AINSLEE’S

Simeon Ponsonby—the
professor of botany
at Harmouth—had
married
when over forty
the eldest daughter
of a distinguished though impecunious
family in his own college
town. His mother, on her
deathbed, foresaw that he would
need a housekeeper and suggested
the match.

“Simeon,” she said, “it isn’t for
us to question the Lord’s ways,
but I am mortally sorry to leave
you, my son; it is hard for a man
to shift for himself. I was thinking
now if you were to marry
Deena Shelton you might go right along
in the old house. The Sheltons would
be glad to have her off their hands,
and she is used to plain living. She
would know enough to keep her soup
pot always simmering on the back of
the range and make her preserves with
half the regular quantity of sugar. I
like her because she brushes her hair
and parts it in the middle, and she has
worn the same best dress for three
years.”

At twenty Deena was able to accommodate
herself to her new life with
something more than resignation; a
wider experience would have made it
intolerable. She was flattered by his
selection, proud to have a house of her
own, and not sorry to be freed from the
burdens of her own home. There were
no little Ponsonbys, and there had been
five younger Sheltons, all clamoring for
 Deena’s love and care, whereas Simeon
made no claims except that she
should stay at home and care for the
house and not exceed her allowance.
If she expected to see a great deal of
her own family she was mistaken, for,
while no words passed on the subject,
she felt that visiting was to be discouraged
and the power to invite was vested
in Simeon alone. Respect was the keynote
of her attitude in regard to him,
and he made little effort to bridge the
chasm of years between them.

He was a tall, spare man, slightly
stooped, with a prominent forehead,
insignificant nose, and eyes red and
strained through too ardent a use of the
microscope. He habitually wore gold-rimmed
spectacles; indeed, he put them
on in the morning before he tied his
cravat, and took them off at the corresponding
moment of undressing at
night. His mouth was his best feature,
for, while the lips were pinched, they
had a kind of cold refinement.

He was a just man but close, and the
stipend he gave his wife for their
monthly expenses barely kept them in
comfort, but Deena had been brought
up in the school of adversity, and had
few personal needs. Her house absorbed
all her interest, as well as stray
pennies. The old mahogany furniture
was polished till it shone; the Ponsonby
silver tea set looked as bright as if
no battering years lay between it and
its maker’s hand a century ago; the
curtains were always clean; the flowers
seemed to grow by magic—and Deena
still parted her wonderful bronze hair
and kept it sleek.

At the end of two years, when she
was twenty-two, a ripple of excitement
came into her life; another Shelton girl
married, and caused even greater relief
to her family than had Deena, for she
married a Boston man with money. He
had been a student at Harmouth and
had fallen in love with Polly Shelton’s
violet eyes and strange red-gold hair,
that seemed the only gold fate had bestowed
upon the Sheltons. He took
Polly to Boston, where, as young Mrs.
Benjamin Minthrop, she became the
belle of the season, and almost a professional
beauty, though she couldn’t
hold a candle to Deena—Deena whose
adornment was “a meek and quiet spirit,”
who obeyed Simeon with the subjection
St. Peter recommended—whose
conversation was “chaste coupled with
fear.”

But one day all this admirable monotony
came to an end quite adventitiously,
and events came treading on each other’s
heels. It was a crisp October day,
and an automobile ran tooting and
snorting, and trailing its vile smells,
through Harmouth till it stopped at
Professor Ponsonby’s gate and a lady
got out and ran up the courtyard path.
Deena had been trying in vain to make
quince jelly stiffen—jell was the word
used in the receipt book of the late
Mrs. Ponsonby—with the modicum of
sugar prescribed, till in despair she had
resorted to a pinch of gelatine, and felt
that the shade of her mother-in-law
was ticking the word incompetent from
the clock in the hall—when suddenly
the watchword was drowned in the
stertorous breathing of the machine at
the gate, and Polly whisked in without
ringing and met Deena face to face.

“We have come to take you for a
spin in our new automobile,” Polly
cried, gayly. “Where is Simeon? You
think he would not care to go? Well,
leave him for once, and come as far as
Wolfshead, and we will lunch there
and bring you back before sunset.”

Deena’s delicate complexion was reddened
by the heat of the preserve kettle,
her sleeves were rolled above her elbows,
and a checked apron with a bib
acted as overalls. Polly twitched her
to the stairs.

“What a fright you make of yourself,”
she exclaimed; “and yet, I declare,
you are pretty, in spite of it!
Ben has to go down in the town to get
some more gasoline, and then he means
to persuade Stephen French to go with
us, so rush upstairs and change your
dress while I report to him that you will
go, and he will come back for us in
half an hour.”

Stephen French, who was to make
the fourth in the automobile, was Harmouth’s
young professor of zoölogy,
 a favorite alike with the students and
the dons, with the social element in the
town as well as the academic. To Ben
Minthrop he had been a saving grace
during a rather dissipated career at college,
and now that that young gentleman
was married, and his feet set in
the path of commercial respectability,
the friendship was even more cemented.
On Ben’s part there was admiration
and gratitude, on Stephen’s the genuine
liking an older man has for a
youngster who has had the pluck to pull
himself together. It was a bond between
the Shelton sisters that their husbands
shared one sentiment in common—namely,
a romantic affection for Stephen
French.

Deena was standing in her petticoat
when her sister joined her in her bed-room—not
in a petticoat of lace and
needlework, such as peeped from under
the edge of Polly’s smart frock as she
threw herself into a chair, but a skimpy
black silk skirt with a prim ruffle, made
from an old gown of Mrs. Ponsonby’s.
It was neat and fresh, however, and
her neck and arms, exposed by her little
tucked underwaist, were of a beauty
to ravish a painter or a sculptor. Polly
herself, boyish and angular in build,
groaned to think of such perfection
“born to blush unseen”; her one season
in Boston had demonstrated to her the
value of beauty as an asset in that
strange, modern exchange we call society.
She was evidently trying to say
something that would not get itself
said, and her elder sister was too busy
with her toilet to notice the signs of
perturbation. Finally the words came
with a rush.

“Deena,” she said, “when we were
children in the nursery you once said
I was a ‘coward at you’—I remember
your very words. Well, I believe I am
still! You are so dignified and repressing
that I am always considering what
you will think a liberty. I have taken
a liberty now, but please don’t be angry.
It does seem so absurd to be afraid to
make a present to one’s own sister.”

She opened the bedroom door, and
dragged in a huge box, which she proceeded
to uncord, talking all the while.

“I have brought you a dress,” she
said; “a coat and skirt made for me
by R——, but Ben cannot bear me in
it because it’s so womanish—pockets
where no man would have them, and
the sleeves all trimmed—and so, as I
think it charming myself, I hoped, perhaps,
you would accept it.”

Both sisters blushed, Polly with shyness,
Deena with genuine delight. She
loved pretty things, although she rarely
yielded to their temptations, and she
kissed her sister in loving acknowledgment
of the gift. It never occurred
to her that Simeon could object.

Polly, in high spirits at her success,
next declared that she must arrange
Deena’s hair, and she pushed her into a
low chair in front of the dressing table,
and fluffed the golden mane high above
the temples, and coiled and pinned it
into waves and curls that caught the
sunlight on their silken sheen and gave
it back. A very beautiful young woman
was reflected in old Mother Ponsonby’s
small looking-glass, a face of character
and spirit, in spite of its regularity.

“There, admire yourself!” exclaimed
Polly, thrusting a hand mirror into her
sister’s grasp. “I don’t believe you
ever look at your profile or the back of
your head! You are so busy enacting
the part of your own mother-in-law
that I only wonder you don’t insist upon
wearing widow’s caps. Oh! I beg
your pardon—I forgot that could only
be done by forfeiting Simeon! Where
do you keep your shirt-waists? This
one isn’t half bad; let me help you into
it.”

She chose the least antiquated blouse
in Deena’s wardrobe, and pinned it into
place with the precision of experience;
next she hooked the new skirt round
the waist and held the little coat for her
sister to put on.

“Where is your hat?” she demanded.

Deena fetched a plain black straw,
rusty from the sun and dust of two
summers, and shook her head as she
tried to pinch the bows into shape.

“I shall be like a peacock turned
topsy-turvy,” she laughed—“ashamed
of my head instead of my feet!”

 Polly took it out of her hand.

“Of course, you cannot wear that
with your hair done in the new way—besides,
it spoils your whole costume.
I saw quite a decent hat in a shop
window in the next street. I’ll get it
for you!” and she was out of the room
like a flash of lightning.

Deena ran to the window and caught
her mercurial sister issuing from the
door below.

“Stop, Polly!” she called. “I cannot
afford a new hat, and I cannot accept
anything more—please come back.”

Polly made a little grimace and
walked steadily down the path; at the
gate she condescended to remark:

“Have all your last words said to
your cook by the time I get back, for
Ben will not want to wait.”

In ten minutes she returned with a
smart little hat, and in answer to
Deena’s remonstrances, she tossed the
condemned one into the wood fire that
was burning on the dining-room
hearth; at the same instant the automobile
arrived at the gate. Deena, nearly
in tears, pinned the unwelcome purchase
on her head, and followed her
sister to the street. The hat set lightly
enough on her curls, but it weighed
heavily on her conscience.

After the manner of the amateur
chauffeur, Ben was doubled up under
the front wheels of his motor, offering
a stirrup-cup of machine oil to the god
of the car, but Stephen French stood
at the gate, his grave face lighted up
with the fun of a stolen holiday.

“You see a truant professor!” he
exclaimed. “Simeon doesn’t approve;
we couldn’t induce him to come. He
said a day off meant a night on for
him—he is so wise, is Simeon—but I
positively had to do something in the
way of sport; I am in a reckless mood
to-day.”

“I’ll do the wrecking for you, if
that’s all you want,” came from under
the auto’s wheels.

Stephen conveyed his thanks.

“I dare say you will, with no effort
on your part,” he said, opening the
back door of the great, puffing monster.
“Get in here, Mrs. Ponsonby. Ben
likes his wife beside him in front, he
says, because she understands how to
run the machine when he blows his
nose, but I think it is a clear case of
belated honeymoon.”

Here Ben scrambled to his feet, his
broad, good-humored face crimson
from groveling.

“Deena, good-day to you,” he cried.
“How perfectly stunning you look! I
declare I thought Polly was the pick
of the Sheltons, but, by Jove! you are
running her hard. What have you been
doing to yourself?”

Stephen French was delighted—he
laughed his slow, reluctant laugh, and
then he called to Ben:

“Turn round and see whether you
dropped them in the road.”

“Dropped what?” asked Ben, his
hand on the lever, making a black semicircle.

“Your manners,” said Stephen, and
chuckled again.

“You go to thunder,” roared Ben,
shooting ahead. “A poor, wretched
bachelor like you instructing a married
man how to treat his sister-in-law, and
just because once upon a time I sat
in your lecture room and let you bore
me by the hour about protoplasms! Do
you suppose I should dare admit to
Polly that Deena is as handsome as she
is? Why, man alive, a Russian warship
off Port Arthur would be a place
of safety compared to this automobile.”

Deena, laughing though embarrassed,
was trying to cover the countenance
that provoked the discussion with a
veil, for her hat strained at its pins
and threatened to blow back to Harmouth
before the knotty point was settled
as to who should pay for it.

They were flying between fields
strewn with Michaelmas daisies and
wooded banks gay with the first kiss
of frost, and gradually Deena forgot
everything but the exhilaration of rushing
through the air, and their attitude
of holiday-making. She was thoroughly
at her ease with French; he was
Simeon’s one intimate in the corps of
professors, the only creature who was
ever welcome at the Ponsonby table,
the one discerning soul who found
 something to admire in Simeon’s harsh
dealings with himself and the world.
Their line of study naturally drew them
together, but Stephen admired the man
as well as the scholar; the purity of
his scientific ambition, the patience with
which he bore his poverty—for poverty
seemed a serious thing to French, who
was a man of independent fortune, and
whose connection with the university
was a matter of predilection only.
With Ponsonby it was bread and butter,
and yet he had ventured to marry with
nothing but his splendid brain between
his wife and absolute want. French
stole a glance at Deena, who was looking
more beautiful than he had ever
seen her, and wondered whether she
found her lot satisfactory; whether
there were not times when Simeon’s
absence was precious to her. Without
disloyalty to his friend, he hoped so,
for he had something to tell her before
the day was over that might lead to a
temporary separation, and he hated to
think of those lovely eyes swimming in
tears—all women were not Penelopes.

“She can’t care in that way,” he reflected.
“Ponsonby is tremendous in his
own line, of course, but no woman
could love him.”

Perhaps he was mistaken—perhaps
Mrs. Ponsonby loved her husband with
all the fervor of passion, but she conveyed
an impression of emancipation
to-day, and of powers of enjoyment
hitherto suppressed, that made Stephen
doubt. She was like a child bubbling
over with happiness, gay as a lark, as
unlike her usual self in behavior as her
modish appearance was unlike that of
Simeon Ponsonby’s self-denying wife.

“Of course she won’t mind; why
should she?” he decided, and yet determined
to put off making his announcement
till after lunch.

At Wolfshead they stopped at the little
inn, found the one o’clock dinner
smoking on the table, and sat down with
the rest of the hungry company—employees
of a branch railroad that had its
terminus there; drummers in flashy
shop-made clothes, and temporary residents
in the little town. This jaunt had
given them an appetite, and roast beef
and apple tart disappeared at a rate that
should have doubled their bill.

After lunch they strolled down to the
beach, Deena starting ahead with
French, while Polly went with Ben to
get cushions from the automobile. The
present generation seems to consider
comfort the first aim of existence,
though the trouble they take to insure
it more than counterbalances the results
in old-fashioned judgment.

Stephen stopped to light his cigar behind
the shelter of a tree, and then came
running after Deena, who was walking
slowly toward the vast plain of blue water
stretching to the east. She turned
at the sound of his footsteps and waited
for him, wondering what his classes
would think if they could see their professor
bounding along with his hat under
his arm. There was something peculiarly
charming in the lighter side of
Stephen’s nature; a simplicity and boyishness,
which was the secret of his popularity
far more than his weightier qualities.
The women of Harmouth called
him handsome, but he had small claims
to beauty. A well set-up figure rather
above the medium height, dark hair
grizzled at the temples, eyes that seemed
to laugh because of a slight contraction
of the muscles at the outer corners, and
a nose decidedly too high and bony.
The expression of the mouth was
shrewd, almost sarcastic, and possibly
a little coarse, but his smile redeemed
it and illumined his face like sunshine.
What dazzled the ladies of Harmouth
was really a certain easy luxury in dress
and habits not common in the little
town. It is always the exotic we prize
in our conservatories.

This summing up of French’s outer
man was not Deena’s estimate, as she
watched his approach—she was too familiar
with his appearance to receive
any especial impression. She accepted
his apologies for his cigar and for keeping
her waiting with an indifferent air,
and turned once more toward the sea.

CHAPTER II.

The beach at Wolfshead was pebbly,
with rocks thrown untidily about and
 ridges of blackened seaweed marking
the various encroachments of the tide.
Stephen brushed the top of a low bowlder
with his handkerchief and invited
Deena to sit down.

“You would be more comfortable,”
he said, “if Ben would come with the
cushions.”

“I am quite comfortable without
them,” she answered, “though I cannot
but resent the Paul and Virginia attitude
of the young Minthrops. One
would think a year of married life
would have satisfied their greed for
tête-à-têtes. I wonder whether they
would continue sufficient to each other
if they really were stranded on a desert
island.”

“Could you be happy on such an island
with the man of your heart, Mrs.
Ponsonby?” asked Stephen.

And Deena, feeling that Simeon was
perforce the man of her heart, and that
he was quite unfitted to live on sea
air and love, answered, smiling:

“Not unless there were a perfectly
new flora to keep him contented.”

Stephen saw his opportunity to make
his communication, and said, quickly:

“I suspect you have been reading
those articles of Simeon’s in the Scientist
on the vegetation of Tierra del
Fuego. They are very able. He ought
to go there and verify all he has gleaned
by his reading. We fully appreciate we
have a remarkable man at Harmouth in
our professor of botany.”

Deena colored with pleasure.

“Poor Simeon,” she said; “his limited
means have stood in the way of such
personal research, and then, also, the
college holidays are too short for extended
trips.”

“Let him throw over his classes in
the cause of science,” said Stephen,
with excitement. “Why, such a book
as Simeon would write after an exploration
of—Fuegia, let us say—would
place him among the scientists of the
world.”

The thought that raced across
Deena’s mind was what dull reading it
would be, but she recognized the impropriety
of the reflection and said,
simply:

“It is too bad we haven’t a little more
money.”

Stephen put his hand in his breast
pocket and half drew out a letter, and
then let it drop back, and then he
walked a little apart from Deena and
looked at her thoughtfully, as if trying
to readjust his previous ideas of her
to the present coquetry of her appearance.
The way her thoughts had flown
to Simeon when a desert island existence
was mooted seemed as if she did
care, and Stephen hated to give pain,
and yet the letter had to be answered,
and the opportunity was not likely to
occur again. The thing he had always
admired most in his friend’s wife was
her common sense—to that he trusted.

“Mrs. Ponsonby,” he said, boldly, “if
Simeon had a chance to do this very
thing—free of expense—would you be
unhappy at his desertion? Would you
feel that the man who sent him to Patagonia
was doing you an unkindness
you could not forgive?”

“I should rejoice at his good fortune,”
she answered, calmly. “The fact
that I should miss him would not weigh
with me for a moment.”

French gave a sigh of relief, while
his imagination pictured to him a dissolving
view of Polly under similar circumstances.

“The Argentine Government is fitting
up an expedition,” he went on, “to
go through the Straits of Magellan and
down the east coast of Fuegia with a
view of finding out something more exact
in regard to the mineral and agricultural
resources than has been known
hitherto. I happen to have been in active
correspondence for some time with
the man who virtually set the thing going,
and he has asked me to send him
a botanist from here. Shall I offer the
chance to your husband? He must go
at once. It is already spring in that
part of the world, and the summer at
Cape Horn is short.”

Deena’s face grew crimson and then
paled. She felt an emotion she could
not believe—pure, unalloyed joy! But
in a second she understood better; it
was joy, of course, but joy at Simeon’s
good luck.

 “Could he get leave of absence right
in the beginning of the term?” she
asked, breathlessly.

And Stephen answered that he had
never taken his Sabbatical year, and that
some one could be found to do his work,
though it might mean forfeiting half his
salary.

Here they were joined by Polly and
Ben, and as Deena made no reference
to the subject they had been discussing,
the talk wandered to general topics.

The sun was making long shadows
and the hour to start was come. The
gayety of the morning deserted Deena
as they sped back to Harmouth. Her
brain was busy fitting her ideas to this
possible change that French had just
foreshadowed, and though she was silent,
her eyes shone with excitement
and her color came and went in response
to her unspoken thoughts.

In her mind she saw Tierra del
Fuego as it looked on the map at the
end of the narrowing continent, and
then she remembered a picture of Cape
Horn that had been in her geography
when she was a child—a bold, rocky
promontory jutting into a restless sea,
in which three whales were blowing
fountains from the tops of their heads.
She reflected that it was very far away,
and that in going there Simeon might
encounter possible dangers and certain
discomfort, and she tried to feel sorry,
and all the time a wild excitement
blazed in her breast. She felt as if her
youth had been atrophied, and that if
Simeon went it might revive, and then
a great shame shook her to have allowed
such thoughts, and a tender pity for
the lonely man she had married obliterated
self.

Stephen’s voice broke in upon her
reverie.

“Have I depressed you, Mrs. Ponsonby?”

“No, no,” she answered. “I am only
considering ways and means. I want
him to go. We might rent our house
for the winter, and I could go home to
live. Count upon my doing everything
in my power to make Simeon’s going
easy, Mr. French.”

“You are admirable,” said Stephen,
with genuine satisfaction. He even half
put out his hand to give hers a grasp
of approbation, but thought better of it.
If she had had her hair parted in the
middle, and had been mending Ponsonby’s
stockings under the drop-light in
her parlor, he might have done so, braving
the needle’s point; but, looking as
she did to-day, it seemed safer to refrain.

It was six o’clock when the auto
stopped at Deena’s door.

“I wish she had shown a little more
emotion at his going,” was Stephen’s
reflection as he helped her out, forgetting
how he had dreaded any evidence
of distress; but he only said:

“May I come back to tea, Mrs. Ponsonby?
I should like to talk this over
with Simeon to-night.”

She acquiesced with an inward misgiving;
it was the first time, she had ever
given an invitation to her own table,
but it was her husband’s friend, and
she was still excited. As she exchanged
good-bys with her sister and Ben, Polly
suddenly remembered to tell her something
quite unimportant.

“Oh, Deena!” she whispered, bending
over the side of the automobile,
“when I came to pay for your hat today,
I found I hadn’t enough money,
and I knew you wouldn’t like me to explain
the circumstances to Ben, so I told
them to send the bill to you and we will
settle it later.”

“I’ll settle it!” said Deena. She was
a proud woman, and hated favors that
savored of cash. “Good-night—I am
afraid you will be late in getting to
Newbury Hill for your dinner.”

“All aboard, French!” shouted Ben—and
they were gone.

Deena stood for a moment and
watched the retreating machine before
she followed the path to the front door.
A great deal that was pleasant was disappearing
with its puffs—Ben’s gay
spirits and Polly’s ready sympathy,
which, if superficial, was very soothing—and
the money power that made them
what they were, which, in fact, permitted
the auto to exist for them at all.
It had all come into Deena’s life for a
few brief hours, and was gone, but
 something remained—something that
had not been there when she got up that
morning: the knowledge that she was
a very beautiful woman, and more than
a suspicion that a crisis was impending
in her life.

As she turned to face the house the
remembrance of the unpaid hat bill laid
a cold clutch on her heart. Until the
first of next month she had exactly ten
dollars at her credit, and that was Simeon’s—not
hers—given to her for a specific
purpose. She determined to throw
herself upon his indulgence, confess her
weakness and beg him to pay the bill for
her. She had never before asked a personal
favor of him, but was she justified
in doubting his kindness, because of her
own shyness and pride in concealing her
needs? She almost persuaded herself
he would be gratified at her request.
After all, Simeon was not an anchorite;
he had his moods like other men, and
there were times when a rough passion
marked his dealings with his wife; perhaps
he had not been very felicitous in
his rôle of lover, but the remembrance
that there was such a side to his nature
gave a fillip to her courage.

For the first time he would see her
at her best; might not her prettiness—bah!
the thought disgusted her! That
she, a typical, housewifely, modest New
England woman should be calculating
on her beauty to draw money from a
man’s pocket, even though that man
were her husband, seemed to her immoral.
She would plainly and directly
ask him to pay the money, and there
was the end of it. She opened the front
door and went in.

The Ponsonby house was two stories
high, built of wood and set a little back
from the street, with flower beds bordering
the path to the gate and neat
grass plots on either side. Within, a
small parlor and dining room on the
right of the hall, and to the left a spacious
study; behind that was the kitchen.

The door of the study was half open,
and Simeon sat at his desk reading
proof; one of his many contributions to
a scientific periodical, and, judging by
the pile of galley sheets, an important article.
He had a way of pursing his lips
and glaring through his spectacles when
he read that gave him a look of preternatural
wisdom. He was never what
Deena’s cook called “a pretty man.”

Mrs. Ponsonby’s slim figure slid
through the opening without pushing
the door wide, and spoke with a kind
of reckless gayety.

“Good-evening, Simeon,” she said,
making a little courtesy; “you see, I
have returned safely, ‘clothed and in my
right mind.’”

He made a marginal note of cabalistic
import before he swung round in his
chair and looked at her over his spectacles.

“Hardly in your right mind, I should
think,” he said, coldly.

“Don’t you like me in my new
clothes?” she asked, twirling slowly
round to give him the entire effect of
her costume.

He was apt to be irritable when disturbed
at his work, and Deena had not
attached much importance to his speech.

“I think,” he said, curtly, “you look
like a woman on a poster, and not a
reputable woman at that.”

“That is hardly a nice thing to say
of one’s wife——” she began, when he
interrupted her.

“Look here, Deena, I have work to
do before tea, and the discussion of
your appearance is hardly important
enough to keep publishers waiting.
Oblige me by taking off that dress before
I see you again. Where did you
get it—if I may ask?”

“Polly gave it to me,” she answered,
and was astonished to find a lump in her
throat, a sudden desire to burst into
tears.

“Then Polly was guilty of an impertinence
you should have resented instead
of accepting. Ben Minthrop’s
money may dress his own wife, but not
mine. Let it go for this time, but never
again subject me to such an indignity.”

“But she didn’t give me the hat, Simeon,”
said poor Deena, who knew it
was now or never.

“And who furnished you with the
hat?” he asked, insultingly.

“I meant to ask you to,” she said, and
 a tear escaped and splashed on the lapel
of her new coat, “but never mind, I will
find some means to pay for it myself.”
And she moved toward the door,
wounded pride expressed in every line
of her retreating figure.

“Come back, if you please,” he called.
“This is childish folly. How can you
pay when you have no money except
what I give you? I am responsible for
your debts, and as you have taken advantage
of that fact, I have no choice
but to pay. This must never occur
again. How much is it?”

“I—I don’t know,” faltered Deena,
struggling with her emotion.

“You don’t know? You buy without
even asking the price?” he pursued.

The enormity of the offense crushed
his irritation; it struck at the very
foundations of his trust in Deena’s
judgment, at her whole future usefulness
to him; he almost felt as if his
bank account were not in his own keeping.

She tried to answer, but no words
would come; explanations were beyond
her powers, and she left the room, shutting
the door behind her. A passion of
tears would have made the situation
bearable, but when you are the lady of
the house and unexpected company is
coming to tea, and you have but one
servant, you have to deny yourself such
luxuries.

Deena went for a moment into the
open air while she steadied her nerves;
she forced herself to think what she
could add to the evening meal, and succeeded
in burying her mortification in
a dish of smoked beef and eggs.

Old Mrs. Ponsonby had never given
in to late dinners, and Simeon’s digestion
was regulated to the more economical
plan of a light supper or tea at seven
o’clock.

Deena gave the necessary orders and
went upstairs to her own room. One
blessing was hers—a bedroom to herself.
Simeon had given her his mother’s
room and retained his own, which
was directly in the rear. She shut the
communicating door, and was glad she
had done so when she heard his step in
the passage and knew he had come to
make the brief toilet he thought necessary
for tea. She tore off her finery—hung
the pretty costume in her closet,
and, as she laid her hat on the shelf,
registered a vow that no power on earth
should induce her to pay for it with
Ponsonby money. Though the clock
pointed to ten minutes to seven, she
shook down her hair and parted it in
the severe style that had won its way to
her mother-in-law’s heart. At this point
Simeon’s door opened, and Deena remembered,
with regret, that she had
omitted to tell him that French was
coming to tea. He was already halfway
downstairs, but she came out into the
passageway and called him. He stopped,
gave a weary sigh, and came back.

“I forgot to tell you Mr. French is
coming to tea,” she said, quite in her
usual tone.

“Who asked him?” demanded Simeon,
and Deena, too proud to put the responsibility
on French, where it belonged,
said: “I did.”

Simeon was not an ill-tempered man,
but he had had an exasperating day,
and his wife’s conduct had offended his
prejudices; he was not in a company
frame of mind, and was at small pains
to conceal his feelings; he hardly
looked at her as he said:

“I do not question your right to ask
people to the house, but I should be
glad to be consulted. My time is often
precious beyond what you can appreciate,
and I happen to be exceptionally
busy to-night—even French will be an
unwelcome interruption.”

“I shall remember your wish,” Deena
said, quietly, and returned to her room.

A moment later she heard Stephen
arrive, and the study door shut behind
him.

Her toilet was soon made. She knew
every idiosyncrasy of the hooks and
buttons of her well-worn afternoon
frock. It was dark blue, of some clinging
material that fell naturally into
graceful lines, and was relieved at the
throat and wrists by embroidered bands
always immaculate. The damp sea
breeze had ruffled her hair into rebellion
against the sleekness Simeon approved,
so that, in spite of her efforts,
 some effects of the holiday still lingered.
Suppressed tears had made violet shadows
under her eyes, and her mouth—sweet
and sensitive like a child’s—drooped
a little in recollection of her
annoyances, but, all the same, she was
a very beautiful young woman, whether
sad or merry.

The study door was still shut as she
passed downstairs and into the little
parlor. Her workbasket was standing
by her chair, piled high with mending
that she had neglected for her pleasuring.
It was Saturday night, and no
good housewife should let the duties
of one week overlap the next. Simeon’s
aphorism, “A day off means a
night on,” seemed likely to be her experience
with darning needle and patches,
but it was a quarter past seven, and she
deferred beginning her task till after
tea.

The servant announced the meal, and
by Deena’s orders knocked at the study
door, but got no response; indeed, the
pièce de résistance—the smoked beef
and eggs—had almost hardened into a
solid cake before the friends emerged,
arm in arm, and followed Deena to the
table. French drew out her chair with
that slight exaggeration of courtesy that
lent a charm to all he did, and with his
hands still on the bar he bent over her
and said—smiling the while at Simeon:

“I have been telling your husband of
what I hinted to you this afternoon,
Mrs. Ponsonby; the expedition to Patagonia
and his chance to join it.”

Simeon’s brow contracted. It was
disagreeable to him to have momentous
affairs like his own discussed by anticipation
with Deena—Deena, who was
only a woman, and he now feared a silly
one at that.

“It is no secret, then!” said Simeon,
contemptuously, and added, turning to
his wife: “Be good enough not to
speak of this before the servant; I
should be sorry to have the faculty hear
of such a thing from anyone but me.”

