When at last he had freed himself from a few financial worries he had

lingered to attend to, and was hurrying toward her in the night express

which left New York, he assured himself that now for the first time he

was comfortably settled in a state which might be reasonably expected to

endure. The careless first impulse of his affection would wane, he

knew--it were as useless to regret the inevitable passing of the

spring--but beyond this was it not possible that Laura might hold his

interest by qualities more permanent than any transient exaltation of

the emotions? He thought of the soul in her face rather than of the mere

changing accident of form--of the smile which moved like an edge of

light across her eyes and lips--and this rare spiritual quality in her

appearance appealed to him at the instant as vividly as it had done on

the first day he saw her. This charm of strangeness had worn with him as

nothing in the domain of the sensations had worn in his life before. In

the smoking car, when he entered it a little later, he found a man named

Barclay, whom he saw sometimes at his club; and they sat talking

together until long after midnight. Barclay was a keen, aggressively

energetic person, who lived in a continual rush of affairs, which had

not kept him from a decided over-development about the waist. He was

married to an invalid wife, who, as he now told Kemper, was threatened

with consumption and condemned to spend the whole year in the

Adirondacks. Kemper had seen her once, and though she was neither pretty

nor intelligent, he remembered her with respect as the owner of a

property of forty millions. The knowledge of this fact covered her with

a certain distinction in his mind, and because of it he condoned almost

unconsciously the absence in her of any more personal attraction than

that of wealth. The marriage, so far as he could judge, had been, from

Barclay's point of view, entirely satisfactory--domestic affairs

occupied no place whatever in the man's existence, which was devoted

exclusively to speculation in stocks; and he had solved the eternal

problem of philosophy by reducing life, not to a formula, but to a

figure. Of scandal there had never blown the faintest breath about him;

he paid apparently as little attention to other women as to his wife;

and money, Kemper decided now, not without an irrational envy, appeared

to satisfy as well as absorb his every instant.

"Yes, it's a great thing to get back to the woods now and then," Barclay

was saying, "I usually manage to run up for Sunday--and then I find time

to look over all the news of the week."

By "news," Kemper was aware he meant only the changes in the stock

market; but his recognition that the man had not so much as a casual

interest above the accumulation of wealth, did not detract in the least

from the admiration with which Barclay inspired him. This was a life

that counted! he thought with generous enthusiasm; and success

incarnate, he felt, was riding beside him in the train.

Barclay had drawn a paper from his pocket, and was following the list of

figures with the point of his toothpick. Though there was but one

subject upon which he possessed even the rudiments of knowledge, the

fact that he could speak with authority in a single department of life

had conferred upon him a certain dignity of manner; and so Kemper, as he

fell into conversation with him, found himself wishing that he might

arrange to be thrown with him during the month of his vacation. Money,

though he himself was ignorant of it, possessed almost as vital an

attraction for him as he found in love.

But the next morning, when he descended from the train and saw Laura

awaiting him against a green background of forest, all recollection of

Barclay and his financial genius, was swept from his thoughts. As he

looked at her small distinguished figure, and met her charming eyes,

radiant with love, he told himself that he had, indeed, got to the good

place in his life at last. The pressure of her hand, the surrender in

her look, the tremor of her voice, appealed to his inflammable senses

with a freshness which he found as delicious as the dawn in which they

stood.

"To think that I'm only beginning to live when I've past forty years!"

he exclaimed, as they rolled in the little cart over the forest road.

Laura held the reins, and while she drove he flung his arm about her

with a boyish laugh.

"But this is heavenly--how did you manage it?" he asked.

"Oh, I came alone in the cart because I wanted these first minutes all

to ourselves," she answered, "I didn't want even Gerty to see how happy

we could be." And it seemed to her as she spoke that all that she had

demanded of happiness was fulfilled at last.

A week later she could still tell herself that the dream was true.

Kemper had thrown himself into his love making with all the zest, as he

said, of his college days; and there was in his complete absorption in

it something of the exclusive attention he devoted to a game of

billiards. It was a law of his nature that he should live each minute to

its utmost and let it go; and this romance of the forest was less an

idyl to him than a delicious experience which one must enjoy to the

fullest and have over. There were moments even when Laura saw his

temperamental impatience awake in his face, as if his thoughts were

beginning already to plunge from the fruition of to-day after the

capricious possibility which lies in to-morrow. In the midst of the

forest, under the gold and green of the leaves, she realised at times

that his moods were more in harmony with the city streets and the rush

of his accustomed eager life.

And yet to Kemper the month was full of an enchantment which belonged

half to his actual existence and half to some fairy stories he

remembered from his childhood. It was more beautiful than the reality,

but still it was not real; and this very beauty in it reminded him at

times of the vanishing loveliness which results from a mere chance

effect--of the sunlight on the green leaves or the flutter of Laura's

blue gown against the balsam. In the very intensity of his enjoyment

there was at certain instants almost a terrified presentiment; and

following this there were periods of flagging impulse when he asked

himself indifferently if a life of the emotions brought as its Nemesis

an essential incapacity for love? If Laura had only kept up the pursuit

a little longer, he complained once in a despondent mood, if she had

only fluttered her tinted veil as skilfully as a woman of the world

might have done. "Yet was it not for this unworldliness--for this lack

of artifice in her--that I first loved her?" he demanded, indignant with

her, with nature, with himself. She had surrendered her soul, he

realised, with the frankness of inexperience; the excitement of the

chase was now over forever, and he saw stretching ahead of him only the

radiant monotony of love. Was the satiety with which, in these listless

instants, he looked forward to it merely, he questioned bitterly, the

inevitable end to which his life had reached?

Lying in a hammock on the broad piazza of Gerty's camp, he asked himself

the question while he watched Laura, who stood at a little distance

examining some decorations for the hall.

"Oh, I'd choose the green tapestry by all means," he heard her say; and

he told himself as he listened to the ordinary words that if she had

been a perfect stranger to him he would have known her voice for the

voice of a woman who was in love. Was she really lacking, he asked

himself in amusement, in the quality which he called for want of a

better phrase--"the finesse of sentiment?" or was the angelic candour of

her emotion only the outward expression of that largeness of nature

which inspired him at times with a respect akin to awe? The absence of

any coquetry in her attitude impressed him as the final proof of her

inherent nobility; and yet there were instants when he admitted almost

in spite of himself, that he would have relished the display of a little

amorous evasion. Laura, he believed, was perfectly capable of a great

emotion, but the great emotion, after all, he concluded humorously, was

less conducive to his immediate enjoyment than was the small flirtation.

The two women were still discussing the bit of tapestry; and while he

watched them, a ray of sunlight, piercing the bough of a maple beside

the porch, felt with a charming brightness upon Gerty's hair Each

brilliant red strand he noticed, appeared to leap instantly into life

and colour.

It was pure effect, a mere creation of changing light and shade and yet,

as he looked, he was aware of a sudden tremor in his blood. The time had

been when Gerty had rather liked him, he remembered--or was it, after

all, merely that he had exaggerated the subtle suggestion in her look?

Something had passed between them--just what it was, he could hardly

recall with distinctness--a mere fervent glance, perhaps a half spoken

phrase, or at most a cousinly kiss which had contained the passion of a

lover. The incident had passed, and though he told himself now that it

had vanished entirely from his memory, he felt that it had left behind a

vague longing that it might some day occur again.

"I can't for the life of me remember what it was, nor how it happened,"

he thought. "It was out of the question, of course, that I should fall

in love with Perry's wife--and yet, by Jove, I'd like to know what she

felt about it all. I'm glad," he added earnestly after a moment, "that

Laura doesn't happen to be the flirtatious kind." Nevertheless he

continued to wonder, as he looked at the sunlight on Gerty's hair, if

there could have been, after all, a grain of truth in those hints she

had so carelessly let fall.

* * * * *

Early in August Laura was summoned home by the illness of Angela; and

Kemper, after a few days spent with her in the city, started upon a

yachting cruise which occupied him for two weeks. On the day of his

return, when as yet he had not seen Laura he accidentally ran across

Adams shortly before the luncheon hour.

"Look here, old chap, let's lunch together at the club," he suggested,

adding with a laugh, "if I let you go now, heaven knows when I'll be so

fortunate as to knock up against you any more."

Adams readily agreed; and a little later, as they sat opposite each

other at table, he showed, as usual, a sincere enough enjoyment of his

companion's society. Though he had never taken Kemper as he said, "quite

seriously," there were few men whom he found it pleasanter to meet at

dinner.

"I wish you came more in my way," he observed, while Kemper gave the

order, with the absorbed attention he devoted to such details, "I don't

believe I've laid eyes on you but once in the last six months."

"Oh, you've something better to think of," returned Kemper carelessly.

