CHAPTER XI

ON THE WINGS OF LIFE

It was on the morning after Gerty's conversation with Adams that Laura

carried the news of her engagement to Uncle Percival.

"I've something really interesting for you this morning," she began,

taking his withered little hand in hers as she sat down on the high

footstool before his chair.

His wandering blue eyes fixed her for a moment, then, turning

restlessly, travelled to his flute which lay silent on the table on his

elbow.

"Ah, but I'm ahead of you for once," he remarked with his amiable

toothless smile, "there's a new batch of rabbits in the yard and I've

already seen 'em. Don't tell Rosa, my dear," he cautioned in a whisper,

"or she'll be sure to drown 'em everyone."

Releasing his hand from her clasp, he reached for his flute, and, with a

pathetic delight in the presence of his enforced listener, raised the

mouth of the instrument to his lips. The tune he played was "The Last

Rose of Summer," and Laura sat patiently at his side until the end. With

the final note, even as he laid the flute lovingly across his knees, she

saw that the music had strengthened and controlled his enfeebled mind.

"I want to tell you that I shall be married in the autumn, dear Uncle

Percival," she said with a renewed effort to penetrate the senile

abstraction in which he lived.

"Married!" repeated the old man, with an indignant surprise for which

she was entirely unprepared. "Married! Why, what on earth makes you do a

ridiculous thing like that? It's out of the question," he continued with

an angry vehemence, "it is utterly and absurdly out of the question."

For an instant it seemed to Laura that she had absolutely no response to

offer.

"But almost everyone marries in the end, you know," she said at last.

"I have lived very comfortably to be eighty-five," retorted Uncle

Percival, "and I never married."

"Oh, but you never fell in love," persisted Laura.

"In love? Tush!" protested the old man with scorn, "and why should you?

I have never felt the need of it."

"Well, I don't think one can help it sometimes," remonstrated Laura, a

little helplessly. "One doesn't always want it, but it comes anyway."

"Then if I didn't want it I wouldn't let it bother me," said Uncle

Percival, adding immediately. "What does Rosa think of this state of

things, I wonder--Rosa is a very sensible woman."

"Oh, she's heartily pleased--everybody is pleased but you."

Uncle Percival shook his head in stubborn disapproval. "People are

always pleased at the mistakes of others," he observed, "it's human

nature, I suppose, and they can't help it, but I tell you I've seen a

great deal too much of love all my life--and it's better left alone,

it's better left alone."

Rising dejectedly, he wandered off to his rabbits, while Laura, as soon

as the curtains at the door had fallen together again behind his

shrunken little figure, forgot him with that complete forgetfulness of

trivial details which is possible only to the mind that is in the

possession of an absorbing emotion. All hesitation, all uncertainty, all

disappointment, had been swept from her consciousness as if by a

destroying and purifying flame; and for the past few weeks she had lived

with that passionate swiftness of sensation which gives one an ecstatic

sense of rushing, like a winged creature, through crawling time. Life,

indeed, was winged for her at the moment; her soul flew; and she felt

her happiness beating like a caged bird within her breast. The agony of

the imprisoned creature was there also, for she loved blindly without

understanding why she loved--and yet it was this hidden mystery of her

passion, this divine miracle which attended its conception, that filled

the world about her with the invisible, announcing hosts of angels. She

could explain nothing--life, death, birth, the ordinary incidents of

every day were but so many signs and portents of 'the unseen wonders;

and every breath she drew seemed as great a miracle to her as the

raising of Lazarus from the tomb.

Closing her eyes she thought of the afternoon before when she had gone

out with her lover in his automobile. Life at the instant had condensed

itself into a flash of experience, and his face as he looked at her had

been clear and strong as the wind which rushed by them. "Faster! faster!

let us go faster!" she had begged, "let me live this one hour flying,"

and even with the words she had wondered if the same rapture would ever

enter into her love again? Was it possible to touch the highest point of

one's being twice in a single lifetime? Was it given to any human

creature to repeat perfection? And he? Would he ever know it again? she

questioned, with an uncertainty sharp as a sword that pierced her

through. Would she ever find in his eyes a look that would be anything

but a shadow of the look she had seen on the day before? Was happiness,

after all, as fluid a quantity as the emotion which gave it birth?

Standing beside the table, she leaned her cheek for a moment upon the

roses in the Venetian vase; and it seemed to her, as the petals brushed

her face, that she felt again his eager kisses fall on her eyes and

throat. The memory sent her blood beating to her pulses; and she saw his

face in her thoughts as she had seen it on that afternoon, transfigured

and intensified by the peculiar vividness of her perceptions.

"There has been nothing like this in my life before," he had said in a

passion of sincerity, "there has been nothing in my life but you from

the beginning." The irony was gone then from his voice; she had found no

hint of even the satirical humour in his eyes; and as she remembered

this now it seemed to her that she had there for the first time--for the

one and only moment since she had known him--succeeded in holding by her

touch that deeper chord of his nature for which she had always felt

herself to be instinctively groping.

She was still brooding over the rapture of yesterday, when the door

opened quickly and Kemper came in with the eager haste in which he

appeared to live every instant of his life. At the first glance she saw

that the ardour of the last afternoon was still in his eyes, and the

next moment she found herself yielding to his impatient kisses.

"I was trying to decide whether I love you more when you are with me or

when you are away," she said with a joyful laugh.

"Well, as for me, I love you exactly a hundred times more when I see

you," he retorted gayly.

His words seemed, as she repeated them, an affront to her insatiable

desire for the perfection of love.

"Then if you never saw me again you would be able to forget me?" she

asked a little wounded.

He laughed easily with a quick return to his pleasant banter, "I hope

so. What's the use of loving when nothing comes of it?"

When nothing comes of it! A cloud dimmed the radiant clearness of her

morning; then she met the strong tenderness in his eyes, and with an

effort, she thrust her disappointment aside, as she had thrust it aside

at every meeting since the beginning of her love.

"I have always wondered if happiness were as happy as people thought,"

she said gravely, "and now I know, I know."

"And is it really?" he asked, with the confident smile which piqued her

even while it fascinated.

For answer she lifted to him "the seraphic look" which he had never seen

in any face but hers; and as he met her eyes it appeared to him that all

other women whom he had loved were but tinted shadows--that they were

one and all utterly devoid of the mystery by which passion lives. Here

in her face he saw at last the charm and the wonder of sex made

luminous; and while he watched her emotion quiver on her lips, he began

to ask himself if this were not the assurance in his own heart of a

feeling that might endure for life? Would this, too, change and perish

as his impulses had changed and perished until to-day?

"Shall I tell you what I have been thinking since last night?" she

questioned in a voice that was like a song to his ears, "it is that I

have been all my life a plant in a dark cellar, groping toward the light

and never finding it--always groping, groping."

She leaned toward him, placing her hands, the lovely, delicate hands he

loved, upon his shoulders, "I've grown to the light! I've grown to the

light!" she whispered joyously.

He raised her hand to his lips, and his teeth closed softly over each

slender finger one by one.

"So I am the light?" he enquired with tender humour.

She shook her head. "Not you, but love."

A short laugh broke from him. "But where, my dear sweetheart," he

retorted? "would love be without me?"

"I don't dare to think," she was too earnest to take his jest with

lightness, "it is strange, isn't it?--that but for you I should never

have known--this."

"Who can tell? There might have come along another fellow and you'd

probably have made love quite as prettily to a substitute."

"Never!" she shook her head with an indignant protest, "and you?" she

added softly after a moment.

"And I? What?"

"Without me could you have felt it quite like this?"

She waited breathlessly, but the ironic spirit had got the better of his

tenderness.

"My dear girl," he rejoined, "what a question?"

"But could you?--tell me," she implored in sudden passion.

"Well, I devoutly hope so," he answered lightly, "it's a thing I

should'nt like to have missed, you know."

He leaned back closing his eyes; and immediately, without warning and

against his will, there rose before him the seductive face of Madame

Alta, and he recalled her exquisite voice, with its peculiar high note

of piercing sweetness. Then he remembered his wife, and, one by one, the

other women whom he had loved and forgotten or merely forgotten without

loving. They meant so little in his existence now, and yet once, each in

her own bad time had engrossed utterly his senses. In what rare quality

of sentiment could this love differ from those lesser loves that had

gone before?

But he was not given to introspection, and so the disturbing question

left him almost as readily as it had come. When one attempted to think

things out, there was no hope of escaping the endless circle with a

clear head. No, he wasn't analytical, thank Heaven!