She grew scarlet, but managed to
murmur a word of acquiescence. Stephen
looked amazed; he thought he
must be mistaken in the rudeness of his
friend’s manner, and then began making
imaginary excuses for him. Of
course, the tea table was not the place
for confidences, and, naturally, a man
would prefer telling such things privately
to his wife, and the rebuke was
meant for him, not for Mrs. Ponsonby.
How lovely she looked—even prettier
than in those smart clothes she had
worn in the morning. He wondered
whether Ponsonby knew how absolutely
perfect she was.

The servant was much in the room,
and the talk turned on the progressive
spirit of Argentina, its railroads, its
great natural resources, its vast agricultural
development. It was a dialogue
between the men, for Simeon addressed
himself exclusively to French—what
could a woman know of what goes to
make the wealth of nations!—and, as
for Stephen, he was still uncomfortable
from the failure of his first effort to
bring her into the discussion.

When tea was over Simeon pushed
back his chair and was about to stalk
from the room, when he remembered
that French was his guest, and halted
to let him go out first, but when French
waited beside him to let Deena pass, an
expression of impatience crossed her
husband’s face, as if the precious half
seconds he could so ill spare from his
work, in order to reach conclusions,
were being sacrificed to dancing master
ceremonials.

Deena sat sewing till Stephen came to
bid her good-night.

“I think it is all arranged,” he said,
but without the joyousness of his first
announcement. He had, perhaps, lost
a little of his interest in his friend, Ponsonby,
since the incident at the tea
table.

Deena, with a woman’s instinct,
guessed at his feelings, and made no
effort to detain him. She was tired and
discouraged, and would gladly have
gone to bed when their guest departed,
except for a suspicion that Simeon
would want to talk things over with her,
in spite of his seeming indifference. She
was not mistaken. In ten minutes he
came into the parlor and threw himself
wearily on the sofa.

“Deena,” he said, and his tone was
 kind, “if I should go away for six
months, do you think you could manage
without me?”

“I am sure I could,” she answered,
cheerfully, “and I want to say to you,
now that you have opened the subject,
that you must not let my expenses stand
in your way. I know, of course, if you
give up your college work, part of your
salary would naturally pass to the person
who, for the time, undertakes your
duties, and I have been thinking that
a simple plan would be to rent this
house.”

The idea was not quite agreeable to
Simeon—the old house was part of himself;
he had been born there; his love
for his mother overflowed into every
rickety chair; but the common-sense
commercial value of the scheme made
him regard Deena with revived respect.

“It is hardly practicable,” he said.
“In the first place, it is too old-fashioned
to attract, and, in the second,
there is no market for furnished houses
at Harmouth.”

“Mrs. Barnes would take it, I fancy,”
said Deena. “She is the mother of the
student who was hurt last week in the
football match. She is trying everywhere
to find a furnished house so that
she can take care of him and yet let him
stay on here. I think we could rent it,
Simeon, and I should need so little—so
very little to keep me while you are
gone.”

He took off his spectacles and sat up.

“It isn’t a bad idea,” he said, almost
gayly. “The rent would pay the taxes
and give you a small income besides,
and leave me practically free. You have
relieved my mind of a serious worry.
Thank you, Deena.”

“You will see the president to-morrow?”
she asked.

He hesitated before admitting that
such was his intention; it was one thing
for his wife to meet his difficulties with
practical suggestions, and quite another
for her to put intrusive questions.

“You shall be informed when things
take a definite shape,” he said, pompously.
“Good-night, my dear; I shall
be at work on my galley proof till daylight.”

“Good-night, Simeon,” she said, gently.
“I am sorry I displeased you today.”

He mumbled something about young
people having to make mistakes, but his
mumble was pleasant, and then he
crossed to her side, and kissed her forehead.

She felt the pucker of his lips like
wrinkled leather, but she told herself it
was kind in Simeon to kiss her.

As she laid her head on her pillow,
she thought:

“He never had the curiosity to ask
what I proposed to do with myself
when my home and husband were taken
from me,” and the tears came at last,
unchecked.

CHAPTER III.

Simeon was gone—gone with his
clothes packed in the sole leather trunk
that his father had used before him,
but with an equipment for botanizing as
modern and extended as his personal
arrangements were meager.

The house was rented to Mrs. Barnes,
the mother of the too ardent champion
of the football field—but as her son
was too suffering to be moved for several
weeks to come, Deena had leisure
to get the house in order and habituate
herself to the idea of being homeless.

Simeon behaved liberally in money
matters; that is, he arranged that the
rent should be paid to his wife, and he
gave her a power of attorney which was
to make her free of his bank account
should anything delay his return beyond
her resources. At the same time the
injunctions against spending were so
solemn that she understood she was to
regard her control of his money as a
mere formality—a peradventure—made
as one makes his will, anticipating the
unlikely.

The faculty made no objection to
Simeon’s going; indeed, his researches
were thought likely to redound to the
high scientific reputation that Harmouth
particularly cherished, and Stephen
French had taken care to foster this
impression.

The day he left was sharp for October;
 a wood fire crackled on the
hearth in the dining room, and Deena,
pale and calm, sat behind the breakfast
service and made his coffee for the last
time in many months. He ate and
drank, and filled in the moments with
the Harmouth Morning Herald, and his
wife’s natural courtesy forbade her interrupting
him. Without a word he
stretched his arm across the table with
his cup to have it refilled, and Deena,
feeling her insignificance as compared
with the morning news, still dared not
speak. When finally he pushed back
his chair, the little carryall was at the
door waiting to take him and his luggage
to the train.

“You will write from New York,
Simeon, and again by the pilot,” she
urged, following him into the hall.
“And where is your first port—Rio?
Then from Rio, and as often as you
can.”

He was stuffing the pockets of his
overcoat with papers and pamphlets, but
he nodded assent.

She came a step nearer and laid her
hand on his arm.

“Be sure I shall try to do as you
would wish,” she half whispered, and
there were tears in her eyes.

“To be sure, to be sure,” said Simeon,
with a kind of embarrassment.
“Oh, yes, I shall write frequently—if
not to you, to French, who will keep
you informed. Don’t forget to make
your weekly contribution to your mother’s
housekeeping. I cannot allow you
to be a burden on them during my absence;
and consult Stephen whenever
you are in doubt. Good-by, Deena—I
am sorry to leave you.”

He puckered his lips into the hard
wrinkles that made his kisses so discreet,
and gave her a parting embrace.
She stood at the open door watching
the distribution of his luggage, which
he superintended with anxious care, and
then he stepped into the one free seat
reserved for him, and the driver
squeezed himself between a trunk and
roll of rugs, and they were off.

Simeon waved his hand, and even
leaned far out from the carriage window
and smiled pleasantly, and Deena
wiped her eyes, and began the awful
work of making an old house, bristling
with the characteristic accumulations of
several generations, impersonal enough
to rent. She had plenty to do to keep
her loneliness in abeyance, but in the
back of her consciousness there was a
feeling that she had no abiding place.
Her family had urged her to marry
Simeon, and he was now throwing her
back upon her family, and her dignity
was hurt.

At sunset Stephen came to see how
she was getting on, and they had a cup
of tea beside the dining-room fire, and
talked about the voyage and the ports
Simeon would touch at; and Stephen,
who had the power of visualizing the
descriptions he met with in his reading,
made her see his word-painted pictures
so clearly that she exclaimed:

“When were you in South America,
Mr. French?” and he laughed and declared
himself a fraud.

They talked on till the firelight
alone challenged the darkness, and then
French remembered he was dining out,
and left her with an imagination aglow
with all the wonders Simeon was to see.
Lest she should be lonely, he undid a
roll of papers, and took out several new
magazines which he said would keep
her amused till bedtime, and somehow
he put new courage into her heart.

Presently she went into the study and
lit the Welsbach over the table, and
curled herself up in Simeon’s great
chair to enjoy her periodicals, and then
her eye fell upon a parcel of proof, directed
but not sent, and she read the address,
weighed and stamped the package,
and rang the bell for the servant
to post it. As she took up her magazine
once more, she noticed on the outside
cover the same name of street and
building as on Simeon’s direction, and
she wondered whether the same publishers
lent themselves to fact and fancy.

Her servant brought her something
to eat on a tray—women left to themselves
always find economy in discomfort—and
she nibbled her chicken and
read her stories till she felt surfeited
with both, and fell to pondering on
what made a story effective. Her eye
 lit upon a short poem at the end of
a page; it seemed to her poor to banality—did
it please the public or the editor?
Her own verses were a thousand
times better.

She sat up suddenly with a heightened
color and shining eyes, and
laughed out loud. She had an inspiration.
She, too, would become a contributor
to that great publishing output;
she would try her luck at making
her brains pay her bills. The name
“Mrs. Simeon Ponsonby” would carry
weight with the magazine she selected,
but, while disclosing her identity to the
editor, she determined to choose a pen
name, fearing her husband’s disapproval.

From childhood Deena had loved to
express herself in rhyme, and of late
years she had found her rhyming—so
she modestly called it—a safety valve
to a whole set of repressed feelings
which she was too simple to recognize
as starved affections, and which she
thought was nature calling to her from
without. It was nature, but calling
from within, thrilling her with the
beauty of things sensuous and driving
her for sympathy to pen and ink.

Tossing down her book, she ran to
her own room, unlocked a drawer, took
out an old portfolio and returned to
the study. There were, perhaps, twenty
poems she had thought worth preserving,
and her eye traveled over page after
page as she weighed the merits and
defects of each before making her
choice. A sensitive ear had given her
admirable imitative powers in versification,
and her father, before dissipation
had dulled his intellect, had been a man
of rare cultivation and literary taste.
Deena, among all his children, was the
only one whose education he had personally
superintended, and she brought
to her passion for poetry some critical
acumen.

She finally selected a song of the
Gloucester fishermen she had written
two years before—a song of toil and
death—but with a refrain that effaced
the terror with the dance of summer
seas. She wrote a formal note to the
editor, saying the price was fifteen dollars,
that if accepted the signature was
to be Gerald Shelton, and the check
to be made to her, and she signed her
own name. Simeon should know as soon
as he came home, but she thought he
could have no objection to Geraldine
Ponsonby accepting a check for the
supposititious Gerald Shelton.

Before all this was accomplished, her
servant had gone to bed and Deena,
afraid to be left alone downstairs in a
house so prone to spooky noises, followed
her example, but alas! not to
sleep. She tossed on her bed, sacred
for many years to the ponderous weight
of old Mrs. Ponsonby, till suddenly all
she had suffered from the maxims and
example of her mother-in-law took
form, and she wove a story half humorous,
half pathetic, that she longed to
commit to paper; but her delicacy forbade.
She was even ashamed to have
found a passing amusement at the expense
of Simeon’s mother, and she tried
to make her mind a blank and go to
sleep. Toward morning she must have
lost consciousness, for she dreamed—or
thought she dreamed—that old Mrs.
Ponsonby sat in her hard wooden rocking-chair
by the window—the chair with
the patchwork cushion fastened by three
tape bows to the ribs of its back; the
chair Simeon had often told her was
“mother’s favorite.” The old lady
rocked slowly, and her large head and
heavy figure were silhouetted against
the transparent window shade. A
sound of wheels came from the street,
and she raised the shade and looked out,
leaning back, in order to follow the disappearing
object till it was out of range,
and then she buried her face in her
hands and sobbed the low, hopeless sobs
of old-age.

Deena found herself sitting up in
bed, the early daylight making “the
casement slowly grow a glimmering
square.” The impression of her dream
was so vivid that the depression
weighed upon her like something physical.
It was impossible to sleep, and at
seven o’clock she got up to dress, having
heard the servant go downstairs.
On her way to her bath she passed the
rocking-chair, and lying directly in her
 path was a little card, yellow with age.
Deena picked it up and read: “From
Mother to Simeon.” The coincidence
worked so on her imagination that she
sank into the nearest chair trembling
from head to foot, and then she reflected
that she must have pulled the
card out of the table drawer when she
went to fetch the portfolio the night
before, and she called herself a superstitious
silly, and made her bath a little
colder than usual, as a tonic to her
nerves. Cold water and hot food work
wonders, and after breakfast young
Mrs. Ponsonby forgot she had ever had
a predecessor.

Her family paid her flying visits during
the day, with a freedom unknown
in Simeon’s reign, and she worked hard
at her preparations for renting, but in
the evening, when the house was quiet,
she settled herself at the study table
and made her first attempt at story
writing, this time steering clear of the
personal note that had brought such
swift reprisal the night before. The occupation
was absorbing; she neither desired
nor missed companionship. She
was not the first person to find life’s
stage amply filled by the puppets of her
own imagination.

At the end of the week two things
had happened. The Illuminator had accepted
her poem, and her story was finished.
She determined to submit it to
Stephen, and yet when he looked in at
five o’clock, she was ashamed to ask
him; what she had thought so well of
the night before, in the excitement of
work, suddenly seemed to her beneath
contempt.

He lingered later than usual, for he
mistook her preoccupation for unhappiness,
and hated to leave her alone.

“When do you move to your mother’s?”
he asked, for he thought anything
better than her present desolation; the
genteel poverty brought about by Mr.
Shelton’s habits, the worldliness of Mrs.
Shelton, and the demands upon time
and temper made by the younger brothers
and sisters, were only the old conditions
under which she had grown up.

“Next week,” she said, sadly. “I
shall be sorry to leave here.”

“You are not lonely, then, poor little
lady?” he said, kindly, while he searched
her face to see whether she told the
whole truth.

His eyes were so merry, his smile so
encouraging, that Deena blurted out her
request.

“I haven’t felt lonely,” she said, “because
I have been writing a foolish
story, and my characters have been my
companions. I am sure it is no good,
and yet my head is a little turned at having
expressed myself on paper. Like
Dr. Johnson’s simile of the dog walking
on its hind legs, the wonder isn’t to find
it ill done, but done at all. I am trying
to screw my courage to the point of
asking you——”

“To be sure I will,” he interrupted,
eagerly, “and what is a great deal
stronger proof of friendship, I’ll tell
you what I think, even if my opinion
is nihilistic.”

He followed her into the study, and
she laid her manuscript on the table and
left him without a word.

The story was the usual magazine
length, about five thousand words, and
Deena’s handwriting was as clear and
direct as her character. At the end of
half an hour she heard his voice calling
her name, and she joined him.

“It is very creditable,” he said. “It
fairly glows with vitality. Without
minute description, you have conveyed
your story in pictures which lodge in
the imagination; but in construction it
is poor—your presentment of the plot is
amateurish, and you have missed making
your points tell by too uniform a
value to each.”

“I understand you,” said Deena,
looking puzzled, “and yet, somehow,
fail to apply what you say to what I
have written.”

He drew a chair for her beside his
own, and began making a rapid synopsis
of her story, to which he applied his
criticism, showing her what should be
accentuated, what only hinted, what
descriptions were valuable, what
clogged the narrative. She was discouraged
but grateful.

“You advise me to destroy it?” she
asked.

 “I advise you to rewrite it,” he answered.
Then, after a pause, he asked:
“Why do you want to write?”

“For money,” she answered.

“But Simeon told me,” French remonstrated,
“that he had left you the
rent of this house as well as part of his
salary, and a power of attorney that
makes you free of all he possesses.
Why add this kind of labor to a life that
is sober enough already? Amuse yourself;
look the way you did that day at
Wolfshead; be young!”

“Simeon is very generous,” she said,
loyally, silent as to the restrictions put
upon his provisions for her maintenance,
as well as the fact that his salary
only covered the letter of credit he took
with him for such expenses as he might
incur outside the expedition. “In spite
of his kindness, can’t you understand
that I am proud to be a worker? Have
you lived so long in the companionship
of New England women without appreciating
their reserves of energy? I
have to make use of mine!”

“Then use it in having ‘a good time.’
I conjure you, in the name, as well as
the language, of young America.”

Deena shook her head, and French
stood hesitating near the door, wondering
what he could do to reawaken the
spirit of enjoyment that had danced in
her eyes the day at Wolfshead.

“Will you dine with me to-morrow
if I can get Mrs. McLean to chaperon
us?” he asked.

The phrase “chaperon us” was pleasant
to him; it implied they had a common
interest in being together, and her
companionship meant much to him.
He smiled persuasively—waiting, hat in
hand, for her answer.

Deena felt an almost irresistible desire
to say yes—to follow the suggestions
of this overmastering delightful
companion who seemed to make her
happiness his care, but she managed to
refuse.

“Thank you very much,” she murmured,
“it is quite impossible.”

It was not at all impossible, as Stephen
knew, and he turned away with a
short good-night. He wondered whether
his friend’s wife were a prude.

Undoubtedly the refusal was prudent,
whether Mrs. Ponsonby were a
prude or no, but it had its rise in quite
a different cause. She had no dress she
considered suitable for such an occasion.
Her wedding dress still hung in
ghostly splendor in a closet all by itself,
but that was too grand, and the others
of her trousseau had been few in number
and plain in make, and would now
have been consigned to the rag bag had
she seen any means of supplying their
place. They were certainly too shabby
to grace one of Stephen’s beautiful little
dinners, which were the pride of
Harmouth.

Deena’s ideas of French in his own
entourage as opposed to him in hers
were amusing. Viewed in the light of
Simeon’s friend, voluntarily seeking
their companionship and sharing their
modest hospitality, they met on terms
of perfect equality; but when associated
with his own surroundings he seemed
transformed into a person of fashion,
haughty and aloof. It was quite absurd.
Stephen was as simple and
straightforward in one relation as the
other, but perhaps the truth was that
Deena was afraid of his servants.

The house was the most attractive
in the town, and stood in the midst of
well-kept grounds with smooth lawns
and conservatories, and Deena felt oppressed
by so much prosperity. On the
few occasions when Simeon had taken
her there to lunch on Sunday—the only
dissipation he allowed himself—-she had
thought the butler supercilious, and the
maid who came to help her off with her
wraps, snippy. She had suspected the
woman of turning her little coat inside
out after it was confided to her care,
and sneering at its common lining.

Deena was too superior a woman not
to be ashamed of such thoughts, but the
repression of her married life had developed
a morbid sensitiveness, and she
was always trying to adjust the unadjustable—Simeon’s
small economies to
her own ideas of personal dignity; she
hardly realized how much the desire to
live fittingly in their position had to do
with her wish to earn an income.

While Stephen’s criticisms were still
 fresh in her mind she rewrote her story,
and when she read it again—which was
not till several days had passed—she
felt she had made large strides in the
art she so coveted.

CHAPTER IV.

When affairs of a family once begin
to stir, they seem unable to settle till
a flurry takes place quite bewildering
to the stagnant ideas of the easy-going.
The fact that Deena was coming back
to her old quarters in the third story
was the first event to excite a flutter of
interest in the Shelton home circle; with
Mr. Shelton, because she was his favorite
child; with Mrs. Shelton, because
Deena would both pay and help; with
the children, because they could count
upon her kindness no matter how outrageous
their demands. The next thing
that happened, while it hastened her
coming, entirely eclipsed it. Fortunately
it was delayed until the day before
the Ponsonby house was to be handed
over to its new tenant, Mrs. Barnes.

Mrs. Shelton was busy clearing a
closet for her daughter’s use when she
heard her husband calling to her from
below.

“Mary,” he said, “here is a telegram.”

They were not of everyday occurrence,
and Mrs. Shelton’s fears were
for Polly, her one absent child, as she
joined her husband and stretched out
her hand for the yellow envelope.

The magnetic heart of a mother is
almost as invariably set to the prosperous
daughter as to the good-for-nothing
son; there is a subtle philosophy in
it, but quite aside from the interest of
this story.

The telegram said:

Mrs. Thomas Beck’s funeral will take place
on Thursday at 11 A. M.

It was dated Chicago, and signed
“Herbert Beck.”

“Who is Mrs. Beck?” asked Mr.
Shelton, crossly; the morning was not
his happiest time.

“She is my first cousin, once removed,”
Mrs. Shelton answered, with
painstaking accuracy. “You must remember
her, John. She was my bridesmaid,
and we corresponded for years
after she married and moved to Chicago
until”—here Mrs. Shelton’s pale face
flushed—-“I once asked her to lend me
some money, and told her how badly
things were going with us, and she refused—very
unkindly, I thought at the
time; but perhaps it was just as well—we
might never have paid it back.”

It was Mr. Shelton’s turn to flush,
but he only said, irritably:

“And why the devil should they think
you want to go to her funeral?”

Mrs. Shelton professed herself unable
to guess, unless the fact that the
family was nearly extinct had led her
cousin to remember her on her deathbed.

“Well, they might have saved themselves
the expense of the telegram,”
Mr. Shelton grumbled, adding, sarcastically,
“unless they would like to pay
our expenses to Chicago, and entertain
us when we get there!”

It appeared later that was exactly
what they hoped to do. A registered letter,
written at Mrs. Beck’s request,
when her death was approaching, arrived
within an hour. She begged her
cousin’s forgiveness for past unkindness,
told her that she had left her the
savings of her lifetime—though the
main part of the estate passed to Mr.
Beck’s nephew—and besought Mrs.
Shelton, as her only relation, to follow
her to her grave. Young Mr. Beck,
the said nephew, who wrote the letter,
added that the house should be kept up
for Mrs. Shelton’s convenience till after
her visit, and that his aunt had expressed
a wish that her clothes and
jewels should be given to Mrs. Shelton.

“We’ll go, Mary!” said Mr. Shelton,
blithe as a lark—several things had
raised his spirits!—and Mrs. Shelton,
with a burst of her old energy, borrowed
some mourning, packed her
trunk, summoned Deena and caught the
train, with five minutes to spare.

And so it happened that when Mr.
French called, as was his daily custom,
to take his last cup of tea with Mrs.
Ponsonby before her flitting, he found
the house in the temporary charge of
 the servant and Master Dicky Shelton,
a shrimpish boy of thirteen, whose red
hair and absurd profile bore just enough
likeness to his sister’s beauty to make
one feel the caricature an intentional
impertinence.

French had got into the drawing
room before he understood what the
servant was saying. Deena had gone,
leaving no message for him! His first
feeling of surprise was succeeded by
one of chagrin; these afternoon chats
by her fireside had become so much to
him, so much a part of his daily life,
that he hated to think they had no corresponding
value to her. He was recalled
from these sentimental regrets by the
irate voice of Master Shelton in dispute
with Bridget.

“She—said—there—was cake! Mrs.
Ponsonby—said—there—-was—cake—and—that
I—could—have
some!” each word very emphatic, judicial
and accusative. Then followed a
rattling tail to the sentence: “And if
you have eaten it all, it was horridly
greedy in you, and I hope it will disagree
with you—so I do!”

Bridget now came forward and addressed
French.

“There ain’t so much as a cheese-paring
left in the house, Mr. French. Mrs.
Ponsonby’s gone off at a moment’s notice,
and I’m off myself to-morrow; and
there sits that boy asking for cake! He’s
been here now the better part of an
hour, trackin’ mud over the clean carpets
till I’m a’most ready to cry.”

Dick seized his hat and moved sulkily
to the door, hurling back threats as
he walked.

“Just you wait! We’ll see—you think
I won’t tell, but I will!”

French perceived that the case was
to be carried to the Supreme Court for
Deena’s decision, and to save her annoyance
at a time when he felt sure she was
both tired and busy, he made a proposition
to the heir of the Sheltons that established
his everlasting popularity with
that young person.

“Come home with me, Dicky,” he
said, “and if my people haven’t any
cake, I can at least give you all the hothouse
grapes you can eat, and some to
carry home. How does that strike
you?”

“Done!” cried Dicky, slipping his
hand under Stephen’s arm, and, after
one horrid grimace at Bridget, he allowed
himself to be led away.

The sun had nearly disappeared when
they reached French’s house, which was
a little outside of the town, and he reflected
that he must quickly redeem his
promise, and dispatch his young companion
home before the darkness should
make his absence a cause of alarm. He
rang the bell by way of summoning a
servant, and then, opening the door with
his latchkey, he invited Dicky to enter.

It was a most cheerful interior. The
staircase, wide and old-fashioned, faced
you at the far end of the hall, and on
the first landing a high-arched window
was glowing with the level rays of the
setting sun. A wood fire blazed on the
hearth, and on the walls the portraits of
all the Frenches, who for two hundred
years had made a point of recording
their individualities in oil, looked down
to welcome each arrival.

Dicky, who wore no overcoat, presented
his nether boy to the fire, while
he gazed at the portraits with a frown.
He thought them extremely plain.

A servant came from some hidden
door, took his master’s coat and hat and
received an order in which such inspiring
words as “cakes, or chocolates, or
dessert of any kind,” gave the earnest
of things hoped for.

“And, Charles,” Mr. French concluded,
“tell Marble to bring the things
as quickly as he can to the library, with
a good supply of grapes.”

Dicky smiled a slow smile. He could
even allow his mind to wander to other
things, now that his refreshment was
drawing nigh.

“I say, Mr. French, who is that old
cove over the door, with a frill on his
shirt and a ribbon to his eyeglass?
He is nearly as ugly as brother Simeon.”

Stephen felt genuine alarm; he was
unused to children.

“That,” he said, “is my great-grandfather.
I don’t think he is much like
your brother-in-law, I must confess.”

 “He doesn’t look quite so musty,”
said Dicky, reflectively. “Did it ever
seem strange to you, Mr. French, that
a pretty girl like Deena could marry
Mr. Ponsonby?”

“He is a very distinguished man,”
Stephen replied, in an agony of embarrassment.
“You ought to appreciate
what an honor it is to be connected by
marriage with Professor Ponsonby.”

“We ain’t intimate,” said Dicky, lightly,
and his tone betrayed how much
Simeon was the loser by a restricted intercourse.

“One of these days when you are a
little older you will be very proud of
his reputation,” Stephen protested.

Dicky walked to the end of the great
Persian rug on the blue pattern—it was
evidently a point of honor to avoid the
red—before he answered:

“Well, I’m blamed glad he’s gone
away, anyhow.” And then, to French’s
relief, Marble came and announced in
his unctuous voice:

“The tray is in the library, sir,” and
all thought of Simeon was abandoned.

That feast at Stephen’s lived in
Dicky’s memory for years. It supported
him through the disappointments
of many a dessertless dinner—in the
hopeless fancy engendered by seeing
sweets pressed to the lips of others;
it won for him an easy victory in times
of gustatory boasting when at school.
He could affirm, with truth, that for
once he had had his fill of the very best.

With Stephen also the experience
was a revelation. The capacity of his
guest caused him amazement mingled
with fear.

And still he gazed

And still the wonder grew

That one small boy

Could hold all he could chew.

The chiming of the clock reminded
French that it was already dark and
high time Dicky was dispatched home.

“Do you want to take these grapes
home with you,” asked Stephen, “or
shall I send you a basket of them tomorrow?”

Dicky looked coy.

“If you don’t mind,” he said, “I guess
I’ll take the chocolates, and you can
send the grapes to-morrow.”

He pulled a very dirty handkerchief
from his pocket, in order to provide a
wrapping for the chocolates, and, as he
spread it on the table, a letter dropped
out. He turned his eyes upon French
with an expression of sincere regret.

“I say!” he began. “Now, isn’t that
too bad! And Deena so particular that
you should get the note before tea time.
I’m awfully sorry, Mr. French—it’s all
Bridget’s fault. Deena said if I got that
note to you before five o’clock I should
have a piece of cake, and when Bridget
wouldn’t give it to me it made me so
mad I forgot everything. I wanted to
kill her.”

“I know just how you felt,” said Stephen,
with irony.

Dicky was tying his chocolates into
a hard ball, but with the finishing grimy
knot he tossed responsibility to the
winds.

“Oh, well,” he said, soothingly,
“you’ve got it now, at any rate, so
there’s no occasion for saying just when
I gave it to you, unless you want to get
a fellow into trouble.”

Stephen looked grave; he did want
Mrs. Ponsonby to know why he had
failed to follow her suggestion of taking
tea with her at her mother’s house—and
also he hated evasion.

“As it happens, that is the exact point
I wish your sister to know. I shall not
tell her, but I expect you, as a gentleman,
to tell of yourself.”

“All right,” said Dicky, mournfully.
“Good-night, Mr. French.”

CHAPTER V.

Deena had ample time to get accustomed
to the old home life before her
parents returned, for she had already
been in charge for two weeks and still
they tarried.

It was evident that young Mr. Beck
wished to carry out his aunt’s bequests
in the spirit as well as the letter of her
instructions, for trunks of linen and
silver began to arrive from Chicago
which gave some idea of the loot obtained
 from the dismantling of Mrs.
Beck’s fine house. The young Sheltons
took the keenest interest in unpacking
these treasures. Children are naturally
communistic. They enjoy possessions
held in common almost as much as their
individual acquisitions—only in a different
way. There is more glorification in
the general good luck, but not such far-reaching
privilege.

In the midst of these excitements
Deena received a letter the possession of
which no one seemed inclined to dispute
with her. It was from Simeon, posted
at Montevideo, and containing the first
news of his voyage. His wife read it in
the retirement of her own room, but she
might have proclaimed it from the rostrum,
so impersonal was its nature. He
had made an attempt, however, to meet
what he conceived to be feminine requirements
in a correspondent, for the
handwriting was neat, and the facts he
recorded of an unscientific nature. He
described his cabin in the vessel, also
his fellow passengers; not humorously,
but with an appreciation of their peculiarities
Deena had not anticipated; he
introduced her to flying fish, and then to
the renowned albatross, and he conducted
her up the river Platte to Montevideo,
which he described with the
ponderous minuteness of a guide book.
At the end he made a confidence—namely,
that even his summer flannels
had proved oppressive in that climate—but
the intimacy of his letter went no
further, and he omitted to mention any
personal feelings in regard to their separation.

