j THE PEACOCK LIBRARY 
 
 | A SAWDUST DOLL 
 
 BY 
 TUfBS. REGINALD DE KOVEN
 
 SM. 
 B!)f 
 WO fACIfIC At

 
 / f ^ 
 
 The Peacock Library* 
 f 
 
 A Sawdust Doll
 
 Sawdust Doll 
 
 Mrs. Reginald de Koven 
 
 CHICAGO 
 
 Stone and Kimball 
 MDCCCXCV
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1895 
 BY STONE * KIM HALL 
 
 FIRST EDITION 
 MARCH 23RD. 
 SECOND EDITION- 
 MARCH 27TH.
 
 Chapter I. 
 
 said General Riv- 
 ington to the old servant who 
 was standing behind his chair, "it is 
 chilly. You may light the fire." 
 
 It was nine o'clock, the habitual 
 breakfast hour in this house, in Wash- 
 ington Square, which had been Gen- 
 eral Rivington's home for sixty years. 
 The table at which he sat had never 
 been set for more than two, but had 
 always stood in lonely dignity in the 
 midst of the panelled dining-room 
 covered with the same spotless damask, 
 the same silver, old English and pol- 
 ished to an irreproachable whiteness, 
 which he remembered as a child. Those 
 long past years seemed to linger in the 
 room; seemed to speak to him some- 
 times in the familiar hum of the tea- 
 
 2046392
 
 2 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 kettle. He could see himself as a child 
 sitting silently opposite, his eyes dwell- 
 ing upon the gray head of his father 
 bent over his newspaper, or wandering 
 upward and beyond to the girlish face 
 of his mother, known only thus in her 
 portrait which had already taken its 
 place among the score of silent faces 
 which filled the walls ; but for many 
 years he had occupied his father's chair, 
 and for years the two portraits of his 
 father and mother had hung side by side 
 on the oak panelling above the fire- 
 place that of his father done late in 
 life with his gray hair, high aquiline 
 nose, his head stiffly borne in its stock, 
 his jurist's hand upon a law-book 
 beside the slender lady with her velvet 
 gown and sloping shoulders, her ring- 
 lets and her pearls, whose plaintive 
 grace and old time elegance spoke of an 
 earlier day. 
 
 Alexander Rivington had inherited 
 the aquiline sternness of his father's
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 3 
 
 features, but a different expression was 
 imparted to them by the mobile bril- 
 liancy of his dark eyes and the modish 
 arrangement of his gray hair which 
 curled upon the temples and was cut, 
 with a fantastic suggestion of old time 
 coquetry, straight across the brow. The 
 military bearing of his tall figure, still 
 slight and perfectly erect, completed 
 the impression of a distinguished man, 
 whom fortune had made an arbiter of 
 fashion and pride had made a soldier. 
 The hand which held the newspaper was 
 scrupulously kept, of a smooth, long- 
 fingered type, showing both taste and 
 distinction, but it was full veined and a 
 little tremulous. His brows were drawn 
 together over the eyes which scanned 
 the paper, he moved impatiently and 
 looked often at the door. 
 
 The dishes remained covered and the 
 tea-kettle boiled imperiously. General 
 Rivington gave a sigh of irritation and 
 laying down his paper began to turn
 
 4 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 over the letters which had been placed 
 beside his plate, 
 
 The door opened and a young woman 
 entered with a graceful, rapid step, 
 trailing her white garments behind her, 
 her small heels clicking on the wooden 
 floor. 
 
 " I am so sorry I am late," she said 
 as she took her seat. " Why have you 
 waited for me?" 
 
 "My dear," replied her husband, with 
 a marked air of formality, " I should 
 never think of beginning without you." 
 
 She sighed, and putting up a white 
 hand leaned her head languidly upon 
 it, stifling a yawn. The invariable 
 breakfast hour was one of the few un- 
 changeable rules in this house, whose 
 mistress she had been for ten years, and 
 one of the few exactions which her hus- 
 band's indulgence imposed upon her. 
 But sometimes it was an effort; she had 
 danced until four o'clock. " This morn-
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 5 
 
 ing, surely," she thought to herself, " it 
 is really good of me to be down." 
 
 There was silence for a moment, while 
 the servants served the breakfast, and 
 General Rivington surveyed his wife's 
 bent head, noting the blue tinge about the 
 eyes, the pallor of her small dark face. 
 
 "How was your ball?" he asked. 
 " You look a trifle pale. I am not sorry 
 it is the last." 
 
 " No, nor I," she replied, looking up 
 from her plate with a glance of languid 
 acquiescence. " Really they are hardly 
 worth the trouble." 
 
 " Rather a painful duty, I always con- 
 sidered them," said her husband. " One 
 I am very glad to leave you to but I 
 thought they amused you. You went 
 with the Lindsays, didn't you?" 
 
 "Yes, Kate would not take no for an 
 answer said she had supper all ar- 
 ranged for, and besides I had promised 
 Tom Gary the cotillion ever since the
 
 6 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 beginning of the season. It was pretty 
 enough." 
 
 The annoyance had quite faded from 
 General Rivington's face. He drank his 
 coffee leisurely and looked frequently 
 at his wife. Ten years had passed since 
 their marriage but her arresting per- 
 sonality had still for him the charm of 
 mystery not quite revealed. It was a 
 difficult task for anyone who knew her 
 to think of anything else when she was 
 near. If he had been a younger man 
 he would have suffered as well as loved 
 her ; with thirty years between them, his 
 affection for his young wife had become 
 less jealous than indulgent. He real- 
 ized that the obedience she showed him 
 was of her own loyalty and not of com- 
 pulsion. He was grateful for the tact 
 which permitted him to continue un- 
 hindered a life crystallized into cher- 
 ished habits for years before he knew 
 her, and in return urged upon her 
 a like liberty of taste and found a con-
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. ? 
 
 stant pleasure in a careful and gallant 
 consideration of her wishes. 
 
 She never tired but always charmed 
 him. His eyes rested lovingly on her 
 now. She was dressed in a loose white 
 gown, with dark fur a. '-hroat and hem, 
 an ancient girdle confining its heavy 
 folds. She sat a little turned from the 
 table, her head resting languidly against 
 the high, carved back of the chair, her 
 small feet crossed upon a foot-stool, 
 her dress falling from her slight waist 
 over her knee and amply to the floor in 
 folds which defined and suggested the 
 slender roundness of her tall figure. 
 She had eaten little and rapidly, her 
 hands moving with a dainty and vigor- 
 ous precision, and then she had assumed 
 this attitude of relaxation. Her eyes 
 became absent and absorbed ; they were 
 dark, deep-set under their straight 
 brows, dreamy now, with their habitual 
 look of brooding abstraction, but they 
 could be keen, observing, sometimes
 
 8 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 even sarcastic. Her hair grew low in a 
 lovely untormented curve, parted simply 
 and drawn back into a knot at the 
 neck in the rapid toilet of the morning. 
 Her face was small and pale, her fea- 
 tures firmly cut and delicate. The ex- 
 pression of her mouth in repose was sad 
 sometimes even to sternness, but her 
 eyes rarely lost their mysterious look of 
 vague abstraction. She gave an im- 
 pression of a power not quite conscious 
 of itself, of an unfocused image in a 
 lense. Her voice alone, deep and slow, 
 of an individual and haunting quality, 
 seemed to express if it failed to define 
 her. Her enemies called her cruel. 
 Those who loved her found her cold. 
 She was discontented enough this morn- 
 ing. The ball had not amused her 
 nothing had, for so long a time that she 
 was afraid of confessing it even to herself. 
 "Is there anything I can do for you 
 to-day?" asked her husband, rising and 
 coming towards her.
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. Q 
 
 "No, nothing," she replied, "except 
 perhaps you might ask some men for 
 the opera to night." 
 
 "Certainly, my dear. How many do 
 you want?" 
 
 "Two, I think. I do not care much 
 who. The music will rest me. I shall 
 ask some woman." She stopped a mo- 
 ment and then looking up quickly into 
 her husband's face, "You won't go 
 yourself?" she asked. 
 
 "You really wish it?" he said reluct- 
 antly, thinking of his club and his 
 whist. 
 
 " Oh, no," she replied quickly, recog- 
 nizing the significance of his tone. 
 "Certainly not, my dear. It is Faust 
 again. You have heard it so often!" 
 
 There was a little pause. Many such 
 conversations had passed without com- 
 ment. This morning she rose, and 
 taking his hand with a pretty gesture of 
 affection, looked up into her husband's 
 face.
 
 IO A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 " I am sorry do you know, dear, you 
 leave me much to myself?" 
 
 He raised her hand gallantly to his 
 lips. "Why not?" he replied. "What 
 I see I love. What I don't see I can 
 trust." 
 
 She looked at him a moment in 
 silence. "You are far too good to me," 
 she said. 
 
 "No, my dear. You are the most 
 reasonable, as well as the most beautiful 
 woman of my acquaintance." 
 
 "Will you drive this afternoon?" she 
 continued, smiling, her clear gaze still 
 fixed upon his face. 
 
 "With the greatest pleasure," he re- 
 plied, "but no! I must beg to be ex- 
 cused. There is a sale of old prints at 
 Bangs to-day. I may find the Moliere 
 I have wanted so long. To-morrow, 
 my love, I shall be at your service." 
 
 "Of course," she said, "Don't think 
 of it then." Her hand had been resting 
 upon his shoulder as she had made her
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. II 
 
 last request, she dropped it now, but with 
 no expression of annoyance and watched 
 him as he gathered up his papers and 
 left the room. Then her face fell and 
 she sighed a sigh which was not quite 
 all disappointment, not quite all relief; 
 she took up her own letters, and sink- 
 ing in a low chair by the fire began to 
 read them. 
 
 Some with foreign stamps she laid 
 aside with a slight smile, raised her eye- 
 brows over the number of invitations, 
 and stopped short, to examine carefully 
 an unfamiliar hand-writing on another, 
 the last of the pile, which she finally 
 opened and began to read : 
 
 MY DEAR MRS. RIVINGTON: 
 
 Unless I am quite mistaken, I saw you 
 last night at the Opera. If you will permit 
 me, I should like above all things to come 
 and see you. It is more than a dozen years 
 since we met, and I seem to myself very 
 bold in making this request, but in so doing 
 I shield myself behind an acquaintance dat- 
 ing almost from our childhood.
 
 12 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 Most of the years since then have been 
 spent away from home, and I find, quite 
 naturally perhaps, that I am a stranger in 
 my native land. If you knew Bow much 
 pleasure this glimpse of you has given me, 
 you would forgive me that I thus tempt fate 
 in asking if you will receive me. 
 
 Very sincerely yours, 
 
 PHILIP AYTOUN. 
 
 The brilliant smile with which Mrs. 
 Rivington read this short letter a smile 
 natural and childish which illumined 
 her face had stolen into her eyes by 
 the time she had re-read it and folded 
 it back into its envelope. She rose 
 with a quick movement from the 
 chair, dropping her other letters un- 
 heedingly on the floor, and with one 
 foot on the fender, her small hands 
 held to the blaze, looked out with 
 shining eyes upon the cloudy sky, 
 forgetting the present moment in the 
 retrospect which the letter brought 
 before her. 
 
 "Philip Aytoun," she murmured to
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 13 
 
 herself, "in this country! It will be 
 charming to see him again. I wonder 
 what he will be like." Her mind re- 
 possessed its memories rapidly. They 
 returned to her now clear and distinct, 
 and the friend of her childhood ap- 
 peared before her mental vision with 
 his eager boyish face and the strange 
 beauty which had been woven into her 
 early dreams. 
 
 *' He will be changed, of course," she 
 reflected, "but I hope not spoiled. 
 What a sensitive, shy creature he was ! 
 full of promise, but no one could have 
 predicted he would go so far ! " 
 
 "Philip Aytoun," she repeated the 
 name again, dwelling upon it with a 
 thrill of pleasure, made up partly of 
 wonder that the name of her boyish 
 friend should now be that of a famous 
 painter, and partly of pride, that he had 
 not forgotten her. 
 
 A little later during the hour, which 
 according to her custom she usually
 
 14 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 spent at her desk, she had replied to the 
 letter 
 
 "Come to see me Sunday," she had 
 written first, "when I am always at 
 home." Then she had written another 
 note appointing an hour when he might 
 see her alone. "He will not like to 
 meet others here," she reflected. "It 
 might spoil a pretty moment." 
 
 During her drive in the afternoon her 
 thoughts again reverted to the letter. 
 She recalled broken fragments of sen- 
 tences, and tones of his voice. One lit- 
 tle scene she remembered distinctly 
 three young lads walking among the 
 autumn leaves which had fallen by the 
 road-side, and he, the hero of her child- 
 ish fancy, turning away his head, and 
 refusing to recognize her, as she drove 
 by in her phaeton. Beautiful, sought 
 after, admired, hated and discussed as 
 she was by the world, whose ways she 
 had learned to know so well, Mrs. Riving- 
 ton remembered with a little thrill the
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. I 5 
 
 moment of bitterness and chagrin she 
 felt that day, the slight to her child's 
 pride. The rustle of the leaves, the boy's 
 averted face came back to her with 
 sense of vivid reality. She remembered, 
 too, the tardy and reluctant explanation 
 which followed, how the others had ral- 
 lied him on his fancy for her and 
 challenged him to pass her by un- 
 noticed, and how this little shock to 
 a fancy which with her was fleeting and 
 light as the thistle-down of the fields, 
 was followed by other childish quarrels 
 and misunderstandings, and finally for- 
 gotten in other caprices of her girlhood. 
 Yet his individuality among all the stu- 
 dents of the academy which made the 
 life of the quiet village in which she 
 spent her youth stood out with great 
 distinctness, his sensitiveness, his in- 
 nate refinement, his untamable shyness 
 and self-consciousness. Thus recalling 
 him, her thoughts were caught again by 
 an insistent detail of her present life,
 
 1 6 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 and the letter and its author were for 
 the time dismissed. 
 
 Helen Rivington was beautiful, intel- 
 ligent ; but she was also indolent, lonely, 
 and as a natural consequence unhappy. 
 This she did not confess to herself, 
 blindfolded as was her mental vision by 
 the luxury of her material surroundings. 
 Her outer life was full of movement 
 variety and the sound of cymbals. She 
 knew the odor of incense, and her path 
 was strewn with flowers, but she trod it in 
 a solitude of soul, which deserved a pity 
 it never received. Her mind was rare, 
 and her soul a garden; but she was 
 romantic, given over to reveries and the 
 idleness of dreams. For years she had 
 lived a life of outward gayety, of inner 
 loneliness, productive of neither interest 
 or joy, but this prolonged inactivity had 
 become retributive, and endurance was 
 merging into pain. Like a ship whose 
 engines were asleep, she had floated with 
 no sign of struggle; but now the stir-
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. IJ 
 
 rings of a new and insistent vitality dis- 
 turbed her long repose. Her nature had 
 never expressed itself. This, under the 
 existing circumstances, was as strange 
 and anomalous as a truth is apt to be. 
 The recognition of this fact she had 
 long held in banishment. In revenge 
 it now monopolized her horizon. She 
 became preoccupied with herself, and 
 forgot to look without. She was far too 
 intelligent to be mildly bored, which 
 condition, optimistically defined as con- 
 tent, represents that measure of happi- 
 ness which resignation teaches hope. 
 
 Her girlhood had been passed in the 
 country near New York, where she had 
 been carefully taught by a succession 
 of governesses whose ministrations 
 were succeeded by private instructions 
 from tutors of the neighboring academy. 
 Her clear and vigorous mind responded 
 with enthusiasm to the intellectual train- 
 ing she received, and the continuous life 
 in the pure country air furnished her
 
 1 8 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 with an equally advantageous physical 
 surrounding. 
 
 At nineteen her face suggested to 
 the uncomplex mind of her many and 
 abject adorers rhymes of flowers and 
 bowers, and to the reflective a won- 
 dering query as to the origin of an 
 alluring exotic personality which defied 
 them to forget her. There are some 
 characters which can never be reduced 
 to an equation, some natures which bear 
 only the suggested explanation of a 
 metaphor. Helen's was one of these. 
 Her eyes dreamed of mirages, but her 
 lips were prophetic of martyrdoms. If 
 her soul had matched the pure line of 
 her brow, she would not have needed 
 the discipline of this world. She was 
 slight as a girl, and her weight had 
 never varied. Nature for once having 
 made a perfect work had apparently 
 decided to leave it unmolested, and had 
 begged indulgence of the destroyer 
 Time.
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. IQ 
 
 At eighteen vagrant fancy had led 
 Helen to an oblique place, where she 
 experienced a slight fall and a consider- 
 able shock. She decided that love was 
 over, when she had not learned to spell 
 the name. 
 
 At this juncture, her father's fortune, 
 the result of many years of audacious 
 dealings in Wall Street, suddenly rolled 
 away like a mist, and her father himself 
 died a week after in the physical col- 
 lapse which followed his failure. From 
 him she had inherited a pliable and 
 vigorous intelligence and a temperament 
 whose influence upon others was elec- 
 tric, whose future was unprophesiable. 
 From her mother she had inherited an 
 ineradicable Puritanism, unsuspected 
 and as yet held in solution in a nature 
 which no test of Fate had ever analyzed. 
 A stern intellectuality had indeed 
 widened the mental horizon of the ori- 
 ginal Puritan, but had not restricted 
 her mother's capacity for suffering,
 
 2O A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 which was indeed a talent only un- 
 developed by the adverse conditions 
 which extreme prosperity had imposed 
 upon it. Her influence over her only 
 child was as uncomprehending as it was 
 strenuous and affectionate; loving Helen 
 devotedly, she succeeded in making her 
 thoroughly unhappy. Obedient at first 
 to the exacting training which her 
 mother's ambition imposed upon her, 
 Helen became moody, inclined to soli- 
 tude and secrecy, and finally after some 
 years of painful friction took possession 
 of her own developed and original na- 
 ture, which eluded the influence of her 
 mother's character, quite as much as it 
 differed from it. But the loneliness 
 and pain incident upon so seriously 
 alien an environment had tinged her 
 mind with melancholy and her bitter 
 experience of the false idol of her youth, 
 as interpreted by the morbid romanticism 
 of a mind quite without perspective and 
 wholly dedicated to introspection, led
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 21 
 
 her to abandon the idea of living a life 
 guided by her own preference. She ac- 
 cepted an attitude of resignation and 
 abandoned hope, the prerogative of her 
 years. 
 
 At twenty she still retained the im- 
 pression , that she could never love 
 again, and when bitter grief at the death 
 of her father crushed her and misfor- 
 tune faced her, she married Alexander 
 Rivington, not unwillingly, but with a 
 resignation which bordered on content. 
 
 He did not ask her love, and she con- 
 ceived herself amply justified in the 
 darkness of her young despair in her 
 acceptance of a life whose possibilities 
 inspired respect, at the hands of a man 
 whose personality commanded admira- 
 tion if not affection; more than that he 
 had been her father's life-long friend. 
 She felt that he would have approved. 
 
 At fifty Alexander Rivington might 
 have inspired sentiment if he had not 
 himself been content with admiration.
 
 22 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 The unbroken prosperity of his life had 
 crystallized the springs of feeling; thus 
 he had been influenced by the condi- 
 tions of his birth and period, and had 
 become representative rather than indi- 
 vidual. He was conservative, formal 
 and intensely proud; an autocrat whose 
 selfishness wore the mask of courtesy. 
 Coming early into the possession of a 
 very large fortune, he had put his leisure 
 to excellent use, and had evinced dur- 
 ing twenty-five years no inclination to 
 give up his liberty. His fortune had 
 not deprived him of ambition, which 
 was early satisfied by an honorable and 
 in some respects a brilliant record in the 
 war of the Rebellion. His excellent 
 birth and very keen mind had furnished 
 him with an inherited gallantry of man- 
 ner and many cultivated tastes. His 
 house was filled with the collections of 
 years of travel, and his mind with recol- 
 lections of the distinguished men who 
 had been his friends and companions.
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 23 
 
 His tall figure with his gray hair, ruddy 
 skin and keen dark eyes was a familiar 
 sight upon the avenue, and he was still 
 quoted as the most representative type 
 of the manners which distinguished old 
 New York. 
 
 But for many years his life had fallen 
 into narrow lines. He was oftener at 
 his club in his favorite corner among 
 his friends, than at the Opera. With 
 women his manner was gay, compli- 
 mentary, and a little fantastic. His 
 memory was faultless, his experiences 
 not a few. He still dined out very fre- 
 quently, and his own dinners were 
 famous for their excellent wines, their 
 carefully selected company, and their 
 gayety, for which he always set the 
 pace. His intimates were few, and were 
 among the men whom he had known 
 from boyhood. His wife's father, James 
 Lawrence, was one of these, the best 
 loved, perhaps the nearest friend. 
 They had been at college together, and
 
 24 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 were nearly connected by the innumer- 
 able ties and recollections of lives passed 
 almost side by side during a period of 
 more than thirty years. When ruin and 
 death fell suddenly upon Helen's father, 
 General Rivington was the one who was 
 appealed to for help and advice in the 
 double and irremediable disaster, and in 
 a moment of sympathy for the beautiful 
 girl he had known from childhood, and 
 whom he found in the first despair over 
 the death of her father and face to face 
 with misfortune, he lost the composure 
 he had prized so long and offered her 
 gallantly the remainder of his life, his 
 love, and his protection. When after a 
 day or two of reflection, Helen shyly 
 and gratefully accepted him, he realized 
 that his joy in this new possession was 
 by no means unselfish, and accepted 
 with delight the change in his life, 
 which he had long believed to be im- 
 possible. 
 
 The astonishment with which the an-
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 25 
 
 nouncement of his marriage was received 
 at his club was soon changed to envy 
 when Helen had once been seen, and 
 had taken the place which her husband's 
 position gave to her youth and beauty, 
 and which she filled with a simple dignity 
 which was a continual pleasure to him. 
 Thus with no transition time between 
 lessons and marriage, Helen found her- 
 self one of a very powerful and luxury- 
 loving society, whose prizes and prerog- 
 atives were laid within her hands. She 
 enjoyed it all for a time, the ease, the 
 continual variety which was at first 
 amusement, and her own unquestioned 
 place ; but the novelty of a gift is less 
 enduring than the pride of acquisition, 
 and the well-being which is as easily 
 gained as was hers, becomes too soon an 
 unnoticed condition. It was a long 
 time, however, before her unhappiness 
 became articulate. Her disposition was 
 eminently amiable, she was submissive 
 of circumstances with a resignation be-
 
 26 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 yond her years. Her intelligence ap- 
 prehended the profound sadness of life, 
 and her early experience taught her the 
 futility of struggle and the folly of the 
 attempt to dictate Fate. But if her 
 temperament was obedient, her mind 
 was not. Intellectual curiosity had led 
 her in many wandering ways, and 
 although her memories were astonish- 
 ingly few, and she had learned but little 
 of life, she had come to the conclusion 
 that the only moments which are worth 
 remembering are those in which we 
 have forgotten ourselves. But with a 
 fastidious mind, and an unpromising 
 and conventional environment, the pos- 
 sibility of self-forgetfulness seemed to 
 her daily as elusive as it was alluring. 
 Her experience with the type of unen- 
 lightened heathen, who do not know 
 how to spell sentiment and who cry out 
 loudly for food, had not in any way en- 
 couraged her. It had brought her in- 
 variable disappointment and forced her
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 27 
 
 to be cruel. She did not like the use of 
 the knife, nor fancy herself in the de- 
 fensive attitude. 
 
 Thus life had passed her by. At 
 thirty she was young in living, and un- 
 touched by time. Her beauty was still 
 in its unmarred perfection a promise 
 of joy evocative of dreams.
 
 Chapter II. 
 
 |RS. Rivington's drawing-room was 
 charming, and very character- 
 istic of her. It was not over-crowded 
 with furniture, but was warm and com- 
 forting and shadowy. Near the fire- 
 place was a low sofa with a high carved 
 back, a table with a lamp stood near at 
 hand, in a corner was a low divan heaped 
 with pillows and protected by a screen. 
 Near by was a table covered with yel- 
 low French books, and the month's 
 magazines. Over other tables were 
 scattered an infinite variety of photo- 
 graphs, small and great, and above the 
 mantel was a very remarkable collection 
 of blue china. A protrait of Mrs. Riv- 
 ington by Carolus Duran hung against 
 a tapestry. On the day when Aytoun 
 was expected the room was full of flow- 
 28
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 2Q 
 
 ers, which had just come in from the 
 country. It was a warm day in early 
 spring, and, the windows being open, a 
 fragrant little breeze blew in through the 
 azalea blooms and moved the curtains. 
 Mrs. Rivington had just returned from 
 her drive and was seated, a little fatigued 
 with the first warmth of the spring day, 
 on a sofa with her back to the light, 
 when Aytoun was announced. 
 
 She half rose from her seat to give 
 him a warmer greeting than was her 
 wont. He had quite altered; not only 
 in all that the development from boy to 
 man would necessitate, but he had also 
 changed in type. Helen would not 
 have recognized her childhood's friend 
 in the tall and strikingly original figure 
 she saw before her. The boy's smooth 
 face she remembered with its closely 
 cropped hair, its unmarked features, and 
 its mobile mouth, had developed into 
 an admirable and noble type of beauty, 
 poetic and virile. The reddish brown
 
 30 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 hair was cut close on the neck, but 
 waved thickly over his forehead. A 
 small mustache shaded a mouth full 
 but firmly curved. A vertical line 
 between the straight brows showed the 
 habit of concentration, and in the slight 
 hollowness of the cheeks she saw the 
 unsparing use of the mental qualities. 
 The eyes alone, of a luminous blue, 
 remained as Helen remembered them, 
 clear and young with an expression of 
 singular freshness and charm. The 
 rounded ideality of the chin and throat 
 gave an almost feminine grace to the 
 head. 
 