While he was still rejoicing in what he called his "practical turn of

mind," he remembered suddenly an appointment at his club which he had

made a week ago and then overlooked in the absorbing interest of his

engagement.

"By Jove, you'll get me into an awful scrape some day," he remarked

cheerfully as he hurried into his overcoat. "I might have lost fifty

thousand dollars by letting this thing slip."

His manner had changed completely with the awakened recollection; and

finance in all its forms--the look of figures, the clink of coin--had

assumed instantly the position of romance in his thoughts. For the

moment Laura was crowded from his mind, and she recognised this with a

pang sharp and cold as the thrust of a dagger.

"If you only knew how much you'd nearly cost me," were his last words as

he ran down the steps.

At the corner he met Gerty's carriage and in response to her inviting

gesture, he gave an order to the coachman as he sprang inside.

"Well, this is a godsend," he observed with a grateful sigh while he

wrapped the fur rug carelessly about him. "A drive with a pretty woman

leaves a surface car a good many miles behind. And you are unusually

pretty this morning," he commented with a touch of daring gallantry.

"I ought to be," returned Gerty defiantly, "for heaven knows I take

trouble enough about it. Oh, I _am_ glad to see you!" she finished

gayly, "how is Laura?"

He met her question with his genial smile. "She makes a pretty good

pretence at happiness," he answered.

"And so she's really over head and ears in love?"

"Does it surprise you that she should find me charming?" he asked,

laughing.

She nodded with unshaken candour.

"I was never so much surprised in all my life."

If his smile was ready it did not fail to betray a touch of vanity that

was almost childlike.

"And yet there was a time when you yourself rather liked me," he

retorted with his intimate and penetrating glance.

"Was there?" She avoided his look though her tone was almost insolent,

"my dear fellow, I never in my life liked you better than I like you at

this minute--but we are speaking now of Laura's liking not of mine. Oh,

Arnold, Arnold, I am in a quake of fear."

"About Laura? Then get over it and don't be silly."

"And you are honestly and truly and terribly in earnest?"

"My dear girl, I'm going to marry her--isn't that enough? Does a man

commit suicide except when he's sincere?"

Her shallow cynicism had dropped from her now, and she turned toward him

with an unaffected anxiety in her face.

"Then it will last--it must."

"Last!" An expression of irritation showed in his eyes, and he shrugged

his shoulders with an impatient movement. "Of course it won't

last--nothing does. If you want the eternal you must seek it in

eternity."

"So in the end it will be like--all the others?"

Because the question annoyed him he responded to it with a frankness

that was almost brutal. "Everything is like everything else," he

returned, "there's nothing new, least of all in the emotions."

For a minute she looked at him in silence while the steady green flame

appeared to him to grow brighter in her eyes. Was it contempt or

curiosity that he saw in her face?

"Poor Laura!" she said at last very softly. "Poor happy Laura!"

At her words his dissenting laugh broke out, but he showed by his

animated glance a moment later that it was of herself rather than of

Laura that he was thinking.

"Is it such a terrible fate, after all, to become my wife?" he enquired.

His look challenged hers, and lifting her insolent bright eyes, she

returned steadily the smiling gaze he bent upon her.

"Oh, dear me, yes," she answered merrily, "it is almost if not quite as

bad as being Perry's." The carriage had stopped at the door of his club,

and his mind was already at work over the approaching interview.

"Well, you escaped the lesser for the greater ill," he responded

pleasantly, as he gave her hand a careless parting pressure.

PART III

DISENCHANTMENT

CHAPTER I

A DISCONSOLATE LOVER AND A PAIR OF BLUE EYES

With that strange hunger of youth for the agony of experience, Trent

allowed the news of Laura's engagement to plunge him into an imaginary

despondency which was quite as vivid as any reality of suffering. For a

week he persistently refused his meals, and he was even seized with a

kind of moral indignation when his perfectly healthy appetite asserted

itself at irregular hours. To eat with a broken heart appeared to him an

act of positive brutality; and yet he was aware that, in spite of the

sting of his wounded pride, the tragic ending of his first romance

produced not the slightest effect upon his physical enjoyment. It was an

instance where a purely ideal sentiment struggled against a perfectly

normal constitution.

"You could never have cared for me, of course I always knew that," he

remarked one day to Laura, "but I can't help wishing that you hadn't

fallen in love with anybody else."

From the bright remoteness of her happiness she smiled down upon him.

"But doesn't such a wish as that strike you as rather selfish?"

"I don't care--I want you back again just as you used to be--and now,"

he added bitterly, "you've even given up your writing."

"I shall never write again," she answered, quietly, without regret. It

was a truth which she felt only intuitively at the time, for her reason

as yet had hardly taken account of a fact that was perfectly evident to

the subtler perceptions of her feeling. She would never write again--her

art had been only the exotic flowering of a luxuriant imagination and

she had lost value as a creative energy while she had gained in

experience as a human soul.

"I was too young, that was the trouble," pursued Trent, "there were five

years between us."

"My dear boy," she laughed merrily, "there was all eternity."

His bitterness, he felt, grew heavily upon him while he watched her. A

new beauty had passed into her face; the mystery of a thousand lives was

in her look, in her gestures, in her voice; and she appeared to him not

as herself alone, but as the embodied essence of all former loves of

which he had dreamed--of all the enchanting dead women of whom the poets

wrote. Then he thought of Arnold Kemper, with his exhausted emotions,

his superficial cleverness, his engrossing middle-age, and especially of

his approaching baldness. Was love, after all, he questioned, only a

re-quickened memory in particular brain cells as modern scientists

believed? Was physical heredity, in truth, the fulfilling of the law of

life? and was the soul merely a series of vibrations by which matter

lived and moved?

All the way home his angry scepticism boiled over in his thoughts, and

at the luncheon table, a little later, he met his mother's placid

enquiries with an explosion of boyish despair.

"There's no use trying to persuade me--I can't eat," he said.

"But, my dear son, I fear you'll work yourself into an illness,"

returned Mrs. Trent, with her unshaken calm.

"I don't care," replied the young man desperately, "whether I die now or

later, it is all the same."

"I suppose really it is," admitted his mother; but she added after a

pause in which she had dipped mildly into a philosophic curiosity, "The

way being in love effects one has always seemed to me the very strangest

thing in life. I remember your uncle Channing lived exclusively on

onions for a whole month after Mattie Godwin refused his offer. Why he

selected onions I could never explain," she concluded, "unless it was

that he had never been able to endure the taste of them, and he seemed

bent upon making himself as miserable as it was possible to be."

While she went on placidly eating her hashed chicken, Trent tossed off a

glass or two of claret, which he was perfectly aware, taken on his empty

stomach, would immediately produce a racking headache. Since his passion

was not sincere, it occurred to him that it might at least become

dramatic; but he saw presently, with aggrieved surprise, that the

impression made upon his mother by his violent behavior was far slighter

than he had brought himself to expect. When next she spoke her thoughts

appeared to have strayed utterly from the subject of his appetite.

"I couldn't sleep last night for thinking of that poor Christina Coles,"

she said, "the char-woman told me yesterday that the child had been

obliged to go out and pawn some of her things in order to get the money

to pay her room rent."

With a start his mind swung back from the dream life to the actual. He

had not seen Christina for more than a week, and the thought of her

pierced his heart with a keen reproach.

"Good God, has it come to that?" he exclaimed.

"What hurts me most is not being able to do anything to help her,"

resumed Mrs. Trent, "she's so proud that I don't dare even ask her to a

meal for fear she'll take offence."

"But if it's so bad as that why doesn't she go home--she must have a

home."

"Oh, she has--but to go back, she feels, would mean that she's given up,

and the char-woman declares that she'll never give up so long as she's

alive."

"Well, she's a precious little fool," observed Trent, as he drank an

extra glass of claret.

But the thought of Christina was not to be so lightly put from him, and

before the afternoon was over he went up to the eighth landing and

knocked in vain at her door. She was still out, as the little pile of

rejected manuscript lying on her threshold bore witness; and he turned

away and came down again with a disappointment of which he felt himself

to be half ashamed. An hour later he ran against her when he was going

out into the street, and as she turned with her constrained little bow

and looked at him for an instant with her sincere blue eyes, he was

almost overcome by the rush of pity which the sight of her evoked. How

pale and thin she had grown! how shabby her little tan coat looked in

the daylight; and yet what a charming curve there was to her brown

head! He realised then for the first time that brown--warm, living brown

with glints of amber--was the one colour for a woman's hair.

The next morning he rushed off indignantly to upbraid Adams.

"The girl's starving, I tell you--we can't let her starve," he exclaimed

in an agony of remorse.