It was an admirable family letter, instructive
and kind, and rather pleasanter
and lighter in tone than his conversation.
Deena was glad that no exhortations
to economy made it too private to
show to French when he called that
afternoon. She but anticipated his object
in coming. He also had a letter
which he had brought for her to read,
and they sat on opposite sides of the
fire, enjoying their exchanged correspondence.

But what a difference there was in
the letters; Deena’s had three pages of
pretty handwriting; Stephen’s six of
closely written scrawl. In Deena’s the
ideas barely flowed to the ink; in Stephen’s
they flowed so fast they couldn’t
get themselves written down—he used
contractions, he left out whole words;
he showed the interest he felt in the
work he left behind in endless questions
in regard to his department; he thanked
Stephen more heartily than he had ever
done by word of mouth for suggesting
him for the appointment, and finally he
gave such an account of his voyage as
one intelligent man gives another.

Deena recognized her place in her
husband’s estimation when she finished
his letter to Stephen, and said, with pardonable
sarcasm:

“Simeon saves the strong meat of
observation for masculine digestion, and
I get only the hors-d’œuvres; perhaps
he has discriminated wisely.”

The mere fact of being able to exchange
letters with Deena was a revelation
to French, and as he walked
home from their interview his fancy
was busy putting himself in Simeon’s
place. The paths that lead through another
man’s kingdom are never very
safe for the wandering feet of imagination.
It is an old refrain, “If I were
king,” the song of a usurper, if only
in thought.

If he were king of Deena Ponsonby’s
life, Stephen thought, would he write
letters that another chap might read?
Would he dwell upon the shape of an albatross,
when there must be memories—beautiful,
glowing memories—between
them to recall? Pen and ink was a
wretched medium for love, but the heart
of the world has throbbed to its inspiration
before now. Why, if a woman like
Mrs. Ponsonby shared his hearth, he
would let Tierra del Fuego, with its
flora and its fauna, sink into the sea
and be damned to it, before he’d put the
hall door between himself and her. His
own front door had suggested the idea,
and he shut it with a bang.

He picked up the letters he found
waiting on the hall table, and went directly
to his library, passing through a
room that would have been a drawing-room
had a lady presided there, but
to the master served only as a defense
 against intrusion into the privacy of his
sanctum.

The postman had left a pile of bills
and advertisements, but there was one
letter in Ben Minthrop’s familiar writing,
and Stephen turned up his light
and settled himself to read it. Ben
wrote:

Dear French: When I asked you to spend
Christmas with us in Boston I had no idea
that, like the Prophet Habbacuc, I, with my
dinner pail, was to be lifted by the hair of
my head, and transported to Babylon—in
other words, New York. But so it is! If
you know your Apocrypha, this figurative
language will seem apt, but in case you
should like my end of it explained I will
leave the mystifications of Bel and the
Dragon and come down to plain speech.

My father has conceived the idea that I am
one of the dawning lights in the financial
world, and he has decided to open a branch
office of our business in New York and to
put me at its head. I must confess that the
whole thing is very pleasant and flattering,
and it has stirred all the decent ambitions
I have—that I have any I owe to you, old
fellow—and I am rather keen to be off.

We have taken a house not far from the
park in East Sixty-fifth Street, where a welcome
will always be yours, and where Polly
and I hope you will eat your Christmas
dinner.

Perhaps you may reflect that it is a serious
thing to befriend straying men and dogs;
they are apt to regard past kindness as a
guarantee of future interest in their welfare.
I do not believe, however, that I am making
too large a demand upon your friendship
in asking for your good wishes in this
pleasant turn to my future affairs.

Of course I want one more favor. If you
have any influence with Deena Ponsonby,
will you urge her to spend the winter with
us? Polly is writing to her by this same
mail, but I know the New England conscience
will suggest to Deena that anything
amusing is wrong, and so you might explain
that I am nervous about Polly’s health, and
that I look to her to help me get settled
without overstrain to my wife—in short, administer
a dose of duty, and she may see her
way to coming.

Ever, my dear French,
Sincerely yours,
Benjamin Minthrop.

Anger gives to the natural man a
pedal impulse—in plain language, he
wants to kick something. Rage flows
from the toes as freely as gunpowder
ran out of the great Panjandrum’s
boots when he played “Catch who catch
can” on the immortal occasion of the
gardener’s wife marrying the barber.
Now, Stephen French was a man of
habitual self-restraint, and yet upon
reading Ben Minthrop’s letter he got
up and—ignoring the poker and tongs—kicked
the fire with a savagery that
showed how little the best of us has softened
by civilization. And yet the letter
was distinctly friendly, even modest and
grateful—without one kick-inspiring
sentence. Stephen began pacing his library
floor, hurling his thoughts broadcast,
since there was no one to listen to
his words.

Why were people never content to let
well enough alone? he demanded.
There was old Minthrop, with enough
money to spoil his son, laying plans
for Ben to muddle away a few millions
in New York in the hope of making
more; or even if, by some wild chance,
the boy were successful and doubled it—still
one would think the place for an
only son was in the same town with his
parents. Of course it was their business,
but when it came to dragging
Mrs. Ponsonby into their schemes it
was a different matter. Simeon would
disapprove, he knew, and as her adviser
in Simeon’s absence, he felt it his duty
to tell her to stay at home with her
parents till her husband returned.

And then common sense asserted itself,
and he asked himself what Deena
owed to her parents; and why Harmouth
was a better place for her than
New York; and what possible difference
it could make to Simeon? The
answer came in plain, bold, horrid
words, and he shrank from them. The
curse of Nathan was upon him; like
David, he had condemned his friend to
absence and danger, and had then
promptly fallen in love with his wife.
But not willingly, he pleaded, in extenuation;
it had crept upon him unawares.
It was his own secret, he had
never betrayed himself, and so help his
God, he would trample it down till he
gained the mastery. Not for one moment
would he tolerate disloyalty to his
friend, even in his thoughts. Ben’s
suggestion was a happy solution of the
situation as far as he was concerned;
he would urge Deena to go before his
 folly could be suspected. To have any
sentiments for a woman like Mrs. Ponsonby
except a chivalrous reverence was
an offense against his manhood.

French was a man who had been
brought up to respect ceremonial in
daily living, and he dressed as scrupulously
for his lonely dinner as if a wife
presided and expected the courtesy to
her toilet. Somebody has wisely said
that unconsciously we lay aside our
smaller worries with our morning
clothes, and come down to dinner refreshed
in mind as well as body by the
interval of dressing. If Stephen did
not exactly hang up his anxiety with
his coat, he at least took a more reasonable
view of his attachment to his
neighbor’s wife. He began to think he
had exaggerated an extreme admiration
into love—that he was an honorable
man and a gentleman, and could keep
his secret as many another had done
before him; and that if Deena went
away for the winter it removed the
only danger, which was in daily meeting
under terms of established intimacy.

There was to be a lecture at the
Athenæum that evening on the engineering
difficulties incident to building
the Panama Canal, and Stephen, who
was interested in the subject, made up
his mind to start early and stop for a
moment at the Sheltons’ to carry out
Ben’s request. He took glory to himself
for choosing an hour when Mrs.
Ponsonby was likely to be surrounded
by a bevy of brothers and sisters; he
would never again try to see her alone.

His very footfall sounded heroic
when he ran up the steps and rang the
bell. As he stood within the shelter of
the storm door waiting to be let in, the
voices of the young Sheltons reached
him, all talking at once in voluble excitement,
and then a hand was laid on
the inside knob and advice offered in
a shrill treble.

“You had better run, Deena, if you
don’t want to be caught,” and then
more giggling, and a quick rush across
the hall.

Dicky threw open the hall door, and
French, glancing up the stairs, caught
sight of a velvet train disappearing
round the turn of the first landing. He
took the chances of making a blunder
and called:

“Come down, Mrs. Ponsonby. It is
I—Stephen French—and I have something
to say to you.”

This was first received in silence, and
then in piercing whispers, the little sisters
tried to inspire courage:

“Go down, Deena; you don’t look
a bit funny—really.”

“‘Funny’—ye gods!” thought
French, as Deena turned and came slowly
down the stairs. He only wished she
did look funny, or anything, except the
intoxicating, maddening contrast to her
usual sober self that was descending
to him.

She was dressed in black velvet of a
fashion evidently copied from a picture,
for the waist was prolonged over
the hips in Van Dykes, and from the
shoulders and sleeves Venetian point
turned back, displaying the lovely neck
and arms that Polly had so envied. Her
hair was loosely knotted at the back,
and on her forehead were straying curls
which were seldom tolerated in the severity
of her usual neatness. She wore
a collar of pearls, and her bodice was
ornamented with two sunbursts and a
star.

French, who had never seen her in
evening dress, was amazed. He seemed
to forget that he had asked speech with
her, and stood gazing as if she were an
animated portrait whose exceeding
merit left him dumb. He was recalled
alike to his senses and his manners by
Dicky, who turned a handspring over
his sister’s long train and then addressed
Stephen, when he found himself
right-end up.

“I say, Mr. French, mustn’t she have
been sort of loony to wear a dress like
that, and she sixty-five?”

“Who?” asked French, completely
mystified.

“Why, mother’s cousin, Mrs. Beck.
Didn’t you know she had died and left
us things?” said Dicky, proudly. “A
trunk full of clothes and diamond ornaments
came to-day, and mother wrote
 to Deena to unpack it, and we persuaded
her to dress up in this. Don’t
she look queer? That Mrs. Beck must
have been a dressy old girl.”

Deena ignored the explanation. She
appeared to treat her costume as a usual
and prosaic affair, and said to Stephen,
almost coldly:

“You have something to tell me?”

He wondered whether his eyes had
offended her, whether the stupidity of
his admiration had hurt her self-respect.
She didn’t look at him squarely
and openly, as usual, but kept her head
half turned so that the perfect line of
her throat and chin was emphasized,
and the tiny curls at the back of her
neck set off the creamy whiteness of
her skin. To tell the truth, Deena had
never before worn a low-necked dress.
Prior to her early marriage a simple
white muslin, a little curtailed in the
sleeves and transparent over the neck,
had been sufficient for any college
dance she went to, and after Simeon
had assumed command, even the white
muslin was superfluous, for she never
saw company either at home or abroad.
Her present costume was sufficiently
discreet in sleeves—they came almost to
the elbow, but the bodice allowed so
liberal a view of neck and shoulders as
to cover the wearer with confusion. She
felt exactly as you feel in a dream when
you flit down the aisle of a crowded
car in your night clothes, or inadvertently
remove most of your garments
in a pew in church, and with Deena
self-consciousness always took the form
of dignity.

Stephen pulled himself together.

“I have had a letter from Ben,” he
said, “who seems to think an appeal he
has made for your company in New
York this winter will be more apt to
win a favorable answer if backed up
by your Temporary Adviser. That describes
the position Simeon indicated
for me; doesn’t it, Mrs. Ponsonby?”

She sank back in her chair and, forgetting
herself for a moment, allowed
her eyes to meet his with a merry smile.

“This seems to be like a conspiracy to
make a hungry man eat!” she answered.
“No urging is necessary to
persuade me to go to New York—why
should you and Ben suppose I do not
like to do pleasant things? I shall delight
in being with Polly—I shall like
the excitement and the fun—I am perfectly
mad to go!”

If it had not been for the exaggeration
of the last sentence French would
have been sure of the genuineness of
her wishes, but the force of the expression
was so foreign to her usual moderation
that he asked himself whether
Deena might not also find a separation
desirable. The thought sent the blood
bounding through his veins. If she
cared for him ever so little, it would be
easier to let her go—easier if he knew
she suffered too! Then he called himself
a coxcomb and a self-deceiver, and
made a grasp at the good resolutions
that had almost escaped him.

“I always knew you possessed that
adorable quality, common sense,” he
remarked. “Ben and I might have
guessed you would do the wise thing.
When men rush hot-footed into the
affairs of women, they are apt to play
the fool.”

“Is there any reason why I shouldn’t
go?” she demanded, anxiously.

“On the contrary, every reason why
you should; but I feared some mistaken
idea about expense or Simeon’s approbation
might interfere with your taking
a holiday, which you will enjoy as
much as he enjoys digging up roots in
Patagonia.”

Deena considered the two points of
his answer—expense and Simeon’s approbation—and
replied thoughtfully:

“My husband would recognize so
simple a duty, and, as far as expense
goes, I am a perfectly independent woman.
Didn’t you know our story—the
one you made me rewrite—sold at once,
and, besides that, I have placed a number
of fugitive poems? So I snap my
fingers at expenses till the bank breaks,”
and she tapped her forehead to indicate
from whence the supply flowed.

“Then make the most of the sensation
while it lasts,” he said, with good-natured
cynicism, “for expenses have a
way of sizing you up—cleaning out
your pockets—and going you one better!
 If you are still snapping your
fingers when you come back from New
York, then, indeed, you may boast.”

A troubled look came into her face.

“Simeon would like me to go to
Polly when she is out of health and
needs me,” she said, in a tone she
meant to be assertive, but which was
only appealing, “and if we are careful
about spending, it is because we are
proud and do not wish to incur obligations.”

The we was a masterpiece of loyalty,
and French was suitably impressed by
it.

“Dear Mrs. Ponsonby,” he said, “you
speak as if I were likely to misjudge
Simeon, whereas my object in coming
here was to prevent your misjudging
him by allowing your sensitive conscience
to forbid pleasures he would be
the first to suggest.”

The speech was genuine; in Stephen’s
estimation his friend had noble qualities,
and in bearing testimony to them
he was beginning his chapter of self-discipline.
In this interview, at least,
he had preserved a conscience void of
offense, and he hastened to say goodnight
before any temptation should assail
his discretion. Perhaps, also—for
he was but mortal—the reflection in the
parlor mirror of what was passing in
the hall may have accelerated his departure.

For the benefit of an admiring gallery
at the head of the stairs, Master
Shelton was performing jugglers’ tricks
with their visitor’s best silk hat. Twice
it had turned a somersault in the air,
and twice safely alighted well down
over Dicky’s ears, but a third time it
might miss even such a conspicuous
mark and be smashed out of symmetry
on the hard floor. French beat a hasty
retreat, but he was no match for Dicky
in change of tactics; as he came into
the hall that young gentleman stood
stiffly and solemnly waiting to hand
him his hat and open the front door
with an air he had copied precisely
from Stephen’s own servant the day of
the memorable feast. His presumption
carried him a little too far, however, for
as he closed the door on Stephen he
favored his sister with a comment that
promptly brought its punishment.

“If I were an old bag of bones
like brother Simeon,” he said, grinning,
“I shouldn’t care to have good-lookin’
fellows like Mr. French running
after you twice in the same day,
Deena!”

Deena had always been the tenderest
of elder sisters, but at this apparently
innocent remark, she first got red as
fire, and then, paling with anger, she
rushed at her brother and pulled his
ruddy locks till he cried for mercy,
while she burst into tears.

“Stop it!” roared Dicky, burrowing
his head in a sofa cushion. “I tell you,
you’re hurting me! And I’d like to
know what the mischief you’re crying
for, anyhow?”

Deena left the room, her face buried
in her handkerchief, but she managed
to answer brokenly:

“I will—not—allow—you—to call—my
husband—‘a bag of bones’!”

CHAPTER VI.

The house the young Minthrops had
taken was of a contracted luxury that
oppressed Deena, accustomed as she
was to space and sunshine at Harmouth.
She told Ben that fortunes in
New York could be gauged by the
amount of light the individual could
afford—billionaires had houses standing
free, with light on four sides; millionaires
had corner houses with light
on three sides; while ordinary mortals
lived in tunnels more or less magnificent
where electric light had often to
do duty for the sun. Ben declared that
his income only admitted light fore and
aft, but that with skillful decoration
they could at least travesty the sunshine,
and so they tried to reproduce its
effects by wall hangings of faint yellow
and pale green, by chintz-covered
bedrooms that seemed to blossom with
roses, and living rooms sweet with fresh
flowers. There was no solemn mahogany—no
light-absorbing color on door
or window; all was delicately bright
and gay as the tinting of the spring.

 Deena worked hard to get the house
ready for Polly, who was still in Boston
with her mother-in-law, and seemed
quite content to leave the arranging of
her new quarters to her sister and husband,
who preceded her by several
weeks; indeed, she was becoming so
accustomed to being waited upon that
she considered herself in a fair way
of being spoiled. An heir was expected,
and an heir seemed a very important
thing to the elder Minthrops. They
treated Polly as a queen bee, and the
rest of the world as slaves to wait upon
her. She was behaving in a way to
satisfy their requirements in a daughter-in-law,
and life was to be smoothed
accordingly.

Every day brought a fresh suggestion
covered by a check. Ben was invited
to select a high-stepping gray horse—a
pair of cobs—a tiny brougham—a
victoria—a piano—a pianola. Deena
shopped till she almost sank exhausted,
and yet the requests kept coming. If
dear Mrs. Ponsonby didn’t mind the
trouble, perhaps Polly might be warmer
with sable rugs—perhaps an extra sofa
in her room might induce her to lie
down oftener—perhaps a few of those
charming lace and linen tablecloths
might make her feel like giving little
dinners at home instead of fatiguing
herself by going out to find her amusements.

Deena would have been more than
mortal if the image of old Mrs. Ponsonby
had not risen before her eyes in
forbidding contrast to so much indulgence.
She realized that the genus
mother-in-law has widely differing species,
and yet in her heart she doubted
whether Mrs. Minthrop, with money to
anticipate every wish of her only son,
loved him a whit more than frugal, self-denying
Mother Ponsonby had loved
her Simeon. Lavishness or thrift, alike
they proved a mother’s affection.

Deena executed all the commissions
without a shadow of covetousness and
rejoiced in her sister’s good fortune;
it was reserved for Polly and Ben, when
they took up their life in New York, to
show her the depths of her own loneliness
by the fullness of their comradeship,
and her yearning needs by their
mutual devotion.

Polly arrived one bleak December
day, the week before Christmas, escorted
by Mrs. Minthrop and two
maids, and was met at the Grand Central
by her husband in a state of boyish
excitement. His delight in having his
wife with him once more was so genuine
that Deena forgave him an amount
of fussiness she never before suspected
in his easy-going nature. He altered his
orders half a dozen times as to which
carriage should bring her from the
train to the house, and finally ordered
both; he repeated half a dozen times
the hour at which the Boston express
was due, in order that Deena might
make no mistake about having tea
served to the minute, and when he had
shut the front door, on his way to the
Grand Central, he came tearing back
to ask the menu for dinner, as Polly
was apt to be fanciful about her food.
Deena remembered the time—not two
years ago—when it was quantity rather
than quality that balked Polly’s appetite,
and nearly laughed in his face, but
she loved her big brother-in-law for
his forethought.

The curtains were drawn and the
lights turned up before the bustle of
arrival drew Deena to the stairs. First
old Mrs. Minthrop came, stopping to
commend the house at every step, and
then Polly, with her arm linked in her
husband’s, chattering volubly at the
delight everything gave her; and Deena,
wedged between the elder lady and the
wall in cordial greeting, could not help
hearing Ben welcome his wife to her
own home with a sentiment she never
suspected in him before. Polly flew to
her sister and kissed and thanked her
for all she had done, and lavished her
praises broadcast, and then she insisted
upon pouring out the tea at her own
fireside, and Ben perched on the arm
of her chair; and once, when Deena
turned suddenly from handing the toast
to Mrs. Minthrop, she saw him kiss
Polly’s hair.

Her thoughts sped back to her parting
with Simeon, with its prosaic formality—-the
feel of his puckered lips
 brushing her forehead. What a lack of
imagination marked all his dealings
with her! She felt rebellious and sad;
not that she wanted any of the luxury
that surrounded Polly, but she was hungry
for love. She saw suddenly what
marriage ought to be, and the realization
frightened her. How was it she
had committed this crime against her
own nature? Was it her sin or her
parents’ that she had been so blind?
Not Simeon’s—she exonerated him, she
knew he had given her as much of himself
as he had to spare, and that his
conduct was uniform; what it had been
at the beginning was now and for all
time, and if she had suddenly become a
connoisseur in husbands she was not
the first woman to whom knowledge
brought misery. It was not Simeon’s
fault that he remained stationary while
her views expanded. Fortunately for
Deena’s peace of mind, it was Ben who
figured in these reflections as the exponent
of what a husband should be, and
she had no suspicion that it was Stephen
French who had waked her from her
domestic coma.

Poor sleeping beauty, her conscience
had long ago been pricked by her mother-in-law’s
spindle, and her whole moral
sense infected with the belief that to
keep house wisely was the end and aim
of wifely duty. She reverenced Simeon
for his learning and dignity, and felt
proud that so simple a person as herself
should have been chosen in marriage by
a professor of Harmouth. On that she
had existed for two years, and now she
was waking up to new needs that stirred
her like the prince’s kiss.

Life in the young Minthrops’ dovecote
soon settled down into a glorified
routine. The elder Mrs. Minthrop returned
to Boston, leaving Deena as her
lieutenant, and perplexing her with the
multiplicity of her charges; apparently
Mrs. Ponsonby was to be Providence
to her sister, with health and happiness
under her control. The situation was
paradoxical. Polly was to be denied
nothing, but not allowed to have her
own way too freely; she was to be kept
amused, but most amusements were
strictly prohibited—she was not to be
encouraged to think herself an invalid,
and at the same time her usual occupations
were taken from her. Deena
was wise enough to listen and make no
promises, and when she assumed command
she contented herself with trying
to stand between her sister and domestic
worries.

Christmas came and went without
the visit from Stephen, which Ben had
hoped for, and invitations were pouring
in for the plethora of social functions
that mark the season’s height.
Deena came in for her share, but she
felt too much of a stranger to venture
alone into the vortex. Polly entertained
in a modest way at home—a few people
at dinner, a friend or two at lunch—and
this Deena greatly enjoyed, and had
begun to make herself favorably known
to a small circle when a stop was put
to this mild dissipation. The great doctor,
who had been charged by Mrs.
Minthrop never to forget her daughter-in-law’s
inexperience, issued orders
that Polly was to stay in her room.
This enforced quiet found an outlet in
a desire to send Deena everywhere.
She drove her forth to dinners and
balls, and the high-stepping gray horse
was always at her service, and so the
beautiful Mrs. Ponsonby became the
fashion. New York does not ask too
many questions in these days about
the husbands of handsome married
women who appear as grass widows
in its midst; indeed, the suspicion of a
latent romance or scandal gives a flavor
to the interest, and Deena suffered not
a whit from the rumor that she was a
deserted wife, with money.

“Oh, yes, there is a husband,” the
great Mrs. Star admitted. “She married
him for his money, and he has a
hobby—fossils, I think it is—and he
has gone to collect them at Cape Horn.
She bears his absence surprisingly well,
doesn’t she? Old Mrs. Minthrop’s son
married the sister, and she begged me
to be civil to them. I forget who she
said they were, but Mayflower people,
you know.”

In this way Deena was passed on,
stamped with the hall-mark of the Mayflower.
Mrs. Shelton had contributed
 very generously to her daughter’s outfit
for the season in New York. The
black velvet picture dress was only one
of several found suitable for her use
in the trunk of finery belonging to the
Chicago cousin, and the jewels that had
come into the Shelton family from the
same source were worthy of Deena’s
beauty. Her clothes were good, and
she wore them like a princess.

One evening late in January, Deena
and Ben were dining with a gay young
matron, who, without any especial personal
charm herself, had the faculty of
drawing to her house the best element
society had to offer. The engagement
had been made for them by Polly, much
against her husband’s wishes, and his
anxiety at leaving her alone could hardly
be concealed during dinner. As soon
as the ladies left the table he excused
himself to his host, and, following the
little hostess into the drawing room, he
whispered a few words in her ear,
nodded to Deena and disappeared.

“Your brother-in-law has gone home
to his wife, Mrs. Ponsonby,” said the
hostess. “I have never seen such devotion.”
She laughed a trifle enviously;
her own infelicities were the talk of
the town.

Deena started forward in alarm.

“Was he sent for? Is my sister ill?”
she inquired, nervously, and then sank
back in her chair, smiling, when she
found it was only a phase of young
Minthropism.

While her own daylight hours were
given to her sister, she was always
pleased to be out of the way in the
evening—it left the lovers to themselves—though
she could not quite free herself
from a sense of responsibility to the
elder Mrs. Minthrop.

Mrs. Star, who was beside Deena,
gave a sniff—if so fine a lady could be
suspected of such a plebeian way of
marking her disapprobation.

“My dear,” she said, “why should
your charming sister be treated as a
prisoner over whom somebody must
perpetually keep watch? I have had
six children—they were all healthy and
had their full complement of legs and
arms—except Bob, who lost an arm in
the Spanish war, but that doesn’t count—and
I never was shut up in my room
before I had to be—nor put on a milk
diet—nor forbidden reasonable exercise—and
I think the modern doctors are
full of fads and greed. Their bills! I
don’t know who is rich enough to be
ill nowadays!” Here she shut her eyes
and trembled to think of the portion of
her own great fortune that might have
transferred itself to the doctor’s pockets
if her nursery had not antedated the
present school. “It may not seem very
expensive to young Mrs. Minthrop to
lie on her sofa and drink milk—but just
wait till she comes to pay for it!”

“I don’t believe anyone will care
about the bill, Mrs. Star,” said Deena,
“so long as Polly keeps well.”

“It is bad enough to have food and
exercise taken away from the young
mothers,” continued Mrs. Star, who
was evidently mounted on a hobby, “but
when helpless infants are deprived of
their natural sustenance and fed from
bottles filled in a laboratory and stuffed
with cotton, it is time for the Gerry Society
to interfere. Cruelty to children
is practiced far more by the rich than
by the poor, in my opinion, and if you
want to see cases of inanition and feeble
spines, I’ll show you where to look for
them, and it won’t be in the tenements!”

Deena wanted to laugh, but didn’t
dare to; the old lady proclaimed her
fierce sentiments with such earnest
gravity. She managed, however, to say
politely:

“You think that science has not improved
upon nature in rearing the race,
but you must remember that it finds the
higher classes existing under unnatural
conditions.”

“The conditions would do very well
if we could banish the doctors,” said
the old lady, testily. “I am out of patience
with their incubators and their
weighing machines and their charts and
their thermometers—yes, and their
baby nurses! What do you suppose I
heard a mother say to her own servant
the other day: ‘Please, nurse, may
I take the baby up? He is crying fearfully,’
and the nurse, who had reluctantly
put down the morning paper, said:
 ‘No, m’am, when he cries in that angry
way, he must learn that it is useless!’
His age was six weeks.”

Deena burst into a hearty laugh.

“My dear Mrs. Star,” she said, “I am
a convert.”

Mrs. Star wagged her head in approbation.

“Just tell your sister what I have
said, will you?” she pursued, afraid
that so much wisdom might be lost.
“And, my dear, since your brother-in-law
has gone home, suppose you come
along to the opera with me. I sent
some tickets to a few stray men, and I
must look in before the last act.”

At this point they were joined by the
gentlemen, and as soon as decency
would permit, Mrs. Star made her
adieux, followed by Deena. The Minthrop
brougham was dismissed, and the
ladies whirled away in Mrs. Star’s electric
carriage. She at once took up her
parable, but this time the topic was not
the care of infants.

“I think a great deal of the scenic
effect of an opera box,” she said. “I
always dress with respect to the hangings,
and I never take a discordant color
beside me if I can help it. You
happen to please me very much this
evening; I like the simplicity of the
white dress. Still, it wouldn’t be anything
if you didn’t have such a neck—it
gives an air to any low gown.”

“It was my wedding dress,” said
Deena, frankly, “and my sister’s maid
rearranged it for me. I am glad you
like it.”

“Your wedding dress,” said Mrs.
Star, reflectively. “I think I heard you
had married a naturalist—prehistoric
bones, is it not? Very interesting subject—so
inspiring. Milliken”—to the
footman, who opened the door on their
arrival at the opera house—“you may
keep the carriage here. I shall not be
more than half an hour.”

Half an hour for the enjoyment of
a pleasure that cost her, yearly, a moderate
fortune!

On their way through the foyer to the
box, Deena ventured to disclaim for her
husband a peculiar interest in fossils.

“My husband is a botanist,” she began,
and then desisted when she saw
her companion’s attention was barely
held by a desire to be civil.

“Ah, indeed!” Mrs. Star vaguely responded.
“Delightful topic. I went into
it myself quite extensively when I
was a girl.”

Deena was not often malicious, but
she couldn’t help wishing Simeon could
have stood by to hear this announcement
of a girlish mastery of his life’s
work. She tried to think in what dry
words he would have rebuked the levity,
but before she could arrange a
phrase quite in character, they were in
the front of the box, and in the obscurity
some one took her hand, and
Stephen French’s voice murmured:

“What a piece of luck that I should
see you to-night! I have only been in
town a few hours, and obeyed my aunt’s
summons to the opera as a means of
keeping myself from Ben’s house till the
morning. You can’t think how eager I
have been to see you again, Mrs. Ponsonby.”

There was a strange break in his
voice, as if he were trying to restrain
the rush of happiness.

All the six mighty artists who made
the opera the marvel it was were combining
their voices in the closing sextet
of the fourth act, and Deena, thrilled by
the loveliness of the music and, perhaps,
by the surprise of French’s presence,
felt she was trembling with excitement.

“Fancy meeting you here!” she kept
repeating, the stupid phrase concealing
the great joy that was puzzling her conscience.

“What is so wonderful in my being
in my aunt’s opera box?” Stephen demanded.
“Cannot a professor of zoology
like music, or do you object to a
bachelor owning an aunt?”

How pleasant it was to hear his kind
voice, with its good-natured raillery!
But that was sub-conscious pleasure—her
immediate attention was busy with
the first part of his speech about his
aunt’s opera box; she never supposed
he had any relations.

