IV

Closing the door behind his departing guests, Guion stood for a minute,

with his hand still on the knob, pressing his forehead against the

woodwork. He listened to the sound of the carriage-wheels die away and

to the crunching tread of the two men down the avenue.

"The last Guion has received the last guest at Tory Hill," he said to

himself. "That's all over--all over and done with. Now!"

It was the hour to which he had been looking forward, first as an

impossibility, then as a danger, and at last as an expectation, ever

since the day, now some years ago, when he began to fear that he might

not be able to restore all the money he had "borrowed" from the

properties in his trust. Having descried it from a long way off, he knew

that with reasonable luck it could not overtake him soon. There were

many chances, indeed, that it might never overtake him at all. Times

might change; business might improve; he might come in for the money he

expected from his old Aunt de Melcourt; he might die. If none of these

things happened, there were still ways and means by which he might make

money in big strokes and "square himself" without any one ever being

the wiser. He had known of cases, or, at least, he had suspected them,

in which men in precisely his position had averted by daring play the

deadliest peril and gone down into honored graves. Fortune had generally

favored him hitherto, and probably would favor him again.

So after the first dreadful days of seeing his "mistakes," and, in his

recoil, calling himself by opprobrious names, he began to get used to

his situation and boldly to meet its requirements. That he would prove

equal to them he had scarcely any doubt. It was, in fact, next to

inconceivable that a man of his antecedents and advantages should be

unable to cope with conditions that, after all, were not wholly

exceptional in the sordid history of business.

He admitted that the affair was sordid, while finding an excuse for his

own connection with it in the involuntary defilement that comes from

touching pitch. It was impossible, he said, for a man of business not to

touch pitch, and he was not a man of business of his own accord. The

state of life had been forced on him. He was a trustee of other people's

property by inheritance, just as a man becomes a tsar. As a career it

was one of the last he would have chosen. Had he received from his

father an ample personal fortune instead of a mere lucrative practice he

would have been a country gentleman, in the English style, with, of

course, a house in town. Born with a princely aptitude for spending his

own money, he felt it hard that he should have been compelled to make it

his life's work to husband that of others. The fact that he had always,

to some extent been a square man in a round hole seemed to entitle him

to a large share of moral allowance, especially in his judgment on

himself. He emphasized the last consideration, since it enabled him, in

his moments of solitude, to look himself more straightly in the face. It

helped him to buttress up his sense of honor, and so his sense of

energy, to be able to say, "I am still a gentleman."

He came in time to express it otherwise, and to say, "I must still play

the gentleman." He came to define also what he meant by the word

_still_. The future presented itself as a succession of stages, in which

this could not happen till that had happened, nor the final disaster

arrive till all the intervening phases of the situation had been passed.

He had passed them. Of late he had seen that the flames of hell would

get hold upon him at that exact instant when, the last defense having

been broken down and the last shift resorted to, he should turn the key

on all outside hope, and be alone with himself and the knowledge that he

could do no more. Till then he could ward them off, and he had been

fighting them to the latest second. But on coming home from his office

in Boston that afternoon he had told himself that the game was up.

Nothing as far as he could see would give him the respite of another

four and twenty hours. The minutes between him and the final

preparations could be counted with the finger on the clock.

In the matter of preparation the most important detail would be to tell

Olivia. Hoping against hope that this would never become necessary, he

had put off the evil moment till the postponement had become cruel. But

he had lived through it so often in thought, he had so acutely suffered

with her in imagination the staggering humiliation of it all, that now,

when the time had come, his feelings were benumbed. As he turned into

his own grounds that day it seemed to him that his deadness of emotion

was such that he could carry the thing through mechanically, as a

skilled surgeon uses a knife. If he found her at tea in the drawing-room

he might tell her then.

He found her at tea, but there were people with her. He was almost

sorry; and yet it keyed him up to see that there was some necessity "to

still play the gentleman." He played it, and played it well--with much

of his old-time ease. The feat was so extraordinary as to call out a

round of mental applause for himself; and, after all, he reflected,

there would be time enough in the evening.