"Oh, yes we can," returned Adams with a cheerful brutality which enraged

the younger man. "Starving isn't half so bad as writing trash. But you

needn't look at me like that," he added, "she doesn't come here any

longer now. She told me fiction was the field she meant to dig in."

"Well, you'll kill her among you," was Trent's threatening rejoinder;

and filled with a righteous fury against literature he went back again

to knock at the door of Christina's empty room. Once his mother came up

also, but the girl, it appeared, was always out now, while the rejected

manuscript thickened each morning upon the threshold. Several times Mrs.

Trent arranged a little tray of luncheon and sent it up stairs by the

old negro servant, but the message brought back was always that

Christina was not at home. And then gradually, as the weeks went by, the

dignity and the pathos of her struggle were surrounded in Trent's mind

by a romantic halo. Her beauty borrowed from his poetic fancy the

peculiar touch of atmosphere it lacked, and his thoughts dwelt more and

more upon her slender, girlish figure, her smooth brown hair, and the

flower-like sweetness of her face.

Then just as he had grown almost hopeless of ever seeing her again, he

found her one evening in the elevator as he went up to his mother's

rooms. The touch of her cold little hand on his sent a sudden shock to

his heart, and while he looked anxiously into her face, he saw her go

deadly pale and bite her lip sharply as if to bring back her

consciousness by the sting of pain.

"You are ill," he said eagerly; "don't deny it, for haven't I eyes? Yes,

you must, you shall come with me in to mother."

Even then she would have turned proudly away, but with his impulsive,

lover's sympathy he led her from the elevator upon the landing on which

he lived. "She is waiting for you--she wants you," he urged with

passion; "and can't you see--oh, Christina, I want you, too!"

But his fervour only left her the more cold and shrinking, and she shook

her head with a refusal that was almost angry.

"How dare you? Why did you make me come out?" she asked. "I must go

back--I am not well--oh, I must go back!"

Over the angry tones of her voice he saw her entreating eyes shining

like wet flowers, and as he looked into them it came to him in a

revelation of knowledge that the meaning of everything that had been was

made clear at last. He knew now why he had succeeded where Christina had

failed--he knew why Laura had refused his love, and why, even in his

misery, her refusal had left his heart untouched. And beyond all these

things, he realised that now his boyhood was over and that from the

experience of this one moment he had become a man.

CHAPTER II

THE DEIFICATION OF CLAY

Not until a month after the announcement of Laura's engagement did she

come face to face for the first time with the ugly skeleton which lies

hidden beneath the most beautiful of dreams. The spring had passed in a

troubled rapture; and it was on one of the bright, warm days in early

June that she found awaiting her on the hall table when she came in from

her walk a letter addressed in a strange handwriting and bearing a

strange foreign postmark. Beside this was a note from Kemper explaining

a broken engagement of the day before; and she read first her lover's

letter, which ended, as every letter of his had ended since the

beginning of their love, "Yours with my whole heart and soul, Arnold."

With an emotion which repetition could never deaden, she stooped to kiss

the last sentence he had written, before she turned carelessly to take

up the strange foreign envelope, which she had thrown, with her veil and

gloves, on the chair at her side. For a moment she pondered

indifferently the address; then, almost as she broke the seal, the first

words she read were those which lay hidden away in the love letter

within her hand, "Yours with my whole heart and soul, Arnold."

In her first shock, even while the blow still blinded her eyes, she

turned to seek wildly for some possible solution; and it was then that

she discovered that the letter, in Kemper's handwriting, was addressed

evidently to some other woman, since it bore the date of a day in June

just three years before she had first met him. Three years ago he had

declared himself to belong, heart and soul, to this other woman; and

to-day, with no remembrance in his mind, it seemed, of that former

passion, he could repeat quite as ardently the old threadbare avowal.

How many times, she asked herself, had he used that characteristic

ending to his love letters?--and the thing appeared to her suddenly to

be the veriest travesty of the perfect self-surrender of love.

She was a woman capable of keen retrospective jealousy, and as she sat

there, beaten down from her winged ecstasy by the blow that had struck

at her from the silence, she told herself passionately that her life was

wrecked utterly and her brief happiness at an end. Then, with that

relentless power of intellect, from which her emotions were never

entirely separated, she began deliberately to disentangle the true facts

from the temporary impulses of her jealous anger.

"I am wounded and yet why am I wounded and by what right?" she demanded,

with a pathetic groping after the self-condemnation which would acquit

her lover, "he has lived his life, I know--I have always known it--and

his letter has only brought forcibly before me a fact which I have

accepted though I have not faced it." And it occurred to her, with the

bitter sweetness of a consoling lie, that he could not have been false

to her three years ago, since he was not then even aware of her

existence. To dwell on this thought was like yielding to the power of

an insidious drug, and yet she found herself forcing it almost

deliriously against her saner judgment. "How could he wrong me so long

as I was a stranger to him?" she repeated over and over. "On the day

that he first loved me, his old life, with its sins and its selfish

pleasures, was blotted out." But her conscience, even while she

reasoned, told her that love could possess no power like this--that the

man who loved her to-day, was the inevitable result of the man who had

loved other women yesterday, and that there was as little permanence in

the prompting of mere impulse as there was stability in change itself.

So the voice within her spoke through the intolerable clearness of her

intellect; and in her frantic desire to drown the thing it uttered, she

repeated again and again the empty words which her heart prompted. Yet

she knew even though she urged the falsehood upon her thoughts, that it

was less her argument that pleaded for Kemper than the memory of a look

in his face at animated instants, which rose now before her and appealed

disturbingly to her emotions.

Three ways of conduct were open to her, she saw plainly enough. Wisdom

suggested that she should not only put the letter aside, but that she

should banish the recollection of its existence from her life. But,

while she admitted that this would be the most courageous treatment of

the situation, she recognised perfectly that to act upon such a decision

was utterly beyond her strength. Though she were to destroy the object,

was the memory of it not seared indelibly into her brain? and would not

this memory return to embitter long afterward her happiest moments?

"When he kisses me I shall remember that he has kissed other women and I

feel that I shall grow to hate him if he should ever write to me again

in those lying words." But she knew intuitively that he would use the

same ending in his next letter, and that she would still be powerless to

hate him, if only because of his disturbing look, which came back to her

whenever she attempted to judge him harshly. "I might really hate him so

long as he was absent from me, and yet if he came again and looked at me

in that way for a single instant, I know that, in spite of my

resolution, I would throw myself into his arms." And she felt that she

despised herself for a bondage against which she struggled as hopelessly

as a bird caught in a fowler's net.

Of the two ways which remained to her, she chose, in the end, the course

which appeared to her to be the least ungenerous. She would not read the

letter--the opening and the closing sentences she had seen by

accident--for, when all was said, it had not been written for her eyes;

and it struck her, as she brooded over it, that there would be positive

disloyalty in thus stealing in upon the secrets of Kemper's past. No,

she would place it in his hands, she determined finally, still unread;

and in so doing she would not only defeat the purpose of the sender, but

would prove to him as well as to herself that her faith in him was as

unalterable as her love. After all to trust was easier than to distrust,

for the brief agony of her indecision had brought to her the knowledge

that the way of suspicion is the way of death.

And so when he came a little later she gave the letter, at which she

had not again looked, into his hands. "Here is something that reached me

only this morning," she said. "It is not worth thinking of, and I have

read only the first and the last sentence."

At her words he unfolded the paper, throwing a mere casual glance, as he

did so, upon the thin foreign envelope, which appeared to convey to him

no hint of its significant contents.

Then, after a hurried skimming of the first page, he turned back again

and carefully studied the address in a mystification which was pierced

presently by a flash of light.

"By Jove, so she's heard it!" he exclaimed; and the instant afterward he

added in a kind of grudging admiration, "Well, she's a devil!"

The incident appeared suddenly to engross him in a manner that Laura had

not expected, and he stooped to examine the postmark with an attention

which gave her, while she watched him, a queer sense of being left out

quite in the cold.

"But why, in thunder, should she care?" he demanded.

"She?" there was no trouble in her voice, only an indifferent question.

"Oh, it's Jennie Alta, of course--she's perfectly capable of such a

thing." Then, reaching out, he drew Laura into his arms with a

confidence which had the air, she thought, of taking the situation

almost too entirely for granted--of accepting too readily her attitude

as well as his possession of her. "My darling girl, what a regular brick

you are!" he said.

