The noise of the world
Date: 2025-01-15T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Spouses -- Fiction; United States -- Social conditions -- 1918-1932 -- Fiction

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Title: The noise of the world

Author: Adriana Spadoni

Release date: January 15, 2025 [eBook #75113]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Boni and Liveright, Inc, 1921

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75113

Credits: Mary Meehan and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NOISE OF THE WORLD ***

THE NOISE OF THE WORLD

By ADRIANA SPADONI

AUTHOR OF "THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM"

BONI AND LIVERIGHT
PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT, 1921,
BY BONI & LIVERIGHT, INC.

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

... but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity,

A motion and a spirit that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

—WORDSWORTH

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

THE NOISE OF THE WORLD

CHAPTER ONE

"Well, what do you propose? Come down to facts. It's all very interesting and ethical, this harangue of yours; I wouldn't ask any better if I were the defendants' counsel, but, as the opposition, it is not in line. Are you seriously suggesting that this firm refuse the case?"

"Exactly. I thought I made that plain at the beginning of my 'harangue.'"

John Lowell drew in his upper lip, frowned and swayed slowly back and forth, as was his habit when thinking out some intricate point of law. But, by the nervous tapping of the fingers upon the desk, Roger Barton knew that the other was not analyzing a point of law. He was angry and would continue to sway thoughtfully and tap with long, slim fingers until he had fashioned a verbal sword with which to slash Roger's repression to bits; then, smiling, would watch Roger flounder from abstraction to personality, and drown in the sea of his own anger. Roger Barton's wide mouth closed in a firm line.

At her stenographer's desk by the window, Anne Mitchell leaned across her machine, her eyes on the younger man. In the year of her secretaryship she had seen few men defy John Lowell and none emerge with dignity from the interval of his silent tapping.

"Well?"

Still Roger did not speak. Neither did he knit his brows nor make any outward sign of searching for a more cogent argument than the one he had already advanced. His blue eyes summed up the man in the chair and held his deduction quietly for the other to read. Against that look John Lowell's pretense of calmness finally splintered.

"If we don't, some one else will; and it's eight thousand a year for whoever gets the Morgan work."

Anne Mitchell rose and came round her desk. There she stopped, as Lowell reached the end of his sentence, and stood leaning against the edge. Standing so, she was slighter even than one would expect, almost frail but for a kind of compactness, a perfection of bodily finish that allowed no such waste of material as physical weakness. If Anne had been a few inches taller, or twenty pounds heavier; if she had been more sharply defined instead of being a small portion of space cased in a body for the convenience of physical motion; if she had obstructed attention instead of being almost fluid in the unobtrusiveness of her movements, she would long ago have doubled her twenty dollars a week. As it was, on the few occasions when John Lowell lent her to other members of the firm, they always looked puzzled for a moment: "Mitchell? Oh, sure, send her along. Good." And gave Anne twice the amount of work they had intended.

"Well?" John Lowell drew out his watch, murmured "four twenty-seven!" as if he were noting the amount to be charged later, and slipped his watch back. "You don't seem to have anything very constructive to offer, do you, Barton? Our not taking the case won't save your friends on the hill."

"No. Neither did your refusing that railroad franchise case save the public."

The older man smiled at the reference. "Too sticky. That would have smelled to high Heaven."

"Not a bit stickier or smellier than this." Roger now took a step forward, as if to insure the aim of his words through the unexpected aperture of the other's momentary honesty. "The only difference is, that you can put this over without publicity. The smell would never get beyond the office. No one would whiff the rotten legal juggling that's going to take away those poor beggars' homes. The Morgan Gravel Company has literally blasted away dozens of laborers' homes, of foreigners mostly, in the last ten years, and now that they've come up against a few fighting Irish, the last stand on the Hill, they're going to daub over their proceedings with a coat of white-wash."

"Goldwash," Lowell corrected with a grin. "You seem to forget that these people are going to be paid for their property—whatever the judge decides is fair."

"His imagination may reach to one hundred. McLaughlin may prod him to one hundred and fifty."

"They'll take it."

"Of course they will, because Morgan will take the land out from under them whether they accept the money or not."

"They can appeal. There's always more law."

Roger Barton's shoulders hunched. His thick, dry, blond hair seemed to rise like an angry dog's. Without his moving, Anne felt that he had crossed the space between himself and the other. Her small hands clenched, and she nibbled her lower lip as she always did in moments of forced repression.

"Yes," Roger said quietly, "there is always the law, more law, for the rich, the crooked, the morally rotten. There is always the perversion of justice, the farce of an appeal, the hypocrisy of a judge, the pitiful sight of the 'twelve good men and true.' There is always more law to quibble and distort the truth."

"No doubt." The smile deepened at Roger's vehemence. "Only we lawyers don't usually express it so frankly."

"No, we don't. As long as we stay in the shameful business."

John Lowell's smile vanished. He looked at Roger with a sudden, new penetration, as if he had only just come to the realization of the seriousness of Roger's objection. After all, it might be well to temporize a little with this hectic young idealist. The firm needed Roger in many ways, and, in time, might need him more. With all this popular truckling to labor and democracy, this preposterous inversion of common sense and accepted order that seemed settling on the world, Lowell & Morrison might come to need a signpost in the murk.

John Lowell frowned thoughtfully. In the six months of Roger's connection with Lowell & Morrison, John Lowell had, more than once, admitted to old Morrison that Roger Barton had "principle-itis in an acute form." But as he had never seen, in the long course of his legal life, this disease withstand the treatment of personal success, he had kept his faith in Roger's final malleability—and many cases from Roger's knowledge. This Morgan matter had escaped his vigilance, and he was almost as angry with old Morrison as with Roger.

"Well," he finally conceded and rose to indicate the interview at an end. "I don't want you to do anything you don't believe in, Barton. I'll give the briefs to Daniels. You need have nothing to do with it."

"I never intended to have anything to do with it, nor with any other case from now on. I'm through."

For a moment John Lowell looked at the younger man with a look of hatred, scorn, and a shade of envy so faint that it was gone before Roger could be sure it had been. Then he shrugged his acceptance.

"That, of course, is for you to decide. I would not want to try to influence you in either direction. If you feel there is a purer field for your talents, why, go to it. The law has existed for several thousands of years and will probably go on." With a cold smile that never touched his eyes, he turned to Anne.

"Miss Mitchell, could you take some letters right away? I must get them off before five."

But Anne was coming slowly across the room toward him, as if drawn against her consciousness. Now, at the direct address her face flushed to realization; she hesitated, and then completed the distance with so genuine an effort that Roger Barton felt her courage, and without knowing that he moved, took a step toward her, as if answering the call of her slight frailness for physical support.

"Do you really mean that those people are going to be maneuvered out of their homes? That the legal action is only a sham? That it's all settled before we begin?"

Always physical torture for Anne to assert her beliefs against opposition, the flush flamed to a brick-red burning, her eyes grew smaller, she looked hot and swollen. When Anne blushed like this she was ugly.

John Lowell moved impatiently.

"Really, Miss Mitchell, a law office is not a church. It is a business. Here is a big firm needing rock and gravel, easy to get and close to shipping facilities. Years ago, when the city was not much more than a village, a few people built some dilapidated shacks on Telegraph Hill. The Lord knows what they paid for the land, or whom they paid. Soon the growth of the city will force down these shacks. Morgan offers to buy them now, and unless you value them by the 'home and fireside, and baby's cradle' standard of every sentimental tenant, the price is a fairly just one. The people themselves, if not interfered with, will be glad to take what they can get. On the whole, they're a canny lot. They know that it's only a question of a short time before they'd have to go. A city growing like this has no room to waste so near its water-front in rotting cottages and little gardens. The place for small houses like those is in Ocean View, or the Portrero, or the Mission outskirts."

"But it would take the men hours to get to their work from those places and"—Anne shivered—"they're so dismal and bleak. Gray hills, and wind and dust. The Hill has the Bay and the islands and the ferryboats at night."

John Lowell stared in astonishment and then laughed.

"Really, Miss Mitchell, you alarm me. I'm afraid you'll be turning my dictation into poetry, and sending out letters in blank verse."

The laugh cut Anne's last grip from the hope that John Lowell had not really meant what he said. He was, then, deliberately doing this thing that he knew was wrong, for the money in it. He was going to tear away from these people perhaps the only external beauty their lives held. Safe in his own well-appointed home, with all the glory of Bay and hills spread out before him, he was going to condemn these to the gray, thick dust of the Portrero, the bleak and windswept hills, the dull, depressing streets of the Mission outskirts. All her life Anne had lived on such a street and hated it with the whole force of her nature.

He had the power to do this thing and he was going to do it. Under the suave kindliness of his slim, perfectly groomed figure, he was like an animal snapping at every morsel that came his way. The law suddenly appeared to Anne as a trick surface upon which one walked, ignorant of the complicated mechanism below.

Standing before John Lowell, not reaching above his elbow, she looked straight into the eyes smiling down at her with a new, appraising gleam.

"Well?" he said, "do you feel that you will be able to get them out in plain prose?"

Anne rose on her toes, because the look in the full, brown eyes above her forced her to throw her scorn straight into them.

"No. I shall not be able to get them out in prose—nor—in any other way—after to-night. I—I—sha'n't be taking any more at all."

"No?" he said softly, the look changing to a touch that passed hotly all over the surface of her body. "I'm extremely sorry."

"I—I—couldn't work here another day," Anne squeaked, furious at the ridiculous picture she must make, poised upon her toes, like a silly little bantam pecking in a rage.

"You needn't explain, Miss Mitchell, I understand—perfectly." And, without moving his eyes, Anne felt them now include Roger Barton. "I beg your pardon for suggesting it. Of course you couldn't—under the circumstances. I assure you—I understand."

"Oh," Anne gasped in a cracking whisper that reached only to John Lowell and deepened his touch-like look, "you are—rotten."

Then, feeling the tears rushing to her eyes, she dropped to her heels and walked back to her desk.

The telephone summoned John Lowell. Roger Barton hesitated as if he were coming to her, but she put a sheet of paper quickly into the machine and he left the room. The office routine closed over the incident.

From long practice Anne's fingers worked with accurate independence, but, beyond their flying movement, her brain tried to put in order the chaos of her thoughts. She had given up her job, the best job she had had in the five years of her working life. In another half hour she would go out of the office, never to return. She would go home and tell her people. Into the heat of her mood, this need to tell her people fell like a small, cold lump of lead. Something within herself would drive her to try to make them understand, and only one fact would emerge clearly to them—she had lost her job.

At five-thirty, Anne laid the last letter on John Lowell's desk. As she put on her things, she knew that he was aware of every motion without directly looking at her.

"Good night, Mr. Lowell."

"Good night, Miss Mitchell." He looked up. Anne was the best stenographer he had ever had. In her close-fitting blue tailor suit, with a small blue velvet toque framing the wonderful fairness of her skin, and the smooth, cool gold of her hair, she was exceedingly pretty—prettier than John Lowell had ever noticed. With Roger Barton out of the way——

"If you reconsider your decision by morning, I won't remember it," he said with a smile that she alone among his stenographers had escaped so long.

"I shall not reconsider, Mr. Lowell." Anne spoke with a stiff primness that instantly dispelled his new interest.

"Very well. Your check will be sent you at the end of the week, as usual."

"This is only Wednesday."

"That's all right. You've often given overtime."

"Until Wednesday, if you please," Anne said quietly and wanted to cry. Four days would mean nothing to John Lowell; much to her.

"Very well." He picked up his pen and Anne went out.

She heard Roger Barton's voice as she passed his door and hurried on to the elevator. Down in the street, the home-going crowds flowed by. Anne's eyes filled with tears and she nibbled her lip to keep them back. Then she joined the northward current and walked quickly away.

CHAPTER TWO

The Mitchells lived in an old-fashioned upper flat on a street that, before the great fire of 1906, had been a street of two-story wooden houses and small cottages set back in pleasant gardens. But the fire, sweeping the City's poorer quarters, had driven the inhabitants to the safety of the Mission hills; the little cottages had been converted into flats, the houses raised and small, congested shops inserted below. For the first two years, until the new city settled to permanent lines, there had been a bustle and cheap glitter through these streets, a cosmopolitan mingling of many different types and nationalities, that had touched the district faintly with romance. But now the better shops had gone, and only a few frowsy Italian immigrants continued in their untidy vegetable stands; disheartened widows managed small notion stores and bewailed to the wives of the petty clerks, also nailed to the district by low rents, the mythical comforts they had enjoyed "before the Fire."

The wooden houses were all dulled to the same sad gray by wind and sun and rain. The once pleasant gardens had shrunk to occasional slabs of hard brown earth railed off with rusty iron pickets. The front doors of the flats, raised three steps from the sidewalk, were all exactly alike, warped and dust-grimed, with oblong insets of glass two-thirds of the way up. Behind these insets, in brilliant curtains of silkoline, or conscientious Battenburg or negligent Nottingham, the tenants expressed their individuality against the engulfing monotony. The Mitchells had plain white scrim, of thick quality and tightly drawn on a brass rod. The doors of the upper flats worked by an uncertain mechanism managed from within. When this mechanism broke, if one lived in the top flat, one descended the endless stairs and worked the latch by hand. As a child, Anne had dreaded calling on friends and ascending, watched suspiciously from the heights above, until her identity was disclosed. There were ghastly stories of unsuspecting women who had so opened to burglars and been at their mercy.

As Anne unlocked the door the smell of pot-roast instantly enveloped her, shutting away the problem of her own immediate future and the broad shoulders of Roger Barton, hunched forward in defiance of John Lowell. Anne's lip quivered.

"To-night—of all nights!"

Slowly she began the long ascent, enclosed by the thickening odor as by the walls of a narrow corridor.

Anne hated pot-roast, not because of itself, but for its associations. Pot-roast was a pretense. It had not the open honesty of stew. Pot-roast was Mrs. Mitchell's final compromise in a line of preference that had started with prime ribs of beef. It meant that James Mitchell had bet away more than the usual portion of his monthly pay check; the meager remnant had stung Hilda's patience to rebellion; her imagination had leaped from the invariable shoulder chops of Wednesday evening to prime roast; but, before it could safely land upon that pinnacle of rebellion, had tripped and clutched at pot-roast. Anne sighed and went slowly on. At the stair-head, the gas jet, stuffed with cotton wool to keep it from ever being extravagantly turned to its full capacity, shed a sickly light through an amber globe. She turned the cock ferociously as far as it would go and then went on down the hall to the curtained niche just outside her own hall bedroom.

Long ago this niche had been formed to hold the overflow from the hall closet. Into it Mrs. Mitchell had since crowded broken and worn-out pieces of household furniture, hideous bisque ornaments of the '90's which Anne and Belle had refused to have about, oil lamps, in case "something happens to the gas"; a sewing-machine that would cost more to fix than to replace; dresses and bits of carpet, some day to be made into new rugs; and the week's accumulation of laundry from which she snatched and ironed pieces as she needed them. Years ago Anne had tried to eliminate this niche, but when her mother had demanded where she should put the things and Anne had suggested burning them, Hilda had looked so grieved at the implication of her bad management in ever letting them accumulate, and had asked Anne in so hurt a tone to pick out "one single thing that might not be needed some day," that Anne relented. Now the niche was like a malignant growth, too late to operate upon, to which one submits. But even yet Anne never let the portière quite fall to behind her and enclose her in this cemetery of odds and ends.

When she had hung up her things she went down the hall, past the dining-room where her father sat in the rocker under the hard, white, incandescent light, staring at the unlit gas log in the grate, the evening paper spread on his knees. In the kitchen her mother was making gravy from the fat in the baking-pan.

"Hello, dear. You're late. I was just going to begin without you."

Mrs. Mitchell wiped the perspiration from her face with the corner of a very soiled apron and kissed her daughter. She was taller and broader than Anne, but she had the same long-lashed, deeply-blue eyes, and her skin had once been even fairer. It was remarkably white and soft yet at the base of her throat, although there were tiny lines about her ears and at the corners of her mouth. Her hair had been dark, however, like Belle's, and now was a fluffy mass of gray curls.

Anne always felt older than her mother and loved her, on the whole, with a passionate, protective tenderness. There were times, however, when Hilda's persistent cheerfulness and muddled thinking annoyed her, and at long intervals Hilda disgusted her. These were the moments of confidence in which her mother, under the pretense of "warning the girls," confided to them, in general terms, "some of the things married women have to put up with." Belle and Anne both knew that these confidences were the result of her relations with the small, gray man, their father. Years ago it had deepened Belle's indifference and Anne's dislike to him.

"What is it now?" Anne took the spoon and tried to beat the lumpy gravy to smoothness. "He's just staring into the grate."

Hilda shrugged. "That oil well, I suppose. I wish to goodness they'd stop discovering gushers and copper and all those things. I thought when the Chinese lottery was put out of business we might get a little ahead."

Anne smashed at the lumps and frowned. "You ought to have put your foot down years ago, that's all there is to it. If you'd made a real row every time instead of just—just spluttering sometimes—he would have had to sit up and behave."

Hilda bridled. "It's one thing to talk and another to do. When you're married yourself, you'll understand. By the time you get 'round to see how you could do it better, it's too late. They've got you saddled with a baby and——"

Feeling a confidence about to descend upon her, Anne snatched the first weapon to hand.

"I've quit the office, mamma."

Hilda's mouth remained open, her eyes held the "if-you-only-understood" look that always accompanied such a confidence.

"You needn't look like that, moms; the world is really rotating just as usual."

"Quit!" Hilda echoed in a whisper. "Quit!"

Anne nodded. "But I'll get another place in a day or two, don't worry, dear."

"Quit!" Hilda echoed more faintly, and emerged into the reality of the situation. "What for? I thought you liked the place. Did Mr. Lowell—did he—anything——?"

Anne stamped her foot. "No. Of course he didn't. I did like it as far the general atmosphere of the office went, although I've had doubts of him lately. But to-day he came out into the open. He's a—crook."

"Good gracious! What did he want you to do?"

"Nothing special. But I can't work in a place where I know things are being done that he's doing. I just can't."

Hilda went back to the gravy. She did not want Anne to work in a dishonest office, but she did wish Anne had not discovered the delinquency of John Lowell for a few days.

"No, dear, of course you can't. But—suppose you don't tell papa to-night. It's gloomy enough as it is."

"Why on earth he should create all the gloom is beyond me. Why shouldn't he be annoyed? It might do him good."

"Please, dear."

"Well, I'll see, moms. I won't promise."

Hilda sighed and dished up the potatoes. For all her slim, frail fairness, Anne was very difficult to manage. As Belle said, "You never know when you're going to strike one of Anne's principles. They're like deep sea mines, unsuspected till they go off under you." Hilda carried the roast into the dining-room, Anne followed with the potatoes, and they sat down to dinner. In silence they began to eat.

Through the glass of the mantel above the gas log, wreathed in asbestos moss, Anne watched her father. He was a small man with thin, gray hair and brown eyes, faded from long years of figuring in bad lights. He bent low over his plate, but ate slowly, through habit acquired in an attack of nervous indigestion when Anne and Belle were children. There was little general conversation at the Mitchell meals, although, when James Mitchell was in a good humor, he was inclined to deliver monologues, chiefly against Radicalism and the Catholic Church. Any newspaper mention of the possibility of a strike precipitated the first, which before its finish, by some complicated process of logic, always included the second.

In the office of the Coast Electric Company, where he had been an assistant bookkeeper for thirty years, James Mitchell was known as one of the most faithful men they had. He never took a vacation nor objected to overtime. He had a tremendous respect for every one in authority above him, and the only temper the office had ever seen him display was when one of the younger clerks had tried to organize a clerks' union. James Mitchell had thrown down his pencil, whirled upon the astonished organizer, and demanded to know "where the city would have been if it hadn't been for the men who started this company?" Apparently he considered that the city would still have been using candles. For this act of faith he had been raised five dollars shortly after.

He disliked open conflict and in the early days of his marriage had once left the house to escape the first real discussion between himself and Hilda on the subject of money. This astonishing act had for years hung over the home, and the fear that "papa would take his hat and go out" had been held as an extinguisher over the children's quarrels and suffocated any tendency Anne or Belle might have had to appeal to him.

Anne could never remember an age when either she or Belle had talked to him of their own accord, although there had been periods when her mother, driven by some hidden impulse, had insisted that they "go and talk to papa. Tell him about school; he likes to hear it." At thirteen Belle had refused, and Anne, three years younger, had managed to slip from the obligation at the same time.

They finished the meat and vegetables in safe silence and Hilda gathered up the dishes, hopeful of peace to the end. But the heavy stillness had weighted Anne's already taut nerves, and when her mother returned with brown betty and hard sauce, and her father came suddenly to consciousness of the elaborate nature of this week-day dinner with a remark on the price of butter and sugar, Anne's hands went cold and her face flamed.

"Well, we don't have it often," Hilda propitiated, "but sometimes it gives one a headache trying to think of changes, everything's so high."

"And going higher." He helped himself sparingly to the hard sauce and pushed it across to Anne, who smothered her pudding in it. "And it'll keep on going up, too, unless people stop buying. Women could bring down the prices in a minute if they had the sense. Nobody needs hard sauce."

"They do," Anne spoke quietly without looking up. Her mother tried to touch her foot under the table, but Anne moved just beyond reach. Hilda began to eat her betty.

"They do, do they?" James Mitchell pounced upon Anne's remark like a small and hungry terrier on a bone. "They do? Well, it would take more than any argument you, or anybody else your age, could put up, to show me."

"I don't doubt that," Anne shot at him, still busy with her dessert; "nothing would convince you because you don't want to see, or else you really can't understand."

"I can't understand, can't I? Oh, no, I suppose nobody can understand anything these days when they're past twenty-five. I've been out bucking the world for more years than you've lived in it, but of course I've had my eyes shut all the time. Now see here, let me tell you this, young lady," he leaned toward Anne and thumped the table, "you've got what this whole country's got—a dose of blind staggers. You can't see what's coming and you won't till it's hit you. You go ranting along about people needing hard sauce and luxuries and you kick like steers when the prices go up. Of course they'll go up. Why shouldn't they? It's the law of supply and demand. When dairymen find out people 'have to have hard sauce' they're going to run up butter and eggs. A fool can see that."

"Only a fool can see that," Anne's voice shook in spite of herself. "Why shouldn't people have hard sauce?"

"Don't you get off any of that Socialistic jargon in this house. I won't have it. If I'd had any say in the bringing up of you girls——"

"Now, papa, please. The girls——"

"If you'd had anything to say, Belle would never have been a trained nurse, nor I a special stenographer. We'd both have been wrapping packages in some department store basement." Anne rolled her napkin and rose in an icy quiet.

"A lot of good either Belle's nursing or your stenography does," he darted now down the personal opening Anne had made him. "We never see Belle except when she has a few moments she doesn't know what to do with, and she wouldn't help out with a dollar if she was asked. And as for you—where could you get the board your mother puts up for what you pay?"

"Now, papa! Anne——"

"Well, I've quit my job, so you'll have to board me for nothing until I get another one."

"Quit!" James Mitchell stared as his wife had stared. "Quit! What for?"

"Because John Lowell is dishonest and I won't work for a dishonest firm."

"How many firms do you suppose are honest? You haven't risen to the management of a firm yet."

"Nor have I sunk to conniving with a thief, either."

James Mitchell opened his lips and then, suddenly and unexpectedly, leaned back. He looked shrunken and grayer, and he stared as if he saw something unseen by the others.

"I've had—the same job—for—thirty—years," he said slowly. "Thirty—years—at the same desk."

Anne softened.

"You ought to have quit long ago. They've used you because you let them. You could have done better. You could do better now. Do you want to quit? I'll get another place to-morrow and stake the house till you get a job."

"No, no, I don't want to quit. No." He seemed fleeing before the suggestion. The strangeness of the new road terrified him and he scuttled back to the familiar. "Used me? Of course they've used me. A man with a family has to get used to being used. A married man has to put up with things. Where would you kids have been if I'd have been getting on my ear all the time you were little?"

"Papa has been faithful," Hilda began, but the sudden tears that filled Anne's eyes astonished her to silence.

Without a word, Anne picked up the plates and went into the kitchen. Hilda followed.

"If he only wouldn't get down behind that pretense of having done it all for us, I might respect him, moms. But he just burrows into that hole like a gopher and you can't get him out."

"Well, after all, dear, I don't suppose he would have stuck if it hadn't been for us. He'd have gotten into some kind of a gambling scheme long ago. After all, he brings home most of his salary most of the time."

And Anne saw herself a small girl watching her mother dividing the contents of the pay envelope, counting and recounting and finally tying up each little package in tissue paper, as if to keep the tiny allotments from spending themselves in another department. They had hurt to tears, those thin little allotments, and her mother's sigh as she gathered them up and went humming about the housework. Anne did not answer and they did the dishes in silence until the phone rang. Hilda came from answering it with such a look of relief that Anne smiled.

"Belle?"

"Yes. She's got an hour off and is coming up."

Anne wiped the last glass and put it away.

"Well, I'm all in and I'm going to bed. The autopsy will have to take place without the corpse." The smile deepened as she kissed her mother. "All nice and safe again, moms?"

"I don't care what you say, Belle has a practical mind. She always seems to know what to do."

"As if we had a fever or a dose of colic."

"I'd a lot rather we had things like that. What with you and papa, sometimes I feel as if I were living in a cloud of feathers."

"You dear thing," Anne patted her shoulder. "Well, Belle will be along with her spray in a minute and wet us all down nice and flat. I don't suppose I'll go right to sleep——"

"She'll look in for a minute, I guess."

Anne laughed. "She sure will."

CHAPTER THREE

Belle Mitchell was much taller than Anne or Hilda, with straight, very heavy brown hair and brown eyes. She had a jolly, even disposition, was rarely hurt herself, never knew when she hurt others, and felt competent to manage any situation in which she found herself. Her favorite expression was "look facts in the face." She loved Anne with the same protecting tenderness that Anne felt for Hilda, and never understood the chain of "highfalutin" reasoning by which Anne finally exploded into one of her rare rages. James Mitchell had always been a little afraid of Belle, but he agreed with Hilda that she "had a practical streak." This was supposed to have descended to her intact, like an heirloom, from James' Scotch grandmother.

At seventeen, Belle had looked over the possibilities of the future, left high-school and gone into hospital training. Four years later she was earning twenty-five dollars a week. She had then left the family and taken an apartment with two other nurses. As she explained to Anne:

"The only way to go on caring for your family is to get away from them."

She had paid for Anne's course in a good business college and supplemented the family income with five dollars a week, until Anne was making enough to pay her own board. Then she stopped.

"In some silly streak she'll call 'being honest with papa,' mamma will tell him, and some race-track tout will get that extra five. Or she'll have a fit of rebellion and go off at a tangent in another washing machine or bread mixer or aluminum contraption for getting a whole dinner under one lid, and nobody will have the benefit. But kidlets," and here Belle had put her arms about Anne in a way that always melted any hardness Anne felt for Belle's practicality, "this rule is not for you. If you want any extras—please, sisterkin, ask, won't you?"

Anne had promised, her amazement at Belle's ability to do these firm, decided things, mingling with a sense of disloyalty to her mother in recognizing their truth. She herself could never have left the house, nor stopped a contribution, unless she had done it as the final step against pricks that Belle would never have felt at all.

But now, as Anne sat in the cool darkness of her own little room, looking out into the fog-wrapped silence of the empty street, she was not thinking of Belle, nor of Belle's management of "her case." She was thinking again, in spite of her effort not to, of Roger Barton. He had passed out of her life, and yet, in some inexplicable way, he seemed to have suddenly entered it very intimately.

In the six months of his connection with Lowell & Morrison, Anne had seen more of him than of any man in any of the three offices in which she had worked. They had never talked of personal things, but of business details and the generalities into which these seemed inevitably to lead them; discussions, scarcely ever more than a few moments long, of plays and books and Life.

Anne envied Roger his university education and Roger envied Anne the courage which carried her, after a hard day's work, to extension lectures at night. From these she extracted a kind of sensory conviction of the complex and interesting world beyond her experience. A world of clear thinking, in contrast to the muddled and confused mental processes of her own family and of all the people whom she had ever known; of aims higher than the daily grubbing for food and shelter that they called living. In Roger Barton, Anne had encountered the first person who, born into an environment like her own, had forced his way through to this interesting and complex world. Anne often wondered how he had done it, but as he seemed to take his own progress for granted, and had never commented on the achievement, Anne had been too shy to ask him. And now she would probably never see him again. Through the monotony of the working day there would be no moment to look forward to; no memory with which to contrast the dullness of evenings at home.

Out in the great world open to men, Roger Barton would make another place for himself. Before his ability, his courage and his masculinity, everything was possible. He could leave to-morrow for distant countries and the far strange places he expected some day so confidently to see. He could seek beauty and romance, limited only by his own powers of physical endurance. He could work his way in ships about the world, or tramp alone across deserts. He was strong and free.

And she? In a few days she would begin again to look for another place. Perhaps she would better her salary a little, but she would come and go at fixed hours. For the greater part of the waking day she would sell her intelligence and strength to strangers. They would know nothing of the reality beneath, nor would she touch their lives at any vital spot. Her father would get over this spell of depression at his losses and his annoyance with her contradiction, and the house would run smoothly, like a narrow gauge train along a dusty, uninteresting depression between high hills; beyond these she would never see. It was all so flat, so gray, so dead. Anne shivered:

"Anything as ugly as this house and the way we live is WICKED."

Through the silence of the lonely street, Belle's firm step echoed clearly. The signal ring, three quick peals, brought Hilda running to the stair-head. The lever on the landing clicked, far below the door opened and closed with a slam, and Belle came gayly up the stairs, filling every cranny of the house with the force of her cheerful efficiency, just as if a strong breeze had been suddenly admitted.

"Hello, moms. Her Royal Highness decided she was well enough to let me off for an hour, and so I——"

All sound suddenly ceased. Then Belle, with a brisk "Hello, papa," followed her mother down the hall, past the dining-room, and the kitchen door closed behind them.

Anne shrugged impatiently. No smallest change was ever accomplished in the Mitchell household without this background of tragedy. The news of her action in leaving Lowell & Morrison was now being "broken" to Belle and advice asked, exactly as if Anne had absconded with the funds or tried to commit suicide. There were no degrees of tragedy among the Mitchells.

"I don't care, let them talk it over until there isn't a shred of it left. I'm not going to explain. They wouldn't understand if I talked all night."

Anne closed the window, turned on the softly shaded lamp and chose a book from the small bookcase at the foot of the white enameled bed. Settled in the chintz-covered Morris chair, she opened the book and forced herself to follow the lines to the end of the first page. But Roger Barton's angry gray eyes moved between the words and Anne did not even turn the leaf. The book slowly slid to her lap. Across it Anne stared into the future.

The sound of Belle's step coming firmly along the hall drew her back to the present with a physical reaction of having been literally lifted from one spot and deposited in another. And before she had quite achieved equilibrium in the moment, Belle was tapping at the door. This tap of Belle's was not a motion of the fingers, but a denunciation of any pretense of absence you might be intending. It not only declared Belle's certainty that you were there but her knowledge of exactly what you were doing.

"It's me, kidlets; may I come in?"

Anne opened the door and Belle instantly filled the entire room. Closing the door, she smiled down upon Anne, flushed and a little stiff with the force of her decision not to be led into any apologetic explanation of her act.

"Well, you certainly have done it this time. I never saw such gloom, and that's going some. You'd think the sheriff was in the parlor and the morgue wagon at the door. Tell me the whole sad tale."

From an ivory cigarette case, "a remembrance from an officer patient," Belle drew a cigarette and lighted it.

"Come on, 'fess up."

"You've been out there half an hour and have heard the whole thing, more no doubt."

"From A to Z, and inside out and I haven't got it straight yet. Why did you do it? That's what has upset them, but they don't seem to know what it was. Why did you?"

"That's what they both asked."

"Their intelligence must be looking up. I gather that you were asked to do something your conscience didn't approve and that you up and quit."

"I wasn't asked to do anything. But John Lowell isn't straight and I won't work for him."

Through her cigarette smoke, Belle stared as Hilda and James had done.

"But, kiddie, you'll never find a business man that is straight, or an office or any place where you approve of everything. How long do you think I'd be a nurse if I had to approve of everything I see in an operating room; people cut up when there's no need; often carelessness that would make your hair stand on end. My relation to the surgeon is like yours to Lowell. I hand the instruments, and keep mum."

"And I quit."

"So I hear," Belle laughed. "But what are you going to do? Ask for a certificate of conscience from your next employer? I say, sisterkin, what do you think business life is?"

"That depends on what you want to make it."

"Rot. It's compromise from dawn till dark; from the cradle to the grave. When you start out you think you're going to do wonderful things, reorganize everything and everybody, because your own pet ideals are the very finest ideals in captivity. And—in the end you're lucky if you remember what they were. Why, even I, and nobody would accuse me of being sentimental, had all kinds of ideas about what a nurse's vocation might be, a kind of etherealized Florence Nightingale in a perpetual ecstasy; but when I came up against real patients, whining nervous women and men—well, Belle Nightingale gives her pills and powders now strictly according to the doctor's orders and forgets most of her patients with the last pay check. The whole thing's like Mom's pot-roast—a good solid makeshift for something better."

Anne shrugged. "If Moms had never fallen for that first pot-roast——"

"If Eve had never picked the apple."

"Well? You don't know what the world might have been like if she hadn't, do you?"

"I can make a guess. It would have been just about as it is—if not a little worse. She would have found a pear or a cranberry or a walnut, any old thing." Belle leaned slightly forward and peered with genuine concern through the thickening film of tobacco smoke at the small blonde figure, sitting stiffly now on the bed-edge. "Anne, do you know that I worry a lot about you sometimes? I know you're a good stenographer and as economically independent as any woman, but it always seems to me as if you were out of step with the world in some way. You don't plunk, plunk along with the rest of us. You—you——"

"Sit down on the curb-stone."

"No. You mince along reluctantly. I wish to Heaven you'd get married."

Anne flushed, but Belle was grinding her cigarette stub into Anne's lacquered pin tray and did not notice. She ground it into the polished surface as if the tray were the problem of Anne's future and the stub her own power of settling the difficulty. When she had burned the delicate surface to a black spot, she went on. "But I can't for the life of me picture the kind of man you would marry, not with your opportunities for meeting them. An ordinary business man would drive you as crazy as you would drive him. A professional man—well, there's not much difference. An up-to-date doctor, even an up-to-date minister, has just as keen an eye for the main chance as John Lowell—and that's what seems to upset you. And even if you found one straight in business—men are rotten morally, most of them, and you're so—I don't know just what it is, Anne, but you're like a cool drink in a very clean glass, and men want beer in an earthen mug when it comes right down to everyday diet. They want it in women just as much as they do in business."

"I don't believe it." Anne spoke with such vehement assurance that Belle looked at her sharply.

"You don't? Why not?"

Anne wished now that she had not spoken, but the quickest way to escape from that gimlet-like boring of Belle's eyes was to go on. "It isn't true of all men in business and I don't see why it should be true of all men morally."

"Did you ever know an absolutely honest business man?"

"Yes." Anne felt her face beginning to burn, and to escape the look creeping into her sister's eyes she rose quickly and began doing something unnecessary to the window curtain. She felt Belle's eyes between her shoulder blades and knew that even the back of her neck was flaming. At Belle's low chuckle she bit her lip, dragged about herself the fast vanishing wrap of impersonal interest, and turned to her sister with an assumption of surprise that Belle's look shattered in a moment.

"Come on, sisterkin, this is getting interesting. Who is he?"

"I wasn't thinking of any special individual. I—there must be——"

"Cut it out, Anne, anyhow with sister Belle. When a working girl keeps her faith in men for five years, there is always an individual."

"Shut up, Belle. I loathe that cheap talk."

"And I loathe dodging round and pretending. Who is this torch-bearer in the darkness of the legal world?"

"He isn't a torch-bearer, but he's honest. Roger Barton." It was the easiest way, because Belle would prod until she got it.

"That good-looking young blond? Well, how does he compromise with his honesty and John Lowell?"

"He doesn't. He quit, too."

"Well—I'll—be darned. You both rode out of the office on the same white palfrey! When's the wedding?"

"Will you please get out of this room?"

"Not on your life. Not till I hear the whole thrilling tale. Are you engaged, Anne?"

"No. Will you stop?"

"What'll you bet that you won't be inside a month?"

Anne did not answer.

"All right. It would be a shame to take the money. Why, if dad had tips like that we'd have been rich long ago. What'll you bet, then, that he doesn't ask you?"

Anne's lips trembled. "Belle, please stop joking like that."

"But, kiddie, the most wily flirt in the world couldn't have done better. Any man would be flattered to death. You don't suppose he's going to let a kindred soul—and a pretty one—slip out of his life, do you? He'll look you up, anyhow."

"No, he won't. I won't be here. I'm—I'm going to take a vacation," Anne added in a sudden decision that startled herself.

Belle grinned, and then, at the tears that filled Anne's eyes, relented.

"Fine idea. You never did have a real one. Where are you going?"

"Quincy."

"Heavens! That's not a vacation. That's a penance."

"I never hated it the way you do. I don't mind Aunt Het, and I'm fond of Janet and Bab."

"If it's money, Anne, I'll be tickled to death—Tahoe or Yosemite—or any other real place."

"I loathe them."

"You don't know anything about them. Please. Don't be so highfalutin'. I can do it easily. Make it a birthday present if you like."

"No, thanks just the same. I don't mean to be highfalutin', but I love the bluff, really I do. And I am rather tired. I just want to lie out there on the dunes and think."

Belle's eyes twinkled. "Of course——"

"Belle Mitchell, if you go back to that I'll walk straight out of this room."

"Go back to what?" Belle rose and took the rigid little body in her arms. "Oh, come on, Anne, relax inside and out. Run along and have a grand time feeding the chickens and listening to Aunt Het reminisce and thank the Lord for your simple tastes. When are you going?"

"To-morrow."

"Moms know it?"

"Not yet."

The sisters smiled at each other. Then Belle drew Anne into her arms and held her close, her own cheek on the cool blonde hair, her eyes very soft and tender.

"You dear little thing," she whispered, "you dear—breakable—little thing."

Released, Anne tried to laugh, but she was too queerly excited about something that, as soon as she was alone, was going to slip out from behind the wall to which Belle's presence relegated it. The laugh stopped at her lips in a wistful little smile.

"Remember, Anne, if you change your mind you only have to phone me. I always have some cash on hand. You will, won't you?"

"Yes, I will."

"Honest?"

"Cross my heart to die. And—thanks—awfully——"

"Nonsense."

Belle opened the door and went briskly down the hall. Anne closed it softly, turned out the light, undressed and threw the window as wide as she could. Between the smooth, fresh sheets she lay waiting tensely for silence to settle on the house and leave her quite alone with her own thoughts.

At last Belle and her mother went downstairs, her father wound the cuckoo clock, the door below slammed and Hilda came slowly up. The hall light went out. Silence had come.

In the soft, black stillness, Roger Barton stood out clearly, his crisp blond hair electric with vitality, his wide mouth now tight with repressed anger, now whimsical with mirth.

Would he really look her up?

CHAPTER FOUR

For two days Roger Barton luxuriated in his escape from the law. At twenty-eight all experience had to him the nature of a material thing. It was to be grasped, used to his need, and when it failed him, dropped. He absorbed what his mind needed at the time and went on, as an animal leaves a food supply, its wants satisfied. University and law school had been the road to an education offered by a distant, childless relative with an ambition to have a profession in the family. Roger now wrote and told this relative he had given up the law, but the old man's irate answer did not disturb him in the least. He did not feel that he had been ungrateful or that he owed anything beyond the power of his own conscience to pay.

He had no definite plans for the future, except a general feeling that he was about to enter a real and interesting world. In this world there were fine, high things to do, and he would probably be poor, for John Lowell's office had convinced Roger that ideals do not pay and that nothing else is worth while. He took long tramps through the Marin hills, or lay on the sand at Land's End listening to the waves, and dreamed. In these dreams he thought often of Anne, standing on tiptoes before John Lowell. Now that he would probably never see her again he wished that he knew her better.

There could not be many women like Anne. She gave so fully of her time and interest, and yet there were unstirred depths beneath. Roger had always felt them in sudden, sad looks that passed across Anne's eyes, in the catching of the breath that marked an almost painfully keen interest, in small, quick motions and physical responses that he had accepted as mannerisms, but now saw as revelations of that courage and ideality that was Anne.

"It wasn't easy for her to confront that rotter, but she did it, the slip of a beauty-loving thing! How she must hate an office!"

And she would probably go into just such another in a few days, perhaps a worse one. She might already have found a place. While he lay on the sand, facing the full future, she might be bent above a machine, her fine enthusiasm leashed to the narrow demands of price lists, her physical rarity the object of some cad's coarse admiration. The thought sickened Roger when it first came to him clearly, an employer trying to touch Anne's hand, pressing her knee as he forced her to needless proximity for dictation; Anne, the hurt and quivering object of those advances he had seen other girls welcome with feigned annoyance and sidelong glances. He rose quickly to escape it, although he had come to his favorite cove with a book for the whole afternoon, and began walking again across the dunes. But the picture moved beside him.

"By Jove, it isn't right. A man has a hard enough time hanging to his principles, but a girl, a worth-while girl like that who has something beyond the idea of attracting men—it's a shame."

And he could do nothing to prevent it. He could not even call Anne a friend. He did not know where she lived.

"What a simp!" He stopped and kicked the sand viciously and marveled at his own stupidity. For six months he had worked with Anne and had never asked her to go anywhere with him, or tried to know her better. He knew now that he had looked forward in the mornings to seeing her, soft and small and silvery fair at her desk. He had snatched every opportunity to talk with her. And had made none! Seen so, now, from the outside, it was incredible but true. He knew nothing of Anne whatever. Nothing. She might even be engaged to some man, no better, under the veneer with which men, physically desirous, deceive girls, than John Lowell. Perhaps worse.

Roger strode on, his shoulders hunched now as they always hunched against obstruction and defeat. He would do something to prevent the waste of Anne. He would find Anne a place where that rare fineness would not be quite wasted in the mechanical routine of mercenary ambition. At least he could do that.

Anne quivering with hurt of ugliness, seeing the bay at night, the jewel-like islands, the stately white ferry boats, clinging to them for people she had never known! He would find a place for Anne and see her in it before he went out into the fullness of the future waiting for him. The possibility of Anne's engagement to a worthless man, Roger had finally to push aside, with reluctant concession to his own ideal of her. If Anne were engaged, the man would have to be worth while.

For a day and a half Roger sought a place for Anne. His own mail remained unopened, telephone messages unanswered. About twelve o'clock on the morning of the second day he found what he wanted. It was with a publishing firm and the duties involved a wider scope than the usual stenography. The surroundings were as pleasant as any office could offer, the hours easy, the firm established, conservative to a degree that had always rasped Roger's youthful enthusiasm, but satisfied him when he visioned the two white-haired, old-fashioned gentlemen as Anne's employers. At the end of half an hour he had forced the salary up five dollars a month and secured an option on the opening for two days.

From old Morrison he got Anne's address, and ten minutes later so astonished Hilda by his insistence that he must know Anne's whereabouts, that she forgot the definite orders to tell no one and described the Saunders home at Quincy so minutely that Roger could have found it blindfolded in the dark.

Three hours later Roger got off the train, the sole passenger for the windswept little wooden box upon the dunes. To the north and east the dun sand swelled to mounds and rounded hummocks, held from their eternal drifting by bunches of coarse, gray grass. Across the narrow bay, low hills, dense and black with chaparral, each guarding at its base a tiny white beach, ran westward to the sea, beating on the rocky coast in long, sobbing protest against the lashing wind.

In the vast, clean loneliness of sand and wind and sky, a fear that had touched him on the way up that Anne might think it strange for him to appear suddenly like this, dissolved. The silent emptiness absorbed the misunderstanding of motive, and Roger knew that if Anne did not wish the position she would not think him intrusive. He easily found the half-obliterated wagon-road Hilda had described and took it across the dunes.

As the front gate creaked on its sagging hinges, Barbara Saunders rose from the floor, where she and Anne had been trying to force a faded blue dimity to contain a yard more material than it had ever had.

"I simply will not wear the thing as it is. Janet can say what she likes—she doesn't care what she wears—but I've been to six Quarterlies in it—and I've reached my limit."

The gate slammed and Barbara turned to the window.

"Anne! It's a man!"

Anne looked up, still puzzling over the impossibilities of the faded dimity. "Do you know, Bab, I believe if we ripped the whole thing and turned the top to the bottom and gored it, we could take all the scraps left over and——"

"Come here," Bab whispered as if the person below could hear through the glass. "He doesn't look like an agent. Who on earth——"

Anne came and stood beside her. With nose pressed to the glass she could just see the top of Roger's hat. A loud knock echoed through the house.

"In a hurry, rather, isn't he? Who——" Bab turned. "Why! Anne! Do you know him?"

Before the burning self-consciousness in Anne's eyes, Bab stepped back.

"Will—will—you open the door? Yes, I know him. It's Mr. Barton. He—used to be in the same office."

Barbara's sallow cheeks flushed and her eyes scorned Anne's insincerity. For five nights Anne had let her go on, in the dark intimacy of the same room, piling up the mass of her small perplexities, the annoying efforts at adjustment between herself and Janet and her mother. And all the time Anne had harbored a romance. Anne was not the small, shy cousin, so different from Belle, so like themselves in spite of her daily contact with the great world of business. Anne knew men. When deprived for a few days of her society they came long distances to see her.

"Very well, I'll open the door. But don't be long, please. Janet's cleaning out the chicken house and looks like a fright. My other waist isn't ironed and mother's asleep."

She went. Anne heard her open the door and lead Roger down the creaking hall to the dining-room, a bare, dilapidated room, with sagging floor beyond the skill of the manless household to repair, and woodwork painted streakily by Bab and Janet.

Anne tried to hurry, but her cold fingers fumbled. And even when, at last, the hooks were hooked, the hairpins all in place, and Anne stood with her hand on the knob, it seemed impossible to turn it.

Why had he come?

Was Belle right? How had she known?

Roger Barton looked up as the rear door unexpectedly opened and Anne came toward him, with just the degree of welcome to express her surprise, and the exact amount of pleasure at the sight of a friend. Her greeting angered and disappointed him. Anne thought she did it very well.

"Hunting?" She tossed the word off lightly, as if she had many male friends all deeply interested in the sport.

"No," Roger snapped, annoyed at this assumption of social manner in the stark, unfriendly room, with its stained walls and broken floor. "No. I didn't bring a gun. Besides, it's not duck season yet. I never heard of any other game on the marshes, did you?"

"No. I don't think I have." Anne flushed.

Her embarrassment at discovery did not soften Roger; he had been too hurt by her greeting.

"No. I have no excuse except one you may think presumptuous. I heard, accidentally, of a place I thought might suit you. But you'll have to let them know by Tuesday, to-morrow if possible. It's with Wilmot & Brown—twenty-five a week."

Anne tried to look as if she were seriously considering, but she had scarcely heard. She had not thought of this and now she saw so clearly it could have been the only reason for his coming. He had a deep, human kindliness for all misfortune, and she had been unfortunate. She, a working girl, had given up her place. He had found her another almost instantly.

"Thank you. It was very kind of you. But I'm not sure I'm going back to town directly. My cousins," the word contained the broken floor, the scratched wall, the worn furniture, "want me to stay for the rest of the month. I may do it."

Through the window she saw Janet wheeling a refuse-filled barrow from the chicken run. Bent against the wind, she moved, almost doubled above the vile load. Bab followed with a pitchfork. They disappeared behind the barn. Anne looked straight at Roger:

"There are no men on the place and the school vacations are the only time my Cousin Janet gets enough leisure to do anything. We have been talking about fixing the fences and mending this floor. If you'd come to-morrow instead of to-day you'd have found us calcimining."

Roger's eyes came back to Anne, flushed, defiant, so unmistakably proud and hurt.

"I didn't mean it intrusively," he said quietly. "I just couldn't stand the thought of you taking any old thing—another rotter like Lowell, perhaps—where anything but a machine is wasted. Please believe——"

A sound from beyond the thin partition struck him to silence. It was a high, querulous voice calling, "B—a—b."

Anne started. In another moment Aunt Harriet would come trailing in, her frail hands moving gracefully to insure safety, her sightless blue eyes staring before her. It was years since Harriet Saunders had talked to a city man, a professional man, a man worthy of her own Harrington culture, a culture guarded through long years with Hilda Mitchell's brother, kept undimmed to hand down to "the girls." In another moment she would be there, winding about him the snake-like coils of her selfish monopolization.

"Would you mind if we went outside?" Anne whispered, partly because she could so convey the need for instant action, partly to bear out the quickly invented reason. "Aunt Het is rather an invalid and she has been asleep. If no one answers she'll drop off again, but if she hears us——"

"Certainly," Roger whispered back, and they tiptoed from the room together, out through the nearer kitchen to the yard. And there Anne paused. Where could she take him? There was no spot on that windblown dryness, no garden nook. For a moment she thought of the barn, a favorite place of her own. But it was so overtoned; herself and Roger Barton, who had come to tell her of a position, sitting in the hay!

"It does seem inhospitable to drag you out on a day like this," she began, but Roger cut her short.

"I like gray days, and it may be an extraordinary taste but I love the wind—in the open. Not city wind filled with dust, like the dead hopes of people blowing in your face, but clean, open wind like this."

Anne's face lighted with the pleasure of a shared sensation.

"So do I. It seems to blow all the tangles out of the world and give every one a chance to begin again—simply."

"I guess—maybe—that is it—only I hadn't thought of it as a beginning again. It always makes me feel courageous, like plowing straight on through everything, just as it is."

Anne did not look toward him instantly, but she felt him very sharply, so much taller than herself, broad, with that courageous, crisp hair, and his clear blue eyes that could look so different according to his mood. They would be wide and blue now, with a light in them as if Roger were turning it upon this "everything" through which the wind gave him the courage to plunge. He would be looking straight ahead, his chin up, ready. Anne turned a little, and he was looking exactly like that. She felt that she knew him very well, and then, that he was rushing into the wind, away from her, leaving her behind.

"I think you will, because—I don't believe you're ever afraid, are you?"

"No—I don't believe I am. You see," he seemed to be feeling his way carefully through this new experience of dissecting his own impulses, "there is really nothing to be afraid of in the world. Of course there is sickness, but when you're well you don't go about fearing a possible illness; there's hard work, but that's fun."

"There's poverty."

"Yes, I know there is, but, somehow, the poorer I am the freer I feel."

"But it's so ugly—always skimping and twisting and thinking about money. It—it's stifling."

"But you don't stay in a state of poverty for long," Roger laughed. "You get busy getting out of it. But while it lasts there's something exhilarating in being broke and not knowing what's going to happen. You know how it feels on a clear, cold, sunny morning of north wind, when the bay's all white-caps and you can almost see the windows of every house in Oakland? The air seems more alive than at any other time, and everybody goes round with his head up, smiling. Of course the feeling wouldn't last forever, but, for a time—it's like being suddenly freed from all binding restrictions, being lifted from a groove and thrown suddenly out into new possibilities—like being picked up by this wind and carried—off to China. There's something safe—and depressing—about a steady income."

