THE EMPTY SACK

THE EMPTY SACK

BY BASIL KING

AUTHOR OF THE INNER SHRINE, THE WILD OLIVE, Etc.

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK

GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS

Made in the United States of America

The Empty Sack

Copyright, 1921, by Harper & Brothers

Printed in the United States of America

DEAR OLD MA! STOP CRYING, MA!

CONTENTS

THE EMPTY SACK

[CHAPTER I]

"Mr. Collingham will see you in his office before you go."

Having thus become the Voice of Fate, Miss Ruddick, shirt-waisted and daintily shod, slipped away between the pens where clerks were preening themselves before leaving their desks for the day.

The old man to whom she had spoken raised his head in the mild surprise of an ox disturbed while grazing. He, too, was leaving his desk for the day, arranging his work with the tidy care of one for whom pens, ink, and ledgers were the vital things of life. Finishing his task, his hands trembled. His smile trembled, too, when a young man in a neighboring pen called out in tones which mingled sarcasm with encouragement:

"Good luck, old top! Goin' to get your raise at last!"

It was what he repeated to himself as he shuffled after Miss Ruddick. He was obliged to repeat it in order to steady his step. He was obliged to steady his step because some fifteen or twenty pairs of eyes from all the pens in the office were following him as he went along. It was the last bit of pride in the man marching up to face a firing squad.

He had reached the glass door on which the word "Exit" could be traced in reversed letters, when a breezy young fellow of twenty startled him by a sudden clap on the shoulder. The boy had not come from a pen, but from the more distant portion of the bank where a line of tellers' cages faced the public.

"Hello, dad! Tell ma I'll be home for supper. Off now for a plunge at the gym."

The boy passed on, leaving behind a vision of gleaming teeth and the echo of gay tones.

Opening a glass door and entering a passageway, the old man stumbled along it till another door, standing open, showed Miss Ruddick, beside her typewriter, assorting her papers before going home. Miss Ruddick was a competent woman of thirty-five. She was in her present position of stenographer-secretary to the head of the banking house because Mr. Bickley, the efficiency expert, for whose opinion Mr. Collingham had a kind of reverence, had selected her for the job. Miss Ruddick cultivated her efficiency as another woman cultivates her voice or another her gift for dancing. Throwing off the weaknesses that spring from affection and softness of heart, she had steeled and oiled herself into a swiftly working, surely judging, and wholly impersonal business automaton. Ten years ago she would have felt sorry for a man in Josiah Follett's predicament. She would have felt sorry for him now had she not learned to her cost that sympathy diminished the accuracy of her work. Now she could turn him off as easily as an executioner the man condemned to death.

As a matter of fact, she knew that ten minutes previously the efficiency expert had been closeted with Mr. Collingham, dealing with this very case. With her own ears she had heard Mr. Bickley say:

"You will do as you think best, Mr. Collingham. Only, I can't help reminding you that once you admit any principle but that of supply and demand, business methods are at an end."

Miss Ruddick knew Mr. Collingham's inner struggle because she had been through it herself; but she knew, too, that to Mr. Collingham the efficiency expert was much what his physician is to a king. His advice may be distasteful, but it is a command. The most merciful thing now was rapidity of action, as with the application of the guillotine. It was mercy, therefore, to throw open instantly the door of Mr. Collingham's office, so that Josiah was forced to enter.

He stood meekly, feeling, doubtless, as the psalmist felt when all the ends of the world had come upon him. Confusedly he was saying to himself that all the threads of his laborious life, from the time when, as a boy in Canada, he had begun to earn his living at sixteen, till now, when he was sixty-three, had been drawn together at just this point, where he was either to get his raise or else——

The suspense was terrible. As the August Presence into which he had been ushered was engaged in examining the contents of a lower drawer of the flat-topped desk at which It was seated, It was only partly visible. All Josiah could see was the shoulder of a portly form, the edge of a pear-shaped pearl in a plum-colored tie, and a temple of grizzled hair. The clerk moved forward, coming to a halt midway between the door and the desk till the Presence should recognize his approach by raising Its head.

The Presence didn't quite raise Its head. It merely glanced upward in a casual, sidelong way, continuing the inspection of the drawer.

"Well, Follett, I suppose you know what I've got to say?"

Follett betrayed the fact that he did know.

"Is it the same as you said two years ago, sir?"

Thus challenged, the Presence lifted itself, becoming to the full Bradley Collingham, the distinguished banker, philanthropist, and American citizen, so widely and favorably known for his sympathetic personality. The essence of these traits rang in the appealing quality of his tone.

"What do you think, Follett? I told you then that you were not earning your salary. You haven't been earning it since. What can I do?"

"I could work harder, sir. I could stay overtime, when none of the young fellows want to."

"That wouldn't do any good, Follett. It isn't the way we do business."

"I've been five years with you, sir, and all my life between one banking house and another, in this country and Canada. In my humble way I've helped to build the banking business up."

"And you've been paid, haven't you? I really don't see that you've anything to complain of."

There was no severity in this response. It was made only because the necessities of the case required it, as Follett had the justice to perceive.

"I'm not complaining, sir. I only don't see how I'm going to live."

The voice already distressed became more so.

"But that isn't my affair, is it, now? I'm running a business, not a charitable institution. It isn't as if you'd been with us twenty or thirty years. You've shifted about a good deal in your time——"

"I've had to better myself, sir—with a family."

"Quite so. And once you admit any principle but that of supply and demand business methods are at an end. Don't think that this isn't as hard for me as it is for you, Follett, but——"

"If it was as hard for you as it is for me, sir, you'd——"

But, the possibilities here being dangerous, the banker was forced to cut in:

"Besides, you'll get another job. Stairs will write you any kind of recommendation you ask for."

"Recommendations won't do me any good, sir, once I'm fired for old age. That's a worse brand on you than coming out of jail."

The discussion growing painful, the banker rose to put an end to it. Even so, he had something still to say to justify himself.

"It isn't as if I hadn't warned you of this, Follett. You've had two years in which"—it was hard to find the right phrase—"in which to provide for your future."

The clerk was unable to repress a dim, faraway smile.

"Two years in which to provide for my future—on forty-five a week! And me with five mouths to feed, to say nothing of Teddy, who pays his board!"

The banker found an opening.

"I made a place for him—didn't I, now?—as soon as he was released from the navy. He ought to be able to help you."

"He does help, sir, as far as a young fellow can on eighteen a week with his own expenses to take care of. But I've two little girls still at school, and another, my eldest—"

A hint of embarrassment emphasized the banker's words as he began moving forward to show his visitor to the door.

"I understand that she's engaged as an artist's model. That, too, ought to bring you in something."

"I suppose Mr. Robert told you that, sir."

This was inadvertent on Follett's part, and a mistake. Any other distinguished man would have stiffened at the use of the name of a member of his family in a connection like the present one. Bradley Collingham was admirably temperate in saying:

"I don't talk of such matters with my son. I merely understood that your eldest girl was earning something—"

"She poses six hours a week for Mr. Hubert Wray, at a dollar an hour."

"She could probably get more engagements. I hear—I forget who told me—that she's the type these artist people like to put into their pictures."

Finding himself obliged to keep step with his employer, Follett felt as if he was walking to his soul's dead-march. Only the force of the conventions in which everybody lives enabled him to go on making conversation.

"We don't much like the occupation for a daughter of ours, sir; and, besides, there's lots who think that being an artist's model isn't respectable."

"Still, if she can earn good money at it—"

To Collingham's relief, they were at the door, which he opened significantly and without more words. Follett looked into the outer world as represented by Miss Ruddick's office as into an abyss. For the minute it seemed too awful a void to step into. When his watery blue eyes again sought Collingham's face, it was with the dumb question, "Must I?" which the banker himself could only meet with Mr. Bickley's manfulness.

He, too, spoke only with his eyes: "You must, my poor Follett. There's no help for it. You and I are both caught up into a vast machine. I can't act otherwise than as I'm doing, and I know you don't expect it."

Thus Follett stepped over the threshold and the door closed behind him. So short a time had passed since he had gone the other way that Miss Ruddick was still beside her desk, putting away her papers. Follett didn't look at her, but she looked at him, finding herself compelled to hark back to Mr. Bickley's axioms to check the tears she couldn't allow to rise.

[CHAPTER II]

Meanwhile there was that going on which would have disturbed both these elderly men had they known anything about it.

Jennie Follett, in a Greek peplum of white-cotton cloth, her amber-colored hair drawn into a loose Greek knot, was on her knees before a plaster cast of Aphrodite, to which she was holding up a garland of tissue-paper flowers.

While there was nothing alarming in this pagan act, the freedom with which two young men laid hands on her little person threw out hints of impropriety.

The pretexts were obvious, and, in the case of one of the young men, were backed by what might have been called professional necessity. One bare arm needed to be raised, the other to be lowered. One sandaled foot was too visible beneath the edge of the peplum, the other not visible enough. Adjustments called for readjustments, and readjustments for revisions of the scheme. What one young man approved of the other disallowed, to a running accompaniment of Miss Follett's laughter.

"Do go away," she implored, when Mr. Bob Collingham, with one hand beneath her elbow and the other at her finger-tips, tilted her arm at what seemed to him its loveliest angle.

"Clear out, Bob," the artist seconded, in half-vexed good humor. "We'll never get the pose with you here."

"You'd never get anything if I went away, because Miss Follett wouldn't work. Would you, Miss Follett?"

The artist having gone in search of something at the far end of the studio, Miss Follett replied to Mr. Collingham alone.

"I don't know what I'd do if you went away; but if you stay I shall go frantic. If you touch me again I shall get up."

"I'm not touching you again," he said, going on to bend her left arm ever so slightly, "because this is the same old time all along. The picture is all I care about."

"But it's Mr. Wray's picture. It isn't yours."

"It will be if I buy it. I said I would if I liked it, and I sha'n't like it unless I get it the way I want it."

"You know you don't mean to buy it."

"I don't mean to let anybody else buy it; you can lay down your life on that."

There was so much earnestness in this declaration that Miss Follett laughed again. It was an easy, silvery laugh, pleasant to the ear, and not out of keeping with the medley of beautiful things round her.

"Jennie's value in a studio is more than that of a model," Wray had recently confided to his friend, Bob Collingham. "It's as if she extracted the beauty from every bit of tapestry or bronze and turned it into animate life."

"By doing nothing or standing still," Collingham had added, "she can pin your eyes on her as other girls can't by frisking about. And when she moves—"

An exclamation from Wray conveyed the fact that Jennie's motion was beyond what either of these young experts in womanhood could possibly put into words.

But that Jennie knew where to draw a certain kind of line became evident when, either by inadvertence or design, the back of Bob Collingham's hand rubbed along her cheek. With a smile at once kindly and cold she put away his arm and rose. In the few yards she placed between them before she turned again, still with her kind, cold smile, there was rebuke without offense.

Being fair, the young man colored easily. When he colored, the three inches of scar across his temple which he had brought home from the war became a streak of red. It was one of the reasons why Jennie, who was sensitive to the physical, didn't like to look at him. Not to look at him, she pretended to arrange the folds of her peplum, which kept her gaze downward.

But had she looked, she would have seen that he was hurt. His face was of the honest, sympathetic cast that quickly reflects the wounding of the feelings. If men had prototypes in dogs, Bob Collingham's would have been the mastiff or the St. Bernard—big, strong, devoted, slow to wrath, and with an almost comic humiliation at sound of a harsh word. Though there was no harsh word in Jennie's case, Bob was sure he detected a harsh thought. It hurt him the more for the reason that she was a model, while he had advantages of social consideration. Little as he would have been discourteous to a girl of his own station, he would have thought it unworthy of a cad to profit by Jennie's helplessness in a place like a studio.

"I hope you didn't think I was trying to be fresh."

Now that she felt herself secured by distance, she laughed again.

"I didn't think anything at all. I just—just don't like people touching me."

"Not any people?"

"Not any I need speak about to you."

"Why me?"

"Because I hardly know you."

"You could know me better if you wanted to."

"Oh, I could know lots of people better if I wanted to."

"And you don't want to—for what reason?"

"It isn't always a reason. Sometimes it's just an instinct."

"And which is it in my case?"

"In your case, it doesn't have to be discussed. I shouldn't know you, anyhow. We're like creatures in different—what do they call it?—not spheres—elements, isn't it?—We're like creatures in different elements—a bird and a fish—that don't get a point of contact."

"You mayn't see the points of contact—"

"And if I don't see them they're not there." She turned toward Wray, who was coming back in their direction, addressing him in the idiom she heard among young native-born Americans, and which accorded best with her position in the studio. "Oh, Mr. Wray, could you let me off posing any more to-day? This friend guy of yours has got me all on springs."

"Clear out, friend guy. Can't you see you're in the way?"

She continued to take the tone she was trying to make second nature, since it was not first.

"That's something he wouldn't notice if a car was running over him. But please let me go. There's a quarter of an hour left on to-day, but I'll make it up some other time."

She moved down the studio with as much seeming unconcern as if she didn't know that two pairs of eyes were following her. Picking her way between old English chairs with canvases stacked against their legs, past dusty brocade hangings, and beneath an occasional plaster cast lifted on a pedestal, she went out at the model's exit without a glance behind her.

Bob spoke only when she had disappeared.

"Listen, Hubert. I'm going to marry that girl."

Wray stepped back to the front of the easel, flicking in a touch or two on the rough sketch of the Greek girl kneeling before Aphrodite.

"I was afraid you were getting some such bug in your head."

Bob limped to a table on which he had thrown his hat and the stick that helped his lameness.

People at Marillo Park, where the Collinghams lived for most of the year, said that, with the wounds he had got while in the French army in the early days of the war, he had brought back with him a real enhancement of manhood. Having come through Groton and Harvard little better than an uncouth boy, his experience in France had shaped his outlook on life into something like a purpose. It was not very clear as yet, or sharply defined; but he knew that certain preliminary conditions must be met before he could settle down. One of these had to do with Miss Jennie Follett; and what Hubert called "a bug in his head" was, in his own mind, at least, as vital to his development as his braving his family in going to the war.

That had been in the famous year when the American nation was trying to be "neutral in thought." "I'm not neutral in thought," Bob, who had only that summer left Harvard, had declared to his father. "I'm not neutral in any way. Give me my ticket over, dad, and I'll do the rest myself."

He got his ticket over, and fifteen months later, bandaged and crippled, a ticket back. On the return voyage he had as his companion a young American stretcher-man who had helped to carry him off the battlefield, and who, a few weeks later, nervously shattered, had joined him in the hospital. Wray, who, on the outbreak of war, had been painting in Latoul's atelier, had now got what he called "a sickener of Europe," and was glad to hang out his shingle in New York. A New England man of Gallicized ways of thinking, he had means enough to wait for recognition, so long as he kept his expenses within relatively narrow bounds.

With his soft hat plastered provisionally on the back of his head, Bob leaned heavily on his stick.

"I've got to marry some one," he said, as if in self-defense. "I'm that kind. I can't begin fitting my jig saw together till I do it."

Wray kept on painting.

"Why don't you pick out a girl in your own class? Lots of nice ones at Marillo."

"You don't marry girls just because they're nice, old thing. You take the one who's the other half of yourself."

"I don't see that you're the other half of Miss Follett."

"Well, I am."

"Miss Follett herself doesn't think so."

"She'll think so, all right, when I show her that she can't do without me."

"Some job!" Wray grunted, laconically.

"Sure it's some job; but the bigger the job the more you're on your mettle. That's the way we're made."

The artist continued to add small touches to the shadows of the Aphrodite cast as he changed his tactics.

"If you married Miss Follett, wouldn't your family raise hell?"

"They'd raise hell at first, and put a can on it afterward. Families always do."

"And what would Miss Follett feel—before they'd put on the can?"

Bob limped uneasily toward the door.

"Life wouldn't be all slip-and-go-down for her, of course; but that's what I should have to make up to her."

"Oh, you'd make it up to her."

With his hand on the knob, Collingham turned in mild indignation.

"Say, Hubert, what do you think I'm made of? A girl I'm crazy about—"

"Oh, I only wondered how you were going to do it."

"Well, wonder away." A steely glint came into the deep-set, small gray eyes as he added, "That's something I don't have to explain to you beforehand, now do I?"

Left alone, the painter went on painting. As it always does, the house of Art opened its door to the troubles of the artist. Wray neither turned his head as his friend went out nor muttered a farewell. He merely laid on his strokes with an emotional vigor which hardened the surface of the plaster cast into marble. Neither did he turn his head nor utter a greeting when he became aware that Jennie, in her sport suit of tobacco color set off with collar and cuffs of ruby red, was moving toward him among the studio properties. It was easier to work his desire to look at her into this swift, sure wielding of the brush.

In the spirit rather than with the eyes he knew that she had paused within ten or twelve feet of him, that her kind, soft, bantering glance was resting on him as he worked, and that a kind, soft, bantering smile was flickering about her lips. With a deft force, he found the colors and gave this expression to the mouth and eyes of the kneeling girl. It was the work of a second—the merest twist of the fingers.

"I just wanted to say," Jennie explained, after waiting for him to see her, "that I'm sorry to have been so horrid just now, and I'd like to know when I'm to come again."

"You could marry Bob Collingham—if you wanted to."

His efforts had become so passionately living that he couldn't afford to look up at her now, even had he wished to do so. He did not so wish, because he knew, still in the spirit, how she would take this announcement—without the change of a muscle, without a change of any kind beyond a flame in the amber depths of the irises. It would be a tawny flame, with an indescribable red in it, and he managed, on the instant, to translate it into paint. The girl on her knees was getting a soul as the lumpish white of the plaster cast was taking on the gleam of ancient, long-worshiped stone.

"And would you advise me to do that?"

The voice had the charm of the well-placed mezzo, the enunciation a melodious precision. Born in Halifax, where she had spent her first twelve years, the English tradition of musical speech, which in that old fortified town makes its last tottering stand on the American continent, had been part of her inheritance.

Still working at his highest pitch of tensity, Wray considered his answer.

"I shouldn't advise you to do that—if I thought about myself."

"Then why say anything about it?"

"Because I thought I ought to put you wise."

