MARY HAST INGS BRADLEY fe "'You must let me keep this,' he insisted." [PAGE 14.] The Splendid Chance By MARY HASTINGS BRADLEY AUTHOR OF 'The Palace of Darkened Windows" With Frontispiece By EDMUND FREDERICK A. L. BURT COMPANY Publishers New York Published by Arrangements with D. APPLETON & COMPANY . 0? CALIF. LIBRARY, LOS ANGELF COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY Printed in the United States of America TO L. S. C. 2125757 THE SPLENDID CHANCE BOOK I CHAPTER I SHE knew, as he very high-handedly carried her away from the others who had come to the steamer to see her off, that it was going to be a wretched ten minutes ! They had gone over that ground so often of late ! She was aware to her unhappiness of every plea that he could make, of every stubborn, wounding word that she must give in reply. It did no good to talk about it any more, but since it was the last hour before her sailing she could not grudge him those few instants out of the lifetime that she was so persistently with- holding. To her unhappiness for him there was added a subtle sense of shame, because she had seen this coming and had been irresolute, uncertain, so genuinely liking him that she had been dreadfully tempted. . . . Even now it was hard to be sure that she would never be sorry for this. There were so many ways of look- ing at life! "I'll wait," he kept telling her with maddeningly 1 THE SPLENDID CHANCE dogged insistence. "You don't know yourself, yet. You're crazy now over this painting thing but what is there in that for you? You'll find out! And I'll wait " Across the gray-blue of her eyes there scudded a lit- tle zigzag of panic fear. Across the young eagerness of her face there darkened a shadow of age-old hesita- tion. It was so perilously easy to have him wait with no ostensible responsibility upon her part! Sup- pose he were right? Suppose she failed? Suppose she never loved? Suppose she never met anyone else so likable so distractingly eligible? Oh, she knew what lunacy her refusal of him would be thought ! And she knew, too, for all her youth and buoyancy, that the game of life goes often hardest with the most scrupulous player. From the deeps a hundred whispers of caution rose, a prompting echo from long lines of sensible, home- loving women. Then she shook her head at him angrily, her straight brows knit. "No ! Don't wait, Dick. It's useless." "But you like me?" "Too well. That's the trouble. I can almost per- suade myself that such liking is enough but it's not. There's more I ought to feel, more I could feel, if if " "If you met the right one?" The discord in his voice smote her quivering senses hard. She was a girl with a fatal capacity for feeling others' pain sometimes too late ; a fatal weakness for giving pleasure sometimes too long. Tears leaped to her eyes. 2 THE SPLENDID CHANCE "Oh, Dick, I wish I could give you what you want! I wish I could !" Quickly he told her, "Your liking is enough, Kath- erine. I wouldn't ask for more." She knew better. There was an irony of wisdom in her shadowy smile. It was not enough, she told him. Neither for him nor for her. She was so brimming with life, so conscious of vitality that would be waste with him, that her words came edged with unconscious revelation. "I want to know all of it all of life that there is to feel. There must be something more ! And till it comes I want to be free, free free for my work, free for my own life." Already, beneath her transient distress, her youth had taken on its look of eagerness. He said bitterly, "You'd have married me if you hadn't won that prize." They were stopping at the rail, on the upper deck, hidden by one of the lifeboats. For a moment more his gaze, belligerent yet entreating, rested on her flushed and spirited face as if for the first time he was reading the true meaning of it for him, then his eyes turned away from her in a blind stare across the harbor teem- ing with its plying craft. The March wind, vagrant and capricious, buffeted his set young face where desire and stiffening pride struggled behind locked lips. He opened them on a painful acknowledgment of defeat. "Well, if I can't make you love me, Katherine, I can't, that's all." She put an impulsive hand on his arm. "And some day you'll be glad! Some day when you meet the girl 3 THE SPLENDID CHANCE with no paint stains on her fingers and with naturally curly hair! And you'll tell her that she is the only one you ever loved and that I was just a jolly old thing you grew up with!" The cheer of this prophecy fell flat. The goaded young man grunted. "A fat lot you know about it !" Irrepressible humor bubbled into the compassion of the girl's eyes. She looked at his averted face with a half-rallying, half-roguish air of coaxing him to see how ill tragedy became him. He was a stalwart figure of young manhood, not tall, but very strongly built, with an impressive air of discriminating prosperity from the cut of his spring overcoat to the glint of the black opal in his exclusive scarf. Achievement had cer- tainly been in his forefathers. His own face had been molded in lines of an acquiescent satisfaction with which the present denial was at war. Hesitantly, the girl reminded him of the time. The others were waiting to see her. They would think it strange. . . . He turned and looked at her, seeing a vision that he was to carry as a memory for many a day, a vision of a girl, gray-eyed, fresh-cheeked, with yellow hair blowing in the wind. He put a gripping hand upon her arm and drew her further back in the shelter of the lifeboat. "It's the last time we may ever see each other like this," he said huskily. "You say it's good-by for always. Let me kiss you good-by, Katherine." In touched affection the girl inclined her cheek, cool and rosy with the wind. 4 THE SPLENDID CHANCE And then, whether he was making one last essay, in- tending a conquering assault upon her senses, or whether he was carried away by impulse, his arms closed tightly round her and his lips insistently sought hers. A pang went through her of confused incredibility, of distaste, of unhappiness for him. . . . And as she pressed him back she turned her flushing face away and encountered the brightly fascinated gaze of a young man just rounding the corner of their shelter. She had a sudden, violent impression of the laughter in that young man's eyes. There was wicked mirth in the very set of his shoulders as he swung about and beat a forced retreat. It was humiliating ! The shame of intimacy intruded upon is never with the intruder but with the unlucky intruded-upon ones. A small boy beneath the balcony would have turned Romeo and Juliet to derision. A! hotter color stung Katherine's cheek than Dick Con- rad's unwelcome kiss had brought. If she had loved him but not loving him her concern was for the silly figure that she was cutting in the unknown's eyes. Her anger flared not against poor Dick for she had given her cheek at least but against this intrusive young stranger who came popping about unlikely corners in such unforeseen fashion. Had he no one to whom he should be saying good-by? Did he think he would find his friends behind lifeboats? Or perhaps hate- ful thought! he was not there just to say good-by to someone. Perhaps he was a fellow-passenger! He was indeed. He leaned near her at the rail some little time later, when she and the Whartons, her travel- 5 THE SPLENDID CHANCE ing companions, fluttered their farewells at the figures upon shore that grew smaller and smaller till the faces mingled in a dwindling blur. She had a swift impres- sion of the young man as very tall and thin, with a long ulster and a cap pulled far down over deep-set eyes, and then she saw him take a quick, whimsical look at herself, and as if delicately surmising that she might not care for the proximity of one who had surprised the tender intimacy of her adieu he moved considerately away. He seemed to be alone. . . . She was glad when that young man moved away. She did not want to be made to remember those last moments with Dick Conrad she was distressfully eager to be free of Dick Conrad and all his ways. It was dreadful to have hurt someone. In vain for her sense of character older than her experience to tell her that Dick Conrad was hardly the soil for deep-rooted tragedy. She remembered that queer, impotent look in his eyes. . . . Was life to be forever like that? Could one never be oneself, free to grow and develop as one wished, with- out crushing out what someone else was wishing? She wondered if she would be sorry, selfishly sorry for this, in the years to come? She was not so made but that the thought gave her a qualm ! But she could not help her decision ; she seemed forever secretly different from other people, set on some quest of her own. . . . And then a reanimating gladness was lighted like a lamp in her young relief that this worrying thing was over and done with, the decision made and the future was untrammeled and free. To her, the sailing of this 6 THE SPLENDID CHANCE ship was adventure. It was adventure, romance the eternal quest of youth. It was the first step to the un- known the land of promise. Anything and everything might happen. The stirring of far-away things was in. the air. Hazard was invoked; chance tempted. . . ., Her pulses quickened with the quickening stir of excite- ment, and her face, young, eager, joyous, had the touch- ingly confident look of one who listens to the Winged Victories. CHAPTER II BUT it was not so easy to be done with thoughts of Dick Conrad. There were his roses on the table in the dining salon. There was his fruit basket in the stateroom. There was his steamer letter. There were the Wharton sisters, old family friends, re- curring to him with gentle insistence. Their fancy had been captured by the young man's hasty trip to New York to see her off, and his father's position shed unde- niable glitter upon the romance. In their separate ways both sisters made manifest to her their solicitude lest her youthful desire for a career should lead her to abandon the sphere of truest happi- ness. It came rather touchingly from them, Katherine thought. Ellen Wharton was one whom tragedy had scarred. On the eve of the wedding her lover had been killed. She was a very beautiful woman, with a clear- cut, black and white distinction, but she had never, Kath- erine had heard, "looked" at another man. Her statu- esque whiteness gave her the suggestion, to the girl's fancy, of one from whom her heart's blood had literally been drained. Anne Wharton, the younger, was not so distinctive 8 THE SPLENDID CHANCE nor was her life so dignified by sorrow. She had known neither love nor loss. She was one of those charming women that the world wonders to find unmarried for- getting what men are most prone to marry. Her exclu- sions, her fastidiousness, the shyness behind her social poise, and her fatal facility for generalizing a situation she would have conventionalized an earthquake had all been conspirators against her. From her, even more than from Miss Ellen, Katherine thought, it was elo- quent to hear the gently spoken reminder that, after all, it was in her home that a woman found her most lasting happiness. "But with the right one," said Katherine defiantly. Anne Wharton hesitated. "Yes-s," she murmured into the depths of the steamer trunk which she was un- packing. Then she cast a faintly quizzical glance upon the gii'l. Her unspoken thought seemed to be pointing out that it was a trifle absurd for Katherine daughter of a none-too-affluent professor not to find the right one in Dick Conrad. "He seems to care so genu- inely " "I know," said the girl hastily. "And his father's in Steel. And if I don't live to regret him I'll regret the Steel !" And to Miss Anne's air of deprecation of that shameless point of view she gave a droll little grin that had something indescribably boyish and gamin-like about it. "Never mind, dear Miss Anne, it's the way I'm made. I expect it's the painting," she went on whimsically. "It means more to me than anything else in the world !" "Yes, dear, now but later?" 9 THE SPLENDID CHANCE Always the cold hand of caution, the pointing finger of feminine foresight, Katherine thought rebelliously. Suppose life was a chance? It was a splendid chance! Better never to have lived at all than to live coldly, safely, snugly, like herded sheep! . . . "Later? Who knows? That's the charm of it. And I can't believe that I can ever be anything but happy !" The girl stood for a moment with bright cheeks and dreaming eyes, then whirled about on her companion with one of the sudden turns that revealed her swift, slim grace. "Don't let us bother over things in here any longer ! Come out on deck again. The sea is glorious. It's just as I knew it would be!" Anne Wharton felt a throb of half-wistful, half-pity- ing futility. The girl was so very young ! But there were other reminders of Dick Conrad not so easily diverted. The recollection of that unfortunate farewell was flashed at Katherine half a dozen times a day from the eyes of the young man who had surprised it. Not that this young man the second day out placed him as an Englishman, a Captain Edgerton was so base as to let his recollection dance openly upon the sur- face, but the very pointedness of the repression, the guarded negation of all laughter when his gaze encoun- tered hers, was evidence enough. She knew perfectly well that he remembered, that he was smiling at her in his thoughts, recalling the ardor of the scene, her crimson face . . . And when he met her walking the deck with one or the other of the young; men who sat at her table, or danc- 10 THE SPLENDID CHANCE ing in the salon or chatting at late supper, she knew from the ironic flicker of the Englishman's glance and the twist of his lips that he was saying humorously, "Ah, well, you're certainly not pining whatever you write him! You are a cool hand!" She had just enough conversation with this Cap- tain Edgerton, the second day out, to know how he would phrase it. He had been talking with some people in a group of which Katherine formed a part, a group that had gathered at the rail to watch the black fin of a following shark. When the group thinned the Eng- lishman had sauntered over to where Katherine still stood, and, extending his field-glasses, made some casual remarks. His bright glance, clear and a little cool, had an air of deliberately not remembering that he had seen her before under any circumstances whatever. Katherine had replied with a hauteur which had be- come ludicrous to remember. It had seemed to her to whose social experience "introductions" were the breath of life, and who had been cautioned by an anxious mother concerning shipboard manners it had seemed to her that this stranger was treating her with casual freedom. The memories that he evoked of Dick Conrad constrained her. She was absurdly anxious to make an impression of dignity. He had not waited for the impression to expand. After a pair of monosyllables from her he had sauntered away, and thereafter, to her later chagrin, be it admit- ted, he had made no effort to develop the unpromising acquaintance, contenting himself with an occasional bow when unavoidable, and that carefully guarded glance 2 11 which bespoke his mirthful recollection of something droll to guard. Increasingly Katherine had felt an utterly needless desire to put herself right in his eyes, to prove to him that she was not a young person of eternal stiffness and to paint out the memory of the sentimental creature he must be seeing in her. But one cannot walk up to an all-but-total stranger and say, "Let me tell you, I am not engaged to that young man ! You beheld no Romeo- and-Juliet parting, but an act of charity, abused. Now, for goodness* sake, don't let me catch you twinkling at me any more !" Yet aside from this faintly ruffling resentment of the Englishman's memories, the days were all gladness to her. They slipped past far too rapidly, like bright beads raining from a string. They were unforgettable days of wide seas and skies, days of spring sunshine and March winds, of keen, salt freshness, of tumultuous cloud and scudding shadows. All that loved beauty in her responded to the beauty about her. It seemed enough, then, just to be young and alive, with a heart for loveliness and laughter. Why could not life be like this always, bright and free and plastic, deeply con- scious of its inexhaustible vitality? CHAPTER III IT had rained at noon but later the sun came out, fugitive, faint-hearted, at first, then suddenly con- fident and conquering. The sea that had been foam-flecked and fretful became all bloom and glitter. The clouds looked luminous and joyful, sailing very high on their mysterious ways. The exhilaration of the day was dancing in Kather- ine's blood. A smile of prankish daring edged her lips. Very stealthily she tore out a page of her sketchbook, hidden within a larger book as she sat, rug-wrapped, in the chair next Miss Anne's. Very stealthily she opened the fingers that lifted the loose sheet just as a tall figure, hands deep in the ulster pockets, peaked cap low over the eyes, came tramping by on the tenth or twentieth oblivious round. The wind seized on the paper, fluttered it conspicu- ously, and obligingly flung it across the path of that tall, oncoming figure. And then, like all meddlesome as- sistants, it overdid matters. With an unnecessary puff it sent the paper twirling over the rail. But the tall young man's hands came out of those deep pockets with amazing quickness. He made a swift IS THE SPLENDID CHANCE dash to the rail and reached high for that fluttering paper. In triumph his fingers closed on it. Katherine sat up very straight in her chair, her eyes alight with mischief. The young man turned to restore his capture and as he did so very naturally his fingers busied themselves ab- sently smoothing out the creases he had inflicted, and very naturally his eyes rested upon the damage that his grip had wrought. And then he became aware of bold, black pencil strokes, of a long-legged, hurrying figure in a monumental ulster overhung with a bulldog pipe, an aquiline nose, and a peaked cap. The thing was capi- tally done. The young Englishman began to laugh, and a warm color, like a girl's, rose in his very clear- skinned face. "I say you must let me look at this," he declared to Katherine. "It's too late isn't it? to say no," she gave back, in a soft note of laughter. "You are clever that is, if you are the artist?" he thought to question, and at her admissive nod, "Then you must let me keep this," he insisted, still smiling boy- ishly down at the crumpled sketch. In the next chair Miss Anne bestirred her- self. "Why, Katherine, what is it?" And as the English- man held up his trophy the lady's face was touched with her sympathetic sense of what poor Katherine must be feeling at this incident. "Ah, you mustn't mind that pencil of hers, Captain Edgerton !" she said pacifically. "She caricatures us all wickedly but she isn't always 14 THE SPLENDID CHANCE so terribly found out !" And Katherine had the grace to blush. "But this is very jolly," the Captain maintained. "It's clever, you know." He looked at Katherine as though she might need reassurance upon that point. "At least you recognize it," she returned gaily. "That is more than some portrait painters can claim, isn't it?" "Recognize it? Rather! . . . Do sign it for me. I'd like to keep it, please." Obligingly she printed a neat "Katherine King" in a corner of the sketch, and then, after a little three- cornered chat, when Miss Anne began to find it too cold for comfort in her rug and decided to go within, Cap- tain Edgerton turned to the girl with a boyish air of yielding to impulse. "Won't you take a turn with me, Miss King? It's not cold when you're stirring." She felt a little shy when she started off beside him. And the eternal reminder of Dick Conrad was at hand to embarrass her. Very quickly she began to talk. "I should think more people would be out on deck. It's such a wonderful afternoon." "But there's auction," he reminded her humorously, his hands deep in his ulster pockets again, his head bent before the wind that assailed them as they rounded the bow. "You forget that auction doesn't attend to changes in the weather." "You don't play?" "Not on shipboard. ... If one confesses to it 15 THE SPLENDID CHANCE once, one is lost. There is always a fourth to be found for some dull table." Katherine laughed. "You are far-sighted! I rather wish I had been." "I've observed you being occasionally victimized." "But not often. And I should be adamant to any ap- peal on such a day !" "Ah, it's your first trip, isn't it?" He looked round at her with a friendly smile. She nodded. "It is. But I think I shall feel the same on my tenth. . . . You've crossed often?" "Not the Atlantic. This is only the second trip on that." "Your first trip then to America," she said. "Were you there long?" "A week." "A week!" She laughed. "What was the matter? Didn't you like us?" "Immensely," he assured her. "But I didn't want to forfeit my leave. I was just over for my chum's wedding." "To an American?" "Yes, a New York girl. He met her last winter, on the Mediterranean. One of those shipboard affairs." "Oh!" said Katherine a little blankly. He spoke as if "shipboard affairs" were negligible and fantastic trifles barbed by chance and propinquity. She thought, a bit resentfully, that he was young for such a tone. "But what did you see of America in a week?" she questioned. "Were you in New York?" "Only overnight coming and going. The girl's peo- 16 THE SPLENDID CHANCE pie had a place up the Hudson a very jolly place. There were hills that looked splendid. I wish I'd had more of a chance at them." "You should have stayed. And then you laugh at us for 'doing' Europe in so little time." "Ah, but I don't claim to have 'done' America, you know!" He looked down on her smilingly. "I sup- pose you are going to see all the sights? Castles, cap- itals, cathedrals?" "I'm going to Paris to study." "To study what?" "Painting," she said a little self-consciously her aim was so great and she always felt somehow so femininely inadequate to it in people's eyes. "Painting! . . . Ah, the sketchbook explained! You're the real thing, then," he said lightly, but there was frank astonishment in his eyes. She looked ab- surdly young in the straight, loose coat she wore. Her cheeks were poppy pink in the salt wind ; her eyes were shining with their innocent air of happiness. Below her traveling cap a wave of honey-colored hair was visi- ble. ... It seemed to the young man that the study of painting was a totally inadequate occupation for such a feminine young person. It seemed to the girl that he was feeling that she was a totally inadequate-looking person for the study of painting, and her answer was a meek murmur. "I do hope I am." "But that's a large order," he said, quite seriously. "That is, if you're really going in for it." "I am. I mean to find out if it's actually in me or 17 THE SPLENDID CHANCE just a flash in the pan. You've no idea how furiously I shall work ! And I've a year to do it in." "A year!" A sudden flicker of mischief twinkled in his eyes. He gave her a droll, boyish look. "I say, that's a long time for him, isn't it?" "For ?" No use to evade the audacity of those eyes! "We can't pretend, can we," their teasing look seemed to be saying, "that I didn't see you and that you didn't see that I saw ?" She said lightly, trying for coolness, "That's a very wrong assumption of yours." "Oh, come now, Miss King, don't be a humbug! Don't tell me that it was your brother !" She laughed at that, her cheeks flushing in the quick- ness of her young blood, her eyes for just one instant meeting the chaffing boyishness of his. "No brother, but I was only being a sister to him." "Ah, now now ?" "It was good-by to what never was," she heard herself most strangely insisting. The astonishing young Captain replaced his incredul- ity with large surprise. "Letting the chap down what? Not taking him on? Is that the way," he in- quired with an air of solicitude, "that you usually er let them down? Because if it is " She refused to meet his merriment. "I say, there's three more days before we land. If I could work up a little sympathy for myself " "You're too absurd!" Her laughter bubbled. Her eyes were full of sudden lights. The audacity of hers 18 THE SPLENDID CHANCE danced in tune in his. Poor Dick Conrad's passionate farewell was serving in unremembered irony to bridge these two to sudden intimacy. "You're not a bit what I expected," she ran on mer- rily. "I thought Englishmen were more polite and not at all humorous." "Ha, the funny paper chap ! Lord Dundreary who daren't go to the music halls Saturday night for fear he'll laugh in church on Sunday! . . . But you don't mean that I'm the first Englishman you ever met?" He revealed, in all unconsciousness, his sense of the immense lack of such an existence. Her smile was teasing. "The first ordinary one." "I like that! As if I weren't a most extraordi- nary "But the others were lions writing lions and paint- ing lions, caged and exhibited at receptions. And they were solemn." "I should hope so ! Fancy being exhibited at a pink tea !" The young Captain grimaced. "And I suppose you made heartless fun of their captivity?" "No, I usually poked cakes and ices at them through the bars of the cage. You see father is a professor in a small college and so the social duties fall heavily upon all the family." "I begin to grieve that I am not a lion. Then I might have been handed on to your college and you would have exhibited me and fed me ices. And done my portrait a very respectful portrait !" the young man emphasized, and again their eyes met and their youth 19 THE SPLENDID CHANCE laughed in that sudden, light-hearted sense of inti- macy. "Do you mind if I smoke?" he inquired, and at her quick, "Not a bit," he stopped to fill and light his pipe in the shelter of a companionway. It took several min- utes for the wind was high, but the young man was not impatient. He had an air of attending thoroughly to whatever might be the business of the moment, and Kath- erine, taking fresh note of his lean, clear-cut face and tall, rather spare figure, found herself intensely liking his look of high-bred race and nervous energy. He had laughing eyes and a fighting chin. The eyes were brightly blue, deep-set under arched brows ; the nose was purely aquiline ; the chin would have been too domi- nant but for the boyish sweetness of his mouth when he smiled. . . . And he smiled when he looked up from his pipe and surprised the serious fixity of her gray eyes on him. Without speaking they turned away from the com- panionway and fell into step together, then paused in- voluntarily at the stern of the boat to look down into the churning froth of waters and out across the blue and gold sparkle of the waves. It seemed to Katherine that there had never been so gay a day. She felt a sense of holiday in her heart, a feeling of gladness and content, that yet held its undercurrents of vague agitation. Captain Edgerton broke the lengthening silence. His tone was quite serious now ; so were the blue eyes that were looking steadily down at her. "Tell me about the painting, please," he asked. "I am interested." 20 THE SPLENDID CHANCE The last crimson glow of the sunset which had blazed like a burning Rome had faded from the west and only light strands of purest, palest colors were fluttering there like far banners on some height when Katherine, wind-blown and breathless, came flying into the state- room to dress for dinner. She found Miss Ellen, freshly gowned, sitting on the couch, a spread towel on her silken knees, doing a few last things to her polished nails, while Miss Anne was hooking in place the girdle of her sedate dinner dress. "I am late we didn't realize " she murmured, hastily flinging off her coat and hat, and attacking blouse buttons with cold and rather fumbly fingers. "Who is 'we' ?" inquired Miss Ellen, and at the girl's, "Oh Captain Edgerton and I," Miss Anne looked up quickly. "Not all this time with Captain Edgerton?" she ex- claimed, and then, curbing a natural astonishment to a milder pace, "Why, what did you two find to talk about so long?" "Oh everything." The girl's eyes had little danc- ing points of light in them, belying her vagueness. "Paris London Oxford the barracks painting," she recited. The mirror gave her a sudden shock. "So I look like that?" she exclaimed tragically. "All red and blowsy." "How did you think you looked in this wind?" mur- mured Miss Anne. "I was feeling beautiful," said Katherine whimsically, lowering the wash-stand. "His name is Jeffrey St. Preux Edgerton," she informed them, while busily wash- 21 THE SPLENDID CHANCE ing. "His grandmother was French. Her husband was an ambassador. And all his other grandfathers were soldiers. His father was killed in the Boer War, and his mother lives in the country at Edgerton Hall. Doesn't that sound English and romantic? There are just the two sons the Captain and a little brother now at Eton. He's going to the navy when he's big enough, he says, but the Captain wants him in the army." "What an autobiographical young man," was Miss Ellen's comment. Katherine stared above the folds of her active towel. "Oh, no," she smiled back. "He didn't recite it like that. It just came out when we were talking. You see I'd been telling him about my home, and my brothers, and and painting and so it all came out." "You must have missed your tea," said Miss Anne after a moment, during which Katherine attacked her flying hair with a vigorous brush. "I went on deck to look for you but I didn't see you and I thought you were inside somewhere writing letters." "We must have been on the upper deck, then," Kath- erine reflected. She wavered, her hands full of her light, shining hair, between a part and a low knot or a pompa- dour and a high one, deciding hastily in favor of the pompadour. "But we didn't miss our tea. Captain Edgerton went down and brought some, and we had it up there in the sunshine. Weren't the ginger cookies good to-day, though?" No one made any answer to that, and she completed her hairdressing in absorbed silence, then drew out the steamer trunk and began diving into it for a dress which 22 THE SPLENDID CHANCE she had not yet worn. Behind her back the sisters' eyes met. "He's a very attractive young man, that Captain Edgerton," said Miss Ellen evenly, after an instant. "He comes from a very fine old family, I believe some of the passengers were telling me about him only this morning. It is very interesting to meet a young man like that, so typical of a class foreign to us, full of caste prejudices, of course, and immense exclusions, but all the more interesting, on that account, to such casual acquaintances as we travelers are." Not a word of this did Katherine comprehend. Her silence was not preoccupation with this "No Trespass- ing" sign which Miss Ellen's caution was so swiftly hanging out for her impulsive youth. She was wonder- ing, sitting back on her heels before the open trunk, whether, after all, the corn color would not look a teenty bit too sudden . . . And that night, meeting Captain Edgerton's eyes after dinner, she was not in the least reminded of Dick Conrad. CHAPTER IV SHE was not an early riser but the next morning she suddenly found herself intensely awake in her upper berth, her eyes fixed on the circle of blue, bright sky the port-hole framed. And presently the call of it became imperative, so that she slipped softly down and dressed in stealthy haste. But the terrible intimacy of the stateroom defied precaution, and the two sleepers roused to a sense of something extraordinary going on that the bald simplicity of her explanation did not allay. When the girl had gone, whisking lightly out the stateroom with an air of elate escape, the sisters stared solemnly at one another from lower berth to couch. "Do you think ?" said Miss Ellen. Remembering the yesterday afternoon, remembering the corn-colored dinner dress, remembering the chat over the coffee in the salon and the later walk on deck, they appeared amply justified in thinking. And when, a long hour and a half later, Kathcrine entered the salon for breakfast with the young Englishman in her wake, there was not the slightest doubt of disingenuous collusion. But there the good ladies were wrong. 24 THE SPLENDID CHANCE For Katherine had not the least reason to expect that Jeffrey Edgerton would be striding briskly along the sunshiny deck that morning. She had no notion at all of his inveterately early habits. Simply the day was calling to her and something in her was answering. She strolled about, her hands boyishly deep in her pockets, her uncovered hair blowing back from her face, offering a spectacle of delightful girlhood to the few spectators yet abroad mainly engaged in swabbing the decks she so lightly trod and rubbing endlessly the shin- ing brasses. When a tall and curiously familiar figure came quickly around the bow toward her, her heart gave a queer little jump and then went on a little faster than ordi- nary. She was conscious of no surprise but of a fresh- ened sense of pleasure, only a little troubled and shy for fear he should think she had been expecting him. But his own gladness in the encounter was too frank and simple for such undercurrents. Together they elected to make their way out to the bow, forbidden to cabin passengers in general, and there huddling down against the coils of rope, the ship at their backs, the sea in their faces, with white foam fly- ing past, they knew that wonderful sensation of joyous, lonely flight across the waters that no safe deck can give. They could feel themselves out before the mast of some flying galleon, plunging across an uncharted sea. . . . And to her, after that, those shipboard hours which had seemed so amply sufficing in their changing loveli- ness, became nothing but the background for the sud- 25 THE SPLENDID CHANCE den play of this young attraction. She did not in the least reason about it, she did not plan nor hesitate. She gave herself, as simply as a child, to the pleasure of being with him, of having him in their group, of seeing him near them, knowing that he wanted to be with her. It was very stirring, very exciting, and left her sometimes a little breathless with a curiously hur- rying heart. To the one remonstrance which Miss Ellen thought it worth while quietly to give she had replied, her gray eyes childlike, her lips candidly smiling, "But Miss Ellen, dear, I like Captain Edgerton," and appeared to think that settled it. So might Dido have declared that she liked ^Eneas upon that warrior's arrival, and Helen may undoubtedly have remarked to Menelaus in outward simplicity that she liked Paris! Miss Ellen's dry "Evidently," was significant of hidden depths. But there were no conscious reserves behind Kath- erine's simplicity. For the first time in her life she had been overtaken by a feeling which stirred her into a self she did not know, and beyond whose daily revela- tions she did not attempt to analyze. Perhaps it was all part of the spring wonder of the trip. . . . Perhaps it was just a mood of spring, sparkling, evanescent. . . . Perhaps like the spring it was a beautiful be- ginning. But from that veil her fancy drew back shyly, even with sharp distaste. The present was enough. Real work was waiting in Paris. 