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The success of Verrian did not come early, and it did not come easily. He had been trying a long time to get

his work into the best magazines, and when he had won the favor of the editors, whose interest he had

perhaps had from the beginning, it might be said that they began to accept his work from their consciences,

because in its way it was so good that they could not justly refuse it. The particular editor who took Verrian's

serial, after it had come back to the author from the editors of the other leading periodicals, was in fact moved

mainly by the belief that the story would please the better sort of his readers. These, if they were not so

numerous as the worse, he felt had now and then the right to have their pleasure studied.

It was a serious story, and it was somewhat bitter, as Verrian himself was, after his struggle to reach the

public with work which he knew merited recognition. But the world which does not like people to take

themselves too seriously also likes them to take themselves seriously, and the bitterness in Verrian's story

proved agreeable to a number of readers unexpectedly great. It intimated a romantic personality in the author,

and the world still likes to imagine romantic things of authors. It likes especially to imagine them of

novelists, now that there are no longer poets; and when it began to like Verrian's serial, it began to write him

all sorts of letters, directly, in care of the editor, and indirectly to the editor, whom they asked about Verrian

It was a man's story rather than a woman's story, as these may be distinguished; but quite for that reason

women seemed peculiarly taken with it. Perhaps the women had more leisure or more courage to write to the

author and the editor; at any rate, most of the letters were from women; some of the letters were silly and

fatuous enough, but others were of an intelligence which was none the less penetrating for being emotional

rather than critical. These maids or matrons, whoever or whichever they were, knew wonderfully well what

the author would be at, and their interest in his story implied a constant if not a single devotion. Now and

then Verrian was tempted to answer one of them, and under favor of his mother, who had been his confidant

at every point of his literary career, he yielded to the temptation; but one day there came a letter asking an

answer, which neither he nor his mother felt competent to deal with. They both perceived that they must refer

it to the editor of the magazine, and it seemed to them so important that they decided Verrian must go with it

in person to the editor. Then he must be so far ruled by him, if necessary, as to give him the letter and put

The letter, which had overcome the tacit misgivings of his mother as they read it and read it again together,

was from a girl who had perhaps no need to confess herself young, or to own her inexperience of the world

where stories were written and printed. She excused herself with a delicacy which Verrian's correspondents

by no means always showed for intruding upon him, and then pleaded the power his story had over her as the

only shadow of right she had in addressing him. Its fascination, she said, had begun with the first number, the

first chapter, almost the first paragraph. It was not for the plot that she cared; she had read too many stories to

care for the plot; it was the problem involved. It was one which she had so often pondered in her own mind

that she felt, in a way she hoped he would not think conceited, almost as if the story was written for her. She

had never been able to solve the problem; how he would solve it she did not see how she could wait to know;

and here she made him a confidence without which, she said, she should not have the courage to go on. She

was an invalid, and her doctor had told her that, though she might live for months, there were chances that

she might die at any moment suddenly. He would think it strange, and it was strange that she should tell him

this, and stranger still that she should dare to ask him what she was going to ask. The story had yet four

months to run, and she had begun to have a morbid foreboding that she should not live to read it in the

ordinary course. She was so ignorant about writers that she did not know whether such a thing was ever done,

or could be done; but if he could tell her how the story was to come out he would be doing more for her than

anything else that could be done for her on earth. She had read that sometimes authors began to print their

serial stories before they had written them to the end, and he might not be sure of the end himself; but if he

had finished this story of his, and could let her see the last pages in print, she would owe him the gratitude

The letter was written in an educated hand, and there were no foibles of form or excesses of fashion in the

stationery to mar the character of sincerity the simple wording conveyed. The postal address, with the date,

Verrian himself had no question of the genuineness of the letter in any respect; his mother, after her first

misgivings, which were perhaps sensations, thought as he did about it. She said the story dealt so profoundly

with the deepest things that it was no wonder a person, standing like that girl between life and death, should

wish to know how the author solved its problem. Then she read the letter carefully over again, and again

Verrian read it, with an effect not different from that which its first perusal had made with him. His faith in

his work was so great, so entire, that the notion of any other feeling about it was not admissible.

"Of course," he said, with a sigh of satisfaction, "I must show the letter to Armiger at once."

"Of course," his mother replied. "He is the editor, and you must not do anything without his approval."

The faith in the writer of the letter, which was primary with him, was secondary with her, but perhaps for that

There was nothing to cloud the editor's judgment, when Verrian came to him, except the fact that he was a

poet as well as an editor. He read in a silence as great as the author's the letter which Verrian submitted. Then

he remained pondering it for as long a space before he said, "That is very touching."

Verrian jumped to his question. "Do you mean that we ought to send her the proofs of the story?"

"No," the editor faltered, but even in this decision he did not deny the author his sympathy. "You've touched

"I'm not surprised the girl wants to know how you manage your problem such a girl, standing in the

shadow of the other world, which is always eclipsing this, and seeing how you've caught its awful outline."

Verrian made a grateful murmur at the praise. "That is what my mother felt. Then you have no doubt of the

"No," the editor returned, with the same quantity, if not the same quality, of reluctance as before. "You see, it

"We must prove that it is, or, rather, we must make her prove it. I quite feel with you about it. If I were to act

upon my own impulse, my own convictions, I should send her the rest of the story and take the chances. But

she may be an enterprising journalist in disguise it's astonishing what women will do when they take to

newspaper workand we have no right to risk anything, for the magazine's sake, if not yours and mine. Will

"I expected to leave the whole affair in your hands. Do you mind telling me what you propose to do? Of

"Oh no; and I don't mind telling you what has occurred to me. If this is a true case, as you say, and I've no

question but it is, the writer will be on confidential terms with her pastor as well as her doctor and I propose

asking her to get him to certify, in any sort of general terms, to her identity. I will treat the matter

"Yes, and if she isn't the real thing, but merely a woman journalist trying to work us for a 'story' in her

"I don't see anything to object to in your plan," Verrian said, upon reflection. "She certainly can't complain of

"Why, certainly! I couldn't take a step like that without the approval of the house."

"No," Verrian assented, and he made a note of the writer's address from the letter. Then, after a moment spent

in looking hard at the letter, he gave it back to the editor and went abruptly away.

He had proof, the next morning, that the editor had acted promptly, at least so far as regarded the house. The

house had approved his plan, if one could trust the romantic paragraph which Verrian found in his paper at

breakfast, exploiting the fact concerned as one of the interesting evidences of the hold his serial had got with

the magazine readers. He recognized in the paragraph the touch of the good fellow who prepared the weekly

bulletins of the house, and offered the press literary intelligence in a form ready for immediate use. The case

was fairly stated, but the privacy of the author's correspondent was perfectly guarded; it was not even made

known that she was a woman. Yet Verrian felt, in reading the paragraph, a shock of guilty dismay, as if he

had betrayed a confidence reposed in him, and he handed the paper across the table to his mother with rather

After his return from the magazine office the day before, there had been a good deal of talk between them

about that girl. Mrs. Verrian had agreed with him that no more interesting event could have happened to an

author, but she had tried to keep him from taking it too personally, and from making himself mischievous

illusions from it. She had since slept upon her anxieties, with the effect of finding them more vivid at waking,

and she had been casting about for an opening to penetrate him with them, when fortune put this paragraph in

"Isn't it disgusting?" he asked. "I don't see how Armiger could let them do it. I hope to heaven she'll never see

"Venturesome," Mrs. Verrian compromised to the kindling anger in her son's eyes.

"I don't understand you, mother. I thought you agreed with me about the writer of that letterher sincerity,

"Sincerity, yes. But simplicity Philip, a thoroughly singleminded girl never wrote that letter. You can't

feel such a thing as I do. A man couldn't. You can paint the character of women, and you do it

"You talk," he answered, a little sulkily, "as if you knew some harm of the girl."

"No, my son, I know nothing about her, except that she is not single minded, and there is no harm in not

being singleminded. A great many singleminded women are fools, and some doubleminded women are

"Well, singleminded or doubleminded, if she is what she says she is, what motive on earth could she have

in writing to me except the motive she gives? You don't deny that she tells the truth about herself?"

"Don't I say that she is sincere? But a girl doesn't always know her own motives, or all of them. She may

have written to you because she would like to begin a correspondence with an author. Or she may have done

it out of the love of excitement. Or for the sake of distraction, to get away from herself and her gloomy

"No, I shouldn't. I should pity her for it. But, all the same, I shouldn't want you to be taken in by her."

"I think, very probably, she cares a great deal about it. She is a serious person, intellectually at least, and it is

a serious story. No wonder she would like to know, at first hand, something about the man who wrote it."

This flattered Verrian, but he would not allow its reasonableness. He took a gulp of coffee before saying,

uncandidly, "I can't make out what you're driving at, mother. But, fortunately, there's no hurry about your

meaning. The thing's in the only shape we could possibly give it, and I am satisfied to leave it in Armiger's

"Yes, I'm sure he'll deal kindly. I should be very unhappy if he didn't. He could easily deal more wisely,

Verrian chose not to follow his mother in this. "All is," he said, with finality, "I hope she'll never see that

Only four days after he had seen Armiger, Verrian received an envelope covering a brief note to himself from

the editor, a copy of the letter he had written to Verrian's unknown correspondent, and her answer in the

original. Verrian was alone when the postman brought him this envelope, and he could indulge a certain

passion for method by which he read its contents in the order named; if his mother had been by, she would

"I am almost as much gratified as he by the testimony your request bears to the importance of his work, and if

I could have acted upon my instant feeling I should have had no hesitation in granting it, though it is so very

unusual as to be, in my experience as an editor, unprecedented. I am sure that you would not have made it so

frankly if you had not been prepared to guard in return any confidence placed in you; but you will realize that

as you are quite unknown to us, we should not be justified in taking a step so unusual as you propose without

having some guarantee besides that which Mr. Verrian and I both feel from the character of your letter.

Simply, then, for purposes of identification, as the phrase is, I must beg you to ask the pastor of your church,

or, better still, your family physician, to write you a line saying that he knows you, as a sort of letter of

introduction to me. Then I will send you the advance proofs of Mr. Verrian's story. You may like to address

me personally in the care of the magazine, and not as the editor. "Yours very respectfully, "M. ARMIGER."

The editor's letter was dated the 6th of the month; the answer, dated the 8th, betrayed the anxious haste of the

writer in replying, and it was not her fault if what she wrote came to Verrian when he was no longer able to

do justice to her confession. Under the address given in her first letter she now began, in, a hand into which a

If Verrian had been an older man life might have supplied him with the means of judging the writer of this

letter. But his experience as an author had not been very great, and such as it was it had hardened and

sharpened him. There was nothing wild or whirling in his mood, but in the deadly hurt which had been

inflicted upon his vanity he coldly and carefully studied what deadlier hurt he might inflict again. He was of

the crueller intent because he had not known how much of personal vanity there was in the seriousness with

which he took himself and his work. He had supposed that he was respecting his ethics and aesthetics, his

ideal of conduct and of art, but now it was brought home to him that he was swollen with the conceit of his

own performance, and that, however well others thought of it, his own thought of it far outran their will to

honor it. He wished to revenge himself for this consciousness as well as the offence offered him; of the two

His mother, dressed for the street, came in where he sat quiet at his desk, with the editor's letters and the girl's

before him, and he mutely referred them to her with a hand lifted over his shoulder. She read them, and then

she said, "This is hard to bear, Philip. I wish I could bear it for you, or at least with you; but I'm late for my

engagement with Mrs. Alfred, as it isNo, I will telephone her I'm detained and we'll talk it over"

"No, no! Not on any account! I'd rather think it out for myself. You couldn't help me. After all, it hasn't done

"And you've had a great escape! And I won't say a word more now, but I'll be back soon, and then weOh,

"Well" She looked at him, smoothing her muff with her hand a moment, and then she dropped a fond kiss

Verrian still sat at his desk, thinking, with his burning face in his hands. It was covered with shame for what

had happened to him, but his humiliation had no quality of pity in it. He must write to that girl, and write at

once, and his sole hesitation was as to the form he should give his reply. He could not address her as Dear

Miss Brown or as Dear Madam. Even Madam was not sharp and forbidding enough; besides, Madam, alone

or with the senseless prefix, was archaic, and Verrian wished to be very modern with this most offensive

instance of the latest girl. He decided upon dealing with her in the third person, and trusting to his literary

He tried it in that form, and it was simply disgusting, the attitude stiff and swelling, and the diction affected

and unnatural. With a quick reversion to the impossible first type, he recast his letter in what was now the

He read and read again these lines, with only the sense of their insufficiency in doing the effect of the

bitterness in his heart. If the letter was insulting, it was by no means as insulting as he would have liked to

make it. Whether it would be wounding enough was something that depended upon the person whom he

wished to wound. All that was proud and vain and cruel in him surged up at the thought of the trick that had

been played upon him, and all that was sweet and kind and gentle in him, when he believed the trick was a

genuine appeal, turned to their counter qualities. Yet, feeble and inadequate as his letter was, he knew that he

could not do more or worse by trying, and he so much feared that by waiting he might do less and better that

he hurried it into the post at once. If his mother had been at hand he would have shown it her, though he

might not have been ruled by her judgment of it. He was glad that she was not with him, for either she would

have had her opinion of what would be more telling, or she would have insisted upon his delaying any sort of

He asked himself whether he should let her see the rough first draft of his letter or not, and he decided that he

She read it in silence, and then she seemed to temporize in asking, "Where are her two letters?"

"Yes, I have. It wasn't what I wanted to make it, but I wished to get the detestable experience out of my mind,

"Oh" She seemed beginning to say something, but without saying anything she took the fallen leaf up and

"Being so terribly just, then." She added, at his blank stare, "This is killing, Philip."

"But not a singleminded girl, you warned me. I wish I could have taken your warning. It would have saved

me from playing the fool before myself and giving myself away to Armiger, and letting him give himself

away. I don't think Miss Brown will suffer much before she dies. She will 'get together,' as she calls it, with

that other girl and have 'a real good time' over it. You know the village type and the village conditions, where

the vulgar ignorance of any larger world is so thick you could cut it with a knife. Don't be troubled by my

vindictiveness or my justice, mother! I begin to think I have done justice and not fallen short of it, as I was

Mrs. Verrian sighed, and again she gave his letter back to her son. "Perhaps you are right, Philip. She is

"She's not so tough but she'll be very glad to get out of it so lightly. She has had a useful scare, and I've done

her a favor in making the scare a sharp one. I suppose," Verrian mused, "that she thinks I've kept copies of

Verrian laughed, only a little less bitterly than before. "I shall begin to believe you're all alike, mother.

I didn't keep copies of her letters because I wanted to get her and her letters out of my mind, finally and

forever. Besides, I didn't choose. to emulate her duplicity by any sort of dissimulation.

"I see what you mean," his mother said. "And, of course, you have taken the only honorable way."

Verrian broke the silence to say, "I wish I knew what sort of 'other girl' it was that she 'got together with.'"

"Because she wrote a more cultivated letter than this magnanimous creature who takes all the blame to

"I hope you won't get to thinking about her, then," his mother entreated, intelligibly but not definitely.

Continuity is so much the lesson of experience that in the course of a life by no means long it becomes the

instinctive expectation. The event that has happened will happen again; it will prolong itself in a series of

recurrences by which each one's episode shares in the unending history of all. The sense of this is so

pervasive that humanity refuses to accept death itself as final. In the agonized affections, the shattered hopes,

of those who remain, the severed life keeps on unbrokenly, and when time and reason prevail, at least as to

the life here, the defeated faith appeals for fulfilment to another world, and the belief of immortality holds

against the myriad years in which none of the numberless dead have made an indisputable sign in witness of

it. The lost limb still reports its sensations to the brain; the fixed habit mechanically attempts its repetition

Verrian was aware how deeply and absorbingly he had brooded upon the incident which he had done his

utmost to close, when he found himself expecting an answer of some sort from his unknown correspondent.