Though she realised, as he spoke, that this was the reward of her

silence and her struggle, she told herself, in the next breath that, in

some way, it was all inadequate. She had expected more than a phrase,

and the very fact that the note of earnestness was absent from his voice

but made her desire the sound of it the more passionately. Again she

felt the baffled sensation which came to her in moments of their closest

intimacy. Had his soul, in truth, eluded her for the last time? And was

there in the profoundest emotion always a distance which it was forever

impossible to bridge? Yet the uncertainty, the very lack of a fuller

understanding only added fervour to the passion that burned in her

heart.

"It's all over now, so we may as well warm ourselves by the failure of

her deviltry," he observed presently, as he flung the crumpled paper

into the fire. "I'm downright sorry she'll never know how little harm

she's done."

"It might, I suppose, have been worse," suggested Laura.

"Well, I suppose so--and you mean me to believe that you didn't even

read it?" he enquired with tender gayety.

She gave him her eyes frankly as an answer to his appeal for faith. "Why

should I? I love you," she replied.

For an instant--a single sufficing instant--he met her look with an

earnestness that was equal to her own. The man in him, she almost cried

out in her exultation, was touched at last.

"May God grant that your confidence will never fail me," he rejoined a

little sadly.

"When that comes it will be time to die," was her answer.

Taking her hand in his he held it in a close pressure for several

minutes. Then the earnestness she had arrested fled from her touch, and

when he spoke again she could not tell whether his words were uttered

sincerely or simply as the outcome of his sarcastic humour.

"If you were a flesh-and-blood woman instead of an eccentric sprite," he

remarked, "I suppose you'd want me to make a clean breast of the whole

affair, but I can't because, to tell the truth, I've forgotten

everything about it."

"Then you didn't honestly love her, so it doesn't matter."

"Love her! Pshaw!" Though he laughed out the words there was an angry

flush in his face. "Do you think I'm the kind of man to love a mere

singing animal? And besides," he concluded with a brutal cynicism which

repelled her sharply, "I'm of an economical turn, you know, and the love

of such women comes too high. I've seen them eat up a fellow's income as

if it were a box of Huyler's." The words were no sooner uttered than his

mood changed quickly and he was on his feet. "But I didn't mean to give

you the whole morning, sweetheart, I merely looked in to say that I

wanted you to come out with me in the car this afternoon. There's a fine

breeze blowing."

For a thoughtful moment she hesitated before she answered. "I told Roger

Adams that I should be at home," she returned, "but I dare say he won't

mind not seeing me."

"Oh, I dare say," he retorted gayly. "Well, I'll pick you up, then, on

the stroke of five."

As he left the room she went over to the window, and when he came out a

little later, he turned upon the sidewalk to glance up at her and wave

his hand. She was happy, perfectly happy, she told herself, as she

looked eagerly after the last glimpse of his figure; but even while she

framed the thought into words, she was conscious that her heart throbbed

high in disappointment and that her eyes were already blind with tears.

When Adams sent up his card, at twenty minutes before five o'clock, she

lingered a few moments before going downstairs in her motoring coat and

veil. In response to her embarrassed excuses, he made only a casual

expression of regret for the visit he had missed.

"It's a fine afternoon--just right for a run," he remarked, adding after

a brief hesitation. "It's the proper thing, I suppose, to offer you

congratulations, but I'm a poor hand, as you know, at making pretty

speeches. I wish you happiness with all my heart--that's about all there

is to say--isn't it?"

"That's about all," she echoed, "and at least if I'm not happy I shall

have only myself to blame."

The silence that followed seemed to them both unnatural and constrained;

and he broke it at last with a remark which sounded to him, while he

uttered it, almost irrelevant.

"I've never seen much of Kemper, but I always liked him."

"I know," she nodded, "you were chums at College."

"Oh, hardly that, but we knew each other pretty well. He's a lucky chap

and I hope he has the sense to see it."

"There's no doubt whatever of his sense!" she laughed. Then, growing

suddenly serious, she leaned toward him with her old earnest look. "No

one has ever known him, I think, just as I do," she went on, "because no

one understands how wonderfully good he really is. He's so good," she

finished almost triumphantly, as if she had overcome by her assertion a

point which he disputed, "that there are times when he makes me feel

positively wicked."

Having no answer ready but a smile, he gave her this pleasantly enough,

so that she might take it, if she chose, for a complete agreement.

Though his heart was filled with repressed tenderness, there was nothing

further now that he could say to her, for he realised as he looked into

her face, that there was little room in her happiness either for his

tenderness or for himself. An aversion, too, to meeting Kemper awoke in

him, and so, after a few minutes of trivial conversation, he rose and

held out his hand.

"I'm very busy just now, so I may not see you again for quite awhile,"

he said at parting, "but remember if ever you should want me that I am

always waiting."

A little later, as he walked up the street in the June sunshine, he saw

Kemper's new automobile spinning rapidly from the direction of Fifth

Avenue.

CHAPTER III

THE GREATEST OF THESE

For a minute after Kemper had passed in his car, Adams turned back and

stood looking down the long street filled with pleasant June sunshine.

In the distance a hand-organ was grinding out a jerky sentimental air,

and beside him, at the corner by which he stood, a crippled vender of

fruit had halted his little cart of oranges and apples.

A year ago Adams might have told himself, in the despair of ignorance,

that since Laura had given her love to Kemper she was lost to him

forever. But he had learned now that this could not be true--that she

was too closely knit into his destiny to separate herself entirely from

it; and there came to him, while he stood there, a strange mystic

assurance that she would some day feel that she had need of him again.

His love had passed triumphantly through its first earthly stages, and

in the large impassioned yearning with which he thought of her there

was, so far as he himself was conscious, but little left of a sharper

personal desire. All desire, indeed, which has its root in the physical

craving for possession seemed to have gone out of him in the last few

months; and since the earliest dawn of that deeper consciousness within

his soul, he had almost ceased to think of himself as an isolated

individual life.

To let go the personal was to fall back again on the Eternal; between

the soul and God, he had learned in his deepest agony, there is room for

nothing more impregnable than the illusion of self. As Roger Adams--as a

mere separate existence, he was a failure. The things which he had

desired in life he had not possessed; the things which he had possessed

he had ceased very soon, in any vital sense, to desire. Of his life's

work, so big at the beginning, he saw now that he had made but a small

achievement--a volume of essays on the writings of other men and a few

years editing of a magazine which had absorbed his strength without

yielding him the smallest return of fame. On every side, from all

avenues of hope or of mere impulse, there had crowded upon him, he

admitted smiling, but disappointment and disillusion. He had played for

happiness as every man plays for it from the cradle, he had staked his

throw as boldly, he had made his resolves as desperately, as any of his

fellows, and yet at the end of his forty years he had not a single

object to put forward as his reward. Nothing remained to him! As the

world counts success he could show only failure.

But the larger vision was still before him, and he knew that all these

thoughts were the cheapest falsehood. In spite of appearances, in spite

of the outward emptiness of his existence, he had not failed; and in the

hour that he had put life aside he had for the first time in his whole

experience begun really to live. In surrendering his own small

individual being he knew that he had entered into the possession of a

being immeasurably larger than his own.

He looked at the fruit vender smiling, and the man's answering smile

came to him like the clasp of fellowship. "Did he, too, understand?" was

Adams' unspoken question, "had he, also, found the key that unlocked his

prison?" and there flowed into his heart something of the rapture with

which Laura had cried: "I've grown to the light!" In each exclamation

there was ecstasy, but in hers it was the short, troubled ecstasy of the

senses, which hears its doom even in the hour of its own fulfilment;

while from his finer joy there shone forth that radiant energy, in which

is both warmth and light, both rest and action, which illumines not only

the soul within, but transfigures and refines the mere dull ordinary

facts of life.

As he stood there the car passed him again, and Laura and Kemper both

turned, smiling, to look back at him. When Laura's long white veil was

lost, with a last flutter, in the sunshine, he nodded to the fruit

vender, and crossing to Broadway started in the direction of his home.

He had asked Trent to dine with him--the boy looked fagged he thought,

and it might do him good to talk freely about his play. Then he recalled

several letters that he had put aside for the sake of seeing Laura; and

retracing his steps, he went back to his office and sat down before his

desk. It surprised him sometimes to find how little irksome such

uninteresting details had become.