26 THE SPLENDID CHANCE There were three days of it, three days of flashing, quicksilver hours, and then through fog-drenched air, heavy and blankly veiling as gauze curtains, Katherine saw the shores of France take on a nearer and surer outline. She saw the city of Boulogne looming shadowy ahead, with its roofs and chimneys gaining in individual distinctness against the dun sky, and before it in the vague harbor waters separate ships detached themselves with detail of spars and sail and misty cordage. Soon she saw the little fleet of fishing-vessels stranded by low tide upon the shores, and the puffing tender making ready to come out. Her first view of France and there was no uplift, nor stirring rush of expectation as she stared at the country her heart had so long strained to reach! Her mood was as flat and uninspired as the view. What was to be for her there was hidden behind that wan curtain and she was conscious now only of indefinable heaviness that was not far from depression. It was absurd, but perhaps one always felt so at the journey's end. They would land now in an hour. Jeffrey Edgerton was to go on with the boat to Southampton. All day the rain shut them in to publicity. The sa- lons seemed crowded ; the lower decks, canvas-curtained for protection, held an incessant throng. Everywhere the acquaintances to whom she had been so pleasant had surrounded her; everywhere addresses and friendly wishes and farewells were thrust upon her. Everywhere but from Jeffrey Edgerton. Not a parting word had lie said. Only his eyes, extraordinarily serious, had fol- 3 27 4 THE SPLENDID CHANCE lowed her in an oddly puzzled way, as if he, too, were wondering. . . . And now that the rain had stopped and let them come to the upper deck alone they were standing at the rail, still wet with drops which the heavy air refused to take back, standing in utter silence, staring solemnly at the slowly nearing land. And suddenly it came over her as an instance of the ironic coincidence, the start- ling unexpectedness of life, that here where she had begun the trip with a farewell to one young man she was ending it with a farewell to another and one who four days before had been an utter stranger. . . . But what a difference in her mood. . . . And she thought of that final parting with Dick Conrad, that utter put- ting behind her of the temptation to dally, to be safe, to invest the future, with a sense of almost frightened thanksgiving. Suppose, now, that she were fettered by some obligation ! Suppose these last few days had never been ! Captain Edgerton had drawn a square of folded pa- per from his pocket. With a solemnity that gave him an endearing likeness to a small boy resolutely ignoring his self-consciousness at what he felt was a momentous thing, he told her that it was his address and asked for her own. Hers, she said, was the American Express Company. They were not sure yet at what hotel they would stop. "But later, when you leave the Whartons and take your studio, you'll send me that address ?" "Why, yes, if you wish." "I do wish very much.'* He gazed down at her a 28 THE SPLENDID CHANCE little wistfully and worriedly. "I don't like to think of you alone in Paris," he brought out surprisingly. "Alone in a studio -with no one to look after you. It's absurd." "But why?" A very feminine smile quivered about her lips. "There are hundreds of American girls do- ing that very thing." "But they're not you" Remorselessly his tone dis- posed of these unknown hundreds, lumping them in a safe and untroubling aggregation. He continued to stare anxiously down at her through the soft dusk. "Suppose you were ill?" In sheer light-heartedness she felt a sudden inclina- tion to laugh. Her depression, her dullness, had van- ished magically like mist before some sudden warmth. "But I shan't be ! I never am ! And anyway there are certain to be people in Paris that I know at the studios or at the hotels. Be sure," she declared, "that I went over that with mother!" Still his earnest look dwelt on her and she felt that there was something more that he intended saying, some- thing he did not quite know how to say. She found herself waiting for it with a queer expectation and half dread. And then he asked if he might come and see her. The secret tension was lightened. She felt a sense of relief and gladness. "Why, yes, of course if you're in Paris." "But that's just it. I shan't be in Paris not as a. casual thing, you know." He spoke half humorously,, but with an implication of frank avowal. "I want most 29 THE SPLENDID CHANCE awfully to see you again. I can't bear to think of my not doing so. ... I can't get away till my leave in August and that's too far away except for a possible week-end or two. . . . And if I come for a week-end I want to know if you will really let me see you give me all the time you can, you know?" With an ungloved finger she drew a long line through the drops on the rail. "What a forehanded person !" she murmured possibly to the rail for she did not look up. "Does he leave nothing to chance?" "He's going to leave a good deal to it!" the young man laughed. "But he wants to know if you would be glad to see him again?" Carefully she demolished five bright drops. "It would be sad," she confided then, "to express my anticipatory delight and have you forget to come. Paris is some way from London and our friendship is but four days' old." "But I've seen more of you in these four days than; ever I have of any almost any other girl I ever knew," he answered quickly, and Katherine's mind dwelt with useless curiosity upon that "almost." "Don't you believe," he earnestly demanded, "that in four days I can come to feel that I really know; you " "Oh, yes indeed," she assured him. "I've been un- usually lovely these four days it would be a stout heart that could resist me! But I wonder if I could liave stood the test of five?" He chuckled and then returned with humorous vio- lence, "How I hate myself for that time I lost at the be- 30 THE SPLENDID CHANCE ginning ! I've court-martialed myself for gross in- competence and neglect of opportunity. I wanted to know you all the time. But, you see, I thought " She knew quite well what he had thought! Here, upon this very deck, with wicked laughter in his eyes, he had surprised her in Dick Conrad's arms ! The dark- ness hid her heightening color. Not wholly naively, "But did that matter?" she mur- mured, her finger again intent upon its traceries. "Couldn't you be friends with me even if you did think " "Humbug!" said Captain Edgerton rudely. "Now if you had seen me kissing some delightful girl good- by " A distant shock went through her. That "almost" recurred startlingly, and she began to wonder, rapidly and helplessly, about the delightful girls in his unknown life. And there must have been bridesmaids, yards of visiony bridesmaids at the Hudson estate wedding. . . . A small scare began to spread like a chilly cloud upon her spirit. "Did you?" she murmured pensively. "Humbug again," said the Captain. "You know I wouldn't be here if I had." "There is nothing," she delicately pointed out, the corners of her mouth tilting in a shadowy smile, "so fatally compromising about being here !" It struck her that there was a peculiar, almost an ominous quality in that silence. Glancing hastily up over her shoulder she found the young man looking down. He had not stirred but through the dusk his eyes SI THE SPLENDID CHANCE met hers with a little flash of dancing lights. . . . In the pause a distinct, tingling, electrical disturb- ance made itself felt. "Not yet but if you continue to look like that!" He laughed, but his voice had a sudden treacherous drop in it. Then very quickly he reverted to the serious. Night was closing in upon them and last minutes were pressing hard. "You haven't answered me yet," he said. "Tell me truly will you really be glad to see me in Paris? Do you vrant me to come?" It was youth, with the insistent honesty of its desires. It was life, on the eternal quest. Do you want me? Do I want you? She looked away from him across the darkening har- bor, her eyes seeking dim distances. . . . Strange, that on this very boat, in the act of what she had thought an escape from the perplexing tangle of cross purposes she had plunged even deeper than ever into fresh stirrings and uncertainties. She was accustomed to beginnings all her youth, as yet, was but tentative and promise and undertaking, but the suddenness of this beginning, its utter disconnection with the rest of her life, gave it a sensation of almost ephemeral un- reality. She was silent so long, her eyes remote, that it seemed to him that his answer had been given, and he straightened under it in compliance with a nature which met rebuff bravely. "Of course, if you would rather I didn't come," he said quietly, "if there is someone else so much a better friend than I can ever be " 32 THE SPLENDID CHANCE "Oh, no! There isn't!" The words came springing without her volition. She turned to him, her face lifted, her gray eyes luminous under the shadowing lashes. "I'd like you to come," she uttered with a frankness that was a little breathless in its belated haste. "Only only I was just wondering, Captain Edgerton, if you were real! You've been so sudden you may be just a a mirage." He laughed happily, in the relief of her words. "A jolly substantial one," he declared. "But I know what you mean. I feel," he avowed, "a little bit that way about you. . . . Four days ago there was a distant young lady with yellow hair . . . talking with the other chaps. And now there's you. And everything's quite different. Isn't it?" Her eyes acknowledged it, half laughing, half shy. "And I'll come as soon as I can pull it off," he went on. "It may be a bit hard to get away for a time but it will come right, you'll see. We'll manage it some- how." It was the most unconscious thing in the world that plural. It came slipping out of his exhilaration, his young faith in her sincerity. ... It sent a sudden, sweet, stinging confusion through her, a glad, disturb- ing warmth. And as they stood there, one lingering moment more, the damp salt air in their faces, the low clouds overhead, she realized, with a queer little flutter of her adventur- ous heart, that a scrap of paper, tossed lightly across the path of chance, may lead to solemn consequences. CHAPTER V A LITTLE after noon the doors of the Academic Moderne closed behind her and she came out into the sunshine of the Rue de Notre Dame des Champs. It was April, sweet, warm and bright, with not a cloud from the morning's rain to dim the blueness of the sky. The tender breath of spring came stealing to her in the fragrance of violets from a curb vender's cart, and she stopped impulsively for a damp cluster of the purple flowers. "Always the flowers," jeered Olga Goulebeff beside her. She was a short, plump girl, orphan daughter of a Russian father and a French mother, whose easel was next to Katherine King's in the morning classes. She had merry eyes, an impudent nose, a small, droll mouth and black, curly hair that grew low over her forehead and ears. At first glance she seemed a pleasant, rather childlike creature; it was not till you looked close that you glimpsed something fixed, secretive, inscrutable about these small features. Katherine smiled vaguely in response. Her eyes were absently following the purple and gold masses of the flower cart as it bumped its way through the crowded 34 THE SPLENDID CHANCE street ; in her ears Olga's voice and the competitive cries of the venders were caught up and blent in the chimes that near them rang the quarter hour. She loved all the tones in that unquiet voice of Paris, all the colors in the bright and shifting spectacle. Everywhere she saw pictures. . . . Following a little group of students the two girls turned into a small restaurant farther down the street and took their places at the end of one of the red-clothed tables. Already the scene had grown familiar to Katherine and she nodded to acquaintances here and there at the tables. There were a few girls and more older women present, but the majority were men> earnest-faced, bearded students, at present intent on the business of consuming an excellent luncheon for an in- significant price. Most of them were untidy in their clothes, many of them were shabby, in a picturesque, comfortable way, but the velveteen coat and the flamboy- ant tie and hair of the artist tradition of the quarter were nowhere represented except by two old derelicts of painters sipping their vin ordinaire. At her own table a stream of rapid nonsense and parody was coming from a young man at the opposite end, Etienne de Trezac. De Trezac was the spoiled darling of the Academic. The students acclaimed him a genius. Guerin, the master, believed ardently in his power, and thundered, "Dilettante," bitterly at his in- dolence. "Mediocrity is always industrious," the young man would retort, with his mocking smile. Between him and the other young Frenchmen at the school, good, earnest, provincial young fellows for the 35 THE SPLENDID CHANCE most part, there lay a subtle difference invoked by every aspect of De Trezac's finished young person and grace of manner. He was not, like these others, bending his neck to the eternal yoke of Art; he was but lending some years of his youth until certain expectations of inheritance drew him back into that Faubourg where the obligations of Family reigned supreme. He was not rich; the small allowance on which he subsisted in alternate recklessness and saving care was an unwilling one from a family which felt that to produce instead of to patronize art was unworthy of the blood. The impressionability of Katherine's youth had found romantic glamour in this story which De Trezac's charm enhanced. She was trying now to follow his rapid flow of French with its baffling elisions and its studio slang, but she gave it up and turned to Olga in rueful admiration. "If I could only understand half that you do!" Olga shrugged. "But why should I not? My mother was French. It is as native to me as Russian." "Yes, but the English as well and the German. And I heard you getting on famously with that Italian, the other afternoon." "Our gift for languages is a national necessity. No one can speak our own tongue and since we are a people who must talk we must learn the tongues of others," the girl laughed, finishing the last vegetable in the soup. "Woof I was famished. That woman this morning did you ever see such a pose? I worked like ten demons and then there was nothing right." "Are you going back this afternoon?" 36 THE SPLENDID CHANCE "I don't know. No." She drew a long breath of Katherine's violets, her little nose wrinkling in luxurious delight. "It is too warm. It is enervating. I should like to go to the country, I think. And you? You work, I suppose?" Katherine shook her head. "No, I've some friends coming in to say good-by." "And the croquis?" "I shan't get back for that, either." Olga glanced down the table, caught Etienne de Tre- zac's eye an instant, hesitated, then turned to Katherine with an air of spontaneous inspiration. "But later? Shall we dine together? Let us go to the Lilas and look on. All the quarter will take the air to-night." "I'd love to," Katherine easily agreed. She found Olga a bright and amusing companion whose three years at the art schools had given a patter of informa- tion and gossip to her tongue's end. She went on with her lunch and did not see the little Russian's steady nod to Etienne, nor his quiet signal of intelligence. If she had noticed she would have thought it all a drolly foreign precaution for an apparently casual meeting. To her American mind such subtleties were absurd between frank and friendly companions in art. Leaving Olga at the restaurant she started for the studio which had become home to her now, passing down the Rue de Varin for that detour through the Luxem- bourg Gardens which was a constant joy to her beauty- loving spirit. Here April was at her fairest and sweet- S7 THE SPLENDID CHANCE est ; the trees and shrubs were in delicate leaf ; the grass held that first tender green of spring ; the borders shone with golden-hearted daffodils. From the green shrub- beries white statues gleamed and in the sunshine the drops of the fountain sparkled in rainbow hues. Everywhere against the bloom and color of the park were bonnes and babies and a troop of little children ; huge, bright hoops went flying down the paths with active little bare legs racing after; balloons were bob- bing and floating at mimic heights like a sudden high growth of giant flowers and here and there delicious little girls in miniature skirts and droll little boys in very tight and short trousers above their thin legs were tossing balls or playing at diabolo. The girl's lips curved in unconscious smiles at the youngsters, and she shared her violets with one toddler that swayed perilously about her skirts, then, remember- ing the flying minutes, she hurried on out of the park and through the crooked streets to that gray-stoned old corner where she lived. She entered a worn doorway over which a battered coat of arms still bore its lilies, passed the door of the corner studio which was beneath her own and turned to the stairs. On the lowest step she found a small child sitting, who shrank patiently into the corner to let her pass. A round shade hat and a mop of untidy black curls half hid the little face, but from the shadows a pair of big, black eyes met Katherine's interrogative smile without a flicker of answering brightness. "Do you want to see anyone?" said Katherine in French, for Madame Bonnet, the concierge, was not at 38 THE SPLENDID CHANCE present in her cage, and the mite looked forlorn there on her shadowy step. The child continued to stare darkly at Katherine be- fore replying. "I am waiting for someone," she an- swered briefly in French, with a small air of dignified- reserve. "Oh! I see," Katherine murmured, and being taken by those solemn eyes she lingered, extending another cluster of violets from that depleted bunch. "But it is too fine a day to be waiting, isn't it? You ought to be out picking these." Rather slowly the little thing's fingers closed about the flowers. "I thank you," she said primly, accepting the necessity for so doing, apparently, as part of her lot. A stolidly reserved mite, Katherine reflected humor- ously, abandoning her attempts at friendliness and starting on, when a sudden joyous shout made her look back. "Robert!" cried the little girl with a vigorous American sounding of the "t," and running from her lower step she cast herself jubilantly upon a young man just entering the door. Katherine stared involuntarily; the young man, a stalwart, black-browed fellow, was just fitting his key into the door of the first-floor studio. Katherine re- membered that black-browed young man. She had caught a glimpse of him once or twice in passing in or out; she had heard that he was Robert MacNare, a sculptor, an "arrived" sculptor, as Madame Bonnet had stated succinctly, but the impression which pervaded all others came from the day of her arrival, when, trailing 39 THE SPLENDID CHANCE up the stairs in the wake of Madame Bonnet's creaking stoutness, she had been startled by a stocky, blue- bloused figure darting out to the bottom of the stairs and shaking an admonitory fist after madame. "Pas de chanteuses !" he had barked ferociously, add- ing, "No singers, mind!" in unmistakable American for Katherine's benefit, and madame had turned smilingly and waved a pacific reassurance, "Oh, la, la, jamais, au grand jamais! Pas de chanteuses, monsieur, pas de chanteuses !" The memory of that moment made Kathcrine's lips twitch in irrepressible humor, and finding herself thus caught in staring back and smiling she spoke out frankly to the young man whose neighbor she was. "I have been trying to make friends with the little girl but she was rather shy of me." The young man gave her a just perceptible glance and turned the key in his door. "She has the bad taste to be unsocial, mademoiselle," he rejoined curtly, step- ping briskly into his studio, the mite of a child at his side. His manner more than implied that he also was speaking for himself. Katherine found herself alone and very warm- cheeked. "Surly!" she thought furiously, and then, "Why did I stop and speak to him anyway? It was a silly thing to do ! But he might have been human. . . . I suppose that little thing is his sister. She's American, then, for all her French air. ... I wonder if she lives there with him?" Continuing to wonder at the relation between the odd 40 THE SPLENDID CHANCE pair she reached her own studio, directly above that of the black-browed young man, and her vexation went streaming from her at the sunny pleasantness of the room. It was a bright airy place, with windows to the west and north, and it offered the instant impression of hav- ing been taken by storm after years of primitive occupa- tion and vanquished by feminine civilization. To be sure, the large easel by the north light and the litter of paints and sketch-boxes on the window seat appeared very much as it might always have done, but by the western window a couch was gaily cushioned in yellows and grays and a low table by it held books and photo- graphs, a basket of sewing and a bowl of jonquils, while another table, bearing a fat lamp and more books and writing things, stood between wicker chairs before a cavernous fireplace. In the center of the room hung an electric light, proud triumph of progress to madame's heart, and be- yond a narrow door was a small retreat where the miracle of running water might be spasmodically ob- served. As Katherine entered the studio Madame Bonnet creakingly descended the stairs from a trip to the lodgers overhead, two American ladies of middle age, and paused upon the threshold, having a few words to speak, it appeared, upon the subject of a blanchisseuse. Katherine's choice met with darkly hinted disapproval. Madame had her favorites and played them vigorously. She was a stout, substantial old lady, girdled with a medieval jingle of keys. Her wrinkled face was a map 41 THE SPLENDID CHANCE of shrewd experience, and if the small, bright eyes be- neath the beetling brows proclaimed a trifle derisively that their owner was no man's fool, they also added that there were honest folk in the world and she knew when she was treating with them. Now, as they rested upon Katherine, those eyes were of a philosophic toleration. That a girl, so young and pretty, with such yellow hair and childlike eyes, should come so far from her home to sit in an atelier and copy naked people, that she should make here a mock home of screens and couches it was all part and parcel of the American madness. So lunatic and so young! Madame Bonnet had seen many women come to Paris for some art's sake; she had seen many hopes withered and many hearts drained, but she had never seen one quite so young nor so exceedingly cheerful. She was always smiling, this mademoiselle and in the name of Heaven, why? . . . She should be safe at home, where the good God would send her a fitting husband, and not be here squandering her dowry in senseless paint and couch-covers. Such were Madame Bonnet's inmost thoughts as she stood on her lodger's threshold, discoursing leisurely upon the blanchisseuses, and watched Katherine, kneel- ing triumphantly over a prostrate screen cover, nailing the last edge of gray burlap in snug place. Katherine liked Madame Bonnet and liked to listen to her expressive French. Moreover she was not yet in- nured to the solitude of her much-loved studio, and was not always proof against the insidious waves of loneli- ness and homesickness to which she never referred in her 42 THE SPLENDID CHANCE bright letters home. When she was at work in the Academic she forgot everything, but in the outside hours there were many little chinks not yet filled, and the newness and foreignness of her life, so delightful in general, held occasional little aches of remoteness and disconnection. She wished that her mother and father could see her studio. She transferred it minutely to them in her voluminous letters, with descriptions of the Academie, of Guerin, the master, of Etienne, the genius, and Olga, her informant. Her letters reflected her serenity, her happy assurance, her sense of the miracle of life. On one thing alone were they silent. Suddenly madame broke off. She listened, her head a-cock, and Katherine waited, her hammer in her hand. She hoped the Whartons would not arrive until her screen was finished and in place. "Ah, the voice of the monsieur below !" said madame with impressiveness and creaked hurriedly from the room, to lean over the rail. In the silence the voice of the monsieur from below was distinctly audible. She turned to Katherine. "He desires to know if mademoiselle is to continue for eternity?" she reported simply. "He is annoyed." "Crack!" went Katherine's hammer upon the next nail-head. "There is but a little more to do," she responded coldly. "However that little is necessary." Madame did not return to the hall with the com- munication. She appeared aware that the gentleman below had relieved himself with a question purely 4 43 THE SPLENDID CHANCE rhetorical. She merely shut the door behind her as if that diminished the sounds falling upon the floor. "I have a right to make a screen," said the girl spunkily. "Or doesn't he let you rent rooms to people who make screens?" "Of that he had said nothing," replied madame with fine simplicity. "To singers no nor young ladies who practice the piano. He is of a particularness, that man ! But then, it is not necessary to take such lodgers. Here there are always artists, or ladies who study at -the Sorbonne, like the Americans above, or young gentle- men at the Ecole des Mines, or Afterwards Katherine was a trifle ashamed of the vigor of the blows that sent those last nails home. Un- doubtedly she made the poor man's ceiling quake ! And since he was a sculptor probably he was sensitive to vi- brations. But her remorse did not have time to mount. The screen was no sooner triumphantly in place than the Whartons appeared upon the threshold in Madame Bonnet's stead, their arms filled with generous last things for Katherine and her studio. As they sat about the low tea-table in the western sunshine, the steam rising from the tiny kettle and the air fragrant with crisp cakes hot from the pastry cook's, Katherine felt a keen sense of loss in their departure the next day. She would miss them. They were home friends, those two dear Americans ; with them she had begun this miracle of a foreign year and their going would cut a stanch tie. Their interest in her work was genuine and a little 44 THE SPLENDID CHANCE anxious, and she found herself enthusiastically reassur- ing them that she had found the right place and the right master. "It's the only place where they really teach you to paint !" she declared with the fervor of the disciple. "I'm seeing things I never saw before and I'm doing things- better already." "But that, other Academie was very much praised,'* Miss Ellen demurred. "And Monsieur Simon is such a delightful gentleman " "Monsieur Simon is a delightful gentleman and Mon- sieur Maynard is a delightful gallery god, and they are both delightful painters !" exclaimed Katherine. "And they come in turn each week and never remember you unless you have been there three years so Olga says. Now here Monsieur Guerin knows you. And he knows your work. Why, he asked me this morning," she pro- ceeded triumphantly, "why I made the same mistake in a neck that I made in a pose three weeks ago !" "Why did you?" said Miss Anne worriedly. Katherine's lips twitched. "Because necks are the very Old Harry," she murmured pensively. "Now if it were only legs I could do a centipede with assur- ance !" Something in the two pained faces before her caused her to hurry violently from that topic. She suspected that they would ask her presently if the legs had stock- ings. . . . And yet, she reflected, as she rambled on about her classes, they reveled in the Old Masters. . . . The distaste was for masterpieces in the making. . . . She was telling now of the croquis, the sketch classes; 45 THE SPLENDID CHANCE at four in the afternoon to which everyone came, masters, pupils, arrived artists. "You stay when you like and pay fifty centimes when you leave," she explained. "And such models ! The beauties who don't come to the schools, who only pose at the artists' private studios, come to the croquis after hours to make a little extra money. There was a girl yesterday a young Valkyrie ! There was Norse blood in her I know. Tall and strong and deep bosomed with an arm that could throw a spear and a pillar of a neck that could bear a helmeted head proudly ! And her skin was like silk with muscles that rippled when she moved. They say Roulier is doing her as an Ama- zon. I wonder what the Amazons' sons were like and whether they stayed on at home." "I hope the things one hears about them are not so," Miss Ellen observed, sipping her tea. Katherine stared. "The Amazons?" "The models." "Oh! Poor things I'm afraid that they are." Katherine looked momentarily depressed. "However," and she brightened, "they aren't half as bad as the things one hears about the Americans here !" "Not the representative Americans." Miss Ellen's distinction was rather fine. To her the exuberant millionaires of recently naturalized forebears were no more Americans than the incoming Slovak woman with her shawled head full of superstitions. To be an Amer- ican one must inherit spiritual responsibilities or in- vest heavily in them for oneself. She refused severely to accept as American that rich 46 THE SPLENDID CHANCE and rapid clique of Paris spenders whose gay doings were just then filling the Parisian journals. "That woman's father, my dear, was an illiterate trainman. He came to our country simply to make money the money which she is spending now abroad. He may have had a vote but I trust you do not call him an American?" was her disposal of the matter. It was a fine and solitary discrimination. It was Miss Anne who on her way from Katherine's easel paused at the writing-table and discovered a framed picture there. "Why, Katherine, this looks like " The discovery leaped from her lips with involuntary surprise. Then determinedly she went on with it, feeling a certain re- sponsibility. "Is it Captain Edgerton?" "Yes. He has just had that taken," Katherine re- sponded with a brightness almost too casual. "He sent it over this week." A queer little silence fell. Miss Anne stood looking down at the picture. She noticed that Katherine had it in a silver frame. And she thought, worriedly, that he was a very fine-looking young man, indeed. "You are writing, then?" Miss Ellen's tones held a cool implication of wonder. "Why, yes and when I sent him some of the snaps that we had taken on shipboard he reciprocated with this photograph." Then Katherine hated herself for the 47 THE SPLENDID CHANCE weakness of the explanation. She took the picture from Miss Anne and extended it to Miss Ellen. "He's rather conquering looking, isn't he?" "He is a very soldierly young man." Miss Ellen held the picture a moment and then set it upon the tea-table, where its straight, lifelike glance looked out directly upon the little group. Katherine felt again that odd, subtle, hampering sense of their disapproval creeping over her. And why? Was it simply the precipitation of the friendship which made it distasteful to their notions of dignified pro- gress? Did they think her too impulsive? Too im- pressionable? She smiled a little wistfully over the picture's head at the elder woman. "Dear Miss Ellen," she said, "life can't always be a minuet. Sometimes it must waltz. Sometimes the tempo is accelerando." Faintly Miss Ellen's fine lips smiled. "So it would seem, my dear. But I doubt the wisdom of so much haste." "Are the only right impulses then the laggard ones?" said the girl, resenting. "Is truth never in first feelings?" Miss Ellen merely smiled again with that arching of her brows which was like a shrug, and Katherine was left with a sense of baffled defeat. . . . She did not know that Miss Ellen was remembering a day of thirty years ago when a young man had brought her his pho- tograph in the West Point uniform. They had not been lovers then, not avowed lovers. . . . She remembered his 43 THE SPLENDID CHANCE little formal speech of presentation. . . . And for twenty-nine years he had been lying in the church- yard. . . . The memory did not give her any sense of sympathetic kinship with this other girl and this other photograph. It brought her only the loneliness of detachment, the sense of remoteness to this heedless onrush of the present. She did not think of Katherine's feelings as being in the least like her feelings of thirty years ago. It was Miss Anne who made answer to Katherine's impatient question. "First feelings may be quite true to the moment," she said mildly, "but they are not al- ways true to second feelings are they? ... I am only afraid that you are apt to be a little impulsive at times, Katherine and then have to undo it later." Katherine, drawing fresh water for their second cups, was saved an immediate reply. She thought, as she relighted the alcohol lamp, which was subject to draughts, that if they had read in a book about her friendship with Jeffrey Edgerton Miss Anne, especial- ly, was addicted to mild romance that they would have deemed it a beautiful and youthful expression of sincerity. But because it happened under their very noses, she put it to herself somewhat heatedly, because she was just an everyday girl instead of a book heroine, why they thought her a forward little minx to write a young man like that and let him send her photographs ! There was something vaguely cheapening to them in the greedy haste of youth. . . . Her vanity was sensi- tive to this thought of her. 4-9 THE SPLENDID CHANCE And then she caught at Miss Anne's last phrase. "Undo it? What do you mean, Miss Anne?" "Well you didn't quite know your own mind about Richard Conrad did you?" "He didn't always know his about me. He found out first, that was all. . . . But but this is quite different, please !" The self-conscious color was deepening in her cheeks, but she spoke with an assumption of airy ease. "Because he sends me a picture, Captain Edgerton isn't in the least a devoted suitor." "Englishmen take these things more seriously than our men, my dear. For him to write you and to send you his photograph argues that he is taking a real interest " "And to accept the picture is leading him on?" Kath- erine laughed with increasing constraint. "Either that or you are permitting him a flirta- tion," Miss Ellen answered unexpectedly as Miss Anne hesitated. "His inclination may be going a little faster than his head will follow." It was a startling and an unpalatable thought. Kath- erine betrayed her nai've astonishment in a soft stare, and then she threw out a little ripple of derision. "Am I so very ineligible, dear Miss Ellen? Don't Englishmen like young ladies who paint canvases?" "An Englishman of position thinks of more than his inclination," pronounced Miss Ellen. "I think that water has boiled enough, Katherine." "I beg your pardon. . . . Well I promise not to break my heart over him, then. Nor to let him break his over me. I guarantee it a thoroughly cooperative 50 THE SPLENDID CHANCE friendship of great mutual uplift and enlightenment," Katherine ran on at random, hurrying to pour out the tea. "But now do tell me about Versailles. I was so sorry I couldn't have had that experience with you." And she thought, as she listened to their accounts of the previous day's trip, that it was a fortunate thing that they were not clairvoyant to the letter lying in the portfolio upon her table. For Jeffrey Edgerton was coming to see her a week from that Saturday, "God and the Colonel agreeable," he had cheerily written. Even to read his brief words brought her a vivid sense of him, tall and straight and merry, a vivid feeling of his personality. That feeling had been very strong those first days in Paris. . . . The journey from Boulogne had been an outer blank, beneath which she had given herself over to dreams and revery. And at first even Paris, party-colored, kaleidoscopic Paris, had beat upon the surface of her senses in vain. She had lent it no more than a veiling attention. Yet swiftly that dreaminess had worn away. The continued impact of the novel sights, and the quick plunge into the work for which she had come, had set up their reactions. Edgerton seemed something remote and apart from her present life, and though his letters, arriving regularly each week, revivified the keen sense of his personality, they did not bring him into relation with her everyday existence. She was perfectly content with this. Life was going on splendidly. It was enough to have his friendship for her speaking in the interchange of letters without its reappearance in her daily actual experience. From that 51 THE SPLENDID CHANCE reappearance she secretly shrank, partly from an un- acknowledged feeling that it was putting life to the question too soon, and the announcement of his in- tention to come was causing her many a flutter. There would be something significant in that meeting or something flatly disenchanting. "You won't like me a bit when you see me again," she had written him promptly. "My fingers are always painty and I'm so fearfully impressed by your taking time to come that I shall be dumb with awe." "I'll risk it," he had scrawled back, and underscored, "Especially the dumbness!" The consciousness of this intimate exchange kept Katherine a little flushed and defensive during the re- mainder of the visit. She had meant to refer, frankly in appearance but with misleading casualness, to the prospects of Captain Edgerton's being in Paris, but now she closed her lips upon it. And she wondered, with a sudden gleam of abnormal insight, if Ellen Wharton's fidelity to the memory of that dead lover was utterly due to a broken heart, or to some secret disinclination to the full-bloodedness of sex, from which she was willing to stand forever apart in the sanctifying purity of her grief. It was a mere flash of transient thought, not wholly just to the woman before her, but it held its element of truth. . . . Katherine felt suddenly tenderer toward Miss Anne. And she wished that she would meet some thoroughly nice man, fall tumultuously in love with him and marry him at the consul's in post haste. 