Anne tried to smile in return. But the tissue-wrapped allotments of her childhood were too vivid.

"I don't think it's the having nothing that exhilarated you, it's the excitement of getting the next thing."

Roger stopped and the wind wrapped them about. "I never thought of it that way," he said slowly, "but perhaps it was."

They went on again in a moment, their relation somehow readjusted. Roger felt masculine and dense; Anne protective and feminine. Roger felt her sensitive and intuitive reaction to hidden impulses, and she his need to be looked after.

Anne became conscious of this readjustment first and tried to find an impersonal path back to the reason for having come out at all, but could not. She grew gradually so conscious of the physical motion of walking that she felt she was obeying a natural law as inescapable as the force of gravity. She would put one foot before the other until they had reached the moaning sea two miles away.

By a tremendous effort she stopped. And then the alternative of going back to the house and watching Aunt Het's python-like embrace of Roger in general conversation, emerged from subconsciousness.

"There's an old Indian graveyard back a little; would you like to see it?" Without waiting his agreement, Anne turned into a depression between the dunes and led the way. "When I was a little girl, I used to think this was the most wonderful place in the world. We used to dig up beads and arrow heads and invent the most conventional Indian stories about braves and princesses."

Roger did not answer. The wind swept across the dune tops, leaving them in the warm seclusion of a sandy depression. Anne went lightly just before him, small and silvery blonde, her arms white and quiet by her sides, no physical effort disturbing her swift, quiet way over the shifting sand. A sudden turn brought them to it on a slope above the dunes. Anne stopped and waited for him. Together they climbed the short distance to the small square of parched earth, with its broken fence, once whitewashed, now peeled by sun and wind to leprous patches, like the little wooden crosses that marked the mounds within. At the corners four gaunt gum trees sighed and bent, chieftains wailing the degradation of the Christian burials below. Anne passed through an opening in the fence and Roger followed, tense now with the realization of Anne, of the moaning trees, of the wind searching over the earth, and, far away, the sea crying its everlasting plaint to the rocks.

Up one row and down another they went, Anne trying to read the rain-washed names on the tiny crosses. "You see, many of them were half-breeds, and Father Crowley was the only friend they really had among the whites, and so he managed to baptize most of them and bury them at last with the rites of the Church. I wonder what they really felt while he annointed them."

"Like fakirs, I suppose," Roger said quickly, and moved a little nearer to Anne.

She shook her head. "No, I don't think they felt like that. They're all gone now except one or two, but when I was a little girl there were a lot scattered through these hills, and I knew some of them. One was very old, wrinkled like an oak leaf, with the most piercing black eyes. I used to feel as if he had died, all but his eyes. We called him William Black, but he had a wonderful Indian name we never could pronounce and he would never tell what it meant. Most often, when we asked, he would grunt and walk away, but once he told me that his name was dead, and if he told it, it would come back and kill him. I didn't know what he meant, but now I think he was sad and ashamed of his people and despised us too much to even tell us what he had once meant among them. He was the only Indian I ever heard of who refused to be baptized. Nevertheless, when he died Father Crowley buried him over there. It was really just on the edge of the consecrated ground then, but one night the fence in that corner was broken down, and when they put it up William Black was outside. I think the others were very proud of William, but not so strong as he."

"Very likely," Roger muttered, and stepped nearer still.

She felt him so close that the slightest motion on her part would touch him, strong and alive against this eternal sleep of a dead race.

"On—on—a clear day—you can see the sea—from here, and the spindrift—high as the cliffs—in a rough surf." Her arm, so slim, so white, like a wisp of the fog caught in form, pointed toward the muffled calling.

Leaning over her, Roger's hand closed gently on the cool flesh. He drew her slowly round and they looked silently at each other.

"I think I have always loved you," Roger said at last, like a child, whispering a confession strange to itself, born of the tender knowing in its mother's eyes. He did not understand this thing himself, revealed with such sudden swift quietness, but the earth understood, and the fog, and that old, old race asleep. As if the mist had parted and revealed it to him, so this love was revealed, something concrete in that wind-filled emptiness, something definite and shapeable, a thing he could cup in both hands and offer to Anne.

It had come. Belle had been right and so utterly wrong; Belle, with her cheap experience, her world-eaten deductions from sickness and disease. Roger Barton loved her. The wonder of it held Anne to the exclusion of her own feeling.

Roger dropped her hand and Anne looked up quickly.

"I'm pretty clumsy, Miss Mitchell, but——" the pounding in his throat choked him. A piercing shaft of joy shot through her.

"You're—you're not clumsy at all. And I—I would like to marry you very much."

Sudden awkwardness descended upon them. They looked shyly at each other, Anne waiting for Roger to draw her close and kiss her, Roger a little frightened.

Wasn't he going to kiss her? Chill crept over Anne. And then he was drawing her to him. The surface of her body broke into tiny pricks of excitement, triumph, awe. She could feel his breath on her face, see the inevitable approach of his lips. Now he was too near to see. His lips were on hers. Suddenly, driven by the need to reach through to something beyond them both, Anne returned their pressure. Roger felt their clinging with faint surprise, deep tenderness and awe.

CHAPTER FIVE

The following morning Anne and Roger went back to town. They strolled up Market Street to Third and Kearney and there Anne stopped.

"Wilmot & Brown, you said. They're on Mission, aren't they?"

Roger looked puzzled, until he recalled the position he had found for Anne, and laughed. "You're not going to bother with that now."

"I certainly am. Why not?"

"You're engaged."

Anne giggled. "Not yet. I haven't seen them."

"I'm not joking. Listen." He drew her to a doorway from the hurrying stream. "Don't, dear, please. I don't like to think of you tied down in an office, and anyhow it's not worth while. We're going to be married soon."

Anne looked away confused, partly because of the strange feeling it gave to realize herself engaged, partly at the imminence of the wonderful, new experience of matrimony waiting her; and, beyond her own acknowledgment in words, curiosity as to how Roger planned to marry without a position. In the sweet intimacy of the trip from Quincy, Roger had talked of the future, a future that exhilarated and frightened Anne in its possibility.

"We're going to live for something worth while," Roger had said, "and live for it with every scrap of the stuff that's in us."

Anne's eyes came back to him with a tender smile.

"But we're not going to be married to-day. Besides, I——" Anne had not spoken much of her family yet, but at these definite words of Roger's about marrying, Anne realized what a difference it would make when her income into the house had stopped, especially to many little pleasures she had accustomed her mother. "There are lots of things I want to get and—and—I like to work, really I do."

Roger frowned. "Will you promise to quit the instant I ask you to?"

Anne laughed. "Are you always going to boss me round like this?"

Roger's hand slipped into hers. "No. Because we're going to want to do the same things."

The future was going to be very wonderful.

"And I'm going to do some of the wanting and you're going to do some of the meek and mutual obeying?" she teased, and wished they were alone so that Roger could kiss her. Instead he dropped her hand and looked down seriously.

"Do you mean, honestly, that you would rather work until we marry? I never want to try to persuade you to do anything against a real inclination."

Anne knew that her puckered brows and serious lips were weighing, to Roger, hesitation between her own preference and the dislike of going counter to this, his first expressed request. But behind them the thought clicked away that Roger himself could solve the problem by accepting the opening of private secretary to Hilary Wainwright, a millionaire ship owner and philanthropist, who had offered him the place as soon as he heard that Roger had left John Lowell. But Roger was not quite sure that he believed in Wainwright or that he wanted the place. The tick, tick, kept saying: "Take the place for a beginning and we can marry to-morrow."

"Yes, dear, I think I do," she said at last, and added gayly, "Now, where is Wilmot & Brown?"

They walked east to Mission Street and stopped before the building.

"I'll wait here twenty minutes. If you don't turn up I'll know you're taken."

He sought her hands, and linked, they smiled at each other until a passing man turned to look again, when Anne snatched her hands away, and with a whispered, "Good-by, dear," hurried into the building.

Roger waited half an hour and then went, disappointed.

Every noon hour Roger was waiting for Anne and they had lunch together at a nearby cafeteria which Anne insisted was the only kind of place she liked for lunch. For the rest of the hour they strolled on the sunny side of the street, or, if it were raw and foggy, sought some sheltered bench in one of the small plazas and talked. Roger usually did most of the talking, a running commentary on the people they passed, which linked the individuals up to society as a whole. Roger was always seeing people whom he pitied; starved, eager souls, thwarted longings, stunted minds, drudges in a mill whose working they did not understand, whose spiritual profits they did not share. When he pointed out these people and qualities to Anne, she understood, because she too had felt stifled and thwarted and full of vague, high longing. But she never quite understood how Roger understood, because he never seemed to long vaguely, nor to feel suppressed or driven. As the days slipped into weeks, Anne came to feel that there was a surplus of some qualities in Roger over and above the sum of those same qualities in herself. She had ideals and courage and faith, but his ideals were sharper before him, his courage deeper, his faith firmer.

Roger never doubted the best within himself, nor allowed a nervous over-conscientiousness to distort a quality into its reverse. If he had had a family, he long ago would have told them of his engagement, while Anne could not yet make up her mind what to do. Sometimes she saw her hesitancy as loyalty to Roger, because neither her father nor her mother would understand Roger or his standards. At others she felt that it was her own need for harmony and peace in the life about her, a need so deepgrown that it was a weakness in its inability to risk disturbance. And she knew how her father would accept a son-in-law who had no position, who talked of the world's misery as if it really did matter to him personally, who dallied with the prospect of a private secretaryship at fifty dollars a week to begin with because he could not quite prove to himself Hilary Wainwright's sincerity.

Sometimes, after an irritating day in the office, when old Mr. Wilmot dictated worse than usual and, on rehearing the letters, declared he had never used those words at all, Roger's begging to be allowed to come up in the evening and meet her people annoyed Anne almost to the point of confessing the main difficulty.

It was at the end of such a day, more than a month after she had promised to marry Roger, that she came down from the office almost wishing Roger would not be waiting. It was a June day of clear sunshine, but with a gusty wind straight from the ocean. The air was filled with dust that seeped through clothing and got into one's eyes and mouth and scratched one's nerves to snapping. But Roger was there, holding his hat on with one hand and making his happy little gesture of welcome with the other. Anne tried to smile cheerfully, but it was difficult with dust blowing into her face and a wind whipping her skirt about her. Roger came up quickly and took her arm.

"You mite of a thing. It always astonishes me to think of you getting about by yourself."

Anne was glad that a gust forced her to duck at that moment so that Roger did not see her unsmiling eyes. She was tired, sick of getting around by herself, of being respectful to that impossible old Mr. Brown, of keeping exact hours, every one a tiny bit snatched from the happy future of which Roger was so sure. It was one thing to refuse to work with John Lowell, or in the law at all because it was corrupt and unjust, but it was—to-night anyhow—just a bit overstrained to dally about over the possible insincerity of Hilary Wainwright. Whatever the man might be, at least he was doing real things for civic betterment, the kind of thing Roger seemed to believe in. If Hilary Wainwright's methods were not exactly Roger's, still it was an attempt. And she and Roger could marry.

They had crossed the street and now, in the temporary protection of a high building, were safe for a few moments from the wind. Anne could not go on with her head bent. She looked up into Roger's smiling eyes and succeeded in smiling back. His fingers closed over hers and drew her closer to him.

"You mite," he whispered, "you little, silvery-gold princess. When we're married I'm afraid I'll worry every time you're out of my sight."

"That'll be nice," Anne said a little sharply, but she was very tired.

Roger looked down quickly.

"Anne, when are you going to tell your people? It makes me feel as if you weren't sure yourself. You said at first that you wanted to 'gloat' all by yourself; that's very flattering and I believe it when we're together, but, sometimes after I've left you, I feel—Anne, you are sure, aren't you?"

"Of course I am."

"Don't they expect you ever to marry?"

"Why, I suppose so. We never talked about it."

"Is it me, 'specially, they would object to?"

For a moment Anne hesitated. At last he was giving her the chance. Should she take it? But before she could quite make up her mind Roger was pleading again, and suddenly Anne felt her strength exhausted. She would not evade or pretend any more. It might as well come now as later.

"All right, dear, if you feel that way. Come up to-night."

Roger gave her fingers a quick grip, and they stepped from the protection of the buildings into a side crossing. The wind tore at them. Bent against it, they reached the opposite curb. In that interval Anne felt the matter had been settled beyond change.

"I think I'll take the car here. It's useless trying to walk in this wind."

Just then Anne's car came into sight. They hurried out into the street and Roger helped her through the crush about the steps. It was nice to have Roger making a way for her, to feel the strong, sure lift of his hand under her arm, to feel herself swung up by such a small expenditure of his strength. Now that the decision was made, Anne was glad. After all, no matter what the conditions, her people would have found some objection. Clinging to the hand-strap almost beyond her reach, Anne went over the best ways of opening the subject to them.

But in the end Anne did not open it. She was catapulted from an unusually pleasant meal, straight into it, by a chance remark of her father's.

"I see there's likely to be another street railway strike," he remarked. "They were running provisions into the carbarn as I passed."

"Well, now, that will be a nuisance." Hilda beamed round the table. Any general conversations at dinner always made her feel that they were, after all, a closely knit family. "Thank goodness, I don't have to go on a car to do any shopping, although those Saturday sales at the Sunset Market are quite a save."

"Didn't the company promise the men not to push that matter of open shop until the year was up?" Anne, like her mother, was glad of any general conversation, and had no intention of bringing down the wrath of her father. But he peered at her suddenly over the top of his steel-rimmed glasses.

"What if they did? How long do you think the men would have kept their agreement not to agitate a strike if they had been in a position to call one?"

Anne felt herself chill; a thin surface of frost seemed to cover her as it always did when her father talked like this. But she did not want to anger him and so she said quietly:

"I don't know. But I would like to think that there was a little decency and honesty in the world. There must be."

"Well, it's not among labor agitators, let me tell you that. A greedy, selfish lot, out for what they can get. They won't take a job and stick to it themselves and so they try to stir up others to quit."

"But they couldn't stir the others up all the time, if the others didn't really want to be stirred. Something is wrong and people feel it."

When James Mitchell delivered an opinion he did not expect to be answered, much less argued with. He turned swiftly upon Anne.

"What's that? Who feels things are wrong?"

"A lot of people feel things are unjust and wrong and that something has to be done. They may not be clear as to exactly what it is or how they're going to do it, but they know there's trouble somewhere." The icy veneer deepened, but Anne held her ground.

"Who? A lot of Jews and foreigners who never had enough to eat in their own country. The trouble with this country is that the natives are too good-natured. They won't realize the harm these fools are doing until it's done. They ought to be deported now, every last one of them."

Anne nibbled at her lip and did not trust herself to speak. But she saw Roger, his eyes deep and sad, watching some weary soul in a city park.

"I think papa's right, Anne. It is mostly foreigners that do the kicking. Not the blonde kind. Danes and Swedes are hard workers, but Jews and Dagos are always fussing. Don't you remember that Greek, Kapoulos, who lived over Martini's after The Fire, always haranguing about justice and fair play, and the first chance he got he ran off with the firm's funds and went to Greece?"

James shrugged Hilda's efforts aside and leaned across to Anne.

"Let me tell you one thing, Annie; these theories won't hold water, socialism and I. W. W.-ism and all the other fire-eating babble. And they'll never be put into practice, because, at bottom, the working man is too smart and he knows he'd lose his job if he tried them, and then where'd he be?"

James whisked the tail of this inverted logic in Anne's face and waited triumphantly. But Anne did not see the narrow, tired face, the small work-weakened eyes of her father. She saw Roger, hunching toward John Lowell.

"But men do give up their jobs for their beliefs; not unskilled laborers, but professional men who have spent years getting their preparation."

"Bunk! You talk like a romantic school girl. Show me one professional man, likely to succeed in his line, and show me him quitting."

"I will," Anne spoke with difficulty, "to-night. Roger Barton is coming up this evening."

"Now, I am glad of that," Hilda breathed a sigh of relief. "I wish you would have more company, Anne. It's not my fault the place is not filled with young folks."

"Who's he?" James demanded.

"The man I'm engaged to." It was scarcely more than a whisper.

At last Anne looked up, from one to the other. Her mother sat, the look of pleasure at the prospect of young company frozen in her eyes. Her father peered forward, still amused at her childishness, triumphant at his own logic.

"What say?" He too whispered. "You're engaged!"

Anne rose. Sitting, she felt the coming struggle closing down upon her.

"Yes. I am engaged to Roger Barton and we'll be married as soon as he gets a job."

"You're engaged to a man without a job! A fool, that throws up a profession—fine profession it must have been—and then asks a girl from a decent home to marry him!"

There was a silence, filled by small, clicking noises from Hilda. Then James Mitchell rose too, and with the evening paper screwed to a ferule, banged his ultimatum upon the table.

"No damned skunk like that comes into this house, not if I know it. Do you hear? What you do outside the house I can't help, and I'm not fool enough to suppose I can. I never did have any say in this house, nor about you girls. But I'll have my say about this thing and now. If this fellow thinks he's going to sneak into this house and have me support him, he's going to get left. Go ahead. Marry him; a man that asks a girl to wait till he gets a job! Have half a dozen kids and then sneer at the state of the world and a steady job." His rising voice reached a thin scream. "Do you hear? That blackguard never enters this door."

Anne looked at him, gray, thin, raging, and a sudden pity mingled with her anger. He was so tightly locked within his fear of life, his terror of all strange ways and wide roads, all experience that had not been his. In that moment, Anne's feeling for her father parted in clearer strands than she had ever seen it. She scorned and pitied and disliked him.

Without another word, Anne went into the hall, took the receiver from the hook, and called Roger's number. In the momentary silence until she got it, she felt the two gray-headed people peering at her, like animals from a hole.

"Yes, it's Anne. I don't think you can come up to-night, dear. I twisted my foot getting off the car and it's swelling. I'm going straight to bed."

Not even Roger's genuine concern, nor his loving good-night penetrated the icy calm that encased her. She hung up, and, without looking toward the dining-room, went down the hall to her own room and locked the door. Dressed, she lay upon the bed, staring up through the window to the stars.

She did not know what time it was when her mother came tapping gently at the door. But she did not open, and, after a moment, heard her tiptoe away.

Out on the back porch, Hilda Mitchell stood for a long time looking out over the city lights and trying to straighten her world so suddenly upheaved by Anne. But the fact of the engagement loomed like a blank wall before her and finally she gave up. With a sigh she went in, locked the back door and, without turning on the bedroom light, undressed and got into bed. Beside her the small gray man huddled under the clothes, but, by his stillness Hilda knew that he was not asleep.

"Papa, I wish you wouldn't be so harsh with Anne. Young folks can't be expected to think ahead like old folks. Anne's not flighty or silly like most girls. She won't do anything foolish."

"She can't—after this. My God, what a mess you've made of bringing up those girls! Belle was always an obstinate, headlong piece but—little—Annie——"

"Now, papa. Have patience."

"Oh, shut up. It's no good talking to you." James Mitchell turned on his side and drew the clothes high about his shoulders.

For a long time, Hilda lay beside him, thinking. Then, she, too, sighed and turned over.

Life would have been a simple thing to Hilda Mitchell if it had not been for her family.

CHAPTER SIX

"You didn't hurt your foot after all?"

"No. I didn't hurt it. I didn't want you to come and it was the first thing I thought of."

Roger crumbled his bread on the cloth and waited. Anne tried to go on calmly with her lunch, but she felt her face flushing and she knew Roger was watching her, his eyes growing sterner, his mouth settling in that straight line. She felt like a trapped animal, caught between a quixotic pity of her people, a pity seen most clearly in moments when Anne detested it most, and her longing to have Roger confess, unaided by an explanation, the understanding she was sure he had. But Roger sat on silent, waiting.

Before the strong, free youth of Roger, her father and mother shrank, small, aging, pitiful. Little gray things, scuttling over the surface of their flat, uninteresting world, never looking up, their worried little eyes fastened on their own food and shelter. Units, among incalculable millions of others, all frightened, worried, and avid of personal comfort. To explain was to strip them bare, tear off the meager covering of their self-respect, expose their one pride in all its narrow rigidity.

At last Anne put down her knife and fork and looked at Roger.

"Roger, you asked me to trust you, yesterday. Won't you trust me? You're right, I was not ill. Something did happen and I couldn't have you come."

But no generous yielding softened Roger's eyes.

"It's different, Anne. Yesterday, when I asked you to have faith in me, it was a question between ourselves. But this—there are others. I feel surrounded by enemies. I don't even know which side——"

He bit the sentence, but Anne finished it for him.

"——I am on."

"Because you're not being open with me."

"Neither are you being honest. You do know, but you want to force me to say."

Anne's lip trembled and Roger looked quickly away. In this, their first misunderstanding, Roger wanted no emotional element to enter.

"Yes, I think I do. Your people don't approve of me. You've always known it and that's why you didn't tell them. Why did you pretend it was any other? I wouldn't have minded the truth."

"No, because you would scarcely recognize their existence as human beings. They are of the 'spiritual bourgeoisie.' They are of the great, spiritual middle class you despise so much."

Roger flushed. Anne went on:

"But they are my people. I live with them. I don't share their standards. My brain despises their outlook on life. I can't help knowing what their reactions will be. My father is bigoted and selfish and, on the whole, rather mean. Sometimes, he is jolly and kind and a little more tolerant, usually when a bet goes well. He is a clerk, a corporation clerk, in body and soul. But he is a victim, too, of the smallness of his own soul, just as much as the men who can't get work are victims of 'the system.' And mamma——" Anne held her voice steady by an effort, "I wouldn't hurt mamma for the world, or make things more uncomfortable for her. In time——" but the tears welled over and ran down Anne's cheeks.

Roger gripped her hand. "Don't, Princess, please don't. I was a brute. I do understand, better than you think. But I hate meeting you round in parks and public places, sneaking as if there were something to be ashamed of. Last night, I wanted to sit close to you, in some warm, comfortable room, like a human being."

Anne's lips moved in a warped smile. "You wouldn't have sat in a comfortable room. It's one of the ugliest rooms I have ever seen. There's a crayon portrait of a brother papa always hated and won't have removed, and they would have watched us through hideous chenille portières. That is, mamma would; papa would have pretended to read, in a chair fixed so he could see us in the mantel glass. It would have been ghastly."

Roger smiled, but his fingers held Anne's more firmly. "My high-strung, beauty-loving Princess. We'll never have an ugly thing in the house, will we?"

Anne shook her head. "No. We'll have nothing in it at all, rather than that."

"Oh, it won't be as bad as that," Roger laughed.

"I don't care, Roger. Really I——"

Two people took the vacant places at the same table, so, in a few moments, Anne and Roger finished and went. It was another day of sunshine and dusty wind.

"I don't feel parky, to-day, do you? Then let's walk." Anne turned north and Roger walked close beside her.

They walked slowly, Anne tingling with consciousness of Roger's nearness, and of their isolation from others, in a new understanding that had come to them. All these hurrying strangers were the world, flowing around the little island on which she and Roger stood alone.

Block after block they walked in a silence rhythmic with shared dreams and hopes that seemed to throb in unison with the perfect harmony of their step.

Roger spoke first: "There was another call from Wainwright this morning while I was out and he left word for me to see him this afternoon."

"I guess he wants a decision," Anne said casually.

"Yes. Yes, that's it, no doubt."

"Don't do anything you don't want to do." Anne's voice was even, indifferent to the issue. Roger pressed her arm.

"Anne, you're a trump. The grandest little chum a fellow ever had."

Anne nodded valiantly. "And some hiker. Look where we've walked to. Clear out to the City Hall."

"So we have! It didn't seem but a few blocks, did it?" Roger looked so bewildered at the sight of the City Hall just before him, that Anne laughed.

"Seeming is not being. There it is and I'll have to take a car right straight back."

She moved, but suddenly Roger's hand held her arm and, at the strange look on his face, Anne's eyes grew serious.

"Princess, let's go over and get the license now. It doesn't mean much—but I would like to feel we'd gotten that far."

"Why! Roger! Now, this minute?"

Roger nodded. "Will you, dear?"

Under his look, Anne colored. She tried to say something flippant but could not.

"All right," she whispered finally.

They crossed the street and went up the steps into the rather dirty corridor, along which fat, red-faced politicians and young clerks hurried. In the license office, a bored clerk, just about to leave for his delayed lunch, rushed them through the questions. Anne held up her right hand and swore. Then Roger. The clerk scribbled in the answers. Roger paid the fee. They turned away, as legally two as when they had entered.

But to Anne, something had happened, so that never again would she be the Anne Mitchell who had come up the steps only a few moments before. All the weeks of her hidden secret had not made her feel so irrevocably Roger's as this: a few stereotyped questions gabbled by a bored clerk, the unimportant fact of her age sworn to with ridiculous solemnity. The personal quality of her secret had been hers, even through the ordeal with her parents, but now, it was not hers any longer. It had been given to the world. This bored, gum-chewing clerk had placarded her name and Roger's for the world to see. She and Roger were now tagged and listed, in orthodox fashion, for the great event of matrimony. She began to tremble.

"Let's—do the—rest—now."

"Anne!" A lump rushed to Roger's throat and he could say no more. Then, hand in hand, like two children, they crossed the corridor to the judge's chambers.

In ten minutes it was over, witnessed by a stenographer and the janitor called in from the hall. The judge made his mechanical speech of congratulation, which neither heard nor waited for him to finish. Silent, they walked down the stairs and out into the sunny, dust-filled wind.

"What—what would you like to do?" Roger felt as if he had suddenly been left alone in a strange situation with a strange woman.

Anne wanted to cry. "Are—are—you sorry?" she demanded almost angrily.

"Why, sweetheart!" But the thing he had just done was touching Roger to a seriousness beyond his power to treat gayly.

"Only, we can't go away very well till to-morrow and——"

Anne tried to catch the words fluttering about her like bits of paper in the wind, but the realization that she was now married, that all the rest of her life she would come and go, eat and sleep, share the thoughts of the man beside her, paralyzed her power to think or move. She could not even look at Roger.

"I'm—going—back to work," she managed at last.

"You are not. Not for a single minute."

The tone left no alternative. Anne thrilled.

"But I can't leave them like this—without notice."

"You're going to do just that. I'll phone Wilmot. It'll be all right."

Anne looked at him with a shy smile. Roger pressed her arm.

"You're mine now, Princess," he whispered. "And to-morrow we'll go away into the mountains."

Anne nodded, and then there was nothing small and unimportant to say. They stood in a self-conscious silence that had the separating quality of space, until Anne broke it:

"I—think—I'll go home now."

"Just as you like, sweetheart." The relief in Roger's tone disappointed, although Anne did not know what she had expected. An unending stream of cars all going in the wrong direction passed. They were both glad of the clanging noise and the wind which made speech difficult and filled the silence between them.

At last the right car came and they hurried out into the roadway. As Roger helped her in, he whispered:

"Till to-morrow—little wife."

The crowd on the step jostled her forward, the conductor, like a specialized machine, bellowed his—"Step forward. Fare please. Step forward. Plenty of room in the front of the car."

Through the jam on the back platform Anne looked back and glimpsed Roger, already hurrying away, holding to his hat. A strange mingling of fear and exultation rushed over her.

"Mrs. Roger Barton."

She tried to think of it calmly, as indifferently as any one of the strangers in the car would have thought of it, but the realization danced like electricity along her nerves.

Three-quarters of an hour later, Roger accepted the position of private secretary to Hilary Wainwright, at fifty a week, the work to begin in two weeks.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The next afternoon while Anne packed her trunk, her mother kept wandering to the door and gazing in the puzzled excitement of a child who encounters something pleasant, but so extraordinary and unexpected that its delight is lost in bewilderment—like being confronted with a Christmas tree on the Fourth of July. Without turning from her task, Anne felt her come, stare, decide to say something and go, unable to express her thought.

At last the trunk was packed, locked and corded. Anne rose and smiled at her mother, again in the doorway.

"By the look on your face, one would think you had never expected me to marry."

Hilda came in and sat on the bed-edge. "Of course, I did, Annie. I wouldn't like either of you girls to be old maids. Women have a lot to put up with either way, married or single. But you have certainly rushed right along. First you quit a good job, dash off to a place where there isn't a man for miles and come home engaged; don't tell a soul for weeks and then marry in the lunch hour. I feel all upside-down."

Anne patted her knee. "Well, you'll get right side up again before I come back and then we'll have some good times, momsy."

Hilda's pleasure at the prospect vanished almost instantly.

"What papa will say, I'm sure I don't know."

"Shall I write him a note? I will, if it will make things easier. I don't want to upset him needlessly, for your sake. But he wouldn't be any better if he had a month to think about it."

"I know. But then, you must make allowances, Anne. At our ages we can't shift round so quick as you young folks, and papa thinks——"

"I know what papa thinks. Let's not go into that. But I don't, and, as I am the one marrying, papa's opinion doesn't matter. Besides, you know, I can get a job any day. I don't have to sit at home and be supported."

"Now see here, Anne, you may be a lot smarter than I ever was, but I'm older than you, and one thing I've learnt, if nothing else, it doesn't pay for a woman to work after she's married. A man may pretend he doesn't want her to and all that, but he gets used to it mighty soon and takes it for granted. And no woman can do it—keep a home and work and have babies. Just wait till some morning when you feel sick and have to go out as usual. Why, when Belle was coming, I couldn't lift up my head till ten o'clock. I——"

Anne turned quickly and began putting some things in a handbag. In a few moments Hilda wandered back again from her own first confinement to Anne's marriage.

"And to think you were married yesterday and came home here as cool as you please. Now when I was young, if a girl had done a thing like that it would have been thought wicked, although I don't know but what it is a good thing for the man. It's just as well to keep them waiting as long as you can. Besides, an hotel room, just an ordinary room where the man's been living right along, seems kind of—coarse."

Anne's flaming face bent lower over the grip. There was a short silence. Then Hilda whispered:

"Annie—is there—anything—you would like to know?"

Anne did not even shake her head. She had felt like this once, strengthless in disgust, when Belle had persisted in showing her the colored illustration of a disease in its worst stage. At last she succeeded in turning to her mother.

"I'm going to phone for the taxi, now, mamma, and we'll have a cup of tea before it comes."

"I'll put the kettle right on." Hilda bustled away, relieved. For she had always found it a little difficult to enlighten Anne and had a vague idea that it would have been easier if Anne had been a brunette. Certain simple truths had a way of splattering all over Anne's fairness, and making Hilda uncomfortable.

"Oh, well, I dare say she knows more than I did at her age; everything's different than it used to be, anyhow."

With this large, comforting deduction, Hilda began to make the tea. They drank it in a constrained effort on Anne's part to keep the conversation general, and finished just as the taxi driver rang the bell. The little trunk went bobbing down the stairs; Hilda took Anne in her arms and they clung together, not crying, but very quiet.

"There, dear, I must run, and you can say I eloped and phoned you afterwards, or anything that comes handiest."

"Oh, I'm not going to lie about it. It's done now. Besides, papa's bark's a lot worse than his bite. He'll be decent when you get back."

Anne kissed her mother and ran quickly down the stairs, waved from the door and shut it behind her. As the taxi drove off, she looked back, but Hilda was not at the window. Anne's eyes clouded.

"Dear old moms. She does annoy me sometimes, but she has had a hard time. I'm going to see that it's better in the future."

And then Anne forgot all about her old home, and sat nervous and very timid on the edge of the taxi seat.

At dawn, Roger and Anne went down to the lake edge. In the east, the cold, night gray was melting in green and silver pools. Not a sound. Not a ripple on the surface of the lake. Beyond the lower hills, granite mountains rose, peak upon peak, to the snow-covered barrier beyond which the world lay. They stood silent, hand in hand, part of the eternal youth of the dew-drenched earth.

Behind the towering mountains were cities and hurrying men. Anne knew it because they had passed through them the night before, but it was hard to remember and impossible to visualize. This was the core of the world, calm, absolute in its perfect understanding, untouched by hurry or man's confusion.

Anne pressed closer to Roger and he put his arm about her.

The green and silver pools brightened with the coming light; a faint, crimson glow, herald of the day, spread its warmth for the advance of the sun, and then, suddenly, a great jolly sun looked over the rim of the world and laughed at them. They laughed back.

"The old fool thinks he's surprised us. As if we didn't know he was there and going to do exactly that."

Anne made a face at the sun, just as the breakfast bell at the ranch rang for the milkers' breakfast.

Hand in hand, they turned from the lake. The sun was already well over the mountain top. The herald had rolled his crimson carpet and gone. Day had come.

"I suppose a dewdrop should be meal enough, but I hope it's at least bacon and eggs and pancakes."

"With cereal and cream first," Anne laughed.

Roger squeezed her hand. "I'm awfully glad, Mrs. Barton, that you suggested marrying me."

"Always take my suggestions. You'll find they will always be right, even if I do say so," Anne teased.

"Not a doubt of it." Roger stopped and took Anne in his arms. Tenderness beyond passion was in his hold. "Princess—it's—so good to be alive and love you."

Day after day, deeper and deeper in their understanding, Anne and Roger wandered in the hills. Icy streams tumbled roaring through granite gorges, suddenly emerged to wide sunny meadows, and spread in flat stillness. The fat, black earth of the lower mountains thinned to sheer granite slopes, where sparse trees grew miraculously in tiny crevices, their roots hanging like ropes from the cliffs.

They sat by the lake, which, beginning a hundred yards from the ranch, stretched to the blue distance of the hills. The lake fascinated Anne. No fish swam in it, no birds alighted upon it, the wind seemed scarcely to ruffle its terrible stillness. No one drank of its water. No one swam in it. No craft sailed it. In its own brackish depths, it hid the reason of its existence. No one knew how many centuries it had lain there, acrid, wide, as indifferent to man's need as man to its uselessness. "The lake," the rancher and his wife spoke as if it were a person who had committed some unmentionable crime and been banished from human intercourse because of it. There were legends that, ages ago, the Indians had worshipped a god living far out in its bitter depth. But now, they were afraid of it. The Christian God had stolen their god and given them fear. But the lake was as indifferent to this Christ as it had been to their pagan deity. It needed neither god nor man.

They talked and were still. They were very near.

At the end of the second week, the first sheep-man came. Early in the morning, Anne and Roger were waked by the baaing of the lambs, a piercing wail of terror, as of children pursued by a malignant force. They went quickly to the window. Hundreds of gray, dusty sheep were coming up the road. Every now and then they stopped to nibble the thick, sweet grass. But the dogs, at a call from the shepherd, ran among them and with uncanny knowledge, drove them on. Bleating, they obeyed. The rancher hurried out and opened the gate. The dogs began to maneuver them through. Behind the band, the shepherd came, carrying a lamb in his arms.

"A hierarchy of authority," Roger said. "The shepherd directs the dogs, the dogs drive the sheep."

At last they were all safely through and the gate closed. In a few moments, the bleating was over. The sheep were contentedly munching the lush grass.

"They are like people. A moment ago and they seemed really to have some definite point of view. They wanted to do something. And now, they've forgotten what it was. They'll eat the meadow flat and then the dogs and the shepherd will drive them on, and they'll rebel and yield and eat another meadow flat—and go on—and on."

Anne patted his hand, resting on her breast. Roger was always seeing things so, analogies between animals and mountains and trees and people. Nothing was just itself to Roger, but always a picture of something else. It made Anne very tender and filled her with the same sense of deep protectiveness that a child's belief in fairies does; a gladness, touched faintly with wistful envy and regret that faith must go.

As they sat down to breakfast they realized a new feeling of bustle and industry in the air. The sheep had come. Soon tourists would follow. Automobiles would pass, meals would be called for at all hours. The rancher and his wife talked of rooms to be opened, supplies brought up from cellars, bedding aired. Roger and Anne sat silent, as silent as the dark Indian girl who served them.

The rancher ate quickly and went. In a moment his wife followed. They crossed the rear yard and disappeared in a storehouse. Roger looked at Anne and sighed.

"I suppose it's the end. The place will be all cluttered up with people soon."

"I suppose it will. It's been perfect, hasn't it?"

Roger's hand moved over and took hers. "Absolutely perfect. We——"

A note so clear, so sweet, so rounded that it seemed to be the spirit of the earth slipping into sound, stole into the room.

"Oh!" Anne whispered and held fast to Roger's hand.

The Indian girl straightened and stood listening. A brightness flashed over the brown silence of her face and vanished as she moved noiselessly to the door and passed through. Outside, in the sun-filled meadow, the Basque shepherd stood among his sheep, his arms raised, a little wooden flute to his lips. Once more he sounded the clear, sweet call and then, at the sight of the girl, the happiness of the whole earth came rippling and dancing from his flute.

For a moment, the girl remained motionless on the doorstep. Then, without a sign of recognition, glided away toward the dense high reeds of the lake edge. Still playing, the Basque shepherd moved after her through the munching sheep. At the edge of the reeds, the music stopped. He parted them and they closed, thick and blank, behind him.

That evening, Roger and Anne took their last walk. They walked far along the lake, until a chill little wind crept out from the cañons, a jealous little wind, guarding the tremendous silence of the night from these paltry, human intruders.

Roger and Anne turned back. The sheep were huddled a dark mass in the corner of the meadow. Over the embers of a campfire, the Basque herder and two half-breed milkers were playing cards. Against the door of her whitewashed shack the Indian girl leaned, her black hair in two great braids to her waist, facing toward the glow of the dying fire. As Anne and Roger crossed the front yard, she slipped inside and closed the door.

The rotation of the days had fulfilled its promise. The perfect had come to its own end. Anne lay in Roger's arms.

"I always felt there was something perfect somewhere," she whispered.

Roger drew her closer to him.

"I love you, I love you, I love you," he answered hotly. Anne's arms closed about him. Through the force sweeping him, almost to unconsciousness of Anne as a separate body, he felt her lips, warm, soft, as eager as his own.

CHAPTER EIGHT

In the next weeks, it seemed to Anne that the world had been recreated while she and Roger loved by the lake. The old world of definite working hours, through which strangers claimed her physical energy and brain, as deeply strangers one day as the next; the old family life of repression, grown unconscious from habit; minute but never ceasing spiritual adjustment, strengthless rebellions against habits set in steel bands before one awakened to their cramping horror, all had dissolved in a community of interest in a larger and much simpler world.

In this world, men and women tried to increase happiness. They worked with ideas; many ideas and many people striving to embody them in form. Often in the mornings, after Anne had watched Roger vanish round the corner of the street far below, she continued to stand on the porch of the little cottage they had found on a rocky crag that rose from the grass-grown cobbles to a view of the bay and Tamalpais. It was like her inner life here, high above the confusions of her mother's muddled thinking, her father's petulance, Belle's brutal experience. Above the confusion of The Niche, the unironed laundry, the unreasoned bursts of Hilda's extravagances, the intrusion of uninteresting gossip. The three white-painted rooms with their sweep of bay and hills, close to the stars at night, walled from the city below by the spicy fragrance of a tangled garden, was another world.

Anne dreaded anything that might disturb its peace. No discordant note must enter the full day, when alone in her new home, she made it beautiful, or prepared for the guests Roger like to ask to dinner; nor the pleasant evenings when she and Roger read or talked before the fire, or went to the many meetings included in Roger's duty as Wainwright's secretary.

But, at the end of two months, when Anne realized that this guarding of her new peace had excluded her family, that neither Belle nor her father had seen the place at all, and her mother only once, she was ashamed and decided to ask all three to dinner the first night Belle could take off and to make a little celebration of the occasion. On the next Thursday evening, when Roger was at a conference with Hilary Wainwright, Anne went especially to arrange the night.

"Well! I was just wishing you'd phone or something!" Hilda hurried half-way down the stairs to meet Anne and walked back with her arm about her daughter's waist. "It was kind of lonesome to-night and I was just thinking of running down to Mrs. Welles for a minute, but this is the night she goes to church and it didn't seem worth while. I am glad." Hilda hugged her effusively; for, although Anne had made it a rule to go home once a week, if only for a few moments late in the afternoon, Hilda greeted each visit with such amazed admiration that Anne had been able to include it among the many responsibilities of her new life.

For Hilda was now very deeply impressed with Roger's importance as the private secretary of a millionaire. Millionaire philanthropists had not existed in Hilda's knowledge of the social structure and Roger's close connection with one filled her with awe. The status of Hilary Wainwright in the financial world had done much, also, to reconcile James. And when, one day, shortly after Anne's marriage, he had chanced to see Roger in earnest talk with the president of the Coast Electric, James Mitchell had accepted Roger, in no generous apology to Anne for his attitude the last night before her marriage, but in a thinly veiled eagerness to know all about the schemes of the great man.

Anne despised herself for yielding to this curiosity, but it was so much pleasanter when things moved smoothly, that she catered just a little to him. She admitted him, without apparent consciousness of his real purpose, to the projects of Hilary Wainwright for increasing the total of human happiness. She threw off carelessly such phrases as: "welding of classes," "the larger democracy," "the obligations of wealth"; phrases which James Mitchell heard with satisfaction, as he might have observed the social minutiæ of a class above him. As working theories he did not visualize them at all, but it gave him a feeling of Roger and Anne—hence vaguely himself—moving in high places.

To-night he was specially interested, for the papers were full of some scheme of Wainwright's for getting sugar more cheaply to the market from his plantations in Hawaii. In the office, James Mitchell had spoken with authority upon the subject that very afternoon, and had enjoyed the respectful attention of the other clerks.

He accepted the invitation with such unusual grace that Anne was ashamed for him; but when, a little later, as she said good-by to her mother in the hall and Hilda whispered: "It will be a great occasion for us, Annie. I never saw him so delighted," Anne forgave him. Her mother had so few pleasures and this mood of her father's was almost as great an event as the dinner itself. "I don't believe he remembers a word he said that night," Hilda went on in the same confidential whisper as she went with Anne down the stairs. "Anyhow he's never said another thing about objecting and now—everything's going to be lovely. I feel it in my bones. But three extra to dinner! I'm afraid it will make a lot of extra work for you."

"Now, mamma, don't be silly. Besides, you haven't the least idea what a fine cook I am."

"I don't doubt it a bit. Any one who can get up a dinner for a millionaire! Goodness, I should be scared to death."

"Oh, Mr. Wainwright's simple. Roger says his god is simplicity." But as Anne herself was not quite sure how Roger sometimes meant this, she hurried over the puzzled stare in her mother's eyes. "Next Wednesday at seven."

Hilda sparkled. She had never eaten later than six and the fashionable, if inconvenient hour, clinched her belief in Roger's efficiency.

"I'll finish my new waist for the occasion and see that papa gets a good shave."

She went as far as the street corner with Anne and gave her an extra hug.

"Going to dinner with my married daughter. Why, I feel like a young girl going to her first dance."

Anne kissed her. "You dear thing, you're going to eat a lot of meals of your daughter's contriving only—don't expect too much this first time. In spite of my boasting, I'm not always absolutely sure, especially about salad dressing and gravy."

"I'll take a chance." Hilda nodded, her eyes so bright, that Anne drew her quickly back and kissed her again.

"Don't forget, seven sharp."

"We'll be there in cap and bells, never fear."

She stood on the pavement until Anne had disappeared, then went smiling back to the flat. Hilda Mitchell was indeed deeply grateful for her daughter's happiness. In spite of her denial of the fear that Anne might have been an old maid, she had never been quite sure of Anne's powers of attraction. Anne was so "highfalutin'," what Belle called a "spiritual aristocrat"; and, like most women who refer to the physical relation with their husbands as "duty," Hilda considered spinsterhood a disgrace.

To Anne's relief, by which she measured to a hairline her previous anxiety, the dinner was a success. If Roger made an effort to meet the Mitchells on their own ground, his tact exceeded Anne's keen sensitiveness to discover. He kept the conversation at anecdotal level, apparently because that mood was his own. James Mitchell laughed as Anne had rarely heard him laugh, and reciprocated with uninteresting, tedious reminiscences of the office. In her delight at "papa's mood," Hilda was sobered to quiet dignity. Belle was a little bored, as she always was when she did not direct the conversation, but content, for she had expected to shoulder the social responsibility at this initial dinner, and she was not in the vein. She watched Roger and Anne and wondered whether they were really as united as they seemed. Belle had had more experience than even Hilda suspected.

Roger felt the evening glide pleasantly away and was glad that Anne had done this. The Mitchells interested him not at all. He thought Hilda a vapid fool, Belle pretentious and James a nonentity. They were a perfect illustration of the bewildered and confused sheep. Anne's birth among them was a miracle. But the miracle had happened and they would always be more or less in the background of life.

A little after ten the Mitchells went. They kissed Anne and Anne returned their kisses while Roger tried not to resent this very natural act. They had kissed Anne and she had kissed them years before he had known of her existence, but now, she was so exclusively his, her delicate fairness so fully the outward expression of their love and understanding, that this intimate physical contact with the Mitchells echoed a discordant note in the perfect harmony.

So he forced himself, in rebuke of his jealousy, to the unnecessary courtesy of seeing them down the long flight of stairs with a flashlight, because the porchlight just missed a weak spot below the second landing. But he came back three steps at a time to Anne.

"Well, little hostess, that was some dinner you got up." He went about switching out all the lights except one, as he always did when people had gone. With this dimming of the light, he closed out intruding personalities, focussed life back to the points of himself and Anne. "How did I behave?"

He had then felt the need to "behave."

The unconsciousness of the confession chilled Anne's joy a little. It made her feel a traitor to her people and she moved away and stood looking thoughtfully down into the fire. Her mother, so stiff and subdued in the new waist, so happy in her happiness; Belle, bored, but generous always in her love; even her father so genial that she had wondered several times during dinner whether, if the conditions of his life had been different, he would have been quite so dull and gray-souled and selfish. Each in his own way was a little vain and proud of the way she now lived. To her father and mother, at least, she was a very real part of life; through her, they touched experience not their own. But they were no longer a needed part of her life. Across the chasm of the full present and her future with Roger, they stood apart in the past, a tiny group, a little isolated and lonely, even Belle.

Her eyes filled with tears and Roger took her quickly in his arms.

"Why, Princess, what is it?"

"Oh, Roger, it is tragic, really. I felt it all evening, and when they followed you down the stairs and I knew you would come back alone and they would go to that cold, dismal flat—they seemed suddenly so cut off, so separate. They were the Mitchells and—and we were the Bartons—and it hurt."

"But, honey girl, that's such a natural thing. It's always that way. How did you expect to feel toward your lawful husband?" he added, trying to force an answering smile into Anne's eyes. But she only burrowed deeper into his shoulder and he felt her body quivering.

"It's awful the way children grow up and go away. Mamma hasn't anything really but me and Belle. She's gone on all these years—kind of looking forward, feeling in the midst of life—oh, I can't get it into words, but she doesn't seem to have anything. She's always been so cheerful and planning and doing the best she knew how—and now—there doesn't seem to be any reason for her to keep it up."

Roger stroked Anne's hair gently. "I know, dear, but any one who hasn't anything of his very own in life, has to come to that point. And most people haven't."

"But she did have something of her own. We were her own. She's lost it."

"Nobody can be anybody else's own, not lastingly their own. Men and women who haven't anything but their children, haven't really anything at all. They're just vehicles for the next generation, a kind of machine to keep things running. And what's the good of keeping things running, unless you make them better?"

Anne lay close to Roger, her nerves relaxing under the soft touch of his fingers.

"Roger," she whispered after a long silence, "don't you ever want children?"

Roger's stroking of her hair ceased. She looked up into his suddenly grave eyes. Already Anne was seeing life in relation to children, and he had not thought of a child at all. It seemed very necessary to be honest in his answer.

"It's this way. I do, if you do. But there's so much to do in the world, and there are so many people in it already, that it seems to me selfish just to add to the numbers. There's a lot of talk about children being the highest work of the race and all that, but it seems to me it's on the part of people who can't do anything else. Most anybody can have children, and very few can do anything else; but what's the good of perpetuating a race on and on without time or space to grow in? As for the comfort of children, the selfish clutching at companionship or less lonely age—well—if the children are really worth while as human beings, if they're going to add anything to the sum of life, they have to be so far in advance of their parents' generation—that you just can't bridge the gap. And even if they're not, but just trudge along in the old groove—still they're themselves and not you really. They——"

"Don't," Anne cried, "it breaks my heart."

Roger held her closer still and began stroking her hair again. But he felt, for the first time, a difference between himself and Anne. Was this just the difference between all men and all women? Or was it a difference between one viewpoint and another? The natural growth of life, the widening of human outlook, the wrenching of any bonds, these were pain to all the Mitchells in the world. The sentimental, clutching possession of "family" was Love to them. Roger wished he knew exactly what Anne was thinking, drawn close to him, her arm creeping up until it circled his neck in a clinging hold.

"Roger, let's never grow apart. Let's share always. Wait, if one of us has to, but never go on alone. I—I—couldn't bear it, Roger, now."

"Neither could I, Princess." Roger took Anne's face between his hands and tried to smile into her eyes. But, at the cool firmness of her cheeks beneath his fingers, the smile burned to a flame that scorched Anne's eyes; with a little sigh she closed them and raised her lips to his.

CHAPTER NINE

It was a few weeks after the Mitchell dinner that Roger came back to the office one afternoon to find Hilary Wainwright pacing up and down in a frank perplexity that he did not often permit himself to show; although, as the months had passed, Roger had come to feel very keenly that Hilary Wainwright, who never doubted his own point of view on a business matter, was growing more and more uncertain of his former enthusiasm for carrying out what he always called "the responsibilities of wealth."

Hilary Wainwright had been born to wealth, in a generation that had begun to question the right of such inheritance. Roger had always felt that Hilary was glad of this generation, which permitted him to enjoy his wealth, and, at the same time, by discussing his right to it, admitted him to the inner circle of intellectuals who doubt and lead civilization. He owned vast shipping interests, many sugar plantations in Hawaii and was often called upon by other capitalists to arbitrate their difficulties with labor. He went to strike meetings in a limousine.

He lived in a great, old-fashioned, inherited mansion far out on Pacific Avenue near the Presidio, surrounded by lawns and clipped hedges and conservatories. He lived alone, except for the servants, and entertained in down-town hotels. Long ago mothers had ceased managing their daughters in his direction, but the upper social crust was dotted with matrons, mothers of grown girls, who still had, in the depths of their hearts, a soft spot for this "idealist." If they had married him, they were sure he would have understood them so much better than did their husbands. These women contributed largely to the charities and civic betterment schemes in which Hilary was interested, and never refused committee work.

These schemes for the just treatment of labor and the improvement of living conditions among Wainwright's workmen, were Roger's special province, and he now saw them as a pond upon the surface of which he was paid to swim. Coming from an investigation into the justice of some strike, or from tense discussion with the leader of some industry, Roger felt like a diver bringing back strange fauna and flora, after which he had not been sent. Hilary always listened attentively, but sometimes he tapped his desk in a gesture that recalled John Lowell. He had a habit of saying "Yes. Yes," in an emphatic way, as if his mind were a hammer tapping each nail. But when Roger had finished, no completed structure ever rose from Hilary's agreement.