"Do you know," he pursued after a moment's thought, "I'm sometimes

tempted to wish that I could change place with you and get beaten into

shape for some serious work. It's the only thing in life that counts,

when you come to think of it," he concluded with an irritation directed

less against himself than against his fate.

"Well, I can't say I'd object to standing in your shoes for a while,"

rejoined Adams, "I've a taste for the particular brand of cigar you

smoke."

"Oh, they're good enough--in fact everything is good enough--it comes

too easily, that's the trouble. I've never found anything yet that was

seriously worth trying for."

Adams regarded him for a moment with a smile, to which his whimsical

humour lent a peculiar attraction.

"I, on the other hand, have tried pretty hard for some things I didn't

get," he answered, "the difference between us, I guess, is that I had a

tough time in my youth and you didn't. A man's middle age is usually a

reaction from his youth."

"I've never had a tough time anywhere," replied Kemper, almost in

disgust, "it's' been too soft--that's the deuced part of it. And yet

I've got the stuff in me for a good fight if the opportunity would only

come my way."

The expression of satiety--of moral weariness--was etched indelibly

beneath the brightness of his smile; and yet, Adams, looking at him,

remembered, a little bitterly, that this man had won from him the woman

whom he loved. To Kemper belonged both her body and her spirit; the

touch of her hand no less than the charm of her intellect! At the

thought his old human longing for her awoke and stirred restlessly

again in his heart.

"Yes, the only thing is to have one particular interest," resumed

Kemper, "to occupy oneself with something that is eternally worth while.

Now, look at Barclay--I went up in the train with him to the

Adirondacks, and, upon my word, I never envied a man more in my whole

life. You know Barclay, don't you?"

Adams nodded. "I'd find a little of his financial ability rather useful

myself," he observed. Then he broke into a boyish laugh at a

recollection the name aroused, "the last time I had a talk with him was

at the beginning of our war with Spain, and he told me he was interested

in news from the front because he happened to own some Spanish bonds."

Kemper joined in the laugh. "Oh, he's narrow, of course," he replied,

"but all the same I'd like the chance to get in his place. By Jove, I

don't believe he's ever bored a minute of the day!" And it seemed to

him, as he thought of Barclay, that his own life held nothing for him

but boredom from this time on.

CHAPTER VII

IN WHICH KEMPER IS PUZZLED

Late in October Kemper went South for a couple of weeks shooting; and It

was not until the first day of November that he parted from his

companions of the trip and returned to New York. He had enjoyed every

minute of his absence--until the last few days when the strangeness

appeared, somehow, to have worn from his out-door life--and as he drove

now, on the bright autumn afternoon, from the station to his rooms, he

was agreeably aware that he had never felt physically or mentally in

better shape. After a fortnight spent away from civilisation, he found a

refreshing excitement in watching the crowd in Fifth Avenue, the passing

carriages, and particularly the well-dressed figures of the women in

their winter furs. Taken all in all life was a pretty interesting

business, he admitted; and he remembered with eagerness that he would

see Laura again before the day was over. Though he had barely thought of

her once during the past two weeks, this very forgetfulness served to

surround her with the charm of novelty in his awakened memory.

A woman in a sable coat rolled past him in an automobile; and his eyes

followed her with an admiration which seemed strangely mixed with a

vague longing in his blood--a longing which was in some way produced by

the animated street, the changing November brightness and the crispness

of frost which was in the air. Then he caught sight of a milliner's

pretty assistant carrying a hat box along the sidewalk, and his gaze

hung with pleasure upon her trim and graceful figure in a cheap cloth

coat bordered with imitation ermine. A feeling of benevolence, of

universal good will pervaded his heart; his chest expanded in a sigh of

thankfulness, and it seemed to him that he asked nothing better than to

be alive. He was in the mood when a man is grateful to God, charitable

to himself and generous to his creditors.

The cab stopped before his door, and while he paid the man, he gave

careful directions to Wilkins about the removal of his shooting traps.

Then he entered the apartment house, and passing the elevator with his

rapid step, went gayly humming up the staircase.

On the third landing he paused a moment to catch his breath, and as he

laid his hand, the instant afterward, on the door of his sitting-room,

he became aware of a faint, familiar, and yet almost forgotten perfume,

which entered his nostrils from the apartment before which he stood. The

perfume, distant as it was, revived in him instantly, with that curious

association between odours and visual memory, a recollection which might

otherwise have slumbered for years in his brain--and though he had not

thought of Jennie Alta once during the summer and autumn months, there

rose immediately before him now the memory of her dressing table with

the silver box in which she kept some rare highly scented powder. Every

incident of his acquaintance with her thronged in a disordered series

through his brain; and it was with an odd presentiment of what awaited

him, that he entered his sitting room and found her occupying a chair

before his fireside. When she sprang up and faced him in her coarsened

beauty, it seemed the most natural thing in the world that he should

accept the fact of her presence with merely an ironic protest.

"So you've turned up again," he remarked, as he held out his hand with a

smile, "I was led to believe that the last parting would be final."

"Oh, it was," she answered lightly, "but there's an end even to

finality, you know."

The flute-like soprano of her voice fell pleasantly upon his ears, and

as he looked into her face he told himself that it was marvellous how

well she had managed to preserve an effect of youthfulness. Under the

flaring wings in her hat her eyes were still clear and large and heavy

lidded, her thin red lips still held the shape of their sensual curve. A

white fur boa was thrown carelessly about her neck, and he remembered

that underneath it, encircling her short throat there was the soft

crease of flesh which the ancient poets had named "the necklace of

Venus."

"Well, I can but accept this visit as a compliment, I suppose," he

observed with amiable indifference, "it means--doesn't it? that you won

your fight about the opera contract?"

An expression of anger--of the uncontrolled, majestic anger of a

handsome animal, awoke in her face, and she pulled off her long white

glove as if seeking to free herself from some restraint of custom. Her

hand, he noticed, with a keen eye for such feminine details, was large,

roughly shaped and over fleshy about the wrist.

"I'd starve before I'd sing again by that old contract," she responded.

"No, it's not opera--Parker refused to pay me what I asked and I held

out to the end--I shall sing in concert for the first time, and I shan't

be happy until I have every seat in the opera house left empty."

He laughed with an acute enjoyment of her repressed violence. "Oh,

you're welcome to mine," he returned good-humouredly, "but what is the

day of your great first battle?"

"Not until December. I'm going West and South before I sing in New

York."

"Then you aren't here for much of a stay, after all?"

She shook her head and the orange coloured wings in her hat waved to and

fro.

"Only a few days at a time. After Christmas I sail back again. In

February I'm engaged for Monte Carlo."

Then her expression underwent a curious change--as if personality,

colour, passion pulsed into her half averted face--and the hard

professional tones in which she had spoken were softened as if by an

awakening memory.

"So you still keep my portrait, I see," she observed, lifting her eyes

to the picture above the mantel, "you don't hate me, then, so bitterly

as I thought."

He shrugged his shoulders with the gesture he had acquired abroad.

"I did take it down, but it left a smudge on the wall, so I had to put

it back again."

"Then you sometimes think of me?" she enquired, with curiosity.

"Not when I can help it," he retorted, laughing.

His ironic pleasantry stung her into an irritation which showed plainly

in her face; and she appeared, for the first time, to bend her

intelligence toward some definite achievement.

"And is that always easy?" she asked, in a tone of mere flippant banter.

A petty impulse of revenge lent sharpness to his voice. "Easier than you

think," he responded coolly.

"Well, I suppose, I'll have to take the punishment," she answered, as

lightly as before; and then turning to the mantelpiece again, she raised

her glance to the portrait. "I never liked it," she commented frankly,

"he's got me in an unnatural position--I never stood like that in my

life--and there's an open smirk about the mouth."

He saw her face in the admirable pose which he remembered--the chin held

slightly forward, the cheek rounded upward, the eyes uplifted--and for

an instant he waited, half hoping that her voice of wine and honey would

roll from between her lips. But she was frugal of her notes, he recalled

the instant afterward.

"I've always considered it a pretty fair likeness," he remarked.

"Then you've always considered me pretty hideous," she flashed back in

annoyance.

As she swung round upon the hearthrug, the white fur boa slipped from

her throat, and he saw "the necklace of Venus" above the string of opals

that edged her collarless lace blouse.

"On the contrary I admire you very much when you are in a good humour,"

he observed in his genial raillery.

"Then you thought I had a temper?"

He laughed softly, as if at a returning recollection. "A perfectly

artistic one," he answered.

