"Have you worked out a plan?" he asked, laying down his book. "It

occurred to me that it would be rather a good idea if we began with a

sort of festivity for the kids at the day nursery. You could take Cicely

there early, and I could bring out Mr. Langhope after luncheon. The

whole performance would probably tire him too much."

Justine listened with suspended thread. "Yes--that seems a good plan."

"Will you see about the details, then? You know it's only a week off."

"Yes, I know." She hesitated, and then took the spring. "I ought to

tell you John--that I--I think I may not be here...."

He raised his head abruptly, and she saw the blood mount under his fair

skin. "Not be here?" he exclaimed.

She met his look as steadily as she could. "I think of going away for

awhile."

"Going away? Where? What is the matter--are you not well?"

There was her pretext--he had found it for her! Why should she not

simply plead ill-health? Afterward she would find a way of elaborating

the details and making them plausible. But suddenly, as she was about to

speak, there came to her the feeling which, up to one fatal moment in

their lives, had always ruled their intercourse--the feeling that there

must be truth, and absolute truth, between them. Absolute, indeed, it

could never be again, since he must never know of the condition exacted

by Mr. Langhope; but that, at the moment, seemed almost a secondary

motive compared to the deeper influences that were inexorably forcing

them apart. At any rate, she would trump up no trivial excuse for the

step she had resolved on; there should be truth, if not the whole truth,

in this last decisive hour between them.

"Yes; I am quite well--at least my body is," she said quietly. "But I am

tired, perhaps; my mind has been going round too long in the same

circle." She paused for a brief space, and then, raising her head, and

looking him straight in the eyes: "Has it not been so with you?" she

asked.

The question seemed to startle Amherst. He rose from his chair and took

a few steps toward the hearth, where a small fire was crumbling into

embers. He turned his back to it, resting an arm on the mantel-shelf;

then he said, in a somewhat unsteady tone: "I thought we had agreed not

to speak of all that again."

Justine shook her head with a fugitive half-smile. "I made no such

agreement. And besides, what is the use, when we can always hear each

other's thoughts speak, and they speak of nothing else?"

Amherst's brows darkened. "It is not so with mine," he began; but she

raised her hand with a silencing gesture.

"I know you have tried your best that it should not be so; and perhaps

you have succeeded better than I. But I am tired, horribly tired--I want

to get away from everything!"

She saw a look of pain in his eyes. He continued to lean against the

mantel-shelf, his head slightly lowered, his unseeing gaze fixed on a

remote scroll in the pattern of the carpet; then he said in a low tone:

"I can only repeat again what I have said before--that I understand why

you did what you did."

"Thank you," she answered, in the same tone.

There was another pause, for she could not trust herself to go on

speaking; and presently he asked, with a tinge of bitterness in his

voice: "That does not satisfy you?"

She hesitated. "It satisfies me as much as it does you--and no more,"

she replied at length.

He looked up hastily. "What do you mean?"

"Just what I say. We can neither of us go on living on that

understanding just at present." She rose as she spoke, and crossed over

to the hearth. "I want to go back to my nursing--to go out to Michigan,

to a town where I spent a few months the year before I first came to

Hanaford. I have friends there, and can get work easily. And you can

tell people that I was ill and needed a change."

It had been easier to say than she had imagined, and her voice held its

clear note till the end; but when she had ceased, the whole room began

to reverberate with her words, and through the clashing they made in her

brain she felt a sudden uncontrollable longing that they should provoke

in him a cry of protest, of resistance. Oh, if he refused to let her

go--if he caught her to him, and defied the world to part them--what

then of her pledge to Mr. Langhope, what then of her resolve to pay the

penalty alone?

But in the space of a heart-beat she knew that peril--that longed-for

peril!--was past. Her husband had remained silent--he neither moved

toward her nor looked at her; and she felt in every slackening nerve

that in the end he would let her go.

XL

MR. LANGHOPE, tossing down a note on Mrs. Ansell's drawing-room table,

commanded imperiously: "Read that!"

She set aside her tea-cup, and looked up, not at the note, but into his

face, which was crossed by one of the waves of heat and tremulousness

that she was beginning to fear for him. Mr. Langhope had changed greatly

in the last three months; and as he stood there in the clear light of

the June afternoon it came to her that he had at last suffered the

sudden collapse which is the penalty of youth preserved beyond its time.

"What is it?" she asked, still watching him as she put out her hand for

the letter.

"Amherst writes to remind me of my promise to take Cicely to Hanaford

next week, for her birthday."

"Well--it was a promise, wasn't it?" she rejoined, running her eyes over

the page.

"A promise--yes; but made before.... Read the note--you'll see there's

no reference to his wife. For all I know, she'll be there to receive

us."

"But that was a promise too."

"That neither Cicely nor I should ever set eyes on her? Yes. But why

should she keep it? I was a fool that day--she fooled me as she's fooled

us all! But you saw through it from the beginning--you said at once that

she'd never leave him."

Mrs. Ansell reflected. "I said that before I knew all the circumstances.

Now I think differently."

"You think she still means to go?"

She handed the letter back to him. "I think this is to tell you so."

"This?" He groped for his glasses, dubiously scanning the letter again.

"Yes. And what's more, if you refuse to go she'll have every right to

break her side of the agreement."

Mr. Langhope sank into a chair, steadying himself painfully with his

stick. "Upon my soul, I sometimes think you're on her side!" he

ejaculated.

"No--but I like fair play," she returned, measuring his tea carefully

into his favourite little porcelain tea-pot.

"Fair play?"

"She's offering to do her part. It's for you to do yours now--to take

Cicely to Hanaford."

"If I find her there, I never cross Amherst's threshold again!"

Mrs. Ansell, without answering, rose and put his tea-cup on the

slender-legged table at his elbow; then, before returning to her seat,

she found the enamelled match-box and laid it by the cup. It was

becoming difficult for Mr. Langhope to guide his movements about her

small encumbered room; and he had always liked being waited on.

* * * * *

Mrs. Ansell's prognostication proved correct. When Mr. Langhope and

Cicely arrived at Hanaford they found Amherst alone to receive them. He

explained briefly that his wife had been unwell, and had gone to seek

rest and change at the house of an old friend in the west. Mr. Langhope

expressed a decent amount of regret, and the subject was dropped as if

by common consent. Cicely, however, was not so easily silenced. Poor

Bessy's uncertain fits of tenderness had produced more bewilderment than

pleasure in her sober-minded child; but the little girl's feelings and

perceptions had developed rapidly in the equable atmosphere of her

step-mother's affection. Cicely had reached the age when children put

their questions with as much ingenuity as persistence, and both Mr.

Langhope and Amherst longed for Mrs. Ansell's aid in parrying her

incessant interrogations as to the cause and length of Justine's

absence, what she had said before going, and what promise she had made

about coming back. But Mrs. Ansell had not come to Hanaford. Though it

had become a matter of habit to include her in the family pilgrimages to

the mills she had firmly maintained the plea of more urgent engagements;

and the two men, with only Cicely between them, had spent the long days

and longer evenings in unaccustomed and unmitigated propinquity.

Mr. Langhope, before leaving, thought it proper to touch tentatively on

his promise of giving Cicely to Amherst for the summer; but to his

surprise the latter, after a moment of hesitation, replied that he

should probably go to Europe for two or three months.

"To Europe? Alone?" escaped from Mr. Langhope before he had time to

weigh his words.

Amherst frowned slightly. "I have been made a delegate to the Berne

conference on the housing of factory operatives," he said at length,

without making a direct reply to the question; "and if there is nothing

to keep me at Westmore, I shall probably go out in July." He waited a

moment, and then added: "My wife has decided to spend the summer in

Michigan."

Mr. Langhope's answer was a vague murmur of assent, and Amherst turned

the talk to other matters.

* * * * *

Mr. Langhope returned to town with distinct views on the situation at

Hanaford.

"Poor devil--I'm sorry for him: he can hardly speak of her," he broke

out at once to Mrs. Ansell, in the course of their first confidential

hour together.

"Because he cares too much--he's too unhappy?"

"Because he loathes her!" Mr. Langhope brought out with emphasis.

Mrs. Ansell drew a deep sigh which made him add accusingly: "I believe

you're actually sorry!"

"Sorry?" She raised her eye-brows with a slight smile. "Should one not

always be sorry to know there's a little less love and a little more

hate in the world?"

"You'll be asking _me_ not to hate her next!"

She still continued to smile on him. "It's the haters, not the hated,

I'm sorry for," she said at length; and he flung back impatiently: "Oh,

don't let's talk of her. I sometimes feel she takes up more place in our

lives than when she was with us!"