 He entered the room with a slight air 
 of embarrassment, charming in its sim- 
 plicity. The sensitiveness of old was 
 recalled to Helen by his voice, which 
 had many notes in it musical and 
 unconventional. His English was a 
 little stilted as if from disuse. There is 
 a distinction which comes from within, 
 another from without. Aytoun's was
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 3! 
 
 the first. As it happened, he was per- 
 fectly dressed, but Mrs. Rivington forgot 
 to notice it. She motioned him to a 
 chair beside her. 
 
 " How charming of you to have writ- 
 ten me!" 
 
 " More charming of you to have given 
 me so prompt a pardon for my indiscre- 
 tion I hardly knew " 
 
 She interrupted him " Not know 
 what a real pleasure it is to see you 
 again after all these years? " 
 
 " I am only too glad to be reassured," 
 he answered. 
 
 She looked intently at him, searching 
 for her recollection of him, verifying 
 the survivals, noting the changes. She 
 found herself genuinely interested and 
 amused ; her eyes as she looked at him 
 were bright with pleasure. 
 
 " How could you doubt it? " she asked 
 him. "Did you think I should be 
 changed?" 
 
 He faltered a moment.
 
 32 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 " I thought (leaning forward in his 
 chair), that I might find you 
 spoiled." 
 
 "Ah! I hope not! but I must have 
 changed." 
 
 " Yes, you have changed, but not as I 
 feared. You are quite fresh, quite 
 natural. You are," pausing, "even 
 more than I could have expected." 
 
 She scanned him attentively from 
 under her white lids, and found his hes- 
 itating words exquisitely flattering. 
 
 "I," she replied, "I am nothing. Tell 
 me about yourself. It is worth while, 
 your life. You have worked so hard, 
 done so much. Tell me all about it." 
 
 " Not now," he said, " some day you 
 shall know all you like about me. But 
 now tell me, do you remember the day 
 we went to the old pond, near the wood, 
 to skate?" 
 
 "Oh, yes," she replied, laughing; "of 
 course I do." 
 
 "Do you remember your setting your
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 33 
 
 foot in the print of mine in the snow, 
 and laughing at the difference in size? 
 Do you remember the day I drew you 
 home on your sled? Do you remember 
 the little cipher letter you sent me?" 
 He paused a moment. " No, I see you 
 don't. Never mind, I have it yet, and 
 your photograph with the inscription, 
 'always your friend, Helen.' " 
 
 " And do you remember the day you 
 refused to recognize me?" she asked 
 him, laughingly. " No; that you have 
 forgotten, but I have not. It hurts yet. 
 How dared you?" 
 
 " That was just the trouble," he re- 
 plied; "I did not dare. You fright- 
 ened me. You do now. How mys- 
 terious you are. How beautiful." The 
 last word dropped from his lips almost 
 inaudibly, and his eyes narrowed imper- 
 ceptibly with the artist's instinct as he 
 watched her, sitting there in the half 
 light, bending her head and listening 
 to him.
 
 34 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 " How long ago it is! " she exclaimed. 
 " We will keep it a secret, will we not? 
 It is quite fifteen years did you know 
 it since I first knew you? " 
 
 His embarrassment had quite disap- 
 peared. He seemed to have forgotten 
 himself in the charm of her presence. 
 
 "Yes, fifteen, and I said you had 
 changed. I was wrong. Now that I 
 see you and hear you speak, you seem 
 just the same. Your expression; yes, 
 that alone has changed. Something 
 has come into your face, and something 
 has gone. I can't quite express it." 
 
 "You," she exclaimed, "have chang- 
 ed. I am preserved perhaps, but you 
 have developed. I have done nothing; 
 you have earned the change I see in 
 you. It is not for the worse, believe 
 me." 
 
 Aytoun flushed a little at this, and 
 his self-consciousness returned. There 
 was a little irremediable pause. He rose 
 to go.
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 35 
 
 " May I come again? " he asked. 
 
 "If you only will." She watched him 
 as he rose. At the door he turned im- 
 pulsively. 
 
 "Do let me come," he said; "I feel 
 like a boy again. How good it is to 
 see you!"
 
 Chapter III. 
 I 
 
 JEVERAL days slipped by before 
 Mrs. Rivington realized that 
 Aytoun had made no sign, no effort to 
 see her again. But nearly a fortnight 
 passed before the unconfessed pique, 
 which had been sharpening the edge of 
 her curiosity, drove her to visit the col- 
 lection of his pictures then on view at 
 an uptown gallery. 
 
 The spring had suddenly declared 
 itself, and hung its pennons triumph- 
 antly from the branches in Madison 
 Square. Above them rose the creamy 
 tower of the garden. Life, multiform, 
 electric, was rolling by in the Avenue, 
 but the hurry and stress of the laboring 
 city seemed somehow less strenuous. 
 The stream of humanity which surges 
 and divides at the corner of Twenty- 
 36
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 37 
 
 third street was dotted with flowers. 
 The women carried them in their hands, 
 the men in their coats. If one listened 
 carefully, one could hear above the rat- 
 tle of the cars and carriages the twitter 
 of the birds in the park. A faint fra- 
 grance floated in the air. Spring had 
 invaded the town. 
 
 As Helen drove by in her carriage 
 she was conscious of a distinct pleasure 
 in the air, the motion. She was glad 
 she was alive. A delicate pink flush 
 stained her cheek, her hair under the 
 large hat she wore blew back from her 
 brow, her ideas floated too. She was 
 glad to feel young, with a gladness 
 which the knowledge of her thirty years 
 rather emphasized than diminished. She 
 remembered when she had not appre- 
 ciated her youth, and atoned for that 
 scant courtesy with an ample gratitude 
 for its gracious lingering. As she drove 
 up the avenue she abandoned herself to 
 the happiness which floated in the mild
 
 38 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 atmosphere, the consciousness of* com- 
 ing summer, and the content of her own 
 beauty, latent and comforting, which 
 she neither diminished by over-con- 
 sciousness, nor cheapened by neglect. 
 
 The curiosity which took her to see 
 Aytoun's pictures was only sharpened 
 by his apparent forgetfulness of her, not 
 embittered. She was in fact rather 
 pleased than otherwise. "He is not 
 changed," she mused. "This is the 
 same boy who refused to recognize me 
 that autumn day and who will not bear 
 the touch of the whip. No driving here, 
 no tyrannies but he has not forgotten 
 me." 
 
 The carriage stopped at the door of 
 the gallery and Helen went up its mar- 
 ble steps. Within it was cool and 
 silent. She went immediately to the 
 room which contained the collection of 
 Aytoun's pictures. It was not a regular 
 exhibition day, but there were a num- 
 ber of people there, examining them
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 39 
 
 carefully. A group of eager girls, art- 
 students evidently by their dress, were 
 standing before one of his portraits, that 
 of a girl, pointing out to each other 
 with a mixture of envy and admiration 
 the looseness but brilliancy of the tech- 
 nique. The face was not beautiful, but 
 the cool gaze of the gray eyes, the hair 
 loosely combed back, the suggestion of 
 ancient costume in the dress, the alert 
 intellectual interest in the face, riveted 
 the attention with a daring sarcastic 
 command, most characteristic of the 
 painter. Before another, a landscape 
 with a predominant sky, full of moving 
 clouds and some wind-swept hills, a 
 couple of men were standing. One of 
 them, a bearded man with deeply- 
 marked features, and a fatigued look 
 about the eyes, was talking of the pic- 
 ture in the artist vernacular. Helen 
 caught a few words as she passed them. 
 A pretty woman, in gray, with violets 
 in her bonnet, and very red lips, was
 
 4O A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 nervously poking the tip of a smart shoe 
 with her parasol, her eyes cast down; 
 the man beside her was talking earn- 
 estly to her with a triumphant smile. 
 He turned as Helen passed them, and 
 she recognized a man who had sat next 
 to her at dinner the night before, and 
 whose flowers had filled her rooms all 
 winter. His face fell, and he instantly 
 stopped talking. The woman looked 
 up and stared at Helen, who crossed 
 immediately to the other side of the 
 gallery. Her lip curled a little. 
 
 The beauty of the pictures began to 
 absorb her mind, which possessed a far 
 keener and more correct instinct for 
 what was good in art than she had ever 
 given herself credit for. The presence 
 of the pictures penetrated and stimu- 
 lated her mind, and she began to feel a 
 keen envy for the talent and the will 
 which had so triumphantly expressed 
 themselves. 
 
 She turned and walked to the door
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 4! 
 
 to buy a catalogue, when she saw Aytoun 
 standing at the entrance of the gallery 
 with some men and talking earnestly. 
 Helen was impressed by the suggestion 
 of power and exhilaration in his man- 
 ner, and the pose of his head. Noting 
 the graceful movements of his hands, 
 she watched him for a moment in sil- 
 ence. He was standing before one of 
 his pictures, evidently explaining it. 
 
 "Well he may be proud !" she said to 
 herself. "I shall tell him so." 
 
 He looked up quickly and caught 
 sight of her. Excusing himself from 
 his companions, he came towards her 
 gallantly, hat in hand, bending low, 
 with a little French exaggeration of 
 manner, which became him well. 
 
 " How good of you to come and see 
 my pictures," he said. "I am infinitely 
 honored." 
 
 He has learned other arts in Paris 
 than that of painting, she observed 
 quickly, while she replied :
 
 42 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 "Why good? grateful, perhaps," she 
 looked around the room. "Come, tell 
 me about your pictures. When did you 
 do this one, I have just been looking 
 at ? Which do you like best yourself?" 
 
 "Would you really like to know?" 
 
 "Oh, so much." 
 
 She was interested. It was a collec- 
 tion of pictures of which youth might 
 be proud and age content. 
 
 He began to speak of them; simply, 
 and without affectation. She was charmed 
 with the careful explanations which he 
 gave, flattered with the compliment at 
 being addressed as an equal. He was 
 clear, direct and modest, revealing with 
 almost unconscious significance the dis- 
 tance she had traveled in his art, with 
 a word sometimes disclosing where he 
 stood so far beyond her. 
 
 Reason had never taught Helen how 
 to listen. That knowledge was a cradle 
 gift. "Helen," her mother had said to 
 her one day while she loitered over
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 43 
 
 a page of Latin, "why don't you learn 
 your lessons ? Do you want to be an 
 ignoramus when you grow up ? " 
 "Mamma!" she had replied, bravely, 
 lifting her appealing brown eyes, "I 
 have never found the man, woman or 
 child yet, I could not talk to, and I 
 don't think I should do any better, if I 
 knew the whole of Julius Caesar." 
 
 She had learned the lesson, notwith- 
 standing, and many others, but none so 
 valuable as one she never learned but 
 always practiced, that to most men no 
 intellectual pleasure equals the pure 
 delight of teaching a pretty woman 
 what they think she ought to know. 
 Helen was receiving in very full meas- 
 ure the reward for her obedience to this 
 golden rule of life, for in response to 
 the encouragement of her manner, her 
 lifted, sympathetic eyes, Aytoun was ex- 
 pressing, as he rarely had before, his 
 thoughts, his hopes, his experiences in 
 the art to which he devoted his life. 

 
 44 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 She asked him when he had left America, 
 and when he had begun to paint. 
 There was a long gap to fill up between 
 the time when still a lad he had disap- 
 peared from her life, and the present. 
 He told of the years in Paris, years of 
 discouragement while he continued to 
 paint in the manner of his masters, his 
 groping experiments, and finally the 
 discovery of his own individual manner, 
 and the astonishingly quick reward 
 which followed. 
 
 "No, it is not easy," he said, "learn- 
 ing the metier, and it is harder still for 
 many who have had the perseverance to 
 learn it and learn it well, to realize that 
 after all the manner is nothing. When 
 we have advanced one step further and 
 have found out something important to 
 say, we of the nineteenth century will 
 say it better than it has been said be- 
 fore ; but just now it is very discourag- 
 ing the older men are terribly demodes, 
 and many of the younger ones seem to
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 45 
 
 have forgotten that there is a mltier to 
 learn. They would have us believe that 
 individuality is the one essential, and 
 seek above all things to be eccentric. 
 For this they discard everything, nature 
 first of all, and paint women, trees, 
 houses, beasts, and the sea, green, blue, 
 and purple, as their mood dictates 
 anything is legitimate, so that they may 
 be pronounced 'clever,' and that they 
 may declare their picture has been done 
 between eleven o'clock and noon." 
 
 The art students had disappeared, the 
 pretty woman in the gray dress and her 
 companion had long since departed, the 
 rooms were nearly empty and very still, 
 but the daylight still lingered and Helen 
 had forgotten it was growing late. She 
 stopped before a picture of a little sea- 
 port, drowned in a brown and melan- 
 choly mist. 
 
 "What is that?" she asked. 
 
 "Oh! a little scene in the South." 
 
 " How sad! " she exclaimed, " how
 
 46 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 despairing. What expression inanimate 
 things can have!" 
 
 " It was myself, I think." 
 
 " Ah," she said, giving him the cat- 
 alogue, "show me what you have called 
 it." 
 
 " Oh, nothing. A sea-port." 
 
 " It is not well named ; you should 
 call it 'Spleen.' Baudelaire would have 
 painted thus." 
 
 " Oh, yes, of course," he laughed de- 
 lightedly, " I should. I shall call it that 
 in the next exhibition." 
 
 He watched her as she looked at the 
 pictures and noted the beautiful propor- 
 tion of her slight figure, the length from 
 the knee down, the slender waist and 
 hips, the flowing line from throat to 
 wrist. She was dressed in black, of a 
 soft material which fell gracefully in 
 heavy folds. She wore a short cape of 
 prune velvet with some white lace about 
 it, a large hat of black shaded her eyes 
 and threw out the fine line of her pro-
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 47 
 
 file, the heavy wave of her dark hair. 
 Aytoun noticed all this, even to the 
 slight gold chain with its watch and 
 trinkets which fastened at her waist and 
 the jewel in the handle of her parasol. 
 She had quite forgotten herself, and 
 Aytoun could see how natural was the 
 proud, the almost insolent lift, of her 
 small head, and he forgave her as his 
 eyes watched the sensitive ripples of ex- 
 pression about her mouth, a mouth 
 which was far too womanly to be cruel. 
 He had ceased to look for the girl, the 
 almost child, he had remembered, or to 
 listen for the recollected sound of her 
 voice. He was pleased, aroused and 
 even disturbed at this woman, whose life 
 had been so different from anything he 
 had experienced or seen, and yet, with a 
 beauty which satisfied his eyes, and 
 stirred his laggard pulses, both under- 
 stood and stimulated his mind. "How 
 complex she is," he thought to himself, 
 " I cannot understand her." He turned
 
 48 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 away his head, averted his eyes, and 
 listened to her voice. 
 
 "How versatile you are!" she was 
 saying, "how versatile! Portraits there, 
 landscapes here, and this picture. Why, 
 you are a musician, too! There is vibra- 
 tion all through it, like the continued 
 sound of a violin, and this, what a 
 strange picture! What does it mean? 
 Those shadowy trees, that strange sign 
 upon the pool which strikes upon the 
 dark as sound upon silence. It is a 
 sound! That man in the boat is listen- 
 ing! What is it? Tell me quickly! A 
 bell? No! it is higher, clearer. Oh! a 
 bird a bird! in the night." She turned 
 towards him excitedly. 
 
 Aytoun handed her the catalogue. 
 
 " The Song of the Nightingale," he 
 said, simply looking at her with a quick 
 drawn breath. 
 
 Helen met his glance a moment and 
 turned away, feeling her heart beat. 
 
 The artistic sympathy is terribly dan-
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 49 
 
 gerous, that of the body flares and wanes 
 quickly, this takes fire at the top. It is 
 a draft of pure alcohol, white, clear, and 
 intoxicating, and ignites the soul. 
 
 Helen felt like one dumb, who sud- 
 denly is given voice, like one who finds 
 the long sought arrow to a bow, but not 
 for long. The moment was too vivid, 
 and her outer self resumed control. 
 
 She looked at her watch. 
 
 "It is very late," she exclaimed, "I 
 must go." 
 
 He put her in her carriage and she 
 thanked him gracefully for his kindness 
 in showing her his pictures, but her 
 courtesy was a little formal, and he re- 
 membered suddenly how as a girl he 
 had often found her cold.
 
 Chapter IV. 
 
 |YTOUN watched Mrs. Rivington's 
 carriage as it turned the corner 
 of Fifty-seventh street to drive down the 
 avenue, and then he lighted a cigarette 
 and took his way leisurely along Broad- 
 way, following its slanting thorough- 
 fare to the rooms he had taken in the 
 middle of the town. He had not quite 
 recovered from the blow which the rush 
 and hurry of American life had inflicted 
 upon him, exile as he had been so long 
 from his own country. 
 
 The dirt of the streets, the bewilder- 
 ing rush of the cars, and the hurrying 
 press of vehicles still disturbed his 
 nerves, which were sensitive to every 
 impression. The restless discontent 
 upon the faces of the people, the lack 
 of the simple human happiness, so often 
 So
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 51 
 
 seen among the laborers of the older 
 countries as they go about their work, 
 impressed him with a feeling of per- 
 plexity and sadness. 
 
 "A quoi bon? " he asked himself a 
 dozen times a day. 
 
 This afternoon his mood was happier; 
 he was proud of the ample recognition 
 which his countrymen had given him, 
 and melted into a mild content by the 
 persuasive warmth of the spring day. 
 As he walked along he noticed, with 
 pleasure, the groups of children playing 
 in front of the shops, in the warmth of 
 the lingering daylight. Two little girls 
 with wheat-like yellow braids and rosy 
 German cheeks were dancing to the 
 music of a one-legged violinist, who 
 stood at the corner of the street. Ay- 
 toun dropped a coin into the battered 
 hat, which was offered to him as he 
 passed by. The man thanked him in a 
 round French patois, which sounded 
 good in his ears.
 
 52 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 "You are from Concarneau?" he 
 said. 
 
 "Oui, monsieur," answered the man 
 with a broad smile. 
 
 Aytoun had painted there one sum- 
 mer with a lot of men and recognized 
 the dialect of Brittany. 
 
 It all came back to him his life that 
 summer on the barren coast, its little 
 villages sunk in the hollows of the 
 rocks, the cliff walk by the sea, the 
 gigantic crucifixes with their blackened, 
 death-like figures. As he picked his 
 way among the crowd of passers-by he 
 could almost smell the sea-weed, and 
 his sight was filled with visions of the 
 tall peasant women in their old-time 
 caps, and the bronzed Breton fishermen. 
 He stopped at a corner; a cable car with 
 its evening load of tired humanity on its 
 homeward way dashed by him with an 
 ominous clang. His thoughts returned 
 with a start to New York and Broad- 
 way. He asked himself for the hun-
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 53 
 
 dredth time why he had come- and 
 promised himself a speedy return; and 
 then he called himself ungrateful for 
 the welcome he had received in his own 
 country, and he thought of the sale of 
 his pictures, and the invitations which 
 had already begun to find their way to 
 his rooms. 
 
 He had never loved the excitement 
 which comes from association with 
 varying types of people; his mind was 
 distracted and depressed rather than 
 stimulated by such contact. He was 
 quite free from any restraint among 
 his confreres, to whom he was a loyal 
 friend and with whom he spent hours of 
 enthusiastic discourse about their com- 
 mon art. It had always been a theory 
 of his, warmly discussed and religiously 
 practiced, to make a life of art rather 
 than an art of life. The easy associa- 
 tions of his student life harmonized 
 with this intention, furnishing a stimu- 
 lating atmosphere and distractions
 
 54 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 easily assumed and as easily discarded. 
 The more exacting relations of the 
 world he shunned. 
 
 Philip Aytoun was the son of a New 
 England clergyman. The stock from 
 which he sprang was purely English, 
 the traditions and trainings of his boy- 
 hood severe and confining. 
 
 He did not remember his mother, but 
 the hours of loneliness which he spent 
 in looking at her picture and longing 
 for some affection warmer and more 
 caressing than it was possible for his 
 stern father to bestow, were the most 
 poignant recollections of his childhood. 
 His father rarely spoke to him of his 
 mother, and he did not realize that it 
 was from her that he inherited the 
 sensitiveness and love of beauty, which, 
 in her case, had not survived the unhap- 
 piness of repression. 
 
 Aytoun blamed this sensitive and 
 lonely childhood for the shyness which 
 still tormented him long after he had
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 55 
 
 been set free to follow his own ambi- 
 tions. 
 
 This natural shyness was further 
 increased by the inherent modesty of a 
 life given up to labor, and a constant 
 and humble comparison of himself with 
 the highest standards of that art to 
 which he was dedicated. If anyone had 
 told Aytoun that his instincts were those 
 of a transferred or translated Puritanism, 
 he would have laughed him to scorn. 
 But it was true. The vigorous will which 
 had so directly brought him into the har- 
 bor of success, was born of an invinci- 
 ble sense of responsibility, the direct 
 inheritance of his American blood. The 
 passion for beauty which from early 
 boyhood had sent him wandering among 
 the fields, a companion of the birds and 
 streams, was a single exotic gift, alienat- 
 ing him from his father to whom dreams 
 were but idleness, and separating him 
 from his natural associates. 
 
 When, after a few years of reluctant
 
 $6 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 obedience to his father's rule, his death 
 released him, Philip went straight 
 to Paris. Aytoun was not a painter 
 by profession, he was a poet who 
 painted. 
 
 He was too manly to take account of 
 his beauty, which, growing into its per- 
 fection with the fine development of his 
 nature, revealed him to his associates. 
 He was too bound by the intense activity 
 of his will to realize that the clairvoyant 
 instinct of his poet's mind was an invin- 
 cible weapon in that art of life to which 
 he paid so little heed. His mind was 
 capable of but one loyalty, that was to 
 beauty, beauty in art; his untiring aim 
 was to express it. He was accustomed 
 to view with a certain contemptuous 
 pity, quite lacking in sympathy, the 
 abandonment to the soft slavery of 
 women which he saw in his friends. To 
 him the flesh alone spoke vainly, leaving 
 his will, his spirit, free. The mad 
 caprices, which his indifference and his
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 57 
 
 beauty not seldom inspired, had never 
 tempted him from his allegiance. Art, 
 friends, whose voices were but the cho- 
 rus of acolytes to his throned goddess; 
 such had been Aytoun's life for many 
 unbroken years. Sometimes his friends 
 divining the power he left unused, 
 would question him jealously as to the 
 cause of his indifference. 
 
 " L'art et les amis," he would say. 
 
 " Et les femmes?" 
 
 " Parole d* honneur, (a n'entre pas" 
 
 This was no affectation but the sim- 
 ple truth. 
 
 He had come to America for a short 
 visit to exhibit his pictures, and in 
 response to a vague sense of responsi- 
 bility to his country too seldom heeded. 
 He was no more genially inclined than 
 ever towards making relations with the 
 world, but he found his usual independ- 
 ence curiously shaken by the sense of 
 solitude which he experienced in his 
 native land. In this mood he had gone
 
 8 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 to the opera, scanning the faces of the 
 women in the boxes with curiosity and 
 a certain unexpected pride in their dis- 
 tinction. 
 
 When under the crowned brightness of 
 Helen's brilliant beauty, he recognized 
 the boyish fancy of his youth, he was 
 astonished and pleased, and experienced 
 a very distinct sensation. He recalled 
 the keen chagrin he had experienced at 
 her girl's indifference and her misunder- 
 standing of him. He admitted the per- 
 sistence with which her memory had 
 haunted him during his first years of 
 absence, and had impulsively written to 
 her. 
 
 On the day he had gone to see her, 
 he recognized with his keen observation 
 every line of her perfected beauty, and 
 responded with all his sensitive nerves 
 to every expression of the charm which 
 lay in her voice, her smile, her manner. 
 Her quick reply to his letter, her gra- 
 cious, unaffected welcome, flattered him,
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 59 
 
 and yet and yet although he had asked 
 her consent he had not returned to see 
 her. His old shyness took possession 
 of him, and his deeply fixed reluctance 
 to form any relation which might ab- 
 sorb him, or separate him from his art, 
 once more commanded him. 
 
 And now this unexpected meeting in 
 the gallery "really, she was very dis- 
 turbing!" "How clever she is," he 
 mused; "how amazing the feminine in- 
 stinct." The exquisite flattery of her 
 manner, her unaffected interest in his 
 work, again took possession of his mind 
 with its soft persuasion, and he smiled 
 to himself. The sound of her voice 
 was in his ears and he confessed to 
 himself that he had never quite forgot- 
 ten it. Its deep music, its mysterious 
 languors, how it expressed her. The 
 droop of her white lids under the 
 straight brows came back to him, her 
 brilliant, upward glance of sudden 
 understanding. "What eyes!" he said.
 
 60 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 "I should like to paint them. What 
 has she done with herself she is rich, 
 idle, probably unhappy ; unless the 
 nature I once knew is quite subdued, 
 and it is not; she is far more intelligent 
 than I thought. No, she is too com- 
 plex, too difficult." 
 
 His thoughts ran thus about her as he 
 finished his walk, and recurred after- 
 wards during the week that followed. 
 He left a card at Mrs. Rivington's door, 
 but the days were long, she had pro- 
 longed her drive in the park, and, 
 indeed, the hour was early, he had not 
 thought to find her.
 
