The reaping
Date: 2024-02-10T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Washington (D.C.) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction

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Title: The reaping

Author: Mary Imlay Taylor

Illustrator: George Alfred Williams

Release date: February 10, 2024 [eBook #72917]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Little, Brown, and Company, 1908

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/72917

Credits: D A Alexander, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was made using scans of public domain works put online by Harvard University Library's Open Collections Program.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE REAPING ***

THE REAPING

THE
REAPING

By
MARY IMLAY TAYLOR
AUTHOR OF “ON THE RED STAIRCASE,” “MY LADY
CLANCARTY,” “THE IMPERSONATOR,” ETC.

With a Frontispiece in Color by
GEORGE ALFRED WILLIAMS

BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY

Copyright, 1908,
By Mary Imlay Taylor.

All rights reserved

Printers
S. J. Parkhill & Co., Boston, U.S.A.

BOOK I

THE REAPING

I

“WILLIAM FOX? He’s the most brilliant man they’ve got, but a two-edged sword; they’re all afraid of him!”

The speaker had just left the swinging doors at the foot of the staircase from the Rotunda, under the old Library rooms in the west front of the Capitol, and his companion, who was also a member, was working himself slowly into his greatcoat.

“No wonder; he’s got a tongue like a whiplash and his smooth ways only make its sting worse,” he retorted, between his struggles with a recalcitrant sleeve lining and a stiff shoulder.

“That’s it, his tongue and his infernal sarcastic humor,” Fox’s admirer admitted with reluctance, “but his logic—it’s magnificent,—his mind cuts as clean as a diamond; look at his speech on the Nicaraguan affair. Lord, I’d like to see the opposition beat it! They can’t do it; they’ve done nothing but snarl since. He’ll be President some day—if he doesn’t cut his own throat.”

“Pshaw, man!” retorted the other irritably, “he’s brilliant, but as unstable as water, and a damned egoist!”

They had reached the top of the wide steps which descend from the west terrace, and Allestree lost the reply to his outburst in the increasing distance as they went down into the park below. He stood looking after their indistinctly outlined figures as they disappeared slowly into the soft mist which enveloped the scene at his feet. It was about six o’clock, an early December evening, and already night overhead where the sky was heavily clouded. The streets, streaming with water, showed broad circles of shimmering light under the electric lamps, and the naked trees and the ilexes clustered below the terrace made a darkness through which, and beyond, he saw the long, converging vista of the Avenue, lined on either side with what seemed to be wavering and brilliant rainbows, suspended above the wet pavements and apparently melting into one in the extreme distance, as though he looked into the sharp apex of a triangle. The whole was veiled and mystically obscured by a palely luminous vapor which transformed and softened every object, while the vehicles and pedestrians, constantly hurrying across the foreground, loomed exaggerated and fantastic in the fog. Now and then a keen point of light, the eye of some motor-car, approached, flashed past the Peace Monument and was lost at the elbow of the Hill.

The terrace, except for Allestree, was deserted, and the continuous murmur and roar of city life came up to him slightly softened and subdued, both by the atmospheric depression and the intervening space of the park. Behind him both wings of the Capitol were vividly lighted, for the House had just risen after a heated debate, prolonged, as he amusedly surmised, by the eloquence of William Fox.

At the thought, that much discussed figure arose before his mind’s eye in a new aspect created by the fragment of conversation which had just reached him. He was in the habit of viewing Fox from that intimate standpoint which, discovering all the details, loses the larger effect of the whole; as the man in the wings of the theatre, disillusioned by the tinsel on the costume of an actor and the rouge on his face, loses the grand climax of his dramatic genius and sees instead only the charlatan. Yet Allestree’s affection for his cousin was strong enough to embrace even those defects, of which he was keenly aware, and personal enough to feel a thrill of elation at the constant evidences of an increasing recognition of Fox’s really great abilities. Yet there was something amusing in the fear which he was beginning to inspire in his opponents; amusing, at least, to one who knew him, as Allestree did, to be a man of careless good humor and large indifference.

Knowing all Fox’s peculiarities, his not infrequent relaxations, and the complex influences which were at work upon his temperament—the irresponsible temperament of genius—Allestree could not but speculate a little upon that future which was beginning to be of poignant interest to more than one aspirant in the great arena of public life.

But his reflections were cut short at this point by the abrupt appearance of Fox himself. He came out of the same door which had, a few moments earlier, emitted his critics, and as he emerged upon the terrace the keen light from the electric globes at the head of the steps fell full on his remarkable face and figure. For, while by no means above the average in stature, Fox possessed one of those personalities which cannot be overlooked. Genius like beauty has magnetic qualities of its own and, even at night and out of doors, Allestree was fully aware of the singular brilliance and penetration of his glance.

“Well, Bob,” he said genially, as he joined his cousin, “you’re a lucky dog, out here in the open! The House has steamed like the witches’ cauldron to-night and brewed devil’s broth, tariff revision and all manner of damnable heresies.”

Allestree smiled grimly in the dusk. “Then you must be the father of them,” he retorted; “I just heard that you’d been making a speech.”

“Eh? you did, did you?” Fox paused an instant to light his cigar; “so I did,” he admitted, tossing away the match, “I talked tommyrot for an hour and a half to keep the House sitting; I might be going on still if old Killigrew hadn’t got to his feet and howled for adjournment. He usually dines at six sharp, and it’s a quarter to seven now; he had death and starvation in his eye, and I yielded the point as a matter of humanity.”

“According to recent information you have very little humanity in you,” Allestree replied, as they descended the long flight of steps from the terrace, “in fact, you are a ‘damned egoist.’”

Fox threw back his head with a hearty, careless laugh. “Which of my enemies have you been interviewing?” he asked, with unruffled good humor.

His cousin briefly related the result of his accidental début in the rôle of eavesdropper, incidentally describing the two men.

“I know who they are,” Fox said amusedly; “one is Burns of Pennsylvania, and the other a fellow from Rhode Island who is picking flaws in everything and everybody; the government’s rotten, the Senate’s corrupt, the Supreme Court is senile—so on and so on ad infinitum! Meanwhile there’s some kind of a scandal attached to his own election—no one cares what! He reminds me of Voltaire’s enraged description of Jean Jacques with the rotten hoops off Diogenes’ tub.”

“That is not all; even your admirer feared the suicidal effects of your tongue,” continued Allestree teasingly, “which is said to be two-edged, while your sarcasm is ‘infernal.’”

“Oh, that’s a mere façon de parler,” laughed Fox, “I’m really as mild as a lamb and as harmless as a dove!”

“Quite so!” retorted his cousin dryly, “yet I think most of your enemies and some of your friends resort to the litany when you cut loose for an oratorical flight.”

“Well, it’s said that even the devil goes to prayers on occasions,” said Fox with a shrug, “so why not my enemies? By the way, the nominations were sent to the Senate just before adjournment to-night, and the Cabinet changes are slated; I heard it as I came out.”

“Does Wingfield go out?” Allestree asked, after a momentary pause, as they threaded their way between the electric cars and the carriages which were slightly congested at the crossing below the Peace Monument.

Fox nodded. “And Seymour gets his place, while Wicklow White is made Secretary of the Navy.”

His companion looked up quickly and caught only his pale profile outlined against the surrounding fog; his expression was enigmatical. “Upon my word!” exclaimed Allestree, “White’s luck is stupendous—you remember what a block-head we always thought him at Harvard? Well, well, Margaret will have her heart’s desire,” he added amusedly.

Fox slightly frowned. “So!” he said contemptuously, “you think the sum total of a woman’s desire is to see a chump of a husband with his foot in the stirrup?”

His cousin smiled coldly. “My dear fellow, it was for that Margaret married him,” he retorted, “that and his money. When I see her, as I saw her the other night, the most beautiful and charming creature, in a miracle of a costume,—she knows how to wear clothes that make pictures,—I longed to say to her:—

“‘You that have so fair parts of woman on you,

Have too a woman’s heart: which ever yet

Affected eminence, wealth, sovereignty.’”

“Pshaw, you dreamer of dreams and painter of pictures; it’s a hollow show, an ugly travesty! What has a man like White to give such a woman? The husks of the prodigal!” Fox’s luminous dark eyes kindled with anger, “when I see him—” he checked himself abruptly and walked on rapidly, his long, easy stride carrying him ahead of Allestree. “Pearls before swine!” he muttered to himself after a moment, plunging his hands into his pockets and relapsing into an angry silence.

They walked on at a smart pace, having occasionally to thread their way single file through the increasing throng, as the long blocks slipped behind them and they approached the heart of business life near Fourteenth Street. When they came together again after such a separation, Allestree asked Fox if he could come home with him to dine but Fox declined rather curtly, pleading an early evening engagement, and Allestree said no more, having his own surmises as to the nature of that engagement, and being somewhat guiltily aware that he was not an entirely involuntary party to his mother’s conspiracy to draw Fox away from a dangerous attraction. Both men were, in fact, conscious that a discord had arisen in their usually confidential relations, and neither of them desired to broach any subject which would add acrimony to the conversation; with the usual masculine instinct of self-defense, therefore, they relapsed into silence. However, at the entrance of a large hotel on the corner, their hurried progress was interrupted to give way to a visitor who was crossing the wide pavement to her carriage, escorted by one of the attendants and a footman. The light from the lobby, brilliantly illuminating the space beneath the awning, outlined her as sharply as a silhouette against the darkness, and her figure,—she was a young and slender girl,—was thrown into high relief; the quiet elegance of her dress, the sables on her shoulders, as well as the large picture hat which framed her face, being merely superfluous accessories to beauty of a type at once unusual and spiritual.

Fox, startled out of a revery which was largely pervaded by the personality of another woman, could not but observe this radiant picture; there was a vitality, a power of expression in every feature of her face and every movement of her tall, lithe figure which at once specialized her. She seemed to belong to a different race of beings from those who were hurrying past her through the fog, whose figures lost themselves at once to vision and memory, dissolving into the masses of the commonplace, as completely as the individual sands at the seashore are lost in the larger sweep of the dunes.

She turned her head, saw Allestree and smiled. “How are you?” she said, with the easy manner of an old intimacy; “I hardly dare look at you—I know I broke the appointment and several of the studio commandments!”

Allestree had hurried forward at once, apparently forgetting his companion, and was helping her into her carriage. “You did,” he said, “and shamelessly; but you must come and make amends.”

She laughed, her hand on the carriage door, and her eyes, involuntarily passing him to Fox, were as quickly averted. “I will, on Saturday at twelve—will that do, Bobby? Don’t be too exacting. I’ve a dozen engagements, you know,” she added lightly, in a tone of careless propitiation.

Fox did not catch his cousin’s reply, it was too low spoken, and in a moment the horses started and the carriage passed him on its way to F Street. Secretly a little piqued at Allestree’s failure to present him, and yet amused at his discovery of his cousin playing knight-errant to a beauty, Fox walked on a few moments in silence, aware that the other was not a little confused.

But at last: “Who is she, Bob, wood-nymph, dryad, or Psyche herself?”

Allestree’s face sobered sharply. “It was Miss Temple,” he said, a trifle stiffly.

Fox gave a moment to reflection. “Ah,” he observed, “I recollect, Judge Temple has a daughter. I had never seen her; I’ve heard her spoken of, though, a hundred times; her name is—?”

“Rose Temple.”

William Fox glanced at his companion obliquely and smiled, but he made no attempt at pleasantry. After a little, however, as they approached the residential quarter and neared his club, where he intended to dine, he returned to the subject. “You are painting Miss Temple’s portrait?”

“Yes, attempting it,” assented Allestree, with marked reluctance; he felt it to be almost a sacrilege to speak of a piece of work which had become, in more ways than one, a labor of love.

He was indeed painting Rose Temple’s portrait, for he was already a notable portrait painter, but he was doing it much as Raphael may have painted the Sistine Madonna, with a reverence which was full of ineffable tenderness and inspiration, and he was too keenly aware of Fox’s intimate knowledge of him and his unmerciful insight into human motives to endure the thought of Fox in possession of his inmost secrets and on terms of friendship with Rose. Fox! one of the most enigmatical, the most dangerous, the most fascinating personalities—Allestree had seen the potency of that spell—to be brought in contact with any woman, and most of all with a young and imaginative girl.

After a moment Fox’s laugh interrupted him. “My dear Allestree,” he said provokingly, “why not paint the Angel Gabriel?”

His companion, whose sensitiveness amounted to an exquisite self-torture, bit his lip and made no reply.

At the door of the club they both paused as Allestree prepared to take a car uptown while his cousin went in to dine.

“Sorry you can’t come to us,” he said, in a tone which was a shade less cordial than usual; “mother will be disappointed; there is no one else coming, and she always counts greatly on a talk with you.”

“Give her my love instead,” Fox retorted, with easy kindness, “I’m sorry, but I dine here and then go up to the Whites’. I promised; there’s to be music—or something—to-night.”

Allestree slightly shrugged his shoulders. “So I supposed,” he said dryly, and signalled his car.

II

A FEW hours later William Fox presented himself at the home of the new Cabinet minister. He was an intimate habitué of the house; a fact which created no little comment in social and political circles, for Fox and White were naturally almost antipodal personalities and had often engaged in political controversies, which had inevitably ended in White’s defeat at the hands of his daring and brilliant adversary. But it was not their antipathies or their rivalries in politics which aroused the gossip, of which Fox was vaguely and carelessly aware, but the presupposed existence of an old sentimental relation between him and White’s wife. However, gossip of all kinds troubled Fox but little, and he followed his own inclinations with the indolent egoism of a man who has been for many years the spoiled darling of fortune.

The house was one of the old landmarks of Washington, and the true values of space and effect were consequently somewhat diminished by low ceilings and small old-fashioned doors. As Fox entered he heard the buzz of conversation in the distance, in more tongues than English, and when the butler announced him he came upon a group of dinner guests who were gathered around the immense fireplace at the end of the ballroom—a huge addition to the original house especially designed for the elaborate entertainments for which the host and hostess were already famous—and the warm glow of the leaping fire increased the effect and brilliance of the scene.

At his name his hostess detached herself from the group and tossing her cigarette into the fire held out her hand in greeting. “You inconsequent wretch!” she said, shaking an admonishing finger, “late as usual—we expected you to dinner and M. de Caillou tells us that, instead, you made a great speech! Pray, what became of you afterwards?”

“Total oblivion for the space of three hours,” replied Fox gaily; “I come now to congratulate you! The next step will be the Presidency, White,” he added, as he shook hands with his host.

“If I can keep you out of it,” retorted the secretary, dryly.

Fox laughed, acknowledging the intimate greetings of the other guests. At a glance he saw that the gathering was as notable as usual, and was secretly amused at White’s attitude which seemed to accept all this as his own achievement, ignoring the influence of his wife. The French ambassador was there, a Russian prince, an Austrian savant, an Italian ex-diplomat, the chancellor of the British embassy, two other Cabinet ministers, a literary celebrity, a Roman Catholic dignitary, and a somewhat notorious French journalist and socialist who had dipped his pen in gall during the controversy between France and the Vatican. Margaret’s usual selections, Fox thought with a smile, and noted that the only other woman was Mrs. Osborne, the former wife of an American ambassador to Russia, whose divorce had created a sensation as distinct and startling as her beauty, which was of that type which somewhat openly advertises the additions of art. A woman, in fact, who had given rise to so much “talk” that the old-fashioned wondered at Margaret White’s complacence in receiving her and even admitting her upon terms of intimacy at the house. But Margaret’s personality was as problematical as it was charming. She stood now regarding Fox with a slightly pensive expression in her gray eyes, which seemed unusually large and bright because of the dark shadows beneath them, while her small head was set on a slender white neck which supported it like the stem of a flower. She was thin, but with a daintiness which eliminated angles, and she possessed in a marked degree, as Allestree had said, the talent for artistic costumes; her slight figure, which had the grace and delicate suppleness of some fabled dryad, had the effect, at the moment, of being marvellously enveloped in a clinging, shimmering cloud of soft, gold-colored silk and embroidery out of which her white shoulders rose suddenly; she was much décolletée, and, except for the jewelled shoulder-straps, her slender but beautiful arms were bare.

She rested her hands on the high back of a chair, apparently listening to all, but actually attentive only to that which immediately concerned Fox and her husband, who were exchanging commonplaces with the purely perfunctory manner of men who cordially detested each other at heart.

“White only pretends indifference,” said Louis Berkman, the literary genius, who was one of the famous writers of the day; “actually he is overjoyed at the exit of Wingfield; that is the very pith of the matter, isn’t it, Mrs. White?”

Margaret shrugged her shoulders. “Why not?” she retorted; “what was it Walpole said? ‘One tiger is charmed if another tiger loses his tail.’”

There was the general laugh at this, which always followed Margaret’s careless and daring candor.

“It was certainly a case of ‘heads or tails’ with the President,” Louis Berkman retorted, with the ease of political detachment in the midst of the inner circle of officialdom; “we shall have a budget now which will carry a billion dollar naval increase.”

“You’ve lived too long in England,” said Fox amusedly, “you don’t get our terms, Berkman. But we shall insist on Mrs. White christening all the new ships.”

“To be sure—I forgot that I was speaking to the money supply, Fox,” he replied; “heaven help White if he gets into your clutches; I should as soon expect mercy from an Iroquois Indian!”

“I don’t mind that from you,” laughed Fox,—“we expect anything from the ‘outs,’—as long as you don’t write us up for the magazines!”

“The gods forbid!” said Berkman sharply, “I’m not ‘the man with the muckrake;’ now if—” he turned his head and, catching a glimpse of the French journalist engaged in an animated discussion with the Italian ex-diplomat, who fairly bristled with suppressed anger, he bit his lip to hide a smile.

One of the secretaries leaned forward to select a new cigarette from the elaborate gold box on the table. “Berkman,” he remarked, “I read that article of yours on the Duma with a great deal of interest, but I got an impression that you lost sight of the main issues in your passion for artistic effects.”

The author responded at once to this challenge with an eagerly indignant denial, and Fox found himself again slightly detached from the group and still standing beside his hostess. She had been taking no part in the conversation and seemed to be in a dreamy mood which ignored alike her environment and her social duties. There was always something in Margaret’s aspect which differentiated her from other people, a spiritual aloofness from the passing moment which could fall upon her suddenly, even in her wildest and gayest moods, and which always carried with it a mystical, uninterpreted suggestion of some tragic destiny, which cast a long shadow before it across the unthinking sybaritism of her life.

“It seems some time since I saw you last,” said Fox; “the House has been very exacting lately and abominably dull. What have you been doing with yourself?”

“Oh, learning to dance,” she replied, “I’m to be a Merry Andrew now, you know, for the delectation of the dear public. Wicklow insists that I must have public receptions; good heavens, what an endless bore!”

Fox smiled. “He takes it seriously then, I see! We must look higher, in that case; you may as well study for the White House rôle at once.”

Margaret laughed derisively, glancing across at her husband who was leaning over Mrs. Osborne’s chair with a quite apparent air of absorption. “Look at them!” she mocked, her eyes gleaming with malicious mischief; “see the pose; Lily Osborne is playing now for a Madame d’Épinay; she discusses French literature and the philosophers. Can you imagine Wicklow as Jean Jacques? I must get him a black cloak!”

Fox laughed involuntarily, but said nothing; Margaret’s free speech sometimes offended his finer discrimination, and the notion of criticizing White to White’s wife did not coincide with his masculine code. “I heard that Mrs. Osborne won the cup at the fencing contest,” he remarked, after a moment.

“She did; Wicklow gave it, you know,” Margaret smiled sarcastically. Then she looked at him suddenly. “Where did you dine to-night?—with Allestree?”

“No, at the club. I really didn’t understand that I was expected here.”

“I must have forgotten how to write notes, or I have too much else to say to you. I’m going to let Bobby Allestree paint my portrait; you know he’s been trying to do it for years.”

Fox smiled. “I admire Allestree’s work,” he said, “but there are limitations; one can’t paint intangible sprites.”

“Do you mean to infer that I’m not human?” she retorted with a frown; “wait and see how beautiful I shall be.”

“You don’t really want compliments from me, Margaret?”

She was silent a moment, then she lifted her softest glance to his face, her own pensive again and slightly shadowed with thought. “No, I don’t!” she said abruptly, “I don’t think I should believe in them—it makes me shiver sometimes to even imagine what you must think of me!”

Fox hesitated how to reply; he was by no means a prudent man, but he was instinctively aware of the dangers of her mood, and he had swiftly entertained and rejected two or three answers which would have led them into yet deeper intricacies, when they were happily interrupted by the approach of the French ambassador, a gentleman who united with great astuteness and diplomatic suavity a strong resemblance to an intelligent and bewhiskered French poodle.

“We have heard so much of those dancing steps, Mrs. White; when shall we have the pleasure of seeing them?” he asked, smilingly courteous and attentive.

“Oh, now!—on the instant,” Margaret retorted, her mood changing like a flash and her eyes sparkling a gay defiance; “there’s no time like the present. William, are the musicians there?”

Fox looked across at the palm-screened alcove, and catching a glimpse of a violin, assented. She clapped her hands. “Tell them to play me the Spanish piece which they played on Tuesday,” she commanded.

At the first note there was a general cessation of conversation, and every eye turned quickly toward her. She stood in the centre of the room, her slender arms raised and her hands clasped behind her head, a dreamy expression on her half lifted face, the shadowy masses of her pale brown hair framing a white brow. Her eyes drooped, her whole aspect seemed to change, like the chameleon’s, to become an embodiment of the dreamily seductive strains which floated softly into space, then, as the music quickened and developed, she began to sway slightly, dancing down the long room alone, her clinging, shimmering skirts trailing around her feet, flowing in and out, but never seeming to arrest the wonderful rhythmic swing of her movements. With her, dancing was an interpretation of music, an expression of some subtle mystery of her nature, the very personification of an enchanting grace.

There was an almost breathless attention on the part of her guests, and no one was conscious of the displeasure on White’s full flushed face. No one but his wife; as she danced to and fro, weaving in the fantasy of strange figures, her eyes rested occasionally on him, and the mockery of her glance was a revelation to those who could read it. It was but little observed, however, nor was she understood when, at last, with a sudden swift movement she caught up her filmy draperies, displaying two slender ankles and a pair of wonderfully shod feet, as she executed a deliberate fandango which not a little amazed the more sedate of her guests.

In answer, perhaps, to some secret signal of White’s, the music stopped abruptly and with it Margaret’s astonishing performance. Quite unmoved, and ignoring the interruption, or rather treating it as the natural termination of her dance, she turned with a graceful swirl of gleaming silks and received the rather effusive applause of her guests with heightened color and flashing eyes.

Louis Berkman alone had lost all the bizarre effect of the finish, and been absorbed in the dance. “A poem in motion, superb!” he exclaimed, with such genuine enthusiasm that Margaret’s expression softened.

The French ambassador was still softly applauding. It appeared that he had seen Bernhardt execute the same figures once; “but madame’s performance was more exquisite, an interpretation, the very expression of the music itself!”

“Naturally,” laughed Margaret maliciously, “I’m an American, ambassador. Did you dream that even Bernhardt could excel one?”

“Bien! I admire your patriotism, also,” he replied smiling.

“Oh, it’s only the screech of the eagle! Of course you are all enthusiastic—all except you, William,” she added abruptly, whirling around to confront Fox with a teasing glance, “you are mute; didn’t I please you?”

He smiled. “You bewildered me; the sudden transitions are confusing. Where did you learn the dance?”

She put her head on one side. “Last week—that’s all I shall ever tell you!” she replied, “but I want Bobby Allestree to paint my portrait dancing. Wicklow would prize it so highly,” and she laughed wickedly.

“Allestree is painting a portrait now, I think,” Fox said, to turn her aside from a dangerous channel, “Miss Temple’s, I believe.”

Margaret’s eyes widened and she looked keenly at him, an indescribable change in her face. “Rose—yes,” she said slowly, “have you seen it?”

He shook his head. “I saw her for the first time to-night.”

She made no immediate reply. M. de Caillou and Berkman had begun to talk together, and the others were already engaged in animated conversation; the controversy between the Italian and the Frenchman having been resumed was rising in a staccato duet. Fox was abruptly aware of a stir in the room beyond and surmised the arrival of evening guests, but his hostess was apparently oblivious.

“She is supremely lovely at times,” she said quietly, after a moment, “but—but not exactly a beauty. What do you think of her?”

Fox parried the question easily. “My dear Margaret, I only saw her for a moment getting into her carriage.”

She gave him a searching glance and bit her lip. He thought he had never seen her wear so entirely the air of a spoiled child; her flushed cheeks, her slightly rumpled hair and the angry droop of her eyes, all appealed for praise and resented criticism. “Allestree is painting her on his knees,” she said, with a little bitter laugh; “he doesn’t regard her as human; you will see that he will make me the imp to her angel, he—”

“Margaret!” Mr. White was hurrying forward, with the ruffled manner of an affronted host; “are you blind as well as deaf, my dear?” he asked curtly, “here are your guests!”

She turned haughtily and looked over her shoulder, her smallest attitude always seeming to defy him, while Fox had an uneasy feeling that he was more acutely aware than usual to-night of the impossible relations between the two. Meanwhile, the entrance to the long room was already filling with the rapidly arriving throng which seemed, to the casual observer, a mass of satin and jewels and lavishly exposed necks and shoulders, with here and there a sprinkling of the black coats of the men.

In spite of this influx, however, the young hostess stood a moment longer looking at them with a glance of malicious amusement in her drooping eyes, noting the whole effect of White’s large and rather florid personality as he received the first enthusiastic advance, responding genially to the murmur of congratulations. Then she turned and swept across the wide intervening space, her small head thrown proudly back, her whole grace of figure and dignity of pose—in direct contradiction to her former wild gayety and audacity—at once suggesting the grande dame assuming her rightful and appropriate place. But Fox found it impossible to as easily free himself from the haunting sorrow of her beautiful haggard eyes. Sometimes she seemed to him to be as fragile, as exquisite and as perishable as a bit of delicately carved ivory. Yet he was forced to dismiss the analogy, for ivory, no matter how marvellously carved in imitation of a living creature, is inanimate, while she was the very personification of unrest; it seemed rather that some wild and beautiful sprite must have been enthralled into temporary captivity, and was wearing its way to liberty through the exquisite clay which had been fashioned into human shape for its mortal disguise, that the touch of inevitable sadness which sometimes came upon her was the moment when the sprite relapsed into the melancholia of prolonged captivity.

III

IT was a little past noon on Saturday when Rose Temple went to Allestree’s studio accompanied by Aunt Hannah Colfax, a faithful old negro woman who had been devoted to her from childhood and now performed the dual duties of maid and duenna with all the complacence and shrewdness of her age and color.

Passing the quaint show-windows of Daddy Lerwick’s curiosity-shop on the first floor, in which were displayed—in amazing medley—pewter cups, old line engravings, camel’s-hair shawls and horse-pistols, they ascended the long narrow flight of stairs to the rooms above. On reaching them, Aunt Hannah promptly ensconced herself and her knitting under the window on the landing, while Rose pushed aside the portière and entered the studio, unconsciously carrying with her some of the crisp out-of-door atmosphere from whence she came and of which, in her buoyant and radiant youth, she seemed a visible and triumphant embodiment.

“It’s perfectly angelic of me to come to-day, Robert,” she remarked, as she greeted him, “for I’m not in the mood for a sitting and, of course, I shall behave abominably.”

“And you wish me to be bowed in the dust with gratitude for your angelic determination to behave abominably?” he replied dryly, looking at her with all an artist’s perception of her beauty and a reluctant consciousness that the glow in her eyes and the color in her cheeks were purely responses to the keen winter air, and that neither had ever been inspired by his presence nor called into being by his words.

Meanwhile Rose moved unconsciously before the long mirror, and removing her hat, slightly and deftly rearranged her beautiful and luxuriant hair as she answered him. “Why not?” she said banteringly; “you can’t believe that any one likes to pose for an hour—even to be made into one of your delightful pictures—but I’ll try to behave beautifully if you’ll answer all my questions, instead of going on with your painting, with a cigarette between your teeth and with the face of a sphinx, as you did the other day!”

“When you asked a dozen questions I couldn’t answer!” Allestree was selecting his brushes and contemplating the canvas on his easel with a despairing eye.

He had already outlined Rose’s figure and decided on the desired pose, but it seemed to him impossible to do justice to the exquisite charm of her beauty. It was a simple picture; he had endeavored to preserve what seemed to him the keynote of her personality, and had forborne to use any of those effects of brilliant color, rich draperies and elaborate accessories which a portrait painter commonly loves to lavish on a beautiful subject; instead, he had made her figure, with its superb poise, stand out in absolute simplicity. To Allestree she personified all the glorious possibilities of youth, with its buoyant hopes, its poignant truth, its magnificent faith in life, in the world, in itself. But when he looked from her to the canvas—where he had hoped to express something of all this—he felt deeply discouraged; his brush might be touched with the magic of a deep if unspoken passion, but it could never paint her as she appeared to him!

“I do not remember asking anything but the simplest questions,” she remarked, as she took her seat in the carved armchair which he had placed for her before a curtain of soft deep blue which seemed to suggest an April sky; “only you didn’t want to answer them. I warn you that I mean to be answered to-day! There’s nothing so abominable as your silences.”

Allestree smiled a little as he began to paint, with a slow and reluctant touch, feeling his way toward some achievement which might at least foreshadow success. “I fancied there was a virtue in silence; there’s a copy-book axiom to that effect,” he remarked; “besides, you would never come here at all punctually if you are not left in doubt on some mooted point. Mystery lures a woman as surely as magic.”

Rose gave him a reproachful glance. “And you think I like to sit here and listen to Mammy Hannah snore while you smoke and paint?” she said in a vexed tone, “for you always smoke and she always falls asleep.”

“Which is a special providence,” he retorted, “and the greatest virtue I ever met in a duenna.”

Without replying Rose looked absently around her, observing the details of his workshop more carefully than usual and noticing the harmonious effect of the colors, which he had grouped in his hangings. There was the high northern light concentrated on his subject, but beyond, in the corners, there were invitingly rich shadows, and here and there a bold, half finished sketch had been nailed to the walls. A well worn Turkey rug covered the portion of the floor occupied by his model, and a table in the window was set with a chafing-dish, a box of Egyptians and an odd shaped bronze tea-pot with some egg-shell cups which he had purchased in Japan. In a way Rose knew the history of everything in the room and almost the cost, but there was a touch of luxury about it which vaguely irritated her; it often seemed that Allestree was too well off to ever be a great artist,—he lacked the spur of necessity.

“Shall you paint for a living if you are ever poor?” she asked abruptly, resting her chin in her hand and contemplating him with a clear and impersonal gaze.

Allestree looked up, and observing the delicate hand with its tapering fingers and the jewelled chain which clasped her throat, smiled. “Shall you sing?” he asked, amused.

She sighed softly. “I wish that I might—and in opera too!” she replied, “I fear I should to-day but for father. You think me a very useless person, I see,” she added, smiling a little, “and perhaps I am. But isn’t it because I’ve had no chance? Girls are trained up in such an objectless way unless they are brought up to marry. Thank heaven, I escaped that; father is as innocent of such designs as a baby! But if I had been a boy I should have been given a profession, I should have had something to do instead of being expected merely to dress well and look ornamental!”

As she spoke her face lost a little of its vivid color and animation, but the slight pensiveness of her look seemed to Allestree to increase the poignancy of her spell; there was a subtle suggestion of that imaginative longing for the fulfilment of those vague youthful conceptions of happiness and life and love which stir in all young things, as the sap stirs in the trees in springtime and the bud forms under the leaves.

He did not immediately reply, but continued to work on the portrait before him which seemed to him more and more hopelessly colorless and lifeless compared with his model. “Perhaps my point of view is too concentrated to be of much value,” he said at length; “to me the mere fact of your existence seems enough to compensate for the loss of a good many more actively employed and earthly individuals who must be working out your privileged season as a lily of the field.”

She gave him a quick, slightly amazed look, and blushed. “You speak as though I were selected from the rubbish heap!” she exclaimed laughing, “as though I profited by the misfortunes of others. I don’t know whether to regard it as a compliment or not!”

But Allestree was quite unmoved, absorbed indeed in his work. “Did I ever pay you a compliment, Rose?” he asked, after an instant, meeting her glance with one that was so eloquent of deeper feeling that she withdrew hers, vaguely alarmed.

“I don’t believe you ever did,” she replied hastily, with an instinctive desire to put off any suggestion of passion on his part, for much as she liked him and long as she had known him, Allestree was only a lay figure on her horizon; he had never stirred her heart, and she dreaded a break in that friendship which she dreamed of prolonging forever with a girl’s usual infatuated belief in the possibilities of such a friendship between a man and a woman. The channel into which their talk had unconsciously drifted so alarmed her indeed that she rose abruptly and went to the window and stood looking down into the street, her perfect profile and the soft upward sweep of her beautiful hair showing against the dark draperies which she had pushed aside, and moving the painter in turn to still deeper depths of artistic self-abasement.

“Robert,” she said suddenly, after a moment’s embarrassed silence, “who was that with you the other evening? Was it Mr. Fox?”

Allestree glanced up quickly, and then stooped to pick up a brush which had dropped to the floor. “Yes,” he said quietly, “how did you happen to recognize him?”

“I was not sure—but I’ve seen two or three pictures of him in the magazines and the weeklies. One can’t forget his head, do you think?” and she came slowly back to her chair, unconscious of the change in Allestree’s expression.

“Well, I never tried,” he confessed; “I’ve known William Fox all my life, and he’s my own first cousin besides. It’s rather odd,” he added, “by the way, that you never met him, but then you have been away from the city when he has been here.”

Rose regarded him thoughtfully, her composure fully restored. “He has a very remarkable face,” she observed, “and it is fine and pale like a bit of old ivory.”

“Oh, yes, all the women fall in love with him,” Allestree assented with impatient irony.

“Do they? That doesn’t sound interesting, but I should not believe it of his face, he doesn’t look like a lady’s man! Is it true—” she added with a moment’s hesitation—“that he has never loved any one but Margaret White?”

“It’s true that Margaret treated him abominably,” said Allestree bluntly; “she was engaged to him when they were both very young and threw him over to marry White.”

“What a singular choice,” Rose observed, “White has nothing attractive about him, and he is so selfish, so hard; they say he treats her badly.”

“He should—in poetic justice,” replied Allestree laughing, “for she married him for his money and his position. Fox was a poor man then with no prospects but his brains and, strange to say, Margaret underestimated their possibilities.”

“And yet she is very clever. Did he really feel it so much?” she added, her natural sympathy for a sentimental situation touched and strengthened by the remembrance of Fox’s clear-cut face, which had appeared to her vision cameo-like against the night.

“Now you are beginning to ask me your unanswerable questions,” he retorted smiling grimly, with a keen sense of annoyance that Fox could intrude so sharply into their talk. “I know he was very much in love with her then, but he is on good terms with them both now and—” he stopped abruptly; his quick ear had caught a step on the stairs accompanied by another sound which startled him with an impatient certainty of a surprise.

It was the tread of a large Scotch collie who lifted the portière on his nose and walked deliberately into the room. Allestree laid down his brush with a peculiarly exasperated expression.

“Well, Sandy,” he said, not unkindly, addressing the dog.

Rose turned and held out her hand. “What a beautiful creature,” she remarked; “who does he belong to? Who is coming?”

Her companion gave her an enigmatical glance, observing the collie as he approached and laid his head against her knee. The step on the stair had now reached the landing, and they heard Aunt Hannah’s chair scrape as she moved and her knitting needles rattled on the floor, for she had been startled out of a nap.

“Who is it?” Rose repeated, framing the question with her lips.

“Fox,” replied Allestree dryly, laying down his palette and lighting a cigarette; “he has an uncommonly retentive memory it appears.”

She glanced at him quickly, a suddenly illuminated understanding in her eyes, and blushed exquisitely, for she was still young enough to be easily embarrassed. At the same moment Fox pushed aside the portière and entered the room.

“Hello, Bobby,” he began, and then paused abruptly at the sight of Rose. “I fear I’m an intruder,” he added courteously.

Allestree smiled grimly and presented him to Miss Temple. “On the contrary, I think you got the time pretty closely,” he remarked ironically.

Fox laughed. “Guilty!” he exclaimed with perfect good humor; “down Sandy!” he added sharply to his collie; “you’ve bewitched the dog, Miss Temple; he rarely makes friends with strangers.”

“Then I appreciate all the more his advances,” she replied smiling, “a dog always knows a friend.”

“And an honest man,” said Fox; “I’m free to confess that I don’t trust one who dislikes dogs.”

“Every man has his crank,” remarked Allestree, walking to and fro before his easel, “and if you begin on dogs with William there’s no end.”

Rose laughed, glancing from Allestree’s slightly vexed countenance to the serenity on the brow of his cousin, who had seated himself on the edge of an elaborate brass-bound chest which was one of the studio properties. “I can sympathize, Mr. Fox,” she said; “we’ve always had dogs.”

Fox gave her one of his brilliant inscrutable looks. “I entirely agree with Lamartine, Miss Temple,” he replied; “when a man is unhappy God gives him a dog.”

“Good Lord, Billy, are you making a bid for our sympathy?” exclaimed Allestree with exasperation.

Both Fox and Rose laughed merrily.

“He’s only quoting the modern classics,” she replied gayly.

“What I should like to know is how he gets out of school in the middle of the day,” said Allestree dryly; “for a man who is supposed to be a leader, he manages to desert at the most remarkable moments. One of the party whips told me the other day that Fox was as hard to trail as a comet.”

“Nothing of the sort,” replied Fox, with indolent amusement; “we adjourned over, last night, until Monday, and I came around here as usual to sit for my portrait.”

Allestree bit his lip, conscious that his irritability was thrown into sharp relief by his cousin’s imperturbable good humor, and resenting, with a sting of premonition, the effect of Fox’s pose upon Rose Temple. He was not a dull man and could not close his eyes to the fact that she had apparently come to life, been revivified and animated by Fox’s entrance, and he knew well enough the interest that the touch of romance in his past history added to his cousin’s brilliant personality. However, it was useless to sulk at the inevitable misfortune which had destroyed his hour with Rose, and he turned his attention to hospitality.

“Will you make tea for us, Rose, if I set the kettle boiling?” he asked, as he drew forward the table, “I’ve got some cakes in the cupboard and a few sandwiches.”