But tea being over, Miss Guion announced that Mr. and Mrs. Temple and

Drusilla Fane were coming informally to dinner, bringing with them a

guest of theirs, "some one of the name of Davenant." For an instant he

felt that he must ask her to telephone and put them off, but on second

thoughts it seemed better to let them come. It would be in the nature of

a reprieve, not so much for himself as for Olivia. It would give her one

more cheerful evening, the last, perhaps, in her life. Besides--the

suggestion was a vague one, sprung doubtless of the hysterical element

in his suppressed excitement--he might test his avowals on Temple and

Davenant, getting a foretaste of what it would be to face the world. He

formed no precise intention of doing that; he only allowed his mind to

linger on the luxury of trying it. He had suspected lately that Rodney

Temple knew more of his situation than he had ever told him, so that the

way to speak out would be cleared in advance; and as for the man of the

name of Davenant--probably Tom Davenant's adopted son, who was said to

have pulled off some good things a few years ago--there would be, in

humbling himself before one so successful, a morbid joy of the kind the

devotee may get in being crushed by an idol.

In this he was not mistaken. While they were there he was able to draw

from his own speeches, covert or open, the relief that comes to a man in

pain from moaning. Now that they were gone, however, the last extraneous

incident that could possibly stand between him and the beginning of the

end had passed. The moment he had foreseen, as one foresees death, was

on him; so, raising his head from the woodwork of the doorway, he braced

himself, and said, "Now!"

At almost the same instant he heard the rustle of his daughter's skirts

as she came from the drawing-room on her way up-stairs. She advanced

slowly down the broad hail, the lights striking iridescent rays from the

trimmings of her dress. The long train, adding to her height, enhanced

her gracefulness. Only that curious deadness of sensation of which he

had been aware all day--the inability to feel any more that comes from

too much suffering--enabled him to keep his ground before her. He did

keep it, advancing from the doorway two or three steps toward her, till

they met at the foot of the stairway.

"Have you enjoyed your evening?" were the words he found himself saying,

though they were far from those he had at heart. He felt that his smile

was ghastly; but, as she seemed not to perceive it, he drew the

conclusion that the ghastliness was within.

She answered languidly. "Yes, so so. It might have been pleasanter if it

hadn't been for that awful man."

"Who? Young Davenant? I don't see anything awful about him."

"I dare say there isn't, really--in his place. He may be only prosy.

However," she added, more brightly, "it doesn't matter for once. Good

night, papa dear. You look tired. You ought to go to bed. I've seen to

the windows in the drawing-room, but I haven't put out the lights."

Having kissed him and patted him on the cheek, she turned to go up the

stairway. He allowed her to ascend a step or two. It was the minute to

speak.

"I'm sorry you feel that way about young Davenant. I rather like him."

He had not chosen the words. They came out automatically. To discuss

Davenant offered an excuse for detaining her, while postponing the blow

for a few minutes more.

"Oh, men would," she said, indifferently, without turning round. "He's

their style."

"Which is to his discredit?"

"Not to his discredit, but to his disadvantage. I've noticed that what

they call a man's man is generally something of a bore."

"Davenant isn't a bore."

"Isn't he? Well, I really didn't notice in particular. I only remember

that he used to be about here years ago--and I didn't like him. I

suppose Drusilla has to be civil to him because he was Cousin Rodney's

ward."

She had paused on the landing at the angle of the staircase.

"He's good-looking," Guion said, in continued effort to interpose the

trivial between himself and what he had still to tell her.

"Oh, that sort of Saxon giant type is always good-looking. Of course.

And dull too."

"I dare say he isn't as dull as you think."

"He might be that, and still remain pretty dull, after the allowances

had been made. I know the type. It's awful--especially in the form of

the American man of business."

"I'm an American man of business myself."

"Yes; by misadventure. You're the business man made, but not born. By

nature you're a boulevardier, or what the newspapers call a 'clubman.' I

admire you more than I can say--everybody admires you--for making such a

success of a work that must always have been uncongenial at the least."