He perceived, then, without owning the fact, that he had really hoped for some protest, some excuse, some

extenuation, which in the end would suffer him to be more merciful. Though he had wished to crush her into

silence, and to forbid her all hope of his forgiveness, he had, in a manner, not meant to do it. He had kept a

secret place in his soul where the sinner against him could find refuge from his justice, and when this

sanctuary remained unattempted he found himself with a regret that he had barred the way to it so effectually.

The regret was so vague, so formless, however, that he could tacitly deny it to himself at all times, and

explicitly deny it to his mother at such times as her touch taught him that it was tangible.

One day, after ten or twelve days had gone by, she asked him, "You haven't heard anything more from that

"What girl?" he returned, as if he did not know; and he frowned. "You mean the girl that wrote me about my

He continued to frown rather more darkly. "I don't see how you could expect me to hear from her, after what

"Yes, and you did quite right; I am more and more convinced of that. But such a very tough young person

might have refused to stay crushed. She might very naturally have got herself into shape again and smoothed

"I should have fancied," his mother suggested, "that if she had wanted to open a correspondence with youif

"Has she let it drop easily? I thought I had left her no possible chance of resuming it."

"That is true," his mother said, and for the time she said no more about the matter.

Not long after this he came home from the magazine office and reported to her from Armiger that the story

was catching on more and more with the best class of readers. The editor had shown Verrian some references

"I thought you might like to look at the letters," Verrian said, and he took some letters from his pocket and

handed them to her across the lunchtable. She did not immediately look at them, because he went on to add

something that they both felt to be more important. "Armiger says there has been some increase of the sales,

"And the house wants to publish the book. They think, down there, that it will have a very pretty

Mrs. Verrian's eyes were suffused with pride and fondness. "And you can always think, Philip, that this has

come to you without the least lowering of your standard, without forsaking your ideal for a moment."

She kept her proud and tender gaze upon him. "No one will ever know as I do how faithful you have been to

your art. Did any of the newspapers recognize thator surmise it, or suspect it?"

"No, that isn't the turn they take. They speak of the strong love interest involved in the problem. And the

abundance of incident. I looked out to keep something happening, you know. I'm sorry I didn't ask Armiger

to let me bring the notices home to you. I'm not sure that I did wisely not to subscribe to that pressclippings

His mother smiled. "You mustn't let prosperity corrupt you, Philip. Wouldn't seeing what the press is saying

"We're all weak, of course. It might, if the story were not finished; but as it is, I think I could be proof against

"Well, for my part, I'm glad you didn't subscribe to the clippings bureau. It would have been a disturbing

element." She now looked down at the letters as if she were going to take them up, and he followed the

"Has he?" his mother eagerly asked, transferring her glance from the letters to her son's face.

"Yes," his mother said. "There could have been no good object in prolonging the affair and letting her

confirm herself in the notion that she was of sufficient importance either to you or to him for you to continue

the correspondence with her. She couldn't learn too distinctly that she had donea very wrong thing in

"That was the way I looked at it," Verrian said, but he drew a light sigh, rather wearily.

"I hope," his mother said, with a recurrent glance at the letters, "that there is nothing of that silly kind among

"No, these are blameless enough, unless they are to be blamed for being too flattering. That girl seems to be

sole of her kind, unless the girl that she 'got together with' was really like her."

"I don't believe there was any other girl. I never thought there was more than one."

"Oh, she could easily imitate two manners. She must have been a clever girl," Mrs. Verrian said, with that

admiration for any sort of cleverness in her sex which even very good women cannot help feeling.

"Well, perhaps she was punished enough for both the characters she assumed," Verrian said, with a smile that

"Don't think about her!" his mother returned, with a perception of his mood. "I'm only thankful that she's out

Verrian said nothing, but he reflected with a sort of gloomy amusement how impossible it was for any

woman, even a woman so wideminded and highprincipled as his mother, to escape the personal view of all

things and all persons which women take. He tacitly noted the fact, as the novelist notes whatever happens or

appears to him, but he let the occasion drop out of his mind as soon as he could after it had dropped out of his

The night when the last number of his story came to them in the magazine, and was already announced as a

book, he sat up with his mother celebrating, as he said, and exulting in the future as well as the past. They had

a little supper, which she cooked for him in a chafingdish, in the diningroom of the tiny apartment where

they lived together, and she made some coffee afterwards, to carry off the effect of the Newburg lobster.

Perhaps because there was nothing to carry off the effect of the coffee, he heard her, through the partition of

their rooms, stirring restlessly after he had gone to bed, and a little later she came to his door, which she set

"You seem to be, mother," he answered, with an amusement at her question which seemed not to have

imparted itself to her when she came in and stood beside his bed in her dressinggown.

"No, I think we couldn't be too severe in a thing like that. She probably thought you were like some of the

other storywriters; she couldn't feel differences, shades. She pretended to be taken with the circumstances of

your work, but she had to do that if she wanted to fool you. Well, she has got her comeuppings, as she

Verrian replied, thoughtfully, "She didn't strike me as a country person at least, in her first letter."

"Girls are very strange," his mother sighed. "They like excitement, adventure. It's very dull in those little

"Oh, nothing. But I know how I was myself when I was a girl. I used almost to die of hunger for something to

Verrian laughed. "NO, I can't. But I don't believe I said half enough. You're nervous, mother."

"Yes, I am. But don't you get to worrying. I merely got to thinking how I should hate to have anybody's

unhappiness mixed up with this happiness of ours. I do so want your pleasure in your success to be pure, not

Verrian answered with light cynicism: "It will be tainted with the pain of the fellows who don't like me, or

who haven't succeeded, and they'll take care to let me share their pain if ever they can. But if you mean that

merry maiden up country, she's probably thinking, if she thinks about it at all, that she's the luckiest girl in the

United States to have got out of an awful scrape so easily. At the worst, I only had fun with her in my letter.

"No, and you did just as you should have done; and I am glad you don't feel bitterly about it. You don't, do

His mother stooped over and kissed him where he lay smiling. "Well, that's good. After all, it's you I cared

for. Now I can say good night." But she lingered to tuck him in a little, from the persistence of the mother

They laughed together, and she left the room, still looking back to see if there was anything more she could

do for him, while he lay smiling, intelligently for what she was thinking, and patiently for what she was

Even in the time which was then coming and which now is, when successful authors are almost as many as

millionaires, Verrian's book brought him a pretty celebrity; and this celebrity was in a way specific. It related

to the quality of his work, which was quietly artistic and psychological, whatever liveliness of incident it

uttered on the surface. He belonged to the good school which is of no fashion and of every time, far both

from actuality and unreality; and his recognition came from people whose recognition was worth having.

With this came the wider notice which was not worth having, like the notice of Mrs. Westangle, since so well

known to society reporters as a society woman, which could not be called recognition of him, because it did

not involve any knowledge of his book, not even its title. She did not read any sort of books, and she

assimilated him by a sort of atmospheric sense. She was sure of nothing but the attention paid him in a certain

very goodish house, by people whom she heard talking in unintelligible but unmistakable praise, when she

said, casually, with a liquid glitter of her sweet, small eyes, "I wish you would come down to my place, Mr.

"Why, thank youthank you very much," Verrian said, waiting to hear more in explanation of the hospitality

launched at him. He had never seen Mrs. Westangle till then, or heard of her, and he had not the least notion

where she lived. But she seemed to have social authority, though Verrian, in looking round at his hostess and

her daughter, who stood near, letting people take leave, learned nothing from their common smile. Mrs.

Westangle had glided close to him, in the way she had of getting very near without apparently having

"I shall send you a little note; I won't let you forget," she said. Then she suddenly shook hands with the ladies

Verrian thought he might ask the daughter of the house, "And if I don't forget, am I engaged to spend

The girl laughed. "If she doesn't forget, you are. But you'll have a good time. She'll know how to manage

that." Other guests kept coming up to take leave, and Verrian, who did not want to go just yet, was retired to

the background, where the girl's voice, thrown over her shoulder at him, reached him in the words, as gay as

The inference was that Mrs. Westangle's place was on the Sound; and that was all Verrian knew about it till

he got her little note. Mrs. Westangle knew how to write in a formless hand, but she did not know how to

spell, and she had thought it best to have a secretary who could write well and spell correctly. Though, as far

as literacy was concerned, she was such an almost incomparably ignorant woman, she had all the knowledge

the best society wants, or, if she found herself out of any, she went and bought some; she was able to buy

Verrian thanked the secretary for remembering him, in the belief that he was directly thanking Mrs.

Westangle, whose widespread consciousness his happiness in accepting did not immediately reach; and in the

very large house party, which he duly joined under her roof, he was aware of losing distinctiveness almost to

the point of losing identity. This did not quite happen on the way to Belford, for, when he went to take his

seat in the drawingroom car, a girl in the chair fronting him put out her hand with the laugh of Miss

"She did remember you!" she cried out. "How delightful! I don't see how she ever got onto you"she made

the slang her own"in the first place, and she must have worked hard to be sure of you since."

Verrian hung up his coat and put his suitcase behind his chair, the porter having put it where he could not

wheel himself visavis with the girl. "She took all the time there was," he answered. "I got my invitation

only the day before yesterday, and if I had been in more demand, or had a worse conscience"

"Oh, do say worse conscience! It's so much more interesting," the girl broke in.

"I shouldn't have the pleasure of going to Seasands with you now," he concluded, and she gave her laugh.

Anything seemed to make Miss Macroyd laugh. "She couldn't have cared about that, and she wouldn't have

known. You may be sure that it was a social question with her after the personal question was settled. She

"On that side I'm invulnerable. It's only a literary vanity to be soothed or to be wounded that I have," Verrian

"Oh, there wouldn't be anything personal in her liking your looks. It would be merely deciding that personally

you would do, "Miss Macroyd laughed, as always, and Verrian put on a mock seriousness in asking:

"Then I needn't be serious if there should happen to be anything so Westangular as a Mr. Westangle?"

"Oh, in Montana or Mesopotamia, or any of those places. Don't you know about him? How ignorant literary

people can be! Why, he was the Amalgamated Clothespin. You haven't heard of that?"

She went on to tell him, with gay digressions, about the invention which enabled Westangle to buy up the

other clothespins and merge them in his ownto become a commercial octopus, clutching the throats of

other clothespin inventors in the tentacles of the Westangle pin. "But he isn't in clothespins now. He's in

mines, and banks, and steamboats, and railroads, and I don't know what all; and Mrs. Westangle, the second

Miss Macroyd laughed all through her talk, and she was in a final burst of laughing when the train slowed

into Stamford. There a girl came into the car trailing her skirts with a sort of vivid debility and overturning

some minor pieces of handbaggage which her draperies swept out of their shelter beside the chairs. She had

to take one of the seats which back against the wall of the stateroom, where she must face the whole length

of the car. She sat weakly fallen back in the chair and motionless, as if almost unconscious; but after the train

had begun to stir she started up, and with a quick flinging of her veil aside turned to look out of the window.

In the flying instant Verrian saw a colorless face with pinched and sunken eyes under a wornlooking

On her part, Miss Macroyd had doubtless already noted that the girl was, with no show of expensiveness,

authoritatively well gowned and personally hatted. She stared at her, and said, "What a very hunted and

They continued both to stare at her, helpless for what ever different reasons to take their eyes away, and they

were still interested in her when they heard her asking the conductor, "Must I change and take another train

"No, this train stops at Southfield," the conductor answered, absently biting several holes into her

"She might be anything," Verrian returned, trying instantly, with a whir of his inventive machinery, to phrase

her. He made a sort of luxurious failure of it, and rested content with her face, which showed itself now in

profile and now fronted him in full, and now was restless and now subsided in a look of delicate exhaustion.

He would have said, if he would have said anything absolute, that she was a person who had something on

her mind; at instants she had that hunted air, passing at other instants into that air of escape. He discussed

these appearances with Miss Macroyd, but found her too frankly disputatious; and she laughed too much and

At Southfield, where they all descended, Miss Macroyd promptly possessed herself of a groom, who came

"Yes, miss," the man said, and led the way round the station to the victoria which, when Miss Macroyd's

Verrian accounted for her activity upon the theory of her quite justifiable wish not to arrive at Seasands with

a young man whom she might then have the effect of having voluntarily come all the way with; and after one

or two circuits of the station it was apparent to him that he was not to have been sent for from Mrs.

Westangle's, but to have been left to the chances of the local drivers and their vehicles. These were reduced to

a single carryall and a frowsy horse whose rough winter coat recalled the aspect of his species in the period

following the glacial epoch. The mud, as of a worldthaw, encrusted the wheels and curtains of the carryall.

Verrian seized upon it and then went into the waitingroom, where he had left his suitcase. He found the

stranger there in parley with the young woman in the ticketoffice about a conveyance to Mrs. Westangle's. It

proved that he had secured not only the only thing of the sort, but the only present hope of any other, and in

the hard case he could not hesitate with distress so interesting. It would have been brutal to drive off and

leave that girl there, and it would have been a vulgar flourish to put the entire vehicle at her service. Besides,

and perhaps above all, Verrian had no idea of depriving himself of such a chance as heaven seemed to offer

He advanced with the delicacy of the highestbred hero he could imagine, and said, "I am going to Mrs.

Westangle's, and I'm afraid I've got the only conveyancesuch as it is. If you would let me offer you half of

it? Mr. Verrian," he added, at the light of acceptance instantly kindling in her face, which flushed thinly, as

"Why, thank you; I'm afraid I must, Mr. Merriam," and Verrian was aware of being vexed at her failure to

catch his name; the name of Verrian ought to have been unmistakable. "The young lady in the office says

there won't be another, and I'm expected promptly." She added, with a little tremor of the lip, "I don't

Verrian interpreted for her: "The seahorses must have given out at Seasands. Or probably there's some

mistake," and he reflected bitterly upon the selfishness of Miss Macroyd in grabbing that victoria for herself

and her maid, not considering that she could not know, and has no business to ask, whether this girl was

going to Mrs. Westangle's, too. "Have you a check?" he asked. "I think our driver could find room for

A frowsy man, to match the frowsy horse, looked in impatiently. "Any other baggage?"

"No," Verrian answered, and he led the way out after the vanishing driver. "Our chariot is back here in

He felt that he did not do it as a man of the world would have done it, and in putting her into the ramshackle

carryall he knew that he had not the grace of the sort of man who does nothing else. But Miss Shirley seemed

to have grace enough, of a feeble and broken sort, for both, and he resolved to supply his own lack with

sincerity. He therefore set his jaw firmly and made its upper angles jut sharply through his cleanshaven

cheeks. It was well that Miss Shirley had some beauty to spare, too, for Verrian had scarcely enough for

himself. Such distinction as he had was from a sort of intellectual tenseness which showed rather in the gaunt

forms of his face than in the gray eyes, heavily lashed above and below, and looking serious but dull with

their rank, black brows. He was chewing a cud of bitterness in the accusal he made himself of having forced

Miss Shirley to give her name; but with that interesting personality at his side, under the same tattered and

illscented Japanese goatskin, he could not refuse to be glad, with all his selfblame.

"I'm afraid it's rather a long drivefor you, Miss Shirley," he ventured, with a glance at her face, which

looked very little under her hat. "The driver says it's five miles round through the marshes."

"Oh, I shall not mind," she said, courageously, if not cheerfully, and he did not feel authorized further to

"These wintry treeforms are fine, though," he found himself obliged to conclude his apology, rather

irrelevantly, as the wheels of the rattling, and tilting carry all crunched the surface of the road in the

"Yes, they are," Miss Shirley answered, looking around with a certain surprise, as if seeing them now for the

first time. "So much variety of color; and that burnished look that some of them have." The trees, far and

"Yes," he said, "it's decidedly more refined than the autumnal coloring we brag of."