“Why, of course; it will be delightful,” she assented readily, rising from her chair to help him find the tea caddy. “I’m eternally indebted, Mr. Fox; he’s going to let me off a half-hour’s posing,” she added, smiling over her shoulder at him.

He laughed, moving over apparently to study the half outlined portrait on the easel, but really enjoying the sight of the graceful figure bending over the table, and her delicate hands engaged in opening the caddy and measuring the tea into Allestree’s old tea-pot. As she did so the light from the window fell vividly on her bright head, and the exquisite details of her profile, the curve of her cheek and chin, the thick lashed white eyelids, the short upper lip, the little pink ear, all engaged Fox’s critical and appreciative eye. Like most men who are forced to live in bachelor apartments, he felt keenly the domesticity of the little scene and the touch of gracious femininity which her presence lent to the tea-table. There was a charm, too, in her unconsciousness, and he was almost sorry when she finally turned with a steaming cup in her hands.

“You’ll have to take lemon,” she said, “for Robert never has cream unless it’s sour, but do you take sugar?”

“He takes three lumps to a cup,” interposed Allestree bluntly; “but he’ll probably deny it—he’s a politician.”

Fox laughed. “And in the house of my friends!” he said; “but that is only a coup d’état on his part,” he added, “to keep me from asking for his last lump, Miss Temple; I saw him looking for more just now.”

“We’ll draw lots for it, Robert,” said Rose gayly, taking her seat at the table and smiling across at Fox from pure pleasure in the little unconventional picnic.

But Allestree’s attention had been arrested by something in the street below, and he interrupted them with a gesture of despair. “Mrs. Osborne is coming!” he announced with a grimace.

Rose glanced hastily at the clock. “Oh, I must be going,” she exclaimed; “I had no idea it was so late!” and she rose hurriedly and reached for her hat.

Allestree murmured something uncomplimentary to his approaching visitor, and Fox set down his cup of tea. The first tremor of an earthquake shock could scarcely have broken up the little group more abruptly. Rose had put on her hat and adjusted her filmy veil, and it was Fox who helped her with her coat and her furs. Allestree, instead, threw a cloth over the picture on the easel.

Rose held out her hand. “Good-by,” she said with a charming smile; “I know I’m a trying model, but you’re a perfect angel of patience, Robert.”

As she spoke there was a frou-frou of skirts in the hall, and Lily Osborne came slowly and gracefully through the portière. She was a handsome woman with an abundance of reddish gold hair and long black eyes which had the effect of having no white, a peculiarity possessed by Rachel and also, we are told, by the devil.

The two women bowed stiffly and Rose slipped out, attended by Fox and Sandy, leaving Allestree to devour his chagrin and receive his accomplished visitor.

IV

ALLESTREE lived alone with his widowed mother in a roomy, old-fashioned mansion in one of the older residential sections, which stand now like decadent environs of the more brilliant quarters where the millionaire and the multi-millionaire erect their palaces. But these changes, in matters of fashion and display, did not trouble the serene bosom of old Mrs. Allestree, who felt that she held her place in the world by the inalienable rights of birth, blood, and long established family position, for, happily, she had as yet no notion of the shadowy nature of such claims in the event of financial disaster, which is as impersonal as the deluge. She was contentedly aware that her old-fashioned drawing-rooms had been the scene of many a brilliant gathering even before her nephew, William Fox, became such a figure in the public eye that his frequent presence in her house was enough to draw there the most distinguished and representative men at the capital. But the old lady herself was clever, shrewdly conversant with the world and its affairs, and not averse to giving ear to the current gossip; she was, indeed, often amused at her son’s aloofness from these worldly concerns which pleased and interested her the most. For, though a detached spectator, because of her age and her comparatively delicate health, she was yet keenly aware of the drift of events both social and political, and possessed the advantages of age in being able to make comparisons between the past and the present, with a touch of eclecticism amusing in one who had been so devotedly attached to the frivolities of fashion. She could draw more accurate deductions than many who were more intimately concerned in the whirling conflict of social and political ambitions which was raging around her. When the President quarrelled with the party leaders, when Congress administered a rebuke by withholding a vote of confidence, she was able to recall this or that parallel case, this or that precedent for an action which to many seemed unprecedented, and when the entertainments at the White House began to evolve a new system of exclusions she could point out an incident when some former President’s wife had tried to introduce a similar measure and had met with disaster on leaving her stronghold, lost at once in the current of a social millrace which whirls to oblivion the queen of yesterday and the leader of to-day, engulfing all past glories in a maelstrom of forgetfulness; the inevitable condition in a republican society where there can be no hereditary distinction and those of class are constantly fluctuating with the rise and fall of fortunes, the manipulations of the Stock Exchange, while birth and breeding have no consideration at all in comparison with the purchase power of gold.

Fully aware of these things, and rejoicing in the rich memories of a varied past, when she had known all the great men of her day, old Mrs. Allestree delighted in observing the world of fashion from her retired corner and, though devoted to her son and admiring and believing in his talent, she sometimes suffered a keen pang of regret that her sister and not she had borne William Fox. But she was jealously afraid of this secret thought, scarcely admitting it even to herself, because of her intuitive feeling that Allestree had already suffered and might suffer more at the hands of his brilliant and careless cousin, and that he was supremely gifted in the refinements of self-torture.

It was twilight, and Mrs. Allestree sat alone by her drawing-room window watching for her son’s return from his workshop. She had been a very handsome woman, and even in age retained much of her beauty and dignity, and her figure and face were finely outlined as she sat against the folds of heavy velvet curtains, looking down into the street where the lamps had just been lighted and shone with the vivid whiteness of electricity on the smooth pavements, while the carriages and motor-cars were beginning to wheel by on their return from afternoon receptions, teas, and matinées. Below, at the circle, she saw the gayly lighted electric cars sweeping around the curve and receding to a final vanishing point of light at the top of a distant hill, while above it the sky was still bright with the afterglow and one star shone like the tip of a naked sword. The city in this retired quarter showed its most kind and friendly aspect, suggesting nothing of the struggle and rush of modern life, but only the whirl of winter gayety, the ceaseless rounds of society.

Within was an atmosphere of repose and comfort; the tea-table was set by the open fire, and the rose-patterned, silver tea kettle was emitting a little cloud of steam when Allestree finally opened the door.

“Well, mother, you here alone in the dark?” he remarked, as he turned on some light and revealed the warm homeliness of the large old-fashioned room, with its mahogany furniture, its soft rugs and velvet hangings, and its long, oval mirrors framed in gold and surmounted by cupids and lovers’ knots.

“Never less alone than when alone,” she replied brightly, and then glancing shrewdly at his slightly perturbed expression, she added: “you’ll take some tea, you look tired.”

“No,” he replied, throwing himself into an easy chair by the fire; “Rose made some tea in the studio, and it’s a bit too late now for another cup.”

“So Rose kept her appointment? I hope you got on with the portrait.”

Allestree shrugged his shoulders. “Impossible, Fox came and then Lily Osborne. The gods don’t mean that I shall finish that picture. And Reynolds painted several of his best in eight hours!” he added despairingly.

But his mother ignored the latter part of his speech. “Fox?” she glanced at him keenly, “then the House adjourned?”

“Yes, and he knew Rose was to be there,” Allestree laughed a little bitterly; “it was the merest chance in the world, he was with me when I met her the other day. Of course he came in as handsome, as gay as ever—and as careless!”

Mrs. Allestree had left her seat by the window and was mechanically pouring out a cup of tea, her fine old hands under their falls of lace as firm and deft as a girl’s. “I wish he was less careless,” she observed quietly; “I’ve just heard some more gossip about him; Martha O’Neal was here to lunch. It appears that he was really selected for the Navy, could have had the portfolio for the lifting of his finger and, at the last moment, when there was no apposite reason for a change, there was a deal and White got it.”

“Well, we can’t blame him for that, can we?” said her son smiling, “you know the saying is that the Administration will not ‘stand hitched.’”

She shook her head. “That’s not it—he made the deal himself; he deliberately favored White, and you can imagine what is said; every one believes that silly story that he’s desperately in love with Margaret still, and, of course, it looks like it. He could have saved Wingfield, and he didn’t, and you know Mrs. Wingfield hates Margaret!”

“I don’t believe a word of it,” said Allestree calmly; “Fox is too much of an egoist. Probably he didn’t want to go into the Cabinet; in fact I’ve heard him say it was a safe receiving-vault for the defunct candidates. Can’t the women ever forget that he was in love with Margaret?”

“Possibly they could,” his mother replied shrewdly, “if Margaret wasn’t in love with him.”

“Good Lord, how you all flatter Fox!” her son exclaimed, with exasperation, “for my part, I can’t fancy that Margaret ever loved him; she treated him abominably to marry White, and now she has everything she wants, money, luxury and power; she’s a perfect little sybarite.”

The old woman looked at him with an expression of affectionate tolerance. “My dear boy,” she said quietly, “Margaret is wildly unhappy; money never yet purchased happiness; that’s the reason she behaves so outrageously. Have you heard of her latest? She danced a kind of highland fling or a jig after her dinner the other night. White was furious, and they’re telling a story of an open quarrel after the musicale when he swore at her and she laughed in his face.”

“White is a brute, but Margaret chose him with her eyes open,” he replied, “and I think Fox feels it. At any rate there’s nothing in that gossip about Wingfield; he had quarrelled with the President. You know the story is that he was found walking up and down his hall, the Wednesday after Congress met, shaking his fist and shouting about the message. ‘That damned message!’ he said, ‘it will ruin the party—if I’d only been here!’ He was away at the time it was written and, of course, that paragraph did virtually condemn his administration of the department. He had to resign; that goes without saying!”

“I suppose so, and Mrs. Wingfield talked; we all know what a tongue she has!”

Allestree laughed, leaning back in his chair with his hands clasped behind his head. “Well, she’s going, anyway.”

“But she isn’t,” sighed Mrs. Allestree; “she’s to stay over two months, heaven knows why!”

“The Lord deliver Margaret then!” exclaimed her son, still laughing.

Mrs. Allestree nodded sagely. “Margaret can hold her own though, Robert, and everybody knows how she has insulted Mrs. Wingfield. Margaret’s bon mots have convulsed the town time and again. You know, as well as I do, that it was Margaret who set half the stories going about her. Margaret can do and say the most shocking and heartless things at one moment and be the most charming creature at the next. She often seems to me to be a perfect Undine, to have no soul! Really, sometimes her treatment of White is impossible. Even Lily Osborne professes to be shocked at the dance the other night; she told Martha O’Neal that it was as suggestive as Salome.”

“Mrs. Osborne is a hypocrite,” retorted Allestree scornfully; “by the way, I’m to paint her portrait. I put it at a figure which, I thought, was prohibitive and precluded all possibility of an order, but she closed it at once, without turning an eyelash.”

Mrs. Allestree gave him a long, comprehending look. “White pays for it then,” she remarked dryly.

“Of course,” he replied, “and White pretends to quarrel with his wife’s wild ways!”

The old woman set down her teacup and looked mournfully into the fire. “It’s a terrible business from beginning to end,” she said finally; “when I think of those two poor babies! Little Estelle is just beginning to notice things too, and Margaret seems utterly indifferent to them. What is the world coming to?”

Allestree laughed and patted his mother’s hand. “You can’t regulate it, mother,” he said cheerfully.

“Heaven forbid! There are too many divorces; one can’t go out now without meeting men with two wives and women with a plurality of husbands; yet we are objecting to seating the Mormons in Congress!”

“After all, is a divorce worse than such a marriage as Margaret’s?” her son rejoined, indolently enjoying the controversy.

“There should have been no marriage,” she retorted firmly, pushing back her chair and rising with a rustle of silks, “White could never have loved her, he hasn’t been true to her for a moment. Her beauty pleased him, or that charm which is more subtle than beauty and which makes her what she is. Now he’s lost his head over the gorgeous coloring, the flesh and blood of Lily Osborne; she would have pleased Rubens, Robert. By the way, Martha O’Neal told me of a curious rumor about her; it is said that she is in the secret employ of the Russian Government; you know she has no conscience.”

“A spy?” Allestree laughed, “but why here? We’ve done Russia a good turn, it’s Japan that is chewing the rag.”

“Robert! what a disgusting expression. But of course you know the tales of the Black Cabinet and that our embassy dispatches were tampered with.”

“Now you’re in your element, mother; you love a mystery!”

The old woman put her hand on his head, stroking back his hair with a fond gesture. “Tell me about Rose,” she said, watching him narrowly, with all her maternal intuition alive; “did she sit patiently—and will your portrait please you? That’s really the only question; every one else is sure to be pleased.”

He shook his head. “I can’t get it to please me,” he replied quietly; “after all, Rose’s beauty is less a question of feature than I thought. I might interpret a soul if I were a Raphael or a Fra Angelico—as it is, it will never look like her.”

“Nonsense! Rose is very human; don’t put her on too high a pedestal, my dear,” his mother counselled wisely; “you are too sensitive, too imaginative. Fox would never make the mistake of treating a woman like a saint on a pillar!”

Allestree made an inarticulate sound and rose also. “Fox—no!” he said a little bitterly; “Fox could make love to Saint Catherine without offending her; he’s one of the men whom women love!”

His mother smiled but made no reply; at heart she was fully aware that there was much truth in the saying. Old as she was, she felt the indescribable spell of Fox’s genius, and knowing her son’s heart as she did, she foresaw difficulties in the way of his happiness if his cousin should forget his old love and find a new one. Much as she had desired and endeavored to break up the unfortunate intimacy between Fox and the Whites, she had not foreseen that her own son’s happiness might be, in a way, dependent on Margaret’s power to hold her place in the regard of her early lover. As she stood looking at the fire in silence the shrewd old woman reflected that the ways of Providence are inscrutably hard to divine and that, after all, it is sometimes fatal to thrust one’s hand into the fire to save a brand from the burning.

V

THAT Mrs. Allestree’s divinations were not very far short of the truth, or unlikely of fulfilment, would have been apparent to her could she have looked in, a few weeks later, on Rose and Fox together in Judge Temple’s fine old library. In the judge’s estimation the library was the one spot of the house, the sanctum sanctorum, and its noble book-lined walls imparted a warmth of color and an erudite dignity to a room of fine proportions lighted by an immense southern bow-window which overlooked the walled garden, where Rose had cultivated every flower which blooms in summer and every evergreen vine and ilex which lives in winter.

Over the high wide mantel was one fine old painting which testified both to the extravagance and distinctive taste of the judge’s grandfather, and on the book littered table stood a slender vase filled with roses. There was an exquisite delicacy, a refinement, an atmosphere of culture, even in such minutiæ as these, which gave a detailed charm to the perspective of the entire house.

Rose herself sat in a high-backed chair by the open fire, her bright head and slender figure outlined against the dark background, while she listened, with all the freshness and enthusiasm of girlhood, to Fox’s gay, easy talk, his dog, Sandy, lying stretched on the hearthrug between them in the blissful content of physical comfort and the instinctive assurance of safety and friendship which Rose’s presence seemed to increase.

To Fox, half the girl’s charm lay in a certain rigid mental uprightness, a clear ethical point of view, which was entirely different from the careless tolerance of the smart set in which he had hitherto almost exclusively moved. Fox had no religion; Rose was devout, and swift in her denunciation of wrong, for she had all the terrible unrelenting standards of youth and the religion of youth which is wont to be the religion of extremes. Her character was indeed just emerging from that raw period of girlhood which is full of passionate beliefs and renunciations as well as a shy pride which can inflict keen mental suffering for a little hurt; a season when the mind is wonderfully receptive and the young, untried spirit full of beautiful inspirations, hopes, and beliefs which are too frequently destined to woeful annihilation in later years.

Fox had recently made a great speech, a speech which had filled both the floor and the galleries of the House to suffocation, and even thronged the corridors with spectators who could gain no admittance, yet, while it had thrilled Rose’s pulses with excitement and enthralled her with the spell of its eloquence, her rigid sense of the proprieties had been shocked; she had felt its flowing periods its scornful references to mysteries which seemed to Fox as rotten as they were immaterial, and the fact that she had taken umbrage at phrases of his, which seemed to him sufficiently innocuous to escape all criticism, amused and pleased him. It was a new point of view; he liked to tease her into expressing a shy opinion, or into a sudden outburst of righteous disapproval which brought the color to her cheek and the sparkle to her eye. It delighted him to feel that even disapproving of him she could not hate him, for in their dawning intimacy he found ample assurance of her liking, and the unguarded friendliness of her feeling showed in her eagerness to win him to her side on any mooted question.

He leaned back in his chair, watching her with a keen appreciation of her loveliness and her unconscious betrayal of her own emotions. “So! after all you didn’t approve of me the other day?” he said, with perfect good humor; “you were really condemning my ethics while you applauded—you know you did applaud, you told me you congratulated me on my ‘great speech.’”

Rose returned his teasing look seriously. “I did congratulate you; it was a great speech, but I didn’t like it,” she said in a low voice and with an evident effort.

“And why?” he asked, his brilliant gaze bent more fully on her.

She turned away, her cheek red, and resting her chin on her hand she fell to studying the fire though she was still courageous. “I didn’t like the tone of it; you belittle your own great gifts,” she said softly, hesitating slightly and choosing her words with care; “you make them of your own creation when they are really given you, given you as the five talents were given to the man in the Scriptures. You haven’t laid them away in a napkin; why then are you ashamed to give the glory where it is justly due? You can’t deny that there is glory in it all!”

He smiled. “You make me feel like a thief. To be entirely honest, I’m not religious, but I read the Bible and Shakespeare as dictionaries of eloquence. Do you think me a dreadful sinner—worse than those on whom the tower of Siloam fell?”

Rose bit her lip. “I’ve no doubt you think me a hypocrite!” she replied.

“I should like to tell you what I think of you,” he said softly, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, looking across at her, “but I’m afraid—afraid of you!”

She laughed a little with a charming diffidence, for she had met the sweetness of his glance which was full of gentle admiration.

“I sometimes wonder,” he continued, “how you would meet a great moral question which involved your happiness and, perhaps, that of another whom you loved.”

She shivered a little, stretching out one slender hand to the fire. “Ah,” she said, with a faint smile, “I hope I may never meet such a question! I see you make me a Pharisee.”

“God forbid!” he replied quickly, “you belong rather to the Christian martyrs; I’m either a Barbarian or a Scythian!”

They both laughed softly at this, and Rose forgot her momentary embarrassment. “I should try to be just!” she said.

He shook his head with that rare smile of his which seemed half mocking, half caressing. “You couldn’t be!” he retorted provokingly, “you are a little Puritan, narrow, firm, righteous; I begin to be more and more afraid of you!”

She lifted her chin. “You think me too narrow to be just? Isn’t that the charge that you worldlings always bring against—against—”

“The righteous?” he supplied quickly.

They laughed again. “You convict me out of my own mouth; I shall dare no more arguments!”

“Ah, now you know how I feel under your criticisms!” he flashed back at her.

His manner wore its happiest aspect, it was delightful to be with her; through all contradictions he began to feel the temperamental sympathy, and she, too young to understand these subtleties, was aware of the glow and warmth of his presence, the sweetness of his manner which could be, when he was neither stern nor angry nor self-absorbed, one of a delicacy and sentiment uncommon in a man; with all his egotism, his spoiled acceptance of the world’s homage, he retained qualities that were inherently noble and lovable.

“But I have more reason,” she declared with warmth, “it’s unworthy of you to espouse any cause for the mere sake of party, ‘to stand pat’ when your heart is against the issue; I don’t believe in it!”

“You have been reading revolutionary documents; you are full of this new heresy,” he retorted, still laughing softly; “you are like some of the new politicians; they pull down the pillars of the temple on their own heads.”

She leaned forward eagerly, her eyes sparkling. “Do you know what this party worship reminds me of?” she said, “this devotion in a man to his party? The tomb of Rosicrucius and the statue which crushed the worshipper who entered there! So your party’s graven image crushes out a man’s originality.”

“Little heretic!” he mocked, “little revolutionist! A party is a great machine; we can’t do without it!”

She shook her head vehemently. “The children of Israel thought they couldn’t do without the golden calf! You were not so strong a party man five years ago, do you remember?”

He looked at her quickly. “Do you?”

“I read your speeches,” she confessed with charming ingenuousness, her eyes kindling with emotion; “I read the first speech they ever printed in the newspapers here. I’ve wanted to tell you how beautiful I thought it, how eloquent!”

He regarded her a moment in silence; he felt suddenly that there had always been a link between them, that across space and time he had spoken not to the public but to her, and even been understood by her; that the virgin whiteness of her young soul had received the inscription of his mind. Then he was as suddenly and vividly conscious of his folly, his egotism, his unworthiness! She was too lovely and too innocent to have received the impression of his spirit; and he—the thought of his careless life, his worship at Margaret’s shrine, the strength of the old fetters which bound him, made him suddenly humble. And then, the beauty of her smile, the warm sympathy of her temperament created an angry impatience of such restrictions; with characteristic scorn of conventionalities he thrust them aside. The perfect innocence and spontaneity of her praise and appreciation was the most subtle of all flattery, and he possessed the temperament of genius which is, at one moment, above the consideration of either praise or blame and the next quivers with sensibility at the breath of either. He returned her shy but glowing look with one of unusual humility. “I feel as if I didn’t deserve it,” he said gently; “it is an exquisite happiness to be praised by you!”

She smiled. “And I feel ashamed to have set myself up as a judge,” she replied quickly, “but it was because—because I didn’t want you to fall below your own standard! You see what it is to have a record of great achievements.”

“Hereafter I shall only seek to deserve your praise,” he rejoined, “but I feel myself a sublime egoist; I’ve sat here talking of myself, of my work, and meanwhile I remember that my aunt told me of your voice. Why do you never sing for me?”

“Because you have never asked me,” she replied simply, with an involuntary smile.

Fox leaned toward her with an eloquent gesture of appeal. “Did I deserve that? Am I such a miserable egoist?” he exclaimed, and then: “I ask you now.”

Rose was entirely unaffected, and she went at once to the piano in the room beyond, and seating herself began to play the first soft notes of a prelude. Fox had followed her and took his place near the instrument, again observing her with keen appreciation; her sweetness, her whiteness of soul had taken possession of his imagination with a force which he had supposed, until this moment, impossible. For, after one bitter and humiliating experience in the drama of love and passion, he had withdrawn with seared sensibilities, and assuming a new attitude had regarded women as a detached spectator, fancying that he possessed a high degree of eclecticism in comparing the emotional phases of their existence which should be henceforth quite apart from his; love and marriage were mere episodes in a man’s life, and feeling no need of assuming either the duties or the responsibilities of the latter state he had not seriously contemplated the former as anything but a remote possibility. Besides, in a curious way, his life seemed to be linked with Margaret White’s; she continued to make claims upon him, to tacitly presuppose his devotion, and he had been too uncertain of himself, too indolent, too easily drifting with the tide to make any effort to free himself from the shackles of that old love affair. But all these things slipped out of mind as he sat listening to Rose’s song.

It was a simple Italian love-song, soft, caressing, gently plaintive, and peculiarly suited to her voice, but the air and the words were nothing compared with that voice. When Mrs. Allestree spoke of it, Fox had thought of it as the usual vocal accomplishment of a raw schoolgirl, something young and sweet, no doubt, but full of crudity and weakness. Instead, he was suddenly aware that he was listening to a voice which had a scope and richness beyond any that he had ever heard except in opera, and there were but few of the great singers who had such a gift as this. The thrill and exquisite freshness of its tones touched his very soul. He found himself listening with a keen feeling of depression; this gift of hers lifted her at once into another sphere than his, and he reflected that her beautiful body was an exquisite envelope for the spirit, her voice its divine interpretation.

His mind drifted back to the sweeter and more sacred relations of life, to those simple emotions which approach more nearly the divine. The complex affairs of the world, of politics, passion, intrigue, slipped away from him, and the holier aspects of a pure and devoted life took visible shape to his imagination in this young and beautiful girl. He had never fully appreciated his own susceptibility to the uplifting power of music, and the charm of her voice seemed more poignant because so unexpected; he lost himself in a delightful revery, the poet in him awoke with a thrill of pleasure,—the joy we feel in discovering a new power, a larger grasp; he was no longer conscious of his surroundings, but only of the supreme delight of her presence.

As she finished singing, her hands slipped from the keys into her lap and she turned and looked at him, smiling, expecting some applause, unconscious of the depth of his emotion. For a moment he said nothing, then he rose and held out his hand, his eyes eloquent of feeling.

“Exquisite!” he said, and she blushed with pleasure, knowing that he could not express his appreciation in words.

She laid her hand in his, rising too. “Thank you,” she exclaimed, “I’m so glad!”

As she spoke and while he still held her hand, intending to tell her how profoundly she had moved him, they were both suddenly aware of some one’s entrance, and turned to see Mrs. White standing just inside the drawing-room door. She had entered unannounced, and stopped abruptly as she came upon the little scene. She was elaborately dressed in black velvet with ermine furs, and an immense bizarre hat of violet velvet and chiffon with masses of violets on the wide brim. Under her arm was a toy Pomeranian as black as her gown and as glossy as silk, its little black head just appearing over her immense ermine muff. She had evaded the servant’s intention of announcing her, she had thought only of surprising Rose at her music and had come upon this! She stood still, a sudden spiritual perception sweeping over her and thrusting a blade of agony into her heart. Every vestige of color ran out of her cheeks, her gray eyes dilated. When they turned they surprised a look on her face which distorted its usual gayety and defiance. Then she thrust it aside with a great effort of will, with the force of a new and vivid determination, and greeted their amazement with her light little laugh.

“Caught!” she said, “next time I shall send a footman—or ring a bell!”

Rose came forward with a blushing but eager welcome, but Fox stood in a moment of awkwardness which both vexed and amused the woman. Men have no resources, she thought bitterly.

As for him he experienced a shock of dismay; he was trying to shake off a vague feeling which possessed him that he had no right to be there, that he owed allegiance still to Margaret, that her look, her manner, her very presence demanded it while, in fact, she had long ago forfeited all claims upon him.

Meanwhile she had led the way back to the library, driven Sandy away from her Pomeranian, and was seated in Rose’s chair, an elegant and conspicuously important figure, at once the centre of the stage; she had one of those personalities which are immediately predominant in society. “So,” she said lightly, “this is why William deserted my Sunday afternoons; I should have looked for him in vain!”

“It seems you are yourself a deserter,” Fox retorted, “this is your day at home.”

“You thought me safely anchored?” she laughed, with a little mocking intonation, caressing the Pomeranian’s ears; “I should be, but I had to make a call of condolence. Wicklow insisted; you know he’s so conventional and so determined upon being the popular public man! Mrs. Wingfield lost her grandmother two weeks ago so, of course, I must call and make my condolences!”

Fox laughed softly; her manner brought back the normal tone of affairs and he knew her moods to perfection. “Of course you condoled?” he said.

She shrugged her shoulder, looking at Rose. “My dear,” she said, “you will be interested; no mere man could understand. I’ve always been uncertain in my mind about the correct mourning for a grandmother; now I know,—it’s settled beyond appeal.”

“By Mrs. Wingfield?” Rose smiled her incredulity.

“By Mrs. Wingfield—it’s shrimp pink!” Margaret said, “she had on a tea-gown with lace ruffles; it was a violent, vivid shrimp pink, and her nose was red. Of course I said all manner of appropriate things. Everybody stared, then I made a grand finale and departed. She was furious. And Wicklow sends me out to make his way for him!” and she threw out her hands with a little gesture of mock despair.

“Why do you tease that poor soul so?” Rose protested laughing, “she falls an easy prey, too. I heard they were going abroad soon.”

“In three months,” Margaret said, “to the Riviera; they tried Switzerland, she told me, a year ago, but she found ‘it wasn’t really fashionable.’”

“Margaret!” Rose shook an admonishing finger, “you make her say such things, you know you do!”

Mrs. White raised her eyebrows, her eyes haggard. “One would suppose me a Sapphira. She truly said it and I kept on asking her what she said; she repeated it twice,—they were all listening of course, and M. de Caillou tried to look plaintive.”

“He’s solemn enough anyway, Margaret,” Fox said, amused; “he might well be shocked at your levity.”

“Oh, I always want to make him sit up and beg for a lump of sugar,” she retorted scornfully.

As she spoke she rose and went to the window, looking out with an abruptness of manner which seemed to take no account of their presence. She was struggling with an overwhelming dread; with the keen intuition of unhappiness she read Fox’s mood, and her very soul cried out against it. But she was an actress, an actress of long training and accomplishment. She turned carelessly, lifting her Pomeranian to her shoulder and resting her cheek against its long black fur. “There’s my motor back,” she said, catching a glimpse of it through the long window in the drawing-room. “I’m going home to receive Wicklow’s public. Can I borrow Fox, Rose?”

Rose turned easily, mistress of herself and aware of his annoyance, keenly alive to the possibility that his old love for Margaret might still be a factor in his life. “I’m afraid I haven’t asked Mr. Fox to take a cup of tea,” she said laughing; “father is late and you know we dine early on Sundays; we’re very unconventional and old-fashioned.”

Margaret was trailing slowly to the door, her velvet draperies and her long ermine stole seeming heavy and burdensome on her slender figure. “Oh, I know,” she retorted, “you’re Old Testament Christians; I’m always expecting to see the scapegoat caught in your fence-railing! In spite of my shortcomings though, you are going to sing for me some Sunday, Rose, and make my sinners think they’ve found the gate of Paradise.”

But Rose shook her head, laughing. “Ask father,” she said; “he declares that I shall not exhibit!”

VI

“MAMMA, give me the beads!”

Margaret turned reluctantly and looked down at the child, a girl between five and six years old, without even the ephemeral beauty of babyhood, and showing already a strong resemblance to her father. “By all means, only don’t swallow them; it’s after the doctor’s office hours,” she replied carelessly.

She was seated before her toilet-table clad in a silk kimono, and her maid had just finished doing her hair and gone in search of some minor accessories of the toilet, for her mistress was dressing for a large dinner at Mrs. O’Neal’s. Meanwhile Margaret sat looking into the oval mirror in front of her, making a keen and critical survey of her own face and figure. As she did so she moved a candle slightly, and thus throwing a stronger light on her features was startled by the haggard look in her eyes, the purple rings beneath them, the hollowing of her cheeks. Was she beginning to lose her beauty? The thought alarmed her, and she leaned forward looking at herself more closely. Yes, there were lines, and she was thin, deplorably, unquestionably thin. The vivid misery of her expression in this unguarded moment was apparent even to her. Heavens, did she look like that to others? The thought was pregnant with fierce mortification; she must be wearing her heart upon her sleeve! And Fox? Was she losing him? The keen pang of agony which had shot through her at the sight of Fox and Rose together, at the glimpse of that little scene by the piano, recurred to her with a burning sense of humiliation. Was she to taste this bitter cup also?

She had known for years the miserable mistake of her choice of White, she had grovelled in the dust of repentance, but there had been one drop of honey in the cup of gall, one saving grace in the situation; she was sure that Fox still loved her, that he would be true to her. No other woman had been set up in her shrine. She knew how deep the hurt had been, and she had fondly believed that she alone could heal it. Through all those arid years, those years of gayety, of luxury, of false happiness and false show, she had hugged her secret to her heart; Fox still loved her!

And now? What had she read in the kindled sympathy of that look at Rose Temple? She bit her lip, staring into the mirror with haggard eyes. Could he give her up? She, who knew so much of the brutal egotism of which a man can be capable, she who had seen such a nature as White’s revealed in the scorching intimacy of married life,—dared she picture Fox as unselfish enough to be still true to her, to content himself with comforting her wretchedness when love and youth and beauty—beauty such as she had never worn—might be his? Her sore heart throbbed passionately in her bosom. She had expiated her mistake, she had suffered for her fault, she had a right to be happy! She would be happy; it is the eternal cry of the human soul. “Every pitifullest whipster,” says Carlyle, “seeks happiness, a happiness impossible even for the gods.” And Margaret’s wilful soul cried out for happiness; why should it not be hers? She was shackled, it was true, with fetters of her own forging, but—the eager thought of liberty darted through her mind like an arrow—others had been so bound and were now free, others were making new lives out of the old, and the ease with which such ties can be dissolved was not the least of her temptations.

Her glance fell suddenly on the child, Estelle, playing soberly with the amethyst beads which she had begged for. The little girl had learned to be quiet; if she was noisy or in the way she was immediately dismissed to the nursery, and she had her lesson by heart; she was making no noise but a soft crooning sound as she fondled the beads. Her hair was flaxen, her face dull and not pretty, her eyes like her father’s. Margaret shuddered and averted her gaze; how cruel that she should look like him! And the baby, only two years old but already like him; she felt it her curse, the retribution of her loveless marriage, that these two living and visible links to bind her to her vows were both like the man she had married without love and without respect, because she could not give up her life and its luxuries to be poor. A marriage with Fox then would have meant the renunciation of everything which seemed to her essential to existence, it would have combined the miseries of cheap living and self-denial, of small and hideous economies, which made her shudder even to contemplate; she had always been a sybarite. Brought up by an extravagant, pleasure-loving mother, by a father who had spent all to live well, Margaret had been unable to conceive anything more horrible than genteel poverty, and White had offered her a dazzling vista of wealth, position, social success. She was very young, raw, untried, and the temptation had been too great.

As she sat there, idly, at her toilet-table, surrounded by all the beautiful and splendid luxuries of a boudoir which had been fitted up with reckless expense to meet her whims and self-indulgences, she remembered with keen self-contempt her excitement over her own magnificent wedding, her tour through France and Italy in a motor-car which had cost a fortune; then a keen pang wrung her heart as she remembered the boy they had killed in the little crooked Italian village and the people who had stoned them! She had felt it then as a cruel prognostication of ill luck, a terrible beginning of her married life and now, whenever she closed her eyes, she could see again the narrow street, the brown Italian houses, that seemed ready to topple over on them, the children playing, the vivid sky above—then the cry, the awful scene, the child’s dead face. She shuddered; so had her gilded dream of happiness ended; a cry, a rush of misery, and now her sore heart to hide, the dance of death to go on to the end unless—again came the haunting thought; it had beset her lately, tempted her, teased her. It was so easy, it would be so easy to break the bonds, and who could blame her? To be happy!

“Mamma, it broke!” Estelle cried suddenly, with a quivering lip, “I didn’t do it!”

Margaret turned and looked at her. “No matter,” she said strangely, “it broke easily, didn’t it, Estelle? Thank heaven, one can break chains!”

As she spoke there was a knock at her door, and White himself entered. He was not a large man but his face was broad and heavy, his hair had been light but was now gray above the ears, and his jaws were slightly purpled by high living. There were some who thought him distinguished, chiefly those who always perceive a halo around officialdom and wealth. Actually he belonged to that type of man who has been in clubs, political and social, from boyhood, who has unlimited money, a mighty egotism and the unfailing preference for his neighbor’s wife. Meeting Margaret’s challenging glance he paused near the door, his hand on a chair, and looked at her with a cold fixed eye which neither changed nor wavered as he spoke.

“I have something to say to you,” he began in a hard dry tone; “it seems to me about time to speak out. I don’t know what’s come over you; you’re clever enough, but you seem to forget that I’m a public man. You were absolutely rude at the reception this afternoon, and your whims are intolerable. It’s all very annoying! If I choose to open my house to the public I expect my wife to accept the rôle and then to play it to the end.”

Margaret looked at him. “I fail to understand you,” she said ironically; “is this a lecture?”

“You may call it what you please,” he retorted angrily, walking to and fro; “you know well enough!”

She shrugged her shoulders. “I’m dressing for dinner—you’d better wait until another time,” she remarked with a yawn.

“There’s no time like the present,” he said harshly; “your manners were detestable to-day; you treated people like dogs!”

She laughed bitterly. “For instance?” she said, “Lily Osborne?”

“Mrs. Osborne knows better than to care!”

“She should!” Margaret mocked, “she should expect it; I congratulate you on her admirable humility.”

He gnawed his lip, the veins swelling in his forehead. “I warn you!” he cried fiercely, “I will not permit such behavior—your dance at the musicale is the talk of the town, and now you receive people who come here with indifference—and I’m a Cabinet minister!”

“Which is a miracle!” his wife replied, laughing softly and provokingly; “you made a mistake in your marriage, Wicklow; you should have chosen a more popular person.”

“I’m aware of my mistake!” he retorted, still walking, and picking up first one knick-knack and then another and setting them down again; “I was a damned fool! I thought you witty and fond of society; I fancied you a success and you can be one if you choose, but everything’s upside down with your whims. You keep Fox hanging around here—you know that he and I are at sword’s points in politics, you know that he—”

“Leave him out please!” Margaret interposed in a cold, hard voice. She had risen and her eyes glowed with passion.

White turned a lowering look on her. “Fox didn’t marry you!” he said cuttingly, “he was too wise!”

She made no reply; she could have answered that she had given up Fox to marry him, but the sting of the insult cut her to the quick, his allusive familiar tone was a whiplash. She turned away, her white face set, a singular light in her eyes. The passion of her hatred of him at that moment was almost beyond restraint; her very flesh quivered under the throb of her maddened nerves. His coarseness, his brutality, his sensuousness revolted her; she felt, under the sting of his lecture, a mere bondswoman, and her fetters fairly burned into her soul. It seemed to her that she could no longer breathe the same air with him.

The child caught her sleeve timidly. “Mamma, don’t!” she whispered, “please don’t make papa look so—I’m afraid!”

Margaret looking down at her saw anew that hateful likeness. “Go away!” she shuddered, “you’re just like him—I can’t bear it; go, I tell you!”

The child’s hand dropped and her lip quivered with impotent anguish; she could not understand, but she read her mother’s chilled, repellant look and it frightened her still more; she drew her arm across her face and fell away with a sob. Margaret, whose heart would have been touched at another moment, hardly heard her.

“I want you to understand,” White began again, angrily, unmindful of the little girl’s presence, “my position. I’m a—”

Margaret interrupted him with an impatient gesture. “Gertrude is coming with my gown,” she said coolly, “I think you may spare me any more at present.”

White turned with a frown, and seeing the maid at the door with her arms full of white satin and lace, he gave way with a growl of discontent while his wife smiled calmly at the startled girl and bade her hurry; it was nearly eight o’clock.

