Edith Wharton ..........................................................................................................................................1

The Hermit and the Wild Woman ............................................................................................................1

The Last Asset. ......................................................................................................................................13

In Trust ..................................................................................................................................................30

The Pretext ............................................................................................................................................42

The Verdict ...........................................................................................................................................59

The PotBoiler ......................................................................................................................................65

The Best Man. .......................................................................................................................................81

THE Hermit lived in a cave in the hollow of a hill. Below him was a glen, with a stream in a coppice of oaks

and alders, and on the farther side of the valley, half a day's journey distant, another hill, steep and bristling,

which raised aloft a little walled town with Ghibelline swallowtails notched against the sky.

When the Hermit was a lad, and lived in the town, the crenellations of the walls had been squaretopped, and

a Guelf lord had flown his standard from the keep. Then one day a steelcoloured line of menatarms rode

across the valley, wound up the hill and battered in the gates. Stones and Greek fire rained from the ramparts,

shields clashed in the streets, blade sprang at blade in passages and stairways, pikes and lances dripped above

huddled flesh, and all the still familiar place was a stew of dying bodies. The boy fled from it in horror. He

had seen his father go forth and not come back, his mother drop dead from an arquebuse shot as she leaned

from the platform of the tower, his little sister fall with a slit throat across the altar steps of the chapel and

he ran, ran for his life, through the slippery streets, over warm twitching bodies, between legs of soldiers

carousing, out of the gates, past burning farmsteads, trampled wheatfields, orchards stripped and broken, till

He had no wish to go back. His longing was to live hidden from life. Up the hillside he found a hollow in the

rock, and built before it a porch of boughs bound together with withies. He fed on nuts and roots, and on trout

which he caught with his hands under the stones in the stream. He had always been a quiet boy, liking to sit at

his mother's feet and watch the flowers grow on her embroidery frame, while the chaplain read aloud the

histories of the Desert Fathers from a great silverclasped volume. He would rather have been bred a clerk

and scholar than a knight's son, and his happiest moments were when he served mass for the chaplain in the

early morning, and felt his heart flutter up and up like a lark, up and up till it was lost in infinite space and

brightness. Almost as happy were the hours when he sat beside the foreign painter who came over the

mountains to paint the chapel, and under whose brush celestial faces grew out of the rough wall as if he had

sown some magic seed which flowered while you watched it. With the appearing of every goldrimmed face

the boy felt he had won another friend, a friend who would come and bend above him at night, keeping off

the ugly visions which haunted his pillow visions of the gnawing monsters about the churchporch,

evilfaced bats and dragons, giant worms and winged bristling hogs, a devil's flock who crept down from the

stonework at night and hunted the souls of sinful children through the town. With the growth of the picture

the bright mailed angels thronged so close about the boy's bed that between their interwoven wings not a

snout or a claw could force itself; and he would turn over sighing on his pillow, which felt as soft and warm

All these thoughts came back to him now in his cave on the cliffside. The stillness seemed to enclose him

with wings, to fold him away from life and evil. He was never restless or discontented. He loved the long

silent empty days, each one as like the other as pearls in a wellmatched string. Above all he liked to have

time to save his soul. He had been greatly troubled about his soul since a band of Flagellants had passed

through the town, exhibiting their gaunt scourged bodies and exhorting the people to turn from soft raiment

and delicate fare, from marriage and moneygetting and dancing and games, and think only how they might

escape the devil's talons and the great red blaze of hell. For days that red blaze hung on the edge of the boy's

thoughts like the light of a burning city across a plain. There seemed to be so many pitfalls to avoid so

many things were wicked which one might have supposed to be harmless. How could a child of his age tell?

He dared not for a moment think of anything else. And the scene of sack and slaughter from which he had

fled gave shape and distinctness to that bloodred vision. Hell was like that, only a million million times

worse. Now he knew how flesh looked when devils' pincers tore it, how the shrieks of the damned sounded,

and how roasting bodies smelled. How could a Christian spare one moment of his days and nights from the

Gradually the horror faded, leaving only a tranquil pleasure in the minute performance of his religious duties.

His mind was not naturally given to the contemplation of evil, and in the blessed solitude of his new life his

thoughts dwelt more and more on the beauty of holiness. His desire was to be perfectly good, and to live in

love and charity with his fellowmen; and how could one do this without fleeing from them?

At first his life was difficult, for in the winter season he was put to great straits to feed himself; and there

were nights when the sky was like an iron vault, and a hoarse wind rattled the oakwood in the valley, and a

great fear came on him that was worse than any cold. But in time it became known to his townsfolk and to the

peasants in the neighbouring valleys that he had withdrawn to the wilderness to lead a godly life; and after

that his worst hardships were over, for pious persons brought him gifts of oil and dried fruit, one good

woman gave him seeds from her garden, another spun for him a hodden gown, and others would have

brought him all manner of food and clothing, had he not refused to accept anything but for his bare needs.

The good woman who had given him the seeds showed him also how to build a little garden on the southern

ledge of his cliff, and all one summer the Hermit carried up soil from the streamside, and the next he carried

up water to keep his garden green. After that the fear of solitude quite passed from him, for he was so busy all

day long that at night he had much ado to fight off the demon of sleep, which Saint Arsenius the Abbot has

denounced as the chief foe of the solitary. His memory kept good store of prayers and litanies, besides long

passages from the Mass and other offices, and he marked the hours of his day by different acts of devotion.

On Sundays and feast days, when the wind was set his way, he could hear the church bells from his native

town, and these helped him to follow the worship of the faithful, and to bear in mind the seasons of the

liturgical year; and what with carrying up water from the river, digging in the garden, gathering fagots for his

fire, observing his religious duties, and keeping his thoughts continually upon the salvation of his soul, the

At first, during his night vigils, he had felt a great fear of the stars, which seemed to set a cruel watch upon

him, as though they spied out the frailty of his heart and took the measure of his littleness. But one day a

wandering clerk, to whom he chanced to give a night's shelter, explained to him that, in the opinion of the

most learned doctors of theology, the stars were inhabited by the spirits of the blessed, and this thought

brought great consolation to the Hermit. Even on winter nights, when the eagle's wings clanged among the

peaks, and he heard the long howl of wolves about the sheepcotes in the valley, he no longer felt any fear,

but thought of those sounds as representing the evil voices of the world, and hugged himself in the solitude of

his cave. Sometimes, to keep himself awake, he composed lauds in honour of Christ and the saints, and they

seemed to him so pleasant that he feared to forget them, so after much debate with himself he decided to ask

a friendly priest from the valley, who sometimes visited him, to write down the lauds; and the priest wrote

them down on comely sheepskin, which the Hermit dried and prepared with his own hands. When the Hermit

saw them written down they appeared to him so beautiful that he feared to commit the sin of vanity if he

looked at them too often, so he hid them between two smooth stones in his cave, and vowed that he would

take them out only once in the year, at Easter, when our Lord has risen and it is meet that Christians should

rejoice. And this vow he faithfully kept; but, alas, when Easter drew near, he found he was looking forward to

the blessed festival less because of our Lord's rising than because he should then be able to read his pleasant

lauds written on fair sheepskin; and thereupon he took a vow that he would not look upon the lauds till he lay

So the Hermit, for many years, lived to the glory of God and in great peace of mind.

ONE day he resolved to set forth on a visit to the Saint of the Rock, who lived on the other side of the

mountains. Travellers had brought the Hermit report of this solitary, how he lived in great holiness and

austerity in a desert place among the hills, where snow lay all winter, and in summer the sun beat down

cruelly. The Saint, it appeared, had vowed that he would withdraw from the world to a spot where there was

neither shade nor water, lest he should be tempted to take his ease and think less continually upon his Maker;

but wherever he went he found a spreading tree or a gushing spring, till at last he climbed up to the bare

heights where nothing grows, and where the only water comes from the melting of the snow in spring. Here

he found a tall rock rising from the ground, and in it he scooped a hollow with his own hands, labouring for

five years and wearing his fingers to the bone. Then he seated himself in the hollow, which faced the west, so

that in winter he should have small warmth of the sun and in summer be consumed by it; and there he had sat

The Hermit was greatly drawn by the tale of such austerities, which in his humility he did not dream of

emulating, but desired, for his soul's good, to contemplate and praise; so one day he bound sandals to his feet,

It was the pleasant spring season, when seeds are shooting and the bud is on the tree. The Hermit was

troubled at the thought of leaving his plants without water, but he could not travel in winter by reason of the

snows, and in summer he feared the garden would suffer even more from his absence. So he set out, praying

that rain might fall while he was away, and hoping to return again in five days. The peasants labouring in the

fields left their work to ask his blessing; and they would even have followed him in great numbers had he not

told them that he was bound on a pilgrimage to the Saint of the Rock, and that it behoved him to go alone, as

one solitary seeking another. So they respected his wish, and he went on and entered the forest. In the forest

he walked for two days and slept for two nights. He heard the wolves crying, and foxes rustling in the covert,

and once, at twilight, a shaggy brown man peered at him through the leaves and galloped away with a soft

padding of hoofs; but the Hermit feared neither wild beasts nor evildoers, nor even the fauns and satyrs who

linger in unhallowed forest depths where the Cross has not been raised; for he said: "If I die, I die to the glory

of God, and if I live it must be to the same end." Only he felt a secret pang at the thought that he might die

without seeing his lauds again. But the third day, without misadventure, he came out on another valley.

Then he began to climb the mountain, first through brown woods of beech and oak, then through pine and

broom, and then across red stony ledges where only a pinched growth of lentisk and briar spread in patches

over the rock. By this time he thought to have reached his goal, but for two more days he fared on through the

same scene, with the sky close over him and the green valleys of earth receding far below. Sometimes for

hours he saw only the red glistering slopes tufted with thin bushes, and the hard blue heaven so close that it

seemed his hand could touch it; then at a turn of the path the rocks rolled apart, the eye plunged down a long

pineclad defile, and beyond it the forest flowed in mighty undulations to a plain shining with cities and

another mountainrange many days' journey away. To some eyes this would have been a terrible spectacle,

reminding the wayfarer of his remoteness from his kind, and of the perils which lurk in waste places and the

weakness of man against them; but the Hermit was so mated to solitude, and felt such love for all things

created, that to him the bare rocks sang of their Maker and the vast distance bore witness to His greatness. So

But one morning, after a long climb over steep and difficult slopes, the wayfarer halted suddenly at a bend of

the way; for beyond the defile at his feet there was no plain shining with cities, but a bare expanse of shaken

silver that reached away to the rim of the world; and the Hermit knew it was the sea. Fear seized him then, for

it was terrible to see that great plain move like a heaving bosom, and, as he looked on it, the earth seemed

also to heave beneath him. But presently he remembered how Christ had walked the waves, and how even

Saint Mary of Egypt, who was a great sinner, had crossed the waters of Jordan dryshod to receive the

Sacrament from the Abbot Zosimus; and then the Hermit's heart grew still, and he sang as he went down the

All day he kept seeing it and then losing it; but toward night he came to a cleft of the hills, and lay down in a

pinewood to sleep. He had now been six days gone, and once and again he thought anxiously of his herbs;

but he said to himself: "What though my garden perish, if I see a holy man face to face and praise God in his

Before daylight he was afoot under the stars; and leaving the wood where he had slept, began climbing the

face of a tall cliff, where he had to clutch the jutting ledges with his hands, and with every step he gained, a

rock seemed thrust forth to hurl him back. So, footsore and bleeding, he reached a little stony plain as the sun

dropped to the sea; and in the red light he saw a hollow rock, and the Saint sitting in the hollow.

The Hermit fell on his knees, praising God; then he rose and ran across the plain to the rock. As he drew near

he saw that the Saint was a very old man, clad in goatskin, with a long white beard. He sat motionless, his

hands on his knees, and two red eyesockets turned to the sunset. Near him was a young boy in skins who

brushed the flies from his face; but they always came back, and settled on the rheum which ran from his eyes.

He did not appear to hear or see the approach of the Hermit, but sat quite still till the boy said: "Father, here is

Then he lifted up his voice and asked angrily who was there and what the stranger sought.

The Hermit answered: "Father, the report of your holy practices came to me a long way off, and being myself

a solitary, though not worthy to be named with you for godliness, it seemed fitting that I should cross the

mountains to visit you, that we might sit together and speak in praise of solitude."

The Saint replied: "You fool, how can two sit together and praise solitude, since by so doing they put an end

The Hermit, at that, was sorely abashed, for he had thought his speech out on the way, reciting it many times

over; and now it appeared to him vainer than the crackling of thorns under a pot.

Nevertheless he took heart and said: "True, Father; but may not two sinners sit together and praise Christ,

But the other only answered: "If you had really learned the blessings of solitude you would not squander

them in idle wandering." And, the Hermit not knowing how to reply, he said again: "If two sinners meet they

After that he shut his lips and continued motionless while the boy brushed the flies from his eyesockets; but

the Hermit's heart sank, and for the first time he felt all the weariness of the way he had fared, and the great

He had meant to take counsel with the Saint concerning his lauds, and whether he ought to destroy them; but

now he had no heart to say another word, and turning away he began to descend the mountain. Presently he

heard steps running behind him, and the boy came up and pressed a honeycomb in his hand.

"You have come a long way and must be hungry," he said; but before the Hermit could thank him he had

hastened back to his task. So the Hermit crept down the mountain till he reached the wood where he had slept

before; and there he made his bed again, but he had no mind to eat before sleeping, for his heart hungered

ON the fourteenth day he came to the valley below his cliff, and saw the walls of his native town against the

sky. He was footsore and heavy of heart, for his long pilgrimage had brought him only weariness and

humiliation, and as no drop of rain had fallen he knew that his garden must have perished. So he climbed the

But there a great wonder awaited him. For though the scant earth of the hillside was parched and crumbling,

his gardensoil reeked with moisture, and his plants had shot up, fresh and glistening, to a height they had

never before attained. More wonderful still, the tendrils of the gourd had been trained about his door, and

kneeling down he saw that the earth had been loosened between the rows of sprouting vegetables, and that

every leaf sparkled with drops as though the rain had but newly ceased. Then it appeared to the Hermit that

he beheld a miracle, but doubting his own deserts he refused to believe himself worthy of such grace, and

went within doors to ponder on what had befallen him. And on his bed of rushes he saw a young woman

The sight was very terrifying to the Hermit, for he recalled how often the demon, in tempting the Desert

Fathers, had taken the form of a woman for their undoing; but he reflected that, since there was nothing

pleasing to him in the sight of this female, who was brown as a nut and lean with wayfaring, he ran no great

danger in looking at her. At first he took her for a wandering Egyptian, but as he looked he perceived, among

the heathen charms, an Agnus Dei in her bosom; and this so surprised him that he bent over and called on her

She sprang up with a start, but seeing the Hermit's gown and staff, and his face above her, lay quiet and said

to him: "I have watered your garden daily in return for the beans and oil that I took from your store."

And when he pressed her again to tell him why she had sought shelter in his cave, she said that the land to the

south, whence she came, was full of armed companies and bands of marauders, and that great license and

bloodshed prevailed there; and this the Hermit knew to be true, for he had heard of it on his homeward

journey. The Wild Woman went on to tell him that she had been hunted through the woods like an animal by

a band of drunken menatarms, Lansknechts from the north by their barbarous dress and speech, and at

length, starving and spent, had come on his cave and hidden herself from her pursuers. "For," she said, "I fear

neither wild beasts nor the woodland people, charcoal burners, Egyptians, wandering minstrels or chapmen;

even the highway robbers do not touch me, because I am poor and brown; but these armed men flown with

And the Hermit's heart melted, for he thought of his little sister lying with her throat slit across the altar steps,

and of the scenes of blood and rapine from which he had fled away into the wilderness. So he said to the

stranger that it was not meet he should house her in his cave, but that he would send a messenger to the town

across the valley, and beg a pious woman there to give her lodging and work in her household. "For," said he,

"I perceive by the blessed image about your neck that you are not a heathen wilding, but a child of Christ,

"Yes," she said, "I am a Christian, and know as many prayers as you; but I will never set foot in city walls

"What," cried the Hermit with a start, "you are a runagate nun?" And he crossed himself, and again thought of

She smiled and said: "It is true I was once a cloistered woman, but I will never willingly be one again. Now

drive me forth if you like; but I cannot go far, for I have a wounded foot, which I got in climbing the cliff

At that, for all his fear, the Hermit was moved to pity, and washed the cut and bound it up; and as he did so

he bethought him that perhaps his strange visitor had been sent to him not for his soul's undoing but for her

But it was not fitting that she should remain in his cave; so, having given her water to drink and a handful of

lentils, he raised her up and putting his staff in her hand guided her to a hollow not far off in the face of the

cliff. And while he was doing this he heard the sunset bells ring across the valley, and set about reciting the

Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae; and she joined in very piously, with her hands folded, not missing a word.

Nevertheless the thought of her wickedness weighed on him, and the next day when he went to carry her food

he asked her to tell him how it came about that she had fallen into such abominable sin. And this is the story

I WAS born (said she) in the north country, where the winters are long and cold, where snow sometimes falls

in the valleys, and the high mountains for months are white with it. My father's castle is in a tall green wood,

where the winds always rustle, and a cold river runs down from the icegorges. South of us was the wide

plain, glowing with heat, but above us were stony passes where the eagle nests and the storms howl; in winter

great fires roared in our chimneys, and even in summer there was always a cool air off the gorges. But when I

was a child my mother went southward in the great Empress's train and I went with her. We travelled many

days, across plains and mountains, and saw Rome, where the Pope lives in a golden palace, and many other

cities, till we came to the great Emperor's court. There for two years or more we lived in pomp and

merriment, for it was a wonderful court, full of mimes, magicians, philosophers and poets; and the Empress's

ladies spent their days in mirth and music, dressed in light silken garments, walking in gardens of roses, and

bathing in a great cool marble tank, while the Emperor's eunuchs guarded the approach to the gardens. Oh,

those baths in the marble tank, my Father! I used to lie awake through the whole hot southern night, and think

of that plunge at sunrise under the last stars. For we were in a burning country, and I pined for the tall green

woods and the cold stream of my father's valley; and when I had cooled my limbs in the tank I lay all day in

My mother pined for the coolness till she died; then the Empress put me in a convent and I was forgotten.

The convent was on the side of a bare yellow hill, where bees made a hot buzzing in the thyme. Below was

the sea, blazing with a million shafts of light; and overhead a blinding sky, which reflected the sun's glitter

like a huge baldric of steel. Now the convent was built on the site of an old pleasurehouse which a holy

Princess had given to our Order; and a part of the house was left standing with its court and garden. The nuns

had built all about the garden; but they left the cypresses in the middle, and the long marble tank where the

Princess and her ladies had bathed. The tank, however, as you may conceive, was no longer used as a bath;

for the washing of the body is an indulgence forbidden to cloistered virgins; and our Abbess, who was famed

for her austerities, boasted that, like holy Sylvia the nun, she never touched water save to bathe her

fingertips before receiving the Sacrament. With such an example before them, the nuns were obliged to

conform to the same pious rule, and many, having been bred in the convent from infancy, regarded all

ablutions with horror, and felt no temptation to cleanse the filth from their flesh; but I, who had bathed daily,

had the freshness of clear water in my veins, and perished slowly for want of it, like your garden herbs in a

My cell did not look on the garden, but on the steep mulepath leading up the cliff, where all day long the

sun beat as if with flails of fire, and I saw the sweating peasants toil up and down behind their thirsty asses,

and the beggars whining and scraping their sores in the heat. Oh, how I hated to look out through the bars on

that burning world! I used to turn away from it, sick with disgust, and lying on my hard bed, stare up by the

hour at the ceiling of my cell. But flies crawled in hundreds on the ceiling, and the hot noise they made was

worse than the glare. Sometimes, at an hour when I knew myself unobserved, I tore off my stifling gown, and

hung it over the grated window, that I might no longer see the shaft of hot sunlight lying across my cell, and

the dust dancing in it like fat in the fire. But the darkness choked me, and I struggled for breath as though I

lay at the bottom of a pit; so that at last I would spring up, and dragging down the dress, fling myself on my

knees before the Cross, and entreat our Lord to give me the gift of holiness, that I might escape the

everlasting fires of hell, of which this heat was like an awful foretaste. For if I could not endure the scorching

of a summer's day, with what constancy could I meet the thought of the flame that dieth not?

This longing to escape the heat of hell made me apply myself to a devouter way of living, and I reflected that

if my bodily distress were somewhat eased I should be able to throw myself with greater zeal into the practice

of vigils and austerities. And at length, having set forth to the Abbess that the sultry air of my cell induced in

me a grievous heaviness of sleep, I prevailed on her to lodge me in that part of the building which overlooked

For a few days I was quite happy, for instead of the dusty mountainside, and the sight of the sweating

peasants and their asses, I looked out on dark cypresses and rows of budding vegetables. But presently I

found I had not bettered myself. For with the approach of midsummer the garden, being all enclosed with

buildings, grew as stifling as my cell. All the green things in it withered and dried off, leaving trenches of

bare red earth, across which the cypresses cast strips of shade too narrow to cool the aching heads of the nuns

who sought shelter there; and I began to think sorrowfully of my former cell, where now and then there came

a seabreeze, hot and languid, yet alive, and where at least I could look out upon the sea. But this was not the

worst; for when the dogdays came I found that the sun, at a certain hour, cast on the ceiling of my cell the

reflection of the ripples on the gardentank; and to say how I suffered from this sight is not within the power

of speech. It was indeed agony to watch the clear water rippling and washing above my head, yet feel no

solace of it on my limbs: as though I had been a senseless brazen image lying at the bottom of a well. But the

image, if it felt no refreshment, would have suffered no torture; whereas every inch of my skin throbbed with

thirst, and every vein was a mouth of Dives praying for a drop of water. Oh, Father, how shall I tell you the

grievous pains that I endured? Sometimes I so feared the sight of the mocking ripples overhead that I hid my

eyes from their approach, lying face down on my burning bed till I knew that they were gone; yet on cloudy

By day I hardly dared trust myself in the garden, for the nuns walked there, and one fiery noon they found me

hanging so close above the tank that they snatched me away, crying out that I had tried to destroy myself. The

scandal of this reaching the Abbess, she sent for me to know what demon had beset me; and when I wept and

said, the longing to bathe my burning body, she broke into great anger and cried out: "Do you not know that

this is a sin wellnigh as great as the other, and condemned by all the greatest saints? For a nun may be

tempted to take her life through excess of selfscrutiny and despair of her own worthiness; but this desire to

indulge the despicable body is one of the lusts of the flesh, to be classed with concupiscence and adultery."

And she ordered me to sleep every night for a month in my heavy gown, with a veil upon my face.

Now, Father, I believe it was this penance that drove me to sin. For we were in the dogdays, and it was more

than flesh could bear. And on the third night, after the portress had passed, and the lights were out, I rose and

flung off my veil and gown, and knelt in my window fainting. There was no moon, but the sky was full of

stars. At first the garden was all blackness; but as I looked I saw a faint twinkle between the cypresstrunks,

and I knew it was the starlight on the tank. The water! The water! It was there close to me only a few bolts

The portress was a heavy sleeper, and I knew where her keys hung, on a nail just within the door of her cell. I

stole thither, unlatched the door, seized the keys and crept barefoot down the corridor. The bolts of the

cloisterdoor were stiff and heavy, and I dragged at them till the veins in my wrists were bursting. Then I

turned the key and it cried out in the ward. I stood still, my whole body beating with fear lest the hinges too

should have a voice but no one stirred, and I pushed open the door and slipped out. The garden was as

airless as a pit, but at least I could stretch my arms in it; and, oh, my Father, the sweetness of the stars! The

stones in the path cut my feet as I ran, but I thought of the joy of bathing them in the tank, and that made the

wounds sweet to me. . . . My Father, I have heard of the temptations which in times past assailed the holy

Solitaries of the desert, flattering the reluctant flesh beyond resistance; but none, I think, could have

surpassed in ecstasy that first touch of the water on my limbs. To prolong the joy I let myself slip in slowly,

resting my hands on the edge of the tank, and smiling to see my body, as I lowered it, break up the shining

black surface and shatter the starbeams into splinters. And the water, my Father, seemed to crave me as I

craved it. Its ripples rose about me, first in furtive touches, then in a long embrace that clung and drew me

down; till at length they lay like kisses on my lips. It was no frank comrade like the mountain pools of my

childhood, but a secret playmate compassionating my pains and soothing them with noiseless hands. From

the first I thought of it as an accomplice its whisper seemed to promise me secrecy if I would promise it

love. And I went back and back to it, my Father; all day I lived in the thought of it; each night I stole to it

But at length the old portress died, and a young laysister took her place. She was a light sleeper, and

keeneared; and I knew the danger of venturing to her cell. I knew the danger, but when darkness came I felt

the water drawing me. The first night I fought on my bed and held out; but the second I crept to her door. She

made no motion when I entered, but rose up secretly and stole after me; and the second night she warned the

I was punished with terrible penances: fasting, scourging, imprisonment, and the privation of drinking water;

for the Abbess stood amazed at the obduracy of my sin, and was resolved to make me an example to my

fellows. For a month I endured the pains of hell; then one night the Saracen pirates fell on our convent. On a

sudden the darkness was full of flames and blood; but while the other nuns ran hither and thither, clinging to

the Abbess's feet or shrieking on the steps of the altar, I slipped through an unwatched postern and made my

way to the hills. The next day the Emperor's soldiery descended on the carousing heathen, slew them and

burned their vessels on the beach; the Abbess and nuns were rescued, the convent walls rebuilt, and peace

restored to the holy precincts. All this I heard from a shepherdess of the hills, who found me in my hiding,

and brought me honeycomb and water. In her simplicity she offered to lead me home to the convent; but

while she slept I laid off my wimple and scapular, and stealing her cloak fled away lest she should betray me.

And since then I have wandered alone over the face of the world, living in woods and desert places, often

hungry, often cold and sometimes fearful; yet resigned to any hardship, and with a front for any peril, if only

THE Hermit, as may be supposed, was much perturbed by this story, and dismayed that such sinfulness

should cross his path. His first motion was to drive the woman forth, for he knew the heinousness of the

craving for water, and how Saint Jerome, Saint Augustine and other holy doctors have taught that they who

would purify the soul must not be distraught by the vain cares of bodily cleanliness; yet, remembering the

lust that drew him to his lauds, he dared not judge his sister's fault too harshly.

Moreover he was moved by the Wild Woman's story of the hardships she had suffered, and the godless

company she had been driven to keep Egyptians, jugglers, outlaws and even sorcerers, who are masters of

the pagan lore of the East, and still practice their dark rites among the simple folk of the hills. Yet she would

not have him think wholly ill of this vagrant people, from whom she had often received food and comfort;

and her worst danger, as he learned with shame, had come from the girovaghi or wandering monks, who are

the scourge and dishonour of Christendom; carrying their ribald idleness from one monastery to another, and

leaving on their way a trail of thieving, revelry and worse. Once or twice the Wild Woman had nearly fallen

into their hands; but had been saved by her own quick wit and skill in woodcraft. Once, so she assured the

Hermit, she had found refuge with a faun and his female, who fed and sheltered her in their cave, where she

slept on a bed of leaves with their shaggy nurslings; and in this cave she had seen a stock or idol of wood,

extremely seamed and ancient, before which the woodcreatures, when they thought she slept, laid garlands

She told him also of a hillvillage of weavers, where she lived many weeks, and learned to ply their trade in

return for her lodging; and where wayfaring men in the guise of cobblers, charcoalburners or goatherds

came and taught strange doctrines at midnight in the poor hovels. What they taught she could not clearly tell,

save that they believed each soul could commune directly with its Maker, without need of priest or

intercessor; also she had heard from some of their disciples that there are two Gods, one of good and one of

evil, and that the God of evil has his throne in the Pope's palace in Rome. But in spite of these dark teachings

they were a mild and merciful folk, full of lovingkindness toward poor persons and wayfarers; so that her

heart grieved for them when one day a Dominican monk appeared in the village with a company of soldiers,

and some of the weavers were seized and dragged to prison, while others, with their wives and babes, fled to

the winter woods. She fled with them, fearing to be charged with their heresy, and for months they lay hid in

desert places, the older and weaker, who fell sick from want and exposure, being devoutly ministered to by

All this she related modestly and simply, not as one who joys in a godless life, but as having been drawn into

it through misadventure; and she told the Hermit that when she heard the sound of church bells she never

failed to say an Ave or a Pater; and that often, as she lay in the midnight darkness of the forest, she had

The wound in her foot healed slowly; and the Hermit, while it was mending, repaired daily to her cave,

reasoning with her in love and charity, and exhorting her to return to the cloister. But this she persistently

refused to do; and fearing lest she attempt to fly before her foot was healed, and so expose herself to hunger

and illusage, he promised not to betray her presence, or to take any measures toward restoring her to her

He began indeed to doubt whether she had any calling to the life enclosed; yet her gentleness and innocency

of mind made him feel that she might be won back to holy living, if only her freedom were assured. So after

many inward struggles (since his promise forbade his taking counsel with any concerning her) he resolved to

let her remain in the cave till some light should come to him. And one day, visiting her about the hour of

Nones (for it became his pious habit to say the evening office with her), he found her engaged with a little

goatherd, who in a sudden seizure had fallen from a rock above her cave, and lay senseless and full of blood

at her feet. And the Hermit saw with wonder how skilfully she bound up his cuts and restored his senses,

giving him to drink of a liquor she had distilled from the wild simples of the mountain; whereat the boy

opened his eyes and praised God, as one restored by heaven. Now it was known that this lad was subject to

possessions, and had more than once dropped lifeless while he heeded his flock; and the Hermit, knowing

that only great saints or unclean necromancers can loosen devils, feared that the Wild Woman had exorcised

the spirits by means of unholy spells. But she told him that the goatherd's sickness was caused only by the

heat of the sun, and that, such seizures being common in the hot countries whence she came, she had learned

from a wise woman how to stay them by a decoction of the carduus benedictus, made in the third night of the

"But," she continued, "you need not fear my bringing scandal on your holy retreat, for by the arts of the same

wise woman my own wound is wellnigh healed, and tonight at sunset I set forth on my travels."

