The Eddy: A Novel of To-day

by Clarence Louis Cullen

"BUT, WHY DID YOU NEVER TELL ME, MOTHER?"

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Mrs. Treharne, on the defensive, tried to devise excuses, but they were very feeble ones. She had not wanted to worry Louise by telling her; the girl had been too young to be told while at school, and, since her return, she had not had the courage to tell her; it would have done no good to tell her at any rate, would it? And so on.

After a while Louise rose.

"I can't stay here, mother," she said. "I am going at once."

"That is absurd," her mother replied, flutteringly. "It is after midnight. You must not be hasty, dear. He had been drinking. Men are beasts when they drink. It will all pass over," she added weakly.

"No, it cannot pass over," said Louise in a wearied tone. "I am going. I could not remain here another hour. You must not ask me to. It is impossible."

"But, my child," cried Mrs. Treharne, beginning to dab at her eyes, "it is out of the question—unheard of! There is no reason for it. These things happen everywhere. You must face life as it is, not as you have been dreaming it to be. Sleep with me tonight and think it over. You'll view it all differently in the morning."

"I am going now, mother," replied Louise, and her mother knew then that the girl's decision was unalterable.

"But where are you going at this hour of the night, child?" she asked, now weeping outright.

"To Laura's," said Louise. Saying it, she was swept by a sudden wave of feeling. "Mother," she went on in a broken voice, "come with me, won't you? Let us go together. I want to be with you all the time. I want to live with you only. I need you. We can be so happy together, just by ourselves! We can get a pretty little place somewhere and be happy together, just you and I. And I have been so unhappy, so miserable, here! Won't you come with me—come now?"

A beautiful hour had struck for that mother, had she but known it.

But she released herself from Louise's arms and shook her head, all the time dabbing, dabbing at her eyes with her little wad of a lace handkerchief.

"Don't ask me such an absurd thing, Louise," she replied. "Of course I can't do anything so outlandishly foolish."

"Then I must go alone, dear," said Louise, bitter disappointment placarded on her drawn face. "I wanted to be always with you. I never meant to leave you. But I can't stay now. Won't you come, mother?"

Mrs. Treharne shook her head and sobbed. Louise gazed commiseratingly at the weak, tempestuously-crying little woman, and then went to her rooms. She called Laura on the telephone.

"I am coming to you now, Laura," she said.

"You mean tonight, dear?" inquired Laura in her caressing contralto, refraining, with the wisdom of a woman of experience, from giving utterance to any astonishment.

"Yes, at once," said Laura. "I shall take a taxicab and be there within the half hour."

"I shall be waiting, dear," replied Laura.

Louise, in hat and coat, bent over her mother, who had thrown herself weeping on a couch, and sought to soothe her. But her mother had only wild, broken reproaches for her for going away "so foolishly, so unnecessarily," and Louise saw that her efforts to calm her were futile. So she bent over and kissed her mother's tear-wet face, then walked down the stairs and out of the house to the waiting taxicab. She never put foot in the house on the Drive again.

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CHAPTER IX

Laura, her face flushed from sleep and a cheerful awakening, her burnished black hair in two great plaits that fell forward on her shoulders far below the waist of her negligée, tiptoed early next morning into the room, next to her own, where she had put Louise. But her tiptoeing was a considerateness wasted. Louise was wide awake. She had scarcely slept at all. The shock of her experience had been heavier than her ensuing weariness, so that, for the greater part of the night, she had lain wide-eyed, gazing into the darkness; dozing once, she had been gripped by a hideous dream, in which she had stood paralyzed by terror, awaiting the approach, from opposite directions, of two gigantic reptiles, wearing the faces of Judd and Jesse. Laura noticed the dark rings under the girl's feverishly bright eyes, and her heart glowed at the thought that Louise, quite as a matter of course, had sought asylum with her.

When the girl had arrived at her apartment on the previous night Laura, far from questioning her, had pantomimed, finger at lip, that Louise was not to tell her anything then; and Louise had been grateful for the fine delicacy of the remission.

Finding Louise awake, Laura, smiling to match the sunlight that streamed through the curtains, and exhibiting none of the curiosity or jarring glumness of manner with which a woman of less tact might easily have intensified the misery of such a situation, sat on the edge of Louise's bed and began to chatter as gaily as if her listener's world had been swimming in rose.

"My dear," she said, stretching her satin-smooth arms high above her head in an abandonment of waking enjoyment, "I feel as chirpful this morning as a sparrow in a wistaria vine. Let's talk until we get hungry. Let's make plans and things. Plan number one: we are going abroad next week, instead of early in May. I can't wait for May. I need things to wear at once. I am positively in rags and tatters, the Cinderella of Central Park West. How is that for one gorgeous plan?" It might easily have been thought, listening to her and studying her enthusiasm, that she was the girl and Louise the woman. But Louise, for all of her still throbbing memory of the night before, was infected with the older woman's unquenchable cheerfulness.

"You talk of going to Europe as if it were a run out to the Bronx in your car, dear," she said, smiling. "And am I really to go with you? At any rate, of course I must ask——" She had meant to say that she must ask her mother's permission; but the thought rushed to her mind that in all likelihood her mother would be only too willing to let her go. Laura divined her thought and rushed to her aid.

"Oh, I shall do all the asking," she interposed. "That's another of my glittering specialties—asking. I'm the most immoderately successful asker, I think, in all North America; yes, and getter, too, I verily believe. Really, I can't remember when I was refused anything that I out-and-out asked for. So I'll arrange that. But with this stipulation: you'll have to ask Mr. Blythe yourself."

"Mr. Blythe?" said Louise, wonderingly. The sound of his name somehow gave her an immediate sense of uplift; but for the moment she failed to catch Laura's meaning. "What is it that I must ask Mr. Blythe about, dear?"

Laura gazed at her with skeptical eyes.

"What is it we were talking about, Louise?" she asked, mischievously. "The Relation of the Cosmic Forces to—er—Mental Healing? The Real Nub of the Suffragettes' Cause? Child, you don't really suppose that you could gallumph off to the continent of Europe with a frivolous, irresponsible, happy-go-lucky person like me without first asking the consent of your guardian—or, at any rate, your guardian-to-be?"

Louise's flush shone through her amused smile.

"That is true, isn't it?" she said simply. "Of course I must ask him."

"I am in a frenzy of fear, though," went on Laura, affecting an exaggerated solemnity, "that the ogre will flatly put his foot down and refuse to let you go. I know that I should if I were he."

"Why, Laura?" asked Louise with such genuine wide-eyed innocence that Laura laughed outright.

"Why?" she repeated in Louise's tone. "Well, I haven't the least doubt that I should be a great deal more selfish about it than he will be. Just because a man has to be such a horridly legal, dry-as-dust creature as a guardian, is that any particular reason why he should become incapable of experiencing the entirely human misery called lonesomeness?"

Louise had no reply for that except a little gesture of deprecation that quite failed to convince.

"How could we possibly get ready to go abroad in a week, Laura?" she covered her confusion by asking.

"My dear," replied Laura, convincingly, "I could and would start for the Straits of Sunda inside of twenty minutes if there were any possible reason why I should want to go there—if, for example, there happened to be a dressmaker or milliner there whose creations I particularly fancied. The voyage to Europe is now a mere ferry trip. You speak as if we were still living in the Victorian period. In those days folks 'made preparations' to go abroad—the dear, fussy, old-fashioned creatures! Now it is like riding to Staten Island, with the exception of the sleeps and meals in between. One of the most delightful men I know goes to Europe every year with no other impedimenta than a walking stick—he is so used to a cane that he must have it for his constitutionals on deck—and a toothbrush; he gets his changes of linen from the head steward—I believe he knows every head steward afloat; and he is such a cheerful steamer companion, because he is unhampered by luggage, that it is a delight to be his fellow voyager. Once, when I was a young woman ("You are so aged and decrepit now, aren't you?" murmured Louise.) I went on board a steamer to wish some friends bon voyage. It was rather a cheerless day in New York, with overcast skies. I thought of sunny Italy. And so I went along with them, in the clothes I was standing in, and I had the most enjoyable voyage of my life."

Thus Laura chattered on, eager to take Louise's mind off the previous night's experience which, even without having heard any of the details, she well knew must have been a trying one. During the night Laura had decided to start within the week on the trip to Europe which she made every year. The climactic turn in Louise's affairs, which had by no means been unexpected by Laura, had prodded her to this decision. She had meant to take Louise abroad with her early in May at any rate; now, however, that her young friend, whom she had come to regard with an encompassing affection, was in obvious distressing straits, an almost immediate withdrawal of her from painful scenes would, Laura felt, be at least an attempt at a solution. A few months abroad would enable Louise to shake off the bravely-borne but none the less wearing depression which had taken possession of her when she found herself so unexpectedly thrust into a horribly difficult situation—a situation which Laura now blamed herself for not having actively sought to terminate before the interposition of the incident, whatever had been its nature, which had caused the girl to leave the house on the Drive in the middle of the night. And Laura, meditating these things as she lay awake, declared in her heart that Louise should never again be subjected to a renewal of that ordeal.

Without any questioning, Louise, after a little actual planning with Laura for the early trip abroad, told the older woman what had happened at the house on the Drive on the previous night. She went over the details calmly enough, grouping Judd's brutal utterances into a few phrases which presented the picture almost as plainly to Laura's mental vision as if she had been actually present at what she knew must have been a scene sufficiently searing in its effect upon a girl yet under twenty and fresh from school. It was only when she came to her mother's flaccid, vacillating part in the affair that Louise's voice weakened a little.

"She disappointed me, Laura," said Louise, feelingly. "I would not say that to anybody else but you. But she did. I don't know just what to think. I thought that, having returned in time to hear at least some of the things that were said to me, she would come with me when she saw how impossible it was for me to stay there. I can't even guess why she did not. That was the worst part of it—her remaining there. And now I am afraid that I did wrong in leaving her. Perhaps there was something to prevent her leaving. It may be that if I had stayed on with her for a while longer she might have——"

Laura interrupted her with a gesture.

"Don't say that, Louise," she put in, earnestly. "You must not do yourself injustice. That wouldn't be fair. Your mother is one of my oldest friends; we were girls together. But right is right. Your mother should never have permitted you to so much as set foot in that house. I am not disloyal to her in saying that. She herself knows in her heart that it is true. But, having been allowed to go there, you did your part; you played the game, as one says, without complaint; and you stayed as long as you could. You have nothing to reproach yourself for. Your mother herself, I think, will be fair enough to acknowledge that. And you are never to go back there. That, of course, is settled. The situation must work itself out in some other way. I feel perfectly confident that your mother will see it all in the right light, and before very long; probably while you are abroad with me. She will miss you. And it is right that she should miss you. Missing you, she will come to a realization of what she is sacrificing for—what? That, dear, is my prediction as to the way it will all come out. But you must not think of reproaching yourself for the step you have taken, nor even dream of retracing that step."

During the forenoon Laura telephoned Blythe, giving him an outline of what had happened.

"It was inevitable, of course," was Blythe's brief comment over the 'phone. "Since it had to come, I am glad that it is over with—better now than later. May I come up to see you?"

"To see me—hypocrite!" Laura answered, laughing—and she could hear Blythe hastily and rather fumbling hanging up the receiver.

Blythe arrived at Laura's early in the afternoon and his arrival was a signal for Laura to profess burdensome housekeeping cares in a distant part of the apartment.

This time Louise's feeling in Blythe's presence was not a mere vague shyness, but genuine embarrassment. She had thought of him a great deal during the night, particularly of that which had passed between them during the ride in the Park. Now she flushed at the thought that she had even passively permitted such a thing, much less have seemed to invite it. Her mother's position, and the stigma which, she could not but feel, that position placed upon herself, now seemed, with the humiliating incident of the night before fresh in her mind, to forbid the continuation of any relationship between Blythe and herself other than that of guardian and ward. It was purely from a sense of consideration for Blythe, a man who had won his way in the world in the teeth of almost insuperable obstacles, that Louise resolved that there must be an abridgement of their gradually growing intimacy. She had sighed in making that mental decision, for the relationship had been very agreeable and—and something else which she could not quite analyze; but she shrank from certain intuitive forecastings involving Blythe's progress toward the goal he had set for himself, which she feared a continuation of their closer relationship might develop.

Blythe was quick to notice her altered manner, expressed by a reserve which, with the penetration of an alert mind, he could not but see was studied. He was puzzled by it; but he attributed it, after a moment of rapid pondering, to the effect of the shock from which he knew she must still be suffering. Nevertheless he was conscious of a sudden depression which for a while he found it difficult to throw off.

Louise spared him the difficulty of making the first adversion to that which she knew was uppermost in his mind—her course, that is, now that she had voluntarily, but under the press of circumstance, detached herself from an impossible environment. More guardedly than she had related the incident to Laura, Louise told him of the affair; but he was more than able to fill in the grisly details.

"What I cannot understand," she said, not in any tone of reproach, but earnestly enough, "is the fact that I was not told, particularly after I left school, that I was so intolerably indebted to—to that man. My impression always was so different. I never doubted that my father was providing for me. I was given to understand that when I was a young girl, and I never thought anything different. It would have been difficult, of course I know, to tell me any such a thing while I was at school; but I can't help but believe that I should have been told when I went to live in that house. I doubt if I could have stayed there had I known, even to be near my mother; I should have found some other way of meeting her. It is unthinkable that I should be in that man's debt. I shall not remain in his debt, at any rate, to the extent of the amount my father sent me recently. I shall use that, at all events, to help rid myself of such an intolerable obligation."

Blythe then explained it all to her: how her father had never ceased to make provision for her, even after Blythe had informed him that his remittances were being rejected; how, when he had seen her father in Honolulu, he had been instructed to deposit the remittances as a fund for Louise's future use, and he named the amount which he was holding for her. Louise's eyes lighted up when she heard this.

"I shall send the entire amount to that man," she said, in precipitate decision, "to reimburse him for what he has expended for me."

Blythe was forced to repress a smile.

"That decision does you credit, Louise," he said quietly. "But it is out of the question. The man not only would not accept the reimbursement, but, in offering it, you would simply give him another opportunity to mortify you by returning it. That is what he would do. He is very rich, and he has the porcine pride of riches. He would keenly enjoy the flourish of thrusting back at you the offered reimbursement, just enjoy as he enjoyed—I hate to say it, but I must to make matters clear—thrusting back the quarterly remittances of your father."

"But why did you not tell me these things when my father asked you to become my guardian?" Louise asked him. A natural curiosity, but no reproof, marked her tone.

"Because I did not feel up to it," Blythe replied plainly enough. "That would have involved telling you the whole miserable story. I could not do that. Nor could Laura. We talked it over and we found that neither of us was equal to so gruelling a task. It seemed better to let you gradually grasp the facts yourself. Our telling you would not have helped matters. Moreover, so far as I was concerned, I did not feel that I had the right to touch upon matters so intimate. It is different now—today. The proscription has been removed. I am now your guardian."

Louise gave a little start at his last words, and Blythe, trained in observation, did not fail to notice the increased lustre of her wide eyes, any more than he neglected to see that she was at some pains to quell words which he felt assured would have been phrases of gladness had she permitted herself to utter them. Why was she thus repressing her impulses? Blythe immediately concentrated an acute mentality upon the problem. The answer, and the right one, came to him in a flash, as if by telepathic revelation: he understood the reason underlying her new restraint, which he perceived, not without pleasure, she was having difficulty in maintaining. It was from a keener realization of her mother's position: Blythe felt so sure of it that he smiled inwardly and was comforted. Her mother's position was nothing to him! But how to convince Louise of that? He made poor progress of this factor of the problem in trying to study it while talking with Louise. He told her that he had only been notified that morning that the court had appointed him her guardian.

"Are you prepared to be severely disciplined?" he asked her. He felt in vastly better spirits since arriving at what he felt assured was the correct solution as to Louise's manifestly changed manner toward him. "I rather believe I shall insist upon your permitting me to pick out your frocks and hats. I think I shall have you change at once to Quaker garb."

Louise could not repress a smile at that. She caught herself longing to be on her former plane with him. But her fancied ineligibility, her somewhat morbid consciousness that she was hedged in by circumstances which she had no right even to tacitly ask him to share with her, put a damper upon her temptation to resume her former manner with him.

Blythe walked to the window and looked out over the Park for a silent moment. Then he thrust his hand into his breast pocket, brought out a photograph, and handed it to her.

"I came upon the picture this morning in rummaging through my safe," he said to her.

Louise gazed puzzledly at the photograph. It was that of a tall, distinguished-looking man with silvered hair and mustache, dressed in white linen; he was shown standing on the porch of a squat, wide, comfortable-looking bungalow, the open space in front of which was a riot of tropical verdure.

Louise glanced up at Blythe, and her eyes filled.

"You must not think it odd that I did not give it to you before this," said Blythe, fighting a bit of a lump in his throat. "I've been spending at least two hours every day searching for it ever since—well, ever since I met you on the train," he admitted, his cheeks tingling with the confession.

"When was it taken? And is he so—so glorious-looking as this?" asked Louise, her enthusiasm over her father's photograph—the first she had ever seen of him, for her mother had resentfully destroyed the earlier ones—overcoming her hardly-maintained restraint.