Her annoyance disappeared beneath his gaze, and the smile he had but

half forgotten--a faint sweet ripple of expression, which seemed less

the result of an inner working of intelligence than of some outward

fascination in the curve of mouth and chin--hovered, while he watched

her attentively, upon her bright red lips. In the making of her the soul

he recognised had dissolved into the senses; and yet the accident of her

one exquisite gift had conferred upon her the effect, if not the quality

of genius. Because of the voice in her throat she appeared to stand

apart by some divine election of nature.

"I believe I did slap your face once," she confessed, laughing, "but I

begged your pardon afterward--and you must admit that you were sometimes

trying."

"Perhaps--but what's the use of bringing all this up now? It's well

over, isn't it?"

"Isn't it?" she repeated softly; and he had an odd impression that her

voice was melting into liquid honey. The thought made him laugh aloud

and at the sound she relapsed quickly into her indifferent attitude.

"Of course, it's over," she resumed promptly. "If it were not over--if I

didn't feel myself entirely safe--do you think that I'd ever dare come

back again?"

The absence of any hint of emotion in her words produced in him an

agreeable feeling of security, and for the first time he went so close

to her that he might almost have touched her hand.

"Safe?" he repeated, smiling, "then were you ever really in danger?"

Her glance puzzled him, and she followed it a moment afterward with a

sentence which had the effect of increasing, rather than diminishing,

the obscurity in which he floundered.

"In danger of losing my head, do you mean?" she asked, "Wasn't that

question answered when I ran away?"

But the next instant she burst into a laugh of ridicule, and threw

herself back into the chair upon the hearthrug, with the particular fall

of drapery by which she delighted the eyes of her audience in the opera

house.

"I asked your man to bring me tea, for I'm famished," she remarked; "do

you think he has forgotten it?"

"He had, probably, to go out to buy the cakes," he replied, with a touch

upon the bell which was immediately answered by Wilkins bearing the

silver tray. As she rose to make tea, Kemper took the fur boa from her

shoulders and held it for a minute to his nostrils.

"You use the same perfume, I notice," he observed.

She waited until the door had closed upon Wilkins, and then looked up,

smiling, as she handed him his cup.

"There are two things one should never change," she returned, "a perfume

and a lover."

With a laugh he tossed the fur upon the sofa. "By Jove, you've arrived

at the conventional morality at last."

"Is it morality?" she rejoined sweetly, "I thought it was experience."

"Well, any way, you're right and I'm moral," he remarked, "the joy of

living, after all, is not in having a thing, but in wanting it."

"Which proves, as I have said," she concluded, "that one love is as good

as a thousand."

There was a sharp edge of ridicule to his glance; but the words he spoke

were uttered from some mere impulse of audacity.

"I wonder if I taught you that?" he questioned.

Leaning slightly forward she clasped her large white hands upon her

knees; and the position, while she kept it, showed plainly the rounded

ample length of her figure.

"I might tell you the truth--but, after all, why should I?" she

demanded.

An emotional curiosity which was almost as powerful as love flamed in

his face. How much or how little did she feel? he wondered; and the

vanity which was the inspiration of his largest as well as his smallest

passion, dominated for the time all other impressions which she

produced.

"Would it be possible for you to tell the truth if you tried?" he asked.

"I never try--all the harm on earth comes from women telling men the

truth. It is the woman who tells the truth who becomes--a door mat. If I

ever felt myself in danger of speaking the truth--" she hesitated for a

quick breath, while her eyes drew his gaze as by a cord--"I would run

away."

It was his turn to breathe quickly now. "You did run away--once."

"I ran because--" her voice was so low that he felt it like a breath

upon his cheek.

"Because?" he echoed impatiently; and the vehemence in his tone wrought

an immediate change in her seductive attitude. With a laugh that was

almost insolent, she rose to her feet and looked indifferently down upon

him.

"Oh, that's over long ago and we've both forgotten. I came to-day only

to ask the honour of your presence at my first concert."

An impulse to irritate her--to provoke her into an expression of her

hidden violence--succeeded quickly the curiosity she had aroused; and he

felt again the fiendish delight with which, as a savage small boy, he

had prodded the sleeping wild animals in their cages in the park.

"I'm not sure that I can arrange it," he responded, "I may be off on my

honeymoon, you know."

"Ah, yes," she nodded while he saw a perceptible flicker of her heavy

eyelids, "but when, if I'm not impertinent, does the interesting event

take place? I might be able to postpone my concert," she concluded

jestingly.

He shook his head. "You can't do that because I expect it to last

forever."

"One usually does, I believe, but it is easy to miscalculate. Have you a

photograph visible of the lady?"

He shook his head, but with the denial, his glance travelled to a

picture of Laura upon his desk; and crossing the room, she took it up

and returned with it to the firelight, where she dropped upon her knees

in order to study it the more closely.

"Has she money?" was her first enquiry at the end of her examination.

"If she has I am not aware of it," he retorted angrily.

"Well, I wonder what you see in her," she remarked, with her attentive

gaze still upon the picture, "though she looks as if she'd never let a

man go if she once got hold of him."

Her vulgar insolence worked him into an uncontrollable spasm of anger;

and with a smothered oath he wrenched the photograph from her and flung

it into the open drawer of his desk.

"She is too sacred to me to be made the subject of your criticism," he

exclaimed.

Whether she was frankly offended or unaffectedly amused he could not

tell, but she burst into so musical a laugh that he found himself

listening to it with positive pleasure.

"There! there! don't be foolish--I was only joking," she returned,

"please don't think for one minute that it's worth my while to be

jealous of you."

"I don't think so," he replied, with open annoyance, "but I wish you

wouldn't come here."

She had taken up her fur and stood now wrapping it about her throat,

while her eyes were fixed upon him with an expression he found it

impossible to read. Was it anger, seduction, passion or disappointment?

Or was it some deeper feeling than he had ever believed it possible for

her face to show?

"It is the last time, I promise you," she said, "but do you know why I

came this afternoon?"

"Why?--no, and I doubt if you do."

For a moment she was silent; then he watched the curious physical

fascination grow in her smile.

"I came because I had a very vivid dream about you on the boat last

night," she said, "I dreamed of that evening, during the first winter,

in my dressing-room after the second act in 'Faust.' I thought I had

forgotten it, but in my sleep it all came clearly back again--every

minute and--"

"And?" the word burst from him eagerly as he leaned toward her.

"I broke a bottle of perfume, do you remember?" her soft laugh shook in

her full, white throat, "your coat still smelt of it next day, you

said."

Her wonderful voice, softened now to a speaking tone, seemed to endow

each word, not only with melody, but with form and colour. They became

living things to him while she spoke, and the night he had almost

forgotten, stood out presently as in the glow of a conflagration of his

memory. He smelt again the perfume which she had spilled on his coat; he

saw again the fading roses, heaped on chairs and tables, that overflowed

her dressing room. It was the night of her great triumph--the eyes with

which she looked at him still held the intoxication of her own

music--and it was to the applause of a multitude, that, alone with her

behind the scenes, he had first taken her in his arms.

"It's all over, I tell you," he said angrily; "so what's the use of

this?"

"It's never over!--it's never over!" she repeated in her singing voice.

She was very close to him at last; but breaking away with an effort, he

crossed the room and laid his hand upon the door.

"It was over forever two years ago," he said, "and now good-bye!"

He held out his hand, but without taking it, she stood motionless while

she looked at him with her unchanging smile.

"Then I'll let it be good-bye," she answered, "but not this way--not

just like this--"

Her voice mocked him; and moved by an impulse which was half daring,

half vanity, he closed the door again and came back to where she stood.

"So long as it's good-bye, I'll have it any way you wish," he said.

CHAPTER VIII

SHOWS THAT LOVE WITHOUT WISDOM IS FOLLY

The odd part was, he admitted next morning as he sat at breakfast, that

from first to last he had not found one moment's pleasure in the society

of Madame Alta. Pleasure in a suitable quantity he was inclined to

regard as sufficient excuse for the most serious indiscretion; but in

this case the temptation to which he had yielded appeared to him, by the

light of day, to be entirely out of proportion to any actual enjoyment

he had experienced. An impulse which was neither vanity nor daring, but

a mixture of the two, had swept away his resolve before he was clearly

aware, as he expressed it, "of the drift of the wind." He had not wanted

to go with her and yet he had gone, impelled by some fury of adventure

which had seemed all the time to pull against his saner inclinations.

While he ate his two eggs and his four pieces of toast, as he had done

every morning for the last fifteen years, he remembered, with a mild

pang of remorse, that he had not seen Laura since his return. Without

doubt she had expected him last evening, had put on, probably, her most

becoming gown to receive him; and the thought of her disappointment

entered his heart with a very positive reproach. This reproach, short

lived as it was, had the effect of enkindling his imaginary picture of

her; and the eagerness with which he now looked forward to his visit

completely crowded from his mind the recollection that, but for his own

fault, he might have seen her with as little effort on the evening

before.