"What's the good of that, when I don't like him?"

"Girls often marry men they don't like when they have as much money as he'll have."

"Money's an object, of course; but when a fellow—"

"He's not so bad. I like him. Most men do."

"Most men wouldn't have to stand his pawing them about. I like him, too—except for the physical."

"Then you wouldn't marry him?"

"Not unless it was the only way not to starve to death."

"But you'll marry some one."

"Probably; and, probably—so will you."

Her voice was as cool and unflurried as if the words were tossed off without intention.

Both knew that an electric change had come into the mental atmosphere. Of the two, the girl was the less perturbed. Though beneath her feet the floor seemed to heave like the deck of a ship in a storm, she could stand in a jaunty attitude, her hands in her ruby-red pockets, and throw up at its sauciest angle her daintily modeled chin.

With him it was different. He had two main points to consider. In the first place, Bob Collingham had just made an announcement to which he, Wray, was obliged to give some thought. He didn't need to give much to it, because the conclusions were so obvious. Jennie had hit the poor fellow in the eye, and, instead of viewing the case in a common-sense, Gallicized way, he was taking it with crazy American solemnity. There was nothing to it. The Collinghams would never stand for it. It would be a favor to them, as well as to Bob himself, to put the whole thing out of the question.

"So that settles that," he said to himself.

Because as he continued to reflect he worked furiously, Jennie saw in him the being whom the lingo of the hour had taught her to call a caveman. In the motion-picture theaters she generally frequented, cavemen struggled with vampires in duels of passion and strength. Jennie longed to be loved by one of this race; and a caveman who came to her with violet eyes and a sweeping brown mustache possessed an appeal beyond the prehistoric. In spite of the challenge in her smile and the daring angle at which she held her chin, she waited in violent emotion for what he would say next.

"Oh, I sha'n't marry for years to come," he jerked out, still going on with his work. "Sha'n't be able to afford it. If I didn't have a few, a very few, hundred dollars a year, I couldn't pay you your miserable six a week."

She took this manfully. The head, with its ruby-red toque, to which a tobacco-colored wing gave the dash which was part of Jennie's personality, was perhaps poised a little more audaciously; but there was no other sign outside the wildness of her heart.

"Oh, well; you're only beginning your career as yet. One of these days you'll do a big portrait—"

"But, Jennie, marriage isn't everything."

It was the caveman's plea, the caveman's tone; and though Jennie knew she couldn't respond to it in practice, the depths of her being thrilled.

"No it isn't everything; but for a girl like me it's so much that—"

"Why specially for a girl like you?"

"Because her ring and her marriage lines are about all she's got to show. No woman can hold a man for more than—well, just so long; and when his heart's gone where is she, poor thing, except for the ring and the parson's name?"

"A woman's heart is as free as a man's; and when he goes his way—"

"She's left standing in the same old place. We'd all be better off if we felt as free to wander as the men; but most of us are made so that we don't want to. God! what a life!" she moaned, with a comic grimace to take the pain from the exclamation. "But, tell me, Mr. Wray, what day do you want me to come again?"

He asked, as if casually:

"Why do you say, 'God! what a life'?"

"Oh, I don't know. I suppose because it's the only thing to say. Wouldn't you say it if—"

"If what?"

"Oh, nothing."

"Is it anything to do with me?"

"No—not specially. It's everything—beginning with being born."

"I shouldn't think you had any kick against being born—with a face and a figure like yours."

"What good are they to me? My mother used to be—Well, I'm only pretty, and she was a great beauty—but look at her now."

"But you don't have to go the same way."

"All women of our class go the same way. It's awful to spend your whole life toiling and aching and worrying and scraping and paring just on the hither side of starving to death; and yet, if it was only yourself, you could stand it. But when you see that your father and mother did it before you, and that your children will have to do it after you—"

"Not in this country, Jennie," he put in, sententiously. "This country gives everyone a chance."

She gave another of her comic little moans.

"This country is like every other country. It's a football field. If you're big enough and tough enough, with skin padded and conscience wadded, and legs to kick hard enough—you get a chance—yes—and one man in a hundred thousand is able to make use of it. But if you're just a decent, honest sort, willing to do a decent, honest day's work, your only chance will be to keep at it till you drop."

"Aren't you rather pessimistic?"

She ignored this question to pace up and down with little tossings of the hands which Wray found infinitely graceful.

"Look at my father. He's worked like a convict all his life, just to reach the magnificent top-notch of forty-five a week. We've been praying to God to give him a raise—"

"And perhaps God will."

She snapped her fingers. "Like that he will! God has no use for the prayers of the decent, honest sort. He's on the side of the football tough with the biggest kick in the scrimmage—Ah, what's the use? I'm born, and I've got to make the best of it. Tell me when to come again, and let me go."

Laying aside his brushes and palette, he went close to her. All the poetry in the world seemed to Jennie to vibrate in his tones.

"Making the best of it because you're born is loving and letting yourself be loved, Jennie."

"So it is." She laughed, with a ring of the desperate in her mirth. "You don't have to tell me that."

His voice sank to a whisper.

"Then why not do it?"

"I would like a shot if I had only myself to think about."

"In love, there are only two to think about, Jennie."

She laughed—a hard little laugh, in spite of its silvery tinkle.

"When I love I've got two sisters and a brother, all younger than myself, to bring into the little affair, to say nothing of a nice old dad and a mother that I'm very fond of. I've got to love for them as well as for myself—"

"Then why don't you love Bob Collingham?"

She threw him a reproachful look.

"Don't! Please don't! That's brutal of you! But then, you are brutal, aren't you? I suppose, if you weren't, I shouldn't—"

A little nondescript gesture expressed her thought better than she could have put it into words; and with this tribute to the caveman she slipped away again amid the brocades, pedestals, and old furniture.

[CHAPTER III]

Marillo Park, N. Y., is more than a park; it is a life. When a social correspondent registers the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Robert Bradley Collingham, Miss Edith Collingham, and Mr. Robert Bradley Collingham, Junior, have arrived at Collingham Lodge, Marillo Park, from their camp in the Adirondacks, their farm in Dutchess County, or their apartment in Fifth Avenue, the implications are beyond any that can be set forth in cold print. Cold print will tell you that a man has died, but it can convey no adequate notion of the haven of peace into which presumably he has entered.

Cold print might describe Marillo Park as it might describe Warwick Castle or the Château of Chenonceau, with a catalogue of landscapes and architectural minutiæ. It could tell you of charming houses set in artfully laid-out grounds, of gardens, shrubberies, and tennis courts, of the club, the swimming pool, the riding school, the golf links; but only experience could give you that sense of being beyond contact with outside vulgarity which is Marillo's specialty. Against its high stone wall outside vulgarity breaks as the sea against a cliff; before its beautiful grille gate it swirls like a river at the foot of a lawn with no possibility of overflow. As nearly as may be on earth, the resident of Marillo Park can be barricaded against the sordid, and withdrawn from all things inharmonious with his own high thought.

But every Eden has its serpent, and at Collingham Lodge on that October afternoon this Satan had taken the form of a not very good-looking young man who was pacing the flagged terrace side by side with Miss Edith Collingham. I emphasize the fact that he was not good-looking for the reason that, in his role of Satan, it was an added touch of the diabolic. Tall, thin, and stormy eyed, his knifelike features were streaked with dark shadows which seemed to fall in the wrong places in his face. When it is further said that he was a young professor of political economy in a near-by university, without a penny or much prospect in the world, it will easily be seen how devilish a creature he was to have crept into such a paradise.

He had crept in by means of being occasionally invited by young Sidebottom, whose family had the next estate to Collingham Lodge. Walls and hedges being unknown at Marillo, the lawns melted into one another with no other hint of demarcation than could be sketched by clumps of shrubs or skillfully scattered trees. You could be off the Collingham grounds and on to those of the Sidebottoms without knowing you had crossed a boundary. Between trees and shrubs you could slip from the one place to the other and not be seen from either.

"She might meet him a thousand times and you or I wouldn't know it," Mrs. Collingham had pointed out to her husband when her suspicions were first roused. "All she's got to do is to go round that lilac bush and she might do anything."

True; besides which, the mere chances of that hospitality without which Marillo could not be Marillo would throw together any two young people minded so to come. In such spacious freedom, an ineligible young professor could touch the hem of the garment of a banker's daughter without forcing the issue in any way.

With the conversation between Miss Edith Collingham and Professor Ernest Ayling we have almost nothing to do. It is enough to say that, from the rapidity of the young pair's movements and the animation of their gestures, Mrs. Collingham judged that they were very much in earnest. Looking out from what was known as the terrace drawing-room, she was convinced that no two young people could talk like that without an understanding between them.

She had been led to the terrace drawing-room by the sound of voices and the fact that it was the end of the house toward the Sidebottoms' premises. Against a background of cannas, dahlias, and gladioli, with maples flinging their flame and crimson up into a golden sky, the two figures passing and repassing the long French windows were little more than silhouettes. Such scraps of their phrases as drifted her way told her that they were up to nothing more criminal than settling the affairs of a distracted universe, but she had no intention that they should settle anything. At the appropriate moment she decided to make her presence felt.

In doing this she was supported by the knowledge that her presence was a presence to be felt impressively. Of her profile, it was mere economy of effort to say that it was like a cameo, aristocratically regular and clear-cut. Her hair, prematurely white, lent itself to the simplest dressing, too classic to be a mode. A figure, of which it would have been vulgar to use the word "plump," carried the most sumptuous costumes with regal suitability. Studied, polished, and perfected, she wore her finish as a mask that concealed the lioness mother which she was.

It was the lioness mother who confronted the young couple as they turned in their promenade. Edith alone came forward. Her professor being given a bow so cold that it was tantamount to a dismissal, as a dismissal was obliged to take it. Within a minute, he was down both the flowered terraces and out of sight behind the lilac bush.

Mrs. Collingham's enunciation had the exquisite precision of the rest of her personality.

"I thought I asked you, dear, not to encourage that impossible young man to come here."

"But I can't stop his coming without encouragement, can I, mother darling?"

Mother darling moved to the edge of the flagged pavement, looking down on the blaze of summer's final fireworks. On each of the two lower terraces fountains played, their back drops falling on the water lillies in the basins. It being the moment for a strong appeal, she sounded the first note without turning round.

"Edith, I wonder if you have the faintest idea of a mother's ambitions for her children?"

Instinct had taken her to the root of the whole difference between the two generations in the family. Instinct took Edith to the same spot in her reply.

"I think I have. But, on the other hand, I wonder if a mother has the faintest idea of her children's ambitions for themselves."

Following an outflanking movement, Mrs. Collingham threw her line a little farther.

"It's curious how, as your father and I approach middle age, we feel that you and Bob are going to disappoint us."

"I'm sure I speak for Bob as well as for myself when I say that we wouldn't disappoint you willingly. It's only that the things we want are so different."

"Ours—your father's and mine—are simple and natural."

"That's the way Bob's and mine seem to us."

She was in a tennis costume carelessly worn and not very fresh. A weatherbeaten Panama pulled down to shade her eyes gave a touch of cowboy picturesqueness to an ensemble already picturesque rather than pretty or beautiful. Leaning nonchalantly against the high, carved back of a teakwood chair, the figure had a leopard grace to which the owner seemed indifferent. Indifference, boredom, dissatisfaction focused the expression of the delicate, irregular features to a wistful longing as far as possible from the mother's brisk self-approval. All this was emphasized by a pair of restless, intelligent eyes, of which one was blue and the other brown.

The mother turned round with an air of expostulation.

"I'm sure I can't see what you want to make of your life. You seem to have no ideals, not any more than Bob. You're not pretty, but you're not ugly; and you've a kind of witchiness most pretty girls have to do without. If you'd only dress with some decency and make the best of yourself, you could take as well as any other girl."

"Yes; if the game was worth the candle."

"But surely some game is worth the candle."

"Oh, certainly; only, not this one, of taking—in the way you seem to think girls want to take."

"Some girls do."

"Oh, some girls, of course—only, not—not my kind."

"But what is your kind? That's what I can't understand."

The girl smiled—a dim, distant, rather wistful smile that merely fluttered on the lips and died like a feeble light.

"And that's what I can't explain to you, mother darling."

"Are we so far apart as that?"

"We're not far apart at all. It's only that I'm myself, while you want me to be a continuation of you."

"I don't want anything but what will make for your happiness."

"My happiness as you see it for me—not as I see it for myself."

"But you're my child, Edith. I can't be without hopes for you."

Another dim, quickly dying smile was the only answer to this as Edith picked up her racket from the teakwood chair and moved toward the house. On a note that would have been plaintive had it not been so restrained, Mrs. Collingham continued:

"Edith darling, I don't think there's been a moment since you were born when I haven't dreamed of a brilliant future for you, and now—"

"But, oh, mother dear, what's the use of a brilliant future, as you call it, when your whole soul is set on something else?"

The lioness mother was roused.

"But it shouldn't be set on something else. That's what I resent. Don't think for a minute that your father and I mean to stand by and see you throw yourself away."

"I didn't know there was any question of my doing that."

"That boy will never be anything better than a university professor—never in this world; and if it comes to our forbidding it, forbid it we shall without hesitation."

The girl's head was flung up. Boredom and indifference passed out of the strange eyes. For an instant the conflict of wills seemed about to break out into mutual challenge. It was Edith who first regained enough mastery of self to say, quietly.

"You surely wouldn't take that responsibility—whatever I did."

The soft answer having warned the mother of the danger of collision, she subsided to an easier, if a more fretful, tone.

"And Bob's such a worry, too. If your father knew about this Follett girl, I think he would go wild."

"But we don't know anything ourselves—beyond the few hints dropped by Hubert Wray which I'm sure he didn't mean."

"Well, I'm worried. It's the war, I suppose. If he'd only settle down to work—"

"He won't settle down till he marries; and if he marries, it will have to be some girl he's in love with."

"If he were to marry a girl of that class—"

"Girl of what class? What's the good word?"

Mrs. Collingham turned on her son, who stood on the threshold of one of the French windows.

"We're talking about men and women marrying outside of their own class, Bob, and I was trying to say how fatal it was."

"Good Lord! mother, do people still think things like that? I thought they'd rung the bells on them even at Marillo. Wasn't it one of the things we fought for in the war—to wipe out the lines of caste?"

"But not to wipe out ideals, Bob. What fathers and mothers have worked to build up their sons fought to maintain."

Max, the police-dog puppy, who had been poking his nose between Bob's legs, now squeezed his vigorous person through the opening and came out on the terrace joyously. Wagging his powerful tail and sniffing about each of the ladies in turn, he seemed to be saying: "Don't you see that I'm here? Now cheer up, everybody, and let's have a good time."

Bob made a feint at seconding this invitation. Going up to his mother, he slipped an arm round her waist and kissed her.

"Old lady, you're years behind the times. What fathers and mothers built turned out to be a rotten old world which they've handed to us to bolster up. We're tackling the job as well as we can, but you must give us a free hand."

Releasing herself from his embrace, she stood with an air of authority.

"If giving you a free hand means looking on at the frustration of our hopes, you'll have to learn, Bob, that your father and mother still have some of the energy that placed you where you are."

"Of course you've placed us where we are, mother dear," Edith agreed, pacifically, "but that's just the point. Because we are where you've placed us, we're crazy to go on to something else. Isn't that the way of life—the perpetual struggle for what we haven't got? Because you and father didn't have a big house and a big position to begin with, you worked till you got them. Bob and I were born to them, and so—"

"It's this way, old lady," Bob broke in. "All your generation had bigness on the brain. It was a kind of disease like the water that swells a baby's head. They used to think it was a specially American disease till they found out it was English, French, German, and every other old thing. The whole lot of you puffed up till the earth hadn't room for you, and you made the war to push one another off."

"I didn't make the war, Bob. I've never been anything but a poor mother, striving and praying for her children."

"Well, you did push one another off—to the tune of ten or twelve millions, mostly the young. Since then, the universal disease of swelled head is being got under control, as they say of epidemics. Only the left-overs catch it still, and Edith and I aren't that. Hardly anyone of our age is. We just don't take the germ. Not that we blame you and your lot, old lady—"

"Thanks, Bob."

"Oh, don't thank me. I'm just telling you."

"And the point of your homily is—"

"That our generation all over the world has got out of Marillo Park. Marillo Park is a back number. It's as out of date as the hat you wore five years ago. You couldn't give it away to the poor, because the poor don't wear that kind of thing, and the rich have gone on to a new fashion. Listen, old lady. The thing I'd hate worst of all for dad and you is to see you left behind, trying to put over the footlights a lot of old gags that the audience swallowed in its time, but which don't get a laugh any more. The actor who tries to do that is pass-ay forever—"

"If you'd keep to English, Bob, I should understand you a little better."

Bob grew excited, laying down the law on the palm of his left hand with the forefinger of the right, while Max, all aquiver, scored the points with his terrific tail.

"I'll not only keep to English, but I'll tell you the line to take if you want to remain the up-to-date, bright-as-a-button old lady you are."

"I should be grateful."

"Then here goes. Take a long breath. Keep your wig on. Put your feet in plaster casts so as not to kick." He summoned his forces to speak strongly. "If Edith was to pick out a man she wanted to marry—and I was to pick out a girl—no matter who—it would be the chic new stuff for father and you—"

But the chic new stuff for father and her was not laid down on the palm of the hand for the reason that a portly shadow was seen to move within the dimness of the drawing-room. At the same time, Max's joy was stifled by the appearance on the terrace of Dauphin, the Irish setter, who was consciously the dog en tître of the master of the house. Mrs. Collingham composed herself. Edith picked up a tennis ball from the flags and jumped it on her racket. Bob put a cigarette in his mouth and struck a match. It was the unwritten law of the family not to risk intimate discussion before a tribunal too august.

Once he had reached the terrace, it was plain that Collingham was tired. His shoulders were hunched; his walk had no spring in it.

"I'm all in," he sighed, sinking into the teakwood chair.

"Poor father!"

Edith dropped a hand on his shoulder. He drew it down to his lips and kissed it.

"You'd like your tea, wouldn't you?" The solicitude was his wife's. "We were just going to have it. Bob, do find Gossip and tell him to bring it here."