The Hermit's heart grew heavy as she spoke, and it seemed to him that her own look was sorrowful. And

suddenly his perplexities were lifted from him, and he saw what was God's purpose with the Wild Woman.

"Why," said he, "do you fly from this place, where you are safe from molestation, and can look to the saving

of your soul? Is it that your feet weary for the road, and your spirits are heavy for lack of worldly discourse?"

She replied that she had no wish to travel, and felt no repugnance to solitude. "But," said she, "I must go forth

to beg my bread, since in this wilderness there is none but yourself to feed me; and moreover, when it is

known that I have healed the goatherd, curious folk and scandalmongers may seek me out, and, learning

Then the Hermit answered her and said: "In the early days, when the faith of Christ was first preached, there

were holy women who fled to the desert and lived there in solitude, to the glory of God and the edification of

their sex. If you are minded to embrace so austere a life, contenting you with such sustenance as the

wilderness yields, and wearing out your days in prayer and vigil, it may be that you shall make amends for

the great sin you have committed, and live and die in the peace of the Lord Jesus."

He spoke thus, knowing that if she left him and returned to her roaming, hunger and fear might drive her to

fresh sin; whereas in a life of penance and reclusion her eyes might be opened to her iniquity, and her soul

He saw that his words moved her, and she seemed about to consent, and embrace a life of holiness; but

"A stream flows in the glen below us," she said. "Do you forbid me to bathe in it in the heat of summer?"

"It is not I that forbid you, my daughter, but the laws of God," said the Hermit; "yet see how miraculously

heaven protects you for in the hot season, when your lust is upon you, our stream runs dry, and temptation

will be removed from you. Moreover on these heights there is no excess of heat to madden the body, but

always, before dawn and at the angelus, a cool breeze which refreshes it like water."

And after thinking long on this, and again receiving his promise not to betray her, the Wild Woman agreed to

embrace a life of reclusion; and the Hermit fell on his knees, worshipping God and rejoicing to think that, if

THEREAFTER for two years the Hermit and the Wild Woman lived side by side, meeting together to pray

on the great feastdays of the year, but on all other days dwelling apart, engaged in pious practices.

At first the Hermit, knowing the weakness of woman, and her little aptitude for the life apart, had feared that

he might be disturbed by the nearness of his penitent; but she faithfully held to his commands, abstaining

from all sight of him save on the Days of Obligation; and when they met, so modest and devout was her

demeanour that she raised his soul to fresh fervency. And gradually it grew sweet to him to think that, near by

though unseen, was one who performed the same tasks at the same hours; so that, whether he tended his

garden, or recited his chaplet, or rose under the stars to repeat the midnight office, he had a companion in all

Meanwhile the report had spread abroad that a holy woman who cast out devils had made her dwelling in the

Hermit's cliff; and many sick persons from the valley sought her out, and went away restored by her. These

poor pilgrims brought her oil and flour, and with her own hands she made a garden like the Hermit's, and

planted it with corn and lentils; but she would never take a trout from the brook, or receive the gift of a snared

wildfowl, for she said that in her vagrant life the wild creatures of the wood had befriended her, and as she

had slept in peace among them, so now she would never suffer them to be molested.

In the third year came a plague, and death walked the cities, and many poor peasants fled to the hills to

escape it. These the Hermit and his penitent faithfully tended, and so skilful were the Wild Woman's

ministrations that the report of them reached the town across the valley, and a deputation of burgesses came

with rich offerings, and besought her to descend and comfort their sick. The Hermit, seeing her depart on so

dangerous a mission, would have accompanied her, but she bade him remain and tend those who fled to the

hills; and for many days his heart was consumed in prayer for her, and he feared lest every fugitive should

But at length she returned, weariedout but whole, and covered with the blessings of the townsfolk; and

Seeing how constant she remained in her chosen life, and what advance she had made in the way of

perfection, the Hermit now felt that it behoved him to exhort her again to return to the convent; and more than

once he resolved to speak with her, but his heart hung back. At length he bethought him that by failing in this

duty he imperilled his own soul, and thereupon, on the next feastday, when they met, he reminded her that

in spite of her good works she still lived in sin and excommunicate, and that, now she had once more tasted

the sweets of godliness, it was her duty to confess her fault and give herself up to her superiors.

She heard him meekly, but when he had spoken she was silent and her tears ran over; and looking at her he

wept also, and said no more. And they prayed together, and returned each to his cave.

It was not till late winter that the plague abated; and the spring and early summer following were heavy with

rains and great heat. When the Hermit visited his penitent at the feast of Pentecost, she appeared to him so

weak and wasted that, when they had recited the Veni, sancte spiritus, and the proper psalms, he taxed her

with too great rigour of penitential practices; but she replied that her weakness was not due to an excess of

discipline, but that she had brought back from her labours among the sick a heaviness of body which the

intemperance of the season no doubt increased. The evil rains continued, falling chiefly at night, while by day

the land reeked with heat and vapours; so that lassitude fell on the Hermit also, and he could hardly drag

himself down to the spring whence he drew his drinkingwater. Thus he fell into the habit of going down to

the glen before cockcrow, after he had recited Matins; for at that hour the rain commonly ceased, and a faint

air was stirring. Now because of the wet season the stream had not gone dry, and instead of replenishing his

flagon slowly at the trickling spring, the Hermit went down to the waterside to fill it; and once, as he

descended the steep slope of the glen, he heard the covert rustle, and saw the leaves stir as though something

moved behind them. As he looked silence fell, and the leaves grew still; but his heart was shaken, for it

seemed to him that what he had seen in the dusk had a human semblance, such as the woodpeople wear.

A few days passed, and again, descending to the stream, he saw a figure flit by him through the covert; and

this time a deeper fear entered into him; but he put away the thought, and prayed fervently for all souls in

temptation. And when he spoke with the Wild Woman again, on the feast of the Seven Maccabees, which

falls on the first day of August, he was smitten with fear to see her wasted looks, and besought her to cease

from labouring and let him minister to her in her weakness. But she denied him gently, and replied that all

Before the feast of the Assumption the rains ceased, and the plague, which had begun to show itself, was

stayed; but the ardency of the sun grew greater, and the Hermit's cliff was a fiery furnace. Never had such

heat been known in those regions; but the people did not murmur, for with the cessation of the rain their crops

were saved and the pestilence banished; and these mercies they ascribed in great part to the prayers and

macerations of the two holy anchorets. Therefore on the eve of the Assumption they sent a messenger to the

Hermit, saying that at daylight on the morrow the townspeople and all the dwellers in the valley would come

forth, led by their Bishop, who bore the Pope's blessing to the two solitaries, and who was mindful to

celebrate the Mass of the Assumption in the Hermit's cave in the cliffside. At the blessed word the Hermit

was wellnigh distraught with joy, for he felt this to be a sign from heaven that his prayers were heard, and

that he had won the Wild Woman's grace as well as his own. And all night he prayed that on the morrow she

Before dawn he recited the psalms of the proper nocturn; then he girded on his gown and sandals, and went

As he went downward daylight stood on the mountains, and he thought he had never seen so fair a dawn. It

filled the farthest heaven with brightness, and penetrated even to the woody crevices of the glen, as the grace

of God had entered into the obscurest folds of his heart. The morning airs were hushed, and he heard only the

sound of his own footfall, and the murmur of the stream which, though diminished, still poured a swift

current between the rocks; but as he reached the bottom of the glen a sound of chanting came to him, and he

knew that the pilgrims were at hand. His heart leapt up and his feet hastened forward; but at the streamside

they were suddenly stayed, for in a pool where the water was still deep he saw the shining of a woman's body

Fear and rage possessed the Hermit's heart, and he stood as one smitten speechless, covering his eyes from

the shame. But the song of the approaching pilgrims swelled ever louder and nearer, and finding voice he

She made no answer, but in the dusk he saw her limbs sway with the swaying of the water, and her eyes were

turned to him as if in mockery. At the sight blind fury filled him, and clambering over the rocks to the pool's

edge he bent down and caught her by the shoulder. At that moment he could have strangled her with his

hands, so abhorrent to him was the touch of her flesh; but as he cried out on her, heaping her with cruel

names, he saw that her eyes returned his look without wavering; and suddenly it came to him that she was

dead. Then through all his anger and fear a great pang smote him; for here was his work undone, and one he

One moment pity possessed him; the next he bethought him how the people would find him bending above

the body of a naked woman, whom he had held up to them as holy, but whom they might now well take for

the secret instrument of his undoing; and beholding how at her touch all the slow edifice of his holiness was

demolished, and his soul in mortal jeopardy, he felt the earth reel round him and his sight grew red.

Already the head of the procession had entered the glen, and the stillness shook with the great sound of the

Salve Regina. When the Hermit opened his eyes once more the air was quivering with thronged

candleflames, which glittered on the gold thread of priestly vestments, and on the blazing monstrance

"My Father in God," he cried, "behold, for my sins I have been visited by a demon " But as he spoke he

perceived that those about him no longer heeded him, and that the Bishop and all his clergy had fallen on

their knees about the pool. Then the Hermit, following their gaze, saw that the brown waters of the pool

covered the Wild Woman's limbs as with a garment, and that about her floating head a great light floated; and

to the utmost edges of the throng a cry of praise went up, for many were there whom the Wild Woman had

healed and comforted, and who read God's mercy in this wonder. But fresh fear fell on the Hermit, for he had

cursed a dying saint, and denounced her aloud to all the people; and this new anguish, coming so close upon

the other, smote down his weakened frame, so that his limbs failed him and he sank once more to the ground.

Again the earth reeled about him, and the bending faces grew remote; but as he forced his weak voice once

more to proclaim his sins he felt the blessed touch of absolution, and the holy oils of the last voyage laid on

his lips and eyes. Peace returned to him then, and with it a great longing to look once more upon his lauds, as

he had dreamed of doing at his last hour; but he was too far gone to make this longing known, and so tried to

banish it from his mind. Yet in his weakness the wish held him, and the tears ran down his face.

Then, as he lay there, feeling the earth slip from under him, and the Everlasting Arms replace it, he heard a

great peal of voices that seemed to come down from the sky and mingle with the singing of the throng; and

the words of the chant were the words of his own lauds, so long hidden in the secret of his breast, and now

rejoicing above him through the spheres. And his soul rose on the chant, and soared with it to the seat of

"THE devil!" Paul Garnett exclaimed as he reread his note; and the dry old gentleman who was at the

moment his only neighbour in the quiet restaurant they both frequented, remarked with a smile: "You don't

Garnett returned the smile. "I don't know why I apostrophized him, for he's not in the least present except

The old gentleman who, like Garnett, was an American, and spoke in the thin rarefied voice which seems best

fitted to emit sententious truths, twisted his lean neck toward the younger man and cackled out shrewdly:

"Ah, it's generally a woman who is at the bottom of the unexpected. Not," he added, leaning forward with

deliberation to select a toothpick, "that that precludes the devil's being there too."

Garnett uttered the requisite laugh, and his neighbour, pushing back his plate, called out with a perfectly

His repast, as usual, had been a simple one, and he left only thirty centimes in the plate on which his account

was presented; but the waiter, to whom he was evidently a familiar presence, received the tribute with Latin

affability, and hovered helpfully about the table while the old gentleman cut and lighted his cigar.

"Yes," the latter proceeded, revolving the cigar meditatively between his thin lips, "they're generally both in

the same hole, like the owl and the prairiedog in the natural history books of my youth. I believe it was all a

mistake about the owl and the prairiedog, but it isn't about the unexpected. The fact is, the unexpected is the

devil the sooner you find that out, the happier you'll be." He leaned back, tilting his smooth bald head

against the blotched mirror behind him, and rambling on with gentle garrulity while Garnett attacked his

"Get your life down to routine eliminate surprises. Arrange things so that, when you get up in the

morning, you'll know exactly what is going to happen to you during the day and the next day and the next.

I don't say it's funny it ain't. But it's better than being hit on the head by a brickbat. That's why I always

take my meals at this restaurant. I know just how much onion they put in things if I went to the next place

I shouldn't. And I always take the same streets to come here I've been doing it for ten years now. I know at

which crossings to look out I know what I'm going to see in the shopwindows. It saves a lot of wear and

tear to know what's coming. For a good many years I never did know, from one minute to another, and now I

like to think that everything's cutanddried, and nothing unexpected can jump out at me like a tramp from a

He paused calmly to knock the ashes from his cigar, and Garnett said with a smile: "Doesn't such a plan of

The old gentleman made a contemptuous motion. "Possibilities of what? Of being multifariously miserable?

There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop

running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't

"That was Schopenhauer's idea, I believe," the young man said, pouring his wine with the smile of youthful

"I guess he hadn't the monopoly," responded his friend. "Lots of people have found out the secret the

He rose from his seat, pushing the table forward, and standing passive while the waiter advanced with his

shabby overcoat and umbrella. Then he nodded to Garnett, lifted his hat politely to the broadbosomed lady

Garnett looked after him with a musing smile. The two had exchanged views on life for two years without so

much as knowing each other's names. Garnett was a newspaper correspondent whose work kept him mainly

in London, but on his periodic visits to Paris he lodged in a dingy hotel of the Latin Quarter, the chief merit

of which was its nearness to the cheap and excellent restaurant where the two Americans had made

acquaintance. But Garnett's assiduity in frequenting the place arose, in the end, less from the excellence of the

food than from the enjoyment of his old friend's conversation. Amid the flashy sophistications of the Parisian

life to which Garnett's trade introduced him, the American sage's conversation had the crisp and homely

flavor of a native dish one of the domestic compounds for which the exiled palate is supposed to yearn. It

was a mark of the old man's impersonality that, in spite of the interest he inspired, Garnett had never got

beyond idly wondering who he might be, where he lived, and what his occupations were. He was presumably

a bachelor a man of family ties, however relaxed, though he might have been as often absent from home

would not have been as regularly present in the same place and there was about him a boundless

desultoriness which renewed Garnett's conviction that there is no one on earth as idle as an American who is

not busy. From certain allusions it was plain that he had lived many years in Paris, yet he had not taken the

trouble to adapt his tongue to the local inflections, but spoke French with the accent of one who has formed

The city itself seemed to have made as little impression on him as its speech. He appeared to have no artistic

or intellectual curiosities, to remain untouched by the complex appeal of Paris, while preserving, perhaps the

more strikingly from his very detachment, that odd American astuteness which seems the fruit of innocence

rather than of experience. His nationality revealed itself again in a mild interest in the political problems of

his adopted country, though they appeared to preoccupy him only as illustrating the boundless perversity of

mankind. The exhibition of human folly never ceased to divert him, and though his examples of it seemed

mainly drawn from the columns of one exiguous daily paper, he found there matter for endless variations on

his favorite theme. If this monotony of topic did not weary the younger man, it was because he fancied he

could detect under it the tragic implication of the fixed idea of some great moral upheaval which had

flung his friend stripped and starving on the desert island of the little cafe where they met. He hardly knew

wherein he read this revelation whether in the resigned shabbiness of the sage's dress, the impartial

courtesy of his manner, or the shade of apprehension which lurked, indescribably, in his guileless yet

suspicious eye. There were moments when Garnett could only define him by saying that he looked like a man

AN apparition almost as startling had come to Garnett himself in the shape of the mauve note received from

Not that, on the face of it, a missive announcing Mrs. Sam Newell's arrival at Ritz's, and her need of his

presence there that afternoon at five, carried any special mark of the portentous. It was not her being at Ritz's

that surprised him. The fact that she was chronically hard up, and had once or twice lately been so brutally

confronted with the consequences as to accept indeed solicit a loan of five pounds from him: this

circumstance, as Garnett knew, would never be allowed to affect the general tenor of her existence. If one

came to Paris, where could one go but to Ritz's? Did he see her in some grubby hole across the river? Or in a

family pension near the Place de l'Etoile? There was no affectation in her tendency to gravitate toward what

was costliest and most conspicuous. In doing so she obeyed one of the profoundest instincts of her nature,

and it was another instinct which taught her to gratify the first at any cost, even to that of dipping into the

pocket of an impecunious newspaper correspondent. It was a part of her strength and of her charm too

that she did such things naturally, openly, without any of the ugly grimaces of dissimulation or compunction.

Her recourse to Garnett had of course marked a specially low ebb in her fortunes. Save in moments of

exceptional dearth she had richer sources of supply; and he was nearly sure that, by running over the "society

column" of the Paris Herald, he should find an explanation, not perhaps of her presence at Ritz's, but of her

means of subsistence there. What really perplexed him was not the financial but the social aspect of the case.

When Mrs. Newell had left London in July she had told him that, between Cowes and Scotland, she and

Hermy were provided for till the middle of October: after that, as she put it, they would have to look about.

Why, then, when she had in her hand the opportunity of living for three months at the expense of the British

aristocracy, did she rush off to Paris at heaven knew whose expense in the beginning of September? She was

not a woman to act incoherently; if she made mistakes they were not of that kind. Garnett felt sure she would

never willingly relax her hold on her distinguished friends was it possible that it was they who had

As Garnett reviewed the situation he began to see that this possibility had for some time been latent in it. He

had felt that something might happen at any moment and was not this the something he had obscurely

foreseen? Mrs. Newell really moved too fast: her position was as perilous as that of an invading army without

a base of supplies. She used up everything too quickly friends, credit, influence, forbearance. It was so

easy for her to acquire all these what a pity she had never learned to keep them! He himself, for instance

the most insignificant of her acquisitions was beginning to feel like a squeezed sponge at the mere

thought of her; and it was this sense of exhaustion, of the inability to provide more, either materially or

morally, which had provoked his exclamation on opening her note. From the first days of their acquaintance

her prodigality had amazed him, but he had believed it to be surpassed by the infinity of her resources. If she

exhausted old supplies she always found new ones to replace them. When one set of people began to find her

impossible, another was always beginning to find her indispensable. Yes but there were limits there

were only so many sets of people, at least in her social classification, and when she came to an end of them,

what then? Was this flight to Paris a sign that she had come to an end was she going to try Paris because

London had failed her? The time of year precluded such a conjecture. Mrs. Newell's Paris was nonexistent

in September. The town was a desert of gaping trippers he could as soon think of her seeking social

For a moment it occurred to him that she might have to come over to replenish her wardrobe; but he knew her

dates too well to dwell long on this hope. It was in April and December that she visited the dressmakers:

before December, he had heard her explain, one got nothing but "the American fashions." Mrs. Newell's

scorn of all things American was somewhat illogically coupled with the determination to use her own

Americanism to the utmost as a means of social advance. She had found out long ago that, on certain lines, it

paid in London to be American, and she had manufactured for herself a personality independent of

geographical or social demarcations, and presenting that remarkable blend of plantation dialect, Bowery slang

and hyperbolic statement, which is the British nobility's favorite idea of an unadulterated Americanism. Mrs.

Newell, for all her talents, was not naturally either humorous or hyperbolic, and there were times when it

would doubtless have been a relief to her to be as monumentally stolid as some of the persons whose dulness

it was her fate to enliven. It was perhaps the need of relaxing which had drawn her into her odd intimacy with

Garnett, with whom she did not have to be either scrupulously English or artificially American, since the

impression she made on him was of no more consequence than that which she produced on her footman.

Garnett was perfectly aware that he owed his success to his insignificance, but the fact affected him only as

adding one more element to his knowledge of Mrs. Newell's character. He was as ready to sacrifice his

personal vanity in such a cause as he had been, at the outset of their acquaintance, to sacrifice his professional

When he had accepted the position of "London correspondent" (with an occasional sideglance at Paris) to

the New York Searchlight, he had not understood that his work was to include the obligation of

"interviewing"; indeed, had the possibility presented itself in advance, he would have met it by unpacking his

valise and returning to the drudgery of his assistanteditorship in New York. But when, after three months in

Europe, he received a letter from his chief, suggesting that he should enliven the Sunday Searchlight by a

series of "Talks with Smart Americans in London" (beginning, say, with Mrs. Sam Newell), the change of

focus already enabled him to view the proposal without passion. For his life on the edge of the great

worldcaldron of art, politics and pleasure of that highspiced brew which is nowhere else so subtly and

variously compounded had bred in him an eager appetite to taste of the heady mixture. He knew he should

never have the full spoon at his lips, but he recalled the peasantgirl in one of Browning's plays, who has

once eaten polenta cut with a knife which has carved an ortolan. Might not Mrs. Newell, who had so

successfully cut a way into the dense and succulent mass of English society, serve as the knife to season his

He had expected, as the result of the interview, to which she promptly, almost eagerly, assented, no more than

the glimpse of brightly lit vistas which a waiting messenger may catch through open doors; but instead he had

found himself drawn at once into the inner sanctuary, not of London society, but of Mrs. Newell's relation to

it. She had been candidly charmed by the idea of the interview: it struck him that she was conscious of the

need of being freshened up. Her appearance was brilliantly fresh, with the inveterate freshness of the

toilettable; her paint was as impenetrable as armor. But her personality was a little tarnished: she was in

want of social renovation. She had been doing and saying the same things for too long a time. London,

Cowes, Homburg, Scotland, Monte Carlo that had been the round since Hermy was a baby. Hermy was

her daughter, Miss Hermione Newell, who was called in presently to be shown off to the interviewer and add

Miss Newell's appearance was so full of an unassisted freshness that for a moment Garnett made the mistake

of fancying that she could fill a paragraph of her own. But he soon found that her vague personality was

merely tributary to her parent's; that her youth and grace were, in some mysterious way, her mother's rather

than her own. She smiled obediently on Garnett, but could contribute little beyond her smile and the general

sweetness of her presence, to the picture of Mrs. Newell's existence which it was the young man's business to

draw. And presently he found that she had left the room without his noticing it.

He learned in time that this unnoticeableness was the most conspicuous thing about her. Burning at best with

a mild light, she became invisible in the glare of her mother's personality. It was in fact only as a product of

her environment that poor Hermione struck the imagination. With the smartest woman in London as her

guide and example she had never developed a taste for dress, and with opportunities for enlightenment from

which Garnett's fancy recoiled she remained simple, unsuspicious and tender, with an inclination to good

works and afternoon church, a taste for the society of dull girls, and a clinging fidelity to old governesses and

retired nursemaids. Mrs. Newell, whose boast it was that she looked facts in the face, frankly owned that she

had not been able to make anything of Hermione. "If she has a role I haven't discovered it," she confessed to

Mrs. Newell spoke as if her daughter were a piece of furniture acquired without due reflection, and for which

no suitable place could be found. She got, of course, what she could out of Hermione, who wrote her notes,

ran her errands, saw tiresome people for her, and occupied an intermediate office between that of lady's maid

and secretary; but such small returns on her investment were not what Mrs. Newell had counted on. What

was the use of producing and educating a handsome daughter if she did not, in some more positive way,

"IT'S about Hermy," Mrs. Newell said, rising from the heap of embroidered cushions which formed the

Her sittingroom at Ritz's was full of penetrating warmth and fragrance. Longstemmed roses filled the

vases on the chimneypiece, in which a fire sparkled with that effect of luxury which fires produce when the

weather is not cold enough to justify them. On the writingtable, among notes and cards, and signed

photographs of celebrities, Mrs. Newell's gold inkstand, her jewelled penholder, her heavilymonogrammed

despatchbox, gave back from their expensive surfaces the glint of the flame, which sought out and

magnified the orient of the pearls among the lady's laces and found a mirror in the pinky polish of her

fingertips. It was just such a scene as a little September fire, lit for show and not for warmth, would delight

to dwell on and pick out in all its opulent details; and even Garnett, inured to Mrs. Newell's capacity for

extracting manna from the desert, reflected that she must have found new fields to glean.

"It's about Hermy," she repeated, making room for him among the cushions. "I had to see you at once. We

Garnett, seating himself, continued his leisurely survey of the room. In the glitter of Mrs. Newell's

magnificence Hermione, as usual, faded out of sight, and he hardly noticed her mother's allusion.

She received the tribute with complacency. "The rooms are not bad, are they? We came over with the

Woolsey Hubbards (you've heard of them, of course? they're from Detroit), and really they do things very

decently. Their motorcar met us at Boulogne, and the courier always wires ahead to have the rooms filled

with flowers. This salon, is really a part of their suite. I simply couldn't have afforded it myself."

She delivered these facts in a high decisive voice, which had a note akin to the clink of her many bracelets

and the rattle of her ringed hands against the enamelled cigarettecase which she extended to Garnett after

"You are always meeting such charming people," said Garnett with mild irony; and, reverting to her first

"Ill? She was never ill in her life," exclaimed Mrs. Newell, as though her daughter had been accused of an

Mrs. Newell brought out the words impressively, drawing back to observe their effect on her visitor. It was

such that he received them with a long silent stare, which finally passed into a cry of wonder. "Married? For

Mrs. Newell continued to regard him with a smile so serene and victorious that he saw she took his somewhat

unseemly astonishment as a merited tribute to her genius. Presently she extended a glittering hand and took a

Garnett, receiving the paper, read in Hermione's own finished hand: "A marriage has been arranged, and will

shortly take place, between the Comte Louis du Trayas, son of the Marquis du Trayas de la Baume, and Miss

Hermione Newell, daughter of Samuel C. Newell Esqre. of Elmira, N. Y. Comte Louis du Trayas belongs to

one of the oldest and most distinguished families in France, and is equally well connected in England, being

the nephew of Lord Saint Priscoe and a cousin of the Countess of Morningfield, whom he frequently visits at

The perusal of this document filled Garnett with such deepening wonder that he could not, for the moment,

even do justice to the strangeness of its being written out for publication in the bride's own hand. Hermione a

bride! Hermione a future countess! Hermione on the brink of a marriage which would give her not only a

great "situation" in the Parisian world but a footing in some of the best houses in England! Regardless of its

unflattering implications, Garnett prolonged his stare of mute amazement till Mrs. Newell somewhat sharply

Garnett, in spite of himself, smiled at this revised version of his hostess's frequent assertion that Hermione

was too goodygoody to take in England, but that with her little dowdy air she might very well "go off" in

the Faubourg if only a dot could be raked up for her and the recollection flashed a new light on the

"But how did you do it ?" was on the tip of his tongue; and he had barely time to give the query the more

"Oh, we were up at Glaish with the Edmund Fitzarthurs. Lady Edmund is a sort of cousin of the

Morningfields', who have a shootinglodge near Glaish a place called Portlow and young Trayas was

there with them. Lady Edmund, who is a dear, drove Hermy over to Portlow, and the thing was done in no

time. He simply fell over head and ears in love with her. You know Hermy is really very handsome in her

peculiar way. I don't think you have ever appreciated her," Mrs. Newell summed up with a note of exquisite

"I've appreciated her, I assure you; but one somehow didn't think of her marrying so soon."

"Soon? She's threeandtwenty; but you've no imagination," said Mrs. Newell; and Garnett inwardly

admitted that he had not enough to soar to the heights of her invention. For the marriage, of course, was an

invention of her own, a superlative stroke of business, in which he was sure the principal parties had all been

passive agents, in which everyone, from the bankrupt and disreputable Fitzarthurs to the rich and immaculate

Morningfields, had by some mysterious sleight of hand been made to fit into Mrs. Newell's designs. But it

was not enough for Garnett to marvel at her work he wanted to understand it, to take it apart, to find out

how the trick had been done. It was true that Mrs. Newell had always said Hermy might go off in the

Faubourg if she had a dot but even Mrs. Newell's juggling could hardly conjure up a dot: such feats as she

was able to perform in this line were usually made to serve her own urgent necessities. And besides, who was

likely to take sufficient interest in Hermione to supply her with the means of marrying a French nobleman?

The flowers ordered in advance by the Woolsey Hubbards' courier made Garnett wonder if that accomplished

functionary had also wired over to have Miss Newell's settlements drawn up. But of all the comments

hovering on his lips the only one he could decently formulate was the remark that he supposed Mrs. Newell

and her daughter had come over to see the young man's family and make the final arrangements.

"Oh, they're made everything is settled," said Mrs. Newell, looking him squarely in the eye. "You're

wondering, of course, about the dot Frenchmen never go off their heads to the extent of forgetting that; or

Garnett murmured a vague assent, and she went on without the least appearance of resenting his curiosity: "It

all came about so fortunately. Only fancy, just the week they met I got a little legacy from an aunt in Elmira

a good soul I hadn't seen or heard of for years. I suppose I ought to have put on mourning for her, by the

way, but it would have eaten up a good bit of the legacy, and I really needed it all for poor Hermy. Oh, it's not

a fortune, you understand but the young man is madly in love, and has always had his own way, so after a

lot of correspondence it's been arranged. They saw Hermy this morning, and they're enchanted."

"Yes, in a few weeks, here. His mother is an invalid and couldn't have gone to England. Besides, the French

Mrs. Newell stared. "It doesn't take long. And it suits Hermy exactly she can go to church so much

oftener. So I thought," Mrs. Newell concluded with dignity, "that a wedding at Saint Philippe du Roule would

"Dear me," said Garnett, "I am left breathless I can't catch up with you. I suppose even the day is fixed,

though Miss Hermione doesn't mention it," and he indicated the official announcement in his hand.

Mrs. Newell laughed. "Hermy had to write that herself, poor dear, because my scrawl's too hideous but I

dictated it. No, the day isn't fixed that's why I sent for you." There was a splendid directness about Mrs.

Newell. It would never have occurred to her to pretend to Garnett that she had summoned him for the

Mrs. Newell met his banter with a look which quelled it. "I want you to find her father."

Garnett blushed at his own clumsiness. "I yes that is, I really knew nothing " he stammered, feeling

that each word added to it. If Hermione was unnoticeable, Mr. Newell had always been invisible. The young

man had never so much as given him a thought, and it was awkward to come on him so suddenly at a turn of

"Well, he is living here in Paris," said Mrs. Newell, with a note of asperity which seemed to imply that her

"To find him? I daresay it won't be difficult, though he is rather mysterious. But the point is that I can't go to

"That he must come to the wedding that we must show ourselves together at church and at the breakfast."

She delivered the behest in her sharp imperative key, the tone of the born commander. But for once Garnett

"He must if he cares for his daughter's happiness. She can't be married without him."