Blythe sat down beside her and told her about the picture. He had gotten it from her father upon the occasion of his visit to Honolulu nearly three years before. Blythe had been summoned to California on some legal business, and, a bit run down from over work, he had made the six-day cruise down to Honolulu, partly for recuperation and partly to go over some affairs with George Treharne. Treharne had come from his plantations on the Island of Maui to meet him in Honolulu. Louise sat rapt for more than half an hour while Blythe answered her eager questions about her father. He had felt a delicacy about expanding on that subject so long as the girl was domiciled with her mother; now, however, that Louise had been literally forced to the severance of at least her constant propinquity to her mother, and, now, too, that he was her guardian in fact instead of in prospect, he felt at liberty to throw off that reserve; and he keenly enjoyed the absorption with which she listened to his account of her father, nearly every detail of which was absolutely new to her.

"How I should love to see him!" Louise exclaimed, sighing, when at length Blythe rose to leave.

"I am promising myself the intense satisfaction and pleasure of taking you to see him, Louise—some day," Blythe said, tacking on the last two words when he caught her scarlet flush. It was not until after he had spoken that he reflected that what he had said might easily be open to one very lucid and palpable interpretation; but that interpretation so fitted in with what he meant to encompass, all conditions being fair and equal, that he refused to stultify himself by modifying or withdrawing his words. And Louise's beauty was heightened when she flushed in that way, anyhow!

Laura, with the skillfully-assumed air of one who had been excessively busy, came in at that moment.

"Well, Mr. Ogre-Guardian, are you going to be at the pier to wish us bon voyage?" she asked Blythe.

Blythe stared at her. Laura stared back at him.

"Do you mean to tell me," exclaimed Laura, laughing, "that, after you've been here more than a solid hour, Louise has not told you? In heaven's name, what else could you two have been talking about?"

"Don't keep me oscillating on this—this ten-thousand-revolutions-to-the-minute fly-wheel, please, Laura," said Blythe, blankly. "What are you talking about?"

"Then it is true that Louise hasn't told you we are going abroad next week?"

"Next week?" Blythe's jaw fell.

"Why, I thought surely she would have finished asking your guardianly permission—and everything by this time," said Laura, shaking a finger at Louise. "But I can see how it is going to be: she means to wheedle me into asking her guardian all the terribly difficult things."

"But are you really going so—so scandalously soon?" inquired Blythe, for a moment genuinely glum. "Why, New York will seem like some miserable tank town plunged in Stygian darkness without you and——"

"Oh, finish it!" dared Laura when he came to a sudden halt. But Blythe did not, for already his mind was grasping the fact that the plan was a good one, as Laura's plans generally were. He did not try to convince himself that he would not miss them both sorely; Laura for her cordial, unexacting friendship and camaraderie and Louise because——He knew equally well why he should miss Louise, but there was a shyness about this man even in his self-communings, and so he did not go to the bottom of that in his summary reflection on the project. Laura's keen eye detected that there was something distrait in Louise's manner with Blythe, and, wondering, she made another escape in order to permit Blythe to make his devoirs to one instead of to two. Blythe took Louise's hands in his and gradually, by mere silent compulsion, drew her averted eyes into a direct line with his own, which were smiling and alight with an utter frankness.

"Louise," he said, going straight to the point, "I know what is in your mind and why you are holding me at a little more than arm's length. I am glad to say, although I am a little sorry that you do not already know it, that you are absolutely wrong; not hopelessly wrong, because you are going to see the matter differently when you are less troubled in mind than you now are. I wish such an idea had not entered your mind. I believe it would not have entered your mind had you known me better."

Louise, startled that he should have read her so clearly as his words denoted, replied, with no great conviction that what she said was exactly true:

"Does not the very fact that you seem to understand so clearly furnish the best evidence?" But that sounded rather inconsequential to her, and she went on flurriedly: "I don't mean just that. Perhaps I do not know precisely what I do mean," averting her head again in her confusion, "now that you——" and she came to a futile end.

"Now that I read you aright, you were about to say," said Blythe, smiling gravely. "Well, I am not going to be ungenerous enough to triumph over you because you have virtually admitted that you were wrong—for you have so admitted, haven't you?"

Louise remained silent, her head still averted; but her hands still rested in Blythe's.

"Haven't you?" said Blythe; and she was conscious that his grasp upon her hands was tightening.

Blythe peered around to catch a view of her face, and he saw that she was faintly smiling. He did not let go of her hands, nor did she appear at all eager to have him do so.

"I have an appointment for which I am already late, and I am keen to have a look at my watch," went on Blythe, quite cheerfully, without in the least relaxing his possession of her hands. "But of course I can't look at it—I can't do anything but remain here for a week, say—until you tell me that you are wrong."

Louise turned her natural face upon him and nodded brightly—conquered, and willing to be; there was, she noticed, an inviting little hollow in his coat, between his left shoulder and the rise of his chest, which she vaguely imagined would be a very inviting spot upon which to rest, if even for a transitory moment, a tired head; Blythe was conscious of a decided response when he pressed her hands just before releasing them; and when he went out she felt that the room, somehow, had become a little darker than it had been. She knew that he had understood, and she appraised his fineness in telling her that she had been wrong at its true value; but she was not entirely convinced, and she recoiled from the thought of permitting him to make any sacrifice for her sake. But she was glad that he had divined what had been in her mind, and her heart gave a little leap when she thought that, if ever there was to be any computation of or allusion to a sacrifice, it would be on her side, and not on his; she knew now that he was above even the thought of entertaining, much less measuring, such a consideration.

Her mother came to Laura's late in the afternoon, very downcast, very plaintive on the subject of how terribly she already had missed Louise. Judd, with his customary morning penitence, had seen her at noon and made his usual abject apology; and he had endured the lash of her scornful tongue with a shaky consciousness that his conduct had been pretty outrageous even for him. He did not acknowledge how set back he was, however, when Mrs. Treharne, a tirade over, let fall the fact that Louise had gone to Laura's, and the additional fact that Louise, having been placed under John Blythe's guardianship at her father's direction, would be very well looked after and provided for. But Judd wondered, nevertheless, just how these facts would dovetail with Langdon Jesse's sweet scheme to have Louise relegated, under Judd's provision, to the depressing and chastening surroundings of a "five-by-eight flat."

Louise's heart went out to her mother when Mrs. Treharne, in an effusion of tears, told her how hideously lonesome the house on the Drive was and would continue to be without her; but the girl had difficulty in matching this with the undeniable fact that, when she told her mother that she would be sailing for Europe within a week, Mrs. Treharne, drying her tears, offhandedly pronounced that the plan was a very wise one and would be the best imaginable thing for Louise.

Louise, as often before, was stunned by the palpable contradiction afforded by her mother's tears over what she called her lonesomeness and, in the next moment, her dry-eyed approval of a trip that would place an ocean between them. She wanted to go with Laura and she meant to go; but she was conscious of a sinking of the heart when she found that, far from seeking to deter her, her mother appeared not only willing but anxious to have her go. Mrs. Treharne's one thought, of course, was that the trip would give her a breathing spell, "give her a chance to think," as she futilely expressed it to herself; for her life had become one continuous procrastination. Louise, she considered, would be "broadened by travel" and sheared of some of her "old-fashioned notions." And, while Louise was gone, she herself could "think things over" and block out a course. A misty, intangible idea of abandoning Judd already had crept into her mind, in her self-searching, self-contemning moments; perhaps, while Louise was across the sea, she might be able to evolve some plan whereby——And here her musings halted when she came plumb upon the thought of the surrender of luxuries that her abandonment of Judd would involve, the scrimping and saving of a "narrow, smug existence with smug, narrow people." Anyhow, Louise's absence from the scene would "give her time to think." That was the main point.

But Louise, who had been lonesome for her mother, now found herself lonesome in her mother's presence.

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Judd met Langdon Jesse at the club a few nights later.

"Judd," Jesse sneered, "you are, all in all, about the most accomplished damned blunderer in the Western Hemisphere, aren't you?"

"That will be about all of that from you," growled Judd in reply. He had got out of the cotton market with, as he put it, an "unpunctured pelt," so that he had no present fear of the vindictive machinations of the younger man. "A civil tongue between your teeth henceforth in your dealings with me, or we don't deal. Do you get that?"

"Oh!" said Jesse, eloquently. He surrendered the whip hand with his customary deftness. "But you'll remember, I suppose," going on suavely, "that you told me that Miss Treharne was a virtual dependent of yours?"

"Well," snarled Judd, "supposing I really thought so? How about that?"

"Oh, if you really thought so, why of course that's different," said Jesse, graciously. "But you were pretty wrong, weren't you? You separated her from her mother on that presumption by bawling at her as if she had been a chambermaid; and all the time she was virtually, as she is now in fact, under the guardianship of that toploftical Blythe fellow; she is living with Mrs. Stedham, with whom she starts for Europe in a few days, and she is more than amply provided for by her father. In all candor, and between man and man, could you possibly have botched things worse than you did upon your mistaken premise?"

"You mean botched the thing so far as you are concerned, eh?" growled Judd. "Well, things were botched for you in that direction before you ever started. You've been kicking around long enough to know when you're left at the post; but you don't know it, all the same. Anyhow, count me out of your confounded woman-hunting schemes in future, understand? I've got enough to do to attend to my own game. Play your own hand. But you're butting your head against a stone wall in this one instance, let me tell you that."

"Is that so?" inquired Jesse, with no sign of perturbation or discouragement. "Well, to adopt your somewhat crude metaphor, I'll play the hand out, and I'll show you the cards after I've finished. Will you want to see them?"

"Oh, go to the devil," virtuously replied Judd.

---

CHAPTER X

Late in the afternoon of the day before Louise and Laura were to sail, John Blythe, having fled his office and a great mass of work at an unusually early hour and without any conscientious scruples whatever, strode up and down, back and forth, the entire length of his apartment—barring the kitchen—many dozens of times. He subjected his hair to an absurd hand-tousling as he paced; he kicked up corners of the rugs and then kicked them into place again on the next trip back; he stopped at tables to pick up books, glancing at their titles with unseeing eyes and then tossing them back on the tables with a bang; once he picked up an ordinary match-safe that he had owned for years, and caught himself holding it out in front of him and staring curiously at it—but really far, far beyond it—as if he had never before clapped an eye upon it, and, emerging for a moment from that trance, he replaced the match-safe on the table with a flickering smile.

Noticing all of which from the kitchen out of the corners of her solicitous and suspicious eyes, Sarah became worried. Sarah was the stout, grey-wooled colored woman who managed, not to say ruled, John Blythe's bachelor establishment, including John Blythe himself. She had been Blythe's boyhood nurse, and, never having been entirely out of touch with him through all of his early struggles, she had returned to him when he had won his way and set up his solitary Lares and Penates. She was highly privileged. There were times, indeed, when she exercised the actual veto power; as for example, when Blythe wanted to shift too early into lighter-weight linen, or sought to rush off to an appointment without his breakfast, and so on.

Now, polishing a glass to give her hands something to do, she appeared at the door of the kitchen, completely filling it, and waited for Blythe to stride back that way. So intense was his absorption that he did not see her until she coughed remindfully. Then he looked up and at her—still without seeing her, as she well knew.

"Yo' all ain't sick, is yo' Mistuh John?" inquired Sarah, gazing at him slantwise and showing a good deal of the whites of her eyes.

Blythe didn't hear her. He gazed right through her, and, thence on, through the rear wall of the kitchen. After quite a pause, however, it was borne in upon his consciousness that she had said something.

"How is that, Sarah?" he asked her, coming to a standstill.

"Ah said, Is yo' tuk sick, suh?" repeated Sarah. "Dis heah crazy, triflin', no-'count N'Yawk weathuh is 'nough tuh mek anybody tuhn ovuh an' die, an' Ah got de misuhy in mah haid mahse'f. Is yo' got any fevuh, suh? Yo' face looks raid on de tips o' de cheeks."

Blythe, only half-hearing, felt tentatively of the "raid" spots on his cheeks, which, as a matter of fact, were decidedly flushed. Then he thrust his hands into his pockets and resumed his up-and-down pacing, saying:

"Oh, I'm all right, Sarah. Not a bit under the weather. Just—er—fixing up a case, that's all."

Sarah, polishing away at the glass, gazed intently at his back as he walked away. Then she slowly turned and re-entered the kitchen, muttering to herself:

"Can't tell me no sich conjingulatin' stuff—'fixin' up a case.' De case dat boy is fixin' up weahs petticoats an' puffs an' maybe one o' dese heah D'rectory dresses—Ah reckon Ah can tell de symptoms!"

Wherein, as to the main point of her suspicion, the sagacious Sarah was exactly right.

John Blythe was indubitably, whole-heartedly, whole-mindedly in love with Louise Treharne. He knew that. He had known it for some time. That, however, in accordance with a by no means uncommon rule in such cases, was, he considered, an exceedingly unimportant factor in the problem. The problem, briefly stated, was this: What did Louise Treharne think of him? He remembered now, with impatience, his words to Louise in the Park, when he had hoped that she might accept his "devotion as a man," and her reply. His "devotion as a man?" That, Blythe reflected, might mean anything, especially to a girl placed in a difficult position and, as a natural consequence, in need of all the devotion of any sort that might be offered her. Had Louise understood his words as he had meant them? Blythe, with the customary self-depreciating pessimism of the lover, was afraid she had not. He reproached himself for not having made his meaning more plain—another grisly pastime in which love-possessed males indulge for the purpose of making themselves even more acutely miserable. Immediately atop of this regret that he had not been more explicit, he flared at himself and decided that he would have been an inexcusable scoundrel had he done anything of the sort. It would have been taking a mean and an unworthy advantage of her in her distress.

Then he pondered the few words of hers that had so thrilled him. What, after all, had they amounted to? She had said that she was ready to accept his devotion. What of that? Devotion, how? Devotion, from whom? Why, her guardian-to-be, of course! How else could her words possibly be viewed by a sane man? What right had he to seek to torture her simple utterance into anything more meaningful, more solacing to his wretched self-esteem? At this point of his cogitations Blythe became quite indignant with himself.

Here he was (he reflected, figuratively hiding his head), a man of thirty-two who had been brushing elbows with the world's people nearly all his life, and wearing a few more than the average number of scars to show for it—here he was, actually thinking of pouncing upon a girl of nineteen, who had scarcely forgotten the discipline of school; actually contemplating the imbecility (why, worse than that—the crime!) of hurling himself and his love at her, before she had so much as had a chance to meet any other man or men, before, in fact, she had had even a chance to turn around—for hadn't he (accidentally or not) begun to vaguely form these idiotic notions on the very day she was leaving school? And what would be her natural implication? That he was seeking to take advantage of her inexperience and her helplessness, solely on the strength of his being her legal guardian!

He had been all wrong (he mentally maundered on) the other day at Laura's when he had attributed Louise's perfectly proper restraint with him to her keener realization of her mother's ostracized status in its bearing upon her own position. What had Louise's mother's status to do with Louise? And hadn't he been a complaisantly self-satisfied numbskull to suppose that this was the reason for Louise's obvious aloofness on that day! The truth was (still he drivelled on, never sparing himself) that she had come to a perfectly proper realization of how presumptuous he, Blythe, had been in his attitude toward her, and she had distinctly meant to indicate to him in an unmistakable manner that any aspirations of that kind on his part might as well be immediately suppressed, inasmuch as they were foredoomed to fail. True (taking again for the moment his own case as plaintiff), the love of any reasonably honest and fairly successful man for a woman ought to be at least worth considering, and Louise Treharne was the first woman he had wholly loved; other little affairs, scattered through the flown years, had been mere inconsequentialities, the mutual amusements (and so mutually understood) of an hour, a day, a week, perhaps, at most, a month. Three months before Blythe would have smiled, if he had not laughed outright, if any smirking imp had whispered to him that the time was quite close at hand when he would be shamefully neglecting his decidedly important practice because of his work-disqualifying absorption in thoughts, not to say dreams, of a woman. And yet here he was, supposedly a self-contained, level-headed man of the law, a man rigorously trained in the austere school of experience—here he was, sighing like a furnace, drawing meaningless pictures on blotting pads when he should have been preparing briefs, forgetting his meals, to Sarah's profound worriment and scandalization, and walking the world in a veritable schoolboy trance! Blythe, in lucid moments, caught himself smiling inwardly at the thought of it. Was he sorry that such a thing had come to be? He quickly beat down that trivial question, tentatively submitted by his subconsciousness. Schoolboy, furnace-sigher, sentimentalist, imbecile, what not—he was glad!

Ceaselessly pacing the apartment, then, and mulling the matter over, first condemning himself for his presumptuousness and then wondering in a blank sort of a way if Louise herself took this view of his attitude, Blythe found himself on the horns of his life's dilemma. It would not be so bad, he thought with a catch at the throat, if she were not going away; but the thought of the wide Atlantic rolling between them caused his heart to thump against his ribs and incited him to rumple his hair still more outrageously.

At length, seized by an idea, he walked into his study, closed the door after him, sat down at his desk telephone, and called up Laura. Very promptly he heard her musically rising "Well?"

"Greetings, Laura," he said. "This is your insane friend, John Blythe."

"Greetings, Deserter Blythe," replied Laura. "You have not been to see us for an age. And how long have you been insane?"

"For several months, I believe. I am hardly a competent witness as to that."