As he sat there over his breakfast, with an unfolded newspaper on the

table beside him, he realised, in a proper spirit of thankfulness, that

he had never felt himself to be in a more thoroughly domestic mood. His

face, in which the clear red from his country trip was still visible,

settled immediately into its most genial lines, while he expanded his

chest with a deep breath which strained the topmost button on the new

English waistcoat which he wore. The sober prospect of marriage no

longer annoyed him when he thought of it, and he could even look forward

complacently to seeing the same woman opposite to him at breakfast for

twenty years.

"By Jove, I've come to the place when to settle down and live quietly is

the best thing I can do," he concluded, as he helped himself to

marmalade. "I've reached the time of life when a man has to pull up and

go easily or else break to pieces. It's all very well to take one's

fling in youth, but middle age is the period for retrenchment."

Then, while he still congratulated himself upon the expediency of

virtue, another image appeared in his reflections, and the paternal

instinct, so strong in men of his kind, responded instantly to the

argument which clothed his mere natural impulse. Marriage, he told

himself, would mean a son of his own, and the stability which he had

always missed in any relation with a woman would be secured through the

responsibility which fatherhood involved. Here was the interest his

life had lacked, after all--here was the explanation of that vacancy his

emotions had not filled; and it appeared to him that his loves had

failed in definiteness, in any vital purpose, because he had never seen

himself fulfilled in the son which he now desired.

"I shouldn't wonder if this is what I've been wanting all the time," he

thought; and the generous fervour, the ideal purity, he had never been

able to introduce into his romances, gathered luminously about the

cradle of his unborn child. It seemed to him, as he smoked his second

cigar in the face of this paternal vision, that he had stumbled by

accident upon the one secret of happiness which he had overlooked; and

it was while the beaming effulgence of this mood still lasted, that he

finished his papers, and determined to look in upon Laura on his way

down town. The memory of last evening was placed at the distance of a

thousand miles by his sudden change of humour, and it seemed as useless

to reproach himself for an act so far beyond his present area of

personality as it would have been to moralise upon an indiscretion in

ancient history. A little later, as he ascended Laura's steps, he felt

serenely assured that he had made the best possible disposition of his

future.

To his surprise she was not in her sitting-room when he entered, and it

was several minutes before she came in, very quietly and with an averted

face. When he would have taken her in his arms, she drew back quickly

with an indignant and wounded gesture. Her eyes were burning, but he had

never heard her speak in so hard a voice.

"You were in town last night," she said, and by her look more than her

words he was brought face to face with the suspicion that she was

capable of a jealous outburst.

"I wanted to come, but I couldn't," he answered, with an attempt at his

quizzical humour. "I rushed here as soon as I dared this morning--isn't

that enough to prove something?"

Again he made a movement to take her in his arms, but her face was so

unyielding that his hands, which he had outstretched, fell to his sides.

From the look in her eyes he could almost believe that she had grown to

hate him in the night; and at the thought his earlier impetuous emotion

flamed in his heart.

"Don't lie to me," she said passionately, "there's nothing I hate so

much as a lie."

"I never lied to you in my life," he answered, as he drew back with an

expression of cold reproach--for it seemed to him that her attack had

offered an unpardonable affront to his honour.

"When you did not come I sent a note to you--I feared something had

happened--I hardly knew what--but something. The note came back. They

told the messenger--" the words were wrenched out of her as by some act

of bodily torture, and, at last, in spite of her struggle, she could go

no further. Pausing she looked at him in silence, while her hand pressed

into her bosom as if to keep down by physical force the passion which

she could no longer control by a mental effort. The violence of temper

which in a coarser--a more flesh-and-blood beauty--would have been

repelling and almost vulgar, was in her chastened and ennobled by the

ethereal quality in her outward form--and the emotion she expressed

seemed to belong less to the ordinary human impulses than to some finer

rage of spirit which was independent of the gesture or the utterance of

flesh.

"And you suspected what?" he demanded, in a hurt and angry voice, "you

were told some story by a servant--and without waiting for my

explanation--without giving me a decent chance to clear myself--you were

ready, on the instant, to believe me capable--of what?"

Her suspicion worked him into a furious resentment; and the

consciousness that he, himself, was at fault was swallowed up by the

greater wrong of her unuttered accusation. While he spoke he was

honestly of the opinion that their whole future happiness was wrecked by

the fact that she believed him capable of the thing which he had done.

"I would die now before I would justify myself to you," he added.

Before the unaffected resentment in his face, she was suddenly, and

without knowing it, thrown into a position of defence.

"What could I believe? What else was there for me to believe?" she asked

in a muffled voice. Then, as she looked up at him, it seemed to her that

for the first time she saw the man as he really was in the truth of his

own nature--saw his egoism, his vanity, his shallowness and saw, too,

with the same mental clearness, that he had ceased to love her. But at

the instant with this vision before her, she told herself that the

discovery made no difference--that it no longer mattered whether he

loved or hated her. Afterward, when he had gone, her perceptions would

be blunted again and she would suffer, she knew; but now, while she

stood there face to face with him, she could not feel that he bore any

vital part in her existence.

"You must believe whatever your feeling for me dictates," he retorted.

"I shall not stoop to meet a charge of which I am still ignorant--I have

loved you," he added, "more than I have ever loved any man or woman in

my life."

"You have never loved me--you do not love me now," she responded coolly.

She had not meant to speak the words; they held no particular meaning

for her ears; and yet they had no sooner passed her lips than she had a

strange impression that they remained like detached, living things in

the space between them. Why she had spoken as she had done, she could

not tell, nor why she had really cared so little at the instant when she

had uttered her passionate reproach. Then she remembered a wooden figure

she had once seen on the stage--a figure that walked and moved its arms

and uttered sounds which resembled a human voice--and it seemed to her

that she, herself, was this figure and that her gestures and the words

she spoke were the result of the hidden automaton within her.

She saw him pass to the door, look back once, and then leave the room

with his rapid step, and while her eyes followed him, she felt that the

man who had just gone from her with that angry glance was a different

individual from the man whom she still loved and for whom she would

presently suffer an agony of longing. Then as the sound of the hall door

closing sharply fell on her ears, she passed instantly from the

deadening lethargy of her senses into a vivid realisation of the thing

which had just happened--of the meaning of the words which she had

spoken and of the look which he had thrown back at her as he went. A

passion of despair rose in her throat, struggling for release until it

became a physical torture, and she cried out in her loneliness that

nothing mattered--neither truth nor falsehood--so long as she could be

brought again face to face with his actual presence.

But--if she had only known the truth!--Kemper had never desired her so

ardently as in the hour when he told himself that, by his own fault, he

had lost her forever; she had never shown herself so worthy to be won as

when she had looked down upon him from the remoteness of her disdain.

Like many men of flexible morality, he entertained a profound respect

for any rigid ethical standard; and had Laura maintained her unyielding

attitude, he would probably have suffered a hopeless passion for her to

the end of his embittered but still elastic experience. Though he was

hardly aware of it, the only virtues he could perfectly appreciate were

the ones which usually present themselves in a masculine shape--courage,

honour, fair play among men and chivalry to women; and it seemed to him

that Laura, in exacting his entire fidelity, was acting upon an

essentially masculine prerogative. The more she demanded, the more,

unconsciously to himself, he felt that he was ready to surrender--and he

cursed now the intervention of Madame Alta with a vehemence he would

never have felt had the course of his love flowed on smoothly in spite

of his relapses.

"What a damned fool I made of myself," he confessed, as he walked

rapidly away from Gramercy Park. "I got no pleasure from seeing Jennie

Alta--not an atom of enjoyment even--and yet I've ruined my whole life

because of her, and the chances are nine to one that if I had it to go

over I'd act the same blooming idiot again. And all the time I'm more in

love with Laura than I've ever been with any woman in my life. Here's

the whole happiness of my future swept away at a single blow."

And the domestic dream which Madame Alta had destroyed was mapped out

for him by his imagination, until she seemed, not only to have prevented

his marriage, but, by some singular eccentricity of feeling, to have

murdered the son who had played so large a part in his confident

expectations.

"But why should this have happened to me when I'm no worse than other

men?" he questioned, "when I'm even better than a hundred whom I know?