At the dinner Margaret was the most conspicuous and observed figure at the table; she was strikingly dressed in white satin, her lace bodice fastened on the shoulders with jewels, her long, slender throat wound with pearls, and the black lace scarf—which she wore in deference to her hostess who was dining a cardinal—only accentuated the peculiar pallor of her face and the whiteness of her bare arms. She was radiant, witty, vivacious; her reckless tongue never ceased its unmerciful chatter. She talked Spanish to the Spanish ambassador, Italian to the Papal delegate who sat opposite, she entertained the cardinal. Every eye was on her; she was at once the most unusual and the most talked of woman in Cabinet and Diplomatic circles, and she had a wit as keen as it was unmerciful.

White watched her with an increasing feeling of uneasiness, he read defiance in her manner and began to dread some overt challenge; he had been untimely in his remonstrance, and he felt it too late.

Meanwhile their hostess loved the fair offender, and aided and abetted her in her wild sallies. Martha O’Neal was an old, old woman, the widow of a famous and wealthy jurist, and she was herself famous as a hostess and a social leader. Her eyes were still bright and keen, though her hair was white as snow; she knew everybody, everybody knew her; a worldly old woman who pursued society with the eagerness of a young débutante, played bridge for high stakes, smoked cigarettes in an exquisite holder of gold and amber, hurried to receptions, balls and routs with a tottering gait and a slightly vibrating head; a woman of large knowledge of the world, shrewd political partisanship and, withal, an eager and determined Romanist. Her dinners were famous; no more than ten ever sat down at her table, and usually five or six was the limit; she believed in conversation, not in isolated pairs. She had a service of gold, she would have no lights but candles. Huge candelabra were set in niches in her walls and on her table; her cut glass was famous, her roses the rarest money could purchase, yet nothing was lavish, nothing glaring or vulgar or new. The flavor of her old wine was as famous as the subdued taste of her surroundings; in a season of display and a city where riches are ostentatious, her drawing-room had the effect of space and repose, there was no crowding of useless and glittering furniture, no blaze of gold, no medley of bric-à-brac and sculpture. What she possessed represented the expenditure of a small fortune; for the rest, her beautiful mahogany, her rare silver were inherited.

The old woman, with the keen perception of long social training, had discovered all Margaret’s gifts as an entertainer, and her occasional outbreaks—as the famous dance and other not less bizarre performances—only gave her an additional value as an element of the unexpected. Mrs. O’Neal, therefore, rarely gave a dinner without asking Margaret, though she included Margaret’s husband with a grimace and a shrug. To-night she was delighted with her guest’s gayety, her wit, her endless vivacity, and she watched her across the wide table with some curiosity, much too keen not to observe the haggard misery which Margaret tried in vain to hide. The dark, Italian face of the delegate, the broad heaviness of White, who wore a perturbed frown, the keen, fine lines of the Spanish ambassador, the placid commonplace fairness of the ambassadress, the vivid coloring of Lily Osborne, the thin, ascetic face and keen eyes of the cardinal were all in sharp contrast to the pale face, the shadowy hair, the brilliant eyes of Margaret White. Mrs. O’Neal, watching her, wondered and was amused.

The dinner was a splendid affair, the delegate talked with the smooth ease, the habitual guarded courtesy of the Italian churchman, the ambassador was genial and responsive, the cardinal said little, throwing in a word now and then, but a word which set the ball rolling, and Margaret never failed. She had never appeared so witty, so sweet, so dangerously amiable.

It was over at last, the cardinal leaving early, and as he rose to depart, the women present being all ardent Catholics except Margaret, rustled forward to kneel and kiss his ring, while Mrs. O’Neal, following the old custom abroad, had bidden her footmen bring the candles, and the Romanists present were gathered at the head of the stairs to light his eminence to the door.

There was a little pause, and Margaret, a slender, white-robed figure, her shoulders veiled in a diaphanous black scarf, came forward to bid the cardinal farewell. White, who stood apart uneasy and conventional in the midst of the dramatic little scene, turned in time to see her kneel devoutly and kiss his eminence’s ring.

They drove home early through the lighted streets and neither spoke a word during the short drive to their own door. The footman helped Margaret with her wraps and attended her up the steps; White had entered ahead of her, and when the servants were gone and she had crossed the hall to the stairs he called her. She turned, with one foot on the lowest step and her hand on the balustrade, and seeing the deep flush on his heavy face she smiled a little with a slightly scornful shrug.

He looked across at her with an expression of savage anger, ill-suppressed. “Your conduct passes all patience!” he said bitterly, controlling himself with an effort; “you know where I stand, that I want to be President, and you flaunt your defiance!”

She returned his look, her head thrown back, her eyelids drooping, the delicate hollows in her cheeks apparent in the half light. “Pray, what is it now?” she asked provokingly.

He gnawed his lip, the cords standing out again on his forehead. “You know,” he said in a low voice, “you make yourself ridiculous by kissing the cardinal’s ring! I don’t care a damn for your religion, but I do care for the Protestant vote; they’ll have this in the papers!”

She laughed a tormenting laugh. “I’m thinking of becoming a Romanist!” she said.

He stared at her,—words were inadequate but his face whitened. The slim elegance of her figure in its splendid dress, her dusky hair, the dazzling white of her forehead, all seemed to him so many additional reasons to hate her. He had bought her for these things, for her charm, her wit, her daring, and she had turned every weapon against him and defied him. He felt a shiver of rage sweep through him, controlled it and turned away at last with clenched hands.

She remained standing, one hand on the balustrade, the other lightly holding her cloak which was slipping from her bare shoulders, and her eyes followed him with ineffable scorn and mockery.

VII

MEANWHILE William Fox was plunged deeply into the vortex of a busy session. The holidays were over and Congress had settled down to its task; it was the short session year, and the bulk of the large supply bills were being pushed steadily through the House,—the routine of business being constantly interrupted by the fanfaronnade of noisy members and the agitation of tariff revision which hung like a nightmare over the party in power, and was a delightful fetich for the minority to drag out of its hiding-place and dangle before the eyes of their opponents. Fox, who was a leader, besides being a great orator, was constantly employed in holding down his followers, stamping out any sparks of rebellion and silencing the enemy.

He was sharply conscious, too, of the tongues which were busily engaged in circulating rumors about him, for there was more than the proverbial mustard seed of truth in the story which Mrs. Allestree had heard. He had indeed been on the point of entering the Cabinet, but White’s double dealing and not his voluntary surrender had been the cause of the exchange. There had been an agreement between the two men who were both from the same state; White had been allowed to come to the Senate to serve out an unexpired term of two years under a pledge to keep out of Fox’s way in the matter of Cabinet changes. He had broken his word at every point and had succeeded in a shrewd manœuvre to prejudice the Administration against the more clever man, no difficult matter where jealousy of Fox already existed. Moreover White had the inevitable prestige of great wealth, powerful connections and an easy conscience.

Fox had known many of these things when White received his portfolio, but his later discoveries had placed him in a position where he no longer cared to be so frequent a guest in White’s house; to break bread with the man who had wilfully maligned him was an offence to his coldly scrupulous pride. Fox was careless of public opinion, fond of indulging his own whims and fancies, and easy in his tolerance of offenders against himself, but when a man transgressed the laws that he laid down in matters of personal honor and integrity he could be uncompromisingly severe and contemptuous. Of late, therefore, Fox had absented himself from White’s table and from those evenings—famous among the favored few who obtained invitations—when Margaret entertained the brains and the talent of the capital. Literary men were always there, artists, musicians, scientists; it was said of Mrs. White that she would entertain a famous thief if he had wit. But there had been another and a more potent attraction for Fox; he had found the seclusion of Judge Temple’s library, the old judge’s slow and studious speech, the magnificent voice of Rose, more potent charms than the conversation and music of Margaret’s salon. Having discovered the temperamental sympathy and ingenuous friendship in this young and beautiful girl, Fox had begun to pursue that interesting study of character which leads to but one result—whether it be tragic or happy.

At this stage, too, of the matter, Fox ignored the feelings and the possible claims of his less brilliant cousin; he was aware that Allestree loved Rose, but he considered it as an affair of little moment because he perceived clearly that Rose did not love him, that not even the most scrupulous adjuration on his own part could convert her indifference into a more tender feeling toward the painter. At first he had entertained very little serious thought of the matter, but the charm of Rose’s personality, both spiritual and physical, had very soon begun to take hold of his imagination, and if he secretly compared her fresh, sweet immaturity with Margaret’s worldliness and finish it was to plunge the thought instantly into oblivion. The girl was so young, so fresh, so easily responsive to his wit and his eloquence, that it was like discovering a pure and beautiful flower in a hedge of thorns. Between his work, therefore, and his study of Rose he had managed to refuse more than one invitation to the Whites’, and his absence was beginning to be sharply observed.

There was a rumor that White had quarrelled with him about Margaret, that Margaret had herself openly dismissed him, that he was vexed at the loss of the Cabinet place; in short, the usual crop of idle ingenious stories which spring up in the height of a winter season, like a growth of noxious weeds, were in full bloom and strength.

Fox was watching the slow progress of an important bill through the lower House, and busily engaged at the same moment on the Naval Appropriation Bill in which White was intimately concerned, and which offered a wide scope for the surmises of those who were watching the two men. It was an open question whether Fox intended to thwart the Secretary of the Navy or to support his effort to get a larger appropriation. Conscious of the scrutiny to which he was subjected, Fox worked on, with an enigmatical smile, and betrayed nothing of his thoughts or his position.

It was late one Thursday afternoon and he had been speaking on an important matter for more than an hour, endeavoring to close up a question which threatened to be of international significance, and, thoroughly fagged, he finally left the floor of the House amid a tremendous outburst of applause. As usual the galleries had been packed to hear him, and he managed to make his way out with many delays, stopped on all sides by members and personal friends, eager to congratulate him on another great speech.

Once out of the lobby, he was crossing the corridor on his way to a committee-room when he heard his name spoken, and turned, to see Margaret detach herself from a party of fashionables who had been in the Diplomatic Gallery, and come toward him. As they met he was immediately aware of the change in her that a few weeks of absence had made sharply apparent. She was extremely pale and her eyes seemed abnormally large and shining under the brim of her immense picture hat, her elaborate dress only accentuating the slightness of her figure. She held out her hand without smiling. “I want to speak to you,” she said, almost with an air of command, “where can we go?”

He turned, hesitating a moment as to some suitable spot, arrested by the thought that Margaret’s presence there or anywhere, alone with him, would be so much fuel to the fire.

But she solved the problem for him. “Come outside,” she said; “it’s heavenly on the terrace, the sun is setting. Besides, I can’t breathe here in these corridors—heavens, where do they get their tobacco?”

“Not where you buy your Egyptians,” Fox laughed.

She shrugged her shoulders. “The doctor says I mustn’t smoke any more,” she said, “but I shall.”

“The doctor?” Fox cast a startled glance at her white face; “what’s the matter, Margaret?”

“A cigarette heart, I suppose!” she replied laughing, and then as the smile died on her lips an expression of dull misery fell like a veil over her features.

They had crossed the Rotunda together and gone out by the same door where Allestree had waited months before. As they emerged upon the terrace they were enfolded in a radiant atmosphere, the sun was setting, and the whole western façade of the Capitol, the fluted columns of the loggia before the old library rooms, the long rows of shining windows, the magnificent arch of the dome, were bathed in the glowing light which seemed to flood the world. There was still a little snow on the sheltered slopes of the terrace and under the trees, but the promise of spring was in the air and in the deep blue of the sky above them. Margaret stopped abruptly and stood looking down at the panorama at their feet; absorbed in her own emotions, she did not immediately perceive the expression of her companion’s face; it was one of extreme reluctance, of reserve, almost of resentment. He had a man’s hatred of a scene, of being “talked about,” and he knew that such a circumstance as their tête-à-tête at such a time could scarcely escape unnoticed. He was annoyed and disturbed, but for once she was blind to those potent signs.

Keen as Margaret’s perceptions were, she shared with other women the passionate blindness to change in another when her own heart was clamoring to be satisfied; her vision was warped by one aspect of it all; she remembered those moments, long past, of comradeship and sympathy and passion on his part; she remembered and she refused to believe that change was even possible.

The silence for a moment was almost oppressive, then she spoke without trusting herself to meet his eyes. “You have refused two invitations to dinner, and you have quite deserted my evenings and my Sundays,” she said in a low voice.

Slightly embarrassed he began some conventional excuse, but she lifted her hand with a peremptory little gesture. “I know—I quite understand,” she said; “Wicklow has behaved abominably but—am I to suffer, too?”

“My dear Margaret,” he replied, without too deep emotion, “such a possibility is absurd!”

She looked up, searching his face, and her smile was the shadow of itself, pale and suddenly controlled. “You do not mean to accept his hospitality again?” she said, with an effort.

He was deeply annoyed; why must she force this issue upon him? He was capable, at times, of extreme hardness toward others. To-day she was unfortunate enough to jar upon him, to recall too sharply White’s conduct. “I’m not prepared to say,” he replied with some impatience; “can’t we avoid the subject? Tell me of yourself, Margaret, you look tired and pale.”

She bit her lip, a sudden color refuting his charge. “I am very well,” she replied coldly; “I danced until two o’clock this morning; at eleven I received a delegation of Wicklow’s jackdaws; at two I lunched with Madame de Caillou—she is so diplomatic that she only discusses generalities and parrots; she has three—M. de Caillou not included; he belongs to the poodle class. At four I came here with Mrs. O’Neal and Lily Osborne; I give a dinner to-night and then go to the opera. It is much the same to-morrow. Have you a cigarette, William?”

He opened his case and she selected one and lit it; Fox was not smoking. “I presume that it will be in the newspapers to-morrow that I was seen with a cigarette on the terrace talking to the next President,” she remarked dryly; “I mean you to be the candidate,” she added, “Wicklow is playing for it but—” she laughed, blowing the cigarette smoke into rings before her face.

“He will probably be nominated,” Fox rejoined easily; “he has a large following; I shall like to see you in that rôle, Margaret.”

“To see me?” she shrugged her shoulders; “my dear William, do you happen to know what Lily Osborne is doing?”

He laughed. “Ask me something easier!”

Margaret stopped in her promenade and looked out over the city; it seemed to float in a golden mirage, all commonplaceness, all familiarity lost in the radiance of the western sky, against which, here and there, a cross-crowned spire thrust its slender, tapering height, or a campanile rose, dark and sharply pictured, above shining roofs. Far off the bells were ringing, sweetly and insistently, an evening chime.

“She is using Wicklow to attain her ends,” Margaret said, a little mocking smile on her pale face; “he is dull and infatuated. I am told she’s in Russian employ and there is information, plenty of it, in his reach. You mark my words, she’ll ruin him—he’ll never be a candidate.”

Fox frowned. “Pardon me,” he said abruptly; “I cannot listen.”

She tossed her cigarette over the terrace and watched it descend, a mere spark in the dusk below, where evening lay in purple shadows. “Forgive me,” she returned lightly, “I forgot—men are such conscientious creatures and I—I’m an unscrupulous wretch, but I’m not cruel, William!”

“Nor I!” he replied, with a slight change of color, “but, Margaret, can’t you see how impossible—”

She laughed bitterly. “I’m very dull,” she remarked.

A shuddering recognition of some new, terrible barrier between them tore her heart. She held out her hand. “Good-by,” she said in a low voice, “I’m going to ask you to dine again—will you come?” her feverishly glowing eyes fixed themselves on his face.

Fox colored again, conscious that he must seem an ill-mannered brute. “Of course I’ll come,” he assented, vexed at himself and touched by the sudden sweetness of her manner.

But her smile was wan; she felt as if the universe moved beneath her feet; as yet the moment was delayed when her wounded heart would refuse to submit, and her whole passionate, sensuous nature rise up to battle for life and love.

VIII

ROSE let the bridle lie loosely on her horse’s neck as they halted at the elbow of the path. Rock Creek, leaping over its gray boulders and flowing between them with little swirls of foam, comes rushing madly past, slips under the trailing branches of a weeping birch and suddenly widening, hushes its tumult and drops placidly below the ford, where, in summer, in a wide shallow basin, the swan and the little white ducks lie. The scene was wild; the untouched forest rose behind them, its bare gray limbs against the sky, the black green of an occasional spruce or cedar breaking the monotony above the brown-leafed earth and closing the long vistas of stripped tree trunks which stand on the shoulder of the hill in serried ranks in the teeth of the north wind, like soldiers, with their faces to the foe. Below, the stream gurgled and murmured; on the farther bank the dense growth of young maples showed here and there a scarlet bud. The air was sweet, redolent with fresh pine and the promise of the spring; overhead the crows were flying by twos and tens and twenties, lost at last in the soft blue distance.

Fox, who was riding with Rose, dismounted and turning back the dead leaves on a sunny slope found a single spray of arbutus. She uttered a little exclamation of pleasure, holding out her hand.

He laughed. “When I was a boy I always found the first wild flowers,” he said; “I knew just where the blood-root grew and the anemone. Since then I’ve been making speeches at the primaries and getting votes for my party. There’s no comparison between the two pursuits!”

She had the arbutus in her hand and gave him a challenging glance; she began to understand him better, but her convictions were too strong to be subdued. “You mean that you’ve given up your life for politics, just to be a part of a machine?”

He assented, still smiling as he remounted, and the horses moved on at a walk.

“I can’t see why you think it noble to be merely a politician,” she persisted.

“Am I?” his amused eyes met hers.

“Yes!” she retorted, “a statesman is above his party, before it; he guides, moves, sways it. You like to call yourself part of a machine! You don’t vote against a bill which concerns the party—that’s being a politician!”

“But I can’t betray my party,” he objected, unmoved.

“You should be independent of it.”

“You can’t judge,” he argued, with his teasing laugh, “your coat is of another color.”

“Well, at least it isn’t Joseph’s!” she exclaimed vexed.

“You think I can’t be trusted?” He pursued the subject with a boyish enjoyment of her red cheek and kindling eye.

“I didn’t mean that—of course party men can be honest, but I don’t call it the highest honesty to vote against your own convictions for any party.”

“Yet that is what I did on a bill the other day,” mused Fox, “because the party opposed it.”

“Was it a good bill?”

“Excellent.”

“And you voted against it when you believed in it?” indignantly.

“I’m the guilty creature,” he replied, laughter in his eyes but his face sober.

Rose bit her lip.

“You see it’s a bad moment to make a split in the party; next year is the Presidential campaign,” he continued provokingly.

She could not restrain her indignation. “Aren’t you ashamed to go against your own conscience for that?” she cried; “it isn’t worthy of you.”

“Then you think better things of me?” he argued softly, “you see a chance for my redemption?”

She looked up and met his glance fully but with a sudden feeling of confusion. “It is because you are meant for so much greater things that I speak,” she said finally; “I think you will be a greater man than you are now at last.”

His manner softened at once, with that subtle gentleness which no man knew better how to use. “Your belief should make me so!” he said gravely; “a man might accomplish much to justify your belief in him!”

She averted her face, her lip trembling. Around her the woodland seemed suddenly transfigured, the tumult of the stream, breaking here in little cataracts, scarcely leaped more wildly than her pulses; before them the long road narrowed in a beautiful perspective where trailing branches locked their spectral arms and the evergreen honeysuckle hung on gray rocks.

Fox leaned forward in his saddle, trying to meet her eyes, but seeing only the soft curve of her cheek and throat. “Will you try to believe in me?” he asked, with that new sweetness of tone which took the sting out of his jests.

But she had touched her horse lightly and he shot ahead, trotting down the long road, his rider swaying and bending slightly to avoid an occasional sweeping bough. Fox followed quickly, and overtaking her, the two horses galloped together while their riders relapsed for a while into a significant silence.

“Did you know that my portrait is nearly finished?” Rose said at last; “I think that Robert has painted it out and in again just five times.”

“It isn’t in the least like you,” retorted Fox sharply, “he has made a failure.”

“Oh, no, every one likes it!” protested Rose.

“Not at all,” said Fox; more calmly; “I don’t—neither does Allestree.”

“He has too high a standard for his work,” she replied laughing, “but I hoped you liked it.”

“No picture of you could ever please me,” he retorted significantly; “when I shut my eyes I can still see your face. Allestree’s wits have been wool-gathering; he has made an image, nothing more—he—”

Rose interrupted laughing. “Please don’t tell father; he likes it, and Mrs. Vermilion was so pleased that she and Mr. Vermilion have ordered life-sized portraits of the entire family, en masse and singly; Robert’s fortune is made.”

“The Vermilions are parvenus,” said Fox, with a shrug; “poor Bob!”

“And why poor Bob?” she objected lightly; “it seems to me the greatest good fortune.”

“Does it?” Fox looked down at the creek musingly; “and yet I say, ‘poor Bob.’”

She colored, scarcely conscious of the cause of her blush, unless Fox’s dreamy sympathy for Allestree touched a responsive chord in her own bosom when she remembered how lightly she had thought of him and his unspoken but candid devotion to her; a little thing, a word, a gesture reproached her with ingratitude, for how easily she had passed over all those years and forgotten Allestree in the charm of his cousin’s presence! Then she remembered all the stories she had heard of Fox’s love for Margaret Ward before she married White; steadily as she had tried to forget them, to cease to think of his past where it touched another woman’s life, the stories suddenly took tangible shape and it seemed to her that Margaret was concerned with his existence and she—a mere intruder. Rose, whose heart had been hitherto as untouched as a child’s, shrank with infinite shyness and reluctance from those old dead leaves of passion which had never yet sullied the whiteness of her soul.

Some intuition, perhaps, of her feeling warned him, for he began to tell her stories of his boyhood and gradually spoke of his home, his dead mother, his father who had been a distinguished jurist, and so, little by little, won her from her mood. His gentleness, his kindling speech, the tenderness of his eyes thrilled her again with that wonderful attraction which was part of the man’s genius and which even his enemies found incontrovertible.

He told her of his mother’s gentleness, her profound religion, her meekness compared with his father’s fierce severity, an Old Testament Christian who beat his boys if they did not go to church three times on Sunday and also to meeting on Thursday nights. “And out of that home I grew up a heathen and a publican,” he said with a smile.

Rose looked steadily before her; far off the road dwindled, and she saw Sandy racing a squirrel to a tree. “How can you?” she said at last, in a low voice.

“Confess it?” He leaned forward and touched her hand; “will you convert me?”

She looked up, their eyes met with the shock of sudden feeling. Her lip trembled like a child’s. “I’m not wise enough,” she replied simply; “you would end by laughing at me!”

His face sobered. “Am I so utterly unworthy?” he demanded.

She was silent; the water rushed and murmured beside them, and the still bright atmosphere seemed to palpitate with some great mystery; were all barriers really disappearing and a new sweet understanding emerging from the challenge of their two opposing temperaments? Her heart trembled and beat fast at the thought; it was so wild, so improbable, so dangerously sweet. Then she made one great effort to master her emotions, to be herself. She schooled herself to meet his eyes again, with that new subtle sweetness of expression in them, that delicate understanding of her mood which frightened her!

“Who am I that I should judge?” she said tremulously, with a charming smile, full of youth, simplicity, unconscious confession.

Something in the very girlishness and purity of her face, and her unguarded mood smote Fox with sudden humility; he felt himself the veriest worldling and sinner compared with her. What right had he to thrust his life into hers? His hand closed over hers with unconscious force. “Who are you?” he repeated passionately, “my guardian angel.”

Rose smiled; there were tears in her eyes but his emotion had the effect of crystallizing hers, she understood her own heart at last, and with a woman’s intuition began to hide it; she withdrew her hand gently and the horses went on.

Neither spoke; both had been deeply moved and there was a new happiness in mere companionship. It was one of those rare moments, in the higher relations between man and woman, when a new situation emerges from the old, a more beautiful understanding is established, and the exquisite gentleness of his mood was a revelation to her of a phase of his character which she had only dimly perceived.

The road had left the creek now and following the rising ground lay through a growth of stunted cedars; the stillness was broken suddenly by the full sweet note of a robin.

Rose turned with kindling eyes. “Hark!” she exclaimed softly; “doesn’t that make you think of apple-blossoms? There must be periwinkles somewhere!”

The spell was broken and he smiled, turning to look back for the singer. At the same moment Sandy stopped and pricked his ears.

There was a full sound in the air, a throbbing and buzz of some machine and a big motor-car swung suddenly around the curve and bore down upon them. The road was narrow and both riders had to turn out on to the short turf beside the cedars. The car came on, and then abruptly slackening its speed it stopped a few yards beyond them and some one called to them.

Rose looked back startled and met Margaret’s eyes. Mrs. White was leaning on the door of the car and beckoning to them, her great crimson hat flaming against the dark background. Meanwhile Louis Berkman had slipped down from the farther side and came up to Rose smiling, hat in hand.

“I feel myself as fortunate as Balaam’s ass,” he said gayly, “since I, too, have met an angel in the way!”

“Never mind, Rose,” interposed Margaret laughing; “Louis is a poet and he’s had a terrible experience, he isn’t quite himself!”

“I don’t in the least mind being called an angel; I rather like it,” Rose retorted with amusement; “it is only a little startling. What has happened, Mr. Berkman?”

“Nothing of the least importance,” he answered, a trifle stiffly; “only Mrs. White is laughing at me.”

Margaret still leaned on the door of the motor-car, her face as white as paper against her flame-colored hat, but her laugh was light and careless; the fierce pain tugging at her heart demanded a mask and she wore it gayly and well. “He went to the White House last night,” she exclaimed maliciously.

“What new form of insanity overtook you, Berkman?” asked Fox; “went to a crush?—and it wasn’t compulsory either!”

“Oh, I’ve repented,” Berkman retorted, with a harsh laugh; “I’ll never be taken alive again!”

“What happened?” Rose asked, laughing softly, her hand on her saddle and the reins hanging loose while the horse cropped the dry turf and dead leaves.

Margaret’s laugh interrupted again. “Let me tell them, Louis,” she said.

Berkman shrugged his shoulders with a gesture of assent, coloring a little in spite of himself.

“He got an invitation without the cabalistic sign,” Margaret began, her eyes dancing, “and, in the ignorance of his soul, he went. He was an hour and a half getting in,—you know how they come—two and two—like the couples that left the ark. They had to keep on the carpet; he says one of the ushers kept shouting: ‘move on—keep on the carpet, don’t scratch the floors!’ Louis, did you wear hobnails or sabots?”

“I wish I’d worn overshoes!” he retorted disgustedly; “fancy it—I’ve been received at Buckingham Palace and in Berlin and Vienna; it’s the first time I was ever told ‘to keep off the grass!’”

“Your own fault!” laughed Margaret, “you should have come to me. He never got into the Blue Room at all! Tell us what you saw in the East Room, Louis?” she mocked.

“What I saw?” Berkman drew a deep breath of indignation; “a damned lot of goats like myself; the sheep were figuratively roped off in sacred precincts—I saw you going to supper.”

“Served you right!” laughed Fox; “no sane person goes without the open sesame—unless forced to. What will happen when your personality is revealed? You can trust Margaret for that. You’ll be invited to lunch.”

“Sha’n’t go!” said Berkman angrily.

“Hoity-toity! you’ll have to!” cried Margaret teasingly, “it’s in the nature of a police summons, you know!”

“I’ll get out of jurisdiction! I’ll go hang myself,” Berkman retorted, with a reluctant laugh; and then to Rose: “I’ve just seen your portrait, Miss Temple, and it seems Allestree has established his fame; it is beautiful, as it should be.”

“I’m so glad you like it,” she replied; “Mr. Fox has just been abusing it.”

“He’s a notorious unbeliever!” said Berkman; “don’t mind him; it’s inspired. Mrs. Vermilion hopes to look like it!”

“With the immortal bonnet?” said Fox laughing, but with a glance which perceived every detail of Rose’s beautiful young face and figure radiant in the sunshine.

Margaret saw it; a shudder of perception passed over her and she drew back into her corner of the motor-car with a little sigh of agony, dragged from her very heart, but happily unnoticed. Her whole being rebelled against fate, against submission, against loss!

Berkman was still laughing, uncovered, at Rose’s bridle, and Fox sat listening, idly amused. The clear atmosphere cut every detail out,—the low growth of cedars, the sweeping slope of the dun colored hill behind it, the dark ribbon of woods in the hollow where the creek flowed unseen, the long vista of the road which seemed to meet the sky.

Margaret called to them. “Good-bye,” she said, “I’m engaged to receive the canaille—as Madame de Caillou calls it—at five. Come, Louis, or else we’ll send you to the East Room again.”

“The gods forbid!” he exclaimed, and ran to the motor amid more gay laughter.

A moment later Margaret’s white face smiled at them as she was whirled away.

IX

MARGARET leaned over the glass show-counter in Daddy Lerwick’s curiosity-shop and looked down at the pathetic medley within.

Her figure, in its usual elaborate elegance, was in sharp contrast to the dingy surroundings. The fine camel’s-hair shawls hung up behind her, the old velvet curtain with its tapestry border, the moth-eaten furs, the tarnished Mexican sombrero, the ancient horse-pistols, the innumerable curious articles which heaped every corner of the room, down to the chintz curtain, screening the rear end of the shop in a weak-minded and fluttering way, formed a patchwork background.

In the case was an ivory fan of antique workmanship which had drifted here at last, carrying with it a history which might frame many a tale, and with it a tortoise-shell comb, with a top eight inches high, some gold link cuff buttons, a string of pearls that had clasped the throat of a beauty in 1776, but lay now, pale and lustreless and forgotten, the price, perhaps, of a week’s lodging or of a grave, God knows!

But Margaret was interested in a bracelet set with topaz, still beautiful, still radiant, still warm with a life’s history. She passed the stones to and fro between her slender fingers, pricing them with careless indifference. The romance and the sorrow of it would have touched Rose Temple and sent her shuddering from the purchase. To Margaret they signified nothing but jewels and the value of jewels, for her life of selfish ease, of social prominence, her endless quest for pleasure, had nearly atrophied those finer and more tender emotions of sympathy and love for her fellow creatures.

Daddy Lerwick himself waited on her. He was a short, thickset man with the face of an underdone pudding, his gray whiskers attached like wings below the ears. His small dull eyes seemed to observe little, but he was notorious for driving a shrewd bargain and nothing really escaped him.

“The stones are good stones,” he commented, clasping his fat creased hands on the case in an attitude which displayed the solitaire on his little finger, “and the price very low, madam.”

Margaret laughed, her eyes haggard again. “You get them second-hand,” she observed carelessly; “who brought these?”

He looked at her without surprise and unclasped his hands. “I have the name,” he said; “the law requires that we take the name, but I don’t think they ever give the right one, and we don’t tell it—usually. It was a young girl, madam, quite a young girl.”

“Never mind!” Margaret dropped the chain, her mood changing. “I really didn’t want to know,” she said with a shrug, “why should I? I don’t know why I asked. I’ll take the gold cigarette-case, if you can get the monogram off, and the tea-pot. Bring them over and I’ll send the check.”

The man bowed and rubbed his hands. He knew Margaret very well and profited largely by her careless and profuse use of money. Knowing the world too, as he did, and the people in it, he thought her more wretched than the girl who had traded the bracelet, or the owner of the gold cigarette-case who, he happened to know, had since shot himself and now lay in an unmarked grave. Daddy Lerwick, indeed, knew more than was good for him but, perhaps, not more than many others who stand thus at the gateway between the upper stratum of gilded pleasure and the lower stratum of sordid misery, and receive the tolls!

Meanwhile, unconscious of his eyes and certainly proudly disdainful of his thoughts, the society beauty, the Cabinet minister’s wife, trailed through the dingy shop and passed out by the side door, which Lerwick opened for her, to the stairs of Allestree’s studio. As she ascended, the cloud which had rested on her face slightly cleared and her expression grew more decisive; the desolate misery of her heart had taken a more concrete form, she had arrived at last at a resolution. She had reached a point where she must resist or die. Her bruised heart throbbed with continuous pain and she was proudly aware that she was losing all—losing it, too, without an apparent struggle. She, Margaret, who had always borne herself proudly and defiantly to the world, was she to be a mendicant asking the alms of love and asking it in vain?

She swept on, crossed the landing under Aunt Hannah’s accustomed window, and thrusting aside the portière entered upon a tableau of the artist and his two new clients, Mrs. and Miss Vermilion, and her enemy, Mrs. Wingfield. The two older women stout, tightly laced, gorgeously over-dressed, the younger, slender and well done by the best French art and with that indescribable air of disdain which, commonly assumed by the parvenu to be the sign manual of birth and breeding, might be called the bar sinister of society. At the sight of Margaret, however, she unbent with an alacrity which was as amazing as it was sudden.

“Dear Mrs. White,” she chirped, “do come and advise me; mamma wants me painted, and really I can’t choose a pose! I saw a picture of the Duchess of Leinster which was lovely, but Mr. Allestree says he never copies even attitudes! Isn’t it confusing?”

Margaret shrugged one shoulder and held out two fingers to the elder women. “Try Aphrodite rising from the sea,” she suggested with a provoking drawl, “I dare say Bobby can do waves, he’s admirable on flesh tints.”

The girl colored furiously and bit her lip. It was impossible to know where to meet Mrs. White, she reflected, without daring to provoke another catastrophe by retaliation.

But Mrs. Wingfield had felt the sting of Margaret’s rudeness too often. She moved to the door with the rustle of silk draperies. “I hear Mr. Fox is to marry Miss Temple,” she said pointedly, looking Margaret full in the face.

“And I heard that Mr. Wingfield was to get the mission to Brazil,” retorted Margaret unmoved.

Mrs. Wingfield’s cheek crimsoned and the feathers on her bonnet trembled. “Nothing of the sort! You don’t mean to tell me you heard that?”

Margaret shrugged her shoulders again. “One hears everything, you know!” she said, with a dangerous smile.

Mrs. Wingfield breathed hard and opened her lips, but Mrs. Vermilion was a wiser if a duller woman; she laid a restraining hand on her arm and propelled her gently but firmly toward the exit.

“You’re coming to my ball next week, Mrs. White?” she ventured with a propitiating smile.

“Oh, is it next week?” drawled Margaret, with elevated brows, “I never know. Little Miss English keeps my books; if she didn’t I should go to the wrong place every night and forget the White House.”

“I thought your memory more accommodating,” Mrs. Wingfield retaliated pointedly; “I remember when you forgot to come to my dinner after you’d accepted.”

Margaret laughed. “Did I?” she said, “I’m evidently a sinner. Tell Mr. Wingfield that I heard who wrote in those corrections in that paragraph of the message—but I really can’t tell.”

Mrs. Wingfield turned away with a red cheek.

“Margaret!” remonstrated Allestree sharply, as the three women withdrew, “how can you? Good Lord, talk about the brutality of men! Women are Malays and North American Indians—you have no mercy! I’m blushing all over now at the thought of it!”

She laughed, her short, even white teeth set close together, her eyes sparkling. “Wasn’t I horrid?” she said, “I haven’t any manners and they hate me.”

“I should think they would!” he replied warmly, “Margaret, why do you do such things? It isn’t like you, it isn’t—”

“Well bred!” she concluded dryly, “I know it. The other night, too, I did something that horrified Wicklow. We were dining at Mrs. O’Neal’s; I knelt, and kissed the cardinal’s ring. Wicklow was wild; he seemed to have an A. P. A. nightmare at once. It was all in the New York papers yesterday,” Margaret laughed again, resting her arms on the back of the carved chair where Rose had sat.

Allestree laid down his brushes; he had been working on a sketch of Margaret herself, and, lighting a cigarette, he passed his case to her. She took one mechanically and lit it at his. As the spark flamed up between them, he caught the hollowness of her eyes, the startling pallor of her face.

“What in the world is it, Margaret?” he asked sharply; “you’re ill.”

She turned and looked over her shoulder into the mirror. “Do I look so?” Something she saw in her own image, in the deeply shadowed eyes, the sharpened curve of the cheeks startled her. “What a fright I grow to be! No wonder that Vermilion girl stared. What an Aphrodite she’d make—in French corsets and a trail!” Margaret laughed silently.

Then catching a look on Allestree’s face which she read too easily. “Were you born proper, Bobby?” she said, knocking the ashes from her cigarette, “or did you achieve it, or was it thrust upon you?”

“I can’t paint you in this mood, Margaret,” he said dryly, “you wouldn’t look like yourself; you’d remind me of a malicious elf.”

She leaned her elbow on the chair back again, resting her chin in the hollow of her hand. “There!” she said, “I told William Fox that you’d make me the imp to Rose’s angel.”

“I’d like to make you what you are, a fascinating, wilful woman with no heart at all!” he retorted.

“No heart!” she laughed, tossing her cigarette away; “that’s true, Bobby, I’ve no heart!”

As she spoke she moved over to Rose’s portrait which still rested on an easel in the corner. It was a magnificent piece of work, the artist had dreamed his heart into it; the young head symbolized youth, purity, hope. The figure had the simplicity and loveliness of some beautiful Greek inspiration when the art of Greece was young. Margaret stood looking at it in silence, herself unaware of the sharp contrast between the pictured youth and enthusiasm of this girl and her own slim beauty, her subtly charming and unhappy face, which seemed to have lost that magic touch which is like a breath from the Elysian fields, the presence of belief, of hope, most of all of love. She turned at last and met Allestree’s thoughtful glance. “Bobby,” she said briefly, “you’re a fool.”

He smiled. “What else, oh, mine enemy?” he asked.

“Everything;” Margaret threw out both hands with a gesture which seemed to appeal to earth and heaven; “a blind fool, Bobby! You love her, she probably loves you, and yet you stand by and let her go! Fool, fool!” Margaret drew her brows down, her cheeks flaming:

“‘He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
Who fears to put it to the touch,
To win or lose it all!’”

she quoted defiantly.

Allestree lighted another cigarette. “My dear Margaret,” he said, “let me show you this sketch of my mother.”

Margaret bit her lip and stood watching as he turned over two or three sketches. As he did so her quick eye caught familiar outlines. “So, that is Lily Osborne?” she said, with a hard little laugh; “I’m not sensitive, Bobby, let me see it. Did you know the latest gossip about her?”

Allestree shook his head. “Spare me!” he said smiling.

“Not a bit of it, you deserve no quarter!” Margaret took the sketch and looked at it, ignoring the one of Mrs. Allestree; “it’s good,” she commented with amusement; “how fine and full blooded she looks, and reptilian. The gossip is that she’s caused the recall of the Russian Ambassador; she’s been telling tales out of school, the female diplomatist, you know! What did you do, by the way, when she met Rose here?”

