But she had no sooner shut her eyes than she began to live over again

the afternoon in Kemper's room; and her heart beat so high that she

heard the muffled sound under the coverlet "Why did Gerty look at me

so?" she asked. "Did she really look at me as if she were afraid, or was

it only my imagination?" From Gerty her excited thoughts flew back to

Kemper and it seemed to her that she had read scorn and suspicion in the

beaming glance he had thrown upon her--in the breathless apology of his

entrance. "Had he met her downstairs? Did he know all the time? and was

he only waiting for Gerty's absence to accuse me face to face of my

dishonesty? But it was a very little thing," she argued aloud, as if

justifying herself to a presence beside her bed, "it was such a little

thing that it had almost escaped my memory." Then, as she uttered the

words, she realised that the justification she attempted was for her own

soul rather than for her lover; and she saw that whether Kemper

suspected or not made no vital difference to her so long as the

dishonesty was there. "The unspoken lie is still between us and his

knowledge of it can neither take it away nor undo the fact that it has

been. And if I burned the letter might I not be guilty of even greater

things under the same impulse? Since I trust neither him nor myself what

is there but misery in any future that we may share? Shall I give him up

even now? Can I give him up?" But as she demanded this of herself there

returned to her the look in his eyes at certain animated instants, and

she felt that the charm of his look, which meant nothing, was stronger

to hold her than a multitude of reasons. "If I could forget this look in

his face, I might forget him," she thought, "but though I struggle to

forget it I cannot any more than I can forget the letter lying on his

desk."

Again she closed her eyes in a fresh effort to shut out consciousness;

but when she determined to sleep the darkness seemed to grow suddenly

alive about her, and starting up in a spasm of terror, she lighted the

candle on the table beside her bed.

"In the morning I shall tell him," she exclaimed aloud, "I shall tell

him everything and if he looks at me with anger I shall go away and not

see him any more." At the time it appeared to her very easy, and she

felt that it made no difference to her however things might happen on

the morrow. "It will be as it will be, and I cannot alter it, for in any

event I shall be miserable whether I marry him or give him up." Then she

remembered that though she had pardoned Kemper greater sins than this,

by the courage of his attitude he had always succeeded in placing her

hopelessly in the wrong. "Even after his meeting with Madame Alta it was

he who forgave me," she thought with the strange mental clearness, which

destroyed her happiness without lessening her emotion, "and through his

whole life, however deeply he may wrong me, I know that I shall always

be the one to justify myself and seek forgiveness. Is it, after all,

only necessary to have the courage of one's acts that one may do

anything and not be punished?"

The light of the candle flickering on the mirror gave back her own face

to her as if reflected in the dim surface of a pool. She watched the

shadows from a vase, of autumn leaves come and go across it, until it

seemed to her that the rippling reflection resembled a drowned face that

was still her own; and shrinking back in horror, she sat holding the

candle in her hand, so that the light would shine on the walls and

floor.

"Yes, that is settled--I shall tell him to-morrow," she said, as if

surrendering her future into the power of chance or God or whatever

stood outside herself, "it will happen as it must, I cannot change it."

For a moment there was some comfort in the fatalism of this thought, and

after blowing out the candle, she turned her face to the wall and fell

at last into a troubled sleep. But her sleep even was filled with

perplexing questions, which she continued to ask herself with the same

piercing mental clearness that tormented her when she was awake; and she

passed presently into a vivid dream, in which she rescued the letter

with burned hands, from the fire, and carried it to Kemper, who laughed

and kissed her burns and threw the letter back into the flames. "It has

never really happened--you have imagined it all," he said, "you've

dreamed Jennie Alta and now you're dreaming me and yourself also. Look

up, for you are just beginning to awake." And when she looked up at his

words, his face changed suddenly and she saw that it was Roger Adams who

held her hands.

From this dream she awoke with a more distinct memory of Adams than she

had had for many days; and she felt again the impulse to unburden her

heart to him, which she had resisted on the afternoon they walked

together down Fifth Avenue. The dawn had begun to break, and while she

waited impatiently for the growing light, she resolved with one of those

promptings of wisdom, in which ordinary reason appeared to have no part,

that when the morning came she would go to Adams' office before seeing

Kemper. Then she remembered the distance which had sprung between them

in the last few months, and it seemed to her to have grown still more

impassable since the evening before. But because the visit offered an

excuse to postpone her confession to Kemper until the afternoon, she

caught at it with an eagerness, which hurried her into her hat and coat

as soon as her pretence of breakfasting with Angela was at an end.

The morning was bright and clear, and as she walked through the early

sunshine in the street, she remembered the day, so long ago now, when

she had met Adams going to his office at this hour, and she recalled,

with a smile, that she had pitied him then because of the worn places on

his overcoat. She no longer pitied him now--Gerty, herself, Perry

Bridewell, even Kemper, she felt, might be deserving of compassion, but

not Adams. Yes, she, herself, in spite of her boasted strength had come

at last to feel the need of being loved for the very weakness she had

once despised. But she knew that, though Adams might understand and

forgive this weakness, in Kemper it would provoke only the scorn which

she had begun to fear and dread. Yet her intellect rather than her heart

told her that Adams was a stronger man than Kemper and that his wider

sympathies proved only that he was, also, the larger of the two. Was the

difference between them merely one of goodness, after all, her

intellect, not her heart, demanded, and was it true that the perfect

love could not enter except where this goodness had been to blaze the

way before it in the soul?

As she walked through the streets fanciful comparisons between the two

men thronged in her brain, but when presently she reached Adams' office,

and stood beside his desk, with her hand in his hearty grasp, she

realised all at once that the visit was useless, and that there was

nothing she could say to him which would not sound hysterical and

absurd.

"So, thank heaven, there's something I can do for you!" he exclaimed,

with his cordial smile. "Wait till I get into my overcoat and then we'll

see about it."

"No--no," she protested in a terror, which she could not explain even to

herself, "don't come out with me--there's nothing you can do. I came

because I couldn't help myself," she added, smiling; "and I'll go for no

better reason, in a little while."

"Well, I'm ready whenever you say so. If it's to overturn Brooklyn

Bridge, I'll set about it for the asking."

"It isn't anything so serious--there's nothing really I want done," she

answered gayly, though the pain in her eyes stabbed him to the heart,

"all I wanted was to make sure of you--to make sure, I mean, that you

are really here."

"Oh, I'm here all right!" he replied, with energy. She looked at him

steadily for a moment with her excited eyes which had grown darkly

brilliant.

"Do you know what I sometimes think?" she said, breaking into a pathetic

little laugh, "it is that I remind myself of one of those angels who,

after falling out of heaven, could neither get back again nor reconcile

themselves to the things of earth."

Her hand lay on his desk, and while she spoke he bent forward and

touched it an instant with his own. Light as the gesture was, it

possessed a peculiar power of sympathy; and she was conscious as he

looked at her that there was no further need for her to speak, because

he understood, not only all that she had meant to put into words, but

everything that was hidden in her heart as well.

"I can't preach to you, Laura," he said, "but--but--oh, I can't express

even what is in my mind," he added. "I wish I could!"

"It wouldn't help me," she replied, "because although I am not

reconciled with the things of earth I want to be--oh, how I want to be!"

"But you can't be--not you," he said. "You're of that particular fibre

which grows stronger through pain, I think--and, in the end, how much

easier it is to be made all spirit or all clay--it's the combination,

not the pure quantity that hurts."

"I wonder if you ever know what it is?" she rejoined. "Does the earth

ever pull you back when you want to climb?"

His smile faded, and he looked at her again with the sympathy which

accepted, without explanation, not only her outward aspect, but the soul

within. "There's not much in my life that counts for a great deal,

Laura," he said, "but you come in for considerably the larger share of

it. At this moment I am ready to do either of two things, as you may

wish--I am ready to stand aside and let your future settle itself as it

probably will, or I am ready, at your word, to hear everything and to

judge for you as I would judge for myself. No--no, don't answer me now,"

he added, "carry it away with you, and remember or forget it, as you

choose."

Though there were tears in her eyes as she looked at him, she turned

away, after an instant, with a flippant laugh.

"Why, it all sounds as if I were really unhappy!" she exclaimed, "but

you won't believe that, will you?"

"I'll gladly believe otherwise when you prove it."

"But haven't I proved it? Don't I prove it every day I live?"

"You prove to me at this minute that you are particularly wretched," he

returned.