"Of course, Barton, I, personally, agree with you. There is a lot to be said for the other side. But, after all, present society is founded on wealth, and one can't disturb the foundations without jeopardizing every one—every one," Hilary would repeat, unconsciously warning Roger that he himself might go down in the welter, if every Wainwright suddenly put his principles into operation.

The first time he had explained this kindly to Roger, but, as the weeks slipped by, and Roger had continued to make the same suggestions for the adjustment of conditions which Hilary pretended were disturbing him, Hilary had gradually allowed his impatience to appear.

"What's the good, Barton, of talking like that?" he had demanded almost angrily one day, about a week before the Mitchell dinner. "It's the way the man who has never had wealth talks, as if it were an excrescence, something that can be cut away from the possessor without injury to any one else. Wealth is an essential plank in the social structure of our day, the keystone in the arch. Redistribute wealth suddenly and the whole thing will fall."

It had been a tiring day full of very clear deductions on Roger's part that something was fundamentally wrong with the whole economic system. He shrugged impatiently. "I don't know but what it might not be a good thing if it did—only the wrong people would probably be underneath."

Sitting in the well-appointed office of his employer the man's manicured nails, his ostentatiously unconventional soft shirt and tie were as offensive as the smug personal safety of his theories.

For a moment Wainwright had not answered. Then, with marked repression and annoying calm, as if Roger were a fractious child to be excused because of his usually good behavior:

"That's rather wild talk, Barton. You can't knock out the essential plank of a structure and not make things worse for every one."

"And you can't expect Tom and Pete and Jim to get all worked up over the luxuries Mr. Vanderbilt might have to go without under a new order."

"Because the average workingman doesn't think clearly. His mind is untrained. He doesn't see beyond the food and clothes of the day."

"No. The average man doesn't think—yet."

"I'm afraid it will take many years." Hilary had reminded Roger of one perfunctorily mourning the death of a hated relative whose passing was to his financial advantage.

"I'm not so sure," Roger had said shortly.

"Ah—let us hope you're right."

In the pause that followed, a feeling that Roger had always had from the very first interview suddenly crystallized. The man was spiritually smug, soaked through and through in unconscious insincerity.

Why had he ever consented to work for Hilary Wainwright? Instantly Roger had pushed the question from him and never again had he allowed it to rise clearly before him.

But now, as he came into the office and for a moment unobserved, watched Wainwright pacing slowly the length of the thick, rich rug, the well-kept hands clasped behind his back, frowning so seriously, Roger felt a positive repulsion of the man's smugness touch him, an almost physical inability to go over to his own desk and seriously begin consideration of one of Hilary's futile little problems.

At the sound of the door closing, Wainwright turned.

"That Sabatini case has bobbed up again, Barton, and I wish you'd look into it. All kinds of welfare committees are pestering me about it and your legal experience will make a report valuable."

"He's that Sicilian fisherman who burned down the warehouse of the United Fish Company and incidentally almost killed Joe Morelli?"

"That's the man. It's straight arson and attempt to murder, as far as I can see, but the Republicans and the Democrats are fighting for the elections and this thing has been dragged in. The fishermen worship Sabatini. He has power. Worse, he has a wife and eight children. There is no issue in the Latin Quarter at present to hang a fight upon and so Sabatini's friends are using him. The present district attorney is against him, but—the present district attorney wants to be reëlected. Sabatini speaks very little English, wears gold hoops in his ears and a red sash, and his children are really beautiful. The Settlement is very fond of the family and a lot of sentimentality is creeping into the thing, I'm afraid. Could you make it to-day?"

"Certainly. There's nothing special. I'll report back to-night."

"If you could. I'd like a clear, logical report before to-morrow. I'm being pestered a good deal by some people," Hilary smiled the smile that meant "women," "and I want to know more and take a stand."

An hour later, Roger stood beside Angelo Sabatini in his prison cell.

The man sat on the narrow cot, his elbows on his knees, his face buried in his grimed and broken hands. His broad, bent shoulders, the shoulders of a toiler from childhood, were hunched to the flat-backed head, covered with coarse, curly black hair. On the floor at his feet lay a little pile of torn paper, the citizenship papers of Angelo Sabatini. Roger stood silent, leaning against the steel door of the cell. Outside, a guard stopped every now and then in the monotony of his walking to stare.

"You deliberately waited until you knew that Joe Morelli was in his office, then you set fire to the building and when you saw that Morelli had a chance to get away you tried to knife him?" Roger spoke very slowly and distinctly, so that Angelo Sabatini caught the drift.

He nodded. "Morelli—he no buy and sell de feesh—he buy and sell de mens—me and Paolo and Giacomo—everybody—and de babies of me and Paolo and Giacomo. Many days—we have no meat—and no shoes—but Morelli have much meat and de childrens fine shoes. Ecco." With a gesture that laid before Roger the primitive justice of survival, Sabatini paused. "We work all night on the sea. We bring much feesh. Morelli he trow it all—all—back into the sea. Much feesh—too cheap. Ecco."

Roger paced the short cell length and came back again to the steel bars.

"Did you tell the judge all the circumstances, the meat and shoes of Morelli, your own children, the tons of wasted fish?"

The small black eyes blinked. "Che disc'? No caspic' good Inglis. Too queer talk."

Roger repeated slowly. The heavy face lit with a scorn before which Roger was ashamed. "Yes. I tell. And I show dat." A grimed and hairy finger pointed to the pile of torn papers. "I tell dat I come America to get good chance and I no get. All mens is de same and Morelli do me bad. Many times me and Paolo and Beppo go to Morelli and tell: 'Throw no feesh into de sea. We must live.' Morelli laugh. Den me and Paolo and Giacomo talk many nights in de cellar of Beppo. We make—I don know in Inglis—de leetle papers in a hat. It tells me. Ecco. I go."

"And you told the judge?"

"De seguro, I tell. I make swear on Libro Santo to say true and I tell. Ecco."

Roger's body sagged against the steel bars with the hopelessness of this man's case. He had done this thing and confessed it. No twisting of ethics, no pointing of advantage, could make him change one comma. His code was dearer to him than all the complications of the law that might set him free. As long as Giuseppe Morelli lived and threw the fish into the sea, Angelo Sabatini would try to kill him. And Giuseppe Morelli would continue to throw fish into the sea and keep up prices, as long as society permitted him to do it.

On the cot, Angelo Sabatini was leaning again with his face in his hands, the tiny gold hoop in his right ear twinkling through the black curls. He had told his story again, in spite of his lawyer's warnings, because Angelo Sabatini saw no reason to withhold the truth. In time, perhaps, some one would believe, understand that he had done this thing because he had been chosen to do it and his children needed as many shoes and as much food as the children of Giuseppe Morelli. But, the quiet form of Roger, leaning against the bars, his chin on his breast, Sabatini understood. This man was only another with the right to ask him many things and go away and leave him.

Roger wanted to put his hand on the bowed shoulder and say something. But there was nothing to say. Tell him to hope? Against the United Fish Company? To brace up? Before twenty, thirty years in prison walls? Angelo Sabatini, who had lived all his life in the sun on the sea, ever since as a tiny boy in the old country he had gone out before dawn in his father's blue painted boat. Roger moved and the man looked up. Already the hope had gone from him. His small, black eyes were dead embers in the dull, brown face. He looked at Roger, stupid, dumb, confused. In five years, in less, he would be scarcely human.

Roger beckoned the turnkey and without another word, went out. Angelo Sabatini did not move. As Roger passed the desk, a woman with a baby in her arms and a little boy of ten beside her was trying to make the man behind the desk understand. The little boy translated, in an awed whisper, what his mother said. The man behind the desk shook his head:

"Tell her not to keep coming here. She can't see him except on visitors' day and if she keeps up this pestering she won't see him then."

The child translated. The woman wrung her hands and pleaded. Under the torrent of harsh Sicilian dialect, the man behind the desk rose.

"Get out!"

The child pulled his mother's skirts and they hurried away.

Roger went straight home. It was dusk, the wood fire was lighted, and the dinner table spread before it. Anne came quickly at the sound of Roger's key and he kissed her.

"What's the matter?" she laughed. "It's me, not a wax image in a shop."

Roger kissed her again. "I beg your pardon, Princess, but I'm all wrought up. I never want to have another afternoon like this one."

While Anne put the finishing touches to dinner, Roger told her of Angelo Sabatini. Anne made no comment until, the dinner served, they faced each other across the little table.

"But he's scarcely human now," Roger repeated. "A year of those granite walls—and he'll be a beast indeed."

Anne shivered. Roger had drawn the man very vividly, hunched on the cot, his thick neck, his round, flat head.

"If he'd only stopped to think," she said, "he must have seen that you can't go round burning property and murdering people."

"No, he wouldn't have seen it. As Wainwright says," Roger spoke bitterly, "the average working man's mind is untrained. He doesn't think. He's too busy getting food and clothes."

Anne thought of her father, his servile acceptance of rules and orders. His ever-haunting fear of losing his job, of a rainy day.

"I think Mr. Wainwright's right, don't you? The average person does not think."

"Then he's got to be made to think," Roger said with such sudden vehemence that Anne started. "It's not because he doesn't want to think. He hasn't got time to think. And he realizes the uselessness of thinking when he can't do anything with his thoughts."

"But everybody has time to think, Roger. You're always talking about the way machinery affects men, they just do things over and over with their hands because it gets mechanical and they don't have to think about it. They can think while they're working, if they're the thinking kind."

"Try it. Make the same motion over and over for eight hours and see how alive your brain would be. Make it for a week, a month, all a working life. You're dead."

Anne looked thoughtful. She liked discussing with Roger and they usually agreed. But a note had crept into Roger's line of argument lately, that disturbed her almost physically, just as it did to hear a soap-boxer shrieking on the corner. It always made something inside her curl up and retreat, so that she could never stop and listen to what the man was saying.

She got back again to particulars. "But he did do it. He burned a building and tried to kill a man."

"Yes, he did it, just as a machine that is started by a clever mechanic does the work for which it is made. It obeys its law. Angelo Sabatini is obeying his law, the law that ground him and his ancestors down until there was only a spark left—the spark that brought him six thousand miles—to the 'Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave'. And then we tried to kill that spark and Sabatini kicked out. Why, it's this spark, this will and courage to kick, that's the only thing in the man worth saving."

Anne felt a little frightened. "But, dear, I know things are all wrong and ought to be different, but they're not different yet. If you do wrong you have to pay the price."

Roger pushed back his almost untouched plate and began walking up and down the pretty room. "But that's just the point. The guilty, the really ethically guilty, do not pay the price. Angelo Sabatini is a victim of society, just as much as he would have been the victim of a beam falling on him. This isn't a personal fight between one fisherman and another, it's the whole social revolution. And that's what fools like Wainwright don't see or pretend they don't. They patch and sing hymns while they patch."

Anne laid down her dessert spoon hastily. "Roger," she said quietly after a silence, filled only by the dropping of the burned wood and Roger's even tread the length of the room, "you're not going to quarrel with Mr. Wainwright, are you?"

Roger smiled. "Hilary Wainwright doesn't quarrel with his employees. He dismisses them."

Anne looked quickly away into the fire. After a moment she asked, almost indifferently: "Do you think he will dismiss you?"

Roger shrugged; then stopped and looked at the little figure turned toward the fire.

"No," he said slowly. "He won't dismiss me—yet."

Anne got up and began to clear the table. Roger came forward to help as he always did, but Anne insisted he was tired.

"Besides you have to make the report to-night. I can do these few things quite well."

Roger looked at the clock. "And I'd better hurry, too. It's half past eight now."

Still he continued to walk up and down while Anne thoughtfully washed the dishes. She had just finished when he came to kiss her good-night.

"Don't wait up, dear, I may be late."

Anne went to the door with him, then came back, turned out the lights and made up the fire.

Deep in the easy chair, Anne felt the battling and struggling far down under the pleasant surface of life. Rough men, like Angelo Sabatini, were striking blindly up at her peaceful security. Anne looked slowly around the quiet room, uncluttered by useless furniture, wide, clean and calm. She loved her living-room. It was almost alive to her. Anne's lips trembled.

"He takes things so hard," she whispered to herself, "and one person can't really do anything."

It was after eleven when Roger came in. He thought Anne was asleep and got into bed quietly. But after a little while, she turned to him.

"What's Mr. Wainwright going to do, Roger?"

"Nothing," Roger said heavily. "Nothing at all."

Anne crept closer to him and stroked his cheek. "I'm so sorry, dear."

Roger moved impatiently. "Don't do that, Anne, it fidgets me."

Anne instantly withdrew her hand. Roger reached for it and clasped it listlessly. "Excuse me, dear, but I'm all tensed up. He was so damned judicial and—and 'just.'"

CHAPTER TEN

For several weeks after Roger's outburst, Anne sensed a new element in her life, as if she had come face to face with something hidden before. This element was a quality in Roger that changed the angle of their relations. She felt that she might be suddenly called upon for calm judgment, a need might arise for a balancing force between them. The foundations of her new life, of the deep peace and security she had felt for the last six months, were not quite so secure as she had thought them. There was something in Roger she was not quite sure of.

Often during the day, Anne stopped her housework, and made conversational beginnings calculated to lead to an opening of this subject with him. But when she concentrated her uneasiness in words, it seemed always to gain more substance than it really had. Roger did not approve of Hilary Wainwright. He never had, exactly. But Hilary Wainwright was not crooked as John Lowell had been. At worst, his methods might be mistaken. He was trying to do something worth while, even if he went more slowly and cautiously than Roger's enthusiasm demanded.

Again and again, Anne concluded that she was exaggerating the tension between Roger and Wainwright, only to have her fear reach out of the most unexpected situations and touch her with a small, cold finger.

"I will not start managing him. It gets nowhere and does no good." Anne's logic always led her to this point, where, by an extra effort, she usually succeeded in leaving it for the time.

And then, two weeks before Christmas, something happened that drove all other thoughts from Anne's mind. She was going to have a child. She knew it now beyond a doubt. The vague fears and tenuous analyses of the last weeks vanished.

"It's what mamma would call 'my condition,' I suppose."

The world had changed, suddenly, and Anne's relation to it and to herself had changed. Everything seemed bigger, wider and full of soft mystery. The universe, a great, shadowy stretch far beyond her or her immediate concerns, now centered in herself. She was the center of something beyond ordinary life, beyond any small, blind struggle of mistaken millions, almost beyond the law that governed the daily comings and goings of mere humanity. No mystic ever felt nearer to bodies unseen, heard far voices more clearly, than did Anne in the first days of her sureness; when, her secret guarded for the perfect moment of revelation, she sat hour after hour, looking out across the tangled garden to the Bay, to old Tamalpais, quiet, eternal, understanding.

The Wednesday before Christmas the weather turned. The long period of sunshine was blotted by the first rain. All day it fell, soaking the garden and shutting Anne from the world behind a thick, soft curtain. Roger came early that night, less troubled than he had seemed of late, and after dinner sat reading before the fire, instead of staring into it as he had done so often since the Sabatini case. She felt small and happy and understanding, shut within the warm peace of her home by the pouring rain, very near to the man sitting so close beside her. She would tell him now. When he closed his book she slipped her hand into his and then, leaving her chair, curled up in his lap.

Roger's arms held her gently, and he leaned his cheek against her hair. Anne waited, a little disappointed that he did not sense instantly the secret just behind her lips. Surely if Roger had had anything so vital to tell her, she would have known it. But he only stroked her hair and now that she was listening with every nerve in her for a key to Roger's mood, she felt that he was really far away. He was thinking of something that had nothing whatever to do with her, while she felt so strangely, almost terribly, one with him. She sat up.

"What is it, Princess?" Roger drew his attention from some distant point. "Aren't you comfy?"

"How do you know it was anything? You were miles away."

"I guess I was. Not so far, however, not farther than the office."

Anne frowned. "Has Hilary Wainwright come to live permanently in the house with us? It was really much nicer when we were alone."

Something in Anne's tone made Roger look at her intently. He had come as near having a quarrel with Hilary Wainwright that afternoon as he could come, and still keep the secretaryship. He had intended to laugh off his seriousness and to say nothing until he was surer of himself, but, at the look in Anne's eyes, he changed his mind:

"Anne, the man's false. I don't believe he really believes a thing he says. It's a pose, as much of a pose as those silly soft shirts he wears and those ready-made clothes. He thinks it brings him nearer to 'The People.' He——"

But Anne did not hear beyond the first sentence. Roger stood before her, defying John Lowell, giving up the law. She rose slowly from his knees and said quietly:

"Let's not talk about that to-night. Roger,—we're going to have a baby."

It seemed to Anne an hour that they stood staring at each other while she saw understanding dawn slowly in Roger's eyes. Understanding, and then such a blank look of helplessness, that Anne felt the fears of the last weeks form visibly before her and swarm down, almost suffocating her.

"Good Lord!" he whispered.

Tears ran down Anne's cheeks.

Roger brushed his hand across his eyes and reached to her, but Anne stepped back.

"You—don't—want—it," she whispered fiercely, "but I do. I don't care how many people there are already. I want my baby. I——" She was almost hysterical now.

Roger took her firmly in his arms.

"Of course I want it, too, Anne. There, dear, there."

Just as if she were a child, crying for a toy, instead of a woman telling the father of her child the most wonderful news in the world!

Anne lay close, afraid to move away, to make concrete to herself her own hurt and anger and separateness from Roger. He had not wanted it. His first reaction had not been joy, but fear. Fear of what? Over-burdening the world with one small baby more? Or fear for himself, the new weight of responsibility?

"Please, dear, won't you believe me? I am glad. But it came so suddenly. Why——"

It was Roger now who was suddenly afraid to voice his question. Why had Anne chosen that moment to tell him? Had she thrown the thing at him, a grapple to hold him fast in safe acceptance of Hilary Wainwright's insincerity? Roger pushed the thought aside.

"This is not the usual way of whispering the 'sweet secret,' is it, dear?" He turned Anne's face up and smiled into her eyes, wet and hurt. "Whisper it now, Princess," and he bent his head.

But Anne could not smile. It would take all her strength and courage to forget—and forgive—that first blank, helpless bewilderment in Roger's eyes. He might be glad—he had said he was, but he was glad for her gladness. He had none for the baby itself. He was cheating the baby of its full meed of welcome, accepting gracefully now for his own peace and comfort, something he could not escape. And she had hoarded her secret. She had even thought of saving it to Christmas day! Of giving Roger this, the biggest present in her power, early in the dawn when they always waked. She had seen it so clearly, herself creeping close to Roger. Then the rain had come, walling them in together, and Roger had seemed nearer than he had for weeks and the depth of her own happiness had forced the secret from her. And Roger had said:

"Good Lord!"

Anne moved away to physical freedom. In this spiritual isolation she did not want Roger's arms about her, nor to have him touch her in any way. Roger straightened at Anne's movement and they stood, one on each side of the fireplace, outwardly two people very near in the intimacy of the low fire and shadowed lights, inwardly far apart.

Why had Anne told him, at just this moment? Why had she done it? Had she felt him slipping over the edge of Hilary Wainwright's insincerity, out from these months of his own uncertainty, into spiritual freedom, and thrown the silken lariat of her dependence over him, drawn him back to the safety of 'a job'?

Without turning, Roger felt Anne standing small, almost prim, by the fireplace, distrusting him, clinging fast to her safety, as James Mitchell clung to his little job. Afraid to dare, clutching comfort at any price. Perhaps she had deliberately decided this thing should be. She so often understood his unuttered thoughts, clarified his reactions before they had emerged clearly to himself from their first chaos of emotion and enthusiasm. If Anne had done this, feeling the safety of their present comfort slipping! But, when he turned to her—she was so silvery fair, shame of his own thought rushed over him. Against the reluctance he felt in her, he drew her to him again. And Anne, in her desperate need to believe, came back. He kissed her and smiled into her eyes, and this time, Anne smiled too. But she was glad that Roger did not insist again that she whisper "the sweet secret!" She did not want to talk of it until this mood was dead in the past. After a long silence, she looked up.

"Mamma phoned to-day. She wants us to go there for Christmas."

Their first Christmas to be spent with the Mitchells!

"It's going to be the first real Christmas party mamma has ever had," Anne went on, "and she's as excited as a child. Dr. Stetson is back from the East, more successful and famous than ever and he's asked Belle to go out twice in three weeks. He's coming, and I believe moms has some kind of idea that when he sees how successful matrimony can be, he will be moved to go and do likewise."

Roger tried to smile, but none of Mrs. Mitchell's ideas ever amused him. This was so exactly the kind of crude thing she would do. But he had hurt Anne too much to-night to do anything but pretend genuine pleasure.

"We'll do our best to help the good cause along. Shall I hold your hand and murmur sweet nothings? Come on, let's practice."

"Don't be silly. But I do wish Belle would marry him." Anne spoke in such a matronly tone that Roger laughed. "You needn't laugh. Belle's awfully independent and all that, but she'd make a corking wife for some man. And this Dr. Stetson does seem more persistent than most. She usually frightens them off. I shouldn't wonder a bit if something doesn't come of it." Anne looked oddly like Hilda for a moment.

"Well, you can coach me up, or we'll arrange a code to entangle the gentleman in domestic felicity. I'll do whatever you tell me."

"Then it's sure to be a success. But, Roger, I do want this to be a nice dinner. It's really the first effort mamma has ever been able to make at a jolly Christmas. And she would so have loved trees and Santa Clauses and all the regulation fixings. Only they cost so much, and it never seemed worth while, because it would have taken all the money—even if she could have scraped it together—just for the machinery and there would have been no party."

Roger's own childhood had not been very full of treats, but at the picture of little Anne deprived of the usual Christmas, Roger's heart melted.

"You sweet baby, you. Ours will have a tree the very first year."

Anne nestled to him. "Oh, Roger, he will be cute, won't he?"

"He?"

"Of course. It's got to be a boy."

"I rather hope so myself, although I should never dare to prophesy so vehemently. But I daresay you are right. What's his name? No doubt that detail's settled, too."

"It certainly is. He is Roger Mitchell Barton. How do you like it?"

"Great," Roger said very quickly.

But after he and Anne were in bed, and he had held Anne and assured her of his own free will that he was glad, and Anne was sleeping with his arms about her, Roger whispered to himself:

"Roger MITCHELL Barton!"

CHAPTER ELEVEN

After days of tentative discussion, Hilary Wainwright decided on Christmas Eve to have a Christmas tree at his office for the children of the striking stevedores who loaded his sugar fleet. When he announced the decision Roger almost flatly refused to have anything to do with it.

"The children really should not be made to pay for their fathers' obstinacy," Hilary said, and recalled to Roger the sanctimonious aunt who had brought him up, trying to force a cookie on him after she had unjustly spanked him.

"Why not settle the strike?" he suggested, without looking at Hilary. "The men are only asking ten cents an hour more, and the right to organize."

He felt Hilary's lips compress, exactly like that aunt's, and wanted to laugh, although he was angry and disgusted.

"The matter is being arbitrated, and, in the meantime, Christmas is here. I don't like to think of children unmerry on Christmas day."

"It would be uncomfortable," Roger said in a tone that made Hilary glance at him with the look of a financier considering an uncertain investment. But, whatever Hilary Wainwright's reaction to Roger's tone, he dismissed it and said pleasantly:

"I guess we'll have to deliver the invitations personally. There's not enough time for notes. Could you take half? I have the names and addresses. They all live rather close together."

For a moment Roger hesitated. Then he agreed.

"I can probably cover the lot. They all live in one section."

Hilary nodded. "That would be great, if you can."

Years afterwards, when Roger recalled the thing that had made him most ashamed of himself before men, it was this house-to-house canvass of Hilary Wainwright's stevedores.

They all lived in mean, dilapidated buildings, down close to the great wharves, on narrow side-streets, never free from the smell of tar and bilge water and refuse. The men were mostly physical giants, with badly shaped heads, small, close-set eyes, and brutal mouths. The women were worn and dull, although here and there, among those with fewer children, faint traces of an anemic, youthful prettiness were fading to shrewish angles and deep lines about the pale lips. The children were dirty and sharp-eyed, with the shifting look and the quick, darting movements of children who live in the streets, dodging policemen and irate parents and passing trucks.

The men glared sullenly at Roger, and, for the most part, made no comment. Some of the women reviled Hilary Wainwright in gutter speech; some were confused; none were grateful. But in the end, they all accepted. If the "kids" did not go to this tree, they would have none. The kids would like it.

On Christmas morning Anne went to the office and helped with the tree. It was the finest that Hilary could find and weighted under innumerable, if cheap, presents, and bags of candy and lights. It was finished a little before twelve, and the clerks and clerks' wives who had helped stood back and admired it.

"It's a lot better than my children are going to have," one woman whispered to Anne.

"It really is pretty, isn't it, Roger?" Anne had enjoyed hanging the thick, silver tinsel and concealing the colored electric globes in the most effective places.

"Yes. It's pretty." Roger had made up his mind to see the thing through decently, but it was difficult.

The lights were switched on for a trial view; every one exclaimed "O-h," and, after other appropriate remarks of appreciation for the beauty of the tree, and Hilary's generosity, left. Anne came close to Roger.

"Next year," she whispered, "we're going to have one exactly like this, only a teeny, weeny one, aren't we?"

Roger did not answer, but as Hilary called to him just then, Anne did not notice. In a moment Roger returned.

"He wants me to come back after lunch and start things going. His sister can't get here until half past three and the tree's scheduled for three."

"Half past three!" The Mitchell dinner was to be at four, to give Belle time to get back to her case at seven. Roger could not possibly be punctual and James Mitchell hated a meal to be delayed. But Roger could not refuse Hilary.

"It's one now. There's hardly time to go home for lunch and get back here."

"I tell you. I'll go round the corner and get a bite and then clear up a few reports I didn't have time for yesterday and stay right on until she arrives. I'll leave the minute she comes."

"Try not to be later than you can help, dear, won't you?"

"I'll try. But don't wait for me. I won't be much behind. I'll come right out."

"All right. I guess you've got to stay, but—I wanted us to go together. Don't be any later than you can help," Anne again warned Roger as he took her to the elevator.

"I won't." But coming back to the office, Roger wished that Miss Wainwright would not come at all. The Mitchell dinner, from a boring incident, had become in the last forty-eight hours, through Anne's constant reference to it, an ordeal not unlike the delivery of the invitations and the tree itself. He had wanted a quiet home dinner, with liberty of silence afterwards, a small space in the cluttered confusion of the last days, in which to take careful stock of his almost irrepressible scorn of Hilary Wainwright.

But Hilda Mitchell had never had a pleasant Christmas!

Roger frowned and tried to shrug off his unjust impatience. "I wish to the Lord they'd all go and live in China or somewhere. I suppose it will be worse after the baby comes. Roger Mitchell Barton!" he whispered. "Sabatini would be better." But at the impossible combination of Roger Sabatini Barton, Roger laughed.

At two the children began to arrive, surprisingly clean and well dressed; the girls with bright hair ribbons and white stockings and patent leather shoes and the boys with plastered hair and neat suits. A clerk, with no family ties, who had come from the shipping office to help, made a running line of comment aside to Roger on the extraordinary and warped viewpoint of men who could afford patent leather shoes for their children, striking for higher wages.

"If they came in the things they wear at home during the week, you'd be afraid of germs," Roger exploded.

The man looked at him suspiciously, but ceased his comments.

Anne waited for Roger until three and then left the house. By Hilda's concern at seeing her alone, Anne knew that her mother was not quite sure that Roger would come at all.

"He's coming, but yesterday Mr. Wainwright sprang a Christmas tree for the children of his striking stevedores, and his sister can't get there to help him entertain until after three. The children will begin coming long before that and he needed Roger. I would have stayed too except that I knew you wouldn't like us both to be late."

"Now, I think that's mighty kind of Mr. Wainwright. Not many rich people, men 'specially, would have thought of such a thing. Yes, dear, it would have made it a little awkward for you both to be late, but we'll wait a bit for Roger anyhow."

"No, please don't. He won't be much behind and he'd rather you didn't."

Anne and Hilda were in Anne's old room where she was taking off her things. In the front room, Belle and Dr. Stetson were talking. Hilda closed the door softly.

"I believe there is something doing," she whispered with raised eyebrows and quick nods. "He's one of those thin, decided-looking men and he's got Belle going. I heard him tell her not to smoke so much and she actually threw her cigarette away."

"They must be married."

"Anne! No, they're not married. I don't believe he's asked her yet, but I hope he will. Belle says he's a wonder at his line, cuts the queerest things out of you, and never makes a cut for less than a thousand dollars."

"Maybe he'll do it cheaper for the family. I couldn't afford a pin prick at that rate."

"I hope you'll never need it. But papa seems to like him. Listen. That's him laughing. I like his voice, don't you?"

Anne thought it was cold, rather like one of his wonderful knives, but she said it sounded pleasant and followed Hilda down the hall to the kitchen, where she gave her the black silk underskirt she had brought. Hilda's eyes filled with tears, and she touched the thick messaline lovingly.

"It's the first real silk petticoat I've ever had, Annie. It's almost too nice to wear."

"Now, mamma, you put it right on."

Hilda hesitated, then dropped the torn gingham she was wearing, made a face at it, slipped into the new skirt, and waltzed about the kitchen holding up her dress skirt like a ballet dancer.

"You're just a girl, yourself, mamma. I don't believe you'll ever grow up." Anne watched her mother with the deep tenderness and sense of protection. No piece of finery could ever make her as happy as this black silk petticoat made her mother. It was a shame that she had never been able to have pretty things. The old resentment against her father, somewhat allayed since her marriage, rose in Anne, and she was glad that Dr. Stetson's presence prevented her having to give him at that moment the box of good cigars she had brought. She had always resented giving her father presents, ever since, as a little girl of ten, she had discovered one Christmas morning, that the handkerchiefs with "papa's love" had really come from Hilda's manipulation of the tissue-wrapped allotments. She had succeeded in losing every one of the handkerchiefs before New Year, but she had gone on giving him gifts and thanking him for his.

Hilda had waltzed into the bedroom, and now returned with the family's remembrances to Anne and Roger, a silver cigarette case from Belle, a necktie from James and Hilda to Roger. Three pair of silk stockings from Belle to Anne, a hand-embroidered nightgown from Hilda and James.

And then, the matter of presents being over, they both felt a little freer. Hilda looked at the kitchen clock. It was five minutes after four.

"If you don't think Roger would really mind, Anne, we'll begin. I want a nice, long talky dinner, and a little evening after." Hilda gave her petticoat a last flirt, twirled about on her toes, and began dishing up the turkey. "Belle came early and made the salad, something extra fancy she's learned. The plates are ready in the pantry, Anne. If you'll just carry them in, then I'll introduce you."

Anne carried the salad into the dining-room, catching a side view of Dr. Stetson through the drawn portière. He looked as she imagined he would look from his voice; slim, and exceedingly well groomed. He was leaning back now in the rocker, his thin, strong white hands clasped behind his sleek, dark head. He was listening to an animated anecdote of Belle's and smiling. Anne thought he was the most collected, self-possessed being she had ever seen. He might have removed every nerve in his body by one of his own skillful operations.

"If Belle marries him, she'll toe the mark." Anne smiled and went back to the kitchen. When the turkey and cranberries and sprouts were dished and in the hotplate, Hilda took Anne into the parlor. Dr. Stetson rose instantly, gave her a penetrating glance as if she were a patient, dismissed her as much less interesting than Belle, and they all followed Hilda into the dining-room beyond.

"Why, where's Roger?" Belle demanded.

"He'll be along shortly. Hilary Wainwright's giving a party, a Christmas tree to some poor children, and Roger had to help get the thing going."

"If there were a few more Wainwrights in this country there wouldn't be any labor trouble," James explained, squinting and pursing up his lips as if he had private information of this certainty. Belle laughed.

"Well, I'm glad I'm not a philanthropic millionaire if he can't even take Christmas off. It must be worse than nursing or surgery, don't you think so, Doctor?"

"It must be if it keeps any one from a salad like this," Dr. Stetson smiled at Hilda, who was saved in the nick of time by Belle's look, from disclaiming the honor.

Roger's absence was not further commented upon and the talk became general. Dr. Stetson had traveled extensively before the war in Europe and he described people and places well, always picking out with the unerring accuracy of his famous thousand-dollar cuts, the weak or ridiculous spots in people and conditions. James Mitchell scarcely stopped smiling. Belle's ringing laugh interrupted every few moments. Anne, too, was interested. She felt the charm of the man's culture and experience. It would be nice to travel and meet interesting people, go to wonderful concerts and luxuriate for a little while in pleasant, easy places. To meet people concerned in creating beauty or enjoying it; not only those always striving to divide it up. Perhaps, some day, when Europe had settled again to a semblance of what it had been before, she and Roger and Rogie would go. Anne began in imagination to travel.

A loud peal of the doorbell brought her back from Rome, and stopped Dr. Stetson in the middle of a story.

Roger came up the stairs two at a time, explaining to Hilda as he came.

"I'm awfully sorry, but I couldn't make it sooner. Miss Wainwright was later even than she expected. The train was stalled or something."

"That's all right. We've only just about begun."

When Roger had said he would come straight on, Anne had not thought of his clothes, and now, as he followed Hilda, she saw that he was in his everyday suit, rumpled and covered with a fine powdering of dust from the tree. A bit of wool and a scrap of tinsel clung to his sleeve. He looked tired. She saw Dr. Stetson size him up and a touch of annoyance cloud Belle's eyes. She was annoyed herself. Roger took the vacant place and Hilda made a great to-do about getting him salad, although Roger said, more emphatically than one usually refuses a course at a special dinner, that he did not want any. And when it came, he ate it as indifferently as if it had been plain lettuce. Anne saw her mother watching him and tried to catch his eye, but Roger's head was bent and she gave it up. Dr. Stetson had caught again the thread of his interrupted story, but Anne heard little of the rest. She wished that Roger would not sit so, absorbed in his salad as if he were alone at a lunch counter.

The others, seeing that Roger was not entering the talk, abandoned their pretense of eating slowly until he caught up with them, took their second helping of turkey, and disregarded him. As Hilda removed his salad plate and passed him turkey, Anne managed at last to catch his eye. He looked puzzled, frowned slightly, and with a distinct effort banished his thoughts and turned to the doctor.

"It's the same in all countries," the doctor was saying, "there's just a small group of people who really care for what's beautiful. We hear a lot about the artistic French and Italians. The average Latin—the ordinary man—doesn't respond to beauty, pure beauty, in itself, any more than does the average Saxon. They grub along with their eyes in the dust in exactly the same dull way."

"What is pure beauty, in itself?" Roger demanded, as if he were heckling a witness on the stand. "What is impure beauty, or beauty out of itself?"

Dr. Stetson regarded him for a moment with a smile of forced amusement, as if this were a joke, in poor taste, but to be condoned in a family gathering.

"The Latin past," he elaborated, "was very closely tangled up with Art, and, as they have nothing to be proud of now, they fall back a few centuries and rave about their paintings and marbles, which never did interest more than a very few of them. And it's the same thing with other nations which have not much now to boast of. They go back to something centuries ago and find comfort in it. You can't talk ten minutes to an educated Portuguese before he's referring to the dead glories of the Portuguese fleet and dragging in Vasco da Gama as if he lived to-day. A Spaniard—at any rate up until the time of the Spanish-American War—would talk as if Mexico and all South America were still theirs. Nations, like people, the less they have as a whole to boast of now, the more they blind themselves with the dreams a few choice souls among them had generations ago."

"Just as we, in America, blind ourselves with the dream of liberty and equality that Washington and Lincoln had," Roger interposed so quietly that his inference was lost for a moment in the echo of Dr. Stetson's sweeping assertions. The doctor himself was the first to catch it, and turning to Roger with a look as if he were diagnosing an unexpected symptom said, with the same smug assurance with which Hilary Wainwright regretted the slow coming of the Average Man's ability to think:

"No, I don't think the cases are parallel. At least I, personally, am old fashioned enough to believe we have liberty and equality for all."

"You're right." James Mitchell threw out his narrow shoulders and glared at Roger. "Liberty and equality! There's too much of them now, allowing every dirty foreigner and crack-brained native to stir up any fool that will listen. Let me tell you," and James Mitchell cut the heart of the problem from the air before him with his knife, "if there isn't a little less 'liberty and equality' pretty soon, this country's going to be in the same rotten mess as Russia. The people are half asleep. If I didn't know that down at bottom, the great middle class of America is really sane——"

"——we might get somewhere," Roger spoke almost sadly, so that Belle and Dr. Stetson looked toward him, puzzled; but Anne, her face flushing, looked down. "It's the great, sane, middle class that's holding back liberty—killing it. The rich, to a certain extent, have it. The poor are struggling for it. It's only in the middle that they're dead, and safe. The middle class. There is no middle class, really. It is the dividing class. It's the blow-neither-hot-nor-cold. It's the lackey-souled. It's the misfortune of any country that has it, this great, sane, safe, middle class."

"From your point of view, whatever that is, it may be. Not from mine." Dr. Stetson now spoke in crisp, sharp tones; like tiny glittering knives they seemed to pare the emotion from Roger's words. "The lackey-souled are, on the whole, the clean bodied. Your struggling poor, battling for so-called liberty, are unfit, humanly below par. They can't function efficiently as humans where they are, much less direct matters. Perhaps you don't know the number of mental defectives there are in this country. The draft records showed a tremendous proportion of men with the mental capacity of children. They work at trades requiring little skill, they marry and raise others like themselves. It's ridiculous to talk about increasing the liberty of these people. It ought to be restricted, anyhow redirected. At the other end of the scale, we have, of course, the effect of over-license, but, it may surprise you to know that in school tests taken through all classes, it was the children of the rich who, on the whole, averaged highest."

"It doesn't surprise me at all," Roger said quietly, while Hilda fidgeted and made little clucking noises, as if trying to swallow the too large portions of mental food offered by Dr. Stetson. "It's exactly what I would expect under the present system."

"Which system is the result of these conditions, not the other way round. The upper class, using it in a broad sense as the directors of the world, are there because they are most fit."

"Exactly," James Mitchell interpolated like a stinging wasp. "Look at the directors of any corporation, quiet, clean, sharp-eyed men. Look at the soap-boxers, the I. W. W.'s, the union organizers—all shifty-looking, as if they'd never had enough baths or enough to eat."

"Maybe they haven't," Roger said slowly, while Anne's face flamed and with difficulty she kept back the tears.

Why did Roger persist? What did it matter anyhow who was right or who wrong, at this first real Christmas of her mother's?

"Perhaps they haven't," Dr. Stetson conceded, "but that doesn't alter the fact that, socially, they are not fit to function as directors. They are mentally below par," he repeated in clean, crisp finality. "They are to be classed roughly, to the layman, in the same general division as idiots."

"Idiots!" Hilda murmured with a shiver.

"Nonsense, mamma." Belle's hand pushed away Hilda's excited, intruding interest. "They're not idiots. That's just the point. Idiots, real ones that everybody recognizes, get locked up. These people—why you meet them every day. You wouldn't know them, very likely. You——"

"Why, Belle! I certainly would know an idiot when I see one."

"They're not idiots, not driveling idiots, Mrs. Mitchell," the doctor hastened to her aid; "they are—well, just the average unskilled worker, the laborer, the migratory worker, the seasonal worker. Many stevedores and longshoremen, fruit pickers, the simplest work in machine shops—an appalling percentage of these men aren't over ten or twelve years of age really. From these sub-normals or variants, come the criminals. Criminology is only just beginning to associate itself with psychology, but I could tell you some apparent miracles worked in prisons by small, minor operations. Which proves," he turned now, including Roger, "that it is not a question of opportunity or will—Nature isn't romantic or emotional—it's a scientific question. Deficiencies, variations, do exist. Perhaps, in time, all this may be correctable, but only by scientific methods—not by talk." He allowed himself the last thrust, covering it by a genial smile. "A clinic is enough to make one doubt the right of the democratic principle."

"Not unless you refuse to look below the surface. Nature may be scientific, but she's not insane. She doesn't turn out millions upon millions of human beings that a few may scramble to themselves all the beauty of the universe. I grant you all the mentally inefficient you claim, but, what started it, what caused it? Why?"

"A thousand things, many too intricate, too subtle to explain. And remember we know very little about it. The field is new. There are a thousand threads tangled in the problem, pre-natal influences, going back for generations, malnutrition of mothers, early environment of the baby, nervous stimuli—dozens of influences. A psychopathic clinic in any of the big, free institutions, a ward in a baby hospital, a maternity ward—it's enough to make one doubt the right of the democratic principle," he repeated as if he found the phrase so exact he needed no other.

Roger looked at him. "It would be very hopeless, if it were true: I mean if nothing preventive could be done." Hilda moved uneasily and James Mitchell cleared his throat. Anne's flaming face was still lowered. "But since, according to science, malnutrition, pre-natal conditions, unhealthy nerve conditions, do play a part, it seems to me there is a chance. As you say, the children of the rich, under the best physical and educational conditions, do average higher; if these conditions, or even approximately these, were extended, it ought to help some, don't you think?"

Dr. Stetson saw where Roger was leading and looked at him coldly. "Really, Mr. Barton, it's such an intricate subject, and, on the whole, so impossible to discuss with a layman, that"—he beamed round, his charming smile of culture and advantage—"I think we'd have to give more time to it, and more seriousness, than I, at least, am able to give under these conditions." A gracious gesture laid the responsibility for this upon the well-cooked turkey.

Hilda got up to remove the dishes and Anne rose quickly to help. Out in the kitchen, Hilda closed the door and whispered:

"What on earth is the matter with Roger?"

Anne shrugged. "Oh, I don't know. He simply can't take those things lightly. He gets all wrought up about the state of the world."

"Do you think he's dropped it now?" Hilda said hurriedly, detaining Anne as she was about to pass back to the dining-room.

"Yes," Anne said shortly. "He won't say any more."

"Really, it's enough to scare one to death," Hilda went on in her hurried whisper, as she slipped the mince pies from their pans to the serving plates. "Idiots and criminals lurking round and you can't tell them from sane people! Sometimes I think Christian Science must be an awful comfort. Look at Charlotte Welles, she never gets all stewed up. She just goes round saying—All is Love—and she doesn't have to bother about fixing it. What with Dr. Stetson saying you can almost cut wickedness out of people, and Roger wanting to feed it out of them, and Charlotte saying there is none in them—one doesn't know what to believe."

Belle's laughter drifted from the dining-room. Hilda heaved a sigh of real relief. "That's nice. I guess everything'll be all right now. Belle has a lot of tact."

The rest of the meal went off pleasantly. Although Roger made no definite contribution, he no longer sat frowning and crumbling his bread. It was after six when they rose from the table, and, according to a prearranged scheme of Belle's, had black coffee in the other room before the gas log. But Anne saw that Belle did not quite trust Roger yet, because she so evidently kept the conversation in her own hands.

"It's a shame," Anne decided. "He couldn't change them, and this is the first time Belle has ever brought any of her friends home and had things pleasant."

As soon after the black coffee as she could, she let her eye catch Roger's and, at the question in his, nodded faintly. The others would have a better time when he had gone, and they would all be going soon anyhow. She slipped out as Hilda took the empty coffee things.

"I think we'll have to go now, mamma. Roger has had a tiring day and there may be reports to do yet. This is Mr. Wainwright's busy season."

"Do you have to go, dear, really?" Hilda could not keep every atom of relief out of her voice, for neither was she sure of Roger. Perhaps James would let the dinner pass, but not if Roger annoyed him any more.

"I think so. It was a lovely dinner. I'd like to help you with the dishes, but I suppose you'll leave them till morning."

Hilda laughed. "I'm not going to do them at all. Mrs. Welles' Jap schoolboy's coming at half past eight for an hour."

"Good for you!"

"It's papa's present," Hilda said proudly. "Really, Anne, papa's changing quite a bit."

Anne put her arms about her mother. "You dear, patient thing. I wish I were more like you."

"Go on, you flatterer. There's Roger coming to look you up."

"They're going to play bridge for a while. Do you want to play, dear?" he asked.

"No. We'll just slip out the back way. They won't notice."

"Why, Anne, that's awfully rude. Of course they'll notice."

"Is it?" Anne asked coldly, as Hilda disappeared for a moment into the pantry. "Well, I don't think it matters if it is now."

She got her things quietly and joined Roger again in the kitchen. Hilda leaned over the porch railing and waved as they disappeared into the covered tunnel that led to the street. On the sidewalk, Roger slipped his hand under Anne's arm, but Anne drew violently away.

"Why, honey, what's the matter? Surely you don't——"

"Surely I do care for common decency and politeness. Mamma got up a lovely dinner; every one was having a good time, until you got one of those excited streaks on. You might know they wouldn't agree with you. What sense was there in insisting? Besides, Dr. Stetson is an authority and you don't know anything about subnormal psychology or criminology."

Under the stream of Anne's anger, Roger's nerves quivered. Like fork lightning, fears cut across his mind, phrases of Anne's, moods, likes and dislikes, resemblances to the Mitchells. He had been longing to get away from the house, now he wanted to get away from the stream of Anne's invective. But, once started, Anne clung to her hurt.

"Please, Anne, quit it," Roger said as they reached the corner where they had to take the car. "I don't want to hear any more about it."

The car was just coming into sight. "No," Anne said hurriedly, "you never do, after you've had your say."

Side by side, hurt and angry, they sat through the long ride home. But, as they climbed the hill, quiet at this hour, the earth sweet with long rain, the stars clean and shining from a densely blue-black sky, Roger took Anne's hand.

"I'm sorry I hurt you, dear. I really never meant to."

"I don't see how you could have helped meaning it," Anne said coldly, and then, because she too was afraid of this their first real disagreement, pressed his fingers faintly.

CHAPTER TWELVE

They did not mention the dinner again, but for weeks it hung in the background of all Anne's thought. The long silences and sudden irritations of Roger she interpreted by it, as well as her own growing inability to discuss his work with him. All their talks now were touched with the same dislike, almost fear, she had always had of dropping the curtain of Hilda's Niche behind her, and being left alone in the dark confusion of the interior.

Beyond the brilliant light of her own happiness in the coming of the baby, the still positive joy in her pretty home, there was something dark, hidden and unclear. It was as if Roger himself had absorbed some of the dumb hatred, the bitterness of revolt that saturated the outside world.

The longshore strike hung on; other strikes threatened in sympathy. The newspapers clamored for settlement. Through January and February, Roger was out almost every evening with Hilary Wainwright, attending useless efforts at adjustment. From these he returned, his anger throttled to consideration of Anne's condition, a consideration so palpable that Anne felt the foundations of her peace tremble.

Finally, one night at the beginning of March, when, after a brief rest of exhaustion, the rain was again pouring hour after hour, a mass of water from sky to earth, Anne spoke:

"A penny, Roger. You've been staring into the fire half an hour by the clock. I spoke twice and you never heard a word."

Roger turned to her. "Didn't I? I was thinking."

Anne put aside the tiny white nightgown she was hemstitching and drew her chair closer. "I should hope so. I'd hate to think you were just gazing blankly. You're getting awfully quiet, Roger."

"Am I? I suppose I am. There's so little time to really think in the day. It's so cluttered up doing—nothing."

"I thought Mr. Wainwright used to overwork you at first. It's about time he did a little more himself." Anne watched Roger's face, with something of the same tense interest with which one waits for a stage curtain to roll back.

"Oh, he gives me enough to do. It's not that. It's the kind of thing."

"What's he want now?" Anne was going to say: "Another Christmas tree?" but the subject had closed itself naturally on Christmas night and neither had again referred to it.

"He wants to call a meeting of the strike leaders; the heads of the other unions he's afraid are going out in sympathy—a bunch of charity buttinskies, Rockefeller Foundation people and Russell Sage investigators, and—some of his own stock-holders. The thing's to be a cross between a directors' meeting and a church social. He's going to have refreshments served—after a friendly, informal talk, served by his private butler, brought down from the house for the occasion!"

Anne laughed. Roger smiled, and then laughed with her. "If it wasn't pitiful, wicked in a way, it's so dense and stupid, it would be a scream. Black Tom O'Connell, and the Reverend Kenneth Peabody Smythe—being buttled with expensive sandwiches."

Now that he had really started to talk about it, Roger felt the enthusiasm of communication sweep him. It was nice to talk again like this to Anne. The habit had dropped out lately, ever since the Christmas dinner.

"He's obsessed with the idea that if he can persuade Capital and Labor to eat a sandwich together, all will be harmony and brotherly love."

"The men will swallow their claims with their sandwich, as it were?"

"Exactly. And his directors will swallow their just grievances at the men's obstinacy, and everything will be exactly as it was before."

"Did you try to dissuade him?"

"No. It would do no good. He cannot or will not see the thing as an indicator. To him, each strike is a separate act of obstinacy, or anger, or a monetary demand on the part of the men. He concedes some to be just and some unjust, but the just ones are getting fewer, rapidly fewer. He sees the whole labor situation as a kind of rising shriek on the part of the workers, higher and higher, like angry and perverse children who have found a way to terrify their nurses. He's looked the shrieking baby over and can find no pins in its clothing and so he's going to give it a lollypop and tell it to be good. If it doesn't obey—he'll set it down with a thump and leave it to itself."

Under the grotesque figure of his speech, Anne felt Roger's anger. He now hated Hilary Wainwright with a personal bitterness Anne had not believed in him. After a little, she asked quietly:

"When's this meeting coming off?"

"To-morrow night. The invitations went out days ago; off-hand, 'comradely' notes to the labor people; beseeching little appeals to the Russell Sagers, et al. 'to help out'; I didn't see those to the company directors; he managed them himself."

Again there was a short silence, filled to Anne with cold little puffs of anxiety blowing from beyond the warm security of their pretty rooms.

"Can outsiders go, Roger? There wouldn't be any real objection, would there?"

"Why, no. I don't see that there would. Why?"

"I'd like to go."

"Really?" Roger turned to her, his eyes full of a pleased surprise that hurt Anne a little.

"Of course I would. It sounds interesting."

"Interesting? Yes, it will be interesting as a psychological problem—a kind of clinic for studying the blind stupidity of Hilary Wainwright and his kind. It may be rough, too. I wouldn't answer for Black Tom O'Connell—if he comes."

"I guess it won't be so rough that I can't stand it—if you can," Anne added in an emphasis that escaped Roger, visioning again the absurd sandwich that was to unite Labor and Capital.

But the next evening, as she followed Roger into the already well-filled room, Anne forgot her personal interest in the feel of suppressed antagonism that filled the very air. Almost abnormally sensitive to hidden currents, as Anne passed down the empty space so clearly separating the two factions of the audience, she felt the currents playing across her.

