Spellbinders

by Margaret Culkin Banning

II

He did not go to the great Auditorium until the next afternoon. It took some time to get himself into shape. The heat had begun, heat which settled thickly on the city for three days and played its own part in making possible agreements and compromises. By noon the smart look, the brisk look had gone from everything and everybody and the sticky battle with the weather had begun. Gage had met some men from his own part of the country and they entered the great hall where the banners hung limp from the ceiling and the delegates were already coming back to their places after the noon recess. Gage did not look for his wife but after a while he saw her—as usual looking the mistress of herself. His head was hot and thick and he hated her for the fine mastery of her health and beauty. He wanted to see her in tears—prostrate—and because he knew his desire was ugly he slipped down in his own self-respect, which already was becoming such a frail reed to cling to.

All that day he did not go near her. He watched her furtively sometimes while he was in the auditorium but most of the time he spent with other men in hotel rooms which grew hotter in spite of the efforts of electric fans and all the time the whisky which he drank made his brain hot and seething with misconceptions and desires and hatreds.

By the afternoon of the second day it had settled down to an endurance meeting.

Watching the restless, heated crowd, going through the same old formalities, Gage wondered whether Helen was aware now what kind of game this was she had chosen to sit in—whether the farce of it was clear. He did not wonder clearly. It was a kind of vindictive spite which pricked a muddled brain.

He had not intend to be there when she spoke but in the end he stayed. He heard the round commonplace phrases of the man who was nominating the candidate she was working for—a good man, as Gage admitted—better caliber than most, but without a ghost of a show for nomination. He listened with irritation to the outburst of applause. Then he saw his wife before the great crowd. It seemed quite unreal.

He had not guessed her voice would carry like that. He had not known she would show up like that. She came like a breath of cool air into that heated place. In her blue linen gown and white feather hat she looked cool, fresh, immaculate. When she spoke they listened to her and for a few minutes Gage caught himself listening eagerly. She was talking well. No nonsense. It was to the point. Just then he heard a man behind him.

“Some looker, isn’t she? That’s the kind of dames we ought to have in politics all right.”

Blind rage swept over Gage again. He wanted to turn on the man and fight. But he did nothing of the sort, being held by a thousand inhibitions. Instead he watched his wife and as she talked he seemed to see her offering her beauty to the crowd, seemed to see in every man’s face—as they watched her—amusement, desire, lust.

He heard the burst of applause when she finished, applause with real enthusiasm and at every hand clap he felt fury rising. Getting up, he found his way to the door.

If Helen had expected a tribute from him, piled on the many she received that night, she was mistaken. Men, women, newspapers all congratulated her on having put some real fire into the speeches. Her speech, printed and flashed all over the country was given its own share of praise. It was clear, forceful, new in its outlook. The women of the country had chosen a good spokesman, said the papers. But from Gage there was only a note at the hotel, saying briefly that he had thought it best to return to St. Pierre—the convention was the usual farce.

Helen twisted his note in her hands.

“So he couldn’t stay away from Freda Thorstad even that long,” she thought. “Well,—”

CHAPTER XVI
MR. SABLE STARTS SOMETHING

WHAT Mr. Sable had counted on was that Gage, once away for the Convention, with his wife travelling with him, would stay away for a week or so. In any case, he had taken matters rather summarily into his own hands in the case of Freda Thorstad. The presence of the girl in the office was to him like an open scandal. He knew that she had to get out of the office and the time to get her out was while Gage was away. Of course Flandon might raise trouble when he came back but there would be no scene with the girl and he could put it flatly and finally that amours had to be conducted outside of the office if at all. He was extremely correct and secure in his own position and he felt he was most delicate.

So he was at the office a little earlier than usual the morning after Gage left for the Convention. Freda was at her desk sorting the first batch of mail. She looked very neat and capable, in her white blouse open a little at the throat, her thick golden red hair pulled back smoothly from her forehead, and her head industriously bent over her letters.

“Will you come in my office for a moment, Miss Thorstad?”

Freda followed him obediently. He closed the door and, taking his arm chair, left her standing a little dubiously before him.

“Miss Thorstad,” he said, “I think—er—that it will be best for you to sever your connection with this office.”

His tone, wholly disapproving, weighted with meaning, told his reasons with almost comic flatness.

Freda’s brow contracted and she looked sharply at him. Then she laughed. A brazen laugh, he would have said. Truly a laugh with no more fear or care or apprehension in it than the laugh of any child who comes upon something ridiculous.

Mr. Sable frowned. She was a hussy, he thought. Might try to bulldoze him a little—he became increasingly stern.

“I have no desire to go into our reasons for this but I think it will be best for you to simply leave at once. You may find the work too heavy for you. I am sure you understand that no office of this kind could take the situation differently.”

“Wouldn’t it be better for me to wait until Mr. Flandon’s return?” she asked.

He had feared that.

“Surely you understand that your presence here is embarrassing to Mr. Flandon,” he said sharply.

If she had guessed what he suspected she might have contended. But all that he said struck her as true. She evidently was being gossiped about and if it did make it embarrassing for Mr. Flandon—Perhaps that was why he had been so over courteous, to conceal a deep embarrassment.

“Very well, Mr. Sable,”—she straightened her shoulders a little—“I shall not go on with my work here.”

“Exactly.” With victory so easily accomplished, Mr. Sable became different, adept at smoothing things over. “Of course when a young lady cannot typewrite, an office like this has hardly the right kind of work—”

“I know that. I told Mr. Flandon that at the start.”

“Mr. Flandon being absent, I will give you a check for this week’s work.”

“I’ve done only one day’s work, Mr. Sable. It is only”—she calculated—“two and a half dollars.”

She took his check for that—he did not dare press the point—and left his office. Mr. Sable smoothed his little white mustache, straightened his papers with the air of having done a good day’s work already, and pressed the buzzer for his own secretary.

It was only half past nine o’clock. Freda got her hat and coat from the tiny dressing-room. Her desk was in order and there was no use in fussing over it. She wanted to get out into the clean air. The pompous little lawyer’s insinuations while they did not strike deep enough to insult her, made her feel soiled and dirty.

Cele followed her into the dressing-room.

“Where you going?”

“Going out to look for a job.”

“He let you out?”

“That’s the substance of his message.”

“Well—I call that—” Cele stopped, a veil of thought coming over her eyes. “Look here,” she went on, “if there’s anything I can do—” She stressed the last word violently, as if the need for action pressed upon her.

“Not a thing.”

“You aren’t going back to—what-you-may-call-it? The place you came from?”

“Mohawk? No—mother’s coming here in a day or two. I’ll wait, and look for a job.”

“A job,” said Cele, reflectively, “don’t worry too much, will you? Say—I’ll be around to see you to-night. I think it’s rotten.”

Freda went out, wondering if the slanderous tongues had found even Cele’s ear.

But she did not linger on thoughts of her dismissal. She was sorry to leave Mr. Flandon so, but after all he knew and understood and the whole business was so temporary anyway. Gregory should be back any day now—and they would go away and never think of such ugliness any more. It was like her that no thought of personal justification, of setting people straight on the gossip, ever entered her head. She wanted to shake them off—that was all. She wanted to get away into light and clearness and cleanness with Gregory. And it seemed to her that merely being with Gregory would make an atmosphere like that.

She had received no letter from him in five or six days now and she missed one sadly. She needed that written touch of vigor and sweetness which set her days aflame with happiness. Especially now, with the knowledge that she was probably to bear his child. The lack of an address so she might send him that delightful information was distressing. She could have reached him through his lecture bureau but she had a dread of the letter going astray if it were not sent directly to him. Not a word or thought of resentment did she allow to penetrate her love. She kept herself free from that. It was harder to keep fear away.

She was strolling along, passing through the shopping district, now and then stopping to look idly at something in the window when she heard herself greeted. Looking up she saw Ted Smillie. He was quietly affable and there seemed no escape from speaking to him.

“How are you, Freda?” he asked calmly.

She resented his use of her name though he had come to using it before their disastrous evening.

“Quite well,” she said, and looked at him evenly, waiting for him to pass her.

He did not pass. He lingered, showing in his face the return of that avid attraction which he had felt so strongly before. She was thinner than she had been when he had seen her last and the shadows under her eyes made her face more delicate—more interesting!

“I wanted to see you again and luck’s come my way. You know that I did call on you the next day at the Brownleys’ and found you’d gone. I’m afraid I acted like an awful fool that night. Didn’t I?”

“Worse than that.”

“But it truly wasn’t my fault. I had been drinking. I know I can’t stand the stuff. And you made me quite lose my head.”

She reflected that of course it hadn’t been his fault as much as Barbara’s. And not knowing or dreaming that he was the agency which had violated the privacy of those two days at the Roadside Inn, she did not persist in great resentment. She disliked him of course but she was very idle and ready for distraction.

He went on talking, eagerly.

“It’s been on my mind ever since. I hated to let you think I was like that. Look here, Freda, I’ve got a free afternoon. Come in and have a cool drink somewhere with me—won’t you?”

“I don’t think so,” said Freda.

“Please.”

“I might hurt your reputation,” she said, with a scornful little laugh. “I understand I’m causing a lot of talk among your friends.”

“They always talk about every one—especially if a girl has the courage not to be conventional—”

She did not trust him in the least. Nor did she like him. It was sheer ennui which made her consent. She needed company.

They went to the tea room of a hotel, a cool place, furnished with abundant white willow and great palms. Freda had not been in such a place before and she, as ever, was esthetically responsive to the oasis of comfort and coolness it made in the sweltering city. Ted ordered for her—a tall glass of cool Russian tea with mint leaves and thin lettuce edged sandwiches. His solicitude for her comfort dulled the edge of whatever resentment she had towards him—she had never bothered to preserve much.

“And what are you doing? Did I hear you were working—like all modern women?”

“Working I was—like all women who need the money,” she answered, “but I’m not working now.”

“You’re not going back to Mohawk?”

She remembered part of his proposition that she need not go back to Mohawk, made some weeks ago, glancing at him guardedly, thinking with a certain amount of interest that this was the very young man who had made suggestions which should have barred him permanently from her presence. Here she was, taking his iced tea. Things were queer. She didn’t even feel particularly angry at him. There wasn’t any use pretending false rigors.

“I don’t know,” she said, as she had said before.

“I’m glad you left the Brownleys’ anyhow. Are you living with other friends?”

“No—I’ve a room by myself.”

Obviously he liked that and the visible signs of his liking amused her.

“Can I come to see you once in a while?”

“Oh, no, indeed. I shouldn’t in the least like you as a caller.”

He was undisturbed.

“I’ll have to make you change your mind somehow.”

She shrugged her shoulders slightly, delicately, in negation.

“Do you know how much I’ve thought about you since that night?” he asked, bending a little closer to her.

“How much?”

“All the time.”

She pushed her glass away from her.

“Don’t be silly. I’m not a half-wit, Ted. I think you ought to be ashamed of yourself. You know quite well you’re engaged to Barbara Brownley. Her mother told Miss Duffield that.”

His face darkened.

“Well,” he said, “I thought you were above a lot of silly conventions.”

She smiled serenely. “I am.”

“Then—just because a man is engaged to a woman is no reason why he should never speak to any one else.”

“No—that would put a pretty high penalty on such things, wouldn’t it?”

“People are getting over their old fashioned notions about such things. Men and women aren’t simpletons as they used to be, you know. We’re regarding these things in a modern way. More like the French,” he said largely.

“The French—oh, yes,” said Freda, gravely, “you mean having wives and mistresses too. I’ve often wondered if the French couldn’t sue us for libel for the things provincial Americans think about them.”

He flushed. “Are you making fun of me?”

“Gracious, no.” But he knew from her laugh that she was. “Why should I make fun of you?”

She was enjoying herself. She felt so secure, so strong. It was fun to bait this temperish young man, make him scuttle about for phrases which had no effect on her at all.

“Anyway you know how I feel.” He pushed aside the glasses and plates between them and bent himself over the tiny table towards her. She sat back in her chair promptly.

“You know how I feel,” he persisted, “I never cared for a girl as I’ve cared for you.”

“Then,” said Freda, with an air of great simplicity, “why not ask me to marry you?”

He threw out his hands in a theatrical gesture of despondency.

“I’m tied hand and foot. This marriage of mine has been cooked up by our families. It’s all arranged for us.”

“I know,” said Freda wisely, “as in France.”

He glanced sharply at her.

“But,” said Freda, “the modern way is not to let your parents put that sort of thing over. Truly. One simply says, ‘Mother—I will wed the girl of my choice.’”

“You are making fun of me.”

“Well—who wouldn’t?” Freda collapsed into a laugh. “Here I sit, listening to you make the funniest clandestine love in the world. You feel you’ve got to do it—to uphold your reputation as a—Frenchman! And if you slipped into a serious situation you’d be aghast. You don’t care a thing about me and you know it.”

“Ah, don’t I?” He looked for a moment as if he did.

“You probably care a little about corrupting me. Now look here, Ted, please stop talking such nonsense. You can’t shock me and it’s pretty hard to insult me—I am a little ashamed of not being more insulted—but you probably could make me very angry by persisting in trying to involve me in petty vice. In the first place I don’t like it. In the second place, if I ever went in for vice, it would be on a larger scale than you could dream of. I haven’t the slightest intention of—being French! You’d better go along and make love to Bob Brownley. She’ll bring some excitement into your life, I think. The reason I’m not more angry with you is that you were, indirectly, the cause of the greatest bit of luck that ever happened to me.”

“What?”

“I wouldn’t dream of telling you. But I’m awfully obliged for the tea—truly. It set me up. Shall we go?”

He was not so easy to repulse. He got up and pulled his chair around to her side of the table.

“Freda,” he tried to take her hand, “if I gave up Bob would you let me see you?”

“I wouldn’t if you gave up the world.”

She rose a little impatiently, feeling that this was going too far, and started for the door of the dining-room.

“At least you’ll tell me where you live?” he pressed her. “Let me go home with you now.”

“Don’t you have to work in the middle of the afternoon?”

“Nobody’s working much. It’s too hot.”

“Then go play with Barbara. I’ve other things to do.”

Possibly it was the heat and the sense of effort which got nowhere that made Ted’s face intense and angry. He saw her about to slip away again.

“You can’t go like this, Freda, I’ve only just found you.”

“You’d better let me,” answered Freda, “because I see Maud Dubonnet looking at you and she knows you and obviously isn’t intending to speak to me though I lunched at her house, so you see it will be hot with you when Barbara hears this.”

Against his will Ted looked up and saw Maud truly, with two other girls and three young men coming into the room. They had to pass Ted and Freda as they stood there, discussing. Maud Dubonnet was the only one of the group whom Freda knew. The others all evidently knew Ted and glanced at him with some interest. Maud did not look at Freda. She held her head stiffly as she passed, then said something to the others which made them turn with an attempt at casualness to look at the man and girl. Ted delayed no longer. He followed Freda out.

“You see it doesn’t pay to do things Barbara won’t like. This will get back to her before to-morrow and she won’t be pleasant.”

Ted’s mouth set in an rather ugly line.

“I’ll manage Bob all right.” He looked at Freda. Her face under the plain white hat she wore was mocking, insubordinate, fascinating. “But I want to see you again. To-night?”

“Nonsense. Good-by, Ted. Be good and make your peace with Bob.”

She turned and went in the opposite direction from the one in which they had started, going into the first big department store and retiring to the ladies’ waiting-room where she wrote a letter to her father, and mailed it. Then, having made sure she was rid of Ted she went home. The afternoon dragged along. She read and thought and on an impulse went out again to go to the railway station and get some time tables. She wanted to see just how far Gregory had been away from her when he last wrote.

Each time the postman approached the house there was a leap of her heart. Four times a day he came and each time he brought fresh hope. She would play tricks on herself as she went down to look in the mail box she shared with the people who rented the apartment in which she stayed. Each time she put her hand in the box she hesitated before she looked, then looked quickly as if to catch fate before it tricked her. But it would be an advertisement of a corset firm for Mrs. Miller, an envelope with unmistakable savor of a bill about it, a postcard, a white Louisine envelope with a woman’s handwriting on it. How she hated all the flatness of the Miller mail.

Each envelope she took in her hands seemed to be mischievously metamorphosed into one of these stupid envelopes which represented such dull contact with the outside world. Nothing to do but to go upstairs and read all over again the old messages of love from him—to wear her wedding ring in the privacy of her room—to make endless computations on the presumable date of her child’s birth—to read with unfailing zest and yet slight nausea the rather mawkish pages of “What Every Mother Should Know” which she had shamefacedly but defiantly bought at a book shop, feeling the necessity for some practical knowledge of marriage.

The next day, breaking through her apprehension and her waiting, cutting across her vague fears, came the letter. It lay between an announcement of the opening of a new hair dressing parlor and Mr. Miller’s water and light bill. How could she hope that the other white envelope would be anything more interesting? Then she turned it over and the address stared at her blackly. It was addressed to Mrs. Gregory Macmillan, in an unfamiliar hand, postmarked at the town from which Gregory had last written. Gregory always addressed her letters to Freda Thorstad to avoid any explanations to the Millers. A quick faint fear came over her. She almost crushed the letter as she flew up the stairs and with her back against her door faced the envelope again.