 Chapter V. 
 
 |HE first warm days of April were 
 succeeded by a sudden return 
 of cold, of rain and wind; most of 
 Helen's friends had sailed for Europe, 
 and there was a cessation of opera. 
 Helen had spent several evenings at 
 home, with no other occupation than 
 her own thoughts, which, as usually hap- 
 pened under such conditions, had been 
 making her very uncomfortable. She 
 was seated one day in her drawing-room, 
 idly watching the rain which drove 
 against the window, her book fallen 
 from her hand, her thoughts wandering 
 aimlessly, when she heard the roll of a 
 carriage and a ring at the door. The 
 servant entered the room and asked if 
 she were receiving, and on her affirma- 
 tive answer, announced " Mrs. Lindsay." 
 "Why, Kate," said Mrs. Rivington, 
 61
 
 62 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 rising and kissing her cheek, "how 
 awfully good of you! I didn't suppose 
 anything would bring you out on such 
 a day." 
 
 "My dear," Mrs. Lindsay replied, "I 
 was bored to extinction, and thought 
 you would cheer me up." 
 
 "A sort of last resort when every- 
 thing fails," Helen laughed. "Never 
 mind, I am grateful for my mercies. 
 Sit down, I'll ring for some tea. I am 
 very glad to see you." 
 
 Mrs. Lindsay threw off her wrap and 
 settled herself in the chair by the fire, 
 putting out a small foot in a high- heeled 
 shoe to the blaze. 
 
 "Oh! how comfortable this fire is it 
 is as disagreeable outside as John was 
 last night; but, never mind! he is gone, 
 and that woman with him." 
 
 "Good heavens!" said Helen, "you 
 don't mean to say your husband's 
 eloped?" 
 
 "Eloped! Of course not; he wouldn't
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 63 
 
 know how; it's his aunt who has done 
 nothing but show me my duty since she 
 came. She makes John perfectly un- 
 bearable while she is in the house. He 
 always agrees with her! Fancy I 
 can't do anything with him while she 
 is in the house." 
 
 She was a tall, slight woman, very 
 fashionably dressed, an expression of 
 restless discontent in her brilliant eyes, 
 which were black as if they had been 
 washed in ink. Her face was pale, 
 almost triangular in shape with its 
 whimsical small chin and impertinent 
 nose, her small mouth was brilliantly 
 red, her voice was clear, high pitched 
 and decided. 
 
 Helen took up a bit of embroidery, 
 which lay on the sofa beside her, and 
 looked at her friend. 
 
 "Relations are trying, I admit; is 
 anything else the matter?" 
 
 "Oh, no," Mrs. Lindsay replied, 
 "only I am so tired of New York and
 
 64 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 John won't listen to my going over as 
 every one else does he says he doesn't 
 believe in my tearing across the Atlantic 
 every year he thinks we ought to stay 
 at home and encourage American in- 
 dustries American industries indeed! 
 Can't you hear him? He delivered me 
 a long lecture about it last night at din- 
 ner we dined at home for the first 
 time in three months. I think that is 
 what is the matter. I am afraid I was 
 not intended for domestic life. Never 
 mind, I shall have to get my gowns 
 over here. He will regret that I am 
 sure. I shall make myself look a per- 
 fect fright." 
 
 " He ought to be satisfied with your 
 conscientious encouragement of the 
 American dressmaker at least." 
 "Well, he is good I admit." 
 "You are incorrigible. To hear you, 
 one would believe you were a heartless, 
 frivolous thing you will never admit 
 all the good things I know about you
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 65 
 
 now confess, where have you been this 
 afternoon? You look guilty. 'Children's 
 Nursery,' or 'The Hospital for the 
 Blind' or the " 
 
 "Do be quiet," said Mrs. Lindsay. 
 
 "It is something worse yet! You 
 have been regularly slumming, and have 
 a basket and provisions in your carriage 
 this minute!" 
 
 "Well, it is empty, and I didn't bring 
 it in." She laughed outright. "What 
 have you been doing yourself since 
 Lent began?" 
 
 "Oh nothing nothing absolutely 
 nothing; it is dull I must confess." 
 
 "Why don't we arrange something?" 
 
 "What is there to do?" 
 
 "Shall we go somewhere for Sun- 
 day?" 
 
 Mrs. Lindsay demurred. "Oh, no, 
 it is too early for the country, and then 
 such weather! We should be cross and 
 quarrel before we got back to town." 
 
 "Well, then come and dine with me 
 5
 
 66 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 I will ask anyone you like come say 
 who you want, Kate." 
 
 "No, I don't like dinners, they bore 
 me to death, or to indigestion which 
 leads to it. I am always put next to 
 somebody I don't like, and then I 
 overeat." 
 
 Helen laughed. " But there are din- 
 ners and dinners; we have paid off all 
 our debts by this time, and might 
 arrange something amusing." She 
 stopped a moment thinking. "We 
 needn't dine at home, we might borrow 
 Graham Murray's studio. Did you ever 
 see it?" 
 
 "No, I don't think I have." 
 
 "My dear," said Mrs. Rivington, "it 
 is the most beautiful place I have ever 
 seen in that new building overlooking 
 the park. I think he would lend it to 
 us, and we could get some nice people 
 together, it might be quite amusing 
 What do you think?" 
 
 "Is it really queer and different?"
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 67 
 
 asked Mrs. Lindsay. " It might be 
 nice." 
 
 "I shan't describe it to you, but we will 
 go there one day and see it if you like." 
 
 "Shall we give it together?" 
 
 "Yes, why not?" 
 
 "John won't be here, but your hus- 
 band will, I suppose." 
 
 "Yes, and I think it might amuse 
 him. He said the other day he would 
 like to see the rooms. What a pity Mr. 
 Lindsay will be away. Your domestic- 
 ity isn't lasting very long, is it?" 
 
 " Quite long enough but who shall 
 we have?" 
 
 "Oh, Grace Armitage, I suppose, and 
 Mrs. deCourcy." 
 
 " Yes, Grace is so decorative and Mrs. 
 de Courcy will dance. We must have 
 Teddy, too." 
 
 Mrs. Rivington looked up in surprise. 
 " Is Teddy de Courcy here? " 
 
 "Yes, didn't you know? He landed 
 last week."
 
 68 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 "How is he looking?" 
 
 "Oh, very fit indeed with a fresh 
 stock of stories and bibelots. He has 
 begun to distribute them already. I 
 wish you could see the fan he has 
 brought me." 
 
 " How nice of him," said Helen. 
 "He never forgets you, does he? But 
 no wonder you are friends. You are 
 really so amusing, you two, when you 
 are together. It doesn't make much 
 difference who else we ask to the dinner, 
 you and Teddy would make anything 
 go." 
 
 "I'm afraid he will get drunk, but as 
 he is funnier than ever that way, I sup- 
 pose it doesn't matter." 
 
 "His wife will keep him in order, I 
 think. He always behaves better when 
 she is there." 
 
 "The reason why he stays away so 
 much, I suppose." 
 
 "Undoubtedly."
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 69 
 
 "There is Graham Murray himself 
 and his wife," said Mrs. Rivington. 
 
 "Yes, of course, she is a nice woman. 
 I like her." 
 
 "Yes, so do I; but I do wish she 
 wouldn't always wreathe her brow with 
 ivy. It was pretty some years ago, but 
 why does she go on wearing it?" 
 
 "To deck the ruin I suppose," said 
 Mrs. Lindsay. "Dear me, if people 
 could only see how they looked. It is 
 fatal to be original at her age." 
 
 "Her age, my dear, is 1830. We 
 must be grateful, she doesn't wear side 
 curls and hoops." 
 
 "We have five women now. We must 
 think of some men." 
 
 "Who shall we ask? Dear me! what 
 a dearth there is of them. I wish we 
 could discover some new ones." 
 
 "So do I," said Mrs. Lindsay with 
 emphasis; "they might have some grat- 
 itude for all we do for them. For my
 
 JO A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 part, I'm tired of society anyway. The 
 men Stre all utterly spoiled, and as for 
 the wbmett they are cats, the whole of 
 them, they do nothing but talk about 
 each other I am sure they do about 
 me, and about you too, my dear ; don't 
 think you are exempt." 
 
 "I don't suppose I am," said Helen 
 quietly. She had taken a small tablet 
 from a table on which to write the list 
 of guests and now sat waiting, pencil in 
 hand, quite undisturbed. "Why do you 
 go out then?" 
 
 "Because there is nothing else to 
 do," said Mrs. Lindsay, looking mood- 
 ily into the fire. Then she rose impul- 
 sively and seated herself by Helen on 
 the sofa. "Whom have you written 
 down," she asked with interest. 
 
 "No one else," said Helen. "Can't 
 you suggest someone?" 
 
 "No, I can't. I only know the old 
 ones." 
 
 Helen was silent a moment.
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. Jl 
 
 "What are you thinking of?" said 
 Mrs. Lindsay. 
 
 "I was wondering whether you would 
 like a man I used to know, and who 
 has just come over here with his pic- 
 tures." 
 
 "You don't mean Aytoun, do you? 
 for if you do I think I might." 
 
 "Why! would you? I thought you 
 didn't like artists." 
 
 "Well, ordinarily, I don't. I think 
 they are queer, and I haven't an idea 
 what to say to them, but Grace Armi- 
 tage dragged me in to see his pic- 
 tures the other day, when I was driving 
 with her, and I liked them. I think I 
 will have my portrait done, that is if 
 he is nice. I don't want to be bored. 
 John has been insisting I should be 
 done." 
 
 "He is nice, very but I don't know 
 whether you would like him." 
 
 "Why not?" asked Mrs. Lindsay, 
 with a little air of chagrin.
 
 72 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 "Oh, well," said Helen, "after all 
 perhaps you would there is only one 
 thing absolutely certain about you, and 
 that is your unexpectedness. We will 
 ask him anyway." 
 
 "Very well, now we need another 
 woman and two more men to make up 
 the dozen." 
 
 "There are the Bertrams and Tom 
 Gary." 
 
 "Would the Bertrams come in from 
 the country? They only went out last 
 week?" 
 
 "Oh, yes, I think so, and they are 
 really very nice. She is so pretty, and 
 I like Louis, too. We always get on 
 very well together, and if we want Tom 
 Gary, he won't come unless she is in- 
 vited." 
 
 " Are you friends again with Tom ? " 
 Helen asked. 
 
 " Oh yes, no one is worth quarrelling 
 with. I thought he was good looking 
 once. How could I ? "
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 73 
 
 " So he is, very," said Helen. " I am 
 sure he thinks so himself." 
 
 " He ought to know, he is the best 
 authority, he has given the subject thor- 
 ough attention. They are none of them 
 worth thinking about. After all my 
 old John is the only one I could ever 
 put up with, and he is a necessary evil. 
 Here is the tea. Give me a cup 
 and let's talk some more about the 
 dinner." 
 
 The servant brought in the table and 
 lighted the lamps, which filled the room 
 with a warm light, shining upon Helen's 
 dark head and her white hands busy 
 among the tea cups. Mrs. Lindsay 
 drank her tea leisurely and with evident 
 relish, while they discussed the details 
 of their plans, and then it grew late ; 
 it was still raining and had become 
 quite dark. Mrs. Lindsay remembered 
 she was dining early and going to the 
 play ; she rose to go, but turned sud- 
 denly at the door.
 
 74 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 "We haven't decided what day we 
 shall have it! " she exclaimed. 
 
 "To be sure, how silly." Helen 
 turned to her desk and referred to her 
 engagement book. "Will next week 
 Thursday do ? That is the first day 
 I am free." 
 
 "Yes, I think so," said Mrs. Lindsay, 
 drawing on her gloves. " Good-bye, 
 dear; I must really go. Oh, I forgot, 
 John may be at home by that time, and 
 that will make thirteen." 
 
 "What shall we do, we can't get 
 along without you? " 
 
 "Never mind, it won't make any 
 difference. John and I are always at 
 sixes and sevens." 
 
 " How absurd," said Helen laughing. 
 
 Mrs. Lindsay kissed her affection- 
 ately. " Nice lady," she said. " Good- 
 bye, I can't stay another minute."
 
 Chapter VI. 
 
 * 
 
 IHEN Helen sat down at her desk 
 the next morning after this con- 
 versation with her friend, and began her 
 note to Aytoun, she found her pen a 
 laggard. She was astonished at this, 
 and made a mental admission of her 
 self-consciousness. She knew quite well 
 that she was taking an aggressive step 
 in giving Aytoun this proof of her rec- 
 ollection of him and following up what 
 she more than half suspected was a re- 
 treat. She had assured herself of the 
 early hour which he had chosen to leave 
 his card, and had sufficiently deplored 
 her own curiosity. She knew herself to 
 be taking account of the appearance 
 and not the actual and significant in- 
 tention in acknowledging the empty 
 courtesy by this invitation. But she 
 75
 
 76 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 justified herself for this error in tactics 
 by the thought of his remembered shy- 
 ness, and refused to believe this expres- 
 sion other than an indication of his per- 
 sistent character. She laughed a little 
 nervously at the care with which she 
 wrote and re-wrote her formal little 
 note, saying to herself that in any case 
 she was not taking him seriously. 
 
 She half expected a refusal of her in- 
 vitation, and when Aytoun's note of 
 acceptance arrived she was relieved, and 
 contentedly admitted to herself an ac- 
 cession of intelligence in the manage- 
 ment of particular cases. 
 
 The balance of Aytoun's desire and 
 reluctance to see Mrs. Rivington again 
 was as she had expected, tipped in the 
 negative scale by the weight of his in- 
 born shyness; her invitation promptly 
 displaced this, and he found himself 
 looking forward to their meeting with 
 an anticipation as pleasurable as it was 
 disturbing.
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 77 
 
 When he arrived at the studio in the 
 top of the tall building to which Mrs. 
 Rivington's note had directed him, on the 
 evening of the day set for the dinner, 
 it was already filled with people, laugh- 
 ing and talking with the prompt inter- 
 change of long familiarity. He paused 
 at the door, confused with the sense of 
 his own strangeness, when Mrs. Riving- 
 ton caught sight of him and came for- 
 ward, smiling, to welcome him. 
 
 "My husband has failed me," she 
 said. "He had promised to come, and 
 I thought he would up to the last mo- 
 ment, but he rarely abandons his whist. 
 It is I who have to give him up after all." 
 She laughed a little, hesitating slightly 
 over her words; then she turned and 
 introduced Aytoun to Murray Graham, 
 the owner of the beautiful room in 
 which they had assembled. He was a 
 tall man with reddish hair, growing 
 awkwardly away from a fine brow, whose 
 simple cordiality of manner put Aytoun
 
 78 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 at his ease. He recognized the brother 
 artist and they fell into mutual question- 
 ings, Mrs. Rivington standing by when 
 the Bertrams, who were the late comers, 
 arrived, and the company sat down to 
 dinner. 
 
 Aytoun was between Helen and her 
 friend Mrs. Armitage, who began talk- 
 ing about some marriage, just an- 
 nounced, of people well known to them 
 both, and for a moment he was left to 
 himself. He took advantage of this 
 moment of quiet to look about him. 
 
 The room was large and of a curious 
 shape, with one deeply curving recess 
 and many nooks and corners hung with 
 curtains. Curious lamps of brass and 
 bronze, shining mysteriously among the 
 shadows which gathered in the corners 
 of the room, lit into luminous ruby 
 smoothly hanging folds of deep red 
 drapery, or with wandering rays brought 
 out here and there the figures or foliage 
 of a tapestry. In a far corner above a
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. /Q 
 
 low seat with cushions, the early moon 
 scattered opal prisms through a painted 
 window. The table stood in the recess, 
 whose ceiling was supported by fluted 
 columns of gold with carved and wreath- 
 ing ornaments of laurel, and tapestry 
 hung upon the wall. The table was in 
 the form of a half circle, following the 
 shape of the recess, the seats were curved 
 divans set against the wall and heaped 
 with pillows. In the curve of the table 
 opposite to where the guests were sit- 
 ting were placed two enormous Roman 
 jars of a light green color, adorned with 
 deeper green leaves, which held tall 
 laurel trees, in which lights were con- 
 cealed shining from among the foliage 
 with the clear blue radiance of a dia- 
 mond. The table was covered with a 
 heavy yellow brocade, and heaped with 
 roses and orchids, while orchids hung 
 from the ceiling. The tinkling music 
 of a Spanish band of mandolin players 
 behind one of the curtains, filled the
 
 8O A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 room with its sparkling spray-like sound. 
 The glimmer from the laurel trees 
 brought out with clear lights and clean 
 shadows, the faces of the men and 
 women who sat about the table. The 
 strongly variant types of the women 
 astonished Aytoun. He had known 
 his own country only in the quiet by- 
 ways of New England, where the emaci- 
 ated English pattern is so generally im- 
 pressed upon a melancholy and strenuous 
 race, he was utterly unprepared for this 
 contrasting combination of exotic beauty, 
 which the great city with its inevitable 
 choice of the best had offered as it were 
 for his inspection; he alone among 
 them being the conscious and im- 
 pressed spectator. At the outer curve 
 of the table, between the columns, sat 
 Mrs. Armitage, decorative truly, with 
 the fine columnar lines of her throat, 
 her short, well-cut nose, with its fine 
 nostrils, and the free rippled sweep of 
 the heavy, reddish hair. She moved
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 8 1 
 
 her head with a proud, almost courage- 
 ous lift as she joined conversation with 
 her neighbor, Murray Graham, speaking 
 in a deep and resonantly musical voice. 
 "A beautiful, high-spirited and intelli- 
 gent woman," Aytoun thought as he 
 watched her. She was talking to Mur- 
 ray about his last new portrait of a 
 woman well known to them all, judi- 
 ciously flattering, genuinely interested. 
 Aytoun wondered what he should find 
 to say when she should turn that beauti- 
 ful head toward him he was content 
 to wait, he enjoyed looking at her. 
 
 At one end of the table sat Mrs. de 
 Courcy, a very dark woman, of a pure 
 Andalusian type. She was laughing 
 and talking, the focus of a story telling 
 eddy. Her brilliant dark face, and 
 flowing line of throat and chin, floated 
 like a tropic flower over the wave of 
 her snowy white shoulders. She wore 
 many jewels and radiated warm happi- 
 ness and good humor. 
 6
 
 82 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 At the other end Mrs. Bertram sat 
 primly in her seat, fair-haired with a 
 Puritan fairness of skin, dressed in 
 white, a blue ribbon in her yellow locks 
 and no other color but the two roses of 
 her cheeks and the rose at her shoulder. 
 There was a faint blue shadow about 
 the eyes, and a delicate fragility was 
 suggested in the slight roundness of 
 the arms, the blue veins in her temples. 
 Her eyes were keen and alert, and her 
 voice was clear with no mysteries or 
 suggestions in its tones. Next her was 
 Tom Gary, master of the Willow Brook 
 Hunt, a tall, thin man with a very 
 straight nose, a drooping, fair mustache 
 and a fatigued expression about his 
 keen, blue eyes. She was chaffing him 
 with a light ease and evident interest, 
 which showed that she not only appre- 
 ciated, but understood him. Mrs. 
 Rivington and Mrs. Lindsay, in arrang- 
 ing their dinner, had not neglected to 
 put them together. They never went
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 83 
 
 where the other was not invited not 
 that they were in love with each other 
 far from it, but she was the prettiest 
 woman of the young set they both be- 
 longed to, and he the smartest man. It 
 looked well to be together. 
 
 Their conversation was the light run- 
 ning gossip of the hunting field, or of 
 their friends, whom they referred to by 
 their first names. " Ruth is leading 
 Tony cleverly up the fence this time, 
 don't you think ? " Aytoun overheard 
 her saying to her companion : " Yes, it 
 looks like it now," was the answer. 
 " She has a wonderfully light hand, but 
 he is a rank refuser. Nobody knows 
 what will happen at the finish." 
 
 On the other side of Mrs. Bertram a 
 small dark-haired man with quickly 
 moving eyes and an inky black mous- 
 tache was shouting across the table to 
 Mrs. Lindsay. This was Teddy de 
 Courcy, and he was in his best form. 
 Helen had insisted on putting him on
 
 84 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 the opposite side of the table from Mrs. 
 Lindsay, and, as she had anticipated, 
 they had struck fire and were keeping 
 the table in a roar. 
 
 Helen watched Aytoun as he sur- 
 veyed the room and the company, 
 divining the effect of the beauty of the 
 one and the variety of the other upon 
 his mind, with that quick intuition of 
 another's thought which was her pecu- 
 liar gift. 
 
 " It is a pretty room," she said, with 
 an upward inflection. 
 
 Aytoun looked at the fair company 
 of laughing, .white shouldered women 
 about the rose-strewn table and at Mrs. 
 Armitage with her auburn hair and 
 gown of velvet, seated in the midst, 
 against the background of tapestry and 
 fluted pillars. 
 
 "Venice and Veronese," he ex- 
 claimed enthusiastically, "wonderfully 
 beautiful ! I am so glad you asked
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 8$ 
 
 She smiled and began to tell him of 
 the people, introducing him to his 
 other neighbor, and then she character- 
 istically brought up a topic of interest 
 common to them all and soon the four, 
 Mrs. Armitage and Murray, Aytoun 
 and Helen, were talking about art and 
 architecture, literature and music, the 
 knell of realism, the birth of symbol- 
 ism. They were very cultivated indeed. 
 Mrs. Armitage chanted a line of Byron, 
 Helen quoted a verse of Verlaine, 
 which Aytoun had last heard from the 
 lips of the convict poet himself, in a 
 reeking brasserie on the other side of 
 the Seine, and which had haunted him 
 ever since. 
 "Qu'as fu fait, otoi quivoila pleurant 
 
 sans cesse" 
 
 " Qu'as fu fait o tot qui voila dt fa 
 jeunesse" 
 
 The despairing cry of a ruined soul 
 dropping simply, pathetically from the 
 pure lips of this daughter of the Puri-
 
 86 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 tans, startled Aytoun again with the 
 same thrill of sympathy which had 
 united them that moment in the gallery 
 before his picture. She hesitated a 
 moment "how does that verse end?" 
 she said. " I forget." 
 
 Aytoun finished it. Their eyes met 
 and one more unforgetable instant was 
 added to their lives. For a moment 
 the gay voices and laughter sounded 
 afar, and the noisy tinkle of the man- 
 dolins sank to a murmur. The solitude 
 of this insistent sympathy bound them 
 in an invisible circle which contained 
 nothing but their consciousness of each 
 other. Then it passed. 
 
 " How long have you lived, I'd like 
 to know?" he asked her, puzzled, half 
 laughing. " You seer! with a saint's 
 face. What have you to do with the 
 occult maladies of a lost soul ? Where 
 have you known despair ? " 
 
 "Ah," she said, looking at him with 
 her mysterious eyes, " the griefs of the
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 8/ 
 
 imagination are many, I am centuries 
 old." 
 
 "What's that you say," asked Mur- 
 ray, " about being centuries old ? " 
 
 " Oh," said Mrs. Armitage, " Helen's 
 romantic. It's her most effective mood, 
 but not her only one; ask her to dance." 
 
 Helen looked up and saw Teddy 
 de Courcy, who had left his seat at the 
 end of the table, and was dancing a 
 bolero to the Spanish tune of the man- 
 dolins. They were all applauding him, 
 clapping their hands in time to the 
 music, as he threw his slight figure into 
 the graceful poses of the dance. 
 
 "Oh yes, come dance," said Murray, 
 "dance, Mrs. Rivington, dance!" they 
 all entreated. 
 
 She hesitated a moment, and then 
 her face breaking into a merry smile, 
 her eyes sparkling with excitement, she 
 slipped from her place and joined the 
 dancer on the floor. 
 
 She was dressed in a trailing gown of
 
 88 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 yellow satin, with a deep red rose fas- 
 tened in her hair ; bending low, she 
 swept her gown away from her feet, 
 gathering its heavy folds in one hand, 
 while with the other she held her fan 
 above her head in a pose of indescriba- 
 ble individuality and grace, and then 
 she danced, untaught, unguided, except 
 by her own beauty, which seemed to 
 dictate every dissolving pose. 
 
 Aytoun watched her, bewildered, fas- 
 cinated beyond hope of recall. 
 
 The dainty challenge with which she 
 threw back her head and lightly stamped 
 her slippered foot, the luring invitation 
 of her liquid eyes, half unconscious of 
 their charm, as she bent and swayed 
 with a fawn-like lightness of motion, 
 swept over Aytoun's senses with a 
 strange feeling of faintness. 
 
 Suddenly she stopped and threw her 
 slight body backwards, lifting her fan 
 once more above her head. 
 
 There was a storm of applause.
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 89 
 
 "She never danced so well," whis- 
 pered Mrs. Armitage. 
 
 "Oh, dance again," they entreated, 
 and still protested as she found her way 
 to her seat, blushing, confused, aston- 
 ished at herself. 
 
 And then the merry contagion seized 
 them all, and there was a confusion of 
 singing and dancing. 
 
 Aytoun could only look on with ever 
 increasing astonishment at these people 
 born in artificiality, nurtured on con- 
 ventions, who in a rare moment of 
 graceful abandon could return so easily 
 to natural, almost childish, amusement. 
 
 The scene changed continually. 
 
 Mrs. Armitage with an applauding 
 circle about her, snatched a gold cap 
 and an inlaid sword from an Oriental 
 canopy and drawing her sumptuous 
 gown away from her fine straight ankles 
 and ruffled petticoat essayed to show 
 her newly learned skill in fencing. 
 Throwing herself forward and recover-
 
 9O A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 ing position with astonishing ease and 
 grace, she revealed the Greek perfec- 
 tion of her figure. 
 
 And then the group dissolved and 
 formed again in a ring under Mrs. de 
 Courcy's leadership, dancing and sing- 
 ing at the top of their voices. 
 