The opening was obvious. Nothing could have been more opportune. Two or

three beginnings presented themselves, and as he hesitated, choosing

between them, he moistened his lips and wiped the cold perspiration

from his brow. After all, the blessed apathy within him was giving way

and going to play him false! He had a minute of feeling as the condemned

man must feel when he catches sight of the guillotine.

Before his parched tongue could formulate syllables she mounted another

step or two of the staircase, and turned again, leaning on the banister

and looking over. He noticed--by a common trick of the perceptive powers

at crises of anguish--how the slender white pilasters, carved and

twisted in sets of four, in the fashion of Georgian houses like Tory

Hill, made quaint, graceful lines up and down the front of her black

gown.

"It's really true--what I say about business, papa," she pursued. "I'm

very much in earnest, and so is Rupert. I do wish you'd think of that

place near Heneage. It will be so lovely for me to feel you're there;

and there can't be any reason for your going on working any longer."

"No; there's no reason for that," he managed to say.

"Well then?" she demanded, with an air of triumph. "It's just as I said.

You owe it to every one, you owe it to me, you owe it to yourself above

all, to give up. It might have been better if you'd done it long ago."

"I couldn't," he declared, in a tone that sounded to his own ears as a

cry. "I tried to, ... but things were so involved ... almost from the

first...."

"Well, as long as they're not involved now there's no reason why it

shouldn't be better late than never."

"But they _are_ involved now," he said, with an intensity so poignant

that he was surprised she didn't notice it.

"Then straighten them out. Isn't that what we've been saying all along,

Cousin Rodney and I? Take a partner; take two partners. Cousin Rodney

says you should have done it when Mr. Maxwell died, or before--"

"I couldn't.... Things weren't shipshape enough ... not even then."

"I'm sure it could be managed," she asserted, confidently; "and if you

don't do it now, papa, when I'm being married and going away for good,

you'll never do it at all. That's my fear. I don't want to live over

there without you, papa; and I'm afraid that's what you're going to let

me in for." She moved from the banister, and continued her way upward,

speaking over her shoulder as she ascended. "In the mean time, you

really _must_ go to bed. You look tired and rather pale--just as I do

after a dull party. Good night; and _don't_ stay up."

She reached the floor above, and went toward her room. He felt

strangled, speechless. There was a sense of terror too in the thought

that his nerve, the nerve on which he had counted so much, was going to

fail him.

"Olivia!"

His voice was so sharp that she hurried back to the top of the stairs.

"What is it, papa? Aren't you well?"

It was the sight of her face, anxious and suddenly white, peering down

through the half-light of the hall that finally unmanned him. With a

heart-sick feeling he turned away from the stairway.

"Yes; I'm all right. I only wanted you to know that ... that ... I shall

be working rather late. You mustn't be disturbed ... if you hear me

moving about."

He would have upbraided himself more bitterly for his cowardice had he

not found an excuse in the thought that, after all, there would be time

in the morning. It was best that she should have the refreshment of the

night. The one thing important was that she should not have the shock of

learning from others on the morrow that he was not coming back--that he

was going to Singville. Should he go there at all, he was determined to

stay. Since he had no fight to put up, it was better that his going

should be once for all. The thought of weeks, of months, perhaps, of

quasi-freedom, during which he should be parading himself "on bail," was

far more terrible to him than that of prison. He must prepare her for

the beginning of his doom at all costs to himself; but, he reasoned, she

would be more capable of taking the information calmly in the daylight

of the morning than now, at a few minutes of midnight.

It was another short reprieve, enabling him to give all his attention to

the tasks before him. If he was not to come back to Tory Hill he must

leave his private papers there, his more intimate treasures, in good

order. Certain things would have to be put away, others rearranged,

others destroyed. For the most part they were in the library, the room

he specially claimed as his own. Before setting himself to the work

there he walked through some of the other rooms, turning out the lights.