"The French are like that especially the old families. I was given to understand at once that my husband

"Mercy, no! Divorce is stupid. They don't like it in Europe. And in this case it would have been the end of

Hermy's marriage. They wouldn't think of letting their son marry the child of divorced parents."

"Yes; but I always think of such things beforehand. And of course I've told them that my husband will be

"No; not at first; but you must make him. You must tell him how sweet Hermione is and you must see

Louis, and be able to describe their happiness. You must dine here tonight he is coming. We're all dining

with the Hubbards, and they expect you. They have given Hermy some very good diamonds though I

should have preferred a cheque, as she'll be horribly poor. But I think Kate Hubbard means to do something

about the trousseau Hermy is at Paquin's with her now. You've no idea how delightful all our friends have

been. Ah, here is one of them now," she broke off smiling, as the door opened to admit, without

preliminary announcement, a gentleman so glossy and ancient, with such a fixed unnatural freshness of smile

and eye, that he gave Garnett the effect of having been embalmed and then enamelled. It needed not the

exoticlooking ribbon in the visitor's buttonhole, nor Mrs. Newell's introduction of him as her friend Baron

Schenkelderff, to assure Garnett of his connection with a race as ancient as his appearance.

Baron Schenkelderff greeted his hostess with paternal playfulness, and the young man with an ease which

might have been acquired on the Stock Exchange and in the dressingrooms of "leading ladies." He spoke a

faultless, colourless English, from which one felt he might pass with equal mastery to half a dozen other

languages. He enquired patronizingly for the excellent Hubbards, asked his hostess if she did not mean to

give him a drop of tea and a cigarette, remarked that he need not ask if Hermione was still closeted with the

dressmaker, and, on the waiter's coming in answer to his ring, ordered the tea himself, and added a request

for fine champagne. It was not the first time that Garnett had seen such minor liberties taken in Mrs. Newell's

drawingroom, but they had hitherto been taken by persons who had at least the superiority of knowing what

they were permitting themselves, whereas the young man felt almost sure that Baron Schenkelderff's manner

was the most distinguished he could achieve; and this deepened the disgust with which, as the minutes

GARNETT had always foreseen that Mrs. Newell might some day ask him to do something he should greatly

dislike. He had never gone so far as to conjecture what it might be, but had simply felt that if he allowed his

acquaintance with her to pass from spectatorship to participation he must be prepared to find himself, at any

The moment had come; and he was relieved to find that he could meet it by refusing her request. He had not

always been sure that she would leave him this alternative. She had a way of involving people in her

complications without their being aware of it, and Garnett had pictured himself in holes so tight that there

might not be room for a wriggle. Happily in this case he could still move freely. Nothing compelled him to

act as an intermediary between Mrs. Newell and her husband, and it was preposterous to suppose that, even in

a life of such perpetual upheaval as hers, there were no roots which struck deeper than her casual intimacy

with himself. She had simply laid hands on him because he happened to be within reach, and he would put

Having thus inwardly asserted his independence, he felt free to let his fancy dwell on the strangeness of the

situation. He had always supposed that Mrs. Newell, in her flight through life, must have thrown a good

many victims to the wolves, and had assumed that Mr. Newell had been among the number. That he had been

dropped overboard at an early stage in the lady's career seemed probable from the fact that neither his wife

nor his daughter ever mentioned him. Mrs. Newell was incapable of reticence, and if her husband had still

been an active element in her life he would certainly have figured in her conversation. Garnett, if he thought

of the matter at all, had concluded that divorce must long since have eliminated Mr. Newell; but he now saw

how he had underrated his friend's faculty for using up the waste material of life. She had always struck him

as the most extravagant of women, yet it turned out that by a miracle of thrift she had for years kept a

superfluous husband on the chance that he might some day be useful to her. The day had come, and Mr.

Newell was to be called from his obscurity. Garnett wondered what had become of him in the interval, and in

what shape he would respond to the evocation. The fact that his wife feared he might not respond to it at all,

seemed to show that his exile was voluntary, or had at least come to appear preferable to other alternatives;

but if that were the case it was curious that he should not have taken legal means to free himself. He could

hardly have had his wife's motives for wishing to maintain the vague tie between them; but conjecture lost

itself in trying to picture what his point of view was likely to be, and Garnett, on his way to the Hubbards'

dinner that evening, could not help regretting that circumstances denied him the opportunity of meeting so

enigmatic a person. The young man's knowledge of Mrs. Newell's methods made him feel that her husband

might be an interesting study. This, however, did not affect his resolve to keep clear of the business. He

entered the Hubbards' diningroom with the firm intention of refusing to execute Mrs. Newell's commission,

and if he changed his mind in the course of the evening it was not owing to that lady's persuasions.

Garnett's curiosity as to the Hubbards' share in Hermione's marriage was appeased before he had been seated

Mrs. Woolsey Hubbard was an expansive blonde, whose ample but disciplined outline seemed the result of a

wellmatched struggle between her cook and her corsetmaker. She talked a great deal of what was

appropriate in dress and conduct, and seemed to regard Mrs. Newell as a final arbiter on both points. To do or

to wear anything inappropriate would have been extremely mortifying to Mrs. Hubbard, and she was

evidently resolved, at the price of eternal vigilance, to prove her familiarity with what she frequently referred

to as "the right thing." Mr. Hubbard appeared to have no such preoccupations. Garnett, if called upon to

describe him, would have done so by saying that he was the American who always pays. The young man, in

the course of his foreign wanderings, had come across many fellowcitizens of Mr. Hubbard's type, in the

most diverse company and surroundings; and wherever they were to be found, they always had their hands in

their pockets. Mr. Hubbard's standard of gentility was the extent of a man's capacity to "foot the bill"; and as

no one but an occasional compatriot cared to dispute the privilege with him, he seldom had reason to doubt

Garnett, nevertheless, did not believe that this lavish pair were, as Mrs. Newell would have phrased it,

"putting up" Hermione's dot. They would go very far in diamonds, but they would hang back from securities.

Their readiness to pay was indefinably mingled with a dread of being expected to, and their prodigalities

would take flight at the first hint of coercion. Mrs. Newell, who had had a good deal of experience in

managing this type of millionaire, could be trusted not to arouse their susceptibilities, and Garnett was

therefore certain that the chimerical legacy had been extracted from other pockets. There were none in view

but those of Baron Schenkelderff, who, seated at Mrs. Hubbard's right, with a new order in his buttonhole,

and a fresh glaze upon his features, enchanted that lady by his careless references to crowned heads and his

condescending approval of the champagne. Garnett was more than ever certain that it was the Baron who was

paying; and it was this conviction which made him suddenly feel that, at any cost, Hermione's marriage must

take place. He had felt no special interest in the marriage except as one more proof of Mrs. Newell's

extraordinary capacity; but now it appealed to him from the girl's own standpoint. For he saw, with a touch

of compunction, that in the mephitic air of her surroundings a lovestory of surprising freshness had

miraculously flowered. He had only to intercept the glances which the young couple exchanged to find

himself transported to the candid region of romance. It was evident that Hermione adored and was adored;

that the lovers believed in each other and in every one about them, and that even the legacy of the defunct

His first glance at the Comte Louis du Trayas showed Garnett that, by some marvel of fitness, Hermione had

happened upon a kindred nature. If the young man's long mild features and shortsighted glance revealed no

special force of character, they showed a benevolence and simplicity as incorruptible as her own, and

declared that their possessor, whatever his failings, would never imperil the illusions she had so miraculously

preserved. The fact that the girl took her good fortune naturally, and did not regard herself as suddenly

snatched from the jaws of death, added poignancy to the situation; for if she missed this way of escape, and

was thrown back on her former life, the day of discovery could not be long deferred. It made Garnett shiver

to think of her growing old between her mother and Schenkelderff, or such successors of the Baron's as might

probably attend on Mrs. Newell's waning fortunes; for it was clear to him that the Baron marked the first

stage in his friend's decline. When Garnett took leave that evening he had promised Mrs. Newell that he

IF Mr. Newell read in the papers the announcement of his daughter's marriage it did not cause him to lift the

A round of the American banks in Paris failed to give Garnett his address, and it was only in chance talk with

one of the young secretaries of the Embassy that he was put on Mr. Newell's track. The secretary's father, it

appeared, had known the Newells some twenty years earlier. He had had business relations with Mr. Newell,

who was then a man of property, with factories or something of the kind, the narrator thought, somewhere in

Western New York. There had been at this period, for Mrs. Newell, a phase of large hospitality and showy

carriages in Washington and at Narragansett. Then her husband had had reverses, had lost heavily in Wall

Street, and had finally drifted abroad and been lost to sight. The young man did not know at what point in his

financial decline Mr. Newell had parted company with his wife and daughter; "though you may bet your hat,"

he philosophically concluded, "that the old girl hung on as long as there were any pickings." He did not

himself know Mr. Newell's address, but opined that it might be extracted from a certain official at the

Consulate, if Garnett could give a sufficiently good reason for the request; and here in fact Mrs. Newell's

emissary learned that her husband was to be found in an obscure street of the Luxembourg quarter.

In order to be near the scene of action, Garnett went to breakfast at his usual haunt, determined to despatch

his business as early in the day as politeness allowed. The head waiter welcomed him to a table near that of

the transatlantic sage, who sat in his customary corner, his head tilted back against the blistered mirror at an

angle suggesting that in a freer civilization his feet would have sought the same level. He greeted Garnett

affably and the two exchanged their usual generalizations on life till the sage rose to go; whereupon it

occurred to Garnett to accompany him. His friend took the offer in good part, merely remarking that he was

going to the Luxembourg gardens, where it was his invariable habit, on good days, to feed the sparrows with

the remains of his breakfast roll; and Garnett replied that, as it happened, his own business lay in the same

"Perhaps, by the way," he added, "you can tell me how to find the rue Panonceaux where I must go presently.

His companion came to a sudden halt on the narrow sidewalk, to the confusion of the dense and desultory

traffic which marks the old streets of the Latin quarter. He fixed his mild eye on Garnett and gave a twist to

"The rue Panonceaux? It is an out of the way hole, but I can tell you how to find it," he answered.

He made no motion to do so, however, but continued to bend on the young man the full force of his

interrogative gaze; then he added abruptly: "Would you mind telling me your object in going there?"

Garnett looked at him with surprise: a question so unblushingly personal was strangely out of keeping with

his friend's usual attitude of detachment. Before he could reply, however, the other had quietly continued:

His companion uttered a sigh. "I supposed so," he said resignedly; "and in that case," he added, "we may as

Garnett had halted before him with deepening astonishment. "But you don't mean to tell me ?" he

The little man made a motion of assent. "I am Samuel C. Newell," he said drily; "and if you have no

objection, I prefer not to break through my habit of feeding the sparrows. We are five minutes late as it is."

He quickened his pace without awaiting any reply from Garnett, who walked beside him in unsubdued

wonder till they reached the Luxembourg gardens, where Mr. Newell, making for one of the less frequented

alleys, seated himself on a bench and drew the fragment of a roll from his pocket. His coming was evidently

expected, for a shower of little dusky bodies at once descended on him, and the gravel fluttered with battling

It was not till the ground was white with crumbs, and the first frenzy of his pensioners appeased, that he

Garnett coloured with embarrassment: the more simply the old man took his mission the more complicated it

"From your wife and from Miss Newell," he said at length. "You have perhaps heard that she is to be

"Oh, yes I read the Herald pretty faithfully," said Miss Newell's parent, shaking out another handful of

Garnett cleared his throat. "Then you have no doubt thought it natural that, under the circumstances, they

The sage continued to fix his attention on the sparrows. "My wife," he remarked, "might have written to me."

"In reply? Why should she? I suppose she merely wishes to announce the marriage. She knows I have no

Garnett felt his colour deepen: he had a vague sense of standing as the representative of something guilty and

"I don't think you understand," he said. "Mrs. Newell and your daughter have asked me to see you because

Mr. Newell, at this, ceased to give his attention to the birds, and turned a compassionate gaze upon Garnett.

"My dear sir I don't know your name " he remarked, "would you mind telling me how long you have

been acquainted with Mrs. Newell?" And without waiting for an answer he added judicially: "If you wait

This echo of his own thoughts gave Garnett a sharp twinge of discomfort, but he made shift to answer

goodhumouredly: "If you refer to my present errand, I must tell you that I don't find it disagreeable to do

Mr. Newell fumbled in his pocket, as though searching unavailingly for another morsel of bread; then he said:

"From her point of view I shall not be the most important person at the ceremony."

Garnett smiled. "That is hardly a reason " he began; but he was checked by the brevity of tone with which

his companion replied: "I am not aware that I am called upon to give you my reasons."

"You are certainly not," the young man rejoined, "except in so far as you are willing to consider me as the

"Oh, I accept your credentials," said the other with his dry smile; "what I don't recognize is their right to send

This reduced Garnett to silence, and after a moment's pause Mr. Newell drew his watch from his pocket.

"I am sorry to cut the conversation short, but my days are mapped out with a certain regularity, and this is the

hour for my nap." He rose as he spoke and held out his hand with a glint of melancholy humour in his small

"My dear sir, those ladies have got on very well without me for a number of years: I imagine they can put

"You are mistaken, then; if it were not for that I shouldn't have undertaken this errand."

"The fact that, as it happens, the wedding can't be put through without your help."

Mr. Newell's thin lips formed a noiseless whistle. "They've got to have my consent, have they? Well, is he a

"The bridegroom?" Garnett echoed in surprise. "I hear the best accounts of him and Miss Newell is very

Her parent met this with an odd smile. "Well, then, I give my consent it's all I've got left to give," he

Garnett hesitated. "But if you consent if you approve why do you refuse your daughter's request?"

Mr. Newell looked at him a moment. "Ask Mrs. Newell!" he said. And as Garnett was again silent, he turned

But in an instant the young man was at his side. "I will not ask your reasons, sir," he said, "but I will give you

mine for being here. Miss Newell cannot be married unless you are present at the ceremony. The young man's

parents know that she has a father living, and they give their consent only on condition that he appears at her

"Old French families be damned!" said Mr. Newell with sudden vigour. "She had better marry an American."

But his resistance only strengthened the young man's. The more unpleasant the latter's task became, the more

unwilling he grew to see his efforts end in failure. During the three days which had been consumed in his

quest it had become clear to him that the bridegroom's parents, having been surprised into a reluctant consent,

were but too ready to withdraw it on the plea of Mr. Newell's nonappearance. Mrs. Newell, on the last edge

of tension, had confided to Garnett that the Morningfields were "being nasty"; and he could picture the whole

powerful clan, on both sides of the Channel, arrayed in a common resolve to exclude poor Hermione from

their ranks. The very inequality of the contest stirred his blood, and made him vow that in this case at least

the sins of the parents should not be visited on the children. In his talk with the young secretary he had

obtained some glimpses of Baron Schenkelderff's past which fortified this resolve. The Baron, at one time a

familiar figure in a muchobserved London set, had been mixed up in an ugly moneylending business

ending in suicide, which had excluded him from the society most accessible to his race. His alliance with

Mrs. Newell was doubtless a desperate attempt at rehabilitation, a forlorn hope on both sides, but likely to be

an enduring tie because it represented, to both partners, their last chance of escape from social extinction.

That Hermione's marriage was a mere stake in their game did not in the least affect Garnett's view of its

urgency. If on their part it was a sordid speculation, to her it had the freshness of the first wooing. If it made

of her a mere pawn in their hands, it would put her, so Garnett hoped, beyond farther risk of such base uses;

The sense that, if he lost sight of Mr. Newell, the latter might not easily be found again, nerved Garnett to

hold his ground in spite of the resistance he encountered; and he tried to put the full force of his plea into the

MRS. NEWELL, that afternoon, met him on the threshold of her sittingroom with a "Well?" of pentup

In the room itself, Baron Schenkelderff sat with crossed legs and head thrown back, in an attitude which he

Garnett hesitated; but it was not the summariness of the Baron's greeting which he resented.

She followed his glance and answered it with a slight shrug. "I can't take you into my room, because there's a

dressmaker there, and she won't go because she is waiting to be paid. Schenkelderff," she exclaimed, "you're

The Baron rose and, lighting a cigarette, laughingly retired to the embrasure. Mrs. Newell flung herself down

"I told him so; but you must remember that he has plenty. He has taken twentyfour hours."

Mrs. Newell groaned. "Oh, that's too much. When he thinks things over he always refuses."

She rose nervously from her seat and pressed her hands to her forehead. "It's too hard, after all I've done! The

trousseau is ordered think how disgraceful! You must have managed him badly; I'll go and see him

"I was merely putting myself in the place of a man on whom you have ceased to smile."

He picked up his hat and stick, nodded knowingly to Garnett, and walked toward the door with an air of

"Don't go I must speak to you," she said, following him into the antechamber; and Garnett remembered

In a moment Mrs. Newell returned, with a small flat packet which she vainly sought to dissemble in an

"He makes everything too odious!" she exclaimed; but whether she referred to her husband or the Baron it

She sat silent, nervously twisting her cigarettecase between her fingers, while her visitor rehearsed the

details of his conversation with Mr. Newell. He did not indeed tell her the arguments he had used to shake her

husband's resolve, since in his eloquent sketch of Hermione's situation there had perforce entered hints

unflattering to her mother; but he gave the impression that his hearer had in the end been moved, and for that

"Ah, it's not that it's to prolong our misery!" Mrs. Newell exclaimed; and after a moment she added

It seemed needless for Garnett to protract his visit, and he took leave with the promise to report at once the

result of his final talk with Mr. Newell. But as he was passing through the antechamber a sidedoor opened

and Hermione stood before him. Her face was flushed and shaken out of its usual repose of line, and he saw

He paused, considering her with surprise: he had never supposed her capable of such emotion as her voice

"I want to speak to you; we are quite safe here. Mamma is with the dressmaker," she explained, closing the

"You have seen my father? Mamma told me that you were to see him today," the girl went on, standing

"Yes; I have seen him," Garnett replied with increasing wonder. Hermione had never before mentioned her

father to him, and it was by a slight stretch of veracity that he had included her name in her mother's plea to

Mr. Newell. He had supposed her to be either unconscious of the transaction, or else too much engrossed in

her own happiness to give it a thought; and he had forgiven her the last alternative in consideration of the

abnormal character of her filial relations. But now he saw that he must readjust his view of her.

"You went to ask him to come to my wedding; I know about it," Hermione continued. "Of course it is the

custom people will think it odd if he does not come." She paused, and then asked: "Does he consent?"

He was astonished at the passion of her accent; astonished still more at the tone with which she went on,

laying her hand on his arm: "Mr. Garnett, he must not be asked he has been asked too often to do things

Garnett looked at the girl with a shock of awe. What abysses of knowledge did her purity hide?

"I know what you are going to say," she interrupted him. "It is necessary that he should be present at the

marriage or the du Trayas will break it off. They don't want it very much, at any rate," she added with a

strange candour, "and they will not be sorry, perhaps for of course Louis would have to obey them."

"Yes yes; I knew you would put it to him. But that makes no difference, Mr. Garnett. He must not be

"No; but if it is painful to him if it reminds him too much . . . Oh, Mr. Garnett, I was not a child when he

left us. . . . I was old enough to see . . . to see how it must hurt him even now to be reminded. Peace was all he

Garnett paused in deep embarrassment. "My dear child, there is no need to remind you that your own future

She had a gesture that recalled her mother. "My future must take care of itself; he must not be made to see

us!" she said imperatively. And as Garnett remained silent she went on: "I have always hoped he did not hate

Garnett continued to stand before her, deeply struck. "It might be the best thing," he reflected inwardly; but

he did not give utterance to the thought. He merely put out his hand, holding Hermione's in a long pressure.

"Then I want you to repeat to him what I have said I want him to be left undisturbed. I don't want him

The next day, at the appointed hour, Garnett resorted to the Luxembourg gardens, which Mr. Newell had

named as a meetingplace in preference to his own lodgings. It was clear that he did not wish to admit the

young man any further into his privacy than the occasion required, and the extreme shabbiness of his dress

Garnett found him feeding the sparrows, but he desisted at the young man's approach, and said at once: "You

"If that means that you are going to send me away with a refusal, I have come to spare you the necessity,"

Mr. Newell turned on him a glance of undisguised wonder, in which an undertone of disappointment might

"I want to make'em hate ugliness so that they'll smash nearly everything in sight."

IN the good days, just after we all left college, Ned Halidon and I used to listen, laughing and smoking, while

They were immense, these plans, involving, as it sometimes seemed, the ultimate aesthetic redemption of the

whole human race; and provisionally restoring the sense of beauty to those unhappy millions of our fellow

countrymen who, as Ambrose movingly pointed out, now live and die in surroundings of unperceived and

"I want to bring the poor starved wretches back to their lost inheritance, to the divine past they've thrown

away I want to make 'em hate ugliness so that they'll smash nearly everything in sight," he would

passionately exclaim, stretching his arms across the shabby blackwalnut writingtable and shaking his thin

"You might set the example by smashing that table," I once suggested with youthful brutality; and Paul,

pulling himself up, cast a surprised glance at me, and then looked slowly about the parental library, in which

His parents were dead, and he had inherited the house in Seventeenth Street, where his grandfather Ambrose

had lived in a setting of black walnut and pier glasses, giving Madeira dinners, and saying to his guests, as

they rejoined the ladies across a florid waste of Aubusson carpet: "This, sir, is Dabney's first study for the

Niagara the Grecian Slave in the bay window was executed for me in Rome twenty years ago by my old

friend Ezra Stimpson " by token of which he passed for a Maecenas in the New York of the 'forties,' and a

poem had once been published in the Keepsake or the Book of Beauty "On a picture in the possession of

Since then the house had remained unchanged. Paul's father, a frugal liver and hardheaded manipulator of

investments, did not inherit old Jonathan's artistic sensibilities, and was content to live and die in the

unmodified black walnut and red rep of his predecessor. It was only in Paul that the grandfather's aesthetic

faculty revived, and Mrs. Ambrose used often to say to her husband, as they watched the little palebrowed

boy poring over an old number of the Art Journal: "Paul will know how to appreciate your father's treasures."

In recognition of these transmitted gifts Paul, on leaving Harvard, was sent to Paris with a tutor, and

established in a studio in which nothing was ever done. He could not paint, and recognized the fact early

enough to save himself much wasted labor and his friends many painful efforts in dissimulation. But he

brought back a touching enthusiasm for the forms of beauty which an old civilization had revealed to him and

He had paused in his harangue to take in my illtimed parenthesis, and the color mounted slowly to his thin

"It is an ugly room," he owned, as though he had noticed the library for the first time.

The desk was carved at the angles with the heads of helmeted knights with long blackwalnut moustaches.

The red cloth top was worn threadbare, and patterned like a map with islands and peninsulas of ink; and in

its centre throned a massive bronze inkstand representing a Syrian maiden slumbering by a well beneath a

"The fact is," I said, walking home that evening with Ned Halidon, "old Paul will never do anything, for the

Ned, who was an idealist, shook his handsome head. "It's not that, my dear fellow. He simply doesn't see

The next time I dined with Paul he said, when we entered the library, and I had gently rejected one of his

cheap cigars in favour of a superior article of my own: "Look here, I've been looking round for a decent

writingtable. I don't care, as a rule, to turn out old things, especially when they've done good service, but I

"For an apostle of beauty to write his evangel on," I agreed, "it is a little inappropriate, except as an awful

Paul colored. "Well, but, my dear fellow, I'd no idea how much a table of this kind costs. I find I can't get

anything decent the plainest mahogany under a hundred and fifty." He hung his head, and pretended

"Well, what's a hundred and fifty to you?" I rejoined. "You talk as if you had to live on a bookkeeper's

He smiled nervously and twirled the ring on his thin finger. "I know I know that's all very well. But for

twenty tables that I don't buy I can send some fellow abroad and unseal his eyes."

"Oh, hang it, do both!" I exclaimed impatiently; but the writingtable was never bought. The library

remained as it was, and so did the contention between Halidon and myself, as to whether this inconsistent

acceptance of his surroundings was due, on our friend's part, to a congenital inability to put his hand in his

pocket, or to a real unconsciousness of the ugliness that happened to fall inside his point of vision.

"Yes, but not till you'd called his attention to the fact; and I'll wager he became unconscious of it again as

"Not before he'd had time to look at a lot of others, and make up his mind that he couldn't afford to buy one."

"That was just his excuse. He'd rather be thought mean than insensible to ugliness. But the truth is that he

"Oh, hang it, now, if he were mean would he have founded three travelling scholarships and be planning this

"Yes; and magnificently, royally generous to all the world besides!" Halidon exclaimed with one of his great

But if, on the whole, the last word remained with Halidon, and Ambrose's personal chariness seemed a

trifling foible compared to his altruistic breadth of intention, yet neither of us could help observing, as time

went on, that the habit of thrift was beginning to impede the execution of his schemes of artphilanthropy.

The three travelling scholarships had been founded in the first blaze of his ardour, and before the personal

management of his property had awakened in him the sleeping instincts of parsimony. But as his capital

accumulated, and problems of investment and considerations of interest began to encroach upon his visionary

"For every thousand dollars he talks of spending on his work, I believe he knocks off a cigar, or buys one less

newspaper," Halidon grumbled affectionately; "but after all," he went on, with one of the quick revivals of

optimism that gave a perpetual freshness to his spirit, "after all, it makes one admire him all the more when

one sees such a nature condemned to be at war with the petty inherited instinct of greed."

Still, I could see it was a disappointment to Halidon that the great project of the Academy of Arts should

languish on paper long after all its details had been discussed and settled to the satisfaction of the projector,

"He's quite right to do nothing in a hurry to take advice and compare ideas and points of view to

collect and classify his material in advance," Halidon argued, in answer to a taunt of mine about Paul's

perpetually reiterated plea that he was still waiting for Soandso's report; "but now that the plan's mature

and such a plan! You'll grant it's magnificent? I should think he'd burn to see it carried out, instead of

pottering over it till his enthusiasm cools and the whole business turns stale on his hands."

That summer Ambrose went to Europe, and spent his holiday in a frugal walkingtour through Brittany.

When he came back he seemed refreshed by his respite from business cares and from the interminable

revision of his cherished scheme; while contact with the concrete manifestations of beauty had, as usual,

"By Jove," he cried, "whenever I indulged my unworthy eyes in a long gaze at one of those big things

picture or church or statue I kept saying to myself: 'You lucky devil, you, to be able to provide such a

sight as that for eyes that can make some good use of it! Isn't it better to give fifty fellows a chance to paint or

carve or build, than to be able to daub canvas or punch clay in a corner all by yourself?'"

"Well," I said, when he had worked off his first ebullition, "when is the foundation stone to be laid?"

Paul, with his hands in his sagging pockets, began to pace the library hearthrug I can see him now,

"My dear fellow, there are one or two points to be considered still one or two new suggestions I picked up

I sat silent, and he paused before me, flushing to the roots of his thin hair. "You think I've had time enough

that I ought to have put the thing through before this? I suppose you're right; I can see that even Ned

Halidon thinks so; and he has always understood my difficulties better than you have."

This insinuation exasperated me. "Ned would have put it through years ago!" I broke out.

Paul pulled at his straggling moustache. "You mean he has more executive capacity? More no, it's not

He had never before alluded to this weakness to either of us, and I sat abashed, suffering from his evident

distress. But he remained planted before me, his little legs wide apart, his eyes fixed on mine in an agony of

"That's my trouble, and I know it. Big sums frighten me I can't look them in the face. By George, I wish

Ned had the carrying out of this scheme I wish he could spend my money for me!" His face was lit by the

reflection of a passing thought. "Do you know, I shouldn't wonder if I dropped out of the running before

either of you chaps, and in case I do I've half a mind to leave everything in trust to Halidon, and let him put

"Much better have your own fun with it," I retorted; but he shook his head, saying with a sigh as he turned

Halidon, to whom I could not help repeating our talk, was amused and touched by his friend's thought.

"Heaven knows what will become of the scheme, if Paul doesn't live to carry it out. There are a lot of hungry

Ambrose cousins who will make one gulp of his money, and never give a dollar to the work. Jove, it would

be a fine thing to have the carrying out of such a plan but he'll do it yet, you'll see he'll do it yet!" cried

Ned, his old faith in his friend flaming up again through the wet blanket of fact.

PAUL AMBROSE did not die and leave his fortune to Halidon, but the following summer he did something

far more unexpected. He went abroad again, and came back married. Now our busy fancy had never seen

Paul married. Even Ned recognized the vague unlikelihood of such a metamorphosis.

"He'd stick at the parson's fee not to mention the best man's scarfpin. And I should hate," Ned added

sentimentally, "to see 'the touch of a woman's hand' desecrate the sublime ugliness of the ancestral home.

"Goodbye, poor Academy!" I exclaimed, tossing over the bridegroom's eightpage rhapsody to Halidon, who

"Now, why the deuce do you say that?" he growled. "I never saw such a beast as you are for imputing mean

To defend myself from this accusation I put out my hand and recovered Paul's letter.

"Here: listen to this. 'Studying art in Paris when I met her "the vision and the faculty divine, but lacking

the accomplishment," etc. . . . A little ethereal profile, like one of Piero della Francesca's angels . . . not rich,

thank heaven, but not afraid of money, and already enamored of my project for fertilizing my sterile millions

"Well, why the deuce ?" Ned began again, as though I had convicted myself out of my friend's mouth; and

He brushed aside my misgivings. "Thank heaven, she can't paint, any how. And now that I think of it, Paul's

The lady was lovely, of that there could be no doubt; and if Paul now for a time forgot the Academy, his

doing so was but a vindication of his sex. Halidon had only a glimpse of the returning couple before he was

himself snatched up in one of the chariots of adventure that seemed perpetually waiting at his door. This time

he was going to the far East in the train of a "special mission," and his head was humming with new hopes

"You'll see you'll see!" he summed up hopefully as we parted; and what I was to see was, of course, the

crowning pinnacle of the Academy lifting itself against the horizon of the immediate future.