"It is," she approved, as with novel conviction. "The landscape is really beautiful. So nice and flat," she

He took her intention, and he said, as he craned his neck out of the carryall to include the nearer roadside

stretches, with their low bushes lifting into remoter trees, "It's restful in a way that neither the mountains nor

"Oh yes," she sighed, with a kind of weariness which explained itself in what she added: "It's the kind of

thing you'd like to have keep on and on." She seemed to say that more to herself than to him, and his eyes

questioned her. She smiled slightly in explaining: "I suppose I find it all the more beautiful because this is my

She smiled still. "Sick people are terribly, egotistical, and I suppose it's my conceit of having been the centre

of the universe so lately that makes me mention it." And here she laughed a little at herself, showing a

charming little peculiarity in the catch of her upper lip on her teeth. "But this is divinethis air and this

sight." She put her head out of her side of the carryall, and drank them in with her lungs and eyes.

"Oh no," she said, visiting him with a furtive turn of her eyes. "It's quite ideally what invalids in easy

"Yes, it's certainly carriage exercise," Verrian admitted in the same spirit, if it was a drolling spirit. He could

not help being amused by the situation in which they had been brought together, through the vigorous

promptitude of Miss Macroyd in making the victoria her own, and the easy indifference of Mrs. Westangle as

to how they should get to her house. If he had been alone he might have felt the indifference as a slight, but as

it was he felt it rather a favor. If Miss Shirley was feeling it a slight, she was too secret or too sweet to let it

be known, and he thought that was nice of her. Still, he believed he might recognize the fact without

deepening a possible hurt of hers, and he added, with no apparent relevance, "If Mrs. Westangle was not

looking for us on this train, she will find that it is the unexpected which happens."

"We are certainly going to happen," the girl said, with an acceptance of the plural which deepened the

intimacy of the situation, and which was not displeasing to Verrian when she added, "If our friend's vehicle

holds out." Then she turned her face full upon him, with what affected him as austere resolution, in

continuing, "But I can't let you suppose that you're conveying a society person, or something of that sort, to

Mrs. Westangle's." His own face expressed his mystification, and she concluded, "I'm simply going there to

He smiled provisionally in temporizing with the riddle. "You women are wonderful, nowadays, for the work

"Oh, but," she protested, nervously, anxiously, "it isn't good work that I'm going to doI understand what

you meanit's work for a living. I've no business to be arriving with an invited guest, but it seemed to be a

Verrian stared at her now from a visage that was an entire blank, though behind it conjecture was busy, and

he was asking himself whether his companion was some new kind of hairdresser, or uncommonly cultivated

manicure, or a nursery governess obeying a hurry call to take a place in Mrs. Westangle's household, or some

sort of amateur housekeeper arriving to supplant a professional. But he said nothing.

Miss Shirley said, with a distress which was genuine, though he perceived a trace of amusement in it, too, "I

"I am going to Mrs. Westangle's as a sort of mistress of the revels. The business is so new that it hasn't got its

name yet, but if I fail it won't need any. I invented it on a hint I got from a girl who undertakes the floral

decorations for parties. I didn't see why some one shouldn't furnish suggestions for amusements, as well as

flowers. I was always rather lucky at that in my own famat my father's" She pulled herself sharply up,

as if danger lay that way. "I got an introduction to Mrs. Westangle, and she's to let me try. I am going to her

simply as part of the catering, and I'm not to have any recognition in the hospitalities. So it wasn't necessary

for her to send for me at the station, except as a means of having me on the ground in good season. I have to

"It's very interesting," Verrian said, and he hoped he was not saying it in any ignoble way.

He was very presently to learn. Round a turn of the road there came a lively clacking of horses' shoes on the

hard track, with the muted rumble of rubbertired wheels, and Mrs. Westangle's victoria dashed into view.

The coachman had made a signal to Verrian's driver, and the vehicles stopped side by side. The footman

"Oh no," she answered, quickly, "it's better for me to go on as I am. But the carriage was sent for you. You

Verrian interrupted to ask the footman, "How far is it yet to Mrs. Westangle's?"

"I think I won't change for such a short distance. I'll keep on as I am," Verrian said, and he let the goatskin,

which he had half lifted to free Miss Shirley for dismounting, fall back again. "Go ahead, driver."

She had been making several gasping efforts at speech, accompanied with entreating and protesting glances

at Verrian in the course of his brief colloquy with the footman. Now, as the carryall lurched forward again,

and the victoria wheeled and passed them on its way back, she caught her handkerchief to her face, and to

Verrian's dismay sobbed into it. He let her cry, as he must, in the distressful silence which he could not be the

first to break. Besides, he did not know how she was taking it all till she suddenly with threw her

handkerchief and pulled down her veil. Then she spoke three heartbroken words, "How could you!" and he

"I think you ought to have done it yourself, Miss Shirley," Verrian said, feeling like the worm that turns. He

"No, Mrs. Westangle might have felt, very properly, that it was presumptuous in me, whether I came alone in

it or with you. Now we shall arrive together in this thing, and she will be mortified for you and vexed with

me. She will blame me for it, and she will be right, for it would have been very well for me to drive up in a

" No, indeed, she shall not blame you, Miss Shirley. I will make a point of taking the whole responsibility. I

"Mr. Merriam!" she cried, in anguish. "Will you please do nothing of the kind? Do you want to make bad

She instantly relented a little. "You mustn't think me unreasonable. But I was determined to carry my

undertaking through on business principles, and you have spoiled my chanceI know you meant it kindly

or, if not spoiled, made it more difficult. Don't think me ungrateful. Mr. Merriam"

"My name isn't Merriam," he resented, at last, a misnomer which had annoyed him from the first.

"Oh, I am so glad! Don't tell me what it is!" she said, giving a laugh which had to go on a little before he

recognized the hysterical quality in it. When she could check it she explained: "Now we are not even

acquainted, and I can thank a stranger for the kindness you have shown me. I am truly grateful. Will you do

"Yes," Verrian assented; but he thought he had a right to ask, as though he had not promised, "What is it?"

"Oh yes, you would. She will expect you, perhaps, to laugh about the little adventure, and I would rather she

"That is very good of you." She put her hand impulsively across the goatskin, and gave his, with which he

took it in some surprise, a quick clasp. Then they were both silent, and they got out of the carryall under Mrs.

Westangle's portecochere without having exchanged another word. Miss Shirley did not bow to him or look

Verrian kept seeing before his inner eyes the thin face of the girl, dimmed rather than lighted with her sick

yes. When she should be stronger, there might be a pale flush in it, like sunset on snow, but Verrian had to

imagine that. He did not find it difficult to imagine many things about the girl, whom, in another mood, a

more judicial mood, he might have accused of provoking him to imagine them. As it was, he could not help

noting to that second self which we all have about us, that her confidences, such as they were, had perhaps

been too voluntary; certainly they had not been quite obligatory, and they could not be quite accounted for,

except upon the theory of nerves not yet perfectly under her control. To be sure, girls said all sorts of things

to one, ignorantly and innocently; but she did not seem the kind of girl who, in different circumstances,

would have said anything that she did not choose or that she did not mean to say. She had been surprisingly

frank, and yet, at heart, Verrian would have thought she was a very reticent person or a secret personthat

is, mentally frank and sentimentally secret; possibly she was like most women in that. What he was sure of

was that the visual impression of her which he had received must have been very vivid to last so long in his

consciousness; all through his preparations for going down to afternoon tea her face remained subjectively

before him, and when he went down and found himself part of a laughing and chattering company in the

He was aware of suffering a little disappointment in Mrs. Westangle's entire failure to mention Miss Shirley,

though he was aware that his disappointment was altogether unreasonable, and he more reasonably decided

that if she knew anything of his arrival, or the form of it, she had too much of the making of a grande dame to

be recognizant of it. He did not know from her whether she had meant to send for him at the station or not, or

whether she had sent her carriage back for him when he did not arrive in it at first. Nothing was left in her

manner of such slight specialization as she had thrown into it when, at the Macroyds', she asked him down to

her house party; she seemed, if there were any difference, to have acquired an additional ignorance of who

and what he was, though she twittered and flittered up close to his elbow, after his impersonal welcome, and

asked him if she might introduce him to the young lady who was pouring tea for her, and who, after the brief

drama necessary for possessing him of a cup of it, appeared to have no more use for him than Mrs. Westangle

herself had. There were more young men than young women in the room, but he imagined the usual

superabundance of girlhood temporarily absent for repair of the fatigues of the journey. Every girl in the

room had at least one man talking to her, and the girl who was pouring tea had one on each side of her and

was trying to fix them both with an eye lifted towards each, while she struggled to keep her united gaze

watchfully upon the teaurn and those who came up with cups to be filled or refilled.

Verrian thought his fellowguests were all amiable enough looking, though he made his reflection that they

did not look, any of them, as if they would set the Sound on fire; and again he missed the companion of his

After he had got his cup of tea, he stood sipping it with a homeless air which he tried to conceal, and cast a

furtive eye round the room till it rested upon the laughing face of Miss Macroyd. A young man was taking

"How did you get here?" she asked, rather shamelessly, since she had kept him from coming in the victoria,

"That was very thoughtful of you. But I found a delightful public vehicle behind the station, and I came in

that. I'm so glad to know that it wasn't Mrs. Westangle who had the trouble of sending the carriage back for

Miss Macroyd laughed and laughed at his resentment. "But surely you met it on the way? I gave the man a

"Oh yes, but I was too proud to change by that time. Or perhaps I hated the trouble."

Miss Macroyd laughed the more; then she purposely darkened her countenance so as to suit it to her

"After all your trouble in supposing so?" Verrian reflected a moment, and then he said, deliberately, " I don't

Miss Macroyd was not going to let him off like that. "You don't know how she came, or you don't know

Her laugh resounded again. "Now you are trying to be wicked, and that is very wrong for a novelist."

"But what object could I have in concealing the fact from you, Miss Macroyd?" he entreated, with mock

"What are you two laughing so about?" the voice of Mrs. Westangle twittered at Verrian's elbow, and,

looking down, he found her almost touching it. She had a very long, narrow neck, and, since it was long and

narrow, she had the good sense not to palliate the fact or try to dress the effect of it out of sight. She took her

neck in both hands, as it were, and put it more on show, so that you had really to like it. Now it lifted her

face, though she was not a tall person, well towards the level of his; to be sure, he was himself only of the

He stirred the tea which he had ceased to drink, and said, "I wasn't 'laughing so about,' Mrs. Westangle. It

"And I was laughing so about a mysterious stranger that came up on the train with us and got out at your

"And I was trying to make out what was so funny in a mysterious stranger, or even in her getting out at your

Mrs. Westangle was not interested in the case, or else she failed to seize the joke. At any rate, she turned from

them without further question and went away to another part of the room, where she semi attached herself in

like manner to another couple, and again left it for still another. This was possibly her idea of looking after

her guests; but when she had looked after them a little longer in that way she left the room and let them look

"Come, Mr. Verrian," Miss Macroyd resumed, "what is the secret? I'll never tell if you tell me."

"Now you are becoming merely trivial. You are ceasing even to be provoking." Miss Macroyd, in token of

"Am I?" he questioned; thoughtfully. "Well, then, I am tempted to act upon impulse."

"If you had seen me an hour ago you would have said I was very impulsive. I think I may have exhausted

His impulse really had failed him. It had been to tell Miss Macroyd about his adventure and frankly trust her

with it. He had liked her at several former meetings rather increasingly, because she had seemed open and

honest beyond the most of women, but her piggish behavior at the station had been rather too open and

honest, and the sense of this now opportunely intervened between him and the folly he was about to commit.

Besides, he had no right to give Miss Shirley's part in his adventure away, and, since the affair was more

vitally hers than his, to take it at all out of her hands. The earlyfalling dusk had favored an unnoticed advent

for them, and there were other chances that had helped keep unknown their arrival together at Mrs.

Westangle's in that squalid carryall, such as Miss Shirley's having managed instantly to slip indoors before

the man came out for Verrian's suitcase, and of her having got to her own appointed place long before there

It was not for him now to undo all that and begin the laughing at the affair, which she had pathetically

intimated that she would rather some one else should begin. He recoiled from his imprudence with a shock,

but he had the pleasure of having mystified Miss Macroyd. He felt dismissal in the roving eye which she cast

from him round the room, and he willingly let another young man replace him at her side.

Yet he was not altogether satisfied. A certain meaner self that there was in him was not pleased with his

relegation even merely in his own consciousness to the championship of a girl who was going to make her

living in a sort of menial way. It had better be owned for him that, in his visions of literary glory, he had

figured in social triumphs which, though vague, were resplendent with the glitter of smart circles. He had

been so ignorant of such circles as to suppose they would have some use for him as a brilliant young author;

and though he was outwearing this illusion, he still would not have liked a girl like Julia Macroyd, whose

family, if not smart, was at least chic, to know that he had come to the house with a professional mistress of

the revels, until Miss Shirley should have approved herself chic, too. The notion of such an employment as

hers was in itself chic, but the girl was merely a paid part of the entertainment, as yet, and had not risen above

the hireling status. If she had sunk to that level from a higher rank it would be all right, but there was no

evidence that she had ever been smart. Verrian would, therefore, rather not be mixed up with herat any

rate, in the imagination of a girl like Julia Macroyd; and as he left her side he drew a long breath of relief and

By this time the girl who was "pouring" had exhausted one of the two original guards on whom she had been

dividing her vision, and Verrian made a pretence, which she favored, that he had come up to push the man

away. The man gracefully submitted to be dislodged, and Verrian remained in the enjoyment of one of the

girl's distorted eyes till, yet another man coming up, she abruptly got rid of Verrian by presenting him to yet

another girl. In such manoeuvres the hour of afternoon tea will pass; and the time really wore on till it was

By the time that the guests came down to dinner they were all able to participate in the exchange of the

discovery which each had made, that it was snowing outdoors, and they kept this going till one girl had the

goodluck to say, "I don't see anything so astonishing in that at this time of year. Now, if it was snowing

This relieved the tension in a general laugh, and a young man tried to contribute further to the gayety by

declaring that it would not be surprising to have it snow indoors. He had once seen the thing done in a

crowded hall, one night, when somebody put up a window, and the freezing current of air congealed the

respiration of the crowd, which came down in a light fall of snowflakes. He owned that it was in Boston.

"Oh, that excuses it, then," Miss Macroyd said. But she lost the laugh which was her due in the rush which

some of the others made to open a window and see whether it could be made to snow indoors there.

"Oh, it isn't crowded enough here," the young man explained who had alleged the scientific marvel.

"And it isn't Boston," Miss Macroyd tried again on the same string, and this time she got her laugh.

The girl who had first spoken remained, at the risk of pneumonia, with her arm prettily lifted against the open

sash, for a moment peering out, and then reported, in dashing it down with a shiver, "It seems to be a very

"Then it will be rain by morning," another predicted, and the girl tried hard to think of something to say in

support of the hit she had made already. But she could not, and was silent almost through the whole first

In spite of its being a soft snow, it continued to fall as snow and not as rain. It lent the charm of stormy cold

without to the brightness and warmth within. Much later, when between waltzes some of the dancers went out

on the verandas for a breath of air, they came back reporting that the wind was rising and the snow was

Upon the whole, the snow was a great success, and her guests congratulated Mrs. Westangle on having

thought to have it. The felicitations included recognition of the originality of her whole scheme. She had

downed the hoary superstition that people had too much of a good time on Christmas to want any good time

at all in the week following; and in acting upon the wellknown fact that you never wanted a holiday so

much as the day after you had one, she had made a movement of the highest social importance. These were

the ideas which Verrian and the young man of the indoors snowstorm urged upon her; his name was

Bushwick, and he and Verrian found that they were very goodfellows after they had rather supposed the

Mrs. Westangle received their ideas with the twittering reticence that deceived so many people when they

At breakfast, where the guests were reasonably punctual, they were all able to observe, in the rapid

succession in which they descended from their rooms, that it had stopped snowing and the sun was shining

"There isn't enough for sleighing," Mrs. Westangle proclaimed from the head of the table in her high twitter,

"Then what are we going to do with it?" one of the young ladies humorously pouted.

"That's what I was going to suggest," Mrs. Westangle replied. She pronounced it 'sujjest', but no one felt that

it mattered. "And, of course," she continued, "you needn't any of you do it if you don't like."