“Who is your aunt?” she asked,
abruptly.

 “Mrs. Star,” he answered. “Don’t
you see the family likeness?”

And oddly enough, in the half light,
there was a distinct resemblance in the
profile of the bewigged old lady to her
handsome young kinsman’s. Deena regretted
both the likeness and the relationship;
it made her uncomfortable
to know that Stephen was the nephew
of this worldly-minded old lady, with
her fictitious standards and her enormous
riches; it seemed to place a barrier
between them and to lift him out
of the simplicity of his college setting.

“Have I become a snob in this Relentless
City’?” she exclaimed. “I find
my whole idea of you changed by this
announcement. It depresses me! You
seem to me a different person here, with
these affiliations of fashion and grandeur,
than when I thought of you simply
as Simeon’s friend.”

“Don’t think of me simply as Simeon’s
friend,” he pleaded, half in fun,
half in sinful earnest.

“I never shall again,” she said, sadly.
“Your greatest charm is eclipsed by
this luxury—I want you to belong to
Harmouth only.”

Stephen’s lips were twitching with
suppressed amusement.

“There is a proverb, my dear lady,”
he said, “of the pot and the kettle, that
you may recall. I am not sure but what
I may find a word to say to you upon
the cruelty of disturbing associations.”

“To me!” she said, turning to him
with the gentle dignity that was her
crowning charm. “Surely there are no
surprises in me.”

Stephen shook his head in mock disapproval
as he allowed his eyes to sweep
from the topmost curl of her head to her
slipper points, and then he said:

“Go home, Mrs. Ponsonby, and take
off that white lace evening dress, and
perhaps the wreath of holly might come,
too—and that diamond star on your
bodice; and put on, instead—let me see—the
dark blue frock you wore the
evening I told Simeon about the Patagonian
expedition, and then you will be
in a position to reproach me for any
relapse from the simplicity of Harmouth.
If you disapprove of me as the
nephew of my aunt, how do you suppose
I feel about you? And oh! my
stars! what would Simeon say?”

“Simeon,” she said, faintly. “You
are right; Simeon might not understand——”
and before French had time
to protest that he had only been teasing
her, the curtain went down, strange
men came flocking into the box, Mrs.
Star was introducing a Russian grand
duke, and Stephen, surrendering his
chair, withdrew to the other side of his
aunt.

Deena could not but admire the old
lady’s admirable manner. She kept up
an easy chatter, sometimes in French,
sometimes in English, with the Russian
and with a Spanish artist; she never allowed
Deena to feel out of touch with
the conversation, and in the midst of it
all she managed to welcome her nephew.

“You are stopping at my house, of
course, Stephen? No—at the Savoy?
That is uncharitable to a lonely old
woman. Where did you know that pretty
creature, Mrs. Ponsonby?” she asked,
seeing that the two foreigners were absorbing
the attention of her beautiful
protégée. “You should learn to guard
the expression of your face, my dear
boy. I begin to understand why you
cling so obstinately to Harmouth. I see
the place has advantages outside the
work of the college.”

Here she wagged her head in self-congratulation
at her own astuteness,
and Stephen flushed angrily.

“Hush!” he said. “She will hear you.
You have little knowledge of Mrs. Ponsonby
if you think she would permit the
attentions of any man. She is not in
the least that kind of person. She is
one of the most dignified, self-respecting,
high-minded women I ever knew.”

Mrs. Star cut him short with a wave
of her fan.

“Spare me the rhapsodies,” she
laughed. “You merely mark the stage
of the disease you have arrived at. The
object of your love sits enthroned! If
the husband is wise he will throw his
fossils into the sea and come back to
look after this pretty possession. Flesh
and blood is worth more than dry
bones.”

 “Ponsonby is a botanist,” Stephen
corrected, grimly, while his inward
thought was that the dry bones were
Simeon’s own; and then, ashamed of
the disloyal—though unspoken—sneer,
he went back to Deena and began talking
volubly of his last letter from her
husband.

They had both had letters from Simeon,
now safely arrived in the Straits
of Magellan. He had written to Deena
when they first cast anchor off the Fuegian
shore. He described to her the
visits of the Indians in their great canoes,
containing their entire families
and possessions, and the never-dying
fire of hemlock on a clay hearth in the
middle of the boat; how they would
sell their only garment—a fur cloak—-for
tobacco and rum, and how friendly
they seemed to be, in spite of all the
stories of cannibalism told by early voyagers.

In the midst of this earnest conversation,
Mrs. Star rose to go, escorted by
the grand duke, and Stephen, following
with Deena, was able to let his enthusiasm
rise above a whisper when they
gained the corridor.

“Didn’t he tell you that they were
all going guanaco hunting?”

“Simeon!” in a tone of incredulity.

“Greatest fun in the world, I am
told,” pursued French; “something like
stag hunting, only more exciting—done
with the bolas. You whirl it round
your head and let it fly, and it wraps itself
round a beast’s legs and bowls him
over before he knows what hit him.”

“Does it kill him?” asked Deena,
shrinking from the miseries of the
hunted.

“Only knocks him over,” explained
Stephen. “You finish him with your
knife.”

“Sport is a cruel thing,” she said,
shuddering. “I am glad Simeon cannot
even ride.”

“Can’t ride!” repeated Stephen. “Indeed,
I can tell you he means to. He
says the Indians have offered him the
best mount they have. They considered
him a medicine man, on account of his
root-digging propensities, and treated
him as the high cockalorum of the
whole ship’s company.”

“Surely he is joking,” she said. “Simeon
is making game of you.”

“Simeon!” he echoed, mimicking
her incredulous tone.

“A joke would be no stranger to him
than a horse,” she said, smiling.

They had reached the entrance, and
Deena stood shaking with suppressed
laughter. “Fancy! Simeon!” she repeated.

“And why not Simeon, pray?” asked
Stephen, slightly nettled.

A vision of Simeon with his gold-rimmed
spectacles and stooped figure
mounted on horseback in the midst of
a party of Indians, whirling his bolas
over his head and shouting, presented
itself to Deena’s imagination. The
carriage was waiting, and, obeying Mrs.
Star’s motion to get in first, Simeon
Ponsonby’s wife fell back on the seat
and laughed till the tears ran down
her cheeks.

Outside, Stephen was entreating to
be allowed to visit her the next morning.

“I haven’t half finished my story,
Mrs. Ponsonby,” he protested.

And Deena managed to steady her
voice and invite him to lunch the next
day.

CHAPTER VII.

French’s visit to New York was not
the result of any weakening resolution
in regard to his neighbor’s wife; the
object was business. His property was
chiefly in real estate, and the distinguished
law firm who managed his affairs
had summoned him to confer with
a tenant who was desirous of becoming
a purchaser. Being in the same town
with Deena, he decided that he could
not well avoid visiting her, to say nothing
of Ben. It was his misfortune that
every meeting made his self-discipline
harder, for, if they lived, he had got
to see her under still more trying circumstances—reunited
with a husband
who misunderstood her.

These thoughts passed through his
 mind the morning after their encounter
at the opera, as he finished his breakfast
at the Savoy. He had an appointment
at his lawyers’ at ten o’clock, and at
the Minthrops’ for luncheon at half-past
one. The first, if properly conducted,
might result in a largely increased
income; the second in self-repression
and a heartache; and yet his
one idea was to dispatch the business,
so that no precious moments of Deena’s
society should be lost to him.

He was hurrying out of the hotel to
go downtown, when a telegram was
put into his hand. For the detached
bachelor such messages have little interest.
Stephen opened this one as
casually as most people open an advertisement—may
the foul fiend fly away
with those curses of our daily mail!—and
read:

Buenos Ayres, Jan. 30.

Pedro Lopez to the Hon’ble Professor
French, Harmouth University.

Tintoretto on its way home. Ponsonby
missing.

Stephen read the dispatch several
times before he quite understood its
significance. Pedro Lopez was his
South American friend, who had set
on foot the Fuegian expedition and applied
to Harmouth for a botanist; the
Tintoretto was the vessel furnished by
the Argentine Government.

The cable message had gone to Harmouth
and been repeated to New York,
probably by Stephen’s butler.

The first effect of evil tidings is apt
to be superficial. We receive a mental
impression rather than a shock to the
heart. We are for the moment spectators
of our own misfortunes, as if the
blow had produced a paralysis to the
feelings, leaving the intellect clear.

Stephen went back to his own room
conscious of no emotion except intense
curiosity as to what had become of
Simeon, though, perhaps, far back in
his mind anxiety was settling down to
its work of torture.

He flung himself into a chair near
the window which overlooked the entrance
to the park and let his eyes gaze
blankly at the busy scene. It had
snowed during the night, and sleighs
were dashing in and out under the
leafless arches of the trees. Bells were
tinkling, gay plumes of horsehair floating
from the front of the Russian
sleighs and the turrets of the horses’
harness, men and women wrapped in
costly furs were being whirled along,
laughing and chatting, through the
crisp morning air.

Stephen didn’t know he was receiving
an impression—he thought his mind
was at a standstill, but whenever in the
future that terrible day came back to
his memory, he always saw a picture,
as it were, of the brilliant procession
dashing into the city’s playground,
while Saint Gaudens’ statue of Sherman
stood watching, grim and cold,
with the snow on his mantle and his
Victory in a winding sheet.

It was not very long before French
was able to pull himself together and
to face the situation. What did it
mean? Had Simeon lost himself in the
Patagonian wilds or was he drowned?
French felt that he couldn’t carry such
an uncertain report to Deena, the strain
upon her would be too great. It was
horrible to have to tell her at all, but
he must try to make the news definite—not
vague. Gradually he thought out
a course of action; he would telegraph
to Lopez to send him a detailed account,
cabling the answer at his expense,
and until this reply came he
thought himself justified in concealing
the news. Lopez was in constant communication
with the expedition, and
the letter which had announced Ponsonby’s
disappearance must have gone
into particulars.

After dispatching this cable he kept
his appointment in Wall Street, transacting
the business with the dull precision
of a person in a hypnotic sleep,
and then presented himself at the Minthrops’
a few minutes before the lunch
hour. He had not been prepared to
find Deena installed as hostess, and her
manner of greeting him and presiding
at the lunch table was so assured, so
different from the timid hospitality she
was wont to offer under Simeon’s roof,
that her whole personality seemed
 changed. She more than ever satisfied
his admiring affection, but she was so
unlike the Mrs. Ponsonby of Harmouth
that he felt like confiding to this gracious,
sympathetic woman the tragedy
that threatened her other self.

Early in the day, before that woeful
message came, he had counted the minutes
he could spend with her, and now
he was timing his visit so as to curtail
it to the least possible duration, and
taxing his ingenuity as to how best to
avoid seeing her alone. It was Saturday,
and he trusted to the half holiday
for the protection of Ben’s presence;
his depression of spirits would be less
noticeable in general conversation.

He arrived on the stroke of the hour
set for lunch, and to his chagrin was
shown to the library, where Deena was
sitting alone. His trouble deepened, for,
after motioning him to a chair beside
her, she resumed her embroidery and
said, with a quizzical expression:

“You were in the midst of Simeon’s
last letter when we parted last evening,
Mr. French; please go on with it.
You may remember you left my unfortunate
husband pledged to become a
horseman.”

Stephen could not respond to her
merry mood; his anxiety was to steer
the conversation away from Simeon,
and he had run against a snag at the
start.

“At all events, I left him safely surrounded
by friends,” he said—more in
answer to his own feelings than her
banter.

In thinking over any disaster, the
mind loves to dwell on the peaceful moments
that preceded it. Stephen found
comfort in recalling the gay tone of
Simeon’s letter, his delight in his coming
adventure, and the good feeling that
evidently existed between him and the
ship’s company.

Deena took exception to his remark.

“You have strange ideas of safety!”
she laughed. “Not content with mounting
a confirmed pedestrian on a wild
horse of the Pampas, you must needs
turn him loose among a horde of savages.
The hunt had not taken place
when he wrote, had it? It is a pity, for
I should like Simeon safely back on
shipboard without the loss of spectacles
or dignity.”

She would like Simeon back!
What wouldn’t French give to know
her husband was still alive!

The butler announced lunch, and Ben
came dashing downstairs, delighted to
see Stephen and full of excuses at having
lingered in his wife’s room. He
said Polly was feeling rather poorly,
and Stephen was glad to see a look of
anxiety cross Deena’s face; he rightly
judged her thoughts had been diverted
from Patagonia to Polly’s sofa, and he
breathed once more.

What a pleasant luncheon it was, in
spite of the lurking dread. Deena was
wearing the old blue dress he had recommended
to her the night before. It
could not be from coquetry—she was
above coquetry—but perhaps she had
put it on to recall associations; to remind
him of the close bonds of friendship
that existed between them in those
pleasant autumn days that followed
Simeon’s departure. Stephen was not
very learned in the make of women’s
frocks, but he understood color and
could appreciate how that steely-blue
made her complexion glow warm as
ivory and her hair like copper.

They were pretending to quarrel
over a dish of salted almonds; Deena
declared that French was getting the
lion’s share, and finally covered the little
silver basket that held them with her
hand. On the third finger flashed old
Mrs. Ponsonby’s diamond in its antiquated
silver setting, and below it was
her wedding ring, the narrow band that
symbolized her bondage to Simeon.
For the first time since French had received
the cable, its possible significance
to him took possession of his
mind, and he flushed a dull red and
fell into a reverie.

In all probability there was no longer
any barrier between him and the
woman he loved; nothing to prevent his
striving to win her, but the period of
her mourning—the respect she owed to
the memory of a husband who was the
palest shadow of a lover, and not even
the ghost of a companion. He wondered
 whether she had ever guessed
his feelings—feelings which he had
subdued and held under with all the
strength of his nature, partly through
fear of forfeiting her friendship and
partly because her charm was in the
simplicity of her goodness. If love had
once been named between them, Deena
would have been other than herself.

Her voice roused him. She was excusing
herself in order to go to her sister,
and leave him and Ben to smoke.
He held the door open for her to pass
with a profound sense of relief—no suspicion
of his awful secret had been betrayed.
But oh! the comfort of talking
it over with Ben, of sharing the
burden with another! They discussed
the meager announcement till they had
exhausted every probability and found
nothing to hope and everything to fear.

“I hope to Heaven he is dead!” cried
Ben. “Imagine a man physically weak,
like Ponsonby, enduring slow starvation
in the damp and chill of the Patagonian
seacoast. It will be a positive
relief if we hear he fell overboard.”

“Anything is better than uncertainty,”
said Stephen, and the speech must
have been from the new point of view,
the hope of Deena’s freedom, for the
next moment he was conscious of a
wave of shame.

“I ought to get an answer from Lopez
before night,” he added, rising to
go; “and as soon as I hear I will return
and let you know.”

Ben followed him to the front door,
whispering like a conspirator and glancing
furtively up the stairs. There was
a childish streak in the boy’s nature
that gloried in a confidence; the joy
of the secret nearly made up for the
sorrow of the fact. But secrets and
sorrows were soon put out of his head,
for a crucial moment had come to the
young Minthrops—one we anticipate
and are never quite prepared for.

As he ran upstairs, after seeing Stephen
off, he met Deena, evidently looking
for him.

“Oh, Ben,” she said, “Polly is ill,
and I have telephoned for——”

But she got no further, for her big
brother-in-law turned white as a frightened
girl, and when he tried to speak no
sound came from his lips.

“Goose!” said Deena, laying an affectionate
hand on his shoulder. “Shall
I get a glass of brandy? Do you suppose
no one has ever met with this experience
before?”

Ben recovered himself with a fit of
irritation, which seems the corollary to
being frightened.

“Brandy!” he repeated. “Why in
thunder should I want brandy? Really,
Deena, for a sensible woman, you
are given at times to saying the most
foolish things I ever heard.”

In the meanwhile, as the afternoon
was still early, French was anxious to
find some occupation that might distract
his thoughts. He decided to visit
his aunt, whose conversation was usually
startling enough to hold the attention
of her hearers in any stress of agitation,
and then when he was halfway
up her steps repented the intention, on
the ground that he needed soothing
rather than stimulating; but his retreat
was cut off by the good lady coming
out of her door and discovering him,
and, as she was about to walk round
the block for exercise before taking her
afternoon drive, she promptly claimed
his company for both occasions. The
wind blew her dress up to her ankles
as she reached the sidewalk, displaying
a pair of pointed-toed, high-heeled boots
that perforce made walking—even
round the block—a torturing task. But
Mrs. Star was a brave woman, and
walking a matter of conscience, so she
tottered along beside her nephew, occasionally
laying a hand on his arm when
a bit of icy pavement made her footing
more than usually uncertain.

“How I hate the late winter in New
York!” she exclaimed, when a few minutes
later they were seated in her sleigh
on their way to the park. “Here we
are at the threshold of February, when
any self-respecting climate would be
making for spring, and we must count
on two months more of solid discomfort.
Ah, well, this year I do not mean
to face it. I have had the yacht put in
commission, and she sails next week for
 the Mediterranean, where I shall overtake
her by one of the German boats,
and do a little cruising along the African
coast. Come with me, Stephen,”
she said, coaxingly. “Let this silly
school-teaching go. You are a rich
man—why under the sun do you want
to work? If you are holding on to
Harmouth on account of that pretty
Mrs. Ponsonby, it can’t do you much
good when she is in New York. Besides,”
she added, quite as an afterthought,
“it is bad morality, and you
ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

He was about to turn and rend her
for what he considered an unpardonable
meddling with his affairs, when
he saw her eyes fixed on him with tenderest
affection and his anger melted.

“Dear Stevie,” she said, “be good-natured
and bear an old woman company—you
know you are as dear as
my own sons.”

She used to call him Stevie when he
was a lonely little boy, and she made
her house his home; when all he knew
of family life was supplied by that good-natured,
worldly household—the name
touched a chord of memory that softened
his irritation.

“I wish I could, Aunt Adelaide,”
he answered, “but I have managed to
tie myself to my work in a way you
cannot understand. You will have to
take Bob as a companion.”

Bob was her only unmarried child,
wedded only to his clubs and amateur
soldiering, and even less available than
Stephen for a cruise.

“Bob!” she said, contemptuously.
“He never voluntarily went to a foreign
country except Cuba, and I don’t
believe he knows on which side of the
Mediterranean Africa lies! I shall find
some one who will be glad to go with
me—perhaps your charming friend,
Mrs. Ponsonby, might go. She looks
as if she would be a pleasant traveling
companion.”

French’s heart tightened as he
thought of the horror that stood between
Deena and pleasure, and was
even debating in his mind whether it
would not be better to tell his aunt the
truth, when conversation was rendered
impossible for the moment by the puffing
and tooting of a great automobile
advancing toward them down the west
drive of the park—its wheels slipping
in a crazy manner, that made the coachman
of Mrs. Star’s sleigh give it a wide
berth. Just as it got abreast of them,
it became perfectly unmanageable—slewed
to the left, made a semicircle
which turned it round, and, catching
the back of the sleigh on its low front,
turned the light vehicle over as easily
as if it had been made of pasteboard.

Mrs. Star allowed herself a shrill
shriek as the sleigh went over and then
lay quite still in a heap by the side of
the road, with Stephen across her feet.
The automobile seemed to have recovered
its serenity, for it now stood still
like any well-behaved machine, quiet
save for its noisy breathing, while the
sleigh was being bumped, on its side,
far up the road, at the heels of the
outraged horses.

French scrambled to his feet and endeavored
to help his aunt, who had
raised herself to a sitting posture and
was looking white and disheveled, while
she cast furious glances at the motor
and its owner. She took her nephew’s
hands and attempted to rise, but fell
back, declaring she had broken her
knee, as it hurt her excruciatingly
when she tried to move it.

The owner of the auto now came
forward in great contrition to offer
help and apologies. He was a physician,
he explained, hastening to a case
of great urgency, and he had taken his
automobile as the quickest means of
covering the distance, though he had
known it at times to behave badly on
slippery and snowy roads.

The admission was a mistake—it put
him in the wrong, and Mrs. Star, who
distrusted all modern doctors, felt a
consuming rage against this one in particular.

“You must have a strange estimate
of a physician’s duty if you feel justified
in risking many lives to save one!”
she said, haughtily. “Not that you are
much worse than the fire engines and
ambulances. We ought to add a petition
to the litany for safety against our
 safeguards, for they kill more than they
rescue.”

The gentleman bore her sarcasms
with becoming humility, and begged to
be allowed to take her home, promising
that the machine should execute no
more “Voyages en zigzag,” and she,
ashamed of her temper, forced herself
to decline, with some graciousness,
though she made it very plain that no
person on earth could tempt her to get
into the automobile.

“At least let him tell you whether
your knee is seriously hurt,” Stephen
whispered, loath to see the medical help
departing.

“I’ll do nothing of the sort,” retorted
Mrs. Star. “A nice spectacle
you would make of me by the roadside!
Besides, I am not going to allow
my knee to buy him a new automobile.
Thank Heaven, I know how to guard
my pocket against the medical profession—I’ll
not stir from this spot till he
takes himself off.”

“Don’t be so foolish!” urged French.
“If your knee is injured it is a very serious
thing.”

“Well, it isn’t seriously injured,” she
said, perversely. “I have changed my
mind, and I mean to have it tied up
with witch hazel.”

Fortunately her equipage was now
seen approaching in the charge of two
park policemen, who had stopped
the horses about a mile further on,
righted the sleigh and now brought it
back not much the worse for the misadventure.
The coachman and groom
were collected from the bushes, and, as
they were quite uninjured, Stephen
lifted his aunt into the back seat and
they turned their faces homeward.

However much the rest of the party
may have been inconvenienced, French
had certainly attained the object of his
solicitude—namely, to have his thoughts
distracted from Simeon Ponsonby.

CHAPTER VIII.

The second cable from Lopez arrived
soon after dinner; it brought small comfort.
Its nineteen words told the story
but too conclusively.

Strayed from party while hunting. Weather
turned foggy. Search parties persevered for
two weeks. Hope abandoned. Expedition
homeward bound.

There was no further excuse for concealment;
indeed, it was French’s plain
duty to tell Deena what might be told
by the newspapers if he delayed.

It was just nine o’clock, and he
walked rapidly to the Minthrops’ and
rang the bell. Outside an electric cab
was waiting, its great lamps casting
pathways of light across street and sidewalk.
The motorman was inside; an
indication that long waiting had driven
him to shelter, though the circumstance
had no significance to Stephen.

The bell was answered by the butler,
who looked portentous and stood resolutely
in the doorway.

“Not at ’ome, sir,” he said, in response
to Stephen’s request to see Mrs.
Ponsonby.

“Then I must see Mr. Minthrop,”
French insisted.

The man hesitated and then relaxed
his wooden expression.

“I beg your pardon, Mr. French. I
did not recognize you, sir. The truth
is, we’re a bit h’upset h’inside. Mrs.
Minthrop is tuk ill, sir—very sudden—and
we’re expecting the good word
every minute. I shall tell Mr. Minthrop
you called.”

Stephen nodded and turned away—the
fates had ordained that he was to
carry his secret till the morning. It
had been a harassing burden in the
daylight hours, but during the night it
became maddening; it seemed beyond
his resolution to tell Deena that the
pleasure trip he had set on foot for her
husband’s advantage had ended in
death.

As early as he thought permissible,
the next morning, he presented himself
at Ben’s door—this time gaining, a
cheerful admission—and was shown to
the library on the second floor. There
he found the young father, radiantly
happy, and so self-centered that he had
entirely forgotten the misfortune overhanging
his sister-in-law.

“Come and see my son,” he said,
proudly, and in spite of an expression
 of reluctance on the part of French to
intrude into the upper regions of the
house, he pushed him ahead of him up
the next flight of stairs and knocked
softly at the door of a back bedroom.

Deena’s voice bade them enter, and
French was ushered into a large room
fitted out as a nursery, with the newest
appliances for baby comfort. There
was a bassinette so be-muslined and be-ribboned
and be-laced that it looked
like a ball dress standing by itself in
the middle of the floor; and a bathtub
that looked like a hammock; and
a weighing machine; and a chart for
recording the daily weight; and a large
table with a glass top; and a basket containing
all the articles for the Lilliputian
toilet; while near the fender some doll-like
clothes were airing.

Deena was sitting in a low rocking-chair
near the fire with her nephew in
her arms. She welcomed her visitors
with a smile, and turned down a corner
of the baby’s blanket to display his
puckered ugliness to Stephen. She was
looking happy, tender, proud, maternally
beautiful.

“Hasn’t he a beautifully shaped
head?” she demanded, passing her hand
tenderly over the furry down that
served him for hair. “And look at his
ears and his hands—was there ever anything
so exquisite?”

It was French’s first introduction to
a young human, and he found it slightly
repulsive, but Deena, in her Madonna-like
sweetness, made his heart swell.

“He is part of an exquisite picture,”
he answered.

Ben, who had been for a moment
with Polly, now came into the room
with his usual noisy bustle, and Deena
got up and, surrendering the baby to
the nurse, led the way downstairs.

At the library door Stephen paused to
whisper to Ben:

“Stay with me while I tell her,” in
tones of abject fright; but Ben shook
his head.

“Look here, old man,” he said, in
mild remonstrance, “if you had had a
baby last night, you wouldn’t be casting
about for fresh trouble to-day—now,
would you?”

Stephen gave him an indignant
glance, and, following Deena, he shut
the library door. He did it in so pronounced
a way that she looked up surprised,
and was even more at a loss to
account for the gravity of his expression;
she wondered whether he had
thought her rude yesterday when she
had disappeared from the table at lunch
and had never returned, but it was not
like French to be touchy.

“I left you very unceremoniously yesterday,”
she began, “but the nurse appeared
for a moment at the door, and
I did not want to alarm Ben. You were
not offended?”

“Believe me, no,” French answered,
with a sort of shudder; “for the first
time in my life I was glad to see you go—your
presence was torture to me—I
was concealing something from you,
Mrs. Ponsonby, and it has got to get
itself told.”

While he spoke her expression
changed rapidly from amazement to
alarm, and she got up and came close
to him—waiting—but without a word.

“Simeon is lost,” he said, hoarsely,
hurling the bald fact at her before his
courage failed. “I tried to tell you
yesterday,” he went on, drawing the
cables from his pocket, “but I couldn’t;
it all seemed so vague at first, and I
ventured to wait until I got more
news.”

She was standing before him with
her hands clasped and her face deadly
pale, but with a calm that frightened
him.

“Do you mean lost at sea?” she
asked, in a steady voice—toneless but
perfectly clear.

He shook his head.

“No—on land. He was hunting—it
must have been the very hunt we were
talking about—and wandered from his
party. A fog came on, and they were
unable to find him. Lopez telegraphs
that they sent out search parties for a
fortnight, but could find no trace.”

He longed for a word from her, but
none came.

“At last they abandoned hope,” he
concluded. “The expedition is now on
its way home.”

 She had turned her back upon him,
and he waited in misery to hear her sob,
to see her shoulders shake with her
weeping; but, instead, the whole figure
seemed to stiffen, and, wheeling round,
she faced him with blazing eyes.

“The cowards!” she cried. “To abandon
a man to starvation! What are
they made of to do such a barbarous
thing!”

“We must not judge them unheard,”
Stephen ventured. “Their search may
have been exhaustive—they may have
risked their own lives gladly—and you
know,” he added, gently, “that beyond
a certain time it would have been useless
from the standpoint of saving life.”

“It was inhuman to sail away and
leave him,” she went on, beating her
hands together in a sort of rage. “How
can you defend them! You, who sent
him off on this horrible journey—how
can you sleep in your bed when you
know Simeon in perishing by inches! I
should think you would be on your way
now—this moment—to search for him!
Oh, do something—don’t just accept it
in this awful way. Haven’t you any
pity?” Unconsciously she laid her hand
on his shoulder, as if she would push
him from the room.

Stephen bore her reproaches with a
meekness that exasperated her.

“Are there no cables to Magellan?”
she asked. “There must be somebody
there who for money would do your
bidding. Don’t waste time,” she answered,
stamping her foot.

Stephen kept his temper. Perhaps he
was shrewd enough to see that it was
pity rather than love that gave the
fierceness to her mood. It was the
frenzy of a tender-hearted woman at
hearing of an act of cruelty rather than
the agony of one who suffers a personal
bereavement.

“Deena,” he said, not even knowing
he had used her name, “do you really
want me to go on this hopeless errand?
Think of its utter uselessness—the time
that has elapsed, the impossibility of
penetrating into such a country in the
advancing winter. It is the first of
February, and I could not get there
before March; it would be already their
autumn. By this time he has either
reached help or he is beyond it.”

At the beginning of his speech
Deena’s pale face flushed, but as he
went on setting forth the obstacles to
his going she seemed to harden in her
scorn.

“Oh, yes,” she sneered. “Let him
die! It is cold in Patagonia for a gently
nurtured person like Mr. French.
Simeon is poor in friends—he only had
one besides his wife, and that one is a
fair-weather friend. But I’ll go—I am
not afraid of privation. I’ll entreat the
Argentine Government for help—I’ll
make friends with the Indians—I’ll——”

“Hush,” he said, “you have said
enough—I will go.”

Having gained her point, she burst
into tears.

“I am cruel,” she said, “selfishly cruel
to you, who have been so good to me—but
whom can I turn to except to you?
How can we abandon Simeon without
raising a finger to save him? Say you
forgive me.”

He held out his hand in mute acquiescence.
Her sneers had stung him
to the quick, but her appeal to his manhood
for help in her distress moved
him deeply.

“Perhaps,” she went on, half to herself,
“perhaps if I had been a better
wife—if I had loved him more, I could
bear it better—but it is so pitiful. He
has always been alone in life, and now
he is dying alone.”