It was in the nature of things that I should, meanwhile, see less than formerly of the projector of that

unrealized structure. Paul had a personal dread of society, but he wished to show his wife to the world, and I

was not often a spectator on these occasions. Paul indeed, good fellow, tried to maintain the pretense of an

unbroken intercourse, and to this end I was asked to dine now and then; but when I went I found guests of a

new type, who, after dinner, talked of sport and stocks, while their host blinked at them silently through the

The first innovation that struck me was a sudden improvement in the quality of the cigars. Was this Daisy's

doing? (Mrs. Ambrose was Daisy.) It was hard to tell she produced her results so noiselessly. With her

fair bent head and vague smile, she seemed to watch life flow by without, as yet, trusting anything of her own

to its current. But she was watching, at any rate, and anything might come of that. Such modifications as she

produced were as yet almost imperceptible to any but the trained observer. I saw that Paul wished her to be

well dressed, but also that he suffered her to drive in a hired brougham, and to have her door opened by the

rawboned Celt who had bumped down the dishes on his bachelor table. The drawingroom curtains were

renewed, but this change served only to accentuate the enormities of the carpet, and perhaps discouraged Mrs.

Ambrose from farther experiments. At any rate, the desecrating touch that Halidon had affected to dread

In the early summer, when Ned returned, the Ambroses had flown to Europe again and the Academy was

"Well, what do you make of her?" the traveller asked, as we sat over our first dinner together.

"Too many things and they don't hang together. Perhaps she's still in the chrysalis stage."

"Oh, there you go again!" I offered no denial, and after a pause he asked: "Did she ever talk to you about it?"

"She thinks it all too beautiful. She would like to see beauty put within the reach of everyone."

Halidon rose with a shrug. "Very likely you frightened her with your ugly sardonic grin."

But the next winter did not bring Ambrose back. A brief line, written in November from the Italian lakes, told

me that he had "a rotten cough," and that the doctors were packing him off to Egypt. Would I see the

architects for him, and explain to the trustees? (The Academy already had trustees, and all the rest of its

official hierarchy.) And would they all excuse his not writing more than a word? He was really too groggy

but a little warm weather would set him up again, and he would certainly come home in the spring.

He came home in the spring in the hold of the ship, with his widow several decks above. The funeral

services were attended by all the officers of the Academy, and by two of the young fellows who had won the

travelling scholarships, and who shed tears of genuine grief when their benefactor was committed to the

After that there was a pause of suspense and then the newspapers announced that the late Paul Ambrose

had left his entire estate to his widow. The board of the Academy dissolved like a summer cloud, and the

secretary lighted his pipe for a year with the official paper of the stillborn institution.

After a decent lapse of time I called at the house in Seventeenth Street, and found a man attaching a

realestate agent's sign to the window and a vanload of luggage backing away from the door. The

caretaker told me that Mrs. Ambrose was sailing the next morning. Not long afterward I saw the library

table with the helmeted knights standing before an auctioneer's door in University Place; and I looked with a

pang at the familiar inkstains, in which I had so often traced the geography of Paul's visionary world.

Halidon, who had picked up another job in the Orient, wrote me an elegiac letter on Paul's death, ending with

"And what about the Academy?" and for all answer I sent him a newspaper clipping recording the terms

of the will, and another announcing the sale of the house and Mrs. Ambrose's departure for Europe.

Though Ned and I corresponded with tolerable regularity I received no direct answer to this communication

till about eighteen months later, when he surprised me by a letter dated from Florence. It began: "Though she

tells me you have never understood her " and when I had reached that point I laid it down and stared out

"Ned Halidon and Paul's wife!" I murmured; and, incongruously enough, my next thought was: "I wish I'd

The letter went on with waxing eloquence: "I could not stand the money if it were not that, to her as well as to

me, it represents the sacred opportunity of at last giving speech to his inarticulateness . . ."

"Oh, damn it, they're too glib!" I muttered, dashing the letter down; then, controlling my unreasoning

resentment, I read on. "You remember, old man, those words of his that you repeated to me three or four

years ago: 'I've half a mind to leave my money in trust to Ned'? Well, it has come to me in trust as if in

mysterious fulfillment of his thought; and, oh, dear chap " I dashed the letter down again, and plunged

"WON'T you own yourself a beast, dear boy?" Halidon asked me gently, one afternoon of the following

I had escaped for a six weeks' holiday, and was lying outstretched beside him in a willow chair on the terrace

My eyes turned from the happy vale at our feet to the illuminated face beside me. A little way off, at the other

end of the terrace, Mrs. Halidon was bending over a pot of carnations on the balustrade.

"You see," he continued, glowing, "living here costs us next to nothing, and it was quite her idea, our

I had already heard of the fourth scholarship, but I may have betrayed my surprise at the plural pronoun, for

the blood rose under Ned's sensitive skin, and he said with an embarrassed laugh: "Ah, she so completely

"Oh, chiefly altogether. I should be no more than a wretched parasite if I didn't live first of all for that!"

Mrs. Halidon had turned and was advancing toward us with the slow step of leisurely enjoyment. The bud of

her beauty had at last unfolded: her vague enigmatical gaze had given way to the clear look of the woman

"She's not living for anything but her own happiness," I mused, "and why in heaven's name should she? But

"My wife," Halidon continued, his eyes following mine, "my wife feels it too, even more strongly. You know

a woman's sensitiveness. She's there's nothing she wouldn't do for his memory because in other

ways. . . . You understand," he added, lowering his tone as she drew nearer, "that as soon as the child is born

Mrs. Halidon recovered slowly after the birth of her child: the return to America was deferred for six months,

and then again for a whole year. I heard of the Halidons as established first at Biarritz, then in Rome. The

second summer Ned wrote me a line from St. Moritz. He said the place agreed so well with his wife who

was still delicate that they were "thinking of building a house there: a mere cleft in the rocks, to hide our

happiness in when it becomes too exuberant" and the rest of the letter, very properly, was filled with a

The following year the Halidons reappeared in New York, and I heard with surprise that they had taken the

"Well, why not?" I argued with myself. "After all, the money is hers: as far as I know the will didn't even hint

at a restriction. Why should I expect a pretty woman with two children" (for now there was an heir) "to spend

her fortune on a visionary scheme that its originator hadn't the heart to carry out?"

My first impression of Halidon was that he had thickened thickened all through. He was heavier,

physically, with the ruddiness of good living rather than of hard training; he spoke more deliberately, and had

less frequent bursts of subversive enthusiasm. Well, he was a father, a householder yes, and a capitalist

now. It was fitting that his manner should show a sense of these responsibilities. As for Mrs. Halidon, it was

evident that the only responsibilities she was conscious of were those of the handsome woman and the

accomplished hostess. She was handsomer than ever, with her two babies at her knee perfect mother as

she was perfect wife. Poor Paul! I wonder if he ever dreamed what a flower was hidden in the folded bud?

Not long after their arrival, I dined alone with the Halidons, and lingered on to smoke with Ned while his

wife went alone to the opera. He seemed dull and out of sorts, and complained of a twinge of gout.

He had gone afoot for a good many years, and kept his clear skin and quick eye on that homely regimen

but I had to remind myself that, after all, we were both older; and also that the Halidons had champagne

"How do you like these cigars? They're some I've just got out from London, but I'm not quite satisfied with

them myself," he grumbled, pushing toward me the silver box and its attendant taper.

I leaned to the flame, and our eyes met as I lit my cigar. Ned flushed and laughed uneasily. "Poor Paul! Were

you thinking of those execrable weeds of his? I wonder how I knew you were? Probably because I have

been wanting to talk to you of our plan I sent Daisy off alone so that we might have a quiet evening. Not

Halidon pushed his armchair back from the firelight, and twirled his cigar between his fingers. "I didn't

suppose there were till I began to look into things a little more closely. You know I never had much of a head

for business, and it was chiefly with you that Paul used to go over the figures."

"There it is, you see." He paused. "Have you any idea how much this thing is going to cost?"

"Paul didn't live," he said impatiently. "I can't ask a woman with two children to think of hang it, she's

under no actual obligation " He rose and began to walk the floor. Presently he paused and halted in front

of me, defensively, as Paul had once done years before. "It's not that I've lost the sense of my obligation it

grows keener with the growth of my happiness; but my position's a delicate one "

"You do see it? I knew you would." (Yes, he was duller!) "That's the point. I can't strip my wife and children

to carry out a plan a plan so nebulous that even its inventor. . . . The long and short of it is that the whole

I rose and tossed my cigar into the fire. "There were some things he never dreamed of," I said.

He pulled himself up with darkening brows; then the muscles of his forehead relaxed, a flush suffused it, and

He kept up his idea of going over the Academy question threshing it out once for all, as he expressed it;

but my suggestion that we should provisionally resuscitate the extinct board did not meet with his approval.

"Not till the whole business is settled. I shouldn't have the face Wait till I can go to them and say: 'We're

We had one or two conferences, and Ned speedily lost himself in a maze of figures. His nimble fancy was

recalcitrant to mental discipline, and he excused his inattention with the plea that he had no head for business.

"All I know is that it's a colossal undertaking, and that short of living on bread and water " and then we

At the close of the second conference we fixed a date for a third, when Ned's business adviser was to be

called in; but before the day came, I learned casually that the Halidons had gone south. Some weeks later Ned

wrote me from Florida, apologizing for his remissness. They had rushed off suddenly his wife had a

When they returned in the spring, I heard that they had bought the Brereton house, for what seemed to my

inexperienced ears a very large sum. But Ned, whom I met one day at the club, explained to me convincingly

that it was really the most economical thing they could do. "You don't understand about such things, dear

boy, living in your Diogenes tub; but wait till there's a Mrs. Diogenes. I can assure you it's a lot cheaper than

building, which is what Daisy would have preferred, and of course," he added, his color rising as our eyes

met, "of course, once the Academy's going, I shall have to make my headquarters here; and I suppose even

The Brereton roof was a vast one, with a marble balustrade about it; and I could quite understand, without

Ned's halting explanation, that "under the circumstances" it would be necessary to defer what he called "our

work " "Of course, after we've rallied from this amputation, we shall grow fresh supplies I mean my

wife's investments will," he laughingly corrected, "and then we'll have no big outlays ahead and shall know

THE Halidons floated off to Europe for the summer. In due course their return was announced in the social

chronicle, and walking up Fifth Avenue one afternoon I saw the back of the Brereton house sheathed in

I did not look up Halidon, nor did I hear from him till the middle of the winter. Once or twice, meanwhile, I

had seen him in the back of his wife's opera box; but Mrs. Halidon had grown so resplendent that she reduced

her handsome husband to a supernumerary. In January the papers began to talk of the Halidon ball; and in

due course I received a card for it. I was not a frequenter of balls, and had no intention of going to this one;

but when the day came some obscure impulse moved me to set aside my rule, and toward midnight I

I shall never forget his look when I accosted him on the threshold of the big new ballroom. With celibate

egoism I had rather fancied he would be gratified by my departure from custom; but one glance showed me

my mistake. He smiled warmly, indeed, and threw into his handclasp an artificial energy of welcome

"You of all people my dear fellow! Have you seen Daisy?" but the look behind the smile made me feel

Nor was Mrs. Halidon's greeting calculated to restore my circulation. "Have you come to spy on us?" her

frosty smile seemed to say; and I crept home early, wondering if she had not found me out.

It was the following week that Halidon turned up one day in my office. He looked pale and thinner, and for

the first time I noticed a dash of gray in his hair. I was startled at the change in him, but I reflected that it was

nearly a year since we had looked at each other by daylight, and that my shavingglass had doubtless a

He fidgeted about the office, told me a funny story about his little boy, and then dropped into a chair.

"Well, why not? I suppose men have gone to work, even at my age, and not made a complete failure of it.

The fact is, I want to make some money." He paused, and added: "I've heard of an opportunity to pick up for

next to nothing a site for the Academy, and if I could lay my hands on a little cash "

"Heaven forbid! But don't you see that, if I had a fixed job so much a quarter I could borrow the

I meditated upon this astounding proposition. "Do you really think it's wise to buy a site before "

His face fell for a moment, but he rejoined cheerfully: "It's an exceptional chance, and after all, I shall see

ahead if I can get regular work. I can put by a little every month, and by and bye, when our living expenses

diminish, my wife means to come forward her idea would be to give the building "

He broke off and drummed on the table, waiting nervously for me to speak. He did not say on what grounds

he still counted on a diminution of his household expenses, and I had not the cruelty to press this point; but I

We discussed his potentialities for work, which were obviously still an unknown quantity, and the conference

ended in my sending him to a firm of realestate brokers who were looking out for a partner with a little

money to invest. Halidon had a few thousands of his own, which he decided to embark in the venture; and

thereafter, for the remaining months of the winter, he appeared punctually at a desk in the brokers' office, and

sketched plans of the Academy on the back of their business paper. The site for the future building had

meanwhile been bought, and I rather deplored the publicity which Ned gave to the fact; but, after all, since

this publicity served to commit him more deeply, to pledge him conspicuously to the completion of his task,

It was a dull winter in realty, and toward spring, when the market began to revive, one of the Halidon

children showed symptoms of a delicate throat, and the fashionable doctor who humoured the family ailments

"He says a New York spring would be simply criminal and as for those ghastly southern places, my wife

won't hear of them; so we're off. But I shall be back in July, and I mean to stick to the office all summer."

He was true to his word, and reappeared just as all his friends were deserting town. For two torrid months he

sat at his desk, drawing fresh plans of the Academy, and waiting for the windfall of a "big deal"; but in

September he broke down from the effect of the unwonted confinement, and his indignant wife swept him off

"Why Ned should work when we have the money I wish he would sell that wretched piece of land!" And

sell it he did one day: I chanced on a record of the transaction in the realty column of the morning paper. He

afterward explained the sale to me at length. Owing to some spasmodic effort at municipal improvement,

there had been an unforeseen rise in the adjoining property, and it would have been foolish yes, I agreed

that it would have been foolish. He had made $10,000 on the sale, and that would go toward paying off what

he had borrowed for the original purchase. Meanwhile he could be looking about for another site.

Later in the winter he told me it was a bad time to look. His position in the realestate business enabled him

to follow the trend of the market, and that trend was obstinately upward. But of course there would be a

As the resuscitated Academy scheme once more fell into abeyance, I saw Halidon less and less frequently;

and we had not met for several months, when one day of June, my morning paper startled me with the

announcement that the President had appointed Edward Halidon of New York to be Civil Commissioner of

our newly acquired Eastern possession, the Manana Islands. "The unhealthy climate of the islands, and the

defective sanitation of the towns, make it necessary that vigorous measures should be taken to protect the

health of the American citizens established there, and it is believed that Mr. Halidon's large experience of

Eastern life and wellknown energy of character " I read the paragraph twice; then I dropped the paper,

and projected myself through the subway to Halidon's office. But he was not there; he had not been there for

A day or two later Ned appeared in my office. He looked better than when we had last met, and there was a

"My wife? Heaven forbid! You don't suppose I should think of taking her? But the job is a tremendously

interesting one, and it's the kind of work I believe I can do the only kind," he added, smiling rather

He faced me with a look of quiet resolution. "I think I've been through all the buts. It's an infernal climate, of

course, but then I am used to the East I know what precautions to take. And it would be a big thing to

He met this with deliberation. "I have considered my children that's the point. I don't want them to be able

"That's the one thing they shan't say of me," he pressed on vehemently. "I've tried other ways but I'm no

good at business. I see now that I shall never make money enough to carry out the scheme myself; but at least

I can clear out, and not go on being his pensioner seeing his dreams turned into horses and carpets and

He broke off, and leaning on my desk hid his face in his hands. When he looked up again his flush of wrath

"Just understand me it's not her fault. Don't fancy I'm trying for an instant to shift the blame. A woman

with children simply obeys the instinct of her sex; she puts them first and I wouldn't have it otherwise. As

far as she's concerned there were no conditions attached there's no reason why she should make any

sacrifice." He paused, and added painfully: "The trouble is, I can't make her see that I am differently

He lifted his brows. "That's a queer argument from you. And, besides, I'm up to the tricks of all those

agueholes. And I've got to live, you see: I've got something to put through." He saw my look of enquiry, and

added with a shy, poignant laugh how I hear it still! : "I don't mean only the job in hand, though that's

enough in itself; but Paul's work you understand. It won't come in my day, of course I've got to

accept that but my boy's a splendid chap" (the boy was three), "and I tell you what it is, old man, I believe

Halidon went to the Mananas, and for two years the journals brought me incidental reports of the work he

was accomplishing. He certainly had found a job to his hand: official words of commendation rang through

the country, and there were lengthy newspaper leaders on the efficiency with which our representative was

prosecuting his task in that lost corner of our colonies. Then one day a brief paragraph announced his death

That evening, at my club, I heard men talking of him. One said: "What's the use of a fellow wasting himself

on a lot of savages?" and another wiseacre opined: "Oh, he went off because there was friction at home. A

fellow like that, who knew the East, would have got through all right if he'd taken the proper precautions. I

saw him before he left, and I never saw a man look less as if he wanted to live."

I turned on the last speaker, and my voice made him drop his lighted cigar on his complacent knuckles.

"I never knew a man," I exclaimed, "who had better reasons for wanting to live!"

A handsome youth mused: "Yes, his wife is very beautiful but it doesn't follow "

MRS. RANSOM, when the front door had closed on her visitor, passed with a spring from the drawingroom

Though slender, and still light of foot, she did not always move so quickly: hitherto, in her life, there had not

been much to hurry for, save the recurring domestic tasks that compel haste without fostering elasticity; but

some impetus of youth revived, communicated to her by her talk with Guy Dawnish, now found expression

in her girlish flight upstairs, her girlish impatience to bolt herself into her room with her throbs and her

She approached the cramped "Colonial" mirror above her plain prim dressingtable: just such a meagre

concession to the weakness of the flesh as every oldfashioned house in Wentworth counted among its

heirlooms. The face reflected in this unflattering surface for even the mirrors of Wentworth erred on the

side of depreciation did not seem, at first sight, a suitable theatre for the display of the tenderer emotions,

Her fair hair had grown too thin it no longer quite hid the blue veins in her candid forehead a forehead

that one seemed to see turned toward professorial desks, in large bare halls where a snowy winter light fell

uncompromisingly on rows of "thoughtful women." Her mouth was thin, too, and a little strained; her lips

were too pale; and there were lines in the corners of her eyes. It was a face which had grown middleaged

Well but if she could still blush? Instinctively she drew back a little, so that her scrutiny became less

microscopic, and the pretty lingering pink threw a veil over her pallor, the hollows in her temples, the faint

wrinkles of inexperience about her lips and eyes. How a little colour helped! It made her eyes so deep and

shining. She saw now why bad women rouged. . . . Her redness deepened at the thought.

But suddenly she noticed for the first time that the collar of her dress was cut too low. It showed the shrunken

lines of the throat. She rummaged feverishly in a tidy scentless drawer, and snatching out a bit of black

velvet, bound it about her neck. Yes that was better. It gave her the relief she needed. Relief contrast

that was it! She had never had any, either in her appearance or in her setting. She was as flat as the pattern

of the wallpaper and so was her life. And all the people about her had the same look. Wentworth was the

kind of place where husbands and wives gradually grew to resemble each other one or two of her friends,

she remembered, had told her lately that she and Ransom were beginning to look alike. . . .

But why had she always, so tamely, allowed her aspect to conform to her situation? Perhaps a gayer exterior

would have provoked a brighter fate. Even now she turned back to the glass, loosened the tight strands of

hair above her brow, ran the fine end of the comb under them with a rapid frizzing motion, and then disposed

them, more lightly and amply, above her eager face. Yes it was really better; it made a difference. She

smiled at herself with a timid coquetry, and her lips seemed rosier as she smiled. Then she laid down the

comb and the smile faded. It made a difference, certainly but was it right to try to make one's hair look

thicker and wavier than it really was? Between that and rouging the ethical line seemed almost impalpable,

and the spectre of her rigid New England ancestry rose reprovingly before her. She was sure that none of her

grandmothers had ever simulated a curl or encouraged a blush. A blush, indeed! What had any of them ever

had to blush for in all their frozen lives? And what, in Heaven's name, had she? She sat down in the stiff

mahogany rockingchair beside her worktable and tried to collect herself. >From childhood she had been

taught to "collect herself" but never before had her small sensations and aspirations been so widely

scattered, diffused over so vague and uncharted an expanse. Hitherto they had lain in neatly sorted and easily

accessible bundles on the high shelves of a perfectly ordered moral consciousness. And now now that for

the first time they needed collecting now that the little winged and scattered bits of self were dancing

madly down the vagrant winds of fancy, she knew no spell to call them to the fold again. The best way, no

doubt if only her bewilderment permitted was to go back to the beginning the beginning, at least, of

She clasped her hands on the arms of the chair, checked its swaying with a firm thrust of her foot, and fixed

To begin with, what had made today's visit so different from the others? It became suddenly vivid to her that

there had been many, almost daily, others, since Guy Dawnish's coming to Wentworth. Even the previous

winter the winter of his arrival from England his visits had been numerous enough to make Wentworth

aware that very naturally Mrs. Ransom was "looking after" the stray young Englishman committed to

her husband's care by an eminent Q. C. whom the Ransoms had known on one of their brief London visits,

and with whom Ransom had since maintained professional relations. All this was in the natural order of

things, as sanctioned by the social code of Wentworth. Every one was kind to Guy Dawnish some rather

importunately so, as Margaret Ransom had smiled to observe but it was recognized as fitting that she

should be kindest, since he was in a sense her property, since his people in England, by profusely

acknowledging her kindness, had given it the domestic sanction without which, to Wentworth, any social

relation between the sexes remained unhallowed and to be viewed askance. Yes! And even this second

winter, when the visits had become so much more frequent, so admitted a part of the day's routine, there had

Mrs. Ransom smiled with a faint bitterness. She was protected by her age, no doubt her age and her past,

Her doorhandle turned suddenly, and the bolt's resistance was met by an impatient knock.

She started up, her brightness fading, and unbolted the door to admit her husband.

It was possible for Ransom to reach his dressingroom by a slight circuit through the passage; but it was

characteristic of the relentless domesticity of their relation that he chose, as a matter of course, the directer

way through his wife's bedroom. She had never before been disturbed by this practice, which she accepted as

inevitable, but had merely adapted her own habits to it, delaying her hasty toilet till he was safely in his room,

or completing it before she heard his step on the stair; since a scrupulous traditional prudery had miraculously

"Oh, I shan't dress this evening I shall just have some tea in the library after you've gone," she answered

He looked surprised. "The dinner's at seven. I suppose the speeches will begin at nine. I thought you were

She wavered. "I don't know. I think not. Mrs. Sperry's ill, and I've no one else to go with."

He glanced at his watch. "Why not get hold of Dawnish? Wasn't he here just now? Why didn't you ask him?"

She turned toward her dressingtable, and straightened the comb and brush with a nervous hand. Her

husband had given her, that morning, two tickets for the ladies' gallery in Hamblin Hall, where the great

public dinner of the evening was to take place a banquet offered by the faculty of Wentworth to visitors of

aca demic eminence and she had meant to ask Dawnish to go with her: it had seemed the most natural

thing to do, till the end of his visit came, and then, after all, she had not spoken. . . .

Her husband came toward her, and she turned quickly to face him, lest he should suspect her of trying to

Ransom laid a friendly hand on her arm: "Come along, Margaret. You know I speak for the bar." She was

aware, in his voice, of a little note of surprise at his having to remind her of this.

"Well, then " He opened his dressingroom door, and caught a glimpse of the retreating housemaid's

skirt. "Here's Maria now. Maria! Call up Mr. Dawnish at Mrs. Creswell's, you know. Tell him Mrs.

Ransom wants him to go with her to hear the speeches this evening the speeches, you understand? and

Margaret heard the Irish "Yessir" on the stairs, and stood motionless, while her husband added loudly: "And

bring me some towels when you come up." Then he turned back into his wife's room.

"Why, it would be a thousand pities for Guy to miss this. He's so interested in the way we do things over here

and I don't know that he's ever heard me speak in public." Again the slight note of fatuity! Was it possible

He paused in front of her, his shortsighted unobservant glance concentrating itself unexpectedly on her face.

"Like what?" she faltered, lifting a conscious hand to the velvet at her throat.

"With your hair in such a fearful mess. Have you been shampooing it? You look like the Brant girl at the end

The Brant girl was their horror the horror of all right thinking Wentworth; a laced, whaleboned,

frizzleheaded, high heeled daughter of iniquity, who came from New York, of course on long,

disturbing, tumultuous visits to a Wentworth aunt, working havoc among the freshmen, and leaving, when

she departed, an angry wake of criticism that ruffled the social waters for weeks. She, too, had tried her hand

at Guy with ludicrous unsuccess. And now, to be compared to her to be accused of looking "New

Yorky!" Ah, there are times when husbands are obtuse; and Ransom, as he stood there, thick and yet

juiceless, in his dry legal middle age, with his wiry dustcoloured beard, and his perpetual pince nez,

seemed to his wife a sudden embodiment of this traditional attribute. Not that she had ever fancied herself,

poor soul, a " femme incomprise." She had, on the contrary, prided herself on being understood by her

husband, almost as much as on her own complete comprehension of him. Wentworth laid a good deal of

stress on "motives"; and Margaret Ransom and her husband had dwelt in a complete community of motive. It

had been the proudest day of her life when, without consulting her, he had refused an offer of partnership in

an eminent New York firm because he preferred the distinction of practising in Wentworth, of being known

as the legal representative of the University. Wentworth, in fact, had always been the bond between the two;

they were united in their veneration for that estimable seat of learning, and in their modest yet vivid

consciousness of possessing its tone. The Wentworth "tone" is unmistakable: it permeates every part of the

social economy, from the coiffure of the ladies to the preparation of the food. It has its sumptuary laws as

well as its curriculum of learning. It sits in judgment not only on its own townsmen but on the rest of the

world enlightening, criticising, ostracizing a heedless universe and nonconformity to Wentworth

In a world without traditions, without reverence, without stability, such little expiring centres of prejudice and

precedent make an irresistible appeal to those instincts for which a democracy has neglected to provide.

Wentworth, with its "tone," its backward references, its inflexible aversions and condemnations, its hard

moral outline preserved intact against a whirling background of experiment, had been all the poetry and

history of Margaret Ransom's life. Yes, what she had really esteemed in her husband was the fact of his being

so intense an embodiment of Wentworth; so long and closely identified, for instance, with its legal affairs,

that he was almost a part of its university existence, that of course, at a college banquet, he would inevitably

WHEN, punctually at ten minutes to seven, her husband had emerged from the house, Margaret Ransom

remained seated in her bedroom, addressing herself anew to the difficult process of self collection. As an aid

to this endeavour, she bent forward and looked out of the window, following Ransom's figure as it receded

down the elmshaded street. He moved almost alone between the prim flowerless grassplots, the white

porches, the protrusion of irrelevant shingled gables, which stamped the empty street as part of an American

college town. She had always been proud of living in Hill Street, where the university people congregated,

proud to associate her husband's retreating back, as he walked daily to his office, with backs literary and

pedagogic, backs of which it was whispered, for the edification of dulyimpressed visitors: "Wait till that old

This had been her world, a world destitute of personal experience, but filled with a rich sense of privilege and

distinction, of being not as those millions were who, denied the inestimable advantage of living at

She rose and turned to her worktable where she had dropped, on entering, the handful of photographs that

Guy Dawnish had left with her. While he sat so close, pointing out and explaining, she had hardly taken in

the details; but now, on the full tones of his low young voice, they came back with redoubled distinctness.

This was Guise Abbey, his uncle's place in Wiltshire, where, under his grandfather's rule, Guy's own boyhood

had been spent: a long gabled Jacobean facade, manychimneyed, ivydraped, overhung (she felt sure) by

the boughs of a venerable rookery. And in this other picture the walled garden at Guise that was his

uncle, Lord Askern, a hale goutylooking figure, planted robustly on the terrace, a gun on his shoulder and a

couple of setters at his feet. And here was the river below the park, with Guy "punting" a girl in a flapping hat

how Margaret hated the flap that hid the girl's face! And here was the tenniscourt, with Guy among a

jolly cross legged group of youths in flannels, and pretty girls about the tea table under the big lime: in the

centre the curate handing bread and butter, and in the middle distance a footman approaching with more cups.

Margaret raised this picture closer to her eyes, puzzling, in the diminished light, over the face of the girl

nearest to Guy Dawnish bent above him in profile, while he laughingly lifted his head. No hat hid this

"And who is that handsome girl?" Margaret had said, detaining the photograph as he pushed it aside, and

struck by the fact that, of the whole group, he had left only this member unnamed.

"Oh, only Gwendolen Matcher I've always known her . Look at this: the almshouses at Guise. Aren't

And then without her having had the courage to ask if the girl in the punt were also Gwendolen Matcher

they passed on to photographs of his rooms at Oxford, of a cousin's studio in London one of Lord

Askern's grandsons was "artistic" of the rose hung cottage in Wales to which, on the old Earl's death, his

Every one of the photographs opened a window on the life Margaret had been trying to picture since she had

known him a life so rich, so romantic, so packed in the mere casual vocabulary of daily life with

historic reference and poetic allusion, that she felt almost oppressed by this distant whiff of its air. The very

words he used fascinated and bewildered her. He seemed to have been born into all sorts of connections,

political, historical, official, that made the Ransom situation at Wentworth as featureless as the top shelf of a

dark closet. Some one in the family had "asked for the Chiltern Hundreds" one uncle was an Elder Brother

of the Trinity House some one else was the Master of a College some one was in command at

Devonport the Army, the Navy, the House of Commons, the House of Lords, the most venerable seats of

learning, were all woven into the dense background of this young man's light unconscious talk. For the

unconsciousness was unmistakable. Margaret was not without experience of the transatlantic visitor who

sounds loud names and evokes reverberating connections. The poetry of Guy Dawnish's situation lay in the

fact that it was so completely a part of early associations and accepted facts. Life was like that in England

in Wentworth of course (where he had been sent, through his uncle's influence, for two years' training in the

neighbouring electrical works at Smedden) in Wentworth, though "immensely jolly," it was different. The

fact that he was qualifying to be an electrical engineer with the hope of a secretaryship at the London end

of the great Smedden Company that, at best, he was returning home to a life of industrial "grind," this

fact, though avowedly a bore, did not disconnect him from that brilliant pinnacled past, that many faceted

life in which the brightest episodes of the whole body of English fiction seemed collectively reflected. Of

course he would have to work younger sons' sons almost always had to but his uncle Askern (like

Wentworth) was "immensely jolly," and Guise always open to him, and his other uncle, the Master, a capital

old boy too and in town he could always put up with his clever aunt, Lady Caroline Duckett, who had

made a "beastly marriage" and was horribly poor, but who knew everybody jolly and amusing, and had

It was not and Margaret had not, even in her own thoughts, to defend herself from the imputation it

was not what Wentworth would have called the "material side" of her friend's situation that captivated her.