Then steeling her mind and her heart, presenting only outer senses to what blow it might contain, she opened it. The written words made their sense clear, like some amazingly vital story that thrilled every nerve.

“My dear Mrs. Macmillan:

I obtained your address from your husband and I am writing you to tell you that he is extremely ill. We have done our best for him and he has a nurse with him constantly but I feel that you should come to him if it is at all possible. I do not know what responsibilities of family may hold you but I think it my duty to inform you that your husband is very sick. He lectured here on the fourteenth and the next morning the proprietor of this hotel called me to attend him. I found him in the first stages of typhoid and had him removed to a hospital here which is comfortable and where we have given him every attention. At a time like this his family should be with him. I regret that I must be the agent of such distressing news.

Faithfully yours,
L. D. Merritt, M.D.”

She read it through twice carefully. The thing struck her as quite unreal, although she had speculated on the possibility of his illness.

Then her mind, working reasonably, went on. She thought of trains and money. She had fifty—no forty-nine dollars and seventy-five cents. It wasn’t enough, she knew.

She had the time tables which she had obtained the day before. She studied them, her body held tautly, her face calm, showing a control which had come unconsciously. She could leave at three fifteen that afternoon. She’d have to change trains at midnight. She’d get there at noon next day. There was money. She must have money. No one to get it from unless she wired her father—better not—Miss Duffield away—Mr. Flandon away—Cele had none. She thought even of Ted Smillie. Better not—she’d pawn something. That was what people did when they needed money.

Like most girls she had a small collection of semi-precious jewelry—nothing of great value. She opened the little mock-ivory box on her dressing table and considered the contents carefully. Then she closed it, put on her hat and stuck the box in her pocket.

Pawning was unlike any experience she had ever had and not as exciting as books had led her to believe. She felt no shame—only a vague hostility to the pawnbroker. She hated his having so obviously the best of the transaction. He was scornful in her array of articles to sell—the gold bracelet that had cost her father thirty-five dollars—the little one carat diamond ring that had been her mother’s—the opal ring—the seal ring—the little silver locket.

In the end he gave her thirty-three dollars, and with the money in her hands she immediately got his point of view. She had exchanged a lot of things which meant little to her for the boundless power of thirty-three dollars which added to forty-nine made eighty-two.

She bought a ticket to Fairmount, Montana. It cost her twenty-eight dollars and sixty-four cents. She put it in her purse and went home, a splendid sense of action stirring her.

It took her a very short time to pack her bag. There remained two hours before the train. She spent it sitting in her room and letting the knowledge of what she was doing penetrate her mind. It occurred to her that she should let some one know where she was going but in the face of Gregory’s illness it seemed even less possible to confide the news of her marriage. That was to have been a glorious revelation to a few people. She could not turn it into tragedy, so she decided to tell no one.

To her father she wrote a letter.

Yet even to him she could not tell the facts. It seemed now when circumstances seemed to imperil her secret that she clutched it even more tightly to herself. She could not bear the thought of comment breaking in like a destructive barrage on the secret glory and beauty she cherished. In her absorption she did not think much of consequences or possible worry for any one. Only as she told Mrs. Miller that she wanted to pay up for her week and that she had been called out of town, did it occur to her from a comment of Mrs. Miller’s, that her mother was coming in a day or two. The complication puzzled her—then she overrode it boldly. It was one of the things that had to be. So she wrote a note for her mother and entrusted it to Mrs. Miller. It was only a few lines to tell her that she had left the city—“I’m sorry that I can’t be more definite about my plans. There’s nothing to worry you, mother. It’s quite all right and I’m not doing anything I shouldn’t. So please don’t worry about me. Only trust me, won’t you? I know you will.” She sent her love and for all her assurances on paper that she knew her mother would trust her she sealed it with a dubious look.

In the letter to her father she was, if not more informative, at least more expansive.

It was incoherent, reassuring, happy, sad—the kind of letter that carries with it great fear to the one who reads it and who sees how delicate the balance is on which the future is being weighed.

Freda mailed the note to her father, left the one for her mother with Mrs. Miller and went to the station. Almost before she knew it the long train, with a jerk of its loose hung body had gathered itself together and moved out of the yards through the scattering, blackened railroad district. She watched the little houses and let her mind sink into a blur of remembrance and anticipation. She was going to Gregory. No more waiting for letters, no more dreams. Whatever it was that was to come, it was reality—something to feel and to do—not to wait for.

She slipped her wedding ring on her finger and displayed her hand a little absurdly on the edge of the window casing. Marvelous symbol—that ring, she thought. Too bad that people had come to regard it so disdainfully. How ill it must have been treated to have sunk into such disrepute. Across the aisle of the day coach she saw a like ring on the hand of a woman. It was a fleshy hand and the coarse pink skin pushed itself up on either side of the encircling band but Freda felt kinship and friendliness. With this unknown woman, with the unintelligent face she almost felt it possible to converse intimately—as if she might cross to her and say, “I am Mrs. Gregory Macmillan. Are you going far?”

When the shadows fell thick across the prairie and a white-coated waiter, a shade more important in his manner that he had been in passing through the Pullmans, had intrigued a fair number of the day-coach passengers into the diner, Freda rose a little stiffly. Her chin had red marks on it where she had cupped it in her hand for so long and there were streaks of coal dust under her eyes. She made a perfunctory and inadequate attempt to look presentable and faced a new adventure. She had never eaten on a train in her life.

The warm bustle and luxury of the place stirred her senses and brought her out of her lonely rhapsody into an appreciation of what went on around her. The adventure spirit came to the surface. Freda Thorstad—sitting at a tidy table in a dining-car, on the way to her husband. There was no disloyalty to Gregory’s illness that she could not resist the enchantment of shining dishes which looked like silver and warm and savory smells and smiling, interesting travelers, with above and around it all the clatter and rush of the train, moving on to a hundred destinations, a hundred tragedies and comedies and romances. Her thoughts at least admitted no staleness as a possibility.

The meal stood out in her memory. She never forgot it. Tentatively she ordered, tea, biscuits and lamb chops. When the lamb chops came they lay on a platter with little sprigs of parsley offering them up and made her very hungry. They looked delightful but inadequate. She ate hungrily, for these last few days she had had little food.

Four—five—dragging hours. She bought a magazine with a flaring girl on its cover and read avidly, her mind sinking into its soporific fiction with weariness, getting respite from her own sharp and vivid thoughts.

The conductor came to tell her that this was her station. He lifted her heavy bag for her and carried it to the foot of the steps of the coach.

Then came the excitement of the swoop and pause of the Flyer. Freda was bundled aboard, hat awry, nervously watching for her bag, taken from her hands by some one, porter or conductor. The curtains swung from all the berths. The porter’s voice was low and lazy. He showed her to lower six—a little cubby hole with curtains drawn aside, revealing the delightful neatness of the berth. Freda knew even less of sleeping on trains than she did of eating there. Awkwardly she managed to undress and crept in between the thick white sheets. In the darkness she lay awake, wondering. Wondering at the rush and sound and the mysteries shrouded behind green swinging curtains. When the train shrieked a signal or stopped lurchingly at some station she pushed up the curtain beside her and, propped on her pillows, lay looking into the night tasting the full delight of inexperience. At last she fell asleep and dreamed of Gregory. It was a frightening dream. He did not know who she was, did not remember her. Towards dawn she pushed her way out of it and woke up to see the rain falling lightly over the even country and to realize that she was begrimed with the coal dust and sticky with heat.

At noon she reached Fairmount and stood in the station looking about her for information. The excitement of the last lap and approaching climax of her journey overcame her fatigue and her eyes were brilliant. She decided to take a taxi to the hospital and chose at random one from a row of disheveled looking “For Hire” machines waiting for the daily debouch of passengers from the Flyer. She climbed in with her bag and closed the shaky door, and the driver started his motor. Freda’s heart was racing. The cab could not go fast enough—nor slow enough. It seemed to her as if she could not bear what might be waiting of joy or sorrow, as if emotion was welling up so strong that it would burst its bounds and overcome her. Through the dusty cab windows she saw Fairmount—ill developed wooden houses with unhealthy looking trees giving little shade—a business district of twelve or fifteen squares with all the machinery of business being conducted as it was at this hour in hundreds of other First National Banks and Gilt Edge Stores and Greek Restaurants and brick office buildings. The cab whisked through it rapidly and came to a section of broader streets where more impressive looking houses of brick or stone appeared at leisurely intervals. A little park with a dusty looking playground adjoining it. A row of apartments and there on the corner where a “Silent Zone” sign, awry and disregarded by a group of boys playing in the street made a vain appeal, was St. Agatha’s Hospital.

Inside the little entry was an office with three or four glass windows, behind which she looked for an informant. A slim, weary looking nun came at last, looking at her from behind steel rimmed glasses without curiosity.

“Macmillan—yes,” she said, “you’re—?”

“I’m his wife.”

The nun accepted the fact simply and as if she yielded Freda certain rights and privileges. Freda felt frightened. She wanted to go into Gregory’s room, kneel down by his bed and tell him to get well. She could see it wasn’t going to be as direct as that.

A buzzing, muffled bell, sounded by the nun, had summoned a nurse, who came into the office thumping heavily on her flat rubber-heeled shoes. She was commissioned to take Freda to the last room in corridor “A”—the “typhoid case.” Freda left her bag in the office and followed the nurse, as she clumped indifferently along. The presence of the nurse bothered her. She wanted to get rid of her—tell her she would go on alone but she did not dare. In corridor “A” the nurse gave her a chair.

“I’ll find his nurse and see if you can see him now.”

“I’m his wife,” said Freda.

The nurse nodded.

“I’ll get the nurse first. She wouldn’t like me to bring any one in without calling her first, you see.” She smiled a little as she explained this convention of the hospital and her smile angered Freda. It seemed an intrusion.

Gregory’s nurse came to her. She held out a friendly hand.

“I’m glad you’ve come. We’re doing our best but I was glad when the doctor wrote you,” she said simply.

Something in her tone pricked the adventure spirit in Freda. It lay flat, useless, a bit of torn balloon. She saw herself as this other woman saw her—a wife, come in time of stress to a sick husband, not a lover to a meeting. That was what she herself had colored her worry with.

Panic seized her. She followed almost resistingly. The door, with its printed “No Visitors” sign was opened softly. She had to accustom her eyes to the darkness. A smell of disinfectants, clean and pungent, came to her. There was the bed, white and high. She made her way towards it falteringly. The head, bandaged for coolness, did not turn to her. It was only when she stood by the bedside that it moved a little, restlessly. He did not look real to her, not like himself.

“Gregory,” she said mechanically.

His fever-dulled eyes looked up at her—lighted. He made one motion permeating his whole body as if he would rise in spite of the quickly detaining hand of the nurse.

“Angel,” he said huskily, “you angel of God—Freda.”

The sound of his voice was a release. All her frightened feelings, reassured, warmed into life, flooded Freda. She sank down by his side, her head bent over the hot hand, which lay so impotent on the gray blanket.

CHAPTER XVII
GAGE FINISHES IT

THE Convention went on as Gage had predicted. It held few surprises. Here and there a wave of new sentiment was perceptible but the old rules held good. The tremendous heat was a factor. It made many of the delegates relapse very easily into the political fatalism which is the breath of life to party control.

To the women it was more interesting and more disappointing than it was to the men. They were interested because it was all new. They were disappointed because every one seemed to give in to the obvious so readily. Harriet Thompson and her group were somewhat grim—humorous enough. They had not expected anything else really.

It was an exhausting week. There was a threat that the Convention might go over into the succeeding week but that was unfulfilled. Saturday night Margaret and Helen went back to St. Pierre too tired and worn to even talk much to each other, thoughtful, depressed a little and revolving new enthusiasms at the same time. But now that they were emerging from the impersonal world in which they had been they felt the pressure of the personal responsibilities they both were speeding toward, perhaps, for they sat in silence in their compartment, each full of her own reflections. Younger and less experienced women would have welcomed the egotism of their own visions—the anticipations of scenes in which they would be central. Helen and Margaret, fresh from the lift of experience which was largely intellectual, did not look anticipative, or particularly happy.

Helen had wired Gage that she was coming and he met her at the station. One glance at his dark face told her all she needed to know of his mood. He took her bags, not offering to kiss her and she and Margaret, oddly constrained, got into the waiting car. Margaret was dropped at her apartment and there, at the door, Gage vouchsafed his only conversation. He asked them briefly if they “were satisfied with the show” and his voice was heavy with ridicule.

“I think we were,” said Helen, “we didn’t expect as much as you did, perhaps, Gage.”

A light answer, ringing sharply. Margaret went into her room and flung open the windows to air it. At the window she looked down the street but the Flandon motor had disappeared.

Helen kept wishing that it were not Sunday. Sunday was such a long, intimate, family day. She meant to have been very definite with herself about what her mode of approach to Gage would be. She found herself floundering again. Of course there could be no compromise now. This business with this girl had to be sifted through, admitted—faced. She supposed there was nothing at all left of any feeling for Gage. He had been outrageous and, even as she thought that, she worried about him. He did look so very badly. Other people must be noticing it too.

He said nothing. At the house he helped her out and went into the house with her. She sought the children. They were delightful and welcoming, full of questions, of tales about the fun they had while she was away, eager for presents. Helen kept the children with her, nervously, postponing the encounter with Gage, wishing he would go down to the city. But he did not. He hung about, ominous, smoking, reading, yet not reading with absorption, suddenly throwing book or paper aside and restlessly trying some new one, watching Helen.

She was pent up. There was such a contrast between the easy interchange of yesterday and the constraint of to-day. The house didn’t seem big enough to hold her and Gage. She went about her work trying to be normal, directing the maids, playing with the children, unpacking her bags. All the time she felt him watching her even if she were not in the same room, felt his brooding concentration on her, knew he was wondering what she thought about, whether she was glad to be back, what she was going to do about Freda Thorstad. For the first time in her married life, she had the sense of marriage as a trap. It had never been that. There were times when she had been a little restive, but she had always been building on a rock of belief in marriage, joy in it. It was different to-day. She felt as if she had come in out of the fresh air of clean discourse, free intercourse, into a narrow room where she was shut up with a growling man—a room heavy with discord, enmity, suspicion.

The morning passed somehow. They had finished dinner and she was waiting for Gage to propose something. He usually took the children for country drives on Sunday. They were in the big sunroom, shady now with its awnings let down, and Helen was stretched out on a white willow chaise longue trying to believe she was ridiculous and making mountains out of molehills when a maid came in to announce a caller.

“There’s a lady and gentleman to see Mr. Flandon.”

“You hear, Gage?”

“Who is it?” asked Gage.

“I think it’s a lady who’s been here before.”

Gage’s face was interested. He rose from his chair and followed the maid. Helen heard a brief colloquy of voices then Gage saying, “Come out here where my wife is, Mrs. Thorstad.”

He reappeared through the French doors with the little Mohawk lady behind him, and behind her a man, a rather stooping, pleasant-faced gentleman with well poised head and an air of mingled anxiety and embarrassment. His manner was unlike that of his wife which was definite, sharp, assertive, even before she spoke. As she saw them Helen had the quick perception of a crisis. The parents of this girl here together could mean only complications of trouble. Her mind stiffened itself for whatever might be coming, as she rose and greeted Mrs. Thorstad with easy cordiality and accepted the introduction to her husband graciously.

“Did you enjoy the convention? I didn’t see you again after Wednesday.”

“No,” answered Mrs. Thorstad, “I came up to St. Pierre on Friday night.”

She seated herself in the chair Gage brought for her, a little uneasily, with a righteous wriggle of her thin body. Her husband and Gage stood together exchanging a few commonplace remarks. The air was electric.

Surprisingly, it was Mr. Thorstad who began.

“We are sorry to intrude upon you on this Sunday afternoon but our errand is pressing and it will be best to make it clear at once. My daughter has been employed in your office, Mr. Flandon.”

“Yes?”

“My wife came from Chicago to pay her a brief visit. She found that Freda had gone away, leaving no address with any one. We are very much concerned—greatly disturbed. My wife went at once to your office and there saw your partner—Mr. Sable, is it?” Gage inclined his head—“You were not there. I believe Freda was directly in your employ. Mr. Sable tells my wife that Freda resigned her place on Friday morning. Questioning him we find that she was asked to resign—that,” he paused and spoke with difficulty, though still calmly, “that rumors subversive to her character have been afloat. She has disappeared, Mr. Flandon.” The stoop in his shoulders had somehow straightened. He was as tall as Gage as he looked at him with restraint and yet with indictment. “Do you know where my daughter is, Mr. Flandon?”