"I am so distressed to hear it—when your career and—and everything looks so promising, too!"

"'Everything?' Define 'everything.'"

"I haven't the gift of being specific. You have. What, then, is the most convincing manifestation of your insanity?"

"I am thinking of taking a great chance; prematurely, and therefore insanely."

"You are talking rationally enough. Perhaps your madness is a sort of recurrent mania, with lucid intervals?"

"No, there are no lucid intervals. At this moment I am obsessed by a fear of the perils of the sea."

"That is odd, considering that you are not going to sea. Are you?"

"No; but you are—and she. Is she with you now?"

"No; she is in her room writing a letter to her father, the first she has ever written to him. A little sad, is it not? I am in my dressing room, quite comfortable, thank you, with my elbows on my writing desk; and so there is no danger of interruption. What is it you wish to tell me, John? Or ask me, perhaps?"

"It is something both to tell you and to ask you. In about an hour from now I want to ask Louise if she will marry me. That's the telling. The asking is this: Would that be a fair thing to do?"

"Such Druid-like deliberation! You speak, John, as if you were leading up to asking one for a cup of tea!"

"Do I? Well, I am mindful of this somewhat open medium of communication. Believe me, I feel anything but deliberate. But my question: Would it be fair?"

"How could it possibly be viewed as anything else but fair?"

"Because the circumstances are unusual. In the first place, I am almost the only man she knows—that she has had a chance to know. Then, I am her guardian. Would it not be rather presumptuous, not to say downright unfair, for me to take advantage of these things?"

"That, I think, is what might be called an obliquely conscientious view, John."

"Then the disparity in our ages."

"The difference between nineteen and thirty-two hardly constitutes a case of May and December. Another wholly trivial consideration of yours. Thirteen years' difference—and, by the way, haven't I heard you affirm that thirteen is your lucky number?"

"Finally, I haven't the least imaginable reason for supposing that she has ever thought of me in that respect."

"Haven't you? How perfectly unimportant! Isn't that quite the rule? How many men ever believed they were considered as possibilities until they endured the travail of finding out?"

"You are riotously optimistic this afternoon. I wish I were in the same humor. I think I shall be in need of a mood like that very soon."

"What a glorious opportunity for me to work in that antique bromidiom, 'Faint heart ne'er won,' and so forth. But I shan't. In an hour, you said?"

"About an hour."

"Don't expect to see me. I am horribly busy packing silver and things. Perhaps I may see you a moment before you leave. If not, then at the steamer in the morning."

"I wish I had words to tell you what a trump you are, Laura."

"I wish I had words to tell you how delighted I am, John."

"Not prematurely delighted, I hope, good friend. At this moment I find myself believing that the perils of the sea are nothing to certain perils of the land. Goodbye."

"Goodbye. Don't lose confidence in your lucky number—even if you do call it a 'disparity!'"

---

It would have been the obvious thing for Laura, after her telephone conversation with Blythe, to at least intimate to Louise that she was upon the verge of an event quite universally and correctly deemed of considerable importance in a young woman's life—her first proposal. Most women in Laura's place would have done so. But Laura's dislike for the obvious was almost a part of her religion. She had none of the benevolent marplot in her composition. She made it a point never to interfere with symmetrical sequences. Her own unhappy marital experience had by no means bereft her of sentiment; and she felt that a girl about to receive an offer of marriage should be entitled to enjoy the surprise—and in this case she knew it would be a surprise—inhering to so important an occasion. So Laura, although she visited Louise in her room after her telephone talk with Blythe, said nothing about it; but she craftily intimated, in order that Louise might look her best, that she would not be greatly surprised if Blythe were to drop in. The intimation was sufficient. Louise, a very human woman, promptly proceeded, as soon as Laura returned to her own quarters, to correct even her most trifling disarrays; so that when Blythe (astonishingly conforming to Laura's prophecy, Louise thought) arrived she looked very lovely in a one-piece dress of Quaker-grey rajah, with a band of grey velvet, which somehow suggested to Blythe the insignia of a princess, around her wonderful hair. She was at the piano, striving, soft pedal down, to extract musical sense from Strauss' "Salome" (impossible task!) when Blythe came in.

He noticed her grey dress at once.

"It is a comfort to have such a tractable, obedient ward," he said, studying the dress approvingly when she rose to greet him. "Here, a little less than a week after I threatened to insist upon your adopting the Quaker garb, I find that you've voluntarily assumed it—the color, at any rate. I know some guardians who would envy me."

Louise, quickly at ease—which had been Blythe's purpose in beginning with persiflage—smiled with a woman's usual deprecation of a complimented costume.

"Seeing that I have had this dress for more than a year," she said, "my obedience must have become an unconscious habit before I knew you."

Blythe, a trained hand at sparring, took advantage of the opening.

"Before you knew me, perhaps, Louise," he said. "But not before I knew you. Aren't you forgetting that I knew you when you still believed in Kris Kringle and Hans Andersen?" He sighed with rather too smiling an assumption of melancholy. "That reflection, I confess, makes me feel pretty aged."

"Does it?" asked Louise. "You forget that, if it makes you feel aged, it should make me feel at least middle aged, don't you? And I believe in Santa Claus and in fairy tales yet, I think." Then, resuming the first thread: "It seems singular that there should have been a time when you knew me and I didn't know you; that is, to remember you. For I didn't remember you at all on the train that day. Come to think of it, you didn't remember me, either, until you were reminded—that telegram, you know. An odd chance, was it not?"

"So odd," said Blythe, "that I catch myself wondering what my life had been before and what it would be now if—" He paused, already groping for words;—"if I had missed that train."

Louise, far from missing his meaning, grasped it so acutely that Blythe caught the tell-tale color mounting to her face.

"And now I am wondering," he went on, gazing for comfort at his nails, "since we are on the subject, whether my having known you for such a long, long time confers upon me the privilege of—well, of being entirely candid with you?"

"I should expect candor, in any case—from you," said Louise, trying desperately to concentrate her mind upon something quite matter-of-fact in order to keep her color down.

"Why, particularly, from me?" said Blythe, grasping at straws.

"Oh, I can hardly say—because you are the embodiment of candor, or candor itself," said Louise. "Aren't you?"

"I don't know," he answered as if really in doubt about it—as he was. "It seems to me that if I actually possessed that quality in such a high degree, I should have proved it to you, Louise, before this. Proved it, for example, in the Park the other afternoon."

Louise knew quite well what he meant. Moreover, it never occurred to her to pretend that she did not know.

"Are you sure that you did not?" she asked him, flushing, but with a direct enough gaze.

"I am afraid that I did not," said Blythe, nervously rising and facing her. "Perhaps it was as well, too. For the first time in my life I am in more than one mind as to whether a certain sort of candor is always desirable."

Having thus plunged into the domain of the purely ethical, Blythe could scarcely have expected an offhand reply. As a matter of fact, he got no reply at all.

"What I am striving to say, I suppose, Louise," he went on, taking himself a little better in hand, "is that, after you sail tomorrow, I am going to be more lonesome than I have ever been in my life before."

"Is that so hard to say?" Louise asked.

"Not when it is rewarded by so helpful an answer," said Blythe, conscious of a throbbing at his temples.

"I do not find it in the least hard to say that I shall miss you," said Louise, frankly enough; nevertheless, to give herself countenance, she picked up from the table a little carved ivory tiger and examined it with great apparent curiosity.

"Miss me for—for my guardianly wisdom and ghostly counsel?" said Blythe, his wide smile visibly nervous. Then, when there was a pause, he pressed the point: "Is that it, Louise?"

Her silence did not imply affirmation, and, the throbbing at his temples increasing, Blythe knew it. He bent over her chair, gently but firmly removed the ivory tiger from her hands, took one of them in his own, and said:

"Listen to me, Louise. I am fearful, if I do not plunge ahead, of becoming entangled in a weave of subtleties. I don't want to be incoherent, even if my excuse would be that I became so while taking a desperate chance. I haven't the least idea what you think of me—I don't mean as your guardian and interested friend, but as a man very susceptible to human impulses. But I am not debarred from finding out. And I should have no right to ask you such a question before telling you, as I tell you now, that I love you." She rose as he spoke, her hand still tightly grasped in his, and their eyes mingled. "You have set a new light to glow within me. I am conscious of a new propulsion that I never knew before—that I did not believe existed until I met you as a woman grown. It means everything to me—the world and all. I do not know that I am fair in saying this to you. I am incapable of judging. I do know that I want to be fair. After all, there is no unfairness in my simply telling you that I love you. It would be different, I think—but you are to judge of that—if I were to ask you to marry me—yet. But that, Louise, is what I came here to ask you."

There is no eloquence, however ornately phrased, to compare with that of a man or a woman who is altogether in earnest. Louise thrilled under the quiet, but, as she knew, deeply-felt words of this man whose clear-cut, rugged face, as he spoke, became positively handsome. She placed an impulsive hand on his arm.

"I told you that I should miss you," she said haltingly, but with a womanly sweetness that moved him like a harp-chord. "And I could not miss you if I did not care for you? I do care for you—as much as I esteem and honor you; and that is a great deal. I have not yet asked myself, I think, if I love you. It may be that I do. If to miss you dreadfully when I do not see you every day—and, until now, I had not seen you for nearly a week!—is—is that, then perhaps I—"

Blythe, fighting, as if in actual conflict with something tangible, the temptation to take her in his arms, grasped her other hand. His face was very close to hers, and her curved, girlish lips sent his blood swirling with their maddening proximity. But he held himself in a vise, knowing that the hour had not yet struck for their contact of lips.

"It is enough that you care for me, Louise," he said, hoarsely fervid; and he felt as weak as a man who has successfully come through a great peril. "I could ask no more; I ask no more. Your caring for me is, I know now, more than I ever hoped or dreamed. It is enough—for now. It is a start." He smiled vaguely at the homeliness of his phrase. "I scarcely know what I am saying, Louise. But it doesn't much matter what a man says, does it, when he is happier than he has ever before been in his life?"

She raised the hand which had been resting on his arm and took hold, with thumb and forefinger, of a button of his coat. The unconscious little intimacy set his pulses to throbbing again.

"I shall know when I come back," she said to him with a simplicity that was almost quaint, "whether—whether my caring for you is more than just that. I believe that it is, but—but there are reasons—you know what they are—that restrain me from owning it, even if I knew positively; which I do not, yet, John."

John!

A quiver ran through the man, which, as she still was unconsciously toying with the button of his coat, she could not help but feel.

"Louise," he said, bending so close to her that he felt her cool, fragrant breath upon his cheek, "I want you to call me that; but not again now. There must be an interval—tonight, say—for me to become used to it. I warn you of my irresponsibility if you call me that again before tomorrow. And I am not minding, my dear, about what you do not know positively. Neither am I presuming upon it. You have made me happy enough. Everything else can wait. You are not committed. I wouldn't dream of holding you committed. Your life is still all your unpromised own. I tell you that it is enough for me now—it will be enough for me hereafter, if nothing else is to be—to know that I am even cared for, have been cared for, by a woman like you. I am going now. My heart is raging with love and honor for you; I want to get out underneath the sky; feel the cold upon my face so that I shall know I am not dreaming. Goodbye, dear, until I send you away from me—send you away, not with wretchedness and despair in my heart, but with hope, and light, and happiness—tomorrow!" and he pressed her hands, gazed at her with wide, kindling eyes, and went reeling from the room, as one who seeks a secure footing after many days at sea.

Laura, by design, was standing in the doorway of her sitting room when he passed unsteadily out.

"Well?" she said to him. "Did the 'disparity' number win, John?"

He stopped, gazed at her for an instant unseeingly, then shook himself together and grasped her outstretched hands.

"I may be a John o' Dreams, dear friend," he said to her huskily. "In fact, I am sure that I am, right now. But it is worth a little delirium to find that, after all, I am not actually insane," and he strode out, Laura watching him with a dimpling face.

After a while Laura went in and found Louise standing musing before a window, seeming to watch the twilight settling upon the vaguely greening Park. Laura threw an arm around the girl's shoulder and kissed her.

"Did he tell you, dear?" Louise asked, turning.

"Not in words," replied Laura. "But one surmises. The air has been charged with it. I know, of course, that he has been worshipping you as did the shepherd of old a distant star. And you, heart of hearts?"

"I seem, somehow, to have been loving him all my life," said Louise.

"Did you tell him so?" asked Laura.

"I am afraid that he, too, surmises," said Louise, smiling shyly.

---

CHAPTER XI

"American letters!" exclaimed Laura, turning the packet over eagerly. "Some rainy afternoon—which means, probably, this afternoon, even if the sun is shining smokily now—I am going to write a brief but enthusiastic essay, 'for private distribution,' on how good American stamps look on American letters addressed to Americans who are not in America—long may she wave!" and she sorted over the just-brought letters with fluttering fingers.

"What a lot of America in one sentence!" said Louise, her own eyes alight at the bulgy little packet of letters from overseas. "I wish," she added a little wistfully, "America were as near as your patriotism is genuine."

"Don't I!" heartily agreed Laura. "Could anything be better calculated to inspire patriotism in the American bosom than an occasional inspection of Europe—and particularly an occasional residence in London? All Americans possessed of the steamship fare should be forced by law to visit Europe—particularly London—at least once. Then there would be no further trouble in getting soldiers for our army. All of the tourists by mandate would become so patriotic that they would enlist just as soon as they got back to the United States!"

Then they fell upon their United-States-stamped mail as if the envelopes had contained anxiously awaited reprieves or dispensations, and for the next quarter of an hour the only sounds in the room were the crackling of paper and the absorbed, subdued ejaculations to which women give utterance in perusing letters.

The murk-modified morning sunshine of early June in London filtered wanly through the windows of their rooms at the Savoy. Very close to the consciousness of both women was the keen recollection of glorious Junes in the United States, with over-arching skies of sapphire, unstained for days at a stretch even by the fleeciest of golden clouds. Louise was confessedly lonesome. Laura, who had her London almost at her fingers' ends, was lonesome, too, but not confessedly so. It would be too much to ask a seasoned Londoner from New York to admit such a departure from the elemental rule of cosmopolitanism. Laura, in London or anywhere else in Europe, was lonesome in the abstract, so to speak. Her method of giving expression to her feeling was to comment—when no Europeans were of her audience, of course—upon the superior comforts and joys of life in the United States, which, to her, meant New York almost exclusively.

Louise shared the almost inevitable feeling of genuine lonesomeness and unanalyzable oppression which overcomes, to the point of an afflictive nostalgia, most Americans of whatever degree who find themselves for the first time in European capitals. They had spent their first fortnight in London; and Louise had only been saved from complete dejection during that period by the gayety—somewhat studied and reserved, but still gayety—of Laura's troops of friends, English and American, in the city that, for the socially unacclimated American, is the dullest and most hopeless in all Europe. Paris, whence they had gone from London for a month's stay, had been made endurable to Louise by her close fellowship with Laura in the older woman's incessant battlings with the milliners and makers of dresses. Victory had never failed eventually to perch upon Laura's banners at the termination of these conflicts; but the intervening travail had given her young companion more than enough to think about and thus to ward off an ever-recurring depression. She did not call it "homesickness," even to herself; for by this time she had become, if not used, at least reconciled to the thought that she had no real home.

One of the least true maxims of all of those having perennial currency is that which declares that "All good Americans go to Paris when they die." Most Americans, if the truth could be tabulated, are poignantly disappointed with Paris. It is a city where American men of a certain type feel that they have almost a Heaven-bestowed license to "throw off responsibility." But "the morning after" knows neither latitude nor longitude, and it is just as dismal and conducive to remorse and good resolutions in Paris as it is in any other quarter of the irresponsible world. It takes an American man about a week to become thoroughly disillusioned as to Paris. The American woman, who, like women the world over, must preserve her sense of responsibility at all times, even in the French capital, discovers her disappointment with and her weariness of the over-lauded Paris in considerably less time than a week. Louise found it unutterably tiresome, artificial, insincere, absurdly over-praised. Now they had been back in London for three weeks, and she was beginning to wonder when Laura would give the "pack-up signal" for the return to New York. Whenever she circuitously led up to such a suggestion, however, Laura told her how ridiculous it would be to return to New York in June, at the height of the London season; besides, there were thousands upon thousands of people in London whom Laura wanted Louise to meet; and Louise (Laura would go on) must fight to overcome her Londonphobia, because, after all, London probably would be on the map as a sort of meeting place for peripatetic folk for quite a long time to come; whereupon, with fine feminine inconsistency, Laura would round upon London for its primitiveness in the supplying of ordinary comforts, for its incurable smudginess, for the mediæval complaisance of its populace, and for a hundred other matters that made it a mere "widely-spraddled" hamlet in comparison with her beloved New York.

Additionally, there had been an utter absence of the querulous note, and an unwonted tone of positive sadness, in her mother's letters that gravely disquieted Louise. Her mother's self-revelations on paper hitherto had been characterized by a sort of acidulous recklessness; her letters to Louise while the girl was at school had been long-drawn out epistolary complaints, the pages running over with the acridness of a woman at variance not only with her world but with herself. But the half dozen and odd letters which Louise had received from her mother since leaving New York had been of an entirely different character. Their tone denoted, not the indifference which proceeds from the callousness of surrender, but the long-deferred awakening of a maternal instinct and a maternal conscience. They were filled with reproaches, not for others, but for herself. In them, too, Louise perceived a vein of hopelessness, as of one who has been aroused all too late to the evils and dangers of a self-wrought environment, a self-created peril, which sorely disturbed her daughter.