In doing so he was consciously taking a farewell. He had been born in

this house; in it he had spent his boyhood; to it he had come back as a

young married man. He had lived in it till his wife and he had set up

their more ambitious establishment in Boston, an extravagance from

which, perhaps, all the subsequent misfortunes could be dated. He had

known at the time that his father, had he lived, would have condemned

the step; but he himself was a believer in fortunate chances. Besides,

it was preposterous for a young couple of fashion to continue living in

a rambling old house that belonged to neither town nor country, at a

time when the whole trend of life was cityward. They had discussed the

move, with its large increase of expenditure, from every point of view,

and found it one from which, in their social position, there was no

escape. It was a matter about which they had hardly any choice.

So, too, a few years later, with the taking of the cottage at Newport.

It was forced on them. When all their friends were doing something of

the sort it seemed absurd to hesitate because of a mere matter of

means--especially when by hook or by crook the means could be procured.

Similar reasoning had attended their various residences abroad--in

London, Paris, Rome. Country-houses in England or villas on the Riviera

became matters of necessity, according to the demands of Olivia's entry

into the world of fashion or Mrs. Guion's health.

It was not till the death of the latter, some seven years ago, that

Guion, obliged to pause, was able to take cognizance of the degree to

which he had imperiled himself in the years of effort to maintain their

way of life. It could not be said that at the time he regretted what he

had done, but he allowed it to frighten him into some ineffectual

economies. He exchanged the cottage at Newport for one at Lenox, and,

giving up the house in Boston, withdrew to Tory Hill. Ceasing himself to

go into society, he sent his daughter abroad for a large portion of her

time, either in the care of Madame de Melcourt or, in London, under the

wing of some of the American ladies prominent in English life.

Having taken these steps, with no small pride in his capacity for

sacrifice, Guion set himself seriously to reconstruct his own fortune

and to repair the inroads he had made on those in his trust. It was a

matter in which he had but few misgivings as to his capacity. The making

of money, he often said, was an easy thing, as could be proved by the

intellectual grade of the men who made it. One had only to look about

one to see that they were men in whom the average of ability was by no

means high, men who achieved their successes largely by a kind of rule

of thumb. They got the knack of investment--and they invested. He

preferred the word investment to another which might have challenged

comment. They bought in a low market and sold in a high one--and the

trick was done. Some instinct--a _flair_, he called it--was required in

order to recognize, more or less at sight, those properties which would

quickly and surely appreciate in value; and he believed he possessed it.

Given the control of a few thousands as a point of departure, and the

financial ebb and flow, a man must be a born fool, he said, not to be

able to make a reasonable fortune with reasonable speed.

Within the office of Guion, Maxwell & Guion circumstances favored the

accession to power of the younger partner, who had hitherto played an

acquiescent rather than an active part. Mr. Maxwell was old and ailing,

though neither so ailing nor so old as to be blind to the need of new

blood, new money, and new influence in the fine old firm. His weakness

was that he hated beginning all over again with new men; so that when

Smith and Jones were proposed as possible partners he easily admitted

whatever objections Guion raised to them, and the matter was postponed.

It was postponed again. It slipped into a chronic condition of

postponement; and Mr. Maxwell died.

The situation calling then for adroitness on Guion's part, the fact that

he was able to meet it to the satisfaction of all the parties concerned,

increased his confidence in his own astuteness. True, it required some

manipulation, some throwing of dust into people's eyes, some making of

explanations to one person that could not be reconciled with those made

to another; but here again the circumstances helped him. His clients

were for the most part widows and old maids, many of them resident

abroad, for whom Guion, Maxwell & Guion had so long stood, in the matter

of income, for the embodiment of paternal care that they were ready to

believe anything and say anything and sign anything they were told to.

With the legal authorities to whom he owed account he had the advantage

of the house's high repute, making it possible to cover with formalities

anything that might, strictly speaking, have called for investigation.

Whatever had to be considered shifty he excused to himself on the ground

of its being temporary; while it was clearly, in his opinion, to the

ultimate advantage of the Clay heirs and the Rodman heirs and the

Compton heirs and all the other heirs for whom Guion, Maxwell & Guion

were _in loco parentis_, that he should have a free hand.

