tomorrow night." I grunted. "Carmody working overtime, I suppose?" "If the plant's still standing." I changed the subject. Two hours later Starza called a council of war. * * * * * The conference room was crammed with quivering executives. Starza carefully let the tension build to a shrill crescendo before he said: "One of you gentlemen is a Guild mindless-controlled." Ragged silence. Starza's smile was very faint. "You gave us an ultimatum. But destroying this plant is an admission of failure you're not willing to make--yet. You'll try another tack. You're just beginning to discover that this environment we've created for the Terms is superior to the primitive jungle. Tichnat!" Tichnat stepped forward. His antennae were a proud, brilliant gold. "Do you want a shutdown?" Starza asked softly. "Are we fools?" Tichnat clicked. "To lose what we've gained? To return to our tribe? To be destroyed?" Starza's calm gaze caressed each face, probing. "You see? Stalemate. Whoever you are, _you're bluffing_. Tomorrow our conveyor speeds return to normal. You'll do nothing. You may try to agitate the Terms, but they're satisfied--" One of the superintendents cleared his throat. "Look," he said unsteadily, "sometimes you can't afford to call a bluff." Starza said pleasantly, "Any resignations will be accepted right now. You can wait safely in the Term village until next week's freighter arrives. No repercussions, I promise." The lie was blatant. Carmody stood by the door, his smile strained. It was all too obvious what would happen to any resignees. "None?" Starza's brows rose. "I'm proud of you. That's it, gentlemen." The next day was a frenetic nightmare. My cost dropped, but it didn't matter. That was one day when the best company man became a clock-watcher. Line foremen, department heads, cracked under the strain, and were summarily removed to Psych. Carmody and staff worked overtime. [Illustration] I toiled feverishly over operation schedules, the crazily fluctuating cost charts. My headache was gone, but I still couldn't remember my axioms! I felt guilty over not going to Psych, but there just wasn't the time. Hell, _I'd_ never needed indoctrination. I was an Amalgamated man through and through. Finally I grabbed an engineering manual, leafed angrily through it--and sat there, empty and shaking. I'd gone insane. The words were gibberish. Oh, I could read them all right, but they didn't make _sense_. What a filthy trick. Semantic block, Starza would call it. I kept staring at the meaningless words, conscious of a tearing sense of loss. And I wanted to cry. Six o'clock was zero hour. Six o'clock came, and the factory held its collective breath while nothing happened. At six-thirty Starza made a long speech over the public address. About the selfless spirit of man, helping the Terms reach the stars, about how we would never admit defeat, and about how, after tonight, the Term festival would be discontinued. The Terms had adopted mankind's culture, they had no further need of their effete native customs. At seven, Fern and I were walking past Administration towards the lighted square-mile enclosure of the Term village. Fern had never seen a festival. "A throwback," I said, "to their old tribal days. Their harvest, when they pay tribute to the Queen-Mother and pray for good crops and work well done. It's their yearly substitute for _Stammverstand_. Back in the native villages, whenever a Term's in trouble, he goes to the council hut and the others join him in a silent, group telepathy. But we've just about weaned them, angel! They'll be individuals soon." We walked down the deserted row of Term huts, past the council hall, to the great stone amphitheatre, and sat with the other execs. Fern was very gay and cheerful, but I kept thinking about my axioms, trying to bring them back to life. I felt dead, all dead inside. Starza came up, frowning, and I congratulated him. "It's too pat, Jake, it worries me. Where's Carmody?" "Setting up those semantic reaction tests you gave him," Fern said. "But I never gave him--" Abruptly the lights snuffed out. At one end of the arena loomed a twelve-foot statue of a bloated Term, limned in a soft pale glow. The Queen-Mother. The hush. Then the radiance. Slowly the Terms filed into the arena, rank upon rank of living flame. First the fighters, their antennae shining crimson and splendid against the tall night. Then the twins glows of blue that denoted the spinners, the weavers. The golden blaze of the harvesters. The lambent colors crept through the air like a mood, like a dream, and deepened into a shimmering cataract of rainbow fire, a paean of light and glory that whirled and spun in a joyous rhythm as old as the race itself. Then--chaos. A blinding flare cascaded from the six-foot antennae of the statue. The radiance grew, brighter than an atomic flare, more terrible than the sun. The Terms stood frozen. Beside me, Starza swore. This wasn't in the script. That colossal voice. Ear-snapping clicks, and liquid vowels. Terminese. The forbidden tongue. The voice blared. I caught most of it. "_Children, you have sinned. You are defiled with the taint of alien monsters. You have failed the Queen-Mother. Return, my children, return to your tribes. Return to the tabernacle of unity, the one-in-all, the Queen-Mother! For in death there is life, and there is joy in immolation. Return!_" Lastly, the climax. That last shattering hunk of propaganda that would have been so tritely amusing if it hadn't been so terrifying. "_You have nothing to lose but your chains._" The giant antennae faded to a liquid silver. The silver of hope, of forgiveness. For a moment I was blind. I felt Fern trembling against me. The execs were chattering like frightened sheep. Then I could see. I saw Starza. He was moving down the aisle, cursing in a tight, dull monotone. I followed him down into the arena. The Terms stood shriveled, mute. Starza was fumbling at the base of the statue, and he said in a thick horrible voice, "Look." The loudspeaker. The coiled wiring. The Terms stirred. Starza leaped to the lap of the statue. He bawled, "Listen! This is sacrilege! You have been victims of a hoax--" Not listening, they filed in silent groups out of the arena. Their antennae were the color of ashes. Starza jumped down. He pounded after them. He was shouting at Los Tichnat. "I know," Tichnat droned. He kept walking. "You are right. It does not matter that you are right. The Queen-Mother called." "Listen," Starza mouthed. "It was a fraud, a trick. You can't--" "We must." Tichnat paused. For a long moment the great faceted eyes stared somberly. "It was a splendid dream, the thing you offered us. But this is the final reality. And yours is but a dream." He tramped stolidly on, after the others. The council hall door closed. Starza clawed at the door. It opened. He was too late. They sat silently around the great table, the faceted eyes dead, the antennae coruscating indigo, now green, now rose. Communion. The meshing of minds. Starza shouted at them. Stillness. Starza looked blindly at me. He was shaking. "Carmody," he said. "Carmody knows the Term mind. He can do something. Come on," he said. * * * * * We found Carmody in his quarters, methodically packing. His eyebrows rose as we burst in. "Did you gentlemen ever try knocking?" Starza just looked at him. Carmody drew a long breath. "You'll find my resignation on your desk, Dave." "Ah?" Starza's voice was very soft. "It's only a question of time," Carmody said. "Call it the rat deserting the ship if you like, but I'm through." Starza was smiling, a fat man's smile. "So you really think you can pull it off," he whispered. Carmody shrugged, and Starza calmly took out a sonic pistol and shot him in the belly. A sonic blast hemorrhages. It rends the capillaries, ploughs the flesh into a flaccid collection of shattered nerve fibers and ruined arteries. It's a rotten way to die. Starza watched Carmody thrash himself to death on the floor. I turned away. "For the record, Jake, he made a full confession. We both heard him." "Just for the record," I said. "It had to be him," Starza said. "That thoughtcaster blast yesterday morning made reference to your study on the Term. Only Harvey and Carmody knew about that. It couldn't have been Harvey. He cut his throat this morning. "I've decided," Starza said. "This is a Type L planet, after all. The natives are chronically unstable. Hostile, in fact. Pursuant to Solar Regulation 3, we have the right to enforce martial law. It should be six months before an investigation. Meanwhile--" "We'll get production," I said. "We'll get production." He wiped his forehead, relaxed. "I'll send in a full report tonight. Better turn in, Jake," he said kindly. "I'll need you in the morning." I turned in. You lie awake, staring into the blackness. It gnaws. My head throbbed. I should have felt a triumphant relief, but I could not remember my axioms, and I felt a sick dull hate for the thing the Guild spy Carmody had done to me. What happens when you strip a man of everything he believes in? He remembers other things. Those memories came trooping back like ghosts and I fought them, sweating, but they came. Once upon a time, there was a starry-eyed young engineer who started out to set the galaxy on fire. But he got squeamish, somewhere along the way. So Carmody operated on him. Carmody did things to his brain, made a good production man out of him. I remembered now. That time I had argued with Starza about standards, nine years ago. And I had resigned. And Starza sent me to Psych. Good old Carmody. There never would be a white marble villa on Venus. It was a harmless dream, a substitute for what I had lost. But it didn't matter! Those superimposed patterns had been removed, that thoughtcaster had crippled my thinking, but, by Heaven, I was still an Amalgamated man! They couldn't take that away. But Starza had been wrong about Carmody. Nothing definite. But when you dedicate your life into extrapolating curves, frozen chunks of time and motion, into the thunder of jets lifting Amalgamated ships from Terminorb, your mind becomes a very efficient analogue computor, if you know how to use. I used it now. I fed little things, facts, variables, into that computor, and it told me three times. Probability: sixty percent at least. I got up, dressed stiffly. I was trembling. I could still serve, after all. I took the lift up to Administration, and walked down that long gray corridor on leaden feet towards the illuminated rectangle of Starza's office. I opened the door. "Hello, darling," Fern said. * * * * * She was unhurriedly burning Starza's report. Starza sat mutely in his chair, head tilted back at an impossible angle, staring at nothing. "It had to be you." I had never felt so tired. "You would have destroyed the plant, wouldn't you? Only I showed you another way. Make the Terms revert. And you had that hypo all ready when I reeled into Psych." I moved towards her carefully. "You're so damned altruistic. A Guild mindless-controlled," I said. Fern's smile was compassionate. She methodically ground the ashes to powder, lifted that calm green gaze. "Stupid words to frighten children, Jake. Yes, they kidnapped me. I never reached Earth, three months ago. I was indoctrinated--oh, they didn't have far to go. _Each race to its own fulfillment._" Her eyes were shining. "Look out the window." Numbly, I moved past her. I stared. In the distant blackness, a column of living flame flickered up the slope of Cobalt Mountain. Ice-green, ruby, silver and blue. The Terms were leaving. "They're not ready for individuality yet," Fern breathed. "In a million years perhaps. Not now. They're going home." "To die." "The race will live. Individuality isn't the penultimate, darling. You'll find out." I moved towards her. "You've got a very tough mind, Jake. You'll make a wonderful Guild agent--" I got both hands on her throat. Fern moved. Her right arm was a snake striking, and a steel strength lifted me, turning, against one and a half gravities, and the floor wavered up to hit me in the face. Something broke. I tasted blood. Through the agony, I moved. I crawled towards her. "They gave me six weeks of hand combat under two gravs," she said. "Soon you'll be one of us, Jake. One of the Guild!" I stared up at her in a dull horror. I kept crawling. "We'll heal you," Fern said. "We'll give you back the dream. We may even work together! Maybe I'll fall in love with you again, who knows?" Her eyes were brimming. She took out a sonic pistol. "It's all right, darling. I'll adjust it for knockout. In three hours we'll be on a Guild flier. Please, darling," she said, and I kept crawling. And Fern's smile was a benediction as she pulled the trigger. 
16321	----	THE BREADWINNERS A Social Study New York and London Harper & Brothers Publishers 1901 I. A MORNING CALL A French clock on the mantel-piece, framed of brass and crystal, which betrayed its inner structure as the transparent sides of some insects betray their vital processes, struck ten with the mellow and lingering clangor of a distant cathedral bell. A gentleman, who was seated in front of the fire reading a newspaper, looked up at the clock to see what hour it was, to save himself the trouble of counting the slow, musical strokes. The eyes he raised were light gray, with a blue glint of steel in them, shaded by lashes as black as jet. The hair was also as black as hair can be, and was parted near the middle of his forehead. It was inclined to curl, but had not the length required by this inclination. The dark brown mustache was the only ornament the razor had spared on the wholesome face, the outline of which was clear and keen. The face suited the hands--it had the refinement and gentleness of one delicately bred, and the vigorous lines and color of one equally at home in field and court; and the hands had the firm, hard symmetry which showed they had done no work, and the bronze tinge which is the imprint wherewith sky and air mark their lovers. His clothes were of the fashion seen in the front windows of the Knickerbocker Club in the spring of the year 187-, and were worn as easily as a self-respecting bird wears his feathers. He seemed, in short, one of those fortunate natures, who, however born, are always bred well, and come by prescription to most of the good things the world can give. He sat in a room marked, like himself, with a kind of serious elegance--one of those apartments which seem to fit the person like a more perfect dress. All around the walls ran dwarf book-cases of carved oak, filled with volumes bound in every soft shade of brown and tawny leather, with only enough of red and green to save the shelves from monotony. Above these the wall space was covered with Cordovan leather, stamped with gold _fleurs-de-lis_ to within a yard of the top, where a frieze of palm-leaves led up to a ceiling of blue and brown and gold. The whole expression of the room was of warmth and good manners. The furniture was of oak and stamped leather. The low book-cases were covered with bronzes, casts, and figurines, of a quality so uniformly good that none seemed to feel the temptation either to snub or to cringe to its neighbor. The Owari pots felt no false shame beside the royal Satsuma; and Barbedienne's bronzes, the vases of Limoges and Lambeth and bowls from Nankin and Corea dwelt together in the harmony of a varied perfection. It was an octagon room, with windows on each side of the fire-place, in which a fire of Ohio coal was leaping and crackling with a cheerful and unctuous noisiness. Out of one window yon could see a pretty garden of five or six acres behind the house, and out of the other a carefully kept lawn, extending some hundred yards from the front door to the gates of hammered iron which opened upon a wide-paved avenue. This street was the glory of Buff-land, a young and thriving city on Lake Erie, which already counted a population of over two hundred thousand souls. The people of Clairfield, a rival town, denied that there was anything like so many inhabitants, and added that "the less we say about 'souls' the better." But this was pure malice; Buffland was a big city. Its air was filled with the smoke and odors of vast and successful trade, and its sky was reddened by night with the glare of its furnaces, rising like the hot breath of some prostrate Titan, conquered and bowed down by the pitiless cunning of men. Its people were, as a rule, rich and honest, especially in this avenue of which I have spoken. If you have ever met a Bufflander, you have heard of Algonquin Avenue. He will stand in the Champs Elysees, when all the vice and fashion of Europe are pouring down from the Place of the Star in the refluent tide that flows from Boulogne Wood to Paris, and calmly tell you that "Algonquin Avenue in the sleighing season can discount this out of sight." Something is to be pardoned to the spirit of liberty; and the avenue is certainly a fine one. It is three miles long and has hardly a shabby house in it, while for a mile or two the houses upon one side, locally called "the Ridge," are unusually line, large, and costly. They are all surrounded with well-kept gardens and separated from the street by velvet lawns which need scarcely fear comparison with the emerald wonders which centuries of care have wrought from the turf of England. The house of which we have seen one room was one of the best upon this green and park-like thoroughfare. The gentleman who was sitting by the fire was Mr. Arthur Farnham. He was the owner and sole occupant of the large stone house--a widower of some years' standing, although he was yet young. His parents had died in his childhood. He had been an officer in the army, had served several years upon the frontier, had suffered great privations, had married a wife much older than himself, had seen her die on the Plains from sheer want, though he had more money than he could get transportation for; and finally, on the death of his grandfather he had resigned, with reluctance, a commission which had brought him nothing but suffering and toil, and had returned to Buffland, where he was born, to take charge of the great estate of which he was the only heir. And even yet, in the midst of a luxury and a comfort which anticipated every want and gratified every taste, he often looked longingly back upon the life he had left, until his nose inhaled again the scent of the sage-brush and his eyes smarted with alkali dust. He regretted the desolate prairies, the wide reaches of barrenness accursed of the Creator, the wild chaos of the mountain canons, the horror of the Bad Lands, the tingling cold of winter in the Black Hills. But the Republic holds so high the privilege of serving her that, for the officer who once resigns--with a good character--there is no return forever, though he seek it with half the lobby at his heels. So Captain Farnham sat, this fine May morning, reading a newspaper which gave the stations of his friends in the "Tenth" with something of the feeling which assails the exile when he cons the court journal where his name shall appear no more. But while he is looking at the clock a servant enters. "That same young person is here again." "What young person?" There was a slight flavor of reproach in the tone of the grave Englishman as he answered: "I told you last night, sir, she have been here three times already; she doesn't give me her name nor yet her business; she is settin' in the drawin'-room, and says she will wait till you are quite at leisure. I was about to tell her," he added with still deeper solemnity, "that you were hout, sir, but she hinterrupted of me and said, 'He isn't gone, there's his 'at,' which I told her you 'ad several 'ats, and would she wait in the drawin'-room and I'd see." Captain Farnham smiled. "Very well, Budsey, you've done your best--and perhaps she won't eat me after all. Is there a fire in the drawing-room?" "No, sir." "Let her come in here, then." A moment afterward the rustle of a feminine step made Farnham raise his head suddenly from his paper. It was a quick, elastic step, accompanied by that crisp rattle of drapery which the close clinging garments of ladies produced at that season. The door opened, and as the visitor entered Farnham rose in surprise. He had expected to see the usual semi-mendicant, with sad-colored raiment and doleful whine, calling for a subscription for a new "Centennial History," or the confessed genteel beggar whose rent would be due to-morrow. But there was nothing in any way usual in the young person who stood before him. She was a tall and robust girl of eighteen or nineteen, of a singularly fresh and vigorous beauty. The artists forbid us to look for physical perfection in real people, but it would have been hard for the coolest-headed studio-rat to find any fault in the slender but powerful form of this young woman. Her color was deficient in delicacy, and her dark hair was too luxuriant to be amenable to the imperfect discipline to which it had been accustomed; but the eye of Andrea, sharpened by criticising Raphael, could hardly have found a line to alter in her. The dress of that year was scarcely more reticent in its revelations than the first wet cloth with which a sculptor swathes his kneaded clay; and pretty women walked in it with almost the same calm consciousness of power which Phryne displayed before her judges. The girl who now entered Farnham's library had thrown her shawl over one arm, because the shawl was neither especially ornamental nor new, and she could not afford to let it conceal her dress of which she was innocently proud; for it represented not only her beautiful figure with few reserves, but also her skill and taste and labor. She had cut the pattern out of an illustrated newspaper, had fashioned and sewed it with her own hands; she knew that it fitted her almost as well as her own skin; and although the material was cheap and rather flimsy, the style was very nearly the same as that worn the same day on the Boulevard of the Italians. Her costume was completed by a pair of eyeglasses with steel rims, which looked odd on her rosy young face. "I didn't send in my name," she began with a hurried and nervous utterance, which she was evidently trying to make easy and dashing. "because you did not know me from Adam----I have been trying to see you for some time," she continued. "It has been my loss that you have not succeeded. Allow me to give you a chair." She flushed and seemed not at all comfortable. This grave young man could not be laughing at her; of course not; she was good-looking and had on a new dress; but she felt all her customary assurance leaving her, and was annoyed. She tried to call up an easy and gay demeanor, but the effort was not entirely successful. She said, "I called this morning--it may surprise you to receive a visit from a young lady----" "I am too much pleased to leave room for surprise." She looked sharply at him to see if she were being derided, but through her glasses she perceived no derision in his smile. He was saying to himself, "This is a very beautiful girl who wants to beg or to borrow. I wonder whether it is for herself or for some 'Committee'? The longer she talks the more I shall have to give. But I do not believe she is near-sighted." She plucked up her courage and said: "My name is Miss Maud Matchin." Farnham bowed, and rejoined: "My name is----" She laughed outright, and said: "I know well enough what your name is, or why should I have come here? Everybody knows the elegant Mr. Farnham." The smile faded from his face. "She is more ill-bred than I suspected," he thought; "we will condense this interview." He made no reply to her compliment, but looked steadily at her, waiting to hear what she wanted, and thinking it was a pity she was so vulgar, for she looked like the huntress Diana. Her eyes fell under his glance, which was not at all reassuring. She said in almost a humble tone: "I have come to ask a great favor of you. I am in a good deal of trouble." "Let us see what it is, and what we can do," said Farnham, and there was no longer any banter in his voice. She looked up with sudden pleasure, and her glasses fell from her eyes. She did not replace them, but, clasping her hands tightly together, exclaimed: "Oh, sir, if you can do anything for me----But I don't want to make you think----" She paused in evident confusion, and Farnham kindly interposed. "What I may think is not of any consequence just now. What is it you want, and how can I be of service to you?" "Oh, it is a long story, and I thought it was so easy to tell, and I find it isn't easy a bit. I want to do something--to help my parents--I mean they do not need any help--but they can't help me. I have tried lots of things." She was now stammering and blushing in a way that made her hate herself mortally, and the innocent man in front of her tenfold more, but she pushed on manfully and concluded, "I thought may be you could help me get something I would like." "What would you like?" "Most anything. I am a graduate of the high school. I write a good hand, but I don't like figures well enough to clerk. I hear there are plenty of good places in Washington." "I could do nothing for you if there were. But you are wrong: there are no good places in Washington, from the White House down." "Well, you are president of the Library Board, ain't you?" asked the high-school graduate. "I think I would like to be one of the librarians." "Why would you like that?" "Oh, the work is light, I suppose, and you see people, and get plenty of time for reading, and the pay is better than I could get at anything else. The fact is," she began to gain confidence as she talked, "I don't want to go on in the old humdrum way forever, doing housework and sewing, and never getting a chance at anything better. I have enough to eat and to wear at home, but the soul has some claims too, and I long for the contact of higher natures than those by whom I am now surrounded. I want opportunities for self-culture, for intercourse with kindred spirits, for the attainment of a higher destiny." She delivered these swelling words with great fluency, mentally congratulating herself that she had at last got fairly started, and wishing she could have struck into that vein at the beginning. Farnham was listening to her with more of pain than amusement, saying to himself: "The high school has evidently spoiled her for her family and friends, and fitted her for nothing else." "I do not know that there is a vacancy in the library." "Oh, yes, there is," she rejoined, briskly; "I have been to see the librarian himself, and I flatter myself I made a favorable impression. In fact, the old gentleman seemed really smitten." "That is quite possible," said Farnham. "But I hope you will not amuse yourself by breaking his heart." "I can't promise. He must look out for his own heart." She had regained her saucy ease, and evidently enjoyed the turn the conversation was taking. "I find my hands full taking care of myself." "You are quite sure you can do that?" "Certainly, sir!" This was said with pouting lips, half-shut eyes, the head thrown back, the chin thrust forward, the whole face bright with smiles of provoking defiance. "Do you doubt it, Monsieur?" She pronounced this word Moshoor. Farnham thought in his heart "You are about as fit to take care of yourself as a plump pigeon at a shooting match." But he said to her, "Perhaps you are right--only don't brag. It isn't lucky. I do not know what are the chances about this place. You would do well to get some of your friends to write a letter or two in your behalf, and I will see what can be done at the next meeting of the Board." But her returning fluency had warmed up Miss Maud's courage somewhat, and instead of taking her leave she began again, blushingly, but still boldly enough: "There is something I would like much better than the library." Farnham looked at her inquiringly. She did not hesitate in the least, but pushed on energetically, "I have thought you must need a secretary. I should be glad to serve you in that capacity." The young man stared with amazement at this preposterous proposal. For the first time, he asked himself if the girl's honest face could be the ambush of a guileful heart; but he dismissed the doubt in an instant, and said, simply: "No, thank you. I am my own secretary, and have no reason for displacing the present incumbent. The library will suit you better in every respect." In her embarrassment she began to feel for her glasses, which were lying in her lap. Farnham picked up a small photograph from the table near him, and said: "Do you recognize this?" "Yes," she said. "It is General Grant." "It is a photograph of him, taken in Paris, which I received to-day. May I ask a favor of you?" "What is it?" she said, shyly. "Stop wearing those glasses. They are of no use to you, and they will injure your eyes." Her face turned crimson. Without a word of reply she seized the glasses and put them on, her eyes flashing fire. She then rose and threw her shawl over her arm, and said, in a tone to which her repressed anger lent a real dignity: "When can I learn about that place in the library?" "Any time after Wednesday," Farnham answered. She bowed and walked out of the room. She could not indulge in tragic strides, for her dress held her like a scabbard, giving her scarcely more freedom of movement than the high-born maidens of Carthage enjoyed, who wore gold fetters on their ankles until they were married. But in spite of all impediments her tall figure moved, with that grace which is the birthright of beauty in any circumstances, out of the door, through the wide hall to the outer entrance, so rapidly that Farnham could hardly keep pace with her. As he opened the door she barely acknowledged his parting salutation, and swept like a huffy goddess down the steps. Farnham gazed after her a moment, admiring the undulating line from the small hat to the long and narrow train which dragged on the smooth stones of the walk. He then returned to the library. Budsey was mending the fire. "If you please, sir," he said, "Mrs. Belding's man came over to ask, would you dine there this evening, quite informal." "Why didn't he come in?" "I told him you were engaged." "Ah, very well. Say to Mrs. Belding that I will come, with pleasure." II. A HIGH-SCHOOL GRADUATE. Miss Matchin picked up her train as she reached the gate, picked up her train as she reached the gate, and walked down the street in a state of mind by no means tranquil. If she had put her thoughts in words they would have run like this: "That was the meanest trick a gentleman ever played. How did he dare know I wasn't nearsighted? And what a fool I was to be caught by that photograph--saw it as plain as day three yards off. I had most made up my mind to leave them off anyway, though they are awful stylish; they pinch my nose and make my head ache. But I'll wear them now," and here the white teeth came viciously together, "if they kill me. Why should he put me down that way? He made me shy for the first time in my life. It's a man's business to be shy before me. If I could only get hold of him somehow! I'd pay him well for making me feel so small. The fact is, I started wrong. I did not really know what I wanted; and that graven image of an English butler set me back so; and then I never saw such a house as that. It is sinful for one man to live there all alone. Powers alive! How well that house would suit my complexion! But I don't believe I'd take it with _him_ thrown in." It is doubtful whether young girls of Miss Matchin's kind are ever quite candid in their soliloquies. It is certain she was not when she assured herself that she did not know why she went to Farnham's house that morning. She went primarily to make his acquaintance, with the hope also that by this means she might be put in some easy and genteel way of earning money. She was one of a very numerous class in large American towns. Her father was a carpenter, of a rare sort. He was a good workman, sober, industrious, and unambitious. He was contented with his daily work and wage, and would have thanked Heaven if he could have been assured that his children would fare as well as he. He was of English blood, and had never seemed to imbibe into his veins the restless haste and hunger to rise which is the source of much that is good and most that is evil in American life. In the dreams of his early married days he created a future for his children, in the image of his own decent existence. The boys should succeed him in his shop, and the daughters should go out to service in respectable families. This thought sweetened his toil. When he got on well enough to build a shop for himself, he burdened himself with debt, building it firmly and well, so as to last out his boys' time as well as his own. When he was employed on the joiner-work of some of those large houses in Algonquin Avenue, he lost himself in reveries in which he saw his daughters employed as house-maids in them. He studied the faces and the words of the proprietors, when they visited the new buildings, to guess if they would make kind and considerate employers. He put many an extra stroke of fine work upon the servants' rooms he finished, thinking: "Who knows but my Mattie may live here sometime?" But Saul Matchin found, like many others of us, that fate was not so easily managed. His boys never occupied the old shop on Dean Street, which was built with so many sacrifices and so much of hopeful love. One of them ran away from home on the first intimation that he was expected to learn his father's trade, shipped as a cabin-boy on one of the lake steamers, and was drowned in a storm which destroyed the vessel. The other, less defiant or less energetic, entered the shop and attained some proficiency in the work. But as he grew toward manhood, he became, as the old man called it, "trifling"; a word which bore with it in the local dialect no suggestion of levity or vivacity, for Luke Matchin was as dark and lowering a lout as you would readily find. But it meant that he became more and more unpunctual, did his work worse month by month, came home later at night, and was continually seen, when not in the shop, with a gang of low ruffians, whose head-quarters were in a den called the "Bird of Paradise," on the lake shore. When his father remonstrated with him, he met everything with sullen silence. If Saul lost his temper at this mute insolence and spoke sharply, the boy would retort with an evil grin that made the honest man's heart ache. "Father," he said one day, "you'd a big sight better let me alone, if you don't want to drive me out of this ranch. I wasn't born to make a nigger of myself in a free country, and you can just bet your life I ain't a-going to do it." These things grieved Saul Matchin so that his anger would die away. At last, one morning, after a daring burglary had been committed in Buffland, two policemen were seen by Luke Matchin approaching the shop. He threw open a back window, jumped out and ran rapidly down to the steep bluff overlooking the lake. When the officers entered, Saul was alone in the place. They asked after his boy, and he said: "He can't be far away. What do you want of him? He hain't been doing nothing, I hope." "Nothing, so far as we know, but we are after two fellows who go by the names of Maumee Jake and Dutch George. Luke runs with them sometimes, and he could make a pile of money by helping of us get them." "I'll tell him when he comes in," said Saul, but he never saw or heard of his son again. With his daughters he was scarcely more successful. For, though they had not brought sorrow or shame to his house, they seemed as little amenable to the discipline he had hoped to exert in his family as the boys were. The elder had married, at fifteen years of age, a journeyman printer; and so, instead of filling the place of housemaid in some good family, as her father had fondly dreamed, she was cook, housemaid, and general servant to a man aware of his rights, and determined to maintain them, and nurse and mother (giving the more important function precedence) to six riotous children. Though his child had thus disappointed his hopes, she had not lost his affection, and he even enjoyed the Sunday afternoon romp with his six grandchildren, which ordinarily took place in the shop among the shavings. Wixham, the son-in-law, was not prosperous, and the children were not so well dressed that the sawdust would damage their clothes. The youngest of Matchin's four children was our acquaintance Miss Maud, as she called herself, though she was christened Matilda. When Mrs. Matchin was asked, after that ceremony, "Who she was named for?" she said, "Nobody in partic'lar. I call her Matildy because it's a pretty name, and goes well with Jurildy, my oldest gal." She had evolved that dreadful appellation out of her own mind. It had done no special harm, however, as Miss Jurildy had rechristened herself Poguy at a very tender age, in a praiseworthy attempt to say "Rogue," and the delighted parents had never called her anything else. Thousands of comely damsels all over this broad land suffer under names as revolting, punished through life, by the stupidity of parental love, for a slip of the tongue in the cradle. Matilda got off easily in the matter of nicknames, being called Mattie until she was pretty well grown, and then having changed her name suddenly to Maud, for reasons to be given hereafter. She was a hearty, blowzy little girl. Her father delighted in her coarse vigor and energy. She was not a pretty child, and had not a particle of coquetry in her, apparently; she liked to play with the boys when they would allow her, and never presumed upon her girlhood for any favors in their rough sport; and good-natured as she was, she was able to defend herself on occasion with tongue and fists. She was so full of life and strength that, when she had no playing to do, she took pleasure in helping her mother about her work. It warmed Saul Matchin's heart to see the stout little figure sweeping or scrubbing. She went to school but did not "learn enough to hurt her," as her father said; and he used to think that here, at least, would be one child who would be a comfort to his age. In fancy he saw her, in a neat print dress and white cap, wielding a broom in one of those fine houses he had helped to build, or coming home to keep house for him when her mother should fail. But one day her fate came to her in the shape of a new girl, who sat near her on the school-bench. It was a slender, pasty young person, an inch taller and a year or two older than Mattie, with yellow ringlets, and more pale-blue ribbons on her white dress than poor Mattie had ever seen before. She was a clean, cold, pale, and selfish little vixen, whose dresses were never rumpled, and whose temper was never ruffled. She had not blood enough in her veins to drive her to play or to anger. But she seemed to poor Mattie the loveliest creature she had ever seen, and our brown, hard-handed, blowzy tomboy became the pale fairy's abject slave. Her first act of sovereignty was to change her vassal's name. "I don't like Mattie; it ain't a bit romantic. I had a friend in Bucyrus whose name was Mattie, and she found out somehow--I believe the teacher told her--that Queen Matilda and Queen Maud was the same thing in England. So you're Maud!" and Maud she was henceforward, though her tyrant made her spell it Maude. "It's more elegant with an _e_," she said. Maud was fourteen and her school-days were ending when she made this new acquaintance. She formed for Azalea Windora one of those violent idolatries peculiar to her sex and age, and in a fort-' night she seemed a different person. Azalea was rather clever at her books, and Maud dug at her lessons from morning till night to keep abreast of her. Her idol was exquisitely neat in her dress, and Maud acquired, as if by magic, a scrupulous care of her person. Azalea's blonde head was full of pernicious sentimentality, though she was saved from actual indiscretions by her cold and vaporous temperament. In dreams and fancies, she was wooed and won a dozen times a day by splendid cavaliers of every race and degree; and as she was thoroughly false and vain, she detailed these airy adventures, part of which she had imagined and part read in weekly story-papers, to her worshipper, who listened with wide eyeballs, and a heart which was just beginning to learn how to beat. She initiated Maud into that strange world of vulgar and unhealthy sentiment found in the cheap weeklies which load every news-stand in the country, and made her tenfold more the child of dreams than herself. Miss Windom remained but a few months at the common school, and then left it for the high school. She told Maud one day of her intended flitting, and was more astonished than pleased at the passion of grief into which the announcement threw her friend. Maud clung to her with sobs that would not be stilled, and with tears that reduced Miss Azalea's dress to limp and moist wretchedness, but did not move the vain heart beneath it. "I wonder if she knows," thought Azalea, "how ugly she is when she bawls like that. Few brunettes can cry stylishly anyhow." Still, she could not help feeling flattered by such devotion, and she said, partly from a habit of careless kindness and partly to rescue the rest of her raiment from the shower which had ruined her neck-ribbon,-- "There, don't be heart-broken. You will be in the high school yourself in no time." Maud lifted up her eyes and her heart at these words. "Yes, I will, darling!" She had never thought of the high school before. She had always expected to leave school that very season, and to go into service somewhere. But from that moment she resolved that nothing should keep her away from those walls that had suddenly become her Paradise. Her mother was easily won over. She was a woman of weak will, more afraid of her children than of her husband, a phenomenon of frequent occurrence in that latitude. She therefore sided naturally with her daughter in the contest which, when Maud announced her intention of entering the high school, broke out in the house and raged fiercely for some weeks. The poor woman had to bear the brunt of the battle alone, for Matchin soon grew shy of disputing with his rebellious child. She was growing rapidly and assuming that look of maturity which comes so suddenly and so strangely to the notice of a parent. When he attacked her one day with the brusque exclamation, "Well, Mattie, what's all this blame foolishness your ma's being tellin' me ?" she answered him with a cool decision and energy that startled and alarmed him. She stood straight and terribly tall, he thought. She spoke with that fluent clearness of girls who know what they want, and used words he had never met with before out of a newspaper. He felt himself no match for her, and ended the discussion by saying: "That's all moonshine--you shan't go! D'ye hear me?" but he felt dismally sure that she would go, in spite of him. Even after he had given up the fight, he continued to revenge himself upon his wife for his defeat. "We've got to have a set of gold spoons, I guess. These will never do for highfliers like us." Or, "Drop in at Swillem's and send home a few dozen champagne; I can't stummick such common drink as coffee for breakfast." Or, "I must fix up and make some calls on Algonkin Av'noo. Sence we've jined the Upper Ten, we mustn't go back on Society." But this brute thunder had little effect on Mrs. Matchin. She knew the storm was over when her good-natured lord tried to be sarcastic. It need hardly be said that Maud Matchin did not find the high school all her heart desired. Her pale goddess had not enough substantial character to hold her worshipper long. Besides, at fifteen, a young girl's heart is as variable as her mind or her person; and a great change was coming over the carpenter's daughter. She suddenly gained her full growth; and after the first awkwardness of her tall stature passed away, she began to delight in her own strength and beauty. Her pride waked at the same time with her vanity, and she applied herself closely to her books, so as to make a good appearance in her classes. She became the friend instead of the vassal of Azalea, and by slow degrees she found their positions reversed. Within a year, it seemed perfectly natural to Maud that Azalea should do her errands and talk to her about her eyes; and Miss Windom found her little airs of superiority of no avail in face of the girl who had grown prettier, cleverer, and taller than herself. It made no difference that Maud was still a vulgar and ignorant girl--for Azalea was not the person to perceive or appreciate these defects. She saw her, with mute wonder, blooming out before her very eyes, from a stout, stocky, frowzy child, with coarse red cheeks and knuckles like a bootblack, into a tall, slender girl, whose oval face was as regular as a conic section, and whose movements were as swift, strong, and graceful, when she forgot herself, as those of a race-horse. There were still the ties of habit and romance between them. Azalea, whose brother was a train-boy on the Lake Shore road, had a constant supply of light literature, which the girls devoured in the long intervals of their studies. But even the romance of Miss Matchin had undergone a change. While Azalea still dreamed of dark-eyed princes, lords of tropical islands, and fierce and tender warriors who should shoot for her the mountain eagle for his plumes, listen with her to the bulbul's song in valleys of roses, or hew out a throne for her in some vague and ungeographical empire, the reveries of Miss Maud grew more and more mundane and reasonable. She was too strong and well to dream much; her only visions were of a rich man who should love her for her fine eyes. She would meet him in some simple and casual way; he would fall in love at sight, and speedily prosper in his wooing; they would be married,--privately, for Maud blushed and burned to think of her home at such times,--and then they would go to New York to live. She never wasted conjecture on the age, the looks, the manner of being of this possible hero. Her mind intoxicated itself with the thought of his wealth. She went one day to the Public Library to read the articles on Rothschild and Astor in the encyclopedias. She even tried to read the editorial articles on gold and silver in the Ohio papers. She delighted in the New York society journals. She would pore for hours over those wonderful columns which described the weddings and the receptions of rich tobacconists and stock-brokers, with lists of names which she read with infinite gusto. At first, all the names were the same to her, all equally worshipful and happy in being printed, black on white, in the reports of these upper-worldly banquets. But after a while her sharp intelligence began to distinguish the grades of our republican aristocracy, and she would skip the long rolls of obscure guests who figured at the: "coming-out parties" of thrifty shop-keepers of fashionable ambition, to revel among the genuine swells whose fathers were shop-keepers. The reports of the battles of the Polo Club filled her with a sweet intoxication. She knew the names of the combatants by heart, and had her own opinion as to the comparative eligibility of Billy Buglass and Tim Blanket, the young men most in view at that time in the clubs of the metropolis. Her mind was too much filled with interests of this kind to leave any great room for her studies. She had pride enough to hold her place in her classes, and that was all. She learned a little music, a little drawing, a little Latin, and a little French--the French of "Stratford-atte-Bowe," for French of Paris was not easy of attainment at Buffland. This language had an especial charm for her, as it seemed a connecting link with that elysium of fashion of which her dreams were full. She once went to the library and asked for "a nice French book." They gave her "La Petite Fadette." She had read of George Sand in newspapers, which had called her a "corrupter of youth." She hurried home with her book, eager to test its corrupting qualities, and when, with locked doors and infinite labor, she had managed to read it, she was greatly disappointed at finding in it nothing to admire and nothing to shudder at. "How could such a smart woman as that waste her time writing about a lot of peasants, poor as crows, the whole lot!" was her final indignant comment. By the time she left the school her life had become almost as solitary as that of the bat in the fable, alien both to bird and beast. She made no intimate acquaintances there; her sordid and selfish dreams occupied her too completely. Girls who admired her beauty were repelled by her heartlessness, which they felt, but could not clearly define. Even Azalea fell away from her, having found a stout and bald-headed railway conductor, whose adoration made amends for his lack of romance. Maud knew she was not liked in the school, and being, of course, unable to attribute it to any fault of her own, she ascribed it to the fact that her father was a mechanic and poor. This thought did not tend to make her home happier. She passed much of her time in her own bedroom, looking out of her window on the lake, weaving visions of ignoble wealth and fashion out of the mists of the morning sky and the purple and gold that made the north-west glorious at sunset. When she sat with her parents in the evening, she rarely spoke. If she was not gazing in the fire, with hard bright eyes and lips, in which there was only the softness of youth, but no tender tremor of girlhood's dreams, she was reading her papers or her novels with rapt attention. Her mother was proud of her beauty and her supposed learning, and loved, when she looked up from her work, to let her eyes rest upon her tall and handsome child, whose cheeks were flushed with eager interest as she bent her graceful head over her book. But Saul Matchin nourished a vague anger and jealousy against her. He felt that his love was nothing to her; that she was too pretty and too clever to be at home in his poor house; and yet he dared not either reproach her or appeal to her affections. His heart would fill with grief and bitterness as he gazed at her devouring the brilliant pages of some novel of what she imagined high life, unconscious of his glance, which would travel from her neatly shod feet up to her hair, frizzed and banged down to her eyebrows, "making her look," he thought, "more like a Scotch poodle-dog than an honest girl." He hated those books which, he fancied, stole away her heart from her home. He had once picked up one of them where she had left it; but the high-flown style seemed as senseless to him as the words of an incantation, and he had flung it down more bewildered than ever. He thought there must be some strange difference between their minds when she could delight in what seemed so uncanny to him, and he gazed at her, reading by the lamp-light, as over a great gulf. Even her hands holding the book made him uneasy; for since she had grown careful of them, they were like no hands he had ever seen on any of his kith and kin. The fingers were long and white, and the nails were shaped like an almond, and though the hands lacked delicacy at the articulations, they almost made Matchin reverence his daughter as his superior, as he looked at his own. One evening, irritated by the silence and his own thoughts, he cried out with a sudden suspicion: "Where do you git all them books, and what do they cost?" She turned her fine eyes slowly upon him and said: "I get them from the public library, and they cost nothing." He felt deeply humiliated that he should have made a blunder so ridiculous and so unnecessary. After she had left the school--where she was graduated as near as possible to the foot of the class--she was almost alone in the world. She rarely visited her sister, for the penury of the Wixham household grated upon her nerves, and she was not polite enough to repress her disgust at the affectionate demonstrations of the Wixham babies. "There, there! get along, you'll leave me not fit to be seen!" she would say, and Jurilda would answer in that vicious whine of light-haired women, too early overworked and overprolific: "Yes, honey, let your aunt alone. She's too tiffy for poor folks like us"; and Maud would go home, loathing her lineage. The girls she had known in her own quarter were by this time earning their own living: some in the manufactories, in the lighter forms of the iron trade, some in shops, and a few in domestic service. These last were very few, for the American blood revolts against this easiest and best-paid of all occupations, and leaves it to more sensible foreigners. The working bees were clearly no company for this poor would-be butterfly. They barely spoke when they met, kept asunder by a mutual embarrassment. One girl with whom she had played as a child had early taken to evil courses. Her she met one day in the street, and the bedraggled and painted creature called her by her name. "How dare you?" said Maud, shocked and frightened. "All right!" said the shameless woman. "You looked so gay, I didn't know." Maud, as she walked away, hardly knew whether to be pleased or not. "She saw I looked like a lady, and thought I could not be one honestly. I'll show them!" She knew as few men as women. She sometimes went to the social gatherings affected by her father's friends, Odd Fellows' and Druids' balls and the festivities with which the firemen refreshed themselves after their toils and dangers. But her undeniable beauty gained her no success. She seemed to take pains to avoid pleasing the young carpenters, coachmen, and journeyman printers she met on these occasions. With her head full of fantastic dreams, she imagined herself a mere visitor at these simple entertainments of the common people, and criticised the participants to herself with kindly sarcasm. If she ever consented to dance, it was with the air with which she fancied a duchess might open a ball of her servants. Once, in a round game at a "surprise" party, it came her turn to be kissed by a young blacksmith, who did his duty in spite of her struggles with strong arms and a willing heart. Mr. Browning makes a certain queen, mourning over her lofty loneliness, wish that some common soldier would throw down his halberd and clasp her to his heart. It is doubtful if she would really have liked it better than Miss Maud did, and she was furious as a young lioness. She made herself so disagreeable about it that she ceased to be invited to those lively entertainments; and some of the most eligible of the young "Cariboos"--a social order of a secret and mysterious rite, which met once a week in convenient woodsheds and stable-lofts--took an oath with hands solemnly clasped in the intricate grip of the order, that "they would never ask Miss Matchin to go to party, picnic, or sleigh-ride, as long as the stars gemmed the blue vault of heaven," from which it may be seen that the finer sentiments of humanity were not unknown to the Cariboos. Maud came thus to be eighteen, and though she was so beautiful and so shapely that no stranger ever saw her without an instant of glad admiration, she had had no suitor but one, and from him she never allowed a word of devotion. Samuel Sleeny, a carpenter who worked with her father, and who took his meals with the family, had fallen in love with her at first sight, and, after a year of dumb hopelessness, had been so encouraged by her father's evident regard that he had opened his heart to Saul and had asked his mediation. Matchin undertook the task with pleasure. Pie could have closed his eyes in peace if he had seen his daughter married to so decent a man and so good a joiner as Sleeny. But the interview was short and painful to Matchin. He left his daughter in possession of the field, and went to walk by the lake shore to recover his self-possession, which had given way beneath her firm will and smiling scorn. When he returned to the shop Sleeny was there, sitting on a bench and chewing pine shavings. "What did she say?" asked the young fellow. "But never mind--I see plain enough it's no use. She's too good for me, and she knows it." "Too good!" roared Saul. "She's the golderndest----" "Hold on there," said Sleeny. "Don't say nothin' you'll have to take back. Ef you say anything ag'in her, you'll have to swaller it, or whip me." Saul looked at him with amazement. "Well! you beat me, the pair of you! You're crazy to want her, and she's crazy not to want you. She liked to a' bit my head off for perposin' you, and you want to lick me for calling her a fool." "She ain't no fool," said Sleeny with sullen resignation; "she knows what she's about," and lie picked up another shaving and ruminated upon it. The old man walked to and fro, fidgeting with his tools. At last he came back to the young man and said, awkwardly dusting the bench with his hand: "Sam, you wasn't 'lowin' to leave along o' this here foolishness?" "That's just what I was 'lowin' to do, sir." "Don't you be a dern fool, Sam!" and Saul followed up this judicious exhortation with such cogent reasons that poor Sleeny was glad to be persuaded that his chance was not over yet, and that he would much better stay where he was. "How'll _she_ like it?" "Oh! it won't make a mite o' difference to her," said the old man airily, and poor Sam felt in his despondent heart that it would not. He remained and became like the least of her servants. She valued his attachment much as a planter valued the affection of his slaves, knowing they would work the better for it. He did all her errands; fetched and carried for her; took her to church on evenings when she did not care to stay at home. One of the few amusements Saul Matchin indulged in was that of attending spiritualist lectures and seances, whenever a noted medium visited the place. Saul had been an unbeliever in his youth, and this grotesque superstition had rushed in at the first opportunity to fill the vacuum of faith in his mind. He had never succeeded, however, in thoroughly indoctrinating his daughter. She regarded her father's religion with the same contempt she bestowed upon the other vulgar and narrow circumstances of her lot in life, and so had preferred her mother's sober Presbyterianism to the new and raw creed of her sire. But one evening, when she was goaded by more than usual restlessness, Sleeny asked her if she would go with him to a "sperritual lectur." To escape from her own society, she accepted, and the wild, incoherent, and amazingly fluent address she heard excited her interest and admiration. After that, she often asked him to take her, and in the long walk to and from the Harmony Hall, where the long-haired brotherhood held their sessions, a sort of confidential relation grew up between them, which meant nothing to Maud, but bound the heart of Sleeny in chains of iron. Yet he never dared say a word of the feeling that was consuming him. He feared he should lose her forever, if he opened his lips. Of course, she was not at ease in this life of dreamy idleness. It did not need the taunts of her father to convince her that she ought to be doing something for herself. Her millionaire would never come down to the little house on Dean Street to find her, and she had conscience enough to feel that she ought to earn her own clothes. She tried to make use of the accomplishments she had learned at school, but was astonished to find how useless they were. She made several attempts to be a teacher, but it was soon found that her high-school diploma covered a world of ignorance, and no board, however indulgent, would accept her services. She got a box of colors, and spoiled many fans and disfigured many pots by decorations which made the eyes of the beholder ache; nobody would buy them, and poor Maud had no acquaintances to whom she might give them away. So they encumbered the mantels and tables of her home, adding a new tedium to the unhappy household. She answered the advertisements of several publishing companies, and obtained agencies for the sale of subscription books. But her face was not hard enough for this work. She was not fluent enough to persuade the undecided, and she was too proud to sue _in forma pauperis_; she had not the precious gift of tears, by which the travelling she-merchant sells so many worthless wares. The few commissions she gained hardly paid for the wear and tear of her high-heeled boots. One day at the public library she was returning a novel she had read, when a gentleman came out of an inner room and paused to speak to the librarian's assistant, with whom Maud was at the moment occupied--a girl whom she had known at school, and with whom she had renewed acquaintance in this way. It was about a matter of the administration of the library, and only a few words were exchanged. He then bowed to both the ladies, and went out. "Who was that?" Maud asked. "Don't you know?" rejoined the other. "I thought everybody knew the elegant Captain Farnham. He is president of our board, you know, and he is just lovely. I always manage to stop him as he leaves a board meeting and get a word or two out of him. It's worth the trouble if I only get a bow." "I should think so," assented Maud. "He is as sweet as a peach. Is there any chance of getting one of those places? I should like to divide those bows with you." "That would be perfectly splendid," said her friend, who was a good-natured girl. "Come, I will introduce you to the old Doctor now." And in a moment Maud was in the presence of the librarian. She entered at a fortunate moment. Dr. Buchlieber was a near-sighted old gentleman who read without glasses, but could see nothing six feet away. He usually received and dismissed his visitors without bothering himself to discover or imagine what manner of people they were. "I do not care how they look," he would say. "They probably look as they talk, without form and void." But at the moment when Maud entered his little room, he had put on his lenses to look out of the window, and he turned to see a perfect form in a closely fit ting dress, and a face pretty enough to look on with a critical pleasure. He received her kindly, and encouraged her to hope for an appointment, and it was in accordance with his suggestion that she called upon Farnham, as we have related. She did not go immediately. She took several days to prepare what she called "a harness" of sufficient splendor, and while she was at work upon it she thought of many things. She was not even yet quite sure that she wanted a place in the library. The Doctor had been very kind, but he had given her clearly to understand that the work required of her would be severe, and the pay very light. She had for a long time thought of trying to obtain a clerkship at Washington,--perhaps Farnham would help her to that,--and her mind wandered off among the possibilities of chance acquaintance with bachelor senators and diplomats. But the more she thought of the coming interview, the more her mind dwelt upon the man himself whom she was going to see--his bow and his smile, his teeth and his mustache, and the perfect fit of his clothes. One point in regard to him was still vague in her mind, and as to that her doubts were soon resolved. One evening she said to her father: "Did you ever see Captain Farnham?" "Now, what a foolish question that is I'd like to know who built his greenhouses, ef I didn't?" "He is pretty well off, ain't he?" Saul laughed with that satisfied arrogance of ignorant men when they are asked a question they can answer easily. "I rather guess he is; that is, ef you call three, four, five millions well off. I don't know how it strikes you" (with a withering sarcasm), "but _I_ call Arthur Farnham pretty well fixed." These words ran in Maud's brain with a ravishing sound. She built upon them a fantastic palace of mist and cloud. When at last her dress was finished and she started, after three unsuccessful attempts, to walk to Algonquin Avenue, she was in no condition to do herself simple justice. She hardly knew whether she wanted a place in the library, a clerkship at Washington, or the post of amanuensis to the young millionaire. She was confused by his reception of her; his good-natured irony made her feel ill at ease; she was nervous and flurried; and she felt, as she walked away, that the battle had gone against her. III. THE WIDOW AND HER DAUGHTER. Mrs. Belding's house was next to that of Mr. Farnham, and the neighborly custom of Algonquin Avenue was to build no middle walls of partition between adjoining lawns. A minute's walk, therefore, brought the young man to the door of Mrs. Belding's cottage. She called it a cottage, and so we have no excuse for calling it anything else, though it was a big three-storied house, built of the soft creamy stone of the Buffland quarries, and it owed its modest name to an impression in the lady's mind that gothic gables and dormer windows were a necessary adjunct of cottages. She was a happy woman, though she would have been greatly surprised to hear herself so described. She had not been out of mourning since she was a young girl. Her parents, as she sometimes said, "had put her into black"; and several children had died in infancy, one after the other, until at last her husband, Jairus Belding, the famous bridge-builder, had perished of a malarial fever caught in the swamps of the Wabash, and left her with one daughter and a large tin box full of good securities. She never afterward altered the style of her dress, and she took much comfort in feeling free from all further allegiance to milliners. In fact, she had a nature which was predisposed to comfort. She had been fond of her husband, but she had been a little afraid of him, and, when she had wept her grief into tranquillity, she felt a certain satisfaction in finding herself the absolute mistress of her income and her bedroom. Her wealth made her the object of matrimonial ambition once or twice, and she had sufficient beauty to flatter herself that she was loved more for her eyes than her money; but she refused her suitors with an indolent good-nature that did not trouble itself with inquiries as to their sincerity. "I have been married once, thank you, and that is enough"; this she said simply without sighing or tears. Perhaps the unlucky aspirant might infer that her heart was buried in the grave of Jairus. But the sober fact was that she liked her breakfast at her own hours. Attached to the spacious sleeping-room occupied in joint tenancy by herself and the bridge-builder were two capacious closets. After the funeral of Mr. Belding, she took possession of both of them, hanging her winter wardrobe in one and her summer raiment in the other, and she had never met a man so fascinating as to tempt her to give up to him one of these rooms. She was by no means a fool. Like many easy-going women, she had an enlightened selfishness which prompted her to take excellent care of her affairs. As long as old Mr. Farnham lived, she took his advice implicitly in regard to her investments, and after his death she transferred the same unquestioning confidence to his grandson and heir, although he was much younger than herself and comparatively inexperienced in money matters. It seemed to her only natural that some of the Farnham wisdom should have descended with the Farnham millions. There was a grain of good sense in this reasoning, founded as it was upon her knowledge of Arthur's good qualities; for upon a man who is neither a sot nor a gambler the possession of great wealth almost always exercises a sobering and educating influence. So, whenever Mrs. Belding was in doubt in any matter of money, she asked Arthur to dine with her, and settle the vexing questions somewhere between the soup and the coffee. It was a neighborly service, freely asked and willingly rendered. As Farnham entered the widow's cosey library, he saw a lady sitting by the fire whom he took to be Mrs. Belding; but as she rose and made a step toward him, he discovered that she was not in mourning. The quick twilight was thickening into night, and the rich glow of the naming coal in the grate, deepening the shadows in the room, while it prevented him from distinguishing the features of her face, showed him a large full form with a grace of movement which had something even of majesty in it. "I see you have forgotten me," said a voice as rich and full as the form from which it came. "I am Alice Belding." "Of course you are, and you have grown as big and beautiful as you threatened to," said Farnham, taking both the young girl's hands in his, and turning until she faced the fire-light. It was certainly a bonny face which the red light shone upon, and quite uncommon in its beauty. The outline was very pure and noble; the eyes were dark-brown and the hair was of tawny gold, but the complexion was of that clear and healthy pallor so rarely met with among blonde women. The finest thing about her face was its expression of perfect serenity. Even now, as she stood looking at Farnham, with her hands in his, her cheek flushed a little with the evident pleasure of the meeting, she received his gaze of unchecked admiration with a smile as quiet and unabashed as that of a mother greeting a child. "Well, well!" said Farnham, as they seated themselves, "how long has it taken you to grow to that stature? When did I see you last?" "Two years ago," she answered, in that rich and gentle tone which was a delight to the ear. "I was at home last summer, but you were away--in Germany, I think." "Yes, and we looked for you in vain at Christmases and Thanksgivings." "Mamma came so often to New York that there seemed no real necessity of my coming home until I came for good. I had so much to learn, you know. I was quite old and very ignorant when I started away." "And you have come back quite young and very learned, I dare say." She laughed a little, and her clear and quiet laugh was as pleasant as her speech. Mrs. Belding came in with gliding footsteps and cap-strings gently fluttering. "Why, you are all in the dark! Arthur, will you please light that burner nearest you?" In the bright light Miss Alice looked prettier than ever; the jet of gas above her tinged her crisp hair with a lustre of twisted gold wire and threw tangled shadows upon her low smooth forehead. "We have to thank Madame de Veaudrey for sending us back a fine young woman," said Farnham. "Yes, she _is_ improved," the widow assented calmly. "I must show you the letter Madame de Veaudrey wrote me. Alice is first in languages, first----" "In peace, and first in the hearts of her countrywomen," interrupted Miss Alice, not smartly, but with smiling firmness. "Let Mr. Farnham take the rest of my qualities for granted, please." "There will be time enough for you two to get acquainted. But this evening I wanted to talk to you about something more important. The 'Tribune' money article says the Dan and Beersheba Railroad is not really earning its dividends. What am I to do about that, I should like to know?" "Draw your dividends, with a mind conscious of rectitude, though the directors rage and the 'Tribune' imagine a vain thing," Farnham answered, and the talk was of stocks and bonds for an hour afterward. When dinner was over, the three were seated again in the library. The financial conversation had run its course, and had perished amid the arid sands of reference to the hard times and the gloomy prospects of real estate. Miss Alice, who took no part in the discussion, was reading the evening paper, and Farnham was gratifying his eyes by gazing at the perfect outline of her face, the rippled hair over the straight brows, and the stout braids that hung close to the graceful neck in the fashion affected by school-girls at that time. A servant entered and handed a card to Alice. She looked at it and passed it to her mother. "It is Mr. Furrey," said the widow. "He has called upon _you_." "I suppose he may come in here?" Alice said, without rising. Her mother looked at her with a mute inquiry, but answered in an instant, "Certainly." When Mr. Furrey entered, he walked past Mrs. Belding to greet her daughter, with profuse expressions of delight at her return, "of which he had just heard this afternoon at the bank; and although he was going to a party this evening, he could not help stopping in to welcome her home." Miss Alice said "Thank you," and Mr. Furrey turned to shake hands with her mother. "You know my friend Mr. Farnham?" "Yes, ma'am--that is, I see him often at the bank, but I am glad to owe the pleasure of his acquaintance to you." The men shook hands. Mr. Furrey bowed a little more deeply than was absolutely required. He then seated himself near Miss Alice and began talking volubly to her about New York. He was a young man of medium size, dressed with that exaggeration of the prevailing mode which seems necessary to provincial youth. His short fair hair was drenched with pomatum and plastered close to his head. His white cravat was tied with mathematical precision, and his shirt-collar was like a wall of white enamel from his shoulders to his ears. He wore white kid gloves, which he secured from spot or blemish as much as possible by keeping the tips of the fingers pressed against each other. His speech was quicker than is customary with Western people, but he had their flat monotone and their uncompromising treatment of the letter R. Mrs. Belding crossed over to where Farnham was seated and began a conversation with him in an undertone. "You think her really improved?" "In every way. She has the beauty and stature of a Brunhild; she carries herself like a duchess, I was going to say--but the only duchess I ever knew was at Schwalbach, and she was carried in a wicker hand-cart. But mademoiselle is lovely, and she speaks very pretty English; and knows how to wear her hair, and will be a great comfort to you, if you can keep the boys at bay for awhile." "No danger there, I imagine; she will keep them at bay herself. Did you notice just now? Mr. Furrey called especially to see her. He was quite attentive to her last summer. Instead of going to the drawing-room to see him, she wants him to come in here, where he is in our way and we are in his. That is one of Madame de Veaudrey's notions." "I should fancy it was," said Farnham, dryly; "I have heard her spoken of as a lady of excellent principles and manners." "Now you are going to side against me, are you? I do not believe in importing these European ideas of surveillance into free America. I have confidence in American girls." "But see where your theories lead you. In Algonquin Avenue, the young ladies are to occupy the drawing-room, while the parents make themselves comfortable in the library. But the houses in Dean Street are not so spacious. Most citizens in that quarter have only two rooms below stairs. I understand the etiquette prevailing there is for parents, when their daughters receive calls, to spend the evening in the kitchen." "Oh, dear! I see I'm to get no help from you. That's just the way Alice talks. When she came home to-day, there were several invitations for her, and some notes from young gentlemen offering their escort. She told me in that quiet way of hers, that reminds me of Mr. Belding when he was dangerous, that she would be happy to go with me when I cared to go, and happy to stay at home if I stayed. So I imagine I am booked for a gay season." "Which I am sure you will greatly enjoy. But this Madame de Veaudrey must be a sensible woman." "Because I disagree with her? I am greatly obliged. But she is a saint, although you admire her," pursued the good-tempered woman. "She was a Hamilton, you know, and married Veaudrey, who was secretary of legation in Washington. He was afterward minister in Sweden, and died there. She was returning to this country with her three girls, and was shipwrecked and they all three perished. She was picked up unconscious and recovered only after a long illness. Since then she has gone very little into the world, but has devoted herself to the education of young ladies. She never has more than three or four at a time, and these she selects herself. Alice had heard of her from Mrs. Bowman, and we ventured to write to ask admission to her household, and our request was civilly but peremptorily declined. This was while we were in New York two years ago. But a few days afterward we were at church with Mrs. Bowman, and Madame de Veaudrey saw us. She called the next day upon Mrs. Bowman and inquired who we were, and then came to me and begged to withdraw her letter, and to take Alice at once under her charge. It seems that Alice resembled one of her daughters--at all events, she was completely fascinated by her, and Alice soon came to regard her in return as the loveliest of created beings. I must admit I found her a little still--though she _was_ lovely. But still, I cannot help being afraid that she has made Alice a little to particular; you know the young gentlemen don't like a girl to be too stiff." Farnham felt his heart grow hot with something like scorn for the worthy woman, as she prattled on in this way. He could hardly trust himself to reply and soon took his leave. Alice rose and gave him her hand with frank and winning cordiality. As he felt the warm soft pressure of her strong fingers, and the honest glance of her wide young eyes, his irritation died away for a moment, but soon came back with double force. "Gracious heavens!" he exclaimed, as he closed the door behind him, and stepped into the clear spring starlight, hardly broken as yet by the budding branches of the elms and limes. "What a crazy woman that mother is! Her daughter has come home to her a splendid white swan, and she is waddling and quacking about with anxiety and fear lest the little male ducklings that frequent the pond should find her too white and too stately." Instead of walking home he turned up the long avenue, and went rapidly on, spurred by his angry thoughts. "What will become of that beautiful girl? She cannot hold out forever against the universal custom. She will be led by her friends and pushed by her mother, until she drops to the level of the rest and becomes a romping flirt; she will go to parties with young Furrey, and to church with young Snevel. I shall see her tramping the streets with one, and waltzing all night with another, and sitting on the stairs with a third. She is too pretty to be let alone, and her mother is against her. She is young and the force of nature is strong, and women are born for sacrifice--she will marry one of these young shrimps, and do her duty in the sphere whereto she has been called." At this thought so sharp a pang of disgust shot through him, that he started with surprise. "Oh, no, this is not jealousy; it is a protest against what is probable in the name of the eternal fitness of things." Nevertheless, he went on thinking very disagreeably about Mr. Furrey. "How can a nice girl endure a fellow who pomatums his hair in that fashion, and sounds his R's in that way, and talks about Theedore Thommus and Cinsunnatta? Still, they do it, and Providence must be on the side of that sort of men. But what business is all this of mine? I have half a mind to go to Europe again." He stopped, lighted a cigar, and walked briskly homeward. As he passed by the Belding cottage, he saw that the lower story was in darkness, and in the windows above the light was glowing behind the shades. "So Furrey is gone, and the tired young traveller is going early to rest." He went into his library and sat down by the dying embers of the grate. His mind had been full of Alice and her prospects during his long walk in the moonlight; and now as he sat there, the image of Maud Matchin suddenly obtruded itself upon him, and he began to compare and contrast the two girls, both so beautiful and so utterly unlike; and then his thoughts shifted all at once back to his own early life. He thought of his childhood, of his parents removed from him so early that their memory was scarcely more than a dream; he wondered what life would have been to him if they had been spared. Then his school-days came up before him; his journey to France with his grandfather; his studies at St. Cyr; his return to America during the great war, his enlistment as a private in the regular cavalry, his promotion to a lieutenancy three days afterward, his service through the terrible campaign of the Peninsula, his wounds at Gettysburg, and at last the grand review of the veterans in front of the White House when the war was over. But this swift and brilliant panorama did not long delay his musing fancy. A dull smart like that of a healing wound drew his mind to a succession of scenes on the frontier. He dwelt with that strange fascination which belongs to the memory of hardships--and which we are all too apt to mistake for regret--upon his life of toil and danger in the wide desolation of the West. There he met, one horrible winter, the sister-in-law of a brother captain, a tall, languid, ill-nourished girl of mature years, with tender blue eyes and a taste for Byron. She had no home and no relatives in the world except her sister, Mrs. Keefe, whom she had followed into the wilderness. She was a heavy burden on the scanty resources of poor Keefe, but he made her cordially welcome like the hearty soldier that he was. She was the only unmarried white woman within a hundred miles, and the mercury ranged from zero to -20 degrees all winter. In the spring, she and Farnham were married; he seemed to have lost the sense of there being any other women in the world, and he took her, as one instinctively takes to dinner the last lady remaining in a drawing-room, without special orders. He had had the consolation of reflecting that he made her perfectly proud and happy every day of her life that was left. Before the autumn ended, she died, on a forced march one day, when the air was glittering with alkali, and the fierce sun seemed to wither the dismal plain like the vengeance of heaven. Though Farnham was even then one of the richest men in the army, so rigid are the rules imposed upon our service, by the economy of an ignorant demagogy, that no transportation could be had to supply this sick lady with the ordinary conveniences of life, and she died in his arms, on the hot prairie, in the shade of an overloaded baggage wagon. He mourned her with the passing grief one gives to a comrade fallen on the field of honor. Often since he left the army, he reproached himself for not have grieved for her more deeply. "Poor Nellie," he would sometimes say, "how she would have enjoyed this house, if she had lived to possess it." But he never had that feeling of widowhood known to those whose lives have been torn in two. IV. PROTECTOR AND PROTEGEE. A few days later, Mr. Farnham attended a meeting of the library board, and presented the name of Miss Matchin as a candidate for a subordinate place in the library. There were several such positions, requiring no special education or training, the duties of which could be as well filled by Miss Maud as by any one else. She had sent several strong letters of recommendation to the board, from prominent citizens who knew and respected her father, for when Maud informed him of her new ambition, Matchin entered heartily into the affair, and bestirred himself to use what credit he had in the ward to assist her. Maud had not exaggerated the effect of her blandishments upon Dr. Buchlieber. The old gentleman spoke in her favor with great fluency; "she was young, healthy, active, intelligent, a graduate of the high school." "And very pretty, is she not?" asked a member of the board, maliciously. The Doctor colored, but was not abashed. He gazed steadily at the interrupter through his round glasses, and said: "Yes, she is very fine looking--but I do not see that that should stand in her way." Not another word was said against her, and a ballot was taken to decide the question. There were five members of the board, three besides Farnham and Buchlieber. Maud had two votes, and a young woman whose name had not been mentioned received the other three. Buchlieber counted the ballots, and announced the vote. Farnham flushed with anger. Not only had no attention been paid to his recommendation, but he had not even been informed that there was another candidate. In a few sarcastic words he referred to the furtive understanding existing among the majority, and apologized for having made such a mistake as to suppose they cared to hear the merits of appointees discussed. The three colleagues sat silent. At last, one of them crossed his legs anew and said: "I'm sure nobody meant any offence. We agreed on this lady several days ago. I know nothing about her, but her father used to be one of our best workers in the seventh ward. He is in the penitentiary now, and the family is about down to bedrock. The reason we didn't take part in the discussion was we wanted to avoid hard feelings." The other two crossed their legs the other way, and said they "concurred." Their immovable phlegm, their long, expressionless faces, the dull, monotonous twang of their voices, the oscillation of the three large feet hung over the bony knees had now, as often before, a singular effect upon Farnham's irritation. He felt he could not irritate them in return; they could not appreciate his motives, and thought too little of his opinion to be angry at his contempt. He was thrown back upon himself now as before. It was purely a matter of conscience whether he should stay and do what good he could, or resign and shake the dust of the city hall from his feet. Whatever he recommended in regard to the administration of the library was always adopted without comment; but, whenever a question of the sort which the three politicians called "practical" arose, involving personal patronage in any form, they always arranged it for themselves, without even pretending to ask his or Buchlieber's opinion. The very fact of his holding the position of chairman of the board was wounding to his self-love, as soon as he began to appreciate the purpose with which the place had been given him. He and some of his friends had attempted a movement the year before, to rescue the city from the control of what they considered a corrupt combination of politicians. They had begun, as such men always do, too late, and without any adequate organization, and the regular workers had beaten them with ridiculous ease. In Farnham's own ward, where he possessed two thirds of the real estate, the candidates favored by him and his friends received not quite one tenth of the votes cast. The loader of the opposing forces was a butcher, one Jacob Metzger, who had managed the politics of the ward for years. He was not a bad man so far as his lights extended. He sold meat on business principles, so as to get the most out of a carcass; and he conducted his political operations in the same way. He made his bargains with aspirants and office-holders, and kept them religiously. He had been a little alarmed at the sudden irruption of such men as Farnham and his associates into the field of ward politics; he dreaded the combined effect of their money and their influence. But he soon found he had nothing to fear--they would not use their money, and they did not know how to use their influence. They hired halls, opened committee-rooms, made speeches, and thundered against municipal iniquities in the daily press; but Jacob Metzger, when he discovered that this was all, possessed his soul in peace, and even got a good deal of quiet fun out of the canvass. He did not take the trouble to be angry at the men who were denouncing him, and supplied Farnham with beefsteaks unusually tender and juicy, while the young reformer was seeking his political life. "Lord love you," he said to Budsey, as he handed him a delicious rib-roast the day before election. "There's nothing I like so much as to see young men o' property go into politics. We need 'em. Of course, I wisht the Cap'n was on my side; but anyhow, I'm glad to see him takin' an interest." He knew well enough the way the votes would run; that every grog-shop in the ward was his recruiting station; that all Farnham's tenants would vote against their landlord; that even the respectable Budsey and the prim Scotch gardener were sure for him against their employer. Farnham's conscience which had roused him to this effort against Metzger's corrupt rule, would not permit him to ask for the votes of his own servants and tenants, and he would have regarded it as simply infamous to spend money to secure the floating crowd of publicans and sinners who formed the strength of Jacob. His failure was so complete and unexpected that there seemed to him something of degradation in it, and in a fit of uncontrollable disgust he sailed for Europe the week afterward. Metzger took his victory good-naturedly as a matter of course, and gave his explanation of it to a reporter of the "Bale-Fire" who called to interview him. "Mr. Farnham, who led the opposition to our organize-ation, is a young gen'l'man of fine talents and high character. I ain't got a word to say against him. The only trouble is, he lacks practical experience, and he ain't got no pers'nal magn'tism. Now I'm one of the people, I know what they want, and on that line I carried the ward against a combine-ation of all the wealth and aristocracy of Algonkin Av'noo." Jacob's magnanimity did not rest with merely a verbal acknowledgment of Farnham's merits. While he was abroad some of the city departments were reorganized, and Farnham on his return found himself, through Metzger's intervention, chairman of the library board. With characteristic sagacity the butcher kept himself in the background, and the committee who waited upon Farnham to ask him to accept the appointment placed it entirely upon considerations of the public good. His sensitive conscience would not permit him to refuse a duty thus imposed, and so with many inward qualms he assumed a chair in the vile municipal government he had so signally failed to overthrow. He had not long occupied it, when he saw to what his selection was attributable. He was a figure-head and he knew it, but he saw no decent escape from the position. As long as they allowed him and the librarian (who was also a member of the board) to regulate the library to their liking, he could not inquire into their motives or decline association with them. He was perfectly free to furnish what mental food he chose to two hundred thousand people, and he felt it would be cowardice to surrender that important duty on any pitiful question of patronage or personal susceptibility. So once more he stifled the impulse to resign his post, and the meeting adjourned without further incident. As he walked home, he was conscious of a disagreeable foreboding of something in the future which he would like to avoid. Bringing his mind to bear upon it, it resolved itself into nothing more formidable than the coming interview with Miss Matchin. It would certainly be unpleasant to tell her that her hopes were frustrated, when she had seemed so confident. At this thought, he felt the awakening of a sense of protectorship; she had trusted in him; he ought to do something for her, if for nothing else, to show that he was not dependent upon those ostrogoths. But what could be done for such a girl, so pretty, so uncultivated, so vulgarly fantastic? Above all, what could be done for her by a young and unmarried man? Providence and society have made it very hard for single men to show kindness to single women in any way but one. At his door he found Sam Sleeny with a kit of tools; he had just rung the bell. He turned, as Farnham mounted the steps, and said: "I come from Matchin's--something about the greenhouse." "Yes," answered Farnham. "The gardener is over yonder at the corner of the lawn. He will tell you what is to be done." Sam walked away in the direction indicated, and Farnham went into the house. Some letters were lying on the table in the library. He had just begun to read them when Budsey entered and announced: "That young person." Maud came in flushed with the fresh air and rapid walking. Farnham saw that she wore no glasses, and she gained more by that fact in his good-will than even by the brilliancy of her fine eyes which seemed to exult in their liberation. She began with nervous haste: "I knew you had a meeting to-day, and I could not wait. I might as well own up that I followed you home." Farnham handed her a chair and took her hand with a kindly earnestness, saying, "I am very glad to see you." "Yes, yes," she continued; "but have you any good news for me?" The anxious eagerness which spoke in her sparkling eyes and open lips touched Farnham to the heart. "I am sorry I have not. The board appointed another person." The tears sprang to her eyes. "I really expected it. I hoped you would interest yourself." "I did all I possibly could," said Farnham. "I have never tried so hard for anybody before, but a majority were already pledged to the other applicant." She seemed so dejected and hopeless that Farnham, forgetting for a moment how hard it is for a young man to assist a young woman, said two or three fatal words, "We must try something else." The pronoun sounded ominous to him as soon as he had uttered it. But it acted like magic upon Maud. She lifted a bright glance through her tears and said, like a happy child to whom a new game has been proposed, "What shall we try?" Simple as the words were, both of them seemed to feel that a certain relation--a certain responsibility--had been established between them. The thought exhilarated Maud; it seemed the beginning of her long-expected romance; while the glow of kind feeling about the heart of Farnham could not keep him from suspecting that he was taking a very imprudent step. But they sat a good while, discussing various plans for Maud's advantage, and arriving at nothing definite; for her own ideas were based upon a dime-novel theory of the world, and Farnham at last concluded that he would be forced finally to choose some way of life for his protegee, and then persuade her to accept it. He grew silent and thoughtful with this reflection, and the conversation languished. He was trying to think how he could help her without these continued interviews at his house, when she disposed of the difficulty by rising briskly and saying, "Well, I will call again in a day or two, about this hour?" "Yes, if it suits you best," he answered, with a troubled brow. He followed her to the door. As she went out, she said, "May I pick a flower as I go?" He seized his hat, and said, "Come with me to the rose-house in the garden, and you shall have something better." They walked together down the gravel paths, through the neat and well-kept garden, where the warm spring sunshine was calling life out of the tender turf, and the air was full of delicate odors. She seemed as gay and happy as a child on a holiday. Her disappointment of an hour ago was all gone in the feeling that Arthur was interested in her, was caring for her future. Without any definite hopes or dreams, she felt as if the world was suddenly grown richer and wider. Something good was coming to her certainly, something good had come; for was she not walking in this lovely garden with its handsome proprietor, who was, she even began to think, her friend? The turf was as soft, the air as mild, the sun as bright as in any of her romances, and the figure of Farnham's wealth which she had heard from her father rang musically in her mind. They went into the rose-house, and he gave her two or three splendid satiny Marechal Niels, and then a Jacqueminot, so big, so rich and lustrous in its dark beauty, that she could not help crying out with delight. He was pleased with her joy, and gave her another, "for your hair," he said. She colored with pleasure till her cheek was like the royal flower. "Hallo!" thought Farnham to himself, "she does not take these things as a matter of course." When they came into the garden again, he made the suggestion which had been in his mind for the last half hour. "If you are going home, the nearest way will be by the garden gate into Bishop's Lane. It is only a minute from there to Dean Street." "Why, that would be perfectly lovely. But where is the gate?" "I will show you." They walked together to the lower end of the lawn, where a long line of glass houses built against the high wall which separated the garden from the street called Bishop's Lane, sheltered the grapes and the pine-apples. At the end of this conservatory, in the wall, was a little door of thin but strong steel plates, concealed from sight by a row of pear trees. Farnham opened it, and said, "If you like, you can come in by this way. It is never locked in the daytime. It will save you a long walk." "Thanks," she replied. "That will be perfectly lovely." Her resources of expression were not copious, but her eyes and her mouth spoke volumes of joy and gratitude. Her hands were full of roses, and as she raised her beautiful face to him with pleasure flashing from her warm cheeks and lips and eyes, she seemed to exhale something of the vigorous life and impulse of the spring sunshine. Farnham felt that he had nothing to do but stoop and kiss the blooming flower-like face, and in her exalted condition she would have thought little more of it than a blush-rose thinks of the same treatment. But he refrained, and said "Good morning," because she seemed in no mood to say it first. "Good-by, for a day or two," she said, gayly, as she bent her head to pass under the low lintel of the gate. Farnham walked back to the house not at all satisfied with himself. "I wonder whether I have mended matters? She is certainly too pretty a girl to be running in and out of my front door in the sight of all the avenue. How much better will it be for her to use the private entrance, and come and go by a sort of stealth! But then she does not regard it that way. She is so ignorant of this wicked world that it seems to her merely a saving of ten minutes' walk around the block. Well! all there is of it, I must find a place for her before she domesticates herself here." The thought of what should be done with her remained persistently with him and kept him irritated by the vision of her provoking and useless beauty. "If she were a princess," he thought, "all the poets would be twanging their lyres about her, all the artists would be dying to paint her; she would have songs made to her, and sacred oratorios given under her patronage. She would preside at church fairs and open the dance at charity balls. If I could start her in life as a princess, the thing would go on wheels. But to earn her own living--that is a trade of another complexion. She has not breeding or education enough for a governess: she is not clever enough to write or paint; she is not steady enough, to keep accounts,--by the Great Jornada! I have a grievous contract on my hands." He heard the sound of hoofs outside his window, and, looking out, saw his groom holding a young brown horse by the bridle, the well-groomed coat of the animal shining in the warm sunlight. In a few moments Farnham was in the saddle and away. For awhile he left his perplexities behind, in the pleasure of rapid motion and fresh air. But he drew rein half an hour afterward at Acland Falls, and the care that had sat on the crupper came to the front again. "As a last resort," he said, "I can persuade her she has a voice, and send her to Italy, and keep her the rest of her life cultivating it in Milan." All unconscious of the anxiety she was occasioning, Maud walked home with her feet scarcely aware of the pavement. She felt happy through and through. There was little thought, and we may say little selfishness in the vague joy that filled her. The flowers she held in her hands recalled the faint odors she had inhaled in Farnham's house; they seemed to her a concrete idea of luxury. Her mind was crowded and warmed with every detail of her visit: the dim, wide hall; the white cravat of Budsey; the glimpse she caught of the dining-room through the open door; the shimmer of cut glass and porcelain; the rich softness of the carpets and rugs, the firelight dancing on the polished brass, the tender glow of light and repose of shadow on the painted walls and ceilings; the walk in the trim garden, amid the light and fragrance of the spring; the hot air of the rose-house, which held her close, and made her feel faint and flushed, like a warm embrace; and through all the ever-present image of the young man, with his pleasant, unembarrassed smile, the white teeth shining under the dark mustache; the eyes that seemed to see through her, and yet told her nothing; and more than all this to poor Maud, the perfect fit and fashion of his clothes, filled her with a joyous trouble. She could not dwell upon her plans for employment. She felt as if she had found her mission, her true trade,--which was to walk in gardens and smell hot-house roses. The perplexities which filled Farnham's head as to what he should do with her found no counterpart in hers. She had stopped thinking and planning; things were going very well with her as it was. She had lost the place she had wished and expected, and yet this was the pleasantest day of her life. Her responsibility seemed shifted to stronger hands. It had become Farnham's business to find something nice for her: this would be easy for him; he belonged to the class to whom everything is easy. She did not even trouble herself to think what it would be as she loitered home in the sunshine. She saw her father and informed him in a few words of her failure; then went to her room and sat down by her window, and looked for hours at the sparkling lake. She was called to supper in the midst of her reverie. She was just saying to herself, "If there was just one man and one woman in the world, and I had the picking out of the man and the woman, this world would suit me pretty well." She resented being called into other society than that of her idle thoughts, and sat silent through supper, trying to keep the thread of her fancies from breaking. But she was not allowed to go back undisturbed to her fool's paradise. Sleeny, who had scarcely removed his eyes from her during the meal, rose with a start as she walked into the little sitting-room of the family, and followed her. She went to the window with a novel to make use of the last moments of daylight. He stood before her without speaking, until she raised her eyes, and said sharply: "Well, Sam, what's the matter?" He was not quick either of thought or speech. He answered: "Oh! nothin'. Only----" "Only what?" she snapped. "Won't you go and take a walk by the Bluff?" She threw down her book at once. She liked exercise and fresh air, and always walked with pleasure by the lake. Sam was to her such a nullity that she enjoyed his company almost as much as being alone. She was ready in a moment, and a short walk brought them to the little open place reserved for public use, overlooking the great fresh-water sea. There were a few lines of shade trees and a few seats, and nothing more; yet the plantation was called Bluff Park, and it was much frequented on holidays and Sundays by nurses and their charges. It was in no sense a fashionable resort, or Maud would never have ventured there in company with her humble adorer. But among the jovial puddlers and brake-men that took the air there, it was well enough to have an escort so devoted and so muscular. So pretty a woman could scarcely have walked alone in Bluff Park without insulting approaches. Maud would hardly have nodded to Sleeny on Algonquin Avenue, for fear some millionaire might see it casually, and scorn them both. But on the Bluff she was safe from such accidents, and she sometimes even took his arm, and made him too happy to talk. They would walk together for an hour, he dumb with audacious hopes that paralyzed his speech, and she dreaming of things thousands of miles away. This evening he was even more than usually silent. Maud, after she had worn her reverie threadbare, noticed his speechlessness, and, fearing he was about to renew the subject which was so tiresome, suddenly stopped and said: "What a splendid sunset! Did you ever see anything like it?" "Yes," he said, with his gentle drawl. "Less set here, and look at it." He took his seat on one of the iron benches painted green, and decorated with castings of grapes and vine leaves. She sat down beside him and gazed out over the placid water, on which the crimson clouds cast a mellow glory. The sky seemed like another sea, stretching off into infinite distance, and strewn with continents of fiery splendor. Maud looked straight forward to the clear horizon line, marking the flight of ships whose white sails were dark against the warm brightness of the illumined water. But no woman ever looked so straight before her as not to observe the man beside her, and she knew, without moving her eyes from the spectacle of the sunset, that Sam was gazing fixedly at her, with pain and trouble in his face. At last, he said, in a timid, choking voice, "Mattie!" She did not turn her face, but answered: "If it ain't too much trouble, I'd like to have you call me Miss when we're alone. You'll be forgetting yourself, and calling me Mattie before other people, before you know it." "Hold on," he burst out. "Don't talk to me that way to-night--I can't stand it." She glanced at him in surprise. His face was pale and disordered; he was twisting his fingers as if he would break them. "Your temper seems to be on the move, Mr. Sleeny. We'd better go home," she said quietly, drawing her shawl about her. "Don't go till I tell you something," he stammered hastily. "I have no curiosity to hear what you have to say," she said, rising from her seat. "It ain't what you think--it ain't about me!" Her curiosity awoke, and she sat down again. Sleeny sat twisting his fingers, growing pale and red by turns. At last, in a tremulous voice, he said: "_I_ was there to-day." She stared at him an instant and said: "Where?" "Oh, I was there, and I seen you. I was at work at the end of the greenhouse there by the gate when you come out of the rose-house. I was watchin' for you. I was on the lawn talkin' with the gardener when you went in the house. About an hour afterward I seen you comin' down the garden with him to the rose-house. If you had stayed there a minute more, I would ha' went in there. But out you come with your hands full o' roses, and him and you come to the gate. I stopped workin' and kep' still behind them pear trees, and I heard everything." He uttered each word slowly, like a judge delivering sentence. His face had grown very red and hot, and as he finished his indictment he drew a yellow handkerchief from his pocket and mopped the sweat from his forehead, his chin, and the back of his neck. "Oh!" answered Maud, negligently, "you heard everything, did you? Well, you didn't hear much." "I tell you," he continued, with a sullen rage, "I heard every word. Do you hear me? I heard every word." The savage roughness of his voice made her tremble, but her spirits rose to meet his anger, and she laughed as she replied: "Well, you heard 'Thank you, sir,' and 'Good-morning.' It wasn't much, unless you took it as a lesson in manners, and goodness knows you need it." "Now, look'ye here. It's no use foolin' with me. You know what I heard. If you don't, I'll tell you!" "Very well, Mr. Paul Pry, what was it?" said the angry girl, who had quite forgotten that any words were spoken at the gate. "I heard him tell you you could come in any time the back way," Sam hoarsely whispered, watching her face with eyes of fire. She turned crimson as the sunset she was gazing at, and she felt as if she could have torn her cheeks with her fingernails for blushing. She was aware of having done nothing wrong, nothing to be ashamed of. She had been all day cherishing the recollection of her visit to Farnham as something too pleasant and delicate to talk about. No evil thought had mingled with it in her own mind. She had hardly looked beyond the mere pleasure of the day. She had not given a name or a form to the hopes and fancies that were fluttering at her heart. And now to have this sweet and secret pleasure handled and mauled by such a one as Sam Sleeny filled her with a speechless shame. Even yet she hardly comprehended the full extent of his insinuation. He did not leave her long in doubt. Taking her silence and her confusion as an acknowledgment, he went on, in the same low, savage tone: "I had my hammer in my hand. I looked through the pear trees to see if he kissed you. If he had 'a' done it, I would have killed him as sure as death." At this brutal speech she turned pale a moment, as if suddenly struck a stunning blow. Then she cried out: "Hold your vile tongue, you----" But she felt her voice faltering and the tears of rage gushing from her eyes. She buried her face in her hands and sat a little while in silence, while Sam was dumb beside her, feeling like an awkward murderer. She was not so overcome that she did not think very rapidly during this moment's pause. If she could have slain the poor fellow on the spot, she would not have scrupled to do so; but she required only an instant to reflect that she had better appease him for the present, and reserve her vengeance for a more convenient season. She dried her eyes and turned them on him with an air of gentle, almost forgiving reproach. "Sam! I could not have believed you had such a bad, wicked heart. I thought you knew me better. I won't make myself so cheap as to explain all that to you. But I'll ask yon to do one thing for me. When we go home this evening, if you see my father alone, you tell him what you saw--and if you've got any shame in you you'll be ashamed of yourself." He had been irritated by her anger, but he was completely abashed by the coolness and gentleness which followed her burst of tears. He was sorely confused and bewildered by her command, but did not dream of anything but obeying it, and as they walked silently home, he was all the time wondering what mysterious motive she could have in wishing him to denounce her to her father. They found Saul Matchin sitting by the door, smoking a cob-pipe. Maud went in and Sam seated himself beside the old man. "How'd you get along at Farnham's?" said Saul. Sam started, as if "the boss" had read his uneasy conscience. But he answered in his drawling monotone: "All right, I guess. That doggoned Scotchman thinks he knows it all; but it'll take nigh on to a week to do what I could ha' done in a day or two, if I worked my way." "Well," said Saul, "that ain't none o' your lookout. Do what Scotchee tells you, and I'll keep the time on 'em. We kin stand it, ef they kin," and the old carpenter laughed with the foolish pleasure of a small mind aware of an advantage. "Ef Art. Farnham wants to keep a high-steppin' Scotchman to run his flowers, may be he kin afford it. I ain't his gardeen." Now was Sleeny's chance to make his disclosure; but his voice trembled in spite of him, as he said: "I seen Mattie up there." "Yes," said the old man, tranquilly. "She went up to see about a place in the library. He said there wasn't none, but he'd try to think o' somethin' else that 'ud suit her. He was mighty polite to Mat--give her some roses, and telled her to run in and out when she liked, till he got somethin' fixed. Fact is, Mat is a first-rate scholar, and takes with them high-steppers, like fallin' off a log." Saul had begun to feel a certain pride in his daughter's accomplishments which had so long been an affliction to him. The moment he saw a possibility of a money return, he even began to plume himself upon his liberality and sagacity in having educated her. "I've spared nothin'--Sam--in giving her a----" he searched an instant for a suitable adjective, "a commodious education." The phrase pleased him so well that he smoked for awhile contemplatively, so as not to mar the effect of his point. Sam had listened with, a whirling brain to the old man's quiet story, which anticipated his own in every point. He could not tell whether he felt more relieved or disquieted by it. It all seemed clear and innocent enough; but he felt, with a sinking heart, that his own hopes were fading fast, in the flourishing prospects of his beloved. He hated Farnham not less in his attitude of friendly protection than in that which he had falsely attributed to him. His jealousy, deprived of its specific occasion, nourished itself on vague and torturing possibilities. He could not trust himself to talk further with Matchin, but went away with a growing fire in his breast. He hated himself for having prematurely spoken. He hated Maud for the beauty that she would not give him, and which, he feared, she was ready to give to another. He hated Saul, for his stolid ignorance of his daughter's danger. He hated most of all Farnham, for his handsome face, his easy smile, his shapely hands, his fine clothes, his unknown and occult gifts of pleasing. "'Tain't in natur," he growled. "She's the prettiest woman in the world. If he's got eyes, he knows it. But I spoke first, and he shan't have her, if I die for it." V. A PROFESSIONAL REFORMER. Sleeny walked moodily down the street, engaged in that self-torture which is the chief recreation of unhappy lovers. He steeped his heart in gall by imagining Maud in love with another. His passion stimulated his slow wits into unwonted action, until his mind began to form exasperating pictures of intimacies which drove him half mad. His face grew pale, and his fists were tightly clinched as he walked. He hardly saw the familiar street before him; he had a far clearer vision of Maud and Farnham by the garden gate: her beautiful face was turned up to the young man's with the winning sweetness of a flower, and Sam's irritated fancy supplied the kisses he had watched for in the shadow of the pear-trees. "I 'most wish't he'd 'a' done it," he growled to himself. "I had my hammer in my hand, and I could 'a' finished him then and had no more bother." He felt a hand on his shoulder, and, turning, saw a face grinning a friendly recognition. It was a face whose whole expression was oleaginous. It was surmounted by a low and shining forehead covered by reeking black hair, worn rather long, the ends being turned under by the brush. The mustache was long and drooping, dyed black and profusely oiled, the dye and the grease forming an inharmonious compound. The parted lips, which were coarse and thin, displayed an imperfect set of teeth, much discolored with tobacco. The eyes were light green, with the space which should have been white suffused with yellow and red. It was one of those gifted countenances which could change in a moment from a dog-like fawning to a snaky venomousness. The man wore a black hat of soft felt; his clothes were black and glistening with use and grease. He was of medium height, not especially stout, but still strong and well knit; he moved too briskly for a tramp, and his eyes were too sly and furtive to belong to an honest man. "Well, Samivel!" he began, with a jolly facetiousness, "what's your noble game this evenin'? You look like you was down on your luck. Is the fair one unkind?" Sam turned upon him with an angry gesture. "Hold your jaw, or I'll break it for you! Ever since I was fool enough to mention that thing to you, you've been cacklin' about it. I've had enough of it." "Go slow, Quaker!" the man rejoined. "If you can't take a joke, I'll stop jokin'--that settles it. Come along and get a glass of beer, and you'll feel better." They soon came to a garden near the lake, and sat down by a little table at their beer. The consumers were few and silent. The garden was dimly lighted, for the spring came slowly up that way, and the air was not yet conducive to out-door idling. The greasy young man laid a dirty hand on the arm of Sleeny, and said: "Honor bright, now, old fellow, I didn't mean to rough, you when I said that. I don't want to hurt your feelings or lose your confidence. I want you to tell me how you are gettin' along. You ain't got no better friend than me nowhere." "Oh," said Sam, sulkily, "I got nothin' to say. She don't no more care for me than that there mug." The expression that came over his friend's face at these discouraged words was not one of sympathetic sorrow. But he put some sympathy into his voice as he said: "Jest think of that! Such a fine young fellow as you are, too. Where can her eyes be? And I seen you walking this evenin' by the lake just like two robins. And yet you don't get ahead any!" "Not a step," said Sam. "Anybody in your light, you think? Hullo there, Dutchy, swei glass. Any other fellow takin' your wind?" and his furtive eyes darted a keen interrogation. Sam did not answer at once, and his friend went on: "Why, she don't hardly know anybody but me and you, and, he-he! I wouldn't stand no chance at all against you--hum?" "Of course you wouldn't," said Sam, with slow contempt, which brought the muddy blood into the sallow cheek in front of him. "She wouldn't look at you. I'm not afraid of no man, Andy Offitt,--I'm afraid of money." He flattered his jealous heart by these words. It was too intolerable to think that any mere man should take his sweetheart away from him; and though he felt how hopeless was any comparison between himself and Farnham, he tried to soothe himself by the lie that they were equal in all but money. His words startled his friend Offitt. He exclaimed, "Why, who does she know that's got money?" But Sleeny felt a momentary revolt against delivering to even his closest confidant the name of the woman he loved coupled with the degrading suspicions by which he had been tormented all day. He gruffly answered: "That's none of your business; you can't help me in this thing, and I ain't agoin' to chin about it any more." They sat for awhile in silence, drank their beer, and ordered more. Offitt at last spoke again: "Well, I'll be hanged if you ain't the best grit of any fellow I know. If you don't want to talk, a team of Morgan horses couldn't make you. I like a man that can hold his tongue." "Then I'm your huckleberry," said Sleeny, whose vanity was soothed by the compliment. "That's so," said Offitt, with an admiring smile. "If I wanted a secret kept, I'd know where to come." Then changing his manner and tone to an expression of profound solemnity, and glancing about to guard against surprise, he said: "My dear boy, I've wanted to talk to you a long time,--to talk serious. You're not one of the common kind of cattle that think of nothin' but their fodder and stall--are you?" Now, Sam was precisely of the breed described by his friend, but what man ever lived who knew he was altogether ordinary? He grinned uneasily and answered: "I guess not." "Exactly!" said Offitt. "There are some of us laboring men that don't propose to go on all our lives working our fingers off to please a lot of vampires; we propose to have a little fairer divide than heretofore; and if there is any advantage to be gained, we propose to have it on the side of the men who do the work. What do you think of that?" "That's all solid," said Sleeny, who was indifferently interested in these abstractions. "But what you goin' to do about it?" "Do!" cried Offitt. "We are goin' to make war on capital. We are goin' to scare the blood-suckers into terms. We are goin' to get our rights-- peaceably, if we can't get them any other way. We are goin' to prove that a man is better than a moneybag." He rattled off these words as a listless child says its alphabet without thinking of a letter. But he was closely watching Sam to see if any of these stereotyped phrases attracted his attention. Sleeny smoked his cigar with the air of polite fatigue with which one listens to abstract statements of moral obligations. "What are we, anyhow?" continued the greasy apostle of labor. "We are slaves; we are Roosian scurfs. We work as many hours as our owners like; we take what pay they choose to give us; we ask their permission to live and breathe." "Oh, that's a lie!" Sleeny interrupted, with unbroken calmness. "Old Saul Matchin and me come to an agreement about time and pay, and both of us was suited. Ef he's got his heel onto me, I don't feel it" Offitt darted a glance of scorn upon the ignoble soul who was content with his bondage; but the mention of Matchin reminded him that he had a final shot in reserve, and he let it off at once. "Yes, Saul Matchin is a laborin' man himself; but look at his daughter. She would die before she would marry a workman. Why?" and his green eyes darted livid fire as they looked into the troubled ones of Sleeny. "Well, why?" he asked, slowly. "Because she loves money more than manhood. Because she puts up her beauty for a higher bidder than any------" "Now, shet up, will you?" cried Sam, thoroughly aroused. "I won't set here and hear her abused by you or any other man. What business is it of yours, anyway?" Offitt felt that his shot had gone home, and pursued his advantage. "It's my business, Sam, because I'm your friend; because I hate to see a good fellow wronged; because I know that a man is better than a moneybag. Why, that girl would marry you in a minute if you was rich. But because you're not she will strike for one of them rose-water snobs on Algonquin Avenue." Sam writhed, and his wheedling tormentor continued, watching him like a ferret. "Perhaps she has struck for one of them already--perhaps--oh, I can't say what may have happened. I hate the world when I see such doin's. I hate the heartless shams that give labor and shame to the toilers and beauty and luxury to the drones. Who is the best man," he asked, with honest frankness, "you, or some high-steppin' snob whose daddy has left him the means to be a loafer all his days? And who would the prettiest girl in Buffland prefer, you or the loafer? And you intend to let Mr. Loafer have it all his own way?" "No, I don't!" Sam roared, like a baited bull. "Ef any man crosses my path, he can find out which is the best man." "There, that's more like you. But what can you do alone? That's where they get us foul. The erristocrats, the money power, all hang together. The laborin' men fight singly, and alwuz get whipped. Now, we are goin' to change that. We are goin' to organize. Look here, Sam, I am riskin' my head in tellin' you this--but I trust you, and I like you, and I'll tell you. We _have_ organized. We've got a society in this town pledged to the cause of honest labor and against capital--for life or death. We want you. We want men of sand and men of sense, and you've got both. You must join." Sam Sleeny was by this time pretty well filled with beer and wrath. He felt himself in a certain sense bound by the weighty secret which Offitt had imparted to him and flattered by his invitation. A few touches more of adroit flattery, and the agitator's victory was complete. Sleeny felt sore and tired to the very heart. He had behaved like a brute to the girl he loved; he had been put clearly in the wrong in his quarrel with her, and yet he was certain that all was not well with either of them. The tormenting syllogism ran continually through his head: "She is the prettiest woman in the world--rich fellows like pretty women,--therefore--death and curses on him!" Or sometimes the form of it would change to this: "He is rich and handsome--girls like men who are rich and handsome,--therefore------," the same rage and imprecations, and the same sense of powerless fury. He knew and cared nothing about Offitt's Labor Reform. He could earn a good living by his trade no matter who went to Congress, and he hated these "chinny bummers," as he called them, who talked about "State help and self-help" over their beer. But to-night he was tormented and badgered to such a point that he was ready for anything which his tempter might suggest. The words of Offitt, alternately wheedling and excoriating, had turned his foolish head. His hatred of Farnham was easily extended to the class to which he belonged, and even to the money which made him formidable. He walked away from the garden with Offitt, and turned down a filthy alley to a squalid tenement house,--called by its proprietor Perry Place, and by the neighbors Rook's Ranch,--to the lodge-room of the Brotherhood of Bread-winners, which proved to be Offitt's lodging. They found there a half dozen men lounging about the entrance, who scowled and swore at Offitt for being late, and then followed him sulkily up two flights of ill-smelling stairs to his room. He turned away their wrath by soft answers, and hastily lighting a pair of coal-oil lamps, which gave forth odor more liberally than illumination, said briskly: "Gentlemen, I have brought you a recruit this evenin' that you will all be glad to welcome to our brotherhood." The brothers, who had taken seats where they could find them, on a dirty bed, a wooden trunk, and two or three chairs of doubtful integrity, grunted a questionable welcome to the new-comer. As he looked about him, he was not particularly proud of the company in which he found himself. The faces he recognized were those of the laziest and most incapable workmen in the town--men whose weekly wages were habitually docked for drunkenness, late hours, and botchy work. As the room gradually filled, it seemed like a roll-call of shirks. Among them came also a spiritual medium named Bott, as yet imperfectly developed, whose efforts at making a living by dark seances too frequently resulted in the laughter of skeptics and the confusion of his friends. His forehead and cheek were even then purple with an aniline dye, which some cold-blooded investigator had squirted in his face a few nights before while he was gliding through a twilight room impersonating the troubled shade of Pocahontas. This occurrence gave, for the moment, a peculiarly sanguinary and sinister character to his features, and filled his heart with a thirst for vengeance against an unbelieving world. After the meeting had been called to order, and Sam had taken an oath of a hot and lurid nature, in which he renounced a good many things he had never possessed, and promised to do a lot of things of which he had no idea, Mr. Offitt asked "if any brother had anything to offer for the good of the order." This called Mr. Bott to his feet, and he made a speech, on which he had been brooding all day, against the pride of so-called science, the arrogance of unrighteous wealth, and the grovelling superstition of Christianity. The light of the kerosene lamp shone full on the decorated side of his visage, and touched it to a ferocious purpose. But the brotherhood soon wearied of his oratory, in which the blasphemy of thought and phrase was strangely contrasted with the ecclesiastical whine which he had caught from the exhorters who were the terror of his youth. The brothers began to guy him without mercy. They requested him to "cheese it"; they assisted him with uncalled-for and inappropriate applause, and one of the party got behind him and went through the motion of turning a hurdy-gurdy. But he persevered. He had joined the club to practise public speaking, and he got a good half hour out of the brothers before they coughed him down. When he had brought his speech to a close, and sat down to wipe his streaming face, a brother rose and said, in a harsh, rasping voice, "I want to ask a question." "That's in order, Brother Bowersox," said Offitt. The man was a powerful fellow, six feet high. His head was not large, but it was as round as an apple, with heavy cheek-bones, little eyes, close-cut hair, and a mustache like the bristles of a blacking-brush. He had been a driver on a streetcar, but had recently been dismissed for insolence to passengers and brutality to his horses. "What I want to ask is this: I want to know if we have joined this order to listen to chin-music the rest of our lives, or to do somethin'. There is some kind of men that kin talk tell day of jedgment, lettin' Gabrel toot and then beginnin' ag'in. I ain't that kind; I j'ined to do somethin';--what's to be done?" He sat down with his hand on his hip, squarely facing the luckless Bott, whose face grew as purple as the illuminated side of it. But he opened not his mouth. Offitt answered the question: "I would state," he said glibly, "the objects we propose to accomplish: the downfall of the money power, the rehabitation of labor, the----" "Oh, yes!" Bowersox interrupted, "I know all about that,--but what are we goin' to _do?_" Offitt paled a little, but did not flinch at the savage tone of the surly brute. He began again in his smoothest manner: "I am of the opinion that the discussion of sound principles, such as we have listened to to-night, is among the objects of our order. After that, organization for mutual profit and protection against the minions of the money power,--for makin' our influence felt in elections,--for extendin' a helpin' hand to honest toil,--for rousin' our bretheren from their lethargy, which, like a leaden pall----" "I want to know," growled Bowersox, with sullen obstinacy, "what's to be done." "Put your views in the form of a motion, that they may be properly considered by the meetin'," said the imperturbable president. "Well, I motion that we stop talkin' and commence doin'----" "Do you suggest that a committee be appointed for that purpose?" "Yes, anything." And the chairman appointed Bowersox, Bott, and Folgum such a committee. All breathed more freely and felt as if something practical and energetic had been accomplished. The committee would, of course, never meet nor report, but the colloquy and the prompt action taken upon it made every one feel that the evening had been interesting and profitable. Before they broke up, Sleeny was asked for his initiation fee of two dollars, and all the brethren were dunned for their monthly dues. "What becomes of this money?" the neophyte bluntly inquired of the hierophant. "It pays room rent and lights," said Offitt, with unabashed front, as he returned his greasy wallet to his pocket. "The rest goes for propagatin' our ideas, and especially for influencin' the press." Sleeny was a dull man, but he made up his mind on the way home that the question which had so long puzzled him--how Offitt made his living--was partly solved. VI. TWO MEN SHAKE HANDS. Sleeny, though a Bread-winner in full standing, was not yet sufficiently impressed with the wrongs of labor to throw down his hammer and saw. He continued his work upon Farnham's conservatory, under the direction of Fergus Ferguson, the gardener, with the same instinctive fidelity which had always characterized him. He had his intervals of right feeling and common sense, when he reflected that Farnham had done him no wrong, and probably intended no wrong to Maud, and that he was not answerable for the ill luck that met him in his wooing, for Maud had refused him before she ever saw Farnham. But, once in a while, and especially when he was in company with Offitt, an access of jealous fury would come upon him, which found vent in imprecations which were none the less fervid for being slowly and haltingly uttered. The dark-skinned, unwholesome-looking Bread-winner found a singular delight in tormenting the powerful young fellow. He felt a spontaneous hatred for him, for many reasons. His shapely build, his curly blond hair and beard, his frank blue eye, first attracted his envious notice; his steady, contented industry excited in him a desire to pervert a workman whose daily life was a practical argument against the doctrines of socialism, by which Offitt made a part of his precarious living; and after he had met Maud Matchin and had felt, as such natures will, the force of her beauty, his instinctive hate became an active, though secret, hostility. She had come one evening with Sleeny to a spiritualist conference frequented by Offitt, and he had at once inferred that Sleeny and she were either engaged to be married or on the straight road toward it. It would be a profanation of the word to say that he loved her at first sight. But his scoundrel heart was completely captivated so far as was possible to a man of his sort. He was filled and fired with a keen cupidity of desire to possess and own such beauty and grace. He railed against marriage, as he did against religion and order, as an invention of priests and tyrants to enslave and degrade mankind; but he would gladly have gone to any altar whatever in company with Maud Matchin. He could hardly have said whether he loved or hated her the more. He loved her much as the hunter loves the fox he is chasing to its death. He wanted to destroy anything which kept her away from him: her lover, if she had one; her pride, her modesty, her honor, if she were fancy-free. Aware of Sleeny's good looks, if not of his own ugliness, he hated them both for the comeliness that seemed to make them natural mates for each other. But it was not in his methods to proceed rashly with either. He treated Maud with distant respect, and increased his intimacy with Sleeny until he found, to his delight, that he was not the prosperous lover that he feared. But he still had apprehensions that Sleeny's assiduity might at last prevail, and lost no opportunity to tighten the relations between them, to poison and pervert the man who was still a possible rival. By remaining his most intimate friend, he could best be informed of all that occurred in the Matchin family. One evening, as Sam was about leaving his work, Fergus Ferguson said: "You'll not come here the morn. You're wanted till the house--a bit o' work in the library. They'll be tellin' you there." This was faithfully reported by Sam to his confessor that same night. "Well, you are in luck. I wish I had your chance," said Offitt. Sam opened his blue eyes in mute wonder. "Well, what's the chance, and what would you do with it, ef you had it?" Offitt hesitated a moment before replying. "Oh, I was just a jokin'. I meant it was such an honor for common folks like us to git inside of the palace of a high-toned cuss like Farnham; and the fact is, Sammy," he continued, more seriously, "I _would_ like to see the inside of some of these swell places. I am a student of human nature, you know, in its various forms. I consider the lab'rin' man as the normal healthy human--that is, if he don't work too hard. I consider wealth as a kind of disease; wealth and erristocracy is a kind of dropsy. Now, the true reformer is like a doctor,--he wants to know all about diseases, by sight and handlin'! I would like to study the symptoms of erristocracy in Farnham's house--right in the wards of the hospital." "Well, that beats me," said Sam. "I've been in a lot of fine houses on Algonquin Avenue, and I never seen anything yet that favored a hospital." This dense stupidity was almost more than Offitt could bear. But a ready lie came to his aid. "Looky here!" he continued, "I'll tell you a secret. I'm writin' a story for the 'Irish Harp,' and I want to describe the residence of jess such a vampire as this here Farnham. Now, writin', as I do, in the cause of humanity, I naturally want to git my facts pretty near right. You kin help me in this. I'll call to-morrow to see you while you're there, and I'll get some p'ints that'll make Rome howl when they come out." Sam was hardly educated up to the point his friend imagined. His zeal for humanity and the "rehabitation" of labor was not so great as to make him think it a fine thing to be a spy and a sneak in the houses of his employers. He was embarrassed by the suggestion, and made no reply, but sat smoking his pipe in silence. He had not the diplomatist's art of putting a question by with a smile. Offitt had tact enough to forbear insisting upon a reply. He was, in fact, possessed of very considerable natural aptitude for political life. He had a quick smile and a ready tongue; he liked to talk and shake hands; he never had an opinion he was not willing to sell; he was always prepared to sacrifice a friend, if required, and to ask favors from his worst enemies. He called himself Andrew Jackson Offitt--a name which, in the West, is an unconscious brand. It generally shows that the person bearing it is the son of illiterate parents, with no family pride or affections, but filled with a bitter and savage partisanship which found its expression in a servile worship of the most injurious personality in American history. But Offitt's real name was worse than Andrew Jackson--it was Ananias, and it was bestowed in this way: When he was about six years old, his father, a small farmer in Indiana, who had been a sodden, swearing, fighting drunkard, became converted by a combined attack of delirium tremens and camp-meeting, and resolved to join the church, he and his household. The morning they were going to the town of Salem for that purpose, he discovered that his pocket had been picked, and the money it contained was found on due perquisition in the blue jeans trousers of his son Andrew Jackson. The boy, on being caught, was so nimble and fertile in his lies that the father, in a gust of rage, declared that he was not worthy the name of the great President, but that he should be called Ananias; and he was accordingly christened Ananias that morning in the meeting-house at Salem. As long as the old man lived, he called him by that dreadful name; but when a final attack of the trembling madness had borne him away from earth, the widow called the boy Andrew again, whenever she felt careless about her spiritual condition, and the youth behaved himself, but used the name of Sapphira's husband when the lad vexed her, or the obligations of the christening came strongly back to her superstitious mind. The two names became equally familiar to young Offitt, and always afterward he was liable to lapses of memory when called on suddenly to give his prenomen; and he frequently caused hateful merriment among his associates by signing himself Ananias. When Sam presented himself at Captain Farnham's house the next morning, he was admitted by Budsey, who took him to the library and showed him the work he was to do. The heat of the room had shrunk the wood of the heavy doors of carved oak so that the locks were all out of position. Farnham was seated by his desk, reading and writing letters. He did not look up as Sam entered, and paid no attention to the instructions Budsey was giving him. For the first time in his life, Sleeny found that this neglect of his presence was vaguely offensive to him. A week before, he would no more have thought of speaking to Farnham, or being spoken to by him, than of entering into conversation with one of the busts on the book-cases. Even now he had no desire to talk with the proprietor of the house. He had come there to do certain work which he was capable of doing well, and he preferred to do it and not be bothered by irrelevant gossip. But, in spite of himself, he felt a rising of revolt in his heart, as he laid out his tools, against the quiet gentleman who sat with his back to him, engaged in his own work and apparently unconscious of Sleeny's presence. A week before, they had been nothing to each other, but now a woman had come between them, and there is no such powerful conductor in nature. The quiet in which Farnham sat seemed full of insolent triumph to the luckless lover, and scraps of Offitt's sounding nonsense went through his mind: "A man is more than a money-bag"; "the laborer is the true gentleman"; but they did not give him much comfort. Not until he became interested in his work did he recover the even beat of his pulse and the genuine workmanlike play of his faculties. Then he forgot Farnham's presence in his turn, and enjoyed himself in a rational way with his files and chisels and screwdrivers. He had been at work for an hour at one door, and had finished it to his satisfaction, and sat down before another, when he heard the bell ring, and Budsey immediately afterward ushered a lady through the hall and into the drawing-room. His heart stood still at the rustle of the dress,--it sounded so like Maud's; he looked over his shoulder through the open door of the library and saw, to his great relief, that there were two female figures taking their seats in the softly lighted room beyond. One sat with her back to the light, and her features were not distinctly visible; the other was where he could see three-quarters of her face clearly relieved against the tapestry portiere. There is a kind of beauty which makes glad every human heart that gazes on it, if not utterly corrupt and vile, and it was such a face as this that Sam Sleeny now looked at with a heart that grew happier as he gazed. It was a morning face, full of the calm joy of the dawn, of the sweet dreams of youth untroubled by love, the face of Aurora before she met Tithonus. From the little curls of gold on the low brow to the smile that hovered forever, half formed, on the softly curving lips and over the rounded chin, there was a light of sweetness, and goodness, and beauty, to be read of all men, and perhaps in God's good time to be worshipped by one. Budsey announced "Mrs. Belding and Miss Halice," and Farnham hastened to greet them. If Sam Sleeny had few happy hours to enjoy, he could at least boast himself that one was beginning now. The lovely face bore to his heart not only the blessing of its own beauty, but also a new and infinitely consoling thought. He had imagined till this moment, in all seriousness, that Maud Matchin was the prettiest woman in the world, and that therefore all men who saw her were his rivals, the chief of whom was Farnham. But now he reflected, with a joyful surprise, that in this world of rich people there were others equally beautiful, and that here, under Farnham's roof, on terms of familiar acquaintance with him, was a girl as faultless as an angel,--one of his own kind. "Why, of course," he said to himself, with a candid and happy self-contempt, "that's _his_ girl--you dunderheaded fool--what are you botherin' about?" He took a delight which he could not express in listening to the conversation of these friends and neighbors. The ladies had come over, in pursuance of an invitation of Farnham's, to see the additions which had recently arrived from Europe to his collection of bronzes and pottery, and some little pictures he had bought at the English water-color exhibition. As they walked about the rooms, expressing their admiration of the profusion of pretty things which filled the cabinets and encumbered the tables, in words equally pretty and profuse, Sleeny listened to their voices as if it were music played to cheer him at his work. He knew nothing of the things they were talking about, but their tones were gentle and playful; the young lady's voice was especially sweet and friendly. He had never heard such voices before; they are exceptional everywhere in America, and particularly in our lake country, where the late springs develop fine high sopranos, but leave much to be desired in the talking tones of women. Alice Belding had been taught to use her fine voice as it deserved and Cordelia's intonations could not have been more "soft, gentle, and low,--an excellent thing in woman." After awhile, the voices came nearer, and he heard Farnham say: "Come in here a moment, please, and see my new netsukes; I got them at a funny little shop in Ostend. It was on a Sunday afternoon, and the man of the house was keeping the shop, and I should have got a great bargain out of him, but his wife came in before we were through, and scolded him for an imbecile and sent him into the back room to tend the baby, and made me pay twice what he had asked for my little monsters." By this time they were all in the library, and the young lady was laughing, not loudly, but musically, and Mrs. Belding was saying: "Served you right for shopping on Sunday. But they are adorable little images, for all that." "Yes," said Farnham, "so the woman told me, and she added that they were authentic of the twelfth century. I asked her if she could not throw off a century or two in consideration of the hard, times, and she laughed, and said I blagued, and honestly she didn't know how old they were, but it was _drole, tout de meme, qu'on put adorer un petit bon Dieu d'une laideur pareille._" "Really, I don't see how they can do it," said Mrs. Belden, solemnly; at which both the others laughed, and Miss Alice said, "Why, mamma, you have just called them adorable yourself." They went about the room, admiring, and touching, and wondering, with the dainty grace of ladies accustomed to rare and beautiful things, until the novelties were exhausted and they turned to go. But Budsey at that moment announced luncheon, and they yielded to Farnham's eager importunity, and remained to share his repast. They went to the dining-room, leaving Sleeny more than content. He still heard their voices, too distant to distinguish words; but he pleased himself by believing that there was a tender understanding in the tones of Farnham and Miss Belding when they addressed each other, and that it was altogether a family party. He had no longer any feeling of slight or neglect because none of them seemed aware of his presence while they were in the room with him. There was, on the contrary, a sort of comfort in the thought that he belonged to a different world from them; that he and Maud were shut out--shut out together--from the society and the interests which claimed the Beldings and the Farnhams. "You was a dunderheaded fool," he said, cheerfully apostrophizing himself again, "to think everybody was crazy after your girl." He was brought down to a lower level by hearing the door open, and the voice of Offitt asking if Mr. Sleeny was in. "No one of that name here," said Budsey. "I was told at Matchin's he was here." "Oh! the yonng man from Matchin's. He is in the library," and Offitt came in, looking more disreputable than usual, as he had greased his hair inordinately for the occasion. Budsey evidently regarded him with no favorable eye; he said to Sleeny, "This person says he comes from Matchin's; do you know him?" "Yes, it's all right," said Sam, who could say nothing less; but when Budsey had left them, he turned to Offitt with anything but welcome in his eye. "Well, you've come, after all." "Yes," Offitt answered, with an uneasy laugh. "Curiosity gets us all, from Eve down. What a lay-out this is, anyhow," and his small eyes darted rapidly around the room. "Say, Sam, you know Christy Fore, that hauls for the Safe Company? He was telling me about the safe he put into this room--said nobody'd ever guess it _was_ a safe. Where the devil is it?" "I don't know. It's none of my business, nor yours either." "I guess you got up wrong foot foremost, Sam, you're so cranky. Where can the ---- thing be? Three doors and two winders and a fire-place, and all the rest book-cases. By Jinx! there it is, I'll swear." He stepped over to one of the cases where a pair of oaken doors, rich with arabesque carving, veiled a sort of cabinet. He was fingering at them when Sam seized him by the shoulder, and said: "Look here, Andy, what _is_ your game, anyhow? I'm here on business, and I ain't no fence, and I'll just trouble you to leave." Offitt's face turned livid. He growled: "Of all Andylusian jacks, you're the beat. I ain't agoin' to hurt you nor your friend Farnham. I've got all the p'ints I want for my story, and devilish little thanks to you, neither. And say, tell me, ain't there a back way out? I don't want to go by the dinin'-room door. There's ladies there, and I ain't dressed to see company. Why, yes, this fits me like my sins," and he opened the French window, and stepped lightly to the gravel walk below, and was gone. Sleeny resumed his work, ill content with himself and his friend. "Andy is a smart fellow," he thought; "but he had no right to come snoopin' around where I was at work, jist to get points to worry Mr. Farnham with." The little party in the drawing-room was breaking up. He heard their pleasant last words, as the ladies resumed their wraps and Farnham accompanied them to the door. Mrs. Belding asked him to dinner, "with nobody but ourselves," and he accepted with a pleased eagerness. Sleeny got one more glimpse of the beautiful face under the gray hat and feather, and blessed it as it vanished out of the door. As Farnham came back to the library, he stood for a moment by Sam, and examined what he had done. "That's a good job. I like your work on the green-house, too. I know good work when I see it. I worked one winter as a boss carpenter myself." It seemed to Sleeny like the voice of a brother speaking to him. He thought the presence of the young lady had made everything in the house soft and gentle. "Where was you ever in that business?" he asked. "In the Black Hills. I sawed a million feet of lumber and built houses for two hundred soldiers. I had no carpenters; so I had to make some. I knew more about it when I got through than when I began." Sleeny laughed--a cordial laugh that wagged his golden beard and made his white teeth glisten. "I'll bet you did!" he replied. The two men talked a few minutes like old acquaintances; then Sleeny gathered up his tools and slung them over his shoulder, and as he turned to go both put out their hands at the same instant, with an impulse that surprised each of them, and said "Good-morning." VII. GHOSTLY COUNSEL. A man whose intelligence is so limited as that of Sam Sleeny is always too rapid and rash in his inferences. Because he had seen Farnham give Maud a handful of roses, he was ready to believe things about their relations that had filled him with fury; and now, because he had seen the same man talking with a beautiful girl and her mother, the conviction was fixed in his mind that Farnham's affections were placed in that direction, and that he was therefore no longer to be dreaded as a rival. He went home happier, in this belief, than he had been for many a day; and so prompt was his progress in the work of deceiving himself, that he at once came to the conclusion that little or nothing now stood between him and the crowning of his hopes. His happiness made him unusually loquacious, and at the supper-table he excited the admiration of Matchin and the surprise of Maud by his voluble history of the events of the day. He passed over Offitt's visit in silence, knowing that the Matchins detested him; but he spoke with energetic emphasis of the beauty of the house, the handsome face and kindly manners of Farnham, and the wonderful beauty and sweetness of Alice Belding. "Did that bold thing go to call on him alone?" cried Miss Maud, thoroughly aroused by this supposed offence against the proprieties of life. "Why, no, Mattie," said Sam, a little disconcerted. "Her ma was along." "Why didn't you say so, then?" asked the unappeased beauty. "I forgot all about the old lady, though she was more chinny than the young one. She just seemed like she was a-practisin' the mother-in-law, so as to do it without stumblin' when the time come." "Hullo! Do you think they are strikin' a match?" cried Saul, in high glee. "That would be first-rate. Keep the money and the property all together. There's too many of our rich girls marryin' out of the State lately--keeps buildin' dull." "I don't believe a word of it," Maud interposed. "He ain't a man to be caught by a simperin' schoolgirl. And as to money, He's got a plenty for two. He can please himself when he marries." "Yes, but may be he won't please you, Mattie, and that would be a pity," said the ironical Saul. The old man laughed loudly at his own sarcasm, and pushed his chair back from the table, and Maud betook herself to her own room, where she sat down, as her custom was, by the window, looking over the glowing lake, and striving to read her destiny as she gazed into the crimson and golden skies. She did not feel at all so sure as she pretended that there was no danger of the result that Sleeny had predicted; and now that she was brought face to face with it, she was confounded at discovering how much it meant to her. She was carrying a dream in her heart which would make or ruin her, according as it should prove true or false. She had not thought of herself as the future wife of Farnham with any clearness of hope, but she found she could not endure the thought of his marrying any one else and passing forever out of her reach. She sat there, bitterly ruminating, until the evening glow had died away from the lake and the night breeze spread its viewless wings and flapped heavily in over the dark ridge and the silent shore. Her thoughts had given her no light of consolation; her chin rested on her hands, her elbows on her knees; her large eyes, growing more luminous in the darkness, stared out at the gathering night, scarcely noting that the sky she gazed at had changed from a pompous scene of red and yellow splendor to an infinite field of tender and dark violet, fretted with intense small stars. "What shall I do?" she thought. "I am a woman. My father is poor. I have got no chance. Jurildy is happier to-day than I am, and got more sense." She heard a timid rap at her door, and asked, sharply: "Who's there?" "It's me," said Sleeny's submissive voice. "What do you want?" she asked again, without moving. "Mr. Bott give me two tickets to his seance tonight,"--Sam called it "seeuns,"--"and I thought mebbe you'd like to go." There was silence for a moment. Maud was thinking: "At any rate it will be better than to sit here alone and cry all the evening." So she said: "I'll come down in a minute." She heard Sam's heavy step descending the stairs, and thought what a different tread another person had; and she wondered whether she would ever "do better" than take Sam Sleeny; but she at once dismissed the thought. "I can't do that; I can't put my hand in a hand that smells so strong of sawdust as Sam's. But he is a good soul, and I am sorry for him, every time I look in the glass." Looking in the glass, as usual, restored her good humor, and she started off to the ghostly rendezvous with her faithful attendant. They never talked very much when they were alone together, and this evening both were thoughtful. Maud had never taken this commerce with ghosts much to heart. She had a feeling, which she could hardly have defined, that it was a common and plebeian thing to believe in it, and if she ever heard it ridiculed she joined in the cry without mercy. But it was an excitement and an interest in a life so barren of both that she could not afford to throw it away. She had not intelligence enough to be disgusted or shocked by it. If pressed to explain the amount of her faith in the whole business, she would probably have said she thought "there was something in it," and stopped at that. In minds like hers, there is no clearly drawn line between the unusual and the supernatural. An apparent miracle pleased her as it would please a child, without setting her to find out how it was done. She would consult a wizard, taking the chances of his having occult sources of information, with the same irregular faith in the unlikely with which some ladies call in homoeopathic practitioners. All the way to the rooms of Bott, she was revolving this thought in her mind: "Perhaps he could tell me something about Mr. Farnham. I don't think much of Bott; he has too many knuckles on his hands. I never saw a man with so many knuckles. I wouldn't mention Mr. Farnham to him to save his life, but I might get something out of him without telling him anything. He is certainly a very smart man, and whether it's spirits or not, he knows lots of things." It was in this mood that she entered the little apartment where Bott held what he called his "Intermundane Seances." The room was small and stuffy. A simulacrum of a chest of drawers in one corner was really Bott's bed, where the seer reposed at night, and which, tilted up against the wall during the day, contained the rank bedclothes, long innocent of the wash-tub. There were a dozen or so of cane-bottom chairs, a little table for a lamp, but no other furniture. At one side of the room was a small closet without a door, but with a dark and dirty curtain hung before its aperture. Around it was a wooden railing, breast high. A boy with a high forehead, and hair combed behind ears large and flaring like those of a rabbit, sat by the door, and took the tickets of invited guests and the half-dollars of the casuals. The seer received everybody with a nerveless shake of a clammy hand, showed them to seats, and exchanged a word or two about the weather, and the "conditions," favorable or otherwise, to spiritual activity. When he saw Maud and Sam his tallowy face flushed, in spots, with delight. He took them to the best places the room afforded, and stammered his pleasure that they had come. "Oh! the pleasure is all ours," said Maud, who was always self-possessed when she saw men stammering. "It's a great privilege to get so near to the truth as you bring us, Mr. Bott." The prophet had no answer ready; he merely flushed again in spots, and some new arrivals called him away. The room was now pretty well filled with the unmistakable crowd which always attend such meetings. They were mostly artisans, of more intellectual ambition than their fellows, whose love of the marvellous was not held in control by any educated judgment. They had long, serious faces, and every man of them wore long hair and a soft hat. Their women were generally sad, broken-spirited drudges, to whom this kind of show was like an opera or a ball. There were two or three shame-faced believers of the better class, who scoffed a little but trembled in secret, and a few avowed skeptics, young clerks on a mild spree, ready for fun if any should present itself. Bott stepped inside the railing by the closet, and placing his hands upon it, addressed the assembly. He did not know what peculiar shape the manifestations of the evening might take. They were in search of truth; all truth was good. They hoped for visitors from the unseen speers; he could promise nothing. In this very room the spirits of the departed had walked and talked with their friends; perhaps they might do it again; he knew not. How they mingled in the earth-life, he did not pretend to say; perhaps they materialized through the mejum; perhaps they dematerialized material from the audience which they rematerialized in visible forms; as to that, the opinion of another--he said with a spacious magnanimity--was as good as his. He would now request two of the audience to step up and tie him. One of the long-haired ruminant men stood up, and a young fellow, amid much nudging and giggling among the scorners, was also forced from his chair. They came forward, the believer with a business-like air, which showed practice, and the young skeptic blushing and ill at ease. Bott took a chair inside the curtain, and showed them how to tie him. They bound him hand and foot, the believer testified that the binding was solid, and the skeptic went to his seat, playfully stepping upon the toes of his scoffing friends. The curtain was lowered, and the lamp was turned down. In a few moments, a scuffling sound was heard in the closet, and Bott's coat came flying out into the room. The believer pulled back the curtain, and Botts sat in his chair, his shirt sleeves gleaming white in the dust. His coat was laid over his shoulders, and almost as soon as the curtain was lowered he yelled for light, and was disclosed sitting tied as before, clothed in his right coat. Again the curtain went down amid a sigh of satisfaction from the admiring audience, and a choking voice, which tried hard not to sound like Bott's, cried out from the closet: "Turn down the light; we want more power." The kerosene lamp was screwed down till hardly a spark illumined the visible darkness, and suddenly a fiery hand appeared at the aperture of the closet, slowly opening and shutting its long fingers. A half dozen voices murmured: "A spirit hand"; but Sam Sleeny whispered to Maud: "Them are Bott's knuckles, for coin." The hand was withdrawn and a horrible face took its place--a pallid corpse-like mask, with lambent fire sporting on the narrow forehead and the high cheek-bones. It stayed only an instant, but Sam said, "That's the way Bott will look in----" "Hush!" said Maud, who was growing too nervous to smile, for fear of laughing or crying. A sound of sobbing came from a seat to the right of them. A poor woman had recognized the face as that of her husband, who had died in the army, and she was drawing the most baleful inferences from its fiery adjuncts. A moment later, Bott came out of the closet, crouching so low that his head was hardly two feet from the ground. He had a sheet around his neck, covering his whole person, and a white cap over his head, concealing most of his face. In this constrained attitude he hopped about the clear space in front of the audience with a good deal of dexterity, talking baby-talk in a shrill falsetto. "Howdy, pappa! Howdy, mamma! Itty Tudie tum adin!" A rough man and woman, between joy and grief, were half hysterical. They talked to the toad-like mountebank in the most endearing tones, evidently believing it was their dead baby toddling before them. Two or three times the same horrible imposture was repeated. Bott never made his appearance without somebody recognizing him as a dear departed friend. The glimmering light, the unwholesome excitement, the servile credulity fixed by long habit, seemed to produce a sort of passing dementia upon the regular habitues. With these performances the first part came to an end. The light was turned on again, and the tying committee was requested to come forward and examine the cords with which Bott still seemed tightly bound. The skeptic remained scornfully in his seat, and so it was left for the believer to announce that not a cord had been touched. He then untied Bott, who came out from the closet, stretching his limbs as if glad to be free, and announced that there would be a short intermission for an interchange of views. As he came toward Maud, Sam rose and said: "Whew! he smells like a damp match. I'll go out and smoke a minute, and come back." Bott dropped into the seat which Sleeny had left. To one who has never attended one of these queer _cenacula_, it would be hard to comprehend the unhealthy and even nauseous character of the feeling and the conversation there prevalent. The usual decent restraints upon social intercourse seem removed. Subjects which the common consent of civilized creatures has banished from mixed society are freely opened and discussed. To people like the ordinary run of the believers in spiritism, the opera, the ballet, and the annual Zola are unknown, and they must take their excitements where they can find them. The dim light, the unhealthy commerce of fictitious ghosts, the unreality of act and sentiment, the unwonted abandon, form an atmosphere in which these second-hand mystics float away into a sphere where the morals and the manners are altogether different from those of their working days. Miss Matchin had not usually joined in these morbid discussions. She was of too healthy an organization to be tempted by so rank a mental feast as that, and she had a sort of fierce maidenhood about her which revolted at such exposures of her own thought. But to-night she was sorely perplexed. She had been tormented by many fancies as she looked out of her window into the deepening shadows that covered the lake. The wonders she had seen in that room, though she did not receive them with entire faith, had somewhat shaken her nerves; and now the seer sat beside her, his pale eyes shining with his own audacity, his lank hair dripping with sweat, his hands uneasily rubbing together, his whole attitude expressive of perfect subjection to her will. "Why isn't this a good chance?" she thought. "He is certainly a smart man. Horrid as he looks, he knows lots. May be he could tell me how to find out." She began in her airiest manner: "Oh, Mr. Bott, what a wonderful gift you have got! How you must look down on us poor mortals!" Bott grew spotted, and stammered: "Far from it, Miss Matchin. I couldn't look down on you." "Oh, you are flattering. That's not right, because I believe every word you say--and that ain't true." She rattled recklessly on in the same light tone. "I'm going to ask you something very particular. I don't know who can tell me, if you can't. How can a young lady find out whether a young gentleman is in love with her or not? Now, tell me the truth this time," she said with a nervous titter, "for it's very important." This question from any one else would not have disconcerted Bott in the least. Queries as absurd had frequently been put to him in perfect good faith, and answered with ready and impudent ignorance. But, at those giggling words of Maud Matchin, he turned livid and purple, and his breath came heavily. There was room for but one thought in that narrow heart and brain. He had long cherished a rather cowardly fondness for Maud, and now that this question was put to him by the agitated girl, his vanity would not suffer him to imagine that any one but himself was the subject of her dreams. There was, to him, nothing especially out of the way in this sort of indirect proposal on the part of a young woman. It was entirely in keeping with the general tone of sentiment among the people of his circle, which aimed at nothing less than the emancipation of the world from its old-fashioned decencies. But he would not answer hastily; he had a coward's caution. He looked a moment at the girl's brilliant color, her quick, high breathing, her eager eyes, with a gloating sense of his good luck. But he wanted her thoroughly committed. So he said, with an air in which there was already something offensively protecting: "Well, Miss Matchin, that depends on the speer. If the affection be unilateral, it is one thing; if it be recippercal, it is another. The currents of soul works in different ways." "But what I mean is, if a young lady likes a young gentleman pretty well, how is she going to find out for sure whether he likes her?" She went intrepidly through these words, though her cheeks were burning, and her eyes would fall in spite of her, and her head was singing. There was no longer any doubt in Bott's mind. He was filled with an insolent triumph, and thought only of delaying as long as possible the love chase of which he imagined himself the object. He said, slowly and severely: "The question is too imperious to be answered in haste. I will put myself in the hands of the sperruts, and answer it as they choose after the intermission." He rose and bowed, and went to speak a word or two to his other visitors. Sam came back and took his seat by Maud, and said: "I think the fun is about over. Less go home." "Go home yourself, if you want to," was the petulant reply. "I am going to stay for the inspirational discourse." "Oh, my!" said Sam. "That's a beautiful word. You don't know how pretty your mouth looks when you say that." Sam had had his beer, and was brave and good-natured. Bott retired once more behind the railing, but took his seat in a chair outside the curtain, in full view of the audience. He sat for some minutes motionless, staring at vacancy. He then slowly closed his eyes, and a convulsive shudder ran through his frame. This was repeated at rapid intervals, with more or less violence. He next passed his hands alternately over his forehead, as if he were wiping it, and throwing some invisible, sticky substance, with a vicious snap, to right and left. At last, after a final shudder, which stiffened him into the image of death for a moment, he rose to his feet and, leaning on the railing, began to intone, in a dismal whine, a speech of which we need give only the opening words. "Dear brothers and sisters of the earth-life! On pearly wings of gossamer-down we float down from our shining speers to bring you messages of the higher life. Let your earth-soul be lifted to meet our sperrut-soul; let your earth-heart blend in sweet accordion with our heaven-heart; that the beautiful and the true in this weary earth-life may receive the bammy influence of the Eden flowrets, and rise, through speers of disclosure, to the plane where all is beautiful and all is true." He continued in this strain for some time, to the evident edification of his audience, who listened with the same conventional tolerance, the same trust that it is doing your neighbor good, with which the ordinary audience sits under an ordinary sermon. Maud, having a special reason for being alert, listened with a real interest. But during his speech proper he made no allusion to the subject on which she had asked for light. It was after he had finished his harangue, and had gone through an _entr'acte_ of sighs and shudders, that he announced himself once more in the hands of the higher intelligences, and ready to answer questions. "It does not need," he whined, "the word of the month or the speech of the tongue to tell the sperruts what your souls desire. The burden of your soul is open to the sperrut-eye. There sits in this room a pure and lovely soul in quest of light. Its query is, How does heart meet heart in mutual knowledge?" Maud's cheek grew pale and then red, and her heart beat violently. But no one noticed her, and the seer went on. "If a true heart longs for another, there is no rest but in knowledge, there is no knowledge but in trewth, there is no trewth but in trust. Oh, my brother, if you love a female, tell your love. Oh, my sister, if you love--hum--if you love--hum--an individual of the opposite sex--oh, tell your love!--Down with the shams of a false-hearted society; down with the chains of silence that crushes your soul to the dust! If the object of your hearts' throbs is noble, he will respond. Love claims love. Love has a right to love. If he is base, go to a worthier one. But from your brave and fiery heart a light will kindle his, and dual flames will wrap two chosen natures in high-menial melodies, when once the revelating word is spoke." With these words he subsided into a deep trance, which lasted till the faithful grew tired of waiting, and shuffled slowly out of the door. When the last guest had gone, he rose from his chair, with no pretence of spiritual dignity, and counted his money and his tickets. He stretched himself in two chairs, drew his fingers admiringly through his lank locks, while a fatuous grin of perfect content spread over his face, as he said aloud to himself, "She has got it bad. I wonder whether she will have the nerve to ask me. I'll wait awhile, anyhow. I'll lose nothing by waiting." Meanwhile, Maud was walking rapidly home with Sam. She was excited and perplexed, and did not care to answer Sam's rather heavy pleasantries over the evening's performance. He ridiculed the spirit-lights, the voices, and the jugglery, without provoking a reply, and at last he said: "Well, what do you think of his advising the girls to pop? This ain't leap year!" "What of that?" she answered, hastily. "I don't see why a girl hasn't as good a right to speak her mind as a man." "Why, Mattie," said Sam, with slow surprise, "no decent girl would do that." They had come to Matchin's gate. She slipped in, then turned and said: "Well, don't be frightened, Mr. Sleeny; I'm not going to propose to you," and she was gone from his sight. She went directly to her room, and walked up and down a few moments without taking off her hat, moving with the easy grace and the suppressed passion of an imprisoned panther. Then she lighted her lamp and placed it on her bureau at one side of her glass. She searched in her closet and found a candle, which she lighted and placed on the other side of the glass. She undressed with reckless haste, throwing her clothes about on the floor, and sat down before her mirror with bare arms and shoulders, and nervously loosened her hair, watching every movement with blazing eyes. The thick masses of her blue-black curls fell down her back and over her sloping shoulders, which glowed with the creamy light of old ivory. The unequal rays of the lamp and candle made singular effects of shadow on the handsome face, the floating hair, and the strong and wholesome color of her neck and arms. She gazed at herself with eager eyes and parted lips, in an anxiety too great to be assuaged by her girlish pride in her own beauty. "This is all very well," she said, "but he will not see me this way. Oh! if I only dared to speak first. I wonder if it would be as the spirits said. 'If he is noble he will respond!' He _is_ noble, that's sure. 'Love claims love,' they said. But I don't know as I love him. I _would_, if that would fetch him, quick enough;" and the hot blood came surging up, covering neck and brow with crimson. VIII. A BUD AND A BLOSSOM. Farnham was sitting the next evening in his library, when Budsey entered and said Mr. Ferguson desired to see him. The gaunt Scotchman came in and said with feverish haste: "The cereus grandiflorus will be goin' to bloom the night. The buds are tremblin' and laborin' now." Farnham put on his hat and went to the conservatory, which was separated from the house by the entire extent of the garden. Arriving there, the gardener took him hurriedly to an inner room, dimly lighted,--a small square piece between the ferns and the grapes,--where the regal flower had a wall to itself. Two or three garden chairs were disposed about the room. Ferguson mounted on one of them, and turned up the gas so that its full light shone upon the plant. The bud was a very large one, perfect and symmetrical; the strong sheath, of a rich and even brown, as yet showed only a few fissures of its surface, but even now a faint odor stole from the travailing sphere, as from a cracked box of alabaster filled with perfume. The face of the canny Fergus was lighted up with an eager joy. He had watched the growth and progress of this plant from its infancy. He had leaned above its cradle and taken pride in its size and beauty. He had trained it over the wall--from which he had banished every rival--in large and graceful curves, reaching from the door of the fernery to the door of the grapery, till it looked, in the usual half light of the dim chamber, like a well-regulated serpent maturing its designs upon the neighboring paradise; and now the time was come when he was to see the fruit of his patience and his care. "Heaven be thankit," he murmured devoutly, "that I was to the fore when it came." "I thank you, Fergus, for calling me," said Farnham, smiling. "I know it must have cost you an effort to divide such a sight with any one." "It's your siller bought it," the Scotchman answered sturdily; "but there's nobody knows it, or cares for it, as I do,--and that's the truth." His glance was fixed upon the bud, which seemed to throb and stir as he spoke. The soft explosive force within was at work so strongly that the eye could watch its operation. The fissures of the sheath widened visibly and turned white as the two men looked at them. "It is a shame to watch this beautiful thing happening for only us," Farnham said to the gardener. "Go and tell Mrs. Belding, with my compliments, and ask her and Miss Belding to come down." But observing his crestfallen expression, he took compassion on him and said: "No, you had better remain, for fear something should happen in your absence. I will go for the ladies." "I hope ye'll not miss it," said Fergus, but his eyes and his heart were fixed upon the bud, which was slowly gaping apart, showing a faint tinge of gold in its heart. Farnham walked rapidly up the garden, and found the Beldings at the door, starting for evening service with their prayer-books in their hands. "Do you wish to see the prettiest thing you ever saw in your lives? of course I except your mirrors when in action," he began, without salutation. "If so, come this moment to my conservatory. My night-blooming cereus has her coming-out party tonight." They both exclaimed with delight, and were walking with him toward the garden. Suddenly, Mrs. Belding stopped and said: "Alice, run and get your sketch-book and pencil. It will be lovely to draw the flower." "Why, mamma! we shall not have time for a sketch." "There, there! do as I tell you, and do not waste time in disputing." The young girl hesitated a moment, and then, with instinctive obedience, went off to fetch the drawing materials, while her mother said to Farnham: "Madame de Veaudrey says Alice is very clever with her pencil; but she is so modest I shall have to be severe with her to make her do anything. She takes after me. I was very clever in my lessons, but never would admit it." Alice came down the steps. Farnham, seeing her encumbered by her books, took them from her, and they went down the walks to the conservatory. They found Ferguson sitting, with the same rapt observation, before his tropical darling. As the ladies entered, he rose to give them seats, and then retired to the most distant corner of the room, where he spent the rest of the evening entirely unaware of any one's presence, and given up to the delight of his eyes. The bud was so far opened that the creamy white of the petals could be seen within the riven sheath, whose strong dark color exquisitely relieved the pallid beauty it had guarded so long. The silky stamens were still curled about the central style, but the splendor of color which was coming was already suggested, and a breath of intoxicating fragrance stole from the heart of the immaculate flower. They spoke to each other in low tones, as if impressed with a sort of awe at the beautiful and mysterious development of fragrant and lovely life going forward under their sight. The dark eyes of Alice Belding were full of that vivid happiness which strange and charming things bring to intelligent girlhood. She was looking with all her soul, and her breath was quick and high, and her soft red lips were parted and tremulous. Farnham looked from her to the flower, and back again, gazing on both with equal safety, for the one was as unconscious of his admiring glances as the other. Suddenly, the sound of bells floated in from the neighboring street, and both of the ladies started. "No, don't you go," said Mrs. Belding to her daughter. "I must, because I have to see my 'Rescue the Perishing.' But you can just as well stay here and make your sketch. Mr. Farnham can take care of you, and I will be back in an hour." "But, mamma!" cried Miss Alice, too much scandalized to speak another word. "I won't have you lose this chance," her mother continued. "I am sure Mr. Farnham will not object to taking care of you a little while; and if he hasn't the time, Fergus will bring you home--hm, Fergus?" "Ay, madam, with right guid will," the gardener said, his hard face softening into a smile. "There, sit down in that chair and begin your sketch. It is lovely just as it is." She waited until Alice, whose confusion had turned her face crimson, had taken her seat, opened her sketch-book, and taken her pencils in her trembling hands, and then the brisk and hearty woman drew her shawl about her and bustled to the door. "I will walk to the church door with you," said Farnham, to the infinite relief of Alice, who regained her composure at the instant, and began with interest to sketch the flower. She thought, while her busy fingers were at work, that she had perhaps been too prudish in objecting to her mother's plan. "He evidently thinks nothing of it, and why should I?" By the time Farnham returned, the cereus had attained its full glory of bloom. Its vast petals were thrown back to their fullest extent, and shone with a luminous beauty in which its very perfume seemed visible; the countless recurved stamens shot forth with the vigorous impulse and vitality of sun rays; from the glowing centre to the dark fringe with which the shattered sheath still accented its radiant outline it blazed forth, fully revealed; and its sweet breath seemed the voice of a pride and consciousness of beauty like that of the goddess on Mount Ida, calmly triumphant in the certainty of perfect loveliness. Alice had grown interested in her task, and looked up for only an instant with her frank, clear eyes as Farnham entered. "Now, where shall I sit?" he asked. "Here, behind your right elbow, where I can look over your shoulder and observe the work as it goes on?" "By no means. My hand would lose all its little cunning in that case." "Then I will sit in front of you and study the artistic emotions in your face." "That would be still worse, for you would hide my subject. I am sure you are very well as you are," she added, as he seated himself in a chair beside her, a little way off. "Yes, that is very well. I have the flower three-quarters and you in profile. I will study the one for a panel and the other for a medal." Miss Alice laughed gently. She laughed often from sheer good humor, answering the intention of what was said to her better than by words. "Can you sketch and talk too?" asked Farnham. "I can sketch and listen," she said. "You will talk and keep me amused." "Amusement with malice aforethought! The order affects my spirits like a Dead March. How do the young men amuse young ladies nowadays? Do they begin by saying, 'Have you been very gay lately?'" Again Miss Alice laughed. "She is an easy-laughing girl," thought Farnham. "I like easy-laughing girls. When she laughs, she always blushes a very little. It is worth while talking nonsense to see a girl laugh so pleasantly and blush so prettily." It is not worth while, however, to repeat all the nonsense Farnham uttered in the next hour. He got very much interested in it himself, and was so eager sometimes to be amusing that he grew earnest, and the gentle laugh would cease and the pretty lips would come gravely together. Whenever he saw this he would fall back upon his trifling again. He had the soldier's fault of point-blank compliment, but with it an open sincerity of manner which relieved his flattery of any offensiveness. He had practised it in several capitals with some success. A dozen times this evening, a neat compliment came to his lips and stopped there. He could hardly understand his own reserve before this laughing young lady. Why should he not say something pretty about her hair and eyes, about her graceful attitude, about the nimble play of her white fingers over the paper? He had uttered frank flatteries to peeresses without rebuke. But he held his hand before this school-girl, with the open dark-brown eyes and a club of yellow hair at the back of her neck. He could not help feeling that, if he talked to her with any forcing of the personal accent, she would stop laughing and the clear eyes would be troubled. He desired anything rather than that, and so the conversation went rattling on as free from personalities as the talk of two light-hearted and clever schoolboys. At one moment he was describing a bill of fare in a Colorado hotel. "With nice bread, though, one can always get on," she said. "True," Farnham answered; "but this bread was of a ghostly pallor and flatness, as if it had been baked by moonlight on a grave-stone." "The Indian women cook well, do they not?" she asked. "Some are not so bad as others. One young chief boasted to me of his wife's culinary accomplishments. He had been bragging all the morning about his own exploits, of the men he had killed and the horses he had stolen, and then to establish his standing clearly in my mind, he added: 'My squaw same white squaw--savey pie.'" "Even there, then, the trail of the pie-crust is over them all." "No! only over the aristocracy." "I should like so much to see that wonderful country." "It is worth seeing," he said, with a curious sinking of the heart, "if you are not under orders." He could not help thinking what a pleasant thing a journey through that Brobdingnaggian fairy-land would be with company like the young girl before him. Nature would be twice as lovely reflected from those brown eyes. The absurdities and annoyances of travel would be made delightful by that frank, clear laugh. The thought of his poor Nellie flitted by him an instant, too gentle and feeble for reproach. Another stronger thought had occupied his mind. "You ought to see it. Your mother will need rest before long from her Rescue-the-Perishings, and you are overworking yourself dreadfully over that sketch-book. There is a touch of malaria about the fountain in Bluff Park. Colorado will do you both no end of good. I feel as if I needed it myself. I haven't energy enough to read Mr. Martin's 'Life of the Prince Consort.' I shall speak to Mrs. Belding as soon as she returns." "Do, by all means. I should like to go, but mamma would not spend three nights in a sleeping-car to see the Delectable Mountains themselves." He rose and walked about the room, looking at the flower and the young artist from different points of view, and seeing new beauties in each continually. There were long lapses of conversation, in which Alice worked assiduously and Farnham lounged about the conservatory, always returning with a quick word and a keen look at the face of the girl. At last he said to himself: "Look here! She is not a baby. She is nearly twenty years old. I have been wondering why her face was so steady and wise." The thought that she was not a child tilled his heart with pleasure and his face with light. But his volubility seemed to die suddenly away. He sat for a good while in silence, and started a little as she looked up and said: "Now, if you will be very gentle, you can see my sketch and tell me what to do next." It was a pretty and unpretentious picture that she had made. The flower was faithfully though stiffly given, and nothing especially remarkable had been attempted or achieved. Farnham looked at the sketch with eyes in which there was no criticism. He gave Alice a word or two of heartier praise for her work than she knew she deserved. It was rather more than she expected, and she was not altogether pleased to be so highly commended, though she could hardly have said why. Perhaps it was because it made her think less of his critical faculty. This was not agreeable, for her admiration of him from her childhood had been one of the greatest pleasures of her life. She had regarded him as children regard a brilliant and handsome young uncle. She did not expect from him either gallantry or equality of treatment. "There! Do not say too much about it--you will make me ashamed of it. What does it lack?" "Nothing, except something on the right to balance the other side. You might sketch in roughly a half-opened flower on the vine about there," indicating the place. She took her pencils and began obediently to do what he had suggested. He leaned over her shoulder, so near her she could feel his breath on the light curls that played about her ear. She wished he would move. She grew nervous, and at last said: "I am tired. You put in that flower." He took the book and pencils from her, as she rose from her chair and gave him her place, and with a few strong and rapid strokes finished the sketch. "After all," she said to herself, with hearty appreciation, "men do have the advantage of girls. He bothered me dreadfully, and I did not bother him in the least. And yet I stood as near to him as he did to me." Mrs. Belding came in a moment later. She was in high spirits. They had had a good meeting--had converted a Jew, she thought. She admired the sketch very much; hoped Alice had been no trouble to Farnham. He walked home with the ladies, and afterward smoked a cigar with great deliberation under the limes. Mrs. Belding asked Alice how they had got on. "He did not eat you, you see. You must get out of your ideas of men, especially men of Arthur Farnham's age. He never thinks of you. He is old enough to be your father." Alice kissed her mother and went to her own room, calculating on the way the difference between her age and Captain Farnham's. IX. A DRAMA WITH TWO SPECTATORS. The words of Bott lingered obstinately in Maud Matchin's mind. She gave herself no rest from dwelling on them. Her imagination was full, day after day, of glowing pictures of herself and Farnham in tete-a-tete; she would seek in a thousand ways to tell her love--but she could never quite arrange her avowal in a satisfactory manner. Long before she came to the decisive words which were to kindle his heart to flame in the imaginary dialogue, he would himself take fire by spontaneous combustion, and, falling on his knees, would offer his hand, his heart, and his fortune to her in words taken from "The Earl's Daughter" or the "Heir of Ashby." "Oh, pshaw! that's the way it ought to be," she would say to herself. "But if he won't--I wonder whether I ever could have the brass to do it? I don't know why I shouldn't. We are both human. Bott wouldn't have said that if there was nothing in it, and he's a mighty smart man." The night usually gave her courage. Gazing into her glass, she saw enough to inspire her with an idea of her own invincibility; and after she had grown warm in bed she would doze away, resolving with a stout heart that she would try her fate in the morning. But when day came, the enterprise no longer seemed so simple. Her scanty wardrobe struck her with cowardice as she surveyed it. The broad daylight made everything in the house seem poor and shabby. When she went down-stairs, her heart sank within her as she entered the kitchen to help her mother, and when she sat with the family at the breakfast-table, she had no faith left in her dreams of the rosy midnight. This alternation of feeling bred in her, in the course of a few days, a sort of fever, which lent a singular beauty to her face, and a petulant tang to her speech. She rose one morning, after a sleepless night, in a state of anger and excitement in which she had little difficulty in charging upon Farnham all responsibility for her trouble of mind. "I won't stand it any longer," she said aloud in her chamber. "I shall go to him this day and have it out. I shall ask him what he means by treating me so." She sat down by her bureau and began to crimp her hair with grim resolution. Her mother came and knocked at her door. "I'm not coming to breakfast, I've got a headache," she said, and added to herself, "I sha'n't go down and get the smell of bacon on me this morning." She continued her work of personal adornment for two hours, going several times over her whole modest arsenal of finery before she was ready for the fray. She then went down in her street costume, and made a hasty meal of bread and butter, standing by the pantry. Her mother came in and found her there. "Why, Mattie, how's your head?" "I'm going to take a walk and see what that will do." As she walked rapidly out of Dean Street, the great clock of the cathedral was striking the hour of nine. "Goodness!" she exclaimed, "that's too early to call on a gentleman. What shall I do?" She concluded to spend the time of waiting in the library, and walked rapidly in that direction, the fresh air flushing her cheeks, and blowing the frizzed hair prettily about her temples. She went straight to the reference rooms, and sat down to read a magazine. The girl who had prompted her to apply for a place was there on duty. She gave a little cry of delight when she saw Maud, and said: "I was just crazy to see you. I have got a great secret for you. I'm engaged!" The girls kissed each other with giggles and little screams, and the young woman told who _he_ was--in the lightning-rod business in Kalamazoo, and doing very well; they were to be married almost immediately. "You never saw such a fellow, he just won't wait;" and consequently her place in the library would be vacant. "Now, you must have it, Maud! I haven't told a soul. Even the Doctor don't know it yet." Maud left the library and walked up the avenue with an easier mind. She had an excuse for her visit now, and need not broach, unless she liked, the tremendous subject that made her turn hot and cold to think of. She went rustling up the wide thoroughfare at a quick pace; but before arriving at Farnham's, moved by a momentary whim, she turned down a side street leading to Bishop's Lane. She said to herself, "I will go in by that little gate once, if I never do again." As she drew near, she thought, "I hope Sam isn't there." Sam was there, just finishing his work upon the greenhouse. Farnham was there also; he had come down to inspect the job, and he and Sleeny were chatting near the gate as Maud opened it and came in. Farnham stepped forward to meet her. The unexpected rencounter made her shy, and she neither spoke to Sam nor looked toward him, which filled him with a dull jealousy. "Could I have a few moments' conversation with you, sir?" she asked, with stiff formality. "Certainly," said Farnham, smiling. "Shall we go into the house?" "Thank you, sir," she rejoined, severely decorous. They walked up the garden-path together, and Sam looked after them with an unquiet heart. She was walking beside Farnham with a stately step, in spite of the scabbard-like narrowness of the dress she wore. She was nearly as tall as he, and as graceful as a young pine blown to and fro by soft winds. The carpenter, with his heart heavy with love and longing, felt a bitter sense that she was too fine for him. They passed into the house, and he turned to his work with a sigh, often dropping his busy hands and looking toward the house with a dumb questioning in his eyes. After a half hour which seemed endless to him, they reappeared and walked slowly down the lawn. There was trouble and agitation in the girl's face, and Farnham was serious also. As they came by the rose-house, Maud paused and looked up with a sorrowful smile and a question. Farnham nodded, and they walked to the open door of the long, low building. He led the way in, and Maud, looking hastily around, closed the door behind them. "He's goin' to give her some more of them roses," said Sam, explaining the matter to himself. But he worked for some time with his blond beard on his shoulder in his impatience to see them come out. At last, he could resist no longer. He knew a point where he could look through the glass and see whatever was taking place among the roses. He walked swiftly across the turf to that point. He looked in and saw Maud, whose back was turned toward him, talking as if she were pleading for her life, while Farnham listened with a clouded brow. Sleeny stood staring with stupid wonder while Maud laid her hand upon Farnham's shoulder. At that moment he heard footsteps on the gravel walk at some distance from him, and he looked up and saw Mrs. Belding approaching. Confused at his attitude of espionage, he walked away from his post, and, as he passed her, Mrs. Belding asked him if he knew where Mr. Farnham was. "Yes," he answered, "he's in there. Walk right in;" and in the midst of his trouble of spirit he could hardly help chuckling at his own cleverness as he walked, in his amazement, back to the conservatory. While she was in the house, Maud had confined herself to the subject of the vacancy in the library. She rushed at it, as a hunter at a hedge, to get away from the other matter which had tormented her for a week. When she found herself alone with Farnham she saw that it would be "horrid" to say what she had so long been rehearsing. "Now I can get that place, if you will help me. No earthly soul knows anything about it, and Minnie said she would give me a good chance before she let it out." Farnham tried to show her the difficulties in the way. He was led by her eagerness into a more detailed account of his differences with the rest of the board than he had ever given to any one, a fuller narrative than was perhaps consistent with entire prudence. Whenever he paused, she would insist with a woman's disconcerting directness: "But they don't know anything about it this time--they can't combine on anybody. You can certainly get one of them." Farnham still argued against her sanguine hopes, till he at last affected her own spirits, and she grew silent and despondent. As she rose to go, he also took his hat to return to the garden, where he had left Sleeny, and they walked over the lawn together. As they approached the rose-house, she thought of her former visit and asked to repeat it. The warm breath of the flowers saluted her as she crossed the threshold, bringing so vivid a reminiscence of the enchantment of that other day, that there came with it a sudden and poignant desire to try there, in that bewitched atmosphere, the desperate experiment which would decide her fate. There was no longer any struggle in her mind. She could not, for her life, have kept silent now. She walked slowly beside him to the place where the pots of roses stood ranged on their frames, filling the air with dense fragrance. Her hands were icy cold and quick flushes passed through her, while her face reddened and paled like a horizon smitten by heat-lightning in a sultry night of summer. She looked at the moist brick pavement at her feet, her eyelids seemed too heavy to lift, and the long lashes nearly touched her cheeks. "What sort will you have?" said Farnham, reaching for the gardener's shears. "Never mind the roses," she said, in a dry voice which she hardly recognized as her own. "I have something to say to you." He turned and looked at her with surprise. She raised her eyes to his with a great effort, and then, blushing fiery red, she said, in a clear, low voice, "I love you." Like many another daughter and son of Eve, she was startled at the effect of these momentous words upon herself. Of all forms of speech these three words are the most powerful, the most wonderworking upon the being who utters them. It was the first time they had ever passed her lips, and they exalted and inebriated her. She was suddenly set free from the bashful constraint which had held her, and with a leaping pulse and free tongue she poured out her heart to the astonished and scandalized young man. "Yes, I love you. You think it's horrid that I should say so, don't you? But I don't care, I love you. I loved you the first time I saw you, though you made me so angry about my glasses. But you were my master, and I knew it, and I never put them on again. And I thought of you day and night, and I longed for the day to come when I might see you once more, and I was glad when I did not get that place, so that I could come again and see you and talk with you. I can tell you over again every word you ever said to me. You were not like other men. You are the first real man I ever knew. I was silly and wild when I wanted to be your secretary. Of course, that wouldn't do. If I am not to be your wife, I must never see you again; you know that, don't you?" and, carried away by her own reckless words, she laid her hand on his shoulder. His frown of amazement and displeasure shook her composure somewhat. She turned pale and trembled, her eyes fell, and it seemed for an instant as if she would sink to the floor at his feet. He put his arm around her, to keep her from falling and pressed her closely to him. She threw her head back upon his shoulder and lifted her face to him. He looked down on her, and the frown passed from his brow as he surveyed her flushed cheeks, her red full lips parted in breathless eagerness; her dark eyes were wide open, the iris flecked with golden sparks and the white as clear and blue-tinged as in the eyes of a vigorous infant; her head lay on his shoulder in perfect content, and she put up her mouth to him as simply and as sure of a response as a pretty child. He was entirely aware of the ridiculousness of his position, but he stooped and kissed her. Her work seemed all done; but her satisfaction lasted only a second. Her face broke into happy smiles. "You do love me, do you not?" she asked. "I certainly do not," he answered; and at that instant the door opened and Mrs. Belding saw this pretty group of apparent lovers on a rich background of Jacqueminot roses. Startled more at the words of Farnham than at the entry of Mrs. Belding, Maud had started up, like Vivien, "stiff as a viper frozen." Her first thought was whether she had crushed her hat on his shoulder, and her hands flew instinctively to her head-gear. She then walked tempestuously past the astonished lady out into the garden and brushed roughly by Sleeny, who tried to detain her. "Hold your tongue, Sam! I hate you and all men"; and with this general denunciation, she passed out of the place, flaming with rage and shame. Mrs. Belding stood for a moment speechless, and then resorted to the use of that hard-worked and useful monosyllable, "Well!" with a sharp, falling inflection. "Well!" returned Farnham, with an easy, rising accent; and then both of them relieved the strained situation with a laugh. "Come, now," said the good-natured woman, "I am a sort of guardian of yours. Give an account of yourself." "That is easily given," said Farnham. "A young woman, whose name I hardly know, came to me in the garden this morning to ask for help to get some lady-like work to do. After discussing that subject threadbare, she came in here for a rose, and, apropos of nothing, made me a declaration and a proposal of honorable wedlock, _dans toutes les formes_." "The forms were evident as I entered," said Mrs. Belding, dryly. "I could not let her drop on the damp floor," said Farnham, who was astonished to find himself positively blushing under the amused scrutiny of his mother-confessor. "Consider, if you please, my dear madam, that this is the first offer I have ever received, and I was naturally somewhat awkward about declining it. We shall learn better manners as we go along." "You did decline, then?" said Mrs. Belding, easily persuaded of the substantial truth of the story, and naturally inclined, as is the way of woman, to the man's side. Then, laughing at Arthur's discomfiture, she added, "I was about to congratulate you." "I deserve only your commiseration." "I must look about and dispose of you in some way. You are evidently too rich and too fascinating. But I came over to-day to ask you what I ought to do about my Lake View farm. I have two offers for it; if I had but one, I would take either--well, you know what I mean;" and the conversation became practical. After that matter was disposed of, she said, with a keen side-glance at Farnham, "That was a very pretty girl. I hope you will not be exposed to such another attack; I might not be so near the next time." "That danger, thanks to you, is over; Mademoiselle will never return," he answered, with an air of conviction. Mrs. Belding went home with no impression left of the scene she had witnessed but one of amusement. She thought of it only as "a good joke on Arthur Farnham." She kept chuckling to herself over it all day, and if she had had any especial gossip in the town, she would have put on her hat and hurried off to tell it. But she was a woman who lived very much at home, and, in fact, cared little for tattling. She was several times on the point of sharing the fun of it with her daughter, but was prevented by an instinctive feeling that it was hardly the sort of story to tell a young girl about a personal acquaintance. So she restrained herself, though the solitary enjoyment of it irritated her. They were sitting on the wide porch which ran around two sides of the house just as twilight was falling. The air was full of drowsy calls and twitters from the grass and the trees. The two ladies had been sitting ever since dinner, enjoying the warm air of the early summer, talking very little, and dropping often into long and contented silences. Mrs. Belding had condescended to grenadine in consideration of the weather, and so looked less funereal than usual. Alice was dressed in a soft and vapory fabric of creamy bunting, in the midst of which her long figure lay reclined in an easy chair of Japanese bamboo; she might have posed for a statue of graceful and luxurious repose. There was light enough from the rising moon and the risen stars to show the clear beauty of her face and the yellow lustre of her hair; and her mother cast upon her from time to time a glance of pride and fondness, as if she were a recovered treasure to which the attraction of novelty had just been added anew. "They say she looks as I did at her age," thought the candid lady; "but they must flatter me. My nose was never so straight as that: her nose is Belding all over. I wonder whom she will care about here? Mr. Furrey is a nice young man, but she is hardly polite to him. There he is now." The young man came briskly up the walk, and ran up the steps so quickly that he tripped on the last one and dropped his hat. He cleverly recovered it, however, and made very elaborate bows to both the ladies, hoping that he found them quite well. Mrs. Belding bustled about to give him a chair, at which Alice knitted her pretty brows a little. She had scarcely moved her eyelashes to greet her visitor; but when Mrs. Belding placed a light chair near her daughter and invited Mr. Furrey to take it, the young lady rose from her reclining attitude and sat bolt upright with a look of freezing dignity. The youth was not at all abashed, but took his seat, with his hat held lightly by the brim in both hands. He was elegantly dressed, in as faithful and reverent an imitation as home talent could produce of the costume of the gentlemen who that year were driving coaches in New York. His collar was as stiff as tin; he had a white scarf, with an elaborate pin constructed of whips and spurs and horseshoes. He wore dog-skin gloves, very tight and red. His hair was parted in the middle with rigorous impartiality and shed rather rank fragrance on the night. He began conversation with an easy air, in which there was something of pleasurable excitement mixed. "I come to receive your congratulations, ladies!" "What, you are engaged?" said Mrs. Belding, and even the placid face of Miss Alice brightened with a look of pleased inquiry. "Oh, dear, no; how could you think so?" he protested, with an arch look at Alice which turned her to marble again. "I mean I have this day been appointed assistant cashier of our bank!" Napoleon, informing Madame de Beauharnais [* - Perhaps Josephine told Napoleon herself, but I think she was clever enough to let him imagine he owed the appointment to his merits.] that he was to command the army of Italy, probably made less ado about it. Mrs. Belding made haste to murmur her congratulations. "Very gratifying, I am sure,--at your age;" to which Alice responded like a chorus, but without any initiative warmth, "Very gratifying, I am sure." Furrey went on at some length to detail all the circumstances of the event: how Mr. Lathers, the president of the bank, had sent for him, and how he complimented him; how he had asked him where he learned to write such a good hand; and how he had replied that it came sort of natural to him to write well, that he could make the American eagle with pen and ink before he was fifteen, all but the tail-feathers, and how he discovered a year later that the tail-feathers had to be made by holding the pen between the first and second fingers; with much more to the like innocent purpose, to which Mrs. Belding listened with nods and murmurs of approval. This was all the amiable young man needed to encourage him to indefinite prattle. He told them all about the men in the bank, their habits and their loves and their personal relations to him, and how he seemed somehow to be a general favorite among them all. Miss Alice sat very still and straight in her chair, with an occasional smile when the laughter of Mr. Furrey seemed to require it, but with her eyes turned to the moonlit night in vagrant reverie, and her mind in those distant and sacred regions where we cannot follow the minds of pure and happy girls. "Now, you would hardly understand, if I did not tell you," said Mr. Furrey, "how it is that I have gained the confidence----" At this moment Alice, who had been glancing over Mr. Furrey's shoulder for a moment with a look of interest in her eyes, which he thought was the legitimate result of his entertaining story, cried: "Why, there comes Mr. Farnham, mamma." "So it is," said her mother. "I suppose he wants to see me. Don't move, Mr. Furrey. Mr. Farnham and I will go into the house." "By no means," said that gentleman, who by this time had mounted the steps. "I was sitting all alone on my porch and saw by the moon that yours was inhabited; and so I came over to improve my mind and manners in your society." "I will get a chair for you," said Mrs. Belding. "No, thank you; this balustrade will bear my weight, and my ashes will drop harmless on the flower-bed, if you will let me finish my cigar." And he seated himself between the chair of Furrey and the willow fabric in which Alice had resumed her place. This addition to the company was not at all to the taste of the assistant cashier, who soon took his leave, shaking hands with the ladies, with his best bow. "After all, I do prefer a chair," said Farnham, getting down from his balustrade, and throwing away his cigar. He sat with his back to the moonlight. On his left was Alice, who, as soon as Furrey took his departure, settled back in her willow chair in her former attitude of graceful ease. On the right was Mrs. Belding, in her thin, cool dress of gauzy black. Farnham looked from one to the other as they talked, and that curious exercise, so common to young men in such circumstances, went through his mind. He tried to fancy how Mrs. Belding looked at nineteen, and how Miss Belding would look at fifty, and the thought gave him singular pleasure. His eyes rested with satisfaction on the kindly and handsome face of the widow, her fine shoulders and arms, and comfortable form, and then, turning to the pure and exquisite features of the tall girl, who was smiling so freshly and honestly on him, his mind leaped forward through corning years, and he said to himself: "What a wealth of the woman there is there--for somebody." An aggressive feeling of disapproval of young Furrey took possession of him, and he said, sharply: "What a very agreeable young man Mr. Furrey is?" Mrs. Belding assented, and Miss Alice laughed heartily, and his mind was set at rest for the moment. They passed a long time together. At first Mrs. Belding and Arthur "made the expenses" of the conversation; but she soon dropped away, and Alice, under the influence of the night and the moonlight and Farnham's frank and gentle provocation, soon found herself talking with as much freedom and energy as if it were a girls' breakfast. With far more, indeed,--for nature takes care of such matters, and no girl can talk to another as she can to a man, under favoring stars. The conversation finally took a personal turn, and Alice, to her own amazement, began to talk of her life at school, and with sweet and loving earnestness sang the praises of Madame de Veaudrey. "I wish you could know her," she said to Farnham, with a sudden impulse of sympathy. He was listening to her intently, and enjoying her eager, ingenuous speech as much as her superb beauty, as the moon shone full on her young face, so vital and so pure at once, and played, as if glad of the privilege, about the curved lips, the flashing teeth, the soft eyes under their long lashes, and the hair over the white forehead, gleaming as crisply brilliant as fine-spun wire of gold. "By her fruits I know her, and I admire her very much," he said, and was sorry for it the moment afterward, for it checked the course of the young girl's enthusiasm and brought a slight blush to her cheek. "I ought to have known better," he said to himself with real penitence, "than to utter a stupid commonplace to such a girl when she was talking so earnestly." And he tried to make amends, and succeeded in winning back her attention and her slow unconscious smiles by talking to her of things a thousand miles away. The moon was silvering the tops of the linden-trees at the gates before they thought of the flight of time, and they had quite forgotten the presence of Mrs. Belding when her audible repose broke in upon their talk. They looked at each other, and burst into a frank laugh, full of confidence and comradeship, which the good lady heard in her dreams and waked, saying, "What are you laughing at? I did not catch that last witticism." The young people rose from their chairs. "I can't repeat my own mots," said Arthur: "Miss Belding will tell you." "Indeed I shall not," replied Alice. "It was not one of his best, mamma." She gave him her hand as he said "Good-night," and it lay in his firm grasp a moment without reserve or tremor. "You are a queer girl, Alice," said Mrs. Belding, as they walked into the drawing-room through the open window. "You put on your stiffest company manners for Mr. Furrey, and you seem entirely at ease with Mr. Farnham, who is much older and cleverer, and is noted for his sarcastic criticisms." "I do not know why it is, mamma, but I do feel very much at home with Mr. Farnham, and I do not want Mr. Furrey to feel at home with me." Upon this, Mrs. Belding laughed aloud. Alice turned in surprise, and her mother said, "It is too good to keep. I must tell you. It is such a joke on Arthur;" and, sitting in a low arm-chair, while Alice stood before her leaning upon the back of another, she told the whole story of the scene of the morning in the rose-house. She gave it in the fullest detail, interrupting herself here and there for soft cachinnations, unmindful of the stern, unsmiling silence with which her daughter listened. She finished, with a loud nourish of merriment, and then asked: "Did you ever hear anything so funny in your life?" The young lady was turning white and red in an ominous manner, and was biting her nether lip. Her answer to her mother's question was swift and brief: "I never heard anything so horrid," and she moved majestically away without another word. Mrs. Belding sat for a moment abashed. "There!" she said to herself, "I knew very well I ought not to tell her. But it was too good to keep, and I had nobody else to tell." She went to bed, feeling rather ill-used. As she passed her daughter's door, she said, "Good-night, Alice!" and a voice riot quite so sweet as usual replied, "Good-night, mamma," but the door was not opened. Alice turned down her light and sat upon a cushioned seat in the embrasure of her open window. She looked up at the stars, which swam and glittered in her angry eyes. With trembling lips and clinched hands she communed with herself. "Why, why, why did mamma tell me that horrid story? To think there should be such women in the world! To take such a liberty with him, of all men! She could not have done it without some encouragement--and he could not have encouraged her. He is not that kind of a vulgar flirt at all. But what do I know about men? They may all be--but I did not think--what business have I thinking about it? I had better go to bed. I have spent all the evening talking to a man who--Oh! I wish mamma had not told me that wretched story. I shall never speak to him again. It is a pity, too, for we are such near neighbors, and he is so nice, if he were not--But I don't care how nice he is, she has spoiled him. I wonder who she was. Pretty, was she? I don't believe a word of it--some bold-faced, brazen creature. Oh! I shall hate myself if I cry;" but that was past praying for, and she closed her lattice and went to bed for fear the stars should witness her unwelcome tears. X. A WORD OUT OF SEASON. Arthur Farnham awoke the next day with a flight of sweet hopes and fancies singing in his heart and brain. He felt cheerfully and kindly toward the whole human race. As he walked down into the city to transact some business he had there with his lawyer, he went out of his way to speak to little children. He gave all his acquaintances a heartier "Good-morning" than usual. He even whistled at passing dogs. The twitter of the sparrows in the trees, their fierce contentions on the grass, amused him. He leaned over the railing of the fountain in the square with the idlers, and took a deep interest in the turtles, who were baking their frescoed backs in the warm sun, as they floated about on pine boards, amid the bubbles of the clear water. As he passed by the library building, Dr. Buchlieber was standing in the door. "Good luck," he said; "I was just wishing to see you. One of our young women resigned this morning, and I think there may be a chance for our handsome friend. The meeting, you remember, is this afternoon." Farnham hardly recalled the name of the young lady in whose success he had been so interested, although recent intimate occurrences might have been expected to fix it somewhat permanently in his remembrance. But all female images except one had become rather vague in his memory. He assented, however, to what the doctor proposed, and going away congratulated himself on the possibility of doing Maud a service and ridding himself of the faintest tinge of remorse. He was not fatuous or conceited. He did not for a moment imagine that the girl was in love with him. He attributed her demonstration in the rose-house to her "congenital bad breeding," and thought it only one degree worse than other match-making manoeuvres of which he had been the object in the different worlds he had frequented. He gave himself no serious thought about it, and yet he was glad to find an apparent opportunity to be of use to her. She was poor and pretty. He had taken an interest in her welfare. It had not turned out very well. She had flung herself into his arms and been heartily kissed. He could not help feeling there was a balance against him. As he turned the corner of the street which led to the attorney's office where he was going, he saw a man standing by the wall with his hat off, bowing to him. He returned the unusual salutation and passed on; it was some moments before he remembered that it was one of his colleagues on the Library Board. He regretted not having stopped and made the effort to engage his vote for Maud; but, on second thought, he reflected that it would be as well to rely upon the surprise of the three to prevent a combination at the meeting. When he reached the entrance of the building where his lawyer's offices were, he turned, with a sense of being pursued by a shuffling footstep which had hastened its speed the last few paces, and saw his colleague coming up the steps after him with a perspiring but resolute face. "Hold on, Cap," he said, coming into the shade of the passage. "I was thinkin' o' comin' to see you, when I sighted you comin' round the corner." "I am glad to see you, Mr. Pennybaker," said Arthur, taking the clumsy hand which was held out to him. "Gettin' pretty hot, ain't it?" said Pennybaker, wiping his brow with his forefinger and dexterously sprinkling the floor with the proceeds of the action. "No danger of frost, I think," Arthur assented, admiring the dexterity of Pennybaker, but congratulating himself that the shake-hands was disposed of. "You bet your life. We're going to have it just sizzling from now on." "Were you wishing to see me about anything in particular?" asked Farnham, who saw no other way of putting an end to a meteorological discussion which did not interest him. "Well, yes," answered Pennybaker, getting around beside Farnham, and gazing at the wall opposite. "I heerd this mornin' that Minnie Bell was goin' to get married. My daughter is doing some sewing for her, and it slipped out that way. She was trying to keep it secret. Some girls is mighty funny that way. They will do anything to get engaged, and then they will lie like Sam Hill to make believe they ain't. Well, that makes a vacancy." He did not turn his head, but he cast a quick glance sideways at Farnham, who made no answer, and Pennybaker resumed: "So I thought I would come to you, honor bright, and see if we couldn't agree what to do. That's me. I'm open and square like a bottle of bitters." Farnham gave no indication of his surprise at this burst of candor, but asked: "What do you propose?" "That's it," said Pennybaker, promptly. "I don't propose nothing--I _ex_pose. You hear me--I _ex_pose." He said this with great mystery, one eye being shut fast and the other only half open. He perceived that he had puzzled Farnham, and enjoyed it for a moment by repeating his mot with a chuckle that did not move a muscle of his face. "I'll tell you the whole thing. There's no use, between gentlemen, of playing the thing too fine." He took his knife from one pocket and from another a twist of tobacco, and, cutting off a mouthful, began his story: "You see, me and Bud Merritt and Joe Dorman have most generally agreed on paternage, and that was all right. You are well fixed. You don't want the bother of them little giblets of paternage. We've 'tended to 'em for what there was in 'em and for the good of the party. Now Bud he wants to be auditor, and he's got Joe to go in with him, because, if he gits there, Joe's brother-in-law, Tim Dolan, will be his debbity. Bud is weak in the Third Ward, and he knows it, and he knows that Jake Runckel can swing that ward like a dead cat; and so they have fixed it all up to give the next vacancy to Jake for his sister. She's been turned out of the school for some skylarking, and weighs pretty heavy on Jake's hands. Very well. That's the game, and I'm a-kickin'! Do you hear me? I'm a-kickin'!" Pennybaker pushed up his hat and looked Farnham fairly in the face. The assertion of his independence seemed to give him great gratification. He said once more, slowly closing one eye and settling back in his former attitude against the wall, while he aimed a deluge of tobacco-juice at the base of the wall before him: "I'm a-kickin' like a Texas steer." He waited a moment to allow these impressive words to have their full effect, while Farnham preserved a serious and attentive face. "Well, this bein' the case," continued Pennybaker, "I comes to you, as one gentleman to another, and I asks whether we can't agree against this selfish and corrupt game of Merritt and Dorman. For, you see, I don't get a smell out of what they're doin'. I'm out in the cold if their slate goes through." "I don't see that I can be of any service to you, Mr. Pennybaker. If I have any influence in the matter, it shall be given to Miss Matchin, whom I proposed once before." "Exactly! Now you're talkin'. Miss Matchin shall have it, on one little proviso that won't hurt you nor me nor nobody. Say the word, and it's a whack." And he lifted up his hand to strike the bargain. "What is it?" asked Farnham, in a tone which was severe and contemptuous, in spite of him. "Namely, just this," answered Pennybaker, "You ain't on the make; you're fixed. You don't care about these d---- little things except to help a friend once 'n awhile," he said, in a large and generous way. "But I ain't that kind yet. I've got to look out for myself--pretty lively, too. Now, I'll tell you what's my racket. You let me perpose Miss Matchin's name and then go and tell her father that I put it through, and it'll be done slick as a whistle. That's all solid, ain't it?" Farnham's brow clouded. He did not answer at once. Pennybaker repeated his question a little anxiously: "That's all solid, ain't it?" "You will excuse me, Mr. Pennybaker, if I do not quite understand your racket, as you call it. I do not see how you make anything out of this. Matchin is a poor man. You surely do not intend----" "To strike Saul for a divvy? Nothing of the sort," said Pennybaker, without the least offence. "The whole thing lies just here. Among gentlemen there's no use being shy about it. My brother wants to be assessor in Saul Matchin's ward. Saul's got a lot of influence among the boys in the planing-mills, and I want his help. You see?" Farnham thought he saw, and, after assenting to Pennybaker's eager demand, "That's all solid?" he walked away, too much relieved by the thought that Maud was provided for to question too closely the morality of the proceeding which the sordid rascal had exposed to him. In the afternoon, at the meeting of the board, the programme agreed upon was strictly carried out. Pennybaker proposed Miss Matchin's name as soon as the vacancy was announced, to the amazement of his late confederates. They moved a postponement, but to no purpose; Maud was elected; and the angry politicians had no better revenge than to say spitefully to Pennybaker on the stairs, as they went away, "How much did the Captain give you for that sell-out?"