* * * * *

Amherst went to the Berne conference in July, and spent six weeks

afterward in rapid visits to various industrial centres and model

factory villages. During his previous European pilgrimages his interest

had by no means been restricted to sociological questions: the appeal of

an old civilization, reaching him through its innumerable forms of

tradition and beauty, had roused that side of his imagination which his

work at home left untouched. But upon his present state of deep moral

commotion the spells of art and history were powerless to work. The

foundations of his life had been shaken, and the fair exterior of the

world was as vacant as a maniac's face. He could only take refuge in his

special task, barricading himself against every expression of beauty and

poetry as so many poignant reminders of a phase of life that he was

vainly trying to cast off and forget.

Even his work had been embittered to him, thrust out of its place in the

ordered scheme of things. It had cost him a hard struggle to hold fast

to his main purpose, to convince himself that his real duty lay, not in

renouncing the Westmore money and its obligations, but in carrying out

his projected task as if nothing had occurred to affect his personal

relation to it. The mere fact that such a renunciation would have been a

deliberate moral suicide, a severing once for all of every artery of

action, made it take on, at first, the semblance of an obligation, a

sort of higher duty to the abstract conception of what he owed himself.

But Justine had not erred in her forecast. Once she had passed out of

his life, it was easier for him to return to a dispassionate view of his

situation, to see, and boldly confess to himself that he saw, the still

higher duty of sticking to his task, instead of sacrificing it to any

ideal of personal disinterestedness. It was this gradual process of

adjustment that saved him from the desolating scepticism which falls on

the active man when the sources of his activity are tainted. Having

accepted his fate, having consented to see in himself merely the

necessary agent of a good to be done, he could escape from

self-questioning only by shutting himself up in the practical exigencies

of his work, closing his eyes and his thoughts to everything which had

formerly related it to a wider world, had given meaning and beauty to

life as a whole.

The return from Europe, and the taking up of the daily routine at

Hanaford, were the most difficult phases in this process of moral

adaptation.

Justine's departure had at first brought relief. He had been too sincere

with himself to oppose her wish to leave Hanaford for a time, since he

believed that, for her as well as for himself, a temporary separation

would be less painful than a continuance of their actual relation. But

as the weeks passed into months he found he was no nearer to a clear

view of his own case: the future was still dark and enigmatic. Justine's

desire to leave him had revived his unformulated distrust of her. What

could it mean but that there were thoughts within her which could not be

at rest in his presence? He had given her every proof of his wish to

forget the past, and Mr. Langhope had behaved with unequalled

magnanimity. Yet Justine's unhappiness was evident: she could not

conceal her longing to escape from the conditions her act had created.

Was it because, in reality, she was conscious of other motives than the

one she acknowledged? She had insisted, almost unfeelingly as it might

have seemed, on the abstract rightness of what she had done, on the fact

that, ideally speaking, her act could not be made less right, less

justifiable, by the special accidental consequences that had flowed from

it. Because these consequences had caught her in a web of tragic

fatality she would not be guilty of the weakness of tracing back the

disaster to any intrinsic error in her original motive. Why, then, if

this was her real, her proud attitude toward the past--and since those

about her believed in her sincerity, and accepted her justification as

valid from her point of view if not from theirs--why had she not been

able to maintain her posture, to carry on life on the terms she had

exacted from others?

A special circumstance contributed to this feeling of distrust; the

fact, namely, that Justine, a week after her departure from Hanaford,

had written to say that she could not, from that moment till her return,

consent to accept any money from Amherst. As her manner was, she put her

reasons clearly and soberly, without evasion or ambiguity.

"Since you and I," she wrote, "have always agreed in regarding the

Westmore money as a kind of wage for our services at the mills, I

cannot be satisfied to go on drawing that wage while I am unable to do

any work in return. I am sure you must feel as I do about this; and you

need have no anxiety as to the practical side of the question, since I

have enough to live on in some savings from my hospital days, which were

invested for me two years ago by Harry Dressel, and are beginning to

bring in a small return. This being the case, I feel I can afford to

interpret in any way I choose the terms of the bargain between myself

and Westmore."

On reading this, Amherst's mind had gone through the strange dual

process which now marked all his judgments of his wife. At first he had

fancied he understood her, and had felt that he should have done as she

did; then the usual reaction of distrust set in, and he asked himself

why she, who had so little of the conventional attitude toward money,

should now develop this unexpected susceptibility. And so the old

question presented itself in another shape: if she had nothing to

reproach herself for, why was it intolerable to her to live on Bessy's

money? The fact that she was doing no actual service at Westmore did not

account for her scruples--she would have been the last person to think

that a sick servant should be docked of his pay. Her reluctance could

come only from that hidden cause of compunction which had prompted her

departure, and which now forced her to sever even the merely material

links between herself and her past.

Amherst, on his return to Hanaford, had tried to find in these

considerations a reason for his deep unrest. It was his wife's course

which still cast a torturing doubt on what he had braced his will to

accept and put behind him. And he now told himself that the perpetual

galling sense of her absence was due to this uneasy consciousness of

what it meant, of the dark secrets it enveloped and held back from him.

In actual truth, every particle of his being missed her, he lacked her

at every turn. She had been at once the partner of his task, and the

_pays bleu_ into which he escaped from it; the vivifying thought which

gave meaning to the life he had chosen, yet never let him forget that

there was a larger richer life outside, to which he was rooted by deeper

and more intrinsic things than any abstract ideal of altruism. His love

had preserved his identity, saved him from shrinking into the mere

nameless unit which the social enthusiast is in danger of becoming

unless the humanitarian passion is balanced, and a little overweighed,

by a merely human one. And now this equilibrium was lost forever, and

his deepest pain lay in realizing that he could not regain it, even by

casting off Westmore and choosing the narrower but richer individual

existence that her love might once have offered. His life was in truth

one indivisible organism, not two halves artificially united. Self and

other-self were ingrown from the roots--whichever portion fate

restricted him to would be but a mutilated half-live fragment of the

whole.

Happily for him, chance made this crisis of his life coincide with a

strike at Westmore. Soon after his return to Hanaford he found himself

compelled to grapple with the hardest problem of his industrial career,

and he was carried through the ensuing three months on that tide of

swift obligatory action that sweeps the ship-wrecked spirit over so many

sunken reefs of fear and despair. The knowledge that he was better able

to deal with the question than any one who might conceivably have taken

his place--this conviction, which was presently confirmed by the

peaceable adjustment of the strike, helped to make the sense of his

immediate usefulness outbalance that other, disintegrating doubt as to

the final value of such efforts. And so he tried to settle down into a

kind of mechanical altruism, in which the reflexes of habit should take

the place of that daily renewal of faith and enthusiasm which had been

fed from the springs of his own joy.

* * * * *

The autumn came and passed into winter; and after Mr. Langhope's

re-establishment in town Amherst began to resume his usual visits to his

step-daughter.

His natural affection for the little girl had been deepened by the

unforeseen manner in which her fate had been entrusted to him. The

thought of Bessy, softened to compunction by the discovery that her love

had persisted under their apparently hopeless estrangement--this

feeling, intensified to the verge of morbidness by the circumstances

attending her death, now sought expression in a passionate devotion to

her child. Accident had, in short, created between Bessy and himself a

retrospective sympathy which the resumption of life together would have

dispelled in a week--one of the exhalations from the past that depress

the vitality of those who linger too near the grave of dead experiences.

Since Justine's departure Amherst had felt himself still more drawn to

Cicely; but his relation to the child was complicated by the fact that

she would not be satisfied as to the cause of her step-mother's absence.

Whenever Amherst came to town, her first question was for Justine; and

her memory had the precocious persistence sometimes developed in

children too early deprived of their natural atmosphere of affection.

Cicely had always been petted and adored, at odd times and by divers

people; but some instinct seemed to tell her that, of all the tenderness

bestowed on her, Justine's most resembled the all-pervading motherly

element in which the child's heart expands without ever being conscious

of its needs.

If it had been embarrassing to evade Cicely's questions in June it

became doubly so as the months passed, and the pretext of Justine's

ill-health grew more and more difficult to sustain. And in the following

March Amherst was suddenly called from Hanaford by the news that the

little girl herself was ill. Serious complications had developed from a

protracted case of scarlet fever, and for two weeks the child's fate was

uncertain. Then she began to recover, and in the joy of seeing life come

back to her, Mr. Langhope and Amherst felt as though they must not only

gratify every wish she expressed, but try to guess at those they saw

floating below the surface of her clear vague eyes.

It was noticeable to Mrs. Ansell, if not to the others, that one of

these unexpressed wishes was the desire to see her stepmother. Cicely no

longer asked for Justine; but something in her silence, or in the

gesture with which she gently put from her other offers of diversion and

companionship, suddenly struck Mrs. Ansell as more poignant than speech.