They talked late over their cigars and coffee, and when at last Trent

rose, with a laughing reminder of his mother, and went out into the hall

to put on his overcoat, Adams passed by him, after a final handshake,

and entered his darkened study at the end of the hall. He heard the

door close quickly as Trent left the house, and his mind was still full

of the boy's dramatic ambitions, as he paused beside his desk and bent

down to raise the wick of the green lamp. He had fallen into the habit

of sitting up rather late now, and there was a paper on his blotting-pad

which he was preparing for the coming issue of his magazine. After

glancing hastily over, he found that the last few sentences were

rearranging themselves in his thoughts, and he had set himself patiently

to the redraughting of the paragraph, when a slight sound at the door

caused him to look up suddenly with the suspended blue pencil still, in

his hand. It was too late for the maids, he knew--they had already gone

to bed before Trent left--and he knew also that the person who entered

at this hour must have opened the outer door by means of a latch-key.

The soft, slow movement outside sent a nervous shiver through him; he

was aware the next instant that he gripped the pencil more closely in

his hand; and then, rising to his feet with a breathless impulse to be

face to face at once with the inevitable moment, he made a single step

forward, while he watched the knob turn, the door open slowly, and

Connie cross the threshold and pause confusedly as if blinded by the

lamplight.

The pencil dropped from his hand; he heard it fall with a thud upon the

carpet; and then he heard nothing else except the beating of his own

arteries in his ears. Time seemed to stop suddenly and then to whirl

madly forward while he stood rooted to his square of carpet, with his

useless hands hanging helplessly at his sides. It was the supreme

instant his life that was before him, and yet he was as powerless to

meet it as the infant in the womb to avert the hour of its birth. Dumb

and petrified by very force of the will within him, he waited immovable

on the spot of carpet, while his eyes saw only the visible wreck of the

woman who stood upon his threshold. His dreams of her had been visions

of horror, but the most pitiable of them had fallen far short of the

reality as he saw it now. From her streaked blonde hair, already

powdered with gray, to her exhausted bedraggled feet, which seemed

hardly to support her trembling body, she stood there, terrible and full

of anguish, like the most tragic ghost of his imaginary horrors. Face to

face with each other they were held speechless by the knowledge that

there was no word by which the past might be justified or the future

made any easier for them to meet; and as in all great instants of life

the thing that was said between them was uttered at last in an unbroken

silence.

Then as they stood there a slight sound changed the atmosphere of the

room. The shade of the lamp, which Adams had raised too high, cracked

with a sharp noise and fell to the floor in broken pieces; and at the

shock Connie gave a hysterical shriek and lifted to Adams the frightened

glance of her ignorant blue eyes.

"I--I had nowhere to go and I am very tired," she said, in her old tone

of childish irritation, "I don't think I was ever so tired in my life

before."

Her voice snapped the icy constraint which held him and he knew now that

he was ready to face the hour on its own terms. His will was as the

strength of the strong, and he felt standing there, that he would ask

no quarter of his fate. Let it be what it would, he knew that it was

powerless to close on him again the door of his prison.

"Then you did right to come back; Connie," he said quietly, "you did

right to come back."

His words rang out almost exultantly, but the moment afterward he was

terrified by their immediate effect--for Connie--throwing herself

forward upon the floor, burst wildly into one of her old spells of

weeping, calling upon God, upon himself, and upon the man whom she had

loved and hated. The frenzied beating of her small, helpless hands, the

streaming of her tears, the quiver of her wrecked, emaciated body, the

convulsed agony that looked at him from her face--these things made

their appeal to that compassion by which he lived, and he found that the

way which he had thought difficult had become to him as familiar as the

breath he drew.

"It is all over now--there is nothing but quiet here," he said.

She lay still instantly at his words, her face half hidden in the

cushions of the sofa; and turning from her he went into the dining-room

and brought back a glass of wine and some bread and milk. As he fed her,

she opened her lips with a little humble, tired movement which was

utterly unlike the Connie whom he remembered. Was it possible that in

her degradation she had learned the first rare grace of spirit which is

meekness?

"Take it all, every drop," he said once, when she would have pushed the

spoon away; and turning obediently, she swallowed the last drops of

milk.

"It is very good," she murmured as he rose to put down the emptied

bowl. The words brought a quick moisture of recollection to his eyes,

and he found himself asking if the time had come at last when Connie

could find pleasure in the taste of bread and milk?

After this she lay motionless on the floor until he carried her upstairs

and placed her upon the bed as he had done so often on her past reckless

nights. But there was no remembrance in his mind now of that former

service; and as he turned on the electric light and drew the blankets

over her shivering body, he was hardly surprised even by the readiness

with which events, left perfectly alone, had managed to adjust

themselves. Why he had acted as he had done, he could not have told; had

he stopped to think of it he would probably have said that he had seen

no other way. Connie as his wife, as the mother even of his dead child,

had come to mean nothing to him any more; but Connie as something far

deeper than this--as the object of inexhaustible compassion, as the

tragedy of mortal failure--possessed now a significance which no human

relation could cover by a name. Beyond the abandoned wife, he could

see--not less clearly than on that night when he had waited in the snow

outside the opera house--the small terrified soul caught in a web of

circumstance from which there was no escape.

Standing at daybreak in the centre of his study floor, he remembered the

last humble look with which she had closed her eyes; and he saw in it a

gratitude that was like the first faint dawning of the daybreak. For the

first time in his life he had watched in Connie's eyes the struggle for

consciousness which was as the struggle of an animal in whom a soul had

come painfully to birth; and the memory of it sent a strange, an almost

divine happiness to his heart. Was it possible that the will of God had

moved here while he slept? Was it possible, he asked himself in an

ecstasy of wonder, that in spite of all sin, all failure, all

degradation, all despair, he had really won Connie's soul?

CHAPTER IV

ADAMS WATCHES IN THE NIGHT AND SEES THE DAWN

For a week after her home-coming Connie lay ill and almost unconscious

in her chamber. Since her first wild outburst on the night of her return

she had allowed no hint of remorse or gratitude to break through the

obstinate silence upon her lips; and the impression she gave Adams, on

his occasional visits to her room, was of a soul and body too exhausted

for even the slightest emotional activity. She had made of her life what

her desire prompted; and she seemed to suggest now, lying there wrecked

and silent, that the end of all self-gratification is in utter weariness

of spirit.

Then gradually, as the long June days went by, life appeared feebly to

renew itself and move within her. At first it was only a look, raised to

Adams, when he bent over her, with something of the pathetic, expectant

wonder of a sick child; then a helpless expressive gesture, and at last

he found in her eye a clearer and fuller recognition of her surroundings

and of himself. The gratitude he had seen on that terrible night

surprised him again one day as he spoke to her; and after this he began

to watch for its reappearance with an eagerness which he himself found

it difficult to understand. Of all virtues gratitude was most lacking

in the woman who had been his wife; and this slow, silent growth of it,

showed to him as no less a miracle than the coming of the spring or the

resurrection of the dead earth beneath the rain. There were moments

even, when he felt that he must move softly, lest he disturb the working

of those spiritual forces which make for righteousness by strange and

wonderful ways. Strange and wonderful, indeed, he had found, beyond all

miracles were the means by which the soul might be brought back to the

knowledge of its immortal destiny. Was it not under the eyes of a harlot

that he, himself, had seen the mystery which is God's goodness? and so

might he not find that Connie had learned, in the depths of her

self-abasement, that the light which surrounds the pleasures of the

senses is full of enchantment only for the distant, deluded vision?

But there were other hours when he asked himself if he were strong

enough for the thing which he had before him--strong enough, not for the

swift, exalted moment of the sacrifice, but for the daily fret and

torment of a perfectly unpoetic self-denial. Would the light go out

again and the exaltation fail him before many days? Then he remembered

the pathos of her struggling smile, the timid groping of her hands, the

deprecating gratitude he found in her look; and it seemed to him when

all other resources were exhausted--when his energy, his duty, his

religion flagged--that his compassion would still remain in his heart to

render possible all that was impossible to his will alone. Compassion!

this, he came to find in the end, was the true and the necessary key to

any serious understanding of life.

He was still putting these questions to himself, when, coming in one

afternoon from his office, he found Connie, wearing a loose fitting

wrapper of some pale coloured muslin, awaiting him in an easy chair

beside her window. It was the first time that she had left her bed; and

when he offered a few cheerful congratulations upon her recovered

strength, she looked up at him with a face which still showed signs of

the hideous ravages of the last few months. In her hollowed cheeks, in

her quivering unsteady lips, and in the dull grayness of her hair, from

which the golden dye had faded, he could find now no faint traces of

that delicate beauty he had loved. At less than thirty years she looked

the embodiment of uncontrolled and reckless middle-age.

"It isn't that I'm really better--not really," she said, in answer to

his look almost more than to his words, "but the doctor told me that I

must get up and dress to-day. He wants me to go to the hospital this

afternoon."

Her voice was so composed--so unlike the usual nervous quiver of her

speech--that at first he could only repeat her words in the vague

blankness of his surprise.

"To the hospital? Then you are ill?"

"I asked him not to tell you," she replied, with a tremor of the lips

which had almost the effect of a smile, "he didn't understand--he

couldn't, so I wanted you to hear it first from me. I'll never be any

better--I'll never get really well again--without such an operation--and

he thinks, he says, that it must be at once--without delay."

As she spoke she stretched out her hand for a glass of water that stood

at her side, and in the movement her wedding ring slipped from her thin

finger and rolled to a little distance upon the floor. Picking it up he

handed it back to her, but she placed it indifferently upon the table.

Her attitude, with its dull quiet of sensation, impressed him at the

instant almost more than the greater importance of what she told him.

Was it this acceptance of the thing, he wondered, which appeared to rob

it of all terror in her mind? and was the dumb resignation in her face

and voice, merely an expression of the physical listlessness of despair?

There was about her now that peculiar dignity which belongs less to the

human creature than to the gravity of the moment in which he stands; and

he remembered vividly that he had never watched any soul in the supreme

crisis of its experience without the stirring in himself of a strange

sentiment of reverence. Even the most abandoned was covered in that

exalted hour by some last rag of honour.

"Then you have suffered great pain?" he asked, because no other words

came to him that he could utter.

"Weeks ago--yes--but not now. It does not hurt me now."

"And you thought, yourself, that it was so serious as this?"

She shook her head. "Oh, no, I never thought of it. When it came I drove

it off with brandy."

The absence in her of any appeal for pity moved him far more than the

loudest outcry could have done.

"Poor girl!" he said, and stopped in terror, lest he had obtruded the

personal element into a situation which seemed so devoid of feeling.

"It was a pity," she returned to his surprise very quietly; and without

looking at him, she spoke presently in a voice which struck him as

having a strange quality of hollowness, "it was a pity; but it can't be

helped. You might try and try because you're made that way, but it

wouldn't, in the end, do the very least bit of good. If I live till

to-morrow and get well and come out of the hospital, it will all be over

just exactly what it was before. Not at first, perhaps--oh, I know, not

at first!--but afterward, when things bored me, the taste would come

back again."

"Hush!" he said quickly, with a forward movement, "hush! you shall not

think such things!"

"The taste would come back again!" she repeated, with a kind of savage

sternness. "I am not strong and the doctor told me long ago that there

was no cure."

"Then he lied--there is always a cure."

"There is not--there is not," she insisted harshly, dwelling upon the

words because in them she found a keen agony which relieved her lethargy

of bitterness, "I am different now for a while, but it would not last. I

am very tired, but after I have rested--"

"What would not last?" he broke in, as she hesitated over her unfinished

sentence.

For a long pause she waited, searching in vain, he saw, for some phrase

which might describe the thing she had not as yet thought out clearly in

her own dazed mind. Then, at last, she spoke almost in a whisper, "the

freedom."

The word gave him a sudden shock of gladness. "Then you are free

to-day--you feel it now?"

She raised her hand, pushing back her faded hair, as if she would look

more closely at an object which rose but dimly before her eyes.

"I want you to know all--everything," she went on slowly, "I want you to

understand how low I sank--to what fearful places I came in the end. At

first it was merely discontent, and I felt that it was only happiness I

wanted. I loved him--for a time, I think, I really loved him--you know

whom I mean--but at last, when I began to weary him, when he knew what I

took, he cursed me and left me alone in the street one night. Then a

devil was let loose within me--I wanted hell, and I went

further--further."

Her voice was still lifeless, but while she spoke he felt his teeth bite

into his lips with a force which stung him to the consciousness of what

she said. There awoke in him a triumph, almost a glory in the rage he

felt, and he knew now why men had always believed in a hell--why they

had even come at last to hope for it.

"I never meant to come back," she began again, after a pause in which

the tumult of his feeling seemed to fill the air with violence, "but I

had reached the end of wretchedness, I was tired and hungry, and nothing

that happened really mattered. If you had told me to go away I don't

think that I should have cared. I meant, in that case, to sell my coat

for a bottle of brandy, and to put an end to it all while I had the

courage of drink."

Her bent disordered head trembled slightly, but she appeared to him to

have passed in her misery beyond the bounds where any human sympathy

could be of use. She was no longer his wife, nor he her husband; she was

no longer even a fellow mortal between whom and himself there might be

some common ground of understanding. Absolutely alone and

unapproachable, he knew that she had reached the ultimate desolation of

her soul.

"It was because you did not send me away that I have told you," she said

quietly. "It is because, too, I want you to know that I--understand."

To the end her thoughts were but poor faltering, half-developed things;

yet he knew what she meant to say, though she, herself, had divined it

only through some pathetic, dumb instinct.

"I think I know what you mean," he said presently, when it appeared to

him that her confession was over; but after he had spoken she took up

her sentence with the dead calm in which she had come to rest.

"There's no use saying that I'm sorry and yet--I am sorry."

Her look of weariness was so great that with the words she seemed to

lose instantly her remaining strength; and he gathered in her silence,

an impression that she was reaching blindly out to him for help.

"Promise me that you will stay with me as long as they will let you?"

she implored, with a quick return to her convulsion of childish terror.

He promised readily; but when the time came for her to go, she had

entirely recovered her aspect of listless fortitude, and during the

short drive to the hospital, she talked, without stopping, of perfectly

indifferent subjects--of the dust in the street, the deserted look of

the closed houses, and of the wedding present she wished to buy for a

maid who was to be married in the coming week.

"Let it be something really thee," she asked, and this single request

marked for him, as she uttered it, a change in Connie greater than any

he had seen before.

At the hospital he expected a relapse into her hysterical dread, but, to

his surprise, she watched the surgical preparations with a calmness in

which there was a kind of passive curiosity. While the nurse laid out

her nightdress on the small white iron bed, and braided her hair in two

long, slender braids, she assisted with a patient attention to such

details which seemed hardly to account for the terrible event for which

they prepared. Her hair, he noticed, was combed straight back from her

forehead in the fashion in which she might have worn it as a little

girl; and this simple change gave her an expression which was almost one

of injured innocence. Age and experience were suddenly wiped out of her

face, not by any act of mental illumination, but merely by the ruffles

of her white nightdress and the simple childish fashion in which they

had combed her hair.

When they came to take her upstairs to the operating room upon the roof,

he would have gone also, but after reaching the top landing, she turned

to him upon the threshold and told him that she would rather he came no

farther.

"I can bear everything better alone now," she said; and so when they

carried her inside he turned away and entered the little waiting room

at the other end of the hall. The place stifled him with the odours of

chloroform and ether, and going to the window, he threw open the blinds

and leaned out into the street. With the first breath of air in his

face, he realised that it was he, and not Connie, who had turned coward

at the end; and he wondered if it were merely waning vitality which had

assumed in her an appearance of such natural dignity. She had lived her

life in terror of imaginary horrors and now in presence of the actual

suffering she could show herself to be absolutely unafraid. Not she but

he, himself, now shivered at the thought of her unconscious body in the

surgeon's hands, and he felt that it would be a positive relief to

change places with her at the instant--to confront in her stead either

the returning pangs of consciousness or the greater mystery of her

unawakening.

In the small, newly painted room, which smelt of chloroform and varnish,

he sat staring through the half open door to the hall where a surgeon,

wearing a shirt with roiled-up sleeves, had just hurried by. A nurse

passed carrying a basin from which a light steam rose; then a young

doctor with a brown leather bag, and presently a second surgeon, who

walked rapidly, and turned up his cuffs over his fat arms, just before

he reached the threshold.

Connie was no longer his wife, Adams had told himself; and yet this fact

seemed not in the least to lessen the importance of the news which he

awaited. For the first time he understood clearly how trivial are any

mere social relations between man and woman.

Then, while he watched the hand of the clock on the mantel drag slowly

around the great staring face, he compelled his thoughts gradually to

detach themselves from her helpless body, as it lay outstretched on the

table across the hall, and to regather about the girlish figure he had

first seen under cherry coloured ribbons. The old vibrant emotion was

but ashes; try as he would he could bring back but a pale memory of that

golden moment; and this emptiness where there had once been life,

lessened forever in his mind the value of all purely human passion. But

his personal attitude to her was lost suddenly in his wider regret that

such tragedies were possible--that the girl with the delicate babyish

face could have become a creature to whom vice was a desired familiar

thing.

"Did the outcome lie in my hands? and might I have prevented it?" he

demanded. "If I had stood in the way of her impulse, would it have

turned aside from me at the last?" And the salvation of the world

appeared to him to depend upon just this courageous coming between evil

and the desire which it invited--for had not the soul of the weak, been

delivered, in spite of all moral subterfuge, into the power of the

strong?

Then his vision broadened, and he looked from Connie's life to the lives

of men and women who were more fortunate than she; but all human

existence, everywhere one and the same, showed to him as the ceaseless

struggle after the illusion of a happiness which had no part in any

possession nor in any object. He thought of Laura, with the radiance of

her illusion still upon her; of Gerty, groping after the torn and

soiled shreds of hers; of Kemper, stripped of his and yet making the

pretence that it had not left him naked; of Perry Bridewell, dragging

his through the defiling mire that led to emptiness; and then of all the

miserable multitude of those that live for pleasure. And he saw them,

one and all, bound to the wheel which turned even as he looked.

The door across the hall opened and they brought Connie out, breathing

quietly and still unconscious. He followed the stretcher downstairs; but

after they had placed her upon the bed, he came back again and sat down,

as before, in the little stuffy room. Presently he would go home, he

thought, but as the night wore on, he became too exhausted for further

effort, and closing his eyes at last, he fell heavily asleep.

When he awoke the day was already breaking, and the electric light

burned dimly in the general wash of grayness. About him the atmosphere

had a strangely sketchy effect, as if it had been laid on crudely with a

few strokes from a paint brush.

The window was still open, and going over to it he leaned out and stood

for several minutes, too tired to make the necessary effort to collect

his thoughts, while he looked across the sleeping city to the pale amber

dawn which was beginning to streak the sky with colour. The silence was

very great; in the faint light the ordinary objects upon which he

gazed--the familiar look of the houses and the streets--appeared to him

less the forms of a material substance than the result of some shadowy

projection of mind. All the earth and sky showed suddenly as belonging

to this same transient manifestation of thought; and gradually, as he

stood there, his perceptions were reinforced by a sense which is not

that of the eye nor of the ear. He neither saw nor heard, yet he felt

that the spirit had moved toward him on the face of the dawn; and the

"I" was not more evident to his illumined consciousness than was the

"Thou." He beheld God, with the vision which is beyond vision; the light

of his eyes, the breath of his body were less plain to him than was the

mystery of his soul. And the universal life, he saw--spirit and matter,

fibre and impulse, vibration of atom and quiver of aspiration--was but

an agonised working out into this consciousness of God. With the

revelation his own life was changed as by a miracle of nature; right

became no longer difficult, but easy; and not the day only, but his

whole existence and the end to which it moved were made as clear to him

as the light before his eyes.

Again he thought of Laura, still under the troubled radiance of her

illusion, and his heart dissolved in sympathy, not for her only, but for

all mankind--for Kemper, whom she loved, for Gerty, for Connie, for

Perry Bridewell. "They seek for happiness, but it is mine," he thought;

"and because they seek it first, it will keep away from them forever. It

is not to be found in pleasure, nor in the desire of any object, nor in

the fulfilment of any love--for I, who have none of these things, am

happier than they."

He turned away from the window toward the door, and it was at this

instant that one of the nurses ran up to him.

"We thought you had gone home," she said, "so we have rung you up by

telephone for an hour--" She stopped and paused hesitating for an

instant; then meeting the quiet question in his look, she added simply,

"Your wife died, still unconscious, an hour ago."

CHAPTER V

TREATS OF THE POVERTY OF RICHES

On the morning of Connie's death, Gerty, dropping in shortly before

luncheon, brought the news to Laura.

"Do you know for once in my life my social instinct has failed me," she

confessed in her first breath, "I am perfectly at a loss as to how the

situation should be met. Ought one to ignore her death or ought one not

to?"

"Do you mean," asked Laura, "that you can't decide whether to write to

him or not?"

"Of course that's a part of it, but, the main thing is to know in one's

own mind whether one ought to regard it as an affliction or a blessing.

It really isn't just to Providence to be so undecided about the

character of its actions--particularly when in this case it appears to

have arranged things so beautifully to suit everybody who is concerned."

"It was, to say the least, considerate," remarked Laura, with the

cynical flavour she adopted occasionally from Kemper or from Gerty, "and

it is certainly a merciful solution of the problem, but does it ever

occur to you," she added more earnestly, "to wonder what would have

happened if she hadn't died?"

"Oh, she simply had to die," said Gerty, "there was nothing else that

she could do in decency--not that she would have been greatly

influenced by such a necessity," she commented blandly.

"I'd like all the same to know how he would have met the difficulty, for

that he would have met it, I am perfectly assured."

"Well, I, for one, can afford to leave my curiosity unsatisfied,"

responded Gerty; then she added in a voice that was almost serious. "Do

you know there's really something strangely loveable about the man. I

sometimes think," she concluded with her fantastic humour, "that I might

have married him myself with very little effort on either side."

"And lived happily forever after on the _International Review?_"

"Oh, I don't know but what it would be quite as easy as to live on

clothes. I don't believe poverty, after all, is a bit worse than

boredom. What one wants is to be interested, and if one isn't, life is

pretty much the same in a surface car or in an automobile. I don't

believe I should have minded surface cars the least bit," she finished

pensively.

"Wait till you've tried them--I have."

"What really matters is the one great thing," pursued Gerty with a

positive philosophy, "and money has about as much relation to happiness

as the frame has to the finished picture--all it does is to show it off

to the world. Now I like being shown off, I admit--but I'd like it all

the better if there were a little more of the stuff upon the canvas."

"If you were only as happy as I am!" said Laura softly.

For a moment Gerty looked at her with a sweetness in which there was an

almost maternal understanding. "I wish I were, darling," was what she

answered.

Her hard, bright eyes grew suddenly wistful, and she looked at Laura as

if she would pierce through the enveloping flesh to the soul within. Of

all the people she had ever known Laura was the only one, she had

sometimes declared, who had never lied to her. The world had lied to

her, Kemper had lied to her, Perry had lied to her more than all; and

she had come at last to feel, almost without explaining it to herself,

that the truth was in Laura as in some obscure, mystic sense the

sacrament was in the bread and wine upon the altar. Though she herself

was quite content to slip away from her ideals, she felt that to believe

in somebody was as necessary to her life as the bread she ate. It made

no difference that she should number among the profane multitude who

found their way back to the fleshpots, but her heart demanded that her

friend should remain constant to the prophetic vision and the promised

land. Laura was not only the woman whom she loved, she had become to her

at last almost a vicarious worship. What she couldn't believe Laura

believed in her stead; where she was powerless even to be good, Laura

became not only good but noble. And through all her friendship, from

that first day at school to the present moment, she remembered now that

no hint of jealousy had ever looked at her from Laura's eyes. "A thrush

could hardly borrow the plumage of a paroquet," Trent had said; and the

brilliant loveliness which had disturbed the peace of other women she

had known, had produced in Laura only an increasing delight, a more

fervent rapture. As she looked on the delicate, poetic face of the

woman before her, she found herself asking, almost in terror, if it were

possible that her friend was not only reconciled but positively

enamoured of the world? Had Laura, also, entered into a rivalry which

would be as relentless and more futile than her own? Would she, too,

waste her life in an effort to give substance to a shadow and to render

permanent the most impermanent of earthly things? But the question came

and went so abruptly that the minute afterward she had entirely

forgotten the passage of it through her mind.

"What a bore of a summer I shall have," she observed lightly, with one

of those swift changes of subject so characteristic of her restless

temperament. "The doctor has ordered me back to camp in the Adirondacks,

and unless Arnold and yourself take pity on me heaven knows whether I'll

be any better than a fungus by the autumn."

She was arranging her veil before the mirror as she spoke, and she

paused now to survey with a dissatisfied frown one of the large black

spots which had settled across her nose. "I told Camille I couldn't

stand dots like these," she remarked with an equally irrelevant flash of

irritation.

"Of course I'll come for July if you ask me," replied Laura, ignoring

the question of the veil for the sake of the more important issue, "I

can't answer for Arnold, but I think it's rather what he's looking

forward to."

"Oh, he told me yesterday that he'd come if I could persuade you. He

didn't have the good manners to leave me in doubt as to what the

attraction for him would be."

Laura's happy laugh rewarded her. "This will be the first summer he's

spent in America for ten years," she replied, "so I hope he'll find me

worth the sacrifice of Europe."

"Then he's really given up his trip abroad for you?"

"There's hardly need to ask that--but don't you think it a quite

sufficient reason?"