--a jeer which he met by a smile of conscious rectitude and a request to be informed the next time they organized a freeze-out against him. It must be said, however, that he lost no time in going to Matchin, informing him that he had succeeded in carrying Maud in by unheard-of exertions, and demanding and receiving on the spot five per cent of her year's salary, which he called "the usual commission." Saul announced the appointment that evening at supper. Maud flushed crimson, and the tears started to her eyes. She was about to declare she would not have it, when her father's next words put a different face on the matter. "And it's no thanks to Cap'n Farnham, neither. He tried it oncet, and couldn't make the riffle. But me and Joel Pennybaker got together and done it. And now I hope, Mattie, you'll behave yourself and save money. It's like a fortun' comin' to you, if you're smart." Maud found no reply ready. She could not wholly believe her father's story. She still fancied the appointment came from Farnham, and there was a certain bitterness in it; but, on the whole, she received it not without a secret complacency. Mrs. Matchin's pleasure was checked by her daughter's morose confusion. Sam made no pretence of being pleased, but sat, unmoved by Matchin's speech, in scowling silence, and soon went out without a word of comment. The scene he had witnessed in the rose-house had poisoned his mind; yet, whenever he looked at Maud, or tried to speak to her, he was met with an air of such fierce and beautiful defiance, that his eyes fell and his voice stuck in his throat. So the piece of good fortune, so anxiously awaited in the household, brought little delight when it came. Maud reported for duty next day, and soon learned the routine of her work; but she grew more and more silent at home, and Saul's hope of a wedding in the family died away. Arthur Farnham walked away from the meeting with the feeling of a school-boy who has finished a difficult task and who thinks he deserves some compensating pleasure. The day had been fine and warm, but the breeze of the late afternoon was already blowing in from the lake, lending freshness and life to the air. The sky was filled with soft gray clouds, which sailed along at a leisurely rate, evidently on very good terms with the breeze. As Farnham walked up the avenue, he cast about in his mind for the sort of dissipation with which he would reward himself for the day's work and he decided for a ride. But as he was drawing on his boots, it occurred to him, for the first time in his life, that it was a churlish and unneighborly proceeding for him to go riding alone day after day, and that he would be doing no more than his duty to offer his escort to Miss Belding. He said Miss Belding to his own thought--making it as formal and respectful as possible. So, sending an order to his groom to keep his horse at the stable for a moment, he walked over the lawn to the Belding cottage and asked for the ladies. "I believe they are upstairs, sir. Walk into the drawing-room, and I will see," said the neat housemaid, smiling at Farnham, as indeed was the general custom of women. He took his seat in the cool and darkened room facing the door-way, which commanded a view of the stairs. He sat in a large willow chair very much at his ease, looking about the pretty salon, enjoying its pictures and ornaments and the fragrance of the roses in the vases, as if he had a personal interest in them. The maid came back and said the ladies would be down in a moment. She had announced Farnham to Mrs. Belding, who had replied, "Tell him, in a moment." She was in the summer afternoon condition which the ladies call "dressing-sack," and after an inspection at the glass, which seemed unsatisfactory, she walked across the hall to her daughter's room. She found Alice standing by the window, looking out upon the lake. "There, I am glad you are all dressed. Arthur Farnham has called, and you must go down and excuse me. I said I would come, but it will take me so long to dress, he will get tired of waiting. You run down and see him. I suppose there is nothing particular." "Oh, mamma," said Alice, "I don't want to see him, and especially not alone." Mrs. Belding made large eyes in her surprise. "Why, Alice, what has got into you?" Alice blushed and cast down her eyes. "Mamma," she said, in a low voice, "do not ask me to go down. You know what you told me last night." "There, that will do," said the mother, with a tone of authority. "Perhaps I was foolish to tell you that silly little story, but I am the judge of who shall visit this house. You are too young to decide these questions for me, and I insist that what I told you shall make no difference in your treatment of Mr. Farnham. You think too much of your own part in the matter. He has come to see me, and not you, and I wish you to go down and make my excuses for keeping him waiting. Will you go?" "Yes, I will go," said the young girl. The blush had left her cheek and she had become a trifle pale. She had not raised her eyes from the floor during her mother's little speech; and when it was over and her mother had gone back to her room, Alice cast one glance at her mirror, and with a firm face walked down the stairs to the drawing-room. Farnham heard the rustle of her dress with a beating of the heart which filled him with a delicious surprise. "I am not past it, then," was the thought that came instantly to his mind, and in that one second was a singular joy. When she came in sight on the stairs, it was like a sudden enchantment to him. Her beautiful head, crowned with its masses of hair drawn back into a simple Greek knot; her tall, strong figure, draped in some light and clinging stuff which imposed no check on her natural grace and dignity, formed a charming picture as she came down the long stairs; and Farnham's eyes fastened eagerly upon her white hand as it glided along the dark walnut baluster. His heart went out to meet her. He confessed to himself, with a lover's instantaneous conviction, that there was nothing in the world so utterly desirable as that tall and fair-haired girl slowly descending the stairs. In the midst of his tumultuous feeling a trivial thought occurred to him: "I am shot through the heart by the blind archer," he said to himself; and he no longer laughed at the old-fashioned symbol of the sudden and fatal power of love. But with all this tumult of joy in the senses waking up to their allegiance, there came a certain reserve. The goddess-like creature who had so suddenly become the mistress of his soul was a very serious personage to confront in her new majesty. He did not follow the impulse of his heart and rush forward as she entered the room. He merely rose and bowed. She made the faintest possible salutation, and, without taking a seat, conveyed her mother's excuses in a tone of such studied coldness that it amused Farnham, who took it as a school-girl's assumption of a grand and ceremonious manner suitable to a tete-a-tete with man. "Thank you," he said, "but I did not come especially to see your mother. My object was rather to see you." She did not smile or reply, and he went on, with a slight sensation of chill coming upon him from this stony dignity, which, the more he observed it, seemed less and less amusing and not at all artificial. "I came to ask if you would not like to go to ride this afternoon. It is just gray enough for comfort." "I thank you very much for being so kind as to think of me," she replied, "but it will not be convenient for me to go." "Perhaps the morning will suit better. I will come to-morrow at any hour you say." "I shall not be able to go to-morrow either, I think." Even while exchanging these few words, Alice felt herself growing slightly embarrassed, and it filled her with dismay. "I am a poor creature," she thought, "if I cannot get this self-satisfied gentleman out of the house without breaking down. I can't stand here forever though," and so she took a seat, and as Arthur resumed his willow chair with an air of content, she could not but feel that as yet the skirmish was not in her favor. She called her angry spirit to her aid, and nerved herself to say something which would promptly close the interview. His next words gave her the opportunity. "But you surely do not intend to give up riding altogether?" "Certainly not. I hope to ride a good deal. Andrews will go with me." "Ah! Your objection to me as a groom is entirely personal, then." "Now for it!" she thought to herself, and she said firmly, "Yes." But the effort was too great, and after the word was launched her mouth broke up into a nervous smile, for which she despised herself, but which she could not control for her life. Farnham was so pleased with the smile that he cared nothing for the word, and so he continued in a tone of anxious and coaxing good-nature, every word increasing her trouble: "You are wrong as you can be. I am a much better groom than Andrews. He has rather more style, I admit, on account of his Scotch accent and his rheumatism. But I might acquire these. I will be very attentive and respectful. I will ride at a proper distance behind you, if you will occasionally throw a word and a smile over your shoulder at me." As he spoke, a quick vision flashed upon him of the loveliness of the head and shoulder, and the coil of fair hair which he should have before him if he rode after her, and the illumination of the smile and the word which would occasionally be thrown back to him from these perfect lips and teeth and eyes. His voice trembled with love and eagerness as he pleaded for the privilege of taking her servant's place. Alice no longer dared to interrupt him, and hardly ventured to lift her eyes from the floor. She had come down with the firm purpose of saying something to him which would put an end to all intimacy, and here, before she had been five minutes in his presence, he was talking to her in a way that delighted her ears and her heart. He went rattling on as if fearful that a pause might bring a change of mood. As she rarely looked up, he could feast his eyes upon her face, where now the color was coming and going, and on her shapely hands, which were clasped in her lap. He talked of Colorado as if it were settled that they were to go there together, and they must certainly have some preliminary training in rough riding; and then, merely to make conversation, he spoke of other places that should only be visited on horseback, always claiming in all of them his post of groom. Alice felt her trouble and confusion of spirit passing away as the light stream of talk rippled on. She took little part in it at first, but from monosyllables of assent she passed on to a word of reply from time to time; and before she knew how it happened she was engaged in a frank and hearty interchange of thoughts and fancies, which brought her best faculties into play and made her content with herself, in spite of the occasional intrusion of the idea that she had not been true to herself in letting her just anger die so quickly away. If Farnham could have seen into the proud and honest heart of the young girl he was talking to, he would have rested on the field he had won, and not tempted a further adventure. Her anger against him had been dissipated by the very effort she had made to give it effect, and she had fallen insensibly into the old relation of good neighborhood and unreserved admiration with which she had always regarded him. She had silenced her scruples by the thought that in talking pleasantly with him she was obeying her mother, and that after all it was not her business to judge him. If he could have known his own best interest, he would have left her then, when her voice and her smile had become gay and unembarrassed according to their wont, with her conscience at ease about his faults, and her mind filled with a pleasant memory of his visit. But such wisdom was beyond his reach. He had felt suddenly, and once for all, in the last hour, the power and visible presence of his love. He had never in his life been so moved by any passion as he was by the joy that stirred his heart when he heard the rustle of her dress in the hall and saw her white hand resting lightly on the dark wood of the stairs. As she walked into the parlor, from her face and her hair, from every movement of her limbs, from every flutter of her soft and gauzy garments, there came to him an assertion of her power over him that filled him with a delicious awe. She represented to him, as he had never felt it before, the embodied mystery and majesty of womanhood. During all the long conversation that had followed, he had been conscious of a sort of dual operation of his mind, like that familiar to the eaters of hashish. With one part of him he had been carrying on a light and shallow conversation, as an excuse to remain in her presence and to keep his eyes upon her, and with all the more active energies of his being he had been giving himself up to an act of passionate adoration of her. The thoughts that uttered themselves to him, as he chatted about all sorts of indifferent things, were something like these: How can it have ever happened that such beauty, such dignity, such physical perfection could come together in one person, and the best and sweetest heart have met them there? If she knew her value, her pride would ruin her. In her there is everything, and everything else beside: Galatea, the statue, with a Christian soul. She is the best that could fall to any man, but better for me than for any one else. Anybody who sees her must love her, but I was made for nothing else but to love her. This is what mythologies meant. She is Venus: she loves laughter, and her teeth and lips are divine. She is Diana: she makes the night beautiful; she has the eye and the arm of an athlete goddess. But she is a woman: she is Mrs. Belding's daughter Alice. Thank heaven, she lives here. I can call and see her. To-morrow, I shall ride with her. She will love and marry some day like other women. Who is the man who shall ever kiss her between those straight brows? And fancies more audacious and extravagant fed the fever of his heart as he talked deliberate small talk, still holding his hat and whip in his hand. He knew it was time he should go, but could not leave the joy of his eyes and ears. At last his thoughts, like a vase too full, ran over into speech. It was without premeditation, almost without conscious intention. The under-tone simply became dominant and overwhelmed the frivolous surface talk. She had been talking of her mother's plans of summer travel, and he suddenly interrupted her by saying in the most natural tone in the world: "I must see your mother before she decides. I hope you will make no plans without me. I shall go where you go. I shall never be away from you again, if I can help it. No, no, do not frown about it. I must tell you. I love you; my whole life is yours." She felt terribly shocked and alarmed, not so much at his words as at her own agitation. She feared for a moment she could not rise from her seat, but she did so with an effort. He rose and approached her, evidently held in check by her inflexible face; for the crisis had brought a momentary self-control with it, and she looked formidable with her knit brows and closed lips. "Do not go," he pleaded. "Do not think I have been wanting in respect and consideration. I could not help saying what I did. I cannot live without you any more than I can without light and sunshine. I ought to have waited and not startled you. But I have only begun to live since I loved you, and I feel I must not waste time." She was deeply disturbed at these wild and whirling words, but still bore herself bravely. She felt her heart touched by the vibration of his ardent speech, but her maiden instinct of self defence enabled her to stand on her guard. Though beaten by the storm of his devotion, she said to herself that she could get away if she could keep from crying or sobbing, and one thought which came to her with the swiftness of lightning gave her strength to resist. It was this: "If I cry, he will take me in his arms, and we shall repeat the tableau mamma saw in the rose-house." Strong in that stimulating thought, she said: "I am too sorry to hear you say these things. You know how much we have always thought of you. If you forget all this, and never repeat it, we may still be friends. But if you renew this subject, I will never speak to you again alone, as long as I live." He began to protest; but she insisted, with the calm cruelty of a woman who sees her advantage over the man she loves. "If you say another word, it is the end of our acquaintance, and perhaps it is best that it should end. We can hardly be again as we were." Farnham was speechless, like one waked in the cold air out of a tropical dream. He had been carried on for the last hour in a whirlwind of emotion, and now he had met an obstacle against which it seemed that nothing could be done. If he had planned his avowal, he might have been prepared for rejection; but he had been hurried into it with no thought of what the result would be, and he was equally unprovided for either issue. In face of the unwavering voice and bearing of Alice, who seemed ten times more beautiful than ever as she stood before him as steady and unresponsive as a young Fate, his hot speech seemed suddenly smitten powerless. He only said: "It shall be as you wish. If I ever offend you again, I will take my punishment upon myself and get out of your way." She did not dare to say another word, for fear it would be too kind. She gave him her hand; it was soft and warm as he pressed it; and if he had only known how much softer and warmer her heart was, he would have covered her hand with a thousand kisses. But he bowed and took his leave, and she stood by the lattice and saw him go away, with eyes full of tears and a breast filled with the tenderest ruth and pity--for him and for herself. XI. THE SANTA RITA SHERRY. Farnham walked down the path to the gate, then turned to go to his own house, with no very definite idea of what direction he was taking. The interview he had just had was still powerfully affecting his senses, he was conscious of no depression from the prompt and decided refusal he had received. He was like a soldier in his first battle who has got a sharp wound which does not immediately cripple him, the perception of which is lost in the enjoyment of a new, keen, and enthralling experience. His thoughts were full of his own avowal, of the beauty of his young mistress, rather than of her coldness. Seeing his riding-whip in his hand, he stared at it an instant, and then at his boots, with a sudden recollection that he had intended to ride. He walked rapidly to the stable, where his horse was still waiting, and rode at a brisk trot out of the avenue for a few blocks, and then struck off into a sandy path that led to the woods by the river-side. As he rode, his thoughts were at first more of himself than of Alice. He exulted over the discovery that he was in love as if some great and unimagined good fortune had happened to him. "I am not past it, then," he said to himself, repeating the phrase which had leaped from his heart when he saw Alice descending the stairs. "I hardly thought that such a thing could ever happen to me. She is the only one." His thoughts ran back to a night in Heidelberg, when he sat in the shadow of the castle wall with a German student of his acquaintance, and looked far over the valley at the lights of the town and the rippling waves of the Neckar, silvered by the soft radiance of the summer moon. "Poor Hammerstein! How he raved that night about little Bertha von Eichholz. He called her _Die Einzige_ something like a thousand times. It seemed an absurd thing to say; I knew dozens just like her, with blue eyes and Gretchen braids. But Hammerstein meant it, for he shot himself the week after her wedding with the assessor. But mine _is_ the Only One--though she is not mine. I would rather love her without hope than be loved by any other woman in the world." A few days before he had been made happy by perceiving that she was no longer a child; now he took infinite pleasure in the thought of her youth; he tilled his mind and his senses with the image of her freshness, her clear, pure color, the outline of her face and form. "She is young and fragrant as spring; she has every bloom and charm of body and soul," he said to himself, as he galloped over the shady woodland road. In his exalted mood, he had almost forgotten how he had left her presence. He delighted in his own roused and wakened passion, as a devotee in his devotions, without considering what was to come of it all. The blood was surging through his veins. He was too strong, his love was too new and wonderful to him, to leave any chance for despair. It was not that he did not consider himself dismissed. He felt that he had played a great stake foolishly, and lost. But the love was there, and it warmed and cheered his heart, like a fire in a great hall, making even the gloom noble. He was threading a bridle-path which led up a gentle ascent to a hill overlooking the river, when his horse suddenly started back with a snort of terror as two men emerged from the thicket and grasped at his rein. He raised his whip to strike one of them down; the man dodged, and his companion said, "None o' that, or I'll shoot your horse." The sun had set, but it was yet light, and he saw that the fellow had a cocked revolver in his hand. "Well, what do you want?" he asked. "I want you to stop where you are and go back," said the man sullenly. "Why should I go back? My road lies the other way. You step aside and let me pass." "You can't pass this way. Go back, or I'll make you," the man growled, shifting his pistol to his left hand and seizing Farnham's rein with his right. His intention evidently was to turn the horse around and start him down the path by which he had come. Farnham saw his opportunity and struck the hand that held the pistol a smart blow. The weapon dropped, but went off with a sharp report as it fell. The horse reared and plunged, but the man held firmly to the rein. His companion, joined by two or three other rough-looking men who rushed from the thicket, seized the horse and held him firmly, and pulled Farnham from the saddle. They attempted no violence and no robbery. The man who had held the pistol, a black-visaged fellow with a red face and dyed mustache, after rubbing his knuckles a moment, said: "Let's take it out o' the ---- whelp!" But another, to whom the rest seemed to look as a leader, said: "Go slow, Mr. Bowersox; we want no trouble here." Farnham at this addressed the last speaker and said, "Can you tell me what all this means? You don't seem to be murderers. Are you horse-thieves?" "Nothing of the kind," said the man. "We are Reformers." Farnham gazed at him with amazement. He was a dirty-looking man, young and sinewy, with long and oily hair and threadbare clothes, shiny and unctuous. His eyes were red and furtive, and he had a trick of passing his hand over his mouth while he spoke. His mates stood around him, listening rather studiedly to the conversation. They seemed of the lower class of laboring men. Their appearance was so grotesque, in connection with the lofty title their chief had given them, that Farnham could not help smiling, in spite of his anger. "What is your special line of reform?" he asked,--"spelling, or civil service?" "We are Labor Reformers," said the spokesman. "We represent the toiling millions against the bloated capitalists and grinding monopolies; we believe that man is better----" "Yes, no doubt," interrupted Farnham; "but how are you going to help the toiling millions by stopping my horse on the highway?" "We was holding a meeting which was kep' secret for reasons satisfactory to ourselves. These two gentlemen was posted here to keep out intruders from the lodge. If you had 'a' spoke civil to them, there would have been no harm done. None will be done now if you want to go." Farnham at once mounted his horse. "I would take it as a great favor," he said, "if you would give me your name and that of the gentleman with the pistol. Where is he, by the way?" he continued. The man they called Bowersox had disappeared from the group around the spokesman. Farnham turned and saw him a little distance away directly behind him. He had repossessed himself of his pistol and held it cocked in his hand. "What do you want of our names?" the spokesman asked. Farnham did not again lose sight of Bowersox. It occurred to him that the interview might as well be closed. He therefore said, carelessly, without turning: "A man has a natural curiosity to know the names of new acquaintances. But no matter, I suppose the police know you," and rode away. Bowersox turned to Offitt and said, "Why in ---- did you let him go? I could have knocked his head off and nobody knowed it." "Yes," said Offitt, coolly. "And got hung for it." "It would have been self-defence," said Bowersox. "He hit me first." "Well, gentlemen," said Offitt, "that closes up Greenwood Lodge. We can't meet in this grass any more. I don't suppose he knows any of us by sight, or he'd have us up to-morrow." "It was a piece of ---- nonsense, comin' out here, anyhow," growled Bowersox, unwilling to be placated. "You haven't done a ---- thing but lay around on the grass and eat peanuts and hear Bott chin." "Brother Bott has delivered a splendid address on 'The Religion of Nature,' and he couldn't have had a better hall than the Canopy to give it under," said Offitt. "And now, gentlemen, we'd better get back our own way." As Farnham rode home he was not much puzzled by his adventure in the woods. He remembered having belonged, when he was a child of ten, to a weird and mysterious confraternity called "Early Druids," which met in the depths of groves, with ill-defined purposes, and devoted the hours of meeting principally to the consumption of confectionery. He had heard for the past few months of the existence of secret organizations of working-men--wholly outside of the trades-unions and unconnected with them--and guessed at once that he had disturbed a lodge of one of these clubs. His resentment did not last very long at the treatment to which he had been subjected; but still he thought it was not a matter of jest to have the roads obstructed by ruffians with theories in their heads and revolvers in their hands, neither of which they knew how to use. He therefore promised himself to consult with the chief of police the next morning in regard to the matter. As he rode along, thinking of the occurrence, he was dimly conscious of a pleasant suggestion in something he had seen among the hazel brush, and searching tenaciously in his recollection of the affair, it all at once occurred to him that, among the faces of the men who came out of the thicket in the scuffle, was that of the blonde-bearded, blue-eyed young carpenter who had been at work in his library the day Mrs. Belding and Alice lunched with him. He was pleased to find that the pleasant association led him to memories of his love, but for a moment a cloud passed over him at the thought of so frank and hearty a fellow and such a good workman being in such company. "I must see if I cannot get him out of it," he said to himself, and then reverted again to thoughts of Alice. Twilight was falling, and its melancholy influence was beginning to affect him. He thought less and less of the joy of his love and more of its hopelessness. By the time he reached his house he had begun to confront the possibility of a life of renunciation, and, after the manner of Americans of fortune who have no special ties, his mind turned naturally to Europe. "I cannot stay here to annoy her," he thought, and so began to plot for the summer and winter, and, in fancy, was at the second cataract of the Nile before his horse's hoofs, ringing on the asphalt of the stable-yard, recalled him to himself. The next day, he was compelled to go to New York to attend to some matters of business. Before taking the train, he laid his complaint of being stopped on the road before the chief of police, who promised to make vigorous inquisition. Farnham remained several days in New York, and on his return, one warm, bright evening, he found his table prepared and the grave Budsey waiting behind his chair. He ate his dinner hastily and in silence, with no great zest. "You have not forgot, sir," said Budsey, who was his external conscience in social matters, "that you are going this evening to Mrs. Temple's?" "I think I shall not go." "Mr. Temple was here this afternoon, sir, which he said it was most particular. I asked him would he call again. He said no, he was sure of seeing you to-night. But it was most particular, he said." Budsey spoke in the tone of solemn and respectful tyranny which he always assumed when reminding Farnham of his social duties, and which conveyed a sort of impression to his master that, if he did not do what was befitting, his butler was quite capable of picking him up and deferentially carrying him to the scene of festivity, and depositing him on the door-step. "What could Temple want to see me about 'most particular'?" Farnham asked himself. "After all, I may as well pass the evening there as anywhere." Mr. Temple was one of the leading citizens of Buffland. He was the vice-president of the great rolling-mill company, whose smoke darkened the air by day and lighted up the skies at night as with the flames of the nether pit. He was very tall and very slender, with reddish-brown hair, eyes and mustache. Though a man of middle age, his trim figure, his fashionable dress, and his clean shaven cheek and chin gave him an appearance of youth. He was president of the local jockey club, and the joy of his life was to take his place in the judges' stand, and sway the destinies of the lean, keen-faced trainers who drove the trotting horses. He had the eye of a lynx for the detection of any crookedness in driving, and his voice would ring out over the track like the trump of doom, conveying fines and penalties to the luckless trickster who was trying to get some unfair advantage in the start. His voice, a deep basso, rarely was heard, in fact, anywhere else. Though excessively social, he was also extremely silent. He gave delightful dinner-parties and a great many of them, but rarely spoke, except to recommend an especially desirable wine to a favored guest. When he did speak, however, his profanity was phenomenal. Every second word was an oath. To those who were not shocked by it there was nothing more droll and incongruous than to hear this quiet, reserved, well-dressed, gentleman-like person pouring out, on the rare occasions when he talked freely, in a deep, measured, monotonous tone, a flood of imprecations which would have made a pirate hang his head. He had been, as a boy, clerk on a Mississippi River steamboat, and a vacancy occurring in the office of mate, he had been promoted to that place. His youthful face and quiet speech did not sufficiently impose upon the rough deck-hands of that early day. They had been accustomed to harsher modes of address, and he saw his authority defied and in danger. So he set himself seriously to work to learn to swear; and though at first it made his heart shiver a little with horror and his cheek burn with shame, he persevered, as a matter of business, until his execrations amazed the roustabouts. When he had made a fortune, owned a line of steamboats, and finally retired from the river, the habit had been fastened upon him, and oaths became to him the only form of emphatic speech. The hardest work he ever did in his life was, while courting his wife, a Miss Flora Ballston, of Cincinnati, to keep from mingling his ordinary forms of emphasis in his asseverations of affection. But after he was married, and thrown more and more into the company of women, that additional sense, so remarkable in men of his mould, came to him, and he never lapsed, in their presence, into his natural way of speech. Perhaps this was the easier, as he rarely spoke at all when they were by--not that he was in the least shy or timid, but because they, as a rule, knew nothing about stocks, or pig-iron, or wine, or trotting horses,--the only subjects, in his opinion, which could interest any reasonable creature. When Farnham arrived at his house, it was already pretty well filled with guests. Mr. and Mrs. Temple were at the door, shaking hands with their friends as they arrived, she with a pleasant smile and word from her black eyes and laughing mouth, and he in grave and speechless hospitality. "Good-evening, Mr. Farnham!" said the good-natured lady. "So glad to see you. I began to be alarmed. So did the young ladies. They were afraid you had not returned. Show yourself in the drawing-room and dispel their fears. Oh, Mr. Harrison, I am so glad you resolved to stay over." Farnham gave way to the next comer, and said to Mr. Temple, who had pressed his hand in silence: "Did you want to see me for anything special to-day?" Mrs. Temple looked up at the word, and her husband said: "No; I merely wanted you to take a drive with me." Another arrival claimed Mrs. Temple's attention, and as Farnham moved away, Temple half-whispered in his ear, "Don't go away till I get a chance to speak to you. There is merry and particular bloom of h---- to pay." The phrase, while vivid, was not descriptive, and Farnham could not guess what it meant. Perhaps something had gone wrong in the jockey club; perhaps Goldsmith Maid was off her feed; perhaps pig-iron had gone up or down a dollar a ton. These were all subjects of profound interest to Temple and much less to Farnham; so he waited patiently the hour of revelation, and looked about the drawing-room to see who was there. It was the usual drawing-room of provincial cities. The sofas and chairs were mostly occupied by married women, who drew a scanty entertainment from gossip with each other, from watching the proceedings of the spinsters, and chiefly, perhaps, from a consciousness of good clothes. The married men stood grouped in corners and talked of their every-day affairs. The young people clustered together in little knots, governed more or less by natural selection-- only the veterans of several seasons pairing off into the discreet retirement of stairs and hall angles. At the further end of the long drawing-room, Farnham's eyes at last lighted upon the object of his quest. Alice sat in the midst of a group of young girls who had intrenched themselves in a corner of the room, and defied all the efforts of skirmishing youths, intent upon flirtation, to dislodge them. They seemed to be amusing themselves very well together, and the correct young men in white cravats and pointed shoes came, chatted, and drifted away. They were the brightest and gayest young girls of the place; and it would have been hard to detect any local color in them. Young as they were, they had all had seasons in Paris and in Washington; some of them knew the life of that most foreign of all capitals, New York. They nearly all spoke French and German better than they did English, for their accent in those languages was very sweet and winning in its incorrectness, while their English was high-pitched and nasal, and a little too loud in company. They were as pretty as girls are anywhere, and they wore dresses designed by Mr. Worth, or his New York rivals, Loque and Chiffon; but they occasionally looked across the room with candid and intelligent envy at maidens of less pretensions, who were better dressed by the local artists. Farnham was stopped at some distance from the pretty group by a buxom woman standing near the open window, cooling the vast spread of her bare shoulders in a current of air, which she assisted in its office with a red-and-gold Japanese fan. "Captain Farnham," she said, "when are you going to give that lawn-tennis party you promised so long ago? My character for veracity depends on it. I have told everybody it would be soon, and I shall be disgraced if it is delayed much longer." "That is the common lot of prophets, Mrs. Adipson," replied Farnham. "You know they say in Wall Street that early and exclusive information will ruin any man. But tell me, how is your club getting on?" he continued disingenuously, for he had not the slightest interest in the club; but he knew that once fairly started on the subject, Mrs. Adipson would talk indefinitely, and he might stand there and torture his heart and delight his eyes with the beauty of Alice Belding. He carried his abstraction a little too far, however, for the good lady soon perceived, from his wandering looks and vague replies, that she was not holding his attention. So she pettishly released him after following the direction of his eyes, and said, "There, I see you are crazy to go and talk to Miss Dallas. I won't detain you. She _is_ awfully clever, I suppose, though she never took the trouble to be brilliant in my presence; and she is pretty when she wears her hair that way--I never liked those frizzes." Farnham accepted his release with perhaps a little more gratitude than courtesy, and moved away to take a seat which had just been vacated beside Miss Dallas. He was filled with a boyish delight in Mrs. Adipson's error. "That she should think I was worshipping Miss Dallas from afar! Where do women keep their eyes? To think that anybody should look at Miss Dallas when Alice Belding was sitting beside her." It was pleasant to think, however, that the secret of his unhappy love was safe. Nobody was gossiping about it, and using the name of his beloved in idle conjectures. That was as it should be. His love was sacred from rude comment. He could go and sit by Miss Dallas, so near his beloved that he could see every breath move the lace on her bosom. He could watch the color come and go on her young cheek. He could hear every word her sweet voice uttered, and nobody would know he was conscious of her existence. Full of this thought, he sat down by Miss Dallas, who greeted him warmly and turned her back upon her friends. By looking over her shining white shoulder, he could see the clear, pure profile of Alice just beyond, so near that he could have laid his hand on the crinkled gold of her hair. He then gave himself up to that duplex act to which all unavowed lovers are prone--the simultaneous secret worship of one woman and open devotion to another. It never occurred to him that there was anything unfair in this, or that it would be as reprehensible to throw the name of Miss Dallas into the arena of gossip as that of Miss Belding. That was not his affair; there was only one person in the universe to be considered by him. And for Miss Dallas's part, she was the last person in the world to suspect any one of being capable of the treason and bad taste of looking over her shoulder at another woman. She was, by common consent, the belle of Buffland. Her father was a widowed clergyman, of good estate, of literary tendencies, of enormous personal vanity, who had abandoned the pulpit in a quarrel with his session several years before, and now occupied himself in writing poems and sketches of an amorous and pietistic nature, which in his opinion embodied the best qualities of Swinburne and Chalmers combined, but which the magazines had thus far steadily refused to print. He felt himself infinitely superior to the society of Buffland,--with one exception,--and only remained there because his property was not easily negotiable and required his personal care. The one exception was his daughter Euphrasia. He had educated her after his own image. In fact, there was a remarkable physical likeness between them, and he had impressed upon her every trick of speech and manner and thought which characterized himself. This is the young lady who turns her bright, keen, beautiful face upon Farnham, with eyes eager to criticise, a tongue quick to flatter and to condemn, a head stuffed full of poetry and artificial passion, and a heart saved from all danger by its idolatry of her father and herself. "So glad to see you--one sees so little of you--I can hardly believe my good fortune--how have I this honor?" All this in hard, rapid sentences, with a brilliant smile. Farnham thought of the last words of Mrs. Adipson, and said, intrepidly, "Well, you know the poets better than I do, Miss Euphrasia, and there is somebody who says, 'Beauty draws us by the simple way she does her hair'--or something like it. That classic fillet was the first thing I saw as I entered the room, and _me voici!_" We have already said that the fault of Farnham's conversation with women was the soldier's fault of direct and indiscriminate compliment. But this was too much in Euphrasia's manner for her to object to it. She laughed and said, "You deserve a _pensum_ of fifty lines for such a misquotation. But, _dites-donc, monsieur_"--for French was one of her favorite affectations, and when she found a man to speak it with, she rode the occasion to death. There had been a crisis in the French ministry a few days before, and she now began a voluble conversation on the subject, ostensibly desiring Farnham's opinion on the crisis, but really seizing the opportunity of displaying her familiarity with the names of the new cabinet. She talked with great spirit and animation, sometimes using her fine eyes point-blank upon Farnham, sometimes glancing about to observe the effect she was creating; which gave Farnham his opportunity to sigh his soul away over her shoulder to where Alice was sweetly and placidly talking with her friends. She had seen him come in, and her heart had stood still for a moment; but her feminine instinct sustained her, and she had not once glanced in his direction. But she was conscious of every look and action of his; and when he approached the corner where she was sitting, she felt as if a warm and embarrassing ray of sunshine was coming near her, She was at once relieved and disappointed when he sat down by Miss Dallas. She thought to herself: "Perhaps he will never speak to me again. It is all my fault. I threw him away. But it was not my fault. It was his--it was hers. I do not know what to think. He might have let me alone. I liked him so much. I have only been a month out of school. What shall I do if he never speaks to me again?" Yet such is the power which, for self-defence, is given to young maidens that, while these tumultuous thoughts were passing through her mind, she talked and laughed with the girls beside her, and exchanged an occasional word with the young men in pointed shoes, as if she had never known a grief or a care. Mr. Furrey came up to say good-evening, with his most careful bow. Lowering his voice, he said: "There's Miss Dallas and Captain Farnham flirting in Italian." "Are you sure they are flirting?" "Of course they are. Just look at them!" "If you are sure they are flirting, I don't think it is right to look at them. Still, if you disapprove of it very much, you might speak to them about it," she suggested, in her sweet, low, serious voice. "Oh, that would never do for a man of my age," replied Furrey, in good faith. He was very vain of his youth. "What I wanted to speak to you about was this," he continued. "There is going to be a Ree-gatta on the river the day after to-morrow, and I hope you will grant me the favor of your company. The Wissagewissametts are to row with the Chippagowaxems, and it will be the finest race this year. Billy Raum, you know, is stroke of the------" Her face was still turned to him, but she had ceased to listen. She was lost in contemplation of what seemed to her a strange and tragic situation. Farnham was so near that she could touch him, and yet so far away that he was lost to her forever. No human being knew, or ever would know, that a few days ago he had offered her his life, and she had refused the gift. Nobody in this room was surprised that he did not speak to her, or that she did not look at him. Nobody dreamed that he loved her, and she would die, she resolved deliberately, before she would let anybody know that she loved him. "For I do love him with my whole heart," she said to herself, with speechless energy, which sent the blood up to her temples, and left her, in another instant, as pale as a lily. Furrey at that moment had concluded his enticing account of the regatta, and she had quietly declined to accompany him. He moved away, indignant at her refusal, and puzzled by the blush which accompanied it. "What did that mean?" he mused. "I guess it was because I said the crews rowed in short sleeves." Farnham also saw the blush, in the midst of a disquisition which Miss Dallas was delivering upon a new poem of Francois Coppee. He saw the clear, warm color rise and subside like the throbbing of an auroral light in a starry night. He thought he had never seen anything so lovely, but he wondered "what that oaf could have said to make her blush like that. Can it be possible that he----" His brow knitted with anger and contempt. "_Mais, qu'est-ce que vous avez donc?_" asked Euphrasia. Farnham was saved from the necessity of an explanation by Mr. Temple, who came up at that moment, and, laying a hand on Arthur's shoulder, said: "Now we will go into my den and have a glass of that sherry. I know no less temptation than Tio Pepe could take you away from Miss Dallas." "Thank you awfully," said the young lady. "Why should you not give Miss Dallas herself an opportunity to decline the Tio Pepe?" "Miss Dallas shall have some champagne in a few minutes, which she will like very much better. Age and wickedness are required to appreciate sherry." "Ah! I congratulate your sherry; it is about to be appreciated," said the deserted beauty, tartly, as the men moved away. They entered the little room which Temple called his den, which was a litter of letter-books, stock-lists, and the advertising pamphlets of wine-merchants. The walls were covered with the portraits of trotting horses; a smell of perpetual tobacco was in the air. Temple unlocked a cupboard, and took out a decanter and some glasses. He filled two, and gave one to Arthur, and held the other under his nose. "Farnham," he said, with profound solemnity, "if you don't call that the"--(I decline to follow him in the pyrotechnical combination of oaths with which he introduced the next words)--"best sherry you ever saw, then I'm a converted pacer with the ringbone." Arthur drank his wine, and did not hesitate to admit all that its owner had claimed for it. He had often wondered how such a man as Temple had acquired such an unerring taste. "Temple," he said, "how did you ever pick up this wine; and, if you will excuse the question, how did you know it when you got it?" Temple smiled, evidently pleased with the question. "You've been in Spain, haven't you?" "Yes," said Farnham. "You know this is the genuine stuff, then?" "No doubt of it." "_How_ do you know?" "The usual way--by seeing and drinking it at the tables of men who know what they are about." "Well, I have never been out of the United States, and yet I have learned about wine in just the same way. I commenced in New Orleans among the old Spanish and French Creoles, and have kept it up since, here and there. I can see in five minutes whether a man knows anything about his wine. If he does, I remember every word he says--that is my strong point--head and tongue. I can't remember sermons and speeches, but I can remember every syllable that Sam Ward said one night at your grandfather's ten years ago; and if I have once tasted a good wine, I never forget its fashion of taking hold." This is an expurgated edition of what he said; his profanity kept up a running accompaniment, like soft and distant rolling thunder. "I got this wine at the sale of the Marquis of Santa Rita. I heard you speak of him, I don't know how long ago, and the minute I read in the paper that he had turned up his toes, I cabled the consul at Cadiz--you know him, a wild Irishman named Calpin--to go to the sale of his effects and get this wine. He cabled back, 'What shall I pay?' I answered, 'Head your dispatch again: Get means get!' Some men have got no sense. I did not mind the price of the wine, but it riled me to have to pay for the two cables." He poured out another glass and drank it drop by drop, getting, as he said, "the worth of his money every time." "Have some more?" he said to Farnham. "No, thank you." "Then I'll put it away. No use of giving it to men who would prefer sixty-cent whiskey." Having done this, he turned again to Farnham, and said, "I told you the Old Boy was to pay. This is how. The labor unions have ordered a general strike; day not fixed; they are holding meetings all over town to-night. I'll know more about it after midnight." "What will it amount to?" asked Farnham. "Keen savey?" replied Temple, in his Mississippi River Spanish. "The first thing will be the closing of the mills, and putting anywhere from three thousand to ten thousand men on the streets. Then, if the strike gains the railroad men, we shall be embargoed, ---- boiling, and safety-valve riveted down." Farnham had no thought of his imperilled interests. He began instantly to conjecture what possibility of danger there might be of a disturbance of public tranquillity, and to wish that the Beldings were out of town. "How long have you known this?" he asked. "Only certainly for a few hours. The thing has been talked about more or less for a month, but we have had our own men in the unions and did not believe it would come to an extremity. To-day, however, they brought ugly reports; and I ought to tell you that some of them concern you." Farnham lifted his eyebrows inquiringly. "We keep men to loaf with the tramps and sleep in the boozing kens. One of them told me to-day that at the first serious disturbance a lot of bad eggs among the strikers--not the unionists proper, but a lot of loose fish--intend to go through some of the principal houses on Algonquin Avenue, and they mentioned yours as one of them." "Thank you. I will try to be ready for them," said Farnham. But, cool and tried as was his courage, he could not help remembering, with something like dread, that Mrs. Belding's house was next to his own, and that in case of riot the two might suffer together. "There is one thing more I wanted to say," Mr. Temple continued, with a slight embarrassment. "If I can be of any service to you, in case of a row, I want to be allowed to help." "As to that," Farnham said with a laugh, "you have your own house and stables to look after, which will probably be as much as you can manage." "No," said Temple, earnestly, "that ain't the case. I will have to explain to you"--and a positive blush came to his ruddy face. "They won't touch me or my property. They say a man who uses such good horses and such bad language as I do--that's just what they say--is one of them, and sha'n't be racketed. I ain't very proud of my popularity, but I am willing to profit by it and I'll come around and see you if anything more turns up. Now, we'll go and give Phrasy Dallas that glass of champagne." XII. A HOLIDAY NOT IN THE CALENDAR. The next morning while Farnham was at breakfast he received a note from Mr. Temple in these words: "Strikes will begin to-day, but will not be general. There will be no disturbance, I think. They don't seem very gritty." After breakfast he walked down to the City Hall. On every street corner he saw little groups of men in rather listless conversation. He met an acquaintance crossing the street. "Have you heard the news?" The man's face was flushed with pleasure at having something to tell--"The firemen and stokers have all struck, and run their engines into the round-house at Riverley, five miles out. There won't be a train leave or come in for the present." "Is that all?" "No, that ain't a start. The Model Oil men have struck, and are all over the North End, shutting up the other shops. They say there won't be a lick of work done in town the rest of the week." "Except what Satan finds for idle hands," Farnham suggested, and hastened his steps a little to the municipal buildings. He found the chief of police in his office, suffering from nervousness and a sense of importance. He began by reminding him of the occurrence of the week before in the wood. The chief waited with an absent expression for the story to end, and then said, "My dear sir, I cannot pay any attention to such little matters with anarchy threatening our city. I must protect life and property, sir--life and property." "Very well," rejoined Farnham, "I am informed that life and property are threatened in my own neighborhood. Can you detail a few policemen to patrol Algonquin Avenue, in case of a serious disturbance?" "I can't tell you, my dear sir; I will do the best I can by all sections. Why, man," he cried, in a voice which suddenly grew a shrill falsetto in his agitation, "I tell you I haven't a policeman for every ten miles of street in this town. I can't spare but two for my own house!" Farnham saw the case was hopeless, and went to the office of the mayor. That official had assumed an attitude expressive of dignified and dauntless energy. He sat in a chair tilted back on its hind feet; the boots of the municipal authority were on a desk covered with official papers; a long cigar adorned his eloquent lips; a beaver hat shaded his eyes. He did not change his attitude as Farnham entered. He probably thought it could not be changed for the better. "Good-morning, Mr. Quinlin." "Good-morning, sirr, to you." This salutation was uttered through teeth shut as tightly as the integrity of the cigar would permit. "There is a great deal of talk of possible disturbance to-night, in case the strikes extend. My own neighborhood, I am told, has been directly threatened. I called to ask whether, in case of trouble, I could rely on any assistance from the city authorities, or whether we must all look out for ourselves." The mayor placed his thumbs in the arm-holes of his waistcoat, and threw his head back so that he could stare at Farnham from below his hat brim. He then said, in a measured voice, as if addressing an assembly: "Sirr! I would have you to know that the working-men of Buffland are not thieves and robbers. In this struggle with capital they have my profound sympathy. I expect their conduct to be that of perr-fect gentlemen. I, at least, will give no orders which may tend to array one class of citizens against another. That is my answer, sirr; I hope it does not disappoint you." "Not in the least," said Farnham, putting on his hat. "It is precisely what I should have expected of you." "Thank you, sirr. Call again, sirr." As Farnham disappeared, the chief magistrate of the city tilted his hat to one side, shut an eye with profoundly humorous significance, and said to the two or three loungers who had been enjoying the scene: "That is the sort of T-rail I am. That young gentleman voted agin me, on the ground I wasn't high-toned enough." Farnham walked rapidly to the office of the evening newspaper. He found a man in the counting-room, catching flies and trimming their wings with a large pair of office shears. He said, "Can you put an advertisement for me in your afternoon editions?" The man laid down his shears, but held on to his fly, and looked at his watch. "Have you got it ready?" "No, but I will not be a minute about it." "Be lively! You haven't got but a minute." He picked up his scissors and resumed his surgery, while Farnham wrote his advertisement. The man took it, and threw it into a tin box, blew a whistle, and the box disappeared through a hole in the ceiling. A few minutes later the boys were crying the paper in the streets. The advertisement was in these words: "Veterans, Attention! All able-bodied veterans of the Army of the Potomac, and especially of the Third Army Corps, are requested to meet at seven this evening, at No. -- Public Square." From the newspaper office Farnham went to a gunsmith's. The dealer was a German and a good sportsman, whom Farnham knew very well, having often shot with him in the marshes west of the city. His name was Leopold Grosshammer. There were two or three men in the place when Farnham entered. He waited until they were gone, and then said: "Bolty, have you two dozen repeating rifles?" "Ja wohl! Aber, Herr Gott, was machen Sie denn damit?" "I don't know why I shouldn't tell you. They think there may be a riot in town, and they tell me at the City Hall that everybody must look out for himself. I am going to try to get up a little company of old soldiers for patrol duty." "All right, mine captain, and I will be the first freiwilliger. But I don't dink you wants rifles. Revolvers and clubs--like the pleecemen-- dat's de dicket." "Have you got them?" "Oh, yes, and the belts thereto. I got der gondract to furnish 'em to de city." "Then you will send them, wrapped up in bundles, to my office in the Square, and come yourself there at seven." "Freilich," said Leopold, his white teeth glistening through his yellow beard at the prospect of service. Farnham spent an hour or two visiting the proprietors of the large establishments affected by the strikes. He found, as a rule, great annoyance and exasperation, but no panic. Mr. Temple said, "The poor ------ fools! I felt sorry for them. They came up here to me this morning,--their committee, they called it,--and told me they hated it, but it was orders! 'Orders from where?' I asked. 'From the chiefs of sections,' they said; and that was all I could get out of them. Some of the best fellows in the works were on the committee. They put 'em there on purpose. The sneaks and lawyers hung back." "What will they do if the strike should last?" asked Farnham. "They will be supported for awhile by the other mills. Our men are the only ones that have struck so far. They were told off to make the move, just as they march out a certain regiment to charge a battery. If we give in, then another gang will strike." "Do you expect to give in?" "Between us, we want nothing better than ten days' rest. We want to repair our furnaces, and we haven't a ---- thing to do. What I told you this morning holds good. There won't be any riot. The whole thing is solemn fooling, so far." The next man Farnham saw was in a far less placid frame of mind. It was Jimmy Nelson, the largest grocer in the city. He had a cargo of perishable groceries at the station, and the freight hands would not let them be delivered. "I talked to the rascals," he said. "I asked them what they had against _me_; that they was injuring Trade!" a deity of which Mr. Nelson always spoke with profound respect. "They laughed in my face, sir. They said, 'That's just our racket. We want to squeeze you respectable merchants till you get mad and hang a railroad president or two!' Yes, sir; they said that to me, and five thousand dollars of my stuff rotting in the depot." "Why don't you go to the mayor?" asked Farnham, though he could not suppress a smile as he said it. "Yes, I like that!" screamed Jimmy. "You are laughing at me. I suppose the whole town has heard of it. Well, it's a fact. I went and asked that infernal scoundrel what he was going to do. He said his function was to keep the peace, and there wasn't a word in the statutes about North Carliny water-melons. If I live till he gets out of office, I'll lick him." "Oh, I think you won't do that, Jimmy." "You think I won't!" said Nelson, absolutely incandescent with the story of his wrongs. "I'll swear by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, that I will thrash the hide off him next spring--if I don't forget it." Farnham went home, mounted his horse, and rode about the city to see what progress the strike was making. There was little disorder visible on the surface of things. The "sections" had evidently not ordered a general cessation of labor; and yet there were curious signs of demoralization, as if the spirit of work was partially disintegrating and giving way to something not precisely lawless, but rather listless. For instance, a crowd of workmen were engaged industriously and, to all appearance, contentedly upon a large school-building in construction. A group of men, not half their number, approached them and ordered them to leave off work. The builders looked at each other and then at their exhorters in a confused fashion for a moment, and ended by obeying the summons in a sullen and indifferent manner. They took off their aprons, went to the hydrant and washed their hands, then put on their coats and went home in silence and shamefacedness, amid the angry remonstrances of the master-builder. A little farther on Farnham saw what seemed like a burlesque of the last performance. Several men were at work in a hole in the street; the tops of their heads were just visible above the surface. A half-grown, ruffianly boy, with a boot-black's box slung over his shoulder, came up and shouted, "You ---- ---- rats, come out of that, or we'll knock the scalps off'n you." The men, without even looking to see the source of the summons, threw down their tools and got out of the hole. The boy had run away; they looked about for a moment, as if bewildered, and then one of them, a gray-headed Irishman, said, "Well, we'd better be a lavin' off, if the rest is," and they all went away. In this fashion it came about that by nightfall all the squares and public places were thronged with an idle and expectant crowd, not actively mischievous or threatening, but affording a vast mass of inflammable material in case the fire should start in any quarter. They gathered everywhere in dense groups, exchanging rumors and surmises, in which fact and fiction were fantastically mingled. "The rolling-mills all close to-morrow," said a sallow and hollow-eyed tailor. "That'll let loose twenty thousand men on the town,--big, brawny fellows. I'm glad my wife is in Clairfield." "All you know about it! Clairfield is twice as bad off as here. The machine shops has all struck there, and the men went through the armory this afternoon. They're camped all along Delaware street, every man with a pair of revolvers and a musket." "You don't say so!" said the schneider, turning a shade more sallow. "I'd better telegraph my wife to come home." "I wouldn't hurry," was the impassive response. "You don't know where we'll be to-morrow. They have been drilling all day at Riverley, three thousand of 'em. They'll come in to-morrow, mebbe, and hang all the railroad presidents. That may make trouble." Through these loitering and talking crowds Farnham made his way in the evening to the office which he kept, on the public square of the town, for the transaction of the affairs of his estate. He had given directions to his clerk to be there, and when he arrived found that some half-dozen men had already assembled in answer to his advertisement. Some of them he knew; one, Nathan Kendall, a powerful young man, originally from the north of Maine, now a machinist in Buffland, had been at one time his orderly in the army. Bolty Grosshammer was there, and in a very short time some twenty men were in the room. Farnham briefly explained to them his intention. "I want you," he said, "to enlist for a few days' service under my orders. I cannot tell whether there will be any work to do or not; but it is likely we shall have a few nights of patrol at least. You will get ten dollars apiece anyhow, and ordinary day's wages besides. If any of you get hurt, I will try to have you taken care of." All but two agreed to the proposition. These two said "they had families and could not risk their skins. When they saw the advertisement they had thought it was something about pensions, or the county treasurer's office. They thought soldiers ought to have the first chance at good offices." They then grumblingly withdrew. Farnham kept his men for an hour longer, arranging some details of organization, and then dismissed them for twenty-four hours, feeling assured that there would be no disturbance of public tranquillity that night. "I will meet you here to morrow evening," he said, "and you can get your pistols and sticks and your final orders." The men went out one by one, Bolty and Kendall waiting for a while after they had gone and going out on the sidewalk with Farnham. They had instinctively appointed themselves a sort of bodyguard to their old commander, and intended to keep him in sight until he got home. As they reached the door, they saw a scuffle going on upon the sidewalk. A well-dressed man was being beaten and kicked by a few rough fellows, and the crowd was looking on with silent interest. Farnham sprang forward and seized one of the assailants by the collar; Bolty pulled away another. The man who had been cuffed turned to Kendall, who was standing by to help where help was needed, and cried, "Take me away somewhere; they will have my life;" an appeal which only excited the jeers of the crowd. "Kendall, take him into my office," said Farnham, which was done in an instant, Farnham and Bolty following. A rush was made,--not very vicious, however,--and the three men got safely inside with their prize, and bolted the door. A few kicks and blows shook the door, but there was no movement to break it down; and the rescued man, when he found himself in safety, walked up to a mirror there was in the room and looked earnestly at his face. It was a little bruised and bloody, and dirty with mud, but not seriously injured. He turned to his rescuers with an air more of condescension than gratitude. "Gentlemen, I owe you my thanks, although I should have got the better of those scoundrels in a moment. Can you assist me in identifying them?" "Oh! it is Mayor Quinlin, I believe," said Farnham, recognizing that functionary more by his voice than by his rumpled visage. "No, I do not know who they were. What was the occasion of this assault?" "A most cowardly and infamous outrage, sir," said the Mayor. "I was walking along the sidewalk to me home, and I came upon this gang of ruffians at your door. Impatient at being delayed,--for my time is much occupied,--I rebuked them for being in me way. One of them turned to me and insolently inquired, 'Do you own this street, or have you just got a lien on it?' which unendurable insult was greeted with a loud laugh from the other ruffians. I called them by some properly severe name, and raised me cane to force a passage,--and the rest you know. Now, gentlemen, is there anything I can do?" Farnham did not scruple to strike while the iron was hot. He said: "Yes, there is one thing your Honor may do, not so much for us as for the cause of order and good government, violated to-night in your own person. Knowing the insufficiency of the means at your disposal, a few of us propose to raise a subsidiary night-patrol for the protection of life and property during the present excitement. We would like you to give it your official sanction." "Do I understand it will be without expense to my--to the city government?" Mr. Quinlin was anxious to make a show of economy in his annual message. "Entirely," Farnham assured him. "It is done, sir. Come to-morrow morning and get what papers you want. The sperrit of disorder must be met and put down with a bold and defiant hand. Now, gentlemen, if there is a back door to this establishment, I will use it to make me way home." Farnham showed him the rear entrance, and saw him walking homeward up the quiet street; and, coming back, found Bolty and Kendall writhing with merriment. "Well, that beats all," said Kendall. "I guess I'll write home like the fellow did from Iowa to his daddy, 'Come out here quick. Mighty mean men gits office in this country.'" "Yes," assented Bolty. "Dot burgermeister ish better as a circus mit a drick mule." "Don't speak disrespectfully of dignitaries," said Farnham. "It's a bad habit in soldiers." When they went out on the sidewalk the crowd had dispersed. Farnham bade his recruits good night and went up the avenue. They waited until he was a hundred yards away, and then, without a word to each other, followed him at that distance till they saw him enter his own gate. XIII. A BUSY SUNDAY FOR THE MATCHINS. Matters were not going on pleasantly in the Matchin cottage. Maud's success in gaining an eligible position, as it was regarded among her friends, made her at once an object of greater interest than ever; but her temper had not improved with her circumstances, and she showed herself no more accessible than before. Her father, who naturally felt a certain satisfaction at having, as he thought, established her so well, regarded himself as justified in talking to her firmly and seriously respecting her future. He went about it in the only way he knew. "Mattie," he said one evening, when they happened to be alone together, "when are you and Sam going to make a match?" She lifted her eyes to him, and shot out a look of anger and contempt from under her long lashes that made her father feel very small and old and shabby. "Never!" she said, quietly. "Come, come, now," said the old man; "just listen to reason. Sam is a good boy, and with what he makes and what you make----" "That has nothing to do with it. I won't discuss the matter any further. We have had it all out before. If it is ever mentioned again, Sam or I will leave this house." "Hoity-toity, Missy! is that the way you take good advice----" but she was gone before he could say another word. Saul walked up and down the room a few moments, taking very short steps, and solacing his mind by muttering to himself: "Well, that's what I get by having a scholar in the family. Learning goes to the head and the heels--makes 'em proud and skittish." He punctually communicated his failure to Sam, who received the news with a sullen quietness that perplexed still more the puzzled carpenter. On a Sunday afternoon, a few days later, he received a visit from Mr. Bott, whom he welcomed, with great deference and some awe, as an ambassador from a ghostly world of unknown dignity. They talked in a stiff and embarrassed way for some time about the weather, the prospect of a rise in wages, and other such matters, neither obviously taking any interest in what was being said. Suddenly Bott drew nearer and lowered his voice, though the two were alone in the shop. "Mr. Matchin," he said, with an uneasy grin, "I have come to see you about your daughter." Matchin looked at him with a quick suspicion. "Well, who's got anything to say against my daughter?" "Oh, nobody that I know of," said Bott, growing suspicious in his turn. "Has anything ever been said against her?" "Not as I know," said Saul. "Well, what _have_ you got to say?" "I wanted to ask how you would like me as a son-in-law?" said Bott, wishing to bring matters to a decision. Saul stood for a moment without words in his astonishment. He had always regarded Bott as "a professional character," even as a "litrary man"; he had never hoped for so lofty an alliance. And yet he could not say that he wholly liked it. This was a strange creature--highly gifted, doubtless, but hardly comfortable. He was too "thick" with ghosts. One scarcely knew whether he spent most of his time "on earth or in hell," as Saul crudely phrased it. The faint smell of phosphorus that he carried about with him, which was only due to his imperfect ablutions after his seances, impressed Saul's imagination as going to show that Bott was a little too intimate with the under-ground powers. He stood chewing a shaving and weighing the matter in his mind a moment before he answered. He thought to himself, "After all, he is making a living. I have seen as much as five dollars at one of his seeunses." But the only reply he was able to make to Bott's point-blank question was: "Well, I dunno." The words were hardly encouraging, but the tone was weakly compliant. Bott felt that his cause was gained, and thought he might chaffer a little. "Of course," he said, "I would like to have a few things understood, to start with. I am very particular in business matters." "That's right," said Saul, who began to think that this was a very systematic and methodical man. "I am able to support a wife, or I would not ask for one," said Bott. "Exactly," said Saul, with effusion; "that's just what I was saying to myself." "Oh, you was!" said Bott, scowling and hesitating. "You was, was you?" Then, after a moment's pause, in which he eyed Saul attentively, he continued, "Well--that's so. At the same time, I am a business man, and I want to know what you can do for your girl." "Not much of anything, Mr. Bott, if you must know. Mattie is makin' her own living." "Yes. That's all right. Does she pay you for her board?" "Look here, Mr. Bott, that ain't none of your business yet, anyhow. She don't pay no board while she stays here; but that ain't nobody's business." "Oh, no offence, sir, none in the world. Only I am a business man, and don't want misunderstandings. So she don't. And I suppose you don't want to part with your last child--now, do you? It's like breaking your heart-strings, now, ain't it?" he said, in his most sentimental lecture voice. "Well, no, I can't say it is. Mattie's welcome in my house while I live, but of course she'll leave me some day, and I'll wish her joy." "Why should that be? My dear sir, why should that be?" Bott's voice grew greasy with sweetness and persuasion. "Why not all live together? I will be to you as a son. Maud will soothe your declining years. Let it be as it is, Father Saul." The old carpenter looked up with a keen twinkle of his eye. "You and your wife would like to board with us when you are married? Well, mebbe we can arrange that." This was not quite what Bott expected, but he thought best to say no more on that subject for the moment. Saul then asked the question that had all along been hovering on his lips. "Have you spoke to Mattie yet?" The seer blushed and simpered, "I thought it my duty to speak first to you; but I do not doubt her heart." "Oh! you don't," said Saul, with a world of meaning. "You better find out. You'll find her in the house." Bott went to the house, leaving Saul pondering. Girls were queer cattle. Had Mattie given her word to this slab-sided, lanky fellow? Had she given Sam Sleeny the mitten for him? Perhaps she wanted the glory of being Mrs. Professor Bott. Well, she could do as she liked; but Saul swore softly to himself, "If Bott comes to live offen me, he's got to pay his board." Meanwhile, the seer was walking, not without some inward perturbation, to the house, where his fate awaited him. It would have been hard to find a man more confident and more fatuous; but even such fools as he have their moments of doubt and faltering when they approach the not altogether known. He had not entertained the slightest question of Maud's devotion to him, the night she asked from him the counsel of the spirits. But he had seen her several times since that, and she had never renewed the subject. He was in two minds about it. Sometimes he imagined she might have changed her purpose; and then he would comfort himself with the more natural supposition that maiden modesty had been too much for her, and that she was anxiously awaiting his proffer. He had at last girded up his loins like a man and determined to know his doom. He had first ascertained the amount of Maud's salary at the library, and then, as we see, had endeavored to provide for his subsistence at Saul's expense; and now nothing was wanting but the maiden's consent. He trembled a little, but it was more with hope than fear. He could not make himself believe that there was any danger--but he wished it were over and all were well. He paused as he drew near the door. He was conscious that his hands were disagreeably cold and moist. He took out his handkerchief and wiped them, rubbing them briskly together, though the day was clear and warm, and the perspiration stood beaded on his forehead. But there was no escape. He knocked at the door, which was opened by Maud in person, who greeted him with a free and open kindness that restored his confidence. They sat down together, and Maud chatted gayly and pleasantly about the weather and the news. A New York girl, the daughter of a wealthy furrier, was reported in the newspaper as about to marry the third son of an English earl. Maud discussed the advantages of the match on either side as if she had been the friend from childhood of both parties. Suddenly, while she was talking about the forthcoming wedding, the thought occurred to Bott, "Mebbe this is a hint for me," and he plunged into his avowal. Turning hot and cold at once, and wringing his moist hands as he spoke, he said, taking everything for granted: "Miss Maud, I have seen your father and he gives his consent, and you have only to say the word to make us both happy." "What?" Anger, surprise, and contempt were all in the one word and in the flashing eyes of the young woman, as she leaned back in her rocking-chair and transfixed her unhappy suitor. "Why, don't you understand me? I mean----" "Oh, yes, I see what you mean. But I _don't_ mean; and if you had come to me, I'd have saved you the trouble of going to my father." "Now, look here," he pleaded, "you ain't a-going to take it that way, are you? Of course, I'd have come to you first if I had 'a' thought you'd preferred it. All I wanted was----" "Oh," said Maud, with perfect coolness and malice,--for in the last moment she had begun heartily to hate Bott for his presumption,--"I understand what _you_ want. But the question is what _I_ want--and I don't want you." The words, and still more the cold monotonous tone in which they were uttered, stung the dull blood of the conjurer to anger. His mud-colored face became slowly mottled with red. "Well, then," he said, "what did you mean by coming and consulting the sperrits, saying you was in love with a gentleman------" Maud flushed crimson at the memory awakened by these words. Springing from her chair, she opened the door for Bott, and said, "Great goodness! the impudence of some men! You thought I meant _you?_" Bott went out of the door like a whipped hound, with pale face and hanging head. As he passed by the door of the shop, Saul hailed him and said with a smile, "What luck?" Bott did not turn his head, he growled out a deep imprecation and walked away. Matchin was hardly surprised. He mused to himself, "I thought it was funny that Mattie should sack Sam Sleeny for that fellow. I guess he didn't ask the sperrits how the land lay," chuckling over the discomfiture of the seer. Spiritualism is the most convenient religion in the world. You may disbelieve two-thirds of it and yet be perfectly orthodox. Matchin, though a pillar of the faith, always keenly enjoyed the defeat and rout of a medium by his tricksy and rebellious ghosts. He was still laughing to himself over the retreat of Bott, thinking with some paternal fatuity of the attractiveness and spirit of his daughter, when a shadow fell across him, and he saw Offitt standing before him. "Why, Offitt. is that you? I did not hear you. You always come up as soft as a spook!" "Yes, that's me. Where's Sam?" "Sam's gone to Shady Creek on an excursion with his lodge. My wife went with him." "I wanted to see him. I think a heap of Sam." "So do I. Sam is a good fellow." "Excuse my making so free, Mr. Matchin, but I once thought Sam was going to be a son-in-law of yours." "Well, betwixt us, Mr. Offitt, I hoped so myself. But you know what girls is. She jest wouldn't." "So it's all done, is it? No chance for Sam?" Offitt asked eagerly. "Not as much as you could hold sawdust in your eye," the carpenter answered. "Well, now, Mr. Matchin, I have got something to say." ("Oh, Lordy," groaned Saul to himself, "here's another one.") "I wouldn't take no advantage of a friend; but if Sam's got no chance, as you say, why shouldn't I try? With your permission, sir, I will." "Now look ye here, Mr. Offitt. I don't know as I have got anything against you, but I don't know nothing _fur_ you. If it's a fair question, how do you make your livin'?" "That's all right. First place, I have got a good trade. I'm a locksmith." "So I have heard you say. But you don't work at it." "No," Offitt answered; and then, assuming a confidential air, he continued, "As I am to be one of the family, I'll tell you. I don't work at my trade, because I have got a better thing. I am a Reformer." "You don't say!" exclaimed Saul. "I never heard o' your lecturin'." "I don't lecture. I am secretary of a grand section of Labor Reformers, and I git a good salary for it." "Oh, I see," said Saul, not having the least idea of what it all meant. But, like most fathers of his kind, he made no objection to the man's proposal, and told him his daughter was in the house. As Offitt walked away on the same quest where Bott had so recently come to wreck, Saul sat smiling, and nursing his senile vanity with the thought that there were not many mechanics' daughters in Buffland that could get two offers in one Sunday from "professional men." He sat with the contented inertness of old men on his well-worn bench, waiting to see what would be the result of the interview. "I don't believe she'll have him," he thought. "He ain't half the man that Sam is, nor half the scholar that Bott is." It was well he was not of an impatient temperament. He sat quietly there for more than an hour, as still as a knot on a branch, wondering why it took Offitt so much longer than Bott to get an answer to a plain question; but it never once occurred to him that he had a right to go into his own house and participate in what conversation was going on. To American fathers of his class, the parlor is sacred when the daughter has company. There were several reasons why Offitt stayed longer than Bott. The seer had left Maud Matchin in a state of high excitement and anger. The admiration of a man so splay and ungainly was in itself insulting, when it became so enterprising as to propose marriage. She felt as if she had suffered the physical contact of something not clean or wholesome. Besides, she had been greatly stirred by his reference to her request for ghostly counsel, which had resulted in so frightful a failure and mortification. After Bott had gone, she could not dismiss the subject from her mind. She said to herself, "How can I live, hating a man as I hate that Captain Farnham? How can I breathe the same air with him, blushing like a peony whenever I think of him, and turning pale with shame when I hear his name? That ever I should have been refused by a living man! What _does_ a man want," she asked, with her head thrown back and her nostrils dilated, "when he don't want me?" As she was walking to and fro, she glanced out of the window and saw Offitt approaching from the direction of the shop. She knew instantly what his errand would be, though he had never before said a word to her out of the common. "I wonder if father has sent him to me--and how many more has he got in reserve there in the shop? Well, I will make short work of this one." But when he had come in and taken his seat, she found it was not so easy to make short work of him. Dealing with this one was very different from dealing with the other-- about the difference between handling a pig and a panther. Offitt was a human beast of prey--furtive, sly, and elusive, with all his faculties constantly in hand. The sight of Maud excited him like the sight of prey. His small eyes fastened upon her; his sinewy hands tingled to lay hold of her. But he talked, as any casual visitor might, of immaterial things. Maud, while she chatted with him, was preparing herself for the inevitable question and answer. "What shall I say to him? I do not like him. I never did. I never can. But what shall I do? A woman is of no use in the world by herself. He is not such a dunce as poor Sam, and is not such a gawk as Bott. I wonder whether he would make me mind? I am afraid he would, and I don't know whether I would like it or not. I suppose if I married him I would be as poor as a crow all my days. I couldn't stand that. I won't have him. I wish he would make his little speech and go." But he seemed in no hurry to go. He was talking volubly about himself, lying with the marvellous fluency which interest and practice give to such men, and Maud presently found herself listening intently to his stories. He had been in Mexico, it seemed. He owned a silver mine there. He got a million dollars out of it, but took it into his head one day to overturn the Government, and was captured and his money taken; barely escaped the garrote by strangling his jailer; owned the mine still, and should go back and get it some day, when he had accomplished certain purposes in this country. There were plenty of people who wished he was gone now. The President had sent for him to come, to Washington; he went, and was asked to breakfast; nobody there but them two; they ate off gold plates like he used to in Mexico; the President then offered him a hundred thousand to leave, was afraid he would make trouble; told the President to make it a million and then he wouldn't. His grandfather was one of the richest men in Europe; his father ran away with his mother out of a palace. "You must have heard of my father, General Offitt, of Georgy? No? He was the biggest slaveholder in the State. I have got a claim against the Government, now, that's good for a million if it's worth a cent; going to Washington next winter to prosecute it." Maud was now saying to herself, "Why, if half this is true, he is a remarkable man," like many other credulous people, not reflecting that, when half a man says is false, the other half is apt to be also. She began to think it would be worth her while, a red feather in her cap, to refuse such a picturesque person; and then it occurred to her that he had not proposed to marry her, and possibly had no such intention. As his stream of talk, dwelling on his own acts of valor and craft, ran on, she began to feel slightly piqued at its lack of reference to herself. Was this to be a mere afternoon call after all, with no combat and no victory? She felt drawn after awhile to bring her small resources of coquetry into play. She interrupted him with saucy doubts and questions; she cast at him smiles and glances, looking up that he might admire her eyes, and down that her lashes might have their due effect. He interpreted all these signs in a favorable sense, but still prudently refrained from committing himself, until directly challenged by the blush and simper with which she said: "I suppose you must have seen a great many pretty ladies in Mexico?" He waited a moment, looking at her steadily until her eyelids trembled and fell, and then he said, seriously and gravely: "I used to think so; but I never saw there or anywhere else as pretty a lady as I see at this minute." This was the first time in her life that Maud had heard such words from a man. Sam Sleeny, with all his dumb worship, had never found words to tell her she was beautiful, and Bott was too grossly selfish and dull to have thought of it. Poor Sleeny, who would have given his life for her, had not wit enough to pay her a compliment. Offitt, whose love was as little generous as the hunger of a tiger, who wished only to get her into his power, who cared not in the least by what means he should accomplish this, who was perfectly willing to have her find out all his falsehoods the day after her wedding, relying upon his brute strength to retain her then,--this conscienceless knave made more progress by these words than Sam by months of the truest devotion. Yet the impression he made was not altogether pleasant. Thirsting for admiration as she did, there was in her mind an indistinct conscious ness that the man was taking a liberty; and in the sudden rush of color to her cheek and brow at Offitt's words, there was at first almost as much anger as pleasure. But she had neither the dignity nor the training required for the occasion, and all the reply she found was: "Oh, Mr. Offitt, how can you say so?" "I say so," he answered, with the same unsmiling gravity, "because it's the fact. I have been all over the world. I have seen thousands of beautiful ladies, even queens and markisses, and I never yet saw and I never expect to see such beauty as yours, Miss Maud Matchin, of Buffland." She still found no means to silence him or defend herself. She said, with an uneasy laugh, "I am sure I don't see where the wonderful beauty is." "That's because your modesty holds over your beauty. But I see where it is. It's in your eyes, that's like two stars of the night; in your forehead, that looks full of intellect and sense; in your rosy cheeks and smiling lips; in your pretty little hands and feet----" Here she suddenly rolled up her hands in her frilled white apron, and, sitting up straight, drew her feet under her gown. At this performance, they both laughed loud and long, and Maud's nerves were relieved. "What geese we are," she said at last. "You know I don't believe a word you say." "Oh, yes, you do. You've got eyes and a looking-glass. Come now, be honest. You know you never saw a girl as pretty as yourself, and you never saw a man that didn't love you on sight." "I don't know about that." "Don't all the men you know love you?" "There is one man I know hates me, and I hate him." "Who is it? This is very interesting." Maud was suddenly seized with a desire to tell an adventure, something that might match Offitt's tales of wonder. "You'll never tell?" "Hope I may die." "It's Arthur Farnham!" She had succeeded in her purpose, for Offitt stared at her with looks of amazement. "He once wanted to be rather too attentive to me, and I did not like it. So he hates me, and has tried to injure me." "And you don't like him very well?" "I don't. I would owe a good deal to the man who would give him a beating." "All right. You give me--what?--a kiss, or a lock of your hair, and he shall have his thrashing." "You do it and bring me the proofs, and we will talk about it." "Well, I must be off," he said, picking tip his hat. He saw on her face a slight disappointment. He put out his hand to take leave. She folded her arms. "You needn't be in such a hurry," she said, poutingly. "Mother won't be back for ever so long, and I was half asleep over my book when you came in." "Oh, very well," he said. "That suits me." He walked deliberately across the room, picked up a chair, and seated himself very near to Maud. She felt her heart beat with something like terror, and regretted asking him to stay. He had been very agreeable, but she was sure he was going to be disagreeable now. She was afraid that if he grew disagreeable she could not manage him as she could the others. Her worst fears were realized with his first words. "Miss Matchin, if you ask me to stay longer, you must take the consequences. I am going to say to you what I never said to mortal woman before: I love you, and I want you for my wife." She tried to laugh. "Oh, you do?" but her face grew pale, and her hands trembled. "Yes, I do; and I am going to have you, too." He tried to speak lightly, but his voice broke in spite of him. "Oh, indeed!" she replied, recovering herself with an effort. "Perhaps _I'll_ have something to say about that, Mr. Confidence." "Of course; excuse me for talking like a fool. Only have me, and you shall have everything else. All that wealth can buy shall be yours. We'll leave this dull place and go around the world seeking pleasure where it can be found, and everybody will envy me my beauteous bride." "That's very pretty talk, Mr. Offitt; but where is all this wealth to come from?" He did not resent the question, but heard it gladly, as imposing a condition he might meet. "The money is all right. If I lay the money at your feet, will you go with me? Only give me your promise." "I promise nothing," said Maud; "but when you are ready to travel, perhaps you may find me in a better humor." The words seemed to fire him. "That's promise enough for me," he cried, and put out his arms toward her. She struck down his hands, and protested with sudden, cattish energy: "Let me alone. Don't you come so near me. I don't like it. Now you can go," she added. "I have got a lot to think about." He thought he would not spoil his success by staying. "Good-by, then," he said, kissing his fingers to her. "Good-by for a little while, my own precious." He turned at the door. "This is between us, ain't it?" "Yes, what there is of it," she said, with a smile that took all sting from the words. He walked to the shop, and wrung the old man's hand. His look of exultation caused Saul to say, "All settled, eh?" "No," said Offit; "but I have hopes. And now, Mr. Matchin, you know young ladies and the ways of the world. I ask you, as a gentleman, not to say nothing about this, for the present, to nobody." Saul, proud of his secret, readily promised. XIV. CAPTAIN FARNHAM SEES ACTIVE SERVICE AGAIN. Farnham lost no time in calling upon the Mayor to fulfil his engagement. He found his Honor a little subdued by the news of the morning. None of the strikers of the day before had gone back to work, and considerable accessions were reported from other trades. The worst symptoms seemed to be that many shops were striking without orders. The cessation of work was already greater than seemed at first contemplated by the leading agitators themselves. They seemed to be losing their own control of the workingmen, and a few tonguey vagrants and convicts from the city and from neighboring towns, who had come to the surface from nobody knew where, were beginning to exercise a wholly unexpected authority. They were going from place to place, haranguing the workmen, preaching what they called socialism, but what was merely riot and plunder. They were listened to without much response. In some places the men stopped work; in others they drove out the agitators; in others they would listen awhile, and then shout, "Give us a rest!" or "Hire a hall!" or "Wipe off your chir!" But all the while the crowds gradually increased in the streets and public places; the strike, if it promised nothing worse, was taking the dimensions of a great, sad, anxious holiday. There was not the slightest intention on the part of the authorities to interfere with it, and to do them justice, it is hard to see what they could have done, with the means at their disposal. The Mayor, therefore, welcomed Farnham with great cordiality, made him a captain of police, for special duty, on the spot, and enrolled his list of recruits of the night before as members of the police force of the city, expressly providing that their employment should cost the city nothing, now or hereafter. Farnham again made his rounds of the city, but found nothing especially noteworthy or threatening. The wide town, in spite of the large crowds in the streets, had a deserted look. A good many places of business were closed. There was little traffic of vehicles. The whistle of the locomotives and the rush of trains--sounds which had grown so familiar in that great railroad centre that the ear ceased to be affected by them--being suddenly shut off, the silence which came in their place was startling to the sense. The voices of the striking employees, who retained possession of the Union Passenger Depot, resounded strangely through the vast building, which was usually a babel of shrill and strident sounds. On the whole, the feature which most struck him in this violent and unnatural state of things was the singular good-nature of almost all classes. The mass of the workingmen made no threats; the greater number of employers made no recriminations. All hoped for an arrangement, though no one could say how it was to come. The day passed away in fruitless parleys, and at night the fever naturally rose, as is the way of fevers. When nightfall came, the crowd had become so great, in the public square that Farnham thought it might be better not to march his improvised policemen in a body up-town. He therefore dispatched orders to Kendall to send them up with their arms, singly or by twos and threes, to his house. By eight o'clock they were all there, and he passed an hour or so in putting them through a rude form of drill and giving them the instructions which he had prepared during the day. His intention was to keep them together on his own place during the early part of the night, and if, toward midnight, all seemed quiet, to scatter them as a patrol about the neighborhood; in case of serious disturbance anywhere else, to be ready to take part in restoring order. About nine o'clock a man was seen coming rapidly from the house to the rear garden, where Farnham and his company were. The men were dispersed about the place; some on the garden seats, some lying on the grass in the clear moonlight. Farnham was a little apart, talking with Kendall and Grosshammer. He started up to meet the intruder; it was Mr. Temple. "What's all this?" said Temple. "The manly art of self-defence," said Farnham, smiling. "I see, and I am glad to see it, too," answered Temple, warmly. "One of my men told me an hour ago that in the Tramps' Lodging House, last night, it was the common talk that there would be a rush on the houses in this region to-night. I went to the Mayor and tried to see him, but he was hiding, I think. I went to the Chief of Police, and he was in a blue funk. So I thought I would come up myself and see you. I knew you could raise a few men among your servants over here, and I would bring half a dozen, and we could answer for a few tramps, anyhow. But you are all right, and there is nothing to do but wait for them." "Yes, thank you!" said Farnham, "though I am a thousand times obliged to you for your good-will. I won't forget it in a hurry, old man. Are you going home now? I will walk a block or two with you." "No, I am not going home--not by"--[we draw the veil over Temple's language at this point]. "I have come to spend the evening. Have you any tools for me?" "Nonsense, my dear fellow! there is not the least use of it. There is not one chance in a million that there will be anything to do." The two men were walking toward the house. Temple said: "Don't be too sure of it. As I passed by the corner of the Square ten minutes ago, there was a fellow in front of Mouchem's gin-mill, a longhaired, sallow-looking pill, who was making as ugly a speech to a crowd of ruffians as I ever heard. One phrase was something like this: 'Yes, my fellow-toilers'--he looked like he had never worked a muscle in his life except his jaw-tackle,--'the time has come. The hour is at hand. The people rule. Tyranny is down. Enter in and take possession of the spoilers' gains. Algonquin Avenue is heaped with riches wrung from the sweat of the poor. Clean out the abodes of blood guiltiness.' And you ought to have heard the ki-yi's that followed. That encouraged him, and he went on: 'Algonquin Avenue is a robbers' cave, It's very handsome, but it needs one thing more.' 'What's that?' some fellows yelled. 'An aristocrat hung to every lamppost.' This was very popular too, you can bet your boots. On that I toddled off, so as to get you a chance to say your peccavy, anyhow." Walking and talking together, they had passed the house and come to the gate opening on the Avenue. "You might shut these wide gates," said Temple. "I do not think they have been shut in ten years," Farnham answered. "Let's try it." The effort was unsuccessful. The heavy gates would not budge. Suddenly a straggling, irregular cheer was heard from the direction of the Square. "There!" said Temple, "my friend the orator has got off another good thing." But Farnham, who had stepped outside at the sound and gazed on the moon-lighted avenue, said, "There they come now!" They both ran back to the house, Farnham blowing his watchman's whistle. "See here," said Temple, "I must have some tools. You have a club and revolver. Give me the club," which he took without more ceremony. The men came up from the garden in an instant, and quickly fell in at Farnham's word of command. Masked by the shadows of the trees and the shrubbery, they were not discernible from the street. "Remember," said Farnham. "Use your clubs as much as you see fit, if you come to close quarters; but do not fire without orders, unless to save your own lives. I don't think it is likely that these fellows are armed." The clattering of feet grew louder on the sidewalk, and in a moment the leaders of the gang--it could hardly be called a mob--stopped by the gates. "Here's the place. Come along boys!" one of them shouted, but no one stirred until the whole party came up. They formed a dense crowd about the gates and half-filled the wide avenue. There was evidently a moment of hesitation, and then three or four rushed through the gate, followed by a larger number, and at last by the bulk of the crowd. They had come so near the porch that it could now be seen by the light of the moon that few of them carried arms. Some had sticks; one or two men carried heavy stones in their hands; one young man brandished an axe; one had a hammer. There was evidently no attempt at organization whatever. Farnham waited until they were only a few feet away, and then shouted: "Forward! Guide right! Double time! March!" The men darted out from the shadow and began to lay about them with their clubs. A yell of dismay burst from the crowd. Those in front turned and met those behind, and the whole mass began striking out wildly at each other. Yelling and cursing, they were forced back over the lawn to the gate. Farnham, seeing that no shots had been fired, was confirmed in his belief that the rioters were without organization and, to a great extent, without arms. He therefore ordered his men to the right about and brought them back to the house. This movement evidently encouraged the mob. Loud voices were distinctly heard. "Who's afraid of half a dozen cops?" said a burly ruffian, who carried a slunfg-shot. "There's enough of us to eat 'em up." "That's the talk, Bowersox," said another. "You go in and get the first bite." "That's my style," said Bowersox. "Come along, Offitt. Where's Bott? I guess he don't feel very well. Come along, boys! We'll slug 'em this time!" And the crowd, inspirited by this exhortation and the apparent weakness of the police force, made a second rush for the house. Temple was standing next to Farnham. "Arthur," he whispered, "let's change weapons a moment," handing Farnham his club and taking the revolver from his hand. Farnham hardly noticed the exchange, so intently was he watching the advance of the crowd, which he saw, in a moment, was far more serious than the first. They were coming up more solidly, and the advantage of the surprise was now gone. He waited, however, until they were almost as near as they had been before, and then gave the order to charge, in the same words as before, but in a much sharper and louder tone, which rang out like a sudden blast from a trumpet. The improvised policemen darted forward and attacked as vigorously as ever, but the assailants stood their ground. There were blows given as well as taken this time. There was even a moment's confusion on the extreme right of the line, where the great bulk of Bowersox bore down one of the veterans. Farnham sprang forward and struck the burly ruffian with his club; but his foot slipped on the grass, and he dropped on one knee. Bowersox raised his slung-shot; a single report of a pistol rang out, and he tumbled forward over Farnham, who sprang to his feet and shouted, "Now, men, drive 'em!" Taking the right himself and profiting by the momentary shock of the shot, they got the crowd started again, and by vigorous clubbing drove them once more into the street. Returning to the shadow by the house, Farnham's first question was, "Is anybody hurt?" "I've got a little bark knocked off," said one quiet fellow, who came forward showing a ghastly face bathed in blood from a wound in his forehead. Farnham looked at him a moment, and then, running to his door, opened it and called Budsey, who had been hiding in the cellar, praying to all his saints. "Here, Budsey, take this man down to the coachman's house, and then go round the corner and bring Dr. Cutts. If he isn't there, get somebody else. It does not amount to much, but there will be less scar if it is attended to at once." The man was starting away with Budsey, when Temple said, "Look here! You won't need that arsenal any more to-night. Pass it over," and took the man's belt, with club and pistol, and buckled them around his own slim waist. Handing Farnham his own pistol, he said: "Thanks, Arthur. I owe you one cartridge." "And I owe you, God knows how much!" Farnham then briefly announced to his men that the shot which had just been fired was not by a member of the company, and was, therefore, not a disobedience of orders. Catching sight of Bowersox lying motionless on the grass, he ordered, "Two file-closers from the right, go and bring in that man!" But at that moment Bowersox moved, sat up and looked about him, and, suddenly remembering where he was, struggled to his feet and half-ran, half staggered to his friends in the street. They gathered about him for a moment, and then two of them were seen supporting him on his way into the town. Farnham was standing behind his men, and a little apart. He was thinking whether it might not be best to take them at once into the street and disperse the crowd, when he felt a touch at his elbow. He turned, and saw his gardener, Ferguson. "If I might speak a word, sir!" "Certainly--what is it? But be quick about it." "I think all is not right at the Widow Belding's. I was over there but now, and a dozen men--I did not count them,--but--" "Heavens! why did I not think of that? Kendall, you take command of these men for a moment. Bolty, you and the three files on the left come with me. Come, Temple,--the back way." And he started at a pace so rapid that the others could hardly keep him in sight. After the first repulse of the crowd, Offitt, Bott, and a few more of the Bread-winners, together with some of the tramps and jail-birds who had come for plunder, gathered together across the street and agreed upon a diversion. It was evident, they said, that Farnham had a considerable police force with him to protect his property; it was useless to waste any more time there; let the rest stay there and occupy the police; they could have more fun and more profit in some of the good houses in the neighborhood. "Yes," one suggested, "Jairus Belding's widder lives just a step off. Lots o' silver and things. Less go there." They slipped away in the confusion of the second rush, and made their way through the garden to Mrs. Belding's. They tried the door, and, finding it locked, they tore off the shutters and broke the windows, and made their way into the drawing-room, where Mrs. Belding and Alice were sitting. They had been alarmed by the noise and tumult in front of Farnham's house, and had locked and bolted their own doors in consequence. Passing through the kitchen in their rounds, they found Ferguson there in conversation with the cook. "Why, Fergus!" said the widow: "why are you not at home? They are having lively times over there, are they not?" "Yes," said the gardener; "but they have a plenty of men with arms, and I thought I'd e'en step over here and hearten up Bessie a bit." "I'm sure she ought to be very much obliged," responded Mrs. Belding, dryly, though, to speak the truth, she was not displeased to have a man in the house, however little she might esteem his valor. "I have no doubt he sneaked away from the fuss," she said to Alice; "but I would rather have him in the kitchen than nothing." Alice assented. "That is what they mean by moral support, I suppose." She spoke with a smile, but her heart was ill at ease. The man she loved was, for all she knew, in deadly danger, and she could not show that she cared at all for him, for fear of showing that she cared too much. "I am really anxious about Arthur Farnham," continued Mrs. Belding. "I hope he will not get himself into any scrape with those men." The tumult on the street and on the lawn had as yet presented itself to her in no worse light than as a labor demonstration, involving cheers and rude language. "I am afraid he won't be polite enough to them. He might make them a little speech, complimenting Ireland and the American flag, and then they would go away. That's what your father did, in that strike on the Wabash. It was in the papers at the time. But these soldiers--I'm afraid Arthur mayn't be practical enough." "Fortunately, we are not responsible for him," said Alice, whose heart was beating violently. "Why, Alice! what a heartless remark!" At this instant the windows came crashing in, and a half-dozen ruffians burst into the room. Alice sprang, pale and silent, to the side of her mother, who sat, paralyzed with fright, in her rocking-chair. A man came forward from the group of assailants. His soft hat was drawn down over his eyes, and a red handkerchief concealed the lower part of his face. His voice was that of Offitt, as he said, "Ladies, we don't want to do no violence; but, in the name of the Revolutionary Committee, we have called to collect an assessment on you." This machinery was an invention of the moment, and was received with great satisfaction by the Bread-winners. "That's what's the matter," they said, in chorus. "Your assessment, and be lively about it. All you've got handy." "I have no money in the house," Mrs. Belding cried. "What shall I do?" "You forget, mamma," said Alice. "There is some upstairs. If these gentlemen will wait here a moment, I will go and get it." Offitt looked at her sharply. "Well, run and get it. Bott, you go with her." Bott turned angrily upon his chief. "What's the use of calling names? What if I said your name was----" "There, there, don't keep the lady waiting." Alice turned from the room, closely followed by Bott. Reaching the stairs, she swept up the long flight with the swift grace of a swallow. Bott hurried after her as fast as he could; but she gained her bedroom door enough in advance to shut and lock it between them, leaving him kicking and swearing in the hall. She ran to her open window, which looked toward Farnham's, and sent the voice of her love and her trouble together into the clear night in one loud cry, "Arthur!" She blushed crimson as the word involuntarily broke from her lips, and cried again as loudly as she could, "Help!" "I hope he did not hear me at first," she said, covering her face with her hands, and again she cried, "Help!" "Shut up that noise," said Bott, who was kicking violently at the door, but could not break it down. "Shut up, or I'll wring your neck." She stopped, not on account of his threats, which suddenly ceased, but because she heard the noise of footsteps on the porch, and of a short but violent scuffle, which showed that aid of some sort had arrived. In a few moments she heard Bott run away from her door. He started toward the stairs, but finding his retreat cut off ran to the front window, closely pursued. She heard a scramble. Then a voice which made her heart beat tumultuously said. "Look out below there." A moment after, the same voice said, "Have you got him?" and then, "All right! keep him." A light knock on her door followed, and Farnham said, "Miss Belding." Alice stood by the door a moment before she could open it. Her heart was still thumping, her voice failed her, she turned white and red in a moment. The strongest emotion of which she was conscious was the hope that Arthur had not heard her call him by his name. She opened the door with a gravity which was almost ludicrous. Her first words were wholly so. "Good-evening, Captain Farnham," was all she could find to say. Then, striving desperately to add something more gracious, she stammered, "Mamma will be very----" "Glad to see me in the drawing room?" Farnham laughed. "I have no doubt of it. She is quite safe there; and your visitors have gone. Will you join her now?" She could not help perceiving the slight touch of sarcasm in his tone. She saw he was hurt by her coldness and shyness, and that made her still more cold and shy. Without another word she walked before him to the drawing-room, where Mrs. Belding still sat in her rocking-chair, moaning and wringing her hands. Mr. Temple was standing beside her trying to soothe her, telling her it was all over. Bolty was tying the arms of one of the ruffians behind him, who lay on the floor on his face. There was no one else in the room. Alice knelt on the floor by her mother and took her in her arms. "You are not hurt, are you, mamma dear?" she said, in a soft, tender tone, as if she were caressing a crying child. "Oh, no! I suppose not," said the widow; "but I am not used to such doings at this time of night, and I don't like them. Captain Farnham, how shall I ever thank you? and you, Mr. Temple? Goodness knows what we should have done without you. Alice, the moment you left the room, some of them ran to the sideboard for the silver, another one proposed to set the house afire, and that vile creature with the red handkerchief asked me for my ear-rings and my brooch. I was trying to be as long as I could about getting them off, when these gentlemen came in. I tell you they looked like angels, and I'll tell your wife so when I see her, Mr. Temple; and as for Arthur----" At this moment Bolty, having finished the last knot to his satisfaction, rose and touched his prisoner with his foot. "Captain," he said, saluting Farnham, "vot I shall do mit dis schnide?" "They have got the one I dropped from the window?" "Jawohl! on de gravel-walk draussen!" "Very well. Take them both to the stable behind my house for the present, and make them fast together. Then come back here and stand guard awhile with the men on the porch, till I relieve you." "All right. Git up mid yourself," he said, touching his prostrate foe not so gently, "and vorwaerts." As they went out, Farnham turned to Mrs. Belding, and said, "I think you will have no more trouble. The men I leave as a guard will be quite sufficient, I have no doubt. I must hurry back and dismiss the friends who have been serenading me." She gazed at him, not quite comprehending, and then said, "Well, if you must go, good-night, and thank you a thousand times. When I have my wits about me I will thank you better." Arthur answered laughingly as he shook hands. "Oh, that is of no consequence. It was merely neighborly. You would have done as much for me, I am sure." And the gentlemen took their leave. When the ladies were alone, Mrs. Belding resumed her story of the great transaction. "Why, it will be something to tell about as long as I live," she said. "You had hardly got upstairs when I heard a noise of fighting outside on the walk and the porch. Then Arthur and Mr. Temple came through that window as if they were shot out of a cannon. The thief who stood by me, the red handkerchief one, did not stop, but burst through the hall into the kitchen and escaped the back way. Then Mr. Temple took another one and positively threw him through the window, while Arthur, with that policeman's club, knocked the one down whom you saw the German tying up. It was all done in an instant, and I just sat and screamed for my share of the work. Then Arthur came and caught me by the shoulder, and almost shook me, and said, 'Where is Alice?' Upon my word, I had almost forgotten you. I said you were upstairs, and one of those wretches was there too. He looked as black as a fury, and went up in about three steps. I always thought he had such a sweet temper, but to-night he seemed just to _love_ to fight. Now I think of it, Alice, you hardly spoke to him. You must not let him think we are ungrateful. You must write him a nice note to-morrow." Alice laid her head upon her mother's shoulder, where her wet eyes could not be seen. "Mamma," she asked, "did he say 'Where is Alice?' Did he say nothing but 'Alice'?" "Now, don't be silly," said Mrs. Belding. "Of course he said 'Alice.' You wouldn't expect a man to be Miss Beldinging you at such a time. You are quite too particular." "He called me Miss Belding when he came upstairs," said Alice, still hiding her face. "And what did you say to him--for saving this house and all our lives?" The girl's overwrought nerves gave way. She had only breath enough to say, "I said 'Good evening, Captain Farnham!' Wasn't it too perfectly ridiculous?" and then burst into a flood of mingled laughter and tears, which nothing could check, until she had cried herself quiet upon her mother's bosom. XV. THE WHIP OF THE SCYTHIANS. Farnham and Temple walked hastily back to where they had left Kendall with the rest of the company. They found him standing like a statute just where he had been placed by Farnham. The men were ranged in the shadow of the shrubbery and the ivy-clad angle of the house. The moon shone full on the open stretch of lawn, and outside the gates a black mass on the sidewalk and the street showed that the mob had not left the place. But it seemed sluggish and silent. "Have they done anything new?" asked Farnham. "Nothin', but fire a shot or two--went agin the wall overhead; and once they heaved a lot of rocks, but it was too fur--didn't git more'n half way. That's all." "We don't want to stand here looking at each other all night," said Farnham. "Let's go out and tell them it's bed-time," suggested Temple. "Agreed!" said Farnham. He turned to his men, and in a voice at first so low that it could not have been heard ten feet away, yet so clear that every syllable was caught by his soldiers, he gave the words of command. "Company, attention! Eight, forward. Fours right. Double time. March!" The last words rang out clear and loud, and startled the sullen crowd in the street. There was a hurried, irresolute movement among them, which increased as the compact little corps dashed out of the shadow into the clear moonlight, and rushed with the rapid but measured pace of veterans across the lawn. A few missiles were thrown, without effect. One or two shots were heard, followed by a yell in the street-- which showed that some rioter in his excitement had wounded one of his own comrades. Farnham and his little band took only a moment to reach the gate, and the crowd recoiled as they burst through into the street. At the first onslaught the rioters ran in both directions, leaving the street clear immediately in front of the gates. The instant his company reached the middle of the avenue, Arthur, seeing that the greater number of the divided mob had gone to the left, shouted: "Fours left. March--guide right." The little phalanx wheeled instantly and made rapid play with their clubs, but only for a moment. The crowd began to feel the mysterious power which discipline backed by law always exerts, and they ran at full speed up the street to the corner and there dispersed. The formation of the veterans was not even broken. They turned at Farnham's order, faced to the rear, and advanced in double time upon the smaller crowd which still lingered a little way beyond the gate. In this last group there was but one man who stood his ground and struck out for himself. It was a tall young fellow with fair hair and beard, armed with a carpenter's hammer, with which he maintained so formidable an attitude that, although two or three policemen were opposed to him, they were wary about closing in upon him. Farnham, seeing that this was all there was left of the fight, ordered the men to fall back, and, approaching the recalcitrant, said sharply: "Drop that hammer, and surrender! We are officers of the law, and if you resist any longer you'll be hurt." "I don't mind that. I was waiting for _you_," the man said, and made a quick and savage rush and blow at Farnham. In all his campaigns, he had never before had so much use for his careful broadsword training as now. With his policeman's club against the workman's hammer, he defended himself with such address, that in a few seconds, before his men could interfere, his adversary was disarmed and stretched on the sidewalk by a blow over the head. He struggled to rise, but was seized by two men and held fast. "Don't hit him," said Farnham. "I think I have seen this man somewhere." "Why," said Kendall, "that's Sam Sleeny, a carpenter in Dean Street. He orter be in better business." "Yes, I remember," said Farnham; "he is a Reformer. Put him with the others." As they were tying his hands, Sam turned to Farnham and said, in a manner which was made dignified by its slow, energetic malice, "You've beat me to-night, but I will get even with you yet--as sure as there's a God." "That's reasonably sure," said Farnham; "but in the meanwhile, we'll put you where you can cool off a little." The street was now cleared; the last fugitives were out of sight. Farnham returned to his garden, and then divided his men into squads for patrolling the neighborhood. They waited for half an hour, and, finding all was still quiet, then made arrangements for passing the night. Farnham made Temple go into the house with him, and asked Budsey to bring some sherry. "It is not so good as your Santa Rita," he said; "but the exercise in the night air will give it a relish." When the wine came, the men filled and drank, in sober American fashion, without words; but in the heart of each there was the thought of eternal friendship, founded upon brave and loyal service. "Budsey," said Farnham, "give all the men a glass of this wine." "Not this, sir?" said Budsey, aghast. "I said this," replied Farnham. "Perhaps they won't enjoy it, but I shall enjoy giving it to them." Farnham and Temple were eating some bread and cheese and talking over the evening, when Budsey came back with something which approached a smile upon his grave countenance. "Did they like it?" asked Farnham. "Half of 'em said they was temperance and wouldn't 'ave any. Some of the rest said--you will excuse me, sir--as it was d---- poor cider," and Budsey went out of the room with a suspicious convulsion of the back. "I'll go on that," said Mr. Temple. "Goodnight. I think we will have good news in the morning. There will be an attack made on those men at Riverley to-morrow which will melt them like an iceberg in Tartarus." Mr. Temple was not classical, and, of course, did not say Tartarus. Farnham was left alone. The reaction from the excitement of the last few hours was settling upon him. The glow of the fight and his success in it were dying away. Midnight was near, and a deep silence was falling upon the city. There was no sound of bells, of steam-whistles, or of rushing trains. The breeze could be heard in the quiet, stirring the young, soft leaves. Farnham felt sore, beaten, discomfited. He smiled a little bitterly to himself when he considered that the cause of his feeling of discouragement was that Alice Belding had spoken to him with coldness and shyness when she opened her door. He could not help saying to himself, "I deserved a kinder greeting than she gave me. She evidently wished me to understand that I am not to be permitted any further intimacy. I have forfeited that by presuming to love her. But how lovely she is! When she took her mother in her arms, I thought of all the Greek heroines I ever read about. Still, 'if she be not fair for me'--if I am not to be either lover or friend--this is no place for me." The clock on the mantel struck midnight. "A strange night," he mused. "There is one sweet and one bitter thing about it. I have done her a service, and she did not care." He went to the door to speak to Kendall. "I think our work is over for to-night. Have our prisoners taken down to the Refrigerator and turned over to the ordinary police. I will make charges to-morrow. Then divide the men into watches and make yourself as comfortable as you can. If anything happens, call me. If nothing happens, good-night." He returned to his library, turned down the gas, threw himself on the sofa, and was soon asleep; even before Alice, who sat, unhappy, as youth is unhappy, by an open window, her eyes full of tears, her heart full of remorse. "It is too wretched to think of," she bemoaned herself. "He is the only man in the world I could ever care for, and I have driven him away. It never can be made right again; I am punished justly. If I thought he would take me, I believe I could go this minute and throw myself at his feet. But he would smile, and raise me up, and make some pretty speech, very gentle, and very dreadful, and bring me back to mamma, and then I should die." But at nineteen well-nourished maidens do not pass the night in mourning, however heavy their hearts may be, and Alice slept at last, and perhaps was happier in her innocent dreams. The night passed without further incident, and the next day, though it may have shown favorable signs to practised eyes, seemed very much, to the public, like the day which had preceded it. There were fewer shops closed in the back streets; there were not so many parties of wandering apostles of plunder going about to warn laborers away from their work. But in the principal avenues and in the public squares there were the same dense crowds of idlers, some listless and some excited, ready to believe the wildest rumors and to applaud the craziest oratory. Speakers were not lacking; besides the agitators of the town, several had come in from neighboring places, and they were preaching, with fervor and perspiration, from street corners and from barrel-heads in the beer-houses, the dignity of manhood and the overthrow of tyrants. Bott, who had quite distinguished himself during the last few days, was not to be seen. He had passed the night in the station-house, and, on brief examination before a police-justice at an early hour of the morning, on complaint of Farnham and Temple, had been, together with the man captured in Mrs. Belding's drawing-room, bound over to stand his trial for house-breaking at the next term of court. He displayed the most abject terror before his trial, and would have made a full confession of the whole affair had Offitt not had the address to convey to him the assurance that, if he stood firm, the Brotherhood of Bread-winners would attend to his case and be responsible for his safety. Relying upon this, he plucked up his spirits and bore himself with characteristic impudence in the presence of the police-justice, insisting upon being called Professor Bott, giving his profession as inspirational orator, his religion the divinity of humanity. When bound over for trial, he rose and gained a round of applause from the idlers in the court-room by shouting, "I appeal from this outrage to the power of the people and the judgment of history." This was his last recorded oration; for we may as well say at once that, a month later, he stood his trial without help from any Brotherhood, and passed away from public life, though not entirely from public employment, as he is now usefully and unobtrusively engaged in making shoes in the State penitentiary--and is said "to take serious views of life." The cases of Sleeny and the men who were taken in the street by Farnham's policemen were also disposed of summarily through his intervention. He could not help liking the fair-bearded carpenter, although he had been caught in such bad company, and so charged him merely with riotous conduct in the public streets, for which the penalty was a light fine and a few days' detention. Sleeny seemed conscious of his clemency, but gave him no look or expression of gratitude. He was too bitter at heart to feel gratitude, and too awkward to feign it. About noon, a piece of news arrived which produced a distinct impression of discouragement among the strikers. It was announced in the public square that the railway blockade was broken in Clairfield, a city to the east of Buffland about a hundred miles. The hands had accepted the terms of the employers and had gone to work again. An orator tried to break the force of this announcement by depreciating the pluck of the Clairfield men. "Why, gentlemen!" he screamed, "a ten-year-old boy in this town has got twice the sand of a Clairfield man. They just leg the bosses to kick 'em. When they are fired out of a shop door, they sneak down the chimbley and whine to be took on again. We ain't made of that kind of stuff." But this haughty style of eloquence did not avail to inspirit the crowd, especially as the orator was just then interrupted to allow another dispatch to be read, which said that the citizens of a town to the south had risen in mass and taken the station there from the hands of the strikers. This news produced a feeling of isolation and discouragement which grew to positive panic, an hour later, on the report that a brigade of regular troops was on its way to Buffland to restore order. The report was of course unfounded, as a brigade of regular troops could not be got together in this country in much less time than it would take to build a city; but even the name of the phantom army had its effect, and the crowds began to disperse from that time. The final blow was struck, however, later in the day. Farnham learned it from Mr. Temple, at whose counting-room he had called, as usual, for news. Mr. Temple greeted him with a volley of exulting oaths. "It's all up. You know what I told you last night about the attack that was preparing on Riverley. I went out there myself, this forenoon. I knew some of the strikers, and I thought I would see if the -- -- -- -- would let me send my horse Blue Ruin through to Rochester to-morrow. He is entered for the races there, you know, and I didn't want, by -- -- -- --, to miss my engagements, understand? Well, as I drove out there, after I got about half way, it began to occur to me that I never saw so many women since the Lord made me. The road was full of them in carts, buggies, horseback, and afoot. I thought a committee of 'em was going; but I suppose they couldn't trust a committee, and so they all went. There were so many of 'em I couldn't drive fast, and so I got there about the same time the head of the column began to arrive. You never saw anything like it in your life. The strikers had been living out there in a good deal of style--with sentries and republican government and all that. By the great hokey-pokey! they couldn't keep it up a minute when their wives came. They knew 'em too well. They just bulged in without rhyme or rule. Every woman went for her husband and told him to pack up and go home. Some of 'em--the artful kind--begged and wheedled and cried; said they were so tired--wanted their sweethearts again. But the bigger part talked hard sense,--told 'em their lazy picnic had lasted long enough, that there was no meat in the house, and that they had got to come home and go to work. The siege didn't last half an hour. The men brazened it out awhile; some were rough; told their wives to dry up, and one big fellow slapped his wife for crying. By jingo! it wasn't half a flash before another fellow slapped _him_, and there they had it, rolling over and over on the grass, till the others pulled them apart by the legs. It was a gone case from the start. They held a meeting off-hand; the women stayed by to watch proceedings, and, not to make a long story about it, when I started back a delegation of the strikers came with me to see the president of the roads, and trains will run through to-night as usual. I am devilish glad of it, for my part. There is nothing in Rochester of any force but Rosin-the-Bow, and my horse can show him the way around the track as if he was getting a dollar an hour as a guide." "That _is_ good news certainly. Is it generally known in the city?" "I think not. It was too late for the afternoon papers. I told Jimmy Nelson, and he tore down to the depot to save what is left of his fruit. He swore so about it that I was quite shocked." "What about the mill hands?" asked Farnham. "The whole thing will now collapse at once. We shall receive the proposition of the men who left us to-morrow, and re-engage on our own terms, next day, as many as we want. We shan't be hard on them. But one or two gifted orators will have to take the road. They are fit for nothing but Congress, and they can't all go from this district. If I were you, Arthur, by the way, I wouldn't muster out that army of yours till to-morrow. But I don't think there will be any more calls in your neighborhood. You are too inhospitable to visitors." The sun was almost setting as Farnham walked through the public square on his way home. He could hardly believe so sudden a change could have fallen upon the busy scene of a few hours before. The square was almost deserted. Its holiday appearance was gone. A few men occupied the benches. One or two groups stood beneath the trees and conversed in under-tones. The orators had sought their hiding-places, unnecessarily--too fearful of the vengeance which never, in this happy country, attends the exercise of unbridled "slack jaw." As Arthur walked over the asphalt pavement there was nothing to remind him of the great crowds of the last few days but the shells of the pea-nuts crunching under his feet. It seems as if the American workman can never properly invoke the spirit of liberty without a pocketful of this democratic nut. As he drew near his house, Farnham caught a glimpse of light drapery upon Mrs. Belding's piazza, and went over to relieve her from anxiety by telling her the news of the day. When he had got half way across the lawn, he saw Alice rise from beside her mother as if to go. Mrs. Belding signed for her to resume her seat. Farnham felt a slight sensation of anger. "It is unworthy of her," he thought, "to avoid me in that manner. I must let her see she is in no danger from me." He gave his hand cordially to Mrs. Belding and bowed to Alice without a word. He then briefly recounted the news to the elder lady, and assured her that there was no probability of any farther disturbance of the peace. "But we shall have our policemen here all the same to-night, so that you may sleep with a double sense of security." "I am sure you are very good," she said. "I don't know what we should have done without you last night, _and_ Mr. Temple. When it comes to ear-rings, there's no telling what they wouldn't have done." "Two of your guests are in jail, with good prospects of their remaining there. The others, I learn, were thieves from out of town; I doubt if we shall capture them." "For goodness' sake, let them run. I never want to see them again. That ugly creature who went up with Alice for the money--you caught him? I am so glad. The impudence of the creature! going upstairs with my daughter, as if she was not to be trusted. Well," she added candidly, "she wasn't that time, but it was none of _his_ business." Here Alice and Farnham both laughed out, and the sound of the other's voice was very pleasant to each of them, though they did not look toward each other. "I am beginning to think that the world is growing too wicked for single women," Mrs. Belding continued, philosophically. "Men can take care of themselves in so many ways. They can use a club as you do----" "Daily and habitually," assented Arthur. "Or they can make a speech about Ireland and the old flag, as Mr. Belding used to; or they can swear like Mr. Temple. By the way, Alice, you were not here when Mr. Temple swore so at those thieves. I was scandalized, but I had to admit it was very appropriate." "I was also away from the room," said Farnham; "but I can readily believe the comminatory clauses must have been very cogent." "Oh, yes! and such a nice woman _she_ is." "Yes, Mrs. Temple is charming," said Farnham, rising. "Arthur, do not go! Stay to dinner. It will be ready in one moment. It will strengthen our nerves to have a man dine with us, especially a liberating hero like you. Why, you seemed to me last night like Perseus in the picture, coming to rescue What's-her-name from the rock." Farnham glanced at Alice. Her eyes were fixed upon the ground; her fingers were tightly clasped. She was wishing with all her energy that he would stay, waiting to catch his first word of assent, but unable to utter a syllable. "Alice," said Mrs. Belding rather sharply, "I think Arthur does not regard my invitation as quite sufficient. Will you give it your approval?" Alice raised her face at these words and looked up at Farnham. It was a beautiful face at all times, and now it was rosy with confusion, and the eyes were timid but kind. She said with lips that trembled a little: "I should be very glad to have Captain Farnham stay to dinner." She had waited too long, and the words were a little too formal, and Arthur excused himself on the plea of having to look out for his cohort, and went home to a lonely dinner. XVI. OFFITT DIGS A PIT. A week had passed by; the great strike was already almost forgotten. A few poor workmen had lost their places. A few agitators had been dismissed for excellent reasons, having no relation with the strike. The mayor had recovered from his panic, and was beginning to work for a renomination, on the strength of his masterly dealing with the labor difficulties, in which, as he handsomely said in a circular composed by himself and signed by his friends, he "nobly accomplished the duty allotted him of preserving the rights of property while respecting the rights of the people, of keeping the peace according to his oath, and keeping faith with the masses, to which he belonged, in their struggle against monopoly." The rich and prosperous people, as their manner is, congratulated themselves on their escape, and gave no thought to the questions which had come so near to an issue of fire and blood. In this city of two hundred thousand people, two or three dozen politicians continued as before to govern it, to assess and to spend its taxes, to use it as their property and their chattel. The rich and intelligent kept on making money, building fine houses, and bringing up children to hate politics as they did, and in fine to fatten themselves as sheep which should be mutton whenever the butcher was ready. There was hardly a millionaire on Algonquin Avenue who knew where the ward meetings of his party were held. There was not an Irish laborer in the city but knew his way to his ward club as well as to mass. Among those who had taken part in the late exciting events and had now reverted to private life was Sam Sleeny. His short sentence had expired; he had paid his fine and come back to Matchin's. But he was not the quiet, contented workman he had been. He was sour, sullen, and discontented. He nourished a dull grudge against the world. He had tried to renew friendly relations with Maud, but she had repulsed him with positive scorn. Her mind was full of her new prospects, and she did not care to waste time with him. The scene in the rose-house rankled in his heart; he could not but think that her mind had been poisoned by Farnham, and his hate gained intensity every hour. In this frame of mind he fell easily into the control of Offitt. That worthy had not come under the notice of the law for the part he took in the attack on the Belding house; he had not been recognized by Farnham's men, nor denounced by his associates; and so, after a day or two of prudential hiding, he came to the surface again. He met Sam at the very door of the House of Correction, sympathized with him, flattered him, gained his full confidence at last, and held him ready for some purpose which was vague even in his own brain. He was determined to gain possession of Maud, and he felt it must be through some crime, the manner of which was not quite clear to him. If he could use Sam to accomplish his purpose and save his own skin, that would be best. His mind ran constantly upon theft, forgery, burglary, and murder; but he could frame no scheme which did not involve risks that turned him sick. If he could hit upon something where he might furnish the brains, and Sam the physical force and the risk! He dwelt upon this day and night. He urged Sam to talk of his own troubles; of the Matchins; at last, of Maud and his love, and it was not long before the tortured fellow had told him what he saw in the rose-house. Strangely enough, the thought of his fiancee leaning on the shoulder of another man did not in the least diminish the ardor of Offitt. His passion was entirely free from respect or good-will. He used the story to whet the edge of Sam's hatred against Farnham. "Why, Sam, my boy," he would say, "your honor is at stake." "I would as soon kill him as eat," Sam answered. "But what good would that do me? She cares no more for me than she does for you." Offitt was sitting alone in his room one afternoon; his eyes were staring blankly at the opposite wall; his clinched hands were cold as ice. He had been sitting in that way motionless for an hour, a prey to a terrible excitement. It had come about in this way. He had met in one of the shops he frequented a machinist who rented one of Farnham's houses. Offitt had asked him at noon-time to come out and drink a glass of beer with him. The man complied, and was especially careful to bring his waistcoat with him, saying with a laugh, "I lose my shelter if I lose that." "What do you mean?" asked Offitt. "I've got a quarter's rent in there for Cap. Farnham." "Why are you carrying it around all day?" "Well, you know, Farnham is a good sort of fellow, and to keep us from losing time he lets us come to his house in the evening, after working hours, on quarter-day, instead of going to his office in the day-time. You see, I trot up there after supper and get rid of this wad." Offitt's eyes twinkled like those of an adder. "How many of you do this?" "Oh, a good many,--most everybody in our ward and some in the Nineteenth." "A good bit of money?" said Offitt carelessly, though his mouth worked nervously. "You bet your boots! If I had all the cash he takes in to-night, I'd buy an island and shoot the machine business. Well, I must be gettin' back. So long." Offitt had walked directly home after this conversation, looking neither to the right nor the left, like a man asleep. He had gone to his room, locked his door behind him, and sat down upon the edge of his bed and given himself up to an eager dream of crime. His heart beat, now fast, now slow; a cold sweat enveloped him; he felt from time to time half suffocated. Suddenly he heard a loud knocking at his door--not as if made by the hand, but as if some one were hammering. He started and gasped with a choking rattle in his throat. His eyes seemed straining from their sockets. He opened his lips, but no sound came forth. The sharp rapping was repeated, once and again. He made no answer. Then a loud voice said: "Hello, Andy, you asleep?" He threw himself back on his pillow and said yawningly, "Yes. That you, Sam? Why don't you come in?" "'Cause the door's locked." He rose and let Sleeny in; then threw himself back on the bed, stretching and gaping. "What did you make that infernal racket with?" "My new hammer," said Sam. "I just bought it to day. Lost my old one the night we give Farnham the shiveree." "Lemme see it." Offitt took it in his hand and balanced and tested it. "Pretty good hammer. Handle's a leetle thick, but--pretty good hammer." "Ought to be," said Sam. "Paid enough for it." "Where d'you get it?" "Ware & Harden's." "Sam," said Offitt,--he was still holding the hammer and giving himself light taps on the head with it,--"Sam." "Well, you said that before." Offitt opened his mouth twice to speak and shut it again. "What are you doin'?" asked Sleeny. "Trying to catch flies?" "Sam," said Offitt at last, slowly and with effort, "if I was you, the first thing I did with that hammer, I'd crack Art Farnham's cocoa-nut." "Well, Andy, go and crack it yourself if you are so keen to have it done. You're mixing yourself rather too much in my affairs, anyhow," said Sam, who was nettled by these too frequent suggestions of Offitt that his honor required repair. "Sam Sleeny," said Offitt, in an impressive voice, "I'm one of the kind that stands by my friends. If you mean what you have been saying to me, I'll go up with you this very night, and we will together take it out of that aristocrat. Now, that's business." Sleeny looked at his friend in surprise and with some distrust. The offer was so generous and reckless, that he could not help asking himself what was its motive. He looked so long and so stupidly at Offitt, that the latter at last divined his feeling. He thought that, without telling Sleeny the whole scheme, he would test him one step farther. "I don't doubt," he said carelessly, "but what we could pay ourselves well for the job,--spoil the 'Gyptians, you know,--forage on the enemy. Plenty of portables in them houses, eh!" "I never said"--Sam spoke slowly and deliberately--"I wanted to 'sassinate him, or rob him, or burgle him. If I could catch him and lick him, in a fair fight, I'd do it; and I wouldn't care how hard I hit him, or what with." "All right," said Offitt, curtly. "You met him once in a fair fight, and he licked you. And you tried him another way,--courtin' the same girl,--and he beat you there. But it's all right. I've got nothin' against him, if you hain't. Lemme mark your name on this hammer," and, turning the conversation so quickly that Sleeny had no opportunity to resent the last taunt, he took his knife and began dexterously and swiftly to cut Sam's initials in the handle of his hammer. Before, however, he had half completed his self-imposed task, he exclaimed, "This is dry work. Let's go out and get some beer. I'll finish your hammer and bring it around after supper." "There's one S on it," said Sam; "that's enough." "One S enough! It might mean Smith, or Schneider, or Sullivan. No, sir. I'll put two on in the highest style of art, and then everybody will know and respect Sam Sleeny's tool." They passed out of the room together, and drank their beer at a neighboring garden. They were both rather silent and preoccupied. As they parted, Offitt said, "I've got a scheme on hand for raising the wind, I want to talk to you about. Be at my room to-night between nine and ten, and wait till I come, if I am out. Don't fail." Sam stared a little, but promised, asking no questions. When Offitt came back, he locked the door again behind him. He bustled about the room as if preparing to move. He had little to pack; a few shabby clothes were thrown into a small trunk, a pile of letters and papers were hastily torn up and pitched into the untidy grate. All this while he muttered to himself as if to keep himself in company. He said: "I had to take the other shoot--he hadn't the sand to help--I couldn't tell him any more. . . . I wonder if she will go with me when I come tonight--ready? I shall feel I deserve her anyhow. She don't treat me as she did him, according to Sam's story. She makes me keep my distance. She hasn't even shook hands with me since we was engaged. I'll pay her for that after awhile." He walked up and down his room breathing quick and hard. "I shall risk my neck, I know; but it won't be the first time, and I never will have such a reason again. She beats anything I ever saw. I've _got_ to have the money--to suit such a woman. . . . I'm almost sorry for Sam--but the Lord made some men to be other men's fools. . . ." This was the staple of his musings; other things less edifying still may be omitted. While he was engaged in this manner he heard a timid knock at his door. "Another visitor? I'm getting popular," he said, and went to open the door. A seedy, forlorn-looking man came in; he took off his shabby hat and held it under his arm. He said, "Good-evenin'," in a tone a little above a whisper. "Well, what's the matter?" asked Offitt. "Have you heered about Brother Bowersox?" "Never mind the brothering--that's played out. What is there about Bowersox?" "He's dangerous; they don't think he'll live through the night." "Well, what of it?" This was not encouraging, but the poor Bread-winner ventured to say, "I thought some of the Brothers----" But Offitt closed the subject by a brutal laugh. "The Brothers are looking out for themselves these times. The less said about the Brotherhood the better. It's up the spout, do you hear?" The poor fellow shrunk away into his ragged clothes, and went out with a submissive "Good-evenin'." "I'll never found another Brotherhood," Offitt said to himself. "It's more trouble than it brings in." It was now growing dark. He took his hat and went down the stairs and out into the street. He entered a restaurant and ordered a beefsteak, which he ate, paid for, and departed after a short chat with the waiter, whom he knew. He went around the corner, entered another eating-house, called for a cup of coffee and a roll. There also he was careful to speak with the man who served him, slapping him on the shoulder with familiarity. He went into a drug store a little later and bought a glass of soda-water, dropping the glass on the marble floor, and paying for it after some controversy. He then walked up to Dean Street. He found the family all together in the sitting-room. He chatted awhile with them, and asked for Sleeny. "I don't really know where Sam is. He ain't so reg'lar in his hours as he used to be," said Saul. "I hope he ain't gettin' wild." "I hope not," said Offitt, in a tone of real distress--then, after a pause, "You needn't mention my havin' asked for him. He may be sensitive about it." As he came away, Maud followed him to the door. He whispered, "Be ready, my beauty, to start at a moment's notice. The money is on the way. You shall live like a queen before many days are gone." "We shall see," she answered, with a smile, but shutting the door between them. He clinched his fists and muttered, "I'll figure it all up and take my pay, Missy. She's worth it. I will have to do some crooked things to get her; but by ----, I'd kill a dozen men and hang another, just to stand by and see her braid her hair." Returning to his house, he ran nimbly up the stairs, half fearing to find Sleeny there, but he had not yet arrived. He seized the hammer, put it in his pocket, and came down again. Still intent upon accounting for as much of the evening as possible, he thought of a variety-show in the neighborhood, and went there. He spoke to some of the loafers at the door. He then walked to the box-office and asked for a ticket, addressing the man who sold it to him as "Jimmy," and asking how business was. The man handed him his ticket without any reply, but turned to a friend beside him, and said, "Who is that cheeky brother that knows me so well?" "Oh! that's a rounder by the name of Offitt. He is a sort of Reformer-- makes speeches to the puddlers on the rights of man." "Seems rather fresh," said Jimmy. "A little brine wouldn't hurt him." Offitt strolled into the theatre, which was well filled. The curtain was down at the moment, and he walked the full extent of the centre aisle to the orchestra, looking about him as if in search of some one. He saw one or two acquaintances and nodded to them. He then walked back and took a seat near the door. The curtain rose, and the star of the evening bounded upon the stage,--a strapping young woman in the dress of an army officer. She was greeted with applause before she began her song, and with her first notes Offitt quietly went out. He looked at the clock on the City Hall, and saw that he had no more time to kill. He walked, without hurrying or loitering, up the shady side of the street till he came to the quarter where Farnham lived. He then crossed into the wide avenue, and, looking swiftly about him, approached the open gates of Farnham's place. Two or three men were coming out, one or two were going in. He waited till the former had turned down the street, and the latter were on the door-step. He then walked briskly up the path to the house; but instead of mounting the steps, he turned to the left and lay down under the library windows behind a clump of lilacs. "If they catch me here," he thought, "they can only take me for a tramp and give me the grand bounce." The windows opened upon a stone platform a few feet from the ground. He could hear the sound of voices within. At last he heard the men rise, push back their chairs, and say "Good-night." He heard their heavy shoes on the front steps. "Now for it," he whispered. But at that moment a belated tenant came in. He wanted to talk of some repairs to his house. Offitt lay down again, resting his head on his arm. The soft turf, the stillness, the warmth of the summer night lulled him into drowsiness. In spite of the reason he had for keeping awake, his eyes were closing and his senses were fading, when a shrill whistle startled him into broad wakefulness. It was the melancholy note of a whippoorwill in the branches of a lime-tree in the garden. Offitt listened for the sound of voices in the library. He heard nothing. "Can I have slept through----no, there is a light." A shadow fell across the window. The heavy tread of Budsey approached. Farnham's voice was heard: "Never mind the windows, Budsey. I will close them and the front door. I will wait here awhile; somebody else may come. You can go to bed." "Good-night, sir." "Good-night." Offitt waited only a moment. He rose and looked cautiously in at the window. Farnham was seated at his desk. He had sorted, in the methodical way peculiar to men who have held command in the army, the papers which he had been using with his tenants and the money he had received from them. They were arranged on the desk before him in neat bundles, ready to be transferred to the safe, across the room. He had taken up his pen to make some final indorsement. Offitt drew off his shoes, leaped upon the platform, and entered the library as swiftly and noiselessly as a panther walking over sand. XVII. IN AND OUT OF WINDOWS. Alice Belding was seated before her glass braiding her long hair. Her mother had come in from her own room, as her custom often was, to chat with her daughter in the half hour before bed-time. It gratified at once her maternal love and her pride to watch the exquisite beauty of her child, as she sat, dressed in a white wrapper that made her seem still taller than she was brushing and braiding the luxuriant tresses that gave under the light every tint and reflection of which gold is capable. The pink and pearl of the round arm as the loose sleeve would slip to the elbow, the poise of the proud head, the full white column of the neck, the soft curve of cheek and chin,--all this delighted her as it would have delighted a lover. But with all her light-headedness, there was enough of discretion, or perhaps of innate New England reserve, to keep her from ever expressing to Alice her pleasure in her beauty. So the wholesome-minded girl never imagined the admiration of which she was the object, and thought that her mother only liked to chat a little before sleeping. They talked of trivial matters, of the tea at Mrs. Hyson's, of Formosa Hyson's purple dress which made her sallower than ever, of rain and fair weather. "I think," said Mrs. Bekling, "that Phrasy Dallas gets more and more stylish every day. I don't wonder at Arthur Farnham's devotion. That would make an excellent match--they are both so dreadfully clever. By the way, he has not been here this week. And I declare! I don't believe you have ever written him that note of thanks." "No," said Alice, smiling--she had schooled herself by this time to speak of him carelessly. "I was too much frightened to thank him on the spot, and now it would be ancient history. We must save our thanks till we see him." "I want to see him about other things. You must write and ask him to dinner to-morrow or next day." "Don't you think he would like it better if you would write?" "There you are again--as if it mattered. Write that 'Mamma bids me.' There, your hair is braided. Write the note now, and I will send it over in the morning before he gets away." Alice rose and walked to her escritoire, her long robe trailing, her thick braids hanging almost to the floor, her fair cheek touched with a delicate spot of color at the thought of writing a formal note to the man she worshipped. She took a pen and wrote "My dear Mr. Farnham," and the conventional address made her heart flutter and her eyes grow dim. While she was writing, she heard her mother say: "What a joke!" She looked up, and saw that Mrs. Belding, having pushed open the shutters, had picked up her opera-glass and was looking through it at something out of the window. "Do you know, Alice," she said, laughing, "since that ailantus tree was cut down, you can see straight into his library from here. There he is now, sitting at his desk." "Mamma!" pleaded Alice, rising and trying to take the glass away from her. "Don't do that, I beg!" "Nonsense," said her mother, keeping her away with one hand and holding the glass with the other. "There comes Budsey to close the blinds. The show is over. No; he goes away, leaving them open." "Mamma, I will leave the room if----" "My goodness! look at that!" cried the widow, putting the glass in her daughter's hand and sinking into a chair with fright. Alice, filled with a nameless dread, saw her mother was pale and trembling, and took the glass. She dropped it in an instant, and leaning from the window sent forth once more that cry of love and alarm, which rang through the stillness of night with all the power of her young throat: "Arthur!" She turned, and sped down the stairs, and across the lawn like an arrow shot for life or death from a long-bow. Farnham heard the sweet, strong voice ringing out of the stillness like the cry of an angel in a vision, and raised his head with a startled movement from the desk where he was writing. Offitt heard it, too, as he raised his hand to strike a deadly blow; and though it did not withhold him from his murderous purpose, it disturbed somewhat the precision of his hand. The hammer descended a little to the right of where he had intended to strike. It made a deep and cruel gash, and felled Farnham to the floor, but it did not kill him. He rose, giddy and faint with the blow and half-blinded with the blood that poured down over his right eye. He clapped his hand, with a soldier's instinct, to the place where his sword-hilt was not, and then staggered, rather than rushed, at his assailant, to grapple him with his naked hands. Offitt struck him once more, and he fell headlong on the floor, in the blaze of a myriad lights that flashed all at once into deep darkness and silence. The assassin, seeing that his victim no longer moved, threw down his reeking weapon, and, seizing the packages of money on the desk, thrust them into his pockets. He stepped back through the open window and stooped to pick up his shoes. As he rose, he saw a sight which for an instant froze him with terror. A tall and beautiful form, dressed all in white, was swiftly gliding toward him over the grass. It drew near, and he saw its pale features set in a terrible expression of pity and horror. It seemed to him like an avenging spirit. He shut his eyes for a moment in abject fright, and the phantom swept by him and leaped like a white doe upon the platform, through the open window, and out of his sight. He ran to the gate, quaking and trembling, then walked quietly to the nearest corner, where he sat down upon the curb-stone and put on his shoes. Mrs. Belding followed, as rapidly as she could, the swift flight of her daughter; but it was some minutes after the young girl had leaped through the window that her mother walked breathlessly through the front door and the hall into the library. She saw there a sight which made her shudder and turn faint. Alice was sitting on the floor, holding in her lap the blood-dabbled head of Farnham. Beside her stood a glass of water, a pitcher, and several towels. Some of them were red and saturated, some were still fresh and neatly folded. She was carefully cleansing and wiping the white forehead of the lifeless man of the last red drop. "Oh, Alice, what is this?" cried her mother. "He is dead!" she answered, in a hoarse, strained voice. "I feared so when I first came in. He was lying on his face. I lifted him up, but he could not see me. I kissed him, hoping he might kiss me again. But he did not. Then I saw this water on the stand over there. I remembered there were always towels there in the billiard-room. I ran and got them, and washed the blood away from his face. See, his face is not hurt. I am glad of that. But there is a dreadful wound in his head." She dropped her voice to a choking whisper at these words. Her mother gazed at her with speechless consternation. Had the shock deprived her of reason? "Alice," she said, "this is no place for you. I will call the servants and send for a surgeon, and you must go home." "Oh, no, mamma. I see I have frightened you, but there is no need to be frightened. Yes, call the servants, but do not let them come in here for awhile, not till the doctors come. They can do no good. He is dead." Mrs. Belding had risen and rung the bell violently. "Do, mamma, see the servants in the hall outside. Don't let them come in for a moment. Do! I pray! I pray! I will do anything for you." There was such intensity of passion in the girl's prayer that her mother yielded, and when the servants came running in, half-dressed, in answer to the bell, she stepped outside the door and said, "Captain Farnham has been badly hurt. Two of you go for the nearest doctors. You need not come in at present. My daughter and I will take care of him." She went back, closing the door behind her. Alice was smiling. "There, you are a dear! I will love you forever for that! It is only for a moment. The doctors will soon be here, and then I must give him up." "Oh, Alice," the poor lady whimpered, "why do you talk so wildly? What do you mean?" "Don't cry, mamma! It is only for a moment. It is all very simple. I am not crazy. He was my lover!" "Heaven help us!" "Yes, this dear man, this noble man offered me his love, and I refused it. I may have been crazy then, but I am not now. I can love him now. I will be his widow--if I was not his wife. We will be two widows together--always. Now you know I am doing nothing wrong or wild. He is mine. "Give me one of those towels," she exclaimed, suddenly. "I can tie up his head so that it will stop bleeding till the doctors come." She took the towels, tore strips from her own dress, and in a few moments, with singular skill and tenderness, she had stopped the flow of blood from the wound. "There! He looks almost as if he were asleep, does he not? Oh, my love, my love!" Up to this moment she had not shed one tear. Her voice was strained, choked, and sobbing, but her eyes were dry. She kissed him on his brow and his mouth. She bent over him and laid her smooth cheek to his. She murmured: "Good-by, good-by, till I come to you, my own love!" All at once she raised her head with a strange light in her eyes. "Mamma!" she cried, "see how warm his cheek is. Heaven is merciful! perhaps he is alive." She put both arms about him, and, gently but powerfully lifting his dead weight of head and shoulders, drew him to her heart. She held him to her warm bosom, rocking him to and fro. "Oh, my beloved!" she murmured, "if you will live, I will be so good to you." She lowered him again, resting his head on her lap. A drop of blood, from the napkin in which his head was wrapped, had touched the bosom of her dress, staining it as if a cherry had been crushed there. She sat, gazing with an anguish of hope upon his pale face. A shudder ran through him, and he opened his eyes--only for a moment. He groaned, and slowly closed them. The tears could no longer be restrained. They fell like a summer shower from her eyes, while she sobbed, "Thank God! my darling is not dead." Her quick ear caught footsteps at the outer door. "Here, mamma, take my place. Let me hide before all those men come in." In a moment she had leaped through the window, whence she ran through the dewy grass to her home. An hour afterward her mother returned, escorted by one of the surgeons. She found Alice in bed, peacefully sleeping. As Mrs. Belding approached the bedside, Alice woke and smiled. "I know without your telling me, mamma. He will live. I began to pray for him,--but I felt sure he would live, and so I gave thanks instead." "You are a strange girl," said Mrs. Belding, gravely. "But you are right. Dr. Cutts says, if he escapes without fever, there is nothing very serious in the wound itself. The blow that made that gash in his head was not the one which made him unconscious. They found another, behind his ear; the skin was not broken. There was a bump about as big as a walnut. They said it was concussion of the brain, but no fracture anywhere. By the way, Dr. Cutts complimented me very handsomely on the way I had managed the case before his arrival. He said there was positively a professional excellence about my bandage. You may imagine I did not set him right." Alice, laughing and blushing, said, "I will allow you all the credit." Mrs. Belding kissed her, and said, "Good-night," and walked to the door. There she paused a moment, and came back to the bed. "I think, after all, I had better say now what I thought of keeping till to-morrow. I thank you for your confidence to-night, and shall respect it. But you will see, I am sure, the necessity of being very circumspect, under the circumstances. If you should want to do anything for Arthur while he is ill, I should feel it my duty to forbid it." Alice received this charge with frank, open eyes. "I should not dream of such a thing," she said. "If he had died, I should have been his widow; but, as he is to live, he must come for me if he wants me. I was very silly about him, but I must take the consequences. I can't now take advantage of the poor fellow, by saving his life and establishing a claim on it. So I will promise anything you want. I am so happy that I will promise easily. But I am also very sleepy." The beautiful eyelids were indeed heavy and drooping. The night's excitement had left her wearied and utterly content. She fell asleep even as her mother kissed her forehead. The feeling of Offitt as he left Algonquin Avenue and struck into a side street was one of pure exultation. He had accomplished the boldest act of his life. He had shown address, skill, and courage. He had done a thing which had appalled him in the contemplation, merely on account of its physical difficulties and dangers. He had done it successfully. He had a large amount of money in his pocket--enough to carry his bride to the ends of the earth. When it was gone--well, at worst, he could leave her, and shift for himself again. He had not a particle of regret or remorse; and, in fact, these sentiments are far rarer than moralists would have us believe. A ruffian who commits a crime usually glories in it. It exalts him in his own eyes, all the more that he is compelled to keep silent about it. As Offitt walked rapidly in the direction of Dean Street, the only shadow on his exultation was his sudden perception of the fact that he had better not tell Maud what he had done. In all his plans he had promised himself the pleasure of telling her that she was avenged upon her enemy by the hands of her lover; he had thought he might extort his first kiss by that heroic avowal; but now, as he walked stealthily down the silent street, he saw that nobody in the universe could be made his confidant. "I'll never own it, in earth or hell," he said to himself. When he reached Matchin's cottage, all was dark and still. He tried to attract Maud's attention by throwing soft clods of earth against her window, but her sleep was too sound. He was afraid to throw pebbles for fear of breaking the panes and waking the family. He went into the little yard adjoining the shop, and found a ladder. He brought it out, and placed it against the wall. He perceived now for the first time that his hands were sticky. He gazed at them a moment. "Oh, yes," he said to himself, "when he fell I held out my hands to keep his head from touching my clothes. Careless trick! Ought to have washed them, first thing." Then, struck by a sudden idea, he went to the well-curb, and slightly moistened his fingers. He then rubbed them on the door-knob, and the edge of the door of the cottage, and pressed them several times in different places on the ladder. "Not a bad scheme," he said, chuckling. He then went again to the well, and washed his hands thoroughly, afterward taking a handful of earth, and rubbing them till they were as dirty as usual. After making all these preparations for future contingencies, he mounted the ladder, and tried to raise the window. It was already open a few inches to admit the air, but was fastened there, and he could not stir it. He began to call and whistle in as low and penetrating a tone as he could manage, and at last awoke Maud, whose bed was only a few feet away. She started up with a low cry of alarm, but saw in a moment who it was. "Well, what on earth are you doing here? Go away this minute, or I'll call my father." "Let me in, and I will tell you." "I'll do nothing of the sort. Begone this instant." "Maud, don't be foolish," he pleaded, in real alarm, as he saw that she was angry and insulted. "I have done as you told me. I have wealth for us both, and I have"--he had almost betrayed himself, but he concluded--"I have come to take you away forever." "Come to-morrow, at a decent hour, and I will talk to you." "Now, Maud, my beauty, don't believe I am humbugging. I brought a lot of money for you to look at--I knew you wanted to be sure. See here!" He drew from his pocket a package of bank bills--he saw a glittering stain on them. He put them in the other pocket of his coat and took out another package. "And here's another, I've got a dozen like them. Handle 'em yourself." He put them in through the window. Maud was so near that she could take the bills by putting out her hand. She saw there was a large amount of money there--more than she had ever seen before. "Come, my beauty," he said, "this is only spending-money for a bridal tour. There are millions behind it. Get up and put on your dress. I will wait below here. We can take the midnight train east, be married at Clairfield, and sail for Paris the next day. That's the world for you to shine in. Come! Waste no time. No tellin' what may happen tomorrow." She was strongly tempted. She had no longer any doubt of his wealth. He was not precisely a hero in appearance, but she had never insisted upon that--her romance having been always of a practical kind. She was about to assent--and to seal her doom--when she suddenly remembered that all her best clothes were in her mother's closet, which was larger than hers, and that she could not get them without passing through the room where her parents were asleep. That ended the discussion. It was out of the question that she should marry this magnificent stranger in her every-day dress and cotton stockings. It was equally impossible that she should give that reason to any man. So she said, with dignity: "Mr. Offitt, it is not proper for me to continue this conversation any longer. You ought to see it ain't. I shall be happy to see you to-morrow." Offitt descended the ladder, grinding out curses between his set teeth. A hate, as keen as his passion, for the foolish girl fired him. "Think," he hissed, "a man that killed, half an hour ago, the biggest swell in Buffland, to be treated that way by a carpenter's wench." "Wait awhile, Miss; it'll come my innings." He lifted up the ladder, carried it carefully around the house, and leaned it against the wall under the window of the room occupied by Sleeny. He hurried back to his lodging in Perry Place, where he found Sam Sleeny lying asleep on his bed. He was not very graciously greeted by his drowsy visitor. "Why didn't you stay out all night?" Sam growled. "Where have you been, anyhow?" "I've been at the variety-show, and it was the boss fraud of the season." "You stayed so long you must have liked it." "I was waiting to see just how bad a show could be and not spoil." "What did you want to see me about tonight?" "The fact is, I expected to meet a man around at the Varieties who was to go in with us into a big thing. But he wasn't there. I'll nail him to-morrow, and then we can talk. It's big money, Sammy, and no discount. What would you think of a thousand dollars a month?" "I'd a heap rather see it than hear you chin about it. Give me my hammer, and I'll go home." "Why, I took it round to your shop this evening, and I tossed it in through the window. I meant to throw it upon the table, but it went over, I think from the sound, and dropped on the floor. You will find it among the shavings, I reckon," "Well, I'm off," said Sam, by way of good-night. "All right. Guess I'll see you to-morrow." Offitt waited till he could hear the heavy tread of Sleeny completing the first flight of stairs and going around to the head of the second. He then shut and locked his door, and hung his hat over the keyhole. He turned up his lamp and sat down by the table to count his night's gains. The first package he took from his pocket had a shining stain upon the outside bill. He separated the stained bill carefully from the rest, and held it a moment in his hand as if in doubt. He walked to his wash-stand, but at the moment of touching his pitcher he stopped short. He took out his handkerchief, but shook his head and put it back. Finally, he lighted a match, applied it to the corner of the bill, and watched it take fire and consume, until his fingers were scorched by the blaze. "Pity!" he whispered--"good money like that." He seated himself again and began with a fierce, sustained delight to arrange and sort the bank-bills, laying the larger denominations by themselves, smoothing them down with a quick and tender touch, a kindling eye and a beating heart. In his whole life, past and future, there was not such another moment of enjoyment. Money is, of course, precious and acceptable to all men except idiots. But, if it means much to the good and virtuous, how infinitely more it means to the thoroughly depraved--the instant gratification of every savage and hungry devil of a passion which their vile natures harbor. Though the first and principal thing Offitt thought of was the possession of Maud Matchin, his excited fancy did not stop there. A long gallery of vicious pictures stretched out before his flaming eyes, as he reckoned up the harvest of his hand. The mere thought that each bill represented a dinner, where he might eat and drink what he liked, was enough to inebriate a starved rogue whose excesses had always been limited by his poverty. When he had counted and sorted his cash, he took enough for his immediate needs and put it in his wallet. The rest he made up into convenient packages, which he tied compactly with twine and disposed in his various pockets. "I'll chance it," he thought, after some deliberation. "If they get me, they can get the money, too. But they sha'n't get it without me." He threw himself on his bed, and slept soundly till morning. XVIII. OFFITT PLANS A LONG JOURNEY. The bright sun and the morning noises of the city waked Offitt from his sleep. As he dressed himself the weight of the packages in his pockets gave him a pleasant sensation to begin the day with. He felt as if he were entering upon a new state of existence--a life with plenty of money. He composed in his mind an elaborate breakfast as he walked down-stairs and took his way to a restaurant, which he entered with the assured step of a man of capital. He gave his order to the waiter with more decision than usual, and told him in closing "not to be all day about it, either." While waiting for his breakfast, he opened the morning "Bale Fire" to see if there was any account of "The Algonquin Avenue Tragedy." This was the phrase which he had arranged in his mind as the probable head-line of the article. He had so convinced himself of the efficacy of his own precautions, that he anticipated the same pleasure in reading the comments upon his exploit that an author whose incognito is assured enjoys in reading the criticisms of his anonymous work. He was at first disappointed in seeing no allusion to the affair in the usual local columns; but at last discovered in a corner of the paper this double-leaded postscript: "We stop the press to state that an appalling crime was last night committed in Algonquin Avenue. The mansion of Arthur Farnham, Esq., was entered by burglars between ten and eleven o'clock, and that gentleman assaulted and probably murdered. "Full particulars in a later edition." "LATER. Captain Farnham is still living, and some hopes are entertained of his recovery. The police have found the weapon with which the almost fatal blow was struck--a carpenter's hammer marked with a letter S. It is thought this clew will lead to the detection of the guilty parties." Offitt was not entirely pleased with the tone of this notice. He had expected some reference to the address and daring of the burglar. But he smiled to himself, "Why should I care for Sam's reputation?" and ate his breakfast with a good appetite. Before he had finished, however, he greatly modified his plan, which was to have the threads of evidence lead naturally, of themselves, to the conviction of Sleeny. He determined to frighten Sam, if possible, out of the city, knowing that his flight would be conclusive evidence of guilt. He swallowed his coffee hurriedly and walked down to Dean Street, where by good fortune he found Sam alone in the shop. He was kicking about a pile of shavings on the floor. He turned as Offitt entered and said: "Oh, there you are. I can't find that hammer anywhere." Offitt's face assumed a grieved expression. "Come, come, Sam, don't stand me off that way. I'm your friend, if you've got one in the world. You mustn't lose a minute more. You've got time now to catch the 8.40. Come, jump in a hack and be off." His earnestness and rapidity confused Sleeny, and drove all thoughts of the hammer from his mind. He stared at Offitt blankly, and said, "Why, what are you givin' me now?" "I'm a-givin' you truth and friendship, and fewest words is best. Come, light out, and write where you stop. I'll see you through." "See here," roared Sam, "are you crazy or am I? Speak out! What's up?" "Oh! I've got to speak it out, raw and plain, have I? Very well! Art. Farnham was attacked and nearly murdered last night, and if you didn't do it who did? Now come, for the Lord's sake, get off before the police get here. I never thought you had the sand--but I see you've got too much. Don't lose time talking any more. I'm glad you've killed him. You done just right--but I don't want to see you hung for it." His excitement and feigned earnestness had brought the tears to his eyes. Sam saw them and was convinced. "Andy," he said solemnly. "I know you're my friend, and mean right. I'll swear before God it wasn't me, and I know nothing about it, and I won't run away." "But how will we prove it," said Offitt, wringing his hands in distress. "Where was you last night from ten to eleven?" "You know where I was--in your room. I went there just after nine and fell asleep waiting for you." "Yes, of course, but who knows it? Sam, I believe you are innocent since you say so. But see the circumstances. You _have_ talked about goin' for him. You _have_ had a fight with him, and got put in jail for it, and--" he was about to mention the hammer, but was afraid--"I wish you would take my advice and go off for a week or so till the truth comes out. I'll lend you all the money you want. I'm flush this week." "No, Andy," said Sleeny, "nobody could be kinder than you. But I won't run away. They can't put a man where he wasn't." "Very well," replied Offitt, "I admire your pluck, and I'll swear a blue streak for you when the time comes. And perhaps I had better get away now so they won't know I've been with you." He went without a moment's delay to the chief of police and told him that he had a disagreeable duty to perform; that he knew the murderer of Captain Farnham; that the criminal was an intimate friend of his, a young man hitherto of good character named Sleeny. "Ah-ha!" said the chief. "That was the fellow that Captain Farnham knocked down and arrested in the riot." "The same," said Offitt. "He has since that been furious against the Captain. I have reasoned with him over and over about it. Yesterday he came to see me; showed me a hammer he had just bought at Ware & Harden's; said he was going to break Arthur Farnham's skull with it. I didn't believe he would, he had said it so often before. While we were talking, I took the hammer and cut his initial on it, a letter S." The chief nodded, with a broad smile. "He then left me, and when I came back to my room a little before midnight, I found him there. He looked excited, and wanted me to go and get a drink with him. I declined, and he went off. This morning when I heard about the murder I said: 'He's the man that did the deed.'" "You have not seen him since last night?" "No; I suppose, of course, he has run away." "Where did he live?" "Dean Street, at Matchin's the carpenter." The chief turned to his telegraphic operator and rapidly gave orders for the arrest of Sleeny by the police of the nearest station. He also sent for the clerks who were on duty the day before at Ware & Harden's. "Mr. ----, I did not get your name," he said to Offitt, who gave him his name and address. "You have acted the part of a good citizen." "The most painful act of my life," Offitt murmured. "Of course. But duty before everything. I will have to ask you to wait a little while in the adjoining room till we see whether this man can be found." Offitt was shown into a small room, barely furnished, with two doors; the one through which he had just come, and one opening apparently into the main corridor of the building. Offitt, as soon as he was alone, walked stealthily to the latter door and tried to open it. It was locked, and there was no key. He glanced at the window; there was an iron grating inside the sash, which was padlocked. A cold sweat bathed him from head to foot. He sank into a chair, trembling like a leaf. He felt for his handkerchief to wipe his wet forehead. His hand touched one of the packages of money. He bounded from his chair in sudden joy. "They did not search me, so they don't suspect. It is only to make sure of my evidence that they keep me here." Nevertheless, the time went heavily. At last an officer came in and said he was to come to the police justice's for the preliminary examination of Sleeny. "They have caught him, then?" he asked, with assumed eagerness and surprise. "He had not got away?" "No," the man answered curtly. They came to the court-room in a few steps. Sam was there between two policemen. As Offitt entered, he smiled and slightly nodded. One or two men who had been summoned as witnesses were standing near the justice. The proceedings were summary. One of the policemen said that he had gone to Matchin's shop to arrest the prisoner; that the prisoner exhibited no surprise; his first words were, "Is Mr. Farnham dead yet?" Offitt was then called upon, and he repeated, clearly and concisely, the story he had told the chief of police. When he had concluded he was shown the hammer which had been picked up on the floor at Farnham's, and was asked, "Is that the hammer you refer to?" "Yes, that is it." These words were the signal for a terrible scene. When Sleeny saw Offitt step forward and begin to give his evidence, he leaned forward with a smile of pleased expectation upon his face. He had such confidence in his friend's voluble cleverness that he had no doubt Offitt would "talk him free" in a few minutes. He was confused a little by his opening words, not clearly seeing his drift; but as the story went on, and Offitt's atrocious falsehood became clear to his mind, he was dumb with stupefaction, and felt a strange curiosity wakening in him to see how the story would end. He did not, for the moment, see what object Offitt could have in lying so, until the thought occurred to him: "May be there's a reward out!" But when the blood-stained hammer was shown and identified by Offitt, all doubt was cleared away in a flash from the dull brain of Sleeny. He saw the whole horrible plot of which he was the victim. He rose from his seat before the officer could stop him, and roared like a lion in the toils, in a voice filled equally with agony and rage: "You murdering liar! I'll tear your heart out of you!" There was a wide table and several chairs between them, but Sleeny was over them in an instant. Offitt tried to escape, but was so hemmed in, that the infuriated man had him in his hands before the officers could interpose. If they had delayed a moment longer all would have been over, for already Sleeny's hands were at the throat of his betrayer. But two powerful policemen with their clubs soon separated the combatants, and Sleeny was dragged back and securely handcuffed. Offitt, ghastly pale and trembling, had sunk upon a bench. The justice, looking at him narrowly, said: "The man is going to faint; loosen his collar." "No," said Offitt, springing to his feet. "I am perfectly well." In his struggle with Sleeny a button of his coat had been torn away. He asked a by-stander for a pin, and carefully adjusted the garment. The thought in his mind was, "I don't mind being killed; but I thought he might tear off my coat, and show them my money." From this moment he kept his hand in such position that he might feel the packages in his pockets. Sleeny was still panting and screaming execrations at Offitt. The justice turned to him with sternness, and said, "Silence there! Have you not sense enough to see how your ferocious attack on the witness damages you? If you can't restrain your devilish temper while your friend is giving his evidence, it will be all the worse for you." "Judge," cried Sam, now fairly beside himself, "that's the murderer! I know it. I can prove it. He ain't fit to live. I'll break his neck yet!" Offitt raised his hands and eyes in deprecating sorrow. "This is the wild talk of a desperate man," said the justice. "But you may as well tell us how you passed last evening." "Certainly," said Offitt, consulting his memory. "Let me see. I took supper about seven at Duffer's; I went to Glauber's drug-store next and got a glass of soda water; if they don't know me, they'll remember my breaking a glass; then I made a visit at Mr. Matchin's on Dean Street; then I went to the Orleans theatre; I come out between the acts and got a cup of coffee at Mouchem's--then I went back and stayed till the show was over, that was about half-past eleven. Then I went home and found Mr. Sleeny there." "You had better go with Mr. Fangwell, and let him verify this statement," said the justice. He then called the policeman who arrived first at Farnham's house the night before. He told his story and identified the hammer which had been shown to Offitt. A young man from Ware & Harden's swore that he had sold the hammer the day before to Sleeny, whom he knew. The justice held this evidence sufficient to justify Sleeny's detention. "I should think so," said some of the by-standers. "If it don't hang him, there's a loud call for Judge Lynch." "Silence!" said the justice. "The prisoner will be taken for the present to the city jail." Sam was led out, and Offitt accompanied the chief of police back to the room he had just quitted. He remained there several hours which seemed to him interminable. At last, however, the detective who had been sent to inquire as to the truth of the account he had given of himself, returned with a full confirmation of it, and Offitt was suffered to go, on his own engagement to give further evidence when called upon. He left the City Hall with a great load off his mind. It was not without an effort that he had sworn away the character, the freedom, and perhaps the life of his comrade. If he could have accomplished his purpose without crushing Sleeny he would have preferred it. But the attack which his goaded victim had made upon him in the court-room was now a source of lively satisfaction to him. It created a strong prejudice against the prisoner; it caused the justice at once to believe him guilty, and gave Offitt himself an injured feeling that was extremely comforting in view of what was to happen to Sleeny. He went along the street tapping his various pockets furtively as he walked. He was hungry. His diverse emotions had given him an appetite. He went into an eating-house and commanded a liberal supper. He had an odd fancy as he gave his order. "That's the sort of supper I would have, if it was my last--if I was to be hanged tomorrow." He thought of Sleeny and hoped they would treat him well in jail. He felt magnanimously toward him. "Who would have thought," he mused, "that Sam had such a devil of a temper? I most hope that Farnham won't die--it would be rough on Sam. Though perhaps that would be best all round," he added, thinking of Sam's purple face in the court-room and the eager grip of his fingers. He came out of the eating-house into the gathering twilight. The lamps were springing into light in long straight lines down the dusky streets. The evening breeze blew in from the great lake tempering the stale heat of the day. Boys were crying the late editions of the newspapers with "Full account arrest o' the Farnham burglar!" He bought one, but did not stop to open it. He folded it into the smallest possible compass, and stuffed it into his pocket, "along with the other documents in the case," as he chuckled to himself; "I'll read all about it in the train to-morrow--business before pleasure," he continued, pleased with his wit. Every moment he would put his hand into his side pocket and feel the package containing the largest bills. He knew it was imprudent--that it might attract the attention of thieves or detectives; but to save his life he could not have kept from doing it. At last he scratched his hand on the pin which was doing duty for the button he had lost in his scuffle with Sleeny. "Ah!" he said to himself, with humorous banter, "it won't do to be married in a coat with the buttons off." He went into a little basement shop where a sign announced that "Scouring and Repairing" were done. A small and bald Hamburger stepped forward, rubbing his hands. Offitt told him what he wanted, and the man got a needle and thread and selected from a large bowl of buttons on a shelf one that would suit. While he was sewing it on, he said: "Derrible news apout Gabben Farnham." "Yes," said Offitt. "Is he dead?" "I don't know off he ish tet. Dey say he ish oud mid his het, und tat looksh mighty pad. But one ting ish goot; dey cotch de murterer." "They have?" asked Offitt, with languid interest. "What sort of fellow is he?" "Mutter Gottes!" said the little German. "De vorst kind. He would radder gill a man as drink a glass bier. He gome mighty near gillin' his pest vrient to-day in de gourt-house droben, ven he vas dellin' vat he knowed apout it alleweil." "A regular fire-eater," said Offitt. "So you've finished, have you? How much for the job!" The German was looking at a stain on the breast of the coat. "Vot's dish?" he said. "Looksh like baint. Yust lemme take your coat off a minute and I gleans dot up like a nudel soup." "Say, mind your own business, won't you?" growled Offitt. "Here's your money, and when I want any of your guff I'll let you know." He hurried out, leaving the poor German amazed at the ill result of his effort to turn an honest penny and do a fellow-creature a service. "Vunny beebles!" he said to himself. "But I got a kevarter off a tollar for a den-cent chob." Offitt came out of the shop and walked at a rapid pace to Dean Street. He was determined to make an end at once of Maud's scruples and coquetry. He said to himself: "If we are both alive to-morrow, we shall be married." He believed if he could have her to himself for half an hour, he could persuade her to come with him. He was busy all the way plotting to get her parents out of the house. It would be easy enough to get them out of the room; but he wanted them out of hearing, out of reach of a cry for help even. He found them all together in the sitting-room. The arrest of Sleeny had fallen heavily upon them. They had no doubt of his guilt, from the reports they had heard, and their surprise and horror at his crime were not lessened but rather increased by their familiar affection for him. "To think," said Saul to his wife, "that that boy has worked at the same bench, and slept in the same