 "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer 
 true," they sang, these women with the 
 diadems of queens, as if they had been 
 a group of ragged urchins on a street 
 corner. 
 
 Aytoun wondered how long their 
 spirits would last, and finally they did 
 become exhausted. 
 
 Teddy de Courcy threw himself at 
 Mrs. Lindsay's feet, swearing quite 
 audibly his life long devotion, and 
 Murray took luxurious possession of a 
 comfortable divan, Mrs. de Courcy and 
 Mrs. Armitage on either side, while he 
 explained benevolently with a not too 
 distant appreciation, his faith in the 
 religion of beauty.
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. QI 
 
 Mrs. Grahame, she of the ivy wreath, 
 had become very much fatigued, for 
 she had danced with rash enthusiasm 
 forgetting her years. She was fanning 
 herself breathlessly, while Mr. Lindsay 
 and Louis Bertram talked across her 
 ample draperies about the latest flurry 
 in the street. 
 
 Mrs. Bertram and Tom Gary, who 
 had held themselves slightly aloof from 
 the prevailing gayety, were pursuing 
 their study of each other, and Helen 
 and Aytoun found themselves in one of 
 the quiet corners, partly screened by a 
 heavy red curtain, which hung against 
 a gilded column. 
 
 In a moment, this slight ebullition of 
 gayety, like a burst of sunshine on a 
 wintry day, was over. Aytoun was 
 astonished to witness its sudden disso- 
 lution, to see that no sleeping lions 
 were loosened in this merry play; the 
 atmosphere of cool detachment, of fa- 
 miliarity without affection, of uncon-
 
 Q2 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 ventional demonstration, without the 
 most remote significance in impulse, 
 amazed him, with his totally differing 
 experiences, his ignorance of his own 
 country. The will o' wisp of febrile 
 gayety and self-forgetting excitement 
 floats usually over old marshes of decay, 
 but here it dances over ice. 
 
 The mandolins still tinkled on, but 
 the flowers lay scattered on the floor, 
 the lights burned a little dimly, and the 
 delicious quiet of the end of a feast set- 
 tled down upon the room. In a mo- 
 ment they would all scatter, but just 
 now they talked to each other in pleas- 
 ant mellowed confidences in a passing 
 moment of content. 
 
 Behind the curtain Aytoun and Helen 
 sat as if alone, the voices and the music 
 coming to their ears in an unheeded 
 murmur. 
 
 The excitement of the dance still 
 glowed in her cheeks, and a curly ten- 
 dril of hair escaped over her brow.
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 93 
 
 She was rallying him gayly about his 
 fear of her, sitting with her hands 
 clasped over her knees, her head thrown 
 slightly back, while she looked at him 
 from under her straight brows provok- 
 ingly. 
 
 Aytoun began to dream, and the un- 
 forgotten fancies of his boyhood clasped 
 him again as he sat there in the cur- 
 tained shadow listening to her voice. 
 He felt again the little mortal sinking 
 of the heart, when she turned her head 
 and looked at him full with those deep 
 clairvoyant eyes. The feeling of slavery, 
 of subjection, which had frightened him 
 as a boy, swept over him now over- 
 poweringly. She had one look he had 
 never quite banished from his mind, it 
 had haunted him for years. The red, 
 half-open lips, the slight dilating of the 
 sensitive nostrils under the indrawn 
 breath, the drooping liquid eyes, ah, it 
 was intolerable! She could not know 
 how cruel it was. So she had looked
 
 94 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 in his remembrance, so she was looking 
 now, but her voice was clearly sweet; as 
 she repeated : 
 
 "Confess, you are afraid! " 
 
 "And if I am," he answered falter- 
 ing, " are you not afraid of my fear 
 there is contagion in a panic." 
 
 " No," she said, meeting his intensely 
 questioning gaze, with a disarming 
 glance from frank wide-open eyes, " no, 
 you understand me. Perhaps we may 
 understand each other. There is no 
 fear where no darkness is. We were 
 friends once, let us be friends again 
 say yes." 
 
 He took her hands and kissed them 
 lingeringly, one after the other, unre- 
 buked, completely conquered, and in 
 her face was a look of beautifying happi- 
 ness, and in his mind the farewell to 
 calculation or regret as he faltered : 
 
 " Anything, anything to you."
 
 Chapter VII. 
 
 JRIGHT weather came again in 
 the last days of April, and with 
 it a final week of opera, a parting obli- 
 gation to the winter's occupations. 
 
 Aytoun was astonished at the willing- 
 ness he observed in himself to accept 
 the invitations which came to him to 
 attend it, from Mrs. Lindsay, who was 
 still contemplating her portrait, from 
 Mrs. Armitage, who confessed herself 
 interested in the personality of the 
 famous painter, and from others of her 
 kind. He no longer attempted to mis- 
 name the preoccupation which filled his 
 nights and haunted his footsteps like a 
 presence, and if he had, the keenness of 
 his disappointment at not seeing Mrs. 
 Rivington at the Opera would have en- 
 lightened him. The resentful reluctance 
 95
 
 g6 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 to be made a plaything of, his own tor- 
 menting shyness, and his admitted 
 ignorance of the influences and preju- 
 dices which governed Helen's nature, 
 had all been banished, and he daily 
 strove to solve the glittering puzzle 
 which was always before his mind. For 
 some reason she had chosen to be in- 
 terested in him; the fear which the 
 recognition of this interest brought, still 
 disturbed, but no longer ruled him; 
 instead, the persistent vision of her face 
 hypnotized his consciousness into a de- 
 licious subjection. This attitude was so 
 strongly felt that he made no effort to 
 see her, but waited impatiently for her 
 summons. For this reason he had gone 
 every night to the opera, expecting and 
 hoping to see her, but a passing illness 
 of her husband kept her housed, and it 
 was only on the last night, when the 
 lights went up after the first act, that he 
 discovered her sitting in her box with 
 General Rivington beside her.
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 97 
 
 She was dressed very simply in white, 
 looking like a girl beside her gray- 
 haired husband, and at the moment Ay- 
 toun saw her, was sitting a little lan- 
 guidly, her hands laid carelessly in her 
 lap, while she still held her pre-occupied 
 gaze upon the fallen curtain, but when 
 in obedience to the communication of 
 Ay toun's gaze, she turned and recognized 
 him, he thought he saw a permission 
 for him to join her. 
 
 Her manner was very simple and 
 sweet, as she introduced him to her hus- 
 band and offered him a seat. He was 
 impressed by the change from the bril- 
 liant aggressive mood in which he had 
 last seen her. As he noted the shade 
 of melancholy on her quiet face, the 
 vision of her lonely youth and woman- 
 hood seen thus in this glimpse of re- 
 pose swept over him with a feeling 
 very near to pity, and this sadness 
 and the womanly sensitiveness of her 
 mouth stirred him even more deeply 
 
 7
 
 98 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 than the victorious gayety of her former 
 mood. 
 
 Although intensely virile in will, and 
 in the vigorous development of mind 
 and body, Aytoun possessed something 
 of the woman's instinct, an almost clair- 
 voyant intuition, the common founda- 
 tion of the artistic and the feminine 
 natures. In a moment while she sat 
 there quite simply, her clear eyes meet- 
 ing his, unclouded with any preoccupa- 
 tion or thought of self, the riddle was 
 riddle no longer, and the loneliness, the 
 beauty and the sadness of her soul was 
 revealed to him, clear as a limpid 
 stream. He set his teeth and looked 
 away. General Rivington was talking to 
 him, speaking cordially of his pleasure 
 in seeing a friend of his wife's. Aytoun 
 observed how brilliant were the dark 
 eyes, how erect the figure, but the vigor 
 had left his voice, which was dry, but 
 distinguished in its modulation. He 
 questioned Aytoun about the painters
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 99 
 
 of his own day, but his mind had suf- 
 fered the inevitable crystallization of 
 old age, and he became a little peremp- 
 tory in some of his statements. Aytoun 
 was compelled to parry them as well as 
 he could to escape a disagreement with 
 him, and then he thought of the evi- 
 dently hopeless separation between 
 Helen's mind and that of her husband, 
 and of the courteous consideration 
 which was only too apparent in his 
 manner towards his wife. " So this is 
 her horizon," he thought to himself, 
 " this her prison house. There is no 
 escape from gratitude." 
 
 Helen did not attempt to turn the 
 conversation, but the sadness of her face 
 took on a deeper shade, and Aytoun's 
 comprehension of her mind became 
 more clearly defined. She did not re- 
 alize the significance of this passing 
 mood. There are many revelations in 
 an ebbing tide. 
 
 A number of other men came in, with
 
 IOO A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 whom Mrs. Rivington talked in a per- 
 functory manner, but as she motioned 
 to Aytoun to take the seat directly be- 
 hind her, they soon departed. 
 
 And then the lights fell again, and 
 the music filled the air with its vibrat- 
 ing waves, inundating Helen's mind, 
 answering, subduing and expressing 
 the bitter longings of her empty soul. 
 Aytoun sat quietly behind her in silence 
 his mind, which was filled with thoughts 
 of her, unconsciously communicating its 
 influence to hers and gradually Helen 
 become conscious of this thought and 
 was vaguely comforted. They spoke 
 but little, but a delicious sympathy, 
 wordless but expressed to them both by 
 the music which surrounded them like 
 an ether, merged their double con- 
 sciousness into one. 
 
 Just in front of him, near, almost too 
 near, was the white line of her throat 
 and shoulder, he could hear the quiet 
 taking of her breath and the faint per-
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. IOI 
 
 fume of her hair made his heart beat 
 dumbly. Scenes succeeded scenes, one 
 act followed another, and the applause 
 rose and lapsed into silence. Helen 
 knew nothing, but this strange happi- 
 ness which was rising in her heart like 
 a flood. Aytoun realized nothing, ex- 
 cept this new understanding of her, 
 which was absorbing all his conscious- 
 ness, and which under the appeal of her 
 beauty and her loneliness strengthened 
 into a tyrannical impulse of possession. 
 As Helen sat there so near to him, she 
 felt the silent command, turned away 
 her head, and set her whitening lips, 
 "No, no," she said to herself, "I will 
 not look at him, I dare not." 
 
 The music stopped, her husband left 
 them, to give the orders for the carriage 
 and they were alone. 
 
 Helen moved from her chair. "Is it 
 over?" she asked him with the dazed 
 look of one awakening from a dream. 
 
 "No, not over," Aytoun answered
 
 IO2 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 with an insistent look, "Only just 
 begun." 
 
 "But yes, it is quite over," she re- 
 peated, wilfully ignoring his meaning in 
 the tremor of her new born fear. "Will 
 you give me my cloak?" 
 
 Aytoun put it over her shoulders, and 
 then as she turned, he paused deliber- 
 ately in the half darkness and looked 
 down upon her bended head. 
 
 There was a moment of intolerable 
 suspense while the silence laid its com- 
 mands upon them, and then the stronger 
 will was victor, and Helen threw back 
 her head and looked full into Aytoun's 
 eyes, meeting there a look of worship, 
 of comprehension, of command, and 
 returning her confession of mingled joy 
 and fear. 
 
 Aytoun was satisfied.
 
 Chapter VIII. 
 
 [HE days which followed brought 
 to Helen the nearest approach 
 to happiness she had ever known. She 
 saw Aytoun constantly, and the impres- 
 sion of intimacy strengthened daily. 
 He never permitted her to feel that he 
 had forgotten her, and there were no 
 lapses unaccounted for. They had 
 reached that delicious period of friend- 
 ship in which they never parted without 
 some definite arrangement for a future 
 meeting. 
 
 When Helen awoke in the morning, 
 it was with an impression of beatitude 
 as if from some blissful drama of the 
 night, she would keep her eye-lids 
 closed to prolong the moment of return- 
 ing consciousness with its dim sugges- 
 tion of content, before she awoke to the 
 103
 
 IO4 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 knowledge of another day with its cer- 
 tainty of full and satisfying pleasure. 
 The depressing environment of her 
 youth and the negative and confining 
 influences of her marriage had never 
 brought her anything in any way com- 
 parable to the sense of mental exhilara- 
 tion which she daily experienced through 
 association with Aytoun. She had, 
 unnoticed by those about her, a pro- 
 foundly curious mind, and a just and 
 exquisite literary taste. It was an 
 instant and irresistible delight to her to 
 find her impressions and opinions rati- 
 fied by the agreement of Aytoun's larger 
 experience, her taste justified by his 
 approbation and sympathy. 
 
 "Who told you to read this book," he 
 asked her one day, picking up a rare 
 volume of the poetry of a young French- 
 man who died after having put forth a 
 slender book of strangely beautiful 
 verse, whose curious sought-out effects 
 and indefinable charm, made his work
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 10$ 
 
 only appreciated by a very few of those 
 best acquainted with the symbolic school 
 of writers, which arose after his death. 
 
 "I don't believe there is another vol- 
 ume in the country I knew him well," 
 he said. Then he told her of the man ; 
 his pitiable ugliness, the exquisite flavor 
 of his mind, his early death ; and Helen 
 listened, her mind closing over this and 
 other treasures, which his wider exper- 
 ience offered her, believing that in the 
 enjoyment of his friendship she was only 
 obeying the demands of her own nature. 
 By force of the extreme distinction of 
 her taste, her forms of expression had a 
 peculiar grace and almost literary value 
 of style, which he was the first to recog- 
 nize, remark upon, and stimulate. Every 
 day he brought to her tea table at the 
 hour when she usually received him, 
 some book difficult to find which he had 
 procured for her, or sketches of out of 
 the way places where he had found a 
 peculiar individuality or charm.
 
 106 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 For the moment they were both con- 
 tent. Aytoun was charmed by the 
 finesse of this mind of a distinguished 
 woman such as he had never known 
 before, held in willing subjection by 
 the loyal directness of her friendship 
 and responding deeply to the purity and 
 sweetness of her character. Her wishes, 
 her wants, became every day clearer and 
 more important to him, and in observ- 
 ing them he was for the moment satis- 
 fied, and to them both the impression of 
 these days of their growing friendship 
 was one of almost unbroken quiet, of an 
 enveloping and subduing charm. 
 
 Helen's friends found the new-comer 
 attractive, and when she did not see him 
 quietly at her own house, she met him 
 at small dinners and parties to the thea- 
 tre, and once they drove out into the 
 country on one of the road-coaches, 
 which had been taken by Mrs. Lindsay, 
 and lunched at a club house with a party 
 of her friends. Together they reveled
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. IO/ 
 
 in the glories of their first day in the 
 open, as they drove along among the 
 flowering trees, the faint blue sky and 
 floating clouds of spring above them 
 amid a chorus of exulting birds. 
 
 In June, Helen and General Rivington, 
 somewhat earlier than was their habit 
 moved to Newport, whither Mrs. Lind- 
 say soon followed them, and as she had 
 finally decided upon her portrait, and 
 it was as yet too early to be disturbed 
 by the midsummer season, Aytoun de- 
 cided to paint it there. He found a 
 room in a little farm house near the 
 sea, and there established his studio. 
 
 General Rivington's house had been 
 built before the time of marble pal- 
 aces, or Queen Anne cottages. Its 
 massive simplicity was softened by lux- 
 uriant vines. Within, the rooms were 
 large and of a stately formality. Helen 
 had wisely refrained from any attempt 
 to alter or modernize them, but had 
 softened the brilliancy of the damasks
 
 IO8 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 and bright brocades with a profusion of 
 plants and flowers. She had, however, 
 persuaded her husband to widen the 
 veranda which overlooked the sea and 
 there under its broad roof she had 
 hung swinging Indian seats, and ar- 
 ranged screened corners where she 
 could idly watch the waves, which broke 
 upon the rocks below. 
 
 General Rivington was very fond of his 
 Newport house, but it was his custom to 
 spend the early weeks of the summer 
 in yachting with his friends. So it 
 happened that June in Newport was the 
 quietest month of Helen's year. She 
 made no effort to anticipate the season, 
 which turns the inhabitants of the beau- 
 tiful still city by the sea into moon- 
 maniacs during August, but abandoned 
 herself with joy to the reposeful influ- 
 ences of the embowering trees, the blue 
 and sleeping sea. Sometimes in those 
 lonely weeks, ths beauty which sur- 
 rounded her seemed almost too fair.
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. IOQ 
 
 " This summer for once," she thought 
 blissfully, "Spring has kept its prom- 
 ises ; " thus her happy days slipped by 
 her, each one crystalline and magical, 
 and in her heart was the song of birds. 
 
 She saw Aytoun every day, and their 
 friendship seemed at last to have found 
 its proper setting. Every succeeding 
 mood found its natural expression. 
 Sometimes when life was vivid and 
 youth was with them, they would ride 
 together in the early morning, breath- 
 ing the salt air of the sea which floated 
 to them mingled with the perfumes of 
 the gardens luxurious with the roses of 
 June. Often Helen would come to his 
 studio in the afternoon, while the por- 
 trait of her friend was being painted. 
 
 Unconsciously to herself, Mrs. Lind- 
 say was enjoying the free atmosphere 
 which haunts a studio. Bohemia, the 
 land of liberty, waves its flag wherever 
 there are gathered together an easel, a 
 palette and some brushes. Mrs. Lind-
 
 IIO A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 say would smoke her cigarette as she 
 posed, gossiping the while and telling 
 stories; while Helen, speaking little, 
 would watch the painting, asking Ay- 
 toun a question here and there, delight- 
 ing in the exhibition of a fine talent 
 intent on its work, watching the con- 
 centrated look of the eyes, the swiftly 
 moving brushes, the rapid and myster- 
 ious transfer of the face of the sitter 
 with its elusive individuality to the 
 canvas. 
 
 Aytoun was interested in his subject, 
 and had rendered with astonishing 
 faithfulness the alert sarcastic expression 
 of Mrs. Lindsay's brilliant dark face. 
 The flexibility of the slight figure was 
 indicated in the pose, sinuous, sug- 
 gestive, daringly original, which repre- 
 sented her body, leaning, almost twisted, 
 backward in the chair, the wrists cross- 
 ing, the small feet in their high-heeled 
 shoes crossed also and pointed sharply 
 downward. He had recognized with
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. Ill 
 
 joy the perfection of her type, and had 
 expressed it with just that degree of 
 accentuation necessary to reveal a per- 
 sonality. The dress was a little fan- 
 tastic, yellow with a curious green 
 embroidery, some black about the 
 waist. There was an emerald feather 
 in her hair and emeralds on her yellow 
 shoes. 
 
 There she was, subtle, daring, ex- 
 quisite, intensely modern, the product 
 of her passing hour ; as brilliant and 
 as brittle as a butterfly. 
 
 Aytoun forgot sometimes that he was 
 not alone, absorbed completely in the 
 excitement of his work; he knew that he 
 had hit the right note, and heard in 
 imagination what his friends would say 
 of it. He smiled to himself as he 
 worked. 
 
 Helen was amused at her friend's at- 
 titude before Aytoun's idea of her. He 
 knew his sitter so much better than she 
 knew herself. The very unmistakable
 
 112 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 and individual air of smartness about 
 her pictured self, pleased Mrs. Lindsay 
 evidently. 
 
 "I am glad," she would say as she 
 descended from the platform to look 
 curiously at the picture, "you have not 
 made me out a milk-maid," and then 
 she would nearly lose her temper over 
 Aytoun's refusal to alter at her sugges- 
 tion, any of the faults of her face. 
 
 "Faults," he would say smiling, turn- 
 ing toward her, palette in hand, "my 
 dear Mrs. Lindsay, they are the most 
 charming things about you if it were 
 not for the faults in people's faces I 
 would paint no more portraits." 
 
 Helen looked and listened, happier 
 than she knew, recognizing the expres- 
 sion of pride and power which he had 
 worn before in the gallery with his pic- 
 tures, and woman-like rejoicing with a 
 thrill of intoxicating pride in her 
 knowledge of her place in his thoughts; 
 and she admired and praised him none
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 113 
 
 the less that he could seem to forget 
 her, proud to see her slave a master. 
 Sitting in the corner among the cush- 
 ions of a broad seat by an open win- 
 dow, absorbed and fascinated, she 
 watched from beneath her dreaming 
 eye-lids the beautiful head and earnest 
 face, grateful to the light which turned 
 his hair to gold and defined the pure 
 line of his throat. 
 
 His gestures as he painted were un- 
 consciously expressive. Sometimes he 
 would seem to wrestle with his work, 
 standing firmly before it, one foot ad- 
 vanced, while he dealt the strokes he 
 meant should tell, sometimes he ca- 
 ressed it with soft and curving touches. 
 The cruelty of the curved mouth firmly 
 set in the absorption of his work fascin- 
 ated and vaguely frightened her. " How 
 long," she asked herself in a dumb 
 whisper, " How long will he choose to 
 be a slave?" 
 
 At five they would take their tea, 
 8
 
 114 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 which Aytoun made for them in little 
 Indian cups, and they would sit quietly 
 awhile, watching the long sweep of 
 shore and sky through the open win- 
 dow of the little farm-house. He had 
 hung the room in a blue-green stuff 
 like the changeable blue-green of the 
 sea, and had filled large jars with road- 
 side flowers. A painted Indian table 
 held his brushes and colors, a blue haze 
 of cigarette smoke hung in the air. The 
 little house was on the very edge of the 
 water far away from the town. It was 
 cool, detached and quiet. Even Mrs. 
 Lindsay forgot her restlessness some- 
 times, and lapsed into a reverie. 
 
 One day when the portrait was nearly 
 finished, Helen and Mrs. Lindsay loi- 
 tered a little over their tea, and a sud- 
 den rain kept them until the room was 
 gray with twilight. Mrs. Lindsay had 
 been chattering merrily all the after- 
 noon, but the quiet of the room, the 
 regular wash of the waves on the beach
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 115 
 
 beneath them had calmed her into si- 
 lence. 
 
 "Why so quiet?" Helen said, re- 
 marking her unusual mood. 
 
 "Oh, I like it here, it rests me; I for- 
 get I am in Newport, it does me good." 
 
 "Do you want to forget it? You 
 know you wouldn't go anywhere else in 
 the world." 
 
 "Would you?" Mrs. Lindsay asked 
 in return. 
 
 They both laughed. 
 
 " There's nowhere else to go!" said 
 Mrs. Lindsay. 
 
 Aytoun was silent for a moment and 
 did not attempt to join in the conver- 
 sation, but looked out upon the water, 
 livid white in the twilight, upon which 
 the rain made wavering lines like an 
 etching upon silver. 
 
 It had turned quite cool, and he had 
 lighted a fire in the chimney which cast 
 a flickering glow upon the white dresses 
 of the women. Helen was sitting in her
 
 Il6 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 favorite attitude when she talked, her 
 head thrown back, her hands clasped 
 over her knees. Mrs. Lindsay, lying 
 back in a deep chair, was smoking. 
 The bright point of her cigarette shone 
 in the half light. 
 
 As Aytoun listened to their voices he 
 experienced an unexpected feeling of 
 detachment, of strangeness; the taste 
 for his old life suddenly recurred to him 
 with a sharp and irresistible appeal. 
 "Oh, yes! they were interesting, these 
 people, or he had thought them so, but 
 they were unreal, he was not of them." 
 
 Mrs. Lindsay's clear, high voice, with 
 its vibrant, uncompromising English, 
 grated upon his ears perceptibly. What 
 a curious creature she was, amusing, 
 yes, restless and fantastic; yet Helen 
 understood her, was agreeing with her. 
 Newport, indeed! He recalled the daily 
 pageant with its varying scenes, the 
 gathering at the Casino, the beauty of 
 the women, the brutality of their veiled
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 117 
 
 and dainty insolence, the staring imper- 
 tinence of the men; the utter aimless- 
 ness, the destroying inactivity of the 
 brain expressed in their faces, set with 
 the grim endurance of unending noth- 
 ingness, astonished him. And they 
 said there was no other place; good 
 heavens! no other place 1 Mrs. Lind- 
 say said that, yes but Helen was 
 agreeing with her. How could she? 
 His eyes dwelt on her face, the low pure 
 brow, fair as a pearl in the dim light, 
 the poetic beauty of her eyes, the re- 
 fined spirituality of her face, and a feel- 
 ing of irritation, of dumb anger, against 
 this something in her he could not 
 understand, took possession of him. He 
 had a sensation as of a veil suddenly 
 dropped between them. 
 
 " It is degrading," Helen continued, 
 lightly laughing. " What do you think 
 I heard to-day? Susie Bertram has not 
 invited Mrs. de Courcy to her ball, and 
 she is furious of course. They have
 
 Il8 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 been intimate friends ever since I've 
 known them. That will be another 
 quarrel, I suppose, and quarrels are such 
 bores." 
 
 " Not so very angry," said Mrs. Lind- 
 say. " I saw her talking to Susie this 
 morning with her sweetest smile. I 
 wondered what was the matter." 
 
 " It won't do any good," said Helen; 
 " there is only one way possible to make 
 your place quite sure, and that is to give 
 balls, and leave out half your friends 
 then they will not dare to treat you so 
 themselves." 
 
 " Mrs. Bertram has certainly found 
 that plan successful, I must admit, par- 
 ticularly as it seems to have been her 
 own invention she may well be proud 
 of it." 
 
 "What a dreadful time that pretty 
 little Mrs. Perkins is having," Helen 
 continued. "She looked quite pale 
 this morning. No one has spoken to 
 her yet that I know of."
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. IIQ 
 
 " Nothing in the world against her I 
 suppose," asked Mrs. Lindsay. 
 
 "Oh, no, only that no one knows her, 
 and, therefore, no one will." 
 
 "I wonder how long she will stay?" 
 
 44 For good, my dear," said Helen. 
 " She is very rich and I believe clever. 
 Besides I saw Tom Gary walking with 
 her near the beach yesterday. She will 
 be all right next year." 
 