“Oh, we got on,” said Allestree laughing; “what of it?”

“You haven’t heard?” Margaret laughed; “Rose went there to one of madame’s small and earlies; you know the kind? It seems they played bridge and Rose didn’t understand it was for money; imagine a lamb in the hands of wolves! Poor little simpleton! Well, Lily told her at last that she owed two hundred. Rose fled home, and the judge—” Margaret laughed and shrugged her shoulders. “Old Testament Christian, you know! He sent the check but he told Rose to cut her dead.”

“I knew there was something; Rose never told me, but they speak,” he rejoined, “the way you women do! In spite of your shrugs, Margaret, you know the ethics of the thing were abominable; it’s swindling.”

Margaret continued to laugh. “My dear Bobby,” she said, “Rose isn’t sixteen and we all play bridge; I lost six hundred last night; she should have known. It’s tiresome to be a madonna on a pillar!”

“Still Rose was right,” he said bluntly.

“Oh, granted!” Margaret touched his arm lightly; “and you love her!”

Allestree made an impatient movement. “Don’t torture me, Margaret!” he said sharply.

She whirled around and held out both hands, her eyes moist. “I’m a brute, Bobby!” she cried; “forgive me—I always say the wrong thing unless some one sets me a copy; let’s talk about Mahomet’s coffin!”

X

WITH Margaret things had reached a crisis long before that culminating moment of remorseful emotion in Allestree’s studio; at last the realities of life—as they appear separated from its pleasures and its follies—were forced upon her. Too young at the time of her marriage to comprehend its full significance, as a mere act of barter and exchange, she had never seriously anticipated her position as White’s wife; it had been shrouded in a nebulous haze of gratified vanity, of pleasures and indulgences, for she was glad to shirk the thought of it. Her awakening, therefore, had been accompanied with a shock of horror and disgust.

White had been kind to her at first; even the most common and violent of brute creatures is often kind to its chosen mate, and he was proud of her beauty, determined to get the value of his money out of her social distinction; but her capricious temper, her bitter tongue and her indifference soon had their natural effect. His kindness wore itself out and when angry he could be tolerably brutal, for his temper, at best, was coarse and exacting. She had come at last to look upon the beautiful house, the lavish display, the sumptuous living as so much gilded misery, and, possessing no talisman to give her contentment, her stormy nature spent itself in rebellion and in a growing regret for her own folly. She saw, at last, in Fox all the qualities which she most admired; her mind answered his with a subtilty, a kindred sympathy which seemed to assure her of his love, to justify her assumption that his feeling had never changed. In her eager pursuit of happiness she had thought to purchase it first with beauty, then with money and now with love—the beggar’s price! It was the absorbing impulse of her being; religion she had none, except the religion of self-indulgence. Standing on the brink of disaster she still demanded happiness; it was her creed, her gospel, her divine right. The temptation of it, too, pursued her; how easy to obtain a divorce from Wicklow, a word almost and it was done! It was true that there would be a great scandal but, after all, the scandal could only add a zest to her social success; she was young, beautiful, distinguished, and if she broke the shackles that bound her could she not begin all over again? Intoxicating dream,—how full of temptation it was, of alluring sweetness! After all, does not the devil appear to us in the shape of an angel of light?

What were ethics compared with her inalienable right to be happy? The thought of it made her draw a keen breath of relief. Free!—She alone knew the value of that word.

The children crossed her mind only occasionally; Estelle was more and more like her father every day, and as for the baby? Margaret had only vague conceptions of his possibilities; she had seen but little of him since his birth, except in his nurse’s arms, but she had recognized that odious likeness to the Whites. Of course old Mrs. White would take them; she adored them, and Margaret felt that she knew more about them than she did. After a while when they grew up—but Margaret could not afford to dwell upon it. They were associated with her misery, her captivity, as she chose to call it, and she could not love them; she shrank, indeed, from the thought of them, and the responsibility that their existence had thrust upon her, as so many links in her chains.

She returned from her interview with Allestree in a curious frame of mind. Her unreasonable discourtesy to the Vermilions and Mrs. Wingfield—people who really only hovered on the edge of her horizon—her insistent attacks upon Allestree’s sore heart, had all been prompted by her own feverish misery. Once alone in her room she went to the mirror, and holding up one of the candelabra, gazed long and fixedly at her own reflection, asking over again the question she had asked herself on the night of Mrs. O’Neal’s dinner. Had she lost her beauty? Was the potency of her spell destroyed in some mysterious way? Hideous thought—was she growing old?

She saw, indeed, all that she had seen in Allestree’s mirror, and more; the misery that looked out of her own eyes frightened her, and there were more delicate lines than there had been on that previous occasion, or else the light was stronger. This was the reason then of the senseless stare of Miss Vermilion’s china blue eyes—Margaret wondered vaguely why girls of that sort always had china blue eyes?

She set down the candelabrum, and sinking into a chair by the open fire began to brood over her troubles, forgetful that she must be dressed soon for her own reception; it was the night when her weekly guests assembled at those already famous evenings. Her thoughts reverted to Fox; the remembrance of his love for her was like the sudden fragrance of violets in a desolate place.

He had loved her; it never seemed possible for a moment that a word, a sign, could not reanimate his passion, as a breath of air will strike fire from the smouldering embers. Now, too, she could appreciate and understand his love; she was no longer a raw slip of a girl or a stiff little Puritan like Rose Temple! But she knew the barrier which existed between them; never by a word or a sign had Fox trespassed against White’s hospitality, he would never urge her to desert her husband, but if she were free—

She rose and began to walk about the room, touching first one object and then another with restless fingers; the thought of freedom was like wine, it went to her brain; the vision of the divorce court, the lawyers, the judges, the newspapers, floated into space. She stretched her clasped hands high above her head and drew a long breath, her soul almost shouted for joy. Freedom!

It was, next to happiness, the desired of the gods! And after all did not one involve the other, was not one absolutely essential to the other?

She wondered, with a smile, why they talked so much cant about marriage and divorce? Had they suffered as she had suffered they would rejoice, as she did, at the thought that there were divorces, that one could be free again!

Free—good heavens! Not to see him every day, not to hear his voice, with that mean, trivial rasp in it, not to be one of his chattels!

And Rose? Margaret did not allow herself to dwell too long upon that vision of the girl’s young figure, her fair, animated face against the background of the cedars and the sky. Was she jealous of her? That was an ignominy too deep to contemplate without bitter self-abasement; she refused to believe it! The shuddering certainty which had drained the life-blood from lip and cheek became now, on reflection, a fancy of her feverish brain. Such a raw, simple creature as Rose was no mate for William Fox; that indisputable attraction of opposites, which is one of the laws of nature, for a moment lost its significance in her eyes; she would not believe it. It was not quite natural for her, though, to take this view, even for a moment, for a woman, as a rule, has less faith in the endurance of a man’s love than he has in it himself, because she has usually discovered that the heart of the ordinary male creature is uncommonly like a pigeon-cote!

She was determined to forget all these things; she walked to and fro battling with herself, her restless hands sometimes at her throat and sometimes clasped behind her head. The strong passion of rebellion which shook her being amazed even herself. She would never give him up! She could not—to Rose or to any one; her starved heart cried out against surrender and defeat, he was hers—hers.

Her maid’s knock at the door startled her, she stopped short and passed her hands over her eyes, her face burned; she no longer lacked color, her cheeks had the flush of fever. The girl, coming in to dress her, was surprised by her high colored beauty, the brilliance of her eyes, and began to lay out the gown and its accessories with nervous fingers, half expecting one of Margaret’s wild bursts of temper. But her mistress seemed only concerned with her toilet; one gown after another was tried on and rejected until at last she was arrayed in a shimmering dress of violet and silver which was as delicate as the tints of the sky at moonrise. She allowed no ornament on her white neck and arms except a single diamond star which clasped the ribbon around her throat.

Nothing could have been more perfect than her manner to her guests. It was one of those occasions, growing constantly more rare, when White had no reason to complain. She was charming to all, from the most distinguished to the most socially obscure, she forgot her prejudices, she even forgot to snub her husband’s political protégés—to their infinite and undisguised relief—and to her own particular coterie she was the old, charming, inimitable Margaret. As on the occasion of her musicale, men predominated, and among those men were all the notables at the capital. Speaking several languages, Margaret had made her house a Mecca for all Europeans; it was an open secret that she espoused the cause of the Russian ambassador against his secret enemy, Lily Osborne, and espoused it with a zeal which caused a whispered sensation in official circles. It was an anxious question what Mrs. White might not dare to do, for it was believed that she would pause at nothing in her determination to defeat Mrs. Osborne. Yet it was never hinted that she concerned herself even remotely with White’s devotion to the fair divorcée. Her indifference to her husband was a fact too generally accepted to cause even a ripple in the stream.

There had been much secret comment on her changed and haggard looks, but her dryadlike loveliness to-night silenced every whisper, and her gayety, her ease, her clever, reckless talk proclaimed her the same Margaret they had always known and loved and feared, whose wit was as keen as it was cruel.

Mrs. O’Neal was the first to bid her good-night. The old lady in her gorgeous panoply of silk and velvet tottered on, like an ancient war-horse answering the bugle call, her white head vibrating as she talked. Still athirst for social power and success, no one was a keener judge of achievements, and she patted Margaret’s hand.

“My dear,” she whispered, “you’re the most charming creature in the world when you choose! I’m old enough to tell you.”

“I can never equal you,” Margaret retorted lightly, “even when I choose!”

“There! It was worth the risk to get the compliment!” the older woman laughed back; “and your husband, he looked most distinguished to-night, and those dear children—I saw them in the park! Be good, my child, and you’ll be happy!” and she smiled complacently at the axiom as she moved away, a figure of ancient gayety in tight shoes and costly stays. An hour later when her maid had taken her to pieces, she presented a spectacle at once instructive and amazing.

Following Mrs. O’Neal’s exit, the accepted signal for departure, Margaret’s guests began to flow past her in a steady stream, stopping a moment for the individual farewells or congratulations on the pleasures of a brilliant evening. She was standing just inside the ballroom door alone, for White had been summoned unexpectedly to the White House a half-hour previously, his departure adding to the zest of gossip and speculation upon the political situation. Margaret’s slim figure in its shimmering dress, her animated face, the peculiar charm of her smile, had never been more observed; she was beautiful. Those who had questioned it, those who had been only half convinced and those who had denied it, were alike overwhelmed with its manifestation. It seemed as if the intangibility of her much disputed charm had vanished and her beauty had taken a visible shape, was crystallized and purified by some fervent emotion which made her spirit illuminate it as the light shines through an alabaster lamp.

One by one they pressed her hand and passed on, feeling the inspiration of her glance; one white haired diplomat bent gracefully and kissed her fingers, an involuntary tribute which brought a faint blush to her cheek.

Fox was among the last to approach, and as he did so she stopped him with a slight but imperative gesture. “Stay a moment, William,” she murmured, with almost a look of appeal, “I want to speak to you.”

Thus admonished he turned back, conscious that by so doing he startled a glance of comprehension in the eyes of Louis Berkman, who was following him, which annoyed him for Margaret’s sake. He went over to the fireplace and stood watching the falling embers while the remaining guests made their adieux, then as the rustle and murmur of their departure grew more distant and lost itself in the rooms beyond, he turned and saw her coming down the long room alone and was startled by the extreme youthfulness and fragility of her appearance, and by the discovery, which came to him with the shock of surprise, that her radiant aspect had slipped from her with her departing guests, that her face was colorless and pinched, though her eyes were still feverishly bright.

“It was good of you to stay,” she said, coming to the fire and holding out her hands to the blaze; “how cold it is for the first of April. Sit down, William, and let me send for wine and cigarettes; you look tired.”

He raised a deprecating hand. “No more hospitality,” he said firmly; “you’ve done enough; you’ve lost all your color now.”

“Except what I put on with a brush,” she said dryly, clasping her hands and letting her long white arms hang down before her as she looked across at him with a keen glance. “I know—you’ve eaten nothing here since Wicklow broke his word and the rest of it. You won’t eat his bread!”

Fox colored. “Should I be here in that case?” he asked.

She shook her head, glancing at the fire. “You can’t fool me—I understand.”

“Come, I must go,” he said firmly; “it is very late and you look wearied to death. You must be, you were absolutely the life of it to-night; you should have heard old de Caillou rhapsodize!”

“Did I do well—did I look my best?” she asked, her lip quivering like a child’s, her eyes still on the fire.

“You were your own happy self!” he replied.

She looked up, her slight figure swaying a little as she wrung her hands together; the tears rained down her cheeks. “Billy,” she sobbed, “I’m wretched—I—I can’t stand it any longer, it will kill me!”

XI

FOX stood aghast at the force, the agony, the abandon of Margaret’s confession. Any presentiment which might have warned him had been disarmed by her previous gayety.

Almost unconsciously his hand met hers, which was stretched out in a mute appeal. He drew her to a chair. “Sit down,” he said, in an unsteady voice, with an impotent impulse of resistance; “try to calm yourself! This is dreadful!”

She obeyed him mechanically; sinking into the great armchair and turning her face against it, she continued to weep, her whole delicate frame shaken and quivering with her emotion.

Fox stood still holding her hand and looking down at her in deep perplexity. He was intuitively aware of the extreme peril and delicacy of the situation for them both, only too certain of her wild and unguarded impulses, and that moment—more supremely than ever—revealed to him the absolute demise of his own passion. He tried to quiet her, speaking a few gentle and soothing words, sharply conscious of their inadequacy.

But she scarcely heeded them. After a moment the storm spent itself, and she turned, revealing her white, tear-stained face which was still beautiful in spite of her weeping. “There comes a time,” she said, in a low voice, “when one can bear it no longer—when one would rather die.”

“For God’s sake, Margaret, don’t say such things!” he exclaimed, profoundly moved.

Her lips quivered. “Is it so dreadful to say them?” she retorted passionately; “when you feel them? When they are burned into your flesh? I’m so weary of conventionalities. I tell you that I can’t bear it, that I will not bear it any longer!”

As she spoke she rose and stood facing him, her eyes feverishly bright and moist with unshed tears. “You ask too much of me, you have no right to ask it—no one has!” she continued, her lip quivering again; “I cannot be silent—it’s killing me by inches!”

Fox colored deeply; he was suddenly forced into an impossible position. “My dear Margaret,” he said gravely, “I have no words to meet it; you must know how profoundly I feel it!”

“If I did not—if I were not sure of you!” she replied, a little wildly, “it would kill me sooner. Sometimes I have wanted to die. The doctors say that I have heart trouble—I hope I have! If I believed in prayer I should have prayed to die.”

“Margaret! is it as bad as that?” he cried, in sudden uncontrollable pity; he remembered her as so young, so beautiful, so happy!

Her lips twitched. “As bad as that?” she repeated wildly; “I feel like a trapped squirrel, a rabbit in a snare, I can only shriek because it hurts me—it isn’t bad enough yet to kill! I’m caged—oh, William, William, help me get out!”

“Margaret!” he exclaimed sharply, “don’t you know that I can’t hear this? This is White’s house, I’ve broken his bread. My God, how dreadful it all is!”

Her hand clenched unconsciously at her side, her white neck rose and fell with her tortured breathing, a horrible doubt had assailed her. Then the light broke over her face; he loved her, that was it, and he was too honorable to speak! She held out both hands. “William, forgive me,” she murmured softly, “but what have we gained by silence? What does it all matter to the world? But you must go, perhaps I did wrong to tell you now! Good-night, I—I—”

Her lips quivered pitifully. “I have always loved you—don’t think me a wicked woman.”

“Margaret!” he groaned, deeply, terribly touched, yet with a sickening consciousness of his own unresponsive heart.

She smiled faintly, moving away from him toward the stairs. “Oh, you must go, good-night!” she repeated, as he paused half reluctant. “I’m resolved, nothing shall change me—in a little while—” she paused and he saw the change in her face, its lighting up and softening, the revelation of its beauty, its subtle charm; saw it with a slow agony of remorse and reluctance; “in a little while,” she said, and her smile was wonderful, “I shall be free!”

Fox scarcely knew how he got out of the house; he left it in a dream and went directly home to his own apartments in an uptown flat. The distance was not great and he scarcely allowed himself to think. His mind was almost confused by the sudden and blinding climax. But as he opened his door, and the dog, Sandy, leaped to meet him, a rush of feeling swept away his passive resistance; he forced himself to turn on the lights more fully and to look about at the familiar objects which met his eyes on all sides, his books, his pictures, his littered writing-table; he even picked up the evening mail, which his clerk had left in its accustomed place, and looked over the pile of letters and pamphlets. But it cost him an effort.

It was very late, but sleep was impossible, and picking up his hat and stick he whistled to Sandy and the two went out into the almost deserted streets. The dog leaped about him with quick, joyous barks, rejoicing in the unexpected outing, and Fox turned his face northward, walking steadily along the brilliantly lighted and strangely quiet avenue which led him through the heart of the northwest section and up on the hill. The tumult of his mind found relief in the physical exercise and the fresh cold air of an early April night.

In spite of that central egotism of his, which was capable of much when unkindly stirred, Fox believed that he possessed strong convictions on the nicer points of honor. If he had drifted often to White’s house and been much in Margaret’s society it was with no intention of offending against his host. His indolence, his carelessness of what was mere gossip and tittle-tattle, had made him indifferent to the conclusions of others, but he was not unaware of the talk and the surmises of his enemies; he was not unaware that Margaret stood on delicate ground and that, if she separated from White, there would be a wild burst of excited comment—the comment which costs a woman her good name. Such being the case she had suddenly thrown herself upon his sympathy, she had torn away the thin veil of conventionality which had saved them, and it was for him to desert her or to defend her when the supreme moment came.

That moment would involve not only his own happiness but—he paused in his thoughts with a shock of feeling which flooded his consciousness with a lucidity, an insight, which appalled him. Was he mistaken, or did it also involve the happiness of the young and innocent girl whom he loved? At the thought of Rose his heart sank; he felt instinctively her abhorrence, her complete lack of understanding of his peculiar situation. To Rose’s mind, doubtless, he would appear in the likeness of Mephistopheles!

Good God, what would she think of him? he thought; but yesterday he had held her hand, looked into her pure, young eyes, almost spoken the final words which would have laid bare his very soul—and now! He seemed to feel the heated, perfumed atmosphere, the pressure of Margaret’s fingers on his arm, her wild, sweet smile when she proclaimed her love for him without shame—how vividly he saw it! And her absolute belief in his unchanged love for her! Infatuation, madness, self-deception, it might be all these and more, but she was a woman—and she had flung herself upon his mercy!

As yet that other aspect of the affair, the blighting of his public career which such a scandal might in a measure effect, had not thrust itself upon him; his only thought was for Rose. In that hour he learned how profoundly he loved her; it was part of his nature that the very denial of a gift increased his desire to obtain it.

He walked long and far; the night was lightly clouded; but once the moon broke through a rift and flooded the upper sky with light. As he turned on the heights the city lay at his feet, dark and slumbering save for the lighted streets. A policeman tramping past glanced keenly at him. The air had a crispness that was not wintry, and once or twice the sweetness of hyacinths reached him from some flower-studded lawn. Sandy trailed at his heels, faithful but anxious; the way was new and the hour strange.

They walked on; it was toward morning when the man and the dog returned and, when they entered his rooms again, Fox’s face was white, his eyes and mouth were haggard, with the look of a man who has passed through a great crisis with much agony of soul. For he had found but one solution, and that sealed his lips.

If his careless preference for her, for her gayety and her wit, if his thoughtless seeking of her society, if the coupling of his name with hers, had led her to this breaking of her life, then there was no question, there could be no question—he thrust the thought deep down out of sight but it remained there, coiled like the serpent, ready to strike at the heart of his happiness.

XII

IT was ten o’clock in the morning, and Rose was clipping the dead leaves from her flowers in the bow-window of the library, while Judge Temple still read the morning paper in his great high-backed chair; a shaft of sunlight stealing through the open carving touched his scanty white hair and showed the crumpled lines of the blue veins on his temples. He was an old man; he had married late in life and Rose, the youngest born and only survivor of five children, was proportionately dear to him. There was a warm sympathy between them and a companionship beautiful to see.

“There’s some trouble in the Cabinet,” he observed, as he turned his paper; “there are hints here about Wicklow White.”

Rose looked thoughtful but continued to arrange her flowers. “Margaret seems very unhappy and very gay, as usual,” she remarked softly.

“Too gay, my dear,” the judge commented; “old-fashioned fogies like myself get easily shocked. Never go to her dressmaker!”

Rose laughed, her scissors sparkling in the sun. “Why, father, people rave about her and copy her everywhere.”

“Let them,” said the judge dryly, “let them—but not my daughter! Rose, I’d—I’d whip you!”

“You never did that in your life,” she smiled, “I’m almost tempted to try it and see.”

“Better not,” he retorted grimly, taking off his spectacles and putting them into his pocket; “you’d get a lesson!”

“Poor Margaret!” Rose colored a little; she had caught the glance which Margaret had bestowed on her and Fox.

“Poor fiddlesticks!” replied the judge, rising and folding his paper; “she’s made her bed, child, and she must lie on it; that’s the law of life; we reap as we sow.”

Rose looked across at him affectionately, but she was wondering what he thought of William Fox; she had never dared to ask. “It’s a hard law, father,” she said gently, “we all want to be happy.”

“You will be—just in proportion to your right to be,” he retorted calmly; “it’s a matter of the heart anyway, Rose, and not of external matters.”

“I suppose so,” she replied, with a slight sigh; “but one would like to have externals and internals agree, don’t you think?”

The old man laughed pleasantly. “Most of us would,” he admitted, “but we never have our way in this world, not in my observation.”

As he spoke there was a stir in the hall, and a young girl appeared at the drawing-room door.

“It’s Gertrude English,” Rose said; “don’t go yet, father, I’ll take her away.”

But it appeared that the judge had to go to court, and he went out, patting little Miss English on the shoulder as he passed. “We children grow,” he said laughing.

“I wish I’d grown more,” she retorted ruefully; “everybody calls me ‘a little thing,’ and I’m not, really, I’m five feet four.”

“Napoleon was small,” remarked the judge teasingly, “and William Third and Louis Fourteenth.”

“I know what you think of two of those!” objected Gertrude; “we remember our history lessons here, don’t we, Rose?”

“Well—but when a rogue’s famous!” said the judge, and went out smiling at his own jest.

Miss English walked over to the window and watched Rose water her plants and turn them religiously to the sun.

“Take off your hat, Gertrude,” she said pleasantly; “you really look tired; can’t you stay awhile?”

Gertrude shook her head. “No,” she said firmly; “I’ve got about a million notes to write for Margaret and the lunch cards to get ready for to-morrow; to-night she dines the President. I’m tired of it; I wish I could make money cracking stones!”

“Poor Gerty!” Rose looked at her with gentle concern; “you’re very pale, you look as if you hadn’t slept.”

“I haven’t,” said Miss English flatly, “not a wink.”

“I hope Margaret doesn’t make you work late,” Rose murmured, beginning to search again for dead leaves.

“Margaret?” the little secretary sat down and leaned her elbows on her knees, her chin in her hands; “Rose, I’m so sorry for her!”

“She seems gay enough,” Rose observed quietly.

“I should say so! I was there very late last night; it was one of her entertainments, and little Ward was sick. I sat with him. You know she treats the children sometimes like playthings, and again—like rats! I was in the nursery watching him and helping the nurse until all the guests went. Then I went down stairs; I wanted to tell Margaret what I’d done, and I went to the ballroom door. She didn’t hear me call to her, and I went back up stairs feeling like a sneak. She was there with Mr. Fox and she was crying dreadfully when I saw her.”

Rose’s scissors clipped sharply and a fresh young twig fell unnoticed to the floor. There was a long pause. Miss English had mechanically taken off her gloves and she was drawing them through her fingers, her face full of honest trouble.

“After awhile she came up stairs,” she continued, “and came into the room where I was—”

“Gertrude,” interrupted Rose suddenly, “ought you to tell me this?”

“Every one will know soon,” said Gertrude dryly; “she came over and looked at the child and said she was glad he was better—he was asleep then and the nurse had gone out of the room for some extra milk. Margaret’s face was white, and her eyes—I never saw her eyes so wonderful. Suddenly she flung her arms around my neck and began to cry, softly so as not to wake the child. She told me—she’s going to get a divorce!”

Rose put aside her scissors and sat down, looking across at Gertrude with a strange expression, but she said nothing.

Miss English sighed, folding her gloves again. “Of course I know how bad it’s been,” she said; “he’s a brute to her sometimes and swears at her before everybody but, well, Rose, don’t you think you’d swear at Margaret if you had to live with her?”

Rose smiled a little, her lips pale. “I don’t know, Gerty,” she said, “I never did—in my life.”

“Didn’t you?” Miss English sighed again; “well,” she said, “when you’re poor, downright, disgustingly poor, you just have to say ‘damn’ once in awhile, if you didn’t you’d kill somebody!”

“But White isn’t poor,” objected Rose, “he’s only vulgar.”

“Well, of course there’s Lily Osborne,” Gertrude shrugged her shoulders; “there won’t be any trouble about the divorce in the State of New York or anywhere else, I fancy! I wonder if she means to go to Omaha.”

“Do you believe it’s really settled?” Rose asked, with a strong feeling of self-abasement; she thought herself a scandal-monger, an unworthy creature, but her heart quaked within her with an unspoken dread, and Miss English’s next remarks drove it home.

“Without doubt,” she said; “I know it is and,”—she colored a little and looked out of the window at the April sunshine on the garden wall—“Rose, do you believe she’ll marry William Fox?” she whispered.

Rose sat regarding her and said nothing. What could she say, poor child? That vividly pictured scene of Margaret weeping and Fox as her comforter was burning deep, and Rose had been brought up by an Old Testament Christian!

“It would be a great pity,” Miss English observed, after a long silence; “it would ruin Mr. Fox—people would say everything.”

Rose colored painfully. “People say very cruel things, Gerty,” she said slowly, “and, perhaps, we’re as bad as any just now.”

Gertrude shook her head vigorously, her pleasant round face flushing a little too. “I don’t mean to be,” she said, “of course it’s a great temptation; we secretaries know everything, it’s like turning a dress inside out and finding the lining’s only paper-cambric with a silk facing; it’s all a big sham, we’re on the inside and know! But, goodness, it would ruin Fox, and I know, Rose, I know she’s in love with him.”

Rose looked steadily away; she, too, saw the ivy leaves fluttering gently in the sunshine as the light breeze rippled across them.

Miss English sighed. “Well,” she said, “I don’t care; Margaret’s so unhappy, it seems as if she ought to try over again, only there are the children. I forgot though, Rose, you’re very stiff-necked; I suppose you hate divorces?”

Rose shook her head. “I don’t believe in marriage after divorce,” she said; she was very young and she had rigid standards, like a great many people who have never had to test them in their hearts’ blood.

Gertrude English opened her mild blue eyes. “Don’t you?” she said, “I didn’t, either, until I saw Margaret; then I began to think it was awful to have to live out a mistake; and there’s White too; really he’s had his trials. I don’t know whether it would be wicked or not for her to marry again.”

“It isn’t Scriptural,” said Rose firmly, her face colorless now.

Miss English rose and began to put on her gloves. “Well, there isn’t any marrying or giving in marriage in heaven,” she remarked, “so I suppose most of us have got to do it all here. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t find any rush for a poor girl. It’s amazing to me that the male creatures can’t see the advantages of the habit of economy!” she added, with a good humored laugh.

“I wish you’d stay to lunch,” said Rose mechanically; she had not Gerty’s keen sense of humor, and her heart felt like lead in her bosom.

“I can’t!” the little secretary went to the mirror and adjusted her hat-pins; “I’ve got to go and write notes. Margaret has no head, and she’s probably in bed now. You know she really has heart trouble; I shouldn’t wonder if she died in one of her fandangoes.”

“And she’s talking of divorce and marriage!” Rose looked gravely into the other girl’s troubled face.

“Of course; isn’t it like her?” Miss English moved slowly to the door, buttoning her gloves, and Rose followed.

In the hall she turned. “After all, who’s to blame?” she said stoutly; “Margaret’s awfully unhappy, and Fox—goodness, he used to almost live there, he was there to everything until that row with White over the Cabinet business. I’d like to know what you think of him, Miss Moralist, a man who flirts with a married woman!”

“I try not to think of it,” Rose replied quietly.

Miss English had opened the door and the sunlight streamed in. “Oh, good gracious!” she exclaimed; “why, Rose, what’s the matter? You’re as white as a sheet!”

“I’ve—I’ve got a headache,” Rose faltered, the fib lodging in her throat, for she had been reared to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

“And I’ve been teasing you! I’m a brute. Go and lie down, you poor dear!” Gertrude kissed her affectionately and penitently; “try phospho-caffein; your hands are like ice!”

“Oh, it’s nothing—only a headache,” fibbed Rose, more easily the second time; she realized it with a shudder. The way of the transgressor is not always hard, the road is wide, also it is agreeable—but she had not discovered that yet!

“I’ll stop by to-night and inquire,” said Gertrude.

But Rose shivered at the thought of continued deception. “Oh, I’ll be all right,” she called after her visitor, then she closed the door and laid her head against it; everything turned dark for a minute and swam around her.

She went back to the library and picking up her scissors put them away, and quite mechanically arranged her father’s chair and his footrest and looked up the book he would want in the evening. She tried not to let her mind dwell too much on what Miss English had told her, but her lips tightened and her eyes darkened with controlled emotion. She had led, hitherto, a happy, sheltered life, she had never suffered much, and her capacity for suffering was very great. Her character, which was just emerging from the malleable sweetness of girlhood, had begun to feel the impress of her father’s stern morality. With Rose right was right, and wrong was wrong; there was no middle course. She had an exalted conception of duty and the sacrifices that one should be ready to make for a principle. She had never tested any of these admirable theories in the fiery furnace of temptation, but she had a shadowy notion that if she had lived in the age of Nero she should have offered her body to be burned to save her soul alive. It is unfortunate for some of the modern Christian martyrs that they did not live at that time; a diet of prepared breakfast foods and French entrées is not conducive to the production of heroes.

Rose had been so happy the day before, the birth of a new and beautiful emotion had so transfigured her young soul, that this sudden and dreadful revelation was in the nature of a thunderbolt from a clear sky; her heart shrivelled and shrank within her. Yet to question Fox, to doubt him was, to her simple, loyal nature a hideous possibility.

If this were true, if he had all the while loved a married woman—

Rose knelt down by her father’s vacant chair and laid her head on her arms. She tried to thrust the thought away, but it haunted her and that verse—she had been brought up on the Scriptures, she knew them by heart, their denunciations had frightened her when she was a little girl, they chilled her still—For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all. She shuddered; what should she do? O God, would it be very hard? She caught herself pleading; was she begging off? The stern conscience in her made her start up from her knees with a sob.

XIII

IT fell out—most unseasonably for the Vermilions—that Mrs. O’Neal had planned her annual reception for the same night as their fancy-ball. All the world was sure to go to Mrs. O’Neal’s sooner or later, and it broke up the mask-ball at an unusual hour, just before the champagne began to take effect, which was, on the whole, rather a mercy to the Vermilions, though they knew it not and suffered some keen pangs of anger and jealousy. Mrs. O’Neal had, of course, done it on purpose, Cynthia Vermilion said, and, perhaps she had! Mrs. O’Neal was a thoroughly worldly old person who would have driven her social chariot over a hundred Vermilions, figuratively speaking, and felt a grim pleasure in doing it. The world is not precisely the place for the cultivation of the more tender feelings, or an undue love for your neighbor, and Martha O’Neal had long since forgotten that there might be really serious reasons for considering any one but herself.

So she gave her famous annual ball on that beautiful spring evening when the scent of the lilacs in her garden came in through the open windows. She had the house decorated with Easter lilies—it was Eastertide—and she had made her offering from the front pew in the most fashionable church in town, wearing her new bonnet while her head vibrated sufficiently to make the roses dance in weird mockery on its brim. She had remembered to mention, too, that she gave a thousand dollars a year to the church, because it is quite useless to hide your light under a bushel. Having done all these things she gave her ball on the Vermilions’ evening, and it was a very beautiful, a very select and a very famous affair, made more famous in the end by an incident which she had not foreseen.

Those poor Vermilions! They had spent many thousands, and yet people hurried away or came late, only to eat the supper; old Vermilion was a magnificent provider. Of course there were some who never went to the Vermilion’s at all, but always to Mrs. O’Neal’s; among these were the Temples and old Mrs. Allestree, who made a point to be present at Martha’s house, for she and Martha had been schoolmates and were still good friends, although nothing could have been more amusing than the contrast; the one in her old-fashioned dress with her placid face and her kindly smile, and the other, tight-laced, over-burdened with satin and jewels, her old head wagging and quivering under its high white pompadour and its jewelled aigrette.

Her rooms were thronged; the dark polished floors, the old mahogany furniture, the glittering mirrors, the bewildering array of candles, tall candles and short candles, huge seven-armed silver candelabra, short, stout silver candlesticks, the masses of white lilies, the sweet, heavy odor of them; what a beautiful, dazzling, fanciful scene it was, when the lovely women in their rich dresses began to throng every room and corridor and even lingered laughing and talking on the wide stairs and in the gallery above which commanded the lower hall and the ballroom, where the fluted pillars were festooned with vines and crowned with capitals of roses. The old, old woman, with her white head and her false teeth and her gorgeous gown, receiving her guests, chattering and smiling and proud; truly the ruling passion is strong in death. She stood there nobly, heroically, cheerfully, though her tight satin shoes pinched her poor, old feet, and the draughts from the door sent a shiver of rheumatic pain across her poor, old, bare, shrivelled shoulders; and the wide expanse of her ample neck and bosom, clad in jewels and the imagination, felt the breeze too.

After awhile the guests from the fancy-ball began to drift in, a few at first in costume, and then more and more, until the ballroom took on the look of a harlequin show, and there was much gay laughter and criticism of each new arrival from those who had disdained the Vermilion ball or who had never been asked.

Mrs. Osborne came, beautiful and striking, dressed as an Eastern sorceress, and almost at once she had a circle around her in the corner of the conservatory, and was telling fortunes and interpreting dreams with all the arts of a charlatan and the charm of a lovely woman. The crimson tunic, the dark blue petticoat worked with gold, the shapely ankles with broad gold bracelets, the glittering scarfs which draped her shoulders and revealed her white arms, the dull gold band on her forehead, binding back the masses of glossy auburn hair, all combined to make her a charming and seductive picture. She told fortunes well; it is an alluring art, it shows pretty hands and delicate wrists, and the downward sweep of soft eyelashes, the arch of a white brow, besides that swift glance upward from bewilderingly lovely eyes—

The women looked at her over their shoulders and stiffened, while the men all had their fortunes told and found the lines on their palms of sudden and absorbing interest. One or two elderly women, the mothers of grown boys and girls, were seized with a sudden desire to go home, but it was no easy matter because the elderly gentlemen belonging to them, and also the fathers of grown boys and girls, found that corner too attractive to leave.

Judge Temple, observing it with his shrewd common sense, smiled with much secret amusement and looked about to see if Rose saw it, for Rose would understand though she had not his sense of humor. But he discovered Rose greeting William Fox with an expression on her sweet young face which startled him. She was smiling and speaking easily, he saw that, but what was it in her eyes, her lips, which seemed almost too subtle to interpret? The judge stopped talking to his nearest neighbor and looked at his own child oddly; could it be? Then he looked at Fox and there he read something too, the look of a man in pain, physical or mental, a pain which he meant to hide. The old judge had been to the supper-table and was standing at the door when he saw them; he quite forgot the plate in his hand, he almost let a strawberry roll off on to the floor when he heard Mrs. Allestree’s voice.

“Dear me, judge, do remember that I’m wearing my one evening gown and strawberries stain!” and she laughed as she saw his start; “there, see what it is to be a philosopher out for an evening with a frivolous old woman!”

“My dear Jane,” replied the judge—he had gone to school with Mrs. Allestree—; “I’d forgotten that it wasn’t a strawberry vine. Do you remember those we stole from old Mr. White’s patch a thousand years ago?”

“Do I?” the old woman sighed; “Stephen,” she said, “how much nicer they were than these! I wonder if I stole some now—”

“I should send you to jail,” he retorted, twinkling, “the second offense, you know!”

“You stole those yourself!” she replied indignantly, “I was only accessory after the fact! Who in the world is that?” she added, catching her breath and craning her neck to peep through the throng.

It was Margaret White. She had just come from the fancy-ball where it had been her whim to appear as Ophelia. Perhaps her conscience had pinched her for her treatment of Mrs. Vermilion in Allestree’s studio, or it had merely pleased her to go. It was often impossible to find the key to her conduct. At any rate she had gone, and she came late to Mrs. O’Neal’s, where she was to meet her husband, for he had refused to go in costume to the Vermilions’. He was a man of too heavy common sense to trick himself out in fancy dress, and on that one point he knew his own limitations; he had never been able to play a part to his own satisfaction, and he had too high an opinion of Wicklow White to belittle him with a failure. So it happened that he had already had his fortune told by the enchantress in the conservatory when a ripple of excitement from the ballroom reached him.

When Mrs. Allestree spoke the crowd had parted to let Margaret pass through it. She wore a flowing, soft, white gown, thin, clinging, revealing her neck and arms and the long slim lines of her figure; her hair, which was beautiful and an unusual tint of pale brown, was unbound and hanging, trimmed with flowers, while her arms were full of them.

There was a silence; every eye was on her, and there was an instantaneous recognition of her remarkable fitness for the part; the delicate, subtle beauty of her face, her brilliant eyes, with the dusky shadows below them, the longing, the pain, the uninterpreted feeling of her expression, her wild hair, her slim, graceful figure, the appealing beauty of her slender white hands as she held them out, offering rosemary and rue and daisies, was she really an actress born or—the very nymph herself? That mystic atmosphere of tragedy which sometimes seemed to pervade her being had at last found an expression at once visible and beautiful.