house with me for so many years, and I never knowed the Satan that was in him!" "It's in all of us, Saul," said Mrs. Matchin, trying to improve the occasion for the edification of her unbelieving husband. Maud had felt mingled with her sorrow a suspicion of remorse. She could not help remembering that Sam considered Farnham his rival, with how little reason she knew better than any one. She could understand how her beauty might have driven him to violence; but when the story of the robbery transpired also--as it did in the course of the morning,--she was greatly perplexed. When she joined in the lamentations of her parents and said she never could have believed that of Sam Sleeny, she was thinking of the theft, and not of the furious assault. When they had all, however, exhausted their limited store of reflections, a thing took place which increased the horror and the certainty of Mr. and Mrs. Matchin, and left Maud a prey to a keener doubt and anxiety than ever. Late in the afternoon a sharp-faced man, with a bright eye and a red mustache, came to the house and demanded in the name of the law to be shown Sam's bedroom. He made several notes and picked up some trifling articles, for which he gave Mr. Matchin receipts. Corning out of the room, he looked carefully at the door-knob. "Seems all right," he said. Then turning to Matchin, he said, with professional severity, "What door did he generally come in by?" "Sometimes one and sometimes another," said Saul, determined not to give any more information than he must. "Well, I'll look at both," the detective said. The first one stood his scrutiny without effect, but at the second his eye sparkled and his cheek flushed with pleasure, when he saw the faint, red-dish-brown streaks which Offitt had left there the night before. He could not express his exultation; turning to Saul, "There's where he came in last night, any way." "He didn't do no such a thing," replied Saul. "That door I locked myself last night before he came in." "Oh, you did? So you're sure he came in at the other door, are you. We will see if he could get in any other way." Walking around the corner, he saw the ladder where Offitt had left it. "Hello! that's his window, ain't it?" Without waiting for an answer the detective ran up the ladder, studying every inch of its surface as he ran. He came down positively radiant, and slapped Saul heartily on the shoulder. "All right, old man. I'll trouble you to keep that ladder and that door just as they are. They are important papers. Why don't you see?" he continued--"bless your innocent old heart, he comes home with his hands just reg'larly dripping with murder. He fumbles at that door, finds it locked, and so gets that ladder, histes it up to the window, and hops into bed as easy as any Christian schoolboy in town, and he thinks he's all right--but he never thinks of Tony Smart, your humble servant." This view of the case was perfectly convincing to Saul and also to his wife when he repeated it at the supper-table; but it struck Maud with a sudden chill. She remembered that when she had dismissed Offitt from that midnight conference at her casement, he had carefully taken the ladder away from her window, and had set it against the house some distance off. She had admired at the time his considerate chivalry, and thought how nice it was to have a lover so obedient and so careful of her reputation. But now, the detective's ghastly discovery turned her thought in a direction which appalled her. Could it be possible--and all that money--where did it come from? As she sat with her parents in the gathering darkness, she kept her dreadful anxiety to herself. She had been hoping all day to see her lover--now she feared to have him come, lest her new suspicions might be confirmed. She quickly resolved upon one thing: she would not go away with him that night--not until this horrible mystery was cleared up. If she was worth having she was worth waiting for a little while. They all three started as the door opened and Offitt came in. He wasted no time in salutations, but said at once, "It's a funny thing, but I have got a message for each of you. The district attorney saw me coming up this way, Mr. Matchin, and asked me to tell you to come down as quick as you can to his office--something very important, he said. And, stranger than that, I met Mr. Wixham right out here by the corner, and he asked me if I was comin' here, and if I would ask you, Mrs. Matchin, to come right up to their house. Jurildy is sick and wants to see you, and he has run off for the doctor." Both the old people bustled up at this authoritative summons, and Offitt as they went out said, "I'll stay a while and keep Miss Maud from gettin' lonesome." "I wish you would," said Mrs. Matchin. "The house seems creepy-like with Sam where he is." Maud felt her heart sink at the prospect of being left alone with the man she had been longing all day to see. She said, "Mother, I think I ought to go with you!" "No, indeed," her mother replied. "You ain't wanted, and it wouldn't be polite to Mr. Offitt." The moment they were gone, Offitt sprang to the side of Maud, and seized her hands. "Now, my beauty, you will be mine. Put on your hat and we will go." She struggled to free her hands. "Let go," she said, "you hurt me. Why are you in such a terrible hurry?" "Why can you ask? Your parents will be back in a few minutes. Of course you know that story was only to get them out of our way. Come, my beautiful Maud! my joy, my queen! To-morrow New York! next day the sea, and then Europe and love and pleasure all your life." "I want to talk with you a minute," said Maud, in a voice which trembled in spite of her efforts. "I can't talk in the dark. Wait here, till I get a lamp." She slipped from the room before he could prevent her and left him pacing the floor in a cold rage. It was only a moment, however, until she returned, bringing a lamp, which she placed on a table, and then asked him to be seated, in a stiff, formal way, which at once irritated and enchanted him. He sat down and devoured her with his eyes. He was angry when she went for the lamp; but, as its light fell on her rich, dark hair, her high color, and her long, graceful figure, as she leaned back in her chair, he felt that the tenderest conversation with her in the darkness would lose something of the pleasure that the eyes took in her. This he said to her, in his coarse but effective way. She answered him with coquettish grace, willing to postpone the serious talk she dreaded so. But the conversation was in stronger hands than hers, and she found herself forced, in a few minutes, to either go with him, or give a reason why. "The fact is, then," she stammered, with a great effort, "I don't know you well enough yet. Why cannot you wait a while?" He laughed. "Come with me, and you will know me better in a day than you would here in a year. Do not waste these precious moments. Our happiness depends upon it. We have everything we can desire. I cannot be myself here. I cannot disclose my rank and my wealth to these people who have only known me as an apostle of labor. I want to go where you will be a great lady. Oh, come!" he cried, with an outburst of pent-up fire, throwing himself on the floor at her feet, and laying his head upon her knee. She was so moved by this sudden outbreak, which was wholly new to her experience, that she almost forgot her doubts and fears. But a remnant of practical sense asserted itself. She rose from her chair, commanded him once more to be seated, and said: "I am afraid I am going to offend you, but I must ask you something." "Ask me anything," he said, with a smile, "except to leave you." She thought the phrase so pretty that she could hardly find courage to put her question. She blushed and stammered, and then, rushing at it with desperation, she said: "That money--where did you get it?" "I will tell you when we are married. It is a secret." He tried still to smile, but she saw the laughter dying away from his face. Her blood turned cold in her veins, but her heart grew stronger, and she determined to know the worst. She was not a refined or clever woman; but the depth of her trouble sharpened her wits, and she instinctively made use of her woman's wiles to extort the truth from the man who she knew was under the spell of her beauty, whatever else he was. "Come here!" she said. Her face was pale, but her lips were smiling. "Get down there where you were!" she continued, with tender imperiousness. He obeyed her, hardly daring to trust his senses. "Now put your hands between my hands," she said, still with that pale, singular smile, which filled him with unquiet transports, "and tell me the truth, you bad boy!" "The truth," with a beating of the heart which made his utterance thick, "the truth is, that you are the most glorious woman in the world, and that you will be mine to-morrow." "Perhaps," she almost whispered. "But you must tell me something else. I am afraid you are a naughty boy, and that you love me too much. I once told you I had an enemy, and that I wanted somebody to punish him. Did you go and punish him for me--tell me that?" Her voice was soft and low and beguiling. She still smiled on him, leaving one hand in his, while she raised the forefinger of the other in coquettish admonition. The ruffian at her feet was inebriated with her beauty and her seductive playfulness. He thought she had divined his act--that she considered it a fine and heroic test of love to which she had subjected him. He did not hesitate an instant, but said: "Yes, my beauty, and I am ready to do the same for anybody who gives you a cross look." Now that she had gained the terrible truth, a sickening physical fear of the man came over her, and she felt herself growing faint. His voice sounded weak and distant as he said: "Now you will go with me, won't you?" She could make no answer. So he continued: "Run and get your hat. Nothing else. We can buy all you want. And hurry. They may come back any moment." She perceived a chance of escape and roused herself. She thought if she could only get out of the room she might save herself by flight or by outcry. "Wait here," she whispered, "and be very quiet." He kissed his fingers to her without a word. She opened the door into the next room, which was the kitchen and dining-room of the family, and there, not three feet from her, in the dim light, haggard and wan, bareheaded, his clothes in rags about him, she saw Sam Sleeny. XIX. A LEAP FOR SOMEBODY'S LIFE. When Sleeny was led from the room of the police justice in the afternoon, he was plunged in a sort of stupor. He could not recover from the surprise and sense of outrage with which he had listened to Offitt's story. What was to happen to him he accepted with a despair which did not trouble itself about the ethics of the transaction. It was a disaster, as a stroke of lightning might be. It seemed to him the work had been thoroughly and effectually done. He could see no way out of it; in fact, his respect for Offitt's intelligence was so great that he took it for granted Andy had committed no mistakes, but that he had made sure of his ruin. He must go to prison; if Farnham died, he must be hanged. He did not weary his mind in planning for his defence when his trial should come on. He took it for granted he should be convicted. But if he could get out of prison, even if it were only for a few hours, and see Andy Offitt once more--he felt the blood tingling through all his veins at the thought. This roused him from his lethargy and made him observant and alert. He began to complain of his handcuffs; they were in truth galling his wrists. It was not difficult for him to twist his hands so as to start the blood in one or two places. He showed these quietly to the policemen, who sat with him in a small anteroom leading to the portion of the city jail, where he was to be confined for the night. He seemed so peaceable and quiet that they took off the irons, saying good-naturedly, "I guess we can handle you." They were detained in this room for some time waiting for the warden of the jail to come and receive their prisoner. There were two windows, both giving view of a narrow street, where it was not bright at noonday, and began to grow dark at sunset with the shade of the high houses and the thick smoke of the quarter. The windows were open, as the room was in the third story, and was therefore considered absolutely safe. Sleeny got up several times and walked first to one window and then to another, casting quick but searching glances at the street and the walls. He saw that some five feet from one of the windows a tin pipe ran along the wall to the ground. The chances were ten to one that any one risking the leap would be dashed to pieces on the pavement below. But Sleeny could not get that pipe out of his head. "I might as well take my chance" he said to himself. "It would be no worse to die that way than to be hanged." He grew afraid to trust himself in sight of the window and the pipe: it exercised so strong a fascination upon him. He sat down with his back to the light and leaned his head on his hands. But he could think of nothing but his leap for liberty. He felt in fancy his hands and knees clasping that slender ladder of safety; he began to think what he would do when he struck the sidewalk, if no bones were broken. First, he would bide from pursuit, if possible. Then he would go to Dean Street and get a last look at Maud, if he could; then his business would be to find Offitt. "If I find him," he thought, "I'll give them something to try me for." But finally he dismissed the matter from his mind,--for this reason. He remembered seeing a friend, the year before, fall from a scaffolding and break his leg. The broken bone pierced through the leg of his trousers. This thought daunted him more than death on the gallows. The door opened, and three or four policemen came in, each leading a man by the collar, the ordinary riffraff of the street, charged with petty offences. One was very drunk and abusive. He attracted the attention of everybody in the room by his antics. He insisted on dancing a breakdown which he called the "Essence of Jeems' River"; and in the scuffle which followed, first one and then the other policeman in charge of Sleeny became involved. Sleeny was standing with his back to the window, quite alone. The temptation was too much for him. He leaped upon the sill, gave one mighty spring, caught the pipe, and slid safely to the ground. One or two passers-by saw him drop lightly to the sidewalk, but thought nothing of it. It was not the part of the jail in which prisoners were confined, and he might have been taken for a carpenter or plumber who chose that unusual way of coming from the roof. His hat blew off in his descent, but he did not waste time in looking for it. He walked slowly till he got to the corner, and then plunged through the dark and ill-smelling streets of the poor and crowded quarter, till he came by the open gate of a coal-yard. Seeing he was not pursued he went in, concealed himself behind a pile of boards and lay there until it was quite dark. He then came out and walked through roundabout ways, avoiding the gas-lights and the broad thoroughfares, to Dean Street. He climbed the fence and crept through the garden to the back door of the house. He had eaten nothing since early morning, and was beginning to be hungry. He saw there were no lights in the rear of the house, and thought if he could enter the kitchen he might get a loaf of bread without alarming the household. He tried the back door and found it fastened. But knowing the ways of the house, he raised the cellar door, went down the steps, shut the door down upon himself, groped his way to the inner stairs, and so gained the kitchen. He was walking to the cupboard when the door opened and he saw Maud coming toward him. She did not seem in the least startled to see him there. In the extremity of her terror, it may have seemed to her that he had been sent especially to her help. She walked up to him, laid her hands on his shoulders and whispered, "Oh, Sam, I am so glad to see you. Save me! Don't let him touch me! He is in there." Sam hardly knew if this were real or not. A wild fancy assailed him for an instant--was he killed in jumping from the window? Surely this could never happen to him on the earth; the girl who had always been so cold and proud to him was in his arms, her head on his shoulder, her warm breath on his cheek. She was asking his help against some danger. "All right, Mattie," he whispered. "Nobody shall hurt you. Who is it?" He thought of no one but the police. "Offitt," she said. He brushed her aside as if she had been a cobweb in his path, and with a wild cry of joy and vengeance he burst through the half-open door. Offitt turned at the noise, and saw Sam coming, and knew that the end of his life was there. His heart was like water within him. He made a feeble effort at defence; but the carpenter, without a word, threw him on the floor, planted one knee on his chest, and with his bare hands made good the threat he uttered in his agony in the court-room, twisting and breaking his neck. Sleeny rose, pulled the cover from the centre-table in the room, and threw it over the distorted face of the dead man. Maud, driven out of her wits by the dreadful scene, had sunk in a rocking-chair, where, with her face in her hands, she was sobbing and moaning. Sam tried to get her to listen to him. "Good-by, Mattie, I shall never see you again, I suppose. I must run for my life. I want you to know I was innocent of what they charged me with----" "Oh, I know that, Sam," she sobbed. "God bless you, Mattie, for saying so. I don't care so much for what happens, now. I am right glad I got here to save you from that----" he paused, searching for a word which would be descriptive and yet not improper in the presence of a lady, but his vocabulary was not rich and he said at last, "that snide. But I should have done that to him anyhow; so don't cry on that account. Mattie, will you tell me good-by?" he asked with bashful timidity. She rose and gave him her hand; but her eyes happening to wander to the shapeless form lying in the corner, she hid her face again on his shoulder and said with a fresh burst of tears. "Oh, Sam, stay with me a little while. Don't leave me alone." His mind travelled rapidly through the incidents that would result from his staying--prison, trial, and a darker contingency still, rearing its horrible phantom in the distance. But she said, "You will stay till father comes, won't you?" and he answered simply: "Yes, Mattie, if you want me to." He led her to a seat and sat down beside her, to wait for his doom. In a few minutes, they heard a loud altercation outside the door. The voice of Saul Matchin was vehemently protesting, "I tell ye he ain't here," and another voice responded, "He was seen to climb the fence and to enter the house. We've got it surrounded, and there's no use for you to get yourself into trouble aidin' and abettin'." Sam walked to the door and said to the policeman, with grim humor, "Come in! you'll find two murderers here, and neither one will show any fight." The policemen blew their whistles to assemble the rest, and then came in warily, and two of them seized him at once. "It's all very well to be meek and lowly, my friend," said one of them, "but you'll not play that on us twice--least ways," he added with sarcastic intention, "not twice the same day. See here, Tony Smart," addressing a third, who now entered, "lend a hand with these bracelets," and in a moment Sam was handcuffed and pinioned. "Where's the other one you was talking about?" asked the policeman. Sam pointed with his foot in the direction where Offitt lay. The policeman lifted the cloth, and dropped it again with a horror which his professional phlegm could not wholly disguise. "Well, of all the owdacious villains ever I struck ---- Who do you think it is?" he asked, turning to his associates. "Who?" "The witness this afternoon,--Offitt. Well, my man," he said, turning to Sam, "you wanted to make a sure thing of it, I see. If you couldn't be hung for one, you would for the other." "Sam!" said Saul Matchin who, pale and trembling, had been a silent spectator of the scene so far, "for heaven's sake, tell us what all this means." "Mind now," said the officer, "whatever you say will be reported." "Very well, I've got nothing to hide," said Sam. "I'll tell you and Mother Matchin" (who had just come in and was staring about her with consternation, questioning Maud in dumb show) "the whole story. I owe that to you for you've always used me well. It's a mighty short one. That fellow Offitt robbed and tried to murder Captain Farnham last night, and then swore it onto me. I got away from the officers to-night, and come round here and found him 'saulting Mattie, and I twisted his neck for him. If it's a hanging matter to kill snakes, I'll have to stand it--that's all." "Now, who do you think is going to believe that?" said the captain of the squad. Maud rose and walked up to where Sam was standing and said, "I know every word he has said is true. That man was the burglar at Captain Farnham's. He told me so himself to-night. He said he had the money in his pocket and wanted to make me go with him." She spoke firmly and resolutely, but she could not bring herself to say anything of previous passages between them; and when she opened her lips to speak of the ladder, the woman was too strong within her, and she closed them again. "I'll never tell that unless they go to hang Sam, and then I won't tell anybody but the Governor," she swore to herself. "It's easy to see about that story," said the officer still incredulous. They searched the clothing of Offitt, and the face of the officer, as one package of money after another was brought to light, was a singular study. The pleasure he felt in the recovery of the stolen goods was hardly equal to his professional chagrin at having caught the wrong man. He stood for a moment silent, after tying up all the packages in one. "It's no use dodging," he said at last. "We have been barking up the wrong tree." "I don't know about that," said the one called Tony Smart. "Who has identified this money? Who can answer for this young lady? How about them marks on the door and the ladder? Anyhow there's enough to hold our prisoner on." "Of course there is," said the captain. "He hadn't authority to go twisting people's necks in this county." At this moment the wagon which had been sent for arrived. The body of Offitt was lifted in. The captain gathered up the money, notified Matchin that he and his family would be wanted as witnesses in the morning, and they all moved toward the door. Sam turned to say "Farewell." Pinioned as he was, he could not shake hands, and his voice faltered as he took leave of them. Maud's heart was not the most feeling one in the world, but her emotions had been deeply stirred by the swift succession of events; and as she saw this young fellow going so bravely to meet an unknown fate, purely for her sake, the tears came to her eyes. She put out her hand to him; but she saw that his hands were fastened and, seized with sudden pity, she put her arms about his neck and kissed him, whispering, "Keep up a good heart, Sam!" and he went away, in all his danger and ignominy happier than he had been for many a day. The probabilities of the case were much discussed that night at police head-quarters, in conferences from which the reporters were rigorously excluded, and the next morning the city newspapers revelled in the sensation. They vied with each other in inventing attractive head-lines and startling theories. The _Bale-Fire_ began its leader with the impressive sentence: "Has a carnival of crime set in amongst us? Last night the drama of Algonquin Avenue was supplemented by the tragedy of Dean Street, and the public, aghast, demands 'What next?' A second murder was accomplished by hands yet dripping with a previous crime. The patriotic witness who, yesterday, with a bleeding heart, denounced the criminality of his friend, paid last night with his life for his fidelity." In another column called for a "monument, by popular subscription for Andrew Jackson Offitt, who died because would not tell a lie." On the other hand, _The Morning Astral_, representing the conservative opinion of the city, called for a suspension of judgment on the part of its candid readers; said that there were shady circumstances about the antecedents of Offitt, and intimated that documents of a compromising character had been found on his person; congratulated the city on the improved condition of Captain Farnham; and, trusting in the sagacity and diligence of the authorities, confidently awaited from them a solution of the mystery. Each of them, nevertheless, gave free space and license to their reporters, and Offitt was a saint, a miscreant, a disguised prince, and an escaped convict, according to the state of the reporter's imagination or his digestion; while the stories told of Sleeny varied from cannibalism to feats of herculean goodness. They all agreed reasonably well, however, as to the personal appearance of the two men, and from this fact it came about that, in the course of the morning, evidence was brought forward, from a totally unexpected quarter, which settled the question as to the burglary at Farnham's. Mrs. Belding had been so busy the day before, in her constant attendance upon Farnham, that she had paid no attention to the story of the arrest. She had heard that the man had been caught and his crime clearly established, and that he had been sent to jail for trial. Her first thought was, "I am glad I was not called upon to give evidence. It would have been very disagreeable to get up before a court-room full of men and say I looked with an opera-glass out of my daughter's window into a young man's house. I should have to mention Alice's name, too,-- and a young girl's name cannot be mentioned too seldom in the newspapers. In fact, twice in a life-time is often enough, and one of them should be a funeral notice." But this morning, after calling at Farnham's and finding that he was getting on comfortably, she sat down to read the newspapers. Alice was sitting near her, with hands and lap full of some feminine handiwork. A happy smile played about her lips, for her mother had just repeated to her the surgeon's prediction that Captain Farnham would be well in a week or two. "He said the scalp wound was healing 'by the first intention,' which I thought was a funny phrase. I thought the maxim was that second thoughts were best." Alice had never mentioned Farnham's name since the first night, but he was rarely out of her mind, and the thought that his life was saved made every hour bright and festal. "He will be well," she thought. "He will have to come here to thank mamma for her care of him. I shall see him again and he shall not complain of me. If he should never speak to me again, I shall love him and be good to him always." She was yet too young and too innocent to know how impossible was the scheme of life she was proposing to herself, but she was thoroughly happy in it. Mrs. Belding, as she read, grew perplexed and troubled. She threw down one newspaper and took up another, but evidently got no more comfort out of that. At last she sighed and said, "Oh, dear! Oh, dear! I shall have to go down there after all. They have got the wrong man!" Alice looked up with wondering eyes. "These accounts all agree that the assassin is a tall, powerful young man, with yellow hair and beard. The real man was not more than medium height, very dark. Why, he was black and shiny as a cricket. I must go and tell them. I wonder who the lawyer is that does the indicting of people?" "It must be the prosecuting attorney, Mr. Dalton," said Alice. "I heard he was elected this spring. You know him very well. You meet him everywhere." "That elegant young fellow who leads germans? Well, if that is not too absurd! I never should have thought of him, outside of a dress-coat. I don't mind a bit going to see _him_. Order the carriage, while I get my things on." She drove down to the City Hall, and greatly astonished Mr. Dalton by walking into his office and requesting a moment's private conversation with him. Dalton was a dapper young man, exceedingly glib and well dressed, making his way in political and official, as he had already made it in social life. He greeted Mrs. Belding with effusion, and was anxious to know how he might serve her, having first cleared the room of the half-dozen politicians who did their lounging there. "It is a most delicate matter for a lady to appear in, and I must ask you to keep my name as much in reserve as possible." "Of course, you may count upon me," he answered, wondering where this strange exordium would lead to. "You have got the wrong man. I am sure of it. It was not the blonde one. He was black as a cricket. I saw him as plainly as I see you. You know we live next door to Captain Farnham----" "Ah!" Dalton cried. "Certainly. I understand. This is most important. Pray go on." With a few interruptions from him, full of tact and intelligence, she told the whole story, or as much of it as was required. She did not have to mention Alice's name, or the opera-glass; though the clever young man said to himself, "She is either growing very far-sighted, or she was scouring the heavens with a field-glass that night--perhaps looking for comets." He rang his bell and gave a message to an usher who appeared. "I will not ask you to wait long," he said, and turned the conversation upon the weather and social prospects for the season. In a few minutes the door opened, and Sleeny was brought into the room by an officer. "Was this the man you saw, Mrs. Belding?" asked Dalton. "Not the slightest resemblance. This one is much taller, and entirely different in color." "That will do"; and Sleeny and the officer went out. "Now may I ask you to do a very disagreeable thing? To go with me to the Morgue and see the remains of what I am now sure is the real criminal?" Dalton asked. "Oh, mercy! I would rather not. Is it necessary?" "Not positively necessary, but it will enable me to dismiss the burglary case absolutely against young Sleeny." "Very well. I'll go. I am so glad," she said to herself, "that I did not bring Alice." They went in her carriage to the Morgue. Dalton said, "I want to make it as easy as I can for you. Please wait a moment in your carriage." He went in and arranged that the face of Offitt, which was horrible, should be turned away as much as possible; the head, and shoulders and back being left exposed, and the hat placed on the head. He then brought Mrs. Belding in. "That is the man," she said, promptly, "or at least some one exactly like him." "Thank you," he said, reconducting her to her carriage. "The first charge against Sleeny will be dismissed, though of course he must be held for this homicide." A few weeks later Sleeny was tried for the killing of Offitt, on which occasion most of the facts of this history were given in evidence. Mrs. Belding had at last to tell what she knew in open court, and she had an evil quarter of an hour in the hands of Mr. Dalton, who seemed always on the point of asking some question which would bring her opera-glass into the newspapers; but he never proceeded to that extremity, and she came away with a better opinion of the profession than she had ever before entertained. "I suppose leading germans humanizes even a lawyer somewhat," she observed, philosophically. Maud Matchin was, however, the most important witness for the defence. She went upon the stand troubled with no abstract principles in regard to the administration of justice. She wanted Sam Sleeny to be set free, and she testified with an eye single to that purpose. She was perhaps a trifle too zealous--even the attorney for the defence bit his lip occasionally at her dashing introduction of wholly irrelevant matter in Sleeny's favor. But she was throughout true to herself also, and never gave the least intimation that Offitt had any right to consider himself a favored suitor. Perhaps she had attained the talent, so common in more sophisticated circles than any with which she was familiar, of forgetting all entanglements which it is not convenient to remember, and of facing a discarded lover with a visage of insolent unconcern and a heart unstirred by a memory. The result of it all was, of course, that Sleeny was acquitted, though it came about in a way which may be worth recording. The jury found a verdict of "justifiable homicide," upon which the judge very properly sent them back to their room, as the verdict was flatly against the law and the evidence. They retired again, with stolid and unabashed patience, and soon reappeared with a verdict of acquittal, on the ground of "emotional insanity." But this remarkable jury determined to do nothing by halves, and fearing that the reputation of being queer might injure Sam in his business prospects, added to their verdict these thoughtful and considerate words, which yet remain on the record, to the lasting honor and glory of our system of trial by jury: "And we hereby state that the prisoner was perfectly sane up to the moment he committed the rash act in question, and perfectly sane the moment after, and that, in our opinion, there is no probability that the malady will ever recur." After this memorable deliverance, Sam shook hands cordially and gravely with each of the judicious jurymen, and then turned to where Maud was waiting for him, with a rosy and happy face and a sparkling eye. They walked slowly homeward together through the falling shadows. Their lives were henceforth bound together for good or evil. We may not say how much of good or how much of evil was to be expected from a wedlock between two natures so ill-regulated and untrained, where the woman brought into the partnership the wreck of ignoble ambitions and the man the memory of a crime. XX. "NOW DO YOU REMEMBER?" Farnham's convalescence was rapid. When the first danger of fever was over, the wound on the head healed quickly, and one morning Mrs. Belding came home with the news that he was to drive out that afternoon. Alice sat in the shade by the front porch for an hour, waiting to see him pass, and when at last his carriage appeared, she rose and waved her handkerchief by way of greeting and congratulation. He bowed as he went by, and Alice retired to her own room, where she used her handkerchief once more to dry her wet and happy eyes. It was not long after, that Farnham came to dine with them. They both looked forward to this dinner as an occasion of very considerable importance. Each felt that much depended upon the demeanor of the other. Each was conscientiously resolved to do and to say nothing which should pain or embarrass the other. Each was dying to fall into the other's arms, but each only succeeded in convincing the other of his or her entire indifference and friendship. As Farnham came in, Mrs. Belding went up to him with simple kindliness, kissed him, and made him sit down. "You dear boy," she said, "you do not know how glad I am to see you here once more." Alice looked on, almost jealous of her mother's privilege. Then she advanced with shy grace and took Arthur's hand, and asked: "Do you begin to feel quite strong again?" Farnham smiled, and answered, "Quite well, and the strength will soon come. The first symptom of returning vitality, Mrs. Belding, was my hostility to gruel and other phantom dishes. I have deliberately come to dinner to-day to dine." "I am delighted to hear of your appetite," said Mrs. Belding; "but I think you may bear a little watching at the table yet," she added, in a tone of kindly menace. She was as good as her word, and exercised rather a stricter discipline at dinner than was agreeable to the convalescent, regulating his meat and wine according to ladylike ideas, which are somewhat binding on carnivorous man. But she was so kindly about it, and Alice aided and abetted with such bashful prettiness, that Farnham felt he could endure starvation with such accessories. Yet he was not wholly at ease. He had hoped, in the long hours of his confinement, to find the lady of his love kinder in voice and manner than when he saw her last; and now, when she was sweeter and more tender than he had ever seen her before, the self-tormenting mind of the lover began to suggest that if she loved him she would not be so kind. He listened to the soft, caressing tones of her voice as she spoke to him, which seemed to convey a blessing in every syllable; he met the wide, clear beauty of her glance, so sweet and bright that his own eyes could hardly support it; he saw the ready smile that came to the full, delicate mouth whenever he spoke; and instead of being made happy by all this, he asked himself if it could mean anything except that she was sorry for him, and wanted to be very polite to him, as she could be nothing more. His heart sank within him at the thought; he became silent and constrained; and Alice wondered whether she had not gone too far in her resolute kindness. "Perhaps he has changed his mind," she thought, "and wishes me not to change mine." So these two people, whose hands and hearts were aching to come together, sat in the same drawing-room talking of commonplace things, while their spirits grew heavy as lead. Mrs. Belding was herself conscious of a certain constraint, and to dispel it asked Alice to sing, and Farnham adding his entreaties, she went to the piano, and said, as all girls say, "What shall I sing?" She looked toward Farnham, but the mother answered, "Sing 'Douglas'----" "Oh, no, Mamma, not that." "Why not? You were singing it last night. I like it better than any other of your songs." "I do not want to sing it to-night." Mrs. Belding persisted, until at last Alice said, with an odd expression of recklessness, "Oh, very well, if you must have it, I will sing it. But I hate these sentimental songs, that say so much and mean nothing." Striking the chords nervously she sang, with a voice at first tremulous but at last full of strong and deep feeling, that wail of hopeless love and sorrow: "Could you come back to me, Douglas, Douglas, In the old likeness that I knew, I would be so faithful, so loving, Douglas, Douglas, Douglas, tender and true." There had been tears of vexation in her eyes when her mother had forced her to sing this song of all others; but after she had begun, the music took her own heart by storm, and she sang as she had never sung before--no longer fearing, but hoping that the cry of her heart might reach her lover and tell him of her love. Farnham listened in transport; he had never until now heard her sing, and her beautiful voice seemed to him to complete the circle of her loveliness. He was so entranced by the full rich volume of her voice, and by the rapt beauty of her face as she sang, that he did not at first think of the words; but the significance of them seized him at last, and the thought that she was singing these words to him ran like fire through his veins. For a moment he gave himself up to the delicious consciousness that their souls were floating together upon that tide of melody. As the song died away and closed with a few muffled chords, he was on the point of throwing himself at her feet, and getting the prize which was waiting for him. But he suddenly bethought himself that she had sung the song unwillingly and had taken care to say that the words meant nothing. He rose and thanked her for the music, complimented her singing warmly, and bidding both ladies good night, went home, thrilled through and through with a deeper emotion than he had yet known, but painfully puzzled and perplexed. He sat for a long time in his library, trying to bring some order into his thoughts. He could not help feeling that his presence was an embarrassment and a care to Alice Belding. It was evident that she had a great friendship and regard for him, which he had troubled and disturbed by his ill-timed declaration. She could no longer be easy and natural with him; he ought not to stay to be an annoyance to her. It was also clear that he could not be himself in her presence; she exercised too powerful an influence upon him to make it possible that he could go in and out of the house as a mere friend of the family. He was thus driven to the thought which always lay so near to the surface with him, as with so many of his kind; he would exile himself for a year or two, and take himself out of her way. The thought gave him no content. He could not escape a keen pang of jealousy when he thought of leaving her in her beautiful youth to the society of men who were so clearly inferior to her. "I am inferior to her myself," he thought with genuine humility; "but I feel sure I can appreciate her better than any one else she will ever be likely to meet." By and by he became aware that something was perplexing him, which was floating somewhere below the surface of his consciousness. A thousand thoughts, more or less puzzling, had arisen and been disposed of during the hour that had elapsed since he left Mrs. Belding's. But still he began to be sure that there was one groping for recognition which as yet he had not recognized. The more ho dwelt upon it, the more it seemed to attach itself to the song Alice had sung, but he could not give it any definiteness. After he had gone to bed, this undefined impression of something significant attaching itself to the song besieged him, and worried him with tantalizing glimpses, until he went to sleep. But Farnham was not a dreamer, and the morning, if it brought little comfort, brought at least decision. He made up his mind while dressing that he would sail by an early steamer for Japan. He sent a telegram to San Francisco, as soon as he had breakfasted, to inquire about accommodations, and busied himself during the day with arranging odds and ends of his affairs. Coming and going was easy to him, as he rarely speculated and never touched anything involving anxious risks. But in the afternoon an irresistible longing impelled him to the house of his neighbor. "Why should I not allow myself this indulgence?" he thought. "It will be only civil to go over there and announce my departure. As all is over, I may at least take this last delight to my eyes and heart. And I want to hear that song again." All day the song had been haunting him, not on account of anything in itself, but because it vaguely reminded him of something else-- something of infinite importance, if he could only grasp it. It hung about him so persistently, this vague glimmer of suggestion, that he became annoyed, and said at last to himself, "It is time for me to be changing my climate, if a ballad can play like that on my nerves." He seized his hat and walked rapidly across the lawn, with the zest of air and motion natural to a strong man in convalescence. The pretty maidservant smiled and bowed him into the cool, dim drawing-room, where Alice was seated at the piano. She rose and said instinctively to the servant, "Tell mamma Captain Farnham is here," and immediately repented as she saw his brow darken a little. He sat down beside her, and said: "I come on a twofold errand. I want to say good-by to you, and I want you to sing 'Douglas' for me once more." "Why, where are you going?" she said, with a look of surprise and alarm. "To Japan." "But not at once, surely?" "The first steamer I can find." Alice tried to smile, but the attempt was a little woful. "It will be a delightful journey, I am sure," she faltered, "but I can't get used to the idea of it, all at once. It is the end of the world." "I want to get there before the end comes. At the present rate of progress there is not more than a year's purchase of bric-a-brac left in the empire. I must hurry over and get my share. What can I do for you?" he continued, seeing that she sat silent, twisting her white fingers together. "Shall I not bring you the loot of a temple or two? They say the priests have become very corruptible since our missionaries got there--the false religion tumbling all to pieces before the true." Still she made no answer, and the fixed smile on her face looked as if she hardly heard what he was saying. But he went on in the same light, bantering tone. "Shall I bring you back a Jinrickishaw?" "What in the world is that--but, no matter what it is--tell me, are you really going so soon?" If Farnham had not been the most modest of men, the tone in which this question was asked would have taught him that he need not exile himself. But he answered seriously: "Yes, I am really going." "But why?" The question came from unwilling lips, but it would have its way. The challenge was more than Farnham could endure. He spoke out with quick and passionate earnestness: "Must I tell you then? Do you not know? I am going because you send me." "Oh, no," she murmured, with flaming cheeks and downcast eyes. "I am going because I love you, and I cannot bear to see you day by day, and know that you are not for me. You are too young and too good to understand what I feel. If I were a saint like you, perhaps I might rejoice in your beauty and your grace without any selfish wish--but I cannot. If you are not to be mine, I cannot enjoy your presence. Every charm you have is an added injury, if I am to be indifferent to you." Her hands flew up and covered her eyes. She was so happy that she feared he would see it and claim her too soon and too swiftly. He mistook the gesture, and went on in his error. "There! I have made you angry, or wounded you again. It would be so continually, if I should stay. I should be giving you offence every hour in the day. I cannot help loving you, any more than I can help breathing. This is nothing to you or worse than nothing, but it is all my life to me. I do not know how it will end. You have filled every thought of my mind, every vein of my body. I am more you than myself. How can I separate myself from you?" As he poured out these words, and much more, hot as a flood of molten metal, Alice slowly recovered her composure. She was absolutely and tranquilly happy--so perfectly at rest that she hardly cared for the pain her lover was confessing. She felt she could compensate him for everything, and every word he said filled her with a delight which she could not bear to lose by replying. She sat listening to him with half-shut eyes, determined not to answer until he had made an end of speaking. But she said to herself, with a tenderness which made her heart beat more than her lover's words, "How surprised he will be when I tell him he shall not go." The rustling of Mrs. Belding's ample approach broke in upon her trance and Farnham's litany. He rose, not without some confusion, to greet her, and Alice, with bright and even playful eyes, said, "Mamma, what do you think this errant young cavalier has come to say to us?" Mrs. Belding looked with puzzled inquiry from one to the other. "Simply," continued Alice, "that he is off for Japan in a day or two, and he wants to know if we have any commissions for him." "Nonsense! Arthur, I won't listen to it. Come over to dinner this evening and tell me all about it. I've got an appointment this very minute at our Oriental Gospel rooms and cannot wait to talk to you now. But this evening, you must tell me what it all means, and I hope you will have changed your mind by that time." The good lady did not even sit down, but rustled briskly away. Perhaps she divined more of what was toward than appeared--but she did as she would have wished to be done by, when she was young, and left the young people to their own devices. Farnham turned to Alice, who was still standing, and said, "Alice, my own love, can you not give me one word of hope to carry with me? I cannot forget you. My mind cannot change. Perhaps yours may, when the ocean is between us, and you have time to reflect on what I have said. I spoke too soon and too rashly. But I will make amends for that by long silence. Then perhaps you will forgive me--perhaps you will recall me. I will obey your call from the end of the world." He held out his hand to her. She gave him hers with a firm warm grasp. He might have taken courage from this, but her composure and her inscrutable smile daunted him. "You are not going yet," she said. "You have forgotten what you came for." "Yes--that song. I must hear it again. You must not think I am growing daft, but that song has haunted me all day in the strangest way. There is something in the way _you_ sing it--the words and your voice together--that recall some association too faint for me to grasp. I can neither remember what it is, nor forget it. I have tried to get it out of my mind, but I have an odd impression that I would better cherish it--that it is important to me--that life or death are not more important. There! I have confessed all my weakness to you, and now you will say that I need a few weeks of salt breeze." "I will sing you the song first. Perhaps we may pluck out its mystery." She preluded a moment and sang, while Farnham waited with a strained sense of expectancy, as if something unspeakably serious was impending. She sang with far more force and feeling than the night before. Her heart was full of her happy love, as yet unspoken, and her fancy was pleased with that thought that, under the safe cover of her music, she could declare her love without restraint. She sang with the innocent rapture of a mavis in spring, in notes as rich and ardent as her own maiden dreams. Farnham listened with a pleasure so keen that it bordered upon pain. When she came to the line, "I would be so tender, so loving, Douglas," he started and leaned forward in his chair, holding his hands to his temples, and cried, "Can't you help me to think what that reminds me of?" Alice rose from the piano, flushing a pink as sweet and delicate as that of the roses in her belt. She came forward a few paces and then stopped, bent slightly toward him, with folded hands. In her long, white, clinging drapery, with her gold hair making the dim room bright, with her red lips parted in a tender but solemn smile, with something like a halo about her of youth and purity and ardor, she was a sight so beautiful that Arthur Farnham as he gazed up at her felt his heart grow heavy with an aching consciousness of her perfection that seemed to remove her forever from his reach. But the thought that was setting her pulses to beating was as sweetly human as that of any bride since Eve. She was saying to herself in the instant she stood motionless before him, looking like a pictured angel, "I know now what he means. He loves me. I am sure of him. I have a right to give myself to him." She held out her hands. He sprang up and seized them. "Come," she said, "I know what you are trying to remember, and I will make you remember it." He was not greatly surprised, for love is a dream, and dreams have their own probabilities. She led him to a sofa and seated him beside her. She put her arms around his neck and pressed his head to her beating heart, and said in a voice as soft as a mother's to an ailing child, "My beloved, if you will live, I will be so good to you." She kissed him and said gently, "Now do you remember?" THE END. * * * * * * Harper's Popular 12mo series Cloth, Ornamental, 75 Cents Each With Frontispiece Portraits of Authors THE HOUSE-BOAT ON THE STYX. By JOHN KENDRICK BANGS. Illustrated. THE PURSUIT OF THE HOUSE-BOAT. By JOHN KENDRICK BANGS. Illustrated. 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5797	----	Youth Challenges By CLARENCE BUDINGTON KELLAND AUTHOR OF "The Little Moment of Happiness," "The High Flyers," "Sudden Jim," "The Source," "The Hidden Spring," etc. CHAPTER I Bonbright Foote VI arose and stood behind the long table which served him as a desk and extended his hand across it. His bearing was that of a man taking a leading part in an event of historic importance. "My son," said he, "it gratifies me to welcome you to your place in this firm." Then he smiled. When Bonbright Foote VI smiled it was as though he said to himself, "To smile one must do thus and so with the features," and then systematically put into practice his instructions. It was a cultured smile, one that could have been smiled only by a gentleman conscious of generations of correct antecedents; it was an aristocratic smile. On the whole it was not unpleasant, though so excellently and formally done. "Thank you, father," replied Bonbright Foote VII. "I hope I shall be of some use to you." "Your office is ready for you," said his father, stepping to a door which he unlocked with the gravity of a man laying a corner stone. "This door," said he, "has not been opened since I took my place at the head of the business--since I moved from the desk you are to occupy to the one in this room. It will not be closed again until the time arrives for you to assume command. We have--we Footes--always regarded this open door as a patent token of partnership between father and son." Young Foote was well acquainted with this--as a piece of his family's regalia. He knew he was about to enter and to labor in the office of the heir apparent, a room which had been tenantless since the death of his grandfather and the consequent coronation of his father. Such was the custom. For twelve years that office had been closed and waiting. None had ventured into it, except for a janitor whose weekly dustings and cleanings had been performed with scrupulous care. He knew that Bonbright Foote VI had occupied the room for seventeen years. Before that it had stood vacant eleven years awaiting for Bonbright Foote VI to reach such age and attainments as were essential. Young Foote realized that upon the death of his father the office would be closed again until his son, Bonbright Foote VIII, should be equipped, by time and the university founded by John Harvard, to enter as he was entering to-day. So the thing had been done since the first Bonbright Foote invested Bonbright Foote II with dignities and powers. Father and son entered the long-closed office, a large, indeed a stately room. It contained the same mahogany table at which Bonbright Foote II had worked; the same chairs, the same fittings, the same pictures hung on the walls, that had been the property of the first crown prince of the Foote dynasty. It was not a bright place, suggestive of liveliness or gayety, but it was decorously inviting--a place in which one could work with comfort and satisfaction. "Let me see you at your desk," said the father, smiling again. "I have looked forward to seeing you there, just as you will look forward to seeing YOUR son there." Bonbright sat down, wondering if his father had felt oppressed as HE felt oppressed at this moment. He had a feeling of stepping from one existence into another, almost of stepping from one body, one identity, to another. When he sat at that desk he would be taking up, not his own career, but the career of the entity who had occupied this office through generations, and would occupy it in perpetual succession. Vaguely he began to miss something. The sensation was like that of one who has long worn a ring on his finger, but omits to put it on one morning. For that person there is a vague sense of something missing throughout the day. Bonbright did not know what he felt the lack of--it was his identity. "For the next month or so," said his father, "about all you can hope to do is to become acquainted with the plant and with our methods. Rangar will always be at your disposal to explain or to give you desired information. I think it would be well if he were to conduct you through the plant. It will give you a basis to work from." "The plant is still growing, I see," said Bonbright. "It seems as if a new building were being put up every time I come home." "Yes, growing past the prophecy of any of our predecessors," said his father. He paused. "I am not certain," he said, as one who asks a question of his inner self, "but I would have preferred a slower, more conservative growth." "The automobile has done it, of course." "Axles," said his father, with a hint of distaste. "The manufacturing of rear axles has overshadowed everything else. We retain as much of the old business--the manufacturing of machinery--as ever. Indeed, THAT branch has shown a healthy growth. But axles! A mushroom that has overgrown us in a night." It was apparent that Bonbright Foote VI did not approve of axles, as it was a known fact that he frowned upon automobiles. He would not own one of them. They were too new, too blatant. His stables were still stables. His coachman had not been transmuted into a chauffeur. When he drove it was in a carriage drawn by horses--as his ancestors had driven. "Yes... yes..." he said, slowly, with satisfaction, "it is good to have you in the business, son. It's a satisfaction to see you sitting there.... Now we must look about to find a suitable girl for you to marry. We must begin to think about Bonbright Foote VIII." There was no smile as he said this; the observation was made in sober earnest. Bonbright saw that, just as his ancestors looked to him to carry on the business, so they looked to him to produce with all convenient dispatch a male successor to himself. It was, so to speak, an important feature of his job. "I'll send in Rangar," said his father, not waiting for Bonbright to reply to the last suggestion, and walked with long-legged dignity out of the room. Bonbright rested his chin on his palm and stared gloomily at the wall. He felt bound and helpless; he saw himself surrounded by firm and dignified shades of departed Bonbright Footes whose collective wills compelled him to this or prohibited that course of action. Adventure, chance, were eliminated from his life. He was to be no errant musician, improvising according to his mood; the score he was to play was before him, and he must play it note for note, paying strict attention to rests, keys, andantes, fortissimos, pianissimos. He had been born to this, had been made conscious of his destiny from babyhood, but never had he comprehended it as he did on this day of his investiture. Even the selection and courting of a mate, that greatest of all adventures (to the young), was made humdrum. Doubtless his mother already had selected the girl, and presently would marry him to her. ... Somehow this was the one phase of the situation that galled him most. "I'll see about that," he muttered, rebelliously, "I'll see about that." Not that marriage was of importance to him yet, except as a thing to be avoided until some dim future. Women had not assumed consequence to him; his relations with them had been scant surface relations. They were creatures who did or did not please the eye, who did or did not dance well, who did or did not amuse one. That was all. He was only twenty-three. Rangar, his father's secretary, and the man who stood as shield between Bonbright Foote VI and unpleasant contacts with his business and the world's business, entered. Rangar was a capable man whose place as secretary to the head of the business did not measure his importance in the organization. Another man of his abilities and opportunity and position would have carried the title of general manager or vice president--something respect-carrying. As for Rangar, he was content. He drew the salary that would have accompanied those other titles, possessed in an indirect sort of way the authority, and yet managed to remain disentangled from the responsibilities. Had he suddenly vanished the elder Foote would have been left suspended in rarefied heights between heaven and his business, lacking direct contact with the mills and machine shops and foundries; yet, doubtless, would have been unable to realize that the loss of Rangar had left him so. Rangar was a competent, efficient man, if peculiar in his ambitions. "Your father," said he, "has asked me to show you through the plant." "Thank you--yes," said Bonbright, rising. They went out, passing from the old, the family, wing of the office building, into the larger, newer, general offices, made necessary by the vastly increased business of the firm. Here, in a huge room, were bookkeepers, stenographers, clerks, filing cabinets, desks, typewriters--with several cubicles glassed off for the more important employees and minor executives. "We have tried," said Rangar, "to retain as far as possible the old methods and systems. Your father, Mr. Foote, is conservative. He clings to the ways of his father and his grandfather." "I remember," said Bonbright, "when we had no typewriting machines." "We had to come to them," said Rangar, with a note of regret. "Axles compelled us. But we have never taken up with these new contraptions--fads--like phonographs to dictate to, card indices, loose-leaf systems, adding machines, and the like. Of course it requires more clerks and stenographers, and possibly we are a bit slower than some. Your father says, however, that he prefers conducting his business as a gentleman should, rather than to make a mere machine of it. His idea," said Rangar, "of a gentleman in business is one who refuses to make use of abbreviations in his correspondence." Bonbright was looking about the busy room, conscious that he was being covertly studied by every occupant of it. It made him uncomfortable, uneasy. "Let's go on into the shops," he said, impatiently. They turned, and encountered in the aisle a girl with a stenographer's notebook in her hand; indeed, Bonbright all but stepped on her. She was a slight, tiny thing, not thin, but small. Her eyes met Bonbright's eyes and she grinned. No other word can describe it. It was not an impertinent grin, nor a familiar grin, nor a COMMON grin. It was spontaneous, unstudied--it lay at the opposite end of the scale from Bonbright Foote VI's smile. Somehow the flash of it COMFORTED Bonbright. His sensations responded to it. It was a grin that radiated with well wishes for all the world. Bonbright smiled back, awkwardly, and bobbed his head as she stepped aside for him to pass. "What a grin!" he said, presently. "Oh," said Rangar. "Yes--to be sure. The Girl with the Grin--that's what they call her in the office. She's always doing it. Your father hasn't noticed. I hope he doesn't, for I'm sure he wouldn't like it." "As if," said Bonbright to himself, "she were happy--and wanted everybody else to be." "I'm sure I don't know," said Rangar. "She's competent." They passed outside and through a covered passageway into the older of the shops. Bonbright was not thinking about the shops, but about the girl. She was the only thing he had encountered that momentous morning that had interested him, the only thing upon which Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, had not set the stamp of its repressing personality. He tried to visualize her and her smile that he might experience again that sensation of relief, of lightened spirit. In a measure he was able to do so. Her mouth was large, he saw--no small mouth could have managed that grin. She was not pretty, but, somehow, attractive. Her eyes were bully; intelligent, humorous sort of eyes, he decided. "Bet she's a darn nice kid," he concluded, boyishly. His father would have been shocked at a thought expressed in such words. "The business has done wonders these last five years," said Rangar, intruding on Bonbright's thoughts. "Five years ago we employed less than a thousand hands; to-day we have more than five thousand on the payroll. Another few years and we shall have ten thousand." "Axles?" asked Bonbright, mechanically. "Axles," replied Rangar. "Father doesn't approve of them--but they must be doing considerable for the family bank account." Rangar shot a quick glance at the boy, a glance with reproof in it for such a flippancy. Vaguely he had heard that this young man had done things not expected from a Foote; had, for instance, gone in for athletics at the university. It was reported he had actually allowed himself to be carried once on the shoulders of a cheering mob of students! There were other rumors, also, which did not sit well on the Foote tradition. Rangar wondered if at last a Foote had been born into the family who was not off the old piece of cloth, who might, indeed, prove difficult and disappointing. The flippancy indicated it. "Our inventory," he said, severely, "five years ago, showed a trifle over a million dollars. To-day these mills would show a valuation of five millions. The earnings," he added, "have increased in even greater ratio." "Hum," said Bonbright, his mind already elsewhere. His thought, unspoken, was, "If we've got so blamed much, what's the use piling it up?" At noon they had not finished the inspection of the plant; it was well toward five o'clock when they did so, for Rangar did his duty conscientiously. His explanations were long, careful, technical. Bonbright set his mind to the task and listened well. He was even interested, for there were interesting things to see, processes requiring skilled men, machines that had required inventive genius to devise. He began to be oppressed by the bigness of it. The plant was huge; it was enormously busy. The whole world seemed to need axles, preferably Foote axles, and to need them in a hurry. At last, a trifle dazed, startled by the vastness of the domain to which he was heir apparent, Bonbright returned to the aloof quiet of his historic room. "I've a lot to learn," he told Rangar. "It will grow on you.... By the way, you will need a secretary." (The Footes had secretaries, not stenographers.) "Shall I select one for you?" "Yes," said Bonbright, without interest; then he looked up quickly. "No," he said, "I've selected my own. You say that girl--the one who grinned--is competent?" "Yes, indeed--but a girl! It has been the custom for the members of the firm to employ only men." Bonbright looked steadily at Rangar a moment, then said: "Please have that girl notified at once that she is to be my secretary." "Yes, sir," said Rangar. The boy WAS going to prove difficult. He owned a will. Well, thought the man, others may have had it in the family before--but it has not remained long. "Anything more, Mr. Foote?" "Thank you, no," said Bonbright, and Rangar said good evening and disappeared. The boy rested his chin on his hand again, and reflected gloomily. He hunched up his shoulders and sighed. "Anyhow," he said to himself, "I'll have SOMEBODY around me who is human." CHAPTER II Bonbright's father had left the office an hour before he and Rangar had finished their tour of the works. It was always his custom to leave his business early and to retire to the library in his home, where daily he devoted two hours to adding to the manuscript of The Philosophical Biography of Marquis Lafayette. This work was ultimately to appear in several severe volumes and was being written, not so much to enlighten the world upon the details of the career of the marquis as it was to utilize the marquis as a clotheshorse to be dressed in Bonbright Foote VI's mature reflections on men, events, and humanity at large. Bonbright VII sat at his desk motionless, studying his career as it lay circumscribed before him. He did not study it rebelliously, for as yet rebellion had not occurred to him. The idea that he might assert his individuality and depart from the family pattern had not ventured to show its face. For too many years had his ancestors been impressing him with his duty to the family traditions. He merely studied it, as one who has no fancy for geometry will study geometry, because it cannot be helped. The path was there, carefully staked out and bordered; to-day his feet had been placed on it, and now he must walk. As he sat he looked ahead for bypaths--none were visible. The shutting-down whistle aroused him. He walked out through the rapidly emptying office to the street, and there he stood, interested by the spectacle of the army that poured out of the employees' entrances. It was an inundation of men, flooding street from sidewalk to sidewalk. It jostled and joked and scuffled, sweating, grimy, each unit of it eager to board waiting, overcrowded street cars, where acute discomfort would be suffered until distant destinations were reached. Somehow the sight of that surging, tossing stream of humanity impressed Bonbright with the magnitude of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, even more than the circuit of the immense plant had done. Five thousand men, in a newspaper paragraph, do not affect the imagination. Five thousand men in the concrete are quite another matter, especially if you suddenly realize that each of them has a wife, probably children, and that the whole are dependent upon the dynasty of which you are a member for their daily bread. "Father and I," he said to himself, as the sudden shock of the idea impacted against his consciousness, "are SUPPORTING that whole mob." It gave him a sense of mightiness. It presented itself to him in that instant that he was not a mere business man, no mere manufacturer, but a commander of men--more than that, a lord over the destinies of men. It was overwhelming. This realization of his potency made him gasp. Bonbright was very young. He turned, to be carried on by the current. Presently it was choked. A stagnant pool of humanity formed around some center, pressing toward it curiously. This center was a tiny park, about which the street divided, and the center was a man standing on a barrel by the side of a sign painted on cloth. The man was speaking in a loud, clear voice, which was able to make itself perfectly audible even to Bonbright on the extreme edge of the mass. "You are helpless as individuals," the man was saying. "If one of you has a grievance, what can he do?... Nothing. You are a flock of sheep.... If ALL of you have a grievance, what can you do? You are still a pack of sheep.... Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, owns you, body and soul.... Suppose this Foote who does you the favor to let you earn millions for him--suppose he wants to buy his wife a diamond necklace.... What's to prevent him lowering your wages next week to pay for it?... YOU couldn't stop him!... Why can an army beat a mob of double its numbers? Because the army is ORGANIZED! Because the army fights as one man for one object!... You are a mob. Capital is organized against you.... How can you hope to defend yourselves? How can you force a betterment of your conditions, of your wage?... By becoming an army--a labor army!... By organizing.... That's why I'm here, sent by the National Federation--to organize you. To show you how to resist!... To teach you how to make yourselves irresistible!..." There were shouts and cheers which blotted out the speaker's words. Then Bonbright heard him again: "Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, is entitled to fair interest on the money it has invested in its plant. It is entitled to a fair profit on the raw materials it uses in manufacture.... But how much of the final cost of its axles does raw material represent? A fraction! What gives the axles the rest of their value?... LABOR! You men are paid two, three, some of you even four dollars a day--for your labor. Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, adds a little pig iron to your labor, and gives you a place to work in, and takes his millions of dollars a year.... Do you get your fair share?... You do NOT, and you will never get a respectable fraction of your fair share till you organize--and seize it." There was more. Bonbright had never heard the like of it before and it fascinated him. Here was a point of view that was new to him. What did it mean? Vaguely he had heard of Socialism, of labor unions, of the existence of a spirit of suspicion and discord between capital and labor. Now he saw it, face uncovered starkly. A moment before he had realized his power over these men; now he perceived that these men, some of them, realized it even better than he.... Realized it and resented it; resented it and fought with all the strength of their souls to undermine it and make it topple in ruin. His mind was a caldron into which cross currents of thought poured and tossed. He had no experience to draw on. Here was a thing he was being plunged into all unprepared. It had taken him unprepared, and shaken him as he had never been shaken before. He turned away. Half a dozen feet away he saw the Girl with the Grin--not grinning now, but tense, pale, listening with her soul in her eyes, and with the light of enthusiasm glowing beside it. He walked to her side, touched her shoulder.... It was unpremeditated, something besides his own will had urged him to speak to her. "I don't understand it," he said, unsteadily. "Your class never does," she replied, not sharply, not as a retort, but merely as one states a fact to give enlightenment. "My father," she said, "was killed leading the strikers at Homestead. ... The unions educated me." "What is this man--this speaker--trying to do? Stir up a riot?" She smiled. "No. He is an organizer sent by the National Federation. ... They're going to try to unionize our plant." "Unionize?" "Bonbright Foote, Incorporated," she said, "is a non-union shop." "I didn't know," said he, after a brief pause. "I'm afraid I don't understand these things.... I suppose one should know about them if he is to own a plant like ours." Again he paused while he fumbled for an idea that was taking shape. "I suppose one should understand about his employees just as much as he does about his machinery." She looked at him with a touch of awakened interest. "Do you class men with machinery?" she asked, well knowing that was not his meaning. He did not reply. Presently he said: "Rangar told you you were to be my secretary?" "Yes, sir," she said, using that respectful form for the first time. The relation of employer and employee had been re-established by his words. "Thank you for the promotion." "You understand what this is all about," he said. "I shall want to ask you about it.... Perhaps you even know the man who is speaking?" "He boards with my mother," said she. "That was natural," she added, "my father being who he was." Bonbright turned and looked at the speaker with curiosity awakened as to the man's personality. The man was young--under thirty, and handsome in a black, curly, quasi-foreign manner. Bonbright turned his eyes from the man to the girl at his side. "He looks--" said Bonbright. "How?" she asked, when it was apparent he was not going to finish. "As if," he said, musingly, "he wouldn't be the man to call on for a line smash in the last quarter of a tough game." Suddenly the speech came to an end, and the crowd poured on. "Good night," said the girl. "I must find Mr. Dulac. I promised I would walk home with him." "Good night," said Bonbright. "His name is Dulac?" "Yes." Men like Dulac--the work they were engaged upon--had not fallen within the circle of Bonbright's experience. Bonbright's training and instincts had all been aristocratic. At Harvard he had belonged to the most exclusive clubs and had associated with youths of training similar to his. In his athletics there had been something democratic, but nothing to impress him with democracy. Where college broadens some men by its contacts it had not broadened Bonbright, for his contacts had been limited to individuals chipped from the same strata as himself.... In his home life, before going to college, this had been even more marked. As some boys are taught arithmetic and table manners, Bonbright had been taught veneration for his family, appreciation for his position in the world, and to look upon himself and the few associates of his circumscribed world as selected stock, looked upon with especial favor and graciousness by the Creator of the universe. Therefore this sudden dip into reality set him shivering more than it would another who entered the water by degrees. It upset him.... The man Dulac stirred to life in him something that was deeper than mere curiosity. "Miss--" said he, and paused. "I really don't know your name." "Frazer," she supplied. "Miss Frazer, I should like to meet this Dulac. Would you be willing?" She considered. It was an unusual request in unusual circumstances, but why not? She looked up into his boyish face and smiled. "Why not?" she said, aloud. They pressed forward through the crowd until they reached Dulac, standing beside his barrel, surrounded by a little knot of men. He saw the girl approaching, and lifted his hand in acknowledgment of her presence. Presently he came to her, casting a careless glance at Bonbright. "Mr. Dulac," she said, "Mr. Foote has been listening to your speech. He wants to meet you." "Foote!" said Dulac. "Not--" "Mr. Bonbright Foote," said the girl. Evidently the man was nonplussed. He stared at Bonbright, who extended his hand. Dulac looked at it, took it mechanically. "I heard what you were saying, Mr. Dulac," said Bonbright. "I had never heard anything like it before--so I wanted to meet you." Dulac recovered himself, perceived that here was an opportunity, and spoke loudly so that the staring, interested workingmen, who now surrounded them, could hear distinctly. "I'm glad you were present," said he. "It is not often we workingmen catch the ear of you employers so readily. You sit apart from your men in comfortable offices or in luxurious homes, so they get little opportunity to talk straight from the shoulder to you.... Even if they had the chance," he said, with a look about him, "they would not dare. To be respectful and to show no resentment mean their bread and butter." "Resentment?" said Bonbright. "You see I am new to the business and to this. What is it they resent?" "They resent being exploited for the profit of men like yourself.... They resent your having the power of life and death over them...." The girl stood looking from one man to the other; from Dulac, tall, picturesquely handsome, flamboyant, conscious of the effect of each word and gesture, to Bonbright, equally tall, something broader, boyish, natural in his unease, his curiosity. She saw how like he was to his slender, aristocratic father. She compared the courtesy of his manner toward Dulac with Dulac's studied brusqueness, conscious that the boy was natural, honest, really endeavoring to find out what this thing was all about; equally conscious that Dulac was exercising the tricks of the platform and utilizing the situation theatrically. Yet he was utilizing it for a purpose with which she was heart and soul in sympathy. It was right he should do so.... "I wish we might sit down and talk about it," said Bonbright. "There seem to be two sides in the works, mine and father's--and the men. I don't see why there should be, and I'd like to have you tell me. You see, this is my first day in the business, so I don't understand my own side of it, or why I should have a side--much less the side of the men. I hadn't imagined anything of the sort.... I wish you would tell me all about it. Will you?" The boy's tone was so genuine, his demeanor so simple and friendly, that Dulac's weapons were quite snatched from his hands. A crowd of the men he was sent to organize was looking on--a girl was looking on. He felt the situation demanded he should show he was quite as capable of courtesy as this young sprig of the aristocracy, for he knew comparisons were being made between them. "Why," said he, "certainly.... I shall be glad to." "Thank you," said Bonbright. "Good night." He turned to the girl and lifted his hat. "Thank YOU," said he, and eyes in which there was no unfriendliness followed him as he walked away, eyes of men whom Dulac was recruiting for the army of the "other side" of the social struggle. He hurried home because he wanted to see his father and to discuss this thing with him. "If there is a conflict," he said to himself, "in our business, workingmen against employer, I suppose I am on the employer's side. THEY have their reasons. We must have our reasons, too. I must have father explain it all to me." His mother called to him as he was ascending the stairs: "Be as quick as you can, Bonbright. We have guests at dinner to-night." "Some one I know?" "I think not," His mother hesitated. "We were not acquainted when you went to college, but they have become very prominent in the past four years.... Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm Lightener--and their daughter," Bonbright noticed the slight pause before the mention of the daughter, and looked quickly at his mother. She looked as quickly away. "All right, mother," he said. He went to his room with another disturbance added to the many that disquieted him. Just as certainly as if his mother had put it into words he knew she had selected this Lightener girl to be Mrs. Bonbright Foote VII--and the mother of Bonbright Foote VIII. "Confound it," he said, "it's started already.... Dam Bonbright Foote VIII!" CHAPTER III Bonbright dressed with a consciousness that he was to be on exhibition. He wondered if the girl had done the same; if she, too, knew why she was there and that it was her duty to make a favorable impression on him, as it was his duty to attract her. It was embarrassing. For a young man of twenty-three to realize that his family expects him to make himself alluring to a desirable future wife whom he has never seen is not calculated to soothe his nerves or mantle him with calmness. He felt silly. However, here HE was, and there SHE would be. There was nothing for it but to put his best foot forward, now he was caught for the event, but he vowed it would require more than ordinary skill to entrap him for another similar occasion. It seemed to him at the moment that the main object of his life thenceforward would be, as he expressed it, "to duck" Miss Lightener. When he went down the guests had arrived. His mother presented him, using proudly her formula for such meetings, "Our son." Somehow it always made him feel like an inanimate object of virtue--as if she had said "our Rembrandt," or, "our Chippendale sideboard." Mrs. Lightener did not impress him. Here was a quiet, motherly personality, a personality to grow upon one through months and years. At first meeting she seemed only a gray-haired, shy, silent sort of person, not to be spoken of by herself as Mrs. Lightener, but in the reflected rays of her husband, as Malcolm Lightener's wife. But Malcolm Lightener--he dominated the room as the Laocoon group would dominate a ten by twelve "parlor." His size was only a minor element in that impression. True, he was as great in bulk as Bonbright and his father rolled in one, towering inches above them, and they were tall men. It was the jagged, dynamic, granite personality of him that jutted out to meet one almost with physical impact. You were conscious of meeting a force before you became conscious of meeting a man. And yet, when you came to study his face you found it wonderfully human--even with a trace of granite humor in it. Bonbright was really curious to meet this man, whose story had reached him even in Harvard University. Here was a man who, in ten years of such dogged determination as affected one almost with awe, had turned a vision into concrete reality. In a day when the only mechanical vehicles upon our streets were trolley cars, he had seen those streets thronged with "horseless carriages." He had seen streets packed from curb to curb with endless moving processions of them. He had seen the nation abandon its legs and take to motor-driven wheels. This had been his vision, and he had made it reality. From the place of a master mechanic, at four dollars a day, he had followed his vision, until the world acknowledged him one of her richest men, one of her greatest geniuses for organization. In ten years, lifting himself by his boot straps, he had promoted himself from earnings of twelve hundred dollars a year to twelve million dollars a year.... He interested Bonbright as a great adventurer. To Hilda Lightener he was presented last. He had expected, hoped, to be unfavorably impressed; he had known he would be ill at ease, and that any attempts he made at conversation would be stiff and stilted. ... It was some moments after his presentation when he realized he felt none of these unpleasant things. She had shaken hands with him boyishly; her eyes had twinkled into his--and he was at his ease. Afterward he studied over the thing, but could not comprehend it.... It had been as if he were encountering, after a separation, a friend of years--not a girl friend, but a friend with no complications of sex. She was tall, nearly as tall as Bonbright, and she favored her father. Not that the granite was there. She was not beautiful, not even pretty--but you liked her looks. Bonbright liked her looks. At table Bonbright was seated facing Hilda Lightener. His father at once took charge of the conversation, giving the boy a breathing space to collect and appraise his impressions. Presently Mr. Foote said, impressively: "This is an important day in our family, Lightener. My son entered the business this morning." Lightener turned his massive, immobile face toward the boy, his expression not inviting, yet the seeing might have marked the ghost of a twinkle in his gray eyes. "Um.... Any corrections, amendments, or substitutions to offer?" he demanded. Bonbright looked at him, obviously not comprehending the sarcasm. "Most young spriggins I take into MY business," said Lightener, "think a whole day's experience equips them to take hold and make the whole thing over.... They can show me where I'm all wrong." Bonbright smiled, not happily. He was not accustomed to this sort of humor, and did not know how to respond to it. "It was so big," he said. "It sort of weighed me down--yet--somehow I didn't get interested till after the whistle blew." Lightener grunted. "That's what interests most of 'em--getting out of the place after the whistle blows." "Dad!" said Hilda. "What was it interested you then, Mr. Foote?" "The men," said Bonbright--"that great mob of men pouring out of the gates and filling the street.... Somehow they seemed to stand for the business more than all the buildings full of machinery.... I stood and watched them." Interest kindled in Lightener's eyes. "Yes?" he prompted. "It never occurred to me before that being at the head of a business meant--meant commanding so many men... meant exercising power over all those lives.... Then there were the wives and children at home...." Bonbright's father leaned forward icily. "Son," he said, coldly, "you haven't been picking up any queer notions in college?" "Queer notions?" "Socialistic, anarchistic notions. That sort of thing." "I don't believe," said Bonbright, with utter honesty, "that I ever gave the workingman a thought till to-day.... That's why it hit me so hard, probably." "It hit you, eh?" said Lightener. He lifted his hand abruptly to motion to silence Mr. Foote, who seemed about to interrupt. "Leave the boy alone, Foote.... This is interesting. Never saw just this thing happen before.... It hit you hard, eh?" "It was the realization of the power of large employers of labor--like father and yourself, sir." "Was that all?" "At first.... Then there was a fellow on a barrel making a speech about us.... I listened, and found out the workingmen realize that we are sort of czars or some such thing--and resent it. I supposed things were different. This Dulac was sent here to organize our men into a union--just why I didn't understand, but he promised to explain it to me." "WHAT?" demanded Bonbright Foote VI, approaching nearer than his wife had ever seen him to losing his poise. "You talked to him?" asked Hilda, leaning forward in her interest. "I was introduced to him; I wanted to know.... He was a handsome fellow. Not a gentleman, of course--" "Oh!" Lightener pounced on that expression. "Not a gentleman, eh?... Expect to find the Harvard manner in a man preaching riot from a potato barrel?... Well, well, what did he say? How did HE affect you?" "He seemed to think the men resented our power over them. Just how correctly he stated their feeling I don't know, of course. They cheered his speech, however.... He said father had the power to buy mother a diamond necklace to-morrow, and cut their wages to pay for it--and they couldn't help themselves." "Well--could they?" "I don't know. I didn't understand it all, but it didn't seem right that those men should feel that way toward us. I want to talk to father about it--have him explain it to me." Lightener chuckled and turned to Mr. Foote. "I don't suppose you appreciate the humor of that, Foote, the way I do. He's coming to you for an unbiased explanation of why your employees--feel that way.... Young fellow," he turned to Bonbright again--"I could come closer to doing it than your father--because I was one of them once. I used to come home with grease on my hands and a smudge on my nose, smelling of sweat." Mrs. Foote repressed a shudder and lowered her eyes. "But I couldn't be fair about it. Your father has no more chance of explaining the thing to you--than my wife has of explaining the theory of an internal-combustion engine.... We employers can't do it. We're on the other side. We can't see anything but our own side of it." "Come now, Lightener, I'm fair-minded. I've even given some study to the motives of men." "And you're writing a book." He shrugged his shoulders. "The sort of philosophical reflections that go in books aren't the sort to answer when you're up against the real thing in social unrest.... In your whole business life you've never really come into contact with your men. Now be honest, have you?" "I've always delegated that sort of thing to subordinates," said Mr. Foote, stiffly. "Which," retorted Mr. Lightener, "is one of the reasons for the unrest.... That's it. We don't understand what they're up against, nor what we do to aggravate them." "It's the inevitable warfare between capital and labor," said Mr. Foote. "Jealousy is at the root of it; unsound theories, like this of socialism, and too much freedom of speech make it all but unbearable." "Dulac said they must organize to be in condition to fight us." "Organize," said Mr. Foote, contemptuously. "I'll have no unions in my shop. There never have been unions and there never shall be. I'll put a sudden stop to that.... Pretty idea, when the men I pay wages to, the men I feed and clothe, can dictate to me how I shall conduct my affairs." "Yes," said Lightener, "we automobile fellows are non-union, but how long we can maintain it I don't know. They have their eyes on us and they're mighty hungry." "To-morrow morning," said Mr. Foote, "notices will appear in every department stating that any man who affiliates with a labor union will be summarily dismissed." "Maybe that will end the thing this time, Foote, but it'll be back. It 'll be back." Hilda leaned forward again and whispered to Bonbright, "You're not getting much enlightenment, are you?" Her eyes twinkled; it was like her father's twinkle, but more charming. "How," he asked, slowly, "are we ever to make anything of it if we, on the employers' side, can't understand their point of view, and they can't understand ours?" Mrs. Foote arose. "Let's not take labor unions into the other room with us," she said. Bonbright and Hilda walked in together and immediately engaged in comfortable conversation; not the sort of nonsense talk usually resorted to by a young man and a young woman on their first meeting. They had no awkwardness to overcome, nor was either striving to make an impression on the other. Bonbright had forgotten who this girl was, and why she was present, until he saw his mother and Mrs. Lightener approach each other, cast covert glances in their direction, and then observe something with evident pleasure. "They seem attracted by each other," Mrs. Foote said. "He's a nice boy," replied Mrs. Lightener. "I think you're right." "An excellent beginning. Propinquity and opportunity ought to do the rest.... We can see to that." Bonbright understood what they were saying as if he had heard it; bit his lips and looked ruefully from the mothers to Hilda. Her eyes had just swung from the same point to HIS face, and there was a dancing, quizzical light in them. SHE understood, too. Bonbright blushed at this realization. "Isn't it funny?" said Hilda, with a little chuckle. "Mothers are always doing it, though." "What?" he asked, fatuously. "Rubbish!" she said. "Don't pretend not to understand. I knew YOU knew what was up the moment you came into the room and looked at me. ... You--dodged." "I'm sure I didn't," he replied, thrown from his equilibrium by her directness, her frankness, so like her father's landslide directness. "Yes, you dodged. You had made up your mind never to be caught like this again, hadn't you? To make it your life work to keep out of my way?" He dared to look at her directly, and was reassured. "Something like that," he responded, with miraculous frankness for a Foote. "Just because they want us to we don't have to do it," she said, reassuringly. "I suppose not." "Suppose?" "I'm a Foote, you know, Bonbright Foote VII. I do things I'm told to do. The last six generations have planned it all out for me.... We do things according to inherited schedules.... Probably it sounds funny to you, but you haven't any idea what pressure six generations can bring to bear." He was talking jerkily, under stress of emotion. He had never opened his mouth on this subject to a human being before, had not believed it possible to be on such terms with anybody as to permit him to unbosom himself. Yet here he was, baring his woes to a girl he had known but an hour. "Of course," she said, with her soft, throaty chuckle, "if you really feel you have to.... But I haven't any six generations forcing ME. Or do you think yours will take me in hand?" "It isn't a joke to me," he said. "How would you like it if the unexpected--chance--had been carefully weeded out of your future?... It makes things mighty flat and uninteresting. I'm all wrapped up in family traditions and precedents so I can't wriggle--like an Indian baby.... Even THIS wouldn't be so rotten if it were myself they were thinking about. But they're not. I'm only an incident in the family, so far as this goes.... It's Bonbright Foote VIII they're fussing about.... It's my duty to see to it there's a Bonbright Foote VIII promptly." She didn't sympathize with him, or call him "poor boy," as so many less natural, less comprehending girls would have done. "I haven't the least idea in the world," she said, "whether I'll ever want to marry you or not--and you can't have a notion whether you'll want me. Suppose we just don't bother about it? We can't avoid each other--they'll see to that. We might as well be comfortably friendly, and not go shying off from each other. If it should happen we do want to marry each other--why, all right. But let's just forget it. I'm sure I sha'n't marry you just because a lot of your ancestors want me to.... Folks don't fall in love to order--and you can put this away carefully in your mind--when I marry it will be because I've fallen in love." "You're very like your father," he said. "Rushing in where angels fear to tread, you mean? Yes, dad's more direct than diplomatic, and I inherit it.... Is it a bargain?" "Bargain?" "To be friends, and not let our mammas worry us.... I like you." "Really?" he asked, diffidently. "Really," she said. "I like you, too," he said, boyishly. "We'll take in our Keep Off the Grass signs, then," she said. "Mother and father seem to be going." She stood up and extended her hand. "Good night, chum," she said. To herself she was saying what she was too wise to say aloud: "Poor kid! A chum is what he needs." CHAPTER IV Bonbright's first day in the plant had carried no suggestion from his father as to what his work was actually to be. He had merely walked about, listening to Rangar's expositions of processes and systems. After he was in bed that night he began to wonder what work would fall to him. What work had it been the custom for the heir apparent to perform? What work had his father and grandfather and great-grandfather performed when their positions were his position to-day?... Vaguely he recognized his incompetence to administer anything of importance. Probably, little by little, detail by detail, matters would be placed under his jurisdiction until he was safely functioning in the family groove. His dreams that night were of a reluctant, nightmarish passage down a huge groove, a monotonous groove, whose smooth, insurmountable sides offered no hint of variety.... As he looked ahead he could see nothing but this straight groove stretching into infinity. Always he was disturbed and made wretched by a consciousness of movement, of varied life and activity, of adventure, of thrill, outside the groove, but invisible, unreachable.... He strove to clamber up the glassy sides, only to slip back, realizing the futility of the EFFORT. He breakfasted alone, before his father or mother was about, and left the house on foot, driven by an aching restlessness. It was early. The factory whistle had not yet blown when he reached the gates, but already men carrying lunch boxes were arriving in a yawning, sleepy stream.... Now Bonbright knew why he had arisen early and why he had come here. It was to see this flood of workmen again; to scrutinize them, to puzzle over them and their motives and their unrest. He leaned against the wall and watched. He was recognized. Here and there a man offered him good morning with a friendliness of tone that surprised Bonbright. A good many men spoke to him respectfully; more regarded him curiously; some hopefully. It was the occasional friendly smile that affected him. One such smile from an older workman, a man of intelligent face, of shrewd, gray eyes, caused Bonbright to move from his place to the man's side. "I don't know your name, of course," he said, diffidently. "Hooper," said the man, pleasantly. "The men seem to know me," Bonbright said. "I was a little surprised. I only came yesterday, you know." "Yes," said Hooper, "they know who you are." "They seemed---almost friendly." Hooper looked sharply at the young man. "It's because," said he, "they're pinning hopes to you." "Hopes?" "Labor can't get anywhere until it makes friends in the ranks of the employers," said Hooper. "I guess most of the men don't understand that--even most of the leaders, but it's so. It's got to be so if we get what we must have without a revolution." Bonbright pondered this. "The men think I may be their friend?" "Some saw you last night, and some heard you talk to Dulac. Most of them have heard about it now." "That was it?... Thank you, Mr. Hooper." Bonbright went up to his office, where he stood at the window, looking down upon the thickening stream of men as the minute for the starting whistle approached.... So he was of some importance, in the eyes of the workingmen, at least! They saw hope in his friendship. ... He shrugged his shoulders. What could his friendship do for them? He was impotent to help or harm. Bitterly he thought that if the men wanted friendship that would be worth anything to them, they should cultivate his dead forbears. Presently he turned to his desk and wrote some personal letters--as a distraction. He did not know what else to do. There was nothing connected with the plant that he could set his hand to. It seemed to him he was just present, like a blank wall, whose reason for existence was merely to be in a certain place. He was conscious of voices in his father's room, and after a time his father entered and bade him a formal good morning. Bonbright was acutely conscious of his father's distinguished, cultured, aristocratic appearance. He was conscious of that manner which six generations of repression and habit in a circumscribed orbit had bestowed on Bonbright Foote VI. Bonbright was unconscious of the great likeness between him and his father; of the fact that at his father's age it would be difficult to tell them apart. Physically he was out of the Bonbright Foote mold. "Son," said Bonbright Foote VI, "you have made an unfortunate beginning here. You have created an impression which we shall have to eradicate promptly." "I don't understand." "It has been the habit of our family to hold aloof from our employees. We do not come directly into contact with them. Intercourse between us and them is invariably carried out through intermediaries." Bonbright waited for his father to continue. "You are being discussed by every man in the shops. This is peculiarly unfortunate at this moment, when a determined effort is being made by organized labor to force unionism on us. The men have the notion that you are not unfriendly toward unionism." "I don't understand it," said Bonbright. "I don't know what my feelings toward it may be." "Your feelings toward it," said his father with decision, "are distinctly unfriendly." Again Bonbright was silent. "Last evening," said his father, "you mingled with the men leaving the shops. You did a thing no member of our family has ever done--consented to an interview with a professional labor agitator." "That is hardly the fact, sir.... I asked for the interview." "Which is worse.... You even, as it is reported to me, agreed to talk with this agitator at some future time." "I asked him to explain things to me." "Any explanations of labor conditions and demands I shall always be glad to make. The thing I am trying to bring home to you is that the men have gotten an absurd impression that you are in sympathy with them.... Young men sometimes come home from college with unsound notions. Possibly you have picked up some socialistic nonsense. You will have to rid yourself of it. Our family has always arrayed itself squarely against such indefensible theories.... But the thing to do at once is to wipe out any silly ideas your indiscretion may have aroused among our workingmen." "But I am not sure--" "When you have been in this business ten years I shall be glad to listen to your matured ideas. Now your ideas--your actions at least-must conform to the policy we have maintained for generations. I have called some of our department heads to my room. I believe I hear them assembling. Let us go in." Bonbright followed his father mechanically. The next room contained some ten or twelve subordinate executives who eyed Bonbright curiously. "Gentlemen," said the elder Foote, "this is my son, whom you may not have met as yet. I wish to present him to you formally, and to tell you that hereafter he and I share the final authority in this plant. Decisions coming from this office are to be regarded as our joint decisions--except in the case of an exception of immediate moment. ... As you know, a fresh and determined effort is afoot to unionize this plant. My son and I have conferred on the matter, but I have seen fit to let the decision rest with him, as to our policy and course of action." The men looked with renewed curiosity at the young man who stood, white of face, with compressed lips and troubled eyes. "My son has rightly determined to adhere to the policy established many years ago. He has determined that unionism shall not be permitted to enter Bonbright Foote, Incorporated.... I state your sentiments, do I not, my son?" At the direct challenge Bonbright raised his eyes to his father's face appealingly. "Father--" he said. "I state your position?" his father said, sternly. Against Bonbright's will he felt the accumulated power of the family will, the family tradition. He had been reared in its shadow. Its grip lay firm upon him. Struggle he might, but the strength to defy was not yet in him.... He surrendered, feeling that, somehow, his private soul had been violated, his individuality rent from him. "Yes," he said, faintly. "The first step he has decided upon," said his father, "and one which should be immediately repressive. It is to post in every room and department of the shops printed notices to the effect that any man who affiliates himself with organized labor, or who becomes a member of a so-called trade-union, will be summarily dismissed from his employment.... That was the wording you suggested, was it not?" "Yes," said Bonbright, this time without struggle. "Rangar," said Mr. Foote, "my son directs that these cards be printed AT ONCE, and put in place before noon. It can be done, can it not?" "Yes, sir," said Rangar. "I think that is all, gentlemen.... You understand my son's position, I believe, so that if anyone questions you can answer him effectively?" The department heads stirred uneasily. Some turned toward the door, but one man cleared his throat. "Well, Mr. Hawthorne?" said the head of the business. "The men seem very determined this time. I'm afraid too severe action on our part will make trouble." "Trouble?" "A strike," said Hawthorne. "We're loaded with contract orders, Mr. Foote. A strike at this time--" "Rangar," said Mr. Foote, sharply, "at the first sign of such a thing take immediate steps to counteract it.... Better still, proceed now as if a strike were certain. These mills MUST continue uninterruptedly.... If these malcontents force a strike, Mr. Hawthorne, we shall be able to deal with it.... Good morning, gentlemen." The men filed out silently. It seemed as if they were apprehensive, almost as if they ventured to disagree with the action of their employers. But none voiced his disapproval. Bonbright stood without motion beside his father's desk, his eyes on the floor, his lips pressed together. "There," said his father, with satisfaction, "I think that will set you right." "Right?... The men will think I was among them last night as a spy!... They'll despise me.... They'll think I wasn't honest with them." Bonbright Foote VI shrugged his shoulders. "Loyalty to your family," he said, "and to your order is rather more important than retaining the good will of a mob of malcontents." Bonbright turned, his shoulders dropping so that a more sympathetic eye than his father's might have found itself moistening, and walked slowly back to his room. He did not sit at his desk, but walked to the window, where he rested his brow against his hand and looked out upon as much of the world as he could see.... It seemed large to him, filled with promise, filled with interests, filled with activities for HIM--if he could only be about them. But they were held tantalizingly out of reach. He was safe in his groove; had not slipped there gradually and smoothly, but had been thrust roughly, by sudden attack, into it. His young, healthy soul cried out in protest against the affront that had been put upon it. Not that the issue itself had mattered so much, but that it had been so handled, ruthlessly. Bonbright was no friend to labor. He had merely been a surprised observer of certain phenomena that had aroused him to thought. He did not feel that labor was right and that his father was wrong. It might be his father was very right.... But labor was such a huge mass, and when a huge mass seethes it is impressive. Possibly this mass was wrong; possibly its seething must be stilled for the better interests of mankind. Bonbright did not know. He had wanted to know; had wanted the condition explained to him. Instead, he had been crushed into his groove humiliatingly. Bonbright was young, to be readily impressed. If his father had received his uncertainty with kindliness and had answered his hunger's demand for enlightenment with arguments and reasoning, the crisis probably would have passed harmlessly. His father had seen fit not to use diplomacy, but to assert autocratically the power of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. Bonbright's individuality had thought to lift its head; it had been stamped back into its appointed, circumscribed place. He was not satisfied with himself. His time for protest had been when he answered his father's challenge. The force against him had been too great, or his own strength too weak. He had not measured up to the moment, and this chagrined him. "All I wanted," he muttered, "was to KNOW!" His father called him, and he responded apathetically. "Here are some letters," said Mr. Foote. "I have made notes upon each one how it is to be answered. Be so good as to dictate the replies." There it was again. He was not even to answer letters independently, but to dictate to his secretary words put into his mouth by Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. "It will help you familiarize yourself with our routine," said his father, "and your signature will apprise the recipients that Bonbright Foote VII has entered the concern." He returned to his desk and pressed the buzzer that would summon Ruth Frazer with book and pencil. She entered almost instantly, and as their eyes met she smiled her famous smile. It was a thing of light and brightness, compelling response. In his mood it acted as a stimulant to Bonbright. "Thank you," he said, involuntarily. "For what?" she asked, raising her brows. "For--why, I'm sure I don't know," he said. "I don't know why I said that.... Will you take some letters, please?" He began dictating slowly, laboriously. It was a new work to him, and he went about it clumsily, stopping long between words to arrange his thoughts. His attention strayed. He leaned back in his chair, dictation forgotten for the moment, staring at Ruth Frazer without really being conscious of her presence. She waited patiently. Presently he leaned forward and addressed a question to her: "Did you and Mr. Dulac mention me as you walked home?" "Yes," she said. "Would it be--impertinent," he asked, "to inquire what you said?" She wrinkled her brows to aid recollection. "Mr. Dulac," she replied, "wondered what you were up to. That was how he expressed it. He thought it was peculiar--your asking to know him." "What did YOU think?" "I didn't think it was peculiar at all. You"--she hesitated--"had been taken sort of by surprise. Yes, that was it. And you wanted to KNOW. I think you acted very naturally." "Naturally!" he repeated after her. "Yes, I guess that must be where I went wrong. I was natural. It is not right to be natural. You should first find how you are expected to act--how it is planned for you to act. Yourself--why, yourself doesn't count." "What do you mean, Mr. Foote?" "This morning," he said, bitterly, "cards with my name signed to them have been placed, or will be placed, in every room of the works, notifying the men that if they join a labor union they will be discharged." "Why--why--" "I have made a statement that I am against labor unions." She looked at him uncomprehendingly, but somehow compelled to sympathize with him. He had passed through a bitter crisis of some sort, she perceived. "I am not interested in all those men--that army of men," he went on. "I don't want to understand them. I don't want to come into contact with them. I just want to sit here in my office and not be bothered by such things.... We have managers and superintendents and officials to take care of labor matters. I don't want to talk to Dulac about what he means, or why our men feel resentment toward us. Please tell him I have no interest whatever in such things." "Mr. Foote," she said, gently, "something has happened to you, hasn't it? Something that has made you feel bitter and discouraged?" "Nothing unusual--in my family--Miss Frazer. I've just been cut to the Bonbright Foote pattern. I didn't fit my groove exactly--so I was trimmed until I slipped into it. I'm in now." A sudden tumult of shouts and cheers arose in the street under his window; not the sound of a score of voices nor of a hundred, but a sound of great volume. Ruth looked up, startled, frightened. Bonbright stepped to the window. "It's only eleven o'clock," he said, "but the men are all coming out.... The whistle didn't blow. They're cheering and capering and shaking hands with one another. What does that mean, do you suppose?" "I'm afraid," said Miss Frazer, "it's your placard." "My placard?" "The men had their choice between their unions and their jobs--and they've stood by their unions." "You mean--?" "They've struck," said Ruth. CHAPTER V There are family traditions among the poor just as there are among the rich. The families of working-men may cling as tenaciously to their traditions as the descendants of an earl. In certain families the sons are compelled by tradition to become bakers, in others machinists; still other lowly family histories urge their members to conduct of one sort or another. It is inherent in them to hold certain beliefs regarding themselves. Here is a family whose tradition is loyalty to another family which has employed the father, son, grandfather; across the street may live a group whose peculiar religion is to oppose all constituted authority and to uphold anarchism. Theories and beliefs are handed down from generation to generation until they assume the dignity of blood laws. Bonbright was being wrenched to fit into the Foote tradition. Ruth Frazer, his secretary, needed no alterations to conform to the tradition of HER family. This was the leveling tradition; the elevating of labor and the pulling down of capital until there was a dead level of equality--or, perhaps, with labor a bit in the saddle. Probably a remote ancestor of hers had been a member of an ancient guild; perhaps one had risen with Wat Tyler. Not a man of the family, for time beyond which the memory of man runneth not, but had been a whole-souled, single-purposed labor man--trade-union man--extremist--revolutionist. Her father had been killed in a labor riot--and beatified by her. As the men of her family had been, so were the women--so was she. Rights of man, tyranny of capital, class consciousness had been taught her with her nursery rhymes. She was a zealot. A charming zealot with a soul that laughed and wanted all mankind to be happy with it--a soul that translated itself by her famous grin. When she thought of capital, of moneyed aristocracy in the mass and in the abstract, she hated it. It was a thing to be uprooted, plotted against, reviled. When she met a member of it in the body, and face to face, as she was meeting Bonbright Foote, she could not hate. He was a man, an individual. She could not withhold from him the heart-warming flash of her smile, could not wish him harm. Somehow, in the concrete, he became a part of mankind, and so entitled to happiness. She was sincere. In her heart she prayed for the revolution. Her keen brain could plan for the overthrow of the enemy and her soul could sacrifice her body to help to bring it to pass. She believed. She had faith. Her actions would be true to her faith even at a martyr cost. But to an individual whom she saw face to face, let him be the very head and front of the enemy, and she could not wish him personal harm. To a psychologist this might have presented a complex problem. To Ruth it presented no problem at all. It was a simple condition and she lived it. She was capable of hero worship, which, after all, is the keystone of aristocracies. But her heroes were not warriors, adventurers, conquerors of the world, conquerors of the world's wealth. They were revolutionists. They were men who gave their lives and their abilities to laboring for labor.... Already she was inclining to light the fires of her hero worship at the feet of the man Dulac. Ruth Frazer's grin has been spoken of. It has been described as a grin. That term may offend some sensitive eye as an epithet applicable only to something common, vulgar. To smile is proper, may even be aristocratic; only small boys and persons of slack breeding are guilty of the grin.... Ruth Frazer's grin was neither common nor vulgar. It was warming, encouraging, bright with the flashing of a quick mind, and withal sweet, womanly, delicious. Yet that it was a grin cannot be denied. Enemies to the grin must make the most of it. The grin was to be seen, for Dulac had just entered Ruth's mother's parlor, and it glowed for him. The man seemed out of place in that cottage parlor. He seemed out of place in any homelike room, in any room not filled by an eager, sweating, radical crowd of men assembled to hang upon his words. That was the place for him, the place nature had created him to become. To see him standing alone any place, on the street, in a hotel, affected one with the feeling that he was exotic there, misplaced. He must be surrounded by his audience to be RIGHT. Something of this crossed Ruth's mind. No woman, seeing a possible man, is without her sentimental speculation. She could not conceive of Dulac in a HOME. "It's been a day!" he said. "Yes." "Every skilled mechanic has struck," he said, with pride, as in a personal achievement. "And most of the rest. To-night four thousand out of their five thousand men were with us." "It came so suddenly. Nobody thought of a strike this morning." "We were better organized than they thought," he said, running his hand through his thick, black hair, and throwing back his head. "Better than I thought myself.... I've always said fool employers were the best friends we organizers have. The placard that young booby slapped the men in the face with--that did it....That and his spying on us last night." "I'm sure he wasn't spying last night." "Bosh! He was mighty quick to try to get our necks under his heel this morning." "I don't know what happened this morning," she said, slowly. "I'm his secretary, you know. Something happened about that placard. I don't believe he wanted it to go up." "You're defending him? Of course. You're a girl and you're close to the throne with a soft job. He's a good-looking kid in his namby-pamby Harvard way, too." "Mr. Dulac!...My job--I was going to ask you what I should do. I want to help the men. I want them to feel that I'm with them, working for them and praying for them. Ought I to quit, too--to join the strike?" Dulac looked at her sharply, calculatingly. "No," he said, presently, "you can do a lot more good where you are." "Will there be trouble? I dread to think of rioting and maybe bloodshed. It will be bad enough, anyhow--if it lasts long. The poor women and children!" "There'll be trouble if they try to turn a wheel or bring in scab labor." He laughed, so that his white teeth showed. "The first thing they did was to telephone for the police. I suppose this kid with a whole day's experience in the business will be calling in strike breakers and strong-arms and gunmen....Well, let him bring it down on himself if he wants to. We're in this thing to win. It means unionism breaking into this automobile game. This is just the entering wedge." "Won't the automobile manufacturers see that, too?" she asked. "Won't the men have all their power and wealth to fight?" Dulac shrugged his shoulders. "I guess the automobile world knows who Dulac is to-night," he said, with gleaming eyes. Somehow the boast became the man. It was perfectly in character with his appearance, with his bearing. It did not impress Ruth as a brag; it seemed a natural and ordinary thing for him to say. "You've been here just two weeks," she said, a trifle breathlessly; for he loomed big to her girlish eyes. "You've done all this in two weeks." He received the compliment indifferently. Perhaps that was a pose; perhaps the ego of the man made him impervious even to compliments. There are men so confident in their powers that a compliment always falls short of their own estimate of themselves. "It's a start--but all our work is only a start. It's preliminary," His voice became oratorical. "First we must unionize the world. Now there are strong unions and weak unions--both arrayed against a capital better organized and stronger than ever before in the world's history. Unionism is primary instruction in revolution. We must teach labor its power, and it is slow to learn. We must prepare, prepare, prepare, and when all is ready we shall rise. Not one union, not the unions of a state, of a country, but the unions of the world...hundreds of millions of men who have been ground down by aristocracies and wealth for generations. Then we shall have such an overturning as shall make the French Revolution look like child's play....A World's Republic--that's our aim; a World's Republic ruled by labor!" Her eyes glistened as he talked; she could visualize his vision, could see a united world, cleansed of wars, of boundary lines; a world where every man's chance of happiness was the equal of every other man's chance; where wealth and poverty were abolished, from which slums, degradation, starvation, the sordid wickednesses compelled by poverty, should have vanished. She could see a world of peace, plenty, beauty. It was for this high aim that Dulac worked. His stature increased. She marveled that such a man could waste his thoughts upon her. She idealized him; her soul prostrated itself before him. So much of accomplishment lay behind him--and he not yet thirty years old! The confidence reposed in him by labor was eloquently testified to by the sending of him to this important post on the battle line. Already he had justified that confidence. With years and experience what heights might he not climb!...This was Ruth's thought. Beside Dulac's belief in himself and his future it was colorless. Dulac had been an inmate of the Frazer cottage two weeks. In that time he had not once stepped out of his character. If his attitude toward the world were a pose it had become so habitual as to require no objective prompting or effort to maintain. This character was that of the leader of men, the zealot for the cause of the under dog. It held him aloof from personal concerns. Individual affairs did not touch him, but functioned unnoticed on a plane below his clouds. Not for an instant had he sought the friendship of Ruth and her mother, not to establish relations of friendship with them. He was devoted to a cause, and the cause left no room in his life for smaller matters. He was a man apart. Now he was awkwardly tugging something from his pocket. Almost diffidently he offered it to Ruth. It was a small box of candy. "Here..." he said, clumsily. "For me!" Ruth was overpowered. This demigod had brought HER a gift. He had thought about her--insignificant her! True, she had talked with him, had even taken walks with him, but those things had not been significant. It had seemed he merely condescended to the daughter of a martyr to his cause. He had been paying a tribute to her father. But a gift--a personal gift such as any young man might make to a girl whose favor he sought! Could it mean...? Then she saw that he was embarrassed, actually embarrassed before her, and she was ashamed of herself for it. But she saw, too, that in him was a human man, a man with fears and sensations and desires and weaknesses like other men. After all, a demigod is only half of Olympus. "Thank you," she said. "Thank you SO much." "You're not--offended?" He was recovering himself. In an instant he was back again in character. "We men," he said, "who are devoted to the Cause have little time in our lives for such things. The Cause demands all. When we go into it we give up much that other men enjoy. We are wanderers. We have no homes. We can't AFFORD to have homes....I," he said, it proudly, "have been in jail more than once. A man cannot ask a woman to share such a life. A man who leads such a life has no place in it for a woman." "I should think," she said, "that women would be proud to share such a life. To know they were helping a little! To know they were making one comfortable spot for you to come to and rest when you were tired or discouraged...." "Comforts are not for us," he said, theatrically, yet he did not seem theatrical to her, only nobly self-sacrificing. "It isn't right," she said, passionately. "The poorest laborer has more than you. He has his home and his family. No matter how poor he is, no matter what he suffers, he has some compensations....And you--you're giving your life and everything in life that's bright and beautiful for that laborer." "The happiness of one man buying the happiness of millions," he said, his black eyes glowing. "Yet sometimes we have our weak moments. We see and we desire." "And are entitled to possess," she said. His eyes glowed upon her hungrily--she read the hunger in them, hunger for HER! It frightened her, yet it made her heart leap with pride. To be looked upon with favor by such a man! "Some women," he said, slowly, "might live through it. There are women big enough and strong enough--a few, maybe. Big enough to endure neglect and loneliness; to live and not know if their husbands would sleep at home that night or in a jail or be in the middle of a riot on the other side of the world! They could not even depend on their husbands for support....A few might not complain, might be able to endure....You, Miss Ruth--I believe you are one of them!" Her cheeks paled. Was he--could he be about to ask her to share his life? It was impossible! Yet what else could he mean? To what else could his words be tending? She was awed, frightened--yet warmed by a surge of pride. She thought of her father....If he could see and know! If knowledge could only pass to him that his daughter had been thought worthy by such a man to play her part for the Cause!...She waited tensely, hand pressed to her bosom. Dulac stepped toward her, barbarically handsome. She felt the force, the magnetism of him. It called to her, compelled her....She could not lift her eyes. Slowly he approached another step. It was as though he were forced to her against his will. The silence in the room was the tense silence of a human crisis....Then it was broken ruthlessly. There came a pounding on the door that was not a knock, but an alarm. It was imperative, excited, ominous. "Oh..." Ruth cried. Her mother was opening the door. "Dulac! Where's Dulac?" a man's voice demanded. "Here," he replied. "What is it?" "O'Hagan's in town," the man panted, rushing into the room. "They've brought in O'Hagan and his gang of bullies." O'Hagan, king of strike breakers! Ruth knew that name well, and what the arrival of the man of evil omen foretold. It promised violence, riot, bloodshed, suffering. "They're going to try to run, then," said Dulac, calmly. "The police have escorted a mob of scabs into the mill yards. They've tried to drive away our pickets. They've locked up Higgins and Bowen. Got Mason, too, but the crowd took him away from the police." "It's on their own heads," said Dulac, solemnly. "I'll come with you." He turned to Ruth and took her hand. "You see," he said, "it calls me away--even from a moment like that...." CHAPTER VI Malcolm Lightener was not a man to send messages nor to depend upon telephones. He was as direct as a catapult, and was just as regardful of ceremony. The fact that it was his and everybody else's dinner hour did not hold him back an instant from having himself driven to the Foote residence and demanding instant speech with Mr. Foote. Mr. Foote, knowing Lightener, shrugged his shoulders and motioned Bonbright to follow him from the table. "If we asked him to be seated and wait," said he, "Lightener would burst into the dining room." They found their visitor not seated, but standing like a granite monolith in the center of the library. "Well," he said, observing no formalities of greeting, "you've chucked a brick into the hornets' nest." "Won't you be seated?" asked Mr. Foote, with dignified courtesy. "Seated? No, I've got no time for seats, and neither have you, if you would wake up to it. Do you know what you've done with your bullheadedness? You've rammed the automobile manufacturers up against a crisis they've been dodging for years. Needlessly. There was no more need for this strike at this time than there is for fur overcoats in hell. But just when the hornets were stirred up and buzzing, you had to heave your brick.... And now we've got to back your play." "I am not aware," said Mr. Foote, icily, "that we have asked assistance." "If the house next to mine catches fire the owner doesn't have to holler to me for help. I've got to help to keep the blaze from spreading to my own house.... You've never thought beyond the boundaries of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated--that's what's the matter with you. You're hidebound. A blind man could see the unions look at this thing as their entering wedge into the automobile industry. If they break into you they'll break into us. So we've got to stop 'em short." "If we need any help--" Mr. Foote began. "Whether you need it or whether you want it," said Lightener, "you get it." "Let me point out to you," said Mr. Foote, with chilly courtesy, "that my family has been able to manage its business for several generations--with some small success.... Our relations with our employees are our own concern, and we shall tolerate no interference. ... I have placed my son in complete charge of this situation, with confidence that he will handle it adequately." "Huh!" grunted Lightener, glancing at Bonbright. "I heard about THAT. ... What I came to say principally was: This thing can be headed off now if you go at it with common sense. Make concessions. Get to this Dulac. You can get your men back to work--and break up this union thing." "Mr. Lightener, our course is decided on. We shall make no concessions. My son has retained O'Hagan, the strike breaker. To-morrow morning the mills start up as usual, with new men. We have them camped in the yards now. There shall be no compromising. When we have the strikers whipped into their places we'll talk to them--not before." "What's the idea of putting up the boy as stalking horse? What do you expect to get by hiding behind him?" "My son was indiscreet. He created a misapprehension among the men as to his attitude toward labor. I am merely setting them right." "And sewing a fine crop of hatred for the boy to reap." Mr. Foote shrugged his shoulders "The position of my family has not been doubtful since the inception of our business. I do not propose that my son shall make it so. Our traditions must be maintained." "If you'd junk a few traditions," said Lightener, "and import a little modern efficiency--and human understanding of human beings--you might get somewhere. You quit developing with that first ancestor of yours. If the last hundred years or so haven't been wasted, there's been some progress. You're wabbling along in a stage coach when other folks use express trains.... When I met the boy here last night, I thought he was whittled off a different stick from the rest of you.... I guess he was, too. But you're tying a string of ancestors around his neck and squeezing him into their likeness." "My son knows his duty to his family," said Mr. Foote. "I didn't have a family to owe duty to, thank God," said Lightener, "but I spent quite some time figuring out my duty to myself.... You won't listen to reason, eh? You're going to bull this thing through?" "My son will act as my son should act," said Mr. Foote. Lightener turned to where Bonbright stood with set face and eyes that smoldered, and studied him with an eye accustomed to judging men. "There'll be rioting," he said. "Probably there'll be bloodshed. There'll certainly be a devil of a lot of suffering. Your father is putting the responsibility for it on your shoulders, young fellow. Does that set comfortably on your mind?" Bonbright was slow to answer. His position was difficult, for it seemed to him he was being asked by a stranger to criticize his father and his family. His own unrest under the conditions which were forced upon him was not to be mentioned. The major point--the conflict between capital as represented by Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, and labor--as represented by the striking employees--he did not understand. He had wanted to understand it; he had felt a human interest in the men, but this was forbidden to him.... Whatever he felt, whatever he thought, whatever dread he might have of the future as it impended over himself--he must be loyal to his name. So when he spoke it was to say in a singularly unboyish voice: "My father has spoken for me, Mr. Lightener." For the first time Lightener smiled. He laid a heavy hand on Bonbright's shoulder. "That was well done, my boy," he said. Bonbright was grateful for his understanding. A servant appeared. "Mr. Bonbright is wanted on the telephone," she said. It was Rangar. "There's rioting at the plant," the man said, unemotionally. "I have notified the police and taken the necessary steps." "Very well," said Bonbright. He walked to the library, and, standing in the door, stirred by excitement so that his knees quivered and a great emptiness was within him, he said to his father, "There's rioting at the plant, sir." Then he turned, put on his coat and hat, and quietly left the house. There was rioting at the mills! Bonbright was going to see what rioting was like, what it meant. It was no impulse, no boyish spirit of adventure or curiosity, that was taking him, but a command. No sooner had Rangar spoken the words over the telephone than Bonbright knew he must go. "Whatever is happening," he said to himself, "I'm going to be blamed for it." With some vague juvenile notion of making himself unrecognizable he turned up the collar of his coat and pulled down his cap.... When still some blocks from the mills a patrol wagon filled with officers careened past him, its gong emitting a staccato, exciting alarm. Here was reality. Bonbright quickened his step; began to run. Presently he entered the street that lay before the face of the factory--a street lighted by arc lamps so that the scene was adequately visible. As far as the main gates into the factory yards the street was in the possession of the police; beyond them surged and clamored the mob, not yet wrought to the pitch of attack. Bonbright thought of a gate around the corner. He would enter this and ascend to his office, whence he could watch the street from his window. Before the gate a man sat on a soap box, a short club dangling by a thong from his wrist. As Bonbright approached he arose. "What you want?" he demanded, taking a businesslike grip on his weapon. "I want to go in," said Bonbright. "I'm Mr. Foote." The man grinned. "To be sure, Mr. Foote. Howdy, Mr. Foote. You'll be glad to meet me. I'm Santa Claus." "I tell you I'm Mr. Foote. I want to go inside." "And I tell you," said the man, suddenly dropping his grin, "to beat it--while you're able." Youthful rage sent its instant heat through Bonbright. For an instant he meditated jerking the man from that gate by the nape of the neck and teaching him a lesson with his athletic foot.... It was not fear of the result that deterred him; it was the thought that this man was his own employee, placed there by him for this very purpose. If the guard made HIM bristle with rage, how would the sight of the man and his club affect the strikers? He was a challenge and an insult, an invitation to violence. Bonbright turned and walked away, followed by a derisive guffaw from the strike breaker. Bonbright retraced his steps and approached the rear of the police. Here he was stopped by an officer. "Where you goin'?" "I'm Mr. Foote," said Bonbright. "I want to see what's happening." "I can't help it if you're Mr. Roosevelt, you can't go any farther than this.... Now GIT." He gave Bonbright a violent and unexpected shove, which almost sent the young man off his feet. He staggered, recovered himself, and stood glowering at the officer. "Move!" came the short command, and once more burning with indignation, he obeyed. Here was another man acting in his behalf, summoned to his help. It was thus the police behaved, roughly, intolerantly, neither asking nor accepting explanations. It did not seem to Bonbright this could be the right way to meet the emergency. It seemed to him calculated only to aggravate it. The application of brute force might conquer a mob or stifle a riot, but it would leave unquenched fires of animosity. A violent operation may be necessary to remove a malignant growth. It may be the only possible cure; but no physician would hope to cure typhoid fever by knocking the patient insensible with a club. True, the delirium would cease for a time, but the deep-seated ailment would remain and the patient only be the worse for the treatment.... Here the disease was disagreement, misunderstanding, suspicion, bitterness of heart between employer and employees. Neither hired strike breaker nor policeman's baton could get to the root of it.... Yet he, Bonbright Foote VII, was the man held out to all the world as favoring this treatment, as authorizing it, as ordering it! He walked quite around the block, approaching again on a side street that brought him back again just ahead of the police. This street was blocked by excited, restless, crowding, jeering men, but Bonbright wormed his way through and climbed upon a porch from which he could see over the heads of the foremost to where a line of police and the front rank of strikers faced each other across a vacant space of pavement, the square at the intersection of the streets. Behind him a hatless man in a high state of excitement was making an inflammatory speech from a doorstep. He was urging the mob to charge the police, to trample them under.... Bonbright leaned far over the railing so he could look down the street where the main body of the mob was assembled. There was another speaker. Bonbright recognized Dulac--and Dulac, with all his eloquence, was urging the men to disperse to their homes in quiet. Bonbright listened. The man was talking sense! He was pointing out the folly of mob violence! He was showing them that it achieved nothing.... But the mob was beyond the control of wise counsel. Possibly the feet of many had pressed brass rails while elbows crooked. Certainly there was present a leaven of toughs, idlers, in no way connected with the business, but sent by the devil to add to the horror of it. One of these, discreetly distant from the front, hurled half a brick into the line of police. It was a vicious suggestion. Other bricks and missiles followed, while the crowd surged forward. Suddenly the line of patrolmen opened to let through a squad of mounted police, who charged the mob.... It was a thing requiring courage, but a thing ordered by an imbecile. Horses and men plunged into that dammed river of men.... It was a scene Bonbright could never erase from his memory, yet never could have described. It was a nightmare, a sensation of dread rather than a scene of fierce, implacable action. The police drew back. The strikers hesitated.... Between them, on the square of pavement, lay quiet, or writhing in pain, half a dozen human forms.... Bonbright, his face colorless as those who lay below, stared at the bodies. For this that he saw he would be held responsible by the world.... He ran down the steps and began struggling through the mob. "Let me through.... Let me through," he panted. He broke through to the front, not moved by reason, but quivering with the horror of the sight of men needlessly slain or maimed.... He must do something. He must stop it! Then he Was recognized. "It's young Foote," a man shouted, and snatched at his shoulder. He shook the man off, but the cry was taken up. "It's Foote--young Foote.... Spying again." Men sprang upon him, but he turned furiously and hurled them back. They must not stop him. He must not be interfered with, because he had to put an end to this thing. The mob surged about him, striking, threatening, so that he had to turn his face toward them, to strike out with his fists. More than one man went down under his blows before he could break away and run toward the police. "See what you've done," he shouted in their faces. "This must stop." He advanced another step, as if to force the mounted officers to retreat. "Grab him," ordered a sergeant. Bonbright was promptly grabbed and hauled through the line of mounted police, to be thrown into the arms of waiting patrolmen. He fought as strength was given him to fight, but they carried him ungently and hurled him asprawl upon the floor of a patrol wagon, already well occupied by arrests from the mob. "Git 'em to the station," the driver was ordered, and off lurched the patrol wagon. That rapid ride brought cooling to Bonbright's head. He had made a fool of himself. He was ashamed, humiliated, and to be humiliated is no minor torture to a young man. Instead of giving his name to the lieutenant on the desk he refused to give a name, and was entered as John Doe. It was his confused thought to save his family from publicity and disgrace.... So he knew what it was to have barred doors shut upon him, to be alone in a square cell whose only furnishing was a sort of bench across one end. He sank upon this apathetically and waited for what morning should bring. CHAPTER VII The world owes no small part of its advancement to the reflections of men in jails. Bonbright, alone in the darkness of his cell, was admirably situated for concentrated thought. All through the sleepless night he reviewed facts and theories and conditions. He reached few definite conclusions, and these more boyish than mature; he achieved to no satisfaction with himself. His one profound conclusion was that everything was wrong. Capital was wrong, labor was wrong; the whole basis upon which society is organized was wrong. It was an exceedingly sweeping conclusion, embracing EVERYTHING. He discerned no ray of light. He studied his own conduct, but could convince himself of no voluntary wrongdoing. Yet he was in a cell.... In the beginning he had merely tried to understand something that aroused his curiosity--labor. From the point of view of capital, as represented by his father, this had been a sin. How or why it was a sin he could not comprehend.... Labor had been willing to be friendly, but now it hated him. Orders given in his name, but not originating in his will, had caused this. His attitude became fatalistic--he was being moved about by a ruthless hand without regard to his own volition. He might as well close his eyes and his mind and submit, for Bonbright Foote VII did not exist as a rational human individual, but only as a checker on the board, to be moved from square to square with such success or error as the player possessed. Last night.... He had been mishandled by the employees of capital and the guardians of society; he had been mobbed by labor. He resented the guard and the police, but could not resent the mobbing. ... He seemed to be dangling between two worlds, mishandled by either that he approached. But one fact he realized--labor would have none of him. His father had seen to that. There was no place for him to go but into the refuge of capital, and so to become an enemy to labor against which he had no quarrel.... This night set him more deeply in the Bonbright Foote groove. There was nothing for him now but complete submission, apathetic submission. If it must be so, it must be so. He would let the family current bear him on. He would be but another Bonbright Foote, differentiated from the others only by a numeral to designate his generation. Singularly, his own immediate problem did not present itself insistently until daylight began to penetrate the murk of the cell. What would the authorities do with him? How was he to get his liberty? Would the thing become public? He felt his helplessness, his inadequacy. He could not ask his father to help him, for he did not want his father ever to know what had happened the night before, yet he must have help from some one. Suddenly the name of Malcolm Lightener occurred to him. After a time the doorman appeared with breakfast. "Can I send a message?" asked Bonbright. The doorman scrutinized him, saw he was no bum of the streets, but quite evidently a gentleman in temporary difficulty. "Maybe," he said, grudgingly. "Gimme the message and I'll see." "Please telephone Mr. Malcolm Lightener that the younger of the gentlemen he called on last evening is here and would like to see him." "Malcolm Lightener, the automobile feller?" "Yes." "Friend of your'n?" "Yes." "Um!..." The doorman disappeared to return presently with the lieutenant. "What's this about Malcolm Lightener?" the officer asked. "I gave the man here a message for him," said Bonbright. "Is it on the level? You know Lightener?" "Yes," said Bonbright, impatiently. "Then what the devil did you stay here all night for? Why didn't you have him notified last night? Looks darn fishy to me." "It will do no harm to deliver my message," said Bonbright. "Huh!... Let him out." The doorman swung wide the barred door and the lieutenant motioned Bonbright out. "Come and set in the office," he said. "Maybe you'd rather telephone yourself?" "If I might," said Bonbright, amazed at the potency of Lightener's name to open cell doors and command the courtesy of the police. It was his first encounter with Influence. He was conducted into a small office; then the lieutenant retired discreetly and shut the door. Bonbright made his call and asked for speech with Malcolm Lightener. "Hello!... Hello!" came Lightener's gruff voice. "What is it?" "This is Bonbright Foote.... I'm locked up in the Central Station. I wonder if you can't help me somehow?" There was a moment's silence; then Bonbright heard a remark not intended for his ears but expressive of Lightener's astonishment, "Well, I'm DARNED!" Then: "I'll be right there. Hold the fort." Bonbright opened the door and said to the lieutenant, "Mr. Lightener's on his way down." "Um!... Make yourself comfortable. Say, was that breakfast all right? Find cigars in that top drawer." The magic of Influence! In twenty minutes Lightener's huge form pushed through the station door. "Morning, Lieutenant. Got a friend of mine here?" "Didn't know he was a friend of yours, Mr. Lightener. He wouldn't give his name, and never asked to have you notified till this morning.... He's in my office there." Lightener strode into the room and shut the door. "Well?" he demanded. Breathlessly, almost without pause, Bonbright poured upon him an account of last night's happenings, making no concealments, unconsciously giving Lightener glimpses into his heart that made the big man bend his brows ominously. The boy did not explain; did not mention accusingly his father, but Lightener understood perfectly what the process of molding Bonbright was being subjected to. He made no comment. "I don't want father to know this," Bonbright said. "If it can be kept out of the papers.... Father wouldn't understand. He'd feel I had disgraced the family." "Doggone the family," snapped Lightener. "Come on." Bonbright followed him out. "May I take him along, Lieutenant? I'll fix it with the judge if necessary.... And say, happen to recognize him?" "Never saw him before." "If any of the newspaper boys come snoopin' around, you never saw me, either. Much obliged, Lieutenant." "You're welcome, Mr. Lightener. Glad I kin accommodate you." Lightener pushed Bonbright into his limousine. "You don't want to go home, I guess. We'll go to my house. Mother'll see you get breakfast. ... Then we'll have a talk.... Here's a paper boy; let's see what's doing." It was the morning penny paper that Lightener bought, the paper with leanings toward the proletariat, the veiled champion of labor. He bought it daily. "Huh!" he grunted, as he scanned the first page. "They kind of allude to you." Bonbright looked. He saw a two-column head: YOUNG MILLIONAIRE URGES ON POLICE The next pyramid contained his name; the story related how he had rushed frantically to the police after they had barbarously charged a harmless gathering of workingmen, trampling and maiming half a dozen, and had demanded that they charge again. It was a long story, with infinite detail, crucifying him with cheap ink; making him appear a ruthless, heartless monster, lusting for the spilled blood of the innocent. Bonbright looked up to meet Lightener's eyes. "It--it isn't fair," he said, chokingly. "Fairness," said Lightener, almost with gentleness, "is expected only when we are young." "But I didn't.... I tried to stop them." "Don't try to tell anybody so--you won't be believed." "I'm going to tell somebody," said Bonbright, his mind flashing to Ruth Frazer, "and I'm going to be believed. I've got to be believed." After a while he said: "I wasn't taking sides. I just went there to see. If I've got to hire men all my life I want to understand them." "You've got to take sides, son. There's no straddling the fence in this world.... And as soon as you've taken sides your own side is all you'll understand. Nobody ever understood the other side." "But can't there ever be an understanding? Won't capital ever understand labor, or labor capital?" "I suppose a philosopher would say there is no difference upon which agreement can't be reached; that there must somewhere be a common meeting ground.... The Bible says the lion shall lie down with the lamb, but I don't expect to live to see him do it without worrying some about the lion's teeth." "It's one man holding power over other men," said Bonbright. As the car stopped at Malcolm Lightener's door, sudden panic seized Bonbright. "I ought not to come here," he said, "after last night. Mrs. Lightener... your daughter." "I'll bet Hilda's worrying you more than her mother. Nonsense! They both got sense." Certainly Mrs. Lightener had. "Just got him out of the police station," her husband said as he led the uncomfortable Bonbright into her presence. "Been shut up all night.... Rioting--that's what he's been doing. Throwing stones at the cops." Mrs. Lightener looked at Bonbright's pale, weary, worried face. "You let him be, Malcolm.... Never mind HIM," she said to the boy. "You just go right upstairs with him. A warm bath and breakfast are what you need. You don't look as if you'd slept a WINK." "I haven't," he confessed. When Bonbright emerged from the bath he found the motherly woman had sent out to the haberdashers for fresh shirt, collar, and tie. He donned them with the first surge of genuine gratefulness he had ever known. Of course he had said thank you prettily, and had thought he felt thanks.... Now he knew he had not. "Guess you won't be afraid to face Hilda now," said Lightener, entering the room. "I notice a soiled collar is worn with a heap more misgiving than a soiled conscience.... Grapefruit, two soft-boiled eggs, toast, coffee.... Some prescription." Hilda was in the library, and greeted him as though it were an ordinary occurrence to have a young man just out of the cell block as a breakfast guest. She did not refer to it, nor did her father at the moment. Bonbright was grateful again. After breakfast the boy and girl were left alone in the library, briefly. "I'm ashamed," said Bonbright, chokingly. "You needn't be," she said. "Dad told us all about it. I thought the other night I should like you. Now I'm sure of it." She owned her father's directness. "You're good," he said. "No--reasonable," she answered. He sat silent, thinking. "Do you know," he said, presently, "what a lot girls have to do with making a fellow's life endurable?... Since I went to work I--I've felt really GOOD only twice. Both times it was a girl. The other one just grinned at me when I was feeling down on my luck. It was a dandy grin.... And now you..." "Tell me about her," she said. "She's my secretary now. Little bit of a thing, but she grins at all the world... Socialist, too, or anarchist or something. I made them give her to me for my secretary so I could see her grin once in a while." "I'd like to see her." "I don't know her," said Bonbright. "She's just my secretary. I'll bet she'd be bully to know." Hilda Lightener would not have been a woman had she not wondered about this girl who had made such an impression on Bonbright. It was not that she sensed a possible rival. She had not interested herself in Bonbright to the point where a rival could matter. But--she would like to see that girl. Malcolm Lightener re-entered the room. "Clear out, honey," he said to his daughter. "Foote and I have got to make medicine." She arose. "If he rumbles like a volcano," she said to Bonbright, "don't be afraid. He just rumbles. Pompeii is in no danger." "You GIT," her father said. "Now," he said when they were alone, "what's to pay?" "I don't know." "Will your father raise the devil? Maybe you'd like to have me go along when you interview him." "I think I'd rather not." Lightener nodded with satisfaction. "Well, then--I've kind of taken a shine to you. You're a young idiot, all right, but there's something about you.... Let's start off with this: You've got something that's apt to get you into hot water. Either it's fool curiosity or genuine interest in folks. I don't know which. Neither fits into the Bonbright Foote formula. Six generations of 'em seem to have been whittled off the same chip--and then the knife slipped and you came off some other chip altogether. But the Foote chip don't know it, and won't recognize it if it does.... I'm not going to criticize your father or your ancestors, whatever kind of darn fools I may personally think they are. What I want to say is, if you ever kick over the traces, drop in and tell me about it. I'll see you on your road." "Thanks," said Bonbright, not half comprehending. "You can't keep on pressing men out of the same mold forever. Maybe you can get two or three or a dozen to be as like as peas--and then nature plays a joke on you. You're the joke on the Foote mold, I reckon. Maybe they can squeeze you into the form and maybe they can't.... But whatever happens is going to be darn unpleasant for you." Bonbright nodded. THAT he knew well. "You've got a choice. You can start in by kicking over the traces--with the mischief to pay; or you can let the vanished Footes take a crack at you to see what that can make of you. I advise no boy to run against his father's wishes. But everybody starts out with something in him that's his own--individual--peculiar to him. Maybe it's what the preachers call his soul. Anyhow, it's HIS. Whatever they do to you, try to hang on to it. Don't let anybody pump it out of you and fill its room with a standardized solution. Get me?" "I think so." "I guess that's about, all from me. Now run along to your dad. Got any idea what will happen?" Bonbright studied the rug more than a minute before he answered. "I think I was right last night. Maybe I didn't go about it the way I should, but I INTENDED right. At least I didn't intend WRONG. Father will be--displeased. I don't think I can explain it to him... " "Uh!" grunted Lightener. "So I--I guess I sha'n't try," Bonbright ended. "I think I'll go along and have it over with." When he was gone Malcolm Lightener made the following remark to his wife, who seemed to understand it perfectly: "Some sons get born into the wrong families." CHAPTER VIII Bonbright entered his office with the sensations of a detected juvenile culprit approaching an unavoidable reckoning. If there was a ray of brightness in the whole episode it was that the newspapers had miraculously been denied the meatiest bit of his night's adventure--his detention in a cell. If that had been flaunted before the eyes of the public Bonbright felt he would never have been able to face his father. He was vividly aware of the stir his entrance caused among the office employees. It was as though the heart of the office skipped a beat. He flushed, and, with eyes straight before him, hurried into his own room and sat in his chair. He experienced a quivering, electric emptiness--his nerves crying out against an approaching climax. It was blood-relative to panic. Presently he was aware that his father stood in the door scrutinizing him. Bonbright's eyes encountered his father's. They seemed to lock ... In that tense moment the boy was curiously aware how perfectly his father's physical presence stood for and expressed his theory of being. Tall, unbending, slender, aristocratic, intellectual--the pose of the body, the poise of the head, even that peculiar, slanting set of the lips expressed perfectly the Bonbright Foote idea. Five generations had bred him to be the perfect thing it desired. "Well, sir," he said, coldly. Bonbright arose. There was a formality about the situation which seemed to require it. "Good morning," he said, in a low tone. "I have seen the papers." "Yes, sir." "What they printed was in substance true?" "I prefer not--to discuss it, sir." "And _I_ prefer TO discuss it... Do you fancy you can drag the name of Foote through the daily press as though it were that of some dancing girl or political mountebank, and have no reference made of it? Tell me exactly what happened last night--and why it was permitted to happen." "Father--" Bonbright's voice was scarcely audible, yet it was alive and quivering with pain. "I cannot talk to you about last night." The older man's lips compressed. "You are a man grown--are supposed to be a man grown. Must I cross-examine you as if you were a sulking schoolboy?" Bonbright was not defiant, not sulkily stubborn. His night's experiences had affected, were affecting him, working far-reaching changes in him, maturing him. But he was too close to them for their effect to have been accomplished. The work was going on each moment, each hour. He did not reply to his father immediately, but when he did so it was with a certain decision, a firmness, a lack of the old boyishness which was marked and distinct. "You must not cross-question me. There are things about which one's own father has not the right to ask.... If I could have come to you voluntarily--but I could not. In college I have seen fellows get into trouble, and the first thing they thought of was to go to their fathers with it... It was queer. What happened last night happened to ME. Possibly it will have some effect on my family and on the name of Foote, as you say... But it happened to ME. Nobody else can understand it. No one has the right to ask about it." "It happened to YOU! Young man, you are the seventh Bonbright Foote--member of a FAMILY. What happens to you happens to it. You cannot separate yourself from it. You, as an individual, are not important, but as Bonbright Foote VII you become important. Do you imagine you can act and think as an entity distinct from Bonbright Foote, Incorporated?... Nonsense. You are but one part of a whole; what you do affects the whole, and you are responsible for it to the shops." "A man must be responsible to himself," said Bonbright, fumbling to express what was troubling his soul. "There are bigger things than family..." His father had advanced to the desk. Now he interrupted by bringing his hand down upon it masterfully. "For you there is no bigger thing than family. You have a strange idea. Where did you get it? Is this sort of thing being taught in college to-day? I suppose you have some notion of asserting your individuality. Bosh! Men in your position, born as you have been born, have no right to individuality. Your individuality must express the individuality of your family as mine has done, and as my father's and HIS father's did before me... I insist that you explain fully to me what occurred last night." "I am sorry, sir, but I cannot." There was no outburst of passion from the father; it would have been wholly out of keeping with his character. Bonbright Foote VI was a strong man in his way; he possessed force of character--even if that force were merely a standardized, family-molded force of character. He recognized a crisis in the affairs of the Foote family which must be met wisely. He perceived that results could not be obtained through the violent impact of will; that here was a dangerous condition which must be cured--but not by seizing it and wrenching it into place... Perhaps he could make Bonbright obey him, but if matters were as serious as they seemed, it would be far from wise. The thing must be dealt with patiently, firmly. Here was only a symptom; the disease went deeper. For six generations one Bonbright Foote after another had been born true to tradition's form--the seventh generation had gone askew! It must be set right, remolded. "Let me point out to you," said he, "that you are here only because you are my son and the descendant of our forefathers. Aside from that you have no right to consideration or to position. You possess wealth. You are a personage... Suppose it were necessary to deprive you of these things. Suppose, as I have the authority to do, I should send you out of this office to earn your own living. Suppose, in short, I should find it necessary to do as other fathers have done--to disown you... What then? What could you do? What would your individuality be worth?... Think it over, my son. In the meantime we will postpone this matter until you revise your mood." He turned abruptly and went into his own room. He wanted to consider. He did not know how to conduct himself, nor how to handle this distressing affair... He fancied he was acting wisely and diplomatically, but at the same time he carried away with him the unpleasant consciousness that victory lay for the moment with his son. Individuality was briefly triumphant. One thing was clear to him--it should not remain so. The Bonbright Foote tradition should be continued correctly by his son. This was not so much a determination as a state of mind. It was a thing of inevitability. Bonbright's feeling as his father left him was one of utter helplessness, of futility. He had received his father's unveiled threat and later it would have its effect. For the moment it passed without consideration. First in his mind was the fact that he did not know what to do--did not even know what he WANTED to do. All he could see was the groove he was in, the family groove. He did not like it, but he was not sure he wanted to be out of it. His father had talked of individuality; Bonbright did not know if he wanted to assert his individuality. He was at sea. Unrest grappled with him blindly, urging him nowhere, seeming merely to wrestle with him aimlessly and maliciously... What was it all about, anyhow? Why was he mixed up in the struggle? Why could not he be left alone in quiet? If he had owned a definite purpose, a definite ambition, a describable desire, it would have been different, but he had none. He was merely bitterly uncomfortable without the slightest notion what event or course of action could bring him comfort. One thought persisted through the chaos of his surging thoughts. He must call in Ruth Frazer and explain to her that he had not done what the papers said he did. Somehow he felt he owed her explanation, her of all the world. She entered in response to the button he pushed, but there was not the broad smile--the grin--he looked up eagerly to see. She was grave, rather more than grave--she was troubled, so troubled that she did not raise her eyes to look at him, but took her seat opposite him and laid her dictation book on the desk. "Miss Frazer--" he said, and at his tone she looked at him. He seemed very young to her, yet older than he had appeared before. Older he was, with a tired, haggard look left by his sleepless night. She could not restrain her heart from softening toward him, for he was such a boy--just a boy. "Miss Frazer," he said again, "I want to--talk to you about last night--about what the papers said." If he expected help from her he was disappointed. Her lips set visibly. "It was not true--what they said... I sha'n't explain it to anybody else. What good could it do? But I want you to understand. It seems as if I HAVE to explain to you.... I can't have you believing--" "I didn't read it in the papers," she said. "I heard from an eyewitness. "Mr. Dulac," he said. "Yes, he would have seen. Even to him it might have looked that way--it might. But I didn't--I didn't! You must believe me. I did not run to the police to have them charge the strikers again... Why should I?" "Why should you?" she repeated, coldly. "Let me tell you... I went there--out of curiosity, I guess. This whole strike came so suddenly. I don't understand why strikes and troubles like this must be, and I thought I might find out something if I went and watched... I wasn't taking sides. I don't know who is right and who is wrong. All I wanted was to learn. One thing... I don't blame the strikers for throwing bricks. I could have thrown a brick at one of our guards; a policeman shoved me and I could have thrown a brick at him.... I suppose, if there are to be strikes and mobs who want to destroy our property, that we must have guards and police... But they shouldn't aggravate things. I went around where I could see--and I saw the police charge. I saw them send their horses smashing into that crowd--and I saw them draw back, leaving men on the pavement,... There was one who writhed about and made horrible sounds!... The mob was against us and the police were for us--but I couldn't stand it. I guess I lost my head. I hadn't the least intention of doing what I did, or of doing anything but watch... but I lost my head. I did rush up to the police, Miss Frazer, and the strikers tried to mob me. I was struck more than once... It wasn't to tell the police to charge. You must believe me--you MUST.... I was afraid they WOULD charge again, so I rushed at them. All I remember distinctly is shouting to them that they mustn't do it again--mustn't charge into that defenseless mob.... It was horrible." He paused, and shut his eyes as though to blot out a picture painted on his mind. Then he spoke more calmly. "The police didn't understand, either. They thought I belonged to the mob, and they arrested me.... I slept--I spent the night in a cell in Police Headquarters." Ruth was leaning over the desk toward him, eyes wide, lips parted. "Is--is that the TRUTH?" she asked; but as she asked she knew it was so. Then: "I'm sorry--so sorry. You must let me tell Mr. Dulac and he will tell the men. It would be terrible if they kept on believing what they believe now. They think you are--" "I know," he said, wearily. "It can't be helped. I don't know that it matters. What they think about me is what--it is thought best for them to think. I am supposed to be fighting the strike." "But aren't you?" "I suppose so. It's the job that's been assigned to me--but I'm doing nothing. I'm of no consequence--just a stuffed figure." "You caused the strike." "I?" There was genuine surprise in his voice. "How?" "With that placard." "I suppose so," he said, slowly. "My name WAS signed to it, wasn't it?... You see I had been indiscreet the night before. I had mingled with the men and spoken to Mr. Dulac.... I had created a false impression--which had to be torn up--by the roots." "I don't understand, Mr. Foote." "No," he said, "of course not.... Why should you? I don't understand myself. I don't see why I shouldn't talk to Mr. Dulac or the men. I don't see why I shouldn't try to find out about things. But it wasn't considered right--was considered very wrong, and I was--disciplined. Members of my family don't do those things. Mind, I'm not complaining. I'm not criticizing father, for he may be right. Probably he IS right. But he didn't understand. I wasn't siding with the men; I was just trying to find out..." "Do you mean," she asked, a bit breathlessly, "that you have done none of these things of your own will--because you wanted to? I mean the placard, and bringing in O'Hagan and his strike breakers, and taking all these ruthless methods to break the strike?... Were you made to APPEAR as though it was you--when it wasn't?" "Don't YOU misunderstand me, Miss Frazer. You're on the other side--with the men. I'm against them. I'm Bonbright Foote VII." There was a trace of bitterness in his voice as he said it, and it did not escape her attention. "I wasn't taking sides.... I wouldn't take sides now--but apparently I must.... If strikes are necessary then I suppose fellows in places like mine must fight them.... I don't know. I don't see any other way.... But it doesn't seem right--that there should be strikes. There must be a reason for them. Either our side does something it shouldn't--and provokes them, or your side is unfair and brings them on.... Or maybe both of us are to blame.... I wanted to find out." "I shall tell Mr. Dulac," she said. "I shall tell him EVERYTHING. The men mustn't go on hating and despising you. Why, they ought to be sorry for you!... Why do you endure it? Why don't you walk out of this place and never enter it again?..." "You don't understand," he said, with perplexity." I knew you would think I am siding with the men." "I don't think that--no!... You might come to side with us--because we're right. But you're not siding with yourself. You're letting somebody else operate your very soul--and that's a worse sin than suicide.... You're letting your father and this business, this Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, wipe you out as if you were a mark on a slate--and make another mark in your place to suit its own plans. ... You are being treated abominably." "Miss Frazer, I guess neither of us understands this thing. You see this business, for generations, has had a certain kind of man at the head of it. Always. It has been a successful business. Maybe when father, and his father, were young, they had to be disciplined as I am being. Maybe it is RIGHT--what I have heard called TRAINING." "Do you like it?" He did not answer at once. "I--it disturbs me. It makes me uneasy. ... But I can do nothing. They've got me in the groove, and I suppose I'll move along it." "If you would own up to it, you're unhappy. You're being made miserable.... Why, you're being treated worse than the strikers--and by your own father!... Everybody has a right to be himself." "You say that, but father and the generations of Footes before him say the exact opposite.... However, I'm not the question. All I wanted to do was to explain to you about last night. You believe me?" "Of course. And I shall tell--" He shook his head. "I'd rather you didn't. Indeed, you mustn't. As long as I am here I must stick by my family. Don't you see? I wanted YOU to know. My explanation was for you alone." Rangar appeared in the door--quietly as it was his wont to move. "Pardon," he said. "Your father wishes to speak to you, Mr. Foote." "One moment, Miss Frazer. I have some letters," Bonbright said, and stepped into his father's office. "Bonbright," said his father, "Rangar has just discovered that your secretary--this Miss Frazer--lives in the same house with Dulac the strike leader.... She comes of a family of disturbers herself. Probably she is very useful to Dulac where she is. Therefore you will dismiss her at once." "But, father--" "You will dismiss her at once--personally." A second time that day the eyes of father and son locked. Bonbright's face was colorless; he felt his lips tremble. "At once," said his father, tapping his desk with his finger. Bonbright's sensation was akin to that of falling through space--there seemed nothing to cling to, nothing by which to sustain himself. How utterly futile he was was borne in upon him! He could not resist. Protestation would only humiliate him. He turned slowly and walked into his own room, where he stood erect before his desk. "Miss Frazer," he said in a level, timbreless voice, "the labor leader Dulac lives in your house. You come of a family of labor agitators. Therefore you are discharged." "WHAT?" she exclaimed, the unexpectedness of it upsetting her poise. "You are discharged," he repeated; and then, turning his back on her, he walked to the window, where he stood tense, tortured by humiliation, gazing down upon a street which he could not see. Ruth gathered her book and pencils and stood up. She moved slowly to the door without speaking, but there she stopped, turned, and looked at Bonbright. There was neither dismay nor anger in her eyes--only sympathy. But she did not speak it aloud. "Poor boy!" she whispered to herself, and stepped out into the corridor. CHAPTER IX Ruth Frazer had passed her twentieth birthday, and now, for the first time, she was asking herself that question which brings tearful uncertainty, vague fears, disquieting speculations to the great majority of women--should she give herself, body and soul, into the hands of a definite man? It was the definiteness, the identification of the man, that caused all her difficulty. All women expect to be chosen by, and to choose, some man; but when he arrives in actual flesh and blood--that is quite another matter. Some, perhaps many, have no doubts. Love has come to them unmistakably. But not so with most. It is a thing to be wept over, and prayed over, and considered with many changes of mind, until final decision is made one way or the other. Dulac had been interrupted in what Ruth knew would have been a proposal of marriage; the scene would be resumed, and when it was what answer should she give? It is no easy task for a girl of twenty to lay her heart under the microscope and to see if the emotion which agitates it is love, or admiration, or the excitation of glamour. She has heard of love, has read of love, has dreamed of love, possibly, but has never experienced love. How, then, is she to recognize it? With Ruth there had been no long acquaintanceship with this man who came asking her future of her. There had been no months or years of service and companionship. Instead, he had burst on her vision, had dazzled her with his presence and his mission. Hers was a steady little head, and one capable of facing the logic of a situation. Was her feeling toward Dulac merely hero worship? The cause he represented was dear to her heart, and he was an eminent servant in that cause. It thrilled her to know that such a man as he could want HER for his wife. It quite took her breath away. Present also was the feeling that if Dulac wanted her, if she could bring happiness, ease, help to him, it would be her duty to give herself. By so doing she would contribute her all to the cause.... Behind that thought were generations of men and women who had sacrificed and suffered for labor. If her father had given his life, would he not expect his daughter to give HER life? If she could make Dulac stronger to carry on his work for social revolution, had she a right to withhold herself?... But, being a girl, with youth singing in her heart, it was impossible that anything should take precedence of love. That was the great question. Did she love?... At noon she was sure she did; at one o'clock she was sure she did not; at two o'clock she was wavering between the two decisions; at six o'clock she had passed through all these stages half a dozen times, and was no nearer certainty. Being who she was and what she was, her contacts with the world had not been those of the ordinary girl of her age and her station in life. In her earlier years she had been accustomed to radical words, radical thought, radical individuals. The world she was taught to see was not the world girl children are usually taught to see. And yet she retained her humor, her brightness of spirit, the joy of life that gave her her smile.... She had known boys and men. However, none of these had made marked impression upon her. They had been mere incidents, pleasant, uninteresting, wearying, amusing. None had thrilled her.... So she had less experience to call to her aid than the average girl. Dulac occupied her mind as no man had ever occupied it before; the thought of him thrilled her.... He wanted her, this magnetic, theatrically handsome man wanted her.... When we make a choice we do so by a process of comparison. We buy this house because we like it better than that house; we buy this hat because we prefer it to that other;... it is so we get our notions of value, of desirability. It is more than possible that some effort at comparison is made by a woman in selecting a husband. She compares her suitor with other men. Her decision may hinge upon the result. ... Dulac was clearly superior to most of the men Ruth had known.... Then, unaccountably, she found herself thinking of Bonbright Foote, who had that morning discharged her from her employment. She found herself setting young Foote and Dulac side by side and, becoming objectively conscious of this, she felt herself guilty of some sort of disloyalty. What right had a man in Foote's position to stand in her thoughts beside Dulac? He was everything Dulac was not; Dulac was nothing that Foote was. She realized she was getting nowhere, was only confusing herself. Perhaps, she told herself, when Dulac was present, when he asked her to be his wife, she would know what to answer. So, resolutely, she put the matter from her mind. It would not stay out. She dreaded meeting Dulac at supper--for the evening meal was supper in the Frazer cottage--and yet she was burningly curious to meet him, to be near him, to verify her image of him.... Extra pains with the detail of her simple toilet held her in her room until her mother called to know if she were not going to help with the meal. As she went to the kitchen she heard Dulac moving about in his room. When they were seated at the table it was Mrs. Frazer who jerked the conversation away from casual matters. "Ruth was discharged this morning, Mr. Dulac," she said, bitterly, "and her as good a typewriter and as neat and faithful as any. No fault found, either, nor could be, not if anybody was looking for it with a fine-tooth comb. Meanness, that's what I say. Nothing but meanness.... And us needing that fifteen dollars a week to keep the breath of life in us." "Don't worry about that, mother," Ruth said, quickly. "There are plenty of places--" "Who fired you?" interrupted Dulac, his black eyes glowing angrily. "That young cub?" "Young Mr. Foote," said Ruth. "It was because I live here," said Dulac, intensely. "That was why, wasn't it? That's the way they fight, striking at us through our womenfolks.... And when we answer with bricks..." "I don't think he wanted to do it," Ruth said. "I think he was made to." "Nonsense! Too bad the boys didn't get their hands on him last night--the infernal college-bred whipper-snapper!... Well, don't you worry about that job. Nor you, either, Mrs. Frazer." "Seems like I never did anything but worry; if it wasn't about one thing it was another, and no peace since I was in the cradle," said Mrs. Frazer, dolefully. "If it ain't the rent it's strikes and riots and losin' positions and not knowin' if your husband's comin' home to sleep in bed, or his name in the paper in the morning and him in jail. And since he was killed--" "Now, mother," said Ruth, "I'll have a job before tomorrow night. We won't starve or be put out into the street." Mrs. Frazer dabbed at her eyes with her apron and signified her firm belief that capital was banded together for the sole purpose of causing her mental agony; indeed, that capital had been invented with that end in view, and if she had her way--which seldom enough, and her never doing a wrong to a living body--capital should have visited on it certain plagues and punishments hinted at as adequate, but not named. Whereupon she got up from the table and went out into the kitchen after the pie. "Mrs. Frazer," said Dulac, when she returned, "I've got to hurry downtown to headquarters, but I want to have a little talk with Ruth before I go. Can't the dishes wait?" "I did up dishes alone before Ruth was born, and a few thousand times since. Guess I can get through with it without her help at least once more." Dulac smiled, so that his white, even teeth showed in a foreign sort of way. In that moment Ruth thought there was something Oriental or Latin about his appearance--surely something exotic. He had a power of fascination, and its spell was upon her. He stood up and walked to the door of the little parlor, where he stood waiting. Ruth, not blushing, but pale, afraid, yet eager to hear what she knew he was going to say, passed him into the room. He closed the door. "You know what I want to say," he began, approaching close to her, but not touching her. "You know what life will be like with a man whose work is what mine is.... But I'd try to make up for the hardships and the worries and the disagreeable things. I'd try, Ruth, and I think I could do it.... Your heart is with the Cause. I wouldn't marry you if it wasn't because you couldn't stand the life. But you want to see what I want to see.... If I'm willing to run the risks and live the life I have to live because I see how I can help along the work and make the world a better place for those to live in who need to have it a better place... if I can do what I do, I've thought you might be willing to share it all.... You're brave. You come of a blood that has suffered and been willing to suffer. Your father was a martyr--just as I would be willing to be a martyr...." Somehow the thing did not seem so much like a proposal of marriage as like a bit of flamboyant oratory. The theatrical air of the man, his self-consciousness--with the saving leaven of unquestionable sincerity--made it more an exhortation from the platform. Even in his intimate moments Dulac did not step out of character.... But this was not apparent to Ruth. Glamour was upon her, blinding her. The personality of the man dominated her personality. She saw him as he saw himself.... And his Cause was her Cause. If he would have suffered martyrdom for it, so would she. She raised her eyes to his and, looking into them, saw a soul greater than his soul, loftier than his soul. She was an apostle, and her heart throbbed with pride and joy that this man of high, self-sacrificing purpose should desire her.... She was ready to surrender; her decision was made. Standing under his blazing eyes, in the circle of his magnetism, she was sure she loved him. But the surrender was not to be made then. Her mother rapped on the door. "Young gentleman to see you, Ruth," she called. She heard Dulac's teeth click savagely. "Quick," he said. "What is it to be?" The spell was broken, the old uncertainty, the wavering, was present again. "I--oh, let me think. To-morrow--I'll tell you to-morrow." She stepped--it was almost a flight--to the door, and opened it. In the dining room, hat in hand, stood Bonbright Foote. Dulac saw, too. "What does he want here?" he demanded, savagely. "I don't know." "I'll find out. It's no good to you he intends." "Mr. Dulac!" she said, and faced him a moment. He stopped, furious though he was. She stopped him. She held him.... There was a strength in her that he had not realized. Her utterance of his name was a command and a rebuke. "I know his kind," Dulac said, sullenly. "Let me throw him out." "Please sit down," she said. "I want to bring him in here. I know him better than you--and I think your side misunderstands him. It may do some good." She stepped into the dining room. "Mr. Foote," she said. He was embarrassed, ill at ease. "Miss Frazer," he said, with boyish hesitation, "you don't want to see me--you have no reason to do anything but--despise me, I guess. But I had to come. I found your address and came as quickly as I could." "Step in here," she said. Then, "You and Mr. Dulac have met." Dulac stood scowling. "Yes," he said, sullenly. Bonbright flushed and nodded.... Dulac seemed suddenly possessed by a gust of passion. He strode threateningly to Bonbright, lips snarling, eyes blazing. "What do you mean by coming here? What do you want?" he demanded, hoarsely. "You come here with your hands red with blood. Two men are dead.... Four others smashed under the hoofs of your police!... You're trying to starve into submission thousands of men. You're striking at them through their wives and babies.... What do you care for them or their suffering? You and your father are piling up millions--and every penny a loaf stolen from the table of a workingman!... There'll be starving out there soon.... Babies will be dying for want of food--and you'll have killed them.... You and your kind are bloodsuckers, parasites!... and you're a sneaking, spying hound.... Every man that dies, every baby that starves, every ounce of woman's suffering and misery that this strike causes are on your head.... You forced the strike, backed up by the millions of the automobile crowd, so you could crush and smash your men so they wouldn't dare to mutter or complain. You did it deliberately--you prowling, pampered puppy...." Dulac was working himself into blind rage. Bonbright looked at the man with something of amazement, but with nothing of fear. He was not afraid. He did not give back a step, but, as he stood there, white to the lips, his eyes steadily on Dulac's eyes, he seemed older, weary. He seemed to have been stripped of youth and of the lightheartedness and buoyancy of youth. He was thinking, wondering. Why should this man hate him? Why should others hate him? Why should the class he belonged to be hated with this blighting virulence by the class they employed?... He did not speak nor try to stem Dulac's invective. He was not angered by it, nor was he hurt by it.... He waited for it to subside, and with a certain dignity that sat well on his young shoulders. Generations of ancestors trained in the restraints were with him this night, and stood him in good stead. Ruth stood by, the situation snatched beyond her control. She was terrified, yet even in her terror she could not avoid a sort of subconscious comparison of the men. "Mr. Dulac!... Please!... Please!..." she said, tearfully. "I'm going to tell this--this murderer what he is. and then I'm going to throw him out," Dulac raged. "Mr. Foote came to see ME," Ruth said, with awakened spirit. "He is in my house.... You have no right to act so. You have no right to talk so.... You sha'n't go on." Dulac turned on her. "What is this cub to you? What do you care?... Were you expecting him?" "She wasn't expecting me," said Bonbright, breaking silence for the first time. "I came because she didn't get a square deal.... I had to come." "What do you want with her?... You've kicked her out of your office--now leave her alone.... There's just one thing men of your class want of girls of her class...." At first Bonbright did not comprehend Dulac's meaning; then his face reddened; even his ears were enveloped in a surge of color. "Dulac," he said, evenly, "I came to say something to Miss Frazer. When I have done I'm going to thrash you for that." Ruth seized Dulac's arm. "Go away," she cried. "You have no right. ... If you ever want an answer--to that question--you'll go NOW... If this goes on--if you don't go and leave Mr. Foote alone, I'll never see you again.... I'll never speak to you again.... I mean it!" Dulac, looking down into her face, saw that she did mean it. He shot one venomous glance at Bonbright, snatched his hat from the table, and rushed from the room. Presently Ruth spoke. "I'm so sorry," she said. Bonbright smiled. "It was too bad.... He believes what he says about me...." "Yes, he believes it, and thousands of other men believe it.... They hate you." "Because I have lots of money and they have little. Because I own a factory and they work in it.... There must be a great deal to it besides that.... But that isn't what I came to say. I--it was about discharging you." "Yes," she said. "I knew it wasn't you.... Your father made you." He flushed. "You see... I'm not a real person. I'm just something with push buttons. When somebody wants a thing done he pushes one, and I do it.... I didn't want you to go. I--Well, things aren't exactly joyous for me in the plant. I don't fit--and I'm being made to fit." His voice took on a tinge of bitterness. "I've got to be something that the label 'Bonbright Foote VII' will fit.... It was on account of that smile of yours that I made them give you to me for my secretary. The first time I saw you you smiled--and it was mighty cheering. It sort of lightened things up--so I got you to do my work--because I thought likely you would smile sometimes...." Her eyes were downcast to hide the moisture that was in them. "Father made me discharge you.... I couldn't help it--and you don't know how ashamed it made me.... To know I was so helpless. That's what I came to say. I wanted you to know--on account of your smile. I didn't want you to think--I did it willingly.... And--sometimes it isn't easy to get another position--so--so I went to see a man, Malcolm Lightener, and told him about you. He manufactures automobiles--and he's--he's a better kind of man to work for than--we were. If you are willing you can--go there in the morning." She showed him her smile now--but it was not the broad, beaming grin; it was a dewy, tremulous smile. "That was good of you," she said, softly. "I was just trying to be square," he said. "Will you take the place? I should like to know. I should like to know I'd helped to make things right." "Of course I shall take it," she said. "Thank you.... I--shall miss you. Really.... Good night, Miss Frazer--and thank you." She pitied him from her heart. His position was not a joyful one.... And, as people sometimes do, she spoke on impulse, not calculating possible complications. "If--you may come to see me again if you want to." He took her extended hand. "I may?" he said, almost incredulously. "And will you smile for me?" "Once, each time you come," she said. CHAPTER X Day after day and week after week the strike dragged on. Daily strength departed from it and entered into Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. The men had embarked upon it with enthusiasm, many of them with fanatic determination; but with the advent in their home of privation, of hunger, their zeal was transmuted into heavy determination, lifeless stubbornness. Idleness hung heavily on their hands, and small coins that should have passed over the baker's counter clinked upon mahogany bars. Dulac labored, exhorted, prayed with them. It was his personality, his individual powers over the minds and hearts of men, that kept the strike alive. The weight rested upon his shoulders alone, but he did not bend under it. He would not admit the hopelessness of the contest--and he fought on. At the end of a month he was still able to fire his audiences with sincere, if theatrical, oratory; he could still play upon them and be certain of a response. At the end of two months he--even he--was forced to admit that they listened with stolidness, with apathy. They were falling away from him; but he fought on. He would not admit defeat, would not, even in his most secret thoughts, look forward to inevitable failure. Every man that deserted was an added atom of strength to Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. Every hungry baby, every ailing wife, every empty dinner table fought for the company and against Dulac. Rioting ended. It requires more than hopeless apathy to create a riot; there must be fervor, determination, enthusiasm. Daily Dulac's ranks were thinned by men who slunk to the company's employment office and begged to be reinstated.... The back of the strike was broken. Bonbright Foote saw how his company crushed the strike; how, ruthlessly, with machinelike certainty and lack of heart, it went ahead undeviatingly, careless of obstructions, indifferent to human beings in its path. There was something Prussian about it; something that recalled to him Bismarck and Moltke and 1870 with the exact, soulless mechanical perfection of the systematic trampling of the France of Napoleon III.... And, just as the Bonbright Foote tradition crunched the strike to pieces so it was crunching and macerating his own individuality until it would be a formless mass ready for the mold. The will should be a straight steel rod urged in one undeviating direction by heart and mind. No day passed upon which the rod of Bonbright's will was not bent, was not twisted to make it follow the direction of some other will stronger than his--the direction of the accumulated wills of all the Bonbright Footes who had built up the family tradition. No initiative was allowed him; he was not permitted to interest himself in the business in his own youthful, healthy way; but he must see it through dead eyes, he must initiate nothing, criticize nothing, suggest nothing. He must follow rule. His father was not satisfied with him, that he realized--and that he was under constant suspicion. He was unsatisfactory. His present mental form was not acceptable and must undergo painful processes of alteration. His parents would have taken him back, as a bad bargain, and exchanged him for something else if they could, but being unable, they must make him into something else. Humiliation lay heavy on him. Every man in the employ of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, must realize the shamefulness of his position, that he was a fiction, a sham held up by his father's hands. Orders issued from his lips to unsmiling subordinates, who knew well they were not his orders, but words placed in his mouth to recite parrot-like. Letters went out under his signature, dictated by him--according to the dictation of his father. He was a rubber stamp, a mechanical means of communication.... He was not a man, an individual--he was a marionette dancing to ill-concealed strings. The thing he realized with abhorrence was that when he was remade, when he became the thing the artisans worked upon him to create--when at last his father passed from view and he remained master of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, it would not be Bonbright Foote VII who was master. It would be an automaton, a continuation of other automatons.... It is said the Dalai Lama is perpetual, always the same, never changing from age to age. A fiction maintained by a mystic priesthood supplying themselves secretly with fresh Dalai Lama material as needful--with a symbol to hold in awe the ignorance of their religionists.... Bonbright saw that he was expected to be a symbol.... He approached his desk in the morning with loathing, and left it at night without relief. Hopelessness was upon him and he could not flee from it; it was inescapable. True, he sought relief. Malcolm Lightener had become his fast friend--a sort of life preserver for his soul. In spite of his youth and Lightener's maturity there was real companionship between them.... Lightener knew what was going on, and in his granite way he tried to help the boy. Bonbright was not interested in his own business, so Lightener awakened in him an interest in Lightener's business. He discussed his affairs with the boy. He talked of systems, of efficiency, of business methods. He taught Bonbright as he would have taught his own son, half realizing the futility of his teaching. Nor had he question as to the righteousness of his proceeding. Because a boy's father follows an evil course the parenthood does not hallow that course.... So Bonbright learned, not knowing that he learned, and in his own office he made comparisons. The methods of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, he compared with the methods of Malcolm Lightener. He saw where modern business would make changes and improvements--but after the first few trampled-on suggestions he remained silent and grew indifferent. Once he suggested the purchase of dictating machines. "Fol-de-rol," said his father, brusquely--and the matter ended. In Lightener's plant he saw lathes which roughed and finished in one process and one handling. In his own plant castings must pass from one machine to another, and through the hands of extra and unnecessary employees. It was economic waste. But he offered no suggestion. He saw time lost here, labor lavished there, but he was indifferent. He knew better. He knew how it should be done--but he did not care.... The methods of Bonbright Foote I not only suited his father, but were the laws of his father's life. Not only had Bonbright established sympathetic relations with Malcolm Lightener, but with Lightener's family. In Mrs. Lightener he found a woman whose wealth had compelled the so-called social leaders of the city to accept her, but whose personality, once she was accepted, had won her a firm, enduring position. He found her a woman whose sudden, almost magical, change from obscurity and the lower fringe of salary-drawers to a wealth that made even America gasp, had not made her dizzy. Indeed, it seemed not to have affected her character at all. Her dominant note was motherliness. She was still the housewife. She continued to look after her husband and daughter just as she had looked after them in the days when she had lived in a tiny frame house and had cooked the meals and made the beds.... She represented womanhood of a sort Bonbright had never been on terms of intimate friendship with.... There was much about her which gave him food for reflection. And Hilda.... Since their first meeting there had been no reference to the desire of their mothers for their marriage. For a while the knowledge of this had made it difficult for Bonbright to offer her his friendship and companionship. But when he saw, as the weeks went by, how she was willing to accept him unaffectedly as a friend, a comrade, a chum, how the maternal ambition to unite the families seemed to be wholly absent from her thoughts, they got on delightfully. Bonbright played with her. Somehow she came to represent recreation in his life. She was jolly, a splendid sportswoman, who could hold her own with him at golf or tennis, and who drove an automobile as he would never have dared to drive. She was not beautiful, but she was attractive, and the center of her attractiveness was her wholesomeness, her frankness, her simplicity. ... He could talk to her as he could not talk even to her father, yet he could not open his heart fully even to her. He could not show her the soul tissues that throbbed and ached. He was lonely. A lonely boy thrown with an attractive girl is a fertile field for the sowing of love. But Bonbright was not in love with Hilda.... The idea did not occur to him. There was excellent reason--though he had not arrived at a realization of it, and this excellent reason was Ruth Frazer. He had ventured to accept Ruth's impulsive invitation to come to see her. Not frequently, not so frequently as his inclinations urged, but more frequently than was, perhaps, wise in his position.... She represented a new experience. She was utterly outside his world, and so wholly different from the girls of his world. It was an attractive difference.... And her grin! When it glowed for him he felt for the moment as if the world were really a pleasant place to spend one's life. He learned from her. New ideas and comprehensions came to him as a result of her conversations with him. Through her eyes he was seeing the other side. Not all her theories, not even all her facts, could he accept, but no matter how radical, no matter how incendiary her words, he delighted to hear her voice uttering them. In short, Bonbright Foote VII, prince of the Foote Dynasty, was in danger of falling in love with the beggar maid. So, many diverse forces and individualities were at work upon the molding of Bonbright Foote. One, and one only, he recognized, and that was the stern, ever-apparent, iron-handed wrenching of his father. There were times, which grew more and more frequent, when he fancied he had surrendered utterly to it and had handed over his soul to Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. He fancied he was sitting by apathetically watching the family tradition squeeze it into the desired form.... After a wretched day he had called on Ruth. The next morning soft-footed Rangar had moved shadowlike into his father's office, and presently his father summoned him to come in. "I am informed," said the gentleman who was devoting his literary talents to a philosophical biography of the Marquis Lafayette, Hero of Two Worlds, friend of Liberty and Equality, "that you have been going repeatedly to the house of that girl who formerly was your secretary--whose mother runs a boarding house for anarchists." The suddenness, the unexpectedness of attack upon this angle, nonplussed Bonbright. He could only stand silent, stamped with the guilty look of youth. "Is it true?" snapped his father. "I have called on Miss Frazer," Bonbright said, unsteadily. Mr. Foote stood up. It was his habit to stand up in all crises, big or little. "Have you no respect for your family name?... If you must have things like this in your life, for God's sake keep them covered up. Don't be infernally blatant about them. Do you want the whole city whispering like ghouls over the liaison of my son with--with a female anarchist who is--the daughter of a boarding-house keeper?" Liaison!... Liaison!... The foreign term beat again and again against Bonbright's consciousness before it gained admission. Used in connection with Ruth Frazer, with his relations with Ruth Frazer, it was dead, devoid of meaning, conveyed no meaning to his brain. "Liaison, sir!... Liaison?" he said, fumblingly. "I can find a plainer term if you insist." For a moment Bonbright felt curiously calm, curiously cold, curiously detached from the scene. He regarded the other man.... This man was his father. His FATHER! The laws of life and of humanity demanded that he regard this man with veneration. Yet, offhand, without investigation, this man could jump to a vile conclusion regarding him. Not only that, but could accuse him, not of guilt, but of failing to conceal guilt!... Respectability! He knew he was watching a manifestation of the family tradition. It was wrong to commit an unworthy act, but it was a sin unspeakable to be caught by the public in the commission. His mind worked slowly. It was a full half minute before the thought bored through to him that HE was not the sole nor the greatest sufferer by this accusation. It was not HE who was insulted. It was not HE who was outraged.... It was HER! His father could think that of her--casually. The mere fact that she was poor, not of his station, a wage-earner, made it plain to the senior Foote that Ruth Frazer would welcome a squalid affair with his son.... The Sultan throwing his handkerchief. Bonbright's calm gave place to turmoil, his chill to heat. "It's not true," he said, haltingly, using feeble words because stronger had not yet had time to surge up to the surface. "Bosh!" said the father. Then Bonbright blazed. Restraints crumbled. The Harvard manner peeled off and lay quivering with horror at his feet. He stepped a pace closer to his father, so that his face was close to his father's face, and his smoldering eyes were within inches of his father's scornful ones. "It's a lie," he said, huskily, "a damned, abominable, insulting lie." "Young man," his father shipped back, "be careful...." "Careful!... I don't know who carried this thing to you, but whoever did was a miserable, sneaking mucker. He lied and he knew he lied. ... And you, sir, you were willing to believe. Probably you were eager to believe.... I sha'n't defend Miss Frazer. Only a fool or a mucker could believe such a thing of her.... Yes, I have been to see her, and I'll tell you why.... I'll tell you why, good and plenty! ... My first day in this place she was the only human, pleasant thing I met. Her smile was the only life or brightness in the place.... Everything else was dead men's bones. The place is a tomb and it stinks of graveclothes. Our whole family stinks of graveclothes. Family tradition!... Men dead and rotten and eaten by worms--they run this place, and you want me to let them run me.... Every move you make you consult a skeleton.... And you want to smash and crush and strangle me so that I'll be willing to walk with a weight of dead bones.... I've tried. You are my father, and I thought maybe you knew best.... I've submitted. I've submitted to your humiliations, to having everything that's ME--that is individual in me--stamped out, and stuff molded to the family pattern rammed back in its place. ... She was the only bright spot in the whole outfit--and you kicked her out.... And I've been going to see her--just to see her smile and to get courage from it to start another day with you.... That's what my life has been here, and you made it so, and you will keep on making it so.... Probably you'll grind me into the family groove. Maybe I'm ground already, but that doesn't excuse what you've just said, and it doesn't make it any less an abominable lie, nor the man who reported it to you any less a muck-hearted sewer..." He stopped, pale, panting, quivering. "How dare you!... How dare--" "Dare!"... Bonbright glared at his father; then he felt a great, quivering emotion welling up within him, a something he was ashamed to have the eye of man look upon. His lips began to tremble. He swung on his heel and ran staggeringly toward his door, but there he stopped, clutched the door frame, and cried, chokingly, "It's a lie. ... A lie.... A slimy lie!" CHAPTER XI Mr. Foote stood motionless, staring after his son as he might have stared at some phenomenon which violated a law of nature; for instance, as he might have stared at the sun rising in the west, at a stream flowing uphill, at Newton's apple remaining suspended in air instead of falling properly to the ground. He was not angry--yet. That personal and individual emotion would come later; what he experienced now was a FAMILY emotion, a staggering astonishment participated in by five generations of departed Bonbright Footes. He was nonplussed. Here had happened a thing which could not happen. In the whole history of the Foote family there had never been recorded an instance of a son uttering such words to his father or of his family. There was no instance of an outburst even remotely resembling this one. It simply could not be.... And yet it was. He had witnessed it, listened to it, had been the target at which his son's hot words had been hurled. For most occurrences in his life Mr. Foote could find a family precedent. This matter had been handled thus, and that other matter had been handled so. But this thin--it had never been handled because it had never happened. He was left standing squarely on his own feet, without aid or support. Mortification mingled with his astonishment. It had remained for him--who had thought to add to the family laurels the literary achievement of portraying philosophically the life of the Marquis Lafayette--to father a son who could be guilty of thinking such thoughts and uttering such words. He looked about the room apprehensively, as if he feared to find assembled there the shades of departed Bonbrights who had been eavesdropping, as the departed are said to do by certain psychic persons.... He hoped they had not been listening at his keyhole, for this was a squalid happening that he must smother, cover up, hide forever from their knowledge. These sensations were succeeded by plain, ordinary, common, uncultured, ancestorless anger. Bonbright Foote VI retained enough personality, enough of his human self, to be able to become angry. True, he did not do it as one of his molders would have done; he was still a Foote, even in passion. It was a dignified, a cultured, a repressed passion... but deep-seated and seething for an outlet, just the same. What he felt might be compared distantly to what other men feel when they seize upon the paternal razor strop and apply it wholesomely to that portion of their son's anatomy which tradition says is most likely to turn boys to virtue.... He wanted to compel Bonbright to make painful reparation to his ancestors. He wanted to inflict punishment of some striking, uncommon, distressing sort.... His anger increased, and he became even more human. With a trifle more haste than was usual, with the studied, cultured set of his lips less studied and cultured than ever they had been before, he strode to his son's door. Something was going to happen. He was restraining himself, but something would happen now. He felt it and feared it. ... His rage must have an outlet. Vaguely he felt that fire must be fought with fire--and he all unaccustomed to handling that element. But he would rise to the necessities.... He stepped into Bonbright's room, keyed up to eruption, but he did not erupt. Nobody was there to erupt AT. Bonbright was gone.... Mr. Foote went back to his desk and sat there nervously drumming on its top with his fingers. He was not himself. He had never been so disturbed before and did not know it was possible for him to be upset in this manner. There had been other crises, other disagreeable happenings in his life, but he had met them calmly, dispassionately, with what he was pleased to call philosophy. He had liked to fancy himself as ruled wholly by intellect and not at all by emotion. And now emotion had caught him up as a tidal wave might catch up a strong swimmer, and tossed him hither and thither, blinded by its spray and helpless. His one coherent thought was that something must be done about it. At such a moment some fathers would have considered the advisability of casting their sons loose to shift for themselves as a punishment for too much independence and for outraging the laws requiring unquestioning respect for father from son. This course did not even occur to Mr. Foote. It was in the nature of things that it should not, for in his mind his son was a permanent structure, a sort of extension on the family house. He was THERE. Without him the family ended, the family business passed into the hands of strangers. There would be no Bonbright Foote VIII who, in his turn, should become the father of Bonbright Foote IX, and so following. No, he did not hold even tentatively the idea of disinheritance. Something, however, must be done, and the something must result in his son's becoming what he wanted his son to become. Bonbright must be grasped and shoved into the family groove and made to travel and function there. There could be no surrender, no wavering, no concession made by the family.... The boy must be made into what he ought to be--but how? And he must have his lesson for this day's scene. He must be shown that he could not, with impunity, outrage the Family Tradition and flout the Family Ghosts.... Again--how? What Bonbright intended in his present state of boyish rage and revolt, his father did not consider. It was characteristic of him that he failed to think of that. All his considerations were of what he and the Family should do to Bonbright.... A general would doubtless have called this defective strategy. To win battles one must have some notion of the enemy's intentions--and of his potentialities.... His determination--set and stiff as cold metal--was that something unpleasant should happen to the boy and that the boy should be brought to his senses.... If anyone had hinted to him that the boy was just coming to his senses he would have listened as one listens to a patent absurdity. He pressed the buzzer which summoned Rangar, and presently that soft-footed individual appeared silently in the door--looking as Mr. Foote had never seen him look before. Rangar was breathing hard, he was flustered, his necktie was awry, and his face was ivory white. Also, though Mr. Foote did not take in this detail, his eyes smoldered with restrained malignancy. "Why, Rangar," said Mr. Foote, "what's wrong?" "Wrong, Mr. Foote!... I--It was Mr. Bonbright." "What about Mr. Bonbright?" "A moment ago he came rushing out of his office--I use the word rushing advisedly.... He was in a rage, sir. He was, you could see it plain. I--I was in his way, sir, and I stepped aside. But he wouldn't have it. No, sir, he wouldn't.... He reached out, Mr. Foote, and grabbed me; yes, sir, grabbed me right before the whole office. It was by the front of the shirt and the necktie, and he shook me.... He's a strong young man.... And he said, 'You're the sneak that's been running to father with lies,' and then he shook me again. 