"What is it the child wants?" she asked the governess, in the course of

one of their whispered consultations; and the governess, after a

moment's hesitation, replied: "She said something about a letter she

wrote to Mrs. Amherst just before she was taken ill--about having had no

answer, I think."

"Ah--she writes to Mrs. Amherst, does she?"

The governess, evidently aware that she trod on delicate ground, tried

at once to defend herself and her pupil.

"It was my fault, perhaps. I suggested once that her little compositions

should take the form of letters--it usually interests a child more--and

she asked if they might be written to Mrs. Amherst."

"Your fault? Why should not the child write to her step-mother?" Mrs.

Ansell rejoined with studied surprise; and on the other's murmuring: "Of

course--of course----" she added haughtily: "I trust the letters were

sent?"

The governess floundered. "I couldn't say--but perhaps the nurse...."

* * * * *

That evening Cicely was less well. There was a slight return of fever,

and the doctor, hastily summoned, hinted at the possibility of too much

excitement in the sick-room.

"Excitement? There has been no excitement," Mr. Langhope protested,

quivering with the sudden renewal of fear.

"No? The child seemed nervous, uneasy. It's hard to say why, because she

is unusually reserved for her age."

The medical man took his departure, and Mr. Langhope and Mrs. Ansell

faced each other in the disarray produced by a call to arms when all

has seemed at peace.

"I shall lose her--I shall lose her!" the grandfather broke out, sinking

into his chair with a groan.

Mrs. Ansell, gathering up her furs for departure, turned on him abruptly

from the threshold.

"It's stupid, what you're doing--stupid!" she exclaimed with unwonted

vehemence.

He raised his head with a startled look. "What do you mean--what I'm

doing?"

"The child misses Justine. You ought to send for her."

Mr. Langhope's hands dropped to the arms of his chair, and he

straightened himself up with a pale flash of indignation. "You've had

moments lately----!"

"I've had moments, yes; and so have you--when the child came back to us,

and we stood there and wondered how we could keep her, tie her

fast...and in those moments I saw...saw what she wanted...and so did

you!"

Mr. Langhope turned away his head. "You're a sentimentalist!" he flung

scornfully back.

"Oh, call me any bad names you please!"

"I won't send for that woman!"

"No." She fastened her furs slowly, with the gentle deliberate movements

that no emotion ever hastened or disturbed.

"Why do you say no?" he challenged her.

"To make you contradict me, perhaps," she ventured, after looking at him

again.

"Ah----" He shifted his position, one elbow supporting his bowed head,

his eyes fixed on the ground. Presently he brought out: "Could one ask

her to come--and see the child--and go away again--for good?"

"To break the compact at your pleasure, and enter into it again for the

same reason?"

"No--no--I see." He paused, and then looked up at her suddenly. "But

what if Amherst won't have her back himself?"

"Shall I ask him?"

"I tell you he can't bear to hear her name!"

"But he doesn't know why she has left him."

Mr. Langhope gathered his brows in a frown. "Why--what on earth--what

possible difference would that make?"

Mrs. Ansell, from the doorway, shed a pitying glance on him. "Ah--if you

don't see!" she murmured.

He sank back into his seat with a groan. "Good heavens, Maria, how you

torture me! I see enough as it is--I see too much of the cursed

business!"

She paused again, and then slowly moved a step or two nearer, laying her

hand on his shoulder.

"There's one thing you've never seen yet, Henry: what Bessy herself

would do now--for the child--if she could."

He sat motionless under her light touch, his eyes on hers, till their

inmost thoughts felt for and found each other, as they still sometimes

could, through the fog of years and selfishness and worldly habit; then

he dropped his face into his hands, hiding it from her with the

instinctive shrinking of an aged grief.

XLI

AMHERST, Cicely's convalescence once assured, had been obliged to go

back to Hanaford; but some ten days later, on hearing from Mrs. Ansell

that the little girl's progress was less rapid than had been hoped, he

returned to his father-in-law's for a Sunday.

He came two days after the talk recorded in the last chapter--a talk of

which Mrs. Ansell's letter to him had been the direct result. She had

promised Mr. Langhope that, in writing to Amherst, she would not go

beyond the briefest statement of fact; and she had kept her word,

trusting to circumstances to speak for her.

Mrs. Ansell, during Cicely's illness, had formed the habit of dropping

in on Mr. Langhope at the tea hour instead of awaiting him in her own

drawing-room; and on the Sunday in question she found him alone.

Beneath his pleasure in seeing her, which had grown more marked as his

dependence on her increased, she at once discerned traces of recent

disturbance; and her first question was for Cicely.

He met it with a discouraged gesture. "No great change--Amherst finds

her less well than when he was here before."

"He's upstairs with her?"

"Yes--she seems to want him."

Mrs. Ansell seated herself in silence behind the tea-tray, of which she

was now recognized as the officiating priestess. As she drew off her

long gloves, and mechanically straightened the row of delicate old cups,

Mr. Langhope added with an effort: "I've spoken to him--told him what

you said."

She looked up quickly.

"About the child's wish," he continued. "About her having written to his

wife. It seems her last letters have not been answered."

He paused, and Mrs. Ansell, with her usual calm precision, proceeded to

measure the tea into the fluted Georgian tea-pot. She could be as

reticent in approval as in reprehension, and not for the world would she

have seemed to claim any share in the turn that events appeared to be

taking. She even preferred the risk of leaving her old friend to add

half-reproachfully: "I told Amherst what you and the nurse thought."

"Yes?"

"That Cicely pines for his wife. I put it to him in black and white."

The words came out on a deep strained breath, and Mrs. Ansell faltered:

"Well?"

"Well--he doesn't know where she is himself."

"Doesn't _know_?"

"They're separated--utterly separated. It's as I told you: he could

hardly name her."

Mrs. Ansell had unconsciously ceased her ministrations, letting her

hands fall on her knee while she brooded in blank wonder on her

companion's face.

"I wonder what reason she could have given him?" she murmured at length.

"For going? He loathes her, I tell you!"

"Yes--but _how did she make him_?"

He struck his hand violently on the arm of his chair. "Upon my soul, you

seem to forget!"

"No." She shook her head with a half smile. "I simply remember more than

you do."

"What more?" he began with a flush of anger; but she raised a quieting

hand.

"What does all that matter--if, now that we need her, we can't get her?"

He made no answer, and she returned to the dispensing of his tea; but as

she rose to put the cup in his hand he asked, half querulously: "You

think it's going to be very bad for the child, then?"

Mrs. Ansell smiled with the thin edge of her lips. "One can hardly set

the police after her----!"

"No; we're powerless," he groaned in assent.

As the cup passed between them she dropped her eyes to his with a quick

flash of interrogation; but he sat staring moodily before him, and she

moved back to the sofa without a word.

* * * * *

On the way downstairs she met Amherst descending from Cicely's room.

Since the early days of his first marriage there had always been, on

Amherst's side, a sense of obscure antagonism toward Mrs. Ansell. She

was almost the embodied spirit of the world he dreaded and disliked: her

serenity, her tolerance, her adaptability, seemed to smile away and

disintegrate all the high enthusiasms, the stubborn convictions, that he

had tried to plant in the shifting sands of his married life. And now

that Bessy's death had given her back the attributes with which his

fancy had originally invested her, he had come to regard Mrs. Ansell as

embodying the evil influences that had come between himself and his

wife.

Mrs. Ansell was probably not unaware of the successive transitions of

feeling which had led up to this unflattering view; but her life had

been passed among petty rivalries and animosities, and she had the

patience and adroitness of the spy in a hostile camp.

She and Amherst exchanged a few words about Cicely; then she exclaimed,

with a glance through the panes of the hall door: "But I must be

off--I'm on foot, and the crossings appal me after dark."

He could do no less, at that, than offer to guide her across the perils

of Fifth Avenue; and still talking of Cicely, she led him down the

thronged thoroughfare till her own corner was reached, and then her own

door; turning there to ask, as if by an afterthought: "Won't you come

up? There's one thing more I want to say."

A shade of reluctance crossed his face, which, as the vestibule light

fell on it, looked hard and tired, like a face set obstinately against a

winter gale; but he murmured a word of assent, and followed her into the

shining steel cage of the lift.

In her little drawing-room, among the shaded lamps and bowls of spring

flowers, she pushed a chair forward, settled herself in her usual corner

of the sofa, and said with a directness that seemed an echo of his own

tone: "I asked you to come up because I want to talk to you about Mr.

Langhope."

Amherst looked at her in surprise. Though his father-in-law's health had

been more or less unsatisfactory for the last year, all their concern,

of late, had been for Cicely.