She was austerely proof against such appeals: her enthusiasms were all of the imaginative order. What

subjugated her was the unexampled prodigality with which he poured for her the same draught of tradition of

which Wentworth held out its little teacupful. He besieged her with a million Wentworths in one saying,

For this, she told herself somewhat dizzily, was what it came to the summingup toward which her

conscientious efforts at self collection had been gradually pushing her: with all this in reach, Guy Dawnish

"I was a bit lonely here at first but now!" And again: "It will be jolly, of course, to see them all again

If he had known only Wentworth, it would have been wonderful enough that he should have chosen her out

of all Wentworth but to have known that other life, and to set her in the balance against it poor

Margaret Ransom, in whom, at the moment, nothing seemed of weight but her years! Ah, it might well

produce, in nerves and brain, and poor unpractised pulses, a flushed tumult of sensation, the rush of a great

wave of life, under which memory struggled in vain to reassert itself, to particularize again just what his last

When consciousness emerged, quivering, from this retrospective assault, it pushed Margaret Ransom

feeling herself a mere leaf in the blast toward the writingtable from which her innocent and voluminous

correspondence habitually flowed. She had a letter to write now much shorter but more difficult than any

"Dear Mr. Dawnish," she began, "since telephoning you just now I have decided not "

Maria's voice, at the door, announced that tea was in the library: "And I s'pose it's the brown silk you'll wear

In the usual order of the Ransom existence, its mistress's toilet was performed unassisted; and the mere

enquiry at once friendly and deferential projected, for Margaret, a strong light on the importance of the

occasion. That she should answer: "But I am not going," when the going was so manifestly part of a

household solemnity about which the thoughts below stairs fluttered in proud participation; that in face of

such participation she should utter a word implying indifference or hesitation nay, revealing herself the

transposed, uprooted thing she had been on the verge of becoming; to do this was well! infinitely harder

than to perform the alternative act of tearing up the sheet of notepaper under her reluctant pen.

ALL the heat and glare from the long illuminated table, about which the fumes of many courses still hung in

a savoury fog, seemed to surge up to the ladies' gallery, and concentrate themselves in the burning cheeks of

It never occurred to Margaret Ransom that she was sitting in the shade. She supposed that the full light of the

chandeliers was beating on her face and there were moments when it seemed as though all the heads about

the great horseshoe below, bald, shaggy, sleek, closethatched, or thinly latticed, were equipped with an

additional pair of eyes, set at an angle which enabled them to rake her face as relentlessly as the electric

In the lull after a speech, the gallery was fluttering with the rustle of programmes consulted, and Mrs. Sheff

(the Brant girl's aunt) leaned forward to say enthusiastically: "And now we're to hear Mr. Ransom!"

A louder buzz rose from the table, and the heads (without relaxing their upward vigilance) seemed to merge,

and flow together, like an attentive flood, toward the upper end of the horseshoe, where all the threads of

Margaret Ransom's consciousness were suddenly drawn into what seemed a small speck, no more a black

speck that rose, hung in air, dissolved into gyrating gestures, became distended, enormous, preponderant

"It's the heat " Margaret gasped, pressing her handkerchief to her whitening lips, and finding just strength

She felt a touch on her arm. "It is horrible shall we go?" a voice suggested; and, "Yes, yes, let us go," she

whispered, feeling, with a great throb of relief, that to be the only possible, the only conceivable, solution. To

sit and listen to her husband now how could she ever have thought she could survive it? Luckily, under

the lingering hubbub from below, his opening words were inaudible, and she had only to run the gauntlet of

sympathetic feminine glances, shot after her between waving fans and programmes, as, guided by Guy

Dawnish, she managed to reach the door. It was really so hot that even Mrs. Sheff was not much surprised

The winding staircase was empty, half dark and blessedly silent. In a committee room below Dawnish found

the inevitable water jug, and filled a glass for her, while she leaned back, confronted only by a frowning

college President in an emblazoned frame. The academic frown descended on her like an anathema when she

Hamblin Hall stands at the end of the long green "Campus" with its sextuple line of elms the boast and the

singularity of Wentworth. A pale spring moon, rising above the dome of the University library at the opposite

end of the elmwalk, diffused a pearly mildness in the sky, melted to thin haze the shadows of the trees, and

turned to golden yellow the lights of the college windows. Against this soft suffusion of light the Library

cupola assumed a Bramantesque grace, the white steeple of the congregational church became a campanile

topped by a winged spirit, and the scant porticoes of the older halls the colonnades of classic temples.

"This is better " Dawnish said, as they passed down the steps and under the shadow of the elms.

They moved on a little way in silence before he began again: "You're too tired to walk. Let us sit down a few

Her feet, in truth, were leaden, and not far off a group of park benches, encircling the pedestal of a patriot in

bronze, invited them to rest. But Dawnish was guiding her toward a lateral path which bent, through

"It will be cooler by the river," he said, moving on without waiting for a possible protest. None came: it

seemed easier, for the moment, to let herself be led without any conventional feint of resistance. And besides,

there was nothing wrong about this the wrong would have been in sitting up there in the glare, pretending

The path descended, as both knew, to the chosen, the inimitable spot of Wentworth: that fugitive curve of the

river, where, before hurrying on to glut the brutal industries of South Wentworth and Smedden, it simulated

for a few hundred yards the leisurely pace of an ancient university stream, with willows on its banks and a

stretch of turf extending from the grounds of Hamblin Hall to the boat houses at the farther bend. Here too

were benches, beneath the willows, and so close to the river that the voice of its gliding softened and filled

out the reverberating silence between Margaret and her companion, and made her feel that she knew why he

"I'm so glad you did. Of course the speeches were tremendously interesting but I prefer this. What a good

There was a pause, which now, after all, the soothing accompaniment of the river seemed hardly sufficient to

She made a faint inarticulate sound. She wanted to say: "No Robert's speech was to be the last " but

she could not bring herself to pronounce Ransom's name, and at the moment no other way of refuting her

"Your last chance?" How stupid of her to repeat his words on that cooing note of interrogation! It was just

"To be with you like this. I haven't had so many. And there's less than a week left."

She attempted to laugh. "Perhaps it will sound longer if you call it five days."

The flatness of that, again! And she knew there were people who called her intelligent. Fortunately he did not

seem to notice it; but her laugh continued to sound in her own ears the coquettish chirp of middle age! She

decided that if he spoke again if he said anything she would make no farther effort at evasion: she

"Besides," he continued, throwing his arm along the back of the bench, and turning toward her so that his

face was like a dusky basrelief with a silver rim "besides, there's something I've been wanting to tell

The sound of the river seemed to cease altogether: the whole world became silent.

Margaret had trusted her inspiration farther than it appeared likely to carry her. Again she could think of

nothing happier than to repeat, on the same witless note of interrogation: "To tell me?"

The constraint, the difficulty, seemed to be on his side now: she divined it by the renewed shifting of his

attitude he was capable, usually, of such fine intervals of immobility and by a confusion in his

"You've been so perfect to me," he began again. "It's not my fault if you've made me feel that you would

understand everything make allowances for everything see just how a man may have held out, and

fought against a thing as long as he had the strength. . . . This may be my only chance; and I can't go away

He had turned from her now, and was staring at the river, so that his profile was projected against the

There was a slight pause, as though he waited for her to speak; then she leaned forward and laid her hand on

"If I have really been if I have done for you even the least part of what you say . . . what you imagine . . .

He sat motionless, as if fearing to frighten away the shy touch on his hand, and she left it there, conscious of

"Anything anything just to leave our . . . our friendship . . . as it has been as as a painter, if a

friend asked him, might leave a picture not quite finished, perhaps . . . but all the more exquisite. . . ."

She felt the hand under hers slip away, recover itself, and seek her own, which had flashed out of reach in the

same instant felt the start that swept him round on her as if he had been caught and turned about by the

"You you ?" he stammered, in a strange voice full of fear and tenderness; but she held fast, so centred

in her inexorable resolve that she was hardly conscious of the effect her words might be producing.

"Don't you see," she hurried on, "don't you feel how much safer it is yes, I'm willing to put it so! how

much safer to leave everything undisturbed . . . just as . . . as it has grown of itself . . . without trying to say:

'It's this or that' . . . ? It's what we each choose to call it to ourselves, after all, isn't it? Don't let us try to find a

name that . . . that we should both agree upon . . . we probably shouldn't succeed." She laughed abruptly.

When she ceased her heart was beating so violently that there was a rush in her ears like the noise of the river

after rain, and she did not immediately make out what he was answering. But as she recovered her lucidity

she said to herself that, whatever he was saying, she must not hear it; and she began to speak again, half

playfully, half appealingly, with an eloquence of entreaty, an ingenuity in argument, of which she had never

dreamed herself capable. And then, suddenly, strangling hands seemed to reach up from her heart to her

Her companion remained motionless. He had not tried to regain her hand, and his eyes were away from her,

on the river. But his nearness had become something formidable and exquisite something she had never

before imagined. A flush of guilt swept over her vague reminiscences of French novels and of opera plots.

This was what such women felt, then . . . this was "shame." . . . Phrases of the newspaper and the pulpit

danced before her. . . . She dared not speak, and his silence began to frighten her. Had ever a heart beat so

He turned at last, and taking her two hands, quite simply, kissed them one after the other.

A return of strength enabled her to rise, and even to let her eyes meet his for a moment.

She turned away from the bench, regaining the path that led back to the college buildings, and he walked

beside her in silence. When they reached the elm walk it was dotted with dispersing groups. The "speaking"

was over, and Hamblin Hall had poured its audience out into the moonlight. Margaret felt a rush of relief,

followed by a receding wave of regret. She had the distinct sensation that her hour her one hour was

One of the groups just ahead broke up as they approached, and projected Ransom's solid bulk against the

"My husband," she said, hastening forward; and she never afterward forgot the look of his back heavy,

roundshouldered, yet a little pompous in a badly fitting overcoat that stood out at the neck and hid his

THEY met again, inevitably, before Dawnish left; but the thing she feared did not happen he did not try to

It even became clear to her, in looking back, that he had deliberately avoided doing so; and this seemed

merely an added proof of his "understanding," of that deep undefinable communion that set them alone in an

The five days passed in a flash; and when the last one came, it brought to Margaret Ransom an hour of

weakness, of profound disorganization, when old barriers fell, old convictions faded when to be alone

with him for a moment became, after all, the one craving of her heart. She knew he was coming that

afternoon to say "goodby" and she knew also that Ransom was to be away at South Wentworth. She

waited alone in her pale little drawing room, with its scant kakemonos, its one or two chilly reproductions

from the antique, its slippery Chippendale chairs. At length the bell rang, and her world became a rosy blur

through which she presently discerned the austere form of Mrs. Sperry, wife of the Professor of

palaeontology, who had come to talk over with her the next winter's programme for the Higher Thought

Club. They debated the question for an hour, and when Mrs. Sperry departed Margaret had a confused

impression that the course was to deal with the influence of the First Crusade on the development of

European architecture but the sentient part of her knew only that Dawnish had not come.

He "bobbed in," as he would have put it, after dinner having, it appeared, run across Ransom early in the

day, and learned that the latter would be absent till evening. Margaret was in the study with her husband

when the door opened and Dawnish stood there. Ransom who had not had time to dress was seated at

his desk, a pile of shabby law books at his elbow, the light from a hanging lamp falling on his grayish stubble

of hair, his sallow forehead and spectacled eyes. Dawnish, towering higher than usual against the shadows of

the room, and refined by his unusual pallor, hung a moment on the threshold, then came in, explaining

himself profusely laughing, accepting a cigar, letting Ransom push an arm chair forward a Dawnish

she had never seen, ill at ease, ejaculatory, yet somehow more mature, more obscurely in command of

Margaret drew back, seating herself in the shade, in such a way that she saw her husband's head first, and

beyond it their visitor's, relieved against the dusk of the book shelves. Her heart was still she felt no

throbbing in her throat or temples: all her life seemed concentrated in the hand that lay on her knee, the hand

Afterward her heart rang all the changes, and there was a mood in which she reproached herself for

cowardice for having deliberately missed her one moment with him, the moment in which she might have

sounded the depths of life, for joy or anguish. But that mood was fleeting and infrequent. In quieter hours she

blushed for it she even trembled to think that he might have guessed such a regret in her. It seemed to

convict her of a lack of fineness that he should have had, in his youth and his power, a tenderer, surer sense of

At first her days were fire and the nights long solemn vigils. Her thoughts were no longer vulgarized and

defaced by any notion of "guilt," of mental disloyalty. She was ashamed now of her shame. What had

happened was as much outside the sphere of her marriage as some transaction in a star. It had simply given

her a secret life of incommunicable joys, as if all the wasted springs of her youth had been stored in some

After that there came a phase of loneliness, through which the life about her loomed phantasmal and remote.

She thought the dead must feel thus, repeating the vain gestures of the living beside some Stygian shore. She

wondered if any other woman had lived to whom nothing had ever happened? And then his first letter came. .

It was a charming letter a perfect letter. The little touch of awkwardness and constraint under its boyish

spontaneity told her more than whole pages of eloquence. He spoke of their friendship of their good days

together. . . . Ransom, chancing to come in while she read, noticed the foreign stamps; and she was able to

hand him the letter, saying gaily: "There's a message for you," and knowing all the while that her message

On the days when the letters came the outlines of things grew indistinct, and she could never afterward

remember what she had done or how the business of life had been carried on. It was always a surprise when

she found dinner on the table as usual, and Ransom seated opposite to her, running over the evening paper.

But though Dawnish continued to write, with all the English loyalty to the outward observances of friendship,

his communications came only at intervals of several weeks, and between them she had time to repossess

herself, to regain some sort of normal contact with life. And the customary, the recurring, gradually reclaimed

her, the net of habit tightened again her daily life became real, and her one momentary escape from it an

exquisite illusion. Not that she ceased to believe in the miracle that had befallen her: she still treasured the

reality of her one moment beside the river. What reason was there for doubting it? She could hear the ring of

truth in young Dawnish's voice: "It's not my fault if you've made me feel that you would understand

everything. . . ." No! she believed in her miracle, and the belief sweetened and illumined her life; but she

came to see that what was for her the transformation of her whole being might well have been, for her

companion, a mere passing explosion of gratitude, of boyish goodfellowship touched with the pang of

leavetaking. She even reached the point of telling herself that it was "better so": this view of the episode so

defended it from the alternating extremes of selfreproach and derision, so enshrined it in a pale immortality

For a long time she had not been able to pass by the bench under the willows she even avoided the elm

walk till autumn had stripped its branches. But every day, now, she noted a step toward recovery; and at last a

day came when, walking along the river, she said to herself, as she approached the bench: "I used not to be

able to pass here without thinking of him; and now I am not thinking of him at all!"

This seemed such convincing proof of her recovery that she began, as spring returned, to permit herself, now

and then, a quiet session on the bench a dedicated hour from which she went back fortified to her task.

She had not heard from her friend for six weeks or more the intervals between his letters were growing

longer. But that was "best" too, and she was not anxious, for she knew he had obtained the post he had been

preparing for, and that his active life in London had begun. The thought reminded her, one mild March day,

that in leaving the house she had thrust in her reticule a letter from a Wentworth friend who was abroad on a

holiday. The envelope bore the London post mark, a fact showing that the lady's face was turned toward

home. Margaret seated herself on her bench, and drawing out the letter began to read it.

The London described was that of shops and museums as remote as possible from the setting of Guy

Dawnish's existence. But suddenly Margaret's eye fell on his name, and the page began to tremble in her

"I heard such a funny thing yesterday about your friend Mr. Dawnish. We went to a tea at Professor Bunce's

(I do wish you knew the Bunces their atmosphere is so uplifting), and there I met that Miss BrucePringle

who came out last year to take a course in histology at the Annex. Of course she asked about you and Mr.

Ransom, and then she told me she had just seen Mr. Dawnish's aunt the clever one he was always talking

about, Lady Caroline something and that they were all in a dreadful state about him. I wonder if you knew

he was engaged when he went to America? He never mentioned it to us. She said it was not a positive

engagement, but an understanding with a girl he has always been devoted to, who lives near their place in

Wiltshire; and both families expected the marriage to take place as soon as he got back. It seems the girl is an

heiress (you know how low the English ideals are compared with ours), and Miss BrucePringle said his

relations were perfectly delighted at his 'being provided for,' as she called it. Well, when he got back he asked

the girl to release him; and she and her family were furious, and so were his people; but he holds out, and

won't marry her, and won't give a reason, except that he has 'formed an unfortunate attachment.' Did you ever

hear anything so peculiar? His aunt, who is quite wild about it, says it must have happened at Wentworth,

because he didn't go anywhere else in America. Do you suppose it could have been the Brant girl? But why

Margaret folded the letter and looked out across the river. It was not the same river, but a mystic current shot

with moonlight. The bare willows wove a leafy veil above her head, and beside her she felt the nearness of

youth and tempestuous tenderness. It had all happened just here, on this very seat by the river it had come

Well! Was it not, by that very abstention, made more deeply and ineffaceably hers? She could argue thus

while she had thought the episode, on his side, a mere transient effect of propinquity; but now that she knew

it had altered the whole course of his life, now that it took on substance and reality, asserted a separate

existence outside of her own troubled consciousness now it seemed almost cowardly to have missed her

She walked home in a dream. Now and then, when she passed an acquaintance, she wondered if the pain and

glory were written on her face. But Mrs. Sperry, who stopped her at the corner of Maverick Street to say a

word about the next meeting of the Higher Thought Club, seemed to remark no change in her.

When she reached home Ransom had not yet returned from the office, and she went straight to the library to

tidy his writing table. It was part of her daily duty to bring order out of the chaos of his papers, and of late

she had fastened on such small recurring tasks as some one falling over a precipice might snatch at the weak

When she had sorted the letters she took up some pamphlets and newspapers, glancing over them to see if

they were to be kept. Among the papers was a page torn from a London Times of the previous month. Her

"We are requested to state that the marriage arranged between Mr. Guy Dawnish, son of the late Colonel the

Hon. Roderick Dawnish, of Malby, Wilts, and Gwendolen, daughter of Samuel Matcher, Esq. of Armingham

Margaret dropped the paper and sat down, hiding her face against the stained baize of the desk. She

remembered the photograph of the tenniscourt at Guise she remembered the handsome girl at whom Guy

Dawnish looked up, laughing. A gust of tears shook her, loosening the dry surface of conventional feeling,

welling up from unsuspected depths. She was sorry very sorry, yet so glad so ineffably, impenitently

THERE came a reaction in which she decided to write to him. She even sketched out a letter of sisterly,

almost motherly, remonstrance, in which she reminded him that he "still had all his life before him." But she

In the end she decided not to send the letter. He had never spoken to her of his engagement to Gwendolen

Matcher, and his letters had contained no allusion to any sentimental disturbance in his life. She had only his

few broken words, that night by the river, on which to build her theory of the case. But illuminated by the

phrase "an unfortunate attachment" the theory towered up, distinct and immovable, like some high landmark

by which travellers shape their course. She had been loved extraordinarily loved. But he had chosen that

she should know of it by his silence rather than by his speech. He had understood that only on those terms

could their transcendant communion continue that he must lose her to keep her. To break that silence

would be like spilling a cup of water in a waste of sand. There would be nothing left for her thirst.

Her life, thenceforward, was bathed in a tranquil beauty. The days flowed by like a river beneath the moon

each ripple caught the brightness and passed it on. She began to take a renewed interest in her familiar

round of duties. The tasks which had once seemed colourless and irksome had now a kind of sacrificial

sweetness, a symbolic meaning into which she alone was initiated. She had been restless had longed to

travel; now she felt that she should never again care to leave Wentworth. But if her desire to wander had

ceased, she travelled in spirit, performing invisible pilgrimages in the footsteps of her friend. She regretted

that her one short visit to England had taken her so little out of London that her acquaintance with the

landscape had been formed chiefly through the windows of a railway carriage. She threw herself into the

architectural studies of the Higher Thought Club, and distinguished herself, at the spring meetings, by her

fluency, her competence, her inexhaustible curiosity on the subject of the growth of English Gothic. She

ransacked the shelves of the college library, she borrowed photographs of the cathedrals, she pored over the

folio pages of "The Seats of Noblemen and Gentlemen." She was like some banished princess who learns that

she has inherited a domain in her own country, who knows that she will never see it, yet feels, wherever she

May was half over, and the Higher Thought Club was to hold its last meeting, previous to the college

festivities which, in early June, agreeably disorganized the social routine of Wentworth. The meeting was to

take place in Margaret Ransom's drawingroom, and on the day before she sat upstairs preparing for her dual

duties as hostess and orator for she had been invited to read the final paper of the course. In order to sum

up with precision her conclusions on the subject of English Gothic she had been rereading an analysis of the

structural features of the principal English cathedrals; and she was murmuring over to herself the phrase:

"The longitudinal arches of Lincoln have an approximately elliptical form," when there came a knock on the

Margaret's soul dropped from the heights of the shadowy vaulting to the dead level of an afternoon call at

Maria became confused. "She only said she was a lady " and in reply to her mistress's look of mild

Margaret laid her book down, leaving it open at the description of Lincoln, and slowly descended the stairs.

As she did so, she repeated to herself: "The longitudinal arches are elliptical."

On the threshold below, she had the odd impression that her bare and inanimate drawingroom was

brimming with life and noise an impression produced, as she presently perceived, by the resolute forward

dash it was almost a pounce of the one small figure restlessly measuring its length.

The dash checked itself within a yard of Margaret, and the lady a stranger held back long enough to

stamp on her hostess a sharp impression of sallowness, leanness, keenness, before she said, in a voice that

might have been addressing an unruly committee meeting: "I am Lady Caroline Duckett a fact I found it

A warm wave rushed up from Margaret's heart to her throat and forehead. She held out both hands

"I don't wonder," said the latter drily. "I suppose she didn't mention, either, that my object in calling here was

"Oh, yes won't you sit down?" Margaret pushed a chair forward. She seated herself at a little distance,

brain and heart humming with a confused interchange of signals. This dark sharp woman was his aunt the

"clever aunt" who had had such a hard life, but had always managed to keep her head above water. Margaret

remembered that Guy had spoken of her kindness perhaps she would seem kinder when they had talked

together a little. Meanwhile the first impression she produced was of an amplitude out of all proportion to her

somewhat scant exterior. With her small flat figure, her shabby heterogeneous dress, she was as dowdy as

any Professor's wife at Wentworth; but her dowdiness (Margaret borrowed a literary analogy to define it), her

dowdiness was somehow "of the centre." Like the insignificant emissary of a great power, she was to be

While Margaret was receiving these impressions, Lady Caroline, with quick birdlike twists of her head, was

gathering others from the pale void spaces of the drawingroom. Her eyes, divided by a sharp nose like a bill,

seemed to be set far enough apart to see at separate angles; but suddenly she bent both of them on Margaret.

"This is Mrs. Ransom's house?" she asked, with an emphasis on the verb that gave a distinct hint of

"Because your American houses, especially in the provincial towns, all look so remarkably alike, that I

thought I might have been mistaken; and as my time is extremely limited in fact I'm sailing on Wednesday

She paused long enough to let Margaret say: "I had no idea you were in this country."

Lady Caroline made no attempt to take this up. "And so much of it," she carried on her sentence, "has been

wasted in talking to people I really hadn't the slightest desire to see, that you must excuse me if I go straight

Margaret felt a sudden tension of the heart. "Of course," she said while a voice within her cried: "He is dead

There was another pause; then Lady Caroline went on, with increasing asperity: "So that in short if I

The other stared a moment, with much the same look of cautious incredulity that had marked her inspection

"Oh, I beg your pardon. I should have said that I wished to see Mrs. Robert Ransom, not Mrs. Ransom. But I

understood that in the States you don't make those distinctions." She paused a moment, and then went on,

before Margaret could answer: "Perhaps, after all, it's as well that I should see you instead, since you're

evidently one of the household your son and his wife live with you, I suppose? Yes, on the whole, then,

it's better I shall be able to talk so much more frankly." She spoke as if, as a rule, circumstances prevented

her giving rein to this propensity. "And frankness, of course, is the only way out of this this extremely

tiresome complication. You know, I suppose, that my nephew thinks he's in love with your

Margaret made a slight movement, but her visitor pressed on without heeding it. "Oh, don't fancy, please, that

I'm pretending to take a high moral ground though his mother does, poor dear! I can perfectly imagine

that in a place like this I've just been driving about it for two hours a young man of Guy's age would

have to provide himself with some sort of distraction, and he's not the kind to go in for anything

objectionable. Oh, we quite allow for that we should allow for the whole affair, if it hadn't so

preposterously ended in his throwing over the girl he was engaged to, and upsetting an arrangement that

affected a number of people besides himself. I understand that in the States it's different the young people

have only themselves to consider. In England in our class, I mean a great deal may depend on a young

man's making a good match; and in Guy's case I may say that his mother and sisters (I won't include myself,

though I might) have been simply stranded thrown overboard by his freak. You can understand how

serious it is when I tell you that it's that and nothing else that has brought me all the way to America. And my

first idea was to go straight to your daughterinlaw, since her influence is the only thing we can count on

now, and put it to her fairly, as I'm putting it to you. But, on the whole, I dare say it's better to see you first

you might give me an idea of the line to take with her. I'm prepared to throw myself on her mercy!"

Margaret rose from her chair, outwardly rigid in proportion to her inward tremor.

Lady Caroline brushed the interruption aside. "Oh, but I do completely! I cast no reflection on your

daughterinlaw. Guy has made it quite clear to us that his attachment is has, in short, not been rewarded.

But don't you see that that's the worst part of it? There'd be much more hope of his recovering if Mrs. Robert

If Lady Caroline Duckett had hitherto given her hostess the impression of a person not easily silenced, this

fact added sensibly to the effect produced by the intense stillness which now fell on her.

She sat quite motionless, her large bangled hands clasped about the meagre fur boa she had unwound from

her neck on entering, her rusty black veil pushed up to the edge of a "fringe" of doubtful authenticity, her thin

lips parted on a gasp that seemed to sharpen itself on the edges of her teeth. So overwhelming and helpless

was her silence that Margaret began to feel a motion of pity beneath her indignation a desire at least to

facilitate the excuses which must terminate their disastrous colloquy. But when Lady Caroline found voice

"I mean, it's some mistake. Are there two Mrs. Robert Ransoms in the same town? Your family arrangements

are so extremely puzzling." She had a farther rush of enlightenment. "Oh, I see! I ought of course to have

The idea sent her to her feet with a haste which showed her impatience to make up for lost time.

"No other no 'Junior'? Are you sure?" Lady Caroline fell back into her seat again. "Then I simply don't

Margaret's blush had fixed itself on her throbbing forehead. She remained standing, while her strange visitor

continued to gaze at her with a perturbation in which the consciousness of indiscretion had evidently as yet

Suddenly she sprang up, and advancing to Margaret laid an inspired hand on her arm. "But, my dear woman,

you can help us out all the same; you can help us to find out who it is and you will, won't you? Because,

Margaret, freeing her arm from her visitor's hold, drew back a step; but Lady Caroline instantly rejoined her.

"Of course, I can see that if it had been, you might have been annoyed: I dare say I put the case stupidly

but I'm so bewildered by this new development by his using you all this time as a pretext that I really

She had Margaret in her imperious grasp again, but the latter broke from her with a more resolute gesture.

"I'm afraid I have no light to give you," she began; but once more Lady Caroline caught her up.

"Oh, but do please understand me! I condemn Guy most strongly for using your name when we all know

you'd been so amazingly kind to him! I haven't a word to say in his defence but of course the important

The question rang out loudly, as if all the pale puritan corners of the room flung it back with a shudder at the

speaker. In the silence that ensued Margaret felt the blood ebbing back to her heart; then she said, in a distinct

Lady Caroline gave a stare and a gasp. Her distracted hand groped for her boa and she began to wind it

"It would really be an enormous help to us and to poor Gwendolen Matcher," she persisted pleadingly.

Margaret remained silent and motionless while her visitor drew on one of the worn gloves she had pulled off

"I've come a tremendously long way," she said, "and, since it isn't you, I can't think why you won't help me. .

When the door had closed on her visitor Margaret Ransom went slowly up the stairs to her room. As she

dragged her feet from one step to another, she remembered how she had sprung up the same steep flight after

that visit of Guy Dawnish's when she had looked in the glass and seen on her face the blush of youth.

When she reached her room she bolted the door as she had done that day, and again looked at herself in the

narrow mirror above her dressingtable. It was just a year since then the elms were budding again, the

willows hanging their green veil above the bench by the river. But there was no trace of youth left in her face

she saw it now as others had doubtless always seen it. If it seemed as it did to Lady Caroline Duckett,

A pretext she had been a pretext. He had used her name to screen some one else or perhaps merely to

escape from a situation of which he was weary. She did not care to conjecture what his motive had been

everything connected with him had grown so remote and alien. She felt no anger only an unspeakable

She looked at herself long and steadily; she wished to clear her eyes of all illusions. Then she turned away

and took her usual seat beside her worktable. From where she sat she could look down the empty

elmshaded street, up which, at this hour every day, she was sure to see her husband's figure advancing. She

would see it presently she would see it for many years to come. She had a sudden aching sense of the

length of the years that stretched before her. Strange that one who was not young should still, in all

Nothing was changed in the setting of her life, perhaps nothing would ever change in it. She would certainly

live and die in Wentworth. And meanwhile the days would go on as usual, bringing the usual obligations. As

the word flitted through her brain she remembered that she had still to put the finishing touches to the paper

she was to read the next afternoon at the meeting of the Higher Thought Club. The book she had been reading

lay face downward beside her, where she had left it an hour ago. She took it up, and slowly and painfully, like

a child laboriously spelling out the syllables, she went on with the rest of the sentence:

"and they spring from a level not much above that of the springing of the transverse and diagonal ribs,

which are so arranged as to give a convex curve to the surface of the vaulting conoid."

