IX

That evening the Blake house had the sound and look of social life,

voices in conversational interchange and lights where Mary Nellen

excitedly arrayed them. Alston Choate had come to call, and following

him appeared an elderly lady whom Jeffrey greeted with more outward

warmth than he had even shown his father. Alston Choate had walked in

with a simple directness as though he were there daily, and Anne

impulsively went forward to him. She felt she knew him very well. They

were quite friends. Alston, smiling at her and taking her hand on the

way to the colonel and Jeff, seemed to recognise that, and greeted her

less formally than the others. The colonel was moved at seeing him. The

Choates were among the best of local lineage, men and women

distinguished by clear rigidities of conduct. Their friendship was a

promissory note, bound to be honoured to the full. Lydia was for some

reason abashed, and Jeff, both she and Anne thought, not adequately

welcoming. But how could he be, Anne considered. He was in a position of

unique loneliness. He lacked fellowship. Nobody but Alston, in their

stratum at least, had come in person. No wonder he looked warily, lest

he assume too much.

Before they settled down, the elderly lady, with a thud of feet softly

shod, walked through the hall and stood at the library door regarding

them benignantly. And then Jeff, with an outspoken sound of pleasure and

surprise, got up and drew her in, and Choate smiled upon her as if she

were delightfully unlike anybody else. The colonel, with a quick, moved

look, just said her name:

"Amabel!"

She gave warm, quick grasps from a firm hand, gave them all round, not

seeming to know she hadn't met Anne and Lydia, and at once took off her

bonnet. It had strings and altogether belonged to an epoch at least

twenty years away. The bonnet she "laid aside" on a table with a certain

absent care, as ladies were accustomed to treat bonnets before they got

into the way of jabbing them with pins. Then she sat down, earnestly

solicitous and attentive as at a consultation. Anne thought she was the

most beautiful person she had ever seen. It was a pity Miss Amabel

Bracebridge could not have known that impetuous verdict. It would have

brought her a surprised, spontaneous laugh: nothing could have convinced

her it was not delicious foolery. She was tall and broad and heavy. When

she stood in the doorway, she seemed to fill it. Now that she sat in the

chair, she filled that, a soft, stout woman with great shoulders and a

benign face, a troubled face, as if she were used to soothing ills, yet

found for them no adequate recompense. Her dark grey dress was buttoned

in front, after the fashion of a time long past. It was so archaic in

cut, with a little ruffle at neck and sleeves, that it did more than

adequate service toward maturing her. Indeed, there was no youth about

Miss Amabel, except the youth of her eyes and smile. There were

childlike wistfulness and hope, but experience chiefly, of life, of the

unaccounted for, the unaccountable. She had, above all, an expression of

well-wishing. Now she sat and looked about her.

"Dear me!" she said, "how pleasant it is to see this house open again."

"But it's been open," Lydia impulsively reminded her.

"Yes," said Miss Amabel. "But not this way." She turned to Jeff and

regarded him anxiously. "Don't you smoke?" she asked.

He laughed again. He was exceedingly pleased, Anne saw, merely at seeing

her. Miss Amabel was exactly as he remembered her.

"Yes," said he. "Want us to?"

She put up her long eyebrows and smiled as if in some amusement at

herself.

"I've learned lately," she said, "that gentlemen are so devoted to it

they feel lost without it."

"Light up, Choate," said Jeffrey. "My sisters won't mind. Will you?" He

interrogated Anne. "They get along with me."

No, Anne didn't mind, and she rose and brought matches and little trays.

Lydia often wondered how Anne knew the exact pattern of man's

convenience. But though Choate accepted a cigar, he did not light it.

"Not now," he said, when Jeffrey offered him a light; he laid the cigar

down, tapping it once or twice with his fine hand, and Anne thought he

refrained in courtesy toward her and Lydia.

"This is very pleasant," said the colonel suddenly. "It's good to see

you, Amabel. Now I feel myself at home."

But what, after the first settling was over, had they to say? The same

thought was in all their minds. What was Jeffrey going to do? He knew

that, and moved unhappily. Whatever he was going to do, he wouldn't talk

about it. But Miss Amabel was approaching him with the clearest

simplicity.

"Jeff, my dear," she said, "I can't wait to hear about your ideal

republic."

And then, all his satisfaction gone and his scowl come back, Jeff shook

his head as if a persistent fly had lighted on him, and again he

disclaimed achievement.

"Amabel," said he, "I'm awfully sick of that, you know."

"But, dear boy, you revolutionised--" she was about to add, "the

prison," but stumbled lamely--"the place."

"The papers told us that," said Choate. It was apparent he was helping

somebody out, but whether Jeff or Miss Amabel even he couldn't have

said.

"It isn't revolutionised," said Jeff. He turned upon Choate brusquely.

"It's exactly the same."

"They say it's revolutionised," Miss Amabel offered anxiously.

"Who says so?" he countered, now turning on her.

"The papers," she told him. "You didn't write me about it. I asked you

all sorts of questions and you wouldn't say a word."

"But you wrote me," said Jeff affectionately, "every week. I got so used

to your letters I sha'n't be able to do without them; I shall have to

see you every day."

"Of course we're going to see each other," she said. "And there's such a

lot you can do."

She looked so earnestly entreating that Choate, who sat not far from

her, gave a murmured: "Ah, Miss Amabel!" In his mind the

half-despairing, wholly loving thought had been: "Good old girl! You're

spending yourself and all your money, but it's no use--no use."

She was going on with a perfect clarity of purpose.

"Oh, you know, Jeff can do more for us than anybody else."

"What do you want done for you?" he inquired.

His habit of direct attack gave Lydia a shiver. She was sure people

couldn't like it, and she was exceedingly anxious for him to be liked.

Miss Amabel turned to Farvie.

"You see," she said, "Addington is waking up. I didn't dwell very much

on it," she added, now to Jeff, "when I wrote you, because I thought

you'd like best to think of it as it was. But now--"

"Now I'm out," said Jeff brutally, "you find me equal to it."

"I think," said Miss Amabel, "you can do so much for us." Nothing

troubled her governed calm. It might almost be that, having looked from

high places into deep ones, no abyss could dizzy her. "Weedon Moore

feels as I do."

"Weedon Moore?" Jeffrey repeated, in a surprised and most uncordial

tone. He looked at Choate.

"Yes," said Choate, as if he confirmed not only the question but Jeff's

inner feeling, "he's here. He's practising law, and besides that he

edits the _Argosy_."

"Owns it, too, I think," said Farvie. "They told me so at the

news-stand."

"Well," said Choate pointedly, "it's said Miss Amabel owns it."

"Then," said Jeff, including her abruptly, "you've the whip-hand. You

can get Moore out of it. What's he in it for anyway? Did you have to

take him over with the business?"

Miss Amabel was plainly grieved.

"Now why should you want to turn him out of it?" she asked, really of

Choate who had started the attack. "Mr. Moore is a very able young man,

of the highest ideals."

Jeff laughed. It was a kindly laugh. Anne was again sure he loved Miss

Amabel.

"I can't see Moore changing much after twenty-five," he said to Choate,

who confirmed him briefly:

"Same old Weedie."

"Mr. Moore is not popular," said Miss Amabel, with dignity, turning now

to Farvie. "He never has been, here in Addington. He comes of plain

people."

"That's not it, Miss Amabel," said Choate gently. "He might have been

spawned out of the back meadows or he might have been--a Bracebridge."

He bowed to her with a charming conciliation and Miss Amabel sat a

little straighter. "If we don't accept him, it's because he's Weedon

Moore."

"We were in school with him, you know: in college, too," said Jeff, with

that gentleness men always accorded her, men of perception who saw in

her the motherhood destined to diffuse itself, often to no end: she was

so noble and at the same time so helpless in the crystal prison of her

hopes. "We knew Weedie like a book."

Miss Amabel took on an added dignity, proportioned to the discomfort of

her task. Here she was defending Weedon Moore whom her outer

sensibilities rejected the while his labelled virtues moved her soul.

Sometimes when she found herself with people like these to-night,

manifestly her own kind, she was tired of being good.

"I don't know any one," said she, "who feels the prevailing unrest more

keenly than Weedon Moore."

At that instant, Mary Nellen, her eyes brightening as these social

activities increased, appeared in the doorway, announcing doubtfully:

"Mr. Moore."

Jeffrey, as if actually startled, looked round at Choate who was

unaffectedly annoyed. Anne, rising to receive the problematic Moore,

thought they had an air of wondering how they could repel unwarranted

invasion. Miss Amabel, in a sort of protesting, delicate distress, was

loyally striving to make the invader's path plain.

"I told him I was coming," she said. "It seems he had thought of

dropping in." Then Anne went out on the heels of Mary Nellen, hearing

Miss Amabel conclude, as she left, with an apologetic note unfamiliar to

her soft voice, "He wants you to write something, Jeff, for the

_Argosy_."

Anne, even before seeing him, became conscious that Mary Nellen regarded

the newcomer as undesirable; and when she came on him standing, hat in

hand, she agreed that Weedon Moore was, in his outward integument,

exceedingly unpleasant: a short, swarthy, tubby man, always, she was to

note, dressed in smooth black, and invariably wearing or carrying, with

the gravity of a funeral mourner, what Addington knew as a "tall hat".

When the weather gave him countenance, he wore a black coat with a cape.

One flashing ring adorned his left hand, and he indulged a barbaric

taste in flowing ties. Seeing Anne, he spoke at once, and if she had not

been prepared for him she must have guessed him to be a man come on a

message of importance. There was conscious emphasis in his voice, and

there needed to be if it was to accomplish anything: a high voice,

strident, and, like the rest of him, somehow suggesting insect life. He

held out his hand and Anne most unwillingly took it.

"Miss French," said he, with no hesitation before her name, "how is

Jeff?"

The mere inquiry set Anne vainly to hoping that he need not come in. But

he gave no quarter.

"I said I'd run over to-night, paper or no paper. I'm frightfully busy,

you know, cruelly, abominably busy. But I just wanted to see Jeff."

"Won't you come in?" said Anne.

Even then he did not abandon his hat. He kept his hold on it, bearing it

before him in a way that made Anne think absurdly of shields and

bucklers. When, in the library, she turned to present him, as if he were

an unpleasant find she had got to vouch for somehow, the men were

already on their feet and Jeff was setting forward a chair. She could

not help thinking it was a clever stage business to release him from the

necessity of shaking hands. But Moore did not abet him in that

informality. His small hand was out, and he was saying in a sharp,

strained voice, exactly as if he were making a point of some kind, an

oratorical point:

"Jeff, my dear fellow! I'm tremendously glad to see you."

Anne thought Jeff might not shake hands with him at all. But she saw him

steal a shamefaced look at Miss Amabel and immediately, as if something

radical had to be done when it came to the friend of a beloved old girl

like her, strike his hand into Moore's, with an emphasis the more

pronounced for his haste to get it over. Moore seemed enraptured at the

handshake and breathless over the occasion. Having begun shaking hands

he kept on with enthusiasm: the colonel, Miss Amabel and Lydia had to

respond to an almost fervid greeting.

Only Choate proved immune. He had vouchsafed a cool: "How are you,

Weedie?" when Moore began, and that seemed all Moore was likely to

expect. Then they all sat down and there was, Lydia decided, as she

glanced from one to another, no more pleasure in it. There was talk.

Moore chatted so exuberantly, his little hands upon his fattish knees,

that he seemed to squeeze sociability out of himself in a rapture of

generous willingness to share all he had. He asked the colonel how he

liked Addington, and was not abashed at being reminded that the colonel

had known Addington for a good many years.

"Still it's changed," said Moore, regarding him almost archly.

"Addington isn't the place it was even a year ago."

"I hope we've learned something," said Miss Amabel earnestly and yet

prettily too.

"My theory of Addington," said Choate easily, "is that we all wish we

were back in the Addington of a hundred years ago."

"You'd want to be in the dominant class," said Moore. There was

something like the trammels of an unwilling respect over his manner to

Choate; yet still he managed to be rallying. "When the old merchants

were coming home with china and bales of silk and Paris shoes for madam.

And think of it," said he, raising his sparse eyebrows and looking like

a marionette moulded to express something and saying it with painful

clumsiness, almost grotesquerie, "the ships are bringing human products

now. They're bringing us citizens, bone and sinew of the republic, and

we cry back to china and bales of silk."

"I didn't answer you, Moore," said Choate, turning to him and speaking,

Lydia thought, with the slightest arrogance. "I should have wanted to

belong to the governing class--of course."

"Now!" said Miss Amabel. She spoke gently, and she was, they saw, pained

at the turn the talk had taken. "Alston, why should you say that?"

"Because I mean it," said Alston. His quietude seemed to carry a private

message to Moore, but he turned to her, as he spoke and smiled as if to

ask her not to interpret him harshly. "Of course I should have wanted to

be in the dominant class. So does everybody, really."

"No, my dear," said Miss Amabel.

"No," agreed Choate, "you don't. The others like you didn't. I won't

embarrass you by naming them. You want to sit submerged, you others, and

be choked by slime, if you must be, and have the holy city built up on

your shoulders. But the rest of us don't. Moore here doesn't, do you,

Weedie?"

Weedon gave a quick embarrassed laugh.

"You're so droll," said he.

"No," said Choate quietly, "I'm not being droll. Of course I want to

belong to the dominant class. So does the man that never dominated in

his life. He wants to overthrow the over-lords so he can rule himself.

He wants to crowd me so he can push into a place beside me."

Moore laughed with an overdone enjoyment.

"Excellent," he said, squeezing the words out of his knees. "You're such

a humourist."

If he wanted to be offensive, that was the keenest cut he could have

delivered.

"I have often thought," said the colonel, beginning in a hesitating,

deferent way that made his utterance rather notable, "that we saddle

what we call the lower orders with motives different from our own."

"Precisely," Choate clipped in. "We used to think, when they committed a

perfectly logical crime, like stealing a sheep or a loaf of bread, that

it was absolutely different from anything we could have done. Whereas in

their places we should have tried precisely the same thing. Just as

cleanliness is a matter of bathtubs and temperature. We shouldn't bathe

if we had to break the ice over a quart of water and then go out and run

a trolley car all day."

Lydia's face, its large eyes fixed upon him, said so plainly "I don't

believe it" that he laughed, with a sudden enjoyment of her, and, after

an instant of wider-eyed surprise, she laughed too.

"And here's Miss Amabel," Choate went on, in the voice it seemed he kept

for her, "going to the outer extreme and believing, because the

labouring man has been bled, that he's incapable of bleeding you. Don't

you think it, Miss Amabel. He's precisely like the rest of us. Like me.

Like Weedon here. He'll sit up on his platform and judge me like forty

thousand prophets out of Israel; but put him where I am and he'll cling

with his eyelids and stick there. Just as I shall."

Miss Amabel looked deeply troubled and also at a loss.

"I only think, Alston," she said, "that so much insight, so much of the

deepest knowledge comes of pain. And the poor have suffered pain so many

centuries. They've learned things we don't know. Look how they help one

another. Look at their self-sacrifice."

"Look at your own self-sacrifice," said Choate.

"Oh, but they know," said she. The flame of a great desire was in her

face. "I don't know what it is to be hungry. If I starved myself I

shouldn't know, because in somebody's pantry would be the bread-box I

could put my hand into. They know, Alston. It gives them insight. When

they remember the road they've travelled, they're not going to make the

mistakes we've made."

"Oh, yes, they are," said Choate. "Pardon me. There are going to be

robbers and pirates and Napoleons and get-rich-quicks born for quite a

while yet. And they're not going to be born in my class alone--nor

Weedon's."

Weedon squirmed at this, and even Jeff thought it rather a nasty cut.

But Jeff did not know yet how well Choate knew Weedon in the ways of

men. And Weedon accepted no rebuff. He turned to Jeff, distinctly

leaving Choate as one who would have his little pleasantries.

"Jeff," he said, "I want you to do something for the _Argosy_."

Jeff at once knew what.

"Queer," he said, "how you all think I've got copy out of jail."

Anne resented the word. It was not jail, she thought, a federal prison

where gentlemen, when they have done wrong or been, like Jeff, falsely

accused, may go with dignity.

"My dear," said Miss Amabel, in a manner at once all compassion and

inexorable demand, "you've got so much to tell us. You men in

that--place," she stumbled over the word and then accepted

it--"discussed the ideal republic. You made it, by discussing it."

"Yes," said Choate, in voice of curious circumspection as if he hardly

knew what form even of eulogy might hurt, "it was an astonishing piece

of business. You can't expect people not to notice a thing like that."

"I can't help it," said Jeff. "I don't want such a row made over it."

Whether the thing was too intimate, too near his heart still beating

sluggishly it might be, from prison air, could not be seen. But Miss

Amabel, exquisitely compassionate, was yet inexorable, because he had

something to give and must not withhold.

"The wonderful part of it is," she said, "that when you have built up

your ideal government, prison ceases to be prison. There won't be

punishment any more."

"Oh, don't you make that mistake," said Jeff, instantly, moved now too

vitally to keep out of it. "There are going to be punishments all along

the line. The big punishment of all, when you've broken a law, is that

you're outside. If it's a small break, you're not much over the sill. If

it's a big break, you're absolutely out. Outside, Amabel, outside!" He

never used the civil prefix before her name, and Anne wondered again

whether the intimacy of the letters accounted for this sweet

informality. "You're banished. What's worse than that?"

"Oh, but," said she, her plain, beautiful face beaming divinity on him

as one of the children of men, "I don't want them to be banished. If

anybody has sinned--has broken the law--I want him to be educated.

That's all."

"Look here," said Jeff, He bent forward to her and laid the finger of

one trade-stained hand in the other palm. "You're emasculating the whole

nation. Let us be educated, but let us take our good hard whacks."

"Hear! hear!" said Choate, speaking mildly but yet as a lawyer, who

spent his life in presenting liabilities for or against punishment.

"That's hot stuff."

"I believe in law," said Jeff rapidly. "Sometimes I think that's all I

believe in now."

Anne and Lydia looked at him in a breathless waiting upon his words. He

had begun to justify himself to their crescent belief in him, the

product of the years. His father also waited, but tremulously. Here was

the boy he had wanted back, but he had not so very much strength to

accord even a fulfilled delight. Jeff, forgetful of everybody but the

old sybil he was looking at, sure of her comprehension if not her

agreement, went on.

"I'd rather have bad laws than no laws. I believe in Sparta. I believe

in the Catholic Church, if only because it has fasts and penances. We've

got to toe the mark. If we don't, something's got to give it to us good

and hard, the harder the better, too. Are we children to be let off from

the consequences of what we've done? No, by God! We're men and we've got

to learn."

Suddenly his eyes left Miss Amabel's quickened face and he glanced about

him, aware of the startled tensity of gaze among the others. Moore,

with a little book on his knee, was writing rapidly.

"Notes?" Jeff asked him shortly. "No, you don't."

He got up and extended his hand for the book, and Moore helplessly,

after a look at Miss Amabel, as if to ask whether she meant to see him

bullied, delivered it. Jeff whirled back two leaves, tore them out,

crumpled them in his hand and tossed them into the fireplace.

"You can't do that, Moore," he said indifferently, and Choate murmured a

monosyllabic assent.

Moore never questioned the bullying he so prodigally got. He never had

at college even; he was as ready to fawn the next day. It seemed as if

the inner man were small, too small for sound resentment. Jeff sat down

again. He looked depressed, his countenance without inward light. But

Lydia and Anne had rediscovered him. Again he was their hero, reclothed

indeed in finer mail. Miss Amabel rose at once. She shook hands with the

colonel, and asked Anne and Lydia to come to see her.

"Don't you do something, you two girls?" she asked, with her inviting

smile. "I'm sure Jeff wrote me so."

"We dance," said Lydia, in a bubbling bright voice, as if she had run

forward to be sure to get the chance of answering. "Let us come and

dance for you. We can dance all sorts of things."

And Lydia was so purely childlike and dear, after this talk of

punishments and duties, that involuntarily they all laughed and she

looked abashed.

"Perhaps you know folk-dances," said Miss Amabel.

"Oh, yes," said Lydia, getting back her spirit. "There isn't one we

don't know."

And they laughed again and Miss Amabel tied on her bonnet and went away

attended by Choate, with Weedon Moore a pace behind, holding his hat,

until he got out of the house, as it might be at a grotesque funeral.

Miss Amabel had called back to Lydia:

"You must come and train my classes in their national dancing."

Lydia, behind the colonel and Jeff as they stood at the front door,

seized Anne's hand and did a few ecstatic little steps.

The colonel was bright-eyed and satisfied with his evening. "Jeff," said

he, before they turned to separate, "I always thought you were meant for

a writer."

Jeff looked at him in a dull denial, as if he wondered how any man, life

being what it is, could seek to bound the lot of another man. His face,

flushed darkly, was seamed with feeling.

"Father," said he, in a voice of mysterious reproach, "I don't know what

I was meant to be."

X

It was Lydia who found out what Jeff meant himself to be, for the next

day, in course of helping Mary Nellen, she went to his door with towels.

Mr. Jeffrey had gone out, Mary Nellen said. She had seen him spading in

the orchard, and if Miss Lydia wanted to carry up the towels! there was

the dusting, too. Lydia, at the open door, stopped, for Jeff was sitting

at his writing table, paper before him. He flicked a look at her,

absently, as at an intruder as insignificant as undesired, and because

the sacredness of his task was plain to her she took it humbly. But

Jeff, then actually seeing her, rose and put down his pen.

"I'll take those," he said.

It troubled him vaguely to find her and Anne doing tasks. He had a

worried sense that he and the colonel were living on their kind offices,

and he felt like assuring Lydia she shouldn't carry towels about for

either of them long. Then, as she did not yield them but looked,

housekeeper-wise, at the rack still loaded with its tumbled reserves, he

added:

"Give them here."

"You mustn't leave your writing," said Lydia primly if shyly, and

delivered up her charge.

Jeff stepped out after her into the hall. He had left dull issues at his

table, and Lydia seemed very sweet, her faith in him chiefly, though he

didn't want any more of it.

"Don't worry about my writing," said he.

"Oh, no," she answered, turning on him the clarity of her glance. "I

shouldn't. Authors never want it talked about."

"That's not it," said he. She found him tremendously in earnest. "I'm

not an author."

"But you will be when this is written."

"I don't know," he said, "how I can make you see. The whole thing is so

foreign to your ideas about books and life. It only happened that I met

a man--in there--" he hesitated over it, not as regarding delicacies but

only as they might affect her--"a man like a million others, some of 'em

in prison, more that ought to be. Well, he talked to me. I saw what

brought him where he was. It was picturesque."

"You want other people to understand," said Lydia, bright-eyed, now she

was following him. "For--a warning."

His frown was heavy. Now he was trying to follow her.

"No," he said, "you're off there. I don't take things that way. But I

did see it so plain I wanted everybody to see it, too. Maybe that was

why I did want to write it down. Maybe I wanted to write it for myself,

so I should see it plainer. It fascinated me."

Lydia felt a helpless yearning, because things were being so hard for

him. She wished for Anne who always knew, and with a word could help you

out when your elucidation failed.

"You see," Jeff was going on, "there's this kind of a brute born into

the world now, the kind that knows how to make money, and as soon as

he's discovered his knack, he's got the mania to make more. It's an

obligation, an obsession. Maybe it's only the game. He's in it, just as

much as if he'd got a thousand men behind him, all looting territory. It

might be for a woman. But it's the game. And it's a queer game. It cuts

him off. He's outside."

And here Lydia had a simple and very childlike thought, so inevitable to

her that she spoke without consideration.

"You were outside, too."

Jeff gave a little shake of the head, as if that didn't matter now he

was here and explaining to her.

"And the devil of it is, after they're once outside they don't know they

are."

"Do you mean, when they've done something and been found guilty and--"

"I mean all along the line. When they've begun to think they'll make

good, when they've begun to play the game."

"For money?"

"Yes, for money, for pretty gold and dirty bills and silver. That's what

it amounts to, when you get down to it, behind all the bank balances and

equities. There's a film that grows over your eyes, you look at nothing

else. You don't think about--" his voice dropped and he glanced out at

the walled orchard as if it were even a sacred place--"you don't think

about grass, and dirt, and things. You're thinking about the game."

"Well," said Lydia joyously, seeing a green pathway out, "now you've

found it's so, you don't need to think about it any more."

"That's precisely it," said he heavily. "I've got to think about it all

the time. I've got to make good."

"In the same way?" said Lydia, looking up at him childishly. "With

money?"

"Yes," said he, "with money. It's all I know. And without capital, too.

And I'm going to keep my head, and do it within the law. Yes, by God!

within the law. But I hate to do it. I hate it like the devil."

He looked so hard with resolution that she took the resolution for

pride, though she could not know whether it was a fine pride or a

heaven-defying one.

"You won't do just what you did before?" asserted Lydia, out of her

faith in him.

"Oh, yes, I shall."

She opened terrified eyes upon him.

"Be a promoter?"

"I don't know what I shall be. But I know the money game, and I shall

have to play it and make good."

She ventured a question touching on the fancies that were in her mind,

part of the bewildering drama that might attend on his return. She

faltered it out. It seemed too splendid really to assault fortune like

that. And yet perhaps not too splendid for him. This was the question.

"And pay back--" There she hesitated, and he finished for her.

"The money I lost in a hole? Well, we'll see." This last sounded

indulgent, as if he might add, "little sister ".

Lydia plucked up spirit.

"There's something else I hoped you'd do first."

"What is it?"

"I want you to prove you're innocent."

She found herself breathless over the words. They brought her very near

him, and after all she was not sure what kind of brother he was, save

that he had to be supremely loved. He looked pale to her now, of a

yellowed, unhappy hue, and he was staring at her fixedly.

"Innocent!" he repeated. "What do you mean by innocent?"

Lydia took heart again, since he really did invite her on.

"Why, of course," she said, "we all know--Farvie and Anne and I--we know

you never did it."

"Did what?"

"Lost all that money. Took it away from people."

The softness of her voice was moving to him. He saw she meant him very

well indeed.

"Lydia," said he, "I lost the money. Don't make any mistake about that."

"Yes, you were a promoter," she reminded him. "You were trying to get

something on the market." She seemed to be assuring him, in an agonised

way, of his own good faith. "And people bought shares. And you took

their money. And--" her voice broke here in a sob of irrepressible

sympathy--"and you lost it."

"Yes," said he patiently. "I found myself in a tight place and the

unexpected happened--the inconceivable. The market went to pieces. And

of course it was at the minute I was asked to account for the funds I

had. I couldn't. So I was a swindler. I was tried. I was sentenced, and

I went to prison. That's all."

"Oh," said Lydia passionately, "but do you suppose we don't know you're

not the only person concerned? Don't you suppose we know there's

somebody else to blame?"

Jeff turned on her a sudden look so like passion of a sort that she

trembled back from him. Why should he be angry with her? Did he stand by

Reardon to that extent?

"What do you mean?" he asked her. "Who's been talking to you?"

"We've all been talking," said Lydia, with a frank simplicity, "Farvie

and Anne and I. Of course we've talked. Especially Anne and I. We knew

you weren't to blame."

Jeff turned away from her and went back into his room. He shut the door,

and yet so quietly that she could not feel reproved. Only she was sad.

The way of being a sister was a harder one than she had looked for. But

she felt bound to him, even by stronger and stronger cords. He was hers,

Farvie's and Anne's and hers, however unlikely he was to take hold of

his innocence with firm hands and shake it in the public face.

Jeff, in his room, stood for a minute or more, hands in his pockets,

staring at the wall and absently thinking he remembered the paper on it

from his college days. But he recalled himself from the obvious. He

looked into his inner chamber of mind where he had forbidden himself to

glance since he had come home, lest he see there a confusion of idea and

desire that should make him the weaker in carrying out the

inevitabilities of his return. There was one thing in decency to be

expected of him at this point: to give his father a period of

satisfaction before he left him to do what he had not yet clearly

determined on. It was sufficiently convincing to tell Lydia he intended

to make good, but he had not much idea what he meant by it. He was

conscious chiefly that he felt marred somehow, jaded, harassed by life,

smeared by his experience of living in a gentlemanly jail. The fact that

he had left it did not restore to him his old feeling of owning the

earth. He had, from the moment of his conviction and sentence, been

outside, and his present liberty could not at once convey him inside.

He was, he knew, for one thing, profoundly tired. Nothing, he felt sure,

could give him back the old sense of air in his lungs. Confinement had

not deprived him of air. He had smiled grimly to himself once or twice,

as he thought what the sisters' idea of his prison was likely to be.

They probably had conjured up fetid dungeons. There were chains of a

surety, certainly a clank or two. As he remembered it, there was a

clanking in his mind, quite sufficient to fulfil the prison ideal. And

then he thought, with a sudden desire for man's company, the expectation

that would take you for granted, that he'd go down and see old Reardon.

Reardon had not been to call, but Jeff was too sick of solitariness to

mind that.

He went out without seeing anybody, the colonel, he knew, being at his

gentle task of cramming for Mary Nellen's evening lesson. Jeff had not

been in the street since the walk he had cut short with Madame Beattie.

He felt strange out in the world now, as if the light blinded him or the

sun burned him, or there were an air too chill--all, he reflected, in a

grim discovery, the consequence of being outside and not wanting houses

to see you or persons to bow and offer friendly hands. Reardon would

blow such vapours away with a breath of his bluff voice. But as he

reached the vestibule of the yellow house, Reardon himself was coming

out and Jeff, with a sick surprise, understood that Reardon was not

prepared to see him.