"The odder the better, I think," Verrian ventured, and another man declared that nothing Mrs. Westangle

"Well, there is such a thing as being too original," she returned. Then she turned her head aside and looked

down at something beside her plate and said, without lifting her eyes, "You know that in the Middle Ages

there used to be flowerfights among the young nobility in Italy. The women held a tower, and the men

"A speech from the throne, yes," Bushwick solemnly corrected her. "And she's got it written down, like a

"And if I got mixed up I could go back and straighten it," the hostess declared, with a goodhumored candor

that took the general fancy, "and you could understand without so much explaining. We haven't got flowers

enough at this season," she went on, looking down again at the paper beside her plate, "but we happen to have

plenty of snowballs, and the notion is to have the women occupy a snow tower and the men attack them with

"Why," Bushwick said, "this is the snowfort business of our boyhood! Let's go out and fortify the ladies at

once." He appealed to Verrian and made a feint of pushing his chair back. "May we use watersoaked

snowballs, or must they all be soft and harmless?" he asked of Mrs. Westangle, who was now the centre of a

She kept her head and referred again to her paper. "The missiles of the assailants are to be very soft

snowballs, hardly more than mere clots, so that nobody can be hurt in the assault, but the defenders may repel

"Do you think you really will, Mr. Verrian?" she asked. "What is all our athletic training to go for if you do?"

"The terms of capitulation can be arranged on the ground, whether the castle is carried or the assailing party

Their parley was quite lost in the clamor which raged up and down the table till Mrs. Westangle ended it by

saying, "There's no obligation on any one to take part in the hostilities. There won't be any conscription; it's a

free fight that will be open to everybody." She folded the paper she had been reading from and put it in her

"You needn't trouble about building the fort, Mr. Bushwick. I've had the farmer and his men working at the

castle since daybreak, and the ladies will find it all ready for them, when they're ready to defend it, down in

the meadow beyond the edge of the birchlot. The battle won't begin till eleven o'clock."

She rose, and the clamor rose again with her, and her guests crushed about her, demanding to be allowed at

One of the men's voices asked, "May I be one of the defenders, Mrs. Westangle? I want to be on the winning

It fell to Verrian, in the assortment of couples in which Mrs. Westangle's guests sallied out to view the

proposed scene of action, to find himself, not too willingly, at Miss Macroyd's side. In his heart and in his

mind he was defending the amusement which he instantly divined as no invention of Mrs. Westangle's, and

both his heart and his mind misgave him about this first essay of Miss Shirley in her new enterprise. It was,

as Miss Macroyd had suggested, academic, and at the same time it had a danger in it of being tomboyish.

Golf, tennis, riding, boating, swimmingall the vigorous sports in which women now excelwere boldly

athletic, and yet you could not feel quite that they were tomboyish. Was it because the bent of Miss Shirley

was so academic that she was periling upon tomboyishness without knowing it in this primal inspiration of

hers? Inwardly he resented the word academic, although outwardly he had assented to it when Miss Macroyd

proposed it. To be academic would be even more fatal to Miss Shirley's ambition than to be tomboyish, and

he thought with pathos of that touch about the Italian nobility in the Middle Ages, and how little it could have

moved the tough fancies of that crowd of wellgroomed young people at the breakfasttable when Mrs.

Westangle brought it out with her ignorant acceptance of it as a social force. After all, Miss Macroyd was

about the only one who could have felt it in the way it was meant, and she had chosen to smile at it. He

wondered if possibly she could feel the secondary pathos of it as he did. But to make talk with her he merely

"Not unless I can be one of the reserve corps that won't need to be brought up till it's all over. I've no idea of

"That is one of the chances. But you seem to be suffering about it, Mr. Verrian!" she said, and, of course, she

"Who? I?" he returned, in the temptation to deny it. But he resisted. "I always suffer when there's anything

"No, thank you, I believe not. But perhaps you are doing this? One can't suppose Mrs. Westangle imagined

"You mustn't ask too much of me, Mr. Verrian. Somehow, I won't say how, it's been imagined for her. She's

heard of its being done somewhere. It can't be supposed she's read of it, anywhere."

Miss Macroyd came out with her laugh. "I should like to know what she makes of you, Mr. Verrian, when

she is alone with herself. She must have looked you up and authenticated you in her own way, but it would be

"No, that wouldn't be enough, from her point of view. She means to go much further than we've ever got."

You might get to be a fad, and then she would feel that she would have to have you."

"It isn't exactly my idea of the reward I've been working for. What shall I do to be a fad?"

"Well, rather degrading stunts, if you mean in the smart set. Jump about on all fours and pick up a woman's

umbrella with your teeth, and bark. Anything else would be easier for you among chic people, where your

"A girl," Miss Macroyd continued, "might do it by posing effectively for amateur photography. Or doing

something original in dramatics or pantomimics or recitationbut very original, because chic people are

critical. Or if she had a gift for getting up things that would show other girls off; or suggesting amusements;

but that would be rather in the line of swell people, who are not good at getting up things and are glad of

"I see, I see!" Verrian said, eagerly. But he walked along looking down at the snow, and not meeting the

"I believe that's all," she said, sharply. She added, less sharply: "She couldn't afford to fail, though, at any

point. The fad that fails is extinguished forever. Will these simple facts do for fiction? Or is it for somebody

They had come into the meadow where the snow battle was to be, and on its slope, against the dark weft of

the young birchtrees, there was a mimic castle outlined in the masonry of white blocks quarried from the

drifts and built up in courses like rough blocks of marble. A decoration of green from the pines that mixed

with the birches had been suggested rather than executed, and was perhaps the more effective for its

"Yes, it's really beautiful," Miss Macroyd owned, and though she did not join her cries to those of the other

girls, who stood scattered about admiring it, and laughing and chattering with the men whose applause, of

course, took the jocose form, there was no doubt but she admired it. "What I can't understand is how Mrs.

Westangle got the notion of this. There's the soprano note in it, and some woman must have given it to her."

But he did not notice what she said. His eyes were following a figure which seemed to be escaping up

through the birches behind the snow castle and ploughing its way through the drifts; in front of the structure

they had been levelled to make an easier battlefield. He knew that it was Miss Shirley, and he inferred that

she had been in the castle directing the farmhands building it, and now, being caught by the premature

arrival of the contesting forces, had fled before them and left her subordinates to finish the work. He felt, with

a throe of helpless sympathy, that she was undertaking too much. It was hazardous enough to attempt the

practice of her novel profession under the best of circumstances, but to keep herself in abeyance so far as not

to be known at all in it, and, at the same time, to give way to her interest in it to the extent of coming out,

with her infirmly established health, into that wintry weather, and superintending the preparations for the first

Who in the world, "Miss Macroyd suddenly demanded, "is the person floundering about in the birch woods?"

Bushwick detached himself from a group of girls near by and intercepted any response from Miss Macroyd to

Verrian by calling to her before he came up, "Are you going to be one of the enemy, Miss Macroyd?"

"No, I think I will be neutral." She added, "Is there going to be any such thing as an umpire?"

"We hadn't thought of that. There could be. The office could be created; but, you know, it's the post of

Verrian joined the group that Bushwick has left. He found a great scepticism as to the combat, mixed with

some admiration for the castle, and he set himself to contest the prevalent feeling. What was the matter with a

snowfight? he demanded. It would be great fun. Decidedly he was going in for it. He revived the drooping

sentiment in its favor, and then, flown with his success, he went from group to group and couple to couple,

and animated all with his zeal, which came, he hardly knew whence; what he pretended to the others was that

they were rather bound not to let Mrs. Westangle's scheme fall through. Their doubts vanished before him,

and the terms of the battle were quickly arranged. He said he had read of one of those mediaeval

flowerfights, and he could tell them how that was done. Where it would not fit into the snowfight, they

He came out, and some of the young women and most of the young men, who had dimly known of him as a

sort of celebrity, and suspected him of being a prig, were reconciled, and accepted him for a nice fellow, and

It was not very Homeric, when it came off, or very mediaeval, but it was really lots of fun, or far more fun

than one would have thought. The storming of the castle was very sincere, and the fortress was honestly

defended. Miss Macroyd was made umpire, as she wished, and provided with a large snowball to sit on at a

safe distance; as she was chosen by the men, the girls wanted to have an umpire of their own, who would be

really fair, and they voted Verrian into the office. But he refused, partly because he did not care about being

paired off with Miss Macroyd so conspicuously, and partly because he wished to help the fight along.

Attacks were made and repelled, and there were feats of individual and collective daring on the side of the

defenders which were none the less daring because the assailants stopped to cheer them, and to disable

themselves by laughing at the fury of the foe. A detachment of the young men at last stormed the castle and

so weakened its walls that they toppled inward; then the defenders, to save themselves from being buried

under the avalanche, swarmed out into the open and made the entire force of the enemy prisoners.

The men pretended that this was what might have been expected from the beginning, but by this time the

Berserker madness had possessed Miss Macroyd, too; she left her throne of snow and came forward shouting

that it had been perfectly fair, and that the men had been really beaten, and they had no right to pretend that

they had given themselves up purposely. The sexpartisanship, which is such a droll fact in women when

there is any question of their general opposition to men, possessed them all, and they stood as, one girl for the

reality of their triumph. This did not prevent them from declaring that the men had behaved with outrageous

unfairness, and that the only one who fought with absolute sincerity from first to last was Mr. Verrian.

Neither their unity of conviction concerning the general fact nor the surprising deduction from it in Verrian's

case operated to make them refuse the help of their captives in getting home. When they had bound up their

tumbled hair, in some cases, and repaired the ravages of war among their feathers and furs and draperies, in

other cases, they accepted the hands of the late enemy at difficult points of the path. But they ran forward

when they neared the house, and they were prompt to scream upon Mrs. Westangle that there never had been

such a success or such fun, and that they were almost dead, and soon as they had something to eat they were

In the details which they were able to give at luncheon, they did justice to Verrian's noble part in the whole

affair, which had saved the day, not only in keeping them up to the work when they had got thinking it

couldn't be carried through, but in giving the combat a validity which it would not have had without him.

They had to thank him, next to Mrs. Westangle herself, whom they praised beyond any articulate expression,

for thinking up such a delightful thing. They wondered how she could ever have thought of itsuch a simple

thing too; and they were sure that when people heard of it they would all be wanting to have snow battles.

Mrs. Westangle took her praises as passively, if not as modestly, as Verrian received his. She made no show

of disclaiming them, but she had the art, invaluable in a woman who meant to go far in the line she had

chosen, of not seeming to have done anything, or of not caring whether people liked it or not. Verrian asked

himself, as he watched her twittering back at those girls, and shedding equally their thanks and praises from

her impermeable plumage, how she would have behaved if Miss Shirley's attempt had been an entire failure.

He decided that she would have ignored the failure with the same impersonality as that with which she now

ignored the success. It appeared that in one point he did her injustice, for when he went up to dress for dinner

after the long stroll he took towards night he found a note under his door, by which he must infer that Mrs.

Westangle had not kept the real facts of her triumph from the mistress of the revels.

Verrian liked, the note, he even liked the impulse which had dictated it, and he understood the impulse; but

he did not like getting the note. If Miss Shirley meant business in taking up the line of life she had professed

to have entered upon seriously, she had better, in the case of a young man whose acquaintance she had

chanced to make, let her gratitude wait. But when did a woman ever mean business, except in the one great

To have got that sillily superfluous note to Verrian without any one's knowing besides, Miss Shirley must

have stolen to his door herself and slipped it under. In order to do this unsuspected and unseen, she must have

found out in some sort that would not give her away which his room was, and then watched her chance. It all

argued a pervasiveness in her, after such a brief sojourn in the house, and a mastery of finesse that he did not

like, though, he reflected, he was not authorized to like or dislike anything about her. He was thirtyseven

years old, and he had not lived through that time, with his mother at his elbow to suggest inferences from

facts, without being versed in wiles which, even when they were honest, were always wiles, and in lures

which, when they were of the most gossamer tenuity, were yet of texture close enough to make the man who

blundered through them aware that they had been thrown across his path. He understood, of course, that they

were sometimes helplessly thrown across it, and were mere expressions of abstract woman with relation to

abstract man, but that did not change their nature. He did not abhor them, but he believed he knew them, and

he believed now that he detected one of them in Miss Shirley's note. Of course, one could take another view

of it. One could say to one's self that she was really so fervently grateful that she could not trust some

accident to bring them together in a place where she was merely a part of the catering, as she said, and he was

a guest, and that she was excusable, or at least mercifully explicable, in her wish to have him know that she

appreciated his goodness. Verrian had been very good, he knew that; he had saved the day for the poor thing

when it was in danger of the dreariest kind of slump. She was a poor thing, as any woman was who had to

make her own way, and she had been sick and was charming. Besides, she had found out his name and had

probably recognized a quality of celebrity in it, unknown to the other young people with whom he found

In the end, and upon the whole, Verrian would rather have liked, if the thing could have been made to

happen, meeting Miss Shirley long enough to disclaim meriting her thanks, and to ascribe to the intrinsic

value of her scheme the brilliant success it had achieved. This would not have been true, but it would have

been encouraging to her; and in the revery which followed upon his conditional desire he had a long

imaginary conversation with her, and discussed all her other plans for the revels of the week. These had not

the trouble of defining themselves very distinctly in the conversation in order to win his applause, and their

consideration did not carry him with Miss Shirley beyond the strictly professional ground on which they met.

She had apparently invented nothing for that evening, and the house party was left to its own resources in

dancing and sitting out dances, which apparently fully sufficed it. They were all tired, and broke up early.

The women took their candles and went off to bed, and the men went to the billiardroom to smoke. On the

way down from his room, where he had gone to put on his smokingjacket, Verrian met Miss Macroyd

coming up, candle in hand, and received from her a tacit intimation that he might stop her for a joking

"Oh, thank you," she returned, "and I hope your laurels won't keep you awake. It must seem to you as if it

"Oh, I don't mean your promotion of the snow battle. But haven't you heard?" He stared. "You've been found

"The actor?" Verrian frowned blackly in his disgust, so blackly that Miss Macroyd laughed aloud.

"Yes, the coming matinee idol. One of the girls recognized you as soon as you came into the house, and the

The mention of that name which he enjoyed in common with the actor made Verrian furious, for when the

actor first appeared with it in New York Verrian had been at the pains to find out that it was not his real

name, and that he had merely taken it because of the weak quality of romance in it, which Verrian himself

had always disliked. But, of course, he could not vent his fury on Miss Macroyd. All he could do was to ask,

"Then they have got my photograph on their dressingtables, with candles burning before it?"

"No, I don't believe I can give you that comfort. The fact is, your acting is not much admired among the girls

"How should Mrs. Westangle know what she thinks? And if she doesn't, how should I?"

"There's that," Miss Macroyd rejoiced. "Well, so far I've merely said I was sure you were not Verrian the

actor. I'll think the other part over." She went on upstairs, with the sound of her laugh following her, and

Verrian went gloomily back to the billiardroom, where he found most of the smokers conspicuously

yawning. He lighted a fresh cigar, and while he smoked they dropped away one by one till only Bushwick

"Some of the fellows are going Thursday," he said. "Are you going to stick it out to the bitter end?"

Till then it had not occurred to Verrian that he was not going to stay through the week, but now he said, "I

"I might as well stay on. I don't find much doing in real estate at Christmas. Do you?"

This was fishing, but it was better than openly taking him for that actor, and Verrian answered, unresentfully,

"Oh, I beg your pardon," Bushwick said. "I thought I had seen your name with that of a West Side concern."