I HAD always thought Jack Gisburn rather a cheap genius though a good fellow enough so it was no

great surprise to me to hear that, in the height of his glory, he had dropped his painting, married a rich widow,

and established himself in a villa on the Riviera. (Though I rather thought it would have been Rome or

"The height of his glory" that was what the women called it. I can hear Mrs. Gideon Thwing his last

Chicago sitter deploring his unaccountable abdication. "Of course it's going to send the value of my

picture 'way up; but I don't think of that, Mr. Rickham the loss to Arrt is all I think of." The word, on Mrs.

Thwing's lips, multiplied its rs as though they were reflected in an endless vista of mirrors. And it was not

only the Mrs. Thwings who mourned. Had not the exquisite Hermia Croft, at the last Grafton Gallery show,

stopped me before Gisburn's "Moondancers" to say, with tears in her eyes: "We shall not look upon its like

Well! even through the prism of Hermia's tears I felt able to face the fact with equanimity. Poor Jack

Gisburn! The women had made him it was fitting that they should mourn him. Among his own sex fewer

regrets were heard, and in his own trade hardly a murmur. Professional jealousy? Perhaps. If it were, the

honour of the craft was vindicated by little Claude Nutley, who, in all good faith, brought out in the

Burlington a very handsome "obituary" on Jack one of those showy articles stocked with random

technicalities that I have heard (I won't say by whom) compared to Gisburn's painting. And so his resolve

being apparently irrevocable the discussion gradually died out, and, as Mrs. Thwing had predicted, the

It was not till three years later that, in the course of a few weeks' idling on the Riviera, it suddenly occurred to

me to wonder why Gisburn had given up his painting. On reflection, it really was a tempting problem. To

accuse his wife would have been too easy his fair sitters had been denied the solace of saying that Mrs.

Gisburn had "dragged him down." For Mrs. Gisburn as such had not existed till nearly a year after

Jack's resolve had been taken. It might be that he had married her since he liked his ease because he

didn't want to go on painting; but it would have been hard to prove that he had given up his painting because

Of course, if she had not dragged him down, she had equally, as Miss Croft contended, failed to "lift him up"

she had not led him back to the easel. To put the brush into his hand again what a vocation for a wife!

But Mrs. Gisburn appeared to have disdained it and I felt it might be interesting to find out why.

The desultory life of the Riviera lends itself to such purely academic speculations; and having, on my way to

Monte Carlo, caught a glimpse of Jack's balustraded terraces between the pines, I had myself borne thither

I found the couple at tea beneath their palmtrees; and Mrs. Gisburn's welcome was so genial that, in the

ensuing weeks, I claimed it frequently. It was not that my hostess was "interesting": on that point I could have

given Miss Croft the fullest reassurance. It was just because she was not interesting if I may be pardoned

the bull that I found her so. For Jack, all his life, had been surrounded by interesting women: they had

fostered his art, it had been reared in the hothouse of their adulation. And it was therefore instructive to note

what effect the "deadening atmosphere of mediocrity" (I quote Miss Croft) was having on him.

I have mentioned that Mrs. Gisburn was rich; and it was immediately perceptible that her husband was

extracting from this circumstance a delicate but substantial satisfaction. It is, as a rule, the people who scorn

money who get most out of it; and Jack's elegant disdain of his wife's big balance enabled him, with an

appearance of perfect goodbreeding, to transmute it into objects of art and luxury. To the latter, I must add,

he remained relatively indifferent; but he was buying Renaissance bronzes and eighteenthcentury pictures

"Money's only excuse is to put beauty into circulation," was one of the axioms he laid down across the Sevres

and silver of an exquisitely appointed luncheontable, when, on a later day, I had again run over from Monte

Carlo; and Mrs. Gisburn, beaming on him, added for my enlightenment: "Jack is so morbidly sensitive to

Poor Jack! It had always been his fate to have women say such things of him: the fact should be set down in

extenuation. What struck me now was that, for the first time, he resented the tone. I had seen him, so often,

basking under similar tributes was it the conjugal note that robbed them of their savour? No for, oddly

enough, it became apparent that he was fond of Mrs. Gisburn fond enough not to see her absurdity. It was

his own absurdity he seemed to be wincing under his own attitude as an object for garlands and incense.

"My dear, since I've chucked painting people don't say that stuff about me they say it about Victor

Grindle," was his only protest, as he rose from the table and strolled out onto the sunlit terrace.

I glanced after him, struck by his last word. Victor Grindle was, in fact, becoming the man of the moment

as Jack himself, one might put it, had been the man of the hour. The younger artist was said to have formed

himself at my friend's feet, and I wondered if a tinge of jealousy underlay the latter's mysterious abdication.

But no for it was not till after that event that the rose Dubarry drawingrooms had begun to display their

I turned to Mrs. Gisburn, who had lingered to give a lump of sugar to her spaniel in the diningroom.

"Oh, he doesn't have to now, you know; and I want him to enjoy himself," she said quite simply.

I looked about the spacious whitepanelled room, with its familleverte vases repeating the tones of the pale

A slight shade of constraint crossed Mrs. Gisburn's open countenance. "It's his ridiculous modesty, you know.

He says they're not fit to have about; he's sent them all away except one my portrait and that I have to

His ridiculous modesty Jack's modesty about his pictures? My curiosity was growing like the beanstalk.

She glanced out almost timorously at the terrace where her husband, lounging in a hooded chair, had lit a

"Well, come while he's not looking," she said, with a laugh that tried to hide her nervousness; and I followed

her between the marble Emperors of the hall, and up the wide stairs with terracotta nymphs poised among

In the dimmest corner of her boudoir, amid a profusion of delicate and distinguished objects, hung one of the

familiar oval canvases, in the inevitable garlanded frame. The mere outline of the frame called up all

Mrs. Gisburn drew back the windowcurtains, moved aside a jardiniere full of pink azaleas, pushed an

armchair away, and said: "If you stand here you can just manage to see it. I had it over the mantelpiece,

Yes I could just manage to see it the first portrait of Jack's I had ever had to strain my eyes over!

Usually they had the place of honour say the central panel in a pale yellow or rose Dubarry

drawingroom, or a monumental easel placed so that it took the light through curtains of old Venetian point.

The more modest place became the picture better; yet, as my eyes grew accustomed to the halflight, all the

characteristic qualities came out all the hesitations disguised as audacities, the tricks of prestidigitation by

which, with such consummate skill, he managed to divert attention from the real business of the picture to

some pretty irrelevance of detail. Mrs. Gisburn, presenting a neutral surface to work on forming, as it

were, so inevitably the background of her own picture had lent herself in an unusual degree to the display

of this false virtuosity. The picture was one of Jack's "strongest," as his admirers would have put it it

represented, on his part, a swelling of muscles, a congesting of veins, a balancing, straddling and straining,

that reminded one of the circusclown's ironic efforts to lift a feather. It met, in short, at every point the

demand of lovely woman to be painted "strongly" because she was tired of being painted "sweetly" and

"It's the last he painted, you know," Mrs. Gisburn said with pardonable pride. "The last but one," she

"Destroyed it?" I was about to follow up this clue when I heard a footstep and saw Jack himself on the

As he stood there, his hands in the pockets of his velveteen coat, the thin brown waves of hair pushed back

from his white forehead, his lean sunburnt cheeks furrowed by a smile that lifted the tips of a selfconfident

moustache, I felt to what a degree he had the same quality as his pictures the quality of looking cleverer

His wife glanced at him deprecatingly, but his eyes travelled past her to the portrait.

"Mr. Rickham wanted to see it," she began, as if excusing herself. He shrugged his shoulders, still smiling.

"Oh, Rickham found me out long ago," he said lightly; then, passing his arm through mine: "Come and see

He showed it to me with a kind of naive suburban pride: the bathrooms, the speakingtubes, the

dressclosets, the trouserpresses all the complex simplifications of the millionaire's domestic economy.

And whenever my wonder paid the expected tribute he said, throwing out his chest a little: "Yes, I really don't

Well it was just the end one might have foreseen for him. Only he was, through it all and in spite of it all

as he had been through, and in spite of, his pictures so handsome, so charming, so disarming, that one

longed to cry out: "Be dissatisfied with your leisure!" as once one had longed to say: "Be dissatisfied with

"This is my own lair," he said, leading me into a dark plain room at the end of the florid vista. It was square

and brown and leathery: no "effects"; no bricabrac, none of the air of posing for reproduction in a picture

The fact brought home to me the absolute finality of Jack's break with his old life.

"Don't you ever dabble with paint any more?" I asked, still looking about for a trace of such activity.

His confident eyes grew dim, and his cheeks paled a little under their handsome sunburn.

I moved away, instinctively embarrassed by my unexpected discovery; and as I turned, my eye fell on a small

picture above the mantelpiece the only object breaking the plain oak panelling of the room.

It was a sketch of a donkey an old tired donkey, standing in the rain under a wall.

"What a wonder! Made with a dozen lines but on everlasting foundations. You lucky chap, where did you

I must have let a little too much amazement escape through my surprise, for he answered with a deprecating

laugh: "Yes she's an awful simpleton, you know, Mrs. Stroud. Her only idea was to have him done by a

fashionable painter ah, poor Stroud! She thought it the surest way of proclaiming his greatness of

forcing it on a purblind public. And at the moment I was the fashionable painter."

"That was his history. She believed in him, gloried in him or thought she did. But she couldn't bear not to

have all the drawingrooms with her. She couldn't bear the fact that, on varnishing days, one could always

get near enough to see his pictures. Poor woman! She's just a fragment groping for other fragments. Stroud is

He laughed again, and threw back his head to look up at the sketch of the donkey. "There were days when I

couldn't look at that thing couldn't face it. But I forced myself to put it here; and now it's cured me

cured me. That's the reason why I don't dabble any more, my dear Rickham; or rather Stroud himself is the

For the first time my idle curiosity about my companion turned into a serious desire to understand him better.

He stood looking up at the sketch, and twirling between his fingers a cigarette he had forgotten to light.

"I'd rather like to tell you because I've always suspected you of loathing my work."

"Oh, I didn't care a straw when I believed in myself and now it's an added tie between us!"

He laughed slightly, without bitterness, and pushed one of the deep armchairs forward. "There: make

He placed them at my elbow and continued to wander up and down the room, stopping now and then beneath

"How it happened? I can tell you in five minutes and it didn't take much longer to happen. . . . I can

remember now how surprised and pleased I was when I got Mrs. Stroud's note. Of course, deep down, I had

always felt there was no one like him only I had gone with the stream, echoed the usual platitudes about

him, till I half got to think he was a failure, one of the kind that are left behind. By Jove, and he was left

behind because he had come to stay! The rest of us had to let ourselves be swept along or go under, but he

"Well, I went off to the house in my most egregious mood rather moved, Lord forgive me, at the pathos of

poor Stroud's career of failure being crowned by the glory of my painting him! Of course I meant to do the

picture for nothing I told Mrs. Stroud so when she began to stammer something about her poverty. I

remember getting off a prodigious phrase about the honour being mine oh, I was princely, my dear

"Then I was taken up and left alone with him. I had sent all my traps in advance, and I had only to set up the

easel and get to work. He had been dead only twentyfour hours, and he died suddenly, of heart disease, so

that there had been no preliminary work of destruction his face was clear and untouched. I had met him

once or twice, years before, and thought him insignificant and dingy. Now I saw that he was superb.

"I was glad at first, with a merely aesthetic satisfaction: glad to have my hand on such a 'subject.' Then his

strange lifelikeness began to affect me queerly as I blocked the head in I felt as if he were watching me

do it. The sensation was followed by the thought: if he were watching me, what would he say to my way of

"Once, when I looked up, I seemed to see a smile behind his close grayish beard as if he had the secret,

and were amusing himself by holding it back from me. That exasperated me still more. The secret? Why, I

had a secret worth twenty of his! I dashed at the canvas furiously, and tried some of my bravura tricks. But

they failed me, they crumbled. I saw that he wasn't watching the showy bits I couldn't distract his

attention; he just kept his eyes on the hard passages between. Those were the ones I had always shirked, or

"I looked up again, and caught sight of that sketch of the donkey hanging on the wall near his bed. His wife

told me afterward it was the last thing he had done just a note taken with a shaking hand, when he was

down in Devonshire recovering from a previous heart attack. Just a note! But it tells his whole history. There

are years of patient scornful persistence in every line. A man who had swum with the current could never

"I turned back to my work, and went on groping and muddling; then I looked at the donkey again. I saw that,

when Stroud laid in the first stroke, he knew just what the end would be. He had possessed his subject,

absorbed it, recreated it. When had I done that with any of my things? They hadn't been born of me I had

"Hang it, Rickham, with that face watching me I couldn't do another stroke. The plain truth was, I didn't

know where to put it I had never known. Only, with my sitters and my public, a showy splash of colour

covered up the fact I just threw paint into their faces. . . . Well, paint was the one medium those dead eyes

could see through see straight to the tottering foundations underneath. Don't you know how, in talking a

foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can? Well that

was the way I painted; and as he lay there and watched me, the thing they called my 'technique' collapsed like

a house of cards. He didn't sneer, you understand, poor Stroud he just lay there quietly watching, and on

his lips, through the gray beard, I seemed to hear the question: 'Are you sure you know where you're coming

"If I could have painted that face, with that question on it, I should have done a great thing. The next greatest

thing was to see that I couldn't and that grace was given me. But, oh, at that minute, Rickham, was there

anything on earth I wouldn't have given to have Stroud alive before me, and to hear him say: 'It's not too late

"It was too late it would have been, even if he'd been alive. I packed up my traps, and went down and told

Mrs. Stroud. Of course I didn't tell her that it would have been Greek to her. I simply said I couldn't paint

him, that I was too moved. She rather liked the idea she's so romantic! It was that that made her give me

the donkey. But she was terribly upset at not getting the portrait she did so want him 'done' by some one

showy! At first I was afraid she wouldn't let me off and at my wits' end I suggested Grindle. Yes, it was I

who started Grindle: I told Mrs. Stroud he was the 'coming' man, and she told somebody else, and so it got to

be true. . . . And he painted Stroud without wincing; and she hung the picture among her husband's things. . .

He flung himself down in the armchair near mine, laid back his head, and clasping his arms beneath it,

"I like to fancy that Stroud himself would have given it to me, if he'd been able to say what he thought that

And, in answer to a question I put halfmechanically "Begin again?" he flashed out. "When the one thing

He stood up and laid his hand on my shoulder with a laugh. "Only the irony of it is that I am still painting

since Grindle's doing it for me! The Strouds stand alone, and happen once but there's no exterminating our

The studio faced north, looking out over a dismal reach of roofs and chimneys, and rusty fireescapes hung

with heterogeneous garments. A crust of dirty snow covered the level surfaces, and a December sky with

The room was bare and gaunt, with blotched walls and a stained uneven floor. On a divan lay a pile of

"properties" limp draperies, an Algerian scarf, a motheaten fan of peacock feathers. The janitor had

forgotten to fill the coalscuttle overnight, and the castiron stove projected its cold flanks into the room

like a black iceberg. Ned Stanwell, who had just added his hat and greatcoat to the miscellaneous heap on

"By Jove, this is a little too much like the last act of Boheme," he said, slipping into his coat again after a vain

glance at the coalscuttle. Much solitude, and a lively habit of mind, had bred in him the habit of audible

soliloquy, and having flung a shout for the janitor down the seven flights dividing the studio from the

basement, he turned back, picking up the thread of his monologue. "Exactly like Boheme, really that crack

in the wall is much more like a stagecrack than a real one just the sort of crack Mungold would paint if

Mungold, the fashionable portraitpainter of the hour, was the favourite object of the younger men's irony.

"It only needs Kate Arran to be borne in dying," Stanwell continued with a laugh. "Much more likely to be

His neighbour across the landing the little sculptor, Caspar Arran, humorously called "Gasper" on account

of his bronchial asthma had lately been joined by a sister, Kate Arran, a strapping girl, fresh from the

country, who had installed herself in the little room off her brother's studio, keeping house for him with a

chafingdish and a coffeemachine, to the mirth and envy of the other young men in the building.

Poor little Gasper had been very bad all the autumn, and it was surmised that his sister's presence, which he

spoke of growlingly, as a troublesome necessity devolved on him by the inopportune death of an aunt, was

really an indication of his failing ability to take care of himself. Kate Arran took his complaints with

unfailing goodhumour, darned his socks, brushed his clothes, fed him with steaming broths and foaming

milkpunches, and listened with reverential assent to his interminable disquisitions on art. Every one in the

house was sorry for little Gasper, and the other fellows liked him all the more because it was so impossible to

like his sculpture; but his talk was a bore, and when his colleagues ran in to see him they were apt to keep a

hand on the doorknob and to plead a pressing engagement. At least they had been till Kate came; but now

they began to show a disposition to enter and sit down. Caspar, who was no fool, perceived the change, and

perhaps detected its cause; at any rate, he showed no special gratification at the increased cordiality of his

friends, and Kate, who followed him in everything, took this as a sign that guests were to be discouraged.

There was one exception, however: Ned Stanwell, who was deplorably goodnatured, had always lent a

patient ear to Caspar, and he now reaped his reward by being taken into Kate's favour. Before she had been a

month in the building they were on confidential terms as to Caspar's health, and lately Stanwell had

penetrated farther, even to the inmost recesses of her anxiety about her brother's career. Caspar had recently

had a bad blow in the refusal of his magnum opus a vast allegorical group by the Commissioners of

the Minneapolis Exhibition. He took the rejection with Promethean irony, proclaimed it as the clinching

proof of his ability, and abounded in reasons why, even in an age of such crass artistic ignorance, a refusal so

egregious must react to the advantage of its object. But his sister's indignation, if as glowing, was a shade less

hopeful. Of course Caspar was going to succeed she knew it was only a question of time but she paled

at the word and turned imploring eyes on Stanwell. Was there time enough? It was the one element in the

combination that she could not count on; and Stanwell, reddening under her look of interrogation, and cursing

his own glaring robustness, would affirm that of course, of course, of course, by everything that was holy

there was time enough with the mental reservation that there wouldn't be, even if poor Caspar lived to be a

"Vos that you yelling for the shanitor, Mr. Sdanwell?" inquired an affable voice through the doorway; and

Stanwell, turning with a laugh, confronted the squat figure of a middleaged man in an expensive fur coat,

"Hullo, Shepson I should say I was yelling. Did you ever feel such an atmosphere? That fool has forgotten

Mr. Shepson glanced about the studio with a look which seemed to say that, where so much else was lacking,

"Vell, you ain't as vell fixed as Mr. Mungold ever been to his studio, Mr. Sdanwell? De most ex quisite

"Oh, hang it, Shepson, do you call that a studio? It's like a manicure's parlour or a beautydoctor's. By

"Yes oh, well, you wouldn't see," murmured Stanwell, mentally storing his epigram for more appreciative

ears. "But you didn't come just to make me envious of Mungold's studio, did you?" And he pushed forward a

The latter, however, declined it with an affable motion. "Of gourse not, of gourse not but Mr. Mungold is

"My gootness, no I was downstairs looking at Holbrook's sdained class, and I shoost thought I'd sdep up a

"Much obliged, I'm sure especially as I assume that you don't want any of it." Try as he would, Stanwell

could not keep a note of eagerness from his voice. Mr. Shepson caught the note, and eyed him shrewdly

"Vell, vell, vell I'm not prepared to commit myself. Shoost let me take a look round, vill you?"

Stanwell went out on the landing, and Mr. Shepson, left to himself, began a meditative progress about the

room. On an easel facing the improvised dais stood a canvas on which a young woman's head had been

blocked in. It was just in that happy state of semievocation when a picture seems to detach itself from the

grossness of its medium and live a wondrous moment in the actual; and the quality of the head in question

a vigorous dusky youthfulness, a kind of virgin majesty lent itself to this illusion of vitality. Stanwell, who

had reentered the studio, could not help drawing a sharp breath as he saw the picturedealer pausing with

tilted head before this portrait: it seemed, at one moment, so impossible that he should not be struck with it, at

Shepson cocked his parroteye at the canvas with a desultory "Vat's dat?" which sent a twinge through the

"That? Oh a sketch of a young lady," stammered Stanwell, flushing at the imbecility of his reply. "It's

Miss Arran, you know," he added, "the sister of my neighbour here, the sculptor."

"Sgulpture? There's no market for modern sgulpture except tombstones," said Shepson disparagingly, passing

on as if he included the sister's portrait in his condemnation of her brother's trade.

Stanwell smiled, but more at himself than Shepson. How could he ever have supposed that the gross fool

would see anything in his sketch of Kate Arran? He stood aside, straining after detachment, while the dealer

continued his round of exploration, waddling up to the canvases on the walls, prodding with his stick at those

stacked in corners, prying and peering sideways like a great bird rummaging for seed. He seemed to find little

nutriment in the course of his search, for the sounds he emitted expressed a weary distaste for misdirected

effort, and he completed his round without having thought it worth while to draw a single canvas from its

As his visits always had the same result, Stanwell was reduced to wondering why he had come again; but

Shepson was not the man to indulge in vague roamings through the field of art, and it was safe to conclude

that his purpose would in due course reveal itself. His tour brought him at length face to face with the painter,

where he paused, clasping his plump gloved hands behind his back, and shaking an admonitory head.

"Gleffer very gleffer, of course I suppose you'll let me know when you want to sell anything?"

"Let you know?" gasped Stanwell, to whom the room grew so glowingly hot that he thought for a moment

Shepson gave a dry laugh. "Vell, it doesn't sdrike me that you want to now doing this kind of thing, you

"See here, Mr. Sdanwell, vot do you do it for? If you do it for yourself and the other fellows, vell and good

only don't ask me round. I sell pictures, I don't theorize about them. Ven you vant to sell, gome to me with

what my gustomers vant. You can do it you're smart enough. You can do most anything. Vere's dat

bortrait of Gladys Glyde dat you showed at the Fake Club last autumn? Dat little thing in de Romney sdyle?

Dat vas a little shem, now," exclaimed Mr. Shepson, whose pronunciation became increasingly Semitic in

Stanwell stared. Called upon a few months previously to contribute to an exhibition of skits on wellknown

artists, he had used the photograph of a favourite musichall "star" as the basis of a picture in the

"I see everything," returned the dealer with an oracular smile. "If you've got it here let me look at it, please."

It cost Stanwell a few minutes' search to unearth his skit a clever blending of dash and sentimentality, in

just the right proportion to create the impression of a powerful brush subdued to mildness by the charms of

the sitter. Stanwell had thrown it off in a burst of imitative frenzy, beginning for the mere joy of the satire,

but gradually fascinated by the problem of producing the requisite mingling of attributes. He was surprised

now to see how well he had caught the note, and Shepson's face reflected his approval.

"Like business! Like a big order for a bortrait, Mr. Sdanwell dat's what it's like!" cried Shepson, swinging

"Vy not? Accidents vill happen," said Shepson jocosely. "De fact is, Mrs. Archer Millington wants to be

bainted you know her sdyle? Well, she prides herself on her likeness to little Gladys. And so ven she saw

dat bicture of yours at de Fake Show she made a note of your name, and de udder day she sent for me and she

says: 'Mr. Shepson, I'm tired of Mungold all my friends are done by Mungold. I vant to break away and be

Shepson waited to observe the result of this overwhelming announcement, and Stanwell, after a momentary

halt of surprise, brought out laughingly: "But this is a Mungold. Is this what she calls being original?"

"Shoost exactly," said Shepson, with unexpected acuteness. "That's vat dey all want something different

from what all deir friends have got, but shoost like it all de same. Dat's de public all over! Mrs. Millington

don't want a Mungold, because everybody's got a Mungold, but she wants a picture that's in the same sdyle,

Stanwell was listening with real enjoyment. "Ah, you know your public," he murmured.

"Vell, you do, too, or you couldn't have painted dat," the dealer retorted. "And I don't say dey're wrong

mind dat. I like a bretty picture myself. And I understand the way dey feel. Dey're villing to let Sargent take

liberties vid them, because it's like being punched in de ribs by a King; but if anybody else baints them, they

vant to look as sweet as an obituary." He turned earnestly to Stanwell. "The thing is to attract their notice.

Vonce you got it they von't gif you dime to sleep. And dat's why I'm here today you've attracted Mrs.

Millington's notice, and vonce you're hung in dat new ballroom dat's vere she vants you, in a big gold

panel vonce you're dere, vy, you'll be like the Pianola no home gompleat without you. And I ain't

He stood before the painter, exuding a mixture of deference and patronage in which either element might

predominate as events developed; but Stanwell could see in the incident only the stuff for a good story.

"My dear Shepson," he said, "what are you talking about? This is no picture of mine. Why don't you ask me

to do you a Corot at once? I hear there's a great demand for them still in the West. Or an Arthur Schracker

I can do Schracker as well as Mungold," he added, turning around a small canvas at which a paintpot

Shepson ignored the allusion to Corot, but screwed his eyes at the picture. "Ah, Schracker vell, the

Schracker sdyle would take first rate if you were a foreigner but, for goodness sake, don't try it on Mrs.

Stanwell pushed the two skits aside. "Oh, you can trust me," he cried humorously. "The pearls and the eyes

Dat's it dat's it. And the cheque as big as you vant to make it! Mrs. Millington vants the picture finished in

time for her first barty in the new ballroom, and if you rush the job she won't sdickle at an extra thousand.

He stood before the young man, urgent, paternal, and so imbued with the importance of his mission that his

face stretched to a ludicrous length of dismay when Stanwell, administering a goodhumoured push to his

shoulder, cried gaily: "My dear fellow, it will make my price rise still higher when the lady hears I'm too

busy to take any orders at present and that I'm actually obliged to turn you out now because I'm expecting

It was part of Shepson's business to have a quick ear for the note of finality, and he offered no resistance to

Stanwell's friendly impulsion; but on the threshold he paused to murmur, with a regretful glance at the

KATE ARRAN was Stanwell's sitter; but the janitor had hardly filled the stove when she came in to say that

she could not sit. Caspar had had a bad night: he was depressed and feverish, and in spite of his protests she

had resolved to fetch the doctor. Care sat on her usually tranquil features, and Stanwell, as he offered to go

for the doctor, wished he could have caught in his picture the wide gloom of her brow. There was always a

kind of Biblical breadth in the expression of her emotions, and today she suggested a text from Isaiah.

"But you're not busy?" she hesitated; in the full voice which seemed tuned to a solemn rhetoric.

She smiled interrogatively. "I thought perhaps you had an order. I met Mr. Shepson rubbing his hands on the

"Was he rubbing his hands? Well, it was not over me. He says that from the style of my pictures he doesn't

"With ideals!" she exclaimed in a tone caught from her brother, and which would have been irritating to

He gave a slight shrug and took up his hat; but she interposed to say that if it didn't make any difference she

would prefer to have him go and sit with poor Caspar, while she ran for the doctor and did some household

errands by the way. Stanwell divined in her request the need for a brief respite from Caspar, and though he

shivered at the thought of her facing the cold in the scant jacket which had been her only wear since he had

known her, he let her go without a protest, and betook himself to Arran's studio.

He found the little sculptor dressed and roaming fretfully about the melancholy room in which he and his

plastic offspring lodged together. In one corner, where Kate's chair and worktable stood, a scrupulous

order prevailed; but the rest of the apartment had the dreary untidiness, the damp grey look, which the worker

in clay usually creates about him. In the centre of this desert stood the shrouded image of Caspar's

disappointment: the colossal rejected group as to which his friends could seldom remember whether it

represented Jove hurling a Titan from Olympus or Science Subjugating Religion. Caspar was the sworn foe

of religion, which he appeared to regard as indirectly connected with his inability to sell his statues.

The sculptor was too ill to work, and Stanwell's appearance loosed the pentup springs of his talk.

"Hullo! What are you doing here? I thought Kate had gone over to sit to you. She wanted a little fresh air? I

should say enough of it came in through these windows. How like a woman, when she's agreed to do a certain

thing, to make up her mind at once that she's got to do another! They don't call it caprice it's always duty:

that's the humour of it. I'll be bound Kate alleged a pressing engagement. Sorry she should waste your time

so, my dear fellow. Here am I with plenty of it to burn look at my hand shake; I can't do a thing! Well,

luckily nobody wants me to posterity may suffer, but the present generation isn't worrying. The present

generation wants to be carved in sugarcandy, or painted in maple syrup. It doesn't want to be told the truth

about itself or about anything in the universe. The prophets have always lived in a garret, my dear fellow

only the ravens don't always find out their address! Speaking of ravens, though, Kate told me she saw old

Shepson coming out of your place I say, old man, you're not meditating an apostasy? You're not doing the

Stanwell laughed. "Oh, he looked at them but only to confirm his reasons for rejecting them."

"Ha! ha! That's right he wanted to refresh his memory with their badness. But how on earth did he happen

to have any doubts on the subject? I should as soon have thought of his coming in here!"

Stanwell winced at the analogy, but replied in Caspar's key: "Oh, he's not as sure of any of us as he is of

The sculptor received this tribute with a joyous expletive. "By God, no, he's sure of me, as you say! He and

his tribe know that I'll starve in my tracks sooner than make a concession a single concession. A fellow

came after me once to do an angel on a tombstone an angel leaning against a broken column, and looking

as if it was waiting for the elevator and wondering why in hell it didn't come. He said he wanted me to show

that the deceased was pining to get to heaven. As she was his wife I didn't dispute the proposition, but when I

asked him what he understood by heaven he grabbed his hat and walked out of the studio. He didn't wait for

Stanwell listened with a practised smile. The story of the man who had come to order the angel was so

familiar to Arran's friends that its only interest consisted in waiting to see what variation he would give to the

retort which had put the mourner to flight. It was generally supposed that this visit represented the sculptor's

nearest approach to an order, and one of his fellowcraftsmen had been heard to remark that if Caspar had

made the tombstone, the lady under it would have tried harder than ever to get to heaven. To Stanwell's

present mood, however, there was something more than usually irritating in the gratuitous assumption that

Arran had only to derogate from his altitude to have a press of purchasers at his door.