The sequel astonished rather than disillusioned him. It wrought in him

disappointment with the human race, especially as represented by the

Stock Exchange, without diminishing his confidence in his own judgment.

Through all his wild efforts not to sink he was upborne by the knowledge

that it was not his calculations that were wrong, but the workings of a

system more obscure than that of chance and more capricious than the

weather. He grew to consider it the fault of the blind forces that make

up the social, financial, and commercial worlds, and not his own, when

he was reduced to a frantic flinging of good money after bad as offering

the sole chance of working out his redemption.

And, now that it was all over, he was glad his wife had not lived to see

the end. That, at least, had been spared him. He stood before her

portrait in the drawing-room--the much-admired portrait by Carolus

Duran--and told her so. She was so living as she looked down on him--a

suggestion of refined irony about the lips and eyes giving personality

to the delicate oval of the face--that he felt himself talking to her as

they had been wont to talk together ever since their youth. In his way

he had stood in awe of her. The assumption of prerogative--an endowment

of manner or of temperament, he was never quite sure which--inherited by

Olivia in turn, had been the dominating influence in their domestic

life. He had not been ruled by her--the term would have been

grotesque--he had only made it his pleasure to carry out her wishes.

That her wishes led him on to spending money not his own was due to the

fact, ever to be regretted, that his father had not bequeathed him money

so much as the means of earning it. She could not be held responsible

for that, while she was the type of woman to whom it was something like

an outrage not to offer the things befitting to her station. There was

no reproach in the look he lifted on her now--nothing but a kind of

dogged, perverse thankfulness that she should have had the way of life

she craved, without ever knowing the price he was about to pay for it.

In withdrawing his glance from hers he turned it about on the various

objects in the room. Many of them had stood in their places since before

he was born; others he had acquired at occasional sales of Guion

property, so that, as the different branches of the family became

extinct or disappeared, whatever could be called "ancestral" might have

a place at Tory Hill; others he had collected abroad. All of them, in

these moments of anguish--the five K'ang-hsi vases on the mantelpiece,

brought home by some seafaring Guion of Colonial days, the armorial

"Lowestoft" in the cabinets, the Copley portraits of remote connections

on the walls, the bits of Chippendale and Hepplewhite that had belonged

to the grandfather who built Tory Hill--all of them took on now a kind

of personality, as with living look and utterance. He had loved them and

been proud of them; and as he turned out the lights, leaving them to

darkness, eyes could not have been more appealing nor lips more eloquent

than they in their mute farewell.

Returning to the library, he busied himself with his main undertaking.

He was anxious that nothing should be left behind that could give Olivia

additional pain, while whatever she might care to have, her mother's

letters to himself or other family documents, might be ready to her

hand. It was the kind of detail to which he could easily give his

attention. He worked methodically and phlegmatically, steeling himself

to a grim suppression of regret. He was almost sorry to finish the task,

since it forced his mind to come again face to face with facts. The

clock struck two as he closed the last drawer and knew that that part of

his preparation was completed.

In reading the old letters with their echoes of old incidents, old joys,

old jokes, old days in Paris, Rome, or England, he had been so wafted

back to another time that on pushing in the drawer, which closed with a

certain click of finality, the realization of the present rolled back

on his soul with a curious effect of amazement. For a few minutes it was

as if he had never understood it, never thought of it, before. They were

going to make him, Henry Guion, a prisoner, a criminal, a convict! They

were going to clip his hair, and shave his beard, and dress him in a

hideous garb, and shut him in a cell! They were going to give him

degrading work to do and degrading rules to keep, and degrading

associates to live with, as far as such existence could be called living

with any one at all. They were going to do this for year upon year, all

the rest of his life, since he never could survive it. He was to have

nothing any more to come in between him and his own thoughts--his

thoughts of Olivia brought to disgrace, of the Clay heirs brought to

want, of the Rodman heirs and the Compton heirs deprived of half their

livelihood! He had called it that evening the Strange Ride with Morrowby

Jukes to the Land of the Living Dead, but it was to be worse than that.