"Oh," Bushwick returned, politely, and it would have been reassuringly if Verrian had wished not to be

known as an author. The secret in which he lived in that regard was apparently safe from that young, amiable,

good looking realestate broker. He inferred, from the absence of any allusion to the superstition of the

women as to his profession, that it had not spread to Bushwick at least, and this inclined him the more to like

him. They sat up talking pleasantly together about impersonal affairs till Bushwick finished his cigar. Then

he started for bed, saying, "Well, goodnight. I hope Mrs. Westangle won't have anything so active on the

Verrian remained to finish his cigar, but at the end he was not yet sleepy, and he thought he would get a book

from the library, if that part of the house were still lighted, and he looked out to see. Apparently it was as

brilliantly illuminated as when the company had separated there for the night, and he pushed across the foyer

hall that separated the billiardroom from the drawingzoom and library. He entered the drawing room, and

in the depths of the library, relieved against the rows of books in their glass cases, he startled Miss Shirley

At the instant of their mutual recognition she gave a little muted shriek, and then gasped out, "I beg your

After a tacit exchange of forgiveness, he said, "I am afraid I startled you. I was just coming for a book to read

"Not at all," she returned. "I was just" Then she did not say what, and he asked:

"I mustn't ask what," he suggested, and he made an effort to smile away what seemed a painful perturbation

in her as he went forward to look at the bookshelves, from which, till then, she had not slipped aside.

"I'm in your way," she said, and he answered, "Not at all." He added to the other sentence he had spoken, "If

"You are very kind." She hesitated, and then she said, abruptly: "What I did today owed everything to you,

Mr. Verrian," and while he desisted from searching the bookshelves, she stood looking anxiously at him,

with the pulse in her neck visibly throbbing. Her agitation was really painful, but Verrian did not attribute it

to her finding herself there alone with him at midnight; for though the other guests had all gone to bed, the

house was awake in some of the servants, and an elderly woman came in presently bringing a breadth of

"Not exactly, but it will do nicely, Mrs. Stager. Would you mind getting me the very paleblue piece that

"I'm looking for something good and dull," Verrian said, when the woman was gone.

"Travels are good, or narratives, for sleeping on," she said, with a breathless effort for calm. "I found," she

panted, "in my own insomnia, that merely the brokenup look of a page of dialogue in a novel racked my

"Thank you," he responded; "that's a good idea." And stooping, with his hands on his knees, he ranged back

and forth along the shelves. "But Mrs. Westangle's library doesn't seem to be very rich in narrative."

He had not his mind on the search perhaps, and perhaps she knew it. She presently said, "I wish I dared ask

He lifted himself from his stooping posture and looked at her, smiling. "Would that take much courage?" His

smile was a little mocking; he was thinking that a girl who would hurry that note to him, and would

personally see that it did not fail to reach him, would have the courage for much more.

She did not reply directly. "I should have to explain, but I know you won't tell. This is going to be my piece

de resistance, my grand stunt. I'm going to bring it off the last night." She stopped long enough for Verrian to

revise his resolution of going away with the fellows who were leaving the middle of the week, and to decide

"Yes," she said, with a wan smile she had, "and then again it mightn't be another." She went on, abruptly, "As

many as like can take part in the performance. It's to be given out, and distinctly understood beforehand, that

the ghost isn't a veridical phantom, but just an honest, madeup, everyday spook. It may change its pose

from time to time, or its drapery, but the setting is to be always the same, and the people who take their turns

in seeing it are to be explicitly reassured, one after another, that there's nothing in it, you know. The fun will

"Yes," she assented. And after a moment, given to letting the notion get quite home with her, she asked,

"The phrase? Why, certainly. But wouldn't it be rather too psychological? I think just Seeing Ghosts would be

"Better than Seeing Ghosts: A Study of Temperaments? Perhaps it would. It would be simpler."

She smiled, intelligently but reticently. "My idea is that every one somehow really believes in ghostsI

know I doand so fully expects to see one that any sort of makeup will affect them for the moment just as

if they did see one. I thoughtthat perhapsI don't know how to say it without seeming to make use of

"That you could give me some hints about the setting, with your knowledge of the stage" She stopped,

having rushed forward to that point, while he continued to look steadily at her without answering her. She

"It's all right. If I were an actor I shouldn't be ashamed of it. But I was merely curious to know whether you

shared the prevalent superstition. I'm afraid I can't help you from a knowledge of the stage, but if I can be of

use, from a sort of amateur interest in psychology, with an affair like this I shall be only too glad."

"Thank you," she said, somewhat faintly, with an effect of dismay disproportionate to the occasion.

She sank into a chair before which she had been standing, and she looked as if she were going to swoon.

She put out a hand weakly to stay him. "Don't!" she entreated. "I'm a littleI shall be all right in a moment."

"Not for the world!" she commanded, and she pulled herself together and stood up. "But I think I'll stop for

tonight. I'm glad my idea strikes you favorably. It's merely Oh, you found it, Mrs. Stager!" She broke off

to address the woman who had now come back and was holding up the trailing breadths of the electricblue

gauze. "Isn't it lovely?" She gave herself time to adore the drapery, with its changes of meteoric lucence,

before she rose and took it. She went with it to the background in the library, where, against the glass door of

the cases, she involved herself in it and stood shimmering. A thrill pierced to Verrian's heart; she was indeed

Mrs. Stager modestly referred the question to him by her silence. "I will answer for its doing, if it does for the

She laughed. "And you doubly knew what it was. Yes, I think it will go." She took another pose, and then

another. "What do you think of it, Mrs. Stager?" she called to the woman standing respectfully abeyant at one

"Sit down, and I'll go to your room with you when I'm through. I won't be long, now."

She tried different gauzes, which she had lying on one of the chairs, and crowned herself with triumph in the

applauses of her two spectators, rejoicing with a glee that Verrian found childlike and winning. "If they're all

"Are you a severe person?" she asked, coming forward to him. "Ought people to be afraid of you?"

"Yes, people with bad consciences. I'm rattier afraid of myself for that reason."

"Yes, one is. I've noticed that myself. But I didn't suppose that actors Oh, I forgot! I beg your pardon

again, Mr. Verrian. Oh Goodnight!" She faced him evanescently in going out, with the woman after her,

but, whether she did so more in fear or more in defiance, she left him standing motionless in his doubt, and

she did nothing to solve his doubt when she came quickly back alone, before he was aware of having moved,

to say, "Mr. Verrian, I want toI have totell you that I didn't think you were the actor." Then she was

finally gone, and Verrian had nothing for it but to go up to his room with the book he found he had in his

If he had read it, the book would not have eased him off to sleep, but he did not even try, to read it. He had no

wish to sleep. The waking dream in which he lost himself was more interesting than any vision of slumber

could have been, and he had no desire to end it. In that he could still be talking with the girl whose mystery

appealed to him so pleasingly. It was none the less pleasing because, at what might be called her first blushes,

she did not strike him as altogether ingenuous, but only able to discipline herself into a final sincerity from a

She was still a scarcely recovered invalid, and it was pathetic that she should be commencing the struggle of

life with strength so little proportioned to the demand upon it; and the calling she had taken up was of a

fantasticality in some aspects which was equally pathetic. But all the undertakings of women, he mused, were

piteous, not only because women were unequal to the struggle at the best, but because they were hampered

always with themselves, with their sex, their femininity, and the necessity of getting it out of the way before

they could really begin to fight. Whatever they attempted it must be in relation to the man's world in which

livings were made; but the immemorial conditions were almost wholly unchanged. A woman approached this

world as a woman, with the inborn instinct of tempting it as a woman, to win it to love her and make her a

wife and mother; and although she might stoically overcome the temptation at last, it might recur at any

moment and overcome her. This was perpetually weakening and imperilling her, and she must feel it at the

encounter with each man she met. She must feel the tacit and even unconscious irony of his attitude towards

her in her enterprise, and the finer her make the crueller and the more humiliating and disheartening this must

Of course, this Miss Shirley felt Verrian's irony, which he had guarded from any expression with genuine

compassion for her. She must feel that to his knowledge of life she and her experiment had an absurdity

which would not pass, whatever their success might be. If she meant business, and business only, they ought

to have met as two men would have met, but he knew that they had not done so, and she must have known it.

All that was plain sailing enough, but beyond this lay a sea of conjecture in which he found himself without

helm or compass. Why, should she have acted a fib about his being an actor, and why, after the end, should

she have added an end, in which she returned to own that she had been fibbing? For that was what it came to;

and though Verrian tasted a delicious pleasure in the womanish feat by which she overcame her

womanishness, he could not puzzle out her motive. He was not sure that he wished to puzzle it out. To remain

with illimitable guesses at his choice was more agreeable, for the present at least, and he was not aware of

having lapsed from them when he woke so late as to be one of the breakfasters whose plates were kept for

It was the first time that Verrian had come down late, and it was his novel experience to find himself in

charge of Mrs. Stager at breakfast, instead of the butler and the butler's man, who had hitherto served him at

the earlier hour. There were others, somewhat remote from him, at table, who were ending when he was

beginning, and when they had joked themselves out of the room and away from Mrs. Stager's ministrations

he was left alone to her. He had instantly appreciated a quality of motherliness in her attitude towards him,

and now he was sensible of a kindly intimacy to which he rather helplessly addressed himself.

"I don't know as I really expected to," she said. "Won't you have a few more of the buckwheats?"

"Do you think I'd better? I believe I won't. They're very tempting. Miss Shirley makes a very good ghost," he

Mrs. Stager would not at first commit herself further than to say in bringing him the butter, "She's just up

from a long fit of sickness." She impulsively added, "She ain't hardly strong enough to be doing what she is, I

"I understood she had been ill," Verrian said. "We drove over from the station together, the other day."

"Yes," Mrs. Stager admitted. "Kind of a nervous breakdown, I believe. But she's got an awful spirit. Mrs.

Verrian looked at her in surprise. He had not expected that of the Indiarubber nature he had attributed to

Mrs. Westangle. In view of Mrs. Stager's privity to the unimagined kindliness of his hostess, he relaxed

himself in a further interest in Miss Shirley, as if it would now be safe. "She's done splendidly, so far," he

"I guess," Mrs. Stager said, "that if it hadn't been for you at the snow fight She got back from getting

ready for it, that morning, almost down sick, she was afraid so it was going to fail."

Mrs. Stager lowered her voice in an octave of deeper confidentiability. "You got the note? I put it under, and

"Oh yes, I got it," Verrian said, sensible of a relief, which he would not assign to any definite reason, in

knowing that Miss Shirley had not herself put it under his door. But he now had to take up another burden in

the question whether Miss Shirley were of an origin so much above that of her confidant that she could have

a patrician fearlessness in making use of her, or were so near Mrs. Stager's level of life that she would

naturally turn to her for counsel and help. Miss Shirley had the accent, the manners, and the frank courage of

a lady; but those things could be learned; they were got up for the stage every day.

Verrian was roused from the muse he found he had fallen into by hearing Mrs. Stager ask, "Won't you have

"No, thank you," he said. And now he rose from the table, on which he dreamily dropped his napkin, and got

his hat and coat and went out for a walk. He had not studied the art of fiction so long, in the many private

failures that had preceded his one public success, without being made to observe that life sometimes dealt in

the accidents and coincidences which his criticism condemned as too habitually the resource of the novelist.

Hitherto he had disdained them for this reason; but since his serial story was off his hands, and he was

beginning to look about him for fresh material, he had doubted more than once whether his severity was not

It struck him now, in turning the corner of the woodlot above the meadow where the snowbattle had taken

place, and suddenly finding himself face to face with Miss Shirley, that nature was in one of her uninventive

moods and was helping herself out from the old stockintrade of fiction. All the same, he felt a glow of

pleasure, which was also a glow of pity; for while Miss Shirley looked, as always, interesting, she look tired,

too, with a sort of desperate air which did not otherwise account for itself. She had given, at sight of him, a

little start, and a little "Oh!" dropped from her lips, as if it had been jostled from them. She made haste to go

on, with something like the voluntary hardiness of the courage that plucks itself from the primary emotion of

"You may be going to try the sliding," she returned. "I'm afraid there won't be much of either for long. This

"That's too bad of it. Why not hope for a hard freeze tonight? You might as well. The weather has been

"No, I can't do that. I can't think of anything else. It's to bridge over the day that's left before Seeing Ghosts. If

"She's to have her table on a platform, with runners, in a bower of evergreen boughs, and be pushed about,

and the people are to skate up for the tea. There are to be tea and chocolate, and two girls to pour, just as in

real life. It isn't a very dazzling idea, but I thought it might do; and Mrs. Westangle is so goodnatured. Now,

"I am sure it will," Verrian said, but a glance at the gray sky did not confirm him in his prophetic venture.

The snow was sodden under foot; a breath from the south stirred the pines to an Aeolian response and moved

the stiff, dry leaves of the scruboaks. A sapsucker was marking an accurate circle of dots round the throat of

a tall young maple, and enjoying his work in a low, guttural soliloquy, seemingly, yet, dismayingly,

"It's lovely, anyway," she said, following his glance with an upward turn of her face.

"Yes, it's beautiful. I think this sort of winter day is about the best the whole year can do. But I will sacrifice

He did not know why he should have made this speech to her, but apparently she did, and she said, "You're

"I won't, then," she said, with a smile that showed her thin face at its thinnest and left her lip caught on her

teeth till she brought it down voluntarily. It was a small but full lip and pretty, and this trick of it had a

"I haven't any active hostility to it. You can't always be striking twelvetwelve midnightas you will be in

Seeing Ghosts. But your ice tea will do very well for striking five. I'm rather elaborate!"

"Not too elaborate to hide your real opinion. I wonder what you do think of my own elaborationI mean of

They had moved on, at his turning to walk with her, so as not to keep her standing in the snow, and now she

said, looking over her shoulder at him, "I've decided that it won't do to let the ghost have all the glory. I don't

think it will be fair to let the people merely be scared, even when they've been warned that they're to see a

She seemed to refer the point to him, and he said, provisionally, "I don't know what more they can ask."

"They can ask questions. I'm going to let each person speak to the ghost, if not scared dumb, and ask it just

"Yes, it will. But it will be fun, too, a little, and it will help the thing to go off. What do you think?"

"I think it's fine. Are you going to give it out, so that they can be studying up their questions?"

"No, their questions have got to be impromptu. Or, at least, the first one has. Of course, after the scheme has

once been given away, the ghostseers will be more or less prepared, and the ghost will have to stand it."

He stopped breathlessly, but she did not seem called upon to supply any meaning for his abruptness. "I'm

awfully glad you like the idea," she said, "I have had to think the whole thing out for myself, and I haven't

been quite certain that the questionasking wasn't rather silly, or, at least, sillier than the rest. Thank you so

"I've thought of my question," he began again, as abruptly as he had stopped before. "May I ask it now?"

Cries of laughter came up from the meadow below, and the voices seemed coming nearer.

"Oh, I mustn't be seen!" Miss Shirley lamented. "Oh, dear! If I'm seen the whole thing is given away. What

shall I do?" She whirled about and ran down the road towards a path that entered the wood.

He ran after her. "My question is, May I come to see you when you get back to town?"

"Yes, certainly. But don't come now! You mustn't be seen with me! I'm not supposed to be in the house at

If Verrian's present mood had been more analytic, it might have occurred to him that the element of mystery

which Miss Shirley seemed to cherish in regard to herself personally was something that she could

dramatically apply with peculiar advantage to the phantasmal part she was to take in her projected

entertainment. But he was reduced from the exercise of his analytic powers to a passivity in which he was

chiefly conscious of her pathetic fascination. This seemed to emanate from her frail prettiness no less than

from the sort of fearful daring with which she was pushing her whole enterprise through; it came as much

from her undecided blondnessfrom her dustcolored hair, for instanceas from the entreating look of her

pinched eyes, only just lighting their convalescent fires, and from the weakness that showed, with the grace,

in her run through the wintry woods, where he watched her till the underbrush thickened behind her and hid

her from him. Altogether his impression was very complex, but he did not get so far even as the realization of

this, in his mental turmoil, as he turned with a deep sigh and walked meditatively homeward through the

It did not rain at night, as it seemed so likely to do, and by morning the cloudiness of the sky had so far

thinned that the sun looked mildly through it without more than softening the frozen surface of the pond, so

that Mrs. Westangle's icetea (as everybody called it, by a common inspiration, or by whatever circuitous

adoption of Verrian's phrase) came off with great success. People from other houses were there, and they all

said that they wondered how she came to have such a brilliant idea, and they kept her there till nearly dark.