52 THE SPLENDID CHANCE It was a pity these revelations didn't occur. But the matrimonial times had been out of joint for gentle, careful Miss Anne. How pale life would be if it were done with splendid hope ! Pity the heart that never risked its argosies of adventure. In showing out her guests downstairs and lingering over their last farewells she blocked the way of the man who came plunging out his first-floor door. She stood aside to let him pass and he made a reluctant motion toward the slouch hat tugged down over his black- browed eyes, but he did not send a glance in her direc- tion. And Katherine, able wholly to laugh now over the encounter of the afternoon, pointed them gayly to his big, retreating back. "He bites," she said mysteriously, and she christened him to herself for all time. "My neighbor the Surly Man !" CHAPTER VI THE little dinner at the Lilas proved merry. The warm April evening had precipitated an on- slaught of marble-topped tables upon the side- walk where the Boulevard Montparnasse crosses the Avenue de 1'Observatoire and as the two girls sat at one, awaiting their order, what more natural than for Etienne de Trezac to saunter past with a friend, and what more agreeable as it happened than for him to ask permission for them to dine together? De Trezac's friend, a medical student, was also, it appeared, a friend of Olga's, and though a discriminat- ing spectator might have observed, at the first, a slight estrangement between them, a stiffness upon his part, and a defensive antagonism upon hers, Katherine was far too occupied with the novelty of De Trezac's ac- quaintance to perceive those fine shades of the past which indeed swiftly melted into a more congenial though intermittently ruffled present. Katherine found De Trezac charming. He seemed to her a most engaging boy, rarely gifted, and all the more interesting for his French differences, and she accepted companionship with him, ready friendship, 54 even, with that thoughtless confidence which makes the American girl so bewildering to the foreign observers. The talk was rather three-handed, with Katherine put- ting in only an occasional interested word or question. In the beginning it dwelt mildly upon the schools, the exhibitions and studios, but presently it ranged with freedom and liveliness ; during the chicken it concen- trated in a debate between Etienne and Louis Arnaud concerning the veracity of some experiments that a noted chemist was conducting, and by the salad it had veered, unexpectedly, to systems of philosophy with in- timate and personal applications. "But you you find in pleasure the end of life," Louis asserted gesticulating, one confesses, with a fork. "That is the fine substance of your philosophy !" "Naturally. It is the philosophy of all the world," said Etienne calmly, "though one may mask it with names. . . . What else is glory, fame, high office, dis- covery, but the particular kind of thing that delights one? Pleasure that is the sap of gratification which each flings, in one form or another, to this monster of an ego within." Smilingly he tapped on his slender chest. "What name do you give your philosophy, my friend?" "Achievement," said Arnaud with a snap of his jaw. "Achievement ? . . . But that is to say that your am- bition is the hunger of your ego for the pleasure of dis- tinguishing itself from other egos, of receiving acclaim, recognition. . . . Gratified pride is not that your pleasure ?" "But the pleasure of achievement is different from 55 THE SPLENDID CHANCE pleasure in useless gratifications and distractions." "Not at all," said Etienne calmly. "It may be the only one to which your harp of one string vibrates, that is all. What you call distractions may be the reactions of a more plentifully endowed nature." His laughing eyes turned to Katherine and found her smiling at his mockery. "There are higher pleasures/' Louis began doggedly. "Oh, as to that granted! There is the pleasure of painting a Venus and the pleasure of eating an ome- let!" "And the pleasure of making love to a pretty girl," Olga thrust in, her chin in her hands. "Do not forget that, either of you !" They both laughed on different notes. "Where would you put that in?" "Oh, above the omelet, mademoiselle, assuredly !" "Then you would rather paint a woman than kiss one?" pursued Olga, with that impudent tilt of her little nose and mouth, that baffling inscrutability of her eyes. "If we are speaking of generalities yes," the painter blandly parried. "And he he would rather dissect a Venus than em- brace her," Olga commented, with a mocking nod at Arnaud. "One is a step up the way of truth and one a descent into delusion," the young physician observed, not without his own sparkle of malice. He added, emptying the oil cruet upon his last lettuce leaf, "And an embrace leads to bonnets." It was evident to Katherine that Etienne shared her 56 THE SPLENDID CHANCE perception that the chatter was a trifle unabridged. He brought the conversation back with a quick thrust at Louis. "You perceive, then, that in your philosophy of life which you call achievement, you are choosing only the gratification of the pleasure which appeals the most strongly to you?" "At least I have chosen. And what I say is, that if you do not choose, if you spin about with all the vibra- tions which you term the reactions of your plentifully endowed nature you will land nowhere and the end of your life will be regret." "Show me the life without regrets," said Olga sud- denly. "True but do not, at least, arrange to regret the most worthy of your possibilities." Having consumed the last vestige of lettuce, Arnaud wiped up the plate with a piece of bread and then pushed it away from him, thrust his hands into his pockets, tilted back his chair and cocked his narrow, cynical head a trifle derisively at Olga. The girl suddenly laughed. "Your choice then is not hamperingly large," she gibed, "that choice of your 'worthy possibilities' !" Etienne turned to Katherine with a humorous mien. "And what is your philosophy, Mademoiselle King?" he inquired. "What do you seek in life?" "Happiness !" she gave back on a note of laughter, but with an involuntary earnestness of avowal. Her clear, gray eyes, meeting his dark ones so frankly, re- vealed a trustful confidence in her bright quest. 57 THE SPLENDID CHANCE And then, choosing her words more slowly, her faintly smiling lips seeming to deprecate her unnecessary seri- ousness, she added, "The happiness, I mean, of the realization of self of the very most that is in one." Quizzically he drew his brows together. "But accord- ing to our inexorable friend here, one must choose. . . . What kind of happiness? The realization of yourself as a painter? Or as a beautiful woman?" The medical student glanced at her with sudden in- terest. He was attracted by her air of radiant health and vitality, by the freshness of her color and the slen- der firmness of her white throat that the open collar revealed. "A beautiful woman, of course," he interpolated, but not without his air of underlying irony. "The epileptic can paint." The girl glanced from one to the other, her candid eyes subtly appealing against their mockery. It was a discussion which she had often carried on secretly with life. "Perhaps you think I desire to eat my cake and have it, too," she smiled. "But why must a woman renounce herself to be a painter? A man does not." "But he places one thing above the other," Etienne said quickly. "He starves his wife for art or he be- trays his art and becomes what is it that you say in America a good provider? Yes?" "Not always. Some wives understand and share the adventure with them. . . . And for a woman it ought to be easier in a financial way because she is not the provider. . . . And why is she not a more successful 58 THE SPLENDID CHANCE painter for being a woman who lives life not evades it? . . . Every experience enriches . . . reveals " She paused, a little diffident of the deepening waters. Then, smiling, "Isn't every young singer who essays the great roles told to go and have her heart broken?" "But observe, mademoiselle, she is told to have her heart broken not to realize its hopes," Arnaud pointed out, while Etienne watched Katherine's kindled face where her youth was dancing like a blown flame. "There is a difference." "Indeed a difference, the chance of life," murmured Olga unexpectedly pensive. "But the difference is in favor of happiness," Kath- erine replied to Arnaud. "Cannot one do better work with a happy heart, with a full inspiration of life, a stimulating gladness " He interrupted. "A happy heart is a time-consum- ing affair. ... It involves the menage a deadening domesticity. One does not paint immortal works while one " he appeared to interrupt himself, then resumed, "one prepares the meals, mademoiselle or, if the menage is rich, one plays the chatelaine. A pair has a place in society and behold another Moloch for time. . . . But a broken heart is another thing. The affair is over and done with. The broken heart yields its essence of despair. . . . The painter lives in his work, feeds it with that despair, with that energy which love did not consume. . . . Behold the truth !" But she would not yield. "Does a broken heart stay broken?" she laughed. "The heart of Romeo, you remember, was broken for 5 59 THE SPLENDID CHANCE Rosaline and then he saw Juliet! You cannot stifle life of its meanings, its hopes. . . . And is it not better, from your cynical point of view, even, to have a happy love affair and once and for all safely occupy the heart " "Mademoiselle is an economist, then," murmured Ar- naud. "An idealist !" declared Etienne. "She pays the heart the tribute of assuming its constancy, when once its affairs have reached a happy conclusion. . . . But is it not your opinion, Monsieur Philosopher," he inquired of Arnaud with pronounced gravity, "that success in a love affair may prove less engrossing than a fail- ure " "Take care," said Olga, in a low, hostile voice. "I am but a speculator in the realms of fancy," said Louis quickly, with a gay air. "Who knows but what Mademoiselle King is right, and a heart relieved by suc- cess and so freed from the strain of courtship may not turn to its work and spend itself there?" "You are a beast," said Olga across the table to Etienne, who laughed, and raising her demi-tasse she saluted him with her impudent little smile but with cold eyes, "To your perdition !" Katherine reflected that Jeffrey St. Preux Edgerton would judge the conversation extraordinary. She thought it a little extraordinary, herself, but these were student days and to her comrades she gave the students' liberty. She had found the little dinner a quatre so pleasant that she was frankly pleased to have it followed by 60 THE SPLENDID CHANCE other dinners now openly by appointment and those led in the quickly ripening intimacy of student associa- tion to rambling and light-hearted expeditions about Paris in search of interest and diversion. More and more she liked De Trezac. For all the tre- mendous differences of their environment and their per- spective, differences but half understood by her, as yet, she was serenely sure that she and "Etienne," as it easily became after a fortnight of their comradeship, under- stood each other implicitly. And he was very good for her French, she wrote her mother cheerily, for he could not or would not talk English, and her French was becoming so rapid now that it fairly ran away with her I Her Paris days were settling into more and more sharply defined ways. At the College Club she had met several pleasant American girls, but as most of them happened to be studying music the difference in interest drew them steadily apart. There was an English girl she liked, studying art at Julien's, and she saw some- thing of her but not much for most of her time was given to her own Academie and the friends that she made there. Two middle-aged American ladies she liked immense- ly; good, energetic souls, who after an arid youth of teaching drawing were at last realizing something of their long-deferred ambitions. Fortunately they had not yet realized how fatally deferred those poor ambi- tions had been. With them Katherine often went to Henriette's, that little restaurant about which cluster so many traditions of frolicsome student life, and with 61 THE SPLENDID CHANCE them she shared the sly amusement provoked by intrud- ing American tourists, lured by these old tales of high jinks, and woefully taken aback upon beholding many groups of compatriots, mild, feminine, sedate, with their sprinkling of gray hairs. There were other nights, however, when Henriette's was not so decorous. Then it was the Americans, the younger Americans, more than the French students, who upheld the riotous tradition, but the most sympa- thetic eye could not find in the babel of laughter and corks the romantic gayety of the Mimis and the Ru- dolphs of the past. These were the days when Katherine's work absorbed her, when she lived from day to day in an enthusiasm and ennobling delight that was like a spiritual flame in her. Her passionate preoccupation would have worn down a youth less buoyant and healthily gifted. She painted at the Academic every morning and often after- noons ; but her habit was to work in her own studio in the afternoons, at experiments of her own devising, re- turning to the Academic for the croquis at four. At first she had been shy of herself and distrustful of her ability among these strangers, but her gift was genuine and asserted its power. And she had been splendidly trained with nothing to unlearn. She painted, Guerin finally told her, like a man. Her effect was simple and bold and strong. "It is a pity you are not a man," Guerin observed, studying one of her half-finished canvases. Her eyes steadily, a little too defiantly, interrogated liim. 62 THE SPLENDID CHANCE "Oh, yes, you understand," he answered, dryly. "You see now how you work you know that you are painting against time." That held its barb of truth for her. She realized indeed that if ever her work was to justify itself, was to be of paramount concern in the ordering of her life, it must take its place of honor as soon as possible. Etienne, her fellow-student, had scant sympathy with work when it conflicted with his suggestions for an outing, and the way of the world outside that studio was to take it as the pleasant time-serving of talent, and to assume that what life had only to deal with was a gray-eyed girl with a fresh and wholesome color, and a healthy appetite for experience ! She knew, for instance, that Jeffrey Edgerton no more thought of her painting as a thing to be seriously reckoned with in his attraction for her than he thought of her embroidery. Probably he had not even attempted to analyze his impression upon the subject, but if he had it would have been undoubtedly that she sketched very cleverly and would make some pretty things to hang on the walls. As for serious work probably he thought that there she painted badly, very badly in- deed, but Katherine felt intuitively that his loyalty would always stanchly insist that the things were "very jolly." He had not made that trip to Paris upon the expected Saturday. Neither God nor the Colonel had been favor- ably enough inclined, it appeared by the disposition of events, for an absurd epidemic of measles had broken out in his quarters and he was quarantined. 63 THE SPLENDID CHANCE It was the telegram apprising her of this that brought the first sign of humanity from the Surly Man. In the two weeks that had intervened since her ill- advised utterance of neighborliness she had seemed to run -upon that man on almost every occasion and with- out the least softening of their edged aloofness to each other. In general they appeared not to see each other. When this desirable abstraction could not be main- tained for instance when dashing violently against each other in a bundle-laden rush out a delicatessen door his awareness of her personality and reception of her apologies, for she had been the principal dasher, with some fatal damage to an eggy bundle of his, she surmised had been accomplished with a maximum of ill grace. But when the telegram came, when Madame Bonnet handed it interestedly out to her from the little cage as she sped into the hall on her return from the Academie that Friday afternoon, and she stood rather dumbly there, reading it over the second time, a voice came out of the shadows by madame's recess that was so mild that it was not for a minute recognizable as the voice of her neighbor. "No bad news, I hope?" he offered, coming forward awkwardly. "Oh, yes," said Katherine dully, and then, "Why no no. It doesn't matter," and she fled up the stairs in a frame of mind as distracted as her stupid speech. In sharp reaction from that first blank disappointment came cowardly relief. The awkwardness of meeting was postponed for a time. She wouldn't have to lie awake to-night, planning what they would do, and what she 64 THE SPLENDID CHANCE would say feeling foolishly expectant in the thought of that momentous visit . . . feeling chagrined if it fell flat and uninspired. . . . It was better to have his letters going on as usual. And yet, after all, that was a very blank Saturday. iOn the whole, so her mood veered, she wished he had come and had it over with.' The first visit appeared rather humorously in the aspect of a dose of medicine on whose success the rest of their friendship depended. Decidedly she was a young lady of too much humor for her own tranquillity. Sunday, also, opened very emptily. In expectation of Edgerton's arrival, she had declined a trip to the Bois with Etienne and Louis and Olga, and now the perfect loveliness of the day, the relaxing warmth that lured and beckoned, waked restlessness and discontent as she sat over her coffee and rolls in a neighboring cremerie. Then she became aware that the Surly Man and his small charge were at the next table, also at breakfast. He had his back to her, his big shoulders hunched over his paper, a coffee cup in his hand. The child faced her, gravely staring above the rim of her mug. Presently when the Surly Man wandered off about the shop, collecting favorite rolls, the little thing slipped deliberately down from her chair and came slowly to Katherine's table, standing looking at her with that dark, unwavering gaze. "She's not unsocial," thought Katherine, with a little flash of indignation. "She's only shy !" 65 THE SPLENDID CHANCE She smiled, a little shyly herself at her visitor, half fearful of frightening her away. "And what is your name?" she said in English. "Peggy," said the child clearly. ''Peggy in English. . . In French I am Marguerite." "They are both very pretty. . . . But which do you like the best?" A grave consideration of this dwelt in the little girl's face. Then she turned, cast a sudden glance across the room at the Surly Man returning to the table with a heaped plate, and then gave Katherine a look, fleeting, mysterious, embarrassed. "Peggy," she said with a little gasp, as if her reasons for it made it a confession, and turned and precipitated against the Robert that she adored. Fe\7 young men care for the impetuous affection of a public attack that grips them dangerously about the knees, but the Surly Man, though Katherine saw the color mount in his face, offered no suggestion of rebuke. Having clasped a steadying hand an instant over the rocking rolls he put that hand down upon the little girl's head with a gesture of affection that was curiously touching, and when he had lifted her back upon her chair, and buttered a fresh roll for her and refilled her mug, Katherine registered a sudden, enlightening dis- covery about him, also. "Perhaps he's just shy, too !" she thought. But that was not wholly the case. It became the case for her thoughts, however, and she saw the young man's gruffness through eyes of sym- pathy. He was so oddly alone, with that little sister 66 THE SPLENDID CHANCE and how the child adored him ! The English Peggy had been dear to her because it was the name of her brother for her Katherine had divined that in a flash. What old little things they were, these mites, and what quaint things went on in back of their heads ! And as she watched the two of them for the young man's back was to her and his paper again engrossed him she saw that the child had a droll way of drinking only when he did. Several times the little Peggy gripped her mug firmly, in hopeful expectancy, but if the 3 r oung man put down his coffee cup or his glass of water untasted the child put down her mug. When he drank she drank, methodically, watchfully. ... It was, one of those queer secrets of childhood. " She wondered if the man knew, or if this hidden play- went on unseen through all their meals. At the end she saw that he knew. For he told the child to finish her milk, and as she hesitated he raised his own glass with an air of beautiful casualness and kept it at his lips until her milk was drained. And Katherine's sympathy went out to him in a queerly pity- ing way, although he appeared such a very self-sufficient young man, stoutly able to repel all manifestations of interest. Perhaps it was his very air of assurance that made him all the more pitiable. The red wreath on the child's hat with that amazingly blue sash ! She wished, with a woman's intrusive and amiable recklessness, that there was something that she could do for them. CHAPTER VII THE chance came with unexpected suddenness. On that very Sunday a lonely, drifting one for herself, given over to letters and reveries and a brief walk upon the boulevards that disgusted her with all strolling Frenchmen forever, she told herself, the little Peggy was taken down with cold and fever. Upon Madame Bonnet's mentioning, some three days later, that "la petite, la-bas," was ill, Katherine discovered that the good madame was aiding in the nursing, al- though monsieur was devoted as a mother, madame de- clared, nodding emphatically. Katherine put no questions, refraining from appear- ing to interrogate madame upon the subject of a young gentleman and an arrived sculptor, but she did make bold, with what she assured herself was unmixed kind- ness of motive, untouched by feminine curiosity, to tap at Robert MacNare's door and ask if there was any- thing she could do for the child. She had had quite a little experience with her small brothers, but she did not get as far as that in her little speech to MacNare. She met with a scarcely opened door and a curt re- fusal. Thank you, but no help was needed. 68 THE SPLENDID CHANCE On her way upstairs she thought of several things that she would like to happen. Particularly she hoped that Peggy would have fits harmless fits, of course in the night and he would come flying to her, craving her skill. . . . It is not often that life falls into the whim of our sug- gestions. But two nights later, events unfolded with the thorough retribution of the third act of a tragedy. At eleven o'clock the Surly Man came knocking at her door, a very distraught and hastily attired Surly Man, demanding, not beseeching, her presence on the floor be- low while he went for a doctor. He had wakened to find Peggy in a choking paroxysm. There was no telephone in the building and Madame Bonnet was spending the night with a neighbor. Katherine was a little scared by this prompt response of fate, and when she hurried down with him, in informal dressing-gown and slippers, the child's condition shocked her beyond all thoughts but those of fear. Peggy was sitting up in bed, gasping in a horrible, strangled way. Her tortured little face was darkening with blood. "What is it ? She never had this " The young man hung over her in an agony of helplessness, one arm about the shaking little figure. Over his shoulder he flung a look that was a command at Katherine. "You run like the devil for the nearest doctor! I daren't leave her. Try the one at the corner. Quick !" But Katherine had seen croup before, though never such an extremity as this. She flew to the table where there were medicines and an alcohol heater and a moment 69 THE SPLENDID CHANCE later she was holding a spoonful of white vaseline in the blaze, unmindful of her blistering fingers. Pouring the warm stuff into another spoon she gave it to the stran- gling child. "She must cough it up," she said desperately. "She must !" And cough it up poor little Peggy did, with the last remnant of her gasping little strength. And when her head drooped back against the young man's arms with a spent sigh, the dark color fading splotchily from her face, Katherine took her from him and sent him for the doctor. MacNare returned with a slender, bearded man, whose keen brown eyes behind thickly convexed lenses stared rather hard to find the child, made sweet and fresh in her reordered bed drawn out in the middle of the studio, clinging to the hand of a very young girl in a blue dressing-gown with two ropes of light hair down her back like Marguerite's. Katherine had been too busy with Peggy to remember her own appear- ance. Nor was the doctor's astonishment lessened by Mac- Nare. "Dr. Thibault, this is er ' frowningly the Surly Man confronted his guest. "I don't believe I ever knew your name," he blurted. Katherine turned to the doctor. "I am Miss King. I am on the floor above and came down when the child was choking." For just one minute the Frenchman's face permitted the revelation of his thoughts. To have a girl with such hair on the floor above and not to know her name ! It 70 THE SPLENDID CHANCE was incredible! Then he devoted himself to the small invalid, and when he had taken stock of affairs he turned toward Katherine again with an air of admira- tion that had nothing at all to do with her braids, and paid her the compliment that comes only sincerely to a physician's lips. "You would have made a good nurse, Mademoiselle King. You have had experience?" "With my brothers. Now if there is nothing more that I can do ?" "You have done everything." He made her a grave bow. "Then I'll say good-night." At the door the Surly Man shot forward and gripped her hand. "I'm glad you knew what to do," he said with a deep breath. "And I I want " Emotion too strong for speech was struggling inarticulately within him. He did not lift his eyes to her face. Some perception of the past blackness of his conduct was further com- plicating his expression. "I'm so glad that I could help," said Katherine quickly. And then, emerging from her deep relief and gratefulness into a very human triumph, she spread her graciousness a trifle expansively. "And if you need me again to-night or if there is anything that I can do to-morrow for your little sister " Abruptly his hand withdrew from hers. "She is my daughter," he said hurriedly. Then why on earth did she call him Robert? That 71 THE SPLENDID CHANCE was what Katherine wanted to know, staring solemnly wide-eyed in the dark. His daughter! How amazing! It seemed a disconcerting fact, but presently her vig- orous imagination, only momentarily stunned, laid hold of the circumstances and constructed an entire story. And its pathos reinvested the Surly Man with that drap- ing glamour of romance from which the first shocked discovery of his wedded past had contrived, curiously enough, to divest him. His young wife had been beautiful and adored. Her death had broken his heart and he hated all women be- cause they were living while she was gone. ... So he lived alone with his little child and his artist's dreams. It was very tragic. And Katherine, having com- pleted the creation, indulged a woman's passion for sequels. She reflected, as she yielded to her neglected sleep, that it was a pity that he was not ten years older. . . . Miss Anne was so sympathetic when one knew her. But the sculptor, unfortunately, was not much more than thirty. However, since he had done with youthful romance, perhaps. . . . Sleep, impatiently, snuffed out the rest. L CHAPTER VIII IVE, live, live! The sun and stars shall light you!" Forgetful of the ban upon songstresses, Katherine was caroling at her easel shortly after her return from the Academie the next afternoon. " ' Live, live, live ! Some spot of earth invite you Live, live, live ! Some face and heart delight you.' . . . "Come in," she broke off her song to call, looking over her blue-aproned shoulder at the door, expectant of the American ladies from overhead who were to report about some tickets for a play. At sight of the Surly Man, standing rather hesitantly in the doorway, she freed her thumb quickly from the palette and came forward in welcome. "Do come in. How is little Peggy to-day? I inquired of Madame Bonnet at noon and she said that she was better." "She is. Much," MacNare sententiously vouchsafed. He was in his sculptor's blouse, and his hands, though fresh-washed, bore unmistakable traces of clay about the 73 THE SPLENDID CHANCE close-cut nails. It was evident that he had run up from his work on the spur of resolution. ''But you are busy," he objected, with a look at her easel. "Only puttering. And I'd do better to let it alone a bit. . . . Will you take this chair? It's really man- size and comfy." She spoke rapidly, intent upon pleasant hospitality. There was something about this gruff young man, with all his surliness, that stirred both feminine curiosity and a motherly impulse to soften his aloofness. "No, no I only came for a minute." Katherine perched on the wide wicker arm of a chair facing him. She made no motion to take off her very painty apron, fearing that might suggest a criticism of his workaday blouse, and above its long blue folds her fresh-tinted face looked curiously small and young. "And is the croup all gone?" she asked as he stood silent. "Oh yes. Thibault says that came from too heavy a meal last night. . . . She was so much better from her cold then that I didn't know more than to indulge her." "I expect you have your hands full," she ventured sympathetically. He did not immediately reply and she saw, to her sur- prise, that a tide of dark color was rising in his rather white face. "I don't know how to thank you," he said abruptly. "But perhaps you are really a person who doesn't care to be thanked I've read that there are such persons !" Katherine laughed. "Oh no! I like to be thanked 74 THE SPLENDID CHANCE very much," she said mischievously. "Please go ahead." Very blankly he eyed her. Then meeting her smiling eyes he smiled, too, a little stiffly as one unaccustomed to this relaxing intimacy. "I wish I knew how," he said. "Your promptness saved her." "Oh, you could have brought a doctor in time. But I was too frightened to wait. Croup's a horrible thing. You're very fortunate that she never had it before. My brother Donald had more than one siege, poor lad." Again he was silent, still struggling, it appeared with the sense of his deep obligation. "I wish that there was something that I could do to repay you," he ploughed on at last, uncomfortably intent, and she broke out in sensitive opposition, "But I'm not a doctor so you can't send a check! And is a little neighborly kindness so burdensome to you?" Her eyes met his with a sudden little flash. This time it was he who smiled the first, a slow and reluctant smile, admissive of that quality with which she reproached him. It was the first time that Katherine had really looked at the Surly Man; he had been a vaguely featured, black-browed person draped with the fog of both re- sentments and sympathies, but now her quick glance absorbed a host of impressions. He was very black- browed, indeed, and black-eyed, with heavy black hair growing low on a wide white forehead. His nose was straight and finely cut ; his cheek-bones were rather heavy; his mouth had a grim, locked look, and his square- jawed chin was blunt. 