I've never willingly harmed any human being in my life--I've never

cheated, I've never lied to get myself out of a tight place, I've never

breathed a word against the reputation of any woman." He thought of

Brady, who, although he was a cad and had ruined Connie Adams, was now

reconciled with his wife and received everywhere he went; of Perry

Bridewell whose numerous affairs had never interfered with either his

domestic existence or his appetite. Beside either of these men he felt

himself to glow inwardly with virtue, yet he saw that his greater

decency had not in the least prevented his receiving the larger

punishment; and it seemed to him that he must be pursued by some malign

destiny because, though he was so much better than Brady or Perry

Bridewell, he should have been overtaken by a retribution which they had

so easily escaped. An unreasonable anger against Laura pervaded his

thoughts, but this very anger lent fervour to the admiration he now felt

for her. He knew she loved him and if--as in the case of no other woman

he had ever known--her love could be dominated and subdued by her

recognition of what was due her honour, his feeling rather than his

thought, assured him that he would be reduced to a moral submission

approaching the abject. Though he hoped passionately that she would

yield, he realised in his heart that he would adore her if she remained

implacable. Love is not always pleased with reverence, but reverence, he

saw dimly through some pathetic instinct for virtue, is the strongest

possible hold that love can claim. He, himself, would always live in the

external world of the senses, yet deep within him, half smothered by the

clouds of his egoism, there was still a blind recognition of that other

world beyond sense which he had shut out. To this other world, for the

time at least, Laura, with all the enchantment of the distance, appeared

to belong.

The morning, with its unusual burden of introspection, was, perhaps, the

most miserable he had ever spent, and after he had lunched at his

club--when to his surprise he found that his appetite was entirely

undisturbed by his mental processes--he returned to his rooms before

starting dejectedly for a long run in his automobile. But a letter from

Laura was the first object he noticed upon his desk, and his afternoon

plans were swept from his mind with the beginning of her heart-broken

entreaty for reconciliation. While he read it there was recognition in

his thoughts for no feeling except his rapture in her recovery, and he

took up his pen with a hand which trembled in the shock of his reaction

from despair to happiness. Then, while he still hesitated, in a mixture

of self-reproach and tenderness, there was a knock at his door, it

opened and shut quickly, with an abruptness which even in inanimate

things speak of excitement, and Laura, herself, breathing rapidly and

very pale, came hurriedly across the room.

"I could not stay away--you did not answer my note--it would have killed

me," she began brokenly; and as he stretched out his arms she threw

herself into them with a burst of tears.

"Oh, you angel!" he exclaimed, in a tenderness which was almost an

ecstasy of feeling; and then, moved by a passion of sympathy, he called

her by every endearing name his mind could catch at or his voice utter.

The depth of his nature responded in all its volume, as she lay there

weeping for joy, in his arms, and in her coming to him as she had done

he beheld then only an exquisite proof of her nobility of soul, of the

unworldly innocence for which he loved her. In that embrace, for that

one supreme instant, their spirits touched more nearly than they had

ever done in the past or would ever do again in the future--for even

while he held her the tide of being receded from its violence and they

drew apart.

"If you had only waited I should have come to you at once," he said,

looking at her in a rapture which, though he himself was ignorant of it,

struggled against a disappointment because she had shown herself to be

closer to his own level than he had believed.

Drawing slightly away Laura stood shaking the tear drops from her

lashes, while she regarded him with her radiant smile. The misty

brightness of her eyes showed to him in an almost unreal loveliness.

"I didn't care--nothing mattered to me," she answered, "it made no

difference what the world said--nor whether I lived or died."

Though the flattery of her coming moved him strongly, he found himself

wishing while she spoke that she had not proved herself to be so

ardently regardless of conventions--that she had appeared, for once,

less natural and more worldly-wise.

"Well, I'll take you home now," he said, smiling; then as he saw her

gaze, passing curiously about the room, rest enquiringly upon the

portrait of Madame Alta, he broke into a laugh which sounded, for all

its pleasantness, a little strained.

"That goes out of the way as soon as I can get something to cover the

spot," he remarked, adding gayly, "Symonds says he will finish his

portrait of me next week, and I'll hang it there until you claim it."

Her face had clouded, and without looking at him she moved toward the

door. "Are you really glad that I came?" she asked abruptly, turning

upon the threshold.

"Glad! My darling girl, I'm simply overjoyed. You gave me the most

miserable morning of my life."

It was the truth--he knew it for the truth while he uttered it, but, in

his heart of hearts, he felt without confessing it to himself, that his

love had dropped back from that divine height beyond which mere human

impulse becomes ideal passion.

CHAPTER IX

OF THE FEAR IN LOVE

When Laura reached the sidewalk she was seized by one of those reactions

of feeling which are possible only in periods of unnatural and

overstrained excitement.

"I would rather you didn't come with me now," she said, "I've promised

Gerty to go to her this afternoon, and I'd honestly rather go alone."

"But I've seen nothing of you at all," he urged, "put Gerty aside--she

won't mind. If she does, tell her I made you do it."

She shook her head, shrinking slightly away from him in the street. "It

isn't that, but I want to be alone--to think. Come this evening and I'll

be quite myself again. Only just now I--I can't talk."

In the end he had yielded, overborne by so unusual a spirit of

opposition; and with a reproachful good-bye he had returned to his

rooms, while she went slowly up the street in the pale autumn sunshine.

The impulse in which she had gone to him had utterly died down; and she

asked herself, with a curiosity that was almost indifferent, why, since

the reconciliation she had longed for was now complete, she should feel

only melancholy where she had expected to find happiness? Kemper had

never been more impassioned, had never shown himself to be more

thoroughly the lover--yet in some way she admitted, it had all been

different from the deeper reunion she had hoped for; there had come to

her even while she lay in his arms that strange, though familiar sense

of unreality in her own emotion; and beneath the touch of his hands she

had felt herself to be separated from him by the space of a whole inner

world. Though she appeared to have got everything, she realised, with a

pang of resentment directed against herself, that she had wanted a great

deal more than he had had the power to bestow. Could it be that the

thing she had missed was that finer sympathy of spirit without which all

human passion is but the withered husk where the flower has never

bloomed?

"Is it true that I must be forever content with the mere gesture of

love?" she thought. "Is it true that I shall never reach his soul, which

is surely there if I could but find it? Has it eluded me, after all,

only because I did not know the way?"

This longing for the immortal soul of love seized her like an

unquenchable thirst, until it seemed to her that all outward forms of

expression--all embraces all words--were but dead earthly things until

the breath of the spirit had entered in to raise them from mere trivial

accidents into eternal symbols.

Then suddenly she understood, for the first time, that she had

humiliated herself by going to his rooms, and she felt her cheek burn in

remembering a step which she had taken, under the stress of feeling,

without an instant's hesitation. It seemed to her now, when she looked

back upon it, that it would have been better to have lost him forever

than to have lowered her pride in the way that she had done--but before

seeing him her pride had been nothing to her, and she realised that if

she felt his affection slipping from her again she would be driven to

the same or even to greater lengths of self-abasement.

"But I did wrong--I have lowered myself forever in his eyes," she

thought, "he can never feel the same respect for me again, and because I

have lost his respect I have lost also my power to keep him constant to

me in his heart."

With the confession, she was aware that a spiritual battle took place

within her, and she thought of her soul, not as one but as multiple--as

consisting of hosts of good and evil angels who warred against one

another without ceasing. And she felt assured that presently the good or

the evil host would be vanquished and that henceforth she would belong

to the victorious side forever--not for this life only, but for a

thousand lives and an eternal evolution along the course which she

herself had chosen. A passage she had once read in an old book occurred

to her, and she recalled that the writer had spoken of God as "the place

of the soul." If this were so, had she not filled that place which is

God with a confusion in which there was only terror and disorder.

"Why has it all happened as it has?" she demanded almost in despair.

"Why did I love him in the beginning? Why did I humiliate myself in his

eyes to-day?" But her motives, which appeared only as impulses, were

still shrouded in the obscurity of her ignorance; and the one thing that

remained clear to her was that she had struggled breathlessly for the

happiness she had not possessed. Was it this desire for happiness, she

asked, which had returned to her now in the form of an avenging fury?

At the corner of Fifth Avenue, while she stopped upon the sidewalk to

wait for the stage, she was joined by Mr. Wilberforce, who told her that

he had just come from her house.

"I was particularly sorry to miss you," he added, "because I brought a

book of poems I wanted to talk over with you--the work of a young

Irishman with a touch of genius."

"Yes, yes," she responded vaguely, without knowing what she said.

Literature appeared to her suddenly as the most uninteresting pursuit

upon the earth, and she longed to escape from the presence of Mr.

Wilberforce, because she knew that he would weary her by ceaseless

allusions to books which she no longer read.

"I'm on my way to Gerty's--she made me promise to come this afternoon,"

she explained hurriedly, recalling with surprise that she had once found

pleasure in the companionship of this ineffectual old man, with his

placid face and his interminable discussions of books. Feeling that her

impatience might provoke her presently into an act of rudeness which she

would afterward regret, she held out her hand while she signalled with

the other to the approaching stage.