"Well what did you gain by kicking your widower out?" he objected. "Why can't a man do two kinds of

Caspar stopped in his jerky walk the stride of a tall man attempted with short legs (it sometimes appeared

"Yes; and what's more, I'll answer you: it isn't everybody who can adapt his art as he wants to!"

Caspar stood before him, gasping with incredulous scorn. "Adapt his art? As he wants to? Unhappy wretch,

what lingo are you talking? If you mean that it isn't every honest man who can be a renegade "

"That's just what I do mean: he can't unless he's clever enough to see the other side."

The deep groan with which Caspar met this casuistry was cut short by a knock at the studio door, which

thereupon opened to admit a small dapperlydressed man with a silky moustache and mildlybulging eyes.

"Ah, Mungold," exclaimed Stanwell, to cover the gloomy silence with which Arran received the newcomer;

whereat the latter, with the air of a man who does not easily believe himself unwelcome, bestowed a

"My dear chap, I've just met Miss Arran, and she told me you were laid up with a bad cold, so I thought I'd

He looked about him with a smile evidently intended as the first act in his beneficent programme.

Mr. Mungold, freshly soaped and scented, with a neat glaze of gentility extending from his varnished

boottips to his glossy hat, looked like the "flattered" portrait of a common man just such an idealized

presentment as his own brush might have produced. As a rule, however, he devoted himself to the portrayal

of the other sex, painting ladies in syrup, as Arran said, with marshmallow children leaning against their

knees. He was as quick as a dressmaker at catching new ideas, and the style of his pictures changed as rapidly

as that of the fashionplates. One year all his sitters were done on oval canvases, with gauzy draperies and a

background of clouds; the next they were seated under an immemorial elm, caressing enormous dogs

obviously constructed out of doormats. Whatever their occupation they always looked straight out of the

canvas, giving the impression that their eyes were fixed on an invisible camera. This gave rise to the rumour

that Mungold "did" his portraits from photographs; it was even said that he had invented a way of transferring

an enlarged photograph to the canvas, so that all that remained was to fill in the colours. If he heard of this

charge he took it calmly, but probably it had not reached the high spheres in which he moved, and in which

he was esteemed for painting pearls better, and making unsuggestive children look lovelier, than any of his

fellowcraftsmen. Mr. Mungold, in fact, deemed it a part of his professional duty to study his sitters in their

homelife; and as this life was chiefly led in the homes of others, he was too busy dining out and going to the

opera to mingle much with his colleagues. But as no one is wholly consistent, Mr. Mungold had lately belied

his ambitions by falling in love with Kate Arran; and with that gentle persistency which made him so

wonderful in managing obstreperous infantile sitters, he had contrived to establish a precarious footing in her

Part of his success was due to the fact that he could not easily think himself the object of a rebuff. If it

seemed to hit him he regarded it as deflected from its aim, and brushed it aside with a discreet gesture. A

touch of comedy was lent to the situation by the fact that, till Kate Arran's coming, Mungold had always

served as her brother's Awful Example. It was a mark of Arran's lack of humour that he persisted in regarding

the little man as a conscious apostate, instead of perceiving that he painted as he could, in a world which

really looked to him like a vast confectioner's window. Stanwell had never quite divined how Mungold had

won over the sister, to whom her brother's prejudices were a religion; but he suspected the painter of having

united a deep belief in Caspar's gifts with the occasional offer of opportune delicacies the portwine or

Stanwell, persuaded that Mungold would stick to his post till Miss Arran's return, felt himself freed from his

promise to the latter and left the incongruous pair to themselves. There had been a time when it amused him

to see Caspar submerge the painter in a torrent of turbid eloquence, and to watch poor Mungold sputtering

under the rush of denunciation, yet emitting little bland phrases of assent, like a gentleman drowning

correctly, in gloves and eyeglasses. But Stanwell was beginning to find less food for gaiety than for envy in

the contemplation of his colleague. After all, Mungold held his ground, he did not go under. Spite of his

manifest absurdity he had succeeded in propitiating the sister, in making himself tolerated by the brother; and

the fact that his success was due to the ability to purchase portwine and game was not in this case a

mitigating circumstance. Stanwell knew that the Arrans really preferred him to Mungold, but the knowledge

only sharpened his envy of the latter, whose friendship could command visible tokens of expression, while

poor Stanwell's remained gloomily inarticulate. As he returned to his overpopulated studio and surveyed

anew the pictures of which Shepson had not offered to relieve him, he found himself wishing, not for

Mungold's lack of scruples, for he believed him to be the most scrupulous of men, but for that happy mean of

talent which so completely satisfied the artistic requirements of the inartistic. Mungold was not to be despised

as an apostate he was to be congratulated as a man whose aptitudes were exactly in line with the taste of

At this point in his meditations, Stanwell's eye fell on the portrait of Miss Gladys Glyde. It was really, as

Shepson said, as good as a Mungold; yet it could never be made to serve the same purpose, because it was the

work of a man who knew it was bad art. That at least would have been Caspar Arran's contention poor

Caspar, who produced as bad art in the service of the loftiest convictions! The distinction began to look like

mere casuistry to Stanwell. He had never been very proud of his own adaptability. It had seemed to him to

indicate the lack of an individual standpoint, and he had tried to counteract it by the cultivation of an

aggressively personal style. But the cursed knack was in his fingers he was always at the mercy of some

other man's sensations, and there were moments when he blushed to remember that his grandfather had spent

a laborious lifetime in Rome, copying the Old Masters for a generation which lacked the facile resource of

the camera. Now, however, it struck him that the ancestral versatility might be a useful inheritance. In art,

after all, the greatest of them did what they could; and if a man could do several things instead of one, why

should he not profit by the multiplicity of his gifts? If one had two talents why not serve two masters?

STANWELL, while seeing Caspar through the attack which had been the cause of his sister's arrival, had

struck up a friendship with the young doctor who climbed the patient's seven flights with unremitting fidelity.

The two, since then, had continued to exchange confidences regarding the sculptor's health, and Stanwell,

anxious to waylay the doctor after his visit, left the studio door ajar, and went out when he heard a sound of

leavetaking across the landing. But it appeared that the doctor had just come, and that it was Mungold who

The latter at once assumed that Stanwell had been on the alert for him, and met the supposed advance by

"May I come and take a look around, my dear fellow? I have been meaning to drop in for an age "

Mungold always spoke with a girlish emphasis and effusiveness "but I have been so busy getting up Mrs.

Van Orley's tableaux English eighteenth century portraits, you know that really, what with that and my

sittings, I've hardly had time to think. And then you know you owe me about a dozen visits! But you're a

savage you don't pay visits. You stay here and piocher which is wiser, as the results prove. Ah, you're

very strong immensely strong!" He paused in the middle of the studio, glancing about a little

apprehensively, as though he thought the stored energy of the pictures might result in an explosion. "Very

original very striking ah, Miss Arran! A powerful head; but excuse the suggestion isn't there

just the least little lack of sweetness? You don't think she has the sweet type? Perhaps not but could she be

so lovely if she were not intensely feminine? Just at present, though, she is not looking her best she is

horribly tired. I am afraid there is very little money left and poor dear Caspar is so impossible: he won't

hear of a loan. Otherwise I should be most happy . But I came just now to propose a piece of work in

fact to give him an order. Mrs. Archer Millington has built a new ballroom, as I daresay you may have seen

in the papers, and she has been kind enough to ask me for some hints oh, merely as a friend: I don't

presume to do more than advise. But her decorator wants to do something with Cupids something light

and playful, you understand. And so I ventured to say that I knew a very clever sculptor well, I do believe

Caspar has talent latent talent, you know and at any rate a job of that sort would be a big lift for him.

At least I thought he would regard it so; but you should have heard him when I showed him the decorator's

sketch. He asked me what the Cupids were to be done in lard? And if I thought he had had his training at a

confectioner's? And I don't know what more besides but he worked himself up to such a degree that he

brought on a frightful fit of coughing, and Miss Arran, I'm afraid, was rather annoyed with me when she

came in, though I'm sure an order from Mrs. Archer Millington is not a thing that would annoy most people!"

Mr. Mungold paused, breathless with the rehearsal of his wrongs, and Stanwell said with a smile: "You know

"The artist's aim?" Mr. Mungold stared. "What is the artist's aim but to please isn't that the purpose of all

true art? But his theories are so extravagant. I really don't know what I shall say to Mrs. Millington she is

not used to being refused. I suppose I had better put it on the ground of illhealth." The artist glanced at his

handsome repeater. "Dear me, I promised to be at Mrs. Van Orley's before twelve o'clock. We are to settle

about the curtain before luncheon. My dear fellow, it has been a privilege to see your work. By the way, you

have never done any modelling, I suppose? You're so extraordinarily versatile I didn't know whether you

Stanwell had to wait a long time for the doctor; and when the latter came out he looked grave. Worse? No, he

couldn't say that Caspar was worse but then he wasn't any better. There was nothing mortal the matter, but

the question was how long he could hold out. It was the kind of case where there is no use in drugs he had

"It's the cold, I suppose," Stanwell groaned. "He ought to be shipped off to Florida."

The doctor made a negative gesture. "Florida be hanged! What he wants is to sell his group. That would set

"Sell his group?" Stanwell echoed. "But he's so indifferent to recognition he believes in himself so

thoroughly. I thought at first he would be hard hit when the Exhibition Committee refused it, but he seems to

His visitor turned on him the penetrating eye of the confessor. "Indifferent to recognition? He's eating his

heart out for it. Can't you see that all that talk is just so much whistling to keep his courage up? The name of

his disease is failure and I can't write the prescription that will cure that complaint. But if somebody

would come along and take a fancy to those two naked parties who are breaking each other's heads, we'd have

The truth of this diagnosis became suddenly vivid to Stanwell. How dull of him not to have seen before that it

was not cold or privation which was killing Caspar not anxiety for his sister's future, nor the ache of

watching her daily struggle but simply the cankering thought that he might die before he had made

himself known! It was his vanity that was starving to death, and all Mungold's hampers could not appease

that hunger. Stanwell was not shocked by the discovery he was only the more sorry for the little man, who

was, after all, denied that solace of selfsufficiency which his talk so noisily proclaimed. His lot seemed

hard enough when Stanwell had pictured him as buoyed up by the scorn of public opinion it became tragic

if he was denied that support. The artist wondered if Kate had guessed her brother's secret, or if she were still

the dupe of his stoicism. Stanwell was sure that the sculptor would take no one into his confidence, and least

of all his sister, whose faith in his artistic independence was the chief prop of that tottering pose. Kate's

penetration was not great, and Stanwell recalled the incredulous smile with which she had heard him defend

poor Mungold's "sincerity" against Caspar's assaults; but she had the insight of the heart, and where her

brother's happiness was concerned she might have seen deeper than any of them. It was this last consideration

which took the strongest hold on Stanwell he felt Caspar's sufferings chiefly through the thought of his

WITHIN three months two events had set the studio building talking. Stanwell had painted a fulllength

portrait of Mrs. Archer Millington, and Caspar Arran had received an order to execute his group in marble.

The name of the sculptor's patron had not been divulged. The order came through Shepson, who explained

that an American customer living abroad, having seen a photograph of the group in one of the papers, had at

once cabled home to secure it. He intended to bestow it on a public building in America, and not wishing to

advertise his munificence, had preferred that even the sculptor should remain ignorant of his name. The group

bought by an enlightened compatriot for the adornment of a civic building in his native land! There could

hardly be a more complete vindication of unappreciated genius, and Caspar made the most of the argument.

He was not exultant, he was sublimely magnanimous. He had always said that he could afford to await the

Verdict of Posterity, and his unknown patron's act clearly shadowed forth that impressive decision. Happily it

also found expression in a cheque which it would have taken more philosophy to await. The group was paid

for in advance, and Kate's joy in her brother's recognition was deliciously mingled with the thrill of ordering

him some new clothes, and coaxing him out to dine succulently at a neighbouring restaurant. Caspar

flourished insufferably on this regime: he began to strike the attitude of the recognized Great Master, who

gives advice and encouragement to the struggling neophyte. He held himself up as an example of the reward

of disinterestedness, of the triumph of the artist who clings obstinately to his convictions.

"A man must believe in his star look at Napoleon! It's the dogged trust in one's convictions that tells it

always ends by forcing the public into line. Only be sure you make no concessions don't give in to any of

their humbug! An artist who listens to the critics is ruined they never have any use for the poor devils

who do what they tell them to. Run after fame and she'll keep you running, but stay in your own corner and

do your own work, and by George, sir, she'll come crawling up to you and ask to have her likeness done!"

These exhortations were chiefly directed to Stanwell, partly because the inmates of the other studios were apt

to elude them, partly also because the rumours concerning Stanwell's portrait of Mrs. Millington had begun to

disquiet the sculptor. At first he had taken a condescending interest in the fact of his friend's receiving an

order, and had admonished him not to lose the chance of "showing up" his sitter and her environment. It was

a splendid opportunity for a fellow with a "message" to be introduced into the tents of the Philistine, and

Stanwell was charged to drive a long sharp nail into the enemy's skull. But presently Arran began to suspect

that the portrait was not as comminatory as he could have wished. Mungold, the most kindly of rivals, let

drop a word of injudicious praise: the picture, he said, promised to be delightfully "in keeping" with the

decorations of the ballroom, and the lady's gown harmonized exquisitely with the windowcurtains.

Stanwell, called to account by his monitor, reminded the latter that he himself had been selected by Mungold

to do the Cupids for Mrs. Millington's ballroom, and that the friendly artist's praise could, therefore, not be

"Ah, but I didn't do them I kicked him out!" Caspar rejoined; and Stanwell could only plead that, even in

"Ah, that's the worst of it. If the women get at you you're lost. You're young, you're impressionable, you

won't mind my saying that you're not built for a stoic, and hang it, they'll coddle you, they'll enervate you,

"Ah, poor Mungold," Stanwell laughed. "If he lived the life of an anchorite he couldn't help painting pictures

"Whereas you could," Kate interjected, raising her head from the ironingboard where, Sphinxlike,

Caspar directed a groan to his sister. "That's what they all think at first Childe Roland to the Dark Tower

came. But inside the Dark Tower there's the Venusberg. Oh, I don't mean that you'll be taken with truffles

and plush footmen, like Mungold. But praise, my poor Ned praise is a deadly drug! It's the absinthe of the

Stanwell raised a protesting hand. "Really, for one order, you're a little lurid!"

"Not sure wavering already! That's the way the mischief begins. If the women get a fad for you they'll

work you like a galleyslave. You'll have to do your round of 'copy' every morning. What becomes of

inspiration then? How are you going to loaf and invite the soul? Don't barter your birthright for a mess of

pottage! Oh, I understand the temptation I know the taste of money and success. But look at me, Stanwell.

You know how long I had to wait for recognition. Well, now it's come to me I don't mean to let it knock me

off my feet. I don't mean to let myself be overworked; I have already made it known that I will not be bullied

into taking more orders than I can do full justice to. And my sister is with me, God bless her; Kate would

Kate's glance radiantly confirmed this declaration of independence, and Stanwell, with his evasive laugh,

asked her if, meanwhile, she should object to his investing a part of his illgotten gains in theatre tickets for

It appeared that Stanwell had also been paid in advance, and well paid; for he began to permit himself various

mild distractions, in which he generally contrived to have the Arrans share. It seemed perfectly natural to

Kate that Caspar's friends should spend their money for his recreation, and by one of the most touching

sophistries of her sex she thus reconciled herself to the anomaly of taking a little pleasure on her own

account. Mungold was less often in the way, for she had never been able to forgive him for proposing that

Caspar should do Mrs. Millington's Cupids; and for a few radiant weeks Stanwell had the undisputed

Stanwell had "rushed through" Mrs. Millington's portrait in time for the opening of her new ballroom; and it

was perhaps in return for this favour that she consented to let the picture be exhibited at a big Portrait Show

In Mrs. Millington's ballroom the picture had been seen and approved only by the distinguished few who

had access to that social sanctuary; but on the walls of the exhibition it became a centre of comment and

discussion. One of the immediate results of this publicity was a visit from Shepson, with two or three orders

in his pocket, as he put it. He surveyed the studio with fresh disgust, asked Stanwell why he did not move,

and was impressed rather than downcast on learning that the painter had not decided whether he would take

"You might haf a studio at Newport," he suggested. "It would be rather new to do your sitters out of doors,

The picture produced a different and less flattering effect on the critics. They gave it, indeed, more space than

they had ever before accorded to the artist's efforts, but their estimate seemed to confirm Caspar Arran's

forebodings, and Stanwell had perhaps never despised them so little as when he read their comments on his

work. On the whole, however, neither praise nor blame disquieted him greatly. He was engrossed in the

contemplation of Kate Arran's happiness, and basking in the refracted warmth it shed about her. The doctor's

prognostications had come true. Caspar was putting on a pound a week, and had plunged into a fresh

"creation" more symbolic and encumbering than the monument of which he had been so opportunely

relieved. If there was any cloud on Stanwell's enjoyment of life, it was caused by the discovery that success

had quadrupled Caspar's artistic energies. Meanwhile it was delightful to see Kate's joy in her brother's

recovered capacity for work, and to listen to the axioms which, for Stanwell's guidance, she deduced from the

example of Caspar's heroic pursuit of the ideal. There was nothing repellent in Kate's borrowed didacticism,

and if it sometimes bored Stanwell to hear her quote her brother, he was sure it would never bore him to be

quoted by her himself; and there were moments when he felt he had nearly achieved that distinction.

Caspar was not addicted to the visiting of art exhibitions. He took little interest in any productions save his

own, and was moreover disposed to believe that good pictures, like clever criminals, are apt to go unhung.

Stanwell therefore thought it unlikely that his portrait of Mrs. Millington would be seen by Kate, who was not

given to independent explorations in the field of art; but one day, on entering the exhibition which he had

hitherto rather nervously shunned he saw the Arrans at the end of the gallery in which the portrait hung.

They were not looking at it, they were moving away from it, and to Stanwell's quickened perceptions their

attitude seemed almost that of flight. For a moment he thought of flying too; then a desperate resolve nerved

him to meet them, and stemming the crowd, he made a circuit which brought him face to face with their

The room in which they met was momentarily empty, and there was nothing to intervene between the shock

of their interchanged glances. Caspar was flushed and bristling: his little body quivered like a machine from

which the steam has just been turned off. Kate lifted a stricken glance. Stanwell read in it the reflexion of her

For a moment Caspar was silent too; then, with a terrible smile: "My dear fellow, I congratulate you;

The shot delivered, he stalked away with his sevenleague stride, and Kate moved tragically through the

It was winter again, and though the janitor had not forgotten the fire, the studio gave no other evidence of its

master's increasing prosperity. If Stanwell spent his money it was not upon himself.

He leaned back against the wall, his hands in his pockets, a cigarette between his lips, while Shepson paced

"I tell you vat it is, Mr. Sdanwell, I can't make you out!" he lamented. "Last vinter you got a sdart that vould

have kept most men going for years. After making dat hit vith Mrs. Millington's picture you could have

bainted half the town. And here you are sitting on your divan and saying you can't make up your mind to take

another order. Vell, I can only say that if you take much longer to make it up, you'll find some other chap has

cut in and got your job. Mrs. Van Orley has been waiting since last August, and she dells me you haven't

Left to himself, Stanwell stood in silent contemplation of the canvas on which the dealer had riveted his

reproachful gaze. It had been destined to reflect the opulent image of Mrs. Alpheus Van Orley, but some

secret reluctance of Stanwell's had stayed the execution of the task. He had painted two of Mrs. Millington's

friends in the spring, had been much praised and liberally paid for his work, and then, declining several recent

orders to be executed at Newport, had surprised his friends by remaining quietly in town. It was not till

August that he hired a little cottage on the New Jersey coast and invited the Arrans to visit him. They

accepted the invitation, and the three had spent together six weeks of seashore idleness, during which

Stanwell's modest rafters shook with Caspar's denunciations of his host's venality, and the brightness of

Kate's gratitude was tempered by a tinge of reproach. But her grief over Stanwell's apostasy could not efface

the fact that he had offered her brother the means of escape from town, and Stanwell himself was consoled by

the reflection that but for Mrs. Millington's portrait he could not have performed even this trifling service for

When the Arrans left him in September he went to pay a few visits in the country, and on his return, a month

later, to the studio building he found that things had not gone well with Caspar. The little sculptor had caught

cold, and the labour and expense of converting his gigantic offspring into marble seemed to hang heavily

upon him. He and Kate were living in a damp company of amorphous clay monsters, unfinished witnesses to

the creative frenzy which had seized him after the sale of his group; and the doctor had urged that his patient

should be removed to warmer and drier lodgings. But to uproot Caspar was impossible, and his sister could

Stanwell found that during his absence Mungold had reappeared, fresh and rosy from a summer in Europe,

and as prodigal as ever of the only form of attention which Kate could be counted on not to resent. The game

and champagne reappeared with him, and he seemed as ready as Stanwell to lend a patient ear to Caspar's

homilies. But Stanwell could see that, even now, Kate had not forgiven him for the Cupids. Stanwell himself

had spent the early winter months in idleness. The sight of his tools filled him with a strange repugnance, and

he absented himself as much as possible from the studio. But Shepson's visit roused him to the fact that he

must decide on some definite course of action. If he wished to follow up his success of the previous spring he

must refuse no more orders: he must not let Mrs. Van Orley slip away from him. He knew there were

competitors enough ready to profit by his hesitations, and since his success was the result of a whim, a whim

might undo it. With a sudden gesture of decision he caught up his hat and left the studio.

On the landing he met Kate Arran. She too was going out, drawn forth by the sudden radiance of the January

afternoon. She met him with a smile which seemed the answer to his uncertainties, and he asked abruptly if

Yes; for once she had time, for Mr. Mungold was sitting with Caspar, and had promised to remain till she

came in. It mattered little to Stanwell that Mungold was with Caspar as long as he himself was with Kate; and

he instantly soared to the suggestion that they should prolong the painter's vigil by taking the "elevated" to

the Park. In this too his companion acquiesced after a moment of surprise: she seemed in a consenting mood,

The Park was clothed in the double glitter of snow and sunshine. They roamed the hard white alleys to a

continuous tinkle of sleighbells, and Kate brightened with the exhilaration of the scene. It was not often that

she permitted herself such an escape from routine, and in this new environment, which seemed to detach her

from her daily setting, Stanwell had his first complete vision of her. To the girl also their unwonted isolation

seemed to create a sense of fuller communion, for she began presently, as they reached the leafless solitude of

the Ramble, to speak with sudden freedom of her brother. It appeared that the orders against which Caspar

had so heroically steeled himself were slow in coming: he had received no commission since the sale of his

group, and he was beginning to suffer from a reaction of discouragement. Oh, it was not the craving for

popularity Stanwell knew how far above that he stood. But it had been exquisite, yes, exquisite to him to

find himself believed in, understood. He had fancied that the purchase of the group was the dawn of a tardy

recognition and now the darkness of indifference had set in again, no one spoke of him, no one wrote of

"If he were in good health it would not matter he would throw off such weakness, he would live only for

the joy of his work; but he is losing ground, his strength is failing, and he is so afraid there will not be time

The quiver in her voice silenced Stanwell: he was afraid of echoing it with his own. At length he said: "Oh,

"Yes, real success," she said, with a solemn note in which he caught and forgave a reflection on his

"But when the orders do come," she continued, "will he have strength to carry them out? Last winter the

doctor thought he only needed work to set him up; now he talks of rest instead! He says we ought to go to a

He coloured to the roots of his hair. "But illhealth illhealth excuses everything. If he goes away now he

will come back good for twice the amount of work in the spring. A sculptor is not expected to deliver a statue

on a given day, like a package of groceries! You must do as the doctor says you must make him chuck

They had reached a windless nook above the lake, and, pausing in the stress of their talk, she let herself sink

on a bench beside the path. The movement encouraged him, and he seated himself at her side.

"You must take him away at once," he repeated urgently. "He must be made comfortable you must both

"Oh, stop, please; let me explain. I'm not talking of lending you money; I'm talking of giving you myself.

The offer may be just as unacceptable, but it's of a kind to which it's customary to accord it a hearing. I

should have made it a year ago the first day I saw you, I believe! but that, then, it wasn't in my power

to make things easier for you. But now, you know, I've had a little luck. Since I painted Mrs. Millington

things have changed. I believe I can get as many orders as I choose there are two or three people waiting

now. What's the use of it all, if it doesn't bring me a little happiness? And the only happiness I know is the

He paused, suddenly losing the courage to look at her, so that her pained murmur was framed for him in a

glittering vision of the frozen lake. He turned with a start and met the refusal in her eyes.

"The fact that, as you say, things have changed since you painted Mrs. Millington. I haven't seen the later

"You've sold your talent, and you know it: that's the dreadful part. You did it deliberately," she cried with

She received this with a long shuddering sigh, and turned her eyes away from him.

It was on the tip of Stanwell's tongue to answer, "That I might say to you what I am just saying now " but

he replied instead: "A man may paint bad pictures and be a decent fellow. Look at Mungold, after all!"

The adjuration had an unexpected effect. Kate's colour faded suddenly, and she sat motionless, with a

"There's a difference " she began at length abruptly; "the difference you've always insisted on. Mr.

Mungold paints as well as he can. He has no idea that his pictures are less good than they might be."

"So he can't be accused of doing what he does for money of sacrificing anything better." She turned on

him with troubled eyes. "It was you who made me understand that, when Caspar used to make fun of him."

Stanwell smiled. "I'm glad you still think me a better painter than Mungold. But isn't it hard that for that very

reason I should starve in a hole? If I painted badly enough you'd see no objection to my living at the

"I see no reason to at present," said Stanwell drily. "But I won't pretend to be ashamed when I'm not. I think

She drew a deep breath. "Money money? Has Caspar's example been nothing to you, then?"

"There is no occasion which can justify an artist's sacrificing his convictions!" she exclaimed.

Stanwell rose too, facing her with a mounting urgency which sent a flush to his cheek.

"Can't you conceive such an occasion in my case? The wish, I mean, to make things easier for Caspar to

Her face reflected his blush, and she stood gazing at him with a wounded wonder.

Stanwell made an impatient gesture. "You've got to live on something or he has, even if you don't include

"That's just it that's what I came here to say to you." She stood a moment gazing away from him at the

"Yes. That we've got to live on something, Caspar and I, as you say; and since an artist cannot sacrifice his

convictions, the sacrifice must I mean I wanted you to know that I have promised to marry Mr.

"Mungold!" Stanwell cried with a sharp note of irony; but her white look checked it on his lips.

"I know all you are going to say," she murmured, with a kind of nobleness which moved him even through

his sense of its grotesqueness. "But you must see the distinction, because you first made it clear to me. I can

take money earned in good faith I can let Caspar live on it. I can marry Mr. Mungold; because, though his

She began to move away from him slowly, and he followed her in silence along the frozen path.

When Stanwell reentered his studio the dusk had fallen. He lit his lamp and rummaged out some

writingmaterials. Having found them, he wrote to Shepson to say that he could not paint Mrs. Van Orley,

and did not care to accept any more orders for the present. He sealed and stamped the letter and flung it over

the banisters for the janitor to post; then he dragged out his unfinished head of Kate Arran, replaced it on the

DUSK had fallen, and the circle of light shed by the lamp of Governor Mornway's writingtable just rescued

from the surrounding dimness his own imposing bulk, thrown back in a deep chair in the lounging attitude

When the Governor of Midsylvania rested he rested completely. Five minutes earlier he had been bowed over

his office desk, an Atlas with the State on his shoulders; now, his working hours over, he had the air of a man

who has spent his day in desultory pleasure, and means to end it in the enjoyment of a good dinner. This

freedom from care threw into relief the hovering fidgetiness of his sister, Mrs. Nimick, who, just outside the

circle of lamplight, haunted the warm gloom of the hearth, from which the wood fire now and then sent up an

Mrs. Nimick's presence did not usually minister to repose; but the Governor's serenity was too deep to be

easily disturbed, and he felt the calmness of a man who knows there is a mosquito in the room, but has drawn

the netting close about his head. This calmness reflected itself in the accent with which he said, throwing

himself back to smile up at his sister: "You know I am not going to make any appointments for a week."

It was the day after the great reform victory which had put John Mornway for the second time at the head of

his State, a triumph compared with which even the mighty battle of his first election sank into insignificance,

and he leaned back with the sense of unassailable placidity which follows upon successful effort.

Mrs. Nimick murmured an apology. "I didn't understand I saw in this morning's papers that the

"Oh, Fleetwood his reappointment was involved in the campaign. He's one of the principles I represent!"

Mrs. Nimick smiled a little tartly. "It seems odd to some people to think of Mr. Fleetwood in connection with

The Governor's smile had no answering acerbity; the mention of his AttorneyGeneral's name had set his

blood humming with the thrill of the fight, and he wondered how it was that Fleetwood had not already been

"No," he said, goodhumoredly, "two years ago Fleetwood's name didn't stand for principles of any sort; but

I believed in him, and look what he's done for me! I thought he was too big a man not to see in time that

statesmanship is a finer thing than practical politics, and now that I've given him a chance to make the

discovery, he's on the way to becoming just such a statesman as the country needs."

"Oh, it's a great deal easier and pleasanter to believe in people," replied Mrs. Nimick, in a tone full of occult

allusion, "and, of course, we all knew that Mr. Fleetwood would have a hearing before any one else."