6 75 THE SPLENDID CHANCE He looked like a person who made up his mind about things as a bulldog holds to a bone. But there came to her the softening memory, not alone of his helpless agony last night, but of the gentle way he had put his hand on Peggy's head that Sunday morning as she had gripped his knees in her impulsive onslaught. Very decisively Katherine whisked the question of gratitude to the winds. "Will you feel better if I promise to have a spasm some night and call upon you? Then we'll be even." Her flippancy elicited no lightness of response. He told her rather dryly, "Yes, I'd feel better if you would." "How you hate to be grateful! . . . But you needn't be really. It didn't make a particle of differ- ence between us. You mustn't bother to speak to me any more than before, and when I make screens and things you can come and roar just as loudly in the halls !" She looked at him with a little-girl sauciness, swinging a restive foot. "The status quo," she added, her face tilted, its fugitive foreshortened lines touched with a gamin-like malice, "is undisturbed." He shot her a suddenly aroused look under his dark brows. "So you do bear grudges, after all!" he commented, with unexpected amusement. "Not grudges recollections." "The bear that walks like a man?" "Still you were very human once," in justice she re- called. "Last week when I had a telegram and you asked if it were bad news." "You didn't seem to know." 76 THE SPLENDID CHANCE "Your sympathy upset me." She had stirred him, at any rate out of the slough of his inarticulate gratitude. He seemed to be enjoying the saucy clash. She went on quickly, "But I shall insist, however, upon being friends with Peggy. And now do tell me about her. Does she go to a school here? Or is she too young?" And about Peggy, it seemed, once the stream of his speech were thawed, he was pathetically eager to talk. For the child was a problem. In the mornings she went to a little 'kindergarten kept by French ladies for sim- ilarly detached French and American children, and she had her luncheons there before the bus returned her, but the afternoons were difficult now that she was old enough to resent excursions with a bonne. She had few playmates and she was too young for more school. "She ought to be out of doors," Katherine declared. He nodded. "I know," he said rather humbly. "And I do knock off every day or so and take her out, but when I'm working you know how that is?" His appeal recognized her as a fellow-worker and she felt gravely flattered. "Usually she amuses herself in the studio when I'm busy. She's got her paints and her paper dolls she's a self-sufficient child. . . . And of course, we have each other. . . . But lately I've realized she ought to have more of a young life of her own " He was walking up and down the studio, now, his hands under his baggy blouse, deep in his trousers* pockets. 77 THE SPLENDID CHANCE Katherine mused a moment. "I suppose there aren't any relatives you could bring over ?" she threw out. "Oh, God, no ! Relatives !" He gave a stare of hor- ror. "Fancy having relatives around some woman." He jerked a hand free and ran his fingers through his thick hair. "Never mind, you needn't have one," said Katherine hastily. "Why not just get some nice girl to take her out afternoons say four a week to play in the gar- dens?" "I've tried. But it's not so easy to find the right ones. Peg's hated most of them and when she hasn't / have." He stopped for a moment's silent recollection of certain obstructive memories. "Do you know of anybody?" he demanded. "I'd rather have an American than a Frenchwoman, because of the language. Peg knows more French than English now." "I might hear of somebody at the Club," Katherine reflected. "There are lots of nice students who are glad to earn a little extra money and in such a pleasant way. I'll find out." "That would be good of you," he said simply. He seemed to have a fundamental masculine helplessness to- ward some of the practicalities of life, and she sus- pected that the skillful ways she had witnessed in his caring for the child had come rather hard to his slow unhandiness. Mentally she took him and his baby under her untried wing. "I'll find you a splendid somebody," she promised with an infectious smile. "And sometimes, perhaps, you'll let me borrow her for some out-of-door hours? 78 THE SPLENDID CHANCE You see, I haven't forgotten how I used to look after my small brothers. And it will keep me from getting too homesick." "Homesick?" he said with a sudden frowning scru- tiny of her bright face. A little quizzical gleam came into his dark eyes and he was about to speak when a knock sounded and he turned toward the door as Kath- erine moved to open it. Again it was not the ladies from upstairs. Etienne de Trezac, a debonair and frock-coated Etienne with miraculously creased trousers and a waxen boutonniere in his lapel, with a cane and a high hat and lemon-colored gloves now held carelessly in his hands, revealed himself in conscious splendor. "Oh good-by," said the Surly Man abruptly. "I hope I haven't kept you," he muttered, plunging toward the door and ignoring the polite salute of the young man who stood aside to let him pass. As the door closed De Trezac turned to Katherine with raised brows. "So you know Robert MacNare ?" "Why, he lives below me. But how did you know who he was ?" "How did I know?" Ironically he laughed. "True, you did not present me but do you think he is under a bushel ? He is somebody that one ! There is no one to whom Paris looks with more expectation. Did you read what Rodin wrote of him? No?" She shook her head, feeling an odd surprise. Madame Bonnet had insisted impressively that MacNare was an arrived sculptor, but she had never spoken of him to peo- 79 THE SPLENDID CHANCE pie in the studios and she was not prepared for Etienne's complete respect. Generally he had a gibe for the most successful of artists. His gibe now was for other things. "So he lives be- low? Well that is convenient! He consults you, I suppose, about his great fountain?" "His fountain?" "Did you not know of that? Why to him was given the prize, the commission but that is evidently not what he comes to talk to you about? No?" Under his laughter there was a stirring of something she faintly resented. "He came to talk to me about his little daughter. She needs a companion for afternoons " "His daughter !" De Trezac's face registered a droll surprise. "So he has a daughter?" "A tiny little girl. She lives with him. And of course he's rather helpless about her." The young Frenchman nodded. "Well, well I did not know that there was a petticoat in his life! But that is what is back of these hermits cherchez la femme!" Then he added with a flourish of his lemon- colored gloves, "And so he comes to consult you about this daughter ?" "Of course he does. We're both Americans. Don't be absurd, Etienne." The girl spoke sharply, annoyed by something lurking in his mockery which she but scantly understood. "I grieve to have driven him away. . . . But then, he has so many opportunities." There was something besides mockery in De Trezac's manner. That quick, 80 THE SPLENDID CHANCE "We're both Americans," of hers, had pricked the male instinct of domination. . . . He resented it, subtly. And, being Gallic, he mocked. "Will you sit down? Or is this splendor for the Faubourg?" Katherine was aware of his formal de- scents upon his sacred at-homes of his relations. "You have said. My grand-aunt's day." Etienne sighed dolorously. Then with retaliative malice, "And a jeune fille, I understand, fresh from the provinces, and lovely as the dawn. A veritable treasure. Ah, those jeune filtes of my family's designs !" Then he permitted himself to smile, "However, this one there is always expectation." "How you will dazzle her !" Katherine mocked in her turn. "Without saying," the young man responded equably, strolling to the little French mirror with its encircling Cupids which Katherine had rescued from a second-hand shop, and settling his tie with elaborate care. "Well, I must be off, Katherine. I but came to " "To dazzle me?" she laughed going back to her neglected easel and looking at him over her shoulder. "To give pleasure to your eyes," he agreed gayly. "A fine livery for a free man, nest-ce pas?" He made a movement of derision toward his holiday attire. "You know you really dote upon it and your Fau- bourg," she murmured, picking up her brushes with fingers still sore from last night's burns. He turned back at the door. "How busy you are. Am I to descend noisily so that Monsieur MacNare will be aware of my departure ?" 81 THE SPLENDID CHANCE "You forget that I can pound on the floor," she gave back laughing. To her astonishment, for she suspected nothing more in him than mischief, he colored. "Truly. . . . Adieu," he said abruptly, and was gone. She only laughed to herself as she added a reckless blue to the sky in the canvas. "What a boy he is," was her uncomprehending thought and it struck her as drolly irrational for one to think of Robert MacNare as accessible to feminine interest. . . . To her he was a man apart. She thought of his past and his grief as something impenetrable, impassable . . . permanent. . . . But Etienne, she reflected, was incorrigibly French. Nothing that he had said made her in the least self- conscious in her eager young desire to be "nice" to the Surly Man and help him with his problems and his Peggy. Life seemed to have hurt him so badly that she gave free rein to her generous sympathies, and that fatal instinct of hers for giving pleasure. Besides, she was so happy herself that it was a neces- sity to make others happy. Jeffrey Edgerton had writ- ten ; another date was set, the first Saturday after his release from the quarantine, and her spirit was on tip- toe with expectation. The other disappointment had been so keen that she had lost in it her dread of the awkwardness of the visit. She only knew that she wanted him to come. CHAPTER IX IN the shadow-spangled restaurant of the Bois, where violins wailed, and the velvet-shod waiters came and went like genii, the light of the pink-shaded candles lay like a blush, of pleasure on the little table. Between the pink candle-shades the girl's face shone to Jeffrey Edgerton like a rose tipped with sunshine. Happiness was dancing on her eyes and lips. In her youthful white frock, with its mild display of her slender throat she seemed enchanting to him. His memories of the boat had always been of the out-of- doors, of blowing hair and wind-flushed cheeks and jaunty, boyish coats. Now in the sophistication of this Paris restaurant she had taken on new grace and dignity and her charm was more feminine and more alluring. The intimacy of the little meal a deux had woven its spell. Being fanciful, he thought it was like having a nymph of spring opposite one, and being in love, he thought, "How jolly to have her always like that at table !" Unconsciously he was grateful to her for being all that he had dreamed. It had not been a simple thing to do this dashing off for such a pursuing sort of visit. He 83 THE SPLENDID CHANCE was tremendously aware, even in the winged rush of his attraction, of all the implications and the weight of things involved. He knew that he was taking what he very seriously called a "decisive step." . . . And he might be taking it toward a possible misadventure, an awkwardness, a disappointment. Suppose she were not all that his fancy had pictured her ! He had faced that contingency very clear-eyedly in crossing, but he had forgotten it utterly at the first sound of her light, ap- proaching feet. And now they had had Saturday din- ner together and Sunday luncheon and Sunday tea, and this was Sunday dinner and in a few brief hours it would all be over and he would be taking his way back to Eng- land and his post. But he was too happy now to feel the wrench of that. He was so proud of her, so openly glad at being with her, that this seemed the only reality in the world. He wondered about her. Was it possible that this visit could mean as much to her as to him ? . . . But was it possible that he could misread the bright candor of those eyes? It seemed to him that she was surely com- ing with him down the same spring-enchanted way ' otherwise why, otherwise, life would be too cruel, too bitter. And Jeffrey Edgerton had youth's glad confi- dence in its own conquering destiny. Almost, being impetuous and a lover, he was tempted to put some decisive speech to her now, but the leash of common-sense still held. He knew that it was too soon. Dimly, without in the least analyzing it, certain reti- cences of hers, certain fleet intangible withdrawals be- fore too pressing a moment, had made him aware that 84 THE SPLENDID CHANCE precipitation would commit himself to her uncertainties. Even in love he kept his head. A committed lover is less interesting. . . . Besides, a restaurant was not the place. A little silence had fallen upon them. In the hours that had just been passed together there had not been many silences ; with the eager freshness of children they had been busied remaking each other's acquaintance. They had laughed away the first, fleet constraint of meeting. And her secret anxieties as to what to do with him those many hours, her guileless plans and decisions, had been wasted for Jeffrey knew his Paris and had his own plans of pleasant authority. There had been a late dinner Saturday, and a rambling stroll through favorite streets where the lamps winked up at them from the smooth Seine : there had been that day a motor to Ver- sailles and a glimmering noon of April brightness, of playing fountains and holiday crowds ; there had been a fleet dash back to town, and then tea in her studio as she had planned, and then after an interval for rest and dress this last dinner. And in all that time, in all that strenuous youthful dose of each other's society, not one moment but of deep- ening pleasure. That was the young miracle of it. Their talk had ranged with the freedom and easy inter- est of youth; she had given him gay accounts of the Academic, of her acquaintances there, of Olga, of De Tre/ac, of the Club with the pleasant girls, of her studio and her encounters with the Surly Man. She narrated with becoming lightness the adventure of the croup and was not ill-disposed to the admiration which it evoked 85 THE SPLENDID CHANCE in her devoted listener. That the notion which Edgerton received from her droll sketch of her neighbor was that of a crabbed and slightly elderly man, was not, of course, to be attributed to her intention. She did not really think of him as young. . . . And Edgerton, in his turn, had his narrations. He had brought one or two snapshots to supplement them of his quarters, his fellow-officers and of his country home. The pictures gave only glimpses of Edgerton Hall, drolly foreshortened, but they were glimpses of a lovely house front, overhung with ivy, of an old tower, casement-windowed, and of gardens sloping to a river, their walks flanked by old-fashioned flowers. "It's not much of a place," had said Jeffrey modestly, "but it's very jolly. And the gardens are great. To me they're the sweetest spot in England." "They look lovely," Katherine had given back, rather shyly. "I thought I had a good one of the rose garden, but Fred, the scamp, had secretly taken his pony on that film and forgotten to wind it. ... You'd like the rose garden. It has a wall about it and a gate and a jolly old sun-dial in the center. . . . Mother loves it. She's famous for her roses." "So is my mother," Katherine had answered with a sudden laugh of whimsical amusement. "But she hasn't any rose garden and wall and sun-dial just a little side yard and an arbor but she has the most wonder- ful crimson rambler over it in town ! And there's a Dor- othy Perkins on the porch that has figured in many a number of seed catalogs !" 86 THE SPLENDID CHANCE "I know it's charming," Edgerton had instantly agreed. She had shaken her head at him drolly, "Oh, no you wouldn't think it, really! For we haven't any park about us, and any sheep in the meadows and deer in the woods ! And our neighbors on one side are so near that we look in each other's dining-room windows and in summer we can hear everything and he isn't a pro- fessor that father likes ! It's too bad that all you know of America is an estate on the Hudson. You can't pic- ture the rest of us at all." He had smiled at her in silence, not trusting speech. For how could he tell her, without seeming a clumsy flatterer, that that unknown environment must be the rarest in the world since it had produced such a miracle of a girl, innocent, intelligent, self-reliant, brimming with young laughter and simple friendliness? But his eyes had not been dumb and that moment at Versailles was among the most golden of her memories. Now, in the little quiet that had fallen on them at the close of dinner they drained their tiny coffee cups and Edgerton drew out a slim cigar from a dark enameled case and asked for her permission. As she assented, as the attendant waiter leaped from the outer gloom to the ritual of the lighting, she found herself thinking how natural it seemed to have him there with her just as it used to seem natural to round the corner of the deck and find him tramping toward her, his head bent, his cap pulled low, his pipe in his mouth. At that memory she laughed softly. "It should be your pipe," she murmured nodding at the cigar. 87 THE SPLENDID CHANCE "You remember the pipe?" With a ludicrous little moue, "It made a very strong impression upon me." He feigned alarm. "Oh come, you haven't it in for my pipe! What? I always use very good 'baccy." And he added, his blue eyes teasing, "You know I should hate to give up my pipe!" "You wouldn't !" she retorted. " 'A woman is only a woman ' ' He saw the sensitive color rise in her cheeks as she broke off. After all why not in a restaurant? "Remember that sketch of the pipe and me that you made?" he suddenly demanded. Perhaps he felt speech was safest. She nodded, a mischievous sparkle in her face. "I've it framed. On my desk. It it always makes me think of the way you looked when you saw me look- ing at it !" "I ought to have looked," murmured the girl ob- scurely. "That's my mascot," said the Captain fondly. "If it hadn't been for that bit of paper flying out across my path " Katherine suddenly giggled. There was something little-girlish and guilty in that giggle which brought the young man's eyes to her. "Can't you guess why it flew across your path?" she suddenly demanded, her eyes alight with mischief. "Eh? What?" "I threw it." "You threw it?" 88 THE SPLENDID CHANCE "I did." She was softly laughing at his mystification. "I'd just finished it. And you came tramping by again, so lordly and aloof, that a horrid impulse seized me. I wanted you to see yourself as others saw you. I thought you'd be furious. It wasn't flattering, you know. . . . And so I let it go on the wings of chance. The wind did the rest." She laughed again, that little prankish ripple of a laugh that enchanted him. He affected sternness. "You minx !" he brought out. "I thought you looked like a kitten in the cream and I thought it was for discovery of your wicked pencil and I was sorry for you. Sorry ! Ha !" "That was when I began to like you," she amiably confessed. "You began to like me !" "It had to have some beginning on something ! You didn't suppose, did you, that I I evolved this violent friendship on first sight?" But that was an unfortunate speech. It brought back the memory of that actual first sight, and a wave of hasty color surged into her cheeks and into his. Once they had treated that encounter laughingly but now that note was too forced. He felt shot with pain that an- other man's arms had been around her, another man's lips had gathered her sweetness to himself, even in the renunciation of farewell. . . . He lowered his eyes from that flushing face, that sensitively trembling mouth. . . . Her own eyes were on her plate. She felt hot shame at the simple friendliness which had yielded her cheek to Dick Conrad. In deepening self-consciousness she 89 THE SPLENDID CHANCE felt as if she had ignorantly squandered a secret treas- ure. . . . And to have been overseen, misinterpreted by him. . . . Yet after all, she had been no more than a friend to Dick. No more. Jeffrey leaned across the table, his lowered voice a lit- tle strained. "May I ask you I know I've not the least right but is that other man quite gone from your life, your thoughts? Is it a clear field?" She raised her lids till her eyes were looking into his. They were dark as pools of shadowed water beneath the heavy lashes. "Don't you understand," she said quietly, "that it could never have been I could never have let him kiss me good-by if he had been anything to me? He was just a dear friend." Her voice trembled slightly. "He is a dear friend now but a very droll one. For he has quite accepted the fact that I'll never be more to him and to prove his own friendship and to save his pride per- haps, he writes me the oddest of jocular letters. . . . Some day he'll announce in them the discovery of the one and only girl. Then he'll forget that he ever thought of me but as a friend." "That wouldn't be possible," said Jeffrey with a clipped little smile. "Was he forgive me, but I would like to know was he someone that your parents would have cared for you to marry ?" Katherine's eyes grew vague. "Dick is a dear boy and his father is a millionaire " she felt a queer little pride in bringing that home to Edgerton "and my people would have been quite glad if I had loved him, but but they never said one word to advise it. And 90 THE SPLENDID CHANCE if I loved the town doctor's son, who is also a dear and very good to his mother, they would have been just as pleased, if you can believe it. They're tremendously unworldly souls. . . . But I I did think about it," she confessed. "I liked Dick and I wanted to be able to do things for people, and have things yes, and I wasn't sure that I'd ever care for anybody else, in a a differ- ent way. And all the books are full of regretted might- have-beens." She laughed uncertainly. "And so I did think about it. But I didn't want to. And my painting saved me. It took me away and kept me free for the chance of life the splendid chance " She brought it out radiantly with shining eyes. Her face was like a suddenly glowing mirror that gave to him the stirred depths of her feeling. ... It was a magic phrase to her. It voiced that deep craving in her soul for high adventure in living, for glorious excitement, for fine passionate experience that would be the climax of all living. . . . Watching her, the young man felt both the glow of answering youthful enthusiasm and a leap of anxious pity for so sentient a creature, knowing so little, expectant of so much, exposed so confidently to all the world might do. . . . All the masculine impulse of protectiveness rose in him. . . . He felt a sudden de- sire to clasp that slim hand lying on the table. . . . He wanted to be alone with her, to speak his ardor, his de- votion. The waiter brought the bill. His train was inex- orable. The ride back under an April sky sown with stars 7 91 THE SPLENDID CHANCE was a silent one. He was solicitous for her comfort but his hand did not outstay its privilege of drawing the wraps about her. In him, more than in her, was the con- sciousness of the exceptional conditions of their com- panionship, of her trustful, chaperonless estate. Every- thing that was chivalrous in him restrained him, but his look, at parting at the door of her building, was charged with a sudden flash of revealing attraction that sent her from him on the winged feet of dreams. CHAPTER X THAT visit added a conscious excitement to her life, a quickening sense of something stirring about to happen. . . . It was no longer possible to think of her friendship with Jeffrey Edgerton as a thing apart from her every- day world for he had crossed the threshold of her Paris days, and though his visit remained something un- merged, separate, distinct, her sensitive memory was constantly flashing forth pictures of his presence. Those few hours seemed to have peopled her Paris with recollections. There were the magic streets she had walked with him, the cabs she had taken, the meals she had shared. There was the tea in her studio. And she would look up sometimes from a letter she was writ- ing and see him there, young and soldierly erect, in her big wicker chair. And she remembered, with a queer little smile hover- ing about her lips, that he had totally forgotten to ask to see her work, had never once looked at the easel at the study of a head which she had carefully arranged there. . . . Yet her smile was not the smile of a dis- pleased artist, but a woman's smile. . . . 93 THE SPLENDID CHANCE However she did not neglect her work in those days. She worked hard. It was not entirely that she was painting against time, as Guerin had accused, though something of that feeling unconsciously goaded her, but the creative spirit in her was deepening and taking on new strength and impetus. She had that sense of alive- ness which comes to the creative artist in the freshness of his mood, that feeling of power surging and tingling to the finger-tips. The world appeared wonderful. She felt herself in a blessed place in it, with heart-happiness and work-happi- ness like Aurora's steeds at her chariot. There was a feeling of impending gladness in the air. Her gayety, her exuberance dived and circled like swallows through all her moods. Everyone was twice as delightful as before Etienne was charming, Olga was droll, the Surly Man was touching in his new-found efforts at amiability. With so much inner happiness it was impossible not to pour it out upon every circum- stance of her life. Not a thought of folly crossed her careless mind. Etienne de Trezac's finished compliment of manner to her she discounted as part of his foreignness, and the gay pretense of devotion which he more and more as- sumed upon their expeditions was all part of the charm- ing nonsense of their relation. Etienne was French ; he belonged in a romantically exclusive Faubourg; he would some day have a title and income and marry a jeune fille. . . . These were student days. . . . She was perplexed, to be sure, by certain freedoms between Olga and Louis Arnaud. They made less and 94 THE SPLENDID CHANCE less pretense of concealing various intimacies of affec- tion his arm about her in a cab, in the Bois, or at some of the promiscuous bals which their curiosity led them to penetrate. But it was not these casual freedoms which provoked Katherine's speculation as much as cer- tain intangible elements in their manner to each other. They quarreled furiously at times. Katherine often heard Olga's low angry voice some distance behind them on their walks, yet these storms never lasted long. And Olga never explained them. "Louis is a bete!" she would exclaim disdainfully. She always spoke of him in terms of airy superiority and her manner to him often was of insufferable imperti- nence, yet it was generally she whose angers veered first into contrition. Neither of them restricted themselves to the society of the other and Katherine gathered that these ex- cursions into fancy's fields were the cause of some of the acrimonious disputes. Her notion was that some sort of sweethearts' under- standing existed between them, opposed by difficulties of time and means, and perhaps position, for Arnaud's family might be above the orphan daughter of a wild Russian boyar and a lower caste Frenchwoman, living in such un-French independence on the little income the Russian father had left. April had flowered into May and May had blossomed into June. The misty laciness of the trees was lost in luxuriance ; the sky was like broad, bright washes of water-color. Every silvery stone of the gray old build- ings ; every arch of the bridges and gleam of the 95 THE SPLENDID CHANCE river was translated into stronger and brighter effect. The Americans were in possession of Paris. The big hotels were crowded; the streets flashed with motors bearing beautifully gowned women on their rounds ; the windows glittered with jewels and glowed with chiffons. Laurent's and Paillard's were crowded luncheon centers ; there were gay throngs at tea on the terraces above the Seine; the songs of violins harmonized the discordant shrillness of human chatter at the restaurants at the Bois or at the Cafe de Paris ; the theaters were visions of costumes. Katherine felt a touch of the invasion in the increas- ing prices in the big shops. Other Americans were there, too ; her own kind as she called them happy, eager- looking people, with Baedeckers and little books under their arms, looking up galleries and tariffs, pilgrimag- ing to the Louvre, to Versailles, to Les Invalides, climb- ing Notre Dame. . . . Some penetrated even to the threshold of her school and her restaurants. More and more of these came as June went by and the vacation terms released the teachers and often she en- countered acquaintances, or acquaintances of acquaint- ances, and the little tea-kettle on her table boiled at several hospitable parties. It was on one of these that the Surly Man unexpect- edly opened the door, and then turned as if he would bolt, but Katherine's quick call stayed him. "Do come in," she invited. "We've been talking 1 about you for we've just been at the Salon and seen your Prophet." 96 THE SPLENDID CHANCE A perceptible thrill ran through her guests, two teachers and a young niece of theirs. "Have you a a piece of art gum?" said MacNare abruptly, demanding the first thing his eyes fell on. "I'm in a hurry for a bit " With a strong suggestion of intercepting him, Kath- erine flew to the cube of it that he was eying. Not for him so simple an escape ! There was mischief in her eyes. "But you must meet my guests," she declared and rushed the introductions as if fearing a bolt in the middle of them. "Won't you take some tea with us?'* she added wickedly. "Never drink it," he uttered hurriedly, but by now the ladies had found their tongues, and were trying to tell him how much, how very much, his work had meant to them, and especially his wonderful Prophet. And was it any particular prophet or just a symbol? They hastened to say all the kind and flatteringly- meant things which much impressed and none-too-re- sourceful ladies can find to say to the greatness of the moment, and MacNare glowered unresponsively upon them and edged to the door. "But we mustn't drive you away we were just going," one of the ladies protested and the rest rose obediently, gathering their wraps. "But I'm going. I must get back to my work," said MacNare, and the eldest lady in ill-omened inspiration, turned to him with deprecating but insinuating sweet- ness. "And your studio is just under this, isn't it? Dear 97 THE SPLENDID CHANCE Miss King has been telling us a little about it. ... I know it's a great favor to ask, Mr. MacNare, and from such strangers, too, but perhaps as dear Miss King's friends and fellow-Americans and such admirers you would let us just peep in the door and see some of those beautiful things in the making ?" MacNare's dark glance flitted past the three sup- pliants and laid the burden of its wrath upon Katherine who twinkled back impish delight. "There's nothing to be seen," he said crisply. "Noth- ing I want anyone to see." "Oh but surely we understand if you'd just make us an exception?" the lady breathed, flustered but not knowing how gracefully to retreat from her impor- tunities. "It's a workshop not a shop window," he said with his dry smile. The smile misled them to further attempt. This time it was the niece who had pretty eyes. She raised them beseechingly. "But that is just what makes it so interesting "To ladies' curiosity?" he said ironically. "Good afternoon." "He is a character, dear Miss King," breathed the eldest lady, with a politely dissembling air of enjoy- ment. Katherine went down the stairs with them. When they had gone she rapped viciously upon the door of the first-floor studio. MacNare opened it a less than customary crack, then seeing her alone, he flung it wide. 98 THE SPLENDID CHANCE She marched to a table littered with tools and clay and thumped do\vn a cube of art gum. "You forgot to take this away." She was smiling but her tone held a peculiar dryness. He looked at her silently under his dark brows. "You are a Surly Man !" she exploded, facing him in intense exasperation. "Oh! . . . Because I didn't let in that rabble ?" "Rabble! . . . Oh, it wouldn't have hurt you," she cried, "to have let those poor things had their 'peep' for half a minute." "They'd never have gone." "I'd have seen to that if you'd been so decent as to let them in." "Decent !" he echoed irritably. "What earthly good would it have done?" "Everything to them. It would have given them the feeling that they were really seeing Paris and famous folk and that poor lady would have carried back won- derful impressions to the little school she came from." "Impressions !" he snorted. "The woman was a fool, an ignoramus " "Your tongue does lose itself in compliment." "Why does she pretend to interests " "Dear man, they're all she has ! She doesn't know that she doesn't know and it's too late to unlearn her. So you might as well be kind for she's such a tre- mendously good soul, with all sorts of heroisms and sac- rifices in her narrow, deprived life that she never thinks of as heroisms at all just duty to sick sisters and grumpy father." 