On the right, in little knots and groups about Hilary Wainwright's desk, were the directors and their wives, the Russell Sagers, et al., a few thin, rather pale young men and a woman with horn-rimmed glasses, stringy hair and a note book. On the left, a fat man with a red face and very black hair and two women, one scarcely more than a girl, with bobbed chestnut curls, and great violet eyes, child-like eyes above the scarlet lips of a woman.

As Roger led to seats just opposite this girl, Anne noticed that the girl looked at them, and said something to the woman beside her, but the latter did not answer, nor even turn to them. She was a squat, heavily built woman, with a swarthy skin, and densely black, living hair, without a thread of gray, although Anne judged her more than forty.

She gripped Anne's attention and held it. She was so still. She looked as if she could wait forever and, in the end, the thing she waited would come. She was like the earth, silent, indifferent to all the play of light and shadow in life. She lived for a purpose. Whatever it was, Anne felt it like a thick, brown shell about her. Again the girl with the bobbed hair spoke to her. This time she frowned and shrugged aside the girl's remarks. It was like the motion of a tree disturbing the poise of a bright insect lodged for a moment upon its leaves. The girl laughed and the heavy woman lit a cigarette. She smoked in deep, violent draws that obscured her face in a cloud of stinging blue smoke.

At the odor, a short, bald-headed man rose on the other side of the room and opened a window. When he came back to his chair the woman beside him bowed her thanks. She was a large, gray-haired woman, conspicuous as the one bright spot amid the dark tailored suits of the other women and the business clothes of the men. Her amber-colored tunic, of soft silk, blended into the golden tint of her rounded, unlined face. Her skirt of golden-brown broadcloth toned in perfect harmony with her brown suede boots. When, through her gold lorgnette, hung on an amber chain, her brown eyes smiled their thanks to the man for his service, she seemed to come down from some height for the special purpose. She was like a rich, perfectly-ripened apricot, hung beyond reach. Next to her, on the left, the black-coated slimness of the Reverend Kenneth Peabody Smythe stood out like an exclamation point, calling attention to his presence in this extraordinary gathering.

At his desk, Hilary Wainwright kept glancing anxiously from the door to the group of men talking together in the third row. These men were all beyond middle age, with well-brushed gray hair, white, well-kept hands and tailored clothes. Two of them were lean, sharp-eyed men, their bodies tightened like springs, perfect mechanisms for the gripping and adjusting of any obstruction before them. The other was shorter, with a heavy neck and predatory eyes, the cheap cartoonists' favorite illustration of a capitalist.

Hilary Wainwright was just moving to join them, when the door opened and a large, raw-boned man in an untidy overcoat entered hurriedly and, without looking to the right or left, came straight to the seat beside the bobbed-haired girl. His boots left a muddy trail across the rug, and, as he shrugged himself out of his overcoat the ashes from his cigar stub fell on the girl's lap. With a dainty flip of her white fingers she brushed them aside, leaned close to the man, and whispered. He nodded, and the girl patted his knee. With a tap of his gavel, Hilary Wainwright called the meeting to order.

Under cover of the preliminary remarks on the present situation among the longshoremen, Anne whispered to Roger:

"Who's that man?"

"Black Tom O'Connell. The idol of the laboring world."

"Who's that heavy woman this side?"

"That's Katya Orloff, the inevitable Russian Jew."

Anne looked beyond her to Black Tom. He, like Katya, was sitting perfectly still, the unlit butt of the cigar hanging from his lips. His long, thin face was badly shaven and grayish from overwork. His worn clothes hung loosely on his large frame, bent and gnarled from a childhood of work and the passions which Anne felt were always tearing the man. Again and again, Anne tried to look away, to listen to the smooth flow of Hilary Wainwright's studied periods, but her eyes always came back to the still, slouching form next to the pretty girl. Their physical proximity disturbed her. She felt an element in the girl reaching to this man, scarred, untidy, old enough to be her father. When the girl for the second time laid her soft, white hand on his knee, Anne felt herself flush and looked quickly away to Hilary.

Whatever he had been saying, he had now reached the end of the first period. With a distinct bracing of his shoulders, and a decided hardening of his lips, he went on:

"And so it seemed the best thing for us all to get together and talk the thing out frankly and honestly. The situation is serious and it concerns us all, every one of us and the whole city," he added, to impress the fact that it was not his peculiar position as main owner in the sugar fleet, not the financial interest of the other keen directors, that had brought them there, but their world interest in all that touched humanity. "Until now, the strike has been fairly orderly, but it will not continue so much longer. The city, the common people, cannot be made to bear much longer the brunt of curtailed sugar supply, or idle shipping. The boats have got to be run." He paused. Anne felt Katya Orloff move for the first time, a slight movement toward them. She turned slightly and saw that Katya was now looking with faint amusement at Roger, the only one in the room listening intently to Hilary.

The directors, bored by having to give up their evening to this "hare-brained scheme of that idealist, Wainwright," but realizing the importance of having every morning paper blazon the fact that they had met with Labor and tried to reach a sane compromise, sat back in noncommittal placidity. The Reverend Kenneth Peabody Smythe looked worried, and the lady in apricot disgusted. The thin woman with the notebook chewed her pencil while studying the severely plain and expensive suit of the woman in front of her. It was impossible to tell whether Black Tom even knew where he was, and the bobbed-haired girl toyed with a string of jade beads and yawned. Anne moved a little and so obstructed the view of the squat woman. Hilary continued:

"There was, of course, no written and official agreement that the men would not strike, but it was understood, by the law of good will and decency. The world has been through a period of bitter suffering and now it is the duty of every one, from the top to the bottom, to pull and pull together. That it is no longer possible to pay the war time wage, when labor is scarce, is not the fault of any one individual. We, those who happen to be the hirers of labor, regret this as much as any one. The men ought to understand. They refuse to do so. Every method has been tried, short—of strike-breakers." Hilary paused to let the significance sink in. "But the country is full of men eager to work, desperate for work, with a right to work. The mayor understands the situation. He will protect the right of these men to sell their labor. He——"

Black Tom was on his feet, his long, narrow head thrust forward, the stinking ash of his cigar falling again on the bobbed-haired girl, who again brushed it off with an exquisitely dainty fillip of a white finger.

"He will, will he? How long does he think he's going to run this town?"

Hilary Wainwright tapped with his gavel, a little sound like a woodpecker. Every one but Katya was looking at Tom now.

"Just—about—as—long as it will take to bring in those strike-breakers." Black Tom's stained hand moved in a quick, drawing motion, gathering the strike-breakers to him. "Just that long and no longer. Bring them on," he commanded. "You can't bring them too soon. Bring them, dozens, hundreds, thousands—you will need them all."

The heavy hands moved now in a low, undulating wave, the wave of advancing thousands. Anne felt Roger rigid beside her and her own heart was beating thickly. The force of the man was terrific. It rayed from his gaunt body, burned in his deep-set, brown eyes. "Bring them, I tell you, bring them, the poor, starving victims you'll fool with higher wages than you're paying the present ones; hand out the promises you're laughing in your sleeves to see them believe. But—they won't believe them long. They'll take the jobs because they have to, with shame in their hearts, the decent ones, and in the end they'll come to us." He paused, and a smile, so sad, so understanding, so full of pity lit his face that Anne saw Roger's hands grip the chair arms.

Instantly Hilary Wainwright seized the opening. "That's the spirit that's doing so much harm. We came here to-night, each to take advantage of the other's greater knowledge along certain lines, but we can get nowhere unless——"

"Unless liars like you get out," Black Tom thundered, filling the room with the fury of his anger, although he scarcely raised his voice. It was the warning rumble of thunder, distant, rolling nearer. "You've held the power, until the best of you have forgotten that God Almighty didn't create the world for you. But he didn't and He's getting sick of seeing the mess you've made of it. Not much longer, not so very long now." In the pleasantly warmed air before him he seemed to see a vision, a vision that suddenly quelled his anger. He smiled a slow, understanding smile of love and forgiveness. "You can't do it; why do you try? It's not you against us; can't you see that? It's the new against the old, the worn out, the rotten. It's not this strike, or any one strike; it's men, men beating their way up out of the dark below. They're coming, coming." His head, bent now, seemed to hear them in the stillness that filled the room. "Coming slowly, with bleeding feet, the way your God marched on to Calvary, but—nothing will stop them. Nothing." And then he laughed, so genuinely amused, that the terrible silence shattered in little clicks of disgust. "Strike-breakers! Good God, a bunch of starving boobs—to hold back the Social Revolution!"

The apricot-colored woman was the first to move. With a decisive gesture she snapped her gold lorgnette and motioned the bald-headed man to bring her cape. At his desk, Hilary Wainwright looked helplessly about for a moment, then rose and walked down to the group of directors.

Katya Orloff drew on the jacket she had only partly loosed. The pretty girl was already pulling a grass-green tam over the chestnut curls.

"Come on, Tom. Pete and Ikey are having a blowout. Let's beat it. There's lots of time."

The man did not seem to hear, but he followed her. Too impatient for the elevator, whose driver, expecting a protracted "row," had gone into the pool parlor in the next basement, they ran down the stairs. Before they turned the first flight, Anne heard the girl laughing gayly.

Katya stepped up to Roger with a look that Anne resented personally. It was the smile of an older person to a small boy, not a precocious annoying small boy, but the kind of boy one refers to as "an exceedingly bright little chap."

"Your meeting was not a success." She spoke with a soft burr, impossible to reproduce, a thick, throaty tone with an odor of foreignness in it.

"No," Roger answered shortly. "It wasn't."

She seemed to be going to say something else, changed her mind and clumped off alone.

The elevator man had come back to his post. In a few moments the room was empty of all save Roger and Anne.

"I suppose you have to wait," Anne began, when a long, pale face, apparently disconnected from any body, appeared at the door of Hilary's private office.

"No need, Williams; they're gone."

"Gone, sir!"

"Gone. Slipped. Vamoosed," Roger added in an urge to shock the frozen composure of that face. "Sandwiches all wasted unless—you eat them yourself."

The face retreated in shocked but respectful silence. Roger laughed and Hilary Wainwright entered. There was a short, awkward silence, and then Hilary said hurriedly, as if, in the interval of his absence, he had accumulated unforeseen but important duties:

"Would you mind locking up, Barton?" He took some papers from his desk, his raincoat and umbrella, and, with a gracious smile to Anne, moved to the door. "See you in the morning, Roger," he threw back and was gone.

Williams had already disappeared. The untouched sandwiches Roger put into a box, switched off the lights and locked the doors. When he presented the astounded elevator boy with at least a hundred very delicately cut sandwiches, the boy grinned; but Roger did not smile in return.

"Let's walk," Anne suggested.

"Do you feel like it? I'd like to."

They went on in silence.

"Who's that pretty girl with the bobbed hair that went out with Black Tom?"

"Merle something. I don't know her last name. She lives with Black Tom."

Anne stopped. "Lives with him! Do you mean—that—that they live together?"

"Yes. He has a wife somewhere who won't divorce him. He hasn't even seen her for years, I believe. But I don't know much about it."

Anne shuddered. "She's so young and clean and pretty. He's all worn and old enough to be her father."

Roger shrugged. "Sex is queer. You can never tell a thing about it."

Disgust touched Anne. She had felt the man's spirit, but now his body obstructed her vision. She could think of nothing but those scarred hands, and wide, rather heavy lips caressing the clean daintiness of the girl.

"It makes me sick," she said in a tight, hard tone. "A leader of men, a kind of prophet of the oppressed living like that! It's sickening."

Roger looked at her quickly. "What has his private life to do with it? He is a leader, a prophet."

"It has a lot to do with it. For a moment there, he looked as if he were really seeing visions, clean, high, unselfish ideals. It's a pity he can't see himself and—and that child."

"Rubbish, Anne. She's no child. He probably didn't kidnap her."

"Nor will Hilary Wainwright and those men Tom O'Connell despises kidnap the strike-breakers," Anne went on hotly. "They will come of their own free wills—'the poor, deluded victims, fooled with promises.'"

Roger looked at her helplessly. He wished he had not taken Anne's arm, because now, he could not very well drop it. If he did, Anne would think he was angry. And he was not angry.

They walked on again in silence, until Anne asked with a pecking, personal intrusion into the calm he had captured again in the silence:

"Does Katya Orloff live with some one too?"

"I don't know," Roger answered impatiently. "Really, Anne, I don't know anything about the private lives of any of them."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The next morning Roger reached the office at half past nine but Hilary was already there. It was the first morning of a clear sunshine after weeks of rain, and Hilary, even more groomed and manicured than usual, looked as if he, too, had emerged into a new mood. There was a new crispness in his manner; business efficiency sparkled in his quick movements, his hasty finishing of a memorandum, the way he nodded to Roger.

"Just a moment, Barton. I'll be through in a jiffy." Usually Roger passed on to his own partitioned end of the room, and began on work arranged the night before. But now he sat down and waited for Hilary. Seated so, to one side and just a little behind Hilary, Roger saw him spiritually foreshortened in the reflection of last evening. He looked tight and secure, encased in his own assurances of safety as in a spiritual corset. In a moment he had blotted the paper and turned to Roger.

"Well," he began genially, "we didn't put it over, did we? Not discouraged, I hope?"

"Not at all."

Hilary seemed balked, reconsidered what he had arranged for his next sentence, and said instead:

"I rather over-reached myself in having Tom O'Connell. He's an uncertain quantity, a regular firebrand. And he isn't the power he thinks he is. When it comes to a pinch, the men will desert him. They're more level-headed than he gives them credit for."

"The men forced to scab," Roger inquired, and, at the sharp look Hilary darted to him, added "by the pinch of hunger?"

Hilary tapped for a moment, then made his decision with a quick frown.

"Barton, just where do you stand on that meeting last night?"

"With Tom O'Connell," Roger said and rose.

Hilary rose too. They looked at each other. Roger smiled first.

"I suppose it was bound to come," Hilary said, relieved.

"Yes. I have thought for some time—yes—it had to come." Roger almost respected him for his honesty and when, with a truly regretful smile, Hilary held out his hand, Roger was able to return the shake without scorn. "We see things too differently to work well together."

"Yes. I feel like a fish out of water, more so every day."

Hilary twinkled. "Well, if you're going to jump into the sea I think you're headed for—I hope you won't drown," was his comment.

"I'll try to swim," Roger agreed, and then followed a short talk of work Roger was leaving undone. "If it will help out, I'll stay till you get some one."

"N-o, you needn't. I'm taking on Hawthorne from the auditing department as my private secretary. In fact, I'm thinking of changing the angle of some of the work quite materially. It's no good wasting brains and money on conditions that aren't ripe for them."

"None at all," Roger agreed.

At the end of a quarter of an hour it was over. Roger was out again in the warm morning sunshine. And then he thought of Anne.

Would Anne understand? Once he would have been sure. Now he did not know. He was getting to know less and less how Anne would stand on many questions. Last night she had seemed to grasp the power and soul of Tom O'Connell, and then, when the one great fetish of the sane and respectable middle class was violated, when the conventional sanctity of marriage was imperiled, Anne had retreated behind the great bourgeois virtue of "decency," as smug and prim and spiritually corseted as Hilary himself.

Roger went slowly up the long flight of steps and came on Anne, weeding the trailers from a border of violets. Bent so over the bed, her hands and arms spattered with rich black earth, her silvery blonde hair shining in the sun, Anne looked like a little girl. Tenderness touched Roger. Anne looked up.

"You've quit," she said quickly.

Roger nodded.

"I think I knew you would—last night." Anne rose and shook the loam from her fingers. Still her tone had told Roger nothing.

"Do you think I did wrong? Are you angry?"

"Why, Roger, what a silly question. If you felt it was wrong to work with him, of course you did right. And I would never be angry at your doing what you thought was right. I don't think that's quite fair, do you?"

And still Roger did not know how she really felt.

Anne picked up the basket and trowel and Roger took them from her.

"Finished? You look as if you had just started in." Ten minutes earlier Roger would have been disappointed that Anne could go on with the ordinary day's work in face of the great event; now he resented her silent attitude that the course of the day had been terminated by his act. He walked beside her to the kitchen door, but it seemed impossible to go in between walls and leave the pungent earth and blue sky.

"I say, let's celebrate. Let's go over to Tamalpais. We've never taken that scenic trip. We'll make a whole day of it, have lunch at the inn." Still, in her centuries of rest, the Sleeping Beauty lay along the ridge. "Look at the old girl, isn't she clear? I was always a bit uncertain about her nose, but there it is. Quite a feature; looks as if she were sniffing this gorgeous day. Well, do we sniff too?"

Anne smiled and put her gardening things on their shelf by the door.

"Can't, dear, not to-day. Mamma's been waiting for me to come up and finish that house dress. To-day's the best for her. Pretty soon I won't have a thing I can wear."

"I wish you wouldn't do so much sewing, Anne. Can't you buy baby things and—and maternity clothes? I'd a lot rather you did or would hire somebody, than refuse to go on picnics with me," he ended with a pleading, boyish look, that did not influence Anne in the least. It seemed hardly the time to suggest buying clothes or hiring help.

"Yes. But it's so much cheaper. I don't mind sewing."

Roger felt his pleasure in the picnic die. "All right, honey, run along if you really want to. But let's go to somewhere for dinner to-night. I feel spaghetti-ish. How's Ramillotti's?"

"Let's wait and see how we feel then," Anne parried. "A celebration that's all cut and dried beforehand isn't much of a celebration, is it?"

And then, because Anne did look so pretty in her big gardening apron standing in the full sunshine, Roger picked her up and kissed her.

"Don't sew too hard and get all tired out. I think I'll go down to the library for a while. There's a lot of reading I've been wanting to do for a long time. I'll get a chance now."

Until Anne reached Hilda's front door, she wondered what she would do if her mother were out. She could scarcely sit on the front steps and she would not go back. But she was just in time. Hilda was half way downstairs when Anne rang.

"Of all people! I just knew something nice was going to happen to-day." Hilda trilled with a gay laugh, for Anne rarely came in the morning, and Hilda adored all-day visits.

"You were going out, mamma."

"Not any place I had to. I just couldn't stay in alone to-day." They went upstairs hand in hand.

"I thought, perhaps, we might finish that gingham. The idea of it's hanging round half done has gotten on my nerves."

"Never felt more like sewing. A nice long day ahead always seems to have so much more time in it than the same number of hours chopped up during the week. You ought to be glad Roger doesn't come home to lunch, Anne. When I was working at Belle's baby clothes it seemed to me as soon as I got started it was time to stop and fix lunch. I'll just put these dishes out of the way and we'll get right at it."

She took off her things, carried the unwashed breakfast dishes into the pantry and closed the door on them. The broken egg-shell and scraps of toast on the stove she swept into the coal-scuttle, the crumbs from the oilcloth-covered breakfast table followed, and the scuttle was deposited on the back porch. While she rolled the sewing-machine in from the hall, Anne swept the floor.

"This is nice." Hilda's eyes danced; even the gray curls on her neck seemed to bob merrily. "Now, if you'll just slip off your dress, I'll fit it."

When it was pinned to the right length, Hilda leaned back on her heels and admired.

"That's a fine pattern. Wonderful how they get things regulated now—no riding up in front as you get bigger. Why, you won't scarcely show in that at all, right up to the end."

Anne felt the same touch of distaste she always did when her mother referred to her physical condition. There was something in Hilda's manner that stripped the miracle to its physiological basis, and, although she tried not to, Anne always felt naked before it. She had endured a really difficult half-hour when she had first told Hilda of Roger Mitchell Barton.

"It's pretty. What's more important, it will keep clean a long time without washing."

Hilda laughed. "Getting practical at last. Nothing like a baby for doing that. Do you remember the arguments we used to have when you were fourteen, about that black sateen petticoat? You always insisted that it must be just as dirty as if it were white, and wanted to send it to the laundry every week?"

Anne nodded. How she had loathed dark clothes supposed not to show the dirt! "I must have been a nasty child, always fussing about something."

"You weren't at all. But you were pretty finicky and highfalutin. I never did know what was going to send you off. And how you loved pretty things! Even as a tiny baby, I always felt you enjoyed having your best things on. You used to feel one dress, rub your little hands up and down it softly—it was really a lovely cambric; papa's boss's wife sent it; her baby had outgrown it—and goo and smile. I suppose you would have a fit to see his Highness dressed in any one else's cast-offs, but I was glad to get it. How far along's the layette?"

"Most of the under-things are done, not quite all. I haven't begun on dresses."

"I thought you were going to buy those, the best ones?"

"No—I don't—think I will. They'll be cheaper to make."

"But they're such close sewing and you don't like that kind of work, tucks and hemstitching. Don't be a penny-wise and a pound-foolish and get all frazzled out, Anne."

"No—at least—I won't be a pound-foolish. Roger's left Mr. Wainwright."

"Oh!" Hilda gasped. "Oh, Anne, when did it happen?"

Anne tried to laugh. "This morning."

"Don't you think you'd better go right straight home, dear?" she whispered as if Anne had communicated Roger's sudden death.

"Why? There's nothing to do."

"N-o. I don't suppose there is. But—what happened, with the baby and everything?"

"Nothing special. They don't agree. It's been coming on for some months. Roger doesn't feel that Mr. Wainwright is sincere and he can't work with him."

"Well, I must say——"

"And I wouldn't have him stay a minute when he feels like that."

"No, dear, I don't suppose you would," Hilda hastily conciliated Anne's "condition." "But it does seem too bad that his conscience got worked up just at this time. A few months more——"

"This is the best possible time," Anne said decidedly. "There's no extra expense now."

"No. But when a woman's carrying, she likes to feel a good safe road ahead. It's nature, I suppose, like birds building nests and all that. If papa had suddenly given up his job when I was in your condition, like as not you would have been an idiot. I should have worried myself sick. But you always were a cool little customer."

Anne forced a smile and slipped the gingham over her head.

"If you'll stitch the skirt seams, mamma, I'll baste this collar. That's the only tricky part in the whole thing. Perhaps we can finish it to-day."

"We certainly can. We'll stay right with it till it's done."

And they did, stopping only for a cup of tea and some very stale cake, about one o'clock. At three the dress was finished.

"Now, you go lie down and take a nap and when you wake phone Roger to come up for dinner. He hasn't been round for ages, not since Christmas." Having become involved in the exact date, Hilda slipped over it quickly.

"We will some other time, moms, but I can't to-night."

The long day of sewing and chatting, and constant steering away from the subject of Roger, had exhausted Anne and she wanted her own quiet home, which, even if its peace were now disturbed, held its past security, and a calm, quiet cleanliness that her mother's never had. "I've got all the things in for a fussy kind of supper and they'd spoil."

"Then of course you can't." Death itself could not have been a greater deterrent. "What-all are you going to have?"

"Oh, a fussy pudding, and mayonnaise and things."

Anne was putting on her things in the bedroom and Hilda stood watching, a little envious of Anne's calmness. Mayonnaise and fussy pudding! Perhaps, if she had dared, years ago——

"You certainly have learned to be some cook, Anne."

"I like to try new dishes." Her things on, Anne moved from the room and when she had passed Hilda, said, "but it's the so-called fussy things that are easiest. Whipped cream and eggs make a great show, but any fool can beat them up. Lots of things are harder. I don't believe I could make a decent pot-roast, if I tried. I don't even know what part of the animal to buy."

"There are different parts. Cross-rib's fine, but chuck's cheapest, and I like it just as well."

"And it takes hours and hours, doesn't it?" Anne was still moving toward the stair-head, her back to Hilda.

"No, it doesn't. Lots of people think it does and they make those dry, leathery roasts. A piece big enough for us never took more than a couple of hours, going slow, with plenty of suet."

"Chuck, going slow, two hours, plenty of suet," Anne entrenched it in her memory, and then Hilda was saying:

"You never used to like it, but I'm sure I don't know why. I don't think there's any gravy like the gravy of a good pot-roast. And there's always plenty of it."

As usual, she walked down the stairs with Anne and kissed her again at the front door.

Roger was not in when Anne reached home. She lit the gas-range and put the pot-roast on before taking off her things. When it was simmering at the right rate, she shut the kitchen door to keep the odor from the living-room, changed into a kimono, and lay down on the living-room couch.

It was dusk, with the first faint stars winking uncertainly in the deepening twilight, when Roger came running up the stairs. He was out of breath, cool-skinned and glowing. He came straight to the couch and kissed her.

"Well, Princess, which is it, Pietro's or the Pheasant? I felt spaghetti-ish this morning but it's gradually worked round to planked steak."

Anne sat up and said gayly, "It's neither. It's pot-roast, and it'll be ready about six."

Roger stared, the sparkle in his eyes receding slowly. Still Anne smiled gayly at him. "It's the first one I've made and it's going to be a dandy."

But Roger took her hands in his, and Anne's gayety died. They looked at each other, and then Roger said:

"Anne, please, never do a thing like this again. Don't you trust me, dear? We believe in the same things, don't we? We're not afraid of anything, are we, honey?"

Something in Anne urged her to stand her ground. Something else made her want to cry and creep close to Roger and be held safe from her own fears and "common-sense." She was very tired. Her lips trembled. Roger drew her quickly into his arms. They clung so for a moment, as if holding fiercely against a force reaching toward them. Then Roger turned Anne's face to his.

"Princess, let's throw that damned pot-roast out."

Anne smiled faintly. "That would be silly. It's really an awfully good pot-roast. There, you can smell it. It must be going a little too fast."

But Roger did not smile. "I won't eat it. It smells—like death."

"Do you really feel like that?"

"I do, Anne, really."

"Then we'll go and have planked steak."

In the sweetness of reconciliation, Roger forgot to throw out the pot-roast. They had a gay and expensive dinner at the Pheasant and went to the theater afterwards.

But, for the rest of the week, Roger ate savoury ragouts, and meat pies which taxed Anne's ingenuity to the utmost, especially when the pot-roast had dwindled to a dry, outer rim.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

There were times in the next month when Roger seriously considered going back into the law. He even went so far as looking up Walter Marsh, an old college chum with whom he had rather grown out of touch, now a very successful corporation lawyer. But at Marsh's hints that there was an opening with him if Roger cared to consider it, Roger always hurried away from further discussion. Nor did he tell Anne of these visits.

Anne never referred to his leaving Wainwright, nor did she ever again serve pot-roast. Apparently their method of life was unchanged. Roger could not put his finger on any one incident, recall a single allusion of Anne's, but he now felt encased in an atmosphere of watching, of tight guardedness, and of economical maneuverings. Outwardly Anne seemed as cheerful as ever, but Roger could feel unexpressed criticism moving shadow-like about him, and his nerves tightened. He often grew irritable and then desperately contrite. Irritation at this time was brutal, but Roger could not shake off the feeling of breathing imperceptible particles of objection. Sometimes he started to talk out their situation frankly, but it always ended in a fog. He felt as if he were beating with exaggerated violence in a cloud of dust. The air was full of minute, subtle differences, sudden closings of Anne's lips, sentences caught and deftly turned from their first intention; and of Anne's patience. This patience was the hardest to stand without reference.

Again and again Roger tried to explain this growing tensity between them by Anne's nervous condition. But Anne had never felt better in her life. Always pretty in a cool, silvery way, there were moments now when Anne seemed to send from within a living, golden flame. Often, in the evenings, when Anne sat, her head bent above the small, white sewing in her lap, Roger trembled, awed and a little frightened before the marvel of this thing that was happening to Anne.

It was after a sudden, stabbing vision of Anne like this, that Roger went to Walter Marsh's office for the second time in one week.

"Hello." Walter Marsh put away some important work to greet Roger. "Well, what's the decision?"

Up to the very door, Roger had intended to accept the good opening Marsh had definitely offered him at the last visit, but, now, as he looked about the beautifully furnished office, the hard processes of the law softened by the tinted walls, the thick rugs, the great bunch of chrysanthemums in the old-blue, China vase, he sparred for time.

"Haven't made one yet."

Marsh frowned. His genuine admiration for Roger's ability was scarcely proof against a certain quality in Roger that he had always felt might, and now feared had already, swamped Roger's sense of proportion. As he put it to his wife, Helen: "Roger's got that dog-goned idealist sophistry in his bean, that nothing can be right or just or fine—if you make a decent living at it. And the joke of it, or the tragedy for men like Roger, is that it's only outsiders like him who feel that way. You can't get a real radical to do a thing without paying him up to the hilt. I'll wager that Labor god, O'Connell himself, has a pile salted down safely." For, like all financially successful men, Walter Marsh had a fixed belief that no able, sane person worked long for an ideal alone.

"Well, it's up to you," he said shortly.

For, although he was willing to talk the matter over with Roger for the rest of the afternoon if it would lead anywhere, he was not willing to waste more time even on Roger, who, after seven days' consideration of a decidedly advantageous opening, still announced that he had reached no decision. He picked up his pen, not quite indicating the interview over, but very clearly expressing his feeling toward Roger. Years after, Roger used to wonder what he would have done, if Walter Marsh had not picked up his pen in just that way, at just that moment. He looked quietly at Marsh, only a few years older than himself, but already with the fine lines of nervous concentration about his eyes, blue eyes glazed in assurance of their owner's mental processes; the eyes of a very successful man who realizes the uselessness of fretting his conscience over conditions beyond his personal power to change.

"But I don't think I'll take you up," Roger went on as if no interval had intervened. "I've grown too far away from the law. I can't go back."

"Or ahead," Walter almost snapped in his honest disappointment.

"Perhaps not." For a moment Roger felt very much alone.

"Well, I can't change you and I won't try. I hope you'll make a go of anything you settle to." Unconsciously Marsh intimated his doubt of Roger's ever settling to anything worth while.

Roger smiled, his momentary sadness dissolved in Marsh's solicitude. Walter Marsh might have been an elderly uncle, washing his hands of a wild nephew.

"Thanks, just the same, old chap. Your offer was certainly generous."

For a moment the other felt inclined to tell him that it would remain open, changed his mind, and took Roger's out-stretched hand.

"When you get settled, let me know. And come over to dinner some night, you and Anne. Helen's always asking me why I don't make you."

"We will."

Roger left the office, glad that he had not told Anne where he was going.

Dinner was ready when he reached home and they sat down at the daintily set table on the porch. Now that spring was come they had gone back to the pleasant custom. To-night, in his relief at having put the possibility of Walter Marsh behind him, Roger was gayer than he had been for weeks. Anne noticed and wondered and tried to edge the talk around to discovery, and finally, to Roger's astonishment, mentioned Marsh.

"I see Walter Marsh's been engaged for that big Southern Pacific case."

"Yes, he's getting ahead wonderfully. He'll end way up yet."

"Do you think he's honest?" Anne asked after a moment filled with pouring the black coffee into the small cups.

"Y-e-s, in a way. Personally, he's as straight as a die. But he's divided his life into sections, private and public. He'll do as corporation lawyer for the Southern Pacific what he would never dream of doing for himself."

Anne drank her coffee slowly. "I suppose he compromises by being 'a mild progressive' and making things better 'along the line they are.'"

Roger leaned back in his chair and laughed until Anne joined him.

"Princess, you'd make a first class lawyer yourself. Walter calls himself a liberal already."

"And you're—a Socialist, I suppose?"

Roger stopped laughing. "I suppose I am. Are you?"

"I—don't know. I don't know enough about it."

"I don't know much myself, not the technical details. But it seems to me it's the only thing that isn't trying to patch a rotten piece of cloth. It wants to weave a new one, from what I understand."

"Some job," Anne said and lit the single cigarette she ever smoked, the after-dinner cigarette that Roger had taught her to take soon after their marriage, when they had done all things together.

"It certainly is. But a worth-while one. Anne, suppose we frankly join some radical group and begin weaving, too."

Anne puffed, flicked the ash into the tiny lacquer tray, and said with more calmness than she felt:

"I don't think I will, Roger. Not till I know more about it. I don't believe in jumping in and out of things."

Roger looked away. He felt that he had again been caught in the cloud of dust. Anne smoked her cigarette and lit a second. Only by this extraordinary act could she bring herself to the point she had decided upon that afternoon. When it was smoked quite through, she said calmly:

"Why don't you go and see Tom O'Connell?"

"What?" he echoed stupidly.

"Why not? Your sympathies are with him."

Now that Anne had worded it, Roger recognized the longing he had been stifling for weeks. To do something he believed in with his whole soul. His eyes softened and coming quickly about the table he knelt beside her.

"Princess," he whispered, "you're the most wonderful thing in the world."

Anne looked down into Roger's eyes and wondered. Why did he think it wonderful for her to suggest this thing that she had felt in him for weeks? Had he been waiting for her to do so? Why? What would he have done if she had not?

Before her quiet, searching look, Roger's eyes fell.

"Forgive me, honey," he whispered.

Roger had mistrusted. His plea for forgiveness proved it. Something deep in Anne hardened, but she patted his cheek and said cheerfully:

"Why don't you look him up to-night? It's early yet."

"Do you want to get rid of me?" Roger teased with a look in his eyes that had not been there for a long time.

"No—of course I don't," Anne said, and he kissed her.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The next day Roger went to Tom O'Connell. Through a cloud of tobacco smoke, Roger saw him at the end of the dusty loft, sprawled on the edge of a table behind a low railing and listening to two short, heavy men talking at once. Some maps and statistical charts hung from the rough, wooden walls; a magazine-stand stood close to the door, piled with papers and pamphlets, red-bound, or with glaring red splotches in their cover designs. Close to the bench on which Roger waited some one was pounding a typewriter behind a partition. The east end of the loft was enclosed as a separate office and from this enclosure came the voices of men and women talking loudly. The whole room vibrated to the feel of a rushing force, of many violent plans being made and driven through to execution in an incredibly short time. No restraint here, no polish, no modulation. Right or wrong, these people believed in themselves. Society was a wall through which, by brute force, they would drive the spike of their ideal. Roger's excitement grew. He felt like the unfortunate son of the leading citizen in a small town, watching a magnificent back-alley fight by "de gang."

Suddenly the typewriter beside him stopped, and Katya Orloff peered over the top of the partition. If she was surprised she did not show it.

"Come in. Tom will be through in a minute." She disappeared and Roger went round to the gate she opened. Katya's desk was piled with papers, carbons, and cigarette ashes. Teetering on one edge, the dregs of a cup of black coffee, into which Katya had dropped the crust of a ham sandwich, threatened to destroy a pile of clean copy, but didn't.

"Sit down." Katya motioned to an upturned apple box and Roger sat down. Then, for the first time, Katya smiled. A spark lit in the little brown eyes, but the heavy mouth remained unmoved. It was as if her power to smile was slowly dying. The eyes alone refused to petrify in the devastating seriousness of Katya's purpose. Roger smiled back.

"I thought you would come. I expected you sooner."

"Did you?" Roger withdrew his smile, resentful of her assurance. He felt that Katya caught his feeling, but she did not apologize. Instead she offered him one of her vile cigarettes. Roger refused.

"They are beastly, but I can't smoke anything else any more." She inhaled and the cigarette was gone in a few deep breaths. "But I'm really glad you didn't come any sooner. It means you've thought it out carefully. We're overloaded now with enthusiasm, twigs not strong enough to keep the pot boiling. Hear them crackling?" Her frowsy black head jerked toward the voices of the two men talking to Tom. "Poor Tom. He'll have to pour water on them and then—two more vanity-wounded enemies."

Katya's voice, husky from too much loud speech-making and the vile cigarettes, had unexpected soft spots, rest places, quiet corners of pity in the roar of her faith. Roger felt that the woman might have many of these hidden places, little corners of pity and gentleness, and forgot his resentment.

"I'll promise not to crackle."

"How old are you?"

"Twenty-nine. Almost thirty."

"You're married, aren't you?"

"Yes."

Katya lit another cigarette. "Got any ideas?"

"No." Roger began to feel like a small boy again.

"That's good. You're too inexperienced to have any worth while; too obstinate to put up with having any rooted out. What do you know about the movement, anyway?"

"Practically nothing," Roger snapped. After all, Katya had not invented her Social Revolution. It was not her personal property.

"'Virgin Soil,'" Katya grinned. "Ever read it?"

"Yes."

"Like it?"

"Not much."

"Why?"

"It didn't get me."

"Russian literature is a fad with most Americans, only they won't own it. But some day you will like it."

She might as well have said: "Some day you will develop to the point of understanding Russian literature."

For the present, however, she had finished with him. She rose now above the fence and gave a long, clear whistle. Instantly the two men stopped talking.

"No more time to-day, boys." Black Tom answered the whistle with two short notes and Katya opened the gate.

"I say, you're not going to let the thing hang in mid-air, are you?" one of the men demanded belligerently. "You think you've got the whole thing in your own pocket. Well, you haven't. The rest of us——"

"Get out," Tom thundered. "Neither of you has a suggestion worth listening to. I tell you we're not ready yet. You're like a lot of kids with firecrackers, can't wait till the Fourth to make your little splutter. I'm not going to fight just for the sake of fighting."

"You tin Czar——"

"Get out."

The men banged out of the loft and Katya led Roger over to Black Tom.

"Roger Barton."

The big man stared at him, still concerned with the others, until Katya laid a hand on his arm and drew him back to the present.

"Hilary Wainwright's secretary. Sent out those invitations." They smiled at each other, and Roger bristled. The courtesy of these people was an extraordinary thing. "He's left and wants to talk to you." Like a nurse delivering her charge, Katya clumped away.

Black Tom glanced at the desk clock, frowned and said shortly:

"I suppose that means you want to look us over with a view to coming in?"

"I don't know whether I do or not," Roger flung at him.

Black Tom seemed to see him for the first time. He smiled and sat down.

"I beg your pardon, but we get pretty gruff in this thing. So you've left Wainwright? Consequential ass. What do you want to do?"

"Anything that will stop the output of more—consequential asses."

Black Tom leaned back in his chair and laughed, a laugh so deep and eternally young, that Roger knew the man could never seriously annoy him again.

"You've come to the right place. That's our specialty," and added, "any party affiliations?"

Roger shook his head. "Not yet."

"That's all right. Don't—till you're ready. When your faith needs to sign itself to some register, do it. Right Wing, Left Wing Socialist, Syndicalist, Communist, I. W. W., they're all headed right and there's something the matter with them all. It doesn't matter really; start a new party if you like. Names, names," he added, a little wearily, "all names for the same thing—the new world that's struggling to be born. Science, art, religion, politics, we're all fighting for the same end—to root out the dead old forms, give new growths a chance. We're all beating in our different ways toward the same thing—Understanding, Beauty, Unity. One fits in where he can." He looked across the dirty loft to a group of men waiting for him on the bench where Roger had sat a few moments before. "This is mine. I had no special training, nothing but physical strength and longing." His gaze came back to his own hands, broken and sparsely covered at the wrists and knuckles with stiff black hair. "I worked in a Pennsylvania coal mine when I was twelve. I read at night. When I was nineteen I went for a while to night-school with kids thirteen and fourteen. I never had three square meals a day until I was twenty-three. I lived in mines and shops and libraries."

He paused, and it seemed to Roger that he had gone away, back down the years, alone. In those crowded years, herded among men, he had learned to slip away, leave his gaunt, over-worked body to the crowd. Privacy was a spiritual possession, free to his will.

He jerked himself back with a motion of his bowed shoulders.

"Have you had any special training along any line?"

"Yes, I'm a lawyer."

"Great. We need——"

"But I'd rather not practice, anyhow not plead in court for a while. I don't feel that I understand enough about the thing as a whole. I want to soak in it, feel myself honestly a part before I undertake to defend men. Is that an out-of-the-way request?"

"It's an out-of-the-ordinary request. I wish more men felt as you do. There wouldn't be so many misunderstandings and shiftings around and party splits. I guess we can fit you in somewhere. How little can you work for?"

Roger did not answer instantly.

"Married?"

"Yes."

"Perhaps you'd better talk it over with your wife."

"It's not necessary. She—she's with me in this."

"We need lawyers, but we can't pay what the meanest scrub can't better in a very few years. What have you been getting?"

"Fifty a week."

"About ten beyond our possible limit—with expenses when you travel—but not fancy ones. You can take outside cases on the side—if you get them once you're known as one of us. That will have nothing to do with us."

"I don't want any 'cases on the side,' not for the present anyhow."

Black Tom smiled. "When do you want to begin?"

"Now."

Black Tom hesitated. Roger felt his first resentment returning. He leaned forward.

"This thing doesn't belong to any group," he began. "We all happen to be at the same point at the same time. I know what I'm doing. I——"

Black Tom laid a hand on his knee. "Boy, you'll have to excuse a lot of manner when you're one of us. Our material's men and we get to handle them sometimes as if they were—pig iron." He whistled and Katya popped above the fence. "Bring me the Anderson case."

When Katya brought it he said briefly, "Barton's going to work with us."

Roger noticed that he did not say Comrade Barton and wondered whether Black Tom did not quite trust him yet. But he found later that Black Tom tagged no man with artificial distinction, except in addressing a meeting whose sympathy he was not quite sure of. In a few moments he had explained the case to Roger, and turned him back to Katya.

"You can work here if you like. It's noisy at times, but we can fix you up with a kind of office down in the corner. Or you can work elsewhere."

"Here. I don't mind noise."

"Tell Jim to fix up the office Philips used to have," he ordered Katya, took his hat, and was gone.

"Let's go and have lunch," Katya suggested. "Tom's probably forgotten a lot of details you ought to know."

But Anne was expecting him and anxious to hear. "Suppose you come home and have lunch with us?"

Roger thought that Katya smiled, but was not quite sure. One never was sure whether Katya smiled unless her eyes actually twinkled, her face was so swarthy and still.

On the way home Roger listened with interest to Katya's history of the Anderson case, but, as they came to the bottom of the long flight, he wished he could run ahead and prepare Anne. He led and Katya followed, still talking. At the door they met Anne. For a moment she looked disturbed and then greeted Katya with such ease that Roger felt all responsibility for the lunch drop from him. While she skilfully reset the table and twisted the menu to include three instead of two, Katya talked on.

Nor did she stop when Anne summoned them, and only for short periods during lunch. From the Anderson case and the Labor Movement, she drifted to Russia, to her native village, to the Jewish pogroms, her struggles for an education, her imprisonment under the Czarist system, her escape and flight from Siberia through Sweden to Finland and the United States; her gradual migration westward, from an eastside tenement in New York, through New Jersey, to Chicago, to San Francisco. She talked vehemently but without bitterness. In her long fight for an idea, she had become impersonal.

She ate almost greedily, but neither Anne nor Roger felt that she knew what she ate. She smoked cigarette after cigarette, lighting one from the other, and drank cup after cup of black coffee without noticing that Anne refilled her cup. Anne was considering making more coffee, when at last Katya broke off.

"You're a perfect hostess, Mrs. Barton. I don't believe you've said a word."

Anne flushed. Evidently this woman had not expected her interest.

"It's fascinating," she said, with just a touch of primness that brought an odd look to Katya's eyes. Roger felt uncomfortable.

"We've never had a chance before to get it first-hand," he said quietly, and saw Katya's eyes twinkle. She rose and, to Roger's embarrassment, ran her hand over his thick, wavy hair.

"You're a nice boy."

She put on her things, waited a moment for Roger to join her, but when he made no motion, shook hands with both and went clumsily down the stairs without looking back.

"Almost as conceited as Hilary Wainwright, in her own way, isn't she?" Anne said demurely.

Roger laughed. "You're a wiz. I hope you never take a dislike to me."

"Not much of a wiz to get that slam about a perfect hostess. As if one couldn't believe in Man and fruit salad at the same time."

Roger put his arm about her. "We can, but then, you know, we are exceptional people."

"Because, really, I should loathe beet soup and pickled fish and those Russian foods."

"Honey and violet stems for ours." Roger bent to kiss her and Anne ran her fingers through his hair, stopped abruptly and said:

"She's really a terribly lonely soul, for all her world interests."

"I shouldn't wonder. She didn't mention any relatives, after her childhood, did she?"

When they came again into the house Roger picked up the Anderson case and went over to the couch. Anne began clearing the table. As she gathered up the doilies, she asked carelessly:

"What's the salary?"

"Forty. And expenses," Roger answered, making notes on the margin of a sheet. "Outside cases if I want to. But I shall not take any for a while—anyhow."

Anne went into the kitchen without comment.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Through the next three months Anne thought more about money than she had ever thought in her life before. During the Wainwright days she had often been able to save ten dollars a week, but now that this sum was abstracted before it reached her, the remainder refused to include all that it had included then. Their small bank balance Anne refused to count an asset. She never mentioned it and was not sure that Roger remembered they had it. When he suggested some extravagance, a week-end trip, or absurdly expensive theater seats, treats that in the past had been supposed to be made possible by this balance—but which, in the end, Anne had always managed without touching—she now escaped on the plea of fatigue. Nevertheless, when Roger stopped suggesting them, Anne was hurt and angry.

Each week she put aside something for little Roger's need. And if gradually his clothes began to be finer, his bassinet more elaborate, his weighing scales unnecessarily expensive, she did not allow herself to word the reason. Only when Roger donated with extra liberality to some strike benefit or defense fund did Anne deliberately go out and buy something little Roger could very well have done without.

In their daily intercourse there was now more of the old comradeship than there had been for months, but often, her light housework finished, Anne sat in a shady corner of the garden, spicy and sweet again in the hot spring sun, and wondered whence had come this feeling of silently and strongly holding out against something that was always in the background of her mind. Once she had felt this something to be in Roger himself, a kind of accidental quality that circumstances might or might not develop. But now she felt it as something beyond Roger, something permanent functioning through him. Between herself and Roger there was some essential difference. Their attitude toward the coming of Rogie, to Black Tom O'Connell and Merle, to the futile efforts of Hilary Wainwright, even their union against the duplicity of John Lowell, had held this germ of difference. Hour after hour Anne pried into her own motives for action and Roger's, trying to find the source of this difference, but when, in an entirely fictitious future, she sometimes glimpsed its possible scope, she fled back to the concrete present and Rogie.

It was always after one of these exhausting exhumations of motive and impulse that Anne gripped more firmly the old habit of discussion with Roger; that they went to one of the many protest meetings which, now that Anne refused concerts and theaters, had come to be Roger's chief interest outside the direct round of his work; or that Anne called for Roger at the loft, and, while she waited, tried to feel a little of the enthusiasm mounting sometimes almost to fever heat in him.

But the force and driving power that Roger felt as an almost concrete thing never included Anne. She could never lose herself in it, nor be carried away on its flood. It was too loud, too insistent, too hot, like hissing black steam, screaming through a narrow vent.

It did not frighten, but deadened something within, so that Anne, waiting quietly on the bench where Roger had first waited for Black Tom, felt her effort to believe in the ultimate aim of all this striving shrink and grow cold within her. To hear the violent click of Katya's typewriter depressed her. To see Black Tom suddenly rise, and, with the same sweeping gesture with which he had opened before her the advance of strike-breakers, throw clear to Roger some new plan, made Anne feel that the man's broken and unkempt hands had actually drawn her with them. Nor could she ever look at him without thinking of Merle.

Like a brilliant bird, Merle flitted about the dusty place, getting in every one's way, interrupting at her own whim, indifferent to their amused tolerance or irritation. Birdlike, she perched on the gate of Katya's den and chirped through Katya's clicking, or disturbed Roger with her flutey recital of a movie she had taken the afternoon off to enjoy. Only Black Tom's absorption did she respect, but sometimes, when she came and chattered to Anne, Anne saw her watching him with a wistful longing that was not in the least birdlike or gay.

Anne grew gradually to feel a protecting tenderness for Merle, quite distinct from her realization of the girl's shallow mind and different moral standards. It had a little of the same personal tenderness she felt for Hilda's confused thinking and perpetual gayety. When Merle referred to some mass meeting of protest that had fired the enthusiasm of the others to fever heat as "a beastly bore," and Roger or Katya demanded to know why she went, Anne felt that she understood.

For neither could Anne enter the spirit of these meetings. The hatred of the men and women, massed to demand justice for this and that, swept on high above Merle's head, but it weighted Anne and stuck to her like an unclean substance. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of bodies smelling of sweat and dust and the day's toil in factory and machine shop, nauseated her and stifled the purpose of their rebellion. Alone, high in the clean sweetness of her own home, Anne could rebel against the blockade of Russia, the forced toil of little children, the throttling of free speech and liberty. But the air, thick with human breath, the shrill voices of boys and girls selling revolutionary pamphlets, the mass weight of their hatred, woke in her a rebellion against the stark ugliness of its expression that took all Anne's control not to express by rising and leaving the hall. When, inflamed by what she came to feel, as the weeks passed, was deliberate manipulation of this human capacity to hate, protest broke in that mounting cry of rage, that long-drawn, rising bellow of hatred, that inhuman baying with which they greeted the name of some oppressor, Anne shivered with actual cold. "B-o-o-o," it rose and fell and rose again like an icy blast, freezing Anne's capacity to share their anger.

Like bells, certain words and names rang out in signal—war-lords, wage slave, master class. Through the months with Hilary Wainwright Anne had heard them often and used them herself glibly. Now she felt that she would never again be able to utter them. As Hilda stripped the facts of birth and love to their biological skeletons, so these men and women stripped the words of their conventional acceptance, their usefulness as tags of common understanding, and released raging genii to perform their tasks. After such a meeting the surface of her body was covered with a clammy dampness.

But no torrent of unleashed hatred chilled Roger or made him cold and weak. Coming, at the end of May, from the largest meeting they had attended, Anne felt Roger throbbing with enthusiasm, even after they had walked blocks under the peaceful stars.

"Wasn't Tom great?" he demanded for the third time, unconscious that Anne had not answered. "When he talks as he did to-night he makes me think of Christ driving the money changers from the temple."

"The Bible would never have remained literature if Christ had ranted like that."

"It isn't ranting, Anne. He sees things like that, literally sees the workers slaves, just as bound and owned by capitalistic pressure as ever a black African savage was owned by a Southern cotton planter. He sees the 'masters' in their great Wall Street offices just as clearly as any master with the legal right to beat his slave." Roger tried to speak patiently, but sometimes the shadings of Anne's sensitiveness rasped him as much as this "ranting" rasped Anne. Was it really her dislike of Black Tom, what she insisted on calling the "coarseness of his moral fiber," that made her blind to the man's sincerity? Could not, or would not, Anne see above and beyond this single breach of the world's standard? Roger did not know. And, like Anne, fleeing before the definite revelation of the difference between herself and Roger, Roger, too, hurried away.

There was a pause and then Roger said:

"That was the biggest collection I've ever seen taken up at a meeting. Carson certainly can get the cash."

Anne saw, as if he had been there in the night before her, the thin, bowed shoulders of Robert Carson butted out over the edge of the platform in the final gesture he always took before defying the audience not to "give and give their all." His lank, black hair fell in a long side lock across his high forehead, his black eyes burned in his pale, thin face. She shivered.

"It's terrible to use hate like that, or pain, or any feeling, fan it to that white heat and then mint money from it."

Roger bit his lip. "It isn't hate or any pain. It's not a destroying force. It's the demand for universal justice and the right to Beauty that centuries of oppression have not been able to kill. It's love, Anne, not hate."

"Maybe," Anne said drearily, with such an unexpected cessation of personal interest that Roger turned to her quickly.