Bob limped into the house and out again. By the time he had returned, his father was saying:

"Yes; it's been a trying day. Among other things I've had to dismiss old Follett."

"The devil you have!"

The exclamation was so heartfelt as to turn all eyes on the young man.

"Why, Bob dear," his mother asked, craftily, "what difference does it make to you?"

Bob did his best to recapture a position he was not yet ready to abandon.

"It may not make any difference to me, but—but how is he going to live?"

"Is that your responsibility?"

Edith came to her brother's rescue.

"It's some one's responsibility, mother."

"Then let some one shoulder it. Bob doesn't have to saddle himself with it, unless—"

Convinced that, in the presence of his father, his mother wouldn't speak too openly, Bob felt safe in a challenge.

"Yes, mother? Unless—what?"

Mother and son exchanged a long look.

"Unless you go—very far out of your way."

"Well, suppose I did go—very far out of my way?"

"I should have to leave it with your father to deal with that."

"Well, it wouldn't be the first time dad's been philanthropic."

Collingham looked up wearily. He was sitting with one leg thrown across the other, his left hand stroking Dauphin's silky head.

"You can be as philanthropic as you like outside business, Bob," he said, with schooled, hopeless conviction. "Inside, it's no go. Once you admit the principle of treating your employees philanthropically, business methods are at an end."

"I don't think modern economics would agree with you, daddy," Edith objected. "Aren't we beginning to realize that the well-being of employees, even when they're no longer of much use—"

Collingham looked up with a kind of longing in his eyes.

"I wish I could believe that, Edie, but an efficiency expert wouldn't bear you out."

"An efficiency expert doesn't know everything. He studies nothing but the individual private, whereas a political economist knows what's going on all up and down the line."

To Collingham this was like the doctrine of universal salvation to a Calvinist theologian. He would have seized it had he dared, but for daring it was too late. He had trained himself otherwise. On a basis of expert advice and individual efficiency Collingham & Law's had been built up. All he could do was to grasp at the personal.

"Where did you hear that?"

"You can read all about it in Mr. Ayling's last book, The Economic Value of Good Will."

As she passed through the French window into the house, her mother turned with a gesture of both outspread hands.

"There! You see! What did I tell you? She has the effrontery to read his books and name him openly."

But too dispirited to take up the gauntlet, Collingham looked, with welcome, toward Gossip, who appeared in the doorway with the tea.

[CHAPTER IV]

The Folletts came together every evening about six, chiefly by the process known to American cities as commuting. Commuting brought them to Number Eleven Indiana Avenue, Pemberton Heights. Seen from the New York river-front, Pemberton Heights, on top of a great cliff on the New Jersey side of the Hudson, suggests a battlemented parapet. By day, its outline is a fringe against the sky; by night, its clustering lights are like a constellation.

Indiana Avenue is one of those rare spots in the neighborhood of New York where a measure of beauty is still reserved for the relatively poor. The heights are too high for the railways to scale, too inconvenient for factories. The not-very-well-to-do can find shelter there, as the mediæval peoples of the Mediterranean coast found it in the rock towns where the pirates couldn't follow them. It is hardly conceivable that industry will ever climb to this uncomfortable perch, or that much competition will put up rents. Too inaccessible for the social rich, and too isolated for the still more social poor, Pemberton Heights is the refuge of those who don't mind the trouble of getting there for the sake of the compensation.

The compensation is largely in the way of air and panorama. Both have a tendency to take away your breath. You would hardly believe that so much of New York could be visible all at once. The gigantic profile of Manhattan is sketched in here with a single stroke, while the river is thronged like a busy street seen from the top of a tower. City smoke rolls up and ocean mist rolls in while you are looking on. Sunrise, moonrise; moonset, sunset; stars in the heaven and lights along the darkened waterway, afford to the not-very-well-to-do, cooped up all day in kitchens, offices, and factories, a morning and evening glimpse into the ecstatic.

Number Eleven was somewhat withdrawn from all this toward the middle of the plateau. Built at a period when an architect's ambition was chiefly to do something singular, it had a great deal of sloping roof, with windows where you would not expect them. Pemberton Heights being held up bravely to rain and snow, the color of the house was a weatherbeaten brown. Two hydrangea trees, shaped like open umbrellas, and covered now with white blossoms fading to rose, stood one on each side of the front door in the center of two tiny grassplots. There was a piazza, of course, where most of the family leisure was passed, and in the yard behind the house there stood a cherry tree. All up and down the street for the length of about half a mile were similar little houses, each with its piazza and its architectural oddity, homes of the not-very-well-to-do, content with their relative poverty. Among themselves they formed a society as distinct and as active as that of Marillo Park, and out of it they got as much pleasure as the Sidebottoms and Collinghams from their more exclusive forgatherings.

In this soil, the Folletts had taken root with the ease of transplantation of the Anglo-Saxon race. Drawn to Pemberton Heights by the presence there of other Canadians, Josiah had bought the little house for seven thousand dollars. On this he had paid four, raising the other three on a mortgage which it was his ruling desire to pay off. The mild, tenacious optimism of his nature convinced him he should be able to do this, in spite of the danger of being "fired" hanging over him for two years. The fact that, though the months kept passing, that sword didn't fall inspired the belief that it never would. He had grown so sure of this that with regard to the warning issued by Collingham he had never taken his wife into his confidence. For one thing, it was useless to alarm her when it might be without cause, and for another....

But that was the secret tragedy of Josiah's life. He had not made good the promise he gave when Lizzie Scarborough married him, and the falling of the sword would be the final proof of it. It would mean that his whole patient, painstaking life had fitted him for nothing better than the scrap heap. That he should come to such an end he couldn't believe possible. That after nearly fifty years of uncomplaining drudgery he should be flung aside as useless to man in general and worse than useless to his family was not, he argued, in keeping with the will of God. It was to the will of God he trusted more than to the mercy of Bradley Collingham, though he trusted to them both.

When he married Lizzie in the little town of Lisgar, Nova Scotia, he had been a bank clerk. A bank clerk in Canada is a kind of young nobleman at the beginning of what may be a striking career, after the manner of a fledgling in diplomacy. The banking institutions being few and large, the employees are moved from post to post, much like attachés or army officers. As moves bring promotion, the clerk becomes a teller and the teller a cashier and the cashier a branch manager and the branch manager a wealthy man in touch with world-wide issues. It was the kind of progress Josiah expected when he married Lizzie Scarborough, the kind of future they dreamed of and talked about, and which never came.

Josiah lacked something. You couldn't put your finger on the flaw in his energy, but you knew it was there. He was moved about, of course, but with little or no promotion. Other men got that, but he was ignored. Harum-scarum young fellows whose ignorance of bookkeeping was a scandal were lifted over his head, while he and Lizzie stared at each other in perplexity.

Hardest of all for him was that, as years went by, Lizzie herself lost belief in him. More tender with him for his failure, she nevertheless saw that he was not the man she had supposed in the gay young days at Lisgar, and he saw that she saw. She gave up the hope of promotion before he did. The best to which they came to aspire was a "raise."

It was bitter for Lizzie because, as she was fond of saying to herself, and now and then to the children, she had been born a lady. This was no more than the truth. Whatever the meaning given to the word, Lizzie fulfilled it, though her claims were more than moral ones. The Scarboroughs had been great people in Massachusetts before the Revolution. The old Scarborough mansion, still standing in Cambridge, bears witness to the generous scale on which they lived. But they left it as it stood, with its pictures, its silver, its furniture, its stores, rather than break their tie with England. Scorned by the country from which they fled, and ignored by that to which they remained true, their history on Nova-Scotian soil was chiefly one of descent. A few of them prospered; a few reached high positions in the adopted land, but most of them lacked opportunity as well as the will to create it. True, Lizzie's father was a clergyman; but her sisters married poorly, her brothers dropped into any chance jobs that came their way, while she herself got only such fulfillment of her dreams as she found at Pemberton Heights. Even the move to New York which Josiah had made when convinced that the Bank of the Maritime Provinces held no further hope for him had not greatly prospered them. Five years of drifting between one bank and another were followed by five steady years with Collingham & Law; but even that peaceful time was now at an end.

While the Collinghams were drinking tea on the flagged terrace, and Jennie was on the ferryboat, and Teddy dressing and skylarking after his plunge at the gym, and Follett nearing home, Lizzie was on her knees pinning up the draperies she was "making over" for Gussie. Pansy, the daughter of a bulldog and a Boston terrier, whose pansy-face had in it a more than human yearning, stood looking on, with forelegs wide apart.

Gussie was fifteen, pretty, pert, and impatient.

"Everyone'll see that it's the old thing you've been wearing since I dunno when."

Accustomed to this plaint, Lizzie thought it useless to reply.

"I'd rather not have a rag to wear than a thing everyone's sick of the sight of. Momma, why can't I have a new dress, right out and out?"

"My darling, you'll have a new dress when your father gets his raise. It must come before long; but I can't possibly give it you till then."

"I wish you'd stop talking," came from Gladys, who was busy with her lessons in a corner. "How can I study with all this row going on? Momma, what's the meaning of 'coagulation'?"

Coagulation explained, the fitting finished, and a dispute adjusted between the two children, Lizzie began to spread the table for supper, Gussie helping her. Most of the downstairs portion of the house being thrown into one large living room, the dining table stood at the end nearest the kitchen and pantry. It was a pleasure to watch the supple movements of Gussie's figure, and the flittings of her slim-wristed hands as she took the plates and laid them in their places. Most people said she would one day be prettier than Jennie, but as yet that was only promise.

Quite apparent was the fact that the mother had been more beautiful than any of her daughters was ever likely to become. At fifty-odd, it was a beauty that still had youth in it. Worn with the duties of providing for a husband and four children, it retained a quality proud and aloof. In her scouring and cooking and endless domestic round, Lizzie was like an actress dressed and made up for a humble part rather than really living it. The Scarborough tradition, which had first refused to bend to king against people and again to yield to people against king, had survived in this woman fighting for her inner life against failure, poverty, and sordidness.

She was singing at her work when the front door opened and Josiah came in. He stood for a minute in the little entry, surveying the living-room absently, while Pansy pranced about his feet. Gladys was still at her lessons, Gussie laying out the knives and forks.

"Where's your mother?"

Gladys jumped up and ran to him. She was his youngest, his darling, just over twelve. He had always hoped to do better by her than by the older ones.

"Hello, daddy!" With her arms round his neck, she was pulling his face down to hers.

"Where's your mother?" he asked of Gussie, having advanced into the room.

Gussie looked up from her task to inform him that her mother was in the kitchen, but, seeing his gray face and shambling gait, she paused with a fork in her hand.

"You're all right, daddy, aren't you?"

The sound of voices having called Lizzie from her work, she stood on the threshold of the pantry, drying her hands on the corner of her apron. Before he said a word she knew that the calamity which forever threatens those dependent on a weekly wage had fallen on the family.

"Lizzie, I'm fired."

She had never had to take a blow like this, not even when the three who came before Jennie had died in babyhood. This was the worst and hardest thing her imagination could conjure up, because it meant not only the sweeping away of their meager income, but her husband's defeat as a man.

Going to him, she laid her hands on his shoulders and tried to look into the eyes that avoided hers in shame.

"We'll meet it, Jo," she said, quietly. "We've been through other things. I've saved a little money ahead—nearly a hundred dollars. Don't feel badly. I'm glad you're out of Collingham & Law's, where you've said yourself that your desk was in a draught. You'll get another job, with bigger pay, and perhaps"—she sprang to the great glorious hope she was always cherishing—"and perhaps Teddy will earn more money and be a great success."

"Hel-lo, ma!"

Teddy himself was swinging down the room, Pansy capering round him with her silvery bark. Having tossed his cap on the sofa, he caught his mother in a bearish hug. Fresh from his bath, gleaming, ruddy, clear-eyed, stocky rather than short, he was a Herculean cub, the makings of a man, but as yet with no soul beyond play. No one had ever seen him serious. It was a drawback to him at Collingham & Law's, where he skylarked his way through everything. "You must knock the song-and-dance out of that young blood," was Mr. Bickley's report on him, "or he'll never earn his pay."

Before his mother could say anything he was tickling her under the chin with little "clks!" of the tongue, Pansy assisting by springing halfway to his shoulder. The sport ended, he held her out at his strong arm's length, laughing down into her eyes.

"Good old ma!—the best ever! What have you got for supper?"

She told him, as nearly as possible as if nothing else was on her mind. Then she added:

"You've got to know, Teddy darling. They've discharged your father from Collingham & Law's."

Confusedly, Teddy Follett knew he had received a summons, the call to be a man. Hitherto he had been a boy; he had thought himself a boy; he had called himself a boy. Even in the navy he had been with boys who were treated as boys. The pang of agony he felt now was that he was a boy still—with a man's part to play.

He did his best to play it on the instant.

"Oh, is he? Then that's all right. I'll be making more money soon and be able to swing the whole thing."

Gussie was here the discordant element.

"You've got to make it pretty quick, then, and be smarter than you've ever been before."

He turned away from the group in which his mother watched him with adoring eyes while his father stood with gaze cast down like a criminal.

"I'm sorry to put the burden on you at your age, my boy," he said, brokenly, "but perhaps I may get another job, after all, and one that'll pay better."

Teddy didn't hear this, not that he was so far away, but because he was listening to that call which seemed so impossible to respond to. He would have to be a man; he would have to earn big money, and at present he didn't see how. Fifty bucks a week, he was saying to himself, was hardly enough to run the family, and he had only eighteen!

He was standing with his back to them all, his hands in his pockets, when the front door opened again. Jennie came in all aglow and abloom after her walk from the street cars.

"Well, what's the pose?" she asked, briskly, of Teddy, beginning to take off her jacket. "You ought to be model to a sculptor."

"Jen," he whispered, hoarsely, before she could join the others, "pa's fired."

To take this information in, Jennie paused with her arms still outstretched in the act of taking off her jacket.

"Do you mean they don't want him any more at Collingham & Law's?"

"That's the right number."

"But—but what are we going to do?"

"That's for you and me to say. It's up to us, Jen. Pa'll never get another job, not on your life, unless it's running a lift. We've got to shoulder it—you and me between us."

Jennie passed on into the room and down to the group round the table. The glow had gone out of her cheeks, but she was free from her brother's dismay. To begin with, she was a woman, and he was only a man. All his adventures would have to be dull ones in the line of work whereas hers.... She could hear Wray saying, as he had said only two hours ago, "You could marry Bob Collingham if you wanted to."

She didn't want to—as far as that went; but if the worst were to come to the worst and they should be in need of bread....

"Hello, mother! Hello, daddy!" Jennie was quite self-possessed. "Teddy's been telling me. Too bad, isn't 't? But something will turn up. What is there for supper, Gus?"

Gussie minced round the table, putting on the salt cellars.

"There's pickled humming birds for princesses," she said, witheringly. "After that there'll be honey-dew jam."

"Then I'll go up and take my hat off."

This coolness had the inspiriting effect of an officer's calm on a sinking ship. It was an indication that life could go on as usual; and if life could go on as usual, all wasn't lost.

"And for mercy's sake," Jennie added, turning to leave them, "don't everybody look so glum. Why, if you knew what I could tell you you'd all be ordering champagne."

So they were tided over the dreadful minute, which meant that they found power to go on with the preparations for supper and to sit down to supper itself. There the old man cheered up sufficiently to be able to tell what had passed between him and the head of the firm. He was still doing this when Teddy sprang to his feet, striking the table with a blow that made the dishes jump.

"God damn Bradley Collingham!" he cried, with his mouth full. "I'll do something to get even with him yet—if I have to go to the chair for it."

"Sit down, you great gump—talking like that!" Gussie pulled her brother by the coat till he sank back into his seat. "Momma, you should send him away from the table."

"That's a very wicked thing to say, my boy—" Josiah was beginning.

"Let him talk as he likes," the mother broke in, calmly. "Going to the chair can't be so terrible—if you have a reason."

She went on carving as if she had said nothing strange.

"Well, ma, I call that the limit," Jennie commented.

"Oh no, it isn't," the mother returned, with the new strength which seemed to have come to her within half an hour. "I'm ready to say a good deal more."

She looked adoringly toward Teddy, who after his outburst had returned sheepishly to his plate, while Pansy stood apart from them all, wise, yearning, and yet implacable, a little doggy Fate.

[CHAPTER V]

No difference of standard in the Collingham household was so obvious as that between Dauphin, the Irish setter, and Max, the police dog. The situation was specially hard on Dauphin. To have owned Collingham Lodge and its occupants during all his conscious life, and then one day to find himself obliged to share this dominion with a stranger had given him in his declining years a pessimistic point of view. It had made him proud, cold, withdrawn, like a crusty old aristocrat forced in among base company. To the best of his ability he ignored the police dog, though it was difficult not to be aware of the presence of a being too exuberant to appreciate disdain.

For Dauphin, the most beastly experience of the day began about four each afternoon, at the minute when the dog-clock told him that his master might be expected home. That was the hour at which from time immemorial he had taken possession of the great front portico where the distant burr of the motor-car first reached him. When the burr became a throb he knew it was passing the oak that marked the Collingham boundary; and, since it had arrived on his own ground, he could run down the driveway to meet it. This had been his exclusive right. To be joined daily now by a frisky, irrepressible pup made him feel like an old man tied to an insupportable young wife from whom his own death will be the sole deliverance. Life to Dauphin had thus become a mingling of impatience and anguish, poorly masked beneath an air of dignity.

And as far as he could judge, his master's wife, of whom he had no great opinion, had begun to share these emotions. Anguish and impatience had become of late the chief elements in the aura she threw out, and by which dogs take their sense of men. It was not that her words or expressions betrayed her. It was only that when she came within his sphere of perception he was aware that she felt the kind of passion the police dog roused in himself.

He was aware of it on this May afternoon, more than six months after she had first learned of Bob's infatuation for the Follett girl, when she came out on the portico to listen for the expected car. She would come out, listen, and go in. Each time she came out, each time she listened, each time she retired, he felt the sweeping to and fro of an imperious will worried or frustrated, though he sat on his haunches and gave no sign. He couldn't give a sign, because Max would misunderstand it. There he was, down on the lawn before the portico, grinning, prancing, joking, calling names—names quite audible in dog intercourse, though a human being couldn't catch them—and the least little movement Dauphin made would be taken as concession. The old setter was sorry. He would have liked showing his master's wife—he didn't consider her his mistress—that he understood her distress; but he was nailed to the doorstep by force majeure.