The Governor took this imperturbably. "Well, at any rate, he isn't going to fill all the offices in the State;

there will probably be one or two to spare after he has helped himself, and when the time comes I'll think

Mrs. Nimick brightened. "It would make sucha difference to Jack it might mean anything to the poor boy

"Oh, I know, one mustn't say that, or at least you mustn't listen. You're so dreadfully afraid of nepotism. But

I'm not asking for anything for Jack I have never asked for a crust for any of us, thank Heaven! No one

can point to me " Mrs. Nimick checked herself suddenly and continued in a more impersonal tone: "But

there's no harm, surely, in my saying a word for Mr. Ashford, when I know that he's actually under

consideration, and I don't see why the fact that Jack is in his office should prevent my speaking."

"On the contrary," said the Governor, "it implies, on your part, a personal knowledge of Mr. Ashford's

Mrs. Nimick never quite knew how to meet him when he took that tone, and the flickering fire made her face

for a moment the picture of uncertainty; then at all hazards she launched out: "Well, I have Ella's promise, at

The Governor smiled. "You talk as if Ella had a political salonand distributed lettres de cachet!I'm glad she

approves of Ashford; but if you think my wife makes my appointments for me " He broke off with a laugh

Mrs. Nimick reddened. "One never knows how you will take the simplest thing. What harm is there in my

saying that Ella approves of Mr. Ashford? I thought you liked her to take an interest in your work."

"That of promising to use her influence to get people appointed. But you always talk of politics in the

vocabulary of European courts. Thank Heaven, Ella has less imagination. She has her sympathies, of course,

Mrs. Nimick gathered up her furs with an air at once crestfallen and resentful. "I'm sorry I always seem to

say the wrong thing. I'm sure I came with the best intentions it's natural that your sister should want to be

"Of course it is, my dear," exclaimed the Governor genially, as he rose to grasp the hands with which she was

Mrs. Nimick, who lived a little way out of town, and whose visits to her brother were apparently achieved at

the cost of immense effort and mysterious complications, had come to congratulate him on his victory, and to

sound him regarding the nomination to a coveted post of the lawyer in whose firm her eldest son was a clerk.

In the urgency of the latter errand she had rather lost sight of the former, but her face softened as the

Governor, keeping both her hands in his, said in the voice which always seemed to put the most generous

interpretation on her motives: "I was sure you would be one of the first to give me your blessing."

"Oh, your success no one feels it more than I do!" sighed Mrs. Nimick, always at home in the emotional

key. "I keep in the background. I make no noise, I claim no credit, but whatever happens, no one shall ever

Mrs. Nimick's felicitations were always couched in the conditional, with a sideglance at dark contingencies,

and the Governor, smiling at the familiar construction, returned cheerfully: "I don't see why any one should

"Well, I'm in the saddle for another two years at any rate, so you had better put in all the rejoicing you can."

"The only thing likely to happen at present is that you will miss your train if I let you go on saying nice things

Mrs. Nimick at this dried her eyes, renewed her clutch on her draperies, and stood glancing sentimentally

"I take away a lovely picture of you," she murmured. "It's wonderful what you've made of this hideous

"Ah, not I, but Ella there she doesreign undisputed," he acknowledged, following her glance about the

library, which wore an air of permanent habitation, of slowly formed intimacy with its inmates, in marked

"Oh, she's wonderful, quite wonderful. I see she has got those imported damask curtains she was looking at

the other day at Fielding's. When I am asked how she does it all, I always say it's beyond me!" Mrs. Nimick

"It's an art like another," smiled the Governor. "Ella has been used to living in tents and she has the knack of

"She certainly makes the most extraordinary bargains all the knack in the world won't take the place of

"Are they good? I'm glad to hear it. But all the good curtains and carpets won't make a house comfortable to

He recalled with a shudder the lean Congressional years the years before his marriage when Mrs.

Nimick had lived with him in Washington, and the daily struggle in the House had been combined with

domestic conflicts almost equally recurrent. The offer of a foreign mission, though disconnecting him from

active politics, had the advantage of freeing him from his sister's tutelage, and in Europe, where he remained

for two years, he had met the lady who was to become his wife. Mrs. Renfield was the widow of one of the

diplomatists who languish in perpetual first secretaryship at our various embassies. Her life had given her

ease without triviality, and a sense of the importance of politics seldom found in ladies of her nationality. She

regarded a public life as the noblest and most engrossing of careers, and combined with great social

versatility an equal gift for reading bluebooks and studying debates. So sincere was the latter taste that she

passed without regret from the amenities of a European life well stocked with picturesque intimacies to the

rawness of the Midsylvanian capital. She helped Mornway in his fight for the Governorship as a man likes to

be helped by a woman by her tact, her good looks, her memory for faces, her knack of saying the right

thing to the right person, and her capacity for obscure hard work in the background of his public activity. But,

above all, she helped him by making his private life smooth and harmonious. For a man careless of personal

ease, Mornway was singularly alive to the domestic amenities. Attentive service, wellordered dinners,

brightly burning fires, and a scent of flowers in the house these material details, which had come to seem

the extension of his wife's personality, the inevitable result of her nearness, were as agreeable to him after

five years of marriage as in the first surprise of his introduction to them. Mrs. Nimick had kept house jerkily

and vociferously; Ella performed the same task silently and imperceptibly, and the results were all in favor of

the latter method. Though neither the Governor nor his wife had large means, the household, under Mrs.

Mornway's guidance, took on an air of sober luxury as agreeable to her husband as it was exasperating to her

sisterinlaw. The domestic machinery ran without a jar. There were no upheavals, no debts, no squalid

cookless hiatuses between intervals of showy hospitality; the household moved along on lines of quiet

elegance and comfort, behind which only the eye of the housekeeping sex could have detected a gradually

Such an eye was now projected on the Governor's surroundings, and its explorations were summed up in the

tone in which Mrs. Nimick repeated from the threshold: "I always say I don't see how she does it!"

The tone did not escape the Governor, but it disturbed him no more than the buzz of a baffled insect. Poor

Grace! It was not his fault if her husband was given to chimerical investments, if her sons were

"unsatisfactory," and her cooks would not stay with her; but it was natural that these facts should throw into

irritating contrast the ease and harmony of his own domestic life. It made him all the sorrier for his sister to

know that her envy did not penetrate to the essence of his happiness, but lingered on those external signs of

wellbeing which counted for so little in the sum total of his advantages. Poor Mrs. Nimick's life seemed

doubly thin and mean when one remembered that, beneath its shabby surface, there were no compensating

IT was the custodian of his own hidden treasure who at this moment broke in upon his musings. Mrs.

Mornway, fresh from her afternoon walk, entered the room with that air of ease and lightness which seemed

to diffuse a social warmth about her; fine, slender, pliant, so polished and modeled by an intelligent

experience of life that youth seemed clumsy in her presence. She looked down at her husband and shook her

"You promised to keep the afternoon to yourself, and I hear Grace has been here."

"Poor Grace she didn't stay long, and I should have been a brute not to see her."

He leaned back, filling his gaze to the brim with her charming image, which obliterated at a stroke the fretful

The Governor laughed. "She said you were in her confidence that you were backing her up. She seemed to

Mrs. Mornway smiled; her smile, always full of delicate implications, seemed to caress her husband while it

"Poor Grace! I've always bothered her." She paused, removing her gloves reflectively and laying her long

fine hands on his shoulders as she stood behind him. "Then you don't believe in Ashford?" Feeling his slight

"No, and I don't mean to for a week. I'm dead beat, and I want to bring a fresh mind to the question. There is

She turned away from him, smoothing her hair in the mirror above the mantelpiece. "You're sure of that?" she

"Of George Fleetwood? And poor Grace thinks you are deep in my counsels! I am as sure of reappointing

Fleetwood as I am that I have just been reelected myself. I've never made any secret of the fact that if they

"Generous? What a strange word to use! Fleetwood is my trump card the one man I can count on to carry

She mused on this, smiling a little. "That's why I call you generous when I remember how you disliked

"What of that? I was prejudiced against him, I own; or rather, I had a just distrust of a man with such a past.

But how splendidly he's wiped it out! What a record he has written on the new leaf he promised to turn over

if I gave him the chance! Do you know," the Governor interrupted himself with a pleasantly reminiscent

laugh, "I was rather annoyed with Grace when she hinted that you had promised to back up Ashford I told

her you didn't aspire to distribute patronage. But she might have reminded me if she'd known that it

Mrs. Mornway turned with a slight heightening of color. "Grace how could she possibly have known?"

"She couldn't, of course, unless she'd read my weakness in my face. But why do you look so startled at my

"It's only that I so dislike Grace's ineradicable idea that I am a wirepuller. Why should she imagine I would

"Oh, Grace has always been a mild and ineffectual conspirator, and she thinks every other woman is built on

the same plan. But you didget Fleetwood's job for him, you know," he repeated with laughing insistence.

"I had more faith than you in human nature, that's all." She paused a moment, and then added: "Personally,

"Oh, I never doubted your disinterestedness. But you are not going to turn against your candidate, are you?"

She hesitated. "I am not sure; circumstances alter cases. When you made Fleetwood AttorneyGeneral two

"I don't say there is it's not my business to look for him, at any rate. What I mean is that at that time

"But, even if he were not, what do I risk for him now? I don't see your point. Since he didn't cost me my

"He's immensely unpopular. He will cost you a great deal of popularity, and you have never pretended to

"No, nor ever sacrificed anything essential to it. Are you really asking me to offer up Fleetwood to it now?"

"I don't ask you to do anything except to consider if he isessential. You said you were overtired and

wanted to bring a fresh mind to bear on the other appointments. Why not delay this one too?"

Mornway turned in his chair and looked at her searchingly. "This means something, Ella. What have you

"Just what you have, probably, but with more attentive ears. The very record you are so proud of has made

George Fleetwood innumerable enemies in the last two years. The Lead Trust people are determined to ruin

She paused. "You know the 'Spy' has always threatened a campaign. And he has a past, as you say."

"Which was public property long before I first appointed him. Nothing could be gained by raking up his old

political history. Everybody knows he didn't come to me with clean hands, but to hurt him now the 'Spy'

"Unproved accusations don't count much against a man of such proved capacity. The best answer is his

"The public looks wherever the press points. And besides, you have your own future to consider. It would be

a pity to sacrifice such a career as yours for the sake of backing up even as useful a man as George

Fleetwood." She paused, as if checked by his gathering frown, but went on with fresh decision: "Oh, I'm not

speaking of personal ambition; I'm thinking of the good you can do. Will Fleetwood's reappointment secure

the greatest good of the greatest number, if his unpopularity reacts on you to the extent of hindering your

The Governor's brow cleared and he rose with a smile. "My dear, your reasoning is admirable, but we must

leave my career to take care of itself. Whatever I may be tomorrow, I am Governor of Midsylvania today,

and my business as Governor is to appoint as AttorneyGeneral the best man I can find for the place and

that man is George Fleetwood, unless you have a better one to propose." She met this with perfect

goodhumor. "No, I have told you already that that is not my business. But I havea candidate of my own for

"Well, who is your candidate, and for what office? I only hope you don't want to change cooks!"

"Oh, I do that without your authority, and you never even know it has been done." She hesitated, and then

"Gregg? Rufus Gregg?" He stared. "What an extraordinary request! What can I do for a man I've had to kick

"Not much, perhaps; I know it's difficult. But, after all, it was your kicking him out that ruined him."

"It was his dishonesty that ruined him. He was getting a good salary as my stenographer, and if he hadn't sold

"No no; I don't mean that. But, of course, his wife and children believe in him, and think you were cruel,

"I shouldn't have thought it so, but money is not what I want. Mrs. Gregg is proud, and it is hard to help her

in that way. Couldn't you give him work of some kind just a little post in a corner?"

"My dear child, the little posts in the corner are just the ones where honesty is essential. A footpad doesn't

wait under a streetlamp! Besides, how can I recommend a man whom I have dismissed for theft? I won't say

a word to hinder his getting a place, but on my conscience I can't give him one."

She paused and turned toward the door silently, though without any show of resentment; but on the threshold

"Fleetwood? You class Fleetwood with Gregg? The best man in the State with a little beggarly thieving

nonentity? It's evident enough you're new at wirepulling, or you would show more skill at it!"

She met this with a laugh. "I'm not likely to have much practice if my first attempt is such a failure. Well, I

will see if Mrs. Gregg will let me help her a little I suppose there is nothing else to be done."

"Nothing that we can do. If Gregg wants a place he had better get one on the staff of the 'Spy.' He served

THE Governor stared at the card with a frown. Half an hour had elapsed since his wife had gone upstairs to

dress for the big dinner from which official duties excused him, and he was still lingering over the fire before

preparing for his own solitary meal. He expected no one that evening but his old friend Hadley Shackwell,

with whom it was his longestablished habit to talk over his defeats and victories in the first lull after the

conflict; and Shackwell was not likely to turn up till nine o'clock. The unwonted stillness of the room, and the

knowledge that he had a quiet evening before him, filled the Governor with a luxurious sense of repose. The

world seemed to him a good place to be in, and his complacency was shadowed only by the fear that he had

perhaps been a trifle overharsh in refusing his wife's plea for the stenographer. There seemed, therefore, a

certain fitness in the appearance of the man's card, and the Governor with a sigh gave orders that Gregg

Gregg was still the softstepping scoundrel who invited the toe of honesty, and Mornway, as he entered, was

conscious of a sharp revulsion of feeling. But it was impossible to evade the interview, and he sat silent while

Mrs. Mornway had represented the stenographer as being in desperate straits, and ready to accept any job that

could be found, but though his appearance might have seemed to corroborate her account, he evidently took a

less hopeless view of his case, and the Governor found with surprise that he had fixed his eye on a clerkship

in one of the Government offices, a post which had been half promised him before the incident of the letters.

His plea was that the Governor's charge, though unproved, had so injured his reputation that he could only

hope to clear himself by getting some sort of small job under the Administration. After that, it would be easy

He met Mornway's refusal with civility, but remarked after a moment: "I hadn't expected this, Governor. Mrs.

The Governor's tone was brief. "Mrs. Mornway is sorry for your wife and children, and for their sake would

be glad to find work for you, but she could not have led you to think that there was any chance of your

"You have misinterpreted my wife's interest in your family. Mrs. Mornway has nothing to do with the

distribution of Government offices." The Governor broke off, annoyed to find himself asseverating for the

There was a moment's silence; then Gregg said, still in a perfectly equable tone: "You've always been hard on

me, Governor, but I don't bear malice. You accused me of selling those letters to the 'Spy' "

"You couldn't prove your case," Gregg went on imperturbably, "but you were right in one respect. I wason

confidential terms with the 'Spy.'" He paused and glanced at Mornway, whose face remained immovable.

"I'm on the same terms with them still, and I'm ready to let you have the benefit of it if you'll give methe

"In other words, you will do a dirty trick for me if I undertake to convince people that you are the soul of

"There are always two ways of putting a thing. Why not call it a plain case of give and take? I want

Gregg hesitated; then he said: "Perhaps you don't mean to reappoint Fleetwood." The Governor was silent,

and he continued: "If you do, don't kick me out a second time. I'm not threatening you I'm speaking as a

The Governor rose, gripping his chairback sternly. "You will be kind enough to leave my wife's name out of

the discussion. I supposed you knew me well enough to know that I don't buy newspaper secrets at any price,

SHACKWELL and the Governor sat over the evening embers. It was after ten o'clock, and the servant had

carried away the coffee and liqueurs, leaving the two men to their cigars. Mornway had once more lapsed

into his armchair, and sat with outstretched feet, gazing comfortably at his friend.

Shackwell was a small dry man of fifty, with a face as sallow and freckled as a winter pear, a limp mustache,

"I am glad you have given yourself a day's rest," he said, looking at the Governor.

"Well, I don't know that I needed it. There's such exhilaration in victory that I never felt fresher."

"I know but I'm ready for it. You mean the campaign against Fleetwood. I understand there is to be a big

Shackwell paused, surveying his cigar. "You knew the 'Spy' meant to lead the attack?"

Mornway related the incident of Gregg's visit. "I could hardly buy my information at that price," he said,

"and, besides, it is really Fleetwood's business this time. I suppose he has heard the report, but it doesn't seem

to bother him. I rather thought he would have looked in today to talk things over, but I haven't seen him."

Shackwell continued to twist his cigar through his sallow fingers without remembering to light it. "You're

The Governor caught him up. "You're the fourth person who has asked me that today! You haven't lost faith

"Well, then, what are you all thinking of, to suppose I can be frightened by a little newspaper talk? Besides, if

Shackwell, standing up, confronted his friend solemnly. "This that Fleetwood bought his appointment two

"Known found out? This is magnificent! What was my price, and what did I do with the money?"

"The only AttorneyGeneral. "The 'Spy' has the Lead Trust behind it and means to put up a savage fight.

"Hadley, is this a conspiracy? You're saying to me just what Ella said this afternoon."

At the mention of Mrs. Mornway's name a silence fell between the two men and the Governor moved

"You are not advising me to chuck Fleetwood because the 'Spy' is going to accuse me of having sold him his

Shackwell drew a deep breath. "You say yourself that Mrs. Mornway gave you the same advice this

"Well, what of that? Do you imagine that my wife distrib " The Governor broke off with an exasperated

Shackwell, leaning against the mantelpiece, looked down into the embers. "I didn't say the 'Spy' meant to

Mornway stood up slowly, his eyes on his friend's averted face. The ashes dropped from his cigar, scattering

The two men faced each other in the closely curtained silence of the dim luxurious room. Shackwell's eyes

again wandered, as if summoning the walls to reply. Then he said, "I have positive information that the 'Spy'

The Governor stood silent, immovable, while the blood crept slowly from his strong neck to his lowering

brows. Once he laughed, then he set his lips and continued to gaze into the fire. After a while he looked at his

cigar and shook the freshly formed cone of ashes carefully upon the hearth. He had just turned again to

The room swam about Shackwell, and when he recovered himself, Mornway, with outstretched hand, was

Fleetwood was a smaller man than the Governor. He was erect and compact, with a face full of dry energy,

which seemed to press forward with the spring of his prominent features, as though it were the weapon with

which he cleared his way through the world. He was in evening dress, scrupulously appointed, but pale and

"I knew you needed to be let alone. I didn't mean to come to night, but I wanted to say a word to you."

At this, Shackwell, who had fallen into the background, made a motion of leavetaking, but the Governor

"Certainly not. I am glad to have him stay. I have simply come to say that I have been thinking over my

future arrangements, and that I find it will not be possible for me to continue in office."

There was a long pause, during which Shackwell kept his eyes on Mornway. The Governor had turned pale,

Fleetwood stood leaning against a high chairback, fretting its carved ornaments with restless fingers. "It is

"Is one of them the fact that you are afraid of what the 'Spy' is going to say?"

The AttorneyGeneral flushed deeply and moved away a few steps. "I'm sick of mudthrowing," he

"George Fleetwood!" Mornway exclaimed. He had advanced toward his friend, and the two stood

"It's not only that, of course. I've been frightfully hard worked. My health has given way "

Fleetwood forced a smile. "My dear fellow, what a slave driver you are! Hasn't a man the right to take a

"I don't want to fail you now. But it isn't the eve of battle you're in, and that's the main thing."

"The main thing at present is that you promised to stay in with me, and that I must have your real reason for

Fleetwood made a deprecatory movement. "My dear Governor, if you only knew it, I'm doing you a service

"Because I'm hated because the Lead Trust wants my blood, and will have yours too if you appoint me."

The Governor continued to speak with dry deliberation. "Evidently, then, you know what they mean to say."

Fleetwood shrugged his shoulders and was silent. Shackwell, from a distant seat, uttered a faint protesting

sound, but no one heeded him. The Governor stood squarely before Fleetwood, his hands in his pockets. "It

"What the 'Spy' means to say that you bought my wife's influence to get your first appointment."

In the silence Shackwell started suddenly to his feet. A sound of carriagewheels had disturbed the quiet

street. They paused and then rolled up the semicircle to the door of the Executive Mansion.

The Governor turned impatiently; there was the sound of a servant's steps in the hall, followed by the opening

Another step, accompanied by a soft rustle of skirts, was advancing toward the library.

She stood before them in her bright evening dress, with an arrested brilliancy of aspect like the sparkle of a

fountain suddenly caught in ice. Her look moved rapidly from one to the other; then she came forward, while

There was another silence. Fleetwood broke it by saying: "It is getting late. If you want to see me tomorrow

Shackwell moved in Fleetwood's wake to the door. Mrs. Mornway stood with her head high, smiling slightly.

She shook hands with each of the men in turn; then she moved toward the sofa and laid aside her shining

cloak. All her gestures were calm and noble, but as she raised her hand to unclasp the cloak her husband

"This?" She looked at him with astonishment. "It belonged to my mother. I don't often wear it."

He turned away and flung himself with bowed head in the chair behind his writingtable. He wanted to

collect himself, to question her, to get to the bottom of the hideous abyss over which his imagination hung.

But what was the use? What did the facts matter? He had only to put his memories together they led him

straight to the truth. Every incident of the day seemed to point a leering finger in the same direction, from

Mrs. Nimick's allusion to the imported damask curtains to Gregg's confident appeal for rehabilitation.

"If you imagine that my wife distributes patronage " he heard himself repeating inanely, and the walls

seemed to reverberate with the laughter which his sister and Gregg had suppressed. He heard Ella rise from

"Sit still!" he commanded. She sank back without speaking, and he hid his face again. The past months, the

past years, were dancing a witches' dance about him. He remembered a hundred significant things. . . . Oh,

God, he cried to himself, if only she does not lie about it!Suddenly he recalled having pitied Mrs. Nimick

because she could not penetrate to the essence of his happiness. Those were the very words he had used! He

heard himself laugh aloud. The clock struck it went on striking interminably. At length he heard his wife

Authority she spoke to him with authority! He laughed again, and through his laugh he heard the senseless

He looked up haggardly and saw her standing before him. If only she would not lie about it! He said: "You

He sat silent, looking at her, noting with a morbid minuteness the exquisite finish of her dress, that finish

which seemed so much a part of herself that it had never before struck him as a merely purchasable

accessory. He knew so little what a woman's dresses cost! For a moment he lost himself in vague

And then he saw that, all along, he had thought she would be able to disprove it! A smothering blackness

closed in on him, and he had a physical struggle for breath. Then he forced himself to his feet and said: "He

"Oh, no, no, no!" she cried with conviction. He hardly knew whether the shadow lifted or deepened; the fact

that he instantly believed her seemed only to increase his bewilderment. Presently he found that she was still

speaking, and he began to listen to her, catching a phrase now and then through the deafening clamor of his

It amounted to this that just after her husband's first election, when Fleetwood's claims for the

AttorneyGeneralship were being vainly pressed by a group of his political backers, Mrs. Mornway had

chanced to sit next to him once or twice at dinner. One day, on the strength of these meetings, he had called

and asked her frankly if she would not help him with her husband. He had made a clean breast of his past, but

had said that, under a man like Mornway, he felt he could wipe out his political sins and purify himself while

he served the party. She knew the party needed his brains, and she believed in him she was sure he would

keep his word. She would have spoken in his favor in any case she would have used all her influence to

overcome her husband's prejudice and it was by a mere accident that, in the course of one of their talks, he

happened to give her a "tip" (his past connections were still useful for such purposes), a "tip" which, in the

first invading pressure of debt after Mornway's election, she had not had the courage to refuse. Fleetwood had

made some money for her yes, about thirty thousand dollars. She had repaid what he had lent her, and

there had been no further transactions of the kind between them. But it appeared that Gregg, before his

dismissal, had got hold of an old checkbook which gave a hint of the story, and had pieced the rest together

with the help of a clerk in Fleetwood's office. The "Spy" was in possession of the facts, but did not mean to

use them if Fleetwood was not reappointed, the Lead Trust having no personal grudge against Mornway.

Her story ended there, and she sat silent while he continued to look at her. So much had perished in the wreck

of his faith that he did not attach much value to what remained. It scarcely mattered that he believed her when

the truth was so sordid. There had been, after all, nothing to envy him for but what Mrs. Nimick had seen; the

His wife rose at length, pale but still calm. She had a kind of external dignity which she wore like one of her

rich dresses. It seemed as little a part of her now as the finery of which his gaze contemptuously reckoned the

"Don't look at me in that way. I am prepared for your being angry with me I made a dreadful mistake and

must bear my punishment: any punishment you choose to inflict. But you must think of yourself first you

must spare yourself. Why should you be so horribly unhappy? Don't you see that since Mr. Fleetwood has

behaved so well we are quite safe? And I swear to you I have paid back every penny of the money."

THREE days later Shackwell was summoned by telephone to the Governor's office in the Capitol. There had

been, in the interval, no communication between the two men, and the papers had been silent or

In the lobby Shackwell met Fleetwood leaving the building. For a moment the AttorneyGeneral seemed

about to speak; then he nodded and passed on, leaving to Shackwell the impression of a face more than ever

The Governor sat behind his desk in the clear autumn sunlight. In contrast to Fleetwood he seemed relaxed

and unwieldy, and the face he turned to his friend had a gray look of convalescence. Shackwell wondered,

He relieved himself of his overcoat without speaking, and when he turned again toward Mornway he was

"I waited to be sent for; I knew you'd let me know when you wanted me," Shackwell replied.

"I didn't send for you on purpose. If I had, I might have asked your advice, and I didn't want to ask anybody's

advice but my own." The Governor spoke steadily, but in a voice a trifle too well disciplined to be natural.

"I've had a three days' conference with myself," he continued, "and now that everything is settled I want you

"Yes?" Shackwell assented. The private issues of the affair were still wrapped in mystery to him, but he had

never had a moment's doubt as to its public solution, and he had no difficulty in conjecturing the nature of the

service he was to render. His heart ached for Mornway, but he was glad the inevitable step was to be taken

"Everything is settled," the Governor repeated, "and I want you to notify the press that I have decided to

"To reappoint Fleetwood," the Governor repeated, "because at the present juncture of affairs he is the only

man for the place. The work we began together is not finished, and I can't finish it without him. Remember

the vistas opened by the Lead Trust investigation he knows where they lead and no one else does. We

must put that inquiry through, no matter what it costs us, and that is why I have sent for you to take this letter

"You say you don't want my advice, but you can't expect me to go on such an errand with my eyes shut. What

Mornway smiled. "He did persist for three hours. But when he left here just now he had given me his

The Governor laughed. "My poor Hadley, you're worse than I expected. I thought you would understand me."

"Understand you? How can I, in heaven's name, when I don't understand the situation?

"The situation the situation?" Mornway repeated slowly. "Whose? His or mine? I don't either I haven't

The Governor rose, with a gesture toward the window, through which, below the slope of the Capitol

grounds, the roofs and steeples of the city spread their smoky mass to the mild air.

Mornway turned back and sank into his seat. "Don't you see that was all I had to turn to? The State the

country it's big enough, in all conscience, to fill a good deal of a void! My own walls had grown too

cramped for me, so I just stepped outside. You have no idea how it simplified matters at once. All I had to do

was to say to myself: 'Go ahead, and do the best you can for the country.' The personal issue simply didn't

"Then I turned over for three days this question of the AttorneyGeneralship. I couldn't see that it was

changed how should myfeelings have affected it? Fleetwood hasn't betrayed the State. There isn't a scar

on his public record he is still the best man for the place. My business is to appoint the best man I can

The Governor looked up with surprise. Shackwell could almost have sworn that he had indeed forgotten the

"To sacrifice my wife to the State? Oh, let us beware of big words. Fleetwood was inclined to use them at

first, but I managed to restore his sense of proportion. I showed him that our private lives are only a few feet

square anyhow, and that really, to breathe freely, one must get out of them into the open." He paused and

broke out with sudden violence, "My God, Hadley, didn't you see that Fleetwood had to obey me?"

"Yes I see that," said Shackwell, with reviving obstinacy. "But if you've reached such a height and pulled

him up to your side it seems to me that from that standpoint you ought to get an even clearer view of the

madness of your position. You say you have decided to sacrifice your own feelings and your wife's

though I'm not so sure of your right to dispose of hervoice in the matter; but what if you sacrifice the party

and the State as well, in this transcendental attempt to distinguish between private and public honor? You'll

"Yes. It's something more than a notification of Fleetwood's reappointment." Mornway paused and looked

steadily at his friend. "You're afraid of an investigation an impeachment? Well, the letter anticipates that."

"By a plain statement of the facts. My wife has told me that she did borrow of Fleetwood. He speculated for

her and made a considerable sum, out of which she repaid his loan. The 'Spy's' accusation is true. If it can be

proved that my wife induced me to appoint Fleetwood, it may be argued that she sold him the appointment.

But it can't be proved, and the 'Spy' won't waste its breath in trying to, because my statement will take the

sting out of its innuendoes. I propose to anticipate its attack by setting forth the facts in its columns, and

asking the public to decide between us. On one side is the private fact that my wife, without my knowledge,

borrowed money from Fleetwood just before I appointed him to an important post; on the other side is his

public record and mine. I want people to see both sides and judge between them, not in the red glare of a

newspaper denunciation, but in the plain daylight of commonsense. Charges against the private morality of

a public man are usually made in such a blare of headlines and cloud of mudthrowing that the voice he lifts

up in his defence can not make itself heard. In this case I want the public to hear what I have to say before the

yelping begins. My letter will take the wind out of the 'Spy's' sails, and if the verdict goes against me, the case

will have been decided on its own merits, and not at the dictation of the writers of scare heads. Even if I don't

gain my end, it will be a good thing, for once, for the public to consider dispassionately how far a private

calamity should be allowed to affect a career of public usefulness, and the next man who goes through what I

The Governor caught him up with a kindling eye. "It's all right, then? You see, and you'll take it?"

Shackwell met his glance with one of melancholy interrogation. "I think I see a magnificent suicide, but it's

He pulled himself silently into his coat and put the letter into one of its pockets, but as he was turning to the

door the Governor called after him cheerfully: "By the way, Hadley, aren't you and Mrs. Shackwell giving a

"Because, if there is room for two more, my wife and I would like to be invited."

Shackwell nodded his assent and turned away without answering. As he came out of the lobby into the clear

sunset radiance he saw a victoria drive up the long sweep to the Capitol and pause before the central portion.

"Can you tell me if any one is with him? He promised to get away in time for a little turn in the Park before