 " No, not next year in two perhaps." 
 
 " What a place it is ! " Helen contin- 
 ued, " it really is demoralizing. I 
 don't think my character can bear more 
 than one summer of it." 
 
 41 It has been all over with mine for 
 some time," laughed Mrs. Lindsay. "I 
 can stay till the end of my days." 
 
 41 No, not quite over," said Helen. 
 41 1 must be truthful if you are not 
 when you persist in denying that you 
 have a heart somewhere concealed 
 under your chiffons I have not for- 
 gotten,"
 
 I2O A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 " Hush," cried Mrs. Lindsay, " I have 
 forgotten my feelings. They are left 
 behind in town, along with my winter 
 furs. There is no use for them here." 
 
 They both laughed, and there was a 
 little pause, in which Helen poured her- 
 self a second cup of tea, and Mrs. Lind- 
 say lighted another cigarette. 
 
 " I overheard a couple of boys talking 
 to-day," Helen went on, " at the Casino. 
 Kate de Courcy's young brother and 
 a friend, evidently a stranger, who 
 was almost crying. ' I have just seen 
 the only woman I have ever loved,' 
 he said, 'and she didn't even bow 
 to me.'" 
 
 " Poor boy," said Mrs. Lindsay; "he 
 doesn't know his Newport." 
 
 "And it is so beautiful," said Helen, 
 " How can we be wicked in so heavenly 
 a place ? " 
 
 "Wicked !" replied her friend, "that 
 is the one thing I think we are not." 
 
 " And yet we are both luxurious and
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 121 
 
 idle. The other will come soon no 
 doubt." 
 
 "I suppose so," said Mrs. Lindsay, 
 "but now what is the reason, I 
 wonder !" She turned to Aytoun, who 
 was standing by the window, looking 
 out upon the water in a melancholy ab- 
 straction. "Come tell us what you 
 think, Mr. Aytoun ? What makes us so 
 supernaturally good ? " 
 
 Ayioun shrugged his shoulders and 
 looked down at her in her dainty dress, 
 as she blew the smoke idly from her 
 little red lips. 
 
 "Why good?" he said; "because 
 you are so pleased with your new toys, 
 that you are not yet crying for other 
 ones." 
 
 "You mean," said Helen, speaking 
 seriously, "that when we are used to 
 wealth and luxury, and they become a 
 habit, that we shall seek for more dan- 
 gerous playthings ? " 
 
 "Yes, precisely," Aytoun replied, "I
 
 122 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 do. But it may not be very soon, not until 
 your fortunes become more permanent. 
 Wall street is better for the morality of 
 the country than the churches; a better 
 leveller than democracy or death. At 
 present with the luxury of Pompeii you 
 have " he hesitated a moment. 
 
 "The morality of Plymouth Rock/' 
 said Helen, rising and looking out of 
 the window. "It has stopped raining," 
 she said. "Come Kate, you daughter 
 of the Puritans, no more cigarettes. 
 We must go." 
 
 Aytoun opened the door, put them 
 in their carriage, and watched them 
 moodily as they drove off under the 
 dripping trees.
 
 Chapter IX. 
 ft 
 
 |ITH the beginning of July and 
 the more insistent demands of 
 her outward life, Helen's companionship 
 with Aytoun was somewhat interrupted, 
 and the impression of unbroken com- 
 radeship was succeeded by a strange al- 
 ternation of sympathy and detachment, 
 which tortured and perplexed him. The 
 extraordinary emancipation of Helen's 
 mind which by force of very wide read- 
 ing had in some directions traveled far- 
 ther in imagination than his in fact, had 
 given her a very remarkable breadth of 
 view and an accuracy of judgment as 
 unusual in a woman as it was delightful. 
 He frequently appealed to the exquisite 
 justness of her taste during the painting 
 of his pictures and their conversations 
 often assumed the character of a consul- 
 ts
 
 124 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 tation of confreres, when they would 
 almost forget each other in the excite- 
 ment of their subject, and he would ask 
 himself how it had been possible for 
 such utterly different lives to have 
 brought them thus together, sharing in- 
 tellectually an almost identical point of 
 view. Then the sight of her punctil- 
 ious observance of some empty form, 
 her sacrifice of hours of possible com- 
 panionship for some smart social func- 
 tion exasperated him. Her loneliness, 
 the innate sadness of her mind, which 
 he realized had been fully revealed to 
 him alone, appealed to his pity, and 
 what seemed to him a willful and des- 
 tructive waste of a nature which he 
 knew to be filled with the sadness of 
 humanity, the palpitating poetry of life, 
 cast him into fits of angry despair. This 
 grew, and became with his increasing 
 passion for her beauty, a torturing ob- 
 session. During his walks by the 
 cliffs, lost in the evening mists, or alone
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 125 
 
 in his studio, he sought continually to 
 analyze her mysterious nature, to define 
 this strange soul of a woman, this 
 mixture of intelligence and inexpe- 
 rience of emancipated fancy, of captive 
 will, of outward gayety, of secret mel- 
 ancholy. There had been no such tor- 
 menting perplexity in her character as 
 he had known it in those early days in 
 New York, or afterwards in the first 
 weeks of the summer at Newport. Since 
 the pre-occupations of her outward life 
 had begun to claim her time, she seemed 
 to him to have become quite another 
 person. There were times when the 
 scant courtesy she showed him, when he 
 met her at the Casino, on the Polo field 
 among her friends, or in some ball 
 room he had invaded led by his desire 
 to see her, infuriated him. Then the 
 haunting shyness and suspicion of his 
 nature would return with the unbeara- 
 ble thought that after all he might be 
 but a plaything for her idle hours.
 
 126 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 Helen could hardly have explained to 
 herself why she wished no longer to see 
 him in the world. She did not realize 
 her own ungentleness, she only felt that 
 she wanted him for herself, and found 
 it impossible to talk with him, except 
 when they were alone. But to him the 
 sight of her, talking, laughing, dancing 
 with these people, as if she were one of 
 them, was intolerable. Sometimes his 
 anger would reach the point of a deci- 
 sion to leave her and Newport together. 
 Then a note would come summoning 
 him to some long walk, or to dine with 
 her alone, when they would pass hours 
 of the most perfect sympathy, weaving 
 closer than ever the web of association 
 and memory which bound them, and 
 she would seem to rejoice more than 
 ever in the intellectual freedom of their 
 companionship, finding an ever keener 
 pleasure in speaking without subterfuge 
 or convention. Sometime they would
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 127 
 
 pass hours in the dusk, watching the 
 flickering pathway of the moon upon 
 the water, in delicious desultory talk, 
 when scraps of remembered verse and 
 parallel impressions gathered from their 
 different lives would rise to their lips. 
 Sometimes they would go back to the 
 time of their childhood and the years 
 when they had known each other first, 
 dwelling with interest upon every small- 
 est treasure of their recollection. Some- 
 times they would speak in French, the 
 language in which Helen felt she knew 
 him best, talking softly to each other 
 with the delicious familiarity of a friend- 
 ship the most perfect of their lives, and 
 Aytoun would forget the passing mo- 
 ments of separation from her, his anger 
 and distrust. 
 
 "A mystery," he said to her one day, 
 "you are a lovely mystery. I am seek- 
 ing for your definition. Sometimes I 
 think I have you, and then you turn
 
 128 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 another face, and I must begin all over 
 again. Never mind some day I shall 
 have you, tight clasped in a formula." 
 
 Then she laughed and replied that 
 she was a riddle not worth the solving ; 
 that she did not understand herself. 
 
 He would chide her sometimes for 
 the waste of her talents. She had in- 
 deed a lovely deep voice, untrained, 
 irregular, of a haunting quality. " You 
 could sing," he would say. " Write too, 
 I think, if you would try." And she 
 would listen meditatively, happily, real- 
 izing the clearer development of her 
 mind, its growing capacity for impres- 
 sions with a rising impulse, but dimly 
 felt before, to express herself. And 
 daily her beauty brightened into un- 
 wonted brilliancy and expressed itself 
 in the softened grace and languor of 
 her attitudes. 
 
 She never for a moment left Aytoun's 
 thoughts, which were set invincibly in 
 the one direction. By day, he thought
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. I2Q 
 
 of her, but by night, her eyes haunted 
 him, and he could only dream. 
 
 One night Helen arranged a party to 
 sail across the bay, in a little launch her 
 husband had given her the summer 
 before to satisfy a whim she had of 
 spending long hours of solitude upon 
 the water. She had invited Mrs. Lind- 
 say and her husband, who was paying 
 his wife a brief visit in Newport, and the 
 Bertrams who were staying with them. 
 It was understood that the boat should 
 leave them at the landing at the foot of 
 the hill overlooking the bay on which 
 Mrs. Lindsay's new house had been 
 built. Helen had asked Aytoun to join 
 them. They all dined together early, 
 and then after a short drive through the 
 dusk of the wooded streets from Helen's 
 house to the wharf, they set out across 
 the bay. 
 
 It was dark at first before the moon 
 arose, and although they talked together 
 merrily for a while, the subduing influ- 
 9
 
 I3O A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 ence of the softly enveloping night took 
 possession of them, and they soon separ- 
 ated, settling themselves with rugs and 
 cushions in different parts of the boat. 
 Aytoun and Helen, who were left alone 
 in the stern, could hear the murmur of 
 their voices and see the gleam of a light 
 dress in the darkness, and the glowing 
 tips of the men's cigars. 
 
 It was very still, there was no sound 
 but the gentle lapping of the water 
 which gleamed blackly around them like 
 a mirror of tarnished silver. The lights 
 of the town shone dimly in the distance, 
 and a scarcely perceptible breeze blew 
 softly about their faces. They were dis- 
 cussing the old topic, trying to deter- 
 mine once more that invisible boundary 
 which divides the good from evil in 
 human affection. They were laughing 
 lightly, dreading to apply their floating 
 metaphors and fancies to themselves. 
 
 "The reward is for those who believe 
 in the good," said Helen, "and do not
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 13! 
 
 look for evil. We find what we seek for 
 after all." 
 
 "Not lack of belief," Aytoun replied, 
 "but of reason. Blessed are those who 
 can see. It is all black and white with 
 most people. They cannot see that 
 delicious country which lies between, a 
 paradise of pearl gray, such a happy 
 country ! don't you think so, chere antie? 
 
 "What would you call it?" asked 
 Helen. "Not all spirit, not all mind. 
 That country is too near the heart." 
 
 "Bounded by the equator, we will 
 say, lit, but not burned, by the sun, the 
 lower latitudes of the soul. Shall we 
 survey it?" 
 
 "Not to the end, I fear," she answered 
 sadly. 
 
 "Not to the end? Come, answer 
 truly. Think of the great friendships 
 of the world. Would George Sand 
 have been George Sand without Alfred 
 de Musset and Chopin ?" 
 
 She thought a moment.
 
 132 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 "No," she said, "I do not think she 
 would." 
 
 "Ah," he exclaimed, "you are brave 
 enough to admit it. Is there a different 
 law for others less great than she." 
 
 "I do not know," she answered. "I 
 cannot think it out. I can only feel 
 that the best rule for all of us is to be 
 loyal to our own type ; to avoid anything 
 which seems to us destructive besides, 
 the world has grown older since that 
 tropic noon day in which she lived, 
 wiser, too, I think." 
 
 "Grown older, dear," the word 
 dropped unconsciously from his lips 
 "but not outgrown the essence of its 
 life, not old enough to repeal its own 
 laws you have everything on your side 
 but Nature." 
 
 "Nature," said Helen, "is made to be 
 subdued ; there is more joy in victory 
 than in defeat." 
 
 Aytoun looked at her curiously, half 
 doubting, half believing.
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 133 
 
 She turned towards him impulsively. 
 "Ah," she said, "I know what you 
 would say, but listen friendship, sym- 
 pathy, sentiment, call it what you will, is 
 the very soul of all human relationships, 
 of parent and child, sister and brother, 
 husband and wife, even of lovers in 
 their madness. Without it all the rela- 
 tions of family are a grinding chain, and 
 love itself a degradation." 
 
 Long afterwards, when many disillu- 
 sionments and the sadness of departed 
 youth had dimmed his memories, Aytoun 
 could hear the earnest accents of her 
 voice coming to him out of the night, 
 could hear once more the quiet murmur 
 of the sea, the voice of the sighing 
 breeze. 
 
 "Love," she said, and the word fell 
 slowly, reverently from her lips, "one 
 word ! our language is too poor, only 
 one, for feelings as remote as the very 
 essences of good and evil. It is the cause 
 of most of the tragedies of this world."
 
 134 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 "Who shall express it?" he said, 
 wondering at her wisdom, and gazing 
 through the dim star light at her face. 
 Now at last her words seemed to ex- 
 press the thoughts there written and 
 her lips to answer to those dreaming 
 eyes. 
 
 The sweet voice went on. 
 
 "Passion," she said, "the desire of 
 self, I have seen it, but never quite 
 understood it. One-half of the great 
 circle of emotions which are all called 
 Love, it is the last with us if, indeed, we 
 ever traverse it, it is the first with you; 
 but the other half, how many know it ; 
 when we love to love instead of to be 
 loved, and when self dies. Do you 
 understand it?" 
 
 "I think so," he slowly answered. "I 
 will try." 
 
 "That love, I believe," and she spoke 
 quite clearly now and firmly, "is a 
 flower which bears no poison in its pet- 
 als, we may gather and wear it any-
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 13$ 
 
 where and any time with tears of grati- 
 tude." 
 
 The young moon had risen at last 
 and hung like a silver feather in the 
 sky, a sudden mist obscured the shore, 
 and light clouds floated among the 
 stars. As Helen and Aytoun were borne 
 noiselessly along, in their light vessel 
 through the still water, they could see 
 the stars and clouds reflected in its 
 placid surface, while the mist which 
 hung over the shore, obscuring every 
 semblance of the earth, seemed to float 
 like the clouds, and the reflected stars 
 to be the sisters of those above. Stand- 
 ing in the stern of the boat, they seemed 
 themselves to be borne through space, 
 and lost for a moment consciousness 
 of earthly things. Next Aytoun was 
 Helen's face in its pale beauty, her eyes 
 shining strangely, filled with the mys- 
 tery of the night. 
 
 "Ah, I do understand!" he said de- 
 voutly.
 
 136 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 They turned to one another with a 
 long look of exceeding peace, and to 
 Helen the mists through which she sailed 
 were the very essence of her life- long 
 dream. 
 
 The moon rose higher and it grew 
 late. Helen left her guests at the land- 
 ing place, whence they departed with 
 the laughter and the words of their 
 good-night breaking clearly upon the 
 silence, and with the flutter of lace 
 skirts in the lights streaming through 
 the windows, and then the boat went on 
 and Aytoun and Helen were left alone. 
 
 The silence surrrounded them with 
 its compelling charm and the magic of 
 the night once more enfolded them. 
 There seemed to be no barrier, no dis- 
 tance between them in this mysterious 
 intimacy of the soul. Helen had a 
 strange impression as of a wandering 
 far within endless undiscovered caves. 
 They spoke each other's thoughts and 
 trembled as they did so. Perhaps they
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 137 
 
 knew it could not last. But for the 
 moment the great angels of love and 
 death hovered over them and touched 
 them not, enwrapping them only with 
 the dim sense of the mortality of their 
 joy, which was to them as the passing 
 fragrance of a flower, the resolving 
 rhythms of a song, presaging silence; 
 but for the moment they were together 
 on the sea, among the stars! alone. 
 
 "How have I lived so long without 
 you?" he asked her passionately. 
 
 Her eyes shone strangely near him, 
 he looked once more, a sudden madness 
 swept over his senses; slowly he bent 
 toward those mysterious eyes, so long 
 the comrades of his dreams. They did 
 not turn away and suddenly his lips met 
 hers in a long moment of mortal sweet- 
 ness, of ecstasy which seemed like 
 death. 
 
 The sweet eyes closed, and Helen 
 half unconscious sank upon her knees 
 by the side of the boat.
 
 138 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 "Helen, Helen," he begged her 
 wildly, "Oh, forgive me!" 
 
 But as he said it, and as she listened 
 through the dimness of her fainting 
 senses, they knew their dream was over, 
 their happiness was dead.
 
 Chapter X. 
 
 |HEN Aytoun went to see Mrs. 
 Rivington the next day, she re- 
 fused to see him. She kept an engage- 
 ment for a dinner which she had made 
 some weeks before, mechanically answer- 
 ing the questions her neighbor put to 
 her, seeing the lights flicker before her 
 eyes with a sense of painful unreality, 
 and then came home as early as she 
 could, longing to be alone. 
 
 She found a note from Aytoun on 
 her return, and took it with her to her 
 room. 
 
 All day the whirl of emotion had 
 been so blinding that she scarcely knew 
 whether it was joy or pain which she 
 was enduring. She had only the sensa- 
 tion of having suddenly been drawn 
 into the rapids, of losing her foot-hold, 
 139
 
 I4O A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 but her mind, which was usually so clear, 
 and detached, so capable of reflective 
 comment upon her own thoughts and ac- 
 tions warned her that she would soon be 
 compelled to be the inexorable judge of 
 herself, to issue the decree of her future 
 in the court of her own soul. 
 
 Sitting alone with Aytoun's letter be- 
 fore her, she knew that the moment of 
 decision had come. She read and re- 
 read it, pausing over every word. 
 
 " You have refused to see me," it began, 
 " I cannot pretend to be surprised, and yet 
 I must make one appeal to your mercy. I 
 have spent the night and day in a strange 
 torment of ecstasy and utter misery. 
 
 ' I need not protest, but you know that I 
 am wholly yours, to do with as you choose. 
 
 "It is inconceivable to me that I should 
 ever do anything to cause you an instant's 
 pain, and if that moment which fills my 
 whole soul with its glory must be the only 
 such in my life's history let it be so I 
 will bridle my tongue also and only speak 
 to you as I have done hitherto, as to my best 
 and dearest friend, only, I implore you, do
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 14! 
 
 not send me out of your life. I can scarcely 
 breathe since I left your door this afternoon 
 for fear of what that white, stern soul of 
 yours is thinking. Try to trust me, dearest; 
 believe in me. 
 
 " I must wait all through this night before 
 I can hope for a word. For God's sake do 
 not delay." P. A. 
 
 It was very still, the stillness of mid- 
 night. All the lights were extinguished 
 except Helen's one lamp, which shone 
 out upon the soft darkness of the en- 
 circling trees. She looked about her 
 room. The familiar objects seemed to 
 be conscious of the part they were play- 
 ing in her history, the silence and the 
 shadows were full of the meaning of 
 the moments as they passed; a mild air 
 from the sea blew in through the win- 
 dow, and stirred the loose hair upon 
 her brow. She bent over her desk and 
 laid her cheek upon the letter, her 
 heart filled with a rising tide of joy, 
 which overflowed in broken words of 
 tenderness from her lips. She was
 
 142 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 proud of every precious word, and the 
 knowledge of his love, this love for the 
 first time so passionately desired, sank 
 into the empty places in her deepest 
 heart. So she sat, her eyes closed, her 
 face upon the letter in a trance of joy, 
 not forgetting, not unconscious of the 
 persistent reasoning self she knew would 
 claim her soon, granting to her heart a 
 brief respite, a fleeting moment of 
 breath, of life, of happiness, and as she 
 sat there motionless, the mysterious 
 sounds of the night, the faint rustling 
 of the leaves, the minute, unnamable 
 stirs and murmurs in the deep stillness 
 made little ineffaceable marks upon her 
 consciousness. 
 
 She rose and began to walk up and 
 down the length of her room, her hands 
 clasped behind her. Gradually her 
 brain became clear, and with her active 
 consciousness she began to suffer cru- 
 elly. She tried to think it out, to de- 
 fine to herself just where she stood, and
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 143 
 
 every step she took in the path her rea- 
 son led her, brought to her a torture 
 she had never before imagined. In the 
 solitude of the night she stood at last 
 face to face with that unveiled tragedy 
 of life which she had escaped till now. 
 Feeling it in her deepest soul, she had 
 persisted in her attitude of aloofness, 
 still denied that life was serious, or held 
 realities of commanding joy or of cor- 
 roding inescapable agony; but now the 
 vision was before her, she could not 
 escape it, and the way in which it 
 touched her, arresting her steps, com- 
 manding her to silence, was in her 
 hopeless inability to force her mind 
 over the barrier which stood between 
 herself and happiness. She could not 
 make it right. Unconsciously now, she 
 continued her walk up and down her 
 room, pressing her temples with her 
 clasped hands, wringing them some 
 times unconsciously in her fight with 
 herself. Deeply imbedded in the very
 
 144 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 foundations of her nature, her intro- 
 spective mind discovered an unconquer- 
 able, ineradicable revolt against the de- 
 sire of continuing this friendship which 
 was friendship no longer. Her gratitude 
 for her husband's care of her, which had 
 protected her from misfortune and sur- 
 rounded her with indulgence and lux- 
 ury, bound her struggling, sighing, 
 weeping with an unbreakable chain, and 
 her stainless sense of personal honor 
 blazed with a tyrannical demand for 
 obedience like the sword of the angel 
 before the gate of her paradise. If her 
 high belief in the perfectibility of 
 human friendship had led her rejoicing 
 through the first stages of her happy 
 journey, her strict detached intelligence 
 told her exactly where she had finally 
 arrived, and the completeness and per- 
 fection of this friendship warned her 
 that the passion into which it was merg- 
 ing was a like full orbed, perfect and 
 tyrannical. In vain she tried to per-
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 145 
 
 suade herself that she could forget the 
 kiss which had waked them from their 
 dreams, this one sin which had barred 
 the gates against them. She tried to 
 cheat her mind with sophistries, to lull 
 it to sleep with fancies, " A rose may 
 close and be a bud again," she thought; 
 " it shall. We will forget this one, sad 
 error, ignore it, be only friends again. 
 If we try, we can; surely such a friend- 
 ship is worth some sacrifice ! " Then 
 the sinking ecstasy of that remembered 
 moment would return, thrilling with 
 sudden pain to the very tips of her fing- 
 ers, and her eyes would close while the 
 feeling of death-like faintness dimmed 
 her brain. Then she would wake once 
 more to her suffering, to the bitter, irre- 
 vocable truth. She saw that she could 
 no longer misname this blissful friend- 
 ship which had absorbed her heart and 
 mind for all those happy months. It was 
 love, she knew " love," she whispered 
 breathlessly to her solitude. If she had 
 10
 
 146 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 loved him less, or loved before, the de- 
 cision of those midnight hours might 
 have been otherwise, but struggle, weep 
 as she might, she could only see that 
 love had come and come too late. 
 
 Sometimes the weakness of her grief 
 would overcome her, and she would 
 sink upon her bed and weep her heart 
 out, but never for one moment could 
 she deceive herself into believing that 
 she had the smallest right to see Aytoun 
 again, to take one step further in this 
 path now that she knew where it was 
 leading. 
 
 Did Helen know quite what she was 
 doing in giving stern refusal to her 
 desire for happiness ? Perhaps not. 
 She was unversed in pain, and had only 
 just begun her journey of sorrow. She 
 was only answering as a ship answers its 
 helm, to the invincible principle which 
 governed her nature. 
 
 When the morning came, the strug- 
 gle of her soul which had swayed all
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 147 
 
 night between the two opposing forces 
 of the moral world, 'twixt duty and de- 
 sire, was over. She wrote mechanically 
 a note of farewell to Aytoun, short, 
 almost cruel in its brevity, expressing 
 scarcely a trace of the agony she had 
 traversed, and then she threw herself 
 upon her bed, and fell into the deep 
 sleep of physical exhaustion. 
 
 The days which followed brought 
 Helen no respite from her pain. The 
 strain of thought fixed invincibly upon 
 the one point of suffering, and resolve 
 did not for one moment relax its hold. 
 In all the outward actions of her life, 
 when she spoke of other things, when 
 she heard almost with a feeling of 
 mockery the sound of her own light 
 words and laughter, this deep preoccu- 
 pation persisted with its imperious com- 
 mand of pain. At night the attitude of 
 her enslaved and tortured brain re- 
 mained unchanged, for when she awoke
 
 148 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 she was conscious of no break in her 
 thoughts, and the name which in despair 
 or love had left her lips in the night's 
 solitude when sleep finally claimed her, 
 seemed to float above them when she 
 awoke. The grip of physical pain 
 never left her heart, and sometimes the 
 mental strain and bodily torture taxed 
 her resistance almost to the breaking 
 point. Sometimes in the little acts of 
 her daily life a sudden blur would dim 
 her eyes, her hands would tremble as 
 she wrote; then at clearer moments 
 when some insistent need of mental 
 activity had roused her brain, these 
 mists of suffering would clear away, and 
 she would find herself oftenest alone at 
 night face to face again with the em- 
 bodied tragedy which was destroying 
 her. 
 
 She had not believed herself capable 
 of such suffering, and she who had 
 longed to live, spoke bitterly to her own 
 heart, asking if she were at last content.
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 149 
 
 She was alive indeed to the remotest 
 mysteries of her being. 
 
 Hopeless of peace, she threw herself 
 into the crowding occupations of her 
 outward life seeking for physical ex- 
 haustion. In the hot days of August 
 she moved through the succeeding scenes 
 of the heartless drama of her days, 
 hypnotized by the force of her unbreak- 
 able will into a curious mechanical obe- 
 dience to outward forms. Her mind 
 was a dim turmoil whirling to the 
 rhythm of the pain which throbbed 
 through her senses. The white dust 
 of the roads, the heavy embowering 
 trees, sounds of broken laughter, dance 
 music, and a tourbillion of summer 
 gauze rainbow colored, kaleidoscopic, 
 swept changefully across her conscious- 
 ness. 
 