And the woman envied him. He was perfectly aware of that. She assumed that dogs had no social problems. All he had to do, she thought, was to sit and blink at the magnolias, hawthorns, and lilacs pursuing one another into bloom. All he had to think of was the up hill and down dale of the view before him, a haze of blue and green and rose melting to the mauve of hills.

As a matter of fact, this was something like what was passing through her mind. A masterful woman, she was nevertheless reaching that point of self-pity where she envied the untroubled dogs. While she carried the cares of so many others, no one else carried hers. All through the winter she had had Edith and Bob on her mind, and now she had Bradley. On leaving for the bank that morning, he had been so terribly upset that she couldn't rest till knowing how he had got through his day. She was the more worried because of being entirely alone and thus thrown in on herself.

Edith had gone to stay with people in the Berkshires. Of that her mother was glad. She meant for the present to keep her there. With her queer ideas, she would only make her brother the more difficult to deal with, though she had not been difficult herself. Nearly seven months had passed, and yet her affair with Ayling was exactly where it had been in the previous October. That was the advantage of a girl; you could always tell where she stood. Edith was tenacious, but not defiant. Though capable of engaging herself to this young man, she would hardly marry him in face of her father's opposition.

Bob, on the other hand, was not only head-strong, but unreasonable. He would marry the Follett girl if she would marry him, whatever might be the consequences. She, his mother, had it "out" with him, and he had said so. It was a terrible thing to have their whole domestic happiness hang on the whim of a creature like the Follett girl; but apparently it did.

She had not spoken to Bob till Hubert Wray had surrendered all he had to tell. He had done this through a process of "pumping" of which he himself had hardly been aware. Having ascertained that his New England connections were unexceptional, Junia had been attentive to him through the winter, making him feel that Collingham Lodge was a second home. What he didn't tell to her he told to Edith, and what Edith knew the mother had no great difficulty in finding out. Thus when, on the previous Saturday, Bob was about to leave for a party on Long Island, they had had the plain talk which could no longer be deferred.

They had had it after lunch, seated on a bench overlooking the tennis court. They had come out ostensibly to talk over the sacrifice of the pink-and-white hawthorn in the shade of which they sat in favor of extending the court so that Bob and Edith could both have parties simultaneously. While the new court would be an improvement, they would regret the celestial flowering of the hawthorn whenever, as at present, it was May.

"Not that it would make so very much difference to your father and me," Junia began, in a quavering tone, "if things we're afraid of were to happen."

So the subject was opened up. Bob could only ask, "What things?" and his mother could only tell him.

"It's quite true, old lady," he confessed. "You might as well know it first as last."

Junia had not brought up her children without having learned that, while Edith could be controlled, Bob could only be managed. With Edith, she could say, "I forbid," with Bob, it had to be, "I suffer."

"Of course, dear," she said now, "I'm your mother, and whatever you do I shall try to accept. It will be hard, naturally—it's hard already—but you can count on me."

He took her hand and squeezed it.

"Thanks, old lady."

"Of course I can't answer for your father. You know for yourself how stern and unyielding he is."

"Oh, I'm not so sure about that. It's always seemed to me that he'd give in to a lot of things, if you'd only let him."

This perspicacity being dangerous, she glided to another aspect of her theme.

"What I don't understand is why, if you've been in love with her for seven or eight months, and you mean to marry her, you haven't done it already."

He took two or three puffs at his cigarette before tossing off:

"I'd do it like a shot, if she would."

"And she won't?"

"Not yet."

"And you think she will?"

"I'm sure she will."

"What makes you so certain?"

"Nothing. I just know."

Having had her fears verified, Junia had no object in pushing the inquiry further. Her duty in life was to take events as they touched her family and mold them for the best. When she called it "the best" she meant it as the best. She was not a worldly woman with mere fashionable ends in view. Eager for the good of her children, she was conscientious in pursuit of the things she truly believed to be worthiest.

All through Sunday she took counsel with herself, going to communion at the restful little Marillo church, and putting new intensity into her devotion. She had guests at lunch and went out to dinner, and, though equal to all the social demands, her mind did not relinquish the purpose she had in view. Could she have accomplished it without her husband's aid, she would probably not have taken him into her confidence. It being her special task to deal with the children, the less he knew of their mistakes and escapades the simpler it was for them all.

It may be an illuminating digression here to say that there had been a time, some fifteen years earlier, when Junia had had an experience as difficult as the one she was facing now. Nothing but a trained subconsciousness had carried her through that, and she looked for the same mainstay of the self to come to her aid again. One of the lessons she had learned at that time was the value of quietude, of reserve in "giving herself away." She was not one to whom this restraint came natural; but for the very reason that it was acquired, it had the intenser force.

It was at a time when they had lived in the Marillo house only a little while, and the Bradley of that day was not the portly, domesticated bigwig of the present. He was a tempestuous sea of passions right at the dangerous flood-tide, the middle forties. The first ardor of married life was at an end for both of them; but while, for her, existence was running more and more into one quiet purposeful stream, for him it was raging off in new directions.

Whatever Junia suspected she was too wise to know it as a certainty. Knowing, she argued, would probably weaken her and do nothing to strengthen him. Already she was more intensely a mother than she was a wife, living in the amazing careers she was planning for her children. Edith would marry an English peer, while Bob would take a brilliant place in his own country. Their victories would be her victories, till, in some far-distant, beatified old age, she would be translated to the stars.

And then one afternoon, when the flagged pavement had only recently been laid and they were drinking tea on it, Bradley had said, right out of a clear sky:

"Junia I don't know whether you've suspected it or not, but for some time past I've had a mistress."

That was the instant when she first learned the value of a schooled subconsciousness. It seemed to her that she had been slain; and yet, with a nerve little less than miraculous, she went on with her tasks among the tea things.

"If you've done it so far without telling me, Bradley," she said, at last, with only the slightest tremor in her tone, "why shouldn't you let me remain ignorant?"

"Does that mean that you don't care if I go on?"

"I think you can answer that as well as I. What I don't care for is to be drawn into an affair from which your own good taste—merely to put it on that ground—should be anxious to leave me out."

He looked at her savagely.

"Don't you resent it any more than that?"

"Is that why you're giving me the information—to see how much I resent it?"

"Partly."

"Then I'm afraid you will have your labor for your pains. You'll never see more than you're seeing at this instant."

That stand was a master stroke. It gave her the advantage of being enigmatic. It enabled her to take blows without seeming to have felt them, and to deliver them without betraying the quarter from which the next would come.

Right there and then Bradley had been monstrous enough to suggest that, since she liked Collingham Lodge, she should remain there and let him go away. He would make generous provision for her and the children, and in return expect his divorce.

But she had taken her stand—the enigmatic. She didn't argue; she didn't plead; she didn't reproach him; she didn't treat him to the scene through which weaker women would have put him.

"Bradley, I shall expect you to remain with me," were the only words she used.

And he had remained. Less than two years later, it was she who fixed the sum the other woman was to be paid in order to get rid of her. She was sufficiently in sympathy with her sex to insist on the terms being liberal. "I think she should have fifty thousand dollars," she declared, and fifty thousand dollars the woman received.

So that, if Bradley had lost the first passion of his love for her, he had gained vastly in respect. Hot-tempered, high-handed, impetuous, imperious, as he knew her to be, he saw her curb and compress these qualities till they became a prodigious motor force. If she had not mastered herself, she had mastered the expression of herself till she was an instrument at her own command.

It was as an instrument at her own command that, on the Wednesday morning, before he went to town, she gave her husband as much information as she thought he ought to possess about his son.

"Would you mind sitting down for a minute, Bradley? I've something important to say."

He had come up to her room, as she took her breakfast in bed, after he had had his own downstairs. Wearing a lace dressing jacket and a boudoir cap, she was propped up with pillows, a wicker tray with legs on the coverlet before her. In the canopied Louis Quinze bed of old rich-grained walnut, raised six inches above the floor, she suggested an eighteenth-century French princess, Madame Sophie or Madame Victoire, receiving a courtier at her levée.

Luxurious with a note of chastity was the rest of the chintzy room. The pictures on the walls were sacred ones, copies of old Italian masters. A prie-dieu in a corner supported a bible and a prayer-book in tooled bindings with a coat of arms. The white-paneled wardrobe room seen through a door ajar was as austere as a well-kept sacristy. Perfumed air came in through the open windows, and thrushes were fluting in the trees.

Reminding her that Tims, the chauffeur, would soon be at the door to take him to the bank, Collingham sank into the armchair nearest to the bed. His thoughts were on the amount in the proposed issue of Paraguayan bonds the house would be able to carry.

"It's about Bob," she began, in a tone little more than casual. "Did you know he was in a scrape?"

He started, firing off his brief questions rapidly:

"Who? Bob? What kind of scrape? With a girl?"

"Exactly. With a girl who may give us a good deal of trouble unless the thing is stopped."

If Collingham's heart sank it was not wholly because of the scrape with the girl, but because he was afraid of chickens coming home to roost. Though he had never broached the subject with the boy, he had often wondered as to how he met sexual temptation; and now he was to learn.

"Is it anything very wrong?"

"Only in intention." She sipped her coffee before letting him have the full force of it. "He wants to marry her."

He felt some slight relief.

"Oh, then it's not—"

"No; not as far as he's concerned. As to her—well I presume that she's the usual type."

"Did he tell you himself?"

"He told me himself."

"His job at the bank pays him only two thousand dollars a year. Did he say what else he expected to marry on?"

"We didn't discuss that; but I suppose it would be what he expects you to give him."

"And if I don't give him anything?"

"That's what I wanted to know. If you didn't—"

"He'd call it off?"

"No; perhaps not. But she would."

"Have you any special reason for thinking so?"

"None but my knowledge of—of that kind of woman in general." She went on as quietly as if the incident of fifteen years previously had never occurred. "Men are so guileless about women who have—who have love to sell. They're such simpletons. They so easily think these women like them for themselves when all the while they're only gauging the measure of the pocketbook."

Collingham endeavored not to hang his head, but it seemed to go down in spite of him as the placid voice sketched his program for the day.

Junia had heard her husband say that Mr. Huntley, his second in command, was to go to South America in connection with the issue of Paraguayan bonds. Why shouldn't Bob be sent with him? It would add to his experience and make him feel important. After he had left Asuncion, reasons could be found for keeping him at Lima, Rio, or Buenos Aires till the whole thing blew over. Having accepted the suggestion gratefully, Collingham came to the question he had up to now repressed.

"Who's the girl? I suppose you know."

"She's been posing for Hubert Wray. Bob met her at the studio. Her name is—"

Grasping the arms of the chair, he strained forward.

"Not—not Follett's girl?"

"Yes; that is the name. You dismissed her father from the bank last year." Her eyes followed him as he stumbled to his feet. "But what difference does it make whether it's she or some one else?"

He couldn't tell her. The fear of the vague nemesis he called "chickens coming home to roost" was too obscure. Listening in a daze to the rest of his instructions, he seized them chiefly because they would ease the line he was to take with Bob.

He was to give him no hint that he, the father, had heard anything of the Follett girl. The South American mission could stand on its own merits as extremely flattering. Whatever reluctance Bob might feel, he would see the opportunity as too important to forego. All Junia begged of her husband was to know nothing of Bob's love affairs. If Bob himself brought the subject up, it would be enough to remain firm on the question of money. Of the rest, Junia was willing to take charge, as she would explain to him when he came home in the afternoon.

These instructions Collingham did his best to carry out. At lunch, in the house's private room at the Bowling Green Club, he approached Mr. Huntley on the subject of being responsible for Bob on the errand to Asuncion, and Mr. Huntley expressed himself as delighted. On returning to the bank, Collingham asked Miss Ruddick to bring the young man to the private office.

"Hello, Bob! How are things going?"

"So, so, dad," Bob admitted, guardedly.

"Sit down. I want to talk to you."

Bob sat down gingerly, warily, scenting something in the wind, much like Max or Dauphin from a person's atmosphere. Whatever his mother had been told on Saturday, his father might have learned by Wednesday. Bob would have been sure of this were it not that his mother often had curious reserves.

For Collingham there was nothing to do but to plunge on the subject of South America, and he plunged. But, in his dread of the roosting chicken, he plunged nervously, with a tendency to redden, to stammer, and otherwise to betray himself. Before he had finished Bob was saying inwardly: "Mother's put him wise to Jennie and I'm to be packed off. Well, we'll see."

"It's thumping good of you and Mr. Huntley, dad," he said, aloud; "and I suppose it would do if I gave you my answer in a day or two."

"That's the girl," the father thought; but he obeyed Junia's injunction as to not being explicit when it came to words.

"You see, it's this way, Bob: It's not exactly an invitation that I'm giving you; it's—it's a decision of the bank of which you're an employee. We take it for granted that you'll go if we want to send you."

"And I take it for granted that you won't send me if I don't want to go."

Not to force the issue, Collingham left the matter there, preferring to consult Junia as to what he should do next. To this end, he drove home earlier than usual.

It added to Dauphin's irritation that Max should hear the motor first. With ears cocked like a donkey's, how could he help it? There was nothing in the world that Dauphin despised as he despised the police dog's ears. They were forever pointed, alert, inquisitive, ignoble. But there it was! Max was bounding down the driveway, covering yards at a spring, before the setter could drag himself from his haunches. It was Max, too, who, when the motor passed the oak, gave the first yelp of delight.

But it was Dauphin who, as his master descended from the car, entered into his depression. It was he, too, who perceived the conflict of auras when wife and husband met. Waves of unreasoned dread on the one side encountered a force of clear-eyed determination on the other as the weltering sea comes up against the steadfast rocks.

They began talking as they turned to enter the house, continuing the conversation within the great hall, where only the strip of red carpet running its length and up the fine stairway, two or three bits of old carved English oak, and the brass touches on the wrought-iron baluster, relieved the admirable nudity.

"Now come in here," she said, briskly, having heard all that had passed between him and Bob.

He followed her into the library, where she led the way to the desk.

"Read that."

He ran his eye over the lines written in her legible, decorative hand.

Collingham Lodge,

Marillo Park.

Dear Miss Follett:

My husband and I would be greatly obliged if you could give us a half hour of your time to talk over matters which may prove as important to you as to us. If you could make it convenient to come here to-morrow, Thursday, afternoon, you would find a very good train at three-twenty-five, and one by which to return at five-forty-seven. I inclose a time-table, and you would be met at Marillo Station.

Yours sincerely,

Junia Collingham.

He looked at her wonderingly.

"What's the big idea?"

"A very big idea. Don't you see? We can cut the ground right from under his feet without his ever thinking we had anything to do with it. You personally needn't be supposed to know that this nonsense has ever been in the air. It's too late for me, of course, because he and I have already talked of it. But for you—"

He tapped the paper in his hand.

"But this move I don't understand."

"Well, sit down and I'll tell you."

[CHAPTER VI]

At the minute when Junia Collingham was laying before her husband a plan which would bring comparative wealth to the Follett family, a number of things were happening in and about New York.

First, Lizzie Follett had dropped into a chair to think, an action rare with her. She generally thought as she whisked about her work, but this problem called for concentration. Briefly, it was as to how to cook the supper without heat. The gas-man had just gone away, and the gas for the range had been cut off because she couldn't pay a bill of twenty-nine dollars and sixty-seven cents, or anything on account. This was Wednesday, and she would have no more money till the children got their various pay-envelopes on Saturday.

Though in the back of her mind she blamed herself for an unwise distribution of the week's funds, it was one of those situations in which you blame yourself without seeing how you could have done otherwise. With six to feed, and all the subsidiary expenses of a family to meet, she had twenty-two dollars a week. Of his eighteen, Teddy gave her fifteen, three being needed for car fares and other small necessities. From the six she earned at the studio, Jennie contributed three. Gladys, who was now a cash girl on seven a week, was able to turn in four. Gussie brought nothing to the common fund as yet, for the reason that the three-fifty which Madame Corinne conceded for the privilege of "teaching her the millinery" allowed no margin over what she had to spend.

To Lizzie, during the past six months, life had become an exciting game. How to pay the minimum on every account and yet keep alive her credit had been the calculation with which she rose in the morning and lay down at night. It was a game that could be played successfully for two months, or three months, or four. When it came to six, the heaping-up of unpaid balances made it harder to go on.

It was making it impossible to go on. During the past fortnight she had found her credit stopped at three places in The Square where Pemberton Heights did its shopping. In vain she had tried to transfer her account elsewhere, but Pemberton Heights is no more than a huge village where the status of most families is known. More and more her small amount of cash was needed for cash purposes in order that the family might live.

Lizzie sat down to cast up her assets. She had the small remnants of a ham which could be eaten cold. She had bread and butter. If she could only make tea.... She might have done that in a neighbor's house, but she shrank from exposing a situation which a lucky stroke might change.

At the same moment Josiah was turning away from a wooden bar which shut off an office from the public. He had entered and stood there, meek, unobtrusive, trembling, while none of the young men or young women busy at desks or with one another paid him any attention. When a girl with hair combed over her ears, very bright eyes, and very short skirts, tripped by him accidentally, he managed to stammer out something in which she caught the word "job." The word being significant, and Josiah's appearance more so, she whispered to a gentleman, who left his desk and came forward.

"No; I'm very sorry. We can't do anything for you."

He hadn't waited for the word "job"; he hadn't waited for Josiah to speak at all. He knew the situation so well that his method was to end it there and then. Josiah turned away meekly as he had entered, and with no sinking of the heart. His heart used to sink; but that was four and five months previously, before he had exhausted his emotions. Now the bitterness of death was past. It had passed day by day and inch by inch, by stages of slow agony, leaving him with a dried soul that couldn't suffer any more.

And also at this minute Teddy was standing in his cage at the bank in a very peculiar situation. At least it struck him as peculiar, because for the first time he perceived its opportunities.