Louise's parting with her mother had been tender enough on both sides. The girl had said, simply enough, that she was going away for a while in the hope that there would be an adjustment, a righting, of all things awry with her mother before her return. She felt her helplessness, she added, even to make herself a helpful instrument toward such an adjustment by remaining near her mother; but she hoped and believed that before she came back—And Louise had been able to progress no further. Nor was there any need. Her mother, troubled even beyond the relief of tears by her daughter's words, had taken Louise in her arms and cuddled her as if she had been again a child; and her last words had been, "Everything will be changed, dear—the slate will be cleansed, and we shall start hand in hand again—before you get back. Depend upon that. It is odd, I suppose, that I am beginning to remember my duty to you as a mother before I have made a start toward seeing my duty to myself as a woman. But the two awakenings go together, Louise, I find—as you shall see when you return." Louise had been quick to detect the implied promise in her mother's words; and her main reason for not being insistent with Laura upon an earlier return was that she wanted to give her mother plenty of time to redeem the tacit pledge bound up in her parting words.

Her letters from Blythe had been perfervid variations—the effort at restraint being almost humorously visible between the lines—upon the one theme, the leit motif of which was: "We are to be married: when?" The fact itself, it will be observed, was masterfully taken for granted; the time only remained to be mutually agreed upon, so it appeared to Blythe.

It was from such a letter as this that Louise now looked up and gazed pensively at the reddish rays of smothered London sunshine flickering, with the movement of the curtains, upon the rug. Laura herself, just having finished a far more informative letter from Blythe, caught the pensive expression and not unnaturally associated it with the still open letter on Louise's lap.

"Of course the man is impatient, dear," she said to Louise, weaving without effort into the subject matter of the girl's reflections. "But you must not mind that. Being impatient—at such an interesting juncture of their poor, benighted lives, I mean—is good for them. Really, it is the best thing that can possibly happen to them. It chastens them, teaches them the benignities, the joys of—er—abnegation and renunciation and things. By the way, Louise," veering about with diverting instability, "when do you really and privately mean to get rid of the man by marrying him?"

Louise, not without an effort, shook herself out of her reverie, folded her letter from Blythe with an odd sort of deliberation, and looked frankly enough at Laura.

"It is not certain, dear," she replied, with no irresolution of tone, "that I shall ever marry him."

Laura regarded the girl with a gaze of perfectly unaffected stupefaction.

"I wonder," she said, as if to herself, "if the acoustics of these London rooms can be so atrocious, or if I am really becoming so old that my hearing already is affected? Say that again, child. It isn't possible that I could have heard you correctly."

Louise was unable to repress a slight smile at the extraordinary bewilderment which was visible on Laura's face, but her tone was distinct enough when she repeated:

"It is far from a certainty that I shall marry him at all, Laura."

Laura rose from her deep chair, gathered her "getting-up gown" hastily about her, crossed over to where Louise was sitting, placed an arm about the girl's shoulder, and gazed wonderingly into her eyes.

"It is impossible," she said, "that you two are quarrelling across the wide Atlantic? I shall cable John Blythe this very hour! It is his fault! It must be his fault!" and she rushed to her escritoire and pretended to fumble for her cable blanks.

"Of course I know you haven't the least idea of doing any such a thing," said Louise, earnestness showing through her composure. "Won't you please stop your aimless ransacking and come over and talk with me?"

"But," said Laura, seating herself by Louise, "I am afraid I am too anxious to scold somebody—either you, here and now, or John Blythe, by a few stinging words sent under the sea, or—or anybody I can lay my tongue or pen to! Really, I am baffled by what you say, Louise. Of course the man has asked you time and again, since we've been over here, to marry him?"

"He scarcely writes about anything else," replied Louise, smothering a smile over Laura's intense but uninformed earnestness.

"And don't I know," pursued Laura, with a mystified rapidity of utterance, "that he made his incoherent, almost unintelligible declaration to you on the very day before we sailed—didn't I see him as he left, treading on air, and hear him emit the entranced gibberish that customarily mounts to a man's lips at such a time? And you received his declaration as if you had been timing its arrival, and you told me two minutes after he had gone that you loved him. Then what in the wide world is the—" Laura threw up her hands with a baffled gesture that was almost comic. "I confess myself completely daunted, dear. Won't you tell me what it is all about?"

Louise regarded Laura with steady, reflective eyes.

"You know how I appreciate your fine, generous impulsiveness, dear," she said to the older woman. "But you must have thought, haven't you, that it would not be fair for me to marry John Blythe?"

Another film of mystification appeared on Laura's widened eyes.

"Fair?" she almost whispered in her amazement. "How do you mean—'fair'? Fair to whom—to yourself or to John?"

"To him," said Louise. "Of course it would not be fair to him. I cannot see how there could be two views as to that."

Laura, arms folded, rose and lithely crossed the room several times, knitting her brow. Then she sat down again beside Louise.

"I think I know what you mean, child," she said. "But of course you are wrong. Utterly, hopelessly, pitiably wrong. He isn't that sort of a man. You should know that, dear."

"I don't underestimate him—far from that," said Louise. "It is just because he isn't that sort of a man, as you say, that I shrink from the thought of being unfair with him—of permitting him to do himself an injustice."

"But," said Laura, "he is not a cubbish, haphazard lad. He is a man—a real man. He knows and gauges the world. More and better than that, he knows himself. I should have difficulty in recalling the name of any man who knows his mind better than John Blythe does his."

"I know that, Laura," said Louise. "But his unselfishness is too fine a thing to be taken advantage of. He has made his way unaided. He has had a long fight. He will never cease to mount. Why should I hamper him?"

"Hamper him!" exclaimed Laura. "Child, how can the woman a man loves hamper him?"

"Your partiality causes you to generalize, dear," said Louise. "My case—our case, if you will—is entirely different." She took a turn up and down the room and then confronted Laura calmly. "Don't you know what the world—his world—would say if he married me?"

Laura shrugged impatiently.

"The 'They Sayers'!" she exclaimed. "The 'They Sayers' say this, they say that, they say the other thing. And what does their 'They-Saying' amount to?"

"It would amount to nothing at all in his estimation—I am only too sure of that," replied Louise. "But a man who is making his way in the world must even take heed of the 'They-Sayers,' as you call them. He cannot ignore them. His unselfish impulse would be, not only to ignore them, but to flaunt them; and all on my account. It would, I think, be simply contemptible for me to permit him to do that."

Laura studied for a moment, then shook her head despairingly.

"My dear," she said, "you are the first girl I ever knew deliberately to erect barriers between herself and the happiness that rightfully belongs to her. What, in Heaven's name, has your mother's departure from—from rule to do with you? How has it, how could it, ever involve you, or come between you and the man—the big-minded man—who loves you and whom you love? Tell me that."

"It could not come between us," replied Louise. "But the world—the very 'They-Sayers' you mention—could and would use it as a thong to punish him. And that is the one thing I could not have. I am the daughter of my mother. I am not very experienced, but I know how the world views these things. The world does not draw lines of demarcation where women are concerned. Its ostracism is a very long and heavy whip. Its condemnation does not take the least heed of mitigations. I can speak plainly to you, dear—you are of course the only living person to whom I would say these things. But, if I were to permit John Blythe to marry me, can you not hear the gruelling comment—comment that, while it might not actually reach my husband's ears, he could not fail to be conscious of? They would say that he had married a girl whose mother had been openly maintained by a man—a man in the public eye—whose wife was living. They would go farther and say—which of course is the simple truth—that I had lived for a time under the roof maintained by that man. And, with such things to go upon, how could the world possibly reach any other conclusion—granting, as you must, the knack the world has for leaping at conclusions—than that John Blythe, a growing man, a man destined for distinction, had made a tremendous mistake in his marriage? Of course you understand. I have been wanting to say these things to you for a long time, but I could not summon the courage. I wanted to say them to John on the day before we sailed; but I could not."

Her voice broke, and she gazed out of the window to hide the tears that stood in her eyes. Laura, so strongly moved that she deliberately forced herself to think of inconsequentialities to keep back her tears, wrapped her arms about the girl.

"My dear," she said, "I am not, I fear, as religious, as reverent a woman as I should be. But I do not believe that God will keep a woman like you and a man like John Blythe apart. That would be a deviation from His all-discerning rule in which I simply could not believe. I don't admit that you are right. I don't say now that you are wholly wrong. But, through the very nobility of the view you take, a way shall be found. Never doubt that, child. I know that in some ways—many ways—the world is awry enough. But I know, too, that there is not enough injustice in all the world to keep you from the arms of the man who loves you and is beloved by you."

---

There were two topics in John Blythe's letter to Laura that gave her more than a day's material for reflection. One of them concerned Louise's mother.

"Mrs. Treharne summoned me a few days ago, and in the evening I went to the house on the Drive," Blythe wrote. "There seemed to be nothing in particular as to which she wished to see me—except that she was good enough to intimate that she had noticed my 'interest' in Louise. (Interest!'—when that very evening I'd been cursing the slow progress of the art of aviation, which made it impossible for me to fly to London out of hand—out of wing, I mean.) Really, Laura, I think the depressed little woman merely wanted to have a talk with somebody about Louise, which was why she sent for me. She looks in shocking health. If I read aright, I think she is at least at the beginning of some sort of a decline. Better not tell Louise this—just yet. There are reasons why I think it would be better for Louise to remain abroad with you for a while longer. One of the reasons is this: I gather that Mrs. Treharne is pretty nigh through with Judd. She as much as told me so. I was touched by her lack of reserve in speaking to me of this matter. Louise was right. Her mother, as Louise prophesied to you, is undergoing the miseries of an awakening—a singularly bitter awakening in her case, I fear. I felt and feel intensely sorry for her—she was never wrong at heart, but was caught in the eddy of circumstance.

"She hinted, not vaguely, but quite directly, that she was upon the verge of a complete change in her environment—and the intertwined remarks denoted that her keenly-felt humiliation in the eyes of her daughter was at the bottom of the contemplated change, whatever it is to be. I am very confident that it is to be a withdrawal from the protection, if one could call it that, of Judd. It is too bad, isn't it, that this did not come just a few months earlier? But (here's a bromidiom for you!) better late than never! Think what distress such a withdrawal would have spared Louise if it had happened before the child quit school!

"But enough of if-it-had-beens. The point is that Louise, I feel very sure, has accomplished a wonderful regeneration—the regeneration of her own mother! Could there be anything more unheard-of, more marvelous, than that? But it is merely of a piece with the influence which Louise has upon everybody. You know that badly-batted-around modern word, 'uplift'? It applies actually, I think, to but one human being in the world: Louise. I mean that everybody who comes even slightly under her influence experiences that sense of 'uplift.' I know that I do! And even you, my dear Laura, even you ..."

("Of course the dear headlong creature is right," thought Laura when she read this, "but isn't it hard to picture the self-contained, occasionally even austere John Blythe raving so! But they're all alike. I suppose that even Alexander, Cæsar, and Charlemagne privately raved the same way over their sweethearts!")

"So you will see," Blythe went on in his letter, "why it is better that Louise should remain on the other side with you until matters work themselves out here—until, in essence, her mother completely clears her skirts of the wretched Judd entanglement; and that, I think, is something very imminent. It will be a joy for Louise to be freely and unrestrainedly alone with her mother when she comes back. You understand, of course. So stay over there for another month at least, won't you, Petrarch's Laura and the Laura of all of us?...

"A few forenoons ago I came perilously close to getting a bit of needed exercise by throwing a man bodily out of my office—and this will seem the more startling to you when you remember my almost lamb-like non-aggressiveness. I think, though, I should have gone the length of throwing him out of the window had I not mentally visualized, in an unaccustomed access of caution, the large, rampageous red headlines in the afternoon newspapers: 'Struggling Young (?) Lawyer Hurls Famous Financier From Fifth Story Window,' etc., etc.

"The man was Langdon Jesse, whom of course you know. (Sometimes I wish you did not know so many sinister persons, but perhaps you can't help it.) Probably you are aware that I don't like the Jesse individual. I don't believe I am a victim of a prejudice as to him, either. He is a waxy, doughy person who makes the pursuit of women a hobby as decenter men make hobbies of golf, billiards, cigars and so on. I do not lean to the condemnatory tone where men are concerned, but this man's record is too besmudged and his personality too repulsive even for my amiable, non-Pharisaical (I hope) taste. I have known him in a general sort of a way for a number of years, but have always been at some pains to make it clear to him that I preferred the sight of his back.

"He lounged in upon me the other forenoon, very oily and desirous of exhibiting to me his somewhat rhino-like brand of savoir-faire, and he told me that, inasmuch as he was leaving for Europe directly, he thought he would ask me if I, as the guardian of Miss Treharne, would be willing that he should extend the tourist's usual civilities and courtesies to that young lady. Can you imagine a more imbecile question? Naturally, I was astonished to find that he had even met Louise, and you may hold yourself in readiness to be very severely spoken to when you return because you did not inform me of it. Seriously, I am inordinately sorry that Louise ever did meet him. Of course I gave the fellow what the reporters call 'very short shrift.' I can't remember ever having been more annoyed. The impudence of this loathly Eden Musée Lothario, knowing (as he certainly must have known) that I was perfectly familiar with his record and character, coming to me on such a mission! He was upon the pin-point of hinting that a note of recommendation from me, submitting him to the fair opinion of you and Louise, might enable him to offer the two of you certain somewhat prized civilities not easily obtainable—when I, without the least attempt at hinting, indicated the general direction of my door and gave him a view of my back.

"I haven't the least notion as to what the fellow's actual purpose was, but if, as he claims, he really has met Louise, I am perturbed to think that presently he will be in the same hemisphere with her. (I would include you in my perturbation, only I know how thoroughly well able you are to crunch such objects with a mere word, if not, indeed, a simple lifting of the eyebrows.) Of course he will not now have the temerity to call upon you in London. But if he does exhibit such hardihood, and in any way attempts to annoy you or Louise with his 'prized civilities,' you will let me know at once, of course—by cable, if you think it necessary. I don't know why I have permitted and am permitting myself to be disturbed by this individual's inexplicable little machinations (his whole life, in business and in private, is one huge machination), but I have been and I am. Write me just how he contrived to meet Louise, won't you?"

Laura, in reading this, felt considerable compunction over the fact that she had not told Blythe of Louise's unavoidable meetings with Langdon Jesse and of the attentions which he had attempted to force upon her. She had not done so because she had frankly feared the possible consequences of Blythe's quick-blazing anger. While she would have been willing enough to commit Jesse to the corporeal handling of a physically adept man like John Blythe, she had no means of knowing in advance whether the story of such a chastisement, if it took place, would become public; and as Louise had come under her own protection very soon after her final encounter with Jesse, Laura had felt that, as the Jesse incubus probably had been disposed of for good and all, it would be better not to disquiet Blythe by telling him anything about it. She knew that Louise had not mentioned Jesse to Blythe out of a feeling of plain shame that she had been put in the way of meeting a man of his stamp. But Laura, after re-reading that part of Blythe's letter referring to Jesse, found herself vaguely uneasy at the thought that even then he was on his way to London. She determined not to say anything about it to Louise. She also determined that London was going to remain large enough for Louise and herself and ten thousand Langdon Jesses; which, interpreted, means that she had not the remotest idea of bolting for it because of Jesse's impending arrival. Laura also concluded to obey Blythe's injunction to say nothing to Louise as to her mother's changing affairs. She longed to tell the girl of Blythe's forecasting of the approaching dissolution of the relationship between her mother and Judd; but she had learned the time-biding lesson, and she disliked to arouse hopes within Louise's mind that might not, after all, have fruition. Moreover, she had frequently had occasion to test Blythe's judgment, and she had always found it sound.

"But I wish John Blythe would take a vacation of a fortnight or so and run over here," she caught herself meditating. "He would fit into the situation beautifully at the present moment and in some moments that I seem to feel approaching. But there never was a man yet who could recognize the psychological moment even when it paraded before his eyes—much less grasp it by intuition."

---

CHAPTER XII

Not alone from John Blythe had Langdon Jesse suffered a rebuff in his attempt to gather ammunition, in the form of intimate and more or less mandatory credentials, for his European campaign, in which Louise Treharne figured as the alluring citadel of his sinister ambition. First he had tried Louise's mother with that purpose in view; and in that quarter he had been treated to one of the surprises of his by no means uneventful life.

Jesse's method of reasoning, in approaching Mrs. Treharne on such a mission, was in no wise subtle; it was, on the contrary, as plain and pointed as a fence-paling. It all started from the outright premise that Jesse "wanted" Louise Treharne and thoroughly meant to "have" her—for Jesse had the merit (negative enough in his case) of never attempting to deceive himself as to his eventual purposes where women were concerned. Louise, of course, had plainly given him to understand that she despised him. That, however, was, in Jesse's view, a negligible detail. It would make his final conquest all the more satisfying. Many women who had begun by disliking him and frankly questioning his motives had ended by yielding to him; whereupon, after basking in the joys of triumph, he had taken a revengeful pleasure in casting them into what, in his self-communings, he brutally termed his "discard."

It would be the same, Jesse thoroughly believed, in Louise's case. She now represented to him a difficulty to be surmounted, a transaction to be successfully carried through. The weakness in the armor of men of the Jesse type is that they have little or no imagination. They foresee merely results; and their handling of the means to an end often is singularly clumsy and unadept. In regarding all women, of whatever class, as mere palterers with virtue and self-respect, Jesse considered that he was justified by his experience with women; but he made the egregious mistake of supposing that his own experience with women established a criterion, a formula, from which there could be no departure.

A week or so before he contemplated going abroad, mainly for the purpose of continuing his besiegement of Louise, Jesse dropped in at the house on the Drive one evening. He was glad to find Mrs. Treharne alone. He was not unmindful of his boast to Judd that he would victoriously overcome what, in his B[oe]otian imagining, he really deemed Louise's "prejudice" against him; and he preferred to lay his course without any Judd finger on his chart.

Mrs. Treharne, now thin and frail-looking, no longer from banting, but from the conflict with conscience that been consuming her ever since her daughter's departure, received him coldly enough. Not the least of her self-scornings since Louise had gone away had centered upon her complaisance in tacitly permitting her daughter to be pursued by a man of the Langdon Jesse type.

"I am leaving for England," Jesse found early occasion to announce.

Mrs. Treharne, very languid and tired-looking, did not find the announcement sufficiently important to call for comment.

"Louise, I believe, is in London?" pursued Jesse, sensing, without perturbation, the chill Mrs. Treharne was purposely diffusing.

Mrs. Treharne gave him a level, penetrating glance.

"Miss Treharne, I think, would not be interested in knowing that you possessed information as to her movements," she replied, with studied indifference.

Jesse smiled and stooped to stroke a dozing spaniel.

"What have I done, Tony?" he asked after a pause, looking up with a dental smile.

"You have presumed to employ Miss Treharne's first name, after having met her, I believe, not more than three times. Don't do it again," replied Mrs. Treharne in a tone that, while quiet enough, had a ring in it that was utterly new to Jesse. Jesse, seeming by his manner to take the rebuke in a chastened spirit, occupied himself again with the spaniel's silky coat.

"I seem," he said, finally breaking the oppressive silence, "to have found you in a somewhat Arctic humor. Still, that should not be allowed to congeal an old friendship. It cannot be that you, too, are beginning to misunderstand me, as Miss Treharne has from the beginning?"

"Miss Treharne should not have been allowed to meet you at all," returned Mrs. Treharne. "I leave you to imagine how bitterly I condemn myself now for not having at least screened her from that."

"You say 'now,'" said Jesse. "Why, particularly 'now?'"

"That," replied Mrs. Treharne, "is my affair."

The time, of course, had arrived for Jesse to make the best of a poor departure. The man, however, was of a surprising obtuseness as to such details.

"And yet I came this evening," he said, adopting a tonal tremolo which was intended to convey the idea that he was sorely put upon, "to offer, through you, any poor courtesies that I might have at my command to make Miss Treharne's stay in England agreeable."

Mrs. Treharne shrugged impatiently.

"Spare yourself these posturings, if you please," she said. "Miss Treharne has made it plain enough that she detests you. Are you waiting to have me tell you that I applaud her judgment?"

An ugly sneer flickered across Jesse's features. At length the barbs were hitting home. But he effaced the sneer and twisted it into a forced smile.

"What I can't understand is why you received me at all this evening, if this is your feeling—your newly-formed feeling—toward me," he said, quelling the hoarseness that proceeded from his repressed anger.

"I confess to having entertained a certain curiosity, perhaps a certain uneasiness, as to your purpose in calling at all," promptly replied Mrs. Treharne. "It is the first time you have been here since my daughter's departure. I have been sorting over certain of my mistakes since she went away. I have been considering them, too, from a different angle than any you could possibly understand. Not the least of these mistakes, as I have told you, was in permitting my daughter to exchange as much as two words with you. Happily, it is not too late to rectify that mistake, at least. She is well protected. I need not tell you that if you should have the temerity to attempt to call upon her in London she would instruct the flunkeys to cease carrying her your card. I think there is no more to be said?" Mrs. Treharne rose and assumed the attitude of dismissal.

This time Jesse, also rising, did not essay to erase the sneer from his wrath-flushed features.

"What is all this—a scene from some damned imbecile play?" he demanded, completely throwing off the mask. "Are you trying to regale me with a rehearsal of the flighty mother turned virtuous? Don't do that. That isn't the sort of thing you could reasonably expect me to stand for from Fred Judd's kept wo——"

"Say that if you dare!" exclaimed Mrs. Treharne, stepping close to him and transfixing him with blazing eyes.

Jesse, out of sheer timidity, broke off at the exact point where she had interrupted him. As she stepped to the wall to ring, he put on his hat with studied deliberation and patted it to make it more secure on his head. Thus, with his hat on, he spoke to her.

"I suppose your solicitude for the—er—the what-you-may-call-it of your auburn-haired daughter is natural enough, probably being based upon something that you, and you alone, know," he said, sidling, however, toward the door as he spoke. "But it is wasted solicitude, let me tell you that. She has lived here with you, hasn't she? Well, that fact will about settle her, you know. There's no downing that. And after awhile she'll give up. She won't be able to stand the stigma. None of them can stand it. It would take a superwoman to endure, without herself surrendering, the ignominy of having lived under this roof. Don't forget that."

Then the butler, answering the ring, appeared at the door. Mrs. Treharne raised a limp arm and pointed to Jesse.

"This man," she said to the butler, "is not to be admitted to the house again as long as I am in it."

The butler inclined his head with butler-like gravity, detoured to get behind Jesse, and Jesse, patting the top of his hat again to emphasize, in the menial's presence, the insult of wearing it, stalked down the hall.

The broken, faded woman tottered to her sleeping room and fell upon a couch in an agony of tears.

It was on the day following this scene that Jesse, inconceivably persistent in the pursuit of such a purpose as he had in mind, and now roused by obstacles to the point where he swore to himself that he would "win out," made the call at Blythe's office which the latter purposely glossed over in describing it in his letter to Laura.

Jesse's purpose in seeking out Blythe was two-fold. In the first place, he wanted to measure the man who, he knew, had been appointed Louise's guardian. He only recalled Blythe in a general sort of a way, and he wanted to "size him up" from this new angle. He was aware that Blythe was not only the guardian but an admirer of Louise, and he wanted to ascertain, from the contact of an interview, whether Blythe's admiration was of a piece with his own; the manifestation of a mere predatory design, that is to say; for men of the Jesse type are ever prone to drag the motives of other men to a level with their own. Secondly, if he found, as he hoped to find, that Blythe was a mere supple and sycophantic young lawyer, eager to succeed, and therefore capable of being impressed by a call from a man looming large in the financial world, Jesse prefigured that probably Blythe, by means of credentials that would have the weight of a guardian's advice, might very easily aid him in his "little affair" (so he thought of it) with Louise when he reached London. Jesse was not in the least fearful of the consequences, so far as his standing with Louise was concerned, of his unmasking in the presence of her mother. He was under the impression that Louise had left the house on the Drive at odds with her mother and that no correspondence existed between them. So that he felt sure that Louise would not hear from her mother of his brutality toward her.

It took Jesse something less than thirty seconds, when he called upon Blythe, to discover that that young lawyer was neither sycophantic nor supple, and that, so far from being impressed by a visit from Jesse in his capacity of financial magnate, Blythe was coldly but distinctly hostile toward him. The interview had terminated with startling abruptness. After having mentioned Louise's name once, and been forbidden to repeat the offense, Jesse had involuntarily let slip her name again. Blythe, seated in his desk-chair with his hands on his knees, viewed Jesse calmly, but with eyes that showed cold glints of steel.

"Are you going to get out now, or are you waiting for me to throw you out?" Blythe inquired of him in much the same tone that he would have employed in asking for a match.

Jesse, it appeared, was not waiting to be thrown out. He went at once. But when he reached the street level and got into his waiting car, he was in almost as pretty a state of passion as any sepulchral-voiced stage villain. And he was quite as resolved to win the baffling battle, even under the lash of unintermittent scorn, as he had been from the hour of his first meeting with Louise Treharne.

An hour after Jesse had gone, leaving the stunned, shattered woman weltering in his litter of cowardly words, Judd walked into Antoinette Treharne's apartments. He found her dishevelled and still weeping convulsively. He sat down and regarded her with the bewildered helplessness of the male when the woman's tears are streaming. She scarcely saw him, but lay, huddled and shaking, a mere wraith of the woman whom he had beckoned to this present disaster and despair but a few years before.

Judd, a gross, fleshly man not without human traits, felt sorry for her as he sat watching her. Also, he felt sorry for himself. It was not agreeable that a woman—this woman—should be weeping and moaning and shaking her shoulders in her grief in such a manner. It was disturbing. It destroyed the poise of things. It created a sort of sympathy which was bad for the digestion of the sympathizer. But Judd felt sorry for her. He really did. He had been watching, with a sort of mystified concern, how her health had been going to pieces lately. He wondered why that was. Surely, she had everything that she wanted? Well, then. Anyhow, Judd was sorry. He was extremely fond of Tony. She had touched a certain responsive chord in him, and he knew that his chords were pretty well insulated; and here she was weeping and staining her face with tears, her hair all mussed, and all that—Judd was decidedly disturbed, and sorry as well.

"I say, Tony, what is it?" he asked her, after keeping vigil for fifteen minutes without emitting a word.

There was no reply. She did not even look up at him. Gradually, though, her weeping ceased. Judd walked up and down the room, smoking an enormously long, black cigar, occasionally stopping in his heavy stride to look at her. Presently she sat up, blinking in the light, her face still swollen with her tears. A certain prettiness still remained to her; but it was the pathetic prettiness of the exotic the petals of which are dropping, dropping.

"Is it anything that I can help, Tony?" asked Judd in a tone that was not lacking in kindliness, as he stopped and stood before her. She shook her head wearily.

"No," she answered him in a quiet, tear-hoarsened tone. "It is nothing that you can help. It is all my own fault."

Judd flicked the long ash of his cigar to the rug and studied her with a puckered but not scowling brow.

"I don't want to stir up or start anything anew," he said, not unkindly, "but may I ask what it is that is your fault?"

She crushed her wet handkerchief between her palms and looked up at him with vague eyes.

"Oh, everything," she replied, with a shrug of utter weariness. "Few women could be found in all the world tonight, I believe, who have made such an utter mess of their lives as I have of mine. But I am not so unfair, thank God, as to blame it upon anybody but myself. It is a compensation, at any rate, to be able to see things in their true light."

"You are ill, aren't you?" Judd asked her, with a solicitude that was obviously genuine.

"I don't know—I think so," she replied. "I am very tired—I know that. Tired of myself, of everything."

"You need a change," suggested Judd. "You ought to go away somewhere. But I don't want you to go alone. I am pretty busy, but I'll chuck everything to go with you if you want me to, Tony."

She looked at him with a sort of weary curiosity.

"It is just as I have said," she murmured after having made this inspection of him. "It has never been your fault. You have, in your way, been kind to me. You still are. You care for me in your way. But it is a bad way, Fred. I know that now. It is too late, of course. Nevertheless, I am going to make what amendment I can. I must try to preserve at least a shred of womanhood. I am sure you are not going to take it angrily or bitterly. But we have reached the parting of the ways, my friend. You have been fair enough, from your point of view, through the whole wretched business. It has been my fault, my weakness, from the beginning."

Judd plumped into a deep chair near her and, pondering, blew great smoke-rings at the portieres.

"The thing is," he said, presently, "that you've lost your nerve. And, having lost it, why, you've gone into the camp of the folks you call the Smugs. Am I right?"

"You are utterly wrong," she replied, spiritlessly. "I have little toleration for—well, death-bed repentances. That is too old and too unconvincing a story. A woman does as she likes, flouts the world, snaps her finger at usage, until she becomes middle aged or near it; then she begins to fumble her beads, takes on the face of austerity, and condemns, right and left, the lapses of the younger generation of defiant women. I haven't the least use for that sort of thing. It is simply that I have arrived at the knowledge that a woman is an idiot not to conform and to stay conformed. It is mere madness for a woman to suppose that she can fight so unequal a battle against the world's opinion as I have foolishly tried to fight. It makes no difference as to a man. He can do as he pleases. I suppose it was the inequality of that law that goaded me into it all in the first place. But I've lost. I see now that there never was the possibility of any other outcome."

"You get a bit beyond me, you know," said Judd, not argumentatively, but as one seeking enlightenment. "I am willing to grant that men have the best of it, and all that sort of thing. But women know the rules of the game. Then why can't they play the game without moaning and kicking to the umpire?"

"There isn't any umpire except conscience," she answered him. "There isn't any arbitration for a woman. She is what the steel-sheathed law of the ages says she is to be, or she is not. I have not been, and I have lost. That is all. I am not so futile as to complain of the game. I despise myself for having been so opaque as to suppose that I could defy the rules, win, and not be disqualified—as I have been, of course, ever since I tried it."

"It's queer," said Judd, reflectively, after a pause, "how these man-made laws sooner or later anchor all you women, after you've made your flights. The whole thing, you know, is an idiotic system. They try to regulate us by rote and rule, by bell, book and candle. But, after all, they only think they're regulating us that way, don't they? I wonder how many of us really follow their rules? Mighty few that I know of. Openly, we subscribe to all of the iron-bound tenets, privately we laugh at them and do the best we know to rip them apart. It's all a matter of being found out; of being caught with the goods. A woman, of course, has to watch out for more danger signals than a man. But they're pretty clever little watchers, believe me."

"Well, you can't blame them for that," said Mrs. Treharne. "Most of them, at any rate, have the common sense not to attempt to brazen matters out, as I have."

"I see what you mean," said Judd, cogitatively. "Your idea is that it is a woman's business to get all that she can out of life, and that the only way for her to get the most out of life is to pretend to agree to the rules as they've been made for her, and then, if she feels disposed to kick over the traces, why, to keep under cover about it. You're right in that view, of course. But, after all, what difference does it make? Sooner or later, no matter how we play the string, they toss us into a box and plant us. When it comes to that, I can't see why you should permit what you call your conscience to make a wreck of you in this way. What have you done? Why, you've been my companion. Will you be good enough to tell me how that companionship could possibly have been made any better than it has been if, at its outset, a man in a surplice or a mouthing justice had mumbled a few so-called binding words over us? Faugh! You can't believe such crass humbug. The so-called 'consecration of matrimony' is a good enough phrase and a good enough scheme to keep groundlings up to the mark. Don't you suppose we'd have fought and barked at each other just the same if we'd been married according to the frazzled old rule? At that, I'd have married you years ago, just to straighten you out, if there had been the least chance of my prevailing upon my wife, who made life a hell for me with her whinings, to get a divorce from me. But, now that the thing has ambled along to this stage, what's the use of talking about quitting?"

She listened to him composedly. But his words fell thumpingly enough upon her ears. He had never gone to the pains before of giving her so complete an elucidation of his doctrine.

"There is as little use in our debating the world's social and ethical system," she said. "I am not thinking of myself. There is no reason why I shouldn't acknowledge to you that I don't much care how our relationship affects myself. But——"

"Yes, I know what it's all about," put in Judd. "It's your daughter. Well, I'll have to grant that you've got a big end of the argument there. I've got daughters of my own, and I know how I'd snort around if I thought there was a chance on earth for any of my daughters to inherit my doctrine, my view of the world, the flesh and the devil. That's the finest little inconsistency I possess. I might as well stick in the observation here, while we're all confessing our sins, that I've felt a good deal more like a blackguard than has been comfortable to my self-esteem ever since the night I rounded on your daughter. That, I think, was about the meanest and commonest act of my life. A pretty fine sort of a girl, your daughter."

"I didn't think you had it in you to admit that, and I'm glad that you have admitted it," replied Mrs. Treharne. "Of course your surmise is exactly right. It is on my daughter's account that I have brought myself up with a round turn. It is pretty late in the day for me to do that, I know; but one must do the best one can. We can talk as we please about our opinions of morals and ethics and the world's harsh rules; but all of our talk vanishes into murky vapor when we begin to consider our children. The most contemptible act of my life, since you have so unexpectedly acknowledged yours, was in permitting my daughter to come here. You know that as well as I do—now."

Judd lit another cigar and smoked in silence for a time.

"The thing that gets me around the throat in connection with all this," he said, presently, "is that it seems all to simmer down to the fact that you are thinking of quitting me."

"Don't be absurd, Fred," said Mrs. Treharne. "That consideration doesn't disturb you a whit. You know very well that you will be glad to be rid of me."

"That," said Judd, leaning toward her, his small eyes curiously alight, "is not true, and you know it."

"But," she said, perhaps, with the unconquerable desire of the woman for affection and admiration, curious to hear his reply, "I have lost my looks; I am a mere relic of what I was when I came to you; I am not far from forty. You know these things."

"Yes, I know them," said Judd, and there was genuine feeling in the man's tone. "But I know, too, that I care a damned sight more for you than I ever did for any other woman in all my life. I know that, if you really mean to go through with this plan of quitting me, it's going to knock me sky-high. I can't figure myself being without you. You have grown into my scheme of living. I don't profess to much when it comes to morals and all that sort of thing; but I've got a heart built upon some kind of a pattern, I suppose; I must have, and you ought to know it, for you've possessed it for years. And, that being the case—and it is the case—our relationship isn't so bad as you might have been supposing it to be. Don't you imagine that I am so infernally dried up as to what is called the affections. I know that my life won't be worth much to me after you go out of it."

Mrs. Treharne, astonished and perhaps a little pleased at the earnestness of the man's self-revelation, nevertheless shook her head wearily.

"Yet you know very well, at this moment, that I must leave you," she said broodingly.

"Well, I'm going to be fair with you," said Judd, the latent manhood, that had been buried under the callousness of years, showing in him. "I'm leaving that part of it up to you. I wouldn't do that, either, if I didn't care for you as I do. But you've got your end of it, and a big end. You're entitled to do what you are prompted to do in consideration of your daughter. I'm not hound enough to try to block you in that. I'll go further and say that you're right about it. If I were in your place I'd do the same thing. The devil of it is that I care for you all the more when I see you moved to give your daughter the fair deal she's entitled to. I hate to have you go. I don't know what I'll do with myself without you. But you've hit me right where I live in this business—the progeny end of it. The young ones have got to be thought of. And there is, I suppose, no way whereby you could remain openly under my protection and at the same time be doing the right thing by your daughter. Of course, if you cared to be more private about it, why——"

"No, no—don't even suggest that," put in Mrs. Treharne. "That would be a pitiable evasion. You know that."

"Well, probably it would, but I'm putting all angles of the thing up to you," said Judd, perhaps more in earnest that he had ever been in his life before. "One thing, though, you must leave to me. It's only the fair thing that I should continue to take care of you, no matter where you go."

"Not even that, Fred," replied Mrs. Treharne, determinedly. "That, too, would be a dodging of the issue. I have a few thousands put by. They came from you, of course, but before I had made up my mind to—to live otherwise. I shall manage. Let me have my own way this final once, won't you?" and she smiled wanly.

Judd rose and picked up his hat and coat.

"Don't take any leaps in the dark, Tony, that's all," he said. "Think the thing all over. Don't give yourself the worst of it. You know that I won't give you the worst of it. I never have, have I? Maybe you'll change your mind about it all. I'll be back tomorrow night and see. Goodnight."

There were tears standing in the eyes of the huge-girthed man as he went heavily out of the room, and his shoulders were hunched forward as if he had suddenly passed from elderliness to old age.

Mrs. Treharne, for almost an hour after Judd had gone, sat, chin in palm, gazing into vacancy. Then she rose, heavily enough for a woman so fragile as she now had become, gazed for a moment in the glass at her haggard features, and shook her head, smiling bitterly.

"'Facilis descensus,' and the rest of it," she murmured. "That, I suppose, is the truest of the maxims; it stands the wear of time better than any of the rest of them. Well, I have the mournful satisfaction of knowing that I have sufficient intelligence, at any rate, not to blame anybody but myself."

Then she rang for her maid.

"Pack in the morning, Heloise," she said when the maid appeared. "Begin early. Get one of the housemaids to help you. Pack everything—all of your own things, too. We shall be leaving before noon."

"Everything, madame?" inquired Heloise, her eyes widening, "Winter costumes—everything?"

"Everything," repeated Mrs. Treharne. "I am not to return here."

Heloise nodded with a sage acquiescence, and began to take down her mistress's hair.

"Where do we go tomorrow, madame?" Heloise asked when she had finished her task and Mrs. Treharne was in readiness for retiring.

"I haven't the least idea, Heloise," replied Mrs. Treharne, gesturing her unconcern. "I shall decide between now and morning. To the mountains, I suppose—the Adirondacks, probably. I am not very well—New York stifles me. The mountains, I think it shall be, Heloise."

"Madame feels badly?" inquired Heloise, solicitously. "One has noticed that madame is distraite, grows thin, looks unlike herself."

"Sometimes I wish I were anybody but myself, Heloise," said Mrs. Treharne, enigmatically enough, considering her audience. "Goodnight."

After the maid had gone Mrs. Treharne went to her desk and wrote to Louise, telling her that she was leaving the house on the Drive, not to return. It was a long, self-reproachful letter, threaded with the wistful but not outrightly expressed hope that the step she was taking would atone, if only in a slight degree, for the "wretched sin," as she called it, of having permitted her daughter to set foot within the Riverside Drive establishment. She did not mention Langdon Jesse's name. She felt a singular uneasiness over the thought that Jesse's approaching visit to London in some way involved the weaving of a net about her daughter; but she dismissed that thought, as often as it recurred, when she considered Louise's poise and her protection by Laura Stedham, an experienced woman of the world. Moreover, Mrs. Treharne would have found it difficult, unless there were some grave actual peril, to mention Jesse's name in a letter to her daughter; for it brought the blood to her face to remember how unconcernedly she had permitted Louise to meet the man—how she had even chided her daughter for not having accepted Jesse's attentions in a more pliant, not to say grateful, spirit.

"I am leaving with Heloise tomorrow, dear, but I have not decided where to go," she concluded. "I shall write or cable you an address before long. I am entirely well, though I believe I need rest and change. Have out your good time—I know that you are in good hands with Laura, to whom my love. I am looking forward to our new, happy life when you return to me."

Then she penned a little note to be left behind for Judd.

"Don't think me unkind for going without seeing you again," she wrote. "We have gone over it all, and we are both of the same opinion as to the need for the step I am taking. I cannot quite tell you how you have advanced in my opinion for some of the things you said tonight. You have been very fair, and I am correspondingly grateful. I will not be so banal as to suggest that, if there be any chance for a reconciliation, or at least a decent armistice, between you and your wife, it might be at least a solution of a sort, considering your children; I only wish that I could suggest that outright without incurring the suspicion that, having made a belated repentance myself, I am seeking to reform the world. One thing, however, I shall say outright: If I had it all to do over again, I should conform. There is no other way for a woman. We seek to ridicule the promptings of conscience by calling conscience an abnormality, a thing installed in us to whip us into line with age-old system. But it won't do. It is, after all, the true voice. I wish I had never closed my ears to its urgings.

"Time heals all. You will find yourself thinking less and less often of me as the days drift by. That is as it should be. I am sorry for the hurt—I did not know until you spoke as you did tonight that it would be a hurt—I am inflicting upon you in thus effacing myself, at such short notice, from your life. But Time heals. Goodbye, and all best wishes."

Before noon, on the following day, Mrs. Treharne and Heloise left the house on the Drive, leaving no word behind as to whither they were bound.

---

CHAPTER XIII

Langdon Jesse maintained a bachelor apartment in London the year round. When he arrived there, about a fortnight after his turbulent scene with Mrs. Treharne and his signally unsuccessful attempt at an entente with Blythe, he found everything in order, quite as he had left it the year before. Gaskins, factotum and general overseer of the bachelor apartments, of which there were three tiers, Jesse's being the second, was a little more bald and fat, but he still rubbed his hands as a mark of subservience and cocked his head to one side in a bird-like way while engaged in conversation with his supposititious superior. He had a respectful but earnest complaint to make of one of Jesse's New York cronies, a man engaged in the somewhat tempestuous task of drinking himself to death, who had occupied Jesse's apartment for a month during the spring; for it was Jesse's habit to extend the use of his London lodging, which was desirable mainly on account of its highly privileged character, to those of his intimates who happened to be in London while he himself was in New York.

"'E was more than 'arf-seas hover hall the time, sir," Gaskins told Jesse, lamentingly, "which of course was 'is privilege, but 'e did give 'isself some 'orrid bumps when 'e come 'ome along o' three or four o' mornings. Hi'm afraid 'e would 'ave killed 'iself, sir, falling hagainst the furniture, 'ad I not been living on the premises hand come hup hand got 'im straightened hout hin bed. Hand, sir, when Hi didn't come hup, 'e would halways go to sleep in the bath-tub with 'is clothes on. A swift goer, sir, but killing 'isself; killing 'isself fast."

Jesse laughed. He was tolerant enough of the idiosyncrasies of his intimates, and this one, the "swift goer," had been of use to him in New York as a sort of organizer and major domo of revelries.

Jesse's apartment was on one of the quiet squares of Curzon Street, set amid a row of other houses given over to the accommodation of stationary and transient bachelors who found the restraints of London hotels irksome. It was beautifully appointed, even to the culinary department which Jesse himself only used on the occasions when he entertained companies of roystering Americans and their companions, who were usually more or less photographed figurantes from the musical comedies. His breakfast was brought to him from the Gaskins ménage in the basement, and he dined here, there and everywhere—not infrequently at the Savoy.

It had not taken Jesse long, following his arrival in London, to ascertain that Louise and Laura were at the Savoy. He had, in fact, within an hour after his arrival, caused a telephone canvass to be made of the London hotels mainly patronized by Americans during the touring season to gain this information. Now, lounging about his apartment while his Japanese man unpacked his things, he began upon the devising of a method whereby he might again meet Louise. He had been reluctantly forced to abandon the idea that by this time she might have "altered her prejudice" against him and might therefore be at least passively willing to meet him upon the plane of ordinary acquaintanceship, thus giving him an opportunity to exercise his fascinations upon her.

But he had not the least intention of abandoning his besiegement of Louise Treharne—even if the besiegement had to be turned into an ambuscade. He had come to London, leaving New York at a time when the market was setting strongly against him, solely with this purpose in his mind. He furnished himself with plenty of excuses for the deliberation with which he undertook this particular quest. It was his indurated habit to doubt the continence of all women; and he made no exception of Louise Treharne. The fact that she had scarcely been out of school a month when he had first met her did not in the least serve to give her immunity from such a doubt in Jesse's mind. His single guide in such appraisals of women was his own experience with them, and his experience, he told himself, embodied plenty of parallels to the case of Louise Treharne. Why should she be immune from a furtiveness, and the indulgences thereof, which he had so often studied at first hand? Why should she be less clever at dissimulation than many others he had known?

He had not the least doubt that he was right in this view. He sought to make himself believe that otherwise he would be entirely willing to permit Louise to go her way. But, being right, then it was intolerable that she should have flouted him—him!—as she had. It was a girlish, immature prejudice. He had not had sufficient opportunity to gain her better will. Her treatment of him had sorely touched his vanity as a moulder of women to his purposes. The circumstances of his meeting with her had deprived him of a fair chance. She was young, beautiful, and, he felt sure, superbly secretive. He had not the least intention of supinely yielding to her foolish belief—it could not be other than that—that she disliked him.

But how to proceed?

No problem, having to do with what he would have called his diversions, had ever before so daunted him. Laura, to begin with, was a stumbling block in his path. Laura, with whom he had a perfunctory acquaintanceship extending over several years, had pointedly cut him, not once, but frequently, since the newspapers had flared with accounts of the one disreputable affair concerning him which had leaked out. He knew very well that there was not the least possible chance for him to regain even a nodding plane with Laura Stedham. And she was the barrier between himself and Louise Treharne. They were rarely, he felt sure, out of each other's company. If Laura were out of the way, and he could reach Louise alone, there would, he felt, be a chance. It was unimaginable that Louise would, in such a case, be unresponsive to the allurements of his wealth, his power proceeding from wealth, his personality—Jesse felt so absolutely certain of this that he smiled when a vague doubt of it passed through his mind.

He had won many aloof women by bestowing upon them magnificent gifts. But he knew perfectly well that this method would not do with Louise Treharne. Whatever else she might be, there was, he felt, not a particle of greed in her. There had even been times when Jesse had not scrupled to effect his designs by putting forth the pretence that his devotions tended in but one direction—the altar. How to employ even this final method to engage the attention of a woman whose eyes, he very well knew, would flame with scorn of him even if she found herself accidentally in his presence?

For several hours, while Mutsu, his Japanese valet, went forward with the unpacking, Jesse strode up and down his apartment, going over this problem as he would have calculated the chances and mischances of a market campaign.

It was inevitable that Jesse, at the end of his study of the problem, should have reached but one conclusion: it must be an ambuscade.

Having reached this conclusion, he measured the risk and sought to forecast the aftermath. Everything was in his favor. In the situation which he meditated bringing about, he knew that, in case anything went wrong, the man's word would be worth that of a thousand women, no matter how exalted their reputations. And more than likely, he calmly figured, there would be no aftermath at all. Entrapped, and perceiving no possibility of escape Louise would acknowledge her finely-acted furtiveness to him, and, like all women who used furtiveness as a screen, would make the best of the situation—which was all that Jesse desired.

The salient feature of the plan which rapidly took form in his mind consisted in discovering when Louise and Laura should be out of each other's company, even for a short time. Jesse, not in the least balking at the idea of setting a deliberate trap because he knew that he would hold the advantage no matter what the outcome, applied himself to the solution of this by no means minor difficulty. The sight of the silent, busy Mutsu, industriously stowing his master's gear in dressers and closets, furnished Jesse with a suggestion.

He would give his Japanese man a vigil at the Savoy. The vigil might be a tedious as it was sure to be a delicate one, but Mutsu was both patient and discreet. He was a studious but alert man-boy of indeterminate age, as is characteristic of Japanese males under fifty, who had been employed as a club attendant in New York for several years and thus had added to his natural gift for discretion. He had been with Jesse for more than a year, always doing more than was ever asked of him, but studiously refraining from indicating whether he entertained any personal liking for his employer—which is another trait of a certain type of Japanese in their relationships with Occidentals.

Jesse spent a concentrated half hour in minutely instructing Mutsu as to what he desired of him. The valet was to go to the Savoy on the morrow, and, by liberally tipping the doorman at the ladies' entrance, or the carriage-opener, or whomsoever among the hotel's menials he found the most pliable or knowing, have Mrs. Laura Stedham and Miss Louise Treharne, American ladies who were guests of the hotel, pointed out to him when they should make their appearance, as they no doubt would in the course of the day, either for driving or walking. Miss Treharne would be the younger of the two. After having familiarized himself with the personal exteriors of these ladies, Mutsu was to keep vigil, on whatever pretext he might invent, in or around the hotel, until such a time as he should see the older of the two American ladies leaving the hotel alone. Whenever that should happen, the valet was instantly to telephone to Jesse at the Curzon Street apartment. The watch on the movements of the two ladies was not to terminate until Mrs. Stedham should leave the hotel unaccompanied by Miss Treharne, no matter how many days of waiting should be required before such a thing occurred.

Mutsu nodded and exhibited his dental smile when Jesse had finished his instructions. He understood the instructions perfectly, without, of course, in the least guessing at the purpose back of them.

Jesse made no mistake in appraising his Japanese man's acuteness at such work. Within less than two hours after ingratiating himself, by the use of unostentatiously distributed backsheesh, with certain of the Savoy's flunkeys, Matsu had had Laura and Louise pointed out to him as they left the hotel and entered a taxicab. He fixed their faces on his mental recording tablets, and called up Jesse on the telephone and told him of his progress.

Thenceforward, for several days, the wiry little Japanese valet hovered about the ladies' entrance of the Savoy, forestalling suspicion as to the purpose of his loitering by the bestowal of liberal pourboires upon such of the flunkeys as were in a position to notice the constancy of his vigil.

Jesse kept to his Curzon Street apartment during the day, ever on the alert for a telephone message from his valet. He chafed under the necessity—as he deemed it—which kept him indoors throughout the daylight hours and only permitted of his prowling about London at night. But he possessed a sort of Luciferian determination in the pursuit of such a purpose as that upon which he was now engaged; to the successful accomplishment of which he would have passed his days in a cellar if that had been one of the requirements of the game.

---

Laura had many friends, English and American, in London whom she received and called upon informally. She cared nothing for the "functionizing" of the Anglo-American social season in London, but she keenly enjoyed the unceremonious gayeties of little groups of friends. She laughingly declared that she had "trained" the people she liked to "drop in" upon her in London in the American manner of neighborliness; and she enjoyed "showing off," as she expressed it, "the beautiful Miss Treharne, from the States," as some of the chatty London weeklies had alluded to Louise. She liked to junket about, too, with Louise; and there was no lack of agreeable men keen to take them on day-long motor tours through the country, attach them for merry afternoons to houseboat parties, and so on. For her part, Louise enjoyed the contrast afforded by the shy diffidence of the young Englishmen whom she met to the exuberant breeziness of Laura's American men friends in London.

One afternoon—it was ten days after Jesse's arrival in London—Laura suggested to Louise, at luncheon, that, as they had a "clean slate" for the remainder of the daylight hours for the first time in a long while, a tour among the shops, including a visit to the American department store just then established in London, might fill in a part of the time agreeably.

"But I am not insisting upon your going with me, dear," said Laura. "I know your lack of keenness for shopping in London, and I don't blame you, considering how the tradespeople here try to positively make one buy things one doesn't want. So you can very easily escape on the plea that you have letters to write, or that you are tired and want to rest up for the theatre tonight, and I shan't be in the least miffed."

"I'll make it the letter-writing plea, then, Laura," said Louise, "and cling to the truth in spite of the temptation you offer me to fib. I really have a lot of letters to write."

Laura went away in a taxicab directly after luncheon, saying that she would not be gone more than three hours, and Louise, at the desk in the sitting room of their suite, began a letter to her father, from whom, forwarded by John Blythe, she had lately received a long and affectionate letter, expressing his anxiety to see her and the hope that he might so arrange his business affairs as to permit of his visiting New York late in the Autumn.