Stephen, who was pacing the floor,
tried not to listen. He knew she was
not thinking of him when she was
confessing her shortcomings to her own
conscience, but the admission that she
felt herself lacking in love to Simeon
filled him with a deep joy. He did not
dare to linger.

“I am going,” he said, gently. “Good-by,
Deena. Will you pray God to send
you back the man who loves you?”

She stood staring at him dumb with
misery, but as the door shut between
them a cry of anguish burst from her
very soul.

“Come back!” she cried. “Oh, Stephen,
come back! I can’t bear it! I can’t
 let you go! Don’t you know I love you?—and
I have sent you off to die!”

She knew that he had gone—that her
appeal was to the empty air, and she
flung herself on the sofa in a frenzy
of sobs. But the cry reached Stephen
in the hall, where he stood battling with
himself against his yearning for one
more look, one more word to carry
with him, and at the sound his resolution
melted like wax in the flame of
his passion. With a bound he was
back in the room, on his knees beside
her, soothing her with tenderest endearments—pouring
out the fullness of his
love.

“Must I go, Deena?” he pleaded.
“Must I leave you when I know you
love me? And for what?—a search for
the dead!”

At his words her conscience woke
with a stab of shame.

“Yes, go!” she said. “Go quickly. A
moment ago I sent you in the name of
compassion; now I send you in expiation
for this one intolerable glimpse
of Heaven.”

Stephen, eager to do her bidding,
went straight to Mrs. Star’s house to
take leave of the only person to whom
he owed the obligations of family affection,
and found that redoubtable lady
on a sofa in her dressing room. In answer
to his expressions of regret at
this intimation of invalidism, she gave
an angry groan.

“Oh, yes!” she said. “Our medical
friend has succeeded in providing another
doctor with as pretty a case of
water-on-the-knee—to say nothing of
other complications—as he could desire.
My only comfort is, he didn’t get the
charge himself.”

“But you have seen a specialist, surely?”
exclaimed French, who feared her
hatred of physicians might have prevented
her calling in proper aid.

“Don’t distress yourself,” she answered.
“McTorture has me fast in
his clutches; and for how long do you
suppose? Two months! He will promise
nothing short of two months, and
even then objects to my going abroad,
and the yacht ready to start this very
week! I am waiting for Bob to come
into lunch, to get him to send for the
sailing master and break the news to
him. He’ll be a disappointed man!”

“I will take the yacht off your hands,”
said Stephen, casually.

“You!” she exclaimed. “Are you
running away from or with anybody,
that you suddenly annex an ocean
steamer? You were prosing only yesterday
afternoon about work and duty,
as if nothing could separate you from
Harmouth. Is the attraction going to
bolt with you, Stevie?”

Stephen could have killed her as she
lay there, allowing her tongue free play
with his most intimate concerns, but the
respect due to an old woman, to say
nothing of an aunt, restrained his anger,
and he answered, coldly:

“If you want to get rid of the yacht
for the rest of the year, say so. My
friend, Simeon Ponsonby, is lost in the
wilderness of Patagonia, and I am organizing
a party to search for him. I
shall have to resign my work at Harmouth,
but I feel responsible for poor
Ponsonby’s fate; I sent him on the expedition.”

“Ah! did you?” she said, laughing
wickedly. “Poor Uriah has been disposed
of, and now the lady sends you
to look for his bones. Don’t look too
hard, Stevie, you might find he wasn’t
lost, after all!”

“Stop!” cried French, springing to
his feet. “How dare you make a jest of
other people’s misfortunes? Is there so
little decency among your associates
that you no longer recognize it when
you see it?”

She had the grace to look ashamed.

“Take the yacht, my dear,” she said,
kindly, “and if the expense is too great
for your income, you can draw on me
for what you like. Can’t you stand a
little teasing from your old aunt?”

“I will take the yacht, and pay for
it,” said French. “As for the teasing,
we seem to have different ideas about
what is amusing.”

“Then forgive me,” she pleaded, and
there were tears in her eyes, “and be
careful of yourself, my dear boy, in this
 dismal expedition. Take plenty of furs,
and beware of the cannibals.”

She won a smile from him as he bent
over her sofa to kiss her good-by, but
she reserved further comments upon his
errantry for Bob.

“Quixotic nonsense!” she declared.
“Was there ever a man so wise that a
woman couldn’t make a fool of him?”

CHAPTER IX.

Could there be a crueler irony of fate
than to be absolutely convinced of the
widowhood of her you love and to be
unable, practically, to establish the fact?

Stephen French had expatriated himself,
resigned the work he valued, put
the seas between himself and Deena,
only to be baffled at every turn. For
two months he had used his utmost
acumen in prosecuting the search without
even finding a clew, and when finally
he made his great discovery, it was
by yielding to the impulse of the moment
rather than the suggestions of
reason.

From March to May Mrs. Star’s
great ocean-going yacht had steamed
along the southeastern shores of Patagonia.
Sometimes within the confines
of the Straits, sometimes rounding its
headlands into the Atlantic, and dropping
anchor wherever the line of coast
gave any facility for landing an exploring
party, until the hopelessness of the
quest was patent to everybody except
Stephen.

On his way down he had stopped at
Buenos Ayres, where he provided himself
with the charts and surveys made
by the newly returned expedition, and
secured Simeon’s personal effects left
on the Tintoretto, together with his
diary, scientific memoranda and specimens,
which had been carefully preserved,
and were of rare value, from a
botanist’s point of view.

French was fortunate enough to induce
both Lopez and the captain of the
Tintoretto to accompany him as guests,
and they proved invaluable allies, especially
the captain, whose topographical
knowledge and recent experience were
always to be relied upon. From him
Stephen learned all the particulars of
Simeon’s disappearance, though the last
home letter dispatched by the poor fellow,
on the eve of the guanaco hunt,
covered the first part of the story. It
appeared that Ponsonby had landed
with a surveying party from the ship,
one morning in January, on the Patagonian
side of the Straits, and set out to
botanize while his companions worked.
He had climbed a steep bank, in order
to secure a particular shrub just in
flower, when he saw on the plain beyond
a party of Indians gathered by the
shore of a small, fresh-water lake.
Most of them were watering their
horses, but half a dozen were grouped
round a man lying on the ground, apparently
injured. Their sharp eyes
quickly marked Simeon filling his vasculum
with the coveted specimens, and,
waving their hands in friendly greeting,
two of them advanced at a gallop. One
spoke fairly good Spanish, and explained
that the son of their chief had
broken his leg by a fall from his horse,
and he begged Simeon—whom he conceived,
from his occupation of gathering
simples, to be a medicine man—to
come to their assistance.

Simeon’s own Spanish was too poor
to undeceive them, but, thinking he
might be of some use, he went back with
them, and rigged out a set of splints,
that made it possible to carry the young
man to their encampment, about a mile
away. In gratitude for his services,
they accompanied him to the ship on his
return, mounting him on one of their
horses and forming a bodyguard round
him. It was then that they proposed the
guanaco hunt to the officers of the ship;
their own visit to the Straits being simply
in pursuit of game.

The morning of the hunt the captain
described as unusually warm for
that region, even in January, and not
particularly clear; there was a haze that
was just not a fog. The Indians met
them about a mile back from the shore,
bringing a dozen extra horses for their
guests. The quietest beast was selected
for Ponsonby, but its docility was so
questionable, and the rider’s inexperience
so evident, that the captain persuaded
 him to give up the chase, and
content himself with a ride to the encampment
to inquire about his patient.
The last ever seen of him he was sitting
on horseback watching the departing
hunt.

Guanacos in large numbers had been
seen on the plains to the northwest,
whereas the Indian camp lay to the
northeast, and Ponsonby’s route was
widely divergent to that of the hunters.
All that was known is that he never
reached the encampment; perhaps he
mistook the trail, and, having left his
compass in his cabin, had no means of
ascertaining his direction—or perhaps
his horse became unmanageable and
bolted, carrying him far inland; at all
events, his chance without a compass
was poor, for a tremendous rain came
on, which lasted for three days, leadening
the sky to an even gray, with no
mark of setting or rising sun.

At the end of four days the horse he
had ridden came into camp riderless;
its saddle had been removed, probably
by Simeon, to make a pillow at night,
and its whole appearance bespoke long
travel. For a fortnight the ship’s company
and the Indians scoured the country
seeking him. They sent up rockets
at night, and lighted fires on the hilltops
by day; they wearied themselves
and the tireless Indians, and at last,
knowing the limits of human endurance
in a case like Ponsonby’s, they gave up
in despair.

All these incidents formed the main
topics of conversation in the long evenings
in the saloon of the yacht. In addition
to Señor Lopez and the captain
of the Tintoretto, Stephen had secured
the services of a young physician with
a taste for adventure, and his own sailing
master was a person of intelligence,
so that the little party brought a variety
of experience to the councils held on
board ship or round the camp fire when
their search carried them so far inland
that it was impossible to return to the
yacht at night. Several times, accompanied
by Pecheray guides, they had
been gone for ten days at a time, but
never found a trace of the lost man.
There was the faint possibility that he
had been found and cared for by wandering
Indians, but what was far more
likely was that French might stumble
upon the spot where he died. Even in
that land of beasts and birds of prey
something would be left in evidence.

The daylight hours were now so few
that little could be accomplished, and
the cold was becoming severe. A violent
snowstorm on the fifteenth of May
decided French to give up the search
and go home. Accordingly, they
steamed out of the Straits of Magellan
and turned the vessel northward, keeping
as near the Patagonian shore as was
prudent, in the hope of sighting canoes.

They had been steaming in this direction
for about three hours, going slowly
and keeping a sharp outlook toward the
land, when the captain called French’s
attention to an opening in the coast
line, where the Gallegos River empties
into the sea. An impulse—perhaps it
might more truly be called an inspiration—induced
French to order the yacht
brought to anchor in the bay. Although
the shore seemed deserted, several canoes
filled with Indians immediately put
out for the yacht, as was, indeed, their
invariable custom. The boats were
large, capable of holding six or eight
people in the two ends, while in the middle
was the inevitable clay hearth, on
which smoldered the fire of hemlock.
As they approached the yacht, the Indians
began begging for rum and tobacco,
some by gestures and some in a
patois, in which Spanish and Indian
words were strangely blended; and
French, whose policy was always to secure
their good will, invited them on
board and ordered the steward to bring
spirits and tobacco, and also a plentiful
supply of ship biscuit and sweets.

The men were of medium size, and
not bad looking, and for the most part
dressed in loose-fitting mantles of
guanaco skins, stained bright red. In
spite of the cold, this one garment was
their only protection, and even this they
would offer in exchange for rum.
Knowing their customs, French was astonished
to find the first man who
stepped on board wearing the coat of
civilization under his mantle, and his
 astonishment gave way to alarm when
he recognized an old checked cutaway
of Simeon’s, which had done service
for many a winter at Harmouth, and
was as unmistakable as the features of
its lost owner. While Stephen stared—too
agitated to find a word of Spanish—-the
Indian tossed off half a tumbler of
raw whisky at a gulp and, drawing
from the pocket of poor Simeon’s coat
a silver flask, he presented it to the
steward to be filled with the same genial
fluid. The flask was Stephen’s
parting gift to Simeon, and marked
with his name.

The excitement now became intense,
for the Indians declared that the owner
of the coat was alive, and the one who
was wearing it, and who seemed to exercise
some authority over the others,
began an explanation in signs. He
pointed to a cliff that overhung the
stony beach at the mouth of the river,
and, lifting his hand high above his
head; brought it down with a violent
gesture, as if to simulate a fall. He next
motioned toward the canoes, talking
volubly all the while, though his language
was unintelligible to anyone except
the captain of the Tintoretto, who
picked out a word here and there.

The tribes of the Straits of Magellan
and the adjacent coasts vary greatly in
their characteristics; some have the
impassive bearing we associate with the
Indian, and some are imitative, reproducing
sounds and gestures with surprising
exactness.

It was not difficult to guess that Simeon
had fallen over the cliff and been
found by the Indians, who are always
skirting the shore in their canoes, and
the Spanish captain made out that he
was now in one of their boats higher
up the river. When the Indian was
asked whether he would guide them to
the place, he hesitated until bribed by
rum and provisions, and then he agreed
to go in his own canoe and bring Simeon
to the yacht, where the exchange
was to be effected. Why he hesitated
remained a mystery, unless Ponsonby’s
knowledge of herbs had made him of
value to the tribe.

French immediately ordered the various
tins and boxes, containing the supply
of food promised, to be placed conspicuously
on the deck as an earnest of
his honesty in the barter, and when a
small keg of rum was added, the satisfaction
was complete; four or five Indians
followed their leader into his
canoe and paddled up the river.

They were gone so long—over three
hours—that French began to curse his
folly in trusting them, and he was about
to follow them up in the launch, when
he saw their canoe coming round a bend
in the stream. At the first glance it
seemed filled with Indians only, and it
was not until it was actually alongside
that he detected a mummy-like form
lying in the stern, which he guessed to
be Simeon.

Half a dozen sturdy arms made the
transfer, by means of a hammock, from
the canoe to the yacht, and Simeon,
alive but quite unconscious, was laid on
the deck. He had probably been subjected
by the removal to more pain than
in his enfeebled condition he could bear,
and it required long and patient exertion
on the part of the doctor before he
was revived from his syncope.

His condition was pitiable; from an
injury to the spine he was a helpless
cripple, while the arm which had been
broken in his fall had knit in a way to
render it perfectly useless. He was
fearfully emaciated, probably from the
lack of palatable food, and his expression
was vacant.

French gave up his own deck cabin,
the most commodious in size, and before
another hour had passed Simeon was lying
in a comfortable bed, clean, warm,
devotedly tended, but apparently dying.

For forty-eight hours they kept the
yacht within the shelter of the river,
fearing the effect of motion on that
feeble flame of life, but the warmth and
nourishment soon began to tell, and on
the third day he recognized French, and
tried to murmur some words of gratitude
and pleasure.

That night Stephen called the doctor
into his own room and shut the door.
He wanted to put a very simple question,
one which might have been asked
anywhere out of Simeon’s hearing, and
 yet the effort seemed almost beyond his
powers.

“Can he live?”

The words came in such a hoarse, unnatural
voice that the doctor, a sensitive
man, feared to deal the blow of
truth. This was a very marvel of
friendship; like the love of David and
Jonathan, it passed the love of women.

The doctor temporized. Mr. Ponsonby
had rallied wonderfully; his constitution
was much stronger than he had
been given to understand; it was rather
soon to give a definite opinion, but——

Here Stephen interrupted him.

“Great God, man! Can’t you answer
a plain question. Yes or no?”

The doctor drew himself up and, to
quote his own language, “let him have it
straight.”

“If he lives to get home it will be a
good deal more than I expect of him.”

French nodded toward the door, and
turned his back.

That night he relieved the doctor’s
watch by sitting up with his friend, and,
having given him his broth at midnight,
was almost dozing in his chair when a
whisper from Simeon roused him. The
sound was so faint, he held his breath to
listen.

“Stephen, I want to see Deena.”

French’s heart began thumping like
the screw of his yacht. How he thanked
God that he could look his friend in the
face as he answered:

“So you shall, old man; just as quickly
as steam can carry you to her.”

A look of satisfaction came into the
tired eyes.

“It will be a race with death,” he said,
“but perhaps—thank you, Stephen.”
And he fell asleep.

CHAPTER X.

With Deena the spring moved drearily.
Her position was strangely anomalous;
she was neither wife nor widow,
without the right to be glad or sad—only
dumbly wretched. She could not
mourn for a husband who might be living,
nor could she ignore the fact that
he might be dead, and all the while that
parting scene with Stephen burned into
her conscience like a brand.

She shut herself up with Polly and
the baby, and hardly went out of the
house while she remained in New York.
Love for the child crept deep into her
heart and soothed her into patience
when all else failed.

In May the house in Harmouth returned
to her keeping, the lease having
expired, and she left the Sixty-fifth
Street household with reluctance to take
up her old life. In the great city she
had been but a human atom. Her conduct,
her unhappiness, her very existence
mattered to no one there, except,
perhaps, to Ben and Polly, who were as
tender and sympathetic as such vigorous
people could be; but in Harmouth
every creature was interested in Simeon’s
fate, and watched Deena with a
curiosity she found maddening.

She felt herself the main topic of conversation;
she never approached two
people talking in the street that they
didn’t break off in guilty confusion, and
comments upon her mode of dressing
and daily occupations were continually
repeated to her in the form of censure.
Her own family were especially out of
touch, for their assumption that she
mourned her husband as Polly would
have done made her feel like an impostor.
They did not give her much of
their company, for their newly found
fortune made them even more self-centered
than their misfortunes. Dicky
was the exception; perhaps because he
had started in life hard as nails, and so
couldn’t grow any harder. At all
events, Deena thought she discerned a
reluctant affection in his greeting that
was infinitely flattering.

Stephen wrote whenever he could
catch the Chilian mail boats on their
way through the Straits. His letters
were those of a man under the strong
hand of restraint; admirable letters, that
filled her with respect for him and
shame at her own craving for “one
word more.”

On the twenty-fifth of May she had
a cable that changed the face of events.
It was from Montevideo.

 Have found Simeon. Desperately ill. On
our way home.

S. French.

The news spread over the town like
wildfire. The local paper issued an extra;
a thing it had not done since the
assassination of Mr. McKinley. As
soon as Harmouth knew Mrs. Ponsonby’s
exact status it became distinctly
friendly. People are helpful by instinct,
and offers of neighborly assistance
poured in from all sides.

Deena left nothing undone that could,
by anticipation, add to Simeon’s comfort.
His room was ready, a nurse engaged,
and all the paraphernalia belonging
to the care of the sick collected long
before the time due for his arrival. She
counted upon seeing him four weeks
from the date of the cable. The regular
trip of the mail boats between Rio
and New York is twenty days; from
Montevideo two days more; to that
must be added another day to reach
Boston, and she was warned that a
yacht would go more slowly than a
large steamer; she therefore concluded
the third week in June would bring
them.

The lot of women is to wait, and they
do it under a pressure of nervous strain
that makes it slow torture. No turn of
fortune could have surprised Deena at
this crisis, for her imagination had pictured
every possibility.

When a summer storm blackened the
sky she saw the yacht tempest-tossed
and sinking, driven before a tropical
cyclone; when the sun shone, she fancied
it sailing gayly into port with Simeon
restored to health, expecting to find
her as he left her—the willing slave, the
careful housewife—and she shivered
and went pale at the thought; and then
in a revulsion of feeling she saw him
dying, and she was ready to cast herself
at his feet, and tell him all—how she
had tried to do right, how she had
struggled against her love for Stephen.
Perhaps he would have mercy upon her
and let her go away, all by herself, to
wrestle with her heart.

She couldn’t eat; she couldn’t sleep.
She grew so wan and thin she was like
a ghost of her old self.

Her mother said:

“My dear, you must stop fretting.
I am sure, under the care of that clever
young doctor Mr. French took down,
and with the comforts of the yacht,
your husband will be quite himself by
the time he gets home.”

And her father added:

“You must not be so impatient,
Deena; it is mighty nasty sailing
through West Indian waters, and a boat
of that size doesn’t carry enough fuel
for a prolonged voyage; they will have
to stop for coal somewhere on their way
up.”

She was growing irritable under her
dread. Like Elisha, she longed to silence
them with the answer:

“I know it; hold ye your peace.”

The middle of June had passed, the
fourth week of the voyage had begun,
and now any day, any hour, might
bring news. Deena’s anxiety had made
such inroads into her health that her
father took alarm and called in her old
friend Dr. Hassan, and he, wise man,
gave her a sedative and ordered her to
bed, though the afternoon was still
young.

It was the first long sleep she had had
for weeks, and the refreshment came at
the time of her direst need, for at daybreak
the summons roused her. She
waked with a beating heart; wheels
stopped in the street, her gate clicked,
there were footsteps coming up her
path—bold, hurried steps; they reached
the veranda—the bell pealed.

She sprang from her bed, huddling
her dressing gown round her as she
ran, and, slipping back the heavy, old-fashioned
bolts of the front door, she
stood face to face with Stephen.

If she were pale, he was paler; his
blood seemed turned to ice that summer
morning.

“The yacht is at Wolfshead,” he said.
“How soon can you be ready? We
must go by rail—I have a special waiting
for you.”

A glow from the first blush of day
caught her as she stood in the frame of
the doorway. She was like a mediæval
saint, with her hair wound in a crown
about her head, her blue gown falling
 in stately fold, and her bare feet showing
under the hem of her nightgown.
In spite of her seeming calm, her eyes
blazed with excitement.

To French she seemed something
holy and apart—as if those bare feet
rested on a crescent, and the shadows
of the old hall were floating clouds. He
had schooled himself during his hurried
journey, in order to meet her without
emotion, but she was her own protection;
to have touched her would have
seemed sacrilege. Her lips tried to
frame the question that consumed her
with its terrors.

“Simeon——” she began, but her
voice failed.

Stephen’s haggard eyes softened.

“He is dying,” he said. “But there is
time—perhaps to-day—perhaps to-morrow.
His force of will has kept him
alive to see you—he has cared more
than you knew.”

She gave a little sob, and turned toward
the staircase. Halfway up she
stopped.

“I forgot to ask you to come in,” she
said, “or whether you want anything I
can get you? But it doesn’t matter,
does it? All that matters is to do Simeon’s
bidding. I shall be very quick.”

In an incredibly short time she was
back, fully dressed, and carrying a bag,
into which she had thrust what was indispensable
to her comfort for another
day. She waked the servant, left a message
for her father, and then she and
Stephen went out into the street, so gay
with early sunlight and twittering birds,
so bare of human traffic. At first a
strange shyness kept her dumb; she
longed to ask a thousand things, but
the questions that rose to her lips
seemed susceptible of misunderstanding,
and Stephen’s aloofness frightened her.
Did he think, she wondered, that she
could forget her duty to Simeon at such
a moment, that he surrounded himself
with this impenetrable reserve? And
all the time he was regarding her with
a passionate reverence that shamed him
into silence.

At the railway station their train was
waiting—the locomotive hissing its impatience;
they got into the car, for there
was but one, and in a moment were
flying seaward. A man—the steward
of the yacht—was busy at the far end
of the car with a cooking apparatus, and
the aroma of coffee came intoxicatingly
to her nostrils. She remembered she
had eaten nothing since her early dinner
the day before, and she was exhausted
with excitement, and then she
despised herself for thinking of her
physical needs when Simeon lay dying.
It was fortunate that French had taken
a saner view of the situation, for the
coffee was just what was needed to restore
her equipoise.

She began to understand the delicacy
of her companion’s conduct, and the
simplicity of the whole situation when
stripped of morbidness. The only thing
that behooved her was to soothe her
husband’s last hours on earth—to give
out the tenderness of a pitying heart. As
her common sense asserted itself she began
plying Stephen with the questions
that had seemed so impossible half an
hour before—would Simeon know her—could
he bear conversation—was he
changed in appearance—had he suffered
beyond relief? She demanded the whole
story of his rescue and of the voyage
home. She was gentle, womanly, infinitely
sweet. By the time they reached
their destination all constraint was
gone; they were two comrades absorbed
in a common interest, for Simeon
occupied their every thought.

There was a narrow pier at Wolfshead,
sheltered by a point of rocky
shore that made a landing for small
boats in good weather, and there the
steam launch was waiting with its two
trim sailors and its gaudy flag. The
yacht was anchored about a mile from
shore—her graceful outlines clearly defined
against the ocean’s blue. If the
purity of her white paint had suffered
in the long voyage it was not apparent—red
and white awnings were stretched
over the deck. All looked hospitably
gay. Once more Deena shrank into herself,
the brilliant scene mocked the tragedy
within.

All too quickly they crossed the intervening
water; they were on the deck—in
the saloon. She was trembling so
 she could hardly stand, and Stephen
put her into a comfortable chair and
left her, while he made her coming
known. She hardly glanced at the luxurious
fittings of the charming room;
her eyes were fixed on the door, dreading,
yet impatient, for the message.

A small, sensitive-looking man came
toward her and introduced himself.

“I am Dr. Miles,” he said, “Mr. Ponsonby’s
physician, and, if you will allow
me, I will take you to him now.
There is no question of saving his
strength, Mrs. Ponsonby. We have
been nursing what is left to him for
days, in order that he could lavish it in
this interview with you. Don’t try to
curb him; let him have his say.”

She followed him to a deck cabin almost
under the bridge, and stood for a
moment at the threshold, to make sure
of her composure. There was a narrow
brass bed, a chest of drawers, a washstand,
and close to the bed a wicker
chair, with silk cushions, was drawn up,
as if in expectation of a guest. The
head of the bed was toward her, so that
she couldn’t see Simeon’s face, but he
heard the rustle of skirts, and called
her name, and she made a step forward
and sank on her knees beside him.

“Oh, Simeon,” she gasped, “how you
have suffered! I am so sorry!”

He moved his hand feebly and patted
her shoulder, and she, in a passion of
pity, carried it to her lips. For the first
time she ventured to look at him. Was
this Simeon! She would have passed
him in a hospital ward as an utter
stranger, so completely was he changed.
He had discarded his spectacles, and his
eyes were dull and faded; pain had
robbed them of that expression of concentrated
wisdom she knew so well. He
wore a short, curling beard and mustache,
and his clothing, supplied from
Stephen’s wardrobe, was luxurious; it
was silk, of a faint color between blue
and gray, and the handkerchief, protruding
from the pocket, was delicately
fine. Extreme neatness was characteristic
of Simeon, but he disliked anything
florid in dress or appearance, anything
opposed to the austere simplicity
that marked his manner of living. She
wondered whether such things mattered
to him now.

He noticed her start of surprise as
her eyes met his, and fancied she was
shocked by the ravages of illness, for he
said, with a touch of his old irritation:

“Didn’t they tell you I was dying?
Are you afraid to be left alone with me?
You used to be a courageous person,
Deena.”

The querulousness with which he began
the sentence melted into a rallying
smile.

“Oh, no,” she said, “I am not afraid.
I am too sorry to be frightened.”

“There is a bell, in case you want to
summon the doctor,” he continued, “but
I should rather talk to you alone. I
have been very homesick for you, and
for the old house—sometimes the longing
has been most acute—and then the
anxiety of leaving you poorly provided
for has been part of my distress. If I
could have lived a few years more this
would have been obviated, and possibly,
even now, my book will add something
to your income.” He made a visible
effort to speak clearly. “Now, in regard
to your future support; I have a
life insurance of ten thousand dollars,
and securities to about the same amount—and
then, of course, the house. This
is all I have been able to save, though
I have cut our living down to bare necessities.
You have been of great assistance
to me, Deena—without you life
would have had little flavor, but sometimes
I fear that in the desire to provide
for your future I was not considerate
enough of your present. I ought to
have been more mindful that young
people need pleasure. You will have to
forgive that and many other mistakes.”
He looked at her almost wistfully.

Deena’s tears came, dripping plentifully
over her clasped hands.

“It is I who should ask forgiveness,”
she said, humbly, remembering how
often she had scorned his economies.
“The money is more than I shall need—don’t
think of it again, Simeon. Isn’t
there anything you want to tell me about
your work—your book?”

His face lit up eagerly—the topic was
congenial.

 “My papers are safe,” he said. “All
the initial work of classification and description
that I did on the Tintoretto is
in French’s keeping, and he and Sinclair—the
man who has my place—are going
to edit the book. We have had a
great deal of talk about it on the way
up, whenever I had a fairly quiet day.
It is idle to try to put into words what
I owe French.”

“And he feels nothing but self-reproach
for having urged you to go,”
said Deena, faintly. “Not that anyone
could have foreseen the miserable outcome.”

“It isn’t miserable!” Simeon answered,
almost fiercely. “In many respects
it is all that I hoped. I have
made a name for myself—there will not
be a scientific library in the world without
my book, when once it is issued.
People have died for lesser achievements
than that.” And then he added,
more gently: “Not that it could be considered
as an achievement without
French’s aid.”

His mind could not detach itself from
its debt of gratitude, for he suddenly
broke out in passionate eulogy.

“He has sacrificed everything to me—his
ambitions—his time—his comfort—his
money, though that is the last
thing he would begrudge, but you have
no idea what it costs to run one of those
large yachts! It must have made an
inroad even in his large fortune. He
has been a friend indeed!”

Deena turned away her face; it was
hard for her to praise Stephen, although
her heart echoed her husband’s words.

“He has high ideals in friendship as
in everything else,” she answered, “but
you must remember, Simeon, that the
thought of your sufferings agonized us
at home. Who could have abandoned
you to such a fate? It makes me sick
to think of it!”

A sort of shiver passed over him,
while he said, simply:

“It was all in the day’s work. French
ran the same risks, only with better
luck.” Presently he added:

“I feel tired, Deena—and a little oppressed.
Perhaps you had better ring
the bell—but stay. Will you kiss me
before you ring?”

She kissed him with a pity that
wrung her heart, and he sighed contentedly
and shut his eyes. He only
spoke once more, just as the doctor
came to his bedside.

“I should have been glad to see the
old house before I die, but it is just as
well as it is.”

He was dying all the afternoon,
peacefully and gently, and at sunset the
end came.

CHAPTER XI.

Master Richard Shelton sat at the
foot of his sister’s table dispensing its
hospitalities chiefly to himself. Through
some law unknown to science, all dishes
seemed to gravitate toward the main
center of Dicky’s trencher, thereby leaving
the rest of the table comparatively
bare.

For eighteen months Master Shelton
had given Mrs. Ponsonby the advantage
of his company; not so much through
volition—albeit, he was well enough
pleased with his quarters—as through
submission to paternal authority.