"You're tired, Anne. You ought not to have gone."

His eyes were concerned for her, for her personally, her body and her comfort. Anne swallowed the lump that rose suddenly in her throat.

"I guess I am. It was so hot and noisy and they last so long. It must be almost twelve."

Roger drew her arm into his. "I ought not to have let you go."

"I don't think I will any more—before Rogie comes."

"I sha'n't let you," Roger warned, and Anne smiled up at him. Roger smiled back: "You're nothing but a baby yourself."

But he was glad that Anne had decided not to go to any more meetings until after the baby came. Perhaps, then, he and Anne would go and understand together, as they had understood that day on the Bluff in the sweeping wind; and by the lake in the green and scarlet dawn.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

In July the baby was born. Anne was very ill and Hilda fluttered about looking reproachfully at Roger. But, with the least impatience of Roger toward her, she propitiated him with assurances that many women were worse, that Anne would not die or be a wreck for life; and when, at the end of two weeks, Anne took a decided turn for the better and the doctors let him go in for a few moments to see her, Hilda acted as if she had personally managed this for his peace of mind.

Anne was so small and white, so exhausted and utterly content, and his son was such a mite of a thing; although the nurse assured him that little Roger was an "exceptional" fine and healthy boy, Roger felt that any life encased in such a tiny and strengthless form must be precarious. They were so small and helpless, dependent so completely on him. It frightened Roger. Now that his son was there before him, Roger was humble. His own part in this creation no longer seemed a thing of choice. He had been used by the force of Life, which refused to stop. It would go on and on and on, through little Roger and little Roger's sons; on, in its majestic stride indifferent to the means it used, to him as an individual, on to the fulfillment of its own purpose.

Roger went back to the office and was glad that Katya was alone.

"It's a boy," he said queerly, "such a wee mite of red. He fumbles with his clenched fists and sucks in the air. He doesn't seem human."

She listened without looking directly at Roger and did not ask after Anne. Just then Merle came in and Katya began to work again.

But Merle announced that the moment Anne was home she was coming up to see the baby. Roger laughed:

"You wouldn't know which end to take hold of, Merle. He's not bigger than a minute."

"You clumsy brute. I'll bet you're afraid to touch him yourself."

"I am, just about."

Merle giggled. "Well, I'm not and I'm going up to play with him next week."

"You'll be two of a kind," Roger teased, "only don't teach him any of your swear words. They're picturesque—but remember, he's a pure soul."

"Don't worry. I wouldn't teach him or any other living soul a thing. He'll get enough of that before long, poor little devil. This place reeks with instruction."

"But you've escaped," Roger teased on; "the first axiom of the Social Revolution never got under your skin."

"Oh, yes it did. Only it started to fester—and I cut it out." On that she went whistling, the green tam pulled coquettishly to one side.

When Anne was home again Merle kept her promise. At first she stayed only a few moments, but gradually the habit formed for her to drop in late in the afternoon, several times a week. As Anne grew stronger and began again to get regular meals, she often let Merle undress Rogie and make him ready for bed. It seemed to please the girl to take off the tiny garments and feel the soft, warm roundness of the strong little body.

One night in mid-October, a warm evening of glowing sunset, Anne came into the bedroom from the kitchen at the sound of Merle's low crooning. Merle's single song was Tipperary and she had mangled the martial notes to a strange lullaby. Anne laughed and Merle turned quickly, Rogie clasped tight as if from intrusion. Then she laughed, too, not quite so gayly as Anne, and together they put him to bed. When he was tucked in and the window open, Merle followed Anne back to the kitchen.

"Did you really want Rogie, Anne, or was he an accident?"

Anne flushed at the unwarranted intimacy. But Merle was leaning against the wall, her full throat rising so young and white from her brilliant smock, her eyes so serious, that Anne relented.

"I wanted him," she said hastily.

Merle did not answer for a moment. She seemed to be looking at something in no way connected with Anne.

"I wonder if it would have worked out all right—if I had gone ahead. But I haven't your grit, Anne. And I was bugs about Tom; oh, nuts, simply nuts. I believed he was God. If he'd told me to jump off the ferry boat, I'd have done it without waiting to ask him why." There was no bitterness, just the bewildered statement of a fact, a fact that had once been true and that Merle wished were true now.

It was the first reference she had ever made to her relations with Black Tom O'Connell. Anne wished she had not said anything but it seemed unkind to cut her off.

"Didn't—he—want—one?"

"Well, not so you could notice. He has some of his own, you know, so perhaps that makes a difference. I don't suppose if it had been the third or fourth I'd have been as excited myself as I was. But when I told him, he said 'Good God!' and looked so solemn I was scared to death. Having a baby seemed the most terribly serious thing in the world; and then he began to talk of all the suffering and poverty in the world, just as if we were responsible for it, until I saw the poor little beggar starving to death under my nose. Well, perhaps he might have," Merle added with a shrug. "We were sure in a hell of a mess. We were broke, as usual. The police were watching Tom—it was the first months of the war when they were locking up everybody—and I never knew when Tom went out whether he would come back. I own that I felt pretty solemn myself at times. The world seemed to have gone mad. It's died out now, but you remember that feeling as if the bottom of life might drop out at any moment or the heavens open and sweep us all away? There did seem to be so many needless millions in the world already. And what for? Gunfodder. So—I—had it done."

There was no mistaking Merle's meaning. Anne put the saucepan down on the sink very slowly and stood with her back to Merle. She felt the girl's eyes on her rigid body, but it was beyond her power to move or speak.

"I suppose you wouldn't have done it. Nobody could scare you like that, but I must say that Tom didn't force me. He didn't even suggest it. He just frightened me to death with the responsibility and left the decision to me. But he never said afterwards that he wished I hadn't, although—I got to feel that way myself. I got to thinking about it, seeing it—and although I knew it wasn't really alive, it kind of grew, in the night specially when I was waiting for Tom and didn't know whether he had been arrested or not—staring at me with those big, bulging eyes. You know—kind of seeing nothing and yet knowing all the time what I had done to it. I got woozy——"

"Stop." Anne dragged herself round and, gripping the sink board, stared, white and sick, at Merle. Merle flushed.

"Oh, come off, Anne; you needn't look like that. Thousands of women do it; a million a year, here in the United States alone, and you know it. Because they're too lazy to have them, or want to gad, scores are doing it all the time. Everybody knows it. Besides, it's not nearly so bad to——" Merle hesitated, and then at the loathing in Anne's eyes, threw the words at her, "to abort it before it's really alive at all, as it is to let it come and then see it starve or go to the devil."

"Please don't say any more about it, Merle. I can't stand it."

Just then Roger turned the key in the latch.

"I'm—not blaming you, Merle, but it—makes me sick all over."

Quick to forgive, Merle came and put her arm across Anne's shoulder and Anne succeeded in not shuddering. "You're just like a little silver fairy, Anne. And I bet you spoil Rogie like the devil."

"But you forget this stern parent," Roger laughed from the doorway. "I'll discipline him; he's going to be the finest young revolutionist you ever saw."

Merle grinned: "Aren't you and Tom and Katya going to get the poor old world straightened out before that?"

"You're a scoffer." Roger came to Anne and kissed her, but she wanted to take little Rogie and run far from every one; far from those terrible, bulging eyes; those blind, embryonic eyes, resentful, unseeing, so eternally wise.

She served the dinner, but ate little, and was grateful when Merle went. Until she had gone Anne did not feel that she could go near Rogie. But the moment after she had left, Anne went softly into the bedroom. Kneeling by the baby's crib, she looked so long that he seemed to feel it and frowned and moved in his sleep. He was there, safe, alive and hers. But Anne felt all the babies in the world, the babies thwarted of life, staring at her in the warm blackness of the night.

She had wanted him and he was there, but she felt as if, somehow, he had missed a great danger. As if he had won to life by a chance.

Had Roger really wanted him?

Anne rose quickly. Again she saw the look of stupefaction in Roger's eyes. Heard his "Good Lord!"

Anne went slowly out of the room. Roger was reading under the shaded light. He was very strong, very sure of himself, sure that he was right. She stood looking at him speculatively. For the first time since her marriage Anne thought of Roger as the man she had married.

Feeling her eyes on him, Roger glanced up.

"What's the matter?"

"Did you ever wish—before—after I told you that Rogie was coming—that—that—I—that some way——?"

"What on earth are you talking about," Roger asked after a pause in which he waited bewildered for Anne to finish.

Anne moistened her lips. "Did you ever feel—like—suggesting—that—I——?"

She could not say it. Roger frowned and then understanding came to him.

"What are you trying to say, Anne? Do you mean did I ever wish that you wouldn't go on with it?"

Anne nodded.

Roger rose and put both hands on her shoulders.

"What's the matter with you, Anne? No, of course I didn't."

"Not—once, not even once—the least wish——"

"No," Roger said quietly. "I never thought of it once."

"Are you glad now, really glad we have him?"

"I certainly am, Anne; what on earth is the matter with you?"

Anne began to cry. "Merle told me—Tom—oh, Roger, it makes me sick all over. I—I loathe that man. How can he care about the world and—and—be like—he is?"

Roger's hands dropped from Anne's shoulders. "Let's not discuss Tom, Princess; we never agree."

Anne flared. "You don't think it's wicked or disgusting, you don't really—you wouldn't have—minded."

"Stop it, Anne, please. You're being awfully unjust and you know it. He was poor, broke, hunted, everything was chaos. The cases aren't the same at all. Besides, Merle isn't fit to be a mother."

"She's fit to be a mistress."

Roger turned to the couch again and picked up his book.

Anne stood where she was, tense, her lips drawn.

"So you knew it? Perhaps he boasts of it—as one of his 'sacrifices for the Revolution.' When did he tell you?"

"He didn't tell me," Roger answered patiently. "Katya did, one day when we were talking about Merle."

Anne's small frame tightened. "Well! Of all things to discuss with another woman!"

"Oh, hell," Roger exploded, "come off that pedestal, Anne. It's ridiculous."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

For a week the tension between Roger and Anne lasted, pulling a little weaker each day under the pressure of proximity, little Rogie, and the habit of agreement. Anne did not mention Merle again and tried not to think of the staring, embryonic eyes of what might have been Merle's child. She knew such thought was morbid and unhealthy. As Merle had said, one million women a year, in the United States alone, recognized this as their right of escape. To Belle it was perhaps a very ordinary occurrence. Anne herself would have hesitated to call it "wicked." She called it "horrible" instead. But she was glad when Merle stopped coming and never asked about her.

Autumn passed and the holiday season came with early rain. Hilda spoke tentatively of another Christmas dinner, although Belle was in Europe now with a rich patient. But Anne evaded these suggestions and did not even mention them to Roger.

On Christmas Eve Anne bought a tiny tree and decorated it, but Rogie was fretful and squirmed away from it, crying; so that Anne put out the candles and did not light them again.

On Christmas morning she and Roger exchanged their presents and immediately after the late breakfast Roger began work on a complicated case that was to come up right after the New Year.

Just before noon it began to rain again, a thin, icy drizzle that soaked all the cheer and hope from life. Anne tried to read or sew, but the thin, cold, inexhaustible rain washed away all interest. She could not even make up her mind to go to Hilda, although it was Christmas day and she had not been for a week. No decision could crystallize in that icy drip, never condensing to a real downpour, never ceasing, trickling into one's courage until it washed away desire.

They had planned to go to a theater in the evening, but a little after five the woman whom Anne had hired to stay with Rogie phoned that she could not come, and the tickets were cancelled. Roger had worked all afternoon in order to have the evening free, and now that the evening was to be his he decided to take a nap. He slept until Anne waked him for dinner at half past six.

After dinner he helped Anne with the dishes and they smoked an extra cigarette in honor of the day. But he was so plainly anxious to get back to the work he had not quite finished that at last Anne's taut nerves could no longer stand his generosity and she urged him to finish.

"Otherwise you'll want to sit up all night, and you've been up late for days."

"I would like to get it through to-night," he conceded. "But what will you do? I'm afraid I've been pretty absorbed all day."

"That's all right. I may go 'round to mom's for a little. I haven't even phoned and I sent the presents by post."

"Has it stopped raining?"

"I don't know. It doesn't matter." Anne went to the door and the sweet dampness of the garden flooded the warm room. "Yes, it's stopped; thickened to a heavy mist. I won't be long."

"Then I'll try and finish by the time you get back."

Almost before the door closed Roger was at the typewriter. As Anne went down the stairs she heard it click, click, as fast as Katya's.

She found Hilda and James alone, Hilda crocheting and James reading in the silence that always lay over their evenings. For a few moments her entrance shattered it, and they came together in interest of her news, the health of Rogie, the presents Anne had sent. Then James went back to his paper and Hilda rummaged in her disordered work-basket for Belle's last letter.

Would she and Roger some day meet like this for a moment on the coming of Rogie, a grown man?

Anne scarcely heard the letter Hilda had found, not in the work-basket at all, but in the pocket of her kitchen apron. It was only the postscript that drew Anne's attention in time to comment intelligently:

"We're leaving Marseilles to-morrow," Belle wrote, "and may go on to the Far East."

"Now, if that isn't just like Belle's luck," Hilda smiled and folded the letter. "Traipsing 'round like a millionaire with nothing to do. The lady has her own maid, and Belle only has to see that she takes her drops and things and doesn't get too tired. I'll bet Belle has a high old time."

Hilda looked like an excited child, prematurely gray-headed, as she nodded her assurance of Belle's ability to have a good time in any circumstance.

"I don't doubt that, but, personally, I can't imagine anything worse than trotting about with an invalid, looking after her pills and sandwiching all the lovely things in Europe into the spaces between her patient's rests."

Hilda laughed. "If I know Belle, by this time she's got that maid trained."

"She's tried, anyhow," Anne agreed, and they smiled together in appreciation of Belle's "efficiency."

Just as Anne was leaving Charlotte Welles came in, and Anne stayed on a few moments. Charlotte Welles was a slight woman with great dark eyes under cloudy brown hair, a pale skin, and pale, sweet lips. She had a soft voice, but her manner annoyed Anne. Her gentleness was so insistent, and although she never mentioned her belief in Christian Science, Anne was sure she never forgot it for a moment. She seemed always to measure one's remarks up against eternity, to discount any opposition as the meanderings of a clouded mind; to be quite sure that, in time, one would see Truth. To-night she was particularly annoying, although as Anne walked home she could not repeat a single annoying thing Mrs. Welles had said.

"She affects me as the sight of a limousine or a fur-lined overcoat affects the man with a dinner pail trudging in the street, I suppose. She's a kind of spiritual 'capitalist' with an unfair advantage over the rest of the world. Because she started with an illogical mind she's been able to accumulate this 'peace,' and never earned it through a real trouble in her life. I can't imagine what she and moms have in common, but she seems to be always dropping in. Perhaps she hopes to convert mamma to Science." But at the picture of Hilda converted to Science and moving thereafter in calm assurance through the perversities of James Mitchell, Anne laughed aloud. "Dear old moms, she'd never keep her mind on one thing long enough to demonstrate it into existence, even if she could decide what it was she wanted most."

But the calm face of Charlotte Welles continued beside Anne until she reached her own door. After all, the "capitalist" did enjoy his viciously accumulated millions, and Charlotte Welles' peace was real to herself.

The typewriter was covered now, and Roger was reading before the fire. As Anne came in he laid his book aside and looked up.

"Well, what's the news?"

"Nothing special. Belle's going on from France to the Far East. She seems to be having a wonderful time."

"Trust Belle."

"Oh, I don't know. Belle works hard for her money. You wouldn't like to trot a nervous millionaire around the world, would you?"

"Not on your life." Roger was about to add that neither would he like, if he were a nervous millionaire, being trotted about the world by Belle. But he never, if he could avoid it, referred in any way to the Mitchells. He always asked after them when Anne had been there, but he never went himself. He felt at times that Anne understood his feeling, and he wished he could have been more honest with her about it. But at the first hint of criticism Anne flared to their defense; and often, when the Mitchells themselves had been far from his intention, Anne had interpreted his scorn of intellectual narrowness as direct criticism of her people.

The subject of Belle dropped, but Roger did not take his book again. He felt Anne beside him, aloof in some interest acquired at the Mitchell flat, something she would guard from him if he tried to share it. Roger felt a little sentimental and lonely, too, as he searched about among the topics of common interest for a meeting ground with Anne. But this meeting ground had grown narrower and narrower and what remained had dangerous spots, slippery places from which they were sure to slide from generalities to personal recrimination—if Anne let it get that far. Usually, just as they were about to plunge into an anger that Roger often felt would clear the atmosphere, Anne would retreat behind the patient calm that closed him from her as effectually as a barred door.

The silence grew until Roger felt that he must break it at any price, when unexpectedly Anne sighed. She had been wandering through the lovely places of Europe.

"Tired?"

"No, not very. But this rain is getting on my nerves I think. I can't get out much with Rogie, and I feel all cooped up."

"Couldn't we make some arrangement? Couldn't you get Mrs. Horton to come round for so many hours a day? That would leave you free. It's not right to drop all your interests, even for His Highness."

His voice was so concerned, his eyes so gentle that Anne forced back the statement that His Highness was now the only real interest she had.

"I suppose we could. But I really don't know what I would do. I thought the other day of taking some extension lectures again, afternoon ones. I got the prospectus for French literature and history—but I don't know. It seems finicky and dilettantish somehow."

French literature, when Roger was always talking about the drama and tragedy of life about them! History, when the people round her were engaged in making it!

For a moment Roger thought of suggesting that Anne come for a few hours a day and help out in the loft. They were deluged in work. Merle was getting more and more careless. Some days she never appeared at all. She had been away a week now, no one knew where, unless it was Tom, and he had offered no explanation. Katya had done Merle's work in addition to her own, but even Katya was not so good a stenographer as Anne. While he turned the suggestion about, making sure it hid no pitfall of antagonism, Anne went on:

"I guess that the real reason is I'm too lazy."

"You're certainly not that. You keep Rogie like a prince and this house is a regular jewel-box."

And yet, less than two years ago, he had planned to do high things with Anne. One planned, and something, faint as breath, impalpable as a mist, crept in, and one did not do those things. The burned log fell apart. The rain beat again on the roof as if striving to reach within. In the rising wind the acacia lashed at them. Anne came from her thoughts with a little shrug.

"Perhaps I will. I don't know. In the meantime, let's go to bed. The jewel-box has to be thoroughly overhauled this week and I want to get up early to-morrow."

In the darkness they listened for a while to the rain. Then gradually Roger ceased to hear it. His breath came in long, steady sighs, even and assured. Anne rose quietly on her elbow until she could see his face faintly in the blackness. He looked very young in his sleep and remarkably like Rogie.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

It was a windy March afternoon when Anne, having secured the services of Mrs. Horton's oldest daughter to look after Rogie while she did some necessary shopping, came face to face with Merle, a Merle she scarcely knew.

"Going right straight by me," Merle began gayly, but at Anne's astonishment Merle quieted to sincerity. "I don't blame you. I scarcely know myself," she went on with a whimsical gesture that included her own person, from expensive hat and furs to dainty shoes. "I say, Anne, come and have tea. If I don't talk to some one, I'll bust."

But even after she had given the order for an elaborate tea at the exclusive shop where she was evidently known, Merle did not begin. She asked after Rogie and chattered of everything she could think of, until Anne said finally:

"I've only got a few minutes, Merle. Betty Horton can't stay with Rogie after four. She has to be home when the other children come from school."

And then, almost without a break or change of tone, Merle said:

"I've been thinking a lot about you, Anne. I came near 'phoning you twice. I've left Tom."

"Left Tom!"

Merle nodded. "Anne, do you know how Tom took it? Did Roger say anything? I haven't seen a soul of them for three weeks."

"No. I don't believe Roger knows it. He would have said something."

Merle shrugged. "Perhaps he doesn't. Perhaps Tom hasn't noticed it himself."

Her eyes misted, but she tossed her head with a cynical smile. "Oh, well, it doesn't matter. I wouldn't want him to go lallygaggin about it to others—even if he did any lallygaggin to himself."

Anne flushed. Merle and Tom together had seemed so ugly, but Merle like this was even worse.

"What happened?"

"Nothing," Merle said in fierce whisper, "nothing and everything. Anne, I couldn't stand it another minute. I tried, for the sake of the past and everything, but I couldn't." She was like a child begging forgiveness and Anne softened.

"Do you really want to talk about it, Merle?"

"Yes. It won't do any good, but I always did love to talk. I'm a good revolutionist, as far as that goes. I can babble and babble with the best of them till the cows come home. But where we part is that I do something in the end. Oh, I know they all think I'm Merle, the bobbed-haired fool, but I'm not such a fool as to sit tight and let Life run by, the one and only Life we'll ever get, and make no stab at anything in it. Anne, I'm so sick and tired of the Brotherhood of Man and the wicked capitalist and the abused proletariat, I could eat my hat. I can't live up on those holy heights and I don't want to. I always belonged down in the dust, gold dust if I could get it. And now—I'm there."

Anne waited in silence, and after a moment Merle went on:

"Of course, Katya and the rest will just believe I was tempted—if they think at all, but I wasn't. I worked it all out. I even made a kind of trial balance—what would happen if I stayed, on one side of the sheet—what would happen if I went, on the other. And I went. I'm going to keep that paper and some day I'm going to compare the results. Anyhow, I'm gone; Merle, the bobbed-haired fool, is no more. Behold Mrs. Benjamin Wilson, at least on hotel registers, and in private life—if I choose."

Anne did not move. She did not even turn her eyes from the angry violet eyes opposite.

"I'll do a little 'crushing under the heel of capitalism' myself, before my heel gets too old and shriveled and ugly to be hired for the job." The bitterness of Merle's voice cut.

"Don't, Merle. I mean don't talk like that, please. If—if you have left Tom because you want to—don't—don't make it any worse."

"But, Anne, it's true," Merle spoke more quietly now, and quickly, as if the things she had to say must be said instantly, once for all. "I do want money, because money is the only way to get the things I want, to get my kind of Beauty. To Tom it may be beauty to be always dodging jail, to live in the kind of rooms we have lived in, to yell himself hoarse four nights a week about Russia or India or longshoremen, anything that's far enough from him. But it's not to me. When there's a play in town I want to see it, and I want decent clothes to go in and a fairly decent seat, and I'm not waiting for any old 'adjustment' to give it to me. I'm going to take it while it's going. Why, Anne, when I first went to Tom, I used to wake in the night, afraid the 'Revolution' would hit us before morning, and that's five years ago and we're still dashing after its tail. Katya, poor old thing, has been kicking at the world for fifteen years, until she couldn't stop if she tried. And when they get it all done, how do I know it'll be any better? People will only be kicking about something else then. No, I'll take my million dollars now and hang on to it."

"But you loved Tom. You can't——"

"Y-e-s—I loved him. And what did I get for it? Not in money. I—I'm not that bad, Anne, but Tom doesn't know half the time whether I'm alive or not."

"That can't be true, Merle. He's always busy——"

"Oh, shucks, Anne, you can't tell me anything about Tom. I know he's busy. Doing what? Saving the world; wearing himself to skin and bones for millions of people he has never seen. But if all these 'oppressed' were there in one single soul he had to see and touch and be with all the time and do little loving things for, he'd hate them. Bah! they make me sick. They're all the same. They're monomaniacs. It's the fighting they like. If they had it all fixed to-night they'd mess it up again just for fun, or go insane because they had nothing to do. I know. I've been through it. You're only just beginning. Wait and see. Roger's the same stuff, floating 'round in the clouds with those blue eyes and that square chin. It'll get him too, Anne, if you don't watch out."

Anne's lips set tightly. "You're hurt and mad, Merle. You——"

Merle laughed. "All right, call it that. It's been a long time coming, but it's come to stay. I'm going to Europe, Anne."

"When?"

"Just as soon as Mr. Wilson can arrange his business. I went once with Tom—steerage, before the war. Good Lord! I'm going to have a stateroom, Anne, and I'm going to tip, God, how I am going to tip. Pay human beings, 'lackeys,' 'wage slaves,' to do the most menial things I can think of. I hope I'm seasick all the time just to——"

Merle broke off and her eyes invited some one who had just entered the door. The next moment a heavy young man whose well-cut clothes and expensive tie could not refine the overfed body, came forward.

"Anne, let me present Mr. Wilson. Ben, this is Anne you've heard me speak about, Mrs. Roger Barton."

His bold, brown eyes summed up Anne's fair delicacy, and he smiled approval of Merle's friend. But Anne felt that as long as Merle wanted him he would find no real interest in any other woman. He was shrewd and would know when Merle worked him, but it would please him to be so worked at his own pleasure. Merle's childish curls and violet eyes and scarlet mouth saying bitter, worldly things, had caught his jaded interest and filliped it to stinging passion, so far above the torn and frayed sample he had bought at extravagant prices, that the man was humble and grateful. Perhaps he, too, in his own way, was searching for Beauty. Besides, it gave him a pleasant sense of the security of the world he helped to make to have taken Merle from Black Tom O'Connell. In some way it justified the existence of things as they were, proved the tottering foundations of the movements that had begun to give him a good deal of trouble with his labor.

He was so plainly in love with Merle, it surprised Anne that his look was no grosser than it was, for it was evidently difficult for him to sit near and touch her in no way. If Merle were conscious of his restraint she did not show it, but after a few moments it got on Anne's nerves, and she rose. Merle rose too, insisting that Mr. Wilson stay where he was and finish the tea the waitress had just brought.

"I'll be back. I'm just going to the door with Anne. You wait here, honey."

Merle hurried after Anne.

"When's Tom coming back, do you know?" she whispered. "I saw in the papers he is out of town."

"Yes. No, I don't know; in a few days I think."

Merle's small, white teeth marked the crimson lip in a faint line. Slowly her black brows drew down in a frown. Her hands clenched.

"Anne, I would have died for him—I really would have once."

"Merle, don't go on with this. You're doing it in a fit of anger. You'll be sorry."

"I'm not doing it in a fit of anger. Didn't I tell you I thought it out, wrote it out? And do you know what was the last item on the balance sheet for Ben? Well, if I stay and marry him, it's a baby, a warm, cuddly thing like Rogie. And I'm going to dress him in the loveliest clothes, and nobody will kick about the starving Russians or the dying Roumanians. I'll feed him out of a gold-monogrammed nursing bottle if I take the fancy, and Ben will think it's grand."

At the exaggerated picture Anne smiled. Merle smiled, too, and then her eyes darkened again, just for a moment, as if a shadow had crossed them.

"Anne, you might let me know if Tom puts over that case he's gone on. I used to listen to it till I most went frantic, but it's—well, the last thing I'll ever hear of the crowd and I'll feel more finished, neat and tidy-like, to know. I'll be here another two weeks, anyhow."

"All right. I'll let you know."

But Anne did not keep her promise, because two days later she saw in the society news that Mr. Benjamin Wilson was leaving unexpectedly for Europe. The next day Black Tom came back. He had lost his case.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The days passed. Roger did not mention Merle. He was often at the office now in the evening and Anne knew he and Tom were working harder than ever. Some Hindoo revolutionists had been arrested and an almost hopeless fight to free them was under way. Picturesque men with sad, dark eyes came to the cottage to talk to Roger, and Roger made quick trips to adjoining towns to see strange men in secret places.

One day, about a month after Anne had met Merle, Roger came home earlier than he had come for some time, and very gay. He had succeeded in getting an appeal for the Hindoo revolutionists and that was more than any one had expected.

"Tom's like a small boy. I never saw him so excited."

"And Merle, I suppose, is flitting all over the place, trying to talk Hindustani?"

"No. Merle isn't 'round these days. I haven't seen her for weeks. She's been dodging work for some time, coming and going when she liked. Come to think of it, I don't believe she's been there at all for ages. Katya was saying something about getting another stenographer. Merle's bad enough, but she was better than nothing."

"Katya'd better go ahead and get one then, because Merle won't come back. She's gone away with another man."

The amazement in Roger's eyes struck at Anne's control. Merle was right. She had flitted among them and flitted away. Concerned with the affairs of distant India, Roger did not even know it. And he had liked Merle with her gay slang, her flippant comment.

"Do you suppose that Tom O'Connell has happened to notice she's gone? Perhaps you'd better not tell him. He may never find it out at all."

"So—that—was it," Roger said slowly, putting together the pieces of a puzzle that had caught his attention the day after Tom's return from the South. "Poor Tom—poor old Tom. But it had to come. Merle had gone as far as she could—and Tom couldn't stay behind."

"Certainly not," Anne said quietly, "an Indian woman in Burmah might have died."

"What? What about an Indian woman?"

But Anne did not answer. She was afraid she might cry, and after a brief pause Roger went back to the thing that had puzzled him.

"I saw Tom, the day after he came back, sitting all bowed over his desk. It was late in the evening and the others had gone. He was expecting me, but he never moved when I came in and I thought he was ill. I went over to him and he looked up. I never saw a man so torn. His face was ash-gray and those lines he always has down the sides of his mouth were deep like scars. And his eyes, they were like a hurt dog's, so dumb and crushed and puzzled. He didn't even try to cheer up, just said: 'I won't be doing any work to-night; I don't feel well.' I said something about getting him a drink, but he shook his head and I went. I was rather afraid—he was going to cry."

"It wouldn't have hurt him if he had," Anne said in a hard whisper. "He's killed Merle's soul, and if she goes to the dogs it will be his fault."

"Killed Merle's soul? She never had one, at least not much of a one."

"No. There are no individual souls, I suppose; just one great, big world soul—though what it's made of if it isn't individual souls, I don't know."

Roger moved impatiently, but when he spoke it was with weary acceptance:

"You never liked Tom. You never understood him, the real man, or tried to."

"No? I understand what he claims to be, but not what he is."

"What is he?"

"A monomaniac." The word slipped from Anne and frightened her.

"I don't know what you mean, Anne."

"He's gone mad on social injustice, just as mad as any capitalist has on accumulating money. He's lost all sense of individual values. He's a machine, a machine for fighting for his own theory."

Roger's lips set. It brought the squareness of his chin into terrible relief. "Roger's the same stuff, floating around in the clouds with those blue eyes and that square chin." Anne's body began to quiver, but she kept her eyes steady.

"Let's not talk about it. We don't agree."

"Evidently not. There don't seem to be many things we do agree about any more."

Anne tried to speak gayly. Otherwise the tears would come. But she sounded like Hilda Mitchell, pecking at a tragedy with her silly giggle.

"Not many," Roger said shortly. "I've got to go back to the office and I may be late. Don't wait up for me."

He kissed Anne as usual, and as usual she went as far as the door with him. But long after his step had died she stood looking out over the city's lights, lonelier than she had ever been in all her life.

She remembered coming home with Roger once, very late, on just such a night. They had sat hand in hand, far in the prow of the almost empty ferry, and Anne's head had rested on his shoulder. She was tired after a happy day, one of the old picnics they had found time to take. She had been glad of the lights coming nearer and they had traced the row up their own hill. The twinkling lights had beckoned them to the warm, human comfort of others. Now they burned on indifferent to her, lighting the way for hurrying crowds, the creeping, inimical confusion of the world. The twinkling lights lit the ways of men and men were cruel.

Anne went in and sat down before the fire, without turning on the lamp. It was so still she could hear her own thoughts moving about her. Gradually, from the rustling crowd, one emerged:

"I've been through it. You wait and see."

She was not like Merle. Roger was not like Black Tom. And yet——

It was after twelve when Roger came.

"Why, Anne!"

Anne lifted her face. Her lips trembled.

Roger came quickly to her in real concern. "You haven't been sitting here alone worrying, have you? I didn't mean to be harsh."

Anne clung to him. "Roger," she whispered, "I don't want to grow apart."

"Neither do I." Roger stroked her hair, the old tenderness moving him. "And since neither of us do," he said after a moment, with a smile, "I guess we won't."

Anne answered his smile weakly. "Roger, I don't believe it is right just to sit up here keeping the 'house like a jewel-box' and looking after Rogie. I'm going to work."

"What?" Roger had never very clearly heard when Anne looked like that, and she had not looked like that for a long time.

"I—am—going—to work," Anne repeated with exaggerated distinctness, and laughed.

"Oh, you are, are you? Who said you could?"

"Myself. And you—in a minute."

"Oh, I will? That depends. I won't have you drudging in some office."

"No? How about that extra stenographer Katya's looking for?"

"Anne!"

"Don't you think I could do it? I don't believe I've lost much speed. I——"

But Roger's kiss silenced her and Anne did not try to finish. At last he loosed her.

"Do you really want to do this, sweetheart?"

Anne turned her eyes away. "Yes, Rogie's old enough to leave now and I believe Mrs. Horton would be glad of the place. I would get a salary, I suppose—enough to pay her."

Roger grinned. "You would—most of the time, anyhow. How much would she do it for, do you think?"

"How much would I get?"

"Eighteen or so."

"That would be plenty—more than she would ask. I'll talk it over with her to-morrow. You would really like it?"

"Anne! There's nothing in the world I would like so much. Why I—I—thought lots of times of asking you just that thing."

Remembering his reason for not doing it, Roger, too, looked into the fire, his arms still close about Anne.

But Anne did not press for the reason of his silence. Against the long evening alone with Merle's words singing in her ears—"Wait and see. It'll get him yet"—his hold was strong and full of comfort.

Suddenly Anne gripped him close and kissed him, as she had kissed on the Bluff, her lips seeking fiercely, through his, the thing beyond them both.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The following Monday Anne went to the loft with Roger. Another niche was partitioned off for her and she began to take dictation.

Now that she had definitely come among them, joined her interest with Roger's, Anne tried to shake off the feeling that had held her in the past when she waited for Roger, and to get below the surface of this violent enthusiasm. But she could not do it.

So many orders were given during a day, so many plans made, so many contingencies prepared for that never arose. It was an exhausting game, the enthusiasm created by the players themselves. It was an insane May dance, Black Tom in the center holding the ribbons.

And such strange people danced at the end of the strings. Anne had never seen so many different nations and kinds of individuals in one spot, nor imagined they could so exist. Ministers who had given up the Gospel of Christ to preach this gospel of Man; teachers weary of the narrow round of instructing; a college professor who had discovered that the Social Revolution had really begun with creation, and written a pamphlet to prove it. A chemist who had discovered with equal suddenness that the social revolution was the newest and perhaps the last stage in man's evolution from the lower types.

There were men and women who saw some great change in the conduct of world affairs looming in huge, vague mass, but had no clear idea as to how this vague mass was to be shaped. Others who saw only the small, unimportant details and these groups argued for hours accusing each other of wrong methods that delayed progress. There was one young man with mild, kind eyes who forgave all bigotry and personal misunderstanding and wrote fierce, revolutionary songs, clarion calls to these people whom he forgave for not hearing. There was one plump little widow, raised in rigid Boston, who for the first time in her life had found an opportunity to berate car-conductors and minor officials in a loud voice. These she called publicly, in piercing tones—"the wage slaves of a rotten system"—and urged them to organize. She could always be relied upon at a moment's notice to picket, carry banners or distribute leaflets. The "rottenness of the system" excused her from contributing to any charity, but, until the arrival of the millennium, she invested her income with remarkable shrewdness in bonds.

Above this conglomerate of excitement Katya rose like a mountain in her belief and patience. Katya never attacked car-conductors nor urged telephone girls to strike, or bothered whether the social revolution had begun with creation, or whether it was the last stage of progress. Katya worked, often far into the night, and rarely spoke to any one but Tom or Roger. Anne she ignored, not with definite rudeness but with an unfathomable disregard of her existence. In her dark corner Katya was like a brown bear that had been taught to work. So incessant was the click of her machine that it was noticeable only in its rare intervals of silence, as one notices the momentary lull of the sea forever breaking on a rocky coast.

At first it was almost impossible for Anne to take Black Tom's dictation, to speak to him, or be near him. Merle was always there in her brilliant smock. Or the staring, embryonic eyes asking their eternal Why?

It was not until July, when a heavy cold forced Katya to stay home and Black Tom's personal dictation fell to Anne, that the faith of the man at last reached through her repulsion and she reluctantly conceded his sincerity. It was impossible to be admitted even so slightly into his confidence and not feel his faith. It was stark, like a granite headland, unornamented with scholastic theory. Its rough surface bore no intricate carving of historical or philosophic research. The man saw and believed. As the weeks passed, Anne came to feel that if he ever thought of Merle, he thought of her as a victim, neither of himself nor of her own nature, but of this colossal social injustice to which he referred all the ills of life.

But she never grew to like him, and months after she had come to take his dictation with no thought of Merle, any over-emphasized admiration of Roger's stripped her feeling back to her original disgust.

"The trouble is that you demand perfection in people you don't like," Roger said to her one day, when her annoyance at one of Black Tom's schemes for propaganda had driven her to biting criticism. "You measure every quality in them by their highest peak, and when they don't measure up to this standard all the way down, you reject them."

"Rather subtle, but not true," Anne said in the voice that always reminded Roger of a small, sharp gimlet. "I don't see anything for you to take offense at. Tom O'Connell is a monomaniac. Merle was right."

"Any one who believed utterly in an abstract principle would be a monomaniac to Merle."

"Any one who believes in only one aspect of a principle is a monomaniac."

"Tom does not believe in only one aspect; he is concerned with only one application of his principle. And no human being can be interested in more. If that's being a monomaniac then Tom's one, with all the other people in the world who have ever accomplished anything. You can't spatter your interest and energy all over the earth and make it count. A scientist is interested in science and an artist in art. Tom's medium is the present condition of the world. He doesn't want to win strikes for themselves, or stir up disorder, but only that greater order may come. His eyes aren't always fixed on the sores and confusions under his eyes, but on the perfect body society might be. If Jesus Christ had lived to-day and worked in a Pennsylvania coal mine when He was twelve, instead of two thousand years ago on the sandy plains of Syria—he would have been rather like Tom, I think."

"That's ridiculous, Roger. You're getting to be a monomaniac too."

"It's not ridiculous. And if that's what you call being a monomaniac, I'd just as soon be one. In fact, I hope I am."

"Well, I don't. I've always been sorry for Christ's family. I think He must have been dreadfully annoying to live with. Didn't He tell His mother to go home and mind her business while He went and lectured to men old enough to be His grandfather?"

"Nice, old conservatives, gripping their traditions like crabs hanging to their rocks."

"Making their application of their principle."

"No. Not making it at all. Just hanging on to its corpse long after it had ceased to have a spark of life. Once the Syrians had needed their philosophy, but they were petrifying in a social system that human life had really outgrown. They had lived so long in a barren land, fighting for their means of living, fighting against their sand wastes and rocks and neighboring tribes, that the whole of life had become a kind of arena. Their Jehovah was only another brigand of the Syrian hills. Those old men you sympathize with were like the militarists of to-day. They can't think except in terms of gunpowder. 'War always has been' and so it's always going to be. Then Christ happened along and saw that Life was wider than the barren wastes of Syria and that they were at the wrong end of the solution. Those old Syrian War-lords had applied the principle of physical conquest to all kinds of spiritual problems and Christ saw that it wasn't getting them anywhere. He was really telling them how to get the things they had started out after and lost the way of finding. When I was a kid He used to annoy me awfully—an anemic young Jew with a silly beard and girl eyes—but I've gotten to like Him."

"You'll get to like any other monomaniac who's been dead long enough."

"Are we quarreling?" Roger asked impatiently, exasperated by this eternal twisting of a general path back to the personal point. "I thought we were discussing that measure Tom's going to try and put through the convention."

"We are—as far as I am concerned. You dragged in Christ."

"I didn't drag Christ in except to try and make you see why Tom wants to get this particular measure across. I don't understand you, Anne. You say sometimes that you believe the man's sincere and yet you're always trying to measure him up with some little yardstick of inherited social convention. Tom's like the great central wheel of some high-powered machine, and you pick flaws because he's not the spring of some jeweled and useless little watch."

Anne shrugged and began to gather up the dinner things. What did it matter? If she and Roger talked half the night they would only branch from one difference to another. In the exhausting day behind her there was not one still spot wherein they could meet in perfect accord. To her, the day had been filled with whirling, human particles that obstructed her vision and stimulated Roger. All day Anne had felt choked by these particles; the mannerisms, the shop-worn jargon, the unrestrained enthusiasm, had gotten into her ears and eyes and down her throat like sand. She had meant to keep the dinner hour free from this sand, but it had filtered in. It always did. Anne was coming to feel that these people with whom she passed the day followed her home at night.

As Roger watched her moving, slight and graceful, about the room, putting it in evening order, he wondered why Anne had ever offered to come to the loft. She did the work well, as she had done John Lowell's, but with no more personal joy in it. And yet Anne had once felt a larger world calling for more than perfection of mechanical detail or conscientious accomplishment of the day's stint. At what point in their lives had that Anne slipped away into the fog in which he groped now without finding her? Behind his book Roger grappled with this problem, growing larger week by week.

Two years before they had started from the same point to walk along a road together. At no spot had they left the way. No emotional side-path had lured Roger from his faithfulness to Anne; no other way of life had tempted her. Their hope had been the same—to live beautifully a beautiful life. They were not living it beautifully. It was growing ugly, full of impatience on his side, suppressions on hers. Sometimes, for a few days, even a week, they managed to step from stone to stone of personal agreement, and then, on some little hidden rock, they stood and grew bitter toward each other.

In the kitchen Anne stacked the dishes for Mrs. Horton's coming in the morning, clicked off the light, and came back. She, too, took a book and curled up in her favorite spot on the couch to read.

Was she reading? Didn't she feel this fog closing in about them? What would happen if he asked her why she had wished to work with him, or suggested that she leave it? Would Anne be honest and tell him? Did she know herself?

But Roger did not ask. At ten he stopped reading. A few moments later Anne finished her chapter. They went to bed. From habit, Anne lay close for a little, with his arm about her. Then he kissed her and turned over on his side. Once more the harmony of sleep covered the tangled knots and broken threads of the day behind.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

So the weeks passed until one afternoon in early August, when James Mitchell was taken suddenly ill and Hilda sent for Anne. She found her mother sitting in the kitchen, crying helplessly as if she would never stop. Anne knelt beside her.

"Mamma. Dear. Don't. You mustn't; you'll get all worn out."

Through the running tears Hilda's frightened eyes clung to Anne.

"It—it was terrible. I've never been through such a thing in my life. I had such a time to get you. They—brought him home—oh, I wish Belle was here."

Anne took the shaking hands in hers and held them firmly.

"Mamma, you must stop crying. It won't do any good and I want to know. Who said it was a stroke?"

"Dr. Fletcher, the company doctor. Thank goodness the company gives a doctor. What would we do, Anne, if they didn't? What we'll do anyhow—I don't know. And I never would have dreamed of a stroke. Papa, of all people! He isn't the build. He isn't the kind that gets strokes. He——"

"But momsy dear, he has it. Don't, don't go worrying about other things. And the company has a doctor. Let's just take one thing at a time."

At the calm assurance of Anne, Hilda's sobs lessened. She wiped her eyes on the corner of her apron and spoke more quietly.

"I was just ready to go out, down town shopping at that cut-rate market—it's beef bargain day—when the phone rang and some one at the office said papa wasn't well and would be coming home. Of course I thought he had been killed and the girl got so impatient and ugly with me. I don't believe now they were at the office at all, because in a few moments, I had scarcely time to take off my things, the bell rang and they had him in a taxi. Oh—Anne—he was all kind of purplish; papa, who's too pale if anything, and his eyes were twisted like, but he knew me, and—and—he didn't want me to do anything for him. It—it—seemed to make him nervous just to have me near him, and he kept trying to say something and I couldn't understand."

"Can't—he—speak?" Anne's lips were dry but she kept her tone level for Hilda's comfort.

"He can now—but it's not like it was—although it may come back almost as good as ever, in time, the doctor says. But—Anne—he can't—ever work again and what shall we do? There's the lodge and perhaps they'll take up a little collection in the office—papa seemed always donating to collections for families, but then maybe he was only fibbing—and there's some small pension scheme they've just put through. But—it's so—scrappy and he'll need so many things."

Behind the fact of her father's illness, towering over the misfortune of his never again being able to speak quite clearly, or to walk unaided, loomed this ghastly reality—never again to work; never to draw a monthly salary again. All her childhood this possibility had existed in the background of life, as it existed in the background of all the lives she knew—the cessation of income, the wage-earner's power suddenly cut off. Dependents on unearned money. Life continuing with the source of supply not in one's own hands, beyond one's control. Now this fact was no longer in the background. It had stalked to the very front of life and demanded all their thought. Two aging people, dependent on others! Anne shivered away from it.

"Don't think about that now, mamma. Perhaps it won't be so bad as the doctor says. They're often mistaken. You know how little faith Belle has in them."

"If only Belle were here."

"But she isn't, mamma. You'll have to do the best you can with me."

"Don't be sharp with me, Annie. You know I don't mean it that way. I don't know what I would do without you. I could scarcely get to the phone quick enough to call you. But I wish we knew where Belle was. I haven't had a card ever since that one when they were just starting for Jerusalem or some other heathenish spot. She—she'll help if she can, but she never has anything laid aside. And that was one thing papa always did try to impress on you children—to look out for a rainy day. I hope you and Roger will never do that, Anne, live right up to the last cent, not with Rogie and all. It's a temptation when everything's all right, but the minute sickness comes——If only papa hadn't thought that miserly little lodge and his life insurance would be enough—if anything happened—we might have had a snug bit aside."

"He still has the life insurance, has he? You remember you used to be afraid sometimes—he'd try to raise money on it. You——"

"Oh—Anne——" Hilda clutched her in sudden fear. "I—I—suppose so. I never dared ask papa things like that. You don't suppose—he couldn't have—oh, Anne——"

"Hush, dear. I'm sorry I asked. Of course he has. He would surely have told you if he hadn't."

"He surely would have done nothing of the sort. It's exactly what he would not do. He would have thought he could make it up, get it back or something."

Anne rose and began taking off her things. "I'll stay to-night, momsy. I'll just go and phone Roger and Mrs. Horton. She can take Rogie for a day or two until we see how things are."

Hilda looked so relieved, almost cheerful, that Anne bent and kissed her.

"It will be all right, dear. We'll manage."

Hilda clung to her hand. "Annie—you don't really think—he might have——"

Anne took a sudden decision. "I'll ask him, mamma." It would be difficult enough the next few days without this constant, harping anxiety of her mother's.

"Annie! You can't ask him a thing like that. Not now. The doctor said he must have absolute rest, not be worried or annoyed in any way. He would think we were counting—Anne! It's horrible."

"I won't do it that way, moms. I won't do it at all if it doesn't work out. Please trust me."

"I do, Annie. And I would like to know. I sha'n't be able to think of anything else until I do. You won't be long phoning, will you?"

"Just a minute. Suppose you make some tea. I'd like a cup."

Happy to do something definite, more, to be told exactly what to do, Hilda began to make the tea.

Roger had come in and Anne told him briefly what had happened and that she would stay a day or two. He was not to phone as the bell might disturb James and the doctor had said he was to have absolute quiet. She would phone instead, the following evening.

The tea was made and they drank it, Hilda's spirit reviving in bounds at the knowledge she was not to be left alone in her dilemma. Anne tried to talk of other things, but again and again Hilda came back to the question—had James Mitchell disposed of his insurance? At last they heard a sound from the sick room.

"He's waking, Anne. Don't—don't tell him you can't understand what he says—it seemed to vex him so. He——"

"I won't vex him." Now that she was about to see her father, changed perhaps almost beyond recognition, Anne's voice shook. At this sign of weakness Hilda began again to cry. Anne went quickly out of the room.

At the sound of some one entering, James Mitchell tried to turn his head. He was very weak, and his neck seemed twisted and stiff, but his eyes moved and when he saw who it was they lit faintly.

"Annie," he said in a low, thick tone, but much more clearly than she had expected.

She sat down on the bed-edge and took his hand in hers. It was strange to be taking her father's hand, offering him any physical demonstration of affection. As if the act generated the impulse, a welling pity rose in Anne. His fingers closed on hers and he tried to nod.

"Don't try to talk, papa. Just rest. It will do you lots of good."

Anne was not sure whether the faintest smile of scorn touched his lips under the ragged gray mustache, or whether they were curved forever into that faint bitterness.

"I'm glad you've come, Annie. You can stay a while, can you?" It took him a long time to say this and Anne felt her nerves tighten between the words.

"As long as you need me. But you're not going to need me long. If you do as the doctor says, you'll soon be about. These things don't—don't mean anything permanent." Anne spoke cheerfully, but the dawning hope in her father's eyes shamed her to silence. She longed to turn her eyes away from that pitiful hope, but dared not.

"No—Annie—I won't get better." It begged again her assurance.

"Well, we'll do what the doctor says anyhow, papa."

"I've—never been sick——" James mumbled, "always—lived sensibly—just—my luck——"

"Don't worry about anything now, papa," Anne said soothingly, and disengaged her fingers.

"I—want—a drink, Annie."

She brought a glass of fresh, cold water, held it for him to drink and then, supporting him with one arm, deftly shook up the pillows and placed him comfortably on them.

"That—was fine—don't let mamma—she makes me nervous. She doesn't get what I say. Do I talk very thick, Annie?"

"No. I understand."

"Of course you do," he mumbled. He held her fingers again and she could not draw them away. Nor could she ask him about the insurance while he clung like that, so weak, so changed, so suddenly dependent upon her. And she had never loved him. She did not love him now. She could never love him. The tragedy lay in that—she never could. He might grow better. He might grow worse. She might be there a long time, doing the horrible, intimate things nurses did for hire, to Anne revolting, except for deep love. She would do them to save his nerves from Hilda, the woman with whom he had lived for more than thirty years; who did not understand his blurred speech, whose every motion disturbed him; Hilda, sitting in the kitchen waiting to hear whether he had gambled away her only hope of independence when he had gone.

Anne slipped her hand from his, covering its withdrawal by soft little taps on the back of his. She must ask him now, while her presence still held something of the unusual. In a few days he would have accepted her ministering. All the small tyranny of him would have risen in defiance of his dependence on them. She must do it now, or not at all. Without preamble, Anne asked quietly:

"Papa, things may be a little tight for the present. Do you think we might raise a little money on your life insurance? As soon as we can reach Belle——"

With sudden strength his fingers clutched her arm, and he gripped it until she felt the bones press into her flesh. His eyes were full of anger, fear, defiance. With a terrible effort he drew her down, motioning with his slightly twisted lips not to let Hilda hear.

"I haven't got—it—Annie. I—thought—I had a sure—thing—it was sure—and I staked—it's gone," he ended in a squeaking note of fear and anger.

Anne patted his shoulder and tried to speak cheerfully, "Never mind, papa. Never mind. Don't think about it."

That fearful squeak, like a mouse caught in a trap.

"Don't—tell—her, Annie. She'll fuss me about it and—I meant it right. It—was for her—I don't want anything for myself—it was a sure thing. Just my luck—any one would have taken—the tip."