Then the retarded rain began, in a fine drizzle, and her house guests were forced homeward, but not too soon

to get a good, long rest before dressing for dinner. She was praised for her understanding with the weather,

and for her meteorological forecast as much as for her invention in imagining such a delightful and original

thing as an icetea, which no one else had ever thought of. Some of the women appealed to Verrian to say if

he had ever heard of anything like it; and they felt that Mrs. Westangle was certainly arriving, and by no

None of the others put it in these terms, of course; it was merely a consensus of feeling with them, and what

was more articulate was dropped among the ironies with which Miss Macroyd more confidentially celebrated

the event. Out of hearing of the others, in slowly following them with Verrian, she recurred to their talk.

"Yes, it's only a question of money enough for Newport, after this. She's chic now, and after a season there

Verrian did not feel bound to a categorical answer, and in his private reflections he dealt with another

question. This was how far Miss Shirley was culpable in the fraud she was letting Mrs. Westangle practise on

her innocent guests. It was a distasteful question, and he did not find it much more agreeable when it

subdivided itself into the question of necessity on her part, and of a not very clearly realized situation on Mrs.

Westangle's. The girl had a right to sell her ideas, and perhaps the woman thought they were her own when

she had paid for them. There could be that view of it all. The furtive nature of Miss Shirley's presence in the

house might very well be a condition of that grand event she was preparing. It was all very mysterious.

It rained throughout the evening, with a wailing of the wind in the gables, and a weeping and a sobbing of the

water from the eaves that Mrs. Westangle's guests, securely housed from the storm, made the most of for

weirdness. There had been a little dancing, which gave way to so much sittingout that the volunteer music

abruptly ceased as if in dudgeon, and there was nothing left but weirdness to bring young hearts together.

Weirdness can do a good deal with girls lounging in low chairs, and young men on rugs round a glowing

hearth at their feet; and every one told some strange thing that had happened at first hand, or second or third

hand, either to himself or herself, or to their fathers or brothers or grandmothers or old servants. They were

stimulated in eking out these experiences not only by the wildness of the rain without, but by the mystery of

being shut off from the library into the drawingroom and hall while the preparations for the following night

were beginning. But weirdness is not inexhaustible, even when shared on such propitious terms between a

group of young people rapidly advanced in intimacy by a week's stay under the same roof, and at the first

The yawn came from Bushwick, who boldly owned, when his guilt was brought home to him, that he was

sleepy, and then as he expected to be scared out of a year's growth the next night, and not be able to sleep for

a week afterwards, he was now going to bed. He shook hands with Mrs. Westangle for goodnight. The latest

to follow him was Verrian, who, strangely alert, and as far from drowsiness as he had ever known himself,

was yet more roused by realizing that Mrs. Westangle was not letting his hand go at once, but, unless it was

mere absentmindedness, was conveying through it the wish to keep him. She fluttered a little more closely

up to him, and twittered out, "Miss Shirley wants me to let you know that she has told me about your coming

"I don't know why she feels so, but she has a right to do as she pleases about it. She's not a guest."

"It happens very well, though, for the ghostseeing that people don't know she's here. After that I shall tell

them. In fact, she wants me to, for she must be on the lookout for other engagements. I am going to do

Verrian bowed, with a sense of something offensive in her words which he could not logically feel, since it

was a matter of business and was put squarely on a business basis. "I should be very glad," he said,

"She was sure from the first," Mrs. Westangle went on, as if there were some relation between the fact and

"I thought that if you were writing for the newspapers you might know how to help her"

"I'm not a newspaper writer," Verrian answered, with a resentment which she seemed to feel, for she said,

"Oh! Well, I don't suppose it matters. She doesn't know I'm speaking to you about that; it just came into my

head. I like to help in a worthy object, you know. I hope you'll have a good night's rest."

She turned and looked round with the air of distraction which she had after speaking to any one, and which

Verrian fancied came as much from a paucity as from a multiplicity of suggestion in her brain, and so left

him standing. But she came back to say, "Of course, it's all between ourselves till after tomorrow night, Mr.

"Oh, certainly," he replied, and went vaguely off in the direction of the billiardroom. It was light and warm

there, though the place was empty, and he decided upon a cigar as a proximate or immediate solution. He sat

smoking before the fire till the tobacco's substance had half turned into a wraith of ash, and not really

thinking of anything very definitely, except the question whether he should be able to sleep after he went to

bed, when he heard a creeping step on the floor. He turned quickly, with a certain expectance in his nerves,

and saw nothing more ghostly than Bushwick standing at the corner of the table and apparently hesitating

"How does it happen you're up so late, after everybody else is wrapped in slumber?"

"Well, I hadn't gone to bed for much the same reason. Why couldn't you sleep? A realestate broker ought to

"So ought a publisher, for that matter. What do you think of this ghost dance, anyway?"

"It might be amusingif it fails." Verrian was tempted to add the condition by the opportunity for a

cynicism which he did not feel. It is one of the privileges of youth to be cynical, whether or no.

Bushwick sat down before the fire and rubbed his shins with his two hands unrestfully, drawing in a long

breath between his teeth. "These things get on to my nerves sometimes. I shouldn't want the ghostdance to

"I guess Mrs. Westangle could stand it. Look here!" It was rather a customary phrase of his, Verrian noted.

As he now used it he looked alertly round at Verrian, with his hands still on his shins. "What's the use of our

Verrian delayed his answer long enough to decide against the aimless pun of asking, "What Bushwick?" and

"The bush where the milk in the cocoanut grows. You don't pretend that you believe Mrs. Westangle has

Verrian returned to his cigar, from which the ashen wraith dropped into his lap. "I guess you'll have to be a

little clearer." But as Bushwick continued silently looking at him, the thing could not be left at this point, and

Bushwick leaned back in his chair, with his eyes still on Verrian's profile. "As much as Miss Macroyd could

"Ah, I'm still in the dark," Verrian politely regretted, but not with a tacit wish to wring Miss Macroyd's neck,

"Well, she says that Mrs. Westangle has a professional assistant who's doing the whole job for her, and that

"Did she say that she grabbed the whole victoria for herself and maid at the station?" Verrian demanded, in a

Bushwick grinned. "She supposed there were other carriages, and when she found there weren't she hurried

"You think she believes all that? I'm glad she has the decency to be ashamed of her behavior."

The matter rather dropped for the moment, in which Bushwick filled a pipe he took from his pocket and

lighted it. After the first few whiffs he took it from his mouth, and, with a droll look across at Verrian, said,

If Verrian was going to talk of this thing, he was not going to do it with the burden of any sort of reserve or

contrivance on his soul. "This afternoon?" Bushwick nodded; and Verrian added, "That was she." Then he

went on, wrathfully: "She's a girl who has to make her living, and she's doing it in a new way that she's

invented for herself. She has supposed that the stupid rich, or the lazy rich, who want to entertain people may

be willing to pay for ideas, and she proposes to supply the ideas for a money consideration. She's not a guest

in the house, and she won't take herself on a society basis at all. I don't know what her history is, and I don't

care. She's a lady by training, and, if she had the accent, I should say she was from the South, for she has the

enterprise of the South that comes North and tries to make its living. It's all inexpressibly none of my

business, but I happen to be knowing to so much of the case, and if you're knowing to anything else, Mr.

Bushwick, I want you to get it straight. That's why I'm talking of it, and not because I think you've any right

"Thank you," Bushwick returned, unruffled. "It's about what Miss Macroyd told me. That's the reason I don't

Verrian did not notice him. He found it more important to say: "She's so loyal to Mrs. Westangle that she

wouldn't have wished, in Mrs. Westangle's interest, to have her presence, or her agency in what is going on,

known; but, of course, if Mrs. Westangle chooses to, tell it, that's her affair."

"She would have had to tell it, sooner or later, Mrs. Westangle would; and she only told it to Miss Macroyd

this afternoon on compulsion, after Miss Macroyd and I had seen you in the woodroad, and Mrs. Westangle

had to account for the young lady's presence there in your company. Then Miss Macroyd had to tell me; but I

"Oh, it's quite indifferent to me," Verrian retorted. "I'm nothing but a dispassionate witness of the situation."

"Of course," Bushwick assented, and then he added, with a bonhomie really so amiable that a man with even

Verrian could not help laughing. "Well, passionate, then. I don't know why it should be so confoundedly

vexatious. But somehow I would have chosen Miss Macroyd Is shy specially dear to you?"

"I would have chosen her as the last person to have the business, which is so inexpressibly none of my

"I see what you mean," Bushwick said, after a moment's thought. "But, really, I don't think it's likely to go

further. If you want to know, I believe Miss Macroyd feels the distinction of being in the secret so much that

she'll prefer to hint round till Mrs. Westangle gives the thing away. She had to tell me, because I was there

with her when she saw you with the young lady, to keep me from going with my curiosity to you. Come, I do

"Well, only when they're obliged to be. Cheer up! I don't believe Miss Macroyd is one to spoil sport."

"Oh, I think I shall live through it," Verrian said, rather stiffening again. But he relaxed, in rising from his

chair, and said, "Well, good night, old fellow. I believe I shall go to bed now."

"No, I think not. I seem to be just making it, and if I waited I might lose my grip." He offered Bushwick a

"Do you suppose it's been my soothing conversation? I'm like the actor that the doctor advised to go and see

The men who had talked of going away on Thursday seemed to have found it practicable to stay. At any rate,

they were all there on the Saturday night for the ghostseeing, and, of course, none of the women had gone.

What was more remarkable, in a house rather full of girls, nobody was sick; or, at least, everybody was well

enough to be at dinner, and, after dinner, at the dance, which impatiently, if a little ironically, preceded the

supernatural part of the evening's amusement. It was the decorum of a woman who might have been expected

not to have it that Mrs. Westangle had arranged that the evening's amusement should not pass the bound

between Saturday night and Sunday morning. The supper was to be later, but that was like other eating and

At halfpast ten the dancing stopped in the foyer and the drawingroom, and by eleven the guests were all

seated fronting the closed doors of the library. There were not so many of them but that in the handsome

space there was interval enough to lend a desired distance to the apparitions; and when the doors were slid

aside it was applausively found that there was a veil of gauze falling from the roof to the floor, which

promised its aid in heightening the coming mystery. This was again heightened by the universal ignorance as

It was with an access of a certain nervous anxiety that Verrian found himself next Miss Macroyd, whose

frank goodfellowship first expressed itself in a pleasure at the chance which he did not share, and then

extended to a confidential sympathy for the success of the enterprise which he did not believe she felt. She

laughed, but 'sotto voce', in bending her head close to his and whispering, "I hope she'll be equal to her 'mise

en scene'. It's really very nice. So simple." Besides the gauze veil, there was no preparation except in the

stretch of black drapery which hid the bookshelves at the farther wall of the library.

He determined to push her, since she had tried to push him, and he asked, "What reason could there be?"

"Now, Mr. Verrian, asking a woman for a reason! I shall begin to think some one else wrote your book, too!

Perhaps she'll take up supplying ideas to authors as well as hostesses. Of course, I mean Mrs. Westangle."

Verrian wished he had not tried to push Miss Macroyd, and he was still grinding his teeth in a vain endeavor

to get out some fit retort between them, when he saw Bushwick shuffling to his feet, in the front row of the

"Ladies and gentlemen: Mrs. Westangle has chosen me, because a real estate broker is sometimes an

auctioneer, and may be supposed to have the gift of oratory, to make known the conditions on which you may

interview the ghosts which you are going to see. Anybody may do it who will comply with the conditions. In

the first place, you have got to be serious, and to think up something that you would really like to know about

your past, present, or future. Remember, this is no joking matter, and the only difference between the ghost

that you will see here and a real materialization under professional auspices is that the ghost won't charge you

anything. Of course, if any lady or gentlemanespecially ladywishes to contribute to any charitable

object, after a satisfactory interview with the ghost, a hat will be found at the halldoor for the purpose, and

Mrs. Westangle will choose the object: I have put in a special plea for my own firm, at a season when the

realestate business is not at its best." By this time Bushwick had his audience laughing, perhaps the more

easily because they were all more or less in a hysterical mood, which, whether we own it or not, is always

induced by an approximation to the supernatural. He frowned and said, "NO laughing!" and then they

laughed the more. When he had waited for them to be quiet he went on gravely, "The conditions are simply

these: Each person who chooses may interview the ghost, keeping a respectful distance, but not so far off but

that the ghost can distinctly hear a stage whisper. The question put must be seriously meant, and it must be

the question which the questioner would prefer to have answered above everything else at the time being.

Certain questions will be absolutely ruled out, such as, 'Does Maria love me?' or, 'Has Reuben ever been

engaged before?' The laughter interrupted the speaker again, and Verrian hung his head in rage and shame;

this stupid ass was spoiling the hope of anything beautiful in the spectacle and turning it into a gross

burlesque. Somehow he felt that the girl who had invented it had meant, in the last analysis, something

serious, and it was in her behalf that he would have liked to choke Bushwick. All the time he believed that

Miss Macroyd, whose laugh sounded above the others, was somehow enjoying his indignation and divining

"Other questions, touching intemperance or divorce, the questioner will feel must not be asked; though it isn't

necessary to more than suggest this, I hope; it will be left entirely to the good taste and good feeling of

theparty. We all know what the temptations of South Dakota and the rum fiend are, and that to err is

human, and forgive divine." He paused, having failed to get a laugh, but got it by asking, confidentially,

"Where was I? Oh!"he caught himself up" I remember. Those of you who are in the habit of seeing

ghosts need not be told that a ghost never speaks first; and those who have never met an apparition before,

but are in the habit of going to the theatre, will recall the fact that in W. Shakespeare's beautiful play of

'Hamlet' the play could not have gone on after the first scene if Horatio had not spoken to the ghost of

Hamlet's father and taken the chances of being snubbed. Here there are no chances of that kind; the chances

are that you'll wish the ghost had not been entreated: I think that is the phrase."

In the laugh that followed a girl on Miss Macroyd's other hand audibly asked her, "Oh, isn't he too funny?"

"Now, there's just one other point," Bushwick resumed, "and then I have done. Only one question can be

allowed to each person, but if the questioner is a lady she can ask a question and a half, provided she is not

satisfied with the answer. In this case, however, she will only get half an answer. Now I have done, and if my

arguments have convinced any one within the sound of my voice that our ghost really means business, I shall

feel fully repaid for the pains and expense of getting up these few impromptu remarks, to which I have

endeavored to give a humorous character, in order that you may all laugh your laugh out, and no unseemly

mirth may interrupt the subsequent proceedings. We will now have a little music, and those who can recall

In the giggling and chatter which ensued the chords softly played passed into ears that might as well have

been deaf; but at last there was a general quiescence of expectation, in which every one's eyes were strained

to pierce through the gauze curtain to the sombre drapery beyond. The wait was so long that the tension

relaxed and a whispering began, and Verrian felt a sickness of pity for the girl who was probably going to

make a failure of it. He asked himself what could have happened to her. Had she lost courage? Or had her

physical strength, not yet fully renewed, given way under the stress? Or had she, in sheer disgust for the turn

the affair had been given by that brute Bushwick, thrown up the whole business? He looked round for Mrs.

Westangle; she was not there; he conjecturedhe could only conjecturethat she was absent conferring

A long, deeply sighed "Ohhhh!" shuddering from many lips made him turn abruptly, and he saw,

glimmering against the pall at the bottom of the darkened library, a figure vaguely white, in which he

recognized a pose, a gesture familiar to him. For the others the figure was It, but for him it was preciously

She. It was she, and she was going to carry it through; she was going to triumph, and not fail. A lump came

into his 96 throat, and a mist blurred his eyes, which, when it cleared again, left him staring at nothing.

"It is, till some one asks the ghost a question; then it will reappear," Bushwick rose to say. "Will Miss

"Oh no!" the girl answered, with a sincerity that left no one quite free to laugh.

"Some other lady, then?" Bushwick suggested. No one moved, and he added, "This is a difficulty which had

been foreseen. Some gentleman will step forward and put the question next his heart." Again no one offered

to go forward, and there was some muted laughter, which Bushwick checked. "This difficulty had been

foreseen, too. I see that I shall have to make the first move, and all that I shall require of the audience is that I

shall not be supposed to be in collusion with the illusion. I hope that after my experience, whatever it is, some

He passed into the foyer, and from that came into the library, where he showed against the dark background

The phantom seemed to hesitate; it wavered like a pale reflection cast against the pall. Then, in the tones

The phantom had scored a hit, and the applause was silenced with difficulty; but Verrian felt that Miss

Shirley had lost ground. It could not have been for the easy cleverness of such a retort that she had planned

the affair. Yet, why not? He was taking it too seriously. It was merely business with her.

"And I haven't even the right to half a question more!" Bushwick lamented, in a dramatized dejection, and

"Why, haven't you got enough?" one of the men asked, amidst the gay clamor of the women.

The ghost was gone again, and its evanescence was discussed with ready wonder. Another of the men went

round to tempt his fate, and the phantom suddenly reappeared so near him that he got a laugh by his start of

"But we didn't understand," one of the girls said, coming to the rescue, "that the ghost was going to answer

"Then the only thing is for you to go and ask before it gets a chance to answer," Bushwick said.

"Well, I will," the girl returned. And she swept round into the library, where she encountered the phantom

with a little whoop as it started into sight before her. "I'm not going to be scared out of it!" she said, defiantly.

"Well, if I find it there," the girl addressed the company, "I'm a spiritualist from this time forth." And she

came back to her place, where she remained for some time explaining to those near how she had lately lost

Upon the whole, the effect was serious. The women, having once started, needed no more urging. One after

Miss Macroyd asked Verrian, "Hadn't you better take your chance and stop this flow of fatuity, Mr. Verrian?"

"Oh, thank you, I don't believe in ghosts, though this seems to be a very pretty onevery graceful, I mean. I

suppose a graceful woman would be graceful even when a disembodied spirit. I should think she would be

getting a little tried with all this questioning; but perhaps we're only reading the fatigue into her. The ghost

"Oh, may I ask it something now?" a girl's voice appealed to Bushwick. It was the voice of that Miss

Andrews who had spoken first, and first refused to question the ghost. She was the youngest of Mrs.

Westangle's guests, and Verrian had liked her, with a sense of something precious in the prolongation of a

child's unconsciousness into the consciousness of girlhood which he found in her. She was always likelier

than not to say the thing she thought and felt, whether it was silly and absurd, or whether, as also happened,

there was a touch of inspired significance in it, as there is apt to be in the talk of children. She was laughed at,

but she was liked, and the freshness of her soul was pleasant to the girls who were putting on the world as

hard as they could. She could be trusted to do and say the unexpected. But she was considered a little morbid,

and certainly she had an exaltation of the nerves that was at times almost beyond her control.

"Oh, dear!" Miss Macroyd whispered. "What is that strange simpleton going to do, I wonder?"

Verrian did not feel obliged to answer a question not addressed to him, but he, too, wondered and doubted.

The girl, having got her courage together, fluttered with it from her place round to the ghost's in a haste that

expressed a fear that it might escape her if she delayed to put it to the test. The phantom was already there, as

if it had waited her in the curiosity that followed her. They were taking each other seriously, the girl and the

ghost, and if the ghost had been a veridical phantom, in which she could have believed with her whole soul,

She bent forward, in her slim, tall figure, with her hands outstretched, and with her tender voice breaking at

times in her entreaty. "Oh, I don't know how to begin," she said, quite as if she and the phantom were alone

together, and she had forgotten its supernatural awfulness in a sense of its human quality. "But you will

understand, won't you! You'll think it very strange, and it is very unlike the others; but if I'm going to be

The white figure stood motionless; but Verrian interpreted its quiet as a kindly intelligence, and the girl made

a fresh start in a note a little more piteous than before. "It's about thethe truth. Do you think if sometimes

we don't tell it exactly, but we wish we had very, very much, it will come round somehow the same as if we

"Oh, dear!" the girl said; and then, as if she had been going to continue, she stopped.

"Even if we didn't mean it to deceive harmfully?" the girl pursued. "If it was just on impulse, something we

"It is offended," Bushwick said, without knowing the Shakespearian words. "You've asked it three times half

a question, Miss Andrews. Now, Mr. Verrian, it's your turn. You can ask it just onequarter of a question.

Verrian rose awkwardly and stood a long moment before his chair. Then he dropped back again, saying,

The phantom sank straight down as if sinking through the floor, but lay there like a white shawl trailed along

"And is that all?" Miss Macroyd asked Verrian. "I was just getting up my courage to go forward. But now, I

There were formless cries from the women, and the men made a crooked rush forward, in which Verrian did

Bushwick was gathering the prostrate figure up. "She has fainted!" he called. "Get some water, somebody!"

The early Monday morning train which brought Verrian up to town was so very early that he could sit down

She had called joyfully to him from her room, when she heard the rattling of his key as he let himself into the

apartment, and, after an exchange of greetings, shouted back and forth before they saw each other, they could

come at once to the history of his absence over their coffee. "You must have had a very good time, to stay so

long. After you wrote that you would not be back Thursday, I expected it would be Saturday till I got your

"Yes, if those things are ever a rest." He looked down at his cup while he stirred the coffee in it, and she

studied his attitude, since she could not see his face fully, for the secret of any vital change that might have

come upon him. It could be that in the interval since she had seen him he had seen the woman who was to

take him from her. She was always preparing herself for that, knowing that it must come almost as certainly

as death, and knowing that with all her preparation she should not be ready for it. "I've got rather a long story

to tell you and rather a strange story," he said, lifting his head and looking round, but not so impersonally that

"You needn't stay, Margit. I'll give Mr. Philip his breakfast. Well!" she added, when they were alone.

"Well," he returned, with a smile that she knew he was forcing, "I have seen the girl that wrote that letter."

"Now go on, Philip, and don't miss a single word!" she commanded him, with an imperious breathlessness.

"You know I won't hurry you or interrupt you, but you mustyou really musttell me everything. Don't

"I won't," he said. But she was aware, from time to time, that she was keeping her word better than he was

keeping his, in his account of meeting Miss Shirley and all the following events.

"You can imagine," he said, "what a sensation the swooning made, and the commotion that followed it."

"Yes, I can imagine that," she answered. But she was yet so faithful that she would not ask him to go on.

He continued, unasked, "I don't know just how, now, to account for its coming into my head that it was Miss

Andrews who was my unknown correspondent. I suppose I've always unconsciously expected to meet that

"And I've sometimes been afraid that I judged it too harshlythat it was a mere girlish freak without any sort

"And I don't believe now that the hypothetical case brought any intolerable stress of conscience upon Miss

Shirley, or that she fainted from any cause but exhaustion from the general ordeal. She was still weak from

the sickness she had been throughtoo weak to bear the strain of the work she had taken up. Of course, the

catastrophe gave the whole surface situation away, and I must say that those rather banal young people

behaved very humanely about it. There was nothing but interest of the nicest kind, and, if she is going on

with her career, it will be easy enough for her to find engagements after this."

"Why shouldn't she go on?" his mother asked, with a suspicion which she kept well out of sight.

"Well, as well as she could explain afterwards, the catastrophe took her work out of the category of business

"Yes, the general sympathy had penetrated to Mrs. Westangle, though I don't say that she had been more than

negatively indifferent to Miss Shirley's claim on her before. As it was, she sent for me to her room the next

morning, and I found Miss Shirley alone there. She said Mrs. Westangle would be down in a moment."

Now, indeed, Mrs. Verrian could not govern herself from saying, "I don't like it, Philip."

"I knew you wouldn't. It was what I said to myself at the time. You were so present with me that I seemed to

have you there chaperoning the interview." His mother shrugged, and he went on: "She said she wished to tell

me something first, and then she said, "I want to do it while I have the courage, if it's courage; perhaps it's

"I know that I said she wasn't, but she explained, while I sat there rather mum, that there was really another

girl, and that the other girl's name was really Jerusha Brown. She was the daughter of the postmaster in the

village where Miss Shirley was passing the summer. In fact, Miss Shirley was boarding in the postmaster's

family, and the girls had become very friendly. They were reading my story together, and talking about it,

and trying to guess how it would come out, just as the letter said, and they simultaneously hit upon the notion

of writing to me. It seemed to them that it would be a good jokeI'm not defending it, mother, and I must

say Miss Shirley didn't defend it, eitherto work upon my feelings in the way they tried, and they didn't

realize what they had done till Armiger's letter came. It almost drove them wild, she said; but they had a lucid

interval, and they took the letter to the girl's father and told him what they had done. He was awfully severe

with them for their foolishness, and said they must write to Armiger at once and confess the fact. Then they

said they had written already, and showed him the second letter, and explained they had decided to let Miss

Brawn write it in her person alone for the reason she gave in it. But Miss Shirley told him she was ready to

take her full share of the blame, and, if anything came of it, she authorized him to put the whole blame on

Verrian made a pause which his mother took for invitation or permission to ask, "And was he satisfied with

"I don't know. I wasn't, and it's only just to Miss Shirley to say that she wasn't, either. She didn't try to justify

it to me; she merely said she was so frightened that she couldn't have done anything. She may have realized

"I don't believe he did. At any rate, he was satisfied with what his daughter had done in owning up."

"I suppose, what I deserved. Miss Shirley wouldn't say, explicitly. He wanted to answer it, but they wouldn't

let him. I don't know but I should feel better if he had. I haven't been proud of that letter of mine as time has

"Justly? I thought you had your doubts of that. At any rate, I had when it came to hearing the girl accusing

herself as if she had been guilty of some monstrous wickedness, and I realized that I had made her feel so."

"No, she didn't, mother. Don't make it impossible for me to tell you just how it was."

"I don't say she was manly about it; that couldn't be, but she was certainly not throwing herself on my pity,

"Unless you call it so for her to say that she wanted to own up to me, because she could have no rest till she

had done so; she couldn't put it behind her till she had acknowledged it; she couldn't work; she couldn't get

He saw his mother trying to consider it fairly, and in response he renewed his own resolution not to make

himself the girl's advocate with her, but to continue the dispassionate historian of the case. At the same time

his memory was filled with the vision of how she had done and said the things he was telling, with what

pathos, with what grace, with what beauty in her appeal. He saw the tears that came into her eyes at times and

that she indignantly repressed as she hurried on in the confession which she was voluntarily making, for there

was no outward stress upon her to say anything. He felt again the charm of the situation, the sort of warmth

and intimacy, but he resolved not to let that feeling offset the impartiality of his story.

"No, I don't say she threw herself on your mercy," his mother said, finally. "She needn't have told you

"Except for the reason she gavethat she couldn't make a start for herself till she had done so. And she has

got her own way to make; she is poor. Of course, you may say her motive was an obsession, and not a

"There's reality in it, whatever it is; it's a genuine motive," Mrs. Verrian conceded.

"I think so," Verrian said, in a voice which he tried to keep from sounding too grateful.

Apparently his mother did not find it so. She asked, "What had been the matter with her, did she say?"

Verrian reluctantly admitted, "She said it made her want to die. I don't suppose we can quite realize"

"We needn't believe everything she said to realize that she suffered. But girls exaggerate their sufferings. I

Verrian gave an odd laugh. "Well, not unconditionally. I tried to give her my point of view. And I stipulated

that she should tell Jerusha Brown all about it, and keep her from having a nervous fever, too."

"That was right. You must see that even cowardice couldn't excuse her selfishness in letting that girl take all

"And I'm afraid I was not very unselfish myself in my stipulations," Verrian said, with another laugh. "I think

There was a note of cynical ease in this which Mrs. Verrian found morally some octaves lower than the pitch

of her son's habitual seriousness in what concerned himself, but she could not make it a censure to him. "And

"What would you have wished me to do?" he returned, dryly. "Don't you think she had suffered enough?"

"Oh, in this sort of thing it doesn't seem the question of suffering. If there's wrong done the penalty doesn't

The notion struck Verrian's artistic sense. "That's true. That would make the 'donnee' of a strong story. Or a

play. It's a drama of fate. It's Greek. But I thought we lived under another dispensation."

"Will she try to get more of the kind of thing she was doing for Mrs. Westangle at once? Or has she some

"I know you don't, mother. But you must honor the way they work and get on when they come North and

begin doing for themselves. Besides, Miss Shirley's family went South after the war"

"I know! I'm not fair. I ought to beg her pardon. And I ought to be glad it's all over. Shall you see her again?"

"It might happen. But I don't know how or when. We parted friends, but we parted strangers, so far as any

His mother drew a long breath, which she tried to render inaudible. "And the girl that asked her the strange

"Oh yes. She had a curious fascination. I should like to tell you about her. Do you think there's such a thing as

"I hope you'll never find it so, my son," Mrs. Verrian said. And for the first time she was intentionally

"She waylaid me in the afternoon, as I was coming home from a walk, and wanted to talk with me about Miss

"The halfday's, or quarterday's heroine, perhaps. She left on the church train for town yesterday morning

soon after I saw her. Miss Andrews seemed to think I was an authority on the subject, and she approached me

with a largeeyed awe that was very amusing, though it was affecting, too. I suppose that girls must have

many worships for other girls before they have any worship for a man. This girl couldn't separate Miss

Shirley, on the lookout for another engagement, from the psychical part she had played. She raved about her;

she thought she was beautiful, and she wanted to know all about her and how she could help her. Miss

Andrews's parents are rich but respectable, I understand, and she's an only child. I came in for a share of her

awe; she had found out that I was not only not Verrian the actor, but an author of the same name, and she had

read my story with passionate interest, but apparently in that unliterary way of many people without noticing

who wrote it; she seemed to have thought it was Harding Davis or Henry James; she wasn't clear which. But

it was a good deal to have had her read it at all in that house; I don't believe anybody else had, except Miss

Mrs. Verrian deferred a matter that would ordinarily have interested her supremely to an immediate curiosity.

Verrian frowned. "I think from Miss Macroyd. Miss Macroyd seems to have taken a grandmotherly concern

in my affairs through the whole week. Perhaps she resented having behaved so piggishly at the station the day

we came, and meant to take it out of Miss Shirley and myself. She had seen us together in the woods, one

day, and she must have told it about. Mrs. Westangle wouldn't have spoken of us together, because she never

speaks of anything unless it is going to count; and there was no one else who knew of our acquaintance."

"Why, my son, if you went walking in the woods with the girl, any one might have seen you."

"I didn't. It was quite by accident that we met there. Miss Shirley was anxious to keep her presence in the

Mrs. Verrian would not take any but the open way, with this. She would not deal indirectly, with it, or in any

wise covertly or surreptitiously. "It seems to me that Miss Shirley has rather a fondness for secrecy," she said.

"I think she has," Verrian admitted. "Though, in this case, it was essential to the success of her final scheme.

But she is a curious study. I suppose that timidity is at the bottom of all fondness for secrecy, isn't it?"

"Say it out, mother!" Verrian challenged her with a smile. "You're not timid, anyway!"

"She had the courage to join in that letter, but not the courage to own her part in it. She was brave enough to

confess that she had been sick of a nervous fever from the answer you wrote to the Brown girl, but she

wouldn't have been brave enough to confess anything at all if she had believed she would be physically or

"It's only your due. But aren't you a little too hard upon cowards, at times? For the sort of person she is, if you

infer the sort from the worst appearance she has made in the whole business, I think she has done pretty

"Why had she left the Brown girl to take all your resentment alone for the last six or eight months?"

"She may have thought that she was getting her share of the punishment in the fever my resentment brought

"But come, mother, why should we take her at the worst? Of course, she has a complex nature. I see that as

clearly as you do. I don't believe we look at her diversely, in the smallest particular. But why shouldn't a

complex nature be credited with the same impulses towards the truth as a single nature? Why shouldn't we

allow that Miss Shirley had the same wish to set herself right with me as Miss Andrews would have had in

"I dare say she wished to set herself right with you, but not from the same wish that Miss Andrews would

have had. Miss Andrews would not have wished you to know the truth for her own sake. Her motive would

"Yes; and we will describe her as a straight line, and Miss Shirley as a waving line. Why shouldn't the

waving line, at its highest points, touch the same altitude as the straight line?"