Conventional ideas are apt to wilt under
the blight of poverty, and to revive
under the fuller harvesting of this
world’s goods, and Mr. Shelton, Sr.,
who had, in the days of his leanness, let
Polly run wild with all the college boys
of Harmouth, became suddenly particular,
as his bank account fattened, in regard
to the niceties of conduct in his
daughters. His scruples even embraced
Deena; he said she was too young a
widow to live alone, and a blank sight
too handsome, and that either she must
return to the protection of his roof or
else receive her brother under her own.
With the docility of the intelligent, she
accepted his fiat, but chose the evil represented
by a unit rather than by the
sum total of family companionship.

So she and Dicky had lived together
since the day when Simeon had been
laid to rest beside his mother in the
churchyard, and Deena had taken up
life with such courage as she could muster
in the old house. She had started
 out with a long illness, as the result of
overtaxed nerves, and the nurse who
had been engaged for Simeon found
ample employment with Simeon’s widow;
but a good constitution and a quiet
mind are excellent helps toward recovery,
and by September she found herself
in admirable health.

Stephen’s energies had been absorbed
in editing Simeon’s book. He had the
assistance of the botanical department
of Harmouth, and the book was produced
in a manner which would have
given poor Ponsonby infinite pleasure.
French spared no expense, especially in
the color drawings from Simeon’s photographs
and specimens, which were exceptionally
valuable. The printing was
done in Boston, and Stephen was there
much of the time. During Deena’s illness
he was glad of an excuse to be
near enough to get daily reports of her
progress, but as she became strong and
resumed the routine of living, so that
intercourse became unavoidable, he
found the strain of silence more than he
could bear. He resigned his professorship
permanently, and went abroad,
making the book his excuse. He wished
to see that it was properly heralded by
both English and Continental scientific
periodicals, and he preferred to attend
to it himself. To say that Deena missed
him but feebly expresses the void his
going made in her life, but, knowing her
own heart, and suspecting the state of
his, she was glad to be spared his presence
in these early days of widowhood,
and could not but approve his decision.

Dicky’s society was hardly calculated
to stifle her longings for higher things,
for his conduct called for constant repression.
At first he had nearly driven
her wild by his prying interest in what
did not concern him, his way of unmasking
her secret thoughts, his powers
of seeing round corners, if not through
sealed envelopes, but as time went on
she grew fond of his honest boy-nature,
and learned to laugh at his precocious
acuteness. Perhaps with Stephen’s departure
there were fewer occasions for
her to resent the challenge of his intrusive
eye. There were, also, alleviations
coincident with the school year,
for then she was free from his company
from the time he slammed the front
door, at five minutes to nine, till he returned
at two, ravenous for dinner.

On the particular morning indicated
at the beginning of the chapter, the season
was the late autumn—the clock was
pointing ominously near nine—the lady
opposite to Master Shelton looked more
beautiful than ever in her widow’s
weeds. Dicky conveyed half a sausage
and a wedge of buttered toast to the
sustenance of boyhood before he asked—with
some difficulty, if the truth were
confessed:

“May I take a bunch of grapes to
school, Deena?”

She was about to give a cheerful consent,
when he defeated his own ends by
adding:

“None of the other boys have hothouse
grapes; it makes ’em think a lot
of me. I guess they know where they
come from, too!”

“In those circumstances, certainly
not,” she answered, indignantly. “You
can eat all you like at home.”

“Well, I call that low-down mean,”
he said, stabbing another sausage, “and
you gettin’ all the fruit and flowers
from Mr. French’s place sent to you
every day. I wish Polly and Ben were
there still—they wouldn’t begrudge me
a little fruit.”

Polly and Ben had taken Stephen’s
place for the summer, during his protracted
absence, and had but recently
returned to New York.

“Polly and Ben would despise your
snobbishness just as I do; besides, I do
not approve of your taking eatables to
school,” she added, disingenuously, for
her objection was to furnishing food for
Harmouth gossip—not to Dicky.

“Oh, pshaw!” he exclaimed. “As if
I didn’t know why you won’t let me
take ’em! Mr. French will give me
anything I ask for when he gets home—that’s
one comfort. Did you know he
may be here any day? The man who
brought the flowers told me so yesterday.”

Deena’s complexion flushed a lively
pink, or else it was the reflection from
the wood fire, leaping in tongues of
 flame behind the tall brass fender. She
certainly looked singularly girlish as she
sat behind the array of Ponsonby breakfast
silver, her severe black frock, with
the transparent bands of white at throat
and wrists, only serving to mark her
youthful freshness. Her beauty was of
little consequence to her brother, who
was busy considering the advantages
that might accrue to himself from
Stephen’s return.

“When Mr. French went away, he
said I could ride his saddle horse, and
though I’ve been there half a dozen
times since Ben left, that old beast of
a coachman won’t let me inside the stable.
Will you tell Mr. French when he
comes home what an old puddin’ head
he’s got to look after his horses? The
man ought to be kicked out!”

“I shall hardly venture to complain
to Mr. French about his servants,” said
Deena.

“You might be good-natured,” he
urged; “here’s the whole autumn gone
without my getting any riding, and Mr.
French would do anything you
asked——”

“It is time for you to go to school,”
said Deena, shortly.

“No, it isn’t; not for three minutes
yet,” he contradicted. “‘Tenny rate, I
don’t mean to be early this morning—it’s
jography, and I don’t know my
lesson; but I do think you might speak
about the horse, Deena; I never get a
bit of sport worth countin’”—this in a
high, grumbling minor. “There was
Ben; he had his automobile here the
whole summer, and never offered it to
me once! The fellows all think it was
awfully mean—I had promised to take
them out in it, and it made me feel
deuced cheap, I can tell you. The idea
of using a machine like that just to air
a kid every day! I guess it pumped it
full of wind, anyhow—that’s one comfort.”

“If you are going to say disagreeable
things about the baby, I won’t
listen to you,” said Deena, crossly, and
then, ashamed of her petulance, added:
“Run along to school, dear; the sooner
you get some knowledge into that little
red head of yours, the sooner you can
have automobiles and horses of your
own.”

“Those of my brothers-in-law will
suit me just as well,” he said, favoring
her with a horrid grimace, as he wiped
his mouth on a rope of napkin held taut
between his outstretched fists. “Perhaps
I had better let Mr. French know
myself what I expect in the future.”

“Perhaps you’ll mind your own business!”
cried Deena, driven to fury.

He left the room singing in a quavering
treble:

I’ll pray for you when on the stormy ocean

With love’s devotion. That’s what I’ll do.

It was a song with which a nursemaid
of the Shelton children had been
wont to rock the reigning baby to sleep,
and had lurked in Dicky’s memory for
many a year.

Poor Deena was thoroughly ruffled.
It was maddening to have a love she
held as the most sacred secret of her
heart vulgarized by a boy’s coarse teasing,
and, in addition, she was jealous of
her own dignity—anxious to pay her
dead husband proper respect—distressed
at the possibility of Stephen’s
thoughtful kindness becoming a subject
of comment in the town. And yet
what difference did it make?

This carefully guarded secret would
be public property by her own consent
before a week was over, for Dicky’s announcement
of French’s return was no
news to Deena—at that very moment
her heart was beating against a letter
which assured her he was following
fast upon its tracks, and when he came
he was not likely to prove a patient
lover. All through that second summer
his letters had been growing more
tender, more urgent, till at last he had
taken matters into his own hands, and
decided that their separation must end.
For aught she knew, his vessel might
already have reached New York—he
might be that blessed moment on his
way to Harmouth! The thought sent
little thrills of happiness bounding
through her veins. She had a shrewd
idea he would appear unannounced by
letter or telegram, but not to-day—certainly
not to-day—she reflected.

 There were plenty of small duties
waiting for her that morning, but in
woman’s parlance she “couldn’t settle to
anything”; there was an excitement in
her mood that demanded the freedom of
fresh air. She went up to her bedroom
and stood for a moment at her window
before yielding to the impulse that beckoned
her out into the sunshine; and,
drawing Stephen’s letter from her dress,
she read it once more, to make sure she
had missed no precious hint as to the
time of his sailing. He wrote:

May I come back? You must know all I
mean that to imply—to come back, my best
beloved, to you—to order my life in accordance
to your pleasure—to marry you the day
I set foot in Harmouth—or to wait impatiently
till you are pleased to give yourself
to me. I trust your love too entirely to fear
that you will needlessly prolong the time.
You are too fair-minded to let mere conventions
weigh with you as against my happiness.
Between you and me there must be
no shams, and yet I would not shock or
hurry you for the world.

On second thoughts, I shall not wait for
your permission to return—that is not the
best way to gain one’s desires! No, I shall
come before you can stop me, and while you
are saying to yourself, “Perhaps he is on
the ocean,” I may be turning in at your gate.

What did she mean to do? she asked
herself, with a smile that was its own
answer.

She went into her closet, and, fetching
her crape hat from the shelf, began
pinning it on before the glass. Its somber
ugliness accorded ill with the brightness
of her hair, and somehow her hair
seemed to turn mourning into a mockery.

She couldn’t help recalling an incident
that had happened two years before,
when she had seen herself in that
same glass transformed into sudden
prettiness by Polly’s skillful fingers, and
how her pleasure in her appearance
had been turned into humiliation by
Simeon’s petty tyranny, when she
asked him to pay for her hat. And
then she was ashamed of her own
thoughts—distressed that she had let
the paltry reminiscence force itself into
her mind; for great happiness should
put us in charity with all. Never again
would she allow an unkind remembrance
to lodge in her thoughts.

She shut the door of her room and
hurried out into the street—there was
so much indoors to remind her of what
she most wished to forget. When
Stephen came for her they would go
away from Harmouth—just for a little
while, till the memories faded—and,
in a future of perfect love, think kindly,
gratefully, pitifully, of Simeon.

You see, she was desperately in love,
poor child, and at last heart and conscience
were in accord.

Her feet fairly danced up the street;
she moved so lightly she hardly rustled
the carpet of fallen leaves that overspread
the pavement. It was a glorious
day, the sun was touching all prosaic
things with gold, and up in heaven,
against the interminable blue, little
white clouds sailed in dapples, such as
Raphael charged with angel faces, and
every face seemed to smile.

Wandering across the campus, under
the stately arches of the college elms,
she finally reached the open country,
and, realizing that even the wings of
happiness are mortal, she turned homeward,
choosing the avenue that led past
French’s place. Perhaps she hoped for
reassuring signs of his coming—doors
and windows thrown open and gardeners
at work upon the ground—but before
she got beyond the high hedge
that cut off her view, a carriage, which
she recognized as Stephen’s, drove rapidly
toward the gate, and in it sat a
lady, stately and grand, but so closely
veiled as to defy both sun and curiosity.
At a sign from her the carriage stopped,
and a voice exclaimed:

“I have just been to see you, Mrs.
Ponsonby, and was so much disappointed
to find you out—and so was
some one else, I fancy, who I am sure
has been at your house this morning!
Pray get in and drive home with me.
And I will send you back to town after
you have paid me a little visit.”

Deena had by this time recognized
Mrs. Star, and recovered sufficiently
from her surprise to take the offered
seat in the carriage, but she was in such
a tumult of hope and fear she hardly
dared trust herself to do more than
greet her old friend. Mrs. Star understood
 quite well, and gave her time to
recover her wits by a characteristic
harangue.

“How am I?” she repeated, sardonically.
“Lame for life! I have never
got over McTorture’s treatment, and
never shall. Oh, no, it was not the
original accident—that was an innocent
affair—it is the result of McTorture’s
nonsense in keeping me chained
to my sofa in one position till my leg
stiffened. But never mind about doctors;
they’re all alike—bad’s the best!
You look handsome and healthy enough
to keep out of their clutches; tell me all
about yourself.”

“There is never anything to tell about
me,” said Deena. “I am much more
concerned to know why you are here.”

Mrs. Star’s eyes softened.

“Because Stephen wouldn’t stop long
enough in New York for me to exchange
ten words with him, and so I
did the next best thing—indeed, the
only thing I could do to satisfy my
affection—I came with him; and upon
my word, I do not think he wanted me!
Now, how do you account for that,
Mrs. Deena?”

Her expression was so insinuating
that Deena might be excused a slight
irritation in her tone as she answered:

“I don’t account for it.”

Here they reached the front door, for
the approach was a short one, and Mrs.
Star got out laboriously and ushered
her guest into the hall.

“Do you know your way to the library?”
she asked. “It is on the other
side of this barn of a room, and if you
will make yourself comfortable there,
I will join you in a minute. The truth
is, we are not in order, and I must give
a message before I can have the conscience
to sit down and enjoy a chat.”

Deena’s eyes were still blinded by the
midday glare, but she managed to cross
the great drawing room without stumbling
over an ottoman, and, pushing
aside the heavy curtain that shut off the
library, she walked directly into Stephen’s
arms.

As Mrs. Star saw fit to leave her undisturbed,
it would be sheer presumption
for a humble person like the writer
to disregard that compelling example.
Suffice it to say that for one hour
Stephen’s horses stamped and champed
in the stable, and that when finally Mrs.
Star did appear, the occupants of the
library were under the impression she
had been gone barely long enough to
take off her wraps.

Perhaps no mortals deserve happiness,
and certainly few attain it, but if
ever a man and a woman were likely
to find satisfaction in each other’s companionship,
it was the lovers sitting
hand in hand before Stephen’s fire.

Most women of twenty-four have had
some experience of love as a passion;
they have known its fullness or its
blight, or more often still, they have
frittered it away in successive flirtations,
but with Deena it had come as a
revelation and been consecrated to one.
To be sure, she had tried to crush and
repress it, but it had persisted because
of its inherent force. And with Stephen
the passion was at once the delight and
glory of his life. His was no boy’s love
made up of sentiment and vanity; he
had brought a man’s courage to follow
duty to the borders of despair, and all
the while he held the image of her he
loved unsullied in his heart. At last
they were free to take all that life had
before withheld of sympathy and friendship
and perfect understanding. What
wonder that an hour should slip away
before they realized the flight of time?

Mrs. Star received her nephew’s announcement
with suitable effusion, and
with an undercurrent of genuine feeling.
After kissing Deena, she made a
confidence that had a spice of kindly
malice.

“My dear child,” she said, “I knew
so well what was about to happen, that
I came all the way from New York in
order to welcome you into the family,
and I think I showed great self-restraint
not to tell you so in the carriage when
you put that very direct question as to
what brought me.”

When Dickie’s mother
put him in my charge
for the summer she
said: “Keep him out
of as much mischief
as you can.” This
seemed unnecessary,
for, really, Dickie was a well-mannered,
good-looking young fellow, with broad
shoulders, a clear skin and a clean heart.
I said as much.

“Oh, you old bachelors!” laughed
Dickie’s mother, and sailed away to
spend her second season of widowhood
abroad.

Dickie and I were just taking a look
at the country surrounding our summer
headquarters when we found Rosie.
Balancing herself on a gatepost and
eating cherries was Rosie. It must be
admitted that she did both of these
things with a certain grace, also that
the picture she made had its charm.
For she was probably sixteen, with all
that the age implies.

Of course, one could not expect
Dickie to be at all impressed. Certainly
I did not.

“Girls!” Here followed an ominous
inbreathing, ending in an explosive
“Huh!” This was Dickie’s expressed
attitude toward the sex. For Dickie
was nineteen, which is the scornful age,
you know. What are girls when a fellow
is going to be a soph. in the fall,
with the prospect of playing quarterback
on the ’varsity eleven?

As we neared the girl on the gatepost
Dickie gave her a careless glance. She
certainly deserved better. There was
the sifting sunshine in her hair and
there were her white, rounded arms
reaching up to pull down a fruit-laden
branch. Perhaps the girl on the gatepost
felt the slight of Dickie’s unappreciative
glance, perhaps not. At any
rate, she was unstirred.

“Want one?” she asked, saucily
dangling a cherry at us.

Red as the cherry went Dickie’s face,
and he marched stiffly past without reply.
Once we were out of earshot, he
remarked, with deep disgust: “What a
freshy!”

“Yes, but rather pretty,” said I.

“Think so? Now, I don’t.” This
with the air of a connoisseur. “But she
did have good eyes.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “I like brown ones
myself.”

“Brown?” protested Dickie. “They
were blue, dark blue and big—the deep
kind.”

“Oh, were they?” In my tone must
have been that which caused Dickie to
suspect that I was teasing him.

“You bet she knows it, too,” he
added, vindictively. “Conceited beggars,
these girls.”

“Awfully,” I assented. Then, after a
 pause: “But I thought you were fond
of cherries?”

“So I am. If she’d been a boy, I
would have tried to buy a quart.”

“She seemed to want you to have
some,” I suggested. “Perhaps she
would sell you a few.”

Dickie glanced at me suspiciously.
“Think so? I’ve a mind to go back and
try. Will you wait?”

I said I would; in fact, it was the only
thing to be done, for he was off. So I
sat down and watched the scorner of
girls disappear eagerly around a bend
in the road. At the end of a half hour
of waiting I began to speculate. Had
Dickie’s courage failed him, had he
taken to the woods, or was he upbraiding
her of the gatepost for the sin of
conceit? I would go and see for myself.

All unheeding the rest of the world,
they were sitting at the foot of the cherry
tree. The “conceited beggar” of the
deep blue eyes was trying to toss cherries
into Dickie’s open mouth. When
she missed it became Dickie’s turn to
toss cherries. The game was a spirited
one. Dickie appeared to be well entertained.

“I thought you had forgotten me,”
said I, mildly. Dickie’s laugh broke
square in the middle, and he smoothed
his face into a bored expression.

“Her name is Rosie,” this was the
substance of the stammered introduction.

“Indeed!” I replied. “And you were
right about her eyes; they are blue.”

Dickie flushed guiltily and hastily got
on his feet.

“Come on,” he said; “I guess we’d
better be going.”

Very frankly Rosie looked her opinion
of me as we left. It was interesting
to note the elaborate strategy used
by Dickie to conceal the fact that he
waved his handkerchief to her. There
ensued a long silence between us, but
of this Dickie seemed unconscious. He
broke it by whistling “Bedelia” two
notes off the key.

“It’s too bad, Dickie,” I said, finally,
“that you dislike girls so much.”

“They’re a silly lot,” said Dickie, with
a brave effort at a tired drawl.

“But Rosie, now——”

“Oh, she’s not like the rest of them.
She’s rather jolly.”

“Conceited little beggar, though, I
suppose?”

“No, sir; not a bit. She’s just the
right kind.” Then Dickie flushed and
the conversation lapsed suddenly.

We were to go sailing on the river
next morning, but when the time came
Dickie pleaded delay. He had “promised
to take a book to a friend.” He
would be back in a few minutes. Two
hours did Dickie take for that errand,
and I began to think that perhaps my
joking had been unwise.

Dickie now entered upon a chronic
state of being “togged up.” He treasured
faded flowers, raising hue and cry
because the maid threw out a wilted
peony which he had enshrined in a vase
on his chiffonier. Once he almost fell
into the river rescuing an envelope
which had slipped from his pocket. The
treasure it contained seemed to be a
lock of dark hair. His spending money
went for fancy chocolates, which I did
not see him eat.

Such were the beginnings of this tremendous
affair.

Very gentle and serious Dickie became
in these days, moods new to him.
Also he took to reading poetry. Scott’s
“Marmion,” about the only piece of
verse with which he had been on speaking
acquaintance, he abandoned for
fragments of “Locksley Hall” and “Lucille.”
His musical taste underwent
like change. The rollicking college airs
he was accustomed to whistle with more
vigor than accuracy gave place to “Tell
Me, Pretty Maiden,” and “Annie
Laurie.” These he executed quite as
inaccurately, but—and this was some
relief—in minor key.

Sitting in the sacred hush of the
moonlight, we had long talks on sober
subjects not at all related to “revolving
wedges” and “guards back formation,”
on which he had been wont to discourse.
With uneasy conscience I meditated on
the amazing alchemy, potent in young
and tender passion.

 One morning a grinning youngster
with big blue eyes, like Rosie’s, handed
me a note. It was rather sticky to the
touch, by reason of the candy with
which the messenger had been paid. It
bore no address. “Darlingest Dearest——”
Thus far I read, then folded
it promptly and put it in my pocket.

The note was still there the next afternoon
when, jibing our sail, we came
abruptly on an unexpected scene. In a
smart cedar rowboat, such as they have
for hire at the summer hotel, an athletic
youth wielded a pair of long, spruce
oars. Facing him, with her back toward
us and leaning comfortably
against the chair seat in the stern, was
a pretty girl in white.

“Why,” said I, with perhaps a suspicion
of relief, “I believe that is Rosie.”

Dickie, gripping the tiller hard, was
staring as one in a trance. My words
roused him.

“Rosie? What Rosie?” said he.

“Why, the one who gave you the
cherries.”

“Is it?” asked Dickie, stoically. Then,
with studied carelessness and devilish
abandon: “I say, old man, toss me a
cigar, will you? I feel like having a
smoke.”

After dinner I found Dickie in his
room. There was a scent of burned paper
in the air and fresh ashes were in
the grate. The mercury was close to
ninety.

“Chilly?” said I.

Dickie laughed unconvincingly. “No,
just burning some old trash. Want to
take a tramp?”

I did. Was it chance or the immutable
workings of fate which took us in
time past the house of the cherry tree?
In a porch hammock was Rosie, a vision
of budding beauty only half clouded
in flimsy lawn and lace. Yet with never
a turn of the head Dickie swaggered
by, talking meanwhile to me in tones
meant to carry an idea of much light-heartedness.
Over my shoulder I noted
that Rosie was standing watching us,
a puzzled look on her face.

“Dick!” It was rather a faint call,
but loud enough to be heard.

“She’s calling you,” said I.

“Wait, Dickie!” This time there was
an aggrieved, pleading note, against
which the stern Dickie was not proof.

“Well,” said he, “I suppose I’d better
see what she wants. Will you wait?”

“No, I will go on slowly and you can
catch up with me. Don’t be long,
Dickie.”

But a full hour later, when I returned,
he was just starting. From
some distance up the road I could see
them. On the veranda Rosie’s mother
rocked and worked placidly away at
something in her lap. Quite sedately
they walked down the path until a big
hydrangea bush, studded thickly with
great clumps of blossoms, screened
them from the house. Then something
occurred which told me that the boating
incident and the unanswered note
had either been forgiven or forgotten. I
dodged out of sight behind a hedge.
When I thought it safe to come out,
Dickie was swinging up the road toward
me, whistling furiously. Clawing
my shoulder, he remarked: “Say, old
man, what do you think of her?”

“Think of whom?”

“Why, Rosie.”

“Rosie! What Rosie? Oh, you
mean the one who gave you the cherries?”

“Yes, of course. Say”—this impulsively
in my ear—“she’s the sweetest
girl alive.”

“From what I saw just now,” said I,
“I should say that you were quite competent
to pass on Rosie’s flavor. You
took at least two tastes.”

“I don’t care if you did see,” said
Dickie. “Suppose you can keep a secret? We’re en——”

“You young scamp!” I exclaimed.
Visions of an ambitious and angry
mother came to me with abrupt vividness.
“You don’t mean to tell me that
you two——”

“Yep, we are. But no one is to know
of it until I’ve graduated.”

Interesting news for me, wasn’t it?
Well, by means of discreet deception
and the use of such diplomacy as would
have settled a dispute between nations,
I dragged Dickie far away that very
night. Moreover, although it was the
 most difficult and thankless task I had
ever undertaken, I kept him away until
I had seen him safely bestowed in a college
dormitory. There I left him constructing,
in defiance of all the good
advice I had given him, an elaborate
missive to a person whom he addressed
as “My Darling Rosie.” Then I knew
that I might as well give up. Sorrowfully
I recalled the words of a forgotten
sentimentalist: “It is on the deep
pages of the heart that Youth writes indelibly
its salutary to Cupid.”

When I met Dickie’s mother at the
pier in October, I expected to hear that
he had written all about my wicked interference
in the Rosie affair. He
hadn’t, though, and I shamelessly accepted
her thanks, wondering all the
while what she would say when the
shocking truth came out. Her Dickie
engaged! And to a nameless nobody!
It would not be pleasant to face Dickie’s
mother after she had acquired this
knowledge.

So at the end of the term I was on
hand to help Dickie pack his trunk,
meaning to save him, by hook or crook,
from his precocious entanglement. I
should try reason first, then ridicule,
and, lastly, I would plead with him, as
humbly as I might, to forget.

This program I did not carry out. On
the mantel in Dickie’s room, propped
against a tobacco jar, was a photograph
of a girl with fluffy hair and pouting
lips. Observing that Dickie wrapped
the picture carefully in a sweater before
tucking it away in his trunk, I
asked: “Who is that, Dickie?”

“Met her at the Junior hop,” said
Dickie. “She’s a queen, all right.”

“Indeed!” Then I added, anxiously:
“And what of Rosie?”

“Rosie?” Could this blankness on
Dickie’s face be genuine? “What Rosie?”

“Why, the one who gave you the
cherries.”

“Oh, that one!” Dickie laughed
lightly. “Why, that’s all off long ago,
you know.”

Right there I abandoned all faith in
a sentimental theory having to do with
Cupid and certain pages in the heart of
Youth.

SONG

Charlotte Becker.

AN EDITORIAL

SYNOPSIS OF CHAPTERS I—XIII OF “THE DELUGE,” BY DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS

Matthew Blacklock, the central figure of the story, is essentially a self-made man, who has made
himself a power to be reckoned with. He is a man of great natural force, immense egotism, insatiable
greed for notoriety and unswerving adherence to his own standards of morality. He has two devouring
ambitions: First to become one of the inner circle that controls high finance and second to become
one of the elect in society.

The opening chapters explain these ambitions. The magnate of the financial world is Roebuck,
who has from time to time made use of Blacklock’s peculiar abilities and following. The latter has
become impatient and dissatisfied with his role as a mere instrument and demands of Roebuck that
he shall be given a place among the “seats of the mighty.” Roebuck makes a pretense of yielding to
the demand.

Blacklock’s social ambition is awakened and stimulated by his meeting with Anita Ellersly, the
sister of a young society man who has been the recipient of many financial favors from Blacklock.

The latter finally succeeds in his wish so far as to receive an invitation to dinner at the Ellerslys’,
which is given for reasons that are obvious. It is made plain to him, however, that his intentions with
respect to Anita are extremely distasteful to her, and after an evening spent under a tremendous nervous
strain he leaves the house exhausted and depressed.

His first impulse after his visit to the Ellerslys’ house is to regard his plans as hopeless, but his
vanity comes to his rescue and strengthens his resolution to succeed. For assistance he turns to Monson,
the trainer of his racing stable, an Englishman in whom he has discovered unmistakable signs of breeding
and refinement. Under Monson’s tuition he makes rapid progress in adapting himself to the requirements
imposed upon aspirants for social distinction.

His absorption in these pursuits leads to his unconscious neglect of some of the finer points of his
financial game. He allows himself to be misled by the smooth appearance of the friendliness of Mowbray
Langdon, one of Roebuck’s trusted lieutenants, and accumulates a heavy short interest in one of his
pet industrial stocks. He visits Roebuck and is deceived by the latter’s suavity. He has another invitation
to dine at the Ellerslys’, but his experience is as discouraging as before.

Nevertheless, having now become hopelessly in love with Anita, he persists in his attentions and
finally becomes engaged to her, though it is perfectly understood by both that she does not love him
and accepts him only because he is rich and her family is poor.

Meantime, he has to some extent lost his hold upon his affairs in Wall Street and suddenly
awakens to the fact that he has been betrayed by Langdon, who, knowing that Blacklock is deeply involved
in a short interest in Textile Trust stock, has taken advantage of the latter’s preoccupation with
Miss Ellersly to boom the price of the stock. With ruin staring him in the face, Blacklock takes energetic
measures to save himself.

He makes the startling discovery that Langdon is the person responsible for the rise in Textile,
the object being to drive him from the Street. He sees Anita, tells her the situation and frees her, but
she refuses to accept her release when she hears of Langdon’s duplicity.

With the aid of money loaned to him by a gambler friend, he succeeds the next day, by means
of large purchases of Textile Trust, in postponing the catastrophe.

Calling at the house of the Ellerslys’, he has a violent scene with Mrs. Ellersly, who attempts to
break the engagement between him and Anita, but it ends in his taking her with him from the house.

[FOR SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS SEE PRECEDING PAGE]

As we neared the upper
end of the park, I told
my chauffeur, through
the tube, to enter and
go slowly. Whenever
a lamp flashed in at us,
I had a glimpse of her
progress toward composure—now she
was drying her eyes with the bit of
lace she called a handkerchief; now her
bare arms were up, and with graceful
fingers she was arranging her hair; now
she was straight and still, the soft,
fluffy material with which her wrap was
edged drawn close about her throat. I
shifted to the opposite seat, for my
nerves warned me that I could not long
control myself, if I stayed on where
her garments were touching me.

I looked away from her for the pleasure
of looking at her again, of realizing
that my overwrought senses were not
cheating me. Yes, there she was, in all
the luster of that magnetic beauty I cannot
think of even now without an up-blazing
of the fire which is to the heart
what the sun is to the eyes of a blind
man dreaming of sight. There she was
on my side of the chasm that had separated
us—alone with me—mine—mine!
And my heart dilated with pride. But
a moment later came a sense of humility.
Her beauty intoxicated me, but
her youth, her fineness, so fragile for
such rough hands as mine, awed and
humbled me. “I must be very gentle,”
said I to myself. “I have promised
that she shall never regret. God help
me to keep my promise! She is mine,
but only to preserve and protect.” And
that idea of responsibility in possession
was new to me—was to have far-reaching
consequences. Now I think it
changed the whole course of my life.