For Teddy, too, six months had been a period of development, just as it is for a green fruit when you pick it and lay it in the sun. It ripens, but it ripens green. When you eat it, it has a green flavor, or a flat flavor, or none at all. Teddy was a fruit to be left on the tree to take its time. He was now twenty-one, with the promptings of sixteen. At his own rate of progress, he would probably have reached twenty by the time he was twenty-two, but thirty at twenty-five.

As it was, he had been called on to be thirty when his growth was just beginning. Not merely the circumstances had made this demand on him, but the dependence, more or less unconscious, of the members of the family. They looked to him to do something big because he was a young man. Having heard of other young men who had been financially heroic, they expected him to be the same. The possibilities, open to a bank clerk of twenty-one had no relation to their hopes. Even his mother, chiefly because of her adoration, seemed to feel that he should spring from eighteen to a hundred dollars a week by the force of inner flame.

She didn't say so, of course. She only revealed her sentiments as Pansy revealed hers, by an inextinguishable look. The father did no more than throw emphasis on the boy's responsibility. Jennie and Gladys never said anything at all, but Gussie was quite frank.

"A great big fellow like you and only making eighteen per! Look at poor momma, working her fingers to the bone. I'd be ashamed if I were you. Why, Fred Inglis orders his clothes at Love's and keeps his own Ford."

It was all there in a nut shell—his inability to rise to the occasion in a land where everyone else who was worth his salt had only to shake the money tree and pick up coin. How Fred Inglis did it Teddy couldn't think, when your value by the week was so definitely fixed and a raise lay so far ahead. If he had developed during the past six months, it was mainly through a carking sense of inefficiency.

Meanwhile, he had to do what Gussie told him—watch his mother work her fingers to the bone. In spite of a tendency to squabble, the Folletts were an affectionate family, and the mother was the center of their love. Teddy didn't stop to analyze what she was to them; he only knew that there was nothing he wouldn't be to her. If he could only have compassed it, she would have had a bar-pin like their neighbor, Mrs. Weatherby; she would have worn the skunk neckpiece for which he had once heard her utter a desire; she would have gone out in his Ford oftener than Fred Inglis's mother in his. These things he would have done for her and more, had he but been the financial Titan all American example called on him to become. Between Gussie's taunts and his own What lack I yet? he was reaching a condition of despair.

And now, on this particular afternoon, when nearly everyone had left the bank and Mr. Brunt, to whom he was specially attached, was working later than usual, there was the fruit of the money tree piled up on the ground. Mr. Brunt had gone to the other end of the main office, and would return presently to stow these piles of bills in the safe. These bills were money. Teddy had never consciously dwelt on that fact before. He had been in this same situation a thousand times, when he had nothing to do but put out his hands and stuff his pockets with food and fuel and gas and the interest on the mortgage, and all the other things of which there was such a lack at home, and had never considered that the needed things were here.

He remembered that as a child in Nova Scotia he would occasionally swipe an apple from a cart-load, knowing that the owner couldn't miss it, and had the same sensation now. Here were the piles of bills, all arranged in rows according to their values—a pile of hundreds, a pile of fifties, a pile of twenties, and so on down. Mr. Brunt would come back, as he had done at other times, and put them away without counting them. Having counted them already, he would accept this reckoning for the day. He, Teddy, was left there to see that nothing happened to this treasure.

He was never able to tell how it came about, but without seemingly being able to control the action of his hand he had slipped a twenty-dollar bill from the top of the pile into his own pocket. It was an instant's weakness, followed the next instant by repentance. Teddy knew what theft was. He had not, through his father, had so much to do with banks without being fully aware of the sure and pitiless punishment meted out to it. He didn't mean to steal. He was horror-stricken at the act. Quick as a flash his hand went into his pocket again—but Mr. Brunt was back. The thing that could have been done at once had to be deferred.

Looking for a chance to drop the bill to the floor and make restitution by picking it up, it was annoying that Mr. Brunt should give him none. Mr. Brunt seemed possessed by a demon of speed, so quickly had he locked all the piles in the safe, and then locked the cage behind him. Teddy found himself outside with the bill still burning in his pocket.

Even so there were other possibilities. Going to the washroom, he hung on there till Mr. Brunt had gone home. The cage was made of open wire-work. It was a simple thing to slip a bill through one of the interstices. It would be found next morning on the floor and a fresh running-over of accounts would show where it belonged. Mr. Brunt would wonder how he came to be so careless, but with his balance straight he would be satisfied.

But as Teddy reached the cage, there was Doolan, the night watchman. Doolan was an ex-policeman, too old for public office, but equal to sounding an alarm in case the bank was being robbed. He was a friendly soul, and in strolling up to Teddy had no motive beyond asking after the "ould man" and whether or not he had yet found a job. But Teddy suspected that he was being watched. He didn't know but that Doolan might have seen the movement of the hand which snatched the bill from the pile. When he stirred to go homeward, Doolan might clutch him by the neck. It was a strange, new sensation to feel that within a minute, within a few seconds, the law might have its grip on him. Having said good-by to Doolan and turned away, he took the first steps in expectation of a stern command to come back.

It was another strange new sensation to be walking the familiar ways of Broad Street and Wall Street with this strange new consciousness. There were thousands of bright young men and women streaming to electrics, subways, and ferries in the first stages of commuting, and among them he bore a secret mark. Tramping along in the crowd, he felt like a soldier marching with his comrades to the trenches, but knowing himself picked for death. Luckily, his folly was not even now beyond reparation. He would get to the bank early in the morning, discover the cursed bill lying in some artfully chosen corner of the floor, and restore it to Mr. Brunt. All the same, it was a relief to get away from the fear of detection which he felt to be haunting the streets by plunging into the maw of the subway, where his identity was swallowed up.

At this minute, too, in the studio, Hubert Wray was leaning over Jennie Follett's shoulder and placing before her a rough pencil sketch.

"Take it away!" Jennie cried, tearfully. "I don't want to look at it."

"But, Jennie, I only wish you to see how little it involves."

It was a drawing of a nude woman, her hair coiled on the top of her head, sitting very upright in a marble Byzantine chair, her knees pressed together in the manner of the Egyptian cat-goddess. On a level with her face and poised on the tips of her fingers, she held a human skull which she inspected with slanting, mysterious eyes.

Wray continued to keep the sketch before Jennie, hanging over her shoulder. He was so close that she felt his breath on her neck. He could easily have pressed his lips against her amber-colored hair, and Jennie wished he would. But having long ago made up his mind that she could best be won by a system of starving out, he refrained from doing it. As, however, she persisted in brushing the sketch aside, he straightened himself up.

"Then, Jennie, I'm afraid I can't use you any more—that is, for the present. Since you won't do it, I must get some one who will."

"You could paint another kind of picture," she argued indignantly, "with me with clothes on."

"You don't understand. I'm an artist. An artist doesn't paint the picture he chooses, but the one that's given him to paint."

"No one gave you this to paint. It isn't a commission. It's just your own bad mind."

"I'm not ready to explain what it is. You wouldn't understand. Something comes to you. You've got to obey it. This is the picture I've seen and which I'm obliged to do next. And, besides, it isn't a bad mind, Jennie. The human form is the most—"

"Oh, you don't have to hand me out any hokum about the human form. It's all very well in its place. But you fellows are crazy—the way you stick it up where it doesn't belong. Look at that picture of Sims's you were all so wild about—three women walking in a field, and not a stitch between them. Who'd go out like that? There's no sense in it—"

"It isn't a question of sense, Jennie; it's one of business. If you want to be a model, you must be a model and meet the demands of the market."

She wore the cheap linen suit that had been her best last summer, and the corresponding hat; but her beauty being of the type which subordinates externals to itself, she was more than adorable; she was elegant. With tears still rolling down her cheeks, she pointed at the sketch Wray held in his hand as he stood before her at a distance.

"Do you know what my father would do if he thought I was going to be painted like that? He'd turn me out of doors."

Wray tossed the sketch on the table.

"Then, Jennie, there's no use talking of it any more. You're not that kind of a model, and it's that kind of a model I'm looking for."

"I'm the kind of model you were looking for when you put that advertisement in the paper nearly a year ago. I answered it because you said a pretty girl, not a professional—"

"Yes; that was a year ago. That's what I wanted then. But now it's something else. It doesn't follow that because you're satisfied with an egg for breakfast, that an egg will be enough for every meal all the rest of your life."

She looked up reproachfully.

"Yes; all the rest of your life! That's the way you talk. Nothing will ever be enough for you all the rest of your life."

"No, Jennie; nothing—not as far as I see now."

"And yet you expect me to stake everything—"

"You must choose your words there, Jennie. I don't expect you to do anything. There may have been a time when I hoped—but that's all over. We won't talk of it. You've made up your mind; I must make up mine. There's nothing between us now but a question of business. I'm looking for a model who does this kind of thing, and it doesn't suit you to serve my turn. Well, that settles it, doesn't it? Our little account is paid up to date, and so—"

She stumbled to her feet. The only form her resentment took was a trembling of the lip and the streaming of more tears.

"But what can I do?"

"Do you mean for a living?"

As she nodded speechlessly, he smiled, with a faint shrug of the shoulders.

"That's not for me to decide, is it, Jennie? Once you've left me—"

"I'm not leaving you. You're driving me away."

"Suppose we said that life was separating us? Wouldn't that express it better? We've—we've liked each other. I've never made any secret of it on my side—have I, Jennie?—though you're so terribly discreet on yours. And yet life—"

"I've only been discreet about one thing."

"But that one thing is the whole business."

"And I wouldn't be discreet about that if there was any other way."

"There's the way I've told you about."

"Yes; and be left high and dry after two or three years, neither one thing nor the other."

"Isn't that looking pretty far ahead?"

"It's not looking farther ahead than a girl has to. It's easy enough to talk. There you'd be, able to walk off without a sign on you; whereas I'd have to lie down and die or—or find some one else."

"Well, there'd be that possibility, wouldn't there? They're not so difficult for a pretty girl to find when—"

She stamped her foot.

"I hate you!"

"Oh no, you don't, Jennie. You love me—only, you won't let yourself—"

"And I never will—never—never—never! Not if I was starving in the streets—so help me God!"

She was running toward the model's exit when he called after her.

"Then you leave me to work with another woman, Jennie—another woman sitting in your place—another woman—" When she threw him a despairing glance he snatched the sketch from the table and held it up to her. "Another woman—dressed like that!"

But out on the stairs she paused. Anger was giving place to fear. It was, first of all, a fear of the other woman dressed like that, and then it was a fear not less agonizing of the loss of her six a week.

Her six a week was all that stood between Jennie and the not very carefully veiled contempt of the family. In the testing to which the past half year had subjected them all, Jennie had not made very good. Six a week had been her measure. For obscure reasons which none of them could fathom, she had proved incapable of really lucrative work. She had tried to get employment with other artists who would leave her free for her hours with Wray, but she had failed. She had failed, too, in stores, factories, offices, and dressmaking establishments. Perhaps they saw she was only half hearted in her attempts; perhaps her air of helplessness told against her. "She was too much like a lady," had been one employer's verdict, and possibly that was true. Whatever the reason, she seemed a creature not primarily meant to work, but to be utilized in some other way. The question was as to that way. "You're splendid to love," little Gladys had whispered one day, when Jennie was crying to herself, and much in her recent experience confirmed this opinion. In her applications for something to do, it had more than once been made plain to her that money could be made by other means than by punching a time clock at seven.

But she couldn't retrace her steps and go back to Wray. She thought of it. She had chosen to descend by the stairs instead of by the lift which served the huge studio building, in order to give herself the chance of changing her mind. She went down a few steps and stood still, then a few more steps and stood still. If it had been only a question of the money she might have swallowed her pride and returned to throw herself at his feet.

But there was the other woman—dressed like that! He had dared to invoke her. Well, let him invoke her. Let him paint her; let him do anything he liked. She, Jennie, would break her heart over it; but it would be easier to break her heart than go back.

And yet not to go back made her feet like lead as she dragged herself down the interminable steps.

[CHAPTER VII]

"Shall I ever go in or out of this door again?"

Jennie lingered on the threshold to ask herself this question, and, as she did so, saw Bob Collingham lift his hat.

For the time being she had forgotten him. That is, she had a way of putting him out of her mind except when, as he expressed it to herself, he came bothering her. Bothering her meant asking her to marry him, which he had done perhaps twenty times. Each time she refused him she considered that it was for good. There was a quality in him that raised her ire—a certainty that, pressed by need, she would one day come to him. That, Jennie said to herself, would be the last thing! She wouldn't do it as long as there was any other possibility on earth. In view, however, of the state of things at home and Wray's cold-bloodedness at the studio it had sometimes seemed to her of late as if earth would not afford her any other possibility.

If she welcomed him now, it was chiefly as a distraction from thoughts which, were she to keep dwelling on them, would drive her mad. Her temperament being naturally happy, anguish was the more anguishing for being so unnatural. The mere necessity of having to strive with Bob called forth in her that spirit of sex-wrestling which was not so much second nature in her as it was first.

She greeted him, therefore, with a sick little smile, and allowed him to limp along beside her. The studio building was in a street in the Thirties and east of Lexington Avenue. To take the way by which she usually went, they sauntered toward the sunset.

"You're in trouble, Jennie, aren't you?"

The kindly tone touched her. He was always kind. He was always looking for little things he could do. It was part of the trouble with him from her point of view that he was so watchful and overshadowing. He poured out so much more than her cup was able to receive that he frightened her. All the same, his sympathy, coming at this minute, started her tears afresh.

"Is it things at home?" he persisted, when she didn't respond.

Thinking this enough for him to know, she admitted that it was.

"I've got something in my pocket that would—that would help all that—in the long run."

From anyone else this would have alarmed her. She would have taken it to mean money, money which she would in her own way be expected to repay. As it was she merely turned her swimming eyes toward him in mild curiosity.

"Look!"

Seeing a little white box which could contain nothing but a ring held between his thumb and forefinger on the edge of his waistcoat pocket, she flushed with annoyance.

"I think you'd better go away," she said, coldly, pausing to give him the chance to take his leave.

"And chuck you back upon your trouble?"

The argument was more effective than he knew. Jennie became aware that even this little bit of drama had put home conditions and Wray's cruelty a perceptible distance behind her. It was sheer terror at being thrown on them again that induced her to walk on, tacitly permitting him to stay with her.

"You can't be saved from one kind of trouble by getting into another," she argued, ungraciously. "The fire's not much of a relief from the frying pan."

"It is if it doesn't burn you—if it only warms and comforts you and makes it easier to live."

"This fire would burn me—to death."

"Oh no, it wouldn't; because I'd be there. I'd be the stoker, to see that it was kept in the furnace. The furnace in the house, Jennie, is like the heart in the body—something out of sight, but hot and glowing, and cheering everybody up." If she could have listened to such words from Hubert Wray, she thought, how enraptured she would have been. "Did you ever hear the story of the guy who gave us fire in the first place?" Bob continued, as she walked on and said nothing. "You know we didn't have any fire on earth—at least, that's the tune to which the rig is sung. The gods had fire in heaven, but men had to shiver."

"Why didn't they freeze to death?''

"They did—in a parable way. It wasn't life they lived; it was a great big creeping horror on the edge of nothing. Then this old bird—I forget his name—went up to heaven—"

"How did he do that?"

"The story doesn't tell; but up he went, stole the fire, and brought it down. After that, they were able to open the ball we call 'civilization,' which gives every one a good time."

"Oh, does it? Much you know!"

"I know this much, Jennie—that I could give you a good time if you'd let me."

"You couldn't give me the good time I want."

"But I could make you want the good time I'd give you, which would come to the same thing. I imagine the folks on earth didn't think much of the fire from heaven—beforehand; but once they'd got it, they knew what it meant to them. That's the way you'd feel, Jennie, if you married me. You can't begin to fancy now—" On coming in sight of a line of taxicabs drawn up before a hotel, he broke off to say, "Do you see those taxis, Jennie?"

She replied that she did.

"Well, one of them may mean a great deal to you and me."

"Which one of them?"

"Whichever one we get into."

"Why should we get into it?"

"Because"—he tapped the white box in his waistcoat pocket—"this little thing I've got in here wouldn't do us any good without something else. We should have to go after it together."

Her mystified expression told him that she was in the dark.

"It's something we should have to ask for, and to sign—Robert Bradley Collingham, bachelor, and Jane Scarborough Follett, spinster—I believe that's the way it runs."

"Oh!" The low ejaculation was just enough to show that she understood.

"Why shouldn't we, Jennie? It wouldn't take half an hour to get there and back."

"'Back?'" She was so dazed that she echoed the word more or less unconsciously.

They came in sight of a low brown tower at which he pointed with his stick. "Do you see that church? Well, that church has got a parson—quite a decent sort for a parson—"

"How do you know?"

"Because I talked to him—about half an hour ago. I said that if he was going to be at home, we might look in on him toward the end of the afternoon."

"You had no right to say anything of the kind."

"I know I hadn't, but I took a chance. Won't you take a chance, too, Jennie? It would mean the beginning of the end of all your troubles. In the long run, if not in the short run, I could take them off your hands."

That she should be dead to this argument was not in human nature. Her basic conception of a man was of one who would relieve her of her burdens. Helplessness was a large part of her appeal. That marriage meant being taken care of imparted, according to her thinking, its chief common sense to the institution. She shrank from marrying just to be taken care of; but if there was no other way, and if in this way she could bring to the family the stupendous Collingham connection in lieu of her six a week.... She made up her mind to temporize.

"What makes you in such an awful hurry? We could do it any other day—"

"Did you ever see a sick man who wasn't in an awful hurry to get well?"

"You're not as bad as all that."

"Listen, Jennie," he said, with an ardor enhanced by her hints at relenting; "listen, and I'll tell you what I am. I'm like a chap that's been cut in two, who only lives because he knows the other half will be joined to him again."

"That's all very well; but where's the other half?"

"Here." He touched her lightly on the arm. "You're the other half of me, Jennie; I'm the other half of you."

She laughed ruefully.

"That's news to me."

"I thought it might be. That's why I'm telling you. You don't suppose any other fellow could be to you what I'd be, do you?"