"It wouldn't touch it all the time, and in character, or nature, as you call it, that is the great thing. It's at the

"Well, I don't deny that. But I'm anxious to be just to a person who hasn't experienced a great deal of mercy

for what, after all, wasn't such a very heinous thing as I used to think it. You must allow that she wasn't

"Yes, she was, Philip. As I said before, she hadn't the physical or moral strength to keep it from you when she

"Well, she has no particular complexion, but it's not thick. Her eyes are the best of her, though there isn't

much of them. They're the 'waters on a starry night' sort, very sweet and glimmering. She has a kind of

groundcolored hair and a nice little chin. Her mouth helps her eyes out; it looks best when she speaks; it's

The following week Verrian and his mother were at a show of paintings, in the gallery at the rear of a dealer's

shop, and while they were bending together to look at a picture he heard himself called to in a girlish voice,

His mother and he lifted themselves to encounter a tall, slim girl, who was stretching her hand towards him,

and who now cried out, joyously, "Oh, Mr. Verrian, I thought it must be you, but I was afraid it wasn't as

soon as I spoke. Oh, I'm so glad to see you; I want so much to have you know my motherMr. Verrian," she

"And I you mine," Verrian responded, in a violent ellipse, and introduced his own mother, who took in the

fact of Miss Andrews's tall thinness, topped with a wide, white hat and waving white plumes, and her little

face, irregular and somewhat gaunt, but with a charm in the lips and eyes which took the elder woman's heart

with pathos. She made talk with Mrs. Andrews, who affected one as having the materials of social severity in

"Oh, I didn't believe I should ever see you again," the girl broke out impulsively upon Verrian. "Oh, I wanted

"Oh, I thought perhaps you had. I've been to the address that Mrs. Westangle gave me, but she isn't there any

more; she's gone up into Harlem somewhere, and I haven't been able to call again. Oh, I do feel so anxious

"Oh, Mr. Verrian, don't you think she's wonderful? I've been telling mother about it, and I don't feel at all the

"Why, of course! I hadn't told you! She thinks it was a makeup between Miss Shirley and that Mr.

Verrian found the suggestion so distasteful, for a reason which he did not quite seize himself, that he

"It would be incriminating to that extent, certainly," Verrian owned, ironically. He found the question of Miss

Shirley's blame for the collusion as distasteful as the supposition of the collusion, but there was a fascination

Sometimes Miss Andrews apparently knew that he was playing with her innocence, and sometimes she did

not. But in either case she seemed to like being his jest, from which she snatched a fearful joy. She was

willing to prolong the experience, and she drifted with him from picture to picture, and kept the talk

Her mother and Mrs. Verrian evidently got on together better than either of them at first expected. When it

came to their parting, through Mrs. Andrews's saying that she must be going, she shook hands with Mrs.

Verrian and said to Philip, "I am so glad to have met you, Mr. Verrian. Will you come and see us?"

"Yes, thank you," he answered, taking the hand she now offered him, and then taking Miss Andrews's hand,

"Oh, shall you?" she said, with her transparent sincerity. "And you won't forget Thursdays! But any day at

"Thank you," Verrian said. I might forget the Thursdays, but I couldn't forget all the days of the week."

When the mother and daughter had gone Mrs. Verrian said, "She is a great admirer of yours, Philip. She's

read your story, and I suspect she wants an opportunity to talk with you about it."

"Yes. I suppose the daughter hasn't waited for an opportunity. The mother had read that publisher's paragraph

about your invalid, and wanted to know if you had ever heard from her again. Women are personal in their

Then, as they could not pretend to look at the pictures any longer, they went away, too. Their issue into the

open air seemed fraught with novel emotion for Mrs. Verrian. "Well, now," she said, "I have seen the woman

"Child, you mean," Philip said, not pretending that he did not know she meant Miss Andrews.

"That girl," his mother returned, "is innocence itself. Oh, Philip, dear, do marry her!"

"Well, I don't know. If her mother is behaving as sagely with her as you are with me the chances are that she

won't let me. Besides, I don't know that I want to marry quite so much innocence."

"She is conscience incarnate," his mother uttered, perfervidly. "You could put your very soul in her keeping."

"Oh, I am not worthy of the job, my dear. I have always felt that. I am too complex, and sometimes I can't see

Philip was silent a moment while he lost the personal point of view. "I suspect we don't see the right when we

"Don't you be complex, my dear. You know I mean Miss Shirley. What has become of her, I wonder. I heard

Philip laughed sardonically. "Now, I shall forget Thursdays and all the other days, too. You are a very unwise

They laughed with each other at each other, and treated her enthusiasm for Miss Andrews as the joke it partly

was. Mrs. Verrian did not follow him up about her idol, and a week or so later she was able to affect a decent

surprise when he came in at the end of an afternoon and declined the cup of tea she proposed on the ground

that he had been taking a cup of tea with the Andrewses. "You have really been there?"

"Oh, I found I could turn the consciousness you created in me into literary material, and so I was rather eager

to go. I have got a point for my new story out of it. I shall have my fellow suffer all I didn't suffer in meeting

the girl he knows his mother wants him to marry. I got on very well with those ladies. Mrs. Andrews is the

mother of innocence, but she isn't innocence. She managed to talk of my story without asking about the

person who wanted to anticipate the conclusion. That was what you call complex. She was insincere; it was

"Well, she is rather an optimistic conscience. She talked about books and plays that some people do not think

are quite proper. I have a notion that, where the point involved isn't a fact of her own experience, she is not

"Oh, she wasn't insipid; she was only limpid. I really like her, and, as for reverencing her, of course I feel that

in a way she is sacred." He added, after a breath, " Too sacred. We none of us can expect to marry Eve before

Verrian began to go rather regularly to the Andrews house, or, at least, he was accused of doing it by Miss

Macroyd when, very irregularly, he went one day to see her. "How did you know it?" he asked.

"I didn't say I knew it. I only wished to know it. Now I am satisfied. I met another friend of yours on

Sunday." She paused for him to ask who; but he did not ask. "I see you are dying to know what friend: Mr.

"Perhaps that's because you never call on Miss Shirley." Miss Macroyd waited for this to take effect, but he

"They were walking together in the park at noon. I suppose they had been to church together."

Verrian manifested no more than a polite interest in the fact. He managed so well that he confirmed Miss

Macroyd in a tacit conjecture. She went on: " Miss Shirley was looking quite blooming for her. But so was

"I will tell you if he did. He was very cordial in his inquiries; and I had to pretend, to gratify him, that you

were very well. I implied that you came here every Tuesday, but your Thursdays were dedicated to Miss

"You are a clever woman, Miss Macroyd. I should never have thought of so much to say on such an

"Ah, she is a clever woman, too. She showed the prettiest kind of curiosityso perfectly managed. She has a

studioI don't know just how she puts it to usewith a painter girl in one of those studio apartment houses

on the West Side: The Veronese, I believe. You must go and see her; I'll let you have next Tuesday off;

"Yes, there's nothing mean about me," she returned, in slang rather older than she ordinarily used. "If you're

"Oh, don't do that, Mr. Verrian! Please! Or else I can't let you have any Tuesday off."

Upon the whole, Verrian thought he would go to see Miss Shirley the next Tuesday, but he did not say so to

Miss Macroyd. Now that he knew where the girl was, all the peculiar interest she had inspired in him

renewed itself. It was so vivid that he could not pay his usual Thursday call at Miss Andrews's, and it filled

his mind to the exclusion of the new story he had begun to write. He loafed his mornings away at his club,

and he lunched there, leaving his mother to lunch alone, and was dreamily preoccupied in the evenings which

he spent at home, sitting at his desk, with the paper before him, unable to coax the thoughts from his brain to

In his desperation he would have gone to the theatre, but the fact that the ass who rightfully called himself

Verrian was playing at one of them blocked his way, through his indignation, to all of them. By Saturday

afternoon the tedious time had to be done something with, and he decided to go and see what the ass was like.

He went early, and found himself in the end seat of a long row of many rows of women, who were

prolonging the time of keeping their hats on till custom obliged them to take them off. He gave so much

notice to the woman next him as to see that she was deeply veiled as well as widely hatted, and then he lapsed

into a dreary muse, which was broken by the first strains of the overture. Then he diverted himself by looking

round at all those ranks of women lifting their arms to take out them hatpins and dropping them to pin their

hats to the seatbacks in front of them, or to secure them somehow in their laps. Upon the whole, he thought

the manoeuvre graceful and pleasing; he imagined a consolation in it for the women, who, if they were forced

by public opinion to put off their charming hats, would know how charmingly they did it. Each turned a little,

either her body or her head, and looked in any case out of the corner of her eyes; and he was phrasing it all

for a scene in his story, when he looked round at his neighbor to see how she had managed, or was managing,

The stress of their voices fell upon different parts of the sentences they uttered, but did not commit either of

"How very strange we should meet here!" she said, with pleasure in her voice. "Do you know, I have been

wanting to come all winter to see this man, on account of his name? And to think that I should meet the other

"I have just yielded myself," Verrian said. "I hope you don't feel punished for yielding."

She did not say why it seemed so, and he suggested, "The privilege of comparing the histrionic and the

They were laughing when the curtain rose, and the histrionic Verrian had his innings for a long, long first act.

"Yes. Didn't he?" She looked at the little watch in her wristlet. "A whole hour! Do you know, Mr. Verrian, I

am going to seem very rude. I am going to leave you to settle this question of superiority; I know you'll be

impartial. I have an appointmentwith the dressmaker, to be specificat halfpast four, and it's halfpast

three now, and I couldn't well leave in the middle of the next act. So I will say goodbye now"

"Don't!" he entreated. "I couldn't bear to be left alone with this dreadful double of mine. Let me go out with

She had put on her hat and risen, and he now stepped out of his place to let her pass and then followed her. At

"I don't know," she murmured, meditatively, looking up the street as if that would settle it. "If it's only

They started on their walk so blithely that they did not sadden in the retrospect of their joint experiences at

Mrs. Westangle's. By the time they reached the park gate at Columbus Circle they had come so distinctly to

the end of their retrospect that she made an offer of letting him leave her, a very tacit offer, but unmistakable,

if he chose to take it. He interpreted her hesitation as he chose. "No," he said, "it won't be any longer if we go

She drew in her breath softly, smoothing down her muff with her right hand while she kept her left in it. "And

it will certainly be pleasanter." When they were well up the path, in that part of it where it deflects from the

drive without approaching the street too closely, and achieves something of seclusion, she said:

"Your speaking of him just now makes me want to tell you something, Mr. Verrian. You would hear of it

very soon, anyway, and I feel that it is always best to be very frank with you; but you'll regard it as a secret

The currents that had been playing so warmly in and out of Verrian's heart turned suddenly cold. He said,

with joyless mocking, "You know, I'm used to keeping your secrets. Ishall feel honored, I'm sure, if you

"Yes," she returned, pathetically, "you have always been faithfuleven in your wounds." It was their joint

tribute to the painful past, and they had paid no other. She was looking away from him, but he knew she was

aware of his hanging his head. "That's all over now," she uttered, passionately. "What I wanted to sayto

He could have answered that she had no need to tell him. The cold currents in and out of his heart stiffened

frozenly and ceased to flow; his heart itself stood still for an eternal instant. It was in this instant that he said,

"He is a fine fellow." Afterwards, amid the wild bounding of his recovered pulse, he could add, "I

"Thank you," she said. "No one knows as I do how good he ishas been, all through." Probably she had not

meant to convey any reproach to Verrian by Bushwick's praise, but he felt reproach in it. "It only happened

last week. You do wish me happy, don't you? No one knows what a winter I have had till now. Everything

"Let me sit down a moment," she begged. And she dropped upon the bench at which she faltered, and rested

there, as if from the exhaustion of running. When she could get her breath she began again: "There is

"Thank you," she answered, piteously. And she added, with superficial inconsequence, "I shall always think

He did not pretend not to know what she meant, and he said, "I shall always think so, too. I tried to revenge

myself for the hurt your harmless hoax did my vanity. Of course, I made believe at the time that I was doing

"But you wereyou were doing an act of justice. I deserved what you said, but I didn't deserve what has

followed. I meant no harmit was a silly prank, and I have suffered for it as if it were a crime, and the

consequences are not ended yet. I should think that, if there is a moral government of the universe, the Judge

of all the earth would know when to hold his hand. And now the worst of it is to come yet." She caught

"Yes, Yes!" she owned, releasing him and withdrawing to the other end of the seat.

"But it almost drives me wild. What shall I do? You ought to know. It is your fault. You have frightened me

Had he, indeed, done that? Verrian asked himself, and it seemed to him that he had done something like it. If

it was so, he must help her over her fear now. He answered, bluntly, harshly: "You must tell him all about

"But if he won't believe me? Do you think he will believe me? Would you believe me?"

"You have nothing to do with that. There is nothing for you but to tell him the whole story. You mustn't share

such a secret with any one but your husband. When you tell him it will cease to be my secret."

Then they were both silent, looking intensely into each other's eyes. In that moment all else of life seemed to

melt and swim away from Verrian and leave him stranded upon an awful eminence confronting her.

"Hello, hello!" a gay voice called, as if calling to them both. "What are you two conspiring?" Bushwick, as

suddenly as if he had fallen from the sky or started up from the earth, stood before them, and gave a hand to

eachhis right to Verrian, his left to Miss Shirley. "How are you, Verrian ? How are you, Miss Shirley?" He

mocked her in the formality of his address. "I've been shadowing you ever since you came into the park, but I

thought I wouldn't interrupt till you seemed to have got through your conversation. May I ask what it was all

"Very absorbing, indeed," Miss Shirley said, making room for him between them. "Sit down and let me tell

"I hope you'll always be silent," the girl shared in his drolling. She began and told the whole story to the last

detail, sparing neither herself nor Verrian, who listened as if he were some one else not concerned, and kept

saying to himself, "what courage!" Bushwick listened as mutely, with a face that, to Verrian's eye, seemed to

harden from its light jocosity into a severity he had not seen in it before. "It was something," she ended

"And nowshe attempted a little forlorn playfulness"don't you think he gave me what I deserved?"

Bushwick rose up and took her hand under his arm, keeping his left hand upon hers.

He turned his back on Verrian, who fancied a tremor in her hat, as if she would look round at him; but then,

as if she divined Bushwick's intention, she did not look round, and together they left him.

It was days before Verrian could confess himself of the fact to his mother, who listened with the justice

instinctive in her. She still had not spoken when he ended, and he said, "I have thought it all over, and I feel

that he did right. He did the only thing that a man in love with her could do. And I don't wonder he's in love

with her. Yes"he stayed his mother, imperatively"and such a man as he, though he ground me in the dirt

and stamped on me, I will say, it, is worthy of any woman. He can believe in a woman, and that's the first

thing that's needed to make a woman like her, true. I don't envy his job." He was speaking self

contradictorily, irrelevantly, illogically, as a man thinks. He went on in that way, getting himself all out. "She

isn't singlehearted, but she's faithful. She'll never betray him now. She's never given him any reason to

distrust her. She's the kind that can keep on straight with any one she's begun. straight with. She told him all

that before me be cause she wanted me to knowto realizethat she had told him. It took courage."

Mrs. Verrian had thought of generalizing, but she seized a single point. "Perhaps not so much courage as you

think. You mustn't let such bravado impose upon you, Philip. I've no doubt she knew her ground."

"She knew he wouldn't. She knew him, and she knew you. She knew that if he cast her off"

His mother did not say it, or anything more, then. Late at night she came to him. "Are you asleep, Philip?"

"I didn't suppose you were. But I have had a note today which I must answer. Mrs. Andrews has asked us to

dinner on Saturday. Philip, if you could see that sweet girl as I do, in all her goodness and sincerity"

"I think I do, mother. And I wouldn't be guilty of her unhappiness for the world. You must decline."

Well, perhaps you are right." Mrs. Verrian went away, softly, sighing. As she sealed her reply to Mrs.

Andrews, she sighed again, and made the reflection which a mother seldom makes with regard to her son,