It was the small daughter of the house who chose this moment to emerge from under the table, clutching fast a jaded-looking doll and a handful of its belongings. Her round eyes were fear-struck and her quick glance curiously hostile, but she slipped silently from the room. Her presence there was soon forgotten by her parents-- but children do not forget. Of all the incomprehensible words tossed to and fro above her head, Marvel remembered every one.
II
Marvel Charleroy found the letter in the box at the gate where the postman had left it. There was other mail; she glanced at the covers light-heartedly as she went toward the house. She was {150} not very familiar with her mother's handwriting and, for the moment, did not recognize it.
The house was low, gray-shingled, and inviting. It had a kindly, human aspect, and though it was a modern structure built at the time of Professor Charleroy's second marriage, eleven years before, there was about it some thing of that quiet dignity we associate with age. The branches of a wide-spreading old elm swept one of its chimneys; the lawn was broad, the lilacs and syringas tall; ranks of high hollyhocks in shades of rose and wine, rising against gray lattice, shut off the kitchen gardens at the rear. The beds that bordered the paths were planted to a tangle of old-fashioned flowers, gorgeous in the July sunshine. There was a subdued gayety about the whole aspect of the sheltered, sunny place, a {151} look of warmth and home and joy, that was especially dear to Marvel Charleroy. It satisfied in her some elemental need.
She preserved a vivid memory, of which she never spoke, of the box-like little house on Spring Street, her early home. She recalled that house as disorderly and uncomfortable during her mother's regime; as frigid and uncomfortable during the reign of her Aunt Josephine. She figured herself as always holding her breath, as always waiting for something, while she lived there. It was not until she was twelve (four years after Clarissa Charleroy left her husband), that Marvel, to her own childish apprehension, began to fill her lungs, began, indeed, to live.
It will be inferred that the catastrophe, so clearly outlined on that April afternoon fifteen years earlier, did, in {152} fact, occur. For various reasons, it did not take place immediately. For one thing, it required time for Clarissa to put herself into touch with causes that desired to be "promoted" by her silver tongue and wistful, winning ways. Then, too, there were moments when she wavered. So long as Paul could maintain that pose, achieved with great effort, of good-natured, sarcastic scoffing at their tragedy, Clarissa herself did not believe in it wholly. Sometimes they drew very near together. A debonair, indifferent Paul who jested about her "calling" attracted her. A Paul who could demand cheerfully as he took his second cup of coffee, "Well, Clarissa, am I the Tyrant Man this morning?" was not unlikely to elicit the answer, "No, not to-day, Paul. You're just own folks to-day." But a Paul who had heard the wolf howling at the door {153} of his heart, who looked at her with eyes in which she saw fear and the shadow of a broken life, repelled her utterly. Women are reputed to be soft-hearted. Paul Charleroy, musing upon his own predicament in those days, remembered this age-long superstition with wonder.
In spite of various respites, a catastrophe which is latent in a temperament will, some day, come to pass unless, of course, the owner of the temperament decides to be absolute master of himself. Nothing was further from Clarissa's thought than to recapture her married happiness by an assault on her own disposition.
It is not good to linger over this portion of their story. Clarissa did, finally, take over the task of reforming as much of humanity as she could persuade to see the need of it, and she laid {154} aside the business of looking after her husband and her child. Miss Josephine Charleroy, ten years her brother's senior, and competent rather than sympathetic, assumed these discarded responsibilities.
By slow degrees, Paul Charleroy's circumstances became less straitened. He did place his text-book well, and derived a considerable income therefrom; on the death of old Dr. Lettarby he succeeded to the full professorship, with the munificent salary of twenty-five hundred a year. Last of all, some time after Clarissa and he were made free of each other by legal means, he did actually marry Evelyn Ames.
Thus, it will be seen, Clarissa's forecasts were fulfilled. Her notions were absolutely practicable; they really, all of them, worked, and worked well. In the long run they even worked {155} beneficently, but one prefers to attribute this to the mercy of Providence rather than to the foresight of Clarissa.