About half an hour after she had begun writing the telephone bell rang.

"His this Miss Tre'arne?" Louise heard a man's voice, "but Mrs. Stedham says that you are that of an upper servant," in the telephone.

"Yes, I am Miss Treharne—what is it?" she replied.

"Begging pardon, Miss Tre'arne," went on the man's voice, "but Mrs. Stedham says that you are not to be halarmed. Mrs. Stedham, Miss, was taken slightly ill in a taxicab—nothing serious, Miss, she hasks me to hassure you—and she is now with Mrs. 'Ammond, at Number Naught-Fourteen Curzon Street. Mrs. Stedham, Miss, hinsists that you be not halarmed, and wishes you to come to 'er at Mrs. 'Ammond's at once. This is Mrs. 'Ammond's butler that is speaking."

"Tell Mrs. Stedham, please, that I shall come at once," said Louise, instantly aroused by the thought that something serious might have happened to Laura. "What is the number and street again, please? And you are sure Mrs. Stedham has had no accident or is not seriously ill?"

"It is Naught-Fourteen Curzon Street, Miss Tre'arne," came the reply, "hand Mrs. Stedham 'erself hasks that you be hassured that she is only slightly hindisposed."

"I shall be there immediately, please tell her," said Louise, making a pencilled note of the address.

Very uneasy, Louise put on her hat and long pongee coat with fluttering fingers. She felt that something serious must have happened to deflect Laura from a shopping tour to the home of a woman friend. She had not heard Laura allude to any woman friend in London named Mrs. Hammond, but that consideration did not linger more than an instant in her mind, for Laura no doubt had many London friends of whom she had not chanced to speak.

Within less than five minutes after receiving the telephoned summons, Louise was on her way in a taxicab to the address in Curzon Street. She was pale and in a tremor of uneasiness when the taxicab pulled up at the curb of a neat three-story house near the end of a row of similar houses.

So perturbed was she by the thought that she had not been told the entire truth as to what had happened to Laura that she scarcely noticed the bald, bland Gaskins when he opened the door for her and said "Miss Tre'arne?"

"Yes, yes," hastily replied Louise. "Where is Mrs. Stedham?"

"If you please, Miss, Hi shall conduct you," said Gaskins, inured by years of experience to the sort of deception he was practising; and he softly padded up the thickly-carpeted stairs in advance of her. Closely followed by Louise, who paid hardly any attention at all to the surroundings in her trepidation as to how she might find Laura, Gaskins quietly opened the front side door of the second floor apartment and held it open for her. Louise stepped into the room, and Gaskins, not entering himself, closed the door after her. She did not of course notice the click which denoted that the closed door was fitted with a spring lock. Afterwards Louise remembered having thought it odd that Gaskins did not follow her into the room to announce her, instead of so suddenly effacing himself.

Louise quickly saw that there was nobody in the charmingly arranged room—partly study, partly living room—in which she found herself. Also she noticed that it was distinctively a man's room. Wondering, but not yet affected by any fear, she made a few steps toward the portieres at the rear of the room.

She was about to reach out a hand to draw the portieres side, when they parted; and Langdon Jesse confronted her. He was trig in a big, overweight way in his lounging suit of grey; but the pallor of excitement had overspread his naturally waxy face, and his attempt at the debonair manner was proclaimed to be a mere assumption by the trembling of his hands and the huskiness of his voice when he spoke.

Louise had never swooned in her life. Now, however, at this apparition of the one human being she had ever learned to loathe, she pressed one hand to her forehead and another to her heart and swayed slightly. She feared that she would fall; but the thought rocketed through her mind that if she yielded to the almost overpowering physical weakness of the moment she would be at his mercy. By an effort of will which she afterwards remembered with wonderment, she steadied herself as if by the process of actually forcing her blood to flow evenly. She permitted her hands to fall to her sides and regarded Jesse with an appearance of calmness. In that clash of eyes, Jesse, after a very few seconds of it, turned his head away on pretence of motioning Louise to a chair. The impalement of her gaze was beyond his endurance.

Louise paid no attention to his arm-waved invitation to be seated, but stood in the spot where she had stopped when the first sight of him had almost sent her reeling. She regarded him steadily, almost incredulously; an expression of incredulity that such a thing could be.

"It is unpardonable, of course, Miss Treharne," said Jesse, with a clearing of the throat in an attempt to sweep away his huskiness. "But my madness to see you, the hopelessness of trying to see you, alone, in any other way—" He brought his sentence to a finish with a gesture meant to emphasize the excusableness of his position.

"Therefore you have sought to entrap me?" said Louise, with no trace of scorn in her tone; her contempt for him was quite beyond such a manifestation of loathing; she asked the question as if really astonished to discover that a man would do such a thing.

"What other method could I employ save a sort of strategy?" asked Jesse, evading her gaze. "Knowing that I was under the ban of your unreasonable dislike, that you would refuse to receive me, and wretched, despairing, under the constant castigation of your prejudice—what else could I do? What else could any man do who found himself in a state of desperation from his love for a woman?"

"Say anything but that, I beg of you," replied Louise, experiencing a surge of disgust at the man's effrontery in professing love in such a situation. "I have no reason to expect anything savoring of manliness from you, of course; but you might at least spare yourself the humiliation—if you can be humiliated—of seeming ridiculous."

"I expected harsh words from you, which, of course, is tantamount to confessing that I deserve them," said Jesse. "But I think we shall have a better understanding. Won't you be seated?"

"I would have credited you for knowing better than to ask me that," replied Louise. She stepped to the door by which she had entered, tried the knob, and of course found that the door was locked. Jesse, watching her, gradually resumed his attempt at the debonair manner. All of the odds were in his favor in this adventure. He could not see where he stood a chance to lose. Therefore, according to the smooth argument of cowardice, there was no reason, he considered, why he should continue his air of deference.

"You did not suppose that, having been to somewhat adroit pains to get you here, I would make it so easy for you to walk out without, at least, a little interchange of ideas?" he asked her, with coolly lifting brows, when she turned from the door.

She noticed his change of tone, and was conscious that she preferred it to his manner of fawning self-exculpation.

"Make your mind easy as to that. I have told you that I expect nothing whatever of you that befits a man," she replied with a coldness of tone from which he inwardly recoiled far more than if she had poured out upon him an emotional torrent of rebuke.

For a moment Jesse, studying her, was visited by the suggestion that perhaps, after all, Louise Treharne was wearing no mask; that she was really that anomaly—as he would have viewed such a one—a woman who was what she professed to be. But he quickly dismissed this prompting as something out of the question. She was merely a proficient in the art of acting, and she was employing her mimetic talent to the utmost upon him—thus he argued it out with himself. Moreover, he decided to give expression to his belief, as being calculated sooner to bring her to the realization that he had her measured.

"Listen, Louise," he said to her, thus calling her without even attempting to make his tone apologetic; he leaned his elbows on the back of a leather chair and forced himself to look directly at her as he spoke: "It is idle for you to seek to delude me. It might do if I were not nearly twice your age and had not had about five thousand times your experience. As the matter stands, it is simply absurd. At least give me credit for having cut my wisdom teeth as to women. You portray the part you assume with me very well. I'll have to say that for you. But, seeing that I have penetrated to the heart of the comedy, why protract the play?"

Louise disdained to attempt to have him believe that she did not understand him. But she was so riven by the shamefulness of his imputation that she could not have found words to reply to him if she had wanted to.

"Why not give me a chance to make good with you, Louise?" went on Jesse in a tone of arguing familiarity, coming from behind the leather chair and advancing toward her. He accepted her silence for wavering, or at least a willingness to listen to the sort of a presentation he had started. "You know that I am devilishly fond of you, else I would not have gone to all this trouble to get you here. Of course you may call it a trap and all that sort of penny-dreadful rot; but what other way had I to see you? You've scarcely been out of my mind since first I met you at Judd's—I should say, at your mother's house. I've been stark raving about you—am yet; and that's the truth. Why can't we be bully good friends? Your little pretenses are all very engaging and that sort of thing, and do you credit, of course, but you see I have penetrated them. Well, then, why can't we hit it off? You don't know how good I'll be to you if you look at the thing in the sensible way. The first time I saw you I heard them hail you as Empress Louise. Well, I'll see to it that you have the adornment and the investiture of an Empress. Well, is it a bargain, Louise? Will you shake hands on it?"

He was very close to where she stood by this time, having continued to advance toward her as he spoke. A sudden flush had appeared on his features, and his enunciation was choppy, muffled, indistinct from the huskiness of passion.

"Don't come any closer to me than you are," she said to him when, within an arm's length of her, he stopped and held out his hand to bind the pact his words had attempted to frame. She spoke quietly, stood her ground, looked straight at him, and placed her hands behind her back. "And allow me to say this: I feel sure no coward of your kind ever yet escaped some sort of retribution. You will repent what you have said to me. But you will repent far more if you put your hands upon me. Will you open this door and let me go?"

She looked her innocence, her perfect purity, as she stood before him. But Jesse was blind to what even the most ordinary, uncultivated man might have seen at a glance. His prominent, protrusive eyes had become bloodshot, and, instead of breathing, he was almost gasping.

"So you're going to keep on your white domino of pretense, eh?" he sneered. "Open the door? Do you think I'm going to let you treat me as if I were some credulous cub just turned loose from school? Open the door? Don't, for Heaven's name, take me for an imbecile!"

Suddenly he reached forward and twined his arms about her waist and crushed her to him, making for her lips. She gave no outcry, but, raising her right forearm, pressed it under his chin, thus holding his head back and keeping his face from hers. But he did not relax his powerful embrace. Louise strove with all of her unusual woman's strength to break his hold upon her, but his hands were clasped back of her, and her exertions only caused the two of them to sway and change ground; and his embrace remained that of a python.

"You might as well drop this damned ground-and-lofty business and behave yourself like a sensible girl, you know," panted Jesse, speaking in a choked tone because her forearm remained wedged under his chin. "You're game, and all that sort of thing, and you're all kinds of a good actress, too; but, by God, you're not quite clever enough to pull the wool over my eyes! You're Antoinette Treharne's daughter, and you're some other things besides that I don't exactly know the details of but have a pretty good guess at; and you're going to rest quiet in these arms today, if you never do again!"

They struggled back and forth, Louise, quite conscious that she stood in the greatest peril she was ever likely to know, holding her own with a strength which Jesse, even in the madness of the moment, told himself was almost preternatural in a young, slender woman.

"You are simply wasting your strength, you know," Jesse went on, putting forth all of the power of his arms and holding her so close to him that for a moment she could not move. "I have no taste for this sort of schoolboy and schoolgirl tugging and hauling. But you force me to it. You haven't a chance on earth of getting out of here, even if I release you—which I shall, as soon as I have taken a little harmless toll of your lips. Now, are you going to be sensible and quit this idiotic business?"

Louise did not answer him. She had said no word, made no plea, since he had seized upon her. She knew that words would be useless, and she could not have framed a beseeching phrase to address to him had she tried. She was taking her chance, doing all she could to make the chance better. But she could not and would not implore him to release her. She thought of screaming; but, remembering how the man who had conducted her upstairs had let her into the room and then obliterated himself, she reasoned it out, even in the intensity of the struggle, that this man no doubt was a flunky accomplice who would pay no attention to her screaming. Nevertheless she did decide that, as a last resort, she would scream, taking the chance that whomsoever happened to be on the floor beneath or the one above might come to her assistance.

She had relaxed a little, for rest, as he spoke to her, and, catching her off her guard, Jesse suddenly put forth all of his power and swung her, slipping and almost falling as he did so, partly through the portieres from which he had emerged when she came in.

When the portieres thus were thrust apart, Louise saw, standing in the middle of the room which they screened off, a surprised-looking, somewhat scowling little Japanese. Jesse caught sight of Mutsu at the same instant that Louise did.

"What the devil are you doing here?" Jesse demanded of the valet. "Get out and stay out till this evening, do you hear?"

Mutsu first lowered his head, then shook it with a most decided negative. His lips were pulled back from his teeth; mutiny shone all over him.

"What you do?" he demanded of Jesse, falling into a pidgin vernacular which he rarely used except when excited. "She no like to be crushed in embrace? She is of an innocence. She is of an honorable. I saw that at Savoy Hotel when first I see her. Why you no let go?"

"Get out of here, I say, you damned chattering monkey!" Jesse raged at him, relaxing his hold upon Louise, and leaping at the little Japanese.

Mutsu, retreating not an inch, met the charge of his employer with lowered head, and when Jesse thrust out a hand to grab him the Japanese, revealing a perfect adeptness at jiu-jitsu which Jesse never had known he possessed, seized the thrust-out hand between both of his own sinewy ones; and in an instant Jesse's face was drawn with pain. Then the Japanese made a sudden dart behind Jesse, pulling back the hand to which he still clung and the arm to which it was attached in such a way that the big, bulky man could not move without breaking the arm; he felt the tendons stretching to the breaking point as it was.

"Now you go, Miss innocent honorable lady," said Mutsu, without visible excitement, to Louise. "Go through next back room and out door there. I see you at Savoy tonight after I get fired-dismissed from valet position here."

Jesse, his face red with the torture of the accomplished jiu-jitsuing he was receiving, stormed at and cursed the Japanese in fo'c'sle terms as he saw Louise pass toward the rear door the Japanese had indicated. She nodded affirmatively to Mutsu when he told her that he would be at the Savoy that evening to see that she had arrived there safely; then she passed through the rear door leading into the hall, went down the thickly-padded stairs without awakening the bald and bland Gaskins, who dozed in a hall chair; and had the luck to hail a taxicab almost in front of the house.

---

Laura was at the hotel, and in a panic of worriment about Louise, when the girl got back. Louise told Laura what had happened in a few words, then fainted, falling back heavily upon a couch, for the first time in her life—after the danger was all over, with the usual feminine whimsiness.

That night the following cable message to John Blythe was flashed under the sea:

"Come immediately. You are needed here. Laura."

---

CHAPTER XIV

The mutiny of Mutsu, culminating at so opportune a time for Louise, was the result of an enmity for his employer which had been slumbering for a long time in the mind of the Japanese valet. It had its origin in Jesse's treatment of several women and girl victims for the entrapment of whom Jesse had invoked the unwilling services of his Japanese man. Mutsu had been employed as an attendant at New York clubs long enough to know the meaning of the word "thoroughbred" in its vernacular application to men; and he knew very well that the "thoroughbred" man did not go in for the sort of women-corraling machinations to which Jesse devoted more than half of his time. Thus formed and grew Mutsu's contempt for his employer as a coward who preyed upon the defencelessness of inveigled women; and his contempt had reached a focal point when, after having been made the instrument to accomplish the enmeshment of Louise Treharne, he had returned to the Curzon Street house to find her in a peril with which he had become all too familiar since entering Jesse's service. Louise's beauty and palpable purity had touched a sympathetic chord in the Japanese; so that, after accomplishing his vigil, his knowledge, based upon experience, of the indignities and perhaps worse to which she was bound to be subjected by his employer had impelled him, in a sudden surge of Oriental wrath, to follow her after he had seen her start for the Curzon Street house.

Mutsu had no difficulty in making a leisurely departure from Jesse's establishment and service after having released Louise from his employer's toils. He retained his tendon-stretching jiu-jitsu hold on Jesse until he was sure that Louise had reached the street, while Jesse, literally foaming at the mouth in his rage, cursed him with an almost Arabic variety and profusion of epithets. Then Mutsu, suddenly releasing his employer, darted to the center of the room and faced Jesse with a teeth-exhibiting smile that was also half a snarl.

"Now I quit," said Mutsu, briefly. "I am glad for a quit. I despise-hate your typical. You not come near me—" as Jesse, rubbing his sorely-stretched arm, made a step toward him—"or I break your two-both arms. I pack. You pay me. I quit permanent-forever."

Jesse came to a full stop at the threat of being treated to a pair of broken arms. He was twice the size of the Japanese, but the difference in their sizes was more than compensated for by his own cravenness and the valet's mastery of the bone-breaking art. Mutsu, never taking his eyes off Jesse, got out his two suit-cases and packed them carefully and deliberately. Jesse, striding up and down and storming, seized a heavy jade ornament from a mantel, when Mutsu was about half through with his packing task, and drew it back as if to heave it at the valet; but Mutsu, making two agile backward steps, grabbed one of Jesse's pistols which lay on top of the tray of an open trunk, and thus waited for the missile. Jesse replaced the jade ornament on the mantel and resumed his striding up and down. When the Japanese had finished his packing, he consulted a little notebook and, totting up a column of expenditures, found that Jesse owed him fifteen pounds.

"You pay now and permanent I quit," the Japanese said to Jesse, and the latter threw his wallet on a table.

"Take it out of that, you dirty little mandril," he growled to Mutsu, "and be on your way before I have you handed over on the charge of being a thief."

"Just that you try," replied Mutsu, breathing hard, as he counted over the money that was due him, "and I—you see where you get off—just that you try! Your name like fertilizer I would make!"

Then Mutsu stuffed the amount that was due him into his pocket, tossing the rest of the money on to the table, clapped on his hat, picked up his pair of suit-cases, and walked out, flying the gonfalon of victory. He went straight to the Savoy, and was taken into the service of Laura Stedham the instant he made his appearance before her.

