The fragrance of spring was in the air, and through the fortnight that

she stayed at The Cedars, it seemed to her that this inescapable

sweetness became a reminder and a torture--a reminder of the beauty and

the evanescence of youth, a torture to all the sensitive nerves of her

imagination, which conjured up delusive visions of happiness. In the

beginning she had thought that work would be her salvation, as it had

been when she was younger, that every day, every week, would soften the

pain, until at last it would melt into the shadows of memory, and cease

to trouble her life. But as the days went by, she realized that this

emotion differed from that earlier one as maturity differs from

adolescence--not in weakness, but in the sharper pang of its regret.

Hour by hour, the image of Blackburn grew clearer, not dimmer, in her

mind; day by day, the moments that she had spent with him appeared to

draw closer instead of retreating farther away. Because he had never

been to The Cedars she had believed that she could escape the sharper

recollections while she was here; yet she found now that every object at

which she looked--the house, the road, the fields, the garden, even the

lilacs blooming beneath her window--she found now that all these dear

familiar things were attended by a thronging multitude of associations.

The place that he had never known was saturated with his presence. "If I

could only forget him," she thought. "Caring wouldn't matter so much, if

I could only stop thinking." But, through some perversity of will, the

very effort that she made to forget him served merely to strengthen the

power of remembrance--as if the energy of mind were condensed into some

clear and sparkling medium which preserved and intensified the thought

of him. After hours of work, in which she had buried the memories of

Briarlay, they would awake more ardently as soon as she raised her head

and released her hands from her task. The resolution which had carried

her through her first tragedy failed her utterly now, for this was a

situation, she found, where resolution appeared not to count.

And the bitterest part was that when she looked back now on those last

months at Briarlay, she saw them, not as they were in reality, filled

with minor cares and innumerable prosaic anxieties, but irradiated by

the rosy light her imagination had enkindled about them. She had not

known then that she was happy; but it seemed to her now that, if she

could only recover the past, if she could only walk up the drive again

and enter the house and see Blackburn and Letty, it would mean perfect

and unalterable happiness. At night she would dream sometimes of the

outside of the house and the drive and the elms, which she saw always

shedding their bronze leaves in the autumn; but she never got nearer

than the white columns, and the front door remained closed when she rang

the bell, and even beat vainly on the knocker. These dreams invariably

left her exhausted and in a panic of terror, as if she had seen the door

of happiness close in her face. The day afterwards her regret would

become almost unendurable, and her longing, which drowned every other

interest or emotion, would overwhelm her, like a great flood which had

swept away the natural boundaries of existence, and submerged alike the

valleys and the peaks of her consciousness. Everything was deluged by

it; everything surrendered to the torrent--even the past. Because she

had once been hurt so deeply, she had believed that she could never be

hurt in the same way again; but she discovered presently that what she

had suffered yesterday had only taught her how to suffer more intensely

to-day. Nothing had helped her--not blighted love, not disillusionment,

not philosophy. All these had been swept like straws on the torrent from

which she could not escape.

The days were long, but the nights were far longer, for, with the first

fall of the darkness, her imagination was set free. While she was

working with Margaret in the garden, or the kitchen, she could keep her

mind on the object before her--she could plant or weed until her body

ached from fatigue, and the soft air and the smell of earth and of

lilacs, became intermingled. But it was worse in the slow, slow

evenings, when the three of them sat and talked, with an interminable

airy chatter, before the wood-fire, or round the lamp, which still

smoked. Then she would run on gaily, talking always against time,

longing for the hour that would release her from the presence of the

beings she loved best, while some memory of Blackburn glimmered in the

fire, or in the old portraits, or through the windows, which looked,

uncurtained, out on the stars. There were moments even when some quiver

of expression on her mother's face or on Margaret's, some gleam of

laughter or trick of gesture, would remind her of him. Then she would

ask herself if it were possible that she had loved him before she had

ever seen him, and afterwards at Briarlay, when she had believed herself

to be so indifferent? And sitting close to her mother and sister,

divided from them by an idea which was more impregnable than any

physical barrier, she began to feel gradually that her soul was still

left there in the house which her mind inhabited so persistently--that

her real life, her vital and perpetual being, still went on there in the

past, and that here, in the present, beside these dear ones, who loved

her so tenderly, there was only a continuous moving shadow of herself.

"But how do I know that these aren't the shadows of mother and of

Margaret?" she would demand, startled out of her reverie.

At the end of a fortnight a letter came from Mrs. Timberlake, and she

read it on the kitchen porch, where Perzelia, the field hand, was

singing in a high falsetto, as she bent over the wash-tub.

"_We is jew-els--pre-cious--jew-els in--His--c-r-ow-n!_" sang Perzelia

shrilly, and changing suddenly from hymn to sermon, "Yas, Lawd, I tells

de worl'. I tells de worl' dat ef'n dat nigger 'oman don' stop 'er lies

on me, I'se gwine ter cut 'er heart out. I'se gwine ter kill 'er jes'

de same ez I 'ould a rat. Yas, Lawd, I tells 'er dat. '_We is

jew-els--pre-cious--jew-els in His c-r-o-w-n._'"

Mrs. Timberlake wrote in her fine Italian hand:

* * * * *

MY DEAR CAROLINE,

I have thought of you very often, and wanted to write to you, but ever

since you left we have been rather upset, and I have been too busy to

settle down to pen and paper. For several weeks after you went away

Letty was not a bit well. Nobody knew what was the matter with her, and

Doctor Boland's medicine did not do her any good. She just seemed to

peak and pine, and I said all along it was nothing in the world except

missing you that made her sick. Now she is beginning to pick up as

children will if you do not worry them too much, and I hope she will

soon get her colour back and look as natural as she did while you were

here. We have a new trained nurse--a Miss Bradley, from somewhere up in

the Shenandoah Valley, but she is very plain and uninteresting, and,

between you and me, I believe she bores Letty to death. I never see the

child that she does not ask me, "When is Miss Meade coming back?"

We were very anxious to have a word from you after you went away.

However, I reckon you felt as if you did not care to write, and I am

sure I do not blame you. I suppose you have heard all the gossip that

has been going on here--somebody must have written you, for somebody

always does write when there is anything unpleasant to say. You know, of

course, that Angelica left David the very day you went away, and the

town has been fairly ringing with all sorts of dreadful scandals. People

believe he was cruel to her, and that she bore his ill-treatment just as

long as she could before leaving his house. Only you and I and Mammy

Riah will ever know what really happened, and nobody would believe us if

we were to come out and tell under oath--which, of course, we can never

do. I cannot make out exactly what Angelica means to do, but she has

gone somewhere out West, and I reckon she intends to get a divorce and

marry Alan, if he ever comes back from the war. You may not have heard

that he has gone into the army, and I expect he will be among the very

first to be sent to France. Roane is going, too. You cannot imagine how

handsome he is in his uniform. He has not touched a drop since we went

to war, and I declare he looks exactly like a picture of a crusader of

the Middle Ages, which proves how deceptive the best appearances are.

David has not changed a particle through it all. You remember how

taciturn he always was, and how he never let anybody even mention

Angelica's name to him? Well, it is just the same now, and he is, if

possible, more tight-lipped than ever. Nobody knows how he feels, or

what he thinks of her behaviour--not even Colonel Ashburton, and you

know what close and devoted friends they are. The Colonel told me that

once, when he first saw how things were going, he tried to open the

subject, and that he could never forget how Blackburn turned him off by

talking about something that was way up in the air and had nothing to do

with the subject. I am sure David has been cut to the heart, but he will

never speak out, and everybody will believe that Angelica has been

perfectly right in everything she has done. If it goes on long enough,

she will even believe it herself, and that, I reckon, is the reason she

is so strong, and always manages to appear sinned against instead of

sinning. Nothing can shake her conviction that whatever she wants she

ought to have.

Well, my dear, I must stop now and see about dinner. The house is so

lonely, though, as far as I can tell, Letty hardly misses her mother at

all, and this makes it so provoking when people like Daisy Colfax cry

over the child in the street, and carry on about, "poor dear Angelica,

who is so heartbroken." That is the way Daisy goes on whenever I see

her, and it is what they are saying all over Richmond. They seem to

think that David is just keeping Letty out of spite, and I cannot make

them believe that Angelica does not want her, and is glad to be relieved

of the responsibility. When I say this they put it down as one of my

peculiarities--like blinking eyes, or the habit of stuttering when I get

excited.

Give my love to your mother, though I reckon she has forgotten old Matty

Timberlake, and do drop me a line to let me hear how you are.

Your affectionate friend,

MATTY TIMBERLAKE.

Letty sends her dearest, dearest, dearest love.

* * * * *

When she had finished the letter, Caroline looked over the lilacs by the

kitchen porch and the broken well-house, to the road beneath the aspens,

which still led somewhere--somewhere--to the unattainable. At one corner

of the porch Perzelia was singing again, and the sound mingled with the

words that Mrs. Timberlake had written.

"_We is jew-els, pre-cious jew-els in His c-r-o-w-n._"

A fever of restlessness seized Caroline while she listened. The letter,

instead of quieting her, had merely sharpened the edge of her longing,

and she was filled with hunger for more definite news. In an hour The

Cedars had become intolerable to her. She felt that she could not endure

another day of empty waiting--of waiting without hope--of the monotonous

round of trivial details that led to nothing, of the perpetual,

interminable effort to drug feeling with fatigue, to thrust the

secondary interests and the things that did not matter into the

foreground of her life. "He has never wasted a regret on me," she

thought. "He never cared for a minute. I was nothing to him except a

friend, a woman who could be trusted." The confession was like the

twist of a knife in her heart; and springing to her feet, she picked up

the letter she had dropped, and ran into the house.

"I must go back to work, mother darling," she said. "The money I saved

is all gone, and I must go back to work."

CHAPTER IX

THE YEARS AHEAD

Toward the close of an afternoon in November, Caroline was walking from

the hospital to a boarding-house in Grace Street, where she was spending

a few days between cases. All summer she had nursed in Richmond; and now

that the autumn, for which she had longed, had at last come, she was

beginning to feel the strain of hard work and sleepless nights. Though

she still wore her air of slightly defiant courage, a close observer

would have noticed the softer depths in her eyes, the little lines in

her face, and the note of sadness that quivered now and then in her

ready laughter. It was with an effort now that she moved with her

energetic and buoyant step, for her limbs ached, and a permanent

weariness pervaded her body.