99 THE SPLENDID CHANCE "Is it your idea that I am to soften the mishaps of life to deprived ladies who don't know art from artificial by letting them make free with my studio ?" She shook her yellow head at him in a kind of despair. "It's only that it would have been so kind of you. . . . And even if you didn't you might have been politer to them softened it made excuses." "I don't soften things and I don't make excuses," he returned indignantly. "That's not in my character. And if I didn't hold my studio and my time sacred there would come nothing from them worth the intrusive cu- riosity of lady teachers or anyone else." "I know but these were my friends," she murmured with a shamelessly feminine change of front. "And if I hadn't thought them deserving of your forbearance I wouldn't have " "Oh, Lord Harry!" He ran his fingers through his hair with a gesture of fierce exasperation. "Well, see here here's the key of this place. I'm goijng out. You can bring them here at your freedom and let them revel in impressions " He flung his arms toward an attending circle of unfinished models. "Only they can't peep at that," he prohibited, indicating the model for his fountain under a shrouding cloth. "But it was you that was the magnet ' "The magnet damn ! I beg your pardon no, I don't either. You deserved worse than that. . . . But if you've really set your heart on pouring that crew in here, on me, why why" again that distraught ges- ture through his rumpled hair "why you get them back here again and I'll let them in. ... Only don't 100 THE SPLENDID CHANCE ask me to explain my 'revelation of a Prophet,' " he snorted. She met his look with a face all gleams of laughing triumph. "Now you are nice! . . . But it's too late for you to suffer for it, for they are off to an unknown restaurant, and they are leaving in a rush to-mor- row. . . . Besides, I explained you." "Explained me?" She nodded, a teasing little smile about her lips. "I hinted mystery beneath the words of truth. I said that you were working and and undoubtedly there was nothing here that you wanted anyone to see. . . . Your own words, you see. And the dears guessed a model!" "A model?" He looked but faintly enlightened. Then a wry grin flickered across his face. "You should have seen their slant looks at the door as they passed. . . . And they told me they quite under- stood!" "And felt they were treading near to bacchanalian secrets ?" He chuckled suddenly and Katherine wondered what made her so surprised and then recalled that it was the first recognizable sound of mirth she had heard from him in all these weeks of their increasing friendship. He was not a gloomy man, though taciturn to strangers, dry and unsocial, but never, even with little Peggy, had she heard him laugh. She was still thinking about that and fitting it into her scheme of his tragedy when he startled her by march- ing up to her, his hands deep in his pockets, his dark head thrust forward with an air of active belligerency. 101 THE SPLENDID CHANCE "It's all very well for you to preach to me you have a sweet missionary spirit as no one knows better than my Surly Self," he said dryly, "but I have a few words of warning to say to you. . . . It's all very 'nice' to be agreeable to worthy travelers and deprived ladies but there are plenty of other people's time for them to waste. ... If you are ever going to do anything in the world and bring a harvest out of the seed that's in you, there's just one way do it." He drew a hand out of his pocket and shook it at her impressively. "Give yourself to it, body and soul. Keep the distractions down to the thinnest margin of recreation. . . . Save your strength and your time for your work. . . . That's the one condition of doing your best and making your best better." "And you think I fritter?" She meant a touch of amusement, but she was too impressed by his force. "Not much yet," he acknowledged grimty. "It's natural that makes it almost inevitable. . . . The un- natural and amazing thing would be to have a girl of your age and your" he hesitated then shading his words with irony "your degree of pulchritude conse- crate herself to serious and creditable achievement. . . . You started in well at first. Now you're letting things get hold of you." "Such as ?" There was trepidation behind the defiant innocence of her smile. But he surprised her. "Such as that French popinjay that chap that came in on you one afternoon, do you remember?" She did and was amazed that he did. "And I've seen you about with him constantly. . . . 102 THE SPLENDID CHANCE That's all very well for some people but it's a blind alley and leads nowhere. . . . Don't waste your time on him. You didn't come over here to flirt with adolescent Frenchmen." Her chin went up with a swift gesture of anger. Her eyes were gray as agates with all the soft and cloudy blue withdrawn. "As I happen not to be flirting " "Then he is," he said bluntly. "Don't tell me. I know them. . . . They're daft about la femme. . . . You don't suppose he'd waste time on you if you weren't young and pretty, do you?" His manner quite removed any trace of compliment. Her lips quivered with wrath. "I think it's you who are daft about la femme to take that view of things ! Can't you understand friendship, companionship " "/ can but he can't. Not so much of it. ... And you'll be letting yourself in for a lot of time-consuming explanations some of these days if you don't let a little less companionship go a longer way." "I suppose you think I ought not to go anywhere," she said in a childishly furious voice, "except to the Louvre with the two ladies from the Sorbonne." "Oh no I'll throw in a few outings with Peggy and me," he said coolly. "We don't count. . . . But that young Frenchman thinks he does or I'm mistaken." "That you're mistaken is the kindest thing I can think about you," she retorted and felt that she carried the honors of war from the room. One hour afterward she came downstairs again. It 103 THE SPLENDID CHANCE was little Peggy who answered her knock. Robert was out buying strawberries the child explained; they were to dine in the studio and Peggy was to make chocolate. Then, slipping into French with her best manners, the child asked if Mademoiselle King would care to join them it would be a pleasure. She was a drolly re- pressed little thing in the French formality of her school- mistress's phrases. Her emotions and her childish in- coherencies were for her English. Katherine declined with responding courtesy, then stood irresolute a moment, looking about the room, a larger one than hers, for here a partition has been re- moved, making one room of two. MacNare also rented the sleeping-room beyond, but Katherine remembered that Peggy's bed had been drawn out here the first time she had entered the place that night of the croup. Now, but for the little table the child was setting with slow care by one of the windows, there were scant signs of domestic possession. The big room was barren of artistic litter; it had a clean and wind-swept look. It was like the owner's life with the superfluous gone, leav- ing it stripped and barren of incumbrance, like a boxer entering a ring. By one of the windows the model of his fountain stood beneath the shrouding cloth and one or two other cloths covered certain unfinished studies, while all about the room, ghastly white in the deepening shadows, were the pale creatures of the sculptor's hand. They were old acquaintances now to Katherine, but she seemed to feel them now as for the first time the great torso study, straining in a Sisyphus endeavor, a fragment of an un- 104 THE SPLENDID CHANCE finished Victory, a charming head of Peggy, a Greek runner, a Prometheus, a horseshoer, and a dozen other studies of man and beast. The girl's eyes went from one to the other, then lingered upon the study for the Prophet. The im- pressiveness of the great marble at the Salon was not in the model, but there was power and passion even in the smaller clay of the gaunt and fiery Prophet, appeal- ing with outflung hands and vision-touched lips to the multitude who turned from him in cynical incredulity, in ribald mockery, in dull oblivion and gay pursuits. . . . As she gazed a great humility of spirit came upon her. She found a pencil and paper and wrote upon the edge of a clay, moist table. DEAR SURLY MAN : I am one of the multitude who did not heed the Prophet and I am very much ashamed. . . . You are a Great Man who is patient with all my foolery and foolishness and very good to take an interest in my poor work. I am going to work very hard indeed, and when I am no longer young and pulchritudinous and tempted I may be on the line ! You see I am joking again but that is only bravado. I am really very sad over my bad temper. K. K. She left the little note on his plate and fled. And Peggy, devotedly eyeing her Robert father over the strawberries wondered why he pocketed that note so carefully and then took it out and tore it into a hundred pieces. CHAPTER XI TO the good resolutions of that note Katherine adhered steadily in the days that followed and she was the less tempted to Avander from the Surly Man's counsels of perfection because Etienne de Trezac was out of the city at a family gathering at some country chateau. The Academic was officially closed for the summer vacation but a substitute held morning classes for those who lingered, and there were sketching classes made up for afternoons in the Bois and about Paris. Sometimes Katherine worked with these ; sometimes she went by herself. Even in these few months of Paris study her advance was perceptible. Olga Goulebeff commented upon it with a jeer of irony. "Ah, you will rival Etienne, our genius ! Do you think you will be the dearer to him for that?" Olga's nerves were often on edge. Louis Arnaud had left for the summer vacation. At first Katherine in- quired after him with friendly interest, but to one in- quiry if he had written lately, Olga had responded with a fury of derision. 106 THE SPLENDID CHANCE 'Tou jours, . . . et tou jours avec tendresse, je vous assure I I" Katherine's own spirits were subject to unwonted moods those warm June days. There were times when discouragement assailed her; when she distrusted her work, her power, her future. It seemed to her at those rather depressed hours that she was standing outside of life, futilely painting its reflections, while others worked in its real stuff. It was the hard application of the day that brought these reactions of lassitude, but Dick Conrad's accounts of house-parties and motoring had something to do with them. . . . She was quite human enough to want to eat her cake and have it, too. . . . And the gray and yellow studio room seemed very far away on long, lonely evenings, from the dear associations of her home. Jeffrey Edgerton appeared a person of many engage- ments and occupations. He wrote of a cousin's wed- ding, of the London season, of numerous acquaintances, of visiting officers. His life was very far away, too, from the old American interests. The England in which he lived and moved and had his soldierly being was re- mote. She told herself that she was glad he did not come again. Sometimes when she was very, very tired, and the colors were dull instead of clear and her lines were mediocre and unrevealing, she wondered if her splendid dreams would bring her only to the life of a maiden art teacher. They must have had their dreams, once their human dreams, their hopes of glory. . . . She 8 107 THE SPLENDID CHANCE ! cried dolefully into her pillow one night at the pitiful prospect. . . . And even if she succeeded, if she became a "somebody" why, what would that really bring her? . . . The Surly Man was a somebody, a very distin- guished somebody and some day he would be famous but she thought him the most lonely creature that she had ever known. She did not in the least want to be lonely and pitied or sensible and matter-of-fact. She wanted, with every fiber of her healthy, egoistic youth, to be splendidly and actively and happily occupied. In these unwonted low spirits she came to rely more and more upon the companionship of Robert MacNare. Not that she said a word to him of her occasionally painful forebodings, but it was a comfort for her to be with someone as blunt and frank and uncompromising in his relation to the facts of life. She felt that she would learn truth from him if ever she asked it. She had odd fluctuations in her attitude to him. Sometimes, especially in the presence of his work, she felt queerly young and untried and aspiring in comparison with the greatness of his genius, and her manner was hedged with a fleet, shy diffidence of her discipleship, but gen- erally she was too merry of speech and too saucy for reverence, and too responsive to the pity that he invol- untarily waked in her to remember that he was a great man. Their intercourse was peculiarly in the present tense. Katherine, to be sure, often spoke of her home, her mother and father and brothers, but MacNare's utter silence upon his own past environment made her sensi- 108 THE SPLENDID CHANCE live to constraint. His past was never touched upon between them until one night that she never forgot. They had been speaking of Peggy. He had come up, one evening, to carry her away from one of her frequent visits to Katherine, and little Peg had refused to go until she had finished putting all the paper dolls to bed between the pages of the book they lived in a lengthy and monotonous rite. Curled up on Katherine's couch she was sleepily murmuring, "Now I wash 'is one's face and now I wash 'at one's face and now I comb 'is one's hair and now I comb " ad infmitum after the manner of the repetitious Scribes and Pharisees. In moments of intense happiness she spoke an odd baby jargon of her own; in dull, everyday affairs she was a stolid and reserved little soul. MacNare, at Katherine's request, had drawn out his pipe, and was smoking while he waited, and Katherine finished a letter to her mother, thinking with a wave of homesickness how many miles it must travel before it would be brought up the steps of that old white porch into the eager hands awaiting it, and how, when her father came home from classes her mother would greet him with, "I've heard from Katherine to-day," and little Don would call out impatiently, "When's she coming home? When's she coming home?" From such faraway thoughts as these she roused her- self to try and banish the odd, worried frown that was knitting MacNare's black brows together. Peggy was the best topic she knew to bait his speech, but her low- toned mention of the child served to deepen the frown. Yes, Miss Lowe, the new American governess of 109 Katherine's discovery, was all right, MacNare admitted briefly. Peg liked her; the child was certainly better for the greater outdoor freedom. "And happier, too," suggested Katherine. MacNare cast a glance at his little daughter whose oblivious head was sinking sleepily lower and lower. Her tousled black curls half hid her face, but one round dimpled arm was outflung over her dolls, and two fat knees and plump little legs were displayed between the short socks and her rumpled white frock. The picture was winning enough to lighten any parent's look of care, but the man's dark gaze did not brighten. "I can do for her now all right," he muttered, as if to himself, "but by and by . . ." By and by little Peggy with her great eyes and curls would be a handful for any man, most of all for a grimly unsocial artist who had cut the ordinary ties of human associations. Katherine's glance had lingered on his set face, a veil of quick, human sympathy softening the bright direct- ness of her eyes. "It's hard," she said in a low voice. After a moment MacNare turned his head deliberately and looked at her. "What's hard?" he said in a chal- lenging way. "For her? For me?" "For you both to be so alone," slipped confusedly from her. He drew a long breath upon his pipe and sent a cloud of blue smoke into the air. "It would be a great deal harder if we weren't alone," he said with a grim emphasis of satisfaction. 110 THE SPLENDID CHANCE A sharp wonder struck her. In the pause Peggy's faint croon came across the room to them. "Now I put 'is one here now I put 'at one here " MacNare lowered his voice when he spoke again. It was held taut as a whipcord against all trace of feeling and the words came like a crack. "Peggy's mother is not dead." He looked straight at Katherine and she could feel the visible rush of her confusion to her unguarded face. She could not meet his eyes ; there seemed something sardonic and defiant in their depths, and she turned her head away, a wave of bright color in her cheeks. "Oh !" was all that she could find to offer. Limply she added, trying to sound matter-of-fact, "I always supposed " "I generally let people suppose." His tone was grating. He went on, not looking at her now, "I prefer to be frank with you. . . . We parted five years ago." Katherine's eyes turned unconsciously to the child. Peggy's head had sunk to the outflung arm and from her parted lips came the deep, even breathing of sleep. That pause grew heavy. It seemed necessary to Kath- erine to say something, but everything that occurred to her she rejected as a stock formula of inadequacy. Hesitantly at last she murmured, "Of course when people aren't happy it's better to separate " "I'm divorced," said MacNare abruptly. She said nothing. He added, "I don't want any false pretenses. Truth isn't always simple but here it is. ... I made a thor- 111 THE SPLENDID CHANCE ough young fool of myself. I married at twenty-three. That's a century ago I'm thirty-two now. . . . We lived together three years. Then Peg was born. Be- fore she was a year old I got my divorce. I took her to New York then came here. We've been here nearly four years." There seemed nothing in the world to say to that bald narrative. Phrases of it went snapping through the girl's head A thorough young fool / got my divorce. . . . Her sentimental notions of the man's tragedy went crashing. . . . From the chaos loomed dimmer and grimmer specters, dark outlines she could not apprehend. . . . She thought, confusedly, that the Surly Man would probably be hard on a woman especially a woman who had wronged him. . . . She looked at the child over whose unconscious head the story had been told and felt a pang of pity for the mother who had lost her. From that pity sprang the unconsidered question, "Does her mother never see her?" "Never." He went on, biting off his words, "The one desire of my life is that her mother will never see her and that Peggy will never see her mother. And if I live it's safe enough to prophesy. . . . She," there was an odd, indescribably shading of the word, "she has married again." "I'm glad," said Katherine, from a confusion of feel- ing. A wry, mirthless grin flickered over a corner of that young-old mouth. 112 THE SPLENDID CHANCE "So am I." Determinedly he reapplied himself to his pipe. He had said all that he meant to say. Katherine could but faintly guess what it had cost him, yet now that it was done he felt a distinct relief. As he sat there in the gathering dusk, silently smok- ing, he seemed to Katherine's pitying fancy to be some grim and forceful projection from the dark background that his words had painted for her. She thought she un- derstood how dark it had been. . . . She thought it the old three-cornered tragedy, and wondered concerning that unknown woman over whom he had been such a "thorough young fool," that woman who had taken his youth and then flung it away. . . . She wondered in- curable sentimentalist! if he still "loved" her. She thought it quite in keeping with his character that he should love and not forgive. . . . Then a consuming pity for him rose in her, a helpless sorrow for the bru- talities of life. And suddenly she felt herself a child, ignorant of passion, untried and unstirred by the deep terrible cur- rents that sweep men and women to their fates. Yet when he rose to go, without a further word, lift- ing Peggy gently and easily in his strong arms, she felt herself at the same time a very mother to him, longing to sooth, to assuage. . . . But to heal that, she knew, was beyond such simple gifts as her friendship could bring to him. "Good night," was all the word she had for him but her eyes spoke for her. CHAPTER XII IT was some two weeks later upon a Saturday morning that Madame Bonnet unburdened herself of a few observations. She had eyes in her head, that shrewd madame, for other things than the studio which she was officiously setting to rights beneath Mac- Nare's protesting nose. He always remained on guard to defend his possessions from this invasion of feminine cleanliness. It was late June and warm and the north windows were wide to lure a most capricious breeze. The broad doors upon the side street had been opened, too, to ad- mit the great block of marble for MacNare's fountain, which was now in the middle of the studio, mantled in heavy white cloths. MacNare was still struggling with the bolts and bars of the cumbersome doors, used only for his statues, and madame glanced once or twice ten- tatively at his back before she commenced her conver- sation. "A wonderful day," she observed, her damp cloth vigorous upon a mantle top. "Not a day in which to be in Paris." "I thought you were a good Parisian." MacNare 114 THE SPLENDID CHANCE drove the last bolt home and grunted with satisfaction. Then he turned to eye her onslaught upon his mantle with disapprobation. "And so I am a good Parisian. . . . But I was also a good country girl before I married Bonnet God rest his soul ! and I have not forgotten how soft the air is at Les Buissons nor how the little stream runs through the meadow with the ducks floating on it. ... My son's Marie has hatched out some fine duck's eggs," madame continued with a broad disregard of distinc- tions. "Now there are fat little ducklings ready for the oven. Monsieur must go down and taste them." "Without a doubt," MacNare assented vaguely, be- ginning to sort his motley pipes upon a table next in the line of attack. t "And never will there be a better time than now!" madame enthusiastically proclaimed. "Why not this very day, monsieur? Marie does not need warning. Or monsieur can sleep at the inn and come to Marie's for dinner " "I thought that Marie " "That is not for three months. My son did not marry a weakling," said madame scornfully. "Marie would be glad of a lodger. And the country air would benefit monsieur. He has not the look of one who has the good appetite." "Oh, tut-tut-tut! What should I do down in the country?" returned the sculptor irritably. "Madame understands that I do not paint pictures of fields in bloom nor make models of domestic hens." "Monsieur could take a walk with mademoiselle." 115 THE SPLENDID CHANCE "Eh?" MacNare stared sharply at the bland coun- tenance of his landlady. "What mademoiselle?" "The mademoiselle la-dessus." Madame rolled her eyes to the ceiling, her hands being occupied with the table top. "She went this morning. She had spoken of going before, and yesterday, seeing what weather it is, she came to me and asked me to telegraph Marie. She is to make pictures there for a week." "And you propose that I should go this afternoon !" MacNare gave a hoot of a laugh. "Fie, madame, at your age !" But he did not meet the look in her eyes. He began to fill the pipe nearest his hand, jamming the tobacco down hurriedly with those strong, blunt, marvelously sensitive fingers of his. Madame shrugged and sent her cloth vigorously across the table, surveying its blackened folds with proper expressiveness. "As to my age, it is one of good sense which monsieur apparently has not yet reached," she rejoined smartly, in the habitual frankness of years of association. "For monsieur to turn his back upon a mademoiselle with cheeks like apples and a heart of gold !" "I turn my back !" said the young man gruffly. "Yes, yes, I have seen ! For a time after the little one's illness affairs were pleasant. Then it was, 'Ma- demoiselle, come to the Bois this Sunday with us,' and 'Mademoiselle, take a walk' . . . but of late it is as if mademoiselle were Cain. When monsieur hears her com- ing he turns back into his room. If mademoiselle knocks when the little one is not here he does not answer Oh, 116 THE SPLENDID CHANCE I have heard ! Ungrateful ! Stupid !" madame hurled, her face pink with indignation. "It is not as if mon- sieur were a graybeard with a wooden leg that he could not lift his eyes to a young girl who knows no better than to think the good God sent her into the world to paint worthless women !" MacNare had turned his back squarely upon madame. A dull, dark red was mounting higher and higher in his face, crimsoning the roots of his hair. It was not pleasant to a man of his temperament to find the feeling which he had refused to admit to the light of his own recognition being wantonly twirled, like an impaled but- terfly, upon madame's observation. And yet her last words struck a queer, forbidden pleasure into him which he denied. He took his big chair and planted himself in it, eyeing her determinedly with an air of outfacing the enemy, and remarked in a rallying tone, "Do I look to you> then, a lover?" She gave him the fleetest of glances, but so pointed with a shrewd feminine penetration that he felt his bravado disposed of on the instant. But he did not abandon his note of jocular scorn. "And this advice from you, you who know so much of me ! Why, I thought that you were a good Catholic and believed that once married, always married to the death !" "Monsieur is not a Catholic." "Do you then wish me in deadly sin?" Madame came a little closer, her face a study. "Oh, as to being a good Catholic," she observed, with frank- 117 T-HE SPLENDID CHANCE ness, yet also with embarrassment, "why so I hope I am. I hold with religion. It is necessary for the people. How else should one be baptized and married and laid in the ground? And the Church has its own rules the Church is very wise. . . . Divorce is not seemly. It is hard enough, God knows, to get one good husband for a girl nowadays there are not many young men like my Jean ! without having to get her a second. And if the first swallowed all the dowry what would there be for the second? And if a man could rid himself of a wife every time that the wind turned north no, no, no !" She shook her head vigorously. "But as for sucking in all that a priest says like mother's milk why, I will tell monsieur. . . . When I was quite a girl, my father God rest his soul!" piously madame crossed herself "my father took me to walk in the churchyard where we had laid a bead wreath upon the grave of a relation. 'Look you, Clotilde,' he said to me in confidence, 'you are my child; you are not an ordinary fool of a girl. As to mass and confession and the rest, it is the re- spectable thing, and will keep you a good girl, and there is nothing else for the people. But do not be deceived. Do not pay the priest instead of the doctor, nor waste yourself in candles for purgatory. When you are dead you go back into the earth, and it is the fresh seeds that rise from the earth in the spring, and not the fallen petals. If you would live again you live in the memory of just deeds and loving kindnesses!' ' She sighed deeply. "He was a shrewd man, my father, and the priest had great respect for him. 118 THE SPLENDID CHANCE 'When you are once dead,' he said that day, and never again did he open his mouth to me about it, 'you are dead a long time, and it is well to have lived while you live.' And so I say to you, monsieur, that when once you are dead you are dead, and it is well to live while you are young and not to sit in a room with a block of marble as if you were carving your own monument. ... It was not worth the time of the good God to have blown the breath of life into your bones if you make no more use of it than this !" Madame ceased to talk and applied herself to another side of the room. MacNare's pipe had gone out. A little spark from its bowl was charring an undiscovered spot upon his cuff . From the open window the sounds of the summer streets filled the room but did not penetrate his mood. He had thought himself done with women forever. Certainly one of them had shown him everything that was weakest and basest in the feminine heart. It was not that she had loved another. He was a man who could have risen above his own hurt and loss to under- standing and compassion for another's tragedy and pain, but the iron that had entered his soul had been poisoned with a far more venomous barb. The woman that he had married, in the first flush of a boy's infatuation for a beautiful face, had been a trifler as light as air, ignorant of worth or honor or truth, greedy for every cheap excitement, every easy praise or moment's passion that her beauty snared. She had been wild before she came to MacNare's little city, and met him, and she did not stay long in the 119 THE SPLENDID CHANCE confines of that position and society which pleased her like a toy in the first months of their marriage. She was the talk of the little town, the occasion for many knowing winks and nods among the traveling men, be- fore MacNare had his first hint of the truth, before he knew what her mysterious visits to "friends in the city" meant. That was when Peggy was coming. But the child was his own. The very angle of her stubborn tiny baby jaw told him that. And the mother promised what facile tears she wept, what hysterics, what appeals ! And then there was another traveling man, and Mac- Nare took his baby and got a divorce. It was the cheapness of it that was salt in his wounds, the galling, futile, sordid cheapness. To have given his heart to such slack and tawdry hands ! . . . Well, she was married, to the last traveling man, and being of her fiber, it might be that he could hold her as he wished. For himself the marriage meant relief and security. He thought of her marriage with detachment, but the image of her brought always that sick nausea of mem- ory. That once he had kissed her ropes of gold-brown hair, her rose-pink lips ! A fool's passion ! How he had grown to loathe her big eyes, with their trick of watching him out of their corners, her moist, red, al- ways love-seeking lips. Well, it had been a dose of the sex to last him a life- time. But he had ignored his own youth. He had ignored the tremendous springs of life. . . . And then, when he had found himself turning to that girl from the States, with her clear true eyes, her innocent friend- 120 THE SPLENDID CHANCE ship, her merry youth, how he had snatched himself back as if from the brink of the most disastrous folly! His recoil was instinctive; it was the burnt flesh's memory of the fire. He had no desire to suffer again, no intention of playing the fool to a commendable, but hopeless passion. He shrank from even the sound of Katherine's light feet on the stairs. Sometimes he left his studio rather than listen to her quick footsteps over- head, or the soft soprano of her singing. He could see her too clearly there, the light on her yellow head, her gray eyes clear and shining, her lips just touched with that teasing little smile. . . . That night he had told her of his marriage he had not owned to himself what motives prompted him to open the past to her. . . . But the hours that followed had been merciless in their revelations. And he had avoided her with almost resentful anger because she had the power to make him feel. . . . And as he sat there drawing at his lifeless pipe, the deadening years slipped suddenly from him. He ceased to feel a hundred and thirty-two. . . . He thought of Les Buissons and the yellow of the grain in the fields that was like the yellow of Katherine's hair, and the blue of the little stream with the ducklings floating on its placid surface. He thought of the straight, white road that led to it, with the straight, green trees on each side, and he remembered a little hill, just beyond the farm . . . and the way that the country faded at twi- light in the silver distance. He rose to his feet, stretching his strong arms, and feeling the sense of power and vigor in his muscles. 