It was her whim to play the part out, and people watched her, fascinated; those who did not approve of her, those who disliked her, as well as those who fell under her spell, watched her with undisguised eagerness. She drew all eyes and knew it. She looked up and saw her husband standing in the door of the conservatory; their eyes met with a challenge; they had quarrelled woefully over her coming in this dress, and it only needed the sight of him to kindle her wilful daring, her abominable obstinacy. Some one called her by name and spoke to her but, unheeding, she began to sing Ophelia’s song, throwing flowers as she walked slowly, very slowly down the crowded room.

“Hey non nonny, nonny, hey nonny!” she sang.

There was a little breathless applause, but she met it with a vacant look, coming on, tossing a rose here, a lily there, to be caught by some ready hand.

Mrs. Wingfield, unhappily, stood in her path. She had been watching her approach with an expression which needed no explanation, but she could not be content with silent disapproval, she rushed upon her fate. “Why, how do you do, Mrs. White,” she said, in her audible voice, “I really didn’t know it was you; I thought it must be some actress!”

Margaret looked at her blankly, then she put her head on one side. “‘Well, God ’ild you!’” she exclaimed, “‘they say the owl was a baker’s daughter.’”

Mrs. Wingfield turned painfully scarlet. There was a titter, an audible and wavering titter around her. Alack, there were only too many who remembered, with the memory of society, that her father had dealt in loaves and fishes!

But Margaret had passed on; she handed a flower to Fox as she passed, rosemary for remembrance; she gave a rose to Rose Temple and to the judge a sprig of rue with a little malicious smile.

“Call it herb of grace o’ Sundays!” she said lightly, and the judge laughed good humoredly with the others, for he knew that his stiff, old-fashioned manners and customs were often meat for jests.

After all, it was not so bad, people were obviously entertained; White began to draw a breath of relief, he tried to signal to her to stop. But Margaret was not done, instead, the very spirit of defiance seemed to possess her. She suddenly knelt in the centre of the room and began to make a wreath of flowers, singing Ophelia’s lament, her sweet, high voice carrying far in the great rooms. The throng of gayly dressed women drew farther away, the circle widened, necks were craned, those behind stood on tip-toe.

It was too much for Wicklow White, he could endure no more; he walked abruptly across the space. “Margaret,” he said, in a low peremptory voice, “this is too much, we must go home!”

She looked up and shook back her soft, wild hair as she tossed a flower at him.

“‘For bonny, sweet Robin is all my joy!’” she sang maliciously.

He crimsoned and bit his lip. Again some one applauded; there was a slight murmur of talk.

Margaret rose abruptly from her knees and began to laugh, herself again, gay, debonair, indifferent. “What a fool I can be to entertain you,” she said, her delicate face bright as a child’s.

People gathered about her at once; she was congratulated, praised, but in the corners others disapproved and thought her a little mad. Mrs. Osborne glanced meaningly at her nearest friend and tapped her forehead, and Mrs. Wingfield laughed furiously.

“What a delightful side-show!” she said; “they say White will lose his place—no wonder!”

The throng had closed up again, the gay murmur of talk rose; the musicians were just beginning to play a waltz and the ballroom was filling with dancers.

Margaret, laughing and talking gayly, stood in the door. Fox, looking across at her, experienced a feeling of deep amazement. What an actress a woman can be! It seemed to him that he had dreamed that scene in White’s house, that it was impossible, untrue, a phantasm of his troubled brain. Then, as he watched her, pondering on a woman’s unfathomable moods, he saw a sudden gray whiteness spread over her face like a veil, her eyelids quivered, her lips parted and she swayed.

In an instant he had reached her and caught her as she fell. Judge Temple helped him hush the stir it made, and he carried her quietly and swiftly down stairs to a reception room below where he could get help at once.

Half an hour later Judge Temple took Rose home.

“What was it, father?” she asked, as they got into the carriage; “I didn’t see it and I just heard that Margaret fainted. Mrs. O’Neal kept us all dancing, she didn’t want it known.”

The judge looked thoughtfully out of the window. He was not thinking of Margaret. “She is better now, they got her home in a little while. I believe White did his best in spite of that scene,” he said; “she has heart disease; the doctor intimated to me that she might go just like that if she keeps this up—but people live a long time with Margaret’s kind of heart trouble; I knew one man who had it for twenty years and finally died of stale cucumbers. A beautiful creature, a very beautiful creature, I’ll admit it!”

Rose made an effort, she must learn to hide her heart, she who had never hidden anything! “Father, may I go to her dressmaker?” she asked archly.

“No!” he said sharply, “nor walk in her ways—the most extraordinary creature! Jane Allestree tells me there’ll be a divorce, and no wonder!”

Rose was silent for a moment. “Yes,” she said, “Gerty said so.”

The judge leaned back in his corner and passed his hand over his eyes. “Ah!” he ejaculated and relapsed into silence.

XIV

ROSE slept but little that night; she tossed instead, trying to still her heart. She had seen Fox but a moment in the throng, but that moment had been enough for her to feel the subtle change in their relations. Her perceptions were delicate, far reaching, exquisitely sensitive. He was not himself, his troubled eye met hers with a confession of sorrow which she could not interpret. Standing outside of his consciousness, unaware of the struggle in his soul, she only saw estrangement, awkwardness, a mute appeal, which seemed to her incapable of explanation unless he loved Margaret and had been trifling with her. The thought made Rose sit up in bed with flaming cheeks.

It is useless to inculcate the spirit of meekness and Christian submission in a child when you cannot pluck the old Adam out of the heart. Rose was her father’s daughter; she meant to be a good Christian, she had little stiff limitations in her life, but she never thought of breaking her pride; it came to her with her blood, with her long and respectable descent from a race of God-fearing English yeomen, transplanted to the soil of a new world and endowed with a new and fuller stream of blood and physical beauty, but with the same hardy pluck, the same psalm-singing, fighting spirit which led the van at Naseby.

If Fox loved Margaret, if he meant to marry White’s wife when she was free—Rose shuddered, she had learned her father’s views on divorce and re-marriage by heart. At least, he should not pity her!

After awhile she lay down again and hid her burning face on her pillows, for it was wet with tears. She would not cry out, she would not flinch, but it hurt.

In the morning she bathed her eyes again and again in cold water, dressed and went down to breakfast. The judge was reading his morning paper and they were both rather taciturn. The old man had troubles of his own just then which Rose knew nothing about. He had invested some money unwisely and had heavily endorsed the notes of a friend, a man he had trusted, but lately a doubt began to thrust itself into his abstracted mind. Besides his salary as judge he had but a slender fortune, and if that were really involved and he should die—he looked up over his paper at Rose with anxious, affectionate eyes. She was looking down at her cup of coffee and did not perceive his glance, but he saw again the trouble in her face and thought her eyes looked as if she had been weeping; there was a droop, too, to her lips which was unnatural. It set him thinking, and a cloud settled on his usually serene brow.

After awhile he got up and went into his library to finish his paper before he went out, and he was still there when Rose came in and began to tend her plants. He noticed that she was very quiet and that she took less pains than usual. He laid down his paper. “Rose, has Allestree finished your picture yet?” he asked.

“Yes, I think so,” she replied, blushing suddenly; “but he keeps on fussing over it. Perhaps we should send for it.”

“I want to pay for it; I’ll send him a check to-day,” the judge said, opening a drawer and looking absently for his checkbook; “it may not be convenient later.”

Rose set down her pitcher and stood twisting a broken leaf in her fingers. “He’ll never take anything for it, father.”

The judge looked over his spectacles. “We can’t take such a present,” he remarked dryly; “I’m afraid you’ve let Robert fall in love with you, Rose.”

She gave him a quick, pained glance. “I—I hope not!” she said softly.

The old man smiled. “He’s a good boy, Rose; I shouldn’t disapprove except that I can’t spare you—I’m such a selfish old brute.”

“And I can’t leave you!” she retorted with a queer little laugh, tears in her voice; “but I know Robert won’t take any money for it; I—I shouldn’t dare offer it.”

“You needn’t, but I shall,” replied her father calmly; “if he tells me he’s in love with you I shall not be surprised; no one will be any the worse for it, Rose.”

“I should be very sorry,” she said simply.

The old man gave her a keen glance and pursed his lips as he wrote the check.

“He’ll never take it,” she repeated, taking up her pitcher again.

“Well, I’m not anxious to give him you instead!” said the judge.

Rose laughed a little in spite of herself. “You need not!” she replied.

Her father signed the check. “Rose,” he said, in an absent voice, “what did Gerty English say about Margaret’s divorce?”

Rose bent assiduously to her task. “Not much,” she answered quietly; “just that it was settled, she meant to get one; she’s very unhappy.”

“Of course she means to marry again, that’s what they do these days,” the judge said, in a tone of fine irony; “one husband isn’t enough or one wife. Solomon ought to get here! Of course she’ll marry Fox.”

Rose was silent; through the open window she could see the buds on the Persian lilac, but she shivered.

“What I should like to know,” said the judge shrewdly, “is this—does Fox want to marry her?”

Rose put her hand to her throat with a helplessly futile gesture. “They say he was in love with her long ago, father.”

The old man smiled. “My dear child,” he remarked, “women always remember that Jacob served seven years! But Fox is a genius, an unusual man and probably as fickle as the wind. However, he’ll have to reap as he has sown; doubtless he has dangled at Margaret’s elbow; it’s been the fashion. Well, well, it will very likely thwart his career and, if so, he’ll deserve it, but I hoped great things of him though I’ve feared him a little too; genius is like fire—it burns where it touches.”

He rose and put aside his papers. “I’ve written to Robert and enclosed the check,” he said; “he’ll get it to-morrow.”

“Then I’ll go there to-day,” said Rose; “I shouldn’t dare to-morrow; he’ll be furious.”

“Not a bit of it, he has too much sense,” retorted the judge; “besides, he can’t have my girl yet!”

“Nor ever!” said Rose smiling as her father bent suddenly and kissed her.

“Ever is a long word,” he replied and laughed gently; in his heart he believed that Allestree would make her happy.

An hour later Rose joined Mrs. Allestree on the way to the studio. The old lady was out walking in the spring sunshine, her fine aged face mapped close with delicate wrinkles and little puckers and her keen old eyes bright and alert in spite of the weight of years.

She took Rose’s proffered arm with a smile. “I forgot my cane,” she said; “I always forget that I’m more than twenty-four until I try to go up stairs. I tell Robert that I can’t climb up to his studio much longer, he’ll have to have an elevator. I’m going now to see your picture, he means to send it to your father to-morrow; it’s been hard to part with it!”

Rose colored deeply, much to her own chagrin. “Father is anxious to have it,” she said, “he spoke about it this morning.”

“Wants to pay for it, I presume,” the old woman retorted shrewdly; “I’ve always said that Stephen Temple would offer to pay for his halo! Tell him not to try to pay Robert, Rose, it would hurt.”

Rose looked at her helplessly. “He’s written about it,” she said reluctantly; “I told him, but he would do it.”

Mrs. Allestree’s sensitive face colored almost as vividly as the girl’s and she stopped, her hand on Rose’s arm, and looked down thoughtfully. “It’s in your father’s writing, of course?” she said at last.

“Yes, he wrote this morning and posted it himself.”

The old woman drew a long breath. “I’m going to commit a felony, Rose,” she said, “I’m going to get that letter; Robert’s mail comes to the house, I see it first. I shall send the check back to your father myself.”

“I’m afraid he’ll be angry,” said Rose thoughtfully; “I didn’t know what to do; I was sure Robert didn’t want to—to be paid for it.”

“Paid for it!” Mrs. Allestree shook her head sadly; “my dear child, it has been a labor of love. You couldn’t ask Robert to take money for it.”

Rose was silent, she felt herself a mere puppet in Mrs. Allestree’s hands; the old woman was as shrewd and as skilful as the most worldly matchmaker in her gentle and affectionate way; besides she adored her son and, like most mothers, she was willing to offer up any sacrifice which seemed to her sufficiently worthy for immolation. There was a moment of embarrassment on Rose’s part, and she was glad to see the Wicklow White motor-car coming swiftly toward them. At the sight of the liveries Mrs. Allestree turned quickly and caught an indistinct view of a woman’s figure, a white chiffon hat and a feather boa.

“Why, it’s Margaret!” she exclaimed, half stopping to look back.

“No, it’s Mrs. Osborne,” Rose said quietly; “she’s taken off her half mourning.”

Mrs. Allestree’s face changed sharply. “In White’s motor-car?” the old woman glanced after the vanishing juggernaut with an eloquent expression. “Society is curious now-a-days! White has behaved outrageously; I suppose you’ve heard of the divorce project?”

Rose nodded. “Gerty told me.”

“So she did me,” said Mrs. Allestree grimly, “in strict confidence, of course!”

They looked at each other and laughed helplessly.

“Poor Gerty, she tells everything!” said Rose; “but she’s so good hearted.”

“My dear child,” remarked Mrs. Allestree, “the longer you live the more convinced you’ll be that good-hearted people and fools are blood relations. Of course White has behaved dreadfully, we all know it—but the Lord knows Margaret has provoked him beyond endurance many a time! I shall speak to her about the children. Robert says I sha’n’t; he’ll have me locked up first, that it’s none of my business. A pretty way to speak to his old mother! I can’t help it, I shall ask her to remember her poor little children.”

“I’m afraid they’re an awful burden to her, anyway,” rejoined Rose soberly.

“Oh, I’ll admit that it’s an affliction, a downright scourging of the Almighty’s, to have them look so much like old Mrs. White! But she’s got to consider them; she brought them into the world, poor, little, homely souls! Estelle always reminds me of a little pink-eyed rabbit! As for the divorce, it will be a hideous scandal!” and the old lady’s bright eyes glanced quickly at Rose. She was wondering if she had heard that Mrs. Wingfield said that Fox was the cause of it. It was cruel, it couldn’t possibly be true, but it was sure to gain credence and Mrs. Wingfield knew it!

William Fox was her own nephew, she was proud of him and she loved him, but she was torn between her desire to see her son happy and to shield her nephew. Her thin old lips opened once to speak and closed again quickly; no, she dared not! What was in the child’s heart? Rose was such a child and her father had brought her up so unlike other girls, she was sure to take the man’s view, the hard, flat, ethical view of Stephen Temple, and Mrs. Allestree felt, with some secret amusement, that she would as soon try to argue with the devil as with the judge when once his feet were planted in the straight and narrow path, the old, blue Presbyterian path, as the old woman called it, with her whimsical smile.

Ah, if Rose had only loved Robert as any well regulated young woman would! But Robert’s mother had few self deceptions on that point; she had eyes and she had used them.

Meanwhile they walked up the hill to the studio. On the right, the terraced wall of the corner garden was half hidden by the fresh green sprays on the ivy which mantled it, and a great purple lilac in full bloom nodded above it, its fragrance filling the air. The row of old brick houses opposite had assumed a more genial aspect, here and there a striped awning broke the dull red of their monotonous fronts, and the white pillars of a rejuvenated portico shone in the sunshine. A little girl was buckling her roller-skates on the curb just in front of Daddy Lerwick’s curiosity-shop.

Mrs. Allestree stopped and halted Rose before the glass show-windows, peering in at the odds and ends with a smiling face. “Rose,” she said amusedly, “what shall I give you? A camel’s-hair shawl or a six shooter?”

“I couldn’t buy anything here,” the girl replied quickly; “I suppose I’m foolish, but the thought—oh, poor things, how it must have hurt to sell them, one after another, for a trifle, too!”

The old woman laughed softly. “You’re your father’s daughter, Rose,” she said; “I’m ashamed, but I’m going to buy that old mirror. Go up stairs and send Robert down with his purse; I don’t want you about, you make me uncomfortable!”

“I suppose I am very silly,” Rose admitted reluctantly, “but I can’t help it.”

“My dear, you’re perfectly right, I haven’t a doubt about it,” laughed Mrs. Allestree gently; “you haven’t a sense of humor, that’s all, child, and if I were a man I’d just as soon marry an animated conscience; you’ll either reform your husband or you’ll be the death of him! Now, go and send Robert, for I’m an old sinner and I want that mirror!”

Rose went up stairs, laughing in spite of herself. But as she approached the studio she caught her breath, she heard voices, could Fox be there? She hesitated and stood still, agitated by the thought, then, unwilling to listen even to assure herself, she parted the portières and called to Allestree. As she did so she came face to face with Mrs. Osborne. This then was her destination when she had passed in the motor-car, Rose thought swiftly, but it was too late now to retreat; she gave Robert his mother’s message.

“I’ll go,” he said, “if you’ll excuse me a moment, and bring mother up; if I don’t, she’ll get the whole shop on credit.”

“Oh, go at once!” exclaimed Mrs. Osborne laughing; “that would be worse and more expensive than a bridge tournament.”

Rose bit her lip; the reference was pointed and she caught Robert’s eye full of doubt. “Go,” she said hastily, “and bring your mother up stairs; she didn’t want me there to see her bargain.”

“I shan’t be a moment,” he exclaimed, and they heard him running down stairs.

Left alone with Mrs. Osborne, Rose moved to the window and looked out. The atmosphere was radiant; even the commonplace narrow street below was touched with the alchemy of spring; sunshine slanted across it, a flock of pigeons gathered where some grain had fallen, to rise with the whir of wings at the first alarm. The garden opposite, above the terrace wall, was coming into bloom, a tall magnolia in a fluttering mantle of white and pink and the lilacs full out on the southern slope, while behind it, a long row of young elm trees were still delicate with new greens, and beyond rose the gray tower of the church across the square. How sweet it was, how calm, how reassuring!

Rose heard the rustle of the other woman’s silken linings as she moved restlessly about the studio, and after a moment she came over to the window, though Rose’s very attitude was repellent.

“How full the lilacs are,” she observed, and the girl noticed the rich softness of her tone, “I like them; we had lilacs about the old house at home.”

“They grow wonderfully in New England, I know. I’ve often seen them like trees,” Rose rejoined a little stiffly.

“But I’m not from New England,” laughed Lily Osborne, “I’ve often wondered what mother thought of it.”

“She wasn’t a New Englander then?” Rose turned and looked at her, more interested than usual.

Mrs. Osborne shrugged her shoulders with much expression. “She was from New Orleans, a French Creole. She married a Frenchman, I was born in Paris; it was my husband who took me to New Hampshire first; my mother had lived there five years with some relatives, but she never spoke of it!” she added laughing.

“You are only half an American then,” Rose remarked, surprised.

Mrs. Osborne looked at her critically through her long eyelashes. “I’m a woman,” she said; “that’s all we ever are, my dear, and it’s enough.”

“More than enough sometimes,” Rose replied quietly.

Lily Osborne laughed again, stooping a little to lean both hands on the window-sill as she looked out. At the touch of her flowing draperies Rose drew back with instinctive repugnance. They were naturally antagonistic, and the touch of her dress, the sound of her voice, were distasteful.

The older woman noticed the movement instantly, her perceptions were of the keenest. She looked upon the girl as rather dull, if beautiful, and as an unworthy adversary, yet she resented her manner. Her cheek reddened and she bit her lip as she stared down into the street with unseeing eyes. The offense lay deeper; she had never forgotten or forgiven the bridge whist incident, nor the day when Judge Temple, an important figure in the social world, failed to see her. She turned and saw Rose looking at a rough sketch of Fox. Allestree had done it in a few moments when Fox was talking and unconscious that he was a model. The result was remarkable; the artist had caught his happiest expression and the fine upward sweep of the brow, the noble pose of the head. Rose saw it for the first time and she had forgotten Lily Osborne. She was looking at it with an absorbed eye, her cheek pale.

The other woman read her as easily as an open page; she moved over to her side and raised her lorgnon. “Excellent,” she commented; “a splendid head, I always said so! You have heard of the great divorce—Mrs. White from the secretary?”

Rose did not reply, she glanced anxiously toward the door. They both heard steps on the stairs and Mrs. Allestree’s voice panting at every step. “Robert, I don’t care! Of course the man cheats, they all do, but it’s a beauty and only seventy-five dollars!”

Lily Osborne continued. “Of course Fox will have to marry her, that’s the code, I believe! Thank heaven, when I got my divorce I didn’t have to marry to save myself! It’s such a pity on his account, with his career, but the secretary would be a fool not to divorce her, she—”

Rose turned coldly. “Pardon me,” she said, with white lips, “I don’t care to listen to scandal,” and she walked away to meet Mrs. Allestree, her head up but her heart sinking within her. The sheer misery that swept in upon her being, chilling its natural happy calm, transforming all the cheerful amenities of life, appalled her.

XV

TWO days later Mrs. Allestree rang the bell at Margaret’s door with a sudden sensation of panic. She had felt it her duty to go, in spite of Robert’s protests, for the morning newspaper had printed a scarcely veiled account of the scandal in the Cabinet. White, it appeared, had openly quarrelled with his wife and abruptly left her the day before, publishing his private affairs by going to a large hotel which was crowded with fashionable guests. Society caught its breath and waited—with the relish that it usually waits—for a cause célèbre.

“It’s a cowardly thing to do, Robert,” Mrs. Allestree declared hotly; “no man should expose a woman to such a scandal. I shall go to see Margaret to-day, it’s my duty!”

“Oh, Lord, mother!” groaned Allestree, “can’t you let it alone? What in the world can you do?”

“Do? Robert!” the old lady’s bright eyes flashed, “I’m ashamed of you! Do you think I’ll let people imagine that I believe my own nephew is a scamp? Not a bit of it! And Margaret—the child’s heart-broken, that’s all; I’ll never believe a word against her! Of course he’ll marry that Osborne woman.”

“Mother, mother! You know what Gerty told us; Margaret herself is going to get the divorce, she’s forced the situation.”

“Gerty’s a fool!” said his mother promptly and unreservedly.

Then she put on her bonnet and went, but as she approached the imposing house with its great porte-cochère and its long row of fluted white pillars, its upper balcony and its conservatory, its flagrant and ostentatious wealth, her heart sank drearily. Experience had taught her that the very wealthy have their own way; moreover, what could she say? What had she a right to say? But she was a courageous old woman and strong in her convictions; she rang the bell. A tardy but irreproachable footman opened the door and regarded her with a carefully impersonal stare.

“Wonders who the old party is in an 1830 bonnet!” thought Mrs. Allestree amusedly, but she inquired for Margaret and was admitted after an instant of hesitation which involved the inspection of her card.

She waited a long while, it seemed to her, in the dim drawing-room, and looked about her at its luxuries and the long vista of the ballroom beyond with a new interest. She had never been a frequent visitor at the house and its aspect was new and unnatural, its spacious and imposing vacancy seemed to be accentuated by every touch of the golden talisman; there was no atmosphere of home. “Splendid misery,” she thought, and sighed; there was not much to bind the heart of a woman—a natural woman—here! She listened, hoping to hear a child’s voice, even the baby’s cry, but the stillness was perfect; it was evidently a well ordered household even if Margaret held the reins with a lax hand. Gerty must be a tolerably good manager, Mrs. Allestree thought with a prick of conscience, remembering that Margaret put everything on Gerty’s shoulders.

It was all dazzling enough, there were gold nuggets in the very ceiling, fifteen carat, the old woman recollected with a secret smile, and even the pictures suggested great wealth; on the wall opposite was “The Angelus” and beyond a Reynolds which had cost White a fabulous sum. He knew as little of art as he did of the kingdom of heaven, but Margaret had married him for money, and she seemed to have been inspired with a grim contempt for it afterwards and loved to scatter his wealth to the four winds of heaven.

After awhile a French maid came down and asked Mrs. Allestree to come up stairs. Margaret, it appeared, was only half recovered from her attack at Mrs. O’Neal’s.

She was lying on a lounge by the open window of her bedroom when the old woman entered, and she greeted her with a languid smile. Her white morning gown made her look paler than usual, but she was the picture of indifference and she had been viewing a new hat of a very pronounced size and startling effect.

She held out a hand to Mrs. Allestree with an odd little laugh. “Oh, how do you do?” she said calmly; “you know Wicklow has gone off and left me! I’m ordering a new hat to keep up my spirits.”

Mrs. Allestree sat down weakly in the nearest chair. “Margaret!” she protested faintly.

Margaret looked at her from under her drooping lashes. “Did you expect to find me in tears?” she asked coolly.

Her visitor colored deeply; after all, Robert had been right, she had no justification, her well meant sympathy was fruitless, her coming an intrusion. “I suppose I shouldn’t have come here at all,” she admitted reluctantly, her fine old hands trembling a little in her lap, “but I came to tell you that I had always loved you, Margaret.”

The younger woman looked at her strangely, her face changing rapidly from defiance to a shamed affection, the unlooked for tenderness touched her sore heart; her stormy nature had been passing through one of its eclipses, when the light itself seemed to go out and leave her groping blindly for relief, for hope, for an escape from the intolerable situation which her own folly and infatuation had created, and which kept closing in upon her like the narrowing walls of the inquisition dungeon. “I think it lovely of you to say it,” she murmured, a little break in her voice, her lip quivering as she averted her face.

Mrs. Allestree’s eyes softened; she gave a hasty glance about her, partly to assure herself that they were alone and partly because she was just realizing the fanciful splendor of Margaret’s surroundings. The room was white and gold and every article on her toilet-table was gold mounted, every detail suggesting the height of luxurious sybaritism. “Margaret,” she began gently, “it is never too late, can’t I do something to—to bridge it over?”

Margaret’s lips stiffened, her momentary emotion passing at the mere suggestion of a continuance in the old intolerable relation. She shook her head impatiently. “I wouldn’t bridge it over if I could!” she exclaimed with passion.

But the old lady, foreseeing troubles which would involve those near and dear to her, could not give up so easily. “My dear child, it’s dreadful! The woman always suffers—and your husband’s high position, the publicity of it!”

Margaret shrugged her shoulders. “I can’t help that!” she said scornfully, “I’ve borne it long enough. Haven’t I a right to be happy? A nursemaid might expect that, a cook! Why shouldn’t I have a little happiness in my life?”

“You have so much!” Mrs. Allestree looked about her, “everything wealth can purchase—and the children! God has been good to you; hasn’t He a right to chasten you a little?”

Her glance at the material comforts of the room, her evident consideration of the wealth, the worldly as well as the religious side of the question, irritated Margaret anew, for she had no tolerance for compromise, she had bought all these things at too dear a cost, and knew it in the overwhelming bitterness of her soul.

“What in the world do I care for all this if I haven’t happiness?” she demanded bitterly, “and I’ve never had it, never for a moment! Besides, it’s all nonsense to argue about it; it’s over and done with, thank God! We quarrelled irrevocably; Wicklow wouldn’t forgive me if I’d forgive him—and I never will!”

“Oh, Margaret, Margaret!” Mrs. Allestree shook her head; “there are your children, you must think of them, you’re bound to, my heart aches for them!”

“Well, it needn’t! Mrs. White will bring them up beautifully; she adores them, I don’t!” Margaret’s thin cheeks were burning and her eyes glowed dangerously; the children had been held over her head too often, she was in no mood to hear of them again.

“That’s the most wicked thing you’ve said!” exclaimed her visitor with indignation; “you’ve lost your mind, Margaret; you can’t expect happiness feeling as you do! There, I know you’ll despise me, but I’m an old woman, and I had to speak my mind!”

Margaret raised herself on her elbow and pointed an accusing finger. “Speak it,” she exclaimed with bitterness, “but—were you ever in my place? Were you ever married to a man like my husband, a man who was openly unfaithful to you—who was the talk and the jest of the town because of another woman? Were you ever made to feel that you were bought, a mere chattel?”

Mrs. Allestree looked at her in silence, her fine old face grew pale, her lips trembled. Margaret sank down again, her hand on her heart.

“You never were!” she said scornfully.

Mrs. Allestree wiped away her tears. “I meant well,” she said, “but despise me, Margaret, I deserve it!”

“I don’t despise you, I think you a dear,” Margaret retorted, softening; “only you do not in the least understand. It’s all right for you to be so good and so pious, but I can’t be!”

“You’ve made me a wretched old hypocrite!” said Mrs. Allestree; “oh, Margaret, you can be just what you want to be, you are so clever, so beautiful, so charming!”

Margaret shrugged her shoulders. “I’m a miserable sinner, dear heart, it’s no use to try to reform me.”

“You are wilful! Oh, child, it’s for you I speak, you’ll regret it!” She bent forward and patted the limp white hand that hung over the side of the lounge. From the bottom of her heart she wished she knew how to reach her, but she had been curiously defeated. “You’ll regret it all your life; we women never can break the bonds. Marriage is an incident in a man’s life; God didn’t mean that women should feel the same about it.”

“A great many do break the bonds,” said Margaret eagerly, “and begin all over again; why shouldn’t I?” she spoke with the force of longing; hour after hour she had argued thus with herself, yet at a word her soul leaped up unconvinced and the battle began all over again; that inexorable law which binds a woman’s life and fixes it in the orbit of eternity had laid hold upon her.

“A great many do?” Mrs. Allestree’s thin lips tightened and she looked away. Then she rose and gathered up her gloves and her parasol and her spectacles. “Too many, and what do people say of most of them?” she added severely, regaining a hold upon her shaken convictions.

Margaret bit her lip, there was a little spot of color in each cheek, her heavy eyes shone with feverish defiance. “I wish I were like you, I wish I had lived your life, I should like to be good if I could!” she said slowly, without mockery.

Mrs. Allestree turned red. “Don’t, Margaret! I’m really not the Pharisee or the Levite, only I wanted to help you!”

“I meant just what I said,” Margaret retorted quietly; “but I can’t be religious, I—I must be loved, I must be happy, I should die just being good!”

The old lady stooped and kissed her impetuously. “You’re ill, child, and weak; wouldn’t it do any good if I—I should go to see Mr. White?”

“And bring him back here?” Margaret shuddered. “My dear friend, I’m going to get out of here to-morrow, I shall never come into this house again!”

Mrs. Allestree stood up shocked, the force of Margaret’s hatred of White bit through all reserves. The old woman felt her impotence, how could she fight this will, this unscrupulous will to be happy, happy at any price? “Where will you go?” she asked helplessly.

“To Omaha. Of course I could get a divorce anywhere, every one knows that! Oh, you wouldn’t have borne all I’ve borne! But I shall go to Omaha; I want to have it over soon and I can stay there until I get it.”

“And the children?”

“I sent them over to Wicklow’s mother this morning; she was nearly in spasms for fear I’d want the custody!”

Mrs. Allestree stood looking at her a moment in speechless amazement; then she surrendered. “Good-bye, Margaret,” she said quietly; “I’m a useless old fogy and busybody, I see it, but I couldn’t help coming; I remember you running about in short skirts with your hair in a pigtail. Heaven knows I wish you were a child still and as happy as you were then!”

Margaret sighed. “I wish I were!” she said.

Mrs. Allestree tightened her bonnet ribbons under her chin with shaking fingers, her heart swelling with anger and disgust. A woman, the mother of children, to behave like this! It was monstrous! Behave like it herself? Never! Her stern lips parted once to utter a word of rebuke, but her courage failed her; she remembered Robert’s remonstrances. After all, what right had she to speak? “I wish you were, indeed!” she repeated stiffly.

Her tone, something in her offended gesture, reached Margaret’s heart. She rose, rose with a visible effort, and went to her with an unsteady step, throwing her arms around her neck, disarranging the astonished old woman’s bonnet as she did it. “Love me!” she sobbed, with the abandon of a child who has been punished, “love me—I’m starving to be loved, to be taken care of, oh, don’t you understand? I want to be happy!”

There was a moment of suspended indignation, of doubt, then the old arms clasped her; if she could but save this brand from the burning! “Poor child!” she murmured, “you poor, unhappy, misguided child! Let me be the peace-maker.”

It was a woeful mistake; Margaret raised her head with a wild little laugh, pushing her away again almost with force. “Oh, you’ll never understand me!” she cried, with a finality which was a sharp shock to her listener, “never! You can never change me—I’d sell my soul to be free!”

XVI

FOX had not seen Rose alone since that night, now some weeks distant, when, after a bitter struggle with himself, he had definitely accepted the inexorable fact of Margaret’s demand upon him. To injure a woman, however unwittingly, seemed to him contemptible, even when he secretly raged against the injustice of her claims and repudiated them in his heart with something akin to savage anger. It had been a bitter experience, a shock to his egotism, to his infatuated belief in himself, that belief which comes sometimes to genius with the force of absolute conviction.

The adjournment of Congress had left him more at liberty than usual and he was anxious to leave the city, yet to do so would be interpreted as flight. He had purposely absented himself from White’s house, and Margaret, understanding his mood, had refrained from communicating with him, but he was instinctively aware that she was unshaken in her resolution, and the news of the open rupture came to him almost as a relief; it was over, and it was useless to indulge in vague hopes and futile thoughts of escape from his responsibility; he must meet the fate that his folly and selfishness had invited, and with it the wreck of his own happiness! And he was a strong willed, selfish man; it was well nigh impossible to yield to such a course, to give up, to let Rose go just when it seemed most possible to win her. As for Margaret, the manner in which he thought of her, the wretched obstinacy with which her fate entangled his, argued ill indeed for her future hope of happiness if he married her. If he yielded that reluctant assent to the situation, if he accepted the claim she made upon him, it might be a bare and cruel fate for both. He was himself unaware of the impossibility of concealment, that his final indifference would be more cruel, more deadly than present repudiation. He thought, instead, of himself, of the wreck of a dream which had filled his soul with the beautiful and tender amenities of love and loyalty and protection; he forgot that a man can hide his heart as little as the leopard can change his spots, and that a woman can suffer more in its revelation than she would from physical brutality.

All this while the thought of Rose came to him with cruel regret. There were hours, between daylight and dawn, when he walked the floor battling with his own soul, battling with the irresistible desire to go to her, to tell her that he loved her, no matter what happened; let the universe crumble, let her despise him for his weakness, if she would, but to tell her the truth! It seemed to him supremely worth the cost.

It was late in the afternoon of one of those perfect spring days when the cherry trees are white with bloom behind the garden walls and all the parks are full of robins. Fox had left his work in his vacant committee-room at the Capitol, and crossing the city was walking westward with no companion but Sandy. The desire to see Rose had crystallized in his heart even while he struggled against it, and he turned almost unconsciously in the direction of her home. He had heard that very morning of the rumors, now numerous and substantial, of Judge Temple’s financial losses; one man had told him that the judge was on the brink of ruin, and the thought of distress and sorrow coming to her stung Fox with renewed misery. As he came in sight of the modest old house with its ivy mantled wall and its white door, with the half moon of triangular panes above it, and its fluted white pilasters on either side, he looked up over it with the feeling of a man who had shut the gate of Paradise in his own face. He had intended to pass it, crossing on the street below, but at the corner Sandy stopped and pricked his ears and then dashed forward with a joyous bark of greeting, and his master knew that he was betrayed.

Rose had just mounted her horse at her own door and was dismissing the negro who had held the reins. The sun shone full in her face and made a nimbus of her soft bright hair, while her slim figure in the saddle looked more youthful than ever. She had recognized Sandy and greeted him with a kindly word as he leaped at her stirrup, and seeing his master behind him, she held in her restless horse and waited quietly, only a slight deepening of the color in her cheeks indicating the tumult in her heart. She had schooled herself for the moment and even in the shock of unexpected meeting her training held good; she was more composed than he was, as she answered his greeting. But, at a glance, he saw the change in her, the reserve in her eyes, the slightness of her smile, and taking offense at what seemed to him an injustice, he overlooked the fact that it was the baldest, the most pitiful acting of one who had never dissembled before in her life.

“It’s too perfect a day to be indoors,” she said, with a lightness of tone which shocked her own ears; “I am going down by the speedway to see the river and that soft haze which I know is lying over on the Virginia shore; in the afternoon sun it looks like a mirage.”

“I don’t think I should enjoy the sight,” Fox said dryly; “life has been too much of a mirage to me lately.”

She looked down at him, the sun illuminating her beautiful eyes. “Life?” she repeated, with sudden girlish enthusiasm; “isn’t it what we make it? We owe it to ourselves—that moral responsibility.”

He laughed with bitterness; her childishness struck him with renewed force; she could never understand his impossible situation; she would condemn him, and he deserved it! “Moral responsibility!” he repeated, with sudden fury, “what cant it is. I’d be willing to cast it all into Hades for one moment of liberty from these wretched shackles which ‘make cowards of us all!’ No living man can control his life where it touches another’s.”

She shrank instinctively, with a sharp moral recoil, from his impassioned words, coloring deeply. Her hands trembled as she held the bridle, and even that slight motion made her horse swerve, eager to be off. Intuition, swift and unerring, interpreted his words and his sudden stress of feeling. “Pardon me,” she said simply, “I did not mean to set myself up as a judge. I suppose I’m very ignorant of such matters and—I would rather be so,” she added with gentle dignity.

He looked at her deeply touched. “My God, Rose,” he murmured, “leave me; if you stay a moment longer I must speak, and you will never forgive me!”

Her lip trembled like a child’s, but her clear eyes were full of a grave condemnation; yet she was deeply moved; he had never called her by her name before, and the sound of it upon his lips, the very way in which it was uttered voiced his heart; she could not close her ears to it, no matter how much she struggled with herself, and she did struggle, determined to hide her own pang of anguished regret. For a moment neither spoke, then she leaned slightly from her saddle and held out her hand. “Let us part friends,” she said in a voice of restraint.

He did not take her hand; he groaned. “I cannot!” he exclaimed with renewed bitterness; “do not offer a sop to a starving man!”

Her horse plunged and she grasped the bridle again with both hands. Her face changed so completely that it seemed to him a strange face. He could not read it but he believed that, in her heart, she condemned him, that he appeared to her in the guise of Mephistopheles himself. Yet, as she turned and looked back at him, there was an expression in her eyes at once inscrutable and beautiful; he could never be sure how far it confessed her heart. Had she loved him? It was impossible to know, and he stood mute watching her slight figure outlined against the sun as she galloped down the long quiet street, under an arcade of new green, wreathed here and there with the bloom of the tulip trees, narrowing at last to an arched vista of luminous sky above blue distant hills; its stillness and its new thick foliage shutting from view, at once of mind and eye, the city life which enfolded it, and was shut out by its gracious gift of leafage, which hid long rows of houses or clothed them with imaginary beauty.

Fox stood still, rooted to the spot, his mind darkened by the fierce tumult of feeling which clamored against fate and against Margaret. She had broken with him long ago, what right had she to thrust herself into his life? Then the picture of her in her forlorn grief, in her appeal to him, came back with an abruptness which wrung a groan from his lips. What man, so placed as he, could fling her unhappy love in her face?