 Thus days, even weeks, passed by. 
 
 It was the middle of August and as 
 General Rivington, had returned from 
 his yachting, she had no time to herself
 
 I5O A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 except the few exhausted moments 
 which were hers at night. 
 
 In the afternoon she drove with her 
 husband, sometimes stopping at the 
 Polo field, sometimes driving out past 
 the cliffs into the quieter country, and 
 she was grateful for these hours of 
 silence. The affection she had always 
 borne her husband seemed to be 
 strengthened under the mute appeal of 
 her heart for sympathy and compassion. 
 Her self reproach at times was very bit- 
 ter, and she longed deeply for the lux- 
 ury of confession and of punishment. 
 Often in these long drives, a rising im- 
 pulse to ease her own pain would tempt 
 her strongly, but she would always 
 check it, realizing that she was already 
 doing her utmost of loyalty in her refusal 
 to see Aytoun again, and believing that 
 she had no right to cause her husband 
 useless distress. 
 
 There were times when in the ebb of 
 the outward excitement with which her
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. I$I 
 
 days were full, her face would reveal the 
 secret and daily exhaustion of her vital- 
 ity. It showed itself in an indescriba- 
 ble spiritualizing of her features, which 
 was hardly illness or emaciation, but 
 which changed the radiating beauty of 
 her perfect health into something mys- 
 terious, fragile and deeply alluring. In 
 these days of her own mortal pain, 
 Helen was more passionately loved and 
 lovable than ever before in her life, and 
 became the moving center of the chang- 
 ing life about her. Her personality 
 was for the moment the ruling influence 
 in an atmosphere mysteriously charged 
 with the intense magnetism of her vital- 
 ity, brought to its completest poten- 
 tiality by the force of her own suffering. 
 She was amazed at this tide of interest, 
 of passionate occupation with herself, 
 which seemed to set towards her, and 
 gave herself up to it with a bitter grati- 
 tude half mockery, half despair. 
 
 Every day she would be the foremost
 
 152 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 figure of some gay party when she 
 would sit in her dainty dress on the box 
 seat of some coach, the very figure of 
 frivolity and fashion, beautiful, insolent, 
 and admired. Every night in her dia- 
 monds and her tulle, she would dance, 
 laughing a little recklessly, never rest- 
 ing, while she wondered at her own en- 
 durance, and then she would drive 
 home in silence, her face sunk upon the 
 cushions of her carriage, her hands 
 clasped over that never ceasing pain at 
 her heart, her breath coming shortly, 
 heavily in the depth of her pain. "Philip, 
 Philip, oh ! Philip," she would sigh, 
 repeating his name over and over in 
 her solitude, with all the words which 
 were the very golden coinage of her 
 heart, unspent, unspoken except thus in 
 her despair.
 
 Chapter XI. 
 ft 
 
 |ELEN wondered sometimes how 
 it could be possible that her hus- 
 band could be unconscious of the intense 
 preoccupation of her mind. 
 
 General Rivington was very happy at 
 Newport ; its streets for him were filled 
 with associations. Its formal life with its 
 invariable elegance, its precision, pleased 
 his taste, and it delighted him to see 
 his young wife moving before him in 
 the apparent enjoyment of the position 
 he had given her and the beauty of 
 which he was so proud. It pleased 
 him to order their life on a somewhat 
 more lavish scale than when in town. 
 He occupied himself with the details of 
 their weekly dinners whose perfection 
 had for years been a standard of envy 
 and imitation, and which it was an inter- 
 '53
 
 154 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 est and pride for him to continue. He 
 began his day with a consultation with 
 the cook, an important person who had 
 been for years in his service, and with 
 whom Helen never attempted to inter- 
 fere. Then he would walk into town, 
 a mild constitutional of a mile and a 
 half, and smoke his cigar with one or 
 another of his friends at the Casino, or 
 at the Reading Room. 
 
 At the Casino during the days of the 
 tennis tournament Helen would join 
 him, and they would drive together in 
 her phaeton to their luncheon at home, 
 or abroad. General Rivington had so 
 long been a part of the life at Newport 
 that he was unconscious of any lack of 
 naturalness in its society. He was at 
 home among its formalities, of which 
 he was himself a part. He was accus- 
 tomed, however, to inveigh against 
 the curt impertinence of the younger 
 men, and asked with indignation by
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 155 
 
 whose authority insolence had been 
 established, as the first principle of 
 good manners. 
 
 One morning, as often happened, he 
 met his friend Tom Ripley, as he turned 
 out of his gate, and adjusting his long 
 step to the somewhat shorter one of his 
 companion they strolled off towards the 
 town. It was a clear morning, the sun 
 shone brightly upon Tom Ripley's 
 smoothly shaven, handsome face and 
 brought out the old ivory tones in his 
 skin, the lines about the pale blue eyes. 
 General Rivington had some trouble in 
 keeping step with his friend, whose 
 movements were slow, and whose figure 
 was undoubtedly a little bent. "Upon 
 my word," said General Rivington to 
 himself, "Tom is getting old." He 
 straightened his shoulders as he walked 
 beside his friend, "and I am two years 
 older than he," he thought with pride. 
 "It is not the years which tell."
 
 I$6 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 A landau with a party of sight seeing 
 strangers rolled slowly by, the occupants 
 staring openly. 
 
 "I wonder who those two distinguished 
 old men are," a clear voice said. " You 
 never see such old men anywhere but in 
 Newport." 
 
 General Rivington and Ripley looked 
 at each other. 
 
 "Old! yes, I suppose we are," said 
 General Rivington, "but upon my word 
 I wouldn't exchange with any of those 
 young cubs at the Casino I should like 
 to give them a lesson in manners." 
 
 "You would have your trouble for 
 your pains," replied his friend. "They 
 know more than you do." 
 
 "Yes, of course, of course they do, but 
 upon my word it makes my blood boil 
 sometimes;" General Rivington struck 
 his stick sharply upon the sidewalk. 
 "Their insolence is beyond belief ! this 
 country is not what it was, the race of 
 American gentlemen is dying out."
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. I 57 
 
 "Oh ! come, come," said Ripley, "you 
 are a little hard." 
 
 "Not a bit of it," General Rivington 
 insisted ; "if I had a son I should see to 
 it that he should remember some things 
 my father never permitted me to forget, 
 and which these young men never seem 
 to have thought of." 
 
 "What for instance," said Ripley, 
 agreeing in his heart, but enjoying his 
 friend's indignation. 
 
 "Patriotism, man !" answered General 
 Rivington, irately. "They haven't an 
 idea of such a thing; it's as old fash- 
 ioned to their minds as the wigs of our 
 grandfathers." 
 
 "True, true," said Ripley with convic- 
 tion. 
 
 "And respect for women, and courtesy 
 for their elders and betters," continued 
 General Rivington. "Have you seen 
 the least indication that they know what 
 good manners mean." 
 
 Thy walked on towards the Casino.
 
 158 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 A bright faced girl drove by in a russet 
 wagon, flicking her ponies skillfully, 
 while she smiled and nodded to Ripley. 
 
 "That's a fine girl of yours," said 
 Rivington. 
 
 "Yes, my youngest;" replied Ripley, 
 with pride. "She's taller than I am." 
 
 "Drives awfully well, too," said Gen- 
 eral Rivington. " I'll admit the girls are 
 better. It's a pity! The men aren't fit 
 to tie their shoe strings." 
 
 As they neared the Casino, carriages, 
 carts and occasional horsemen passed 
 incessantly, and Gen. Rivington and 
 Ripley with a scrupulous courtesy fre- 
 quently raised their hats in greeting to 
 smiling women in light gowns and 
 flowered hats, who bowed to them from 
 under their lace parasols as they drove 
 by. 
 
 They went into the club and sat 
 down, taking their places in the line of 
 men in the embowered balcony above 
 the Casino door, and looking down up-
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 159 
 
 on the crowd which was gathering 
 around a coach about to start. A num- 
 ber of men went out leaving two who 
 were apparently immersed in conversa- 
 tion at the end of the porch opposite to 
 where General Rivington and Ripley sat 
 quietly with their cigars. 
 
 The taller of the two, whose name 
 was Seton, was dressed in traveling 
 tweed, and surveyed the scene below 
 him with the undisguised interest of a 
 new comer, noting the familiar and the 
 unfamiliar faces in the crowd of gayly 
 dressed people, gathered about the 
 coach. 
 
 He was long limbed and slender, his 
 hat was pushed back from his brown 
 hair, his eyes were alert, his nose 
 impertinent, the shape of his face and 
 the curve of his lips, young and poetic- 
 ally classic. He held a cigarette loosely 
 in his mouth, his voice was crisp and 
 high pitched, but vigorous. 
 
 The other was Tom Gary, who ac-
 
 l6O A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 cording to his invariable habit was 
 spending August in Newport. His 
 melancholy blue eyes were half shut, he 
 leaned languidly over the balcony, re- 
 plying to his friend's questions his 
 words dropping shortly from his lips, 
 which were set in an expression of un- 
 moved indifference, under his drooping 
 blond moustache. 
 
 "Otis sits his box very well, doesn't 
 he, Gary ? I never saw such a man. He 
 drives as well as if he had owned horses 
 for years. Best all around sport I ever 
 saw. Somebody must be late, he looks 
 rather cross there is Mrs. Bertram. By 
 Jove ! she is prettier than ever, Isn't 
 she going?" 
 
 "No, we took the coach yesterday 
 together don't know who's got it. 
 Not much of a crowd. It's an off day." 
 
 "Yes, I should think so, never saw 
 such a set." 
 
 A victoria drove up rapidly, and a 
 very pretty woman making her way
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. l6l 
 
 among the crowd mounted hurriedly to 
 the box seat. 
 
 "Upon my word," said Seton sitting 
 forward, "There's Mabel Perkins, in 
 Newport 1 That woman has nerve I'd 
 no idea she'd try it so soon how is she 
 getting on ?" 
 
 "Not a woman has spoken to her as 
 yet." 
 
 "Of course they haven't, she might 
 have known. I can't think how she 
 could have made such a mistake she's 
 usually cleverer than that." 
 
 "Why! didn't you know? the old 
 man has made a pile." 
 
 "Another pile, you mean." 
 
 "Yes, he's simply drowned in money 
 ugh, it makes me sick." 
 
 "Is he here? "asked Gary. 
 
 "Of course not, she isn't quite such 
 a fool as that." 
 
 "Fool? she isn't a fool at all 
 She's had to take that coach and fill it 
 up with duffers, but never mind she'll 
 ii
 
 1 62 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 have four or five hours with Otis and by 
 the time she gets back, he'll know who 
 she is." 
 
 "The women are all down on her, 
 she's got a long row to hoe before she 
 gets there. It's astonishing how mean 
 they are the lot of them." 
 
 "Well no wonder they hate her," said 
 Seton, "she can give them all points on 
 looks, and that's the whole business 
 after all. Deliver me from a woman 
 who talks." 
 
 During this conversation Mrs. Per- 
 kins settled herself on the box seat of 
 the coach, and tilted her parasol over 
 her frizzy yellow head. Her face was 
 smooth and round, with a Greuze-like 
 softness of outline and a peachy skin. 
 She lifted her chin and looked down 
 from under her dropped eyelids upon 
 the crowd of staring people about the 
 coach with a cool insolence which 
 matched their own, her slight figure in 
 its faultless dress held gracefully erect,
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 163 
 
 her tiny feet in their smart shoes ad- 
 vanced a trifle. 
 
 "Upon my word!" said Seton, be- 
 tween his teeth. "She looks cool, she 
 knows I'm here too," he brought his 
 hand down on the edge of the balcony. 
 "By all that's holy, I'd change that ex- 
 pression for you, my lady, if I were here 
 for more than a minute but only over 
 Sunday ! A man's got to have time." 
 He turned towards his friend, " By Jove 
 that woman is a stunner. Did you see 
 that foot ? there isn't another like it in 
 the place;" his eyes were alit, his voice 
 eager. 
 
 "Small good will it do her," grum- 
 bled his companion, who was biting his 
 mustache. 
 
 "Why! what's the matter with you, 
 Gary, you look rusty. You know she's 
 the best looking woman here." Gary 
 looked down and kept silent. Seton 
 eyed him with a sudden glance of in- 
 telligence.
 
 1 64 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 " I believe you have tried it on," he 
 said with conviction. 
 
 The other looked up resentfully. 
 
 " Well," he said, " didn't you tell me 
 to." 
 
 " I told you I had," said Seton with 
 cool impertinence, " but I didn't advise 
 you to follow my example." 
 
 " Confound your conceit," growled 
 Gary, flushing red. 
 
 " So she wouldn't have it? " laughed 
 Seton, " what did she say? " 
 
 " Oh, she took the high moral ground, 
 said I didn't understand her, that I 
 might kiss her hand if I liked." 
 
 " Oh, her hand." 
 
 " Yes, said she hadn't permitted any- 
 thing else since her marriage." 
 
 " Good heavens, how she has wasted 
 her timel" 
 
 "She lied, of course," said Gary, 
 looking sharply at Seton, who raised 
 his eyebrows and whistled softly through 
 his teeth.
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 1 65 
 
 Gary rose with an impatient move- 
 ment, and seated himself on the edge of 
 the balcony. 
 
 "They are all liars, and there's no 
 such thing as principles if they fancy a 
 man. Look at that beautiful Mrs. Riv- 
 ington." 
 
 " What! " said Seton " that lily of 
 purity. You don't mean to say she's 
 joined the great majority who's the 
 man ? By Jove, I shouldn't mind chang- 
 ing places with him." 
 
 " Oh, nobody you know; Aytoun, an 
 artist. Been up here painting Mrs. 
 Lindsay's portrait. He and Mrs. Riv- 
 ington have been simply inseparable." 
 
 " You don't mean it? What does she 
 want with him? Why doesn't she stick 
 to her own set." 
 
 " Don't ask me. You never know 
 when the fancy will take them. He's a 
 good looking chap; I suppose she likes 
 him." 
 
 Their voices had become louder as
 
 1 66 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 they continued. The noise and con- 
 fusion which drowned their conversa- 
 tion before, had subsided with the de- 
 parture of the coach and the scattering 
 of the crowd. 
 
 General Rivington and Ripley had 
 heard the last of their remarks about Mrs. 
 Perkins, and had turned their backs. 
 
 "Young ruffians," General Rivington 
 had exclaimed angrily. "What was I 
 saying, Ripley? Tell me what you 
 think of that sort of a conversation in a 
 public place." 
 
 "Oh, well," replied Ripley, "they 
 might have said worse things," but Gen- 
 eral Rivington moved his chair noisily, 
 quite failing to attract the attention of 
 the offenders, and puffed angrily at his 
 cigar. 
 
 Suddenly he caught his wife's name 
 and Ripley saw the blood rush to his 
 face. He rose to his feet. Ripley also 
 had heard quite distinctly, and put a 
 detaining hand upon his arm.
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 1 67 
 
 "Rivington," he said earnestly, "Riv- 
 ington for heaven's sake don't make a 
 fool of yourself." 
 
 General Rivington stood for a mo- 
 ment erect, his hands clenched over his 
 stick his eyes afire, thinking rapidly 
 even in his anger. " I have been away," 
 he thought, " what knowledge have I 
 with which to refute these lies. I shall 
 defend her but not in the dark," as he 
 hesitated with his friend's hand upon 
 his arm, the two men rose carelessly 
 without a glance in their direction, and 
 left the balcony. General Rivington 
 shut his'lips. 
 
 " Thank you, Tom," he said, " I shall 
 settle with these cubs later. You are 
 right, this is not the time." They went 
 down stairs in silence. 
 
 "Good morning," General Rivington 
 said abruptly at the door. " Good 
 morning, Tom." 
 
 Ripley watched him as he walked 
 away.
 
 Chapter XII. 
 IENERAL RIVINGTON did not 
 
 see his wife until they met at 
 the door to drive to their dinner. Al- 
 though his mood of anger had persisted 
 during the day, he did not deem it wise 
 to discuss a subject of such importance 
 during the brief moment of their drive, 
 but when they returned and Helen had 
 put her foot upon the stairs, and had 
 bidden him good-night he interrupted 
 her progress with a gravely detaining 
 word. 
 
 "Helen," he said, "I must speak with 
 you a moment." 
 
 She followed him into the library ; a 
 single light was burning dimly, and the 
 room was filled with the diffused white 
 radiance of the summer night. She 
 stood quietly by the table at which her 
 1 68
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 169 
 
 husband had taken his accustomed seat, 
 pale in her white dress her cloak 
 falling away from her bare shoulders. 
 Her eyes were startled, but not afraid. 
 
 General Rivington took up a paper 
 knife which lay on the table, and turned 
 it nervously in his hand. 
 
 "Helen," he said in a voice which 
 she had never heard, "it is very pain- 
 ful;" he paused, and then went on rap- 
 idly, "I overheard your name to-day 
 at the club, spoken in connection with 
 a man whom I myself have never seen 
 but once, but whom you must have 
 often seen during my absence. The 
 words used were very unpleasant for me 
 to hear, if not compromising to your- 
 self ; I must defend you and myself, 
 and to do this I must not be left in 
 ignorance." 
 
 "If you will tell me;" began his 
 wife, in a deep and perfectly quiet 
 voice 
 
 "Understand me," he interrupted ; I
 
 I/O A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 do not wish to pry into your secrets I 
 have left you every liberty, have I not?" 
 
 "Absolute liberty," she answered. 
 
 "You do not need to be told that I 
 trusted you. It is intolerable to me to 
 question you, to remind you of what 
 you owe to your own dignity and 
 mine." 
 
 She threw up her head, "Ah," she 
 said, " I do not deserve this. Have I 
 ever needed such a lesson?" 
 
 "If what I heard to-day has a founda- 
 tion in truth, you do." He looked at 
 her searchingly. 
 
 She hesitated, her lips trembling, and 
 he noticed for the first time the pallor 
 of her face, and was startled to see how 
 thin she had grown. A sudden pain 
 and pity for her sharpened his anger 
 intolerably, as he realized that some- 
 thing indeed had entered into her life 
 to change her so. 
 
 "Answer me;" he insisted sternly. 
 She still hesitated, confused between
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 171 
 
 her desire to confess her unhappiness, 
 and the pride of her conscious inno- 
 cence. Her husband still held his com- 
 manding gaze fixed upon her. 
 
 "I do not need your blame, but your 
 sympathy; if you only knew!" 
 
 "It is not true? Then why ask for 
 pity." His voice was dry and hard. 
 
 "It is not true," she answered more 
 firmly in reply to the continued cruelty 
 of his manner. "Certainly not true that 
 I have forgotten what I owe to you 
 except" and here her rigid instinct of 
 truth arrested her, she hesitated, and 
 then began to speak falteringly. "Oh, 
 listen, listen," she exclaimed, throwing 
 out her hands appealingly. "I have not 
 done wrong, I think, not very wrong " 
 she stopped again. "Oh, how can I tell 
 you?" 
 
 "You must," he replied, but even as 
 he spoke sternly and unrelentingly he 
 began to realize her suffering, to steel 
 himself against it.
 
 172 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 "I must go back a little," she said. 
 "I was very young when you married 
 me, and I have not been unhappy. Oh, 
 believe me not unhappy." 
 
 "You did not seem so," he replied. 
 
 "I was not, and you have been very 
 kind to me, but we must all live, must 
 we not? I thought I had, when I mar- 
 ried you, else I never should have con- 
 sented. I thought the danger was over. 
 I thought I might add to your hap- 
 piness by my affection and gratitude, 
 make some return for all you did for 
 me." She paused again, looking to him 
 for a little help in her painful speech, 
 but he was silent. "The danger was 
 not over," she continued; "for after a 
 while I saw that I had not known what 
 it was to live and I was lonely some- 
 times; you thought, I know, that you 
 were giving me all I desired in grant- 
 ing me so much liberty, but oh, I grew 
 so tired of all that empty lifel I was 
 very lonely, but I believed that I was
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 173 
 
 cold, as they all think me, and tried to 
 forget it, and then " 
 
 "Well?" 
 
 "I had known Mr. Aytoun years 
 ago;" she said, speaking the name 
 simply. "He understood me inter- 
 ested me, I did not think our friendship 
 could be wrong I never knew anyone 
 so well in all my life." She paused and 
 turned away her head. For a fleeting 
 moment, standing there as she did 
 before her husband, the peace of that 
 friendship, in which she had alone 
 known happiness, absorbed her, and her 
 face softened into a momentary gleam 
 of joy. 
 
 General Rivington watched her, suf- 
 fering deeply, and a dumb jealousy 
 such as he had never before experienced 
 took possession of him. 
 
 "I did not think it was wrong," she 
 repeated, "and I was happy in my igno- 
 rance until, she hesitated again I saw 
 where we had come and then, Oh!
 
 174 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 believe me, believe me," she appealed 
 to him, "I have tried to do right, I 
 have refused to see him, I have" 
 
 "When was this?" he asked her. 
 "Let me understand quite clearly. 
 You saw Mr. Aytoun constantly while 
 I was away?" 
 
 "Yes," she answered ; "I think so 
 very often." 
 
 "And as soon as you discovered;" 
 General Rivington found it difficult to 
 continue. "You have nothing more to 
 tell me?" He dropped his eyes from 
 her frank gaze. 
 
 "Oh, how can you," she exclaimed 
 bitterly, the blood rushing to her face 
 and then leaving it pale again. " Look 
 at me! yes, I love this man, as much, 
 I think, as he loves me, but I have had 
 the strength to bid him good-bye. I 
 have not sinned, no, except in the 
 recognition of this love, which is not 
 stronger than my will oh, try to be 
 sorry for me," she said in her deep
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 175 
 
 voice. " Love comes once in all our 
 lives, I think, and then we live in joy 
 or pain ; it is nothing but suffering to 
 me." 
 
 General Rivington closed his eyes for 
 a moment to shut away the sight of his 
 wife's face, steeling his heart against 
 her suffering, unable in his anger, to 
 think of her youth, her loneliness, her 
 pain. 
 
 She stood there her hands clasped 
 tightly over her heart, her eyes dark, 
 her pale lips drawn with suffering, 
 lonely, except for his sympathy, his 
 affection. For a moment he almost 
 yielded to the impulse to forgive her 
 freely, to tell her how he honored her 
 for her bravery, for he did understand 
 and believe her wholly, but he was not 
 strong enough. He rose from his chair. 
 
 "I quite believe all you say your 
 explanation is sufficient you have not 
 transgressed the letter of the law, that 
 is quite evident. We will not speak
 
 1/6 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 of this again. You are probably tired. 
 Good night." 
 
 Helen looked at him a moment, his 
 tall figure held rigidly erect, noting 
 hopelessly the stern passivity of his 
 face, and then she turned and slowly 
 traversed the length of the great room, 
 pale and stately in her white dress, 
 whose satin murmured on the floor, the 
 only sound in the deep stillness. At 
 the door she stopped and turned 
 towards her husband with a half 
 checked gesture of appeal, but his at- 
 titude was still rigidly unmoved, and 
 she went out leaving him alone. 
 
 General Rivington resumed his seat 
 at the table, his lips firmly set. He 
 turned up the light, and drawing some 
 writing materials about him, began to 
 compose a letter of importance, which 
 he had been considering for some days; 
 but in the double activity of his mind, 
 he was aware that the thought which he 
 had deliberately attempted to banish to
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 177 
 
 sub-consciousness, was asserting itself. 
 He saw his wife's face instinct with sad- 
 ness, her appealing voice sounded in 
 his ears. 
 
 His tardy love and pride in the 
 young girl he had married had re- 
 mained upon the surface of a nature 
 long settled into the formality of habit, 
 the coldness of continual good fortune. 
 But now as he sat there alone in silence, 
 a strange suffering rent and shook him. 
 He dropped his pen and covered his 
 face with his hands. Dreams of a youth 
 long passed, his memory gave them up 
 reluctantly, his own thwarted fancies 
 and ideals and long forgotten sorrows 
 and joys, moved before him in the still- 
 ness, rising again at this vision of a 
 love, which was not for him. The 
 sweetness of her nature, never wholly 
 known till now, which he realized was 
 not stirred for him, smote him with a 
 bitter sense of longing and regret. 
 Painful reluctant thoughts of the years 
 
 12
 
 178 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 which lay between himself and Helen, 
 clamored for recognition, and the re- 
 membrance of the solitary life she had 
 led among the formal, empty gayeties 
 to which he had abandoned her re- 
 proached him bitterly. Trying still tc 
 maintain his attitude of angry con- 
 demnation of his wife against the flood 
 of sympathy which assailed him, there 
 came a moment when he found he 
 could no longer blame her. Alone, 
 delivered over to this strange conflict 
 with himself and his pride, his cold- 
 ness suddenly gave way, and grief and 
 love penetrated his heart, crusted with 
 the composure of years; entered and 
 filled it full. 
 
 He dropped his head in his hands. 
 "Too late," he groaned. "Too late." 
 But to Helen, sobbing alone in her 
 room, abandoned to her suffering, her 
 sorrow had never seemed so hopeless, 
 her solitude so deserted.
 
 Chapter XIII. 
 
 |HE kiss which had awakened 
 Helen and Aytoun from their 
 dream of friendship had brought despair 
 to her, but to Aytoun it was revolution. 
 Past the temptations and expansions of 
 early youth, Aytoun had maintained an 
 unswerving loyalty to his ideal of life 
 in art. At thirty-five he believed him- 
 self sincerely to be incapable of treach- 
 ery to that faith. 
 
 But life has surprises for the strongest. 
 At any moment some thunder-bolt from 
 the electricities which sweep about us, 
 may strike us into silence from which 
 we awake the slaves of a new passion. 
 Lightning will breed an infidelity in a 
 compass. 
 