He stopped. Mrs. Thorstad edged to the side of her chair, foot tapping nervously on the floor, eyes on Gage. Helen’s eyes were on him too, though there was no change in her attitude. She had not paled or flushed. It might have been the most casual of conversations.

The second before Gage’s answer weighed on all of them. He looked as if he were pondering something—then back at Mr. Thorstad. His voice was even and controlled.

“No, Mr. Thorstad, I don’t know where your daughter is.”

“Why did she leave your office?”

“She was discharged by my partner in my absence, most unjustly, for preposterous suspicions. I shall do my best to reinstate her.”

“It will not be necessary, sir.”

Mrs. Thorstad could bear it no longer.

“And what were these suspicions?” She waited for no answer, turning quickly on Helen. “I went to see Mrs. Brownley to find out if she could tell me and her attitude is most peculiar—most peculiar. She insinuated that I should give up my work to keep watch over my daughter. She cast reflections on me as a mother. I told her that I had always upheld the strictest doctrines of the home and the family, that I had always insisted on a moral purity before everything else. That I should be so treated amazed me! My daughter has always had the strictest upbringing. What ideas of modern license she had absorbed from contact with this Miss Duffield I am sure I don’t know. I always objected to that woman. I asked Miss Duffield about it this morning. She doesn’t know where Freda is—at least, she says she doesn’t. Well—who does? You took her into your office, Mr. Flandon, you exposed her to this gossip—”

“Please, Adeline—”

“I need not tell you, Mr. Thorstad, that this unwarranted action of my partner has incensed me beyond measure. I have the greatest respect for your daughter.”

Mr. Thorstad inclined his head a little.

“We wish to find her, Mr. Flandon. We are greatly disturbed. My daughter went away of her own free will, according to a letter I had from her. She was evidently drawn by some enthusiasm of emotion.”

“She wrote you that?”

“To that effect.”

Mrs. Thorstad broke in again.

“Even before your wife, Mr. Flandon, I think we should tell you that we know that your name has been coupled with our daughter’s name. Mr. Sable let us infer it. I’m sorry, Mrs. Flandon—”

She did not look sorry. She looked vindictive.

“I know,” said Helen, “I believe, Gage, that you could throw some light on all this. I don’t know that you could but Miss Thorstad’s parents should be relieved of anxiety if possible.”

Gage looked at his wife. Her eyes met his levelly, seemingly void of feeling, empty even of anger. Her resistance to pain woke admiration—then cruelty. So that was all she cared, was it? New woman—modern stuff!

“I do not know where Miss Thorstad is,” he repeated, “I think, however, that a girl with her strength and control is safe wherever she may be. She may think it best to keep her plans to herself for the time being—”

“You speak with curious confidence, Mr. Flandon,” said Mrs. Thorstad sharply. “This matter involves my daughter’s reputation.”

“From what I have seen of your daughter she is above gossip,” answered Gage. He turned to the other man. “I am sorry I cannot help you. I am more sorry than I can say that she was treated unfairly in my office and I shall do my best to adjust that. If I should hear from her of course you will be informed.”

Mr. Thorstad looked a little tired. He had perhaps keyed himself to this encounter and found it exhausting to have it end in futility.

“I shall pursue my inquiries, of course. It is not a matter which we care to have handled through any ordinary channels of search as we are informed by her that she left voluntarily. It may be that she will communicate with me to-morrow.”

An embarrassed pause came.

“Come, Adeline,” said her husband, still initiative.

Mrs. Thorstad felt and looked frustrated. She frowned at him, tight lips compressed. It was clear that she was neither pleased nor satisfied, that she wished to ferret further and the presence of her husband restrained her.

“The affair shall be probed,” she said somewhat absurdly.

“You mustn’t go out in this heat without a cool drink. Let me give you a glass of lemonade, won’t you?”

Helen rang the bell before Mrs. Thorstad could protest.

“It’s very good of you, Mrs. Flandon,” she subsided, stiffly.

Gage seized his opportunity.

“I’ll get you a real drink, Thorstad. Come out in the dining-room, won’t you?”

Mr. Thorstad, on the point of refusal, checked himself. Gage’s face was significant. He wanted to see him alone.

In the dining-room they were out of earshot. Gage poured two small glasses of whisky, his companion’s restraining hand dictating the amount. Even then Mr. Thorstad waited. He raised his glass perfunctorily but did not drink.

“I’m sorry for this mess, Thorstad. I don’t believe in taking notice of gossip ordinarily and you can’t help what a lot of small people think. But I saw something of your daughter in my office. I admired her character, her idealism immensely. I—am not involved in any way with her. I believe wherever she is that she is happy—and safe.”

“Did she leave the city because of that dismissal from your office?”

Gage strode up and down the room.

“That’s it! I don’t know. It might be. I was in Chicago. My partner took it on himself to let her go. How deeply he wounded her I don’t know. I was appalled when I heard what he had done. I am going to make reparation to her in some way, I assure you. It’s the sort of thing that is hard to repair but I shall do my best when I know where she is.”

“Why did they talk about her in connection with you, Flandon, if there’s nothing to it?”

“Fools. I shan’t contradict them.”

“It might be wise to contradict them.”

“No.” A gleam of hysteria was in Gage’s smile. “Let them say what they please as long as it doesn’t hurt Miss Thorstad.”

“It may do that.”

“Then we stop it. But there’s no point in statements now that there is no possible connection between our names. The thing is to find her if you feel she ought not to be left alone.”

“Why should she be left alone? She may be in distress.”

“I don’t think so,” Gage was guarding Freda’s secret as best he could and trying to reassure her father who so inspired sympathy and respect. “She is so controlled—so high minded that she would act wisely, I’m sure.”

Mr. Thorstad looked at him curiously.

“Then you have no further information?”

“No—only I hope you’ll take my word that I’m not involved.”

“I am inclined to do so.” Mr. Thorstad put down his untasted glass on the table and accepted Gage’s outstretched hand. “I do not feel exactly as her mother does about the matter. Of course Mrs. Thorstad is actuated by a mother’s great anxiety. I am a little more inclined to trust to Freda’s judgments. She is, as you say, not a person to be the victim of any easy emotion or to yield to any false persuasion. She has great perception of the alliance between true things and beautiful things.”

“I saw that,” said Gage. “You’re very wise, Mr. Thorstad. It’s too bad she can’t be left alone to work this out.”

“Personally,” went on the other, “the scandal doesn’t perturb me at all. It is for her mother’s sake that I feel obliged to overstep my own inclination to let Freda have her own time to make her confidence. I felt it necessary to trace any possible connection you might have with her disappearance. I—I am apt to take the word of a gentleman as truth, Mr. Flandon.”

“You are very good,” said Gage. “Very good. I am deeply grateful.”

“Shall we return to the others?”

The two women were sitting silently, making no pretense at casual talk, their curiosity as to what the two men had said to each other indisguisable.

“We must go now, Adeline.”

She rose, evidently torn by a desire to be easy and complaisant and a disgruntled lack of satisfaction in the interview.

“Very well,” she said, “I’m sure I shall not be able to rest for a second until my daughter is safe and with me once more.”

They were courteous to the little outbreak of melodrama but not too responsive.

Helen and Gage accompanied their visitors to the door and saw them walk down the street, the sunlight bringing out the shiny seams in Mr. Thorstad’s coat, beating unmercifully on the defiant little daisies in his wife’s hat.

Helen turned to her husband.

“Why didn’t I hear of this?”

“I didn’t know you’d be interested. You’ve been so interested in national affairs I couldn’t suppose you had time for little local troubles.”

She set her lips in anger.

“You gain nothing by viciousness, Gage. Where is that girl?”

“Haven’t I said I didn’t know?”

“I don’t believe you.”

“That’s quite in line with your other theories of wifely conduct.”

“I’m not interested in quarreling with you, Gage. I simply want to know for my own protection what is going on. Is it true that George Sable discharged that girl while you were away?”

“Quite true.”

“For what reason?”

Gage lighted a swaggering cigarette.

“His mind runs along with yours, Helen. He had the same delicate ideas you have.”

“Where did the girl go?”

“Didn’t you hear me say I didn’t know?”

“Has she run away from you too? Have you got that girl into trouble?”

“I always hated that phrase,” answered Gage, nonchalantly.

“Why did you come back from Chicago so soon?”

“Why should I stay? A fifth wheel? The entirely superfluous husband of one of the great feminist successes?”

“I asked you why you came back.” She framed each word with an artificial calmness.

“You haven’t taken so much interest in me for years, Helen. It’s true, isn’t it? All a man has to do is to get involved in a scandal to have the women after him.”

She pressed her hand to her face as if to shut out the sight of him.

“You’re a madman, Gage.”

“I shouldn’t be surprised.”

Then she dropped into a chair, weeping long sobs, drawn from emotion controlled beyond her strength.

“Why do you torture me so, Gage? What devil possesses you?”

He had always had a horror of seeing her weep. He took a step towards her.

“I’m tired—I’m tired,” sobbed Helen.

Gage stiffened. “And why are you tired? Because you’ve been running around Chicago. I didn’t tire you. You tire yourself. Then you come back exhausted and blame me because you are exhausted. If you were more a wife—less a public character—”

She had risen and stood looking at him angrily again, eyes wide with hurt and disappointment.

“You jealous fool—you’re on the point of becoming a degenerate. If even Sable has to watch over your actions—publicly reprove you—”

“He won’t do it again,” said Gage, “not again. I am severing my connection with the upright Sable. He’ll never pry into my business again. I’ll tell you that for certain.”

She stopped considering the personal trouble in sheer amazement.

“You’re not going to break with Sable?”

“I told him yesterday I was through. In fact I told him cordially to go to hell. He can’t play the black mammy to me, you know.”

“But—what are you to do?”

“Oh, I’ll do something. I’ll show him whether I have to sit and take dictation from him.”

“You’re going to practice by yourself?”

“When my plans are ready, you’ll hear them, Helen.”

She shivered.

“I wonder if you’re headed for destruction.”

“You told me I was a degenerate. Well, we’ll see.”

Looking at him she saw, underneath the mask of tawdry control, the agitation he was in and the ravages of nervousness. His eyes were not steady—they were too bright and he had a way of biting at his lower lip which she could not remember.

She straightened her hair mechanically and went past him toward the sunroom. As she went she heard him return to the dining-room and stood with clenched hands trying not to interfere until she had thought things out.

Lying down in the same chair she had occupied before she tried to get some order into her thoughts. The problem of Freda, so overwhelmingly great a moment ago, was matched if not overcome by her realization that Gage was going from bad to worse—that he seemed to be on the loose mentally—tearing from catastrophe to catastrophe. The significance of a quarrel with Sable grew upon her—the probability of all the financial trouble that Gage might be letting himself in for. And the thing that she came back to time after time as her thoughts went around in circles was that Gage did not seem to care any more—that he was so recklessly indifferent to what she thought—to what was wise for the children and for her.

For the moment she had passed beyond the point of thinking of rights and wrongs. She was concentrated on immediate necessities. She almost forgot the complication of Freda and was shocked at herself when that came back to her.

She heard the sound of Gage’s car starting down the driveway. He was going out then. All her feelings, her thoughts bore on one question. Where was he going?

CHAPTER XVIII
IN HOSPITAL

AFTER the first twenty-four hours with Gregory nothing seemed real to Freda outside of the hospital. She had found for herself a hotel room, a shabby little room in a second rate hotel, a room with scarred brown maple bureau and iron bed from which the paint had peeled. It looked out on a fire escape and a narrow court, helplessly trapped between tall brick walls.

To that room she went for her periods of rest, for the hospital had no vacant room or even bed, where she might relax. After she had gone to the hotel from the hospital several times the way seemed curiously familiar. Two blocks to the east, across the street car line, past the drug store with its structure of Tanlac in the window—one block to the north and there was the entrance of the hotel with seven or eight broad cement steps leading up to it. There was not one thing which she passed which impressed itself in the least on her imagination—not one image that was vivid enough to penetrate. Night and day it was the same—like moving blindfolded through still air. It was only when she went back to the hospital that her mind seemed to stir from its lethargy.

The hardest moments were those of Gregory’s lucidity—when the sight of her made him flame with a passion which leapt through his restricted and suffering body, when phrases came to his hot lips which made her quiver with the sense of him. She would kneel beside his bed and tell him softly reassuring things and with his head turned on his pillow he would regard her from the depths of those eyes, always haggardly set, but now far sunken.

She had no faintest doubts as to her past or present actions. That was Freda’s great triumph over most of the women she knew. She did not doubt; she did not worry. Most of them had carried over into their new self-confidence and their new chances a habit of worry born of ingrowing responsibilities in the past and now fostered by general self-consciousness. It was unnatural to Freda to mope over her actions or to analyze them. She knew how to go ahead and there always was absence of self-consciousness about what she did, simplicity of manner, dignity of step. It was as if she had somehow stepped over the phase of altercation, doubt and experiment into a manner which did the unusual easily, but only if the unusual came in her path, which accepted new rules, new customs without a flush, and most of all was able to merge the best of feminism into a fine yet unchristened ease of sex. She did not need either the little fears or defenses of her mother or the larger ones of Margaret Duffield. It did not occur to her that she was very complete in herself and satisfying to herself. She bothered with no altercations or analysis.

It was not a wholly sad time for all the deepening anxiety and danger—it was not a time for depression. Freda knew that she had come to grips with life and she was glad to feel her full strength called to battle.

While they wondered about her in St. Pierre, while her name ran like a little germ of gossip spreading contagion from lip to lip in St. Pierre, she sat most of the time in the hospital, in the chair beside Gregory’s bed, touching his hot, tense wrist with the coolness of her fingers—she sat outside his room in the recess of the bay windows on a curved window seat and watched people come and go—and once in a while she slipped into the hospital library and got hold of a book on pregnancy which fascinated her. Skillfully manipulated conversation with the nurse had given her enough information so that she had been able to control a great part of her own present liability to sickness and she felt better than she had for several weeks.

Three days after her arrival Gregory came successfully through the first crisis of his illness. Freda walked on air the next day. The doctor was cheerful and jocose.

“We’ll have that young Irishman of yours out of the woods in ten days,” he said to Freda, and she had no doubt of it.

The difficulty was not in the progress of the disease but in Gregory’s own debility. He was not so well a few days later. The doctor talked gravely of exhaustion and Freda picked up from the reluctant nurse that exhaustion during the third week was dangerous—that one might die because of it.

For the first time she was fearful. Here was nothing you could combat for him. Here was a slow slipping away. He did not often talk now. Almost all the time he lay, incredibly thin, mournfully haggard against his pillow, too tired even for Freda to call back.

She thought about death. One day she passed a room in which a man was dying. She heard the raucous gasp from the filling lungs and trembled. They brought a priest. She wondered. If Gregory should die, would he too have a priest to guide him out? She supposed that usually you sent for a minister or priest. A month before the mere suggestion that a soul needed ushering into immortality would have seemed absurd to her healthy pagan young mind, but now, with the severing of the thread so possible, with the limits of the unknown receding even while they grew close she wondered. Gregory was not formally religious but in his poems he had seemed so conscious of God.

“Most poets write of women—but you write only of God and Ireland.” So she had said to him, she remembered, and he had answered.

“I shall write of woman now, dear heart.”

She went softly to his door. No change. Well, she should go to the hotel for an hour—But the nurse stopped her.

“Mrs. Macmillan, he is not so well. The doctor thinks these next twelve hours will be the worst. If you wish to leave I think it will be all right. If not, I can see that you get a supper tray and if he is better in the night you can take my cot.”

Freda felt a strange chill rushing over her.

“I’ll stay.” She looked at Gregory. “Worse? He looks just the same.”

“He is weaker—”

The stillness of the phrase—the helplessness. She sat down in the chair by him again. It seemed so absurd not to call him back—so impotent. He looked unguarded. If—if he should die he would go—wherever it was—there must be a future for a soul like Gregory’s somewhere—he would go alone. Cruel. She thought of the child growing within her. How much more gentle was birth than death. Gentle and gradual and kind. It was shared, but this horrible singleness of dying—

She had supper in the nurse’s kitchen. The nurses were kind to her, faintly curious, preoccupied, full of that gayety so characteristic of nurses when for an hour they can slip out of the technique of the manner which they affect and become informal, unrestrained. The shadow of Gregory’s crisis rested on them not at all, Freda thought. She was not resentful. But she ate to please the nurse who had managed to get the supper for her and then went quickly back to Gregory. If it should happen when she was away! It must not. She must go there to keep it from happening. Surely she could. Surely she could.

She did not sleep. The nurse watched on one side, she on the other, the nurse nodding a little and Freda shaking off the fearful drowsiness that came over her too. She did not want to sleep. She was afraid that if she slept, it might happen. It was like sentry duty. As long as she was awake such a thing would not happen. She did not name death in her thoughts. It was like invoking a presence. She understood trite phrases as she thought—the triteness of “he has left us,” “passed on,” “was called.” How those phrases irked her in the newspapers sometimes. But they were true. It was like that. She heard the soft rise and fall of the nurse’s breathing. She was asleep—no, not quite.