"I am not--I am not," she retorted angrily, while a frown drew her dark

brows together. "You have no right to think such things of me--they are

not true."

"I have a right to think anything that occurs to me," he corrected

quietly, "though I am willing to beg your pardon for putting it into

words. Well, since you assure me that you are entirely happy, I can

only say that I am overjoyed to hear it."

"I am happy," she insisted passionately; and a little later when she was

alone in the street, she told herself that a lie had become more

familiar to her than the truth. The conversation with Adams appeared a

mistake when she looked back upon it--for instead of lessening it seemed

only to increase the weight of her troubles--so she determined presently

to think no more either of Adams or of the reasons which had prompted

her impulsive visit to him. To forget oneself! Yes, Gerty was right in

the end, and the object of all society, all occupations, all amusements,

showed to her now as so many unsuccessful attempts to escape the

haunting particular curse of personality. Gerty escaped it by her

frivolous pursuits and her interminable flirtations, which meant

nothing; Kemper escaped it by living purely in the objective world of

sense; Adams escaped it--The name checked her abruptly, and she stopped

in her thoughts as if a light had flashed suddenly before her eyes.

Here, at last, was the explanation of happiness, she felt, and yet she

felt also, that it presented itself to her mind in an enigma which she

could not solve--for Adams, she recognised, had mastered, not escaped,

his personality. The poison of bitterness was gone, but the

effectiveness of power was still as great; and his temperament, in

passing through the fiery waters of experience, was mellowed into a

charm which seemed less a fortunate grace of aspect than the result of a

peculiar quality of vision. Was it his own life that had opened his eyes

until he could look into the secret chambers in the lives of others?

In Gramercy Park she found Mrs. Payne waiting for her with the carriage,

and she accepted almost eagerly the old lady's invitation to spend the

morning in a search for hats. At the moment it seemed to her that hats

offered as promising an aid to forgetfulness as any other, and she threw

herself immediately into the pursuit of them with an excitement which

enabled her, for the time, at least, to extinguish the fierce hunger of

her soul in supplying the more visible exactions of her body.

At luncheon Gerty appeared, wearing a startling French gown, which, she

said, had just arrived that morning. After the first casual greeting

they fell into an animated discussion of the choice of veils, during

which Gerty declared that Laura had never selected the particular spots

which would be most becoming to her features. "You get them too large

and too far apart," she insisted, picking up a black net veil from a

pile on Laura's table, "even I with my silly nose can't stand this

kind."

Laura's eyes were fixed upon her with their singular intensity of look,

but in spite of the absorption of her gaze, she had not heard a single

word that Gerty uttered.

"Yes, yes, you're right," she said; but instead of thinking of the

veils, she was wondering all the time if Gerty had really forgotten her

jealousy of Madame Alta and the letter she had burned.

"I shall tell him this afternoon and that will make everything easy,"

she thought; and when, after a little frivolous conversation Gerty had

remembered an engagement and driven hurriedly away, the situation

appeared to Laura to have become perfectly smooth again. At the

announcement of Kemper's name, she crossed the room to meet him with

this impulse still struggling for expression. "I shall tell him now, and

then everything will be made easy," she repeated.

But when she opened her lips to speak, she found that the confession

would not come into words, and what she really said was:

"It has been a century since yesterday, for I've done nothing but shop."

Laughing he caught her hands, and she saw with her first glance, that he

was in one of his ironic moods.

"I thought I'd netted a wren," he answered, "but it seems I've caught a

bird of Paradise."

"Then it was your ignorance of natural history, and not I, that deceived

you," she retorted gayly, "because I didn't spread my wings for you, did

you imagine that they were not brilliant?"

There was a note almost of relief in her voice as she spoke--for she

knew now that, so long as he refused to be serious, she could not tell

him until to-morrow.

CHAPTER II

IN WHICH LAURA ENTERS THE VALLEY OF HUMILIATION

Two weeks later Laura was still able to assure herself that it was this

lack of "seriousness" in Kemper's manner which had kept her from

alluding to the burned letter. Since the morning on which she had seen

Adams, she felt that she had merely skimmed experience without actually

touching it; and three days from the date of her marriage she was as far

from any deeper understanding of the situation as she had been in the

beginning of her love. In the end it was so much easier to ignore her

difficulties than to face them; and it seemed to her now that she was

forced almost in spite of herself into Gerty's frivolous attitude toward

life. To evade the real--to crowd one's existence with little lies until

there was no space left through which the larger truth might enter--this

was the only solution which she had found ready for her immediate need.

Adams she had not met again; once he had called, but impelled by a

shrinking which was almost one of fear, she had turned back on the

threshold and refused to see him. Even Gerty she had tried to avoid

since the afternoon in Kemper's rooms, but Gerty, who was in her gayest

mood, drove down every day "to overturn," as she carelessly remarked,

"the newest presents."

"I'm heartily glad you're going to Europe," she said, "and I hope by the

time you come back you'll have lost that nervous look in your face. It

never used to be there and I don't like it."

At her words Laura threw an alarmed glance at the mirror; then she

turned her head with a laugh in which there was a note of bitterness.

"It came there in my effort to make conversation," she answered. "I've

been engaged to Arnold eight months and we've talked out every subject

that we have in common. Do you know what it is to be in love with a man

and yet to rack your brain for something to say to him?" she finished

merrily.

"That's because you ought to have married Roger Adams, as I was the only

one to suggest," retorted Gerty, "then you'd have had conversation

enough to flow on, without a pause, till Judgment Day. It's a very good

thing, too," she added seriously, "because the real bug-a-boo of

marriage is boredom, you know."

"But how can two people bore each other when they are in love?" demanded

Laura, almost indignant.

The possibility appeared to her at the moment as little short of

ridiculous, yet she knew, in her heart of hearts, that she faced, not

without approaching dread, the thought of those two months in Europe;

and she admitted now for the first time that beyond the absorption of

their love, she and Kemper had hardly an interest which they shared.

Even the eyes with which they looked on Europe would be divided by the

space of that whole inner world which stretched between them. Yet

because of the supremacy of this one sentiment she had striven to crush

out her brain in order that she might have the larger heart with which

to nourish the emotion which held them together. In the pauses of this

sentiment she realised that their thoughts sprang as far asunder as the

poles, and as she looked from Gerty to the wedding presents scattered in

satin boxes on chairs and tables, the fact that the step she took was

irrevocable, that in three days she would be Kemper's wife, that there

was no possible escape from it now, produced a sudden sickening terror

in her heart. Then with a desperate clutch at her old fatalistic

comfort, she told herself that it would all come right if she were only

patient--that with her marriage everything would be settled and become

entirely simple.

Gerty was unpacking a case from a silversmith's when Kemper came in; and

he gave a low whistle of dismay as he glanced about the room strewn with

boxes.

"By Jove, I believe they think we're going to set up a business!" he

exclaimed.

"Oh, you can't imagine how all this comes in for entertaining," replied

Gerty, shaking out her skirt as she rose from her knees.

Laura's eyes were on Kemper's face, and she saw that it wore a look of

annoyance beneath the conventional smile with which he responded to

Gerty's words. Something had evidently happened to displease him, and

she waited a little anxiously half hoping for, half dreading her

friend's departure.

"I trust you'll go through the ceremony more gracefully than Perry did,"

Gerty was saying with a teasing merriment, while she broke a white

rosebud from the vase of flowers and fastened it in his coat. "I declare

he quite spoiled the whole effect, he looked so frightened. I never

realised how little sense of humour Perry has until I saw him at the

altar."

"Well, it isn't exactly a joke, you know," retorted Kemper.

For the first time, as Laura watched him, she remembered that he had

been through it all before without her; and the thought entered her

heart like a dagger, that even now there was another woman alive

somewhere in the world who had been his wife--who had been almost as

much loved, almost as close to him as she herself was to-day. The

thought sickened her, and she felt again her blind terror of a step so

irrevocable.

Gerty had gone at last; and Kemper, after walking twice up and down the

room, stopped to examine a silver coffee service with an attention which

was so evidently assumed that Laura was convinced he might as well have

fixed his gaze upon the fireplace. His thoughts were busily occupied in

quite an opposite direction from his eyes, for turning presently, he

laid down the sugar bowl he had picked up, and went rapidly to the

mantel piece, where he took down a photograph of Roger Adams.

"You don't see much of Adams now?" he remarked enquiringly.

"Not much," she went over to the mantel and glanced carelessly at the

picture in his hand. "I never shall again."