And Rose? What she believed of him, shaping her thoughts by that stern old moralist her father, it was not difficult to imagine!

He started to self-consciousness as Sandy, tired of waiting, suddenly jumped up and pawed his arm. Coming to himself again he flushed hotly at the discovery that some chance passers-by were staring at him, and whistling to the dog he walked rapidly away, the battle still raging in his soul with bitterness.

Meanwhile Rose had turned her horse’s head through less frequented streets toward the White Lot, and galloping through the bridle paths around the ellipse, she turned and crossing the street rode down to the speedway, the sun shining athwart her path and the river lying before her a sheet of silver.

As she had anticipated, a soft haze floated on the farther shore, the sun seemed to turn the very mist to gold, and through this glowing, impalpable atmospheric vapor she saw the beautiful swelling hills, half fledged in tenderest green, the shadows purple, the distances melting into the sky itself. Across the river a flock of birds winged their flight, vanishing at last into the heart of the west.

The long white road stretched smooth and bare to the water’s edge, she heard the tide lap the sand, and the sharp hoofbeats of her horse rang clear. It was almost deserted; some social function had drawn the tide of carriages and motors elsewhere; a few stragglers passed her, but she galloped on. Behind her the city dropped away into silence, the foliage in the open spaces of the park and the White House grounds almost hiding the public buildings and clothing the whole with a sylvan aspect. Some children paddled at the water’s edge; a boy cast his net; the prattle of their voices came up through the clear soft air.

Rose checked her horse and sat looking across the river, shading her eyes with her hand. The sight of Fox, the sound of his voice had unnerved her. She had thought herself strong enough to dismiss him from her mind, to live down that dream, that idle futile dream, but she found that she had not counted the cost, that she had suffered a serious hurt. Already Rose’s inner mind began to question her own judgment. She knew nothing of the circumstances; had she a right to condemn him? Secretly she blamed Margaret; what woman does not blame the other woman a little? What woman does not know that the other’s charming ways, her skill, her beauty, may have captured the unwary male creature almost against his will and certainly against his better judgment? Eve would never have blamed Adam in her heart if there had been any one for Adam to flirt with, but therein lay Eve’s profound superiority over her descendants—she was the only woman!

But Rose knew Margaret, knew her charm, her subtilty, her daring, and she battled with herself, trying to beat down her secret condemnation of the woman only. She was a stern little moralist, and she tried to be just; Fox must be to blame also, for was not Margaret married? The enormity of his offense could not be excused; besides, as she reflected, with a gnawing pain at her heart, of what avail to argue? If the divorce was granted—and it would be, beyond a doubt—Fox would marry Margaret.

Her lips tightened, her hands grasped the bridle again, and she galloped on, a wave of misery sweeping over her young soul, blotting out the bright contentment of her life, her natural cheerfulness. Suddenly she thought of that day a year ago, how happy she had been! She remembered it, a bright beautiful day, and she and Mrs. Allestree and Robert had driven out to Rock Creek Park and she had found some wood violets. A few months, and her old life had been blotted out, her happiness clouded; even her affection for her father seemed overshadowed, her whole being preoccupied and absorbed with this new misery. Was this then what men called love? Alack, she wished that she had never met the little blind god, or meeting him, had passed unscathed!

She turned her horse’s head and rode slowly back; the scent of flowers, of sweet new grass, of the fresh turned earth came to her, and the sweet treble note of a song-sparrow, but the world would never be quite the same again; she had met life face to face and learned one of its profound lessons. The young purity of her soul refused to accept it as a common lot, and it was characteristic of the sweetness of her temperament that, however she suffered, she did not blame Fox for having deliberately won her love, but she shrank, with almost physical repugnance, from the thought of him as the lover of a married woman. The judge’s lessons had gone even deeper than he knew.

XVII

GERTRUDE ENGLISH, with her hands clasped behind her, stood looking over Allestree’s shoulder and watching him as he worked, in a desultory way, at some details of Margaret’s now nearly finished portrait. It was good work, but it lacked the inspiration of his picture of Rose; it had been, indeed, well nigh impossible to convey the mockery, the uninterpreted mystery of Margaret’s glance.

“You haven’t made the face half sad enough,” was Gerty’s candid criticism, “and her eyes—do you suppose any one else ever had quite such eyes?”

Allestree smiled. “I was going to say that I hoped not, but I suppose you would construe that as a want of appreciation.”

Miss English opened her own eyes. “Of course I should,” she said promptly, “and I can’t see what you mean; her eyes are lovely!”

“Admitted!” he said teasingly; “you can’t understand me, Gerty; I have vagaries.”

“Oh, I suppose that’s genius, isn’t it?”

“Precisely, genius is a form, a mild one, of adolescent insanity.”

“Well, don’t get violent while I’m here, Robert,” she retorted; “I have enough of whirlwind and tornado just now with Margaret. Heavens, how glad I’d be if I didn’t have to go to Omaha with her!”

“Poor child, must you?” Allestree stopped painting and looked around with open sympathy.

“Oh, yes, I must,” Gerty replied with resignation; “I’m homely and poor, Robert, and they will take me along labelled—‘Propriety, reduced gentlewoman as secretary and chaperon, age near thirty, conduct exemplary, travelling expenses paid!’”

“I’d take to the woods, Gerty!” he laughed, not without sympathy; he dimly imagined the sting under the words.

“Or do something outrageous and get sent home—I wish I could, but I’d starve,” Gerty said calmly; “nothing else keeps me in the straight and narrow way but the fact that meat is twenty cents a pound and bread five. Isn’t it sordid? But I’m really dreadfully sorry for Margaret!”

“I was beginning to lose sight of that fact,” remarked Allestree dryly.

“I’m not sorry for Fox though,” she added, laughing maliciously.

Allestree frowned, concentrating his attention on the picture again. “It’s a wretched business,” he observed.

Gerty walked to the window and looked out; when she came back her face was flushed. “Robert, do you know I’m afraid that I did something wrong the other day,” she broke out; “I’m nearly sure I did!”

He looked at her smiling grimly. “You forgot about the scale of domestic necessities then, Gerty?” he said.

But she ignored him. “I went to see Rose some time ago, just after Margaret told me, and I talked—I talked too much.”

“The unruly member, alas!” he mocked, laughing now.

“I did,” she replied. “I told her about Fox and Margaret—and Robert,” Gerty paused and dropped into a convenient chair, “Robert, she turned as white as a ghost! Is it possible, do you think it’s possible that she loves Fox? I never thought of it until Lily Osborne told me so last week.”

“Mrs. Osborne—why do you listen to Mrs. Osborne?” Allestree broke out, with a fury which astounded Miss English; “she has no right to speak of Rose Temple, it’s—it’s an outrage!”

Gerty stared at him a moment in silence, her face reddening still more with the horrified recognition of another blunder; of course she knew that he had always loved Rose, in fact she had discounted his devotion as too stale an affair to be really vital. “I know Lily Osborne is a cat, of course,” she said slowly, “but then one can’t be rude without any given reason. She didn’t say a word against Rose, and I suppose it’s natural enough if Fox has admired her; everybody does.”

But Allestree was not appeased. “Mrs. Osborne!” he broke out again, “of all women—Mrs. Osborne! Gerty, don’t you let her say a word to you again.”

“Good heavens, Robert, I shan’t dare squeak after this!” Miss English retorted plaintively; “and, of course, Mrs. Osborne will marry White and, they say, he’s going to lose his place in the Cabinet. What on earth has she been doing about the Russian and German ambassadors?”

“I don’t know,” said Allestree sharply, “and I don’t care!”

Gerty rose abruptly and picked up her parasol. “Robert,” she said with feeling, “you’re like a bear with a sore head, and I always said you had such a nice disposition; I should have fallen in love with you myself if I hadn’t had a snub nose and freckles.”

In spite of himself Robert laughed. “Was that an insurmountable barrier, Gerty?”

“Certainly; snub nosed girls never fall in love with artists, it isn’t profitable!” and Gerty moved toward the door.

As she did so she glanced out of the open window. “There’s Rose now,” she said and beckoned gayly; “she’ll come up and make amends for my blunders!” she laughed.

Allestree colored hotly, aware that he had betrayed himself; the amazing indelicacy of Gerty’s raillery was not inconsistent with her usual careless freedom of speech which gave much unwitting pain and had cost her correspondingly dear more than once, yet it made him wince to encounter it, to feel her thoughtless probe sink into the dearest recesses of his heart and be powerless to resent it. Frankness, after all, is frequently a doubtful virtue; like a two-edged sword it cleaves both ways and leaves no healing balsam in its train. It was Margaret White who always said that an expert and comfortable liar was an absolute blessing to society.

Meanwhile, Rose had dismounted at the door and come up stairs with no other motive than a desire to escape her own society. The sight of Gerty at the window furnished her with an excuse, and she came in still pale, in spite of her swift gallop by the river, and with a look in her eyes which shocked Allestree; he had never seen pain in her look before. Miss English greeted her affectionately; at heart she was really penitent.

“I came up here to see Lily Osborne’s picture,” she declared, “and Robert has sent it off already! Isn’t it a shame? I hadn’t seen it.”

“It was excellent,” Rose replied soberly, taking the chair Allestree pushed forward for her; “she really is a beauty, Gerty; I like to say that to show myself just and broad-minded!”

“That makes two pictures Robert has finished this winter;—yours and the serpent’s, as I call Lily Osborne, and now he is nearly done with Margaret.”

“Not many, if I’m to make a living by it, Gerty,” Allestree retorted smiling.

“A living? Goodness, if I could only get your prices!” Gerty raised her eyes and hands to heaven; “I’m a poor thing worth a dollar an hour and expenses.”

“Raise your rates, Gerty, you’re indispensable,” said Rose.

“Indeed I’m not, there are lots of others waiting for my shoes. Good-bye, dear children; I’m going now to write two dozen notes, pay fifty bills and interview a caterer and a florist,” and she kissed her hand to them as she withdrew, mischievously aware that she had coaxed Rose into an interview with Allestree; like Judge Temple, Gerty thought happiness lay in this direction and in no other.

As she disappeared Rose left her chair and went to look at Margaret’s portrait with dreamy eyes. “I must go, too,” she said, “I only stopped for a moment on my way. I’ve been riding by the river and through the White Lot. I kept thinking of those lines, do you remember them, Robert?—

“‘Hast thou seen by daisied leas,
And by rivers flowing
Lilac-ringlets which the breeze
Loosens, lightly blowing!’”

“I’ve been longing to be out all day myself,” he said soberly enough, “to see the ‘lilac-ringlets,’ but I must finish this; in some way I have grown to believe that Margaret will never again be quite the Margaret we have known so long. I wanted to be sure of this expression.”

Rose looked again at the picture, and her lip quivered a little in spite of herself. “Yes,” she replied simply, “I understand you; I don’t believe you will see that old look again. I feel—” she paused, choosing her words, her eyes darkening with an emotion which she was controlling with an effort—“I feel as if Margaret had died, that some one else would come back to us, some one we do not know!”

It was a striking fact that at the very moment when Margaret believed that she was about to achieve happiness, her friends regarded her as approaching its final eclipse. One moment of detachment, of the external view-point, would open an appalling vista to many a human soul, for it is true that those whom the gods desire to destroy they first make blind.

As Rose voiced this thought Allestree averted his eyes; he felt the keenest regret for his thoughtless words; Gertrude English’s unmerciful tongue had torn away the veil from Rose’s emotions. He would have been more than human had not his heart burned with a sudden fierce anger. What right had Fox, who had so much, to step in between him and the girl he loved,—to wound a heart so delicate, so sensitive, so tender as hers?

“I pity Margaret!” he said sharply, with some bitterness, “but he who sows the tares—”

“I don’t want to judge,” Rose rejoined quietly; “father is very bitter against divorce; he thinks it a menace to the national existence, and I know I think always as he does and—perhaps I’m hard, Robert;” as she spoke she looked at him appealingly, resting her slender, ungloved hand on the easel beside Margaret’s portrait; her whole attitude was one of regret, of reluctance.

“I shouldn’t like to speak of it too often,” he said in a low voice, “as it stands—in the bare aspect that we see it—Margaret’s plain justification is lost in what we know to be her wild determination to be happy at any price.”

Rose sighed. His words revealed her own thought, she knew that Margaret sought divorce to marry Fox; it was hideous to her, unpardonable, and Fox? She was silent, looking at the pictured face, seeing its mystical beauty, that weird suggestion of an unhappy fate which seemed to shadow its wild loveliness. Allestree had only dimly conveyed it, but Rose’s memory supplied the details. No wonder that men fell under her spell; there was a charm as subtle as it was absolute in her whole personality.

“Ah, well,” Rose said at last, “it is natural—she is wonderful.”

She had almost forgotten Allestree, so absorbed was she in her own thoughts; and he saw her emotion and raged again at the thought of it. With a sudden impulse he bent and kissed the hand upon the easel. Rose started violently and blushed with painful emotion.

“Robert!” she exclaimed reproachfully.

“Can I say nothing?” he replied with passion; “must I stand by like a mute and let my happiness, my love, my life slip away from me? Rose, you ask too much!”

“I’m so sorry!” she said simply, “now I must go and—and I hate to seem unkind, Robert!”

Their eyes met with the shock of natural feeling and his face blanched. “Of course I know it’s useless, Rose, I’ve always known it, but—well, I had to speak, and you’ll have to forgive me for it!”

She smiled faintly. “There’s nothing to forgive,” she said gently, “and I must go home to meet father anyway. Won’t you come with me, Robert?”

Without a word he laid down his brushes and the two went down the old stairs together, each miserable enough in different ways; the man bitterly rebellious, the girl resolutely enduring with a self repression that suggested her father in her.

XVIII

THAT very day Judge Temple violated his usual custom and did not come home promptly after court adjourned. The hour came and passed and he had not appeared.

Rose was waiting for him in the library and she began to glance uneasily at the clock. His habits were as fixed as the laws of the Medes and Persians; any deviation indicated something out of the common. These spring evenings it was his custom to walk in the garden before dinner. Rose had accordingly opened the long French window on the piazza and the tendrils of the jasmine vine, not yet budding, swung across it; the air was sweet, redolent with the perfume of the wistaria which hung in festoons on the arbor. The sweet full note of a catbird broke the stillness.

Rose walked to and fro, trying to distract her mind; if she relaxed a moment she heard Fox’s voice, saw his strong pale face. It was pathetically significant that Allestree, and Allestree’s pain at her finality had dropped from her mind. Love and youth are absolutely selfish, they ignore the universe.

When she came home that day and was alone in her room, she had shed some passionate tears; her young strong heart had rebelled utterly; she wanted happiness too, wanted it as bitterly as Margaret did, but Margaret had robbed her of it! She gave way then to the passion and the rage of her grief, she forgot all Christian maxims, and in her heart stormed against Margaret again, not against Margaret’s lover. But the fury of her mood passed, leaving her pale and wan, exhausted by it, but still unsubmissive. It was no longer an unusual thing to wash away the stains of tears and go down stairs with a smile. It occurred to her as she smoothed her rumpled hair and made her toilet for the evening that she had learned the alphabet of deceit too easily, she was a veritable whited sepulchre. Nevertheless she went down bravely to meet her father and take up her life just where she had broken off for those few hours of mad grief and restlessness. But the delay fretted her nerves; it was one thing to be ready, another to keep that smile, that brave air of comfort for an hour, two hours, three! She grew uneasy, too, for the judge,—could he be ill? Could anything have happened? A dim foreboding crept through the preoccupation of her mood. She ran to the front window and looked down the long street and saw her father coming slowly toward the house, his head slightly bowed and his tall thin figure showing more than usually the student’s stoop of the shoulders. The last rays of sunlight slanting down the street fell on the whiteness of his beard and hair.

A swift, pained perception of his age, his feebleness, gave Rose a sudden sharp pang of grief, of foreshadowed loss; the revelation that comes suddenly—like the opening of a window in the soul—of the mortality of those we love, of life’s awful uncertainty.

She opened the door with a pale face. “Father!” she exclaimed, “you’re so late, I was getting anxious.”

He looked up without a smile, his eyes dull and weary. “I was delayed—by business matters,” he said simply.

He followed her into the library, and putting down a bundle of papers he carried sank wearily into his great chair and hid his face in his hands without another word.

Rose looked at him keenly, her heart throbbing with a new dismay, and seeing that the fingers which pressed his temples slightly trembled she went to the dining-room and pouring out a glass of wine brought it to him. “You are very tired,” she said gently; “try to take this, father, I think you need it.”

He looked up blankly, took the glass and tasting the wine set it aside. His face had aged ten years.

In her distress Rose only thought of cheering him. She averted her eyes; it seemed almost an indelicacy to inquire too closely into such apparent distress. “The roses I ordered came to-day,” she said, with a forced lightness of tone which jarred; “I thought, perhaps, we could decide this evening where to set them out. Do you think they’d do best by the south wall, father?”

He passed his hand over his eyes like a man whose sight was failing. “The roses?” he repeated absently; “I do not know. My child,” he added in a heavy tone, “something has happened to-day; I’m practically a ruined man.”

She caught her breath, frightened for the moment and taken unawares; in the assured comfort and peace of her life it seemed impossible. “Oh, father!” she exclaimed, “not really?”

He nodded, speech was difficult; the full force and horror of the calamity still hung over him.

A hundred conjectures darted through her mind, but intuitively she knew the actual fact, his trust had been betrayed. “It’s that man—the note you endorsed?” she said.

“Yes,” he replied simply, “that and the unfortunate investments I made in New York. They turned out badly two months ago; I did not tell you, Rose, but I was swindled. This morning the note came due and Erkhardt has disappeared.”

“Oh, the villain!” Rose exclaimed hotly, “and you so kind. Father, can’t it be delayed—warded off? Surely something can be done—must you lose all that too?”

He roused himself with an effort from the cloud which seemed to be enfolding him, shutting down on his stupefied senses. “I shall have to pay the whole obligation; it can’t be honorably delayed,” he said; “it will sweep away my whole principal, Rose, and leave me nothing but my salary.”

“But we can live on that,” she exclaimed eagerly, her face brightening, “we can easily live on that, father; you’ll see how famously I can manage!”

The judge looked at her with a pitiful tightening of the lines about his mouth, his eyes filled with unshed tears; her ignorance seemed to him the sweetest, the most helpless thing in the world. “But when I die, Rose,” he said hoarsely, “and I may die soon—” he rose and walked to and fro before the open window where the soft twilight was falling. He was suddenly bowed with years, shrunken, haggard. “My God, child, there will be nothing for you!” he broke out at last.

She went to him then, throwing her young arms around his neck and staying him in his walk. He looked at her, bewildered, and she laid her soft cheek against his in a mute caress. “It doesn’t matter, father!” she whispered; “don’t think of me, don’t add that to your burden.”

The old man groaned. “My child,” he exclaimed, his voice quavering with grief, “my poor child, I can never forgive myself!”

Tears of sympathy filled her eyes, but she smiled bravely. “Why, father, we have so much—here is the house, the—”

“It’s mortgaged,” he said, and sank heavily into his chair.

For an instant Rose stood appalled. Unconsciously she glanced about her; in the gathering gloom the dear familiar room, the book-lined walls, the littered table, the old clock, seemed suddenly changed. Between yesterday and to-day, between this morning and to-night was a great gulf fixed. She shivered, a horrible sensation of loss, of unreality, of despair, swept over her young soul and bared it to misery, the poignant, unreasoning misery of youth. Then she saw the bowed white head, the bent shoulders which had borne the heat and burden of the day, and forgot herself. She knelt by his chair and slipped her arms around his neck. “Nothing matters, dear daddy, while we have each other,” she whispered, a little sob in her voice.

He put his shaking hand on her head. “My poor child,” he repeated.

She raised her head, a soft light in her eyes. “Father, you’ll let me sing now,” she said, “you’ll let me sing—I know I can make a fortune for us both. Mancini told me that with a year in Paris I could be ready. He believes in my voice, father, and you know he has trained two great sopranos.”

The judge shook his head sadly. “Child, child, you know how I feel about your singing in public!”

“But now, daddy,” she pleaded, “now when it will save me from poverty, and I love it, oh, I love it! May I go, just for six months?”

Again the judge shook his head, his lips almost formed “no,” but Rose’s arms tightened around his neck.

“Don’t say it, daddy!” she cried, “don’t say it, for then you will not unsay it! Truly, truly I must sing, it is my greatest desire, my happiness, the talent that was given me—surely I mustn’t be the one to fold it in a napkin! Daddy, daddy, say yes.”

He sat looking out of the window with unseeing eyes, his lips compressed. The demand struck at his dearest prejudices, his firmest convictions, yet to leave her helpless and poor!

In the still room the ticking of the clock sounded with monotonous distinctness; it seemed to jar the silence. Twilight fell fast, the corners were dark, the two faces in the foreground showed white and tense.

At last the judge sighed heavily. “I must give in,” he said, with slow reluctance, “in my folly I have wrecked us both; I’m no longer fit to command. You may sing, child, but I hope it will only be in concerts.”

Rose’s face fell but hope kindled, one step was gained, and like every wedge it makes the other easier. “But I must go abroad to be finished for any really great success,” she said; “father, can’t you go with me?”

The judge looked at her strangely. “Child, I never thought,” he said harshly; “I haven’t the money to send you yet,—you’ll have to wait until we can save it; it’s another denial for you, Rose. You know I sent a large check to Allestree the other day, and there is little left now.”

A wild hope leaped in her heart, she knew the check would come back, but dared she tell him? Would he take it if it came? Her lips trembled, she was glad of the darkness. “Father, I shall sing,” she said bravely, “perhaps,—who knows,—I shall sing so well that you’ll be proud of me and sit and applaud and send me bouquets.”

He wiped away the gathering moisture in his eyes. “I’ve always been proud of you, Rose!” he said sadly, “but that a child of mine should have to sing for a living! The Lord’s hand is heavy upon me in my old age,” he added pitifully, completely broken down.

The girl’s arms were closer about his neck; her own sorrow, her thoughts of Fox were lost in her love for the old man in his distress. “Who knows?” she cried with new sweet courage, almost gay in her bravery, “perhaps I shall be as lucky as Patti and we’ll have a great fortune and a palace to live in! Oh, daddy, I shall be so happy to sing!”

But he sat motionless, his chin upon his breast and his dull eyes fixed on the open space beyond the window where the lilac bush stood like a ghost amidst the gathering night.

XIX

FOX sat at his writing-table turning over and signing some papers left there in methodical order by his stenographer. He was going out of town at last, and the thought of escape from the oppression of the last few weeks was like a breath of sweet fresh air from the hills where he was born. But even with the prospect of this reprieve he did his work mechanically, glancing up occasionally at the waving tree-tops which were on a level with his open windows and limited his view.

Sandy lay at his feet waiting impatiently for his daily run and in sympathy with his master’s mood. Fox spoke to him once or twice as he paused in his work, and once he bent down and caressed the faithful creature’s head; there was comfort in the sense of dumb companionship. Yet at this very moment of depression he was aware that he had achieved a signal political triumph. His last speech before the closing of Congress had resounded from one end of the country to the other, and been caught up and echoed abroad. He had healed a breach in the party, plucked victory from defeat, and his name was on every lip.

A few months ago the significance of it would have stirred him deeply, his keen political foresight would have shown him the greatest possibilities; now it was dead sea fruit. He knew that in a year, perhaps in less time, he must take a step which would inflict a sharp injury to his career, which would, perhaps, lose him his popularity forever.

And a few weeks ago how differently the world had looked! Then such a victory as he might now easily win would have meant greater honor to offer to the girl he loved.

His lips tightened and he bent to his work. He was still reading and signing letters when there was a knock at his door, and he opened it to admit Louis Berkman. Berkman had been away and, returning but a few days before, was not fully aware of the current gossip, but he had just heard of Fox’s achievement and came in with breezy congratulations.

“My dear fellow, I always said you had it in you! Some day we shall get you in the White House!”

Fox laughed a little bitterly. “It will be a long day, Berkman,” he said coolly; “the newspapers make a great deal of fuss over a small matter.”

“Not at all! I just saw Wingfield, and you know he hasn’t much reason to love you; he told me that you’d be Secretary of State in three months.”

Fox bit his lip. “Wingfield’s an old fool!” he retorted sharply.

Berkman laughed. “Oh, I know about White, he’ll have to go; I’m jolly sorry on account of his wife, she’s no end of fun! What the devil has he been doing with that Osborne woman’s help? I heard in New York that she had sold information to Wall Street and something about our Navy to Japan.”

“I don’t believe that!” said Fox flatly; “White hasn’t done that, it’s only meant as an attack on him of course. They say everything of Mrs. Osborne, they always have, and that dirty sheet in New York has published a lot of lies; it ought to be suppressed.”

“Nevertheless White will go out; I hear that everywhere,” said Berkman obstinately; “and then you’ll come in.”

Fox smiled with exceeding bitterness. “Then I shall not come in,” he retorted quietly; “I shan’t go into the Cabinet.”

Something in his tone at last warned Berkman, and he colored deeply with embarrassment. Certain vague rumors took shape in his mind and he remembered suddenly Margaret’s mood after they had left Fox and Rose together in Rock Creek Park. He reached over and took a cigarette from the box on the table and lighted it to hide his confusion.

“I believe you’re right,” he said, with assumed lightness of tone; “the Cabinet isn’t as brilliant an opportunity as the House. At any rate I congratulate you, my dear fellow, and I wish you all success.”

Fox thanked him dryly and asked a few desultory questions about Berkman’s trip and his new book which was in press.

“It will be out in about ten days,” the author said calmly, “and then my friends will make a business of sending me all the adverse criticisms. If I didn’t like to see the favorable ones occasionally I shouldn’t need to employ clipping bureaus. I’m hanged if I see the point of view which makes it a duty to be disagreeable!”

Fox laughed. “My dear fellow, our friends never realize us. I remember the first speech I ever made at the primaries; I was a little flushed with success; I’d had some applause, but suddenly I heard a voice, the sharp high voice of my childhood’s neighbor, an old Methodist deacon, and it said: ‘Well, I’m beat if it ain’t Billy Fox makin’ a speech, an’ the last time I saw him I was mighty nigh givin’ him a lickin’ for fishin’ on Sunday in my pool!’ By heavens,” Fox added with sudden bitterness, “I wish I were fishing there now; how cool and deep the shadows were!”

“Trout, of course?” said Berkman sympathetically.

Fox nodded. “Big ones; there was a willow behind the pool; we cut our whistles there and hid there when we saw old man Siddons coming. Lord, Berkman, how the past slips away!”

“You ought to go back there now,” said the author abruptly, as he rose; “I never saw you so pale; have you been ill?”

“Never better; you know that like Prosper Merimée I am naturally of the color of the pale horse in the Apocalypse.”

“Ah, well,” said Berkman, knocking the ashes from his cigarette, “I don’t envy you public life; it’s a harness, Fox, and a pretty tight harness too, I fancy.”

“I don’t think I shall see a great deal more of it,” Fox answered, with an enigmatical smile.

Berkman stared. “You!” he exclaimed; “you’re at the threshold, man; in another year or so the country will be clamoring for you.”

“Or against me,” said Fox scornfully; “wait a moment,” he added, with a complete change of tone, “I’ll go with you, this room suffocates me to-day, it’s full of vapors!”

Meanwhile old Mrs. Allestree sat opposite to Judge Temple in his library; the door was closed and they were alone save for the birds in the garden, for the windows were wide open, cool striped awnings shading the room from the warm glow of the afternoon, which steeped that secluded spot in slumberous calm.

“Stephen, I’m the criminal,” she said firmly, “Robert had nothing whatever to do with it; there’s your old check and you’ve got to keep it!”

The judge colored painfully; he had aged twenty years in the last few weeks and his old friend saw it. Once or twice she had winked back her tears but her voice was acrid.

“I can’t keep it and keep the picture,” he said firmly; “Robert has earned the money; I distinctly stipulated that I should pay the regular price for the portrait.”

“And Robert never meant you should! My dear friend, you and I know that he loves Rose; why hurt the boy’s feelings?”

“That’s one reason why I can’t accept it, don’t you see—” the judge stopped abruptly.

The old woman nodded. “Yes,” she said, “I see; I know Rose doesn’t love him; I wish she did, I hope and pray she may! But that’s neither here nor there; as for the money, Robert won’t have it.”

“Then I shall return the picture, and I should like to keep it, especially if Rose goes abroad.”

She looked at him with exasperation. “You know Rose can’t go without that money; you just admitted that you couldn’t afford it!”

“Which was not an appeal for charity,” flashed the judge hotly.

“Stephen, I’m ashamed of you!” she exclaimed, then her eyes brightened and she looked at him with new defiance. “You can’t have the picture, Robert will keep it; he loves it better than anything else; you shan’t insult him with money for it; I won’t have it, sir! Where are your old ideas of chivalry? One would suppose that you were one of these new vulgar people who think that money is the criterion of everything, that they can buy shares in paradise! You’ve lived too long in the neighborhood of the new rich; I’m really ashamed of you. I hated to have Robert part with the picture anyway; he shan’t do it now for he’ll never take pay for it!”

The judge looked blank, his hands trembled. “But I wanted it!” he said plaintively, “I can’t stand in the child’s light but—” he passed his shaking hand over his forehead—“I shall miss her terribly.”

Mrs. Allestree nodded wisely without any sign of relenting. “I know,” she said, “so shall I! But Robert won’t take pay for the picture; I fancy you selling a picture of the woman you loved!”

The old man sighed profoundly, staring at the floor, distinctly aware that she was tapping her foot impatiently and eying him like an angry sparrow, her head on one side. The silence was painful, they both heard the bees in the trumpet creeper which hung blooming over the bow-window.

After a while she stole a cautious amused look at him, then she stirred eagerly in her chair. “Stephen, I’ve just thought of a way! Robert will, of course, keep the picture, but he’ll lend it to you while Rose is away.”

Her manner was a trifle too elaborately casual, but the judge did not observe it; a shamed look of relief stole over his face, he passed his handkerchief across his brow, pushing back the scant white hair. “And I can give it back as soon as she comes home,” he said with almost an eager note in his voice.

“Yes,” Mrs. Allestree replied in a matter-of-fact tone, stern business in her eye as she added: “you’ll have to give it back at once, Stephen, and, of course, you’ll be responsible for it while it’s here. Now, you give that check to Rose, I want to hear the child sing.”

The judge sighed profoundly, his head bowed. “I’d rather be whipped, Jane,” he said brokenly, “but the child has set her heart on it—and I’ve shown myself an old fool!”

Mrs. Allestree rose. “You have!” she said uncompromisingly, “but then we’re both way behind the times. In the first place you’ve only had one wife and I’ve only had one husband! Margaret White left for Omaha to-day; of course she’ll be divorced and married to my nephew in half an hour. I’ve some hope now of being fashionable, if I can get a motor accident in the family! And you’re broken hearted because your girl wants to sing in public; tut, Stephen, you’re a hopeless old fogy, go and marry Martha O’Neal!”

BOOK II

I

IT was early in the following December before Mrs. Allestree again came face to face with the situation which was so intimately connected, though in such different ways, with the happiness of two members of her family, her son and her nephew. The long months that had intervened, however, had not dulled her remembrance of that vivid scene in Margaret’s bedroom, or lessened the degree of her secret sympathy—which was in exact opposition to her judgment.

It was a long time indeed before she could recur to that scene without a poignant feeling of guilt; her conscience pinched her with self-righteousness; she had found the mote in her sister’s eye without seeing the beam in her own, she had judged without experience. However, after awhile, this sensitiveness was enveloped in a thicker moral coating, and she began again to view the affair with horror. The two little White children were constant spectacles in the parks with their two French nurses and their general air of bewildered desolation; it was perfectly well known that Estelle had raised a terrible outcry for her mother and refused to be comforted, in spite of the conscientious efforts of poor old Mrs. White who, whatever her faults, was sincere in her devotion to the two poor little waifs of wealth.

Mr. White, meanwhile, had created fresh scandal by his open devotion to Lily Osborne, and would probably have been still more outrageous if that astute young woman had not judiciously absented herself from the city at the very moment when society had reached the limit of its endurance; but her disappearance from the surface scarcely arrested White’s downward career; he was plunging deeper and deeper, and there were many rumors of scandals connected with his administration which would lead to his dismissal from the Cabinet. Some secret information from the Navy Department had found its way into the hands of a foreign government, and the way of its passage through White’s careless hands to Lily Osborne’s and from hers to the representative of the foreign power was unfortunately made altogether too plain to be ignored except on the surface of things, to hush scandal.

December found Washington a little aghast; Congress had just re-assembled, Wicklow White had somewhat hastily resigned, almost on the date which, in the previous year, had seen the retirement of Wingfield, and one of the ambassadors had been as hastily recalled, clearing the atmosphere of an international situation with the accustomed scapegoat! That the Cabinet would have to be reorganized was evident, and Berkman’s prophecy of eight months before was apparently on the eve of fulfilment. The very atmosphere, surcharged with excitement, seemed to breathe the name of William Fox; only those who knew the secret of Margaret’s divorce, which had just been granted in Omaha, divined the fatal combination of circumstances.

Fox had been absent for months in his own state, taking part in a campaign of unusual bitterness and importance, and his remarkable powers of organization, his keen policy, his magnetic eloquence, had carried all before him. There had been, in fact, a storm of applause; every newspaper in the country had discussed him as a possible candidate for the Presidency in the following year, his own party with triumphant confidence, and the opposing faction with reluctant admission of his great strength. If anything had delayed his invitation to take a seat in the Cabinet, it was openly hinted to be the jealousy of the Administration and an uncertainty whether such a position would conveniently shelve him or increase his popularity.

To those who knew the whole truth Fox’s position was almost tragic, but the man had returned more than usually brilliant and untiring.

Rose had sailed for Europe in the previous June in charge of an elderly cousin and Aunt Hannah, and no one knew the secret of that parting or the cost of it to Fox; no one indeed even surmised it but old Mrs. Allestree.

The last six months had been trying ones to her and she was meditating upon them, sitting before the open fire in her drawing-room, her tea-table at her elbow, waiting for Robert.

She measured the tea into the old Canton tea-pot, she looked at the lamp under the kettle, and then she turned back to her knitting, working fast without looking at it, counting stitches now and then and making an elaborate pattern with incredible swiftness, her knitting needles flashing in and out as the work slipped from one to the other and back again. The glow of the fire played on her face and showed the soft lines there, the alert bright eyes, the snowy hair on the temples. The clock struck six and she looked up expecting Robert, but instead her parlormaid opened the door to admit Mrs. O’Neal.

“Why, Martha, I’m delighted to see you! It’s such a bitter evening I didn’t expect a call. Sit down and have a cup of my tea.”

“I don’t take much tea now, I hear that it’s bad for the complexion; but you can give me some hot water and lemon, Jane,” replied her visitor, seating herself with a rustle of silks and a rattle of chains which made a distinct sensation in the quiet room.

Mrs. Allestree poured out the hot water and put in the lemon. “I’m eighty-one,” she remarked, with a queer little smile, “and I’ve rather forgotten my complexion.”

“A mistake, my dear Jane,” replied Mrs. O’Neal calmly, taking the steaming cup and slipping back her sables; “I keep young by constant attention to such details; I have my face massaged every day, and even study my bonnets and veils with that point in view.”

Mrs. Allestree cast a covert glance at the vibrating head under the large, flaring bonnet with its cascade of ostrich feathers and said nothing, instead she knitted violently.

“I suppose you’ve heard the news?” Mrs. O’Neal remarked, after she had sipped the hot water with a slightly wry face; “Margaret White has returned.”

Mrs. Allestree dropped a knitting needle. “When?” she exclaimed rather hastily, while she tried to recover the fugitive.

“Yesterday; she’s taken the apartment that she had last spring.” Mrs. O’Neal mentioned one of the more expensive but quiet apartment houses; “have you any idea how much alimony she got?”

“Good heavens, no!” exclaimed Mrs. Allestree; “Gerty wrote me that White was disposed to be very liberal, and he ought to be!”

Mrs. O’Neal nodded. “He’ll marry Lily Osborne, of course, and I shall cut them dead.”

“I should hope so!”

“Well, of course Lily’s footing was slippery enough at the best and this passes endurance. Mrs. Wingfield told me that it is absolutely certain that she got money from Von Groten for some kind of information; Lily has no conscience and she’s only half an American, thank Heaven! Mrs. Wingfield says she saw the check—”

“Martha, that woman will say anything!”

Mrs. O’Neal shrugged her shoulders. “So does everybody! If Margaret had only let her get into society she wouldn’t have been so bitter now that she’s got her chance; I often think that it pays to be polite to these parvenus! I only hope Margaret doesn’t expect me to hold her up until this blows over.”

Mrs. Allestree smiled involuntarily. “I can’t imagine Margaret in the light of a suppliant,” she said quietly.

“A mere façon de parler, of course, on my part,” Mrs. O’Neal retorted; “but, Jane, this is all a bad business, it will have to be patched up, but—” she set down her cup and looked earnestly at Mrs. Allestree—“Jane, does she mean to marry your nephew?”

Mrs. Allestree dropped her knitting and held up both hands. “Heaven knows, not I!” she replied; “of course she can’t be in the fashion unless she marries again.”

“But to marry Fox! That will create a perfect furore. Did you know he’s been offered the portfolio of State?”

A quiver of excitement passed over Mrs. Allestree’s pale face. “Actually—or only metaphorically, Martha?”

“Actually, to-day—I had it from two Cabinet officers.”

Mrs. Allestree’s hands fell on her knitting, and she sat looking into the fire. What a nightmare of a complication! To marry Margaret would ruin him, yet not to marry her—

“It isn’t generally known yet that he may marry Margaret; if he does—” Mrs. O’Neal held up her hands this time, and her plumes trembled.

“I don’t know anything about it, Martha,” Mrs. Allestree said judiciously.

Martha O’Neal looked at her shrewdly and smiled, but she changed the subject as she gathered up her furs again preparatory to departure. “Lily Osborne is reported to have made twenty thousand at bridge at the Hot Springs,” she observed casually; “I wish I didn’t entertain an awful doubt of her integrity.”

Mrs. Allestree looked up weakly. “You can’t mean she cheats at cards?”