Now and then he moved a little. His troubled breathing seemed to sigh, slight, weary sighs. Freda bent close over him. Here we are, she thought, he and I and him within me. We must stay close, closer than death can come.

Three hours later, with the gray light coming so early into the room, the nurse, who had slept a little, roused herself, busy immediately with the routine of temperature taking, her cap a little askew, her face puffed with uncompleted sleep.

“Well, we got through that night all right,” she said cheerfully, softly. “And our patient looks better, Mrs. Macmillan. Look at him—doesn’t he?”

Freda looked shakily at him. It seemed almost true. He seemed to be sleeping almost naturally.

“Then you think he’s come through?” she ventured.

The nurse straightened her cap professionally.

“Well, I should say that bad turn he took last night would be the last. He’ll be coming along now. We’ll get some nourishment into him pretty soon. You go over to the hotel and get some sleep—no, lie down here on my cot. You look weak.”

And now it was a new atmosphere—an atmosphere of convalescence, of Gregory coming slowly back to life, visibly changing for the better, smiling, joking feebly, watching her wonderingly and devotedly, talking when he was allowed.

“It’s such a ridiculous way to begin housekeeping,” Freda would tease him, gently.

“It’s a maddening way and a marvelous way—to have all day to watch you and adore you and not to dare to pull you into my arms for fear a nurse will pop out on me.”

“You may be sure one would.”

“How long do I have to stay here?”

“A wheeled chair next week if you are good and don’t get excited.”

“A wheeled chair—when I want a highway with you beside me—”

“If you’re impatient—” she stopped to smile at him.

“Listen, Freda—we go straight off together, don’t we?”

“Off where?”

“Back home.”

“We should stop to see my father and my mother. Do you know, Gregory, I didn’t even tell any one where I was going. I just came. I suppose they’re all mystified and probably worried. Though I wrote them not to be.”

“Well, we’ll stop to tell your parents. And then off for Ireland.”

“Have we enough money?” asked Freda.

“Plenty. I have it somewhere. Let me see. It was a black bill case—maybe you could find it for me. Black bill case with an elastic band around it. There’s about five hundred. They paid me in notes—(bills, you say)—at these last places and I meant to get post office orders. Much safer. Hunt it up, will you, darling? And you might be looking up passage.”

“Passage for weeks from now,” she said sternly. But she was as eager as he and they smiled at each other, doubled, trebled in happiness now that their storm had come and they had been able to weather it together.

She went on the trail of the black bill case and found it easily enough. It was, with Gregory’s few valuables, in the possession of the hospital office. In it were some papers, some letters and twenty-three dollars. Her heart fell with a thump.

“Is this all there was?”

“His watch too—we never leave valuables with sick patients who have no relatives about. They might get picked up and the hospital be considered responsible.”

“I mean all the money?”

The nurse in charge of the office wrinkled her forehead and looked at the note regarding Gregory on her record.

“Black bill case—letters—papers—twenty-three dollars in currency. That’s what he brought here. Is that correct? We’ve kept the bill case in our safe, of course.”

She looked questioningly at Freda.

“That’s what is here,” said Freda, “but you see my husband thought there was more—quite a lot more. I wonder was he sick in the hotel long?”

But the hotel was a blind trail and a suspicious one. The chambermaid who had called the doctor for Gregory had left the town—strangely enough two days after he was taken sick. She had never been a competent girl—The hotel courteously disclaimed all responsibility and hoped the loss was not great. There was a safe in the office—guests were requested and so forth—.

“Of course,” said Freda, “I quite understand.” She did. She understood that the money had vanished and that it was not coming back to her or to Gregory. She went back to her hotel room and counted what money she had. With Gregory’s present resources they had fifty dollars between them. And there was an unpaid nurse at five dollars a day—hospital bills, doctor bills, doubtless bills for all the medicines. All those things and no money to meet them, she pondered. Besides she must not tell Gregory. She must not worry him just now or disappoint him. The nurse wanted him kept calm and cheerful. But in the meantime, what was she to do?

It was hard going back to the hospital and facing the nurse. The nurse was so good to her and Freda felt miserably that to let her be so good when there was no money to pay her was deceiving. She herself was hot and troubled. Her clothes were an annoyance. She had only three blouses and one of those was torn at the neck irremediably. It was hard to keep cheerful when you needed fresh clothes so badly and had hardly enough money to pay the hotel bill mounting up against you. But she forgot all that in the presence of Gregory. He was feeling better this afternoon than he had up to that time, his convalescence taking one of those quick strides so encouraging to those who watch. The nurse had propped him up on his pillows and he wanted Freda beside him.

So she let the matter drift and when he asked if she had found the bill case she told him “yes.”

“Then that’s all right,” he said gaily, and saved her the lie she had ready. Nor did he waste more time on money. He wanted to talk of other things, to ask her questions and it was that afternoon that she dared to tell him that she expected their child, and to let herself relax a little in the companionship of his happiness and the comfort of his reverence.

But when she went back to the hotel she could not bring herself to order supper. The menu stared at her—with ducklings and roasts and table d’hotes. Figure as she would, she could not order a supper for less than a dollar. So she pleaded a headache to the waiter and left the table to go supperless to her room and then to bed, for the nurse had said Gregory must be quiet that evening.

CHAPTER XIX
MENTAL SURGERY

MARGARET knew all about it now. From her point of view certain conventions of non-interference between husband and wife were so many links in the old chain. Undoubtedly it was not that she wanted to force Helen’s confidence. But to come upon Helen the Monday after that exhausting Sunday, come to her to say good-by and make plans for the future, and to find the splendid dignity and poise of the Helen she had been with in Chicago destroyed angered her. Helen had told her the facts. She had to tell some one, she told herself in a justification she felt bound to make in secret, and Margaret was at least a stranger in the city and moreover the only woman she knew who would not make the slightest impulse to carry her story to other ears.

Margaret, in immaculate white linen, looking as cool and competent as an operating surgeon, had listened. She heard the whole of the story, how Gage had changed—for that Helen insisted upon.

“He’s simply not himself. I suppose it’s the feeling he has towards the girl.”

“Don’t ‘the girl’ her, Helen. I’m not a bit sure of that part of the story. Somehow it’s too preposterous that Freda should be languishing somewhere waiting for Gage’s casual attention. I tell you that girl doesn’t languish. She’s not that kind. She’s the most magnificently unconscious modern you ever saw. She wouldn’t be any one’s mistress. She hasn’t that much dependence in her. Not for a minute. I simply don’t believe it.”

“She disappeared the day after he came back from the convention. And then he was away that week-end she was seen at the Roadside Inn.”

“I don’t believe she was ever seen there,” said Margaret.

Helen put her hand to her head.

“I don’t want to believe it, but if he won’t deny it—and isn’t it possible that the poor child’s run away even from him? If she should be going to have—oh, damn, I can’t say it even—” She broke off a little hysterically.

“No—I don’t believe that either.” But for all her stout words, Margaret sounded a little more dubious this time. “Let’s leave her out of it. What is there to do about you and Gage?”

“I despise my own incompetence of decision,” said Helen. “But I don’t know. I don’t know how to go through the business. It seems impossible that we’ve come to the edge of divorce but I can’t go on living with a man who acts as Gage does. I can’t, that is, with any measure of self-respect. And yet I look around and the very weight of detail—the tremendous business of unwinding a marriage—it seems then as if the quick flare-up of partings that you read about—the separations that never involve themselves with the machinery of complaints and retaining lawyers and distributing property and—moving vans—are quite fantastic. I wonder if it’s laziness which keeps me so fearful of the mass of detail, Margaret—”

“Of course you’re trivial on purpose, I suppose,” answered Margaret. “The things you speak of don’t really bother you.”

“Yes. Translated into more serious terms I suppose the thing that hurts is the terrible pain of cleavage between two people who have grown into each other for years.”

“More likely. Helen, I don’t want to probe, but do you want to live without Gage?”

Helen pondered.

“I don’t want to lose him. I feel dreadfully cheated—put upon. I didn’t want any of this. If I’d known that he was going to feel so outraged at the political venture I’d have stopped, I think, before I let it get to an impasse. But I’m afraid it’s that now. He and I were—well, there’s no use debauching myself with memories. No—I don’t think I want to lose him but even aside from this question of his disloyalty—this business with Freda Thorstad—he’s becoming impossible to live with. The children are noticing it. He doesn’t play with them as he used to. Goes off by himself. There’s no free and easy interchange between us at all. Of course he’s often flatly rude to me before the servants.”

“Suppose you gave up all the things he doesn’t like now, would that solve things?”

Helen shook her head.

“Not now. The thing has gone too far. We’ve been ugly to each other and we wouldn’t forget that. Besides I’m afraid I’d be resentful. There’s no reason why I should be completely subject to Gage’s slightest word. We can’t build on that basis.”

“What he wants,” said Margaret astutely, “is to have you subject to his dream.”

Helen smiled rather ruefully.

“He might wake up from his dream!”

“That’s the chance women have always taken—even the luckiest ones.”

“I don’t see that it’s any use for me to think over causes and rake up a justification here and a justification there anyway,” said Helen. “The only thing of vital importance is to decide whether I’m going to let events come as they will and be passive under them or whether I’m going to try to manage the events.”

“I shouldn’t think there’d be much choice there.”

“There is though. It’s so easy to sit back and say, ‘I’m trapped. I’ll just have to take whatever fate sends. There’s nothing I can do.’”

“But you won’t, for there are no ends of things you could do. It’s complicated of course. If you leave Gage, of course it puts a crimp in your political possibilities just now, not that the fact of separation would much matter but of course up to this point your political reputation has been partly builded on Gage’s name.”

“And I can’t trade on his name and not live with him. But then I can’t trade on his name anyway. I must define a position and take what is coming to me as an individual and give up the rest.”

“No. It’s complicated too by money. I haven’t any, you know, Margaret—and Gage has made a lot but we’ve lived rather up to the limit of it. I don’t believe he stands awfully well financially. If we are to separate things would go pretty much to pieces in every direction.”

“Very much,” said Gage. He had come in quietly and stood looking at them in a kind of derisive anger. “I’m sorry to break in on your conference, and on this delightful exhibition of my wife’s loyalty but since we are all here, let’s talk it over.”

He sat down elaborately, his eyes on Margaret, ignoring his wife fixedly.

“Have you made up your mind what we should do, Miss Duffield?”

“Don’t be insulting, Gage,” said Margaret, “it’s so unnecessary. I haven’t been interfering with your affairs any more than was necessary.”

“Than was necessary to release Helen from the chains of marriage?” Gage laughed. “Well, your work is done. As far as I’m concerned she’s released. You may tell her, since you are in charge of our affairs, that I will leave her as soon as possible—and that is very soon—and that whatever financial arrangement is possible shall be made for her and the children. She is correct in saying that my affairs are in a bad way. Mr. Sable, from whom I have just separated in business, can tell her more about that. She might care to engage him to represent her in any action you might see fit for her to take.”

Helen had risen to her feet, quite white.

“Stop!” she cried. “Don’t you dare keep on insulting me. You’re mad—abnormal—”

Gage bowed vaguely in her direction and continued speaking to Margaret.

“Tell her that she is right. I am mad and abnormal and that she has made me so, instigated by you. Excuse me now, won’t you?”

He went upstairs but he could hear through the floor the swift, staccato, shrieking sobs of Helen’s hysteria, hear the whisper of a maid to the nurse in the back hall, hear a murmur which must be the calming voice of Margaret. He paced viciously up and down—up and down.

Yet he had come home, driven by an invigorating impulse which had come to him inexplicably, perhaps born of pity and sudden insight into Helen’s mind, come home to ask her forgiveness, explain what Freda Thorstad had told him and ask her to go away with him for a little while until their minds both cleared. The impulse had risen in his throat—it had choked him with delight and fear lest she should not be home. And then through the sunroom doors he saw them, two calm women, talking together, making and receiving confidences, uncovering him, dissecting him, and as he stood still and let the blackness of rage sweep over him again he had heard Helen tell this stranger, this inimical stranger, of his financial condition. The sense of outrage overmastered him.

After a little it was quiet downstairs and he decided to go to the city again, going downstairs, looking straight ahead of him. He wanted to see the children, to have their reception of him ease this last sharp hurt. They were in the garden of course, and they greeted him with their usual shouts of delight.

“Well,” he thought, as he bent down to caress them, “I can’t stop now. I can’t stop now.”

He sat down on the garden bench and took the children on his knees, the boy and girl, so sturdy and happy, with fat brown knees and thick soft hair. They were full of comments and questions. Peggy was three and Bennett just eighteen months older. It was going to hurt terribly to break away from them. Sable had said, “You can’t act as though you didn’t have a family dependent on you.” He had shown Sable that he could act that way, that the family dependent on him was not going to force him to knuckle under. He stroked Peggy’s hair. How restful it was—if he could only stay here in this sheltered little garden with the children who had no tangles in their minds—if Helen would come out as she used to come out last summer and sit with him while they talked and planned of the beautiful things ahead for the children and their initiations into living.

Helen had deserted. She had gone off notoriety seeking. She preferred to sit in that room talking disloyalty to that woman to whose hard influence she had subjected herself—Helen was driving him out.

He kissed the children sternly and went back through the house. In the hall Helen met him. Her face was ravaged by hysterics, red hollows under her eyes, mouth pulled out of shape. It hurt to regard it.

“Where are you going, Gage?”

For a moment he was gentle.

“Downtown. I’ll not be back till late. There’s no use trying to talk. We are killing each other.” Then he thought of Margaret Duffield, listening perhaps and loosening his wife’s hands from his shoulders, where she had placed them, he went out.

But that was not the only crisis Margaret had to meet that day. She was eager to go back to New York. There was no possible work left for her to do and she wanted to get away from St. Pierre. She did not tell Helen that she was planning to go in a few days as she had told her landlady that morning. When she left the Flandon house Helen was quite calm. With her fine power of organization she had already decided that the best temporary thing to do was to accept Gage’s actions and see how far he would go, allowing her action to be modified by that later. Margaret looked rather pale. The reasonableness of her own mind was bound to be affected somehow by this drama through which she had passed and in which she had been forced to play so disagreeable a part. Perhaps it showed chiefly in the slight hardness of her attitude toward Walter Carpenter that night.

She never seemed to attack that decision squarely. She seemed to try to deny it a right to confront her. And yet, definitely, constantly, with less impatience than a younger lover and vastly more skill than a less intellectual one, Carpenter made himself felt. Now and then in their discussions and in their arguments, he destroyed some reason against their marriage. Her defenses had been made very weak. She had no argument against the lack of liberty in marriage which he could not destroy. He would grant anything. Indeed he asked only for the simplest, most unadorned marriage bond—and companionship which she had admitted she enjoyed with him. She might retain her own name if she liked without any altercation—might leave him for months at a time—he let her frighten him with no such threats. He offered too, more leisure for thought than she had ever had in the pressure of earning her own living. She had told him a little of what it meant to always need all the money she had in the bank—to do many things and yet never have any feeling of ease, to fear dependency. “It would mean a charitable hospital or going to a remote little Pennsylvania town to an aunt who lived with my mother until she died and who lives on in the almost worthless little place where I was born.” When she told Walter that, he had almost won her, so absorbed were they both in the pity and dread of her loneliness. Then again there leapt between them some deep-rooted fear, some instinct, some dread pulling Margaret back to her little island of celibacy.

It was far from an unpleasant, bickering companionship that they had. Margaret, at thirty, past all the desires of adolescence, informed without experience, had given Gregory nothing and had only been disturbed and made nervous by him, even while she appreciated his fine fire and ardors. Carpenter satisfied, soothed her. They had the same shynesses, the same dread of absurdities in themselves. And Margaret was afraid that she might be lonely without him and that too worried her. She did not want to be lonely for any one. So she told him and he laughed and ventured to bring her hand to his lips and hold it there. She did not draw it away, perhaps because she was reasonable, perhaps because she was not.

To-night he talked of Gage, reflecting the gossip of the men of Gage’s acquaintance. With them the fact of the severing of the firm of Sable and Flandon was a subject of much speculation. Walter was worried about it, in his own quiet fashion. Gage and Helen were both his close friends.

“Talking won’t do any good,” advised Margaret.

“Talking never did do any good with a man. It drives him into himself, and that’s usually unhealthy. I mean the sort of talking which is full of advice, of course—or of prohibition.”

“Yet some of you ought to do something with Gage Flandon before he goes straight to pieces.” Margaret said nothing of what had happened that afternoon.

“Yes,” said Walter absently, “he’s been going to pieces obviously. But let’s not talk about him. Let’s talk about ourselves, Margaret.”

They were driving through the summer night, trying to get all the coolness possible. It was soft warm darkness but the swift car made a wind which blew back upon them, laden with clover smells, deeply sweet. All the elaborate mental approaches which Walter had made to the girl he wanted to marry were abandoned. He stopped the car and put his arm around her, not supplicating but as if the time had come for concession.