'I suppose,' he says in a second, 'that I've got to expect to be spied on.... Go ahead, it's a job that fits you.' Yes, sir, that's exactly what he said in his own words. 'Fits me,' says he. And then he shook me again and threw me across the alleyway so that I fell over on a desk. 'Spy ahead,' he says, so that everybody in the office heard him and was snickering at me, 'but report what you see after this--and see to it it's the truth.... One more lie like this one,' he says, and then stopped and rushed on out of the office. It was a threat, Mr. Foote, and he meant it. He means me harm." "Nonsense!" said Mr. Foote, holding himself resolutely in the character he had built for himself. "A fit of boyish temper." Rangar's eyes glinted, but he made no rejoinder. "He rather lost his temper with ME," said Mr. Foote, "when I accused him of a liaison with that girl.... He denied it, Rangar, or so I understood. He was very young and--tempestuous about it. Are you sure you were right?" "What else would he be going there for, Mr. Foote?" "My idea exactly." "Unless, sir, he fancies he's in love with the girl.... I once knew a young man in a position similar to Mr. Bonbright's who fell in love with a girl who sold cigars in a hotel.... He fairly DOGGED her, sir. Wanted to marry her. You wouldn't believe it, but that's what he did, and his family had to buy her off and send her away or he'd have done it, too.... It might happen to any young man, Mr. Foote." "Not to a member of my family, Rangar." "I can't agree with you, sir.... Nobody's immune to it. You can't deny that Mr. Bonbright has been going to see her regularly. Five or six times he's been there, and stayed a long time every visit.... It was one thing or the other he went for, and you can't deny that. If he says it wasn't what you accused him of, then it was the other." "You mean that my son--a Foote--could fall in love, as you call it, with the daughter of a boarding house and a companion of anarchists?" "I hate to say it to you, sir, but there isn't anything else to believe.... He's young, Mr. Foote, and fiery. She isn't bad looking, either, and she's clever. A clever girl can do a lot with a boy, no matter who he is, if she sets her heart on him. It wouldn't be a bad match for a girl like her if she was to entice Mr. Bonbright into a marriage." "Impossible, Rangar.... However, you have an eye kept on him. I want to be told every move he makes, where he goes, who he sees. I want to know everything about him, Rangar. Will you see to it?" "Yes, sir," said Rangar, a gleam of malice again visible in his eyes. "What do you know about this girl? Have you had her looked up?" "Not fully, sir. But I've heard she was heart and soul with what these anarchists believe. Her father was one of them. Killed by the police or soldiers or somebody.... The unions educated her. That's why Dulac went to live there--to help them out.... And it's been reported to me, Mr. Foote, that Dulac was sweet on her himself. That came from a reliable source." "My son a rival of an anarchist for the favor of the daughter of a cheap boarding house!" exclaimed Mr. Foote. "This Dulac was seen, Mr. Foote, with reference to the strike. He's a fanatic. Nothing could be done with him. He actually offered violence to our agent who attempted to show him how it would be to his benefit to--to be less energetic. We offered him--" "I don't care to hear what we offered him. Such details are distasteful, Rangar. That's what I hire you for, isn't it?" "Yes, sir.... Anyhow, Mr. Foote, he couldn't be bought." "Yes.... Yes. Well, we'll have to continue along the lines we've been following. They have been not unsuccessful." "True enough. It's just a question of time now. It might do some good, Mr. Foote, to have the rumor get about that we wouldn't take back any men who did not apply for reinstatement before the end of next week.... There's considerable discontent, due largely to insufficient nourishment. Yes, we can lay it to that, I imagine. It's this man Dulac that holds the strike together. If only every laboring man had a dozen babies there'd be less strikes," Rangar finished, not exactly callously, but in a matter-of-fact way. If he had thought of it he might have added, "and a sick wife." Rangar would not have hesitated to provide each striker with the babies and the wife, purely as a strike-breaking measure, if he could have managed the matter. "They're improvident," said Mr. Foote, sagaciously. "If they must strike and cut off their earnings every so often, why don't they lay up savings to carry them through?" "They seem to have the notion, sir, that they don't earn enough to save. That, while it isn't their main grievance, is an important one. But the idiots put nonsensical, immaterial grievances ahead of money matters mostly.... Rights! Rights to do this or not to do that--to organize or to sit at board meetings. They're not practical, Mr. Foote. If it was just money they wanted we might get on with them. It's men like this Dulac putting notions into their heads that they haven't brains enough to think of themselves. Social revolution, you know--that sort of thing." "Do what you like about it. You might have notices tacked up outside the gates stating that we wouldn't take back men who weren't back by the date you named. And, Rangar, be sure Mr. Bonbright's name is signed to it. I want to rid the men thoroughly of any absurd ideas about him." "You have, sir. If Dulac is a fair sample, you have. Why, he seems regularly to HATE Mr. Bonbright. Called him names, and that sort of thing.... Maybe, though, there's something personal mixed up in it." "That girl?..." "Very likely, sir." "You know her, Rangar. She worked under you. What sort of girl is she?... I mean would you consider it wise to approach her with a proposition--delicately put, of course--to--say--move to another city, or something of the sort?" "My observation of her--while not close--(you understand I have little opportunity for close observations of unimportant subordinates)--was that it would be unwise and--er--futile. She seemed to have quite a will. Indeed, I may say she seemed stubborn ... and no fool. If she's got a chance at Mr. Bonbright she wouldn't give it up for a few dollars. Not her, sir." "I don't recall her especially. Small--was she not? Not the--ah--ripe--rounded type to attract a boy? Eh?" "Curves and color don't always do it, Mr. Foote, I've observed. I've known scrawny ones, without a thing to stir up the imagination, that had ten boys running after them to one running after the kind they have pictures of on calendars.... I don't know if it's brains, or what, but they've got something that attracts." "Hum!... Can't say I've had much experience. Probably you're right. Anyhow, we're faced by something definite in the way of a condition. ... If the thing is merely a liaison--we can break it up, I imagine, without difficulty. If my son is so blind to right and wrong, and to his position, as to want to MARRY the girl, we'll have to resort promptly to effective measures." "Promptly," said Rangar. "And quietly, Mr. Foote. If she got an idea there was trouble brewing, she might off with him and get married before we could wink." "Heavens!... An anarchistic boarding-house girl for a daughter-in-law! We'd be a proud family, Rangar." "Yes, sir. I understand you leave it with me?" "I leave it with you to keep an eye on Bonbright. Consult with me before acting. My son is in a strange humor. He'll take some handling, I'm afraid, before we bring him to see things as my son ought to see them. But I'll bring him there, Rangar. I should be doing my duty very indifferently, indeed, if I did not. He's resentful. He wants to display a thing he calls his individuality--as if our family had use for such things. We're Footes, and I rather fancy the world knows what that means.... My son shall be a Foote, Rangar. That's all.... Stay a moment, though. Hereafter bear in mind I do not care to be troubled with squalid details. If things have to be done, do them.... If babies must be hungry--why, I suppose it is a condition that must exist from time to time. The fault of their fathers.... However, I do not care to hear about them. I am engaged on an important literary work, as you know, and such things tend to distract me." "Naturally, sir," said Rangar. "But you will on no account relax your firmness with these strikers. They must be shown." "They're being shown," said Rangar, grimly, and walked out of the office. In the corridor his face, which had been expressionless or obsequious when he saw the need, changed swiftly. His look was that of a man thinking of an enemy. There was malice, vindictiveness, hatred in that look, and it expressed with exactness his sentiments toward young Bonbright Foote.... It did not express all of them, for, lurking in the background, unseen, was a deep contempt. Rangar despised Bonbright as a nincompoop, as he expressed it privately. "If I didn't think," he said, "I'd get all the satisfaction I need by leaving him to his father, I'd take a hand myself. But the Foote spooks will give it to him better than I could.... I can't wish him any worse luck than to be left to THEM." He chuckled and felt of his disarranged tie. As for Bonbright Foote VI, he was frightened. No other word can describe his sensations. The idea that his son might marry--actually MARRY--this girl, was appalling. If the boy should actually take such an unthinkable step before he could be prevented, what a situation would arise! "Of course it wouldn't last," he said to himself. "Such marriages never do.... But while it did last--And there might be a child--a SON!" A Bonbright Foote VIII come of such a mother, with base blood in his veins! He drew his aristocratic shoulders together as though he felt a chill. "When he comes back," Mr. Foote said, "we'll have this thing out." But Bonbright did not come back that day, nor was he visible at home that night.... The next day dragged by and still he did not appear. ... CHAPTER XII Ruth Frazer had been working nearly two months for Malcolm Lightener, and she liked the place. It had been a revelation to her following her experience with Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. It INTERESTED her, fascinated her. There was an atmosphere in the tremendous offices--a tension, a SNAPPINESS, an alertness, an efficiency that made Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, seem an anachronism; as belonging in an earlier, more leisurely, less capable century. There was a spirit among the workers totally lacking in her former place of employment; there was an attitude in superiors, and most notable in Malcolm Lightener himself, which was so different from that of Mr. Foote that it seemed impossible. Foote held himself aloof from contacts with his help and his business. Malcolm Lightener was everywhere, interested in everything, mixing into everything. And though she perceived his granite qualities, experienced his brusqueness, his gruffness, she, in common with the office, felt for him something that was akin to affection. He was the sort to draw forth loyalty. Her first encounter with him occurred a couple of days after her arrival in the office. She was interrupted in the transcription of a letter by a stern voice behind her, saying: "You're young Foote's anarchist, aren't you?" She looked up frightened into the unsmiling eyes of Malcolm Lightener. "Mr. Foote--got me my place here," she said, hesitatingly. "Here--take this letter." And almost before she could snatch book and pencil he was dictating, rapidly, dynamically. When Malcolm Lightener dictated a letter he did it as though he were making a public speech, with emphasis and gesture. "There," he said, "read it back to me." She did, her voice unsteady. "Spell isosceles," he demanded. She managed the feat accurately. "Uh!... That usually gets 'em.... Needn't transcribe that letter. Like it here?" "Yes, sir." "Why?" She looked up at him, considering the matter. Why did she like it there? "Because," she said, slowly, "it doesn't seem like just a--a--big, grinding machine, and the people working here like wheels and pulleys and little machines. It all feels ALIVE, and--and--we feel like human beings." "Huh!..." he grunted, and frowned down at her. "Brains," he said. "Mighty good thing to have. Took brains to be able to think that--and say it." He turned away, then said, suddenly, over his shoulder, "Got any bombs in your desk?" "Bombs!..." "Because," he said, with no trace of a smile, "we don't allow little girls to bring bombs in here.... If you see anything around that you think needs an infernal machine set off under it, why, you come and tell me. See?... Tell me before you explode anything--not after. You anarchists are apt to get the cart before the horse." "I'm not an anarchist, Mr. Lightener." "Huh!... What are you, then?" "I think--I'm sure I'm a Socialist." "All of the same piece of cloth.... Mind, if you feel a bomb coming on--see me about it." He walked away to stop by the desk of a mailing clerk and enter into some kind of conversation with the boy. Ruth looked after him in a sort of daze. Then she heard the girls about her laughing. "You've passed your examination, Miss Frazer," said the girl at the next desk. "Everybody has to.... You never can tell what he's going to do, but he's a dear. Don't let him scare you. If he thought he had he'd be tickled to death--and then he'd find some way to show you you needn't be at all." "Oh!" said Ruth. More than once she saw laboring men, machinists, men in greasy overalls, with grimy hands and smeared faces, pass into Malcolm Lightener's office, and come out with the Big Boss walking beside them, talking in a familiar, gruff, interested way. She was startled sometimes to hear such men address him by his first name--and to see no lightning from heaven flash blastingly. She was positively startled once when a machinist flatly contradicted Lightener in her hearing on some matter pertaining to his work. "That hain't the way at all," the man said, flatly. Ruth waited for the explosion. "Landers planned it that way." Landers was chief engineer in the plant, drawing a princely salary. "Landers is off his nut. He got it out of a book. I'm DOIN' it. I tell you it won't work." "Why?" Always Lightener had a WHY. He was constantly shooting it at folks, and it behooved them to have a convincing answer. The machinist had, and he set it forth at length and technically. Lightener listened. "You win," he said, when the man was done. That was all. More than once Ruth saw Hilda Lightener in the office. Usually the girls in an office fancy they have a grudge against the fortunate daughter of their employer. They are sure she snubs them, or is a snob, or likes to show off her feathers before them. This was notably absent in Hilda's case. She knew many by name and stopped to chat with them. She was simple, pleasant, guiltless of pomp and circumstance in her comings and goings. "They say she's going to marry young Foote. The Foote company makes axles for us," said Ruth's neighbor, and after that Ruth became more interested in Hilda. She liked Bonbright Foote and was sorry for him. Admitting the unwisdom of his calls upon her, she had not the heart to forbid him, especially that he had shown no signs of sentiment, or of stepping beyond the boundary lines of simple friendship.... She saw to it that he and Dulac did not meet. As for Dulac--she had disciplined him for his outbreak as was the duty of a self-respecting young woman, and had made him eat his piece of humble pie. It had not affected her veneration for his work, nor her admiration for the man and his sincerity and his ability.... She had answered his question, and the answer had been yes, for she had come to believe that she loved him.... She saw how tired he was looking. She perceived the discouragements that weighed on him, and saw, as he refused to see, that the strike was a failure in spite of his efforts. And she was sensible. The strike had failed; nothing was to be gained by sustaining the ebbing remnants of it, by making men and women and children suffer futilely. ... She would have ended it and begun straight-way preparing a strike that would not fail. But she did not say so to him. He HAD to fight. She saw that. She saw, too, that it was not in him to admit defeat or to surrender. It would be necessary to crush him first. And then, at five o'clock, as she came out of the office she found Bonbright Foote waiting for her in his car. It had never happened before. "I--I came for you," he said, awkwardly, yet with something of tenseness in his voice. "You shouldn't," she said, not unkindly. He would understand the reasons. "I had to," he said. "I--all day I've done nothing but wait to see you. I've got to talk to you.... Please, now that I'm here, won't you get in?" She saw that something was wrong, that something out of the ordinary had happened, and as she stepped into the car she shot a glance at his set face and felt a wave of sympathy for him. "I want you to--to have something to eat with me--out in the country. I want to get away from town. Let me send a messenger to your mother. I know you don't want to, and--and all that, but you'll come, won't you?" Ruth considered. There was much to consider, but she knew he was an honest, wholesome boy--and he was in trouble. "This once," she said, and let him see her grin. "Thank you," he said, simply. It was but a short drive to an A. D. T. office, where Bonbright wrote a message to Mrs. Frazer: I'm taking your daughter to Apple Lake to dinner. I hope you won't mind. And I promise to have her home safe and early. A boy was dispatched with this, and Bonbright and Ruth drove out the Avenue with the evening sun in their faces, toward distant, beautiful Apple Lake. Bonbright drove in silence, his eyes on the road. Ruth was alone in her appreciation of the loveliness of the waning day. The messenger left on his bicycle, but had not gone farther than around the first corner when a gentleman drew up beside him in an automobile. "Hey, kid, I want to speak to you," said Mr. Rangar. The boy stopped and the car stopped. "You've got a message there that I'm interested in," said Rangar. "It isn't sealed. I want a look at it." He held out a five-dollar bill. The boy pocketed the bill and handed over the message, which Rangar read and returned to him. Then Rangar drove to the office from which the boy had come and dispatched a message of his own, one not covered by his instructions from Mr. Foote. It was a private matter with him, inspired by an incident of the morning having to do with a rumpled necktie and a ruffled dignity. The malice which had glittered in his eyes then was functioning now. Rangar's message was to Dulac. "Your girl's just gone to Apple Lake with young Foote in his car," it said. That was all, but it seemed ample to Rangar. Bonbright was not a reckless driver, but he drove rapidly this evening, with a sort of driven eagerness. From, time to time Ruth turned and glanced at his face and wondered what could have happened, for she had never seen him like this before, even in his darkest moments. There was a new element in his bearing, an element never there before. Discouragement, apathy, she had seen, and bitterness. She had seen wistfulness, hopelessness, chagrin, humiliation, but never until now had she seen set determination, smoldering embers of rage. What, she wondered, could this boy's father have done to him now? Soon they were beyond the rim of industry which banded the city, and, leaving behind them towering chimneys, smokeless for the night, clouds of released working-men waiting their turns to crowd into overloaded street cars, the grimy, busy belt line which extended in a great arc through the body of the manufacturing strip, they passed through sprouting, mushroomlike suburban villages--villages which had not been there the year before, which would be indistinguishable from the city itself the year after. Farther on they sped between huge-lettered boards announcing the location of real-estate developments which as yet consisted only of new cement sidewalks, immature trees promising future shade, and innumerable stakes marking lot boundaries. Mile after mile these extended, a testimonial to the faith of men in the growth of their city.... And then came the country, guiltless of the odors of gregarious humanity, of gasses, of smokes, of mankind itself, and of the operations which were preparing its food. Authentic farms spread about them; barns and farmhouses were dropped down at intervals; everywhere was green quiet, softened, made to glow enticingly by the sun's red disk about to dip behind the little hills.... All this Ruth saw and loved. It was an unaccustomed sight, for she was tied to the city. It altered her mood, softened her, made her more pliable. Bonbright could have planned no better than to have driven her along this road.... Presently they turned off at right angles, upon a country road shaded by century-old maples--a road that meandered leisurely along, now dipping into a valley created for agriculture, now climbing a hillside rich with fruit trees; and now and then, from hilltop, or through gap in the verdure, the gleam of quiet, rush-fringed lakes came to Ruth--and touched her, touched her so that her heart was soft and her lashes wet.... The whole was so placid, so free from turmoil, from competition, from the tussling of business and the surging upward of down-weighted classes. She was grateful to it. Yet when, as she did now and then, she glanced at Bonbright, she felt the contrast. All that was present in the landscape was absent from his soul. There was no peace there, no placidity, but unrest, bitterness, unhappiness--grimness. Yes, grimness. When the word came into her mind she knew it was the one she had been searching for.... Why was he so grim? Presently they entered upon a road which ran low beside Apple Lake itself, with tiny ripples lapping almost at the tire marks in the sand. She looked, and breathed deeply and gladly. If she could only live on such a spot!... The club house was deserted save by the few servants, and Bonbright gave directions that they should be served on the veranda. It was almost the first word he had uttered since leaving the city. He led the way to a table, from which they could sit and look out on the water. "It's lovely," she said. "I come here a good deal," he said, without explanation, but she understood. "If I were you, I'd LIVE here. Every day I would have the knowledge that I was coming home to THIS in the evening.... You could. Why don't you, I wonder?" "I don't know. I can't remember a Foote who has ever lived in such a place. If it hasn't been done in my family, of course I couldn't do it." She pressed her lips together at the bitter note in his voice. It was out of tune. "Have the ancestors been after you?" she asked. She often spoke of the ancestors lightly and jokingly, which she saw he rather liked. "The whole lot have been riding me hard. And I'm a well-trained nag. I never buck or balk.... I never did till to-day." "To-day?" "I bucked them off in a heap," he said, with no trace of humor. He was dead serious. "I didn't know I could do it, but all of a sudden I was plunging and rearing--and snorting, I expect.... And they were off." "To stay?" He dropped his eyes and fell silent. "Anyhow," he said, presently, "it's a relief to be running free even for an hour." "When they go to climb back why don't you buck some more? Now that they're off--keep them off." "It's not so easy. You see, I've been trained all my life to carry them. You can't break off a thing like that in an instant. A priest doesn't turn atheist in a night... and this Family Tradition business is like a religion. It gets into your bones. You RESPECT it. You feel it demanding things of you and you can't refuse.... I suppose there is a duty." "To yourself," she said, quickly. "To THEM--and to the--the future.... But I bucked them off once. Maybe they'll never ride so hard again, and maybe they'll try to break me by riding harder.... Until to-day I never had a notion of fighting back--but I'm going to give them a job of it now.... There are things I WILL do. They sha'n't always have their way. Right now, Miss Frazer, I've broken with the whole thing. They may be able to fetch me back. I don't know.... Sometime I'll have to go. When father's through I'd have to go, anyhow--to head the business." "Your father ought to change the name of the business to Family Ghosts, Incorporated," she said, with an attempt to lighten his seriousness. "I'll be general manager--responsible to a board of directors from across the Styx," he said, with an approach to a smile. "Here's our waiter. I telephoned our order. Hope I've chosen to please you." "Indeed you have," she replied. "I feel quite the aristocrat. I ought not to do this sort of thing.... But I'm glad to do it once. I abhor the rich," she said, laughing, "but some of the things they do and have are mighty pleasant." After a while she said: "If I were a rich man's wife I'd be something more than a society gadabout. I'd insist on knowing his business... and I'd make him do a lot of things for his workmen. Think of being a woman and able to do so much for thousands of--of my class," she finished. "Your class!" he said, sharply. "I belong to the laboring class. First, because I was born into it, and, second, because my heart is with it." "Class doesn't touch you. It doesn't concern you. You're YOURSELF." For the first time in her acquaintance with him he made her uneasy. His eyes and the way he spoke those sentences disturbed her. "Nonsense!" she said. Neither spoke for some time. It was growing dark now, and lights were glowing on the veranda. "When we're through," Bonbright said, "let's walk down by the lake. There's a bully walk and a place to sit.... I asked you to come because I wanted to take you there--miles away from everybody...." She was distinctly startled now, but helpless. She read storm signals, but no harbor was at hand. "We must be getting back," she said, lamely. "It's not eight. We can go back in an hour.... Shall we walk down now? I can't wait, Ruth, to say what I've got to say...." It was impossible to hold back, futile to attempt escape. She knew now why he had brought her and what he wanted to say, but she could not prevent it.... If he must have his say let it be where he desired. Very grave now, unhappy, her joy marred, she walked down the steps by his side and along the shore of the lake. "Here," he said, presently, drawing her into a nook occupied by a bench. She sat down obediently. Was it fortunate or unfortunate that she did not know an automobile was just turning into the lake road, a hired automobile, occupied by her fiance, Dulac? Rangar's note had reached his hands and he had acted as Rangar had hoped.... CHAPTER XIII Until a few moments before Ruth had never had a suspicion of Bonbright's feeling for her; she had not imagined he would ever cross that distinct line which separates the friend from the suitor. It was an unpleasant surprise to her. Not that he was repugnant to her, but she had already bestowed her affections, and now she would have to hurt this boy who had already suffered so much at the hands of others. She recoiled from it. She blamed herself for her blindness, but she was not to blame. What she had failed to foresee Bonbright himself had realized only that morning. He had awakened suddenly to the knowledge that his sentiment for Ruth Frazer was not calm friendship, but throbbing love. He had been awakened to it rudely, not as most young men are shown that they love.... When he flung out of his father's office that morning he had recognized only a just rage; hardly had his feet carried him over the threshold before rage was crowded out by the realization of love. His father's words had aroused his rage because he loved the woman they maligned! Suddenly he knew it.... "It's SO," he said to himself. "It's so--and I didn't know it." It was disconcerting, but he was glad. Almost at once he realized what a change this thing brought into his life, and the major consequences of it.... First, he would have her--he must have her--he would not live without her. It required no effort of determination to arrive at that decision. To win her, to have her for his own, was now the one important thing in his life. To do so would mean--what would it mean? The Family, dead and living, would be outraged. His father would stand aghast at his impiousness; his mother, class conscious as few of the under dogs are ever class conscious, would refuse to receive this girl as her daughter.... There would be bitterness--but there would be release. By this one step he would break with the Family Tradition and the Family Ghosts. They would cast him out.... But would they cast him out? He was Bonbright Foote VII, crown prince of the dynasty, vested with rights in the family and in the family's property by family laws of primogeniture and entail.... No, he would not be cast out, could not be cast out, for his father would let no sin of his son's stand in the way of a perpetuation of the family. Bonbright knew that if a complete breach opened between his father and himself it must be his hand that opened it. His father's would never do so.... He wondered if he could do so--if, when he was calm, he would desire to do so. Once he recognized his love he could not be still; office walls could not contain him. He was in a fever to see Ruth with newly opened eyes, with eyes that would see her as they had not seen her in the days before.... He rushed out--to encounter Hangar, and to experience a surging return of rage.... Then he went on, with no aim or purpose but to get rid of the time that must pass before he could see Ruth. It was ten o'clock, and he could not see her until five. Seven hours.... Now she was here, within reach of his hand, her face, not beautiful by day, very lovely to his eyes as the rising moon stretched a ribbon of light across the lake to touch her with its magic glow... and he could not find words to say what must be said. He had seated her on the bench and now paced up and down before her, struggling to become coherent. Then words came, a torrent of them, not coherent, not eloquent, but REAL. Ruth recognized the reality in them. "I want you," he said, standing over her. "I didn't know--I didn't realize... until to-day. It's so.... It's been so right along. That's why I had to come to you.... I couldn't get along without seeing you, but I didn't know why.... I thought it was to see you smile. But it was because I had to be near you.... I want to be near you always. This morning I found out--and all day I've waited to see you.... That's all I've done--thought about you and waited. It seems as if morning were years away.... I don't know what I've done all day--just wandered around. I didn't eat--until to-night. I couldn't. I couldn't do anything until I saw you--and told you.... That's why I brought you here.... I wanted to tell you HERE--not back there.... Away from all that. ... I can't go on without you--that's what you mean to me. You're NECESSARY--like air or water.... I--Maybe you haven't thought about me this way. I didn't about you.... But you MUST... you MUST!" It was pitiful. Tears wet Ruth's cheeks and she caught her breath to restrain a rising sob. He became calmer, gentler. "Maybe I've surprised you," he said. "Maybe I've frightened you--I hope not. I don't mean to frighten you. I don't want you ever to be frightened or worried.... I want to keep all kinds of suffering out of your life if you'll let me. Won't you let me?..." He stood waiting. "Mr. Foote," she said, presently, "I--" then she stopped. She had intended to tell him about Dulac; that she loved him and had promised to marry him, but she could not utter the words. It would hurt him so to know that she loved another man. She could refuse him without that added pain. "Don't you see," she said, "how impossible it is? It wouldn't do--even if I cared for you." "If you cared for me," he said, "nothing could make it impossible." "We belong in different worlds.... You couldn't come down to mine; I wouldn't fit into yours. My world wouldn't have you, and your world wouldn't have me.... Don't you see?" "I don't see. What has your world or mine to do with it? It's just you and me." "When you saw that your family wouldn't have me, when you found out that your friends wouldn't be friends with me, and that they didn't want to be friends with you any longer just because you married me ..." "I don't want any friends or family but you," he said, eagerly, boyishly. "Be reasonable, Mr. Foote.... You're rich. Some day you'll be the head of a great business--with thousands of men working for you.... I belong with them. You must be against them.... I couldn't bear it. You know all about me. I've been brought up to believe the things I believe. My father and grandfather and HIS grandfather worked and suffered for them.... Just as your ancestors have worked and planned for the things you represent.... It wouldn't ever do. We couldn't be happy. Even if I--cared--and did as you ask--it wouldn't last." "It would last," he said. "I KNOW. I've been trying to tell you, to make you believe that you have crowded everything else out of my life. There's just you in it.... It would last--and every day and every year it would grow--more wonderful." "There must be agreement and sympathy between a husband and his wife, Mr. Foote.... Oh, I KNOW. In the bigger things. And there we could never agree. It would make trouble--trouble that couldn't be avoided nor dodged. It would be there with us every minute--and we'd know it. You'd know I hated the things you stand for and the things you have to do.... No man could bear that--to have his wife constantly reproaching him." "I think," he said, "that your word would be my law...." She sat silent, startled. Unasked, unsought, a thought had entered her mind; a terrifying thought, but a big and vital thought. HER WORD WOULD BE HIS LAW. Her influence would be upon him.... And he was master of thousands of her class. He would be master of more thousands.... If she were his wife--if her word might become his law--how would those laboring men be affected? Would her word be his law with respect to them?... She did not love him, but she did love the Cause she represented, that her promised husband, Dulac, represented.... Her father had given his life for it. She had given nothing. Now she could give--herself.... She could sacrifice herself, she could pass by her love--but would it avail anything?... This boy loved her, loved her with all his strength and honesty. He would continue to love her. She believed that.... If, not loving him, she should marry him, she would be able to hold his love--and her word would be in some sort his law. She could influence him--not abruptly, not suddenly, but gradually, cleverly, cunningly. She could use him for her great purpose. Thousands of men might be happier, safer from hunger and misery, closer to a realization of their hope, if she gave herself to this boy.... She was filled with exaltation--a Joan of Arc listening to her Voices.... It was possible--possible.... And if it were possible, if she could accomplish this great thing for the Cause, dared she avoid it? Was it not a holy duty? Remember her parentage, her training; remember that she had drawn into her being enthusiasm, fanaticism with the air she breathed in the very cradle. She was a revolutionist.... Greater crimes than loveless marriages have been committed in the name of Enthusiasm for a Cause. She hesitated. What should she say?.... She must think, for a new face was upon the matter. She must think, and she must talk with Dulac. Dulac was stronger than she--but he saw eye to eye with her. The things she set up and worshiped in their shrines he worshiped more fervently.... She must put the boy off with evasion. She must postpone her answer until she was certain she saw her duty clearly. Love of humanity in the mass was in her heart--it shouldered out fairness to an individual man. She did not think of this. If she had thought it might not have mattered, for if she were willing to immolate herself would she not have been as ready to sacrifice one man--for the good of thousands? "I-" she began, and was dimly conscious of shame at her duplicity. "I did not know you--wanted me this way.... Let me think. I can't answer--to-night. Wait.... Give me time." His voice was glad as he answered, and its gladness shamed her again. "Wait.... I'd wait forever. But I don't want to wait forever.... It is more than I hoped, more than I had the right to hope. I know I took you by surprise.... Let me have time and the chance to make you love me--to let you get used to the idea of my loving you. But try not to be long. I'm impatient--you don't know how impatient...." "I-I sha'n't be long," she said. "You mustn't build too many hopes...." He laughed. She had never heard him laugh with such lightness, with such a note of soul-gladness, before. "Hope.... I shall eat and drink hope--until you--come to me. For you will come to me. I know it.... It couldn't be any other way." He laughed again, gayly. And then from out the blackness of the surrounding shrubbery there plunged the figure of a man.... Before Bonbright could lift a hand to shield himself blows began to fall, blows not delivered with the naked fist. Once, twice, again the man struck with the strength of frenzy. Ruth sat silent, stunned, paralyzed by fright, and uttered no scream. Then she saw the face of Bonbright's assailant. It was Dulac--and she understood. She sprang to him, clutched at his arm, but he hurled her off and struck again.... It was enough. Bonbright stood wavering a moment, struggling to remain upright, but sagging slowly. Then he slumped to the ground in a sort of uncanny sitting posture, his head sunk upon his knees. Ruth stood looking down upon him with horror-widened eyes. Dulac hurled his weapon into the bushes and turned upon her furiously, seizing her arm and dragging her to him so that his eyes, glowing with unreason, could burn into hers. "Oh--" she moaned. "I've taught him," Dulac said, his voice quivering with rage. "It was time... the vermin. Because he was rich he thought he was safe. He thought he could do anything.... But I've taught him. They starve us and stamp on us--and then steal our wives and smirch our sweethearts." Ruth tried to bend over Bonbright, to lift his head, to give him assistance, but Dulac jerked her away. "Don't touch him. Don't dare to touch him," he said. "He doesn't--move," she said, in a horrified whisper. "Maybe you've-killed him." "He deserved it.... And you--have you anything to say? What are you doing here--with him?" "Let me go," she panted. "Let me see--I must see. He can't be--dead. ... You--you BEAST!" she cried, shrilly. "He was good. He meant no harm.... He loved me, and that's why this happened. It's my fault--my fault." "Be still," he commanded. "He loved you--you admit it. You dare admit it--and you here alone with him at night." "He asked--me--to--marry--him," she said, faintly. "He was not--what you think.... He was a good--boy." Suddenly she tried to break from him to go to Bonbright, but he clutched her savagely. "Help!... Help!..." she cried. Then his hand closed over her mouth and he gathered her up in his arms and carried her away. He did not look behind at Bonbright huddled there with the ribbon of moonlight pointing across the lake at his limp body, but half staggered, half ran to his waiting car.... A snarled word, and the engine started. Ruth, choking, helpless, was carried away, leaving Bonbright alone and still.... CHAPTER XIV Bonbright was on his hands and knees on the edge of the lake, dizzily slopping water on his head and face. He was struggling toward consciousness, fighting dazedly for the power to act. As one who, in a dream, reviews the events of another half-presented dream, he knew what had happened. Consciousness had not fully deserted him. Dulac had attacked him; Dulac had carried Ruth away.... Somehow he had no fears for her personal safety, but he must follow. He must KNOW that she was safe.... Not many minutes had passed since Dulac struck him down. His body was strong, well trained to sustain shocks and to recover from them, thanks to four years of college schooling in the man's game of football. Since he left college he had retained the respect for his body which had been taught him, and with golf and tennis and gymnasium he had kept himself fit... so that now his vital forces marshaled themselves quickly to fight his battle for him. Presently he raised himself to his feet and stood swaying dizzily; with fingers that fumbled he tied his handkerchief about his bruised head and staggered toward his car, for his will urged him on to follow Dulac. To crank the motor (for the self-starter had not yet arrived) was a task of magnitude, but he accomplished it and pulled himself into the seat. For a moment he lay upon the steering wheel, panting, fighting back his weakness; then he thrust forward his control lever and the car began to move. The motion, the kindly touch of the cool night air against his head, stimulated him; he stepped on the gas pedal and the car leaped forward as though eager for the pursuit. Out into the main road he lurched, grimly clutching the steering wheel, leaning on it for support, his aching, blurred eyes clinging to the illuminated way before him, and he drove as he had never ventured to drive before. Beating against his numbed brain was his will's sledge-hammer demands for speed, and he obeyed recklessly.... Roadside objects flicked by, mile after mile was dropped behind, the city's outskirts were being snatched closer and closer--and then he saw the other car far ahead. All that remained to be asked of his car he demanded now, and he overhauled the smaller, less speedy machine. Now his lights played on its rear and his horn sounded a warning and a demand. Dulac's car veered to the side to let him pass, and he lurched by, only turning a brief, wavering glance upon the other machine to assure himself that Ruth was there. He saw her in a flashing second, in the tonneau, with Dulac by her side.... She was safe, uninjured. Then Bonbright left them behind. The road narrowed, with deep ditches on either hand. Here was the place he sought. He set his brakes, shut off his power, and swung his car diagonally across the way, so that it would be impossible for Dulac to pass. Then he alighted, and stood waiting, holding on to his machine for support. The other car came to a stop and Dulac sprang out. Bonbright saw Ruth rise to follow; heard Dulac say, roughly: "Get back. Stay where you are." "No," she replied, and stepped to the road. Bonbright could see how pale she was, how frightened. "Don't be afraid," he said to her. "Nothing is going to--happen." He stood erect now, free from the support of the car, waiting for Dulac, who approached menacingly. "Dulac," he said, "I can't--fight you. I can't even---defend myself--much.... Unless you insist." The men were facing each other now, almost toe to toe. Dulac's face was stormy with passion under scant restraint; Bonbright, though he swayed a bit unsteadily, faced him with level eyes. Ruth saw the decent courage of the boy and her fear for him made her clutch Dulac's sleeve. The man shook her off. "I know--why you attacked me," said Bonbright, slowly, "what you thought.... I--stopped you to--be sure Miss Frazer was safe... and to tell you you were--wrong.... Not that you have a--right to question me, but nobody must think--ill of Miss Frazer.... No misunderstanding...." "Get that car out of the way," said Dulac. Bonbright shook his head. "Not till I'm--through," he said. "Then you may--take Miss Frazer home.... But be kind to her--gentle.... I shall ask her about it--and I sha'n't be--knocked out long." "You threaten me, you pampered puppy!" "Yes," said Bonbright, grimly, "exactly." Dulac started to lift his arm, but Ruth caught it. "No.... No," she said, in a tense whisper. "You mustn't. Can't you see how--hurt he is? He can hardly stand.... You're not a COWARD...." "Dulac," said Bonbright, "here's the truth: I took Miss Frazer to the lake to--ask her to--marry me.... No other reason. She was--safe with me--as with you. I want her for--my wife. Do you understand?... You thought--what my father thought." Ruth uttered a little cry. So THAT was what had happened! "All the decency in the world," Bonbright said, "isn't in--union men, workingmen.... Because I have more money than you--you want to believe--anything of me.... You're even willing to--believe it of her.... I can--love as well as if I were poor.... I can--honor and respect the girl I want to marry as well as if I--carried a union card.... That is TRUE." Dulac laughed shortly; then, even in his rage, he became oratorical, theatrical. "We know the honor and respect of your kind.... We know what our sisters and daughters have to expect from you. We've learned it. You talk fair--you dangle your filthy money under their eyes--you promise this and you promise that.... And then you throw away your toys.... They come back to us covered with disgrace, heart-broken, marked forever, and fit to be no man's wife.... That's your respect and honor. That's your decency.... Leave our women alone.... Go to your bridge-playing, silly, husband-swapping society women. They know you. They know what to expect from you--and get what they deserve. Leave our women alone.... Leave this girl alone. We men have to endure enough at your hands, but we won't endure this.... We'll do as I did to-night. I thrashed you--" "Like a coward, in the dark, from behind," said Bonbright, boyish pride insisting upon offering its excuse. "I didn't stop you to argue about capital and labor. I stopped you--to tell you the truth about to-night. I've told it." "You've lied the way your kind always lies." Bonbright's lips straightened, his eyes hardened, and he leaned forward. "I promised Miss Frazer nothing--should happen. It sha'n't. ... But you're a fool, Dulac. You know I'm telling the truth--but you won't admit it--because you don't want to. Because I'm not on your side, you won't admit it.... And that makes you a fool.... Be still. You haven't hesitated to tell me I lied. I've taken that--and you'll take what I have to say. It isn't much. I don't know much about the--differences between your kind and my kind.... But your side gets more harm than good from men like you. You're a blind fanatic. You cram your men on lies and stir them up to hate us.... Maybe there's cause, but you magnify it.... You won't see the truth. You won't see reason.... You hold us apart. Maybe you're honest--fanatics usually are, but fanatics are fools. It does no good to tell you so. I'm wasting my breath.... Now take Miss Frazer home--and be careful how you treat her." He turned his back squarely and pulled himself into his car. Then he turned to Ruth. "Good night, Miss Frazer," he said. "I am sorry--for all this.... May I come for--your answer to-morrow?" "No...." she said, tremulously. "Yes...." Bonbright straightened his car in the road and drove on. He was at the end of his strength. He wanted the aid of a physician, and then he wanted to lie down and sleep, and sleep. The day that had preceded the attack upon him had been wearing enough to exhaust the sturdiest. The tension of waiting, the anxiety, the mental disturbance, had demanded their usual wages of mind and body. Sudden shock had done the rest. He drove to the private hospital of a doctor of his acquaintance, a member of his club, and gained admission. The doctor himself was there, by good fortune, and saw Bonbright at once, and examined the wounds in his scalp. "Strikers get you?" he asked. "Automobile mix-up," said Bonbright, weakly. "Uh-huh!" said the doctor. "I suppose somebody picked up a light roadster and struck you over the head with it.... Not cut much. No stitches. A little adhesive'll do the trick--and then.... Sort of excited, eh? Been under a bit of a strain?... None of my business, of course.... Get into bed and I'll send up something to tone you down and make you sleep. You've been playing in too high a key--your fiddle strings are too tight." Getting into that cool, soft bed was one of the pleasantest experiences of Bonbright's life. He was almost instantly asleep--and he still slept, even at the deliberate hour that saw his father enter the office at the mills. Mr. Foote was disturbed. He had not seen his son since the boy flung out of the office the morning before; had had no word of him. He had expected Bonbright to come home in the evening and had waited for him in the library to have a word with him. He had come to the conclusion that it would be best to throw some sort of sop to Bonbright in the way of apparent authority, of mock responsibility. It would occupy the boy's mind, he thought, while in no way altering the conditions, not affecting the end to be arrived at. Bonbright must be held.... If it were necessary to administer an anaesthetic while the operation of remaking him into a true Foote was performed, why, the anaesthetic would be forthcoming. But Bonbright did not come, even with twelve strokes of the clock. His father retired, but in no refreshing sleep.... On that day no progress had been made with the Marquis Lafayette. That work required a calm that Mr. Foote could not master. His first act after seating himself at his desk was to summon Rangar. "My son was not at home last night," he said. "I have not seen him since yesterday morning. I hope you can give me an account of him." "Not home last night, Mr. Foote!" Manifestly Rangar was startled. He had not been at ease before, for he had been unable to pick up any trace of the boy this morning; had not seen him return home the night before.... It might be that he had gone too far when he sent his anonymous note to Dulac. Dulac had gone in pursuit, of that he had made sure. But what had happened? Had the matter gone farther than the mere thrashing he had hoped for?... He was frightened. "I directed you to keep him under your eye." "Your directions were followed, Mr. Foote, so far as was possible. I know where he was yesterday, and where he went last night, but when a young man is running around the country in an automobile with a girl, it's mighty hard to keep at his heels. He was with that girl." "When?... What happened?" "He waited for her at the Lightener plant. She works there now. They drove out the Avenue together--some place into the country. Mr. Bonbright is a member of the Apple Lake Club, and I was sure they were going there.... That's the last I know." "Telephone the Apple Lake Club. See if he was there and when he left." Rangar retired to do so, and returned presently to report that Bonbright and a young lady had dined there, but had not been seen after they left the table. Nobody could say when they went away from the club. "Call Malcolm Lightener--at his office. Once the boy stayed at his house." Rangar made the call, and, not able to repress the malice that was in him, went some steps beyond his directions. Mr. Lightener was on the wire. "This is Rangar, Mr. Lightener--Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. Mr. Foote wished me to inquire if you had seen Mr. Bonbright between six o'clock last night and this morning." "No.... Why does he ask me? What's the matter?" "Mr. Foote says Bonbright stayed with you one night, and thought he might have done so again. Mr. Foote is worried, sir. The young man has--er--vanished, so to speak. He was seen last at your plant about five o'clock. In his automobile, Mr. Lightener. He was waiting for a young woman who works for you--a Miss Frazer, I understand. Used to be his secretary. They drove away together, and he hasn't been seen since.... Mr. Foote has feared some sort of--er--understanding between them." "Huh!" grunted Lightener. "Don't know anything about it. Tell Foote to look after his own son... if he knows how." Then the receiver clicked. Lightener swung away from the telephone and scowled at the wall. "He don't look it," he said, presently, "and I'm darned if SHE does.... Huh!..." He pressed a button. "Send in Miss Frazer," he said to the boy who answered the buzzer. In a moment Ruth stood in the door. He let her stand while he scrutinized her briefly. She looked ill. Her eyes were dull and marked by surrounding darkness. She had no color. He shook his head Like a displeased lion. "Miss Frazer," he said, gruffly, "I make it a practice always to mind my own business except when there's some reason for not minding it--which is frequent." "Yes, sir," she said, as he paused. "Yes, sir.... Yes, sir. What do YOU know about it? Come in and shut the door. Come over here where I can look at you. What's the matter? Ill? If you're sick what are you doing here? Home's the place for you." "I'm not ill, Mr. Lightener." "Huh!... I liked your looks--like 'em yet. Like everybody's looks who works here, or I wouldn't have 'em.... You're all right, I'll bet a dollar--all RIGHT.... You know young Foote got you your job here?" He saw the sudden intake of her breath as Bonbright's name was mentioned. "Yes," she said, faintly. "What about him?... Know him well? LIKE HIM?" "I--I know him quite well, Mr. Lightener. Yes, I--like him." "Trust him?" She looked at him a moment before replying; then her chin lifted a trifle and there came a glint into her eyes. "Absolutely," she said. "Um!... Good enough. So do I.... Enough to let him play around with my daughter.... Has he anything to do with the way you look to-day?... Not a fair question--yet. You needn't answer." "I shouldn't," she said, and he smiled at the asperity of her tone. "Mr. Bonbright Foote seems to be causing his family anxiety," he said. "He's disappeared.... I guess they think you carried him off. Did you go somewhere with him in his car last night?" "You have no right to question me, Mr. Lightener." "Don't I know it? I tell you I like you and I like him--and I think his father's a stiff-backed, circumstantial, ancestor-ridden damn fool.... Something's happened or Foote wouldn't be telephoning around. He's got reason to be frightened, and good and frightened. ... A girl, especially a girl in your place, hasn't any business being mixed up in any mess, much less with a young millionaire.... That's why I'm not minding my own business. You work for me, don't you--and ain't I responsible for you, sort of? Well, then? Were you with Bonbright last night?" "Yes, sir." "Huh!... Something happened, didn't it?" "Nothing that--Mr. Foote had anything to do with--" "But something happened. What?" "I can't tell you, Mr. Lightener." He shrugged his shoulders. "Where is he now?" "I don't know." "When did you see him last?" "A little after nine o'clock last night." "Where?" "Going toward home--I thought." "He didn't go there. Where else would he go?" "I don't--know." Her voice broke, her self-control was deserting her. "Hey!... Hold on there. No hysterics or anything. Won't have 'em. Brace up." "Let me alone, then," she said, childishly. "Why can't you let me alone?" "I--Confound it! I'm not deviling you. I'm trying to haul you out of a muss. Quit it, will you?" She had sunk into a chair and covered her face. He got up and stood over her, scowling. "Will you stop it? Hear me? Stop it, I tell you'... What's the matter--anyhow? If Bonbright Foote's done anything to you he hadn't ought to I'll skin him alive." The door opened and Hilda Lightener tripped into the room. "Hello, dad!" she said. "Surprise.... I want to--" She stopped to look at her father, and then at Ruth, crouched in her chair. "What's the matter, dad?" Hilda asked. "You haven't been scaring this little girl? If you have--" She paused threateningly. "Oh, the devil!... I'll get out. You see if you can make her stop it. Cuddle her, or something. I've done a sweet job of it.... Miss Frazer, this is my daughter. Er--I'm going away from here." And he went, precipitately. There was a brief silence; then Hilda laid her hand on Ruth's head. "What's dad been doing to you?" she asked. "Scare you? His bark's a heap sight worse than his bite." "He--he's good," said Ruth, tearfully. "He was trying to be good to me.... I'm just upset--that's all. I'll be--all right in a moment." But she was not all right in a moment. Her sobs increased. The strain, the anxiety, a sleepless night of suffering--and the struggle she had undergone to find the answer to Bonbright's question--had tried her to the depths of her soul. Now she gave quite away and, unwillingly enough, sobbed and mumbled on Hilda Lightener's shoulder, and clung to the larger girl pitifully, as a frightened baby clings to its mother. Hilda's face grew sober, her eyes darkened, as, among Ruth's broken, fragmentary, choking words, she heard the name of Bonbright Foote. But her arm did not withdraw from about Ruth's shoulders, nor did the sympathy in her kind voice lessen.... Most remarkable of all, she did not give way to a very natural curiosity. She asked no question. After a time Ruth grew quieter, calmer. "I'll tell you what you need," said Hilda. "It's to get away from here. My electric's downstairs. I'm going to take you away from father. We'll drive around a bit, and then I'll run you home.... You're all aquiver." She went out, closing the door after her. Her father was pacing uneasily up and down the alley between the desks, and she motioned to him. "She's better now. I'm going to take her home.... Dad, she was muttering about Bonbright. What's he got to do with this?" "I don't know, honey. Nothing--nothing ROTTEN.... It isn't in him--nor HER." Hilda nodded. "Bonbright seems to have disappeared," her father said. "DISAPPEARED?" "His father's hunting for him, anyhow. Hasn't been home all night." "I don't blame him," said Hilda, with a flash in her eyes. "But what's this girl got to do with it?" "I wish you'd find out. I was trying to--and that blew up the house." "I'll try nothing of the kind," she said. "Of course, if she WANTS to tell me, and DOES tell me, I'll listen.... But I won't tell you. You run your old factory and keep out of such things. You just MESS them." "Yes, ma'am," he said, with mock submissiveness, "it looks like I do just that." Hilda went back into the room, and presently she and Ruth emerged and went out of the building. That day began their acquaintance, which was to expand into a friendship very precious to both of them--and one day to be the rod and staff that sustained Ruth and kept her from despair. CHAPTER XV Hilda Lightener represented a new experience to Ruth. Never before had she come into such close contact with a woman of a class she had been taught to despise as useless and worse than useless. Even more than they hated the rich man Ruth's class hated the rich man's wife and daughter. Society women stood to them for definite transgressions of the demands of human equality and fairness and integrity of life. They were parasites, wasters, avoiding the responsibilities of womanhood and motherhood. They flaunted their ease and their luxuries. They were arrogant. When their lives touched the lives of the poor it was with maddening condescension. In short, they were not only no good, but were flagrantly bad. The zealots among whom Ruth's youth had lain knew no exceptions to this judgment. All so-called society women were included. Now Ruth was forced to make a revision.... All employers of labor had been malevolent. Experience had proven to her that Bonbright Foote was not malevolent, and that a more conspicuous, vastly more powerful figure in the industrial world, Malcolm Lightener, was human, considerate, respectful of right, full of unexpected disturbing virtues.... Ruth was forced to the conclusion that there were good men and good women where she had been taught to believe they did not exist.... It was a pin-prick threatening the bubble of her fanaticism. She had not been able to withhold her liking from Hilda Lightener. Hilda was strongly attracted by Ruth. King Copetua may occasionally wed the beggar maid, but it is rare for his daughter or his sister to desire a beggar maid's friendship. Hilda did not press Ruth for confidences, nor did Ruth bestow them. But Hilda succeeded in making Ruth feel that she was trustworthy, that she offered her friendship sincerely.... That she was an individual to depend on if need came for dependence. They talked. At first Hilda carried on a monologue. Gradually Ruth became more like her sincere, calm self, and she met Hilda's advances without reservation.... When Hilda left her at her home both girls carried away a sense of possessing something new of value. "Don't you come back to the office to-day," Hilda told her. "I'll settle dad." "Thank you," said Ruth. "I do need--rest. I've got to be alone to--think." That was the closest she came to opening her heart. She did have to think, though she had thought and reasoned and suffered the torture of mental conflict through a nearly sleepless night. She had told Bonbright to come on this day for her answer.... She must have her answer ready. Also she must talk the thing over with Dulac. That would be hard--doubly hard in the situation that existed. Last night she had not spoken of it to him; had scarcely spoken to him at all, as he had been morosely silent to her. She had been shocked, frightened by his violence, yet she knew that his violence had been honest violence, perpetrated because he believed her welfare demanded it. She did not feel toward him the aversion that the average girl might have felt for one who precipitated her into such a scene.... She was accustomed to violence and to the atmosphere of violence. When she and Dulac arrived at the Frazer cottage, he had helped her to alight. Then he uttered a rude apology, but a sincere one--according to his lights. "I'm sorry I had to do it with you watching," he said. Then, curtly, "Go to bed now." Clearly he suspected her of no wrongdoing, of no intention toward future wrongdoing. She was a VICTIM. She was a pigeon fascinated by a serpent. Now she went to her room, and remained there until the supper hour. When she and her mother and Dulac were seated at the table her mother began a characteristic Jeremiad. "I hope you ain't coming down with a spell of sickness. Seems like sickness in the family's about the only thing I've been spared, though other things worse has been aplenty. Here we are just in a sort of a breathing spell, and you begin to look all peeked and home from work, with maybe losing your place, for employers is hard without any consideration, and food so high and all. I wasn't born to no ease, nor any chance of looking forward like some women, though doing my duty at all times to the best of my ability. And now you on the verge of a run of the fever, with nobody can say how long in bed, and doctors and medicines and worry...." "I'm not going to be ill, mother," Ruth said. "Please don't worry about me." "If a mother can't worry about her own daughter, then I'd like to know what she can do," said Mrs. Frazer, with the air of one suffering meekly a studied affront. Ruth turned to Dulac. "Before you go downtown," she said, "I want to talk to you." Dulac had not hoped to escape a reckoning with Ruth, and now he supposed she was demanding it. Well, as well now as later, if the thing had to be. He was a trifle sulky about it; perhaps, now that his blind rage had subsided, not wholly satisfied with himself and his conduct. "All right," he said, and went silently on with his meal. After a time he pushed back his chair. "I've got a meeting downtown," he said to Ruth, paving the way for a quick escape. "Maybe what I have to say," she said, gravely, "will be as important as your meeting," and she preceded him into the little parlor. His attitude was defensive; he expected to be called on for explanations, to be required to soothe resentment; his mental condition was more or less that of a schoolboy expecting a ragging. Ruth did not begin at once, but walked over to the window, and, leaning her elbow against the frame, pressed her forehead against the cool glass. She wanted to clear and make direct and coherent her thoughts. She wanted to express well, leaving no ground for misunderstanding of herself or her motives, what she had to say. Then she turned, and began abruptly; began in a way that left Dulac helplessly surprised, for it was not the attack he expected. "Mr. Foote asked me to marry him, last night," she said, and stopped. "That is why he took me out to the lake.... I hadn't any idea of it before. I didn't know... He was honest and sincere. At first I was astonished. I tried to stop him. I was going to tell him I loved you and that we were going to be married." She stopped again, and went on with an effort. "Then something came to me--and it frightened me. All the time he was talking to me I kept on thinking about it... and I didn't want to think about it because of--you.... You know I want to do something for the Cause--something big, something great! It's hard for a woman to do such a thing--but I saw a chance. It was a hard chance, a bitter chance, but it was there.... I'm not a doll. I think I could be strong. He's just a boy, and I am strong enough to influence him.... And I thought how his wife could help. Don't you see? He will own thousands of laboring men--thousands and thousands. If I married him I could do--what couldn't I do?--for them. I would make him see through my eyes. I would make him UNDERSTAND. My work would be to make him better conditions, to give those thousands of men what they are entitled to, to give them all men like you and like my father have taught me they ought to have.... I could do it. I know. Think of it--thousands of men, and then--wives and children, made happier, made contented, given their fair share--and by me!... That's what I thought about--and so--so I didn't refuse him. I didn't tell him about you.... I told him I'd give him my answer--later...." His face had changed from sullenness to relief, from relief to astonishment, then to black anger. "Your answer," he said, passionately. "What answer could you give but one? You're mine. You've promised me. That's the answer you'll give him.... You THOUGHT. I know what you thought. You thought about his money--about his millions. You thought what his wife would have, how she would live. You thought about luxuries, about automobiles, about jewels.... Laboring men!... Hell! He showed you the kingdoms of the earth--and you wanted them. He offered to buy you--and you looked at the price and it was enough to tempt you.... You'll give him no answer. I'll give it to him, and it'll be the same kind of answer I gave him last night.... But this time he won't get up so quick. This time..." "Stop!... That's not true. You know it's not true.... I've promised to marry you--and I've loved you. Yes, I've loved you.... I'm glad of that. It makes the sacrifice real. It makes all the more I have to give.... Father gave his life. You're giving your life and your strength and your abilities.... I want to give, too, and so I'm glad, glad that I love you, and that I can give that.... If I didn't love you, if I did care for Mr. Foote, it would be different. I would be afraid I was marrying him because of what he is and what he has. ... But I am giving up more than he can ever return to me with all his money.... Money can't buy love. It can't give back to me that happiness I would have known with you, working for you, suffering with you, helping you. It's my chance.... You must see. You must believe the truth. I couldn't bear it if you didn't--if you didn't see that I am throwing away my happiness and giving myself--just for the Cause. That I am giving all of myself--not to a quick, merciful death. That wouldn't be hard.... But to years of misery, to a lifetime of suffering. Knowing I love you, I will have to go to him, and be his wife, and pretend--pretend--day after day, year after year, that I love him.... I'll have to deceive him. I'll have to hold his love and make it stronger, and I'll--I'll come to loathe him. Does that sound easy? Could money buy that? Look into your heart and see...." He strode to her, and his hands fell heavily on her shoulders, his black, blazing eyes burned into hers. "You love me--you haven't lied to me?" he demanded, hoarsely. "I love you." "Then, by God! you're mine, and I'll have you. He sha'n't buy you away if I have to kill him. You're mine, do you hear?--MINE!" "Who do you belong to?" she asked. "If I demanded that you give up your work, abandon the Cause, would you do it for me?" "No." "You belong to the Cause--not to me.... I belong to the Cause, too. ... Body and soul I belong to it. What am I to you but a girl, an incident? Your duty lies toward all those men. Your work is to help them.... Then you should give me willingly; if I hesitate you should try to force me to do this thing-for it will help. What other thing could do what it will do? Think! THINK!... THINK!" "You're mine.... He has everything else. His kind take everything else from us. Now they want our wives. They sha'n't have them.... He sha'n't have them.... He sha'n't have you." "It is for me to say," she replied, gently. "I'm so sorry--so sorry--if it hurts you. I'm sorry any part of the suffering and sorrow must fall on you. If I could only bear it alone! If I can help, it's my right to help, and to give.... Don't make it harder. Oh, don't make it harder!" He flung her from him roughly. "You're like all of them.... Wealth dazzles you. You fear poverty.... Softness, luxuries--you all--you women--are willing to sell your souls for them." "Did my mother sell her soul for luxuries? If she did, where are they? Did your mother sell her soul for them?... Have the wives of all the men who have worked and suffered and been trampled on for the Cause sold their souls?... You're bitter. I--I am sorry--so sorry. If you care for me as I do for you--I--I know how bitterly hard it will be--to--give me up--to see me his wife...." "I'll never see that. You can throw me over, but you'll never marry him." "You're big--you're big enough to see this as I see it, and big enough to let me do it.... You will be when--the surprise and the first hurt of it have gone. It's asking just one more thing of you--when you've willingly given so much.... But it's I who do the harder giving. In a few months, in a year, you will have forgotten me.... I can never forget you. Every day and every hour I'll be reminded of you. I'll be thinking of you.... When I greet HIM it will be YOU I'm greeting.... When I am pretending to--to care for him, it will be YOU I am loving. The thought of that, and the knowledge of what I am doing for those poor men--will be all the happiness I shall have... will give me courage to live on and to GO on.... You believe me, don't you, dear? You must, you must believe me!" He approached her again. "Look at me!... Look at me," he demanded, and she gave her eyes to his. They were pure eyes, the eyes of an enthusiast, the eyes of a martyr. He could not misread them, even in his passion he could not doubt them.... The elevation of her soul shone through them. Constancy, steadfastness, courage, determination, sureness, and loftiness of purpose were written there.... He turned away, his head sinking upon his breast, and when he spoke the passion, the rancor, the bitterness, were gone from his voice. It was lower, quivering, almost gentle. "You sha'n't.... It isn't necessary. It isn't required of you." "If it is possible, then it is required of me," she said. "No.... No...." He sank into a chair and covered his face, and she could hear the hissing of his breath as he fought for self-control. "If it were you," she said. "If you could bring about the things I can--the good for so many--would you hesitate? Is there anything you wouldn't do to give THEM what I can give?... You know there's not. You know you could withhold no sacrifice.... Then don't make this one harder for me. Don't stand in my way." "I HATE him," Dulac said, in a tense whisper. "If you--married him and I should meet him--I couldn't keep my hands off him.... The thought of YOU--of HIM--I'd KILL him...." "You wouldn't," she said. "You'd think of ME--and you'd remember that I love you--and that I have given you up--and all the rest, so I could be his wife--and rule him.... And you wouldn't make it all futile by killing him.... Then I'd be helpless. I've got to have him to--to do the rest." She went to him, and stroked his black, waving hair--so gently. "Go now, my dear," she said. "You've got to rise to this with me. You've got to sustain me.... Go now.... My mind is made up. I see my way...." Her voice trembled pitifully. "Oh, I see my way--and it is hard, HARD...." "No," he cried, struggling to his feet. "Yes," she said, softly. "Good-by.... This is our good-by. I--oh, my dear, don't forget--never forget--Oh, go, GO!" In that moment it seemed to her that her heart was bursting for him, that she loved him to the very roots of her soul. She was sure at last, very sure. She was certain she was not blinded by glamour, not fascinated by the man and his part in the world.... If there had been, in a secret recess of her heart, a shadow of uncertainty, it was gone in this moment. "Good-by," she said. He arose and walked toward the door. He did not look at her. His hand was on the knob, and the door was opening, yet he did not turn or look.... "Good-by.... Good-by," she sobbed--and he was GONE... She was alone, and through all the rest of her years she must be alone. She had mounted the altar, a sacrifice, a willing sacrifice, but never till this minute had she experienced the full horror and bitterness and woe that were required of her.... She was ALONE. The world has seen many minor passions in the Garden. It sees and passes on, embodying none of them in deathless epic as His passion was embodied.... Men and women have cried out to listening Heaven that the cup might pass from their lips, and it has not been permitted to pass, as His was not permitted to pass. In the souls of men and of women is something of the divine, something high and marvelous--a gift from Heaven to hold the human race above the mire which threatens to engulf it.... Every day it asserts itself somewhere; in sacrifice, in devotion, in simple courage, in lofty renunciation. It is common; wonderfully, beautifully common... yet there are men who do not see it, or, seeing, do not comprehend, and so despair of humanity.... Ruth, crouching on the floor of her little parlor, might have numbered countless brothers and sisters, had she known.... She was uplifting man, not because of the thing she might accomplish, but because she was willing to seek its accomplishment.... Her eyes were dry. She could not weep. She could only crouch there and peer into the blackness of the gulf that lay at her feet.... Then the doorbell rang, and she started. Eyes wide with tragedy, she looked toward the door, for she knew that there stood Bonbright Foote, come for his answer.... CHAPTER XVI Bonbright had disobeyed the physician's orders to stay in bed all day, but when he arose he discovered that there are times when even a restless and impatient young man is more comfortable with his head on a pillow. So until evening he occupied a lounge with what patience he could muster. So it was that Rangar had no news of him during the day and was unable to relieve his father's increasing anxiety. Mr. Foote was not anxious now, but frightened; frightened as any potentate might be who perceived that the succession was threatened, that extinction impended over his line. Bonbright scarcely tasted the food that was brought him on a tray at six o'clock. He was afire with eagerness, for the hour was almost there when he could go to Ruth for her answer. He arose, somewhat dizzily, and demanded his hat, which was given him with protests. It was still too early to make his call, but he could not stay away from the neighborhood, so he took a taxicab to Ruth's corner, and there alighted. For half an hour he paced slowly up and down, eying the house, picturing in his mind Ruth in the act of accepting him or Ruth in the act of refusing him. One moment hope flashed high; the next it was quenched by doubt.... He saw Dulac leave the house; waited another half hour, and then rang the doorbell. Mrs. Frazer opened the door. "Evening, Mr. Foote," she said, without enthusiasm, for she had not approved of this young man's calls upon her daughter. "Miss Frazer is expecting me," he said, diffidently, for he was sensitive to her antagonism. "In the parlor," said she, "and no help with the dishes, which is to be expected at her age, with first one young man and then another, which, if she gets any pleasure out of it, I'm not one to deny her, though not consulted. If I was starting over again I'd wish it was a son to be traipsing after some other woman's daughter and not a daughter to have other women's sons traipsing after.... That door, Mr. Foote. Go right in." Bonbright entered apprehensively, as one might enter a court room where a jury was about to rise and declare its verdict of guilty or not guilty. He closed the door after him mechanically. "Ruth..." he said. Her face, marked with tears, not untouched by suffering, startled him. "Are you--ill?" he said. "Just--just tired" she said. "Shall I go?... Shall I come again to-morrow?" "No." She was aware of his concern, of the self-effacing thoughtfulness of his offer. He was a good boy, decent and kind. He deserved better than he was getting.... She bit her lips and vowed that, giving no love, she would make him happy. She must make him happy. "You know why I've come, Ruth," he said. "It has seemed a long time to wait--since last night. You know why I've come?" "Yes." "You have--thought about me?" "Yes." He stepped forward eagerly. "You look so unhappy, so tired. It hasn't been worrying you like this? I couldn't bear to think it had.... I--I don't want you ever worried or tired, but always--glad.... I've been walking up and down outside for an hour. Couldn't stay away.... Ruth, you haven't been out of my mind since last night--since yesterday morning. I've had time to think about you.... I'm beginning to realize how much you mean to me. I'll never realize it fully--but it will come to me more every day, and every day I shall love you more than I did the day before--if your answer can be yes. ..." He turned away his head and said, "I'm afraid to ask...." "I will marry you," she said, in a dead voice. She felt cold, numb. Her body seemed without sensation, but her mind was sharply clear. She wanted to scream, but she held herself. His face showed glad, relieved surprise. The shine of his eyes accused her.... She was making capital of his love--for a great and worthy purpose--but none the less making capital of it. She was sorry for him, bitterly sorry for herself. He came forward eagerly, with arms outstretched to receive her, but she could not endure that--now. She could not endure his touch, his caress. "Not now.... Not yet," she said, holding up her hand as though to ward him off. "You mustn't." His face fell and he stopped short. He was hurt--surprised. He did not understand, did not know what to make of her attitude. "Wait," she said, pitifully. "Oh, be patient with me.... I will marry you. I will be a good--a faithful wife to you.... But you must be patient with me. Let me have time.... Last night--and all to-day-have been--hard.... I'm not myself. Can't you see?..." "Don't you love me?" he asked. "I--I've said I would marry you," she replied. Then she could restrain herself no longer. "But let it be soon--soon," she cried, and throwing herself on the sofa she burst into tears. Bonbright did not know what to do. He had never seen a woman cry so before.... Did girls always act this way when they became engaged? Was it the usual thing, or was something wrong with Ruth? He stood by, dumbly waiting, unhappy when he knew he should be happy; troubled when he knew there should be no cloud in his sky; vaguely apprehensive when he knew he should be looking into the future with eyes confident of finding only happiness there. He wanted to pick her up and comfort her in his arms. He could do it, he could hold her close and safe, for she was so small. But he dared not touch her. She had forbidden it; her manner had forbidden it more forcefully than her words. He came closer, and his hand hovered over her hair, her hair that he would have loved to press with his lips-he, he did not dare. "Ruth," he said.... "Ruth!" Suddenly she sat up and faced him; forced herself to speak; compelled herself to rise to this thing that she had done and must see through. "I'm--ashamed," she said, irrepressible sobs interrupting her. "It's silly, isn't it--but--but it's hard to KNOW. It's for so long--so LONG!" "Yes," he said, "that's the best part of it.... I shall have you always." Always. He should have her always! It was no sentence for a month or a year, but for life. She was tying herself to this boy until death should free her.... She looked at him, and thanked God that he was as he was, young, decent, clean, capable of loving her and cherishing her.... For her sake she was glad it was he, but his very attributes accused her. She was accepting these beautiful gifts and was giving in return spurious wares. For love she would give pretense of love. ... Yet if he had been other than he was, if he had been old, seeking her youth as some men might seek it, steeped in experience to satiety as some rich man might have been, she knew she could not have gone through with it. To such a man she could not have given herself--even for the Cause.... Bonbright made his own duping a possibility. "I--I sha'n't act this way again," she said, trying to smile. "You needn't be afraid.... It's just nerves." "Poor kid!" he said, softly, but even yet he dared not touch her. "You want me? You're very, very sure you want me? How do you know? I may not be what you think I am. Maybe I'm different. Are you sure, Bonbright?" "It's the only thing in the world I am sure of," he said. "And you'll be good to me?... You'll be patient with me, and gentle? Oh, I needn't ask. I know you will. I know you're good...." "I love you," was his reply, and she deemed it a sufficient answer. "Then," she said, "let's not wait. There's no need to wait, is there? Can't it be right away?" His face grew radiant. "You mean it, Ruth?" "Yes," she said. "A month?" "Sooner." "A week?" "Sooner.... Sooner." "To-morrow? You couldn't?... You don't mean--TO-MORROW?" She nodded, for she was unable to speak "Sweetheart," he cried, and again held out his arms. She shook her head and drew back. "It's been so--so quick," she said. "And to-morrow comes so soon.... Not till then. I'll be your wife then--your WIFE." "To-morrow morning? I will come to-morrow morning? Can it be then?" "Yes." "I--I will see to everything. We'll be married, and then we will go away--somewhere. Where would you like to go, Ruth?" "Anywhere.... I don't care. Anywhere." "It 'll be my secret," he said, in his young blindness. "We'll start out--and you won't know where we're going. I sha'n't tell you. I'll pick out the best place in the world, if I can find it, and you won't know where we're going till we get there.... Won't that be bully?... I hate to go now, dear, but you're all out of sorts--and I'll have a heap of things to do--to get ready. So will you." He stopped and looked at her pleadingly, but she could not give him what his eyes asked; she could not give him her lips to-night.... He waited a moment, then, very gently, he took her hand and touched it with his lips. "I'm patient," he said, softly. "You see how patient I am.... I can wait... when waiting will bring me so much.... At twelve o'clock? That's the swell hour," he laughed. "Shall I drag along a bishop or will an ordinary minister do?" She tried to smile in response. "Good night, dear," he said, and raised her hand again to his lips. "Good night." "Is that all?" "All." "No--trimmings? You might say good night to the groceryman that way." "Good night--dear," she said, obediently. "It's true. I'm not dreaming it. Noon TO-MORROW?" "Noon to-morrow," she repeated. He walked to the door, stopped, turned, hesitated as if to come back. Then he smiled at her boyishly, happily, wagged his head gayly, as though admonishing himself to be about his business and to stop philandering, and went out.... He did not see her drag herself to the sofa wearily; he did not see her sink upon it and bury her face again in the cushions; he did not hear the sobs that wrenched and shook her.... He would then have understood that this was not the usual way for a girl to enter her engagement. He would have understood that something was wrong, very wrong. After waiting a long time for her daughter to come out, Mrs. Frazer opened the door determinedly and went in. Ruth sat up and, wiping her eyes on a tear-soggy handkerchief, said: "I'm going to marry Bonbright Foote to-morrow noon mother." Mrs. Frazer sat down very suddenly in a chair which was fortunately at hand, and stared at her daughter. "Of all things..." she said, weakly. Bonbright was on the way to make a similar announcement to his parents. It was a task he did not approach with pleasure; indeed, he did not look forward with pleasure to any sort of meeting with his father. In his heart he had declared his independence. He had broken away from Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, had clambered out of the family groove--had determined to be himself and to maintain his individuality at any cost.... Ruth would make it easier for him. To marry Ruth was the first great step toward independence and the throwing off of the yoke of the Foote tradition. As he walked home he planned out what he would say and what he would do with respect to his position in the family. He could not break away from the thing wholly. He could not step out of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, as one steps out of an old coat, and think no more of it. No.... But he would demand concessions. He would insist upon being something in the business, something real. He would no longer be an office boy, a rubber stamp, an automaton, to do thus and to do so when his father pressed the requisite buttons.... Oh, he would go back to the office, but it would be to a very different office and to function in a very different manner. The family ghosts had been dissatisfied with him. Well, they could go hang. Using his father as the working tool, they had sought to remake him according to their pattern. He would show them. There would be a row, but he was buoyed up for whatever might happen by what had just happened.... The girl he loved had promised to marry him--and to-morrow. With a consciousness of that he was ready for anything. He did not realize how strongly he was gripped by the teaching that had been his from his cradle; he did not realize how the Foote tradition was an integral part of him, as his arm or his skin. It would not be so easy to escape. Nor, perhaps, would his father be so ready to make concessions. He thought of that. But he banished it from his mind. When his father saw how determined he was the concessions would follow. They would have to follow. He did not ask himself what would happen if they did not follow. Of course his father and mother would resent Ruth. Because Bonbright loved her so truly he was unable to see how anybody could resent her very much. He was blinded by young happiness. Optimism had been born in him in a twinkling, and set aside a knowledge of his parents and their habits of thought and life that should have warned him. He might have known that his father could have overlooked anything but this--the debasing of the Foote blood by mingling with it a plebeian, boarding-house strain; he might have comprehended that his mother, Mrs. Bonbright Foote VI, no less, could have excused crime, could have winked at depravity, but could never tolerate a daughter-in-law of such origin; would never acknowledge or receive her. As a last resort, to save Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, his father might even submit to Bonbright's wife; his mother did not bow so low before that god; her particular deity was a social deity. If Bonbright's argosy did not wreck against the reef of his father, it never could weather the hidden rock of his mother's class consciousness. Bonbright went along, whistling boyishly. He was worried, but not so worried but that he could find room also to be very happy. Everything would come out all right.... Young folks are prone to trust implicitly to the goodness of the future. The future will take care of troubles, will solve difficulties, will always bring around a happy ending. He was not old enough or experienced enough to know that the future bothers with nobody's desires, but goes on turning out each day's work with calm detachment, continues to move its endless film of tomorrow's events to the edge of its kingdom and to give them life on the screen of to-day. It does not change or retouch the film, but gives it to to-day as it is, relentlessly, without pity and without satisfaction. Bonbright saw the future as a benignant soul; he did not realize it is a nonsentient machine. CHAPTER XVII Bonbright stopped in the library door, for he saw there not only his father, whom he had expected to see, but his mother also. He had not foreseen this. It made the thing harder to tell, for he realized in an instant how his mother would receive the news. He wished he had been less abrupt, but here he was and there could be no drawing back now. His mother was first to see him. "Bonbright..." she said, rising. He walked to her and kissed her, not speaking. "Where have you been? Your father and I have been terribly worried. Why did you stay away like this, without giving us any word?" "I'm sorry if I've worried you, mother," he said, but found himself dumb when he tried to offer an explanation of his absence. "You have worried us," said his father, sharply. "You had no business to do such a thing. How were we to know something hadn't happened to you--with the strike going on?" "It was very inconsiderate," said his mother. There fell a silence awkward for Bonbright. His parents were expecting some explanation. He had come to give that explanation, but his mother's presence complicated the situation, made it more difficult. There had never been that close confidence between Mrs. Foote and Bonbright which should exist between mother and son. He had never before given much thought to his relations with her; had taken them as a matter of course. He had not given to her that love which he had seen manifested by other boys for their mothers, and which puzzled him. She had never seemed to expect it of him. He had been accustomed to treat her with grave respect and deference, for she was the sort of person who seems to require and to be able to exact deference. She was a very busy woman, busy with extra-family concerns. Servants had carried on the affairs of the household. Nurses, governesses, and such kittle-cattle had given to Bonbright their sort of substitute for mother care. Not that Mrs. Foote had neglected her son--as neglect is understood by many women of her class. She had seen to it rigidly that his nurses and tutors were efficient. She had seen to it that he was instructed as she desired, and his father desired, him to be instructed. She had not neglected him in a material sense, but on that highest and sweetest sense of pouring out her affection on him in childhood, of giving him her companionship, of making her love compel his love--there she had been neglectful.... But she was not a demonstrative woman. Even when he was a baby she could not cuddle him and wonder at him and regard him as the most wonderful thing in creation.... She had never held him to her breast as God and nature meant mothers to hold their babies. A mercenary breast had nourished him. So he grew up to admire her, perhaps; surely to stand in some awe of her. She was his mother, and he felt vaguely that the relationship demanded some affection from him. He had fancied that he was giving her affection, but he was doing nothing of the sort.... His childish troubles had been confided to servants. His babyish woes had been comforted by servants. What genuine love he had been able to give had been given to servants. She had not been the companion of his babyhood as his father had failed to be the companion of his youth. ... So far as the finer, the sweeter affairs of parenthood went, Bonbright had been, and was, an orphan.... "Have you nothing to say?" his father demanded, and, when Bonbright made no reply, continued: "Your mother and I have been unable to understand your conduct. Even in our alarm we have been discussing your action and your attitude. It is not one we expected from a son of ours.... You have not filled our hopes and expectations. I, especially, have been dissatisfied with you ever since you left college. You have not behaved like a Foote.... You have made more trouble for me in these few months than I made for my father in my life.... And yesterday--I would be justified in taking extreme measures with you. Such an outburst! You were disrespectful and impertinent. You were positively REBELLIOUS. If I had not more important things to consider than my own feelings you should have felt, more vigorously than you shall, my displeasure. You dared to speak to me yesterday in a manner that would warrant me in setting you wholly adrift until you came to your senses.... But I shall not do that. Family considerations demand your presence in our offices. You are to take my place and to carry on our line.... This hasn't seemed to impress you. You have been childishly selfish. You have thought only of yourself--of that thing you fancy is your individuality. Rubbish! You're a Foote--and a Foote owes a duty to himself and his family that should outweigh any personal desires.... I don't understand you, my son. What more can you want than you have and will have? Wealth, position, family? Yet for months you have been sullen and restless-and then openly rebellious.... And worse, you have been compromising yourself with a girl not of your class...." "I could not believe my ears," said Mrs. Foote, coldly. "However," said his father, "I shall overlook what has passed." Now came the sop he had planned to throw to Bonbright. "You have been in the office long enough to learn something of the business, so I shall give you work of greater interest and responsibility.... You say, ridiculously enough, that you have been a rubber stamp. Common sense should have told you you were competent to carry no great responsibilities at first.... But you shall take over a part of my burden now.... However, one thing must come first. Before we go any farther, your mother and I must have your promise that you will discontinue whatever relations you have with this boarding-house keeper's daughter, this companion of anarchists and disturbers." "I have insisted upon THAT," said Mrs. Foote. "I will not tolerate such an affair." "There is no AFFAIR," said Bonbright, finding his voice. His young eyes began to glow angrily. "What right have you to suppose such a thing--just because Miss Frazer happens to be a stenographer and because her mother keeps a boarder! Father insulted her yesterday. That caused the trouble. I couldn't let it pass, even from him. I can't let it pass from you, mother." "Oh, undoubtedly she's worthy enough," said Mr. Foote, who had exchanged a glance with his wife during Bonbright's outburst, as much as to say, "There is a serious danger here." "Worthy enough!" said Bonbright, anger now burning with white heat. "But," said his father, "worthy or not worthy, we cannot have our son's name linked in any way with a person of her class. It must stop, and stop at once." "That you must understand distinctly," said Mrs. Foote. "Stop!" said Bonbright, hoarsely. "It sha'n't stop, now or ever. That's what I came home to tell you.... I'm not a dumb beast, to be driven where you want to drive me. I'm a human being. I have a right to make my own friends and to live my own life.... I have a right to love where I want to--and to marry the girl I love.... You tried to pick out a wife for me.... Well, I've picked out my own. Whether you approve or not doesn't change it. Nobody, nothing can change it.... I love Ruth Frazer and I'm going to marry her. That's what I came home to tell you." "What?" said his father, in a tone of one who listens to blasphemy. Bonbright did not waver. He was strong enough now, strong in his anger and in his love. "I am going to marry Ruth Frazer," he repeated. "Nonsense!" said his mother. "It is not nonsense, mother. I am a man. I have found the girl I love and will always love. I intend to marry her. Where is there nonsense in that?" "Do you fancy I shall permit such a thing? Do you imagine for an instant that I shall permit you to give me a daughter-in-law out of a cheap boarding house? Do you think I shall submit to an affront like that?... Why, I should be the laughingstock of the city." "The city finds queer things to laugh at," said Bonbright. "My son--" began Mr. Foote; but his wife silenced him. She had taken command of the family ship. From this moment in this matter Bonbright Foote VI did not figure. This was her affair. It touched her in a vital spot. It threatened her with ridicule; it threatened to affect that most precious of her possessions--the deference of the social world. She knew how to protect herself, and would attend to the matter without assistance. "You will never see that girl again," she said, as though the saying of it concluded the episode. Bonbright was silent. "You will promise me NOW that this disgraceful business is ended. NOW.... I am waiting." "Mother," said Bonbright, "you have no right to ask such a thing. Even if I didn't love Ruth, I have pledged my word to her..." Mrs. Foote uttered an exclamation indicative of her disgust. "Pledged your word!... You're a silly boy, and this girl has schemed to catch you and has caught you.... You don't flatter yourself that she cares for you beyond your money and your position.... Those are the things she had her eye on. Those are what she is trading herself for.... It's scandalous. What does your pledged word count for in a case like this?... Your pledged word to a scheming, plotting, mercenary little wretch!" "Mother," said Bonbright, in a strained, tense voice, "I don't want to speak to you harshly. I don't want to say anything sharp or unkind to you--but you mustn't repeat that.... You mustn't speak like that about Ruth." "I shall speak about her as I choose..." "Georgia!..." said Mr. Foote, warningly. "If you please, Bonbright." She put him back in his place. "_I_ will settle this matter with our son--NOW." "It is settled, mother," said Bonbright. "Suppose you should be insane enough to marry her," said Mrs. Foote. "Do you suppose I should tolerate her? Do you suppose I should admit her to this house? Do you suppose your friends--people of your own class--would receive her--or you?" "Do you mean, mother," said Bonbright, his voice curiously quiet and calm, "that you would not receive my wife here?" "Exactly that. And I should make it my business to see that she was received nowhere else.... And what would become of you? Everyone would drop you. Your wife could never take your position, so you would have to descend to her level. Society would have none of you." "I fancy," said Bonbright, "that we could face even that--and live." "More than that. I know I am speaking for your father when I say it. If you persist in this we shall wash our hands of you utterly. You shall be as if you were dead.... Think a moment what that means. You will not have a penny. We shall not give you one penny. You have never worked. And you would find yourself out in the world with a wife to support and no means of supporting her. How long do you suppose she would stay with you?... The moment she found she couldn't get what she had schemed for, you would see the last of her.... Think of all that." "I've thought of all that--except that Ruth would care for my money. ... Yesterday I left the office determined never to go into it again. I made up my mind to look for a job--any job--that would give me a living--and freedom from what Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, means to me. I was ready to do that without Ruth.... But the family has some claims to me. I could see that. So I came back. I was going to tell father I would go ahead and do my best.... But not because I wanted to, nor because I was afraid." "You see," his mother said, bitingly, "it lasted a whole day with you." "Mother!" Bonbright turned to his father. "I am going to marry Ruth. That cannot be changed. Nothing can alter it.... I am ready to come back to the office--and be Bonbright Foote VII... and you can't guess what that means. But I'll do it--because it seems to be the thing I ought to do.... I'll come back if--and only if--you and mother change your minds about Ruth.... She will be my wife as much as mother is your wife, and you must treat her so. She must have your respect. You must receive her as you would receive me... as you would have been glad to receive Hilda Lightener. If you refuse--I'm through with you. I mean it.... You have demanded a promise of me. Now you must give me your promise--to act to Ruth as you should act toward my wife.... Unless you do the office and the family have seen the last of me." He did not speak with heat or in excitement, but very gravely, very determinedly. His father saw the determination, and wavered. "Georgia," he said, again. "No," said Mrs. Foote. "The Family--the business." said Mr. Foote, uncertainly. "I'd see the business ended and the Family extinct before I would tolerate that girl.... If Bonbright marries her he does it knowing how I feel and how I shall act. She shall never step a foot in this house while I live--nor afterward, if I can prevent it. Nor shall Bonbright." "Is that final, mother?... Are you sure it is your final decision?" "Absolutely," she said, her voice cold as steel. "Very well," said Bonbright, and, turning, he walked steadily toward the door. "Where are you going?" his father said, taking an anxious step after his son. "I don't know," said Bonbright. "But I'm not coming back." He passed through the door and disappeared, but his mother did not call after him, did not relent and follow her only son to bring him back. Her face was set, her lips a thin, white line. "Let him go," she said. "He'll come back when he's eaten enough husks." "He's GOT to come back.... We've got to stop this marriage. He's our only son, Georgia--he's necessary to the Family. HIS son is necessary." "And hers?" she asked, with bitter irony. "Better hers than none," said Mr. Foote. "You would give in.... Oh, I know you would. You haven't a thought outside of Family. I wasn't born in your family, remember. I married into it. I have my own rights in this matter, and, Family or no Family, Bonbright, that girl shall never be received where I am received.... NEVER." Mr. Foote walked to the window and looked out. He saw his son's tall form pass down the walk and out into the street--going he did not know where; to return he did not know when. He felt an ache in his heart such as he had never felt before. He felt a yearning after his son such as he had never known. In that moment of loss he perceived that Bonbright was something more to him than Bonbright Foote VII--he was flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood. The stifled, cramped, almost eliminated human father that remained in him cried out after his son.... CHAPTER XVIII As Bonbright walked away from his father's house he came into possession for the first time of the word RESPONSIBILITY. It was defined for him as no dictionary could define it. Every young man meets a day when responsibility becomes to him something more than a combination of letters, and when it comes he can never be the same again. It marks definitely the arrival of manhood, the dropping behind of youth. He can never look upon life through the same eyes. Forever, now, he must peer round and beyond each pleasure to see what burden it entails and conceals. He must weigh each act with reference to the RESPONSIBILITY that rests upon him. Hitherto he had been swimming in life's pleasant, safe, shaded pools; now he finds himself struggling in the great river, tossed by currents, twirled by eddies, and with no bottom upon which to rest his feet. Forever now it will be swim--or sink.... To-morrow Bonbright was to undertake the responsibilities of family headship and provider; to-night he had sundered himself from his means of support. He was jobless. He belonged to the unemployed.... In the office he had heard without concern of this man or that man being discharged. Now he knew how those men felt and what they faced. Realization of his condition threw him into panic. In his panic he allowed his feet to carry him to the man whose help had come readily and willingly in another moment of need--to Malcolm Lightener. The hour was still early. Lights shone in the Lightener home and Bonbright approached the door. Mr. Lightener was in and would see him in the office. It was characteristic of Lightener that the room in the house which was peculiarly his own was called by him his office, not his den, not the library.... There were two interests in Lightener's life--his family and his business, and he stirred them together in a quaintly granite sort of way. For the second time that evening Bonbright stood hesitating in a doorway. "Well, young fellow?" said Lightener. Then seeing the boy's hesitation: "Come in. Come in. What's happened NOW?" "Mr. Lightener," said Bonbright, "I want a job. I've got to have a job." "Um!... Job! What's the matter with the job you've got?" "I haven't any job.... I--I'm through with Bonbright Foote, Incorporated--forever." "That's a darn long time. Sit down. Waiting for it to pass will be easier that way.... Now spit it out." He was studying the boy with his bright gray eyes, wondering if this was the row he had been expecting. He more than half hoped, as he would have expressed it, "that the kid had got his back up." Bonbright's face, his bearing, made Lightener believe his back WAS up. "I've got to have a job--" "You said that once. Why?" "I'm going to be married to-morrow--" "What?" "I'm going to be married to-morrow--and I've got to support my wife--decently..." "It's that little Frazer girl who was crying all over my office to-day," said Lightener, deducing the main fact with characteristic shrewdness. "And your father wouldn't have it--and threw you out...or did the thing that stands to him for throwing out?" "I got out. I had gotten out before. Yesterday morning.... Somebody told him I'd been going to see Ruth--and he was nasty about it. Called it a liaison....I--I BURNED UP and left the office. I haven't been back." "That accounts for his calling me up--looking for you. You had him worried." "Then I got to thinking," said Bonbright, ignoring the interruption. "I was going back because it seemed as if I HAD to go back. You understand? As if there was something that compelled me to stick by the Family...." "How long have you been going to marry this girl?" "She said she would marry me to-night." "Engaged to-night--and you're going to marry to-morrow?" "Yes....And I went home to tell father. Mother was there--" Lightener sucked in his breath. He could appreciate what Bonbright's mother's presence would contribute to the episode. "--and she was worse than father. She--it was ROTTEN, Mr. Lightener--ROTTEN. She said she'd never receive Ruth as her daughter, and that she'd see she was never received by anybody else, and she--she FORCED father to back her up....There wasn't anything for me to do but get out....I didn't begin to wonder how I was going to support Ruth till it was all over with." "That's the time folks generally begin to wonder." "So I came right here--because you CAN give me a job if you will--and I've got to have one to-night. I've got to know to-night how I'm going to get food and a place to live for Ruth." "Um!...We'll come to that." He got up and went to the door. From thence he shouted--the word is used advisedly--for his wife and daughter. "Mamma.... Hilda. Come here right off." He had decided that Bonbright's affairs stood in need of woman's counsel. Mrs. Lightener appeared first. "Why, Bonbright!" she exclaimed. "Where's Hilda?" asked Lightener. "Need her, too." "She's coming, dear," said Mrs. Lightener. There are people whose mere presence brings relief. Perhaps it is because their sympathy is sure; perhaps it is because their souls were given them, strong and simple, for other souls to lean upon. Mrs. Lightener was one of these. Before she knew why Bonbright was there, before she uttered a word, he felt a sense of deliverance. His necessities seemed less gnawing; there was a slackening of taut nerves.... Then Hilda appeared. "Evening, Bonbright," she said, and gave him her hand. "Let's get down to business," Lightener said. "Tell 'em, Bonbright." "I'm going to marry Ruth Frazer to-morrow noon," he said, boldly. Mrs. Lightener was amazed, then disappointed, for she had come to hope strongly that she would have this boy for a son. She liked him, and trusted in his possibilities. She believed he would be a husband to whom she could give her daughter with an easy heart.... Hilda felt a momentary shock of surprise, but it passed quickly. Like her father, she was sudden to pounce upon the concealed meaning of patent facts--and she had spent the morning with Ruth. She was first to speak. "So you've decided to throw me over," she said, with a smile.... "I don't blame you, Bonbright. She's a dear." "But who is she?" asked Mrs. Lightener. "I seem to have heard the name, but I don't remember meeting her." "She was my secretary," said Bonbright. "She's a stenographer in Mr. Lightener's office now." "Oh," said Mrs. Lightener, and there was dubiety in her voice. "Exactly," said Lightener. "MOTHER!" exclaimed Hilda. "Weren't you a stenographer in the office where dad worked?" "It isn't THAT," said Mrs. Lightener. "I wasn't thinking about the girl nor about Bonbright. I was thinking of his mother." "That's why he's here," said Lightener. "The Family touched off a mess of fireworks. Mrs. Foote refuses to have anything to do with the girl if Bonbright marries her. Promised to see nobody else did, too. Isn't that it, Bonbright?" "Yes." "I don't like to mix in a family row..." "You've GOT to, dad," said Hilda. "Of course Bonbright couldn't stand THAT." They understood her to mean by THAT the Foote family's position in the matter. "He couldn't stand it.... I expect you and mother are disappointed. You wanted me to marry Bonbright, myself..." "HILDA!" Mrs. Lightener's voice was shocked. "Oh, Bonbright and I talked it over the night we met. Don't be a bit alarmed. I'm not being especially forward.... We've got to do something. What does Bon want us to do?" "He wants me to give him a job." She turned to Bonbright. "They turned you out?" "I turned myself out," he said. She nodded understandingly. "You WOULD," she said, approvingly. "What kind of a job can you give him, dad?" "H'm. THAT'S settled, is it? What do you think, mother?" "Why, dear, he's got to support his wife," said Mrs. Lightener. Malcolm Lightener permitted the granite of his face to relax in a rueful smile. "I called you folks in to get your advice--not to have you run the whole shebang." "We're going to run it, dad....Don't you like Ruth Frazer?" "I like her. She seems to be a nice, intelligent girl....Cries all over a man's office...." "I like her, too, and so will mother when she meets Ruth. I like her a eap, Bon; she's a DEAR. Now that the job for you is settled--" "Eh?" said Lightener. Hilda smiled at him and amended herself. "Now that a very GOOD job for you is settled, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. First thing, I'm invited to the wedding, and so is mother, and so are some other folks. I'll see to that. It isn't going to be any justice-of-the-peace wedding, either. It's going to be in the church, and there'll be enough folks there to make it read right in the paper." "I'm afraid Ruth wouldn't care for that," said Bonbright, dubiously. "I know she wouldn't." "She's got to start off RIGHT as your wife, Bon. The start's everything. You want your friends to know her and receive her, don't you? Of course you do. I'll round up the folks and have them there. It will be sort of romantic and interesting, and a bully send off for Ruth if it's done right. It 'll make her quite the rage. You'll see. ...That's what I'm going to do--in spite of your mother. Your wife will be received and invited every place that _I_ am....Maybe your mother can run the dowagers, but I'll bet a penny I can handle the young folks." In that moment she looked exceedingly like her father. "HILDA!" her mother exclaimed again. "You must consider Mrs. Foote. We don't want to have any unpleasantness over this...." "We've got it already," said Hilda, "and the only way is to--go the limit." Lightener slammed the desk with his fist. "Right!" he said. "If we meddle at all we've got to go the whole distance. Either stay out altogether or go in over our heads.... But how about this girl, Hilda, does she belong?" "She's decently educated. She has sweet manners. She's brighter than two-thirds of us. She'll fit in all right. Don't you worry about her." "Young man," growled Lightener, "why couldn't you have fallen in love with my daughter and saved all this fracas?" Bonbright was embarrassed, but Hilda came to his rescue. "Because I didn't want him to," she said. "You wouldn't have MADE me marry him, would you?" "PROBABLY not," said her father, with a rueful grin. "I'm going to take charge of her," said Hilda. "We'll show your mother, Bon." "You're--mighty good," said Bonbright, chokingly. "I'm going to see her the first thing in the morning. You see. I'll fix things with her. When I explain everything to her she'll do just as I want her to." Mrs. Lightener was troubled; tears stood in her eyes. "I'm so sorry, Bonbright. I--I suppose a boy has the right to pick out his own wife, but it's too bad you couldn't have pleased your mother.... Her heart must ache to-night." "I'm afraid," said Bonbright, slowly, "that it doesn't ache the way you mean, Mrs. Lightener." "It's a hard place to put us. We're meddling. It doesn't seem the right thing to come between mother and son." "You're not," said Hilda. "Mrs. Foote's snobbishness came between them." "HILDA!" "That's just what it is. Ruth is just as nice as she is or anybody else. She ought to be glad she's getting a daughter like Ruth. You'd be....And we can't sit by and see Bon and his wife STARVE, can we? We can't fold our hands and let Mrs. Foote make Ruth unhappy. It's cruel, that's what it is, and nothing else. When Ruth is Bon's wife she has the right to be treated as his wife should be. Mrs. Foote has no business trying to humiliate her and Bon--and she sha'n't." "I suppose you're right, dear. I KNOW you're right.... But I'm thinking how I'd feel if it were YOU." "You'd never feel like Mrs. Foote, mother. If I made up my mind to marry a man out of dad's office--no matter what his job was, if he was all right himself--you wouldn't throw me out of the house and set out to make him and me as unhappy as you could. You aren't a snob." "No," said Mrs. Lightener, "I shouldn't." Malcolm Lightener, interrupted. "Now you've both had your say," he said, "and you seem to have decided the thing between you. I felt kind of that way, myself, but I wanted to know about you folks. What you say GOES....Now clear out; I want to talk business to Bonbright." Hilda gave Bonbright her hand again. "I'm glad," she said, simply. "I know you'll be very happy." "And I'll do what I can, boy," said Mrs. Lightener Bonbright was moved as he had never been moved before by kindliness and womanliness. "Thank you.... Thank you," he said, tremulously. "I--you don't know what this means to me. You've--you've put a new face on the whole future...." "Clear out," said Malcolm Lightener. Hilda made a little grimace at him in token that she flouted his authority, and she and her mother said good night and retired from the room. "Now," said Malcolm Lightener. Bonbright waited. "I'm going to give you a job, but it won't be any private-office job. I don't know what you're good for. Probably not much. Don't get it into your head I'm handing a snap to you, because I'm not. If you're not worth what I pay you you'll get fired. Understand?" "Yes, sir." "If you stick you'll learn something. Not the kind of rubbish you've been sopping up in your own place. I run a business, not a museum of antiquity. You'll have to work. Think you can?" "I've wanted to. They wouldn't let me." "Um!...You'll get dirt on your hands....Most likely you'll be running Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, one of these days. This thing won't last. Your father'll have to come around....I only hope he lets you stay with me long enough to teach you some business sense and something about running a plant. I'll pay you enough to support you and this girl of yours--but you'll earn it. When you earn more you'll get it...Sounds reasonable." "I--I can't thank you enough." "Report for work day after to-morrow, then. You're a man out of a job. You can't afford honeymoons. I'll let you have the day off to-morrow, but next morning you be in my office when the whistle blows. I always am." "Yes, sir." "Where are you going to live? Got any money?" "I don't know where we shall live. Maybe we'd better find a place to board for a while. I've got a hundred dollars or so." "Board!...Huh! Nobody's got any business boarding when they're married. Wife has too much time on her hands. Nothing to do. Especially at the start of things your wife'll need to be busy. Keep her from getting notions....I'll bet the percentage of divorces among folks that board is double that it is among folks that keep house. Bound to be....You get you a decent flat and furnish it. Right off. After you get married you and your wife pick out the furniture. That's what I'm giving you the day off to-morrow for. You can furnish a little flat--the kind you can afford, for five hundred dollars.... You're not a millionaire now. You're a young fellow with a fair job and a moderate salary that you've got to live on. ...Better let your wife handle it. She's used to it and you're not. She'll make one dollar go as far as you would make ten." "Yes, sir." Lightener moved awkwardly and showed signs of embarrassment. "And listen here," he said, gruffly, "a young girl's a pretty sweet and delicate piece of business. They're mighty easy to hurt, and the hurt lasts a long time....You want to be married a long time, I expect, and you want your wife to--er--love you right on along. Well, be darn careful, young fellow. Start the thing right. More marriages are smashed in the first few days than in the next twenty years....You be damn gentle and considerate of that little girl." "I--I hope I shall, Mr. Lightener." "You'd better be....Where you going to-night?" "To the club. I have some things there. I've always kept enough clothes there to get along on." "Your club days are over for some time. Married man has no business with a club till he's forty....Evenings, anyhow. Stay at home with your wife. How'd you like to have her running out to some darn thing three or four nights a week?...Go on, now. I'll tell Hilda where you are. Probably she'll want to call you up in the morning....Good night." "Good night...and thank you." "Huh!" said Malcolm Lightener, and without paying the slightest bit of attention to whether Bonbright stayed or went away, he took up the papers on his desk and lost himself in the figures that covered them. Bonbright went out quietly, thankfully, his heart glad with its own song....The future was settled; safe. He had nothing to fear. And to-morrow he was going to enter into a land of great happiness. He felt he was entering a land of fulfillment. That is the way with the very young. They enter upon marriage feeling it is a sort of haven of perpetual bliss, that it marks the end of unhappiness, of difficulties, of loneliness, of griefs...when, in reality, it is but the beginning of life with all the diverse elements of joy and grief and anxiety and comfort and peace and discord that life is capable of holding.... CHAPTER XIX Hilda Lightener had found Ruth strangely quiet, with a manner which was not indifference to her imminent marriage, but which seemed more like numbness. "You act as if you were going to be hanged instead of married," Hilda told her, and found no smile answering her own. Ruth was docile. She offered no objection to any suggestion offered by Hilda, accepted every plan without demurring. Hilda could not understand her, and was troubled. Wholly lacking was the girlish excitement to be expected. "Whatever you want me to do I will do, only get it over with," seemed to be Ruth's attitude. She seemed to be holding herself in, communing with herself. A dozen times Hilda had to repeat a question or a statement which Ruth had not heard, though her eyes were on Hilda's and she seemed to be giving her attention. She was saying to herself: "I must go through with it.... I can't draw back.... What I am doing is RIGHT--RIGHT." She obeyed Hilda, not so much through pliancy as through listlessness, and presently Hilda was going ahead with matters and acting as a sort of specially appointed general manager of the marriage. She directed Ruth what to wear, saw it was put on, almost bundled Ruth and her mother into the carriage, and convoyed them to the church, where Bonbright awaited them. She could not prevent a feeling of exasperation, especially toward Mrs. Frazer, who had moved from chair to chair, uttering words of self-pity, and pronouncing a constant jeremiad.... Such preliminaries to a wedding she had never expected to witness, and she witnessed them with awakened foreboding. A dozen or so young folks and Malcolm Lightener and his wife witnessed the brief ceremony. Until Ruth's appearance there had been the usual chattering and gayety, but even the giddiest of the youngsters was restrained and subdued by her white, tense face, and her big, unseeing eyes. "I don't like it," Lightener whispered to his wife. "Poor child!... Poor child!" she whispered back, not taking her eyes from Ruth's face. After the rector pronounced the final words of the ceremony Ruth stood motionless. Then she turned slowly toward Bonbright, swaying a trifle as if her knees were threatening to fail her, and said in a half whisper, audible to those about: "It's over?... It's all over?" "Yes, dear." "It can't be undone," she said, not to her husband, but to herself. "We are--married." Hilda, fearing some inauspicious act or word, bustled forward her bevy of young folks to offer their babel of congratulations. As she presented them one by one, Ruth mustered a wan smile, let them take her cold, limp hand. But her mind was not on them. All the while she was thinking: "This is my HUSBAND.... I belong to this man.... I am his WIFE." Once in a while she would glance at Bonbright; he seemed more a stranger to her than he had done the first time her eyes had ever rested on him--a stranger endowed with odious potentialities. ... Mrs. Lightener took Ruth into her arms and whispered, "He's a dear, good boy...." There was comfort in Mrs. Lightener's arms, but scant comfort in her words, yet they would remain with Ruth and she would find comfort in them later. Now she heard Malcolm Lightener speaking to her husband. "You be good to that little girl, young man," he said. "Be mighty patient and gentle with her." She waited for Bonbright's reply. "I love her," she heard Bonbright say in a low voice. It was a good answer, a reassuring answer, but it stabbed Ruth with a new pang, for she had traded on that love; she was a cheat. Bonbright was giving her his love in exchange for emptiness. Somehow she could not think of the Cause now, for this was too intimate, too individual, too personal.... Presently Bonbright and Ruth were being driven to their hotel. The thought of wedding breakfast or of festivities of any sort had been repugnant to Ruth, and Hilda had not insisted. They were alone. Ruth lay back against the soft upholstery of Malcolm Lightener's limousine, colorless, eyes closed. Bonbright watched her face hungrily, scrutinizing it for some sign of happiness, for some vestige of feeling that reciprocated his own. He saw nothing but pallor, weariness. "Dear," he whispered, and touched her hand almost timorously. Her hand trembled to his touch, and involuntarily she drew away from him. Her eyes opened, and in them his own eager eyes read FEAR.... He was startled, hurt. Being only a boy, with a boy's understanding and a boy's pride, he was piqued, and himself drew back. This was not what he had expected, not what the romances he had read had led him to believe would take place. In stories the bride was timid, yet eager; loving, yielding, happy. She clung to her husband, her heart beating against his heart, whispering her adoration and demanding whispered adoration from him.... Here all of this was lacking, and something which crouched at the opposite pole of human emotion was present--FEAR. "You must be patient and gentle with her," Malcolm Lightener had said with understanding, and Bonbright was wise enough to know that there spoke experience; probably there spoke truth, not romance, as it is set down on the printed page. Even if Ruth's attitude were unusual, so the circumstances were unusual. It was no ordinary marriage preceded by an ordinary, joyous courtship. In this moment Bonbright took thought, and it was given him to understand that now, as at no other moment in his life with Ruth, was the time to exercise patience and gentleness. "Ruth," he said, taking her hand and holding it with both his own, "you mustn't be afraid of ME.... You are afraid. You're my wife," he said, boyishly. "It's my job to make you happy--the most important job I've got--and to look after you and to keep away from you everything that might--make you afraid." He lifted her fingers to his lips; they were cold. "I want to take you in my arms and hold you... but not until you want me to. I can wait.... I can do ANYTHING that you want me to do. Both of us have just gone through unpleasant things--and they've tired and worried you.... I wish I might comfort you, dear...." His voice was low and yearning. She let her hand remain in his, and with eyes from which the terror was fading she looked into his eyes to find them clear, honest, filled with love and care for her. They were good eyes, such as any bride might rejoice to find looking upon her from her husband's face. "You're--so good," she whispered. Then: "I'm tired, Bonbright, so tired--and--Oh, you don't understand, you CAN'T understand.... I'll be different presently--I know I shall. Don't be angry..." "Angry!" "I'll be a good wife to you, Bonbright," she said, tremulously, a bit wildly. "I--You sha'n't be disappointed in me.... I'll not cheat. ... But wait--WAIT. Let me rest and think. It's all been so quick." "You asked that," he said, hurt and puzzled. "Yes.... It had to be--and now I'm your wife... and I feel as if I didn't know you--as if you were a stranger. Don't you understand?... It's because I'm so helpless now--just as if you owned me and could do what you wanted to with me... and it makes me afraid...." "I--I don't understand very well," he said, slowly. "Maybe it's because I'm a man--but it doesn't seem as if it ought to be that way." He stopped and regarded her a moment, then he said, "Ruth, you've never told me you loved me." She sensed the sudden fear in his voice and saw the question that had to be answered, but she could not answer it. To-day she could not bring herself to the lie--neither to the spoken lie nor the more difficult lying action. "Not now," she said, hysterically. "Not to-day.... Wait.... I've married you. I've given myself to you.... Isn't that enough for now?... Give me time." It was not resentment he felt, not doubt of her. Her pitiful face, her cold little hands, the fear that lurked in her eyes, demanded his sympathy and forbearance, and, boy though he was, with all a boy's inexperience, he was man enough to give them, intuitive enough to understand something of the part he must play until she could adjust herself to her new condition. He pressed her hand--and released it. "I sha'n't bother you," he said, "until you want me.... But it isn't because I don't want you--don't want to hold you--to LOVE you... and to have you love me.... It will be all right, dear. You needn't be afraid of me...." The car was stopping before the hotel. Now the doorman opened the door and Bonbright helped his bride to alight. She tottered as her feet touched the sidewalk, and he took her arm to support her as he might have helped an invalid. The elevator carried them up to the floor on which were the rooms that had been prepared for them, and they stopped before the door while he inserted the key and turned the lock for their admission. On the threshold she halted, swept by a wave of terror, but, clenching her hands and pressing shut her eyes, she stepped within. The door closed behind them--closed out her girlhood, closed out her independence, shut away from her forever that ownership of herself which had been so precious, yet so unrecognized and unconsidered. It seemed to her that the closing of that door--even more than the ceremony of marriage--was symbolical of turning over to this young man the title deeds of her soul and body. ... Bonbright was helping her to rid herself of her wraps, leading her to a sofa. "Lie down," he said, gently. "You're tired and bothered. Just lie down and rest." "Are we going away?" she asked, presently. "Have I got to get ready?" He had promised her they would go away--and had not seen her since that moment to tell her what had happened. Hilda would not let him go to her that morning, so she was in ignorance of the change in his condition, of his break with his family, and of the fact that he was nothing but a boy with a job, dependent upon his wages. Until this moment he had not thought how it might affect her; of her disappointment, of the fact that she might have expected and looked forward to the position he could give her as the wife of the heir apparent to the Foote dynasty.... It embarrassed him, shamed him as a boy might be shamed who was unable to buy for his girl a trinket she coveted at some country fair. Now she must be told, and she was in no condition to bear disappointments. "I promised you we should go away," he said, haltingly, "but--but I can't manage it. Things have happened....I've got to be at work in the morning. Maybe I should have told you. Maybe I should have come last night after it happened--" She opened her eyes, and at the expression of his face she sat up, alarmed. It told her that no ordinary, small, casual mishap had befallen, but something vital, something which might affect him--and her tremendously. "What is it?" she asked. "What has happened?" "I went home last night," he said, slowly. "After--you promised to marry me--I went home to tell father....Mother was there. There was a row--but mother was worse than father. She was--rather bad." "Rather bad--how, Bonbright?" "She--didn't like my marrying you. Of course we knew neither of them would like it, but I didn't think anything like this would happen. ...You know father and I had a fuss the other day, and I left the office. I had thought things over, and was going back. It seemed as if I ought to go back--as if that was the thing to do.... Well, mother said things that made it impossible. I'm through with them for good. The Family and the Ancestors can go hang." His voice grew angry as recollection of that scene presented itself. "Mother said I shouldn't marry you..." "You--you don't mean you're not going to--to have anything to do with Bonbright Foote, Incorporated--and all those thousands of men?" "That's it....I couldn't do anything else. I had to break with them. Father was bad, but it was mother....She said she would never receive you or recognize you as my wife--and that sort of thing--and I left. I'm never going back.... On your account I'm sorry. I can't give you so much, and I can't do the things for you that I could.... We'll be quite poor, but I've got a job. Mr. Lightener gave me a job, and I've got to go to work in the morning. That's why we can't go away...." "You mean," she said, dully, trying to sense this calamity, "that you will never go back? Never own--that--business?" "It was a choice of giving you up or that. Mother made that clear. If I married you I should never have anything from them...." She did not see the happiness that might lie for her in the possession of a husband whose love was so great that he could give up the kingdoms of the earth for her. She could not see the strength of the boy, his loyalty, his honor. All she saw was the crushing of her plan before it began to germinate.... She had given herself for the Cause. She was here, this young man's wife, alone in these rooms with him, because she loved the Cause and had martyred herself for it.... Her influence was to ameliorate the conditions of thousands of the Bonbright Foote laborers; she was to usher in a new era for them--and for that she had offered herself up.... And now, having bound herself forever to this boy that she did not love--loving another man--the possibility of achievement was snatched from her and her immolation made futile. It was as if she plunged into a rapids, offering her life to save a child that struggled there, to find, when she reached the little body, and it was too late to save herself, that it was a wax figure from some shop window.... But her position was worse than that; what she faced was worse than swift, merciful death.... It was years of a life of horrid possibilities, tied to a man whose chattel she was. She stood up and clutched his arm. "You're joking," she said, in a tense, metallic voice. "I'm sorry, dear. It's very true." "Oh!" Her voice was a wail. "It can't be--it can't be. I couldn't bear that--not THAT...." Bonbright seized her by the arms and peered into her face. "Ruth," he said, "what do you mean? Was THAT why you married me? You're not like those women I've heard about who married--for MONEY." "No....No..." she cried. "Not that--Oh, don't believe that." She spoke the truth, and Bonbright could not doubt it. Truth was in her words, her tone, her face....It was a thing she was incapable of, and he knew it. She could not be mean, contemptible. He drew her to him and kissed her, and she did not resent it. A surge of happiness filled him....She had been dismayed because of him. There was no other interpretation of her words and actions. She was conscience stricken because she had brought misfortune upon him. He laughed boyishly. "Don't worry about me. I don't care," he said, gayly, "so long as I have you. You're worth it a dozen times....I'm glad, Ruth--I'm glad I had to pay for you dearly. Somehow it makes me seem worthier--you understand what I mean...." She understood--understood, too, the interpretation he had put on her words. It brought a flush to her white cheeks....She disengaged herself gently. "If we're not going away," she said, "I can lie down--and rest." "Of course." "Alone? In the next room?" He opened the door for her. "I'll be as quiet as a mouse," he said. "Have a good sleep. I'll sit here and read." She read in his eyes a plea for affection, for another kiss, as she left him, but she had not the strength to give it. She went into the adjoining room, and shut the door after her. Then she stood there silently regarding the door--regarding the KEY.... If she locked it she was safe from him. He could not come in.... She could lock him out. Her hand went to the key, but came away without turning it. No.... She had no right. She had made her bargain and must abide by it. Bonbright was her husband and she was his wife, and as such she must not turn locks upon him.... Marriage gave him the right of free access. Dressed as she was, in the suit that had been her wedding dress, she threw herself upon the bed and gave up her soul to torment. She had taken her all and paid it for a thing desirable in her eyes--and her all had bought her nothing. She had wrenched her love from the man to whom she had given it, and all her life must counterfeit love for a man whom she did not love--and in return she would receive--nothing. She had seen herself a Joan of Arc. That dream was blown away in a breath.... But the bargain was made. That she did not receive what she had thought to receive was no fault of Bonbright's--and she must endure what was to be endured. She must be honest with him--as honesty showed its face to her. To be honest with him meant to her to deceive him daily, hourly, to make her life a lie. He was cheated enough as matters stood--and he did not deserve to be cheated. He was good, gentle, a man. She appreciated him--but she did not love him. ... And appreciating him, aware of his strength and his goodness to her, she could not keep her eyes off the door. She lay there eying it with ever increasing apprehension--yet she did not, would not, could not, rise to turn the key.... CHAPTER XX In every formation of a fresh family group there must be readjustments of habit and of thought. Two people who fancy they know each other intimately discover that they are in reality utter strangers. They start a new acquaintanceship at the moment of marriage, and the wonder of it is that so many millions of them manage the thing with success. It is true that a man and woman who join their hands and their fortunes because of a deep-seated, genuine, calm affection have a greater chance of lasting happiness than those who unite because of the spur of sudden, flaring passion. There are those who contend that friendship and mutual confidence are a firmer foundation for marriage than the emotion that we call love. Thousands of men and women have married because prudence told them a certain other individual would make a trustworthy, efficient, comfortable husband or wife, and as days and weeks and years passed this respect and trust and regard has blossomed into a beautifully permanent flower of love....Doubtless happiness has resulted from marriages which resulted from motives purely mercenary, for human beings are blessed by Heaven with a quality called adaptability. Of no marriage can one predict happiness surely. At the altar the best one can do is to hope for the best....But what can be said of a marriage brought about by the causes and motives that led Bonbright Foote to Ruth Frazer and Ruth Frazer to Bonbright Foote? Of the two, Bonbright's reasons most nearly approached the normal, and therefore the safe; Ruth had been urged by a motive, lofty perhaps, visionary, but supremely abnormal. Therefore the adjustments to be made, the problems to be mastered, the difficulties in their road to a comfortable, reasonably happy future, were multiplied many times. Instead of being probable, the success of their little social entity became merely possible, doubtfully possible. Ruth, being a woman, understood something of this. Bonbright, being a boy, and a singularly inexperienced boy, understood it not at all, and as he sat alone, a closed door between him and his wife, he wearied his brain upon the puzzle of it. He came to the conclusion that the present difficult situation was the natural thing. It was natural for the bride to be timid, frightened, reluctant, for she was entering a dark forest of strange, new experiences. He understood that his own case might be exaggerated because their marriage had been preceded by no ordinary courtship, with the opportunity which a courtship gives to begin the inevitable readjustments, and to become accustomed to intimacy of thought and act. The ordinary man has little intuition, but a world of good intentions. Men blunder woefully in their relations with women, not because of innate boorishness in the sex, not because of willful brashness, but because of lack of understanding. They mean well, but their performance is deplorable.... In that moment Bonbright's most valuable possession was a certain intuition, a fineness, a decency, a reserve, a natural modesty. As he sat there alone he reached a conclusion which was, probably, the most profoundly wise conclusion he was to arrive at in his life. It came not so much from taking thought, as by blessed inspiration. This conclusion was that he must court Ruth Frazer as a sweetheart, not approach her as a husband.... It was a course that would require infinite patience, forbearance, fineness. In his love for Ruth he felt himself capable of it; felt that it would bring its reward. So he sat and waited. He did not approach the door which she had watched with apprehensive eyes until weariness had closed them in sleep.... The luncheon hour had passed when he heard Ruth moving about within. "Hungry?" he called to her, boyishly. His voice reassured her. It was comradely. There was nothing in it that menaced her security....The sleep and the rest had bettered her. She was less tense, more calmly resigned to events. She had marshaled her will; had set it to bear her up and to compel her to carry on bravely and without hysteria the part of a wife. "I am hungry," she said, and presently she appeared in the door, stood there a moment, and then walked across the room to Bonbright. "Thank you," she said, simply, and he understood. "You don't mind being poor for a while?" he asked. "I've always been poor," she said, with something that approached her old smile. "Because," he said, "we are poor. I am going to earn about thirty dollars a week. So, you see, we can't afford to live here. We've got to find a little house or flat...." "Let's begin," she cried. It was not the delight of a woman at the thought of hunting for her first home, but the idea of having something to do, of escaping from these rooms. "Let's go right out to look." "First," he said, with pretended severity, "we eat." So they went down to the dining room, and after they had eaten they inaugurated their house hunting. Perhaps Providence intervened at this difficult moment to give them occupation. If so, Providence acted with amazing wisdom and kindness. Ruth found an interest in the search. She forgot. Her mind was taken from morbid breedings as they climbed stairs and explored rooms and questioned agents. Bonbright was very happy--happier because he was openly and without shame adapting his circumstances to his purse.... They found a tiny flat, to be had for a fourth of their income. Ruth said that was the highest proportion of their earnings it was safe to pay for rent, and Bonbright marveled at her wisdom in such matters. ... Then there were the furnishings to select. Bonbright left the selection and the chaffering wholly to Ruth--and she enjoyed it. The business rested, refreshed, stimulated her. It pushed her fears into the dim background and brought again to the light of day her old self that Bonbright loved. More than once she turned the light of her famous grin upon him or upon some thrice lucky salesman. But the end was reached at last; everything was done that could be done, and there was nothing to do but to return to the hotel. Ruth did her best to keep up her spirits, but by every block that they approached the hotel, by so much her lightness vanished, by so much her apprehension, her heartache, the black disappointment of the failure of her great plan, returned. Bonbright saw the change and it grieved him--it strengthened the determination he had made. When they reached their rooms he drew her over to the sofa. "Let's sit here together, dear," he said. "We haven't had a decent talk, and there are a heap of things to talk about, aren't there?" She forced herself to sit down close to him, and waited icily, steeling herself to yield to his demonstrations of affection if he offered them, but he did not. "I've an idea," he said. "I--I hope you'll like it. It'll be sort of--fun. Sort of a game, you know.... While I sat here this afternoon I was thinking about us--and--how I want to make you happy....We were married--suddenly. Most folks play along and get to know each other, and grow to love each other gradually, I guess....I didn't grow to love you gradually. I don't know how it was with you. But, anyhow, we missed our courtship. We started right in by being husband and wife. Of course I'm glad of that....Don't think I'm not. I wanted you--right away. But--but my idea was that maybe we could--have our courtship now--after we are married....Mayn't we?" "What--what do you mean?" she asked, fearfully, hopefully. "We'll pretend we aren't married at all," he said. "We'll make believe we're at a house party or something, and I just met you. I'm no end interested in you right off, of course. I haven't any idea how you feel about me....We'll start off as if we just met, and it's up to me to make you fall in love with me....I'll bring out the whole bag of tricks. Flowers and candy and such like, and walks and rides. I'll get right down and pursue you....After a while you'll--maybe--get so far as to call me by my first name." He laughed like a small boy. "And some day you'll let me hold your hand--pretending you don't know I'm holding it at all....And I'll be making love to you to--to beat the band. Regular crush I'll have on you....What do you think?" "You mean REALLY?...You mean we'll LIVE like that? That we won't be married, but do like you said?" She was staring at him with big, unbelieving eyes. "That's the idea exactly....We won't be married till I WIN you. That's the game....And I'll try hard--you haven't any notion how hard I'll try." There was something pleading, pathetic in his voice, that went to her heart. "Oh," she said, breathlessly, "that's DEAR of you.... You're good--so GOOD.... I--I hate myself.... You'll do THAT?... I didn't--know anybody--could be--so--so good." She swayed, swayed toward him in a storm of tears, and he drew her face down on his shoulder while with awkward hand he patted her shoulder. "There.... There..." he said, clumsily, happily. She did not draw away from him, but lay there wetting his coat with her tears, her heart swelling with thanks-giving; fear vanished, and something was born in her breast that would never die. The thing that was born was a perfect trust in this man she had married, and a perfect trust is one of the rarest and most wonderful things under the sun. For so young a man, Bonbright felt singularly fatherly. He held his wife gently, silently, willing that she should cry, with a song in his heart because she nestled to him and wept on his shoulder. If he deluded himself that she clung to him because of other, sweeter emotion than grief, relief, it did not diminish his happiness. The moment was the best he had known for months, perhaps the best he had ever known. Ruth sat up and wiped her eyes. He looked into them, saw them cleared now of dread, and it was a sufficient reward. For her part, in that instant, Ruth almost loved Bonbright, not as lovers love, but as one loves a benefactor, some one whose virtues have earned affection. But it was not that sort that Bonbright asked of her, she knew full well. "Now--er--Miss Frazer," he said, briskly, "I don't want to appear forward for a new acquaintance, but if I suggested that there was a bully play in town--sort of tentatively, you know--what would happen to me?" "Why, Mr. Foote," she replied, able to enter into the spirit of the pretense, "I think you'd find yourself in the awkward position of a young man compelled to buy two seats." "No chaperons?" "Where I come from," she said, "chaperons are not in style." "And we'll go some place after the play....I want to make the most of my opportunity, because I've got to work all day to-morrow. It's a shame, too, because I have a feeling that I'd like to monopolize you." "Aren't you going a bit fast for a comparative stranger?" she asked, merrily. He pretended to look crestfallen. "You sha'n't have to put me in my place again," he promised; "but wait--wait till we've known each other a week!...Do you know, Miss Frazer, you have a mighty charming smile!" "It has been remarked before," she said. "We mustn't keep our hostess waiting. I'm afraid we'll be late for dinner, now." He chuckled at the idea. "I never have eaten dinner with a man in evening dress," she said, with a touch of seriousness. "In the country I come from the men don't wear them." How true that was--in the country she came from, the country of widows who kept boarding houses, of laborers, of Dulac and their sort! She was in another land now, a land she had been educated to look upon with enmity; the land of the oppressor. Little revolutionist--she was to learn much of that country in the days to come and to know that in it bad men and good men, worthy women and trifling women, existed in about the same ratio as in her own familiar land....Bonbright insisted upon buying her violets--the first costly flowers she had ever worn. They occupied desirable seats--and the few plays Ruth had seen she had seen from gallery heights! Fortunately it was a bright play, brimming with laughter and gayety, presenting no squalid problems, holding up to the shrinking eyes of the audience no far-fetched, impossible tangles of sex. They enjoyed it. Ruth enjoyed it. That she could do so is wonderful, perhaps, but then, so many human capabilities are wonderful! Men about to be hanged eat a hearty meal with relish.... How much more might Ruth find pleasure since she had been granted a reprieve! When the curtain descended they moved toward the exits, waiting for the crowd to clear the way. Bonbright's attention was all for Ruth, but her eyes glanced curiously about, observing the well-fed, well-kept, brilliantly dressed men and women--men and women of the world to which she belonged now. As one approached them and saw them, they were singularly human. Their faces were not different from faces she was accustomed to. Cleaner they were, perhaps, with something more of refinement. They were better dressed, but there she saw the same smiles, the same weariness, the same charm, the same faces that told their tales of hard work and weary bodies.... They were just human beings, all of them, HER sort and these.... Suddenly her fingers tightened on her husband's arm. He heard her draw a quick, startled little breath, and looked up to see his father and mother approaching them, from the opposite direction. Bonbright had not expected this. It was the last place in the world he had thought to encounter his parents--but there they were, not to be avoided. He stopped, stiffened. Ruth stole a glance at his face and saw it suddenly older, tenser. Mr. and Mrs. Foote approached slowly. Ruth knew the moment Mrs. Foote saw her husband, for the stately woman bit her lip and spoke hurriedly to Bonbright's father, who glanced at Bonbright and then at her uncertainly. Ruth saw that Mrs. Foote held her husband's arm, did not allow him to turn aside, but led him straight toward them.... Bonbright stood stiff, expectant. On came his father and mother, with no quickening of pace. Bonbright's eyes moved from one face to the other as they approached. Now they were face to face. Mrs. Foote's eyes encountered Ruth's, moved away from the girl to her son, moved on--giving no sign of recognition. Mr. Foote looked stonily before him....And so they passed, refusing even a bow to their son, the only child that had been given them....That others had seen the episode Ruth knew, for she saw astonished glances, saw quick whisperings. Then she looked up at her husband. He had not turned to look after his parents, but was staring before him, his face white, his eyes burning, little knots of muscle gathered at the points of his jaw. She pressed his arm gently and heard his quick intake of breath--so like a sob. "Come," he said, harshly. "Come." "It was cruel--heartless," she said, fiercely, quickly partisan, making his quarrel her own, with no thought that the slight had been for her as well as for him. "Come," he repeated. They went out into the street, Bonbright quivering with shame and anger, Ruth not daring to speak, so white, so hurt was his face, so fierce the smolder in his eyes. "You see..." he said, presently. "You see...." "I've cost you THAT," she said. "That," he said, slowly, as if he could not believe his words, "that was my father and--my mother." Ruth was frightened. Not until this moment did she realize what she had done; not until now did the teeth of remorse clench upon her. To marry her--because he loved her--this boy at her side must suffer THIS. It was her doing....She had cheated him into it. She had cost him this and was giving nothing to pay for it. He had foreseen it. Last night he had cut adrift from his parents because of her--willingly. She knew he would have made, would make, any sacrifice for her....And she had married him with no love in her heart, married him to use him for her own ends! She dared not doubt that what she had done was right. She dared not question her act, nor that the end justified the means she had used. ...But the end was not to be attained. By the act of marrying Bonbright she had made it impossible for herself to further the Cause....It was a vicious circle of events. As she watched his face she became all woman; revolutionist and martyr disappeared. Her heart ached for him, her sympathy went out to him. "Poor boy!..." she said, and pressed his arm again. "It was to--be expected," he said, slowly. "I'm glad it's over....I knew what would happen, so why should the happening of it trouble me?...There have been six generations in my family that would do that thing.... Ruth, the Foote Tradition is ended. It ended with me. Such things have no right to exist.... Six generations of it...." She did not speak, but she was resolving silently: "I'll be good to him. I'll make him happy. I'll make up to him for this...." He shook himself. "It doesn't matter," he said. "We sha'n't let it interfere with our evening....Come, Miss Frazer, where shall we lunch?" CHAPTER XXI All of Ruth's life had been spent in contact with the abnormal, the ultraradical. The tradition which time had reared about HER family--as powerful in its way as the Foote Tradition, but separated from it by a whole world--had brought acquaintanceship and intimacy with strange people and strange cults. In the parlor of her home she had listened to frank, fantastic discussions; to lawless theories. These discussions, beginning anywhere, ended always with the reform of the marriage relation. Anarchist, socialist, nihilist, atheist, Utopian, altruist--all tinkered with the family group, as if they recognized that the civilization they were at war with rested upon this and no other foundation. So Ruth was well aware how prone the individual is to experiment with the processes of forming and continuing the relations between men and women which have for their cardinal object the peopling of the earth. But in spite of the radicalism which was hers by right of inheritance and training, she had not been attracted by any of them. A certain basic sense of balance had enabled her to see these things were but vain gropings in the dark; that they might flower successfully in abnormal individual cases--orchid growths--but that each was doomed to failure as a universal solution. For mankind in bulk is normal, and its safety lies in a continuance of normality. Ages had evolved the marriage relation as it existed; ages might evolve it into something different as sudden revolution could not. It was the one way, and she knew it to be the one way. Therefore she recognized that Bonbright and herself were embarked on one of these unstable, experimental craft. She saw, as he did not, that it was unseaworthy and must founder at the first touch of storm. She pinned no false hopes to it; recognized it as a makeshift, welcome to her only as a reprieve--and that it must soon be discarded for a vessel whose planking was reality and whose sails were woven of normal stuff. As the days went by and they were settled in their little flat, living the exotic life which temporarily solved their problem, she knew it could not last; feared it might dissolve at any moment. Inevitable signs of the gust that should destroy it had been apparent...and her dread returned. Even Bonbright was able to see that his plan was not a perfect success. If it had not been for Dulac.... He complicated the thing unendurably.... If Bonbright were still heir apparent to the Foote dynasty, and her plan might be carried out.... She felt a duty toward Dulac--she had promised to hold him always in her thoughts, felt he was entitled to a sort of spiritual loyalty from her. And, deprived of him, she fancied her love for him was as deep as the sea and as enduring as time.... Long days alone, with only the slightest labor to occupy her hands and mind, gave her idle time--fertile soil for the raising of a dark crop of morbid thoughts. She brooded much, and, brooding, became restless, unhappy, and she could not conceal it from Bonbright when he came home eagerly for his dinner, ready to take up with boyish hope the absurd game he had invented. She allowed herself to think of Dulac; indeed, she forced herself to think of him.... Five days she had been married, when, going to the door in answer to the bell, she opened it, to find Dulac standing there. She uttered a little cry of fright and half closed the door. He held it open with his knee. Sudden terror, not of him, but of herself, caused her to thrust against the door with all her strength, but he forced it open slowly and entered. "Go away," she said, shrinking from him and standing with her back against the wall. "Go away...." "I stayed away as long as I could," he said. "Now I'm not going away--until we've had a talk." "There's nothing for us to--say," she whispered. "You must be crazy--to come here." He was laboring under excitement. She could see the smoldering fire in his black eyes; it was plain that he was worn, tired, a man fighting in the last ditch. His hold upon himself was not secure, but she could not be sorry for him now. The possibilities his presence suggested terrified her and excluded all other thoughts. He stood with his burning eyes upon her face, not speaking; staring. "Go away," she begged, but he shook his head. "You've been cheated," he said, hoarsely. "It doesn't matter if you gave yourself to HIM for the reason you said you did--or for his money. You're cheated.... His kind always cheats. You're getting NOTHING.... Are you going to stand it? That's what I came to find out.... Are you going to stand it?" She could make no reply. "What are you going to do about it?" he demanded. "What can I do?... It's too late." "Look here, you married him to get something--to be able to do something.... You didn't have any other reason. You didn't love him. ... You loved ME. He's been kicked out by his family. He doesn't own anything. He's out for good, and you can't get anything or do anything. I want to know what you're going to do about it." "Nothing." "Nothing?... You're not going to stick to him. You don't love him--probably you hate him by this time.... You couldn't help it." "I married him," she said. "It isn't his fault if his family put him out.... It was MY fault. They did it because he married me.... It was I who cheated HIM--and you can see--what it's--cost him.... I've got to make it up to him--someway. I--I don't hate him.... He's been good.... Oh, he's been wonderfully good." "Do you want to live with him?" "No," she said. "No...." "What about me?... I love you, don't I? Wasn't I before HIM?... Didn't you give yourself to me? What about me?..." "That's all--over," she said. "Oh, please go away. I mustn't talk about that....I'm MARRIED...." "Listen," he said, feverishly. "I love you. This fellow you've married doesn't know what love is.... What does he know about it? What would he do for you?..." He leaned forward, his face working, his body quivering with passion. She let her eyes fall, unable to support his gaze, and she trembled. His old fascination was upon her; the glamour of him was drawing her. He poured out a flood of passionate words, bared his soul to her starkly, as he talked swiftly, burningly of his love, and what his love meant to him and what it would mean to her. She closed her eyes to shut out the sight of him; she summoned all the strength of her will to preserve her from his fascination, to resist his temptation.... "I'd have left you alone," he said, "if you'd got what you paid for. ...But when you didn't--when you got nothing--there was no reason for me to stay away.... You belonged to me. You do belong to me.... Why should you stick to him? Why?" She could not answer him. The only reason she should cling to her husband was because he WAS her husband, but she knew that would be no reason to Dulac. "There's been a marriage ceremony," he said, scornfully. "What of it? It isn't marriage ceremonies that unite men and women.... It's love--nothing else.... When you told me you loved me you married me more really than any minister can marry you. That was a real marriage--but you didn't think you were breaking any laws or violating any morals when you left me and married HIM. Just because we hadn't gone to a church.... You're married to ME and living with him--that's what it amounts to.... Now I'm here demanding you. I'm after my wife." "No..." she said, weakly. "Yes, my wife.... I want you back and I'm going to have you back. ... With the bringing up you've had, you're not going to let this CONVENTION--this word--marriage--hold you.... You're coming with me." The thing was possible. She saw the possibility of it, the danger that she might yield. The man's power drew her. She WANTED to go; she WANTED to believe his sophistry, but there was a stanchness of soul in her that continued to resist. "No..." she said, again. "You'll come," he said, "because you can't stand it. I know.... Every time he touches you you want to scream. I know. It's torture. ... He'll find out. Don't you think he'll find out you don't love him--how you feel when he comes near you? And what then?... You'll come to me willingly now--or you'll come when he pushes you out." "He'll--not--find out." Dulac laughed. "Anybody but a young fool would have known before this....But I don't want to wait for that. I want you now." He came toward her eagerly to take her in his arms. She could not move; her knees refused to carry her from him....Her senses swam. If he touched her it would be the end--she knew it would be the end. If he seized her in his arms she would never be able to escape. His will would master her will. Yet she could not move--she was under his spell. It was only subconsciously that she wanted to escape. It was only the true instinct in her that urged her to escape. His arms were reaching out for her now; in an instant his hands would touch her; she would be clutched tightly to him--and she would be lost.... Her back was against the wall....In that supreme instant, the instant that stood between her and the thing that might be, the virtue in her recoiled, the stanchness asserted itself, the command to choose the better from the worse course made itself heard to her will. She cried out inarticulately, thrust out with terrified arms, and pushed him from her. "Don't touch me," she cried. "What you say is not true. I know. ...I'm his wife--and--you must go. You must--never come back. ...Bonbright is my husband--and I'll--stay with him....I'll do what I've got to do. I sha'n't listen to you. Go--please, oh, please go--NOW." The moment had come to Dulac and he had not been swift enough to grasp it. He realized it, realized he had failed, that nothing he could do or say would avail him now....He backed toward the door, never removing his eyes from her face. "You're MY wife," he said. "You won't come now, but you'll come. ...I'll make you come." He stopped a moment in the door, gazing at her with haggard eyes.... "And you know it," he said. Then he closed the door, and she was alone. She sank to the floor and covered her face with her hands, not to hide her tears--for there were no tears to flow--but because she was ashamed and because she was afraid....She knew how close she had been to yielding, how narrow had been the margin of her rescue--and she was afraid of what might happen next time, of what might happen when her life with Bonbright became unbearable, as she knew it must become unbearable. She crouched and trembled...and then she began to think. It was given her to perceive what she must do. Instead of fondling Dulac in her thoughts, she must put him out of her heart, she must not permit him in her dreams....She had promised him he should be always present in her thoughts. That promise she must break. Daily, hourly, she must steel herself against him in preparation for his next appearance, for she knew he would appear again, demanding her....It was not in the man to give her up, as it was not in him to surrender any object which he had set his soul to attain. In spite of cults and theories and makeshifts and sophistries, she knew where her duty lay, where the safety of her soul lay--it was in fidelity to her husband. She resolved that fidelity should be his, and as she resolved it she knew that he deserved it of her. She resolved that she would eject Dulac from her life, and that, with all the strength of her will, she would try to bring herself to give that love to Bonbright which she had promised him by implication, but never by word. She did not know that love cannot be created by an effort of the will.... Before she arose from her pitiful posture she considered many plans, and discarded them all. There was no plan. It must all be left to the future. First she believed it was required that she should tell Bonbright she had married him without love, and beg of him to be patient and to wait, for she was trying to turn her love to him. But that, she saw, would not serve. He was being patient now, wonderfully, unbelievably patient. What more could she ask of him? It would only wound him, who had suffered such wounds through her. She could not do that. She could do nothing but wait and hope--and meet her problems as best she could when they arose. It was not an encouraging outlook. Resolve as she would, she could not quiet her fears. Dulac would come again. He might find her in a weaker moment. Now, instead of one terror she harbored two.... CHAPTER XXII Bonbright, in his business experience, had been like a man watching a play in a foreign language, from a box seat--with an interpreter to translate the dialogue. Now he found himself a member of the cast; very much a member, with abundant lines and business. In his old position as heir apparent to Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, he had been unhappy. Time had hung heavily on his hands. He had not been allowed to participate in actual affairs except as some automatic machine or rubber stamp participates. There every effort of his superiors had been directed to eliminating his individuality and to molding him to the Bonbright Foote type. He had not been required to use his brains--indeed, had been forbidden to do so. In his new employment the condition was reversed. It seemed as if everything his father had desired him to do was interdicted in Malcolm Lightener's vast organization; everything that had been taboo before was required of him now. He was asked to think; he was taught to make his individuality felt; he was encouraged to suggest and to exercise his intelligence independently. There were actually suggestion boxes in every department where the humblest laborer might deposit a slip of paper telling the boss any notion he had which he deemed of service to the enterprise. More than that--any suggestion accepted was paid for according to its value. In Bonbright's father's plant change and invention were frowned upon. New devices were regarded as impious. The typewriter was tolerated; the telephone was regarded with shame. The Ancestors had not made use of such things....Malcolm Lightener let no instrument for adding efficiency pass untried. It was the same in office and in shop. The plant was modern to the second--indeed, it was a stride ahead of the minute. There was a large experimental laboratory presided over by an engineer of inventive trend, whose business it was to eliminate and combine processes; to produce machines which would enable one man to perform the labor of three; to perform at one process and one handling the work that before required several processes and the passing of the thing worked upon from hand to hand. If Bonbright had been interested in any phase of his father's business it had been in the machine shops. Now he saw how costly were those antique processes, how wasteful of time and labor. His father's profits were large; Bonbright saw very quickly how a revolution in methods would make them enormous. But he knew that revolution would not take place--the Ancestors forbade.... The thing had started at the first moment of his connection with Malcolm Lightener as an employee. He had reported promptly at seven o'clock, and found Lightener already in his office. It was Lightener's custom to come down and to go home later for breakfast. "Morning," said Lightener. "Where's your overalls?" "Overalls?" said Bonbright. "Didn't I tell you to bring some? You'll need 'em. Wait, I'll send a boy out for some--while we have a talk....Now then, you've got a job. After six o'clock you and I continue on the same basis as before; between seven in the morning and six at night you're one of the men who work for me--and that's all. You get no favors. What they get you get....There aren't any soft jobs or hangers-on here. Everybody earns what he's paid--or he finds he isn't getting paid. Clear?" "Perfectly," said Bonbright, not wholly at his ease. "The object of this plant is to make automobiles--to make GOOD automobiles, and to make the most of them that can be made. If one man falls down on his job it delays everybody else. Suppose one man finishing THIS"--he held up a tiny forging--"does a botch job.... There's just one of these to a car, and he's held up the completion of a car. That means money.... Suppose the same man manages to turn out two perfect castings like this in the time it once took to turn out one.... Then he's a valuable man, and he hustles up the whole organization to keep even with him. Every job is important because it is a part of the whole operation, which is the turning out of a complete automobile. Understand?" "Yes." "Some men are created to remain laborers or mechanics all their lives. Some are foreordained bookkeepers. A few can handle labor--but that's the end of them. A very few have executive and organizing and financial ability. The plums are for them.... Every man in this plant has a chance at them. You have.... On the other hand, you can keep on earning what you're getting now until you're sixty. It's up to you.... I'm giving you a start. That's not sentiment. It's because you've education and brains--and there's something in heredity. Your folks have been successful--to a degree and in their own way. I'm making a bet on you--that's all. I'm taking a chance that you'll pay back at the box office what you're going to cost for some months. In other words, instead of your paying for your education, I'm sending you to school on the chance that you'll graduate into a man that will make money for me. But you've got to make good or out you go. Fair?" "Yes," said Bonbright. "All right. Remember it....You've got the stuff in you to make a man at the top--maybe. But you don't start at the top. You've got to scramble up just like anybody else. Right now you're not worth a darn. You don't know anything and you can't do anything. Day labor's where you belong--but you couldn't stand it. And it wouldn't be sense to put you at it, or I would. I'd set you to sweeping out the machine shops if I thought you needed it....Maybe you figured on sitting at a mahogany desk?" "I came to do whatever you put me at," Bonbright said. "I've been fed up on sitting at a mahogany desk." "Good--if you mean it. I hear a lot of four flush about what men are willing to do. Heaps of them repeat copybook platitudes....You're going to wear overalls and get your hands dirty. If you don't like it you can always quit....I know how to do darn nearly everything that's done in this place. The man who gets up near me has got to know it, too." Here was a hint for Bonbright of the possibilities that Malcolm Lightener opened up to him. "This morning you're going into the machine shop to run a lathe, and you're going to stay there till you KNOW how it's done. Then we'll move you some place else. Your place is in the office. But how soon you get there, or whether you ever get there, is up to you. Like the looks of it?" Bonbright was silent a moment. When he spoke it was not in reply to Lightener's question, but to put into words a fear that had become apparent. "The men," he said; "how about them?...You know, father sort of advertised me as a strike breaker and that kind of thing. Our men hate me. I suppose all laboring men feel that way about me." "We don't have any unions here. I run my own plant, and, by gracious! I always will. I give my men fair pay--better than most. I give them all the opportunity they ask for. I give them the best and safest conditions to work in that can be had. I figure a good crew in a plant is a heap more valuable than good machinery--and I keep my machinery in repair and look after it mighty careful. But no union nonsense.... You won't have any trouble with the men." Bonbright was not so sure.... Presently the boy returned with the overalls. Lightener wrote a note and handed it to the boy. "Take this man to Shop One and give this note to Maguire," he said; then he turned to Bonbright and jerked his thumb toward the door. Bonbright got up without a word and followed the boy. In a moment the boy opened a big door, and Bonbright stepped through. The sight took away his breath--not that he had never seen this room before, but that he was now seeing it through other eyes, not merely as a spectator, but as a participant. It seemed to him as if the dimensions of the room should be measured not in feet, but in acres. It was enormous, but huge as it was it was all too small for the tangle of machinery it contained. To Bonbright's eyes it seemed a tangle. A labyrinth of shafting, countershafting, hung from the high ceiling, from whose whirring pulleys belts descended to rows upon rows of machines below. It looked like some strange sort of lunar forest, or some species of monstrous, magic banyan tree. Here were machines of a hundred uses and shapes, singly, in batteries--a scrambled mass it seemed. There were small machines--and in the distance huge presses, massive, their very outlines speaking of gigantic power. Bonbright had seen sheets of metal fed into them, to be spewed out at another point bent and molded to a desired form. Overhead conveyers increased the scrambled appearance. Men with trucks, men on hurried errands, hurried here and there; other men stood silently feeding hungry contrivances--men were everywhere, engrossed in their work, paving scant attention to anything outside their task. And rushing up to Bonbright was a wave of composite sounds, a roar, a bellow, a shriek, a rattle, a whir, a grind.... It seemed the ultimate possibility of confusion. But as he walked down the aisle, dodging from time to time men or trucks that regarded him not at all, but depended on him to clear the way and to look out for himself, he was able to perceive something of the miraculous orderliness and system of it. He was given a hint of the plan--how a certain process would start--a bit of rough metal; how it would undergo its first process and move on by gradual steps from one machine to the next, to the next, in orderly, systematic way. No time was lost in carrying a thing hither and thither. When one man was through with it, the next man was at that exact point, to take it and contribute his bit to its transformation.... Something very like a thrill of pride passed over Bonbright. He was a part of this marvel.... Through this room they walked--the room would have sufficed in extent for a good-sized farm--and into another, not smaller, and into another and another. His destination, Shop One, was smaller, but huge enough. The boy led Bonbright to a short, fat man. in unbelievably grimy overalls and black, visored cap. "Mr. Maguire," he shouted, "here's a man and a note from the boss." Then he scurried away. Maguire looked at the note first, and shoved it into his pocket; then he squinted at Bonbright--at his face first; then, with a quizzical glint, at his clothes. Bonbright flushed. For the first time in his life he was ashamed of his clothes, and for a reason that causes few men to be ashamed of their clothes. He wished they were of cheaper cloth, of less expensive tailoring. He wished, most of all, that the bright new overalls in the bundle under his arm were concealing them from view. "You're a hell of a looking machinist," said Maguire. Bonbright felt it to be a remarkably true saying. "The boss takes this for a darn kindergarten," Maguire complained. "Ever run a lathe or a shaper or a planer?" "No." "He said to stick you on a lathe.... Huh! What's he know about it?... How's he expect this room to make a showing if it's goin' to be charged with guys like you that hain't nothin' but an expense?" Bonbright got the idea back of that. Maguire was personally interested in results; Maguire wanted his room to beat other rooms in the weekly reports; Maguire was working for something more than wages--he was playing the game of manufacturing to win. "You go on a planer," Maguire snapped, "and Gawd help you if you spoil more castings than I figger you ought to.... The boys here'll make it hot for you if you pull down their average." So the boys were interested, too. The thing extended downward from the bosses! "Goin' to work in them clothes?" asked Maguire, with a grin. "Overalls," said Bonbright, tapping his parcel. Maguire went to his desk and took a key from a box. "I'll show you your locker," he said; and presently Bonbright, minus his coat, was incased in the uniform of a laborer. Spick and span and new it was, and gave him a singularly uncomfortable feeling because of this fact. He wanted it grimed and daubed like the overalls of the men he saw about him. A boyish impulse to smear it moved him--but he was ashamed to do it openly. Maguire led him to a big contrivance which was called a shaper. A boy of eighteen was operating it. On its bed, which moved back and forth automatically, was bolted a great cake of iron--a casting in the rough. The machine was smoothing its surfaces. "Show him," Maguire said to the boy, "then report to me." The boy showed Bonbright efficiently--telling him what must be done to that iron cake, explaining how the machine was to be stopped and started, and other necessary technical matters. Then he hurried off. Bonbright gazed at the casting ruefully, afflicted with stage fright. ... He was actually about to perform real labor--a labor requiring a certain measure of intellect. He was afraid he would make a mistake, would do something wrong, and possibly spoil the casting. He started the planer gingerly. It had not seemed to move rapidly when the boy was operating it, but now the bed seemed fairly to fly forward and snap back. He bent forward to look at the cutting he had made; it was right. So far he was all right.... Surreptitiously he laid his palm in a mass of grease and metal particles and wiped it across his breast.... It was an operation which he repeated more than once that morning. Gradually his trepidation passed and he began to enjoy himself. He enjoyed watching that casting move resistlessly under the tool; watched the metal curl up in glittering little curlicues as the tool ate its way across. He looked with pleasure at the surface already planed and with anticipation of the surface still in the rough.... It was interesting; it was fun. He wondered vaguely if all men who worked at tasks of this kind found pleasure in them, not appreciating that years of doing the same thing over and over might make it frightfully monotonous. The truth was the thing had not yet become work to him. It was a new experience, and all new experiences bring their thrill. Until the noon whistle blew he hardly took his eyes off his work. He did not know that Maguire passed him a dozen times, not stopping, but watching him closely as he passed.... With the stopping of work about him he realized that he was tired. He had lifted weights; he had used unaccustomed muscles. He was hot, sweaty, aching. He was hungry. "Where do we eat?" he asked the man who stood at the next machine. "Didn't you bring no lunch?" "No." "Some doesn't," said the man, as if he disapproved exceedingly of that class. "They feed at the hash house across the street.... Hain't broke, be you?" Bonbright understood the kindly offer implied. "Thank you--no," he said, and followed to the big wash room. He ate his lunch from the top of a tall stool. It was not the sort of food he was accustomed to, and the coffee was far from being the sort that had been served to him in his home or in his club--but he hardly noticed it. When he was through he walked back across the street and stood awkwardly among his mates. He knew none of them. An oldish, smallish man looked at him and at his overalls, and grinned. "New man?" he asked. "Yes." "Thought them overalls wasn't long off the shelf. You done a good job, though, considerin'." Bonbright blushed. "Where you been workin'?" How was Bonbright to answer? He couldn't tell the truth without shaming himself in this man's eyes, and all at once he found he greatly desired the good opinion of this workingman and of the other workingmen about him. "I--The last place I worked was Bonbright Foote, Incorporated," he said, giving his father's institution its full name. "Urn.... Strikin', eh?" Bonbright nodded. He had struck. Not with a union, but as an individual. "'Bout over, hain't it, from all I hear tell?" "I think so," said Bonbright. "Bad business.... Strikes is always bad--especially if the men git licked. Unions hain't no business to call strikes without some show of winnin'..... The boys talk that this strike never had no chance from the beginnin'.... I don't think a heap of that Foote outfit." "Why?" "Rotten place to work, I hear. A good machinist can't take no pleasure there, what with one thing and another. Out-of-date machines, and what not.... That young Foote, the cub, is a hell winder, they say. Ever see him?" "I've seen him." "His father was bad enough, by all accounts. But this kid goes him one better. Wonder some of them strikers didn't git excited and make him acquainted with a brick. I've heard of fightin' strikes hard--but never nothin' like this one. Seems like this kid's a hard one. Wants to smash hell out of the men just to see them smash.... How'd he strike you?" "I was sorry for him," said Bonbright, simply. "Sorry?... What's the idea?" "I--I don't believe he did what people believe. He didn't really have anything to do with the business, you know. He didn't count.... All the things that he was said to do--he didn't do at all. His father did them and let the men think it was his son." "Sounds fishy--but if it's so somebody ought to lambaste the old man. He sure got his son in bad.... What's this I hear about him marryin' some girl and gettin' kicked out?" "That's true," said Bonbright. "Huh!... Wonder what he'll do without his pa. Them kind hain't much good, I notice.... Maybe he's well fixed himself, though." "He hasn't a cent," said Bonbright. "Appears like you know a heap about him.... Maybe you know what he's doin' now?" "Working." "Friends give him a soft job?" "He's working in a--machine shop," said Bonbright. "G'wan," said the man, incredulously. Then he looked sharply at Bonbright, at his new overalls, back again at his face. "What's your name?" he asked, suspiciously. "Foote," said Bonbright. "HIM?" "Yes," said Bonbright. The man paused before he spoke, and there was something not kindly that came into his eyes. "Speakin' perty well of yourself, wasn't you?" he said, caustically, and, turning his back, he walked away. ... That action cut Bonbright more deeply than any of the few affronts that had been put upon him in his life had cut. He wanted to call the man back and demand that he listen to the truth. He wanted to explain, to set himself right. He wanted that man and all men to know he was not the Bonbright Foote who had brought on the strike and fought it with such vindictive ruthlessness. He wanted to prove that he was innocent, and to wring from them the right to meet and to be received by his fellow laborers as one of themselves.... He saw the man stop beside a group, say something, turn, and point to him. Other men turned and stared. Some snickered. Bonbright could not bear it. He jostled his way through the crowd and sought refuge in the shop. The morning had been a happy one; the afternoon was dismal. He knew he was marked. He saw men pointing at him, whispering about him, and could imagine what they were saying. In the morning he had been received casually as an equal. Nobody had welcomed him, nobody had paid particular attention to him. That was as it should be. He was simply accepted as another workman.... The attitude of the men was quite the opposite now. He was a sort of museum freak to them. From a distance they regarded him with curiosity, but their manner set him apart from them. He did not belong. He felt their hostility.... If they had lined up and jeered him Bonbright would not have felt the hurt so much, for there would have been something to arouse his fighting spirit. One remark he overheard, which stood aptly for the attitude of all. "Well, he's gettin' what's comin' to him," was the sentence. It showed him that the reputation his father had given him was his to wear, and that here he would find no friends, scant toleration, probably open hostility.... He got no pleasure that afternoon from watching his cake of metal move backward and forward with the planer-bed. When the whistle blew again he hurried out, looking into no man's face, avoiding contacts. He sneaked away.... And in his heart burned a hot resentment against the father that had done this thing.... CHAPTER XXIII Such pretense as Bonbright's and Ruth's is possible only to the morbid, the eccentric, or the unhealthy. Neither of them was morbid, neither eccentric, both abundantly well. Ruth saw the failure of it days before Bonbright had even a hint. After Dulac burst in upon her she perceived the game must be brought to an end; that their life of make-believe was weighted with danger for her. She determined to end it--but, ironically enough, to end it meant to enter upon another make-believe existence far harder to live successfully than the first. One can make believe to love on the stage, uttering skillfully the words of an author and carrying out the instructions of a stage director. An audience may be taken in.... A play is brief. But to begin a spurious love scene which is to last, not twenty minutes, but for a lifetime, is a matter of quite different color. She determined to begin it.... But with the sound of Bonbright's footfall on the stairs her resolution vanished. "To-morrow," she whispered to herself, with sudden dread. "To-morrow...." And so she put it off from day to day. In the beginning Bonbright had been optimistic. He had seen her reluctance, her reserves, vanishing in a few days. But they did not vanish. He found himself no nearer his wife than he had been at the beginning. Optimism became hope, hope dwindled, became doubt, uneasy wonder. He could not understand, and it was natural he should not understand. At first he had believed his experience was the experience of all bridegrooms. Days taught him his experience was unique, unnatural. Ruth saw him often now, sitting moodily, eyes on the floor--and she could read his thoughts. Yet he tried to bolster up the pretense. He had given his promise, and he loved Ruth. He could not, would not do as most men would have done.... What neither of them saw was that pretense had made a sudden change to reality impossible.... Bonbright was unhappy at home, unhappy at work. Just as he was outside his wife's real life, so he was excluded from the lives of the men he worked with. He was not, to them, a fellow laborer; he was Bonbright Foote VII. But he made no complaint or appeal to Malcolm Lightener.... He did not know how unnecessary an appeal to Lightener would be, for Lightener kept himself well acquainted with the facts, watched and waited, and the satisfaction of the automobile king grew and increased. "He's no squealer," he said to his daughter. "He's taking his medicine without making a face." "What's the good, dad? It's mean.... Why don't you take him into the office?" "We have a testing department," he said. "Every scrap of metal that goes into a car is tested before we use it.... Bonbright's in the testing department." "Isn't it possible to keep on testing a piece of metal till it's all used up?" she said. "H'm!... Suppose you mind your own business," he said, in his gruff, granite way--not rudely nor offensively. "How's his wife? How are they getting along?" Hilda shook her head. "They're queer, dad. Somehow I don't believe things are working out the way they should. I can't understand HER." "Squabbling?" "Never.... Bonbright's so gentle with her. He has a sort of wistful way with him as soon as she comes near. It makes me want to cry. Somehow he reminds me of a fine, affectionate dog watching a master who doesn't give back any affection. You know." "Doesn't she?" "Give back affection?... That's just it. I don't know. I've been there and seen him come home. She acts queerly. As soon as she hears him coming up the stairs she seems to shut up. It's as if she turned out the lights.... Where the ordinary girl would be running to kiss him and make a fuss over him she--doesn't do anything.... And she keeps watching him. And there's something in her eyes like--well, like she was blaming herself for something, and was sorry for him. ... She seems, when she's with him, as if she were trying to make up to him for something--and didn't know how." "Readjustment," Lightener grunted. "They jumped into the thing kerplunk. Queer start-off." "I don't know.... She's a dear--and he's a dear.... It isn't like anything I've ever seen. It's something peculiar." "Must be his fault. I told him--" "It isn't his fault." Hilda spoke with certainty. "If you could see him you'd know it. His manner toward her--why, dad, I never saw a man so sweet and gentle and patient." "Maybe that's the trouble. Too much patience is as bad as too much raising the devil." "No.... It's something." She turned to leave the room, when her father called after her: "Bonbright quit chawing castings to-night. He doesn't know it, but to-morrow he gets a new job.... Has all of that he needs. Knows how it feels." "What's he going to do now?" "Nice, light, pleasant job.... He'll be passing rear axles--made by his father--down a chute to the assembling track. Bet he'll need Saint Jacob's oil on his back to-morrow night. Give his wife a job." "Why," she scolded, for she was on intimate terms with the factory, "that's common labor. He'll be working with Wops and Guineas and Polacks." He nodded. "If he stands the gaff I'll ease up on him." "If he doesn't?" Lightener shrugged his shoulders. "Dad," said Hilda, "sometimes you make me MAD...." When the factory heard what had become of Bonbright it laughed. Bonbright was aware it laughed, and he set his teeth and labored. Beside what he was doing now the machine shop had been play. Rear axles are not straws to be tossed about lightly. Nor are Wops, Guineas, Polacks, smelling of garlic, looking at one with unintelligent eyes, and clattering to one another in strange tongues, such workfellows as make the day pass more quickly.... Bonbright had to pass down a certain number of axles an hour. At definite, brief intervals a fragment of an automobile would move along the assembling track and pause beneath his spout--and his axle must be ready. There was a constant procession of fragments, and a second's delay brought up to his ears pointed commentary from below. ... The more pointed that those below knew who was above them. He worked feverishly. After a while it became acute torture. He felt as if every axle he handled was the last he could manage--but he forced himself to just one more and then just one more--and another. He worked in a daze. Thought-processes seemed to stop. He was just a mechanism for performing certain set acts. The pain was gone--everything was gone but the stabbing necessity for getting another axle on that chute in time. He wanted to stop at a certain stage, but there was something in him which would not allow it. After that he didn't care. "Another.... Another.... Another..." his brain sang over and over endlessly. He was wet with perspiration; he staggered under the weights; he was exhausted, but he could not stop. It was as if he were on a treadmill where he had to keep stepping on and on and on whether he could take another step or not.... After a century the noon whistle blew. Bonbright did not leave his place. He simply sagged down in his tracks and lay there, eyes shut, panting. Gradually his brain cleared, but he was too weary to move. Then thirst drove him to motion and he dragged himself to the wash room, cramped, aching, and there he drank and sopped himself with cold water.... So this was what men did to live! No wonder men were dissatisfied; no wonder men formed unions and struck and rioted!... Bonbright was getting in an efficient school the point of view of the laborer. In the afternoon Malcolm Lightener stood and watched Bonbright, though Bonbright did not see, for he was working in a red haze again, unconscious of everything but that insistent demand in his brain for "another.... Another.... Another...." Lightener watched, granite face expressionless, and then walked away. Bonbright did not hear the evening whistle. He placed another axle on the chute, but no one was below to take it. He wondered dimly what was the matter.... A Guinea from the next chute regarded him curiously, then walked over and touched his shoulder with dirty hand, and wafted garlic in his face. "Time for quit," said the man. Bonbright sat down where he was. It was over. That day was over. Not another axle, not another, not another. He laid his head against the chute and shut his eyes.... Presently he staggered to his feet and walked blindly to the stairway. At the bottom stood Malcolm Lightener, not there by accident, but with design to test Bonbright's metal to the utmost. He placed himself there for Bonbright to see, to give Bonbright opportunity to beg off, to SQUEAL. Bonbright, shoulders drooping, legs dragging, face drawn, eyes burning, would have passed him without recognition, without caring who it was he passed, but that did not suit Lightener's purpose. "Well, Bonbright?" he said. Sudden fire flashed in Bonbright's brain. He stopped, and with the knuckles of a hand that was torn and blistered and trembling, he knocked on Lightener's broad chest as he would have knocked on a door that refused to open. "Damn your axles," he said, thickly. "I can get them there--another--and another--and another--and another.... They're too slow below.... Make 'em come faster. I can keep up...." And all the time he was rapping on Lightener's chest. He was conscious of what he did and said, but he did not do and say it of his own volition. He was like a man who dimly sees and hears another man. Subconsciously he was repeating: "Not another one till to-morrow.... Not another one till to-morrow...." Abruptly he turned away from Lightener and, setting down each foot heavily with a clump, he plodded toward the wash room. He was going to rest. He was going to feel cool water on his head and his neck; he was going to revel in cool water... and then he would sleep. SLEEP! He made toward sleep as one lost in the desert would make toward a spring of sweet water.... Lightener stood and looked after Bonbright. His granite face did not alter; no light or shade passed over it. Not even in his gray eyes could a hint of his thoughts be read. Simply he stood and looked after Bonbright, outwardly as emotionless as a block of the rock that he resembled. Then he walked to his office, sat down at his desk, selected and lighted a cigar, and tilted back in his chair. "There's something to that Bonbright Foote formula," he said to himself. "It's all wrong, but it could produce THAT." Then, after a few moments of puffing and of studying the thing, he said: "We'll see if he comes back to-morrow.... If he DOES come back--" At home that evening Hilda asked him about Bonbright. He was ashamed to confess to her what he had done to the boy--yet he was proud of having done it. To his own granite soul it was right to subject men to such tests, but women would not understand. He knew his daughter would think him a brute, and he did not want his daughter to think any such thing. "If he comes back in the morning--" he promised. Bonbright came back in the morning, though he had been hardly able to drag himself out of bed. It was not strength of body that brought him, but pure will. He came, looking forward to the day as a man might look down into hell--but he came. "I'll show THEM," he said, aloud, at the breakfast table, as he forced himself to drink a cup of coffee. Ruth did not understand. She did not understand what was wrong with him; feared he was on the verge of an illness. He had come home the night before, scarcely speaking to her, and had gone directly to bed. She supposed he was in his room preparing for dinner, but when she went to call him she found him fast asleep, moaning and muttering uneasily. "What did you say?" she asked, uneasily. "Didn't know I spoke," he said, and winced as he moved his shoulders. But he knew what he had said---that he would show THEM. It wasn't Malcolm Lightener he was going to show, but the men--his fellow laborers. The thing that lay in his mind was that he must prove himself to be their equal, capable of doing what they could do. He wanted their respect--wanted it pitifully. Ruth watched him anxiously as he left the apartment. She knew things were not well with him and that he needed something a true wife should give. First, he needed to tell some one about it. He had not told me. If she had been inside his life, where she belonged, he must have told her. Second, he needed her sympathy, her mothering.... She might have been able to give him that--after a fashion.... She felt how it should be done, knew how she would have done it if only she loved him. "I could be the right kind of a wife," she said, wistfully. "I know I could...." Bonbright went doggedly to his place at the mouth of the chute and was ready with the whistle, an axle poised to slide downward to the assembling car below. He was afraid--afraid he would not be able to get through the day--absurdly afraid and ashamed of his physical weakness. If he should play out!... A boy tapped him on the shoulder. "You're wanted in the office," he heard. "I've got to--keep up," he said, dully. "Cars are coming along below," he explained, carefully, "and I've got to get the axles to them." "Here's a man to take your place," said the boy--and so strange is man created in God's image!--he did not want to go. He wanted to see it through till he dropped. "If you keep the boss waiting--" said the boy, ominously. Bonbright walked painfully to Lightener's office. "Well?" said Lightener. "I can do it--I'll harden to it," Bonbright said. "Huh!... Take off those overalls.... Boy, go to Mr. Foote's locker and fetch his things...." "Am--am I discharged?" "No," said Lightener, bestowing no word of commendation. Men had little commendation from him by word of mouth. He let actions speak for him. When he gave a man a task to perform that man knew he was being complimented.... But he knew it in no other way. "That's the way a laborer feels," said Lightener.... "You got it multiplied. That's because you had to jam his whole life's experience into a day...." "Poor devils!" said Bonbright. "I'm going to put you in the purchasing department--after that, if you make good--into the sales end.... Able to go ahead to-day?" "Yes." "Before you amount to a darn as a business man you've got to know how to buy.... That's the foundation. You've got to be able to buy right. Then you've got to learn how to make. Selling is easiest of all--and there are darn few real salesmen. If you can buy, you can do anything." "I--I would rather stay out of the shops, Mr. Lightener. The men--found out who I was...I'd like to stay there till they--forget it." "You'll go where I put you. Men enough in the purchasing department. Got a tame anarchist there, I hear, and a Mormon, and a Hindu, and a single-taxer. All kinds. After hours. From whistle to whistle they BUY." Lightener took Bonbright personally to his new employment and left him. But Bonbright was not satisfied. Once before he had sought contact with men who labored, and he had landed in a cell in police headquarters. That had been mere boyish curiosity to find what it was all about. Now his desire to know was real. He had been--very briefly, it is true--one of them. Now he wanted to know. He wanted to know how they thought, and why they thought that way. He wanted to understand their attitude toward themselves, toward one another, toward the class they largely denominated as Capital. He had caught snatches of conversation--interesting to him, but none had talked to him. He wanted to get on a footing with them which would permit him to listen, and to talk. He wanted to hear arguments. He wanted to go into their homes and see their wives and find out what their wives thought.... All this had been brought to him by a few days in overalls. He had no idea that Lightener had intended it should be brought to him.... However, that must lie in the future; his present business was to do as he was told and to earn his wages. He must earn his wages, for he had a family to support.... It was his first experience with the ever-present fear of the wage earner--the fear of losing his job. But he determined to know the men, and planned accordingly. With that end in view, instead of lunching with men in his department, he went to the little hash house across the road to drink vile coffee and rub elbows with laborers in greasy overalls. He would go there every day; he would seek other opportunities of contact.... Now that he felt the genuine, sympathetic hunger for an understanding of them and their problems, he would not rest until it was his.... CHAPTER XXIV Bonbright found himself a layman in a department of specialists. On all sides of him were men who knew all about something, a few who knew a great deal about several things, and a man or two who appeared to have some knowledge of every element and article that went into a motor car. There was a man who knew leather from cow to upholstery, and who talked about it lovingly. This man had the ability to make leather as interesting as the art of Benvenuto Cellini. Another was a specialist in hickory, and thought and talked spokes; another was a reservoir of dependable facts about rubber; another about gray iron castings; another about paints and enamels, and so on. In that department it would not have been impossible to compile an encyclopedia. It was impossible that Bonbright should not have been interested. It was not business, it was a fascinating, enthralling debating society, where the debates were not of the "Resolved that the world would be better" sort, but were as to the essential qualities of concrete things. It was practical debate which saved money and elevated the standards of excellence. The department had its own laboratories, its own chemists, its own engineers. Everything was tested. Two articles might appear to the layman equal in virtue; careful examination by experts might not disclose a difference between them, but the skill of the chemist would show that this article was a tenth of one per cent, less guilty of alloy than that, or that the breaking strength of this was a minute fraction greater than that.... So decisions were reached. Bonbright was to learn that price did not always rule. He saw orders given for carloads of certain supplies which tested but a point or two higher than its rival--and sold for dollars more a ton. Thousands of dollars were paid cheerfully for those few points of excellence. ... Here was business functioning as he did not know business could function. Here business was an art, and he applied himself to it like an artist. Here he could lay aside that growing discontent, that dissatisfaction, that was growing upon him. Here, in the excitement of distinguishing the better from the worse, he could forget Ruth and the increasingly impracticable condition of his relations with her. He had come to a realization that his game of make-believe would not march. He realized that Ruth either was his wife or she was not.... But he did not know what to do about it. It seemed a problem without a solution, and it was--for him. Its solution did not lie in himself, but in his wife. Bonbright could not set the thing right; his potentiality lay only for its destruction. Three courses lay open to him; to assert his husbandship; to send Ruth home to her mother; or to put off till to-morrow and to-morrow and still another to-morrow. Only in the last did hope reside, and he clung to hope.... He tried to conceal his unrest, his discontent, his rebellion against the thing that was, from Ruth. He continued to be patient, gentle. ... He did not know how she wept and accused herself because of that gentleness and patience. He did not know how she tried to compel love by impact of will--and how she failed. But he did come to doubt her love. He could not do otherwise. Then he wondered why she had married him, and, reviewing the facts of his hurried marriage, he wondered the more with bitterness and heartache. Against his will his affairs were traveling toward a climax. The approaching footsteps of the day when something must happen were audible on the path. The day after his installation in the purchasing department he lunched at the little hash house across the street. Sitting on his high stool, he tried to imagine he was a part of that sweating, gulping crowd of men, that he was one of them, and not an outsider, suspected, regarded with unfriendly looks. Behind him a man began to make conversation for Bonbright's ears. It had happened before. "The strike up to the Foote plant's on its last legs," said the man, loudly. "So I hear," answered another. "Infernal shame. If it was only the closed-shop question I dunno's I'd feel so. We're open shop here--but we git treated like human bein's.... Over there--" The man shrugged his shoulders. "Look at the way they've fought the strike. Don't blame 'em for fightin' it. Calc'late they had to fight it, but there's fightin' and fightin'. ... Seems like this Foote bunch set out to do the worst that could be done--and they done it." "Wonder when it 'll peter out--the strike?" "Back's busted now. Nothin's holding it up but that man Dulac. There's a man for you! I've knowed labor leaders I didn't cotton to nor have much confidence in---fellers that jest wagged their tongues and took what they could get out of it. But this Dulac--he's a reg'lar man. I've listened to him, and I tell you he means what he says. He's in it to git somethin' for the other feller.... But he can't hold out much longer." It was true; Dulac could not hold out much longer. That very noon he was fighting with his back against the wall. In Workingman's Hall he was making his last fierce fight to hold from crumbling the resolution of the strikers who still stood by their guns.... He threw the fire of his soul into their dull, phlegmatic faces. It struck no answering spark. Never before had he spoken to men without a consciousness of his powers, without pose, without dramatics. Now he was himself, and more dramatic, more compelling than ever before. ... He pleaded, begged, flayed his audience, but it did not respond to his pleadings nor writhe under the whip of his words. It was apathetic, stolid. In its weary heart it knew what it was there to do, and it would do it in spite of Dulac.... He would not admit it. He would not submit to defeat. He talked on and on, not daring to stop, for with the stoppage of his harangue he heard the death of the strike. It lived only with his voice. In the body of the hall a man, haggard of face, arose. "'Tain't no use, Mr. Dulac," he said, dully. "We've stuck by you--" "You've stuck by yourselves," Dulac cried. "Whatever you say.... But'tain't no use. We're licked. Hain't no use keepin' up and stretchin' out the sufferin'.... I hain't the least of the sufferers, Mr. Dulac--my wife hain't with me no more." The dull voice wabbled queerly. "There's hunger and grief and sufferin'--willin'ly endured when there was a chance--but there hain't no chance.... 