It was to be worse than Macbeth with his visions of remorse; it was to

be worse than Vathek with the flame burning in his heart; it was to be

worse than Judas--who at least could hang himself.

He got up and went to a mirror in the corner of the room. The mere sight

of himself made the impossible seem more impossible. He was so fine a

specimen--he could not but know it!--so much the free man, the honorable

man, the man of the world! He tried to see himself with his hair clipped

and his beard shaven and the white cravat and waistcoat replaced by the

harlequin costume of the jailbird. He tried to see himself making his

own bed, and scrubbing his own floor, and standing at his cell door with

a tin pot in his hand, waiting for his skilly. It was so absurd, so out

of the question, that he nearly laughed outright. He was in a dream--in

a nightmare! He shook himself, he pinched himself, in order to wake up.

He was ready in sudden rage to curse the handsome, familiar room for the

persistence of its reality, because the rows of books and the Baxter

prints and the desks and chairs and electric lights refused to melt away

like things in a troubled sleep.

It was then that for the first time he began to taste the real measure

of his impotence. He was in the hand of the law. He was in the grip of

the sternest avenging forces human society could set in motion against

him; and, quibbles, shifts, and subterfuges swept aside, no one knew

better than himself that his punishment would be just.

It was a strange feeling, the feeling of having put himself outside the

scope of mercy. But there he was! There could never be a word spoken in

his defense, nor in any one's heart a throb of sympathy toward him. He

had forfeited everything. He could expect nothing from any man, and from

his daughter least of all. The utmost he could ask for her was that she

should marry, go away, and school herself as nearly as might be to

renounce him. That she should do it utterly would not be possible; but

something would be accomplished if pride or humiliation or resentment

gave her the spirit to carry her head high and ignore his existence.

It was incredible to think that at that very instant she was sleeping

quietly, without a suspicion of what was awaiting her. Everything was

incredible--incredible and impossible. As he looked around the room, in

which every book, every photograph, every pen and pencil, was a part of

him, he found himself once more straining for a hope, catching at

straws. He took a sheet of paper, and sitting down at his desk began

again, for the ten thousandth time, to balance feverishly his meagre

assets against his overwhelming liabilities. He added and subtracted and

multiplied and divided with a sort of frenzy, as though by dint of sheer

forcing the figures he could make them respond to his will.

Suddenly, with a gesture of mingled anger and hopelessness, he swept the

scribbled sheets and all the writing paraphernalia with a crash to the

floor, and, burying his face in his hands, gave utterance to a smothered

groan. It was a cry, not of surrender, but of protest--of infinite,

exasperated protest, of protest against fate and law and judgment and

the eternal principles of right and wrong, and against himself most of

all. With his head pressed down on the bare polished wood of his desk,

he hurled himself mentally at an earth of adamant and a heaven of brass,

hurled himself ferociously, repeatedly, with a kind of doggedness, as

though he would either break them down or dash his own soul to pieces.

"O God! O God!"

It was an involuntary moan, stifled in his fear of becoming hysterical,

but its syllables arrested his attention. They were the syllables of

primal articulation, of primal need, condensing the appeal and the

aspiration of the world. He repeated them:

"O God! O God!"

He repeated them again. He raised his head, as if listening to a voice.

"O God! O God!"

He continued to sit thus, as if listening.

It was a strange, an astounding thought to him that he might pray.

Though the earth of adamant were unyielding, the heaven of brass might

give way!

He dragged himself to his feet.

He believed in God--vaguely. That is, it had always been a matter of

good form with him to go to church and to call for the offices of

religion on occasions of death or marriage. He had assisted at the

saying of prayers and assented to their contents. He had even joined in

them himself, since a liturgical service was a principle in the church

to which he "belonged." All this, however, had seemed remote from his

personal affairs, his life-and-death struggles--till now. Now, all at

once, queerly, it offered him something--he knew not what. It might be

nothing better than any of the straws he had been clutching at. It might

be no more than the effort he had just been making to compel two to

balance ten.