“About ourselves. We talk too much impersonal stuff, Margaret. It’s great fun but there’s more to be done than talk. We must begin on the other things. We know each other’s minds now. Let’s know each other’s feelings.”

It may have been the night, the darkness, the remoteness of the country road which made him so bold. He tipped her face up to his and kissed her eagerly, quite different now from the calm mannered man who had sat so calmly in discussion with her night after night, who had squired her so formally, who had made love to her mind and tried to capture her intellect but never more, except for those two easily restrained outbreaks.

She stiffened like an embarrassed school girl, her hands pressed against his chest—

“Please don’t, Walter—”

“Foolish girl,” he said gently, “you mustn’t tie yourself up so. Let your mind ride for a minute and just remember that we love each other, just as every one in the world wants to love and be loved.”

All the while he talked, urging her, demanding her, he held her against him, unrelaxed.

“I love you,” he told her. “And I want to be—oh, unspeakably commonplace about it. I want to indulge myself in a lot of emotions that are as old as the hills and as glorious. But I want you with me, darling.”

Still she did not speak. He let her go a little and held her shoulders, searching for her eyes in the dimness.

“You do love me, don’t you? Why, I’ve seen it for weeks. I’ve seen a look in your face when I’ve come in—it isn’t boasting, dear, it’s just a wonderful confidence I have to-night.”

She freed her hands and clasped them tightly in each other. They seemed the index of some passionate inhibition, some repression, which was charged with nervousness. Her easy freedom had deserted her, and every muscle seemed drawn taut.

“Oh, my dear,” he pressed her, “don’t be so afraid. I won’t take advantage of the fact you care for me. Is it that which holds you back—that worry about making concessions to a man? Everything I’ve ever said I’ve meant. I respect every militant inch of you. I love you just as you are and for it. But above all that—beyond it—there’s more and hasn’t the time come for the least bit of abandonment?”

“Why?” Her voice was low, not as firm in its tones as it was wont to be.

“Why?” Carpenter repeated her question, “Why? Because we love each other or we don’t. And we can’t love at arms’ length, dear. We’ve got to be close, trustful, together. You do like me, don’t you, Margaret?”

“You know I do.”

“And you know I love you. Won’t you come a little way to meet me? I’m so sure you can trust me. I’m so sure we could be happy. Just let your mind rest. Let yourself go a little.”

Her mood was chilling his. He tried to gather up the shreds of the impetuosity that had first driven him to embrace her.

“Let’s not talk,” he said again, almost plaintively, “Can’t we just—rest in each other?”

“But why are you afraid of talk?” she protested.

He dropped his hands from her shoulders.

“Have I been afraid? Haven’t we talked on every conceivable subject? Haven’t we said enough to understand each other perfectly?”

“Then—”

“Margaret, dear, we’re at it again. This is what I protest—dragging argument into every natural emotion. I don’t want to be mind to your mind to-night. I don’t want to reason or even think—I just want to be man to your woman and caress you without thought.”

But the verve had gone out of his words and as it went she seemed to regain her confidence. He made a last attempt to bring back his spirit. But his embrace seemed to stiffen her. He withdrew his arm and sat tapping on the steering wheel.

“When will you marry me, Margaret?”

No impetuousness in his voice now, no romance. It met hers in calmness.

“I don’t know.”

“You must know. I can’t stand it any longer. You must or you must drive me away. There’s no sense in further talk. You know I’ll exact nothing but the right to be near you. But I must have that. I must know. It isn’t as if I were younger and could rebound from one love into another. You’ve got me. I don’t think of anything else. You color every bit of work I do—every bit of thinking. I’ll trust to your terms. I’ve spent weeks building up my theory of marriage to suit your desires and visions. I don’t want to play upon your sympathies but I’ve got to have you, Margaret—or not.”

He sounded very discouraged, very humble, very desperate.

“I think I’d disappoint you, Walter.”

The pity in her voice and her own discouragement made him turn to her again but she held out a hand to meet his and he stayed, letting her clasp his hand loosely.

“I’d be just like this all the time. You think I’d change—under emotion—when we were married. I don’t think I would. You don’t know how all the things I’ve thought and seen have influenced me. I couldn’t go into marriage believing in it much. I couldn’t—go through it—trusting it much. And when I was cold and I’d nearly always be that way, you’d be disappointed if not angry. And if I did do as you say—relax—I’d be spoiling it by not trusting my own feeling. Don’t you think I know? Don’t you think I almost give in and then some devil of analysis comes and prods me into a watch on myself? I haven’t anything to give, Walter—except just what you’ve had. And the reason I can’t marry you is because while you say and I say that companionship is enough we both know it isn’t all you’d want. And it’s all you’d find. It’s all I can give to any man.”

“But, my God, Margaret, women and men have to marry—.”

“I know. It’s all right for other women—most other women. I’m not speaking for them now. They can keep reasonable and still have enough feeling to transcend reason now and then—carry them through it.” She still held his hand in a kind of cold comfort and he could feel her fingers tighten. “I’ve tried to have feeling lately, Walter—tried to see if I could find enough—and that kind of feeling isn’t there. I can’t—I can’t—don’t ask me.”

She withdrew her hand now and sat looking straight ahead of her. A cloud slipped past the moon and as the earth brightened in the cold white light Walter, turning to look at her saw her quiet and rigid, tears in her open eyes, a slim statue of what she claimed to be, sterility of feeling for him or any man.

“I’m afraid that it’s true,” he said. “Perhaps you can’t.”

At that, coming as a terribly dreary acceptance, she let the sobs come and for a long while she wept, her head in her own hands. Perhaps she wept for him, perhaps for herself. He did not offer to touch her again—as if her dearth of feeling had spread to him in those few minutes. When at last she straightened herself again, he started the car and they sped silently back through the country towards St. Pierre.

“Good-by, then,” he said, as they reached her door and he unlocked it.

“Good-by.”

She saw his face, heavy and lined and stern and it seemed to hurt her cruelly.

“I’ve cheated you,” she said pitifully, “but it’s been myself too. It is myself.”

He hesitated. For a moment he seemed ready to try again and then he saw the pity in her face stiffen into resistance. Bending, he kissed her lightly.

“Nothing I can do for you?”

“Nothing, thank you.”

She heard his car back away from the door. As long as she could hear it she stood listening. Then with swift definiteness she went to her closet and pulled out the trunk standing there.

CHAPTER XX
BARBARA BREAKS LOOSE

A GLAZE settled over the surface of events for the next few weeks in the Flandon household. Both Gage and Helen were torn away from too much indulgence in their own thoughts by the implacability of the things which they must do. Having broken up his legal connections with his own hands, Gage was confronted with the necessity of in some way making his next steps justify his past action and an unholy pride made him determined to show a doubting business world that he had been actuated by deep and skillful motives. There was the alternative of leaving St. Pierre and that he was disinclined to do. He wanted to start an office of his own and demonstrate with the greatest possible rapidity that nothing but benefit had accrued to him from his break with Sable. He guessed what he did not hear of the doubts about his move, and he wanted to put the world in the wrong if possible.

It was true, while he had found Sable’s intervention in the matter of Freda the unbearable breaking point, that he had a kind of long deferred zest in contemplating his new business freedom. Sable’s offer had been, in the beginning, far too lucrative and too flattering to lose but there was a cautiousness, a lack of independence in many of their mutual actions which had galled Gage. He was tired of the connection. He was at odds with the political clique to which his close connection with the Congressman held him. He was disgusted with the result of the convention—not that he had hoped for much but the flatness of the political outlook, the beating of the old drums irritated him. There were times when the exhilaration of the chance he was taking lifted him up and if he had been drinking less steadily he might have turned the exhilaration to much advantage. But his mind was too nervous to plan steadily or well. It shot restlessly past immediacies into dreams of a future when he would have justified every action to himself and the world and particularly to Helen.

He ignored and avoided Helen’s several attempts to come to an understanding on the question of money. She knew enough about their affairs to feel that this change of Gage must make a great difference in their income temporarily, even if he should ultimately succeed. It worried her greatly. She had made up her mind to a separation from Gage but mere independence did not solve the money question for them all. She wanted very much to know exactly where they stood and she was convinced that the spendthrift, financial optimism of Gage, characteristic always, but most marked now, was getting them into deeper waters constantly. Temporarily she and Gage had dropped their personal problem. In one brief, cold conversation Gage had suggested that, pending a settlement of his affairs and his new ventures, they waive the personal matters and Helen had very gladly agreed.

So the days adjusted themselves to a routine so smooth and orderly that sometimes even to Helen it seemed unbelievable that it was not the expression of ease and happiness. Only at times, however, for as she looked at Gage it was impossible not to be conscious of the strain under which he was laboring. He was often out nights, working or not—she did not know. She knew that the supply of whisky in the sideboard was replenished far too often to serve moderate drinking and she knew that Gage slept badly, for she could often see the light reflected from his windows in the early hours of the morning.

He never molested her now but left her to her own activities with hardly a jeer at them. Now and then some scathing remark escaped him and fell blunted from the armor of her indifference. But for the most part his early chafing under her prominence was gone. The flood of letters which came for her in every mail aroused no comment from him. He saw her at work on the organization of her section of the country and hardly seemed to notice what she did. Intent as she was on learning what she could do, how she could do it, always with the thought in the back of her mind that she needed to find a kind of work that would earn her independence as well as notoriety she put an entirely new seriousness into the work she was doing. The old dilettantism was gone and with the death of that half-mocking dilettante spirit came an entirely new zest for the work she did.

Mrs. Brownley was full of a glorious naïveté. She wanted to organize everybody. Politics fairly dripped from her impressive, deliberately moulded lips. She wanted to pin a small white elephant badge on every one she met. She had a practical eye that liked to translate enthusiasm into badges, buttons and costumes. Jerrold Haynes, rather indispensable now and then to Helen, said that he was sure that the end of the campaign would see Mrs. Brownley in full elephant’s costume. Jerrold laughed at Helen too. He told her frankly that she was ruining herself for an observer.

“A year ago you were in a fair way to become the most beautiful philosopher of the twentieth century. Now you’re like all the rest of the women—a good looking hustler. You’ve become ordinary in appealing to your big audience. You should have been content to charm Gage and me.”

“I was. But I wasn’t allowed to remain in my sloth.”

“No—that serpent of a Duffield girl. I seem to remember Gage didn’t like her either. I didn’t, but undoubtedly Gage and I wouldn’t agree on reasons, would we? Well, where is she now?”

“Down on Long Island somewhere with Harriet Thompson, resting. She was pretty well fagged out with the months here.”

“Didn’t marry Carpenter, did she?”

“No. Apparently she didn’t or we might have heard of it.”

“Carpenter saved himself from the yoke of feminism just in time, perhaps.”

“I haven’t seen him lately.”

“He sits around the club all day and cools himself in case he should decide to keep an evening engagement and need to look fresh. I see him off and on. Doesn’t look happy, for a fact.”

“Anyway it’s none of our business, is it?”

Jerrold laughed.

“Not a whit and therefore interesting. I hate talking about what is my business.”

“That’s a common failing,” said Helen a little bitterly. “I never realized how epidemic until lately, since Gage has decided to go in for himself. People ask me about everything except my bank balance.”

“The penalty of being in the limelight, Helen.”

She shrugged lightly, a tinge of weariness in her manner.

“Don’t you like the limelight then?” he urged teasingly.

Impatiently she turned on him.

“Oh, more or less, I suppose. But I shan’t like it six months from now. I’ll be tired to death of it if it still keeps coming. You get fed up on it pretty quickly.”

“So skeptical—”

“You needn’t mock at me, Jerrold. You ought to admire me because I’m honest enough not to say that I weep every time my picture is in the paper. I go further. I am quite miserable when I realize that my limelight is directed mostly not at the inner workings of my mind but at my dress and my name and the fact that I take a marcel well.”

“So you know that too, do you?”

“I know everything about it,” Helen boasted mockingly. “I even admit the necessity for keeping my clothes pretty well pressed and clean. I may scoff with the rest of you at Mrs. Brownley’s methods of organizing a Junior Republican Club but I know that she’s the finest realist of us all. She is willing to admit that women love white elephant badges, and appeals to them as the virtuous sex, and fashionable Junior Republican Clubs, which are Junior Leagues in action. I can see myself developing a philosophy just like Mrs. Brownley and learning to speak of democracy and the home with her impressiveness and Mrs. Thorstad’s italics and bending my energies to making the Republican party sought after by women because after all it includes all the best people.”

“You’re a great woman. I think I’ll write a book about you.”

She looked at him out of the corner of her eyes. “You’ll never write a book about anything, Jerrold. You’re too dilettante to ever get started. I know. I was the same way until Margaret hurled me into all this action. Now I am, as you say, spoiled for a good dilettante. I’m spoiled for a lot of things, in fact. For being an easy going comfortable wife. I’m a poor wreck of a woman politician.” She laughed at him and looked so mockingly pretty under the big gray chiffon hat she wore that Jerrold’s eyes were lit with enthusiasm. Jerrold had motored Helen down to the Brownleys’ summer home for a conference with Mrs. Brownley, who had the Junior Republican Club on her hands at the moment and wanted to talk it over with Helen. Mrs. Brownley had done a great deal of organizing and much of it was extremely effective along the lines suggested by Margaret and Mrs. Thorstad. But Mrs. Brownley knew that the lure of the social column was great and she had pressed Bob and Allie into action. The Junior Republican Club, composed of girls just preparing for the vote, was to be one of the educational features of the campaign. They would be useful, she pointed out, in helping when the Republican women had headquarters, later—and useful or not they ought to be interested.

So the Junior Republican Club was formed amid much enthusiasm on the piazza of the Redding Hotel at Lake Nokomis where St. Pierre sent its fashionable colony during the summer months. They had a president, and several news agencies had already taken pictures of them “reading from left to right and from right to left—standing in the back row, etc.” One of the agencies had been acting for a New York paper and the girls were somewhat stirred over the novelty. As Allie said, “It was time some one did something. Look what happened to Russia where the Bolsheviks drove you out of your homes and took everything you’d got. If they’d been organized it might have been different.” Besides her father said he thought women, especially educated women, (Allie spoke with personal feeling, having spent four thousand a year at the Elm Grove School) were to be the salvation of the country.

She had plenty of support and enthusiasm. Even in these spoiled and under nourished little minds a tiny flame of enthusiasm for the new possibilities of women’s lives were burning. They interpreted the new freedom to suit themselves as did most other women. To them it meant a good deal of license, a cool impudence and camaraderie towards men, a definite claiming of all the rights of men in so far as they contributed to the fun of existence. “Women aren’t as they used to be” was a handy peg for them to hang escapades upon, a blanket reason for refusing to accept any discipline. That was the substance of their feminism.

As for their politics they were hewed from the politics of their fathers and their class. They were defensive for the most part. They had heard of the exigent demands of labor, they had seen their fathers irritant under “Bolshevik legislation”—in their own shrewd minds (and many of them had the shrewdness common to smallness) they knew that all their luxury and their personal license, their expensive clothes and schools and motors and unlimited charge accounts were based on an order whose right to exist was being challenged. They roused to its defense, boisterously, giggling, and yet class conscious.

Helen did what she could to palliate any trouble the club might cause.

She pressed on Mrs. Brownley the need of not antagonizing possible and prospective members of the party by anything that appeared as snobbishness. Mrs. Brownley agreed astutely, starting post haste on a scheme for organizing the stenographers of the city and mapping out a scheme whereby the employees of the large department stores might be drawn into Republican groups. She urged Helen to talk to the Junior Republicans and Helen did it.

She noted Barbara among the rest, handsome in yellow linen and yet looking tired and worn. The artificial penciling under her eyes was circled by deeper yellow brown hollows, and her restlessness and lack of interest in the whole proceeding were conspicuous.

“What a world weary face that child has!” thought Helen.

She remembered one of Mrs. Brownley’s confidences about Barbara’s engagement and idly asked Allie about it.

“Is Bob engaged to Ted?”

“Oh, Lord, who knows!” said Allie. “She’s had an awful row with him, but she’s got his ring. I don’t know what they fought about. And she’s such a fool, for she really is crazy about him and he knows it so he doesn’t pay much attention when she rows.”

She stopped as Barbara came towards them.

“I’m going up to town over night. I wonder if you and Mr. Haynes would take me up? Have you an extra seat? I’ll be a fine chaperon.”

Helen frowned a little. She disliked the insinuation, just as she disliked Barbara, but the girl’s request could not be refused gracefully.

“I’m sure Jerrold will be glad,” she said rather coldly.

“When’d you decide to go to town, Bob?” asked Allie.

Another girl joined the group, overhearing the last remark.

“I think she’s going up to keep a watch on Ted. One of the girls saw him with that pretty Thorstad girl one day at a hotel—the girl there’s been such a lot of talk about.”