'Tain't human to ask any more of our wimmin and children.... It's them I'm a-thinkin' of, Mr. Dulac... and on account of them I say this strike ought to quit. It's got to quit, and I demand a vote on it, Mr. Dulac." "Vote!... Vote!... Vote!..." roared up to Dulac from all over the hall.... It was the end. He was powerless to stay the rush of the desire of those weary men for peace. Dulac turned slowly around, his back to the crowd, walked to a chair, and, with elbows on knees, he covered his face with his hands. There was a silence, as men looked at him and appreciated his suffering. They appreciated his suffering because they appreciated the man, his honesty to their cause, and to his work. He had been true to them. For himself he would gain nothing by the success of the strike--for them he would have gained much.... It was not his loss that bowed his head, but their loss--and they knew it. He was a Messiah whose mission had failed. The vote was put. There was no dissenting voice. The strike was done, and Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, was victor. Men clustered about Dulac, wringing his hands, speaking words of comfort with voices that broke, and the number of those who turned away with tears was greater than of those whose eyes could remain dry. Dulac spoke. "We'll try again--men.... We'll start to get ready--to-day--for another--fight." Then, hurriedly, blindly, he forced his way through them and made his way out of the hall. Grief, the heaviness of defeat, was all that he could feel now. Bitterness would come in its time. Dulac was a soul without restraints, a soul in eternal uproar. His life had been one constant kicking against the pricks, and when they hurt his feet he was not schooled to stifle the cry of pain. He could not endure patiently and in silence; the tumult of his suffering must have an outlet. Now was the time for an overwrought, overtired man, clothed in no restraint, to try what surcease was to be found in the bottom of a glass. But Dulac was not a drinking man. So he walked. As he walked bitterness awoke, and he cursed under his breath. Bitterness increased until it was rage, and, as man is so constituted that rage must have a definite object, Dulac unconsciously sought a man who would symbolize all the forces that had defeated him--and he chose Bonbright Foote. He chose Bonbright the more readily because he hated the boy for personal reasons. If Dulae and Bonbright had met at this moment there would have happened events which would have delighted the yellower press. But they did not meet. Bonbright was safe in Lightener's purchasing department, learning certain facts about brass castings. So Dulac walked and walked, and lashed himself into rage. Rage abated and became biting disappointment and unspeakable heaviness of heart. Again rage would be conjured up only to ebb again and to flood again as the hours went by. There is an instinct in man which, when his troubles become too weighty to bear alone, sends him to a woman. Perhaps this is the survival of an idea implanted in childhood when baby runs to mother for sure comfort with broken doll or bruised thumb. It persists and never dies, so that one great duty, one great privilege, one great burden of womankind is to give ear to man's outpourings of his woes, and to offer such comfort as she may.... Dulac was drawn to Ruth. This time she did not try to close the door against him. His first words made that impossible. "I'm--beaten," he said, dully. His flamboyance, his threatricality, was gone. He was no longer flashily masterful, no longer exotically fascinating. He sagged.... He was just a soul-weary, disappointed man, looking at her out of hollow, burning eyes. He had spent himself magnificently into bankruptcy. His face was the face of a man who must rest, who must find peace.... Yet he was not consciously seeking rest or peace. He was seeking her.... Seeking her because he craved her, and seeking her to strike at her husband, who had become a symbol of all the antagonists he had been fighting. His appearance disarmed her; her fear of him and herself was lured away by the appearance of him. She felt nothing but sympathy and tenderness and something of wonder that he--Dulac the magnificent--should be brought to this pass. So she admitted him, regardless even of the lateness of the afternoon hour. He followed her heavily and sank into a chair. "You're sick," she said, anxiously. He shook his head. "I'm--beaten," he repeated, and in truth beaten was what he looked, beaten and crushed.... "But I'll--try again," he said, with a trace of the old gleam in his eyes. She clasped and unclasped her hands, standing before him, white with the emotions that swayed her.... Here was the man she loved in his bitterest, darkest moment--and she was barred away from him by unwelcome barriers. She could not soothe him, she could not lighten his suffering with the tale of her love for him, but she must remain mute, holding out no hand to ease his pain. "I came for you," he said, dully. "No," she said. "Ruth--I need you--now...." This man, who had wooed her boldly, had demanded her masterfully, now was brought to pleading. He needed her. It was plain that he did need her, and, realizing it, she saw the danger of it. It was a new, a subtle attack, and it had taken her unawares. "I can't.... I can't.... I mustn't..." she said, breathlessly. "I must have you," he said, with dead simplicity, as one states a bare, essential fact. Then Bonbright was visualized before him, and rage flooded once more. "He sha'n't keep you!... You're mine--you were mine first.... What is he to you? I'm going to take you away from him.... I can do THAT...." He was less dangerous so. Perhaps instinct told him, for his passion stilled itself, and he became tired, pitiful again. "We've got a right to be happy," he said, in his tired voice. "You're not happy--and I'm--beaten.... I want you--I need you.... You'll come with me. You've got to come with me." She was moved, swayed. He needed her.... She had cheated Bonbright in the beginning. She was not his wife.... He had none of her love, and she believed this man had it wholly.... She had wronged Bonbright all she could wrong him--what would this matter? It was not this that was wrong, but the other--the marrying without love.... And she, too, was beaten. She had played her game and lost, not going down to defeat fighting as Dulac had gone down, but futilely, helplessly. She had given herself for the Cause--to no profit.... And her heart yearned for peace, for release. "I'm his wife," she said, still struggling flutteringly. "You're MY wife." He lifted his arms toward her, and she swayed, took a step toward him--a step toward the precipice. Suddenly she stopped, eyes startled, a deeper pallor blighting her face--for she heard Bonbright's step on the stairs.... She had forgotten the lateness of the hour. "Oh'." she said. "What is it?" "HE is--here." She was awakened by the shock of it, and saw, saw clearly. She had stood upon the brink--and HE had come in time.... And then she was afraid. Neither of them spoke. Dulac got to his feet, his breath coming audibly, and so they waited. Bonbright opened the door. "Ruth," he called, putting what pretense of gayety he could into his voice. "You've got company. The chronic visitor is here." He was playing his game bravely. She did not answer. "Ruth," he called again, and then stood in the door. She could not see him, but she felt his presence, felt his silence, felt the look of surprise changing to suspicion that she knew must be in his eyes. For a moment he stood motionless, not comprehending. Then the attitude of his wife and of Dulac spoke eloquently, and he whitened. "I don't understand," he said. The words were meaningless, pointless, perhaps, but they stabbed Ruth to the heart. She turned to him, saw him step forward slowly, looking very tall, older than she had ever known him. He had drawn within himself, and there manifested itself his inheritance from his ancestors. He was like his father, but with an even more repressed dignity than was his father's. "You don't understand," snarled Dulac. "Then I'll tell you. I'm glad you came.... I'm after your wife. She's going away with me." "No.... No..." Ruth whispered. "Be still.... She's mine, Foote--and always was. You thought she was yours--well, she's one thing you can't have. I'm going to tell you why she married you...." Ruth cried out in incoherent fright, protesting. "She married you to use you.... Not even for your money. She married you because her heart was with the men your kind is grinding down. ... She saw you were the kind of man a woman could twist around her finger--and you owned five thousand men.... Get the idea?... She was going to do things for them--with you. You were nothing but a button she would push. So she married you--and you cheated her.... So she's done with you. You can't give what she paid for, and she's going away with me.... She LOVES me. She was promised to marry me--when she saw what she could do with you--and I let her go.... If she could give, so could I.... But I loved her and she loved me--and we're going away." It was true. Bonbright knew it was true, but he would not admit his belief until he had confirmation from his wife's lips. "Is this true?" he asked, quietly. She was shaking with sobs, crouching against the wall. "Don't be afraid," Bonbright said again, in a strange, quiet, courteous voice. "Is it true?" "Yes," she whispered, for she could not lie with his eyes upon her. "I knew there was--something," he said, with a little halt in his voice.... That was all. He did not look at Dulac, but stood looking at her for a moment steadily, almost with grave inquiry.... She looked from him to Dulac. Subconsciously she compared them.... Bonbright did not speak again, but turned slowly and walked steadily out of the room.... Ruth heard the outer door close behind him and knew he was gone.... Gone! Dulac laughed shortly. "That settled HIM," he said. "Now you'll come." She stood regarding him as she might have regarded some strangely endowed person she had never seen before. Then with a sudden, passionate vehemence she burst out upon him: "Never.... Never.... I'll never go with you. I'm his wife--his wife.... Oh, what have you done?... I hate you--I hate you! Don't ever dare--come near me again.... I hate you...." She turned and fled to her room and locked the door. Though he knocked and called, though he pleaded and threatened, she made no reply, but sat dry-eyed, on her bed, until she heard him go away raging.... CHAPTER XXV Hilda Lightener's electric stopped before the apartment house where Bonbright Foote lived, and Hilda alighted. She ignored bell and speaking tube and ran upstairs to Bonbright's door, on which she knocked as a warning. Then she opened the door and called: "It's me. Anybody home?" Nobody replied. She called again, and walked into the little living room where Ruth and Bonbright and Dulac had faced one another an hour before.... She called again. This time she heard a sound, muffled, indistinct, but recognizable as a sob. "Ruth!" she called, and went to the bedroom door. Now she could hear Ruth within, sobbing alarmingly. "Ruth Foote," said Hilda, "what's the matter?... Where's Bonbright?... I'm coming in." She opened the door, saw Ruth outstretched on the bed, face buried in her pillow, sobbing with a queer, startling dryness. It was not the sob of a woman in an attack of nerves, not the sob of a woman merely crying to rest herself, nor the sob of a bride who has had a petty quarrel with her husband. It was different, alarmingly different. There was despair in it. It told of something seriously awry, of stark tragedy. Hilda's years were not many, but her intuition was sure. She did not demand explanations, did not command Ruth to stop crying and tell what ailed her, but sat down quietly on the bed and stroked the sobbing girl's hair, crooning over her softly. "There!... There!..." Gradually the tenseness, the dry, racking, tearing quality of Ruth's sobs, softened, ameliorated. Presently she was crying, quietly, pitifully.... Hilda breathed with relief. She did not know that for an hour Ruth had sat on the edge of her bed, still, tearless, staring blindly before her--her soul drying up and burning within her for lack of tears. She had been unable to cry. She had uttered no sound until Hilda's voice came in to her. Then she had thrown herself prone in that paroxysm of wrenching sobs.... "There!... There!..." Hilda crooned. Ruth's hand crept out fumblingly, found Hilda's dress, and clutched it. Hilda laid her warm hand over Ruth's cold fingers--and waited. "He's--gone," Ruth sobbed, presently. "Never mind, honey.... Never mind, now." Ruth mumbled incoherently. After a time she raised herself on her arms and crouched beside Hilda, who put her arms around her and held her close, as she would have held a troubled child. "You'll--despise me," Ruth whispered. "I guess not." Hilda pressed Ruth's slenderness against her more robust body reassuringly. "I don't despise folks, as a rule.... Want to talk now?" She saw that the time for speech had come. "He won't come back.... I saw it in his eyes." "Who won't come back, dear?" "Bonbright." Ruth drew a shuddering breath. Then haltingly, whimperingly, sobs interrupting, she talked. She could not tell it fast enough. It must be told, her mind must be relieved, and the story, pent up so long within her, rushed forth in a flood of despairing, self-accusing words. It came in snatches, fragments, as high lights of suffering flashed upon her mind. She did not start at the beginning logically and carry through--but the thing as a whole was there. Hilda had only to sort it and reassemble it to get the pitiful tale complete. "You--you don't mean you married Bonbright like some of those Russian nihilist persons one hears about--just to use him and your position--for some socialist or anarchist thing? You're not serious, Ruth?... Such things aren't." "I--I'd do THAT again," she said. "It was right--to do that--for the good of all those men.... It's not that--but the rest--not keeping to my bargain--and--Dulac. I would have--gone with him." Hilda shook her head. "Not farther than the door," she said. "You couldn't--not after Bonbright has been such--such an idiotic angel about you." "I would have--THEN." "But you wouldn't now?" "I--I can't bear to THINK of him...." "Um!..." Hilda's expressive syllable was very like her father's. It was her way of saying, "I see, and I'll bet you don't see, and I'm not surprised particularly, but you'll be surprised when you find it out." It said all that--to Hilda's satisfaction. "He's been gone hours," Ruth said, plaintively, and Hilda understood her to refer to Bonbright. "Time he was coming back, then," she said. "He--won't come back--ever.... You don't know him the way I do." There was something very like jealousy in Ruth's tone. "He's good--and gentle--but if he makes up his mind--If he hadn't been that way do you think he could have lived with me the way he HAS?" "He must have loved you a heap," Hilda said, enviously. "He did.... Oh, Hilda, it wasn't wrong to marry him for what I did. ... I hadn't any right to consider him--or me. I hadn't, had I?" "I don't belong," said Hilda. "If I wasn't a wicked capitalist I might agree with you--MAYBE. I'm not going to scold you for it--because you THOUGHT it was right, and that always makes the big difference.... You thought you were doing something splendid, didn't you--and then it fizzled. It must have been tough--I can get that part of it.... To find you'd married him and couldn't get out of it--and that he didn't have any thousands of men to--tinker with.... Especially when you loved Mr. Dulac." Hilda added the last sentence with shrewd intent. "I don't love him--I don't.... If you'd seen him--and Bonbright..." "But you did love him," Hilda said, severely Ruth nodded dumbly. "You're sure Bonbright won't come back?" "Never," said Ruth. "Then you'd better go after him." Ruth did not answer. She was calmer now, more capable of rational thought. What SHOULD she do? What was to be done with this situation?... Her brief married life had been a nightmare with a nightmare's climax; she could not bear a return to that. Her husband was gone. She was free of him, free of her dread of the day when she must face realities with him.... And Bonbright--she felt certain he would not want her to run after him, that, somehow, it would lower her even farther in his eyes if she did so. There was a certain dignity attaching to him that she dared not violate, and to run after him would violate it. There would, of necessity, be a scene. She would have to explain, beg, promise--lie. She did not believe she could lie to him again--nor that she could make him believe a lie. ... Pretense between them had become an impossibility.... She wanted him to know she had not gone with Dulac, would not go with Dulac. It seemed to her she could not bear to have him think THAT of her. She had made his love impossible, but she craved his respect. That was all.... She was freed from him--and it was better so. The phase of it that she did not analyze was why her heart ached so. She did not study into that. "I don't want him--back," she said to Hilda. "It would be just like it was--before." "What ARE you going to do, then? You've got to do something." "I don't know.... Why must I do something? Why can't I just wait--and let him do what--whatever is done?" "Because--if I know anything about Bonbright--he won't do a thing. ... He'll just step aside quietly and make no fuss. I'm afraid he's--hurt. And he's been hurt so much before." "I'm--sorry." The words sounded weak, ineffectual. They did not express her feelings, her remorse, her self-accusation. "Sorry?... You haven't cut a dance with him, you know, or kept him waiting while you did your hair.... You've more or less messed up his life. Yes, you have. There isn't any use mincing words. Your motives may have been lofty and noble and all that sort of thing--from your point of view. But HIS point of view is what I'm thinking about now.... Sorry!" "Don't scold. I can't--bear it. I can't bear anything more.... Please go away. I know you despise me. Leave me alone. Go away..." "I'll do nothing of the kind. You're all upset, and you deserve a heap more than scolding.... But I like you." Hilda was always direct. "You're more or less of a little idiot, with your insane notions and your Joan of Arc silliness, but I like you. You're not fit to be left alone. I'm in charge.... So go and dabble cold water on your eyes, so you don't look like Nazimova in the last act, and come along with. me. We'll take a drive, and then I'm coming back to stay all night with you.... Yes, I am," she said, with decision, as Ruth started to object. "You do what I say." Hilda drove Ruth to her own house. "I've got to tell mother I'm going to stay with you," she said. "Will you come in?" "No--please," Ruth answered. "I won't be but a jiffy, then." And Hilda left Ruth alone in the electric. Alone! Suddenly Ruth was afraid of being alone. She was thankful for Hilda, thankful Hilda was going to see her through. Hilda's father and mother were in the library. "Thought you were going some place with Bonbright and his wife," said Malcolm Lightener. "Dad," said Hilda, with characteristic bluntness and lack of preface, "they're in a dickens of a mess." "Bonbright?" "And Ruth." "Huh!..." Lightener's grunt seemed to say that it was nothing but what he expected. "Well--go ahead." Hilda went ahead. Her father punctuated her story with sundry grunts, her mother with exclamations of astonishment and sorrow. Hilda told the whole story from the beginning, and when she was done she said: "There it is. You wouldn't believe it. And, dad, Bonbright Foote's an angel. A regular angel with wings." "Sometimes it's mighty hard to tell the difference between an angel and a damn fool," said Lightener. "I suppose you want me to mix into it. Well, I won't." "You haven't been asked," said Hilda. "I'm doing the mixing for this family. I just came to tell you I am going to stay all night with Ruth--and to warn you not to mix in. You'd do it with a sledge hammer. I don't suppose it's any use telling you to keep your hands off--for you won't. But I wish you would." "You'll get your wish," he said. "I won't," she answered. "Poor Bonbright," Mrs. Lightener said, "it does seem as if about every misfortune had happened to him that can happen.... And he can't go to his mother for sympathy." "He isn't the kind to go to anybody for sympathy," said Lightener. "Then don't you go to him with any," said Hilda. "I told you I wasn't going to have anything to do with it." "I haven't any patience with that girl," said Mrs. Lightener. "Such notions! Wherever did she get them?... It's all a result of this Votes for Women and clubs studying sociology and that. When I was a girl--" "You wore hoop skirts, mammy," said Hilda, "and if you weren't careful when you sat down folks saw too much stocking.... Don't go blaming Ruth too much. She thought she was doing something tremendous." "I calc'late she was," said Malcolm Lightener, "when you come to think of it.... Too bad all cranks can't put the backbone they use in flub dub to some decent use. I sort of admire 'em." "Father!" expostulated Mrs. Lightener. "You've got to. They back their game to the limit.... This little girl did.... Tough on Bonbright, though." Hilda walked to the door; there she stopped, and said over her shoulder: "Tell you what I think. I think she's mighty hard in love with him--and doesn't know it." "Rats!" said her father, elegantly. At that moment Bonbright was writing a letter to his wife. It was a difficult letter, which he had started many times, but had been unable to begin as it should be begun.... He did not want to hurt her; he did not want her to misunderstand; so he had to be very clear, and write very carefully what was in his heart. It was a sore heart, but, strangely, there was no bitterness in it toward Ruth. He found that strange himself, and marveled at it. He did not want to betray his misery to her--for that would hurt her, he knew. He did not want to accuse. All he wanted to do was to do what he could to set matters right for her. For him matters could never be set right again. It was the end.... The way of its coming had been a shock, but that the end had come was not such a shock. He perceived now that he had been gradually preparing himself for it. He saw that the life they had been living could have ended in nothing but a crash of happiness.... He admitted now that he had been afraid of it almost since the beginning.... "My Dear Ruth," he wrote. Then he stopped again, unable to find a beginning. "I am writing because that will be easier for both of us," he wrote--and then scratched it out, for it seemed to strike a personal note. He did not want to be personal, to allow any emotion to creep in. "It is necessary to make some arrangements," he began once more. That was better. Then, "I know you will not have gone away yet." That meant away with Dulac, and she would so understand it. "I hope you will consent to stay in the apartment. Everything there, of course, is yours. It is not necessary for us to discuss money. I will attend to that carefully. In this state a husband must be absent from his wife for a year before she can be released from him. I ask you to be patient for that time." That was all of it. There was nothing more to say. He read it, and it sounded bald, cold, but he could not better it. At the end he wrote, "Yours sincerely," scratched it out, and wrote, "Yours truly," scratched that out, and contented himself by affixing merely his name. Then he copied the whole and dispatched it to his wife by messenger. It arrived just after Ruth and Hilda returned. "It's from him," said Ruth. "Open it, silly, and see what he says." "I'm afraid...." Hilda stamped her foot. "Give it to me, then," she said. Ruth held the note to her jealously. She opened it slowly, fearfully, and read the few words it contained. "Oh..." she said, and held it out to Hilda. She had seen nothing but the bareness, the coldness of it. "It's perfect," said Hilda. "It's BONBRIGHT. He didn't slop over--he was trying not to slop over, but there's love in every letter, and heartache in every word of it.... And you couldn't love him. Wish _I_ had the chance." "You--you will have," said Ruth, faintly. "If I do," said Hilda, shortly, "you bet I WON'T WASTE it." CHAPTER XXVI Hilda knew her father. He could not keep his hands off any matter that interested him, and most matters did interest him. He had grown to have an idea that he could take hold of almost any sort of tangle or enterprise or concern and straighten it out. Probably it was because he was so exceedingly human.... Therefore he was drawn irresistibly to his purchasing department and to Bonbright Foote. "Young man," he said, gruffly, "what's this I hear?" Bonbright looked up inquiringly. "Come over here." Lightener jerked his head toward a private spot for conversation. "About you and that little girl," he said. "I would rather not talk about it," said Bonbright, slowly. "But I'm going to talk about it. It's nonsense...." Bonbright looked very much like his father; tall, patrician, coldly dignified. "Mr. Lightener," he said, "it is a thing we will not mention--now or later." Seven generations contributed to that answer and to the manner of it. It was final. It erected a barrier past which even Malcolm Lightener could not force his way, and Lightener recognized it. "Huh!..." he grunted, nonplused, made suddenly ill at ease by this boy. For a moment he looked at Bonbright, curiously, appraisingly, then turned on his heel and walked away. "Young spriggins put me in my place," he said to Mrs. Lightener that evening. "I wish I knew how to do it--valuable. Made me feel like he was a total stranger and I'd been caught in his hen house.... That Bonbright Foote business isn't all bad by a darn sight." From that day Bonbright tried to work himself into forgetfulness. Work was the only object and refuge of his life, and he gave himself to it wholly. It was interesting work, and it kept him from too much thinking about himself.... If a man has ability and applies himself as Bonbright did, he will attract notice. In spite of his identity Bonbright did attract notice from his immediate superiors. It was more difficult for him, being who he was, to win commendation than it would have been for an unmarked young man in the organization. That was because even the fairest-minded man is afraid he will be tempted into showing favoritism--and so withholds justice.... But he forced it from his laborers--not caring in the least if he had it or not. And word of his progress mounted to Malcolm Lightener. His craving for occupation was not satisfied with eight hours a day spent in the purchasing department. It was his evenings that he feared, so he filled them with study--study of the manufacture of the automobile. Also he studied men. Every noon saw him in the little hash house; every evening, when he could arrange it so, saw him with some interested employee, boss, department boss, or somebody connected with Malcolm Lightener's huge plant, pumping them for information and cataloguing and storing it away in his mind. He tried to crowd Ruth out of his mind by filling it so full of automobile there would be no room for her.... But she hid in unexpected crannies, and stepped forth to confront him disconcertingly. Gradually the laboring men changed their attitude toward him and tolerated him. Some of them even liked him. He listened to their talk, and tried to digest it. Much he saw to call for his sympathy, much that they considered vital he could not agree with; he could not, even in a majority of things, adapt his point of view to theirs. For he was developing a point of view. On that evening when he had gone down to see what a mob was like he had no point of view, only curiosity. He had leaned neither toward his father's striking employees nor against them.... His attitude was much the same now--with a better understanding of the problems involved. He was not an ultracapitalist, like his father, nor a radical like Dulac.... One thing he believed, and that was in the possibility of capital and labor being brought to see through the same eyes. He believed the strife between them, which had waged from time immemorial, was not necessary, and could be eliminated.... But as yet he had no cure for the trouble. He did not lean to socialism. He was farther away from that theory than he was from his father's beliefs. He belonged by training and by inheritance to the group of employers of labor and utilizers of capital.... Against radicalism he had a bitter grievance. Radicalism had given him his wife--for reasons which he heard expressed by laboring men every day. He had no patience with fanaticism; on the other hand, he had little patience with bigotry and intolerance. His contact with the other side was bringing no danger of his conversion. ... But he was doing what he never could have done as heir apparent to the Foote dynasty--he was asserting in thought his individuality and forming individual opinions.... His education was being effectively rounded out. News of the wrecking of Bonbright's domestic craft came to his father quickly, carried, as might have been anticipated, by Hangar. "Your son is not living with his wife, Mr. Foote," Rangar announced. "Indeed!" said Mr. Foote, concealing both surprise and gratification under his habitual mask of suave dignity. "That, I fear, was to have been anticipated.... Have you the particulars?" "Only that she is living in their apartment, and he is boarding with one of the men in his department at Lightener's." "Keep your eye on him, Rangar--keep your eye on him. And report." "Yes, sir," said Rangar, not himself pleased by the turn affairs had taken, but resolved to have what benefit might lie thereabouts. His resentment was still keen to keep him snapping at Bonbright's heels. The breach between himself and his son had been no light blow to Mr. Foote. It threatened his line. What was to become of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, with no heir to hand the business over to when his hands could drop it? He wanted his son, not as a father wants his son, but because a Bonbright Foote VII was requisite. He had hoped for this thing that had happened; indeed, had felt confident it would happen, and that he would have Bonbright back unencumbered, purged of nonsense. He spoke of it with satisfaction to his wife when he returned to his home that afternoon to take up the important matter of adding to the manuscript of his philosophical biography of the Marquis Lafayette. "Perhaps I should see Bonbright," he suggested. "No," said Mrs. Foote. "He must come to you. He's got to have all his wildness crushed out of him. He'll come. He must have had enough of it before this." But Bonbright did not come, showed no signs of coming, and Mr. Foote grew impatient, so impatient that he disregarded his wife's advice. He could not bring his pride to allow him to seek out Bonbright in person, but sent Rangar as his ambassador. Rangar found Bonbright in his room, reading a book devoted to the ailments of the internal-combustion engine, and acquitted himself of his mission with that degree of diplomacy which his desire for success dictated. "Well?" said Bonbright, as the door opened to admit the ambassador. "Your father sent me, Mr. Foote." "Yes." "He has heard that--er--the marriage which caused your--er--estrangement has ended as he feared." Bonbright arose slowly and walked toward Rangar, who appeared in two minds whether to remain or to depart to other places. "Tell my father," Bonbright said, "that I can appreciate his satisfaction. Tell him also that if he has anything to say to me to say it in person.... That is all." "Your father--" "That is all," repeated Bonbright, and Rangar made up his mind. He slammed the door after him. In the morning he reported to Mr. Foote, who compressed his lips at the recitation of his son's words. Let his son come to him, then, when he had eaten his fill of husks. But Bonbright did not come. After several days had elapsed Mr. Foote considered his duty, and interpreted it to impel him to call in person upon his son--clothed in dignity and with the demeanor of outraged parenthood. Mrs. Foote was not privy to the project. He met his son descending the steps of the house where he boarded. Bonbright could not have evaded his father if he would. He stopped and waited for his father to speak. "I have come to talk to you, Bonbright," he said, severely. "Very well, sir," Bonbright said. "I have come, not from inclination or delight in an interview which must be distasteful to both of us, but because I believe it my duty to point out the thanklessness of your conduct and to see if you cannot be brought to a proper sense of your obligations." "Our ideas of my obligations are rather far apart, sir." "They shouldn't be. You're a mere boy--my son. You should derive your ideas from me until you are capable of formulating correct ideas yourself." "I'm afraid we can never agree on that," said Bonbright, patiently. "Your marriage has ended the way such marriages are fated to end," said Mr. Foote. "We will not discuss that, please," said Bonbright. "You made your own bed--" "And am not complaining about the discomfort of it." "It is essential that you return to your duty. Your unpleasant experience is over. You are old enough to understand your position as my son, and the responsibilities and duties of it. You are Bonbright Foote VII and the future head of our family. I am being very patient and lenient with you.... You have defied me openly, but I am willing to overlook that, and I am sure your mother will overlook your conduct toward her, providing you return to your place in a frame of mind proper for my son. I think you understand what that is." "Perfectly, sir. It means to be jammed back in a mold that will turn me out to the family pattern. It means a willingness to give up thinking for myself and accept YOUR thoughts and shape my life by them. It means being a figurehead as long as you live and a replica of yourself when you are gone. That's it, isn't it?" "That is it," said Mr. Foote, shortly. "You are rid of that woman. ... I am willing to give you another chance." Bonbright's hold upon himself was firm. "If you wish to continue this conversation you will not speak in that way of my wife. Let me make that very clear.... As to coming back to the office--there is nothing under heaven that would bring me back to what I escaped from. Nothing.... If I were ever to come it would have to be on terms of my own making, and you would never agree to them. And whatever terms you agreed to I should not come until you and mother--both of you--went to my wife and made the most complete apology for the thing you did to her in the theater that night.... I am not thinking of myself. I am thinking of her. My mother and father passed my wife and myself on our wedding night, in a public place, and refused to recognize us.... It was barbarous." Bonbright's voice quivered a trifle, but he held himself well in hand. "That apology must come before anything else. After you have made it, we will discuss terms." "You--you--" Mr. Foote was perilously close to losing his dignity. "No," said Bonbright; "on second thought, we will not discuss terms. You can have my final reply now.... You have nothing to give me that will take the place of what I have now. I will not come back to you. Please understand that this is final." Mr. Foote was speechless. It was moments before he could speak; then it was to say, in a voice that trembled with rage: "In the morning I shall make my will--and your name will not appear in it except as a renegade son whom I have disowned..., Probably you regarded the property as under entail and that it would come to you after me.... For six generations it has gone from father to son. You shall never touch a penny of it." "I prefer it that way, sir." Mr. Foote glared at his son in quite unrestrained, uncultured rage, and, whirling on his heel, strode furiously away. Bonbright looked after him curiously. "I wonder how the thing missed out with me," he thought. "It worked perfectly six generations--and then went all to smash with me.... Probably I'd have been a lot happier...." It had been a month since he saw Ruth. He had not wanted to see her; the thought of seeing her had been unbearable. But suddenly he felt as if he must see her--have a glimpse of her. He must see how she looked, if she had changed, if she were well.... He knew it would bring refreshed suffering. It would let back all he had rigidly schooled himself to shut out--but he must see her. He set his will against it and resolutely walked away from the direction in which her apartment lay, but the thing was too strong for him. As a man surrenders to a craving which he knows will destroy him, yet feels a relief at the surrender, he turned abruptly and walked the other way. The apartment in which they had lived was on the second floor of a small apartment house. He passed it on the opposite side of the street, looking covertly upward at the windows. There was a light within. She was there, but invisible. Only if she should step near the window could he see her.... Again and again he passed, but she did not appear. Finally he settled himself guiltily in the shadows, where he could watch those windows, and waited--just for that distant sight of her. There was a lamp on the table before the window. Before she retired she would have to come to shut it off.... He waited for that. He would then see her for a second, perhaps. At last she came, and stood an instant in the window--just a blur, with the light behind her, no feature distinguishable, yet it was her--her. "Ruth..." he whispered, "Ruth...." Then she drew down the shade and extinguished the light. For a moment he stood there, hands opened as if he would have stretched them out toward her. Then he turned and walked heavily away. He had seen her, but It had not added to his happiness. He had seen her because he must see her.... And by that he knew he must see her again and again and again. He knew it. He knew he would stand there in the shadows on innumerable nights, watching for that one brief second of her presence.... And she loved another man. In a year she would be free to marry Dulac! He returned to his room and to his book on the ailments of internal-combustion engines; but it was not their diagrams his eyes saw, but only a featureless blur that represented a girl standing in an upper window---forever beyond his reach.... CHAPTER XXVII Malcolm Lightener's plant, huge as it was, could not meet the demands of the public for the car he manufactured. Orders outran production. New buildings had been under construction, but before they were completed and equipped their added production was eaten up and the factory was no nearer to keeping supply abreast with demand than it had been in the beginning. Lightener was forced to make contracts with other firms for parts of his cars. From one plant he contracted for bodies, from another for wheels. He urged Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, to increase their production of axles by ten thousand a year--and still dealers in all parts of the country wrote and telephoned and telegraphed for more cars--more cars. Hitherto Lightener had made his own engines complete. From outside manufactories he could obtain the other essential parts, but his own production of engines held him back. The only solution for the present was to find some one to make engines to his specifications, and he turned to Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. Whatever might be said of the Foote methods, their antiquity, their lack of modern efficiency, they turned out work whose quality none might challenge--and Malcolm Lightener looked first to quality. He reached his determination at noon, while he was eating his luncheon, and to Mrs. Lightener's amazement sprang up from the table and lunged out of the room without so much as a glance at her or a word of good-by. In some men of affairs this might not be remarkable, but in Malcolm Lightener it was remarkable. Granite he might be; crude in his manner, perhaps, more dynamic than comfortable, but in all the years of his married life he had never left the house without kissing his wife good-by. He drove his runabout recklessly to his office, rushed into the engineering department, and snatched certain blue prints and specifications from the files. He knew costs down to the last bolt or washer on the machine he made, and it was the work of minutes only to determine what price he could afford to pay for the engines he wanted. His runabout carried him to the entrance to Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, and he hurried up the stairs to the office. "Mr. Foote in?" he snapped. "Just returned, Mr. Lightener." "Want to see him--right off--quick." "Yes, sir." The girl at the switchboard called Mr. Foote and informed him. "He says to step right in, sir," she said, and before she was done speaking Lightener was on his way down the corridor. Mr. Foote sat coldly behind his desk. He held no kindness for Malcolm Lightener, for Lightener had befriended Bonbright in his recalcitrancy. Lightener had made it possible for the boy to defy his father. Lightener's wife and daughter had openly waged society war against his wife in behalf of his son's wife.... But Mr. Foote was not the man to throw away an enormous and profitable business because of a personal grudge. Lightener paused for no preliminaries. "Foote," he said, "I want ten thousand engines complete. You can make 'em. You've got room to expand, and I can give you approximate figures on the costs. You make good axles and you can make good engines. What d'you think about it?" Mr. Foote shrugged his shoulders. "It doesn't attract me." "Huh!... You can have that plant up in six months. I'll give you a contract for five years. Two years' profits will pay for the plant. Don't know what your profits are now, but this ought to double them. ... Doesn't half a million a year extra profit make you think of anything?" "Mr. Lightener, this business was originally a machine shop. It has grown and developed since the first Bonbright Foote founded it. I am the first to deviate in any measure from the original plan, and I have done so with doubt and reluctancy. I have seen with some regret the manufacturing of axles overshadow the original business--though it has been profitable, I admit. But I shall go no farther. I am not sure my father and my grandfather would approve of what I have done. I know they would not approve of other changes.... More money does not attract me. This plant is making enough for me. What I want is more leisure. I wish more time to devote to a certain literary labor upon which I have been engaged..." "Literary flub-dub," said Lightener. "I'm offering you half a million a year on a silver platter." "I don't want it, sir.... I am not a young man. I have not been in the best of health--owing, perhaps, to worries which I should not have been compelled to bear.... I am childless. With me Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, comes to an end. Upon my death these mills close, the business is to be liquidated and discontinued. Do I make myself clear?... I am not interested in your engines." "What's that you said?" Lightener asked. "Childless? Wind up this business? You're crazy, man." "I had a son, but I have one no longer.... In some measure I hold you responsible for that. You have taken sides with a disobedient son against his father..." "And you've treated a mighty fine son like a dog," said Lightener, harshly. "I have done my duty.... I do not care to discuss it with you. The fact I want to impress is that my family becomes extinct upon my death. My wife will be more than amply provided for. I may live ten years or twenty years--but I shall live them in such comfort as I can obtain.... Is there anything else you wish to talk to me about?" It was a dismissal, and Malcolm Lightener was not used to being dismissed like a troublesome book agent. "Yes," he said, getting to his feet. "There is something, and I'll be short and sweet about it. You have a son, and if I'm any judge, he's about four times the man his father is. You don't want him!... Well, I do. I want him in my business, and he won't lose such a lot by the change. It's your ledger that shows the loss, and don't you forget it. You did what you could to warp him out of shape--and because he wouldn't be warped you kicked him out. Maybe the family ends with you, but a new Foote family begins with him, and it won't be any cut-and-dried, ancestor-ridden outfit, either. One generation of his kind will be worth more to this country than the whole six of yours.... I hope you live to see it." Lightener stuffed his blue prints and specifications into his pocket and left the office truculently. Once more in his own office he summoned a boy. "Fetch Mr. Foote from the purchasing department," he said. Malcolm Lightener was acting on impulse again. He had no clear idea why he had sent for Bonbright, nor just what he should say when the boy came--but he wanted to talk to him. Lightener was angry--angry because Bonbright's father had rejected his proposition to manufacture engines; more angry at the way Mr. Foote had spoken concerning his son. In the back of Lightener's mind was the thought that he would show a Foote.... Just what he would show him was not determined. Bonbright came in. He was not the Bonbright of six months before. The boy in him was gone, never to return. He had lost none of his old look of breeding, of refinement, of blood--but he had lost that air which rich young men bear about with them. It is an air, not of carelessness, precisely, but of absence of care; a sort of nonchalance, bred of lack of responsibilities and of definite ambitions. It is an air that makes one think of them that they would fit better into the scenery of a country club or a game of golf than into an office where men strain their intelligence and their bodies to attain important aims. This was gone with his boyishness. In its place was an alertness, an awakeness, born of an interest in affairs. His eyes were the eyes of a man who concentrated much, and was keenly interested in the object of his concentration. His movements were quicker. He seemed to see and catalogue more of what was going on about him. If one had seen him then for the first time, the impression received would have been that here was a very busy young man who was worth watching. There was something aggressive about him. He looked competent. One could not question that his new life had improved him, but it had not made him happy. It would be absurd to say that he looked sad. A boy of his age cannot look sad continually, unless sadness is a pose with him, which he is enjoying very much indeed. But Bonbright was no poser.... And he did not look happy. There were even times when there was a worn, haggard look about his eyes when he came down in the morning. This was when he had allowed himself to think too much. "Just came from your father's office," said Lightener. "I offered him a chance to clean up half a million a year--and he turned it down... because his great-grandfather might not like it." Bonbright understood perfectly. He knew how his father would do such a thing. Lightener's statement seemed to call for no reply, so he made none. "I wanted to look at you," said Lightener, "to make sure you aren't anything like him.... But you ARE like him. You stand like him and you look like him--only you don't. If I thought you'd grow to think the way he does I'd send you to the cashier for your pay, in a second. But I don't believe it." He scowled at Bonbright. "No, by Jove! you don't LOOK it." "I don't think father and I are much alike," said Bonbright, slowly. Lightener switched the subject. "You ought to know considerable about this business. Been here six months. From what I hear you've picked up quite a lot outside of office hours." "I've been studying hard. It gave me something to do." "Darn it all, why couldn't you and Hilda have taken to each other!..." Lightener stopped, and stared at his desk. Perhaps it was not too late yet. Bonbright's marriage had been no success; Bonbright was young; and it was not thinkable that he would not recover from that wound in time to marry again. Of course he would.... Then why should he not marry Hilda? Not the least reason in the world. In the affair Bonbright was guiltless--merely unfortunate. The thing was worth bearing in mind. Perhaps something might be done; at any rate, he would talk it over with his wife. "I want you to put in another six months learning this business," he said. "If you pan out I'll have a job for you.... I haven't heard of your falling down any place yet.... Know what I told your father? He said the Foote family ended with him--became extinct. Well, I said the family just started with you, and that one generation of your kind was worth the whole six of his. And I hoped he lived to see it." "Somehow I can't feel very hard toward father, Mr. Lightener. Sometimes I'm--sorry for him. To him it's as bad as if I'd been born with a hunchback. Worse, maybe, because, hunchback and all, I might have been the sort he wanted.... He doesn't understand, that's it. I can understand him--so I don't have any hard feelings-except on HER account.... He said the family was extinct?" "Yes." "I guess it is," said Bonbright. "The family, as he thought of it, meant something that went on and on as he and his ancestors went.... Yes, it's extinct. I don't know why I was different from them, but I was. Always. I'm glad." "He must be worth five millions, anyhow, maybe more." "I don't know," said Bonbright. "You won't get a cent of it, from what he says." "I suppose not.... No, I won't get a cent." "You don't make much fuss about it." "I had that out with myself six months ago. It was hard to give it up.... Nobody wants to be poor when he can be rich. If it hadn't been for Ruth I suppose I should have been there yet--pretty well made over to fit by this time." As Bonbright and Malcolm Lightener talked, Mr. Foote sat in his office, his head upon his desk, one arm stretched out across the blotter, the other shielding his face. He did not move.... After Malcolm Lightener left the room he had sat for a time staring at the door. He did not feel well. He was troubled. None but himself knew how deep was his disappointment, his bitterness, because of his son's failure to stand true to his type. It was not the grief of a father at the loss of a son; it was the suffering of a man whose supreme motive is the carrying on of family and of family traditions. He had just told Lightener the family became extinct with his passing. Now he reaffirmed it, and, reaffirming it, he felt the agony of ultimate affliction. Six generations the family and the family's business had endured honorably according to its beliefs and tenets; with the sixth generation it ended because of the way-wardness of a boy--his boy! Mr. Foote felt a trifle dizzy, a bit oppressed. He leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes. He would go home for the day as soon as the dizziness passed, he said to himself.... It passed. He opened his eyes and leaned toward his desk, but he stopped suddenly, his right hand flying to his breast. There was a sudden pain there; such a pain as he had never experienced before. It was near his heart. With each heartbeat there came a twisting stab of agony. Presently the spasm passed, and he sank back, pale, shaking, his forehead damp with clammy moisture.... He tried to pull himself together. Perhaps it would be best to summon some one, but he did not want to do that. To have an employee find him so would be an invasion of his dignity. Nobody must see him. Nobody must know about this.... The spasm returned-departed again, leaving him gasping for breath. ... It would come again. Something told him it would come again-once more. He KNEW.... A third time it would come, but never again. He forced himself to rise. He would meet it standing. For the honor of the Foote family he would meet it on his feet, looking into its eyes. He would not shrink and cringe from it, but would face it with dignity as a Foote should face it, uttering no cry of pain or fear. It was a dignified moment, the most dignified and awful of his life. ... Five generations were looking on to see how he met it, and he was conscious of their eyes. He stared before him with level eyes, forcing a smile, and waited the seconds there remained to wait. It was coming. He could feel its first approach, and drew himself up to the fullness of his slender height. Never had he looked so much a Foote as in that instant, never had he so nearly approached the ideal he had set for himself--for he knew. The spasm came, but it tore no cry from him. He stood erect, with eyes that stared straight before him fearlessly until they became sightless. He held his head erect proudly.... Then he sighed, relaxed into his chair, and lay across his desk, one arm outstretched, the other protecting his face.... The telephone on Malcolm Lightener's desk rang. "Hello!" said Lightener. "What is it? Who?... Yes, he's right here." He looked up to Bonbright. "Somebody wants to speak to you." Bonbright stepped to the instrument. "Yes," he said, "this is Bonbright Foote.... Who is it? Rangar?..." Suddenly he turned about and faced Malcolm Lightener blankly. He fumbled with the receiver for its hook. "My father is dead," he said, in a hushed voice. "They just found him--at his desk...." CHAPTER XXVIII Ruth had continued to live in the apartment. It had not been her intention to do so. From the moment of reading Bonbright's succinct note she was determined to go back to the little cottage and to her mother. But she put it off for a day, then for another day, and days grew into weeks and months. "To-morrow I'll move," she told herself each night, but next day she was no nearer to uprooting herself than she had been the day before. She gave herself no reasons for remaining. If she had been asked for a reason she might have said it was because Dulac still boarded with her mother. He had not left the city with the breaking of the strike, but had remained. He had remained because he had asked the union he represented to let him remain and had been able to show them reasons for granting his request. He wanted to stay on the ground to work quietly underground, undoing the harm that had been done by the strike; quietly proselyting, preaching his gospel, gaining strength day by day, until he should have reared an organization capable of striking again. The courage of the man was unquenchable.... And he wanted to be near Ruth. Just as he had set his will to force Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, to bow to the will of the men, so he had set his will to force Ruth to bow to his will.... So he remained and labored. But his presence at her mother's was not the real reason that impelled Ruth to continue in the home Bonbright had made for her. It was something more intangible. She found the thought of leaving that spot unendurable, but she did not, dared not, seek in her heart for what made it unendurable. For a week she scarcely ventured outside the door; then the loneliness, the lack of occupation, drove her out. She must be busy, for when she sat idly in a room her thoughts became torture. There were many sides to her affliction. First in her mind she placed the failure of her great project. She had wrecked her life for it without accomplishment. Second in the rank of her griefs stood the fact that she had been on the point of giving herself to Dulac. She would have gone with him, disregarding convention, breaking her vows of marriage. For that she despised herself... despised herself the more because she knew now that she did not love Dulac, that she had never loved Dulac. That discovery had shocked and shaken her, and when she thought of what might have happened if she had gone with him a numbness of horror crept over her, leaving her cold and trembling. ... She would have gone, and she did not love him. She would not have known she did not love him until it was too late to draw back... and then she would have lived, but her soul would have died! She accused herself bitterly for mistaking glamour for love. She knew now that Dulac had called from her nothing deeper than a foolish, girlish fascination. His personality, his work, his enthusiasm had enmeshed her, blinded her--and she had mistaken her feelings for love! Of this she was certain.... There were moments when she felt she must tell Bonbright. Once she actually took writing materials to do so, but she did not tell him.... She wanted him to know, because, she thought, it would be a sort of vindication in his eyes. But she was wrong. She wanted him to know for quite another reason than that. Third in the order of her griefs was the consciousness that she had caused Bonbright grief. She dealt ungently with herself because of it, for Bonbright had not deserved it at her hands. She could appreciate how good he had been to her, how solicitous, how patient, how tender. If a man ever deserved well of a woman, he deserved it. She told herself that a hundred times daily. She remembered small thoughtfulnesses which had been a part of his daily conduct to her. She recalled small forbearances. She pictured to herself the life they had lived together, and saw how it was only the character of her husband that had made it possible at all.... And in the end he had not uttered one word of censure; had not even looked at her with just anger.... There had been no pretense about him, no labored effort to be kind. He had simply been himself. These were her thoughts; this is how she remembered him.... The house was unbearably lonely. As evening approached she found herself more than once listening for Bonbright's step on the stairs and his hand on the door.... At such times she cried. She puzzled herself. She did not understand why she should be so lonely, nor why the expectation of Bonbright's step--with quick awakening to the knowledge that no foot of his would ever sound at her door again--should bring her tears.... She knew she should have been glad, relieved. With Bonbright she had lived in daily dread. She had not loved him, and the fear that his restraint would break, that he would force his love upon her, had made her days a ghastly dream.... She should be crying out with the joy and relief of his removal. But she felt no relief, felt no joy.... She could not understand it. If Hilda Lightener, who came often and stayed long, had asked her if she missed Bonbright or were lonely without him, she would have denied it hotly. But Hilda did not ask.... Ruth did not ask that question of herself. She knew she was lonely, miserable, and she thought she knew why--but Bonbright's absence had nothing to do with it. Hilda watched, she did not talk about Bonbright, for she saw her task was to help Ruth over these first few days. Her suspicions were her own, but, being a woman, she understood the baffling psychology of another woman and what harm a premature word might work.... If the thing she believed were true, then time would bring its realization to Ruth. Ruth must discover the truth for herself.... "I can't stand this," Ruth said one evening. "I can't bear to stay here alone in these rooms. If there were work enough to keep me busy--but there's nothing." "If you'd only go the places I ask you to," said Hilda. "I don't want to meet people--your sort of people. They must know what has happened.... I couldn't have them looking at me with their catty, curious eyes." "Most of them would be very kind," Hilda said. "No.... I'm going to work. I'm going to find a place and work...." "But--" Hilda wondered what Bonbright would think of that. She imagined he would not like it. "I know what you were going to say. He wouldn't want me to. Maybe he wouldn't--but if he knew he'd let me do it. I tell you I've got to, Hilda." "You've got to decide for yourself," Hilda admitted, so Ruth became a job hunter, and because intelligent stenographers are by no means as plentiful as daisies in a July field, she was not long in finding employment.... From that day life was easier. She found her wages were ample to support herself and pay the rent of her apartment. Ample, in that they sufficed. There was no surplus. So she folded and put away the weekly checks she received from Bonbright. She did not send them back to him because, to her mind, that would have been a weekly slap in his face. But she would not cash them. There was a difference to her; probably there was a real difference. Of a Sunday Ruth often went driving with Hilda, and Hilda noticed how closely her companion watched the sidewalks, how she scrutinized the passing crowds. It was as though Ruth were trying to catch sight of somebody.... While daylight lasted Hilda saw that Ruth was drawn to her windows to sit looking down at the street. Once Hilda ventured dangerously. "Why do you always sit there watching folks go by?" she asked. Ruth turned and looked at her strangely. "I--why, I don't know," she said. Of herself Ruth rarely mentioned Bonbright; never unless in some recollection of him, or if Hilda meddled with some portion of the household that had been peculiarly Bonbright's. As, for instance: "Why don't you move that leather chair out of the other bedroom?" Hilda asked. "It's doing no good there and it looks mighty comfortable." "That was HIS chair," Ruth said, quickly. "He used to sit there and read after--after I had gone to bed." Once Ruth asked for news of Bonbright. After that Hilda brought her news voluntarily. Not too frequently, but often enough according to her notion. Betweentimes she gave Ruth plenty of time to wonder what was happening to her husband. Ruth knew Hilda saw him often. She wondered if they talked about her, and what they said, but that she never asked, nor did Hilda refer to such conversations. Indeed, these were few and sparing, for Bonbright could not be made to talk about his wife--even to her. But she gave Bonbright news of Ruth just as she gave Ruth news of Bonbright. Sometimes Hilda tormented Ruth with set purpose. "Bonbright looks mighty thin," she said. "I think he's working too hard. If he keeps it up he'll make himself sick." "Oh..." said Ruth--nothing more, but for the rest of that Sunday she was quiet--very quiet. Once Hilda found Ruth in a passion of tears, and when she sought the reason she learned that Ruth had met Dulac on the street, face to face, and that he had spoken to her. He had told Ruth that he was staying in the city because of her; that he would not go without her. ... He had been careless of listening ears, not concealing his emotions. "Well, he didn't hurt you, did he?" "No," said Ruth. "You weren't afraid of him?" "No." "You--didn't want to go away with him?" "No.... No...." "Then what are you making all the fuss about? He can't carry you off" 'HE might have seen us together," said Ruth. "And--and it made me--remember--that horrid afternoon." "What if Bonbright did see you together? Don't you suppose Bonbright thinks you are seeing him? Of course he does. What else would he think? Naturally he supposes you are going to have your divorce when the year is up, and marry Mr. Dulac." Hilda was merciless. "Does he think that? Are you sure?" Hilda shrugged her shoulders. "He mustn't think it," Ruth said, affrightedly. "Why, he--If he thought that--" "If he thought that--what?" Ruth bit her lips and turned away. "Nothing," she said. Then: "Can't you let him know?... Not tell him, you know, but--sort of let him understand." "If I can see a good chance," Hilda said; but in her mind was the resolution that she would never see the chance. "Does he--seem cheerful?" Ruth asked. "It's been quite a long time now--months.... He--must have gotten over--caring for me now. Do you think so?" Her voice was anxious, pleading. Hilda could not hold out against that appeal. "No, silly, he hasn't. He isn't that sort.... It's too bad." "Yes--it's too bad," said Ruth, but it was not sympathy that put the tiny thrill into her voice. "He's just a boy.... He can't go on all his life loving a girl that doesn't want him. Some day he's going to fall in love again. It's natural he should." "Has he--Do you think--" "No, I haven't seen any signs of it yet.... And I'd be jealous if he did. I think I could manage to fall in love with him myself if--" "--he wasn't tied to me," interrupted Ruth, with a little whimper. "I--I wish he knew--about Mr. Dulac.... He wouldn't think so--hard of me, maybe... if he knew I didn't--never did--love Mr. Dulac...." "The only thing that would make any difference to him would be to know that you loved him," said Hilda. Ruth had no answer, but she was saying to herself, with a sort of secret surprise: "If I loved him.... If I loved him...." Presently she spoke aloud: "You won't be angry with me, Hilda?... You won't misunderstand, but--but won't you please--go away?... Please.... I--I don't want to see anybody. I want to be alone." "Well, of all things!" said Hilda. But she was not offended. Her resemblance to her father was very faint indeed, at that moment. She looked more like her mother, softer, more motherly. She put on her hat and went away quietly. "Poor Bonbright!" she was thinking. Then: "It's come to her.... She's got a hint of it. It will come now with a rush...." Ruth sat in her chair without movement. "If I loved him..." she said, aloud, and then repeated it, "... loved him...." She was questioning herself now, asking herself the meaning of things, of why she had been lonely, of why she had sat in her window peering down into the street--and she found the answer. As Hilda had said in her thoughts, it was coming with a rush.... She was frightened by it, dared not admit it.... She dared not admit that the biggest, weightiest of her woes was that she no longer had Bonbright with her; that she was lonesome for him; that her heart had been crying out for him; that she loved him! She dared not admit that. It would be too bitter, too ironically bitter.... If she loved him now she had loved him then! Was her life to be filled with such ironies--? Was she forever to eat of Dead Sea fruit? Did she love Bonbright? At last she dared to put the question squarely.... Her answer came quickly. "Oh, I do... I do!" she cried, aloud. "I love him...." A surge of happiness welled up from her heart at the words. "I love him," she repeated, to hear the sound of them again. The happiness was of short life. "I love him--but it's too late.... It's always too late," she sobbed. "I've lost him.... He's gone. ..." The girl who could give herself to a man she did not love for the Cause was not weak; she did not lack resolution, nor did she lack the sublimity of soul which is the heritage of women. She had lost her happiness; she had wrecked her life, and until this moment there seemed no possibility of recovering anything from the wreckage.... But she loved.... There was a foundation to build from. If she had been weak, a waverer, no structure could have risen on the foundation; it must have lain futile, accusing. But there was strength in her, humility, a will that would dare much, suffer much, to fight its way to peace. "If he loves me still," she thought; and there hope was born. "If I go to him.... If I tell him--everything?" she asked herself, and in asking made her resolution. She would venture, she would dare, for her happiness and for his. She would go, and she would say: "Bonbright, I love you.... I have never loved anybody but you.... You must believe me." He would believe her, she knew. There was no reason why he should not believe her. There was nothing for her to gain now by another lie. "I'll make him believe," she said, and smiled and cried and smiled again. "Hilda will tell me where he lives and I'll go to him--now...." At that instant Hilda was coming to her, was on the stairs, and Hilda looked grave, troubled. She walked slowly up the stairs and rapped on the door. "Ruth," she called, "it's Hilda.... May I come in now?" Ruth ran to the door and threw it open. "Come in.... Come in." Her voice was a song. "Oh, Hilda..." "Honey," said Hilda, holding her at arm's length, '-his father is dead. They found him dead just after noon...." "Oh!..." said Ruth. It was an instant before the full significance of this news was shown to her. Then she clutched Hilda with terror-stricken fingers. "No.... No!..." she cried. "It can't be.... It mustn't be...." "Why--what is it? I--I didn't think you'd take it like this...." "I love him.... I love Bonbright," Ruth said, in a blank, dead voice. "I was going to him.... I was going to tell him... and he would have believed. But now---he wouldn't believe. He would think I came--because his father was dead--because he--he was what I thought he was when I married him.... Don't you see? He'd think I was coming to him for the same reason.... He'd think I was willing to give myself to him--for that...." Hilda took the slight form in her arms and rocked her to and fro, while she thought.... "Yes," she said, sorrowfully, "you can't go to him now.... It would look--oh, why couldn't his father have made a will, as he was going to?... If he'd left his old money to charity or something.... We thought he had.... But there has been no will. Everything is Bonbright's...." "I'm always--too--late..." Ruth said, quietly. CHAPTER XXIX Bonbright was in his own home again--in the house that had been his father's, and that was now his. He stood in the room that had been his since babyhood. He had not thought to stand there again, nor did he know that the room and the house were his own. He had come from the shops but a half hour before; had come from that room where his father lay across his desk, one arm outstretched, the other shielding his face. There had been no time to think then; no time to realize. ... What thought had come to him was one of wonder that the death of his father could mean so little to him. Shock he felt, but not grief. He had not loved his father. Yet a father is a vital thing in a son's life. Bonbright felt this. He knew that the departing of a father should stand as one of the milestones of life, marking a great change. It marked no change for him. Everything would go on as it had gone--even on the material side. It was inevitable that he should remember his father's threat to disinherit him. Now the thing had come--and it made little difference, for Bonbright had laid out his life along lines of his own.... His father would be carried to the grave, would disappear from the scene--that was all. He saw that the things were done which had to be done, and went home to his mother, dreading the meeting. He need not have dreaded it, for she met him with no signs of grief. If she felt grief she hid it well. She was calm, stately, grave--but her eyes were not red with weeping nor was her face drawn with woe. He wondered if his father meant as little to his father's wife as it did to his father's son. It seemed so. There had been no affectionate passage between Bonbright and his mother. She had not unbent to him. He had hardly expected her to, though he had been prepared to respond.... Now he was in his room with time to think--and there was strangely little to think of. He had covered the ground already. His father was dead. When Bonbright uttered that sentence he had covered the episode completely. That was it--it was an EPISODE. A servant came to the door. "Mr. Richmond wishes to speak with you on the phone, Mr. Bonbright," the man said, and Bonbright walked to the instrument. Richmond had been his father's counsel for many years. "Bonbright?" asked Mr. Richmond. "Yes." "I have just had the news. I am shocked. It is a terrible thing." "Yes," said Bonbright. "I will come up at once--if you can see me. The death of a man like your father entails certain consequences which cannot be considered too soon. May I come?" "If you think it is necessary," said Bonbright. "It is necessary," said Mr. Richmond. In twenty minutes Richmond was announced and Bonbright went to meet him in the library. Richmond extended his hand with the appropriate bearing for such an occasion. His handshake was a perfect thing, studied, rehearsed, just as all his life was studied and rehearsed. He had in stock a manner and a handshake and a demeanor which could be instantly taken off the shelf and used for any situation which might arise. Richmond was a ready man, an able man. On the whole, he was a good man, as men go, but cut and dried. "Your father was a notable man," he declared. "He will be missed." Bonbright bowed. "There will be a great deal for you to look after," said the lawyer, "so I will be brief. The mass of detail can wait--until after--er--until you have more leisure." "I think, Mr. Richmond, it is my mother you wish to see, not myself. I thought you would understand my position. I am surprised that you do not, since you have been so close to my father.... My father and I did not agree on matters which both of us considered vital. There were differences which could not be abridged. So I am here merely as his son, not as his successor in any way." "I don't understand." "My father," said Bonbright, with a trace of impatience, "disowned me, and--disinherited, I believe, is the word--disinherited me." "Oh no! No!... Indeed no! You are laboring under a misapprehension. ... You are mistaken. I am glad to be able to relieve your mind on that point. Nothing of the sort was done. I am in a position to know. ... I will admit your father discussed such action, but the matter went no farther. Perhaps it was his intention to do as you say, but he put it off.... He seemed to have a prejudice against making a will. As a matter of fact, he died intestate..." "You mean--" "I mean that your father's wealth--and it was considerable, sir--will be disposed of according to the statutes of Descent and Distribution. In other words, having failed to dispose of his property by testament, the law directs its disposition. With the exception of certain dower rights the whole vests in yourself." Here was something to think of. Here was a new and astounding set of circumstances to which he must adapt himself.... He experienced no leap of exultation. The news left him cold. Queerly, his thoughts in that moment were of Ruth and of her great plan. "If she had waited..." he thought. No, he was glad she had not waited. He did not want her that way.... It was not her he wanted, but her love. He thought bitterly that he would willingly exchange all that had become his for that one possession. He could have anything--everything--he wanted now but that.... "I am glad to be able to give you such news," said Mr. Richmond. "I was thinking of something else," said Bonbright. Richmond looked at the young man obliquely. He had heard that Bonbright was queer. This rumor seemed not without foundation. Richmond could not comprehend how a young man could think of anything else when he had just learned that he was several tunes a millionaire. "Sit down," said Bonbright. "This, of course, makes a difference." Richmond seated himself, and drew documents from his green bag. For half an hour he discussed the legal aspects of the situation and explained to Bonbright what steps must be taken at once. "I think that is all that will be necessary to-day," he said, finally. "Very well.... There is no reason why affairs may not go on for a couple of days as they are--as if father were alive?" "No, I see no reason why they should not." "Very well, then.... Will you see to it? The--the funeral will be on Saturday. Monday I shall be in the office." "I hope you will call upon me for any assistance or advice you find necessary.... Or for any service of whatsoever nature.... Good afternoon.... Will you convey my sympathy to Mrs. Foote?" The rest of that day, and of the days that followed it, Bonbright was trying to find the answer to the question, What does this mean to me? and to its companion question, What shall I do with it? One paper Richmond had left in Bonbright's hands, as Richmond's predecessors had left it in the hands of preceding Bonbright Footes. It was a copy of the will of the first Bonbright Foote, and the basic law, a sort of Salic law, a family pragmatic sanction for his descendants, through time and eternity. It laid upon his descendants the weight of his will with respect to the conduct of the business of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated. Five generations had followed it faithfully, deviating only as new conditions made deviation necessary. It was all there, all set forth minutely. Bonbright could visualize that first of his line from the reading of it--and he could visualize his father. His father was the sort of man that will would create.... He considered himself. He was not off that piece.... His father had tried to press him in the family mold, and he remembered those unbearable days. Now, from his remote grave the first Bonbright Foote reached out with the same mold and laid his hands on the hope of the line.... Bonbright read the words many times. His was the choice to obey or to disobey, to remain an individual, distinct and separate from all other individuals since the world began, or to become the sixth reincarnation of Bonbright Foote I.... The day following his father's burial he chose, not rashly in haste, nor without studied reason. To others the decision might not have seemed momentous; to Bonbright it was epoch-marking. It did mark an epoch in the history of the Foote family. It was the Family's French Revolution. It was Martin Luther throwing his inkpot at the devil--and overturning the ages. Bonbright's decision required physical expression. Most human decisions require physical expression to give them effect. He had a feeling as though six disembodied Bonbright Footes stood about in an agony of anxiety, watching to see what he would do as he took the emblematical paper in his hands. He tore it very slowly, tore it again and again into ribbons and into squares, and let them flutter into his wastebasket.... If others had been present to assert that they heard a groan he would not have denied it, for the ancestors were very real to him then... their presence was a definite fact. "There..." he said. The king was dead. Long live the king! It was after that he had his talk with his mother. Perhaps he was abrupt, but he dreaded that talk. Perhaps his diplomacy was faulty or lacking. Perhaps he made mistakes and failed to rise to the requirements of the conditions and of his relationship with her. He did his best. "Mother," he said, "we must talk things over." She sat silently, waiting for him to speak. "Whatever you wish," he said, "I shall do... if I can." "There is a qualification?" she said. "Suppose you tell me what you want done," he said. "I want you to come to your senses and realize your position," she said, coldly. "I want you to get rid of that woman and, after a decent interval, marry some suitable girl...." "I was discussing your affairs, mother, not mine. We will not refer to my wife." "All I want," she said, "is what I am entitled to as your father's widow." "This house, of course," he said. "You will want to stay here. I want you to stay here." "And you?" "I prefer to live as I am." "You mean you do not care to come back here?" "Yes." "You must. I insist upon it. You have caused scandal enough now.... People would talk." "Mother, we might as well understand each other at once. I am not Bonbright Foote VII. Let that be clear. I am Bonbright Foote. I am myself, an individual. The old way of doing things is gone.... Perhaps you have heard of the family law--the first Bonbright's will. ... I have just torn it up." She compressed her lips and regarded him with hostility. Then she shrugged her shoulders. "I suppose I must make the best of it. I realize I am powerless." She realized it fully in that moment; realized that her son was a man, a man with force and a will, and that it would be hopeless to try to bring him to submit to her influence. "There is nothing for us to discuss. I shall ask for what I need...." "Very well," he said, not coldly, not sharply, but sorrowfully. There was no need to try to approach nearer to his mother. She did not desire it. In her the motherly instinct did not appear. She had never given birth to a son; what she had done was to provide her husband with an heir, and, that being done, she was finished with the affair. ... He went from his mother to his own room, where he sat down at his desk and wrote a brief letter to his wife. It was not so difficult to compose as the other one had been, but it was equally succinct, equally barren of emotion. Yet he was not barren of emotion as he wrote it. MY DEAR RUTH [he said],-My father is dead. This makes a very material change in my financial condition, and the weekly sum I have been sending you becomes inadequate. Hereafter a suitable check will be mailed you each week until the year expires. At that time I shall make a settlement upon you which will be perfectly satisfactory. In the meantime, should you require anything, you have but to notify me, or, if you prefer, notify Mr. Manley Richmond, who will attend to it immediately. This letter he mailed himself.... Not many days later it was returned to him with "Not Found" stamped upon it in red ink. Bonbright fancied there must be some error, so he sent it again by messenger. The boy returned to report that the apartment was vacant and that no one could furnish the present address of the lady who had occupied it. Bonbright sent to Ruth's mother, who could only inform him that Ruth had gone away, she did not know where, and such goings-on she never saw, and why she should be asked to bear more than she had borne was a mystery..-- There was but one conclusion for Bonbright. Ruth had been too impatient to wait for the year to expire and had gone away with Dulac.... Hilda could have corrected that belief, but he did not see Hilda, had not seen her, for his new duties and new problems and responsibilities occupied him many more hours a day than any labor union or legislature would have permitted an employee to be required to work. His hours of labor did not stop with the eighth nor with the tenth.... There were days when they began with daylight and continued almost to daylight again. Ruth had gone with Dulac.... She was hidden away. Not even Hilda Lightener knew where she was, but Hilda knew why she had gone.... There is an instinct in most animals and some humans which compels them to hide away when they suffer wounds. Hilda knew Ruth had crept away because she had suffered the hardest to bear of all wounds--and crushing of hope.... She had gone the morning after Bonbright's father died, leaving no word but that she was going, and she had not gone far. It is simple to lose oneself in a city. One may merely move to the next ward and be lost to one's friends. Only chance will cause a meeting, and Ruth was determined to guard against that chance. She found a cheap, decent boarding house, among laboring people; she found a new position... that was all. She had to live; to continue was required of her, but it must be among strangers. She could face existence where there were no pitying eyes; where there was none to remind her of her husband.... She hid away with her love, and coddled it and held it up for herself to see. She lived for it. It was her life.... Even at her darkest moment she was glad she loved. She devoted herself wholly to that love which had been discovered just too late--which was not the wise nor the healthful thing to do, as any physician could have informed her. CHAPTER XXX For a few days after the commencement of his reign Bonbright remained quiescent. It was not through uncertainty, nor because he did not know what he was going to do. It was because he wanted to be sure of the best way of doing it. Very little of his time was spent in the room that had been his father's and was now his own; he walked about the plant, studying, scrutinizing, appraising, comparing. He did not go about now as he had done with Rangar on the day his father inducted him into the dignity of heir apparent and put a paper crown on his head and a wooden scepter in his hand. He was aware that the men eyed him morosely. Bitterness was still alive in their hearts, and the recollection of suffering fresh in their minds. They still looked at him as a sort of person his father had made him appear, and viewed his succession as a calamity. The old regime had been bad enough, they told one another, but this young man, with his ruthlessness, his heartlessness, with what seemed to be a savage desire to trample workingmen into unresisting, unprotesting submission--this would be intolerable. So they scowled at him, and in their homes talked to their wives with apprehension of dark days ahead. He felt their attitude. It could not be helped--yet. His work could not be started with the men, it must start elsewhere. He would come to the men later, in good time, in their proper order. His third morning in the office he had called Malcolm Lightener on the telephone. "Is your proposition to manufacture ten thousand engines still open?" "Yes." "I'll take the contract--providing we can arrive at terms." "I'll send over blue prints and specifications--and my cost figures. Probably our costs will be lower than yours...." "They won't be," said Bonbright, with a tightening of his jaw. "Can you lend me Mershon for a while?" Mershon was Lightener's engineer, the man who had designed and built his great plant. "I can't, but I will." "As soon as he can arrange it, please. I want to get started." "He'll be there in half an hour." Mershon came, a gray, beefy, heavy-faced man--with clear, keen, seeing eyes. "Mr. Lightener has loaned you to me, Mr. Mershon. It was a tremendous favor, for I know what you can do." Mershon nodded. He was a man who treasured up words. He must have had a great store of them laid by, for in his fifty years he had used up surprisingly few. "This is what I want," Bonbright said. "First, I want a plant designed with a capacity of twenty thousand Lightener engines. You designed Lightener's engine plant--so you're about the one man to give me one that will turn out more engines with less labor and at lower cost than his. That's what I want." Mershon's eyes lighted. "It will cost money," he said. "I'll find the money; you give me the plant," Bonbright said. "And second, I want a survey made of this present plant. I know a lot of it is junk, but I'm not competent to say how much. You will know what to do. If I have to junk the whole outfit I'll do it. I don't want to waste money, but I want these mills to be the equal of any mills in the country.... Not only in efficiency, but as a place to work. I want them safe. You will understand. I want the men considered. Give them light and air. Wait till you see our wash rooms!" He shrugged his shoulders. "It isn't enough to have the best machines," he said. "I want the men to be able to do the best that's in them.... You understand?" Mershon nodded. "The next room is yours." Bonbright pointed toward his old office, the one it had been the family custom to close on the accession of the heir apparent, and never to reopen until a new heir was ready to take up his duties. He felt a sort of pleasure in this profanation. "You'll find it large enough. If you need more room, ask for it.... Get what assistants you need." "No more interruption of production than necessary," said Mershon. "Exactly.... And we need that new plant in a hurry. I've taken a contract to make ten thousand engines for Mr. Lightener this year." It was that day that he called Rangar into the room. Rangar had been uneasy, fearful, since his old employer had died. He had been an important figure under the old order; a sort of shadow behind the throne. He wondered what would happen to him now. More especially if Bonbright had a notion of some of his duties under Bonbright's father. He was not kept in suspense. "Mr. Rangar," said Bonbright, "I have been looking through the files. Some of your duties have become clear to me. I was familiar with others.... Perhaps my father required a man like yourself. I do not. The old way of doing things here is gone, and you and I could not be happy together. I shall direct the cashier to give you a check for six months' salary..." "You mean--" "Exactly what I say." "But--you don't understand the business. Who is going to run it while you learn?" "I don't want to know how this business was run. It's not going to be run that way.... There's nothing you could teach me, Mr. Hangar.... Good afternoon." Rangar went white with rage. Animosity toward this young man he had harbored since the beginning; it flowered into hatred. But he dared not voice it. It was not in Hangar's nature to be open, to fight without cover. If he spoke, the check for six months' salary might be withdrawn, so, uttering none of the venom that flooded to his lips, he went away.... Rangar was the sort of man who vows to get even. ... That evening Bonbright sat in his window and watched the army of his employees surge out of the big gate and fill the street. Five thousand of them.... It was a sight that always fascinated him, as it had that first evening when he saw them, and came to a realization of what it meant to be overlord to such a multitude. More than ever he realized it now--for he was their overlord. They were his men. It was he who gave them the work that kept them alive; he who held their happiness, their comfort, their very existence in the hollow of his hand.... And he knew that in every one of those five thousand breasts burned resentment toward him. He knew that their most friendly feeling toward him was suspicion. It was easy to rebuild a plant; it was simple to construct new mills with every device that would make for efficiency. That was not a problem to awe him. It needed but the free expenditure of money, and there was money in plenty.... But here was a task and a problem whose difficulty and vastness filled him with misgiving. He must turn that five thousand into one smooth-running, willing whole. He must turn their resentment, their bitterness, their suspicion, into trust and confidence. He must solve the problem of capital and labor.... An older, more experienced man might have smiled at Bonbright--at his daring to conceive such a possibility. But Bonbright dared to conceive it; dared to set himself the task of bringing it about. That would be his work, peculiarly. No one could help him with it, for it was personal, appertaining to him. It was between Bonbright Foote and the five thousand. It was inevitable that he should feel bitterness toward his father, for, but for his father, his work would now be enormously more simple. If these men knew him as he was--knew of his interest in them, of his willingness to be fair--he would have had their confidence from the start. His father had made him appear a tyrant, without consideration for labor; had made him a capitalist of the most detestable type. It was a deep-seated impression. It had been proven. The men had experienced it; had felt the weight of Bonbright's ruthless hand.... How could he make them believe it was not his hand? How could he make them believe that the measures taken to crush the strike had not been his measures; that they had been carried out under his name but against his will? It sounded absurd even to himself. Nobody would believe it. Therefore he must begin, not at the beginning, but deeper than the beginning. He could not start fairly, but under a handicap so great as to make his chances of winning all but negligible.... It would be useless to tell his men that he had been but a figurehead. For him the only course was to blot out what had gone--to forget it--and to start against odds to win their confidence. It would be better to let them slowly come to believe he was a convert--that there had been a revolution in his heart and mind. Indeed, there was no other way. He must show them by daily studied conduct that he was not what they feared he was.... He did not know what he was himself. His contact with Malcolm Lightener's workingmen had given him certain sympathies with the theories and hopes of labor; but they had made him certain of fallacies and unsoundness in other theories and ambitions. He was not the romantic type of wealthy young man who, in stories, meets the under dog and loves him, and is suddenly converted from being an out-and-out capitalist to the most radical of socialists. It was not in him to be radical, for he was steadied by a quietly running balance wheel.... He was stubborn, too. What he wanted was to be fair, to give what was due--and to receive what was HIS due.... He could not be swayed by mawkish sentimental sympathy, nor could he be bullied. Perhaps he was stiff-necked, but he was a man who must judge of the right or wrong of a condition himself. Perhaps he was too much that way, but his experiences had made him so. If his men tried to bulldoze him they would find him immovable. What he believed was right and just he would do; but he had his own set notions of right and justice. He was sympathetic. His attitude toward the five thousand was one of friendliness. He regarded them as a charge and a responsibility. He was oppressed by the magnitude of the responsibility.... But, on the other hand, he recognized that the five thousand were under certain responsibilities and obligations to him. He would do his part, but he would demand their part of them. His father had been against unions. Bonbright was against unions. His reason for this attitude was not the reason of his father. It was simply this: That he would not be dictated to by individuals who he felt were meddling in his affairs. He had arrived at a definite decision on this point: his mills should never be unionized.... If his men had grievances he would meet with them individually, or committees sent by them--committees of themselves. He would not treat with so-called professional labor men. He regarded them as an impertinence. Whatever differences should arise must be settled between his men and himself--with no outside interference. This was a position from which nothing would move him.... It will be seen he was separated by vast spaces from socialism. He called together his superintendents and department foremen and took them into his confidence regarding his plans for improving and enlarging the plant. They came, if not with an air of hostility, at least with reserve, for they were nearer to the men than they were to Bonbright. They shared the prejudices of the men. Some of them went away from the meeting with all of their old prejudices and with a new belief that Bonbright added hypocrisy to his other vices; some withheld judgment, some were hopeful. Few gave him implicit belief. When he was done describing the plans for the factory, he said: "There is one more thing I want to speak about. It is as vital as the other.... We have recently gone through a strike which has caused bitterness toward this institution on the part of the men. There has been especial bitterness toward myself. I have no defense of myself to make. It is too late to do that. If any of you men know the facts--you know them. On that point I have nothing to say.... This is what I want to impress on you men who are in authority. I want to be fair to every man in this plant. I am going to give them a fit place to work. Many parts of this plant are not now fit places. From every man I shall demand a day's work for a day's pay, but no more. You are in direct authority. I want each of you to treat his men with consideration, and to have an eye for their welfare. Perhaps I shall not be able to make the men feel toward me as I want them to feel, but if it can be brought about, I want them to know that their interests are my interests.... That is all, except that to-morrow notices will be posted in every department stating that my office door is open to any man who works for me--any man may come to me with complaint or with suggestion at any time. The notices will state that I want suggestions, and that any man who can bring me an idea that will improve his work or the work in his department or in the plant will be paid for it according to its value. In short, I want the co-operation of every man who draws wages from this concern...." As they went back to their departments the men who left the meeting discussed Bonbright, as he knew they would and hoped they would. "It's a four flush," declared one old fellow, hotly. "I don't know.... Wait and see," said another. "He looked like he meant it." Wait and see! That was the general attitude. They took nothing on trust, but put it squarely up to Bonbright to prove himself by his actions. Mershon came into the office. "How about this construction work?" he asked. "Need an army of bricklayers. What about the unions?" Was this question coming up so quickly? Bonbright frowned. His attitude toward the unions must become public and would inevitably raise another obstacle between himself and the men, but he was determined on the point. "A man has a right to join the Masons or the Knights of Columbus, or the Bricklayers' Union," he said, presently. "That's for him to say, but when he comes to work here he comes as an individual." "Open shop?" "Yes." "You won't recognize any union? I want to know how I stand with them at the beginning." "I'll recognize no union," said Bonbright. The card of a young man from Richmond's office was brought in. Bonbright sent word for him to be admitted. "I came about that Hammil accident case," said the young man. "Hammil was hurt yesterday, pretty badly, and the report makes it look as if we'd be stuck if the thing goes to a jury." "I know nothing about it," said Bonbright, with a little shock. It was possible, then, for a man to be maimed or killed in his own plant and news of it to reach him after days or perhaps never. He made a note to rectify THAT state of affairs. "You mean that this man Hammil was hurt through our fault?" "I'm afraid a jury would say so." The young man explained the accident in detail. "He complained about the condition of his machine, and his foreman told him he could stick to his job there or quit." "Forced him to work on an unsafe machine or quit?" "Yes." Bonbright stared at his blotter a moment. "What did you want to see me about?" "We'd better settle. Right now I can probably run up and put a wad of bills under Hammil's nose and his wife's, and it'll look pretty big. Before some ambulance-chaser gets hold of him. He hasn't been able to talk until awhile ago, so nobody's seen him." "Your idea is that we could settle for less than a jury would give him?" The young man laughed. "A jury'd give him four or five thousand, maybe more. Doctor says the injury is permanent. I've settled more than one like it for three or four hundred." "The man won't be able to work again?" "Won't be good for much." "And we're responsible!" Bonbright said it to himself, not to the young man. "Is this thing done often--settling these things for--what we can squeeze them down to?" "Of course." The young man was calloused. His job was to settle claims and save money. His value increased as his settlements were small. "Where's Hammil?" "At the General Hospital." Bonbright got up and went to the closet for his hat. "Come on," he said. "You're not going up there, are you?" "Yes." "But--but I can handle it all right, Mr. Foote. There's no need to bother you." "I've no doubt you can handle it--maybe too well," said Bonbright. They were driven to the hospital and shown up to Jim Hammil's room. His wife was there, pale, tearless, by his bedside. Jim was bandaged, groaning, in agony. Bonbright's lips lost their color. He felt guilty. It was HE who had put this man where he was, had smashed him. It was HIS fault. He walked to the bedside. "Jim," he said, "I am Mr. Foote." "I--know--you," said the man between teeth set to hold back his groans. "And I know you," said his wife. "I know you.... What do you want here?" "I came to see Jim," said Bonbright. "I didn't know he was hurt until a few minutes ago.... It's useless to say I'm sorry." "They made him work on that machine. He knowed it wasn't safe.... He had to work on it or lose his job...." "I know that NOW, Mrs. Hammil.... What was he earning?" "Two-seventy-five a day.... And now.... How'll we live, with him in the hospital and maybe never able to work again?" "Here..." protested Hammil, weakly, glaring at Bonbright. "We'll come out all right. He'll pay.... You'll pay, that's what you will. A jury'll make you pay. Wait till I kin see my lawyer...." "You won't need any lawyer, Jim," said Bonbright. It was hard for him to talk. He could not speak to these people as he wanted to, nor say the words that would make their way through their despair and rage to their hearts. "You won't need any lawyer," he repeated. "If you think I'm--goin'--to sign--one of them--releases--you're damn--mistaken," moaned the man. "Jim," said Bonbright, "you needn't sign anything.... What's done can't be mended.... It was bad. It was criminal..." "Mr. Foote," protested the young lawyer. "I'll attend to this," said Bonbright, shortly. "It's between Jim and me.... I'll make it as nearly right as it can be made.... First we'll have you out of this ward into a room.... As long as you are laid up your wife shall have your full pay every week, and then you and I will have a talk to see what can be done. Only don't worry.... Don't worry, Mrs. Hammil...." Hammil uttered a sound that was intended for a laugh. "You can't catch me," he said, in a dreadful voice. "I'm--up to--them sharp tricks.... You're lyin'.... Git out of here, both of you.... You're--jest here--to cheat me." "You're wrong, Jim." "I know--you and--your kind," Jim said, trying to lift himself on his elbow. "I know--what you--done durin'--the strike.... I had a baby--and she--DIED.... You killed her!" His voice rose almost to a scream. "Better go, sir," said a nurse. "He's hurting himself." Bonbright gazed at her blankly. "How can I go?" he asked. "He won't believe me. He's got to believe me...." "You lie!... you lie!..." Hammil cried. "I won't talk to you.... My lawyer'll--do my talkin'." Bonbright paused a moment. Then he saw it would do no good to remain. The man's mind was poisoned against him; was unable to conceive of a man in Bonbright's place meaning him otherwise than treachery.... It went deeper than suspicion of an individual; it was suspicion of a class. "I'll do what I promised, Jim.... That'll prove it to you." "You--lie.... You lie..." the man called after him, and Bonbright heard the words repeated again and again as he walked down the long corridor. CHAPTER XXXI Bonbright worked feverishly. These were the best days he had known since he left college, but they were not happy days. He could not forget Ruth--the best he could do was to prevent himself from remembering too much, and so he worked. He demanded of himself more than it is in a single man to give, but he accomplished an astonishingly large part of it. Day and night he drove himself without relaxation and without pause. If he stopped, the old feeling of emptiness, of the futility of his existence, and the bitterness of his fortune returned. His nature might have become warped, but for the labor. The building of the new shops he left to Mershon, knowing himself incompetent. He knew what sort of shops he wanted; Mershon knew how to produce them, and Mershon was dependable. Bonbright had implicit confidence in the engineer's ability and integrity, and it was justified. The new mills were rising.... Bonbright's part in that was enough to keep one man occupied, for, however much he might leave to Mershon, there were countless details that he must decide; innumerable points to be referred to him and discussed. But his chief interest was not in producing a plant to manufacture engines, but in producing a crew of men to operate the plant; not merely hiring capable workingmen, but producing a condition where himself and those working-men would be in accord; where the men would be satisfied, happy in their work; a condition millennial in that the known as labor unrest should be eliminated. He had set himself to find a solution to the age-old problem of capital and labor.... He had not realized how many elements entered into the matter, and what a high degree of specialized knowledge must be brought to the task. In the beginning he had fancied himself as capable of working out the basis for ideal relations between him and his employees as any other. He soon discovered himself to be all but unequipped for the effort.... It was a saving quality of Bonbright's that he would admit his own futilities. Therefore he called to conference the country's greatest sociologist, Professor Witzer. The professor, a short, wabbling individual, with watery eyes that could read print splendidly if it were held within six inches of them, and who, when he did read, moved book or paper back and forth in front of his spectacles in a droll, owlish, improbable way, instead of letting his eyes travel across the lines of print, was skeptical at first. He suspected Bonbright of being a youth scratching the itch of a sudden and transient enthusiasm. But he became interested. Bonbright compelled his interest, for he was earnest, intense, not enthusiastic, not effervescing with underdone theories. "What you want to do, as I understand it," said the professor, "is merely to revolutionize the world and bring on the millennium." "What I want to do," said Bonbright, "is to formulate a plan that will be fair to labor and fair to me. I want a condition where both of us will be satisfied--and where both will know we are satisfied. It can be done." "Um!..." said the professor. "Are you, by chance, a socialist?" "Far from it." "What are your theories?" "I haven't any theories. I want facts, working facts. There's no use palavering to the men. What they want and what I want is something concrete. I want to know what they want, and how much of it will be good for them. I want something that will work in dollars and cents, in days' work, in making life more comfortable for the women and children at home. If merely paying wages will do it, then I'll pay the wages...." "It won't," said the professor. "But it 'll go quite some distance." "It isn't a matter of sentiment with me," Bonbright said. "It's a matter of business, and peace of mind, and all-around efficiency. I don't mean efficiency in this plant, but efficiency in LIVING.... For the men and their families." "It can't be done by giving them rest rooms with Turkish rugs nor porcelain bathtubs, nor by installing a moving-picture show for them to watch while they eat lunch," said the professor. "It can't be done with money alone. It would work in isolated cases. Give some men a sufficient wage and they would correct their ways of living; they would learn to live decently, and they would save for the rainy day and for old age. I don't venture an estimate of the proportion.... But there would be the fellows whose increased pay meant only that much more to spend. Mighty little would filter through to improve the conditions of their actual living.... In any scheme there will have to be some way of regulating the use of the money they earn--and that's paternalism." "Can it be made to work? It's your honest opinion I'm after." "I don't believe it, but, young man, it will be the most interesting experiment I ever engaged in. Have you any ideas?" "My basic idea is to pay them enough so they can live in comfort. ..." "And then you've got to find some machinery to compel them to live in comfort." "I'd like to see every employee of this concern the owner of his home. I'd like to feel that no man's wife is a drudge. An astonishingly large number of wives do washing, or work out by the day.... And boarders. The boarder is a problem." "You HAVE been thinking," said the professor. "Do I understand that you are offering me the chance to work with you on this experiment?" "Yes." "I accept.... I never dreamed I'd have a chance to meddle with human lives the way you seem to want to meddle with them...." So they went to work, and day after day, week after week, their plan grew and expanded and embraced unforeseen intricacies. Bonbright approached it from the practical side always. The professor came to view him with amazement--and with respect. "I'm sticking my finger into the lives of twenty thousand human beings!" the professor said to himself many times a day, with the joy of the scientist. "I'm being first assistant to the world's greatest meddler. That young man is headed for a place as one of the world's leaders, or for a lamp-post and a rope.... I wonder which...." The thing that Bonbright asked himself many, many times was a different sort of question. "Is this the sort of thing she meant? Would she approve of doing this?" He was not embarked on the project for Ruth's sake. It was not Ruth who had driven him to it, but himself, and the events of his life. But her presence was there.... He was doing his best. He was doing the thing he thought would bring about the condition he desired, and he hoped she would approve if she knew.... But whether she approved or not, he would have persisted along his own way.... If he had never known her, never married her, he would have done the same thing. Some day she would know this, and understand it. It would be another irony for her to bear. The man she had married that she might influence him to ameliorate the conditions of his workingmen was doing far more than she had dreamed of accomplishing herself--and would have done it if she had never been born.... Neither she nor Bonbright realized, perhaps would never realize, that it is not the individual who brings about changes in the social fabric. It is not fanatics, not reformers, not inspired leaders. It is the labored working of the mass, and the working of the mass brings forth and casts up fanatics, reformers, leaders, when it has gestated them and prepared the way for their birth. The individual is futile; his aims and plans are futile save as they are the outcome of the trend of the mass.... Ruth was not so fortunate as Bonbright. Her work did not fill her time nor draw her interest. It was merely the thing she did to earn the necessities of life. She was living now in a boarding house on the lower side of the city, where a room might be had for a sum within her means. It was not a comfortable room. It was not a room that could be made comfortable by any arrangement of its occupant. But it was in a clean house, presided over by a woman of years and respectable garrulity. Six days of the week Ruth worked, and the work became daily more exhausting, demanding more of her nervous organism as her physical organism had less to give. She was not taking care of herself. It is only those who cling to life, who are interested in life and in themselves, who take care of their bodies as they should be taken care of. She had been slight; now she was thin. No one now would have dreamed of calling her the Girl with the Grin. She looked older, lifeless, almost haggard at times. Her condition was not wholly the result of unhappiness. It was due to lack of fresh air and exercise, for she went seldom abroad. It was fear of meeting acquaintances that shut her in her room--fear of meeting Bonbright, fear of encountering Dulac. It was loneliness, too. She made no new acquaintances, and went her way in solitude. She had not so much as a nodding acquaintance with most of her fellow lodgers. Not one of them could boast of conversation with her beyond the briefest passing of the day.... At first they gossiped about her, speculated about her, wove crude stories about her. Some chose to think her exclusive, and endeavored to show her by their bearing that they thought themselves as good as she--and maybe better. They might have saved themselves their trouble, for she never noticed. Lack of proper nourishment did its part. Women seem prone to neglect their food. The housewife, if her husband does not come home to the midday meal, contents herself with a snack, hastily picked up, and eaten without interest. Ruth had no appetite. She went to the table three times a day because a certain quantity of food was a necessity. She did not eat at Mrs. Moody's table, but "went out to her meals...." She ate anywhere and everywhere. Mrs. Moody alone had tried to approach Ruth. Ruth had been courteous, but distant. She wanted no prying into her affairs; no seekers after confidences; no discoverers of her identity. For gossip spreads, and one does not know what spot it may reach.... "It hain't healthy for her to set in her room all the time," Mrs. Moody said to the mercenary who helped with the cooking. "And it hain't natural for a girl like her never to have comp'ny. Since she's been here there hain't been a call at the door for her--nor a letter." "I hain't seen her but once or twict," said the mercenary. "If I was to meet her face to face on the street, I hain't sure I'd know it was her." "She didn't look good when she come, and she's lookin' worse every day. First we know we'll have her down on her back.... And then what?... S'pose she was to be took sudden? Who'd we notify?" "The horspittle," said the mercenary, callously. "She's sich a mite of a thing, with them big eyes lookin' sorry all the while. I feel sort of drawed to her. But she won't have no truck with me... nor nobody.... She hain't never left nothin' layin' around her room that a body could git any idee about her from. Secretive, I call it." "Maybe," said the mercenary, "she's got a past." "One thing's certain, if she don't look better 'fore she looks worse, she won't have a long future." That seemed to be a true saying. Ruth felt something of it. It was harder for her to get up of mornings, more difficult to drag herself to work and hold up during the day. Sometimes she skipped the evening meal now and went straight home to bed. All she wanted was to rest, to lie down.... One day she fainted in the office.... Her burden was harder to support because it included not grief alone, but remorse, and if one excepts hatred, remorse is the most wearing of the emotions.... As she became weaker, less normal, it preyed on her. Then, one morning, she fainted as she tried to get out of bed, and lay on the floor until consciousness returned. She dragged herself back into bed and lay there, gazing dully up at the ceiling, suffering no pain... only so tired. She did not speculate about it. Somehow it did not interest her very much. Even not going to work didn't bother her--she had reached that point. Mrs. Moody had watched her going and coming for several days with growing uneasiness. This morning she knew Ruth had not gone out, and presently the woman slap-slapped up the stairs in her heelless slippers to see about it. She rapped on Ruth's door. There was no response. She rapped again.... "I know you're in there," she said, querulously. "Why don't you answer?" Inside, Ruth merely moved her head from side to side on the pillow. She heard--but what did it matter? Mrs. Moody opened the door and stepped inside. She was prepared for what she saw. "There you be," she said, with a sort of triumphant air, as of one whose prophecy had been fulfilled to the letter, "flat on your back." Ruth paid no attention. "What ails you?" No answer. "Here now"--she spoke sharply--"you know who I be, don't you?" "Yes," said Ruth. "Why didn't you answer?" "I am--so--tired," Ruth said, faintly. "You can't be sick here. Don't you go doin' it. I hain't got no time to look after sick folks." She might as well have spoken to the pillow. Ruth didn't care. She had simply reached the end of her will, and had given up. It was over. She was absolutely without emotion. Mrs. Moody approached the bed and felt of Ruth's hand. She had expected to find it hot. It was cold, bloodless. It gave the woman a start. She looked down at Ruth's face, from which the big eyes stared up at her without seeming to see her. "You poor mite of a thing," said Mrs. Moody, softly. Then she seemed to jack herself up to a realization that softness would not do and that she could not allow such goings-on in her house. "You're sick, and if I'm a judge you're mighty sick," she said, sharply. "Who's goin' to look after you. Say?" The tone stirred Ruth.... "Nobody..." she said, after a pause. "I got to notify somebody," said Mrs. Moody. "Any relatives or friends?" Ruth seemed to think it over as if the idea were hard to comprehend. "Once I--had a--husband..." she said. "But you hain't got him now, apparently. Have you got anybody?" "... Husband..." said Ruth. "... husband.... But he--went away.... No, _I_--went away... because it was--too late then.... It was too late--THEN, wasn't it?" Her voice was pleading. "You know more about it than me," said Mrs. Moody. "I want you should tell me somebody I can notify." "I--loved him... and I didn't know it.... That was--queer--wasn't it?... He NEVER knew it...." "She's clean out of her head," said Mrs. Moody, irritably, "and what'll I do? Tell me that. What'll I do, and her most likely without a cent and all that?... Why didn't you go and git sick somewheres else? You could of...." She wrung her hands and called Providence to witness that all the arrows of misfortune were aimed at her, and always had been. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself--a growd woman like you--makin' me all this nuisance. I sha'n't put up with it. You'll go packin' to the horspittle, that's what you'll do. Mark my word." Mrs. Moody's method of packing Ruth off to the hospital was unique. It consisted of running herself for the doctor. It consisted of listening with bated breath to his directions; it consisted of giving up almost wholly the duties--A conducting her boarding house, and in making gruels and heating water and sitting in Ruth's room wielding a fan over Ruth's ungrateful face. It consisted in spending of her scant supply of money for medicines, in constant attendance and patient, faithful nursing--accompanied by sharp scoldings and recriminations uttered in a monotone guaranteed not to disturb the sick girl. Perhaps she really fancied she was being hard and unsympathetic and calloused. She talked as if she were, but no single act was in tune with her words.... She grumbled--and served. She complained--and hovered over Ruth with clumsy, gentle hands. She was afraid somebody might think her tender. She was afraid she might think so herself.... The world is full of Mrs. Moodys. Ruth lay day after day with no change, half conscious, wholly listless.... It seemed to Mrs. Moody to be nothing but a waiting for the end. But she waited for the end as though the sick girl were flesh of her flesh, protesting to heaven against the imposition, ceaselessly. CHAPTER XXXII If Bonbright's handling of the Hammil casualty created a good impression among the men, his stand against the unions more than counterbalanced it. He was able to get no nearer to the men. Perhaps, as individuals became acquainted with him, there was less open hostility manifested, but there remained suspicion, resentment, which Bonbright was unable to convert into friendship and co-operation. The professor of sociology peered frequently at Bonbright through his thick spectacles with keen interest. He found as much enjoyment in studying his employer as he did in working over his employer's plan. Frequently he discussed Bonbright with Mershon. "He's a strange young man," he said, "an instructive psychological study. Indeed he is. One cannot catalogue him. He is made up of opposites. Look you, Mershon, at his eagerness to better the conditions of his men--that's why I'm abandoning classes of boys who ought to be interested in what I teach them, but aren't--and then place beside it his antagonism to unionism...." Mershon was interested at that instant more in the practical aspects of the situation. "The unions are snapping at our heels. Bricklayers, masons, structural steel, the whole lot. I've been palavering with them--but I'm about to the end of my rope. We've needed men and we've got a big sprinkling of union men. Wages have attracted them. I'm afraid we've got too many, so many the unions feel cocky. They think they're strong enough to take a hand and try to force recognition on us.... He won't have it." Mershon shrugged his shoulders. "I've got to the end of my rope. Yesterday I told him the responsibility was one I didn't hanker for, and put it up to him. He's going to meet with the labor fellows to-day.... And we can look for fireworks." "If I were labor," said the professor, "I think I should leave that young man alone--until I saw where he headed. They're going to get more out of him than organization could compel or even hope for. If they prod him too hard they may upset things. He's fine capacity for stubbornness." The labor representatives were on their way to the office. When they arrived they asked first for Mershon, who received them and notified Bonbright. "Show them in," he said. "We may as well have it over." There were four of the men whom Mershon led through the door into Bonbright's office, but Bonbright saw but one of them-Dulac! The young man half rose from his chair, then sat down with his eyes fixed upon the man into whose hands, he believed, his wife had given herself. It was curious that he felt little resentment toward Dulac, and none of that murderous rage which some men might have felt.... "Mr. Dulac," he said, "I want to--talk with you. Will you ask these--other gentlemen if they will step outside for--a few moments.... I have a personal matter to discuss with--Mr. Dulac." Dulac was not at his ease. He had come in something like a spirit of bravado to face Bonbright, and this turn to the event nonplused him. However, if he would save his face he must rise to the situation. "Just a minute, boys," he said to his companions, and with Mershon they filed into the next room. "Dulac," said Bonbright, in a voice that was low but steady, "is she well and--happy?" "Eh?..." Dulac was startled indeed. "I haven't kept you to--quarrel," said Bonbright. "I hoped she would--wait the year before she went--to you, but it was hers to choose. ... Now that she has chosen--I want to know if it has--made her happy. I want her to be happy, Dulac." Dulac came a step nearer the desk. Something in Bonbright's voice and manner compelled, if not his sympathy, at least something which resembled respect. "Do you mean you don't know where Ruth is?" he asked. "No." "You thought she was with me?" "Yes." "Mr. Foote, she isn't with me.... I wish to God she was. I've seen her only once since--that evening. It was by accident, on the street. ... I tried to see her. I found the place empty, and nobody knew where she'd gone. Even her mother didn't know. I thought you had sent her away." "Dulac," said Bonbright, leaning forward as though drawn by spasmodic contraction of tense muscles, "is this true?" For once Dulac did not become theatrical, did not pose, did not reply to this doubt, as became labor flouting capital. Perhaps it was because the matter lay as close to his stormy heart as it did to Bonbright's. "Yes," he said. "Then where..." "I don't--know." "She's out there alone," said Bonbright, dully. "She's been out there alone--all these months. She's so little.... What made her go away?... Something has happened to her...." "Haven't you had any word--anything?" Dulac was becoming frightened himself. "Nothing--nothing." Bonbright leaped to his feet and took two steps forward and two back. "I've got to know," he said. "She must be found.... Anything could have happened...." "It's up to us to find her," said Dulac, unconsciously, intuitively coupling himself with Bonbright. They were comrades in this thing. The anxiety was equally theirs. "Yes.... Yes." "She wasn't the kind of a girl to--" "No," said Bonbright, quickly, as if afraid to hear Dulac say the words, "she wouldn't do THAT.... Maybe she's just hiding away--or hurt--or sick. I've got to know." "Call back the boys.... Let's get this conference over so we can get at it." Bonbright nodded, and Dulac stepped to the door. The men re-entered. "Now, gentlemen," said Bonbright. "We just came to put the question to you squarely, Mr. Foote. We represent all the trades working on the new buildings. Are you going to recognize the unions?" "No," said Bonbright. "More than half the men on the job are union." "They're welcome to stay," said Bonbright. "Well, they won't stay," said the spokesman. "We've fiddled along with this thing, and the boys are mighty impatient. This is our last word, Mr. Foote. Recognize the unions or we'll call off our men." Bonbright stood up. "Good afternoon, gentlemen," said he. With angry faces they tramped out, all but Dulac, who stopped in the door. "I'm going to look for her," he said. "If you find anything--hear anything--" Dulac nodded. "I'll let you know," he said. "I'll be--searching, too," said Bonbright. Mershon came in. "Here's a letter--" he began. Bonbright shook his head. "Attend to it--whatever it is. I'm going out. I don't know when I shall be back.... You have full authority. ..." He all but rushed from the room, and Mershon stared after him in amazement. Bonbright did not know where he was going, what he was going to do. There was no plan, but his need was action. He must be doing something, searching.... But as he got into his machine he recognized the futility of aimlessness. There was a way of going about such things.... He must be calm. He must enlist aid. Suddenly he thought of Hilda Lightener. He had not seen her for weeks. She had been close to Ruth; perhaps she knew something. He drove to the Lightener residence and asked for her. Hilda was at home. "She's LOST," said Bonbright, as Hilda came into the room. "What? Who are you talking about?" "'Ruth.... She's not with Dulac. He doesn't know where she is; she was never with him." "Did you think she was?" Hilda said, accusingly. "You--you're so--Oh, the pair of you!" "Do you know where she is?" "I haven't seen nor heard of her since the day--your father died." "Something must have happened.... She wouldn't have gone away like that--without telling anybody, even her mother...." "She would," said Hilda. "She--she was hurt. She couldn't bear to stay. She didn't tell me that, but I know.... And it's your fault for--for being blind." "I don't understand." "She loved you," said Hilda, simply. "No.... She told me. She never--loved--me. It was him. She married me to--" "I know what she married you for. I know all about it.... And she thought she loved him. She found out she didn't. But I knew it for a long time," Hilda said, womanlike, unable to resist the temptation to boast of her intuition. "It all came to her that day--and she was going to tell you.... She was going to do that--going to go to you and tell you and ask you to take her back.... She said she'd make you believe her...." "No," said Bonbright, "you're--mistaken, Hilda. She was my wife.... I know how she felt. She couldn't bear to have me pass close to her. ..." "It IS true," Hilda said. "She was going to you.... And then I came and told her your father was dead.... That made it all impossible, don't you see?... Because you knew why she had married you, and you would believe she came back to you because--you owned the mills and employed all those men.... That's what you WOULD have believed, too. ..." "Yes," said Bonbright. "And then--it was more than she could bear. To know she loved you and had loved you a long time--and that you loved her. You do, don't you?" "I can't--help it." "So that made it worse than anything that had gone before--and she went away. She didn't tell even me, but I ought to have known...." "And you haven't even a trace?" "Bonbright, if you find her--what?" "I don't know.... I've just got to find her. I've got to know what's happened...." "Are you going to tell her you love her--and take her back?" "She wouldn't want me.... Oh, you think you are right, Hilda. But I know. I lived with her for weeks and I saw how she felt. You're wrong.... No, I'll just FIND her...." "And leave her as bad off as she was before." "I'll do anything for her--you know that." "Except the one thing she can't do without...." "You don't understand," he said, wearily. "And you're dense and blind--and that's what makes half the cruelty in the world." "Let's not--talk about that part of it, Hilda. Will you help me find her?" "No," said Hilda. "She's where she wants to be. I'm not going to torture her by finding her for you--and then letting her slip back again--into hopelessness. If you'll promise to love her and believe she loves you--I'll try to find her." Bonbright shook his head. "Then let her be. No matter where she is, she's better off than she would be if you found her--and she tried to tell you and you wouldn't believe.... You let her be." "She may be hurt, or sick...." "If she were she'd let somebody know," said Hilda, but in her own mind was a doubt of this. She knew Ruth, she knew to what heights of fanaticism Ruth's determination could rise, and that the girl was quite capable, more especially in her state of overwrought nerves, of dying in silence. "I won't help you," she said, firmly. Bonbright got up slowly, wearily. "I'm sorry," he said. "I thought you--would help.... I'll have to hunt alone, then...." And before she could make up her mind to speak, to tell him she didn't mean what she said, and that she would search with him and help him, he was gone. The only thing he could think of to do was to go once more to their apartment and see if any trace of her could be picked up there. Somebody must have seen her go. Somebody must have seen the furniture going or heard where it was going.... Perhaps somebody might remember the name on the van. He did not content himself with asking the janitor and his wife, who could tell him nothing. He went from tenant to tenant. Few of them remembered even that such a girl had lived there, for tenants in apartment houses change with the months. But one woman, a spinster of the sort who pass their days in their windows and fill their lives meagerly by watching what they can see of their neighbors' activities, gave a hint. She was sure she remembered that particular removal on account of the young woman who moved looking so pale and anxious. Yes, she was sure she did, because she told herself that something must have happened, and it excited her to know that something had happened so close to her. Evidently she had itched with curiosity for days. "It was a green van--I'm sure it was a green van," she said, "because I was working a centerpiece with green leaves, and the van was almost the same shade.... Not quite the same shade, but almost. I held my work up to the window to see, and the van was a little darker...." "Wasn't there a name on it? Didn't you notice the name?" The spinster concentrated on that. "Yes, there was a name. Seems to me it began with an 'S,' or maybe it was a 'W.' Now, wasn't that name Walters? No, seems more as if it was Rogers, or maybe Smith. It was one of those, or something like it. Anyhow, I'm sure it began with a 'B.'..." That was the nearest Bonbright came to gleaning a fact. A green van. And it might not have been a green van. The spinster's memory seemed uncertain. Probably she had worked more than one centerpiece, not all with green leaves. She was as likely to have worked yellow flowers or a pink design.... But Bonbright had no recourse but to look for a green van. He drove to the office of a trucking and moving concern and asked if there were green vans. The proprietor said HIS vans were always yellow. Folks could see them farther and the paint wore better; but all men didn't follow his judgment. Yes, there WERE green vans, though not so good as his, and not so careful of the furniture. He told Bonbright who owned the green vans. It was a storage house. Bonbright went to the huge brick storage building, and persuaded a clerk to search the records. A bill from Bonbright's pocketbook added to the persuasion.... An hour's wait developed that a green van belonging to the company had moved goods from that address--and the spinster was vindicated. "Brought 'em here and stored 'em," said the young man. "Here's the name--Frazer. Ruth Frazer." "That's it," said Bonbright. "That's it." "Storage hain't been paid.... No word from the party. Maybe she'll show up some day to claim 'em. If not, we'll sell 'em for the charges." "Didn't she leave any address?" "Nope." It had been only a cul de sac. Bonbright had come to the end of it, and had only to retrace his steps. It had led him no nearer to his wife. What to do now? He didn't see what he could do, or that anybody could do better than he had done.... He thought of going to the police, but rejected that plan. It was repulsive to him and would be repulsive to Ruth.... He might insert a personal in the paper. Such things were done. But if Ruth were ill she would not see it. If she wanted to hide from him she would not reply. He went to Mrs. Frazer, but Mrs. Frazer only sobbed and bewailed her fate, and stated her opinion of Bonbright in many confused words. It seemed to be her idea that her daughter was dead or kidnapped, and sometimes she appeared to hold both notions simultaneously.... Bonbright got nothing there. Discouraged, he went back to his office, but not to his work. He could not work. His mind would hold no thought but of Ruth.... He must find her. He MUST.... Nothing mattered unless he could find her, and until he found her he would be good for nothing else. He tried to pull himself together. "I've got to work," he said. "I've got to think about something else...." But his will was unequal to the performance.... "Where is she?... Where is she?.." The question, the DEMAND, repeated itself over and over and over. CHAPTER XXXIII There was a chance that a specialist, a professional, might find traces of Ruth where Bonbright's untrained eyes missed them altogether. So, convinced that he could do nothing, that he did not in the least know how to go about the search, he retained a firm of discreet, well-recommended searchers for missing persons. With that he had to be content. He still searched, but it was because he had to search; he had to feel that he was trying, doing something, but no one realized the uselessness of it more than himself. He was always looking for her, scanned every face in the crowd, looked up at every window. In a day or two he was able to force himself to work steadily, unremittingly again. The formula of his patent medicine, with which he was to cure the ills of capital-labor, was taking definite shape, and the professor was enthusiastic. Not that the professor felt any certainty of effecting a permanent cure; he was enthusiastic over it as a huge, splendid experiment. He wanted to see it working and how men would react to it. He had even planned to write a book about it when it should have been in operation long enough to show what its results would be. Bonbright was sure. He felt that it would bridge the gulf between him and his employees--that gulf which seemed now to be growing wider and deeper instead of disappearing. Mershon's talk was full of labor troubles, of threatened strikes, of consequent delays. "We can finish thirty days ahead of schedule," he said to Bonbright, "if the unions leave us alone." "You think I ought to recognize them," Bonbright said. "Well, Mr. Mershon, if labor wants to cut its own throat by striking--let it strike. I'm giving it work. I'm giving it wages that equal or are higher than union scale. They've no excuse for a strike. I'm willing to do anything within reason, but I'm going to run my own concern. Before I'll let this plant be unionized I'll shut it down. If I can't finish the new shops without recognizing the unions, then they'll stand as they are." "You're the boss," said Mershon, with a shrug. "Do you know there's to be a mass meeting in the armory to-night? I think the agitator people are going to try to work the men up to starting trouble." "You think they'll strike?" "I KNOW they will." "All the men, or just the steel workers and bricklayers and temporary employees on the new buildings?" "I don't know.... But if any of them go out it's going to make things mighty bad." "I'll see what can be done," said Bonbright. The strike must be headed off if possible. It would mean a monstrously costly delay; it might mean a forfeiture of his contract with Lightener. It might mean that he had gone into this new project and expended hundreds of thousands of dollars to equip for the manufacture of engines in vain.... The men must not strike. There seemed no way to avert it but to surrender, and that Bonbright did not even consider.... He called in the professor. "The plan is practically complete, isn't it?" he asked. "I'd call it so. The skeleton is there and it's covered with flesh. Some of the joints creak a little and maybe there's an ear or an eyebrow missing.... But those are details." Bonbright nodded. "We'll try it out," he said. "To-night there's a mass meeting--to stir our men up to strike. They mustn't strike, and I'm going to stop them--with the plan." "Eh?" said the professor. "I'm going to the meeting," said Bonbright. "You're--young man, you're crazy." "I'm going to head off that strike. I'm going there and I'm going to announce the plan." "They won't let you speak." "I think they will.... Curiosity will make them." The young man did understand something of human nature, thought the professor. Curiosity would, most likely, get a hearing for him. "It's dangerous," said he. "The men aren't in a good humor. There might be some fanatic there--" "It's a chance," said Bonbright, "but I've got to take it." "I'll go with you," said the professor. "No. I want to be there alone. This thing is between my men and me. It's personal. We've got to settle it between ourselves." The professor argued, pleaded; but Bonbright was stubborn, and the professor had previous acquaintance with Bonbright's stubbornness. Its quality was that of tool steel. Bonbright had made up his mind to go and to go alone. Nobody could argue him out of it. Bonbright did go alone. He went early in order to obtain a good position in the hall, a mammoth gathering place capable of seating three thousand people. He entered quietly, unostentatiously, and walked to a place well toward the front, and he entered unobserved. The street before the hall was full of arguing, gesticulating men. Inside were other loudly talking knots, sweltering in the closeness of the place. In corners, small impromptu meetings were listening to harangues not on the evening's program. Already half the seats were taken by the less emotional, more stolid men, who were content to wait in silence for the real business of the meeting. There was an air of suspense, of tenseness, of excitement. Bonbright could feel it. It made him tingle; it gave him a sensation of vibrating emptiness resembling that of a man descending in a swift elevator. Bonbright was not accustomed to public speaking, but, somehow, he did not regard what he was about to say as a public speech. He did not think of it as being kindred to oratory. He was there to talk business with a gathering of his men, that was all. He knew what he was going to say, and he was going to say it clearly, succinctly, as briefly as possible. In half an hour the chairs on the platform were occupied by chairman, speakers, union officials. The great hall was jammed, and hundreds packed about the doors in the street without, unable to gain admission.... The chairman opened the meeting briefly. Behind him Bonbright saw Dulac, saw the members of the committee that had waited on him, saw other men known to him only because he had seen their pictures from time to time in the press. It was an imposing gathering of labor thought. Bonbright had planned what he would do. It was best, he believed, to catch the meeting before it had been excited by oratory, before it had been lashed to anger. It was calmer, more reasonable now than it would be again. He arose to his feet. "Mr. Chairman," he said, distinctly. The chairman paused; Bonbright's neighbors turned to stare; men all over the hall rose and craned their necks to have a view of the interrupter. "Sit down!...Shut up!" came cries from here and there. Then other cries, angry cries. "It's Foote!... It's the boss! Out with him!... Out with him!" "Mr. Chairman," said Bonbright, "I realize this is unusual, but I hope you will allow me to be heard. Every man here must admit that I am vitally interested in what takes place here to-night.... I come in a friendly spirit, and I have something to say which is important to me and to you. I ask you to hear me. I will be brief..." "Out with him!... No!... Throw him out!" came yells from the floor. The house was on its feet, jostling, surging. Men near to Bonbright hesitated. One man reached over the shoulders of his fellows and struck at Bonbright. Another shoved him back. "Let him talk.... Let's hear him," arose counter-cries. The meeting threatened to get beyond control, to become a mob. The chairman, familiar with the men he dealt with, acted quickly. He turned to Dulac and whispered, then faced the hall with hands upheld. "Mr. Foote is here uninvited," he said. "He requests to be heard. Let us show him that we are reasonable, that we are patient.... Mr. Dulac agrees to surrender a portion of his time to Mr. Foote. Let us hear what he has to say." Bonbright pushed his way toward the aisle and moved forward. Once he stumbled, and almost fell, as a man thrust out a foot to trip him--and the hall laughed. "Speak your piece. Speak it nice," somebody called, and there was another laugh. This was healthier, safer. Bonbright mounted the platform and advanced to its edge. "Every man here," he said, "is an employee of mine. I have tried to make you feel that your interests are my interests, but I seem to have failed--or you would not be here. I have tried to prove that I want to be something more than merely your employer, but you would not believe me." "Your record's bad," shouted a man, and there was another laugh. "My record is bad," said Bonbright. "I could discuss that, but it wouldn't change things. Since I have owned the mills my record has not been bad. There are men here who could testify for me. All of you can testify that conditions have been improved.... But I am not here to discuss that. I am here to lay before you a plan I have been working on. It is not perfect, but as it stands it is complete enough, so that you can see what I am aiming at. This plan goes into effect the day the new plant starts to operate." "Does it recognize the unions?" came from the floor. "No," said Bonbright. "Please listen carefully.... First it establishes a minimum wage of five dollars a day. No man or woman in the plant, in any capacity, shall be paid less than five dollars a day. Labor helps to earn our profits and labor should share in them. That is fair. I have set an arbitrary minimum of five dollars because there must be some basis to work from...." The meeting was silent. It was nonplused. It was listening to the impossible. Every man, every employee, should be paid five dollars a day! "Does that mean common labor?" "It means everyone," said Bonbright. "It means the man who sweeps out the office, the man who runs the elevator, the man who digs a ditch. Every man does his share and every man shall have his share. "I want every man to live in decent comfort, and I want his wife and babies to live in comfort. With these wages no man's wife need take in washing nor work out by the day to help support the family. No man will need to ask his wife to keep a boarder to add to the family's earnings...." The men listened now. Bonbright's voice carried to every corner and cranny of the hall. Even the men on the platform listened breathlessly as he went on detailing the plan and its workings. Nothing like this had ever happened before in the world's history. No such offer had ever been made to workingmen by an employer capable of carrying out his promises.... He told them what he wanted to do, and how he wanted to do it. He told them what he wanted them to do to co-operate with him--of an advisory board to be elected by the men, sharing in deliberations that affected the employees, of means to be instituted to help the men to save and to take care of their savings, of a strict eight-hour day.... No union had ever dreamed of asking such terms of an employer. "How do we know you'll do it?" yelled a man. "You have my word," said Bonbright. "Rats!" "Shut up... shut up!" the objector was admonished. "That's all, men," Bonbright said. "Think it over. This plan is going into effect. If you want to share in it you can do so, every one of you.... Thank you for listening." Bonbright turned and sat down in a chair on the platform, anxious, watching that sea of faces, waiting to see what would happen. Dulac leaped to his feet. "It's a bribe," he shouted. "It's nothing but an attempt to buy your manhood for five dollars a day. We're righting for a principle--not for money.... We're--" But his voice was drowned out. The meeting had taken charge of itself. It wanted to listen to no oratory, but to talk over this thing that had happened, to realize it, to weigh it, to determine what it meant to them. Abstract principle must always give way to concrete fact. The men who fight for principle are few. The fight is to live, to earn, to continue to exist. Men who had never hoped to earn a hundred dollars a month; men who had for a score of years wielded pick and shovel for two dollars a day or less, saw, with eyes that could hardly believe, thirty dollars a week. It was wealth! It was that thirty dollars that gripped them now, not the other things. Appreciation of them would come later, but now it was the voice of money that was in their ears. What could a man do with five dollars a day? He could live--not merely exist.... The thing that could not be had come to pass. Dulac shouted, demanded their attention. He might as well have tried to still the breakers that roared upon a rocky shore. Dulac did not care for money. He was a revolutionist, a thinker, a man whose work lay with conditions, not with individuals. Here every man was thinking as an individual; applying that five dollars a day to his own peculiar, personal affairs.... Already men were hurrying out of the hall to carry the amazing tidings home to their wives. Dulac stormed on. One thing was apparent to Bonbright. The men believed him. They believed he had spoken the truth. He had known they would believe him; somehow he had known that. The thing had swept them off their feet. In all that multitude was not a man whose life was not to be made easier, whose wife and children were not to be happier, more comfortable, removed from worry. It was a moving sight to see those thousands react. They were drunk with it. An old man detached himself from the mass and rushed upon the platform. "It's true?... It's true?" he said, with tears running down his face. "It's true," said Bonbright, standing up and offering his hand. That was the first of hundreds. Some one shouted, hoarsely, "Hurrah for Foote!" and the armory trembled with the shout. The thing was done. The thing he had come to do was accomplished. There would be no strike. Dulac had fallen silent, was sitting in his chair with his face hidden. For him this was a defeat, a bitter blow. Bonbright made his way to him. "Mr. Dulac," he said, "have you found her?" "You've bribed them.... You've bought them," Dulac said, bitterly. "I've given them what is theirs fairly.... Have you found any trace of her?" Even in this moment, which would have thrilled, exalted another, which would have made another man drunk with achievement, Bonbright could think of Ruth. Even now Ruth was uppermost in his mind. All this mattered nothing beside her. "Have you got any trace?" he asked. "No," said Dulac. CHAPTER XXXIV Next morning the whole city breakfasted with Bonbright Foote. His name was on the tongue of every man who took in a newspaper, and of thousands to whom the news of his revolutionary profit-sharing or minimum-wage plan was carried by word of mouth. It was the matter of wages that excited everyone. In those first hours they skipped the details of the plan, those details which had taken months of labor and thought to devise. It was only the fact that a wealthy manufacturer was going to pay a minimum wage of five dollars a day. The division between capital and labor showed plainly in the reception of the news. Capital berated Bonbright; labor was inclined to fulsomeness. Capital called him on the telephone to remonstrate and to state its opinion of him as a half-baked idiot of a young idealist who was upsetting business. Labor put on its hat and stormed the gates of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, seeking for five-dollar jobs. Not hundreds of them came, but thousands. The streets were blocked with applicants, every one eager for that minimum wage. The police could not handle the mob. It was there for a purpose and it intended to stay.... When it was rebuked, or if some one tried to tell them there were no jobs for it, it threw playful stones through the windows. It was there at dawn; it still remained at dark. A man who had an actual job at Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, was a hero, an object of admiring interest to his friends and neighbors. The thing touched him. There had been a miraculous laying on of hands, under which had passed away poverty. So must the friends and acquaintances of a certain blind man whose sight was restored by a bit of divine spittle have regarded him. Malcolm Lightener did not content himself with telephoning. He came in person to say his say to Bonbright, and he said it with point and emphasis. "I thought I taught you some sense in my shop," he said, as he burst into Bonbright's office. "What's this I hear now? What idiocy are you up to? Is this infernal newspaper story true?" "Substantially," said Bonbright. "You're crazy. What are you trying to do? Upset labor conditions in this town so that business will go to smash? I thought you had a level head. I had confidence in you--and here you go, shooting off a half-cocked, wild-eyed, socialistic thing! Did you stop to think what effect this thing would have on other manufacturers?" "Yes," said Bonbright. "It'll pull labor down on us. They'll say we can afford to pay such wages if you can." "Well," said Bonbright, "can't you?" "You've sowed a fine crop of discontent. It's damned unfair. You'll have every workingman in town flocking to you. You'll get the pick of labor." "That's good business, isn't it?" Bonbright asked, with a smile. "Now, Mr. Lightener, there isn't any use thrashing me. The plan is going into effect. It isn't half baked. I haven't gone off half cocked. It is carefully planned and thought out--and it will work. There'll be flurries for a few days, and then things will come back to the normal for you fellows.... I wish it wouldn't. You're a lot better able than I am to do what I'm doing, and you know it. If you can, you ought to." "No man has a right to go ahead deliberately and upset business." "I'm not upsetting it. I'm merely being fair, and that's what business should have been years ago. I'm able to pay a five-dollar minimum, and labor earns it. Then it ought to have it. If you can pay only a four-dollar minimum, then you should pay it. Labor earns it for you.... If there's a man whose labor earns for him only a dollar and seventy-five cents a day, and that man pays it, he's doing as much at I am..." "Bonbright," said Malcolm Lightener, getting to his feet, "I'm damn disappointed in you." "Come in a year and tell me so, then I'll listen to you," said Bonbright. "This nonsense won't last a year. It won't pan out. You'll have to give it up, and then what? You'll be in a devil of a pickle, won't you?" "All you see is that five dollars. In a day or two the whole plan will be ready. I'm having it printed in a pamphlet, and I'll send you one. If you read it carefully and can come back and tell me it's nonsense, then I don't know you. You might let me go under suspended sentence at least." Lightener shrugged his heavy shoulders. "Take one chunk of advice," he said. "Keep away from the club for a few days. If the boys feel the way I do they're apt to take you upstairs and drown you in a bathtub." That was the side of the affair that Bonbright saw most during the day. Telephone messages, letters, telegrams, poured in and cluttered his desk. After a while he ceased to open them, for they were all alike; all sent to say the same thing that Malcolm Lightener had said. Capital looked upon him as a Judas and flayed him with the sharpest words they could choose. He read all the papers, but the papers reflected the estimated thought of their subscribers. But to all of them the news was the big news of the day. No headline was too large to announce it... But the papers, even those with capitalistic leanings, were afraid to be too outspoken. Gatherers of news come to have some knowledge of human nature, and these men saw deeper and farther and quicker than the Malcolm Lighteners. They did not commit themselves so far but that a drawing back and realignment would be possible... No little part of Bonbright's day was spent with reporters. The news came to every house in the city. It came even to Mrs. Moody's obscure boarding house, and the table buzzed with it. It mounted the stairs with Mrs. Moody to the room where Ruth lay apathetically in her bed, not stronger, not weaker, taking no interest in life. Mrs. Moody sat daily beside Ruth's bed and talked or read. She read papers aloud and books aloud, and grumbled. Ruth paid slight attention, but lay gazing up at the ceiling, or closed her eyes and pretended she was asleep. She didn't care what was going on in the world. What did it matter, for she believed she was going to leave the world shortly. The prospect did not frighten her, nor did it gladden her. She was indifferent to it. Mrs. Moody sat down in her rocker and looked at Ruth triumphantly. "I'll bet this'll interest you," she said. "I'll bet when I read this you won't lay there and pertend you don't hear. If you do it's because somethin's wrong with your brains, that's all I got to say. Sick or well, it's news to stir up a corpse." She began to read. The first words caught Ruth's attention. The words were Bonbright Foote. She closed her eyes, but listened. Her thoughts were not clear; her mental processes were foggy, but the words Mrs. Moody was reading were important to her. She realized that. It was something she had once been interested in--terribly interested in... She tried to concentrate on them; tried to comprehend. Presently she interrupted, weakly: "Who--who is it--about?" she asked. "Bonbright Foote, the manufacturer. I read it out plain." "Yes... What is it?... I didn't--understand very well. What did he--do?" Mrs. Moody began again, impatiently. This time it was clearer to Ruth ... Once she had tried to do something like this thing she was hearing about--and that was why she was here... It had something to do with her being sick... And with Bonbright... It was hard to remember. "Even the floor sweepers git it," said Mrs. Moody, interpreting the news story. "Everybody gits five dollars a day at least, and some gits more." "Everybody?..." said Ruth. "HE'S--giving it to--them?" "This Mr. Foote is. Yes." Suddenly Ruth began to cry, weakly, feebly. "I didn't help," she wailed, like an infant. Her voice was no stronger. "He did it alone--all alone... I wasn't there..." "No, you was right here. Where would you be?" "I wonder--if he did--it--for me?" Her voice was piteous, pleading. "For you? What in goodness name have YOU got to do with it? He did it for all them men--thousands of 'em.... And jest think what it'll mean to 'em!... It'll be like heaven comin' to pass." "What--have I--got to do--with it?" Ruth repeated, and then cried out with grief. "Nothing... Nothing.... NOTHING. If I'd never been born--he would have done it--just the same." "To be sure," said Mrs. Moody, wondering. "I guess your head hain't jest right to-day." "Read... Please read... Every word. Don't miss a word." "Well, I swan! You be int'rested. I never see the like." And the good woman read on, not skipping a word. Ruth followed as best she could, seeing dimly, but, seeing that the thing that was surpassed was the thing she had once sacrificed herself in a futile effort to bring about... It was rather vague, that past time in which she had striven and suffered... But she had hoped to do something... What was it she had done? It was something about Bonbright... What was it? It had been hard, and she had suffered. She tried to remember.... And then remembrance came. She had MARRIED him! "He's good--so good," she said, tearfully. "I shouldn't have--done it ... I should have--trusted him... because I knew he was good--all the tune." "Who was good?" asked Mrs. Moody. "My husband," said Ruth. "For the land sakes, WHAT'S HE got to do with this? Hain't you listenin' at all?" "I'm listening... I'm listening. Don't stop." Memory was becoming clearer, the fog was being blown away, and the past was showing in sharper outline. Events were emerging into distinctness. She stared at the ceiling with widening eyes, listening to Mrs. Moody as the woman stumbled on; losing account of the reading as her mind wandered off into the past, searching, finding, identifying... She had been at peace. She had not suffered. She had lain in a lethargy which held away sharp sorrow and bitter thoughts. They were now working their way through to her, piercing her heart. "Oh!..." she cried. "Oh!..." "What ails you now? You're enough to drive a body wild. What you cryin'about? Say!" "I--I love him... That's why I hid away--because I--loved him--and--and his father died. That was it. I remember now. I couldn't bear it..." "Was it him or his father you was in love with?" asked Mrs. Moody, acidly. "I--hated his father... But when he died I couldn't tell HIM--I loved him... He wouldn't have believed me." "Say," said Mrs. Moody, suddenly awakening to the possibilities of Ruth's mood, "who was your husband, anyhow?" Ruth shook her head. "I--can't tell you... You'd tell him... He mustn't find me--because I--couldn't bear it." The mercenary came to the door. "Young woman at the door wants to see you," she said. "Always somebody. Always trottin' up and down stairs. Seems like a body never gits a chance to rest her bones.... I'm comin'. Say I'll be right downstairs." In the parlor Mrs. Moody found a young woman of a world with which boarding houses have little acquaintance. She glanced through the window, and saw beside the curb a big car with a liveried chauffeur. "I vum!" she said to herself. "I'm Mrs. Moody, miss," she said. "What's wanted?" "I'm looking for a friend... I'm just inquiring here because you're on my list of boarding houses. I guess I've asked at two hundred if I've asked at one." "What's your friend's name? Man or woman?" "Her name is Foote. Ruth Foote." "No such person here... We got Richards and Brown and Judson, and a lot of 'em, but no Foote." The young woman sighed. "I'm getting discouraged.... I am afraid she's ill somewhere. It's been months, and I can't find a trace. She's such a little thing, too.... Maybe she's changed her name. Quite likely." "Is she hidin' away?" asked Mrs. Moody. "Yes--you might say that. Not hiding because she DID anything, but because--her heart was broken." "Um!... Little, was she? Sort of peaked and thin?" "Yes." "Ever hear the name of Frazer?" "Why, Mrs. Moody--do you--That was her name before she was married ..." "You come along with me," ordered Mrs. Moody, and led the way up the stairs. "Be sort of quietlike. She's sick..." Mrs. Moody opened Ruth's door and pointed in. "Is it her?" she asked. Hilda did not answer. She was across the room in an instant and on her knees beside the bed. "Ruth!... Ruth!... how could you?..." she cried. Ruth turned her head slowly and looked at Hilda. There was no light of gladness in her eyes; instead they were veiled with trouble. "Hilda..." she said. "I didn't--want to be found. Go away and--and unfind me." "You poor baby!... You poor, absurd, silly baby!" said Hilda, passing her arm under Ruth's shoulders and drawing the wasted little body to her closely. "I've looked for you, and looked. You've no idea the trouble you've made for me... And now I'm going to take you home. I'm going to snatch you up and bundle you off." "No," said Ruth, weakly. "Nobody must know... HE--mustn't know." "Fiddlesticks!" "Do you know?... He's done something--but it wasn't for me... I didn't have ANYTHING to do with it... Do you know what he's done?" "I know," said Hilda. "It was splendid. Dad's all worked up over it, but I think it is splendid just the same." "Splendid," said Ruth, slowly, thoughtfully--"splendid... Yes, that's it--SPLENDID." She seemed childishly pleased to discover the word, and repeated it again and again. Presently she turned her eyes up to Hilda's face, lifted a white, blue-veined, almost transparent hand, and touched Hilda's face. "I"--she seemed to have difficulty to find a word, but she smiled like a tiny little girl--"I--LIKE you," she said, triumphantly. "I'm--sorry you came--but I--like you." "Yes, dear," said Hilda. "You'd BETTER like me." "But," said Ruth, evidently striving to express a differentiation, "I--LOVE him." Hilda said nothing; there was nothing she could say, but her eyes brimmed at the pitifulness of it. She abhorred tears. "I'm going now, dear," she said. "I'll fix things for you and be back in no time to take you home with me.... So be all ready." "No..." said Ruth. "Yes," Hilda laughed. "You'll help, won't you, Mrs. Moody?" "Hain't no way out of it, I calc'late," said the woman. "I won't be half an hour, Ruth... Good-by." But Ruth had turned away her face and would not answer. "Say," said Mrs. Moody, in a fever of curiosity which could not be held in check after they had passed outside of Ruth's room, "who is she, anyhow?... SOMEBODY, I'll perdict. Hain't she somebody?" "She's Mrs. Foote... Mrs. Bonbright Foote." "I SWAN to man!... And me settin' there readin' to her about him. If it don't beat all... Him with all them millions, and her without so much as a nest like them beasts and birds of the air, in Scripture. I never expected nothin' like this would ever happen to me..." Hilda saw that Mrs. Moody was glorifying God in her heart that this amazing adventure, this bit out of a romance, had come into her drab life. "Is that there your auto?" Mrs. Moody asked, peering out with awe at the liveried chauffeur. Hilda nodded. "And who be you, if I might ask?" Mrs. Moody said. "My name is Hilda Lightener, Mrs. Moody." "Not that automobile man's daughter--the one they call the automobile king?" "They call dad lots of things," said Hilda, with a sympathetic laugh. She liked Mrs. Moody. "I'll be back directly," she said, and left the good woman standing in an attitude suggestive of mental prostration, actually, literally, gasping at this marvel that had blossomed under her very eyes. As Hilda's car moved away she turned, picked up her skirts, and ran toward the kitchen. The news was bursting out of her. She was leaking it along the way as she sought the mercenary to pour it into her ears. Hilda was driving, not to her home, but to Bonbright Foote's office. CHAPTER XXXV Dulac was on his way to Bonbright's office, too. He had started before Hilda, and arrived before she did. If he had been asked why he was going, it is doubtful if he could have told. He was going because he had to go... with fresh, burning hatred of Bonbright in his heart. Bonbright was always the obstacle he encountered. Bonbright upset every calculation, brought his every plan to nothing. He believed it was Bonbright who had broken the first strike, that strike upon which he had pinned such high hopes and which meant so much to labor. It had been labor's entering wedge into the automobile world. Then Bonbright had married the girl he loved. Some men can hate sufficiently for that cause alone... Ruth had loved him, but she had married Bonbright. He had gone to take her away, had seen her yielding to him--and Bonbright had come. Again he had intervened. And now, better equipped than for the first strike, with chances of success multiplied, Bonbright had intervened again--with his plan. Dulac did not consider the plan; did not perceive virtues in it, not the intent that was behind it. He did not see that labor was getting without effort benefits that no strike could bring. He did not see the happiness that it brought to thousands... All he saw was that it had killed the new strike before birth. He regarded it as sharp practice, as a scheme for his undoing. The thing he fought for was the principle of unionization. Nothing else mattered; not money, not comforts, not benefits multiplied could weigh against it... He was true to his creed, honest in its prosecution, sincere in his beliefs and in his efforts to uplift the conditions of his fellow men. He was a fanatic, let it be admitted, but a fanatic who suffered and labored for his cause. He was stigmatized as a demagogue, and many of the attributes of the demagogue adhered to him. But he was not a demagogue, for he sought nothing for himself... His great shortcoming was singleness of vision. He fixed his eyes upon one height and was unable to see surrounding peaks. So he was going to see the man who had come between him and every object he had striven for... And he did not know why. He followed impulse, as he was prone to follow impulse. Restraints were not for him; he was a thinker, he believed, and after his fashion he WAS a thinker.... But his mind was equipped with no stabilizer. The impulse to see Bonbright was conceived in hatred and born in bitterness. It was such an impulse as might, in its turn, breed children capable of causing a calloused world to pause an instant on its way and gasp with horror. He brushed aside the boy who asked his business with Mr. Foote, and flung open Bonbright's door. On the threshold he stood speechless, tense with hatred, eyes that smoldered with jealousy, with rage, burning in hollows dug by weariness and labor and privation. He closed the door behind him slowly. Bonbright looked up and nodded. Dulac did not reply, but stared, crouching a little, his lips drawn a trifle back so that a glint of white showed between. "You wanted to see me?" said Bonbright. "Yes," said Dulac. The word was spoken so low, so tensely, that it hardly reached Bonbright's ears. That was all. He said no more, but stood, haggard and menacing. Bonbright eyed him, saw his drawn face, saw the hatred in his eyes. Neither spoke, but eye held eye. Bonbright's hand moved toward a button on his desk, but did not touch it. Somehow he was not surprised, not startled, not afraid--yet he knew there was danger. A word, a movement, might unleash the passions that seethed within Dulac.... Dulac stepped one step toward Bonbright, and paused. The movement was catlike, graceful. It had not been willed by Dulac. He had been drawn that step as iron is drawn to magnet. His eyes did not leave Bonbright's. Bonbright's eyes did not leave Dulac's. It seemed minutes before Dulac made another forward movement, slowly, not lifting his foot, but sliding it along the rug to its new position.... Then immovability.... Then another feline approach. Step after step, with that tense pause between--and silence! It seemed to Bonbright that Dulac had been in the room for hours, had taken hours to cross it to his desk. Now only the desk separated them, and Dulac bent forward, rested his clenched fists on the desk, and held Bonbright's eyes with the fire of his own.... His body moved now, bending from the waist. Not jerkily, not pausing, but slowly, slowly, as if he were being forced downward by a giant hand. ... His face approached Bonbright's face. And still no word, no sound. Now his right hand moved, lifted. He supported his weight on his left arm. The right moved toward Bonbright, opening as it moved. There was something inexorable about its movement, something that seemed to say it did not move by Dulac's will, but that it had been ordained so to move since the beginning of time.... It approached and opened, fingers bent clawlike. Bonbright remained motionless. It seemed to him that all the conflict of the ages had centered itself in this man and himself; as if they were the chosen champions, and the struggle had been left to them... He was ready. He did not seek to avoid it, because it seemed inevitable. There could never be peace between him and Dulac, and, strangely enough, the thought was present in his brain that the thing was symbolical. He was the champion of his class, Dulac the champion of HIS class--between which there could never be peace and agreement so long as the classes existed. He wondered if himself and Dulac had been appointed to abolish each other... In those vibrating seconds Bonbright saw and comprehended much. The hand still approached. Bonbright saw a change in the fire of Dulac's eyes, a sudden upleaping blaze, and braced himself for the surge of resistance, the shock of combat. The door opened unheeded by either, and Hilda stood in the opening. "I've found her..." she said. Dulac uttered a gulping gasp and closed his eyes, that had been unwinking, closed his eyes a moment, and with their closing the tenseness went out of him and he sagged downward so that his body rested on the desk. Bonbright shoved himself back and leaped to his feet. "Hilda..." he said, and his voice was tired; the voice of a man who has undergone the ultimate strain. "I've found her. She's ill--terribly ill. You must go to her." Dulac raised himself and looked at her. "You've found--HER?" he said. "We must go to her," said Bonbright. He was not speaking to Hilda, but to Dulac. It seemed natural, inevitable, that Dulac should go with him. Dulac was IN this, a part of it. Ruth and Dulac and he were the three actors in this thing, and it was their lives that pivoted about it. They went down to the car silently, Dulac breathing deeply, like a man who had labored to weariness. In silence they drove to Mrs. Moody's boarding house, and in silence they climbed the stairs to Ruth's little room. Mrs. Moody hovered about behind them, and the mercenary sheltered her body behind the kitchen door, her head through the narrow opening, looking as if she were ready to pop it back at the least startling movement. The three entered softly. Ruth seemed to be sleeping, for her eyes were closed and she was very still. Bonbright stood at one side of her bed, Dulac stood across from him, but they were unconscious of each other. Both were looking downward upon Ruth. She opened her eyes, saw Bonbright standing over her; shut them again and moved her head impatiently. Again she opened her eyes, and looked from Bonbright to Dulac. Her lips parted, her eyes widened... She pointed a trembling finger at Dulac. "Not you..." she whispered. "Not you... HIM." She moved her finger until it indicated Bonbright. "I don't--believe you're--really there... either of you," she said, "but I--like to have--YOU here.... You're my husband.... I LOVE my husband," she said, and nodded her head. "BONBRIGHT!" whispered Hilda. He did not need the admonition, but was on his knees beside her, drawing her to him. He could not speak. Ruth sighed as she felt his touch. "You're REAL," she whispered. "Is he real, too?" "We're all real, dear," said Hilda. "Ask HIM--please to go away, then," Ruth said, pointing to Dulac. "I don't want to--hurt him... but he knows I--don't want him...." "Ruth!" Dulac's utterance was a groan. "YOU know--don't you, Hilda?... I told you--a long time ago... I never loved--HIM at all. Isn't that--queer?... I thought I did--but--I didn't know... It was something else... You won't feel too bad ... will you?" Ruth looked up at Dulac. "I think you--better--go," she said, gently. He looked at Ruth, looked at Bonbright. Then he turned and, stumbling a little as he went, fumbling, to open the door, he obeyed. They listened in silence to the slow descent of his footsteps; to the opening and closing of the door, as Dulac passed out into the street. "Poor--man!" said Ruth. "Bonbright," said Hilda, "do you believe me now?" He nodded. Hilda moved toward the door. "If you want her--cure her ... Nobody else can. You've got the only medicine." And she left them alone. "I--loved you all the time, but... I didn't know... I was going... to tell you... and then HE died. Hilda knows. You'll... believe me, won't you?" "Yes," was all he could say. "And you... want me back? You... want me to be your... wife?" "Yes." She sighed happily. "I'll get... well, then... It wasn't worth the--the BOTHER before." Neither of them spoke for a time; then she said: "I saw about it... in the papers. It was... splendid." She used proudly the word Hilda had found for her. "I was... proud." Then: "You haven't... said anything. Isn't there... something you ... ought to say?" He bent over closer and whispered it in her ear, not once, but many times. She shut her eyes, but her lips smiled and her fragile arms drew his head even closer, her white hand stroked his cheek. "If it's all... REAL," she said, "why don't you... KISS me?" Words were not for him. Here was a moment when those symbols for thoughts which we have agreed upon and called words, could not express what must be expressed. As there are tones too high or too low to be sounded on any instrument, so too there are thoughts too tender to be expressed by words. "Do you really... WANT me?" She wanted to be told and told again and again. "I'll be a... nice wife," she said. "I promise... I think we'll be... very happy." "Yes," he said. "I'll never... run away any more... will I?" "No." "You'll--keep me CLOSE?" "Yes." "Always?" "Always." "And you won't... remember ANYTHING?" "Nothing you don't want me to." "Tell me again... Put your... lips close to my ear... like that ... now tell me... "I think I'll... sleep a little now... You won't run away--while my eyes are shut?" "Never," he said. "Let me put my head... on your arm... like that." She closed her eyes, and then opened them to smile up at him. "This is... so nice," she said. When she opened her eyes again Bonbright was still there. He had not moved... Her smile blossomed for him again, and it was something like her old, famous smile, but sweeter, more tender. "I didn't... dream a bit of it," she said to herself. Hilda came in. "We're going to take her to our house, Bonbright, till she gets well. That's best, isn't it?" "Yes." "You'll come, won't you, Ruth--now?" "If my... husband comes, too," she said. CHAPTER XXXVI Ruth's strength returned miraculously, for it had not been her body that was ill, but her soul, and her soul was well now and at peace. Once she had thought that just to be at peace would be perfect bliss. She knew better now, for she was at peace, and happiness was hers, besides.... It was pitiful how she clung to Bonbright, how she held him back when he would be leaving in the morning, and how she watched the door for his return. Bonbright knew peace, too. Sometimes it seemed that the conflict was over for him and that he had sailed into a sure and quiet haven where no storm could reach him again. All that he had lacked was his; independence was his and the possibility of developing his own individualism. The ghosts of the ancestors were laid; Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, was no longer a mold that sought to grasp him and turn him into something he was not and did not wish to be. The plan was proving itself, demonstrating its right to be. Even Malcolm Lightener was silenced, for the thing marched. It possessed vitals. Nor had it upset business, as Lightener once predicted. After the first tumult and flurry labor had settled back into its old ways. The man who worked for Bonbright Foote was envied, and that man and his family prospered and knew a better, bigger life. The old antagonism of his employees had vanished and he had become a figure to call out their enthusiasm. He believed every man of them was his friend, and, more than that, he believed he had found the solution to the great problem. He believed he had found a way of bringing together capital and labor so that they would lie down together like the millennial lion and lamb... All these things made for peace. But in addition he had Ruth's love, and that brought back his old boyishness, gave him something he had never had before, even in his youth--a love of life, a love of living, a gladness that awoke with him and accompanied him through his days. When Ruth was able to sit up they began to lay out their future and to plan plans. Already Bonbright was building a home, and the delight they had from studying architect's drawings and changing the position of baths and doors and closets and porches was unbelievable. Then came the furnishing of it, and at last the moving into it. "I'm almost glad it all happened," Ruth said. "Yes," said Bonbright. "We'd have been just ordinarily happy if we'd started like other folks... But to have gone through that--and come into all this!..." "Let's not remember it," he said. Then: "Ruth, you never make any suggestions--about the men. You know lots more about them than I do. You were born among them. But you just listen to me when I talk to you, and never offer a word." "I--I've been afraid to," she said. "Afraid?" "Yes... Don't you remember? It might look as if..." He silenced her, knowing what was her thought. "I'll never think anything about you that isn't so," he said. "Then I'll suggest--when I think of anything. But I couldn't have suggested any of it. I couldn't have dreamed it or hoped it. Nothing I could have asked for them would have been as--as splendid as this." "You believe in it?" "More than that. I've been into their homes. They were glad to see me. It was wonderful... Enough to eat, cleanliness, mothers at home with their babies instead of out washing, no boarders... And no worries. That was best. They showed me their bank accounts, or how they were buying homes, and how quickly they were paying for them... And I was proud when I thought it was my husband that did it." "Lightener says it looks all right now, but it won't last. He says it's impractical." "He doesn't know. How could he know as well as you do? Aren't you the greatest man in the world?" She said it half laughingly, but in her heart she meant it. She loved to talk business with him; to hear about the new mills and how they were turning out engines. She discussed his project of enlarging further, perhaps of manufacturing automobiles himself, and urged him on. "It will give work to more men, and bring more men under the plan," she said. That was her way of looking at it. Hilda came often, and laughed at them, but she loved them. "Just kids," she jeered, but she envied them and told them so. And then, because she deserved it, there came a man into her own life, and he loved her and she loved him. Whereupon Bonbright and Ruth returned her jeers with interest. More than a year went by, a year of perfection. Then came a cloud on the horizon. Even five dollars a day and the plan did not seem to content labor, and Bonbright became aware of it. Dulac was active again, or, rather, he had always been active. Discontent manifested itself.... It grew, and had to be repressed. In spite of the plan--in spite of everything, a strike threatened, became imminent. Ruth was thunderstruck, Bonbright bewildered. His panacea was not a panacea, then. He studied the plan to better it, and did make minor improvements, but in its elements it was just, fair. Bonbright could not understand, but Malcolm Lightener understood and the professor of sociology understood. "I can't understand it," Bonbright said to them. "Huh!" grunted Lightener. "It's just this: You're capital, and they're labor. That's it in a nutshell." "But it's fair." "To be sure it's fair--as fair as a thing can be. But the fact remains. Capital and labor can't get together as long as they remain capital and labor." The professor nodded. "You've said the thing that is, Mr. Lightener. But it's deeper than that. It's the inevitable surge upward of humanity. You rich men try to become richer. That is natural. You are reaching up. Labor has a long way to climb to reach you, but it wants to reach you. Perhaps it doesn't know it, but it does. As long as a height remains to be climbed to, man will try to climb... Class exists. The employer class and the employed. So long as one man can boss another; so long as one man can say to another, 'Do this or do that,' there will be conflict. Everybody, whether he knows it or not, wants to be his own boss, and by as much as he is bossed he is galled ... It can never be otherwise..." "You knew from the beginning I would fail," said Bonbright. "You haven't failed, my boy. You've done a fine thing; but you haven't solved a problem that has no solution... You are upset by it now, but after a while you'll see it and the disappointment will go. But you haven't failed... I don't believe you will ever understand all you have accomplished." But Bonbright was unhappy, and he carried his unhappiness to his wife. "It's all been futile," he said. She was wiser than he. "No," she said, hotly, "it's been wonderful ... Nothing was ever more wonderful. I've told you how I've visited them and seen the new happiness--seen women happy who had never been happy before; seen comfort where there had been nothing but misery ... It's anything but futile, dear. You've done your best--and it was a splendid best... If it doesn't do all you hoped, that's no sign of failure. I'm satisfied, dear." "They want something I can't give them." "Nobody can give it to them... It's the way things are. I think I understand what the professor said. It's true. You've given all you can and done all you can.... You'd have to be God and create a new world... Don't you see?" "I see..." he said. "I see..." "And you won't be unhappy about it?" He smiled. "I'm like the men, I guess. I want more than the world has to give me... I don't blame them. They're right." "Yes," she said, "they're right." It was not many weeks after this that Bonbright sat, frightened and anxious, in the library--waiting. A nurse appeared in the door and motioned. She smiled, and a weight passed from his heart. Bonbright followed into Ruth's room, pausing timidly at the door. "Come in, come in, young man. I have the pleasure to announce the safe arrival of Bonbright Foote VIII." Bonbright looked at Ruth, who smiled up at him and shook her head. "Not Bonbright Foote VIII, doctor," said Bonbright, as he moved toward his wife and son. "Plain Bonbright Foote. There are no numerals in this family. Everyone who is born into it stands by himself... I'll have no ancestors hanging around my boy's neck..." "I know it," Ruth whispered in his ear, "but I was a--a teeny bit--afraid. He's OURS--but he's more than that. He's HIS OWN... as God wants every man to be." THE END 