"Come to-morrow when I shall be at home," she said; and though she

remembered that she would probably spend the next afternoon with Kemper,

this suggestion of an untruth seemed at the time to make no difference.

A moment later as she seated herself in the stage, she drew a long

breath as if she had escaped from an oppressive atmosphere; and the

rumbling of the vehicle was a relief to her because it silenced for

awhile the noise of the opposing hosts of angels that warred unceasingly

within her soul.

When she reached Gerty's house in Sixty-ninth Street, she found not only

her friend, whom she wished to see, but Perry Bridewell, whom she had

tried particularly to avoid. At first she felt almost angry with Gerty

for not receiving her alone; but Gerty, suspecting as much from her

chilled look, burst out at once into a comic protest:

"I tried my best to get rid of Perry," she said, "perhaps you may make

the attempt with better success."

"I've caught a beastly cold," responded Perry, from the cushioned chair

on the hearthrug, where he sat prodding the wood fire with a small brass

poker, "it's stuck in my chest, and the doctor tells me if I don't look

out I'll be in for bronchitis or pneumonia or something or other of the

kind."

That he was genuinely frightened showed clearly by the unusual pallor on

his handsome face; and with an appearance of giving emphasis to the

danger in which he stood, he held out to Laura, as he spoke, a glass

bottle filled with large brown lozenges.

"He remembers his last illness," observed Gerty seriously, "which was an

attack of croup at the age of two--and he's afraid they will bandage his

chest as they did then."

As he fell back languidly in his easy chair, resting his profile against

the pale green cushions, Laura noticed, for the first time, a striking

resemblance to Kemper in the full, almost brutal curve of his jaw and

chin. Ridiculous as her annoyance was, she felt that it mounted through

her veins and showed in her reddening face.

"Since you are ill I'll not take Gerty away from you to-day," she said,

rising hastily.

"Oh, don't think of going on my account," replied Perry, with a pale

reflection of his amiable smile, "a little cheerful company is the very

thing I need." Then, as a servant entered with a cup of tea and a plate

of toast, he sat up, with his invalid air, to receive the tray upon his

knees. "I manage to take a little nourishment every hour or two," he

explained, as he crumbled his toast into bits.

"I've racked my brain to amuse him," remarked Gerty, while she watched

him gravely, "but he can't get his mind off that possible attack of

pneumonia, and he's even made me look up the death rate from it in the

bulletin of the Board of Health. Do you think Arnold would come if I

telephoned him? or shall I send instead for Roger Adams? I have even

thought of writing invitations to his entire club list."

"Oh, I'll send Arnold myself," rejoined Laura, "he got back just last

night, you know."

"I saw him coming up at five o'clock when I went to the doctor's,"

returned Gerty; and this innocent chance remark plunged Laura

immediately into a melancholy which not only arrested the words upon her

lips, but seemed to deaden her whole body even to her hands which held

her muff. An intolerable suspicion seized her that they were aware of

the return of Madame Alta, that they blamed Arnold for something of

which they did not speak, that they pitied her because she was deluded

into an acceptance of the situation. Though her judgment told her that

this suspicion was a mere wild fancy, still she could not succeed in

driving it from her thoughts, and the more she struggled against it, the

stronger was the hold it gained upon her imagination if not upon her

reason. In the effort to banish this persistent torment, she began to

talk fast and recklessly of other things, until the animation with which

she spoke rekindled the old brilliant fervour in her face.

She was still talking with her restless gayety, when Adams came in to

ask after Perry, but with his presence a stillness which was almost one

of peace, came over her. At the end of a few minutes she rose to leave,

and a little later as he walked with her along Sixty-ninth Street in the

direction of the Park, she had, for the first time in her life, a vague

intuition that the secret of happiness, after all, might lie for her,

not in the gratification but in the relinquishment of desire.

"I saw Kemper a while ago," he remarked, as they crossed Fifth Avenue to

the opposite sidewalk which ran along the wall under the bared November

trees. "He seemed very much interested in some mining scheme which

Barclay has gone in for. I never saw him more enthusiastic."

"Was he?" she asked indifferently; and she felt almost a resentment

against Kemper because he could pass so easily from the reconciliation

with her to the subject of mining. Since the evening before, when she

had received the news of his absence with Madame Alta, her attitude to

her lover had, unconsciously to herself, undergone a change; and her

critical faculty, so long dominated by her feeling, appeared now to have

usurped the place which was formerly held by her ideal image of him. But

this awakening of her intellect had no power whatever over her love,

which remained unaltered, and the one result of her clearer mental

vision was to destroy her happiness, while it did not lessen the

strength of her emotion.

She glanced up at Adams as he walked beside her in the pale sunshine,

and the smile with which he responded to her look, awoke in her the

impulse to confess to him the burden which oppressed her thoughts.

Realising that it would be impossible to confide these things to any

human being, she changed the subject by asking him a trivial question

about Trent's play.

"There's no doubt of his success, I think," he answered, "but just now

his mind is absorbed with other things. He's as deep in his love as he

ever was in his ambition."

"So he has found her?" enquired Laura, with but little animation. She

was glad that Trent was happy at last, but she could not force herself

to feel an interest in this love affair which was so unlike her own.

"Well, he didn't have to look far," rejoined Adams, laughing, "he

discovered her, I believe, in the same apartment house. Some of us," he

concluded a little sadly, "go a good deal farther with considerably less

success."

"It does puzzle one," said Laura, thinking of Kemper, "that some people

should find what they want lying on their very doorstep, while others

must go on looking for it their whole lives through."

He smiled at her with a tenderness which seemed, somehow, a part of his

strength. "But yours was the easier fate," he said.

"Is it the easier? I hardly know," she answered, and the note of pain in

her voice entered his heart. "I sometimes think that the best of life is

to go on wanting till one dies."

"Not the best--not the best," he responded, with a touch of his

whimsical humour. "I have had my share of wanting and I speak of what I

know. It all comes right in the end, I suppose, but it's a pretty tough

experience while it lasts, and, after all, we live in the minute not in

eternity."

Her gaze had dropped away from him, but at his words she lifted her eyes

again to meet his look.

"I wonder what it was you wanted so," she said--for he impressed her

suddenly as possessing a force of will which it would be not only

ineffectual, but even foolish to resist. The aggressive bulk of Perry

Bridewell, the impetuous egoism of Kemper showed, not as strength, but

as violence compared to the power which controlled the man at her side.

Where had he found this power? she wondered, and by what miracle had he

been able to make it his own?

"If I told you, I dare say it wouldn't enlighten you much," he answered.

"Isn't it enough to confess that I've done my share of crying for the

moon?"

"And if it had dropped into your hands, you would have found, probably,

that it was made only of green cheese," she replied.

For an instant he looked at her with a glance in which his humour

seemed to cover a memory which she could not grasp.

"Oh, well, I'd have risked it!" he retorted almost gayly.

CHAPTER X

THE END OF THE PATH

Having decided that Laura was to be married on the nineteenth of

December, Mrs. Payne had gathered not only the invitations, but the

entire trousseau into the house three weeks before the date upon which

she had fixed. Laura, who had at first entered enthusiastically into the

question of clothes, had shown during the last fortnight an indifference

which was almost an open avoidance of the subject; and the lively old

lady was forced to conduct an unsupported campaign against dressmakers

and milliners.

"It's fortunate, to put it mildly, my dear, that you have me to attend

to such matters," she remarked one day, "or you would most likely have

started on your wedding journey a dowd--and there can be no happy

marriage," she concluded with caustic philosophy, "which is not founded

upon a carefully selected trousseau."

"If his love for me depends on clothes, I don't want it," replied Laura

in an indignant voice.

Mrs. Payne shook her false gray curls, until the little wire hairpins

which held them in place slipped out and dropped into her lap.

"It might very well depend upon something more difficult to procure,"

she retorted with reason. Then in a last effort to arouse Laura into the

pride of possession, she brought out her multitude of boxes and

unfolded her treasures of old lace.

At the time Laura looked on with listless inattention, but two days

later she returned in a change of mood which put to blush the worldly

materialism of Mrs. Payne.

"Aunt Rosa, you're right," she said, "I haven't paid half enough

attention to my clothes. I believe, after all, that clothes are among

the most important things in life."

"I regard it as a merciful providence that you have come to your senses

in time," observed the old lady, with a sincerity which survived even

the extravagance into which her niece immediately plunged--for, after

looking carelessly over the contents of the large white boxes, Laura

turned away as if disappointed, and demanded in her next breath a sable

coat.

"Arnold admired a woman in a sable coat yesterday," she said, with a

gravity which impressed Mrs. Payne as almost solemn.