And there was nothing Anne could find to say, although she seemed to be tearing her brain apart in an effort to find a thought. She could only whisper absently, over and over:

"Never mind, papa; we'll talk about it later." At last the monotony of repetition soothed him, and he freed her to tuck the clothes about him. But Anne could not bend to kiss him. With all her strength she tried. Her muscles would not obey. She stroked his cheek and, with an extra little pat, said good night and left him. Almost before she was out of the room he was asleep.

Anne went slowly the short distance from the bedroom to the kitchen. The door was ajar and she saw Hilda crocheting, a wad of lace in a soupbowl by her on the table. Years ago Anne and Belle had rebelled against the monstrosity of pineapple edging or star pattern upon their underclothes. Still Hilda persisted in "not wasting time." The darkest crannies of the Niche were filled with these rolls of crochet; they were even tucked away on the pantry shelves.

"One—two—three plain, and four chain," Hilda mumbled.

Anne went in and closed the door. "He did do it. He's lost the insurance, bet it away on a sure thing and it's gone."

"Oh—Anne——"

"Don't cry," Anne went on in the stern tone with which one handles an hysterical child. "It won't get it back. And if I were you I wouldn't say anything to him. It's done. He can't undo it now and he'll have time enough to wish it undone—lying—there—thinking about it."

Hilda forced back the tears. After a moment she heaved a sigh and picked up the edging again. Soon she was lost once more in the intricacies of one—two—three plain, and four chain.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The days went by neither slowly nor quickly, but with a terrible fixity of sameness. The routine of illness, once established, life adjusted itself to nourishment at certain hours, periods of sleep, efforts to entertain James. Even waiting to hear from Belle was reduced to a law, once in the morning post, once in the afternoon. As soon as they received her address they would cable. Till then they had to wait.

With the assumption of all responsibility by Anne, Hilda Mitchell ceased to worry about the future. Her old gayety returned. Sometimes Anne felt that her mother was really enjoying herself more than she had for many years. In this release from the housekeeping cares she had borne so long, she was like a child. She insisted on doing all the errands, and although it sometimes annoyed Anne, on the whole it filled her with tender amusement to find how far Hilda insisted on going for some small, needed thing. Prescriptions she always had filled at night in a big down-town drug store, although there was a small, reliable but very dull little drug store on the corner. She followed food bargains about the city, adding carfare until the article cost more than it would have in her own block.

At the end of the first week Anne brought Rogie to the flat. When James was awake he liked to have the baby crawling and laughing about him. Sometimes Anne wanted to cry as she watched the numbed form propped in the big bed and the laughing, crawling baby dragging his little limbs in their awkward newness over the limbs that would never walk again.

At the end of the second week she felt that she had lived this way for years, that she would never live otherwise. The loft and the world with its bickering were far away, behind the present routine. On Tuesdays and Sunday evenings two old men took turns in coming to see James. A quick, wiry little man came on Tuesday. A slow, fat man on Sunday. They came early in the evening, just after their own suppers, and James watched all day for their coming. They never had much news and there were long pauses between their remarks. The flat was never so still, so cut off from the world functioning beyond this silence, as in these long intervals between the items of office gossip. Anne could never shut the kitchen door and forget the old men, but sat tense, waiting for the next buzz from the sick room.

They had imposed upon themselves this task of calling, but she felt their relief when, always a few moments before half-past eight, each old man rose to go, said something reassuring about soon seeing James Mitchell back at work, and with awkward kindliness got himself out of the room. Then Anne would go in, straighten her father's pillows, make him comfortable for the night, and listen with assumed interest while he retailed in his thick, halting speech, their meager news. The paucity of it hurt beyond her strength to reply. To have lived fifty-five years and have no interests larger than the clickings of a machine, functioning far above him; to be bound in the tiny screws and cogs of an intricate mechanism, towering into official dimness. The old men depressed Anne terribly, almost more than James himself. His illness separated him, in his first distinction, from the rest of his world. But they were still part of it. Like chained animals they seized and gnawed at each tiny happening until they had gnawed it to powder. In these clouds of dust they were walking blindly toward the grave.

On the nights when the old men did not come James dropped asleep almost immediately after his light supper. Anne put little Roger to bed. Hilda found some reason to leave the house, even if it were only "to run down to Mrs. Welles' for a minute," and Anne was alone. Sometimes she sat in her old room, beside Rogie's basket, and stared out into the darkening street. Strange noises emerged into the stillness, tickings and creakings in the walls, rustlings and faint tappings.

Anne's thoughts, too vivid to be held within her brain, slipped into the darkness and she saw them, pictures in the thick silence; the terrible black vacuum of life in which moved the old gray men, her father, Hilda, herself, Roger, Tom, the dancing marionettes about him; Hilary Wainwright, his keen-eyed partners in great enterprises; Merle snatching at beauty, the grimed workers; all groups of whirling dervishes, spinning round in useless effort, until they dropped into decay and death.

It was in such a mood, one night about three weeks after she had come to care for James, that Anne went on the back porch, where the sure shining of the stars, the black outline of the unchanging hills, sometimes gave her rest. But to=night no peace came. The stars were hard and cold, the hills indifferent. Locked in a vault of decay and death, she heard the voice of Life, like the undertone of the sea wailing forever: This is all there is. I am decay and death, decay and death.

So deep was she within the darkness of this realization that when a man's quick step sounded on the stairs and she saw Roger smiling up, Anne stared back as if he were a stranger from another world. Roger's smile vanished and he bounded up the last steps and took her in his arms. At his touch the vividness of thought vanished, and she seemed to slip down from the high places of a dream into waking. It was good to feel his hold again and Anne smiled at him, but he looked at her anxiously.

"Princess, you're awfully pale, and your eyes are as big as saucers."

"Are they? That's good news; they always were too small."

"I'm not joking, Anne. You look all in."

"I feel all right, a little tired, but I'm perfectly well. Papa had a pretty hard day—sometimes I think he knows he'll never get about again and it frightens him. He—doesn't want to be left alone with mamma. She fusses him and he gets all nervous and worn out."

"Can't they get some one?"

"No. They couldn't pay any one. The pension isn't straightened yet. They're taking up a collection, but a couple of hundred will be a miracle, and how long does that last in illness? Besides, mamma is such a bad manager."

"You're not responsible for that. And how about me?"

"You're a wonderful manager."

"I'm not."

"Then you ought to learn," Anne tried to tease. "It's really my duty to stay away until you do. A great, big, social revolutionist able to reorganize the world, needing one small wife to look out for him!"

"It's beastly eating at restaurants, and that hill's the stillest place in the world at night. It's like lighting up a tomb to go home and not hear you or Rogie."

Anne thought of the old man in the other room, eating his soft, childish foods, alone with the empty past and death.

"I can't leave them, Roger, not yet. The doctor says that in a few weeks he may be able to get into a wheel-chair, and then he can come out here. That will be some change."

But Roger did not hear what Anne was saying; her eyes with their dark circles beneath were too big, her cheeks too pale.

"But you'll be ill yourself, and what good will that do them? Anne, Tom isn't going to be able to make that Chicago convention; he wants me to go instead. Won't you come?"

"To Chicago! Now! I couldn't, Roger. I couldn't go that far away now."

"Why not?"

If the Mitchells had been on the other side of the world they would have had to manage without her. "It seems to me you've done as much as they can expect."

Anne stiffened. "They don't expect anything. I'm not doing it because they expect it. There's nothing else to do. Don't talk like that, Roger; I don't like it."

"And I don't like it either, this arrangement, not one bit."

Anne flushed. She felt that Roger was opposing her opposition more than entreating her to go.

"Let's not talk about it. No matter what they expect or don't expect, I should be miserable. Besides, it is impossible."

"What would they do if you weren't here?"

"I am here."

"But, sweetheart, you say he doesn't need special attention. It wouldn't even take the expense of a trained nurse—if your mother has to have some one. A woman like Mrs. Horton could do it."

"Who would pay?"

"We will—until you hear from Belle, anyhow."

"How?"

Roger looked away into the twinkling lights.

"You see," Anne said after a moment, with the prim patience that made Roger feel like a greedy child clinging to his toys. "There's no sense in talking round and round like that. I couldn't go—even if I felt free in other ways."

Deftly Anne had poured the responsibility over him. Roger felt himself choking in the patience of Anne.

"You don't want to go. Why can't you be honest and say so?"

"I can't leave them with no one to see after papa." Anne's reiteration was an iceberg before the sputtering match of his objections.

"She saw to him for years."

Into that "she" went all Roger's scorn of Hilda Mitchell.

"Then mamma has had her share and I wish to help now."

"Why didn't you say so in the first place? There's no need to beat about the bush. When it comes to a show-down between your people and me, I go."

Anne's eyes narrowed. Her face flamed its ugly, brick-red, "I might just as well have, mightn't I?"

"Certainly." Roger's voice accepted Anne's decision.

There was nothing else to say. Having fought over James Mitchell's body, it seemed grotesque to ask after him. Roger turned again to the winking lights. Anne moved away to the kitchen and lit the gas.

If he followed—there was nothing to talk about. But he could not call "good night" and go off down the back stairs—to Chicago. Roger hesitated. Voices sounded below. Two women were coming up the stairs. He went slowly into the kitchen. United in the need of pretense, he and Anne stood together.

"I can only stay a moment," Charlotte Welles' voice trailed like a soft cloud after the crackling sunshine of Hilda's laugh.

Then Roger was being introduced to a small, pale woman with dark eyes that seemed to see his annoyance at being bothered with this introduction.

As soon as they were settled, he moved toward the door.

"Going already?" Hilda asked brightly.

"Yes. I have a lot to do to-night."

Anne's heart thumped. Perhaps he was going to leave for Chicago to-night. He had not said when.

"Roger's going to Chicago," she explained.

"To Chicago! Well, that is a trip! Won't it be roasting? Going on business?"

What did she suppose he was going for? "Yes," he answered as pleasantly as he could, and knew that Mrs. Welles thought him extremely rude.

"It's not so hot now," she interposed in her sweet, low voice, so evidently smoothing a situation she had no right to assume existed, that Roger resented her almost more than he did Hilda.

"No. It cools off in September." He moved nearer the door. Anne and Hilda followed.

"How long will you be away?"

"I don't know exactly. Perhaps only two weeks, perhaps longer."

"Good gracious!" Hilda trilled, "it doesn't seem worth while going for such a little while, does it? Two weeks! Hardly time to get there and back."

"I'm not going for the pleasure of the trip," Roger said stiffly, "and the convention won't last more than four days. But I won't have time to come up again. I'll say good-by now." It was almost a challenge, but it was the best that he could do. Followed by Hilda's stupid injunction to have a good time, he preceded Anne into the hall and she shut the door. Instantly the heavy breathing of James Mitchell filled the space between them. In silence they reached the stair-head and he began the long descent.

Would Roger really go like that, without a kind word or apology? Three steps below, Roger stopped, and looked back.

He was going away for weeks and Anne could not even come to the door with him.

"I won't write often. You'll see all the news in the papers and I'll be pretty busy."

"Oh, that's all right. And don't worry if you don't hear from me. There won't be any news."

They looked at each other.

Anne went slowly down the three stairs and kissed him, a kiss of condescending allowance for his bad temper and rudeness. Roger's lips brushed her cheek. "Good-bye. Take care of yourself."

He was gone.

"Annie! Annie!" It was repeated in a querulous quaver from the sick room and Anne went to her father.

"That was Roger, wasn't it? Are you going back home, Annie?" He looked up from the burrow of the bed-clothes, so disturbed that Anne laid her hand upon his shoulder to reassure him.

"No. I'm not going. Roger has to go to Chicago and he ran up to say good-by."

"That's nice. That's nice, Annie." He patted her hand, his eyes were already filming with sleep. In a moment he was breathing evenly again.

He had wakened from his sleep to clutch at her, to hold her to his need, no matter what her own. True to his own selfishness until the end; his claims always hidden under a false consideration, just as his pleased "that's nice, that's nice," covered, in its implication of affection for her, the hook with which he would draw her to him, hold her between the fussy efforts of Hilda and his own exhausted nerves.

Anne went quietly from the room, closing the door except for the narrow crack left open always for his call. In her own room, Rogie was asleep. If she lit the light he might wake. She could not lie in the dark thinking. She would have liked to go and walk far in the night, but Hilda would ask questions. There was no spot in the universe hers, hers alone, free from some binding chain, some duty to some one.

In the kitchen, Charlotte Welles was talking while Hilda listened, her blue eyes wide in a fascinated interest. As Anne came just inside the door, Charlotte's eyes included her in what she had been saying and Anne's bitterness changed slowly to anger.

"She has lost everything," Charlotte Welles was saying, "husband, child, wealth. But she has found peace. Now she knows. She says she was never really happy before."

"It's wonderful. It does seem as if there must be something in it." Hilda's head wabbled as if over-weighted by the marvel imposed upon her intelligence.

"Why didn't she give away her money," Anne demanded fiercely, "and leave her husband and kill her children—whoever she may be—years ago, if that's all she needed for her happiness?"

Charlotte Welles looked up with such gentle understanding of her bitterness and hurt that Anne wanted to strike her. What right had this woman to penetrate one's mood, to be always down there under the surface of one's thoughts? It was as if she had entered a room locked against her.

"Why, Annie!"

Anne ignored Hilda and went on in a rapid, cracking voice.

"How on earth you can believe such rubbish, I don't know. And to call it science! If science is anything, it's the seeking of effect from cause. Something happens, and you burrow far enough down under the surface and find the cause. A woman loses everything in the world she cared about and—she sings for joy! She never loved her husband or children nor enjoyed her wealth."

"She did—all three. She was a loyal wife, a devoted mother, and I never knew any one do as much good with their money, or use it to finer purpose."

"Then she's lying," Anne went on, "she's hysterical and unbalanced by grief. It's not peace she's found, it's a delusion."

"It is no delusion. It is peace, the peace that comes from understanding."

"'The peace that passes understanding.'"

"That passes understanding—until you find it."

"And no sane person ever will find it in—'Science and Health'."

"Annie! Why, what's got into you?" Hilda flushed with shame of Anne's rudeness, but Mrs. Welles did not seem to notice it.

"I don't suppose you know much about Science, do you? Have you ever read 'Science and Health'?"

"No. But would I have to read a book claiming the moon was made of green cheese, to know it wasn't?"

"Certainly not. Long ago the moon was proved not to be made of green cheese."

"And long ago, farther back than that, it was proved that human beings—except a few insane ascetics—are not happy when everything worth while in life is snatched from them and they have nothing left to make the fight worth while."

"No power in heaven or earth can snatch everything from one. It is impossible to be left with nothing. There is no such thing as a spiritual vacuum, because Love is everywhere."

"Like the poor!"

"No, because there are no poor who cannot escape from their poverty if they will. They remain poor because they do not understand Love. They do not grasp it as a force, a greater force than any so-called natural force that material science has ever discovered. Love is the magnet that draws worlds together. No star, no earth, no planet can oppose it. The poor, the ill, the unhappy remain so because they do not, will not Love. They shut themselves off, insulate themselves against the power of Love by their small, physical desires. 'Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto you.' Christ understood."

"Without Mary Baker Eddy?"

"Anne! If I were Mrs. Welles I wouldn't explain another thing to you."

"She needn't," Anne said wearily, "I'm going to bed."

And she went. They could talk her over if they liked, wonder, excuse her, give her absent treatment. Nothing mattered. They were not real, her mother and father and Roger were not real. Black Tom with his detached love of humanity and his indifference to Merle; Charlotte Welles with her disgusting monopoly of Universal Love, her intrusive intimacy with God; all snatching at some personal comfort and dressing up their little fetish, just as she dressed Rogie's teddy bear and made a sailor of him.

Nothing mattered but sleep.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

At the end of three weeks, Roger wrote his first real letter. He was going on to the Pennsylvania coal fields, then to New York, the West Virginia mining country, the southern cotton mills and home. It would take him fully a month longer. Anne read it several times, as if committing the itinerary to memory, gathered no picture or quickening of interest from it, and slowly tore the pages up. Roger might have mapped a trip from star to star, so little did it seem to touch her life. The only realities were this growing antagonism between herself and Roger, and the helplessness of her father and Rogie. Between these two points of advancing Death and Life, Anne stood, making mechanical motions of getting up, going to bed, caring for Rogie, listening to Hilda's chatter, and filling some of the empty hours for her father.

This was the most difficult of all. No book held him, although he complained if none were provided for him. His fettered mind exhausted itself in the effort to assimilate experience beyond his own. He would put away the travels and biographies and fiction, for which Anne spent hours searching the library, for the evening paper or the most trivial bit of gossip. Sometimes this need to fill the emptiness about him with little concrete facts oppressed Anne until her very jaws ached with the unuttered words she could not summon, and her brain went dizzily round, searching in the vacancy, conscious of its own motion.

Bound in a life of routine, James Mitchell complained if his useless medicine was a moment late, his nourishment delayed. He was jealous of Hilda's health and upbraided her cheerfulness as indifference; but when she was over-zealous for his comfort he grew irritable and asked for Anne.

Anne quieted him. The old friction between them was lost in the profundity of Anne's indifference to all that happened. It was cloaked under her gentle touch, her quiet movements, her quickness in understanding his thickened speech, her anticipation of his needs. He liked to hold her cool hand after she had straightened his pillows for the night, or feel its sure grip guiding his dragging feet to the window to investigate some trivial noise in the street below. She read to him for hours, never putting the book aside at his first lurching into sleep, and so drawing him back to realization of her own preference.

She read on until his gray head dropped to his breast and his hands relaxed in his lap. Then Anne would lay aside the book and look at him impersonally; at the thin hair, the clothes spotted with dropped food, the heavy canes propped against the chair arm. This man was her father. From this now decaying body, she had drawn life. She had never loved him, never been near him, and could never be quite separated from him. From the beginning of Time to the end of Time, the chain ran, a living link, a dead link, on and on; health no more permanent than decay, life as accidental and meaningless as death. She would grow old and rot; Rogie would grow old and rot; and his son's sons until Time itself dropped in death. Or, somewhere along the line, Time would snap suddenly, as purposeless in its ceasing as in its beginning. Her longings for a permanent Beauty, Hilda's unconscious clutching at happiness, Roger's childish faith in his power to create justice, Black Tom's ferocious idealism, all meaningless words scratched on the monument to Death. This overwhelming negation was Reality. Only people like Charlotte Welles, blind and insensate before their own terror of extermination, could juggle away this truth.

Charlotte Welles no longer annoyed Anne. Charlotte was no more deluded than any one else. In the confusion of living, she had darted down a blind alley, but no more of a blind alley than any other path opened to the shufflings of humanity. At least this path hurt no one, as Roger hurt her, as Black Tom hurt Merle, as her father and mother hurt each other.

Anne had even grown to like Mrs. Welles and look for her coming. With quiet cheerfulness she often led James Mitchell away from the realization of his heavy canes and numbed feet back into the only world he had ever known. Deep within him, the hope lingered that he would again be able to go to the office, make endless rows of figures and be commended for his faithfulness: that he would draw his salary, place his small bets, make his luckless snatches at fortune, become again "the head of the house." Without deliberately deceiving him, Mrs. Welles deepened this faith, so that, after a visit from her he was actually stronger and once managed, unaided except for his canes, to stumble across the room.

Anne felt her always standing beside the sick man, throwing the thread of her faith about him, trying to draw him back to health. When she did not come for a few days, James fretted.

"I really believe you do him good," Anne said to her at the end of an afternoon in which Charlotte had kept him cheerful for hours.

"Faith will move mountains. You can never tell." It was the first direct reference she had made to her belief since the night of Anne's rudeness. But now, the assurance did not anger Anne. She was too weary.

"Faith in what?"

"Faith—in the power of faith. Just believing."

"Believing that you will get what you want just because you want it?"

"Not exactly. Believing in the harmony of Life, knowing that what you must have, what your soul needs, must come."

"How do you know what your soul needs?"

The other paused, thoughtful. "By listening," she said at last. "By escaping from the noise of material life. Material life is not Real."

"It's the only reality we have, our brains and bodies and senses to measure by."

Mrs. Welles shook her head. "No. Our brains and bodies and senses are not the ultimate reality. It is something else, something almost impossible to put into words, something you must feel."

"But how can you feel without your body?"

"By leaving your body behind and going into Silence. Then you Know. You Feel it, you See it, you Touch it."

On the last words, Hilda came in, fresh and gay from a walk with Rogie.

"Touch what?"

"Peace and reality," Anne said with a faint smile.

Hilda looked puzzled.

"We were talking of faith," Charlotte explained, "and the absolute certainty you get in Silence."

"Oh, yes," Hilda nodded. "Just getting away from a racket does help. Why, I used to feel sometimes when the children were small, and it rained so they had to play in the house, that I'd go frantic with them tearing round getting in my way, when I had a lot to do. I broke down once and the doctor told me to take things easier, so after that I used to go into my own room with a novel every day for an hour and lock the door. It helped a lot."

Anne caught the twinkle in Charlotte's eyes and returned it.

"I'd forgotten all about it," Hilda went on. "But I shouldn't wonder if that wouldn't be a good thing to keep up. Do you do it?"

"I don't take the novel, but I try to get quiet some part of every day."

"I don't know that I could do it without a book. There doesn't seem to be anything to think about when you just sit down and try to think."

"Don't try to think. Don't try to do anything. Just relax."

"Good gracious, I'd have to crochet or something. I'd feel wicked sitting like that wasting the time."

"It's the one thing that isn't wasting time. It's getting at the only thing in Life worth getting at."

"Is it? Well, I must say if you can keep your house looking the way it does and find time to sit round doing nothing, nothing at all, I guess there's something in it. I don't know but what I'll try it sometime."

"Perhaps you'd understand better if you didn't 'try it' alone."

"But I'd feel so silly relaxing with other people looking at me."

"Other people wouldn't be looking at you. They'd be quiet too. There's a terrific force in many people being quiet together."

"'Many-people-being-quiet-together,'" Anne whispered.

"Well—if I were sure they weren't paying any attention," Hilda spoke with mounting excitement, as if about to venture an intoxicating drink, not quite certain of its after-effects.

"You know that any time you care to come with me," Charlotte suggested, "I shall be glad. Our meetings always close with a few moments of utter stillness."

"Maybe I will. I'd like to see it."

"Next Sunday we're going to have one of the Boston Board of Lecturers out. If you like, I'll call up for you. About half past three?"

"That's just the time I never know what to do with myself. I'd like to."

But the following Sunday when Charlotte came, Hilda had not returned from an outing with Rogie.

"She must have forgotten all about it," Anne explained. "She did say something about taking Rogie to the Park, but I thought she would be back in time. She's been talking about Silence all the week."

Mrs. Welles laughed and turned to go. She was a little late already. "Perhaps the outing will do her just as much good. Besides she can come some other time. It makes no difference."

In a moment Charlotte would be gone and there would be nothing for Anne to do but sit as she had sat for the last hour, staring out into the deserted street, listening to the wind and the heavy breathing of her father asleep.

"Perhaps you would take me, instead," Anne said in a sudden need to escape from this stillness that had no force or peace in it. "Papa will be all right and mamma won't be long now."

"Certainly. Could you be ready in ten minutes? There's sure to be a crowd and I like to walk. It gets me in the mood more than riding in a crowded car."

Anne went quickly from the room and was back again in five minutes. "I'll just leave a note for moms or she'll wonder what's happened."

She scribbled, "Gone with Mrs. Welles," and pinned the paper on the wall.

They walked quickly in a silence that rested, so that, by the time they reached the church, Anne no longer felt the need of this escape and wished she had not come. But as she had herself suggested it, she did not know how to retreat now and followed Charlotte through the iron gate and up the wide graveled path, with reluctant curiosity and a hope that the service would not be long.

The church was a low, gray stone building, covered with ivy, standing back from the street on a lawn, undisturbed by shrubs or flowers. Its leaded casement windows and outer door of heavy oak studded with nails, gave a feeling of age and great strength. Silently swinging doors led from the wide vestibule into the body of the building, which was covered with thick soft carpet that deadened all sound. Across the foot of the platform, stretching the width of the room, great branches of oak and huckleberry broke the hardness of line and filled the room with a faint odor of living greenness. Half-way down the aisle, they stopped and then, with no rustle of disturbance, Anne found herself seated in the center of the row. Mrs. Welles took a leaflet from the rack before her and Anne looked about.

She had had no clear idea of what such a gathering would be like, but now, as she studied the faces of those within her range, she marveled at their likeness. There were old and young, men and women, but they all looked to have gone through a process that had dissolved their personal differences. They all sat quietly, their bodies in repose, their faces calm. They were neither eager nor indifferent. No doubt or uncertainty disturbed them. Anne could conceive of no opposition that would sweep them to anger. No power could force from these well-dressed, cultured bodies the cry of rage that lashed the audiences of Black Tom O'Connell.

Here there were no slovenly clothes, no stunted bodies, no stormy, foreign eyes. They had found their Peace and held it with well-bred restraint. They were sure, not waiting; positive, not patient. Before this sureness, Katya's was the certainty of an elemental force striving through obstacles to prove itself in creation. This surety was the after-calm, when God, having labored to create a world, stood back satisfied and said: "It is good." It was restful in a way but had something of the same supreme aloofness.

The side doors of the platform opened. Two men and a woman, dressed in white, took the three vacant chairs behind the hedge of green. A hymn was announced and the audience rose. Verse after verse they sang of gloating peace and furious good-will. Protected by the music, their calm at last broke through restraint, and flung itself aloft in an abandon their composed bodies never would have allowed. Anne felt the peace about her crack like thin ice and disappear.

When the Reader advanced to the rostrum and the reading of the day's selections from the Scriptures and from Science and Health began, Anne held her patience by an effort. Before the colossal discovery of Mary Baker Eddy, the old Hebrew Prophets were little children searching in the dark. Again and again, the name of Mary Baker Eddy, uttered in unctuous pride of possession, struck at Anne's resolve to give tolerant attention, until she felt her own lips forming the words in the respectful pause which invariably preceded them. The old woman herself might have been peeping from a door, counting these ordered references, tabbing them against a possible omission. But the trained Reader never forgot, at the appointed places he gave her due, in perfection of delivery that set him aside from others, made him the special messenger of the exaggerated optimism of Mary Baker Eddy. When he had finished he sat down, in quiet withdrawal, and the Boston Lecturer took his place.

With bowed head, the Boston Lecturer stood for a moment, in silence receiving the silent applause, spirit greeting spirit. He was a middle-aged man, his slim alertness padded to suave courtesy by prosperity; not the obtrusive prosperity of Mr. Benjamin Wilson, but an unobtrusive prosperity, like a bank-book bound in morocco to stimulate a book of poems. He made sweeping statements of incredible facts, in a slow careful way that claimed a long process of logical analysis to which they had never been subjected. He spoke fluently, as if he had said the same things many times, but inserted unexpected pauses, direct demands that gave the impression of deep concern for this special audience; a willingness to give them personally of his great abundance.

At the end of twenty minutes, he, too, sat down. A faint motion marked the loosened tension of his hearers. The meeting was thrown open to testimony. Men and women rose to relate, in nauseating detail, illnesses from which they had been cured by Divine Truth. Tumors, cancers and wasting weaknesses had been alleviated, instantly in some cases, by a reading of Science and Health with a Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. The listeners radiated affirmation. If they had ever possessed the power to doubt, it had long ago been buried under the weight of Science and Health with a Key to the Scriptures, by Our Revered Leader, Mary Baker Eddy.

At last those eager to testify grew fewer. The Reader looked over the hall to find no one standing. The Boston Lecturer rose again and named the solo to be sung by the woman in white. She came forward in her turn to the edge of green and Anne sat back, disappointed to the point of tears. The woman sang well, but Anne did not hear. After the solo would follow the five minutes of Utter Silence. Anne wished that she could get up and slip away. Why had she come?

And then, so silently, so swiftly that she long afterwards recalled this moment as one in which she must have lost consciousness, Anne felt herself swept out upon a Silence, so deep, so profound that there was no room within it for doubt or antagonistic withholding. Without a break, as if a great curtain had suddenly and noiselessly been rolled back, the whole hall moved into stillness. It was not a thing that descended upon them. It was a state into which they passed. The terrific wave of silence carried Anne with it; caught her on the pinnacle of its huge curve and dropped her gently into a peace so profound and so real that Anne felt it laving the whole surface of her body. Something within slipped beyond the tight hold of her will, escaped from the encasing body in which she had gripped it, claimed its own and fled into Peace.

The rustle of others brought Anne back. She got up and followed Charlotte Welles through the groups smiling and shaking hands and agreeing on the wonders of the Boston Lecturer. She was glad that Mrs. Welles did not stop but went directly out, and hoped Charlotte would not ask her about the meeting. She could not talk of it. And yet these unmagnetic, unvital, bewildered people had within themselves this tremendous power. Close to Charlotte Welles she walked in silence, angry at their possession of it.

Gradually Anne's mood dulled. Exhausted by her own emotion, she felt spiritually weak and drained. In her reaction, she could have dropped to sleep. She stifled a yawn and knew that Charlotte had seen. But it didn't matter. Without mention of the meeting, Anne left Mrs. Welles at the door and went upstairs.

At her step, Hilda looked up from the cake she was slicing and laughed.

"I never did a thing like that before, but do you know, it never entered my head. I took Rogie to the Park and was giving him a ride in the goat carriage when it struck me, all of a sudden, that I'd promised her. It was four then, but I came, right straight back home, although I knew it was too late."

"You might just as well have stayed."

"I suppose I might. Oh, well, we had a lovely time. Rogie was as good as gold. How did you like it? Is there anything in it?"

"Not for me," Anne said wearily.

"I thought as much. Still, I wish I could believe it. I'd like to get rid of that sciatica and no liniment touches it."

"But if you are a scientist, momsy, you don't have sciatica; and if you have sciatica you're not a scientist. So they get you coming and going."

"I suppose they do," Hilda agreed placidly. "Besides, I haven't tried that salt and bacon grease the delicatessen woman told me of. I'll do that to-night."

But the sciatica was miraculously cured without the bacon grease or Science. It disappeared that very evening with a cablegram from Belle. She sent a hundred dollars and said she was starting for home. At intervals all evening Hilda read the message. By nine o'clock the hundred dollars had been stretched to include a dozen things.

"And a wheel-chair for papa," she concluded.

"Not if you buy those other things," Anne warned, struggling to keep Hilda's imagination within some kind of bounds.

"Are chairs very expensive?"

"They're sure to be. Perhaps you could get a second-hand one."

"Perhaps we could."

There was a long pause and then Hilda asked: "Annie, do you suppose that papa—do you think he will be able—it would be silly to——"

Anne looked quickly away. "I don't know, mamma, let's ask the doctor."

"I don't know just how to do it," Hilda whispered. "But really, Annie, if he couldn't use it, it would be——"

"A waste," Anne finished.

But it was another week before the doctor found time to include this useless visit in his busy round. He came in mid-afternoon, as James Mitchell waked from his after-luncheon nap. He stayed chatting for a quarter of an hour and wrote a new prescription to make the sick man feel that everything possible was being done. As he left, Hilda drew him into the kitchen.

"He seems brighter, doctor, don't you think so?"

"Yes. You're good nurses. His general health is wonderfully good."

Hilda looked at Anne, the unasked question in her eyes, but Anne refused to put it. Not until the doctor was drawing on his gloves, did Hilda face it.

"How long, doctor—is there—always a second stroke—how——?"

"My dear Mrs. Mitchell," he said with his professional smile, "please ask me something I can tell you. After all, you know, we doctors are not prophets. I have known the strokes to follow each other within a very short time and sometimes they are years apart. In fact, sometimes the patient never has another and dies of some quite other—complication. The only thing to do is rest, quiet and diversion."

After he had gone, Hilda said thoughtfully:

"I wonder, if I went straight down town now, whether they could get a chair here to-night."

"You might try."

"I believe I will."

Just at dusk, they brought it, a comfortable chair on wheels, with a little rack for books, a tiny adjustable side tray, and a footrest. Hilda lit both gas jets in the bedroom and Anne wheeled herself gayly in. This unusual game covered over the presentation long enough to get James settled, and then the added comfort and independence hid, for the moment, his terrible need.

No one knew that James Mitchell cried that night when the excitement was over.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Hour after hour, day after day, the train raced on, away from the smoke-wrapped slums of great cities, from great stretches of the earth torn open for men's greed, from the mills where little children slaved to accumulate the wealth of those whom they would never see. On and on, over the sun-soaked earth, across black, fat land; clean and empty desert; past lonely farms; little towns, isolated from the inimical immensity about them by their fenced gardens, their paved streets and electric lights. Above the prairie flatness, the gilded domes of their courthouses boomed pompously of law and order, and the tapering spires of churches pricked the blue sky to attract the attention of God.

Long after the rest of the car was asleep, Roger sat on the observation watching the distant lights break through the thick blackness, come near, recede, disappear. Something was so desperately wrong. There was so much land, so few owners. So much wealth, so many poor. Myriads lived and died, that a few might enjoy. That a few might own the earth, millions upon millions tore it apart, herded in unclean cities, built uncanny machines to speed the process of accumulation.

When at last the train dropped over the snowy crest of the Sierras and plunged down, down past clear mountain lakes, forest fringed, down, down into the richest land of all, Roger felt as if something had hardened and shaped to new purpose within him. Nothing in all the world mattered but to help; to slave too, and die trying to even the chances a little. When the ferry docked and the hills of the city rose misty in the salt fog creeping across their tops, Roger felt older and full of a stronger faith than he had ever had.

And he wanted Anne and Rogie. They were so small and helpless and the world was so cruel. He had been impatient lately with Anne, but he did not feel now that he would ever be impatient again. He wanted them and the quiet little house on the hill.

Half an hour later he rang the Mitchell bell and Anne peered from the dim light above.

"It's me," he called gayly and went up the stairs three at a time. But before he could take Anne in his arms or kiss her, a warning gesture motioned him to quiet.

"Papa's only just gotten to sleep and if he wakes now he'll get all fussed up and nervous. It's been a bad day."

She tiptoed past the partly open door of the sick room and Roger felt the darkness within reach through and chill his eagerness. He had not telegraphed purposely to take Anne unawares. He had pictured holding her in his arms and kissing away the memory of their last meeting in a new effort at nearness and understanding. Anne led the way to the kitchen and closed the door noiselessly. The gas was not lit and through the open back door the fog was stealing swiftly from the hills. A silent tidal wave, it was sweeping directly upon himself and Anne standing together in the dim dusk. In a moment it would break over the thick, black silence of the house and engulf them in its chill.

"Why didn't you let me know, Roger? I hadn't the least idea."

What would have been her greeting if he had? Perhaps a wire to tell him to be sure and come up the back stairs.

"I wasn't positive I could make it. Such a lot of delays turned up. I expected once to be here last week. How's Rogie? I suppose he's asleep."

"For hours. Shall I wake him?"

"N-o—no, of course not."

Roger moved to the back door and closed it. The fog was so stealthy, so uncannily conscious, an inimical spirit released to stifle himself and Anne in its silence. As he turned again Anne struck a match to light the gas-taper but he stopped her. He could conceal his disappointment better in the dark.

"Don't light the light, unless you want it. I like it—dark—after the last weeks. It was so noisy and glaring and dirty most of the time."

Anne put the taper back on its hook. "I like it this way, too," she said in a detached tone that drew Roger's attention sharply. It was the voice of some one, not at all concerned with present reality, scarcely conscious of its surroundings. It was as lonely and detached as a wisp of the fog. He went nearer to her.

"How is your father? Better?"

"Yes. He's better on the whole, in some ways at least. But——" Anne shivered. "It's terrible, watching some one die; that's what it really is. He may live for years like this, good days and then a bad day—but—all the time—he is really dying—dying every day—a little bit—dropping apart—until—he drops away altogether over the Edge."

She was turned to him, but her eyes strained past to the chasm beyond the Edge, and her hands were clenched as if she would hold the old man from it.

Roger put his arm about her, but Anne stood stiffly within his hold, seeing only the terrible, slow progress of her father to the grave. But to Roger, it was not terrible that one old man, criminal in his narrowness and stupidity, was slowly dying in the same dull way he had lived. There was a magnificent poetic justice in it—the little gray mole, creeping blindly through life, now creeping blindly, selfishly toward death. Men in their prime poured their strength into the fiery pits of the steel mills; the slums of great cities battened on the babyhood of thousands; here, in the comfort of his home, one uninteresting, unimportant human unit was dying. He had contributed nothing to life. He would leave no unfillable space behind him. Even his own wife would not sincerely mourn him, nor would the faintest ray of beauty be dimmed in any life by his going. Impatience touched Roger, although he still held Anne and quietly stroked her hair.

"You mustn't think about it like that. Your father isn't old, but he isn't young, either. He has had the average length of life. We all have to die."

"Why?" Anne whispered fiercely.

Before the mills debouching their hundreds at set hours, the miles upon miles of sordid streets, Roger's eyes saddened.

"I don't know—unless it is to make more room."

"Then why not go now—every one, quickly and cleanly—instead of rotting into it?"

"Suicide? No. Not until you're sure anyhow that you can't do anything to make it better. It can't be the purpose of life, this horrible chaos, like the panic at a fire, with the stronger treading down the weak."

Anne shivered. "The strong—as you call them—have been treading on the weak since the beginning of time and will go on to the end. If it would all stop—just for a day, an hour—not a human being on the face of the earth—not a sound—just silence. Perhaps we could hear then—if there's anything to hear."

"Anne! You're getting morbid. What do you do here all day? How many times a week do you get out?"

"Whenever I want to. I'm not tied here."

"You might as well be, if you take no more advantage of your freedom than you look to have done. You're thinner, Anne, a lot thinner. And I don't like it."

The old man in the other room was thinner, too, so thin that Anne could feel his shoulder blades when she put her arm round to help him.

"I don't think so. I feel all right anyhow."

"You couldn't possibly—and look the way you do. Haven't you heard from Belle yet?"

"Yes. She cabled a hundred dollars. We bought papa a wheel-chair."

Across the wheel-chair, Anne felt the thought leap to Roger's brain. They should have hired some one to help with James. She should have rested and taken walks and kept herself in condition for his coming. Like a valuable animal for his master's pleasure. She moved from Roger's hold, understanding of his resentment in her eyes.

"He can get out on the back porch now when it's sunny."

"That's nice," Roger said indifferently. "When is Belle coming back?"

"In a few weeks. She cabled from Genoa."

"Are you going to stay until she comes?"

"No—I don't think so—not unless you're going away again."

"I'm not going away that I know of."

"Then I'll be home to-morrow. I can't very well to-night because I made mamma go to Pinafore with Mrs. Welles. She won't be back till twelve and I can't leave papa and Rogie."

"No, of course not." There was a short self-conscious pause and then Roger said:

"Does His Highness get that 'daddy' any better than he did? I don't suppose so, just because I feel I've been away a year."

"Oh, yes, he does. He says it quite distinctly. And he makes a weird noise that papa insists is 'grandpa'."

They both smiled. For an instant they had met in Rogie. Once more Roger tried to reach to Anne.

"I often wished that you could have come with me. It was a wonderful experience."

"It must have been. Did you have a good trip?"

"Yes. We swung the convention. But the rest of it—Anne, it's terrible. They're so thwarted and driven! Millions of human beings with never a real rest, never all they need to eat, and worse than all—no hope, not even understanding, so many of them. Down in the social mud they're crawling, thousands upon thousands, like lower forms of life, not undeveloped, but being pushed back, down the scale of humanity. Human beings—going backward!"

But no thrill of anger gripped Anne. What did it matter whether one went forward or backward, since, in the end all dropped in death. Roger and Black Tom spoke as if this life were the purpose of creation; the personal comfort of the individual the apex of creation's effort; while all the time, behind this violence of adjustment, Death stood indifferent to their misunderstanding. Across the confusion of living, Death's shadow lay, penetrating to consciousness in moments of illness; in the stillness of dawn; in moments of physical exhaustion, when the weary body for an interval ceased its demands and something within yearned toward its own without; in rare moments like the massed silence that had swept Anne into peace. Death was the Great Silence, the everlasting Peace.

"I know," she said absently.

"You don't know," Roger broke out passionately. "We have no conception of it out here. The land itself is too rich, the mountains and the sun and sea are too emotional. We're all drugged with the beauty of the land. We have no slums, no poverty as they have it in New York and Chicago and Philadelphia. We have graft, oppression, rotten politics, indifference, all the symptoms of the disease, but the ghastly, running sore itself we do not see. Broiling heat in summer, freezing cold in winter, twice every year adjusting the mere physical machinery of life to climate—a scramble for coal in the winter; for ice and air in summer; thousands of people herded in a single block, hundreds of families, packed like sardines in a can; layer on layer of life in one rotting building! Two men for every job. Millions of bewildered insects crawling over each other to find a little morsel to pick from the carcass."

His voice had risen and Anne motioned him hastily to lower it.

"It's terrible, dear, but please don't wake papa. He has to have all the sleep he can and if he wakes now he'll have a hard time getting to sleep again."

The old man in the next room must not be wakened! He was indeed the great, safe, sane, middle-class incarnate. James Mitchell and his daughter Anne! With her "It's terrible, dear."

"Don't you think you'd better go straight home, you're tired out," Anne suggested after a short silence.

Roger shrugged. "I'm not tired, not bodily tired. I couldn't sleep if I went home."

Remembering the tomb-like stillness of which Roger had complained, Anne laid her hand on his arm.

"I'll come the first thing in the morning, Roger. Now papa has the chair, it helps such a lot. I'll come up two or three afternoons a week, but I don't really need to be here steadily."

"Don't come unless you feel you want to," Roger said dully and moved to the door. He opened it cautiously, no need to warn him now. They tiptoed to the stair-head, kissed perfunctorily, and Anne watched him to the door which he closed noiselessly. The next moment the chug of a starting motor drew Anne's attention and she hurried to a front window. A taxi was just leaving, the driver's head bent to catch Roger's instructions.

He had come in a taxi, kept it waiting, and now was going back in it!

"And he thinks he's consistent," Anne whispered with quiet bitterness. "Dollars wasted and—'thousands never have enough to eat.'"

She watched the taxi out of sight and went slowly back to the kitchen.

She was still sitting there in the dark when Hilda came. At her mother's step, Anne jumped up and lit the light, otherwise she would have to explain or invent an excuse for sitting in the dark. No one understood without words. The smallest act had to be dragged out, cut up into speech and put together like an intricate puzzle. And then it was not really understood.

Radiantly gay, her curls damp and tight with the fog, Hilda bustled in.

"You just lit the light, didn't you? I thought I saw it go up."

"Did you? How was the show?"

"Anne, it was too funny for words. I haven't enjoyed a thing so for years. You must see it. There's a matinée to-morrow. I'll feel selfish if you don't."

"Maybe I will, sometime before it goes. It'll be here a week. But I can't to-morrow. Roger's home."

Hilda's gayety vanished. "Oh," she said forlornly, "I suppose you'll be going, then."

"Yes. To-morrow, I think."

Hilda took off her things and they had some hot cocoa. In its warmth, her cheerfulness returned. To-morrow her freedom would be gone. But to-morrow was to-morrow.

"Really, Anne, I never laughed so much in my life. That's the funniest thing that ever was written."

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The next day Anne went home and the following Monday was back in the loft. A long period of stagnant waiting had ended in a new burst of hope and the place vibrated with the rush of people going and coming. Like the three prongs of a huge fork, Black Tom, Roger and Katya caught up on their unflagging faith and indefatigable energy the smaller plans and physical limitations of those about them.

Often Anne came from a revery to find that her hands had been idle on the keyboard for a long time. There was no safe, quiet spot anywhere in life. The surface at every point was heaving, just as the surface of the earth had heaved and cracked on the day of the Great Quake, torn open by forces within itself. Until then the earth had been the most stable thing in the universe. Sun and moon came and went; stars gleamed and died away; rain beat upon it and the wind swept over it, but, to human sense, the old, old earth was still. And then, in a moment, without warning, its patience exhausted, it had risen and like an angry giant, struggled to hurl aside the pigmies crawling upon it. Anne had never forgotten that feeling, as the earth began to rock, the feeling of being grasped and personally shaken by a malignant force beyond her power to propitiate, a force growing more and more furious, illimitable in its anger. In a moment it might release her or it might go on forever until it had annihilated every living thing.

There was no permanence, no sureness, no stability, no stillness anywhere. Often Anne closed her machine and slipped away unable to endure the noise and confusion. But out upon the streets the noise and confusion continued. People hurried everywhere. Cars clanged by obeying many desires to go in many directions. Newsboys shrieked their announcements of murders, explosions, and terrible deeds of violence. Sometimes Anne sought quietness by the sea, but, gripped in the law of ebb and flood, the sea roared or moaned or whimpered to its degree of strength.

As the weeks passed, the longing for a place of stillness, one little spot of silence, grew to a desperate need. She must have it. Somewhere it must exist, this small place of peace where she could stop for a moment. She thought of the meeting to which she had gone with Charlotte, but when she visioned the interval that preceded filled with the assertions of false optimism, the hymns of gloating joy, the sickening testimony, she could not face them. Then the silence had caught her but Anne knew that if she sought it deliberately in these surroundings it would escape. Perhaps, somewhere else, in other faiths, if she searched she would find it. Anne began to search.

And now, that all her thought was turned to find Silence, she found others seeking, too. Some sought silence in costly edifices, beautiful with stained glass and priceless paintings. Others in public halls, cozily furnished rooms, rickety buildings. In offices that did double service, where Business and Silence alternated like opposing armies occupying the same fortress successively.

There were Services of Silence conducted by men and services by women. Some built a vestibule of music and, in the beautiful vestments of ancient orthodoxy, walked slowly through to the treasure room of Stillness. Others, in the common garb of everyday, entered without prelude. Some plunged from the roar of traffic into Silence as if it were a bath; others went through little personal rituals of reading and bodily posturing, as if to steal upon it unawares.

Old, old faiths claimed silence as their own, and conceded reluctantly to the modern scramble in simple statements of the hour and place they offered it. Like a conservative firm reluctant to meet the modern need of advertising, they offered this staple so long a specialty of their own. New faiths shrieked of Silence as if it were a food to be eaten instantly before it cooled.

"A half-hour of Silence, from twelve to twelve-thirty,"—like the professional card of a reputable physician; and "Come and be Quiet With Us"; "Learn the Power of Silence"; "Be Still and Know"—the paid advertisement of a hustling quack.

Anne sought but could not find. The stained glass and wide arches of the churches; the few cozily placed chairs of ordinary rooms were as glaring in their claims as the thick carpet, the heavy oaken door and casement windows of the little gray stone church. The solemn music, the sentimental texts upon the walls, as artificial as the modulated voice of the Trained Reader and the bowed head of the Boston Lecturer.

Outwardly Anne grew quieter and quieter. Sometimes she saw Katya watching her with a mingling of triumph and curiosity that would have interested her deeply six months before. Now, nothing interested her. Not even the dependence of Rogie held her to the exclusion of this growing need to find a place of peace. Once, Rogie had seemed to fill every need, but now Anne knew within herself something over and above the power of any person or situation quite to fill. It had always been so. In her love for her mother and Belle, there had been the empty spot of longing for a wider life and deeper interests. Then Roger had come, with the wider life and deeper interests, but the tiny empty spot had remained, the very core of herself that had never melted into Roger's. Now, she and Roger could scarcely see each other across the space of separation.

Concerned with the pain of the world, Roger strode on, confusing the force of his own effort with the accomplishment of results. When, early in spring, he won the case of a Hindoo revolutionist, he was as excited as Rogie at a new toy. He came shouting down the loft, and because Katya was out, and he had to share this enthusiasm with some one, came to Anne.

"Singh's been released. They couldn't make their case. We've got them on the run." Perched on the railing about Anne's desk, he swung his feet like an excited boy. "Of course England will chase him out of India again, but he'll get in some deadly licks before she does. Gosh, but I'd like to be there to-day. Think of it, that slip of a fellow, stirring up that old race, prodding it out of its centuries of sleep."

But Anne did not see that old race rising from its sleep. At most it would be only a little turning, as Rogie turned and then settled to deeper sleep. She shrugged: "He will prod and then die."

"What of that? It doesn't nullify his accomplishment. Suppose millions more still have to do it. Can't you get the romance—if nothing else?"

Anne smiled faintly. "That's just what I do get—millions of sleepers—in an ageless sleep." Across the room, Black Tom was the center of an excited group, elated at the success of Singh. A messenger boy dashed in with a telegram. Two telephones rang wildly. "It's like a little child with a horn," she said quietly, "blowing because he likes to hear the noise himself."

Roger's hands clenched and he dropped quickly from the railing.

"You've got—just about as much imagination—as a flea."

Anne shrugged. "Since you don't know the extent of a flea's imagination, your figure hasn't much force, has it?"

Roger turned away and Anne went on with her work.

At two o'clock she left the office and went to the flat. But even here she was not needed as she once had been. On her return, Belle had installed a practical nurse three afternoons a week to relieve Hilda, and the woman had filled Anne's place completely. Anne went on the days she did not come, but she felt her in Hilda's accounts of how "she rests papa and manages him to perfection," and in James' constant references to things she said or did for him. Now that there was no need to fill hours with chatter, Anne missed the need. The empty relationship with her father was emptier than before.

In the vacuum of her isolation, Anne began to watch her thoughts, until she came to see them as minute machines, installed within her brain by some outside power, clicking away independent of her will. A power was working out some experiment with her, using her brain as if it were a dark room for the development of a film. Without emotion Anne watched the negative develop. She grew absorbed in the process. She often asked Roger to repeat a statement, and then sat motionless, watching its reaction, as if it were a stone he had dropped into the well of her intelligence. With judicial exactness she weighed the most trite remark, until conversation with Anne became impossible.

Roger escaped it when he could. Night after night, he stayed on at the office and Anne ate her dinner alone. Or he returned to work immediately after dinner, always courteous and insincere in his excuse. Anne saw the insincerity but never resented it. She was glad to have Roger go. When he stayed there was nothing real to talk about and the effort of making conversation with Roger was more exhausting than the lonely evening.

It was on a Sunday afternoon, after several such evenings in succession, that Anne sat pretending to read in her favorite place, a cushioned settle under the window that gave on the bay and hills beyond. It was a still day of little wind, but a dry, high fog hid the sun. It was three o'clock, the dreariest, the least personal of any hour of the day. The feeling of youth that morning has was gone. The positiveness of evening and lighted lamps had not yet come.

Roger had gone to the office in the morning, read for a little after lunch and was now asleep in the darkened room beyond, Rogie in the crib beside him. But he would not sleep much longer. Rogie would probably wake when he did and Roger would play a while with him. Then, unless Roger went to a meeting, they would sit, each absorbed or feigning absorption in his reading: Roger in some legal or economic work of vast pretension, Anne in her novel, a thing so far from life in the maudlin sentimentality, spread like soft icing over the relation between the man and the woman, that it would better have been frankly a fairytale. About them the silence of the dead hour would close and they would sit in peace as false as the stillness of the churches and small meeting rooms.