121 THE SPLENDID CHANCE "If I should go for the Sabbath," he remarked, en- deavoring to infuse an air of gruffness into his voice, *'it would be to escape thy foolish tongue. Can you have the little one ready by the morning train?" He would have liked to go that evening but he con- sidered the delay a last screen to his pride. "For the morning train," assented madame. Being a wise woman she gave no sign of undue triumph. "Marie's little Jeanne will be glad to see her. They will have a fine time together in the fields. And she will find the little Thomas walking." MacNare grunted, and became suddenly aware that the pipe in his mouth was cold. "And for monsieur," continued madame evenly, with a scarcely perceptible glance in his direction, "something in the nature of a more suitable costume for the coun- try yes? Lighter for comfort and convenience. And if I should venture another suggestion it is that mon- sieur's cravats may well go now to tie his parcels and a new one, of perhaps, a blue, not a black, would be an acceptable reinforcement of his modishness !" "Imbecile!" said MacNare with a scornful laugh. And he aired a new black cravat with the gray suit which he self-consciously wore home that afternoon. But there was a blue cravat in his pocket. CHAPTER XHI ALONG, straight white road led to Les Buissons, shaded with tall trees, between whose sturdy trunks were glimpses of rich rolling fields and lovely woods. It was a pretentious road, but Les Buis- sons was not pretentious ; it was an old gray-stoned place that seemed to have grown very cozily and com- pactly upon the bosom of the luxuriant countryside. Even the spires of the weathered church did not rise very high in their modest aspirations, but they were pleasant spires and not above a sense of companionable- ness. The church was at one side of the square into which the single street of the village led from the white high- way, where one descended from the train of infinite ac- commodation, and on the other sides were a town hall and a row of substantial little shops and an old inn and a new inn where "Garage" and "Petrol" displayed on commanding signs told of the inspiring frequence of motorists. But it was not the shops and the inns that made Les Buissons ; it was the little farms, those small, independ- ent holdings that are the pride and glory of the French 123 THE SPLENDID CHANCE tiller of the soil, and the backbone of thrifty France. Their red roofs were dotted all about the countryside, and the carefully tilled fields were squared off like check- erboards in the varying greens and golds. A little stream wandered fitfully about the edges of the village ; at one place there was a mill, at another the flat stones where the women washed their clothes ; and some distance away was the pool where the sheep were washed before the shearing. The farm of Jean Bonnet it was madame's farm, too, but having become addicted to the city in her husband's lifetime she still clung to Paris through her working days was some distance beyond the village on the banks of this little stream, and not far from the straight highway. It was so trim and fresh-looking a little farm, so bright of color with its red tiles and its white-washed buildings, so clean with its scrubbed door stones and bright window-panes that its age was not even sug- gested until you passed the sunken door stones, under the worn lintel, into the wide, oak-paneled room. Here the years had turned the oak to blackness save for the curious squares upon the wall opposite the case- ment window where the sunlight had bleached the wood to ivory pallor and one end of the long room had re- ceived additional darkening from the smoke of the great oven. Shining brasses and coppers gleamed about the oven, and old pottery ware added its charm of color to the shelves. It was ware of whose worth Marie Bonnet was proudly acquainted and to the occasional tourists, offering a franc or so for an odd piece which they averred had "happened to catch their fancy" she would 124 THE SPLENDID CHANCE composedly remark, "But that is the pottery of the Vosges. See, madame, this is the mark of authenticity. It is not for two francs that one disposes of such." Many of these pieces dated from the old times when there had been a grand seigneur in the chateau beyond the woods, not two tenant Americans, and the farm had been one of his possessions. It had been given to one of Madame Bonnet's ancestors for signal service in the chase, and had remained in her family through all the years. Little by little, self-denial had added to its tiny fields until it was indeed a farm of which to be proud. Marie Bonnet met MacNare and Peggy at the door. He and his little girl had lodged with her several times, and she welcomed them now with a flow of hospitable re- gret that he had chosen to stop at the inn. It was true that the mademoiselle had the best room, overhead, but it was not as if there were not other places where he could be made comfortable. Did monsieur remember the time, in hot midsummer, when he had elected to sleep out on the hay, at the Inn of the Silver Moon? And the little one ! How glad she was that she had come ! The child would be the better for country milk. The cow was giving splendidly now there was a new calf, yes, and new pigs. Little Marguerite should be- hold them. Quickly the woman busied herself in filling a blue bowl with yellow cream, and breaking off an end of a long loaf for the little girl who stood clinging to her young father's hands, staring about at the half-remembered room with dark, eager eyes. MacNare was fidgeting like a boy in school. He had 125 THE SPLENDID CHANCE been on a holiday ever since he and Peggy had taken the train early that Sunday morning, a holiday from his wonted self. He had yielded to the lure that was draw- ing him, and he felt young again, elated with the old sense of being ready for life, and equal to it. ... He drew a deep breath of the good country air and the faint flush of the sun was already coloring his pale skin. Marie, good woman, her mind running ahead to this addition to the midday meal and selecting the extra duckling to be dispatched, was not too occupied to note sympathetically that the monsieur was like a boy, and that a blue cravat became him. She moved to call her husband and the two children but MacNare was already out the door again. With betraying eagerness under his assumption of ease he asked Marie where the mademoiselle was now. Out painting? "Down the long road to the lull beyond," Marie answered gesturing. "There is a view " "Let the little one stay here," said MacNare brusque- ly, and vanished. The straight white road was hot and dusty, but on the edge of it, beneath the shade of the trees, there was a narrow path worn by generations of feet, bare or saboted, little active feet bringing home the geese or cows. Here MacNare tramped along, not in undue haste, savoring the day and his own mood. The sky was very blue and filled with soft little clouds, floating slowly. Their shadows fell lightly as a bird's wing on the fields that the Sabbath had emptied of the busy workers. The rich smell of the fertile land came to 126 THE SPLENDID CHANCE him and the fresh scent of growing things. It was still June but there was the breath of July's luxuriance in the air, the warm forerunner of harvest. The broad earth was sunning herself in happy anticipation. . . . Something of that same warmth was coursing through the man's veins. The happiness of the fertile earth com- municated itself to him. He had been a fool, he thought, to let one weak woman darken the face of this earth for him, and sour the taste of life to his tongue. . . . She had distorted love to him, like a bleared looking-glass, tainting and falsifying. Now he could think of her, with hard justice, but not with bitterness. He did not even regret that it had been, for it had given him Peggy, the child of his lonely heart and it had given him, too a measure of deeper understanding for this other woman, this girl who had come so swiftly into his life. If he had never known un faith and tinsel lures and shameful calculation how could he have known the beauty of such simply sincerity as Katherine's, such innocent gayetyand brave friendliness? He thought ofKatherine with rare tenderness as he went on, not thinking of what he should say to her, not sure that he should say any- thing at all as yet, but only dwelling upon her image and glad to be going to her conscious with all his faculties that he was going to her. She had surprised his nature and filled it with her own sunny youth. . . . He thought of her young friendliness to him, her ready trust, her saucy humor. He thought of the bright hair like daffo- dil-gold, and the fine sweep of it over her close-set ears ; he thought of the lovely carriage of her head, its light 127 THE SPLENDID CHANCE poise upon her slender neck, and the slim, strong lines of her young and buoyant body. She was the embodi- ment of springtime to him, of youth, clean, strong, light- hearted youth, innocent, tender, audacious. With a deepening of his reverence he felt that it was perhaps well that he had suffered for now he would be wise arid strong enough to guard her, if ever in the future she should grant that to him, so that the ugliness of life should never hurt her if he could help it. Not even the winds of heaven should visit her face too roughly, he thought, the phrase singing itself over and over in his mind. The sun was high over his head, marking the noon, but in the shade of the path he took off his hat, letting the light wind ruffle his thick hair. The dust of the walk and of the journey was on his new gray clothes and he was glad; he felt drolly self-conscious to be coming to her in such fine array after all her daily knowledge of his rumpled garments and working blouses, and yet he was boyishly pleased. She would not think him a sloven. He turned aside from the road to mount the hill, and as he did so Katherine's figure appeared at the top, silhouetted against the blue. She was not alone. Beside her, very close, was a tall young man, and her arm was slipped through his, and his other hand was laid upon hers in a gesture of intimacy. Her face was upturned to his, and her lips were moving in soft, laughing speech. He was smiling down upon her. And upon both their faces was the look that life wears only once in all its time. 128 THE SPLENDID CHANCE MacNare stopped short. He did not stir and was standing as rigidly by the path as one of his own statues when Katherine caught sight of him and the color came rushing rosily to her pretty face. It was a day when her young blood was swift to stir. With an accent of frank pleasure she called his name, and as he advanced and met them she presented him to the tall soldier at her side, who greeted him with the cordiality of an absent-minded god. It did not take more than one glance to see that this Captain Edgerton, from whose arm her hand had fallen, was a man in the very top-heaven of happiness. His young face was shining as if a lamp were lighted back of his eyes. To MacNare, suddenly conscious of defeated years, the boy seemed victorious youth, hand- some, happy-hearted, created for passion and vigor and triumphant love. Bitterness surged sickeningly over him ; it filled his mouth, his throat, his nostrils like a palpable taste. . : . The sudden eclipse of all tender expectation dashed a sense of suffocating despair into his very soul. He met his own pain with iron contempt for its deluded folly. He knew, now, that he was done with folly for- ever. Meanwhile he was walking with them, and talking. At least he was answering Katherine's half-absent ques- tions. It did not seem strange to her that MacNare had come, for Madame Bonnet had told her that often he went to the farm, and she chatted of him and his child to Edgerton with the kindness of an overflowing heart. Perhaps Edgerton, suddenly perceiving the vigorous 129 THE SPLENDID CHANCE youth of this father of Peggy of whom she had written as of a graybeard, had his own thoughts, but he was too scrupulous to admit them. He could afford to feel a pang of pity for the dark-browed fellow who had stared so blankly at them. They reached Marie's where the scent of the duck- lings filled the air, and where Jean Bonnet and his two children in their Sunday best were waiting to greet him, but it appeared that MacNare could not remain for dinner. Peggy must get her hat and say farewell. Marie was voluble in regret. Moving on to Armande ? What, in the name of heaven, was there to interest a gentleman at Armande ? Pigs and a bad smell pervaded that place it was no village for a gentleman and at dinner hour, also, with ducklings ready to pop into one's mouth ! Armande was but the first of a journey, he assured her. He and Peggy were upon a pilgrimage. It was for their health. . . . And so he was gone, the child clinging tightly to his hand, desolated at being torn from the small Thomas and the black pigs, but shutting her lips, so like his own, over her griefs. For no more than an hour had he been at Les Buissons and for no more than an hour was he remembered by the girl he had gone to meet. "I'm always so sorry for him!" she sighed to her lover. He gazed into her radiant eyes. "I'm sorry for everybody else in the whole wide world, sweetheart." She had come there to avoid Edgerton. She had con- 130 fessed that to him that morning when he had met her in the road, setting forth upon her trip to the hill. When his letter had reached her, announcing that at last he was free to come to Paris for another week- end and asking her to wire if not convenient, she had hesitated and dallied until the last moment. And then sudden panic had sent winging the late reply that she was to be out of the city, for a week in the country, painting. Hurriedly that Saturday she had packed her things and fled to the daughter-in-law of whom madame had so often told her. It was sheer fright, scurrying for cover. She was afraid of him, of that steady intentness, that simple concentration of his. She told herself that she didn't know him, that he didn't know her, that it was too soon, that they were too young, that it was absurd to think that he meant anything and that she must be awaiting him as if she meant anything, and that she was too unsettled to decide anything at all. . . . And so she fled . . . like any mid-Victorian maiden, instead of a modern girl confronting her future with fearless eyes. For just one second Edgerton had been balked by that telegram. But he was a young man who hated disap- pointments. Metaphorically he sprang into the saddle and made for the border. What he really did was to come straight to Paris, and finding that the studio build- ing had no telephone he took a cab to it and inquired for Miss King of Madame Bonnet. Madame, believing him no more than a caller, replied that mademoiselle was out of town and gave her address. This happened Sat- urday evening, while MacNare was packing his bags. Edgerton left on the evening train for Les Buissons. 131 THE SPLENDID CHANCE He had no notion what manner of place it might be but if Katherine were there he was confident that he could find her. American girls with gray eyes and yellow hair were not so frequent as to be unnoticed in rural France. His inquiries informed him of her presence at Jean Bonnet's, but it was late, for the train had not hurried in its extremely local character, so he had gone to the inn and slept the sleep of young and eager lovers that is to say he had been awake half the night, not unhap- pily. And then he had slept so heavily and long, that though he had dashed through his petit dejeuner Kath- erine was just coming down the path into the road, her sketchbook under her arm when he met her. Whatever misgivings the young man had had as to her reception of his audacity had vanished at that mo- ment. Her starry-eyed surprise, the sweet color stealing into her cheeks, the hint of confusion these unconscious signs banished every doubt that had battled with the happiness of his coming. His own face, though he did not know it, was shining. They touched hands, then he took her sketching things from her, and together they turned into the road and walked side by side under the trees, and then climbed the hill where she set out her things and made a pretense of painting. But soon she gave up, with a confessing laugh, and they seated themselves in the long grass in the shade of the wide-branched trees, looking off into the sunny distances. The air was sweet with the slow ringing of bells. On the road below them the country folk were coming in to church but from their point they could not see the road, 132 THE SPLENDID CHANCE only the field and wood beyond, with the blue gleams of a winding river against the green-gray of more distant woods. It was a day of tender warmth, of high heartbeats, of dreams that seemed to hover with gossamer wings like the bright butterflies circling about them. Small need for words on such a day. It was enough to be together. They shared a sense of something blessed and uplifting ; of happiness in which the whole world seemed to take part. Whatever Power had made them had given them this. He was looking at her with all his heart in his eyes, honest, unashamed, unbelievably tender. His hand in the grass was pressing close to hers. Suddenly he said huskily, "Ever since I've known you," and bent and pressed the back of her hand to his lips. Then he lifted his head and looked down on her, and she saw the brightness of his eyes darken and grow grave with the question asked. She sat very still, her hand lying in his, her eyes up- turned, held by his. She was pale and her heart was beating unsteadily, shaken by a terrifyingly sweet sur- prise that was not at any suddenness in his touch or words, for these were the simple crystallization of the vague happiness in which she seemed to have been float- ing, but a surprise that it should all seem to her so simple, so natural, so inevitable. The moment had brought its revelation and de- molished at a touch her vagueness and her wistful hesi- tancies. The eyes that were lifted to him grew starry bright through their soft wonder. . . . 133 THE SPLENDID CHANCE With a gesture infinitely tender he gathered her into his arms and held her close, his cheek pressed against hers one throbbing moment before his kiss touched her cheek and then her quivering lips. It was a shy, sweet passage of love that held their first kiss, so much of the reverent boy in him, so much of the unawakened girl in her. And like two happy children in some enchanted wood, they lingered through unperceived hours, while the sun grew higher and higher overhead, and dancing gleams of sunshine dappled the fawn-colored shade. Their talk, fitful and infrequent, ran at first upon their past, that short little past which had accomplished such tremendous miracles of things for them. He told her that he had fallen in love with her on the boat, but that he couldn't quite believe it, for he hadn't fancied himself the sort to fall in love with anyone. "As if a chap knew himself in these things !" he said with a laughing contempt from his height of experience for that callow ignorance of yesterday. "But my chums have always chaffed me for being such an awfully thick- skinned sort that I'd come to believe them fancied that when I married it would be some nice neighborly jog- trot affair, arranged by the Mammas. ... I never dreamed of this." His arm tightened about her as he spoke. Katherine leaned back against it and looked up at him with eyes that were brushed with laughing surprise. "I'm afraid that there was some nice, neighborly girl in the background that you did dream of !" The fresh color rose high under his bronzed skin. 134 THE SPLENDID CHANCE "But I didn't dream." He hesitated, uncomfortably. "You see, dearest, it's not very easy to talk about. It sounds as if I were fearfully conceited. But I've always fancied you know how Maters look out for one?" Katherine, remembering her unworldly and improvi- dent mother, tempered her assent with reservation. "Well, there is a very sweet little girl next place to ours we were rather fond of each other as kids. And later I imagined, Oh, from nothing on the girl's part, you know " "That wasn't true," thought Katherine with inner conviction. "It was Mater rather put the idea in my head, just because she wished it, I fancy, and so, as there was noth- ing at all in it, I kept out of the way. I've only been down to the Hall once this spring when I took those snaps I brought you. Remember? Now next week I have to go down it's Mater's birthday and that was one of the reasons I couldn't let your telegram put me off. It had been impossible to get away to you before, and I had to see you before I went down and have some- thing definite to go on." He added, his voice a happy boy's, "And for my long leave, the end of next month, you'll come to the Hall, won't you darling? Mater will write you, of course." "But but you're not going to tell her at once ?" Katherine sat up very straight, a yellow elf-lock tumbling over a flushed cheek, her gray eyes round with ingenuous wonder. "Of course." 135 THE SPLENDID CHANCE "But it's so fearfully sudden! I can't imagine what my own mother will say !" "When she sees me?" The Captain chuckled. "Oh, I'm not worrying about that," she conceded with fond pride. "It's what she'll say before she sees you when you're just a vague, unknown English officer." "I know." He looked concerned. "It is pretty abrupt for her. I've thought about it. But your friends these Whartons? those very charming souls on the boat, they know your mother don't they? And they will write and reassure her that I'm not a fearful cut-throat, and you can have your friends investigate me, you know. And I assure you, darling," he declared, "that I can stand any amount of investigation !" Katherine smiled vaguely, tucking up her blowing hair, confused with sudden thoughts of her mother, and of the Whartons' surprise, after their warnings of the Captain's "caste." "It all sounds very far away," she murmured. "Far away! Dear girl, aren't you to marry me in six months ?" "Six m ?" She let her hair alone and stared at him, her lips parted. "I know chat dates are the bride's prerogatives," he smiled, "but you aren't averse to suggestions, dear? Of course, if you can be ready in three "Why, I can't be married for years and years !" Katherine gasped. He put a strong arm about her and drew her back to his shoulder again. 136 THE SPLENDID CHANCE Presently she admitted, "Well next summer, then. Next summer.*' "I'll come for you at any time. But it seems to me tliat spring " She murmured, "My poor mother." "She won't like your living in England?" "Of course not." And she added, her lips curving, "And I won't, either. Said the Captain confidently, "Wait till you've seen it." "It doesn't matter. If it were as horrid as India " "Would you, my darling?" With such interruptions the conversation did not pro- ceed rapidly. But by and by an ordered plan came out of the incoherence. Instead of his announcing it at once, as it was his frank young intention to do, and having her invited to the Hall during his leave the last of July and the first of August, they would wait until his leave, and then she would come to London with the Whartons, who, she remembered, were providentially scheduled to appear among the English cathedrals at that time. Then he could come and see her, and she would meet his mother in a less trying way than plunging down to the Hall for a visit, and then everything could be an- nounced, both to his side and to hers. The Whartons were to sail for America the last of August, and their personal word would allay her parents' anxieties. "Though, of course," she worriedly mentioned, "even their glowing account of you isn't going to make England any nearer to mother." "But you can go often to her, dear, and with your 137 THE SPLENDID CHANCE father's long vacations he's a professor, isn't he? he and your mother can come often to you." "You don't know a professor's salary," said the girl with a whimsical smile for the intrusion of rueful prac- ticalities into the idealism of the hour, "nor the cost of living in the great American Republic and supporting our millionaires and trusts ! However we'll manage." As for the immediate future and the young man kept a very commanding eye upon that it was finally agreed that she would return to Paris for a time "Where I can get over to see you," he declared, with a shameless disregard for the claims of art and then, abridging that year of work, she would return just be- fore Christmas to America, so as to have at least six months at home before he came for her in June. It seemed very unreal and dreamlike, as they planned it there on the hilltop, and yet he had such a way of making dreams come true ! How dream-like he had seemed to her memory, those first days in Paris, and yet how real and how vivid he was now more near and dear than anything in the world. Her eyes kept turning to him with that touching look of soft and happy wonder. She hardly knew what had been happening to her. But what had happened was so clearly written in her face that MacNare had not needed to look twice. CHAPTER XIV IT was a day of enchantment. At the farm Katherine presented the Englishman to Marie Bonnet's astonishment Marie was al- ready in a sentimental excitement over the appearance of MacNare and his strange haste to find the mademoi- selle and Jeffrey Edgerton, believing it more seemly to establish his status, had made the first announcement of his betrothal in that ancient farmhouse to these un- known French folk. There was something idyllic in the rustic quality of the scene that touched the fancies of the young lovers. The long, dark, low-ceiled room, the sunshine sparkling through the tiny casements upon the table spread with Marie's whitest linen and the brightest of the old pot- tery, the open door through which inquiring hens wan- dered, the shining, rosy faces of the little children, were all delighting to the girl's pictorial sensitiveness. They dined upon the ducklings that were fit to pop into the mouth of an archangel as the merry Jean declared, and afterwards Jean, his French blood stirred by the romance of these newcomers to his hos- pitable roof, descended to his tiny cellar and returned 10 139 THE SPLENDID CHANCE with a cobwebby bottle of the vintage of the last seigneur wherein to drink the health of mademoiselle and le capitaine, if they would graciously permit. And Katherine, touching glasses half shyly, felt the first stir of womanly possessive pride as she saw how Jeffrey's unconscious charm, his boyishness over his di- rect, manly authority, had captivated already those simple but shrewd folk. Afterward the young people had another walk and talk, in the heart of the dreamy afternoon, and later they climbed their hill again, while the long twilight died into the first faint starlight, and the magic of evening turned the world to fairyland. Life, in that hour, seemed to hold its cup brimming at her lips. Older than the seigneur's vintage, she tasted of the very wine of miracle. Silvery and remote the fields lay at their feet, with the soft white gauze mists stealing over them. The woods looked far and shadowy ; the distant river revealed itself in pale and fugitive gleams. . . . How high above the world she seemed, with Jeffrey at her side. . . . And his eyes upon her, those dear, blue eyes with their look of love and power, their strong, "Trust me," to her every sense. She knew that she would answer that look as long as her heart had strength to beat. And that night, as she lay in Marie Bonnet's rose- mary-scented linen sheets, with the starlight stealing in the casement, and the scent of the hay mingling with the breath of the night, she lived that hour again, and her heart was very humble in its joy. . . . Through all 140 THE SPLENDID CHANCE the chances of the world love had come to her, a splen- did love, a love to which one could give one's life in honoring. And she was grateful that she had been true to herself, to those deep instinctive cravings that had spoken of high and stirring things so that she had kept her heart free and her life unfettered to answer the clear call when it came. Also it seemed very wonderful to her that Jeffrey Edgerton should love her as he did. She was not too young to feel the rarity of that pure, romantic impulse in him that had brought him to her, undelayed by con- siderations of a more worldly choice, but it was not that he had yielded to his love as that she should have awakened it that made her heart beat fast and her cheeks flush in the darkness of that happy night. Her feel- ings were beyond anything that she had known, any- thing that she had divined that she could know. All things that were in her, heart and soul and mind and body, were united like a single flame in that altar fire of" her devotion. CHAPTER XV KATHERINE returned from Les Bulssons upon Wednesday, not waiting to stay her week, feel- ing each day of importance now in those classes where her time was to be so abridged. And knowing that Marie would inevitably write to her mother-in-law of the English officer who had appeared upon that Sabbath, making his revelations, she showed Madame Bonnet his picture, one day in her room, with a brief statement. "Ma foi!" said madame amazedly, and then promptly expressed many graceful wishes for the mademoiselle's happiness. "Eh, Mary, Mother of God, what have I done!" ran her inner ejaculations. And, a suitable time having been devoted to the mademoiselle's happy prospects, she recurred casually to the ones at Les Buissons, and inquired if Monsieur MacNare had ap- peared at the farm. She had urged him to take the lit- tle one there for her health. And Katherine answered simply that he had come but did not stay ; she thought he was making some sort of a tour. "A tour of Purgatory," said madame's inner self with conviction. And she wondered, with a flame of re- 142 THE SPLENDID CHANCE sentment against self-absorbed youth, wrapped in the chrysalis of its own affairs, what Heaven had given the girl such large clear gray eyes for, if it was not to see through a grindstone. . . . And why had the girl, her heart gone to an absent Englishman, been so lavish of herself with the American? Did she think he was of marble like his own statues ? Did she think that lonely men were made to contemplate pink cheeks and bright eyes and hear merry laughter every day of the calendar and not reach a hand for them? Apparently that was Katherine's frame of mind. She did have an uncomfortable qualm or so about Mac- Nare's abrupt withdrawal from the farm, believing that if he had found her unoccupied and ready to share her time with him, he would have stayed companionably on. But she did not dream that he would have wanted of her more than friendliness. She merely thought that the contrast between her evident happiness and his own marred life was painful for him. For two weeks MacNare and Peggy were away. And then one night they were back, Peggy browner and healthier than of yore, with dusty clothes and shabby boots and an epic of narrative, concerned with intimate detail of four-legged beasties for she had a farmer's heart, and MacNare leaner, grimmer, more taciturn than ever. Between madame and himself not one word was ever exchanged concerning that ill-omened expedition of his. But Katherine, believing that madame would communi- cate the fact of her engagement, and aware, too, that he could not have been unperceptive of her evident relation 143 to Edgerton, though their enlightening remarks to the Bonnets had been made after his departure, felt that she really ought to make some reference to it so he would not feel that her friendship was not being frank with him. Indeed, so overflowing was her heart with it, that it was hard not to tell all her world desperately hard not to write it in those letters of hers home. But there she knew it would cause pain and appre- hension. "John," her mother would say tragically, "we've let that goose of a girl go off painting and she's engaged herself to an unknown Englishman. What shall we do?" And she could hear her father's unrevealing reply, "Do? She seems to have done enough herself. Just what does she say?" And then they would go over and over it, worrying, unsettled, confronting the grief of losing her, and the anxieties of her choice. No need of perturbing them now. In a month, when they would soon see the Whartons when she had grown more used to this new state of things. It was one thing to reveal the happiness of her engagement and another to go into all the plans that must ensue. Nor could she tell her mother very well until Jeffrey had told his, and that announcement she had absolutely prohibited until they should meet in London. The opportunity of speaking of it to the Surly Man did not occur immediately. He was working like a demon upon that fountain of his, and when they met the conversation did not flow into channels of intimate revelation. The most of his remarks were ireful com- 144 THE SPLENDID CHANCE ments upon models. Katherine reminded herself that her small concerns were a very negligible factor in his interests, and that however she might have occasionally served to fill some of the gaps in his solitary life for him, he probably did not remember her existence when the flame of his genius was kindled in him. In which she was utterly deceived. For into the woman of his Fountain of Life MacNare was pour- ing the buoyancy and the young gladness of the girl he secretly loved and his passion touched the face in marble with the light which was denied to shine upon him. And many a night, his head bent in his hands, he sat motionless by the open window, while from above floated down the soft strains of the Croatian song that Kath- erine loved so much. " 'Live live live, the sun and stars shall light- you ' " But it was the second verse that she sang oftenest now. ' 'Love, love, love, some magic glance befall you, Love, love, love, some magic whisper call you, Love, love ,love, some magic touch enthrall you.' " And then in a little shower of happy notes the gay little love song from "Carmen" would come down to him, or the plaintiveness of old ballads. But it was always of love that she sang. And he who had called, "Pas de chanteuses" after his 145 THE SPLENDID CHANCE first glimpse of her back, sat and listened, his windows wide to catch every faint and delicate note. She was not working much those days. Her dream possessed her. And as her dream concerned first of all that visit to London, happily arranged with the Whar- tons, and that visit meant luncheons and teas and din- ners and drives and pretty frocks, her errant feet led her past windows of alluring hats and witching gowns, and her wistful eyes were full of chiffons and modes and linens and practical calculations. Since she was not to stay the year out she could draw more deeply upon the sum put aside for that year, a sum derived from part of a small legacy and from a prize competition for a magazine cover the prize against which Dick Conrad's resentment had burned bit- terly. And since when one is young and in love and Paris frocks are a Voccasion it would be a sin not to be beautiful for one's beloved, the girl's thoughts and fingers were more often occupied with ninon and lace than with her paints and brushes. But she did adhere determinedly to the morning classes, which met now in a garden of the substitute teacher's home. The sunshiny gladness of her mood fell brightly upon Etienne de Trezac. Even in those short months her French had grown supple and quick, and was pliant enough now for her jesting humor to meet his own turns of raillery. This developed a habit of chaffing intimacy which she greatly enjoyed, for one cannot live entirely upon dreams and the society of the two stren- uous and elderly American art teachers, who like her- self were staying on in Paris during the vacation time. 146 THE SPLENDID CHANCE One night she and Etienne dined, "Dutch treat" as she always insisted, except upon some special occasion, at one of the little restaurants upon the left bank, and then were tempted into a rambling walk by the loveli- ness of the summer night, which seemed to hang upon them like a sweet-breathing, impalpable presence. They were both silent, Katherine's thought so given to Jeffrey that it almost seemed as if he were walking at her side. The beauty of the night without him made her heart ache, but when she thought that in a little time now, the very end of this same month, he would be with her again, why then her pulses seemed to sing in their light beating. At the door of the studio building Etienne, his man- ner oddly irresolute, asked if he might come up. "For the space of one last cigarette," he said lightly. "I have the blue-moon hunger to-night you would not cast me off to it?" "For just a little then," said Katherine uncertainly. It was not really too late for a call, but she wanted to be alone and write to Jeffrey while the words that the night had brought her were still brimming in her heart. But her good-humor was. too pliant. In the studio she smilingly offered Etienne the matches for that cigarette and then took off her white hat, lift- ing the flattened hair with ruffling fingers, while the young man stood watching her, his dark eyes intent, then she drifted aimlessly to her table and sat down to sorting its decidedly overtaxed capacities. A basket, brimming with a tangle of lace, brought a faint smile to her lips as she tidied it. 147 THE SPLENDID CHANCE "How you are beautiful to-night !" said De Trezac suddenly, with honest sincerity. "You are always pretty but this summer you have bloomed like a flower. Perhaps it is the Paris air," he added, recap- turing his old note of raillery. "Then it is a pity that I am to leave,'* she smiled, and wondered what Jeffrey thought about this matter. Never, she recalled, had he paid her one of those com- pliments supposed to issue from a lover's lips. Even the Surly Man had once dryly granted her "a degree of pulchritude." Well perhaps Jeffrey didn't like her looks. Perhaps he preferred brunettes. Perhaps it was her soul he loved, or her intellectual sobriety. She felt in her heart the soft laughter of a secure and happy love. "To leave Paris ?" De Trezac said, with sharpness. "Not forever ! But I think I shall take a vacation and see London." "A vacation in England an anomaly! There one does not relax. Oh, you should not do that," he said quickly. He added, rising suddenly and moving restlessly around the room, "But you are right here it is too hot. Impossible to work! The city air the pave- ments the dust. ... I will tell you. . . . You have never been to Normandy?" "I have never been anywhere in Europe but here." "You should see Normandy. And what better time? ... I will tell you. ... I know a place no crowds, no tourists, but the sea and the great rocks Ah, yes you should go there for your vacation, yes ?" 