 When Aytoun first realized the danger 
 which awaited him, his pride revolted 
 179
 
 180 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 strongly, and his struggle, though brief, 
 was bitter. Then, when the real simi- 
 larity of their natures declared itself, 
 charmed by Helen's mind, lulled into a 
 false security by her frankness, her loy- 
 alty, he lent himself to her search for an 
 ideal friendship. But if the real deli- 
 cacy and spiritual cleanliness of his mind, 
 which had its sources in the pure foun- 
 tains of his American birth, had made 
 him able to understand her deeply, that 
 knowledge also taught him that she did 
 not realize the danger they were brav- 
 ing. Divining the invincible decree of 
 separation which she would issue if she 
 knew she loved him, he put commands 
 upon himself, and with his assisting will 
 maintained the deception which gained 
 for them both hours of unforgetable 
 happiness, while they walked the road 
 which they called friendship. For the 
 first time the joy of life in life was his, 
 for the first time he touched that unspent 
 capital of sentiment, of self-forgetting
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. l8l 
 
 passion, which had so long lain hidden 
 in his nature. 
 
 He had loved her first resentfully, 
 fearing to lose his long-kept independ- 
 ence, jealous of his art; then gratefully, 
 as the sweetness and delicacy of this 
 woman's mind met his, the freshness of 
 this poetic heart was revealed to him; 
 then madly, as the ineffable beauty of 
 the beloved woman took possession of 
 him. Her eyes, the fragrance of her 
 hair, her dress, enslaved his senses. 
 There was a little curl which escaped 
 upon her neck. There were soft mys- 
 teries of shadow about her eyes, inde- 
 scribable ripples of expression about the 
 deep corners of her mouth curved with 
 happiness, which were impressed upon 
 his brain as the sun upon eyes, which 
 have gazed too long upon its intoler- 
 able light. 
 
 During the last weeks of their friend- 
 ship, while he suffered those painful 
 alternations of love and anger, which the
 
 1 82 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 sight of her worldly life inflicted on him, 
 he still doubted if she loved him, still 
 held his own love captive to his will, but 
 when her kiss revealed to him how much 
 her heart was his, pride and reserve, and 
 his life's loyalty to his art abdicated at 
 last, leaving place but for one worship 
 the beloved woman. 
 
 On the night when they had sailed 
 together through their dream to this 
 blinding reality, he walked home in an 
 ecstatic solitude, his soul expanding on 
 the wings of the infinite within him to 
 the infinite of the sky. His mood of 
 joy was triumphant as the beauty of the 
 moon which rode free of obscuring 
 clouds in the deep vault of the night. 
 He wandered solitary through the quiet 
 streets of the town, and out upon the 
 cliffs, and as he stood upon the shore 
 alone with the limitless sky above him, 
 the waves of the ocean rushing to his 
 feet, obedient to the law of nature, he 
 realized by the light of his own passion
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 183 
 
 that nature with its waves was throbbing 
 through him, that he was a part of it, 
 this love a law, his soul an eternity, 
 infinite as the stars. 
 
 His surrender was deep and exultant, 
 the surrender of the lover and the 
 poet. 
 
 There were moments when fears of 
 her stern self-judgment assailed him, 
 but they were powerless as yet to hurt him, 
 clothed upon as he was with the glory 
 of a first love revealed, crowned with 
 the knowledge of its full requital. He 
 did not go to his rooms that night, but 
 wandering far along the shore uncon- 
 scious of whither his steps were leading, 
 the dawn surprised him. He went to 
 his studio, where he spent the hours of 
 the morning in a deep slumber. When 
 he awoke, his mind slowly and hesitat- 
 ingly repossessed its happiness, for with 
 that happiness the lurking fear which in 
 the glories and the illuminations of the 
 night had been powerless to hurt him,
 
 1 84 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 grasped his heart with a painful clutch 
 of apprehension. 
 
 He waited with impatience for the 
 hour when Helen usually received him. 
 The servant admitted him, and he made 
 his way to the verandah, where the tea 
 table stood ready in its accustomed 
 place. His heart beat heavily he 
 braced his nerves in his effort at control. 
 The servant appeared with a consciously 
 passive face. 
 
 "Mrs. Rivington begs to be excused." 
 Aytoun left the house in a daze of 
 dismay. What he most feared had 
 happened. She knew she loved him, 
 and with that knowledge judged herself 
 inexorably. He understood only too 
 well the pure invincibility of her awak- 
 ened conscience, with a breathless fear 
 he wrote the letter over which Helen in 
 the solitude of that sleepless mid-night 
 had fought the great fight of her life. 
 In the morning her short note of fare- 
 well came.
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. l8$ 
 
 "Do not hate me. It is best for us not to 
 see each other again. I do not need to ex- 
 plain why to you who know! I do not blame 
 you. I cannot write. God bless you. Good- 
 bye." H. R. 
 
 Aytoun was angry when he received 
 this note, impatient of its brevity, which 
 struck upon his throbbing nerves like a 
 sudden blow. For a day he was stunned, 
 unable to think clearly, and then he 
 attempted to gather his thoughts to- 
 gether, to call to his aid all the force of 
 his pride, and the self-control which 
 never before had failed him. He found 
 himself totally incapable to think upon 
 any other subject, and realized with 
 a bitter anger that he was no longer 
 his own master. His chains galled him 
 intolerably. Sometimes he shut himself 
 up in his studio, painting furiously, 
 then destroying the work which seemed 
 worthless to him. Sometimes, he walked 
 the street, driven by the caprices of his 
 broken will, led by the desire to catch 
 some glimpse of her.
 
 1 86 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 For a week she went nowhere, and 
 then one day he saw her. She drove 
 past him on a coach with a laughing 
 party of her friends. He paused at the 
 roadside to let them pass. She bowed 
 to him as they rolled by heavily with 
 the sweep of the horses, the rattle of the 
 harness; her salutation was slight and 
 constrained, with a fleeting smile. He 
 thought he heard her laugh as they 
 passed on. 
 
 She had not left his thoughts for one 
 waking moment since she had bidden 
 him good-night on that fatal evening 
 upon the water. " A week ! " he thought, 
 "was it only a week ago?" He had 
 walked miles that day with the hope of 
 deadening with physical fatigue this 
 anguish which was driving him like a 
 leaf before the wind. 
 
 And she Aytoun was ashamed of the 
 bitter anger and suspicion which rose 
 within him at the sight of her thus driv- 
 ing past him, gay and laughing, appar-
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 1 87 
 
 ently forgetful of him. As he stood 
 there in the dust while the coach disap- 
 peared around a curve in the road, he 
 put his hand to his throat with a sudden 
 sensation of choking. "She has been 
 playing with me," he said between his 
 teeth. "I have been a pastime for an 
 idle hour." All his early suspicion of 
 her, his hatred of this world of which 
 she was part, swept over him again over- 
 poweringly, blotting out his love with 
 its tender passion, his knowledge of the 
 nature he knew and loved so well. He 
 walked homeward blindly, the victim of 
 anger and jealousy, a thousand times 
 worse than his despair. 
 
 And the next day he bitterly re- 
 proached himself for his suspicion of 
 her, and called himself unworthy to love 
 her. Sometimes at night during the 
 hours when Helen alone in her room 
 was thinking of him, he also in his soli- 
 tude would be filled with a vision of her, 
 and he would become mysteriously con-
 
 1 88 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 scious of her suffering, filled with a cer- 
 tainty of her love. Sometimes in obedi- 
 ence to this unconscious summons, he 
 would leave his room, and walking si- 
 lently through the empty streets, would 
 watch her solitary light. He fancied 
 sometimes he saw her shadow, but the 
 knowledge of her unhappiness was no 
 fancy, but the mysterious omniscience 
 of a love, which in spite of all barriers 
 and conventions still united them. 
 
 As the days went on, the instinct to 
 possess his own became intolerable. 
 Aytoun had known women, but not 
 love, and the virginity of heart which 
 was his gave birth to wishes, strong as 
 winged eagles, fresh as youth. The 
 passion with which that kiss of his first 
 love had enslaved him, he knew sur- 
 passed any of the fine rigors of labor, or 
 the joy of success. Life had become 
 Love, where it had been Art; with one 
 thought he effaced ambition even 
 memory. But the virility of mind and
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 1 89 
 
 the unbreakable will by which he had 
 conquered his art, was now the life and 
 strength of his demand for happiness; 
 his adoration of beauty was centralized 
 into a passionate personal need. 
 
 If aided by his American instinct and 
 led by his understanding of Helen's na- 
 ture, he had at first accepted her terms, 
 and consented to see out of her eyes, 
 the revelation of her love for him gave 
 sudden and overpowering strength to his 
 desire for his own happiness. He be- 
 gan to think of her in a closer connec- 
 tion with his own wishes, to look from 
 his own point of view. 
 
 Aytoun had lived for years a life in 
 which the binding conventions and 
 distinctions of society are first despised, 
 and then forgotten. He had never him- 
 self gone contrary to any of its written 
 or unwritten laws, but he had lived 
 apart and had so long been unconscious 
 of their existence that they now seemed 
 vague and shadowy and had no terror
 
 igO A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 for him. Thus his sympathy for Helen's 
 position, his reverence for her scruples 
 was reminiscent and intellectual, and 
 had no root in feeling. 
 
 He dreamed sweet and impossible 
 dreams of a life together between love 
 and work, when Helen herself should 
 give him back his art. Sometimes the 
 pride which prevented him from again 
 attempting to see her dictated his de- 
 parture from Newport; but although he 
 twice made his arrangements he found 
 his resolution unequal to the test. His 
 mind swayed between love which melt- 
 ed into tenderness by the knowledge of 
 her suffering, and anger that she should 
 seek refuge from it in the empty dis- 
 tractions of her outward life. 
 
 Days passed by ; it was the end of 
 August. He realized that his endurance 
 was reaching its end. The processes of 
 his brain began to crystallize into a 
 hopeless and agonizing repetition, and 
 the fear of his slavery sank into the un-
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. igi 
 
 consciousness of an emotion, which in- 
 undated thought. 
 
 He slept only from exhaustion, and 
 often forgot to eat. He went irregu- 
 larly to his rooms in the town, and wan- 
 dering often far away among the cliffs, 
 he found his way at nightfall to the 
 lonely house which he had made his 
 studio. There he awoke late one night 
 from a sleep into which he had fallen, a 
 dreamless sleep of utter fatigue, awoke 
 with his brain suddenly clear. 
 
 A storm of wind and rain blew the 
 dead leaves of the declining summer in 
 gusts against the window, the dampness 
 and the salt smell of the sea came in 
 through the door which a blast had 
 blown open. Aytoun shivered; he was 
 faint from lack of food, and as he sat 
 there alone in the darkness he trembled 
 with the weakness of his shattered 
 nerves. A totally unknown feeling of 
 physical helplessness came over him, 
 and his solitude oppressed him strange-
 
 IQ2 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 ly; but his brain suddenly regained its 
 reflective power, his will once more re- 
 sponded to his call. " Come, come," he 
 said aloud ; " this is folly ; worse than 
 madness." 
 
 He rose, shut the door, and, lighting 
 some candles, found some biscuits, made 
 himself a drink and forced himself to 
 reason, to formulate logically these 
 thoughts, which had been beating 
 through his brain with a maddening 
 and futile repetition. 
 
 " First," he said, " it is clear this weak 
 yielding is over. She either loves me 
 or she does not. If she does she is 
 suffering quite as much as I am. Why 
 is it she refuses to see me? Her re- 
 sponsibility to her husband compels this 
 sacrifice; the irresistible Puritan convic- 
 tion that happiness is wrong is governing 
 her." 
 
 He went on from point to point, 
 forcing his mind to bare, unimaginative 
 forms of thought:
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 1 93 
 
 " Swayed by this prejudice, obedient 
 to her inherited leaning toward the duty 
 which is martyrdom, she does not real- 
 ize her responsibility to herself or to 
 me. She either loves me completely 
 and distrusts herself, or else she is tired 
 of a caprice which threatens to become 
 exacting, and is glad to be done with 
 it." 
 
 The sight of her driving past him on 
 the coach came back again with its un- 
 reasoning pang of anger and suspicion, 
 and for the moment dwelt in his mind 
 as proof of her heartlessness and insin- 
 cerity, but he dismissed it quickly ; the 
 thought was intolerable. " No," he 
 continued, "she is bound by the con- 
 ventions of her life, her loyalty to what 
 she believes to be her duty; but what 
 are the facts? In preserving the vague 
 and bloodless happiness of a man who 
 never really loved her and in continu- 
 ing this life, hollow, profitless and de- 
 stroying, she is sacrificing the best 
 '3
 
 194 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 interests and possibilities of her own 
 nature. 
 
 " Can I make her feel that she has 
 duties also to herself and me? At 
 least," he thought, "she may grant 
 some clemency. I will accept any 
 terms, wear any chains; slavery is better 
 than death. I may at least persuade 
 her to see me. I will try." 
 
 Aytoun sat down and began to write: 
 
 "It is three weeks since I received your 
 short and cruel note. Did you know how 
 cruel it was, or what wretched pain you have 
 caused another by this edict of your implaca- 
 ble will ? I cannot believe you did. 
 
 "I have borne the torture you have in- 
 flicted, until I have reached the end of my 
 endurance. I may not see you, but at least 
 you shall know what you are doing. 
 
 "Since you bade me good-night that even- 
 ing, you have not for one waking instant left 
 my thoughts. I am torn between belief in 
 you and a doubt of your sincerity worse than 
 any suffering I have ever imagined. 
 
 "In all those moments of our happy 
 friendship, did you not dream I loved you? 
 How could you fail to know it, so absolutely
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 195 
 
 absorbed as I was in your lightest word, 
 your smallest movement. We were happy; 
 you cannot deny it. I know you were happy, 
 for your eyes told me so, your smile, the 
 whole of your brightening beauty. At first 
 you were pleased and flattered and amused, 
 and then you were so grateful that I under- 
 stood you, and gave you what with all that 
 life has brought you you still longed for? 
 Why should I not have understood you? 
 Love has taught me the meaning of all your 
 lovely face; the mysteries of your voice, the 
 meaning of your every gesture are all clear 
 to me. All my life I have loved beauty that 
 I might understand you, and now I know 
 you better than you do yourself. Your 
 thoughts, those thoughts which you have 
 brought to me, so modestly sometimes, did 
 you not know I had been thinking them 
 over, and over again for you, until you 
 should apprehend them, realize your own 
 nature, be yourself? And I watched, oh! 
 how patiently, for the look in your eyes 
 which they were made to wear. Your eyes 
 are made for love, my darling, pure and 
 proud as you are; you cannot forbid them 
 their dreams and promises. Where did they 
 come from, what ancestor spending his sick 
 soul over the passions and the languors
 
 ig6 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 of the east set those strange wonders in your 
 face? I waited for the look, I commanded 
 it one day, do you remember? and you 
 yielded it up to me. And then because I 
 saw that you were dreaming of friendship 
 and the loves of the mind and spirit, and as 
 mind and spirit were yours too, I did my 
 best to make them obedient to you, and you 
 grew very happy, and your best self blos- 
 somed like a flower. I was so proud of what 
 I, who was your bond slave, had done, and 
 you did not half imagine how keen and fine 
 and natural you became. You will be re- 
 membered for your loveliness, but if you 
 will you can be powerful too, and know the 
 excitement and the great joy which comes 
 from the use of talent. With me, dearest, 
 not without me. There is one crime which 
 nature never forgives, the refusal to live 
 this is the unpardonable sin. You live now 
 because you suffer, needlessly, cruelly, mis- 
 takenly, but when you cease to suffer you 
 will no longer be you, you will live, your 
 sweet lips will smile, your eyes will dream, 
 but they will lie; they will be the mask of a 
 murdered nature, and you, dear, are your 
 own executioner. I do not need to be told 
 why in the pride of your purity and your 
 honor you have sent me from you, nor do
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 197 
 
 you need to tell me that it is because you 
 love me wholly that you have done it. What, 
 dear, do you not dafe to see me? Ah, how I 
 glorify and curse the moment which united 
 only to separate us forever. Ah, love, love, 
 be merciful. Is there no forgiveness, no re- 
 treat? 
 
 " Listen, my own, I love you wholly, every 
 smallest inch of you, with every nerve; but 
 as heaven hears me that passion is not 
 stronger than my reverence for you. It is 
 you, you, you I love, not myself. 
 
 " Why could it not go on as before? I will 
 obey your slightest wish. 
 
 "I will not attempt to deny that I would 
 take you away from this life you are leading, 
 yes, with rapture, if you would consent to 
 come; but I would not try to persuade you. 
 You should come, if come at all, without one 
 pang of conscience, without the remotest 
 shadow of a doubt. 
 
 "But you will not come, you will not 
 change, let it be so. My love suffices. I 
 will change for you. I will not give you one 
 moment more to regret, no matter under 
 what temptation. I will control myself abso- 
 lutely, only trust me! You will never realize 
 what it has cost me to write this letter. It is 
 my last appeal."
 
 Chapter XIV. 
 
 JYTOUN gave himself one week 
 in which to await the answer to 
 his letter, and then, should none come, 
 he decided to leave Newport and Amer- 
 ica together. Three days passed, and 
 he had received no answer. He found 
 that if he had calculated his endurance, 
 he had miscalculated his capacity for 
 anger. On the afternoon of the fourth 
 day after he had sent his letter to Helen, 
 he shut himself grimly in his rooms, 
 and awaited her answer. As the hours 
 went by inexorably, the waves of his 
 love rolled back upon him in an over- 
 whelming flood of bitterness and rage, 
 and every remembered thought of his 
 own tenderness and trust in Helen 
 turned now against him with a point of 
 steel. What had been love and pity for her 
 198
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 1 99 
 
 was transformed into a mad, unreason- 
 ing wish to hurt her. What had been 
 suspicion, seemed now to him only a pre- 
 vision of the truth. "False, heartless," 
 he called her bitterly, with a deep scorn 
 of her, and deeper contempt for himself, 
 that he should have been so deceived. 
 He stood at his window, smoking ner- 
 vously cigar after cigar, sometimes 
 walking the room, sometimes sitting in- 
 tentionally immovable with teeth shut 
 and hands clasped tightly, in his fierce 
 anger and resolve. "She never loved 
 me!" he said, "I served to fill an empty 
 moment in an idle day, I have been a 
 dummy on which to hang her flimsy 
 theories to be cast down, discarded at 
 the first sign of life." 
 
 As his love had been complete, ab- 
 sorbing, so this bitterness turned it all 
 to poison, and Aytoun suffered a terrible 
 transformation of soul. What had been 
 gentleness was now a desire for revenge. 
 What had been the unspoiled poetry of
 
 200 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 a simple, strong, and beauty loving na- 
 ture, became cynicism, and an incurable 
 pessimism. 
 
 He determined to see her. 
 
 "I will tell her to her face what I 
 think of her, for one moment at least 
 her pride if not her heart shall suffer. 
 See her? yes but how?" 
 
 Aytoun turned hastily to his desk and 
 looked over the invitations which lay 
 there in an unopened pile. Among 
 them he found one for that night. He 
 noted the name, that of Mrs. Bertram, of 
 whose balls he had heard Mrs. Lindsay 
 speak in that conversation in the studio, 
 which he had not forgotten, and whose 
 worldliness had even then revolted him. 
 He noticed the words "Bal Poudre" 
 written in one corner, and in the other 
 "very, very small dance." He laughed 
 bitterly. "This will be very very smart 
 then. She will not fail to be there." 
 He looked at his watch. It was eight 
 o'clock. He dressed and dined alone
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 201 
 
 at the club, and then walked rapidly 
 down the street, out towards the cliffs, 
 where Mrs. Bertram's beautiful house 
 stood by the water's edge. There were 
 lanterns on the marble gateposts, and 
 looking beyond, he could see congrega- 
 tions of lights, blue, green and yellow, 
 hung among the trees and scattered in 
 groups along the grass. But it was early 
 yet; there were no carriages in sight. 
 Aytoun walked away, past the houses out 
 among the rocks and sand, and there he 
 sat nursing his anger, unspeakably 
 wretched, impatient of the lagging mo- 
 ments as they passed. 
 
 It was midnight when he finally re- 
 turned. The ball was in full progress. 
 He did not go in but walked around 
 among the shadows of the trees to the 
 other side of the house where a porch 
 with marble pillars faced the sea. 
 
 Terraces with balustrades and steps of 
 marble, descended to the water's edge. 
 In the distance groves of thickly grow-
 
 2O2 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 ing trees, enclosed the brightness of the 
 smooth stretches of lawn, where trees 
 cut in fantastic old world shapes cast 
 their strange shadows in the moonlight. 
 Wreaths of roses fallen from the pillars 
 lay along the steps, exhaling their odors 
 in the air. Above the sound of the 
 music and laughter from within, the 
 voice of one bird singing among the 
 trees struck with liquid sweetness upon 
 the night. The regular sound of the 
 waves came up from the sea, whence 
 floated also a light vapor twisted and 
 curling in strange shapes among the 
 fantastic figures of the trees, like un- 
 bodied spirits drifting in a dream. 
 
 Through the open windows Aytoun 
 could see the dancers swaying in the 
 varying figures of the dance, in a maze 
 of color, light and sound. The room 
 was stately with marble pillars and full 
 of the sweet dim grace of the Watteau 
 panels, whose figures were repeated in 
 the living women, lovely in their old
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 2O3 
 
 brocades and powdered hair, who moved 
 before Aytoun's eyes like pictures living 
 in a dream. Sometimes a maiden in 
 quilted petticoat and rose-piled basket 
 with her attendant shepherd would 
 emerge from the brightness within into 
 the moonlight of the porch, or a cav- 
 alier with feathered hat on arm would 
 lift his lady's train over the low window 
 sill, while on the terraces, or stepping 
 slowly down the marble stairs, graceful 
 figures met and greeted each other, 
 joining in groups of blue and white and 
 rose, and dividing again with the clear 
 sound of floating laughter. Aytoun 
 stood alone and watched the chang- 
 ing scene, the misery of his sleepless 
 nights burning in his eyes, with a 
 strange sense of unreality, born of the 
 beauty of the night, and the madness 
 of his own despair. 
 
 Suddenly one of the groups dissolved, 
 and a woman in a dress of rose came to- 
 ward him. He could see her as she
 
 2O4 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 paused near where he stood. There were 
 roses in her powdered hair, rouge and 
 patches on her face. She stopped and 
 clasped her hands together with a gesture 
 of pain, breathing deeply in her solitude, 
 as if she could bear no more. " Heaven 
 help me," she sighed, "how can I 
 bear it?" 
 
 It was Helen! 
 
 Aytoun heard her voice. He emerged 
 from the shadow where he stood. She 
 looked at him a moment, and then she 
 turned as if to go. He caught her hand. 
 
 "You shall not go," he exclaimed in 
 a husky voice; "how dare you make me 
 suffer so? Ah! the misery, if you could 
 know!" 
 
 She was silent, but her lips moved as 
 she gazed at his white face. 
 
 "I wrote you," he said. "Did you 
 receive the letter?" 
 
 The lips framed "Yes." He looked 
 at her a moment with wondering anger 
 in his eyes.
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 2O$ 
 
 "You did not mean to answer it?" 
 
 She looked helplessly from side to 
 side, and then up into his face, fright- 
 ened at its expression of somber rage. 
 
 "Have you no mercy?" she said at 
 last in a low voice, which broke, trem- 
 bling as she forced herself to speak. 
 "Can't you understand? I have tried 
 to answer it. I could not not yet 
 wait." 
 
 "Tell me," he insisted, "do you wish 
 this to be the end think I shall give 
 you no other chance is it over? Shall 
 I leave you?" 
 
 She was silent. 
 
 "Helen," he said slowly, "I believe, 
 in spite of all your cruelty, that you 
 love me; but if you can say you do not, 
 I will go. Speak! answer." 
 
 "Oh," she faltered, painfully, "it is 
 too much. I cannot, cannot," she 
 stopped, swaying, and he caught her in 
 his arms. For one moment she rested 
 there, blindly, half unconscious, while
 
 206 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 he kissed her brow, her eyes, her lips, 
 while he murmured, "No! you cannot, 
 cannot say it." 
 
 But it was only for a moment. Then 
 she tore herself away and stood apart 
 from him, trembling, covering her face, 
 and then she dropped her hands, clasp- 
 ing them together, and raising her eyes 
 to his face. 
 
 "No!" she said, in a voice which was 
 strangely clear, though faltering, "I do 
 not love you." 
 
 He gazed at her incredulously. 
 
 "I do not believe you," he said. He 
 came near her, taking her face in his 
 hands and looking deep into her eyes, 
 which bravely returned his gaze. "Say 
 it again! " he insisted sternly. "You do 
 not love me." 
 
 She made no reply. 
 
 "Answer," he cried, "are you woman? 
 Are you real?" 
 
 "No," she answered. "It is over." 
 
 "Not a word," he said, "after all
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 2O/ 
 
 these months! Did you never care for 
 me?" 
 
 Still she was silent, wondering at her 
 own courage, blindly holding to the un- 
 truth which should accomplish her 
 sacrifice. 
 
 "You are a cruel woman," he said at 
 last, each word falling with fatal dis- 
 tinctness from his white lips. "May 
 heaven forgive you, for I never will." 
 
 There was an instant's silence, while 
 Aytoun and Helen there in the moon- 
 light of the music haunted night looked 
 once more upon each other. 
 