"You think him less well?" he enquired.

She waited to draw off and smooth her gloves, with one of the

deliberate gestures that served to shade and supplement her speech.

"I think him extremely unhappy."

Amherst moved uneasily in his seat. He did not know where she meant the

talk to lead them, but he guessed that it would be over painful places,

and he saw no reason why he should be forced to follow her.

"You mean that he's still anxious about Cicely?"

"Partly that--yes." She paused. "The child will get well, no doubt; but

she is very lonely. She needs youth, heat, light. Mr. Langhope can't

give her those, or even a semblance of them; and it's an art I've lost

the secret of," she added with her shadowy smile.

Amherst's brows darkened. "I realize all she has lost----"

Mrs. Ansell glanced up at him quickly. "She is twice motherless," she

said.

The blood rose to his neck and temples, and he tightened his hand on the

arm of his chair. But it was a part of Mrs. Ansell's expertness to know

when such danger signals must be heeded and when they might be ignored,

and she went on quietly: "It's the question of the future that is

troubling Mr. Langhope. After such an illness, the next months of

Cicely's life should be all happiness. And money won't buy the kind she

needs: one can't pick out the right companion for such a child as one

can match a ribbon. What she wants is spontaneous affection, not the

most superlative manufactured article. She wants the sort of love that

Justine gave her."

It was the first time in months that Amherst had heard his wife's name

spoken outside of his own house. No one but his mother mentioned Justine

to him now; and of late even his mother had dropped her enquiries and

allusions, prudently acquiescing in the habit of silence which his own

silence had created about him. To hear the name again--the two little

syllables which had been the key of life to him, and now shook him as

the turning of a rusted lock shakes a long-closed door--to hear her name

spoken familiarly, affectionately, as one speaks of some one who may

come into the room the next moment--gave him a shock that was half pain,

and half furtive unacknowledged joy. Men whose conscious thoughts are

mostly projected outward, on the world of external activities, may be

more moved by such a touch on the feelings than those who are

perpetually testing and tuning their emotional chords. Amherst had

foreseen from the first that Mrs. Ansell might mean to speak of his

wife; but though he had intended, if she did so, to cut their talk

short, he now felt himself irresistibly constrained to hear her out.

Mrs. Ansell, having sped her shaft, followed its flight through lowered

lashes, and saw that it had struck a vulnerable point; but she was far

from assuming that the day was won.

"I believe," she continued, "that Mr. Langhope has said something of

this to you already, and my only excuse for speaking is that I

understood he had not been successful in his appeal."

No one but Mrs. Ansell--and perhaps she knew it--could have pushed so

far beyond the conventional limits of discretion without seeming to

overstep them by a hair; and she had often said, when pressed for the

secret of her art, that it consisted simply in knowing the pass-word.

That word once spoken, she might have added, the next secret was to give

the enemy no time for resistance; and though she saw the frown reappear

between Amherst's eyes, she went on, without heeding it: "I entreat you,

Mr. Amherst, to let Cicely see your wife."

He reddened again, and pushed back his chair, as if to rise.

"No--don't break off like that! Let me say a word more. I know your

answer to Mr. Langhope--that you and Justine are no longer together. But

I thought of you as a man to sink your personal relations at such a

moment as this."

"To sink them?" he repeated vaguely: and she went on: "After all, what

difference does it make?"

"What difference?" He stared in unmitigated wonder, and then answered,

with a touch of irony: "It might at least make the difference of my

being unwilling to ask a favour of her."

Mrs. Ansell, at this, raised her eyes and let them rest full on his.

"Because she has done you so great a one already?"

He stared again, sinking back automatically into his chair. "I don't

understand you."

"No." She smiled a little, as if to give herself time. "But I mean that

you shall. If I were a man I suppose I couldn't, because a man's code of

honour is such a clumsy cast-iron thing. But a woman's, luckily, can be

cut over--if she's clever--to fit any new occasion; and in this case I

should be willing to reduce mine to tatters if necessary."

Amherst's look of bewilderment deepened. "What is it that I don't

understand?" he asked at length, in a low voice.

"Well--first of all, why Mr. Langhope had the right to ask you to send

for your wife."

"The right?"

"You don't recognize such a right on his part?"

"No--why should I?"

"Supposing she had left you by his wish?"

"His wish? _His----?_"

He was on his feet now, gazing at her blindly, while the solid world

seemed to grow thin about him. Her next words reduced it to a mist.

"My poor Amherst--why else, on earth, should she have left you?"

She brought it out clearly, in her small chiming tones; and as the sound

travelled toward him it seemed to gather momentum, till her words rang

through his brain as if every incomprehensible incident in the past had

suddenly boomed forth the question. Why else, indeed, should she have

left him? He stood motionless for a while; then he approached Mrs.

Ansell and said: "Tell me."

She drew farther back into her corner of the sofa, waving him to a seat

beside her, as though to bring his inquisitory eyes on a level where her

own could command them; but he stood where he was, unconscious of her

gesture, and merely repeating: "Tell me."

She may have said to herself that a woman would have needed no farther

telling; but to him she only replied, slanting her head up to his: "To

spare you and himself pain--to keep everything, between himself and you,

as it had been before you married her."

He dropped down beside her at that, grasping the back of the sofa as if

he wanted something to clutch and throttle. The veins swelled in his

temples, and as he pushed back his tossed hair Mrs. Ansell noticed for

the first time how gray it had grown on the under side.

"And he asked this of my wife--he accepted it?'"

"Haven't _you_ accepted it?"

"I? How could I guess her reasons--how could I imagine----?"

Mrs. Ansell raised her brows a hair's breadth at that. "I don't know.

But as a fact, he didn't ask--it was she who offered, who forced it on

him, even!"

"Forced her going on him?"

"In a sense, yes; by making it appear that _you_ felt as he did

about--about poor Bessy's death: that the thought of what had happened

at that time was as abhorrent to you as to him--that _she_ was as

abhorrent to you. No doubt she foresaw that, had she permitted the least

doubt on that point, there would have been no need of her leaving you,

since the relation between yourself and Mr. Langhope would have been

altered--destroyed...."

"Yes. I expected that--I warned her of it. But how did she make him

think----?"

"How can I tell? To begin with, I don't know your real feeling. For all

I know she was telling the truth--and Mr. Langhope of course thought she

was."

"That I abhorred her? Oh----" he broke out, on his feet in an instant.

"Then why----?"

"Why did I let her leave me?" He strode across the room, as his habit

was in moments of agitation, turning back to her again before he

answered. "Because I _didn't_ know--didn't know anything! And because

her insisting on going away like that, without any explanation, made me

feel...imagine there was...something she didn't _want_ me to

know...something she was afraid of not being able to hide from me if we

stayed together any longer."

"Well--there was: the extent to which she loved you."

Mrs. Ansell; her hands clasped on her knee, her gaze holding his with a

kind of visionary fixity, seemed to reconstruct the history of his past,

bit by bit, with the words she was dragging out of him.

"I see it--I see it all now," she went on, with a repressed fervour that

he had never divined in her. "It was the only solution for her, as well

as for the rest of you. The more she showed her love, the more it would

have cast a doubt on her motive...the greater distance she would have

put between herself and you. And so she showed it in the only way that

was safe for both of you, by taking herself away and hiding it in her

heart; and before going, she secured your peace of mind, your future. If

she ruined anything, she rebuilt the ruin. Oh, she paid--she paid in

full!"

Justine had paid, yes--paid to the utmost limit of whatever debt toward

society she had contracted by overstepping its laws. And her resolve to

discharge the debt had been taken in a flash, as soon as she had seen

that man can commit no act alone, whether for good or evil. The extent

to which Amherst's fate was involved in hers had become clear to her

with his first word of reassurance, of faith in her motive. And

instantly a plan for releasing him had leapt full-formed into her mind,

and had been carried out with swift unflinching resolution. As he forced

himself, now, to look down the suddenly illuminated past to the weeks

which had elapsed between her visit to Mr. Langhope and her departure

from Hanaford, he wondered not so much at her swiftness of resolve as at

her firmness in carrying out her plan--and he saw, with a blinding flash

of insight, that it was in her love for him that she had found her

strength.

In all moments of strong mental tension he became totally unconscious of

time and place, and he now remained silent so long, his hands clasped

behind him, his eyes fixed on an indeterminate point in space, that Mrs.

Ansell at length rose and laid a questioning touch on his arm.

"It's not true that you don't know where she is?" His face contracted.

"At this moment I don't. Lately she has preferred...not to write...."

"But surely you must know how to find her?"

He tossed back his hair with an energetic movement. "I should find her

if I didn't know how!"

They stood confronted in a gaze of silent intensity, each penetrating

farther into the mind of the other than would once have seemed possible

to either one; then Amherst held out his hand abruptly. "Good-bye--and

thank you," he said.

She detained him a moment. "We shall see you soon again--see you both?"

His face grew stern. "It's not to oblige Mr. Langhope that I am going to

find my wife."

"Ah, now you are unjust to him!" she exclaimed.

"Don't let us speak of him!" he broke in.

"Why not? When it is from him the request comes--the entreaty--that

everything in the past should be forgotten?"

"Yes--when it suits his convenience!"

"Do you imagine that--even judging him in that way--it has not cost him

a struggle?"

"I can only think of what it has cost her!"

Mrs. Ansell drew a deep sighing breath. "Ah--but don't you see that she

has gained her point, and that nothing else matters to her?"

"Gained her point? Not if, by that, you mean that things here can ever

go back to the old state--that she and I can remain at Westmore after

this!"

Mrs. Ansell dropped her eyes for a moment; then she lifted to his her

sweet impenetrable face.

"Do you know what you have to do--both you and he? Exactly what she

decides," she affirmed.

XLII

JUSTINE'S answer to her husband's letter bore a New York address; and

the surprise of finding her in the same town with himself, and not half

an hour's walk from the room in which he sat, was so great that it

seemed to demand some sudden and violent outlet of physical movement.

He thrust the letter in his pocket, took up his hat, and leaving the

house, strode up Fifth Avenue toward the Park in the early spring

sunlight.

The news had taken five days to reach him, for in order to reestablish

communication with his wife he had been obliged to write to Michigan,

with the request that his letter should be forwarded. He had never

supposed that Justine would be hard to find, or that she had purposely

enveloped her movements in mystery. When she ceased to write he had

simply concluded that, like himself, she felt the mockery of trying to

keep up a sort of distant, semi-fraternal relation, marked by the

occasional interchange of inexpressive letters. The inextricable

mingling of thought and sensation which made the peculiar closeness of

their union could never, to such direct and passionate natures, be

replaced by the pretense of a temperate friendship. Feeling thus

himself, and instinctively assuming the same feeling in his wife,

Amherst had respected her silence, her wish to break definitely with

their former life. She had written him, in the autumn, that she intended

to leave Michigan for a few months, but that, in any emergency, a letter

addressed to her friend's house would reach her; and he had taken this

as meaning that, unless the emergency arose, she preferred that their

correspondence should cease. Acquiescence was all the easier because it

accorded with his own desire. It seemed to him, as he looked back, that

the love he and Justine had felt for each other was like some rare

organism which could maintain life only in its special element; and that

element was neither passion nor sentiment, but truth. It was only on the

heights that they could breathe.

Some men, in his place, even while accepting the inevitableness of the

moral rupture, would have felt concerned for the material side of the

case. But it was characteristic of Amherst that this did not trouble

him. He took it for granted that his wife would return to her nursing.

From the first he had felt certain that it would be intolerable to her

to accept aid from him, and that she would choose rather to support

herself by the exercise of her regular profession; and, aside from such

motives, he, who had always turned to hard work as the rarest refuge

from personal misery, thought it natural that she should seek the same

means of escape.

He had therefore not been surprised, on opening her letter that

morning, to learn that she had taken up her hospital work; but in the

amazement of finding her so near he hardly grasped her explanation of

the coincidence. There was something about a Buffalo patient suddenly

ordered to New York for special treatment, and refusing to go in with a

new nurse--but these details made no impression on his mind, which had

only room for the fact that chance had brought his wife back at the very

moment when his whole being yearned for her.

She wrote that, owing to her duties, she would be unable to see him till

three that afternoon; and he had still six hours to consume before their

meeting. But in spirit they had met already--they were one in an

intensity of communion which, as he strode northward along the bright

crowded thoroughfare, seemed to gather up the whole world into one

throbbing point of life.

He had a boyish wish to keep the secret of his happiness to himself, not

to let Mr. Langhope or Mrs. Ansell know of his meeting with Justine till

it was over; and after twice measuring the length of the Park he turned

in at one of the little wooden restaurants which were beginning to

unshutter themselves in anticipation of spring custom. If only he could

have seen Justine that morning! If he could have brought her there, and

they could have sat opposite each other, in the bare empty room, with

sparrows bustling and twittering in the lilacs against the open window!

The room was ugly enough--but how she would have delighted in the

delicate green of the near slopes, and the purplish haze of the woods

beyond! She took a childish pleasure in such small adventures, and had

the knack of giving a touch of magic to their most commonplace details.

Amherst, as he finished his cold beef and indifferent eggs, found

himself boyishly planning to bring her back there the next day....

Then, over the coffee, he re-read her letter.

The address she gave was that of a small private hospital, and she

explained that she would have to receive him in the public parlour,

which at that hour was open to other visitors. As the time approached,

the thought that they might not be alone when they met became

insufferable; and he determined, if he found any one else, in possession

of the parlour, to wait in the hall, and meet her as she came down the

stairs.

He continued to elaborate this plan as he walked back slowly through the

Park, He had timed himself to reach the hospital a little before three;

but though it lacked five minutes to the hour when he entered the

parlour, two women were already seated in one of its windows. They

looked around as he came in, evidently as much annoyed by his appearance

as he had been to find them there. The older of the two showed a sallow

middle-aged face beneath her limp crape veil; the other was a slight

tawdry creature, with nodding feathers, and innumerable chains and

bracelets which she fingered ceaselessly as she talked.

They eyed Amherst with resentment, and then turned away, continuing

their talk in low murmurs, while he seated himself at the marble-topped

table littered with torn magazines. Now and then the younger woman's

voice rose in a shrill staccato, and a phrase or two floated over to

him. "She'd simply worked herself to death--the nurse told me so.... She

expects to go home in another week, though how she's going to stand the

_fatigue_----" and then, after an inaudible answer: "It's all _his_

fault, and if I was her I wouldn't go back to him for anything!"

"Oh, Cora, he's real sorry now," the older woman protestingly murmured;

but the other, unappeased, rejoined with ominously nodding plumes:

"_You_ see--if they do make it up, it'll never be the same between

them!"

Amherst started up nervously, and as he did so the clock struck three,

and he opened the door and passed out into the hall. It was paved with

black and white marble; the walls were washed in a dull yellowish tint,

and the prevalent odour of antiseptics was mingled with a stale smell of

cooking. At the back rose a straight staircase carpeted with brass-bound

India-rubber, like a ship's companion-way; and down that staircase she

would come in a moment--he fancied he heard her step now....

But the step was that of an elderly black-gowned woman in a cap--the

matron probably.

She glanced at Amherst in surprise, and asked: "Are you waiting for some

one?"

He made a motion of assent, and she opened the parlour door, saying:

"Please walk in."

"May I not wait out here?" he urged.

She looked at him more attentively. "Why, no, I'm afraid not. You'll

find the papers and magazines in here."

Mildly but firmly she drove him in before her, and closing the door,

advanced to the two women in the window. Amherst's hopes leapt up:

perhaps she had come to fetch the visitors upstairs! He strained his

ears to catch what was being said, and while he was thus absorbed the

door opened, and turning at the sound he found himself face to face with

his wife.

He had not reflected that Justine would be in her nurse's dress; and the

sight of the dark blue uniform and small white cap, in which he had

never seen her since their first meeting in the Hope Hospital,

obliterated all bitter and unhappy memories, and gave him the illusion

of passing back at once into the clear air of their early friendship.

Then he looked at her and remembered.

He noticed that she had grown thinner than ever, or rather that her

thinness, which had formerly had a healthy reed-like strength, now

suggested fatigue and languor. And her face was spent, extinguished--the

very eyes were lifeless. All her vitality seemed to have withdrawn

itself into the arch of dense black hair which still clasped her

forehead like the noble metal of some antique bust.

The sight stirred him with a deeper pity, a more vehement compunction;

but the impulse to snatch her to him, and seek his pardon on her lips,

was paralyzed by the sense that the three women in the window had

stopped talking and turned their heads toward the door.

He held his hand out, and Justine's touched it for a moment; then he

said in a low voice: "Is there no other place where I can see you?"

She made a negative gesture. "I am afraid not to-day."

Ah, her deep sweet voice--how completely his ear had lost the sound of

it!

She looked doubtfully about the room, and pointed to a sofa at the end

farthest from the windows.

"Shall we sit there?" she said.

He followed her in silence, and they sat down side by side. The matron

had drawn up a chair and resumed her whispered conference with the women

in the window. Between the two groups stretched the bare length of the

room, broken only by a few arm-chairs of stained wood, and the

marble-topped table covered with magazines.

The impossibility of giving free rein to his feelings developed in

Amherst an unwonted intensity of perception, as though a sixth sense had

suddenly emerged to take the place of those he could not use. And with

this new-made faculty he seemed to gather up, and absorb into himself,

as he had never done in their hours of closest communion, every detail

of his wife's person, of her face and hands and gestures. He noticed how

her full upper lids, of the tint of yellowish ivory, had a slight bluish

discolouration, and how little thread-like blue veins ran across her

temples to the roots of her hair. The emaciation of her face, and the

hollow shades beneath her cheek-bones, made her mouth seem redder and

fuller, though a little line on each side, where it joined the cheek,

gave it a tragic droop. And her hands! When her fingers met his he

recalled having once picked up, in the winter woods, the little

feather-light skeleton of a frozen bird--and that was what her touch was

like.

And it was he who had brought her to this by his cruelty, his

obtuseness, his base readiness to believe the worst of her! He did not

want to pour himself out in self-accusation--that seemed too easy a way

of escape. He wanted simply to take her in his arms, to ask her to give

him one more chance--and then to show her! And all the while he was

paralyzed by the group in the window.

"Can't we go out? I must speak to you," he began again nervously.

"Not this afternoon--the doctor is coming. Tomorrow----"

"I can't wait for tomorrow!"

She made a faint, imperceptible gesture, which read to his eyes: "You've

waited a whole year."

"Yes, I know," he returned, still constrained by the necessity of

muffling his voice, of perpetually measuring the distance between

themselves and the window. "I know what you might say--don't you suppose

I've said it to myself a million times? But I didn't know--I couldn't

imagine----"

She interrupted him with a rapid movement. "What do you know now?"

"What you promised Langhope----"

She turned her startled eyes on him, and he saw the blood run flame-like

under her skin. "But _he_ promised not to speak!" she cried.

"He hasn't--to me. But such things make themselves known. Should you

have been content to go on in that way forever?"

She raised her head and her eyes rested in his. "If you were," she

answered simply.

"Justine!"

Again she checked him with a silencing motion. "Please tell me just what

has happened."

"Not now--there's too much else to say. And nothing matters except that

I'm with you."

"But Mr. Langhope----"

"He asks you to come. You're to see Cicely to-morrow."

Her lower lip trembled a little, and a tear flowed over and hung on her

lashes.

"But what does all that matter now? We're together after this horrible

year," he insisted.

She looked at him again. "But what is really changed?"

"Everything--everything! Not changed, I mean--just gone back."

"To where...we were...before?" she whispered; and he whispered back: "To

where we were before."

There was a scraping of chairs on the floor, and with a sense of release

Amherst saw that the colloquy in the window was over.

The two visitors, gathering their wraps about them, moved slowly across

the room, still talking to the matron in excited undertones, through

which, as they neared the threshold, the younger woman's staccato again

broke out.

"I tell you, if she does go back to him, it'll never be the same between

them!"

"Oh, Cora, I wouldn't say that," the other ineffectually wailed; then

they moved toward the door, and a moment later it had closed on them.

Amherst turned to his wife with outstretched arms. "Say you forgive me,

Justine!"

She held back a little from his entreating hands, not reproachfully, but

as if with a last scruple for himself.

"There's nothing left...of the horror?" she asked below her breath.

"To be without you--that's the only horror!"

"You're _sure_----?"

"Sure!"

"It's just the same to you...just as it was...before?"

"Just the same, Justine!"

"It's not for myself, but you."

"Then, for me--never speak of it!" he implored.

"Because it's _not_ the same, then?" leapt from her.

"Because it's wiped out--because it's never been!"

"Never?"

"Never!"

He felt her yield to him at that, and under his eyes, close under his

lips, was her face at last. But as they kissed they heard the handle of

the door turn, and drew apart quickly, her hand lingering in his under

the fold of her dress.

A nurse looked in, dressed in the white uniform and pointed cap of the

hospital. Amherst fancied that she smiled a little as she saw them.

"Miss Brent--the doctor wants you to come right up and give the

morphine."

The door shut again as Justine rose to her feet. Amherst remained

seated--he had made no motion to retain her hand as it slipped from him.

"I'm coming," she called out to the retreating nurse; then she turned

slowly and saw her husband's face.

"I must go," she said in a low tone.

Her eyes met his for a moment; but he looked away again as he stood up

and reached for his hat.

"Tomorrow, then----" he said, without attempting to detain her.

"Tomorrow?"

"You must come away from here--you must come home," he repeated

mechanically.

She made no answer, and he held his hand out and took hers. "Tomorrow,"

he said, drawing her toward him; and their lips met again, but not in

the same kiss.

XLIII

JUNE again at Hanaford--and Cicely's birthday. The anniversary was to

coincide, this year, with the opening of the old house at Hopewood, as a

kind of pleasure-palace--gymnasium, concert-hall and museum--for the

recreation of the mill-hands.

The idea had first come to Amherst on the winter afternoon when Bessy

Westmore had confessed her love for him under the snow-laden trees of

Hopewood. Even then the sense that his personal happiness was enlarged

and secured by its promise of happiness to others had made him wish that

the scene associated with the opening of his new life should be made to

commemorate a corresponding change in the fortunes of Westmore. But when

the control of the mills passed into his hands other and more necessary

improvements pressed upon him; and it was not till now that the

financial condition of the company had permitted the execution of his

plan.

Justine, on her return to Hanaford, had found the work already in

progress, and had been told by her husband that he was carrying out a

projected scheme of Bessy's. She had felt a certain surprise, but had

concluded that the plan in question dated back to the early days of his

first marriage, when, in his wife's eyes, his connection with the mills

still invested them with interest.

Since Justine had come back to her husband, both had tacitly avoided all

allusions to the past, and the recreation-house at Hopewood being, as

she divined, in some sort an expiatory offering to Bessy's plaintive

shade, she had purposely refrained from questioning Amherst about its

progress, and had simply approved the plans he submitted to her.

Fourteen months had passed since her return, and now, as she sat beside

her husband in the carriage which was conveying them to Hopewood, she

said to herself that her life had at last fallen into what promised to

be its final shape--that as things now were they would probably be to

the end. And outwardly at least they were what she and Amherst had

always dreamed of their being. Westmore prospered under the new rule.

The seeds of life they had sown there were springing up in a promising

growth of bodily health and mental activity, and above all in a dawning

social consciousness. The mill-hands were beginning to understand the

meaning of their work, in its relation to their own lives and to the

larger economy. And outwardly, also, the new growth was showing itself

in the humanized aspect of the place. Amherst's young maples were tall

enough now to cast a shade on the grass-bordered streets; and the

well-kept turf, the bright cottage gardens, the new central group of

library, hospital and club-house, gave to the mill-village the hopeful

air of a "rising" residential suburb.

In the bright June light, behind their fresh green mantle of trees and

creepers, even the factory buildings looked less stern and prison-like

than formerly; and the turfing and planting of the adjoining

river-banks had transformed a waste of foul mud and refuse into a little

park where the operatives might refresh themselves at midday.

Yes--Westmore was alive at last: the dead city of which Justine had once

spoken had risen from its grave, and its blank face had taken on a

meaning. As Justine glanced at her husband she saw that the same thought

was in his mind. However achieved, at whatever cost of personal misery

and error, the work of awakening and freeing Westmore was done, and that

work had justified itself.

She looked from Amherst to Cicely, who sat opposite, eager and rosy in

her mourning frock--for Mr. Langhope had died some two months

previously--and as intent as her step-parents on the scene before her.

Cicely was old enough now to regard her connection with Westmore as

something more than a nursery game. She was beginning to learn a great

deal about the mills, and to understand, in simple, friendly ways,

something of her own relation to them. The work and play of the

children, the interests and relaxations provided for their elders, had

been gradually explained to her by Justine, and she knew that this

shining tenth birthday of hers was to throw its light as far as the

clouds of factory-smoke extended.

As they mounted the slope to Hopewood, the spacious white building,

with its enfolding colonnades, its broad terraces and tennis-courts,

shone through the trees like some bright country-house adorned for its

master's home-coming; and Amherst and his wife might have been driving

up to the house which had been built to shelter their wedded happiness.

The thought flashed across Justine as their carriage climbed the hill.

She was as much absorbed as Amherst in the welfare of Westmore, it had

become more and more, to both, the refuge in which their lives still met

and mingled; but for a moment, as they paused before the flower-decked

porch, and he turned to help her from the carriage, it occurred to her

to wonder what her sensations would have been if he had been bringing

her home--to a real home of their own--instead of accompanying her to

another philanthropic celebration. But what need had they of a real

home, when they no longer had any real life of their own? Nothing was

left of that secret inner union which had so enriched and beautified

their outward lives. Since Justine's return to Hanaford they had

entered, tacitly, almost unconsciously, into a new relation to each

other: a relation in which their personalities were more and more merged

in their common work, so that, as it were, they met only by avoiding

each other.