34419	----	produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Print project.) THE ANCIENT LAW BY THE SAME AUTHOR THE WHEEL OF LIFE THE DELIVERANCE THE BATTLE-GROUND THE FREEMAN, AND OTHER POEMS THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE PHASES OF AN INFERIOR PLANET THE DESCENDANT The Ancient Law By ELLEN GLASGOW New York Doubleday, Page & Company 1908 COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY PUBLISHED, JANUARY, 1908 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN TO MY GOOD FRIEND EFFENDI CONTENTS BOOK FIRST--THE NEW LIFE CHAPTER PAGE I. The Road 3 II. The Night 15 III. The Return to Tappahannock 31 IV. The Dream of Daniel Smith 42 V. At Tappahannock 54 VI. The Pretty Daughter of the Mayor 62 VII. Shows the Graces of Adversity 72 VIII. "Ten Commandment Smith" 90 IX. The Old and the New 101 X. His Neighbour's Garden 111 XI. Bullfinch's Hollow 123 XII. A String of Coral 135 BOOK SECOND--THE DAY OF RECKONING I. In Which a Stranger Appears 147 II. Ordway Compromises With the Past 162 III. A Change of Lodging 174 IV. Shows That a Laugh Does not Heal a Heartache 185 V. Treats of a Great Passion in a Simple Soul 196 VI. In Which Baxter Plots 209 VII. Shows That Politeness, Like Charity, Is an Elastic Mantle 222 VIII. The Turn of the Wheel 234 IX. At the Cross-roads 248 X. Between Man and Man 256 XI. Between Man and Woman 268 BOOK THIRD--THE LARGER PRISON I. The Return to Life 281 II. His Own Place 290 III. The Outward Pattern 303 IV. The Letter and the Spirit 317 V. The Will of Alice 329 VI. The Iron Bars 341 VII. The Vision and the Fact 353 VIII. The Weakness in Strength 363 BOOK FOURTH--LIBERATION I. The Inward Light 379 II. At Tappahannock Again 392 III. Alice's Marriage 409 IV. The Power of the Blood 420 V. The House of Dreams 434 VI. The Ultimate Choice 443 VII. Flight 454 VIII. The End of the Road 469 IX. The Light Beyond 482 BOOK FIRST THE NEW LIFE CHAPTER I THE ROAD Though it was six days since Daniel Ordway had come out of prison, he was aware, when he reached the brow of the hill, and stopped to look back over the sunny Virginia road, that he drank in the wind as if it were his first breath of freedom. At his feet the road dropped between two low hills beyond which swept a high, rolling sea of broomsedge; and farther still--where the distance melted gradually into the blue sky--he could see not less plainly the New York streets through which he had gone from his trial and the walls of the prison where he had served five years. Between this memory and the deserted look of the red clay road there was the abrupt division which separates actual experience from the objects in a dream. He felt that he was awake, yet it seemed that the country through which he walked must vanish presently at a touch. Even the rough March wind blowing among the broomsedge heightened rather than diminished the effect of the visionary meeting of earth and sky. As he stood there in his ill-fitting clothes, with his head bared in the sun and the red clay ground to fine dust on his coarse boots, it would have been difficult at a casual glance to have grouped him appropriately in any division of class. He might have been either a gentleman who had turned tramp or a tramp who had been born to look a gentleman. Though he was barely above medium height, his figure produced even in repose an impression of great muscular strength, and this impression was repeated in his large, regular, and singularly expressive features. His face was square with a powerful and rather prominent mouth and chin; the brows were heavily marked and the eyes were of so bright a blue that they lent an effect which was almost one of gaiety to his smile. In his dark and slightly coarsened face the colour of his eyes was intensified until they appeared to flash at times like blue lights under his thick black brows. His age was, perhaps, forty years, though at fifty there would probably be but little change recorded in his appearance. At thirty one might have found, doubtless, the same lines of suffering upon his forehead and about his mouth. As he went on over some rotting planks which spanned a stream that had gone dry, the road he followed was visible as a faded scar in a stretch of impoverished, neutral-toned country--the least distinctive and most isolated part of what is known in Virginia as "the Southside." A bleached monotony was the one noticeable characteristic of the landscape--the pale clay road, the dried broomsedge, and even the brownish, circular-shaped cloud of smoke, which hung over the little town in the distance, each contributing a depressing feature to a face which presented at best an unrelieved flatness of colour. The single high note in the dull perspective was struck by a clump of sassafras, which, mistaking the mild weather for a genial April, had flowered tremulously in gorgeous yellow. The sound of a wagon jolting over the rough road, reached him presently from the top of the hill, and as he glanced back, he heard a drawling curse thrown to the panting horses. A moment later he was overtaken by an open spring wagon filled with dried tobacco plants of the last season's crop. In the centre of the load, which gave out a stale, pungent odour, sat a small middle-aged countryman, who swore mild oaths in a pleasant, jesting tone. From time to time, as the stalks beneath him were jostled out of place, he would shift his seat and spread out his short legs clad in overalls of blue jean. Behind him in the road the wind tossed scattered and damaged leaves of tobacco. When the wagon reached Ordway, he glanced over his shoulder at the driver, while he turned into the small grass-grown path amid the clumps of sassafras. "Is that Bernardsville over there?" he asked, pointing in the direction of the cloud of smoke. The wagon drew up quickly and the driver--who showed at nearer view to be a dirty, red-bearded farmer of the poorer class--stared at him with an expression which settled into suspicion before it had time to denote surprise. "Bernardsville! Why, you've come a good forty miles out of your road. That thar's Tappahannock." "Tappahannock? I hadn't heard of it." "Mebbe you ain't, but it never knowed it." "Anything going on there? Work, I mean?" "The biggest shippin' of tobaccy this side o' Danville is goin' on thar. Ever heard o' Danville?" "I know the name, but the tobacco market is about closed now, isn't it? The season's over." The man's laugh startled the waiting horses, and lifting their heads from a budding bush by the roadside, they moved patiently toward Tappahannock. "Closed? Bless you, it never closes--Whoa! thar, won't you, darn you? To be sure sales ain't so brisk to-day as they war a month back, but I'm jest carryin' in my leetle crop to Baxter's warehouse." "It isn't manufactured, then--only bought and sold?" "Oh, it's sold quick enough and bought, too. Baxter auctions the leaf off in lots and it's shipped to the factories in Richmond an' in Danville. You ain't a native of these parts, I reckon?" "A native--no? I'm looking for work." "What sort of work? Thar's work an' work. I saw a man once settin' out in an old field doin' a picture of a pine tree, an' he called it work. Wall, wall, if you're goin' all the way to Tappahannock, I reckon I kin give you a lift along. Mebbe you kin pick up an odd job in Baxter's warehouse--thar's a sayin' that he feeds all the crows in Tappahannock." He drove on with a chuckle, for Ordway had declined the proffered "lift," and the little cloud of dust raised by the wagon drifted slowly in the direction of the town. A mile farther on Ordway found that as the road approached Tappahannock, the country lost gradually its aspect of loneliness, and the colourless fields were dotted here and there with small Negro cabins, built for the most part of unbarked pine logs laid roughly cross-wise to form square enclosures. Before one of these primitive dwellings a large black woman, with a strip of checked blue and white gingham bound about her head, was emptying a pail of buttermilk into a wooden trough. When she saw Ordway she nodded to him from the end of the little path, bordered by rocks, which led from the roadside to the single stone step before her cabin door. As he watched the buttermilk splash into the trough, Ordway remembered, with a spasm of faintness, that he had eaten nothing since the day before, and turning out of the road, he asked the woman for a share of the supper that she gave the pigs. "Go 'way, honey, dis yer ain' fit'n fur you," she replied, resting the pail under her arm against her rolling hip, "I'se des' thowin' hit ter de hawgs." But when he had repeated his request, she motioned to a wooden bench beside a scrubby lilac bush on which a coloured shirt hung drying, and going into the single room inside, brought him a glass of buttermilk and a piece of corn bread on a tin plate. While he ate hungrily of the coarse food a half-naked Negro baby, covered with wood ashes, rolled across the threshold and lay sprawling in the path at his feet. After a little rambling talk the woman went back into the cabin, where she whipped up cornmeal dough in an earthenware bowl, turning at intervals to toss a scrap or two to a red and white cock that hovered, expectant, about the doorway. In the road a covered wagon crawled by, and the shadow it threw stretched along the path to the lilac bush where the coloured shirt hung drying. The pigs drank the buttermilk from the trough with loud grunts; the red and white cock ventured, alert and wary, across the threshold; and the Negro baby, after sprawling on its stomach in the warm earth, rolled over and lay staring in silence at the blue sky overhead. There was little beauty in the scene except the beauty which belongs to all things under the open sky. Road and landscape and cabin were bare even of any chance effect of light and shadow. Yet there was life--the raw, primal life of nature--and after his forty years of wasted experience, Ordway was filled with a passionate desire for life. In his careless pursuit of happiness he had often found weariness instead, but sitting now homeless and penniless, before the negro's cabin, he discovered that each object at which he looked--the long road that led somewhere, the smoke hanging above the distant town, the deep-bosomed negro mother and the half-naked negro baby--that each of these possessed an interest to which he awakened almost with a start of wonder. And yielding to the influence of his thought, his features appeared to lose gradually their surface coarseness of line. It was as if his mouth grew vague, enveloped in shadow, while the eyes dominated the entire face and softened its expression to one of sweetness, gaiety and youth. The child that is in every man big enough to contain it looked out suddenly from his altered face. He was thinking now of a day in his boyhood--of an early autumn morning when the frost was white on the grass and the chestnuts dropped heavily from the spreading boughs and the cider smelt strong and sweet as it oozed from the crushed winesaps. On that morning, after dressing by candlelight, he had gone into town with his maiden aunt, a lady whom he remembered chiefly by her false gray curls which she wore as if they had been a halo. At the wayside station, while they had waited for the train to the little city of Botetourt, he had seen a convict brought in, handcuffed, on his way to the penitentiary, and in response to the boy's persistent questioning, his aunt had told him that the man was wicked, though he appeared to the child's eyes to be only miserable--a thin, dirty, poorly clad labourer with a red cotton handkerchief bound tightly about his jaw. A severe toothache had evidently attacked him, for while he had stared sullenly at the bare planks of the floor, he had made from time to time a suffering, irritable movement with his head. At each gesture the guard had called out sharply: "Keep still there, won't you?" to which the convict had responded by a savage lowering of his heavy brows. For the first time it had occurred to the child that day that there must be a strange contradiction--a fundamental injustice in the universal scheme of nature. He had always been what his father had called impatiently "a boy with ideas," and it had seemed to him then that this last "idea" of his was far the most wonderful of them all--more wonderful than any he had found in books or in his own head at night. At the moment he had felt it swell so large in his heart that a glow of happiness had spread through his body to his trembling hands. Slipping from his aunt's hold he had crossed the room to where the convict sat sullenly beside his guard. "I'll give you all my money," he had cried out joyously, "because I am so much happier than you." The convict had started and looked up with an angry flash in his eyes; the guard had burst into a loud laugh while he spat tobacco juice through the window; the silver had scattered and rolled under the benches on the plank floor; and the child's aunt, rustling over in her stiff brocade, had seized his arm and dragged him, weeping loudly, into the train. So his first mission had failed, yet at this day he could remember the joy with which he had stretched out his little hand and the humiliation in which he had drawn it back. That was thirty years ago, but he wondered now if the child's way had been God's way, after all? For there had come an hour in his life when the convict of his boyhood had stood in closer relationship to his misery than the people whom he had touched in the street. His childish memories scattered like mist, and the three great milestones of his past showed bare and white, as his success, his temptation and his fall. He remembered the careless ambition of his early youth, the brilliant promise of his college years, and the day on which he had entered as a younger member the great banking house of Amos, Bonner, and Amos. Between this day and the slow minutes when he had stood in his wife's sitting-room awaiting his arrest, he could find in his thoughts no gradation of years to mark the terrible swiftness of his descent. In that time which he could not divide Wall Street had reached out and sucked him in; the fever of speculation had consumed like disease the hereditary instincts, the sentiments of honour, which had barred its way. One minute he had stood a rich man on the floor of the Stock Exchange--and was it an instant or a century afterwards that he had gone out into the street and had known himself to be a beggar and a criminal? Other men had made millions with the use of money which they held in trust; but the star of the gambler had deserted him at the critical hour; and where other men had won and triumphed, he had gone down, he told himself, dishonoured by a stroke of luck. In his office that day a mirror over the mantel had showed him his face as he entered, and he had stopped to look at it almost with curiosity--as if it were the face of a stranger which repelled him because it bore some sinister likeness to his own. After this there had come days, weeks, months, when at each sudden word, at each opening of the door, he had started, half sickened, by fear of the discovery which he knew must come. His nerves had quivered and given way under the pressure; he had grown morose, irritable, silent; and in some half-insane frenzy, he had imagined that his friends, his family, his wife, even his young children, had begun to regard him with terror and suspicion. But at last the hour had come, and in the strength with which he had risen to meet it, he had won back almost his old self--for courage, not patience, was the particular virtue of his temperament. He had stood his trial bravely, had heard his sentence without a tremor, and had borne his punishment without complaint. The world and he were quits now, and he felt that it owed him at least the room for a fair fight. The prison, he had said once, had squared him with his destiny, yet to-day each act of his past appeared to rivet, not itself, but its result upon his life. Though he told himself that he was free, he knew that, in the reality of things, he was still a prisoner. From the lowest depths that he had touched he was reached even now by the agony of his most terrible moment when, at the end of his first hopeless month, he had found awaiting him one day a letter from his wife. It was her final good-bye, she had written; on the morrow she would leave with her two children for his father's home in Virginia; and the single condition upon which the old man had consented to provide for them was that she should separate herself entirely from her husband. "The condition is hard," she had added, "made harder, too, by the fact that you are his son and my only real claim upon him is through you--yet when you consider the failure of our life together, and that the children's education even is unprovided for, you will, I feel sure, admit that my decision has been a wise one." The words had dissolved and vanished before his eyes, and turning away he had flung himself on his prison bed, while the hard, dry sobs had quivered like blows in his chest. Yet she was right! His judgment had acquitted her in the first agony of his reproach, and the unerring justice in her decision had convicted him with each smooth, calm sentence in her letter. As he lay there he had lost consciousness of the bare walls and the hot sunshine that fell through the grating, for the ultimate desolation had closed over him like black waters. A little later he had gone from his cell and taken up his life again; but all that he remembered of it now was a voice that had called to him in the prison yard. "You look so darn sunk in the mouth I'll let you have my last smoke--damn you!" Turning sullenly he had accepted the stranger's tobacco, unaware at the moment that he was partaking of the nature of a sacrament--for while he had smoked there in his dogged misery, he had felt revive in his heart a stir of sympathy for the convict he had seen at the wayside station in Virginia. As if revealed by an inner illumination the impressions of that morning had started, clear as light, into his brain. The frost on the grass, the dropping chestnuts, the strong sweet smell of the crushed winesaps--these things surrounded in his memory the wretched figure of the man with the red cotton handkerchief bound tightly about his swollen jaw. But the figure had ceased now to stand for itself and for its own degradation alone--haunting, tragic, colossal, it had become in his thoughts the image of all those who suffer and are oppressed. So through his sin and his remorse, Ordway had travelled slowly toward the vision of service. With a word of thanks to the woman, he rose from the bench and went down the little path and out into the road. The wind had changed suddenly, and as he emerged from the shelter of a thicket, it struck against his face with a biting edge. Where the sun had declined in the western sky, heavy clouds were driving close above the broken line of the horizon. The night promised to be cold, and he pushed on rapidly, urged by a feeling that the little town before him held rest and comfort and the new life beneath its smoking chimneys. Walking was less difficult now, for the road showed signs of travel as it approached the scattered houses, which appeared thrust into community by the surrounding isolation of the fields. At last, as he ascended a slight elevation, he found that the village, screened by a small grove of pines, lay immediately beneath the spot upon which he stood. CHAPTER II THE NIGHT The scattered houses closed together in groups, the road descended gradually into a hollow, and emerging on the opposite side, became a street, and the street slouched lazily downhill to where a railroad track ran straight as a seam across the bare country. Quickening his steps, Ordway came presently to the station--a small wooden building newly painted a brilliant yellow--and pushed his way with difficulty through a crowd of Negroes that had gathered closely beside the waiting train. "Thar's a good three hundred of the critters going to a factory in the North," remarked a man behind him, "an' yit they don't leave more'n a speck of white in the county. Between the crows an' the darkies I'll be blamed if you can see the colour of the soil." The air was heavy with hot, close smells--a mingling of smoke, tobacco, dust and humanity. A wailing sound issued from the windows of the cars where the dark faces were packed tightly together, and a tall Negro, black as ebony, in a red shirt open at the throat, began strumming excitedly upon a banjo. Near him a mulatto woman lifted a shrill soprano voice, while she stood beating the air distractedly with her open palms. On the other side of the station a dog howled, and the engine uttered an angry whistle as if impatient of the delay. After five years of prison discipline, the ugly little town appeared to Ordway to contain an alluring promise of freedom. At the instant the animation in the scene spoke to his blood as if it had been beauty, and movement seemed to him to possess some peculiar æsthetic quality apart from form or colour. The brightly dyed calicos on the Negro women; the shining black faces of the men, smooth as ebony; the tragic primitive voices, like voices imprisoned in the soil; the strumming of the rude banjo; the whistling engine and the howling dog; the odours of smoke and dust and fertilisers--all these things blended in his senses to form an intoxicating impression of life. Nothing that could move or utter sounds or lend a spot of colour appeared common or insignificant to his awakened brain. It was all life, and for five years he had been starved in every sense and instinct. The main street--Warehouse Street, as he found later that it was called--appeared in the distance as a broad river of dust which ran from the little station to where the warehouses and small shops gave place to the larger dwellings which presided pleasantly over the neighbouring fields. As Ordway followed the board sidewalk, he began idly reading the signs over the shops he passed, until "Kelly's Saloon," and "Baker's General Store" brought him suddenly upon a dark oblong building which ran back, under a faded brick archway. Before the entrance several men were seated in cane chairs, which they had tilted conveniently against the wall, and at Ordway's approach they edged slightly away and sat regarding him over their pipes with an expression of curiosity which differed so little in the different faces that it appeared to result from some internal automatic spring. "I beg your pardon," he began after a moment's hesitation, "but I was told that I might find work in Baxter's warehouse." "Well, it's a first-rate habit not to believe everything you're told," responded an enormous man, in half-soiled clothes, who sat smoking in the middle of the archway. "I can't find work myself in Baxter's warehouse at this season. Ain't that so, boys?" he enquired with a good-natured chuckle of his neighbours. "Are you Mr. Baxter?" asked Ordway shortly. "I'm not sure about the Mister, but I'm Baxter all right." He had shifted his pipe to the extreme corner of his mouth as he spoke, and now removing it with what seemed an effort, he sat prodding the ashes with his stubby thumb. His face, as he glanced down, was overspread by a flabbiness which appeared to belong to expression rather than to feature. "Then there's no chance for me?" enquired Ordway. "You might try the cotton mills--they's just down the next street. If there's a job to be had in town you'll most likely run up against it there." "It's no better than a wild goose chase you're sending him on, Baxter," remarked a smaller member of the group, whose head protruded unexpectedly above Baxter's enormous shoulder; "I was talking to Jasper Trend this morning and he told me he was turning away men every day. Whew! but this wind is getting too bitter for me, boys." "Oh, there's no harm can come of trying," insisted the cheerful giant, pushing back his chair as the others retreated out of the wind, "if hope doesn't fill the stomach it keeps the heart up, and that's something." His great laugh rolled out, following Ordway along the street as he went in pursuit of the fugitive opportunity which disported itself now in the cotton factory at the foot of the hill. When he reached the doors the work of the day was already over, and a crowd of operatives surged through the entrance and overflowed into the two roads which led by opposite ways into the town. Drawing to one side of the swinging doors, he stood watching the throng a moment before he could summon courage to enter the building and inquire for the office of the manager. When he did so at last it was with an almost boyish feeling of hesitation. The manager--a small, wiry man with a wart on the end of his long nose--was hurriedly piling papers into his desk before closing the factory and going home to supper. His hands moved impatiently, almost angrily, for he remembered that he had already worked overtime and that the muffins his wife had promised him for supper would be cold. At any other hour of the day he would have received Ordway with politeness--for he was at heart a well-disposed and even a charitable person--but it happened that his dinner had been unsatisfactory (his mutton had been served half raw by a new maid of all-work) and he had particularly set his hopes upon the delicious light muffins in which his wife excelled. So when he saw Ordway standing between him and his release, his face grew black and the movements of his hands passed to jerks of frantic irritation. "What do you want? Say it quick--I've no time to talk," he began, as he pushed the last heap of papers inside, and let the lid of his desk fall with a bang. "I'm looking for work," said Ordway, "and I was told at Baxter's warehouse----" "Darn Baxter. What kind of work do you want?" "I'll take anything--I can do bookkeeping or----" "Well, I don't want a bookkeeper." He locked his desk, and turning to take down his hat, was incensed further by discovering that it was not on the hook where he had placed it when he came in. Finding it at last on a heap of reports in the corner, he put it on his head and stared at Ordway, with his angry eyes. "You must have come a long way--haven't you? Mostly on foot?" "A good distance." "Why did you select Tappahannock? Was there any reason?" "I wanted to try the town, that was all." "Well, I tell you what, my man," concluded the manager, while his rage boiled over in the added instants of his delay; "there have been a blamed sight too many of your kind trying Tappahannock of late--and the best thing you can do is to move on to a less particular place. When we want bookkeepers here we don't pick 'em up out of the road." Ordway swallowed hard, and his hands clinched in a return of one of his boyish spasms of temper. His vision of the new life was for an instant defaced and clouded; then as he met the angry little eyes of the man before him, he felt that his rage went out of him as suddenly as it had come. Turning without a word, he passed through the entrance and out into the road, which led back, by groups of negro hovels, into the main street of the town. His anger gave place to helplessness; and it seemed to him, when he reached presently the larger dwellings upon the hill, and walked slowly past the squares of light that shone through the unshuttered windows, that he was more absolutely alone than if he had stood miles away from any human habitation. The outward nearness had become in his thoughts the measure of the inner distance. He felt himself to be detached from humanity, yet he knew that in his heart there existed a stronger bond than he had ever admitted in the years of his prosperity. The generous impulses of his youth were still there, but had not sorrow winnowed them from all that was base or merely selfish? Was the lesson that he had learned in prison to be wholly lost? Did the knowledge he had found there count for nothing in his life--the bitterness of shame, the agony of remorse, the companionship with misery? He remembered a Sunday in the prison when he had listened to a sermon from a misshapen little preacher, whose face was drawn sideways by a burn which he had suffered during an epileptic seizure in his childhood. In spite of his grotesque features the man had drawn Ordway by some invisible power which he had felt even then to be the power of faith. Crippled, distorted, poorly clad, the little preacher, he felt, had found the great possession which he was still seeking--this man believed with a belief that was larger than the external things which he had lost. When he shut his eyes now he could still see the rows of convicts in the chapel, the pale, greenish light in which each face resembled the face of a corpse, the open Bible in its black leather binding, and beside it the grotesque figure of the little preacher who had come, like his Master, to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance. The sun had dropped like a ball below the gray horizon, and the raw March wind, when it struck him now, brought no longer the exhilaration of the afternoon. A man passed him, comfortable, well-fed, wheezing slightly, with his fat neck wrapped in a woollen muffler, and as he stopped before a whitewashed gate, which opened into the garden surrounding a large, freshly painted house, Ordway touched his arm and spoke to him in a voice that had fallen almost to a whisper. At his words, which were ordinary enough, the man turned on him a face which had paled slightly from surprise or fear. In the twilight Ordway could see his jaw drop while he fumbled awkwardly with his gloved hands at the latch of the gate. "I don't know what you mean--I don't know" he repeated in a wheezing voice, "I'm sorry, but I really don't know," he insisted again as if in a helpless effort to be understood. Once inside the garden, he closed the gate with a bang behind him, and went rapidly up the gravelled walk to the long piazza where the light of a lamp under a red shade streamed through the open door. Turning away Ordway followed the street to the end of the town, where it passed without distinct change of character into the country road. On this side the colour of the soil had paled until it looked almost blanched under the rising moon. Though the twilight was already in possession of the fields a thin red line was still visible low in the west, and beneath this the scattered lights in negro cabins shone like obscure, greenish glow-worms, hidden among clumps of sassafras or in stretches of dried broomsedge. As Ordway looked at these humble dwellings, it seemed to him that they might afford a hospitality denied him by the more imposing houses of the town. He had already eaten of the Negro's charity, and it was possible that before dawn he might be compelled to eat of it again. Beneath his feet the long road called to him as it wound a curving white line drawn through the vague darkness of the landscape. Somewhere in a distant pasture a bull bellowed, and the sound came to him like the plaintive voice of the abandoned fields. While he listened the response of his tired feet to the road appeared to him as madness, and stopping short, he turned quickly and looked back in the direction of Tappahannock. But from the spot on which he stood the lights of the town offered little promise of hospitality, so after an uncertain glance, he moved on again to a bare, open place where two roads met and crossed at the foot of a blasted pine. A few steps farther he discovered that a ruined gate stood immediately on his right, and beyond the crumbling brick pillars, he made out dimly the outlines of several fallen bodies, which proved upon nearer view to be the prostrate forms of giant cedars. An avenue had once led, he gathered, from the gate to a house situated somewhere at the end of the long curve, for the great trees lying across the road must have stood once as the guardians of an estate of no little value. Whether the cedars had succumbed at last to age or to the axe of the destroyer, it was too dark at the moment for him to ascertain; but the earth had claimed them now, magnificent even in their ruin, while under the dim tent of sky beyond, he could still discern their living companions of a hundred years. So impressive was the past splendour of this approach that the house seemed, when he reached it, almost an affront to the mansion which his imagination had reared. Broad, low, built of brick, with two long irregular wings embedded in English ivy, and a rotting shingled roof that sloped over dormered windows, its most striking characteristic as he first perceived it under the moonlight was the sentiment which is inevitably associated with age and decay. Never imposing, the dwelling was now barely habitable, for the roof was sagging in places over the long wings, a chimney had fallen upon one of the moss-covered eaves, the stone steps of the porch were hollowed into dangerous channels, and the ground before the door was strewn with scattered chips from a neighbouring wood pile. The air of desolation was so complete that at first Ordway supposed the place to be uninhabited, but discovering a light presently in one of the upper windows, he ascended the steps and beat with the rusted knocker on the panel of the door. For several minutes there was no answer to his knock. Then the sound of shuffling footsteps reached him from the distance, drawing gradually nearer until they stopped immediately beyond the threshold. "I ain' gwine open dis yer do' ef'n hits oner dem ole hants," said a voice within, while a sharp point of light pierced through the keyhole. An instant later, in response to Ordway's assurance of his bodily reality, the bolt creaked back with an effort and the door opened far enough to admit the slovenly head and shoulders of an aged negress. "Miss Meely she's laid up en she cyar'n see ner comp'ny, Marster," she announced with the evident intention of retreating as soon as her message was delivered. Her purpose, however, was defeated, for, slipping his heavy boot into the crack of the door, Ordway faced her under the lamp which she held high above her head. In the shadows beyond he could see dimly the bare old hall and the great winding staircase which led to the painted railing of the gallery above. "Can you give me shelter for the night?" he asked, "I am a stranger in the county, and I've walked thirty miles to-day." "Miss Meely don' wan'ner comp'ny," replied the negress, while her head, in its faded cotton handkerchief, appeared to swing like a pendulum before his exhausted eyes. "Who is Miss Meely?" he demanded, laying his hand upon her apron as she made a sudden terrified motion of flight. "Miss Meely Brooke--Marse Edward's daughter. He's daid." "Well, go and ask her. I'll wait here on the porch until you return." Her eyelids flickered in the lamplight, and he saw the whites of her eyes leap suddenly into prominence. Then the door closed again, the bolt shot back into place, and the shuffling sound grew fainter as it passed over the bare floor. A cold nose touched Ordway's hand, and looking down he saw that an old fox-hound had crept into the porch and was fawning with pleasure at his feet. He was conscious of a thrill of gratitude for the first demonstrative welcome he had received at Tappahannock; and while he stood there with the hound leaping upon his chest, he felt that, in spite of "Miss Meely," hidden somewhere behind the closed door, the old house had not lost utterly the spirit of hospitality. His hand was still on the dog's head when the bolt creaked again and the negress reappeared upon the threshold. "Miss Meely she sez she's moughty sorry, suh, but she cyarn' hev ner strange gent'mun spendin' de night in de house. She reckons you mought sleep in de barn ef'n you wanter." As the door opened wider, her whole person, clad in a faded woollen dress, patched brightly in many colours, emerged timidly and followed him to the topmost step. "You des go roun' ter de back en den thoo' de hole whar de gate used ter be, en dar's de barn. Nuttin' ain' gwine hu't you lessen hits dat ar ole ram 'Lejab." "Well, he shall not find me unprepared," responded Ordway, with a kind of desperate gaiety, and while the old hound still leaped at his side, he found his way into a little path which led around the corner of the house, and through the tangled garden to the barn just beyond the fallen gateposts. Here the dog deserted him, running back to the porch, where a woman's voice called; and stumbling over a broken ploughshare or two, he finally reached the poor shelter which Miss Meely's hospitality afforded. It was very dark inside, but after closing the door to shut out the wind, he groped his way through the blackness to a pile of straw in one corner. The place smelt of cattle, and opposite to the spot on which he lay, he distinguished presently a soft, regular sound which he concluded to be caused by the breathing of a cow. Evidently the barn was used as a cattleshed also, though his observation of the mansion did not lead him to suppose that "Miss Meely" possessed anything approaching a herd. He remembered the old negress's warning allusion to the ram, but so far at least the darkness had revealed nothing that could prove hostile to his company. His head ached and his will seemed suddenly benumbed, so stretching himself at full length in the straw he fell, after a few troubled moments, into the deep and dreamless sleep of complete physical exhaustion. An instant afterwards, it seemed to him, he was aroused by a light which flashed into his face from the opening door. A cold wind blew over him, and as he struggled almost blindly back into consciousness, he saw that a girl in a red cape stood holding a lantern above her head in the centre of the barn. At his first look the red cape warmed him as if it had been flame; then he became aware that a voice was speaking to him in a peculiar tone of cheerful authority. And it seemed to him that the red cape and the rich voice expressed the same dominant quality of personality. "I thought you must be hungry," said the voice with energy, "so I've brought your supper." Even while he instinctively grasped the tray she held out, he observed with quickened attention that the hands which offered him the food had toiled out of doors in good and bad weather--though small and shapely they were chapped from cold and roughened by marks of labour. "You'd better drink your coffee while it's hot," said the voice again. The practical nature of her advice put him immediately at his ease. "It's the first hot thing I've had for a week," he responded. "Then it will be all the better for you," replied the girl, while she reached up to hang the lantern from a rusted nail in the wall. As the light fell over her, the red cape slipped a little from her shoulder and she put up her hand to catch it together on her bosom. The movement, slight as it was, gave Ordway a chance to observe that she possessed a kind of vigorous grace, which showed in the roundness of her limbs and in the rebellious freedom of her thick brown hair. The airy little curls on her temples stood out, he noticed, as if she had been walking bareheaded in the wind. At his first look it did not occur to him that she was beautiful; what impressed him most was the quality of radiant energy which revealed itself in every line of her face and figure--now sparkling in her eyes, now dimpling in her cheek, now quickening her brisk steps across the floor, and now touching her eyes and mouth like an edge of light. It may have been merely the effect of the red cape on a cold night, but as she moved back and forth into the dark corners of the barn, she appeared to him to gather both warmth and animation out of the gloom. As she did not speak again during her work, he found himself forced to observe the same friendly silence. The ravenous hunger of the afternoon had returned to him with the odour of the food, and he ate rapidly, sitting up on his straw bed, while she took up a bucket and a piece of wood sharpened at one end and prepared a bran mash for the cow quartered in a stall in one corner. When a little later she gathered up an armful of straw to replenish the animal's bed, Ordway pushed the tray aside and made a movement as if to assist her; but stopping an instant in her task, she waved him aside with the easy dignity of perfect capability. "I can do it myself, thank you," she said, smiling; and then, glancing at his emptied plate, she added carelessly, "I'll send back presently for the tray and lantern--good-night!" Her tone had changed perceptibly on the last word, for its businesslike authority had given place to the musical Southern drawl so familiar to his ears in childhood. In that simple phrase, accompanied by the gracious bend of her whole person, she had put unconsciously generations of social courtesy--of racial breeding. "Thank you--good-night," he answered, rising, and drawing back with his hand on the heavy latch. Then before she could reach the door and pass through, a second lantern flashed there out of the blackness beyond, and the terrified face of a Negro urchin was thrust into the full glare of light. "Fo' de good Lawd, Miss Em'ly, dat ar ole ram done butt Sis Mehitable clean inter de smoke 'us." Perfectly unruffled by the news the girl looked at Ordway, and then held out her small, strong hand for the lantern. "Very well, I'll come and shut him up," she responded quietly, and holding the red cape together on her bosom, she stepped over the threshold and followed the Negro urchin out into the night. CHAPTER III THE RETURN TO TAPPAHANNOCK At sunrise he came out of the barn, and washed his face and hands at the well, where he found a coarse towel on the moss-covered trough. The day was breaking clear, but in the fine golden light the house and lawn appeared even more desolate than they had done under the full moon. Before the war the place had been probably a comfortable, unpretentious country mansion. Some simple dignity still attached to its bowers of ivy and its ancient cedars, but it was easy to imagine that for thirty years no shingle had been added to its crumbling roof, and hardly a ship gathered from the littered walk before the door. At the end of the avenue six great trees had fallen a sacrifice, he saw now, to the mere lust for timber--for freshly cut and still odorous with sap, the huge trunks lay directly across the approach over which they had presided through the tragic history of the house. Judged by what it must have been in a fairly prosperous past, the scene was sad enough even to the eyes of a stranger; and as Ordway walked slowly down the dim, fragrant curve of the avenue, he found it difficult to place against so sombre a background, a figure as full of life and animation as that of the girl he had seen in the barn on the evening before. She appeared to his imagination as the embodiment of youth amid surroundings whose only remaining beauties were those of age. Though he had resolved yesterday not to return to Tappahannock, he found himself presently retracing, almost without an effort of will, the road which he had travelled so heavily in the night. Something between sunrise and sunset had renewed his courage and altered his determination. Was it only the wasted strength which had returned to him in his sleep? Or was it--he hesitated at the thought--the flush of shame which had burned his face when the girl's lantern had flashed over him out of the darkness? In that pitiless illumination it was as if not only his roughened surface, but his secret sin was laid bare; and he had felt again all the hideous publicity that had touched him and put him as one apart in the court-room. Though he had outgrown the sin, he knew now that he must carry the scar of it until his death; and he knew, also, that the reality of his punishment had been in the spirit and not in the law. For a while he walked rapidly in the direction of Tappahannock; then sitting down in the sunshine upon the roadside, he ate the piece of cornbread he had saved last night from his supper. It would be several hours at least before he might hope to find the warehouses open for the day, so he sat patiently eating his bread under the bared boughs of a young peach-tree, while he watched the surface of the long white road which appeared to hold for him as much despondency as freedom. A farmer driving a spotted cow to market spoke to him presently in a friendly voice; and rising to his feet, he overtook the man and fell into the jogging pace which was rendered necessary by the reluctance of the animal to proceed. "I declar' the sense in them thar critters do beat all," remarked the farmer, after an ineffectual tug at the rope he held. "She won't be drove no more 'n a woman will--her head is what she wants no matter whar it leads her." "Can you tell me," inquired Ordway, when they had started again upon the advance, "the name of the old house I passed a mile or so along the road?" "Oh, you mean Cedar Hill, I reckon!--thar now, Betsey, that thar toad ain't a turnip!" "Cedar Hill, is it? Well, they appear to be doing their level best to get rid of the cedars." "Mr. Beverly did that--not Miss Em'ly. Miss Em'ly dotes on them trees jest the same as if they were made of flesh and blood." "But the place belongs to Mr. Beverly, I presume?" "If thar's a shingle of it that ain't mortgaged, I reckon it does--though for that matter Miss Em'ly is overseer and manager, besides teachin' every day in the public school of Tappahannock. Mr. Beverly's got a soft heart in his body--all the Brookes had that they say--but the Lord who made him knows that he ain't overblessed with brains. He used to speculate with most of the family money, but as luck would have it he always speculated wrong. Then he took to farmin', but he's got such a slow gentlemanly way about him that nothin' he puts in the ground ever has spirit enough to come up agin. His wife's just like him--she was Miss Amelia Meadows, his second cousin from the up-country, and when the children kept on comin' so thick and fast, as is the Lord's way with po' folks, people said thar warn't nothin' ahead of 'em but starvation. But Miss Em'ly she come back from teachin' somewhar down South an' undertook to run the whole place single-handed. Things are pickin' up a little now, they say--she's got a will of her own, has Miss Em'ly, but thar ain't anybody in these parts that wouldn't work for her till they dropped. She sent for me last Monday to help her mend her henhouse, and though I was puttin' a new roof over my wife's head, I dropped everything I had and went. That was the day Mr. Beverly cut down the cedars." "So Miss Emily didn't know of it?" "She was in school, suh--you see she teaches in Tappahannock from nine till three, so Mr. Beverly chose that time to sell the avenue to young Tom Myers. He's a sly man, is Mr. Beverly, for all his soft, slow ways, and if Young Tom had been on time he'd have had half the avenue belted before Miss Em'ly got back from school. But he got in some mess or other at the store, and he was jest hewin' like thunder at his sixth cedar, when up come Miss Em'ly on that old white horse she rides. Good Lord! I hope I'll never see anybody turn so white agin as she did when her eyes lighted on them fallen trees. 'Beverly,' she called out in a loud, high voice, 'have you dared to sell the cedars?' Mr. Beverly looked a little sick as if his stomach had gone aginst him of a sudden, but he stood right up on the trunk of a tree, and mumbled something about presarvin' useless timber when the children had no shoes an' stockings to thar feet. Then Miss Em'ly gave him a look that scorched like fire, and she rode straight up to Myers on her old horse and said as quiet as death: 'Put up your axe, Tom, I'll give you back your money. How much have you paid him down?' When Young Tom looked kind of sheepish and said: 'a hundred dollars,' I saw her eyelids flicker, but she didn't hesitate an instant. 'You shall have it within an hour on my word of honour,' she answered, 'can you wait?' 'I reckon I can wait all day, Miss,' said Young Tom--and then she jumped down from her horse, and givin' me the bridle, caught up her skirt and ran indoors. In a minute she came flying out agin and before we had time to catch our breath she was ridin' for dear life back to town. 'You'd better go on with yo' work,' said Mr. Beverly in his soft way, but Young Tom picked up his axe, and sat down on the big stump behind him. 'I reckon I can take her word better 'n yours, Mr. Beverly,' he answered, 'an' 'I reckon you can, too, Young Tom,' said I----." "But how did she raise the money?" inquired Ordway. "That's what nobody knows, suh, except her and one other. Some say she sold a piece of her mother's old jewelry--a locket or something she had put by--and some believe still that she borrowed it from Robert Baxter or Jasper Trend. Whichever way it was, she came ridin' up within the hour on her old white horse with the notes twisted tight in her handkerchief. She was mighty quiet, then, but when it was over, great Lord, what a temper she was in. I declar' she would have struck Mr. Beverly with the sour gum twig she used for a whip if I hadn't slipped in between 'em an' caught her arm. Then she lashed him with her tongue till he seemed to wither and shrink all over." "And served him right, God bless her!" said Ordway. "That's so, suh, but Mr. Beverly ain't a bad man--he's jest soft." "Yet your Miss Emily still sticks to him, it seems?" "If she didn't the farm wouldn't hold together a week. What she makes from teachin' is about all they have to live on in my opinion. Last summer, too, she started raisin' garden things an' poultry, an' she'd have got quite a thrivin' business if she had had any kind of help. Then in July she tried her hand at puttin' up preserves and jellies to send to them big stores in the North." Ordway remembered the cheerful authority in her voice, the little cold red hands that had offered him his supper; and his heart contracted as it did at the memory of his daughter Alice. Yet it was not pity alone that moved him, for mingled with the appeal to his sympathy there was something which awoke in him the bitter agony of remorse. So the girl in the red cape could endure poverty such as this with honour! At the thought his past sin and his present disgrace appeared to him not only as crime but as cowardliness. He recalled the angry manager of the cotton mills, but there was no longer resentment in his mind either against the individual or against society. Instead it seemed to him that all smaller emotions dissolved in a tenderness which placed this girl and Alice apart with the other good and inspiring memories of his life. As he walked on in silence a little incident of ten years before returned to his thoughts, and he remembered the day he had found his child weeping beside a crippled beggar on his front steps. When, a little later, they reached Tappahannock, the farmer turned with his reluctant cow into one of the smaller paths which led across the common on the edge of the town. As it was still too early to apply for work, Ordway sat down on a flat stone before an iron gate and watched the windows along the street for any signs of movement or life within. At length several frowsy Negro maids leaned out while the wooden shutters swung slowly back against the walls; then a milk wagon driven by a small boy clattered noisily round the corner, and in response to the shrill whistle of the driver, the doors opened hurriedly and the Negro maids rushed, with outstretched pitchers, down the gravelled walks to the iron gates. Presently an appetising odour of bacon reached Ordway's nostrils; and in the house across the street a woman with her hair done up on pins, came to the window and began grinding coffee in a wooden mill. Not until eight o'clock did the town open its gates and settle itself to the day's work. When the doors of the warehouses were fastened back, Ordway turned into the main street again, and walked slowly downhill until he came to the faded brick archway where the group of men had sat smoking the evening before. Now there was an air of movement in the long building which had appeared as mere dim vacancy at the hour of sunset. Men were passing in and out of the brick entrance, from which a thin coat of whitewash was peeling in splotches; covered wagons half filled with tobacco were standing, unhitched, along the walls; huge bags of fresh fertilisers were thrown carelessly in corners; and in the centre of the great floor, an old Negro, with a birch broom tied together with coloured string, was sweeping into piles the dried stems left after yesterday's sales. As he swept, a little cloud of pungent dust rose before the strokes of his broom and floated through the brick archway out into the street. This morning there was even less attention paid to Ordway's presence than there had been at the closing hour. Planters hurried back and forth preparing lots for the opening sale; a wagon drove into the building, and the driver got down over the muddy wheel and lifted out several willow crates through which Ordway could catch a glimpse of the yellow sun-cured leaf. The old Negro swept briskly, piling the trash into heaps which would finally be ground into snuff or used as a cheap grade of fertiliser. Lean hounds wandered to and fro, following the covered wagons and sniffing suspiciously at the loose plants arranged in separate lots in the centre of the floor. "Is Baxter here this morning?" Ordway asked presently of a countryman who lounged on a pile of bags near the archway. "I reckon you'll find him in his office," replied the man, as he spat lazily out into the street; "that thar's his door," he added, pointing to a little room on the right of the entrance--"I seed him go in an' I ain't seed him come out." Nodding his thanks for the information, Ordway crossed the building and rapped lightly on the door. In response to a loud "come in," he turned the knob and stood next instant face to face with the genial giant of the evening before. "Good-morning, Mr. Baxter, I've come back again," he said. "Good-morning!" responded Baxter, "I see you have." In the full daylight Baxter appeared to have increased in effect if not in quantity, and as Ordway looked at him now, he felt himself to be in the presence less of a male creature than of an embodied benevolent impulse. His very flabbiness of feature added in a measure to the expansive generosity of mouth and chin; and slovenly, unwashed, half-shaven as he was, Baxter's spirit dominated not only his fellow men, but the repelling effect of his own unkempt exterior. To meet his glance was to become suddenly intimate; to hear him speak was to feel that he had shaken you by the hand. "I hoped you might have come to see things differently this morning," said Ordway. Baxter looked him over with his soft yet penetrating eyes, his gaze travelling slowly from the coarse boots covered with red clay to the boyish smile on the dark, weather-beaten face. "You did not tell me what kind of work you were looking for," he observed at last. "Do you want to sweep out the warehouse or to keep the books?" Ordway laughed. "I prefer to keep the books, but I can sweep out the warehouse," he replied. "You can--can you?" said Baxter. His pipe, which was never out of his hand except when it was in his mouth, began to turn gray, and putting it between his teeth, he sucked hard at the stem for a minute. "You're an educated man, then?" "I've been to college--do you mean that?" "You're fit for a clerk's position?" "I am sure of it." "Where did you work last?" Ordway's hesitation was barely perceptible. "I've been in business," he answered. "On your own hook?" inquired Baxter. "Yes, on my own hook." "But you couldn't make a living at it?" "No; I gave it up for several reasons." "Well, I don't know your reasons, my man," observed Baxter, drily, "but I like your face." "Thank you," said Ordway, and he laughed again with the sparkling gaiety which leaped first to his blue eyes. "And so you expect me to take you without knowing a darn thing about you?" demanded Baxter. Ordway nodded gravely. "Yes, I hope that is what you will do," he answered. "I may ask your name, I reckon, mayn't I?--if you have no particular objection." "I don't mind telling you it's Smith," said Ordway, with his gaze on a huge pamphlet entitled "Smith's Almanac" lying on Baxter's desk. "Daniel Smith." "Smith," repeated Baxter. "Well, it ain't hard to remember. If I warn't a blamed fool, I'd let you go," he added thoughtfully, "but there ain't much doubt, I reckon, about my being a blamed fool." He rose from his chair with difficulty, and steadying his huge body, moved to the door, which he flung open with a jerk. "If you've made up your mind dead sure to butt in, you might as well begin with the next sale," he said. CHAPTER IV THE DREAM OF DANIEL SMITH He had been recommended for lodging to a certain Mrs. Twine, and at five o'clock, when the day's work at Baxter's was over, he started up the street in a bewildered search for her house, which he had been told was situated immediately beyond the first turn on the brow of the hill. When he reached the corner there was no one in sight except a small boy who sat, crying loudly, astride a little whitewashed wooden gate. Beyond the boy there was a narrow yard filled with partly dried garments hung on clothes lines, which stretched from a young locust tree near the sidewalk to the front porch, where a man with a red nose was reading the local newspaper. As the man with the red nose paid no attention to the loud lamentations of the child, Ordway stopped by the gate and inquired sympathetically if he could be of help. "Oh, he ain't hurt," remarked the man, throwing a side glance over his paper, "he al'ays yells like that when his Ma's done scrubbed him." "She's washed me so clean that I feel naked," howled the boy. "Well, you'll get over that in a year's time," observed Ordway cheerfully, "so suppose you leave off a minute now and show me the way to Mrs. Twine's." At his request the boy stopped crying instantly, and stared up at him while the dirty tearmarks dried slowly on his cheeks. "Thar ain't no way," he replied solemnly, "'cause she's my ma." "Then jump down quickly and run indoors and tell her I'd like to see her." "'T ain't no use. She won't come." "Well, go and ask her. I was told to come here to look for board and lodging." He glanced inquiringly at the man on the porch, who, engrossed in the local paper, was apparently oblivious of the conversation at the gate. "She won't come 'cause she's washin' the rest of us," returned the boy, as he swung himself to the ground, "thar're six of us an' she ain't done but two. That's Lemmy she's got hold of now. Can't you hear him holler?" He planted his feet squarely on the board walk, looked back at Ordway over his shoulder, and departed reluctantly with the message for his mother. At the end of a quarter of an hour, when Ordway had entered the gate and sat down in the cold wind on the front steps, the door behind him opened with a jar, and a large, crimson, untidy woman, splashed with soapsuds, appeared like an embodied tempest upon the threshold. "Canty says you've come to look at the dead gentleman's room, suh," she began in a high voice, approaching her point with a directness which lost none of its force because of the panting vehemence with which she spoke. "Baxter told me I might find board with you," explained Ordway in her first breathless pause. "To be sure he may have the dead gentleman's room, Mag," put in the man on the porch, folding his newspaper, with a shiver, as he rose to his feet. "I warn't thinkin' about lettin' that room agin'," said Mrs. Twine, crushing her husband's budding interference by the completeness with which she ignored his presence. "But it's jest as well, I reckon, for a defenceless married woman to have a stranger in the house. Though for the matter of that," she concluded in a burst of domestic confidence, "the woman that ain't a match for her own husband without outside help ain't deservin' of the pleasure an' the blessin' of one." Then as the man with the red nose slunk shamefacedly into the passage, she added in an undertone to Ordway, "and now if you'll jest step inside, I'll show you the spare room that I've got to let." She led the way indoors, scolding shrilly as she passed through the hall, and up the little staircase, where several half-dressed children were riding, with shrieks of delight, down the balustrade. "You needn't think you've missed a scrubbing because company's come," she remarked angrily, as she stooped to box the ears of a small girl lying flat on her stomach upon the landing. "Such is my taste for cleanness," she explained to Ordway, "that when my hands once tech the soap it's as much as I can do to keep 'em back from rubbin' the skin off. Thar 're times even when the taste is so ragin' in my breast that I can hardly wait for Saturday night to come around. Yet I ain't no friend to license whether it be in whiskey or in soap an' water. Temperance is my passion and that's why, I suppose, I came to marry a drunkard." With this tragic confession, uttered in a matter of fact manner, she produced a key from the pocket of her blue gingham apron, and ushered Ordway into a small, poorly furnished room, which overlooked the front street and the two bared locust trees in the yard. "I kin let you have this at three dollars a week," she said, "provided you're content to do yo' own reachin' at the table. Thar ain't any servant now except a twelve year old darkey." "Yes, I'll take it," returned Ordway, almost cheerfully; and when he had agreed definitely as to the amount of service he was to receive, he closed the creaking door behind her, and looked about the crudely furnished apartment with a sense of ownership such as he had not felt since the afternoon upon which he had stood in his wife's sitting-room awaiting his arrest. He thought of the Florentine gilding, the rich curtains, the long mirrors, the famous bronze Mercury and the Corot landscape with the sunlight upon it--and then of the terrible oppression in which these familiar objects had seemed closing in upon him and smothering him into unconsciousness. The weight was lifted now, and he breathed freely while his gaze rested on the common pine bedstead, the scarred washstand, with the broken pitcher, the whitewashed walls, the cane chairs, the rusted scuttle, filled with cheap coal, and the unpainted table holding a glass lamp with a smoked chimney. From the hall below he could hear the scolding voice of Mrs. Twine, but neither the shrill sound nor the poor room produced in him the smothered anguish he felt even to-day at the memory of the Corot landscape bathed in sunlight. An hour later, when he came upstairs again as an escape from the disorder of Mrs. Twine's supper table, he started a feeble blaze in the grate, which was half full of ashes, and after lighting the glass lamp, sat watching the shadows flicker to and fro on the whitewashed wall. His single possession, a photograph of his wife taken with her two children, rested against the brick chimney piece, and as he looked at it now it seemed to stand in no closer relationship to his life than did one of the brilliant chromos he had observed ornamenting the walls of Mrs. Twine's dining-room. His old life, indeed, appeared remote, artificial, conjured from unrealities--it was as if he had moved lightly upon the painted surface of things, until at last a false step had broken through the thin covering and he had plunged in a single instant against the concrete actuality. The shock had stunned him, yet he realised now that he could never return to his old sheltered outlook--to his pleasant fiction--for he had come too close to experience ever to be satisfied again with falsehood. The photograph upon the mantel was the single remaining link which held him to-day to his past life--to his forfeited identity. In the exquisite, still virgin face of his wife, draped for effect in a scarf of Italian lace--he saw embodied the one sacred memory to which as Daniel Smith he might still cling with honour. The face was perfect, the expression of motherhood which bent, flamelike, over the small boy and girl, was perfect also; and the pure soul of the woman seemed to him to have formed both face and expression after its own divine image. In the photograph, as in his memory, her beauty was touched always by some rare quality of remoteness, as if no merely human conditions could ever entirely compass so ethereal a spirit. The passion which had rocked his soul had left her serenity unshaken, and even sorrow had been powerless to leave its impress or disfigurement upon her features. As the shadows flickered out on the walls, the room grew suddenly colder. Rising, he replenished the fire, and then going over to the bed, he flung himself, still dressed, under the patchwork quilt from which the wool was protruding in places. He was thinking of the morning eighteen years ago when he had first seen her as she came, with several girl companions, out of the old church in the little town of Botetourt. It was a Christmas during his last year at Harvard, when moved by a sudden interest in his Southern associations, he had gone down for two days to his childhood's home in Virginia. Though the place was falling gradually to ruin, his maiden great-aunt still lived there in a kind of luxurious poverty; and at the sight of her false halo of gray curls, he had remembered, almost with a start of surprise, the morning when he had seen the convict at the little wayside station. The station, the country, the muddy roads, and even the town of Botetourt were unchanged, but he himself belonged now to another and what he felt to be a larger world. Everything had appeared provincial and amusing to his eyes--until as he passed on Christmas morning by the quaint old churchyard, he had seen Lydia Preston standing in the sunshine amid the crumbling tombstones of several hundred years. Under the long black feather in her hat, her charming eyes had dwelt on him kindly for a minute, and in that minute it had seemed to him that the racial ideal slumbering in his brain had responded quickly to his startled blood. Afterward they had told him that she was only nineteen, a Southern beauty of great promise, and the daughter of old Adam Preston, who had made and lost a fortune in the last ten years. But these details seemed to him to have no relation to the face he had seen under the black feather against the ivy-covered walls of the old church. The next evening they had danced together at a ball; he had carried her fan, a trivial affair of lace and satin, away in his pocket, and ten days later he had returned, flushed with passion, to finish his course at Harvard. Love had put wings to his ambition; the following year he had stood at the head of his class, and before the summer was over he had married her and started brilliantly in his career. There had been only success in the beginning. When had the tide turned so suddenly? he wondered, and when had he begun to drift into the great waters where men are washed down and lost? Lying on the bed now in the firelight, he shivered and drew the quilt closer about his knees. She had loved beauty, riches, dignity, religion--she had loved her children when they came; but had she ever really loved him--the Daniel Ordway whom she had married? Were all pure women as passionless--as utterly detached--as she had shown herself to him from the beginning? And was her coldness, as he had always believed, but the outward body of that spiritual grace for which he had loved her? He had lavished abundantly out of his stormy nature; he had spent his immortal soul upon her in desperate determination to possess her utterly at her own price; and yet had she ever belonged to him, he questioned now, even in the supreme hours of their deepest union? Had her very innocence shut him out from her soul forever? In the end the little world had closed over them both; he had felt himself slipping further--further--had made frantic efforts to regain his footing; and had gone down hopelessly at last. Those terrible years before his arrest crowded like minutes into his brain, and he knew now that there had been relief--comfort--almost tranquillity in his life in prison. The strain was lifted at last, and the days when he had moved in dull hope or acute despair through the crowd in Wall Street were over forever. To hold a place in the little world one needed great wealth; and it had seemed to him in the time of temptation that this wealth was not a fugitive possession, but an inherent necessity--a thing which belonged to the inner structure of Lydia's nature. A shudder ran over him, while he drew a convulsive breath like one in physical pain. The slow minutes in which he had waited for a rise in the market were still ticking in agony somewhere in his brain. Time moved on, yet those minutes never passed--his memory had become like the face of a clock where the hands pointed, motionless, day or night, to the same hour. Then hours, days, weeks, months, years, when he lived with ruin in his thoughts and the sound of merriment, which was like the pipe of hollow flutes, in his ears. At the end it came almost suddenly--the blow for which he had waited, the blow which brought something akin to relief because it ended the quivering torture of his suspense, and compelled, for the hour at least, decisive action. He had known that before evening he would be under arrest, and yet he had walked slowly along Fifth Avenue from his office to his home; he recalled now that he had even joked with a club wit, who had stopped him at the corner to divulge the latest bit of gossip. At the very instant when he felt himself to be approaching ruin in his house, he remembered that he had complained a little irritably of the breaking wrapper of his cigar. Yet he was thinking then that he must reach his home in time to prevent his wife from keeping a luncheon engagement, of which she had spoken to him at breakfast; and ten minutes later it was with a sensation of relief that he met the blank face of his butler in the hall. On the staircase his daughter ran after him, her short white, beruffled skirts standing out stiffly like the skirts of a ballet dancer. She was taking her music lesson, she cried out, and she called to him to come into the music room and hear how wonderfully she could run her scales! Her blue eyes, which were his eyes in a child's face, looked joyously up at him from under the thatch of dark curls which she had inherited from him, not from her blond mother. "Not now, Alice," he answered, almost impatiently, "not now--I will come a little later." Then she darted back, and the stumbling music preceded him up the staircase to the door of his wife's dressing-room. When he entered Lydia was standing before her mirror, fastening a spotted veil with a diamond butterfly at the back of her blond head; and as she turned smilingly toward him, he put out his hand with a gesture of irritation. "Take that veil off, Lydia, I can't see you for the spots," he said. Complaisant always, she unfastened the diamond butterfly without a word, and taking off the veil, flung it carelessly across the golden-topped bottles upon her dressing-table. "You look ill," she said with her charming smile; "shall I ring for Marie to bring you whiskey?" At her words he turned from her, driven by a torment of pity which caused his voice to sound harsh and constrained in his own ears. "No--no--don't put that on again," he protested, for while she waited she had taken up the spotted veil and the diamond pin. Something in his tone startled her into attention, and moving a step forward, she stood before him on a white bearskin rug. Her face had hardly changed, yet in some way she seemed to have put him at a distance, and he felt all at once that he had never known her. From the room downstairs he heard Alice's music lesson go on at broken intervals, the uncertain scales she ran now stopping, now beginning violently again. The sound wrought suddenly on his nerves like anger, and he felt that his voice was querulous in spite of the torment of pity at his heart. "There's no use putting on your veil," he said, "a warrant is out for my arrest and I must wait here till it comes." * * * * * His memory stopped now, as if it had snapped suddenly beneath the strain. After this there was a mere blank of existence upon which people and objects moved without visible impression. From that minute to this one appeared so short a time that he started up half expecting to hear Alice's scales filling Mrs. Twine's empty lodgings. Then his eyes fell on the whitewashed walls, the smoking lamp, the bare table, and the little square window with the branches of the locust tree frosted against the pane. Rising from the bed, he fell on his knees and pressed his quivering face to the patchwork quilt. "Give me a new life, O God--give me a new life!" CHAPTER V AT TAPPAHANNOCK After a sleepless night, he rose as soon as the dawn had broken, and sitting down before the pine table wrote a letter to Lydia, on a sheet of paper which had evidently been left in the drawer by the former lodger. "It isn't likely that you'll ever want me," he added at the end, "but if you should happen to, remember that I am yours, as I have always been, for whatever I am worth." When he had sealed the envelope and written her name above that of the town of Botetourt, he put it into his pocket and went down to the dining-room, where he found Mrs. Twine pouring steaming coffee into a row of broken cups. A little mulatto girl, with her hair plaited in a dozen fine braids, was placing a dish of fried bacon at one end of the walnut-coloured oil-cloth on the table, around which the six children, already clothed and hungry, were beating an impatient tattoo with pewter spoons. Bill Twine, the father of the family, was evidently sleeping off a drunken headache--a weakness which appeared to afford his wife endless material for admonition and philosophy. "Thar now, Canty," she was remarking to her son, "yo' po' daddy may not be anything to be proud of as a man, but I reckon he's as big an example as you'll ever see. He's had sermons p'inted at him from the pulpit; they've took him up twice to the police court, an' if you'll believe me, suh," she added with a kind of outraged pride to Ordway, "thar's been a time when they've had out the whole fire department to protect me." The coffee though poor was hot, and while Ordway drank it, he listened with an attention not unmixed with sympathy to Mrs. Twine's continuous flow of speech. She was coarse and shrewish and unshapely, but his judgment was softened by the marks of anxious thought on her forehead and the disfigurements of honest labour on her hands. Any toil appeared to him now to be invested with peculiar dignity; and he felt, sitting there at her slovenly breakfast table, that he was closer to the enduring heart of humanity than he had been among the shallow refinements of his past life. Mrs. Twine was unpleasant, but at her worst he felt her to be the real thing. "Not that I'm blamin' Bill, suh, as much as some folks," she proceeded charitably, while she helped her youngest child to gravy, "for it made me downright sick myself to hear them carryin' on over his beatin' his own wife jest as much as if he'd been beatin' somebody else's. An' I ain't one, when it comes to that, to put up with a white-livered, knock-kneed, pulin' sort of a critter, as I told the Jedge a-settin' upon his bench. When a woman is obleeged to take a strappin' thar's some real satisfaction in her feelin' that she takes it from a man--an' the kind that would lay on softly with never a broken head to show for it--well, he ain't the kind, suh, that I could have helt in any respect an' honour. And as to that, as I said to 'em right then an' thar, take the manly health an' spirit out o' Bill, an' he's jest about as decent an' law abidin' as the rest. Why, when he was laid up with malaria, he never so much as rized his hand agin me, an' it'll be my belief untwel my dyin' day that chills an' fever will keep a man moral when all the sermons sence Moses will leave him unteched. Feed him low an' work him hard, an' you kin make a saint out of most any male critter, that's my way of thinkin'." While she talked she was busily selecting the choicest bit of bacon for Bill's plate, and as Ordway left the house a little later, he saw her toiling up the staircase with her husband's breakfast on a tin tray in her hands. "If you think I'm goin' to set an' wait all day for you to get out o' bed, you've jest about clean lost yo' wits, Bill Twine," she remarked in furious tones, as she flung open a door on the landing above. Out of doors Ordway found that the wind had died down, though a sharp edge of frost was still in the air. The movement of the day had already begun; and as he passed the big house on the brow of the hill he saw a pretty girl, with her hair tied back with a velvet ribbon, run along the gravelled walk to meet the postman at the gate. A little farther, when he had reached the corner, he turned back to hand his letter to the postman, and found to his surprise that the pretty girl was still gazing after him. No possible interest could attach to her in his thoughts; and with a careless acknowledgment of her beauty, she faded from his consciousness as rapidly as if she had been a ray of sunshine which he had admired as he passed along. Then as he turned into the main street at the corner, he saw that Emily Brooke was riding slowly up the hill on her old white horse. She still wore her red cape, which fell over the saddle on one side, and completely hid the short riding-skirt beneath. On her head there was a small knitted Tam-o'-shanter cap, and this, with the easy freedom of her seat in the saddle, gave her an air which was gallant rather than graceful. The more feminine adjective hardly seemed to apply to her at the moment; she looked brave, strong, buoyant, a creature that had not as yet become aware of its sex. Yet she was older, he discovered now, than he had at first imagined her to be. In the barn he had supposed her age to be not more than twenty years; seen in the morning light it was impossible to decide whether she was a year younger or ten years older than he had believed. The radiant energy in her look belonged, after all, less to the accident of youth than to some enduring quality of spirit. As she neared him, she looked up from her horse's neck, rested her eyes upon him for an instant, and smiled brightly, much as a charming boy might have done. Then, just as she was about to pass on, the girth of her saddle slipped under her, and she was thrown lightly to the ground, while the old horse stopped and stood perfectly motionless above her. "My skirt has caught in the stirrup," she said to Ordway, and while he bent to release her, he noticed that she clung, not to his arm, but to the neck of the horse for support. To his surprise there was neither embarrassment nor amusement in her voice. She spoke with the cool authority which had impressed him during the incident of the ram's attack upon "Sis Mehitable." "I don't think it is quite safe yet," he said, after he had drawn the rotten girth as tight as he dared. "It looks as if it wouldn't last, you see." "Well, I dare say, it may be excused after forty years of service," she returned, smiling. "What? this saddle? It does look a little quaint when one examines it." "Oh, it's been repaired, but even then one must forgive an old servant for growing decrepit." "Then you'll ride it again?" he asked, seeing that she was about to mount. "Of course--this isn't my first tumble--but Major expects them now and he knows how to behave. So do I," she added, laughing, "you see it doesn't take me by surprise." "Yes, I see it doesn't," he answered gaily. "Then if you chance to be about the next time it happens, I hope it won't disturb you either," she remarked, as she rode up the hill. The meeting lingered in Ordway's mind with a freshness which was associated less with the incident itself than with some vivid quality in the appearance of the girl. Her face, her voice, her carriage--even the little brown curls blowing on her temples, all united in his thoughts to form a memory in which Alice appeared to hold a place. Why should this country girl, he wondered, bring back to him so clearly the figure of his daughter? But there was no room for a memory in his life just now, and by the time he reached Baxter's Warehouse, he had forgotten the interest aroused in him a moment before. Baxter had not yet appeared in his office, but two men, belonging evidently to the labouring class, were talking together under the brick archway. When Ordway joined them they did not interrupt their conversation, which he found, after a minute, to concern the domestic and financial troubles of the one whom he judged to be the poorer of the two. He was a meanly clad, wretched looking workman, with a shock of uncombed sandy hair, a cowed manner, and the expression of one who has been beaten into apathy rather than into submission. A sordid pathos in his voice and figure brought Ordway a step closer to his side, and after a moment's careless attention, he found his mind adjusting itself to the small financial problems in which the man had become entangled. The workman had been forced to borrow upon his pathetic personal securities; and in meeting from year to year the exorbitant rate of interest, he had paid back several times the sum of the original debt. Now his wife was ill, with an incurable cancer; he had no hope, as he advanced beyond middle age, of any increase in his earning capacity, and the debt under which he had struggled so long had become at the end an intolerable burden. His wife had begged him to consult a lawyer--but who, he questioned doggedly, would take an interest in him since he had no money for a fee? He was afraid of lawyers anyway, for he could give you a hundred cases where they had stood banded together against the poor. As Ordway listened to the story, he felt for an instant a return of his youthful enthusiasm, and standing there amid the tobacco stems in Baxter's warehouse, he remembered a great flour trust from which he had withdrawn because it seemed to him to bear unjustly upon the small, isolated farmers. Beyond this he went back still further to his college days, when during his vacation, he had read Virginia law in the office of his uncle, Richard Ordway, in the town of Botetourt. He could see the shining rows of legal volumes in the walnut bookcases, the engraving of Latane's Burial, framed in black wood above the mantel, and against this background the silent, gray haired, self-righteous old man so like his father. Through the window, he could see still the sparrows that built in the ivied walls of the old church. With a start he came back to the workman, who was unfolding his troubles in an abandon of misery under the archway. "If you'll talk things over with me to-night when we get through work, I think I may be able to straighten them out for you," he said. The man stared at him out of his dogged eyes with a helpless incredulity. "But I ain't got any money," he responded sullenly, as if driven to the defensive. "Well, we'll see," said Ordway, "I don't want your money." "You want something, though--my money or my vote, and I ain't got either." Ordway laughed shortly. "I?--oh, I just want the fun," he answered. The beginning was trivial enough, the case sordid, and the client only a dull-witted labourer; but to Ordway it came as the commencement of the new life for which he had prayed--the life which would find its centre not in possession, but in surrender, which would seek as its achievement not personal happiness, but the joy of service. CHAPTER VI THE PRETTY DAUGHTER OF THE MAYOR The pretty girl whom Ordway had seen on the gravelled walk was Milly Trend, the only child of the Mayor of Tappahannock. People said of Jasper Trend that his daughter was the one soft spot in a heart that was otherwise as small and hard as a silver dollar, and of Milly Trend the same people said--well, that she was pretty. Her prettiness was invariably the first and the last thing to be mentioned about her. Whatever sterner qualities she may have possessed were utterly obscured by an exterior which made one think of peach blossoms and spring sunshine. She had a bunch of curls the colour of ripe corn, which she wore tied back from her neck with a velvet ribbon; her eyes were the eyes of a baby; and her mouth had an adorable little trick of closing over her small, though slightly prominent teeth. The one flaw in her face was this projection of her teeth, and when she looked at herself in the glass it was her habit to bite her lips closely together until the irregular ivory line was lost. It was this fault, perhaps, which kept her prettiness, though it was superlative in its own degree, from ever rising to the height of beauty. In Milly's opinion it had meant the difference between the glory of a world-wide reputation and the lesser honour of reigning as the acknowledged belle of Tappahannock. She remembered that the magnificent manager of a theatrical company, a gentleman who wore a fur-lined coat and a top hat all day long, had almost lost his train while he stopped to look back at her on the crowded platform of the station. Her heart had beat quickly at the tribute, yet even in that dazzling minute she had felt a desperate certainty that her single imperfection would decide her future. But for her teeth, she was convinced to-day, that he might have returned. If a woman cannot be a heroine in reality, perhaps the next best thing is to look as if she might have been one in the age of romance; and this was what Milly Trend's appearance suggested to perfection. Her manner of dressing, the black velvet ribbon on her flaxen curls, her wide white collars open at her soft throat, her floating sky-blue sashes and the delicate peach bloom of her cheeks and lips--all these combined to produce a poetic atmosphere about an exceedingly poetic little figure. Being plain she would probably have made currant jelly for her pastor, and have taught sedately in the infant class in Sunday school: being pretty she read extravagant romances and dreamed strange adventures of fascinating highwaymen on lonely roads. But many a woman who has dreamed of a highwayman at eighteen has compromised with a bank clerk at twenty-two. Even at Tappahannock--the veriest prose piece of a town--romance might sometimes bud and blossom, though it usually brought nothing more dangerous than respectability to fruit. Milly had read Longfellow and _Lucille_, and her heroic ideal had been taken bodily from one of Bulwer's novels. She had played the graceful part of heroine in a hundred imaginary dramas; yet in actual life she had been engaged for two years to a sandy-haired, freckled face young fellow, who chewed tobacco, and bought the dry leaf in lots for a factory in Richmond. From romance to reality is a hard distance, and the most passionate dreamer is often the patient drudge of domestic service. And yet even to-day Milly was not without secret misgivings as to the wisdom of her choice. She knew he was not her hero, but in her short visits to larger cities she had met no one who had come nearer her ideal lover. To be sure she had seen this ideal, in highly coloured glimpses, upon the stage--though these gallant gentlemen in trunks had never so much as condescended to glance across the foot-lights to the little girl in the dark third row of the balcony. Then, too, all the ladies upon the stage were beautiful enough for any hero, and just here she was apt to remember dismally the fatal projection of her teeth. So, perhaps, after all, Harry Banks was as near Olympus as she could hope to approach; and there was a mild consolation in the thought that there was probably more sentiment in the inner than in the outward man. Whatever came of it, she had learned that in a prose age it is safer to think only in prose. On the morning upon which Ordway had first passed her gate, she had left the breakfast table at the postman's call, and had run down the gravelled walk to receive a letter from Mr. Banks, who was off on a short business trip for his firm. With the letter in her hand she had turned to find Ordway's blue eyes fixed in careless admiration upon her figure; and for one breathless instant she had felt her insatiable dream rise again and clutch at her heart. Some subtle distinction in his appearance--an unlikeness to the masculine portion of Tappahannock--had caught her eye in spite of his common and ill-fitting clothes. Though she had known few men of his class, the sensitive perceptions of the girl had made her instantly aware of the difference between him and Harry Banks. For a moment her extravagant fancy dwelt on his figure--on this distinction which she had noticed, on his square dark face and the singular effect of his bright blue eyes. Then turning back in the yard, she went slowly up the gravelled walk, while she read with a vague feeling of disappointment the love letter written laboriously by Mr. Banks. It was, doubtless, but the average love letter of the average plain young man, but to Milly in her rosy world of fiction, it appeared suddenly as if there had protruded upon her attention one of the great, ugly, wholesome facts of life. What was the use, she wondered, in being beautiful if her love letters were to be filled with enthusiastic accounts of her lover's prowess in the tobacco market? At the breakfast table Jasper Trend was pouring maple syrup on the buckwheat cakes he had piled on his plate, and at the girl's entrance he spoke without removing his gaze from the plated silver pitcher in his hand. "Any letters, daughter?" he inquired, carefully running his knife along the mouth of the pitcher to catch the last drop of syrup. "One," said Milly, as she sat down beside the coffee pot and looked at her father with a ripple of annoyance in her babyish eyes. "I reckon I can guess about that all right," remarked Jasper with his cackling chuckle, which was as little related to a sense of humour as was the beating of a tin plate. He was a long, scraggy man, with drab hair that grew in scallops on his narrow forehead and a large nose where the prominent red veins turned purple when he became excited. "There's a stranger in town, father," said Milly as she gave him his second cup of coffee. "I think he is boarding at Mrs. Twine's." "A drummer, I reckon--thar're a plenty of 'em about this season." "No, I don't believe he is a drummer--he isn't--isn't quite so sparky looking. But I wish you wouldn't say 'thar,' father. You promised me you wouldn't do it." "Well, it ain't stood in the way of my getting on," returned Jasper without resentment. Had Milly told him to shave his head, he might have protested freely, but in the end he would have gone out obediently to his barber. Yet people outside said that he ground the wages of his workers in the cotton mills down to starvation point, and that he had been elected Mayor not through popularity, but through terror. It was rumoured even that he stood with his wealth behind the syndicate of saloons which was giving an ugly local character to the town. But whatever his public vices may have been, his private life was securely hedged about by the paternal virtues. "I can't place him, but I'm sure he isn't a 'buyer,'" repeated Milly, after a moment's devotion to the sugar bowl. "Well, I'll let you know when I see him," responded Jasper as he left the table and got into his overcoat, while Milly jumped up to wrap his neck in a blue spotted muffler. When he had gone from the house, she took out her lover's letter again, but it proved, on a second trial, even more unsatisfactory than she had found it to be at her first reading. As a schoolgirl Milly had known every attribute of her divinity from the chivalry of his soul to the shining gloss upon his boots--but to-day there remained to her only the despairing conviction that he was unlike Banks. Banks appeared to her suddenly in the hard prosaic light in which he, on his own account, probably viewed his tobacco. Even her trousseau and the lace of her wedding gown ceased to afford her the shadow of consolation, since she remembered that neither of these accessories would occupy in marriage quite so prominent a place as Banks. The next day Ordway passed at the same hour, still on the opposite side of the street. After this she began to watch regularly for his figure, looking for it when it appeared on Mrs. Twine's little porch, and following it wistfully until it was lost beyond the new brick church at the corner. She was not aware of cultivating a facile sentiment about the stranger, but place a riotous imagination in an empty house and it requires little effort to weave a romance from the opposite side of the street. Distance, that subtle magnifier of attachments, had come to her aid now as it had failed her in the person of Harry Banks. Even from across the street it was impossible to invest Mr. Banks with any quality which might have suggested an historic background or a mysterious past. He was flagrantly, almost outrageously himself; in no fictitious circumstances could he have appeared as anything except the unvarnished fact that he was. No legendary light could have glorified his features or improved the set of his trousers--which had taken their shape and substance from the legs within. With these features and in these trousers, she felt that he must usurp the sacred precincts where her dream had dwelt. "It would all be so easy if one could only be born where one belongs," she cried out hopelessly, in the unconscious utterance of a philosophy larger than her own. And so as the week went by, she allowed her rosy fancies to surround the figure that passed three times daily along the sidewalk across the way. In the morning he walked by with a swinging stride; at midday he passed rapidly, absorbed in thought; in the evening he came back slowly, sometimes stopping to watch the sunset from the brow of the hill. Not since the first morning had he turned his blue eyes toward Milly's gate. At the end of the month Mr. Banks returned to Tappahannock from a business trip through the tobacco districts. He was an ugly, freckled face, sandy-haired young fellow--an excellent judge of tobacco--with a simple soul that attired itself in large checks, usually of a black and white variety. On the day of his first visit to Milly he wore a crimson necktie pierced by a scarf-pin bearing a turtle-dove in diamonds. "Who's that fellow over there?" he inquired as Ordway came up the hill to his dinner. "I wonder if he's the chap Hudge was telling me about at breakfast?" "Oh, I don't know," answered Milly, in a voice that sounded flat in her own ears. "Nobody knows anything about him, father says. But what was Hudge telling you?" she asked, impelled by a devouring yet timid curiosity. "Well, if he's the man I mean, he seems to be a kind of revivalist out of a job--or something or other queer. Hudge says he broke up a fight last Saturday evening in Kelly's saloon--that's the place you've never heard the name of, I reckon," he added hesitatingly, "it's where all the factory hands gather after work on Saturday to drink up their week's wages." For once Milly's interest was stronger than her modesty. "And did he fight?" she demanded in a suspense that was almost breathless. "He wasn't there, you know--only passing along the street outside, at least that's what they say--when the rumpus broke out. Then he went in through the window and----" "And?" repeated Milly, with an entrancing vision of heroic blows, for beneath her soft exterior the blood of the primitive woman flowed. "And preached!" finished Banks, with a prodigious burst of merriment. "Preached?" gasped Milly, "do you mean a sermon?" "Not a regular sermon, but he spoke just like a preacher for a solid hour. Before he'd finished the men who were drunk were crying like babies and the men who weren't were breaking their necks to sign the pledge--at any rate that's something like the tale they tell. There was never such speaking (Hudge says he was there) heard before in Tappahannock, and Kelly is as mad as a hornet because he swears the town is going dry." "And he didn't strike a single blow?" asked Milly, with a feeling of disappointment. "Why, he had those drunken fools all blubbering like kids," said Banks, "and then when it was over he got hold of Kit Berry (he started the row, you know) and carried him all the way home to the little cottage in the hollow across the town where Kit lives with his mother. Next Sunday if it's fine there's going to be an open air meeting in Baxter's field." There was a sore little spot in Milly's heart, a vague sentiment of disenchantment. Her house of dreams, which she had reared so patiently, stood cold and tenantless once more. "Did you ever find out his name?" she asked, with a last courageous hope. "Smith," replied Banks, with luminous simplicity. "The boys have nick-named him 'Ten Commandment Smith.'" "Ten Commandment Smith?" echoed Milly in a lifeless voice. Her house of dreams had tottered at the blow and fallen from its foundation stone. CHAPTER VII SHOWS THE GRACES OF ADVERSITY On the morning after the episode in the barroom which Banks had described to Milly, Ordway found Baxter awaiting him in a condition which in a smaller person would have appeared to be a flutter of excitement. "So you got mixed up in a barroom row last night, I hear, Smith?" "Well, hardly that," returned Ordway, smiling as he saw the other's embarrassment break out in drops of perspiration upon his forehead. "I was in it, I admit, but I can't exactly say that I was 'mixed up.'" "You got Kit Berry out, eh?--and took him home." "Nothing short of a sober man could have done it. He lives on the other side of the town in Bullfinch's Hollow." "Oh, I've been there," said Baxter, "I've taken him home myself." The boyish sparkle had leaped to Ordway's eyes which appeared in the animation of the moment to lend an expression of gaiety to his face. As Baxter looked at him he felt something of the charm which had touched the drunken crowd in the saloon. "His mother was at my house before breakfast," he said, in a tone that softened as he went on until it sounded as if his whole perspiring person had melted into it. "She was in a great state, poor creature, for it seemed that when Kit woke up this morning he promised her never to touch another drop." "Well, I hope he'll keep his word, but I doubt it," responded Ordway. He thought of the bare little room he had seen last night, of the patched garments drying before the fire, of the scant supper spread upon the table, and of the gray-haired, weeping woman who had received his burden from him. "He may--for a week," commented Baxter, and he added with a big, shaking laugh, "they tell me you gave 'em a sermon that was as good as a preacher's." "Nonsense. I got angry and spoke a few words, that's all." "Well, if they were few, they seem to have been pretty pointed. I hear Kelly closed his place two hours before midnight. Even William Cotton went home without falling once, he said." "There was a good reason for that. I happened to have some information Cotton wanted." "I know," said Baxter, drawing out the words with a lingering emphasis while his eyes searched Ordway's face with a curiosity before which the younger man felt himself redden painfully. "Cotton told me you got him out of a scrape as well as a lawyer could have done." "I remembered the law and wrote it down for him, that's all." "Have you ever practised law in Virginia?" "I've never practised anywhere, but I intended to when--" he was going to add "when I finished college," but with a sudden caution, he stopped short and then selected his words more carefully, "when I was a boy. I read a good deal then and some of it still sticks in my memory." "I see," commented Baxter. His heart swelled until he became positively uncomfortable, and he coughed loudly in the effort to appear perfectly indifferent. What was it about the chap, he questioned, that had pulled at him from the start? Was it only the peculiar mingling of pathos and gaiety in his look? "Well, I wouldn't set about reforming things too much if I were you," he said at last, "it ain't worth it, for even when people accept the reforms they are pretty likely to reject the reformer. A man's got to have a mighty tough stomach to be able to do good immoderately. But all the same," he concluded heartily, "you're the right stuff and I like you. I respect pluck no matter whether it comes out in preaching or in blows. I reckon, by the way, if you'd care to turn bookkeeper, you'd be worth as good as a hundred a month to me." There was a round coffee stain, freshly spilled at breakfast, on his cravat, and Ordway's eyes were fixed upon it with a kind of fascination during the whole of his speech. The very slovenliness of the man--the unshaven cheeks, the wilted collar, the spotted necktie, the loosely fitting alpaca coat he wore, all seemed in some inexplicable way, to emphasise the large benignity of his aspect. Strangely enough his failures as a gentleman appeared to add to his impressiveness as a man. One felt that his faults were merely virtues swelled to abnormal proportions--as the carelessness in his dress was but a degraded form of the lavish generosity of his heart. "To tell the truth, I'd hoped for that all along," said Ordway, withdrawing his gaze with an effort from the soiled cravat. "Do you want me to start in at the books to-day?" For an instant Baxter hesitated; then he coughed and went on as if he found difficulty in selecting the words that would convey his meaning. "Well, if you don't mind there's a delicate little matter I'd like you to attend to first. Being a stranger I thought it would be easier for you than for me--have you ever heard anybody speak of Beverly Brooke?" The interest quickened in Ordway's face. "Why, yes. I came along the road one day with a farmer who gave me his whole story--Adam Whaley, I heard afterward, was his name." Baxter whistled. "Oh, I reckon, he hardly told you the whole story--for I don't believe there's anybody living except myself who knows what a darn fool Mr. Beverly is. That man has never done an honest piece of work in his life; he's spent every red cent of his wife's money, and his sister's too, in some wild goose kind of speculation--and yet, bless my soul, he has the face to strut in here any day and lord it over me just as if he were his grandfather's ghost or George Washington. It's queer about those old families, now ain't it? When they begin to peter out it ain't just an ordinary petering, but a sort of mortal rottenness that takes 'em root and branch." "And so I am to interview this interesting example of degeneration?" asked Ordway, smiling. "You've got to make him understand that he can't ship me any more of his worthless tobacco," exclaimed Baxter in an outburst of indignation. "Do you know what he does, sir?--Well, he raises a lazy, shiftless, worm-eaten crop of tobacco in an old field--plants it too late, tops it too late, cuts it too late, cures it too late, and then lets it lie around in some leaky smokehouse until it isn't fit for a hog to chew. After he has left it there to rot all winter, he gathers the stuff up on the first pleasant day in spring and gets an old nigger to cart it to me in an open wagon. The next day he lounges in here with his palavering ways, and demands the highest price in the market--and I give it to him! That's the damned outrage of it, I give it to him!" concluded Baxter with an excitement in which his huge person heaved like a shaken mountain. "I've bought his trash for twenty years and ground it into snuff because I was afraid to refuse a Brooke--but Brooke or no Brooke there's an end to it now," he turned and waved his hand furiously to a pile of tobacco lying on the warehouse floor, "there's his trash and it ain't fit even for snuff!" He led Ordway back into the building, picked up several leaves from the pile, smelt them, and threw them down with a contemptuous oath. "Worm-eaten, frost-bitten, mildewed. I want you to go out to Cedar Hill and tell the man that his stuff ain't fit for anything but fertiliser," he went on. "If he wants it he'd better come for it and haul it away." "And if he refuses?" "He most likely will--then tell him I'll throw it into the ditch." "Oh, I'll tell him," responded Ordway, and he was aware of a peculiar excitement in the prospect of an encounter with the redoubtable Mr. Beverly. "I'll do my best," he added, going through the archway, while Baxter followed him with a few last words of instruction and advice. The big man's courage had evidently begun to ebb, for as Ordway passed into the street, he hurried after him to suggest that he should approach the subject with as much delicacy as he possessed. "I wouldn't butt at Mr. Beverly, if I were you," he cautioned, "just edge around and work in slowly when you get the chance." But the advice was wasted upon Ordway, for he had started out in an impatience not unmixed with anger. Who was this fool of a Brooke? he wondered, and what power did he possess that kept Tappahannock in a state of slavery? He was glad that Baxter had sent him on the errand, and the next minute he laughed aloud because the big man had been too timid to come in person. He had reached the top of the hill, and was about to turn into the road he had taken his first night in Tappahannock, when a woman, wrapped in a shawl, hurried across the street from one of the smaller houses fronting upon the green. "I beg your pardon, sir, but are you the man that helped William Cotton?" Clearly William Cotton was bringing him into notice. At the thought Ordway looked down upon his questioner with a sensation that was almost one of pleasure. "He needed business advice and I gave it, that was all," he answered. "But you wrote down the whole case for him so that he could understand it and speak for himself," she said, catching her breath in a sob, as she pulled her thin shawl together. "You got him out of his troubles and asked nothing, so I hoped you might be willing to do as much by me. I am a widow with five little children, and though I've paid every penny I could scrape together for the mortgage, the farm is to be sold over our heads and we have nowhere to go." Again the glow that was like the glow of pleasure illuminated Ordway's mind. "There's not one chance in a hundred that I can help you," he said; "in the case of William Cotton it was a mere accident. Still if you will tell me where you live, I will come to you this evening and talk matters over. If I can help you, I promise you I will with pleasure." "And for nothing? I am very poor." He shook his head with a laugh. "Oh, I get more fun out of it than you could understand!" After writing down the woman's name in his notebook, he passed into the country road and bent his thoughts again upon the approaching visit to Mr. Beverly. When he reached Cedar Hill, which lay a sombre shadow against the young green of the landscape, he saw that the dead cedars still lay where they had fallen across the avenue. Evidently the family temper had assumed an opposite, though equally stubborn form, in the person of the girl in the red cape, and she had, he surmised, refused to allow Beverly to profit by his desecration even to the extent of selling the trees he had already cut down. Was it from a sentiment, or as a warning, he wondered, that she left the great cedars barring the single approach to the house? In either case the magnificent insolence of her revenge moved him to an acknowledgment of her spirit and her justice. In the avenue a brood of young turkeys were scratching in the fragrant dust shed by the trees; and at his approach they scattered and fled before him. It was long evidently since a stranger had penetrated into the melancholy twilight of the cedars; for the flutter of the turkeys, he discovered presently, was repeated in an excited movement he felt rather than saw as he ascended the stone steps and knocked at the door. The old hound he had seen the first night rose from under a bench on the porch, and came up to lick his hand; a window somewhere in the right wing shut with a loud noise; and through the bare old hall, which he could see from the half open door, a breeze blew dispersing an odour of hot soapsuds. The hall was dim and empty except for a dilapidated sofa in one corner, on which a brown and white setter lay asleep, and a rusty sword which clanked against the wall with a regular, swinging motion. In response to his repeated knocks there was a sound of slow steps on the staircase, and a handsome, shabbily dressed man, holding a box of dominoes, came to the door and held out his hand with an apologetic murmur. "I beg your pardon, but the wind makes such a noise I did not hear your knock. Will you come inside or do you prefer to sit on the porch where we can get the view?" As he spoke he edged his way courteously across the threshold and with a hospitable wave of his hand, sat down upon one of the pine benches against the decaying railing. In spite of the shabbiness of his clothes he presented a singularly attractive, even picturesque appearance, from the abundant white hair above his forehead to his small, shapely feet encased now in an ancient pair of carpet slippers. His figure was graceful and well built, his brown eyes soft and melancholy, and the dark moustache drooping over his mouth had been trained evidently into an immaculate precision. His moustache, however, was the one immaculate feature of his person, for even his carpet slippers were dirty and worn threadbare in places. Yet his beauty, which was obscured in the first view by what in a famous portrait might have been called "the tone of time," produced, after a closer and more sympathetic study, an effect which, upon Ordway at least, fell little short of the romantic. In his youth Beverly had been, probably, one of the handsomest men of his time, and this distinction, it was easy to conjecture, must have been the occasion, if not the cause, of his ruin. Even now, pompous and slovenly as he appeared, it was difficult to resist a certain mysterious fascination which he still possessed. When he left Tappahannock Ordway had felt only a humorous contempt for the owner of Cedar Hill, but sitting now beside him on the hard pine bench, he found himself yielding against his will to an impulse of admiration. Was there not a certain spiritual kinship in the fact that they were both failures in life? "You are visiting Tappahannock, then?" asked Beverly with his engaging smile; "I go in seldom or I should perhaps have seen you. When a man gets as old and as much of an invalid as I am, he usually prefers to spend his days by the fireside in the bosom of his family." The bloom of health was in his cheeks, yet as he spoke he pressed his hand to his chest with the habitual gesture of an invalid. "A chronic trouble which has prevented my taking an active part in the world's affairs," he explained, with a sad, yet cheerful dignity as of one who could enliven tragedy with a comic sparkle. "I had my ambitions once, sir," he added, "but we will not speak of them for they are over, and at this time of my life I can do little more than try to amuse myself with a box of dominoes." As he spoke he placed the box on the bench between them and began patiently matching the little ivory blocks. Ordway expressed a casual sympathy, and then, forgetting Baxter's warning, he attempted to bring the conversation to a practical level. "I am employed now at Baxter's warehouse," he began, "and the object of my call is to speak with you about your last load of tobacco." "Ah!" said Beverly, with warming interest, "it is a sufficient recommendation to have come from Robert Baxter--for that man has been the best, almost the only, friend I have had in life. It is impossible to overestimate either his character or my admiration. He has come to my assistance, sir, when I hardly knew where to turn for help. If you are employed by him, you are indeed to be envied." "I am entirely of your opinion," observed Ordway, "but the point this morning----" "Well, we'll let that rest a while now," interrupted Beverly, pushing the dominoes away, and turning his beautiful, serious face upon his companion. "When there is an opportunity for me to speak of Baxter's generosity, I feel that I cannot let it escape me. Something tells me that you will understand and pardon my enthusiasm. There is no boy like an old boy, sir." His voice broke, and drawing a ragged handkerchief from the pocket of his corduroy coat, he blew his nose and wiped away two large teardrops from his eyes. After such an outburst of sentiment it seemed a positive indecency to inform him that Baxter had threatened to throw his tobacco into a ditch. "He regrets very much that your crop was a failure this year," said Ordway, after what he felt to be a respectable pause. "And yet," returned Beverly, with his irrepressible optimism, "if things had been worse it might even have rotted in the ground. As it was, I never saw more beautiful seedlings--they were perfect specimens. Had not the tobacco worms and the frost and the leak in the smokehouse all combined against me, I should have raised the most splendid crop in Virginia, sir." The spectacle of this imaginary crop suffused his face with a glow of ardour. "My health permits me to pay little attention to the farm," he continued in his eloquent voice, "I see it falling to rains about me, and I am fortunate in being able to enjoy the beauty of its decay. Yes, my crop was a failure, I admit," he added, with a touching cheerfulness, "it lay several months too long in the barn before I could get it sent to the warehouse--but this was my misfortune, not my fault, as I am sure Robert Baxter will understand." "He will find it easier to understand the case than to sell the tobacco, I fancy." "However that may be, he is aware that I place the utmost confidence in his judgment. What he does will be the right thing, sir." This confession of artless trust was so overpowering that for a moment Ordway hung back, feeling that any ground would be dangerous ground upon which to proceed. The very absorption in which Beverly arranged the dominoes upon the bench added to the childlike simplicity of his appearance. Then a sudden irritation against the man possessed him, for he remembered the girl in the red cape and the fallen cedars. From where he sat now they were hidden by the curve of the avenue, but the wonderful trees, which shed their rich gloom almost upon the roof of the house, made him realise afresh the full extent of Beverly's folly. In the fine spring sunshine whatever beauties were left in the ruined place showed in an intenser and more vernal aspect. Every spear of grass on the lawn was tipped with light, and the young green leaves on the lilacs stood out as if illuminated on a golden background. In one of the ivy-covered eaves a wren was building, and he could see the flutter of a bluebird in an ancient cedar. "It is a beautiful day," remarked Beverly, pensively, "but the lawn needs trimming." His gaze wandered gently over the tangled sheep mint, orchard grass and Ailantus shoots which swept from the front steps to the fallen fence which had once surrounded the place, and he added with an outburst of animation, "I must tell Micah to turn in the cattle." Remembering the solitary cow he had seen in a sheltered corner of the barn, Ordway bit back a smile as he rose and held out his hand. "After all, I haven't delivered my message," he said, "which was to the effect that the tobacco is practically unfit for use. Baxter told me to request you to send for it at your convenience." Beverly gathered up his dominoes, and rising with no appearance of haste, turned upon him an expression of suffering dignity. "Such an act upon my part," he said, "would be a reflection upon Baxter's ability as a merchant, and after thirty years of friendship I refuse to put an affront upon him. I would rather, sir, lose every penny my tobacco might bring me." His sincerity was so admirable, that for a moment it obscured even in Ordway's mind the illusion upon which it rested. When a man is honestly ready to sacrifice his fortune in the cause of friendship, it becomes the part of mere vulgarity to suggest to him that his affairs are in a state of penury. "Then it must be used for fertilisers or thrown away," said Ordway, shortly. "I trust myself entirely in Baxter's hands," replied Beverly, in sad but noble tones, "whatever he does will be the best that could be done under the circumstances. You may assure him of this with my compliments." "Well, I fear, there's nothing further to be said," remarked Ordway; and he was about to make his final good-bye, when a faded lady, wrapped in a Paisley shawl, appeared in the doorway and came out upon the porch. "Amelia," said Beverly, "allow me to present Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith, Mrs. Brooke." Mrs. Brooke smiled at him wanly with a pretty, thin-lipped mouth and a pair of large rather prominent eyes, which had once been gray but were now washed into a cloudy drab. She was still pretty in a hopeless, depressed, ineffectual fashion; and though her skirt was frayed about the edges and her shoes run down at the heel, her pale, fawn-coloured hair was arranged in elaborate spirals and the hand she held out to Ordway was still delicately fine and white. She was like a philosopher, who, having sunk into a universal pessimism of thought, preserves, in spite of himself, a small belief or so in the minor pleasures of existence. Out of the general wreck of her appearance she had clung desperately to the beauties of her hair and hands. "I had hoped you would stay to dinner," she remarked in her listless manner to Ordway. Fate had whipped her into submission, but there was that in her aspect which never permitted one for an instant to forget the whipping. If her husband had dominated by his utter incapacity, she had found a smaller consolation in feeling that though she had been obliged to drudge she had never learned to do it well. To do it badly, indeed, had become at last the solitary proof that by right of birth she was entitled not to do it at all. At Ordway's embarrassed excuse she made no effort to insist, but stood, smiling like a ghost of her own past prettiness, in the doorway. Behind her the bare hall and the dim staircase appeared more empty, more gloomy, more forlornly naked than they had done before. Again Ordway reached for his hat, and prepared to pick his way carefully down the sunken steps; but this time he was arrested by the sound of smothered laughter at the side of the house, which ran back to the vegetable garden. A moment later the girl in the red cape appeared running at full speed across the lawn, pursued by several shrieking children that followed closely at her skirts. Her clear, ringing laugh--the laugh of youth and buoyant health--held Ordway motionless for an instant upon the porch; then as she came nearer he saw that she held an old, earth-covered spade in her hands and that her boots and short woollen skirt were soiled with stains from the garden beds. But the smell of the warm earth that clung about her seemed only to increase the vitality and freshness in her look. Her vivid animation, her sparkling glance, struck him even more forcibly than they had done in the street of Tappahannock. At sight of Ordway her laugh was held back breathlessly for an instant; then breaking out again, it began afresh with redoubled merriment, and sinking with exhaustion on the lowest step, she let the spade fall to the ground while she buried her wind-blown head in her hands. "I beg your pardon," she stammered presently, lifting her radiant brown eyes, "but I've run so fast that I'm quite out of breath." Stopping with an effort she sought in vain to extinguish her laughter in the curls of the smallest child. "Emily," said Beverly with dignity, "allow me to present Mr. Smith." The girl looked up from the step; and then, rising, smiled brightly upon Ordway over the spade which she had picked up from the ground. "I can't shake hands," she explained, "because I've been spading the garden." If she recognised him for the tramp who had slept in her barn there was no hint of it in her voice or manner. "Do you mean, Emily," asked Beverly, in his plaintive voice, "that you have been actually digging in the ground?" "Actually," repeated Emily, in a manner which made Ordway suspect that the traditional feminine softness was not included among her virtues, "I actually stepped on dirt and saw--worms." "But where is Micah?" "Micah has an attack of old age. He was eighty-two yesterday." "Is it possible?" remarked Beverly, and the discovery appeared to afford him ground for cheerful meditation. "No, it isn't possible, but it's true," returned the girl, with good-humoured merriment. "As there are only two able-bodied persons on the place, the mare and I, it seemed to me that one of us had better take a hand at the spade. But I had to leave off after the first round," she added to Ordway, showing him her right hand, from the palm of which the skin had been rubbed away. She was so much like a gallant boy that Ordway felt an impulse to take the hand in his own and examine it more carefully. "Well, I'm very much surprised to hear that Micah is so old," commented Beverly, dwelling upon the single fact which had riveted his attention. "I must be making him a little present upon his birthday." The girl's eyes flashed under her dark lashes, but remembering Ordway's presence, she turned to him with a casual remark about the promise of the spring. He saw at once that she had achieved an indignant detachment from her thriftless family, and the ardent, almost impatient energy with which she fell to labour was, in itself, a rebuke to the pleasant indolence which had hastened, if it had not brought about, the ruin of the house. Was it some temperamental disgust for the hereditary idleness which had spurred her on to take issue with the worn-out traditions of her ancestors and to place herself among the labouring rather than the leisure class? As she stood there in her freshness and charm, with the short brown curls blown from her forehead, the edge of light shining in her eyes and on her lips, and the rich blood kindling in her vivid face, it seemed to Ordway, looking back at her from the end of his forty years, that he was brought face to face with the spirit of the future rising amid the decaying sentiment of the past. CHAPTER VIII "TEN COMMANDMENT SMITH" When Ordway had disappeared beyond the curve in the avenue, Emily went slowly up the steps, her spade clanking against the stone as she ascended. "Did he come about the tobacco, Beverly?" she asked. Beverly rose languidly from the bench, and stood rubbing his hand across his forehead with an exhausted air. "My head was very painful and he talked so rapidly I could hardly follow him," he replied; "but is it possible, Emily, that you have been digging in the garden?" "There is nobody else to do it," replied Emily, with an impatient flash in her eyes; "only half the garden has been spaded. If you disapprove so heartily, I wish you'd produce someone to do the work." Mrs. Brooke, who had produced nothing in her life except nine children, six of whom had died in infancy, offered at this a feeble and resigned rebuke. "I am sure you could get Salem," she replied. "We owe him already three months' wages," returned the girl, "I am still paying him for last autumn." "All I ask of you, Emily, is peace," remarked Beverly, in a gentle voice, as he prepared to enter the house. "Nothing--no amount of brilliant argument can take the place of peace in a family circle. My poor head is almost distracted when you raise your voice." The three children flocked out of the dining-room and came, with a rush, to fling themselves upon him. They adored him--and there was a live terrapin which they had brought in a box for him to see! In an instant his depression vanished, and he went off, his beautiful face beaming with animation, while the children clung rapturously to his corduroy coat. "Amelia," said Emily, lowering her voice, "don't you think it would improve Beverly's health if he were to try working for an hour every day in the garden?" Mrs. Brooke appeared troubled by the suggestion. "If he could only make up his mind to it, I've no doubt it would," she answered, "he has had no exercise since he was obliged to give up his horse. Walking he has always felt to be ungentlemanly." She spoke in a softly tolerant voice, though she herself drudged day and night in her anxious, tearful, and perfectly ineffectual manner. For twenty years she had toiled patiently without, so far as one could perceive, achieving a single definite result--for by some unfortunate accident of temperament, she was doomed to do badly whatever she undertook to do at all. Yet her intention was so admirable that she appeared forever apologising in her heart for the incompetence of her hands. Emily placed the spade in the corner of the porch, and desisting from her purpose, went upstairs to wash her hands before going in to dinner. As she ascended the wide, dimly lighted staircase, upon which the sun shone with a greenish light from the gallery above, she stopped twice to wonder why Beverly's visitor had slept in the barn like a tramp only six weeks ago. Before her mirror, a minute later, she put the same question to herself while she braided her hair. The room was large, cool, high-ceiled, with a great brick fireplace, and windows which looked out on the garden, where purple and white lilacs were blooming beside the gate. On the southern side the ivy had grown through the slats of the old green shutters, until they were held back, crumbling, against the house, and in the space between one of the cedars brushed always, with a whispering sound, against the discoloured panes. In Emily's absence a curious melancholy descended on the old mahogany furniture, the greenish windows and the fireless hearth; but with the opening of the door and the entrance of her vivid youth, there appeared also a light and gracious atmosphere in her surroundings. She remembered the day upon which she had returned after ten years' absence, and how as she opened the closed shutters, the gloom of the place had resisted the passage of the sunshine, retreating stubbornly from the ceiling to the black old furniture and then across the uncarpeted floor to the hall where it still held control. For months after her return it had seemed to her that the fight was between her spirit and the spirit of the past--between hope and melancholy, between growth and decay. The burden of debt, of poverty, of hopeless impotence had fallen upon her shoulders, and she had struggled under it with impetuous gusts of anger, but with an energy that never faltered. To keep the children fed and clothed, to work the poor farm as far as she was able, to stay clear of any further debts, and to pay off the yearly mortgage with her small income, these were the things which had filled her thoughts and absorbed the gallant fervour of her youth. Her salary at the public school had seemed to Beverly, though he disapproved of her position, to represent the possibility of luxury; and in some loose, vague way he was never able to understand why the same amount could not be made to serve in several opposite directions at the same time. "That fifty dollars will come in very well, indeed, my dear," he would remark, with cheerfulness, gloating over the unfamiliar sight of the bank notes, "it's exactly the amount of Wilson's bill which he's been sending in for the last year, and he refuses to furnish any groceries until the account is settled. Then there's the roof which must be repaired--it will help us there--then we must all have a supply of shoes, and the wages of the hands are due to-morrow, I overlooked that item." "But if you pay it all to Wilson," Emily would ask, as a kind of elementary lesson in arithmetic, "how is the money going to buy all the other things?" "Ah, to be sure," Beverly would respond, as if struck by the lucidity of the idea, "that is the question." And it was likely to remain the question until the end of Beverly--for he had grown so accustomed to the weight of poverty upon his shoulders that he would probably have felt a sense of loss if it had been suddenly removed. But it was impossible to live in the house with him, to receive his confidences and meet his charming smile and not to entertain a sentiment of affection for him in one's heart. His unfailing courtesy was his defence, though even this at times worked in Emily an unreasonable resentment. He had ruined his family, and she felt that she could have forgiven him more easily if he had ruined it with a less irreproachable demeanour. After her question he had said nothing further about the tobacco, but a chance meeting with Adam Whaley, as she rode into Tappahannock on the Sunday after Ordway's visit, made clear to her exactly what the purpose of that visit had been. "It's a pity Mr. Beverly let his tobacco spoil, particular' arter his wheat turned out to be no account," remarked Adam. "I hope you don't mind my sayin', Miss Em'ly, that Mr. Beverly is about as po' a farmer as he is a first rate gentleman." "Oh, no, I don't mind in the least, Adam," said Emily. "Do you know," she asked presently, "any hands that I can get to work the garden this week?" Whaley shook his head. "They get better paid at the factories," he answered; "an' them that ain't got thar little patch to labour in, usually manage to git a job in town." Emily was on her old horse--an animal discarded by Mr. Beverly on account of age--and she looked down at his hanging neck with a feeling that was almost one of hopelessness. Beverly, who had never paid his bills, had seldom paid his servants; and of the old slave generation that would work for its master for a song, there were only Micah and poor half-demented Aunt Mehitable now left. "The trouble with Mr. Beverly," continued Adam, laying his hand on the neck of the old horse, "is that he was born loose-fingered jest as some folks are born loose-moraled. He's never held on to anything sense he came into the world an' I doubt if he ever will. Why, bless yo' life, even as a leetle boy he never could git a good grip on his fishin' line. It was always a-slidin' an' slippin' into the water." They had reached Tappahannock in the midst of Adam's philosophic reflection; and as they were about to pass an open field on the edge of the town, Emily pointed to a little crowd which had gathered in the centre of the grass-grown space. "Is it a Sunday frolic, do you suppose?" she inquired. "That? Oh no--it's 'Ten Commandment Smith,' as they call him now. He gives a leetle talk out thar every fine Sunday arternoon." "A talk? About what?" "Wall, I ain't much of a listener, Miss, when it comes to that. My soul is willin' an' peart enough, but it's my hands an' feet that make the trouble. I declar' I've only got to set down in a pew for 'em to twitch untwel you'd think I had the Saint Vitus dance. It don't look well to be twitchin' the whole time you are in church, so that's the reason I'm obleeged to stay away. As for 'Ten Commandment Smith,' though, he's got a voice that's better than the doxology, an' his words jest boom along like cannon." "And do the people like it?" "Some, of 'em do, I reckon, bein' as even sermons have thar followers, but thar're t'others that go jest out of the sperit to be obleegin', an' it seems to them that a man's got a pretty fair licence to preach who gives away about two-thirds of what he gits a month. Good Lord, he could drum up a respectable sized congregation jest from those whose back mortgages he's helped pay up." While he spoke Emily had turned her horse's head into the field, and riding slowly toward the group, she stopped again upon discovering that it was composed entirely of men. Then going a little nearer, she drew rein just beyond the outside circle, and paused for a moment with her eyes fixed intently upon the speaker's face. In the distance a forest, still young in leaf, lent a radiant, springlike background to the field, which rose in soft green swells that changed to golden as they melted gradually into the landscape. Ordway's head was bare, and she saw now that the thick locks upon his forehead were powdered heavily with gray. She could not catch his words, but his voice reached her beyond the crowd; and she found herself presently straining her ears lest she miss the sound which seemed to pass with a peculiar richness into the atmosphere about the speaker. The religious significance of the scene moved her but little--for she came of a race that scorned emotional conversions or any faith, for that matter, which did not confine itself within four well-built walls. Yet, in spite of her convictions, something in the voice whose words she could not distinguish, held her there, as if she were rooted on her old horse to the spot of ground. The unconventional preacher, in his cheap clothes, aroused in her an interest which seemed in some vague way to have its beginning in a mystery that she could not solve. The man was neither a professional revivalist nor a member of the Salvation Army, yet he appeared to hold the attention of his listeners as if either their money or their faith was in his words. And it was no uncultured oratory--"Ten Commandment Smith," for all his rough clothes, his muddy boots and his hardened hands, was beneath all a gentleman, no matter what his work--no matter even what his class. Though she had lived far out of the world in which he had had his place, she felt instinctively that the voice she heard had been trained to reach another audience than the one before him in the old field. His words might be simple and straight from the heart--doubtless they were--but the voice of the preacher--the vibrant, musical, exquisitely modulated voice--was not merely a personal gift, but the result of generations of culture. The atmosphere of a larger world was around him as he stood there, bare-headed in the sunshine, speaking to a breathless crowd of factory workers as if his heart went out to them in the words he uttered. Perfectly motionless on the grass at his feet his congregation sat in circles with their pathetic dumb eyes fixed on his face. "What is it about, Adam? Can't you find out?" asked Emily, stirred by an impulsive desire to be one of the attentive group of listeners--to come under the spell of personality which drew its magic circle in the centre of the green field. Adam crossed the space slowly, and returned after what was to Emily an impatient interval. "It's one of his talks on the Ten Commandments--that's why they gave him his nickname. I didn't stay to find out whether 'twas the top or the bottom of 'em, Miss, as I thought you might be in a hurry." "But they can get that in church. What makes them come out here?" "Oh, he tells 'em things," said Adam, "about people and places, and how to get on in life. Then he's al'ays so ready to listen to anybody's troubles arterward; and he's taken over Martha Frayley's mortgage--you know she's the widow of Mike Frayley who was a fireman and lost his life last January in the fire at Bingham's Wall--I reckon, a man's got a right to talk big when he lives big, too." "Yes, I suppose he has," said Emily. "Well, I must be going now, so I'll ride on ahead of you." Touching the neck of the horse with her bare hand, she passed at a gentle amble into one of the smaller streets of Tappahannock. Her purpose was to call upon one of her pupils who had been absent from school for several days, but upon reaching the house she found that the child, after a slight illness, had recovered sufficiently to be out of doors. This was a relief rather than a disappointment, and mounting again, she started slowly back in the direction of Cedar Hill. A crowd of men, walking in groups along the roadside, made her aware that the gathering in the field had dispersed, and as she rode by she glanced curiously among them in the hope of discovering the face of the speaker. He was walking slightly behind the crowd, listening with an expression of interest, to a man in faded blue overalls, who kept a timid yet determined hold upon his arm. His face, which had appeared grave to Emily when she saw it at Cedar Hill, wore now a look which seemed a mixture of spiritual passion and boyish amusement. He impressed her as both sad and gay, both bitter and sympathetic, and she was struck again by the contrast between his hard mouth and his gentle eyes. As she met his glance, he bowed without a smile, while he stepped back into the little wayside path among the dusty thistles. Unconsciously, she had searched his face as Milly Trend had done before her, and like her, she had found there only an impersonal kindliness. CHAPTER IX THE OLD AND THE NEW When she reached home she found Beverly, seated before a light blaze in the dining-room, plunged in the condition of pious indolence which constituted his single observance of the Sabbath. To do nothing had always seemed to him in its way as religious as to attend church, and so he sat now perfectly motionless, with the box of dominoes reposing beside his tobacco pouch on the mantel above his head. The room was in great confusion, and the threadbare carpet, ripped up in places, was littered with the broken bindings of old books and children's toys made of birchwood or corncob, upon which Beverly delighted to work during the six secular days of the week. At his left hand the table was already laid for supper, which consisted of a dish of batter-bread, a half bared ham bone and a pot of coffee, from which floated a thin and cheap aroma. A wire shovel for popping corn stood at one side of the big brick fireplace, and on the hearth there was a small pile of half shelled red and yellow ears. Between the two long windows a tall mahogany clock, one of the few pieces left by the collector of old furniture, ticked with a loud, monotonous sound, which seemed to increase in volume with each passage of the hands. "Did you hear any news, my dear?" inquired Beverly, as Emily entered, for in spite of the fact that he rarely left his fireside, he was an insatiable consumer of small bits of gossip. "I didn't see anybody," answered Emily in her cheerful voice. "Shall I pour the coffee?" She went to the head of the table, while her brother, after shelling an ear of corn into the wire shovel, began shaking it slowly over the hickory log. "I thought you might have heard if Milly Trend had really made up her mind to marry that young tobacco merchant," he observed. Before Emily could reply the door opened and the three children rushed in, pursued by Aunt Mehitable, who announced that "Miss Meely" had gone to bed with one of her sick headaches and would not come down to supper. The information afforded Beverly some concern, and he rose to leave the room with the intention of going upstairs to his wife's chamber; but observing, as he did so, that the corn was popping finely, he sat down again and devoted his attention to the shovel, which he began to shake more rapidly. "The terrapin's sick, papa," piped one of the children, a little girl called Lila, as she pulled back her chair with a grating noise and slipped into her seat. "Do you s'pose it would like a little molasses for its supper?" "Terrapins don't eat molasses," said the boy, whose name was Blair. "They eat flies--I've seen 'em." "My terrapin shan't eat flies," protested Bella, the second little girl. "It ain't your terrapin!" "It is." "It ain't her terrapin, is it, papa?" Beverly, having finished his task, unfastened the lid of the shovel with the poker, and suggested that the terrapin might try a little popcorn for a change. As he stood there with his white hair and his flushed face in the red firelight, he made a picture of beautiful and serene domesticity. "I shouldn't wonder if he'd get quite a taste for popcorn if you could once persuade him to try it," he remarked, his mind having wandered whimsically from his wife to the terrapin. Emily had given the children batter-bread and buttermilk, and she sat now regarding her brother's profile as it was limned boldly in shadow against the quivering flames. It was impossible; she discovered, to survey Beverly's character with softness or his profile with severity. "Don't you think," she ventured presently, after a wholesome effort to achieve diplomacy, "that you might try to-morrow to spade the seed rows in the garden. Adam can't find anybody, and if the corn isn't dropped this week we'll probably get none until late in the summer." "'I cannot dig, to beg I am ashamed,'" quoted Beverly, as he drank his coffee. "It would lay me up for a week, Emily, I am surprised that you ask it." She was surprised herself, the moment after she had put the question, so hopeless appeared any attempt to bend Beverly to utilitarian purposes. "Well, the tomatoes which I had counted on for the market will come too late," she said with a barely suppressed impatience in her voice. "I shouldn't worry about it if I were you," returned Beverly, "there's nothing that puts wrinkles in a pretty face so soon as little worries. I remember Uncle Bolingbroke (he used to be my ideal as a little boy) told me once that he had lived to be upward of ninety on the worries from which he had been saved. As a small child I was taken to see him once when he had just come to absolute ruin and had been obliged to sell his horses and his house and even his wife's jewellery for debt. A red flag was flying at the gate, but inside sat Uncle Bolingbroke, drinking port wine and cracking nuts with two of his old cronies. 'Yes, I've lost everything, my boy,' he cried, 'but it doesn't worry me a bit!' At that instant I remember noticing that his forehead was the smoothest I had ever seen." "But his wife had to take in dressmaking," commented Emily, "and his children grew up without a particle of education." "Ah, so they did," admitted Beverly, with sadness, "the details had escaped me." As they had escaped him with equal success all his life, the fact seemed to Emily hardly deserving of comment, and leaving him to his supper, she went upstairs to find Mrs. Brooke prostrate, in a cold room, with her head swathed in camphor bandages. In answer to Emily's inquiries, she moaned plaintively that the pantry shelves needed scouring and that she must get up at daybreak and begin the work. "I've just remembered lying here that I planned to clean them last week," she said excitedly, "and will you remind me, Emily, as soon as I get up that Beverly's old brown velveteen coat needs a patch at the elbow?" "Don't think of such things now, Amelia, there's plenty of time. You are shivering all over--I'll start the fire in a moment. It has turned quite cool again." "But I wanted to save the pine knots until Beverly came up," sighed Mrs. Brooke, "he is so fond of them." Without replying to her nervous protest, Emily knelt on the hearth and kindled a blaze which leaped rosily over the knots of resinous pine. Of the two family failings with which she was obliged to contend, she had long ago decided that Beverly's selfishness was less harmful in its results than Amelia's self-sacrifice. Inordinate at all times, it waxed positively violent during her severe attacks of headache, and between two spasms of pain her feverish imagination conjured up dozens of small self-denials which served to increase her discomfort while they conferred no possible benefit upon either her husband or her children. Her temperament had fitted her for immolation; but the character of the age in which she lived had compelled her to embrace a domestic rather than a religious martyrdom. The rack would have been to her morally a bed of roses, and some exalted grace belonging to the high destiny that she had missed was visible at times in her faded gray eyes and impassive features. "Mehitable brought me an egg," she groaned presently, growing more comfortable in spite of her resolve, as the rosy fire-light penetrated into the chill gloom where she lay, "but I sent it down to Blair--I heard him coughing." "He didn't want it. There was plenty of batter-bread." "Yes, but the poor boy is fond of eggs and he so seldom has one. It is very sad. Emily, have you noticed how inert and lifeless Mr. Brooke has grown?" "It's nothing new, Amelia, he has always been that way. Can't you sleep now?" "Oh, but if you could have seen him when we became engaged, Emily--such life! such spirits! I remember the first time I dined at your father's--that was before Beverly's mother died, so, of course, your mother wasn't even thought of in the family. I suppose second marriages are quite proper, since the Lord permits them, but they always seem to me like trying to sing the same hymn over again with equal fervour. Well, I was going to say that when your father asked me what part of the fowl I preferred and I answered 'dark meat, sir,' he fairly rapped the table in his delight: 'Oh, Amelia, what a capital wife you'll make for Beverly,' he cried, 'if you will only continue to prefer dark meat!'" She stopped breathlessly, lay silent for a moment, and then began to moan softly with pain. Emily swept the hearth, and after putting on a fresh log, went out, closing the door after her. There was no light in her room, but she reflected with a kind of desperation that there was no Beverly and no Amelia. The weight of the family had left her bruised and helpless, yet she knew that she must go downstairs again, remove the supper things, and send the three resisting children off to bed. She was quite equal to the task she had undertaken, yet there were moments when, because of her youth and her vitality, she found it harder to control her temper than to accomplish her work. At ten o'clock, when she had coaxed the children to sleep, and persuaded Amelia to drink a cup of gruel, she came to her room again and began to undress slowly by the full moonlight which streamed through the window. Outside, beyond the lilac bushes, she could see the tangled garden, with the dried stubble of last year's corn protruding from the unspaded rows. This was the last sight upon which her eyes turned before she climbed into the high tester bed and fell into the prompt and untroubled sleep of youth. Awaking at six o'clock she went again to the window, and at the first glance it seemed to her that she must have slipped back into some orderly and quiet dream--for the corn rows which had presented a blighted aspect under the moonlight were now spaded and harrowed into furrows ready for planting. The suggestion that Beverly had prepared a surprise for her occurred first to her mind, but she dismissed this the next instant and thought of Adam, Micah, even of the demented Aunt Mehitable. The memory of the fairy godmother in the story book brought a laugh to her lips, and as she dressed herself and ran downstairs to the garden gate, she half expected to see the pumpkin chariot disappearing down the weed-grown path and over the fallen fence. The lilac blossoms shed a delicious perfume into her face, and leaning against the rotting posts of the gate, she looked with mingled delight and wonder upon the freshly turned earth, which flushed faintly pink in the sunshine. A heavy dew lay over the landscape and as the sun rose slowly higher the mist was drawn back from the green fields like a sheet of gauze that is gathered up. "Beverly? Micah? Mehitable?" each name was a question she put to herself, and after each she answered decisively, "No, it is impossible." Micah, who appeared at the moment, doting, half blind and wholly rheumatic, shook his aged head helplessly in response to her eager inquiries. There was clearly no help to be had from him except the bewildered assistance he rendered in the afternoon by following on her footsteps with a split basket while she dropped the grains of corn into the opened furrows. His help in this case even was hardly more than a hindrance, for twice in his slow progress he stumbled and fell over a trailing brier in the path, and Emily was obliged to stop her work and gather up the grain which he had scattered. "Dese yer ole briers is des a-layin' out fur you," he muttered as he sat on the ground rubbing the variegated patch on his rheumatic knee. When the planting was over he went grumbling back to his cabin, while Emily walked slowly up and down the garden path and dreamed of the vegetables which would ripen for the market. In the midst of her business calculations she remembered the little congregation in the green field on Sunday afternoon and the look of generous enthusiasm in the face of the man who passed her in the road. Why had she thought of him? she wondered idly, and why should that group of listeners gathered out of doors in the faint sunshine awake in her a sentiment which was associated with some religious emotion of which she had been half unconscious? The next night she awoke from a profound sleep with the same memory in her mind, and turning on her pillow, lay wide awake in the moonlight, which brought with it a faint spring chill from the dew outside. On the ivy the light shone almost like dawn, and as she could not fall asleep again, she rose presently, and slipping into her flannel dressing-gown, crossed to the window and looked out upon the shining fields, the garden and the blossoming lilacs at the gate. The shadow of the lilacs lay thick and black along the garden walk, and her eyes were resting upon them, when it seemed to her that a portion of the darkness detached itself and melted out into the moonlight. At first she perceived only the moving shadow; then gradually a figure was outlined on the bare rows of the garden, and as her eyes grew accustomed to the light, she saw that the figure had assumed a human shape, though it was still followed so closely by its semblance upon the ground that it was impossible at a distance to distinguish the living worker from his airy double. Yet she realised instantly that her mysterious gardener was at work before her eyes, and hastening into her clothes, she caught up her cape from a chair, and started toward the door with an impulsive determination to discover his identity. With her hand on the knob, she hesitated and stopped, full of perplexity, upon the threshold. Since he had wished to remain undiscovered was it fair, she questioned, to thrust recognition upon his kindness? On the other hand was it not more than unfair--was it not positively ungrateful--to allow his work to pass without any sign of acceptance or appreciation? In the chill white moonlight outside she could see the pointed tops of the cedars rising like silver spires. As the boughs moved the wind entered, bringing mingled odours of cedar berries, lilacs and freshly turned soil. For an instant longer her hesitation lasted; then throwing aside her cape, she undressed quickly, without glancing again down into the garden. When she fell asleep now it was to dream of the shadowy gardener spading in the moonlight among the lilacs. CHAPTER X HIS NEIGHBOUR'S GARDEN In his nightly work in the Brookes' garden, Ordway was prompted at first by a mere boyish impulse to repay people whose bread he had eaten and in whose straw he had slept. But at the end of the first hour's labour the beauty of the moonlight wrought its spell upon him, and he felt that the fragrance of the lilacs went like strong wine to his head. So the next night he borrowed Mrs. Twine's spade again and went back for the pure pleasure of the exercise; and the end of the week found him still digging among the last year's plants in the loamy beds. By spading less than two hours a night, he had turned the soil of half the garden before Sunday put a stop to his work. On his last visit, he paused at the full of the moon, and stood looking almost with sadness at the blossoming lilacs and the overgrown path powdered with wild flowers which had strayed in through the broken fence. For the hours he had spent there the place had given him back his freedom and his strength and even a reminiscent sentiment of his youth. While he worked Lydia had been only a little farther off in the beauty of the moonlight, and he had felt her presence with a spiritual sense which was keener than the sense of touch. As he drew his spade for the last time from the earth, he straightened himself, and standing erect, faced the cool wind which tossed the hair back from his heated forehead. At the moment he was content with the moonlight and the lilacs and the wind that blew over the spring fields, and it seemed easy enough to let the future rest with the past in the hands of God. Swinging the spade at his side, he lowered his eyes and moved a step toward the open gate. Then he stopped short, for he saw that Emily Brooke was standing there between the old posts under the purple and white lilacs. "It seemed too ungrateful to accept such a service and not even to say 'thank you,'" she remarked gravely. There was a drowsy sound in her voice; her lids hung heavily like a child's over her brown eyes, and her hair was flattened into little curls on one side by the pressure of the pillow. "It has been a pleasure to me," he answered, "so I deserve no thanks for doing the thing that I enjoyed." Drawing nearer he stood before her with the spade on his shoulder and his head uncovered. The smell of the earth hung about him, and even in the moonlight she could see that his blue eyes looked almost gay. She felt all at once that he was younger, larger, more masculine than she had at first believed. "And yet it is work," she said in her voice of cheerful authority, "and sorely needed work at that. I can thank you even though I cannot understand why you have done it." "Let's put it down to my passion to improve things," he responded with a whimsical gravity, "don't you think the garden as I first saw it justified that explanation of my behaviour?" "The explanation, yes--but not you," she answered, smiling. "Then let my work justify itself. I've made a neat job of it, haven't I?" "It's more than neat, it's positively ornamental," she replied, "but even your success doesn't explain your motive." "Well, the truth is--if you will have it--I needed exercise." "You might have walked." "That doesn't reach the shoulders--there's the trouble." She laughed with an easy friendliness which struck him as belonging to her gallant manner. "Oh, I assure you I shan't insist upon a reason, I'm too much obliged to you," she returned, coming inside the gate. "Indeed, I'm too good a farmer, I believe, to insist upon a reason anyway. Providence disposes and I accept with thanks. I may wish, though, that the coloured population shared your leaning toward the spade. By the way, I see it isn't mine. It looks too shiny." "I borrowed it from Mrs. Twine, and it is my suspicion that she scrubs it every night." "In that case I wonder that she lets it go out to other people's gardens." "She doesn't usually," he laughed as he spoke, "but you see I am a very useful person to Mrs. Twine. She talks at her husband by way of me." "Oh, I see," said Emily. "Well, I'm much obliged to her." "You needn't be. She hadn't the remotest idea where it went." Her merriment, joining with his, brought them suddenly together in a feeling of good fellowship. "So you don't like divided thanks," she commented gaily. "Not when they are undeserved," he answered, "as they are in this case." For a moment she was silent; then going slowly back to the gate, she turned there and looked at him wonderingly, he thought. "After all, it must have been a good wind that blew you to Tappahannock," she observed. Her friendliness--which impressed him as that of a creature who had met no rebuffs or disappointments from human nature, made an impetuous, almost childlike, appeal to his confidence. "Do you remember the night I slept in your barn?" he asked suddenly. She bent down to pick up a broken spray of lilac. "Yes, I remember." "Well, I was at the parting of the ways that night--I was beaten down, desperate, hopeless. Something in your kindness and--yes, and in your courage, too, put new life into me, and the next morning I turned back to Tappahannock. But for you I should still have followed the road." "It is more likely to have been the cup of coffee," she said in her frank, almost boyish way. "There's something in that, of course," he answered quietly. "I _was_ hungry, God knows, but I was more than hungry, I was hurt. It was all my fault, you understand--I had made an awful mess of things, and I had to begin again low down--at the very bottom." It was in his mind to tell her the truth then, from the moment of his fall to the day that he had returned to Tappahannock; but he was schooling himself hard to resist the sudden impulses which had wrecked his life, so checking his words with an effort, he lowered the spade from his shoulder, and leaning upon the handle, stood waiting for her to speak. "Then you began again at Baxter's warehouse the morning afterward?" she asked. "I had gone wrong from the very base of things, you see," he answered. "And you are making a new foundation now?" "I am trying to. They're decent enough folk in Tappahannock, aren't they?" he added cheerfully. "Perhaps they are," she responded, a little wistfully, "but I should like to have a glimpse of the world outside. I should like most, I think, to see New York." "New York?" he repeated blankly, "you've never been there?" "I? Oh, no, I've never been out of Virginia, except when I taught school once in Georgia." The simple dignity with which she spoke caused him to look at her suddenly as if he had taken her in for the first time. Perfectly unabashed by her disclosure, she stood before him as calmly as she would have stood, he felt, had he possessed a thousand amazed pairs of eyes. Her confidence belonged less to personal experience, he understood now, than to some inherited ideal of manner--of social values; and it seemed to him at the moment that there was a breadth, a richness in her aspect which was like the atmosphere of rare old libraries. "You have, I dare say, read a great many books," he remarked. "A great many--oh, yes, we kept our books almost to the last. We still have the entire south wall in the library--the English classics are there." "I imagined so," he answered, and as he looked at her he realised that the world she lived in was not the narrow, provincial world of Tappahannock, with its dusty warehouses, its tobacco scented streets, its red clay roads. She had turned from the gate, but before moving away she looked back and bowed to him with her gracious Southern courtesy, as she had done that first night in the barn. "Good-night. I cannot thank you enough," she said. "Good-night. I am only paying my debt," he answered. As he spoke she entered the house, and with the spade on his shoulder he passed down the avenue and struck out vigorously upon the road to Tappahannock. When he came down to breakfast some hours later, Mrs. Twine informed him that a small boy had come at daybreak with a message to him from Bullfinch's Hollow. "Of course it ain't any of my business, suh," she continued impressively, "but if I were you I wouldn't pay any attention to Kit Berry or his messages. Viciousness is jest as ketchin' as disease, that's what I say, an' you can't go steppin' aroun' careless whar it is in the air an' expect to git away with a whole morality. 'Tain't as if you were a female, either, for if I do say it who should not, they don't seem to be so thin-skinned whar temptation is concerned. 'Twas only two weeks ago last Saturday when I went to drag Bill away from that thar low lived saloon (the very same you broke into through the window, suh) that Timmas Kelly had the imperence to say to me, 'This is no place for respectable women, Mrs. Twine.' 'An, indeed, I'd like to know, Mr. Kelly,' said I to him, 'if it's too great a strain for the women, how the virtue of the men have stood it? For what a woman can't resist, I reckon, it's jest as well for a man not to be tempted with.' He shet up then tight as a keg--I'd wish you'd have seen him." "In his place I should probably have done the same," admitted Ordway, as he took his coffee from her hands. He was upon excellent terms with Mrs. Twine, with the children, and even with the disreputable Bill. "Wall, I've done a lot o' promisin', like other folks," pursued Mrs. Twine, turning from the table to pick up a pair of Canty's little breeches into which she was busily inserting a patch, "an' like them, I reckon, I was mostly lyin' when I did it. Thar's a good deal said at the weddin' about 'love' and 'honour' and 'obey', but for all the slick talk of the parson, experience has taught me that sich things are feelin's an' not whalebones. Now if thar's a woman on this earth that could manage to love, honour and obey Bill Twine, I'd jest like for her to step right up an' show her face, for she's a bigger fool than I'd have thought even a female could boast of bein'. As for me, suh, a man's a man same as a horse is a horse, an' if I'm goin' to set about honourin' any animal on o'count of its size I reckon I'd as soon turn roun' an' honour a whale." "But you mustn't judge us all by our friend Bill," remarked Ordway, picking up the youngest child with a laugh, "remember his weakness, and be charitable to the rest of us." Mrs. Twine spread the pair of little breeches upon her knee and slapped them into shape as energetically as if they had contained the person of their infant wearer. "As for that, suh," she rejoined, "so far as I can see one man differs from another only in the set of his breeches--for the best an' the worst of 'em are made of the same stuff, an' underneath thar skin they're all pure natur. I've had three of 'em for better or for worse, an' I reckon that's as many specimens as you generally jedge things by in a museum. A weak woman would have kept a widow after my marriage with Bob Cotton, the brother of William, suh--but I ain't weak, that's one thing can be said for me--so when I saw my opportunity in the person of Mike Frazier, I up an' said: 'Wall, thar's this much to be said for marriage--whether you do or whether you don't you'll be sure to regret it, an' the regret for things you have done ain't quite so forlorn an' impty headed a feelin' as the regret for things you haven't.' Then I married him, an' when he died an' Bill came along I married him, too. Sech is my determination when I've once made up my mind, that if Bill died I'd most likely begin to look out for another. But if I do, suh, I tell you now that I'd try to start the next with a little pure despisin'--for thar's got to come a change in marriage one way or another, that's natur, an' I reckon it's as well to have it change for the better instead of the worst." A knock at the door interrupted her, and when she had answered it, she looked back over her shoulder to tell Ordway that Mr. Banks had stopped by to walk downtown with him. With a whispered promise to return with a pocket-full of lemon drops, Ordway slipped the child from his knee, and hurriedly picking up his hat, went out to join Banks upon the front steps. Since the day upon which the two men had met at a tobacco auction Banks had attached himself to Ordway with a devotion not unlike that of a faithful dog. At his first meeting he had confided to the older man the story of his youthful struggles, and the following day he had unburdened himself with rapture of his passion for Milly. "I've just had breakfast with the Trends," he said, "so I thought I might as well join you on your way down. Mighty little doing in tobacco now, isn't there?" "Well, I'm pretty busy with the accounts," responded Ordway. "By the way, Banks, I've had a message from Bullfinch's Hollow. Kit Berry wants me to come over." "I like his brass. Why can't he come to you?" "He's sick it seems, so I thought I'd go down there some time in the afternoon." They had reached Trend's gate as he spoke, to find Milly herself standing there in her highest colour and her brightest ribbon. As Banks came up with her, he introduced Ordway, who would have passed on had not Milly held out her hand. "Father was just saying how much he should like to meet you, Mr. Smith," she remarked, hoping while she uttered the words that she would remember to instruct Jasper Trend to live up to them when the opportunity afforded. "Perhaps you will come in to supper with us to-night? Mr. Banks will be here." "Thank you," said Ordway with the boyish smile which had softened the heart of Mrs. Twine, "but I was just telling Banks I had to go over to Bullfinch's Hollow late in the afternoon." "Somebody's sick there, you know," explained Banks in reply to Milly's look of bewilderment. "He's the greatest fellow alive for missionarying to sick people." "Oh, you see it's easier to hit a man when he's down," commented Ordway, drily. He was looking earnestly at Milly Trend, who grew prettier and pinker beneath his gaze, yet at the moment he was only wondering if Alice's bright blue eyes could be as lovely as the softer ones of the girl before him. As they went down the hill a moment afterward Banks asked his companion, a little reproachfully, why he had refused the invitation to supper. "After all I've told you about Milly," he concluded, "I hoped you'd want to meet her when you got the chance." Ordway glanced down at his clothes. "My dear Banks, I'm a working man, and to tell the truth I couldn't manufacture an appearance--that's the best excuse I have." "All the same I wish you'd go. Milly wouldn't care." "Milly mightn't, but you would have blushed for me. I couldn't have supported a comparison with your turtle-dove." Banks reddened hotly, while he put his hand to his cravat with a conscious laugh. "Oh, you don't need turtle-doves and things," he answered, "there's something about you--I don't know what it is--that takes the place of them." "The place of diamond turtle-doves and violet stockings?" laughed Ordway with good-humoured raillery. "You wouldn't be a bit better looking if you wore them--Milly says so." "I'm much obliged to Milly and on the whole I'm inclined to think she's right. Do you know," he added, "I'm not quite sure that you are improved by them yourself, except for the innocent enjoyment they afford you." "But I'm such a common looking chap," said Banks, "I need an air." "My dear fellow," returned Ordway, while his look went like sunshine to the other's heart, "if you want to know what you are--well, you're a downright trump!" He stopped before the brick archway of Baxter's warehouse, and an instant later, Banks, looking after him as he turned away, vowed in the luminous simplicity of his soul that if the chance ever came to him he "would go to hell and back again for the sake of Smith." CHAPTER XI BULLFINCH'S HOLLOW At five o'clock Ordway followed the uneven board walk to the end of the main street, and then turning into a little footpath which skirted the railroad track, he came presently to the abandoned field known in Tappahannock as Bullfinch's Hollow. Beyond a disorderly row of negro hovels, he found a small frame cottage, which he recognised as the house to which he had brought Kit Berry on the night when he had dragged him bodily from Kelly's saloon. In response to his knock the door was opened by the same weeping woman--a small withered person, with snapping black eyes and sparse gray hair brushed fiercely against her scalp, where it clung so closely that it outlined the bones beneath. At sight of Ordway a smile curved her sunken mouth; and she led the way through the kitchen to the door of a dimly lighted room at the back, where a boy of eighteen years tossed deliriously on a pallet in one corner. It was poverty in its direst, its most abject, results, Ordway saw at once as his eyes travelled around the smoke stained, unplastered walls and rested upon the few sticks of furniture and the scant remains of a meal on the kitchen table. Then he looked into Mrs. Berry's face and saw that she must have lived once amid surroundings far less wretched than these. "Kit was taken bad with fever three days ago," she said, "an' the doctor told me this mornin' that the po' boy's in for a long spell of typhoid. He's clean out of his head most of the time, but whenever he comes to himself he begs and prays me to send for you. Something's on his mind, but I can't make out what it is." "May I see him now?" asked Ordway. "I think he's wanderin', but I'll find out in a minute." She went to the pallet and bending over the young man, whispered a few words in his ear, while her knotted hand stroked back the hair from his forehead. As Ordway's eyes rested on her thin shoulders under the ragged, half soiled calico dress she wore, he forgot the son in the presence of the older and more poignant tragedy of the mother's life. Yet all that he knew of her history was that she had married a drunkard and had brought a second drunkard into the world. "He wants to speak to you, sir--he's come to," she said, returning to the doorway, and fixing her small black eyes upon Ordway's face. "You are the gentleman, ain't you, who got him to sign the pledge?" Ordway nodded. "Did he keep it?" Her sharp eyes filled with tears. "He hasn't touched a drop for going on six weeks, sir, but he hadn't the strength to hold up without it, so the fever came on and wore him down." Swallowing a sob with a gulp, she wiped her eyes fiercely on the back of her hand. "He ain't much to look at now," she finished, divided between her present grief and her reminiscent pride, "but, oh, Mr. Smith, if you could have seen him as a baby! When he was a week old he was far and away the prettiest thing you ever laid your eyes on--not red, sir, like other children, but white as milk, with dimples at his knees and elbows. I've still got some of his little things--a dress he wore and a pair of knitted shoes--and it's them that make me cry, sir. I ain't grievin' for the po' boy in there that's drunk himself to death, but for that baby that used to be." Still crying softly, she slunk out into the kitchen, while Ordway, crossing to the bed, stood looking down upon the dissipated features of the boy who lay there, with his matted hair tossed over his flushed forehead. "I'm sorry to see you down, Kit. Can I do anything to help you?" he asked. Kit opened his eyes with a start of recognition, and reaching out, gripped Ordway's wrist with his burning hand, while he threw off the ragged patchwork quilt upon the bed. "I've something on my mind, and I want to get it off," he answered. "When it's once off I'll be better and get back my wits." "Then get it off. I'm waiting." "Do you remember the night in the bar-room?" demanded the boy in a whisper, "the time you came in through the window and took me home?" "Go on," said Ordway. "Well, I'd walked up the street behind you that afternoon when you left Baxter's, and I got drunk that night on a dollar I stole from you." "But I didn't speak to you. I didn't even see you." "Of course you didn't. If you had I couldn't have stolen it, but Baxter had just paid you and when you put your hand into your pocket to get out something, a dollar bill dropped on the walk." "Go on." "I picked it up and got drunk on it, there's nothing else. It was a pretty hard drunk, but before I got through you came in and dragged me home. Twenty cents were left in my pockets. Mother found the money and bought a fish for breakfast. "Well, I did that much good at least," observed Ordway with a smile, "have you finished, Kit?" "It's been on my mind," repeated Kit deliriously, "and I wanted to get it off." "It's off now, my boy," said Ordway, picking up the ragged quilt from the floor and laying it across the other's feet, "and on the whole I'm glad you told me. You've done the straight thing, Kit, and I am proud of you." "Proud of me?" repeated Kit, and fell to crying like a baby. In a minute he grew delirious again, and Ordway, after bathing the boy's face and hands from a basin of water on a chair at the bedside, went into the kitchen in search of Mrs. Berry, whom he found weeping over a pair of baby's knitted shoes. The pathos of her grief bordered so closely upon the ridiculous that while he watched her he forced back the laugh upon his lips. "Kit is worse again," he said. "Do you give him any medicine?" Mrs. Berry struggled with difficulty to her feet, while her sobs changed into a low whimpering sound. "Did you sit up with him last night?" asked Ordway, following her to the door. "I've been up for three nights, sir. He has to have his face and hands bathed every hour." "What about medicine and food?" "The doctor gives him his medicine free, every drop of it, an' they let me have a can of milk every day from Cedar Hill. I used to live there as a girl, you know, my father was overseer in old Mr. Brooke's time--before he married Miss Emily's mother----" Ordway cut short her reminiscences. "Well, you must sleep to-night," he said authoritatively, "I'll come back in an hour and sit up with Kit. Where is your room?" She pointed to a rickety flight of stairs which led to the attic above. "Kit slept up there until he was taken ill," she answered. "He's been a hard son to me, sir, as his father was a hard husband because of drink, but to save the life of me I can't forgit how good he used to be when he warn't more'n a week old. Never fretted or got into tempers like other babies----" Again Ordway broke in drily upon her wandering recollections. "Now I'll go for an hour," he said abruptly, "and by the way, have you had supper or shall I bring you some groceries when I come?" "There was a little milk left in the pitcher and I had a piece of cornbread, but--oh, Mr. Smith," her small black eyes snapped fiercely into his, "there are times when my mouth waters for a cup of coffee jest as po' Kit's does for whiskey." "Then put the kettle on," returned Ordway, smiling, as he left the room. It was past sunset when he returned, and he found Kit sleeping quietly under the effect of the medicine the doctor had just given him. Mrs. Berry had recovered sufficient spirit, not only to put the kettle on the stove, but to draw the kitchen table into the square of faint light which entered over the doorstep. The preparations for her supper had been made, he saw, with evident eagerness, and as he placed his packages upon the table, she fell upon them with an excited, childish curiosity. A few moments later the aroma of boiling coffee floated past him where he sat on the doorstep smoking his last pipe before going into the sick-room for the night. Turning presently he watched the old woman in amazement while she sat smacking her thin lips and jerking her shrivelled little hands over her fried bacon; and as he looked into her ecstatic face, he realised something of the intensity which enters into the scant enjoyments of the poor. The memory of his night in the Brookes' barn returned to him with the aroma of the coffee, and he understood for the first time that it is possible to associate a rapture with meat and drink. Then, in spite of his resolve to keep his face turned toward his future, he found himself contrasting the squalid shanty at his back with the luxurious surroundings amid which he had last watched all night by a sick-bed. He could see the rich amber-coloured curtains, the bowls of violets on the inlaid table between the open windows, the exquisite embroidered coverlet upon the bed, and the long pale braid of Lydia's hair lying across the lace ruffles upon her nightgown. Before his eyes was the sunken field filled with Negro hovels and refuse heaps in which lean dogs prowled snarling in search of bones; but his inward vision dwelt, in a luminous mist, on the bright room, scented with violets, where Lydia had slept with her baby cradled within her arm. He could see her arm still under the falling lace, round and lovely, with delicate blue veins showing beneath the inside curve. In the midst of his radiant memory the acrid voice of Mrs. Berry broke with a shock, and turning quickly he found that his dream took instant flight before the aggressive actuality which she presented. "I declare I believe I'd clean forgot how good things tasted," she remarked in the cheerful tones of one who is full again after having been empty. Picking up a chip from the ground, Ordway began scraping carelessly at the red clay on his boots. "It smells rather nice anyway," he rejoined good-humouredly, and rising from the doorstep, he crossed the kitchen and sat down in the sagging split-bottomed chair beside the pallet. At sunrise he left Kit, sleeping peacefully after a delirious night, and going out of doors for a breath of fresh air, stood looking wearily on the dismal prospect of Bullfinch's Hollow. The disorderly road, the dried herbage of the field, the Negro hovels, with pig pens for backyards, and the refuse heaps piled with tin cans, old rags and vegetable rinds, appeared to him now to possess a sordid horror which had escaped him under the merciful obscurity of the twilight. Even the sun, he thought, looked lean and shrunken, as it rose over the slovenly landscape. With the first long breath he drew there was only dejection in his mental outlook; then he remembered the enraptured face of Mrs. Berry as she poured out her coffee, and he told himself that there were pleasures hardy enough to thrive and expand even in the atmosphere of Bullfinch's Hollow. As there was no wood in the kitchen, he shouldered an old axe which he found leaning in one corner, and going to a wood-pile beyond the doorstep, split up the single rotting log lying upon a heap of mould. Returning with his armful of wood, he knelt on the hearth and attempted to kindle a blaze before the old woman should make her appearance from the attic. The sticks had just caught fire, when a shadow falling over him from the open door caused him to start suddenly to his feet. "I beg your pardon," said a voice, "but I've brought some milk for Mrs. Berry." At the words his face reddened as if from shame, and drawing himself to his full height, he stood, embarrassed and silent, in the centre of the room, while Emily Brooke crossed the floor and placed the can of milk she had brought upon the table. "I didn't mean to interrupt you," she added cheerfully, "but there was no one else to come, so I had to ride over before breakfast. Is Kit better?" "Yes," said Ordway, and to his annoyance he felt himself flush painfully at the sound of his own voice. "You spent last night with him?" she inquired in her energetic tones. "Yes." As he stood there in his cheap clothes, with his dishevelled hair and his unwashed hands, she was struck by some distinction of personality, before which these surface roughnesses appeared as mere incidental things. Was it in his spare, weather-beaten face? Or was it in the peculiar contrast between his gray hair and his young blue eyes? Then her gaze fell on his badly made working clothes, worn threadbare in places, on his clean striped shirt, frayed slightly at the collar and cuffs, on his broken fingernails, and on the red clay still adhering to his country boots. "I wonder why you do these things?" she asked so softly that the words hardly reached him. "I wonder why?" Though she had expected no response to her question, to her surprise he answered almost impulsively as he stooped to pick up a bit of charred wood from the floor. "Well, one must fill one's life, you know," he said. "I tried the other thing once but it didn't count--it was hardly better than this, when all is said." "What 'other thing' do you mean?" "When I spoke I was thinking of what people have got to call 'pleasure,'" he responded, "getting what one wants in life, or trying to get it and failing in the end." "And did you fail?" she asked, with a simplicity which saved the blunt directness of the question. He laughed. "Do you think if I had succeeded, I'd be splitting wood in Bullfinch's Hollow?" "And you care nothing for Kit Berry?" "Oh, I like him--he's an under dog." "Then you are for the under dog, right or wrong, as I am?" she responded with a radiant look. "Well, I don't know about that," he answered, "but I have at least a fellow feeling for him. I'm an under dog myself, you see." "But you won't stay one long?" "That's the danger. When I come out on top I'll doubtless stop splitting wood and do something worse." "I don't believe it," she rejoined decisively. "You have never had a chance at the real thing before." "You're right there," he admitted, "I had never seen the real thing in my life until I came to Tappahannock." "Do you mind telling me," she asked, after an instant's hesitation, "why you came to Tappahannock? I can't understand why anyone should ever come here." "I don't know about the others, but I came because my road led here. I followed my road." "Not knowing where it would end?" He laughed again. "Not _caring_ where it would end." Her charming boyish smile rippled across her lips. "It isn't necessary that I should understand to be glad that you kept straight on," she said. "But the end isn't yet," he replied, with a gaiety beneath which she saw the seriousness in his face. "It may lead me off again." "To a better place I hope." "Well, I suppose that would be easy to find," he admitted, as he glanced beyond the doorway, "but I like Tappahannock. It has taken me in, you know, and there's human nature even in Bullfinch's Hollow." "Oh, I suppose it's hideous," she remarked, following his look in the direction of the town, "but I can't judge. I've seen so little else, you know--and yet my City Beautiful is laid out in my mind." "Then you carry it with you, and that is best." As she was about to answer the door creaked above them and Mrs. Berry came down the short flight of steps, hastily fastening her calico dress as she descended. "Well, I declare, who'd have thought to see you at this hour, Miss Emily," she exclaimed effusively. "I thought you might need the milk early," replied the girl, "and as Micah had an attack of rheumatism I brought it over on horseback." While the old woman emptied the contents of the can into a cracked china pitcher, Emily held out her hand to Ordway with an impulsive gesture. "We shall have a flourishing kitchen garden," she said, "thanks to you." Then taking the empty can from Mrs. Berry, she crossed the threshold, and remounted from the doorstep. CHAPTER XII A STRING OF CORAL As Emily rode slowly up from Bullfinch's Hollow, it seemed to her that the abandoned fields had borrowed an aspect which was almost one of sentiment. In the golden light of the sunrise even the Negro hovels, the refuse heaps and the dead thistles by the roadside, were transfigured until they appeared to lose their ordinary daytime ugliness; and the same golden light was shining inwardly on the swift impressions which crowded her thoughts. This strange inner illumination surrounded, she discovered now, each common fact which presented itself to her mind, and though the outward form of life was not changed, her mental vision had become suddenly enraptured. She did not stop to ask herself why the familiar events of every day appear so full of vivid interests--why the external objects at which she looked swam before her gaze in an atmosphere that was like a rainbow mist? It was sufficient to be alive to the finger tips, and to realise that everything in the great universe was alive around one--the air, the sky, the thistles along the roadside and the dust blowing before the wind, all moved, she felt, in harmony with the elemental pulse of life. On that morning she entered for the first time into the secret of immortality. And yet--was it only the early morning hour? she asked herself, as she rode back between the stretches of dried broomsedge. Or was it, she questioned a moment later, the natural gratification she had felt in a charity so generous, so unassuming as that of the man she had seen at Mrs. Berry's? "It's a pity he isn't a gentleman and that his clothes are so rough," she thought, and blushed the next instant with shame because she was "only a wretched snob." "Whatever his class he _is_ a gentleman," she began again, "and he would be quite--even very--good-looking if his face were not so drawn and thin. What strange eyes he has--they are as blue as Blair's and as young. No, he isn't exactly good-looking--not in Beverly's way, at least--but I should know his face again if I didn't see it for twenty years. It's odd that there are people one hardly knows whom one never forgets." Her bare hands were on Major's neck, and as she looked at them a displeased frown gathered her brows. She wondered why she had never noticed before that they were ugly and unwomanly, and it occurred to her that Aunt Mehitable had once told her that "ole Miss" washed her hands in buttermilk to keep them soft and white. "They're almost as rough as Mr. Smith's," she thought, "perhaps he noticed them." The idea worried her for a minute, for she hated, she told herself, that people should not think her "nice"--but the golden light was still flooding her thoughts and these trivial disturbances scattered almost before they had managed to take shape. Nothing worried her long to-day, and as she dismounted at the steps, and ran hurriedly into the dining-room, she remembered Beverly and Amelia with an affection which she had not felt for years. It was as if the mere external friction of personalities had dissolved before the fundamental relation of soul to soul; even poor half-demented Aunt Mehitable wore in her eyes, at the minute, an immortal aspect. A little later when she rode in to the public school at Tappahannock, she discovered that the golden light irradiated even the questions in geography and arithmetic upon the blackboard; and coming out again, she found that it lay like sunshine on the newly turned vegetable rows in the garden. That afternoon for the first time she planted in a discarded pair of buck-skin gloves, and as soon as her work was over, she went upstairs to her bedroom, and regarded herself wistfully by the light from a branched candlestick which she held against the old greenish mirror. Her forehead was too high, she admitted regretfully, her mouth was too wide, her skin certainly was too brown. The blue cotton dress she wore appeared to her suddenly common and old-fashioned, and she began looking eagerly through her limited wardrobe in the hopeless quest for a gown that was softened by so much as a fall of lace about the throat. Then remembering the few precious trinkets saved from the bartered heirlooms of her dead mother, she got out the old black leather jewel case and went patiently over the family possessions. Among the mourning brooches and hair bracelets that the box contained there was a necklace of rare pink coral, which she had meant to give Bella upon her birthday--but as her gaze was arrested now by the cheerful colour, she sat for a moment wondering if she might not honestly keep the beads for her own. Still undecided she went to the bureau again and fastened the string of coral around her firm brown throat. "I may wear it for a week or two at least," she thought. "Why not?" It seemed to her foolish, almost unfeminine that she had never cared or thought about her clothes until to-day. "I've gone just like a boy--I ought to be ashamed to show my hands," she said; and at the same instant she was conscious of the vivid interest, of the excitement even, which attached to this new discovery of the importance of one's appearance. Before going downstairs she brushed the tangles out of her thick brown hair, and spent a half hour arranging it in a becoming fashion upon her neck. The next day Micah was well enough to carry the milk to Mrs. Berry's, but three mornings afterward, when she came from the dairy with the can, the old negro was not waiting for her on the porch, and she found, upon going to his cabin, that the attack of rheumatism had returned with violence. There was nothing for her to do but carry the milk herself, so after leading Major from his stall, she mounted and rode, almost with a feeling of shyness, in the direction of Bullfinch's Hollow. The door was closed this morning, and in answer to her knock, Mrs. Berry appeared, rubbing her eyes, beyond the threshold. "I declare, Miss Emily, you don't look like yourself at all," she exclaimed at the girl's entrance, "it must be them coral beads you've got on, I reckon. They always was becomin' things--I had a string once myself that I used to wear when my po' dead husband was courtin' me. Lord! Lord!" she added, bursting into sobs, "who'd have thought when I wore those beads that I'd ever have come to this? My po' ma gave 'em to me herself--they were her weddin' present from her first husband, and when she made up her mind to marry again, she kind of thought it warn't modest to go aroun' wearin' what she'd got from her first marriage. She was always powerful sensitive to decency, was po' ma. I've seen her scent vulgarity in the most harmless soundin' speech you ever heard--such as when my husband asked her one day if she was afflicted with the budges in her knee, and she told me afterward that he had made a sneakin' allusion to her leg. Ten years from that time, when all my trouble came upon me, she held that over me as a kind of warnin'. 'If you'd listened to me, Sarindy,' she used to say, 'you'd never have got into this scrape of marryin' a man who talked free befo' women. For a man who is indecent in his language can't be decent in his life,' she said." As she talked she was pouring the milk into the cracked pitcher, and Emily breaking in at the first pause, sought to hasten the washing of the can, by bringing the old woman's rambling attention back to Kit. "Has he had a quiet night?" she asked. "Well, yes, miss, in a way, but then he always was what you might call a quiet sleeper from the very hour that he was born. I remember old Aunt Jemima, his monthly nurse, tellin' me that she had never in all her experience brought a more reliable sleeper into the world. He never used to stir, except to whimper now and then for his sugar rag when it slipped out of his mouth." Hurriedly seizing the half-washed can, Emily caught up her skirt and moved toward the door. "Did you sit up with him last night?" she asked, turning upon the step. "That was Mr. Smith's night, miss--he's taken such a fancy to Kit that he comes every other night to watch by him--but he gets up and leaves now a little before daybreak. I heard him choppin' wood before the sun was up." "He has been very kind about it, hasn't he?" "Lord, miss, he's been a son and a brother as far as work goes, but I declare I can't help wishin' he wasn't quite so shut mouthed. Every blessed sound he utters I have to drag out of him like a fox out of a burrow. He's a little cranky, too, I reckon, for he is so absent-minded that sometimes when you call his name he never even turns aroun'. But the Lord will overlook his unsociable ways, I s'pose, for he reads his Bible half the night when he sets up, jest as hard as if he was paid to do it. That's as good a recommendation, I reckon, as I need to have." "I should think his charity would be a better one," rejoined Emily, with severity. "Well, that's as it may be, Miss," returned Mrs. Berry, "I'm not ungrateful, I hope, and I'm much obliged for what he gives me--particularly for the coffee, which ain't as thin as it might be seein' it's a present. But when all's said I ain't so apt to jedge by things like that because charity is jest a kind of Saint Vitus dance with some folks--it's all in the muscles. Thank you, miss, yes, Kit is doin' very well." Mounting from the step, Emily turned back into the Tappahannock road, aware as she passed through the deserted fields that her exaltation of the morning had given way before a despondency which seemed to change the face of nature. The day was oppressive, the road ugly, Mrs. Berry more tiresome than usual--each of these things suggested itself as a possible reason for the dissatisfaction which she could not explain. Not once during her troubled mood did the name or the face of Ordway appear as the visible cause of her disturbance. So far, indeed, was his individual aspect from her reflections, that some hours later, when she rode back to school, it was with a shock of surprise that she saw him turn the corner by the new brick church, and come rapidly toward her from the brow of the long hill. That he had not at first seen her was evident, for he walked in an abstracted reverie with his eyes on the ground, and when he looked up at last, she had drawn almost within speaking distance. At sight of his face her heart beat so quickly that she dropped the reins on Major's neck, and raised her free hand to her bosom, while she felt the blood mount joyously to her cheeks; but, to her amazement, in the first instant of recognition, he turned abruptly away and entered the shop of a harness maker which happened to be immediately on his right. The action was so sudden that even as she quickened her horse's pace, there flashed into her mind the humiliating conviction that he had sought purposely to avoid her. The throbs of her heart grew faster and then seemed to die utterly away, yet even as the warm blood turned cold in her cheeks, she told herself with spirit that it was all because she "could not bear to be disliked." "Why should he dislike me?" she questioned presently; "it is very foolish of him, and what have I done?" She searched her memory for some past rudeness of which she had been guilty, but there was nothing she could recall which would justify, however slightly, his open avoidance of a chance meeting. "Perhaps he doesn't like the colour of my hair. I've heard men were like that," she thought, "or the freckles on my face? Or the roughness of my hands?" But the instant afterward she saw how ridiculous were her surmises, and she felt angry with herself for having permitted them to appear in her mind. She remembered his blue eyes with the moonlight upon them, and she wondered why he had seemed to her more masculine than any man that she had ever known. With the memory of his eyes and his smile she smelt again the odour of the warm earth that had clung about him, and she was conscious that this and everything about him was strange and new as if she had never looked into a pair of blue eyes or smelt the odour of the soil before. After this meeting she did not see Ordway again for several weeks, and then it was only to pass him in the road one Sunday afternoon when he had finished his sermon in the old field. As he drew back among the thistles, he spoke to her gravely, with a deference, she noticed, which had the effect of placing him apart from her as a member of the working class. Since Kit Berry's recovery she had not gone again to Bullfinch's Hollow; and she could not fail to observe that even when an opportunity appeared, Ordway made no further effort to bridge the mere casual acquaintance which divided rather than united them. If it were possible to avoid conversation with her he did so by retiring into the background; if the event forced him into notice, he addressed her with a reserve which seemed at each meeting to widen the distance between them. Though she hardly confessed it to herself, her heart was wounded for a month or two by his frank indifference to her presence. Then one bright afternoon in May, when she had observed him turn out of his path as she rode up the hill, she saved the situation in her mind by the final triumph of her buoyant humour. "Everybody is privileged to be a little fool," she said with a laugh, "but when there's the danger of becoming a great big one, it's time to stop short and turn round. Now, Emily, my dear, you're to stop short from this minute. I hope you understand me." That the Emily she addressed understood her very clearly was proved a little later in the afternoon, when going upstairs to her bedroom, she unfastened the coral beads and laid them away again among the mourning brooches and the hair bracelets in the leather case. BOOK SECOND THE DAY OF RECKONING CHAPTER I IN WHICH A STRANGER APPEARS On a bright June morning, when Ordway had been more than two years at Tappahannock, he came out upon Mrs. Twine's little porch as soon as breakfast was over, and looked down the board walk for Harry Banks, who had fallen into the habit of accompanying him to the warehouse. From where he stood, under the hanging blossoms of the locust trees, he could see the painted tin roofs and the huddled chimneys of the town, flanked by the brazen sweep of the cornfields along the country roads. As his eyes rested on the familiar scene, they softened unconsciously with an affection which was almost paternal--for in the last two years Tappahannock had become a different place from the Tappahannock he had entered as a tramp on that windy afternoon in March. The town as it stood to-day was the town which he had helped to make, and behind each roll of progress there had been the informing purpose of his mind, as well as the strength of his shoulder at the wheel. Behind the law which had closed the disreputable barrooms; behind the sentiment for decency which had purified the filthy hollows; behind the spirit of charity which had organised and opened, not only a reading room for the factory workers, but an industrial home for the poorer classes--behind each of these separate movements there had been a single energy to plan and act. In two years he had watched the little town cover the stretch of ten years' improvement; in two years he had aroused and vitalised the community into which he had come a stranger. Tappahannock was the child of his brain--the life that was in her to-day he had given her out of himself, and the love he felt for her was the love that one bestows upon one's own. Standing there his eyes followed the street to the ugly brick church at the corner, and then as his mental vision travelled down the long, hot hill which led to the railroad, he could tell himself, with a kind of exultation, that there was hardly a dwelling along the way which had not some great or little reason to bless his name. Even Kelly, whose saloon he had closed, had been put upon his feet again and started, with a fair chance, in the tobacco market. Yes, a new life had been given him, and he had made good his promise to himself. The clothes he wore to-day were as rough as those in which he had chopped wood in Bullfinch's Hollow; the room he lived in was the same small, bare lodging of Mrs. Twine's; for though his position at Baxter's now assured him a comfortable income, he had kept to his cramped manner of life in order that he might contribute the more generously to the lives of others. Out of his little he had given abundantly, and he had gained in return the happiness which he had ceased to make the object of his search. In looking back over his whole life, he could honestly tell himself that his happiest years since childhood were the ones that he had spent in Tappahannock. The gate closed with a slam, and Banks came up the short brick walk inside, mopping his heated face with a pink bordered handkerchief. "I'm a minute late," he said, "but it doesn't matter, does it? The Trends asked me to breakfast." "It doesn't matter in the least if you spent that minute with Milly," replied Ordway, with a laugh, as he knocked the ashes out of his pipe and descended the steps. "The hot weather has come early, hasn't it?" "Oh, we're going in for a scorcher," responded Banks, indifferently. There was a heavy gloom in his manner which was hardly to be accounted for by the temperature in which he moved, and as they closed the gate behind them and passed under the shade of the locust trees on the board walk, he turned to Ordway in an outburst which was little short of desperation. "I don't know how it is--or whether it's just a woman's way," he said, "but I never can be sure of Milly for ten minutes at a time. A month ago I was positive that she meant to marry me in the autumn, but now I'm in a kind of blue funk about her doing it at all. She's never been the same since she went North in April." "My dear chap, these things will vary, I suppose--though, mind you, I make no claim to exact knowledge of the sex." "It isn't the sex," said Banks, "it's Milly." "Well, I certainly can't claim any particular knowledge of Milly. It would be rather presumptuous if I did, considering I've only seen her about a dozen times--mostly at a distance." "I wish you knew her better, perhaps you could help me," returned Banks in a voice of melancholy. "To save the life of me I don't see how it is--I've done my best--I swear I've done my best--yet nothing somehow seems to suit her. She wants to make me over from the skin and even that doesn't satisfy her. When my hair is short she wants it long, and when it's long she says she wants it short. She can't stand me in coloured cravats and when I put on a black tie she calls me an undertaker. I had to leave off my turtle-dove scarf-pin and this morning," he rolled his innocent blue eyes, like pale marbles, in the direction of Ordway, "she actually got into a temper about my stockings." "It seems to be a case for sympathy," commented Ordway seriously, "but hardly, I should say, for marriage. Imagine, my dear Banks, what a hell you'd make out of your domesticity. Suppose you give her up and bear it like a man?" "Give her up? to what?" "Well, to her own amiability, we'll say." "I can't," said Banks, waving his pink bordered handkerchief before his face in an effort either to disperse the swarming blue flies or to conceal the working of his emotion. "I'd die--I'd kill myself--that's the awful part of it. The more she bangs me over the head, the more I feel that I can't live without her. Is that natural, do you s'pose?" he inquired uneasily, "or have I gone clean crazy?" Checking his smile severely, Ordway turned and slipped his left arm affectionately through his companion's. "I've heard of similar cases," he remarked, "though I confess, they sounded a little strained." "Do you think I'd better see a doctor? I will if you say so." "By no means. Go off on a trip." "And leave Milly here? I'd jump out of the train--and, I reckon, she'd bang my head off for doing it." "But if it's as bad as that, you couldn't be much more miserable without her." "I know it," replied Banks obstinately, "but it would be a different sort of miserableness, and that happens to be the sort that I can't stand." "Then I give it up," said Ordway, cheerfully, "there's no hope but marriage." With his words they turned under the archway of Baxter's warehouse, and Banks's passionate confidences were extinguished in the odour of tobacco. A group of men stood talking loudly in the centre of the building, and as Ordway approached, Baxter broke away, with his great rolling laugh, and came to join him at the door of his private office. "Catesby and Frazier have got into a squabble about that lot of tobacco they brought in last February," he said, "and they have both agreed to accept your decision in the matter." Ordway nodded, without replying, as he followed the other through the doorway. Such judicial appeals to him were not uncommon, and his power of pacification, as his employer had once remarked, was one of his principal qualifications for the tobacco market. "Shall I hear them now? or would it be as well to give them time to cool off?" he asked presently, while Baxter settled his great person in a desk chair that seemed a size too small to contain it. "If they can cool off on a day like this they're lucky dogs," returned Baxter, with a groan, "however, I reckon you might as well get it over and let 'em go home and stew in peace. By the way, Smith, I forgot to tell you that Major Leary--he's the president of the Southside Bank, you know, was asking me yesterday if I could tell him anything about you before you came to work for me." "Of the Southside Bank," repeated Ordway, while his hand closed tightly over a paper weight, representing a gambolling kitten, which lay on Baxter's desk. With the words he was conscious only of the muffled drumming of his pulses, and above the discord in his ears, the cheerful tones of Baxter sounded like an echo rather than a real voice. At the instant he was back again in his room in the great banking house of Amos, Bonner & Amos, in the midst of the pale brown walls, the black oak furniture and the shining leather covered volumes behind the glass doors of the bookcases. With peculiar vividness he remembered the eccentric little bird on the bronze clock on the mantel, which had hopped from its swinging perch to strike the hour with its beak; and through the open windows he could hear still the din of traffic in the street below and the ceaseless, irregular tread of footsteps upon the pavement. "Oh, I didn't mean to raise your hopes too high," remarked Baxter, rising from his chair to slap him affectionately upon the shoulder, "he isn't going to make you president of the bank, but of the Citizen's Improvement League, whose object is to oust Jasper Trend, you know, in the autumn. The Major told me before he left that you'd done as much for Tappahannock in two years as any other man had done in a lifetime. I said I thought he'd hit the nail pretty squarely, which is something he doesn't generally manage to do." "So I'm to fight Jasper Trend, am I?" asked Ordway, with sudden interest. The sound of his throbbing arteries was no longer in his ears, and as he spoke, he felt that his past life with his old identity had departed from him. In the swift renewal of his confidence he had become again "Ten Commandment Smith" of Tappahannock. "Well, you see, Jasper has been a precious bad influence around here," pursued Baxter, engrossed in the political scheme he was unfolding. "The only thing on earth he's got to recommend him is his pretty daughter. Now, I've a soft enough heart, as everybody knows, when the ladies come about--particularly if they're pretty--but I'm ready to stand up and say that Jasper Trend can't be allowed to run this town on the platform of pure chivalry. There's such a thing as fairness, suh, even where women are concerned, and I'll back my word with my oath that it ain't fair!" "And I'll back your word with another that it isn't," rejoined Ordway. "There's no doubt, I reckon," continued Baxter, "that Jasper has connived with those disorderly saloons that you've been trying to shut up, and for all his money and the men he employs in the cotton mills there's come a considerable reaction against him in public sentiment. Now, I ain't afraid to say, Smith," he concluded with an ample flourish of his dirty hand, "that the fact that there's any public sentiment at all in Tappahannock is due to you. Until you came here there weren't six decent men you could count mixed up in the affairs of this town. Jasper had everything his own way, that's why he hates you." "But I wasn't even aware that he did me so much honour." "You mean he hasn't told you his feelings to your face. Well, he hasn't gone so far as to confide them to me either--but even if I ain't a woman, I can hear some things that ain't spoke out in words. He's made a dirty town and you're sweepin' it clean--do you think it likely that it makes him love you?" "He's welcome to feel about me anyway he pleases, but do you know, Baxter," he added with his whimsical gravity, "I've a pretty strong conviction that I'd make a jolly good street sweeper." "I reckon you're right!" roared Baxter, "and when you're done, we'll shoot off some sky-rockets over the job--so there you are, ain't you?" "All right--but there's Jasper Trend also," retorted Ordway. "Oh, he can afford to send off his own sky-rockets. We needn't bother about him. He won't be out of a job like Kelly, you know. Great Scott!" he added, chuckling, "I can see your face now when you marched in here the day after you closed Kelly's saloon, and told me you had to start a man in tobacco because you'd taken him out of whiskey." His laugh shook through his figure until Ordway saw his fat chest heave violently beneath his alpaca coat. Custom had made the younger man almost indifferent to the external details which had once annoyed him in his employer, and he hardly noticed now that Baxter's coat was turning from black to green and that the old ashes from his pipe had lodged in the crumpled bosom of his shirt. Baxter was--well, Baxter, and tolerance was a virtue which one acquired sooner or later in Tappahannock. "I suppose I might as well get at Catesby and Frazier now," remarked Ordway, watching the other disinter a tattered palm leaf fan from beneath a dusty pile of old almanacs and catalogues. "Wait a minute first," said Baxter, "there's something I want to say as soon as I get settled. I ain't made for heat, that's certain," he pursued, as he pulled off his coat, and hung it from a nail in the wall, "it sweats all my morals out of me." Detaching the collar from his shirt, he placed it above his coat on the nail, and then rolling up his shirt sleeves, sank, with a panting breath, back into his chair. "If I were you I'd get out of this at night anyway, Smith," he urged. "Why don't you try boarding for the next few months over at Cedar Hill. It would be a godsend to the family, now that Miss Emily's school has stopped." "But I don't suppose they'd take me in," replied Ordway, staring out into the street, where the dust rose like steam in the air, and the rough-coated country horses toiled patiently up the long hill. Across the way he saw the six stale currant buns and the three bottles of pale beer behind the fly-specked window panes of a cheap eating house. In front of them, a Negro woman, barefooted, with her ragged calico dress tucked up about her waist, was sousing the steaming board walk with a pailful of dirty water. From his memory of two years ago there floated the mingled odours of wild flowers and freshly turned earth in the garden of Cedar Hill, and Emily appeared in his thoughts only as an appropriate figure against the pleasant natural background of the lilacs and the meadows. In the past year he had seen her hardly more than a dozen times--mere casual glimpses for the most part--and he had almost forgotten his earlier avoidance of her, which had resulted from an instinctive delicacy rather than from any premeditated purpose. His judgment had told him that he had no right to permit a woman to become his friend in ignorance of his past; and at the same time he was aware of a terrible shrinking from intruding his old self, however remotely, into the new life at Tappahannock. When the choice came between confessing his sin and sacrificing the chance acquaintance, he had found it easier simply to keep away from her actual presence. Yet his interest in her had been so closely associated with his larger feeling for humanity, that he could tell himself with sincerity that it was mere folly which put her forward as an objection to his boarding for the summer at Cedar Hill. "The truth is," admitted Baxter, after a pause, "that Mrs. Brooke spoke to me about having to take a boarder or two, when I went out there to pay Mr. Beverly for that tobacco I couldn't sell." "So you bought it in the end," laughed Ordway, "as you did last year after sending me out there on a mission?" "Yes, I bought it," replied Baxter, blushing like a boy under the beads of perspiration upon his face. "I may as well confess it, though I tried to keep it secret. But I ask you as man to man," he demanded warmly, "was there another blessed thing on God's earth for me to do?" "Let Mr. Beverly go about his business--that's what I'd have done." "Oh, no, you wouldn't," protested Baxter softly, "not when he'd ruin himself for you to-morrow if you were to walk out and ask him." "But he couldn't," insisted Ordway with the brutality of the naked fact, "he did that little job on his own account too long ago." "But that ain't the point, Smith," replied Baxter in an awed and solemn accent. "The point ain't that he couldn't, but that he _would_. As I make it out that's the point which has cost me money on him for the last thirty years." "Oh, well, I suppose it's a charity like any other, only the old fool is so pompous about his poverty that it wears me out." "It does at Tappahannock, but it won't when you get out to Cedar Hill, that's the difference between Mr. Beverly in the air and Mr. Beverly in the flesh. The one wears you out, the other rests you for all his darnation foolishness. Now, you can board out there for twenty-five dollars a month and put a little ready money where it ought to be in Mrs. Brooke's pocket." "Of course I'd like it tremendously," said Ordway, after a moment in which the perfume of the lilacs filled his memory. "It would be like stepping into heaven after that stifling little room under the tin roof at Mrs. Twine's. Do you know I slept out in the fields every hot night last summer?" "You see you ain't a native of these parts," remarked Baxter with a large resigned movement of his palm leaf fan, "and your skin ain't thick enough to keep out the heat. I'll speak to 'em at Cedar Hill this very day, and if you like, I reckon, you can move out at the beginning of the week. I hope if you do, Smith, that you'll bear with Mr. Beverly. There's nothing in the universe that he wouldn't do for me if he had the chance. It ain't his fault, you see, that he's never had it." "Oh, I promise you I'll bear with him," laughed Ordway, as he left the office and went out into the warehouse. The knot of men was still in the centre of the building, and as Ordway walked down the long floor in search of Catesby and Frazier, he saw that a stranger had drifted in during his half hour in Baxter's office. With his first casual glance all that he observed of the man was a sleek fair head, slightly bald in the centre, and a pair of abnormally flat shoulders in a light gray coat, which had evidently left a clothing shop only a day or two before. Then as Frazier--a big, loud voiced planter--turned toward him with the exclamation, "here's Smith, himself, now!"--he saw the stranger wheel round abruptly and give vent the next instant to a sharp whistle of surprise. "Well, I'll be damned!" he said. For a minute the tobacco dust filled Ordway's throat and nostrils, and he felt that he was stifling for a breath of air. The dim length of the warehouse and the familiar shadowy figures of the planters receded before his eyes, and he saw again the bare walls of the prison chapel, with the rows of convicts seated in the pale, greenish light. With his recognition of the man before him, it seemed to him suddenly that the last year in Tappahannock was all a lie. The prison walls, the grated windows, and the hard benches of the shoe shop were closer realities than were the open door of the warehouse and the free, hot streets of the little town. "I am very happy to meet you, Mr. Smith," said the stranger, as he held out his hand with a good-humoured smile. "I beg your pardon," returned Ordway quietly, "but I did not catch your name." At the handshake a chill mounted from his finger tips to his shoulder, but drawing slightly away he stood his ground without so much as the perceptible flicker of an eyelash. "My name is Brown--Horatio Brown, very much at your service," answered the other, with a manner like that of a successful, yet obsequious commercial traveller. It was on Ordway's tongue to retort: "You lie--it's Gus Wherry!"--but checking the impulse with a frown, he turned on his heel and asked the two men for whom he was looking to come with him to settle their disagreement in Baxter's office. As he moved down the building an instant later, it was with an effort that he kept his gaze fixed straight ahead through the archway, for he was aware that every muscle in his body pricked him to turn back and follow Wherry to the end. That the man would be forced, in self-defence, to keep his secret for a time at least, he had caught in the smiling insolence of his glance; but that it was possible to enter into a permanent association or even a treaty with Gus Wherry, he knew to be a supposition that was utterly beyond the question. The crime for which the man had been sentenced he could not remember; but he had a vague recollection that something morbidly romantic in his history had combined with his handsome face to give him an ephemeral notoriety as the Adonis of imaginative shop-girls. Even in prison Wherry had attained a certain prominence because of his beauty, which at the time when Ordway first saw him had been conspicuous in spite of his convict's clothes. In the years since then his athletic figure had grown a trifle too heavy, and his fair hair had worn a little thin on the crown of his head; yet these slight changes of time had left him, Ordway admitted reluctantly, still handsome in the brawny, full-blooded style, which had generally made fools of women. His lips were still as red, his features as severely classic, and his manner was not less vulgar, and quite as debonnair as in the days when the newspapers had clamoured for his pictures. Even the soft, girlish cleft in his smooth-shaven chin, Ordway remembered now, with a return of the instinctive aversion with which it had first inspired him. Yet he was obliged to confess, as he walked ahead of Catesby and Frazier down the dusty floor of the warehouse, that if Wherry had been less of an uncompromising rascal, he would probably have made a particularly amiable acquaintance. CHAPTER II ORDWAY COMPROMISES WITH THE PAST When Ordway came out of Baxter's office, he found that Gus Wherry had left the warehouse, but the effect upon him of the man's appearance in Tappahannock was not to be overcome by the temporary withdrawal of his visible presence. Not only the town, but existence itself seemed altered, and in a way polluted, by the obtrusion of Wherry's personality upon the scene. Though he was not in the building, Ordway felt an angry conviction that he was in the air. It was impossible to breathe freely lest he might by accident draw in some insidious poison which would bring him under the influence of his past life and of Gus Wherry. As he went along the street at one o'clock to his dinner at Mrs. Twine's, he was grateful for the intensity of the sun, which rendered him, while he walked in it, almost incapable of thought. There was positive relief in the fact that he must count the uneven lengths of board walk which it was necessary for him to traverse, and the buzzing of the blue flies before his face forced his attention, at the minute, from the inward to the outward disturbance. When he reached the house, Mrs. Twine met him at the door and led him, with an inquiry as to his susceptibility to sunstroke, into the awful gloom of her tightly shuttered parlour. "I declar' you do look well nigh in yo' last gasp," she remarked cheerfully, bustling into the dining-room for a palm leaf fan. "Thar, now, come right in an' set down an' eat yo' dinner. Hot or cold, glad or sorry, I never saw the man yit that could stand goin' without his dinner at the regular hour. Sech is the habit in some folks that I remember when old Mat Fawling's second wife died he actually hurried up her funeral an hour earlier so as to git back in time for dinner. 'It ain't that I'm meanin' any disrespect to Sary, Mrs. Twine,' he said to me right whar I was layin' her out, 'but the truth is that I can't even mourn on an empty stomach. The undertaker put it at twelve,' he said, 'but I reckon we might manage to git out to the cemetery by eleven.'" "All the same if you'll give me a slice of bread and a glass of milk, I'll take it standing," remarked Ordway. "I'm sorry to leave you, Mrs. Twine, even for a few months," he added, "but I think I'll try to get board outside the town until the summer is over." "Well, I'll hate to lose you, suh, to be sure," responded Mrs. Twine, dealing out the fried batter with a lavish hand despite his protest, "for I respect you as a fellow mortal, though I despise you as a sex." Her hard eyes softened as she looked at him; but his gaze was on the walnut coloured oilcloth, where the flies dispersed lazily before the waving elm branch in the hands of the small Negro, and so he did not observe the motherly tenderness which almost beautified her shrewish face. "You've been very kind to me," he said, as he put his glass and plate down, and turned toward the door. "Whatever happens I shall always remember you and the children with pleasure." She choked violently, and looking back at the gasping sound, he saw that her eyes had filled suddenly with tears. Lifting a corner of her blue gingham apron, she mopped her face in a furious effort to conceal the cause of her unaccustomed emotion. "I declar' I'm all het up;" she remarked in an indignant voice, "but if you should ever need a friend in sickness, Mr. Smith," she added, after a moment in which she choked and coughed under the shelter of her apron, "you jest send for me an' I'll drop every thing I've got an' go. I'll leave husband an' children without a thought, suh, an' thar's nothin' I won't do for you with pleasure, from makin' a mustard plaster to layin' out yo' corpse. When I'm a friend, I'm a friend, if I do say it, an' you've had a way with me from the very first minute that I clapped eyes upon you. 'He may not have sech calves as you've got,' was what I said to Bill, 'but he's got a manner of his own, an' I reckon it's the manner an' not the calves that is the man.' Not that I'm meaning any slur on yo' shape, suh," she hastened to explain. "Well, I'll come to see you now and then," said Ordway, smiling, "and I shan't forget to take the children for a picnic as I promised." But with the words he remembered Gus Wherry, as he had seen him standing in the centre of Baxter's warehouse, and it seemed to him that even his promise to the children was rendered vain and worthless. The next day was Sunday, and immediately after dinner he walked over to Baxter's house, where he learned that Mrs. Brooke had expressed her willingness to receive him upon the following afternoon. "We had to talk Mr. Beverly over," said Baxter, chuckling. "At first he didn't like the idea because of some notion he'd got out of his great-grandfather's head about the sacredness of the family circle. However, he's all right now, though if you take my advice, Smith, you'll play a game of dominoes with him occasionally just to keep him kind of soft. The chief thing he has against you is your preachin' in the fields, for he told me he could never bring himself to countenance religion out of doors. He seems to think that it ought to be kept shut up tight." "Well, I'm glad he doesn't have to listen to me," responded Ordway. "By the way, you know I'm speaking in Catlett's grove of pines now. It's pleasanter away from the glare of the sun." Then as Baxter pressed him to come back to supper, he declined the oppressive hospitality and went back to Mrs. Twine's. That afternoon at five o'clock he went out to the grove of pines on the Southern edge of the town, to find his congregation gathered ahead of him on the rude plank benches which had been placed among the trees. The sunshine fell in drops through the tent of boughs overhead, and from the southwest a pleasant breeze had sprung up, blowing the pine needles in eddies about his feet. At sight of the friendly faces gathered so closely around him, he felt his foreboding depart as if it had been blown from him by the pure breeze; and beginning his simple discourse, he found himself absorbed presently in the religious significance of his subject, which chanced to be an interpretation of the parable of the prodigal son. Not until he was midway of his last sentence did he discover that Gus Wherry was standing just beyond the little wildrose thicket on the edge of the grove. In the instant of recognition the words upon his lips sounded strangely hollow and meaningless in his ears, and he felt again that the appearance of the man had given the lie, not only to his identity, but to his life. He knew himself at the instant to have changed from Daniel Smith to Daniel Ordway, and the name that he had worn honestly in Tappahannock showed to him suddenly as a falsehood and a cheat. Even his inward motive was contemptible in his eyes, and he felt himself dragged back in a single minute to the level upon which Wherry stood. As he appeared to Wherry, so he saw himself now by some distorted power of vision, and even his religion seemed but a convenient mask which he had picked up and used. When he went on a moment later with his closing words, he felt that the mockery of his speech must be evident to the ears of the congregation that knew and loved him. The gathering broke up slowly, but after speaking to several men who stood near him, Ordway turned away and went out into the road which led from Tappahannock in the direction of Cedar Hill. Only after he had walked rapidly for a mile, did the sound of footsteps, following close behind him, cause him to wheel round abruptly with an impatient exclamation. As he did so, he saw that Wherry had stopped short in the road before him. "I wanted to tell you how much obliged I am for your talk, Mr. Smith," he said, with a smile which appeared to flash at the same instant from his eyes and his teeth. "I declare you came pretty near converting me--by Jove, you did. It wouldn't be convenient to listen to you too often." Whatever might be said of the effusive manner of his compliments, his good humour was so evident in his voice, in his laugh, and even in his conspicuously flashing teeth, that Ordway, who had been prepared for a quarrel, was rendered almost helpless by so peaceable an encounter. Turning out of the road, he stepped back among the tall weeds growing in the corner of the old "worm" fence, and rested his tightly clinched hand on the topmost rail. "If you have anything to say to me, you will do me a favour by getting it over as soon as possible," he rejoined shortly. Wherry had taken off his hat and the red disc of the setting sun made an appropriate frame for his handsome head, upon which his fair hair grew, Ordway noticed, in the peculiar waving circle which is found on the heads of ancient statues. "Well, I can't say that I've anything to remark except that I congratulate you on your eloquence," he replied, with a kind of infernal amiability. "If this is your little game, you are doing it with a success which I envy from my boots up." "Since this is your business with me, there is no need for us to discuss it further," returned Ordway, at white heat. "Oh, but I say, don't hurry--what's the use? You're afraid I'm going to squeeze you, now, isn't that it?" "You'll get nothing out of me if you try." "That's as much as I want, I guess. Have I asked you for as much as a darned cent? Haven't I played the gentleman from the first minute that I spotted you?" Ordway nodded. "Yes, I suppose you've been as fair as you knew how," he answered, "I'll do you the justice to admit that." "Well, I tell you now," said Wherry, growing confidential as he approached, "my object isn't blackmail, it's human intercourse. I want a decent word or two, that's all, on my honour." "But I won't talk to you. I've nothing further to say, that's to be understood." "You're a confounded bully, that's what you are," observed Wherry, in the playful tones which he might have used to a child or an animal. "Now, I don't want a blooming cent out of you, that's flat--all I ask for is a pleasant word or two just as from man to man." "Then why did you follow me? And what are you after in Tappahannock?" Wherry laughed hilariously, while his remarkably fine teeth became the most prominent feature in his face. "The reply to your question, Smith," he answered pleasantly, "is that I followed you to say that you're an all-fired, first rate sort of a preacher--there's not harm in that much, is there? If you don't want me to chaff you about it, I'll swear to be as dead serious on the subject as if it were my wife's funeral. What I want is your hand down, I say--no matter what is trumps!" "My hand down for what?" demanded Ordway. "Just for plain decency, nothing more, I swear. You've started on your road, and I've started on mine, and the square thing is to live and let live, that's as I see it. Leave room for honest repentance to go to work, but don't begin to pull back before it's had a chance to begin. Ain't we all prodigals, when it comes to that, and the only difference is that some of us don't get a bite at the fatted calf." For a moment Ordway stared in silence to where the other stood with his face turned toward the red light of the sunset. "We're all prodigals," repeated Wherry, as if impressed by the ethical problem he had uttered unawares, "you and me and the President and every man. We've all fallen from grace, ain't we?