Helen felt herself change color and as she tried to get quick control caught sight of Barbara’s face. It was almost white, but not as if white from shock or pain—rather an ugly white, lips compressed, eyes lifted angrily.

“I don’t consider myself in the least responsible for Ted’s company, Mildred,” she said sharply.

“Aren’t you afraid to stay alone in the house with just Mathilda?” went on Allie.

Barbara looked her contempt.

“If you are there,” Allie went on, “call up Mrs. Wilkins and tell her I’ve got to have those new white skirts by noon Wednesday. If she doesn’t get them here I won’t pay for them.”

“Write her your grouch,” said Bob, graciously, “I’ve got my own errands.”

They left Barbara at the portico of the big stone house where the shades were drawn down and the windows closed.

“Are you sure you’ll be all right here?” asked Helen.

“Oh, yes,” said Bob, “the housekeeper’s here and father’s going to take me back to-morrow night after I get my shopping done. Thanks so much for taking me up. And I do feel so guilty—”

But Jerrold speeded the motor and the sound of her voice was lost.

“What a lascivious little mind she has,” he remarked as they drove on to Helen’s house.

“And malicious, I think. It’s odd. Her parents are really kindly on the whole. And Allie’s just a nice clumsy child.”

“Whatever hereditary influences might have made this girl, they’ve been completely choked,” said Jerrold. “She’s pure and simple environment—rotted by it just as she might have rotted in a slum somewhere. The only thing that has survived her complete subordination to money and luxury is old Brownley’s acquisitive instinct—and God help the person who thwarts that!”

It was a considerate invocation if it had done any good, for at that moment Barbara was preparing to destroy any obstacles which lay in the path of her acquiring Ted.

She went to the telephone in her mother’s room and called Ted Smillie’s house. He was not in. She tried two clubs and finally located him.

“Yes, it is Bob. I came up—oh, to see a dressmaker. No—just to-night. No—I’m tired and hot. I don’t want to dance. You come over here. Why, of course it’s all right. Do come. Well, I’ll make you some lemonade and we’ll have a talk. Of course. Eight—that’s fine.”

But it was nearly nine before he came. Barbara had found a black dinner dress which became her, and she had thrown open the windows of the second floor library to the cooling evening air. She had found some supper for herself, a casual, icebox supper but for her guest she had made sandwiches. Also she had hunted long and wearily for some key which would open the wine cellar and failed to find any. But there were lemons fortunately and she had, as she promised, made the lemonade. By eight she was all ready for him—waiting, in repose. By nine she was tense. In that empty hour she had much time for thinking and her thoughts did not rest her. They roused her to a nervous tension which was manifest in the quick gestures so unlike her usual pose of lazy indifference.

He rang at last and she slipped down the stairs to let him in. A single light burned in the hall cluster.

He looked down at her from his admired height, smiling without eagerness.

“Where did you drop from? Nowhere? I was going to go down to see you next week.”

“I had to come up to town to see about some clothes.”

He laid down his hat and turned to her.

“All alone?”

“All alone,” answered Bob coolly. “Even the housekeeper’s gone to see a sick sister and won’t be back until morning. I guess the caretaker’s in the basement—at least I told him to stay there.”

“You going to stay here alone all night?”

“Why not? It’s safe as a clock. Bars on mother’s windows and all the front of the house. Safety locks on the doors. Nothing stealable in the house and a telephone and house phone in my room.”

“All the same it’s—”

“Unconventional? By this time you ought to know I’m the most unconventional person on earth. Women don’t bother about conventions as they used to. We don’t need chaperons at our elbows, thank goodness!”

He smiled appreciatively.

“Let’s go upstairs to the library,” said Bob, “and tell me what you’ve been doing.”

He followed her obediently and they settled themselves in two great soft leather chairs drawn up to a little table, the tray of sandwiches and lemonade between them.

“What’s new?” said Bob.

“It’s dull as can be. Nothing stirring.”

“Who’ve you been seeing?”

“Pretty much of nobody. A few stalemates around the club. That’s all.”

“Then why stay in town? Why don’t you come down to join your mother? It’s really not bad at Nokomis this year. Dot Lodge has two girls from New York visiting her that are pretty snappy. And we’ve gone in for politics. Formed a Republican club.”

“Oh, Lord!” exclaimed Ted. “Torchlight processions and all that? Going to purify politics?”

“Maybe—can’t tell.”

“Maybe not, probably.”

They scuffed around in tawdry repartee, going swiftly through a few motions of convention that seemed to cling to them. But shortly he was sitting on the arm of her chair and then he had her held more closely. For a while she let him fondle her, her cheeks growing hot. Then she returned to her line of attack.

“If it’s as dull as you say here you ought to be in the country where we can make it less dull.”

“Can’t. Lose my job if I do. The old man said that he’d make no distinction in the office this summer. Me and the hallroom boys—we’ve got to do our eight hours.”

“Sure it’s that? Sure it’s not some girl holding you up here?”

That pleased him.

“So you came up to see me because you’re jealous, did you? Little cat!”

He caressed her as he spoke and she did not seem to mind what he said.

“No—I’m not jealous. But perhaps I’m lonesome.”

“Not this minute you aren’t.”

She seemed to purr.

“Well, this is nice,” he repeated.

“I wish we could stay this way forever. Isn’t it fun to be away from every one?”

For answer he kissed her.

“I suppose you’re dreadfully shocked by my unconventionality,” said Bob, “but I don’t care. I despise conventions. I think women have a right to do as they please. Anything they please. Women aren’t slaves as they used to be.”

She lay back, invoking her vulgar license in the name of the hard won liberties of women, corrupting the words she spoke.

“Look out what you say,” said Ted. “Look out, young woman and don’t get me to take you at your word.”

She shivered ecstatically.

“Ted,”—the time seemed ripe, no doubt—“do you care for that Thorstad girl?”

“Who—Freda Thorstad?”

“All the girls are talking because you were seen at some hotel with her.”

“Let them talk, the silly fools.”

She released herself a little.

“Where is she, Ted?”

“Why?” He began to tease her, and her lack of control showed instantly.

“You know she’s disappeared. Why did she go and where did she go?”

“Why should I know?”

“You do know,” she countered.

“I said nothing of the sort.”

Pulling herself loose, she confronted him. Every thwarted undisciplined desire in her raged at the frail control maintained by habit. Her eyes, no longer sleepy, blazed at him.

“You know where she is. The creature has gone off somewhere to hide herself and her shame, I suppose. The abandoned hussy. I know all about it, Ted. I found out all about it.”

He became a little surly and yet curiosity seemed to pique him.

“You know all about what, Bob?”

She was losing control completely now. The confession, abasement, she had worked up to was not forthcoming.

“Where is she?” she stormed. “Where are you keeping that girl?”

Her face had changed from that of a pretty girl to that of a furious, uncontrolled shrew. Her shrill voice tore through the empty room, struck against the silence.

“Hush,” he said sharply, “don’t yell like that, Bob. Don’t be a fool.”

“I won’t have it. I won’t have you making a laughing stock out of me. Before everybody—everybody’s talking, laughing at you—at me. You’ve got to give that girl up. You’ve got to! Pay her off and let her go away and hide till it’s over.”

The vein of caddishness was rich in Ted. He looked at her coolly—calculated her hysteria, made her maddeningly conscious of his imperturbability. Turning away, he lit a cigarette.

“So you won’t answer me!”

“I really don’t know what you mean, Bob. You hurl a lot of accusations at me and in the same breath you want a lot of promises. I don’t know what you’re driving at, my dear.”

“Then I’m through with you,” she said, viciously.

An impolite smile glimmered at the corners of his mouth.

“Oh, in that case—” He turned to the door.

But she did not have strength enough to let him go. She followed him, distressing now in her abandonment which was not even held together by anger.

“Ted—you know I care—how can you—how can you?”

He turned and appraised her. It was obvious now how much of her charm was in that thrown aside pose of indifference, lazy mockery.

“You told me you were through with me.”

His voice was quite cold, stiff. It brought her to him with a rush, her arms thrown about his neck, cheek against his, hot, panting.

“I didn’t mean it, Ted. Really, I was just about crazy. I won’t talk about that girl—about anything. Let’s just be as we were when you first came in.”

“I didn’t start all this,” he answered sullenly.

She urged him back to his chair, pulled things into some semblance of order.

“There, let’s be comfortable after all the melodrama. Here you must eat some of these sandwiches. I made them myself.”

She poised herself on the arm of his chair and played with him.

“You can’t understand how a girl feels,” she told him, “under a lot of foolish teasing. They all know I’m fond of you—a little anyway” (that fell cold)—“and they take it out of me because I’m honest and not a flirt.”

Ted chuckled. “Not a flirt.”

“You know what I mean. A girl who has been brought up as I have—can’t let herself go the way other girls of a different class can. I can see that those girls have an advantage. We’re just as—we’re just like they are only they’ve been brought up differently.”

She paused for a moment in her fumbling, in the pleading to be admitted to the class of women of easy virtue whom she fancied held her lover in their toils, trying to convince him that she was ripe for abandonment. But he would not help her. He looked at her rather curiously—that was all.

Sighing she rested her head on his shoulder.

“It’s so nice to have you here.”

“But it’s getting late, Bob. I’ll really have to go.”

She threw a restraining arm across his chest.

“Go where?”

“I have to get back—” he said vaguely.

It was time for her last card. Actuated by that vivid fear of his possible destination, perhaps, she relaxed completely in his rather unwilling arms.

“Don’t go—don’t go at all to-night. Let’s just stay here—together.”

She could feel him stiffen and looked up slowly, languorously, slyly at him. But she should have known what she would see—should have known that so easily played a game would not be worth the candle of compromise which would bind him so much more to her. He was too sophisticated to be attracted by unsought abandonment.

“Look here, Bob,” he almost shook himself to be free of her, “you’re not quite yourself to-night. You’re a bit tired and you’ll be better for a night’s sleep. I’ll have to run along now. Don’t come down. Good night.”

She made a swift movement—then seemed checked by a vision of its futility. The other door closed quietly and heavily. Stripped of the pose that served her for strength, the vanity which served her for modesty, Barbara sat in the leather chair which Ted had abandoned and let her ugly imaginings consume her.

CHAPTER XXI
WALTER’S SOLUTION

THE Thorstads had not gone back to Mohawk. Mrs. Thorstad had said that she would stay in St. Pierre until they heard further from Freda and since it was the school vacation her husband had agreed. After the first shock of disappearance they had accepted Freda’s letter at its face value and decided to wait for news from her. It was all they could do, in fact. One alternative, publicity, advertising her disappearance, would have done only harm and have looked cruelly unnecessary in view of her farewell letter to her father. The other alternative, setting private detectives to work, would have been too expensive and again her letters did not justify that. They must wait. Mrs. Thorstad, after a bit, did not brood, nor indeed appear to worry greatly. She was quickly allied with clubdom and petty politics and was busy. Her husband, trying to interest himself in stray free lectures at the University and in the second hand bookstores, grew rather pallid and thin.

They stopped at an inexpensive boarding house on the West Side. It was a place of adequate food, adequate cleanliness and no grace. Mrs. Thorstad’s reputation as a prominent club woman stood her in good stead in these rather constricted surroundings where most of the guests were men of sapped masculinity, high busted women dividing their time between small shopping and moving pictures. The men were persons of petty importance and men of small independence, but there was one strangely incongruous person in the company. He was the editor of the scandal paper of the city, a thin, elderly, eye-glassed person of fifty, who had maintained, in spite of his scavenging for scandals, some strange insistence on and delight in his own respectability. He was personally so polite, so gentlemanly, so apparently innocuous that it was almost incredible to think of him as the editor of the sheet which sold itself so completely on the strength of its scandal that it needed no advertising to float its circulation.

There was a natural attraction between him and Adeline Thorstad. They had mutually a flare for politics and intense personal prejudices complicating that instinctive liking. They often ran upon the same moral catch words in their conversation. Robinson began to be a “booster” for Mrs. Thorstad. He saw her political possibilities and commenced to call attention to her here and there in his columns.

It was one of Mr. Thorstad’s few occasions of protest.

“Shall you tell him to keep your name out of his paper or shall I?”

“But he’s said nothing that isn’t awfully friendly, Eric. I hate to hurt his feelings. I’m sure he meant to be kind.”

“You don’t want to be featured in ‘The Town Reporter,’ Adeline. It doesn’t—it isn’t right.”

She let the stubborn lines settle over her face.

“I don’t think the ‘Town Reporter’ is as corrupt as almost any of the others.”

“Look at the stuff it prints!”

“But, my dear, if it’s true, isn’t there a kind of courage in printing it?”

He looked at her in exasperation, measuring her and his own futility.

“So you want to let that go?”

“I think it’s better not to hurt him, Eric.”

He shut the door of their room sharply and yet when she saw him again he had regained his quiet indifference to her doings. The friendship between her and the editor continued to flourish.

They were in the dining-room on Tuesday, the third of August, when the morning papers were brought in. It was a sticky, hot, lifeless morning. Halves of grapefruit tipped wearily on the warmish plates. No one spoke much. The head of the silk department in Green’s was hurrying through his breakfast in order to get down to inspect the window trim. The stenographer at Bailey and Marshall’s had slipped into her place. Mrs. Thorstad was alert determinedly, Mr. Thorstad sagging a little beside her. Robinson picked up his paper first, casually, and uttered a low whistle.

“That’s a bit of news,” he said.

Several people craned and reached for the papers they had been too indolent to open. A headline ran across the page.

PROMINENT CLUBMAN KILLS HIMSELF IN
FASHIONABLE CLUB
WALTER GRANGE CARPENTER, CAPITALIST, SHOOTS SELF
FATALLY IN EARLY MORNING HOURS. CAUSE
OF SUICIDE MYSTERY.

They gathered around the news without a particle of sympathy. No one cared. He was a mystery and sensation—that was all.

“Funny thing,” said Robinson. “I wonder what was at the bottom of that.”

“I shouldn’t be surprised if it was the Duffield girl,” Mrs. Thorstad said rather casually.

“Who was that?”

“You know—the political organizer who was sent here for the Republican women.”

“Was Carpenter in love with her?”

“I think so. I saw him—well, perhaps I shouldn’t say—”

Robinson gave her a keen glance and let the matter drop. But that night after dinner he sought her out again, segregating her from the rest of the people. Mr. Thorstad was not there.

“What was it you were saying about that Miss Duffield?”

She hedged a little.

“Oh, I don’t like to talk scandal, Mr. Robinson. I’m no gossip. I never liked the woman. I always believed she made a great deal of trouble and I know she was not a good influence on my daughter. But I have no wish to malign her. If she is responsible for this tragedy, she and her free love doctrines have indeed wrought havoc—”

She paused abruptly.

“I wish you’d tell me what you know,” said Robinson. “I’ll confide in you, Mrs. Thorstad. I heard from a certain source to-day that Carpenter left this Duffield women everything he possessed. Every one seems to know they were seen around town constantly until she went away. There seems to have been considerable expectation that they would marry—surprise that they did not. Well—you can see that any information added—”

“But what good would it do?” She pressed him, her utilitarian little mind anxious for results.

“I’d rather like to know why Carpenter shot himself. So would other people. If this woman is a menace she should be exposed.”

“She should indeed. An interloper, making trouble, trying to run politics—”

He surveyed her amusedly, familiar with outbreaks of spite, waiting for his point to win itself.

“You knew her well.”

“I worked with her closely. A brilliant person—clever, modern. Modern in the way that these Eastern young women are modern. I did not approve of many things she did. I did not approve of some of the things she said. Then there was an incident which convinced me.”

She went on, a little deft prodding keeping her in motion, telling the story of having seen Walter Carpenter come to Margaret’s room and of having seen the letter from Gregory with its protestation that he must see her, that he wanted “to unloose her emotions—not fetter her in marriage.” How those words had imprinted themselves on Mrs. Thorstad’s mind! There was great satisfaction in Robinson’s face.

“And this Gregory?”

She had thought that out too.

“Why it must have been that Gregory Macmillan. He came here later and she talked of knowing him. I heard Mrs. Flandon speak of it.”

“Ah, the Sinn Feiner! Why, it’s perfect.”

She had a moment of fearful doubt.

“You wouldn’t quote me? There’d be no libel—?”

“My dear lady, I’ve no money to spend on libel suits. I’ll never get mixed up in one. Every bit of my stuff is looked over by a lawyer before it sees the light of print. Don’t you worry. I’d never implicate a lady. Scourging a vampire”—he fell into his grandiloquent press language again—“is an entirely different matter.”

“There’s such a thing as justice,” said Mrs. Thorstad bridling.

He nodded with gravity. They might have been, from their appearance, two kindly middle-aged persons discussing a kindly principle, so well did their faces deceive their minds.

So it happened that the next issue of the ‘Town Reporter’ carried in its headlines on the following day—

WAS MYSTERY OF SUICIDE OF RICH CLUBMAN ENTANGLED
IN FREE LOVE PROBLEM?