Anne thrust her book aside. If she went out to walk, the Sunday streets would echo the tread of others trying to kill the day in the same way. At the flat James would be asleep in his chair, Hilda napping in the dining-room. Anne leaned forward, her elbows on the sill, her chin in her palms. The Bay, flat and gray as if it, too, were exhausted from the week's work, stretched to the fog-crowned hills. Under the pall, the Sleeping Beauty on Tamalpais had passed to eternal rest. The commanded peace of the Seventh Day shut like a cover of lead upon the world.

Only Charlotte Welles could move beneath such grayness, unconscious of its deadening weight. She would be walking now, with her short, quick steps, straight to the peace she entered at her will. Anne moved uneasily, like a sick person resisting a desired opiate. Perhaps, if she went once again, and tried not to hear the hymns or the testimonies or the selected readings, if she slipped into the back seat, just before the meeting closed, she might yet grasp the secret and have it for her own.

In the room beyond, Rogie cried and Roger woke. She heard him lift the baby from its crib and in a moment they were laughing together. Then the blind went up with a noisy spring, and Roger came out, rested and carrying the delighted Rogie in his arms.

"There, you little fake." He deposited the baby on the rug before the fire, threw a piece of wood which caught instantly in gay little tongues of flame, and laughed at Rogie's clumsy efforts to reach them through the screen. But Anne did not see them. She was looking at Roger's back, at the rumpled hair and slightly creased shirt, with faint distaste.

Roger removed his son to safer distance, stretched and crossed to the window on the other side of the room.

"Beastly day. I wonder how that Kenneally meeting will be."

Roger yawned and, leaning against the window sash, looked into the gray stillness for an inspiration. Rogie, finding the pretty flames inaccessible and himself deserted, puckered his face for a cry, which Anne diverted just in time by cuddling him to her and kissing his bare toes.

Roger turned listlessly from the window, took a cigarette from the brass box on the mantel shelf, and began to walk up and down.

"Are you going? It's at four, isn't it?" she asked.

"I don't know—I haven't decided yet. Kenneally isn't much of a speaker."

He might not go. The afternoon would shut heavy upon them. She could not face it. She carried Rogie into the bedroom and closed the door. She dressed first and then dressed Rogie. If Roger did decide to go, she did not wish to prevent him by leaving the baby on his hands. A few moments later, carrying Rogie, delighted at the prospect of going out, but objecting strongly to his bonnet, which he tried to remove by vicious tugs, Anne came into the living-room. Roger was in his chair now, an open book on his lap. He looked up surprised at Anne, dressed to go out.

"I'll take him, so you needn't stay in if you want to go to the meeting."

"Going up to the house?" He was sure she was because Anne never went anywhere else on a Sunday, but he always mentioned her coming and going with kindly formality.

"No. I'm going to church."

"To church!"

Anne drew on her gloves and nodded.

"What church?"

"Christian Science."

"What!" Roger barked the word in exasperated astonishment.

"The Christian Science Church," Anne said with maddening composure, as if she were disciplining a child for its harsh voice.

Roger closed his book and rose. "Are you a Scientist now?"

"No."

"Then what do you want to go and listen to that drivel, for?"

Anne did not answer and moved to the door. Roger stepped quickly in front of her.

"How many times have you been?"

Anne's face flamed with the ugly, brick-red flush. Her body tightened and she looked scornfully at Roger.

"I shall be late as it is," she said stiffly. "Please let me pass."

"I won't." Roger knew that his anger was carrying him to rudeness, but Anne's manner rasped him beyond control. Behind Anne, he saw the subtle, low-voiced influence of Charlotte Welles. A Christian Science wife, believing in the muddled effusions of a sick old woman; for all he knew practicing her ridiculous faith upon him. Lost in a stupid philosophy that denied disease and poverty, Anne dared to look in scorn at Black Tom, at Katya, at Singh, at himself. With a quick movement, Anne passed him and laid her hand on the door-knob.

"You sha'n't go," he cried, white with anger.

"I shall go where I please," Anne answered quietly, "I don't interfere with you. You can go to your meeting, listen to your own particular brand of 'drivel,' pump up the enthusiasm of a few dozen people who don't know what else to do with themselves on a Sunday afternoon. At least, the few million Scientists, more or less, in the world, haven't had their belief manufactured and forced down their throats."

Roger's anger died. He reached for Rogie, and before Anne knew what had happened, holding the baby firmly, Roger stood aside.

"You're right. You don't interfere with me. But Rogie doesn't go."

It was Anne now who flamed to anger. Standing upon her tiptoes she snatched for the baby, who, thinking it was a new kind of game, wound his hands in his father's thick hair and kicked with joy.

"Give him to me," she commanded in a cracked whisper.

Roger stepped back, for between himself and Anne clutching for their child, the old Anne stood upon her tiptoes defying John Lowell.

"No, Rogie does not go." He turned and went silently back to the fire and sat down, Rogie clinging to his neck. For a moment Anne stood motionless in an anger that seemed to have frozen her to the bone. Then, with a sob that was a cry of hate, she opened the door and went quickly.

Until it was dark, Anne walked up one street and down another. She passed mean houses where families sat at dinner behind partly-drawn blinds, and stately homes, the intimacy of family life decorously concealed behind thick curtains. She did not know when the high fog parted and the stars came out, but when the sky was all a-glitter and a soft little wind ruffled the bay, she found herself sitting on a pile of lumber at the farthest jetty of Fisherman's Wharf. The lighted ferries lumbered cheerfully, the fishing boats grated softly on the piles. A few yards behind, in the new warehouse of Giuseppe Morelli, a group of fishermen laughed and chattered while they mended their nets against the turn of the tide.

Beyond the wharf, on the rocky crest of a hill, she could just glimpse the cottage light. She looked at it for a long time without emotion. She was cold and calm. Nothing could ever again stir her to anger or feeling of any kind.

The wind freshened. The men began climbing down into their boats. With much calling back and forth, the boats pushed off.

Anne left the wharf and went slowly up the steep, silent streets. At the foot of her own stairs she stopped and looked at her watch. It was five minutes after eleven.

The light in the cottage was out, the fire lay a handful of smoldering embers. The room was rather cold but she was not conscious of its chill although she stood for some time listening to the even breathing of Roger asleep in the next room. Then she crept into the bedroom, undressed and got noiselessly into bed. At its warmth, she shivered as if touched by something unclean. But in a few minutes she was asleep, worn by her long walk and the storm of anger and despair.

In the dawn, Roger woke, and, turning slightly, looked at Anne. She was sleeping as always, on her side, her cheek pillowed on one arm; small, exquisitely fair and utterly unmoving. Roger looked at her, almost with surprise that she should be there. And then aversion to Anne's body gripped him. He did not want to touch her or be near her. Never again of his own impulse would he wish to hold her in his arms or kiss her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Winter came, a dry winter of cool mornings and nights, and days of clear sunshine. Against this sparkling background, Anne and Roger moved side by side in almost total silence. Anne still went to the loft but not regularly. Roger never asked why she stayed away or what she did with her time. He worked now far into the night, often even after Katya had gone with a comforting, indifferent "good night." Sometimes they left together and Roger walked as far as her car with her, talking of their plans, never of personal things. If she noticed that Anne no longer came regularly to the loft, she never mentioned it, nor did she make any comment when Anne ceased coming at all.

It was in February that Rogie had an attack of croup and Anne stayed away for two weeks. When he was well she did not return. On the first night of his illness she had moved his crib into the wing of the living-room they called a library and this arrangement was maintained. She bought a screen of silk and lacquer and converted the wing into a comfortable bedroom. Roger made no comment. For a few days their eyes held consciousness of the change and then they spoke indifferently of "your room" and "my room."

On the evenings when Roger was home, Anne usually retired first. Behind the impregnable wall of silk and lacquer, Roger heard the soft swish of her garments as she dropped them, then the even breathing of her sleep. For a little while, after their forced nearness in the illness of Rogie, Roger would sometimes close his book, and, with tightening muscles, glare at this thing of silk, or stare before him, trying to find a clew through the present to the past.

When had it all begun?

Farther back than the day that Anne had snatched at Rogie. Much farther back than that. Perhaps, back at the very beginning, when Anne had been afraid to tell her people. But when Roger visioned again the Indian graveyard, the weeks by the lake, the Basque herder playing his flute in the sunny meadow, the clinging of Anne's lips that last night, and moments in their first months, the clew vanished in hurt wonder.

If moments like those were not real, what was? If a certainty as real as the certainty that had come to him in the sweeping wind on the Bluff was false, what was true?

Had their nearness even then held within itself the germ of discord? Had this erosion of difference, that had at last eaten its way down to their physical relationship, always existed between himself and Anne? Did it exist between all men and women, and was that marvelous nearness only a cloak over the stark skeleton of sex? The hunger once appeased, was the purpose satisfied, and did the soul demand this separateness for its own development? Was marriage only the lowering of an ideal beyond the average man and woman to reach?

At farther and farther intervals, the puzzle held him. Then, wonder settled to acceptance. Roger no longer heard the swish of Anne's garments or her breathing behind the screen. He came from the office pleasantly tired and was content with the wide coolness of the big bed and freedom.

But his mouth grew firmer and his eyes lit less often. Like a copy done in fainter wash, his eyes at times had the loneliness of Black Tom's. Katya watched and found it harder and harder not to go to him on the nights they worked alone. Often after they had separated, and Katya sat in the ugly hall bedroom that had been her home for years, she would clench her fists and pound the washstand as if it were a rostrum and she were addressing a crowd:

"It had to come, with that little fool. She couldn't hold him back. He will grow now."

But when, stealing a glance toward Roger, she saw him staring out across the loft with lonely eyes, she would have had him happy at any price. To have his enthusiasm bubble over in gayety as it used to do, to feel him warmly happy, Katya would have freely given the years that remained. Standing at that terrible spot of middle ground, the future clear in the light of the past and perfect knowledge of self, looking back down the lonely years indifferently, through the future lonelier still, nothing mattered but to have Roger happy.

At last, one night in early April, a warm night of many stars, Katya rose from her machine and went to Roger sitting motionless at Black Tom's desk. It was late and the others had all gone long ago. As Katya took a seat on the window sill, Roger looked up, not concerned at all with this action of Katya's but with the confusion of his own thought. He had gone home to dinner that night, stirred by the soft spring warmth, to make an effort at some kind of adjustment with Anne. They had slipped so far now, to almost quarreling over the most trivial things. To-night Anne had objected to the way he sat at the table and asked with plaintive primness if the world would be saved any more quickly if every one slouched over his plate like a plow-hand. And he, in blind rage to smash that primness to bits, had deliberately done things to annoy her, until he felt the disgust in Anne's eyes flick him like whips. The remainder of the meal had been eaten in hasty silence and he had left immediately after.

What a thing to quarrel over!

Katya smoked through her cigarette and then said slowly:

"Why do you go on?"

So perfectly did it fit with Roger's thought, that he answered with no wonder at her understanding.

"I don't know."

There was a short silence before Katya added: "You ought never to have married her."

"I—suppose not. But it seemed——" Roger broke off, disturbed at discussing Anne with another. He shrugged and made a motion as if to go on with his work. But he felt Katya's look on him, and, after a moment, met it. Her concern was too deep for insincerity and he said thoughtfully:

"Love is a queer thing. One thinks it is going to last forever and bear any weight. Perhaps the very weight of the years themselves must break it."

Katya made a strange noise deep in her throat, as if the words were cracking their way through some obstruction.

"Love does bear any weight—love, but nothing else. Only there is so little love and so few find it. What the world calls love is a flash of desire—a Catherine wheel of emotion, Life's urge to continue tricked out in finery, like an old woman dressed in silk. Fools. They understand nothing. They are afraid of truth, everywhere. To excuse the suffering in the world, the human cruelty of man to man, they have invented the patient, anemic Christ. The fact of sex they have hung over with the ornaments of matrimony. And of Love they know nothing, nothing at all."

Katya had turned while she spoke and was looking out now through the open window to the light-strewn city. Seen so, in profile, the thickness of feature was thinned to hardness. It seemed to Roger, for a moment, that Katya had never been born, would never die. She was like her own steppes, stretching away beyond the weariness of human sight, unhurt by the rage of men. She was eternal truth and courage.

"Perhaps. But if you're not one of the rare few? We have been as happy as most people."

"And now you are content to be as miserable as most people. To go on year after year, dragging at each other, quarreling, making up, hating, despising, driven sometimes, by a force beyond you—to—to—mocking Love."

"Don't," Roger whispered. "Don't. You're exaggerating. One adjusts to anything in time."

"Yes. And then there is no strength left for anything else—and spiritually—you die. You will die. You are weaker than she is, because there is no force so unbreakable as the rigidity of self-righteous mediocrity. You will die—in this 'adjustment,' slowly perhaps, as thousands of others have died, sometimes men, sometimes women, whichever has the finer soul. 'It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.' But a camel goes easier through the eye of a needle than a high purpose breathes with a smaller fastened upon it. Adjust and die."

Katya threw the stub of her cigarette violently out the window and then leaned from it to watch the tiny red spark expiring on the black tarred roof below.

"What—can—I do?"

Katya's brain despised the question and her arms ached for Roger.

"Do? Leave. Demand your own life."

"Leave Anne!"

Katya shrugged. Why did she love this boy looking at her like a frightened baby?

"Do you want to go on like this forever?"

The future opened before Roger, all the years to the end faced by the lacquer screen, the almost silent meals, the never-ceasing need for watchfulness, artificial and unfree.

"No," he said slowly. "No."

"Then don't."

"There's—Rogie."

With a broken laugh, Katya got down from the window sill.

"And, in a few years, there will probably be others. Then your 'duty' will be still clearer."

She clumped away and a moment later Roger heard her heavy step going down the stairs. He stayed for another hour, staring out into the night.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Now that he had worded aloud the idea of leaving Anne, the thought was always with him.

Spiritual freedom. He wished for no other. The man in the street might talk as if sex were a devouring hunger, a ravening wolf ready to spring upon one unexpectedly at any moment. But sex without companionship nauseated him to visualize. There might be moments—these he would deal with when they arose. Now, the wind of spiritual freedom carried no taint of lesser, fiercer need.

How did Anne feel? Perhaps she, too, would welcome freedom. He had visioned restrictions binding him alone. Perhaps Anne, too, was bound.

The need to know consumed Roger's thought and his impatience with smaller issues. As one forgives trivial failings in the face of a great crisis, Roger grew strangely gentle and forbearing. He rarely left home in the evenings now, and Anne often felt his eyes on her questioningly, as she sat sewing under the lamp. For she rarely read; she so often forgot to turn the pages.

It was one evening, about three weeks after he had talked with Katya, that Roger looked up to see Anne almost immersed under a billow of white material. Usually Anne's work was something small and compact, and more than once he had traced fanciful analogies between the short, swift movements of Anne's needle, mending a jagged hole in a sock, and the mental methods of the world of Mitchells. It was with such little stabs that they attempted to draw together the holes of life, patch it for what?—a few more wearings at best. But to-night, as if in keeping with the wonder of Anne's attitude to freedom, she was engaged on larger work.

He laid his book aside and asked with real interest:

"What's that?"

Anne started. They scarcely ever broke in on each other's occupations any more.

"A sheet."

"A sheet? Do you make sheets? I thought you bought them all ready."

"You do, if you want to throw away every one that gets a hole in it. But you can cut them in two—they usually wear in the center—and sew them up again and they're as good as new except for the seam."

Roger was disappointed. No doubt it was an excellent method, but it annoyed him. It was so vehemently sensible and frugal.

"It seems to me that's mending—in extremis. If we need new sheets I wish you'd buy them."

"We don't need new sheets. These are for mamma. Hers are almost all gone."

Roger felt as if he were being quietly suffocated in an ocean of mended sheets. He sat looking at Anne until his eyes disturbed her beyond her power to pretend indifference. She glanced up, but before she could ask him why he was so interested in her sewing, Roger spoke.

"Anne," he said slowly, "why aren't things the same as they used to be between us?"

At last it had come, the thing that had been moving toward her for weeks. It had taken possession of her. The matter was no longer in her control.

"I don't know."

"Neither do I, when I try to put it into words."

Anne threaded her needle in the silence that followed and bent again over the hem. Bent so, with the light gilding to the cool fairness of her, Roger's clear-cut decision of the last few weeks clouded. Surely nothing so physically exquisite as Anne could be empty of beauty within.

"If—neither—of us knows," he went on, "it—can't be terribly serious—can it?"

"Then why are we talking about it?" Anne asked stiffly.

"But what is it? We—we both feel it and yet you say you don't know either. But you feel it, as well as I. Something we used to have is gone."

"Yes. I feel it. We haven't really anything at all," she added, as if facing a fact Roger had avoided.

"I tried to keep it," he said bitterly. "I tried desperately for a long time."

"Did you?"

"Yes, I did. But one can't do those things alone." This was not what he had meant to say, but Anne was looking at him with such cool composure, so safe from all touch of blame in her small assurance of having done all in her power.

"No, of course not. One can't do all the understanding—alone."

Roger felt his anger rising, and stood up, as if by so standing he could reach the calm escaping him.

"I don't suppose you think I tried at all."

"I didn't say you didn't try. You asked me if I felt it and I said I did."

"Well, have you any suggestion to make?" He might have been asking an accused witness to submit proof of his innocence.

"No. I haven't any. Have you?"

"We can't go on like this. We claim to be reasonable human beings and we might as well recognize the truth. We—" but the words were so final; like bullets to say—"we can separate"—that Roger temporized. "We must find what it's all about and try to straighten it out or——" Roger shrugged and turned away. "I have tried to find out what it's all about."

"So have I." Anne went calmly on to the end of the seam, although afterwards she had to rip out every stitch, for not one of them had caught through. At the end of the hem, she looked up, fastened her needle in the material, and said:

"Then there is no real alternative."

At the decision of Anne's tone, Roger started.

"What do you mean?"

"What you didn't quite like to say—we can separate."

"Do you mean that?"

"If you do."

"What do you want?"

"Whatever you do," Anne said after a thoughtful pause. "In a situation like this, the wish of one must be the wish of both."

The cold patience of her explanation was maddening.

"That's unfair—to put it up to me like that."

"I'm not. You put it up to me in the first place. You say we can't go on like this and the only thing to do is separate."

"You said separate."

"Don't quibble." The first impatience pricked Anne's calm. "This isn't a witness stand. You said we had to find the trouble or—you didn't quite have the courage to say separate, but you meant it."

"If you know so well what I mean," Roger said a little sadly, "why haven't you applied that knowledge more frequently? It's only when—oh, what's the use?"

Anne waited but he did not go on. "None, unless you'll speak plainly. I don't know what you're referring to."

"No, I don't suppose you do. You can only interpret my unspoken thoughts against me. Never the other way round."

"Are we quarreling?" she asked with frigid politeness, as she might have asked a detail of social behavior by which to regulate her action.

"No," Roger shouted in a need to break through that icy calm, "we're not quarreling because there's nothing to quarrel about. There's nothing at all."

"That's where we began," Anne rose and carefully folded the sheet which she felt now was the shroud of all dead hopes. "There's really nothing more to be said, is there?"

She was actually waiting for him to confirm this fact, put a neat, rhetorical period to this immense finality. He did not answer.

"I don't want to discuss this again. There's really no need." She put her thimble and cotton back in the work-basket and closed the lid. "We've reached the decision. Haven't we?"

After all, why try to change Anne? She would force the decision upon him. She was right. It was quibbling to evade it.

"Yes. I guess we have."

They stood for a moment looking at each other quietly. Then, to stifle the scream Anne felt rising beyond her control, she yawned.

"Good night. There's no need to keep on talking about it, is there?"

"None at all. Good night."

She turned out the light over the sewing table and went behind the screen. Her garments dropped with the soft swish. Roger heard her open the windows and get into bed.

He stood leaning his elbows on the mantelshelf, his face in his hands, for what seemed to Anne an entire lifetime.

In reality it was not half an hour. This was the situation he had been reluctant to face, had wasted weeks of thought upon. Anne seized the first suggestion, yawned in his face and went to bed. It was almost funny.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The next morning Roger went before Anne awoke. In the afternoon a messenger brought a note asking to have his things sent to the office. At dusk the express came and Anne watched Roger's trunk down the stairs and the truck clang away over the grass-grown cobbles. When the last sound had died she went in, fed Rogie and let him kick for a while naked before the fire. When he crumpled in sleep upon the rug, Anne carried him to bed, to the crib back now beside the wide bed, hers alone. A little later she was asleep beside him.

The hours heaped themselves to days, the days dropped under their weight to nights. Each day was the same as another. Anne neither cried, regretted, nor rebelled. She did not even think. She seemed to be moving in a clear, white light that illuminated every cranny of the past, so that the shadows which had been her thoughts and reactions to Roger and the world, were now obliterated in this dazzling lucidity, a light so vivid and intense that nothing but itself existed, a wordless understanding and acceptance. Anne could not have said what it was she so clearly understood, but she moved in a petrifaction of calm. Her exhausted nerves were dead.

On the tenth day, Anne received a short note enclosing two-thirds of Roger's salary, with the receipt for the rent and the electric bill and asking her to make some arrangement for his seeing Rogie. On the third reading, the meaning penetrated and Anne faced the future.

The clear white light was gone. It was unclear and confused, filled with sudden, new needs and readjustments. Roger could not go on sending her so much of his salary. Nor did she wish to be dependent on him. If she gave nothing, she would take nothing for herself.

She would go back to work. She would have to sell her brain and obedience again to the highest bidder, give of her best, suit her hours to the order of another, give to the limit of her power, always conscious of others waiting to snatch this privilege from her. Outwardly her life would be the life before she met Roger. Inwardly it could never be that again. Rogie made it impossible. Neither girl nor wife, Anne faced the years. Only motherhood was left.

Hour after hour, Anne sat, tense and still, staring out across the garden, moving only to the need of Rogie. Unsuspected threads crossed and tangled her clearest purposes. She would go back again into the prison cell of some law office. She would begin again the deadening round that had once so disturbed Roger. Now it would not disturb him. From depths within, anger rose at the world, at life, at Roger. Into the pit of his belief he could throw all his own energy and hope, even the first loneliness,—if he felt any,—for past material comfort and little Rogie. She had no such pit. She would walk through the days, physically weary, empty of purpose except for Rogie. And he was so little, his demands for food and sleep and cleanliness, any kind woman could meet.

Anne sat until dawn, the darkness within as dense as the night without. Not until the first faint streaks of silver broke in the east did Anne see the thread of a path before her. She could not move on blindly into the future—a future like Hilda's Niche. To the limit of her power, she would straighten it, begin her new life with no thread running to the past. She would get a legal divorce, stipulate a small amount for Rogie's maintenance and fixed times and ways for Roger to see him.

Late that morning Anne went to a lawyer. As she moved across the outer office to the door marked private it gave her an extraordinary feeling of being two people, in two different spots at the same time—Anne Mitchell, private secretary, going to take dictation, and Anne Barton, wife of Roger Barton, mother of Roger Mitchell Barton, going to seek a divorce.

The lawyer Anne had selected because she had once written him a letter in a case John Lowell was handling, was an elderly man with sagging cheeks, passion-weary eyes, and a fastidious nicety of dress. Within the casque of his manner and clothes, the soul of man was rotted. His surprise at Anne's blond youth flashed for a second in his eyes, and then with lowered head, he listened with professional interest while she stated her wish briefly. When she had finished he looked up.

"Ah—incompatible, you say, quite incompatible. A great pity. Are you sure you've given the matter every possible consideration, Mrs. Barton?"

"Every possible consideration," Anne said sharply.

"Incompatible," he repeated, and his eyes stripped from the word every meaning but the connotation of physical repulsion. Anne's hands clenched and she wanted to run. But where? The world would give this same interpretation; under all the large vague terms with which people might cover them, this would be their thought. She turned her eyes quickly from the eyes moving with pretense of deep consideration over her flaming face and neck and body.

"Suppose you don't do anything definite for a time, Mrs. Barton. Nearly all young couples—ah—after the first two or three years—reach this point. It seems as if the first passion almost invariably runs its course in that time then—after a period of physical indifference—aversion often—if you have intellectual interests——"

Anne rose. "If you do not wish to take the case, please say so. I am not doing this hastily. I have thought it over very carefully."

"Ah—then there is perhaps nothing else to do," he said with a sudden change of tone. He was like a well-trained dog, refusing a bone until his master's permission allows him to snatch it. "You wish to institute proceedings directly, I suppose?"

"Yes. I would like you to act right away."

"Certainly. After all, Mrs. Barton, that is the brave thing to do—think, decide and act." His smile admitted Anne to the regions of masculine logic, uncluttered by the usual feminine sentimentality.

Ten minutes later, Anne was down again on the street. Dazed as if she had emerged into a strange world, she walked unseeing in the hurrying stream. She had done the one clear thing to do and yet she could not shake off the feeling that this act, instead of ending a situation, had created it. It had not existed until she had risen and spoken sharply to that vile old man. Until then she had been alone. Now she had admitted strangers. Before, her inner life had been her own; now, every one who heard of the Barton divorce would share it. They would surmise, and discuss, and nibble at her privacy.

Anne walked slowly along in the hot noon sunshine, up the hill to the cottage. This was changed, too. It was like a house, clean and straightened after a funeral, the flowers gone, the extra chairs removed. This was divorce of which one spoke so carelessly, this great emptiness to be filled with unglimpsed future. No one to consider now but herself. Every experience to be her own, unshared, unadjusted to another. It was like the clearness of a cold north wind that obliterates all softness, sharpens every outline. Clear, cold, stark, the future lay before her.

The next Thursday afternoon, as usual, a little before three, Anne let herself into the flat. At this hour, James was usually awake and Hilda busy warming the broth or malted milk he always took in the afternoon. But to-day, as Anne went up the stairs, she felt a thick silence envelop her, and before she had reached the top, she knew that they knew. For a moment she thought of slipping away. Then she went quietly on. They would have had to know soon. It did not matter.

In the kitchen, James Mitchell sat in his chair, the daily paper spread open on the reading rack. Hilda stood beside him. They might have been victims of Pompeii, stricken at their tasks. As Anne came quietly into the room and stood inside the door, Hilda turned frightened eyes upon her.

"What is it," she whispered piteously, "what is it, Annie? It isn't true?"

She pointed to the paper and Anne knew how they knew. The lawyer had indeed lost no time. Anne moved to the chair and took the paper.

"Anne vs. Roger Barton, incompatibility."

She laid the paper back on the rack. "Yes, it's true. Roger and I have separated."

The old man took the paper and tried to tear it, but it only rustled in his futile striving. He pulled at it and shook his head and then, with a supreme effort, tore it and rising a few inches in his chair, waved the torn pieces uncertainly.

"I—won't—have—it—do you—hear—you sha'n't—do—this." His thick muttering choked him and Hilda began to cry.

"Don't, papa, don't. It isn't good for you. Annie will explain."

The old man cried with her, at first helplessly like a child, then more violently. Anne took the torn paper from him and laid her hand on his shoulder.

"Be quiet, papa."

He shook her hold from him and again tried to speak. The contortion was terrible. Hilda put her arms about him, the effort strangled in a sob and Hilda held him close.

"There, there," she murmured, "don't cry, papa."

As she held him the sobs lessened. Anne stood looking at them, this extraordinary sight of her mother comforting her father, both of them locked together beyond her, opposing her; with every scrap of their strength clutching their own peace.

"Please," she began wearily, "stop this fuss. If you want to talk, I'll talk, but there's nothing to say. Roger and I don't agree. That's all. We'll both be freer to be ourselves, apart. That's all, really."

"Rub—bish," Hilda sputtered between her lessening sobs, but a little cheered at the familiar garb of a situation in words. Silence terrified Hilda. "Nonsense, Anne. Freer to be yourselves! Nobody expects to be free when they're married."

"Nobody—listens—to—me——" James began muttering again. "I—told—you—socialist—anarchist—nobody—in my own—house—I——"

"Don't, papa, don't get all stirred up again," Hilda patted his head soothingly. "You're getting along so nice and the doctor said——"

"To—hell—doctor," he spluttered, stopped for a moment, took a deep breath, and said in a quick, almost unintelligible rush, "I—won't—have it—disgrace—everybody—in—office—know——" his breath exhausted, he leaned back panting, and glared at Anne.

She returned his look quietly. In his rage and weakness he was not pitiful, only disgusting. Thin and gray and unshaven, he was like a mangy old dog, clinging to the dry bone of his respectability. Icy nausea swept Anne. The room began to move, to gyrate in mockery about her. She gripped the wall with her fingers, and the smooth coldness gave her strength.

"Listen, please, and then I don't want to talk about it any more." She knew that her words were audible because they were both looking at her, but her whole effort was concentrated in uttering them and she felt herself forming each syllable separately and throwing it at the two bewildered people before her. "We don't agree, and neither of us wishes to live like that; to hold each other, for what? I am economically independent. I can work. I don't have to stay for support. Roger will help with Rogie and we will go our own ways. We have grown apart spiritually——"

But the last word was too heavy a burden for Hilda's credulity. She went swiftly to Anne and would have put her arms about her, if Anne had not eluded.

"Don't, mamma. Please don't talk or ask me any questions. I am telling you exactly what it is."

"Anne Mitchell! Do you expect me to believe that? Grow apart spiritually! Anne—is there—don't be ashamed—to tell us—is there another woman?"

James Mitchell leaned avidly forward: "Old—sick—but—no man—deserts—my—daughter——"

Under cover of the hissing whisper, Hilda murmured rapidly, "Don't act hastily, Anne. All men——"

The muttering ceased, and Hilda broke off. But a faint shrug and an almost imperceptible nod toward the chair, spread before Anne's sickened sense, some long concealed, almost forgotten infidelity of the decaying old man in the chair.

"Stop. Both of you," she cried sharply. "There is no other woman. Roger has done nothing disgraceful. If you can't understand, I can't make you. We no longer love each other. Marriage is a free contract. It fitted one condition. It doesn't fit another. We've dissolved it."

The old man blinked and then turned piteously to Hilda. She went quickly to him. With her arms again about him, she flared at Anne.

"Anne Mitchell, you're doing a silly and wicked thing. You're—making—papa—miserable. You've no—right—in our old—age——"

James' fingers closed about hers. "Don't—cry—Hildy—children—ungrateful——"

And then, the walls began to dance about her, the two angry faces oscillated like grotesque masks, the floor was sinking under her. A great, peaceful darkness was coming towards her. At last she could let go, sink down into this soothing blackness. Anne swayed, clutched at the wall, and slid along its smoothness to the floor.

Twice she came to partial consciousness of a great bustle; some one was calling, footsteps rushed about, some one stepped over her and ran somewhere. Then she was being lifted and carried, and some one, not Hilda—it sounded like a faint, far echo of Charlotte Welles—said:

"There, she'll be all right now. Don't disturb her. Let her sleep as long as she can."

So dim that it was not clearly a thought at all, Anne was grateful for this suggestion. She heard the door to whatever place she was in close softly and footsteps recede.

When she woke she was in her own little room, the stars were shining and Belle was standing beside the bed. Anne tried to return the cheerful smile, but the effort did not get further than a slight motion of her lips.

"You poor little kid. Here, drink this." Belle held a glass to Anne's lips and supported her while she obeyed. "And then we'll talk. I wouldn't disturb you, but I have to get back on my case and we'll just settle one or two things first. No, I'm not going to talk about it. I don't want to know anything. But you're going away."

Anne gazed at her without interest.

"If you try to stick round here listening to moms' buzzing you'll have brain fever. But they'll buzz themselves out in a week and—" she was going to add, "be glad of it," but caught herself in time and said—"see the thing straight. Now, the only thing I want to know is whether you have any place you'd like to go. Several old patients have places here and there, inaccessible ranches and things, and I could fix up something. They're always inviting me but I'm not keen on solitude as you know." She chattered along, watching Anne with soft, loving eyes. The authority of her tone comforted Anne and she felt a little cheered.

"Of course, I'm not suggesting a high-class resort but somewhere you have never been, that's quiet."

Anne drew a deep sigh. Some new place where it was still!

"There are two places I can arrange for quickly and you can have your choice. One's down in Monterey County, on the coast, a ranch that hangs on a mountain side rising right out of the sea. It——"

Anne sat up. "No. No. Belle, not the sea." She looked past Belle, through the fog of the Bluff to the bar where the sea moaned its everlasting complaint. "I can't stand the sea, always moving and crying—never, never still. Oh," Anne shivered and Belle laid a large, cool hand on the hot little one gripping the comforter.

"All right, sisterkin. I get you. The sea is rather a fussy old party. Exit the sea."

Anne tried to smile. "It's—like the Social Revolution. It's been moaning away for centuries and it's just where it started."

A look of understanding crossed Belle's eyes and was gone before Anne looked up.

"Then the other's the thing you want. It's away up in the high Sierras. There's only an old couple as caretakers. You won't have to see much of them, but the old man—I saw him once—is as still as a tree. I should go crazy in two days but you'll love it."

High up in the mountains, higher and stiller even than the lake. And the old man like a tree. Anne's eyes filled with tears.

"But there's the cottage—all the things—I can't——"

"I'll fix that. I'll write to Roger; he'll have to know you're not there anyhow, and let him struggle with storage if he wants to."

"But—I can't stay away very long. I'm not going to take money from Roger—I'm going to work, I——"

Belle put both hands very gently on Anne's shoulder and forced her back on the pillows from which she had risen in nervous need to manage the details of her going.

"Sisterkin, you've passed out of your own authority now; you're in mine. You're going, and you're going to-morrow and you'll stay until you're well."

"I'm not sick."

"No? All right. But you will be if you don't do as you're told. Listen, kiddie. Is there any real reason why you can't go and go to-morrow?"

Anne shook her head. There was no reason beyond her own desire. There never would be any more. Anne tried to smile. She did not want to cry, not even before Belle.

"How long are you going to make me stay, nurse?"

"There, that's the way to behave. Stay? Until you want to come back. Until—you want noise, jangling cars and people rushing round and the whole silly mess."

"Then—I'll—never—come."

"Don't then." She smoothed the pillows, stroked back the hair from Anne's troubled eyes and smiled.

"You're—awfully—good to me, Belle."

"A perfect angel," Belle agreed, but her own eyes were not quite clear.

"I must have Rogie with me, Belle. Don't—try to manage me out of that."

"We'll settle everything in the morning. I'm not going to insist on anything against your will, kiddie. Don't worry. Only you must go to sleep now and do not think of a thing. You'll be all right after a good night's rest."

The peace of yielding settled upon Anne. Not to think of anything—to go to sleep—and to-morrow—the high, still mountains—and the old man—like—a—tree. Anne's eyes closed.

"I'll do—anything—you—say."

She was asleep before Belle had quite finished opening the window and arranging the blind so that it would not rattle if the wind came up.

Back beside the bed, Belle stood looking down at Anne.

"Poor little kid," she whispered, "poor little kid, she's rather like the sea herself—crying forever for something out of reach." She smoothed a fold in the sheet and added:

"Poor old Roger—he isn't half bad either."

CHAPTER THIRTY

Roger received Belle's note telling him that Anne had left town and asking him to make some arrangement about the cottage in the same mail that he received the legal notice of Anne's action. Both letters were on his desk when he came back to the loft after dinner to work as he had done every night since that sudden, quiet ending of everything between himself and Anne.

He opened Belle's first and read it slowly, surprise changing rapidly to anger.

Anne had gone away. Where, for how long, why, alone or with Rogie? Belle did not say. The few lines breathed possession of Anne, pushed him aside from all interest or concern in her movements.

Anne had left the cottage and gone away. He was to do what he liked with the place. Evidently the past with its memory was too distasteful to Anne. She was going to begin somewhere else. For a moment Roger felt a touch of the old anxiety, the need to look after Anne, manage and arrange for her; the feeling that she was too frail and fair to look out for herself, the feeling that had amused Anne so in the days of their engagement when, if she were a little late in meeting him, he was always afraid that something terrible had happened.

It passed and was gone, blotted in his clear understanding of how perfectly well Anne was able to look out for herself. That frail fairness, that delicate sensitiveness behind which she tripped with such deep assurance of herself, was almost a masque in the completeness with which it hid the real Anne. Life would present no problem that would trouble or perplex her. With the scalpel of her assurance she would delicately remove all emotion, all passion, all hot, human weakness, wrap it neatly in her own conceit, label it and forever after know exactly where she had put it.

Roger drew a sheet of paper to him and began writing to Belle. At least she had no right to withhold information of his son. But when he had written two angry pages he read them and tore them up. Finally in words, as blunt and straightforward as Belle, he demanded to know Rogie's whereabouts. When this was sealed and addressed, he pushed it aside to mail when he went out, and picked up the other letter.

He read it only this once and then it fluttered between his knees and lay upon the floor. His chin dropped to his breast, his lips closed in a hard line. Now that Anne had done this thing, his own surprise in not having thought of the possibility was lost in his understanding of how perfectly this action expressed Anne.

When two people loved, they came together in legal sanction.

When they no longer loved, they separated legally.

Anne would no more live apart without the ceremony of divorce than she would have lived with him without the ceremony of marriage.

Anne had tidied the situation.

She had instituted her action for divorce and gone away. She had put the little period of her standard to the past, blotted the paper and ordered it sent to him. It was almost like sending him a receipt for the old love, the months of bickering strain, itemized and receipted in full.

Roger made a strange little noise, a kind of choking grunt of amusement, anger and hurt. Across the loft Katya looked up. The clicking of her machine stopped suddenly. Over it she gazed at Roger with passionate longing, pain and anger and tenderness in her small brown eyes.

Roger was in trouble. He never sat so, his head bowed, his hands clenched like that. For days Katya had felt something in him that eluded her; something strange had entered their relationship, the old frankness was gone. It had gone from the night she counseled his leaving Anne, but they had not mentioned the subject again, and since then Katya had moved in an uncertainty of his motive that had been like a stone wall about her. At every move she had touched it and it had sent strange hopes and fears through her.

Now, she leaned across her machine, her lips parted. Something was forming from these days of uncertainty, coming toward her. Katya held her place before her machine by an effort that at last forced from her a low cry. At the sound, Roger turned slowly toward her, his own problem in his eyes. They looked so for a moment at each other, then Katya's hands trembled and she rose. His muscles had answered, but his real concern was far away. Her lips quivered.

"What is it?" she demanded angrily. "Why are you staring at me like that?"

Her voice drew Roger's consciousness. He shook his head as if physically throwing aside something that held him in its grip and said with pitiful assumption of his usual cheerfulness:

"Was I staring at you unpleasantly, Katya? I beg your pardon. I didn't mean to."

Katya came toward him. If she did not reach physical proximity, in a moment the old camaraderie would rise and shut off this thing Katya felt forming for the first time clearly between them. Coming to the window ledge, the same ledge on which she had counseled his leaving Anne, Katya lit a cigarette and said with forced calm:

"What's the matter? Can I help?"

"N-o—nothing's the matter. I——" Roger broke off.

"You're lying," Katya replied calmly. "Something has happened. Something—very—big to you."

For a second Roger stiffened in resentment of her assurance. It was like the first time he had ever seen her, when her certainty had annoyed him. Then the memory of all the past months of friendship and understanding, shamed the insincerity of denial. He picked the lawyer's letter from the floor and handed it to her. Katya read it and without the least change of expression returned it, but her whole squat body trembled violently and only by drawing deeply on the cigarette could she maintain an outward semblance of poise.

Roger sat fingering the letter. Now that he was sharing this with Katya, emotion was rapidly chilling to intellectual speculation. What would have happened between him and Anne if they had not done this thing? Would they really have adjusted in time? Would they have bickered to weariness and dropped at last from spiritual exhaustion to any compromise that held outward peace? Would he have fallen to the revolting relationship suggested by Katya?

Why had Katya said that? From her knowledge of him or from her own experience? She had spoken so earnestly, as if her certainty were a concrete thing she was thrusting into his keeping. It was no general warning gathered from vague reflection of life or observation. Katya knew—either herself or him to the deepest recesses.

What was the source of Katya's knowledge?

She was so wise and still and dark, like the night. Gazing at her now, Roger felt as if he were gazing into the well of human impulse, weakness and strength. In it lay understanding of the death of love between himself and Anne.

"What is it?" she demanded turning suddenly from the night outside.

"I was thinking of something you said to me and wondering why you said it."

"Yes. What was it I said?"

"You said that if I did not separate from Anne I would stay and——" It was difficult to say even to Katya and he stumbled, annoyed at the touch of scorn that came to Katya's eyes. It was like the first look she had ever given him,—the nice small boy who had called a silly meeting. "That there would be other children," he flung at her, "and that I would then see my duty clearer to stay. Did you mean that I was so bound in physical ties that I could not break them. Is that what you meant?"

Katya nodded. "If you hadn't separated, what else? If you had gone on living with her, you would have gone on 'loving.' Nothing else is possible. And because you are an idealist and must have harmony, you would have tied together the soul and body, because only so would you not have been ashamed before yourself. You would have done what many millions have done and will do till Time ends. You would have come to deny the existence of Love. You would have talked of the death of physical passion and the survival of something else, in the large vague words that dead souls use, like you talked of 'adjusting.' You would have stifled the body because you could not make it one with the soul. Or—you would have stifled the soul. With you I do not know—which it would have been I am not sure. But now your soul has a chance. Perhaps, some day, you will find another woman and then——"

"Never," Roger began vehemently, and stopped.

After all, who could say? He had not meant to marry until years later than he did. He had meant to go to many countries and do many things alone. He had not even thought of Anne in that way, half an hour before they stood alone among the dunes, and his need had shaped itself from the wind and fog.

"Perhaps," Katya said slowly, "it will be never. I am not sure. Perhaps you will never love. I do not know."

She was looking at him with faint bitterness and his interest in her certainty hardened to impatience. "Perhaps I won't," he said shortly, "since, according to you, so few people even know what it is. Why should I expect to be one of the chosen few?"

Katya looked away. "I don't know—perhaps because you need it?"

"Need what?" This was almost as tenuous as some of Anne's involved reactions. First Katya wanted him to be free for his soul, then she wanted this same soul meshed and tangled in an absorbing passion. Roger looked at her impatiently now, turned from him, again gazing out across the roofs. Then his impatience vanished as suddenly as it had come.

Katya looked tired to-night. Her eyes were red-rimmed as if she had not slept. Her thick lips held the cigarette uncertainly. Swarthy, squat and blunt, Katya's body conveyed a feeling of unsureness, as if she were trembling just beneath the surface. He had no right to intrude on her sympathy, but it was so easy to monopolize Katya's understanding. He laid his hand on her knee and started to feel the vibration of her body. She must be holding it in check by her supreme will.

"Never mind, Katya, let's not probe too deeply to-night."

But he knew that Katya did not hear. She was reading in places hidden from him, the answer to his own question.

"You need to love," she said slowly, as if she were translating from a foreign tongue, "because there is a chance that you are worth it. If you love you may be truly great. If you never love—you will go no higher than now—and—it will be all wasted," she ended in a whisper.

Roger felt that Katya was actually drawing a curtain back before him, a thick, black curtain that hid strange things he did not wish to see.

"Well, let's hope that whatever ought not to be wasted, won't be," he said with forced lightness.

"You—will—be afraid," Katya whispered and leaned so close that involuntarily Roger stepped back. At his motion, she laughed in scorn.

"Yes, that is what you will do when you see it coming. You will step back. You will run away. You will be afraid of love."

"Oh, no, I won't. Why should I be afraid?" With an uncertain smile Roger tried to turn the tide creeping from the pit that Katya had opened.

"Because it hurts." Katya shuddered so violently that Roger saw the heavy muscles of her shoulders and neck quiver. "It hurts more than any pain in all the world. It burns out everything in the world, in you, but itself. It takes your brain and your body and makes white ashes of them. It takes you, the individual, and melts you into the world. It is the volcano through which the highest force of spirit finds expression. There are not many volcanoes in the world or the earth would melt in flames. There are not many who can love or the race too would melt away. Through all the ages a few mountains above the level, flat earth. A few who can love, only a few. That is love. Would you run away?"

In spite of her body trembling as with cold, little beads of moisture stood on Katya's face. It was too fierce, too elemental, too naked. Roger looked away. A choking noise from Katya drew his eyes again. She was gazing at him now with anguish and hatred in her eyes. Roger stepped back. The blood flamed into his brain, then rushed away, leaving him cold and sick at the stark nakedness of Katya's revelation.

"Don't," he whispered, "don't."

Slowly the spark in Katya's eyes faded. She gazed at him blankly with the dead eyes of a statue. Then, with a quick shudder she came back to life.

"Never mind," she said in her husky whisper. "It isn't your fault."

"I—I never—dreamed—it isn't possible—you can't——"

"Oh, keep quiet. What does it matter? I don't mind your knowing. I didn't choose to love you. I don't respect you a great deal or admire you in many ways. You're so young, so undeveloped, like a baby. Stop staring like a frightened child. It doesn't matter, I tell you. It doesn't matter."

And, in spite of himself, Roger felt that it did not really matter so very much. Katya, the Russian Jewess, with her squat body, her strange foreign past, was a being of another world, as she stood there talking of volcanoes and white ashes and souls that melted in their own fire.

If she had been of his own race, his own age—but no woman of his age and race would have said those things, would have thought them, would have felt them. Disgust rose against his will, disgust seated deep in the past of his people, disgust of flagrant confession like this.

Katya smiled, a twisted smile of pity for the feeling in him. His lips moved to deny it, but against the penetration of Katya's knowledge, the falsehood died.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly, and knew that it sounded like Anne regretting the pain and sorrow of the world.

"You needn't be. I'm not. Can't you stop staring and trying to pretend?"

"Yes," Roger snapped, angry now with her and with himself, "when you stop pretending too. You talk of melting fire and volcanoes and yet you say it doesn't matter. It must matter. It——"

"It doesn't matter—as you mean. You understand nothing at all. Will you please go away?"

Roger's head dropped and he turned from her.

Her whisper followed. "Please forget. You can if you try because it really doesn't matter—to you." The last words were so low and Roger already so far across the loft that he did not hear them. He went without looking back.

But as he walked slowly home, he knew that something within himself had gone forever. Never again would he be absolutely certain of any human being. Katya, the indefatigable worker, the passionless comrade, the clear thinker; Katya the unconfused, had tangled life and the threads that bound one to another beyond his power of ever straightening. Never again would he be able to say of any human being "I am sure of this. I am positive of that."

It was a warm night but Roger was cold and lit a fire. Before it he sat till dawn, moving only to reach for wood in the basket on the hearth.

Was Katya right? Would he run from love if it ever came to him, devastating burning passion in a body other than Katya's? Before such a love as this his love for Anne was the flickering of a tiny flame, as small, as pale as Anne's feeling for a world beyond the narrow limits of her own individual safety.

And Anne?

Again Roger lived that first hour on the Bluff, his own surprise and tenderness at Anne's kiss. The night on the lake when her lips had clung as hotly as his own.

What was he himself?

What was Anne?

To-night, in this whirlwind that was Katya, he felt strangely near to Anne. When at last he groped in the wood basket and found it empty, he rose and went to bed. The east was lighting. The bed was wide and chill, as if the little ghost of Anne were there beside him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Day after day Anne sat at rest in the vast silence. Far back in space and time she had waved a last good-bye up the black funnel of the staircase to Hilda, holding Rogie, for, in the end, Belle had prevailed and Anne had come alone. Trains and stages and the creaking wagon of old Timothy Potter had brought her from the world below and laid her in the heart of this little grassy meadow. Ringed by mountain peaks it lay, small and still, at the top of the world.

In the morning the sun rose with sudden gladness, not with the slow reluctance of the lowlands, but as if forced by its own energy and desire from the blackness of night. All day it poured its warmth into the meadow and when it went, yielding to night in a blaze of color; it called good-by in brilliant purple and crimson and went as gladly as it had come. In the afternoons a busy little wind came down from the snowy peaks, went its round of inspection over the lush green grass of the meadow, chatted with the little brook, whispered to the trees, saw all was well and slipped back again into the granite gorges. The stars came out, not with furious twinkling and effort to reach through to men so far below, but, with still gold, they moved forward into night.

It seemed to Anne that she made no definite motion of her own volition. The day came, lifted her into the perfect rhythm of its rotation, carried her through the clear warm morning, the still gold-filled afternoon, deposited her gently in the deep black peace of night.

This was the silence she had sought, the perfect peace. No artificial formula summoned it. No bodily posture propitiated it. It was there, deep, all pervading, everlasting, to one's need.

Perhaps, in incalculable space, other worlds were being made and destroyed. But this world was finished. In the marvelous perfection of its completion, the beginning was impossible to visualize, an ending inconceivable. No force could ever move again those granite peaks, melt the glacial ice, upheave the profound permanence of that tiny grassy meadow. It was done; perfectly done and left in peace.

Even old Timothy Potter and his wife were part of this profundity of accomplishment. They could never have been other than they were. Through the years of close companionship they had grown to look alike. It was impossible to imagine them ever having been younger, slimmer, more agile than they were. They must always have been together since the beginning of time, stout and quiet, with their understanding smile, their white hair, the little wrinkles of happiness about their kindly eyes.

As a separate human unit, apart from the spirit of the universe, she no longer existed. She was alone with old Timothy and Mary, his wife, at the very center of the all-living; so deep within the heart of Life that words were not needed. They communicated in silence like the earth and grass and trees. They were not bodies, opposed in their humanity to an exterior spirit without. They were part of the whole, as grass, the gnarled cedars growing in the clefts of the granite mountains, and the brook bubbling through the little meadow, were parts. Sitting in utter stillness Anne felt this engulfing Unity, drawing her gently down into the single purpose that ran through the granite mountains, the dancing brook, the rustling leaves, through her own body, and linked them all, each to the other.

Now, a poem of Wordsworth that she had thought silly and sentimental in the days of college extension, came back to her with new meaning, and often, sitting on the porch after the early supper, watching the day's gorgeous farewell to the granite peaks, Anne whispered slowly:

To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What Man has made of Man.

The rest of the stanzas she had forgotten, except the three final lines of all:

If such be Nature's Holy plan,
Have I not reason to Lament
What Man has made of Man?

Far off beyond distant Dana, rising in ice-capped majesty above the last range of mountains, hate and discord and confusion were positive qualities. Men struggled against each other, ideals clashed, faiths oppressed. Even love fought for its place and in the end surrendered. There was nothing sure, nothing positive, nothing motionless like this in its own perfection. It was all distorted, ugly and forever battling.

Sitting on the porch, after an early supper, watching the day's farewell to the granite peaks, Anne's eyes filled with tears. If only she had Rogie with her she would never leave this peace. The world beyond could fight its futile battles. If only Rogie were with her, nothing would be lacking. Undisturbed by the world's confusion, they would live out their lives, and sink, at last into the stillness of the earth.

What did it matter if they made no place for themselves among men; if no one ever heard of them; the ambitions of men were such pitiful things?