He stood in the middle of the room under the cluster of electric lights

and tried to recollect what he knew, what he had heard, of this Power

that could still act when human strength had reached its limitations.

It was nothing very definite. It consisted chiefly of great phrases,

imperfectly understood: "Father Almighty," "Saviour of the World,"

"Divine Compassion" and such like. He did not reason about them, or try

to formulate what he actually believed. It was instinctively, almost

unconsciously, that he began to speak; it was brokenly and with a kind

of inward, spiritual hoarseness. He scarcely knew what he was doing when

he found himself saying, mentally:

"Save me!... I'm helpless!... I'm desperate!... Save me!... Work a

miracle!... Father!... Christ! Christ! Save my daughter!... We have no

one--but--but You!... Work a miracle! Work a miracle!... I'm a thief and

a liar and a traitor--but save me! I might do something yet--something

that might render me--worth salvation--but then--I might not.... Anyhow,

save me!... O God! Father Almighty!... Almighty! That means that You can

do anything!... Even now--You can do--anything!... Save us!... Save us

all!... Christ! Christ! Christ!"

* * * * *

He knew neither when nor how he ceased, any more than when or how he

began. His most clearly defined impression was that of his spirit coming

back from a long way off to take perception of the fact that he was

still standing under the cluster of electric lights and the clock was

striking three. He was breathless, exhausted. His most urgent physic

need was that of air. He strode to the window-door leading out to the

terraced lawn, and, throwing it open, passed out into the darkness.

There was no mist at this height above the Charles. The night was still,

and the moon westering. The light had a glimmering, metallic essence, as

from a cosmic mirror in the firmament. Long shadows of trees and

shrubbery lay across the grass. Clear in the moonlit foreground stood an

elm, the pride of Tory Hill--springing as a single shaft for twice the

measure of a man--springing and spreading there into four giant

branches, each of which sprang and spread higher into eight--so

springing and spreading, springing and spreading still--rounded,

symmetrical, superb--till the long outermost shoots fell pendulous, like

spray from a fountain of verdure. The silence held the suggestion of

mighty spiritual things astir. At least the heaven was not of brass, if

the earth continued to be of adamant. On the contrary, the sky was high,

soft, dim, star-bestrewn, ineffable. It was spacious; it was free; it

was the home of glorious things; it was the medium of the eternal.

He was not reassured; he was not even comforted; what relief he got came

only from a feeling--a fancy, perhaps--that the weight had been eased,

that he was freed for a minute from the crushing pressure of the

inevitable. It would return again and break him down, but for the moment

it was lifted, giving him room and power to breathe. He did

breathe--long deep draughts of the cool night air that brought

refreshment and something like strength to struggle on.

He came back into the room. His pens and papers were scattered on the

floor, and ink from the overturned inkstand was running out on the

Oriental rug. It was the kind of detail that before this evening would

have shocked him; but nothing mattered now. He was too indifferent to

lift his hand and put the inkstand back into its place. Instead, he

threw himself on a couch, turning his face to the still open window and

drinking in with thirsty gasps the blessed, revivifying air.

V

Guion awoke in a chill, gray light, to find himself covered with a rug,

and his daughter, wrapped in a white dressing-gown, bending above him.

Over her shoulder peered the scared face of a maid. His first sensation

was that he was cold, his first act to pull the rug more closely about

him. His struggle back to waking consciousness was the more confused

because of the familiar surroundings of the library.

"Oh, papa, what's the matter?"

He threw the coverlet from him and dragged himself to a sitting posture.

"What time is it?" he asked, rubbing his eyes. "I must have dropped off

to sleep. Is dinner ready?"

"It's half-past six in the morning, papa dear. Katie found you here when

she came in to dust the room. The window was wide open and all these

things strewn about the floor. She put the rug on you and came to wake

me. What is it? What's happened? Let me send for the doctor."

With his elbow on his knee, he rested his forehead on his hand. The

incidents of the night came back to him. Olivia seated herself on the

couch beside him, an arm across his shoulder.