148 THE SPLENDID CHANCE She said absently, faintly surprised by his odd en- thusiasm but too preoccupied with her own thoughts for attention, "Oh, I know Normandy is lovely, but " "Lovely? It is a heaven upon earth when one brings the essence of heaven with one ! . . . Ah, you will come with me? Yes? I will manage. I will take every care " She whirled about in her chair, just as he stooped to bend over her. His face, close to her own, was alight with his strange excitement ; his dark eyes were glowing. She thought amazedly, "Why why, he is perfectly mad! . . . He's insulting me !" It seemed to be absolutely preposterous. She could have smiled at such a word in connection with herself. Aloud her voice was saying coldly, "What in the world are you talking about?" Her cool crispness was arresting, even to an ardor abandoning its leash. An instant wariness leaped in his eager eyes ; he looked at her with uncertain calculation beneath his smile. "You do not understand? . . . But it is very simple." Then a surge of feeling drove him toward her again. "Ah, you make me quite mad for you ! Be a little kind, Katherine, and do not play any longer with me. . . . Just a little holiday ... in Normandy " His hurried words stopped. She had drawn frigidly back from his eager approach and taken a few steps from him into the room, where she paused and looked at him with calm-eyed assurance. She was feeling a cold disgust, a bitter impatience at his stupidity. 149 THE SPLENDID CHANCE "I wonder if you have any idea how absurd you are, Etienne?" she said very clearly. "Absurd? But why?" His expression concentrated on her own. "To say such things to me." She was still very quiet and clear-voiced. Intuitively, with the rush of enlight- enment, she understood that he would laugh at heroics of moral indignation. Her scornful amusement was her only weapon. "It is as droll as if a tourist to whom one had been pleasant urged your sister to fly for a vacation with him! I had not thought you so dull. Must you see the background of society, the chap- eronage of mother and father, to appreciate one's qual- ity and one's position in the world?" An ironic smile edged his handsome lips. "That is a little too strong," he returned, endeavoring to reflect her calm, but with the betraying color burning hotly in his cheeks. "What 'position in the world' am I to assume for one who makes Olga Goulebeff her intimate?" "Olga! What is wrong with Olga? She is a com- rade, a fellow-student "And the very good friend of Louis Arnaud ! When she told you of her vacation in the Alps, the winter sports, the games, did you not know who took her there, who ?" He laughed disagreeably at the blank stare she gave him. "I don't believe it," she flung back. "I don't be- lieve " "As you will." He shrugged airily, finding himself growing master of the situation. "But as for me, I 150 THE SPLENDID CHANCE know. Louis is not alone in his conquest J To every- one the right of solace in neglect !" She thought his laugh was the most hateful thing that she had heard in her life. "And you can boast that is your code!" she said furiously, feeling herself in defensive league with her sex against his dominant one. "Ah, poor Olga!" "Poor Olga! And you never knew you never sus- pected?" He stared hard at the unbelievable innocence of her gray eyes. Then softly he whistled and snapped his fingers. "Tiens! . . . What was I to think? . . . You and Olga, together. . . . And you played with me " He whirled about on her suddenly, and his eyes grew hot and angry again. "Can you pretend that you have not seen not permitted one to believe? What was it that you were thinking, in the name of Heaven? Oh, you knew, you were content to have me follow you, to smile at me, to accept, to kindle and you thought to hold me at a distance forever ! That is the American way, then ? You would practice on me, amuse yourself, be cool while I I Name of a Name, but you Americans are either the greatest fools on earth or the greatest cheats ! . . . You would play the game but you do not risk the counters." "You were I thought you were my friend !" She gave back, and flinched at his laugh. "And did you think that that was all I would desire to be I whom you permitted to see you alone, to dine with you, to smile into your eyes ... to talk to you of myself, of my most sacred dreams but you under- 151 THE SPLENDID CHANCE stood what was growing within me. It is impossible to be so blind. My words, my actions "I thought you were gallant that your real liking made a pretense, perhaps, and play of compliments you did not feel " She faltered, and he made a sound of mingled disgust and unbelief. "Pretense ! . . . Compliment ! For a pretense do I waste my time, do I put myself at the service of a girl who " Very suddenly the color came back into her pale cheeks, and very suddenly and sharply she flung back her head, with that oddly boyish gesture of defiance in- stinctive to her moments of emotion. "I have been used to American men," she uttered. "Are they blocks of wood?" he interposed, with im- pertinence. "They are men of honor, and their friendship for a girl is very real. And if they grow to be more than friends, they do not talk nonsense about vacations, like the villains in the theater. They are honorable men," she insisted broadly, like Anthony of his Romans. "In their own class of life," said Etienne de Trezac, very amiably. "But did you imagine that I was seek- ing my future countess ?" In a society where chivalric custom had sheered man- kind of its pointed clarity of speech to the other sex, however unchivalricly its masculine behaviors may veer beneath the veil, Katherine had not known such taunts could be endured. And the bland presentation of his 152 THE SPLENDID CHANCE assurance of her social inequality was gall and worm- wood to her proudly democratic soul. She was silent, and her silence was not unreceptive of new impressions and adjustments. . . . Even in her stinging mortification she was not unconscious of various truths in his position. She uttered chokingly, "It is impossible for us to dis- cuss " and then her pride came stoutly to her aid. In a voice that sounded creditably like her own, "For we could never understand each other," she continued. "However impossible I might be to your society as a future countess, you would be just as impossible to mine, and I should be making myself absurd, and cheap, if I were to consider marrying a foreign count . . . you do not know how the Americans laugh at the mil- lionaires' daughters who bought your titles ! But that is the very reason," she went on quickly, "just because our lives were so different, that I thought it was inter- esting to be friends, and thought that our friendship Was perfectly safe, because we could neither of us be more to each other than friends." Her French began to stumble and hesitate. She was conscious of a reaction of horrible weariness that threat- ened to leave her weakly stranded, without having made a harbor. Determinedly she rallied her forces and her language. "It did not occur to me that you could think any- thing else." He looked at her out of the corners of his eyes, then gazed down into the cigarette case which he had drawn out, and made a careful selection. 153 THE SPLENDID CHANCE "The misunderstanding seems to have been unani- mous," he remarked softly. Applying a match he added, "Observe, mademoiselle, the villain in the theater always smokes a cigarette." "And makes a low bow at the door," she supplemented with a wan smile. . . . Most unaccountably and uncon- trollably her knees were trembling under her and she felt a supreme desire to sink down into the nearest chair. And then she saw that the hand which was resting upon the back of the chair by her was distinctly quivering and she tried desperately to control it, proudly afraid he would read her excitement for weakness. "I accept the suggestion," murmured De Trezac, and moved to the door with his lightest grace of carriage. It occurred to her that the honors were even. If he had discredited himself in her eyes, he had certainly retali- ated with a few home truths implanted unforgettably in her pride. "Adieu to our understanding," he smiled, made his low bow with a flourish and was gone. It was when she stood before Jeffrey Edgerton's photograph that the full tide of shame rose over her. That such a thing could happen to his betrothed ! . . . She felt dishonored, cheapened. . . . She could feel in the leap of his anger against De Trezac an edge of wounded amazement for herself. . . . Never would he fully understand. . . . Never would he need to under- stand. She knew that the episode was buried in her conscious- ness with such a millstone of shame tied to it that no tidal storm could bring it to the surface. 154- CHAPTER XVI ONE factor of the situation remained for her to deal with Olga. To be sure she had not seen much of Olga lately, but their manner to each other had long been of a casual intimacy. And now . . . Olga was not at classes the next two days but upon Sunday morning she came early to Katherine's studio, with rolls and butter and strawberries under her arm, to breakfast in the room. "But I am to have breakfast in the cremerie with Robert MacNare and his little girl," said Katherine. It was an engagement made that instant, but she was familiar with Surly Man's hours and habits. "Then I will eat while you dress, lazy one," said Olga, and began to brew her own coffee. As she dressed Katherine stole a troubled glance or two at the other girl. It was a problem beyond her powers. She was conscious of a sudden repugnance for the sight of Olga's little laughing mouth, and her secretive eyes, yet the repugnance was touched by a queer pity. Olga turned briskly and found Katherine's eyes upon her. 11 155 "How you stare! Is it my earrings? Do you not like them?" Her attention drawn to them Katherine found her- self far from liking them. The huge pearls that for- merly would have easily seemed to her a part of Olga's foreignness became significant of falsity, commonplace and cheap. She shook her head shortly. "You are too young for them." A moment later she added, "Have you heard from Louis Arnaud?" Olga continued to eye the boiling coffee, then she looked up with deliberate fixity of expression. "Now why do you ask?" "Olga, why weren't you frank with me?" blurted Katherine. The other girl's face did not change. It seemed to solidify its expression of blank interrogation, to grow rigid and fixed like a mask. Her little eyes were very still. "What do you mean?" "About Louisi. About what you were to each other. If if that is true. . . ." Something flickered behind those set eyes and then was gone. "So someone has been talking of me," said Olga, in intense disdain. "You listen to scandal yes?" Katherine felt wretchedly that she had made a mis- erable botch of things in the beginning. Indeed she did not know what she had expected to accomplish. But the old relation had become impossible for her, and she had made a blind rush toward the truth. "Who was it?" said Olga fiercely. 156 THE SPLENDID CHANCE Katherine was silent. "And you believe what is said by someone you dare not name?" "I don't know what I believe." "Was itEtienne?" "Does it matter who said it? If only it isn't true " "Etienne I suppose that it would be he !" Katherine saw Olga's breast heave stormily, yet her features were unchanged in their stony wariness. "Yes, it was he," said Katherine with desperation. "And if it isn't true, Olga, outface him and deny it!" Olga sat watching her a moment, then she gave a bit- ter laugh. "And if I do would you believe me?" "Yes," said Katherine heavily, and disbelieved herself. "And if it were true you desire to see no more of me ?" "If if I can help you, Olga, you know I will. I " "Help !" Olga's sneer was something that Katherine remembered for many a day with a sense of her own inadequacy. "What do you call help?" "If you need money," Katherine faltered, "you could come here to me for a time " "Shelter for the Magdalene." Decidedly there was a terrible spirit loose in Olga Goulebeff that morning. In another mood she might have met Katherine with denial, with mockery, with reassurance. Now she was possessed by a fury of insolent and indifferent contempt. "Grand merely but I need neither a bed nor a sermon ! 157 THE SPLENDID CHANCE And I have no explanation to make to you! Whatever you think of me and Louis . . . it is not my concern. I will make no answer to such impertinence. Tell Etienne de Trezac that from me. And as for yourself and Eti- enne " "I have been very foolish to go about so much with him," said Katherine swiftly. "And perhaps you have been only foolish, Olga. . . . Do stop then, and turn your back on them. You have talent. You can make a name for yourself. And some day you will meet a man worth while " "My talent !" The little Russian snapped her fingers. "You have seen for yourself what that is ! A straw ! I might make a drawing mistress in a provincial school if I had the references. And my life what is it? My father's people cast me off. He was above my mother. And my mother's people country dullards from whom she ran away to come to Paris ! . . . What friends have I? ... But I am a fool to talk. . . . Do not think I admit anything. ... I despise your lies. But you can clear your own skirts." She pushed the food before her sharply away and turned from the table. Katherine, buttoning her blue linen frock with shak- ing fingers, felt a terrible pity. "Do not go just because I must hurry away," she stammered. "Sit down and eat your breakfast." Olga stared at her a moment. "Eh, very well," she said at last coolly, and sat down again at the table. But her eyes returned stealthily to Katherine. At the door Katherine paused. She wanted to add 158 THE SPLENDID CHANCE something definite to the futile inadequacy of the inter- view, to say something friendly and kind and bracing. Her feeling of indignation against the girl was gone, lost in a new comprehension and sorrow. She was too innocent of realities to feel the full sordidness of the revelation. But she could think of nothing to say. Olga's manner made her feel herself an intrusive fool. "Good-by," she said at last, in a strained voice, with lowered eyes, as if hers were the disgrace, and "Good-by," returned Olga with hard brilliance, reap- plying herself to the rolls. But when the door had closed Olga leaned back from her pretense of eating, and sat very still, one hand on her throbbing throat. In the cremerie, at the table where Katherine joined MacNare and Peggy, the girl's anxieties could not be repressed. It seemed to her notions of American responsibility that she ought to "do" something, something helpful and decisive, but she felt utterly at sea. "How can one help?" she begged of MacNare, with incoherent suddenness breaking one of their companion- able silences. "There's a girl, a girl at the school a friend of mine, too. And I find she's been she isn't I mean she's rather gay very gay and rash and wild and and wicked. And yet I think she was in love with him and hoped. . . . Anyway she's all alone, and I'm afraid that she's going on drifting and drifting. She hasn't enough ambition for anchor, and there isn't one to whom she matters. And I I've said all the wrong a 59 THE SPLENDID CHANCE things to her, and and I don't know what the right things are. If I could only do something " "Does she want you to help ?" said MacNare briskly, buttering his roll. "No no. It isn't that. But what is going to be- come of her?" "Several things," said the young man coolly, handing Peggy the roll and taking another for himself. Some- thing in his tone made Katherine remember with a start that another such girl had found being his wife one of the things that she could compass. "And all of them beyond your power of interference," he went on. "But I seem like like a wretch to cast her off " MacNare looked shrewdly at the girl's flushed cheeks and troubled eyes, as she sat staring into the ugliness of this tragedy. "Does she want to cling to you to draw herself out of the mud," he asked, "or to lend herself countenance in her indulgence? That's one question. And another can you undertake the duties of permanent prop? . . . Nonsense. Everyone has to stand on his own feet. It's grim gospel, but it's the only one that will save the world. The only pilgrim worth salvage is the kind that climbs his hill himself not gets lugged there on some poor John Christian's back. That isn't saying that we shouldn't make every allowance in our judgments," he added with unexpected gentleness. "But but can't we help?" "Help? Sometimes. Sometimes not. 'Character is destiny,' you know, and you can't create character. You can't even legislate it," he added, sardonically, 160 THE SPLENDID CHANCE "though the American legislatures seem trying to do that for the other fellow." Conscious of Peggy's eyes fixed anxiously upon him, he raised his coffee to his lips, and the child, with a relieved sigh, promptly applied her thirsty little lips to her milk. Katherine sat silent. "Help? How do you think you can help?" he shot at her with sudden irritability. But that was just what nonplussed her. "Perhaps if she had plenty of good companionship " "Meaning yours?" With a ghost of a smile she nodded. "Hasn't she had it all summer? And can you hon- estly share your life with her now, your friends? And don't flatter yourself that anything less than sharing counts. Condescension isn't help. It's salt on the raw. . . . Nonsense. Your business isn't to go about frat- ernizing with wavering virtue. Your business is to live your own life beautifully, which will be helpfully, and to paint strong, true, beautiful pictures that will take the seal from people's eyes and hearts " He stopped, balking at the first hint of eloquence. He added very slowly and gruffly, his eyes turning to that signet ring on her finger which Jeffrey had placed there until the London visit, "Besides there's more to consider. . . . Hasn't that English captain friend of yours something to say about this?" It was the first mention of Edgerton between them since the encounter at Les Buissons. Katherine felt the self-conscious color rise in her face. She had 161 THE SPLENDID CHANCE wanted this opportunity, but now she met it constrain- edly. "Yes, I suppose he has." "Well, he'd tell you to wait a few years for your missionarying. . . . You'll find plenty of chance to be quite broadminded enough to suit him in years to come.'* "He's not narrow-minded," flashed Katherine. "But he's not fool enough, either, I hope, to want you to make yourself a public target for the sake of a sense- less girl." The Surly Man bit quite savagely into the crust of his roll. "Remember that in Paris you will find a practically unlimited field for such talents !" "You make me feel a great goose," said Katherine, with a rueful laugh. "That's good. A woman who feels herself a fool isn't so likely to be making one of herself that moment. . . . Don't marmalade your napkin, Peg, it isn't be- coming. . . . How soon does your Academic reopen?" "Not till September." "And you've given yourself one year for your study here?" "I I don't think I shall stay that year out." Some- how it took courage to say that. And she did not meet his eyes. Perhaps her subconscious self knew a little more than that surface girl admitted. "I think I'll go home for Christmas." "Homesick?" "N-not exactly." "Funds out?" "No. They're all right But but if I'm to leave my mother rather soon for good Still she did not look up. And the pause between 162 THE SPLENDID CHANCE them seemed freighted with some heavy significance. She could not have told why she felt so reluctant about this telling him, now that it came to the point. He made a gruff sound of comprehension. Pres- ently he said, "Before Christmas?" Peggy raised her head quickly. "/ had a Christ- mas," she said eagerly. "I did an' I had a doll and; another doll, and a bed for a " "And what becomes of the career?" "Oh that? That goes on, forever and ever as long as I do," said Katherine with sudden relieved gayety. "There will be lots of chance to study afterwards " Under his dark brow his gaze rested on her a long moment in silence, then he said sharply, "See that there is ! For if it is the real thing you can never bury it alive it will be like a living child struggling for birth. Mind you, I don't say that you are a genius but you have a spark. . . . And what does he say to it, your Englishman?" "He never said anything to it for he hadn't looked at it, not till last week," returned Katherine merrily. "And then I sent him a sketch I made after he left Les Buissons, and he thinks it's very, very wonderful and I must exhibit it in the Academy when I come to Lon- don." "Ha!" MacNare gave his bark of a laugh. "Paint a pair of Airdales or a little boy in a lace collar and send it in." Then the sardonic hardness of his eyes softened as they rested on the girl's look of touching happiness. "Never mind just so you do your dogs well," he 163 THE SPLENDID CHANCE conceded, "with not too noble eyes. . . . And I'm very glad you are so happy. It's probably the best thing in the world for you. He he looked a very fine sort." "Oh, he is a fine sort," she instantly agreed, with the radiance on her eyes and lips. "The very finest sort !" MacNare, looking at her with that dark-browed gaze, so unrevealing of the stark, human hunger behind it, felt again that sore, beaten feeling which had crushed him as he stood at the foot of the hill and saw her turn her face to that other man. He wondered dumbly what he had done that he should be so outcast from the happiness that fell to other men as their daily lot. Then swiftly the hard lines of his face relaxed. He gave the girl one of his rare smiles. "And may you always continue to think so," he said in a voice so charged with friendly warmth that Kath- erine wondered, as she left the cremerie with him, fol- lowed by the totally misapprehending eyes of the bride- of-a-year who kept the desk, why she should ever have thought him indifferent or oblivious. Certainly, after that, he found time even in the fervor of his work, for some companionable hours, for he told himself, with grim bitterness, that at least he could in- dulge himself to that extent. There was no need to hide and bury his head like an ostrich. Nature, the arch enemy, had already found him out. It was late in the day for him to be saving himself pain. By Christmas she would be gone. He would never see her again. The future was utterly a blank. Mean- while, there was at least for him the sound of her voice, and the light of her unsuspecting eyes. 164 BOOK II CHAPTER XVII SUNSHINE again after the weeks of rain, and with the sun there came a brightening of spirits and a laughing away of the fears which had been gathering in those gray, wet days of flying rumor and threatening headlines. At the Club where Katherine King had lunched with some American acquaintances the reaction of relief was especially vivid. Someone in a pension had been told by someone in another pension who had been told by a sub-editor of a paper all this in privacy and confi- dence, to be sure that an absolute arrangement had been made by the conferring Powers, and there was to be no war at all except, of course, in the un- happy Balkans where war appeared the status quo and that everybody could go on with their trips and get their checks cashed and their itineraries arranged. For this small tableful the cloud was quite dispelled. And now they were sure that it had never been a real cloud, just a pother of dust thrown up by the scare- heads and the jingoists and the war party. War an Eastern-European war was too absurd to be contem- 165 THE SPLENDID CHANCE plated ; it was an anachronism, an obsolete bogy. That sort of thing had been settled by the Peace Conferences. Moreover the deadliness of modern inventions had made warfare too destructive to be possible. Of all the luncheon party Katherine's relief was probably the keenest, for while she had never believed in this French war at all, still the red tape surrounding it had interfered prodigiously with her plans. For Jeffrey Edgerton's leave had been postponed till the middle of August and as that postponement didn't agree with the plans she had made with the Whartons she had been obliged to write them that she was delayed and beg them to wait for her. And then there had been the possibility of another postponement in the background. It seemed very long since the enchanted day at Les Buissons and even the dear daily letters did not stop the little ache of her hope deferred. But now everything was settled, just as she had known it would be, and they could plan again. The sunshine was too glorious to waste, after those dull, dark days, so when she left her friends she started on one of those rambling strolls through the older streets which never failed to delight her even after these five months of Paris, a stroll having for objective a tiny lace shop in one of the old quarters. It was Saturday, the first of August. She looked back on that date afterwards as separated, as by the sudden cleavage of a sword, from everything which had gone before in her life. She walked slowly, lingering in the Jardins where the children were again at play, and it was after four 166 THE SPLENDID CHANCE when she came to her tiny shop and it was dark in the narrow place. But even in the dimness it was impossible not to see that the young woman who came slowly forward to wait upon her had been crying. Her face was swollen and her breath came brokenly as she went about the measur- ing of the lace and the tying of the little parcel. Only the necessary words were uttered. Katherine would have liked to find the right expression of interest for the poor thing's evident trouble but the shyness of sympathy and the fear of intrusion took her quickly away. And then out on the sidewalk again, in the glow of the August sun, she came upon a couple clasped in each other's arms, the woman wildly sobbing. "Oh, non non non !" the poor thing was gasping, her thin hands clutching the man's shoulders, and the man, a young ouvrier, in his blue cotton blouse and greasy trousers, was patting her heaving shoulders with dumb devotion. Katherine slipped past them with bent head, wonder- ing vaguely if some tragedy of the quarter had befallen, and then in the restaurant just ahead, where she had contemplated a cup of tea on one of the little tables shining in the sun, she saw the wife of the proprietor with her head on arms outcast across one of the table tops, and an unnoticed baby pulling at her skirts. Just beyond, a knot of people were standing, talking excitedly, hands gesticulating, eyes gleaming, the words crackling like whips. Beside an old, one-armed man Katherine stopped. 167 THE SPLENDID CHANCE "What is it, please? What is it?" "C'est arrivee . . . c'est arrivee," said the old man. "What has come?" "C'est arrivee. . . . C'est la guerre." La guerre the word beat meaninglessly in her ears as she hurried away, turning instinctively toward the Ave- nue de 1'Opera. War France was in war, then? The trouble which had seemed to be brewing in such far-off cauldrons, that cry of Slavic peril what had that to do with France? Those rumors, then, those flying undertones of anx- iety, the whisperings of the men about the cafes, the gatherings of the women in the streets, these had nob been meaningless ebullitions of anxiety, of far-fetched apprehension born of the terrible memories of 1870. These people had known Her thoughts flew to Jeffrey. Could this actually involve England? But it could delay his leave and play havoc with their cherished plans. She told herself that was all, but the queer breathless excitement in her was tightening its tension. She raced along the streets faster and faster. Now a throng blocked the way, a jostling crowd of men of all sorts and conditions, silk-hatted men, with side whiskers suggesting the aisle managers in the shops, men with tall coachmen's whips, blue-bloused, grimy men, a chauffeur in khaki, and a footman in a gleaming livery of silver and blue and buff, a wonderful creature that one supposed had no reality except a waxen pose upon the boxes of carriages with coroneted doors. Yet 168 THE SPLENDID CHANCE here he was in the rear of that crowd, pushing, talking, shoving, his sphinx-like gaze alive and vibrant. Ivatherine plucked at the sleeve of the nearest man; when he remained oblivious she shook it vehemently. "What is it? What is it?" He looked down on her with glassy eyes. It was the mobilization order, she was told, and pressing closer into the throng, she caught the glaring print of the huge posters. ARMEE de TERRE et ARMEE de MER ORDRE DE MOBILIZATION GENERALE Very quietly and very soberly she made her way out of that crowd through the streets. Over and over again she tried to tell herself just what it was that was hap- pening but her mind refused to accept the monstrous thing. A million men in arms. A million men uprooted. And many times a million hearts wrung with parting and suspense. . . . The streets were scene after scene of parting. Paris was oblivious of everything but the beating of her own heart. Everywhere the girl saw the sudden, unforget- table glimpses of agony, an old mother clinging to her sons, a man taking the ribbon from the neck of his little child to stuff within his shirt, a husband comforting a wife, a girl stifling her sobs as her sweetheart left her. ... A million men going. . . . Everyone between the ages of twenty-one and forty-eight. . . . 