Mrs. O’Neal laughed. “She’d be caught at that, my dear, and ostracized. She only happens to know who to fleece, you can see how rich she grows.”

“I heard; Gerty told me that Senator Turkman had advised her judiciously in placing some money in mining shares and there has been a rise; Lily told her.”

“Humph!” ejaculated Mrs. O’Neal, finally catching the other end of her sable boa; “it’s rather odd, isn’t it, that Senator Turkman didn’t make any money for himself at the same time? He’s terribly embarrassed.”

Mrs. Allestree leaned back in her chair and laughed silently. “Martha,” she said finally, “you’re a sinner and a publican, let me alone! I haven’t heard so much gossip in a year.”

“My dear Jane,” retorted the other woman dryly, “you live under a hill.”

II

IN the midst of these eddying swirls of gossip, little muddy pools in the thin ice on which he trod, William Fox made his way with singular self-absorption. Even the vortex of the political campaign had not succeeded in decentralizing his thoughts, and he could not now lose sight of the impending climax.

The clamor of applause, the proffered Cabinet portfolio, which was not without significance as an effort on the part of the Administration to bind him to its interests and avert his candidacy in the ensuing year, all fell short of their effect. Such brilliant prospects were indeed stultified to his mental vision by the chilling knowledge that he must soon outrage the feelings of his friends and reanimate his enemies. There were moments when the future which lay before him loomed so black and unfriendly that he could not endure the thought, and he found it well nigh impossible to picture himself playing the rôle of lover and husband to the woman who had twice thwarted his life; first by her careless rejection of his love and then by her determined demand upon his honor. He should marry her, but beyond that bald fact his mind refused to go. He had erred and he would resolutely pay the cost and it would be heavy. He realized that, realized the probable collapse of his career, the long years of building up which must follow, the impossibility of living down the scandal of such a marriage under such circumstances.

He knew that Margaret was in town, but he had not yet gone to see her; it seemed impossible that he should go. Yet the plain actualities of the case could not be denied. He was aware, however, of a feeling of keen thankfulness that the House, under pressure of some special business, was sitting late, and that the organization of committees and the hundred other calls involved him in such a round of duty that he could well excuse delay.

Yet when the House rose one day at five o’clock, and he had time to go to see Margaret, he went instead on foot to Allestree’s studio. He had seen but little of his cousin in the past few months; perhaps because he was haunted with a secret dread that Rose would finally marry Allestree, and he hated the thought, with all a lover’s selfishness.

The snow was falling fast and the streets were sheeted in white when he and Sandy approached the old house on the corner, and he noticed that the windows of Lerwick’s curiosity-shop were coated thick with frost. A bright light in the upper window assured him that the painter was still at work, and stamping the snow from his feet he ascended the narrow stair to the studio.

Allestree, in his shirt sleeves, was engaged in putting away some old canvases and cleaning up his workshop, and was somewhat startled by the unexpected entrance of Sandy and his master.

“I hardly thought to find you here so late,” Fox remarked as he greeted him, “but I saw the light and came up.”

“I was house cleaning,” Allestree explained; “I can’t trust the janitor in here until I put things in shape. Besides, mother is away and there’s no hurry about going home.”

Fox expressed surprise at his aunt’s absence at this season, and Allestree explained further that she had gone to Orange to visit a younger sister who was ill there; a fact which the nephew of both had forgotten.

“I’ve intended to go to see Aunt Jane every day,” Fox remarked, seating himself on the end of Allestree’s brass wood-box and looking at the general disorder with an absent eye, “but I’ve been busy and—” he laughed bitterly—“she has let me know pretty plainly that she doesn’t approve of me.”

“A sure sign of her devotion,” retorted Allestree dryly; “she is always taking sides when her affections are involved. I’ve often thought you were more after her own heart than I, William.”

“God help her, I hope not!” Fox exclaimed with such abrupt passion that his cousin stared.

“I heard this morning that you had been offered the State Department,” he said quietly; “are congratulations in order?”

The other man laughed with great bitterness. “My dear Robert,” he replied, “I’ve been offered the moon, but being merely mundane I can’t pull it down.”

“Well, I’m not sure that the Cabinet is even desirable for you! I’ve known it to quietly swallow up more than one bit of Presidential timber,” Allestree observed, turning his attention to the canvases he was tying together with unsteady fingers.

“Desirable or not, I have refused it,” Fox said curtly.

There was a pause; Allestree put away some boxes and collected his scattered brushes. Fox, looking about the studio with a moody glance, observed that a curtain was drawn before the little tea-table where Rose had made tea, and the chair in which she had posed was gone. He was not at a loss to understand these signs, and he recalled the whole little scene, with its air of domesticity, their gayety, the tender beauty of her drooping profile as she bent over her tea-cups, he even remembered how the light from the alcohol lamp glowed softly on her face and caught the golden tints in her hair. He stifled a groan. The whole covetous passion of his soul had surged up at the thought, and he was to see her married at last to this good, harmless, slow cousin who was so worthy of her because of his clean unspotted life and his honest love! He glanced keenly at Allestree and saw the haggard trouble of his face, the lines on his brow and about his mouth, with almost a pang of joy. There was no assurance of happiness here, only a kindred trouble. The hard element of his personal feeling melted a little, and he turned to the painter with renewed friendliness. “You have heard of the Temples?” he said guardedly; “is the old man out of his troubles, and has Rose returned?”

Allestree shook his head, avoiding his eye. “The judge is still in the quagmire; he was miserably imposed upon and I fancy there is nothing left but his salary. He has been making gigantic efforts to save that old house; you know it’s mortgaged, and he seems ill and worn, though he goes regularly to court.”

“Who holds the mortgage?” Fox asked absently.

Allestree named a large trust company, and began an eager search behind his easels, apparently excluding Rose from his reply. But Fox was not done. “And his daughter?” he said, in a low voice, caressing Sandy who had laid his head upon his knee as a gentle reminder that it was time to go.

“She is still in Paris; she wrote my mother that she was succeeding very well with her lessons and hoped for the best.” Allestree’s voice betrayed his extreme reluctance to produce even these hard facts.

Fox rose abruptly and going to the window thrust aside the curtain and looked out. The storm had increased and the street light opposite shone behind a dazzling whirl of snow-flakes which were swept before the wind and hurled themselves against the pane in a wild rush of blinding white.

Fox turned away and began to walk to and fro, his hands plunged into his pockets and his head sunk on his breast. Allestree glancing at him once or twice was shocked by the drawn grayness of his face, the absolute despair in his dark, deep-set eyes. At last he looked up with a bitter smile. “Good God!” he exclaimed abruptly, “if I were only coward enough to shoot myself!”

“A very unprofitable move,” remarked his cousin coldly, “and it leaves the blame to others.”

Fox nodded. “Precisely,” he said, “and to a woman. But, my dear Allestree, if you want to create a hell for a man, find one who loves a young lovely untried girl with all his soul, and then force him to marry another woman!”

His cousin bit his lip, the color rushing over his face. “No easy matter, I fancy,” he said; “you couldn’t make the man do it; he’d back out at last!”

Fox gave him a strange look; he had never intended to make such an admission to Allestree, it had been wrung from him by the stress of his own feeling and now he would not recall it. “You think so? You think it cannot be done? The shooting would be preferable,” he added grimly, “but, unhappily, a man’s honor lives after him.”

His cousin turned sharply and held out his hand; the gesture was involuntary. “Upon my soul, William, I’m sorry for you!” he exclaimed, with much feeling.

Fox took his hand and wrung it. “You’ll make her happy, Allestree!” he exclaimed with profound emotion; “she’ll marry you.”

Allestree smiled sadly. “She’s refused me,” he said, with a tone of finality which carried conviction if not relief.

Fox turned away with a smothered groan, and groping for his hat and coat went out without another word.

At that moment the tumult of his heart repudiated every other claim and demanded happiness with an unscrupulous passion which excelled Margaret’s own.

III

IT was the following evening that Margaret rose restlessly and looked out of the window of her little hotel drawing-room. She knew that the House had risen at five, she had telephoned twice to ascertain that fact, and her note of the morning should have brought Fox straight from the Capitol.

It was now almost six o’clock, the streets were lighted and thronged with people, some hurrying home from office or shopping, others still on those endless social rounds which had once been the orbit of Margaret’s life. She thought of that existence now, its brilliance, its flattery, its hollowness, with a shudder. Between the two periods of her life there was a chasm. It had been only a few months, but those months had been years in her emotional existence, and her stormy soul struggling through the depths of it had worn away the body which with her seemed but the beautiful ephemeral garment of a wild spirit. When it was over, the divorce with its hideous publicity, its sordid details, its piercing accusations, and freedom had come to her with almost blinding reality, she had declared that she should rebuild her life, forget all, be happy—happy!

She had expected at once some message from Fox, some sign of sympathy, but when none came she interpreted his silence by her own heart; he was loth, she thought, to show too much joy at once. They could wait! How sweet it was to think that once again they had their lives before them; they were still young, the world had potent possibilities of happiness for them. The sheer joy of the thought drove the blood to her heart; she could not breathe sometimes but lay panting, her head thrown back on her pillows and her arms flung wide and helpless, until Gerty came and with trembling hand administered restoratives and threw up the windows. They called them heart attacks but it did not matter, nothing mattered now; she would begin all over again. Her old life had slipped from her, as though its shackles, having been stricken off, had left no scar. She had been in Washington a week, but she had not asked to see her children; she could not, the thought of them sent a shiver through her; they were the visible and actual links which bound her to the past, the past which her soul loathed.

She had waited eagerly for Fox, aware that he was in the city before her arrival, and when he did not come she still attributed his absence to a reluctance to be too soon to claim her. That he loved her she never doubted, and her heart trembled at the thought of that meeting which must come at last, with all its sweetness, its fulfilment, after her long waiting. That morning she had written him and now she watched the clock, carelessly aware that Gerty English was also watching it, and that the girl seemed disconcerted and awkward with her work over Margaret’s letters and books.

But to Margaret everything outside of that one absorbing fact was of little moment; what Gerty thought of no consequence at all, for while she had made only half a confidante of the girl, turning to her in uncontrollable moments and then relapsing again into reserve, she was actually indifferent to the nature and extent of Gerty’s knowledge; the little secretary seemed to her as unimportant as any other parasite upon the lives of the more fortunate.

Margaret went openly to the window therefore, and drew aside the curtains to watch the long brilliantly lighted street, where the snow lay yet in white drifts between the muddy slush of traffic, and she returned openly to the fire to look at the clock on the mantel. At first the delay had been almost sweet, she liked to dwell upon the thought of seeing him, of being happy again, but at last it grew irksome and she paced nervously to and fro, her hands clasped behind her head, scarcely vouchsafing an answer to Gerty’s occasional questions.

Time passed; it was nearly half past six before her maid came in to announce a visitor and Margaret turned, hiding herself a little in the shadow of the curtain that she might see him first when he entered.

As the door finally opened to admit Fox, Gerty English rose rather hastily and retreated to one of the other rooms, with her arms full of books and papers, and he found himself face to face at last with Margaret.

There was an eloquent silence; he was painfully aware of the change in her, that the delicate hollows in her cheeks were sharpened while her eyes seemed larger and more brilliant, and there was a wistfulness, a soft tremulous happiness and expectation in her expression which touched him to the heart. She had never looked so young, so fragile and so gentle since those old days when as half child, half woman, he had loved her. That dead love lying between them now made an impassable barrier, she could as little rekindle it as she could reclaim a fallen star. Some dim, half interpreted perception of this chilled her heart and stayed the passionate greeting on her lips; she stood a moment looking at him, terribly aware of the calmness of his bearing, his pallor, his dark troubled eye which neither kindled nor blenched at the sight of her, but met hers with a studied gentleness which expressed neither joy nor reluctance. A keen pang of dread tore her heart, but the next instant joy, wild, almost childish joy at the sight of him, welled up and swept away her doubts.

“Oh, William!” she exclaimed with trembling lips, holding out both hands, “at last, at last! It has been eons since we met!”

“And you look ill,” he replied kindly, “Margaret, I hoped to see you well again. How is this?”

Her eyes sought his face, eager, feverish, questioning; her heart trembled, was this all?—this stilted, quiet, commonplace greeting? She checked the cry of reproach which rose to her white lips, and smiled—a wan and pallid smile. “I’m quite well,” she replied with sudden calm; “you forget the months have been long and troubled ones; I suppose I grow old!”

“I never saw you look younger, more as you used to look ten years ago,” he exclaimed involuntarily.

“Do I?” there was a tremulous note of eagerness in her voice, and a faint blush passed over her face, but she evaded his hand, which he had stretched out again to clasp hers, and went quietly to a shaded corner where neither lamplight nor firelight fell too sharply on her. “Sit down, William, and tell me about yourself.”

He obeyed her mechanically, unconscious that his manner had betrayed anything, but aware of a sudden indefinable change in her, a restraint and repression. “There is nothing to tell,” he said, with some impatience; “the old story—primaries, conventions, a stormy campaign and finally, as you know, my re-election is assured, if I care for it!” he added, a hard new note of indifference in his voice.

She heard it and leaned forward a little on her cushions, trying to read his face, studying every fine and classic outline of the strong head, the brow, the deep-set brilliant eye, the thin-lipped sensitive mouth, the clean shaven, strong jaw and chin. It was his face; how often she had dreamed about it and dreamed of it as turned to her with the glow of love and joy on it, but how pale it was, how hard, how resolute!

“I knew the campaign was hotly contested, but I never doubted your success,” she said simply; “you know I always believed in you.”

He turned sharply and looked at her. “What is the matter, Margaret? You are not yourself.”

She smiled. “No,” she admitted, looking at him with an enigmatical expression, “no, I am not myself; the old Margaret is dead—and buried! Not even Mrs. Wingfield would know me; I burnt up my last red hat yesterday, William.”

He answered her smile involuntarily, but his eyes remained grave, almost stern. He turned abruptly, holding out his hand. “Margaret,” he said, “I came—of course you know it—to ask you to be my wife.”

She drew a long breath and was silent, her eyes on his face; she was wonderfully calm.

“It seems to me that the sooner it is over the better for both of us,” he went on hurriedly; “there will, of course, be some talk; we must face it together.”

Without answering him she bent over and picked up a half sheet of the morning newspaper from the floor, and after glancing at it, held it out to him. “There is an article there about you,” she said in a low voice; “it says you have refused the State Department; is that true?”

He put the paper aside with a little impatience. “Of course it’s true,” he said; “I refused it three days ago.”

She was again silent for an instant while she folded the paper into plaits. “Why did you refuse it?” she asked.

Fox moved sharply and turned his face away, looking at the fire. “That does not concern us, Margaret,” he said gravely; “our marriage is the only question now; I—”

She interrupted him. “Tell me,” she insisted, “it’s my right to know; this had something to do with me, with the prospect of—of your marrying Wicklow’s divorced wife, I know it! Tell me the truth.”

“Of what avail?” he retorted with evident reluctance, his cheek red.

“I have a right to know,” she reiterated.

He smiled bitterly. “The situation is quite clear, isn’t it? I can’t take White’s place in the Cabinet and White’s wife; it would be monstrous.”

She leaned back in her chair, shading her face with her thin hand which trembled slightly, she tried to speak, but her dry lips refused to move. His manner, no less than his words, had ruthlessly torn away the last shreds of her self-deception, and her poor shivering soul shuddered at this revelation of the hardness in him, the eternal note of egoism. How plain it was, how simple, how inexorable! The man’s love had died, and hers had fed itself upon a chimera, a phantasm of her imagination, a dream of the past! Her hand trembled so that she let it fall in her lap and averted her face.

Something of the anguish she felt reached him; he perceived her thought without knowing that he had laid bare his heart to her, and he felt a pang of remorse for his words, though she had wrung them from him with a woman’s besotted madness, a woman’s wild determination to probe her own agony to the core.

“It is of no consequence to me, Margaret,” he said kindly; “I shall give it all up and go away with you; we must build it up from the beginning again. Only it is best to have it over.”

She smiled faintly, looking into the fire which had fallen from the andirons and lay in red coals on the broad hearth. “Tell me,” she said abruptly, turning her full gaze on him, “I have been away and I do not know—where is Rose Temple? Is she still in Paris?”

There was a striking change in his face as though his features, made of potter’s clay, had suddenly fixed themselves into the shape of a mask, stern and unchanging in its finality. “Yes, she’s in Paris,” he replied, with strong reluctance to speak of her; “I know nothing else. You can ask Allestree.”

“Ah, then I suppose it will end happily at last,” Margaret said softly; “she will marry Allestree; I always thought so.”

Fox rose abruptly and walked to the fire, standing a moment looking down at its fallen embers, his back toward her. She could not see his face, but in the covetous agony of her soul she needed no sight, she knew! A gray shadow passed over her own features, her eyes closed, she shivered from head to foot.

After a moment of terrible silence he turned. “When can we be married, Margaret?” he demanded, with passionate haste; “it must be soon, it cannot be too soon!”

She rose, looking slighter and more frail than ever. “No, it cannot be too soon; I will decide, I have no preparations to make,” she added, with a little, mocking smile; “I’m sorry, William, I’ll be but a sober bride; you should have married a young girl and had a grand wedding with a flourish of trumpets.”

“Which I hate,” he said bluntly, “as you know.”

“As I know?” she laughed a little wildly; “I have known very little! You must go now; I—I’m not very strong yet, and the excitement—”

“Has been too much,” he said kindly, “I’ll come again to-morrow—you can tell me then; it can’t be too soon.”

“What an ardent lover!” she said, her lips trembling, “I’m proud of you, William, you do famously, I—I—” she broke off and suddenly laying her thin white hands lightly on his shoulders she kissed his cheek, turned, evaded his touch, and bursting into uncontrollable weeping ran from the room.

IV

MARGARET, leaning a little on Gertrude English, stopped her with a slight pressure on her arm, and shading her eyes with her free hand stood gazing down the long vista of the sunlit avenue. A final recognition of the contrast between realities and the dreams which had changed and warped her life came upon her with a shock which made familiar objects seem strange and distorted. A shudder of anguish shook her slight frame and stole the blood from her lip; stripped at last of all illusions, facing the immutable laws of life, she felt as though she had been thrust out into the streets homeless, and naked, and ashamed; a wrecked soul to wander henceforth up and down on the face of the earth and find no place. How strange, how different from yesterday! The tremulous love, the hope half justified, the unscrupulous, unflinching desire for happiness—where were they? Gone, shrivelled, dead! And she was not dreaming, she was wide awake, this was life, life with its inexorable bonds, its laws, its justice, its cruel requitals, all else had been a dream! Happiness—what was it? A phantom of some man’s imagination, the flaming sword of the angel at the Garden of Eden.

Before her lay the busy, beautiful thoroughfare, alive with carriages and motor-cars, with gay people, children, old women and perambulators. The sun had already swept away all but a few vestiges of snow; it was one of those spring days which come to us in December. At her very feet were some pansies blooming hardily. Away at the north, between long rows of houses, across the intervening circle, she saw the street ascending the hill, caught the white outlines of the high buildings on the heights, the deep blue of the sky.

Yesterday and to-day, oh, God!

She walked on, unconscious of the curious glances which followed her slight, elegant figure, her small pinched face under the great hat with its toppling plumes; unaware, too, that women leaned forward in passing carriages, looked eagerly and sank back into the friendly shelter, glad to escape the necessity of recognition until some one should decide upon the proper course,—rehabilitation or oblivion.

Gerty, shrewd and watchful, saw and made mental notes. She decided swiftly who should be struck off the list when Margaret’s star rose again; no court chamberlain ever drew lines tighter than she at that moment because, in her pity and her affection, she resented every slight with bitter zeal.

Margaret, meanwhile, walked on, regaining her self control with an effort, her large, melancholy eyes gazing dreamily ahead of her. “Gerty,” she said at last, “do you suppose any one is ever really happy?”

“Oh, mercy, yes!” retorted that matter-of-fact young woman, in great astonishment, “I am often! There are so many nice things in the world, Margaret, and when one has money—” Miss English drew a long breath; it expressed her thought.

Margaret smiled bitterly. “Is that the sum total, Gerty? Is there nothing else?”

“Oh, yes, of course, but not to have to pinch and work and reason, just to be vulgarly downright rich once! I shouldn’t ask much else,” said Gerty ecstatically.

“You have no imagination, Gerty,” Margaret replied, “that’s been my curse, I’ve imagined myself into a fool’s paradise! As for money—I’ve had it all my life, it never gave me anything I wanted.”

“Oh, Margaret!” Miss English almost sobbed, “think of all you’ve had, of all you’ve got, of all you’re going to have!” she added incoherently.

“Of all I’m going to have?” Margaret repeated, with a strange smile; “my dear Gerty, the prospect is certainly blinding. Thank you!”

Gerty stared. She did not understand, and she dared not press the question; she could not but perceive the cold agony in Margaret’s eye.

Their walk had brought them to a little triangle between the streets, and as they crossed above it, a child’s voice cried out after them with a shrill little note of joy. “Oh, mamma, there’s mamma!”

Gerty felt the hand on her arm tighten, and the shiver which ran through the figure at her side was almost as perceptible. They both turned and looking across the grass-plot saw two French nurses, a child in a carriage and Estelle running toward them, her small face flushing with eagerness, her pale hair streaming in the breeze. She came swiftly, reached them and, with the first unchecked impulse of her life, flung her arms around her mother. “Mamma, mamma!” she cried, “I’ve wanted you so much!”

Margaret looked at her strangely for a moment, then her lips twitched and tears came into her eyes, as she stooped down and clasped the child close. For the first time the instinct of maternity spoke; she had seen, too, a strange vague likeness to herself in the small, upturned face, one of those fleeting glimpses that come in a look. “Did you really want me, Estelle?” she asked gently, submitting to the child’s wild joy with a new surprised tenderness.

“Oh, mamma, you’re coming home?” Estelle sobbed, clinging to her; “you’re coming back to us? Oh, where have you been, mamma?”

Margaret kissed her and rose, putting her off a little; she saw that people were looking at them, and a slow dull flush rose to her forehead. “Yes, I’m coming,” she said with an effort; “I’ll—I’ll come to-morrow, Estelle, and ask Grandmother White to let me take you for a while. You must be good, child; don’t cry, mamma can’t bear it!”

“Come now, mamma!” Estelle wailed, holding her dress with desperate fingers and calling to her little brother who still clung to his nurse, staring as if he saw a stranger.

The two French women were huddled together, not sure of their instructions and obviously alarmed. Margaret looked over at them and gently detached Estelle’s fingers from her draperies. “I’ll come to-morrow,” she said more firmly; “now run and play.”

But the child caught at her skirts again, still sobbing; she had felt her mother’s arms about her, and half the dread and fear of desertion which had hung over her, half the talk of the nurses which had frightened her, was swept away; she had a mother. “Oh, mamma,” she sobbed, “take me with you—I won’t make any noise!”

Margaret bent and kissed her again, her strange, wild look almost frightening poor Gerty who stood completely discomfited and at a loss, her honest blue eyes full of tears. “There, there!” the mother whispered, “I’m glad you love me, Estelle, I’m coming, coming soon. Oh, Gerty, go home with her!” she added suddenly, “take her away—I—I can’t bear it!”

Gerty obeyed with a pale face. She bent down and whispered to Estelle, kissed and cajoled and threatened until the child let go her mother’s skirt and began to cling to the girl whom she really knew far more intimately, for the good-hearted little secretary had spent many an hour in that gloomy, magnificent nursery. Gerty’s hands shook but she held the child, told her about some lovely things she was going to bring her, a doll, a fairy-book, a toy which ran about the floor of its own accord.

In the midst of it Margaret turned and fled; she had not dared to go to the little boy, although, quite unacquainted with his mother, he was merely staring in a dull, infantile way, his finger in his mouth, ready, no doubt, to raise a sympathetic wail if his sister’s grief warranted a chorus.

The mother, whose rights in the children had been settled by the courts at six months in the year if she desired it, went on blindly along the sunny avenue which seemed now to mock her with its gayety. She turned sharply away from a crowded circle into another street, hardly conscious where she went, but bent upon escape, oblivion, silence.

The child’s cry had touched her chilled and starving heart; she saw her life revealed; she had thrust away the ties of nature, the demands of natural love and duty in her mad pursuit of happiness; she had lost all and gained nothing.

She put up a shaking hand and drew down her veil; her lips were dry and parched, it was difficult to breathe, she had to relax her pace. Another corner brought her to an abrupt and horrified pause. She came face to face with Mrs. O’Neal at a moment when she felt that she could least abide the sight of any one. But with the shock of recognition her scattered senses recovered themselves, her nerves vibrated again, she summoned back her will.

“Margaret!” exclaimed the old lady, pausing, with her skirts gathered up and her foot on her carriage-step, just the shadow of surprised restraint in her manner, the indefinable change that greets the altered social scale; “I’m—I’m delighted to see you! And how are you, my dear?”

“Well,” Margaret replied, with an odd little laugh, for her quick ear had caught the note; “don’t I look so?”

The bird of paradise on Mrs. O’Neal’s hat trembled. “No,” she said flatly, “you don’t; you need building up, you should go to the country for awhile. I’m due at bridge now or I should make you get in and drive with me.”

“Thank you, I couldn’t,” Margaret replied, with forced calm; “I wish you luck at cards instead.”

Mrs. O’Neal glanced at her coachman, stiff and expressionless upon the box, then she leaned over and put a gentle hand on the younger woman’s arm. “My dear, I congratulate you,” she murmured, “you’re lucky to be free; I was so shocked to read this morning that Mr. White had married Lily Osborne yesterday.”

Margaret suppressed her start of surprise. “Has he?” she said, “I forgot to read the paper, and Gerty misses everything except the ninety-eight cent bargains.”

“Yesterday—in New York!” said Mrs. O’Neal tragically; “I hope you’ve got the children.”

Margaret quietly withdrew her arm. “Thanks, yes,” she said; “I’m afraid you’ll be late for your bridge.”

As she walked on, her heart sank. Lily Osborne—of course she had known it would be so! But if anything happened to her and Mrs. White died—poor Estelle!

The cry of the child pursued her. Until now she had thought only of herself, of her own misery, but the touch, the voice of the little girl had reached her very soul; after lying dormant and unknown all those years it was awakening, awakening to a reality so dreadful that it was appalled, without hope, desolate. And shame, the shame of a woman’s heart swept over her and shook her being to its depths. The humiliation which comes upon a woman when she knows, by some overwhelming perception, that her love is not fully returned; she felt as if she had stripped her soul naked and left it lying in the dust at Fox’s feet.

She walked on; agony winged her feet and she could not be still; she avoided the places which she knew, and turned down strange streets and byways. She had no thought of time. It grew late, the short winter day drew to its close; still she walked on. While her strength endured she went on,—it seemed as if pursuing fate drove her. She was not physically strong, yet she was walking beyond the endurance of most women.

As the twilight gathered and the lights began to start up here and there, she turned, with a dim realization of her unfamiliar surroundings and her sudden complete exhaustion. It was St. Thomas’ Day, four days to Christmas; she had no recognition of it, but, looking up, her eye caught the lighted vestibule of a church, and she saw some women going in to vespers; an impulse made her follow them. The heavy doors swung easily inward, and conscious only of the shelter, the chance for rest, a moment to collect her thoughts, she passed in.

The service was nearly concluded, but she paid no heed to that; moving quietly across the aisle and finding a dark corner, she sat down wearily, and crossing her arms upon the back of the pew in front of her hid her face upon them. Mere physical weariness had brought a dull relief to the gnawing pain at her heart; it clouded her brain too, as weariness sometimes does, and she found the horrible vivid thoughts which had tormented her slipping softly away into a haze of forgetfulness; her mind seemed a mere blur.

The soft organ tones swelling through the dim church harmonized with her mood; she lost herself, lost the agony of those past hours, and rested there, inert, helpless, without power to think. She was scarcely conscious of what passed around her, her throbbing head felt heavy on her slender arms, and she listened, in a vague way, to the music, aware at last of a stillness, then the rustle and stir of people settling themselves back in the long pews. She stirred herself, turning her face upon her arms.

A voice penetrated the stillness, a voice with that vibrant quality of youth and passionate self-confidence.

“‘The wages of sin is death!’”

Margaret started and raised her head. Her eyes, blinded by the sudden light in the chancel, flickered a moment and she passed her hand across them; at last she saw quite plainly a young strong face, with a tense eager look, white against the dark finishings of the pulpit; she caught the dazzling white of his surplice, the vivid scarlet of the hood which showed on his shoulders.

“‘The wages of sin is death!’” He repeated it, giving out his text in a voice which was resonant with feeling.

Margaret sat back in her corner, gazing at him with fixed, helpless eyes, her very soul dazed under the force of revelation which was coming to her swiftly, overwhelmingly. The revelation of her own life, not of God. As yet she framed no thought of that awful Presence, found no interpretation of the tumult in her own soul, but she knew, at last, that she had sinned. Sinned against herself, her womanhood, her honor, her self-respect, sinned against the man she had married, against the children she had borne, and, at last—oh, God!—against the man she loved.

The wages of sin is death.

She rose, rose with an effort of will for her knees shook under her, and drawing herself together, summoning all her strength and her pride to hide the agony which was devouring her heart, she drew down her veil and slipped out unnoticed, silent, like a shadow. Once at the door, beyond the ring of that terrible young voice, she paused and steadied herself by laying her hand on a pillar of the portico.

It was now very dark; the electric lights at the corner only made the space where she stood more shadowy and secure; the air was chill, damp, penetrating, and she shivered. A horrible sense of homelessness and misery swept over her; she had cast herself out of a home, she had deserted her children for the love of a man who—oh, God!—who loved her not. She who had dreamed of happiness, lived for it, fought for it, sinned for it, who would have purchased it at the cost of heaven itself, had found at last, not happiness but her own soul.

The wages of sin is death!

She wrung her hands in silent agony; was there no escape? She had no belief but, at last, she felt that the very devils believed and trembled. Was not God pursuing her with vengeance? Who else?

V

AT last the tumult of passion subsided and Margaret, still leaning on the pillar of the church portico, looked out with bewildered eyes. Again an overwhelming weakness swept over her and wiped out some of the vivid misery.

She must go home—home! The word brought a dull pang of anguish, she had no right to a home, for she had broken up her own and orphaned her children. She closed her eyes, trying to shut out the thoughts which stormed back, at a word, to assault her poor fagged brain again. Then the soft sweet notes of the recessional came out to her and she knew that in a few moments the dispersing congregation would find her there; summoning all her flagging energies she stepped down into the street and turning westward was suddenly apprised of the fact that she had been in the old church so often visible from the windows of Allestree’s studio. The discovery brought her a feeling of relief; she was near the studio and she could go there and telephone for a cab to take her back to the hotel. Losing herself in the shadows of the darkest side of the poorly lighted street, she hurried toward the old building on the corner and saw, with relief, the light still shining in Allestree’s window as well as in the curiosity-shop below.

She crossed the street and trying the side door found the latch down. In another moment she was toiling wearily up the old stairs, clinging to the balustrade with an absolute need of its support.

To her surprise the studio was empty; she called to Allestree, supposing him to be, perhaps, in his storeroom above, but there was no answer and she sank down in the nearest chair, too weary and helpless to frame her thoughts. An open fire was burning low on the hearth, and a half smoked cigarette lay on the mantel edge. He had evidently gone out for a moment and would soon return. Margaret roused herself and looked about her with a wretched feeling of strangeness and separation from her own life. She seemed suddenly detached, a mere onlooker where once she had been the centre of the stage. There had stood the portrait of her, and there the picture of Rose; both were gone! She even noticed that the little tea-table was pushed away, and divined Allestree’s secret feeling. She knew every detail of the room, the tapestries, the worn Turkey rug, Robert’s old cigarette-case. It was intolerable; she rose, and going to the table, where the telephone stood, saw Allestree’s portfolio and the pen and ink. She would leave a line to explain her visit before she called a cab, and she opened the portfolio to look for a scrap of paper; as she did so her eye fell on the page of a letter written in old Mrs. Allestree’s clear hand; unconsciously she read the lines before her:

“Margaret has broken up Fox’s happiness twice, once when she broke her own engagement to him, and now in separating him from Rose—”

She closed the book sharply, suddenly aware of what she did and deeply shamed by it, but the thought of the personal dishonesty of her heedless act was lost in the sharper pang of realization; she saw at last the light in which her actions had appeared to others. She stood still, her face frozen, and a cry sprang to her lips from the depths of hidden passion, the cry of some mortally wounded wild creature who faces death alone. She knew it, she did not need to be told it, but others knew it too! It was the bitter drop in her cup of gall; the wild anguish which swept away all other realities, even the desire for life, amazed her. For one moment she hated Rose with all the strength of her undisciplined soul, the next a great wave of humiliation submerged her being. She turned, forgetting the telephone, forgetting everything but a desire to escape the meeting with Allestree, groped her way to the door like a blind woman and went down stairs. At the foot she hesitated; a step in the street made her fear to meet Robert at the door, and she turned and plunged into the curiosity-shop. She found herself behind the chintz curtain, in the place which evidently served as a living-room for Daddy Lerwick, and she saw a table spread for supper, while the scent of garlic streamed from a pot on the stove. Hurrying across the room she lifted the curtain and entered the shop.

Daddy Lerwick was leaning on the counter talking to a young girl and passing a necklace back and forth in his fat hands. At the sound of Margaret’s step they both turned and looked at her in surprise, a surprise which gave place on his part to servile courtesy. But Margaret scarcely noticed him; instead she saw the pale, worn face of the girl, the pinched misery of her look as she glanced at the stones in Lerwick’s coarse fingers. Margaret’s eyes following hers, lighted, too, on the jewels; it was a topaz necklace, the mate to the bracelet which she had prized so long ago. The intuition of misery, the sixth sense of the soul which—no longer atrophied with selfishness—had suddenly awakened within her, divined the secret. She read the suspended bargain in Lerwick’s eye, the hopeless anguish in the girl’s. It was only an instant; the thought came to her like the opening of a dungeon door on the glare of midday. Then she drew back to avoid an encounter with two more customers who had entered the shop and who began at once to ask the prices of the objects in the windows. Lerwick went forward to answer them; the girl leaned on the counter, hiding her face in her hands; a shiver of misery passed over her and Margaret saw it. Moved by an impulse, as inexplicable as it was unnatural, she touched the shabby sleeve. “What is the matter?” she asked softly.

The young woman looked up startled, but only for an instant, the next the dull misery of her look closed over her face like a mask, though her lip trembled. “He’s offered me fifteen dollars,” she faltered; “I—I suppose I’ll have to take it.”

Margaret quietly put out her hand. “Will you sell it to me?” she said; “I will give more and you will not have to give your name.”

The girl’s cheek crimsoned; she hesitated and gathered the necklace into her hands; the gesture was pathetic, it bespoke the actual pang of parting with an old keepsake.

Margaret saw it. “Come, come with me,” she said and led her back through the door to the studio entrance; she no longer feared to meet Allestree; a new impulse stirred her heart.

Under the light there she opened her purse and hastily counted her money, she had a little over a hundred dollars in small bills. Hurriedly thrusting a dollar or two back into her pocketbook, she pressed the remainder into her companion’s hands, saying at the same time: “Keep your necklace, I do not want it; I only wished to help you save it.”

The young stranger looked at her in dull amazement, stunned by the incomprehensible sympathy and generosity when she had long since ceased to look for either. She drew a long shuddering breath. “Oh, I can’t take so much!” she gasped out, “you—you must keep the necklace!”

Margaret regarded her sadly. “Child,” she replied, “I’m more unhappy than you are; I do not want either the money or the necklace; keep them both!”

“Do you really mean it?” the girl whispered, her eyes fastened on the face opposite in absolute wonder and doubt; “you really mean to give me all this—and you want nothing?”

Margaret smiled with stiff lips. “Nothing!”

The pinched, childlike features of the stranger quivered; it seemed as if the frozen sensibilities were melting under this touch of common humanity. Suddenly she burst into an agony of tears, slipping down upon the stairs, her slender shabby figure racked with sobs. “He heard me!” she cried, “there is a God!”

Margaret looked at her strangely. “Do you think so?” she asked vaguely, with parched lips, “do you believe in God?”

“Yes,” the girl cried, clasping her hands, “I prayed—oh, God, how I prayed! It seemed as if He didn’t hear me, no help came and I couldn’t pay; I couldn’t pay, and they didn’t believe me any more because I’d failed—you don’t know, you’ve never failed like that! I thought God didn’t care, that He had forgotten—but now—” she rose from her knees, her face still wet with tears but singularly changed, “I shan’t have to do it!” she cried, “here’s enough to begin all over again, I can go on, I’m saved! He heard! Don’t you believe it? Don’t you see it must be so?” she persisted, unconsciously catching at Margaret’s draperies and her thin toil-worn hand closing on their richness.

“For you, yes,” the older woman replied slowly; “good heavens, I never knew how much money meant before!” she murmured, passing her hand over her eyes again, “and you think—God heard you—God?”

“He sent you!” the girl cried, exultantly, wildly happy; “oh, yes, I’m sure of it—oh, God bless you!”

A strange expression passed over Margaret’s face. She leaned back against the wall, pressing her hand to her heart. Then, as the girl still sobbed softly, she touched her shoulder. “Open the door,” she said quietly, “I—I must go, can you help me? I’m a little dizzy.”

The young woman sprang to her and put out her arm eagerly. “Let me help you; oh, I’d do anything for you!”

Margaret smiled, a wan little smile that made her haggard brilliant face weirdly sad. “It is nothing. There, the air from the outside makes me well again, this place is choking!”

The stranger walked with her to the corner, eager to help her, to call a cab, to put her on the cars, but as Margaret’s faintness passed she refused, putting aside her protests with firm dismissal. “No, no, I can go home,” she said bravely; “good-bye, I’m glad I could help you.”

“Oh, let me go with you, let me do something!” the girl appealed to her eagerly.

But Margaret dismissed her and they parted, the young stranger hurrying away down a narrow by-street while her benefactress walked slowly toward the nearest avenue. But she had gone only a few steps when she turned and looked after the shabby figure, which was only a short distance from her. A vivid recollection of that cry that God had heard her prayer, the absolute conviction of it, swept over the stricken woman, and moved by an impulse which she did not pause to question, Margaret ran after the girl through the gathering mist and overtook her, breathless. She turned with a frightened look, full of dread, no doubt, that she must yet give up the miraculously acquired wealth, and she started when Margaret laid a thin, ungloved hand on her arm.