"I don't know what you'd be to me because I've so many other things to think of first."

"What sort of things?"

"What your folks would say, for one."

He replied, with a shade of embarrassment: "They'd say some pretty mean things, to begin with."

"And to end with?"

"They'd give in. They'd have to. Families always do when you only leave them Hobson's choice."

She dropped into the studio idiom.

"That wouldn't be all pie for me, would it?"

"Is anything ever all pie? You've got to work for your living in this old world if you want to eat. I'm ready to work for this, Jennie. I'm ready to move mountains for it, and, by God! I'm going to move them! But do you know why?"

She said, shyly, "I suppose because you like me."

"I don't know whether I do or not. That's not what I think about first." Though they had not yet reached the line of taxicabs, he paused to make an explanation. "Suppose you were inventing a machine and had got it pretty well fitted together, only that you couldn't make it work. And suppose, one day, you found the very part that was missing—the thing that would make it run. You'd know you'd have to have that one thing, wouldn't you? You'd have to have it—or your life wouldn't be worth while."

"I never heard any other man talk like that."

"Listen, Jennie. There are men and men. They'll go into two big bunches. To one kind women are like whisky—some better than others, but all good. If they can't have Mary, Susan'll do, and when they're tired of Susan they'll run after Ann. That's one kind of fellow, and he's in the great majority. They're polygamous by nature, those chaps. I suppose the Lord made them so. Anyhow, as far as I can see—and I've seen pretty far—they can't help themselves." He drew a long breath. "Then there's another kind."

If Jennie listened with attention, it was not because she was interested in him, but in Hubert Wray. Hubert had more than once said things of the same kind. He had declared male constancy to be outside the possibilities of flesh and blood, and, with her preference for cave men, Jennie had agreed with him. That is, she had agreed with him as to everyone but himself. Others could take their pleasure where and as they found it; but she could not conceive of any man loving her, or of herself loving any man, unless it was for life. On the subject of constancy or inconstancy, this was her sole reservation.

"You'll think me an awful chump, Jennie, but I'm that other kind."

She threw him a sidelong glance of some perplexity.

"You mean the kind that—"

"I'm not polygamous," he declared, as one who confessed a criminal tendency. "There it is, laid out flat. I'm—" He hesitated before using the term lest she might not understand it. "There's a word for my kind," he went on, tenderly. "It's monogamous."

She made a little sound of dismay at the strangeness, it almost seemed the indecency, of the syllables.

"Yes; I thought you might never have heard it," he pursued, in the same tender strain, "but it means the opposite of polygamous. A polygamous guy wants to marry all the wives he can make love to. A one-wife chap like me asks for nothing so much as to be true to the girl he loves. I'm that kind, Jennie."

To his amazement, and somewhat to his joy, he saw a tear trickle down her cheek. It was a tear of regret that Hubert couldn't have expressed himself like this, but Bob thought her touched by his appeal. It encouraged him to continue with accentuated warmth.

"You've heard of what they call the battle of the sexes, haven't you?"

She thought she had.

"Well, that's what it comes from chiefly—the crowds of polygamous men and the small number of polygamous women; or else it's the crowds of monogamous women and the small number of monogamous men. Out of every hundred men, about ninety are polygamous, and ten want only one woman for a lifetime. Out of every hundred women, ninety are satisfied to love one man, and the other ten are rovers. Don't you see what a bad fit it makes?"

"Yes; but how do you know I'm not one of the rovers?"

"You couldn't be, Jennie. Even if I thought you might be, I'd be willing to take a chance. And the reason I've spun this rigmarole to you is because, if you don't take me, it'll be ten to one that you'll fall into the hands of one of the gay ninety who'll make your life a hell. I'd hate that. God! how I should hate it! Even if I didn't care anything about you, I should want to marry you, just to save you from some fancy man who'd think no more of breaking your heart than he would of smashing an egg-shell."

As they walked on toward the row of public conveyances, he explained himself further. On Monday next he might sail for South America. But he couldn't do this leaving everything at loose ends between them. If she married him, he could go off with an easy mind, and they could keep their secret till his return. In the meanwhile he would be able to supply her with a little cash, not much, he was afraid, as dad kept so tight a rubber band round the pocketbook. It would, however, be something, and he would know that she could give up her work at the studio without danger of starving to death.

"And you might as well do it first as last, Jennie," he summed up, "because I mean that you shall do it sometime."

"And suppose," she objected, "that you came back from South America in six months' time—and were sorry. Where should I be then?"

He argued that this was impossible. A monogamous man always knew his mate as a monogamous bird knew his. It was instinct that told them both, and instinct never went wrong.

They reached the row of taxis, and, in spite of the queer looks of the passers-by, he took her by the hand.

"Come, Jennie, come!"

But she hung back.

"Oh, Bob, how can I? All of a sudden like this!"

"It might as well be all of a sudden as any other way, since you're my woman and I'm your man."

"But I don't believe it."

"Then I'll prove to you that it's so."

Though he could not do this, she went with him in the end. She was not won; she was not more moved by his suit than she had been at other times; she still shrank from the scar on his brow and the touch of his tremendous hands. But she was afraid of letting him go, of dropping back into the horror of no lover in the studio and no money to bring home. To do this thing would save her from that emptiness, even if it led to something worse. Worse would be easier to bear than returning to nothing but a void; and so slowly, reluctantly, with anguish in her heart, she let herself be helped into the shabby vehicle.

An hour or so later, Teddy reached home. He arrived breathless, because he had run nearly all the way from the street-car. In the empty spaces of Indiana Avenue he felt himself conspicuous. He knew it was fancy, that no hint of his folly could have come to this quiet suburb, and that his theft could not possibly be discovered as yet, even by those most concerned. But he was not used to a guilty conscience. Already in imagination he saw himself tried, sentenced, and serving a long sentence at Bitterwell, of which he had once seen the grim gray walls.

"God! I'd shoot myself first!" was his comment to himself, as he hurried past the trim grassplots where care-free men in shirt sleeves were watering their bits of lawn.

It was Pansy who first knew that something was amiss. At sound of his hand on the door knob she had come scampering, with little silvery yelps, and had suddenly been checked by the atmosphere he threw out. Pansy knew what wrongdoing was; she knew the pangs of remorse. She had once run away from being shut up in the coalbin, her fate when the family went to the movies, and had been lost for half a day. The agony of being adrift and the joy of seeing Gussie come whistling and calling down the Palisade Walk formed the great central escapade in Pansy's memory. For days afterward, whenever the family spoke of it, she would stand with forepaws planted apart, and head hanging dejectedly, aware that no terms could be scathing enough fully to cover her guilt.

And here was Teddy in the same state of mind. Pansy had learned that the great race could suffer; but she hadn't supposed that it could get into scrapes like herself. All she could do on second thoughts was to creep forward timidly, raise herself on her hind legs, with her paws against his shin, and tell him that whatever the trouble was she had been through it all.

He paid her no attention because, as he looked into the living room, Gladys was seated at a table, crying, her hands covering her face. At the same time Gussie was peacocking up and down the room, saying things to her little sister that were apparently not comforting. Now that Gussie, at Madame Corinne's request, had "put up" her hair, her great beauty was apparent. Her face had not the guileless purity of Jennie's, but it had more intellectual vigor and much more fire.

Gladys was Teddy's pet, as she was her father's. Of the three girls, she was the plain one, a little red-haired, snub-nosed thing, with some resemblance to Pansy, and a heart of gold. Teddy went over and laid his hand on her fiery crown.

"Say, poor little kiddie, what's the matter?"

"It's my feet," Gladys moaned.

"And she thinks that learning the millinery at three-fifty per is all jazz and cat-step," Gussie declared, grandly. "Well, let her try it and see. She's welcome. My soul and body! Corinne would blow her across the river when she got into a temper. I say that if you're a cash girl you've got to take the drawbacks of a cash girl, and what's the use of kicking? If you're on your feet, you're on your feet. Rub 'em with oil and buck up. That's what I say."

"It's all very well for you to talk, spit-cat," Gladys retorted. "All you've got to do is to play with ribbons as if you were dressing a doll. If you had to run like Pansy every time some stuck-up thing calls, 'Ca-ash!'—"

Gussie undulated her person and her outstretched arms in sheer joy of the dancing step as she strutted up and down.

"That's right, old girl. Blame it on me. I'm always the one that's in the wrong in this house. If Master Teddy lets a glass fall and breaks it, as he did last night, I pushed it out of his hand on purpose, though I'm in the next room. All the same, I say, 'Buck up,' and I don't care who says different. Sniffing won't cure your feet or give you a brother like Fred Inglis who can pay for a woman to do all the heavy work, and his mother hardly lifting a hand."

Teddy passed on to the kitchen to see if his mother was there.

She was seated at a table with a ham bone before her, and from it was paring the last rags of the meat. He tried to take his old-time tone of gayety.

"Hello, ma! At it again? What are you giving us for supper? Something good, I'll bet."

Lizzie went on working without lifting her eyes. She didn't even smile. Teddy sensed something new in the way of care, as Pansy had sensed it in him. He stood at a little distance, waiting for the look that had never failed to welcome him, but which this time didn't come.

"What's the matter, ma? Has anything gone wrong?"

Putting down the ham, Lizzie raised her eyes, though with no light in them.

"It's nothing so very wrong, dear, but I haven't told your sisters because it's no use to worry them if—"

"What is it, ma? Out with it."

She told him. If it was necessary to go without a hot meal between Wednesday and Saturday, of course it could be done; but even on Saturday the gas people would demand fifteen dollars on account before the gas would be turned on again. There were just two possibilities: The father might come home with the news that he had found a job, or Teddy might have—she didn't believe it, but he had talked of saving for a new suit of clothes—Teddy might have fifteen dollars laid away.

He turned his back and walked out of the kitchen. He did it so significantly that it seemed to the mother there could be only one meaning to the act. He had saved the money and resented being robbed of it. She knew he was something of a coxcomb, and had always been proud that he could look so neat. He had only two suits, a common one and a best one, but even the common one was as brushed and pressed and stylish as if he had a valet. Nevertheless, his great activity and his love of rough-and-tumble skylarking made him hard on clothes in the sense of wear, and the common one was growing shiny at the seams and thin where there was most attrition. A new suit was an urgent necessity; so that if he had a few dollars put away toward getting it, it would be no wonder if it hurt him to be asked to give them up.

But Teddy had no few dollars put away. When the fund for the new suit could be counted otherwise than in pennies, some special need had always swept it into the family treasury. Teddy had let it go without a sigh. He would have let it go without a sigh to-day, only that he had nothing saved. Being naturally of a loving, care-taking disposition, it meant more to him that Gussie or Gladys should have a new pair of shoes than that he should be able to emulate Fred Inglis in ordering a suit at Love's.

Having left the kitchen, he did not go farther than the living room, where, Gussie having taken herself upstairs, Gladys was drying her eyes. He merely walked to the end of the room, his hands in his pockets, as he stared above one of the hydrangea trees into Indiana Avenue. The windows being open, the voices of playing children mingled with the even-song of birds. To Teddy, there was mockery in these cheerful sounds. There was mockery in the westering May sunshine, mockery in the groups of girls, bareheaded and arm in arm, as they strolled toward Palisade Walk; mockery in the ruddy-faced men who watered their shrubs and grass; mockery in the aproned women who came to windows or doors in the intervals of preparing supper. It all spoke of a homey comfort and content, with no bluff behind it. In the Follett house all was bluff—and misery.

Somehow, for reasons he couldn't fathom, the cutting off of the gas from the range seemed the last humiliation. In the matter of food, if one thing was too dear, you could eat another. So it was in the whole round of essentials in living. You could get a substitute or you could go without. But for heat there was no substitute, and you couldn't go without it. It ranked with clothes and shelter as a necessity even among savages. And yet here they were, a civilized family, living in a civilized house, in a suburb of New York, deprived of what even Micmacs could have at will. It was one of the happenings that could never have been foreseen as possibilities.

His hands being in his pockets, Teddy fingered the twenty-dollar bill. He did this unconsciously, merely because it was there. It did occur to him to wish it was his own; but his wishes went no farther.

They had gone no farther when he swung on his heel to go back to the kitchen. He must tell his mother that he didn't have fifteen dollars put away. He hadn't done so at once merely because his emotions had been too strong for him.

He pulled his burly figure down the length of the room as one who has to drag himself along. If he had only been Fred Inglis, he would have handed his mother a sheaf of bills with instructions to buy all she wanted. Why couldn't he, Teddy Follett, do the same? He was, as Gussie phrased it, a great big fellow of twenty-one—and his value was only eighteen per. He had proved that to his own satisfaction, for in secretly trying to unearth a better place he had been offered less than he got at Collingham & Law's.

What were the shackles that bound him? Were they of his own creation, or were they forced on him by the world outside? He was as industrious as his father had been, and, except for a tendency to do his work with a broad grin, just as wholehearted. If good intentions had commercial value, both father and son should have been rated high; but here was his father a bit of old junk, while he himself, having reached man's estate, having served his country, having tacitly offered himself to the limit of his strength, was rewarded with a wage on which he could hardly live, to say nothing of helping others live.

Madly, wildly, these thoughts churned in his mind as he lurched down the room toward the kitchen, while Pansy watched him with a look into which she was putting all her soul.

He knew what he would say. He would say: "Ma, it's no go. I haven't a red cent. We've got to eat cold and wash cold till Saturday, anyhow. We'll not look farther ahead than that. When Saturday comes, we'll see."

But, on the threshold of the kitchen, he saw something which brought a new sensation. In free fights while in the navy he had thought he had seen red; but he had never seen red like this. He had never supposed it possible that this torrent of wrath, tenderness, and pity should rise within himself, a fountain spouting at the same time both sweet water and bitter.

His mother was seated at the table, crying. The ham bone was before her, the rags of meat on the plate, and the knife on top of them. But she, like Gladys a few minutes previously, had covered her face with her hands, while her shoulders rocked.

In all his twenty-one years Teddy had never seen his mother cry. He had cried; the girls had cried; his father had very nearly cried; but his mother never. The strong spirit had grieved in strong ways, but not in this way. Now it seemed as if all the griefs she had laid up since the days when she was Lizzie Scarborough had heaped themselves to the point at which these strange, harsh, unnatural tears were their only assuagement.

Teddy was down on his knees beside her, his arm flung round her neck.

"Ma! Good old ma! Dear old ma! Don't cry! For God's sake don't cry! Stop crying, ma!" he shouted, in an imploring passion as strange, harsh, and unnatural as her own. "Here's the money I had saved for my new clothes. Take it and go and pay something on the gas bill. There! There! Stop! For God's sake! For your little boy's sake! I love you, ma. Only stop! There! That's better! Calm down, ma! Everything will be all right, and I'll—I'll get the new clothes by and by."

But in his heart he was saying, "To hell with Collingham & Law's!" as he laid the bill before her.

[CHAPTER VIII]

Jennie cried herself to sleep that Wednesday night, and, in the morning, cried herself awake. She was in no doubt as to the motive of her tears; she was sorry for having put a gulf between her and the man she loved by marrying one she didn't care for.

Why she didn't care for him was beyond her power of analysis. He was good and kind and tender; he was rocklike and steady and strong. In a forceful way he was almost handsome, and some day he would be rich. But there was the fact that, her heart being given to the one man, her nerves shuddered at the other. The explanation she used to give, that the lividness of the scar on his forehead frightened her, was no longer tenable, since the mark tended to fade out. The other infirmity, his limp, was also less conspicuous, for, though he would never walk as if his foot had not been crushed, he walked as well as many other men. It wasn't these peculiarities; it wasn't any one thing in itself; it was simply that she didn't love him and never would.

Whereas, she did love another man. She loved his violet eyes, his brown mustache, his flashing teeth, his selfishness, his cruelty. She loved his system of starving her out, his habit of keeping her in anguish. Too much reasonableness was hard for her to assimilate, like too much water to a portulaca.

And Bob had been so reasonable. He had tried to explain himself. He had used words that scared, that shocked her. Polygamous! Monogamous! The very sounds suggested anatomy or impropriety.

Nevertheless, she could have pardoned this language as an eccentricity if, in the dimness of the parson's hall, he hadn't taken her in his arms and kissed her. This possibility was something she forgot when she followed him up the rectory's brownstone steps. For the inadvertence she blamed herself the more, since, throughout the winter, she had never once lost sight of it. Whenever he had proposed to her, the advantages of marrying so much money had been offset by her terror at his "pawing her about." With no high-flown ideas as to virtue, Jennie would have fought like a wildcat for her virginity of mind and body till ready of her own free will to give them up. And here she had sold herself to Bob Collingham, a man whose touch made her shrink.

"I can't live with you!" she had cried, as she tore herself from his embrace.

And poor Bob had been reasonable again.

"Of course not, Jennie darling—not yet. When I come back—"

She hadn't let him finish. She had dashed through the door and down the steps, so that he had some ado to keep up with her.... Even then, if he had only dragged her away and been a cave man....

And the evening at home had been one of the oddest she had ever spent under her father's roof. Everyone was so queer—or else she was queer herself. Gussie and Gladys, reconciled after their squabble, had both been in high spirits, and Teddy almost hysterical. He gave imitations of the men with whom he worked most closely at the bank, of Fred Inglis, of Mrs. Inglis, of Dolly, Addie, and Sadie Inglis, which made everyone feel that a great actor was being lost to the stage; but on top of these exhibitions he would fall into spells of profound reverie. The father had been apathetic, but he was always apathetic now; the mother, on the other hand, more serene than usual. More than usual, too, her eyes applauded Teddy's high spirits with a quiet, adoring smile. Altogether, the supper had been a merry one, and yet, to Jennie's thinking, merry with a mysterious note in the merriment—a note which perhaps only Pansy's intuitions could have really understood.

But sitting on the edge of her bed in the morning, she saw a ray of hope. There was divorce. Marriage wasn't the irreparable thing which their family traditions assumed it to be. As a tolerably diligent reader of the personal items in the papers, Jennie had more than once read of divorces granted to young couples who had parted at the church door. Naturally, she shrank from the fuss it would involve, but better the fuss than....

Having got up, for the reason that she couldn't stay in bed, she dressed slowly, because none of the family was as yet astir. She would surprise her mother by lighting the gas range and making the coffee before anyone came down. Thus it happened that she saw the postman crossing the street with a letter in his hand. Though letters were not rare in the family, they were rare enough to make the arrival of one an incident. She went to the door to take it from the postman's hand. Seeing it addressed to Miss Follett and bearing the postmark "Marillo," her knees trembled under her.

Having read what Mrs. Collingham had written, Jennie's first thought was that her early rising enabled her to keep this missive secret. What it could portend was beyond her surmise. It was not unfriendly, but neither was it cordial. It took the guarded tone, she thought, of a woman who meant to see her face to face before being willing to commit herself. As success on meeting people face to face had mostly been Jennie's portion, she was not so much afraid of the test as of what it might bring afterward.

What it might bring afterward was the recognition of her marriage and her translation into a rich family. This would mean the end of her father's and mother's material cares, Teddy's advancement at the bank, and brilliant careers for Gussie and Gladys in New York social life. Jennie could think of at least half a dozen picture plays in which the sacrifice of some lovely, virtuous girl had done as much as this for her relatives.

So, all that day, sacrifice was much in her mind. Against a vague background of grandeur, it had the same emotional effect as of passion sung to the accompaniment of a great orchestra. To see herself with a limousine at her command, and the family established in a modest villa somewhere near Marillo Park, if not quite within it, enabled her mentally to face another embrace from Bob in the spirit of an early—Christian maiden thinking of the lions awaiting her in the arena. It would be terrible—but it could be met.

The vision of the limousine at her command seemed to have come partly true as a trim chauffeur stepped up to her in the station at Marillo, touching his cap and asking if he spoke to Miss Follett. He touched his cap again when he closed the door on her, and the car tooled away along a road which bore the same relation to the roads with which Jennie was familiar as a glorified spirit to a living man.

The park was not so much a park as it was a country. It had hills, valleys, landscapes, lakes, and what seemed to Jennie immense estates for which there was plenty of room. There were houses as big as hotels and much more beautiful. Trees, flowers, lawns, terraces, fountains, tennis courts, dogs, horses, and motor cars were as silver in the building of the Temple of Jerusalem—nothing accounted of. Jennie had seen high life as lived by the motion-picture heroine, but she had not believed that even wealth could buy such a Garden of Eden as this. Expecting to reach Collingham Lodge a few minutes after passing the grille, she had gone on and on, over roads that branched, and then branched, and then branched again, like the veinings of a leaf.

After descending at the white-columned portico, she went up the steps in a state bordering on trance. She knew what to do much as Elijah, having come by the chariot of fire to another plane of life, must have known what to do when required to get out and go onward. Since a man in livery opened a door of wrought-iron tracery over glass, she had no choice but to pass through.

It is possible that Max, by his supersenses, knew that she belonged to his master, for, springing toward her, he nosed her hand. It was, as she put it to herself, the only human touch in the first stages of her welcome. Thenceforward, during all the forty or fifty minutes of her stay, he kept close to her, either on foot or crouched beside her chair, till a curious thing happened when she regained the car.

I have said in the first stages of her welcome, for as soon as she entered the hall she heard a cheery voice.

"Oh, so it's you, Miss Follett! So glad you've come. It's really too bad to bring you so far—only, it seemed to me we might be cozier here than if I went up to town."

Adown the golden space which seemed to Jennie much too majestic for anyone's private dwelling, a brisk figure moved, with hand outstretched. A few seconds later Jennie was looking into eyes such as she didn't suppose existed in human faces. Beauty, dignity, poise, white hair dressed to perfection, and clothes such as Jennie had never seen off the stage—and rarely on it—were all subordinated to a hearty, kindly, womanly greeting before which they sank out of sight. Overpowered as she was by the material costliness of all she saw, the girl was well-nigh crushed by this unaffected affability. Like the Queen of Sheba at the court of Solomon, to be Scriptural again, there was no more spirit left in her.

Mrs. Collingham went on talking as, side by side, they walked slowly up the strip of red carpet into the cool recesses of the house.

"I hope you didn't find the train too stuffy. It's too bad they won't give us a parlor car on the locals. For the last three or four years we only have a parlor car on what they call the 'husbands' trains'—one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and, my dear, they make us pay for it as if—"

A toss of the hands proved to Jennie that Mrs. Collingham knew the difference between cheap and dear, which again took her by surprise.

They passed through the terrace drawing-room, which Jennie couldn't notice because she trod on air, and came out to the flagged pavement. Even here, Mrs. Collingham didn't pause, but, leading the way to the end of it, she went round a corner to the northern and more private side of the house, which looked into a little wood.

"Mr. Collingham's at home—just driven down—but I'm not going to have him here. Men are such a nuisance when women talk about intimate things, don't you think? They make such mountains of molehills. It's just as when you have a cry. They think your heart must be breaking, and never seem to understand that it gives you some relief."

Jennie was still more astounded. That the mistress of Collingham Lodge, a great figure in Marillo Park, and therefore high up in the peerage of the United States, could have the same feelings as herself seemed the touch of nature that makes the whole world kin to a degree she had put beyond the limits of the human heart.

They came to a construction like a giant birdcage—a room out of doors, yet sheltered from noisome insects like their own screened piazza, furnished with an outdoor-indoor luxury.

"We don't have many mosquitoes at Marillo," Mrs. Collingham explained, as she led the way in, "but in spring they can be troublesome. So we'll have our tea here. Gossip will bring it presently. Where will you sit? I think you'll like that chair. There! What about a cushion? Oh, I'm sure you don't need it at your age, but, still, one likes to be comfortable. No, Max; stay out. Well, if you must come in, come in. He seems to like you," she chatted on. "He's Bob's dog, and I suppose he takes to Bob's friends."

Rendered speechless by this frank reference to the man who was the bond between them, there was, fortunately, no immediate need for Jennie to speak, since Gossip appeared in the doorway pushing the tea equipage. It was a little table on wheels, and on it Jennie noticed, in a general way, every magnificent detail—the silver tray, the silver kettle, the silver teapot, the silver tongs, the silver spoons. "And all of them solid," she said to herself, awesomely. She regretted that she wouldn't be at liberty to recount these marvels at home. At home, they thought her merely at the studio, while she had been borne away through the air as by a witch on a broomstick.

Jennie would have said that Mrs. Collingham had hardly looked at her, but then, she reflected, every woman knew how little looking you had to do to grasp the details of another woman's personality. You took them all in at a glance, as if you brought seven or eight senses into play. Each time her hostess, now settled behind the tea table, lifted her fine eyes, Jennie was sure they "got" her, like a camera.

"You pose, don't you?" The words came out in a casual, friendly tone, as she busied herself with the spirit lamp. "That must be so interesting. I often wonder, when I'm in the big galleries, what the immortal women would have said had they known how their features would go down through the ages. Take Dorotea Nachtigal, for instance, the original of Holbein's 'Meyer Madonna' in Darmstadt—the most wonderful of all the Madonnas, I always say—and how queer I suppose she would have felt if she'd known that we should be adoring her when she's no more than a handful of dust. Or the model who posed for the Madonna di San Sisto! Or the young things who sat to Greuze! Did you ever think of them?"

Jennie saw how Bob could have come by words like "polygamous" and "monogamous." People at Marillo Park spoke a language of their own—"English with frills on it," was the way she put it to herself. From the intonation, she was able to frame her answer in the negative, while, once more, the superb eyes, which were oddly like Bob's little steely ones, were lifted on her with a smile.

"You know, I should think people would be crazy to paint you. How do you like your tea? Sugar? Cream? One lump? Two lumps?" Having flung out answers at random, Jennie leaned forward to take her cup, while the kindly voice ran on: "Just as you sit there you're a picture. Funny I should have given you a tan-colored cushion, because it tones in exactly."

Jennie explained that the various shades of brown and some of the deeper ones of red were among her favorites.

"Because they go so well with your hair," her hostess said, comprehendingly, and studying her now more frankly. "My dear, you've got the most lovely hair! It isn't auburn; it isn't coppery; it isn't red. It's—what is it? Oh, I see! It's amber—it's the extraordinary shade Romney gets into some of his portraits of Lady Hamilton. You see it in the one in the Frick gallery, if I remember rightly. You must look the next time you're there."

Jennie tried to stammer that she would, only that her syllables ran into one another and became incoherent.

"But Romney couldn't paint you," Mrs. Collingham declared, enthusiastically, putting her cup to her lips. "He's too Georgian. You're the twentieth century. You're the perfect spirit of the age—restless, rebellious, wistful, and delicate all at once. Girls nowadays remind me of exquisite fragile things like the spire of the Sainte Chapelle, only built of steel. You've got the steel look—all slender and unbendable. It's curious that—the way women look like the ages in which they're born. You've only to go through a portrait collection to see that it's so. Take the Stuart women, for instance—the Vandyke and Lely women—great saucer-eyed things, with sensual lips and breasts. And then the Holbein women, so terribly got up in their stiff Sunday clothes, which they must have hurried to put into their cedar chests the minute they got home from mass. But they belong to their time, don't you think?"

Jennie could only say she did think, vowing in her heart that the next day would see her going round the Metropolitan Museum with a catalogue.

"But you! Hubert Wray says he's done a wonderful study of you, and I'm crazy to see it. The only thing I don't like from his description is that he's got you in a Greek dress and attitude, and I think, now that I've seen you, that the day after to-morrow is your style. What do you say yourself?"

"I don't know about the day after to-morrow; I'm so busy with to-day."

Mrs. Collingham took this with a pleasant little laugh.

"You clever thing! You won't give yourself away." She mused a few seconds, a smile on her lips, and then said, with a sudden lifting of the eyes, "What do you think of Bob?"

The girl could only stammer:

"Think of him—in what way?"

"Do you think he looks like me?"

In this rapid, unexpected shifting of the ground, Jennie was like a giddy person trying to keep her head.

"Well, yes—in a way; only—"

Mrs. Collingham laughed again.

"I see that, too. He does. I can't deny it. Often when I look at him, I see myself, only—you'll laugh, I know—only myself as I'd be reflected in the back of a silver spoon. That's the trouble with Bob—he's so unformed. You must have noticed it. I suppose it's the war; and yet I don't know. He's always been like that—a dear fellow, but no more than half grown. I dare say that by the time he's fifty he'll be something like a man."

As there seemed to be no absolute need for a response to this, Jennie waited for more. It came, after another little spell of musing.

"He's talked to me so much about you all through the winter. That's why I asked you to come down. Mr. Collingham and I feel so tremendously indebted to you for the way you've acted."

Jennie could only repeat feebly, "The way I've acted?"

"I mean the way you've understood him. Almost any other girl—yes, girls right here in Marillo Park—would have taken him at his word." Jennie's lips were parted, but unable to frame a question. Mrs. Collingham eyed the spirit lamp. "All the same, that doesn't excuse him. Even a fellow who isn't half grown should have more sense than to make love to every girl he spends an hour with. One of these days, some girl will catch him, and then he'll be sorry. That's why we've been so thankful for the kind of influence you've had over him, and why my husband and I thought we'd like to do something—well, something a little audacious."

Jennie was twisting her fingers and untwisting them, but luckily her hostess, by keeping her eyes on the spirit lamp, didn't notice this sign of nervousness. Once more she spoke, with a musing half smile.

"We—we see a good deal of some one else who keeps talking about you; and—you won't mind, will you?—of course we've drawn our conclusions. We couldn't help that—could we?—when they were staring us in the face."

"Do you mean Mr. Wray?" Jennie asked, with the point-blank helplessness of one who doesn't know how to hedge.

"Oh, I didn't use the name, now did I? And, as I've said, what we've seen we've seen, and we couldn't help it. But, of course, if it hadn't been for Bob, we shouldn't have seen so quickly."

"But he doesn't know?" Jennie cried, more as query than as affirmation.

"No; I suppose he doesn't. I only mean that as you refused Bob so many times—he told me that—we naturally thought there must be some one else, and when everything pointed that way and Hubert talked of you so much—" She kept this line of reasoning suspended while once more she shifted her ground suddenly. "I wonder if you've ever realized how hard it is to show your gratitude toward people to whom you truly and deeply feel grateful?"

Jennie mumbled something to the effect that she had never been in that situation.

"Well, it is a situation. People are so queer and proud and difficile. I suppose it's we older people who run up oftenest against that; but if Mr. Collingham and I could only do for people the things we might do, and which they won't let us do—"

Once more the idea was suspended to give Jennie time to take in the fact that a good thing was coming her way; but all she could manage was to stare with frightened, fascinated eyes and no power of thought.

"Do you know, my dear," the artless voice ran on, "now that I'm face to face with you, I'm really afraid? I told my husband that, if he'd leave us alone together, I shouldn't be—and, after all, I am." She leaned forward confidentially. "How frank would you let me be? How much would you be willing for me to say?"

But before the girl could invent a reply the voice kept up its even, caressing measure.

"I know how things are with you—at least, I think I do. I've been young, my dear. I know what it is to be in love. You're coloring, but you needn't do it—not with me. You're very much in love, aren't you?"

Jennie bowed her head to hide her tears. She hadn't meant to admit how much in love she was, but this sympathy unnerved her.

"You do love Hubert, don't you?"

"Yes, but—"

"And that's why you told Bob you couldn't marry him?"

"That's one of the reasons, but—"

"One of the reasons will do, my dear. You don't know how much I feel with you and for you. I could tell you a little story about myself when I was your age—but, then, old love tales are like dried flowers, they've lost their scent and color. Mr. Collingham and I are very fond of Hubert, and, of course, he doesn't make enough to marry on as things are now. He has a little something, I suppose, and, with the work he's doing, the future is secure. You'll find, one day, that he'll be painting you as Andrea del Sarto painted Lucrezia, and Rembrandt Saskia—their wives, you know—"

"Oh, but, Mrs. Collingham—"

"There, there, my dear! I'm not going to say anything more about that. I know Hubert and what he wants, and so my husband and I thought that if we could show our gratitude to you and make things easier for him—"

"Oh, but you couldn't!"

"We couldn't unless you helped us. That goes without saying, of course. But we hoped you would. You see, when people have so much—not that we're so tremendously rich, but when they have enough—and when they know as we do what struggle is—and there's been anyone whom they admire as we admire you, after all you've done for Bob—we thought that if we could give you a little present—a wedding present it would be—only just a little in anticipation—we thought five thousand dollars—"

She ceased suddenly because Jennie appeared as one transfixed. She sat erect; but the life seemed to have gone out of her.

Mrs. Collingham was prepared for this; she had discounted it in advance. "She's playing for more," she said to herself. Luckily, she had named her minimum only, and had arranged with her husband for a maximum. The maximum was all the same to her so long as she saved Bob. Having given Jennie credit for seeing through the game all along—such girls were quick and astute—she had expected that the first figure of the "present" would meet with just this reception.

But Jennie was saying to herself, "Oh, if this kind offer had only come yesterday!" Five thousand dollars was a sum of which she could not see the spending limitations. It meant all of which the family had need and that she herself had ever coveted. With five thousand dollars, she could not only have put her father on his feet, but have come before Hubert as an heiress.

"If you don't think it enough," Mrs. Collingham said, at last, with a shade of coldness in her tone, "I should be willing to make it seven—or ten. Perhaps we'd better say ten at once, and end the discussion. My husband's willing to make it ten, but I don't think he'd give more. Our son is very dear to us"—the realities seeped through in spite of her attempts at comedy—"and, oh, Miss Follett, if you'll only help us to keep him for ourselves as you've helped us already—"

Jennie staggered to her feet. Her arms hung lax at her sides. Ten thousand dollars! The sum was fabulous! It would have meant all cares lifted from the home—and Hubert! She was hardly aware of speaking as she said:

"Oh, Mrs. Collingham, I can't take your money. I wish I could. My God! how I wish I could! But—but—"

"But, for goodness' sake, child, why can't you?"

"Because—oh, because—I'm married to Bob already."

[CHAPTER IX]

It was one of those occasions when the auditory nerve seems to connect imperfectly with the brain. Mrs. Collingham placed her cup on the table and leaned forward, puzzled, tense.

"What did you say? Sit down. Tell me that again."

Jennie collapsed against the tan cushion of the chair, and repeated her confession. Her hostess's brows knitted painfully.

"But I don't understand. When did you marry him?"

The girl explained that it had been on the previous afternoon.

"But—but—you said just now that you were in love with some one else."

"So I am—only—only, Bob made me."

"Made you what?"

"Made me go and get a license and marry him. He said"—her lips and tongue were so parched that it was hard to form the words—"he said he was going away in a few days to South America, and that he couldn't go unless he knew I was his wife. I begged him to let me off, but he—he wouldn't. Oh, Mrs. Collingham, what am I to do?"

The appeal helped Junia to rally her stricken powers. It enabled her to say inwardly: "I must act through this girl herself. If I estrange her, I may lose my son." A flash of the lioness wrath with which she trembled might lead to an irretrievably false step. So she made her tone kindly, sympathetic, almost affectionate.

"And Bob—does he know that—that you care for some one else?"

"He never asked me."

"But don't you think you should have told him?"

"That's not so very easy when—"

"But there was some sort of understanding between you and Hubert, wasn't there?"

Jennie's only answer to this was to clasp her hands and say,

"Oh, Mrs. Collingham, how do people get divorces?"

This being more than Junia had hoped for, she tried to use the opening to the best of her ability.

"They—they do something that—that makes the other person want to be free." Trying to explain this further, she ran the risk of citing a case perhaps too close to the point. "For instance, if my husband wanted to be free, he'd do something that would make me willing to divorce him."

"And would you?"

"You see, I'm taking the case of his wanting to be free. In that situation, he's the one who would do the thing. If I wanted to be free, I suppose—I suppose I should do it."

"So that if I wanted to be free, it would be up to me to do the thing rather than up to Bob."

A moral issue being here at stake, Junia was obliged, in the expressive American phrase, "to sidestep," though she supposed that the suggestion in the air was of no more than Jennie had done already. As an artist's model, it would be part of her professional occupation.

"I'm not giving you advice, my dear; I'm only trying to answer your question. I'm so sorry for you that I'd do anything I could to help you unravel the tangle."