A high wind was blowing, and from the scattered trees on the block, a

few brown and wrinkled leaves were torn roughly, and then whirled in a

cloud of dust up the street. The block ahead was deserted, except for an

aged negro wheeling a handcart full of yellow chrysanthemums, but as

Caroline approached the crossing, Daisy Colfax came suddenly from the

corner of a church, and hesitated an instant before speaking. The last

time that Caroline had seen her, old Mrs. Colfax had been in the car,

and they had not spoken; but now that Daisy was alone, she pounced upon

her with the manner of an affectionate and playful kitten.

"Oh, I didn't know you at first, Miss Meade! You are so much thinner.

What have you been doing?"

She held out her hand, diffusing life, love, joy, with the warmth of her

Southern charm; and while Caroline stood there, holding the soft, gloved

hand in her own, a dart of envy pierced the armour of her suffering and

her philosophy. How handsome Daisy looked! How happy! Her hat of the

royal purple she favoured made her black hair gleam like velvet; her

sealskin coat, with its enormous collar of ermine, wrapped her

luxuriously from head to foot; her brilliant complexion had the glow of

a peach that is just ready to drop. She also had had an unfortunate

romance somewhere in the past; she had married a man whom she did not

love; yet she shone, she scintillated, with the genuine lustre of

happiness. Never had the superior advantages of a shallow nature

appeared so incontestable.

"I saw you go by yesterday, Miss Meade, and I said to myself that I was

going to stop and speak to you the first chance I got. I took such a

fancy to you when you were out at Briarlay, and I want to tell you right

now that I never believed there was anything queer in your going away

like that so early in the morning, without saying a word to anybody. At

first people didn't understand why you did it, and, of course, you know

that somebody tried to start gossip; but as soon as Mrs. Timberlake told

me your sister was ill, I went straight about telling everybody I saw.

You were the last woman on earth, I always said, to want anything like a

flirtation with a man, married or single, and I knew you used to

sympathize _so_ with Angelica. I shall never forget the way you looked

at David Blackburn the night you came there, when he was so dreadfully

rude to her at the table. I told mother afterwards that if a look could

have killed, he would have fallen dead on the spot." She paused an

instant, adjusted a loosened pin in her lace veil, and glided on

smoothly again without a perceptible change in her voice, "Poor, dear

Angelica! All our hearts are broken over her. I never knew David

Blackburn well, but I always despised him from the beginning. A man who

will sit through a whole dinner without opening his mouth, as I've known

him to do, is capable of anything. That's what I always say when Robert

tells me I am prejudiced. I am really not in the least prejudiced, but I

just can't abide him, and there's no use trying to make me pretend that

I can. Even if he hadn't ruined Angelica's life, I should feel almost as

strongly about him. Everybody says that she is going to get a divorce

for cruelty, though one of the most prominent lawyers in town--I don't

like to mention his name, but you would know it in a minute--told me

that she could get it on _any_ grounds that she chose. Angelica has such

delicacy of feeling that she went out West, where you don't have to make

everything so dreadfully public, and drag in all kinds of disgraceful

evidence--but they say that David Blackburn neglected her from the very

first, and that he has had affairs with other women for years and years.

He must have selected those nobody had ever heard of, or he couldn't

have kept it all so secret, and that only proves, as I said to Robert,

that his tastes were always low----"

"Why do people like to believe these things?" demanded Caroline

resentfully. "Why don't they try to find out the truth?"

"Well, how in the world are they going to find out any more than they

are told? I said that to Mrs. Ashburton--you know they stand up for Mr.

Blackburn through thick and thin--but even they can't find a word to say

against Angelica, except that she isn't sincere, and that she doesn't

really care about Letty. There isn't a word of truth in that, and nobody

would believe it who had seen Angelica after she told Letty good-bye.

She was heartbroken--simply heartbroken. Her face was the loveliest

thing I ever looked at, and, as Alan Wythe said to me the next day--it

was the very afternoon before he went off to camp--there was the soul of

motherhood in it. I thought that such a beautiful way of putting it, for

it suited Angelica perfectly. Didn't you always feel that she was full

of soul?"

"I wonder how Letty is getting on?" asked Caroline, in the pause. "Have

you heard anything of her?"

"Oh, she is all right, I think. They have a nurse there who is looking

after her until they find a good governess. She must miss her mother

terribly, but she doesn't show it a bit. I must say she always seemed to

me to be a child of very little feeling. If I go away for a week, my

children cry their eyes out, and Letty has lost her mother, and no one

would ever know it to watch her."

"She is a reserved child, but I am sure she has feeling," said Caroline.

"Of course you know her better than I do, and, anyhow, you couldn't

expect a child not to show the effects of the kind of home life she has

had. I tell Robert that our first duty in life is to provide the memory

of a happy home for our children. It means so much when you're grown,

don't you think, to look back on a pleasant childhood? As for Letty she

might as well be an orphan now that David Blackburn has gone to

France----"

"To France?" For a minute it seemed to Caroline that claws were tearing

her heart, and the dull ache which she had felt for months changed into

a sharp and unendurable pain. Then the grey sky and grey street and grey

dust intermingled, and went round and round in a circle.

"You hadn't heard? Why, he went last week, or it may be that he is going

next week--I can't remember which. Robert didn't know exactly what he

was to do--some kind of constructive work, he said, for the Government.

I never get things straight, but all I know is that everything seems to

be for the Government now. I declare, I never worked so hard in my life

as I have done in the last six or eight months, and Robert has been in

Washington simply slaving his head off for a dollar a year. It does one

good, I suppose. Mr. Courtland preached a beautiful sermon last Sunday

about it, and I never realized before how wonderfully we have all grown

in spirit since the war began. I said to Mrs. Mallow, as I came out,

that it was so comforting to feel that we had been developing all the

time without knowing it, or having to bother about it. Of course, we did

know that we had been very uncomfortable, but that isn't quite the same,

and now I can stand giving up things so much better when I realize that

I am getting them all back, even if it's just spiritually. Don't you

think that is a lovely way to feel about it?"

"I must go," said Caroline breathlessly. Her pulses were hammering in

her ears, and she could scarcely hear what Daisy was saying.

"Well, good-bye. I am so glad to have seen you. Are you going to France

like everybody else?"

"I hope so. I have offered my services."

"Then you are just as wild about war work as I am. I'd give anything on

earth to go over with the Y. M. C. A., and I tell Robert that the only

thing that keeps me back is the children."

She floated on to her car at the corner, while Caroline crossed the

street, and walked slowly in the direction of the boarding-house. "It

can make no possible difference to me. Why should I care?" she asked

herself. Yet the clutch of pain had not relaxed in her heart, and it

seemed to her that all the life and colour had gone out of the town. He

was not here. He was across the world. Until this instant she had not

realized how much it meant to her that he should be in the same city,

even though she never saw him.

She reached the house, opened the drab iron gate, went up the short

brick walk between withered weeds, and rang the bell beside the

inhospitable door, from which the sallow paint was peeling in streaks.

At the third ring, a frowzy coloured maid, in a soiled apron, which she

was still frantically tying, opened the door; and when she saw Caroline,

a sympathetic grin widened her mouth.

"You is done hed a caller, en he lef' his name over dar on de table. I

axed 'im ef'n he wouldn't set down en res' his hat, but he jes' shuck

his haid en walked right spang out agin."

Entering the hall, Caroline picked up the card, and passed into the

shabby living-room, which was empty during the afternoon hours. In the

centre of the hideous room, with its damaged Victorian furniture, its

open stove, its sentimental engravings, and its piles of magazines long

out of date--in the midst of the surroundings of a contented and

tasteless period, she stared down, with incredulous eyes, at the bit of

paper she was holding. So he had been there. He had come at the last

moment, probably on his last day in Richmond, and she had missed him!

Life had accorded her one other opportunity, and, with the relentless

perversity of her fate, she had lost it by an accident, by a quarter of

an hour, by a chance meeting with Daisy! It was her destiny to have the

things that she desired held within reach, to watch them approach until

she could almost touch them, to see them clearly and vividly for a

minute, and then to have them withdrawn through some conspiracy of

external events. "I didn't ask much," she thought, "only to see him once

more--only the chance to let him see that I can still hold my head high

and meet the future with courage." In an instant she felt that the utter

futility and emptiness of the summer, of every day that she had passed

since she left Briarlay, enveloped and smothered her with the thickness

of ashes. "It is not fair," she cried, in rebellion, "I have had a hard

life. I asked so little. It is not fair."

Going over to the window, she put the cheap curtains aside, and looked

out into the street, as if searching the pavement for his vanishing

figure. Nothing there except emptiness! Nothing except the wind and

falling leaves and grey dust and the footsteps of a passer-by at the

corner. It was like her life, that long, deserted street, filled with

dead leaves and the restless sound of things that went by a little way

off.

For a minute the idea stayed with her. Then, raising her head, with a

smile, she looked up at the bare trees and the sombre sky over the

housetops. "Life cannot hurt you unless you let it," she repeated. "I

will not let it. I will conquer, if it kills me." And, so inexplicable

are the processes of the soul, the resolution arising in her thoughts

became interfused not only with her point of view, but with the bleak

external world at which she was looking. The will to fight endowed her

with the physical power of fighting; the thought created the fact; and

she knew that as long as she believed herself to be unconquered, she was

unconquerable. The moment of weakness had served its purpose--for the

reaction had taught her that destiny lies within, not without; that the

raw material of existence does not differ; and that our individual lives

depend, not upon things as they are in themselves, but upon the thought

with which we have modified or enriched them. "I will not be a coward. I

will not let the world cheat me of happiness," she resolved; and the

next instant, as she lowered her eyes from the sky, she saw David

Blackburn looking up at her from the gate.

For a moment she felt that life stopped in its courses, and then began

again, joyously, exuberantly, drenched with colour and sweetness. She

had asked so little. She had asked only to see him again--only the

chance to show him that she could be brave--and he stood here at the

gate! He was still her friend, that was enough. It was enough to have

him stand there and look up at her with his grave, questioning eyes.

Turning quickly away from the window, she ran out of the house and down

the brick walk to the gate.