"How's that? and why?"

"Oh, I don't know--one never sees much of one's friends after marriage,

somehow. To supply the world to me," she added gayly, "is a part of the

responsibility of your position."

Though his gaze was fixed intently upon her face, she saw clearly that

he had hardly taken in her words, for while she spoke his hands wandered

to the inside pocket of his coat, as if he wished to make sure of a

letter he had placed there.

"By the way, Laura, a queer thing happened to-day," he said, frowning.

She looked up a little startled.

"A queer thing?"

"I had a letter from Madame Alta asking why I hadn't sold some stock I'd

been holding for her? She lost a good deal by my not selling and she was

in a devilish temper about it."

Laura had not lowered her eyes, and as he finished she smiled into his

face.

"And you did not sell?" she asked.

"I never got the letter--but the odd part is she says she came to see me

about it the day you were there with Gerty--that she saw you and that

she left the letter with you to deliver--"

He broke off and stood waiting with a half angry, half baffled look; and

then as she was still silent he picked up a red leather box from the

table, laid it down again and came nearer to where she stood.

"Is it all a lie, Laura?" he demanded.

The justification which she had attempted alone in the night came back

to her while she stood there with her hands, which felt like dead

things, hanging limp at her sides. "It was so very little that it

escaped my memory," was what she had said to herself in the darkness;

but now, face to face with him in the light of day, she could not bring

her mind to think these words nor her lips to utter them.

"No, it isn't a lie--it is true," she answered.

"It is true?" he repeated in an astonishment which gave place to anger

as he went on. "Do you mean you really met her in my rooms?"

"I met her there--I met her there!" she rejoined in a bitter triumph of

truth which seemed, somehow, a relief to her.

"And you did not tell me?"

She shook her head. "I'd never have told you."

"But the letter? What became of the letter?"

She had drawn a step away from him, not in any fresh spirit of evasion,

but that she might gain a better view of the look with which he

confronted her. Her eyes had not wavered from his since the first

question he had asked, but her hands were nervously knotting and

unknotting a silver cord which she had picked up from a jeweller's box

upon the table at her side.

"Why didn't I get the letter, Laura?" he asked again.

"Because I burned it," she answered slowly, "I burned it in the fire in

your room just before you came in--I burned it," she repeated for the

third time, raising her voice to clearer distinctness.

A dark flush rose to his face and the sombre colour gave him an almost

brutal look.

"In God's name why did you do it?" he asked; and she saw the contempt in

his eyes as she had seen it before in her imagination. "I am to presume,

I suppose, that you were prompted by jealousy?" he added. "An amiable

beginning for a marriage."

"I don't know why I did it," she replied, in a voice which was so

constrained as to sound unfeeling. "I didn't know at the time and I

don't know now. Yes, I suppose jealousy is as good a reason as any

other."

"And is this what I am to expect in the future?" he enquired, with an

irony which he might as well have flung at a figure of wood. "Good God!"

he exclaimed as his righteous resentment swept from his mind all

recollection of his own relapses. "Are you willing to marry a man whom

you can't trust out of your sight?"

The force with which he uttered the words drove them so deeply into his

consciousness that he was convinced by his own violence of the justice

in the stand he took. "Have you absolutely no faith in me?" he demanded.

For a moment the question occupied her thoughts.

"No, I don't think I have any now," she answered, "I've tried to make

myself believe I had--I've told a lie to my conscience about it every

day I lived--but I don't think I've ever really had faith in you since

that night--"

"And yet you are willing to marry me?" he asked, and the scorn in his

voice stung her like a physical blow. He looked at her with an angry

glance, and while his eyes rested upon her, she understood that he had

never really seen her in his life--that he had never penetrated beyond

the outward aspect, the trick of gesture.

"No!--No!" she cried out suddenly, as if she had awakened in terror from

her sleep. At the instant she saw herself through his eyes, humiliated,

beaten down, unwomanly, and she was possessed by a horror of her own

individuality which she felt in some way to be a part of her horror of

the man who had revealed it to her.

In his perplexity he had fallen back a step and stood now pulling

nervously at his moustache with a gesture which recalled his resemblance

to Perry Bridewell. This gesture, more than any words he spoke, shocked

her into an acuteness of perception which was almost unnatural in its

vividness. It was as if her soul, so long drugged to insensibility, had

started up in the last battle for liberation.

"No--no--it is impossible!" she repeated.

"Aren't you rather late in coming to this decision?" he enquired with a

short laugh.

But his irony was wasted upon her, for she saw only the look in his

eyes, which revealed her deception to her in a blaze of scorn--and she

felt that she hated him and herself with an almost equal hatred.

"I am sorry, but--but I can't," she stammered. Feeling her words to be

ineffectual she cast about wildly for some reason, some explanation

however trivial--and in the effort she found her eyes wandering

aimlessly about the room, taking in the scattered wedding presents, his

dejected yet angry look, and the fading white rosebud Gerty had pinned

jauntily in his coat. Then at last she realised that there was nothing

further that she could say, so she stood helplessly knotting the silver

cord while she watched the furious perplexity in which he tugged at his

moustache.

"I can't for the life of me see why you should be so damned jealous,

Laura," he burst out presently, thrust back from the surface

conventions into a brute impulse of rage.

"I told you I didn't know," she answered irritably, "I told you that--"

"Of course, I'm willing to let it go this time," he went on, with what

she felt to be a complacent return to his lordly attitude, "there's no

use making a fuss, so we may as well forget it--but, for heaven's sake,

don't give me a jealous wife. There's nothing under heaven more likely

to drive a man insane."

Some elusive grace in her attitude--a suggestion of a wild thing poised

for flight--arrested him suddenly as he looked at her; and she saw his

face change instantly while the fire of passion leaped to his eyes.

"Be a darling and we'll forget it all!" he exclaimed.

He made a step forward, but shrinking back until she appeared almost to

crouch against the wall, she put out her hands as if warding off his

approach.

"Don't touch me!" she said; and though she spoke in a whisper, her words

seemed to shriek back at her from the air. The thought that she was

fighting for the freedom of her soul rushed through her brain, and at

the instant, had he laid his hand upon her, she knew that she would have

thrown herself from the window.

"I don't want to touch you," he returned, cooling immediately, "but

can't you come to your senses and be reasonable?"

"If you don't mind I wish you'd go," she said, looking at him with a

smile which was like the smile of a statue.

"If I go now will you promise to get sensible again?" he asked, with

annoyance, for it occurred to him that since he had made up his mind to

be magnanimous, she had repulsed his generosity in a most ungrateful

fashion.

"I am sensible," she responded, "I am sensible for the first time for

months."

"Well, you've a pretty way of showing it," he retorted. His irritation

got suddenly the better of him, and fearing that it might break out in

spite of his control, he turned toward the door. "For God's sake, let's

make the best of it now," he added desperately.

In his nervousness he stumbled against the table and upset the red

leather box which contained the coffee service.

"I beg your pardon," he said, and stooping to pick it up, he replaced

the silver in the case before he went into the hall and closed the door

behind him.

CHAPTER III

PROVES A GREAT CITY TO BE A GREAT SOLITUDE

After he had gone Laura remained standing where he had left her, until

the sound of the hall door closing sharply caused her to draw a breath

of relief as if there had come a temporary lifting of the torture she

endured. Then, with her first movement, as she looked about the room in

the effort to bring order into the confusion of her thoughts, her eyes

encountered the array of wedding presents, and the expression of her

face changed back into the panic terror in which she had couched against

the wall before Kemper's approach. She still saw herself revealed in the

light of the scorn which had blazed in his eyes; and the one idea which

possessed her now was to escape beyond the place where that look might

again reach her. An instinct for flight like that of a wild thing in a

jungle shook through her until she stood in a quiver from head to foot;

and though she knew neither where she was going, nor of what use this

flight would be to her, she went into her bedroom and began to dress

herself hastily in her walking clothes. As she tied on her veil and took

up her little black bag from the drawer she heard her own voice, which

sounded to her ears like the voice of a stranger, repeating the words

she had said to Kemper a little earlier: "No--no--I cant. It is

impossible." And she said over these words many times because they

infused into her heart the courage of despair which she needed to impel

her to the step before her. When the door closed after her and she went

down into the street, she was still speaking them half aloud to herself:

"No--no--it is impossible."