She was leaning forward, her elbow
on the casement of the open window of
the brougham, her cheek against her
hand; the moonlight was glistening on
her round, firm forearm and on her
serious face. “How far, far away from—everything
it seems here!” she said,
her voice tuned to that soft, clear light,
“and how beautiful it is!” Then, addressing
the moon and the shadows of
the trees rather than me: “I wish I
could go on and on—and never return
to—to the world.”

“I wish we could,” said I.

My tone was low, but she started,
drew back into the brougham, became
an outline in the deep shadow. In another
mood that might have angered
me. Just then it hurt me so deeply that
to remember it to-day is to feel a faint
ache in the scar of the long healed
wound. My face was not hidden as
was hers; so, perhaps, she saw. At any
rate, her voice tried to be friendly as
she said: “Well—I have crossed the
Rubicon. And I don’t regret. It was
silly of me to cry. I thought I had
been through so much that I was beyond
such weakness. But you will
find me calm from now on, and reasonable.”

“Not too reasonable, please,” said I,
with an attempt at her lightness. “A
reasonable woman is as trying as an
unreasonable man.”

“But we are going to be sensible with
each other,” she urged, “like two
friends. Aren’t we?”

 “We are going to be what we are
going to be,” said I. “We’ll have to
take life as it comes.”

That clumsy reminder set her to
thinking, stirred her vague uneasiness
in those strange circumstances to active
alarm. For presently she said, in a
tone that was not quite so matter-of-course
as she would have liked to make
it: “We’ll go now to my uncle Frank’s.
He’s a brother of my father. I always
used to like him best—and still do. But
he married a woman mamma thought—queer—and
they hadn’t much—and
he lives away up on the West Side—One
Hundred and Twenty-seventh
Street.”

“The wise plan, the only wise plan,”
said I, not so calm as she must have
thought me, “is to go to my partner’s
house and send out for a minister.”

“Not to-night,” she replied, nervously.
“Take me to uncle Frank’s, and
to-morrow we can discuss what to do
and how to do it.”

“To-night,” I persisted. “We must
be married to-night. No more uncertainty
and indecision and weakness.
Let us begin bravely, Anita!”

“To-morrow,” she said. “But not
to-night. I must think it over.”

“To-night,” I repeated. “To-morrow
will be full of its own problems.
This is to-night’s.”

She shook her head, and I saw that
the struggle between us had begun—the
struggle against her timidity and
conventionality. “No, not to-night.”
This in her tone for finality.

To have argued with any woman in
such circumstances would have been
dangerous; to have argued with her
would have been fatal. To reason with
a woman is to flatter her into suspecting
you of weakness and herself of
strength. I told the chauffeur to turn
about and go slowly uptown. She
settled back into her corner of the
brougham. Neither of us spoke until
we were passing Clairmont. Then she
started out of her secure confidence in
my obedience, and exclaimed: “This is
not the way!” And her voice had in
it the hasty call-to-arms.

“No,” I replied, determined to push
the panic into a rout. “As I told you,
our future shall be settled to-night.”
That in my tone for finality.

A pause, then: “It has been settled,”
she said, like a child that feels, yet denies,
its impotence as it struggles in the
compelling arms of its father. “I
thought until a few minutes ago that I
really intended to marry you. Now I
see that I didn’t.”

“Another reason why we’re not going
to your uncle’s,” said I.

She leaned forward so that I could
see her face. “I cannot marry you,”
she said. “I feel humble toward you,
for having misled you. But it is better
that you—and I—should have found
out now than too late.”

“It is too late—too late to go back.”

“Would you wish to marry a woman
who does not love you, who loves some
one else, and who tells you so and refuses
to marry you?” She had tried to
concentrate enough scorn into her voice
to hide her fear.

“I would,” said I. “And I shall. I’ll
not desert you, Anita, when your courage
and strength fail. I will carry you
on to safety.”

“I tell you I cannot marry you,” she
cried, between appeal and command.
“There are reasons—I may not tell you.
But if I might, you would—would take
me to my uncle’s. I cannot marry
you!”

“That is what conventionality bids
you say now,” I replied. “But what will
it bid you say to-morrow morning, as
we drive down crowded Fifth Avenue,
after a night in this brougham?”

I could not see her, for she drew back
into the darkness as sharply as if I had
struck her with all my force full in the
face. But I could feel the effect of my
words upon her. I paused, not because
I expected or wished an answer, but because
I had to steady myself—myself,
not my purpose; my purpose was inflexible.
I would put through what
we had begun, just as I would have
held her and cut off her arm with my
pocketknife if we had been cast away
alone, and I had had to do it to save
her life. She was not competent to decide
for herself. Every problem that
 had ever faced her had been decided by
others for her. Who but me could decide
for her now? I longed to plead
with her, to show her how I was suffering;
but I dared not. “She would
misunderstand,” said I to myself. “She
would think you were weakening.”

Full fifteen minutes of that frightful
silence before she said: “I will go
where you wish.” And she said it in
a tone which makes me wince as I recall
it now.

I called my partner’s address up
through the tube. Again that frightful
silence, then she was trying to choke
back the sobs. A few words I caught:
“They have broken my will—they have
broken my will.”

Ball lived in a big, graystone house
that stood apart and commanded a noble
view of the Hudson and the Palisades.
It was, in the main, a reproduction
of a French chateau, and such
changes as the architect had made in
his model were not positively disfiguring,
though amusing. There should
have been trees and shrubbery about it,
but—“As Mrs. B. says,” Joe had explained
to me, “what’s the use of sinking
a lot of cash in a house people can’t
see?” So there was not a bush, not a
flower. Inside—— One day Ball took
me on a tour of the art shops. “I’ve got
a dozen corners and other big bare
spots to fill,” said he. “Mrs. B. hates
to give up money, haggles over every
article. I’m going to put the job
through in business style.” I soon discovered
that I had been brought along
to admire his “business style,” not to
suggest. After two hours, in which he
bought in small lots about a carload of
statuary, paintings, vases and rugs, he
said, “This is too slow.” He pointed his
stick at a crowded corner of the shop.
“How much for that bunch of stuff?”
he demanded. The proprietor gave him
a figure. “I’ll close,” said Joe, “if you’ll
give fifteen off for cash.” The proprietor
agreed. “Now we’re done,”
said Joe to me. “Let’s go downtown,
and maybe I can pick up what I’ve
dropped.”

You can imagine that interior. But
don’t picture it as notably worse than
the interior of the average New York
palace. It was, if anything, better than
those houses, where people who deceive
themselves about their lack of taste
have taken great pains to prevent anyone
else from being deceived. One
could hardly move in Joe’s big rooms
for the litter of gilded and tapestried
furniture, and their crowded walls
made the eyes ache.

The appearance of the man who
opened the door for Anita and me suggested
that our ring had roused him
from a bed where he had deposited
himself without bothering to take off
his clothes. At the sound of my voice,
Ball peered out of his private smoking
room, at the far end of the hall. He
started forward; then, seeing how I
was accompanied, stopped with mouth
ajar. He had on a ragged smoking
jacket, a pair of shapeless old Romeo
slippers, his ordinary business waistcoat
and trousers. He was wearing neither
tie nor collar, and a short, black pipe
was between his fingers. We had evidently
caught the household stripped of
“lugs,” and sunk in the down-at-the-heel
slovenliness which it called “comfort.”
Joe was crimson with confusion,
and was using his free hand to stroke,
alternately, his shiny bald head and his
heavy brown mustache. He got himself
together sufficiently, after a few
seconds, to disappear into his den.
When he came out again, pipe and
ragged jacket were gone, and he rushed
for us in a gorgeous gray velvet jacket
with dark red facings, and a showy pair
of slippers.

“Glad to see you, Mr. Blacklock”—he
always addressed every man as Mister
in his own house, just as “Mrs. B.”
always called him “Mister Ball,” and
he called her “Missus Ball” before
“company.” “Come right into the front
parlor. Billy, turn on the electric
lights.”

Anita had been standing with her
head down. She now looked round
with shame and terror in those expressive
blue-gray eyes of hers; her
delicate nostrils were quivering. I
hastened to introduce Ball to her. Her
impulse to fly passed; her training in
 doing the conventional thing asserted
itself. She lowered her head again,
murmured an inaudible acknowledgment
of Joe’s greeting.

“Your wife is at home?” said I. If
one was at home in the evening, the
other always was also, and both were
always there, unless they were at some
theater—except on Sunday night, when
they dined at Sherry’s, because many
fashionable people did it. They had
no friends and few acquaintances. In
their humbler and happy days they had
had many friends, but had lost them
when they moved away from Brooklyn
and went to live, like uneasy, out-of-place
visitors, in their grand house, pretending
to be what they longed to be,
longing to be what they pretended to be,
and as discontented as they deserved.

“Oh, yes, Mrs. B.’s at home,” Joe
answered. “I guess she and Alva were—about
to go to bed.” Alva was their
one child. She had been christened
Malvina, after Joe’s mother; but when
the Balls “blossomed out” they renamed
her Alva, which they somehow
had got the impression was “smarter.”

At Joe’s blundering confession that
the females of the family were in no
condition to receive, Anita said to me
in a low voice: “Let us go.”

I pretended not to hear. “Rout ’em
out,” said I to Joe. “And then take my
electric and bring the nearest parson.
There’s going to be a wedding—right
here.” And I looked round the long
salon, with everything draped for the
summer departure. Joe whisked the
cover off one chair, his man off another.
“I’ll have the women folks down
in two minutes,” he cried. Then to the
man: “Get a move on you, Billy. Stir
’em up in the kitchen. Do the best you
can about supper—and put a lot of
champagne on the ice. That’s the main
thing at a wedding.”

Anita had seated herself listlessly in
one of the uncovered chairs. The wrap
slipped back from her shoulders and—how
proud I was of her! Joe gazed,
took advantage of her not looking up
to slap me on the back and to jerk his
head in enthusiastic approval. Then
he, too, disappeared.

A wait, during which we could hear
through the silence excited undertones
from the upper floors. The words were
indistinct until Joe’s heavy voice sent
down to us an angry “No damn’ nonsense,
I tell you. Allie’s got to come,
too. She’s not such a fool as you think.
Bad example—bosh!”

Anita started up. “Oh—please—please!”
she cried. “Take me away—anywhere!
This is dreadful.”

It was, indeed, dreadful. If I could
have had my way at just that moment,
it would have gone hard with “Mrs. B.”
and “Allie”—and heavy-voiced Joe, too.
But I hid my feelings. “There’s nowhere
else to go,” said I, “except the
brougham.”

She sank helplessly into her chair.

A few minutes more of silence, and
there was a rustling on the stairs. She
started up, trembling, looked round, as
if seeking some way of escape or some
place to hide. Joe was in the doorway
holding aside one of the curtains.
There entered, in a beribboned and beflounced
tea gown, a pretty, if rather
ordinary, woman of forty, with a petulant
baby face. She was trying to look
reserved and severe. She hardly
glanced at me before fastening sharp,
suspicious eyes on Anita.

“Mrs. Ball,” said I, “this is Miss Ellersly.”

“Miss Ellersly!” she exclaimed, her
face changing. And she advanced and
took both Anita’s hands. “Mr. Ball is
so stupid,” she went on, with that amusingly
affected accent which is the “Sunday
clothes” of speech.

“I didn’t catch the name, my dear,”
Joe stammered.

“Be off,” said I, aside, to him. “Get
the nearest preacher, and hustle him
here with his tools.”

I had one eye on Anita all the time,
and I saw her gaze follow Joe as he
hurried out; and her expression made
my heart ache. I heard him saying in
the hall, “Go in, Allie. It’s O. K.;”
heard the door slam, knew we should
soon have some sort of minister with
us.

“Allie” entered the drawing room. I
had not seen her in six years. I remembered
 her unpleasantly as a great,
bony, florid child, unable to stand still
or to sit still, or to keep her tongue still,
full of aimless questions and giggles and
silly remarks, which she and her mother
thought funny. I saw her now, grown
into a handsome young woman, with
enough beauty points for an honorable
mention, if not for a prize—straight
and strong and rounded, with a brow
and a keen look out of the eyes which
it seemed a pity should be wasted on a
woman. Her mother’s looks, her father’s
good sense, a personality got from
neither, but all her own, and unusual
and interesting.

“From what Mr. Ball said,” Mrs.
Ball was gushing affectedly to Anita,
“I got an idea, that—well, really, I
didn’t know what to think.”

Anita looked as if she were about to
suffocate. Allie came to the rescue.
“Not very complimentary to Mr. Blacklock,
mother,” said she, good-humoredly.
Then to Anita, with a simple
friendliness there was no resisting:
“Wouldn’t you like to come up to my
room for a few minutes?”

“Oh, thank you,” responded Anita,
after a quick but thorough inspection
of Alva’s face, to make sure she was
like her voice. I had not counted on
this; I had been assuming that Anita
would not be out of my sight until we
were married. It was on the tip of my
tongue to interfere when she looked at
me—for permission to go. “Don’t keep
her too long,” said I to Alva, and they
were gone.

“You can’t blame me—really you
can’t, Mr. Blacklock,” Mrs. Ball began
to plead for herself, as soon as they
were safely out of hearing. “After
some things—mere hints, you understand—for
I’m careful what I permit
Mr. Ball to say before me. I think married
people cannot be too respectful of
each other. I never tolerate vulgarity.”

“No doubt, Joe has made me out a
very vulgar person,” said I, forgetting
her lack of sense of humor.

“Oh, not at all, not at all, Mr. Blacklock,”
she protested, in a panic lest she
had done her husband damage with me.
“I understand, men will be men, though
as a pure-minded woman, I’m sure I
can’t imagine why they should be.”

“How far off is the nearest church?”
I cut in.

“Only two blocks—that is, the Methodist
church,” she replied. “But I know
Mr. Ball will bring an Episcopalian.”

“Why, I thought you were a devoted
Presbyterian,” said I, recalling how
in their Brooklyn days she used to insist
on Joe’s going with her twice every
Sunday to sleep through long sermons.

She looked uncomfortable. “I was
reared Presbyterian,” she explained,
confusedly, “but you know how it is in
New York. And when we came to
live here, we got out of the habit of
churchgoing. And all Alva’s little
friends were Episcopalians. So I
drifted toward that church. I find the
service so satisfying—so—elegant. And—one
sees there the people one sees
socially.”

“How is your culture class?” I inquired,
deliberately malicious, in my impatience
and nervousness. “And do
you still take conversation lessons?”

She was furiously annoyed. “Oh,
those old jokes of Joe’s,” she said, affecting
disdainful amusement.

In fact, they were anything but
jokes. On Mondays and Thursdays
she used to attend a class for women
who, like herself, wished to be “up-to-date
on culture and all that sort of
thing.” They hired a teacher to cram
them with odds and ends about art and
politics and the “latest literature, heavy
and light.” On Tuesdays and Fridays
she had an “indigent gentlewoman,”
whatever that may be, come to her to
teach her how to converse and otherwise
conduct herself according to the
“standards of polite society.” Joe used
to give imitations of those conversation
lessons that raised roars of laughter
round the poker table, the louder
because so many of the other men had
wives with the same ambitions and the
same methods of attaining them.

Mrs. Ball came back to the subject
of Anita. “I am glad you are going to
settle with such a charming girl. She
 comes of such a charming family. I
have never happened to meet any of
them. We are in the West Side set,
you know, while they move in the East
Side set, and New York is so large
that one almost never meets anyone
outside one’s own set.” This smooth
snobbishness, said in the affected “society”
tone, was as out of place in her
as rouge and hair dye in a wholesome,
honest old grandmother.

I began to pace the floor. “Can it
be,” I fretted aloud, “that Joe’s racing
round looking for an Episcopalian
preacher, when there was a Methodist
at hand?”

“I’m sure he wouldn’t bring anything
but a Church of England priest,” Mrs.
Ball assured me, loftily. “Why, Miss
Ellersly wouldn’t think she was married,
if she hadn’t a priest of her own
church.”

My temper got the bit in its teeth. I
stopped before her, and fixed her with
an eye that must have had some fire
in it. “I’m not marrying a fool, Mrs.
Ball,” said I. “You mustn’t judge her
by her bringing up—by her family.
Children have a way of bringing themselves
up, in spite of damn fool parents.”

She weakened so promptly that I was
ashamed of myself. My only excuse
for getting out of patience with her is
that I had seen her seldom in the last
few years, had forgotten how matter-of-surface
her affectation and snobbery
were, and how little they interfered
with her being a good mother and a
good wife, up to the limits of her brain
capacity.

“I’m sure, Mr. Blacklock,” she said,
plaintively, “I only wished to say what
was pleasant and nice about your
fiancée. I know she’s a lovely girl.
I’ve often admired her at the opera.
She goes a great deal in Mrs. Langdon’s
box, and Mrs. Langdon and I are
together on the board of managers of
the Magdalene Home, and also on the
board of the Hospital for Unfortunate
Gentlefolk.” And so on, and on.

I walked up and down among those
wrapped-up, ghostly chairs and tables
and cabinets and statues many times
before Joe arrived with the minister—and
he was a Methodist, McCabe by
name. You should have seen Mrs.
Ball’s look as he advanced his portly
form and round face with its shaven
upper lip into the drawing room. She
tried to be cordial, but she couldn’t—her
mind was on Anita, and the horror
which would fill her when she discovered
that she was to be married by a
preacher of a sect unknown to fashionable
circles.

“All I ask of you,” said I, “is that
you cut it as short as possible. Miss
Ellersly is tired and nervous.” This
while we were shaking hands after Joe’s
introduction.

“You can count on me, sir,” said McCabe,
giving my hand an extra shake
before dropping it. “I’ve no doubt,
from what my young neighbor here tells
me, that your marriage is already made
in your hearts and with all solemnity.
The form is an incident—important, but
only an incident.”

I liked that, and I liked his unaffected
way of saying it. His voice had
more of the homely, homelike, rural
twang in it than I had heard in New
York in many a day. I mentally added
fifty dollars to the fee I had intended to
give him. And now Anita and Alva
were coming down the stairway. I was
amazed at sight of her. Her evening
dress had given place to a pretty blue
street suit with a short skirt—white
showing at her wrists, at her neck and
through slashings in the coat over her
bosom; and on her head was a hat to
match. I looked at her feet—the slippers
had been replaced by boots. “And
they’re just right for her,” said Alva,
who was following my glance, “though
I’m not so tall as she.”

But what amazed me most, and delighted
me, was that Anita seemed to
be almost in good spirits. It was evident
she had formed with Joe’s daughter
one of those sudden friendships so
great and so vivid that they rarely live
long after the passing of the heat of the
emergency which bred them. Mrs. Ball
saw it, also, and was straightway giddied
into a sort of ecstasy. You can imagine
the visions it conjured. I’ve no
 doubt she talked house on the east side
of the park to Joe that very night, before
she let him sleep. However, Anita’s
face was serious enough when we
took our places before the minister, with
his little, black-bound book open. And
as he read in a voice that was genuinely
impressive those words that no voice
could make unimpressive, I watched
her, saw her paleness blanch into pallor,
saw the dusk creep round her eyes until
they were like stars waning somberly
before the gray face of dawn.
When they closed and her head began
to sway, I steadied her with my arm.
And so we stood, I with my arm round
her, she leaning lightly against my
shoulder. Her answers were mere
movements of the lips.

At the end, when I kissed her cheek,
she said: “Is it over?”

“Yes,” McCabe answered—she was
looking at him. “And I wish you all
happiness, Mrs. Blacklock.”

She stared at him with great wondering
eyes. Her form relaxed. I carried
her to a chair. Joe came with a glass of
champagne; she drank some of it, and
it brought life back to her face, and
some color. With a naturalness that
deceived even me for the moment, she
smiled up at Joe as she handed him the
glass. “Is it bad luck,” she asked, “for
me to be the first to drink my own
health?” And she stood, looking tranquilly
at everyone—except me.

I took McCabe into the hall and paid
him off. When we came back, I said:
“Now we must be going.”

“Oh, but surely you’ll stay for supper!”
cried Joe’s wife.

“No,” replied I, in a tone which
made it impossible to insist. “We appreciate
your kindness, but we’ve imposed
on it enough.” And I shook
hands with her and with Allie and the
minister, and, linking Joe’s arm in mine,
made for the door. I gave the necessary
directions to my chauffeur while
we were waiting for Anita to come
down the steps. Joe’s daughter was
close beside her, and they kissed each
other good-by, Alva on the verge of
tears, Anita not suggesting any emotion
of any sort. “To-morrow—sure,”
Anita said to her. And she answered:
“Yes, indeed—as soon as you telephone
me.” And so we were off, a shower of
rice rattling on the roof of the brougham—the
slatternly manservant had
thrown it from the midst of the group
of servants.

Neither of us spoke. I watched her
face without seeming to do so, and by
the light of occasional street lamps saw
her studying me furtively. At last she
said: “I wish to go to my uncle’s now.”

“We are going home,” said I.

“But the house will be shut up,” said
she, “and everyone will be in bed. It’s
nearly midnight. Besides, they might
not——” She came to a full stop.

“We are going home,” I repeated.
“To the Willoughby.”

She gave me a look that was meant
to scorch—and it did. But I showed at
the surface no sign of how I was wincing
and shrinking.

She drew further into her corner, and
out of its darkness came, in a low voice:
“How I hate you!” like the whisper of
a bullet.

I kept silent until I had control of
myself. Then, as if talking of a matter
which had been finally and amicably settled,
I began: “The apartment isn’t exactly
ready for us, but Joe’s just about
now telephoning my man that we are
coming, and telephoning your people to
send your maid down there.”

“I wish to go to my uncle’s,” she repeated.

“My wife will go with me,” said I,
quietly and gently. “I am considerate
of her, not of her unwise impulses.”

A long pause, then from her, in icy
calmness: “I am in your power just
now, but I warn you that, if you do not
take me to my uncle’s, you will wish you
had never seen me.”

“I’ve wished that many times already,”
said I, sadly. “I’ve wished it
from the bottom of my heart this whole
evening, when step by step fate has
been forcing me on to do things that
are even more hateful to me than to
you. For they not only make me hate
myself, but make you hate me, too.” I
laid my hand on her arm and held it
there, though she tried to draw away.
 “Anita,” I said, “I would do anything
for you—live for you, die for you. But
there’s that something inside me—you’ve
felt it—and when it says ‘must,’
I can’t disobey—you know I can’t. And,
though you might break my heart, you
could not break that will. It’s as much
your master as it is mine.”

“We shall see—to-morrow,” she said.

“Do not put me to the test,” I pleaded.
Then I added what I knew to be true:
“But you will not. You know it would
take some one stronger than your uncle,
stronger than your parents, to drive
me from what I believe right for you
and for me.” From the moment that I
found the bogy of conventionality potent
enough with her to frighten her
into keeping her word and marrying me,
I had no fear for “to-morrow.” The
hour when she could defy me had
passed.

A long, long silence, the electric
speeding southward under the arching
trees of the West Drive. I remember it
was as we skirted the lower end of the
Mall that she said evenly: “You have
made me hate you so that it terrifies me.
I am afraid of the consequences that
must come to you and to me.”

“And well you may be,” I answered,
gently. “For you’ve seen enough of
me to get at least a hint of what I
would do, if you drove me to it. Hate
is terrible, Anita, but love can be more
terrible.”

At the Willoughby she let me help
her descend from the electric, waited
until I sent it away, walked beside me
into the building. My man, Sanders,
had evidently been listening for the elevator;
the door opened without my
ringing, and there he was, bowing low.
She acknowledged his welcome with
that regard for “appearances” which
training had made instinctive. In the
center of my—our—drawing-room table
was a mass of gorgeous roses.
“Where did you get ’em?” I asked him,
in an aside.

“The elevator boy’s brother, sir,” he
replied, “works in the florist’s shop just
across the street, next to the church.
He happened to be downstairs when I
got your message, sir. So I was able
to get a few flowers. I’m sorry, sir, I
hadn’t a little more time.”

“You’ve done noble,” said I, and I
shook hands with him warmly.

Anita was greeting those flowers as
if they were a friend suddenly appearing
in a time of need. She turned now
and beamed on Sanders. “Thank you,”
she said; “thank you.” And Sanders
was hers.

“Anything I can do—ma’am—sir?”
asked Sanders.

“Nothing—except send my maid as
soon as she comes,” she replied.

“I shan’t need you,” said I.

“Mr. Monson is still here,” he said,
lingering. “Shall I send him away, sir,
or do you wish to see him?”

“I’ll speak to him myself in a moment,”
I answered.

When Sanders was gone, she seated
herself and absently played with the
buttons of her glove.

“Shall I bring Monson?” I asked.
“You know, he’s my—factotum.”

“I do not wish to see him,” she answered.

“You do not like him?” said I.

After a brief hesitation she answered,
“No.”

I restrained a strong impulse to ask
her why, for instinct told me she had
some especial reason that somehow concerned
me. I said merely: “Then I
shall get rid of him.”

“Not on my account,” she replied, indifferently.
“I care nothing about him
one way or the other.”

“He goes at the end of his month,”
said I.

She was now taking off her gloves.
“Before your maid comes,” I went on,
“let me explain about the apartment.
This room and the two leading out of
it are yours. My own suit is on the
other side of our private hall there.”

She colored high, paled. I saw that
she did not intend to speak.

I stood awkwardly, waiting for something
further to come into my own
head. “Good-night,” said I, finally,
bowing as if I were taking leave of a
formal acquaintance at the end of a formal
call.

She did not answer.

 I left the room, closing the door behind
me. I paused an instant, heard
the key click in the lock. And I burned
in a hot flush of shame—shame that she
should have thought so basely of me.
For I did not then realize how far
apart we were, and utterly in the dark,
each toward the other. I joined Monson
in my little smoking room. “Congratulate
you,” he began, with his nasty,
supercilious grin, which of late had
been getting on my nerves severely.

“Thanks,” I replied, curtly, paying no
attention to his outstretched hand. “I
want you to put a notice of the marriage
in to-morrow morning’s Herald.”

“Give me the facts—clergyman’s
name—place, and so on,” said he.

“Unnecessary,” I answered. “Just
our names and the date—that’s all.
You’d better step lively. It’s late, and
it’ll be too late if you delay.”

With an irritating show of deliberation
he lit a fresh cigarette before setting
out. I heard her maid come. After
about an hour I went into the hall—no
light showed through the transoms
of her suit. I returned to my own
part of the flat and went to bed in the
spare room to which Sanders had hastily
moved my personal belongings.
And almost as soon as my head touched
the pillow I was asleep. That day which
began in disaster—in what a blaze of
triumph it had ended! Anita—she was
my wife, and under my roof! But
stronger than the sense of victory won
was a new emotion—a sense of a duty
done, of a responsibility begun.

XIV.

Joe got to the office rather later than
usual the next morning. They told him
I was already there, but he wouldn’t believe
it until he had come into my private
den and with his own eyes had
seen me. “Well, I’m jiggered!” said
he. “It seems to have made less impression
on you than it did on us. My
missus and the little un wouldn’t let me
go to bed till after two. They sat on
and on, questioning me and discussing.”

I laughed—partly because I knew
that Joe, like most men, was as full of
gossip and as eager for it as a convalescent
old maid, and that, whoever
might have been the first at his house
to make the break for bed, he was the
last to leave off talking. But the chief
reason for my laugh was that, just before
he came in on me, I was almost
pinching myself to see whether I was
dreaming it all, and he had made me
feel how vividly true it was.

“Why don’t you ease down, Blacklock?”
he went on. “Everything’s
smooth. The business—at least, my
end of it, and I suppose your end, too—was
never in better shape, never
growing so fast. You could go off for
a week or two, just as well as not.”

And he honestly thought it, so little
did I let him know about the larger
enterprises of Blacklock & Co. I could
have spoken a dozen words, and he
would have been floundering like a
caught fish in a basket. There are men—a
very few—who work more swiftly
and more surely when they know
they’re on the brink of ruin; but not
Joe. One glimpse of our real National
Coal account, and all my power over
him couldn’t have kept him from showing
the whole Street that Blacklock &
Co. was shaky. And whenever the
Street begins to think a man is shaky,
he must be strong indeed to escape the
fate of the wolf that stumbles as it runs
with the pack.

“No holiday at present, Joe,” was my
reply to his suggestion. “Perhaps the
second week in July; but our marriage
was so sudden that we haven’t had the
time to get ready for a trip.”

“Yes—it was sudden, wasn’t it?”
said Joe, curiosity twitching his nose
like a dog’s at scent of a rat. “How
did it happen?”

“Oh, I’ll tell you some time,” replied
I. “I must go to work now.”

And work a-plenty there was. Before
me rose a huge sheaf of clamorous
telegrams from our out-of-town customers
and our agents; and soon my
anteroom was crowded with my local
following, sore and shorn. I suppose
a score or more of the habitual heavy
plungers on my tips were ruined and
 hundreds of others were thousands and
tens of thousands out of pocket. “Do
you want me to talk to these people?”
inquired Joe, with the kindly intention
of giving me a chance to shift the unpleasant
duty to him.

“Certainly not,” said I. “When the
place is jammed, let me know. I’ll jack
’em up.”

It made Joe uneasy for me even to
talk of using my “language”—he would
have crawled from the Battery to Harlem
to keep me from using it on him.
So he silently left me alone. My system
of dealing face to face with the
speculating and investing public had
many great advantages over that of all
the other big operators—the system of
decoying the public from behind cleverly
contrived screens and slaughtering
it without showing so much as the tip
of a gun or nose that could be identified.
But to my method there was a
disadvantage that made men, who happen
to have more hypocrisy and less
nerve than I, shrink from it—when one
of my tips miscarried, down upon me
would swoop the bad losers in a body to
give me a turbulent and interesting
quarter of an hour.

Toward ten o’clock, my boy came in
and said: “Mr. Ball thinks it’s about
time for you to see some of these people.”

I went into the main room, where the
tickers and blackboards were. As I
approached through my outer office I
could hear the noise the crowd was
making—as they cursed me. If you
want to rile the very inmost soul of the
average human being, don’t take his
reputation or his wife; just cause him
to lose money. There were among my
customers many with the true, even-tenored
sporting instinct. These were
bearing their losses with philosophy—none
of them was there. Of the perhaps
three hundred who had come to
ease their anguish by tongue-lashing
me, every one was mad through and
through—those who had lost a few
hundred dollars as infuriated as those
whom my misleading tip had cost thousands
and tens of thousands; those
whom I had helped to win all they had
in the world more savage than those
new to my following.

I took my stand in the doorway, a
step up from the floor of the main
room. I looked all round until I had
met each pair of angry eyes. They say
I can give my face an expression that
is anything but agreeable; such talent as
I have in that direction I exerted then.
The instant I appeared a silence fell;
but I waited until the last pair, of claws
drew in. Then I said, in the quiet tone
the army officer uses when he tells the
mob that the machine guns will open
up in two minutes by the watch: “Gentlemen,
in the effort to counteract my
warning to the public, the Textile
crowd rocketed the stock yesterday.
Those who heeded my warning and
sold got excellent prices. Those who
did not should sell to-day. Not even
the powerful interests behind Textile
can long maintain yesterday’s prices.”

A wave of restlessness passed over
the crowd. Many shifted their eyes
from me and began to murmur.

I raised my voice slightly as I went
on: “The speculators, the gamblers, are
the only people who were hurt. Those
who sold what they didn’t have are paying
for their folly. I have no sympathy
for them. Blacklock & Co.
wishes none such in its following, and
seizes every opportunity to weed them
out. We are in business only for the
bona fide investing public, and we are
stronger with that public to-day than
we have ever been.”

Again I looked from coward to coward
of that mob, changed from three
hundred strong to three hundred weak.
Then I bowed and withdrew, leaving
them to mutter and disperse. I felt well
content with the trend of events—I
who wished to impress the public and
the financiers that I had broken with
speculation and speculators, could I
have had a better than this unexpected
opportunity sharply to define my new
course? And as Textiles, unsupported,
fell toward the close of the day, my
content rose toward my normal high
spirits. There was no whisper in the
Street that I was in trouble; on the
contrary, the idea was gaining ground
 that I had really long ceased to be a
stock gambler and deserved a much
better reputation than I had. Reputation
is a matter of diplomacy rather
than of desert. In all my career I was
never less entitled to a good reputation
than in those June days; yet the disastrous
gambling follies, yes, and worse,
I then committed, formed the secure
foundation of my reputation for conservatism
and square dealing. From
that time dates the decline of the habit
the newspapers had of speaking of me
as “Black Matt” or “Matt” Blacklock.
In them, and therefore in the public
mind, I began to figure as “Mr. Blacklock”
and “the well-known authority on
finance.”

No doubt, my marriage had something
to do with this. Probably one
couldn’t borrow much money directly
in New York on the strength of a fashionable
marriage; but, so all-pervading
is the snobbishness there, one can get,
by making a fashionable marriage, any
quantity of that deferential respect
from rich people which is, in some circumstances,
easily convertible into cash
and credit.

I waited with a good deal of anxiety,
as you may imagine, for the early editions
of the afternoon papers. The first
article my eye chanced upon was a mere
wordy elaboration of the brief and
vague announcement Monson had put
in the Herald. Later came an interview
with old Ellersly. “Not at all
mysterious,” he had said to the reporters.
“Mr. Blacklock found he
would have to go abroad on business
soon—he didn’t know just when. On
the spur of the moment they decided to
marry.” A good enough story, and I
confirmed it when I admitted the reporters.
I read their estimates of my
fortune and of Anita’s with rather bitter
amusement—she whose father was
living from hand to mouth; I who could
not have emerged from a forced settlement
with enough to enable me to keep
a trap. Still, when one is rich, the
reputation of being rich is heavily expensive;
but when one is poor the reputation
of being rich can be made a
wealth-giving asset.

Even as I was reading these fables of
my millions, there lay on the desk before
me a statement of the exact posture
of my affairs—a memorandum
made by myself for my own eyes, and
to be burned as soon as I mastered it.
On the face of the figures the balance
against me was appalling. My chief asset,
indeed my only asset that measured
up toward my debts, was my Coal
stocks, those bought and those contracted
for; and, while their par value
far exceeded my liabilities, they had to
appear in my memorandum at their actual
market value on that day. I looked
at the calendar—seventeen days until
the reorganization scheme would be announced,
only seventeen days!

Less than three business weeks, and
I should be out of the storm and sailing
safer and smoother seas than I had ever
known. “To indulge hopes is bad,”
thought I, “but not to indulge a hope,
when one has only it between him and
the pit.” And I proceeded to plan on
the not unwarranted assumption that
my coal hope was a present reality. Indeed,
what alternative had I? To put it
among the future’s uncertainties was to
put myself among the utterly ruined.
Using as collateral the Coal stocks I
had bought outright, I borrowed more
money, and with it went still deeper into
the Coal venture.

The morality of these and many of
my other doings in those days will no
doubt be severely condemned. By no
one more severely than by myself—now
that the necessities which then compelled
me have passed. There is no
subject on which men talk, and think,
more humbug than on that subject of
morality. As a matter of fact, except
in those personal relations which are
governed by the affections, what is
morality but the mandate of policy, and
what is policy but the mandate of necessity?
My criticism of Roebuck and
the other “high financiers” is not upon
their morality, but upon their policy,
which is shortsighted and stupid and
base. The moral difference between
me and them is that, while I merely
assert and maintain my right to live,
they deny the right of any but themselves
 to live. I say I criticise them;
but that does not mean that I sympathize
with the public at large in its complainings
against them. The public, its
stupidity and cupidity, creates the conditions
that breed and foster these men.
A rotten cheese reviling the maggots it
has bred!

In those very hours when I was obeying
the great imperative law of self-preservation,
was clutching at every log
that floated by me regardless of whether
it was my property or not so long as it
would help me keep my head above
water—what was going on all around
me? In every office of the downtown
district—merchant, banker, broker,
lawyer, man of commerce or finance—was
not every busy brain plotting not
self-preservation but pillage and sack—plotting
to increase the cost of living
for the masses of men by slipping a little
tax here and a little tax there onto
the cost of everything by which men
live? All along the line between the
farm or mine or shop and the market,
at every one of the tollgates for the
collection of just charges, these big
financiers, backed up by the big lawyers
and the rascally public officials, had an
agent in charge to collect on each passing
article a little more than was honestly
due. A thousand subtle ways of
levying, all combining to pour in upon
the few the torrents of unjust wealth.
I always laugh when I read of laboring
men striking for higher wages. Poor,
ignorant fools—they almost deserve
their fate. They had better be concerning
themselves with a huge, universal
strike at the polls for lower prices.
What will it avail them to get higher
wages, so long as their masters control
and can and will recoup on, the prices
of all the things for which those wages
must be spent?

However, as I was saying, I lived in
Wall Street, in its atmosphere of the
practical morality of “finance.” On
every side swindling operations, great
and small; operations regarded as right
through long-established custom, dishonest
or doubtful; operations on the
way to becoming established by custom
as “respectable.” No man’s title to
anything conceded unless he had the
brains to defend it. There was a time
when it would have been regarded as
wildly preposterous and viciously immoral
to deny property rights in human
beings. There may come a time—who
knows?—when “high finance’s” denial
of a moral right to property of any kind
may cease to be regarded as wicked.
However, I attempt no excuses for myself;
I need them no more than a judge
in the Dark Ages needed to apologize
for ordering a witch to the stake. I
could no more have done differently
than a fish could breathe on land or a
man under water. I did as all the others
did—and I had the justification of
necessity. Right of might being the
code, when men set upon me with pistols,
I meet them with pistols, not with
the discarded and antiquated weapons
of sermon and prayer and the law.

And I thought extremely well of myself
and of my pistols that June afternoon,
as I was hurrying uptown the moment
the day’s settlement on ‘Change
was finished. I had sent out my daily
letter to investors, and its tone of confidence
was genuine—I knew that hundreds
of customers of a better class
would soon be flocking in to take the
places of those I had been compelled to
teach a lesson in the vicissitudes of
gambling. With a light heart and the
physical feeling of a football player
in training, I sped toward home.
Home! For the first time since I was
a squat little slip of a shaver the word
had a personal meaning for me. Perhaps,
if the only other home of mine
had been less uninviting, I should not
have looked forward with such high
beating of the heart to that cold home
Anita was making for me. No, I withdraw
that. It is fellows like me, to
whom kindly looks and unbought attentions
are as unfamiliar as flowers to
the Arctic—it is men like me that appreciate
and treasure and warm up under
the faintest show or shadowy suggestion
of the sunshine of sentiment.
I’d be a little ashamed to say how much
money I handed out to servants and
beggars and street gamins that day. I
had a home to go to!

 As my electric drew up at the Willoughby,
a carriage backed to make
room for it. I recognized the horses
and the driver and the crests. “How
long has Mrs. Ellersly been with my
wife?” I asked the elevator boy, as he
was taking me up.

“About half an hour, sir,” he answered.
“But Mr. Ellersly—I took up
his card before lunch, and he’s still
there.”

Instead of using my key, I rang the
bell, and when Sanders opened, I said:
“Is Mrs. Blacklock in?” in a voice loud
enough to penetrate to the drawing
room.

As I had hoped, Anita appeared. Her
dress told me that her trunks had come—she
had sent for her trunks! “Mother
and father are here,” said she, without
looking at me.

I followed her into the drawing room
and, for the benefit of the servants, Mr.
and Mrs. Ellersly and I greeted each
other courteously, though Mrs. Ellersly’s
eyes and mine met in a glance like
the flash of steel on steel. “We were
just going,” said she, and then I felt
that I had arrived in the midst of a
tempest of uncommon fury.

“You must stop and make me a visit,”
protested I, with elaborate politeness.
To myself I was assuming that they had
come to “make up and be friends”—and
resume their places at the trough.

“I wish we could,” she answered, in
her best manner. And she was moving
toward the door, the old man in her
wake. Neither of them offered to shake
hands with me; neither made pretense
of saying good-by to Anita, standing
by the window like a pillar of ice. I
had closed the drawing-room door behind
me, as I entered. I was about to
open it for them when I was restrained
by what I saw working in the old woman’s
face. She had set her will on escaping
from my loathed presence without a
“scene”; but her rage at having been
outgeneraled was too fractious for her
will.

“You scoundrel!” she hissed, her
whole body shaking and her carefully
cultivated appearance of the gracious
evening of youth swallowed up in a
black cyclone of hate. “You gutter
plant! God will punish you for the
shame you have brought upon us.”

I opened the door and bowed, without
a word, without even the desire to
return insult for insult—had not Anita
again and finally rejected them and
chosen me? As they passed into the
private hall I rang for Sanders to come
and let them out. When I turned back
into the drawing room, Anita was
seated, was reading a book. I waited
until I saw she was not going to speak.
Then I said: “What time will you have
dinner?” But my face must have been
expressing some of the joy and gratitude
that filled me. “She has chosen
me!” I was saying to myself over and
over.

“Whenever you usually have it,” she
replied, without looking up.

“At seven o’clock, then. You had
better tell Sanders.” And I rang for
him and went into my little smoking
room. She had resisted her parents’
final appeal to her to return to them.
She had cast in her lot with me. “The
rest can be left to time,” said I to myself.
And, reviewing all that had happened,
I let a wild hope thrust tenacious
roots deep into me—the hope that
she did not quite understand her own
mind as to me. How often ignorance is
a blessing; how often knowledge would
make the step falter and the heart quail.
Who would have the courage, not to
speak of the desire, to live his life, if he
knew his own future?

XV.

During dinner I bore the whole burden
of conversation—though burden I
did not find it. Like most of the most
reticent men, I am extremely talkative.
Silence sets people to wondering and
prying; he hides his secrets best who
hides them at the bottom of a river of
words. If my spirits are high, I often
talk aloud to myself when there is no
one convenient. And how could my
spirits be anything but high, with her
sitting there opposite me, mine, mine
for better or for worse, through good
and evil report—my wife!

 She was only formally responsive, reluctant
and brief in answers, volunteering
nothing. The servants waiting on
us no doubt laid her manner to shyness;
I understood it, or thought I did—but
I was not troubled. It is as natural
for me to hope as to breathe; and with
my knowledge of character, how could
I take seriously the moods and impulses
of one whom I regarded as a childlike
girl, trained in false pride and false
ideals? “She has chosen to stay with
me,” said I to myself. “Actions count,
not words or manner. A few days or
weeks, and she will be herself, and
mine.” And I went gayly on with my
efforts to interest her, to make her smile
and forget the rôle she had commanded
herself to play. Nor was I wholly unsuccessful.
Again and again I thought
I saw a gleam of interest in her eyes
or the beginnings of a smile about that
sweet mouth of hers. I was careful not
to overdo my part. As soon as we finished
dessert I said: “You loathe cigar
smoke, so I’ll hide myself in my den.
Sanders will bring you the cigarettes.”
I had myself telephoned for a supply of
her kind early in the day.

She made a polite protest for the
benefit of the servants; but I was firm,
and she was free to think things over
alone in the drawing room—“your sitting
room,” I called it now. I had not
finished a small cigar when there came
a timid knock at my door. I threw
away the cigar and opened. “I thought
it was you,” said I. “I’m familiar with
the knocks of all the others. And this
was new—like a summer wind tapping
with a flower for admission at a closed
window.” And I laughed with a little
raillery, and she smiled, colored, tried to
seem cold and hostile again.

“Shall I go with you to your sitting
room?” I went on. “Perhaps the cigar
smoke here——”

“No, no,” she interrupted; “I don’t
really mind cigars—and the windows
are wide open. Besides, I came for
only a moment—just to say——”

As she cast about for words to carry
her on, I drew up a chair for her. She
looked at it uncertainly, seated herself.
“When mamma was here—this afternoon,”
she went on, “she was urging me
to—to do what she wished. And after
she had used several arguments, without
changing me—she said something
I—I’ve been thinking it over, and it
seemed I ought in fairness to tell you.”

I waited.

“She said: ‘In a few days more he’—that
meant you—‘he will be ruined. He
imagines the worst is over for him,
when in fact they’ve only begun.’”

“They!” I repeated. “Who are
‘they’? The Langdons?”

“I think so,” she replied, with an
effort. “She did not say—I’ve told you
her exact words—as far as I can.”

“Well,” said I, “and why didn’t you
go?”

She pressed her lips firmly together.
Finally, with a straight look into my
eyes, she replied: “I shall not discuss
that. You probably misunderstand, but
that is your own affair.”

“You believed what she said about
me, of course,” said I.

“I neither believed nor disbelieved,”
she answered, indifferently, as she rose
to go. “It does not interest me.”

“Come here,” said I. And I waited
until she reluctantly joined me at the
window. I pointed to the steeple of
the church across the way. “You could
as easily throw down that steeple by
pushing against it with your bare
hands,” I said to her, “as ‘they,’ whoever
they are, could put me down. They
might take away my money. But if
they did, they would only be giving me
a lesson that would teach me how more
easily to get it back again. I am not a
bundle of stock certificates or a bag of
money. I am—here,” and I tapped my
forehead.

She forced a faint, scornful smile.
She did not wish me to see her belief of
what I said.

“You think that is vanity,” I went on.
“But you will learn, sooner or later, the
difference between boasting and simple
statement of fact. You will learn that
I do not boast. What I said is no more
a boast than for a man with legs to say,
‘I can walk.’ Because you have known
only legless men, you exaggerate the
 difficulty of walking. It’s as easy for
me to make money as it is for some people
to spend it.”

It is hardly necessary for me to say
I was not insinuating anything against
her people. But she was just then
supersensitive on the subject, though I
did not suspect it. She flushed hotly.
“You will not have any cause to sneer
at my people on that account hereafter,”
she said. “I settled that to-day.”

“I was not sneering at them,” I protested.
“I wasn’t even thinking of
them. And—you must know that it’s a
favor to me for anybody to ask me to
do anything that will please you.”

She made a gesture of impatience.
“I see I’d better tell you why—part of
the reason why—I did not go with them
to-day. I insisted that they give back
all they have taken from you. And
when they refused, I refused to go.”

“I don’t care why you refused,” said
I. “I am content with the fact that you
are here.”

“But you misunderstand it,” she said,
coldly.

“I don’t understand it, I don’t misunderstand
it,” was my reply. “I accept
it.”

She looked depressed, discouraged.
She turned away from the window,
drifted out of the room. While the
surface of my mind was taken up with
her, I must have been thinking, underneath,
of the warning she had brought;
for, perhaps half or three-quarters of
an hour after she left, I was suddenly
whirled out of my reverie at the window
by a thought like a pistol thrust
into my face. “What if ‘they’ should
include Roebuck!” And just as a man
begins to defend himself from a sudden
danger before he clearly sees what the
danger is, so I began to act before I
even questioned whether my suspicion
was plausible or absurd. I went into
the hall, rang the bell, slipped a lightweight
coat over my evening dress
and put on a hat. When Sanders appeared,
I said: “I’m going out for a few
minutes—perhaps an hour—if anyone
should ask.” A moment later I was in
a hansom and on the way to Roebuck’s.

TO BE CONTINUED.

THE WINDOW

Theodosia Garrison.

The author of the following essay on “Americans in London” is one of the most distinguished of the
leaders of English Society. She is the daughter of Sir Sanford Freeling, who was for a time military
secretary at Gibraltar. Her husband, Sir Arthur Willshire, was an officer in the Guards. Lady Willshire,
in addition to her social activities, is, without ostentation, a woman whose charities occupy a large part of
her time. In appearance she is over middle height, rather fragile, with great charm of manner. She is an
accomplished musician and linguist. Her favorite recreations are riding, driving and bicycling, and she is
looked upon as the best dancer in London Society.

I can well remember the
time when I could easily
reckon up the whole
list of my American
acquaintances resident
in London on the fingers
of one hand, and
most of those were the wives of English
husbands.

That was certainly not more than ten
years ago, and then the majority of
Americans that one chanced to meet in
England were travelers, who knew very
little of, and cared less apparently to see
or take part in, the doings of our London
society.

In ten years, however, amazing
changes can and do take place, especially
where the natives of the States are
concerned, and nowadays I find that not
only does it require a great many leaves
in my capacious address book to hold the
names of the Americans—and the women
most particularly—who live and
move and have a large part of their social
being in London, but that a very
impressive majority of these attractive
and prominent ladies are not the life
partners of voting, title-holding British
subjects at all.

The good work accomplished both
ways by the international marriage goes
merrily on. At the present moment we
can claim not less than twenty-five peeresses
of transatlantic birth, while we
don’t pretend to keep anything like an
exact record of the ever-increasing acquisitions,
from American sources, to
our gentry class; but, for all that, the
present big average of American women
who come across the ocean to conduct
a successful siege of London no
longer regard the English husband as a
sort of necessary preliminary and essential
ally to the business of getting on in
our smart metropolitan society.

The fair and welcome invader from
the land of the free and the home of
the brave can, and does, “arrive” astonishingly
well without masculine assistance
and encouragement.

She may appear as maid, wife or widow;
sometimes as divorcee; but, personally,
she conducts her own campaign.
Furthermore, she comes fully equipped
to carry everything before her—she has
wit, wealth and good looks at her command,
and she works along approved
and sensible lines of action.

If she has a thoroughgoing conquest
 of London planned out, she does not
put up at a fashionable hotel and spread
her fine plumage and wait for notice.

She usually begins by taking a house;
she furnishes it with original but discreet
good taste; she wears startlingly
pretty gowns—quite the best, as a rule,
that Paris can supply; she gives the
most taking sorts of entertainments, and
the ordinary result is that in one season
she is not only launched and talked
about, but securely placed and greatly
admired.

And if you want to know why she
does this thing, the answer you can get,
as I did, from her own mouth; she
simply “likes London and London
society.”

As an amiable, broad-minded woman,
she does not love her own country so
much that she cannot find a place in her
heart for London, too, and that which
chiefly appeals to her in our elderly,
sprawling, sooty, amusing and splendid
old capital is the fact that she finds it
interesting.

There you have one explanation, at
least, of the apparent phenomenon of
the ever-growing circle of American
women in the very heart of our biggest
city. But it becomes a Londoner to
confess that another good reason why
she is so familiar and conspicuous a
figure among us is because we reciprocate
her liking with the strongest possible
warmth of admiration.

Not only do we regard our American
colony with genuine enthusiasm, and
take pride and pleasure in the fact that
it is the largest of its kind in any European
capital, but social London pleasantly
feels its influence.

Now, influence is one of those qualities
that the American woman carries
about with her just as naturally as she
carries her pretty airs of independence,
or her capacity for easy and amusing
speech, and it is a sad mistake for anyone
to take it for granted that on her
wealth or her pulchritude alone all her
claim to success and popularity in England
rests.

In no way that I know of has her
influence been more sensibly and beneficially
felt among us than in the introduction
of a quick, vivacious tone to
conversation.

Her gift for light, easy, semi-humorous
talk, her gay, self-confident way of
telling a good story, constitute her a
leading and most lasting attraction in
English estimation. From her the English
woman has learned, first, that which
it seems every transatlantic sister is
aware by intuition, that one supreme
duty of the sex, as it is represented in
society, is to know how to talk a little
to everybody, to talk always in sprightly
fashion, and never to adopt the English
woman’s depressing method of answering
all conversational efforts and
overtures with chilling monosyllables.

It is no exaggeration to say that since
the tremendous enlargement of the
American colony, the whole pace of
London drawing-room talk has enormously
improved. We British are not
by nature a sprightly and speechful
race, with the gift of gay gab, but under
the American woman’s cheerful influence
we are enjoying a sort of reformation.

We send our daughters even to a
fashionable school in fashionable Kensington,
which is kept by a long-headed
American woman, who will very nearly
guarantee to bid a door post discourse
freely and be obeyed. And the women
to whom first honors are due for having
inspired London with a wholesome respect
for what I may justly call the
very superior American parts of speech,
are Mrs. George Cornwallis-West—perhaps
better known on both sides of the
ocean as Lady Randolph Churchill—and
Consuelo, the Dowager Duchess of
Manchester.

It would be a superfluous and ungrateful
task to try to recall the number
of years that have flown since these
two women, unusually attractive as they
are, even for Americans, came over to
literally take London by storm.

Suffice it to say that, as Shakespeare
wrote of Cleopatra, “age cannot wither
nor custom stale her infinite variety;”
and in spite of the amazing influx of
their young and lovely and accomplished
countrywomen into London
since their day of arrival, these two ladies
 still stand, as they have stood for
years, at the very top of the entire
American set abroad.

Both of them, by marriage or through
years of long association, have become
thoroughly identified with English society,
but, unlike Lady Vernon-Harcourt,
widow of the great leader of the
Liberal party, and daughter of the famous
historian Motley, they have never
lost their strong American individuality.

Lady Vernon-Harcourt, to sight and
hearing, seems almost a typical and
thoroughgoing English woman, but
Mrs. George Cornwallis-West and the
Duchess Consuelo are, to all intents and
purposes, as distinctly American as the
day on which they were presented as
brides and beauties at one of Queen
Victoria’s drawing-rooms.

Then, as well as now, they were both
fair to look upon, but they were also
something more—they were the cleverest
of talkers, and the beautiful Consuelo,
in her soft, Southern voice, possessed
a faculty for quaint and witty
turns of phrase that made her an instant
favorite.

At the time of her début, London had
yet to meet the American woman who
could not only chatter along cheerfully
and intelligently, but who could artfully
and unembarrassedly tell an amusing
story before the big and critical audience
that the average dinner table
supplies. Our fair Creole and the fair
New Yorker were, however, more than
equal to all and any such emergencies
and occasions.

It was with their capable tongues,
quite as much as with their charming
faces, that they scored their social triumphs
in England, and it was mainly
through their beguiling conversational
powers that they both caught the attention
of the present king and queen—at
that time Prince and Princess of Wales—and
aroused royalty’s prompt and
lasting admiration.

Until that time no American could
boast the fact that she was the friend
of the queen, prince or princess, but the
young duchess and Lady Randolph
Churchill changed all that. They were
the first of their nation to be asked to
the Sandringham house parties, to be
included in the lists of guests invited
to meet royal folk at dinners, etc., and
to inspire in the present king and queen
the thoroughgoing liking they now
cherish for American things in general
and the American woman in particular.

A good deal of brown Thames water
has flowed under London Bridge, it is
true, since these exponents of two entirely
different types of American womanhood
came over to astonish even our
blasé society, but no two of their sex
and nation have succeeded in making a
more deep and lasting impression upon
London than these, or have done more
to insure the social success of their
countrywomen who followed in their
footsteps.

Consuelo, the duchess, is a grandmother
to-day, but she is almost as
prominent a figure in the gay world as
she ever was; unlike Mrs. George Cornwallis-West,
she never went in, so to
speak, for political prestige. She has
cared for social gayety pure and simple,
preserved much of her beauty, maintained
her reputation as the most delightful
house-party guest in England,
and is noted nowadays as being, as well,
the most skillful, tactful and serenely
polite bridge-whist partner in the
United Kingdom.

When, a few months ago, a house-party
for royalty was given at Chatsworth
by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire,
it was at the urgent request of
both the king and queen that the Dowager
Duchess of Manchester came over
from Paris to spend a few days under
the same roof with their majesties,
whose affection for this low-voiced,
sweet-tempered, witty American woman
has never wavered. Every now and
then one hears anew in London drawing
rooms of some amusing saying of
hers, for she is as gracious and graceful
a conversationalist as of yore, and
with three young and blooming American
duchesses to rival her, still stands
well apart from and ahead of them all,
at least so far as the homage of our
smart and titled society can be accepted
as proof of a woman’s position.

 Of all the three young duchesses, I
think her youthful Grace of Marlborough
is far and away the most distinctly
popular and influential. She has conquered
even the most indifferent and the
most prejudiced, by an exquisitely
charming sweetness of manner that is
quite irresistible.

She does not possess what a Frenchman
would call the vif style of her average
countrywomen, and she is not a
very vigorous talker, but she is wonderfully
sympathetic and attractive of
manner; her porcelain fine, aristocratic
prettiness makes her a distinguished figure
wherever she goes, and from the
first she presided at the head of her vast
establishment, and took her rightful position
in England with a natural dignity
and a complete grasp of the situation
that literally took the breath away
from the rather skeptical British onlooker.

There is a story told, sub rosa, of the
discomfiture of a high-nosed and rather
too helpful aristocratic matron and relative,
who, on the arrival of her shy
looking, slim young Grace, undertook
to set her right and well beforehand
on points of etiquette, ducal duty and
responsibilities, etc.

Nobody knows to this day just what
passed between the fair girl and the
stately matron, but the duchess was not
very much bothered with unnecessary
advice after one short interview with
her rather officious social fairy-godmother.
And if the duchess was not
ready to take advice, it was simply because
she did not need it. When she
gave her first great house party at Blenheim,
it rather outrivaled in splendor
anything of the sort done in England
in a long time, and her chief guests
were royalties; nevertheless, there was
not a hitch or a mistake in all the elaborate
proceedings; and a critical peer,
who enjoyed the magnificent hospitality
of the Marlboroughs, was heard to
remark afterward that to be born an
American millionairess is to apparently
know by instinct all that has to be
taught from childhood to a native English
duchess.

That Her Grace of Marlborough has
a natural taste for splendid surroundings
is shown by her fondness for big
Blenheim and the marvelous luxury she
has introduced into every part of that
vast mansion; and when her indulgent
father offered to buy for her a house in
London, she imposed but two guiding
conditions on his choice for her of a
home in town.

“I want the biggest house on the most
fashionable street,” she is said to have
said. The result was that Mr. Vanderbilt
purchased Sunderland House, in
Curzon Street, and there the duchess is
fittingly installed.

There the most sumptuous decorating
and furnishing has been done, and
when she entertains, her dinners will
be the most splendid and her balls the
largest and most luxurious of the season,
for whatever the duchess does is
done in almost regal style.

Eventually no London hostess can
or will outshine her, and yet this first
among the American duchesses is not
very socially inclined. She prefers the
country life and Blenheim to the best
that London can give her, and this taste
is to a great measure shared by many
of our American peeresses and guests.

The Countess of Orford, Lady Monson,
the Countess of Donoughmore,
Mrs. Spender Clay, Lady Charles Ross
and Mrs. Langhorne Shaw, for example,
find English country life pre-eminently
to their taste, and all but avoid
the town, save in the very height of the
season.

Lady Orford—who was Miss Corbin—lives
at Waborne Hall, her husband’s
magnificent Georgian place in Norfolk.
There she gives shooting parties, from
there she goes with her husband and
pretty young daughter to fish in Scotland
and Norway, and the chief interest
that brings her up to London is her
taste for music and the opera, which,
she declares, is the only pleasure that
one cannot gratify out of town.

Next after music, sport—fishing most
especially—engages her particular interest.
Though she rarely goes out
with the guns, her husband declares she
is a capital shot, and that she could and
would ride to hounds with the most daring
 of our fox-hunting peeresses, if
Norfolk was a hunting shire.

Prominent, however, among the
hunting set is the handsome Countess
of Donoughmore, whose father, the
American millionaire Grace, owns Battle
Abbey, and has made England his
home for many years. His slender,
pretty daughter, who was Miss Eleana
Grace before she married an Irish earl,
rode to hounds from her days of floating
locks and short skirts.