--and it's neither here nor there that you and I have got the swine husks while the President has stuffed and eaten the fatted calf." "If you've honestly meant to begin again, I have certainly no wish to interfere," remarked Ordway, ignoring the other's excursion into the field of philosophy. As he spoke, however, it occurred to him that Wherry's reformation might have had better chance of success if it had been associated with fewer physical advantages. "Well, I'm much obliged to you," said Wherry, "and I'll say the same by you, here's my hand on it. Rise or fall, we'll play fair." "You haven't told me yet why you came to Tappahannock," rejoined Ordway, shortly. "Oh, a little matter of business. Are you settled here now?" "At the moment you can answer that question better than I." "You mean when I come, you quit?" Ordway nodded. "That's something like it." "Well, I shan't drive you out if I can help it--I hate to play the sneak. The truth is if you'd only get to believe it, there's not a more peaceable fellow alive if I don't get backed up into a place where there's no way out. When it comes to that I like the clean, straight road best, and I always have. From first to last, though, it's the women that have been dead against me, and I may say that a woman--one or more of 'em--has been back of every single scrape I ever got into in my life. If I'd had ten thousand a year and a fine looking wife, I'd have been a pillar in the Church and the father of a family. My tastes all lean that way," he added sentimentally. "I've always had a weakness for babies, and I've got it to this day." As he could think of nothing to reply to this touching confession, Ordway picked up a bit of wood from the ground, and taking out his knife, began whittling carelessly while he waited. "I suppose you think I want to work you for that fat old codger in the warehouse," observed Wherry suddenly, passing lightly from the pathetic to the facetious point of view, "but I'll give you my word I haven't thought of it a minute." "I'm glad you haven't," returned Ordway, quietly, "for you would be disappointed." "You mean you wouldn't trust me?" "I mean there's no place there. Whether I trust you or not is another question--and I don't." "Do you think I'd turn sneak?" "I think if you stay in Tappahannock that I'll clear out." "Well, you're a darn disagreeable chap," said Wherry, indignantly, "particularly after all you've had to say about the prodigal. But, all the same," he added, as his natural amiability got the better of his temper, "it isn't likely that I'll pitch my tent here, so you needn't begin to pack for a day or two at least." "Do you expect to go shortly?" "How about to-morrow? Would that suit you?" "Yes," said Ordway, gravely, "better than the day afterward." He threw the bit of wood away and looked steadily into the other's face. "If I can help you live honestly, I am ready to do it," he added. "Ready? How?" "However I can." "Well, you can't--not now," returned Wherry, laughing, "because I've worked that little scheme already without your backing. Honesty is going to be my policy from yesterday on. Did you, by the way," he added abruptly, "ever happen to run up against Jasper Trend?" "Jasper Trend?" exclaimed Ordway, "why, yes, he owns the cotton mills." "He makes a handsome little pile out of 'em too, I guess?" "I believe he does. Are you looking for a job with him?" At this Wherry burst again into his hilarious humour. "If I am," he asked jokingly, "will you promise to stand off and not spoil the game?" "I have nothing to do with Trend," replied Ordway, "but the day you come here is my last in Tappahannock." "Well, I'm sorry for that," remarked Wherry, pleasantly, "for it appears to be a dull enough place even with the addition of your presence." He put on his hat and held out his hand with a friendly gesture. "Are you ready to walk back now?" he inquired. "When I am," answered Ordway, "I shall walk back alone." Even this rebuff Wherry accepted with his invincible good temper. "Every man to his company, of course," he responded, "but as to my coming to Tappahannock, if it is any comfort to you to know it, you needn't begin to pack." CHAPTER III A CHANGE OF LODGING When Ordway awoke the next morning, it seemed to him that Wherry had taken his place among the other nightmares, which, combined with the reflected heat from the tin roof, had rendered his sleep broken and distracted. With the sunrise his evil dreams and his recollections of Wherry had scattered together, and when, after the early closing at Baxter's warehouse, he drove out to Cedar Hill, with the leather bag containing his few possessions at his feet, he felt that there had been something morbid, almost inhuman, in the loathing aroused in him by the handsome face of his fellow prisoner. In any case, for good or for evil, he determined to banish the man utterly from his thoughts. The vehicle in which he sat was an ancient gig driven by a decrepit Negro, and as it drew up before the steps at Cedar Hill, he was conscious almost of a sensation of shame because he had not approached the ruined mansion on foot. Then descending over the dusty wheel, he lifted out his bag, and rapped twice upon the open door with the greenish knocker which he supposed had once been shining brass. Through the hall a sleepy breeze blew from the honeysuckle arbour over the back porch, and at his right hand the swinging sword still clanked against the discoloured plaster. So quiet was the house that it seemed as if the movement of life within had been suspended, and when at last the figure of Mrs. Brooke floated down the great staircase under the pallid light from the window above, she appeared to him as the disembodied spirit of one of the historic belles who had tripped up and down in trailing brocades and satin shoes. Instead of coming toward him, she completed her ghostly impression by vanishing suddenly into the gloom beyond the staircase, and a moment afterward his knock was answered by a small, embarrassed darky in purple calico. Entering the dining-room by her invitation, he stumbled upon Beverly stretched fast asleep, and snoring slightly, upon a horsehair sofa, with the brown and white setter dozing on a mat at his feet. At the approach of footsteps, the dog, without lifting its head, began rapping the floor heavily with its tail, and aroused by the sound, Beverly opened one eye and struggled confusedly into an upright position. "I was entirely overcome by the heat," he remarked apologetically, as he rose from the sofa and held out his hand, "but it is a pleasure to see you, Mr. Smith. I hope you did not find the sun oppressive on your drive out. Amelia, my dear," he remarked courteously, as Mrs. Brooke entered in a freshly starched print gown, "I feel a return of that strange dizziness I spoke of, so if it will not inconvenience you, may I beg for another of your refreshing lemonades?" Mrs. Brooke, who had just completed the hasty ironing of her dress, which she had put on while it was still warm, met his request with an amiable but exhausted smile. "Don't you think six lemonades in one day too many?" she asked anxiously, when she had shaken hands with Ordway. "But this strange dizziness, my dear? An iced drink, I find far more effective than a bandage." "Very well, I'll make it of course, if it gives you any relief," replied his wife, wondering if she would be able to bake the bread by the time Beverly demanded supper. "If you'll come up stairs now, Mr. Smith," she added, "Malviny will show you to the blue room." Malviny, who proved upon further acquaintance to be the eldest great-grandchild of Aunt Mehitable, descended like a hawk upon his waiting property, while Mrs. Brooke led the procession up the staircase to an apartment upon the second floor. The blue room, as he discovered presently, contained a few rather fine pieces of old mahogany, a grandfather's chair, with a freshly laundered chintz cover, and a rag carpet made after the "log cabin" pattern. Of the colour from which it had taken its name, there was visible only a faded sampler worked elaborately in peacock blue worsteds, by one "Margaret, aged nine." Beyond this the walls were bare of decoration, though an oblong streak upon the plaster suggested to Ordway that a family portrait had probably been removed in the hurried preparations for his arrival. After remarking that she hoped he would "make himself quite at home," Mrs. Brooke was glancing inquiringly about the room with her large, pale, rather prominent eyes, when a flash of purple in the doorway preceded the announcement that "Marse Beverly done turn right green wid de dizziness, en wus axin' kinder faintlike fur his lemonade." "My poor husband," explained the exhausted wife, "contracted a chronic heart trouble in the War, and he suffers so patiently that at times we are in danger of forgetting it." Pressing her aching head, she hurried downstairs to prepare Beverly's drink, while Ordway, after closing the broken latch of the door, walked slowly up and down the large, cool, barely furnished room. After his cramped chamber at Mrs. Twine's his eyes rested with contentment upon the high white ceiling overhead, and then descended leisurely to the stately bedstead, with its old French canopy above, and to the broad, red brick hearth freshly filled with odorous boughs of cedar. The cleanly quiet of the place restored to him at once the peace which he had missed in the last few days in Tappahannock, and his nerves, which had revolted from Mrs. Twine's scolding voice and slovenly table, became composed again in the ample space of these high white walls. Even "Margaret, aged nine," delivered a soothing message to him in the faded blues of her crewel work. When he had unpacked his bag, he drew the chintz-covered chair to the window, and leaning his elbow on the sill, looked out gratefully upon the overgrown lawn filled with sheepmint and clover. Though it was already twilight under the cedars, the lawn was still bright with sunshine, and beyond the dwindling clump of cabbage roses in the centre, he saw that the solitary cow had not yet finished her evening meal. As he watched her, his ears caught the sound of light footsteps on the porch below, and a moment afterward, he saw Emily pass from the avenue to the edge of the lawn, where she called the cow by name in a caressing voice. Lifting her head, the animal started at a slow walk through the tangled weeds, stopping from time to time to bite a particularly tempting head of purple clover. As the setting sun was in Emily's eyes, she raised her bared arm while she waited, to shield her forehead, and Ordway was struck afresh by the vigorous grace which showed itself in her slightest movement. The blue cotton dress she wore, which had shrunk from repeated washings until it had grown scant in the waist and skirt, revealed the firm rounded curve of her bosom and her slender hips. Standing there in the faint sunshine against the blue-black cedars, he felt her charm in some mysterious way to be akin to the beauty of the hour and the scene. The sight of her blue gown was associated in his mind with a peculiar freshness of feeling--an intensified enjoyment of life. When the cow reached her side, the girl turned back toward the barnyard, and the two passed out of sight together beyond the avenue. As he followed them with his gaze, Ordway had no longer any thought of Gus Wherry, or of his possible presence in Tappahannock upon the morrow. The evil association was withdrawn now from his consciousness, and in its place he found the tranquil pleasure which he had felt while he watched the sunshine upon the sheepmint and clover--a pleasure not unlike that he had experienced when Emily's blue cotton dress was visible against the cedars. The faces of the men who had listened to him yesterday returned to his memory; and as he saw them again seated on the rude benches among the pines, his heart expanded in an emotion which was like the melting of his will into the Divine Will which contained and enveloped all. A knock at the door startled him back to his surroundings, and when he went to answer it, he found the small frightened servant standing outside, with an old serving tray clutched desperately to her bosom. From her excited stutter he gathered that supper awaited him upon the table, and descending hastily, he found the family already assembled in the dining-room. Beverly received him graciously, Emily quietly, and the children assured him enthusiastically that they were glad he had come to stay because now they might eat ham every night. When they had been properly suppressed by Emily, her brother took up the conversation which he carried on in a polite, rambling strain that produced upon Ordway the effect of a monologue delivered in sleep. "I hope the birds won't annoy you at daybreak, Mr. Smith," he remarked, "the ivy at your windows harbours any number of wrens and sparrows." "Oh, I like them," replied Ordway, "I've been sleeping under a tin roof in Tappahannock which no intelligent bird or human being would approach." "I remember," said Mr. Beverly pensively, "that there was a tin roof on the hotel at Richmond I stayed at during the War when I first met my wife. Do you recall how very unpleasant that tin roof was, Amelia? Or were you too young at the time to notice it? You couldn't have been more than fifteen, I suppose? Yes, you must have been sixteen, because I remember when I marched past the door with my regiment, I noticed you standing on the balcony, in a long white dress, and you couldn't have worn long dresses before you were sixteen." Mrs. Brooke glanced up calmly from the coffee-pot. "The roof was slate," she remarked with the rigid adherence to a single idea, which characterised her devoted temperament. "Ah, to be sure, it was slate," admitted Beverly, turning his genial face upon Ordway, "and I remember now it wasn't the roof that was unpleasant, but the food--the food was very unpleasant indeed, was it not, Amelia?" "I don't think we ever got enough of it to test its quality," replied Mrs. Brooke, "poor mama was so reduced at the end of a month that she had to take up three inches of her bodice." "It's quite clear to me now," observed Beverly, delightedly, "it was not that the food was unpleasant, but that it was scarce--very scarce." He had finished his supper; and when he had risen from the table with his last amiable words, he proceeded to install himself, without apparent selection, into the only comfortable chair which the room contained. Drawing out his pipe a moment afterward, he waved Ordway, with a hospitable gesture, to a stiff wooden seat, and invited him in a persuasive tone, to join him in a smoke. "My tobacco is open to you," he observed, "but I regret to say that I am unable to offer you a cigar. Yet a cigar, I maintain, is the only form in which a gentleman should use tobacco." Ordway took out the leather case he carried and offered it to him with a smile. "I'm afraid they are not all that they might be," he remarked, as Beverly supplied himself with a murmured word of thanks. Mrs. Brooke brought out her darning, and Emily, after disappearing into the pantry, sent back the small servant for the dishes. The girl did not return again before Ordway took his candle from the mantel-piece and went upstairs; and he remembered after he had reached his bedroom that she had spoken hardly two words during the entire evening. Had she any objection, he asked himself now, to his presence in the household? Was it possible, indeed, that Mrs. Brooke should have taken him in against her sister-in-law's inclination, or even without her knowledge? In the supposition there was not only embarrassment, but a sympathetic resentment; and he resolved that if such proved to be the case, he was in honour bound to return immediately to Tappahannock. Then he remembered the stifling little room under the tin roof with a feeling of thankfulness for at least this one night's escape. Awaking at dawn he lay for a while contentedly listening to the flutter of the sparrows in the ivy, and watching the paling arch of the sky beyond the pointed tops of the cedars. A great peace seemed to encompass him at the moment, and he thought with gratitude of the quiet evening he had spent with Beverly. It was dull enough probably, when one came to think of it, yet the simple talk, the measured courtesies, returned to him now as a part of the pleasant homeliness of his surroundings. The soft starlight on the sheepmint and clover, the chirp of the small insects in the trees, the refreshing moisture which had crept toward him with the rising dew, the good-night kisses of the children, delivered under protest and beneath Mrs. Brooke's eyes--all these trivial recollections were attended in his thoughts by a train of pensive and soothing associations. Across the hall he heard the soft opening and closing of a door, and immediately afterward the sound of rapid footsteps growing fainter as they descended the staircase. Already the room was full of a pale golden light, and as he could not sleep again because of the broken shutter to the window which gave on the lawn, he rose and dressed himself with an eagerness which recalled the early morning risings of his childhood. A little later when he went downstairs, he found that the front door was still barred, and removing the heavy iron fastenings, he descended the steps into the avenue, where the faint sunbeams had not yet penetrated the thick screen of boughs. Remembering the garden, while he stood watching the sunrise from the steps, he turned presently into the little footpath which led by the house, and pushing aside the lilacs, from which the blossoms had all dropped, he leaned on the swinging gate before the beds he had spaded on those enchanted nights. Now the rank weeds were almost strangling the plants, and it occurred to him that there was still work ready for his hand in the Brooke's garden. He was telling himself that he would begin clearing the smothered rows as soon as his morning at the warehouse was over, when the old hound ran suddenly up to him, and turning quickly he saw Emily coming from the springhouse with a print of golden butter in her hand. "So it was you I heard stirring before sunrise!" he exclaimed impulsively, as his eyes rested on her radiant face, over which the early mist had scattered a pearly dew like the fragrant moisture upon a rose. "Yes, it was I. At four o'clock I remembered there was no butter for breakfast, so I got up and betook myself to the churn." "And this is the result?" he asked, glancing down at the delicious creamy mould she had just worked into shape and crowned with a printed garland of thistles. "It makes me hungry enough for my muffins upon the minute." "You shall have them shortly," she said, smiling, "but do you prefer pop-overs or plain?" He met the question with serious consideration. "Well, if the choice is mine I think I'll have pop-overs," he replied. Before his unbroken gravity her quick humour rippled forth. "Then I must run to Aunt Mehitable," she responded merrily, "for I suspect that she has already made them plain." With a laughing nod she turned from him, and following the little path entered the house under the honeysuckle arbour on the back porch. CHAPTER IV SHOWS THAT A LAUGH DOES NOT HEAL A HEARTACHE When Emily entered the dining-room, she found that Beverly had departed from his usual custom sufficiently to appear in time for breakfast. "I hardly got a wink of sleep last night, my dear," he remarked, "and I think it was due entirely to the heavy supper you insisted upon giving us." "But, Beverly, we must have hot things now," said Emily, as she arranged the crocheted centrepiece upon the table. "Mr. Smith is our boarder, you know, not our guest." "The fact that he is a boarder," commented Beverly, with dignity, "entirely relieves me of any feeling of responsibility upon his account. If he were an invited guest in the house, I should feel as you do that hot suppers are a necessity, but when a man pays for the meals he eats, we are no longer under an obligation to consider his preferences." "His presence in the household is a great trial to us all," observed his wife, whose attitude of general acceptance was modified by the fact that she accepted everything for the worst. Her sense of tragic values had been long since obliterated by a gray wash of melancholy that covered all. "Well, I don't see that he is very zealous about interfering with us," remarked Emily, almost indignantly, "he doesn't appear to be of a particularly sociable disposition." "Yes, I agree with you that he is unusually depressing," rejoined Mrs. Brooke. "It's a pity, perhaps, that we couldn't have secured a blond person--they are said to be of a more sanguine temperament, and I remember that the blond boarder at Miss Jennie Colton's, when I called there once, was exceedingly lively and entertaining. But it's too late, of course, to give advice now; I can only hope and pray that his morals, at least, are above reproach." As the entire arrangement with Baxter had been made by Mrs. Brooke herself upon the day that Wilson, the grocer, had sent in his bill for the fifth time, Emily felt that an impatient rejoinder tripped lightly upon her tongue; but restraining her words with an effort, she observed cheerfully an instant later that she hoped Mr. Smith would cause no inconvenience to the family. "Well, he seems to be a respectable enough person," admitted Beverly, in his gracious manner, "but, of course, if he were to become offensively presuming it would be a very simple matter to drop him a hint." "It reminds me of a case I read of in the newspaper a few weeks ago," said Mrs. Brooke, "where a family in Roanoke took a stranger to board with them and shortly afterward were all poisoned by a powder in the soup. No, they weren't all poisoned," she corrected herself thoughtfully, "for I am positive now that the boarder was the only one who died. It was the cook who put the poison into the soup and the boarder who ate all of it. I remember the Coroner remarked at the inquest that he had saved the lives of the entire family." "All the same I hope Mr. Smith won't eat all the soup," observed Emily. "It terrifies me at times," murmured Amelia, "to think of the awful power that we place so carelessly in the hands of cooks." "In that case, my dear, it might be quite a safeguard always to have a boarder at the table," suggested Beverly, with his undaunted optimism. "But surely, Amelia," laughed Emily, "you can't suppose that after she has lived in the family for seventy years, Aunt Mehitable would yield at last to a passing temptation to destroy us?" "I imagine the poor boarder suspected nothing while he ate his soup," returned Mrs. Brooke. "No, I repeat that in cases like that no one is safe, and the only sensible attitude is to be prepared for anything." "Well, if I'm to be poisoned, I think I'd prefer to take it without preparation," rejoined Emily. "There is Mr. Smith now in the hall, so we may as well send Malviny to bring in breakfast." When Ordway entered an instant later with his hearty greeting, even Mrs. Brooke unbent a trifle from her rigid melancholy and joined affably in the conversation. By a curious emotional paradox she was able to enjoy him only as an affliction; and his presence in the house had served as an excuse for a continuous parade of martyrdom. From the hour of his arrival, she had been perfectly convinced not only that he interfered with her customary peace of mind, but that he prevented her as surely from receiving her supply of hot water upon rising and her ordinary amount of food at dinner. But as the days went by he fell so easily into his place in the family circle that they forgot at last to remark either his presence or his personal peculiarities. After dinner he would play his game of dominoes with Beverly in the breezy hall, until the sunlight began to slant across the cedars, when he would go out into the garden and weed the overgrown rows. Emily had seen him but seldom alone during the first few weeks of his stay, though she had found a peculiar pleasure in rendering him the small domestic services of which he was quite unconscious. How should he imagine that it was her hand that arranged the flowers upon his bureau, that placed his favourite chair near the window, and that smoothed the old-fashioned dimity coverlet upon his bed. Still less would he have suspected that the elaborate rag carpet upon his floor was one which she had contributed to his comfort from her own room. Had he known these things he would probably have been melancholy enough to have proved congenial company even to Mrs. Brooke, though, in reality, there was, perhaps, nothing he could have offered Emily which would have exceeded the pleasure she now found in these simple services. Ignorant as she was in all worldly matters, in grasping this essential truth, she had stumbled unawares upon the pure philosophy of love--whose satisfaction lies, after all, not in possession, but in surrender. She was still absorbed in the wonder of this discovery, when going out into the garden one afternoon to gather tomatoes for a salad, she found him working among the tall, green corn at the end of the long walk. As he turned toward her in the late sunshine, which slanted across the waving yellow tassels, she noticed that there was the same eager, youthful look in his face that she had seen on the night when she had come down to find him spading by the moonbeams. In response to her smile he came out from among the corn, and went with her down the narrow space which separated two overgrown hills of tomato plants. He wore no coat and his striped cotton shirt was open at the throat and wrists. "It's delicious in the corn now," he said; "I can almost fancy that I hear the light rustle along the leaves." "You love the country so much that you ought to have been a farmer," she returned, "then you might have raised tobacco." "That reminds me that I worked yesterday in your brother's crop--but it's too sticky for me. I like the garden better." "Then you ought to have a garden of your own. Is all your chopping and your digging merely for the promotion of the general good?" "Isn't it better so?" he asked, smiling, "particularly when I share in the results as I shall in this case? Who knows but that I shall eat this wonderful tomato to-night at supper?" She took it from his hand and placed it on the lettuce leaves in the bottom of the basket upon her arm. "You make a careful choice, I see," she observed, "it is a particularly fine one." "I suppose your philosophy would insist that after plucking it I should demand the eating of it also?" "I don't know about my philosophy--I haven't any--but my common sense would." "I'm not sure," he returned half seriously, "that I have much opinion of common sense." "But you would have," she commented gravely, "if you had happened to be born with Beverly for a brother. I used to think that all men were alike," she added, "but you don't remind me of Beverly in the very least." As she spoke she turned her face slightly toward him, and still leaning over the luxuriant tomato row, looked up at him joyously with her sparkling eyes. Her breath came quickly and he saw her bosom rise and fall under the scant bodice of her blue cotton gown. Almost unconsciously he had drifted into an association with her which constituted for him the principal charm of his summer at Cedar Hill. "On the other hand I've discovered many points of resemblance," he retorted in his whimsical tone. "Well, you're both easy to live in the house with, I admit that." "And we're both perfectly amiable as long as everybody agrees with us and nobody crosses us," he added. "I shouldn't like to cross you," she said, laughing, "but then why should I? Isn't it very pleasant as it is now?" "Yes, it is very pleasant as it is now," he repeated slowly. Turning away from her he stood looking in silence over the tall corn to the amber light that fell beyond the clear outline of a distant hill. The association was, as she had just said, very pleasant in his thoughts, and the temptation he felt now was to drift on with the summer, leaving events to shape themselves as they would in the future. What harm, he demanded, could come of any relation so healthful, so simple as this? "I used to make dolls of ears of corn when I was little," said Emily, laughing; "they were the only ones I had except those Beverly carved for me out of hickory nuts. The one with yellow tassels I named Princess Goldylocks until she began to turn brown and then I called her Princess Fadeaway." At her voice, which sounded as girlish in his imagination as the voice of Alice when he had last heard it, he started and looked quickly back from the sunset into her face. "Has it ever occurred to you," he asked, "how little--how very little you know of me? By you I mean all of you, especially your brother and Mrs. Brooke." Her glowing face questioned him for a moment. "But what is knowledge," she demanded, "if it isn't just feeling, after all?" "I wonder why under heaven you took me in?" he went on, leaving her words unanswered. Had Mrs. Brooke stood in Emily's place, she would probably have replied quite effectively, "because the grocer's bill had come for the fifth time"; but the girl had learned to wear her sincerity in a less conspicuous fashion, so she responded to his question merely by a polite evasion. "We have certainly had no cause to regret it," was what she said. "What I wanted to say to you in the beginning and couldn't, was just this," he resumed, choosing his words with a deliberation which sounded strained and unnatural, "I suppose it can't make any difference to you--it doesn't really concern you, of course--that's what I felt--but," he hesitated an instant and then went on more rapidly, "my daughter's birthday is to-day. She is fifteen years old and it is seven years since I saw her." "Seven years?" repeated Emily, as she bent over and carefully selected a ripe tomato. "Doubtless I shouldn't know her if I were to pass her in the street," he pursued, after a minute. "But it's worse than that and it's harder--for it's as many years since I saw my wife." She had not lifted her head from the basket, and he felt suddenly that her stillness was not the stillness of flesh, but of marble. "Perhaps I ought to have told you all this before," he went on again, "perhaps it wasn't fair to let you take me in in ignorance of this and of much else?" Raising her head, she stood looking into his face with her kind, brown eyes. "But how could these things possibly affect us?" she asked, smiling slightly. "No," he replied slowly, "they didn't affect you, of course--they don't now. It made no difference to any of you, I thought. How could it make any?" "No, it makes no difference to any of us," she repeated quietly. "Then, perhaps, I've been wrong in telling you this to-day?" She shook her head. "Not in telling me, but," she drew a long breath, "it might be as well not to speak of it to Beverly or Amelia--at least for a while." "You mean they would regret their kindness?" "It would make them uncomfortable--they are very old-fashioned in their views. I don't know just how to put it, but it seems to them--oh, a terrible thing for a husband and wife to live apart." "Well, I shan't speak of it, of course--but would it not be better for me to return immediately to Tappahannock?" For an instant she hesitated. "It would be very dreadful at Mrs. Twine's." "I know it," he answered, "but I'm ready to go back, this minute if you should prefer it." "But I shouldn't," she rejoined in her energetic manner. "Why should I, indeed? It is much wiser for you to stay here until the end of the summer." When she had finished he looked at her a moment without replying. The light had grown very faint and through the thin mist that floated up from the fields her features appeared drawn and pallid. "What I can't make you understand is that even though it is all my fault--every bit my fault from the beginning--yet I have never really wanted to do evil in my heart. Though I've done wrong, I've always wanted to do right." If she heard his words they made little impression upon her, for going out into the walk, she started, without speaking, in the direction of the house. Then, when she had moved a few steps from him, she stopped and looked back as if she had forgotten something that had been in her thoughts. "I meant to tell you that I hope--I pray it will come right again," she said. "I thank you," he answered, and drew back into the corn so that she might go on alone. A moment later as Emily walked rapidly down the garden path, it seemed to her that the distance between the gate and the house covered an immeasurable space. Her one hope was that she might go to her room for at least the single hour before supper, and that there, behind a locked door with her head buried in the pillows, she might shed the hot tears which she felt pressing against her eyelids. Entering the hall, she had started swiftly up the staircase, with the basket of tomatoes still on her arm, when Mrs. Brooke intercepted her by descending like a phantom from the darkened bend. "O Emily, I've been looking for you for twenty minutes," she cried in despairing tones. "The biscuits refused to rise and Aunt Mehitable is in a temper. Will you run straight out to the kitchen and beat up a few quick muffins for supper." Drawing back into the corner of the staircase, Emily glanced down upon the tomatoes lying in the bottom of the basket; then without raising her eyes she spoke in a voice which might have uttered appropriately a lament upon the universal tragedy of her sex. "I suppose I may as well make them plain?" she said. CHAPTER V TREATS OF A GREAT PASSION IN A SIMPLE SOUL FOR several weeks in August Ordway did not go into Tappahannock, and during his vacation from the warehouse he made himself useful in a number of small ways upon the farm. The lawn was trimmed, the broken fences mended, the garden kept clear of wiregrass, and even Mrs. Brooke's "rockery" of portulaca, with which she had decorated a mouldering stump, received a sufficient share of his attention to cause the withered plants to grow green again and blossom in profusion. When the long, hot days had drawn to a close, he would go out with a watering-pot and sprinkle the beds of petunias and geraniums which Emily had planted in the bare spots beside the steps. "The truth is I was made for this sort of thing, you know," he remarked to her one day. "If it went on forever I should never get bored or tired." Something candid and boyish in his tone caused her to look up at him quickly with a wondering glance. Since the confession of his marriage her manner to him had changed but little, yet she was aware, with a strange irritation against herself, that she never heard his voice or met his eyes without remembering instantly that he had a wife whom he had not seen for seven years. The mystery of the estrangement was as great to her as it had ever been, for since that afternoon in the garden he had not referred again to the subject; and judging the marriage relation by the social code of Beverly and Amelia, she had surmised that some tremendous tragedy had been the prelude to a separation of so many years. As he lifted the watering-pot he had turned a little away from her, and while her eyes rested upon his thick dark hair, powdered heavily with gray above the temples, and upon the strong, sunburnt features of his profile, she asked herself in perplexity where that other woman was and if it were possible that she had forsaken him? "I wonder what she is like and if she is pretty or plain?" she thought. "I almost hope she isn't pretty, and yet it's horrid of me and I wonder why I hope so? What can it matter since he hasn't seen her for seven years, and if he ever sees her again, she will probably be no longer young. I suppose he isn't young, and yet I've never thought so before and somehow it doesn't seem to matter. No, I'm sure his wife is beautiful," she reflected a moment later, as a punishment for her uncharitable beginning, "and she has fair hair, I hope, and a lovely white skin and hands that are always soft and delicate. Yes, that is how it is and I am very glad," she concluded resolutely. And it seemed to her that she could see distinctly this woman whom she had imagined and brought to life. "I can't help believing that you would tire of it in time," she said presently aloud. "Do you tire of it?" he asked in a softened voice, turning his gaze upon her. "I?" she laughed, with a bitterness he had never heard in her tone before, "oh, yes, but I suppose that doesn't count in the long run. Did there ever live a woman who hasn't felt at times like railing against the milk pans and denying the eternal necessity of ham and eggs?" Though she spoke quite seriously the simplicity of her generalisation brought a humorous light to his eyes; and in his imagination he saw Lydia standing upon the white bearskin rug against the oval mirror and the gold-topped bottles upon her dressing-table. "Well, if I'd made as shining a success at my job as you have at yours, I think I'd be content," was all he said. She laughed merrily, and he saw that the natural sweetness of her temper was proof against idle imaginings or vain desires. "You think then that it is better to do a small thing well than a big thing badly?" she inquired. "But it isn't a small thing," he protested, "it's a great big thing--it's the very biggest thing of all." A provoking smile quivered on her lips, and he saw the dimple come and go in her cheek. "I am glad at least that you like my ham and eggs," she retorted mockingly. "I do," he answered gravely, "I like your ham and eggs, but I admire your courage, also." She shook her head. "It's the cheapest of the virtues." "Not your kind, my dear child--it's the rarest and the costliest of achievements." "Oh, I don't know how serious you are," she answered lightly, "but it's a little like putting a man on a desert island and saying, 'make your bed or lie on the rocks.' He's pretty apt to make his bed, isn't he?" "Not in the least. He usually puts up a flag of distress and then sits down in the sand and looks out for a ship." Her voice lost its merriment. "When my ship shows on the horizon, it will be time enough to hoist my flag." A reply was on his lips, but before he could utter it, she had turned away and was moving rapidly across the lawn to the house. The next morning Ordway went into Tappahannock, not so much on account of the little business he found awaiting him at the warehouse, as urged by the necessity of supplying Beverly with cigars. To furnish Beverly three times a day with the kind of cigar he considered it "worth while for a gentleman to smoke"--even though his choice fell, in Ordway's opinion, upon a quite inferior brand--had become in the end a courtesy too extravagant for him to contemplate with serenity. Yet he knew that almost in spite of himself this tribute to Beverly was now an established fact, and that as long as he remained at Cedar Hill he would continue to supply with eagerness the smoke which Beverly would accept with affability. The town was dull enough at mid August, he remembered from the blighting experience of last summer; and now, after a fierce drought which had swept the country, he saw the big, fan-shaped leaves on Mrs. Twine's evening glory hanging like dusty rags along the tin roof of the porch. Banks was away, Baxter was away, and the only acquaintance he greeted was Bill Twine, sitting half drunk, in his shirt sleeves and collarless, on the front steps. There was positive relief when, at the end of an hour, he retraced his steps, with Beverly's cigars under his right arm. After this the summer declined slowly into autumn, and Ordway began to count the long golden afternoons as they dropped one by one into his memory of Cedar Hill. An appeal to Mrs. Brooke, whom he had quite won over by his attentions to Beverly and the children, delayed his moving back into Tappahannock until the beginning of November, and he told himself with satisfaction that it would be possible to awake on frosty October mornings and look out upon the red and gold of the landscape. Late in September Banks returned from his vacation, and during his first visit to Cedar Hill, he showed himself painfully nervous and ill at ease. But coming out for a walk with Ordway one afternoon, he suggested at the end of their first mile that they should sit down and have a smoke beneath a young cherry tree upon the roadside. As he lit his pipe he held the match in his hand until it burned his fingers; then throwing it into the grass, he turned upon his companion as eloquently despairing a look as it is in the power of a set of naturally cheerful features to assume. "Smith," he asked in a hollow voice, "do you suppose it's really any worse to die by your own hand than by disease?" "By Jove!" exclaimed Ordway, and the moment afterward, "Come, now, out with it, Banks. How has she been behaving this time?" Banks lowered his voice, while he glanced suspiciously up at the branches of the cherry tree beneath which they sat. "She hates the sight of me," he answered, with a groan. "Nonsense," rejoined Ordway, cheerfully. "Love has before now worn the mask of scorn." "But it hasn't worn the mask of boredom," retorted the despairing Banks. For a minute his answer appeared final even to Ordway, who stared blankly over the ripened cornfield across the road, without, for the life of him, being able to frame a single encouraging sentence in reply. "If it's the last word I speak," pursued Banks, biting desperately at the stem of his pipe, "she cannot abide the sight of me." "But how does she show it?" demanded Ordway, relieved that he was not expected to combat the former irrefutable statement. "She tried to keep me away from the springs where she went, and when I would follow her, whether or no, she hardly opened her mouth to me for the first two days. Then if I asked her to go to walk she would say it was too hot for walking, and if I asked her to drive she'd answer that she didn't drive with men. As if she and I hadn't been together in a dog-cart over every road within twenty miles of Tappahannock!" "But perhaps the custom of the place was different?" "No, sir, it was not custom that kept her," replied Banks, in a bitterness that scorned deception, "for she went with others. It was the same thing about dancing, too, for if I asked her to dance, she would always declare that she didn't have the strength to use her fan, and the minute after I went away, I'd see her floating round the ball-room in somebody else's arms. Once I did get her to start, but she left off after the first round, because, she said, we could not keep in step. And yet I'd kept in step with her ever since we went on roller skates together." He broke off for an instant, knocked the cold ashes out of his pipe, and plucking a long blade of grass, began chewing it nervously as he talked. "And yet if you could only have seen her when she came down to the ball-room in her white organdie and blue ribbons," he exclaimed presently, in an agony of recollection. "Well, I'm rather glad on the whole that I didn't," rejoined Ordway. "You'd have fallen in love with her if you had--you couldn't have helped it." "Then, thank heaven, I escaped the test. It's a pretty enough pickle as it is now." "I could have stood it all," said Banks, "if it hadn't been for the other man. She might have pulled every single strand of my hair out if she'd wanted to, and I'd have grit my teeth and pretended that I liked it. I didn't care how badly she treated me. What hurt me was how well she treated the other man." "Did she meet him for the first time last summer?" asked Ordway. "Oh no, she's known him ever since she went North in the spring--but it's worse now than it's ever been and, upon my word, she doesn't seem to have eyes or ears for anybody else." "So you're positive she means to marry him?" "She swears she doesn't--that it's only fun, you know. But in my heart I believe it is as good as settled between them." "Well, if she's made up her mind to it, I don't, for the life of me, see how you're going to stop her," returned Ordway, smiling. "But a year ago she'd made up her mind to marry me," groaned Banks. "If she's as variable as that, my dear boy, perhaps the wind will blow her heart back to you again." "I don't believe she's got one," rejoined Banks, with the merciless dissection of the pure passion; "I sometimes think that she hasn't any more heart than--than--I don't know what." "In that case I'd drag myself together and let her alone. I'd go back to my work and resolve never to give her another thought." "Then," replied Banks, "you might have all the good sense that there is in the business, but you wouldn't be in love. Now I love her for what she is, and I don't want her changed even if it would make her kinder. When she used to be sweet I thought sweetness the most fascinating thing on earth, and now that she bangs me, I've come to think that banging is." "I begin to understand," remarked Ordway, laughing, "why you are not what might be called a successful lover." "It isn't because I don't know the way," returned Banks gloomily, "it's because I can't practice it even after I've planned it out. Don't I lie awake at night making up all sorts of speeches I'm going to say to her in the morning? Oh, I can be indifferent enough when I'm dressing before the mirror--I've even put on a purple cravat because she hated it, but I've always taken it off again before I went downstairs to breakfast. Then as soon as I lay my eyes upon her, I feel my heart begin to swell as if it would burst out of my waistcoat, and instead of the flippant speeches I've planned, I crawl and whimper just as I did the day before." They were seated under a cherry tree by the side of the road which led to Tappahannock, and as Banks finished his confessions, a large, dust covered buggy was seen approaching them from the direction of the town. As Ordway recognised Baxter through the cloud of dust raised by the wheels, he waved his hat with a shout of welcome, and a minute later the buggy reached them and drew up in the patch of briars upon the roadside. "I was just on my way to see you, Smith," said Baxter, as he let fall the reins and held out his great dirty hand, "but I'm too heavy to get out, and if I once sat down on the ground, I reckon it would take more than the whole of Tappahannock to pull me up again." "Well, go ahead to Cedar Hill," suggested Ordway, "and we'll follow you at a brisk walk." "No, I won't do that. I can say what I have got to say right here over the wheel, if you'll stand awhile in the dust. Major Leary was in to see me again this morning, and the notion he's got in his head now is that you're the man to run for Mayor of Tappahannock." "I!" exclaimed Ordway, drawing back slightly as he spoke. "He forgets that I'm out of the question. I refuse, of course." "Well, you see, he says you're the only man we've got strong enough to defeat Jasper Trend--and he's as sure as shot that you'd have something like a clean walk-over. He's already drawn up a big red flag with 'The People's Candidate: Ten Commandment Smith,' upon it. I asked him why he wouldn't put just plain 'Daniel,' but he said that little Biblical smack alone was worth as much as a bushel of votes to you. If you drew the line at 'Ten Commandment' he's going to substitute 'Daniel-in-the-Lions'-Den Smith' or something of that kind." "Tell him to stop it," broke in Ordway, with a smothered anger in his usually quiet voice, "he's said nothing to me about it, and I decline it absolutely and without consideration!" "You mean you won't run?" inquired Baxter, in astonishment. "I mean I won't run--I can't run--put it any way you please." "I thought you'd put your whole heart and soul into defeating Trend." "I have, but not that way--where's Trenton whom we've been talking of all summer?" "He's out of it--consumption, the doctor says--anyway he's going South." "Then there's but one other man," said Ordway, decisively, "and that's Baxter." "Me?" said Baxter softly, "you mean me, do you say?" His chuckle shook the buggy until it creaked upon its rusty wheels. "I can't," he added, with a burst of humour, "to tell the truth, I'm afraid." "Afraid?" repeated Ordway, "you're afraid of Jasper Trend?" "No," said Baxter, "it ain't Jasper--it's my wife." He winked slowly as he caught Ordway's eyes, and then picking up the reins, made a movement as if to turn back to Tappahannock. "So you're dead sure then that you can't be talked over?" he asked. "As sure as you are," returned Ordway promptly; then as the buggy started back in the direction from which it had come, he went over to Banks, who had risen to his feet and was leaning heavily against the cherry tree, with the long blade of grass still between his teeth. "What do you think of their wanting to make me Mayor, Banks?" he inquired, with a laugh. Banks started from his gloomy reverie. "Mayor!" he exclaimed almost with animation. "Why, they've shown jolly good sense, that's what I think!" "Well, you needn't begin to get excited," responded Ordway, "for I didn't accept, and you won't have to quarrel either with me or with Jasper Trend." "There's one thing you may be sure of," said Banks with energy, "and that is that I'd quarrel with Jasper every time." "In spite of Milly?" laughed Ordway. "In spite of Milly," repeated Banks in an awed but determined voice; "she may manage my hair and my cravats and my life to come, but I'll be darned if she's going to manage my vote!" "All the same I'm glad you can honestly stick to Jasper," said Ordway, "he counts on you now, doesn't he?" "Oh, I suppose so," returned Banks, without enthusiasm; "at any rate, I think he'd rather she'd marry me than Brown." There was a moment's silence in which the name brought no association into Ordway's consciousness. Then in a single flashing instant the truth leaped upon him, and the cornfields across the road surged up to meet his eyes like the waves of a high sea. "Than whom?" he demanded in so loud a tone that Banks fell back a step and looked at him with blinking eyelids. "Than marry whom?" asked Ordway for the second time, dropping his voice almost to a whisper before the blank surprise in the other's face. "Oh, his name's Brown--Horatio Brown--I thought I'd told you," answered Banks, and he added a moment later, "you've met him, I believe." "Yes," said Ordway, with an effort, "he's the handsome chap who came here last June, isn't he?" "Oh, he's handsome enough," admitted Banks, and he groaned out presently. "You liked him, didn't you?" Ordway smiled slightly as he met the desperation in the other's look. "I like him," he answered quietly, "as much as I like a toad." CHAPTER VI IN WHICH BAXTER PLOTS When Baxter reached the warehouse the following morning, he found Major Leary pacing restlessly back and forth under the brick archway, with the regular military step at which, during the four years' war, he had marched into battle. "Come in, sir, come in and sit down," said Baxter, leading the way into his office, and sweeping a pile of newspapers from an armchair with a hospitable gesture. "Have you seen Smith? and is he all right?" were the Major's first words, as he placed his hat upon the table and took a quick, impatient turn about the room before throwing himself into the chair which the other had emptied. He was a short, erect, nervous man, with a fiery face, a pair of small gray eyes, like steel points, and a long white moustache, discoloured where it overhung his mouth by the faint yellow stain of tobacco. "Oh, I've see him," answered Baxter in a soothing voice, "but he won't run--there's no use talking. He's dead set against it." "Won't run?" cried the Major, furiously. "Nonsense, sir, he must run. There's no help for it. Did you tell him that we'd decided that he should run?" "I told him," returned Baxter, "but, somehow, it didn't look as if he were impressed. He was so positive that he would not even let me put in a word more on the subject. 'Are you dead sure, Smith?' I said, and he answered, 'I'm as dead sure as you are yourself, Baxter.'" The Major crossed his knees angrily, stretched himself back in his chair, and began pulling nervously at the ends of his moustache. "Well, I'll have to see him myself," he said authoritatively. "You may see him as much as you please," replied Baxter, with a soft, offended dignity, "but I'll be mightily surprised, sir, if you get him to change his mind." "Well, I reckon you're right, Bob," admitted the other, after a moment's reflection, "what he won't do for you, it isn't likely that he'll do for the rest of Tappahannock--but the fact remains that somebody has got to step up and defeat Jasper Trend. Now I ask you pointblank--where'll you get your man?" "The Lord knows!" sighed Baxter, and he sucked hard at the stem of his pipe. "Then I tell you if you can't make Smith come out, it's your duty as an honest citizen to run yourself." Baxter relapsed into a depressed silence, in the midst of which his thoughts were invaded not so much by the political necessity of the occasion as by the small, but dominant figure of his wife. The big man, who had feared neither shot nor bayonet, trembled in spirit as he imagined the outraged authority that could express itself in a person that measured hardly a fraction more than five feet from her shoes to the curling gray fringe above her forehead. He remembered that once in the early days of his marriage, he had allowed himself to be seduced by the promise of political honours, and that for a whole miserable month he had gone without griddle cakes and syrup for his breakfast. "No--no, I could never tell Marthy," he thought, desperately, still seeing in imagination the pretty, indignant face of Mrs. Baxter. "It's your duty as an honest citizen to run yourself," repeated the Major, rapping the arm of his chair to enforce his words. "I can't," rejoined Baxter, hopelessly, "I can't sir," and he added an instant afterward, "you see women have got the idea somehow, that politics ain't exactly moral." "Women!" said the Major, in the dry, contemptuous tone in which he might have uttered the word, "Pshaw!" "I don't mean just 'women,'" replied Baxter, "I mean my wife." "Oh!" said the Major, "you mean your wife would be opposed to the whole thing?" "She wouldn't hear of it, sir, she simply wouldn't hear a word of it." For a long pause the Major made no answer; then rising from his chair he began pacing with his military stride up and down the floor of the little room. At the end of five minutes he turned upon Baxter with an exclamation of triumph, and threw himself again into the armchair beside the desk. "I have it, Bob!" he said, slapping his knee until the dust flew out of his striped trousers, "I knew I'd get it in the end and here it is. The very thing, on my word, sir, I've discovered the very thing." "Then I'm out of it," said Baxter, "an' I'm mighty glad of that." "Oh, no, you aren't out of it--not just yet," said the Major, "we're to start you in, Bob, you're to start in as a candidate; and then a week before the nomination, something will crop up to make you fall out of the race, and you'll turn over all your votes to Smith. It would be too late, then, for him to back out--he'd simply have to keep in to save the day." In spite of the roar of delight with which the Major ended his speech, Baxter sat unconvinced and unmoved, shaking his great head in a voiceless protest against the plot. "It's the only way, I tell you," urged the Major, half pleased, half angry. "After Smith you're by long odds the most popular man in Tappahannock, and if it isn't one of you, it's Jasper Trend and his everlasting barrooms." "But suppose Smith still declines," said Baxter remembering his wife. "Oh, he won't--he isn't a blamed fool," returned the Major, "and if he does," he added impressively, "if he does I swear to you I'll go into the race myself." He held out his hand and Baxter grasped it in token of good faith. "Then I'll do it," said the big man, "provided--" he hesitated, cleared his throat, and went on bravely, "provided there's no objection to my telling my wife the scheme"--bending his ear an instant, he drew back with an embarrassed and guilty face, "that's Smith's step in the warehouse. He'll be in here in less than two minutes." The Major took up his hat, and flung back the door with a hurried movement. "Well, good-bye, I'll see Smith later about the plans," he returned, "and meanwhile, we'll go hard to work to whip our friend Jasper." Meeting Ordway an instant later upon the threshold, he passed him with a flourish of his hat, and marched rapidly under the brick archway out into the street. As his bookkeeper entered Baxter appeared to be absorbed in a newspaper which he had picked up hastily from the pile upon the floor. "Good-morning," said Ordway, a little surprised; "it looks as if I'd put the fiery Major to flight." "Smith," said Baxter, dropping his paper, and lifting his big, simple face to the younger man, "Smith, you've got me into a hole, and I want you to pull me out again." "A hole?" repeated Ordway; then as light broke on him, he laughed aloud and held out his hand. "Oh, I see, he's going to make you Mayor of Tappahannock!" With a groan Baxter prodded fresh tobacco into his pipe, and applying a match, sat for several minutes brooding in silence amid the cloud of smoke. "He says it's got to be either you or me," he pursued presently, without noticing Ordway's ejaculation, "and on my word, Smith, seeing I've got a wife who's all against it, I think it would be but fair to me to let me off. You're my friend now, ain't you? Well, I'm asking you, Smith, as friend to friend." A flush passed slowly over Ordway's face, and the unusual colour lent a peculiar animation to his glance. As Baxter met his eyes, he was conscious that they pierced through him, bright blue, sparkling, as incisive as a blade. "To tell the truth, the thing is all but impossible," said Ordway, after a long pause. "You don't know, I suppose, that I've never even touched politics in Tappahannock." "That ain't the point, Smith--it's going on three years since you came here--am I right?" "Yes--three years next March, and it seems a century." "Well, anyway, you've as good a right as I to be Mayor, and a long sight better one than Jasper Trend has. Come, now, Smith, if you don't get me out of this hole I'm in, heaven knows how I 'm going to face the Major." "Give me time," said Ordway, quickly, "give me time--a week from to-morrow I am to make my first speech in the town hall. May I have till then?" "Till Thursday week? Oh, I say, Smith, you've got to give in in the end--and a week sooner or later, what's the difference?" Without replying, Ordway walked slowly to the window and stood looking out upon the steep street that crawled up from the railroad track, where an engine whistled. He had held out till now, but with Baxter's last words he had heard in his thoughts a question larger and older than any of which his employer had dreamed. "Why not?" he asked himself again as he looked out upon the sunshine. "Why should not Daniel Smith, for a good purpose, resume the rights which Daniel Ordway has forfeited?" And it appeared to him while he stood there that his decision involved not himself alone, and that the outcome had ceased to be merely an election to the highest office in Tappahannock. Infinitely deep and wide, the problem belonged not only to his individual life, but to the lives of all those who had sinned and paid the penalty of sin and asked of humanity the right and the freedom to begin anew. The impulsive daring which he had almost lived down stirred for an instant in his pulses, and turning quickly he looked at Baxter with a boyish laugh. "If I go in, Baxter, I go in to win!" he cried. At the moment it had seemed to him that he was obliging rather than ambitious in the choice that he had made; but several days later, when he came out of the warehouse to find the Major's red flag flying in the street, he felt the thrill of his youthful enthusiasm quicken in his blood. There was a strangely martial air about the red flag in the sunshine, and the response in his pulses was not unlike the ardour of battle. "After all the world is no smaller here than it is in New York," he thought, "only the littleness of the one is different from the littleness of the other. In either place success would have meant nothing in itself, but in Tappahannock I can be more than successful, I can be useful." With the words it seemed to him that his heart dissolved in happiness, and as he looked now on the people who passed him in the street--on the old Negro midwife waddling down the board walk; on the Italian who kept a fruit stand at the corner; on the pretty girl flirting in the door of the harness shop; and on the rough-coated, soft-eyed country horses--he felt that one and all of these must recognise and respond to the goodwill that had overflowed his thoughts. So detached from personal bitterness, indeed, was even his fight against Jasper Trend that he went out of his way at the top of the hill to pick up a small whip which the Mayor had dropped from horseback as he rode by. The scowling thanks with which Jasper received the courtesy puzzled him for a moment until he remembered that by the man in the harness shop they were regarded probably as enemies. At the recollection he stopped short in his walk and laughed aloud--no, he was not interested in fighting anything so small, so insignificant as Jasper Trend. It was the injustice, the social disease he combated and not the man. "I wonder if he really hates me?" he thought, for it seemed to him absurd and meaningless that one man should waste his strength in hating another. "If he'd been five years in prison he would have learned how foolish it all is," he added; and an instant afterward he asked himself almost with terror if his punishment had been, in reality, the greatest good that had come to him in life? Without that terrible atonement would he have gone on like Jasper Trend from fraud to fraud, from selfishness to damnation? Looking round him in the perfect October weather, he felt that the emotion in his heart swelled suddenly to rapture. Straight ahead the sunshine sifted in drops through the red and yellow trees that bordered the roadside, while in the field on his right the brown cornricks crowded in even rows to where the arch of the hill was outlined against the deep blue sky. Here was not only peace, but happiness, and his old life, as he glanced back upon it, appeared hollow, futile, a corpse without breath or animation. That was the mere outward form and body of existence; but standing here in the deserted road, with his eyes on the brilliant October fields, he could tell himself that he had come at last into the ways and the understanding of faith. As he had once walked by sight alone and stumbled, so he moved now blindly like a child that is led step by step through the dark. From the road behind him a happy laugh struck on his ears, and turning quickly he saw that a dog-cart was rolling rapidly from Tappahannock. As he stepped back upon the roadside to avoid the dust raised by the wheels, he lifted his eyes to the face of Milly Trend, who sat, flushed and smiling, under a pink sunshade. She bowed joyfully; and it was not until a moment afterward, when the cart had gone by, that Ordway realised, almost with the force of a blow struck unawares, that he had acknowledged the obsequious greeting of Gus Wherry. After the pink sunshade had vanished, Milly's laugh was still blown back to him on the rising wind. With the happy sound of it in his ears, he watched the dust settle again in the road, the tall golden poplars close like a screen after the passing wheels, and the distance resume its aspect of radiant loneliness. Nothing was changed at which he looked, yet he was conscious that the rapture had passed from his thoughts and the beauty from the October landscape. The release that he had won appeared to him as an illusion and a cheat, and lifting his face to the sunshine, he watched, like a prisoner, the flight of the swallows across the sky. At dinner Beverly noticed his abstraction, and recommended a mint julep, which Emily went out immediately to prepare. "The blood is easily chilled at this season," he said, "and care should be taken to keep it warm by means of a gentle stimulant. I am not a great drinker, sir, as you may have remarked, but in cases either of sickness or sorrow, I have observed that few things are more efficacious than a thimbleful of whiskey taken at the proper time. When I had the misfortune to break to my uncle Colonel Algernon Brooke the distressing news of the death of his wife by drowning, I remember that, though he was one of the most abstemious men alive, his first articulate words were: 'bring the whiskey jug.'" Even with the cheering assistance of the mint julep, however, it was impossible for Ordway to eat his dinner; and making an excuse presently, he rose from the table and went out into the avenue, where he walked slowly up and down in the shadow of the cedars. At the end of his last restless turn, he went indoors for his hat, and coming out again started rapidly toward Tappahannock. With his first decisive step he felt that the larger share of his burden had fallen from him. * * * * * The Tappahannock Hotel was a low, whitewashed frame building, withdrawn slightly from the street, where several dejected looking horses, with saddle-bags attached to them, were usually fastened to the iron rings in the hitching-rail upon the sidewalk. The place was the resort chiefly of commercial travellers or of neighbouring farmers, who drove in with wagon loads of garden produce or of sun-cured tobacco; and the number of loungers reclining on the newly painted green benches upon the porch made Ordway aware that the fall trade was already beginning to show signs of life. In answer to his questions, the proprietor an unctuous person, whose mouth was distorted by a professional habit of welcome--informed him that a gentleman by the name of Brown had registered there the evening before, and that he was, to the best of his belief, upstairs in number eighteen at the present moment. "To tell the truth I can't quite size him up," he concluded confidentially. "He don't seem to hev' come either to sell or to buy an' thar's precious little else that ever brings a body to Tappahannock." "Please add that I wish particularly to see him in private," said Ordway. Without turning his head the proprietor beckoned, by a movement of his thumb delivered backward over his left shoulder, to a Negro boy, who sat surreptitiously eating peanuts out of a paper bag in his pocket. "Tell the gentleman in number eighteen, Sol, that Mr. Smith, the people's candidate for Mayor, would like to have a little talk with him in private. I'm mighty glad to see you out in the race, suh," he added, turning again to Ordway, as the Negro disappeared up the staircase. "Thank you," replied Ordway, with a start, which brought him back from his approaching interview with Gus Wherry to the recollection that he was fighting to become the Mayor of Tappahannock. "Thar's obleeged to be a scrummage, I reckon," resumed the loquacious little man, when he had received Ordway's acknowledgments--"but I s'pose thar ain't any doubt as to who'll come off with the scalps in the end." His manner changed abruptly, and he looked round with a lurking curiosity in his watery eyes. "You knew Mr. Brown, didn't you say, suh?--before you came here?" Ordway glanced up quickly. "Did you tell me he got here yesterday?" he asked. "Last night on the eight-forty-five, which came in two hours after time." "An accident on the road, wasn't it?" "Wreck of a freight--now, Mr. Brown, as I was saying----" At this instant, to Ordway's relief, the messenger landed with a bound on the floor of the hall, and picking himself up, announced with a cheerful grin, that "the gentleman would be powerful pleased to see Mr. Smith upstairs in his room." Nodding to the proprietor, Ordway followed the Negro up to the first landing, and knocked at a half open door at the end of the long, dark hall. CHAPTER VII SHOWS THAT POLITENESS, LIKE CHARITY, IS AN ELASTIC MANTLE When Ordway entered the room, he turned and closed the door carefully behind him, before he advanced to where Wherry stood awaiting him with outstretched hand. "I can't begin to tell you how I appreciate the honour, Mr. Smith. I didn't expect it--upon my word, I didn't," exclaimed Wherry, with the effusive amiability which made Ordway bite his lip in anger. "I don't know that I mean it for an honour, but I hope we can get straight to business," returned Ordway shortly. "Ah, then there's business?" repeated the other, as if in surprise. "I had hoped that you were paying me merely a friendly call. To tell the truth I've the very worst head in the world for business, you know, and I always manage to dodge it whenever I get half a chance." "Well, you can't dodge it this time, so we may as well have it out." "Then since you insist upon that awful word 'business,' I suppose you mean that you've come formally to ratify the treaty?" asked Wherry, smiling. "The treaty? I made no treaty," returned Ordway gravely. Laughing pleasantly, Wherry invited his visitor to be seated. Then turning away for an instant, he flung himself into a chair beside a little marble topped table upon which stood a half-emptied bottle of rye whiskey and a pitcher of iced water on a metal tray. "Do you mean to tell me you've forgotten our conversation in that beastly road?" he demanded, "and the prodigal? Surely you haven't forgotten the prodigal? Why, I never heard anything in my life that impressed me more." "You told me then distinctly that you had no intention of remaining in Tappahannock." "I'll tell you so again if you'd like to hear it. Will you have a drink?" Ordway shook his head with an angry gesture. "What I want to know," he insisted bluntly, "is why you are here at all?" Wherry poured out a drink of whiskey, and adding a dash of iced water, tossed it down at a swallow. "I thought I told you then," he answered, "that I have a little private business in the town. As it's purely personal I hope you'll have no objection to my transacting it." "You said that afternoon that your presence was, in some way, connected with Jasper Trend's cotton mills." Wherry gave a low whistle. "Did I?" he asked politely, "well, perhaps, I did. I can't remember." "I was fool enough to believe that you wanted an honest job," said Ordway; "it did not enter my head that your designs were upon Trend's daughter." "Didn't it?" inquired Wherry with a smile in which his white teeth flashed brilliantly. "Well, it might have, for I was honest enough about it. Didn't I tell you that a woman was at the bottom of every mess I was ever in?" "Where is your wife?" asked Ordway. "Dead," replied Wherry, in a solemn voice. "If I am not mistaken, you had not less than three at the time of your trial." "All dead," rejoined Wherry in the same solemn tone, while he drew out his pocket handkerchief and wiped his eyes with a flourish, "there ain't many men that have supported such a treble affliction on the same day." "I may as well inform you that I don't believe a word you utter." "It's true all the same. I'll take my oath on the biggest Bible you can find in town." "Your oath? Pshaw!" "Well, I always said my word was better," observed Wherry, without the slightest appearance of offence. He wore a pink shirt which set off his fine colouring to advantage, and as he turned aside to pour out a second drink of whiskey, Ordway noticed that his fair hair was brushed carefully across the bald spot in the centre of his head. "Whether they are dead or alive," responded Ordway, "I want you to understand plainly that you are to give up your designs upon Milly Trend or her money." "So you've had your eye on her yourself?" exclaimed Wherry. "I declare I'm deuced sorry. Why, in thunder, didn't you tell me so last June?" A mental nausea that was almost like a physical spasm seized Ordway suddenly, and crossing to the window, he stood looking through the half-closed shutters down into the street below, where a covered wagon rolled slowly downhill, the driver following on foot as he offered a bunch of fowls to the shop-keepers upon the sidewalk. Then the hot, stale, tobacco impregnated air came up to his nostrils, and he turned away with a sensation of disgust. "If you'd only warned me in time--hang it--I'd have cut out and given you the field," declared Wherry in such apparent sincerity that Ordway resisted an impulse to kick him out into the hall. "That's my way. I always like to play fair and square when I get the chance." "Well, you've got the chance now, and what's more you've got to make it good." "And leave you the open?" "And leave me Tappahannock--yes." "I don't want Tappahannock. To tell the truth I'm not particularly struck by its attractions." "In that case you've no objection to leaving immediately, I suppose?" "I've no objection on earth if you'll allow me a pretty woman to keep me company. I'm a deuced lonely bird, and I can't get on by myself--it's not in my nature." Ordway placed his hand upon the table with a force which started the glasses rattling on the metal tray. "I repeat for the last time that you are to leave Milly Trend alone," he said. "Do you understand me?" "I'm not sure I do," rejoined Wherry, still pleasantly enough. "Would you mind saying that over again in a lower tone?" "What I want to make plain is that you are not to marry Milly Trend--or any other women in this town," returned Ordway angrily. "So there are others!" commented Wherry jauntily with his eye on the ceiling. The pose of his handsome head was so remarkably effective, that Ordway felt his rage increased by the mere external advantages of the man. "What I intend you to do is to leave Tappahannock for good and all this very evening," he resumed, drawing a sharp breath. The words appeared to afford Wherry unspeakable amusement. "I can't," he responded, after a minute in which he had enjoyed his humour to the full, "the train leaves at seven-ten and I've an engagement at eight o'clock." "You'll break it, that's all." "But it wouldn't be polite--it's with a lady." "Then I'll break it for you," returned Ordway, starting toward the door, "for I may presume, I suppose, that the lady is Miss Trend?" "Oh, come back, I say. Hang it all, don't get into a fury," protested Wherry, clutching the other by the arm, and closing the door which he had half opened. "Here, hold on a minute and let's talk things over quietly. I told you, didn't I? that I wanted to be obliging." "Then you will go?" asked Ordway, in a milder tone. "Well, I'll think about it. I've a quick enough wit for little things, but on serious matters my brain works slowly. In the first place now didn't we promise each other that we'd play fair?" "But you haven't--that's why I came here." "You're dead wrong. I'm doing it this very minute. I'll keep my mouth shut about you till Judgment Day if you'll just hold off and not pull me back when I'm trying to live honest." "Honest!" exclaimed Ordway, and turned on his heel. "Well, I'd like to know what you call it, for if it isn't honesty, it certainly isn't pleasure. My wife's dead, I swear it's a fact, and I swear again that I don't mean the girl any harm. I was never so much gone on a woman in my life, though a number of 'em have been pretty soft on me. So you keep off and manage your election--or whatever it is--while I go about my business. Great Scott! after all it ain't as if a woman were a bank note, is it?" "The first question was mine. Will you leave to-day or will you not?" "And if I will not what are you going to do about it?" "As soon as I hear your decision, I shall let you know." "Well, say I won't. What is your next move then?" "In that case I shall go straight to the girl's father after I leave this room." "By Jove you will! And what will you do when you get there?" "I shall tell him that to the best of my belief you have a wife--possibly several--now living." "Then you'll lie," said Wherry, dropping for the first time his persuasive tone. "That remains to be proved," rejoined Ordway shortly. "At any rate if he needs to be convinced I shall tell him as much as I know about you." "And how much," demanded Wherry insolently, "does that happen to be?" "Enough to stop the marriage, that is all I want." "And suppose he asks you--as he probably will--how in the devil it came to be any business of yours?" For a moment Ordway looked over the whiskey bottle and through the open window into the street below. "I don't think that will happen," he answered slowly, "but if it does I shall tell him the whole truth as I know it--about myself as well as about you." "The deuce you will!" exclaimed Wherry. "It appears that you want to take the whole job out of my hands now, doesn't it?" The flush from the whiskey had overspread his face, and in the midst of the general redness his eyes and teeth flashed brilliantly in an angry laugh. An imaginative sympathy for the man moved Ordway almost in spite of himself, and he wondered, in the long pause, what Wherry's early life had been and if his chance in the world were really a fair one? "I don't want to be hard on you," said Ordway at last; "it's out of the question that you should have Milly Trend, but if you'll give up that idea and go away I'll do what I can to help you--I'll send you half my salary for the next six months until you are able to find a job." Wherry looked at him with a deliberate wink. "So you'd like to save your own skin, after all, wouldn't you?" he inquired. Taking up his hat from the table, Ordway turned toward the door and laid his hand upon the knob before he spoke. "Is it decided then that I shall go to Jasper Trend?" he asked. "Well, I wouldn't if I were you," said Wherry, "but that's your affair. On the whole I think that you'll pay more than your share of the price." "It's natural, I suppose, that you should want your revenge," returned Ordway, without resentment, "but all the same I shall tell him as little as possible about your past. What I shall say is that I have reason to believe that your wife is still living." "One or more?" enquired Wherry, with a sneer. "One, I think, will prove quite sufficient for my purpose." "Well, go ahead," rejoined Wherry, angrily, "but before you strike you'd better be pretty sure you see a snake in the grass. I'd advise you for your own sake to ask Milly Trend first if she expects to marry me." "What?" cried Ordway, wheeling round, "do you mean she has refused you?" "Oh, ask her--ask her," retorted Wherry airily, as he turned back to the whiskey bottle. In the street, a moment later, Ordway passed under the red flag, which, inflated by the wind, swelled triumphantly above his head. From the opposite sidewalk a man spoke to him; and then, turning, waved his slouch hat enthusiastically toward the flag. "If he only knew," thought Ordway, looking after him; and the words brought to his imagination what disgrace in Tappahannock would mean in his life. As he passed the dim vacancy of the warehouse he threw toward it a look which was almost one of entreaty. "No, no, it can't be," he insisted, as if to reassure himself, "it is impossible. How could it happen?" And seized by a sudden rage against circumstances, he remembered the windy afternoon upon which he had come for the first time to Tappahannock--the wide stretches of broomsedge; the pale red road, which appeared to lead nowhere; his violent hunger; and the Negro woman who had given him the cornbread at the door of her cabin. A hundred years seemed to have passed since then--no, not a hundred years as men count them, but a dissolution and a resurrection. It was as if his personality--his whole inner structure had dissolved and renewed itself again; and when he thought now of that March afternoon it was with the visual distinctness that belongs to an observer rather than to an actor. His point of view was detached, almost remote. He saw himself from the outside alone--his clothes, his face, even his gestures; and these things were as vivid to him as were the Negro cabin, the red clay road, and the covered wagon that threw its shadow on the path as it crawled by. In no way could he associate his immediate personality either with the scene or with the man who had sat on the pine bench ravenously eating the coarse food. At the moment it seemed to him that he was released, not only from any spiritual bondage to the past, but even from any physical connection with the man he had been then. "What have I to do with Gus Wherry or with Daniel Ordway?" he demanded. "Above all, what in heaven have I to do with Milly Trend?" As he asked the question he flushed with resentment against the girl for whom he was about to sacrifice all that he valued in his life. He thought with disgust of her vanity, her shallowness, her insincerity; and the course that he had planned showed in this sudden light as utterly unreasonable. It struck him on the instant that in going to Wherry he had been a fool. "Yes, I should have thought of that before. I have been too hasty, for what, after all, have I to do with Milly Trend?" With an effort he put the question aside, and in the emotional reaction which followed, he felt that his spirit soared into the blue October sky. Emily, looking at him at dinner, thought that she had never seen him so animated, so light-hearted, so boyishly unreserved. When his game of dominoes with Beverly was over, he followed the children out into the orchard, where they were gathering apples into great straw hampers; and as he stood under the fragrant clustering boughs, with the childish laughter in his ears, he felt that his perplexities, his troubles, even his memories had dissolved and vanished into air. An irresponsible happiness swelled in his heart while he watched the golden orchard grass blown like a fringe upon the circular outline of the hill. But when night fell the joy of the sunshine went from him, and it was almost with a feeling of heaviness that he lit his lamp and sat down in the chintz-covered chair under the faded sampler worked by Margaret, aged nine. Without apparent cause or outward disturbance he had passed from the exhilaration of the afternoon into a pensive, almost a melancholy mood. The past, which had been so remote for several hours, had leaped suddenly to life again--not only in his memory, but in every fibre of his body as well as in every breath he drew. "No, I cannot escape it, for is it not a part of me--it is I myself," he thought; and he knew that he could no more free himself from his duty to Milly Trend than he could tear the knowledge of her existence from his brain. "After all, it is not Milly Trend," he added, "it is something larger, stronger, far more vital than she." A big white moth flew in from the dusk, and fluttered blindly in the circle of light which the lamp threw on the ceiling. He heard the soft whirring of its wings against the plaster, and gradually the sound entered into his thoughts and became a part of his reflections. "Will the moth fall into the flame or will it escape?" he asked, feeling himself powerless to avert the creature's fate. In some strange way his own destiny seemed to be whirling dizzily in that narrow circle of light; and in the pitiless illumination that surrounded it, he saw not only all that was passed, but all that was present as well as all that was yet to come. At the same instant he saw his mother's face as she lay dead with her look of joyous surprise frozen upon her lips; and the face of Lydia when she had lowered a black veil at their last parting; and the face of Alice, his daughter; and of the girl downstairs as he had seen her through the gray twilight; and the face of the epileptic little preacher, who had preached in the prison chapel. And as these faces looked back at him he knew that the illumination in which his soul had struggled so blindly was the light of love. "Yes, it is love," he thought, "and that is the meaning of the circle of light into which I have come out of the darkness." He looked up startled, for the white moth, after one last delirious whirl of ecstasy, had dropped from the ceiling into the flame of the lamp. CHAPTER VIII THE TURN OF THE WHEEL At eight o'clock the next morning Ordway entered Jasper Trend's gate, and passed up the gravelled walk between borders of white and yellow chrysanthemums. In a window on his right a canary was singing loudly in a gilt cage; and a moment later, the maid invited him into a room which seemed, as he entered it, to be filled with a jubilant burst of music. As he waited here for the man he had come to see, he felt that, in spite of his terrible purpose, he had found no place in Tappahannock so cheerful as this long room flooded with sunshine, in the midst of which the canary swung back and forth in his wire cage. The furniture was crude enough, the colours of the rugs were unharmonious, the imitation lace of the curtains was offensive to his eyes. Yet the room was made almost attractive by the large windows which gave on the piazza, the borders of chrysanthemums and the smoothly shaven plot of lawn. His back was turned toward the door when it opened and shut quickly, and Jasper Trend came in, hastily swallowing his last mouthful of breakfast. "You wanted to see me, Mr. Smith, I understand," he said at once, showing in his manner a mixture of curiosity and resentment. It was evident at the first glance that even in his own house he was unable to overcome the political antagonism of the man of little stature. The smallest social amenity he would probably have regarded as a kind of moral subterfuge. "I must ask you to overlook the intimate nature of my question," began Ordway, in a voice which was so repressed that it sounded dull and lifeless, "but I have heard that your daughter intends to marry Horatio Brown. Is this true?" At the words Jasper, who had prepared himself for a political onslaught, fell back a step or two and stood in the merciless sunlight, blinking at his questioner with his little, watery, pale gray eyes. Each dull red vein in his long nose became suddenly prominent. "Horatio Brown?" he repeated, "why, I thought you'd come about nothing less than the nomination. What in the devil do you want anyway with Horatio Brown. He can't vote in Tappahannock, can he?" "I'll answer that in time," replied Ordway, "my motive is more serious than you can possibly realise--it is a question which involves your daughter's happiness--perhaps her life." "Good Lord, is that so?" exclaimed Jasper, "I don't reckon you're sweet on her yourself, are you?" Ordway's only reply was an impatient groan which sent the other stumbling back against a jar of goldfish on the centre table. Though he had come fully prepared for the ultimate sacrifice, he was unable to control the repulsion aroused in him by the bleared eyes and sunken mouth of the man before him. "Well, if you ain't," resumed Jasper presently, with a fresh outburst of hilarity, "you're about the only male critter in Tappahannock that don't turn his eyes sooner or later toward my door." "I've barely a speaking acquaintance with your daughter," returned Ordway shortly, "but her reputation as a beauty is certainly very well deserved." Mollified by the compliment, Jasper unbent so far as to make an abrupt, jerky motion in the direction of a chair; but shaking his head, Ordway put again bluntly the question he had asked upon the other's entrance. "Am I to understand seriously that she means to marry Brown?" he demanded. Jasper twisted his scraggy neck nervously in his loose collar. "Lord, how you do hear things!" he ejaculated. "Now, as far as I can see, thar ain't a single word of truth in all that talk. Just between you and me I don't believe my girl has had her mind on that fellow Brown more'n a minute. I'm dead against it and that'll go a long way with her, you may be sure. Why, only this morning she told me that if she had to choose between the two of 'em, she'd stick to young Banks every time." With the words it seemed to Ordway that the sunshine became fairly dazzling as it fell through the windows, while the song of the canary went up rapturously like a pæan. Only by the relief which flooded his heart like warmth could he measure the extent of the ruin he had escaped. Even Jasper Trend's face appeared no longer hideous to him, and as he held out his hand, the exhilaration of his release lent a note that was almost one of affection to his voice. "Don't let her do it--for God's sake don't let her do it," he said, and an instant afterward he was out on the gravelled walk between the borders of white and yellow chrysanthemums. At the gate Milly was standing with a letter in her hand, and when he spoke to her, he watched her face change slowly to the colour of a flower. Never had she appeared softer, prettier, more enticing in his eyes, and he felt for the first time an understanding of the hopeless subjection of Banks. "Oh, it's you, Mr. Smith!" she exclaimed, smiling and blushing as she had smiled and blushed at Wherry the day before, "I was asking Harry Banks yesterday what had become of you?" "What had become of me?" he repeated in surprise, while he drew back quickly with his hand on the latch of the gate. "I hadn't seen you for so long," she answered, with a laugh which bore less relation to humour than it did to pleasure. "You used to pass by five times a day, and I got so accustomed to you that I really missed you when you went away." "Well, I've been in the country all summer, though that hardly counts, for you were out of town yourself." "Yes, I was out of town myself." She lingered over the words, and her voice softened as she went on until it seemed to flow with the sweetness of liquid honey, "but even when I am here, you never care to see me." "Do you think so?" he asked gaily, and the next instant he wondered why the question had passed his lips before it had entered into his thoughts, "the truth is that I know a good deal more about you than you suspect," he added; "I have the honour, you see, to be the confidant of Harry Banks." "Oh, Harry Banks!" she exclaimed indifferently, as she turned from the gate, while Ordway opened it and passed out into the street. For the next day or two it seemed to him that the lightness of his heart was reflected in the faces of those about him--that Baxter, Mrs. Brooke, Emily, Beverly each appeared to move in response to some hidden spring within himself. He felt no longer either Beverly's tediousness or Mrs. Brooke's melancholy, for these early October mornings contained a rapture which transfigured the people with whom he lived. With this unlooked for renewal of hope he threw himself eagerly into the political fight for the control of Tappahannock. It was now Tuesday and on Thursday evening he was to deliver his first speech in the town hall. Already the preparations were made, already the flags were flying from the galleries, and already Baxter had been trimmed for his public appearance upon the platform. "By George, I believe the Major's right and it's the Ten Commandment part that has done it," said the big man, settling his person with a shake in the new clothes he had purchased for the occasion. "I reckon this coat's all right, Smith, ain't it? My wife wouldn't let me come out on the platform in those old clothes I've been wearing." "Oh, you're all right," returned Ordway, cheerfully--so cheerfully that Baxter was struck afresh by the peculiar charm which belonged less to manner than to temperament, "you're all right, old man, but it isn't your clothes that make you so." "All the same I'll feel better when I get into my old suit again," said Baxter, "I don't know how it is, but, somehow, I seem to have left two-thirds of myself behind in those old clothes. I just wore these down to show 'em off, but I shan't put 'em on again till Thursday." It was the closing hour at the warehouse, and after a few eager words on the subject of the approaching meeting, Ordway left the office and went out into the deserted building where the old Negro was sweeping the floor with his twig broom. A moment later he was about to pass under the archway, when a man, hurrying in from the street, ran straight into his arms and then staggered back with a laugh of mirthless apology. "My God, Smith," said the tragic voice of Banks, "I'm half crazy and I must have a word with you alone." Catching his arm Ordway drew him into the dim light of the warehouse, until they reached the shelter of an old wagon standing unhitched against the wall. The only sound which came to them here was the scratching noise made by the twig broom on the rough planks of the floor. "Speak now," said Ordway, while his heart sank as he looked into the other's face, "It's quite safe--there's no one about but old Abraham." "I can't speak," returned Banks, preserving with an effort a decent composure of his features, "but it's all up with me--it's worse than I imagined, and there's nothing ahead of me but death." "I suppose it's small consolation to be told that you look unusually healthy at the minute," replied Ordway, "but don't keep me guessing, Banks. What's happened now?" "All her indifference--all her pretence of flirting was pure deception," groaned the miserable Banks, "she wanted to throw dust, not only in my eyes, but in Jasper's, also." "Why, he told me with his own lips that his daughter had given him to understand that she preferred you to Brown." "And so she did give him to understand--so she did," affirmed Banks, in despair, "but it was all a blind so that he wouldn't make trouble between her and Brown. I tell you, Smith," he concluded, bringing his clenched fist down on the wheel of the wagon, from which a shower of dried mud was scattered into Ordway's face, "I tell you, I don't believe women think any more of telling a lie than we do of taking a cocktail!" "But how do you know all this, my dear fellow? and when did you discover it?" "That's the awful part, I'm coming to it." His voice gave out and he swallowed a lump in his throat before he could go on. "Oh, Smith, Smith, I declare, if it's the last word I speak, I believe she means to run away with Brown this very evening!" "What?" cried Ordway, hardly raising his voice above a whisper. A burning resentment, almost a repulsion swept over him, and he felt that he could have spurned the girl's silly beauty if she had lain at his feet. What was a woman like Milly Trend worth, that she should cost him, a stranger to her, so great a price? "Tell me all," he said sharply, turning again to his companion. "How did you hear it? Why do you believe it? Have you spoken to Jasper?" Banks blinked hard for a minute, while a single large round teardrop trickled slowly down his freckled nose. "I should never have suspected it," he answered, "but for Milly's old black Mammy Delphy, who has lived with her ever since she was born. Aunt Delphy came upon her this morning when she was packing her bag, and by hook or crook, heaven knows how, she managed to get at the truth. Then she came directly to me, for it seems that she hates Brown worse than the devil." "When did she come to you?" "A half hour ago. I left her and rushed straight to you." Ordway drew out his watch, and stood looking at the face of it with a wondering frown. "That must have been five o'clock," he said, "and it is now half past. Shall I catch Milly, do you think, if I start at once?" "You?" cried Banks, "you mean that you will stop her?" "I mean that I must stop her. There is no question." As he spoke he had started quickly down the warehouse, scattering as he walked, a pile of trash which the old Negro had swept together in the centre of the floor. So rapid were the long strides with which he moved that Banks, in spite of his frantic haste, could barely keep in step with him as they passed into the street. Ordway's face had changed as if from a spasm of physical pain, and as Banks looked at it in the afternoon light he was startled to find that it was the face of an old man. The brows were bent, the mouth drawn, the skin sallow, and the gray hair upon the temples had become suddenly more prominent than the dark locks above. "Then you knew Brown before?" asked Banks, with an accession of courage, as they slackened their pace with the beginning of the hill. "I knew him before--yes," replied Ordway, shortly. His reserve had become not only a mask, but a coffin, and his companion had for a minute a sensation that was almost uncanny as he walked by his side--as if he were striving to keep pace uphill with a dead man. Banks had known him to be silent, gloomy, uncommunicative before now, but he had never until this instant seen that look of iron resolve which was too cold and still to approach the heat of passion. Had he been furious Banks might have shared his fury with him; had he shown bitterness of mood Banks might have been bitter also; had he given way even to sardonic merriment, Banks felt that it would have been possible to have feigned a mild hilarity of manner; but before this swift, implacable pursuit of something he could not comprehend, the wretched lover lost all consciousness of the part which he himself must act, well or ill, in the event to come. At Trend's gate Ordway stopped and looked at his companion with a smile which appeared to throw an artificial light upon his drawn features. "Will you let me speak to her alone first," he asked, "for a few minutes?" "I'll take a turn up the street then," returned Banks eagerly, still panting from his hurried walk up the long hill. "She's in the room on the right now," he added, "I can see her feeding the canary." Ordway nodded indifferently. "I shan't be long," he said, and going inside the gate, passed deliberately up the walk and into the room where Milly stood at the window with her mouth close against the wires of the gilt cage. At his step on the threshold the girl turned quickly toward the door with a fluttering movement. Surprise and disappointment battled for an instant in her glance, and he gathered from his first look that he had come at the moment when she was expecting Wherry. He noticed, too, that in spite of the mild autumn weather, she wore a dark dress which was not unsuitable for a long journey, and that her sailor hat, from which a blue veil floated, lay on a chair in one corner. A deeper meaning had entered into the shallow prettiness of her face, and he felt that she had passed through some subtle change in which she had left her girlhood behind her. For the first time it occurred to him that Milly Trend was deserving not only of passion, but of sympathy. At the withdrawal of the lips that had offered him his bit of cake, the canary fluttered from his perch and uttered a sweet, short, questioning note; and in Milly's face, as she came forward, there was something of this birdlike, palpitating entreaty. "Oh, it is you, Mr. Smith," she said, "I did not hear your ring." "I didn't ring," responded Ordway, as he took her trembling outstretched hand in which she still held the bit of sponge cake, "I saw you at the window so I came straight in without sending word. What I have to say to you is so important that I dared not lose a minute." "And it is about me?" asked Milly, with a quiver of her eyelids. "No, it is about someone else, though it concerns you in a measure. The thing I have to tell you relates directly to a man whom you know as Horatio Brown----" He spoke so quickly that the girl divined his meaning from his face rather than from his words. "Then you know him?" she questioned, in a frightened whisper. "I know more of his life than I can tell you. It is sufficient to say that to the best of my belief he has a wife now living--that he has been married before this under different names to at least two living women----" He stopped and put out his hand with an impulsive protecting gesture, for the wounded vanity in the girl's face had pierced to his heart. "Will you let me see your father?" he asked gently, "would it not be better for me to speak to him instead of to you?" "No, no!" cried Milly sharply, "don't tell him--don't dare to tell him--for he would believe it and it is a lie--it is a lie! I tell you it is a lie!" "As God is my witness it is the truth," he answered, without resentment. "Then you shall accuse him to his face. He is coming in a little while, and you shall accuse him before me----" She stopped breathlessly and the pity in his look made her wince sharply and shrink away. With her movement the piece of sponge cake fell from her loosened fingers and rolled on the floor at her feet. "But if it were true how could you know it?" she demanded. "No, it is not true--I don't believe it! I don't believe it!" she repeated in a passion of terror. At her excited voice the canary, swinging on his perch, broke suddenly into an ecstasy of song, and Milly's words, when she spoke again, were drowned in the liquid sweetness that flowed from the cage. For a minute Ordway stood in silence waiting for the music to end, while he watched the angry, helpless tremor of the girl's outstretched hands. "Will you promise me to wait?" he asked, raising his voice in the effort to be heard, "will you promise me to wait at least until you find out the truth or the falsehood of what I tell you?" "But I don't believe it," repeated Milly in the stubborn misery of hopeless innocence. "Ask yourself, then, what possible reason I could have in coming to you--except to save you?" "Wait!" cried the girl angrily, "I can't hear--wait!" Picking up a shawl from a chair, she flung it with an impatient gesture over the cage, and turning immediately from the extinguished bird, took up his sentence where he had broken off. "To save me?" she repeated, "you mean from marriage?" "From a marriage that would be no marriage. Am I right in suspecting that you meant to go away with him to-night?" She bowed her head--all the violent spirit gone out of her. "I was ready to go to-night," she answered, like a child that has been hurt and is still afraid of what is to come. "And you promise me that you will give it up?" he went on gently. "I don't know--I can't tell--I must see him first," she said, and burst suddenly into tears, hiding her face in her hands with a pathetic, shamed gesture. Turning away for a moment, he stood blankly staring down into the jar of goldfish. Then, as her sobs grew presently beyond her control, he came back to the chair into which she had dropped and looked with moist eyes at her bowed fair head. "Before I leave you, will you promise me to give him up?--to forget him if it be possible?" he asked. "But it is not possible," she flashed back, lifting her wet blue eyes to his. "How dare you come to me with a tale like this? Oh, I hate you! I shall always hate you! Will you go?" Before her helpless fury he felt a compassion stronger even than the emotion her tears had aroused. "It is not fair that I should tell you so much and not tell you all, Milly," he said. "It is not fair that in accusing the man you love, I should still try to shield myself. I know that these things are true because Brown's--Wherry is his name--trial took place immediately before mine--and we saw each other during the terms which we served in prison." Then before she could move or speak he turned from her and went rapidly from the house and out into the walk. CHAPTER IX AT THE CROSS-ROADS At the corner he looked down the street and saw the red flag still swelling in the wind. A man spoke to him; the face was familiar, but he could not recall the name, until after a few congratulatory words about his political prospects, he remembered, with a start, that he was talking to Major Leary. "You may count on a clean sweep of votes, Mr. Smith--there's no doubt of it," said the Major, beaming with his amiable fiery face. "There's no doubt of it?" repeated Ordway, while he regarded the enthusiastic politician with a perplexed and troubled look. The Major, the political campaign, the waving red flag and the noisy little town had receded to a blank distance from the moment in which he stood. He wondered vaguely what connection he--Daniel Ordway--had ever held with these things? Yet his smile was still bright and cheerful as he turned away, with an apologetic word, and passed on into the road to Cedar Hill. The impulse which had driven him breathlessly into Milly's presence had yielded now to the mere dull apathy of indifference, and it mattered to him no longer whether the girl was saved or lost in the end. He thought of her vanity, of her trivial pink and white prettiness with a return of his old irritation. Well, he had done his part--his temperament had ruled him at the decisive instant, and the ensuing consequences of his confession had ceased now to affect or even to interest him. Then, with something like a pang of thought, he remembered that he had with his own hand burned his bridges behind him, and that there was no way out for him except the straight way which led over the body of Daniel Smith. His existence in Tappahannock was now finished; his victory had ended in flight; and there was nothing ahead of him except the new beginning and the old ending. A fresh start and then what? And afterward the few years of quiet again and at the end the expected, the inevitable recurrence of the disgrace which he had begun to recognise as some impersonal natural law that followed upon his footsteps. As the future gradually unrolled itself in his imagination, he felt that his heart sickened in the clutch of the terror that had sprung upon him. Was there to be no end anywhere? Could no place, no name even afford him a permanent shelter? Looking ahead now he saw himself as an old man wandering from refuge to refuge, pursued always by the resurrected corpse of his old life, which though it contained neither his spirit nor his will, still triumphed by the awful semblance it bore his outward body. Was he to be always alone? Was there no spot in his future where he could possess himself in reality of the freedom which was his in name? Without seeing, without hearing, he went almost deliriously where his road led him, for the terror in his thought had become a living presence before which his spirit rather than his body moved. He walked rapidly, yet it seemed to him that his feet were inert and lifeless weights which were dragged forward by the invincible torrent of his will. In the swiftness of his flight, he felt that he was a conscious soul chained to a body that was a corpse. When he came at last to the place where the two roads crossed before the ruined gate, he stopped short, while the tumult died gradually in his brain, and the agony through which he had just passed appeared as a frenzy to his saner judgment. Looking up a moment later as he was about to enter the avenue, he saw that Emily Brooke was walking toward him under the heavy shadow of the cedars. In the first movement of her surprise the mask which she had always worn in his presence dropped from her face, and as she stepped from the gloom into the sunlight, he felt that the sweetness of her look bent over him like protecting wings. For a single instant, as her eyes gazed wide open into his, he saw reflected in them the visions from which his soul had shrunk back formerly abashed. Nothing had changed in her since yesterday; she was outwardly the same brave and simple woman, with her radiant smile, her blown hair, and her roughened hands. Yet because of that revealing look she appeared no longer human in his eyes, but something almost unearthly bright and distant, like the sunshine he had followed so often through the bars of his prison cell. "You are suffering," she said, when he would have passed on, and he felt that she had divined without words all that he could not utter. "Don't pity me," he answered, smiling at her question, because to smile had become for him the easier part of habit, "I'm not above liking pity, but it isn't exactly what I need. And besides, I told you once, you know, that whatever happened to me would always be the outcome of my own failure." "Yes, I remember you told me so--but does that make it any easier to bear?" "Easier to bear?--no, but I don't think the chief end of things is to be easy, do you?" She shook her head. "But isn't our chief end just to make them easier for others?" she asked. The pity in her face was like an illumination, and her features were enkindled with a beauty he had never found in them before. It was the elemental motherhood in her nature that he had touched; and he felt as he watched her that this ecstasy of tenderness swelled in her bosom and overflowed her lips. Confession to her would have been for him the supreme luxury of despair; but because his heart strained toward her, he drew back and turned his eyes to the road, which stretched solitary and dim beyond them. "Well, I suppose, I've got what I deserved," he said, "the price that a man pays for being a fool, he pays but once and that is his whole life long." "But it ought not to be so--it is not just," she answered. "Just?" he repeated, bitterly, "no, I dare say, it isn't--but the facts of life don't trouble themselves about justice, do they? Is it just, for instance, that you should slave your youth away on your brother's farm, while he sits and plays dominoes on the porch? Is it just that with the instinct for luxury in your blood you should be condemned to a poverty so terrible as this?" He reached out and touched the little red hand hanging at her side. "Is this just?" he questioned with an ironical smile. "There is some reason for it," she answered bravely, "I feel it though I cannot see it." "Some reason--yes, but that reason is not justice--not the little human justice that we can call by the name. It's something infinitely bigger than any idea that we have known." "I can trust," she said softly, "but I can't reason." "Don't reason--don't even attempt to--let God run his world. Do you think if we didn't believe in the meaning--in the purpose of it all that you and I could stand together here like this? It's because we believe that we can be happy even while we suffer." "Then you will be happy again--to-morrow?" "Surely. Perhaps to-night--who knows? I've had a shock. My brain is whirling and I can't see straight. In a little while it will be over and I shall steady down." "But I should like to help you now while it lasts," she said. "You are helping me--it's a mercy that you stand there and listen to my wild talk. Do you know I was telling myself as I came along the road just now that there wasn't a living soul to whom I should dare to say that I was in a quake of fear." "A quake of fear?" She looked at him with swimming eyes, and by that look he saw that she loved him. If he had stretched out his arms, he knew that the passion of her sorrow would have swept her to his breast; and he felt that every fibre of his starved soul and body cried out for the divine food that she offered. At the moment he did not stop to ask himself whether it was his flesh or his spirit that hungered after her, for his whole being had dissolved into the longing which drew him as with cords to her lips. All he understood at the instant was that in his terrible loneliness love had been offered him and he must refuse the gift. A thought passed like a drawn sword between them, and he saw in his imagination Lydia lowering her black veil at their last parting. "It's a kind of cowardliness, I suppose," he went on with his eyes on the ground, "but I was thinking that minute how greatly I needed help and how much--how very much--you had given me. If I ever learn really to live it will be because of you--because of your wonderful courage, your unfailing sweetness----" For the first time he saw in her face the consciousness of her own unfulfilment. "If you only knew how often I wonder if it is worth while," she answered. At this he made a sudden start forward and then checked himself. "The chief tragedy in my life," he said, "is that I knew you twenty years too late." Until his words were uttered he did not realise how much of a confession he had put into them; and with the discovery he watched her face bloom softly like a flower that opens its closed petals. "If I could have helped you then, why cannot I help you now?" she asked, while the innocence in her look humbled him more than a divine fury would have done. The larger his ideal of her became, the keener grew his sense of failure--of bondage to that dead past from which he could never release his living body. As he looked at her now he realised that the supreme thing he had missed in life was the control of the power which lies in simple goodness; and the purity of Lydia appeared to him as a shining blank--an unwritten surface beside the passionate humanity in the heart of the girl before him. "You will hear things from others which I can't tell you and then you will understand," he said. "I shall hear nothing that will make me cease to believe in you," she answered. "You will hear that I have done wrong in my life and you will understand that if I have suffered it has been by my own fault." She met his gaze without wavering. "I shall still believe in you," she responded. Her eyes were on his face and she saw that the wan light of the afterglow revealed the angularities of his brow and chin and filled in with shadows the deeper hollows in his temples. The smile on his lips was almost ironical as he answered. "Those from whom I might have expected loyalty, fell away from me--my father, my wife, my children----" "To believe against belief is a woman's virtue," she responded, "but at least it is a virtue." "You mean that you would have been my friend through everything?" he asked quickly, half blinded by the ideal which seemed to flash so closely to his eyelids. There was scorn in her voice as she answered: "If I had been your friend once--yes, a thousand times." Before his inward vision there rose the conception of a love that would have pardoned, blessed and purified. Bending his head he kissed her little cold hand once and let it fall. Then without looking again into her face, he entered the avenue and went on alone. CHAPTER X BETWEEN MAN AND MAN When he entered Tappahannock the following morning, he saw with surprise that the red flag was still flying above the street. As he looked into the face of the first man he met, he felt a sensation of relief, almost of gratitude because he received merely the usual morning greeting; and the instant afterward he flinched and hesitated before replying to the friendly nod of the harness-maker, stretching himself under the hanging bridles in the door of the little shop. Entering the warehouse he glanced nervously down the deserted building, and when a moment later he opened the door into Baxter's office, he grew hot at the familiar sight of the local newspaper in his employer's hands. The years had divided suddenly and he saw again the crowd in Fifth Avenue as he walked home on the morning of his arrest. He smelt the smoke of the great city; he heard the sharp street cries around him; and he pushed aside the fading violets offered him by the crippled flower seller at the corner. He even remembered, without effort, the particular bit of scandal retailed to him over a cigar by the club wit who had joined him. All his sensations to-day were what they had been then, only now his consciousness was less acute, as if the edge of his perceptions had been blunted by the force of the former blow. "Howdy, Smith, is that you?" remarked Baxter, crushing the top of the paper beneath the weight of his chin as he looked over it at Ordway. "Did you meet Banks as you came in? He was in here asking for you not two minutes ago." "Banks? No, I didn't see him. What did he want?" As he put the ordinary question the dull level of his voice surprised him. "Oh, he didn't tell me," returned Baxter, "but it was some love-lorn whining he had to do, I reckon. Now what I can't understand is how a man can be so narrow sighted as only to see one woman out of the whole bouncing sex of 'em. It would take more than a refusal--it would take a downright football to knock out my heart. Good Lord! in this world of fine an' middling fine women, the trouble ain't to get the one you want, but to keep on wanting the one you get. I've done my little share of observing in my time, and what I've learned from it is that the biggest trial a man can have is not to want another man's wife, but to _want_ to want his own." A knock at the door called Ordway out into the warehouse, where he yielded himself immediately to the persuasive voice of Banks. "Come back here a minute, will you, out of hearing? I tried to get to you last night and couldn't." "Has anything gone wrong?" inquired Ordway, following the other to a safe distance from Baxter's office. At first he had hardly had courage to lift his eyes to Banks' face, but reassured by the quiet opening of the conversation, he stood now with his sad gaze fixed on the beaming freckled features of the melancholy lover. "I only wanted to tell you that she didn't go," whispered Banks, rolling his prominent eyes into the dusky recesses of the warehouse, "she's ill in bed to-day, and Brown left town on the eight-forty-five this morning." "So he's gone for good!" exclaimed Ordway, and drew a long breath as if he had been released from an emotional tension which had suspended, while it lasted, the ordinary movement of life. Since he had prepared himself for the worst was it possible that his terror of yesterday would scatter to-day like the delusions of an unsettled brain? Had Wherry held back in mercy or had Milly Trend? Even if he were spared now must he still live on here unaware how widely--or how pitifully--his secret was known? Would this ceaseless dread of discovery prove again, as it had proved in the past, more terrible even than the discovery itself? Would he be able to look fearlessly at Milly Trend again?--at Baxter? at Banks? at Emily? "Well, I've got to thank you for it, Smith?" said Banks. "How you stopped it, I don't know for the life of me, but stop it you did." The cheerful selfishness in such rejoicing struck Ordway even in the midst of his own bitter musing. Though Banks adored Milly, soul and body, he was frankly jubilant over the tragic ending of her short romance. "I hope there's little danger of its beginning anew," Ordway remarked presently, with less sympathy than he would have shown his friend twelve hours before. "I suppose you wouldn't like to tell me what you said to her?" inquired Banks, his customary awe of his companion swept away in the momentary swing of his elation. "No, I shouldn't like to tell you," returned Ordway quietly. "Then it's all right, of course, and I'll be off to drape the town hall in bunting for to-morrow night. We're going to make the biggest political display for you that Tappahannock has ever seen." At the instant Ordway was hardly conscious of the immensity of his relief, but some hours later, after the early closing of the warehouse, when he walked slowly back along the road to Cedar Hill, it seemed to him that his life had settled again into its quiet monotonous spaces. The peaceful fields on either side, with their short crop of live-ever-lasting, in which a few lonely sheep were browsing, appeared to him now as a part of the inward breadth and calm of the years that he had spent in Tappahannock. In the loneliness of the road he could tell himself that the fear of Gus Wherry was gone for a time at least, yet the next day upon going into town he was aware of the same nervous shrinking from the people he passed, from the planters hanging about the warehouse, from Baxter buried behind his local newspaper. "They've got a piece as long as your arm about you in the Tappahannock _Herald_, Smith," cried Baxter, chuckling; and Ordway felt himself redden painfully with apprehension. Not until the evening, when he came out upon the platform under the floating buntings in the town hall, did he regain entirely the self-possession which he had lost in the presence of Milly Trend. In its white and red decorations, with the extravagant glare of its gas-jets, the hall had assumed almost a festive appearance; and as Ordway glanced at the crowded benches and doorways, he forgot the trivial political purpose he was to serve, in the more human relation in which he stood to the men who had gathered to hear him speak. These men were his friends, and if they believed in him he felt a triumphant conviction that they had seen their belief justified day by day, hour by hour, since he had come among them. In the crowd of faces before him, he recognised, here and there, workingmen whom he had helped--operatives in Jasper Trend's cotton mills, or in the smaller factories which combined with the larger to create the political situation in Tappahannock. Closer at hand he saw the shining red face of Major Leary; the affectionate freckled face of Banks; the massive benevolent face of Baxter. As he looked at them an emotion which was almost one of love stirred in his breast, and he felt the words he had prepared dissolve and fade from his memory to reunite in an appeal of which he had not thought until this minute. There was something, he knew now, for him to say to-night--something so infinitely large that he could utter it only because it rose like love or sorrow to his lips. Of all the solemn moments when he had stood before these men, with his open Bible, in the green field or in the little grove of pines, there was none so solemn, he felt, as the approaching instant in which he would speak to them no longer as a man to children, but as a man to men. On the stage before him Baxter was addressing the house, his soft, persuasive voice mingling with a sympathetic murmur from the floor. The applause which had broken out at Ordway's entrance had not yet died away, and with each mention of his name, with each allusion to his services to Tappahannock, it burst forth again, enthusiastic, irrepressible, overwhelming. Never before, it seemed to him, sitting there on the platform with his roughened hands crossed on his knees, had he felt himself to be so intimately a part of the community in which he lived. Never before--not even when he had started this man in life, had bought off that one's mortgage or had helped another to struggle free of drink, had he come quite so near to the pathetic individual lives that compose the mass. They loved him, they believed in him, and they were justified! At the moment it seemed to him nothing--less than nothing--that they should make him Mayor of Tappahannock. In this one instant of understanding they had given him more than any office--than any honour. While he sat there outwardly so still, so confident of his success, it seemed to him that in the exhilaration of the hour he was possessed of a new and singularly penetrating insight into life. Not only did he see further and deeper than he had ever seen before, but he looked beyond the beginning of things into the causes and beyond the ending of them into the results. He saw himself and why he was himself as clearly as he saw his sin and why he had sinned. Out of their obscurity his father and his mother returned to him, and as he met the bitter ironical smile of the one and the curved black brows and red, half open mouth of the other, he knew himself to be equally the child of each, for he understood at last why he was a mixture of strength and weakness, of gaiety and sadness, of bitterness and compassion. His short, troubled childhood rushed through his thoughts, and with that swiftness of memory which comes so often in tragic moments, he lived over again--not separately and in successive instants--but fully, vitally, and in all the freshness of experience, the three events which he saw now, in looking back, as the milestones upon his road. Again he saw his mother as she lay in her coffin, with her curved black brows and half open mouth frozen into a joyous look, and in that single fleeting instant he passed through his meeting with the convict at the wayside station, and through the long suspended minutes when he had waited in the Stock Exchange for the rise in the market which did not come. And these things appeared to him, not as detached and obscure remnants of his past, but clear and delicate and vivid as if they were projected in living colours against the illumination of his mind. They were there not to bewilder, but to make plain; not to accuse, but to vindicate. "Everything is clear to me now and I see it all," he thought, "and if I can only keep this penetration of vision nothing will be harder to-morrow than it is to-night." In his whole life there was not an incident too small for him to remember it and to feel that it was significant of all the rest; and he knew that if he could have seen from the beginning as clearly as he saw to-night, his past would not have been merely different, it would have been entirely another than his own. Baxter had stopped, and turning with an embarrassed upheaval of his whole body, he spoke to Ordway, who rose at his words and came slowly forward to the centre of the stage. A hoarse murmur, followed by a tumult of shouts, greeted him, while he stood for a moment looking silently among those upturned faces for the faces of the men to whom he must speak. "That one will listen because I nursed him back to life, and that one because I brought him out of ruin--and that one and that one--" He knew them each by name, and as his gaze travelled from man to man he felt that he was seeking a refuge from some impending evil in the shelter of the good deeds that he had done. Though he held a paper in his hand, he did not look at it, for he had found his words in that instant of illumination when, seated upon the stage, he had seen the meaning of his whole life made plain. The present event and the issue of it no longer concerned him; he had ceased to fear, even to shrink from the punishment that was yet to come. In the completeness with which he yielded himself to the moment, he felt that he was possessed of the calm, almost of the power of necessity; and he experienced suddenly the sensation of being lifted and swept forward on one of the high waves of life. He spoke rapidly, without effort, almost without consciousness of the words he uttered, until it seemed to him presently that it was the torrent of his speech which carried him outward and upward with that strange sense of lightness, of security. And this lightness, this security belonged not to him, but to some outside current of being. * * * * * His speech was over, and he had spoken to these factory workers as no man had spoken before him in Tappahannock. With his last word the silence had held tight and strained for a minute, and then the grateful faces pressed round him and the ringing cheers passed through the open windows out into the street. His body was still trembling, but as he stood there with his sparkling blue eyes on the house, he looked gay and boyish. He had made his mark, he had spoken his best speech, and he had touched not merely the factory toilers in Tappahannock, but that common pulse of feeling in which all humanity is made one. Then the next instant, while he still waited, he was aware of a new movement upon the platform behind him, and a man came forward and stopped short under the gas jet, which threw a flickering yellow light upon his face. Though he had seen him but once, he recognized him instantly as the short, long-nosed, irascible manager of the cotton mills, and with the first glance into his face he had heard already the unspoken question and the reply. "May I ask you, Mr. Smith," began the little man, suddenly, "if you can prove your right to vote or to hold office in Virginia?" Ordway's gaze passed beyond him to rest upon Baxter and Major Leary, who sat close together, genial, elated, rather thirsty. At the moment he felt sorry for Baxter--not for himself. "No," he answered with a smile which threw a humorous light upon the question, "I cannot--can you prove yours?" The little man cleared his throat with a sniffling sound, and when he spoke again it was in a high nasal voice, as if he had become suddenly very excited or very angry. "Is your name Daniel Smith?" he asked, with a short laugh. The question was out at last and the silence in which Ordway stood was like the suspension between thought and thought. All at once he found himself wondering why he had lived in hourly terror of this instant, for now that it was upon him, he saw that it was no more tragic, no less commonplace, than the most ordinary instant of his life. As in the past his courage had revived in him with the first need of decisive action, so he felt it revive now, and lifting his head, he looked straight into the angry, little eyes of the man who waited, under the yellow gaslight, on the platform before him. "My name," he answered, still smiling, "is Daniel Ordway." There was no confusion in his mind, no anxiety, no resentment. Instead the wonderful brightness of a moment ago still shone in his thoughts, and while he appeared to rest his sparkling gaze on the face of his questioner, he was seeing, in reality, the road by which he had come to Tappahannock, and at the beginning of the road the prison, and beyond the prison the whole of his past life. "Did you serve a term in prison before you came here?" "Yes." "Were you tried and convicted in New York?" "Yes." "Were you guilty?" Looking over the head of the little man, Ordway's gaze travelled slowly across the upturned faces upon the floor of the house. Hardly a man passed under his look whom he had not assisted once at least in the hour of his need. "I saved that one from drink," he thought almost joyfully, "that one from beggary--I stood side by side with that other in the hour of his shame----" "Were you guilty?" repeated the high nasal voice in his ear. His gaze came quickly back, and as it passed over the head of Baxter, he was conscious again of a throb of pity. "Yes," he answered for the last time. Then, while the silence lasted, he turned from the platform and went out of the hall into the night. CHAPTER XI BETWEEN MAN AND WOMAN He walked rapidly to the end of the street, and then slackened his pace almost unconsciously as he turned into the country road. The night had closed in a thick black curtain over the landscape, and the windows of the Negroes' cabins burned like little still red flames along the horizon. Straight ahead the road was visible as a pale, curving streak across the darkness. A farmer, carrying a lantern, came down the path leading from the fields, and hearing Ordway's footsteps in the road, flashed the light suddenly into his face. Upon recognition there followed a cheerful "good-night!" and the offer of the use of the lantern to Cedar Hill. "It's a black night and you'll likely have trouble in keeping straight. I've been to look after a sick cow, but I can feel my way up to the house in two minutes." "Thank you," returned Ordway, smiling as the light shone full in his face, "but my feet are accustomed to the road." He passed on, while the farmer turned at the gate by the roadside, to shout cheerfully after him: "Well, good-night--Mayor!" The gate closed quickly, and the ray of the lantern darted like a pale yellow moth across the grass. As Ordway went on it seemed to him that the darkness became tangible, enveloping--that he had to fight his way through it presently as through water. The little red flames danced along the horizon until he wondered if they were burning only in his imagination. He felt tired and dazed as if his body had been beaten into insensibility, but the hour through which he had just passed appeared to have left merely a fading impression upon his brain. Not only had he ceased to care, he had ceased to think of it. When he tried now to recall the manager of the cotton mills, it was to remember, with aversion, his angry little eyes, his high nasal voice, and the wart upon the end of his long nose. At the instant these physical details were the only associations which the man's name presented to his thoughts. The rest was something so insignificant that it had escaped his memory. He felt in a vague way that he was sorry for Baxter, yet this very feeling of sympathy bored and annoyed him. It was plainly ridiculous to be sorry for a person as rich, as fat, as well fed as his employer. Wherever he looked the little red flames flickered and waved in the fields, and when he lifted his eyes to the dark sky, he saw them come and go in short, scintillant flashes, like fire struck from an anvil. They were in his brain, he supposed, after all, and so was this tangible darkness, and so, too, was this indescribable delicacy and lightness with which he moved. Everything was in his brain, even his ridiculous pity for Baxter and the angry-eyed little manager with the wart on his long nose. He could see these things distinctly, though he had forgotten everything that had been so clear to him while he stood on the stage of the town hall. His past life and the prison and even the illumination in which he had remembered them so vividly were obscured now as if they, too, had been received into the tangible darkness. From the road behind him the sound of footsteps reached him suddenly, and he quickened his pace with an impulse, rather than a determination of flight. But the faster he walked the faster came the even beat of the footsteps, now rising, now falling with a rhythmic regularity in the dust of the road. Once he glanced back, but he could see nothing because of the encompassing blackness, and in the instant of his delay it seemed to him that the pursuit gained steadily upon him, still moving with the regular muffled beat of the footsteps in the thick dust. A horror of recognition had come over him, and as he walked on breathlessly, now almost running, it occurred to him, like an inspiration, that he might drop aside into the fields and so let his pursuer pass on ahead. The next instant he realised that the darkness could not conceal the abrupt pause of his flight--that as those approaching footsteps fell on his ears, so must the sound of his fall on the ears of the man behind him. Then a voice called his name, and he stopped short, and stood, trembling from head to foot, by the side of the road. "Smith!" cried the voice, "if it's you, Smith, for God's sake stop a minute!" "Yes, it's I," he answered, waiting, and a moment afterward the hand of Banks reached out of the night and clasped his arm. "Hold on," said Banks, breathing hard, "I'm all blown." His laboured breath came with a struggling violence that died gradually away, but while it lasted the strain of the meeting, the awkwardness of the emotional crisis, seemed suddenly put off--suspended. Now in the silence the tension became so great that, drawing slightly away from the detaining hold, Ordway was about to resume his walk. At his first movement, however, Banks clung the more firmly to his arm. "Oh, damn it, Smith!" he burst out, and with the exclamation Ordway felt that the touch of flesh and blood had reached to the terrible loneliness in which he stood. In a single oath Banks had uttered the unutterable spirit of prayer. "You followed me?" asked Ordway quietly, while the illusions of the flight, the physical delicacy and lightness, the tangible darkness, the little red flames in the fields, departed from him. With the first hand that was laid on his own, his nature swung back into balance, and he felt that he possessed at the moment a sanity that was almost sublime. "As soon as I could get out I came. There was such a crush," said Banks, "I thought I'd catch up with you at once, but it was so black I couldn't see my hand before me. In a little while I heard footsteps, so I kept straight on." "I wish you hadn't, Banks." "But I had to." His usually cheerful voice sounded hoarse and throaty. "I ain't much of a chap at words, Smith, you know that, but I want just to say that you're the best friend I ever had, and I haven't forgot it--I haven't forgot it," he repeated, and blew his nose. "Nothing that that darn fool of a manager said to-night can come between you and me," he went on laboriously after a minute. "If you ever want my help, by thunder, I'll go to hell and back again for you without a word." Stretching out his free hand Ordway laid it upon his friend's shoulder. "You're a first-rate chap, Banks," he said cheerfully, at which a loud sob burst from Banks, who sought to disguise it the instant afterward in a violent cough. "You're a first-rate chap," repeated Ordway gently, "and I'm glad, in spite of what I said, that you came after me just now. I'm going away to-morrow, you know, and it's probable that I shan't see you again." "But won't you stay on in Tappahannock? In two weeks all this will blow over and things will be just what they were before." Ordway shook his head, a movement which Banks felt, though he did not see it. "No, I'll go away, it's best," he answered, and though his voice had dropped to a dull level there was still a cheerful sound to it, "I'll go away and begin again in a new place." "Then I'll go, too," said Banks. "What! and leave Milly? No, you won't come. Banks, you'll stay here." "But I'll see you sometimes, shan't I?" "Perhaps?--that's likely, isn't it?" "Yes, that's likely," repeated Banks, and fell silent from sheer weight of sorrow. "At least you'll let me go with you to the station?" he said at last, after a long pause in which he had been visited by one of those acute flashes of sympathy which are to the heart what intuition is to the intellect. "Why, of course," responded Ordway, more touched by the simple request than he had been even by the greater loyalty. "You may do that, Banks, and I'll thank you for it. And now go back to Tappahannock," he added, "I must take the midday train and there are a few preparations I've still to make." "But where will you go?" demanded Banks, swinging round again after he had turned from him. "Where?" repeated Ordway blankly, and he added indifferently, "I hadn't thought." "The midday train goes west," said Banks. "Then, I'll go west. It doesn't matter." Banks had already started off, when turning back suddenly, he caught Ordway's hand and wrung it in a grip that hurt. Then without speaking again, he hurried breathlessly in the direction from which he had come. A few steps beyond the cross-roads Ordway saw through the heavy foliage the light in the dining-room at Cedar Hill. Then as he entered the avenue, he lost sight of it again, until he had rounded the curve that swept up to the front porch. At his knock Emily opened the door, with a lamp held in her hand, and he saw her face, surrounded by dim waves of hair, shining pale and transparent in the glimmering circle of light. As he followed her into the dining-room, he realised that after the family had gone upstairs to bed, she had sat at her sewing under the lamp and waited for his knock. At the knowledge a sense of comfort, of homeliness came over him, and he felt all at once that his misery was not so great as he had believed it to be a moment ago. "May I get you something?" she asked, placing the lamp upon the table and lowering the wick that the flame might not shine on his pallid and haggard face. He shook his head; then as she turned from him toward the hearth, he followed her and stood looking down at the smouldering remains of a wood fire. Her work-basket and a pile of white ruffles which she had been hemming were on the table, but moved by a feeling of their utter triviality in the midst of a tragedy she vaguely understood, she swept them hurriedly into a chair, and came over to lay her hand upon his arm. "What can I do? Oh, what can I do?" she asked. Taking her hand from his sleeve, he held it for an instant in his grasp, as if the pressure of her throbbing palm against his revived some living current under the outer deadness that enveloped him. "I am going away from Tappahannock to-morrow, Emily," he said. "To-morrow?" she repeated, and laid her free hand upon his shoulder with a soothing, motherly gesture--a gesture which changed their spiritual relations to those of a woman and a child. "A man asked me three questions to-night," he went on quietly, yet in a voice which seemed to feel a pang in every word it uttered. "He asked me if my name was Daniel Smith, and I answered--no." As he hesitated, she lifted her face and smiled at him, with a smile which he knew to be the one expression of love, of comprehension, that she could offer. It was a smile which a mother might have bent upon a child that was about to pass under the surgeon's knife, and it differed from tears only in that it offered courage and not weakness. "He asked me if I had been in prison before I came to Tappahannock--and I answered--yes." His voice broke, rather than ceased, and lifting his gaze from her hands he looked straight into her wide-open eyes. The smile which she had turned to him a moment before was still on her lips, frozen there in the cold pallor of her face. Her eyes were the only things about her which seemed alive, and they appeared to him now not as eyes but as thoughts made visible. Bending her head quickly she kissed the hand which enclosed her own. "I still believe," she said, and looked into his face. "But it is true," he replied slowly. "But it is not the whole truth," she answered, "and for that reason it is half a lie." "Yes, it is not the whole truth," he repeated, in his effort to catch something of her bright courage. "Why should they judge you by that and by nothing else?" she demanded with passion. "If that was true, is not your life in Tappahannock true also?" "To you--to you," he answered, "but to-morrow everything will be forgotten about me except the fact that because I had been in prison, I have lived a lie." "You are wrong--oh, believe me, you are wrong," she said softly, while her tears broke forth and streamed down her white face. "No," he returned patiently, as if weighing her words in his thoughts, "I am right, and my life here is wasted now from the day I came. All that I do from this moment will be useless. I must go away." "But where?" she questioned passionately, as Banks had questioned before her. "Where?" he echoed, "I don't know--anywhere. The midday train goes west." "And what will you do in the new place?" she asked through her tears. He shook his head as if the question hardly concerned him. "I shall begin again," he answered indifferently at last. She was turning hopelessly from him, when her eyes fell upon a slip of yellow paper which Beverly had placed under a vase on the mantel, and drawing it out, she glanced at the address before giving it into Ordway's hands. "This must have come for you in the afternoon," she said, "I did not see it." Taking the telegram from her, he opened it slowly, and read the words twice over. "Your father died last night. Will you come home? "RICHARD ORDWAY." BOOK THIRD THE LARGER PRISON CHAPTER I THE RETURN TO LIFE As the train rounded the long curve, Ordway leaned from the window and saw spread before him the smiling battlefields that encircled Botetourt. From the shadow and sunlight of the distance a wind blew in his face, and he felt suddenly younger, fresher, as if the burden of the years had been lifted from him. The Botetourt to which he was returning was the place of his happiest memories; and closing his eyes to the landscape, he saw Lydia standing under the sparrows that flew out from the ivied walls of the old church. He met her pensive gaze; he watched her faint smile under the long black feather in her hat. "His death was unexpected," said a strange voice in his ear, "but for the past five years I've seen that he was a failing man." The next instant his thoughts had scattered like startled birds, and without turning his head, he sat straining his ears to follow the conversation that went on, above the roar of the train, in the seat behind him. "Had a son, didn't he?" inquired the man who had not spoken. "What's become of him, I'd like to know? I mean the chap who went to smash somewhere in the North." "Oh, he misappropriated trust funds and got found out and sent to prison. When he came out, he went West, I heard, and struck a gold mine, but, all the same, he left his wife and children for the old man to look after. Ever seen his wife? Well, she's a downright saint, if there ever lived one." "And yet he went wrong, the more's the pity." "It's a funny thing," commented the first speaker, who was evidently of a philosophic bent, "but I've often noticed that a good wife is apt to make a bad husband. It looks somehow as if male human nature, like the Irish members, is obliged to sit on the Opposition bench. The only example that ever counts with it, is an example that urges the other way." "Well, what about this particular instance? I hope at least that she has come into the old man's money?" "Nobody can tell, but it's generally believed that the two children will get the most of it. The son left a boy and a girl when he went to prison, you know." "Ah, that's rather a pity, isn't it?" "Well, I can't say--they've got good blood as well as bad, when it comes to that. My daughter went to school with the girl, and she was said to be, by long odds, the most popular member of her class. She graduated last spring, and people tell me that she has turned out to be the handsomest young woman in Botetourt." "Like the mother?" "No, dark and tall, with those snapping blue eyes of her grandmother's----" * * * * * So Alice was no longer the little girl in short white skirts, outstanding like a ballet dancer's! There was a pang for him in the thought, and he tried in vain to accustom himself to the knowledge that she would meet him to-night as a woman, not as a child. He remembered the morning when she had run out, as he passed up the staircase, to beg him to come in to listen to her music lesson; and with the sound of the stumbling scales in his ears, he felt again that terrible throbbing of his pulses and the dull weight of anguish which had escaped at last in an outburst of bitterness. With a jolting motion the train drew up into the little station, and following the crowd that pressed through the door of the car, he emerged presently into the noisy throng of Negro drivers gathered before the rusty vehicles which were waiting beside the narrow pavement. Pushing aside the gaily decorated whips which encircled him at his approach, he turned, after a moment's hesitation, into one of the heavily shaded streets, which seemed to his awakened memory to have remained unaltered since the afternoon upon which he had left the town almost twenty years ago. The same red and gold maples stirred gently above his head; the same silent, green-shuttered houses were withdrawn behind glossy clusters of microphylla rose-creepers. Even the same shafts of sunshine slanted across the roughly paved streets, which were strewn thickly with yellowed leaves. It was to Ordway as if a pleasant dream had descended upon the place, and had kept unchanged the particular golden stillness of that autumn afternoon when he had last seen it. All at once he realised that what Tappahannock needed was not progress, but age; and he saw for the first time that the mellowed charm of Botetourt was relieved against the splendour of an historic background. Not the distinction of the present, but the enchantment of the past, produced this quality of atmosphere into which the thought of Tappahannock entered like a vulgar discord. The dead, not the living, had built these walls, had paved these streets, had loved and fought and starved beneath these maples; and it was the memory of such solemn things that steeped the little town in its softening haze of sentiment. A thrill of pleasure, more intense than any he had known for months, shot through his heart, and the next instant he acknowledged with a sensation of shame that he was returning, not only to his people, but to his class. Was this all that experience, that humiliation, could do for one--that he should still find satisfaction in the refinements of habit, in the mere external pleasantness of life? As he passed the old church he saw that the sparrows still fluttered in and out of the ivy, which was full of twittering cries like a gigantic bird's nest, and he had suddenly a ghostly feeling as if he were a moving shadow under shadowy trees and unreal shafts of sunlight. A moment later he almost held his breath lest the dark old church and the dreamy little town should vanish before his eyes and leave him alone in the outer space of shadows. Coming presently under a row of poplars to the street in which stood his father's house--a square red brick building with white Doric columns to the portico--he saw with a shock of surprise that the funeral carriages were standing in a solemn train for many blocks. Until that moment it had not occurred to him that he might come in time to look on the dead face of the man who had not forgiven him while he was alive; and at first he shivered and shrank back as if hesitating to enter the door that had been so lately closed against him. An old Negro driver, who sat on the curbing, wiping the broad black band on his battered silk hat with a red bandanna handkerchief, turned to speak to him with mingled sympathy and curiosity. "Ef'n you don' hurry up, you'll miss de bes' er hit, marster," he remarked. "Dey's been gwine on a pow'ful long time, but I'se been a-lisenin' wid all my years en I ain' hyearn nairy a sh'ut come thoo' de do'. Lawd! Lawd! dey ain' mo'n like I mo'n, caze w'en dey buried my Salviny I set up sech a sh'uttin' dat I bu'st two er my spar ribs clean ter pieces." Still muttering to himself he fell to polishing his old top hat more vigorously, while Ordway quickened his steps with an effort, and entering the gate, ascended the brick walk to the white steps of the portico. A wide black streamer hung from the bell handle, so pushing open the door, which gave noiselessly before him, he entered softly into the heavy perfume of flowers. From the room on his right, which he remembered dimly as the formal drawing-room in the days of his earliest childhood, he heard a low voice speaking as if in prayer; and looking across the threshold, he saw a group of black robed persons kneeling in the faint light which fell through the chinks in the green shutters. The intense odour of lilies awoke in him a sharp anguish, which had no association in his thoughts with his father's death, and which he could not explain until the incidents of his mother's funeral crowded, one by one, into his memory. The scent of lilies was the scent of death in his nostrils, and he saw again the cool, high-ceiled room in the midst of which her coffin had stood, and through the open windows the wide green fields in which spring was just putting forth. That was nearly thirty years ago, yet the emotion he felt at this instant was less for his father who had died yesterday than for his mother whom he had lost while he was still a child. At his entrance no one had observed him, and while the low prayer went on, he stood with bowed head searching among the veiled figures about the coffin for the figure of his wife. Was that Lydia, he wondered, kneeling there in her mourning garments with her brow hidden in her clasped hands? And as he looked at her it seemed to him that she had never lifted the black veil which she had lowered over her face at their last parting. Though he was outwardly now among his own people, though the physical distance which divided him from his wife and children was barely a dozen steps, the loneliness which oppressed him was like the loneliness of the prison; and he understood that his real home was not here, but in Tappahannock--that his true kinship was with the labourers whose lives he had shared and whose bitter poverty he had lessened. In the presence of death he was conscious of the space, the luxury, the costly funeral wreaths that surrounded him; and these external refinements of living produced in him a sensation of shyness, as if he had no longer a rightful place in the class in which he had been born. Against his will he grew ashamed of his coarse clothes and his roughened hands; and with this burning sense of humiliation a wave of homesickness for Tappahannock swept over him--for the dusty little town, with its hot, close smells and for the blue tent of sky which was visible from his ivied window at Cedar Hill. Then he remembered, with a pang, that even from Tappahannock he had been cast out. For the second time since his release from prison, he felt cowed and beaten, like an animal that is driven to bay. The dead man in his coffin was more closely woven into his surroundings than was the living son who had returned to his inheritance. As the grave faces looked back at him at the end of the prayer, he realised that they belonged to branches, near or distant, of the Ordway connections. With the first glimpse of his figure in the doorway there came no movement of recognition; then he observed a slight start of surprise--or was it dismay? He knew that Lydia had seen him at last, though he did not look at her. It appeared to him suddenly that his return was an insult to her as well as to the dead man who lay there, helpless yet majestic, in the centre of the room. Flight seemed to him at the instant the only amendment in his power, and he had made an impulsive start back from the threshold, when the strained hush was broken by a word that left him trembling and white as from a blow. "Father!" cried a voice, in the first uncontrollable joy of recognition; and with an impetuous rush through the crowd that surrounded her, Alice threw herself into his arms. A mist swam before his eyes and he lost the encircling faces in a blur of tears; but as she clung to his breast and he held her close, he was conscious of a fierce joy that throbbed, like a physical pain, in his throat. The word which she had uttered had brought his soul up from the abyss as surely as if it were lifted by the hands of angels; and with each sobbing breath of happiness she drew, he felt that her nature was knit more firmly into his. The repulse he had received the moment before was forgotten, and while he held her drawn apart in the doorway, the silence of Lydia, and even the reproach of the dead man, had ceased to affect him. In that breathless, hysterical rush to his embrace Alice saved him to-day as Emily's outstretched hand had saved him three years before. "They did not tell me! Oh, why, did they not tell me?" cried the girl, lifting her head from his breast, and the funeral hush that shrouded the room could not keep back the ecstasy in her voice. Even when after the first awkward instant the others gathered around him, nervous, effusive, friendly, Alice still clung to his hands, kissing first one and then the other and then both together, with the exquisite joyous abandonment of a child. Lydia had kissed him, weeping softly under her long black veil, and hiding her pale, lovely face the moment afterwards in her clasped hands. Dick, his son, had touched his cheek with his fresh young mouth; Richard Ordway, his father's brother, had shaken him by the hand; and the others, one and all, kinsmen and kinswomen, had given him their embarrassed, yet kindly, welcome. But it was on Alice that his eyes rested, while he felt his whole being impelled toward her in a recovered rapture that was almost one of worship. In her dark beauty, with her splendid hair, her blue, flashing Ordway eyes, and her lips which were too red and too full for perfection, she appeared to him the one vital thing among the mourning figures in this house of death. Her delight still ran in little tremors through her limbs, and when a moment later, she slipped her hand through his arm, and followed Lydia and Richard Ordway down the steps, and into one of the waiting carriages, he felt that her bosom quivered with the emotion which the solemn presence of his father had forced back from her lips. CHAPTER II HIS OWN PLACE Some hours later when he sat alone in his room, he told himself that he could never forget the drive home from the cemetery in the closed carriage. Lydia had raised her veil slightly, as if in a desire for air, and as she sat with her head resting against the lowered blind, he could trace the delicate, pale lines of her mouth and chin, and a single wisp of her ash blond hair which lay heavily upon her forehead. Not once had she spoken, not once had she met his eyes of her own accord, and he had discovered that she leaned almost desperately upon the iron presence of Richard Ordway. Had his sin, indeed, crushed her until she had not power to lift her head? he asked passionately, with a sharper remorse than he had ever felt. "I am glad that you were able to come in time," Richard Ordway remarked in his cold, even voice; and after this the rattle of the wheels on the cobblestones in the street was the only sound which broke the death-like stillness in which they sat. No, he could never forget it, nor could he forget the bewildering effect of the sunshine when they opened the carriage door. Beside the curbing a few idle Negroes were left of the crowd that had gathered to watch the coffin borne through the gate, and the pavement was thick with dust, as if many hurrying feet had tramped by since the funeral had passed. As they entered the house the scent of lilies struck him afresh with all the agony of its associations. The shutters were still closed, the chairs were still arranged in their solemn circle, the streamer of crape, hurriedly untied from the bell handle, still lay where it had been thrown on the library table; and as he crossed the threshold, he trod upon some fading lilies which had fallen, unnoticed, from a funeral wreath. Then, in the dining-room, Richard Ordway poured out a glass of whiskey, and in the very instant when he was about to raise it to his lips, he put it hurriedly down and pushed the decanter aside with an embarrassed and furtive movement. "Do you feel the need of a cup of coffee, Daniel?" he asked in a pleasant, conciliatory tone, "or will you have only a glass of seltzer?" "I am not thirsty, thank you," Daniel responded shortly, and the next moment he asked Alice to show him the room in which he would stay. With laughing eagerness she led him up the great staircase to the chamber in which he had slept as a boy. "It's just next to Dick's," she said, "and mother's and mine are directly across the hall. At first we thought of putting you in the red guest-room, but that's only for visitors, so we knew you would be sure to like this better." "Yes, I'll like this better," he responded, and then as she would have moved away, he caught her, with a gesture of anguish, back to his arms. "You remember me, Alice, my child? you have not forgotten me?" She laughed merrily, biting her full red lips the moment afterward to check the sound. "Why, how funny of you! I was quite a big girl--don't you remember?--when you went away. It was so dull afterwards that I cried for days, and that was why I was so overjoyed when mamma told me you would come back. It was never dull when you lived at home with us, because you would always take me to the park or the circus whenever I grew tired of dolls. Nobody did that after you went away and I used to cry and kick sometimes thinking that they would tell you and bring you back." "And you remembered me chiefly because of the park and the circus?" he asked, smiling for joy, as he kissed her hand which lay on his sleeve. "Oh, I never forget anything, you know. Mamma even says that about me. I remember my first nurse and the baker's boy with red cheeks who used to bring me pink cakes when I was three years old. No, I never forget--I never forget," she repeated with vehemence. Animation had kindled her features into a beauty of colour which made her eyes bluer and brighter and softened the too intense contrast of her full, red lips. "All these years I've hoped that you would come back and that things would change," she said impulsively, her words tripping rapidly over one another. "Everything is so dreadfully grave and solemn here. Grandfather hated noise so that he would hardly let me laugh if he was in the house. Then mamma's health is wrecked, and she lies always on the sofa, and never goes out except for a drive sometimes when it is fair." "Mamma's health is wrecked?" he repeated inquiringly, as she paused. "Oh, that's what everybody says about her--her health is wrecked. And Uncle Richard is hardly any better, for he has a wife whose health is wrecked also. And Dick--he isn't sick, but he might as well be, he is so dull and plodding and over nice----" "And you Alice?" "I? Oh, I'm not dull, but I'm unhappy--awfully--you'll find that out. I like fun and pretty clothes and new people and strange places. I want to marry and have a home of my own and a lot of rings like mamma's, and a carriage with two men on the box, and to go to Europe to buy things whenever I please. That's the way Molly Burridge does and she was only two classes ahead of me. How rough your hands are, papa, and what a funny kind of shirt you have on. Do people dress like that where you came from? Well, I don't like it, so you'll have to change." She had gone out at last, forgetting to walk properly in her mourning garments, tripping into a run on the threshold, and then checking herself with a prim, mocking look over her shoulder. Not until the door had closed with a slam behind her black skirt, did Ordway's gaze turn from following her and fix itself on the long mirror between the windows, in which he could see, as Alice had seen the moment before, his roughened hands, his carelessly trimmed hair and his common clothes. He was dressed as the labourers dressed on Sundays in Tappahannock; though, he remembered now, that in that crude little town he had been conspicuous for the neatness, almost the jauntiness, of his attire. As he laid out presently on the bed his few poor belongings, he told himself, with determination, that for Alice's sake even this must be changed. He was no longer of the class of Baxter, of Banks, of Mrs. Twine. All that was over, and he must return now into the world in which his wife and his children had kept a place. To do Alice honour--at least not to do her further shame--would become from this day, he realised, the controlling motive of his life. Then, as he looked down at the coarse, unshapely garments upon the delicate counterpane, he knew that Daniel Smith and Daniel Ordway were now parted forever. He was still holding one of the rough blue shirts in his hand, when a servant entered to inquire if there was anything that he might need. The man, a bright young mulatto, was not one of the old family slaves; and while he waited, alert and intelligent, upon the threshold, Ordway was seized by a nervous feeling that he was regarded with curiosity and suspicion by the black rolling eyes. "Where is uncle Boaz? He used to wait upon me," he asked. "He's daid, suh. He drapped down daid right on de do' step." "And Aunt Mirandy?" "She's daid, too, en' I'se her chile." "Oh, you are, are you?" said Ordway, and he had again the sensation that he was watched through inquisitive eyes. "That is all now," he added presently, "you may go," and it was with a long breath of relief that he saw the door close after the figure of Aunt Mirandy's son. When a little later he dressed himself and went out into the hall, he found, to his annoyance, that he walked with a cautious and timid step like that of a labourer who has stumbled by accident into surroundings of luxury. As he descended the wide curving staircase, with his hand on the mahogany balustrade, the sound of his footsteps seemed to reverberate disagreeably through the awful funereal silence in which he moved. If he could only hear Alice's laugh, Dick's whistle, or even the garrulous flow of the Negro voices that he had listened to in his childhood. With a pang he recalled that Uncle Boaz was dead, and his heart swelled as he remembered how often he had passed up and down this same staircase on the old servant's shoulder. At that age he had felt no awe of the shining emptiness and the oppressive silence. Then he had believed himself to be master of all at which he looked; now he was conscious of that complete detachment from his surroundings which produces almost a sense of the actual separation of soul and body. Reaching the hall below, he found that some hurried attempt had been made to banish or to conceal the remaining signs of the funeral. The doors and windows were open, the shreds of crape had disappeared from the carpet, and the fading lilies had been swept out upon the graveled walk in the yard. Upon entering the library, which invited him by its rows of calf-bound books, he discovered that Richard Ordway was patiently awaiting him in the large red leather chair which had once been the favourite seat of his father. "Before I go home, I think it better to have a little talk with you, Daniel," began the old man, as he motioned to a sofa on the opposite side of the Turkish rug before the open grate. "It has been a peculiar satisfaction to me to feel that I was able to bring you back in time for the service." "I came," replied Daniel slowly, "as soon as I received your telegram." He hesitated an instant and then went on in the same quiet tone in which the other had spoken, "Do you think, though, that he would have wished me to come at all?" After folding the newspaper which he had held in his hand, Richard laid it, with a courteous gesture upon the table beside him. As he sat there with his long limbs outstretched and relaxed, and his handsome, severe profile resting against the leather back of his chair, the younger man was impressed, as if for the first time, by the curious mixture of strength and refinement in his features. He was not only a cleverer man than his brother had been, he was gentler, smoother, more distinguished on every side. In spite of his reserve, it was evident that he had wished to be kind--that he wished it still; yet this kindness was so removed from the ordinary impulse of humanity that it appeared to his nephew to be in a way as detached and impersonal as an abstract virtue. The very lines of his face were drawn with the precision, the finality, of a geometrical figure. To imagine that they could melt into tenderness was as impossible as to conceive of their finally crumbling into dust. "He would have wished it--he did wish it," he said, after a minute. "I talked with him only a few hours before his death, and he told me then that it was necessary to send for you--that he felt that he had neglected his duty in not bringing you home immediately after your release. He saw at last that it would have been far better to have acted as I strongly advised at the time." "It was his desire, then, that I should return?" asked Daniel, while a stinging moisture rose to his eyes at the thought that he had not looked once upon the face of the dead man. "I wish I had known." A slight surprise showed in the other's gesture of response, and he glanced hastily away as he might have done had he chanced to surprise his nephew while he was still without his boots or his shirt. "I think he realised before he died that the individual has no right to place his personal pride above the family tie," he resumed quietly, ignoring the indecency of emotion as he would have ignored, probably, the unclothed body. "I had said much the same thing to him eight years ago, when I told him that he would realise before his death that he was not morally free to act as he had done with regard to you. As a matter of fact," he observed in his trained, legal voice, "the family is, after all, the social unit, and each member is as closely related as the eye to the ear or the right arm to the left. It is illogical to speak of denying one's flesh and blood, for it can't be done." So this was why they had received him. He turned his head away, and his gaze rested upon the boughs of the great golden poplar beyond the window. "It is understood, then," he asked "that I am to come back--back to this house to live?" When he had finished, but not until then, Richard Ordway looked at him again with his dry, conventional kindness. "If you are free," he began, altering the word immediately lest it should suggest painful associations to his companion's mind, "I mean if you have no other binding engagements, no decided plans for the future." "No, I have made no other plans. I was working as a bookkeeper in a tobacco warehouse in Tappahannock." "As a bookkeeper?" repeated Richard, as he glanced down inquiringly at the other's hands. "Oh, I worked sometimes out of doors, but the position I held was that of confidential clerk." The old man nodded amiably, accepting the explanation with a readiness for which the other was not prepared. "I was about to offer you some legal work in my office," he remarked. "Dry and musty stuff, I fear it is, but it's better--isn't it?--for a man to have some kind of occupation----" Though the words were uttered pleasantly enough, it seemed to the younger man that the concluding and significant phrase was left unspoken. "Some kind of occupation to keep you out of temptation" was what Richard had meant to say--what he had withheld, from consideration, if not from humanity. While the horror of the whole situation closed over Daniel like a mental darkness, he remembered the sensitive shrinking of Lydia on the drive home, the prying, inquisitive eyes of the mulatto servant, the furtive withdrawal of the whiskey by the man who sat opposite to him. With all its attending humiliation and despair, there rushed upon him the knowledge that by the people of his own household he was regarded still as a creature to be restrained and protected at every instant. Though outwardly they had received him, instinctively they had repulsed him. The thing which stood between them and himself was neither of their making nor of his. It belonged to their very nature and was woven in with their inner fibre. It was a creation, not of the individual, but of the race, and the law by which it existed was rooted deep in the racial structure. Tradition, inheritance, instinct--these were the barriers through which he had broken and which had closed like the impenetrable sea-gates behind him. Though he were to live on day by day as a saint among them, they could never forget: though he were to shed his heart's blood for them, they would never believe. To convince them of his sincerity was more hopeless, he understood, than to reanimate their affection. In their very forgiveness they had not ceased to condemn him, and in the shelter which they offered him there would be always a hidden restraint. With the thought it seemed to him that he was stifling in the closeness of the atmosphere, that he must break away again, that he must find air and freedom, though it cost him all else besides. The possibility of his own weakness seemed created in him by their acceptance of it; and he felt suddenly a terror lest the knowledge of their suspicion should drive him to justify it by his future in Botetourt. "Yes, it is better for me to work," he said aloud. "I hope that I shall be able to make myself of some small use in your office." "There's no doubt of that, I'm sure," responded Richard, in his friendliest tone. "It is taken for granted, then, that I shall live on here with my wife and children?" "We have decided that it is best. But as for your wife, you must remember that she is very much of an invalid. Do not forget that she has had a sad--a most tragic life." "I promise you that I shall not forget it--make your mind easy." After this it seemed to Daniel that there was nothing further to be said; but before rising from his chair, the old man sat for a moment with his thin lips tightly folded and a troubled frown ruffling his forehead. In the dim twilight the profile outlined against the leather chair appeared to have been ground rather than roughly hewn out of granite. "About the disposition of the estate, there were some changes made shortly before your father's death," remarked Richard presently. "In the will itself you were not mentioned; a provision was made for your wife and the bulk of the property left to your two children. But in a codicil, which was added the day before your father died, he directed that you should be given a life interest in the house as well as in investments to the amount of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. This is to be paid you in the form of a quarterly allowance, which will yield you a personal income of about six thousand a year." "I understand," replied the younger man, without emotion, almost without surprise. At the moment he was wondering by what name his father had alluded to him in his will. Had he spoken of him as "my son," or merely as "Daniel Ordway"? "That is all, I think," remarked the other, with a movement which expressed, in spite of him, a sensation of relief. With a smile which appeared to be little more than a muscular contraction of his mouth, he held out his hand and stood for a moment, vainly searching for a phrase or a word that would fit the delicate requirements of the occasion. "Well, I shall never cease to be thankful that you were with us at the cemetery," he said at last in a tone which was a patent admission that he had failed. Then, with a kindly inclination of his head, he released the hand he held and passed at his rapid, yet dignified step out of the house. CHAPTER III THE OUTWARD PATTERN The front door had hardly closed when a breath of freshness blew into the library with the entrance of Alice, and a moment afterwards the butler rolled back the mahogany doors of the dining-room and they saw the lighted candles and the chrysanthemums upon the dinner table. "We hardly ever dress," said Alice, slipping her hand through his arm, "I wish we did." "Well, if you'll only pardon these clothes to-night I'll promise to call on the tailor before breakfast," he returned, smiling, conscious that he watched in anxiety lest the look of delight in his presence should vanish from her face. "Oh, it doesn't matter now, because we're in the deepest grief--aren't we?--and mamma isn't coming down. She wants to see you, by the way, just for a minute when you go upstairs. It is to be just for a minute, I was to be very particular about that, as she is broken down. I wonder why they have put so many covers. There is nobody but you and Dick. I asked Uncle Richard, but he said that he wouldn't stay. It's just as well he didn't--he's so dreadfully dull, isn't he, papa?" "All I wish is that I were dull in Uncle Richard's way," remarked Dick, with his boyish air of superiority, "I'd be the greatest lawyer in the state then, when my turn came." "And you'd be even more tiresome than you are now," retorted the girl with a flash of irritation which brought out three fine, nervous wrinkles on her delicate forehead. "Well, I shouldn't have your temper anyway," commented Dick imperturbably, as he ate his soup. "Do you remember, papa, how Alice used to bite and scratch as a baby? She'd like to behave exactly that way now if she weren't so tall." "Oh, I know Alice better than you do," said Ordway, in a voice which he tried to make cheerful. The girl sat on his right, and while she choked back her anger, he reached out and catching her hand, held it against his cheek. "We stand together, Alice and I," he said softly--"Alice and I." As he repeated the words a wave of joy rose in his heart, submerging the disappointment, the bitterness, the hard despair, of the last few hours. Here also, as well as in Tappahannock, he found awaiting him his appointed task. Dick laughed pleasantly, preserving always the unshakable self-possession which reminded his father of Richard Ordway. He was a good boy, Daniel knew, upright, honest, manly, all the things which his grandfather and his great-grandfather had been before him. "Then you'll have to stand with Geoffrey Heath," he said jestingly, "and, by Jove, I don't think I'd care for his company." "Geoffrey Heath?" repeated Ordway inquiringly, with his eyes on his daughter, who sat silent and angry, biting her lower lip. Her mouth, which he had soon discovered to be her least perfect feature, was at the same time her most expressive one. At her slightest change of mood, he watched it tremble into a smile or a frown, and from a distance it was plainly the first thing one noticed about her face. Now, as she sat there, with her eyes on her plate, her vivid lips showed like a splash of carmine in the lustreless pallor of her skin. "Oh, he's one of Alice's chums," returned Dick with his merciless youthful sneer, "she has a pretty lot of them, too, though he is by long odds the worst." "Well, he's rich enough anyway," protested Alice defiantly, "he keeps beautiful horses and sends me boxes of candy, and I don't care a bit for the rest." "Who is he, by the way?" asked Daniel. "There was a family of Heaths who lived near us in the country when I was a boy. Is he one of these?" "He's the son of old Rupert Heath, who made a million out of some panic in stocks. Uncle Richard says the father was all right, but he's tried his best to break up Alice's craze about Geoffrey. But let her once get her nose to the wind and nobody can do anything with her." "Well, I can, can't I, darling?" asked Ordway, smiling in spite of a jealous pang. The appeal of the girl to him was like the appeal of the finer part of his own nature. Her temptations he recognised as the old familiar temptations of his youth, and the kinship between them seemed at the moment something deeper and more enduring than the tie of blood. Yet the thought that she was his daughter awoke in him a gratitude that was almost as acute as pain. The emptiness of his life was filled suddenly to over-flowing, and he felt again that he had found here as he had found at Tappahannock both his mission and his reward. When dinner was over he left the boy and girl in the library and went slowly, and with a nervous hesitation, upstairs to the room in which Lydia was lying on her couch, with a flower-decked tray upon the little inlaid table beside her. As he entered the room something in the luxurious atmosphere--in the amber satin curtains, the white bearskin rugs, the shining mirrors between the windows--recalled the early years of his marriage, and as he remembered them, he realised for the first time the immensity of the change which divided his present existence from his past. The time had been when he could not separate his inner life from his surroundings, and with the thought he saw in his memory the bare cleanliness of the blue guest-room at Cedar Hill--with its simple white bed, its rag carpet, its faded sampler worked in blue worsteds. That place had become as a sanctuary to him now, for it was there that he had known his most perfect peace, his completest reconciliation with God. As he entered the room Lydia raised herself slightly upon her elbow, and without turning her head, nervously pushed back a white silk shawl which she had thrown over her knees. A lamp with an amber shade cast its light on her averted profile, and he noticed that its perfect outline, its serene loveliness, was untouched by suffering. Already he had discovered those almost imperceptible furrows between Alice's eyebrows, but when Lydia looked up at him at last, he saw that her beautiful forehead, under its parting of ash blond hair, was as smooth as a child's. Was it merely the Madonna-like arrangement of her hair, after all, he wondered, not without bitterness, that had bestowed upon her that appealing expression of injured innocence? "You wished to speak to me, Alice said," he began with an awkward gesture, acutely conscious, as he stood there, of the amber light in the room, of the shining waves of her hair, of the delicate perfume which floated from the gold-topped boxes upon her dressing-table. An oval mirror above the mantel gave back to him the reflection of his own roughly clad figure, and the violent contrast between himself and his surroundings stung him into a sense of humiliation that was like a physical smart. "I thought it better to speak to you--Uncle Richard and Dick advised me to----" she broke off in a gentle confusion, lifting her lovely, pensive eyes for the first time to his face. "Of course it is better, Lydia," he answered gravely. "You must let me know what you wish--you must tell me quite frankly just what you would rather that I should do----" The look of gratitude in her face gave him a sudden inexplicable pang. "I am hardly more than an invalid," she said in a voice that had grown firm and sweet, "Uncle Richard will tell you----" Her reliance upon Richard Ordway aroused in him a passion of resentment, and for an instant the primitive man in him battled hotly against the renunciation his lips had made. "I know, I understand," he said hurriedly at last. "I appreciate it all and I shall do whatever is in my power to make it easier for you." As he looked at her bowed head a wave of remorse rose in his breast and swept down, one by one, the impulses of anger, of pride, of self-righteousness. "O my dear, my dear, don't you think I know what I have done to you?" he asked, and going a step toward her, he fell on his knees beside the couch and kissed passionately the hand that lay in her lap. "Don't you think I know that I have ruined your life?" For a moment her eyes dwelt thoughtfully upon his, and she let her hand lie still beneath his remorseful kisses, until her withdrawal of it had lost any appearance of haste or of discourtesy. "Then you will not object to my living on in this way? You will not seek to change anything? You will----" She hesitated and broke off, not impulsively, but with the same clear, sweet voice in which she had put her question. Lifting his head, he looked up at her from his knees, and the dumb loneliness in his eyes caused her at last to drop her own to the rug upon which he knelt. "If you will only let me care for you--serve you--work for you," he implored brokenly. "If you will only let me make up, however poorly, something of what you have suffered." A vague discomfort, produced in her by the intensity of his gaze, moved her to draw slightly away from him, while she turned restlessly on her pillows. At the first shade of perplexity, of annoyance, that showed in her face, he felt, with a terrible power of intuition, that she was seeking in vain to estimate each of his heartbroken words at its full value--to read calmly by the light of experience the passion for atonement to which his lips had tried hopelessly to give expression. The wall of personality rose like a visible object between them. He might beat against it in desperation until his strength was gone, yet he knew that it would remain forever impenetrable, and through its thickness there would pass only the loud, unmeaning sound of each other's voice. "Have you lost all love for me, Lydia?" he asked. "Have you even forgotten that I am the father of your children?" As soon as his words were uttered, he stumbled to his feet, horrified by the effect upon her. A change that was like a spasm of physical nausea had shaken her limbs, and he felt rather than saw that she had shrunk from him, convulsed and quivering, until she was crushed powerless against the back of the sofa on which she lay. Her whole attitude, he realised, was the result, not of a moral judgment, but of a purely physical antipathy. Her horror of him had become instinctive, and she was no more responsible for its existence than a child is responsible for the dread aroused in it by the goblins of nursery rhymes. His life as a convict had not only unclassed him in her eyes, it had put him entirely outside and below the ordinary relations of human beings. To his wife he must remain forever an object of pity, perhaps, but of intense loathing and fear also. The wave of remorse turned to bitterness on his lips, and all the tenderer emotions he had felt when he knelt by her side--the self-reproach, the spiritual yearning, the passion for goodness, all these were extinguished in the sense of desolation which swept over him. "Don't be afraid," he said coldly, "I shall not touch you." "It was nothing--a moment's pain," she answered, in a wistful, apologetic voice. She was playing nervously with the fringe of the silk shawl, and he stood for a minute in silence while he watched her long, slender fingers twine themselves in and out of the tasseled ends. Then turning aside she pushed away the coffee service on the little table as if its fragrance annoyed her. "Is it in your way? Do you wish it removed?" he inquired, and when she had nodded in reply, he lifted the tray and carried it in the direction of the door. "Don't be afraid. It is all right," he repeated as he went out. Back in his own room again, he asked himself desperately if this existence could be possible? Would it not be better for him to lose himself a second time--to throw in his lot with a lower class, since his own had rejected him? Flinging himself on the floor beside the window, he pressed his forehead against the white painted wood as if the outward violence could deaden the throbbing agony he felt within. Again he smelt the delicate, yet intense perfume of Lydia's chamber; again he saw her shrinking from him until she lay crushed and white against the back of the sofa; again he watched her features contract with the instinctive repulsion she could not control. The pitiful deprecating gesture with which she had murmured: "It is nothing--a moment's pain," was seared forever like the mark from a burning iron into his memory. "No, no--it cannot be--it is impossible," he said suddenly aloud. And though he had not the strength to frame the rest of his thought into words, he knew that the impossible thing he meant was this life, this torture, this slow martyrdom day by day without hope and without end except in death. After all there was a way of escape, so why should it be closed to him? What were these people to him beside those others whom he might yet serve--the miserable, the poor, the afflicted who would take from him the gifts which his own had rejected? What duty remained? What obligation? What responsibility? Step by step he retraced the nineteen years of his marriage, and he understood for the first time, that Lydia had given him on her wedding day nothing of herself beyond the gentle, apologetic gesture which had followed that evening her involuntary repulsion. From the beginning to the end she had presided always above, not shared in his destiny. She had wanted what he could give, but not himself, and when he could give nothing more she had shown that she wanted him no longer. While he knelt there, still pressing his forehead against the window sill, the image of her part in his life rose out of the darkness of his mind, which opened and closed over it, and he saw her fixed, shining and immovable, to receive his offerings, like some heathen deity above the sacrificial altar. The next instant the image faded and was replaced by Emily as she had looked at him on that last evening with her soft, comforting gaze. The weakness of self pity came over him, and he asked himself in the coward's luxury of hopeless questioning, what Emily would have done had she stood to him in Lydia's place? He saw her parting from him with her bright courage at the prison doors; he saw her meeting him with her smile of welcome and of forgiveness when he came out. As once before he had risen to the vision of service, so now in the agony of his humiliation he was blessed at last with the understanding of love. For many minutes he knelt there motionless by the open window, beyond which he could see the dimly lighted town on which a few drops of rain had begun to fall. The faint perfume of lilies came up to him from the walk below, where the broken sprays swept from the house were fading under the slow, soft rain. With the fragrance the image of Emily dissolved as in a mist to reappear the minute afterwards in a more torturing and human shape. He saw her now with her bright dark hair blown into little curls on her temples, with her radiant brown eyes that penetrated him with their soft, yet animated glance. The vigorous grace of her figure, as he had seen it outlined in her scant blue cotton gown against the background of cedars, remained motionless in his thoughts, bathed in a clear golden light that tormented his senses. Rising from his knees with an effort, he struck a match and raised the green shade from the lamp on the table. Then while the little blue flame flickered out in his hand, he felt that he was seized by a frantic, an irresistible impulse of flight. Gathering his clothes from the bed in the darkness, he pushed them hurriedly back into the bag he had emptied, and with a last glance at the room which had become unendurable to him, opened the door and went with a rapid step down the great staircase and into the hall below. The direction of his journey, as well as the purpose of it, was obscure in his mind. Yesterday he had told himself that he could not remain in Tappahannock, and to-day he knew that it was impossible for him to live on in his father's house. To pass the hall door meant release--escape to him; beyond that there lay only the distance and the unknown. The lights burned dimly on the staircase, and when he reached the bottom he could see on the carpet the thin reddish stream which issued from the closed door of the library. As he was about to pass by, a short sob fell on his ear, arresting him as authoritatively as if it had been the sound of his own name. While he stood there listening the sobs ceased and then broke out more loudly, now violent, now smothered, now followed by quick, furious steps across the floor within. Alice was shut in the room alone and suffering! With the realisation the bag fell from his hand, and turning the knob softly, he opened the door and paused for an instant upon the threshold. At the noise of the opening door the girl made a single step forward, and as she raised her hands to conceal her distorted features, her handkerchief, torn into shreds, fell to the carpet at her feet. Around her the room showed other signs of an outbreak of anger--the chairs were pushed hurriedly out of place, the books from the centre table were lying with opened backs on the floor, and a vase of dahlias lay overturned and scattered upon the mantel. "I don't care--I don't care," she repeated, convulsively. "Why do they always interfere with me? What right has Dick or Uncle Richard to say whom I shall see or whom I shall not? I hate them all. Mamma is always against me--so is Uncle Richard--so is everybody. They side with Dick--always--always." A single wave of her dark hair had fallen low on her forehead, and this, with the violent colour of her mouth, gave her a look that was almost barbaric. The splendid possibilities in her beauty caused him, in the midst of his pity, a sensation of dread. "Alice," he said softly, almost in a whisper, and closing the door after him, he came to the middle of the room and stood near her, though still without touching her quivering body. "They side with Dick always," she repeated furiously, "and you will side with him, too--you will side with him, too!" For a long pause he looked at her in silence, waiting until the convulsive tremors of her limbs should cease. "I shall never side against my daughter," he said very slowly. "Alice, my child, my darling, are you not really mine?" A last quivering sob shook through her and she grew suddenly still. "They will tell you things about me and you will believe them," she answered sternly. "Against you, Alice? Against you?" "You will blame me as they do." "I love you," he returned, almost as sternly as she had spoken. An emotional change, so swift that it startled him, broke in her look, and he saw the bright red of her mouth tremble and open like a flower in her glowing face. At the sight a sharp joy took possession of him--a joy that he could measure only by the depth of the agony out of which he had come. Without moving from his place, he stretched out his arms and stood waiting. "Alice, I love you," he said. Then his arms closed over her, for with the straight flight of a bird she had flown to his breast. CHAPTER IV THE LETTER AND THE SPIRIT Awaking before dawn, he realised with his first conscious thought that his life had been irrevocably settled while he slept. His place was here; he could not break away from it without leaving a ragged edge; and while he had believed himself to be deciding his future actions, that greater Destiny, of which his will was only a part, had arranged them for him during the dim pause of the night. He could feel still on his arm, as if it had persisted there through his sleep, the firm, almost viselike pressure of Alice's hands, and his whole sensitive nature thrilled in response to this mute appeal to his fatherhood. Yes, his purpose, his mission, and his happiness were here in his father's house. At breakfast he found a white rosebud on his plate, and as he took it up, Alice rushed in from the garden and threw herself into his arms. "I thought you were never, never coming down!" she exclaimed, choking with laughter, and utterly forgetful of the shadow of death which still lay over the house. "At first I was afraid you might have gone away in the night--just as you went that awful day eight years ago. Then I peeped out and saw your boots, so I went back to bed again and fell asleep. Oh, I'm so glad you've come! Why did you stay away such an age? Now, at last, I'll have somebody to take my side against mamma and Dick and Uncle Richard----" "But why against them, Alice? Surely they love you just as I do?" Biting her lips sharply, she bent her heavy brows in a stern and frowning expression. "Oh, they're horrid," she said angrily, "they want me to live just as mamma does--shut up all day in a hot room on a hateful sofa. She reads novels all the time, and I despise books. I want to go away and see things and to have plenty of clothes and all the fun I choose. They let Dick do just as he pleases because he's a boy, but they try to make me dull and stupid and foolish all because I'm a girl. I won't have it like that and it makes them angry----" "Oh, well, we'll have fun together, you and I," returned Ordway, with a sinking heart, "but you must wait a bit till I catch up with you. Don't be in a precious hurry, if you please." "Shall we have a good time, then? Shall we?" she persisted, delighted, kissing him with her warm mouth until he was dazzled by her beauty, her fascination, her ardent vitality. "And you will do just what I wish, won't you?" she whispered in his ear as she hung on his shoulder, "you will be good and kind always? and you will make them leave me alone about Geoffrey Heath?" "About Geoffrey Heath?" he repeated, and grew suddenly serious. "Oh, he's rich and he's fun, too," she responded irritably. "He has asked me to ride one of his horses--the most beautiful chestnut mare in the world--but mamma scolds me about it because she says he's not nice and that he did something once years ago about cards. As if I cared about cards!" By the fear that had gripped him he could judge the strength of her hold on his heart. "Alice, be careful--promise me to be careful!" he entreated. At his words he felt her arms relax from their embrace, and she seemed instantly to turn to marble upon his breast. "Oh, you're just like the others now. I knew you would be!" she exclaimed, as she drew away from him. Before the coldness of her withdrawal he felt that his will went out of him; and in one despairing flight of imagination he saw what the loss of her affection would mean now in his life. An emotion which he knew to be weakness pervaded not only his heart, but his soul and his senses and the remotest fibre of his physical being. "Whatever comes I shall always stand by you, Alice," he said. Though she appeared to be mollified by his subjection, the thin almost imperceptible furrows caused by the moment's anger, were still visible between her eyebrows. There was a certain fascination, he found, in watching these marks of age or of experience come and go on her fresh, childlike forehead, with its lustrous pallor, from which her splendid dark hair rolled back, touched with light, like a moonlit cloud. It was a singular characteristic of her beauty that its appeal was rather to the imagination than to the eye, and the moments, perhaps, when she dazzled least were those in which she conquered most through her enigmatical charm. "You will buy some clothes, first of all, will you not?" she said, when, having finished his breakfast, he rose from the table and went out into the hall. He met her eyes laughing, filled with happiness at the playful authority she assumed, and yet fearful still lest some incautious word of his should bring out those fine nervous wrinkles upon her forehead. "Give me a week and I'll promise you a fashion plate," he responded gaily, kissing his hand to her as he went down the steps, and, under the trailing rose creepers at the gate, out into the street. Rain had fallen in the night, and the ground was covered with shining puddles beneath which a few autumn leaves showed drenched and beaten. From the golden and red maples above a damp odour was wafted down into his face by the October wind, which now rose and now died away with a gentle sound. In the pale sunshine, which had not yet drained the moisture from the bricks, a wonderful freshness seemed to emanate from the sky and the earth and the white-pillared houses. As he approached the corner, he heard his name called in a clear emphatic voice from the opposite sidewalk, and turning his head, he saw hastening toward him, a little elderly lady in a black silk gown trimmed heavily with bugles. As she neared him, followed by a young Negro maid bearing a market basket filled with vegetables, he recognised her as an intimate friend of his mother's, whom he had known familiarly in his childhood as "Aunt Lucy." It seemed so long now since his mother's death that he was attacked by a ghostly sensation, as if he were dreaming over his past life, while he stood face to face with the old lady's small soldierly figure and listened to the crisp, emphatic tones in which she welcomed him back to Botetourt. He remembered his frequent visits to her solemn old house, which she kept so dark that he had always stumbled over the two embroidered ottomans on the parlour hearth. He recalled the smell of spices which had hung about her storeroom, and the raspberry preserves which she had never failed to give him out of a blue china jar. "Why, my dear, blessed child, it's such a pleasure to have you back!" she exclaimed now with an effusion which he felt to be the outward veil of some hidden embarrassment. "You must come sometimes and let me talk to you about your mother. I knew your mother so well--I was one of her bridesmaids." Seizing his arm in her little firm, clawlike hands, she assured him with animation of her delight at his return, alluding in a shaking voice to his mother, and urging him to come to sit with her whenever he could stand the gloom of her empty house. "And you will give me raspberry preserves out of the blue china jar?" he asked, laughing, "and let me feed crackers to the green parrot?" "What a boy! What a boy!" she returned. "You remember everything. The parrot is dead--my poor Polly!--but there is a second." Her effusiveness, her volubility, which seemed to him to be the result of concealed embarrassment, produced in him presently a feeling of distrust, almost of resentment, and he remembered the next instant that, in his childhood, she had been looked upon as a creature of uncontrolled charitable impulses. Upon the occasion of his last meeting with her was she not hastening upon some ministering errand to the city gaol? At the casual recollection an unreasoning bitterness awoke in his mind; her reiterated raptures fell with a strange effect of irritation upon his ears; and he knew now that he could never bring himself to enter her house again, that he could never accept her preserved raspberries out of the blue china jar. Her reception of him, he saw, was but a part of the general reception of Botetourt. Like her the town would be voluble, unnatural, overdone in its kindness, hiding within itself a furtive constraint as if it addressed its speeches to the sensitive sufferer from some incurable malady. The very tenderness, the exaggerated sympathy in its manner would hardly have been different, he understood, if he had been recently discharged as harmless, yet half-distraught, from an asylum for the insane. As the days went on this idea, instead of dissolving, became unalterably lodged in his brain. Gradually he retreated further and further into himself, until the spiritual isolation in which he lived appeared to him more and more like the isolation of the prison. His figure had become a familiar one in the streets of Botetourt, yet he lived bodily among the people without entering into their lives or sharing in any degree the emotions that moved their hearts. Only in periods of sorrow did he go willingly into the houses of those of his own class, though he had found a way from the beginning to reach the poor, the distressed, or the physically afflicted. His tall, slightly stooping figure, in its loose black clothes, his dark head, with the thick locks of iron gray hair upon the temples, his sparkling blue eyes, his bright, almost boyish smile, and the peculiar, unforgettable charm of his presence--these were the things which those in sickness or poverty began to recognise and to look for. In his own home he lived, except for the fitful tenderness of Alice, as much apart as he felt himself to be in the little town. They were considerate of him, but their consideration, he knew, contained an ineradicable suspicion, and in the house as outside, he was surrounded by the watchful regard that is given to the infirm or the mentally diseased. He read this in Lydia's gently averted eyes; he felt it in Richard Ordway's constrained manner; he detected it even in the silent haste with which the servants fulfilled his slightest wish. His work in his uncle's office, he had soon found to be of the most mechanical character, a mere pretext to give him daily employment, and he told himself, in a moment of bitterness that it was convincing proof of the opinion which the older man must hold of his honesty or of his mental capacity. It became presently little more than a hopeless round to him--this morning walk through the sunny streets, past the ivied walls of the old church, to the clean, varnish scented office, where he sat, until the luncheon hour, under the hard, though not unkind, eyes of the man who reminded him at every instant of his dead father. And the bitterest part of it, after all, was that the closer he came to the character of Richard Ordway, the profounder grew his respect for his uncle's unwavering professional honour. The old man would have starved, he knew, rather than have held back a penny that was not legally his own or have owed a debt that he felt had begun to weigh, however lightly, upon his conscience. Yet this lawyer of scrupulous rectitude was the husband, his nephew suspected, of a neglected, a wretchedly unhappy wife--a small, nervous creature, whom he had married, shortly after the death of his first wife, some twenty years ago. The secret of this unhappiness Daniel had discovered almost by intuition on the day of his father's funeral, when he had looked up suddenly in the cemetery to find his uncle's wife regarding him with a pair of wonderful, pathetic eyes, which seemed to gaze at him sadly out of a blue mist. So full of sympathy and understanding was her look that the memory of it had returned to him more than a year later, and had caused him to stop at her gate one November afternoon as he was returning from his office work. After an instant's pause, and an uncertain glance at the big brick house with its clean white columns, he ascended the steps and rang the bell for the first time since his boyhood. The house was one of the most charming in Botetourt, but as he followed the servant down the hall to the library, it seemed to him that all these high, imposing walls, with their fine white woodwork, enclosed but so much empty space to fill with loneliness. His uncle had no children, and the sad, fair-haired little wife appeared to be always alone and always suffering. She was seated now in a low rocking-chair beside the window, and as she turned her head at his entrance, he could see, through the lace curtains, a few pale November leaves, which fluttered down from an elm tree beside the porch. When she looked at him he noticed that her eyes were large and beautiful and of a changeable misty colour which appeared now gray, now violet. "It is so good of you, Daniel," she said, in a soft, grateful voice, removing her work-basket from the chair at her side so that he might come within the reach of her short-sighted gaze. "I've wanted to come ever since I saw you for the first time after my return," he answered cheerfully. "It is strange, isn't it?