There followed an article of subtle insinuation written by the hand of an adept. It crept around the edge of libel, telling only the facts that every one knew, but in such proximity that the train of thought must be complete—that one who knew anything of the people implicated could see that Margaret Duffield (never named) believer in all “doctrines of free madness” had “perhaps preyed upon the soul of the man.” And then after a little the “Sinn Feiner” came into the article, he too coming from groups who knew no “law but license.” Ugly intrigue—all of it—dragging its stain across the corpse of Walter Carpenter.

The news had come to the Flandons at breakfast too. Gage had come down first and picked up the newspaper while he was waiting for Helen and the children. He read it at a glance and the blow made him a little dizzy. Like a flood there came over him the quick sense of the utter blackness of Walter’s mind—more than any sense of loss or pity came horror at the baffled intellect which had caused the tragedy. He stood, reading, moistening his lips as Helen entered and lifted the children to their chairs.

“Any news, Gage?”

He handed it to her silently.

“Oh, my God!” said Helen, “How terrible! How awful, Gage!”

He nodded and sat down in his chair, putting his head in his hands. She read the article through.

“But why, do you suppose?”

Then she stopped, knowing the thought that must have come to him as it came to her.

“Poor, poor Walter!”

She went around the table to Gage.

“You’ll go down of course, but take a cup of coffee first,” she said, her hand on his shoulder.

He roused himself.

“All right.”

Some one telephoned for Gage and he said he would come at once to the club. They went on with the form of breakfast. The children chattered. The room shone with sunlight. Helen, through her shock and grief, caught a glimpse of the shrinking of their trouble against this terrific final snuffing out of life. Abashed at the comfort it gave her, she drew away from the thought.

But it made her tender to Gage. It kept persisting, that thought. “It wasn’t Gage. It might have been Gage. It might have been us. People like us do go that far then. How horribly selfish this is. Poor Walter!” She suddenly stopped short. She must telegraph Margaret. Margaret would have to know. Whatever there had been between her and Carpenter, she must know. Doubtless—perhaps—she would want to come to see him—Or would she?

She telegraphed Margaret as compassionately as possible. Yet it seemed a little absurd to be too compassionate. Margaret wouldn’t like the shock “broken.” She would want to know the facts.

The sun seemed brighter than it had been for days. Despite the grave weight of sorrow on her spirit, Helen was calmed, attended by peace. She was feeling the vast relief attendant on becoming absorbed in a trouble not her own. It was not that her grief was not deep for Carpenter. He had been Gage’s good friend and hers. And yet—it was almost as if in dying he had deflected a tragedy from her, as if he had bought immunity for her with his terrific price. She dared not tamper with the thought of what this might do to Gage.

The mail man in his blue coat was coming up the steps. She opened the door for him, anxious to do something, wondering if there would be a letter from Margaret. There was. She laid the others aside and read that first. It was a long letter full of thought, which at another time would have been interesting. Margaret had wearied of Republicanism. She and many other women were talking of the “League” again.

And Walter Carpenter lay dead. Was it relevant?

Helen put down the letter and looked through her others. There was one from some hotel in Montana. She ripped it open and the first words startled her so that she looked for the signature. It was signed by Freda Thorstad.

A swooning excitement came over Helen. She hardly dared read it. Then, holding it crushed tightly, she went up to her own room. As she went the children called to her. They wanted her to come and see the castle in the sandbox.

“Soon,” she called to them, “I’ll be down soon. Mother’s busy—don’t call me for a few minutes.”

She locked her door and read the letter. What had startled her was that abrupt beginning “Asking for money is the hardest thing in the world—at least nothing has ever been so hard before.” It went on “But I don’t know what else to do, and I must do something. I can’t write any one else, partly because no one else I know has enough money to send me and also because I haven’t told any one except your husband about myself—and I suppose he has told you. If he hasn’t he’ll tell you now that it is the truth. It’s this way. My husband has been terribly sick and what money he had was stolen while he was at the hotel before I got here. He’s still weak and of course he wants to go home. But I haven’t dared tell him we haven’t any money because he doesn’t know the maid picked his pockets while he was ill. We have to get away from the hospital now that he’s well enough to travel—we don’t know anybody in the city and there are his hospital bills to pay. The doctor told me he would wait, but I can’t ask the nurses to do that. It seems almost ridiculous for an able bodied person to be asking for money but we owe so much more than I can earn that I must borrow. There doesn’t seem to be any way to get money sometimes except by borrowing. I know I could pay it back as soon as Gregory gets well again. I suppose you’ll wonder why I don’t ask father. Well—he hasn’t as much money as we need. We need nearly six hundred dollars to take Gregory to Ireland and pay the bills here. Perhaps it would be better to get it from Gregory’s friends in Ireland. But I know from what he’s told me that they all are trying so hard to do things for the country with what little money they have that it would worry him to ask them. And it would take too long. He mustn’t be worried, the doctors say, and he must get back to his home soon. You know something about him for I remember that I saw you at his lecture. He is really very wonderful and.... It isn’t as if I had a right to ask you either, except perhaps a kind of human right.... You’ve been so kind to me, you and Mr. Flandon....”

Helen finished the letter with a rueful, very tired smile. Then she took it into Gage’s room and laid it on his bureau where he would see it, when he came in. He telephoned at noon to tell her that he was coming out; she kept out of the way so that he would read the letter before she saw him.

He brought it to her and gave it back, folded.

“I suppose I should have told you that business but it was the girl’s secret. She didn’t want it known and I stumbled on it.”

“I see,” she answered, inadequately.

“Looks like a bad situation for them, doesn’t it? I didn’t know, by the way, where she had gone. I assumed she had gone to join him but I did think Sable had driven her to do it. Evidently he sent for her.”

“And he nearly died.”

They paused in embarrassment. Helen held herself tautly.

“There’s an apology due you,” she began.

He held his hand out, deprecating it.

“No, please—you had every reason.” He changed the subject abruptly.

“Do we let her have the money?” He smiled for a minute. “Money’s tight as hell. I haven’t got much in cash you know. But I don’t see how we can refuse the girl.”

“We won’t,” said Helen.

“By the way, what I came out to say was that Walter’s lawyer thinks we should send for Margaret Duffield. There’s a rumor that she is his legatee. He had no family—his mother died last year. From what Pratt said he left it all to Margaret. She’ll be rich.”

“I did wire her,” answered Helen, “an hour ago. I thought she ought to know.”

“That’s good.”

“Tell me about it.”

“It was all in the paper. He shot himself a little after midnight. He was alone in his room. It was evidently quite premeditated. There was a sealed letter for his lawyer with instructions undoubtedly and everything was in perfect order. He—he had simply decided to do it. And he has done it. Something made him lie down—that’s all.”

He spoke reflectively, with a degree of abstraction that was surprising.

“Why do they think he did it?”

“Heat—not well physically. That’s what goes to the papers. Better spread that. If the girl is involved, we’ll keep her name clear.”

“Oh, yes.”

“For Walter’s sake,” Gage went on. And then very slowly, he added, “I wouldn’t like people to know that she got him.”

“Yet if it comes out that he left her everything, won’t people guess?”

“They won’t know. Nor do we know. Nobody knows except Walter and he’s dead.”

They sent a second wire to Margaret requesting her presence for urgent reasons and by night they had heard that she would come. The funeral was to be on Friday.

It was Thursday evening when the “Town Reporter” bristled with ugly headlines on the streets of St. Pierre. Walter’s body lay in the undertaking “parlors” those ineffective substitutes for homes for those who die homeless, in the brief period between their last hours among human kind and the grave. No place except a home can indeed truly shelter the dead. Walter lay inscrutably lonely, in the public parlor, mysterious in the death which was a refusal to go on with life, a relinquishment so brave and so cowardly that it always shocks observers into awe. As he lay there, a raucous voiced newsboy outside the window ran down toward the main throughfare, a bunch of “Town Reporters” under his arm, shouting, “All the noos about the sooicide”—and in half an hour his papers were gone, some bought openly, some bought hurriedly and shamefacedly. Hundreds of people now knew the reason Elihu Robinson gave for the death of Walter Carpenter, his version of the struggle in the stilled brain of the man he had not known except by sight and hundreds of people as intimate with the tragedy as he, wagged their heads and said wisely that this “was about the truth of it,” with other and sundry comments on the corruption of the age and particularly of the rich.

The Flandons read it with mixed disgust and anger. They knew it was the kind of stain that only time could scrub away. It did not matter much to Walter now that he was slandered. His suicide was a defiance of slander. They were sorry for Margaret but not too much bothered by her reception of such scandal if it came to her. It was only local scandal.

“The worst of it,” said Helen to Gage, “is tying Gregory Macmillan up that way just as they were about to announce his marriage. I telephoned Freda’s father this afternoon for I was going to tell him you had had a business letter from her and knew where she was. It seemed wise. But anyway he had just heard from her too. He was so happy, poor fellow. Now to have this nasty scandal about his son-in-law will be another blow. I shall go to see him and tell him that it’s an utter lie. I know from what Margaret told me that there never was a thing between her and Macmillan.”

Mr. Thorstad had already taken the matter up with Elihu Robinson. He had called him what he was and his white faced indignation was something the editor preferred to submit to without resistance. But he was not without trumps as usual.

“But who is your authority for saying that Macmillan was implicated with this lady?” asked Mr. Thorstad, angrily.

He had not told that Macmillan was his son-in-law and the editor wondered at his defense of Macmillan.

“My dear fellow,” he said with that touch of apologetic and righteous concern with which he always met such attacks. “My dear fellow, your wife told me that.”

CHAPTER XXII
THE MOURNERS

MARGARET came, calm and yet clearly distressed beyond measure. It was pathetic to see her control, to see that she could not even break through it to the relief of abandonment. She was very white during the day of the funeral and the ones succeeding it and her eyes met other eyes somewhat reluctantly. She came on Friday morning and Helen had not been able to persuade her to stay with them. She had gone to a hotel and from there, quite simply to the parlors of the undertakers.

“Don’t wait for me, Helen—and I’d sooner be alone. I’ll be here a long while, probably.”

Perhaps after all Walter and Margaret found relief in each other when the grim parlor door was shut. At least at the funeral Margaret sat very quietly, though the well-bred curious eyes of the little group of people strayed unceasingly toward her. She went through it as she went through the following days. It was soon known, before the will was probated, that she was Walter’s legatee. There was a great deal of business to be done. Walter had decided no doubt that the brief embarrassment of inheriting his fortune was better than the recurrent fear of cramping poverty which had always pursued her and of which she had told him. She saw the lawyers and his business associates and discussed with them the best way of disposing of Walter’s interests, and word of her coldness spread around rather quickly and was considered to justify Mr. Robinson’s deductions.

Gage saw her at the funeral. He had not looked for her—had not felt ready to see her. But in the semicircle of chairs facing the gray satin coffin, he was so placed that his eyes met hers unexpectedly. When they did, hostility glinted in his. “You got him,” they seemed to say—and hers looked back steady, unrepentant, even though her mouth was drawn with pain and sorrow.

It had hit Gage as it had Helen. The lightning had been drawn from him. Walter’s death had roused in him an instinct of resistance which had been dormant. He had no certain idea of what had passed between Walter and Margaret but he knew what Carpenter’s point of view had been—how far he had gone, how willing he had been to yield every concession to a woman—to Margaret—in the belief that it would then be possible to build love on a basis of comradeship. Walter had found failure, just how or why no one knew except perhaps Margaret herself. Gage’s mind stumbled along nervously, trying to analyze his and Walter’s failure. He remembered how they had talked together about women, how Walter had said he would be “willing to trust to their terms.” For some reason he lay dead of their terms. And he himself—he had looked at himself in the glass an hour ago with a kind of horror as if he saw himself for the first time in weeks. There was a softening of his features it seemed to him, a look of dissipation, of untrimmed thought, brooding. The memory of his face haunted him. That was what came of being unwilling to trust to the terms of women. Either way—

He looked across at Margaret again, quiet, firm, persistent through tragedy, through all emotional upheaval, and a grim admiration shot through his hostility. After all she was consistent. With all his admiration for women, even at the height of his passion for Helen, he had never connected her or any woman with ability to follow a line of action with such consistency. He had some sense of what was going on in Margaret’s mind—an apperception of her refusal to let this tragedy break her down.

He became conscious of Helen’s sigh. She sat beside him, her hands folded loosely in her lap. The minister talked on, performing with decent civility and entanglement of phrase, the rites of last courtesy for the dead. Gage wondered what he and Helen would do. He was glad that the mess about Freda Thorstad was cleared up. Not that it made any grave difference except in a certain clearness of atmosphere. If she got a divorce she couldn’t get it on those grounds. He wondered how their painfully sore minds could be explained in a divorce court which was accustomed to dealing with brutal incidents. Perhaps a separation would be better. He wondered how he was going to provide for her decently. It was going to be a long job building up the new practice. Things were breaking badly.

Some emphatic phrase of the minister, starting out of his droning talk, brought Gage’s eyes back to the coffin. Strange how the sense of that silent form within it gave him fresh energy. Life had got Walter. Women had got him, in some obscure way. He felt his shoulders straighten with stubborn impulse. They wouldn’t get him. Deftly and logically his thought became practical. He would cut out all this thinking about women. He would—perhaps he would get the Thornton business. It meant a big retainer. He could have done it a few months ago. Now—he visualized old Thornton’s tight mouth, keen eyes. He’d want value received. Have to get in shape—cut out the booze—concentrate on business—men’s business. The actual phrase took shape in his mind. Men’s business. By God, that was how women got you. They got you thinking about them until you became obsessed, obsessed with them and their business. It was so and it had always been so. These new problems were not what people thought they were. They were not sex stuff. Perhaps they altered the grain of woman—changed her—but the adjustment of sex was as it always had been, between each man and each woman. Let the women go on, be what they wanted, do what they wanted. It made some of them better, some of them worse—put new figures in the dance but it was the same dance. Even if it wasn’t the minuet or the waltz there was still dancing. And there was choosing of partners.

Every one stood up. Gage was standing too, with the rest, his vagrant thoughts brought back from their wanderings to the ever shocking realization that he was helping in the laying away of this friend of his and the inevitable feeling that life was a short business for him and every one. He fell back into triteness. You must play the game.

After it was all over he was standing beside Helen.

“I want to go to see Margaret,” said Helen. “I’ll go to her hotel now, Gage.”

“Bring her home if you like,” answered Gage.

The ease of his tone startled Helen. She looked at him in quick surprise, meeting his unexpected smile.

“I merely meant I thought I could be reasonably civil,” he said—and with impulse, “I feel rather cleaned out, Helen. I’ll run down town now and see what I can do before dinner.”

She thought, “He hasn’t had anything to drink for two days,” placing the responsibility for his unwonted pleasantness on a practical basis. It cheered her. She went to Margaret’s hotel and found her in her room, lying on her bed and her head buried in the counterpane. It was the nearest to abandonment that Helen had ever seen in her friend so she ventured to try to comfort.

“It’s the awful blackness of his mind that I can’t bear,” said Margaret, “the feeling he must have had that there was no way out.” She sat up and looked at Helen somewhat wildly. “It frightens me too. For he had such a good mind. He saw things straight. Perhaps there isn’t any way out. Perhaps we are battering our heads against life and each other like helpless fools.”

“Did you love him?” asked Helen. It seemed to her the only vital point just then.

Margaret threw her hands out futilely.

“I don’t know. I was afraid of what might happen if we married. Either way it looked too dangerous. I was afraid of softening too much—of lapsing into too much caring—or of not being able to care at all. He wasn’t afraid—but I was. And—the rotten part is, Helen, that I wasn’t afraid for him but for myself.”

She was hushed for a moment and then broke out again.

“It wasn’t for myself as myself. It was just that if our marriage hadn’t been a miracle of success, it would have proved the case against women again.”

“You mustn’t think any more than you can help,” said Helen. “It wasn’t like Walter to want to cause you pain and I know he wouldn’t want you to suffer now.”

“No, he was willing to do all the suffering,” said Margaret in bitter self-mockery. “He did it too.”

She got hold of herself by one swift motion of her well-controlled mind and stood up, brushing her hair back with the gesture Walter loved. “It’s not your burden, poor girl. You have enough.”

“Not so many,” said Helen. “By the way, Margaret, you haven’t heard about Freda Thorstad, have you?”

“Did she come back?”

“No—she wrote. She had married Gregory Macmillan secretly when he was here. They sent her word that he had typhoid out West and she went to him. Why she didn’t tell people is still a mystery.”

“Married him—Gregory? But she’d only known him four days.”

Helen nodded. “That’s just it. Isn’t it—” she stopped, fearing to wound.

“Magnificent—brave—foolish—” finished Margaret. Her voice broke unaccustomedly. “It’s wonderful. Gregory will be a strange husband but if she shares him with Ireland and—oh, it’s rather perfect. And so all that nonsense about Gage being involved—”

“Was nonsense.”