"I thought I had missed you," she said, her eyes shining with

happiness.

"It is my last day in Richmond. I wanted to say good-bye." He had

touched her hand with the briefest greeting; but in his face she read

his gladness at seeing her; and she felt suddenly that everything had

been made right, that he would understand without words, that there was

nothing she could add to the joy of the meeting. It was friendship, not

love, she knew; and yet, at the moment, friendship was all that she

asked--friendship satisfied her heart, and filled the universe with a

miraculous beauty. After the torment of the last six months, peace had

descended upon her abundantly, ineffably, out of the heavens. All the

longing to explain faded now into the knowledge that explanation was

futile, and when she spoke again it was to say none of the things with

which she had burdened her mind.

"How is Letty?" she asked, "I think of her so often."

"She is very well, but she misses you. Will you walk a little way? We

can talk better in the street."

"Yes, the house will soon be full of boarders." Weariness had left her.

She felt strong, gay, instinct with energy. As she moved up the deserted

street, through the autumn dust, laughter rippled on her lips, and the

old buoyant grace flowed in her walk. It was only friendship, she told

herself, and yet she asked nothing more. She had been born again; she

had come to life in a moment.

And everything at which she looked appeared to have come to life also.

The heavy clouds; the long, ugly street, with the monotonous footsteps

of the few passers-by; the wind blowing the dried leaves in swirls and

eddies over the brick pavement; the smell of autumn which lingered in

the air and the dust--all these things seemed not dead, but as living

as spring. The inner radiance had streamed forth to brighten the outward

greyness; the April bloom of her spirit was spreading over the earth.

"This is my hour," her heart told her. "Out of the whole of life I have

this single short hour of happiness. I must pour into it everything that

is mine, every memory of joy I shall ever have in the future. I must

make it so perfect that it will shed a glow over all the drab years

ahead. It is only friendship. He has never thought of me except as a

friend--but I must make the memory of friendship more beautiful than the

memory of love."

He looked at her in the twilight, and she felt that peace enveloped her

with his glance.

"Tell me about yourself," he said gently. "What has life done to you?"

"Everything, and nothing." Her voice was light and cheerful. "I have

worked hard all summer, and I am hoping to go to France if the war

lasts----"

"All of us hope that. It is amazing the way the war has gripped us to

the soul. Everything else becomes meaningless. The hold it has taken on

me is so strong that I feel as if I were there already in part, as if

only the shell of my body were left over here out of danger." He paused

and looked at her closely. "I can talk to you of the things I

think--impersonal things. The rest you must understand--you will

understand?"

Her heart rose on wings like a bird. "Talk to me of anything," she

answered, "I shall understand."

"No one, except my mother, has ever understood so completely. I shall

always, whatever happens, look back on our talks at Briarlay as the

most helpful, the most beautiful of my life."

Her glance was veiled with joy as she smiled up at him. This was more

than she had ever demanded even in dreams. It was the bread of life in

abundance, and she felt that she could live on it through all the barren

years of the future. To have the best in her recognized, to be judged,

not by a momentary impulse, but by a permanent ideal--this was what she

had craved, and this was accorded her.

"For the time I can see nothing but the war," he was saying in a changed

voice. "The ground has been cut from under my feet. I am groping through

a ruined world toward some kind of light, some kind of certainty. The

things I believed in have failed me--and even the things I thought have

undergone modifications. I can find but one steadfast resolve in the

midst of this fog of disappointment, and that is to help fight this war

to a finish. My personal life has become of no consequence. It has been

absorbed into the national will, I suppose. It has become a part of

America's determination to win the war, let it cost what it may."

The old light of vision and prophecy had come back to his face while she

watched it; and she realized, with a rush of mental sympathy, that his

ideas were still dynamic--that they possessed the vital energy of

creative and constructive forces.

"Talk to me of your work--your life," she said, and she thought

exultantly, "If I cannot hold him back, I can follow him. I, too, can

build my home on ideas."

"You know what I have always felt about my country," he said slowly.

"You know that I have always hoped to be of some lasting service in

building a better State. As a boy I used to dream of it, and in later

years, in spite of disappointments--of almost unbearable disappointments

and failures--the dream has come back more vividly. For a time I

believed that I could work here, as well as away, for the future of

America--for the genuine democracy that is founded not on force, but on

freedom. For a little while this seemed to me to be possible. Then I was

pushed back again from the ranks of the fighters--I became again merely

a spectator of life--until the war called me to action. As long as the

war lasts it will hold me. When that is over there will be fresh fields

and newer problems, and I may be useful."

"It is constructive work, not fighting now, isn't it?"

"It is the machinery of war--but, after all, what does it matter if it

only helps to win?"

"And afterwards? When it is over?"

His eyes grew very gentle. "If I could only see into the future! Words

may come to me some day, and I may answer you--but not now--not yet. I

know nothing to-day except that there is work for my hand, and I must do

it. Trust me for the rest. You do trust me?"

There was a glory in her face as she answered, "To do right always.

Until death--and beyond."

"If we have trust, we have everything," he said, and a note of sadness

had crept into his voice. "Life has taught me that without it the rest

is only ashes."

"I am glad for your sake that you can go," she replied. "It would be

harder here."

The man's part was his, and though she would not have had it otherwise,

she understood that the man's part would be the easier. He would go

away; he would do his work; his life would be crowded to the brim with

incident, with practical interests; and, though she could trust him not

to forget, she knew that he would not remember as she remembered in the

place where she had known him.

"The work will be worth doing," he answered, "even if the record is soon

lost. It will mean little in the way of ambition, but I think that

ambition scarcely counts with me now. What I am seeking is an

opportunity for impersonal service--a wider field in which to burn up my

energy." His voice softened, and she felt, for the first time, that he

was talking impersonally because he was afraid of the danger that lay in

the silence and the twilight--that he was speaking in casual phrases

because the real thought, the true words, were unutterable. She was sure

now, she was confident; and the knowledge gave her strength to look with

clear eyes on the parting--and afterwards----

He began to talk of his work, while they turned and walked slowly back

to the boarding-house.

"I will write to you," he said, "but remember I shall write only of what

I think. I shall write the kind of letters that I should write to a

man."

"It all interests me," she answered. "Your thought is a part of you--it

is yourself."

"It is the only self I dare follow for the present, and even that

changes day by day. I see so many things now, if not differently--well,

at least in an altered perspective. It is like travelling on a dark

road, as soon as one danger is past, others spring up out of the

obscurity. The war has cast a new light on every belief, on every

conviction that I thought I possessed. The values of life are changing

hourly--they are in a process of readjustment. Facts that appeared so

steadfast, so clear, to my vision a year ago, are now out of focus. I go

on, for I always sought truth, not consistency, but I go on blindly. I

am trying to feel the road since I cannot see it. I am searching the

distance for some glimmer of dawn--for some light I can travel by. I

know, of course, that our first task is winning the war, that until the

war is won there can be no security for ideas or mankind, that unless

the war is won, there can be no freedom for either individual or

national development."

As they reached the gate, he broke off, and held out his hand. "But I

meant to write you all this. It is the only thing I can write you. You

will see Letty sometimes?"

"Whenever I can. Mrs. Timberlake will bring her to see me."

"And you will think of yourself? You will keep well?"

He held her hand; her eyes were on his; and though she heard his

questions and her answers, she felt that both questions and answers were

as trivial as the autumn dust at her feet. What mattered was the look in

his eyes, which was like a cord drawing her spirit nearer and nearer.

She knew now that he loved her; but she knew it through some finer and

purer medium of perception than either speech or touch. If he had said

nothing in their walk together, if he had parted from her in silence,

she would have understood as perfectly as she understood now. In that

moment, while her hand was in his and her radiant look on his face, the

pain and tragedy of the last months, the doubt, the humiliation, the

haunting perplexity and suspense, the self-distrust and the bitterer

distrust of life--all these things, which had so tormented her heart,

were swept away by a tide of serene and ineffable peace. She was not

conscious of joy. The confidence that pervaded her spirit was as far

above joy as it was above pain or distress. What she felt with the

profoundest conviction was that she could never really be unhappy again

in the future--that she had had all of life in a moment, and that she

could face whatever came with patience and fortitude.

"Stand fast, little friend," he said, "and trust me." Then, without

waiting for her reply, he turned from her and walked away through the

twilight.

CHAPTER X

THE LIGHT ON THE ROAD

When Caroline entered the house, the sound of clinking plates and

rattling knives told her that the boarders had already assembled at

supper; and it surprised her to discover that she was hungry for the

first time in months. Happiness had made everything different, even her

appetite for the commonplace fare Mrs. Dandridge provided. It was just

as if an intense physical pain had suddenly ceased to throb, and the

relief exhilarated her nerves, and made her eager for the ordinary

details which had been so irksome a few hours before. Life was no longer

distorted and abnormal. Her pride and courage had come back to her; and

she understood at last that it was not the unfulfilment of love, but the

doubt of its reality, that had poisoned her thoughts. Since she knew

that it was real, she could bear any absence, any pain. The knowledge

that genuine love had been hers for an hour, that she had not been

cheated out of her heritage, that she had not given gold for sand, as

she had done as a girl--the knowledge of these things was the chain of

light that would bind together all the dull years before her. Already,

though her pulses were still beating rapturously, she found that the

personal values were gradually assuming their right position and

importance in her outlook. There were greater matters, there were more

significant facts in the world to-day than her own particular joy or

sorrow. She must meet life, and she must meet it with serenity and

fortitude. She must help where the immediate need was, without thought

of the sacrifice, without thought even of her own suffering. How often

in the past eight years had she told herself, "Love is the greatest good

in the world, but it is not the only good. There are lives filled to

overflowing in which love has no place." Now she realized that her love

must be kept like some jewel in a secret casket, which was always there,

always hidden and guarded, yet seldom brought out into the daylight and

opened. "I must think of it only for a few minutes of the day," she

said, "only when I am off duty, and it will not interfere with my work."

And she resolved that she would keep this pledge with all the strength

of her will. She would live life whole, not in parts.

Without taking off her hat, she went into the dining-room, and tried to

slip unnoticed into her chair at a small table in one corner. The other

seats were already occupied, and a pretty, vivacious girl she had known

at the hospital, looked up and remarked, "You look so well, Miss Meade.

Have you been for a walk?"

