A Daughter of To-Day

by Sara Jeannette Duncan

Cardiff smiled masterfully. "I could marry you, little one, in a quarter of an hour," he said.

But at the end of that time Lawrence Cardiff found himself very far indeed from the altar, and more enlightened perhaps than he had ever been before about the radicalism of certain modern sentiments concerning it. She would change, he averred; might he be allowed to hope that she would change, and to wait—months, years? She would never change, Elfrida avowed, it was useless—quite useless—to think of that. The principle had too deep a root in her being—to tear it up would be to destroy her whole joy in life, she said, leaving Cardiff to wonder vaguely what she meant.

"I will wait," he said, as she rose to go; "but you will come back with me now, and we will write a book—some other book—together."

The girl laughed gaily. "All alone by myself I must do it," she answered. "And I must do this book. You will approve it when it is done. I am not afraid."

He had her hands again. "Elfrida," he threatened, "if you go on the stage to-night in the costume I see so graphically advertised—an Austrian hussar, isn't it?—I will attend. I will take a box," he added, wondering at his own brutality. But by any means he must prevail.

Elfrida turned a shade paler. "You will not do that," she said gravely. "Good-by. Thank you for having come to persuade me to give this up. And I wish I could do what you would like. But it is quite, quite impossible." She bent over him and touched his forehead lightly with her lips. "Good-by," she said again, and was gone.

An hour later he was on his way back to town. As the mail train whizzed by another, side-tracked to await its passing, Mr. Cardiff might have seen Kendal, if there had been time to look, puffing luxuriously in a smoking compartment, and unfolding a copy of the Illustrated Age.

CHAPTER XXV.

Before he had been back in Norway a week Kendal felt his perturbation with regard to Elfrida remarkably quieted and soothed. It seemed to him, in the long hours while he fished and painted, that in the progress of the little drama, from its opening act at Lady Halifax's to its final scene at the studio, he had arrived at something solid and tangible as the basis of his relation toward the girl. It had precipitated in him a power of comprehending her and of criticising her which he had possessed before only, as it were, in solution. Whatever once held him from stating to himself the results of his study of her had vanished, leaving him no name by which to call it. He found that he could smile at her whimsicalities, and reflect upon her odd development, and regret her devouring egotism, without the vision of her making dumb his voluble thought; and he no longer regretted the incident that gave him his freedom. He realized her as he painted her, and the realization visited him less often, much less often, than before. Even the fact that she knew what he thought gradually became an agreeable one. There would be room for no hypocrisies between them. He wished that Janet Cardiff could have some such experience. It was provoking that she should be still so loyally avengle; that he would not be able to discuss Elfrida with her, when he went back to London, from an impersonal point of view. He had a strong desire to say precisely what he thought of her friend to Janet, in which there was an obscure recognition of a duty of reparation—obscure because he had no overt disloyalty to Janet to charge himself with, but none the less present. He saw the intimacy between the two girls from a new point of view; he comprehended the change the months had made, and he had a feeling of some displeasure that Janet Cardiff should have allowed herself to be so subdued, so seconded in it.

Kendal came back a day or two before Elfrida's disappearance, and saw her only once in the meantime. That was on the evening—which struck him later as one of purposeless duplicity—before the Peach-Blossom Company had left for the provinces, when he and Elfrida both dined at the Cardiffs'. With him that night she had the air of a chidden child; she was silent and embarrassed, and now and then he caught a glance which told him in so many words that she was very sorry, she hadn't meant to, she would never do it again. He did not for a moment suspect that it referred to the scene at Lady Halifax's, and was more than half real. It was not easy to know that even genuine feeling, with Elfrida, required a cloak of artifice. He put it down as a pretty pose, and found it as objectionable as the one he had painted. He was more curious, perhaps, but less disturbed than either of the Cardiffs as the days went by and Elfrida made no sign. He felt, however, that his curiosity was too irreligious to obtrude upon Janet; besides, his knowledge of her hurt anxiety kept him within the bounds of the simplest inquiry, while she, noting his silence, believed him to be eating his heart out. In the end it was the desire to relieve and to satisfy Janet that took him to the Age office. It might be impossible for her to make such inquiries, he told himself, but no obligation could possibly attach to him, except—and his heart throbbed affirmatively at this—the obligation of making Janet happier about it. He could have laughed, aloud when he heard the scheme from Rattray's lips—it so perfectly filled out his picture, his future projection of Elfrida; he almost assured himself that he had imagined and expected it. But his desire to relieve Janet was suddenly lost in an upstarting brood of impulses that took him to the railway station with the smile still upon his lips. Here was a fresh development; his interest was keenly awake again, he would go and verify the facts. When his earlier intention reoccurred to him in the train, he dismissed it with the thought that what he had seen would be more effective, more disillusionizing, than what he had merely heard. He triumphed in advance over Janet's disillusion, but he thought more eagerly of the pleasure of proving, with his own eyes, another step in the working out of the problem which he believed he had solved in Elfrida.