"Oh, I guess so," returned Gerty carelessly. "Once I'd have been quite

positive about it, but that was in the days when I was a fool. Now I'm

not honestly sure that you're doing wisely to let him stay. A man is

perfectly capable of making a sacrifice for a woman in the heat of

emotion, but there are nine chances to one that he never forgives her

for it afterward. Take my advice, my dear, and simply _make_ him

go--shove the boat off yourself if there's no other way. He'll probably

love you ten times more while he's missing you than he will be able to

do through a long hot summer at your side."

"Gerty, Gerty, how little you know love!" said Laura.

"My dear, I never pretended to. I've given my undivided time and

attention to men."

"Well, he doesn't want in the least to go--he'll tell you so himself

when you see him--but I do wish that your views of life weren't quite so

awful."

Gerty was still critically regarding her appearance in the mirror, and

before answering she ran her hand lightly over the exquisite curve of

her hip in her velvet gown.

"I'm sorry they strike you that way," she responded amiably, "because

they are probably what your own will be five years from now. Then I may

positively count on you both for July?" she asked without the slightest

change in her flippant tone, "and I'll try to decoy Billy Lancaster for

August. He's still young enough to find the virgin forest congenial

company."

"But I thought Perry hated him!" exclaimed Laura, in surprise.

"He does--perfectly--but I can't see that you've made an argument out of

that. Billy's really very handsome--I wish you knew him--he's one of the

few men of my acquaintance who has any hair left on the top of his

head."

Her flippancy, her shallowness left Laura for a minute in doubt as to

how she should accept her words. Then rising from her chair, she laid

her restraining hands on Gerty's shoulders.

"My darling, do be careful," she entreated.

The shoulders beneath her hands rose in an indifferent shrug. "Oh, I've

been careful," laughed Gerty, "but it isn't any fun. Perry isn't careful

and he gets a great deal more out of life than I do."

"A great deal more of what?" demanded Laura.

For an instant Gerty thought attentively, while the mocking gayety

changed to a serious hardness upon her face.

"More forgetfulness," she answered presently. "That's what we all want

isn't it? Call it by what name you will--religion, dissipation,

morphia--what we are all trying to do is to intoxicate ourselves into

forgetting that life is life."

"But it isn't what I want," insisted Laura, "I want to feel everything

and to know that I feel it."

"Well, you're different," rejoined Gerty. "What I'm after is to be

happy, and I care very little what form it takes or what kind of

happiness mine may be. I've ceased to be particular about the details

even--if Billy Lancaster is my happiness I'll devour him and never waste

an idle moment in regret. Why should I?--Perry doesn't."

"So there's an end to Perry?"

"An end! Oh, you delicious child, there's only a beginning. Perry's cult

is the inaccessible--present him with all the virtues and he will run

away; ignore him utterly and he'll make your life insupportable by his

presence. For the last twenty-four hours I assure you he's stuck to

me--like a briar."

"Then it's all for Perry--I mean this Billy?" asked Laura.

Gerty shook her head while her brows grew slowly together in an

expression of angry bitterness.

"It was in the beginning," she responded, "but I'm not sure that it is

now--not entirely at any rate. The boy's worship is incense to my

nostrils, I suppose. Yes, I've always been a monument of indifference to

men, but I confess to an increasing enthusiasm for Billy's looks."

"An enthusiasm which Perry doesn't share?"

The laughter in Gerty's voice was a little sad. "I declare it really

hurts me that I've ceased to notice. The poor silly man offered to give

up his golf to go motoring with me yesterday afternoon, and I went and

was absolutely bored to death. I couldn't help thinking how much more

interesting Billy is."

Her veil was at last adjusted to her satisfaction; and with a last

brilliant glance, which swept her entire figure, she turned from the

mirror and paused to draw on her gloves while she bent over and kissed

Laura upon the cheek.

"Goodbye, dear, if Billy turns out to be any real comfort, I'll share

him with you."

"Oh, I have a Billy of my own!" retorted Laura; and though her words

were mirthful there was a seriousness in her look which lasted long

after the door had closed upon her friend. She was thinking of Adams,

wondering if she should write to him, and how she should word her note;

and whether any expression of sympathy would not sound both trivial and

absurd? Then it seemed to her that there was nothing that she could say

because she realised that she stood now at an impassable distance from

him. The connection of thought even which had existed between them was

snapped at the instant; and she felt that she was no longer interested

in the things which had once absorbed them. The friendship was still

there, she supposed, but the spirit of each, the thoughts, the very

language, had become strangely different, and she told herself that she

could no longer speak to him since she had lost the power to speak in

any words he might understand.

"How can I pretend to value what no longer even interests me?" she

thought, "and if I attempt to explain--if I tell him that my whole

nature has changed because I have chosen one thing from out the

many--what possible good, after all, could come of putting this into

words? Suppose I say to him quite frankly: 'I am content to let

everything else go since I have found happiness?' And yet is it true

that I have found it? and how do I know that this is really happiness,

after all?"

It seemed to her, as she asked the question, that her whole life

dissolved itself into the answer; and she became conscious again of the

two natures which dwelt within her--of the nature which lived and of the

nature which kept apart and questioned. She remembered the night after

her first meeting with Kemper and the conviction she had felt then that

her destiny lay mapped out for her in the hand of God. Her soul on that

night had seemed, in the words of the quaint old metaphor, a vase which

she held up for God to fill. The light had run over then, but now, she

realised with a pang, it had ceased to shine through her body, and her

vase was empty. Even love had not filled it for her as her dream had

done.

Again she asked if it were happiness, and still she could find no

answer. The quickened vibration of the pulses, the concentration of

thought upon a single presence, the restless imagination which leaped

from the disappointment of to-day to the possible fulfilment of

to-morrow--these things were bound up in her every instant, and yet

could she, even in her own thoughts, call these things happiness? She

told off her minutes by her heartbeats; but there were brief suspensions

of feeling when she turned to ask herself if in all its height and force

and vividness there was still no perceptible division between agony and

joy.

For at times the way grew dark to her and she felt that she stumbled

blindly in a strange place. From the heights of the ideal she had come

down to the ordinary level of the actual; and she was as ignorant of the

forces among which she moved as a bird in the air is ignorant of a cage.

Gerty alone, she knew, was familiar with it all--had travelled step by

step over the road before her--yet, she realised that she found no help

in Gerty, nor in any other human being--for was it not ordained in the

beginning that every man must come at last into the knowledge of the

spirit only through the confirming agony of flesh?

"No, I am not happy now because he is not utterly and entirely mine,"

she thought, "there are only a few hours of the day when he is with

me--all the rest of the twenty-four he leads a life of which I know

nothing, which I cannot even follow in my thoughts. Whom does he see in

those hours? and of what does he think when I am not with him? Next week

in the Adirondacks we shall be together without interruption, and then I

shall discern his real and hidden self--then I shall understand him as

fully as I wish to be understood." And that coming month appeared to her

suddenly as luminous with happiness. Here, now, she was dissatisfied and

incapable of rest, but just six days ahead of her she saw the beginning

of unspeakable joy. An impatient eagerness ran through her like a flame

and she began immediately the preparations for her visit.

CHAPTER VI

THE FEET OF THE GOD

When Kemper, in an emotional moment, had declared that he would give up

his trip to Europe, he had expected that Laura would see in the

sacrifice a convincing proof of the stability of his affection; but, to

his surprise, she had accepted the suggestion as a shade too much in the

natural order of events. Europe, empty of his presence, would have been

in her eyes a desert; and that any grouping of mountains or arrangement

of buildings could offer the slightest temptation beside the promised

month in the Adirondacks appeared to her as entirely beyond the

question. If the truth were told he did immeasurably prefer the prospect

of a summer spent by her side, but he felt at the same time--though he

hardly admitted this even to himself--that in remaining in America he

was giving up a good deal of his ordinary physical enjoyments. It was

not that he wanted in the very least to go; he felt merely that he ought

to have been seriously commended because he stayed away. Since he had

never relinquished so much as a day's pleasure for any woman in the

past, he was almost overcome by appreciation of his present generosity.

For a time the very virtue in his decision produced in him the agreeable

humour which succeeds any particular admiration for one's own conduct.

Of all states of mind the complacent suavity resulting from self-esteem

is, perhaps, the most pleasantly apparent in one's attitude to others;

and no sooner had Kemper assured himself that he had made an unusual

sacrifice for Laura than he was rewarded by the overwhelming conviction

that she was more than worth it all. In some way peculiar to the

emotions her value increased in direct relation to the amount of

pleasure he told himself he had given up for her sake.