 Then he grasped her wrists, throwing 
 them from him with an almost brutal 
 gesture, turned, and disappeared among 
 the trees. And Helen, with heart of 
 ice, passed falteringly up the marble 
 steps, quite clear, quite conscious in the 
 tragedy of her resolve, and joined the 
 dancers on the floor.
 
 Chapter XV. 
 
 |INE months after Aytoun had left 
 America Mrs. Rivington, accom- 
 panied by Mrs. Lindsay, arrived in 
 Paris. 
 
 The winter had passed with the same 
 monotonous gayety in which Helen had 
 spent the ten years of her married life. 
 No new sensations came to change the 
 current of her thoughts, which as the 
 months slipped by set strongly and 
 more strongly towards Aytoun. 
 
 General Rivington had never again 
 referred to the subject of their mid- 
 night's conversation in the library at 
 Newport. Their relations resumed with 
 no perceptible change the habits of 
 courteous independence, mutual and un- 
 questioned, which had characterized 
 them from the first. If General Riving- 
 208
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 209 
 
 ton sometimes regretfully stifled a wish 
 to speak openly to her of her trouble, 
 she did not know it. 
 
 Undistracted from the ruling thought 
 of her mind, left alone and uninvaded 
 by any outside influence which could 
 comprehend her, the thought of Aytoun 
 became daily more and more absorb- 
 ing. 
 
 She did not question or regret her 
 action in cutting short all possibility of 
 seeing him again. Not once during all 
 the reveries and retrospects of the 
 months that followed, did she admit to 
 herself that she could have followed any 
 other course, but she had not calculated 
 the effect of the loneliness which pressed 
 unrelentingly upon her now that Aytoun 
 had returned to his old life, and gave no 
 sign of his remembrance of her. Dwell- 
 ing in the solitude of her mind upon 
 every word and picture of him which 
 remained to her, their friendship and 
 the hours which she had spent in his 
 14
 
 2IO A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 companionship assumed an ever grow- 
 ing importance. 
 
 Her outer life became an empty form; 
 within she lived in his remembrance. 
 
 Little by little she lost her power over 
 people, and her ability to assume an in- 
 terest in what went on about her. The 
 streams of her nature all flowed inward. 
 
 Her friends began to whisper of the 
 change they saw in her, and General 
 Rivington became at last anxiously ap- 
 prehensive. Finally one day Mrs. Lind- 
 say descended upon her in an indignant 
 flurry of decision. 
 
 "You are pale and ill, my child," she 
 said, "you must have a change! John 
 has given in at last. I am going to 
 Paris next week, and you are going 
 with me. I shall see your husband 
 myself. Now you needn't talk you 
 are going." 
 
 So it happened that when the chest- 
 nut trees were just breaking into blos- 
 som along the Champs Elysees, Helen
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 2 1 I 
 
 and her friend found themselves in 
 Paris. 
 
 There for a fortnight, Helen lent her- 
 self to her friend's caprices, followed her 
 to her conferences with her numerous 
 dressmakers, and dined with her at the 
 different restaurants with the acquaint- 
 ances they met in numbers, fluttering 
 up and down the Rue de la Paix in 
 their search for clothes and jewels. 
 
 Mrs. Lindsay was in the highest spir- 
 its, and Helen followed her, trying to 
 enjoy her gayety, endeavoring to be in- 
 terested herself. But she was compelled 
 to admit her efforts fruitless. The noise 
 of the streets with their wheeling car- 
 riages, the atmosphere of unrest and ex- 
 citement, tried her nerves unexpectedly. 
 The details of shopping failed to amuse 
 and only tired her, and instead, the 
 thought which she had preferred to be- 
 lieve she could subdue kept rising, 
 rising, to the surface of her mind, com- 
 manding her attention. She was in
 
 212 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 Paris under the same sky, breathing the 
 same air with Aytoun. " Philip! Philip 
 Aytoun." This was the name, the one 
 name, which Paris said to her. At any 
 moment she might see him; in an hour, 
 if she should write, he might be with 
 her. 
 
 Again and yet again she found herself 
 compelled to fight the same battle 
 which she had won so hardly, while her 
 strength was still unimpaired, before 
 this winter of suffering had passed over 
 her. 
 
 His success was on every lip. His 
 name in the papers. His pictures were 
 in the salon. She went often to see 
 them, rashly abandoning herself to her 
 persistent thought of him. She found 
 she could no longer command the 
 thought of a complete victory over her- 
 self, and she set herself hourly tasks to 
 cheat her failing strength. She would 
 resolve at each day's waking that she 
 would not write that morning, and when
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 213 
 
 afternoon had come that she would not 
 write till night. So she surmounted her 
 days. 
 
 His words constantly recurred to her. 
 
 " You suffer now, but a time will come 
 when you will suffer no more, and then 
 you will no longer be you." These words 
 now seemed prophetic to her of these 
 days, when all the strength she pos- 
 sessed was used in subduing every im- 
 pulse, since every impulse set towards 
 him, and as her bodily strength declined, 
 she realized that every quality of which 
 her individuality was composed also 
 suffered diminution, and as suffering 
 was unique in her experience, so her 
 vision was without prospective. No hilly 
 retrospect of descents and painful but 
 sure regainings of lost altitudes brought 
 hope to Helen. It seemed to her that 
 she was daily committing the suicide of 
 herself. Dulled brain and weakened im- 
 pulse drew the curtains of her soul; she 
 only felt the darkness.
 
 214 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 To break to pieces in a whirlpool of 
 destruction, or to be ground slowly to 
 nothingness on the rocks of renuncia- 
 tion, of self-nullification ; this was the 
 alternative which swayed her mind, 
 while her instinct held firm ; but she 
 began to question the manner of her 
 rigid dealing with herself, to blame her- 
 self that she had refused to see him and 
 had failed to reply to his letter; what 
 had so long seemed to her the single 
 and inevitable course began now to ap- 
 pear crude, harsh and cruel. 
 
 Involuntarily her mind began to form 
 sentences of excuse and explanation, and 
 she composed many letters to Aytoun in 
 her thoughts; but here in Paris where 
 he might think she had followed him, 
 pride with principle made a double bar- 
 rier against desire. 
 
 Her manner toward her friend became 
 more and more abstracted some days 
 she was almost irritable. There was a 
 transparent look about her temples, and
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 21$ 
 
 the hollowness of her cheeks marred 
 the pure line from chin to brow. Symp- 
 toms of a serious prostration of the 
 nerves began to appear. She found 
 herself unaccountably reluctant to per- 
 form the slightest outward act of life; 
 conceived a strange aversion to see any 
 of her friends; was a prey to a misera- 
 ble feeling of apprehension, and slept 
 a light and broken slumber, awakening 
 at sunrise. 
 
 One morning Mrs. Lindsay, rising 
 earlier than was her wont and wishing 
 to speak with Helen about some project 
 of the day, crossed the little salon which 
 divided their rooms and knocked at her 
 door. Hearing no answer and knowing 
 how early it was her habit to awake, she 
 knocked again more loudly, then yield- 
 ing to a sudden feeling of alarm, she 
 opened the door and entered the room. 
 
 Helen was lying motionless and 
 whiter than her pillow; she was breath- 
 ing, but her heart on which Mrs. Lind-
 
 2l6 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 say laid her hand in terror was scarcely 
 beating. She had fainted in her sleep. 
 
 Restoratives and stimulants revived 
 her, but now, thoroughly alarmed, Mrs. 
 Lindsay sent for a physician, who or- 
 dered them immediately out of Paris. 
 
 " She is too ill to bear the journey 
 home," he said; " don't alarm her, but 
 take a house in the country for a month 
 at least. She must have complete rest." 
 
 Once assured of the necessity of a 
 serious care of her friend, Mrs. Lindsay 
 busied herself about the arrangements 
 for their removal, and discovered a 
 house near the forest of Fontainebleu, 
 not far from Montigny, on the river 
 Loing. 
 
 Helen was pleased when she was in- 
 formed of this plan and smiled a little 
 pale smile, as they drove together one 
 morning in mid-May toward the Gare 
 de Lyon. 
 
 The high pale blue of the sky, with 
 the characteristic gray haze of Paris
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 21 7 
 
 stretched above the Arc. This sky had 
 always seemed to Helen distant and in- 
 sincere an artificial heaven, not the 
 sky which broods low over the meadows 
 and the hills, rich in azure or in storms. 
 The chestnut trees were in full bloom 
 with their glimpses of lighted restaurants 
 between, their surrounding streams of 
 passing humanity. Yes, she was glad to 
 escape for awhile, and wondered vague- 
 ly if in the country where she was going 
 nature would consent to come near, 
 would be generous and comforting. 
 
 The journey seemed long; the jolting 
 of the train fatigued her. She was re- 
 lieved when they arrived at the town of 
 Fontainebleu and had exchanged the 
 railway carriage for a landau, slow and 
 lumbering, which carried them smoothly 
 through the streets of the little city out 
 into the country. 
 
 Helen and her friend leaned back in 
 their seats and breathed the fresh air of 
 spring.
 
 218 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 Mrs. Lindsay laughed at the children 
 who ran out from the cottages by the 
 roadside, and threw them coins from 
 her little gold purse. She was delighted 
 with the novelty of her project, and en- 
 thusiastic in her promises of returning 
 health to Helen. 
 
 " You will be strong," she said, " and 
 well when I have done with you. Don't 
 you worry, my dear, about anything. 
 I'll take care of you." 
 
 Helen sat quietly enjoying the relief 
 from the noise of Paris as they drove 
 slowly along. Presently they entered 
 the forest. A light cloud of pale green 
 foliage floated in the tops of the taller 
 trees, around whose trunks the moss, 
 young and yellow, looked like fallen 
 sunshine. The great oaks bore only 
 their millions of reddish buds shining 
 with sap, and the elms scattered the 
 dead leaves of the past summer upon 
 the path. 
 
 The grass still fresh and unscorched
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 2IQ 
 
 by the heats of the summer, was green 
 and strong. 
 
 The sun was shining through the 
 branches, but little puffs of cool fresh- 
 ness stirred the air. Looking above, 
 towards the light blue sky with its float- 
 ing tufts of clouds, Helen delighted in 
 the fine tracery of the branches still 
 delicately distinct in their gauzelike 
 veil of green, and listened to the chirp- 
 ings and stirrings of the mating birds. 
 As they drove on, the little innumerable 
 stirs and sounds in the great stillness 
 soothed her unhappiness, quieted and 
 purified her spirit. 
 
 "How good you are to me, Kate," 
 she said turning to her friend. " I feel 
 better already. It is delicious." 
 
 They emerged from the forest, driv- 
 ing through the white streets of Mar- 
 lotte just as the sun's rays were striking 
 on the wmdow panes of the little houses 
 which stood closely together by the 
 roadside. The walls were of plaster,
 
 22O A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 freshly whitened, the red tiled roofs 
 glowed under the horizontal rays of the 
 sun, blossoming lilacs showed here and 
 there over the walls, and garden flowers 
 through the open gateways. Neatly 
 dressed children splashed water at the 
 pumps, or drove flocks of geese from 
 under the horse's feet. 
 
 After they had left the village, they 
 drove another half hour by the edge of 
 the forest, and reached their destination 
 just at night fall. 
 
 It was a curious but attractive house, 
 restored and put in order by an old 
 general, a favorite of the last empire, 
 who had retired to the quiet of the 
 country to pass his declining years, but 
 had been drawn into a rash enthusiasm 
 for Boulanger and had lost his fortune 
 together with his hopes of a restoration 
 of the empire. The house had been 
 left for them quite unchanged, the 
 owner being only too delighted at the 
 chance to make a few economies.
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 221 
 
 Helen and Mrs. Lindsay were charmed 
 and amused with their surroundings. 
 Down stairs there was an office, the din- 
 ing-room and kitchen, and two smaller 
 rooms. Up stairs a large salon, smok- 
 ing-room, and two bed rooms with 
 smaller ones adjoining hung with 
 Neapolitan shawls and arranged as 
 dressing rooms. Two servants had 
 been left in the house, who with Mrs. 
 Lindsay's and Helen's two maids sufficed 
 for their needs. 
 
 The house was situated near the river 
 Loing, divided from it only by a gar- 
 den, which adjoined an orchard filled 
 with blossoms. 
 
 Helen opened the window and 
 breathed the fresh air which blew across 
 the meadows, which she could see dimly 
 in the twilight on the other side of the 
 stream. "Here," she thought, " I will 
 learn to be happy, and grow strong 
 once more." 
 
 After they had dined, they returned
 
 222 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 again to the salon, as it was not yet 
 warm enough to stay out of doors. 
 
 Helen was interested in this French 
 interior and examined with curiosity the 
 portraits, the vitrines with their old 
 china, their relics and their medals, and 
 was amused by the curious arrangement 
 and disposition of the furniture. Her 
 bed room, hung in dim blue-gray, 
 pleased her. Its portraits of saints upon 
 the walls, its little font for holy water 
 above the bed and its priedieu gave to 
 this quiet room in the silence of the sur- 
 rounding trees, the reposefulness of a 
 chapel. 
 
 But Mrs. Lindsay was delighted with 
 the smoking-room, where the fallen idol 
 of this military recluse looked boldly 
 out from its frame surrounded by swords 
 and rifles. Uniforms, humorously dis- 
 membered made the ornaments of chairs 
 and curtains. She threw herself in a 
 chair, whose back was adorned with a 
 red coat with hanging empty sleeves.
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 223 
 
 She wound them about her waist, and 
 laughed merrily. 
 
 Helen laughed herself. "How ab- 
 surd 1" she said. 
 
 And yet somehow this fantastic sen- 
 timentality jarred upon her, this strange 
 expression of the ardor of a lost cause 
 seemed too grotesquely pathetic. It was 
 too appropriate, she thought. 
 
 Still laughing, she looked up at the 
 portrait, but her thoughts turned upon 
 the ignoble end of a career, and the love 
 which sacrificed an empire. "It is 
 wonderful," she said to her friend, 
 "Sublime folly perhaps after all." 
 
 "What do you mean," inquired Mrs. 
 Lindsay, whose knowledge of history 
 was elemental. "Tell me about it" 
 
 "Would you believe in a man who 
 could give up what seemed to him the 
 certainty of a throne for the love of a 
 woman dying of consumption?" 
 
 "No, indeed, I would not," she shook 
 her head decisively.
 
 224 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 "You may," said Helen, pointing to 
 the portrait, "for there he is." 
 
 "She probably got well, and lived to 
 make him regret it." 
 
 "No, my dear, she died; and two 
 months after he shot himself upon her 
 grave." 
 
 Mrs. Lindsay's eyes looked around 
 with astonishment, and her face sobered. 
 
 "Really?" she asked. "Then I sup- 
 pose he must have cared." 
 
 She got up from her chair, and moved 
 around the room. Helen threw herself 
 on a sofa beside the fire. Mrs. Lindsay 
 lighted a cigarette and came and sat be- 
 side her friend. 
 
 "How do you feel, not too tired? 
 It's nice here, isn't it?" 
 
 "No, dear, thank you ; I am not 
 tired." 
 
 "Then we'll talk a little." 
 
 There was a pause. 
 
 "Did you ever know one?" she asked, 
 suddenly.
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 225 
 
 "Know who?" smiled Helen. "You 
 are charmingly vague." 
 
 "Why! any man who cared for you, 
 instead of for himself?" 
 
 Helen turned her head upon the cush- 
 ions, and looked at her friend. She was 
 tapping her foot nervously on the floor, 
 her quick, black eyes full of an impatient 
 indignation. 
 
 No word of confidence in regard to 
 the deeper experiences of their lives had 
 ever passed between these women, who 
 had seen each other constantly for years. 
 Helen thought a moment. 
 
 "Yes, and no," she said. "I have 
 certainly known some who were con- 
 vinced they cared." 
 
 "Yes, so have I; but they never con- 
 vinced me." 
 
 "Perhaps you didn't wish to be." 
 
 "Ah," she said, "perhaps." 
 
 There was another pause. The mur- 
 mur of the river came in through the 
 window. The lamp, with its red shade, 
 15
 
 226 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 cast a warm light upon Helen's face 
 among the cushions, and shone upon 
 the black braids of Mrs. Lindsay's hair. 
 The room had an intimate air. 
 
 "And if you did," Helen's voice broke 
 the silence, " would you give up anything 
 because of it?" 
 
 "That's just it," said Mrs. Lindsay, sit- 
 ting up straight in her chair. "There's 
 always some terrible price to pay, and 
 such indignation at the mere breath of 
 hesitation." 
 
 "Yes, I know," said Helen. "They 
 call it calculation with a fine scorn, and 
 declare love is not love if it can count 
 the cost." 
 
 "I know that contempt," said Mrs. 
 Lindsay, "the contempt of the high- 
 wayman when his victim hesitates to 
 give up his money or his life." 
 
 Helen laughed a little. 
 
 "You put it strongly, I think." 
 
 "And what do they give us," Mrs.
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 22; 
 
 Lindsay continued, indignantly; "noth- 
 ing, when the chase is over." 
 
 Helen shook her head. 
 
 "You are not quite fair," she said, 
 after all. "You have everything on 
 earth you want, plenty of money, inde- 
 pendence; I am sure John never refused 
 you anything in all his life." 
 
 "No! nothing but his companion- 
 ship," she said. "You know how it is. 
 Our husbands give us everything but 
 themselves. Did you ever see a man 
 run after a street car?" she asked, 
 whimsically. " He shouts and tears after 
 it, would give his fortune rather than 
 lose it; and when he gets it, he sits 
 down calmly, takes out his paper, and 
 begins to read." 
 
 They both laughed merrily. 
 
 "You are right," said Helen. 
 
 "Oh dear!" sighed Mrs. Lindsay; "is 
 it really all?" 
 
 Helen was silent. "It can't be," she
 
 228 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 said, at last. " Did you notice that for- 
 lorn young couple on the steamer? 
 The man was a soldier in the Italian 
 army; very poor, they told me, who had 
 come over to America on leave to see if 
 he could do anything to improve his 
 fortunes. But he had failed, and they 
 were returning. He was small and thin, 
 and not good looking, but his wife had 
 the sweetest face I ever saw. They 
 were always together, and looked per- 
 fectly happy. I came across them one 
 day in an out of the way corner. She 
 was reading aloud to him. One hand 
 held the book; the other was clasped in 
 his, which was around her neck. If 
 you could have seen her expression! 
 In spite of all their poverty, there it 
 was the real thing happiness. I 
 shall never forget it. It was in her 
 face." 
 
 "I did see it," said Mrs. Lindsay; 
 "but I didn't think you had." 
 
 Helen's eyes filled with tears, and
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 22Q 
 
 when she looked at her friend, she was 
 brushing away her own. 
 
 " How silly we are," she said. " Come, 
 dearest, this is too late for an invalid. 
 We must go to bed."
 
 Chapter XVI. 
 
 lELEN and Mrs. Lindsay spent 
 their first days in the country, in- 
 doors, housed by a continued rain. The 
 utter peace and quiet was reposing to 
 Helen, although she grew no stronger; 
 but Mrs. Lindsay became restless, and 
 Helen insisted that she should take a hol- 
 iday, not regretting the prospect of a 
 few hours complete solitude. So on the 
 first bright day Mrs. Lindsay went to 
 Paris, and Helen was left alone. She 
 wandered about the house at first, rest- 
 lessly. Then she took a book to a ham- 
 mock under the trees, but could not fix 
 her attention on its pages; the words 
 passed over the surface of her mind and 
 left no trace. As afternoon came on she 
 threw a scarf about her, and walking 
 slowly in her light dress, she took her 
 230
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 23! 
 
 way bareheaded through the orchard 
 towards the river path. It was a radiant 
 day after the warm rain, the orchards 
 were in full blossom. Beyond the river, 
 the meadows were tender with young 
 green. The triumphant summons and 
 echoes of the birds filled the branches, 
 stirring with a fragrant breeze. It was 
 the climax of spring. Helen stopped 
 by a tree, whose name she did not know. 
 It was flaming with deep pink blossoms. 
 She lifted her face towards the sweeping 
 branches, breathing deep of its luxuriant 
 promises; her face showed transparently 
 delicate against those blazing blossoms. 
 Her hands trembled a little as she drew 
 them towards her. She was no longer 
 the brilliant beauty of a year ago, but 
 this new loveliness was ethereal, rarer. 
 With her light and swaying step, her 
 white scarf floating from her shoulders, 
 she moved among the blossoming trees 
 like the returning spirit of the spring. 
 She had come to nature for repose
 
 232 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 and cure, sometimes she found it, but 
 not to-day. The appeal of all this 
 springing beauty was intolerable. Her 
 whole being thrilled to its command of 
 happiness. 
 
 It seemed incredible that she alone 
 must shut her heart against this singing 
 harmony about her. To-day it was not 
 resignation which these flowers and 
 birds and trees brought to her, but a 
 bitter revolt against the cruelty of life. 
 "Do these birds reason," she asked her- 
 self; "and these flowers think? They 
 live as they die, in unconscious obedi- 
 ence to the law which made them." As 
 she walked there slowly among the 
 trees, all her torture re-awoke with ten- 
 fold bitterness. 
 
 "Ah, life! life!" she sighed, "must I 
 always pass you by?" 
 
 Her feet faltered in their steps, she 
 stopped a moment, realizing almost 
 gladly how weak she had become. A 
 breath of dampness blew up from the
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 233 
 
 river, she shivered, and drew her scarf 
 about her shoulders, and for the first 
 time, let her thoughts wander as they 
 would. Physical exhaustion had at last 
 loosened her unrelenting hold upon 
 them. Now they flew to Aytoun. As 
 she stood there trembling, her eyes dark 
 with dreams, she clasped her hands to- 
 gether in a pose of willful quiet, while 
 she imagined to herself their meeting. 
 Already in her thoughts she had written 
 to Aytoun; now she saw the vision of 
 his coming. Her eyes dwelt upon the 
 meadows beyond, bathed in the golden 
 light of the declining sun, and through 
 a mist of tears, she saw him stepping 
 towards her over those fields of light, 
 love in his eyes, the summer wind and 
 sunshine in his hair. Once more she 
 heard that unforgotten voice. " Thank 
 God," she thought it said; "you have 
 sent for me. It is not too late." She 
 felt his touch, his kiss upon her mouth 
 such happiness! was it of earth? She
 
 234 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 felt herself sinking, sinking, her will 
 following where her fancy led; her lips 
 moved, she raised her hands to her eyes 
 to shut out that inner vision, blinding, 
 unescapable. "God help me," she 
 whispered dumbly. Still that strange 
 slipping, dissolving of her will! As she 
 stood there, keenly conscious of this 
 fatal drama in her mind, silent, motion- 
 less, the moments passing each one irre- 
 parable and momentous, she heard the 
 slightest sound, the stirring of the 
 leaves, the river's quiet murmur flowed 
 through her brain. 
 
 Suddenly she heard a clear high voice: 
 
 " Nini printemps, dans ma m6moire, 
 C'est a toi la place d'honneur 
 Sans bijoux ni manteau noir, 
 Tu as sQ trouver le bonheur! " 
 
 It sang. 
 
 She dropped her hands and listened. 
 The sound seemed to draw nearer, and 
 then around a bend in the stream came 
 a boat filled with girls and men.
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 235 
 
 How near it was! she was too startled 
 to move. She could see their faces 
 plainly. A young man in a faded vel- 
 veteen jacket lounged in the bottom of 
 the boat between two girls with yellow 
 hair and painted cheeks. 
 
 Another man with a straight brimmed 
 hat pushed back over his brown curls 
 stood behind them, singing as he bent 
 to his oar. 
 
 They were laughing and shouting in 
 a merry confusion, which startled the 
 stillness of the river: 
 
 " En route il faut rire, 
 Cupidon m'inspire! " 
 
 The boat was filled with the blossomed 
 branches of the trees. Another man in 
 the bow of the boat, had his arm around 
 the girl who was singing. His back was 
 turned to Helen, but she could see the 
 girl, who was young with a strange dark 
 face. Her hair was drawn down over 
 her brow in a deep rippled mass. Her 
 head was bare, her white curved throat
 
 236 A SAWDUST DOLL. 
 
 throbbed with her song. As they drew 
 nearer, Helen could hear the words she 
 sang: 
 
 " Par les sentiers remplis d' ivresse 
 
 Aliens ensemble, a petits pas, 
 
 Je veux t' offrir, oh ! ma maitresse, 
 
 Le premier bouquet de lilas! " 
 
 They were quite unconscious of her 
 presence there, so near them. Suddenly 
 the man in the bow turned his head, and 
 looked full into Helen's eyes. 
 
 It was Philip. So he came to her. 
 
 One sharp and startled look of recog- 
 nition from a face so changed, so old, 
 so bitter, that Helen's stricken eyes 
 scarce knew that it was he, and then he 
 turned away, and gave no sign that he 
 had seen her, taking up the refrain of the 
 song, joining the others in their shouts 
 and laughter. 
 
 Helen still stood watching them. 
 
 Je veux t' offrir, oh ! ma maitresse 
 Le premier bouquet de lilas 
 Nini printemps!
 
 A SAWDUST DOLL. 237 
 
 She threw out her hands blindly about 
 the trunk of the tree near which she 
 stood. A great terror filled her eyes. 
 
 "What have I done," she whispered. 
 "What have I done?" 
 
 She stood there helpless, trembling, 
 hearing only that repeated song. 
 
 Nini printemps, dans ma memoire 
 Nini printemps Nini printemps 
 
 She knew that it was over, the suffer- 
 ing, the longing, all the joy and pain. 
 Rolled up like a scroll part of the past 
 forever. 
 
 The song lingered in the air, the boat 
 with its burden of flowers and laughter 
 vanished like a vision with it vanished 
 her youth. 
 
 THE END.
 
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 A SAWDUST DOLL 
 
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