"Yes, I've been for a walk. That is why I am late."

Down the centre of the room, beneath the flickering gas chandelier and

the fly-specked ceiling, there was a long, narrow table, and at the head

of it, Mrs. Dandridge presided with an air as royal as if she were

gracing a banquet. She was a stately, white-haired woman, who had once

been beautiful and was still impressive--for adversity, which had

reduced her circumstances and destroyed her comfort, had failed to

penetrate the majestic armour of her manner. In the midst of drudgery

and turmoil and disaster, she had preserved her mental poise as some

persons are able to preserve their equilibrium in a rocking boat.

Nothing disturbed her; she was as superior to accidents as she was to

inefficiency or incompetence. Her meals were never served at the hour;

the food was badly cooked; the table was seldom tidy; and yet her house

was always crowded, and there was an unimpeachable tradition that she

had never received a complaint from a boarder.

As she sat now at the head of her unappetizing table, eating her

lukewarm potato soup as if it were terrapin, she appeared gracious,

charming, supported by the romantic legends of her beauty and her

aristocratic descent. If life had defeated her, it was one of those

defeats which the philosopher has pronounced more triumphant than

victories.

"I spent the afternoon at the Red Cross rooms," she remarked, regal,

serene, and impoverished. "That is why supper was a little late

to-night. Since I can give nothing else, I feel that it is my duty to

give my time. I even ask myself sometimes if I have a moral right to

anything we can send over to France?"

Inadvertently, or through some instinct of tact which was either divine

or diabolical, she had touched a responsive cord in the heart of every

man or woman at the table. There was no motive beyond impulsive sympathy

in the words, for she was as incapable of deliberate design as she was

of systematic economy; but her natural kindliness appeared to serve her

now more effectively than any Machiavellian subtlety could have done.

The discontented and dejected look vanished from the faces about her;

the distinguished widow, with two sons in the army, stopped frowning at

the potato soup; the hungry but polite young man, who travelled for a

clothing house, put down the war bread he was in the act of passing; and

the studious-looking teacher across the table lost the critical air with

which she had been regarding the coloured waitress. As Caroline watched

the change, she asked herself if the war, which was only a phrase to

these people a few months ago, had become at last a reality? "We are in

it now, body and soul," she thought, "we are in it just as France and

England have been in it from the beginning. It is our war as much as

theirs because it has touched our hearts. It has done what nothing has

been able to do before--it has made us one people."

Into these different faces at Mrs. Dandridge's table, a single idea had

passed suddenly, vitalizing and ennobling both the bright and the dull

features--the idea of willing sacrifice. Something greater than selfish

needs or desires had swept them out of themselves on a wave of moral

passion that, for the moment, exalted them like a religious conversion.

What had happened, Caroline knew, was that the patriotism in one of the

most patriotic nations on earth had been stirred to the depths.

The talk she heard was the kind that was going on everywhere. She had

listened to it day after day, as it echoed and re-echoed from the

boarding-houses, the hospitals, and the streets--and through the long,

bitter months, when coal was scarce and heatless and meatless days kept

the blood down, she was aware of it, as of a persistent undercurrent of

cheerful noise. There were no complaints, but there were many jests, and

the characteristic Virginian habit of meeting a difficult situation with

a joke, covered the fuel administration with ridicule. For weeks ice lay

on the pavements, a famine in coal threatened; and as the winter went

by, bread, instead of growing better, became steadily worse. But, after

all, people said, these discomforts and denials were so small compared

to the colossal sacrifices of Europe. Things were done badly, but what

really counted was that they were done. Beneath the waste and

extravagance and incompetence, a tremendous spirit was moving; and out

of the general aspect of bureaucratic shiftlessness, America was

gathering her strength. In the future, as inevitably as history develops

from a fact into a fable, the waste would be exalted into liberality,

the shiftlessness into efficiency. For it is the law of our life that

the means pass, and the end remains, that the act decays, but the spirit

has immortality.

For the next six months, when the calls were many and nurses were few,

Caroline kept her jewel in the secret casket. She did not think of

herself, because to think of herself was the beginning of weakness, and

she had resolved long ago to be strong. When all was said, the final

result of her life depended simply on whether she overcame obstacles or

succumbed to them. It was not the event, she knew, that coloured one's

mental atmosphere; it was the point of view from which one approached

it. "It is just as easy to grow narrow and bitter over an unfulfilled

love as it is to be happy and cheerful," she thought, "and whether it is

easy or not, I am not going to let myself grow narrow and bitter. Of

course, I might have had more, but, then, I might have had so much

less--I might not have had that one hour--or his friendship. I am going

to be thankful that I have had so much, and I am going to stop thinking

about it at all. I may feel all I want to deep down in my soul, but I

must stop thinking. When the whole country is giving up something, I

can at least give up selfish regret."

The winter passed, filled with work, and not unhappily, for time that is

filled with work is seldom unhappy. From Blackburn she had heard

nothing, though in April a paragraph in the newspaper told her that

Angelica was about to sue for a divorce in some Western state; and Daisy

Colfax, whom she met one day in the waiting-room of the hospital,

breezily confirmed the vague announcement.

"There really wasn't anything else that she could do, you know. We were

all expecting it. Poor Angelica, she must have had to overcome all her

feelings before she could make up her mind to take a step that was so

public. Her delicacy is the most beautiful thing about her--except, as

Robert always insists, the wonderful way she has of bringing out the

best in people."

As the irony of this was obviously unconscious, Caroline responded

merely with a smile; but that same afternoon, when Mrs. Timberlake paid

one of her rare visits, she repeated Daisy's remark.

"Do you suppose she really believes what she says?"

"Of course she doesn't. Things don't stop long enough in her mind to get

either believed or disbelieved. They just sift straight through without

her knowing that they are there."

They were in the ugly little green-papered room at the hospital, and

Caroline was holding Letty tight in her arms, while she interpolated

cryptic phrases into the animated talk.

"Oh, Miss Meade, if you would only come back! Do you think you will come

back when mother and father get home again? I wrote to father the other

day, but I had to write in pencil, and I'm so afraid it will all fade

out when it goes over the ocean. Will it get wet, do you think?"

"I am sure it won't, dear, and he will be so glad to hear from you. What

did you tell him?"

"I told him how cold it was last winter, and that I couldn't write

before because doing all the doctor told me took up every single minute,

and I had had to leave off my lessons, and that the new nurse made them

very dull, anyhow. Then I said that I wanted you to come back, and that

I hadn't been nearly so strong since you went away."

She was looking pale, and after a few moments, Caroline sent her, with a

pot of flowers, into an adjoining room.

"I don't like Letty's colour," she said anxiously to the housekeeper, in

the child's absence.

"She is looking very badly. It is the hard winter, I reckon, but I am

not a bit easy about her. She hasn't picked up after the last cold, and

we don't seem able to keep her interested. Children are so easily bored

when they are kept indoors, and Letty more easily than most, for she has

such a quick mind. I declare I never lived through such a winter--at

least not since I was a child in the Civil War, and of course that was a

thousand times worse. But we couldn't keep Briarlay warm, even the few

rooms that we lived in. It was just like being in prison--and a cold one

at that! I can't help wishing that David would come home, for I feel all

the time as if anything might happen. I reckon the winter put my nerves

on edge; but the war seems to drag on so slowly, and everybody has begun

to talk in such a pessimistic way. It may sound un-Christian, but I

sometimes feel as if I could hardly keep my hands off the Germans. I get

so impatient of the way things are going, I'd like to get over in

France, and kill a few of them myself. It does look, somehow, as if the

Lord had forgotten that vengeance belongs to Him."

"Doctor Boland told me yesterday that he thought it would last at least

five years longer."

"Then it will outlast us, that's all I've got to say." She cleared her

throat, and added with tart irrelevancy, "I had a letter from Angelica a

few weeks ago."

"Is it true? What the paper said?"

"There wasn't a word about it in the letter. She wrote because she

wanted me to send her some summer clothes she had left here, and then

she asked me to let her know about Letty. She said she had been operated

on in Chicago a month ago, and that she was just out of the hospital,

and feeling like the wreck of herself. Everybody told her, she added,

how badly she looked, and the letter sounded as if she were very much

depressed and out of sorts."

"Do you think she may really have cared for Mr. Wythe?"

Mrs. Timberlake shook her head. "It wasn't that, my dear. She just

couldn't bear to think of Mary's having more than she had. If she had

ever liked David, it might have been easier for her to stand it, but she

never liked him even when she married him; and though a marriage may

sometimes manage very well without love, I've yet to see one that could

get along without liking."

She rose as Letty came back from her errand, and a minute or two later,

Caroline tucked the child in the car, and stood watching while it

started for Briarlay.

The air was mild and fragrant, for after the hard, cold winter, spring

had returned with a profusion of flowers. In the earth, on the trees,

and in the hearts of men and women, April was bringing warmth, hope, and

a restoration of life. The will to be, to live, and to struggle, was

released, with the flowing sap, from the long imprisonment of winter. In

the city yards the very grass appeared to shoot up joyously into the

light, and the scent of hyacinths was like the perfume of happiness. The

afternoon was as soft as a day in summer, and this softness was

reflected in the faces of the people who walked slowly, filled with an

unknown hope, through the warm sunshine.

"Love is the greatest good in the world, but it is not the only good,"

repeated Caroline, wondering who had first said the words.

It was then, as she turned back to enter the hospital, that the postman

put some letters into her hand, and looking down, she saw that one was

from Blackburn.

CHAPTER XI

THE LETTER

For the rest of the afternoon she carried the letter hidden in her

uniform, where, from time to time, she could pause in her task, and put

her hand reassuringly on the edge of the envelope. Not until evening,

when she had left her patient and was back in her room, did she unfold

the pages, and begin slowly to read what he had written. The first

sentences, as she had expected, were stiff and constrained--she had

known that until he could speak freely he would speak no word of love to

her--but, as soon as he had passed from the note of feeling to the

discussion of impersonal issues, he wrote as earnestly and spontaneously

as he had talked to Sloane on that October afternoon at Briarlay.

Another woman, she realized, might have been disappointed; but the

ironic past had taught her that emotion, far from being the only bond

with a man like Blackburn, was perhaps the least enduring of the ties

that held them together. His love, if it ever came to her, would be the

flower, not of transient passion, but of the profound intellectual

sympathy which had first drawn their minds, not their hearts, to each

other. Both had passed through the earlier fires of racial impulse; both

had been scorched, not warmed by the flames; and both had learned that

the only permanent love is the love that is rooted as deeply in thought

as in desire.

* * * * *

In France.

MY DEAR CAROLINE:

I have tried to write to you many times, but always something has held

me back--some obscure feeling that words would not help things or make

them easier, and that your friendship could be trusted to understand all

that I was obliged to leave to the silence. You will see how badly I

have put this, even though I have rewritten the beginning of this letter

several times. But it is just as if I were mentally tongue-tied. I can

think of nothing to say that it does not seem better to leave unsaid.

Then I remembered that when we parted I told you I should write of what

I thought, not of what I felt, and this makes it simpler. When I relax

my mental grip, the drift of things whirls like a snow-storm across my

mind, and I grow confused and bewildered----

In the last year I have thought a great deal about the questions before

us. I have tried to look at them from a distance and on the outside, as

well as from a closer point of view. I have done my best to winnow my

convictions from the ephemeral chaff of opinions; and though I am

groping still, I am beginning to see more clearly the road we must

travel, if we are ever to come out of the jungle of speculation into the

open field of political certainty. Behind us--behind America, for it is

of my own country that I am thinking--the way is strewn with experiments

that have met failure, with the bones of political adventurers who have

died tilting at the windmill of opportunity. For myself, I see now that,

though some of my theories have survived, many of them have been

modified or annulled by the war. Two years ago you heard me tell Sloane

that our most urgent need was of unity--the obliteration of sectional

lines. I still feel this need, but I feel it now as a necessary part of

a far greater unity, of the obliteration of world boundaries of

understanding and sympathy. This brings us to the vital question before

us as a people--the development of the individual citizen within the

democracy, of the national life within the international. Here is the

problem that America must solve for the nations, for only America, with

her larger views and opportunities, can solve it. For the next

generation or two this will be our work, and our chance of lasting

service. Our Republic must stand as the great example of the future, as

the morning star that heralds the coming of a new day. It is the cause

for which our young men have died. With their lives they have secured

our democracy, and the only reward that is worthy of them is a social

order as fair as their loyalty and their sacrifice.

And so we approach our great problem--individuality within democracy,

the national order within the world order. Already the sectional lines,

which once constituted an almost insurmountable obstacle, have been

partly dissolved in the common service and sacrifice. Already America is

changing from a mass of divergent groups, from a gathering of alien

races, into a single people, one and indivisible in form and spirit. The

war has forged us into a positive entity, and this entity we must

preserve as far as may be compatible with the development of individual

purpose and character. Here, I confess, lies the danger; here is the

political precipice over which the governments of the past have almost

inevitably plunged to destruction. And it is just here, I see now, in

the weakest spot of the body politic, that the South, and the

individualism of the South, may become, not a national incubus, but the

salvation of our Republic. The spirit that fought to the death fifty

years ago for the sovereignty of the States, may act to-day as a needed

check upon the opposing principle of centralization in government, the

abnormal growth of Federal power; and in the end may become, like the

stone which the builders rejected, the very head of the corner. As I

look forward to-day, the great hope for America appears to be the

interfusion of the Northern belief in solidarity with the ardent

Southern faith in personal independence and responsibility. In this

blending of ideals alone, I see the larger spirit that may redeem

nationality from despotism.

I am writing as the thoughts rush through my mind, with no effort to

clarify or co-ordinate my ideas. From childhood my country has been both

an ideal and a passion with me; and at this hour, when it is facing new

dangers, new temptations, and new occasions for sacrifice, I feel that

it is the duty of every man who is born with the love of a soil in his

heart and brain, to cast his will and his vision into the general plan

of the future. To see America avoid alike the pitfall of arbitrary power

and the morass of visionary socialism; to see her lead the nations, not

in the path of selfish conquest, but, with sanity and prudence, toward

the promised land of justice and liberty--this is a dream worth living

for, and worth dying for, God knows, if the need should ever arise.

The form of government which will yield us this ideal union of

individualism with nationalism, I confess, lies still uninvented or

undiscovered. Autocracies have failed, and democracies have been merely

uncompleted experiments. The republics of the past have served mainly as

stepping-stones to firmer autocracies or oligarchies. Socialism as a

state of mind, as a rule of conduct, as an expression of pity for the

disinherited of the earth--Socialism as the embodiment of the humane

idea, is wholly admirable. So far as it is an attempt to establish the

reign of moral ideas, to apply to the community the command of Christ,

'Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do

ye even so to them;' so far as it expresses the obscure longing in the

human heart for justice and right in the relations of mankind--so far as

it embodies the instincts of compassion and sympathy, it must win the

approval of every man who has looked deeply into human affairs. The evil

of Socialism lies not in these things; nor does it rest in the

impracticability of its theory--in the generous injustice of "robbing

the rich to pay the poor." The evil of it consists in the fact that it

would lend itself in practice even more readily than democracy, to the

formation of that outer crust of officialism which destroys the blood

and fibre of a nation. Socialism obeying the law of Christ might be a

perfect system--but, then, so would despotism, or democracy, or any

other form of government man has invented.

But all theories, however exalted, must filter down, in application,

through the brackish stream of average human nature. The State cannot

rest upon a theory, any more than it can derive its true life from the

empty husks of authority. The Republic of man, like the Kingdom of God,

is within, or it is nowhere.

To-day, alone among the nations, the American Republic stands as the

solitary example of a State that came into being, not through the

predatory impulse of mankind, but, like its Constitution, as an act of

intellectual creation. In this sense alone it did not grow, it was made;

in this sense it was founded, not upon force, but upon moral ideas, upon

everlasting and unchanging principles. It sprang to life in the sunrise

of liberty, with its gaze on the future--on the long day of promise. It

is the heir of all the ages of political experiment; and yet from the

past, it has learned little except the things that it must avoid.

There was never a people that began so gloriously, that started with

such high hearts and clear eyes toward an ideal social contract. Since

then we have wandered far into the desert. We have followed mirage after

mirage. We have listened to the voice of the false prophet and the

demagogue. Yet our Republic is still firm, embedded, as in a rock, in

the moral sense of its citizens. For a democracy, my reason tells me,

there can be no other basis. When the State seeks other authority than

the conscience of its citizens, it ceases to be a democracy, and becomes

either an oligarchy or a bureaucracy. Then the empty forms of hereditary

right, or established officialdom, usurp the sovereignty of moral ideas,

and the State decays gradually because the reservoir of its life has run

dry.

For our Republic, standing as it does between hidden precipices, the

immediate future is full of darkness. We have shown the giant's

strength, and we must resist the temptation to use it like a giant. When

the war is won, we shall face the vital and imminent danger, the danger

that is not material, but spiritual--for what shall it profit a nation,

if it shall gain the whole world, and lose its own soul? In a time of

danger arbitrary power wears always a benevolent aspect; and since man

first went of his own will into bondage, there has never been absolutism

on earth that has not masqueraded in the doctrine of divine

origin--whether it be by the custom of kingship, or by the voice of the

people. War, which is an abnormal growth on the commonwealth, may

require abnormal treatment; but history shows that it is easier to

surrender rights in war than it is to recover them in peace, and a

temporary good has too often developed into a permanent evil. The

freedom of the seas will be a poor substitute for the inalienable rights

of the individual American. A League of Nations cannot insure these; it

is doubtful even if it can insure peace on earth and good will toward

men. Men can hate as bitterly and fight as fiercely within a league as

outside of one.

We shall go forth, when victory is won, to enlighten the world with

liberty and with far-seeing statesmanship; but just as the far-sighted

physical vision perceives distant objects more clearly than near ones,

there is, also, a world vision of duty which overlooks immediate

obligations while it discerns universal responsibilities. In this mental

view the present is invariably sacrificed to the future, the personal

rights to the general security. Yet to the more normal faculty of

vision, it would appear that the perfect whole must result from the

perfect parts; and that only by preserving our individual liberties can

we make a League of Free Nations. International treaties are important,

but national morality is vital--for the treaty that is not confirmed by

the national honour is only a document.

And now, after a year's thinking, I have come back to the conviction

from which I started--that the only substantial groundwork of a republic

is the conscience of its citizens. The future of our democracy rests not

in the Halls of Congress, but in the cradle; and to build for

permanency, we must build, not on theory, but on personal rectitude. We

hear a great deal said now, and said unthinkingly, about the personal

values not counting in a war that is fought for world freedom. Yet there

was never an age, and I say this with certainty, in which personality

was of such supreme significance as it is to-day. For this, after all,

is the end to which my thinking has brought me--nationalism is nothing,

internationalism is nothing, unless it is an expression of individual

aspirations and ideals--for the end of both nationalism and

internationalism is the ultimate return to racial character. Cultivate

the personal will to righteousness, teach the citizen that he is the

State, and the general good may take care of itself.

And so our first duty appears to be, not national expansion, but the

development of moral fibre. Before we teach other nations to stand

alone, we must learn to walk straight; before we sow the seeds of the

future, we must prepare our own ground for planting. National greatness

is a flower that has often flourished over a sewer of class oppression

and official corruption; and the past teaches us that republics, as well

as autocracies, may be founded on slavery and buttressed by

inequalities. As I look ahead now, I see that we may win freedom for

smaller nations, and yet lose our own liberties to a Federal power that

is supported by a civilian army of office-holders. For power is never

more relentless in exercise than when it has transformed the oppressed

of yesterday into the oppressors of to-day; and it is well to remember

that democracy means not merely the tyranny of the many instead of the

few; it means equal obligations and responsibilities as well as equal

rights and opportunities. If we have failed to reach this ideal, it has

been because the individual American has grasped at opportunity while

he evaded responsibility; and the remedy for the failure lies not in a

change of institutions, but in a change of heart. We must realize that

America is a faith as well as a fact--that it is, for many, a divine

hypothesis. We must realize that it means the forward-looking spirit,

the fearless attitude of mind, the belief in the future, the romantic

optimism of youth, the will to dare and the nerve to achieve the

improbable. This is America, and this is our best and greatest gift to

the world--and to the League of Free Nations.

With the end of the war the danger will be threatening; and we must meet

it as we met the feebler menace of Prussian militarism--but we must meet

it and conquer it with intangible weapons. No nation has ever fought for

a greater cause; no nation has ever fought more unselfishly; and no

nation has ever drawn its sword in so idealistic a spirit. We have

entered this war while our hearts were full, while the high and solemn

mood was upon us. If we keep to this mood, if we seek in victory the

immaterial, not the material advantage, if our only reward is the

opportunity for world service, and our only conquered territory the

provinces of the free spirit--if we keep fast to this ideal, and embody

its meaning in our national life and actions, then we may save the

smaller nations because we have first saved our Republic. For, if it is

a day of peril, it is also a day of glory. The seal of blood is upon us,

but it is the prophetic mark of the future, and it has sealed us for the

union of justice with liberty. We have given our dead as a pledge of the

greater America--the America of invisible boundaries. There is but one

monument that we can build in remembrance, and that monument is a nobler

Republic. If we lose the inspiration of the ideal, if we turn aside from

the steady light of democracy to pursue the _ignis fatuus_ of

imperialistic enterprise or aggression, then our dead will have died in

vain, and we shall leave our building unfinished. For those who build on

the dead must build for immortality. Physical boundaries cannot contain

them; but in the soul of the people, if we make room for them, they will

live on forever, and in the spirit we may still have part and place with

them.

And because the collective soul of the race is only the sum total of

individual souls, I can discern no way to true national greatness except

through the cultivation of citizenship. Experience has proved that there

can be no stability either of law or league unless it is sustained by

the moral necessity of mankind; and, for this reason, I feel that our

first international agreement should be the agreement on a world

standard of honour--on a rule of ethical principles in public as well as

in private relations. I confess that a paternalism that enfeebles the

character appears to me scarcely less destructive than a license that

intoxicates. Between the two lies the golden mean of power with charity,

of enlightened individualism, of Christian principles, not applied on

the surface, but embodied in the very structure of civilization. Though

I am not a religious man in the orthodox meaning, the last year has

taught me that the world's hope lies not in treaties, but in the law of

Christ that ye love one another.

This splendid dream of the perfectibility of human nature may not have

led us very far in the past, but at least it has never once led us

wrong. There are ideas that flash by like comets, bearing a trail of

light; and such an idea is that of world peace and brotherhood. Only

those whose eyes are on the heavens behold it; yet these few may become

the great adventurers of the spirit, the prophets and seers of the new

age for mankind. There has never been a great invention that did not

begin as a dream, just as there has never been a great truth that did

not begin as a heresy. And, if we look back over history, we find that

the sublime moments with men and with nations, are those in which they

break free from the anchorage of the past, and set sail toward the

unknown seas, on a new spiritual voyage of discovery.

It is thus that I would see America, not as schoolmistress or common

scold to the nations, but as chosen leader by example, rather than by

authority. I would see her, when this crisis is safely past, keeping

still to her onward vision, and her high and solemn mood of service and

sacrifice; and it is in the spirit of humility, not of pride, that I

would have her stretch the hand of friendship alike to the great and the

little peoples. She has had no wiser leaders than the Founders of this

Republic, and I would see her return, as far as she can return, to the

lonely freedom in which they left her. I would see her enter no world

covenant except one that is sustained not by physical force, but by the

moral law; and I would, above all, see her follow her own great destiny

with free hands and unbandaged eyes. For her true mission is not that of

universal pedagogue--her true mission is to prove to the incredulous

Powers the reality of her own political ideals--to make Democracy, not a

sublime postulate, but a self-evident truth.

I have written as words came to me, knowing that I could write to you

freely and frankly, as I could to no one else, of the life of the mind.

Your friendship I can trust always, in any circumstances; and it is only

by thinking impersonally that I can escape the tyranny of personal

things. I have not written of my surroundings over here, because I could

tell you only what you have read in hundreds of letters--in hundreds of

magazines. It is all alike. One and all, we see the same sights. War is

not the fine and splendid thing some of us at home believe it to be.

There is dirt and cruelty and injustice in France, as well as glory and

heroism. I have seen the good and the evil of the battlefields, just as

I have seen the good and the evil of peace, and I have learned that the

romance of war depends as much upon the thickness of the atmosphere as

upon the square miles of the distance. It is pretty prosaic at close

range; yet at the very worst of it, I have seen flashes of an almost

inconceivable beauty. For it brings one up against the reality, and the

reality is not matter, but spirit.

I am trying to do the best work of my life, and I am doing it just for

my country.

God bless you.

DAVID BLACKBURN.

CHAPTER XII

THE VISION

At the end of June, Caroline learned from the papers that Blackburn had

returned to Briarlay; and the same day she heard through Daisy Colfax

that Alan Wythe had been killed in France.

"I feel so sorry for poor Angelica," said the young woman mournfully.

"They were always such devoted friends. But, of course, it is splendid

to think that he was a hero, and I know that is the way Angelica will

look at it."

At the moment, though Caroline had liked Alan, the thing that impressed

her most was the way in which the whole world shared in the conspiracy

to protect Angelica from the consequences of her own acts. Evidently no

hint of scandal had ever touched her friendship for Alan.

"I am sorry," said Caroline, "I always liked him."

"Oh, everybody did! You know that Mr. Blackburn has come home?"

"Yes, I saw it in the paper."

"And Cousin Matty tells me that you are going away to camp?"

"I have just had my call, and I am leaving next week. I hope it means

France very soon, but of course no one knows."

"Well, be sure to take a great deal more than they tell you to. I know a

nurse who said she almost froze the first winter. Do you really have to

wear woollen stockings? I should think they would make your flesh

creep."

She passed on, blooming and lovely, and Caroline, with her bundle of

woollen stockings under her arm, left the shop, and turned down a side

street on her way to Mrs. Dandridge's. She was glad of the call, and

yet--and yet--she had hoped deep down in her heart, a hope unspoken and

unacknowledged, that she should see David again before she left

Richmond. A moment would be enough--only it might be for the last time,

and she felt that she must see him. In the last two months she had

thought of him very little. Her work had engrossed her, and the hope of

going to France had exhilarated her like wine through all the long days

of drudgery. She had grown to expect so little of life that every

pleasure was magnified into a blessing, and she found, in looking back,

that an accumulation of agreeable incidents had provided her with a

measure of happiness. Underneath it all was the knowledge of Blackburn,

though love had come at last to take the place of a creed that one

believes in, but seldom remembers. Yet she still kept the jewel in the

casket, and it was only when she stopped now and then to reflect on her

life, that she realized how long it had lain in its secret corner where

the light of day never shone.

As she approached the boarding-house she saw a car by the sidewalk, and

a minute afterwards, Mrs. Timberlake turned away from the door, and came

down to the gate.

"Oh, Caroline, I was afraid I had missed you! Are you going very soon?"

"Not until next week." Did the housekeeper hear, she wondered, the wild

throbbing of her heart?

"I came to see if you could come out for the night? Letty has been

ailing for several days, and the doctor says she has a touch of fever.

Miss Bradley is ill in bed, and we can't get a nurse anywhere until

to-morrow. Of course Mammy Riah and I can manage, but David and I would

both feel so much easier if you would come."

"Of course, I'll come. I'll get my bag in a minute. It is already

packed." Without waiting for Mrs. Timberlake's reply, she ran into the

house, and came out with the suitcase in her hands. "Tell me about

Letty. Is her temperature high?"

"It has been all day, but you know how it is with children, as I told

David this morning. You heard that David was back?"

"I saw it in the paper."

"He came very unexpectedly. Of course he couldn't cable about the boat,

and the telegram he sent from New York didn't get to me until after he

was in the house. He is looking badly, but I am sure it isn't the work.

I believe other things have been worrying him."

The car had passed out of Grace Street, and was running in the direction

of Monument Avenue. As they went on, Caroline remembered the April

morning when she had come in this same car down the familiar street,

where flags were flying so gaily. It seemed a hundred years ago--not one

year, but a hundred! Life was the same, and yet not the same, since the

very heart of it was altered. The same sky shone, deeply blue, overhead;

the same sun illuminated the houses; the same flags were flying; the

same persons passed under the glittering green of the leaves. It was

all just as it had been on that April morning--and yet how different!

"I suppose he is anxious about Letty?" she said.

"Even before that I noticed how much he had changed. It was only when he

was telling me about Roane that he looked a bit like himself. My dear,

can you believe that Roane has really turned into a hero?"

"No, I cannot. It must have been a long turning." She was talking only

to make sound. How could it matter to her what Roane had turned into?

"He's been fighting with the French, and David says he's won every

decoration they have to give. He is doing splendid things, like saving

lives under fire, and once he even saved a Red Cross dog at the risk of

his life. David says it's the way he makes a jest of it that the French

like--as if he were doing it for amusement. That's like Roane Fitzhugh,

isn't it? What do you suppose David meant when he said that beneath it

all was a profound disillusionment?"

"I don't know, but I never denied that Roane had a sense of humour."

"You never liked him, and neither did David. He says now that Roane

isn't really any more of a hero than he always was, but that he has

found a background where his single virtue is more conspicuous than his

collective vices. I believe he is the only human being I ever knew David

to be unjust to."

Caroline laughed. "There are some virtues it is simply impossible to

believe in. Whenever I hear of Roane Fitzhugh--even when I hear things

like this--I always remember that he kissed me when he was drunk."

"He hasn't touched a drop since the war. David says he is getting all

the excitement he wants in other ways."

"And I suppose when the war is over he'll have to get it again from

drink." It didn't make any difference whether he was a hero or not, she

told herself, she should always feel that way about him. After all, he

was probably not the first hero who had given a woman good cause to

despise him.

"Oh, I hope not!" Unlike Caroline, the housekeeper had always had a

weakness for Roane, though she disapproved of his habits. But a good

man, she often said to herself in excuse, might have bad habits, just as

a bad man might have good ones. The Lord would have to find something

else to judge people by at the day of reckoning. "He is the only man

I've ever known who could see through Angelica," she concluded after a

pause.

"He began early. She always got everything he wanted when they were

children. I've heard him say so."

"Well, I wrote to him about her the other day. Did I tell you I'd heard

from Cousin Fanny Baylor, who has been with her in Chicago?"

"No, you didn't tell me. How long ago was it?"

"It couldn't have been more than three weeks. She wrote me that Angelica

was only the wreck of herself, and that the operation was really much

more serious than we had ever been told. The doctor said there was no

hope of any permanent cure, though she might linger on, as an invalid,

for a good many years."

"And does she know? Mrs. Blackburn, I mean?"

"They wouldn't tell her. Cousin Fanny said the doctors and nurses had

all been so careful to keep it from her, and that the surgeon who

operated said he could not strike hope out of Angelica's heart by

telling her. Angelica has shown the most beautiful spirit, she wrote,

and everybody in the hospital thought her perfectly lovely. She left

there some months ago, and, of course, she believed that she was going

to get well in time. It's funny, isn't it, that the doctor who is

attending her now should be so crazy about her? Cousin Fanny says he is

one of the most distinguished men in Chicago, but it sounds to me very

much as if he were the sort of fool that Alan Wythe was."

"Could the war have changed her? Perhaps she is different now since Alan

Wythe was killed?"

Mrs. Timberlake met this with a sound that was between a sniff and a

snort. "I expect it's only in books that war, or anything else, makes

people over in a minute like that. In real life women like Angelica

don't get converted, or if they do, it doesn't last overnight. You can't

raise a thunderstorm in a soap bubble. No, Angelica will go on until she

dies being exactly what she has always been, and people will go on until

she dies and afterwards, believing that she is different. I reckon it

would take more than a world war, it would take a universal cataclysm,

to change Angelica."

For a time they drove on in silence, and when the housekeeper spoke

again it was in a less positive tone. "It wouldn't surprise me if she

was sorry now that she ever left David."

Caroline started. "Do you mean she would want to come back?"

"It wouldn't surprise me," Mrs. Timberlake repeated firmly.

"Then she didn't get the divorce?"

"No, she didn't get it, and there wouldn't be any use in her beginning

all over again, now that Alan is dead. If she is really as ill as they

say, I reckon she'd be more comfortable at Briarlay--even if that doctor

out yonder is crazy about her."

"Well, she could find one here who would be just as crazy." There was an

accent of bitterness in Caroline's voice.

"Oh, yes, she wouldn't have to worry about that. The only thing that

would seem to stand in her way is David, and I don't know that she has

ever paid much attention to him."

"Not even as an obstacle. But how can she come back if he doesn't want

her?" It really appeared a problem to Caroline.

"Oh, she'll make him want her--or try to----"

"Do you think she can?"

Mrs. Timberlake pondered the question. "No, I don't believe that she

can, but she can make him feel sorry for her, and with David that would

be half the battle."

"That and Letty, I suppose."

"Yes, she has been writing to Letty very often, and her letters are so

sweet that the child has begun to ask when she is coming home. You know

how easily children forget?"

Caroline sighed under her breath. "Oh, I know--but, even then, how could

Mr. Blackburn?"

"He wouldn't forget. If he thought it was right, he would do it if it

killed him, but he would remember till his dying day. That's how David

is made. He is like a rock about his duty, and I sometimes think

feelings don't count with him at all."

"Yet he did love her once."

"Yes, he loved her once--and, of course," she amended suddenly,

reverting to the traditional formula, "Nobody believes that Angelica

ever did anything really wrong."

For the rest of the long drive they sat in silence; and it seemed to

Caroline, while the car turned into the lane and ran the last half mile

to the house, that time had stopped and she was back again in the

October afternoon when she had first come to Briarlay. It was no longer

a hundred years ago. In the midst of the June foliage--the soft green of

the leaves, the emerald green of the grass, the dark olive green of the

junipers--in the midst of the wonderful brightness and richness of

summer--she was enveloped, as if by a drifting fragrance, in the

atmosphere of that day in autumn. It came to life not as a memory, but

as a moment that existed, outside of time, in eternity. It was here,

around, within, and above her, a fact like any other fact; yet she

perceived it, not through her senses, but through an intuitive

recognition to which she could not give a name. Under the summer sky she

saw again the elm leaves falling slowly; she approached again the red

walls in the glimmer of sunset; and she felt again the divine certainty

that the house contained for her the whole measure of human experience.

Then the car stopped; the door opened; and the scene faded like the

vision of a clairvoyant. Imagination, nothing more! She had stepped from

the dream into the actuality, and out of the actuality she heard Mrs.

Timberlake's dry tones remarking that David had not come home from the

office.

"Let me go to Letty. I should like to see Letty at once," said

Caroline.

"Then run straight upstairs to the night nursery. I know she will be

almost out of her head with joy."

Moses had opened the front door, and as Caroline entered, she glanced

quickly about her, trying to discover if there had been any changes. But

the house was unaltered. It was like a greenhouse from which the rarest

blossom had been removed, leaving still a subtle and penetrating

perfume. All the profusion of detail, the dubious taste, the warmth of

colour, and the lavishness of decoration, were still there. From the

drawing-room she caught the sheen of pink silk, and she imagined for an

instant that Angelica's fair head drooped, like a golden lily, among the

surroundings she had chosen. There was a lack of discrimination, she saw

now even more plainly than on that first afternoon, but there was an

abundance of dramatic effect. One might imagine one's self in any

character--even the character of an angel--with a background like that!

As she drew near to the nursery door she heard Letty's voice exclaiming

excitedly, "There's Miss Meade, mammy, I hear Miss Meade coming!" Then

Mammy Riah opened the door, and the next minute the child was stretching

out her arms and crying with pleasure.

"I asked father to send for you," she said, "I told him you could make

me well faster than Miss Bradley." She appeared to Caroline to have

grown unnaturally tall and thin, like the picture of Alice in Wonderland

they used to laugh over together. Her face was curiously transparent and

"peaked," as Mrs. Timberlake had said, and the flush of fever could not

disguise the waxen look of the skin. In her straight little nightgown,

which was fastened close at the throat, and with the big blue bow on

the top of her smooth brown head, she looked so wistful and pathetic

that she brought a lump to Caroline's throat. Was it any wonder that

Blackburn was anxious when she gazed up at him like that?

"I want to hurry up and get well, Miss Meade," she began, "because it

makes father so unhappy when I am sick. It really hurts father

dreadfully."

"But you're getting well. There isn't much the matter, is there, mammy?"

"She'd be jes ez peart ez I is, ef'n Miss Matty 'ould quit pokin' physic

down 'er thoat. Dar ain' nuttin' else in de worl' de matter wid 'er.

Whut you reckon Miss Matty know about hit? Ain't she done been teckin'

physic day in en day out sence befo' de flood, en ain't she all

squinched up, en jes ez yaller ez a punkin, now?"

"I don't mind the medicine if it will make me well," said the child.

"And you take what the doctor gives you too?"

"Oh, yes, I take that too. Between them," she added with a sigh, "there

is a great deal to take."

"It is because you are growing so fast. You are a big girl now."

Letty laughed. "Father doesn't want me to get much taller. He doesn't

want me to be tall when I'm grown up--but I can't help it, if it keeps

up. Do you think I've grown any since the last time I measured, Mammy

Riah?"

"Naw, honey, dat you ain't. You ain' growed a winch."

"She means an inch," said Letty. "Some people can't understand her. Even

father can't sometimes, but I always can." Then drawing Caroline down

on the bed, she began stroking her arm with a soft caressing touch. "Do

you suppose mother will come back now that you have?" she asked. "When

you are here she wouldn't have so much trouble. She used to say that you

took trouble off her."

"Perhaps she will. You would like to see her, darling?"

The child thought earnestly for a moment. "I'd like to see her," she

answered, "she is so pretty."

"It would make you happier if she came back?"

A smile, which was like the wise smile of an old person, flickered over

Letty's features. "Wasn't it funny?" she said. "Father asked me that

this morning."

A tremor shook Caroline's heart. "And what did you tell him?"

"I told him I'd like her to come back if she wanted to very badly. It

hurts mother so not to do what she wants to do. It makes her cry."

"She says she wants to come back?"

"I think she wants to see me. Her letters are very sad. They sound as if

she wanted to see me very much, don't they mammy? Somebody has to read

them to me because I can read only plain writing. How long will it be,

Miss Meade, before I can read any kind, even the sort where the letters

all look just alike and go right into one another?"

"Soon, dear. You are getting on beautifully. Now I'll run into my room,

and put on my uniform. You like me in uniform, don't you?"

"I like you any way," answered Letty politely. "You always look so

fresh, just like a sparkling shower, Cousin Daisy says. She means the

sort of shower you have in summer when the sun shines on the rain."

Going into her room, Caroline bathed her face in cold water, and brushed

her hair until it rolled in a shining curve back from her forehead. She

was just slipping into her uniform when there was a knock at the door,

and Mrs. Timberlake said, without looking in,

"David has come home, and he has asked for you. Will you go down to the

library?"

"In one minute. I am ready." Her voice was clear and firm; but, as she

left the room and passed slowly down the staircase, by the copy of the

Sistine Madonna, by the ivory walls of the hall and the pink walls of

the drawing-room, she understood how the women felt who rode in the

tumbril to the guillotine. It was the hardest hour of her life, and she

must summon all the courage of her spirit to meet it. Then she

remembered her father's saying, that after the worst had happened, one

began to take things easier, and an infusion of strength flowed from her

mind into her heart and her limbs. If the worst was before her now, in a

little while it would be over--in a little while she could pass on to

hospital wards, and the sounds of the battlefield, and the external

horrors that would release her from the torment of personal things.

The door of the library was open, and Blackburn stood in the faint

sunshine by the window--in the very spot where he had stood on the night

when she had gone to tell him that Angelica had ordered her car to go to

the tableaux. As she entered, he crossed the room and held her hand for

an instant; then, turning together, they passed through the window, and

out on the brick terrace. All the way down the stairs she had wondered

what she should say to him in the beginning; but now, while they stood

there in the golden light, high above the June splendour of the rose

garden, she said only,

"Oh, how lovely it is! How lovely!"

He was looking at her closely. "You are working too hard. Your eyes are

tired."

"I must go on working. What is there in the world except work?" Though

she tried to speak brightly, there was a ripple of sadness in her voice.

Her eyes were on the garden, and it seemed to her that it blazed

suddenly with an intolerable beauty--a beauty that hurt her quivering

senses like sound. All the magic loveliness of the roses, all the

reflected wonder and light and colour of the sunset, appeared to mingle

and crash through her brain, like the violent crescendo of some

triumphant music. She had not wanted colour; she had attuned her life to

grey days and quiet backgrounds, and the stark forms of things that were

without warmth or life. But beauty, she felt, was unendurable--beauty

was what she had not reckoned with in her world.

"You are going to France?" he asked.

"I am leaving for camp next week. That means France, I hope."

"Until the end of the war?"

"Until the end--or as long as I hold out. I shall not give up."

For the first time she had turned to look at him, and as she raised her

lashes a veil of dry, scorching pain gathered before her eyes. He looked

older, he looked changed, and, as Mrs. Timberlake had said, he looked as

if he had suffered. The energy, the force which had always seemed to her

dynamic, was still there in his keen brown face, in his muscular

figure; only when he smiled did she notice that the youth in his eyes

had passed into bitterness--not the bitterness of ineffectual rebellion,

but the bitterness that accepts life on its own terms, and conquers.

"When I parted from you last autumn," he said suddenly, "I was full of

hope. I could look ahead with confidence, and with happiness. I felt, in

a way, that the worst was over for both of us--that the future would be

better and richer. I never looked forward to life with more trust than I

did then," he added, as if the memory of the past were forcing the words

out of him.

"And I, also," she answered, with her sincere and earnest gaze on his

face, "I believed, and I hoped."

He looked away from her over the red and white roses. "It is different

now. I can see nothing for myself--nothing for my own life. Where hope

was there is only emptiness."

The sunset was reflected in the shining light of her eyes. "Life can

never be empty for me while I have your friendship and can think of

you."

By the glow in his face she knew that her words had moved him; yet he

spoke, after a moment, as if he had not heard them. "It is only fair

that you should know the truth," he said slowly and gravely, "that you

should know that I have cared for you, and cared, I think, in the way

you would wish me to. Nothing in my life has been more genuine than this

feeling. I have tested it in the last year, and I know that it is as

real as myself. You have been not only an emotion in my heart--you have

been a thought in my mind--every minute--through everything----" He

stopped, and still without turning his eyes on her, went on more

rapidly, "As a lover I might always have been a failure. There have

been so many other things. Life has had a way of crowding out emotion to

make room for other problems and responsibilities. I am telling you this

now because we are parting--perhaps for a time, perhaps for ever. The

end no one can see----"

Beyond the rose garden, in one of the pointed red cedars down in the

meadow, a thrush was singing; and it seemed to her, while she listened,

that the song was in her own heart as well as in the bird's--that it was

pouring from her soul in a rapture of wonder and delight.

"I can never be unhappy again," she answered. "The memory of this will

be enough. I can never be unhappy again."

From the cedar, which rose olive black against the golden disc of the

sun, the bird sang of hope and love and the happiness that is longer

than grief.

"The end no one can see," he said, and--it may have been only because of

the singing bird in her heart--she felt that the roughness of pain had

passed out of his voice. Then, before she could reply, he asked

hurriedly, "Has Letty spoken to you of her mother?"

"Yes, she talked of her the little while that I saw her."

"You think the child would be happier if she were here?"

For an instant she hesitated. "I think," she replied at last, "that it

would be fairer to the child--especially when she is older."

"Her mother writes to her."

"Yes. I think Letty feels that she wishes to come home."

The bird had stopped singing. Lonely, silent, still as the coming night,

the cedar rose in a darkening spire against the afterglow.

"For us there can be no possible life together," he added presently. "We

should be strangers as we have been for years. She writes me that she

has been ill--that there was a serious operation----"

"Have the doctors told her the truth?"

"I think not. She knows only that she does not regain her strength, that

she still suffers pain at times. Because of this it may be easier."

"You mean easier because you pity her? That I can understand. Pity makes

anything possible."

"I am sorry for her, yes--but pity would not be strong enough to make me

let her come back. There is something else."

"There is the child."

"The child, of course. Letty's wish would mean a great deal, but I doubt

if that would be strong enough. There is still something else."

"I know," she said, "you feel that it is right--that you must do it

because of that."

He shook his head. "I have tried to be honest. It is that, and yet it is

not that alone. I wonder if I can make you understand?"

"Has there ever been a time when I did not understand?"

"God bless you, no. And I feel that you will understand now--that you

alone--you only among the people who know me, will really understand."

For a time he was silent, and when at last he went on, it was in a voice

from which all emotion had faded: "Pity might move me, but pity could

not drive me to do a thing that will ruin my life--while it lasts.

Letty's good would weigh more with me; but can I be sure--can you, or

any one else, be sure that it is really for Letty's good? The doubt in

this could so easily be turned into an excuse--an evasion. No, the

reason that brings me to it is larger, broader, deeper, and more

impersonal than any of these. It is an idea rather than a fact. If I do

it, it will be not because of anything that has happened at Briarlay; it

will be because of things that have happened in France. It will be

because of my year of loneliness and thought, and because of the spirit

of sacrifice that surrounded me. If one's ideal, if one's country--if

the national life, is worth dying for--then surely it is worth living

for. If it deserves the sacrifice of all the youth of the world--then

surely it deserves every other sacrifice. Our young men have died for

liberty, and the least that we older ones can do is to make that liberty

a thing for which a man may lay down his life unashamed."

The emotion had returned now; and she felt, when he went on again, that

she was listening to the throbbing heart of the man.

"The young have given their future for the sake of a belief," he said

slowly, "for the belief that civilization is better than barbarism, that

humanity is better than savagery, that democracy has something finer and

nobler to give mankind than has autocracy. They died believing in

America, and America, unless she is false to her dead, must keep that

faith untarnished. If she lowers her standards of personal

responsibility, if she turns liberty into lawlessness, if she makes

herself unworthy of that ultimate sacrifice--the sacrifice of her

best--then spiritual, if not physical, defeat must await her. The

responsibility is yours and mine. It belongs to the individual

American, and it cannot be laid on the peace table, or turned over to

the President. There was never a leader yet that was great enough to

make a great nation."

As he paused, she lifted her eyes, and looked into his without

answering. It was the unseen that guided him, she knew. It would be

always the unseen. That was the law of his nature, and she would accept

it now, and in the future. "I understand," she said, simply, after a

moment.

"It is because you understand," he answered, "because I can trust you to

understand, that I am speaking to you like this, from my heart. My dear,

this was what I meant when I wrote you that nationality is nothing for

personality is everything. Our democracy is in the making. It is an

experiment, not an achievement; and it will depend, not on the size of

its navy, but on the character of its citizens, whether or not it

becomes a failure. There must be unselfish patriotism; there must be

sacrifice for the general good--a willing, instead of a forced,

sacrifice. There must be these things, and there must be, also, the

feeling that the laws are not for the particular case, but for the

abstract class, not for the one, but for the many--that a democracy

which has been consecrated by sacrifice must not stoop, either in its

citizens, or in its Government, to the pursuit of selfish ends. All this

must be a matter of personal choice rather than of necessity. I have

seen death faced with gladness for a great cause, and, though I am not

always strong enough to keep the vision, I have learned that life may be

faced, if not with gladness, at least with courage and patience, for a

great ideal----"

His voice broke off suddenly, and they were both silent. The sun had

gone down long ago, and it seemed to Caroline that the approaching

twilight was flooded with memories. She was ready for the sacrifice; she

could meet the future; and at the moment she felt that, because of the

hour she had just lived, the future would not be empty. Whatever it

might bring, she knew that she could face it with serenity--that she was

not afraid of life, that she would live it in the whole, not in the

part--in its pain as well as in its joy, in its denial as well as in its

fulfilment, in its emptiness as well as in its abundance. The great

thing was that she should not fall short of what he expected of her,

that she should be strong when he needed strength.

She looked up at him, hesitating before she answered; and while she

hesitated, there was the sound of hurrying footsteps in the library, and

Mrs. Timberlake came through the room to the terrace.

"David," she called in a startled voice. "Did you know that Angelica was

coming back?"

He answered without turning. "Yes, I knew it."

"She is here now--in the hall. Did you expect her so soon?"

"Not so soon. She telegraphed me last night."

"Mrs. Mallow met her at the Hot Springs yesterday, and told her that

Letty was ill. That brought her down. She has been at the Hot Springs

for several weeks."

Blackburn had grown white; but, without speaking, he turned away from

the terrace, and walked through the library to the hall. Near the door

Angelica was leaning on the arm of a nurse, and as he approached, she

broke away from the support, and took a single step forward.

"Oh, David, I want my child! You cannot keep me away from my child!"

She was pale and worn, her face was transparent and drawn, and there

were hollows under the grey velvet of her eyes; but she was still

lovely--she was still unconquerable. The enchanting lines had not

altered. Though her colour had been blotted out, as if by the single

stroke of a brush, the radiance of her expression was unchanged, and

when she smiled her face looked again as if the light of heaven had

fallen over it. Never, not even in the days of her summer splendour, had

Caroline felt so strongly the invincible power of her charm and her

pathos.

"No, I cannot keep you away from her," Blackburn answered gently, and at

his words Angelica moved toward the staircase.

"Help me, Cousin Matty. Take me to her." Abandoning the nurse, she

caught Mrs. Timberlake's arm, clinging to her with all her strength,

while the two ascended the stairs together.

Blackburn turned back into the library, and, for a moment, Caroline was

left alone with the stranger.

"Have you known Mrs. Blackburn long?" asked the other nurse, "she must

have been so very beautiful."

"For some time. Yes, she was beautiful."

"Of course, she is lovely still. It is the kind of face that nothing

could make ugly--but I keep wondering what she was like before she was

so dreadfully thin. You can tell just to look at her what a sad life she

has had, though she bears it so wonderfully, and there isn't a word of

bitterness in anything that she says. I never knew a lovelier nature."

She passed up the stairs after the others, her arms filled with

Angelica's wraps, and her plain young face enkindled with sympathy and

compassion. Clearly Angelica had found another worshipper and disciple.

Alone in the hall, Caroline looked through the library to the pale

glimmer of the terrace where Blackburn was standing. He was gazing away

from her to the rose garden, which was faintly powdered with the silver

of dusk; and while she stood there, with her answer to him still

unuttered, it seemed to her that, beyond the meadows and the river,

light was shining on the far horizon.

THE END

[Illustration: colophon]

THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS

GARDEN CITY, N. Y.