From the first, Justine had accepted this as inevitable; just as she had

understood, when Amherst had sought her out in New York, that his

remaining at Westmore, which had once been contingent on her leaving

him, now depended on her willingness to return and take up their former

life.

She accepted the last condition as she had accepted the other, pledged

to the perpetual expiation of an act for which, in the abstract, she

still refused to hold herself to blame. But life is not a matter of

abstract principles, but a succession of pitiful compromises with fate,

of concessions to old tradition, old beliefs, old charities and

frailties. That was what her act had taught her--that was the word of

the gods to the mortal who had laid a hand on their bolts. And she had

humbled herself to accept the lesson, seeing human relations at last as

a tangled and deep-rooted growth, a dark forest through which the

idealist cannot cut his straight path without hearing at each stroke the

cry of the severed branch: "_Why woundest thou me?_"

* * * * *

The lawns leading up to the house were already sprinkled with

holiday-makers, while along the avenue came the rolling of wheels, the

throb of motor-cars; and Justine, with Cicely beside her, stood in the

wide hall to receive the incoming throng, in which Hanaford society was

indiscriminately mingled with the operatives in their Sunday best.

While his wife welcomed the new arrivals, Amherst, supported by some

young Westmore cousins, was guiding them into the concert-hall, where he

was to say a word on the uses of the building before declaring it open

for inspection. And presently Justine and Cicely, summoned by Westy

Gaines, made their way through the rows of seats to a corner near the

platform. Her husband was there already, with Halford Gaines and a group

of Hanaford dignitaries, and just below them sat Mrs. Gaines and her

daughters, the Harry Dressels, and Amherst's radiant mother.

As Justine passed between them, she wondered how much they knew of the

events which had wrought so profound and permanent change in her life.

She had never known how Hanaford explained her absence or what comments

it had made on her return. But she saw to-day more clearly than ever

that Amherst had become a power among his townsmen, and that if they

were still blind to the inner meaning of his work, its practical results

were beginning to impress them profoundly. Hanaford's sociological creed

was largely based on commercial considerations, and Amherst had won

Hanaford's esteem by the novel feat of defying its economic principles

and snatching success out of his defiance.

And now he had advanced a step or two in front of the "representative"

semi-circle on the platform, and was beginning to speak.

Justine did not hear his first words. She was looking up at him, trying

to see him with the eyes of the crowd, and wondering what manner of man

he would have seemed to her if she had known as little as they did of

his inner history.

He held himself straight, the heavy locks thrown back from his forehead,

one hand resting on the table beside him, the other grasping a folded

blue-print which the architect of the building had just advanced to give

him. As he stood there, Justine recalled her first sight of him in the

Hope Hospital, five years earlier--was it only five years? They had

dealt deep strokes to his face, hollowing the eye-sockets, accentuating

the strong modelling of nose and chin, fixing the lines between the

brows; but every touch had a meaning--it was not the languid hand of

time which had remade his features, but the sharp chisel of thought and

action.

She roused herself suddenly to the consciousness of what he was saying.

"For the idea of this building--of a building dedicated to the

recreation of Westmore--is not new in my mind; but while it remained

there as a mere idea, it had already, without my knowledge, taken

definite shape in the thoughts of the owner of Westmore."

There was a slight drop in his voice as he designated Bessy, and he

waited a moment before continuing: "It was not till after the death of

my first wife that I learned of her intention--that I found by

accident, among her papers, this carefully-studied plan for a

pleasure-house at Hopewood."

He paused again, and unrolling the blue-print, held it up before his

audience.

"You cannot, at this distance," he went on, "see all the admirable

details of her plan; see how beautifully they were imagined, how

carefully and intelligently elaborated. She who conceived them longed to

see beauty everywhere--it was her dearest wish to bestow it on her

people here. And her ardent imagination outran the bounds of practical

possibility. We cannot give you, in its completeness, the beautiful

thing she had imagined--the great terraces, the marble porches, the

fountains, lily-tanks, and cloisters. But you will see that, wherever it

was possible--though in humbler materials, and on a smaller scale--we

have faithfully followed her design; and when presently you go through

this building, and when, hereafter, you find health and refreshment and

diversion here, I ask you to remember the beauty she dreamed of giving

you, and to let the thought of it make her memory beautiful among you

and among your children...."

Justine had listened with deepening amazement. She was seated so close

to her husband that she had recognized the blue-print the moment he

unrolled it. There was no mistaking its origin--it was simply the plan

of the gymnasium which Bessy had intended to build at Lynbrook, and

which she had been constrained to abandon owing to her husband's

increased expenditure at the mills. But how was it possible that Amherst

knew nothing of the original purpose of the plans, and by what mocking

turn of events had a project devised in deliberate defiance of his

wishes, and intended to declare his wife's open contempt for them, been

transformed into a Utopian vision for the betterment of the Westmore

operatives?

A wave of anger swept over Justine at this last derisive stroke of fate.

It was grotesque and pitiable that a man like Amherst should create out

of his regrets a being who had never existed, and then ascribe to her

feelings and actions of which the real woman had again and again proved

herself incapable!

Ah, no, Justine had suffered enough--but to have this imaginary Bessy

called from the grave, dressed in a semblance of self-devotion and

idealism, to see her petty impulses of vindictiveness disguised as the

motions of a lofty spirit--it was as though her small malicious ghost

had devised this way of punishing the wife who had taken her place!

Justine had suffered enough--suffered deliberately and unstintingly,

paying the full price of her error, not seeking to evade its least

consequence. But no sane judgment could ask her to sit quiet under this

last hallucination. What! This unreal woman, this phantom that

Amherst's uneasy imagination had evoked, was to come between himself and

her, to supplant her first as his wife, and then as his fellow-worker?

Why should she not cry out the truth to him, defend herself against the

dead who came back to rob her of such wedded peace as was hers? She had

only to tell the true story of the plans to lay poor Bessy's ghost

forever!

The confused throbbing impulses within her were stifled under a long

burst of applause--then she saw Westy Gaines at her side again, and

understood that he had come to lead Cicely to the platform. For a moment

she clung jealously to the child's hand, hardly aware of what she did,

feeling only that she was being thrust farther and farther into the

background of the life she had helped to call out of chaos. Then a

contrary impulse moved her. She gently freed Cicely's hand, and a moment

later, as she sat with bent head and throbbing breast, she heard the

child's treble piping out above her:

"In my mother's name, I give this house to Westmore."

Applause again--and then Justine found herself enveloped in a general

murmur of compliment and congratulation. Mr. Amherst had spoken

admirably--a "beautiful tribute--" ah, he had done poor Bessy justice!

And to think that till now Hanaford had never fully known how she had

the welfare of the mills at heart--how it was really only _her_ work

that he was carrying on there! Well, he had made that perfectly

clear--and no doubt Cicely was being taught to follow in her mother's

footsteps: everyone had noticed how her step-father was associating her

with the work at the mills. And his little speech would, as it were,

consecrate the child's relation to that work, make it appear to her as

the continuance of a beautiful, a sacred tradition....

* * * * *

And now it was over. The building had been inspected, the operatives had

dispersed, the Hanaford company had rolled off down the avenue, Cicely,

among them, driving away tired and happy in Mrs. Dressel's victoria, and

Amherst and his wife were alone.

Amherst, after bidding good-bye to his last guests, had gone back to the

empty concert-room to fetch the blue-print lying on the platform. He

came back with it, between the uneven rows of empty chairs, and joined

Justine, who stood waiting in the hall. His face was slightly flushed,

and his eyes had the light which in happy moments burned through their

veil of thought.

He laid his hand on his wife's arm, and drawing her toward a table

spread out the blueprint before her.

"You haven't seen this, have you?" he said.

She looked down at the plan without answering, reading in the left-hand

corner the architect's conventional inscription: "Swimming-tank and

gymnasium designed for Mrs. John Amherst."

Amherst looked up, perhaps struck by her silence.

"But perhaps you _have_ seen it--at Lynbrook? It must have been done

while you were there."

The quickened throb of her blood rushed to her brain like a signal.

"Speak--speak now!" the signal commanded.

Justine continued to look fixedly at the plan. "Yes, I have seen it,"

she said at length.

"At Lynbrook?"

"At Lynbrook."

"_She_ showed it to you, I suppose--while I was away?"

Justine hesitated again. "Yes, while you were away."

"And did she tell you anything about it, go into details about her

wishes, her intentions?"

Now was the moment--now! As her lips parted she looked up at her

husband. The illumination still lingered on his face--and it was the

face she loved. He was waiting eagerly for her next word.

"No, I heard no details. I merely saw the plan lying there."

She saw his look of disappointment. "She never told you about it?"

"No--she never told me."

It was best so, after all. She understood that now. It was now at last

that she was paying her full price.

Amherst rolled up the plan with a sigh and pushed it into the drawer of

the table. It struck her that he too had the look of one who has laid a

ghost. He turned to her and drew her hand through his arm.

"You're tired, dear. You ought to have driven back with the others," he

said.

"No, I would rather stay with you."

"You want to drain this good day to the dregs, as I do?"

"Yes," she murmured, drawing her hand away.

"It _is_ a good day, isn't it?" he continued, looking about him at the

white-panelled walls, the vista of large bright rooms seen through the

folding doors. "I feel as if we had reached a height, somehow--a height

where one might pause and draw breath for the next climb. Don't you feel

that too, Justine?"

"Yes--I feel it."

"Do you remember once, long ago--one day when you and I and Cicely went

on a picnic to hunt orchids--how we got talking of the one best moment

in life--the moment when one wanted most to stop the clock?"

The colour rose in her face while he spoke. It was a long time since he

had referred to the early days of their friendship--the days

_before_....

"Yes, I remember," she said.

"And do you remember how we said that it was with most of us as it was

with Faust? That the moment one wanted to hold fast to was not, in most

lives, the moment of keenest personal happiness, but the other kind--the

kind that would have seemed grey and colourless at first: the moment

when the meaning of life began to come out from the mists--when one

could look out at last over the marsh one had drained?"

A tremor ran through Justine. "It was you who said that," she said,

half-smiling.

"But didn't you feel it with me? Don't you now?"

"Yes--I do now," she murmured.

He came close to her, and taking her hands in his, kissed them one after

the other.

"Dear," he said, "let us go out and look at the marsh we have drained."

He turned and led her through the open doorway to the terrace above the

river. The sun was setting behind the wooded slopes of Hopewood, and the

trees about the house stretched long blue shadows across the lawn.

Beyond them rose the smoke of Westmore.

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

| |

| BOOKS BY EDITH WHARTON |

| |

| PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS |

| |

| * * * * * |

| |

| [12 mo. $1.50] |

| |

| The House of Mirth |

| |

| _Illustrations by_ A. B. WENZELL |

| |

| "In my judgment 'The House of Mirth' is a story of such |

| vitality, of such artistic and moral insight, that it will |

| stand by itself in American fiction as a study of a certain |

| kind of society. The title is a stroke of genius in irony, |

| and gives the key to a novel of absorbing interest, as |

| relentless as life itself in its judgment, but deeply and |

| beautifully humanized at the end."--HAMILTON W. MABIE. |

| |

| "Mrs. Wharton has done many good things. She has never done |

| anything better than this."--_The Academy._ |

| |

| "She is the first to make a really powerful and brilliant |

| book out of the material offered by American fashion to the |

| novelist.... A sterling piece of craftsmanship, a tale which |

| interests the reader at the start and never lets him rest |

| till the end is reached."--New York _Tribune_. |

| |

| "So accurate an account of the thoughts and deeds of a |

| single human being has, we are certain, never hitherto been |

| written."--Boston _Transcript_. |

| |

| "It is a great American novel, intensely interesting, |

| marvelous in its literary finish and powerful in its |

| delineation of Lily Bart."--Philadelphia _Press_. |

| |

| * * * * * |

| |

| [12 mo. $1.00] |

| |

| Madame de Treymes |

| |

| _Illustrated in color by_ A. B. WENZELL |

| |

| "We know of no book in which the virtues of the short story |

| are united with the virtues of the novel in a higher degree |

| than in this instance."--New York _Sun_. |

| |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

| |

| BOOKS BY EDITH WHARTON |

| |

| * * * * * |

| |

| SIXTH EDITION |

| |

| [_12mo_, $1.50] |

| |

| The Greater Inclination |

| |

| CONTENTS |

| |

| _The Muse's Tragedy_ |

| _A Journey_ |

| _The Pelican_ |

| _Souls Belated_ |

| _A Coward_ |

| _The Twilight of the Gods_ |

| _A Cup of Cold Water_ |

| _The Portrait_ |

| |

| "Between these stories and those of the ordinary |

| entertaining sort there is a great gulf fixed."--_The Dial._ |

| |

| * * * * * |

| |

| [_12mo_, $1.50] |

| |

| Crucial Instances |

| |

| CONTENTS |

| |

| _The Duchess at Prayer_ |

| _The Angel at the Grave_ |

| _The Recovery_ |

| _"Copy": A Dialogue_ |

| _The Rembrandt_ |

| _The Moving Finger_ |

| _The Confessional_ |

| |

| "Tragedy and comedy, pathos and humor, are mingled in these |

| pages of brilliant writing and splendid |

| imagination."--Philadelphia _Press_. |

| |

| * * * * * |

| |

| [_12mo_, $1.50] |

| |

| The Valley of Decision |

| |

| 25TH THOUSAND |

| |

| "Coming in the midst of an epoch overcrowded with works of |

| fiction, 'The Valley of Decision' stands out giant-like |

| above its surroundings. It stands, indeed, almost without a |

| rival in the modern literary world, and there can be little |

| doubt that it places Mrs. Wharton at once side by side with |

| the greatest novelists of the day."--Boston _Evening |

| Transcript_. |

| |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

| |

| BOOKS BY EDITH WHARTON |

| |

| * * * * * |

| |

| [_12mo, $1.25_] |

| |

| Sanctuary |

| |

| ILLUSTRATIONS BY W. APPLETON CLARK |

| |

| "This is a striking little book--striking in its simplicity |

| and penetration, its passion and restraint."--London |

| _Times_. |

| |

| * * * * * |

| |

| [_12mo, $1.25_] |

| |

| The Touchstone |

| |

| "Its characters are real, their motives and actions |

| thoroughly human. And the author's art is sufficient to |

| bring out the strength of every situation."--_The Argonaut._ |

| |

| * * * * * |

| |

| [_12mo_, $1.50] |

| |

| The Descent of Man |

| |

| CONTENTS |

| |

| _The Descent of Man_ |

| _The Mission of Jane_ |

| _The Other Two_ |

| _The Quicksand_ |

| _The Dilettante_ |

| _The Reckoning_ |

| _Expiation_ |

| _The Lady's Maid's Bell_ |

| _A Venetian Night's Entertainment_ |

| |

| "It is, of course, the extraordinary directness with which |

| Mrs. Wharton's probe goes to the spot under inspection, the |

| deftness with which she is able to bring to the light of day |

| what we had hidden even from ourselves, that account for the |

| admiration with which we regard her short stories."--London |

| _Academy_. |

| |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

| |

| BOOKS BY EDITH WHARTON |

| |

| * * * * * |

| |

| [_8vo, $2.50 net._ Postage 17 cents] |

| |

| Italian Backgrounds |

| |

| ILLUSTRATED BY PEIXOTTO |

| |

| CONTENTS |

| |

| _An Alpine Posting Inn_ |

| _A Midsummer Week's Dream_ |

| _The Sanctuaries of the Pennine_ |

| _Alps_ |

| _What the Hermits Saw_ |

| _A Tuscan Shrine_ |

| _Sub Umbra Liliorum_ |

| _March in Italy_ |

| _Picturesque Milan_ |

| _Italian Backgrounds_ |

| |

| "Belongs in that small class of books of observation which |

| are also books of artistic and spiritual interpretation; |

| which not only describe places and monuments, but convey an |

| impression of peoples, a sense of society, with the elusive |

| atmosphere in which everything of historical or artistic |

| value is seen by those who have the gift of sight."--_The |

| Outlook._ |

| |

| * * * * * |

| |

| [_12mo, $1.25 net_] |

| |

| The Joy of Living |

| |

| (_Es lebe das Leben_) |

| |

| A play in five acts, by HERMANN SUDERMANN. Translated from |

| the German by EDITH WHARTON. |

| |

| * * * * * |

| |

| [_Large 8vo, $2.50 net_] |

| |

| The Decoration of Houses |

| |

| With 56 full-page illustrations, by EDITH WHARTON and OGDEN |

| CODMAN, JR. |

| |

+--------------------------------------------------------------+

Transcriber's Note:

Most inconsistencies in hyphenation and spelling have been left as in the

original. Missing or wrong punctuation has been added or corrected,

where it is obvious (missing punctuation is often a result of the

scanning/OCR process). In one case, a missing letter has also been

added, and the following misspellings have been corrected: involuntairly to

involuntarily, sensastions to sensations, Wetsmore to Westmore, Cilfton

to Clifton, It to If