The dusk had already settled; ahead of her the lights of the city shone

blurred through the greyness, while above the housetops Auriga was

driving higher in the east. With the first touch of fresh air in her

face, she felt herself inspired by an energy; which seemed a part of the

wind that blew about her; and as she walked rapidly through streets

which she did not notice toward an end of which she was still ignorant,

her thoughts breaking from the restraint which held them, rushed in an

excited tumult through her brain.

"Why did he look at me so?" she asked, "for it is this look which has

driven me away--which has made me hate both him and myself." She tried

to recall the other expression which she had loved in his face, but

instead there returned to her only the angry look with which he had

responded to her confession.

As she thought of it now it appeared to her that death was the only

means by which she could free herself and him from this marriage; and

the several ways of dying which were possible to her crowded upon her

with the force of an outside pressure. She might be crushed in the

street? or walk on till she found the river? But the different

approaches to death showed to her as so hideous that she knew she could

not summon the courage with which to select a particular one and follow

it to the end. "Yet I shall never go back," she thought, "he does not

love me--he wishes only to spare himself the scandal. If he loved me he

could never have looked at me like that. And I loved him three weeks

ago," she added. Her love was gone now, and the memory of it had become

intolerable to her, yet the vacancy where it had been was so great that

death occurred to her again as the only outcome. "Though I hate him it

seems impossible that I should live on without him," she said.

But the next instant when she endeavored to recall his face she could

remember him only by his casual likeness to Perry Bridewell, and she saw

him standing upon the hearthrug while he pulled in angry perplexity at

his moustache. The words he had spoken, the tones of his voice, and her

own emotion, were blotted from her recollection as if a thick darkness

had wiped them out, and from the hour of her deepest anguish she could

bring back only a meaningless gesture and the white rosebud he had worn

in his coat. What she had suffered then was the dying agony of the thing

within her which was really herself, and there remained to her now only

the vacant image from which the passion and the life had flown. "How

could it make so much difference when I can barely remember it?" she

asked; and it seemed to her at the instant that nothing that could

happen in one's existence really mattered, since big and little were all

equal, and the memory of an emotion faded sooner than the memory of a

gesture.

Pausing for a moment on the corner, she watched curiously the faces

moving under the electric lights, and she found herself wondering

presently if each man or woman in the crowd was loving and hating or

seeking an escape from both love and hatred? A stout man wearing a red

necktie, a pretty woman in a purple coat, a pale girl carrying a heavy

bundle, a bent shouldered clerk who walked with a satisfied and affected

air--as each one passed she saw his features and even his hidden

thoughts in a grotesque clearness which seemed to come partly from an

illumination within herself and partly from the glare of the lights

without. "The man in the red necktie is happy because he has made money;

the pretty woman is happy because she is loved--but the pale girl and

the bent shouldered clerk are wretched. They have neither love nor

money, and they have not found out how little either is worth."

For a while she watched them, almost forgetting her own unhappiness in

the excitement of their discovered histories; but wearying suddenly, she

turned away and entered a street where the darkness had already

gathered. Here she came close upon a pair of lovers who walked arm in

arm, but the sight irritated her so she turned again at the next corner.

The question whether she should go home or not thrust itself upon her,

and it seemed to her that it would be better to die in the street than

to return to the persuasions of Gerty, the reproaches of Mrs. Payne, and

the complacency of Kemper. As she hurried on in the darkness she saw her

past as distinctly as if her eyes were turned backward, and in this

vision of it there showed to her the steep upward way of the spirit, and

she remembered the day when her destiny had seemed to lie mapped out for

her in the hand of God. "Was this what God meant?" she demanded, and

because there was no answer to the question she asked it again and again

the more passionately. "Or perhaps there is no God after all," she

added.

A sob broke from her lips, and a policeman, who was passing, threw first

an enquiring, then a respectful glance at her, and went on again. A

child playing in the street ran up to beg for some money, and she opened

her bag and gave him a piece of silver with a smile.

"Thank you, lady," he responded, and ran back into the shadows. As he

crossed the street she followed him with her eyes, seeing him hasten,

his palm outstretched, to an Italian who was roasting chestnuts in a

charcoal burner on the opposite sidewalk.

The darkness had grown heavier and as she walked rapidly through streets

which she did not know, her nervous energy failed her, and she began to

tremble presently from exhaustion. Again she asked herself for the last

time if it were possible for her to go home and face Mrs. Payne and

Gerty and marry Kemper in three days. A fantastic humour in the

situation brought a laugh to her lips--for whenever she was confronted

by the hopelessness of her escape, the arguments for her marriage

presented themselves to her in the forms of cases of silver and of her

wedding dress in its white satin box. Mrs. Payne had spent the

afternoon, she knew, in arranging this silver on covered tables in an

empty room, and she could see plainly the old lady's animated movements,

the careful eye with which she estimated the value of each gift, and

the expression of approval or contempt with which she grouped it

according to its importance. Then she thought of Kemper held to his love

by the embarrassment of these presents, by the hopelessness of returning

them, and by his conventional horror of "getting into print," and at the

picture the laugh grew almost hysterical on her lips. How sordid it all

was! This array of silver, Mrs. Payne's reproachful comic mask, and

Kemper, pulling his moustache as he stood upon the hearthrug, all

whirled confusedly in the dimly lighted street before her. She felt her

knees tremble, and while this weakness lasted it seemed to her that it

would be better to go back and get warm again, and submit to anything

they forced upon her. Her flesh, in its weakness, would have yielded,

but something more powerful than the flesh--the soul within which she

had so long rejected--struggled on after the impulses of the body had

surrendered.

The lights grew suddenly blurred before her eyes, and looking up, she

found that she had reached a ferry, and that a crowd from a neighbouring

factory was hurrying through the open doors into the boat which was

about to put off. For the first time it occurred to her that she might

leave the city; and going inside she bought a ticket and followed the

people who were rushing across the gangway. Where it would take her she

had no idea, but when after a few minutes the boat had crossed to the

other side, she went out again with the crowd, and then turning in the

direction where there appeared to be open country, she walked on more

rapidly as if her thoughts flew straight ahead into the broader spaces

of the horizon.

At first there were rows of streets, a few scattered shops in among the

houses, and groups of workmen from the factories lounging upon the

sidewalk. A child, with a crooked back, in a red dress, ran across the

pavement in front of her and stopped with an exclamation before a window

which contained a display of pink and white candy. Then a second child

joined her, and the two fell to discussing the various highly coloured

sweets arrayed on little fancy squares of paper behind the glass. As

Laura watched them, pausing breathlessly in her walk, every trivial

detail of this incident seemed to her to possess an equal importance

with all other happenings large or small: for the events of her

individual experience had so distorted her perceptions of the ascending

values of life, that her own luckless pursuit of happiness appeared of

no greater importance in her eyes than the child, with the crooked back,

making her choice of sweets. Her own emotions, indeed, interested her no

longer, but she was aware of a dull curiosity concerning the crippled

child. Would her whole life become misshapen because of the physical

form which she wore like an outer garment? And she felt, at the thought,

that she would like to stand upon the side of the child and upon the

side of all who were oppressed and made miserable by the crookedness

either of the body or of destiny.

While this pity was still in her mind she tried to recall Kemper as she

had first known him, but it was to remember only that he had reddened

with anger as he spoke to her, and that the sunlight, falling upon him,

had revealed the gray hair on his temples. The physical aspect which had

meant so little in her love was all that the recollection of him could

suggest to her now, for she found that the visual memory still remained

after the passion which had informed it with life and colour was blotted

out.

The child interested her no longer, and walking on again, she passed,

after a time, the scattered houses, and came out upon the open road

which showed white and deserted beneath the stars. Looking overhead, as

she went on, her gaze swept the heavens with that sense of absolute

stillness which comes under the solitude of the sky, and standing

presently in the dust of the road, she fixed her eyes upon the Pleiades

shining softly far above the jagged line of the horizon. Her feet ached

beneath her, but her head seemed suddenly spinning through clear spaces

among the stars, and while she stood there, she felt that the distance

between her and the sky existed only in the hindrance of her body. With

that laid aside might she not recover her soul and God there as well as

here?

Again she went on, but this time she found that her limbs could make no

further effort, and struggling step by step, to a bend in the road, she

looked about her in a physical agony which left her consciousness only

of her desire for rest. A house, set back from the roadside in a clump

of trees, showed to her as she turned, and going through the little

whitewashed gate and up the path, she knocked at the door and then stood

trembling before the threshold.

CHAPTER IV

SHOWS THAT TRUE LOVE IS TRUE SERVICE

On the evening of the day upon which Laura was to have been married,

Adams went, as usual, into his study and lit the green lamp upon his

desk; but his mind was so filled with the mystery of her absence that

even the pretence of distraction became unendurable. Since the news of

her broken engagement and her flight had reached him, he had spent three

days in a fruitless, though still hopeful, search for her; and the

nights when he was forced to relax his efforts were filled with agonised

imaginings of her loneliness at so great a distance and yet in reality

so near. From the moment that he had heard through Gerty of her

disappearance, there had ceased to exist all uncertainty as to the

position in which he now stood to her; and he reproached himself, as he

remembered her visit to his office, because he had failed then to take

into his hands a decision which from an external view appeared so little

to affect him.

But the external view, he realised, was nothing to him to-night. On that

last day he had penetrated beneath the shallow surface of the

conventions, and he had read in her tormented heart the whole story of

the bitter disillusionment which she did not dare to put in words. Her

imagination, he saw, had created an ideal lover in Kemper's shape, and

in the moment of her awakening she had turned away not from the

falsehood, but from the truth. "Though he is not what I loved yet I will

still love him!" her heart had cried, in a subjection to the old false

feminine belief that faithfulness to a mistaken ideal is not weakness

but virtue. Yet in the end she had fled from that ultimate choice

between the higher and the lower nature. How could she have lived on a

lie when her spirit had forged so clear a path of truth before her?

Rising from his chair he walked for a few minutes rapidly up and down

the room. How far or how near was she to-night? Had she remembered him

in her misery? Would God reveal Himself to her in the most terrible

hour? His trust in her final deliverance was so great that even as he

put the questions, he knew in his heart that she was one of those who,

in the end, "win their own souls through perseverance." His eyes fell on

her picture above his desk, and then turning away rested on Connie's

which stood where he had placed it in the first years of his marriage.

Connie and her life with him was like a half-forgotten dream to him now,

yet, looking back upon it, he could not tell himself that there had been

for him no gain of strength, for Connie no growth of understanding, in

the pitiless failure of their marriage. All was softened in his memory

by that last afternoon when he had seen the shame of experience wiped

from her face as they combed her hair straight back from her forehead in

the old childish fashion; and he had realised from that instant that a

soul had come to birth in the hour before her death. A single ray of the

divine light had dispelled the thick darkness, and her blind eyes were

opened for one minute before she closed them to the body forever. Was

that one minute not worth every heart throb he had suffered and every

difficult hope for which he had battled in his thoughts? Having looked

though for a fleeting glimpse only upon the unity of life, was not her

spirit's growth measured in the instant of that flashing vision? For God

had worked here--had worked in the pity of his heart, as well as in the

awakening gratitude in Connie's; and because of the deeper insight he

had attained, he could look back over the whole sordid tragedy and

discern one of those steep and arduous roads by which the spirit mounts

to enlightenment through the flesh. And if this were so here--if in

ugliness such as this he could find beauty, was it not one and the same

over the broad field of human effort? Had not his own life proved to him

that let a man's eyes be opened, and even in the depths of abasement he

may look in his soul and discover God?

And Laura? His heart was flooded with tenderness, and he felt again a

confident, an almost mystic assurance that her destiny was one with his.

In this growing conviction his anxiety appeared to him suddenly as a

pitiable and cowardly denial of his faith--and he was possessed by the

certainty that he had only to send out his will in order to smooth the

way of her return to peace.

The room had become warm, and opening the window he stood looking beyond

the housetops to the stars which shone dimly over the city. The noise in

the streets grew fainter in his ears, and as he stood there with his

eyes on the stars, he could tell himself in the joy of his

reconciliation, that the law by which they moved gloriously toward

their end was the law which controlled his own and Laura's life. The

sense which is less a belief than an intimate knowledge of immortality

belonged to him now, and he realised that so far as he lived at all he

lived not in the hour alone, but in eternity, that so far as he had won

peace it was bound up in a passionate conviction of the survival of the

universe within his soul. To-day or to-morrow, in the minute or in

eternity, he saw that wherever God is there will always be immortal

life.

Turning back into the room he looked again at Laura's picture with a

longing which had not freed itself as yet from the idea of renouncement.

Even now he realised that he had been strong enough to live without her,

and with the admission, he was aware again of that wider sympathy which

had been his compensation in a forefeiture of personal love. His

happiness he had told himself a year ago depended neither upon

possession nor upon any passage of events, yet to-night his heart

strained after her in a tenderness which seemed to bring her visible

presence before him in the room. His love for her appeared not only as a

part of his love for God, but as a part, also, of his sorrows, his

bitter patience, his renouncement and of the compassion which had sprung

from the agony and the enlightenment of his failure. Sorrow he could

still feel--the deepest human grief might be his portion to-morrow, but

while this unfading light shone in his soul, he knew that it was

ordained that he should conquer in the end. By this knowledge alone he

had at last won through suffering into the open places of the spirit

where were joy and freedom.

A ring at the bell startled him from his abstraction, and with an

impatient eagerness for news, he hastened to the door, where a boy

thrust at him a small folded sheet of paper. As he opened it he felt

that his hand trembled, for even before he read the words, he knew that

Laura's appeal to him had come.

"I need a friend. Will you help me?" was all that she had written.

He motioned the boy to come inside, and then stood looking at him

enquiringly as he got into his overcoat.

"Do you go back with me?" he asked.

The boy nodded while he pulled at a scarlet handkerchief about his neck.

Adams noticed that though he was stunted and anæmic in appearance, he

wore his shabby overcoat with an almost rakish swagger. His mouth was

filled with chewing-gum which he rolled aside in his cheek when he

talked.

"Is it far?" Adams enquired in a hopeless effort to extort information

however meagre.

The boy looked important, almost mysterious.

"Yep," he responded, adding immediately, "She's the other side of the

ferry."

"Do you mean the lady?" He opened the door, and hurried to the sidewalk

where he stopped to call a cab from the corner.

"She's been there three nights, so tired she couldn't move," replied the

boy, as he followed Adams into the cab. "A fine lady, too," he commented

with a wink.

"Well, she's all right now, and I'm much obliged to you," said Adams,

but he asked no further questions until they were seated side by side in

the ferry, when he tried again to draw out the bare facts of Laura's

flight.

During the walk through the town and along the country road, he learned

that Laura had reached the house of the boy's mother in an exhaustion of

mind and body which had compelled them to harbour her for the night. On

the next day her appearance and the money with which she was supplied

had so won upon the mother's sympathy that her desire to remain a few

days longer had been met almost with eagerness by the older woman. When

he had, with difficulty, extracted this account of what had passed,

Adams fell a little ahead of his companion, and they went on in silence

until they came, at the end of several miles, in sight of the cottage

withdrawn from the roadside in its clump of trees. A single lighted

window was visible through the bared boughs, and standing out clearly

from the interior, Adams saw a dark figure which his heart recognised

with a bound.

The boy pushed back the gate and Adams went up the path inside, and

entering the house opened the door of the room in which he had seen

Laura standing. She was still there, motionless in the lamplight, and as

he went toward her she lifted her eyes and gazed back at him in the mute

defiance which is the outward expression of despair.

"Do you think you have been quite just to me, Laura?" he asked, not

tenderly, but with a stern and reproachful face.

Without lowering her eyes she looked at him while she shook her head.

"I sent for you because I could not help it. I had nowhere to go," she

said.

"Do you think you have been just to me?" he asked again.

"You? I never thought of you until to-day," she answered. "I came here

because I had to go somewhere--it did not matter where. I was too tired

to walk any farther, so they were very good to me."

"And you have let us search for you three days." His voice was

constrained, but as he looked into her wan face between the loosened

waves of her hair, his heart melted over her in an agony of tenderness.

Every drop of blood appeared to have left her body, which was so pallid

that he seemed to see the light shining through her drawn features.

"So they have been looking for me?" she observed, with but little

interest.

"What did you expect?" he questioned in his turn.

"But I didn't want to be found--I would rather stay lost," she

responded. Shrinking away from him she went to the window and stood

there, pressed closely against the panes, as if in a blind impulse to

put the space of the room between them. "I will not go back even now--I

will not go back," she insisted.

As he entered he had closed the door behind him, and leaning against it

now, he looked at her with a flicker of his quiet smile.

"I'm not talking about going back, am I?" he rejoined. "Heaven knows you

may stay here if you like the place." He glanced quickly about the

crudely furnished little room hung with cheap crayon portraits. "It's

rather hard, though, to fit you into these surroundings," he remarked

with a flash of humour.

She shook her head. "They suit me as well as any other."

"And the people who live here?--What of them?"

"I like them because they are so near to the ground," she answered,

"they've no surface of culture, or personality, or convention to bother

one--they've no surface, indeed, of any kind."

"Well, it's all very interesting," he remarked, smiling, "but, in common

decency, don't you think you might have sent me word?"

"I never thought of you an instant," she replied.

"You never thought of me in your life," he retorted, "and yet when I say

I'm better worth your thinking of than Kemper--God knows I don't pretend

to boast."

A weaker man would have hesitated over the name, but he had seen at the

first glance that the way to save her was not by softness, and his lips,

after he had uttered the word, closed tightly like the lips of a surgeon

who applies the knife.

"Don't speak to me of him!" she cried out sharply, "I had forgotten!"

Her eyes hung upon his in a returning agony, and it was through this

agony alone that he hoped to bring back her consciousness of life.

"This is not the way to forget," he answered, "you are not a coward, yet

you have chosen the cowardly means. There can he no forgetfulness until

you are strong enough to admit the truth to your own heart--to say

'there is no mistake that is final, no wrong done that has power to

crush me.'"

"But there is no truth in my heart," she answered, with sudden energy,

"it is all a lie--I am a lie all over, and it makes no difference

because I have ceased to care. I used to think that people only died

when they were put in coffins, but I know now that you can be dead and

yet move and walk about and even laugh and pretend to be like all the

rest--some of whom are dead also. And I didn't die slowly," she added,

with a vague impersonal interest, which impressed him as almost

delirious in its detachment, "I wasn't killed in a year, but in a

minute. One instant I was quite alive--as alive as you are now--and the

next I was as dead as if I had been buried centuries ago."

"And who is to blame for this?" he demanded, white to the lips.

"Oh, it wasn't he--it was life," she went on calmly, "he couldn't help

it, nor could I--nobody can help anything. Do you understand that?" she

asked, with the searching mental clearness which seemed always lying

behind her dazed consciousness, "that we're all drawn by wires like

puppets, and the strongest wire pulls us in the direction in which we

are meant to go? It's curious that I should never have known this before

because it has become perfectly plain to me now--there is no soul, no

aspiration, no motive for good or evil, for we're every one worked by

wires while we are pretending to move ourselves."

"All right, but it's my turn at the wire now," responded Adams, smiling.

At his words she broke out into little hard dry sobs, which had in them

none of the softness of tears. "Nobody is to blame for anything," she

repeated, still striving, in a dazed way, to be just to Kemper.

Even more than her face and her voice, this pathetic groping of her

reason, moved him into a passion of sympathy; and while he looked at

her, he resisted an impulse to gather her, in spite of her coldness,

against his breast.

"What is it, Laura, that has made you suffer like this?" he asked.

But his words made no impression upon her, perhaps because they could

not penetrate the outer husk of deadness which enveloped her.

"Do you know what it is to feel ashamed?" she demanded suddenly, "to

feel ashamed, not in a passing quiver, but in a settled state every

instant that you live? Do you know what it is to have every sensation of

your body merged into this one feeling of shame--to be ashamed with your

eyes and hands and feet as well as with your mind and heart and soul? I

could have stood anything but this," she added, pressing closer against

the window.

An exclamation which was almost one of anger burst from him, and going

to where she stood, he laid his hand upon her arm as if in the effort to

recall her reason by physical force. But with his first touch his grasp

lost its energy and grew gentle, for her anguish appeared to him, as he

held her, to be only the instinctive crying out of a child that is hurt.

His hold slipped from her arm, and taking her hands, he bent over and

kissed them until they lay quiet in his own.

"Laura, do you trust my love for you?" he asked.

"I trust you, yes," she answered, "but not love--it is only one of the

wires by which we are moved."

"Trust anything you please about me, so long as you trust--that is all I

ask," he let her hands fall from his and looked into her face. "Promise

me that you will be here waiting when I return."

"There's no place for me to go--I shall be here," she answered.

Her eyes followed him with a pathetic child-like fear while he crossed

the room and went out leaving her alone.

CHAPTER V

BETWEEN LAURA AND GERTY

Did he possess the strength as well as the love that she needed? Adams

asked himself a little later as he walked back under the stars. He saw

her as he had just left her--wan, despairing; so bloodless that the

light seemed shining through her features, and then he remembered the

radiant smile which she had lost, the glorious womanhood obscured now by

humiliation. An assurance, in which there was almost exultation, flooded

his thoughts, and he was aware that the passion he felt for her had been

suddenly strengthened by an emotion of equal power--by the longing born

in his heart to afford protection to whatever suffered within his sight.

Never for an instant, since he had entered the room where she retreated

before him, had he doubted either his appointed mission or his power of

renewal. His whole experience, he understood now, had directed him to

this hour which he had not foreseen, and the worldly success for which

he had once struggled meant to him at last only that he might bring hope

where there was failure. Even Connie--her love, her tragic history, her

pitiable reliance upon him at the end--showed to him in the aspect of a

human revelation--for his fuller understanding of Connie had confirmed

him in the patience by which alone he might win back Laura to the

happiness which she had lost.

The road stretching ahead of him was no longer obscured, but shone

faintly luminous out of the surrounding darkness. Not the future alone

but the desert places through which he had come had blossomed, and the

beauty which was revealed to him at last was the beauty in all things

that have form or being--in the earth no less than in the sky, in the

flesh no less than in the spirit, for were not earth and flesh, after

all, only sky and spirit in the making? The perfect plan, he had

learned, in the end, is not for any part but for the whole.

Across the ferry, he found a cab which took him to Gerty's house, and in

response to his message, she came down immediately, looking excited and

perturbed, in an evening gown of black and silver.

"Have you brought me news of Laura?" she asked breathlessly. "Perry's

dragging me to a dinner, but if she's ill, I can't go--I won't."

"Don't go," he answered, "she's not ill, but if she were it would be

better. Will you come with me now and bring her back with you?"

Without replying to his question, she ran from the room and returned, in

a moment, wearing a hat and a long coat which covered her black and

silver dress.

"The carriage is waiting now," she said, "we can take it and let Perry

go to his dinner in a cab."

"But--good Lord, Gerty--what am I to say to them?" demanded Perry while

he shook hands with Adams. "I never could make up an excuse in my life,

you know."

Then his eyes blinked rapidly and he fell back with merely a muttered

protest, for Gerty shone, at the instant, with a beauty which neither he

nor Adams had ever seen in her before. The wonderful child quality

softened her look, and they watched her soul bloom in her face like a

closed flower that expands in sunlight.

"I don't know, my dear," she responded gently, and with her hand on

Adams's arm, she ran down the steps and into the carriage before the

door. As they drove away, she looked up at him with a tender little

smile.

"I am so glad that she has you," she said.

"In having you, she has a great deal more."

"It is you who have done it all--you expected me to have courage, so I

have it. Had you expected me to be cowardly, I should have been so."

"Well, I expect you to save her," he answered quietly.

"Does she need it? What was it? What does it mean?"

"You'll know to-night, perhaps. I shall never know, but what does it

matter?"

"I saw Arnold to-day," she said, "he is terribly--terribly--" she

hesitated for a word, "cut up about it. Yet he swears he can't for the

life of him see that he was to blame. Had he been to blame, he says, he

would have shot himself."

"Would he?" he remarked indifferently.

"He sails for Europe on Saturday--if he hears she's found."

He bit back an exclamation of anger.

"What, under heaven, has he to do with it?" he asked.

"A great deal, one would think. But have you seen her? Tell me of her."

"Be good to her," he answered, "she is in a hard place and needs a great

deal of love."

"And we can give it to her, you and I?"

"Mine is hers already, if it's any help."

"Was it hers before she knew Arnold even?"

"Long before--before he or you or I were born."

"And does she understand?"

"She doesn't know--but what difference does that make?"

Her eyes, in the flickering light, gave him an impression of remoteness

as of dim stars.

"I wonder how it feels to be loved like that?" she said, a little

wistfully.

"You would never have cared for it," he answered, with a flash of his

penetrating insight, "for the kind of man who could have loved you in

that way you couldn't have loved."

"You mean that I was born to adore the god in the brute?" she asked.

"Oh, well, so long as it's the god!" he retorted laughing.

But she paid no heed to his remark, and drawing her coat about her as if

she were cold, she sat in silence until the carriage was driven upon the

ferry and they began the trip across.

"She came this way all alone and at night?" she said.

"How or why we shall probably never know entirely," he answered. "I

doubt if she realised herself where she was going."

"It looks meaningless from a distance, but, I suppose, in reality, it

was a courageous flight?"

"Yes, I think there was courage in it," he responded quietly.

She turned her eyes away, looking out as they drove through the open

country upon the black fields and the stars. Neither of them spoke again

until the carriage stopped and the footman jumped down to ask for some

directions. Then as they drew up presently before the little gate, Adams

helped her out and along the path into the house.

"She is in there," he said, pointing to a closed door, "when you see her

you will understand."

"But you will come, too?" she asked, hesitating.

He shook his head. "Her heart is bleeding--it's a woman that she wants."

Then he opened the door, and pushing her gently inside, closed it after

her.

At first Gerty could see but faintly by the light of a lamp which

smoked, but as she went quickly forward, Laura rose from the sofa upon

which she had been lying, and came a step to meet her.

"Why did you come? I didn't want you--I didn't want anyone," she said.

Before the hard tones of her voice, Gerty stood still, shrinking

slightly away in her baffled splendour. Her heart strained toward her

friend, yet when she tried to think of some comforting word that she

might utter, she found only a vacancy of scattered phrases. What would

words mean to Laura now? What word among all others was there that she

could speak to her?

For a moment, groping blindly for light, she hesitated; then her arms

opened, and she caught Laura into them in spite of her feeble effort at

resistance.

"Dearest! dearest! dearest!" she repeated, for she had found the word at

last.

Partly because she was a woman and partly because of her bitter

triumphs, she had understood that the wisdom in love is the only wisdom

which avails in the supreme agony of life. Neither philosophy nor

religion mattered now, for presently she felt that her bosom was warm

with tears, and when Laura lifted her head, the two women kissed in that

intimate knowledge which is uttered without speech.

CHAPTER VI

RENEWAL

In that strange spiritual death--which was still death though the

members of her body lived--Laura seemed to lose gradually all personal

connection with the events through which she had passed; and when after

three months she turned again to look back upon them, she found that

they stood out, clear, detached, and remote as the incidents of history.

She was not only dead herself, but the whole world about her showed to

her in a curious aspect of unreality, as if a thin veil obscured it, and

there were moments when even Adams and Gerty seemed to her to be barely

alive. To the last she had refused to return to Gramercy Park, and on the

night that she reached Gerty's house she had been aware that she was

slipping away from any actual contact with her former life. Her body

might breathe and move, but her soul and even her senses had become

inanimate, and she felt that they had ceased to take part in any words

she uttered.

Though she had persistently denied herself to her aunts, she sent for

Mr. Payne on the first day that she was able to sit up, and the only

softness she showed was in answer to the compassionate kiss he placed

upon her forehead.

"My child, my child, what did I tell you?" he asked gently.

"It is because of that I wanted to see you," she said, "because you are

the only person, I believe, who can really understand."

"I think I can, my dear."

"You have had beautiful dreams, too, that were false ones?"

"It isn't that the dreams are false," he replied, "but that the stuff of

this earth isn't the kind to grow illusions. They must either wither in

the bud or be wrenched up root and branch."

"And there's only the ugly reality, after all?"

"There's only the reality, but it isn't ugly when one grows accustomed

to it. You'll find it good enough for you yet, my child."

"No--no," she said, "I've always lived on pretty lies, I see that

now--I've always had to find an outlet for my imagination, however

false. My poetry was never more than this--it was all quotation--all a

reflection of the things I had wanted to feel in life. I never wrote a

sincere line," she added.

He pressed her hand--it was his way of showing that he loved her none

the less because she was not a poet--and then as the unnatural wanness

overspread her face, he went out softly, leaving her in Gerty's care. By

different roads they had come at last to the same place in life--she

with her blighted youth and he with his beautiful old age and his

disappointed hopes.

With the beginning of the year Gerty went South with her, but the soft

air or the cold made little difference to Laura, when, as she said, she

could feel neither. There had been no outburst of grief; since the night

when she had wept on Gerty's bosom, she had not shed a tear; and once

when Gerty had alluded to Kemper in her hearing, she had listened with

the polite attention she might have bestowed upon the name of a

stranger. At Gerty's bidding she came or went, admired or disapproved,

but of her old impulsive energy there was so little left that Gerty

sometimes wondered if her friend had really, as she insisted, "turned to

stone." For Laura's face even had frozen until it wore the impassive

smile of a statue, and there was in her movements and her voice

something of the insensibility of extreme old age. She was no longer

young, nor was she middle-aged; it was as if she had outlived, not only

the emotions, but the years of life.

In April they came back again, and on the morning after their return

Gerty paid a dejected visit to Adams in his office.

"I can do nothing with her--she's turned to stone," she said.

"Oh, she'll come alive again," he responded. "Where is she?"

"In Gramercy Park. It makes no difference to her now where she is, nor

whether she sees Mrs. Payne or not. She even sits for hours and listens

to Uncle Percival play upon his flute."

"It will be the death of her," he answered gravely. "Is there nothing we

can do?"

"Nothing. I've done everything--she's really stone."

"Well, we'll bring her round," said Adams cheerfully; but when he saw

Laura herself in the afternoon, he instinctively turned his eyes away

from the frozen sweetness in her look. He was aware that she made an

effort to be pleasant, but her pleasantness reminded him of an

artificial light on a figure of snow.

"I had hoped you would grow stronger in the South," he said, though all

conversation seemed to him to have become suddenly the most impersonal

thing on earth.

"But I am strong," she answered, "I am never ill a day."

"There's something about you, all the same, that I don't like," he

responded frankly.

"I know," she nodded, smiling, "you aren't used to seeing a dead person

walk about. But it's very comfortable when you grow accustomed to it,"

she added, with a laugh.

At this he would have brought a more intimate note into his voice, but

she evaded his first hint of earnestness by a cynical little jest she

had picked up from Gerty. Her intention--if she intended anything--he

saw clearly now was to confine her perceptions to the immediate surface

of life presented before her eyes. She spoke with animation of the

country she had left, of Gerty's gayeties, of the wonderful brightness

of the weather; but when by a more serious question he sought to

penetrate below this fluency of words, he was repelled again by the

impression of a mere hollow amiability in her manner. After a few casual

remarks he left her with the most hopeless feeling he had known for

months, and when, as the days went on, he endeavored fruitlessly to

arouse in her a single sincere interest in human affairs, he found

himself wondering if it were possible for any creature to be still alive

and yet to resemble so closely a figure of marble. Day after day he came

only to yield at last to his baffled efforts; and the thin cold smile

with which she responded to his words appeared to him sadder than any

passionate outburst of tears. Even Connie on that last afternoon had

seemed to him more human and less unapproachable than Laura now.

Through the spring he saw her almost every day, and when in June he put

her on the train with Gerty for the Adirondacks, he came away with the

clutch, as if from a hand of ice, at his heart. He had given her his

best and yet he had not penetrated by word or look beneath the unnatural

gentleness which enveloped her like an outer covering. Then his heart

hardened and he felt that he cursed Kemper for the thing which he had

killed.

Back again in the forest, under the green and gold of the leaves, Laura

asked herself why the associations of that last summer failed so

strangely to disturb her as she looked on the familiar road and

mountains? A single year or a whole lifetime ago, it was all one to her

now, and while she wandered along the paths down which she had walked

with Kemper in the most blissful hours of her love, she found herself

almost regretting that she had ceased to suffer--that since her heart

was broken it had lost even the power to throb. In the city she had felt

herself to be a part of the houses and the streets, and as perfectly

indifferent to the passage of life as they; but here with her heart

against Nature's she would have liked to pulsate with the other live

things in the forest. For the first time for months she began as the

days went by, to quicken to an interest in the songs of the birds, or

the sunsets on the mountains, or the springing up of a new flower beside

the doorstep. And as in every rebound of the emotions from extreme

despair, her connection with life came at last through the eye of the

mind rather than through the heart, and the lesson was taught her

neither by Gerty nor by Adams, but through an awakening to the beauty in

the sights and the sounds of the green natural world about her.