"I'm cold," was all he said.

"Katie, go and mix something hot--some whisky or brandy and hot

water--anything! And you, papa dear, go to bed. I'll call Reynolds and

he'll help you."

"I'm cold," he said again.

Rising, he crawled to the mirror into which he had looked last night,

shuddering at sight of his own face. The mere fact that he was still in

his evening clothes, the white waistcoat wrinkled and the cravat awry,

shocked him inexpressibly.

"I'm cold," he said for the third time.

But when he had bathed, dressed, and begun his breakfast, the chill left

him. He regained the mastery of his thoughts and the understanding of

his position. A certain exaltation of suffering which had upheld him

during the previous night failed him, however, now, leaving nothing but

a sense of flat, commonplace misery. Thrown into relief by the daylight,

the facts were more relentless--not easier of acceptance.

As he drank his coffee and tried to eat he could feel his daughter

watching him from the other end of the table. Now and then he screened

himself from her gaze by pretending to skim the morning paper. Once he

was startled. Reflected in the glass of a picture hanging on the

opposite wall he caught the image of a man in a blue uniform, who

mounted the steps and rang the door-bell.

"Who's that?" he asked, sharply. He dared not turn round to see.

"It's only the postman, papa darling. Who else should it be?"

"Yes; of course." He breathed again. "You mustn't mind me, dear. I'm

nervous. I'm--I'm not very well."

"I see you're not, papa. I saw it last night. I knew something was

wrong."

"There's something--very wrong."

"What is it? Tell me."

Leaning on the table, with clasped hands uplifted, the loose white lace

sleeves falling away from her slender wrists, she looked at him

pleadingly.

"We've--that is, I've--lost a great deal of money."

"Oh!" The sound was just above her breath. Then, after long silence, she

asked: "Is it much?"

He waited before replying, seeking, for the last time, some mitigation

of what he had to tell her.

"It's all we have."

"Oh!" It was the same sound as before, just audible--a sound with a

little surprise in it, a hint of something awed, but without dismay.

He forced himself to take a few sips of coffee and crumble a bit of

toast.

"I don't mind, papa. If that's what's troubling you so much, don't let

it any longer. Worse things have happened than that." He gulped down

more coffee, not because he wanted it, but to counteract the rising in

his throat. "Shall we have to lose Tory Hill?" she asked, after another

silence.

He nodded an affirmative, with his head down.

"Then you mean me to understand what you said just now--quite literally.

We've lost all we have."

"When everything is settled," he explained, with an effort, "we shall

have nothing at all. It will be worse than that, since I sha'n't be

able to pay all I owe."

"Yes; that _is_ worse," she assented, quietly.

Another silence was broken by his saying, hoarsely:

"You'll get married--"

"That will have to be reconsidered."

"Do you mean--on your part?"

"I suppose I mean--on everybody's part?"

"Do you think he would want to--you must excuse the crudity of the

question--do you think he would want to back out?"

"I don't know that I could answer that. It isn't quite to the point.

Backing out, as you call it, wouldn't be the process--whatever

happened."

He interrupted her nervously. "If this should fall through, dear, you

must write to your Aunt Vic. You must eat humble pie. You were too

toplofty with her as it was. She'll take you."

"Take me, papa? Why shouldn't I stay with you? I'd much rather."

He tried to explain. It was clearly the moment at which to do it.

"I don't think you understand, dear, how entirely everything has gone to

smash. I shall probably--I may say, certainly--I shall have to--to go--"

"I do understand that. But it often happens--especially in this

country--that things go to smash, and then the people begin again. There

was Lulu Sentner's father. They lost everything they had--and she and

her sisters did dressmaking. But he borrowed money, and started in from

the beginning, and now they're very well off once more. It's the kind

of thing one hears of constantly--in this country."

"You couldn't hear of it in my case, dear, because--well, because I've

done all that. I've begun again, and begun again. I've used up all my

credit--all my chances. The things I counted on didn't come off. You

know that that happens sometimes, don't you?--without any one being to

blame at all?"