But her reaction into the vanities of the world was as short lived as

her former disdain of them; and by the time the sable coat arrived she

had almost begun to regret that she had ever asked for it. Since the

selection of it she had heard Kemper quite as carelessly express

approval of an ermine wrap, and her heart had suddenly sickened over the

fruitlessness of her ambition. She was still trying on the coat under

Mrs. Payne's eyes, when Gerty, coming in, as she announced, to deliver a

message, paused in the centre of the room as if petrified into an

attitude of admiration.

"My dear, you're so gorgeous that you look like nothing short of a

tragic actress. Well, you ought to be a happy woman."

"If clothes can make me happy, I suppose I shall be," rejoined Laura.

"Aunt Rosa has spared neither her own strength nor Uncle Horace's

money."

"That's because I love you better than my ease and Horace loves you

better than his foundling hospital," replied Mrs. Payne.

Standing before the long mirror, Laura looked with a frown at the sable

coat, which gave her, as Gerty had said, the air of a tragic actress.

Her dark hair, with its soft waves about the forehead, her brilliant

eyes, and the delicate poetic charm of her figure, borrowed from the

costly furs a distinction which Gerty felt to be less that of style than

of personality.

"He will like me in this," she thought; and then remembering the ermine

wrap, which was becoming also, she wondered if another woman would buy

it, if Kemper would see it at the opera, and if he would, perhaps,

admire it again as he had done that day.

"If he does I shall regret these though they were so much more costly,"

she concluded, "and my whole pleasure in them may be destroyed by a

chance remark which he will let fall." She understood, all at once, the

relentless tyranny which clothes might acquire--the jealousy, the

extravagance, the feverish emulation, and the dislike which one woman

might feel for another who wore a better gown. "Yet if I give my whole

life to it there will always be someone who is richer, who is better

dressed and more beautiful than I," she thought. "Though my

individuality wins to-day, to-morrow I shall meet a woman beside whom I

shall be utterly extinguished. And there is no escape from this; it is

inevitable and must happen." A shiver of disgust went through her, and

it seemed to her that she saw her life as plainly as if the glass before

her revealed her whole future and not merely her figure in the sable

coat. She shrank from her destiny, and yet she knew that in spite of

herself, she must still follow it; she longed for her old freedom of

spirit, and instead she struggled helplessly in the net which her own

temperament cast about her. "Is it possible that I can ever enter into

this warfare which I have always despised?" she asked, "into this

conflict of self against self, of vanity against vanity? Shall I, like

Gerty, grow to fear and to hate other women in my foolish effort to keep

alive a passion which I know to be worthless? Shall I even come in the

end to feel terror and suspicion in my love for Gerty?" But this last

thought was so terrible to her that she lacked the courage with which to

face it, and so she put it now resolutely aside as she had learned to

put aside at will all the disturbing questions which her conscience

asked.

"I know that you are over head and ears in it all," Gerty was saying,

"and I shouldn't have dropped in if I hadn't just been called to the

telephone by Arnold. He was, of course, rushing off to a meeting about

those everlasting mines--Perry's in it, too, and it's really helped his

mind to get the better of his lungs at last."

"But I thought Arnold was coming this afternoon," returned Laura, a

little hurt.

With a laughing glance at Mrs. Payne, who sat counting silk stockings by

the window, Gerty buried her face in her muff while she shook with

unaffected merriment.

"Oh, my dear, what a wife you'll make if you haven't learned to mask

your feelings!" she exclaimed, "but as for Arnold, he wants me to bring

you to his rooms for tea. The Symonds portrait has come and he'd like us

to see it before it's hung. He'll hurry back, he says, the minute that

abominable meeting is over-though between you and me he is almost as

much interested in those mines as he is in his marriage."

The disappointment in Laura's face was succeeded by an expression of

impatient eagerness, and a little later as she drove with Gerty through

the streets she was able to convince herself that the uncertainty of the

last fortnight had yielded finally to the perfect security for which she

longed Sitting there in Gerty's carriage, she felt with a compassionate

heart-throb, that out of her own fulness she could look down and pity

the emptiness of her friend's life; and this thought filled her bosom

with a sympathy which overflowed in the smile she turned upon the

brilliant woman at her side.

"I find myself continually rejoicing because you are to take a house up

town," remarked Gerty, as she pressed Laura's hand under the fur robe.

"When you come back we'll see each other every day, and when you land,

I'll be there to welcome you with the house full of flowers and the

dinner ordered."

"There's no use trying to realise it all, I can't," responded Laura; and

the interest with which she entered immediately into a discussion of

furnishing and housekeeping banished from her mind all recollection of

the despondency, the tormenting doubts, of the last few weeks. Yes, all

would go well--all must go well in spite of everything she had imagined.

Once married she would see this foolish foreboding dissolve in air, and

with the wedding ceremony she would enter into that cloudless happiness

which she had expected so confidently to find in the Adirondacks. This

new hope possessed her instantly to the exclusion of all other ideas,

and she clung to it as passionately as she had clung to every illusion

of the kind which had presented itself to her imagination.

When they reached his rooms, Kemper had not returned, and while Gerty

amused herself by examining every photograph upon his desk and mantel,

Laura drew a chair before the portrait, which was a bold, half-length

study painted with a daring breadth of handling. The artist was a new

French painter, who had leaped into prominence because of a certain

extravagance of style which he affected; and his work had taken Kemper's

fancy as everything took it either in art or in life which deviated in

any marked eccentricity from the ordinary level of culture or of

experience.

"There's something queer about it--I don't like it," said Laura, with

her first glance. "Why, it makes him look almost brutal--there's a

quality in it I'll never grow accustomed to."

Then, as she looked a moment longer at the picture, she saw that the

quality in Kemper which the painter had caught and arrested with an

excellent technique upon the canvas, was the resemblance to Perry

Bridewell which had offended her when she noticed it the other day. It

was there, evidently--this foreign painter had seized upon it as the

most subtle characteristic of Kemper's face--and in dwelling upon it in

the portrait as he had done, she realised that he had attempted to

produce, not so much the likeness of the man, as a startling, almost

sinister study of a personality. What he had shown her was the

temperament, not the face of her lover--not her lover, indeed, she told

herself the next instant, but Madame Alta's.

"I can't get used to it--I'll never like it," she repeated, and rising

from her chair, as if the view of the portrait annoyed her, she went

over to the centre table to glance idly over the current fiction with

which Kemper occupied his leisure hours. Her eyes were still wandering

aimlessly over the titles of the books, when her attention was diverted

by the sound of Wilkins' voice, lowered discreetly to an apologetic

whisper; and immediately afterward she heard the softened soprano of a

woman, who insisted, apparently, upon leaving the elevator and crossing

the hall outside. The conversation with Wilkins had reached Gerty's ears

at the same instant, and she, too, sat now with her enquiring gaze bent

on the door, which opened presently to admit the ample person of Madame

Alta. At sight of them she showed no tremor of surprise, but stood

poised there, in an impressive stage entrance, upon the threshold,

presiding, as it were, over the situation with all the brilliant

publicity which her exquisite gift conferred. Her art had not only

placed her below the level of her sex's morality, it had lifted her

above any embarrassment of accident, and as she hesitated for a single

smiling minute in the doorway, she appeared more at home in her

surroundings than either of the two women who stood, in silence,

awaiting her advance. With her ermine, her ostrich feathers, her smile,

and her scented powder, she impressed Laura less as extinguishing her by

the splendour of a presence than as smothering her in the softness of an

effect. For it was at Laura that, after the first gently enquiring

glance, she levelled her words as well as her caressing look.

"It was such a happy chance to meet you that I couldn't let it slip,"

she said, as she bore down upon her with a large, soft hand

outstretched, "Mr. Kemper has been so good a friend to me that I am

overjoyed to have the opportunity of telling you how much I think of

him. He has been really the greatest help about some speculations,

too--don't you think he has quite a genius for that kind of thing?"

For a moment Laura looked at her in a surprise caused less by the

other's entrance than by her own inward composure. For weeks she had

told herself that she hated Madame Alta in her heart, yet, brought face

to face with her, feeling the soft pressure of her hand, she realised

that she had hated merely a creature of straw and not this woman whose

humanity was, after all, of the same flesh and blood and spirit as her

own. By the wonder of her intuition she had recognised in her first

glance the thing which Kemper, for all his worldly knowledge, had missed

in his more intimate association, and this was that the soul of the

woman before her had not perished, but was still tossed wildly in the

fires of art, of greed, of sensuality. Between her lover and the prima

donna she knew that for this one instant at least, she was strong

enough to stand absolutely detached and incapable of judgment. And in a

sudden light, as from a lamp that was turned inward, she saw that if she

could but maintain this attitude of pity, she would place her happiness

beyond any harm from the attacks of Madame Alta or of her kind. She saw

this, yet she felt that the vision was almost useless, for even while

she stood there the light went out and she knew that it would not shine

for her again.