Gerty had left her one afternoon, and as the cart drove away she went

out of the house and sat down in the sun upon the roadside which

bordered the edge of the wood. Behind her was the silence of the forest,

and straight ahead the faint purple hills rose against a pale sky above

which the white clouds sailed like birds. For a while she gazed with

blind eyes at the view for the sake of which the spot was chosen, but

the mountains and the sky left her unmoved, and leaning her arm

presently upon the warm earth, she lay looking at a little blue flower

blooming in the sand at her feet. Her shadow stretched beside her in the

road, and it seemed to her that there was as little difference, save in

her consciousness, between her and her shadow, as there was between her

shadow and the flower. Even her love and her disillusion showed to her

now as of no larger consequence than the wind blowing upon her shadow or

the dew and the storm falling upon the flower. Then as the minutes

passed and her gaze did not waver from the blue petals filled with

sunshine, she was aware gradually, as if between dream and waking, of a

peculiar deepening of her mental vision, until there was revealed to

her, while she looked, not only the outward semblance, but the essence

of the flower which was its soul. And this essence of the flower came

suddenly in contact with the dead soul within her bosom, while she felt

again the energy which is life flowing through her body. At this

instant, by that divine miracle of resurrection she began to live

anew--to live not her old life alone, but a life that was larger and

fuller than the one which had been hers. She began to live anew in

herself as well as in the sky and in humanity and in the songs of birds;

and in this ecstasy of recovered life, she felt her soul to be of one

substance, not only with God and the stars, but with the flower and the

child in the street as well. For that love which had recoiled from its

individual object overflowed her heart again until she felt that it had

touched the boundaries of the world.

When Adams saw her in the autumn, he discovered the change almost with

the first touch of her hand. Not only the outward form, but the

indwelling intellect was alive again, and all that reminded him of her

past anguish were a deeper earnestness in her smile and a faint

powdering of silver on the dark wing-like waves of her hair. That veiled

joy which is the expression of the soul that has found peace shone in

her face with a radiance which if less bright was to him more beautiful

than the sparkling energy she had lost. For the life and the passion of

her womanhood were still there, mellowed and ennobled by that shadow of

experience without which mere beauty of feature had always seemed to him

a meaningless and empty shape. His belief was justified forever in that

instant, and he recognised in her then one of those nobler spirits who

in passing through the tragedy of disillusionment drain from it the

strength without the bitterness that is its portion.

"I want to work, to help," she said eagerly, almost with her first

breath, and while he listened with a tenderness tinged with amusement,

she described to him the elaborate plans she had made for going among

the poor. "It isn't that the poor need help any more than the rich,"

she added, "but the poor are the only ones that I can reach."

He nodded, smiling, while he watched the animated gestures of her hands.

Her poetry, her groping for love, her longing at last to give help to

the oppressed, each phase of thought or feeling through which she had

passed, showed to him only as the effort of the soul within her to find

expression. In this passionate search after the eternal upon earth was

she not, in reality, only seeking in outward forms the thing which was

herself?

"I will help you, of course," he answered, with a gravity which he found

it difficult afterward to maintain, for from that moment she had thrown

her heart into the work of uplifting until her whole existence appeared

to round presently about this new point of interest. While he could

follow her here, he waited almost impatiently for the reaction of her

temperament which would bring her back to him, he felt, as inevitably as

the changes of the seasons would bring the spring again to the earth.

On Christmas Eve she had arranged for some celebration among the poor on

the East Side, and when they came away together, she asked him to take

her to Gerty's house instead of to Gramercy Park. Then as they walked

along the cross-town blocks from the elevated road, she alluded for the

first time to the evening a year ago when he had found her in her

deepest misery.

"I thought then that my life was over," she said, "but to-day I have put

my foot upon my old grief and it has helped me to spring upward. The

world is so full for me now that I can hardly distinguish among so many

vivid interests--and yet nothing in it is changed except myself. Do you

know what it is to feel suddenly that you have found the key?"

"I know," he replied, "for I have found it, too, and it is love."

"Love for the world--for all mankind," she corrected. "No, don't look at

me like that," she added, "I am perfectly happy to-day, but it is the

happiness of freedom."

For a moment he did not answer; then he turned his eyes upon the bright

pallor of her cheek showing above the dark furs she wore, and there was

a smile in his eyes though his voice, when he spoke, was grave.

"Do you know what I have sometimes thought about that, Laura," he said,

"it is that I all along, from first to last, have known your heart

better than you knew it for all your desperate certainty."

"I never knew it," she responded; "I do not know it now."

"And yet I think I do," he answered.

She shook her head. "It is no longer a mystery--there is only light in

it to-day."

"I never thought you loved Kemper," he went on. "What you built your

dream upon was an imaginary image that wore his shape. In my heart, even

when I stood aside--when I was forced to stand aside because of other

claims upon me--I think I was sure all the time that your love was meant

for me at last."

"For you? Oh, no, not now," she answered.

"It's a bold way of saying it, I suppose," he pursued, "here I am

neither rich nor successful as the world counts these things--in debt

probably for several years to come, and with not so much as an athletic

lustre to my name. It's not a cheerful picture I'm drawing, but because

there's a struggle in it I am not afraid to ask you to come and share

it. I wonder if you know how I have loved you, Laura."

"I have known since--since that night," she replied.

"The one argument I have to offer," he said, smiling, "is that in spite

of the unpromising outlook, I happen to be the only man on earth who

could make you happy."

"You might have been once," she responded.

"And if once, why not now? Is not forever as good as yesterday?"

"Do you know why?" she answered, turning upon him in sudden passion.

"You think I am brave and yet I am afraid--afraid, though I won't admit

it, every minute that I live. I walk the streets in terror of a memory."

"But I do not," he answered quietly. "Do you doubt my power to keep what

I have won--my dearest?"

At the word the colour rose to her cheek, but as they reached Gerty's

door, she stopped and put her hand into the one which he held out.

"Like everything else it has come too late," she said.

He shook his head, and then pressing her hand, let it fall.

"I can be patient a little longer," he responded before he turned away.

His words were still in her thoughts when she entered the house; and as

she went quickly upstairs to Gerty's sitting-room, she wondered what

counsel of indecision she would content herself with at last? Then as

she crossed the threshold into the warm firelight, she discovered that

Gerty was absent and that Arnold Kemper was standing upon the hearth

rug.

As he recognised her he came forward, smiling, and held out his hand.

"So we've met again, after all, Laura," he remarked, without

embarrassment.

At the sound of his voice there had come a single high throb of her

heart and immediately afterward she was aware of an exultation which

showed in the uplifting of her head and in her shining eyes--for as she

looked into his face she measured for the first time the distance which

divided her dream from her awakening.

"One always meets again, you know," she answered, "but if you're waiting

for Gerty now, she is usually after time."

"Women always are," he commented gayly, with his foreign shrug.

The window was just behind him, and as he glanced out into the street,

she looked at him in the puzzled wonder with which one seeks in

unchanged features; a discernible justification of a passion which is

altered. Where was the power to-day against which her heart had beat so

helplessly a year ago? Was it possible that she had felt the charm in

this man who was already middle-aged, who was satisfied with the mere

concrete form of life, and in whose eyes she could see now the heaviness

which grows through self-indulgence? His old intimate smile, his

disturbing ironic glance, even the quickening of his first passive

interest into the emotional curiosity which was the strongest impulse

his world-weariness had left alive--each and all of these effects which

she remembered impressed her as little to-day as did the bulky

fascination of Perry Bridewell. When at last she could escape in the

flutter of Gerty's entrance, she left the room and the house with a

tremor of her pulses which was strangely associated with a delicious

sense of peace--for this chance meeting had revealed to her not only

Kemper but herself.

As she walked slowly toward the golden circle of the sky which was

visible through the bared trees in the park, she recognised with every

fibre of her body as unerringly as with her intellect that she had come

at last into that knowledge which is the centre of outgoing life. And as

Adams had seen in his deeper vision, that all life is an evolution into

the consciousness of God, so she divined now through her mere vague

instinct for light, that all emotion is but the blind striving of love

after the consciousness of itself. Her whole experience flashed back

before her, and in that swiftness of memory which prefigures either an

accession of vitality or a tragic death, she understood that both her

illusion and her disenchantment were necessary to the building of the

structure within her soul. She had mounted by her mistake as surely as

by her aspiration, and every pang which she had suffered was but the

rending of the veil between her flesh and spirit.

Looking up as she walked she saw, without surprise, that Adams was

standing under the bared trees before her; and with her first glance

into his face she realised that there are moments charged with so deep a

meaning that all explanations, all promises, all self-reproaches become

only such vain and barren things as words.