Margaret did not ask further about Gage. She reverted to Freda and Gregory. The news left her marveling, an envy that was wonder in her remarks. She made no comparisons between Freda and herself and yet it was clear that Freda wrought herself to another phase—a step on towards some solution of thought.

Helen urged her to come to dinner.

“I’d rather not, I think. I’ll have a rest perhaps.”

“Then you’ll go out with us for a ride to-night?”

“Gage wouldn’t like it, would he?”

“He suggested your coming to dinner, my dear.”

They smiled at each other.

“Then I’ll go.” She turned swiftly to Helen. “Oh, work it out if you can, Helen. Not working it out—is horrible.”

CHAPTER XXIII
RESPITE

FREDA was trying to mend a blouse. Her unskillful fingers pricked themselves and it was obvious that even her laborious efforts could do little to make the waist presentable. Its frayed cuffs were beyond repairing. However, it would do until they got to Mohawk and she could get the clothes which she had there. She had not written her mother to send her anything. Nor had she spent any of the money the Flandons had sent for such luxuries as new clothes. She had been uplifted when that check for a thousand dollars—not for six hundred—had slipped out of the envelope with Mrs. Flandon’s kind, congratulatory letter. Gregory’s three hundred had been put back in his purse and then, as it gradually came over her impractical mind that such a sum was totally inadequate to their need she had told him that she had some money of her own—a little reserve which had been sent to her. Naturally he had assumed her father had sent it and later she thought she would tell him that it was a debt they had assumed and make arrangements for paying it. Not now. He must not worry now about the money. She looked across the room at him—their shabby little hotel room, with its lace curtains pinned back for air and the shaky table desk dragged up before the window. He had not been quite fit enough to travel when they left the hospital, and she had insisted that he must try his strength before they made the journey to Mohawk, the first lap on the way back to Ireland. How eager he was to be off now—how impossible it was to check him! She forgot the blouse and sat looking at him, sitting there unconscious of her regard. His profile was outlined against the blank window opening, still so thin, and yet so restored.

“It’s getting dark. You ought to stop now, Gregory. You’ll be worn out.”

He did not hear her. That was one of the things she had found out could happen. Especially since this lot of mail had been forwarded from his bureau, letters full of such terrible news for him from Ireland. His friends were in prison—were killed. Devastation was spreading.

She rose, with a new air of maturity and crossed to him.

“It’s growing late.” This time she came behind his chair and bent her cheek to his.

He moved absently.

“Yes, sweetheart—I’ll be soon through. I was writing to Larry’s widow, poor girl. There seemed so much to say.”

“I know, but you must stop.” She used the appeal she had already learned to use when he was bound to tax his fragile strength. “You’ll never get back there unless you rest more.”

“Oh, yes I will. And when I do get back—how I’m going to start some things in motion. It will be a terrible swift motion too. I’ve lost a sad amount of time.”

Freda laughed and he looked at her. It was a laugh of pure amusement, and so contagious that he joined her, jumping up from the letter to kiss her.

“No—you laughing rogue—not time lost in winning my bride. Mocker.”

Freda held him at arms length teasingly.

“I have you for a minute now, haven’t I?”

“You always have me. You don’t mind, darling, that they need me? You wouldn’t—not share it with me?”

“Of course I share it. And I know I have you—when you remember me.”

He buried his lips in her hair and then drew her to his knees.

“Sweetheart, if you could know how they suffer—when you see—”

She composed herself to listen, knowing how it would be. He would hold her close like this and tighter and tighter his arms would feel as he explained and related. Then, in his excitement, he would loose her and leave her, gently, while he paced up and down the room and forgot the tenants in the next room and herself and everything in his impassioned oratory.

So he was. That was Gregory. When he put her down she turned on the light and picked up her sewing. It was not that she did not listen willingly. She did. If she could not kindle in his flame she was warmed in the glow of it. She too had come to care. Perhaps when they reached Ireland and she saw for herself she would kindle too—she rather hoped so.

He stopped talking and his mind, relaxed, shot back to her.

“Do you feel well to-night, darling?”

“Of course. I’m the most indomitably healthy person you ever knew. I can’t help it.”

“You’re so sweetly healthy that I keep forgetting to take care of you.”

She tossed the blouse from her restlessly and stretched her long arms back of her head to make a cushion.

“It doesn’t bother me when you forget,” she told him. “I’m very glad that it doesn’t, too. I’m glad I haven’t begun marriage by learning habits of dependency. I think we’re rather lucky, Greg. Being us, as we are, with a two day wedding trip and a crowning episode of typhoid and now a baby and an Irish question ahead of us, we’ve learned how to stand alone. Mind our own business instead of crowding into each other’s, you know.”

He did not know. A great deal of modern difficulty and problem making had slipped by him. “You are an obscure young person,” he told her, “and most divinely beautiful. I am going to get Francis Hart to paint you—like that, with your head thrown back. I want a hundred paintings of you just to compare with you, so that I can show that no painting can be as lovely as you are.”

They spent a week in Mohawk and because Gregory found that Mr. Thorstad knew Irish history with unexpected profundity and sympathy he was content to spend much time with his father-in-law. They met on many points, in the simplicity of their minds, the way they wound their thoughts around simple philosophies instead of allowing the skeins of thought to tangle—in the uncorrupted and untempted goodness of them both and their fine appreciation of freedom—the freedom which in Mr. Thorstad had bade his daughter seek life and in Gregory had tried to unloose the rigors of Margaret Duffield. Gregory did not talk so much to Mrs. Thorstad. He was apt, in the midst of some flight of hers, to look a little bewildered and then become inattentive. She, however, took it for genius. The chastening which she had suffered after that mistake of blackening Gregory’s name in connection with Margaret had still some effect. She was anxious to wipe that error out and to that end she worked very hard to establish the fame and name of Gregory. His books were spread over the library table and she had already, in characteristic method, started a book of clippings about him.

She spent a good deal of time with Freda. Freda was rather more gentle than she had been, and interested honestly in many of the details of child bearing that her mother dragged up from her memory on being questioned. If Mrs. Thorstad felt disappointment in Freda, she tried very honestly to conceal it but now and again there cropped out an involuntary trace of the superiority which she as a modern woman was bound to feel over a daughter who took so little interest in the progress of politics and listened so much to her husband’s talk. She spoke of it once only and most tactfully.

“You must be careful not to be a reactionary, my dear. You are going from the land of freedom and the land in which women are rising to every dignity, to a country which may be—of course is bound to be—comparatively unenlightened. I hope indeed that you have your children. Two—or even three children—are very desirable. But you must not forget that every woman owes a duty to herself in development and in keeping abreast of the times which may not be neglected. I don’t want to hurt you, dear. Of course I myself am perhaps a little exceptional in the breadth of my outlook. But it is not personal ambition. It is for the sex. Did I tell you that Mrs. Flandon talked to me when she saw me in St. Pierre about doing much of the state organizing for the Republican women? She says she needs some of my organizing ability. I shall help her of course. In fact I hope I may be able to prevail upon your father to apply for a position at the University in St. Pierre. I feel we have rather outgrown Mohawk.”

“But, mother, that means an instructorship again for father, and it’s a step backward.”

“Not exactly that. Think of the advantages of living in the city—the cultural advantages. And there is a great field open in municipal politics. I have some strong friends there—and one gentleman—an editor—even went so far as to say there might be a demand for me in public life in St. Pierre, if I established residence there.”

“It would be pretty rough on father to pull up stakes here—”

The hint came again.

“My dear child, you must not be a reactionary. I do not like to see you start out your married life with the idea of subordinating your life as an individual to a husband, no matter how beloved he may be. It is not wise and it is not necessary. Look back over our life. Have I ever for one moment failed in my duty towards the home or towards my husband or child and has it not been possible at the same time for me to keep progress before me always and to remember that the modern woman owes it to herself to go out of the home and keep abreast with the times?”

But it was not a question. It was a statement. Freda made no reply and her mother changed the subject with the satisfied air of the sower of seed.

“When you come to Ireland,” she told her father laughingly that night, “you will sit on the doorstep and learn to smoke a pipe. And Gregory will be president of the Republic. And I will be—(ask mother)—a model housewife, chasing the pigs—”

They laughed with an abandonment which indicated some joke deeper than the banality about the pigs.

“It’s a worthy task,” said her father. “I’ll come—and I’ll enjoy learning to smoke a pipe and see Gregory run the government—and as for you—whatever you do you’ll be doing it with spirit.”

She nodded.

“I’ve just begun to break my trail.”

Then the day came when they must leave the little frame house and after the excitement of getting extremely long railway tickets at the station and checking all Freda’s luggage through to New York, they said good-by to the Thorstads and left them standing together, incongruous even in their farewells to their daughter.

They were to stop at St. Pierre over night. Mrs. Flandon had written to urge them to do so and Freda would not have refused, if she had been inclined to, bearing the sense of her obligation to them. She had not told her father of that. It amused her to think that her father and Gregory each felt the other responsible for those Fortunatus strings of railway ticket. But she wanted Gregory to meet the Flandons again that the debt might be more explainable later on.

St. Pierre was familiar this time when they entered it in mid-afternoon as she had on that first arrival with her mother. It was pleasant to see Mrs. Flandon again and to taste just for a moment the comfortable luxury of the Flandon house. Freda felt in Mrs. Flandon a warmth of friendliness which made it easy to speak of the money and assure her of Gregory’s ability to pay it a little later.

“You’re not to bother,” said Helen, “until you’re quite ready. We were more glad to send it than I can tell you. It’s a hostage to fortune for us.”

Then she changed the subject quickly.

“I wonder if you’ll mind that I asked a few people for dinner to-night. You married a celebrity and you want to get used to it. So many people were interested in the news item about your marriage and wanted to meet Gregory and you. I warned them not to dress so that’s all right.”

“It’s very nice,” said Freda, “I’ll enjoy it and I think—though I never dare to speak for Gregory—that he will too. I remember having a beautiful time at dinner here before. When I was here visiting the Brownleys you asked me—do you remember?”

“I asked the Brownleys to-night. They were in town—all but Allie. I asked the elder two and Bob and her young man—Ted Smillie, you know.”

She looked at Freda a little quizzically and Freda looked back, wondering how much she knew.

“Think they’ll want to meet me?” she asked straight-forwardly.

“I do, very much. I think it’s better, Freda, just to put an end to any silly talk. It may not matter to you but you know I liked your father so much and it occurred to me that it might matter to him if any untrue gossip were not killed. And it’s so very easy to kill it.”

“You take a great deal of trouble for me,” protested Freda.

Helen hesitated. She was on the verge of greater confidence and decided against it.

“Let me do as I please then, will you?” she said smilingly and Freda agreed.

Helen felt a little dishonest about it. The dinner was another hostage to fortune. It was gathering up the loose ends neatly—it was brushing out of sight bits of unsightly thought—establishing a basis which would enable her later to do other things.

She had an idea that it would please Gage, though he had been non-committal when she had broached the idea of having Gregory and his wife for a brief visit. Helen had seen but little of Gage of late. She knew he was working hard and badly worried about money. They had sold a piece of property to raise that thousand for the Macmillans and he had told her definitely of bad times ahead for him. She offered to reduce the expenses of the household and he had agreed in the necessity. They must shave every expense. But it invigorated Helen. She had amends to make to Gage and the more practical the form the easier it was to make them. Neither of them desired to unnecessarily trouble those dark waters of mental conflict now. Helen guessed that Gage’s mind was not on her and that the bad tangle of his business life absorbed him. Brusque, haggard, absorbed, never attempting or apparently needing affection, he came and went. Never since Carpenter’s death had they even discussed the question of separation. That possibility was there. They had beaten a path to it. But hysteria was too thoroughly weeded out of Gage to press toward it. Without mutual reproach they both saw that separation in the immediate future was the last advantageous thing for the work of either of them and flimsy as that foundation seemed for life together, yet it held them. They turned their backs upon what they had lost or given up and looked ahead. Helen heard Gage refer some political question to her for the first time, with a kind of wonder. She suspected irony, then dropped her own self-consciousness as it became apparent that he really did not have any twisted motive behind the query. She began to see that in great measure he had swung loose from her, substituting some new strength for his dependence on her love. And, when some moment of emotional sorrow at the loss of their ardors came over her, she turned as neatly as did he from disturbing thought to the work, which piled in on her by letter and by conference.

They sat at dinner in the long white-paneled dining-room, twelve men and women. The three Brownleys and young Ted Smillie—Jerrold Haynes because Helen wanted to have him meet Freda and Emily Haight because she fitted in with Jerrold now that Walter Carpenter was gone. To these Helen had added the young Harold Spencers because they were the leaders of that group of young people who made or destroyed gossip. It was a dinner party made up hurriedly on the excuse of Gregory’s celebrity and such little intrigue as was hidden in its inception made it no less a pleasant company.

Interest was concentrated on Freda and Gregory of course and under Helen’s deft manipulation the story of their marriage and its secrecy was told, lightly, but with a clearness of detail that sent Ted’s eyes rather consciously to his plate once or twice as he avoided Barbara’s glance. Ted was sitting beside Freda and paying her open homage when he could get her attention. But Gage had much to say to her.

“Are you still chasing romance?” he asked. “I always remember your startling me with your belief that women were more attractive when they believed in romance.”

“Yes—I’m still after it. I feel the least bit guilty towards Gregory. Because while he goes back to Ireland with his heart in his hands ready to offer it to the country, the whole revolution is to me not as great tragedy as it is adventure. It is tragedy intellectually but not emotionally as far as I am concerned while to Gregory”—she turned her head to glance at Gregory.

“And marriage is adventure too, isn’t it?”

She forgot Ted and leaned a confidential elbow towards Gage, resting her chin in her cupped hand.

“I wouldn’t dare say it in the hearing of my mother or the feminist feminists but that’s what it is. They talk of partnerships and new contracts—but they can’t analyze away or starve the adventure of it. All this talk—all the development of women changes things, but its chief change is in making the women type different—stronger, finer, you know, like your wife and Margaret Duffield. But even with women like that when it comes to love and to marriage it is adventure, isn’t it? You can’t rationalize things which aren’t rational and you can’t modernize the things that are eternal.” She became a little shy, afraid of her words. “Mother thinks I’m a reactionary. I don’t think I am. I want women to be stronger, finer—I’ll work for that—but that’s one thing, Mr. Flandon. It hasn’t anything to do with the adventure between men and women, really.”

He started at that. But Ted claimed Freda’s attention and reluctantly she turned to him.

“I think you treated me rather badly not telling me you were married. I thought all along that I had a chance, you know.”

The brazenness did not make her angry. Nothing could anger her to-night. She was all warm vigor, pervading every contact between her and every one else.

“Barbara looks very well to-night,” she answered with cool irrelevance.

Barbara did. She had dressed with her customary skill but with the wit to avoid her usual look of sophistication. To-night she was playing the artless simple girl for Gregory’s benefit, listening to him with only an appreciative comment now and then. It was clear that Gregory was talking to her as he talked to one in whom he felt there was intelligence.

“And how clever she is,” added Freda reflectively.

The talk grew more general. Barbara called the attention of every one to something Gregory had said, a concession for one who did not usually share her dinner partners or else a successful attempt to break up other conversations. Irish problems led to a discussion of general politics. Helen was in the talk now—vigorously. Mrs. Brownley gave the retailed opinion of Mr. Brownley before he could quote himself.

Gage heard without contributing to what was being said. He was listening with amusement to Mrs. Brownley’s platitudes and half unconsciously letting his admiration rise at the clarity of Helen’s thought and the deftness of her phrases. What presence she had! In the contemplation of her he felt the problems which had been harassing him all day—deadlocks in plans, money shortage, fall away. As they had used to—he slipped into memories and amazingly they did not cause him pain, though even as he looked he saw upon her the marks of the work she had done and would do, the new definiteness, the look of being headed somewhere. But his rancor seemed to have burned itself out and with it had gone the old possessive passion. He stirred restlessly. Some phœnix was rising.

Mr. Brownley turned at his movement, offering sympathy.

“Nothing for us to do, Gage,” he chuckled tritely, “except to talk about recipes. The women talk politics now.”

Gage did not laugh at the old joke.

“Women and men may get together on a subject yet,” he answered, with heavy awkwardness.

Instantly it seemed to him that it was what he had meant to say for a long time. He caught the incredulous, almost pitiful look on Helen’s face as she heard and pretended not to hear, met the quick, wondering glance she snatched away from him.

Her tremulousness gave him confidence. Impatient of his guests now, he looked across at her, his eyes kindling. Whether they could work it out through his storms and hers ceased to gnaw at his thought of her. He saw her strong, self-sufficient, felt his own strength rising to meet hers, also self-sufficient. The delight of the adventure, the indestructible adventure between man and woman remained. His mind moored there.

THE END

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

rose with the bawn=> rose with the dawn {pg 149}

what a beneficient=> what a beneficent {pg 183}

---