“I wanted to ask you,” she began,—and then changed the sentence swiftly into a command,—“pray for me to-night! You believe there is a God—perhaps He’ll hear you again!”

“Indeed I will!” the girl cried, bewildered; “oh, I wish—”

But the unfinished speech was lost; Margaret had turned and swiftly disappeared again into the folds of the mist; like a shadow the girl saw her vanishing into deeper shadows; something uncanny and marvellous seemed to lurk in the very thought of her beautiful haggard face, the wildness of her smile, and the young woman hurried away, hugging her treasure close, almost persuaded that she had talked face to face with a being from another world.

VI

AVOIDING the crowded thoroughfares, and no longer remembering her physical weariness or that she had walked for hours without food or drink, Margaret hurried on.

She had thought of death, and the means to attain it most swiftly and easily, but as she passed the brilliantly lighted chemist’s window, with its arch hung with bright red Christmas bells, she put away the thought; it was too cheap and sensational and, after all, if there really were a God could she take that swift, shuddering plunge through the blackness of death to meet Him? The wages of sin is death! It thundered in her ears, making God the avenging Deity of the Old Testament, for how little do those who preach sometimes divine the pictures which they frame of Him who was lifted up, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, that all men might be saved!

A strange new light began to come into Margaret’s soul, and against it her thoughts took on dark and sharply outlined forms like the shadows thrown on a white screen by the stereopticon; she began to understand. Happiness, after all, was a dream, an imagination, a word; it came not from any visible cause, but lay hidden in every man’s heart like hope imprisoned in Pandora’s box. The secret of it came to her at last,—life moved in an orbit; the past held the future, the future the past, the present was but the connecting link in the inexorable circle, it could not be broken while memory existed, while a reckoning was required. She could no more break the links with her past than she could destroy her immortal soul.

In her heart a new, secret thought, born of the strange girl’s gratitude, moved her out of herself. She remembered Mrs. Allestree’s words, and her love for Fox suddenly purged itself of its passionate agony, its jealousy, its pain. Like a woman in a dream she found her way at last to the hotel and climbed the stairs. Her face bore too terrible signs of anguish, and she shrank from the elevator and the curious stare of the servants. It was the dinner hour and the corridors were deserted. She went quietly to her own room and did not ring for her maid. She noticed that her evening gown had been put out and the fire tended. Gerty was not there, she would scarcely be there before nine o’clock, and Margaret went to her desk and sat down and began to write in feverish haste; if she delayed, if she stopped to think she might never do it and she was determined. She bent to her task, white lipped and haggard, writing page after page to Rose Temple. She poured out her heart; in righting Fox she scarcely thought of herself, except that she should never see him again, that Rose must and should marry him! For abruptly the divine impulse of self-immolation had been born in the midst of the tumult of her soul; a woman’s heart, like a eucalyptus tree, trembles with the remembrance of anguish and the eternal sacrifice of love.

As she finished it the clock struck and she looked up startled; it was eight o’clock; she had been out more than four hours. She sealed her letter, stamped it and rose. For a moment her strength failed her and she stood irresolute, but she was unwilling to trust another hand, and she opened the door and took Rose’s letter down to the post herself, avoiding the elevator again. After she had dropped it in the letter-box in the lower hall, she climbed the long flight wearily to her room. The fearful energy of the last few hours dropped from her like a cloak, the effort was too much and she felt an overpowering weakness, a sinking sensation; she had had such moments before and the doctor had furnished her with some restoratives with a grim injunction to avoid tiring herself. A vision of his grave face flashed across her now and warned her. With the sudden ineffable sinking and yielding, which came over her like a cloud and seemed to drop her slowly, softly into space, was born a keen desire to live; Estelle’s voice pierced her memory like a knife; she seemed to hear that plaintive cry—“Mamma, mamma, come home!”

She made one more supreme effort to reach the medicines and was, indeed, but a few yards from the cabinet which held them when her strength yielded to that awful dark cloud which seemed to be pressing down upon her, pushing her lower and lower into the depths of silence. She slipped like water to the floor, her head upon her outstretched arms, a faint shudder ran through her; she was dimly conscious of sinking down, down into a black, fathomless abyss. Again Estelle’s voice quivered through the clouds and mists and reached her heart; she tried to struggle back, up through vague distances, to answer it, but the mists grew thicker; she heard it once again, no more! The soft, ineffable clouds pressed closer, enfolded her; she sank lower, floated off over the edge of space and lost even thought itself.

VII

FOR three days Fox had been under an almost unbearable strain. Before and after speaking to Margaret of their marriage he had plunged in the same agonizing struggle with himself. What diabolical power had been at work to ruin his life, to frustrate his ambitions? The strong egotism of his nature was aroused in all its absorbing passion. On every hand he saw disaster; he had builded well in all respects but one; in that he had miserably failed, and behold the inevitable result! Like Margaret herself, he saw clearly at last; if he had kept away from her, if he had broken from the spell of her fascination and remained out of reach, this would never have been; he had no one to thank but himself. It is usually so; when we get down to the fundamental principles we have ourselves to blame for the fall of the Tower of Siloam.

As he faced the immediate prospect of marriage with another woman, he realized the strength and hopelessness of his love for Rose. To think of her even in the same moment with Margaret was abhorrent to him; he did poor Margaret scant justice at such times, and the vivid realities of her newspaper celebrity was a scourge to his sensitive pride. For these things he must give up all, he must pay the price. He who crossed his path when this mood was on him was unfortunate,—Fox was not a man to spare. His cruel irony, his poignant wit had never been more feared on the floor of the House than they were in those few days before Christmas.

The day after his decisive interview with Margaret he was late at the Capitol, lingering in his committee-room after the others had left. On his way home he dined at the club and was detained there by some out-of-town friends until nearly eleven o’clock. When he finally left the building he started home on foot, and even stopped at a news-stand to buy some papers and magazines. It was twelve o’clock when he went up to his rooms, and he was startled as he walked down the corridor to see his door open and the vestibule lighted. Sandy came to meet him with the air a dog wears who knows that a friend is waiting for his master.

Allestree was sitting by the table in the study, and as Fox entered he rose with a sober face, “I’ve been waiting for you for an hour,” he said; “I have bad news.”

Fox stopped abruptly, his thoughts leaping instantly to Rose. “Bad news?” he repeated in a strange voice.

Allestree met his eye, perhaps read his thoughts. “Yes, the worst,” he replied; “Margaret is dead.”

“Margaret?” Fox dropped the papers he held, on the table, and looked at him, bewildered; “impossible!”

“I wish it were so,” Allestree said quietly, hurrying on with his disagreeable task; “it seems that she was out to-day for a long time alone; no one apparently knows much about it except the elevator boy and he says she was away from the hotel four hours or more. As nearly as we know she was on foot and in the streets most of that time. I know she was in my studio while I was out;” he colored as he spoke; he had found his mother’s letter on the floor and piecing the facts together had divined much. “She came home alone, went to her rooms and was found there later, unconscious, on the floor.”

“Good God, where was Gerty?” Fox exclaimed, with a gesture of horror.

“Margaret had sent her to Mrs. White with Estelle; there was some painful scene in the street with the child—” Allestree stopped an instant and then meeting his cousin’s eye he hurried on—“when Gerty finally got to the hotel and found her it was too late; the doctors say that if help had been at hand she might have been saved. As it was she never regained consciousness. Gerty telephoned to my mother, but she will not be back until to-morrow morning; when I got there Margaret was gone.”

Fox sank into a chair by the table, and propping his head on his hands stared blankly at a sheet of paper before him. “Why was I not told?” he demanded hoarsely.

“Gerty tried to get you, both at the Capitol and here, but we could not find you.”

“I was at the club,” Fox exclaimed and then: “Merciful heaven, Allestree, how terrible, how harrowing! How impossible to realize!”

Allestree looked at him thoughtfully. “Do you think so?” he said, “it has seemed to me for more than a year that I saw death in her face; she had, poor girl, a face of tragedy.”

Fox groaned, covering his own face with his hands. His anger against her of a moment before smote him with horrible reproach. Living, he had ceased to love her, dead, she seemed suddenly to fill his life to the exclusion of all else; she came to him again in the guise of her thoughtless, happy, inconsequent youth which had forged the links between them. He rose and began to walk the floor, his pale face distorted with passion. “My God!” he cried suddenly; “I—Allestree, is it possible that she divined the truth? That she knew me for what I was, a sham, a mockery, a whited sepulchre?”

Knowing him and the unhappy woman, whose love for him had wrecked her life, Allestree knew too much to speak; he was silent.

The storm of his cousin’s passion rose and beat itself against the inevitable refusal of death. Poor Margaret! a few hours ago she had held the power to ruin his career, now she had slipped quietly away from him into the great Silence; the mute appeal of her unhappy love touched his very soul as it had never touched it in life; the impossibility of laying the blame for life’s miseries on the dead came to him with overwhelming force, and she, who a moment before had been guilty, in his thoughts, of embarrassing his future and blighting his life, became suddenly the victim of his vanity, his idle pleasure seeking which she had mistaken for love. He remembered, with sudden horror and self loathing, his coldness, his bitterness toward her, and the manner in which she had received his proposal of marriage. A swift electrifying realization of the scene tore away his selfish absorption; his manner of asking her had been almost an insult to her high spirited pride, to her love, which had humiliated itself by the first confession on that night in the deserted ballroom where she had poured out the wretchedness of her soul. She had come to him wounded, homeless, and he had all but cast her off in his passionate selfishness, his hatred of the loveless marriage which his honor had bound him to make.

If he had only loved her, if he had but dissembled and seemed to love her! Overwhelmed with grief he searched his mind for one reassuring recollection, for one instance which should acquit him of complicity in the tragic agony of her death, but he found none. He had neglected her, denied her, tried to evade that final moment when he must ask her to be his wife, and through all she had borne with him with a sweetness unusual in her stormy nature; she had loved him well enough to make allowances, to forgive, to overlook! And now passing away from him without a word, she had left only her final kiss of forgiveness on his cheek, the wild rush of her tears at their last parting. Henceforth he should never speak to her again, never hear her voice, never know how deeply she had suffered, never ask her forgiveness. The fact that the sequence of events was inevitable, that a woman no sooner seeks a man’s love than she loses it, gave him no relief. In his own eyes he had been little short of a monster of cruelty to a dying woman because, forsooth, he loved another—younger and more beautiful!

Memory, too, tormented him with the thought of Margaret, young, sweet, confiding as she had been when he had first known her and loved her; he thought less of the moment when she broke faith and married White; her fault was less now than his; the error of a beautiful, wilful girl seemed but a little thing before the awful fact of her wrecked life, her tragic death. Through all she had really loved him, that one thing seemed certain; her spirit in all its wild sweet waywardness had held to this one tie, her love for him, and when she had turned to him at last in her wretchedness seeking happiness, asking it, pleading for it like a child, she had received not bread but a stone! He knew now that no living woman could have misunderstood his coldness, his tardiness, his indifference, and in his cousin’s pale and averted face he read an accusing understanding.

He threw himself into a chair again and sat staring gloomily at the floor. “What madness!” he exclaimed at last, with sudden fury; “how dared Gerty neglect her so? She was ill, weak, unprotected!”

“Gerty was no more to blame than others,” Allestree observed quietly.

Fox threw back his head haughtily, and their eyes met. “I was willing to give her my life,” he said bitterly, “I had no more to give!”

Allestree rose. “It is over,” he replied gravely; “we cannot bring her back; come, you will go there, she would wish it, I know,” he added, “and there is no one else!”

The awful finality of those words and the reproach they carried was indisputable. Fox rose with a deep groan and went out with him, without a word, to face the greatest trial of all.

VIII

IN a little pension on the rue Neuve des Petits Champs, Rose Temple had been working patiently at her music for six months and more, studying under one of the great Italian teachers, a man who had trained more than one prima donna and was, therefore, chary of his encouragement. The enthusiasm which she had brought to her task having been gradually dispelled by sharp disappointments, she had struggled on, determined to succeed at last.

The first test of her voice before the maestro and his French critics had been a failure, a failure so complete that she came home to weep her heart out on the faithful shoulder of the elderly cousin who was her chaperon and comforter. The weakness of a voice, beautiful but not yet fully trained, her trepidation at singing before the maestro and his assembled judges, together with the long strain of preparation, had united in her undoing. She came back to the pension without a word of encouragement, feeling at heart that she would never sing a note again.

She sat down, laying her head on the little writing-table, amid a wild confusion of Miss Emily Carter’s pens and papers, and gave way to her despair. “I shall never sing again!” she said, “never—I’m a miserable failure; I haven’t any more voice than a sparrow, and there’s all that money wasted, thrown away!”

Miss Emily eyed her quietly. She had the intense family pride which is nurtured in the State of Virginia; she did not need to be told, she knew that Rose had the loveliest voice in the world. As for these nasty, little, fat, insinuating Frenchmen! She took off her spectacles and smoothed her hair back from her temples; it was done as they did hair forty years ago; it matched her immaculate turn-over lace collar and hair brooch. “You’ll blot my letter, Rose,” she said calmly, with a little drawl that was inimitable; “I don’t see what you’re crying about, it will make your nose red; as for these horrid little Parisians, they know about as much about you as they do about heaven—which isn’t enough to get there!”

In spite of herself Rose laughed feebly. “You’re the most prejudiced person I know, Cousin Emily!”

“Prejudiced?” Miss Carter’s nostrils quivered scornfully, “I wasn’t raised within forty miles of Richmond for nothing, Rose Temple! Don’t you suppose I know a gentleman when I see one? What in the world can you expect from that person if he is a singing master? He wears a solitaire ring on his little finger and a red necktie. I reckon I’ve got eyes if I do wear spectacles.”

“But he’s trained half the great singers of the world, Cousin Emily, and at first he was so kind about my voice—to-day—” Rose winked back the hot tears—“to-day he never said a word!”

“Pig!” ejaculated Miss Carter unmoved.

Rose laughed hysterically. “I shall never sing; I’d better take to washing and ironing for a living!”

“You’d make a fortune,” retorted Miss Carter ironically; “while you were mooning you’d scorch all the shirt bosoms and smash the collars.”

“You’re not a bit encouraging; no one is!” Rose said helplessly, leaning back in her chair; “it makes my heart ache to think of wasting poor father’s money so!”

“And I reckon he’d give the whole of it to keep your little finger from hurting; he thinks you’re a chip of the moon. And how in the world do you know you’ve wasted it yet?” continued her cousin, calmly indignant; “perhaps you didn’t sing well to-day; is that any reason you won’t to-morrow?”

Rose looked at the angular figure opposite, and the color came again slowly to her cheeks and the light to her eyes. “I’m so glad you came, Cousin Emily!” she exclaimed; “without you I should have just given up, they looked so—so indifferent, those men with their eye-glasses and their notebooks and their stare.”

“Stare? I should think so!” replied Miss Carter severely; “I’ll put a Frenchman against anything for staring. I believe myself that Paris is a Sodom and Gomorrah boiled into one, let me tell you! How any nice sweet girl can marry one of them— Rose, if anything should ever induce me at any time to think of marrying one, clap me into an insane asylum, you hear?”

And Rose, burying her face in her hands, laughed until she cried.

But without Miss Carter and Aunt Hannah her courage would have failed her often in the months which followed. She was put back at the alphabet of music and worked with the beginners. More than one night she secretly cried herself to sleep without daring to tell Cousin Emily of her weakness. Homesickness, too, pinched her and took the color from her cheeks, but she worked bravely on. She had reached Paris in June and she had failed at her trial in September. The months which followed were crowded to the brim, and she tried to shut her heart and her ears to news from home, except that which concerned her father. The judge’s letters were purposely cheerful and optimistic, he said so little about financial difficulties that it seemed like a troubled dream to Rose; she never quite realized all it meant to her future.

At last, after many months, her instructor told her one morning that he should bring some competent judges to hear her again and, if she succeeded at this second test, he should try to give her a great opportunity to win her place in the world as a singer. Rose’s heart thrilled. The great man said little, but at last she perceived that he believed in her in spite of her failure, that her voice had finally won his confidence. A word from him was more than a volume from another; it meant success or failure. The girl, full of her dreams of singing and redeeming all with her voice, trembled all over and turned pale. There was a great excitement at the little pension that night; confident though she was, Miss Carter secretly wiped away a tear, and they both worked late to give some fresh touches to the girl’s white gown which brought it up to date; it was a year old, and not made in Paris! They began to see such differences, to recognize the enchanting creations in the show-windows and out walking on the fashionable women on the boulevards.

However, Cousin Emily had her opinion about its owner’s appearance in that same old white frock, and she stole out and bought a single rose for the young singer to wear the next afternoon. Aunt Hannah helped dress her; it was a great occasion; the little flat looked as though a whirlwind had struck it, and at last the two went out in great trepidation to keep the appointment. Secretly Miss Emily longed to give those Frenchmen a piece of her mind about criticizing the voice of a sweet young girl, but she only retired discreetly to a corner and looked on with a peculiar moisture on her spectacles which required the constant use of her handkerchief.

As Rose ceased singing and the last clear notes of her voice floated into the distances of the great empty concert-hall, the thrill of its sweetness, its purity, its young confident power, seemed to fill the very atmosphere of the place with exquisite music; it could not quite pass away into silence, it remained at last, if not in the ears, in the souls of the listeners, a little group to the right of the stage who had gathered there to hear the wonderful pupil, his youthful prima donna, the great gift which, he believed, the new world had for the old.

In the midst of her song she had forgotten herself, her audience, her first failure, even the world itself, while her young ardent soul poured out its joy and its grief in those splendid notes. Love, that great interpreter of the heart, had unlocked hers to sorrow, she sang with the heart of the sorrowful; she was, first of all, as Allestree felt, an impersonation of youth, and she sang with the soul of youth which hopes forever; she loved, purely, unselfishly, gently, and she sang with the love of the world on her lips, and singing thus was supremely lovely; what matter if the old white dress was a little out of fashion? She was a figure as symbolic of youth with its splendid hopes, its faith, its untried strength, as she was the very personification of beautiful womanhood.

No one spoke, no one applauded, but not an eye was dry.

But to Rose, whose ears were not filled with her own music, the silence which followed it came with a shock of terrible revulsion. She waited a moment in keen suspense, but no one spoke, no one moved; the wave of silence that followed the wave of sound engulfed her hopes, she remembered that first disappointment. Bitter dismay swept over her, she turned away to hide her emotion, but the maestro crossed the stage at that instant and held out his hand; he could not praise her but there was actually a tear in his eye.

Rose looked up, and reading his face burst into tears of joy, her hopes suddenly fulfilled.

Then the party of judges broke out with a round of applause and one little Frenchman, with a polished pink bald head and mustaches, shouted: “Brava!”

In the end they crowded around her and overwhelmed her with compliments; they were eager to invite her to a supper and drink her health in champagne, but the staid Virginia cousin, in the old-fashioned black bonnet and the old black alpaca gown, which outraged Paris without hiding the good heart beneath it, frowned on this hilarity; her deep-seated suspicion of the Parisian in general had not been dissipated by this burst of applause. She insisted that Rose, who was trembling with excitement and the strain of the long hours of training, should go straight back to their little apartment to rest. A decision too full of wisdom for even Rose, eager though she was for the sweet meed of praise, to resist it.

They drove back in a fiacre, a wild extravagance which they ventured in view of the great success and the immediate prospects of a fortune; the cousin felt that they were immediate.

“You all were always talented,” she said to Rose, as they drove down the rue de Rivoli; “your mother could do anything; we always said so. Cousin Sally Carter, too, is going to be an artist, and no one ever made preserves like Cousin Anna’s! I reckon it’s in the family, Rose.”

“Oh, Cousin Emily!” Rose sighed, and hid her face on the alpaca shoulder, “oh, if I can only, only sing so well that there shall be no more terrible trouble for father!”

“Now, don’t you worry about the judge, child,” Cousin Emily replied soothingly; “it will all come out right and, anyway, the best families haven’t money now-a-days!” she added with ineffable disdain, “it’s very vulgar.”

“I think I’d risk having it, though!” Rose said, with a sigh.

She was really in a dream. The softness of spring was in the atmosphere as they drove through the gay streets, and all the trees in the garden of the Tuileries were delicately fringed with green; the voices of children, the sounds of laughter, now and then a snatch of song, reminded them that it was a holiday. Rose thought of home; the Persian lilac must be budding, the tulip trees, of course, were in flower; a pang of homesickness seized her, a longing to see the old house again—ah, there was the sorrow of it, could they keep the old house much longer? With these thoughts came others, deeply perturbed, which she tried to thrust away. She knew of Margaret’s sudden death, but she had heard but little of it, of Fox nothing. Her father’s letters excluded the whole matter; Mrs. Allestree’s were chary in mention of it, and from Robert there was no word on the subject. Gerty English, strangely enough, had not written since Margaret’s death, and Rose could only piece together the dim outlines of a tragedy which touched her to the soul. There had been moments when she had been bitter against poor Margaret, had held her responsible, now she thought of her with pity.

As these things floated before her, in a confused dream of sorrow and regret, she was scarcely conscious of Cousin Emily’s chatter, or of the streets through which they passed, but presently they were set down at their own door and she paid the cabman; Cousin Emily’s French was excellent but it belonged exclusively to the classroom and the phrase-book, and no one in Paris understood it, a fact which bewildered her more than any of her other experiences.

They found the pension disturbed by a fire in an adjoining house, and Aunt Hannah was sitting on top of Rose’s trunk with her bonnet on, waiting to be assured that the flames could not reach her.

“It’s all out, Aunt Hannah,” Rose assured her, laughing; “the concierge says it was out half an hour ago.”

“He don’ know nuthin’ about it, Miss Rose; he ain’t sure dat he’s a liar, an’ I knows he is, bekase I’se caught him at it,” the old woman replied firmly; “de place might be afire sure nuff. It was one ob dem ’lection wires dat set de odder house off, an’ dis place is full ob dem; I don’ tole him ter cut ’em loose, an’ he keep on jabberin’ like a monkey; I ain’t got no manner ob use fo’ dese French people no-ways!”

“Nor has Cousin Emily!” laughed Rose, taking off her hat and tossing it to Aunt Hannah, while she passed her hand over her bright hair with a light, deft touch which seemed to bring every ripple into a lovelier disorder; “the poor concierge is a good soul, and he does make us comfortable here.”

“Mebbe he is, an’ mebbe he ain’t!” said Aunt Hannah grudgingly; “dese men folks allus waits on a pretty girl, honey, but I ’lows he’d cheat yo’ jest de same; I’se got my eye on him sure!”

“I wish you’d take off your bonnet and get my trunk open,” retorted Rose good naturedly; “then we’ll see if we can put the concierge in it—if he misbehaves!”

“My sakes, honey, I done clean forgot ter gib yo’ dis letter; it’s a telegram, I reckon; it come jest befo’ de fire broke out, an’ I’se been settin’ on it ter keep it safe.”

It was a cablegram, and Rose stretched out an eager hand for it, with a thrill of anticipation; it seemed as if her father must be reaching out to her across the seas, that he already knew and rejoiced with her for, surely, all his prejudices would dissolve at the assurance of her success.

She opened it with trembling fingers, a smile on her lips. It fluttered and fell to the floor; it was a cablegram to summon her home, the judge was very ill.

IX

AFTERWARDS Rose never quite knew how she endured the voyage home. Her love for her father was so deep, so tender, they were so bound together by a hundred ties not only of affection but of sympathy and tastes and interests, that the very thought of losing him almost broke her down. It took both Cousin Emily Carter and old black Aunt Hannah to comfort and sustain her during those ten days.

But when she reached Washington Allestree met her at the station with good tidings; the judge was out of danger. He had been very near death and came back slowly from the Valley of the Shadow. However, he had come back and Rose knelt beside his bed and cried her heart out with joy to feel his arm around her. How pale and thin and wasted he looked. He had aged so much; poor Rose, she saw it and forced a smile to disguise it even to herself. But he was unaware of the shock which the sight of him gave her, and he forgot his illness in his eager interest in her account of Paris and her final success. She told him very little of those long months of struggle and depression, of the thousand little pinches and trials that they had been through to keep from asking an extra penny from him.

After Rose came the judge began to mend more rapidly; old Mrs. Allestree said he had only been pining away for the child, but she knew better, being a wise old woman. She knew that the judge had been struggling all the year to stave off the foreclosure of the mortgage on the old house which he and Rose loved so well. She knew, too, that he had almost failed when that mysterious arrangement was made for him by an unknown party; the message came that the mortgage had been taken up, and he could have all the time he wanted and at a lower rate of interest.

This news, so amazing and so unprecedented, had been synchronous with the judge’s breakdown and had, Mrs. Allestree believed, contributed to it. The sudden relief had snapped the strain on his nerves, and he slipped down into a state of coma. However, she did not tell Rose this, nor her suspicions, which were fast becoming certainties, about the mortgage; she only kissed her affectionately and made her sing to her the song which had won such an ovation from the French critics, and which Cousin Emily Carter had described with enthusiasm before she departed to the Tidewater region, where she hoped to cut her own asparagus bed and set out her flowers undisturbed by Parisian manners and customs.

Allestree welcomed Rose with even greater relief than his mother and the judge, but wisdom had taught him to rejoice in silence, and he did so, being careful, however, to send promptly for her portrait which, according to the agreement between Mrs. Allestree and the judge, could not be loaned during Rose’s presence in the house, but only as a consolation in her absence. But the judge sighed deeply when they told him it had been returned to the studio again.

It was during the first days of her father’s convalescence that Rose found Margaret’s letter to her among his papers; not knowing Rose’s address in Paris, Margaret had sent it in the judge’s care and he had overlooked it when he forwarded the letters, as he did, once a week. By a strange accident it had slipped under some pamphlets in the basket on his library table and lay there until Rose, rearranging his papers one morning, came upon it and recognizing the writing broke the seal with some trepidation, for Margaret had never been an intimate correspondent, and Rose divined some serious reason for this long closely written letter. She was alone when she found it, and she went to the open window and stood there reading it.

Margaret, moved by the deep sorrow and passion which had swept over her poor troubled soul in those last days of her life, had poured out her heart. She told Rose all; that she had come between her and Fox; in her wild and covetous jealousy she had thought to wrest happiness from despair; to keep his love she had been willing to lose all, and she had lost! She concealed nothing, the last pitiful words of the letter, a remarkable letter of passion and grief and self-sacrifice, told Rose that she was going to give up her life to her children and try to live down her desertion of them.

Rose read it through to the end, and then covered her face with her hands, trying to shut out the terrifying picture that it had unconsciously drawn of a woman, desolate, shipwrecked, without hope in earth or heaven. The terrors which had possessed Margaret’s soul swept over hers. All that Mrs. Allestree had told her, and that Gerty, poor, voluble, good-hearted Gerty, had enlarged upon, filled out the scene. The lonely walk, the visit to the studio, the unfriended and miserable death; she did not know of those other scenes in the church and the curiosity-shop where Margaret had found her heart, but she did know of a strange girl who had brought a single white lily to lay in Margaret’s dead hand and gone away weeping bitterly.

She had blamed poor Margaret, judged her; Rose felt it at that moment and accused herself of heartlessness; of Fox she dared not think. In the new light which this letter shed on the situation, she began to understand how cruelly he had been placed, and there, too, she had judged!

Poor Rose,—her father had inculcated stern and simple lessons and she had tried, before all things, to be just; but to be judicious and calm and in love at the same time was an impossible combination. She dashed the tears from her eyes, and thrust Margaret’s letter into her pocket and went about her duties with the air of a soldier on guard, but her lip would quiver at intervals and she could not sing a note when the judge asked for one of the old ballads that he had loved as a boy, and Rose had learned, to please him.

It was about this time that she began to wonder if the old house must go, or if her father had been able to meet all the payments due upon it. She dared not ask him, and he said nothing, but she noticed that now that he was able to be moved into the library every day and sometimes into the garden in the warm spring sunshine, that he sat for hours at a time in a brown study with a deep furrow between his brows, and constantly pushing back his hair from his forehead, as he did in moments of perplexity. She was afraid to speak, lest any mention of the trouble which had so beset him would bring back the fever and a relapse, so she had to content herself with hope and waited for some sign on his part.

The old house had never seemed so dear; the mantling vines were full out in new foliage, birds were nested on the southern wall toward the garden, and the old garden-plot itself, so sheltered and secluded by the house and the high brick wall which shut out the street, was just coming into bloom. The roses she had set out the spring before were in bud, and the peonies were blooming. Rose looked about her with a sigh and forgot that she would, perhaps, be one day a great prima donna with the world at her feet. Such things do not always fill a woman’s heart.

Meanwhile the judge had written and despatched a letter with great secrecy, and one morning, after he was wheeled into his library, he told Rose that she might take her sewing into the garden for he expected a gentleman on business and he might be there half an hour. She obeyed him with a stifling sensation of anxiety; she knew it was that mortgage, that terrible mortgage, and his reticence convinced her that he was concealing bad news from her. She took her sewing out to the little arbor in the corner, where the library windows were out of sight, and she tried to sew, but her fingers trembled so that she lost her needle and, having neglected to provide herself with another, she sat and watched the robin on the lawn and wished money grew up like grass out of the well tilled earth and was of as little consequence. Yet, all the while, it was not of herself she thought but of her father, broken in health, old and careworn, facing those inexorable obligations without even her help.

The judge alone in the library watched the clock with an anxious eye, and thought of Rose and all it would mean to her if he could save the property. When he lay near death the one overwhelming horror of his heart had been to leave her at the mercy of the world. The old man glanced about him with the same fond recognition of familiar objects; it is strange how dear these inanimate things, which were here before we came and will be here when we are gone, become so valuable to us. To the judge they had associations. The picture over the mantel had been bought by his grandfather, those books dated still farther back in the family; the clock had belonged to his mother’s great grandfather, the old secretary of polished mahogany, with secret drawers and brass mountings, was an heirloom,—it had held a will which had nearly disrupted the family two generations back. Small matters, but to an old man inexpressibly interesting and sacred. Of the house he did not like to think; that was full of memories of his wife, and he could not now explain the madness which had led him to mortgage it to pay off more pressing claims which had followed his first heavy losses.

X

ROSE had been ten minutes in the garden, and the judge was beginning to fidget in his chair when he heard the front door open and shut and at last steps came toward the library. A moment later William Fox entered the room. As he came into the mellow light from the open window the judge was struck by the change in his strong pale face. The old smile which had come so easily to his lips, and which, at times, had almost the sweetness of a woman’s, was gone; the brow and chin had a new resolution. The man was changed. Judge Temple saw it and held out his hand with a sudden impulse of warmer sympathy than he had felt before. After all, Fox had met it like a man and paid the cost.

On his side, Fox was as strongly affected by the broken appearance of the old man in his invalid chair with his white head and his sunken eyes. “My dear judge,” he said, “I hope you’re feeling better? I was glad to obey your summons, though I’m not sure that I understand the reference in your note.”

The judge looked at him a moment in silence, then drawing a letter from his pocket, opened it and handed it to him. Fox took it with evident reluctance; as he read it he colored a little and folding it hastily, handed it back without a word.

“I did not know until yesterday, sir, to whom I was indebted,” Judge Temple said slowly, his lip trembling slightly from weakness and profound emotion.

Fox stirred uneasily in his chair, his color deepening. “I didn’t intend you to know it at all, judge,” he said, almost with an air of diffidence; “I presume I owe my betrayal to Berkman. However, I want to assure you—since it is known—that you can have all the time you desire; I consider it a good investment!”

The judge’s spectacles grew misty and he took them off hurriedly and wiped them, his thin hands shaking as he did it. “I thank you for your confidence,” he said quietly, when he could speak; “you’ll get it—every cent.”

“I know it. I tell you I consider it a good investment, the best I ever made,” Fox retorted smiling; “I’m not usually so judicious in my ventures.”

The old man tried to force an answering smile but he failed, his head sank on his breast and his hands, lying on the carved arms of his great chair, still trembled. Fox looked at him in some anxiety, half afraid that the excitement and relief had been too much, and bitterly indignant that his secret had been betrayed. It had been a difficult matter for him to take up the mortgage, for he was by no means a rich man, but he had vowed in his heart to save Rose her home, the home that he knew she loved so well, and half the joy of doing it had been to do it without her knowledge; but it seemed impossible to keep a secret which, from its very nature, must be shared with others.

The change in the old face opposite was alarmingly sharp.

“My dear judge, you are too indisposed for business; let me ring for assistance,” Fox exclaimed, with real concern.

But the judge protested. “Sir, I’m better to-day than I have been for a year,” he said, a slight break in his voice; “I see my way clear, I’ll be able to save this property, I—” he broke off and passed his handkerchief over his eyes; there was a moment’s painful silence, then he held out his hand. “God bless you, Fox!” he broke out suddenly, “it was killing me to lose it—”

They shook hands. Fox had risen and his face was colorless. “Don’t tell her, judge,” he said abruptly.

The old man started and was about to speak but, meeting the other’s eye, refrained. Many things came into his mind, among them a memory of Rose’s face at Mrs. O’Neal’s ball. It was a bitter moment; no man was good enough for her, and this man had been too much talked about! Yet the child’s happiness was near his heart.

With a certain reluctance Fox turned at last to go, and as he did so his glance passed through the open window into the garden. “I can reach the gate by this path, can I not?” he asked, moving toward it.

The judge started uneasily, with an involuntary gesture as if to detain him, to keep him back at any cost, but Fox did not see it and the old man sank back in his chair quiescent. His lips moved but he said nothing; after all, had he a right to interfere? Unconsciously the younger man went out of the window and down the two short steps to the gravel path.

The judge watched him disappear behind the Persian lilac with a fascinated eye. Then he took out his handkerchief again, and passing it swiftly across his brow pushed back his scant white hair until it seemed to rise up in active protest. The glare of the May sunshine suddenly hurt his gaze and he shook out his handkerchief and threw it over his head, closing his eyes.

Aunt Hannah, opening the door a moment later, with a pleasant jingle of ice in the mint-julep glass on her tray, peeped in, thought him asleep and cautiously and discreetly closed the door again. “Fo’ de Lord,” she murmured, “ef it ain’t de fust time dat he didn’t kinder sense dat de julep was comin’; I reckon he’s right po’ly!”

Fox turned the corner by the lilac, walking slowly, holding his hat behind his back, his bare head bowed. His face was gloomy with thought, and he almost passed the arbor. At the turn a glint of white caught his eye and he looked up quickly and saw Rose industriously sewing without a needle, her head down over her work and the sunshine filtering through a trellis of vines on her soft bright hair and her white gown.

He came toward her with an exclamation of unrestrained joy, but as their eyes met a wave of mutual feeling swept over their souls and left them mute. Between them seemed to lie the sorrow and the love of that beautiful and unfortunate woman who had separated them. The language of conventionality was no longer possible; Rose tried to speak, but her words died in an inarticulate murmur. The anguish of Margaret’s letter came back to her; it had saved Fox in her eyes; she no longer condemned him, she no longer felt it a duty to avoid him, but she found it impossible to tell him of the change in her heart by any commonplace word of friendship. Her hand had slipped from his eager grasp and lay trembling on her work. It was terrible to betray herself so; her cheek reddened and tears of mortification came into her eyes. But to speak to him of common things at such a moment—how could she? And he made no effort to help her, but only watched her, his soul in his eyes. The marks of suffering on his face touched her, too; the lines had sharpened, the gaze deepened and become more introspective, the shock of primitive passions had really decentralized his life. He smiled at the sight of her, almost the old eager smile, but even that light had died out of his face now, and in the pause she seemed to hear her own heart beating against her breast.

He stood looking at her. “How long must I be silent?” he asked at last.

Rose busied herself in a fruitless attempt to thread an imaginary needle, and her slender fingers shook. It had been in her mind to tell him that Margaret had written her, but as he spoke a sudden intuition of the truth arrested her impulse, a flood of light poured in upon her, illuminating the twilight of her thought. She felt that he must not only never know of Margaret’s confession—she had not meant to tell him that—but not even of her letter. It was impossible to answer him; her lips were tremulous as she looked up and met his grave, compelling gaze. In her look, so full of buoyant and beautiful youth, there was not even the shadow of reproach. Her simplicity, her renewal of confidence in him, were profoundly touching; the bitterness and humiliation of the past months seemed at last sanctified by her forbearance. The secret agony which had torn his heart during the long winter fell away from the present; it belonged at once to the past, sinking into that long vista which leads to oblivion. To-day was beautiful and strong with hope.

Before her youth and purity William Fox experienced a feeling of sudden and complete humility. “Can you forgive me?” he asked, in a low voice.

Margaret’s letter seemed to breathe its message in her ears. “There’s nothing to forgive,” Rose said simply.

“You understand?” there was passionate eagerness in his glance; his love for her was sweeping away the obstacles from his mind, leaping up again to demand its right to exist.

“Yes,” Rose said, with white lips, “I understand, not fully—but—”

“And now?” he was strongly moved; not knowing whose hand had lifted the veil of her misunderstanding and far from divining the truth.

“And now?” the tears gathered in her eyes and fell unheeded; “I cannot but think of her love—her unhappiness!”

“And you still blame me?” Fox stood motionless, his face resuming its stern reserve.

Rose shook her head. “I—I cannot!” she murmured, remembering that confession, and the thought of it sealing her lips.

He started, the color rushing to his temples, the kindling passion of his glance transforming him. “Rose!”

She looked up through her tears, and as suddenly hid her face in her hands. “I am afraid!” she murmured brokenly, “out of—of all this sorrow can there be happiness?”

Fox sat down beside her and gently took her hand. “You mean you cannot trust me?” he asked soberly.

For a moment she did not answer. He looked down at her drooping profile, the lovely arch of her brow, the soft cheek and chin; her eyes no longer met his. “Or is it that you do not love me?” he said quietly.

She raised her head at that, and the dawning sweetness of her glance illumined his soul. “It is because I love you—that I can no longer judge!” she faltered, with trembling lips.

He met her look without a word; language, for the moment, had not significance for them.

Silence, filled with the sweet murmur of summer life, the fragrance of flowers, the audible rustling of the magnolia leaves, seemed to enfold them in a new and beautiful world.

THE END.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.

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