Jesse, wearing a thoroughly whipped look, huddled in a deep chair for hours after Mutsu's departure. The chair was close enough to his brandy bottle to enable him to apply himself to it at startlingly frequent intervals. The first "transaction" of his life, having to do with women, had gone flatly against him. He ground his teeth as he drunkenly pondered that irrefutable fact. He had no fear of the consequences of his attempt to enmesh Louise Treharne. Her only male protector, he knew, was on the other side of the sea. But it was the knowledge that he had utterly and finally lost out in the most diligent and ingenious attempt he had ever made upon a feminine citadel that enraged him. He did not even have the satisfaction of framing reprisals. What reprisals could he attempt? And they could avail him nothing even if he succeeded in setting such revengeful machinery in motion.

Jesse was considerably more than middling drunk when, his brandy having receded to the lees, he summoned the obsequious Gaskins.

"Anybody above or below me here now?" he inquired of Gaskins.

"No, sir," replied Gaskins. "The gentleman that 'as the hapartment below is abroad, hand the gentleman that 'as the hapartment above only comes 'ere occasionally, sir, for a little hamusement—'e's married now, sir."

"Well, that's good," said Jesse, reeling about. "That'll let me have the whole damned outfit for my parties for the next ten days or so, eh?"

"Hat your service, sir," replied Gaskins, familiar with Jesse's prodigality in devising and settling for his diversions.

"I'm going to have a series of rough-houses here," said Jesse, minus even a crumb of dignity in the presence of a man who had been a flunky all his life, "to celebrate a defeat—or make me forget a defeat; it all comes to the same thing. Fellows have been defeated before my time, haven't they? Yes, and they'll be defeated after I'm dead, by hell! You've got your work cut out for you, Gaskins; I'm going to paint this sheltered little corner of London a luminous red for a week or so, and then damn your England! I'll have you fix up the suppers and that sort of thing. Engage all the help you want, and right away. And, say, get me another man, will you? I've fired that dirty little Japanese chimpanzee—he's a thief."

"You may leave heverything to me, sir," said Gaskins, rubbing his hands. "Hi quite understand, sir."

The saturnalia in the Curzon Street house began that very night. Certain London stage managers of musical comedies still remember that week as one during which, for several nights running, they had to present their extravaganzas with mere apologies for feminine choruses, and, in some instances, with many of the female principals' shrill understudies doing their dismal best with only half-learned lines and songs.

---

John Blythe, making the Mauretania a quarter of an hour before that leviathan started on one of her East-bound record-breaking voyages, reached London on the sixth day after having received Laura's cablegram. He surmised why he had been summoned. So sure was he that his surmise was correct that, when he walked in upon Laura and Louise at the Savoy, he did not even inquire why so urgent a summons had been sent to him. He preferred to postpone that question until he had an opportunity to be alone with Laura.

Laura had told Louise that Blythe was coming. But neither of the women had been expecting him so soon. When he was announced by telephone from the hotel desk Louise flushed and paled alternately. Laura watched her amusedly.

"Such hardened unconcern is dreadful to see in one so young, Louise," she was beginning to chaff when Blythe was ushered in by a diminutive Buttons. Louise gave him both of her hands. He held them, looking into her eyes with his wide smile.

"May I?" he asked her, a little unsteadily.

"As Louise's chaperon, I shall never forgive her if she refuses—nor you, if you accept her refusal," said Laura.

Louise upraised her face to his. It was a simple but eloquent confession that she knew her lips were for him.

"Not as your guardian, I hope, Louise?" said Blythe, putting it in the form of a question.

Her face still upraised and her eyes partly closed, she shook her head; and Blythe, drawing her to him, kissed her full on the lips. Then he quickly released her and took Laura's outstretched hands.

It was the luncheon hour, and Laura had luncheon served in the rooms. They chatted upon little intimate matters quite as if they had been lunching in Laura's New York apartment. Blythe, in fact, mentioned Laura's apartment.

"I met your decorator the other day," he said, "and he wore a very puzzled expression. He told me that you had charged him by cable to do your place over in Tyrian purple, and he was afraid that color would be too dark, or too obtrusive, or something—I forget his exact words."

They knew, however, that his banter was simply a device. Both of the women, taking Blythe's manner as their cue, and observing how pointedly he refrained from asking why he had been sent for, knew at once that he had formed his surmise. Louise, for her part, was awaiting Laura's signal for her to withdraw. When she had gone, Blythe turned a suddenly-sobered face upon Laura.

"It's Jesse, I suppose?" he said to her.

"Yes," said Laura, and she told him of what had happened at the Curzon Street house. Also she told him of Jesse's attempted advances upon Louise in New York.

"I reprove myself now, of course, that I did not tell you at the time about how the man sought to force his attentions upon her in New York," she said, "but you will understand, I know, why I hesitated to tell you. I felt that you would have found it too hard to keep your hands off of him, and I feared to put you to the test. Of course I should have known that you would do nothing, no matter how sorely tempted, that would have involved Louise; but my timidity, I suppose, is of a piece with that of other women in such circumstances."

"Don't worry about that part of it, Laura," said Blythe, consolingly. "You've atoned, if any atonement were necessary, by getting me here now. After all, I could scarcely have taken it upon myself to chastise him in New York. The blackguard did not go quite far enough there, as I understand it, to permit of me getting out on the firing line, even if I had known about it. It is just as well that you waited, for that and some other reasons. There is everything in having a good case," and his face wreathed in a dry sort of a smile which Laura analyzed as boding little good for the man of whom they were speaking.

"What are your plans, John?" Laura asked him presently. "London, you know, is quite as fruitful a field as New York for the achieving of an unmerited and distorted notoriety. I lean upon your judgment, of course."

"You are not supposing that I am going to call the cur out, or tweak his nose in public, or any such yellow-covered thing as that, are you, Laura?" Blythe asked her with another of his reflective smiles.

"I know that you are going to punish him," replied Laura. "I want you to punish him. Heaven knows that I am not bloodthirsty, but I should dearly love to be by while you are in the article of punishing him. Only it is an affair that must be handled with extreme caution. I promise not to say that again. But, really, John, you must——"

"The only thing I am afraid of," interrupted Blythe, meditatively, "is that he might have left London. Where did you say his place is? I'll have to devise some way to find out if he is still there."

"Mutsu can do that," said Laura. She had told Blythe of the Japanese valet's fine part in saving Louise from Jesse, and now she summoned him. Blythe, studying the wiry little man, who wore a distinctively agreeable smile when he made his appearance, commended him warmly for his conduct and asked him if he knew whether Jesse still remained at the Curzon Street house. Mutsu replied that he did not know but that he could find out; and he went to the telephone and called up Gaskins, representing himself to be a club servant who had been directed to ascertain if Mr. Jesse still remained in town. Gaskins replied that he was, and Mutsu gave that word to Blythe.

"You go there, sir?" inquired Mutsu, evidently sensing that Blythe's contemplated visit to the Curzon Street house was not to be in the nature of a peace errand. "Let it be that I shall go with you, sir? I can the help-assist you."

Blythe laughingly told the Japanese that he considered that he had done his share and that he would not be needing any help-assistance; and Mutsu withdrew.

"Shall we all dine together here?" Blythe asked Laura, rising after the Japanese had gone. "I am staying at the Carlton, and I want to run over there to——"

"Listen, John: are you going to see that man at his place now, at once?" Laura asked him, with an expression of mingled worriment and curiosity. "You know you are!"

"Oh," said Blythe, "I have a bit of running about to do, and——"

"But listen, please: supposing the coward were to try to use some weapon on you and——"

"Tush, Laura. What became of Louise? But stay: make my devoirs to her, won't you, please? I am off to keep an appointment. We are dining here this evening then? You may expect me by eight o'clock," and off he rushed. He had, in fact, been "straining at his leash," as Laura thought, watching him, ever since he had found that Jesse still was in town.

Louise came back a few moments after Blythe's departure, and she looked rueful when she saw that he had gone.

"Don't take it so excessively to heart, dear," Laura said to her. "He left all sorts of messages of apology for going without seeing you, but he had an appointment—er—I mean he had to go to——" Laura came to a somewhat feeble pause, and Louise, moreover, had noticed that her tone was a bit forced. Louise, trembling slightly, placed her hands on Laura's shoulders.

"Dear, he has gone to Curzon Street, has he not?" she asked the older woman.

"Of course he has!—why shouldn't he?" replied Laura, with a bravado which immediately gave away to tears. Louise promptly followed her example. It was merely another repetition of the age-old story wherein women weep when men go forth. And, although they of course did not know it at the time, no doubt both women enjoyed their tears quite as heartily as if they had been justified in feeling the least fear for the safety of John Blythe.

---

Jesse, his fiesta "in celebration of a defeat" at an end, was supervising the packing of his trunks by the young English valet obtained for him by Gaskins. His face was puffed and there were purplish pouches under his restless eyes. Three New York men, two of them somewhat youngish, the third of about Jesse's age, who had been drawn into the current of the recent gayety at the Curzon Street house, lounged about, smoking rather dismally, glancing occasionally into the mantel glass at their furred tongues and shaking their heads in the spirit of self-accusation which comes with the aftermath.

"Back to little old New York and at least a year's exemplary conduct for mine," observed the eldest of Jesse's three visitors, Jermyn Scammel, a stock broker widely known in New York for the catholicity of his views as to his associates.

"The veil for me," chorused the two younger men, sepulchrally.

Jesse accepted their vows of amendment as tributes to his lavishness as an entertainer and smiled flaccidly. The self-gratulating smile still flickered on his face when there came a knock, and Gaskins, grown unceremonious during the recent gay proceedings, opened the door without waiting for a "Come in" and said:

"Gentleman with an happointment with you, sir."

Blythe had told Gaskins that he had an appointment with Jesse and that therefore there would be no need to announce him.

Jesse's smile congealed, his jaw fell, and he stood with mouth agape, when John Blythe stepped into the room. Blythe bestowed a mere nod upon him and then glanced around at the other men. He knew Scammel.

"Hul-lo!" exclaimed that now repentent bon vivant, advancing upon Blythe with outstretched hand. "John Blythe it is, but too late for the doings! But who'd have thought you ever participated in doings, old man!"

Something in Blythe's eye, as well as the panic-stricken appearance of Jesse, stopped Scammel's airy greeting when he had got that far. "Why, what the devil——" he muttered, looking first at Blythe and then at Jesse, whose face had taken on a sickly, chalky pallor. The two younger men, seated a-straddle of chairs, watched the scene with curious eyes.

Blythe rather liked Scammel, in spite of the latter's excessively careless way of living. The man was genuine, at any rate, and Blythe was not displeased to find him there; he knew that Scammel would be a trustworthy witness as to anything that might happen. Blythe bowed to the two younger men, and turned to the still agape Jesse.

"Would you prefer to see me privately, or do you elect to have these gentlemen remain?" he asked Jesse in a quiet tone.

"I have nothing to see you about," spluttered Jesse, "and you are intruding upon——"

"You know what I have crossed the Atlantic to see you about," Blythe broke in upon him in an even tone.

"This is no place for a clergyman's son—I can see that!" ejaculated Scammel, picking up his hat and stick, the two younger men doing likewise; the fact having become very obvious by this time that something unusual between Blythe and Jesse was in the wind.

"Don't you people go!" gasped Jesse, and they all saw, not without a certain immediate disgust, that the man was in positive terror. "I want all of you as witnesses! This man," staring with protrusive eyes at Blythe, "has no appointment with me. He wasn't asked to come here, and he has no right here. He is intruding upon my——"

"Easy has it, Jesse," put in Scammel, putting off his airiness of a sudden and assuming the dignity which belonged to him. "I know Blythe. He doesn't intrude anywhere. This is a quarrel between you two. I am your guest and I'll stay if you want me to and if Blythe is agreeable. How about it, Blythe?"

"I would a little prefer that you and these other gentlemen remain," replied Blythe, quite at his ease. "I think it fair to tell you in advance, however, that you are to witness the chastisement of your host."

Jesse gave an audible gasp, and Scammel looked at him and then at Blythe.

"Well, since you both want us to stay, there is no other way for it, is there?" turning to the two younger men, who nodded acquiescently. "But it's a bit unusual, isn't it, Blythe? Coming to a man's house with a chastising programme?"

"You won't think so, Scammel, nor will your friends here, when I explain the reason," replied Blythe, no trace of excitement in his tone; "and, since you are going to remain, you are of course entitled to an explanation."

"It's all a put-up job!" broke out Jesse, hoarsely. "I've had no affair with this man. He's meddling, that's what he is doing—meddling! I swear it, by God!"

"Just a moment, Jesse," put in Scammel, squarely facing the man he addressed. "Blythe doesn't meddle. I know that as well as I know that I wear a hat. He wouldn't be here with any such purpose as he announces unless he had some pretty good reason. Don't try to prejudice his case in advance. That isn't the square thing."

"But," almost screamed Jesse, "he is picking up other people's affairs and trying to make them his——"

"Stop that, Jesse!" broke in Scammel, raising an authoritative arm, a trace of anger in his tone. "Good God, man, can't you play the game? You've got a man's gizzard, haven't you? What the devil are you trembling and quaking about? Is your case so bad as all that? Go ahead, Blythe. It's your say now, and we're listening."

Jesse, knowing that the verdict of this court of arbitration could not but be against him, glanced at the portieres as if upon the point of bolting for it. Scammel, noticing this, passed behind Jesse and took his stand at the parting of the portieres. The two younger men rose from their straddled chairs and viewed the proceedings standing, their eyes slitting perceptibly when they perceived Jesse's manifest cravenness.

"Gentlemen," said Blythe, glancing from Scammel to the younger men and not even seeming to see Jesse, "I don't think it will be necessary to pledge you to secrecy as to what happens here, even if no names are to be mentioned. If the affair involved a man it would be different. But it does not. It involves a young New York lady, now in London, who has been out of school less than half a year. The young lady is my ward. Moreover, she is to be my wife."

"But I didn't know that!" broke in Jesse with a hideous shrillness of tone. "I swear to God that I did not know that, or——"

Scammel glared Jesse into silence, and Blythe went on.

"It makes no difference, as you will discover, whether he knew it or not," he said, speaking of Jesse as if he had not been present. "The thing that he did, in this place, a week ago, was a thing so incredibly base that my account of it might well tax your credulity. But that it happened precisely as I am going to tell it to you is of course true, else I should not be here. The young New York lady of whom I speak is in London under the protection of a chaperon, a friend of her mother's. A week ago, by means of a trick, this man enticed my ward, who is wholly lacking in experience, to this house. He caused a telephone message to be sent to her at her hotel, informing her that her chaperon, who had left the hotel on a shopping tour, had been overtaken by an illness and had been brought to this house. This house was represented in the telephone message to be the home of a 'Mrs. Hammond,' an imaginary friend of my ward's chaperon. The young lady came here with all haste to see, as she supposed, her chaperon and protectress. This man, waiting for her, not only insulted her grossly, subjecting her to indignities and physical violence which I can scarcely speak of in the presence of gentlemen, but he told her, virtually in so many words, that it was his deliberate purpose to deflower her. His own valet, a Japanese, appeared in her moment of peril; and it was the valet's physical intervention alone that saved her from the fate this man had ingeniously and malignantly planned for her."

Blythe paused. He had spoken quietly, but there was a menacing timbre in his voice. Jesse, looking like a hunted animal, had attempted several times to break in upon Blythe's recital, but each time Scammel had stopped him with a warning gesture.

Now Scammel, with gathered brows, stepped in front of Jesse and inquired of him:

"What have you to say to this, Jesse?"

"I didn't know, I tell you," Jesse broke out in a voice that was choked with terror, "that she was to be married to Blythe, or——"

"Wait!" commanded Scammel, thrusting up a staying hand. "That convicts you, Jesse. You're a damned scoundrel on your own say-so. What difference does it make as to the main facts of your dirty bit of work whether you knew that or not? I am not unmindful of the duties of a guest; but, for all that, if I were Blythe I'd whale the everlasting hell out of you, here and now, and I reckon he will; and I, for one, am going to stick around to see fair play!"

"Same here" and "That goes for me, too," put in the two younger men.

Blythe stepped forward, and, drawing back his right arm, left the quickly-crimsoning imprint of his palm upon Jesse's waxy cheek. Jesse received the blow, merely meant to be introductory, with a shriek, and wriggled back and sought to huddle in a corner of the room.

"Why, damnation take it, Jesse," exclaimed Scammel, reddening with the shame of seeing a man he had been on terms with performing so cravenly, "you're going to put up your hands, aren't you? You're not going to be such a cur as to——Here, none of that, you know!" and he leaped at Jesse and wrenched from his grasp the heavy teakwood tabouret which the man, at bay and with no sense of fairness, had suddenly reached down and grabbed from beneath the jardiniere which it supported.

"Keep out, Scammel, please," quietly enjoined Blythe, and he stepped over to Jesse, pulled him to the center of the room by the lapel of his coat, and then brought his right fist crashing to the point of Jesse's jaw. Jesse, seeing the blow coming, squeaked like a rat; then he went down like a log and lay unconscious before the fireplace. Blythe and the three other men stood looking at him with wonderment mingled with disgust.

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