In the arrogance of his conceit, man had appropriated to himself the pinnacle of creation. In his fury of effort he rushed about over the surface of the great, still earth, erecting his little cities and civilizations, setting up his little philosophies for the guidance of others. His ideals, his religions, his pretentious systems of thought, so futilely abstruse and complicated, were like the rules and regulations for the guiding of traffic in public places: "Keep to the right"; "turn here"; "cross there"; vast in their pretension of public usefulness; needed because of the confusion created by himself. In the peace of the mountains his efforts had less cohesion, less purpose than the movements of the ants, running here and there, making long circuits about some tiny obstacle. So man made circuits through his own philosophies in a stupendous effort to reach the truth which he had lost in the involved processes of his own journey to it. Anne could almost see these myriads of tiny individuals rushing about over the surface of life, jostling, shouting, getting in each other's way, going down, being trampled, struggling to rise, each shouting his own foolish solution of the problem of life.

When Anne had been a month in the mountains she wrote to Belle asking her to find some way of sending Rogie. Belle wrote back promising to do so, even to bring him herself, if no other way opened, but the days slipped again to weeks and Rogie did not come.

Anne grew restless. The peace was disturbed now by this need. At the end of the second month she wrote more insistingly, but this time Belle did not answer.

The leaves began to fall. In the mornings the grass of the meadow was white with frost. The nights were clear, black and cold now with a kind of thrill in the coldness, as if the air were tingling with hidden excitement.

Anne's restlessness increased. Something was creeping upon the world from the places hidden beyond all puny human knowledge.

She no longer sat for hours on the porch, absorbed in the peaceful stillness, but moved about the house or went for long walks. In the evenings she sat with Mary and Timothy, and, although she rarely listened to the words, she liked to hear Timothy read from one of their few books. He read slowly with long pauses instead of comment. These pauses were like caves into which the old people went silently, hand in hand, to look for the deeper truths hidden in words. At the end of these pauses they smiled quietly at each other and the reading began again.

It was one evening in mid-September that a nervous motion of Anne's disturbed the reading and Timothy looked over the steel rim of his spectacles with kindly interest:

"You're worried."

"I'm sorry," Anne apologized. "I didn't mean to interrupt. I was thinking about something else."

Mary Potter leaned across the red-checked cloth and laid her hand on Anne's.

"You were thinking about the baby. Isn't your sister going to send him?"

"I don't know. I can't make it out and I feel so helpless. You won't be going down to Milton again for mail for weeks, will you?"

"I hadn't thought of going again this year," Timothy took off his glasses now and laid them on the closed book. "I don't usually go after the middle of September. Soon the road'll be closed even to Milton."

"Closed!"

"In a few weeks now the snow'll begin."

"Nobody can get in after the snow begins," the old woman explained.

"Nothing can get through!"

"Nothing gets through after the snow begins. Pretty soon it'll come and we'll be shut in tight till Spring."

Anne rose quickly. "Shut—in—tight till Spring!"

Timothy nodded and his eyes lit as if in welcome of the snow.

"Oh, it's wonderful then," he said softly. "You think it's quiet and peaceful now, but it ain't nothing to what it is then—between the storms. You'll love it, white and so still you can almost hear God movin' round. And then the storms." He rose, the first restless motion Anne had ever seen him make. "They're wonderful. Trees that have stood for centuries go crashing down. Mountain sides slip away." His eyes blazed as if he were watching the Creator at work. "When Spring comes, it's a new world. Me and Mary go round like children, don't we, mother, looking up things to see if they're there yet. Last Spring that little creek down there came a~bubbling up to look at us, just like a new baby, laughing and smiling through the snow. It weren't there the year before. A storm cut the channel and there it was dancing and laughing as if it had just been waiting to surprise us. Wasn't it, mother?"

The old woman nodded. "And do you remember that spruce we used to call 'The Hunchback?'" She turned to Anne. "It was so old and twisted and it never seemed happy, like other spruces; they're always so glad and straight. We used to wish a storm would take him, for his own sake, and one winter that gorge yonder opened and when Spring came, he was gone."

"Gone!" Under cover of the snow, cliffs slid away, gorges opened, century-old trees disappeared!

"Yes. Winter makes great changes up here in the mountains. Down in the cities you think winter is a time when everything stops and rests and nothing moves. But up here we see it moving. It's like watching God fix things up, cut out a bit here and there, tinker round making improvements. Nothing ain't ever fixed to stay forever. It stands to reason it can't be. There wouldn't be any life to things that's fixed like that. Things keep moving and changing. Why, that doesn't frighten you, does it?" he asked curiously at the look in Anne's eyes. "There ain't nothing to be afraid of, Mrs. Barton."

"I'm—not afraid," Anne whispered. "Only I—don't want it to change. I want it to stay like this—perfect always, quiet and still."

Timothy shook his head and smiled gently. "Oh, no, it wouldn't be good that way. You wait and see. You'll love it. Why, me and mother's often spoke about it—when we go, we'd like to be out in a big storm and just be swept down. Not be sick and helpless for a long time, just have God throw us in along of some change He's making and use us again in another way, wouldn't we, ma?"

The old woman nodded. "It would be a grand way to go. I suppose we'd get there in the end just the same, even if we was buried in one of them tight little city cemeteries under a marble slab like people put over the dead as if they wanted to keep them shut up in their little boxes forever; or even if we was burned like some people hold with, we'd get back into the earth somehow. But folks have their preference, and me and pa'd like to go, as he says, in some storm that'd sweep us out clean and sudden into the midst of things."

Into the midst of things!

For a few moments Anne stood motionless, her hands gripping the back of the chair, staring at the old people, who, lost in the coming of the snow, seemed already to have slipped away together—into the midst of things. Then, without a word, she went quickly out of the room and upstairs to her own.

It was very cold but she threw the window wide and leaned far out into the night.

In the full moonlight, the peak of Dana rose, the burnished helmet of a giant warrior leading the mountains into the coming battle. In the black secrecy of the granite gorges the courier wind ran swiftly with its orders. The trees took counsel together. Everything was whispering, moving, preparing. Nothing was motionless any longer in the security of its own permanence. Everything was awaiting now the fulfillment of the law beyond its power to anticipate, change, or deviate from its own purpose.

In a few weeks now the snow would come. Mountain sides would slip away. Giant trees go crashing down. New rivers open. God would tinker with the world! Make his changes, form it to his further plan.

Nothing was completed beyond change. Nothing was still. From rocks to man, the force moved, making, changing, destroying, recreating, fashioning to—what? Chaos or perfection.

There was no permanent silence and peace apart from motion, from the ever-changing march of the universe on—to what? A purpose hidden from finite sense. A scale so vast that its first note was lost in the birth of time, its last in infinity.

And she, deaf to this tremendous harmony, had stood scornful of all but the small, thin note of her own personal security! The chord of the world's pain, so clear to Roger and Black Tom, she had not heard. Of the perfect scale so clear to Charlotte Welles, she had not grasped a note. The joy of life that thrust through her mother's muddled thinking was a far sweeter note than her own blind assurance of superiority. Even the sensuous longing of Merle for physical beauty was a finer understanding of the purpose of life than her own.

The moon had moved on across the world, the little meadow lay in darkness, when Anne closed the window at last and went to bed.

A week later, the first snow fell. It came in the night and Anne waked to a white world so white and still that the very stillness throbbed with its own intensity. Anne stood for hours staring out at the snow-filled hollows. Under that thick white, perhaps change was already beginning, a little opening here, a little closing here, the small first notes of the great orchestra tuning for the vast symphony.

In the night the snow fell again, thicker, whiter, heavier.

Early in the morning Anne sought Mary Potter.

"I can get through, can't I? If I go at once?"

"Yes. But there won't be many days longer. The snow's going to be heavy this year. It's going to be a wild winter. Did you hear that crash last night? It was that cedar you say looks like an old woman with a basket. It snapped clear off like——"

"If I pack to-day, can Mr. Potter get me down to Miller's? The stage will take me to Raymond."

The old woman was making bread, her arms deep in the clinging dough. But as Anne spoke, she scraped the dough from them and came quietly round the table.

"You're going back and, do you know, I'm glad. We'll miss you. When we heard you was coming we were kind of upset only there didn't seem to be any good reason why you shouldn't. But now, we'll miss you. You fit in. I guess me and pa got to think we were the only people that like it quiet and I suppose there's lots—even down there." She always spoke so of the world beyond the mountains, "down there," with a nod and a little gesture out and downward.

"Yes. I think that they want quiet down there more than they want anything in the whole world. They look and look for it and—some find it. The world is getting noisier and faster, and yet there are more and more people looking for—Stillness." She smiled. "Churches even advertise it in the papers—half hours and quarter hours of Silence."

"Well! Down there they'd make a business out of most anything, wouldn't they? Advertising silence! Why, it's about the only thing everybody can have."

"Yes—but we don't find that out. We're all making such a noise looking for it."

Mary Potter wiped one hand on her apron and laid it on Anne's shoulder. "I guess you won't make much noise looking for it now, will you?"

"No—I don't—think I will. I'll try not to, anyhow."

"I'd like to have seen the baby. His picture's awful cute."

"He is cute. And as good as gold."

"Maybe you'll want to come back in the Spring and can bring him with you?"

Anne's lip trembled. "I'm never coming back again, Mrs. Potter, unless—I don't have to come."

The old woman did not answer for a moment and then she nodded. "I know. Well, I don't think, my dear, you'll ever have to come again. You—don't—lose it—once you really get it up here."

She patted Anne's shoulder, but Anne suddenly threw her arms round the other and kissed her. The old woman's eyes lit with pleasure. She said nothing. She rarely did when she understood.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

As she stepped from the train into the roar of the city, Anne straightened her shoulders and smiled:

"Perhaps I'll get to love the racket as much as Belle does."

She let herself into the flat and went noiselessly up the stairs to the hall. In the front room her father was talking to Rogie. She could not catch the words but she heard the baby's crow of delight and gripped the balustrade to keep from surprising the old man too suddenly.

The kitchen was empty but Hilda was on the porch picking dead leaves from a geranium. The kettle was boiling and a bottle of malted milk stood beside the inevitable wad of crochet on the table. Very softly Anne closed the door and waited. In another moment the kettle boiled over and Hilda turned. At the sight of Anne, she stepped back, stared, and then came with a little rush and took Anne in her arms. When she stood away at last, her eyes were full of happy tears, but she said gayly:

"I believe you just love to startle people nearly out of their skins. Well, you certainly did give me a turn. I suppose it was the dog that howled all night, but when I saw you there—for a minute—I almost thought——"

"It was my ghost. Moms Mitchell! You are superstitious."

"No, I'm not. Not a bit. I never held with those old sayings but it did give me a start." She still held Anne's hand and stroked it, reluctant to relinquish the comfort of reality.

"Do I look like a ghost?"

"You certainly do not. My, but you're a different girl altogether. Papa will be surprised."

Anne laughed. "If my appearance has the same effect on him as it had on you, you'd better prepare him. Did he hear the dog too?"

"Go on with you. I don't believe those things. No, I don't think he did. Papa sleeps fine now. He's better a lot too. He got down onto the landing yesterday and sat in the sun for an hour."

"Papa! Got down those stairs to the landing! He must be improved."

"He is," Hilda said with subdued pride. "Papa's changed in the last two months, Annie. He's different—in a great many ways. He's more like he was—at first—before you children were born. You won't know papa in some ways."

"Hardly, if he's like he was before I was born. Perhaps we'll have to be introduced."

Hilda smiled, but Anne saw under the amusement a kind of glad possession and knew that a new link had been forged between her father and mother. For an instant, loneliness touched her and she wondered what these months had done to Roger. She had changed. Her mother and father had changed. Had Roger changed too?

"I'm dying to see Rogie. Shall I go in or do you want to tell papa first?"

"I'll just give him a hint. You wait here. He always has his milk in the kitchen and I usually have tea with him. Good gracious, I forgot all about the tea."

"I'll make it. You run along and hint. If I don't see Rogie in a minute I'll be howling like that dog myself."

As she made the tea Anne's hands shook with excitement. It was all so strange, filled with a vibrant livingness it had never had before. In a few moments, she heard them coming along the hall, the tap of her father's canes, his shuffling step, Hilda's gleeful laugh, as they stopped just outside the kitchen door.

"No, I'm not joking, papa, we've got company to tea. I can't help it if you didn't hear them come. No, it's not Charlotte and I'm not going to tell you who it is."

"You can't fool me. When your eyes shine like that it's something good. Do you know, I wouldn't be surprised to see Annie come in most any day."

"Now—how—on earth—did you——"

James laughed. "We've been married more than thirty years and you never put one over on me yet."

He turned the knob and came shuffling into the kitchen. Hilda followed with Rogie. Anne had a passing flash of her father, thin and gray, but with a happy twinkle in his eyes; Hilda smiling behind him and Rogie clinging tightly to her neck, before her eyes filled with tears and they all blurred together.

Leaning unsteadily on one cane, James Mitchell put his arm round her.

"She tried to fool me, Annie, but I smelled the rat. I knew you'd get lonely and come running back when we didn't expect you."

Anne tried to smile. "But you did expect me. You're not surprised a bit." Over his shoulder she was watching Rogie in hungry fear that he was not going to recognize her. If Rogie cried and shrank away——But he didn't. He was only making quite sure before he gave a gurgle of delight and began wriggling in Hilda's grasp. James Mitchell's arm dropped and Anne was beside Hilda with Rogie tight in her hold.

"Grown some, hasn't he?" James demanded as he stumbled to the chair beside the stove. "Not bad nurses, the old folks, eh?"

"He's grown an inch," Anne declared, hugging him to her. "And my gracious, he's heavy!"

"Weighs a ton when he's been on the same spot in your lap ten minutes. Only he don't often stay ten minutes in the same spot. He's a lively youngster, Anne. Got a lot more pep than you ever had at his age. He must take after——" James broke off and looked at Hilda.

"Yes, he's more like Roger," Anne finished. There was no reason to avoid Roger's name.

There was a short silence, filled by her father sipping the malted milk and her mother pouring out the tea. Then Anne said:

"Has Roger seen him often?"

Hilda and James looked at each other in a new habit of consultation.

"No, dear. Belle thought it would be just as well to wait until you could arrange things as you wanted."

"I'm sorry. There's no reason he shouldn't see him. I never intended keeping him all to myself. He's Roger's, too."

Again Hilda and James consulted on a problem they had evidently discussed often. Their glances reached a decision and James said:

"Annie, do you suppose that things between you and Roger could be patched up? Me and mother have talked about it quite a lot. I don't hold with Roger—I never did," there was a touch of the old intolerance which a look from Hilda softened and James went on. "But he's young and there's this to be said for him—the rubbish he believes in is in the air. It's like an epidemic. But there's no reason he shouldn't outgrow it. You can do a lot."

Anne sat holding Rogie and fingering her teaspoon absently.

"I don't want him to outgrow it, papa. I don't want him to be anything but himself."

"No, of course you don't," Hilda broke in with the familiar manner of smoothing a family difference that had once annoyed Anne. But now it did not annoy her. She would have to face, once at least, this discussion of herself and Roger and she might as well do it now. Besides, it clarified her own thought to talk patiently in this way.

"Roger was one kind of person," she went on, "and I was another. Roger saw things—in—in sweeps while I saw them in spots."

The definition was exact to Anne but her father and mother looked bewildered.

"I mean that we really both want the same thing, only we wanted to get it differently. I think—it's harder for two people to agree in their methods—than in their aims. If Roger had been a Jew and I had been a Catholic——"

"Why, Anne!" Hilda was so horrified, that amusement touched Anne's very earnest wish to get this thing perfectly straight to them.

"I'm only supposing, moms, making the wildest example I can think of."

"Well, it's certainly wild enough."

"But, if we had been, it might have been easier than it was. I mean that—in some ways we would have been so very far apart that it would have been useless to try and meet in those ways at all. But Roger and I weren't far apart. We both wanted the same thing—a beautiful world, but we tried to find this beauty in different places and there are no different places. There's only one Beauty everywhere."

"What in the name of Heavens ARE you talking about, Annie?"

Anne began to feel a little helpless but persisted.

"I mean that nearly all the fuss and noise in the world comes from people quarreling about the way to get things, because, nearly everybody wants the same thing really when you get right down to it. They only quarrel about their own pet way of getting it. Roger thinks that if he can make the whole world happy in a lump, then every individual will be happy. And I thought that if every individual was happy then the whole world would be happy. We——"

"I don't know what you're trying to get at, Annie, and I don't believe you do yourself," her father interrupted, but so kindly that Anne forgave his not understanding. After all, she had not understood herself, before the mountains, and it was not clear in detail yet. "I suppose it's something very modern and educated. But common sense is a lot older than education and these up-to-date folderols. When a man and a woman's married they can't expect to agree about everything. Me and mamma never had scarce an idea in common, did we, ma?"

"No. We never agreed about things. I never knew any married folks that did. But it doesn't make much difference if you don't talk about them. As long as you keep still, things go pretty smooth. I guess our home was as comfortable as most homes."

"But I don't want it to be as comfortable as most homes. Most homes are terrible places and I want a real home or none at all."

"Well, I must say, I think there's something to be said for Roger," Hilda conceded. "Do you think a home all by yourself is going to be a 'real home'?"

Anne's throat tightened and she could not answer.

"That's all rubbish, Anne. Nothing we could say would have kept you from marrying him and I guess he was just the same as he is now. Besides, you'll find it's a different thing working now you've got Rogie than it was before when you were a girl."

"Let's not talk about it, mamma. I wouldn't live with Roger just to be supported, not if I had a dozen children."

"I wish to heaven you had, Anne; nothing else will ever get a mite of real common sense into your head. Oh, well, it's no good talking, I suppose. You can't put old heads on young shoulders."

Anne nibbled at her lip and said nothing. She and Hilda finished their tea and James his malted milk. When he had put aside the cup he turned to her again.

"You'll stay with us for a while, Annie?"

"No—I don't think I will, not more than a few days anyhow. I'm going to begin looking for a job to-morrow and I'm sure to find one within a day or two. Then I'll take rooms where Rogie can be looked after and moms will get a rest. It made an awful lot of extra work having him here all that time. He——"

"Now see here, Anne, you needn't use Rogie as an excuse. I don't need a rest and he hasn't been a bit of extra work. You always were an independent thing." Hilda's impatience ended in a laugh and James smiled with her.

"All right, we'll let it go at that. Anyhow, to-morrow morning at eight o'clock, off I go job-hunting."

Anne joined the laugh a little uncertainly. The new life was so very near.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

On the following Monday Anne found a position with a fruit commission house on Front Street. The salary was not quite what she had hoped, but the surroundings were so different from the office of Lowell & Morrison that she was glad to take it.

Here there were no soft rugs, no quietly closing doors, or smoothly running elevators; no suave and courtly men. Great drays rumbled through the street outside; loud-voiced men called orders in strange, foreign tongues. For the first hours of the morning the warehouse shook with the thud of huge crates being thrown from trucks, trundled through the cool darkness of the shed and piled high to the shadow of the roof. In the afternoon the rumble of the drays loading and unloading ceased; many of the men went home; the place was quiet. Anne could hear the whistle of the boats at the wharves, and on foggy days the wail of the fog sirens very near.

On Saturday afternoon the office closed at one o'clock and Anne spent until six looking for an apartment. At dusk she found what she thought would do. It was the upper floor of an old house on the edge of Russian Hill. The house was run down and rather dismal, but the rear windows looked out on a small garden, and from Anne's floor, a little triangle of the Bay was visible.

The landlady was a childless widow, a thin, saddened woman with soft brown eyes that had almost lost the trick of brightening. But when she heard about Rogie they lit gently and she suggested a sand-pile in one corner of the garden and a crib for his morning and afternoon nap in her own bedroom. Anne's first feeling, that there it would be almost impossible to forget the past, lessened, and she closed the arrangement, grateful for the garden, the glimpse of the Bay, and Mrs. Jeffries' pleasure in Rogie.

On Sunday there was a family dinner at the flat and afterwards Anne and Rogie and Belle came to the new home. Mrs. Jeffries had put some flowers on the ugly center table and covered the gas globe with orange crêpe paper.

"Oh," Anne gasped when she saw it, "I wish she hadn't done that."

"Never mind. Let it stay up for a day or two and then it can catch fire or destroy itself somehow," Belle advised.

Anne shook her head. "It doesn't matter really—and she might be hurt."

"Now, Anne, don't start in that way. You know it won't work. If this furnishing is her taste and she begins to 'take an interest' in you and tries 'to make you comfortable' you'll only blow up in the end. Take those orange shades down and tell her in the morning that you don't want anything added to your rooms. You needn't be sharp about it, but you can be firm."

Anne smiled with a wistfulness that escaped Belle, touring the room in inspection of the ugly steel engravings hung exactly in the center of each wall. The first hour in her new home, and already she knew that there would be many nights when she would be grateful for even the terrible green glass vase that held the flowers, if it meant any one's caring for her comfort.

"Don't worry, Belle. When this wall paper gets too much for my nerves I'll go down and sit awhile in 'the parlor.' You should see that."

"Worse?"

"Three horsehair chairs with red velvet trimmings; one rocker to match. An onyx and brass stand with a pink silk drape. A floor lamp with a red shade and a white marble mantel, over a grate that has never had a fire. Oh, yes—a 'good body-Brussels' rug, and the floor-border painted cherry!"

"Heavens! Well, you'll never have to sit in it. And that back room you're going to use for a sitting-room can be made cheerful in time with just a few softening things round. Besides, there's the fireplace. I've a good mind to light a fire, Anne, just to see how it looks. I believe I'd feel better about leaving you alone with this wall paper and that what-not if I got the effect of a fire."

"I'm not afraid of the what-not—wouldn't those ghastly statuettes in the Niche fit perfectly?—but I would rather like a fire. I wonder if Mrs. Jeffries could let us have a little wood."

"I'll ask her." In a moment Belle was back and while Anne undressed Rogie, lit a fire in the back room. When Anne heard the cheerful crackle, her eyes filled with tears but she brushed them angrily away.

"Now see here," she whispered brusquely to herself, "you're not going to get weepy, every time you look at the Bay or hear a fog-whistle or light an open fire."

"Are you coming, Anne? This kindling won't last forever." Belle had not lit the gas and the kindly darkness hid the brown and red wall paper and stiff chairs.

"It's not going to be bad, Belle. It's really wonderfully still, almost as still as the mountains. When the fog-whistles don't go, there'll be hardly a sound outside."

"Nor inside either. Does that women ever laugh, do you suppose?"

"I don't know. Mary Potter never really laughed outright. I think, perhaps, Mrs. Jeffries has only forgotten how."

Belle shrugged. "Well, I hope she'll remember again soon. If she doesn't, Rogie will forget too."

"Now, Belle, can you honestly imagine Rogie a solemn baby?"

"It does take some stretching of the imagination. But—when I look at this wall paper and those chairs I can imagine almost anything. I can even imagine Roger losing faith in——"

"Yes? Go on, Belle, don't be silly; as if Roger's name mustn't be mentioned. I—I don't feel that way at all. Besides, even if I did, I couldn't avoid Roger—because of Rogie. He has just as much right to him as I, and as soon as I feel a little more settled, I'm going to make some regular arrangement for his seeing him, having—him—part—of the time if he wants to."

Belle looked down at the small figure gazing earnestly into the fire and her hand moved toward her sister's shoulder, then drew back without touching.

"Yes, of course, he ought to see him if he wants to," she said in her brusque, impersonal way as if she were agreeing in some physician's instruction concerning a patient.

"I wish," Anne went on, "that Roger had been seeing him right along. I really don't understand, Belle, why you didn't let him. He must think it was my wish that he shouldn't and believe that I was being deliberately mean about it. He must think I am awfully narrow and ungenerous and—and vindictive and——'

"I don't know why he should think that. Naturally he would suppose that Rogie was with you. Besides, how did a poor blunderbuss like myself know what mood you would come back in? If I had let Roger make his own arrangements for seeing him I might have set up a precedent you wouldn't have wanted to keep. Then there was moms and papa. You've grown so calm and sure in the mountains, Anne, you don't realize that the rest of us are pretty jumpy yet. Moms ranted along for days after you'd gone. I don't know but what she might have refused to let Roger look at him even if he had come. Under the circumstances I did what seemed best. You know the family channels aren't the easiest to steer in safely."

Anne smiled. "No, I know they're not. And I didn't mean to be unfair, Belle. You've all been terribly dear to me. I don't believe I ever understood any of you—or—any one—else—before I went away."

Again Belle looked at her sharply, changed her mind about speaking, and put the last piece of kindling on the fire. Together they stood silently watching it flare, then crumble, char and drop to gray ash.

When the last faint glow had died from the embers, Anne brought Belle's things from the room where Rogie was now fast asleep. But even after they were on, Belle lingered as if reluctant to go.

"If there's anything you want, you'll let me know, won't you, kiddie?"

"Yes, I'll let you know, but there won't be anything, I'm sure. The hours at the office aren't bad at all and I believe Mrs. Jeffries will take wonderful care of Rogie. It's—a little strange now—but I'll get it homied up in time. I've got a few ideas about this room already."

"You can have anything of mine out of storage that you want. Do you remember that heavy tapestry stuff I had a mania for once? It didn't go in a small modern apartment, but it would be great with these high ceilings. You'll ask me, won't you?"

"Yes, I promise. But for the present I'll just go on like this till I get the feel of the place."

"Don't go on too long or you'll get to feel like the place. I know you, Anne, better than you know yourself."

Anne laughed. "You make me feel like a fly at the end of a microscope."

"Not a fly," Belle said with a pretense of serious consideration, "no, not a fly. A little moth with gold dust all over it, one of the shimmery kind that looks as if it were going to fall apart if you touched it."

"And never does, but crawls right alone even after it's burnt off its wings."

Anne realized the possible interpretation and flushed, but if Belle had caught this meaning, she said nothing, and a few minutes later went.

As Anne closed the door behind Belle, and came back again up the stairs alone, a little of the courage that she had sincerely felt her own while she and Belle stood before the fire died away. Again before the tiny heap of gray ashes, Anne forced down the tears with an effort. Was her new-found peace to be so easily disturbed? She had been back in the city only a little over a week, and already this going of Belle made her feel so terribly alone. Anne went to the window and opened it wide. Perhaps the touch of night would bring that throbbing, silent assurance of companionship. With her elbows on the sill Anne gazed to the triangle of twinkling lights at the base of the dark hills across the bay. Faintly the murmur of the city came to her, but her hands clenched and it took all her strength to keep back the tears.

She was a part of it. But such a little part.

"I won't be lonely," she whispered fiercely. "I won't. I WON'T."

But the resolution flitted away into the blackness and left Anne tense with her own vehemence. She closed the window quickly and went into the other room. Between the cool sheets she tried to relax, to immerse her body in the vast, eternal unity of all-living, but she was conscious only of the effort and after a while she gave up trying to relax and let her thought go where it would.

It went straight to Roger. What had these months done to Roger? They had done so much to her, it seemed impossible that Roger could be just the same. And yet, she hoped he was. The old Roger she felt now she understood. A new Roger might be very strange. At first the new relationship that had to be between them would be difficult, and, with another Roger, perhaps impossible.

No, Roger must be just the same, have the same sweeping enthusiasm, the same impatience, the same intolerance of prejudice not his own. Until she had gripped more firmly her own peace, she could risk no change in Roger. At last the tightness in her muscles eased and Anne fell asleep a little comforted in her decision to write to Roger before the end of the week.

But the end of the week came and went and Anne had not written. Every evening she had tried and in the morning destroyed the letter. Some were tinged with memory, the others almost belligerent in their indifferent brevity. The second week she did not even try but convinced herself that the mood would descend upon her suddenly and she would tell Roger of her return and suggest his coming to see Rogie with exactly the right degree of friendly interest.

But the mood did not come, although Anne waited for it, in the same bodily relaxation in which Charlotte Welles entered The Silence. By the beginning of the fourth week after her return, this need to communicate with Roger and the impossibility of doing it, was destroying her peace and absorbing every waking thought. That she managed to do her work well, was only because the old power of mechanical attention had returned. Often Anne read through the transcriptions of her employer's dictation and wondered at this subconscious power that permitted her to quote correctly prices and invoices, write intelligently of fruits and vegetables, while her whole consciousness was concerned in forming a letter to Roger.

Once she thought she saw Roger on the street, and, although she would have grasped eagerly this solution if it had occurred to her before, now she turned and went rapidly in the other direction. But no sooner had she lost the possibility—if it had been really Roger—than she wished with her whole heart that she had faced certainty. She began looking for him everywhere, hoping and then dreading to meet him. From walking in places where the possibility of meeting might occur, she swung to going and coming by circuitous ways, angry with herself for her own indecision, touched sometimes even to anger at Roger.

Finally, at the beginning of the fifth week, in exhaustion of her own irresolution, Anne wrote and without rereading or waiting for morning counsel, went out and dropped the note in the letter box. And then began a period of waiting that made the weeks preceding seem full of calm certainty. Now Anne was so sharply conscious of two selves within her, that, at times, she could almost visibly see them both. One went to and from work, wrote letters, cared for her rooms, attended to Rogie, talked quietly with Mrs. Jeffries. The other did nothing, nothing at all, except wait. This self emerged to control at the postman's coming in the morning; when she opened the door in the evening and looked first to the hat-stand to see if there was a letter; and at night when she lay in bed trying to find a reason for Roger's silence. For Roger did not answer.

The days filled to a week, two, three.

When, a few days before Christmas, Anne came home one night to find Mrs. Jeffries crying in the kitchen, her first reaction was almost relief that something had happened that would call upon her for some quality besides the petrifying patience of waiting in which she felt her brain rapidly numbing to a living death.

"What is it? What has happened?"

In the comfort of companionship, Mrs. Jeffries looked up from the table where she had been sitting in the dark, her head buried in her arms.

"My sister's dead. Little Lucy——"

Anne knelt and put her arm about the heaving shoulders. The older woman clung in a renewed passion of sobs and Anne held her quietly until they eased. At last Mrs. Jeffries looked up.

"There are three children, the youngest only five and John doesn't know what to do."

"You'll have to go to them?"

"Yes—I must go. John and Lucy adored each other—they were like lovers always. Poor—John—he's so lost—he doesn't seem able to grasp it. He says——" She reached to the letter lying as she had dropped it two hours before.

"Don't—don't, please, really, I'd rather not." Anne took the letter from her quickly and laid it back on the table.

Mrs. Jeffries shuddered. "They loved each other so. Why did she have to be taken? He and the children need her so. And she was so strong, stronger than I have ever been. Nobody needs me. But Lucy—one moment well and laughing—the next——"

In the cold darkness of the unlit kitchen Anne saw old Mary and Timothy smiling at each other as they pictured "going out sudden into the midst of things." She held the quivering form again until it quieted. Mrs. Jeffries wiped her eyes at last and tried to consider Anne.

"How will you manage? Can you get some one to look after Rogie? I may be away some time. I may bring the children back with me. I don't know. I feel as if everything has changed so; I'm bewildered."

"Don't think of me, I'll manage. Perhaps I can get Mrs. Horton, the woman I used to have, to come up until we see what we're going to do. But you mustn't think about me, or consider me at all. Promise that you won't. I wish I could do something."

"You are doing something. You always have ever since you came. You don't know what it's meant to have you and Rogie round though I haven't seen much of you. I believe I was freezing up clear through—until he came."

"I'm glad you've liked having us. It's meant a great deal to me to know some one was looking after Rogie as you have done."

Mrs. Jeffries put the letter away and rose wearily. Without having taken off her things, Anne went out again. In an hour she had arranged with Mrs. Horton.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Roger was in Los Angeles on a speaking trip when Anne's letter was forwarded to him from the office. He found it when he came back from one of the most successful meetings he had ever held. He had held his audience in his hands, moved them at his will. Enthusiasm had run high. He had thrilled with his own power, and then, depression had followed. It was so easy to move men with words. It was almost a trick, emphasis here, appeal to emotion there, a climax of enthusiasm malleable to his will.

After such a gathering men and women insisted on meeting him personally. He often left the halls with groups violently discussing his words. And so little resulted from this enthusiasm. An inclination strengthened here and there, a few teetering on the edge of belief converted. Sometimes a successful meeting such as this had been exhausted Roger more than any antagonistic opposition could have done.

To-night he was very tired. The ideal for which a few strove seemed so far away, so beyond those for whom he searched for it. He had left the hall instantly, escaping, as he rarely permitted himself to do, the urgent wish of strangers to meet him. Safe in his hotel room at last he had given the order not to be disturbed by any visitor or telephone call, and had begun indifferently looking over the forwarded mail, when he came unexpectedly on Anne's letter.

He looked at it for a moment curiously, as if it were something not intended for him. He turned it over and over, until a sudden eagerness to know of Anne and Rogie seized him and he tore the envelope open with quivering fingers. The note was brief, and, although Anne had intended it to be friendly, it seemed to Roger stiff and formal. He read it only once and then tore it across and dropped the pieces in the waste-basket with a touch of disappointment he refused to recognize. There was no reason Anne should write to him in another tone, and, after all, the important thing was that he could see Rogie. He had longed for this and resented Anne's monopoly of the boy, but now he knew that seeing Rogie rested alone with him he forgave Anne the bitterness he had felt. He sat down to answer instantly, but he, as Anne, found it difficult to write. Three drafts of a simple note he destroyed, and then suddenly pushed the pad from him. He would go. There was a train in an hour. He would be in the city in the morning, Sunday morning. He had another meeting on the following Monday to complete the itinerary, but when Roger visioned the empty Sunday between, he could not face it.

Half an hour later he had paid his bill and left the hotel. As the train pulled out of the station it began to rain sharp, slanting rain that lashed at the windows of his berth. But Roger, exhausted from the meeting and his own reaction to Anne's letter, slept almost instantly. Nor did he wake until the train clanged into the station. It was still raining, but less violently now. The sharp lashing had quieted to a steady fall. Roger had breakfast, went to the loft to see if there was an urgent matter for him, telephoned to Tom to send another speaker to Los Angeles in time for the Monday night meeting, and then went to the cottage.

It was still and clean and empty as he had left it. He made a fire, and, to persuade himself that he was in no haste, sat before it.

By night he would have seen Anne and Rogie. Whatever was to be the future relation between them would have been fixed. What did he want this relation to be? He felt no anger with Anne. She had been true to herself as he had been to himself. He felt no emotional eagerness to meet Anne, nor reluctance. His sharpest feeling was toward Rogie.

In the past Rogie had been a baby, the child of himself and Anne, not in any way distinct from them. But now that the convention of a home had been taken from Rogie—now that the accepted standard of father, mother, child under one roof had been taken from him, somehow Rogie had become a distinct personality. It was as if, in some strange way, the responsibility of being an individual, a separate social unit, had somehow descended upon the baby; so that now he was almost an adult in the separateness of his personality. Roger could not shake off a ridiculous feeling that he would almost meet Rogie as man to man.

It was after six before Roger climbed the hill, and, closing the old-fashioned garden gate quietly behind him, rang the bell.

At the sound of the bell pealing through the still house, Anne started, and then certainty gripped her beyond motion. Again the bell rang, this time less fiercely, as if eagerness in the ringer were passing. Anne hurried from the room, but at the foot of the stairs she paused, staring at the door, her heart thumping until she could scarcely breathe. It sounded again, this time a sad little clang of disappointment. Anne went slowly to the door and opened it. The cold wind and rain rushed in and then Roger was close to her in the hall; the door shut, and the smell of his damp clothes sharp in the air.

"I thought you must have left town," she said calmly.

"I have been away. I only just got back."

In the closing of the umbrella and the hanging up of his hat and overcoat they escaped a more intimate greeting. But now that the hat and coat were hung and the dripping umbrella safe in the stand, Anne faced the need to take Roger upstairs or into the gloomy parlor to the right. She hesitated.

Roger had come. In a moment, she would bring Rogie to him. The future would hold whatever was possible of friendship for them, or else she would be outside the union of Rogie and his father. Until she knew, she must keep her lonely rooms upstairs as a retreat untouched by Roger's presence. If the future was to hold nothing she did not want memory there. She led the way to the parlor and lit the light.

"I was just getting Rogie ready for bed, but he didn't want to go a bit. He's wide awake."

Roger felt the dismal chill of the room shutting down upon him and struggled against it in the first remark that came to him.

"I don't suppose he will remember me."

"Oh, yes, I think he will. I was afraid he wouldn't know me when I came back from the mountains, he took so long to size me up. But he did."

She pulled down the shades and moved to the door.

"I'll just dress him again; it won't take but a few minutes."

She had not taken Rogie with her then. He had been in the city all the time, guarded by the Mitchells. Roger frowned and began walking up and down the rather long room. At the farther end a narrow glass door, draped with an ugly curtain of monk's cloth, hid the garden beyond. When he reached it, Roger pulled the curtain aside and looked out into the dripping bushes. It was a neglected garden, not riotous with overgrown plants as the cottage garden, but a lank, weed-grown strip, long and narrow. Roger dropped the curtain quickly and, lighting a cigarette, began walking again.

As the ugliness of the room penetrated in detail, the red shaded lamp, the horsehair furniture, the onyx stand, gradually his anger at the Mitchells faded in wonder of Anne. Why had Anne come to live here; Anne, who hated ugly surroundings with physical passion? Was Anne so poor that she could find no better place, or had she changed? Did things like this no longer trouble Anne?

A door upstairs closed. Then the silence continued unbroken. Roger's nerves tightened. Why didn't Anne take him up to what was evidently her part of the house? He lit a cigarette and pulled deeply on it. The smell of the smoke drifted up to Anne. Her throat swelled and she braced her shoulders as she buttoned Rogie's rompers with trembling fingers.

Roger heard her coming and ground out the cigarette on the white mantelshelf. Anne was in the doorway, Rogie in her arms. Just as he had done with Anne, so now Rogie leaned away, frowning, before, with a plunge of delight, he almost threw himself from Anne's arms. Roger took him.

"Well, old chap, who is it? So you knew me, did you?"

Over the baby's head Roger smiled proudly at Anne, and Anne smiled back; for Rogie's hands were already clutching his father's hair as if, in this favorite game, he was making assurance doubly sure.

"You see, he did remember," Anne came nearer. "He really has a wonderful memory."

"I don't believe many his age would have remembered, do you?"

"No, I don't believe they would."

They laughed together. Then the memory of their intimacy, incarnate forever in Rogie, swept Anne, and she turned hastily away and sat down on the sofa. Still holding the child, Roger took the rocker.

Silence came between them. Each searched nervously for some spot in the present on which to meet. But the strangeness of seeing Anne and Rogie in these surroundings, his ignorance of all that had happened to them in the last months, wrapped Roger like a fog, through which he felt Anne receding from him.

But, for the first time, the room was not hideous to Anne. The damp smell of Roger's clothes, the lingering cigarette smoke, filled it with a throbbing vitality it had never had. She felt Roger's masculinity in the very air and it made the few small remarks she managed to catch from the whirling mass of feeling seem thin and artificial.

Roger tried to fill the silence with remarks to Rogie; by tickling him and riding him on his foot. For a while it succeeded. Then Rogie grew tired. His eyes filmed; he leaned more heavily on his father's shoulder.

Roger tried to keep him awake, but Rogie objected with impatient jerks, and Roger looked to Anne. In a few moments he would be asleep. Then he and Anne would be faced by the need to fill the silence or he would have to go.

"He's just about asleep. Perhaps I'd better carry him to bed. He must be awfully heavy for you."

"No, I'll take him. That's something no one seems to do just right. He wakes even if Mrs. Jeffries tries to carry him at this stage, and usually he's as good with her as with me."

She took Rogie from him and Roger watched her go, so small and fair herself. He heard her go slowly up the stairs, for Rogie was indeed a heavy weight for her slight arms.

Again it was still.

Anne put Rogie down, stayed a moment to make sure he would not wake, turned out the light and opened the window. Again the smell of smoke drifted to her and now she heard Roger's step walking up and down as he had used to walk in anger at Hilary Wainwright.

Up and down the long, narrow room Roger walked, trying to force the chaos of thought to ordered sequence by the rhythm of his step. He could not go back to the cottage which Anne had made beautiful and leave her and Rogie in this dismal place. No matter whether Anne had grown indifferent to her surroundings or not, he hated to think of his boy, even as a baby, absorbing impressions of that horsehair furniture and onyx stand. And in imagination he saw sharply Mrs. Jeffries, whom they represented, a dull, thin woman like the aunt who had brought him up. Anne hated to face new situations, and, if she had indeed persuaded herself that this was not so bad, she would go on living here year after year. Roger shuddered. What Anne chose to do was no longer his concern, although the old need to protect rose in him, untinged by any personal emotion, almost against his will. He wanted Anne to be happy and have the things she liked. But Rogie was very definitely his concern; not only his duty, but with the feel of the fat little body as vivid in his arms as when he had held him, Rogie was the deepest motive of his life.

He was just turning again at the far end of the room when Anne returned. He looked up quickly, still frowning over the problem, but said, with a strange, new hesitancy and unsureness:

"Anne, I don't like to think of you and Rogie living in this place. You ought to have the cottage. I only moved back because there seemed no reason not to."

Anne leaned against the onyx stand; she could get no farther, but her voice was steady and she even smiled slightly and looked in forced amusement about the room.

"It is pretty bad, isn't it? But I don't come in here often."

"Are your own any better?"

"Not exactly—in the furnishing, but the sitting-room looks over a garden and there's a little triangle of bay."

Roger locked about, trying to get clearer the location of the house.

"Darn little bay from any part of this house. Anne, won't you take the cottage? I have to be away a great deal now. It doesn't matter much where I live in between times."

"I—don't—see how I can quite—not yet, anyhow." By speaking so, very slowly in assumed consideration of this as a proposition, Anne succeeded in keeping her voice even. "I may get a raise after New Year's, although it's rather soon to expect one, but at present I couldn't pay the cottage rent and have Mrs. Horton too. This is ridiculously cheap and when Mrs. Jeffries is here she takes such care of Rogie."

"Isn't she here all the time?"

"Not at present. She had to go to a brother-in-law. Her sister died and left several children. She may bring them back with her."

"Will you go on just the same then?"

"I don't know. We didn't have time to discuss that. I suppose I can."

Again Roger walked the length of the room, past Anne, and back. When he came to the other end, as if only from this spot could he explain, he said sharply:

"Anne, I don't want it. I don't want any woman, no matter how kind she is, bringing Rogie up. Mrs. Horton didn't matter so much when he was quite little, but he's getting a regular boy now and—I don't want it."

This consideration was all for Rogie, but Anne felt as if some one very strong had picked her up and was carrying her easily.

"I would rather be with him all the time, too, but that's impossible."

"No, it isn't. Anne, I don't want you to work. It isn't necessary. No, don't interrupt, please. Listen. I can do it very well. I've been writing some on the side lately and I've got to be quite a speech-maker. You'd be surprised. Speech-making doesn't pay a great deal, but it's something. Please believe me, I can do it very well."

The floor swayed beneath Anne, but she held tight to the cold onyx and answered quietly:

"I'll have to have time to think about it, Roger. I—can't—decide right away now."

Roger shrugged impatiently. "You can if you try. What is there to prevent? I—" he hesitated—"I won't trouble you in any way. You will be exactly as free as you are now. Anne, if you won't do it for yourself, won't you do it for Rogie?"

"I—don't—know," Anne whispered, her strength almost gone.

Roger turned away. Again he felt himself tilting against the soft, unbendable obstinacy of one of Anne's principles.

"Well," he said at length, "will you agree to this? Will you move back to the cottage and let me pay the rent? Will you?" he repeated more gently when Anne did not answer.

To be back in the cottage in her three white-painted rooms with all the Bay and the hills and the sweet garden. Anne felt herself sinking down into a peace so thick and deep that she could scarcely bear to break it even by an answer. She nodded.

"When will you come? To-night?"

"To-night!"

"Why not? It's early. Have you much to pack?"

"No—only my clothes and Rogie's."

"You could do it, couldn't you?"

"Yes—I—could—do it. There's Mrs. Jeffries though——"

Roger felt as if Anne were opposing tiny twigs to this sweeping need of his to get them both out of that horrible house.

"Do you owe her any rent?"

"No. I just sent her a check for the coming month."

"Then there's no reason you can't. Besides, from what you say, she's not sure of her own plans. Perhaps she won't come back herself."

"I think she will. But she may not."

"Then it's settled, is it? I can get a taxi while you pack?"

"All right." The words quivered and dropped from Anne in a low whisper as if her last resistance had died. She hurried from the room and Roger went out to find a telephone and get the taxi.

Anne could never remember how she packed her trunk or dressed Rogie or when she turned to find Roger beside her telling her the taxi was waiting. She seemed to be escaping from some terrible catastrophe, her whole consciousness taken in the effort to get away. It was only when they were all together in the close intimacy of the cab that Anne realized what she had done.

In a few moments she and Roger and Rogie would be again in the cottage. Beyond that Anne could not think. Nor did her mind clear to any detail, even as she followed Roger, carrying Rogie up the long, familiar flight and into the living-room. He put Rogie on the couch, paid the driver and closed the door. Anne was shaking so she could scarcely stand.

"I'll make a fire. Everything is just the same, except the crib. I—I'll get that. It's in the attic."

Roger went into the kitchen and Anne heard him light the candle-lantern they had always kept for searching things stowed in the tiny loft they called the attic. Then he brought the step ladder and, taking out the small square of ceiling that made the attic entrance, clambered up. Anne's hands were stiff with cold. It seemed impossible that Roger should be doing these things exactly as he had done them ages upon ages ago in the past. Life was so different now that no motion in it could be quite the same. But it was exactly the same, even to Roger's throwing the unwanted things out of his way as he always did, because he was a bad packer and never knew exactly where he had put anything. At last he found it, and threw the mattress out through the opening, scrambling down with the framework. When he had put away the ladder and lantern and dusted his clothes, he brought the crib in.

"Shall I put it up in the bedroom?"

Anne was bent now above the opened trunk searching Rogie's night things which she had thrust hastily in among her own clothes in the rush of packing.

"Yes," she whispered, without looking up, feigning this need not to wake Rogie, already restless from the unusual confusion about him.

When she had found the things she carried Rogie to the fire, undressed him, slipped on the tiny pajamas, and, holding him close, listened with every nerve to Roger moving about in the next room. In a few moments now Rogie would be in his own crib, in the old room. What would Roger do?

At last Roger came from the bedroom.

"I've put it up but I didn't make it—I don't know just how you do it. The blankets and things are all on the bed—I'm sure they're all there."

Anne rose and moved to lay Rogie on the couch while she made up the crib, but Roger held out his arms and Anne laid the baby in them. Very gently Roger sat down in Anne's place and she went in to make the crib. But the blood beat so behind her eyes and her hands trembled so violently that she scarcely knew what she did.

Roger stared across his son's head into the flames, conscious of the new disorder of the room, the opened trunk, Rogie's tiny garments lying on the hearthrug, Anne in the next room.

The past, the present, the future tangled before him, a mass of paths leading in all directions; quagmires of misunderstanding, blind alleys of separate interests, smooth, pleasant spots of memories long past. Here a path to the night by the lake when Anne's lips had clung as eagerly as his own; there the blank wall of the lacquer screen and the desert spots of Anne's carping criticism. Here the path of his deepest faith and belief broke short above the chasm of Anne's indifference. The world was indifferent too. But the world's indifference he could escape in the comradeship of others who believed with him; in solitary hours when, physically rested, his own faith always rose again clear and strong. With the narrowness and indifference of strangers he did not have to rise up and lie down, eat, sleep and be patient.

Then suddenly the past and present divided, and in the space between Roger saw a future, the future Katya had pictured—a devastating passion that would destroy him—or remake life. Roger felt as if a fiery wind were suddenly blowing upon him, and his hold on Rogie tightened. He did not want life broken or remade. He wanted to work on as he was working, accomplish more and more, mold Rogie to the ideal he had once shaped for himself, but which he sometimes felt now was very high and far away. He would get only a little way to it and die. But Rogie might reach and pass it.

The door opened and Anne came in. Quietly Roger handed the baby to her, and she went back again into the bedroom. Roger got up and stood leaning against the mantelshelf.

Had Anne really changed?

Had he?

From the maze of separate interests and ideals could they find one tiny path back to the old dreams? Could they cut a new one to a shared future? Would his arms ever again seek Anne hungrily of their own will? Would hers close about him and hold him fiercely as they had held him by the lake? Was need like this ever reborn?

What was Anne doing in the other room? Why didn't she come back?

She came at last, softly closing the door behind her. At the other end of the hearth she too stood leaning against the mantelshelf, staring down into the fire, as conscious of the familiar room and Roger leaning so close beside her as Roger of her.

What was Roger going to do? What did he expect of her? In a moment would he take his things and go, as many guests had gone after a pleasant evening in those far gone days? Would she lock the door and put out the lights after Roger, as Roger had done after those other guests whose going had meant nothing at all?

Why did Roger stand there staring into the fire? Was he waiting for her to speak?

Without changing her position Anne looked to him. He seemed suddenly, in her absence with Rogie, to have grown strangely weary. His face, turned in profile, looked thinner, sharper, and a little drawn about the corners of the eyes and lips. His shoulders sagged as they only did when he was very tired. When he had grown suddenly tired like this it had always rested him to lie on the couch and have her stroke his head quietly in one long, sweeping gesture from forehead to neck. Anne felt the outline of his head now beneath her hand, and the dry crispness of his hair as if it were actually beneath her touch. She looked quickly back into the fire.

The rain began again and Roger threw another log on the fire. The acacia lashed its long, thin arms and the rising wind cried over the hill. Anne felt Roger's look on her and very slowly her own rose to meet it.

"Shall we try again, Anne?"

"Y-e-s," Anne whispered, and her eyes filled with tears.

Roger drew her gently to him. There was no passion of possession in his hold, but deep tenderness and protection,

"I think it will be all right this time, Princess."

Anne stood close.

"Are you quite sure, Roger, that you want it so?"

"Yes. For myself I am quite sure. And you?"

"I'm—sure—too."

They stood so for a moment, then Roger drew her gently nearer.

Would they ever find it now, that everlasting, undestroyable love that they had missed? Over Anne's fair head, Roger gazed wistfully into the fire.

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Table of Contents

- THE NOISE OF THE WORLD
- CONTENTS
- THE NOISE OF THE WORLD
- CHAPTER ONE
- CHAPTER TWO
- CHAPTER THREE
- CHAPTER FOUR
- CHAPTER FIVE
- CHAPTER SIX
- CHAPTER SEVEN
- CHAPTER EIGHT
- CHAPTER NINE
- CHAPTER TEN
- CHAPTER ELEVEN
- CHAPTER TWELVE
- CHAPTER THIRTEEN
- CHAPTER FOURTEEN
- CHAPTER FIFTEEN
- CHAPTER SIXTEEN
- CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
- CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
- CHAPTER NINETEEN
- CHAPTER TWENTY
- CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
- CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
- CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
- CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
- CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
- CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
- CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
- CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
- CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
- CHAPTER THIRTY
- CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
- CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
- CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
- CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE