"No, no--it cannot be--it is impossible," he said suddenly aloud. And

though he had not the strength to frame the rest of his thought into

words, he knew that the impossible thing he meant was this life, this

torture, this slow martyrdom day by day without hope and without end

except in death. After all there was a way of escape, so why should it

be closed to him? What were these people to him beside those others whom

he might yet serve--the miserable, the poor, the afflicted who would

take from him the gifts which his own had rejected? What duty remained?

What obligation? What responsibility? Step by step he retraced the

nineteen years of his marriage, and he understood for the first time,

that Lydia had given him on her wedding day nothing of herself beyond

the gentle, apologetic gesture which had followed that evening her

involuntary repulsion. From the beginning to the end she had presided

always above, not shared in his destiny. She had wanted what he could

give, but not himself, and when he could give nothing more she had shown

that she wanted him no longer. While he knelt there, still pressing his

forehead against the window sill, the image of her part in his life rose

out of the darkness of his mind, which opened and closed over it, and he

saw her fixed, shining and immovable, to receive his offerings, like

some heathen deity above the sacrificial altar.

The next instant the image faded and was replaced by Emily as she had

looked at him on that last evening with her soft, comforting gaze. The

weakness of self pity came over him, and he asked himself in the

coward's luxury of hopeless questioning, what Emily would have done had

she stood to him in Lydia's place? He saw her parting from him with her

bright courage at the prison doors; he saw her meeting him with her

smile of welcome and of forgiveness when he came out. As once before he

had risen to the vision of service, so now in the agony of his

humiliation he was blessed at last with the understanding of love.

For many minutes he knelt there motionless by the open window, beyond

which he could see the dimly lighted town on which a few drops of rain

had begun to fall. The faint perfume of lilies came up to him from the

walk below, where the broken sprays swept from the house were fading

under the slow, soft rain. With the fragrance the image of Emily

dissolved as in a mist to reappear the minute afterwards in a more

torturing and human shape. He saw her now with her bright dark hair

blown into little curls on her temples, with her radiant brown eyes that

penetrated him with their soft, yet animated glance. The vigorous grace

of her figure, as he had seen it outlined in her scant blue cotton gown

against the background of cedars, remained motionless in his thoughts,

bathed in a clear golden light that tormented his senses.

Rising from his knees with an effort, he struck a match and raised the

green shade from the lamp on the table. Then while the little blue flame

flickered out in his hand, he felt that he was seized by a frantic, an

irresistible impulse of flight. Gathering his clothes from the bed in

the darkness, he pushed them hurriedly back into the bag he had emptied,

and with a last glance at the room which had become unendurable to him,

opened the door and went with a rapid step down the great staircase and

into the hall below. The direction of his journey, as well as the

purpose of it, was obscure in his mind. Yesterday he had told himself

that he could not remain in Tappahannock, and to-day he knew that it was

impossible for him to live on in his father's house. To pass the hall

door meant release--escape to him; beyond that there lay only the

distance and the unknown.

The lights burned dimly on the staircase, and when he reached the bottom

he could see on the carpet the thin reddish stream which issued from the

closed door of the library. As he was about to pass by, a short sob fell

on his ear, arresting him as authoritatively as if it had been the sound

of his own name. While he stood there listening the sobs ceased and then

broke out more loudly, now violent, now smothered, now followed by

quick, furious steps across the floor within. Alice was shut in the room

alone and suffering! With the realisation the bag fell from his hand,

and turning the knob softly, he opened the door and paused for an

instant upon the threshold.

At the noise of the opening door the girl made a single step forward,

and as she raised her hands to conceal her distorted features, her

handkerchief, torn into shreds, fell to the carpet at her feet. Around

her the room showed other signs of an outbreak of anger--the chairs were

pushed hurriedly out of place, the books from the centre table were

lying with opened backs on the floor, and a vase of dahlias lay

overturned and scattered upon the mantel.

"I don't care--I don't care," she repeated, convulsively. "Why do they

always interfere with me? What right has Dick or Uncle Richard to say

whom I shall see or whom I shall not? I hate them all. Mamma is always

against me--so is Uncle Richard--so is everybody. They side with

Dick--always--always."

A single wave of her dark hair had fallen low on her forehead, and this,

with the violent colour of her mouth, gave her a look that was almost

barbaric. The splendid possibilities in her beauty caused him, in the

midst of his pity, a sensation of dread.

"Alice," he said softly, almost in a whisper, and closing the door after

him, he came to the middle of the room and stood near her, though still

without touching her quivering body.

"They side with Dick always," she repeated furiously, "and you will side

with him, too--you will side with him, too!"

For a long pause he looked at her in silence, waiting until the

convulsive tremors of her limbs should cease.

"I shall never side against my daughter," he said very slowly. "Alice,

my child, my darling, are you not really mine?"

A last quivering sob shook through her and she grew suddenly still.

"They will tell you things about me and you will believe them," she

answered sternly.

"Against you, Alice? Against you?"

"You will blame me as they do."

"I love you," he returned, almost as sternly as she had spoken.

An emotional change, so swift that it startled him, broke in her look,

and he saw the bright red of her mouth tremble and open like a flower in

her glowing face. At the sight a sharp joy took possession of him--a

joy that he could measure only by the depth of the agony out of which he

had come. Without moving from his place, he stretched out his arms and

stood waiting.

"Alice, I love you," he said.

Then his arms closed over her, for with the straight flight of a bird

she had flown to his breast.

CHAPTER IV

THE LETTER AND THE SPIRIT

Awaking before dawn, he realised with his first conscious thought that

his life had been irrevocably settled while he slept. His place was

here; he could not break away from it without leaving a ragged edge; and

while he had believed himself to be deciding his future actions, that

greater Destiny, of which his will was only a part, had arranged them

for him during the dim pause of the night. He could feel still on his

arm, as if it had persisted there through his sleep, the firm, almost

viselike pressure of Alice's hands, and his whole sensitive nature

thrilled in response to this mute appeal to his fatherhood. Yes, his

purpose, his mission, and his happiness were here in his father's house.

At breakfast he found a white rosebud on his plate, and as he took it

up, Alice rushed in from the garden and threw herself into his arms.

"I thought you were never, never coming down!" she exclaimed, choking

with laughter, and utterly forgetful of the shadow of death which still

lay over the house. "At first I was afraid you might have gone away in

the night--just as you went that awful day eight years ago. Then I

peeped out and saw your boots, so I went back to bed again and fell

asleep. Oh, I'm so glad you've come! Why did you stay away such an age?

Now, at last, I'll have somebody to take my side against mamma and Dick

and Uncle Richard----"

"But why against them, Alice? Surely they love you just as I do?"

Biting her lips sharply, she bent her heavy brows in a stern and

frowning expression. "Oh, they're horrid," she said angrily, "they want

me to live just as mamma does--shut up all day in a hot room on a

hateful sofa. She reads novels all the time, and I despise books. I want

to go away and see things and to have plenty of clothes and all the fun

I choose. They let Dick do just as he pleases because he's a boy, but

they try to make me dull and stupid and foolish all because I'm a girl.

I won't have it like that and it makes them angry----"

"Oh, well, we'll have fun together, you and I," returned Ordway, with a

sinking heart, "but you must wait a bit till I catch up with you. Don't

be in a precious hurry, if you please."

"Shall we have a good time, then? Shall we?" she persisted, delighted,

kissing him with her warm mouth until he was dazzled by her beauty, her

fascination, her ardent vitality. "And you will do just what I wish,

won't you?" she whispered in his ear as she hung on his shoulder, "you

will be good and kind always? and you will make them leave me alone

about Geoffrey Heath?"

"About Geoffrey Heath?" he repeated, and grew suddenly serious.

"Oh, he's rich and he's fun, too," she responded irritably. "He has

asked me to ride one of his horses--the most beautiful chestnut mare in

the world--but mamma scolds me about it because she says he's not nice

and that he did something once years ago about cards. As if I cared

about cards!"

By the fear that had gripped him he could judge the strength of her hold

on his heart. "Alice, be careful--promise me to be careful!" he

entreated.

At his words he felt her arms relax from their embrace, and she seemed

instantly to turn to marble upon his breast. "Oh, you're just like the

others now. I knew you would be!" she exclaimed, as she drew away from

him.

Before the coldness of her withdrawal he felt that his will went out of

him; and in one despairing flight of imagination he saw what the loss of

her affection would mean now in his life. An emotion which he knew to be

weakness pervaded not only his heart, but his soul and his senses and

the remotest fibre of his physical being. "Whatever comes I shall always

stand by you, Alice," he said.

Though she appeared to be mollified by his subjection, the thin almost

imperceptible furrows caused by the moment's anger, were still visible

between her eyebrows. There was a certain fascination, he found, in

watching these marks of age or of experience come and go on her fresh,

childlike forehead, with its lustrous pallor, from which her splendid

dark hair rolled back, touched with light, like a moonlit cloud. It was

a singular characteristic of her beauty that its appeal was rather to

the imagination than to the eye, and the moments, perhaps, when she

dazzled least were those in which she conquered most through her

enigmatical charm.

"You will buy some clothes, first of all, will you not?" she said, when,

having finished his breakfast, he rose from the table and went out into

the hall.

He met her eyes laughing, filled with happiness at the playful authority

she assumed, and yet fearful still lest some incautious word of his

should bring out those fine nervous wrinkles upon her forehead.

"Give me a week and I'll promise you a fashion plate," he responded

gaily, kissing his hand to her as he went down the steps, and, under the

trailing rose creepers at the gate, out into the street.

Rain had fallen in the night, and the ground was covered with shining

puddles beneath which a few autumn leaves showed drenched and beaten.

From the golden and red maples above a damp odour was wafted down into

his face by the October wind, which now rose and now died away with a

gentle sound. In the pale sunshine, which had not yet drained the

moisture from the bricks, a wonderful freshness seemed to emanate from

the sky and the earth and the white-pillared houses.

As he approached the corner, he heard his name called in a clear

emphatic voice from the opposite sidewalk, and turning his head, he saw

hastening toward him, a little elderly lady in a black silk gown trimmed

heavily with bugles. As she neared him, followed by a young Negro maid

bearing a market basket filled with vegetables, he recognised her as an

intimate friend of his mother's, whom he had known familiarly in his

childhood as "Aunt Lucy." It seemed so long now since his mother's death

that he was attacked by a ghostly sensation, as if he were dreaming over

his past life, while he stood face to face with the old lady's small

soldierly figure and listened to the crisp, emphatic tones in which she

welcomed him back to Botetourt. He remembered his frequent visits to her

solemn old house, which she kept so dark that he had always stumbled

over the two embroidered ottomans on the parlour hearth. He recalled the

smell of spices which had hung about her storeroom, and the raspberry

preserves which she had never failed to give him out of a blue china

jar.

"Why, my dear, blessed child, it's such a pleasure to have you back!"

she exclaimed now with an effusion which he felt to be the outward veil

of some hidden embarrassment. "You must come sometimes and let me talk

to you about your mother. I knew your mother so well--I was one of her

bridesmaids."

Seizing his arm in her little firm, clawlike hands, she assured him with

animation of her delight at his return, alluding in a shaking voice to

his mother, and urging him to come to sit with her whenever he could

stand the gloom of her empty house.

"And you will give me raspberry preserves out of the blue china jar?" he

asked, laughing, "and let me feed crackers to the green parrot?"

"What a boy! What a boy!" she returned. "You remember everything. The

parrot is dead--my poor Polly!--but there is a second."

Her effusiveness, her volubility, which seemed to him to be the result

of concealed embarrassment, produced in him presently a feeling of

distrust, almost of resentment, and he remembered the next instant that,

in his childhood, she had been looked upon as a creature of uncontrolled

charitable impulses. Upon the occasion of his last meeting with her was

she not hastening upon some ministering errand to the city gaol? At the

casual recollection an unreasoning bitterness awoke in his mind; her

reiterated raptures fell with a strange effect of irritation upon his

ears; and he knew now that he could never bring himself to enter her

house again, that he could never accept her preserved raspberries out of

the blue china jar. Her reception of him, he saw, was but a part of the

general reception of Botetourt. Like her the town would be voluble,

unnatural, overdone in its kindness, hiding within itself a furtive

constraint as if it addressed its speeches to the sensitive sufferer

from some incurable malady. The very tenderness, the exaggerated

sympathy in its manner would hardly have been different, he understood,

if he had been recently discharged as harmless, yet half-distraught,

from an asylum for the insane.

As the days went on this idea, instead of dissolving, became unalterably

lodged in his brain. Gradually he retreated further and further into

himself, until the spiritual isolation in which he lived appeared to

him more and more like the isolation of the prison. His figure had

become a familiar one in the streets of Botetourt, yet he lived bodily

among the people without entering into their lives or sharing in any

degree the emotions that moved their hearts. Only in periods of sorrow

did he go willingly into the houses of those of his own class, though he

had found a way from the beginning to reach the poor, the distressed, or

the physically afflicted. His tall, slightly stooping figure, in its

loose black clothes, his dark head, with the thick locks of iron gray

hair upon the temples, his sparkling blue eyes, his bright, almost

boyish smile, and the peculiar, unforgettable charm of his

presence--these were the things which those in sickness or poverty began

to recognise and to look for. In his own home he lived, except for the

fitful tenderness of Alice, as much apart as he felt himself to be in

the little town. They were considerate of him, but their consideration,

he knew, contained an ineradicable suspicion, and in the house as

outside, he was surrounded by the watchful regard that is given to the

infirm or the mentally diseased. He read this in Lydia's gently averted

eyes; he felt it in Richard Ordway's constrained manner; he detected it

even in the silent haste with which the servants fulfilled his slightest

wish.

His work in his uncle's office, he had soon found to be of the most

mechanical character, a mere pretext to give him daily employment, and

he told himself, in a moment of bitterness that it was convincing proof

of the opinion which the older man must hold of his honesty or of his

mental capacity. It became presently little more than a hopeless round

to him--this morning walk through the sunny streets, past the ivied

walls of the old church, to the clean, varnish scented office, where he

sat, until the luncheon hour, under the hard, though not unkind, eyes of

the man who reminded him at every instant of his dead father. And the

bitterest part of it, after all, was that the closer he came to the

character of Richard Ordway, the profounder grew his respect for his

uncle's unwavering professional honour. The old man would have starved,

he knew, rather than have held back a penny that was not legally his own

or have owed a debt that he felt had begun to weigh, however lightly,

upon his conscience. Yet this lawyer of scrupulous rectitude was the

husband, his nephew suspected, of a neglected, a wretchedly unhappy

wife--a small, nervous creature, whom he had married, shortly after the

death of his first wife, some twenty years ago. The secret of this

unhappiness Daniel had discovered almost by intuition on the day of his

father's funeral, when he had looked up suddenly in the cemetery to find

his uncle's wife regarding him with a pair of wonderful, pathetic eyes,

which seemed to gaze at him sadly out of a blue mist. So full of

sympathy and understanding was her look that the memory of it had

returned to him more than a year later, and had caused him to stop at

her gate one November afternoon as he was returning from his office

work. After an instant's pause, and an uncertain glance at the big

brick house with its clean white columns, he ascended the steps and rang

the bell for the first time since his boyhood.

The house was one of the most charming in Botetourt, but as he followed

the servant down the hall to the library, it seemed to him that all

these high, imposing walls, with their fine white woodwork, enclosed but

so much empty space to fill with loneliness. His uncle had no children,

and the sad, fair-haired little wife appeared to be always alone and

always suffering.

She was seated now in a low rocking-chair beside the window, and as she

turned her head at his entrance, he could see, through the lace

curtains, a few pale November leaves, which fluttered down from an elm

tree beside the porch. When she looked at him he noticed that her eyes

were large and beautiful and of a changeable misty colour which appeared

now gray, now violet.

"It is so good of you, Daniel," she said, in a soft, grateful voice,

removing her work-basket from the chair at her side so that he might

come within the reach of her short-sighted gaze.

"I've wanted to come ever since I saw you for the first time after my

return," he answered cheerfully. "It is strange, isn't it?--that I

hardly remember you when I lived here. You were always ill, were you

not?"

"Yes, ill almost always," she replied, smiling as she met his glance.

"When you were married I remember I couldn't go to the wedding because

I had been in bed for three months. But that's all over now," she

added, fearing to produce in him a momentary depression. "I am well

again, you see, so the past doesn't matter."

"The past doesn't matter," he repeated in a low voice, struck by the

words as if they held more than their surface meaning for his ears.

She nodded gravely. "How can it matter if one is really happy at last."

"And you are happy at last?"

As he watched her it seemed to him that a pale flame burned in her face,

tinging its sallow wanness with a golden light. "I am at peace and is

that not happiness?" she asked.

"But you were sad once--that day in the cemetery? I felt it."

"That was while I was still struggling," she answered, "and it always

hurts one to struggle. I wanted happiness--I kept on wanting it even

after I ceased to believe in its existence. I fought very hard--oh,

desperately hard--but now I have learned that the only way to get

anything is to give it up. Happiness is like everything else, it is only

when one gives it back to God that one really possesses it."

He had never seen a face in which the soul spoke so clearly, and her

look rather than her words came to him like the touch of divine healing.

"When I saw you standing beside your father's grave, I knew that you

were just where I had been for so many years--that you were still

telling your self that things were too hard, that they were

unendurable. I had been through it all, you see, so I understood."

"But how could you know the bitterness, the shame of feeling that it was

all the result of my own mistake--of my own sin."

Taking his hand in hers, she sat for a moment in silence with her

ecstatic gaze fixed on his face. "I know that in spite of your sin you

are better than they are," she said at last, "because your sin was on

the outside--a thing to be sloughed off and left far behind, while their

self-righteousness is of their very souls----"

"Oh, hush, hush," he interrupted sternly, "they have forgiven me for

what I did, that is enough."

"Sixteen years ago," she returned, dropping her voice, "my husband

forgave me in the same way, and he has never forgotten it."

At his start of surprise, he felt that she clung the more closely to the

hand she held. "Oh, it wasn't so big a thing," she went on, "I had been

married to him for five years, and I was very unhappy when I met someone

who seemed to understand and to love me. For a time I was almost insane

with the wonder and delight of it--I might have gone away with him--with

the other--in my first rapture, had not Richard found it all out two

days before. He behaved very generously--he forgave me. I should have

been happier," she added a little wistfully, "if he had not."

As she broke off trembling, he lifted her hand to his lips, kissing it

with tenderness, almost with passion. "Then that was the beginning of

your unhappiness--of your long illness!" he exclaimed.

She nodded smiling, while a tear ran slowly down her flushed cheek. "He

forgave me sixteen years ago and he has never allowed me to forget it

one hour--hardly a minute since."

"Then you understand how bitter--how intolerable it is!" he returned in

an outbreak of anger.

"I thought I knew," she replied more firmly than he had ever heard her

speak, "but I learned afterwards that it was a mistake. I see now that

they are kind--that they are good in their way, and I love them for it.

It isn't our way, I know, but the essence of charity, after all, is to

learn to appreciate goodness in all its expressions, no matter how

different they may be from our own. Even Richard is kind--he means

everything for the best, and it is only his nature that is

straightened--that is narrow--not his will. I felt bitterly once, but

not now because I am so happy at last."

Beyond the pale outline of her head, he saw the elm leaves drifting

slowly down, and beyond them the low roofs and the dim church spires of

the quiet town. Was it possible that even here he might find peace in

the heart of the storm?

"It is only since I have given my happiness back to God that it is

really mine," she said, and it seemed to him again that her soul

gathered brightness and shone in her face.

CHAPTER V

THE WILL OF ALICE

When he reached home the servant who helped him out of his overcoat,

informed him at the same time that his uncle awaited him in the library.

With the news a strange chill came over him as if he had left something

warm and bright in the November sunset outside. For an instant it seemed

to him that he must turn back--that he could not go forward. Then with a

gesture of assent, he crossed the hall and entered the library, where he

found Lydia and the children as well as Richard Ordway.

The lamps were unlit, and the mellow light of the sunset fell through

the interlacing half-bared boughs of the golden poplar beyond the

window. This light, so rich, so vivid, steeped the old mahogany

furniture and the faded family portraits in a glow which seemed to

Daniel to release, for the first time, some latent romantic spirit that

had dwelt in the room. In the midst of this glamor of historic

atmosphere, the four figures, gathered so closely together against the

clear space of the window, with its network of poplar leaves beyond the

panes, borrowed for the moment a strange effectiveness of pose, a

singular intensity of outline. Not only the figures, but the very

objects by which they were surrounded appeared to vibrate in response to

a tragic impulse.

Richard Ordway was standing upon the hearthrug, his fine head and

profile limned sharply against the pale brown wall at his side. His

right hand was on Lydia's shoulder, who sat motionless, as if she had

fallen there, with her gentle, flower-like head lying upon the arm of

her son. Before them, as before her judges, Alice was drawn to her full

height, her girlish body held tense and quivering, her splendid hair

loosened about her forehead, her trembling mouth making a violent

contrast to the intense pallor of her face.

Right or wrong Ordway saw only that she was standing alone, and as he

crossed the threshold, he turned toward her and held out his hand.

"Alice," he said softly, as if the others were not present. Without

raising her eyes, she shrank from him in the direction of Richard

Ordway, as if shielding herself behind the iron fortitude of the man

whom she so bitterly disliked.

"Alice has been out driving alone with Geoffrey Heath all the

afternoon," said Lydia in her clear, calm voice. "We had forbidden it,

but she says that you knew of it and did not object to her going."

With the knowledge of the lie, Ordway grew red with humiliation, while

his gaze remained fastened on the figure in the carpet at Alice's feet.

He could not look at her, for he felt that her shame was scorching him

like a hot wind. To look at her at the moment meant to convict her, and

this his heart told him he could never do. He was conscious of the loud

ticking of the clock, of the regular tapping of Richard's fingers upon

the marble mantel-piece, of the fading light on the poplar leaves beyond

the window, and presently of the rapid roll of a carriage that went by

in the street. Each of these sounds produced in him a curious irritation

like a physical smart, and he felt again something of the dumb

resentment with which he had entered his wife's dressing-room on the

morning of his arrest. Then a smothered sob reached his ear, and Alice

began to tremble from head to foot at his side. Lifting his eyes at

last, he made a step forward and drew her into his arms.

"Was it so very wrong? I am sorry," he said to Lydia over the bowed head

of their child. Until the words were uttered, and he felt Alice's tense

body relax in his arms, he had not realised that in taking sides with

her, he was not only making himself responsible for her fault, he was,

in truth, actually sharing in the lie that she had spoken. The choice

was an unconscious one, yet he knew even in the ensuing moment of his

clearer judgment that it had been inevitable--that from the first

instant, when he had paused speechless upon the threshold, there had

been open to him no other course.

"I am sorry if it was wrong," he repeated, turning his glance now upon

Richard Ordway.

"Do you know anything of Geoffrey Heath? Have you heard him spoken of by

decent people since you have been in Botetourt?" asked the old man

sternly.

"I have heard little of him," answered Daniel, "and that little was far

from good. We are sorry, Alice, are we not? It must not happen again if

we can help it."

"It has happened before," said Lydia, lifting her head from Dick's arm,

where it had lain. "It was then that I forbade her to see him alone."

"I did not know," responded Daniel, "but she will do as you wish

hereafter. Will you not, Alice?"

"How does it concern them? What have they to do with me?" demanded

Alice, turning in his arms to face her mother with a defiant and angry

look, "they have never cared for me--they have always preferred

Dick--always, even when I was a little child."

He saw Lydia grow white and hide her drooping face again on Dick's

shoulder. "You are unjust to your mother, Alice," he said gravely, "she

has loved you always, and I have loved you."

"Oh, you are different--I would die for you!" she exclaimed

passionately, as she wept on his breast.

While he stood there holding her in his arms, it seemed to him that he

could feel like an electric current the wave of feeling which had swept

Alice and himself together. The inheritance which was his had descended

to her also with its keen joys and its sharp anguish. Even the road

which he had travelled so lately in weariness was the one upon which her

brave young feet were now set. Not his alone, but his child's also, was

this mixture of strength and weakness, of gaiety and sadness, of

bitterness and compassion.

"If you will leave me alone with her, I think I can make her understand

what you wish," he said, lifting his eyes from the dark head on his

breast to Lydia, who had risen and was standing before him with her

pensive, inquiring gaze fixed on his face. "She is like me," he added

abruptly, "in so many ways."

"Yes, she is like you, I have always thought so," returned Lydia,

quietly.

"And for that reason, perhaps, you have never quite understood her," he

responded.

She bowed her head as if too polite or too indifferent to dissent from

his words; and then slipping her hand through Richard Ordway's arm, she

stood waiting patiently while the old man delivered his last bit of

remonstrance.

"Try to curb her impulses, Daniel, or you will regret it."

He went out, still holding Lydia's hand, and a moment afterwards, when

Daniel looked up at the sound of the hall door closing quickly, he saw

that Dick also had vanished, and that he was alone in the library with

Alice, who still sobbed on his breast.

A few moments before it had seemed to him that he needed only to be

alone with her to make all perfectly clear between them. But when the

others had passed out, and the door had closed at last on the empty

silence in which they stood, he found that the words which he had meant

to utter had vanished hopelessly from his mind. He had said to Lydia

that Alice was like himself, but there had never been an hour in his

life when his hatred of a lie had not been as intense, as

uncompromising, as it was to-day. And this lie which she had spoken

appeared to divide them now like a drawn sword.

"Alice," he said, breaking with an effort through the embarrassment

which had held him speechless, "will you give me your word of honour

that you will never tell me a falsehood again?"

She stirred slightly in his arms, and he felt her body grow soft and

yielding. "I didn't to you," she answered, "oh, I wouldn't to you."

"Not to the others then. Will you promise?"

Her warm young arm tightened about his neck. "I didn't mean to--I didn't

mean to," she protested between her sobs, "but they forced me to do it.

It was more than half their fault--they are so--so hateful! I tried to

think of something else, but there was nothing to say, and I knew you

would stand by me----"

"You have almost broken my heart," he answered, "for you have lied,

Alice, you have lied."

She lifted her head and the next instant he felt her mouth on his cheek,

"I wish I were dead! I have hurt you and I wish I were dead!" she cried.

"It is not hurting me that I mind--you may do that and welcome. It is

hurting yourself, my child, my Alice," he answered; and pressing her

upturned face back on his arm, he bent over her in an ecstasy of

emotion, calling her his daughter, his darling, the one joy of his life.

The iron in his nature had melted beneath her warm touch, and he felt

again the thrill, half agony, half rapture, with which he had received

her into his arms on the day of her birth. That day was nearer to him

now than was the minute in which he stood, and he could trace still the

soft, babyish curves in the face which nestled so penitently on his arm.

His very fear for her moved him into a deeper tenderness, and the appeal

she made to him now was one with the appeal of her infancy, for its

power lay in her weakness, not in her strength.

"Be truthful with me, Alice," he said, "and remember that nothing can

separate me from you."

An hour later when he parted from her and went upstairs, he heard

Lydia's voice calling to him through her half open door, and turning

obediently, he entered her bedroom for the first time since the night of

his return. Now as then the luxury, the softness, of his wife's

surroundings produced in him a curious depression, an enervation of

body; and he stood for an instant vainly striving to close his nostrils

against the delicious perfume which floated from her lace-trimmed

dressing-table.

Lydia, still in her light mourning gown, was standing, when he entered,

before a little marquetry desk in one corner, her eyes on an open letter

which she appeared to have left partially unread.

"I wanted to tell you, Daniel," she began at once, approaching the point

with a directness which left him no time to wonder as to the purpose of

her summons, "that Alice's intimacy with Geoffrey Heath has already been

commented upon in Botetourt. Cousin Paulina has actually written to me

for an explanation."

"Cousin Paulina?" he repeated vaguely, and remembered immediately that

the lady in question was his wife's one rich relation--an elderly female

who was greatly respected for her fortune, which she spent entirely in

gratifying her personal passion for trinkets. "Oh, yes," he added

flippantly, "the old lady who used to look like a heathen idol got up

for the sacrifice."

He felt that his levity was out of place, yet he went on rashly because

he knew that he was doomed forever to appear at a disadvantage in

Lydia's presence. She would never believe in him--his best motives would

wear always to her the covering of hypocrisy; and the very hopelessness

of ever convincing her goaded him at times into the reckless folly of

despair.

"She writes me that people are talking of it," she resumed, sweetly, as

if his untimely mirth had returned still-born into the vacancy from

which it emerged.

"Who is this Geoffrey Heath you speak of so incessantly?" he demanded.

"There was a Heath, I remember, who had a place near us in the country,

and kept a barroom or a butcher's shop or something in town."

"That was the father," replied Lydia, with a shudder which deepened the

slightly scornful curve of her lip. "He was a respectable old man, I

believe, and made his fortune quite honestly, however it was. It was

only after his son began to grow up that he became socially

ambitious----"

"And is that all you have against him?"

"Oh, there's nothing against the old man--nothing at least except the

glaring bad taste he showed in that monstrous house he built in Henry

Street. He's dead now, you know."

"Then the son has all the money and the house, too, hasn't he?"

"All he hasn't wasted, yes."

As she spoke she subsided into a chair, with a graceful, eddying motion

of her black chiffon draperies, and continued the conversation with an

expression of smiling weariness. All her attitudes were effective, and

he was struck, while he stood, embarrassed and awkward, before her, by

the plaintive grace that she introduced into her smallest gesture.

Though he was aware that he saw her now too clearly for passion, the

appeal of her delicate fairness went suddenly to his head.

"Then there's not much to be said for the chap, I suppose?" he asked

abruptly, fearing the prolonged strain of the silence.

"Very little for him, but a good deal about him, according to Cousin

Paulina. It seems that three years ago he was sent away from the

University for something disgraceful--cheating at cards, I believe; and

since then he has been conspicuous chiefly because of his low

associations. How Alice met him, I could never understand--I can't

understand now."

"And do you think she cares for him--that she even imagines that she

does?" he demanded, while his terror rose in his throat and choked back

his words.

"She will not confess it--how could she?" replied Lydia wearily, "I

believe it is only wildness, recklessness, lack of discipline that

prompts her. Yet he is good-looking--in a vulgar way," she added in

disgust, "and Alice has always seemed to like vulgar things."

Her eyes rested on him, not directly, but as if they merely included him

in their general pensive survey of the world; yet he read the accusation

in her gentle avoidance of his gaze as plainly as she had uttered in it

her clear, flute-like tones.

"It is very important," she went on, "that she should be curbed in her

impulses, in her extravagance. Already her bills are larger than mine

and yet she is never satisfied with the amount of her allowance. We can

do nothing with her, Uncle Richard and I, but she seems to yield, in a

measure, to your influence, and we thought--we hoped----"

"I will--I will," he answered. "I will give my life to help her if need

be. But Lydia," he broke out more earnestly, "you must stand by and aid

me for her sake, for the sake of our child, we must work together----"

Half rising in her chair, she looked at him fixedly a moment, while he

saw her pupils dilate almost as if she were in physical fear.

"But what can I do? I have done all I could," she protested, with an

injured look. By this look, without so much as a gesture, she put the

space of the whole room between them. The corners of her mouth quivered

and drooped, and he watched the pathos creep back into her light blue

eyes. "I have given up my whole life to the children since--since----"

She broke off in a frightened whisper, but the unfinished sentence was

more expressive than a volley of reproaches would have been. There was

something in her thoughts too horrible to put into words, and this

something of which she could not bring herself to speak, would have had

no place in her existence except for him. He felt cowed suddenly, as if

he had been physically beaten and thrust aside.

"You have been very brave--I know--I appreciate it all," he said, and

while he spoke he drew away from her until he stood with his back

against one of the amber satin curtains. Instinctively he put out his

hand for support, and as it closed over the heavy draperies, he felt

that the hard silken texture made his flesh creep. The physical

sensation, brief as it was, recalled in some strange way the effect upon

him of Lydia's smooth and shining surface when he had knelt before her

on the night of his homecoming. Yet it was with difficulty even now that

he could free himself from the conviction that her emotional apathy was

but one aspect of innocence. Would he admit to-day that what he had once

worshipped as purity of soul was but the frost of an unnatural coldness

of nature? All at once, as he looked at her, he found himself reminded

by her calm forehead, her classic features, of the sculptured front of

a marble tomb which he had seen in some foreign gallery. Was there

death, after all, not life hidden for him in her plaintive beauty? The

next instant, as he watched her, he told himself that such questions

belonged to the evil promptings of his own nature.

"I realise all that you have been, all that you have suffered," he said

at last, aware that his words sounded hysterical in the icy constraint

which surrounded them.

When his speech was out, his embarrassment became so great that he found

himself presently measuring the distance which divided him from the

closed door. With a last effort of will, he went toward her and

stretched out his hand in a gesture that was almost one of entreaty.

"Lydia," he asked, "is it too painful for you to have me here? Would it

be any better for you if I went away?"

As he moved toward her she bent over with a nervous, mechanical movement

to arrange her train, and before replying to his question, she laid each

separate fold in place. "Why, by no means," she answered, looking up

with her conventional smile. "It would only mean--wouldn't it?--that

people would begin to wonder all over again?"

CHAPTER VI

THE IRON BARS

As the days went on it seemed to him that his nature, repressed in so

many other directions, was concentrated at last in a single channel of

feeling. The one outlet was his passion for Alice, and nothing that

concerned her was too remote or too trivial to engross him--her clothes,

her friendships, the particular chocolate creams for which she had once

expressed a preference. To fill her life with amusements that would

withdraw her erring impulses from Geoffrey Heath became for a time his

absorbing purpose.

At first he told himself in a kind of rapture that success was apparent

in his earliest and slightest efforts. For weeks Alice appeared to find

interest and animation in his presence. She flattered, scolded, caressed

and tyrannised, but with each day, each hour, she grew nearer his heart

and became more firmly interwoven into his life.

Then suddenly a change came over her, and one day when she had been

kissing him with "butterfly kisses" on his forehead, he felt her

suddenly grow restless and draw back impatiently as if seeking a fresh

diversion. A bored look had come into her eyes and he saw the three

little wrinkles gather between her eyebrows.

"Alice," he said, alarmed by the swift alteration, "are you tired of the

house? Shall we ride together?"

She shook her head, half pettishly, half playfully, "I can't--I've an

engagement," she responded.

"An engagement?" he repeated inquiringly. "Why, I thought we were always

to ride when it was fair."

"I promised one of the girls to go to tea with her," she repeated, after

a minute. "It isn't a real tea, but she wanted to talk to me, so I said

I would go."

"Well, I'm glad you did--don't give up the girls," he answered, relieved

at once by the explanation.

In the evening when she returned, shortly after dark, "one of the girls"

as she called laughingly from the library, had come home for the night

with her. Ordway heard them chatting gayly together, but, when he went

in for a moment before going upstairs to dress, they lapsed immediately

into an embarrassed silence. Alice's visitor was a pretty, gray-eyed,

flaxen-haired young woman named Jenny Lane, who smiled in a frightened

way and answered "Yes--no," when he spoke to her, as if she offered him

the choice of his favourite monosyllable from her lips. Clearly the

subject which animated them was one in which, even as Alice's father, he

could have no share.

For weeks after this it seemed to him that a silence fell gradually

between them--that silence of the heart which is so much more oppressive

than the mere outward silence of the lips. It was not, he told himself

again and again, that there had come a perceptible change in her

manner. She still met him at breakfast with her flower and her caress,

still flung herself into his arms at unexpected moments, still coaxed

and upbraided in her passionate, childish voice. Nevertheless, the

difference was there, and he recognised it with a pang even while he

demanded of himself in what breathless suspension of feeling it could

consist? Her caresses were as frequent, but the fervour, the

responsiveness, had gone out of them; and he was brought at last face to

face with the knowledge that her first vivid delight in him had departed

forever. The thing which absorbed her now was a thing in which he had no

share, no recognition; and true to her temperament, her whole impulsive

being had directed itself into this new channel. "She is young and it is

only natural that she should wish to have her school friends about her,"

he thought with a smile.

In the beginning it had been an easy matter to efface his personality

and stand out of the way of Alice's life, but as the weeks drew on into

months and the months into a year, he found that he had been left aside

not only by his daughter, but by the rest of the household as well. In

his home he felt himself to exist presently in an ignored, yet obvious

way like a familiar piece of household furniture, which is neither

commented upon nor wilfully overlooked. It would have occasioned, he

supposed, some vague exclamations of surprise had he failed to appear in

his proper place at the breakfast table, but as long as his accustomed

seat was occupied all further use for his existence seemed at an end.

He was not necessary, he was not even enjoyed, but he was tolerated.

Before this passive indifference, which was worse to him than direct

hostility, he found that his sympathies, his impulses, and even his

personality, were invaded by an apathy that paralysed the very sources

of his will. He beheld himself as the cause of the gloom, the suspicion,

the sadness, that surrounded him, and as the cause, too, of Alice's

wildness and of the pathetic loneliness in which Lydia lived. But for

him, he told himself, there would have been no shadow upon the

household; and his wife's pensive smile was like a knife in his heart

whenever he looked up from his place at the table and met it unawares.

At Tappahannock he had sometimes believed that his past was a skeleton

which he had left behind; here he had grown, as the years went by, to

think of it as a coffin which had shut over him and from which there was

no escape. And with the realisation of this, a blighting remorse, a

painful humbleness awoke in his soul, and was revealed outwardly in his

face, in his walk, in his embarrassed movements. As he passed up and

down the staircase, he went softly lest the heavy sound of his footsteps

should become an annoyance to Lydia's sensitive ears. His manner lost

its boyish freedom and grew awkward and nervous, and when he gave an

order to the servants it seemed to him that a dreadful timidity sounded

in his voice. He began to grow old suddenly in a year, before middle age

had as yet had time to soften the way.

Looking in the glass one morning, when he had been less than three years

in Botetourt, he discovered that the dark locks upon his forehead had

turned almost white, and that his shoulders were losing gradually their

youthful erectness of carriage. And it seemed to him that the courage

with which he might have once broken away and begun anew had departed

from him in this new and paralysing humility, which was like the

humility of a helpless and burdensome old age.

After a day of peculiar loneliness, he was returning from Richard's

office on this same afternoon, when a voice called to him from beneath

the fringed linen cover of a little phaeton which had driven up to the

crossing. Turning in surprise he found Aunt Lucy holding the reins over

a fat pony, while she sat very erect, with her trim, soldierly figure

emerging from a mountain of brown-paper parcels.

"This is the very chance I've been looking for, Daniel Ordway!" she

exclaimed, in her emphatic voice. "Do you know, sir, that you have not

entered my house once in the last three years?"

"Yes," he replied, "I know--but the fact is that I have hardly been

anywhere since I came back."

"And why is that?" she demanded sharply.

He shook his head, "I don't know. Perhaps you can tell me."

"Yes, I can tell you," she snapped back, with a rudeness which, in some

singular way, seemed to him kinder than the studied politeness that he

had met. "It's because, in spite of all you've gone through, you are

still more than half a fool, Daniel Ordway."

"Oh, you're right, I dare say," he acknowledged bitterly.

With a frown, which struck him curiously as the wrong side of a smile,

she nodded her head while she made room for him among the brown-paper

parcels on the low linen covered seat of the phaeton. "Come in here, I

want to talk to you," she said, "there's a little matter about which I

should like your help."

"My help?" he repeated in astonishment, as a sensation of pleasure shot

through his heart. It was so seldom that anybody asked his help in

Botetourt. "Is the second green parrot dead, and do you want me to dig

the grave?" he inquired, checking his unseemly derision as he met her

warning glance.

"Polly is perfectly well," she returned, rapping him smartly upon the

knee with her little tightly closed black fan which she carried as if it

were a baton, "but I do not like Richard Ordway."

The suddenness of her announcement, following so inappropriately her

comment upon the health of the green parrot, caused him to start from

his seat in the amazement with which he faced her. Then he broke into an

echo of his old boyish merriment. "You don't?" he retorted flippantly.

"Well, Lydia does."

Her eyes blinked rapidly in the midst of her wrinkled little face, and

bending over she flicked the back of the fat pony gently with the end

of the whip. "Oh, I'm not sure I like Lydia," she responded, "though, of

course, Lydia is a saint."

"Yes, Lydia is a saint," he affirmed.

"Well, I'm not talking about Lydia," she resumed presently, "though

there's something I've always had a burning curiosity to find out." For

an instant she held back, and then made her charge with a kind of

desperate courage. "Is she really a saint?" she questioned, "or is it

only the way that she wears her hair?"

Her question was so like the spoken sound of his own dreadful suspicion

that it took away his breath completely, while he stared at her with a

gasp that was evenly divided between a laugh and a groan.

"Oh, she's a saint, there's no doubt of that," he insisted loyally.

"Then I'll let her rest," she replied, "and I'm glad, heaven knows, to

have my doubts at an end. But where do you imagine that I am taking

you?"

"For a drive, I hope," he answered, smiling.

"It's not," she rejoined grimly, "it's for a visit."

"A visit?" he repeated, starting up with the impulse to jump over the

moving wheel, "but I never visit."

She reached out her wiry little fingers, which clung like a bird's claw,

and drew him by force back upon the seat.

"I am taking you to see Adam Crowley," she explained, "do you remember

him?"

"Crowley?" he repeated the name as he searched his memory. "Why, yes,

he was my father's clerk for forty years, wasn't he? I asked when I came

home what had become of him. So he is still living?"

"He was paralysed in one arm some years ago, and it seems he has lost

all his savings in some investment your father had advised him to make.

Of course, there was no legal question of a debt to him, but until the

day your father died he had always made ample provision for the old

man's support. Crowley had always believed that the allowance would be

continued--that there would be a mention made of him in the will."

"And there was none?"

"It was an oversight, Crowley is still convinced, for he says he had a

distinct promise."

"Then surely my uncle will fulfil the trust? He is an honourable man."

She shook her head. "I don't know that he is so much 'honourable' as he

is 'lawful.' The written obligation is the one which binds him like

steel, but I don't think he cares whether a thing is right or wrong,

just or unjust, as long as it is the law. The letter holds him, but I

doubt if he has ever even felt the motion of the spirit. If he ever felt

it," she concluded with grim humour, "he would probably try to drive it

out with quinine."

"Are we going there now--to see Crowley, I mean?"

"If you don't mind. Of course there may be nothing that you can do--but

I thought that you might, perhaps, speak to Richard about it."

He shook his head, "No, I can't speak to my uncle, though I think you

are unjust to him," he answered, after a pause in which the full joy of

her appeal had swept through his heart, "but I have an income of my own,

you know, and out of this, I can help Crowley."

For an instant she did not reply, and he felt her thin, upright little

figure grow rigid at his side. Then turning with a start, she laid her

hand, in its black lace mitten, upon his knee.

"O my boy, you are your mother all over again!" she said.

After this they drove on in silence down one of the shaded streets,

where rows of neat little houses, packed together like pasteboard boxes,

were divided from the unpaved sidewalks by low whitewashed fences. At

one of these doors the phaeton presently drew up, and dropping the reins

on the pony's back, Aunt Lucy alighted with a bound between the wheels,

and began with Ordway's help, to remove the paper parcels from the seat.

When their arms were full, she pushed open the gate, and led him up the

short walk to the door where an old man, wearing a knitted shawl, sat in

an invalid's chair beyond the threshold. At the sound of their footsteps

Crowley turned on them a cheerful wrinkled face which was brightened by

a pair of twinkling black eyes that gave him an innocent and merry look.

"I knew you'd come around," he said, smiling with his toothless mouth

like an amiable infant. "Matildy has been complaining that the coffee

gave out at breakfast, but I said 'twas only a sign that you were

coming. Everything bad is the sign of something good, that's what I

say."

"I've brought something better than coffee to-day, Adam," replied Aunt

Lucy, seating herself upon the doorstep. "This is Daniel Ordway--do you

remember him?"

The old man bent forward, without moving his withered hand, which lay

outstretched on the cushioned arm of the chair, and it seemed to Ordway

that the smiling black eyes pierced to his heart. "Oh, I remember him, I

remember him," said Crowley, "poor boy--poor boy."

"He's come back now," rejoined Aunt Lucy, raising her voice, "and he has

come to see you."

"He's like his mother," remarked Crowley, almost in a whisper, "and I'm

glad of that, though his father was a good man. But there are some good

people who do more harm than bad ones," he added, "and I always knew

that old Daniel Ordway would ruin his son." A chuckle broke from him,

"but your mother: I can see her now running out bareheaded in the snow

to scold me for not having on my overcoat. She was always seeing with

other people's eyes, bless her, and feeling with other people's bodies."

Dropping upon the doorstep, Ordway replaced the knitted shawl which had

slipped from the old man's shoulder. "I wonder how it is that you keep

so happy in spite of everything?" he said.

"Happy?" repeated Crowley with a laugh. "Well, I don't know, but I am

not complaining. I've seen men who hadn't an ache in their bodies, who

were worse off than I am to-day. I tell you it isn't the thing that

comes to you, but the way you look at it that counts, and because you've

got a paralysed arm is no reason that you should have a paralysed heart

as well. I've had a powerful lot of suffering, but I've had a powerful

lot of happiness, too, and the suffering somehow, doesn't seem to come

inside of me to stay as the happiness does. You see, I'm a great

believer in the Lord, sir," he added simply, "and what I can't

understand, I don't bother about, but just take on trust." All the

cheerful wrinkles of his face shone peacefully as he talked. "It's true

there've been times when things have gone so hard I've felt that I'd

just let go and drop down to the bottom, but the wonderful part is that

when you get to the bottom there's still something down below you. It's

when you fall lowest that you feel most the Lord holding you up. It may

be that there ain't any bottom after all but I know if there is one the

Lord is surely waiting down there to catch you when you let go. He ain't

only there, I reckon, but He's in all the particular hard places on

earth much oftener than He's up in His heaven. He knows the poorhouse,

you may be sure, and He'll be there to receive me and tell me it ain't

so bad as it looks. I don't want to get there, but if I do it will come

a bit easier to think that the Lord has been there before me----"

The look in his smiling, toothless face brought to Ordway, as he

watched him, the memory of the epileptic little preacher who had

preached in the prison chapel. Here, also, was that untranslatable

rapture of the mystic, which cannot be put into words though it passes

silently in its terrible joy from the heart of the speaker to the other

heart that is waiting. Again he felt his whole being dissolve in the

emotion which had overflowed his eyes that Sunday when he was a

prisoner. He remembered the ecstasy with which he had said to himself on

that day: "I have found the key!" and he knew now that this ecstasy was

akin to the light that had shone for him while he sat on the stage of

the town hall in Tappahannock. A chance word from the lips of a doting

old man, who saw the doors of the poorhouse swing open to receive him,

had restored to Ordway, with a miraculous clearness, the vision that he

had lost; and he felt suddenly that the hope with which he had come out

of the prison had never really suffered disappointment or failure.

CHAPTER VII

THE VISION AND THE FACT

As he walked home along one of the side streets, shaded by an irregular

row of flowering linden trees, it appeared to him that his life in

Botetourt, so unendurable an hour before, had been rendered suddenly

easy by a miracle, not in his surroundings, but in himself. His help had

been asked, and in the act of giving there had flowed back into his

heart the strength by which he might live his daily life. His unrest,

his loneliness, his ineffectiveness, showed to him now as the result of

some fatal weakness in his own nature--some failure in his personal

attitude to the people among whom he lived.

Straight ahead of him a fine white dust drifted down from the blossoming

lindens, lying like powder on the roughly paved street, where the wind

blew it in soft swirls and eddies against the crumbling stone steps

which led down from the straight doorways of the old-fashioned houses.

The boughs overhead made a green arch through which the light fell, and

it was under this thick tent of leaves, that, looking up presently, he

saw Emily Brooke coming toward him. Not until she was so close to him

that he could hear the rustle of her dress, did she lift her eyes from

the pavement and meet his cry of welcome with a look of joyful

surprise.

"Emily!" he cried, and at his voice, she stretched out her hand and

stood smiling at him with the soft and animated gaze which, it seemed to

him now, he had but dimly remembered. The thought of her had dwelt as a

vision in his memory, yet he knew, as he looked into her face, that the

ideal figure had lacked the charm, the radiance, the sparkling energy,

of the living substance.

"So you came to Botetourt and did not send me word," he said.

"No, I did not send you word," she answered, "and now I am leaving

within an hour."

"And you would have gone without seeing me?"

For an instant she hesitated, and he watched the joy in her face melt

into a sorrowful tenderness. "I knew that you were well and I was

satisfied. Would it have been kind to appear to you like an arisen ghost

of Tappahannock?"

"The greatest kindness," he answered gravely, "that you--or anyone could

do me."

She shook her head: "Kindness or not, I found that I could not do it."

"And you go in an hour?"

"My train leaves at seven o'clock. Is it nearly that?"

He drew out his watch, a mechanical action which relieved the emotional

tension that stretched like a drawn cord between them. "It is not yet

six. Will you walk a little way with me down this street? There is still

time."

As she nodded silently, they turned and went back along the side

street, under the irregular rows of lindens, in the direction from which

he had come.

"One of the girls I used to teach sent for me when she was dying," she

said presently, as if feeling the need of some explanation of her

presence in Botetourt. "That was three days ago and the funeral was

yesterday. It is a great loss to me, for I haven't so many friends that

I can spare the few I love."

He made no answer to her remark, and in the silence that followed, he

felt, with a strange ache at his heart, that the distance that separated

them was greater than it had been when she was in Tappahannock and he in

Botetourt. Then there had stretched only the luminous dream spaces

between their souls; now they stood divided by miles and miles of an

immovable reality. Was it possible that in making her a part of his

intense inner life, he had lost, in a measure, his consciousness of her

actual existence? Then while the vision still struggled blindly against

the fact, she turned toward him with a smile which lifted her once more

into the shining zone of spirits.

"If I can feel that you are happy, that you are at peace, I shall ask

nothing more of God," she said.

"I am happy to-day," he answered, "but if you had come yesterday, I

should have broken down in my weakness. Oh, I have been homesick for

Tappahannock since I came away!"

"Yet Botetourt is far prettier to my eyes."

"To mine also--but it isn't beauty, it is usefulness that I need. For

the last two years I have told myself night and day that I had no place

and no purpose--that I was the stone that the builders rejected."

"And it is different now?"

"Different? Yes, I feel as if I had been shoved suddenly into a place

where I fitted--as if I were meant, after all, to help hold things

together. And the change came--how do you think?" he asked, smiling. "A

man wanted money of me to keep him out of the poorhouse."

The old gaiety was in his voice, but as she looked at him a ray of faint

sunshine fell on his face through a parting in the leaves overhead, and

she saw for the first time how much older he had grown since that last

evening in Tappahannock. The dark hair was all gray now, the lines of

the nose were sharper, the cheek bones showed higher above the bluish

hollows beneath. Yet the change which had so greatly aged him had

deepened the peculiar sweetness in the curves of his mouth, and this

sweetness, which was visible also in his rare smile, moved her heart to

a tenderness which was but the keener agony of renouncement.

"I know how it is," she said slowly, "just as in Tappahannock you found

your happiness in giving yourself to others, so you will find it here."

"If I can only be of use--perhaps."

"You can be--you will be. What you were with us you will be again."

"Yet it was different. There I had your help, hadn't I?"

"And you shall have it here," she responded, brightly, though he saw

that her eyes were dim with tears.

"Will you make me a promise?" he asked, stopping suddenly before some

discoloured stone steps "will you promise me that if ever you need a

friend--a strong arm, a brain to think for you--you will send me word?"

She looked at him smiling, while her tears fell from her eyes. "I will

make no promise that is not for your sake as well as for mine," she

answered.

"But it is for my sake--it is for my happiness."

"Then I will promise," she rejoined gravely, "and I will keep it."

"I thank you," he responded, taking the hand that she held out.

At his words she had turned back, pausing a moment in her walk, as if

she had caught from his voice or his look a sense of finality in their

parting. "I have but a few minutes left," she said, "so I must walk

rapidly back or I shall be late."

A sudden clatter of horses' hoofs on the cobblestones in the street

caused them to start away from each other, and turning his head, Ordway

saw Alice gallop furiously past him with Geoffrey Heath at her side.

"How beautiful!" exclaimed Emily beneath her breath, for Alice as she

rode by had looked back for an instant, her glowing face framed in blown

masses of hair.

"Yes, she is beautiful," he replied, and added after a moment as they

walked on, "she is my daughter."

Her face brightened with pleasure. "Then you are happy--you must be

happy," she said. "Why, she looked like Brunhilde."

For a moment he hesitated. "Yes," he answered at last, "she is very

beautiful--and I am happy."

After this they did not speak again until they reached the iron gate

before the house in which she was staying. On his side he was caught up

into some ideal realm of feeling, in which he possessed her so utterly

that the meeting could not bring her nearer to him nor the parting take

her farther away. His longing, his unrest, and his failure, were a part

of his earthly nature which he seemed to have left below him in that

other life from which he had escaped. Without doubt he would descend to

it again, as he had descended at moments back into the body of his sin;

but in the immediate exaltation of his mood, his love had passed the

bounds of personality and entered into a larger and freer world. When

they parted, presently, after a casual good-bye, he could persuade

himself, almost without effort, that she went on with him in the soft

May twilight.

At his door he found Lydia just returning from a drive, and taking her

wraps from her arm, he ascended the steps and entered the house at her

side. She had changed her mourning dress for a gown of pale gray cloth,

and he noticed at once that her beauty had lost in transparency and

become more human.

"I thought you had gone riding with Alice," she said without looking at

him, as she stooped to gather up the ends of a lace scarf which had

slipped from her arm.

"No, I was not with her," he answered. "I wanted to go, but she would

not let me."

"Are you sure, then, that she was not with Geoffrey Heath?"

"I am sure that she was with him, for they passed me not a half hour ago

as I came up."

They had entered the library while he spoke, and crossing to the hearth,

where a small fire burned, Lydia looked up at him with her anxious gaze.

"I hoped at first that you would gain some influence over her," she

said, in a distressed voice, "but it seems now that she is estranged

even from you."

"Not estranged, but there is a difference and I am troubled by it. She

is young, you see, and I am but a dull and sober companion for her."

She shook her head with the little hopeless gesture which was so

characteristic of her. Only yesterday this absence of resolution, the

discontented droop of her thin, red lips, had worked him into a feeling

of irritation against her. But his vision of her to-day had passed

through some softening lens; and he saw her shallowness, her vanity, her

lack of passion, as spiritual infirmities which were not less to be

pitied than an infirmity of the body.

"The end is not yet, though," he added cheerfully after a moment, "and

she will come back to me in time when I am able really to help her."

"Meanwhile is she to be left utterly uncontrolled?"

"Not if we can do otherwise. Only we must go quietly and not frighten

her too much."

Again she met his words with the resigned, hopeless movement of her

pretty head in its pearl gray bonnet. "I have done all I can," she said,

"and it has been worse than useless. Now you must try if your method is

better than mine."

"I am trying," he answered smiling.

For an instant her gaze fluttered irresolutely over him, as if she were

moved by a passing impulse to a deeper utterance. That this impulse

concerned Alice he was vaguely aware, for when had his wife ever spoken

to him upon a subject more directly personal? Apart from their children

he knew there was no bond between them--no memories, no hopes, no ground

even for the building of a common interest. Lydia adored her children,

he still believed, but when there was nothing further to be said of Dick

or of Alice, their conversation flagged upon the most trivial topics.

Upon the few unfortunate occasions when he had attempted to surmount the

barrier between them, she had appeared to dissolve, rather than to

retreat, before his approach. Yet despite her soft, cloud-like exterior,

he had discovered that the rigour of her repulsion had hardened to a

vein of iron in her nature. What must her life be, he demanded in a

sudden passion of pity, when the strongest emotion she had ever known

was the aversion that she now felt to him? All the bitterness in his

heart melted into compassion at the thought, and he resisted an impulse

to take her into his arms and say: "I know, I understand, and I am

sorry." Yet he was perfectly aware that if he were to do this, she would

only shrink farther away from him, and look up at him with fear and

mystification, as if she suspected him of some hidden meaning, of some

strategic movement against her impregnable reserve. Her whole relation

to him had narrowed into the single instinct of self-defence. If he came

unconsciously a step nearer, if he accidentally touched her hand as he

passed, he had grown to expect the flaring of her uncontrollable

repugnance in the heightened red in her cheeks. "I know that I am

repulsive to her, that when she looks at me she still sees the convict,"

he thought, "and yet the knowledge of this only adds to the pity and

tenderness I feel."

Lydia had moved through the doorway, but turning back in the hall, she

spoke with a return of confidence, as if the fact of the threshold,

which she had put between them, had restored to her, in a measure, the

advantage that she had lost.

"Then I shall leave Alice in your hands. I can do nothing more," she

said.

"Give me time and I will do all that you cannot," he answered.

When she had gone upstairs, he crossed the hall to the closed door of

the library, and stopped short on hearing Alice's voice break out into

song. The girl was still in her riding habit, and the gay French air on

her lips was in accord with the spirited gesture with which she turned

to him as he appeared. Her beauty would have disarmed him even without

the kiss with which she hastened to avert his reproach.

"Alice, can you kiss me when you know you have broken your promise?"

"I made no promise," she answered coldly, drawing away. "You told me not

to go riding with Geoffrey, but it was you that said it, not I, and you

said it only because mamma made you. Oh, I knew all the time that it was

she!"

Her voice broke with anger and before he could restrain her, she ran

from the room and up the staircase. An instant afterward he heard a door

slam violently above his head. Was she really in love with Geoffrey

Heath? he asked in alarm, or was the passion she had shown merely the

outburst of an undisciplined child?

CHAPTER VIII

THE WEAKNESS IN STRENGTH

At breakfast Alice did not appear, and when he went upstairs to her

room, she returned an answer in a sullen voice through her closed door.

All day his heart was oppressed by the thought of her, but to his

surprise, when he came home to luncheon, she met him on the steps with a

smiling face. It was evident to him at the first glance that she meant

to ignore both the cause and the occasion of last evening's outburst;

and he found himself yielding to her determination before he realised

all that his evasion of the subject must imply. But while she hung upon

his neck, with her cheek pressed to his, it was impossible that he

should speak any word that would revive her anger against him. Anything

was better than the violence with which she had parted from him the

evening before. He could never forget his night of anguish, when he had

strained his ears unceasingly for some stir in her room, hoping that a

poignant realisation of his love for her would bring her sobbing and

penitent to his door before dawn.

Now when he saw her again for the first time, she had apparently

forgotten the parting which had so tortured his heart.

"You've been working too hard, papa, and you're tired," she remarked,

rubbing the furrows between his eyebrows in a vain endeavour to smooth

them out. "Are you obliged to go back to that hateful office this

afternoon?"

"I've some work that will keep me there until dark, I fear," he replied.

"It's a pity because I'd like a ride of all things."

"It is a pity, poor dear," protested Alice, but he noticed that there

was no alteration in her sparkling gaiety. Was there, indeed, almost a

hint of relief in her tone? and was this demonstrative embrace but a

guarded confession of her gratitude for his absence? Something in her

manner--a veiled excitement in her look, a subtle change in her

voice--caused him to hold her to him in a keener tenderness. It was on

his lips to beg for her confidence, to remind her of his sympathy in

whatever she might feel or think--to assure her even of his tolerance of

Geoffrey Heath. But in the instant when he was about to speak, a sudden

recollection of the look with which she had turned from him last

evening, checked the impulse before it had had time to pass into words.

And so because of his terror of losing her, he let her go at last in

silence from his arms.

His office work that afternoon was heavier than usual, for in the midst

of his mechanical copying and filing, he was abstracted by the memory of

that strange, unnatural vivacity in Alice's face. Then in the effort to

banish the disturbing recollection, he recalled old Adam Crowley,

wrapped in his knitted shawl, on the doorstep of his cottage. A check of

Richard's contributing six hundred dollars toward the purchase of a new

organ for the church he attended gave Daniel his first opportunity to

mention the old man to his uncle.

"I saw Crowley the other day," he began abruptly, "the man who was my

father's clerk for forty years, and whose place," he added smiling, "I

seem to have filled."

"Ah, indeed," remarked Richard quietly. "So he is still living?"

"His right arm has been paralysed, as you know, and he is very poor. All

his savings were lost in some investments he made by my father's

advice."

"So I have heard--it was most unfortunate."

"He had always been led to believe, I understand, that he would be

provided for by my father's will."

Richard laid down his pen and leaned thoughtfully back in his chair. "He

has told me so," he rejoined, "but we have only his word for it, as

there was no memorandum concerning him among my brother's papers."

"But surely it was well known that father had given him a pension. Aunt

Lucy was perfectly aware of it--they talked of it together."

"During his lifetime he did pay Crowley a small monthly allowance in

consideration of his past services. But his will was an extremely

careful document--his bequests are all made in a perfectly legal form."

"Was not this will made some years ago, however, before the old man

became helpless and lost his money?"

Richard nodded: "I understood as much from Crowley when he came to me

with his complaint. But, as I reminded him, it would have been a

perfectly simple matter for Daniel to have made such a bequest in a

codicil--as he did in your case," he concluded deliberately.

The younger man met his gaze without flinching. "The will, I believe,

was written while I was in prison," he observed.

"Upon the day following your conviction. By a former will, which he then

destroyed, he had bequeathed to you his entire estate. You understand,

of course," he pursued, after a pause in which he had given his nephew

full time to possess himself of the information, as well as of the

multiplied suggestions that he had offered, "that the income you receive

now comes from money that is legally your own. If it should ever appear

advisable for me to do so, I am empowered to make over to you the sum of

one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in securities. The principal is

left in my hands merely because it is to your interest that I should

keep an eye on the investments."

"Yes, I understand, and I understand, too, that but for your insistence

my father would probably have left me nothing."

"I felt very strongly that he had no right to disinherit you," returned

Richard. "In my eyes he made a grave mistake in refusing to lend you

support at your trial----"

"As you did, I acknowledge gratefully," interrupted Daniel, and wondered

why the fact had aroused in him so little appreciation. As far as the

observance of the conventional virtues were concerned, Richard Ordway,

he supposed, was, and had been all his life, a good man, yet something

in his austere excellence froze instantly all the gentler impulses in

his nephew's heart. It was impossible after this to mention again the

subject of Crowley, so going back to his work, he applied himself to his

copying until Richard put down his papers and left the office. Then he

locked his desk wearily and followed his uncle out into the street.

A soft May afternoon was just closing, and the street lamps glimmered,

here and there, like white moths out of the mist which was fragrant with

honeysuckle and roses. An old lamplighter, who was descending on his

ladder from a tall lamppost at the corner, looked down at Ordway with a

friendly and merry face.

"The days will soon be so long that you won't be needing us to light you

home," he remarked, as he came down gingerly, his hands grasping the

rungs of the ladder above his head. When he landed at Daniel's side he

began to tell him in a pleasant, garrulous voice about his work, his

rheumatism and the strange sights that he had seen in his rounds for so

many years. "I've seen wonders in my day, you may believe it," he went

on, chuckling, "I've seen babies in carriages that grew up to be brides

in orange blossoms, and then went by me later as corpses in hearses.

I've seen this town when it warn't mo'n a little middlin' village, and

I've seen soldiers dyin' in blood in this very street." A train went by

with a rush along the gleaming track that ran through the town. "An'

I've known the time when a sight like that would have skeered folks to

death," he added.

For a minute Ordway looked back, almost wistfully, after the flying

train. Then with a friendly "good-bye!" he parted from the lamplighter

and went on his way.

When he reached home he half expected to find Alice waiting for him in

the twilight on the piazza, but, to his surprise, Lydia met him as he

entered the hall and asked him, in a voice which sounded as if she were

speaking in the presence of servants, to come with her into the library.

There she closed the door upon him and inquired in a guarded tone:

"Has Alice been with you this afternoon? Have you seen or heard anything

of her?"

"Not since luncheon. Why, I thought that she was at home with one of the

girls."

"It seems she left the house immediately after you. She wore her dark

blue travelling dress, and one of the servants saw her at the railway

station at three o'clock."

For an instant the room swam before his eyes. "You believe, then, that

she has gone off?" he asked in an unnatural voice, "that she has gone

off with Geoffrey Heath?"

In the midst of his own hideous anguish he was impressed by the perfect

decency of Lydia's grief--by the fact that she wore her anxiety as an

added grace.

"I have telephoned for Uncle Richard," she said in a subdued tone, "and

he has just sent me word that after making inquiries, he learned that

Geoffrey Heath went to Washington on the afternoon train."

"And Alice is with him!"

"If she is not, where is she?" Her eyes filled with tears, and sinking

into a chair she dropped her face in her clasped hands. "Oh, I wish

Uncle Richard would come," she moaned through her fingers.

Again he felt a smothered resentment at this implicit reliance upon

Richard Ordway. "We must make sure first that she is gone," he said,

"and then it will be time enough to consider ways and means of bringing

her back."

Turning abruptly away from her, he went out of the library and up the

staircase to Alice's room, which was situated directly across the hall

from his own. At the first glance it seemed to him that nothing was

missing, but when he looked at her dressing-table in the alcove, he

found that it had been stripped of her silver toilet articles, and that

her little red leather bag, which he had filled with banknotes a few

days ago, was not in the top drawer where she kept it. Something in the

girl's chamber, so familiar, so redolent of associations with her bright

presence, tore at his heart with a fresh sense of loss, like a gnawing

pain that fastens into a new wound. On the bed he saw her pink flannel

dressing-gown, with the embroidered collar which had so delighted her

when she had bought it; on the floor at one side lay her pink quilted

slippers, slightly soiled from use; and between the larger pillows was

the delicate, lace-trimmed baby's pillow upon which she slept. The

perfume of her youth, her freshness, was still in the room, as if she

had gone from it for a little while through a still open door.

At a touch on his arm he looked round startled, to find one of the

servants--the single remaining slave of the past generation--rocking her

aged body as she stood at his side.

"She ain' gwine come back no mo'--Yes, Lawd, she ain' gwine come back no

mo'. Whut's done hit's done en hit cyarn be undone agin."

"Why, Aunt Mehaley, what do you mean?" he demanded sternly, oppressed,

in spite of himself by her wailing voice and her African superstition.

"I'se seen er tur'ble heap done in my day wid dese hyer eyes," resumed

the old negress, "but I ain' never seen none un um undone agin atter

deys wunst been done. You kin cut down er tree, but you cyarn' mek hit

grow back togedder. You kin wring de neck er a rooster, but you cyarn'

mek him crow. Yes, my Lawd, hit's easy to pull down, but hit's hard to

riz up. I'se ole, Marster, en I'se mos' bline wid lookin', but I ain'

never seen whut's done undone agin."

She tottered out, still wailing in her half-crazed voice, and hastily

shutting the drawers of the dressing-table, he went downstairs again to

where Lydia awaited him in the library.

"There's no doubt, I fear, that she's gone with Heath," he said, with a

constraint into which he had schooled himself on the staircase. "As he

appears to have stopped at Washington, I shall take the next train

there, which leaves at nine-twenty-five. If they are married----"

He broke off, struck by the pallor that overspread her face.

"But they are married! They must be married!" she cried in terror.

For an instant he stared back at her white face in a horror as great as

hers. Was it the first time in his life, he questioned afterwards, that

he had been brought face to face with the hideous skeletons upon which

living conventions assume a semblance of truth?

"I hope to heaven that he has _not_ married her!" he exclaimed in a

passion from which she shrank back trembling. "Good God! do you want me

to haggle with a cad like that to make him marry my child?"

"And if he doesn't? what then?" moaned Lydia, in a voice that seemed to

fade away while she spoke.

"If he doesn't I shall be almost tempted to bless his name. Haven't you

proved to me that he is a cheat and a brute and a libertine, and yet you

dare to tell me that I must force him to marry Alice. Oh, if he will

only have the mercy to leave her free, I may still save her!" he said.

She looked at him with dilated eyes as if rooted in fear to the spot

upon which she stood. "But the consequences," she urged weakly at last

in a burst of tears.

"Oh, I'll take the consequences," he retorted harshly, as he went out.

An hour later, when he was settled in the rushing train, it seemed to

him that he was able to find comfort in the words with which he had

separated from his wife. Let Alice do what she would, there was always

hope for her in the thought that he might help her to bear, even if he

could not remove from her, the consequences of her actions. Could so

great a force as his love for her fail to avert from her young head at

least a portion of her inevitable disillusionment? The recollection of

her beauty, of her generosity, and of the wreck of her womanhood almost

before it had begun, not only added to his suffering, but seemed in some

inexplicable way to increase his love. The affection he had always felt

for her was strengthened now by that touch of pity which lends a deeper

tenderness to all human relations.

Upon reaching Washington he found that a shower had come up, and the

pavements were already wet when he left the station. He had brought no

umbrella, but he hardly heeded this in the eagerness which drove him

from street to street in his search for his child. After making vain

inquiries at several of the larger hotels, he had begun to feel almost

hopeless, when going into the newest and most fashionable of them all,

he discovered that "Mr. and Mrs. Geoffrey Heath" had been assigned an

apartment there an hour before. In answer to his question the clerk

informed him that the lady had ordered her dinner served upstairs,

leaving at the same time explicit instructions that she was "not at

home" to anyone who should call. But in spite of this rebuff, he drew

out his card, and sat down in a chair in the brilliantly lighted lobby.

He had selected a seat near a radiator in the hope of drying his damp

clothes, and presently a little cloud of steam rose from his shoulders

and drifted out into the shining space. As he watched the gorgeous,

over-dressed women who swept by him, he remembered as one remembers a

distant dream, the years when his life had been spent among such crowds

in just such a dazzling glare of electric light. It appeared false and

artificial to him now, but in the meantime, he reflected, while he

looked on, he had been in prison.

A voice at his elbow interrupted his thoughts, and turning in response

to an invitation from a buttoned sleeve, he entered an elevator and was

borne rapidly aloft among a tightly wedged group of women who were

loudly bewailing their absence from the theatre. It was with difficulty

that he released himself at the given signal from his escort, and

stepped out upon the red velvet carpet which led to Alice's rooms. In

response to a knock from the boy who had accompanied him, the door flew

open with a jerk, and Alice appeared before him in a bewildering effect

of lace and pink satin.

"O papa, papa, you naughty darling!" she exclaimed, and was in his arms

before he had time to utter the reproach on his lips.

With her head on his breast, he was conscious at first only of an

irresponsible joy, like the joy of the angels for whom evil no longer

exists. To know that she was alive, that she was safe, that she was in

his arms, seemed sufficient delight, not only unto the day, but unto his

whole future as well. Then the thought of what it meant to find her thus

in her lace and satin came over him, and drawing slightly away he looked

for the first time into her face.

"Alice, what does it mean?" he asked, as he kissed her.

Pushing the loosened hair back from her forehead, she met his question

with a protesting pout.

"It means that you're a wicked boy to run away from home like this and

be all by yourself in a bad city," she responded with a playful shake of

her finger. Then she caught his hand and drew him down on the sofa

beside her in the midst of the filmy train of her tea-gown. "If you

promise never to do it again, I shan't tell mamma on you," she added,

with a burst of light-hearted merriment.

"Where were you married, Alice? and who did it?" he asked sternly.

At his tone a ripple of laughter broke from her lips, and reaching for

her little red leather bag on the table, she opened it and tossed a

folded paper upon his knees. "I didn't ask his name," she responded,

"but you can find it all written on that, I suppose."

"And you cared nothing for me?--nothing for my anxiety, my distress?"

"I always meant to telegraph you, of course. Geoffrey has gone down now

to do it."

"But were you obliged to leave home in this way? If you had told me you

loved him, I should have understood--should have sympathised."

"Oh, but mamma wouldn't, and I had to run off. Of course, I wanted a big

wedding like other girls, and a lot of bridesmaids and a long veil, but

I knew you'd never consent to it, so I made up my mind just to slip away

without saying a word. Geoffrey is so rich that I can make up afterwards

for the things I missed when I was married. This is what he gave me

to-day. Isn't it lovely?"

Baring her throat she showed him a pearl necklace hidden beneath her

lace collar. "We're sailing day after to-morrow," she went on,

delightedly, "and we shall go straight to Paris because I am dying to

see the shops. I wouldn't run away with him until he promised to take me

there."

There was no regret in her mind, no misgiving, no disquietude. The

thought of his pain had not marred for an instant the pleasure of her

imaginary shopping. "O papa, I am happy, so happy!" she sang aloud,

springing suddenly to her full height and standing before him in her

almost barbaric beauty--from the splendid hair falling upon her

shoulders to the little feet that could not keep still for sheer joy of

living. He saw her red mouth glow and tremble as she bent toward him.

"To think that I'm really and truly out of Botetourt at last!" she

cried.

"Then you've no need of me and I may as well go home?" he said a little

wistfully as he rose.

At this she hung upon his neck for a minute with her first show of

feeling. "I'd rather you wouldn't stay till Geoffrey comes back," she

answered, abruptly releasing him, "because it would be a surprise to him

and he's always so cross when he's surprised. He has a perfectly awful

temper," she confided in a burst of frankness, "but I've learned exactly

how to manage him, so it doesn't matter. Then he's so handsome, too. I

shouldn't have looked at him twice if he hadn't been handsome. Now, go

straight home and take good care of yourself and don't get fat and bald

before I come back."

She kissed him several times, laughing in little gasps, while she held

him close in her arms. Then putting him from her, she pushed him gently

out into the hall. As the door closed on her figure, he felt that it

shut upon all that was living or warm in his heart.

BOOK FOURTH

LIBERATION

CHAPTER I

THE INWARD LIGHT

On the day that he returned to Botetourt, it seemed to Ordway that the

last vestige of his youth dropped from him; and one afternoon six months

later, as he passed some schoolboys who were playing ball in the street,

he heard one of them remark in an audible whisper: "Just wait till that

old fellow over there gets out of the way." Since coming home again his

interests, as well as his power of usefulness, had been taken from him;

and the time that he had spent in prison had aged him less than the

three peaceful years which he had passed in Botetourt. All that

suffering and experience could not destroy had withered and died in the

monotonous daily round which carried him from his home to Richard's

office and back again from Richard's office to his home.

Outwardly he had grown only more quiet and gentle, as people are apt to

do who approach the middle years in a position of loneliness and

dependence. To Richard and to Lydia, who had never entirely ceased to

watch him, it appeared that he had at last "settled down," that he might

be, perhaps, trusted to walk alone; and it was with a sensation of

relief that his wife observed the intense youthful beam fade from his

blue eyes. When his glance grew dull and lifeless, and his features fell

gradually into the lines of placid repose which mark the body's

contentment rather than the spirit's triumph, it seemed to her that she

might at last lay aside the sleepless anxiety which had been her

marriage portion.

"He has become quite like other people now," she said one day to

Richard, "do you know that he has grown to take everything exactly as a

matter of course, and I really believe he enjoys what he eats."

"I'm glad of that," returned Richard, "for I've noticed that he is

looking very far from well. I advised him several weeks ago to take care

of that cough, but he seems to have some difficulty in getting rid of

it."

"He hasn't been well since Alice's marriage," observed Lydia, a little

troubled. "You know he travelled home from Washington in wet clothes and

had a spell of influenza afterward. He's had a cold ever since, for I

hear him coughing a good deal after he first goes to bed."

"You'd better make him attend to it, I think, though with his fine chest

there's little danger of anything serious."

"Do you suppose Alice's marriage could have sobered him? He's grown very

quiet and grave, and I dare say it's a sign that his wildness has gone

out of him, poor fellow. You remember how his laugh used to frighten me?

Well, he never laughs like that now, though he sometimes stares hard at

me as if he were looking directly through me, and didn't even know that

he was doing it."

As she spoke she glanced out of the window and her eyes fell on Daniel,

who came slowly up the gravelled walk, his head bent over an armful of

old books he carried.

"He visits a great deal among the poor," remarked Richard, "and I think

that's good for him, provided, of course, that he does it with

discretion."

"I suppose it is," said Lydia, though she added immediately, "but aren't

the poor often very immoral?"

A reply was on Richard's lips, but before he could utter it, the door

opened and Daniel entered with the slow, almost timid, step into which

he had schooled himself since his return to Botetourt. As he saw Richard

a smile--his old boyish smile of peculiar sweetness--came to his lips,

but without speaking, he crossed to the table and laid down the books he

carried.

"If those are old books, won't you remember to take them up to your

room, Daniel?" said Lydia, in her tone of aggrieved sweetness. "They

make such a litter in the library."

He started slightly, a nervous affection which had increased in the last

months, and looked at her with an apologetic glance. As he stood there

she had again that singular sensation of which she had spoken to

Richard, as if he were gazing through her and not at her.

"I beg your pardon," he answered, "I remember now that I left some here

yesterday."

"Oh, it doesn't matter, of course," she responded pleasantly, "it's only

that I like to keep the house tidy, you know."

"They do make rather a mess," he admitted, and gathering them up again,

he carried them out of the room and up the staircase.

They watched his bent gray head disappear between the damask curtains in

the doorway, and then listened almost unconsciously for the sound of his

slow gentle tread on the floor above.

"There was always too much of the dreamer about him, even as a child,"

commented Richard, when the door was heard to close over their heads,

"but he seems contented enough now with his old books, doesn't he?"

"Contented? Yes, I believe he is even happy. I never say much to him

because, you see, there is so very little for us to talk about. It is a

dreadful thing to confess," she concluded resolutely, "but the truth is

I've been always a little afraid of him since--since----"

"Afraid?" he looked at her in astonishment.

"Well, not exactly afraid--but nervous with a kind of panic shudder at

times--a dread of his coming close to me, of his touching me, of his

wanting things of me." A shiver ran through her and she bit her lip as

if to hide the expression of horror upon her face. "There's nobody else

on earth that I would say it to, but when he first came back I used to

have nightmares about it. I could never get it out of my mind a minute

and if they left me alone with him, I wanted almost to scream with

nervousness. It's silly I know, and I can't explain it even to you, but

there were times when I shrieked aloud in my sleep because I dreamed

that he had come into my room and touched me. I felt that I was wrong

and foolish, but I couldn't help it, and I tried--tried--oh, so hard to

bear things and to be brave and patient."

The tears fell from her eyes on her clasped hands, but her attitude of

sorrow only made more appealing the Madonna-like loveliness of her

features.

"You've been a saint, Lydia," he answered, patting her drooping shoulder

as he rose to his feet. "Poor girl, poor girl! and no daughter of my own

could be dearer to me," he added in his austere sincerity of manner.

"I have tried to do right," replied Lydia, lifting her pure eyes to his

in an overflow of religious emotion.

Meanwhile the harmless object of their anxiety sat alone in his room

under a green lamp, with one of the musty books he had bought open upon

his knees. He was not reading, for his gaze was fixed on the opposite

wall, and there was in his eyes something of the abstracted vision which

Lydia dreaded. It was as if his intellect, forced from the outward

experience back into the inner world of thought, had ended by projecting

an image of itself into the space at which he looked. While he sat there

the patient, apologetic smile with which he had answered to his wife

was still on his lips.

"I suppose it's because I'm getting old that people and things no longer

make me suffer," he said to himself, "it's because I'm getting old that

I can look at Lydia unmoved, that I can feel tenderness for her even

while I see the repulsion creep into her eyes. It isn't her fault, after

all, that she loathes me, nor is it mine. Yes, I'm certainly an old

fellow, the boy was right. At any rate, it's pleasanter, on the whole,

than being young."

Closing the book, he laid it on the table, and leaned forward with his

chin on his hands. "But if I'd only known when I was young!" he added,

"if I'd only known!" His past life rose before him as a picture that he

had seen, rather than as a road along which he had travelled; and he

found himself regarding it almost as impersonally as he might have

regarded the drawing upon the canvas. The peril of the inner life had

already begun to beset him--that mysterious power of reliving one's

experience with an intensity which makes the objective world appear dull

and colourless by contrast. It was with an effort at times that he was

able to detach his mind from the contemplative habit into which he had

fallen. Between him and his surroundings there existed but a single

bond, and this was the sympathy which went out of him when he was

permitted to reach the poor and the afflicted. To them he could still

speak, with them he could still be mirthful; but from his wife, his

uncle, and the members of his own class, he was divided by that

impenetrable wall of social tradition. In his home he had ceased to

laugh, as Lydia had said; but he could still laugh in the humbler houses

of the poor. They had received him as one of themselves, and for this

reason alone he could remember how to be merry when he was with them. To

the others, to his own people, he felt himself to be always an outsider,

a reclaimed castaway, a philanthropic case instead of an individual; and

he knew that if there was one proof the more to Lydia that he was in the

end a redeemed character, it was the single fact that he no longer

laughed in her presence. It was, he could almost hear her say,

unbecoming, if not positively improper, that a person who had spent five

years in prison should be able to laugh immoderately afterward; and the

gravity of his lips was in her eyes, he understood, the most

satisfactory testimony to the regeneration of his heart.

And yet Lydia, according to her vision, was a kind, as well as a

conscientious woman. The pity of it was that if he were to die now,

three years after his homecoming, she would probably reconstruct an

imaginary figure of him in her memory, and wear crape for it with

appropriate grace and dignity. The works of the imagination are

manifold, he thought with a grim humour, even in a dull woman.

But as there was not likely to occur anything so dramatic, in the

immediate present, as his death, he wondered vaguely what particular

form of aversion his wife's attitude would next express. Or could it be

that since he had effaced himself so utterly, he hardly dared to listen

to the sound of his footsteps in the house, she had grown to regard him

with a kind of quiet tolerance, as an object which was unnecessary,

perhaps, yet entirely inoffensive? He remembered now that during those

terrible first years in prison he had pursued the thought of her with a

kind of hopeless violence, yet to-day he could look back upon her

desertion of him in his need with a compassion which forgave the

weakness that it could not comprehend. That, too, he supposed was a part

of the increasing listlessness of middle age. In a little while he would

look forward, it might be, to the coming years without dread--to the

long dinners when he sat opposite to her with the festive bowl of

flowers between them, to the quiet evenings when she lingered for a few

minutes under the lamp before going to her room--those evenings which

are the supreme hours of love or of despair. Oh, well, he would grow

indifferent to the horror of these things, as he had already grown

indifferent to the soft curves of her body. Yes, it was a thrice blessed

thing, this old age to which he was coming!

Then another memory flooded his heart with the glow of youth, and he saw

Emily, as she had appeared to him that night in the barn more than six

years ago, when she had stood with the lantern held high above her head

and the red cape slipping back from her upraised arm. A sharp pain shot

through him, and he dropped his eyes as if he had met a blow. That was

youth at which he had looked for one longing instant--that was youth and

happiness and inextinguishable desire.

For a moment he sat with bent head; then with an effort he put the

memory from him, and opened his book at the page where he had left off.

As he did so there was a tap at his door, and when he had spoken, Lydia

came in timidly with a letter in her hand.

"This was put into Uncle Richard's box by mistake," she said, "and he

has just sent it over."

He took it from her and seeing that it was addressed in Baxter's

handwriting, laid it, still unopened, upon the table. "Won't you sit

down?" he asked, pushing forward the chair from which he had risen.

A brief hesitation showed in her face; then as he turned away from her

to pick up some scattered papers from the floor, she sat down with a

tentative, nervous manner.

"Are you quite sure that you're well, Daniel?" she inquired. "Uncle

Richard noticed to-day that you coughed a good deal in the office. I

wonder if you get exactly the proper kind of food?"

He nodded, smiling. "Oh, I'm all right," he responded, "I'm as hard as

nails, you know, and always have been."

"Even hard people break down sometimes. I wish you would take a tonic or

see a doctor."

Her solicitude surprised him, until he remembered that she had never

failed in sympathy for purely physical ailments. If he had needed

bodily healing instead of mental, she would probably have applied it

with a conscientious devotedness.

"I am much obliged to you, but I'm really not sick," he insisted, "it is

very good of you, however."

"It is nothing more than my duty," she rejoined, sweetly.

"Well, that may be, but there's nothing to prevent my being obliged to

you for doing your duty."

Puzzled as always by his whimsical tone, she sat looking at him with her

gentle, uncomprehending glance. "I wish, all the same," she murmured,

"that you would let me send you a mustard plaster to put on your chest."

He shook his head without replying in words to her suggestion.

"Do you know it is three months since we had a letter from Alice," he

said, "and six since she went away?"

"Oh, it's that then? You have been worrying about Alice?"

"How can I help it? We hardly know even that she is living."

"I've thought of her day and night since her marriage, though it's just

as likely, isn't it, that she's taken up with the new countries and her

new clothes?"

"Oh, of course, it may be that, but it is the awful uncertainty that

kills."

With a sigh she looked down at her slippered feet. "I was thinking

to-day what a comfort Dick is to me--to us all," she said, "one is so

sure of him and he is doing so splendidly at college."

"Yes," he agreed, "Dick is a comfort. I wish poor Alice was more like

him."

"She was always wild, you remember, never like other children, and it

was impossible to make her understand that some things were right and

some wrong. Yet I never thought that she would care for such a loud,

vulgar creature as Geoffrey Heath."

"Did she care for him?" asked Daniel, almost in a whisper, "or was it

only that she wanted to see Paris?"

"Well, she may have improved him a little--at least let us hope so," she

remarked as if she had not heard his question. "He has money, at any

rate, and that is what she has always wanted, though I fear even

Geoffrey's income will be strained by her ceaseless extravagance."

As she finished he thought of her own youth, which she had evidently

forgotten, and it seemed to him that the faults she blamed most in Alice

were those which she had overcome patiently in her own nature.

"I could stand anything better than this long suspense," he said gently.

"It does wear one out," she rejoined. "I am very, very sorry for you."

Some unaccustomed tone in her voice--a more human quality, a deeper

cadence, made him wonder in an impulse of self-reproach if, after all,

the breach between them was in part of his own making? Was it still

possible to save from the ruin, if not love, at least human

companionship?

"Lydia," he said, "it isn't Alice, it is mostly loneliness, I think."

Rising from her chair she stood before him with her vague, sweet smile

playing about her lips.

"It is natural that you should feel depressed with that cough," she

remarked, "I really wish you would let me send you a mustard plaster."

As the cough broke out again, he strangled it hilariously in a laugh.

"Oh, well, if it's any comfort to you, I don't mind," he responded.

When she had gone he picked up Baxter's letter from the table and opened

it with trembling fingers. What he had expected to find, he hardly knew,

but as he read the words, written so laboriously in Baxter's big

scrawling writing, he felt that his energy returned to him with the

demand for action--for personal responsibility.

"I don't know whether or not you heard of Mrs. Brooke's death three

months ago," the letter ran, "but this is to say that Mr. Beverly

dropped down with a paralytic stroke last week; and now since he's

dead and buried, the place is to be sold for debt and the children

sent off to school to a friend of Miss Emily's where they can go

cheap. Miss Emily has a good place now in the Tappahannock Bank,

but she's going North before Christmas to some big boarding school

where they teach riding. There are a lot of things to be settled

about the sale, and I thought that, being convenient, you might

take the trouble to run down for a day and help us with your

advice, _which is of the best always_.

"Hoping that you are in good health, I am at present,

BAXTER."

As he folded the letter a flush overspread his face. "I'll go," he said,

with a new energy in his voice, "I'll go to-morrow."

Then turning in response to a knock, he opened the door and received the

mustard plaster which Lydia had made.

CHAPTER II

AT TAPPAHANNOCK AGAIN

He had sent a telegram to Banks, and as the train pulled into the

station, he saw the familiar sandy head and freckled face awaiting him

upon the platform.

"By George, this is a bully sight, Smith," was the first shout that

reached his ears.

"You're not a bit more pleased than I am," he returned laughing with

pleasure, as he glanced from the station, crowded with noisy Negroes, up

the dusty street into which they were about to turn. "It's like coming

home again, and upon my word, I wish I were never to leave here. But how

are you, Banks? So you are married to Milly and going to live contented

forever afterward."

"Yes, I'm married," replied Banks, without enthusiasm, "and there's a

baby about which Milly is clean crazy. Milly has got so fat," he added,

"that you'd never believe I could have spanned her waist with my hands

three years ago."

"Indeed? And is she as captivating as ever?"

"Well, I reckon she must be," said Banks, "but it doesn't seem so

mysterious, somehow, as it used to." His silly, affectionate smile broke

out as he looked at his companion. "To tell the truth," he confessed,

"I've been missing you mighty hard, Smith, marriage or no marriage. It

ain't anything against Milly, God knows, that she can't take your place,

and it ain't anything against the baby. What I want is somebody I can

sit down and look up to, and I don't seem to be exactly able to look up

to Milly or to the baby."

"The trouble with you, my dear Banks, is that you are an incorrigible

idealist and always will be. You were born to be a poet and I don't see

to save my life how you escaped."

"I didn't. I used to write a poem every Sunday of my life when I first

went into tobacco. But after that Milly came and I got used to spending

all my Sundays with her."

"Well, now that you have her in the week, you might begin all over

again."

They were walking rapidly up the long hill, and as Ordway passed, he

nodded right and left to the familiar faces that looked out from the

shop doors. They were all friendly, they were all smiling, they were all

ready to welcome him back among them.

"The queer part is," observed Banks, with that stubborn vein of

philosophy which accorded so oddly with his frivolous features, "that

the thing you get doesn't ever seem to be the same as the thing you

wanted. This Milly is kind to me and the other wasn't, but, somehow,

that hasn't made me stop regretting the other one that I didn't

marry--the Milly that banged and snapped at me about my clothes and

things all day long. I don't know what it means, Smith, I've studied

about it, but I can't understand."

"The meaning of it is, Banks, that you wanted not the woman, but the

dream."

"Well, I didn't get it," rejoined Banks, gloomily.

"Yet Milly's a good wife and you're happy, aren't you?"

"I should be," replied Banks, "if I could forget how darn fascinating

that other Milly was. Oh, yes, she's a good wife and a doting mother,

and I'm happy enough, but it's a soft, squashy kind of happiness, not

like the way I used to feel when I'd walk home with you after the

preaching in the old field."

While he spoke they had reached Baxter's warehouse, and as Ordway was

recognized, there was a quiver of excitement in the little crowd about

the doorway. A moment later it had surrounded him with a shout of

welcome. A dozen friendly hands were outstretched, a dozen breathless

lips were calling his name. As the noise passed through the neighbouring

windows, the throng was increased by a number of small storekeepers and

a few straggling operatives from the cotton mills, until at last he

stopped, half laughing, half crying, in their midst. Ten minutes

afterward, when Baxter wedged his big person through the archway, he saw

Ordway standing bareheaded in the street, his face suffused with a glow

which seemed to give back to him a fleeting beam of the youth that he

had lost.

"Well, I reckon it's my turn now. You can just step inside the office,

Smith," remarked Baxter, while he grasped Ordway's arm and pulled him

back into the warehouse. As they entered the little room, Daniel saw

again the battered chair, the pile of Smith's Almanacs, and the paper

weight, representing a gambolling kitten, upon the desk.

"I'm glad to see you--we're all glad to see you," said Baxter, shaking

his hand for the third time with a grasp which made Ordway feel that he

was in the clutch of a down cushion. "It isn't the way of Tappahannock

to forget a friend, and she ain't forgotten you."

"It's like her," returned Ordway, and he added with a sigh, "I only wish

I were coming back for good, Baxter."

"There now!" exclaimed Baxter, chuckling, "you don't, do you? Well, all

I can say, my boy, is that you've got a powerful soft spot that you left

here, and your old job in the warehouse is still waiting for you when

you care to take it. I tell you what, Smith, you've surely spoiled me

for any other bookkeeper, and I ain't so certain, when it comes to that,

that you haven't spoiled me for myself."

He was larger, softer, more slovenly than ever, but he was so undeniably

the perfect and inimitable Baxter, that Ordway felt his heart go out to

him in a rush of sentiment. "Oh, Baxter, how is it possible that I've

lived without you?" he asked.

"I don't know, Smith, but it's a plain fact that after my wife--and

that's nature--there ain't anybody goin' that I set so much store by.

Why, when I was in Botetourt last spring, I went so far as to put my

right foot on your bottom step, but, somehow, the left never picked up

the courage to follow it."

"Do you dare to tell me that you've been to Botetourt?" demanded Ordway

with indignation.

"Well, I could have stood the house you live it, though it kind of took

my breath away," replied Baxter, with an embarrassed and guilty air,

"but when it came to facing that fellow at the door, then my courage

gave out and I bolted. I studied him a long while, thinking I might get

my eyes used to the sight of him, but it did no good. I declar', Smith,

I could no more have put a word to him than I could to the undertaker at

my own funeral. Bless my soul, suh, poor Mr. Beverly, when he was alive,

didn't hold a tallow candle to that man."

"You might have laid in wait for me in the street, then, that would have

been only fair."

"But how did I know, Smith, that you wan't livin' up to the man at your

door?"

"It wouldn't have taken you long to find out that I wasn't. So poor Mr.

Beverly is dead and buried, then, is he?"

Baxter's face adopted instantly a funereal gloom, and his voice, when he

spoke, held a quaver of regret.

"There wasn't a finer gentleman on earth than Mr. Beverly," he said,

"and he would have given me his last blessed cent if he'd ever had one

to give. I've lost a friend, Smith, there's no doubt of that, I've lost

a friend. And poor Mrs. Brooke, too," he added sadly. "Many and many is

the time I've heard Mr. Beverly grieven' over the way she worked. 'If

things had only come out as I planned them, Baxter,' he'd say to me, 'my

wife should never have raised her finger except to lift food to her

lips.'"

"And yet I've seen him send her downstairs a dozen times a day to make

him a lemonade," observed Ordway cynically.

"That wasn't his fault, suh, he was born like that--it was just his way.

He was always obliged to have what he wanted."

"Well, I can forgive him for killing his wife, but I can't pardon him

for the way he treated his sister. That girl used to work like a farm

hand when I was out there."

"She was mighty fond of him all the same, was Miss Emily."

"Everybody was, that's what I'm quarreling about. He didn't deserve it."

"But he meant well in his heart, Smith, and it's by that that I'm

judgin' him. It wasn't his fault, was it, if things never went just the

way he had planned them out? I don't deny, of course, that he was sort

of flighty at times, as when he made a will the week before he died and

left five hundred dollars to the Tappahannock Orphan Asylum."

"To the Orphan Asylum? Why, his own children are orphans, and he didn't

have five hundred dollars to his name!"

"Of course, he didn't, that's just the point," said Baxter with a

placid tolerance which seemed largely the result of physical bulk, "and

so they have had to sell most of the furniture to pay the bequest. You

see, just the night before his stroke, he got himself considerably

worked up over those orphans. So he just couldn't help hopin' he would

have five hundred dollars to leave 'em when he came to die, an' in case

he did have it he thought he might as well be prepared. Then he sat

right down and wrote the bequest out, and the next day there came his

stroke and carried him off."

"Oh, you're a first-rate advocate, Baxter, but that doesn't alter my

opinion of Mr. Beverly. What about his own orphans now? How are they

going to be provided for?"

"It seems Miss Emily is to board 'em out at some school she knows of,

and I've settled it with her that she's to borrow enough from me to tide

over any extra expenses until spring."

"Then we are to wind up the affairs of Cedar Hill, are we? I suppose

it's best for everybody, but it makes me sad enough to think of it."

"And me, too, Smith," said Baxter, sentimentally. "I can see Mr. Beverly

to the life now playin' with his dominoes on the front porch. But

there's mighty little to wind up, when it comes to that. It's mortgaged

pretty near to the last shingle, and when the bequest to the orphans is

paid out of what's over, there'll be precious few dollars that Miss

Emily can call her own. The reason I sent for you, Smith," he added in a

solemn voice, "was that I thought you might be some comfort to that

poor girl out there in her affliction. If you feel inclined, I hoped

you'd walk out to Cedar Hill and read her a chapter or so in the Bible.

I remembered how consolin' you used to be to people in trouble."

With a prodigious effort Ordway swallowed his irreverent mirth, while

Baxter's pious tones sounded in his ears. "Of course I shall go out to

Cedar Hill," he returned, "but I was wondering, Baxter," he broke off

for a minute and then went on again with an embarrassed manner, "I was

wondering if there was any way I could help those children without being

found out? It would make me particularly happy to feel that I might

share in giving them an education. Do you think you could smuggle the

money for their school bills into their Christmas stockings?"

Baxter thought over it a moment. "I might manage it," he replied,

"seein' that the bills are mostly to come through my hands, and I'm to

settle all that I can out of what's left of the estate."

As he paused Daniel looked hastily away from him, fearful lest Baxter

might be perplexed by the joy that shone in his face. To be connected,

even so remotely, with Emily in the care of Beverly's children, was a

happiness for which, a moment ago, he had not dared to hope.

"Let me deposit the amount with you twice a year," he said, "that will

be both the easiest and the safest way."

"Maybe you're right. And now it's settled, ain't it, that you're to come

to my house to stay?"

"I must go back on the night train, I'm sorry to say, but if you'll let

me I'll drop in to supper. I remember your wife's biscuits of old," he

added, smiling.

"You don't mean it! Well, it'll tickle her to death, I reckon. It ain't

likely, by the way, that you'll find much to eat out at Cedar Hill, so

you'd better remember to have a snack before you start."

"Oh, I can fast until supper," returned Daniel, rising.