169 THE SPLENDID CHANCE At the American Express Office and at Cook's the Americans were gathering excitably, but to Katherine's heart, weighted with sympathy for the great griefs of France, the anxieties of her compatriots as to boats and trains and money was not of great moment. What did it matter if they were delayed, or lost a passage or had no money for a time? They would somehow be fed and cared for; their hearts were not wrung with parting from sons and husbands ordered to meet the cannon of the enemy. Her American acquaintances of that day's luncheon party were in the throng, their buoyant assurance of noontime gone, their ire the keener against the reassur- ances of the sub-editor which had percolated so cheer- ingly from pension to pension. There, also, were the two American art teachers studying at the Academic, resolved on getting out of this dangerous place at the earliest opportunity. Through the various notes of the throng, some quer- ulous, some anxious, most of them patiently good- natured, she heard one boy's jubilant accents, "Why I wouldn't have missed this for anything ! This is an experience!" An experience ! Yes, it was that, even for him. But for the French? Outside Robert MacNare's door she found him talk- ing with a group of Frenchmen, artists she recognized as his occasional companions at a cafe, two already in uniform. In the dim hall, in her cage, Madame Bonnet sat unstirringly, her head sunk forward on her shoul- ders. 170 THE SPLENDID CHANCE Katherine felt a fresh pang, remembering the younger son Henri was still doing his military service. "This will mean Henri?" she said, with diffident sympathy. Madame Bonnet raised her head slowly, staring straight at nothing. "Les deux," she said expressionlessly. Of course it would mean them both ! How sluggishly her mind was working. Jean was not thirty. He would be going to-day, leaving Marie alone upon the farm with her little ones. It is only by individual instances that the mind com- prehends a general disaster. The greatness of it is too great. But when one knows that it is Henri and Jean and Marie who is left when it means the husband in the cremerie across the way whose little wife of a year is expecting her baby, when it means the only son of the old woman boarding overhead with them, and the tailor down the street whose five children are mother- less, why then, pang by pang, the meaning of pain comes home. A million men. . . . That evening Katherine strolled with MacNare up and down the Boul' Miche', an altered, sober BouP Miche', where the students, with linked arms sang "The Marseillaise," with young voices that shook in the be- ginning of their passionate realization of love of coun- try. And everywhere were the scenes of parting, and everywhere through the streets the incessant rolling of taxi-cabs and carts and automobiles and carriages and fiacres, laden with men and women and luggage of every 12 171 THE SPLENDID CHANCE description, hurrying to and from every station in the city, men arriving, provincials leaving, foreigners flee- ing, a turmoil of transit. Sometimes there were cheers and gay greetings for some crowd of dusty reservists marching by with haver- sacks over their shoulders and a long loaf of bread sticking from some jacket pocket; sometimes the irre- pressible humor of the people would be tickled to smile at some self-conscious boy parading with a pretty girl in his fresh regimentals, red-trousered, blue-coated, his knapsack and rifle and tin pans clattering as he walked, but the tears were too near the surface for laughter, and the uniform was too dear to their hearts for youth's naive airs to alter the symbol. And the boy's young pride in his glory was touchingly in contrast with the future for which he was destined. Old men and women cried blessings on him as he passed and little girls ran after to slip a small flag in his hands. Among the students many that Katherine knew were going, for only those of under twenty-one remained. "You will be shouting for us soon," one band of these youngsters called merrily to a group of older friends who were already in the colors. Among these later Katherine saw Etienne de Tresac, wearing his uniform with easy distinction, his handsome face alight with enthusiasm as he passed with one arm flung about a comrade's shoulders. He waved his hand gayly to her and she waved back, calling, "Good luck!" They were her first words to him since that wretched parting in the studio; indeed 172 THE SPLENDID CHANCE she had scarcely seen him since for he had ceased his desultory attendance upon the summer classes. And there was Olga, strolling with girls she did not know, talking eagerly and searching the faces she passed as if she were seeking someone. Katherine called to her but Olga returned only that same indifference and aloofness which had marked her manner since that Sunday morning. Katherine wondered if the girl were looking for Louis Arnaud, hoping that he would pass through Paris and the quarter on the way to whatever barracks claimed him, and she, too, half unconsciously, began to look for him but he was not to be seen. MacNare was very silent. To one question of hers he replied, rather contemptuously that he was not going to run away. He did not think that the Germans would reach Paris, although they must be magnificently ready or they would never have incurred the war. "But do you think that the Germans have always; intended ?" she began diffidently, feeling her deep ig- norance of the real Europe. He looked down on her somberly. "For years the guns have been invented, the powder made, the boy babies encouraged into the word ere this day should come ! Now that men and machines are at a maximum strength they judge the time has come to toss a match into the powder. Any match will do. In 1913 it might have been one thing; in 1914 the Archduke's murder will do as well as another. Raise the cry of Slavic peril and march on to France. Straight to the heart of her, get Paris by the throat, make her buy her breath with a strip of sea coast opposite England. . . . Then, 173 THE SPLENDID CHANCE peace, perhaps, for more machines and more men and more powder but not forty years of it, for eyes will be opened and then England. . . . And then Katherine could only stammer, "But but I thought the Germans were different were " "The Germans? When have the Germans ruled Ger- many? When have the Schuberts and the Schumanns and the Goethes and the Schillers and the Wagners and the Heines been a political influence? . . . The Germans, individually, are delightful collectively their very pe- culiar virtues make them the finest instrument in the world for Prussian militarism to wield docile, fervent, sentimental, brave. . . . Pour them out in masses, in- flame them with a prepared brand of patriotism, instill a calculated hatred, fling them at the enemy there you have your ideal fighting machine. . . . God help those boys," he added under his breath, his black-browed gaze on the marching ranks. "Then then what in the world is to happen ?" He said very slowly, "A struggle to the death." Her eyes clung to him in sudden appeal. "Will Eng- land be in it?" "Who knows?" Then as if he knew that she found his answer evasive he said grimly, "I hope so." "You are cruel," she said chokingly. "I am not thinking of individuals. The hour has struck for nations." The grhn foreboding of his words settled like a weight on her heart. With the crowd they followed to the Gare de 1'Est 174 THE SPLENDID CHANCE to see the men depart. Here the men were to take trains for Toul, Verdun, or for whatever barracks where they were to report the next day. And their destination after that? Who knew? A high iron fence stretched in front of the station, with three gates three gates guarded by soldiers. Three scenes of last farewell . . . and scenes more ter- rible in their poignancy, their ultimate realization, than those the day had held. Outside the fence was crushed a crowd of people, men, women, children, a crowd that from the hundreds leaped to thousands as more and more arrived. And every instant the streams of reservists came through them, some arriving in taxis, some in carts, some on foot, most of them singing, many cheering, but some deadly quiet, stoic, their arms about some woman. It made Katherine think of the guillotine. For just one last minute those women had their men, their sons, their sweethearts, their husbands, clutched in their arms, warm and safe against their breasts, and then through the iron gate into the black oblivion of the future. . . . And so many ... so many. . . . What would happen ? What would happen ? She heard the sounds of the women's sobs under all the strains of "The Marseillaise"; she could feel the breaking of their hearts under all the fervor of sacrifice that had leaped to meet the spiritual demand of their defense. "C'est pour la France," "C'est pour la patrie" these were the words she heard oftenest on the lips of boys to their mothers, of husbands to their wives, and the 175 THE SPLENDID CHANCE women, too, touched with this sacrificial flame, echoed it with lips that paled with their deeper understanding of what lay back of those words. Some of those women remembered 1870. Some had worn black since that year. . . . "C'est pour la France," Katherine heard one acqui- esce in a dry whisper. She had parted with her husband and three sons in that moment. Alone she turned and made her way out of the throng. And as she went she kept tapping upon her breast and speaking in that husky voice which was like the last dry whisper of a consumptive, "C'est fini c'est tout fini." The individual was finished. ... It was only nations now that counted. CHAPTER XVIII BY Sunday noon two facts had made their connec- tion for Katherine. There were no potatoes at her little res- taurant. People were provisioning for a siege. She had not thought till then very particularly of herself, not sharing the traveler's contagion for flight. Indeed she had declared herself a resident of Paris, so that, having secured her papers of identification, she would not have to continue to report each morning at nine as transients were to be required to do. She still intended to leave for London upon the tenth, if she did not hear to the contrary from Jeffrey Edgerton, and it seemed best to her now to wait where she could get word from him, and then accept his decision. Now the excitement of the times was gaining upon her. By Monday the auto busses were gone from the streets. People were swarming about the provision dealers, carrying or wheeling away sacks of flour and rice and macaroni, and Katherine went out and pain- fully lugged home a heavy supply to the Surly Man's amusement. 177 THE SPLENDID CHANCE "Are you going to bake for the army ?" he demanded, wresting the load from her arms. Change was scarce. The shops were iron-barred and shuttered ; the streets were empty of men and quiet of all traffic. In the gloom of a chill rain Paris looked grim and forbidding. Into the quiet streets the newsboys had rushed with their damp sheets, "Speciale de la Guerre !" now an- nouncing Germany's ultimatum to Belgium. Indigna- tion ran high. The excitement was tense but not hysterical. Later, another edition told of the bombard- ment of Luneville. In the larger department stores while some girls were busy putting away stock the others were making Red Cross supplies. The sight of these bandages, deftly rolled by those busy fingers, was the first glimpse to Katherine of what thing it was that Paris was prepar- ing for. Having sent her youth and strength to meet the enemy she sat waiting to receive the shattered re- turns. The next morning she found the door of MacNare's studio wide open and narrow cots being carried in. She saw that the great room was stripped and cleared, with the statues and marble crowded into one corner, and cot after cot was standing in a white, orderly row. Peggy was scurrying up and down the stairs with bundles in her arms. "A sick man's a-coming," she whispered excitedly to Katherine, her eyes big with the fascination of novelty. "We shall sleep on the top floor I've given this for a little nursing depot," said MacNare, and it was not 178 THE SPLENDID CHANCE from him, but from the nursing sister, a quiet, gray- haired woman of Le Croix Rouge, that Katherine learned that his private income was being given for its service. She felt her heart contract with the painful expect- ancy of those white beds. No letter had come from Jeffrey, and she doubted if her telegrams to him had reached him. She felt isolated and alone, and a feeling of fear was creeping higher and higher in her, like a stealthily rising tide. Everywhere the talk was of England. What would she do? Day had dawned with the Germans still in Belgium, having made no reply to Great Britain's midnight warning, de- manding respect for Belgium's neutrality, and all day there was that horrible sense of waiting, waiting. . . . Did the Germans mean to go on, to strike an innocent country, to flout their sacred pledges, the rights of na- tions? Was that way to France so clear to them that they judged they could hew through it and seize Paris before Great Britain's arm could reach them? Did they feel themselves strong enough to overwhelm at once those nations that withstood them? And if they did She read Sir Edward Grey's speech before the Eng- lish Parliament and she thrilled but her thrill died in a shudder. There was a horrible, muffled pounding in her heart as if it were blindly fleeing from some unnam- able apprehension. . . . She tried to tell herself that it was a hundred years since England had sent men to a European soil, and that only the gravest urgency would bring them now but still the Germans were in Belgium. Late in the afternoon a letter from Jeffrey, much de- 179 THE SPLENDID CHANCE layed, reached her already opened, thus giving mute evidence of the activities of the censor. It was very brief and grave ; he promised to let her know as soon as anything was certain for him. That night she went to the Boul' Miche' with Mac- Nare and Peggy, and strolled up and down among the little groups that were casting occasional glances up at the sky for stealthily gliding Taubes. Once a guarding aeroplane winged its way overhead, the hum of its engines sounding faintly, like a swarm of far-away bees. From out a brown study she said aloud, "If I left at once " MacNare was painfully clairvoyant to the girl's thoughts. His voice was full of rugged understanding. *'I don't believe you could see him," he said. "He is with his regiment and any moment " She echoed, "Any moment!" As he looked at her, her slender figure drooping slightly as she walked beside him, her youthful color pal- ing under premonitions of anxiety, he felt a resurgence of old anger against the idiocy of this scheme of things. What infinite waste! With no great confidence in the good intentions of life toward himself, he had uncon- sciously conceived of no destiny as capable of treachery to this girl's bright trust. And now, to see the begin- ning of fear in her eyes "But she is too young to know what it means," he told himself. "And she will have his heroism to adore. . . . He is one of life's lucky ones." He stopped and bought her one of the little English 180 flags offered for sale with those of France and Russia and Belgium and Servia. Everywhere upon the streets was the talk of Eng- land's sending troops to Belgium. Some rumors de- clared that they were already on the way. There were stories now of fighting near Liege, and the women and old men and boys told each other, with kindling faces and shining eyes, of Belgium's heroic reply to Germany. Four mornings later Madame Bonnet was at her door with a blue envelope, and ripping it open, Katherine stared blankly at the French words, Ayez de courage. Avec tout mon cceur, JEFFREY. All telegrams must now be sent in French, but the un- wonted phrases seemed utterly unrelated to her lover. It took a moment for her mind to realize the truth. "Have courage," she repeated under her breath, and then, "With all my heart." "From the Captain?" madame was eagerly demand- ing. "The English, mademoiselle, they are in France?" Katherine turned a soft, unseeing look to her. She spoke without emotion. "Yes, they are in France. The message came from Havre." Jeffrey was there with his men, moving somewhere to- ward the fighting. . . . It was incredible to her. If she could have seen him again, could have talked with him, have held him in her arms as those women had held their men, if they could have met and parted, the parting would have been believ- 181 THE SPLENDID CHANCE able, but this blank this silence this slip of blue paper with strange, hurried words She could have held it a dream but for that grinding pain in her side, that sick, drunken lurching of her heart. "God be thanked !" said madame. "The English they keep their word. Oh, God be thanked they are come." The sight of the girl's blanched face recalled her. "C'est la guerre," she repeated to her, laying a hand upon her shoulder in a comrade's gesture. "You are one with us, mademoiselle." And as she turned away> her flare of enthusiasm sunken to the stolidity of every- day, "This is war." Unthinkable now to leave Paris, to leave the city for whose safety her lover was fighting. She was nearer to him here than anywhere ; here he would know where to address her. So she wrote long, cheerful letters home, saying she was safe and well and better off than in a friendless Eng- land, scrambling for steerage in an overloaded ship. They were not to worry. And she wrote the Whartons, fearing their unselfish sense of responsibility might de- lay them for her, that they were not to wait, that she had friends who would care for her. No one knew when mail would be delivered, but hav- ing seen her letters into a box she felt she had done her utmost and gave herself to the present. CHAPTER XIX IN those tense days of waiting, when the red rush of the invader rolled nearer and nearer to the gates of Paris, Katherine King knew that incredible, stifling sensation of one struggling to break the gripping bonds of nightmare. So utterly had war been a thing apart from the happy security of her American environment that it was fantastic and unreal to be here in this city that was girding itself for mortal combat, with the rage and ruin of war blazing closer and closer, and somewhere on that red line of defense the man whose life was dearer to her than her own. "Can this be I?" the girl thought dumbly, as she walked those silent streets, where the children ceased to play, and waited with those patient, tragic crowds of women and old men for the official communiques. Ah, those communiques ! How infrequent they were and how laconic ! And always the same. Always the Germans were nearer, nearer, a great, oncoming, ma- chine-mass, endless, irresistible. The front ranks that went down were like the vanishing foam on an incoming tide. The tide surged in, mighty, unstopping. She knew the paralyzing fear of helplessness. She saw it re- 183 THE SPLENDID CHANCE fleeted in the faces of the men and women about her, deepened with their knowledge of what helplessness had meant in a bitter past. "It is the guns," said the little bride-of-a-year, in the cremerie, clinging pitifully to her hands. "They have the guns, mademoiselle, the monsters that deal destruc- tion. For this they have been making ready. . . . And our men are there. . . ." "You must not cry so, you must not," Katherine whispered, her own throat choked, her heart aching. The little woman flung back her head, with an effort of defiance. "I will not," she answered. "I will live for the child. And if it is a son a son whose father does not return then when he is a man I will put a gun in his hands to slay the murderers of his father !" So the war seed was sown, thought Katherine ; so the heritage of hate and enmity brought its festering fulfill- ment. "You will not talk so when you have sons to lose," said the old woman who boarded with her. "My mother saw five go in 1870 and I was all that was left to her. And then my man he was my bridegroom it was there he got the wound that took him off in the end. But for that he would be here now. . . . You will not talk so when you have lived a little more." She turned feebly to Katherine. "Is there news, mademoiselle ? I am not strong to go out in the streets to-day " And Katherine went for them and searched the scanty lists for those names that meant everything to those women. There were very few lists and those brief and 184 THE SPLENDID CHANCE incomplete, but by now the wounded were being brought into the city, and hurried from the hospital trains to those waiting beds, and little bands of women went from ward to ward, waiting patiently to speak to the nurse, to ask if such an one were here, or if any of his regiment, or if there was news of that regiment. All day now Katherine made Red Cross supplies, or aided where she could in the nursing going on in Mac- Nare's small asylum. Only the lightest cases were brought there, but as she went from bed to bed, looking down on those rows of wan, drawn faces, Katherine's heart contracted with the terror of deepened under- standing. And the meaning of war, the murderous on- slaught of man against man, raised its bloody face upon her from the draping veils of glory and of custom. The story of Belgium, brought by flying rumor, gasped from the lips of the first poor refugees, had reached the city and set the anxious hearts there afire with a passion of agonized sympathy. Eyes were raised to the mute skies ; locked hands were lifted in despairing grayer. Women fled to the churches to plead at the Madonna's feet for pity upon those helpless ones and safety for their own. It seemed to Katherine that the sun could never shine for her again. That in this day of vaunted Christian- ity invaders who took Christ's name in prayer could pour upon a peaceful countryside, burning, shooting, stabbing, terrorizing, meeting the defense of innocent burghers with the brutalities of Huns, with wanton re- prisals, with wholesale slaughter; that men who called themselves Christians could fling themselves methodical- 185 THE SPLENDID CHANCE ly upon a country of unoffending neutrals and rend it limb from limb in the name of "political necessity" ; that barbaric slogan of "Might is Right," filled her with shocked and fiery horror. All the idealisms, the sugary coating of civilization's assurances, went down like a pack of cards. . . . While the Kaiser had been signing his "scraps of paper" at the Hague, the engines for this destruction were being forged, the plans made for Germany's march through the neutrality she was swearing to protect ! . . . Prus- sia's place in the sun! . . . Big Business, bludgeon- weaponed, empire-crowned, tramping human rights and lives underfoot in the name of a Fatherland ! . . . . That was conquest. Often the Surly Man, wrung by the girl's white cheeks and questioning eyes, made her come for long walks with him through the strange and silent streets, emptied of sound and stir, motorless, trafficless, where old men and youths drilled in little squads and herds of sheep and cattle grazed in the Bois and Champs Elysees. Out from the city had streamed long miles of refugees, women and children, most of them, mothers bearing their babies to safety, little lads hurried by frightened grand- mothers, rich or poor, all unprepared and needy, they had poured out the gates and down the dusty roads be- yond the sound of guns. Hushed and tensely waiting, her heart with her youth upon her battle-line, Paris was beautiful in those August days as never before. The uncut grass grew long in her gardens ; the red geraniums and white roses rioted gorgeously in the borders. And at night the moonlight 186 THE SPLENDID CHANCE bathed the lampless streets in spectral brilliancy, glistening white upon the dome of Les Invalides, upon the Arc de Triomphe, upon the blunt towers of Notre Dame and delicate traceries of fretted column and Gothic arch. ... If Paris was to die it would be in the full panoply of her beauty, in the splendor of her ancient and irrecoverable loveliness. Nearer and nearer the battle-line. On it came, closer, closer, with dull and sullen thunder stealing from the horizon, an arrow-pointed battering ram hammering and hammering, a sweeping tide, surging and submerg- ing, and then in a sugar-beet field near Claye, ten miles from the outer fortifications of Paris, the furthest reach- ing fringe of that tide was met and turned. Slowly it receded, borne back by desperate force. . . . The communiques were first cautious, then explicit. They told of places retaken, of advances made. Now twenty, now thirty, now forty miles, that line of battle was pushed back. And in Paris, the clutch upon the heart relaxed. Free breath was drawn again. Grate- ful eyes shone in white faces. That Sunday of September was France's day of thanksgiving. But all this time no word of Jeffrey. No scrap of writing came back from that unknown place in the front of battle. She heard the stories of the poor, wounded boys in the hospitals and she thought of him there in the days and nights, harried and desperate, fighting those over- 13 187 THE SPLENDID CHANCE whelming odds, pushed back, still stubbornly defending, outnumbered but bitterly resisting, each instant a chance in the hell of battle, and her heart would stop its beat- ing before those fears to which she dared not give a name. Yet because she was young and the eclipse of personal disaster was unthinkable she could draw deeply upon hope. But the blackness of that waiting ! . . . The bitterness of knowing nothing ... of fearing every- thing. . . . She lived years in those weeks, and in her eyes darkened that look of dumb questioning which she pitied in the women's eyes about her. Sometimes she wrote her heart out to her mother, only to tear the letter into a hundred pieces. Why sadden those dear ones at homes with her own agony of sus- pense? . . . It would shock and wound them. . . . And any day now might bring news. . . . Any moment she might hear. . . . And no news was not the worst. . . . So she went about her work, rolling bandages with a little group of French workers, taking lessons in nurs- ing from one : f many classes held, spending her money in comforts fo,r the poor boys in the hospitals and the wretched refugees that brought the misery of Belgium home again and again to tender hearts, writing brave letters to America, begging more money for help for the homeless ones and then one day the miracle hap- pened, and there was a new heaven and a new earth about her. Its precursor was a tremor of alarm, for Madame Sonnet came into her room, bringing Jeanne and little 188 THE SPLENDID CHANCE Thomas with her, and the sight of the children brought a fear of disaster, so many terrible stories had come of slaughter and fire, and bloody reprisals. Quickly Madame Bonnet explained. "No, no, the Germans have not been there. They were all about, but, God be thanked, the village was saved. A wood just beyond they could not get through that, where our soldiers had their guns. . . . But Marie has sent them. The train came in this morning. She feels it safer in. case anything should happen to her she is not well, you understand, and her time is come. . . . See, the little innocents- they are big-eyed with the war. The soldiers took the pigs, yes, our soldiers they have stomachs, the poor lads. Does Marie think they win battles upon emptiness?" "And news have you news of your boys ?" Katherine asked quickly. "Of Jean, yes. He is one of those stationed in the wood beyond the village. One arm was out, nothing to make a fuss about you understand. A scratch, when the Boches tried to come through the wood at night." Madame was excited; her old liveliness reanimated her face, which had been settling into lines of mask-like rigidity. "But it is not of my boys that mademoiselle is thinking no?" A look of sly pleasure came in the old woman's eyes and she pushed little Jeanne toward the girl. "Show the mademoiselle what is about thy neck." Obediently the child began to tug at a discolored rib- bon ; presently a little leather case came outside her collar band. 189 THE SPLENDID CHANCE "Voila, mademoiselle," she said shyly, putting it in Katherine's hand. But Madame Bonnet could contain herself no longer. "From Monsieur le Capitaine !" she exploded. "From the Captain of mademoiselle ! In truth ! In truth ! He came riding through the wood he came to the farm, and learning that the children were about to start he declared that Jeanne was safer than the post !" Madame chuckled delightedly, her keys jingling with their old fervor. "Read, mademoiselle," she exhorted, as if Katherine were not already lost in those few hur- ried lines. "Read, and tell me what he says ! . . . All is well, yes?" Thumb-grimed and creased, the little square of pa- per lay in Katherine's hand. MY DEAREST KATHERINE: Fancy writing you at the old f arm in such times ! We have had the devil's own scratch of it, but now we're getting a bit of our own back. It's nasty business to see your comrades going but it's for the right, and we're in it to the finish. You mustn't worry about me, darling, even if you don't hear. With your love all mine there isn't a bullet that can stop me. Write me here; we'll stick a bit till we get forward. Your JEFFREY. As an afterthought he scribbled that he was perfect- ly well though starving, and Marie had produced a fine hen for him. 190 THE SPLENDID CHANCE Little Jeanne supplied a thousand eager details, when once her shyness was overcome. The Captain had taken her up on his big horse ; he had laughed and kissed her and told her, Oh, yes, she was not to forget, that this kiss was for Mademoiselle Katherine. And the child reached forward and clasped her arms about Katherine's neck. "He held me like this, like this," she explained. Madame clapped her hands eagerly. She forgot that she had cherished a grievance against this Captain who had so utterly overthrown those unselfish hopes for Mac- Nare and little Peggy ; she forgot that she had scarcely glimpsed his features that night when he had come in- quiring for Katherine, and she broke into fervent praises of his handsome appearance and his valor. She beamed upon that picture of his on the girl's table. "A man in a thousand a man of courage and of heart ! . . . But mademoiselle," she added naively, "is there any word of Henri? Has the Captain heard?" And at Katherine's gesture of pitying negation, "Of course he would not hear, among so many," she returned with a semblance of briskness. "But I think of my chickens, of course ! ... It is so long . . . but silence is better than the word of death. That poor old mother over the cremerie ! She heard last night. ... It was at Mons, during that long retreat. . . . They sent her a silver ring of his. She says nothing. . . . But the wife there told me that she had laid upon her bed some little things she had saved, a baby shoe of his, you under- stand, and a little dress and a card of his first letters and sits there looking at them." 191 THE SPLENDID CHANCE Madame Bonnet wiped her eyes. "It is for France, of course, but it is very hard. . . . Why should such things be, mademoiselle?" She added, restlessly, "It is hard on a mother not to smooth her son's brow in his last moments, not to look into his face. . . . But there is no help for it. . . ." The children, growing more familiar in the room, re- called her. "Jeanne ! That is the mademoiselle's cushion do not let thy little brother sprawl upon it like that ! Thank the mademoiselle for the chocolate. . . . That is bet- ter. ... I must take these little ones to a neighbor," she added, "for I have much to do if I am to leave to- night. Would mademoiselle prefer to confide a letter to me sooner than to the army post? If the Captain Edgerton is stationed there I shall get it to him with certainty." "But where are you going?" Katherine demanded quickly. "To Les Buissons, of course. My daughter needs me. . . . Besides, it is my home and my heart has been heavy with fears for it. I shall go to-night." She nod- ded her head slowly, with the air of a Sibyl confirming a decision. "But the permits the passes ?" "There is a train to-night," said madame, and Kath- erine saw that she was formulating a plan already ma- tured. "I shall obtain a permit if I must have one in truth I am but returning to my home. . . . And if mademoiselle will make ready her letter " "My letter?" Impetuously Katherine turned upon 192 THE SPLENDID CHANCE her, her face shining, a great hope dancing in her eyes like a blown flame. "Myself!" And as the Frenchwoman opened her lips, "Surely if I go at once I must find him! He said to write him there. Anyway I would be near if he should be hurt. . . . Oh, I could make my way to him. Dear Madame Bonnet, you get me a permit, if I must have it, or let me just slip along with you. Help me. ... I must go. ... I know I shall find him." And then, trying to speak more calmly and reason- ably, "Since they are running trains for the refugees to return to their homes, surely it is not so difficult to let me go on one of them?" "It is not so easy." Madame eyed her doubtfully. No, Katherine knew that it was not so easy. She knew that newspaper correspondents were mewed up in Paris, cooling their heels in much-to-be-regretted but unavoidable delays ; she knew that when their military passes were at last made out many started for the front in their expensively acquired motors only to meet with strange difficulties over papers, with polite deten- tions. . . . No, it was not so easy. France was not baring her defenses and her stories for every writer to rush to print. The censorship was unimaginably strict. And in a country constantly betrayed by spies, with treachery slipping through every avenue of life, the mere presence of a foreigner in an unwonted place was suspicious in itself. Many of the Americans who still remained in Paris, and even English visitors, were sub- jected to constant surveillance, and she herself had often 193 THE SPLENDID CHANCE been made aware that her simple days were not un- noticed. Once madame humorously reported to her a contro- versy between herself and a questioning agent. "I told him," madame had reported, "that you were betrothed to an English captain at the front, and the wretch replied that any German would betroth herself to any number of captains to obtain a shred of informa- tion. . . . But I took him down your letter from home, telling of the money coming for the refugees," madame concluded triumphantly, "and that settled his imagina- tion. . . . The good God knows they must have a little reason in their suspicions." Reflecting upon this vanished letter from her desk, Katherine perceived that life in France now must be an open book. But in no way had she been annoyed. Per- haps Madame Bonnet's allegiance, perhaps the friend- ship of Robert MacNare had removed her from suspi- cion. Now she gave no thought to the difficulties, the pos- sible dangers. She was on fire with the knowledge that the fortunes of war had brought Edgerton to Les Buis- sons, of all dear places, and that he was actually within reach. If it were humanly possible she was going to him. And so she stormed Madame Bonnet's sympathies and affections, and that good woman surrendered, not at discretion, but with an enthusiasm that entered whole- heartedly into the plan. "But you may have to be my cousin," she declared, eyeing Katherine with an air of humorous misgiving. 194 THE SPLENDID CHANCE "My cousin, whose grandfather went to America. . . . I had such cousins or my mother did. We have lost track of them. . . . But if you are to come with me put on your hat no, not that one, you are too chic, child, and come and say nothing. We shall see what we shall see." CHAPTER XX IT was not humanly possible that everyone in that station had passes ! Katherine eyed the throng with hopeful reassurance, as she edged her way through it after Madame Bonnet's bulky person. Her American passport, and papers of identification were tucked safely away within her blouse, in case of some serious difficulty arising, but for the present she trusted wholly to madame's protection. And it had proved as simple as addition. It had been merely a matter of getting to the station, of finding when a train left for Les Buissons, of buying the tickets and waiting until the train actually left. The pair of them were an unnoticed part of that jostling crowd of refugees, returning to the homes which they had left through the fear or the fact of Ger- man occupation, vigorous women clutching babies and bundles and birdcages, middle-aged men in peasant smocks, some of them, some of them in their Sunday best, by way of carrying it, and girls and boys with arms piled with indiscriminate household goods, most of their faces wreathed in smiles at this return to their acres. 196 THE SPLENDID CHANCE But there were some who were going back to villages through which the Germans had actually passed, once in the rush of their advance and once in the bitterness of their retreat, and these were troubled, and apprehen- sive of what might lie before them. Here the women talked of their homes and household supplies and the men and boys of the crops and the hayricks. Into a train already crammed beyond all hope of com- fort, Katherine followed Madame Bonnet, and found) wedged places among thirteen others in a compartment intended for eight. Nor was their number limited to the two-legged. One little youngster, in an incredibly dirty dress, sat at her grandmother's feet, repeatedly envelop- ing a restless kid in a stout shawl which was also wrapped about her own head, so that the child's head kept bobbing like a mandarin's with the little kid's restless efforts to escape. An infirmiere major and her five nurses, one of the many flying corps sent out by the Union des Femmes de France, were in the compartment, and Katherine watched the clear-eyed women in their neat uniforms and official cloaks with eyes of devoted respect. She wished that she could go as they were going to bring healing to those wounded men. Often she had thought of volunteering, trusting to her quickness in the courses of instruction, already undertaken, added to the expe- rience she was gaining in assisting the nurses in Mac- Nare's tiny hospital, but the fear of being under orders and away from communication and the chance of word from Jeffrey had held her back. And there had been plenty for her to do in unofficial ways. Now she thought 197 THE SPLENDID CHANCE that if the war lasted, and Jeffrey wished her to, she would try to get taken on by the Red Cross if only to scrub floors and wash clothes until she could take responsibility. And washing and making clean were no small part of nursing anyway ! She would have liked to talk with the nurses, in es- pecial with one slender woman whose eyes had met hers in a friendly way, but she shrank from drawing official attention to herself and devoted herself to occupying as little space as possible in order to give them more for their rest. Most of the time she stood out in the crowded corridor, leaning against the barred glass win- dow, looking into the darkening night. As long as it was light she could see bands of refugees returning to the places from which the threat of invasion seemed averted, many more by far than those who had come to Paris by train, a broken procession of people driving goats and sheep and cows and carrying hens and geese and household pets among their other bundles. Some- times a cart would be so loaded that a man would be glimpsed tugging away with the ox or decrepit horse. These people seemed going north, to the villages be- yond Les Buissons, where the Germans had actually penetrated. They were marching now with hope and courage, vastly different from the despair which sent them streaming. It grew dusk and the October haze veiled the land- scape ; then night came on rapidly. Now the train was rumbling through a darkness punctuated by occasional brief flares of bonfires against which men's figures were silhouetted. 198 THE SPLENDID CHANCE