--that I hardly remember you when I lived here. You were always ill, were you not?" "Yes, ill almost always," she replied, smiling as she met his glance. "When you were married I remember I couldn't go to the wedding because I had been in bed for three months. But that's all over now," she added, fearing to produce in him a momentary depression. "I am well again, you see, so the past doesn't matter." "The past doesn't matter," he repeated in a low voice, struck by the words as if they held more than their surface meaning for his ears. She nodded gravely. "How can it matter if one is really happy at last." "And you are happy at last?" As he watched her it seemed to him that a pale flame burned in her face, tinging its sallow wanness with a golden light. "I am at peace and is that not happiness?" she asked. "But you were sad once--that day in the cemetery? I felt it." "That was while I was still struggling," she answered, "and it always hurts one to struggle. I wanted happiness--I kept on wanting it even after I ceased to believe in its existence. I fought very hard--oh, desperately hard--but now I have learned that the only way to get anything is to give it up. Happiness is like everything else, it is only when one gives it back to God that one really possesses it." He had never seen a face in which the soul spoke so clearly, and her look rather than her words came to him like the touch of divine healing. "When I saw you standing beside your father's grave, I knew that you were just where I had been for so many years--that you were still telling your self that things were too hard, that they were unendurable. I had been through it all, you see, so I understood." "But how could you know the bitterness, the shame of feeling that it was all the result of my own mistake--of my own sin." Taking his hand in hers, she sat for a moment in silence with her ecstatic gaze fixed on his face. "I know that in spite of your sin you are better than they are," she said at last, "because your sin was on the outside--a thing to be sloughed off and left far behind, while their self-righteousness is of their very souls----" "Oh, hush, hush," he interrupted sternly, "they have forgiven me for what I did, that is enough." "Sixteen years ago," she returned, dropping her voice, "my husband forgave me in the same way, and he has never forgotten it." At his start of surprise, he felt that she clung the more closely to the hand she held. "Oh, it wasn't so big a thing," she went on, "I had been married to him for five years, and I was very unhappy when I met someone who seemed to understand and to love me. For a time I was almost insane with the wonder and delight of it--I might have gone away with him--with the other--in my first rapture, had not Richard found it all out two days before. He behaved very generously--he forgave me. I should have been happier," she added a little wistfully, "if he had not." As she broke off trembling, he lifted her hand to his lips, kissing it with tenderness, almost with passion. "Then that was the beginning of your unhappiness--of your long illness!" he exclaimed. She nodded smiling, while a tear ran slowly down her flushed cheek. "He forgave me sixteen years ago and he has never allowed me to forget it one hour--hardly a minute since." "Then you understand how bitter--how intolerable it is!" he returned in an outbreak of anger. "I thought I knew," she replied more firmly than he had ever heard her speak, "but I learned afterwards that it was a mistake. I see now that they are kind--that they are good in their way, and I love them for it. It isn't our way, I know, but the essence of charity, after all, is to learn to appreciate goodness in all its expressions, no matter how different they may be from our own. Even Richard is kind--he means everything for the best, and it is only his nature that is straightened--that is narrow--not his will. I felt bitterly once, but not now because I am so happy at last." Beyond the pale outline of her head, he saw the elm leaves drifting slowly down, and beyond them the low roofs and the dim church spires of the quiet town. Was it possible that even here he might find peace in the heart of the storm? "It is only since I have given my happiness back to God that it is really mine," she said, and it seemed to him again that her soul gathered brightness and shone in her face. CHAPTER V THE WILL OF ALICE When he reached home the servant who helped him out of his overcoat, informed him at the same time that his uncle awaited him in the library. With the news a strange chill came over him as if he had left something warm and bright in the November sunset outside. For an instant it seemed to him that he must turn back--that he could not go forward. Then with a gesture of assent, he crossed the hall and entered the library, where he found Lydia and the children as well as Richard Ordway. The lamps were unlit, and the mellow light of the sunset fell through the interlacing half-bared boughs of the golden poplar beyond the window. This light, so rich, so vivid, steeped the old mahogany furniture and the faded family portraits in a glow which seemed to Daniel to release, for the first time, some latent romantic spirit that had dwelt in the room. In the midst of this glamor of historic atmosphere, the four figures, gathered so closely together against the clear space of the window, with its network of poplar leaves beyond the panes, borrowed for the moment a strange effectiveness of pose, a singular intensity of outline. Not only the figures, but the very objects by which they were surrounded appeared to vibrate in response to a tragic impulse. Richard Ordway was standing upon the hearthrug, his fine head and profile limned sharply against the pale brown wall at his side. His right hand was on Lydia's shoulder, who sat motionless, as if she had fallen there, with her gentle, flower-like head lying upon the arm of her son. Before them, as before her judges, Alice was drawn to her full height, her girlish body held tense and quivering, her splendid hair loosened about her forehead, her trembling mouth making a violent contrast to the intense pallor of her face. Right or wrong Ordway saw only that she was standing alone, and as he crossed the threshold, he turned toward her and held out his hand. "Alice," he said softly, as if the others were not present. Without raising her eyes, she shrank from him in the direction of Richard Ordway, as if shielding herself behind the iron fortitude of the man whom she so bitterly disliked. "Alice has been out driving alone with Geoffrey Heath all the afternoon," said Lydia in her clear, calm voice. "We had forbidden it, but she says that you knew of it and did not object to her going." With the knowledge of the lie, Ordway grew red with humiliation, while his gaze remained fastened on the figure in the carpet at Alice's feet. He could not look at her, for he felt that her shame was scorching him like a hot wind. To look at her at the moment meant to convict her, and this his heart told him he could never do. He was conscious of the loud ticking of the clock, of the regular tapping of Richard's fingers upon the marble mantel-piece, of the fading light on the poplar leaves beyond the window, and presently of the rapid roll of a carriage that went by in the street. Each of these sounds produced in him a curious irritation like a physical smart, and he felt again something of the dumb resentment with which he had entered his wife's dressing-room on the morning of his arrest. Then a smothered sob reached his ear, and Alice began to tremble from head to foot at his side. Lifting his eyes at last, he made a step forward and drew her into his arms. "Was it so very wrong? I am sorry," he said to Lydia over the bowed head of their child. Until the words were uttered, and he felt Alice's tense body relax in his arms, he had not realised that in taking sides with her, he was not only making himself responsible for her fault, he was, in truth, actually sharing in the lie that she had spoken. The choice was an unconscious one, yet he knew even in the ensuing moment of his clearer judgment that it had been inevitable--that from the first instant, when he had paused speechless upon the threshold, there had been open to him no other course. "I am sorry if it was wrong," he repeated, turning his glance now upon Richard Ordway. "Do you know anything of Geoffrey Heath? Have you heard him spoken of by decent people since you have been in Botetourt?" asked the old man sternly. "I have heard little of him," answered Daniel, "and that little was far from good. We are sorry, Alice, are we not? It must not happen again if we can help it." "It has happened before," said Lydia, lifting her head from Dick's arm, where it had lain. "It was then that I forbade her to see him alone." "I did not know," responded Daniel, "but she will do as you wish hereafter. Will you not, Alice?" "How does it concern them? What have they to do with me?" demanded Alice, turning in his arms to face her mother with a defiant and angry look, "they have never cared for me--they have always preferred Dick--always, even when I was a little child." He saw Lydia grow white and hide her drooping face again on Dick's shoulder. "You are unjust to your mother, Alice," he said gravely, "she has loved you always, and I have loved you." "Oh, you are different--I would die for you!" she exclaimed passionately, as she wept on his breast. While he stood there holding her in his arms, it seemed to him that he could feel like an electric current the wave of feeling which had swept Alice and himself together. The inheritance which was his had descended to her also with its keen joys and its sharp anguish. Even the road which he had travelled so lately in weariness was the one upon which her brave young feet were now set. Not his alone, but his child's also, was this mixture of strength and weakness, of gaiety and sadness, of bitterness and compassion. "If you will leave me alone with her, I think I can make her understand what you wish," he said, lifting his eyes from the dark head on his breast to Lydia, who had risen and was standing before him with her pensive, inquiring gaze fixed on his face. "She is like me," he added abruptly, "in so many ways." "Yes, she is like you, I have always thought so," returned Lydia, quietly. "And for that reason, perhaps, you have never quite understood her," he responded. She bowed her head as if too polite or too indifferent to dissent from his words; and then slipping her hand through Richard Ordway's arm, she stood waiting patiently while the old man delivered his last bit of remonstrance. "Try to curb her impulses, Daniel, or you will regret it." He went out, still holding Lydia's hand, and a moment afterwards, when Daniel looked up at the sound of the hall door closing quickly, he saw that Dick also had vanished, and that he was alone in the library with Alice, who still sobbed on his breast. A few moments before it had seemed to him that he needed only to be alone with her to make all perfectly clear between them. But when the others had passed out, and the door had closed at last on the empty silence in which they stood, he found that the words which he had meant to utter had vanished hopelessly from his mind. He had said to Lydia that Alice was like himself, but there had never been an hour in his life when his hatred of a lie had not been as intense, as uncompromising, as it was to-day. And this lie which she had spoken appeared to divide them now like a drawn sword. "Alice," he said, breaking with an effort through the embarrassment which had held him speechless, "will you give me your word of honour that you will never tell me a falsehood again?" She stirred slightly in his arms, and he felt her body grow soft and yielding. "I didn't to you," she answered, "oh, I wouldn't to you." "Not to the others then. Will you promise?" Her warm young arm tightened about his neck. "I didn't mean to--I didn't mean to," she protested between her sobs, "but they forced me to do it. It was more than half their fault--they are so--so hateful! I tried to think of something else, but there was nothing to say, and I knew you would stand by me----" "You have almost broken my heart," he answered, "for you have lied, Alice, you have lied." She lifted her head and the next instant he felt her mouth on his cheek, "I wish I were dead! I have hurt you and I wish I were dead!" she cried. "It is not hurting me that I mind--you may do that and welcome. It is hurting yourself, my child, my Alice," he answered; and pressing her upturned face back on his arm, he bent over her in an ecstasy of emotion, calling her his daughter, his darling, the one joy of his life. The iron in his nature had melted beneath her warm touch, and he felt again the thrill, half agony, half rapture, with which he had received her into his arms on the day of her birth. That day was nearer to him now than was the minute in which he stood, and he could trace still the soft, babyish curves in the face which nestled so penitently on his arm. His very fear for her moved him into a deeper tenderness, and the appeal she made to him now was one with the appeal of her infancy, for its power lay in her weakness, not in her strength. "Be truthful with me, Alice," he said, "and remember that nothing can separate me from you." An hour later when he parted from her and went upstairs, he heard Lydia's voice calling to him through her half open door, and turning obediently, he entered her bedroom for the first time since the night of his return. Now as then the luxury, the softness, of his wife's surroundings produced in him a curious depression, an enervation of body; and he stood for an instant vainly striving to close his nostrils against the delicious perfume which floated from her lace-trimmed dressing-table. Lydia, still in her light mourning gown, was standing, when he entered, before a little marquetry desk in one corner, her eyes on an open letter which she appeared to have left partially unread. "I wanted to tell you, Daniel," she began at once, approaching the point with a directness which left him no time to wonder as to the purpose of her summons, "that Alice's intimacy with Geoffrey Heath has already been commented upon in Botetourt. Cousin Paulina has actually written to me for an explanation." "Cousin Paulina?" he repeated vaguely, and remembered immediately that the lady in question was his wife's one rich relation--an elderly female who was greatly respected for her fortune, which she spent entirely in gratifying her personal passion for trinkets. "Oh, yes," he added flippantly, "the old lady who used to look like a heathen idol got up for the sacrifice." He felt that his levity was out of place, yet he went on rashly because he knew that he was doomed forever to appear at a disadvantage in Lydia's presence. She would never believe in him--his best motives would wear always to her the covering of hypocrisy; and the very hopelessness of ever convincing her goaded him at times into the reckless folly of despair. "She writes me that people are talking of it," she resumed, sweetly, as if his untimely mirth had returned still-born into the vacancy from which it emerged. "Who is this Geoffrey Heath you speak of so incessantly?" he demanded. "There was a Heath, I remember, who had a place near us in the country, and kept a barroom or a butcher's shop or something in town." "That was the father," replied Lydia, with a shudder which deepened the slightly scornful curve of her lip. "He was a respectable old man, I believe, and made his fortune quite honestly, however it was. It was only after his son began to grow up that he became socially ambitious----" "And is that all you have against him?" "Oh, there's nothing against the old man--nothing at least except the glaring bad taste he showed in that monstrous house he built in Henry Street. He's dead now, you know." "Then the son has all the money and the house, too, hasn't he?" "All he hasn't wasted, yes." As she spoke she subsided into a chair, with a graceful, eddying motion of her black chiffon draperies, and continued the conversation with an expression of smiling weariness. All her attitudes were effective, and he was struck, while he stood, embarrassed and awkward, before her, by the plaintive grace that she introduced into her smallest gesture. Though he was aware that he saw her now too clearly for passion, the appeal of her delicate fairness went suddenly to his head. "Then there's not much to be said for the chap, I suppose?" he asked abruptly, fearing the prolonged strain of the silence. "Very little for him, but a good deal about him, according to Cousin Paulina. It seems that three years ago he was sent away from the University for something disgraceful--cheating at cards, I believe; and since then he has been conspicuous chiefly because of his low associations. How Alice met him, I could never understand--I can't understand now." "And do you think she cares for him--that she even imagines that she does?" he demanded, while his terror rose in his throat and choked back his words. "She will not confess it--how could she?" replied Lydia wearily, "I believe it is only wildness, recklessness, lack of discipline that prompts her. Yet he is good-looking--in a vulgar way," she added in disgust, "and Alice has always seemed to like vulgar things." Her eyes rested on him, not directly, but as if they merely included him in their general pensive survey of the world; yet he read the accusation in her gentle avoidance of his gaze as plainly as she had uttered in it her clear, flute-like tones. "It is very important," she went on, "that she should be curbed in her impulses, in her extravagance. Already her bills are larger than mine and yet she is never satisfied with the amount of her allowance. We can do nothing with her, Uncle Richard and I, but she seems to yield, in a measure, to your influence, and we thought--we hoped----" "I will--I will," he answered. "I will give my life to help her if need be. But Lydia," he broke out more earnestly, "you must stand by and aid me for her sake, for the sake of our child, we must work together----" Half rising in her chair, she looked at him fixedly a moment, while he saw her pupils dilate almost as if she were in physical fear. "But what can I do? I have done all I could," she protested, with an injured look. By this look, without so much as a gesture, she put the space of the whole room between them. The corners of her mouth quivered and drooped, and he watched the pathos creep back into her light blue eyes. "I have given up my whole life to the children since--since----" She broke off in a frightened whisper, but the unfinished sentence was more expressive than a volley of reproaches would have been. There was something in her thoughts too horrible to put into words, and this something of which she could not bring herself to speak, would have had no place in her existence except for him. He felt cowed suddenly, as if he had been physically beaten and thrust aside. "You have been very brave--I know--I appreciate it all," he said, and while he spoke he drew away from her until he stood with his back against one of the amber satin curtains. Instinctively he put out his hand for support, and as it closed over the heavy draperies, he felt that the hard silken texture made his flesh creep. The physical sensation, brief as it was, recalled in some strange way the effect upon him of Lydia's smooth and shining surface when he had knelt before her on the night of his homecoming. Yet it was with difficulty even now that he could free himself from the conviction that her emotional apathy was but one aspect of innocence. Would he admit to-day that what he had once worshipped as purity of soul was but the frost of an unnatural coldness of nature? All at once, as he looked at her, he found himself reminded by her calm forehead, her classic features, of the sculptured front of a marble tomb which he had seen in some foreign gallery. Was there death, after all, not life hidden for him in her plaintive beauty? The next instant, as he watched her, he told himself that such questions belonged to the evil promptings of his own nature. "I realise all that you have been, all that you have suffered," he said at last, aware that his words sounded hysterical in the icy constraint which surrounded them. When his speech was out, his embarrassment became so great that he found himself presently measuring the distance which divided him from the closed door. With a last effort of will, he went toward her and stretched out his hand in a gesture that was almost one of entreaty. "Lydia," he asked, "is it too painful for you to have me here? Would it be any better for you if I went away?" As he moved toward her she bent over with a nervous, mechanical movement to arrange her train, and before replying to his question, she laid each separate fold in place. "Why, by no means," she answered, looking up with her conventional smile. "It would only mean--wouldn't it?--that people would begin to wonder all over again?" CHAPTER VI THE IRON BARS As the days went on it seemed to him that his nature, repressed in so many other directions, was concentrated at last in a single channel of feeling. The one outlet was his passion for Alice, and nothing that concerned her was too remote or too trivial to engross him--her clothes, her friendships, the particular chocolate creams for which she had once expressed a preference. To fill her life with amusements that would withdraw her erring impulses from Geoffrey Heath became for a time his absorbing purpose. At first he told himself in a kind of rapture that success was apparent in his earliest and slightest efforts. For weeks Alice appeared to find interest and animation in his presence. She flattered, scolded, caressed and tyrannised, but with each day, each hour, she grew nearer his heart and became more firmly interwoven into his life. Then suddenly a change came over her, and one day when she had been kissing him with "butterfly kisses" on his forehead, he felt her suddenly grow restless and draw back impatiently as if seeking a fresh diversion. A bored look had come into her eyes and he saw the three little wrinkles gather between her eyebrows. "Alice," he said, alarmed by the swift alteration, "are you tired of the house? Shall we ride together?" She shook her head, half pettishly, half playfully, "I can't--I've an engagement," she responded. "An engagement?" he repeated inquiringly. "Why, I thought we were always to ride when it was fair." "I promised one of the girls to go to tea with her," she repeated, after a minute. "It isn't a real tea, but she wanted to talk to me, so I said I would go." "Well, I'm glad you did--don't give up the girls," he answered, relieved at once by the explanation. In the evening when she returned, shortly after dark, "one of the girls" as she called laughingly from the library, had come home for the night with her. Ordway heard them chatting gayly together, but, when he went in for a moment before going upstairs to dress, they lapsed immediately into an embarrassed silence. Alice's visitor was a pretty, gray-eyed, flaxen-haired young woman named Jenny Lane, who smiled in a frightened way and answered "Yes--no," when he spoke to her, as if she offered him the choice of his favourite monosyllable from her lips. Clearly the subject which animated them was one in which, even as Alice's father, he could have no share. For weeks after this it seemed to him that a silence fell gradually between them--that silence of the heart which is so much more oppressive than the mere outward silence of the lips. It was not, he told himself again and again, that there had come a perceptible change in her manner. She still met him at breakfast with her flower and her caress, still flung herself into his arms at unexpected moments, still coaxed and upbraided in her passionate, childish voice. Nevertheless, the difference was there, and he recognised it with a pang even while he demanded of himself in what breathless suspension of feeling it could consist? Her caresses were as frequent, but the fervour, the responsiveness, had gone out of them; and he was brought at last face to face with the knowledge that her first vivid delight in him had departed forever. The thing which absorbed her now was a thing in which he had no share, no recognition; and true to her temperament, her whole impulsive being had directed itself into this new channel. "She is young and it is only natural that she should wish to have her school friends about her," he thought with a smile. In the beginning it had been an easy matter to efface his personality and stand out of the way of Alice's life, but as the weeks drew on into months and the months into a year, he found that he had been left aside not only by his daughter, but by the rest of the household as well. In his home he felt himself to exist presently in an ignored, yet obvious way like a familiar piece of household furniture, which is neither commented upon nor wilfully overlooked. It would have occasioned, he supposed, some vague exclamations of surprise had he failed to appear in his proper place at the breakfast table, but as long as his accustomed seat was occupied all further use for his existence seemed at an end. He was not necessary, he was not even enjoyed, but he was tolerated. Before this passive indifference, which was worse to him than direct hostility, he found that his sympathies, his impulses, and even his personality, were invaded by an apathy that paralysed the very sources of his will. He beheld himself as the cause of the gloom, the suspicion, the sadness, that surrounded him, and as the cause, too, of Alice's wildness and of the pathetic loneliness in which Lydia lived. But for him, he told himself, there would have been no shadow upon the household; and his wife's pensive smile was like a knife in his heart whenever he looked up from his place at the table and met it unawares. At Tappahannock he had sometimes believed that his past was a skeleton which he had left behind; here he had grown, as the years went by, to think of it as a coffin which had shut over him and from which there was no escape. And with the realisation of this, a blighting remorse, a painful humbleness awoke in his soul, and was revealed outwardly in his face, in his walk, in his embarrassed movements. As he passed up and down the staircase, he went softly lest the heavy sound of his footsteps should become an annoyance to Lydia's sensitive ears. His manner lost its boyish freedom and grew awkward and nervous, and when he gave an order to the servants it seemed to him that a dreadful timidity sounded in his voice. He began to grow old suddenly in a year, before middle age had as yet had time to soften the way. Looking in the glass one morning, when he had been less than three years in Botetourt, he discovered that the dark locks upon his forehead had turned almost white, and that his shoulders were losing gradually their youthful erectness of carriage. And it seemed to him that the courage with which he might have once broken away and begun anew had departed from him in this new and paralysing humility, which was like the humility of a helpless and burdensome old age. After a day of peculiar loneliness, he was returning from Richard's office on this same afternoon, when a voice called to him from beneath the fringed linen cover of a little phaeton which had driven up to the crossing. Turning in surprise he found Aunt Lucy holding the reins over a fat pony, while she sat very erect, with her trim, soldierly figure emerging from a mountain of brown-paper parcels. "This is the very chance I've been looking for, Daniel Ordway!" she exclaimed, in her emphatic voice. "Do you know, sir, that you have not entered my house once in the last three years?" "Yes," he replied, "I know--but the fact is that I have hardly been anywhere since I came back." "And why is that?" she demanded sharply. He shook his head, "I don't know. Perhaps you can tell me." "Yes, I can tell you," she snapped back, with a rudeness which, in some singular way, seemed to him kinder than the studied politeness that he had met. "It's because, in spite of all you've gone through, you are still more than half a fool, Daniel Ordway." "Oh, you're right, I dare say," he acknowledged bitterly. With a frown, which struck him curiously as the wrong side of a smile, she nodded her head while she made room for him among the brown-paper parcels on the low linen covered seat of the phaeton. "Come in here, I want to talk to you," she said, "there's a little matter about which I should like your help." "My help?" he repeated in astonishment, as a sensation of pleasure shot through his heart. It was so seldom that anybody asked his help in Botetourt. "Is the second green parrot dead, and do you want me to dig the grave?" he inquired, checking his unseemly derision as he met her warning glance. "Polly is perfectly well," she returned, rapping him smartly upon the knee with her little tightly closed black fan which she carried as if it were a baton, "but I do not like Richard Ordway." The suddenness of her announcement, following so inappropriately her comment upon the health of the green parrot, caused him to start from his seat in the amazement with which he faced her. Then he broke into an echo of his old boyish merriment. "You don't?" he retorted flippantly. "Well, Lydia does." Her eyes blinked rapidly in the midst of her wrinkled little face, and bending over she flicked the back of the fat pony gently with the end of the whip. "Oh, I'm not sure I like Lydia," she responded, "though, of course, Lydia is a saint." "Yes, Lydia is a saint," he affirmed. "Well, I'm not talking about Lydia," she resumed presently, "though there's something I've always had a burning curiosity to find out." For an instant she held back, and then made her charge with a kind of desperate courage. "Is she really a saint?" she questioned, "or is it only the way that she wears her hair?" Her question was so like the spoken sound of his own dreadful suspicion that it took away his breath completely, while he stared at her with a gasp that was evenly divided between a laugh and a groan. "Oh, she's a saint, there's no doubt of that," he insisted loyally. "Then I'll let her rest," she replied, "and I'm glad, heaven knows, to have my doubts at an end. But where do you imagine that I am taking you?" "For a drive, I hope," he answered, smiling. "It's not," she rejoined grimly, "it's for a visit." "A visit?" he repeated, starting up with the impulse to jump over the moving wheel, "but I never visit." She reached out her wiry little fingers, which clung like a bird's claw, and drew him by force back upon the seat. "I am taking you to see Adam Crowley," she explained, "do you remember him?" "Crowley?" he repeated the name as he searched his memory. "Why, yes, he was my father's clerk for forty years, wasn't he? I asked when I came home what had become of him. So he is still living?" "He was paralysed in one arm some years ago, and it seems he has lost all his savings in some investment your father had advised him to make. Of course, there was no legal question of a debt to him, but until the day your father died he had always made ample provision for the old man's support. Crowley had always believed that the allowance would be continued--that there would be a mention made of him in the will." "And there was none?" "It was an oversight, Crowley is still convinced, for he says he had a distinct promise." "Then surely my uncle will fulfil the trust? He is an honourable man." She shook her head. "I don't know that he is so much 'honourable' as he is 'lawful.' The written obligation is the one which binds him like steel, but I don't think he cares whether a thing is right or wrong, just or unjust, as long as it is the law. The letter holds him, but I doubt if he has ever even felt the motion of the spirit. If he ever felt it," she concluded with grim humour, "he would probably try to drive it out with quinine." "Are we going there now--to see Crowley, I mean?" "If you don't mind. Of course there may be nothing that you can do--but I thought that you might, perhaps, speak to Richard about it." He shook his head, "No, I can't speak to my uncle, though I think you are unjust to him," he answered, after a pause in which the full joy of her appeal had swept through his heart, "but I have an income of my own, you know, and out of this, I can help Crowley." For an instant she did not reply, and he felt her thin, upright little figure grow rigid at his side. Then turning with a start, she laid her hand, in its black lace mitten, upon his knee. "O my boy, you are your mother all over again!" she said. After this they drove on in silence down one of the shaded streets, where rows of neat little houses, packed together like pasteboard boxes, were divided from the unpaved sidewalks by low whitewashed fences. At one of these doors the phaeton presently drew up, and dropping the reins on the pony's back, Aunt Lucy alighted with a bound between the wheels, and began with Ordway's help, to remove the paper parcels from the seat. When their arms were full, she pushed open the gate, and led him up the short walk to the door where an old man, wearing a knitted shawl, sat in an invalid's chair beyond the threshold. At the sound of their footsteps Crowley turned on them a cheerful wrinkled face which was brightened by a pair of twinkling black eyes that gave him an innocent and merry look. "I knew you'd come around," he said, smiling with his toothless mouth like an amiable infant. "Matildy has been complaining that the coffee gave out at breakfast, but I said 'twas only a sign that you were coming. Everything bad is the sign of something good, that's what I say." "I've brought something better than coffee to-day, Adam," replied Aunt Lucy, seating herself upon the doorstep. "This is Daniel Ordway--do you remember him?" The old man bent forward, without moving his withered hand, which lay outstretched on the cushioned arm of the chair, and it seemed to Ordway that the smiling black eyes pierced to his heart. "Oh, I remember him, I remember him," said Crowley, "poor boy--poor boy." "He's come back now," rejoined Aunt Lucy, raising her voice, "and he has come to see you." "He's like his mother," remarked Crowley, almost in a whisper, "and I'm glad of that, though his father was a good man. But there are some good people who do more harm than bad ones," he added, "and I always knew that old Daniel Ordway would ruin his son." A chuckle broke from him, "but your mother: I can see her now running out bareheaded in the snow to scold me for not having on my overcoat. She was always seeing with other people's eyes, bless her, and feeling with other people's bodies." Dropping upon the doorstep, Ordway replaced the knitted shawl which had slipped from the old man's shoulder. "I wonder how it is that you keep so happy in spite of everything?" he said. "Happy?" repeated Crowley with a laugh. "Well, I don't know, but I am not complaining. I've seen men who hadn't an ache in their bodies, who were worse off than I am to-day. I tell you it isn't the thing that comes to you, but the way you look at it that counts, and because you've got a paralysed arm is no reason that you should have a paralysed heart as well. I've had a powerful lot of suffering, but I've had a powerful lot of happiness, too, and the suffering somehow, doesn't seem to come inside of me to stay as the happiness does. You see, I'm a great believer in the Lord, sir," he added simply, "and what I can't understand, I don't bother about, but just take on trust." All the cheerful wrinkles of his face shone peacefully as he talked. "It's true there've been times when things have gone so hard I've felt that I'd just let go and drop down to the bottom, but the wonderful part is that when you get to the bottom there's still something down below you. It's when you fall lowest that you feel most the Lord holding you up. It may be that there ain't any bottom after all but I know if there is one the Lord is surely waiting down there to catch you when you let go. He ain't only there, I reckon, but He's in all the particular hard places on earth much oftener than He's up in His heaven. He knows the poorhouse, you may be sure, and He'll be there to receive me and tell me it ain't so bad as it looks. I don't want to get there, but if I do it will come a bit easier to think that the Lord has been there before me----" The look in his smiling, toothless face brought to Ordway, as he watched him, the memory of the epileptic little preacher who had preached in the prison chapel. Here, also, was that untranslatable rapture of the mystic, which cannot be put into words though it passes silently in its terrible joy from the heart of the speaker to the other heart that is waiting. Again he felt his whole being dissolve in the emotion which had overflowed his eyes that Sunday when he was a prisoner. He remembered the ecstasy with which he had said to himself on that day: "I have found the key!" and he knew now that this ecstasy was akin to the light that had shone for him while he sat on the stage of the town hall in Tappahannock. A chance word from the lips of a doting old man, who saw the doors of the poorhouse swing open to receive him, had restored to Ordway, with a miraculous clearness, the vision that he had lost; and he felt suddenly that the hope with which he had come out of the prison had never really suffered disappointment or failure. CHAPTER VII THE VISION AND THE FACT As he walked home along one of the side streets, shaded by an irregular row of flowering linden trees, it appeared to him that his life in Botetourt, so unendurable an hour before, had been rendered suddenly easy by a miracle, not in his surroundings, but in himself. His help had been asked, and in the act of giving there had flowed back into his heart the strength by which he might live his daily life. His unrest, his loneliness, his ineffectiveness, showed to him now as the result of some fatal weakness in his own nature--some failure in his personal attitude to the people among whom he lived. Straight ahead of him a fine white dust drifted down from the blossoming lindens, lying like powder on the roughly paved street, where the wind blew it in soft swirls and eddies against the crumbling stone steps which led down from the straight doorways of the old-fashioned houses. The boughs overhead made a green arch through which the light fell, and it was under this thick tent of leaves, that, looking up presently, he saw Emily Brooke coming toward him. Not until she was so close to him that he could hear the rustle of her dress, did she lift her eyes from the pavement and meet his cry of welcome with a look of joyful surprise. "Emily!" he cried, and at his voice, she stretched out her hand and stood smiling at him with the soft and animated gaze which, it seemed to him now, he had but dimly remembered. The thought of her had dwelt as a vision in his memory, yet he knew, as he looked into her face, that the ideal figure had lacked the charm, the radiance, the sparkling energy, of the living substance. "So you came to Botetourt and did not send me word," he said. "No, I did not send you word," she answered, "and now I am leaving within an hour." "And you would have gone without seeing me?" For an instant she hesitated, and he watched the joy in her face melt into a sorrowful tenderness. "I knew that you were well and I was satisfied. Would it have been kind to appear to you like an arisen ghost of Tappahannock?" "The greatest kindness," he answered gravely, "that you--or anyone could do me." She shook her head: "Kindness or not, I found that I could not do it." "And you go in an hour?" "My train leaves at seven o'clock. Is it nearly that?" He drew out his watch, a mechanical action which relieved the emotional tension that stretched like a drawn cord between them. "It is not yet six. Will you walk a little way with me down this street? There is still time." As she nodded silently, they turned and went back along the side street, under the irregular rows of lindens, in the direction from which he had come. "One of the girls I used to teach sent for me when she was dying," she said presently, as if feeling the need of some explanation of her presence in Botetourt. "That was three days ago and the funeral was yesterday. It is a great loss to me, for I haven't so many friends that I can spare the few I love." He made no answer to her remark, and in the silence that followed, he felt, with a strange ache at his heart, that the distance that separated them was greater than it had been when she was in Tappahannock and he in Botetourt. Then there had stretched only the luminous dream spaces between their souls; now they stood divided by miles and miles of an immovable reality. Was it possible that in making her a part of his intense inner life, he had lost, in a measure, his consciousness of her actual existence? Then while the vision still struggled blindly against the fact, she turned toward him with a smile which lifted her once more into the shining zone of spirits. "If I can feel that you are happy, that you are at peace, I shall ask nothing more of God," she said. "I am happy to-day," he answered, "but if you had come yesterday, I should have broken down in my weakness. Oh, I have been homesick for Tappahannock since I came away!" "Yet Botetourt is far prettier to my eyes." "To mine also--but it isn't beauty, it is usefulness that I need. For the last two years I have told myself night and day that I had no place and no purpose--that I was the stone that the builders rejected." "And it is different now?" "Different? Yes, I feel as if I had been shoved suddenly into a place where I fitted--as if I were meant, after all, to help hold things together. And the change came--how do you think?" he asked, smiling. "A man wanted money of me to keep him out of the poorhouse." The old gaiety was in his voice, but as she looked at him a ray of faint sunshine fell on his face through a parting in the leaves overhead, and she saw for the first time how much older he had grown since that last evening in Tappahannock. The dark hair was all gray now, the lines of the nose were sharper, the cheek bones showed higher above the bluish hollows beneath. Yet the change which had so greatly aged him had deepened the peculiar sweetness in the curves of his mouth, and this sweetness, which was visible also in his rare smile, moved her heart to a tenderness which was but the keener agony of renouncement. "I know how it is," she said slowly, "just as in Tappahannock you found your happiness in giving yourself to others, so you will find it here." "If I can only be of use--perhaps." "You can be--you will be. What you were with us you will be again." "Yet it was different. There I had your help, hadn't I?" "And you shall have it here," she responded, brightly, though he saw that her eyes were dim with tears. "Will you make me a promise?" he asked, stopping suddenly before some discoloured stone steps "will you promise me that if ever you need a friend--a strong arm, a brain to think for you--you will send me word?" She looked at him smiling, while her tears fell from her eyes. "I will make no promise that is not for your sake as well as for mine," she answered. "But it is for my sake--it is for my happiness." "Then I will promise," she rejoined gravely, "and I will keep it." "I thank you," he responded, taking the hand that she held out. At his words she had turned back, pausing a moment in her walk, as if she had caught from his voice or his look a sense of finality in their parting. "I have but a few minutes left," she said, "so I must walk rapidly back or I shall be late." A sudden clatter of horses' hoofs on the cobblestones in the street caused them to start away from each other, and turning his head, Ordway saw Alice gallop furiously past him with Geoffrey Heath at her side. "How beautiful!" exclaimed Emily beneath her breath, for Alice as she rode by had looked back for an instant, her glowing face framed in blown masses of hair. "Yes, she is beautiful," he replied, and added after a moment as they walked on, "she is my daughter." Her face brightened with pleasure. "Then you are happy--you must be happy," she said. "Why, she looked like Brunhilde." For a moment he hesitated. "Yes," he answered at last, "she is very beautiful--and I am happy." After this they did not speak again until they reached the iron gate before the house in which she was staying. On his side he was caught up into some ideal realm of feeling, in which he possessed her so utterly that the meeting could not bring her nearer to him nor the parting take her farther away. His longing, his unrest, and his failure, were a part of his earthly nature which he seemed to have left below him in that other life from which he had escaped. Without doubt he would descend to it again, as he had descended at moments back into the body of his sin; but in the immediate exaltation of his mood, his love had passed the bounds of personality and entered into a larger and freer world. When they parted, presently, after a casual good-bye, he could persuade himself, almost without effort, that she went on with him in the soft May twilight. At his door he found Lydia just returning from a drive, and taking her wraps from her arm, he ascended the steps and entered the house at her side. She had changed her mourning dress for a gown of pale gray cloth, and he noticed at once that her beauty had lost in transparency and become more human. "I thought you had gone riding with Alice," she said without looking at him, as she stooped to gather up the ends of a lace scarf which had slipped from her arm. "No, I was not with her," he answered. "I wanted to go, but she would not let me." "Are you sure, then, that she was not with Geoffrey Heath?" "I am sure that she was with him, for they passed me not a half hour ago as I came up." They had entered the library while he spoke, and crossing to the hearth, where a small fire burned, Lydia looked up at him with her anxious gaze. "I hoped at first that you would gain some influence over her," she said, in a distressed voice, "but it seems now that she is estranged even from you." "Not estranged, but there is a difference and I am troubled by it. She is young, you see, and I am but a dull and sober companion for her." She shook her head with the little hopeless gesture which was so characteristic of her. Only yesterday this absence of resolution, the discontented droop of her thin, red lips, had worked him into a feeling of irritation against her. But his vision of her to-day had passed through some softening lens; and he saw her shallowness, her vanity, her lack of passion, as spiritual infirmities which were not less to be pitied than an infirmity of the body. "The end is not yet, though," he added cheerfully after a moment, "and she will come back to me in time when I am able really to help her." "Meanwhile is she to be left utterly uncontrolled?" "Not if we can do otherwise. Only we must go quietly and not frighten her too much." Again she met his words with the resigned, hopeless movement of her pretty head in its pearl gray bonnet. "I have done all I can," she said, "and it has been worse than useless. Now you must try if your method is better than mine." "I am trying," he answered smiling. For an instant her gaze fluttered irresolutely over him, as if she were moved by a passing impulse to a deeper utterance. That this impulse concerned Alice he was vaguely aware, for when had his wife ever spoken to him upon a subject more directly personal? Apart from their children he knew there was no bond between them--no memories, no hopes, no ground even for the building of a common interest. Lydia adored her children, he still believed, but when there was nothing further to be said of Dick or of Alice, their conversation flagged upon the most trivial topics. Upon the few unfortunate occasions when he had attempted to surmount the barrier between them, she had appeared to dissolve, rather than to retreat, before his approach. Yet despite her soft, cloud-like exterior, he had discovered that the rigour of her repulsion had hardened to a vein of iron in her nature. What must her life be, he demanded in a sudden passion of pity, when the strongest emotion she had ever known was the aversion that she now felt to him? All the bitterness in his heart melted into compassion at the thought, and he resisted an impulse to take her into his arms and say: "I know, I understand, and I am sorry." Yet he was perfectly aware that if he were to do this, she would only shrink farther away from him, and look up at him with fear and mystification, as if she suspected him of some hidden meaning, of some strategic movement against her impregnable reserve. Her whole relation to him had narrowed into the single instinct of self-defence. If he came unconsciously a step nearer, if he accidentally touched her hand as he passed, he had grown to expect the flaring of her uncontrollable repugnance in the heightened red in her cheeks. "I know that I am repulsive to her, that when she looks at me she still sees the convict," he thought, "and yet the knowledge of this only adds to the pity and tenderness I feel." Lydia had moved through the doorway, but turning back in the hall, she spoke with a return of confidence, as if the fact of the threshold, which she had put between them, had restored to her, in a measure, the advantage that she had lost. "Then I shall leave Alice in your hands. I can do nothing more," she said. "Give me time and I will do all that you cannot," he answered. When she had gone upstairs, he crossed the hall to the closed door of the library, and stopped short on hearing Alice's voice break out into song. The girl was still in her riding habit, and the gay French air on her lips was in accord with the spirited gesture with which she turned to him as he appeared. Her beauty would have disarmed him even without the kiss with which she hastened to avert his reproach. "Alice, can you kiss me when you know you have broken your promise?" "I made no promise," she answered coldly, drawing away. "You told me not to go riding with Geoffrey, but it was you that said it, not I, and you said it only because mamma made you. Oh, I knew all the time that it was she!" Her voice broke with anger and before he could restrain her, she ran from the room and up the staircase. An instant afterward he heard a door slam violently above his head. Was she really in love with Geoffrey Heath? he asked in alarm, or was the passion she had shown merely the outburst of an undisciplined child? CHAPTER VIII THE WEAKNESS IN STRENGTH At breakfast Alice did not appear, and when he went upstairs to her room, she returned an answer in a sullen voice through her closed door. All day his heart was oppressed by the thought of her, but to his surprise, when he came home to luncheon, she met him on the steps with a smiling face. It was evident to him at the first glance that she meant to ignore both the cause and the occasion of last evening's outburst; and he found himself yielding to her determination before he realised all that his evasion of the subject must imply. But while she hung upon his neck, with her cheek pressed to his, it was impossible that he should speak any word that would revive her anger against him. Anything was better than the violence with which she had parted from him the evening before. He could never forget his night of anguish, when he had strained his ears unceasingly for some stir in her room, hoping that a poignant realisation of his love for her would bring her sobbing and penitent to his door before dawn. Now when he saw her again for the first time, she had apparently forgotten the parting which had so tortured his heart. "You've been working too hard, papa, and you're tired," she remarked, rubbing the furrows between his eyebrows in a vain endeavour to smooth them out. "Are you obliged to go back to that hateful office this afternoon?" "I've some work that will keep me there until dark, I fear," he replied. "It's a pity because I'd like a ride of all things." "It is a pity, poor dear," protested Alice, but he noticed that there was no alteration in her sparkling gaiety. Was there, indeed, almost a hint of relief in her tone? and was this demonstrative embrace but a guarded confession of her gratitude for his absence? Something in her manner--a veiled excitement in her look, a subtle change in her voice--caused him to hold her to him in a keener tenderness. It was on his lips to beg for her confidence, to remind her of his sympathy in whatever she might feel or think--to assure her even of his tolerance of Geoffrey Heath. But in the instant when he was about to speak, a sudden recollection of the look with which she had turned from him last evening, checked the impulse before it had had time to pass into words. And so because of his terror of losing her, he let her go at last in silence from his arms. His office work that afternoon was heavier than usual, for in the midst of his mechanical copying and filing, he was abstracted by the memory of that strange, unnatural vivacity in Alice's face. Then in the effort to banish the disturbing recollection, he recalled old Adam Crowley, wrapped in his knitted shawl, on the doorstep of his cottage. A check of Richard's contributing six hundred dollars toward the purchase of a new organ for the church he attended gave Daniel his first opportunity to mention the old man to his uncle. "I saw Crowley the other day," he began abruptly, "the man who was my father's clerk for forty years, and whose place," he added smiling, "I seem to have filled." "Ah, indeed," remarked Richard quietly. "So he is still living?" "His right arm has been paralysed, as you know, and he is very poor. All his savings were lost in some investments he made by my father's advice." "So I have heard--it was most unfortunate." "He had always been led to believe, I understand, that he would be provided for by my father's will." Richard laid down his pen and leaned thoughtfully back in his chair. "He has told me so," he rejoined, "but we have only his word for it, as there was no memorandum concerning him among my brother's papers." "But surely it was well known that father had given him a pension. Aunt Lucy was perfectly aware of it--they talked of it together." "During his lifetime he did pay Crowley a small monthly allowance in consideration of his past services. But his will was an extremely careful document--his bequests are all made in a perfectly legal form." "Was not this will made some years ago, however, before the old man became helpless and lost his money?" Richard nodded: "I understood as much from Crowley when he came to me with his complaint. But, as I reminded him, it would have been a perfectly simple matter for Daniel to have made such a bequest in a codicil--as he did in your case," he concluded deliberately. The younger man met his gaze without flinching. "The will, I believe, was written while I was in prison," he observed. "Upon the day following your conviction. By a former will, which he then destroyed, he had bequeathed to you his entire estate. You understand, of course," he pursued, after a pause in which he had given his nephew full time to possess himself of the information, as well as of the multiplied suggestions that he had offered, "that the income you receive now comes from money that is legally your own. If it should ever appear advisable for me to do so, I am empowered to make over to you the sum of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in securities. The principal is left in my hands merely because it is to your interest that I should keep an eye on the investments." "Yes, I understand, and I understand, too, that but for your insistence my father would probably have left me nothing." "I felt very strongly that he had no right to disinherit you," returned Richard. "In my eyes he made a grave mistake in refusing to lend you support at your trial----" "As you did, I acknowledge gratefully," interrupted Daniel, and wondered why the fact had aroused in him so little appreciation. As far as the observance of the conventional virtues were concerned, Richard Ordway, he supposed, was, and had been all his life, a good man, yet something in his austere excellence froze instantly all the gentler impulses in his nephew's heart. It was impossible after this to mention again the subject of Crowley, so going back to his work, he applied himself to his copying until Richard put down his papers and left the office. Then he locked his desk wearily and followed his uncle out into the street. A soft May afternoon was just closing, and the street lamps glimmered, here and there, like white moths out of the mist which was fragrant with honeysuckle and roses. An old lamplighter, who was descending on his ladder from a tall lamppost at the corner, looked down at Ordway with a friendly and merry face. "The days will soon be so long that you won't be needing us to light you home," he remarked, as he came down gingerly, his hands grasping the rungs of the ladder above his head. When he landed at Daniel's side he began to tell him in a pleasant, garrulous voice about his work, his rheumatism and the strange sights that he had seen in his rounds for so many years. "I've seen wonders in my day, you may believe it," he went on, chuckling, "I've seen babies in carriages that grew up to be brides in orange blossoms, and then went by me later as corpses in hearses. I've seen this town when it warn't mo'n a little middlin' village, and I've seen soldiers dyin' in blood in this very street." A train went by with a rush along the gleaming track that ran through the town. "An' I've known the time when a sight like that would have skeered folks to death," he added. For a minute Ordway looked back, almost wistfully, after the flying train. Then with a friendly "good-bye!" he parted from the lamplighter and went on his way. When he reached home he half expected to find Alice waiting for him in the twilight on the piazza, but, to his surprise, Lydia met him as he entered the hall and asked him, in a voice which sounded as if she were speaking in the presence of servants, to come with her into the library. There she closed the door upon him and inquired in a guarded tone: "Has Alice been with you this afternoon? Have you seen or heard anything of her?" "Not since luncheon. Why, I thought that she was at home with one of the girls." "It seems she left the house immediately after you. She wore her dark blue travelling dress, and one of the servants saw her at the railway station at three o'clock." For an instant the room swam before his eyes. "You believe, then, that she has gone off?" he asked in an unnatural voice, "that she has gone off with Geoffrey Heath?" In the midst of his own hideous anguish he was impressed by the perfect decency of Lydia's grief--by the fact that she wore her anxiety as an added grace. "I have telephoned for Uncle Richard," she said in a subdued tone, "and he has just sent me word that after making inquiries, he learned that Geoffrey Heath went to Washington on the afternoon train." "And Alice is with him!" "If she is not, where is she?" Her eyes filled with tears, and sinking into a chair she dropped her face in her clasped hands. "Oh, I wish Uncle Richard would come," she moaned through her fingers. Again he felt a smothered resentment at this implicit reliance upon Richard Ordway. "We must make sure first that she is gone," he said, "and then it will be time enough to consider ways and means of bringing her back." Turning abruptly away from her, he went out of the library and up the staircase to Alice's room, which was situated directly across the hall from his own. At the first glance it seemed to him that nothing was missing, but when he looked at her dressing-table in the alcove, he found that it had been stripped of her silver toilet articles, and that her little red leather bag, which he had filled with banknotes a few days ago, was not in the top drawer where she kept it. Something in the girl's chamber, so familiar, so redolent of associations with her bright presence, tore at his heart with a fresh sense of loss, like a gnawing pain that fastens into a new wound. On the bed he saw her pink flannel dressing-gown, with the embroidered collar which had so delighted her when she had bought it; on the floor at one side lay her pink quilted slippers, slightly soiled from use; and between the larger pillows was the delicate, lace-trimmed baby's pillow upon which she slept. The perfume of her youth, her freshness, was still in the room, as if she had gone from it for a little while through a still open door. At a touch on his arm he looked round startled, to find one of the servants--the single remaining slave of the past generation--rocking her aged body as she stood at his side. "She ain' gwine come back no mo'--Yes, Lawd, she ain' gwine come back no mo'. Whut's done hit's done en hit cyarn be undone agin." "Why, Aunt Mehaley, what do you mean?" he demanded sternly, oppressed, in spite of himself by her wailing voice and her African superstition. "I'se seen er tur'ble heap done in my day wid dese hyer eyes," resumed the old negress, "but I ain' never seen none un um undone agin atter deys wunst been done. You kin cut down er tree, but you cyarn' mek hit grow back togedder. You kin wring de neck er a rooster, but you cyarn' mek him crow. Yes, my Lawd, hit's easy to pull down, but hit's hard to riz up. I'se ole, Marster, en I'se mos' bline wid lookin', but I ain' never seen whut's done undone agin." She tottered out, still wailing in her half-crazed voice, and hastily shutting the drawers of the dressing-table, he went downstairs again to where Lydia awaited him in the library. "There's no doubt, I fear, that she's gone with Heath," he said, with a constraint into which he had schooled himself on the staircase. "As he appears to have stopped at Washington, I shall take the next train there, which leaves at nine-twenty-five. If they are married----" He broke off, struck by the pallor that overspread her face. "But they are married! They must be married!" she cried in terror. For an instant he stared back at her white face in a horror as great as hers. Was it the first time in his life, he questioned afterwards, that he had been brought face to face with the hideous skeletons upon which living conventions assume a semblance of truth? "I hope to heaven that he has _not_ married her!" he exclaimed in a passion from which she shrank back trembling. "Good God! do you want me to haggle with a cad like that to make him marry my child?" "And if he doesn't? what then?" moaned Lydia, in a voice that seemed to fade away while she spoke. "If he doesn't I shall be almost tempted to bless his name. Haven't you proved to me that he is a cheat and a brute and a libertine, and yet you dare to tell me that I must force him to marry Alice. Oh, if he will only have the mercy to leave her free, I may still save her!" he said. She looked at him with dilated eyes as if rooted in fear to the spot upon which she stood. "But the consequences," she urged weakly at last in a burst of tears. "Oh, I'll take the consequences," he retorted harshly, as he went out. An hour later, when he was settled in the rushing train, it seemed to him that he was able to find comfort in the words with which he had separated from his wife. Let Alice do what she would, there was always hope for her in the thought that he might help her to bear, even if he could not remove from her, the consequences of her actions. Could so great a force as his love for her fail to avert from her young head at least a portion of her inevitable disillusionment? The recollection of her beauty, of her generosity, and of the wreck of her womanhood almost before it had begun, not only added to his suffering, but seemed in some inexplicable way to increase his love. The affection he had always felt for her was strengthened now by that touch of pity which lends a deeper tenderness to all human relations. Upon reaching Washington he found that a shower had come up, and the pavements were already wet when he left the station. He had brought no umbrella, but he hardly heeded this in the eagerness which drove him from street to street in his search for his child. After making vain inquiries at several of the larger hotels, he had begun to feel almost hopeless, when going into the newest and most fashionable of them all, he discovered that "Mr. and Mrs. Geoffrey Heath" had been assigned an apartment there an hour before. In answer to his question the clerk informed him that the lady had ordered her dinner served upstairs, leaving at the same time explicit instructions that she was "not at home" to anyone who should call. But in spite of this rebuff, he drew out his card, and sat down in a chair in the brilliantly lighted lobby. He had selected a seat near a radiator in the hope of drying his damp clothes, and presently a little cloud of steam rose from his shoulders and drifted out into the shining space. As he watched the gorgeous, over-dressed women who swept by him, he remembered as one remembers a distant dream, the years when his life had been spent among such crowds in just such a dazzling glare of electric light. It appeared false and artificial to him now, but in the meantime, he reflected, while he looked on, he had been in prison. A voice at his elbow interrupted his thoughts, and turning in response to an invitation from a buttoned sleeve, he entered an elevator and was borne rapidly aloft among a tightly wedged group of women who were loudly bewailing their absence from the theatre. It was with difficulty that he released himself at the given signal from his escort, and stepped out upon the red velvet carpet which led to Alice's rooms. In response to a knock from the boy who had accompanied him, the door flew open with a jerk, and Alice appeared before him in a bewildering effect of lace and pink satin. "O papa, papa, you naughty darling!" she exclaimed, and was in his arms before he had time to utter the reproach on his lips. With her head on his breast, he was conscious at first only of an irresponsible joy, like the joy of the angels for whom evil no longer exists. To know that she was alive, that she was safe, that she was in his arms, seemed sufficient delight, not only unto the day, but unto his whole future as well. Then the thought of what it meant to find her thus in her lace and satin came over him, and drawing slightly away he looked for the first time into her face. "Alice, what does it mean?" he asked, as he kissed her. Pushing the loosened hair back from her forehead, she met his question with a protesting pout. "It means that you're a wicked boy to run away from home like this and be all by yourself in a bad city," she responded with a playful shake of her finger. Then she caught his hand and drew him down on the sofa beside her in the midst of the filmy train of her tea-gown. "If you promise never to do it again, I shan't tell mamma on you," she added, with a burst of light-hearted merriment. "Where were you married, Alice? and who did it?" he asked sternly. At his tone a ripple of laughter broke from her lips, and reaching for her little red leather bag on the table, she opened it and tossed a folded paper upon his knees. "I didn't ask his name," she responded, "but you can find it all written on that, I suppose." "And you cared nothing for me?--nothing for my anxiety, my distress?" "I always meant to telegraph you, of course. Geoffrey has gone down now to do it." "But were you obliged to leave home in this way? If you had told me you loved him, I should have understood--should have sympathised." "Oh, but mamma wouldn't, and I had to run off. Of course, I wanted a big wedding like other girls, and a lot of bridesmaids and a long veil, but I knew you'd never consent to it, so I made up my mind just to slip away without saying a word. Geoffrey is so rich that I can make up afterwards for the things I missed when I was married. This is what he gave me to-day. Isn't it lovely?" Baring her throat she showed him a pearl necklace hidden beneath her lace collar. "We're sailing day after to-morrow," she went on, delightedly, "and we shall go straight to Paris because I am dying to see the shops. I wouldn't run away with him until he promised to take me there." There was no regret in her mind, no misgiving, no disquietude. The thought of his pain had not marred for an instant the pleasure of her imaginary shopping. "O papa, I am happy, so happy!" she sang aloud, springing suddenly to her full height and standing before him in her almost barbaric beauty--from the splendid hair falling upon her shoulders to the little feet that could not keep still for sheer joy of living. He saw her red mouth glow and tremble as she bent toward him. "To think that I'm really and truly out of Botetourt at last!" she cried. "Then you've no need of me and I may as well go home?" he said a little wistfully as he rose. At this she hung upon his neck for a minute with her first show of feeling. "I'd rather you wouldn't stay till Geoffrey comes back," she answered, abruptly releasing him, "because it would be a surprise to him and he's always so cross when he's surprised. He has a perfectly awful temper," she confided in a burst of frankness, "but I've learned exactly how to manage him, so it doesn't matter. Then he's so handsome, too. I shouldn't have looked at him twice if he hadn't been handsome. Now, go straight home and take good care of yourself and don't get fat and bald before I come back." She kissed him several times, laughing in little gasps, while she held him close in her arms. Then putting him from her, she pushed him gently out into the hall. As the door closed on her figure, he felt that it shut upon all that was living or warm in his heart. BOOK FOURTH LIBERATION CHAPTER I THE INWARD LIGHT On the day that he returned to Botetourt, it seemed to Ordway that the last vestige of his youth dropped from him; and one afternoon six months later, as he passed some schoolboys who were playing ball in the street, he heard one of them remark in an audible whisper: "Just wait till that old fellow over there gets out of the way." Since coming home again his interests, as well as his power of usefulness, had been taken from him; and the time that he had spent in prison had aged him less than the three peaceful years which he had passed in Botetourt. All that suffering and experience could not destroy had withered and died in the monotonous daily round which carried him from his home to Richard's office and back again from Richard's office to his home. Outwardly he had grown only more quiet and gentle, as people are apt to do who approach the middle years in a position of loneliness and dependence. To Richard and to Lydia, who had never entirely ceased to watch him, it appeared that he had at last "settled down," that he might be, perhaps, trusted to walk alone; and it was with a sensation of relief that his wife observed the intense youthful beam fade from his blue eyes. When his glance grew dull and lifeless, and his features fell gradually into the lines of placid repose which mark the body's contentment rather than the spirit's triumph, it seemed to her that she might at last lay aside the sleepless anxiety which had been her marriage portion. "He has become quite like other people now," she said one day to Richard, "do you know that he has grown to take everything exactly as a matter of course, and I really believe he enjoys what he eats." "I'm glad of that," returned Richard, "for I've noticed that he is looking very far from well. I advised him several weeks ago to take care of that cough, but he seems to have some difficulty in getting rid of it." "He hasn't been well since Alice's marriage," observed Lydia, a little troubled. "You know he travelled home from Washington in wet clothes and had a spell of influenza afterward. He's had a cold ever since, for I hear him coughing a good deal after he first goes to bed." "You'd better make him attend to it, I think, though with his fine chest there's little danger of anything serious." "Do you suppose Alice's marriage could have sobered him? He's grown very quiet and grave, and I dare say it's a sign that his wildness has gone out of him, poor fellow. You remember how his laugh used to frighten me? Well, he never laughs like that now, though he sometimes stares hard at me as if he were looking directly through me, and didn't even know that he was doing it." As she spoke she glanced out of the window and her eyes fell on Daniel, who came slowly up the gravelled walk, his head bent over an armful of old books he carried. "He visits a great deal among the poor," remarked Richard, "and I think that's good for him, provided, of course, that he does it with discretion." "I suppose it is," said Lydia, though she added immediately, "but aren't the poor often very immoral?" A reply was on Richard's lips, but before he could utter it, the door opened and Daniel entered with the slow, almost timid, step into which he had schooled himself since his return to Botetourt. As he saw Richard a smile--his old boyish smile of peculiar sweetness--came to his lips, but without speaking, he crossed to the table and laid down the books he carried. "If those are old books, won't you remember to take them up to your room, Daniel?" said Lydia, in her tone of aggrieved sweetness. "They make such a litter in the library." He started slightly, a nervous affection which had increased in the last months, and looked at her with an apologetic glance. As he stood there she had again that singular sensation of which she had spoken to Richard, as if he were gazing through her and not at her. "I beg your pardon," he answered, "I remember now that I left some here yesterday." "Oh, it doesn't matter, of course," she responded pleasantly, "it's only that I like to keep the house tidy, you know." "They do make rather a mess," he admitted, and gathering them up again, he carried them out of the room and up the staircase. They watched his bent gray head disappear between the damask curtains in the doorway, and then listened almost unconsciously for the sound of his slow gentle tread on the floor above. "There was always too much of the dreamer about him, even as a child," commented Richard, when the door was heard to close over their heads, "but he seems contented enough now with his old books, doesn't he?" "Contented? Yes, I believe he is even happy. I never say much to him because, you see, there is so very little for us to talk about. It is a dreadful thing to confess," she concluded resolutely, "but the truth is I've been always a little afraid of him since--since----" "Afraid?" he looked at her in astonishment. "Well, not exactly afraid--but nervous with a kind of panic shudder at times--a dread of his coming close to me, of his touching me, of his wanting things of me." A shiver ran through her and she bit her lip as if to hide the expression of horror upon her face. "There's nobody else on earth that I would say it to, but when he first came back I used to have nightmares about it. I could never get it out of my mind a minute and if they left me alone with him, I wanted almost to scream with nervousness. It's silly I know, and I can't explain it even to you, but there were times when I shrieked aloud in my sleep because I dreamed that he had come into my room and touched me. I felt that I was wrong and foolish, but I couldn't help it, and I tried--tried--oh, so hard to bear things and to be brave and patient." The tears fell from her eyes on her clasped hands, but her attitude of sorrow only made more appealing the Madonna-like loveliness of her features. "You've been a saint, Lydia," he answered, patting her drooping shoulder as he rose to his feet. "Poor girl, poor girl! and no daughter of my own could be dearer to me," he added in his austere sincerity of manner. "I have tried to do right," replied Lydia, lifting her pure eyes to his in an overflow of religious emotion. Meanwhile the harmless object of their anxiety sat alone in his room under a green lamp, with one of the musty books he had bought open upon his knees. He was not reading, for his gaze was fixed on the opposite wall, and there was in his eyes something of the abstracted vision which Lydia dreaded. It was as if his intellect, forced from the outward experience back into the inner world of thought, had ended by projecting an image of itself into the space at which he looked. While he sat there the patient, apologetic smile with which he had answered to his wife was still on his lips. "I suppose it's because I'm getting old that people and things no longer make me suffer," he said to himself, "it's because I'm getting old that I can look at Lydia unmoved, that I can feel tenderness for her even while I see the repulsion creep into her eyes. It isn't her fault, after all, that she loathes me, nor is it mine. Yes, I'm certainly an old fellow, the boy was right. At any rate, it's pleasanter, on the whole, than being young." Closing the book, he laid it on the table, and leaned forward with his chin on his hands. "But if I'd only known when I was young!" he added, "if I'd only known!" His past life rose before him as a picture that he had seen, rather than as a road along which he had travelled; and he found himself regarding it almost as impersonally as he might have regarded the drawing upon the canvas. The peril of the inner life had already begun to beset him--that mysterious power of reliving one's experience with an intensity which makes the objective world appear dull and colourless by contrast. It was with an effort at times that he was able to detach his mind from the contemplative habit into which he had fallen. Between him and his surroundings there existed but a single bond, and this was the sympathy which went out of him when he was permitted to reach the poor and the afflicted. To them he could still speak, with them he could still be mirthful; but from his wife, his uncle, and the members of his own class, he was divided by that impenetrable wall of social tradition. In his home he had ceased to laugh, as Lydia had said; but he could still laugh in the humbler houses of the poor. They had received him as one of themselves, and for this reason alone he could remember how to be merry when he was with them. To the others, to his own people, he felt himself to be always an outsider, a reclaimed castaway, a philanthropic case instead of an individual; and he knew that if there was one proof the more to Lydia that he was in the end a redeemed character, it was the single fact that he no longer laughed in her presence. It was, he could almost hear her say, unbecoming, if not positively improper, that a person who had spent five years in prison should be able to laugh immoderately afterward; and the gravity of his lips was in her eyes, he understood, the most satisfactory testimony to the regeneration of his heart. And yet Lydia, according to her vision, was a kind, as well as a conscientious woman. The pity of it was that if he were to die now, three years after his homecoming, she would probably reconstruct an imaginary figure of him in her memory, and wear crape for it with appropriate grace and dignity. The works of the imagination are manifold, he thought with a grim humour, even in a dull woman. But as there was not likely to occur anything so dramatic, in the immediate present, as his death, he wondered vaguely what particular form of aversion his wife's attitude would next express. Or could it be that since he had effaced himself so utterly, he hardly dared to listen to the sound of his footsteps in the house, she had grown to regard him with a kind of quiet tolerance, as an object which was unnecessary, perhaps, yet entirely inoffensive? He remembered now that during those terrible first years in prison he had pursued the thought of her with a kind of hopeless violence, yet to-day he could look back upon her desertion of him in his need with a compassion which forgave the weakness that it could not comprehend. That, too, he supposed was a part of the increasing listlessness of middle age. In a little while he would look forward, it might be, to the coming years without dread--to the long dinners when he sat opposite to her with the festive bowl of flowers between them, to the quiet evenings when she lingered for a few minutes under the lamp before going to her room--those evenings which are the supreme hours of love or of despair. Oh, well, he would grow indifferent to the horror of these things, as he had already grown indifferent to the soft curves of her body. Yes, it was a thrice blessed thing, this old age to which he was coming! Then another memory flooded his heart with the glow of youth, and he saw Emily, as she had appeared to him that night in the barn more than six years ago, when she had stood with the lantern held high above her head and the red cape slipping back from her upraised arm. A sharp pain shot through him, and he dropped his eyes as if he had met a blow. That was youth at which he had looked for one longing instant--that was youth and happiness and inextinguishable desire. For a moment he sat with bent head; then with an effort he put the memory from him, and opened his book at the page where he had left off. As he did so there was a tap at his door, and when he had spoken, Lydia came in timidly with a letter in her hand. "This was put into Uncle Richard's box by mistake," she said, "and he has just sent it over." He took it from her and seeing that it was addressed in Baxter's handwriting, laid it, still unopened, upon the table. "Won't you sit down?" he asked, pushing forward the chair from which he had risen. A brief hesitation showed in her face; then as he turned away from her to pick up some scattered papers from the floor, she sat down with a tentative, nervous manner. "Are you quite sure that you're well, Daniel?" she inquired. "Uncle Richard noticed to-day that you coughed a good deal in the office. I wonder if you get exactly the proper kind of food?" He nodded, smiling. "Oh, I'm all right," he responded, "I'm as hard as nails, you know, and always have been." "Even hard people break down sometimes. I wish you would take a tonic or see a doctor." Her solicitude surprised him, until he remembered that she had never failed in sympathy for purely physical ailments. If he had needed bodily healing instead of mental, she would probably have applied it with a conscientious devotedness. "I am much obliged to you, but I'm really not sick," he insisted, "it is very good of you, however." "It is nothing more than my duty," she rejoined, sweetly. "Well, that may be, but there's nothing to prevent my being obliged to you for doing your duty." Puzzled as always by his whimsical tone, she sat looking at him with her gentle, uncomprehending glance. "I wish, all the same," she murmured, "that you would let me send you a mustard plaster to put on your chest." He shook his head without replying in words to her suggestion. "Do you know it is three months since we had a letter from Alice," he said, "and six since she went away?" "Oh, it's that then? You have been worrying about Alice?" "How can I help it? We hardly know even that she is living." "I've thought of her day and night since her marriage, though it's just as likely, isn't it, that she's taken up with the new countries and her new clothes?" "Oh, of course, it may be that, but it is the awful uncertainty that kills." With a sigh she looked down at her slippered feet. "I was thinking to-day what a comfort Dick is to me--to us all," she said, "one is so sure of him and he is doing so splendidly at college." "Yes," he agreed, "Dick is a comfort. I wish poor Alice was more like him." "She was always wild, you remember, never like other children, and it was impossible to make her understand that some things were right and some wrong. Yet I never thought that she would care for such a loud, vulgar creature as Geoffrey Heath." "Did she care for him?" asked Daniel, almost in a whisper, "or was it only that she wanted to see Paris?" "Well, she may have improved him a little--at least let us hope so," she remarked as if she had not heard his question. "He has money, at any rate, and that is what she has always wanted, though I fear even Geoffrey's income will be strained by her ceaseless extravagance." As she finished he thought of her own youth, which she had evidently forgotten, and it seemed to him that the faults she blamed most in Alice were those which she had overcome patiently in her own nature. "I could stand anything better than this long suspense," he said gently. "It does wear one out," she rejoined. "I am very, very sorry for you." Some unaccustomed tone in her voice--a more human quality, a deeper cadence, made him wonder in an impulse of self-reproach if, after all, the breach between them was in part of his own making? Was it still possible to save from the ruin, if not love, at least human companionship? "Lydia," he said, "it isn't Alice, it is mostly loneliness, I think." Rising from her chair she stood before him with her vague, sweet smile playing about her lips. "It is natural that you should feel depressed with that cough," she remarked, "I really wish you would let me send you a mustard plaster." As the cough broke out again, he strangled it hilariously in a laugh. "Oh, well, if it's any comfort to you, I don't mind," he responded. When she had gone he picked up Baxter's letter from the table and opened it with trembling fingers. What he had expected to find, he hardly knew, but as he read the words, written so laboriously in Baxter's big scrawling writing, he felt that his energy returned to him with the demand for action--for personal responsibility. "I don't know whether or not you heard of Mrs. Brooke's death three months ago," the letter ran, "but this is to say that Mr. Beverly dropped down with a paralytic stroke last week; and now since he's dead and buried, the place is to be sold for debt and the children sent off to school to a friend of Miss Emily's where they can go cheap. Miss Emily has a good place now in the Tappahannock Bank, but she's going North before Christmas to some big boarding school where they teach riding. There are a lot of things to be settled about the sale, and I thought that, being convenient, you might take the trouble to run down for a day and help us with your advice, _which is of the best always_. "Hoping that you are in good health, I am at present, BAXTER." As he folded the letter a flush overspread his face. "I'll go," he said, with a new energy in his voice, "I'll go to-morrow." Then turning in response to a knock, he opened the door and received the mustard plaster which Lydia had made. CHAPTER II AT TAPPAHANNOCK AGAIN He had sent a telegram to Banks, and as the train pulled into the station, he saw the familiar sandy head and freckled face awaiting him upon the platform. "By George, this is a bully sight, Smith," was the first shout that reached his ears. "You're not a bit more pleased than I am," he returned laughing with pleasure, as he glanced from the station, crowded with noisy Negroes, up the dusty street into which they were about to turn. "It's like coming home again, and upon my word, I wish I were never to leave here. But how are you, Banks? So you are married to Milly and going to live contented forever afterward." "Yes, I'm married," replied Banks, without enthusiasm, "and there's a baby about which Milly is clean crazy. Milly has got so fat," he added, "that you'd never believe I could have spanned her waist with my hands three years ago." "Indeed? And is she as captivating as ever?" "Well, I reckon she must be," said Banks, "but it doesn't seem so mysterious, somehow, as it used to." His silly, affectionate smile broke out as he looked at his companion. "To tell the truth," he confessed, "I've been missing you mighty hard, Smith, marriage or no marriage. It ain't anything against Milly, God knows, that she can't take your place, and it ain't anything against the baby. What I want is somebody I can sit down and look up to, and I don't seem to be exactly able to look up to Milly or to the baby." "The trouble with you, my dear Banks, is that you are an incorrigible idealist and always will be. You were born to be a poet and I don't see to save my life how you escaped." "I didn't. I used to write a poem every Sunday of my life when I first went into tobacco. But after that Milly came and I got used to spending all my Sundays with her." "Well, now that you have her in the week, you might begin all over again." They were walking rapidly up the long hill, and as Ordway passed, he nodded right and left to the familiar faces that looked out from the shop doors. They were all friendly, they were all smiling, they were all ready to welcome him back among them. "The queer part is," observed Banks, with that stubborn vein of philosophy which accorded so oddly with his frivolous features, "that the thing you get doesn't ever seem to be the same as the thing you wanted. This Milly is kind to me and the other wasn't, but, somehow, that hasn't made me stop regretting the other one that I didn't marry--the Milly that banged and snapped at me about my clothes and things all day long. I don't know what it means, Smith, I've studied about it, but I can't understand." "The meaning of it is, Banks, that you wanted not the woman, but the dream." "Well, I didn't get it," rejoined Banks, gloomily. "Yet Milly's a good wife and you're happy, aren't you?" "I should be," replied Banks, "if I could forget how darn fascinating that other Milly was. Oh, yes, she's a good wife and a doting mother, and I'm happy enough, but it's a soft, squashy kind of happiness, not like the way I used to feel when I'd walk home with you after the preaching in the old field." While he spoke they had reached Baxter's warehouse, and as Ordway was recognized, there was a quiver of excitement in the little crowd about the doorway. A moment later it had surrounded him with a shout of welcome. A dozen friendly hands were outstretched, a dozen breathless lips were calling his name. As the noise passed through the neighbouring windows, the throng was increased by a number of small storekeepers and a few straggling operatives from the cotton mills, until at last he stopped, half laughing, half crying, in their midst. Ten minutes afterward, when Baxter wedged his big person through the archway, he saw Ordway standing bareheaded in the street, his face suffused with a glow which seemed to give back to him a fleeting beam of the youth that he had lost. "Well, I reckon it's my turn now. You can just step inside the office, Smith," remarked Baxter, while he grasped Ordway's arm and pulled him back into the warehouse. As they entered the little room, Daniel saw again the battered chair, the pile of Smith's Almanacs, and the paper weight, representing a gambolling kitten, upon the desk. "I'm glad to see you--we're all glad to see you," said Baxter, shaking his hand for the third time with a grasp which made Ordway feel that he was in the clutch of a down cushion. "It isn't the way of Tappahannock to forget a friend, and she ain't forgotten you." "It's like her," returned Ordway, and he added with a sigh, "I only wish I were coming back for good, Baxter." "There now!" exclaimed Baxter, chuckling, "you don't, do you? Well, all I can say, my boy, is that you've got a powerful soft spot that you left here, and your old job in the warehouse is still waiting for you when you care to take it. I tell you what, Smith, you've surely spoiled me for any other bookkeeper, and I ain't so certain, when it comes to that, that you haven't spoiled me for myself." He was larger, softer, more slovenly than ever, but he was so undeniably the perfect and inimitable Baxter, that Ordway felt his heart go out to him in a rush of sentiment. "Oh, Baxter, how is it possible that I've lived without you?" he asked. "I don't know, Smith, but it's a plain fact that after my wife--and that's nature--there ain't anybody goin' that I set so much store by. Why, when I was in Botetourt last spring, I went so far as to put my right foot on your bottom step, but, somehow, the left never picked up the courage to follow it." "Do you dare to tell me that you've been to Botetourt?" demanded Ordway with indignation. "Well, I could have stood the house you live it, though it kind of took my breath away," replied Baxter, with an embarrassed and guilty air, "but when it came to facing that fellow at the door, then my courage gave out and I bolted. I studied him a long while, thinking I might get my eyes used to the sight of him, but it did no good. I declar', Smith, I could no more have put a word to him than I could to the undertaker at my own funeral. Bless my soul, suh, poor Mr. Beverly, when he was alive, didn't hold a tallow candle to that man." "You might have laid in wait for me in the street, then, that would have been only fair." "But how did I know, Smith, that you wan't livin' up to the man at your door?" "It wouldn't have taken you long to find out that I wasn't. So poor Mr. Beverly is dead and buried, then, is he?" Baxter's face adopted instantly a funereal gloom, and his voice, when he spoke, held a quaver of regret. "There wasn't a finer gentleman on earth than Mr. Beverly," he said, "and he would have given me his last blessed cent if he'd ever had one to give. I've lost a friend, Smith, there's no doubt of that, I've lost a friend. And poor Mrs. Brooke, too," he added sadly. "Many and many is the time I've heard Mr. Beverly grieven' over the way she worked. 'If things had only come out as I planned them, Baxter,' he'd say to me, 'my wife should never have raised her finger except to lift food to her lips.'" "And yet I've seen him send her downstairs a dozen times a day to make him a lemonade," observed Ordway cynically. "That wasn't his fault, suh, he was born like that--it was just his way. He was always obliged to have what he wanted." "Well, I can forgive him for killing his wife, but I can't pardon him for the way he treated his sister. That girl used to work like a farm hand when I was out there." "She was mighty fond of him all the same, was Miss Emily." "Everybody was, that's what I'm quarreling about. He didn't deserve it." "But he meant well in his heart, Smith, and it's by that that I'm judgin' him. It wasn't his fault, was it, if things never went just the way he had planned them out? I don't deny, of course, that he was sort of flighty at times, as when he made a will the week before he died and left five hundred dollars to the Tappahannock Orphan Asylum." "To the Orphan Asylum? Why, his own children are orphans, and he didn't have five hundred dollars to his name!" "Of course, he didn't, that's just the point," said Baxter with a placid tolerance which seemed largely the result of physical bulk, "and so they have had to sell most of the furniture to pay the bequest. You see, just the night before his stroke, he got himself considerably worked up over those orphans. So he just couldn't help hopin' he would have five hundred dollars to leave 'em when he came to die, an' in case he did have it he thought he might as well be prepared. Then he sat right down and wrote the bequest out, and the next day there came his stroke and carried him off." "Oh, you're a first-rate advocate, Baxter, but that doesn't alter my opinion of Mr. Beverly. What about his own orphans now? How are they going to be provided for?" "It seems Miss Emily is to board 'em out at some school she knows of, and I've settled it with her that she's to borrow enough from me to tide over any extra expenses until spring." "Then we are to wind up the affairs of Cedar Hill, are we? I suppose it's best for everybody, but it makes me sad enough to think of it." "And me, too, Smith," said Baxter, sentimentally. "I can see Mr. Beverly to the life now playin' with his dominoes on the front porch. But there's mighty little to wind up, when it comes to that. It's mortgaged pretty near to the last shingle, and when the bequest to the orphans is paid out of what's over, there'll be precious few dollars that Miss Emily can call her own. The reason I sent for you, Smith," he added in a solemn voice, "was that I thought you might be some comfort to that poor girl out there in her affliction. If you feel inclined, I hoped you'd walk out to Cedar Hill and read her a chapter or so in the Bible. I remembered how consolin' you used to be to people in trouble." With a prodigious effort Ordway swallowed his irreverent mirth, while Baxter's pious tones sounded in his ears. "Of course I shall go out to Cedar Hill," he returned, "but I was wondering, Baxter," he broke off for a minute and then went on again with an embarrassed manner, "I was wondering if there was any way I could help those children without being found out? It would make me particularly happy to feel that I might share in giving them an education. Do you think you could smuggle the money for their school bills into their Christmas stockings?" Baxter thought over it a moment. "I might manage it," he replied, "seein' that the bills are mostly to come through my hands, and I'm to settle all that I can out of what's left of the estate." As he paused Daniel looked hastily away from him, fearful lest Baxter might be perplexed by the joy that shone in his face. To be connected, even so remotely, with Emily in the care of Beverly's children, was a happiness for which, a moment ago, he had not dared to hope. "Let me deposit the amount with you twice a year," he said, "that will be both the easiest and the safest way." "Maybe you're right. And now it's settled, ain't it, that you're to come to my house to stay?" "I must go back on the night train, I'm sorry to say, but if you'll let me I'll drop in to supper. I remember your wife's biscuits of old," he added, smiling. "You don't mean it! Well, it'll tickle her to death, I reckon. It ain't likely, by the way, that you'll find much to eat out at Cedar Hill, so you'd better remember to have a snack before you start." "Oh, I can fast until supper," returned Daniel, rising. "Well, don't forget to give my respects to Miss Emily, and tell her I say not to worry, but to let the Lord take a turn. You'll find things pretty topsy-turvy out there, Smith," he added, "but if you don't happen to have your Bible handy, I'll lend you one and welcome. There's the big one with gilt clasps the boys gave me last Christmas right on top of my desk." "Oh, they're sure to have one around," replied Ordway gravely, as he shook hands again before leaving the office. From the top of the hill by the brick church, he caught a glimpse of the locust trees in Mrs. Twine's little yard, and turning in response to a remembered force of habit, he followed the board sidewalk to the whitewashed gate, which hung slightly open. In the street a small boy was busily flinging pebbles at the driver of a coal wagon, and calling the child to him, Ordway inquired if Mrs. Twine still lived in that house. "Thar ain't no Mrs. Twine," replied the boy, "she's Mrs. Buzzy. She married my pa, that's why I'm here," he explained with a wink, as the door behind him flew open, and the lady in question rushed out to welcome her former lodger. "I hear her now--she's a-comin'. My, an' she's a tartar, she is!" "It's the best sight I've laid eyes on sense I saw po', dear Bill on his deathbed," exclaimed the tartar, with delight. "Come right in, suh, come right in an' set down an' let me git a look at you. Thar ain't much cheer in the house now sence I've lost Bill an' his sprightly ways, but the welcome's warm if the house ain't." She brought him ceremoniously into her closed parlour, and then at his request led him out of the stagnant air back into her comfortable, though untidy, kitchen. "I jest had my hand in the dough, suh, when I heard yo' voice," she observed apologetically, as she wiped off the bottom of a chair with her blue gingham apron. "I knew you'd be set back to find out I didn't stay long a widder." "I hadn't even heard of Bill's death," he returned, "so it was something of a surprise to discover that you were no longer Mrs. Twine. Was it very sudden?" "Yes, suh, 'twas tremens--delicious tremens--an' they took him off so quick we didn't even have the crape in the house to tie on the front do' knob. You could a heard him holler all the way down to the cotton mills. He al'ays had powerful fine lungs, had Bill, an' if he'd a-waited for his lungs to take him, he'd be settin' thar right now, as peart as life." Her eyes filled with tears, but wiping them hastily away with her apron, she took up a pan of potatoes and began paring them with a handleless knife. "After your former marriages," he remarked doubtful as to whether he should offer sympathy or congratulations, "I should have thought you would have rested free for a time at least." "It warn't my way, Mr. Smith," she responded, with a mournful shake of her head. "To be sure I had a few peaceful months arter Bill was gone, but the queer thing is how powerful soon peace can begin to pall on yo' taste. Why, I hadn't been in mo'nin' for Bill goin' on to four months, when Silas Trimmer came along an' axed me, an' I said 'yes' as quick as that, jest out a the habit of it. I took off my mo'nin' an' kep' comp'ny with him for quite a while, but we had a quarrel over Bill's tombstone, suh, for, bein' a close-fisted man, he warn't willin' that I should put up as big a monument as I'd a mind to. Well, I broke off with him on that account, for when it comes to choosin' between respect to the dead an' marriage to the livin' Silas Trimmer, I told him 'I reckon it won't take long for you to find out which way my morals air set.' He got mad as a hornet and went off, and I put on mo'nin' agin an' wo' it steddy twil the year was up." "And at the end of that time, I presume, you were wearied of widowhood and married Buzzy?" "It's a queer thing, suh," she observed, as she picked up a fresh potato and inspected it as attentively as if it had been a new proposal, "it's a queer thing we ain't never so miserable in this world as when we ain't got the frazzle of an excuse to be so. Now, arter Bill went from me, thar was sech a quiet about that it began to git on my nerves, an' at last it got so that I couldn't sleep at nights because I was no longer obleeged to keep one ear open to hear if he was comin' upstairs drunk or sober. Bless yo' heart, thar's not a woman on earth that don't need some sort of distraction, an Bill was a long sight better at distractin' you than any circus I've ever seen. Why, I even stopped goin' to 'em as long as he was livin', for it was a question every minute as to whether he was goin' to chuck you under the chin or lam you on the head, an' thar was a mortal lot a sprightliness about it. I reckon I must have got sort a sp'iled by the excitement, for when 't was took away, I jest didn't seem to be able to settle down. But thar are mighty few men with the little ways that Bill had," she reflected sadly. "Yet your present husband is kind to you, is he not?" "Oh, he's kind enough, suh," she replied, with unutterable contempt, "but thar ain't nothin' in marriage that palls so soon as kindness. It's unexpectedness that keeps you from goin' plum crazy with the sameness of it, an' thar ain't a bit of unexpectedness about Jake. He does everything so regular that thar're times when I'd like to bust him open jest to see how he is wound up inside. Naw, suh, it ain't the blows that wears a woman out, it's the mortal sameness." Clearly there was no comfort to be afforded her, and after a few words of practical advice on the subject of the children's education, he shook hands with her and started again in the direction of Cedar Hill. The road with its November colours brought back to him the many hours when he had tramped over it in cheerfulness or in despair. The dull brown stretches of broomsedge, rolling like a high sea, the humble cabins, nestling so close to the ground, the pale clay road winding under the half-bared trees, from which the bright leaves were fluttering downward--these things made the breach of the years close as suddenly as if the divided scenery upon a stage had rolled together. While he walked alone here it was impossible to believe in the reality of his life in Botetourt. As he approached Cedar Hill, the long melancholy avenue appeared to him as an appropriate shelter for Beverly's gentle ghost. He was surprised to discover with what tenderness he was able to surround the memory of that poetic figure since he stood again in the atmosphere which had helped to cultivate his indefinable charm. In Tappahannock Beverly's life might still be read in the dry lines of prose, but beneath the historic influences of Cedar Hill it became, even in Ordway's eyes, a poem of sentiment. Beyond the garden, he could see presently, through a gap in the trees, the silvery blur of life everlasting in the fallow land, which was steeped in afternoon sunshine. Somewhere from a nearer meadow there floated a faint call of "Coopee! Coopee! Coopee!" to the turkeys lost in the sassafras. Then as he reached the house Aunt Mehitable's face looked down at him from a window in the second story: and in response to her signs of welcome, he ascended the steps and entered the hall, where he stopped upon hearing a child's voice through the half open door of the dining-room. "May I wear my coral beads even if I am in mourning, Aunt Emily?" "Not yet, Bella," answered Emily's patient yet energetic tones. "Put them away awhile and they'll be all the prettier when you take them out again." "But can't I mourn for papa and mamma just as well in my beads as I can without them?" "That may be, dear, but we must consider what other people will say." "What have other people got to do with my mourning, Aunt Emily?" "I don't know, but when you grow up you'll find that they have something to do with everything that concerns you." "Well, then, I shan't mourn at all," replied Bella, defiantly. "If you won't let me mourn in my coral beads, I shan't mourn a single bit without them." "There, there, Bella, go on with your lesson," said Emily sternly, "you are a naughty girl." At the sound of Ordway's step on the threshold, she rose to her feet, with a frightened movement, and stood, white and trembling, her hand pressed to her quivering bosom. "You!" she cried out sharply, and there was a sound in her voice that brought him with a rush to her side. But as he reached her she drew quickly away, and hiding her face in her hands, broke into passionate weeping. It was the first time that he had seen her lose her habit of self-command, and while he watched her, he felt that each of her broken sobs was wrung from his own heart. "I was a fool not to prepare you," he said, as he placed a restraining hand on the awe-struck Bella. "You've had so many shocks I ought to have known--I ought to have foreseen----" At his words she looked up instantly, drying her tears on a child's dress which she was mending. "You came so suddenly that it startled me, that is all," she answered. "I thought for a minute that something had happened to you--that you were an apparition instead of a reality. I've got into the habit of seeing ghosts of late." "It's a bad habit," he replied, as he pushed Bella from the room and closed the door after her. "But I'm not a ghost, Emily, only a rough and common mortal. Baxter wrote me of Beverly's death, so I came thinking that I might be of some little use. Remember what you promised me in Botetourt." As he looked at her now more closely, he saw that the clear brown of her skin had taken a sallow tinge, as if she were very weary, and that there were faint violet shadows in the hollows beneath her eyes. These outward signs of her weakness moved him to a passion deeper and tenderer than he had ever felt before. "I have not forgotten," she responded, after a moment in which she had recovered her usual bright aspect, "but there is really nothing one can do, it is all so simple. The farm has already been sold for debt, and so I shall start in the world without burdens, if without wealth." "And the children? What of them?" "That is arranged, too, very easily. Blair is fifteen now, and he will be given a scholarship at college. The girls will go to a friend of mine, who has a boarding school and has made most reasonable terms." "And you?" he asked in a voice that expressed something of the longing he could not keep back. "Is there to be nothing but hard work for you in the future?" "I am not afraid of work," she rejoined, smiling, "I am afraid only of reaching a place where work does not count." As he made no answer, she talked on brightly, telling him of her plans for the future, of the progress the children had shown at their lessons, of the arrangements she had made for Aunt Mehitable and Micah, and of the innumerable changes which had occurred since he went away. So full of life, of energy, of hopefulness, were her face and voice that but for her black dress he would not have suspected that she had stood recently beside a deathbed. Yet as he listened to her, his heart was torn by the sharp anguish of parting, and when presently she began to question him about his life in Botetourt, it was with difficulty that he forced himself to reply in a steady voice. All other memories of her would give way, he felt, before the picture of her in her black dress against the burning logs, with the red firelight playing over her white face and hands. An hour later, when he rose to go, he took both of her hands in his, and bending his head laid his burning forehead against her open palms. "Emily," he said, "tell me that you understand." For a moment she gazed down on him in silence. Then, as he raised his eyes, she kissed him so softly that it seemed as if a spirit had touched his lips. "I understand--forever," she answered. At her words he straightened himself, as though a burden had fallen from him, and turning slowly away he went out of the house and back in the direction of Tappahannock. CHAPTER III ALICE'S MARRIAGE It was after ten o'clock when he returned to Botetourt, and he found upon reaching home that Lydia had already gone to bed, though a bottle of cough syrup, placed conspicuously upon his bureau, bore mute witness to the continuance of her solicitude. After so marked a consideration it seemed to him only decent that he should swallow a portion of the liquid; and he was in the act of filling the tablespoon she had left, when a ring at the door caused him to start until the medicine spilled from his hand. A moment later the ring was repeated more violently, and as he was aware that the servants had already left the house, he threw on his coat, and lighting a candle, went hurriedly out into the hall and down the dark staircase. The sound of a hand beating on the panels of the door quickened his steps almost into a run, and he was hardly surprised, when he had withdrawn the bolts, to find Alice's face looking at him from the darkness outside. She was pale and thin, he saw at the first glance, and there was an angry look in her eyes, which appeared unnaturally large in their violent circles. "I thought you would never open to me, papa," she said fretfully as she crossed the threshold. "Oh, I am so glad to see you again! Feel how cold my hands are, I am half frozen." Taking her into his arms, he kissed her face passionately as it rested for an instant against his shoulder. "Are you alone, Alice? Where is your husband?" Without answering, she raised her head, shivering slightly, and then turning away, entered the library where a log fire was smouldering to ashes. As he threw on more wood, she came over to the hearth, and stretched out her hands to the warmth with a nervous gesture. Then the flame shot up and he saw that her beauty had gained rather than lost by the change in her features. She appeared taller, slenderer, more distinguished, and the vivid black and white of her colouring was intensified by the perfect simplicity of the light cloth gown and dark furs she wore. "Oh, he's at home," she answered, breaking the long silence. "I mean he's in the house in Henry Street, but we had a quarrel an hour after we got back, so I put on my hat again and came away. I'm not going back--not unless he makes it bearable for me to live with him. He's such--such a brute that it's as much as one can do to put up with it, and it's been killing me by inches for the last months. I meant to write you about it, but somehow I couldn't, and yet I knew that I couldn't write at all without letting you see it. Oh, he's unbearable!" she exclaimed, with a tremor of disgust. "You will never know--you will never be able to imagine all that I've been through!" "But is he unkind to you, Alice? Is he cruel?" She bared her arm with a superb disdainful gesture, and he saw three rapidly discolouring bruises on her delicate flesh. The sight filled him with loathing rather than anger, and he caught her to him almost fiercely as if he would hold her not only against Geoffrey Heath, but against herself. "You shall not go back to him," he said, "I will not permit it!" "The worst part is," she went on vehemently, as if he had not spoken, "that it is about money--money--always money. He has millions, his lawyers told me so, and yet he makes me give an account to him of every penny that I spend. I married him because I thought I should be rich and free, but he's been hardly better than a miser since the day of the wedding. He wants me to dress like a dowdy, for all his wealth, and I can't buy a ring that he doesn't raise a terrible fuss. I hate him more and more every day I live, but it makes no difference to him as long as he has me around to look at whenever he pleases. I have to pay him back for every dollar that he gives me, and if I keep away from him and get cross, he holds back my allowance. Oh, it's a dog's life!" she exclaimed wildly, "and it is killing me!" "You shan't bear it, Alice. As long as I'm alive you are safe with me." "For a time I could endure it because of the travelling and the strange countries," she resumed, ignoring the tenderness in his voice, "but Geoffrey was so frightfully jealous that if I so much as spoke to a man, he immediately flew into a rage. He even made me leave the opera one night in Paris because a Russian Grand Duke in the next box looked at me so hard." Throwing herself into a chair, she let her furs slip from her shoulders, and sat staring moodily into the fire. "I've sworn a hundred times that I'd leave him," she said, "and yet I've never done it until to-night." While she talked on feverishly, he untied her veil, which she had tossed back, and taking off her hat, pressed her gently against the cushions he had placed in her chair. "You look so tired, darling, you must rest," he said. "Rest! You may as well tell me to sleep!" she exclaimed. Then her tone altered abruptly, and for the first time, she seemed able to penetrate beyond her own selfish absorption. "Oh, you poor papa, how very old you look!" she said. Taking his head in her arms, she pressed it to her bosom and cried softly for a minute. "It's all my fault--everything is my fault, but I can't help it. I'm made that way." Then pushing him from her suddenly, she sprang to her feet and began walking up and down in her restless excited manner. "Let me get you a glass of wine, Alice," he said, "you are trembling all over." She shook her head. "It isn't that--it isn't that. It's the awful--awful money. If it wasn't for the money I could go on. Oh, I wish I'd never spent a single dollar! I wish I'd always gone in rags!" Again he forced her back into her chair and again, after a minute of quiet, she rose to her feet and broke into hysterical sobs. "All that I have is yours, Alice, you know that," he said in the effort to soothe her, "and, besides, your own property is hardly less than two hundred thousand." "But Uncle Richard won't give it to me," she returned angrily. "I wrote and begged him on my knees and he still refused to let me have a penny more than my regular income. It's all tied up, he says, in investments, and that until I am twenty-one it must remain in his hands." With a frantic movement, she reached for her muff, and drew from it a handful of crumpled papers, which she held out to him. "Geoffrey found these to-night and they brought on the quarrel," she said. "Yesterday he gave me this bracelet and he seems to think I could live on it for a month!" She stretched out her arm, as she spoke, and showed him a glittering circle of diamonds immediately below the blue finger marks. "There's a sable coat still that he doesn't know a thing of," she finished with a moan. Bending under the lamp, he glanced hurriedly over the papers she had given him, and then rose to his feet still holding them in his hand. "These alone come to twenty thousand dollars, Alice," he said with a gentle sternness. "And there are others, too," she cried, making no effort to control her convulsive sobs. "There are others which I didn't dare even to let him see." For a moment he let her weep without seeking to arrest her tears. "Are you sure this will be a lesson to you?" he asked at last. "Will you be careful--very careful from this time?" "Oh, I'll never spend a penny again. I'll stay in Botetourt forever," she promised desperately, eager to retrieve the immediate instant by the pledge of a more or less uncertain future. "Then we must help you," he said. "Among us all--Uncle Richard, your mother and I--it will surely be possible." Pacified at once by his assurance, she sat down again and dried her eyes in her muff. "It seems a thousand years since I went away," she observed, glancing about her for the first time. "Nothing is changed and yet everything appears to be different." "And are you different also?" he asked. "Oh, I'm older and I've seen a great deal more," she responded, with a laugh which came almost as a shock to him after her recent tears, "but I still want to go everywhere and have everything just as I used to." "But I thought you were determined to stay in Botetourt for the future?" he suggested. "Well, so I am, I suppose," she returned dismally, "there's nothing else for me to do, is there?" "Nothing that I see." "Then I may as well make up my mind to be miserable forever. It's so frightfully gloomy in this old house, isn't it? How is mamma?" "She's just as you left her, neither very well nor very sick." "So it's exactly what it always was, I suppose, and will drive me to distraction in a few weeks. Is Dick away?" "He's at college, and he's doing finely." "Of course he is--that's why he's such a bore." "Let Dick alone, Alice, and tell me about yourself. So you went to Europe immediately after I saw you in Washington?" "Two days later. I was dreadfully seasick, and Geoffrey was as disagreeable as he could be, and made all kinds of horrid jokes about me." "You went straight to Paris, didn't you?" "As soon as we landed, but Geoffrey made me come away in three weeks because he said I spent so much money." Her face clouded again at the recollection of her embarrassments. "Oh, we had awful scenes, but I hadn't even a wedding dress, you know, and French dressmakers are so frightfully expensive. One of them charged me five thousand dollars for a gown--but he told me that it was really cheap, because he'd sold one to another American the day before for twelve thousand. I don't know who her husband is," she added wistfully, "but I wish I were married to him." The wildness of her extravagance depressed him even more than her excessive despair had done; and he wondered if the vagueness of her ideas of wealth was due to the utter lack in her of the imagination which foresees results? She had lived since her girlhood in a quiet Virginia town, her surroundings had been comparatively simple, and she had never been thrown, until her marriage, amid the corrupting influences of great wealth, yet, in spite of these things, she had squandered a fortune as carelessly as a child might have strewed pebbles upon the beach. Her regret at last had come not through realisation of her fault, but in the face of the immediate punishment which threatened her. "So he got you out of Paris? Well, I'm glad of that," he remarked. "He was perfectly brutal about it, I wish you could have heard him. Then we went down into Italy and did nothing for months but look at old pictures--at least I did, he wouldn't come--and float around in a gondola until I almost died from the monotony. It was only after I found a lace shop, where they had the most beautiful things, that he would take me away, and then he insisted upon going to some little place up in the Alps because he said he didn't suppose I could possibly pack the mountains into my trunks. Oh, those dreadful mountains! They were so glaring I could never go out of doors until the afternoon, and Geoffrey would go off climbing or shooting and leave me alone in a horrid little hotel where there was nobody but a one-eyed German army officer, and a woman missionary who was bracing herself for South Africa. She wore a knitted jersey all day and a collar which looked as if it would cut her head off if she ever forgot herself and bent her neck." Her laughter, the delicious, irresponsible laughter of a child, rippled out: "She asked me one day if our blacks wore draperies? The ones in South Africa didn't, and it made it very embarrassing sometimes, she said, to missionary to them. Oh, you can't imagine what I suffered from her, and Geoffrey was so horrid about it, and insisted that she was just the sort of companion that I needed. So one day when he happened to be in the writing-room where she was, I locked the door on the outside and threw the key down into the gorge. There wasn't any locksmith nearer than twenty miles, and when they sent for him he was away. Oh, it was simply too funny for words! Geoffrey on the inside was trying to break the heavy lock and the proprietor on the outside was protesting that he mustn't, and all the time we could hear the missionary begging everybody please to be patient. She said if it were required of her she was quite prepared to stay locked up all night, but Geoffrey wasn't, so he swung himself down by the branches of a tree which grew near the window." All her old fascination had come back to her with her change of mood, and he forgot to listen to her words while he watched the merriment sparkle in her deep blue eyes. It was a part of his destiny that he should submit to her spell, as, he supposed, even Geoffrey submitted at times. He was about to make some vague comment upon her story, when her face changed abruptly into an affected gravity, and turning his head, he saw that Lydia had come noiselessly into the room, and was advancing to meet her daughter with outstretched arms. "Why, Alice, my child, what a beautiful surprise! When did you come?" As Alice started forward to her embrace, Ordway noticed that there was an almost imperceptible tightening of the muscles of her body. "Only a few minutes ago," she replied, with the characteristic disregard of time which seemed, in some way, to belong to her inability to consider figures, "and, oh, I am so glad to be back! You are just as lovely as ever." "Well, you are lovelier," said Lydia, kissing her, and adding a moment afterward, as the result of her quick, woman's glance, "what a charming gown!" Alice shrugged her shoulders, with a foreign gesture which she had picked up. "Oh, you must see some of my others," she replied, "I wish that my trunks would come, but I forgot they were all sent to the other house, and I haven't even a nightgown. Will you lend me a nightgown, mamma? I have some of the loveliest you ever saw which were embroidered for me by the nuns in a French convent." "So, you'll spend the night?" said Lydia, "I'm so glad, dear, and I'll go up and see if your bed has sheets on it." "Oh, it's not only for the night," returned Alice, defiantly, "I've come back for good. I've left Geoffrey, haven't I, papa?" "I hope so, darling," answered Ordway, coming for the first time over to where they stood. "Left Geoffrey?" repeated Lydia. "Do you mean you've separated?" "I mean I'm never going back again--that I detest him--that I'd rather die--that I'll kill myself before I'll do it." Lydia received her violence with the usual resigned sweetness that she presented to an impending crisis. "But, my dear, my dear, a divorce is a horrible thing!" she wailed. "Well, it isn't half so horrible as Geoffrey," retorted Alice. Ordway, who had turned away again as Lydia spoke, came forward at the girl's angry words, and caught the hand that she had stretched out as if to push her mother from her. "Let's be humbly grateful that we've got her back," he said, smiling, "while we prepare her bed." CHAPTER IV THE POWER OF THE BLOOD When he came out into the hall the next morning, Lydia met him, in her dressing-gown, on her way from Alice's room. "How is she?" he asked eagerly. "Did she sleep?" "No, she was very restless, so I stayed with her. She went home a quarter of an hour ago." "Went home? Do you mean she's gone back to that brute?" A servant's step sounded upon the staircase, and with her unfailing instinct for propriety, she drew back into his room and lowered her voice. "She said that she was too uncomfortable without her clothes and her maid, but I think she had definitely made up her mind to return to him." "But when did she change? You heard her say last night that she would rather kill herself." "Oh, you know Alice," she responded a little wearily; and for the first time it occurred to him that the exact knowledge of Alice might belong, after all, not to himself, but to her. "You think, then," he asked, "that she meant none of her violent protestations of last night?" "I am sure that she meant them while she uttered them--not a minute afterward. She can't help being dramatic any more than she can help being beautiful." "Are you positive that you said nothing to bring about her decision? Did you influence her in any way?" "I did nothing more than tell her that she must make her choice once for all--that she must either go back to Geoffrey Heath and keep up some kind of appearances, or publicly separate herself from him. I let her see quite plainly that a state of continual quarrels was impossible and indecent." Her point of view was so entirely sensible that he found himself hopelessly overpowered by its unassailable logic. "So she has decided to stick to him for better or for worse, then?" "For the present at all events. She realised fully, I think, how much she would be obliged to sacrifice by returning home?" "Sacrifice? Good God, what?" he demanded. "Oh, well, you see, Geoffrey lives in a fashion that is rather grand for Botetourt. He travels a great deal, and he makes her gorgeous presents when he is in a good humour. She seemed to feel that if we could only settle these bills for her, she would be able to bring about a satisfactory adjustment. I was surprised to find how quietly she took it all this morning. She had forgotten entirely, I believe, the scene she made downstairs last night." This was his old Alice, he reflected in baffled silence, and apparently he would never attain to the critical judgment of her. Well, in any case, he was able to do justice to Lydia's admirable detachment. "I suppose I may have a talk with Heath anyway?" he said at last. "She particularly begs you not to, and I feel strongly that she is right." "Does she expect me to sit quietly by and see it go on forever? Why, there were bruises on her arm that he had made with his fingers." Lydia paled as she always did when one of the brutal facts of life was thrust on her notice. "Oh, she doesn't think that will happen again. It appears that she had lost her temper and tried her best to infuriate him. He is still very much in love with her at times, and she hopes that by a little diplomacy she may be able to arrange matters between them." "Diplomacy with that insufferable cad! Pshaw!" Lydia sighed, not in exasperation, but with the martyr's forbearance. "It is really a crisis in Alice's life," she said, "and we must treat it with seriousness." "I was never more serious in my life. I'm melancholy. I'm abject." "Last night she told me that Geoffrey threatened to go West and get a divorce, and this frightened her." "But I thought it was the very thing she wanted," he urged in bewilderment. "Hadn't she left him last night for good and all?" "She might leave him, but she could not give up his money. It is impossible, I suppose, for you to realise her complete dependence upon wealth--the absurdity of her ideas about the value of money. Why, her income of five thousand which Uncle Richard allows her would not last her a month." "I realised a little of this when I glanced over those bills she gave me." "Of course we shall pay those ourselves, but what is twenty thousand dollars to her, when Geoffrey seems to have paid out a hundred thousand already. He began, I can see, by being very generous, but she confessed to me this morning that other bills were still to come in which she would not dare to let him see. I told her that she must try to meet these out of her income, and that we would reduce our living expenses as much as possible in order to pay those she gave you." "I shall ask Uncle Richard to advance this out of my personal property," he said. "But he will not do it. You know how scrupulous he is about all such matters, and he told me the other day that your father's will had clearly stated that the money was not to be touched unless he should deem it for your interest to turn it over to you." Her command of the business situation amazed him, until he remembered her long conversations with Richard Ordway, whose interests were confined within strictly professional limits. His fatal mistake in the past, he saw now, was that he had approached her, not as a fellow mortal, but as a divinity; for the farther he receded from the attitude of worship, the more was he able to appreciate the quality of her practical virtues. In spite of her poetic exterior, it was in the rosy glow of romance that she showed now as barest of attractions. The bottle of cough syrup on his bureau still testified to her ability to sympathise in all cases where the imagination was not required to lend its healing insight. "But surely it is to my interest to save Alice," he said after a pause. "I think he will feel that it must be done by the family, by us all," she answered, "he has always had so keen a sense of honour in little things." An hour later, when he broached the subject to Richard in his office, he found that Lydia was right, as usual, in her prediction; and with a flash of ironic humour, he pictured her as enthroned above his destiny, like a fourth fate who spun the unyielding thread of common sense. "Of course the debt must be paid if it is a condition of Alice's reconciliation with her husband," said the old man, "but I shall certainly not sacrifice your securities in order to do it. Such an act would be directly against the terms of your father's will." There was no further concession to be had from him, so Daniel turned to his work, half in disappointment, half in admiration of his uncle's loyalty to the written word. When he went home to luncheon Lydia told him that she had seen Alice, who had appeared seriously disturbed, though she had shown her, with evident enjoyment, a number of exquisite Paris gowns. "She had a sable coat, also, in her closet, which could not have cost less, I should have supposed, than forty thousand dollars--the kind of coat that a Russian Grand Duchess might have worn--but when I spoke of it, she grew very much depressed and changed the subject. Did you talk to Uncle Richard? And was I right?" "You're always right," he admitted despondently, "but do you think, then, that I'd better not see Alice to-day?" "Perhaps it would be wiser to wait until to-morrow. Geoffrey is in a very difficult humour, she says, more brutally indifferent to her than he has been since her marriage." "Isn't that all the more reason she ought to have her family about her?" "She says not. It's easier to deal with him, she feels, alone--and any way Uncle Richard will call there this afternoon." "Oh, Uncle Richard!" he groaned, as he went out. In the evening there was no news beyond a reassuring visit from Richard Ordway, who stopped by, for ten minutes, on his way from an interview with Geoffrey Heath. "To tell the truth I found him less obstinate than I had expected," he said, "and there's no doubt, I fear, that he has some show of justice upon his side. He has agreed now to make Alice a very liberal allowance from the first of April, provided she will promise to make no more bills, and to live until then within her own income. He told me that he was obliged to retrench for the next six months in order to meet his obligations without touching his investments. It seems that he had bought very largely on margin, and the shrinkages in stocks has forced him to pay out a great deal of money recently." "I knew you would manage it, Uncle, I relied on you absolutely," said Lydia, sweetly. "I did only my duty, my child," he responded, as he held out his hand. The one good result of the anxiety of the last twenty-four hours--the fact that it had brought Lydia and himself into a kind of human connection--had departed, Daniel observed, when he sat down to dinner, separated from her by six yellow candle shades and a bowl of gorgeous chrysanthemums. After a casual comment upon the soup, and the pleasant reminder that Dick would be home for Thanksgiving, the old uncomfortable silence fell between them. She had just remarked that the roast was a little overdone, and he had agreed with her from sheer politeness, when a sharp ring at the bell sent the old Negro butler hurrying out into the hall. An instant later there was a sound of rapid footsteps, and Alice, wearing a long coat, which slipped from her bare shoulders as she entered, came rapidly forward and threw herself into Ordway's arms, with an uncontrollable burst of tears. "My child, my child, what is it?" he questioned, while Lydia, rising from the table with a disturbed face, but an unruffled manner, remarked to the butler that he need not serve the dessert. "Come into the library, Alice, it is quieter there," she said, putting her arm about her daughter, with an authoritative pressure. "O, papa, I will never see him again! You must tell him that. I shall never see him again," she cried, regardless alike of Lydia's entreaties and the restraining presence of the butler. "Go to him to-night and tell him that I will never--never go back." "I'll tell him, Alice, and I'll do it with a great deal of pleasure," he answered soothingly, as he led her into the library and closed the door. "But you must go at once. I want him to know it at once." "I'll go this very hour--I'll go this very minute, if you honestly mean it." "Would it not be better to wait until to-morrow, Alice?" suggested Lydia. "Then you will have time to quiet down and to see things rationally." "I don't want to quiet down," sobbed Alice, angrily, "I want him to know now--this very instant--that he has gone too far--that I will not stand it. He told me a minute ago--the beast!--that he'd like to see the man who would be fool enough to keep me--that if I went he'd find a handsomer woman within a week!" "Well, I'll see him, darling," said Ordway. "Sit here with your mother, and have a good cry and talk things over." As he spoke he opened the door and went out into the hall, where he got into his overcoat. "Remember last night and don't say too much, Daniel," urged Lydia in a warning whisper, coming after him, "she is quite hysterical now and does not realise what she is saying." "Oh, I'll remember," he returned, and a minute later, he closed the front door behind him. On his way to the Heath house in Henry Street, he planned dispassionately his part in the coming interview, and he resolved that he would state Alice's position with as little show of feeling as it was possible for him to express. He would tell Heath candidly that, with his consent, Alice should never return to him, but he would say this in a perfectly quiet and inoffensive manner. If there was to be a scene, he concluded calmly, it should be made entirely by Geoffrey. Then, as he went on, he said to himself, that he had grown tired and old, and that he lacked now the decision which should carry one triumphantly over a step like this. Even his anger against Alice's husband had given way to a dragging weariness, which seemed to hold him back as he ascended the brown-stone steps and laid his hand on the door bell. When the door was opened, and he followed the servant through the long hall, ornamented by marble statues, to the smoking-room at the end, he was conscious again of that sense of utter incapacity which had been bred in him by his life in Botetourt. Geoffrey, after a full dinner, was lounging, with a cigar and a decanter of brandy, over a wood fire, and as his visitor entered he rose from his chair with a lazy shake of his whole person. "I don't believe I've ever met you before, Mr. Ordway," he remarked, as he held out his hand, "though I've known you by sight for several years. Won't you sit down?" With a single gesture he motioned to a chair and indicated the cigars and the brandy on a little table at his right hand. At his first glance Ordway had observed that he had been in a rage or drinking heavily--probably both; and he was seized by a sudden terror at the thought that Alice had been so lately at the mercy of this large red and black male animal. Yet, in spite of the disgust with which the man inspired him, he was forced to admit that as far as a mere physical specimen went, he had rarely seen his equal. His body was superbly built, and but for his sullen and brutal expression, his face would have been remarkable for its masculine beauty. "No, I won't sit down, thank you," replied Ordway, after a short pause. "What I have to say can be said better standing, I think." "Then fire away!" returned Geoffrey, with a coarse laugh. "It's about Alice, I suppose, and it's most likely some darn rot she's sent you with." "It's probably less rot than you imagine. I have taken it upon myself to forbid her returning to you. Your treatment of her has made it impossible that she should remain in your house." "Well, I've treated her a damned sight better than she deserved," rejoined Geoffrey, scowling, while his face, inflamed by the brandy he had drunk, burned to a dull red; "it isn't her fault, I can tell you, that she hasn't put me into the poorhouse in six months." "I admit that she has been very extravagant, and so does she." "Extravagant? So that is what you call it, is it? Well, she spent more in three weeks in Paris than my father did in his whole lifetime. I paid out a hundred thousand for her, and even then I could hardly get her away. But I won't pay the bills any longer, I've told her that. They may go into court about it and get their money however they can." "In the future there will be no question of that." "You think so, do you? Now I'll bet you whatever you please that she's back here in this house again before the week is up. She knows on which side her bread is buttered, and she won't stay in that dull old place, not for all you're worth." "She shall never return to you with my consent." "Did she wait for that to marry me?" demanded Geoffrey, laughing uproariously at his wit, "though I can tell you now, that it makes precious little difference to me whether she comes or stays." "She shall never do it," said Ordway, losing his temper. Then as he uttered the words, he remembered Lydia's warning and added more quietly, "she shall never do it if I can help it." "It makes precious little difference to me," repeated Geoffrey, "but she'll be a blamed fool if she doesn't, and for all her foolishness, she isn't so big a fool as you think her." "She has been wrong in her extravagance, as I said before, but she is very young, and her childishness is no excuse for your brutality." Rage, or the brandy, or both together, flamed up hotly in Geoffrey's face. "I'd like to know what right you have to talk about brutality?" he sneered. "I've the right of any man to keep another from ill-treating his daughter." "Well, you're a nice one with your history to put on these highfaluting, righteous airs, aren't you?" For an instant the unutterable disgust in Ordway's mind was like physical nausea. What use was it, after all, to bandy speeches, he questioned, with a mere drunken animal? His revulsion of feeling had moved him to take a step toward the door, when the sound of the words Geoffrey uttered caused him to stop abruptly and stand listening. "Much good you'll do her when she hears about that woman you've been keeping down at Tappahannock. As if I didn't know that you'd been running back there again after that Brooke girl----" The words were choked back in his throat, for before they had passed his lips Ordway had swung quickly round and struck him full in the mouth. With the blow it seemed to Daniel that all the violence in his nature was loosened. A sensation that was like the joy of health, of youth, of manhood, rushed through his veins, and in the single exalted instant when he looked down on Geoffrey's prostrate figure, he felt himself to be not only triumphant, but immortal. All that his years of self-sacrifice had not done for him was accomplished by that explosive rush of energy through his arm. There was blood on his hand and as he glanced down, he saw that Geoffrey, with a bleeding mouth, was struggling, dazed and half drunk, to his feet. Ordway looked at him and laughed--the laugh of the boastful and victorious brute. Then turning quickly, he took up his hat and went out of the house and down into the street. The physical exhilaration produced by the muscular effort was still tingling through his body, and while it lasted he felt younger, stronger, and possessed of a courage that was almost sublime. When he reached home and entered the library where Lydia and Alice were sitting together, there was a boyish lightness and confidence in his step. "Oh, papa!" cried Alice, standing up, "tell me about it. What did he do?" Ordway laughed again, the same laugh with which he had looked down on Geoffrey lying half stunned at his feet. "I didn't wait to see," he answered, "but I rather think he got up off the floor." "You mean you knocked him down?" asked Lydia, in an astonishment that left her breathless. "I cut his mouth, I'm sure," he replied, wiping his hand from which the blood ran, "and I hope I knocked out one or two of his teeth." Then the exhilaration faded as quickly as it had come, for as Lydia looked up at him, while he stood there wiping the blood from his bruised knuckles, he saw, for the first time since his return to Botetourt, that there was admiration in her eyes. So it was the brute, after all, and not the spirit that had triumphed over her. CHAPTER V THE HOUSE OF DREAMS FROM that night there was a new element in Lydia's relation to him, an increased consideration, almost a deference, as if, for the first time, he had shown himself capable of commanding her respect. This change, which would have pleased him, doubtless, twenty years before, had only the effect now of adding to his depression, for he saw in it a tribute from his wife not to his higher, but to his lower nature. All his patient ideals, all his daily self-sacrifice, had not touched her as had that one instant's violence; and it occurred to him, with a growing recognition of the hopeless inconsistency of life, that if he had treated her with less delicacy, less generosity, if he had walked roughshod over her feminine scruples, instead of yielding to them, she might have entertained for him by this time quite a wholesome wifely regard. Then the mere possibility disgusted him, and he saw that to have compromised with her upon any lower plane would have been always morally repugnant to him. After all, the dominion of the brute was not what he was seeking. On the morning after his scene with Geoffrey, Alice came to him and begged for the minutest particulars of the quarrel. She wanted to know how it had begun? If Geoffrey had been really horrible? And if he had noticed the new bronze dragon she had bought for the hall? Upon his replying that he had not, she seemed disappointed, he thought, for a minute. "It's very fine," she said, "I bought it from what's-his-name, that famous man in Paris? If I ever have money enough I shall get the match to it, so there'll be the pair of them." Then seeing his look of astonishment, she hastened to correct the impression she had made. "Of course, I mean that I'd like to have done it, if I had been going to live there." "It would take more than a bronze dragon, or a pair of them, to make that house a home, dear," was his only comment. "But it's very handsome," she remarked after a moment, "everything in it is so much more costly than the things here." He made no rejoinder, and she added with vehemence, "but of course, I wouldn't go back, not even if it were a palace!" Then a charming merriment seized her, and she clung to him and kissed him and called him a dozen silly pet names. "No, she won't ever, ever play in that horrid old house again," she sang gaily between her kisses. For several days these exuberant spirits lasted, and then he prepared himself to meet the inevitable reaction. Her looks drooped, she lost her colour and grew obviously bored, and in the end she complained openly that there was nothing for her to do in the house, and that she couldn't go out of doors because she hadn't the proper clothes. To his reminder that it was she herself who had prevented his sending for her trunks, she replied that there was plenty of time, and that "besides nobody could pack them unless she was there to overlook it." "If anybody is obliged to go back there, for heaven's sake, let me be the one," he urged desperately at last. "To knock out more of poor Geoffrey's teeth? Oh, you naughty, naughty, papa!"--she cried, lifting a reproving finger. The next instant her laughter bubbled out at the delightful picture of "papa in the midst of her Paris gowns. I'd be so afraid you'd roll up Geoffrey in my precious laces," she protested, half seriously. For a week nothing more was said on the subject, and then she remarked irritably that her room was cold and she hadn't her quilted silk dressing-gown. When he asked her to ride with him, she declared that her old habit was too tight for her and her new one was at the other house. When he suggested driving instead, she replied that she hadn't her fur coat and she would certainly freeze without it. At last one bright, cold day, when he came up to luncheon, Lydia told him, with her strange calmness, that Alice had gone back to her husband. "I knew it would come in time," she said, and he bowed again before her unerring prescience. "Do you mean to tell me that she's willing to put up with Heath for the sake of a little extra luxury?" he demanded. "Oh, that's a part of it. She likes the newness of the house and the air of costliness about it, but most of all, she feels that she could never settle down to our monotonous way of living. Geoffrey promised her to take her to Europe again in the summer and I think she began to grow restless when it appeared that she might have to give it up." "But one of us could have taken her to Europe, if that's all she wanted. You could have gone with her." "Not in Alice's way, we could never have afforded it. She told me this when I offered to go with her if she would definitely separate from Geoffrey." "Then you didn't want her to go back? You didn't encourage it?" "I encouraged her to behave with decency--and this isn't decent." "No, I admit that. It decidedly is not." "Yet we have no assurance that she won't fly in upon us at dinner to-night, with all the servants about," she reflected mournfully. His awful levity broke out as it always did whenever she invoked the sanctity of convention. "In that case hadn't we better serve ourselves until she has made up her mind?" he inquired. But the submission of the martyr is proof even against caustic wit, and she looked at him, after a minute, with a smile of infinite patience. "For myself I can bear anything," she answered, "but I feel that for her it is shocking to make things so public." It was shocking. In spite of his flippancy he felt the vulgarity of it as acutely as she felt it; and he was conscious of something closely akin to relief, when Richard Ordway dropped in after dinner to tell them that Alice and Geoffrey had come to a complete reconciliation. "But will it last?" Lydia questioned, in an uneasy voice. "We'll hope so at all events," replied the old man, "they appeared certainly to be very friendly when I came away. Whatever happens it is surely to Alice's interest that she should be kept out of a public scandal." They were still discussing the matter, after Richard had gone, when the girl herself ran in, bringing Geoffrey, and fairly brilliant with life and spirits. "We've decided to forget everything disagreeable," she said, "we're going to begin over again and be nice and jolly, and if I don't spend too much money, we are going to Egypt in April." "If you're happy, then I'm satisfied," returned Ordway, and he held out his hand to Geoffrey by way of apology. To do the young man justice, he appeared to cherish no resentment for the blow, though he still bore a scar on his upper lip. He looked heavy and handsome, and rather amiable in a dull way, and the one discovery Daniel made about him was that he entertained a profound admiration for Richard Ordway. Still, when everybody in Botetourt shared his sentiment, this was hardly deserving of notice. As the weeks went on it looked as if peace were really restored, and even Lydia's face lost its anxious foreboding, when she gazed on the assembled family at Thanksgiving. Dick had grown into a quiet, distinguished looking young fellow, more than ever like his Uncle Richard, and it was touching to watch his devotion to his delicate mother. At least Lydia possessed one enduring consolation in life, Ordway reflected, with a rush of gratitude. In the afternoon Alice drove with him out into the country, along the pale brown November roads, and he felt, while he sat beside her, with her hand clasped tightly in his under the fur robe, that she was again the daughter of his dreams, who had flown to his arms in the terrible day of his homecoming. She was in one of her rare moods of seriousness, and when she lifted her eyes to his, it seemed to him that they held a new softness, a deeper blueness. Something in her face brought back to him the memory of Emily as she had looked down at him when he knelt before her; and again he was aware of some subtle link which bound together in his thoughts the two women whom he loved. "There's something I've wanted to tell you, papa, first of all," said Alice, pressing his hand, "I want you to know it before anybody else because you've always loved me and stood by me from the beginning. Now shut your eyes while I tell you, and hold fast to my hand. O papa, there's to be really and truly a baby in the spring, and even if it's a boy--I hope it will be a girl--you'll promise to love it and be good to it, won't you?" "Love your child? Alice, my darling!" he cried, and his voice broke. She raised her hand to his cheek with a little caressing gesture, which had always been characteristic of her, and as he opened his eyes upon her, her beauty shone, he thought, with a light that blinded him. "I hope it will be a little girl with blue eyes and fair hair like mamma's," she resumed softly. "It will be better than playing with dolls, won't it? I always loved dolls, you know. Do you remember the big wax doll you gave me when I was six years old, and how her voice got out of order and she used to crow instead of talking? Well, I kept her for years and years, and even after I was a big girl, and wore long dresses, and did up my hair, I used to take her out sometimes and put on her clothes. Only I was ashamed of it and used to lock the door so no one could see me. But this little girl will be real, you know, and that's ever so much more fun, isn't it? And you shall help teach her to walk, and to ride when she's big enough; and I'll dress her in the loveliest dresses, with French embroidered ruffles, and a little blue bonnet with bunches of feathers, like one in Paris. Only she can't wear that until she's five years old, can she?" "And now you will have something to think of, Alice, you will be bored no longer?" "I shall enjoy buying the little things so much, but it's too soon yet to plan about them. Papa, do you think Geoffrey will fuss about money when he hears this?" "I hope not, dear, but you must be careful. The baby won't need to be extravagant, just at first." "But she must have pretty clothes, of course, papa. It wouldn't be kind to the little thing to make her look ugly, would it?" "Are simple things always ugly?" "Oh, but they cost just as much if they're fine--and I had beautiful clothes when I came. Mamma has told me about them." She ran on breathlessly, radiant with the promise of motherhood, dwelling in fancy upon the small blond ideal her imagination had conjured into life. It was dark when they returned to town, and when Daniel entered his door, after leaving Alice in Henry Street, he found that the lamps were already lit in the library. As he passed up the staircase, he glanced into the room, and saw that Lydia and Dick were sitting together before the fire, the boy resting his head on her knees, while her fragile hand played caressingly with his hair. They did not look up at his footsteps, and his heart was so warm with happiness that even the picture of mother and son in the firelit room appeared dim beside it. When he opened his door he found a bright fire in his grate, and throwing off his coat, he sat down in an easy chair with his eyes on the glowing coals. The beneficent vision that he had brought home with him was reflected now in the red heart of the fire, and while he gazed on it, he told himself that the years of his loneliness, and his inner impoverishment, were ended forever. The path of age showed to him no longer as hard and destitute, but as a peaceful road along which he might travel hopefully with young feet to keep him company. With a longing, which no excess of the imagination could exhaust, he saw Alice's child as she had seen it in her maternal rapture--as something immortally young and fair and innocent. He thought of the moment so long ago, when they had first placed Alice in his arms, and it seemed to him that this unborn child was only a renewal of the one he had held that day--that he would reach out his arms to it with that same half human, half mystic passion. Even to-day he could almost feel the soft pressure of her little body, and he hardly knew whether it was the body of Alice or of her child. Then suddenly it seemed to him that the reality faded from his consciousness and the dream began, for while he sat there he heard the patter of the little feet across his floor, and felt the little hands creep softly over his lips and brow. Oh, the little hands that would bring healing and love in their touch! And he understood as he looked forward now into the dreaded future, that the age to which he was travelling was only an immortal youth. CHAPTER VI THE ULTIMATE CHOICE On Christmas Eve a heavy snowstorm set in, and as there was but little work in the office that day, he took a long walk into the country before going home to luncheon. By the time he came back to town the ground was already covered with snow, which was blown by a high wind into deep drifts against the houses. Through the thick, whirling flakes the poplars stood out like white ghosts of trees, each branch outlined in a delicate tracery, and where the skeletons of last spring's flowers still clung to the boughs, the tiny cups were crowned with clusters of frozen blossoms. As he passed Richard's house, the sight of his aunt's fair head at the window arrested his steps, and going inside, he found her filling yarn stockings for twenty poor children, to whose homes she went every Christmas Eve. The toys and the bright tarleton bags of candy scattered about the room gave it an air that was almost festive; and for a few minutes he stayed with her, watching the glow of pleasure in her small, pale face, while he helped stuff the toes of the yarn stockings with oranges and nuts. As he stood there, surrounded by the little gifts, he felt, for the first time since his childhood, the full significance of Christmas--of its cheer, its mirth and its solemnity. "I am to have a tree at twelve o'clock to-morrow. Will you come?" she asked wistfully, and he promised, with a smile, before he left her and went out again into the storm. In the street a crowd of boys were snowballing one another, and as he passed a ball struck him, knocking his hat into a drift. Turning in pretended fury, he plunged into the thick of the battle, and when he retreated some minutes afterward, he was powdered from head to foot with dry, feathery flakes. When he reached home, he discovered, with dismay, that he left patches of white on the carpet from the door to the upper landing. After he had entered his room he shook the snow from his clothes, and then looking at his watch, saw to his surprise, that luncheon must have been over for at least an hour. In a little while, he told himself, he would go downstairs and demand something to eat from the old butler; but the hearth was so bright and warm that after sinking into his accustomed chair, he found that it was almost impossible to make the effort to go out. In a moment a delicious drowsiness crept over him, and he fell presently asleep, while the cigar he had lighted burned slowly out in his hand. The sound of the opening and closing door brought him suddenly awake with a throb of pain. The gray light from the windows, beyond which the snow fell heavily, was obscured by the figure of Lydia, who seemed to spring upon him out of some dim mist of sleep. At first he saw only her pale face and white outstretched hands; then as she came rapidly forward and dropped on her knees in the firelight, he saw that her face was convulsed with weeping and her eyes red and swollen. For the first time in his life, it occurred to him with a curious quickness of perception, he looked upon the naked soul of the woman, with her last rag of conventionality stripped from her. In the shock of the surprise, he half rose to his feet, and then sank back helplessly, putting out his hand as if he would push her away from him. "Lydia," he said, "don't keep me waiting. Tell me at once." She tried to speak, and he heard her voice strangle like a live thing in her throat. "Is Alice dead?" he asked quietly, "or is Dick?" At this she appeared to regain control of herself and he watched the mask of her impenetrable reserve close over her features. "It is not that--nobody is dead--it is worse," she answered in a subdued and lifeless voice. "Worse?" The word stunned him, and he stared at her blankly, like a person whose mind has suddenly given way. "Alice is in my room," she went on, when he had paused, "I left her with Uncle Richard while I came here to look for you. We did not hear you come in. I thought you were still out." Her manner, even more than her words, impressed him only as an evasion of the thing in her mind, and seizing her hands almost roughly, he drew her forward until he could look closely into her face. "For God's sake--speak!" he commanded. But with his grasp all animation appeared to go out of her, and she fell across his knees in an immovable weight, while her eyes still gazed up at him. "If you can't tell me I must go to Uncle Richard," he added. As he attempted to rise she put out her hands to restrain him, and in the midst of his suspense, he was amazed at the strength there was in a creature so slight and fragile. "Uncle Richard has just come to tell us," she said in a whisper. "A lawyer--a detective--somebody. I can't remember who it is--has come down from New York to see Geoffrey about a check signed in his name, which was returned to the bank there. At the first glance it was seen to be--to be not in his writing. When it was sent to him, after the bank had declined to honour it, he declared it to be a forgery and sent it back to them at once. It is now in their hands----" "To whom was it drawn?" he asked so quietly that his voice sounded in his own ears like the voice of a stranger. "To Damon & Hanska, furriers in Fifth Avenue, and it was sent in payment for a sable coat which Alice had bought. They had already begun a suit, it seems, to recover the money." As she finished he rose slowly to his feet, and stood staring at the snow which fell heavily beyond the window. The twisted bough of a poplar tree just outside was rocking back and forth with a creaking noise, and presently, as his ears grew accustomed to the silence in the room, he heard the loud monotonous ticking of the clock on the mantel, which seemed to grow more distinct with each minute that the hands travelled. Lydia had slipped from his grasp as he rose, and lay now with her face buried in the cushions of the chair. It was a terrible thing for Lydia, he thought suddenly, as he looked down on her. "And Geoffrey Heath?" he asked, repeating the question in a raised voice when she did not answer. "Oh, what can we expect of him? What can we expect?" she demanded, with a shudder. "Alice is sure that he hates her, that he would seize any excuse to divorce her, to outrage her publicly. He will do nothing--nothing--nothing," she said, rising to her feet, "he has returned the check to the bank, and denied openly all knowledge of it. After some violent words with Alice in the lawyer's presence, he declared to them both that he did not care in the least what steps were taken--that he had washed his hands of her and of the whole affair. She is half insane with terror of a prosecution, and can hardly speak coherently. Oh, I wonder why one ever has children?" she exclaimed in anguish. With her last words it seemed to him that the barrier which had separated him from Lydia had crumbled suddenly to ruins between them. The space which love could not bridge was spanned by pity; and crossing to where she stood, he put his arms about her, while she bowed her head on his breast and wept. "Poor girl! poor girl!" he said softly, and then putting her from him, he went out of the room and closed the door gently upon her grief. From across the hall the sound of smothered sobs came to him, and entering Lydia's room, he saw Alice clinging hysterically to Richard's arm. As she looked round at his footsteps, her face showed so old and haggard between the splendid masses of her hair, that he could hardly believe for a minute that this half distraught creature was really his daughter. For an instant he was held dumb by the horror of it; then the silence was broken by the cry with which Alice threw herself into his arms. Once before she had rushed to his breast with the same word on her lips, he remembered. "O papa, you will help me! You must help me!" she cried. "Oh, make them tell you all so that you may help me!" "They have told me--your mother has told me, Alice," he answered, seeking in vain to release himself from the frantic grasp of her arms. "Then you will make Geoffrey understand," she returned, almost angrily. "You will make Geoffrey understand that it was not my fault--that I couldn't help it." Richard Ordway turned from the window, through which he had been looking, and taking her fingers, which were closed in a vice-like pressure about Daniel's arm, pried them forcibly apart. "Look at me, Alice," he said sternly, "and answer the question that I asked you. What did you say to Geoffrey when he spoke to you in the lawyer's presence? Did you deny, then, that you had signed the check? Don't struggle so, I must hear what you told them." But she only writhed in his hold, straining her arms and her neck in the direction of Daniel. "He was very cruel," she replied at last, "they were both very cruel. I don't know what I said, I was so frightened. Geoffrey hurt me terribly--he hurt me terribly," she whimpered like a child, and as she turned toward Daniel, he saw her bloodless gum, from which her lower lip had quivered and dropped. "I must know what you told them, Alice," repeated the old man in an unmoved tone. "I can do nothing to help you, if you will not speak the truth." Even when her body struggled in his grasp, no muscle altered in the stern face he bent above her. "Let me go," she pleaded passionately, "I want to go to papa! I want papa!" At her cry Daniel made a single step forward, and then fell back because the situation seemed at the moment in the command of Richard. Again he felt the curious respect, the confidence, with which his uncle inspired him in critical moments. "I shall let you go when you have told me the truth," said Richard calmly. She grew instantly quiet, and for a minute she appeared to hang a dead weight on his arm. Then her voice came with the whimpering, childlike sound. "I told them that I had never touched it--that I had asked papa for the money, and he had given it to me," she said. "I thought so," returned Richard grimly, and he released his hold so quickly that she fell in a limp heap at his feet. "I wanted it from her own lips, though Mr. Cummins had already told me," he added, as he looked at his nephew. For a moment Daniel stood there in silence, with his eyes on the gold-topped bottles on Lydia's dressing table. He had heard Alice's fall, but he did not stoop to lift her; he had heard Richard's words, but he did not reply to them. In one instant a violent revulsion--a furious anger against Alice swept over him, and the next he felt suddenly, as in his dream, the little hands pass over his brow and lips. "She is right about it, Uncle Richard," he said, "I gave her the check." At the words Richard turned quickly away, but with a shriek of joy, Alice raised herself to her knees, and looked up with shining eyes. "I told you papa would know! I told you papa would help me!" she cried triumphantly to the old man. Without looking at her, Richard turned his glance again to his nephew's face, and something that was almost a tremor seemed to pass through his voice. "Daniel," he asked, "what is the use?" "She has told you the truth," repeated Daniel steadily, "I gave her the check." "You are ready to swear to this?" "If it is necessary, I am." Alice had dragged herself slowly forward, still on her knees, but as she came nearer him, Daniel retreated instinctively step by step until he had put the table between them. "It is better for me to go away, I suppose, at once?" he inquired of Richard. The gesture with which Richard responded was almost impatient. "If you are determined--it will be necessary for a time at least," he replied. "There's no doubt, I hope, that the case will be hushed up, but already there has been something of a scandal. I have made good the loss to the bank, but Geoffrey has been very difficult to bring to reason. He wanted a divorce and he wanted revenge in a vulgar way upon Alice." "But she is safe now?" asked Daniel, and the coldness in his tone came as a surprise to him when he spoke. "Yes, she is safe," returned Richard, "and you, also, I trust. There is little danger, I think, under the circumstances, of a prosecution. If at any time," he added, with a shaking voice, "before your return you should wish the control of your property, I will turn it over to you at once." "Thank you," said Daniel quietly, and then with an embarrassed movement, he held out his hand. "I shall go, I think, on the four o'clock train," he continued, "is that what you would advise?" "It is better, I feel, to go immediately. I have an appointment with the lawyer for the bank at a quarter of five." He put out his hand again for his nephew's. "Daniel, you are a good man," he added, as he turned away. Not until a moment later, when he was in the hall, did Ordway remember that he had left Alice crouched on the floor, and coming back he lifted her into his arms. "It is all right, Alice, don't cry," he said, as he kissed her. Then turning from her, with a strange dullness of sensation, he crossed the hall and entered his room, where he found Lydia still lying with her face hidden in the cushions of the chair. At his step she looked up and put out her hand, with an imploring gesture. "Daniel!" she called softly, "Daniel!" Before replying to her he went to his bureau and hurriedly packed some clothes into a bag. Then, with the satchel still in his hand, he came over and stopped beside her. "I can't wait to explain, Lydia; Uncle Richard will tell you," he said. "You are going away? Do you mean you are going away?" she questioned. "To-morrow you will understand," he answered, "that it is better so." For a moment uncertainty clouded her face; then she raised herself and leaned toward him. "But Alice? Does Alice go with you?" she asked. "No, Alice is safe. Go to her." "You will come back again? It is not forever?" He shook his head smiling. "Perhaps," he answered. She still gazed steadily up at him, and he saw presently a look come into her face like the look with which she had heard of the blow he had struck Geoffrey Heath. "Daniel, you are a brave man," she said, and sobbed as she kissed him. Following him to the threshold, she listened, with her face pressed against the lintel, while she heard him go down the staircase and close the front door softly behind him. CHAPTER VII FLIGHT NOT until the train had started and the conductor had asked for his ticket, did Ordway realize that he was on his way to Tappahannock. At the discovery he was conscious of no surprise--scarcely of any interest--it seemed to matter to him so little in which direction he went. A curious numbness of sensation had paralysed both his memory and his perceptions, and he hardly knew whether he was glad or sorry, warm or cold. In the same way he wondered why he felt no regret at leaving Botetourt forever--no clinging tenderness for his home, for Lydia, for Alice. If his children had been strangers to him he could not have thought of his parting from them with a greater absence of feeling. Was it possible at last that he was to be delivered from the emotional intensity, the power of vicarious suffering, which had made him one of the world's failures? He recalled indifferently Alice's convulsed features, and the pathetic quiver of her lip, which had drooped like a child's that is hurt. These things left him utterly unmoved when he remembered them, and he even found himself asking the next instant, with a vague curiosity, if the bald-headed man in the seat in front of him was going home to spend Christmas with his daughter? "But what has this bald-headed man to do with Alice or with me?" he demanded in perplexity, "and why is it that I can think of him now with the same interest with which I think of my own child? I am going away forever and I shall never see them again," he continued, with emphasis, as if to convince himself of some fact which he had but half understood. "Yes, I shall never see them again, and Alice will be quite happy without me, and Alice's child will grow up probably without hearing my name. Yet I did it for Alice. No, I did not do it for Alice, or for Alice's child," he corrected quickly, with a piercing flash of insight. "It was for something larger, stronger--something as inevitable as the law. I could not help it, it was for myself," he added, after a minute. And it seemed to him that with this inward revelation the outer covering of things was stripped suddenly from before his eyes. As beneath his sacrifice he recognised the inexorable law, so beneath Alice's beauty he beheld the skeleton which her radiant flesh clothed with life, and beneath Lydia's mask of conventionality her little naked soul, too delicate and shivering to stand alone. It was as if all pretence, all deceit, all illusions, had shrivelled now in the hard dry, atmosphere through which he looked. "Yes, I am indifferent to them all and to everything," he concluded; "Lydia, and Dick and even Alice are no closer to me than is the bald-headed man on the front seat. Nobody is closer to another when it comes to that, for each one of us is alone in an illimitable space." The swinging lights of the train were reflected in the falling snow outside, like orbed blue flames against a curtain of white. Through the crack under the window a little cold draught entered, blowing the cinders from the sill into his face. It was the common day coach of a local train, and the passengers were, for the most part, young men or young women clerks, who were hastening back to their country homes for Christmas. Once when they reached a station several girls got off, with their arms filled with packages, and pushed their way through the heavy drifts to a sleigh waiting under the dim oil lamp outside. For a minute he followed them idly in his imagination, seeing the merry party ploughing over the old country roads to the warm farm house, where a bright log fire and a Christmas tree were prepared for them. The window panes were frosted over now, and when the train started on its slow journey he could see only the orbed blue flames dancing in the night against the whirling snowflakes. It was nine o'clock when they pulled into Tappahannock and when he came out upon the platform he found that the storm had ceased, though the ground lay white and hard beneath the scattered street lamps. Straight ahead of him, as he walked up the long hill from the station, he heard the ring of other footsteps on the frozen snow. The lights were still burning in the little shops, and through the uncurtained windows he could see the variegated display of Christmas decorations. Here and there a woman, with her head wrapped in a shawl, was peering eagerly at a collection of toys or a wreath of evergreens, but, for the rest, the shops appeared singularly empty even for so late an hour on Christmas Eve. In the absorption of his thoughts, he scarcely noticed this, and he was conscious of no particular surprise when, as he reached the familiar warehouse, he saw Baxter's enormous figure loom darkly under the flickering light above the sidewalk. Behind him the vacant building yawned like a sepulchral cavern, the dim archway hung with a glistening fringe of icicles. "Is that you, Baxter?" he asked, and stretched out his hand with a mechanical movement. "Why, bless my soul, Smith!" exclaimed Baxter, "who'd ever have believed it!" "I've just got off the train," returned Ordway, feeling vaguely that some explanation of his presence was needed, "and I'm trying to find a place where I can keep warm until I take the one for the West at midnight. It didn't occur to me that you would be in your office. I was going to Mrs. Buzzy's." "You'd better come along with me, for I don't believe you'll find a living soul at Mag Buzzy's--not even a kid," replied Baxter, "her husband is one of Jasper Trend's overseers, you know, and they're most likely down at the cotton mills." "At the cotton mills? Why, what's the matter there?" "You haven't heard then? I thought it was in all the papers. There's been a big strike on for a week--Jasper lowered wages the first of the month--and every operative has turned out and demanded more pay and shorter hours. The old man's hoppin', of course, and the funny part is, Smith, that he lays every bit of the trouble at your door. He says that you started it all by raisin' the ideas of the operatives." "But it's a pretty serious business for them, Baxter. How are they going to live through this weather?" "They ain't livin', they're starvin', though I believe the union is comin' to their help sooner or later. But what's that in such a blood-curdlin' spell as this?" A sudden noise, like that of a great shout, rising and falling in the bitter air, came to them from below the slope of the hill, and catching Ordway's arm, Baxter drew him closer under the street lamp. "They're hootin' at the guards Trend has put around the mills," he said, while his words floated like vapour out of his mouth into the cold, "he's got policemen stalkin' up an' down before his house, too." "You mean he actually fears violence?" "Oh, well, when trouble is once started, you know, it is apt to go at a gallop. A policeman got his skull knocked in yesterday, and one of the strikers had his leg broken this afternoon. Somebody has been stonin' Jasper's windows in the back, but they can't tell whether it's a striker or a scamp of a boy. The truth is, Smith," he added, "that Jasper ought to have sold the mills when he had an offer of a hundred thousand six months ago. But he wouldn't do it because he said he made more than the interest on that five times over. I reckon he's sorry enough now he didn't catch at it." For a moment Ordway looked in silence under the hanging icicles into the cavernous mouth of the warehouse, while he listened to the smothered sounds, like the angry growls of a great beast, which came toward them from the foot of the hill. Into the confusion of his thoughts there broke suddenly the meaning of Richard Ordway's parting words. "Baxter," he said quietly, "I'll give Jasper Trend a hundred thousand dollars for his mills to-night." Baxter let go the lamp post against which he was leaning, and fell back a step, rubbing his stiffened hands on his big shaggy overcoat. "You, Smith? Why, what in thunder do you want with 'em? It's my belief that they will be afire before midnight. Do you hear that noise? Well, there ain't men enough in Tappahannock to put those mills out when they are once caught." Ordway turned his face from the warehouse to his companion, and it seemed to Baxter that his eyes shone like blue lights out of the darkness. "But they won't burn after they're mine, Baxter," he answered. "I'll buy the mills and I'll settle this strike before I leave Tappahannock at midnight." "You mean you'll go away even after you've bought 'em?" "I mean I've got to go--to go always from place to place--but I'll leave you here in my stead." He laughed shortly, but there was no merriment in the sound. "I'll run the mills on the cooperative plan, Baxter, and I'll leave you in charge of them--you and Banks." Then he caught Baxter's arm with both hands, and turned his body forcibly in the direction of the church at the top of the hill. "While we are talking those people down there are freezing," he said. "An' so am I, if you don't mind my mentionin' it," observed Baxter meekly. "Then let's go to Trend's. There's not a minute to lose, if we are to save the mills. Are you coming, Baxter?" "Oh, I'm comin'," replied Baxter, waddling in his shaggy coat like a great black bear, "but I'd like to git up my wind first," he added, puffing clouds of steam as he ascended the hill. "There's no time for that," returned Ordway, sharply, as he dragged him along. When they reached Jasper Trend's gate, a policeman, who strolled, beating his hands together, on the board walk, came up and stopped them as they were about to enter. Then recognising Baxter, he apologised and moved on. A moment later the sound of their footsteps on the porch brought the head of Banks to the crack of the door. "Who are you? and what is your business?" he demanded. "Banks!" said Ordway in a whisper, and at his voice the bar, which Banks had slipped from the door, fell with a loud crash from his hands. "Good Lord, it's really you, Smith!" he cried in a delirium of joy. "Harry, be careful or you'll wake the baby," called a voice softly from the top of the staircase. "Darn the baby!" growled Banks, lowering his tone obediently. "The next thing she'll be asking me to put out the mills because the light wakes the baby. When did you come, Smith? And what on God's earth are you doing here?" "I came to stop the strike," responded Ordway, smiling. "I've brought an offer to Mr. Trend, I must speak to him at once." "He's in the dining-room, but if you've come from the strikers it's no use. His back's up." "Well, it ain't from the strikers," interrupted Baxter, pushing his way in the direction of the dining-room. "It's from a chap we won't name, but he wants to buy the mills, not to settle the strike with Jasper." "Then he's a darn fool," remarked Jasper Trend from the threshold, "for if I don't get the ringleaders arrested befo' mornin' thar won't be a brick left standin' in the buildings." "The chap I mean ain't worryin' about that," said Baxter, "provided you'll sign the agreement in the next ten minutes. He's ready to give you a hundred thousand for the mills, strikers an' all." "Sign the agreement? I ain't got any agreement," protested Jasper, suspecting a trap, "and how do I know that the strike ain't over befo' you're making the offer?" "Well, if you'll just step over to the window, and stick your head out, you won't have much uncertainty about that, I reckon," returned Baxter. Crossing to the window, Ordway threw it open, waiting with his hand on the sash, while the threatening shouts from below the hill floated into the room. "Papa, the baby can't sleep for the noise those men make down at the mills," called a peremptory voice from the landing above. "I told you so!" groaned Banks, closing the window. "I ain't got any agreement," repeated Jasper, in helpless irritation, as he sank back into his chair. "Oh, I reckon Smith can draw up one for you as well as a lawyer," said Baxter, while Ordway, sitting down at a little fancy desk of Milly's in one corner, wrote out the agreement of sale on a sheet of scented note paper. When he held the pen out to Jasper, the old man looked up at him with blinking eyes. "Is it to hold good if the damned thing burns befo' mornin'?" he asked. "If it burns before morning--yes." With a sigh of relief Jasper wrote his name. "How do I know if I'm to get the money?" he inquired the next instant, moved by a new suspicion. "I shall telegraph instructions to a lawyer in Botetourt," replied Ordway, as he handed the pen to Baxter, "and you will receive an answer by twelve o'clock to-morrow. I want your signature, also, Banks," he continued, turning to the young man. "I've made two copies, you see, one of which I shall leave with Baxter." "Then you're going away?" inquired Banks, gloomily. Ordway nodded. "I am leaving on the midnight train," he answered. "So you're going West?" "Yes, I'm going West, and I've barely time to settle things at the mills before I start. God bless you, Banks. Good-bye." Without waiting for Baxter, who was struggling into his overcoat in the hall, he broke away from the detaining hold of Banks, and opening the door, ran down the frozen walk, and out into the street, where the policeman called a "Merry Christmas!" to him as he hurried by. When he gained the top of the hill, and descended rapidly toward the broad level beyond, where the brick buildings of the cotton mills stood in the centre of a waste of snow, the shouts grew louder and more frequent, and the black mass on the frozen ground divided itself presently into individual atoms. A few bonfires had started on the outskirts of the crowd, and by their fitful light, which fell in jagged, reddish shadows on the snow, he could see the hard faces of the men, the sharpened ones of the women, and the pinched ones of little children, all sallow from close work in unhealthy atmospheres and wan from lack of nourishing and wholesome food. As he approached one of these fires, made from a burning barrel, a young woman, with a thin, blue face, and a baby wrapped in a ragged shawl on her breast, turned and spat fiercely in his direction. "This ain't no place for swells!" she screamed, and began laughing shrilly in a half-crazed voice. In the excitement no one noticed her, and her demented shrieks followed him while he made his way cautiously along the outskirts of the strikers, until he came to the main building, before which a few men with muskets had cleared a hollow space. They looked cowed and sullen, he saw, for their sympathies were evidently with the operatives, and he realised that the first organised attack would force them from their dangerous position. Approaching one of the guards, whom he remembered, Ordway touched him upon the arm and asked to be permitted to mount to the topmost step. "I have a message to deliver to the men," he said. The guard looked up with a start of fear, and then, recognising him, exclaimed in a hoarse whisper, "My God, boys, it's 'Ten Commandment Smith' or it's his ghost!" "Let me get through to the steps," said Ordway, "I must speak to them." "Well, you may speak all you want to, but I doubt if they'd listen to an angel from heaven if he were to talk to them about Jasper Trend. They are preparing a rush on the doors now, and when they make it they'll go through." Passing him in silence, Ordway mounted the steps, and stood with his back against the doors of the main building, in which, when he had last entered it, the great looms had been at work. Before him the dark mass heaved back and forth, and farther away, amid the bonfires in the waste of frozen snow, he could hear the shrill, mocking laughter of the half-crazed woman. "We won't hear any talk," cried a spokesman in the front ranks of the crowd. "It's too late to haggle now. We'll have nothin' from Jasper Trend unless he gives us what we ask." "And if he says he'll give it who will believe him?" jeered a woman, farther back, holding a crying child above her head. "He killed the father and he's starvin' the children." "No--no, we'll have no damned words. We'll burn out the scabs!" shouted a man, lifting a torch he had just lit at a bonfire. As the torch rose in a splendid blaze, it lighted up the front of the building, and cast a yellow flame upon Ordway's face. "I have nothing to do with Jasper Trend!" he called out, straightening himself to his full height. "He has no part in the mills from to-night! I have bought them from him!" With the light on his face, he stood there an instant before them, while the shouts changed in the first shock of recognition from anger to surprise. The minute afterward the crowd was rocked by a single gigantic emotion, and it hurled itself forward, bearing down the guards in its efforts to reach the steps. As it swayed back and forth its individual members--men, women and children--appeared to float like straws on some cosmic undercurrent of feeling. "From to-night the mills belong to me!" he cried in a voice which rang over the frozen ground to where the insane woman was laughing beside a bonfire. "Your grievances after to-night are not against Jasper Trend, but against me. You shall have fair pay, fair hours and clean rooms, I promise you----" He went on still, but his words were drowned in the oncoming rush of the crowd, which rolled forward like great waters, surrounding him, overwhelming him, sweeping him off his feet, and bearing him out again upon its bosom. The cries so lately growls of anger had changed suddenly, and above all the din and rush he heard rising always the name which he had made honoured and beloved in Tappahannock. It was the one great moment of his life, he knew, when on the tremendous swell of feeling, he was borne like a straw up the hillside and back into the main street of Tappahannock. An hour later, bruised, aching and half stunned, he entered the station and telegraphed twice to Richard Ordway before he went out upon the platform to take the train. He had left his instructions with Baxter, from whom he had just parted, and now, as he walked up and down in the icy darkness, broken by the shivering lights of the station, it seemed to him that he was like a man, who having been condemned to death, stands looking back a little wistfully at life from the edge of the grave. He had had his great moment, and ahead of him there was nothing. A freight train passed with a grating noise, a station hand, holding a lantern ran hurriedly along the track, a whistle blew, and then again there was stillness. His eyes were wearily following the track, when he felt a touch on his arm, and turning quickly, saw Banks, in a fur-lined overcoat, looking up at him with an embarrassed air. "Smith," he said, strangling a cough, "I've seen Baxter, and neither he nor I like your going West this way all by yourself and half sick. If you don't mind, I've arranged to take a little holiday and come along. To tell the truth, it's just exactly the chance I've been looking for. I haven't been away from Milly twenty-four hours since I married her, and a change does anybody good." "No, you can't come, Banks, I don't want you. I'd rather be alone," replied Ordway, almost indignantly. "But you ain't well," insisted Banks stubbornly. "We don't like the looks of you, Baxter and I." "Well, you can't come, that's all," retorted Ordway, as the red eyes of the engine pierced the darkness. "There, go home, Banks," he added, as he held out his hand, "I'm much obliged to you. You're a first-rate chap. Good-bye." "Then good-bye," returned Banks hastily turning away. A minute afterward, as Ordway swung himself on the train, he heard the bells of a church, ringing cheerfully in the frosty air, and remembered, with a start, that it was Christmas morning. CHAPTER VIII THE END OF THE ROAD In the morning, after a short sleep on the hard plush seat, he awoke with a shooting pain in his head. When the drowsiness of exhaustion had overcome him, he remembered, he had been idly counting the dazzling electric lights of a town through which they were passing. By the time he had reached "twenty-one" he had dropped off into unconsciousness, though it seemed to him that a second self within him, wholly awake, had gone on through the night counting without pause, "twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five--" Still in his brain the numbers went on, and still the great globular lights flashed past his eyes. Struggling awake in the gray dawn, he lay without changing his position, until the mist gave place slowly to the broad daylight. Then he found that they were approaching another town, which appeared from a distant view to resemble a single gigantic factory, composed chiefly of a wilderness of chimneys. When he looked at his watch, he saw that it was eight o'clock; and the conductor passing through the coach at the instant, informed the passengers generally that they must change cars for the West. The name of the town Ordway failed to catch, but it made so little difference to him that he followed the crowd mechanically, without inquiring where it would lead him. The pain in his head had extended now to his chest and shoulders, and presently it passed into his lower limbs, with a racking ache that seemed to take from him the control of his muscles. Yet all the while he felt a curious drowsiness, which did not in the least resemble sleep, creeping over him like the stealthy effect of some powerful drug. After he had breathed the fresh air outside, he felt it to be impossible that he should return to the overheated car, and pushing his way through the crowded station, where men were rushing to the luncheon counter in one corner, he started along a broad street, which looked as if it led to an open square at the top of a long incline. On either side there were rows of narrow tenements, occupied evidently by the operatives in the imposing factories he had observed from the train. Here and there a holly wreath suspended from a cheap lace curtain, reminded him again that it was Christmas morning, and by some eccentricity of memory, he recalled vividly a Christmas before his mother's death, when he had crept on his bare feet, in the dawn, to peep into the bulging stocking before her fireplace. At the next corner a small eating house had hung out its list of Christmas dainties, and going inside he sat down at one of the small deserted tables and asked for a cup of coffee. When it was brought he swallowed it in the hope that it might drive away the heaviness in his head, but after a moment of relief the stupor attacked him again more oppressively than ever. He felt that even the growing agony in his forehead and shoulders could not keep him awake if he could only find a spot in which to lie down and rest. After he came out into the street again he felt stronger and better, and it occurred to him that his headache was due probably to the fact that he had eaten nothing since breakfast the day before. He remembered now that he had missed his luncheon because of his long walk into the country, and the recollection of this trivial incident seemed to make plain all the subsequent events. Everything that had been so confused a moment ago stood out quite clearly now. His emotions, which had been benumbed when he left Botetourt, revived immediately in the awakening of his memory; and he was seized with a terrible longing to hold Alice in his arms and to say to her that he forgave her and loved her still. It seemed to him impossible that he should have come away after a single indifferent kiss, without glancing back--and her face rose before him, not convulsed and haggard as he had last seen it, but glowing and transfigured, with her sparkling blue eyes and her lips that were too red and too full for beauty. Then, even while he looked at her with love, the old numbness crept back, and his feeling for her died utterly away. "No, I have ceased to care," he thought indifferently. "It does not matter to me whether I see her again or not. I must eat and lie down, nothing else is of consequence." He had reached the open space at the end of the long graded hill, and as he stopped to look about him he saw that a small hotel, frequented probably by travelling salesmen, stood directly across the square, which was now deep in snow. Following the pavement to the open door of the lobby, he went inside and asked for a room, after which he passed into the restaurant and drank a second cup of coffee. Then turning away from his untasted food, he went upstairs to the large, bare apartment, with a broken window pane, which they had assigned him, and throwing himself upon the unmade bed, fell heavily asleep. When he awoke the pain was easier, and feeling oppressed by the chill vacancy of the room, he went downstairs and out into the open square. Though it was a dull gray afternoon, the square was filled with children, dragging bright new sleds over the snow. One of them, a little brown-haired girl, was trundling her Christmas doll and as she passed him, she turned and smiled into his face with a joyful look. Something in her smile was vaguely familiar to him, and he remembered, after a minute, that Emily had looked at him like that on the morning when he had met her for the first time riding her old white horse up the hill in Tappahannock. "Yes, it was that look that made me love her," he thought dispassionately, as if he were reviewing some dimly remembered event in a former life, "and it is because I loved her that I was able to do these things. If I had not loved her, I should not have saved Milly Trend, nor gone back to Botetourt, nor sacrificed myself for Alice. Yes, all these have come from that," he added, "and will go back, I suppose, to that in the end." The little girl ran by again, still trundling her doll, and again he saw Emily in her red cape on the old horse. For several hours he sat there in the frozen square, hardly feeling the cold wind that blew over him. But when he rose presently to go into the hotel, he found that his limbs were stiff, and the burning pain had returned with violence to his head and chest. The snow in the square seemed to roll toward him as he walked, and it was with difficulty that he dragged himself step by step along the pavement to the entrance of the hotel. After he was in his room again he threw himself, still dressed, upon the bed, and fell back into the stupor out of which he had come. When he opened his eyes after an hour, he was hardly sure, for the first few minutes, whether he was awake or asleep. The large, bare room in which he had lost consciousness had given place, when he awoke, to his prison cell. The hard daylight came to him through the grated windows, and from a nail in the wall he saw his gray prison coat, with the red bars, won for good behaviour, upon the sleeve. Then while he looked at it, the red bars changed quickly to the double stripes of a second term, and the double stripes became three, and the three became four, until it seemed to him that he was striped from head to foot so closely that he knew that he must have gone on serving term after term since the beginning of the world. "No, no, that is not mine. I am wearing the red bars!" he cried out, and came back to himself with a convulsive shudder. As he looked about him the hallucination vanished, and he felt that he had come out of an eternity of unconsciousness into which he should presently sink back again. The day before appeared to belong to some other life that he had lived while he was still young, yet when he opened his eyes the same gray light filled the windows, the same draught blew through the broken pane, the same vague shadows crawled back and forth on the ceiling. The headache was gone now, but the room had grown very cold, and from time to time, when he coughed, long shivers ran through his limbs and his teeth chattered. He had thrown his overcoat across his chest as a coverlet, but the cold from which he suffered was an inward chill, which was scarcely increased by the wind that blew through the broken pane. There was no confusion in his mind now, but a wonderful lucidity, in which he saw clearly all that had happened to him last night in Tappahannock. "Yes, that was my good moment," he said "and after such a moment there is nothing, but death. If I can only die everything will be made entirely right and simple." As he uttered the words the weakness of self pity swept over him, and with a sudden sense of spiritual detachment, he was aware of a feeling of sympathy for that other "I," who seemed so closely related to him, and yet outside of himself. The real "I" was somewhere above amid the crawling shadows on the ceiling, but the other--the false one--lay on the bed under the overcoat; and he saw, when he looked down that, though he himself was young, the other "I" was old and haggard and unshaven. "So there are two of us, after all," he thought, "poor fellows, poor fellows." But the minute afterward the perception of his dual nature faded as rapidly as the hallucination of his prison cell. In its place there appeared the little girl, who had passed him, trundling her Christmas doll, in the square below. "I have seen her before--she is vaguely familiar," he thought, troubled because he could not recall the resemblance. From this he passed to the memory of Alice when she was still a child, and she came back to him, fresh and vivid, as on the day when she had run out to beg him to come in to listen to her music. The broken scales ran in his head again, but there was no love in his heart. His gaze dropped from the ceiling and turned toward the door, for in the midst of his visions, he had seen it open softly and Banks come into the room on tiptoe and stop at the foot of the bed, regarding him with his embarrassed and silly look "What in the devil, am I dreaming about Banks for?" he demanded aloud, with an impatient movement of his feet, as if he meant to kick the obtruding dream away from his bed. At the kick the dream stopped rolling its prominent pale eyes and spoke. "I hope you ain't sick, Smith," it said, and with the first words he knew that it was Banks in the familiar flesh and not the disembodied spirit. "No I'm not sick, but what are you doing here?" he asked. "Enjoying myself," replied Banks gloomily. "Well, I wish you'd chosen to enjoy yourself somewhere else." "I couldn't. If you don't mind I'd like to stuff the curtain into that window pane." "Oh, I don't mind. When did you get here?" "I came on the train with you." "On the train with me? Where did you get on? I didn't see you." "You didn't look," replied Banks, from the window, where he was stuffing the red velveteen curtain into the broken pane. "I was in the last seat in the rear coach." "So you followed me," said Ordway indignantly. "I told you not to. Why did you do it?" Banks came back and stood again at the foot of the bed, looking at him with his sincere and kindly smile. "Well, the truth is, I wanted an outing," he answered, "it's a good baby as babies go, but I get dog-tired of playing nurse." "You might have gone somewhere else. There are plenty of places." "I couldn't think of 'em, and, besides, this seems a nice town. The're a spanking fine lot of factories. But I hope you ain't sick Smith? What are you doing in bed?" "Oh, I've given up," replied Ordway gruffly. "Every man has a right to give up some time, hasn't he?" "I don't know about every man," returned Banks, stolidly, "but you haven't, Smith." "Well, I've done it anyway," retorted Ordway, and turned his face to the wall. As he lay there with closed eyes, he had an obscure impression that Banks--Banks, the simple; Banks, the impossible--was in some way operating the forces of destiny. First he heard the bell ring, then the door open and close, and a little later, the bleak room was suffused with a warm rosy light in which the vague shadows melted into a shimmering background. The crackling of the fire annoyed him because it suggested the possibility of physical comfort, and he no longer wanted to be comfortable. "Smith," said Banks, coming over to the bed and pulling off the overcoat, "I've got a good fire here and a chair. I wish you'd get up. Good Lord, your hands are as hot as a hornet's nest. When did you eat anything?" "I had breakfast in Botetourt," replied Ordway, as he rose from the bed and came over to the chair Banks had prepared. "I can't remember when it was, but it must have been since the creation of the world, I suppose." The fire grew suddenly black before him, "I'd rather lie down," he added, "my head is splitting and I can't see." "Oh, you'll see all right in a minute. Wait till I light this candle, so the electric light won't hurt your eyes. The boy's gone for a little supper, and as soon as you've swallowed a mouthful you'll begin to feel better." "But I'm not hungry. I won't eat," returned Ordway, with an irritable feeling that Banks was looming into a responsibility. Anything that pulled one back to life was what he wanted to escape, and even the affection of Banks might prove, he thought, tenaciously clinging. One resolution he had made in the beginning--he would not take up his life again for the sake of Banks. "Yes, you must, Smith," remonstrated the other, with an angelic patience which gave him, if possible, a more foolish aspect. "It's after six o'clock and you haven't had a bite since yesterday at eight. That's why your head's so light and you're in a raging fever." "It isn't that, Banks, it's because I've got to die," he answered. "If they don't hush things up with money, I may have to go back to prison." As he said the words he saw again the prison coat, with the double stripes of a second term, as in the instant of his hallucination. "I know," said Banks, softly, as he bent over to poke the fire. "There was a line or two about it in a New York paper. But they'll hush it up, and besides they said it was just suspicion." "You knew all the time and yet you wanted me to go back to Tappahannock?" "Oh, they don't read the papers much there, except the _Tappahannock Herald_, and it won't get into that. It was just a silly little slip anyway, and not two dozen people will be likely to know what it meant." "And you, Banks? What do you think?" he asked with a mild curiosity. Banks shook his head. "Why, what's the use in your asking?" he replied. "Of course, I know that you didn't do it, and if you had done it, it would have been just because the other man ought to have written his name and wouldn't," he concluded, unblushingly. For a moment Ordway looked at him in silence. "You're a good chap, Banks," he said at last in a dull voice. Again he felt, with an awakened irritation, that the absurd Banks was pulling him back to life. Was it impossible, after all, that a man should give up, as long as there remained a soul alive who believed in him? It wasn't only the love of women, then, that renewed courage. He had loved both Emily and Alice, and yet they were of less importance in his life at this hour than was Banks, whom he had merely endured. Yet he had thought the love of Emily a great thing and that of Banks a small one. His gaze went back to the flames, and he did not remove it when a knock came at the door, and supper was brought in and placed on a little table before the fire. "I ordered a bowl of soup for you, Smith," said Banks, crumbling the bread into it as he spoke, as if he were preparing a meal for a baby, "and a good stout piece of beefsteak for myself. Now drink this whiskey, won't you." "I'm not hungry," returned Ordway, pushing the glass away, after it had touched his lips. "I won't eat." Banks placed the bowl of soup on the fender, and then sat down with his eyes fastened on the tray. "I haven't had a bite myself since breakfast," he remarked, "and I'm pretty faintish, but I tell you, Smith, if it's the last word I speak, that I won't put my knife into that beefsteak until you've eaten your soup--no, not if I die right here of starvation." "Well, I'm sorry you're such a fool, for I've no intention of eating it. I left you my whiskey, you can take that." "I shouldn't dare to on an empty stomach. I get drunk too quick." For a few minutes he sat in silence regarding the supper with a hungry look; then selecting a thin slice of bread, he stuck it on the end of a fork, and kneeling upon the hearthrug, held it out to the glowing coals. As it turned gradually to a delicious crisp brown, the appetising smell of it floated to Ordway's nostrils. "I always had a particular taste for toast," remarked Banks as he buttered the slice and laid it on a hot plate on the fender. When he took up a second one, Ordway watched him with an attention of which he was almost unconscious, and he did not remove his gaze from the fire, until the last slice, brown and freshly buttered, was laid carefully upon the others. As he finished Banks threw down his fork, and rising to his feet, looked wistfully at the beefsteak, keeping hot before the cheerful flames. "It's kind of rare, just as I like it," he observed, "thick and juicy, with little brown streaks from the broiler, and a few mushrooms scattered gracefully on top. Tappahannock is a mighty poor place for a steak," he concluded resignedly, "it ain't often I have a chance at one, but I thought to-night being Christmas----" "Then, for God's sake, eat it!" thundered Ordway, while he made a dash for his soup. But an hour after he had taken it, his fever rose so high that Banks helped him into bed and rushed out in alarm for the doctor. CHAPTER IX THE LIGHT BEYOND Out of the obscurity of the next few weeks, he brought, with the memory of Banks hovering about his bed, the vague impression of a woman's step across his floor and a woman's touch on his brow and hands. When he returned to consciousness the woman's step and touch had vanished, but Banks was still nursing him with his infinite patience and his silly, good-humoured smile. The rest was a dream, he said to himself, resignedly, as he turned his face to the wall and slept. On a mild January morning, when he came downstairs for the first time, and went with Banks out into the open square in front of the hotel, he put almost timidly the question which had been throbbing in his brain for weeks. "Was there anybody else with me, Banks? I thought--I dreamed--I couldn't get rid of it----" "Who else could there have been?" asked Banks, and he stared straight before him, at the slender spire of the big, gray church in the next block. So the mystery would remain unsolved, Ordway understood, and he would go back to life cherishing either a divine memory or a phantasy of delirium. After a little while Banks went off to the chemists' with a prescription, and Ordway sat alone on a bench in the warm sunshine, which was rapidly melting the snow. It was Sunday morning, and presently the congregation streamed slowly past him on its way to the big gray church just beyond. A bright blue sky was overhead, the sound of bells was in the air, and under the melting snow he saw that the grass was still fresh and green. As he sat there in the wonderful Sabbath stillness, he felt, with a new sense of security, of reconciliation, that his life had again been taken out of his hands and adjusted without his knowledge. This time it had been Banks--Banks, the impossible--who had swayed his destiny, and lacking all other attributes, Banks had accomplished it through the simple power of the human touch. In the hour of his need it had been neither religion nor philosophy, but the outstretched hand, that had helped. Then his vision broadened and he saw that though the body of love is one, the members of it are infinite; and it was made plain to him at last, that the love of Emily, the love of Alice, and the love of Banks, were but different revelations of the same immortality. He had gone down into the deep places, and out of them he had brought this light, this message. As the people streamed past him to the big gray church, he felt that if they would only stop and listen, he could tell them in the open, not in walls, of the thing that they were seeking. Yet the time had not come, though in the hope of it he could sit there patiently under the blue sky, with the snow melting over the grass at his feet. At the end of an hour Banks returned, and stood over him with affectionate anxiety. "In a few days you'll be well enough to travel, Smith, and I'll take you back with me to Tappahannock." Ordway glanced up, smiling, and Banks saw in his face, so thin that the flesh seemed almost transparent, the rapt and luminous look with which he had stood over his Bible in the green field or in the little grove of pines. "You will go back to Tappahannock and Baxter will take you in until you grow strong and well, and then you can start your schools, or your library, and look after the mills instead of letting Baxter do it." "Yes," said Ordway, "yes," but he had hardly heard Banks's words, for his gaze was on the blue sky, against which the spire of the church rose like a pointing finger. His face shone as if from an inward flame, and this flame, burning clearly in his blue eyes, transfigured his look. Ah, Smith was always a dreamer, thought Banks, with the uncomprehending simplicity of a child. But Ordway was looking beyond Banks, beyond the church spire, beyond the blue sky. He saw himself, not as Banks pictured him, living quietly in Tappahannock, but still struggling, still fighting, still falling to rise and go on again. His message was not for Tappahannock alone, but for all places where there were men and women working and suffering and going into prison and coming out. He heard his voice speaking to them in the square of this town; then in many squares and in many towns---- "Come," said Banks softly, "the wind is changing. It is time to go in." With an effort Ordway withdrew his gaze from the church spire. Then leaning upon Banks's arm, he slowly crossed the square to the door of the hotel. But before going inside, he turned and stood for a moment looking back at the grass which showed fresh and green under the melting snow.