"I know but little of that side of him," she answered, smiling. "It is

pleasant to hear that he has a gift I did not suspect."

"Oh, I dare say he has others," retorted Madame Alta, "but I came about

these very speculations to-day," she added, "and since he isn't at

home--if you'll let me--I'll leave a note on his desk. I start for

Chicago to-night for a month of continuous hard work. Until you know

what it is to race about the country for your life," she wound up

merrily, "never stop to waste your pity on a day labourer."

With a smiling apology to Gerty, she crossed to Kemper's desk, where she

wrote a short note which she proceeded coolly to place in an envelope

and seal. As she moistened the flap of the envelope with her lips, she

turned to glance at Laura over her ermine stole.

"I hope you'll remember to tell him that my visit was by no means thrown

away, since I saw you," she remarked, with her exaggerated sweetness.

"Why not wait and tell him yourself?" suggested Laura, so composedly

that she wondered why her heart was beating quickly, "he'll probably be

back in a few minutes for tea, and in that case it wouldn't be

necessary for me to deliver so flattering a message."

"Oh, but I want you to--I particularly want you to," insisted the other,

creating, as she rose, a lovely commotion by the flutter of her lace

veil and her ostrich feathers. "I send him my liveliest congratulations,

and the part he'll like best is that I am able to send them by you."

The door closed softly after her, and Gerty, going to the window, threw

it open with a bang which served as an outlet to the emotion she lacked

either the courage or the opportunity to put into words.

"I don't like her perfume," she observed, with an affected contortion of

her nostrils, "there's something to be said for the odour of sanctity,

after all."

"Why, I thought it delicious," returned Laura, as if astonished. "It

even occurred to me to ask her where she got it."

"Well, I'm thankful you didn't," exclaimed Gerty; and she concluded

dismally after a moment, "What hurts me most is to think I've wasted

bouquets on her over the footlights, for a more perfectly odious

person--"

"I found her wonderfully handsome," remarked Laura, in a voice which had

a curious quality of remoteness, as if she spoke from some dream-like

state of mental abstraction. "Wonderfully handsome," she insisted,

indignant at the scornful denial in Gerty's look.

"Well, it's the kind of handsomeness that makes me want to scratch her

in the face," rejoined Gerty, with the unshakable courage of her

impressions.

Turning away from her friend, Laura went over to the desk as if drawn in

spite of her resolution, by the large sealed envelope lying on the white

blotter. The handwriting of the address, with its bold, free flourish at

the end, appeared to fascinate her eyes, for after looking at it

attentively a moment, she took it up and brought it over to the hearth

where Gerty stood.

"Yes, she is wonderfully handsome," she repeated; and her tone was so

indifferent that it came with a shock of surprise to Gerty, when she

bent over and laid the letter upon the burning logs. Dropping on her

knees, she watched the paper catch fire, redden in the flame, turn to

ashes, and at last dissolve in smoke. Then she leaned forward and pushed

the logs together, as if she wished to destroy some last vestige of the

words which were still visible to her eyes.

"Laura!" called Gerty sharply. She had made a step forward, but as Laura

rose from her knees and faced her, she fell back into her former

attitude.

"If you want to tell him," said Laura coldly, "you may do it when he

comes. I shan't mind it in the least."

"Tell him!" cried Gerty, and her voice shook with a tremor she could not

control, "but, oh! Laura, what made you do it?"

She knew that she wanted to go away by herself and weep; but she could

not tell at the moment whether it was for Laura or for her own

disappointment that she was more concerned. Her whole outlook on life

was altered by the thing which Laura had done; she felt that she no

longer believed in anybody and that it was impossible for her to go on

living as she had lived until to-day.

"I don't know," replied Laura, with a curiosity so vague that it sounded

almost impersonal, "I don't know why I did it." As she uttered the words

the question seemed to absorb her thoughts; then, before Gerty caught

the sound of Kemper's approaching footsteps, she knew that he must be

coming by the abruptness of the change with which Laura spoke.

"I wonder why it is that men never appreciate the necessity for tea!"

she exclaimed, and laughing she went quickly toward the door. "I don't

believe you'd have cared if you'd found us starving on your threshold,"

she wound up with reproachful gayety.

"Oh, I hoped you'd ordered it," said Kemper, "upon my word I'm sorry--I

fear you must have had a stupid wait."

He entered with his breathless, though smiling, apology, touched the

bell for Wilkins as he crossed the room, and offered his hand first to

Gerty and then to Laura with an equally enthusiastic pressure. The clear

red was still in his face, and his eyes beamed with animation as he

stood warming himself before the fire.

"Have you been here long?" he asked, looking at his watch with a slight

frown. "By Jove, I'm a good half hour after time. What did you do with

yourselves while you cursed me?"

"First we looked at the portrait--which I hate--then we read the names

of all your silly books," responded Laura, with a dissimulation so

natural that Gerty was divided between regret for her sincerity and

admiration for her acting.

"Well, it doesn't do to quarrel not only with our bread and meat, but

with our automobiles, too," protested Kemper lightly, "It's a good thing

I've gone in for, and it all came of my riding up in the train with

Barclay to the Adirondacks--otherwise he'd have been too sharp to have

put me on to the tip." Then his rapid glance travelled to the portrait

leaning against a chair, and he put a question with the same eager

interest he had shown in the subject of mining. "So you've had time to

come to judgment on the French fellow. What do you think of him?"

"It's not you--I won't believe it," replied Laura merrily, "if he's

right, then I've been deluded into marrying the wrong man."

"Oh, he goes in for style, of course," remarked Kemper, closing one eye

as he fell back and examined the picture, "most of the French people do,

you know."

The radiance which belonged to an inner illumination rather than to any

outward flush of colour, had suffused Laura's face, until she seemed to

glow with an animation which revealed itself not only in her look and

voice, but in her whole delicate figure, so fragile, yet so full of

energy. There was something unnatural, almost feverish in the brightness

of her eyes and in the rapid gestures of her small expressive hands. To

Gerty she appeared to resemble a beautiful wild bird, helplessly beating

its wings in the fowler's net.

"But isn't their style mostly affectation as their strength is only

coarseness?" she asked eagerly, wondering as she spoke, what her words

meant and why she should have chosen these out of the whole English

language. "Isn't it truth, after all," she added, with the same excited

emphasis, "that we need in life?" It occurred to her suddenly that she

was repeating words which someone else had said before her, and she

tried to remember what the occasion was and who had uttered them.

Then as she looked at Kemper, she found herself wondering if they would

be obliged, in order to make life bearable, to lie to each other every

day they lived? The letter which she had destroyed was her half of this

lie, she saw, and it seemed to her that Kemper's share was in his old

love for Jennie Alta. But, to her surprise, when she thought of this it

aroused no torment, hardly any disturbance in her heart, for Kemper and

his love for her appeared to her now in an entirely new and different

aspect, and she realised that because of the lie between them, even the

emotion he aroused in her had turned worthless in her eyes.

PART IV

RECONCILIATION

CHAPTER I

THE SECRET CHAMBERS

Waking in the night, with a start, Laura asked herself why she had

burned the letter. As she lay there in the darkness it seemed to her

that the sudden light shone in her thoughts again, and she saw

everything made clear to her as she had seen it while she held Jennie

Alta's hand. In that instant she had looked beyond the small personal

emotions to the woman's soul with its burden of greed and sensuality,

and because she had been able to do this, she had felt herself to be

composed and released from hatred. To discern the soul was to feel not

only tolerance, but pity for the flesh, and it appeared to her now that

in that one moment she had ceased to be herself alone, and had shared in

the divine wisdom which the sudden light had revealed to her in her

breast. Yet the instant afterward her personality had triumphed and she

had burned the letter!

The illumination within her faded now, and as she lay there with wide

open eyes, she saw only the surrounding darkness. Her own motives were

still vague to her; when she tried to remember the prompting of her

thoughts she could recall only a physical pain which had entered her

bosom while she looked at the large white envelope upon the blotter.

"Before this I had never lied in my life," she said, "I had never been

capable of the slightest dishonest act, I had even taken a pride in my

truth like the pride some women take in beauty--and yet I did this thing

without effort and I do not know now why I did, nor what I thought of at

the time, nor whether I regretted it the moment afterward."

With a resolution which had seldom failed her, she attempted to banish

the recollection from her mind; and turning her face from the pale

darkness of the window, she closed her eyes again and lay breathing

quietly. "Why should I worry--it will all come right--everything will

come right if I have patience," she thought, trying to persuade herself

to sleep.