"Then you think there are ways of unraveling it?"

"Oh, certainly, if you were willing to—"

"To what, Mrs. Collingham. There's almost nothing I wouldn't do—to get us all out—when you've been so kind to me."

Having a conscience of her own, Junia continued to "sidestep."

"My dear, I can't tell you what to do. I'm not sure that I know—very well. You see, it's your trouble, and you must get out of it. I'll help you. I will do that. In every way I can I'll make it easy for you. But I couldn't advise—or—or put anything in your way that might be considered as—as temptation."

But conscientious scruples were not in Jennie's line. When eager to reach a point, she went to it straight.

"If Bob came back from South America and found I was living with Hubert, wouldn't he have to divorce me then?"

Junia rose in the agitation of one unused to plain talk, and shocked by it.

"Jennie—your name is Jennie, isn't it?—I must go and speak to Mr. Collingham. You'll stay here—won't you?—till I come back. I may have something then rather important to say."

The girl sat still, looking up adoringly.

"Are you going to tell him?"

"No; I think not. But there's something I want to ask him. I don't think that either you or I had better say anything to anyone. What do you think?"

Jennie shook her head.

"I don't want to. I wish nobody would ever have to know."

"I wish Hubert didn't have to know. Perhaps he won't; and yet—Let us think." She dropped into a chair nearer to Jennie than the one behind the tea table. "One thing I must ask you. What happened after you and Bob went through that ceremony yesterday afternoon?"

"Nothing happened. He motored back to his friends on Long Island and I took the ferry and went home. He said he'd see me on Saturday to say good-by."

"Where?"

"Oh, I don't know. In Central Park, I expect. He's asked me to meet him there once or twice already."

"But I wouldn't go anywhere else with him if I were you—not into a house, or anything."

"I won't if he doesn't make me."

"I'd be firm about that. You see, if you did—well, I'm sure you understand—it might—it might make it harder for you to find your way out to where you'd be happy again. Are you sure you see what I mean?"

"I've had that out with him. He'd said that nothing would happen till he got back from South America."

Relieved by this simple statement, Junia went on.

"And if I were you, I wouldn't say a word to anybody—not even to your own father and mother. Your mother is living, isn't she? Don't even tell Bob that you've seen me. Don't tell anyone anything. Let it be your secret and mine. I want you to feel that I'm your friend and anxious to help you out of the muddle in which you've tied up your happiness. At first, when you told me, I thought more of Hubert; but now that we've talked I'm thinking of you, too, and how much I should like to see you—" A dim smile conveyed the rest of the thought while she rose again. "Now I'll go. Don't be alarmed if I'm a little long. Max will take care of you."

Left to herself, Jennie's emotions came in waves of conflicting calculation. Had she only been in love with Bob, and not with Hubert, all this graciousness would have lapped her round in silk and softness. Nothing would have been denied her from a limousine to pearls. There would have been the villa for the family, with Gussie and Gladys turned into "buds."

But, as an offset to it, there would be the renunciation. Somehow, since cutting herself away from Hubert by the ceremony with Bob, he seemed nearer to her than before. Things she had supposed to be out of the question now presented themselves as more in the line of those that could be done. Within twenty-four hours she had lived much; she had ripened much. Now that she had had this talk with Mrs. Collingham, Hubert became more definitely an alternative. She could choose him and let this wealth and beauty go, or she could choose the wealth and beauty and let him....

But at the thought of turning her back on him something seemed to choke her. To choose what money could buy instead of this great love was treachery to all she knew as sublime. She clutched herself over the heart. It was as if she were going to die. Max was so startled that he sprang upon her with his mighty paws in the roughness of young consternation.

On the other hand, home conditions were well-nigh imperative. Love and Hubert were all very well, but they were part of the world of romance. The family, with their concrete needs, were actuality. Jennie thought of each one of them in turn, but of Teddy most of all. Among those of her own generation, he was her favorite. If she became openly Mrs. Robert Bradley Collingham, Junior, of Marillo Park, Teddy would go far. He might have a place like Mr. Brunt's. Only the other day her father had said of Mr. Brunt, "There's one who don't have any trouble in pickling down his ten a week." To see Teddy pickling down his ten a week, which would be more than five hundred dollars in a year, Jennie was ready to submit to almost anything—even Bob's hands on her person. She might get used to them, and, if she didn't, why, the daily sacrifice would be not without its reward.

She had reached something like this decision when Mrs. Collingham came back. Watching her from the minute when she rounded the corner of the flagged pavement, Jennie noted a rapid change in her expression. At first it was terrible—that of a queen in wrath. As she approached the bird cage, however, it cleared so quickly that by the time she reached the threshold it was almost tender.

"That's because she likes me," Jennie said to herself. She was accustomed to being liked, though especially by men. "I think it will cheer her up if I say right off that I've come to stay with her."

To make this announcement she had risen to her feet, with lips already parted; but Mrs. Collingham forestalled her.

"Sit down again, my dear. I want to talk to you some more. I must tell you about Mr. Collingham." She herself sank into the chair near Jennie which she had already occupied. She panted as after a difficult experience. "Oh dear! It's been so trying! You don't know him, do you? Well, he's a good man—kind and just in his way—but oh, so stern and relentless! If he knew what Bob had done in going through that mad thing with you, he'd turn the boy adrift."

Having reseated herself already, Jennie now closed her lips. She had forgotten Mr. Collingham. Coming to stay was meeting a new obstacle.

"It's only fair to you to make you understand what kind of man my husband is. Of course, he's a strong man, otherwise he wouldn't have accomplished all he has. My son, my daughter, I myself—we're but puppets on his string. His word has to be law to us. And with Bob the way he is—wanting to marry every girl he meets—and forgetting her next day—his father has no patience. You don't know how hard it is for me, my dear, always to have to stand between them."

As she paused to dab her eyes, Jennie saw the limousine, the villa, with Teddy's chance of pickling down ten a week, fading out like a picture in the movies.

"I wouldn't dare to tell him of the great wrong Bob has done to you. He'd disinherit him on the spot. If Bob were to insist on having this escapade—you wouldn't really call it a marriage, would you?—but if he were to insist on its being made public, why, there'd be an end of his relations with his father. My husband would neither give him a cent nor leave him a cent. I must say that Bob would deserve it; but, Jennie, I'm thinking of you. You'd have forsaken the man you loved, married a man you didn't care for, and got nothing in the world to show for it. That's where you'd have to suffer, and I can see well enough that you're suffering already."

There was every reason now that Jennie's tears should begin to flow. Flow they did while her companion watched.

"And yet, as you'll see, Mr. Collingham is not an unkind man. When I explained to him that we might be more indebted to you than I had thought at first, he said—"

With a look of anticipation, Jennie stopped crying suddenly, though the tears already shed were glistening on her cheek.

The point was now to find phraseology at once clear enough and delicate enough to suggest a course and yet not shock the sensibilities.

"You see, my dear, it's this way. One has to keep one's ideals, hasn't one? That goes without saying. Once we let our ideals go"—she flung her hands outward—"well, what's the use of living? My own life hasn't been as happy as you might think; and if it hadn't been for my ideals—"

Jennie broke in because she couldn't help it.

"Mr. Wray is ideal for a man, don't you think, Mrs. Collingham?"

It was the lead Junia needed.

"He's perfect, Jennie, in his way; and, oh, how I wish you were as free as forty-eight hours ago! You could be, of course, if—But I mustn't advise you, must I? I don't know how to. I'm just as lost as you are. Only, if you could find a way to cast the burden of the whole thing on Bob—"

"Do you mean to make him get the divorce?"

"In that case, we should want to feel that you had something to fall back upon. And so my husband thought that perhaps twenty-five thousand dollars—"

Jennie gave a great gasp. Her head began to swim. Not villas and limousines rose before her, but cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces.

"Poor daddy," she thought, "wouldn't have to hunt for a job any more, and momma'd have nothing to do for the rest of her life but sit in a chair and rock."

Yet that was only part of the vision. The rest did not go so easily into words. She had only to hurry to the studio, fling herself into the arms she was longing to feel clasped round her—and become fabulously rich.

That would be if Bob took the opening she offered him. If he didn't—

"But suppose Bob won't?" she asked, in terror lest he should not.

"I've thought of that, too," came the prompt answer. "He will, of course. But suppose he didn't. Well, we're not hagglers, my dear. We're only simple people trying to do right, just as you're trying to do right yourself. If Bob is only in a position in which he can undo his wrong, whether he undoes it or not, you shall have your twenty-five thousand just the same."

"Could I have it as early as—as next week?"

"If the conditions are fulfilled, certainly."

Jennie was anxious to free herself from the charge of cupidity.

"The reason I say next week is that my father is worried about the interest on the mortgage and the taxes. He didn't pay the interest last time, and the taxes are two months overdue. If he can't find the money by next week—"

"You yourself can be in a position to take all the worry off his hands—once the conditions are fulfilled."

Little more was said after this. There was little more to say. The necessities of the case being once understood, Junia steered her guest back to the car which waited at the door.

But into the leave-taking Max threw an odd note of hostility. As if he resented some baseness toward his master, he pressed his flank against Jennie with such force as almost to knock her down, and when she sprang away from him into the car he growled after her.

[CHAPTER X]

"So you can do it and get away with it." This was Teddy's reflection as he left the bank on that Thursday afternoon. He had spent an infernal day, but it was over, and over safely. Of the missing twenty dollars he had neither heard a word nor caught a sign of anxiety. Mr. Brunt had been methodical and taciturn as usual. Always keeping a gulf between Teddy and himself, it was neither more nor less a gulf to-day than it was on other days. As to whether he missed twenty dollars or whether he did not, Teddy could form no idea.

In the middle of the morning there had been a terrifying incident.

"See that guy over there?" Lobley, one of his colleagues, had asked him.

He saw the guy over there—a crafty, clean-shaven Celt—and said so.

"That's Flynn, the detective who copped Nicholson, the teller at the Wyndham National."

"O my God! I'm pinched!" Teddy exclaimed to himself. "If I had a gun or a dose of poison, he'd never get me alive."

But Flynn only chatted with Jackman, one of the house detectives, laughed, cashed a check at a wicket, and left the bank.

Teddy breathed again, wondering if he had given anything away to Lobley. Was it possible that Lobley could have heard of the twenty dollars and been set to try him out? No; he didn't believe so. Lobley had merely pointed out Flynn as a notable character, and gone about his business.

"I shall never forget that mug," Teddy thought, as he summoned his sang-froid to go on with his work. "The mug of a guy without guts," he added, further to define the pitiless set of Flynn's features. "I sure would kill myself before I let him touch me."

There was no other alarm that day; there was only the incessant fear, the incessant watchfulness that made him shrink from every eye that glanced his way, and which, when office hours were over, sent him scuttling to the subway like a rabbit to its hole.

At supper, his father brought up again the subject of the taxes and the interest on the mortgage. The latter would be due at the end of the following week, and the former was long overdue. With the added interest on both, he owed two hundred and sixty-odd dollars, of which he had borrowed from old friends a hundred and fifteen. Between the sum due and that in hand, there was a gap which he didn't see how to fill.

"We'll get it somehow, daddy," Jennie said, encouragingly. "Don't begin worrying."

"No; Ted'll rob the bank," Gussie laughed, flippantly.

Teddy was on his feet, shaking his fist across the table.

"See here, Miss Gus; that's just about—"

Gussie laughed up at him, still more flippantly.

"You haven't robbed it already, have you? Momma, do make him behave."

"Children, don't squabble, please! Teddy darling, Gussie was only poking a little fun. Sit down and have some more hash. It's made with beets in it, just the way you like it. I was reading," she continued, to divert the minds of the company, "of that teller at the Wyndham National—"

"Nicholson," Josiah put in. "I used to know him when I was at the Hudson River Trust. Sharp-eyed little ferret face, he was. Twenty-three thousand, extending over a period of five years. Often had lunch with him at the same counter. Blueberry pie was a favorite of his."

"Twenty-three thousand, extending over a period of five years!" Teddy repeated that to himself. He wondered that it hadn't struck him when he heard the fellows at the bank discussing the arrest. One of them had claimed "inside dope" as to how Nicholson had covered up his tracks, and explained the process. Teddy hadn't listened to that, because the magnitude of the theft had excluded its bearing on his own.

But there it was forcing itself on his attention, like Pansy's cold nose pressed at that minute against his hand. You could have five years' leeway, and never be suspected. He pumped his father for further details as to Nicholson's life, learning that he had owned his home at Leffingwell Manor, where he had been a member of the golf club and a church goer.

At his own fears Teddy smiled inwardly. Twenty dollars, which would certainly be paid back in the course of a few weeks! Already he had saved seventy cents toward the restoration, just by going without his lunch, with a few economies in car fares. If he could pawn his best suit of clothes, he would have the whole sum within a fortnight. The suit had been bought for twenty-six dollars, and would certainly bring in ten. It would be a matter of dodging his mother and getting it out of the closet in her room, where she kept it in order to regulate his use of it.

As supper went on, it was little Gladys who brought up the question which some one older might have asked.

"What would happen, daddy, if you couldn't pay the interest and the taxes?"

"They could sell us out of house and home."

But this possibility being more than a week off, the statement brought no fears with it. Like all people who at the best of times are dependent on a weekly wage, the Folletts had the mental attitude best described as "from hand to mouth." That is, once the dinner was secure, there was no will to worry as to where the supper was to come from. It was fundamentally a question of outlook. People used to being provided for naturally looked ahead; but where your most extended view could take you no more than from one meal to another your powers of forecast grew limited. Doubtless the provision was merciful, for, in the case of the Folletts, even the parents felt the futility of dreading a calamity more than a week away.

Of all the six, Jennie was the only one with a power of making comparisons and drawing contrasts. She had had, that day, a glimpse of a world as different from her own as paradise from earth. It was no use saying that it was different only in degree; it was different also in kind. It was different in values, in textures, in amplitudes. It was another thing, not another aspect of the same thing. Junia Collingham might be a human being like herself; but in all that was of practical account, she was as widely separated from Jennie Follett as a New Yorker from a Central African.

That was as far as Jennie got. Her mind was not given to deduction or her spirit to asking questions. Not having a God in particular, she had nothing to act as a great touchstone, to praise or to blame. Some human beings had everything; others had next to nothing. The Folletts were among "the others." Jennie didn't know how or why. She didn't ask to know. Knowing would perhaps be worse than not knowing, since it might stir rebellion where there was now only lassitude and resignation. But there was the fact. The Collinghams could throw her twenty-five thousand dollars as she threw a titbit to Pansy, while her father might be sold out of house and home for lack of a hundred and fifty.

Jennie mused, but she did no more. Life was too big a mystery to grapple with. If she tried it, it made her unhappy. It made her unhappy that Max should have been friendly at first, and then growled at her so resentfully. She wondered if dogs had a scent for moral and emotional atmospheres. She couldn't express this last in words, but she did it very well by thought. She often had thoughts for which she had no words, so that her inner life was broader than that which she showed outside. It was one of the things she had noticed about Mrs. Collingham—that she had words for everything. It was like her possession of the house, the gardens, the beautiful things. They gave her spaciousness. Her spirit moved with a larger swing. She could think, feel, express herself strongly, vividly, commandingly, while they, the Folletts, had to creep and sneak timidly along the back lanes of life.

"That's why I'm doing it," she reasoned with herself, "because I'm in the back lanes of life. I can creep and sneak along, and I can't do anything else. It was all very well for him to jostle me with his lean, iron flank and to growl; but he didn't know what twenty-five thousand would mean to me."

Along the line of these musings, Teddy said, suddenly:

"Saw young Coll to-day. Came up and spoke to me. Not half a bad sort when you get to know him."

Jennie felt a little faint, but no one noticed it, because Gussie threw back the ball.

"Tell him to come up and speak to me. Any afternoon at half past five, when I leave Corinne's."

"Say, Gus," Gladys giggled; "wouldn't you like a guy with all that wad waitin' for you every day when Corinne shuts down the lid? My! The ice-cream sodas he could blow you to!"

Lizzie was pained. It seemed to her that the process of Americanization which her children were undergoing lay chiefly in the degradation of their speech.

"Gladys darling, can't you find proper words to—"

"Oh, momma dear," Gladys complained, "do put a can on all that. If you're a cash girl, you've got to talk English, or the other girls'll whizzy you round the lot."

"Young Coll is going to South America," Teddy informed the party. "Sails with Huntley on Monday. Gosh! Wouldn't I like to be going, too! Say, dad, why do some fellows come into the world with the way all smoothed for them and their bread buttered in advance?"

"Because," Gussie declared, loftily, "they're clever and can get ahead, like Fred Inglis. I'll bet that if his father wanted his taxes and the interest on a mortgage, he wouldn't have to raise the wind among his old friends. Fred'd be Johnny-on-the-spot with the greenbacks."

Teddy could only gulp, hang his head over his plate, and choke himself with hash, as he muttered to his soul; "God! I'll shoot that Fred Inglis if I ever get a gun."

And just as if she knew that Teddy needed comforting, Pansy sprang upon his knees, pushing her face up along his breast till she could lick his chin.

Twenty-four hours later Max was vexing his soul with the difficulty of transcending planes. There was so much of which he could have warned his master, now that he had got him back from Long Island; but there was neither speech nor language, neither symbol nor sign, to make human beings understand anything but the most primitive needs and concepts. Obedience! Disobedience! Hunger! Thirst! Sorrow! Joy! These sentiments could be put over from the dog plane to the human plane, but without shadings, subtleties, or any of the marvels of untuitive knowledge by which dogs could enlighten men if men had open faculties. To another dog, he could have flashed his information in an instant; whereas human beings could only seize ideas when they were beaten into them with verbal clubs.

Edith and Bob voted Max a nuisance because, in his agony of impotence, he pranced restlessly about the bedroom, lashing his tail in one tempo and pointing his ears in another. Edith had come down from the Berkshires on hearing by wire that Bob was to leave next Monday for South America. She was seated now on the bed, her back against the footboard.

"What I don't quite see," she was saying, "is how you can be so sure."

Bob looked at her as he stood taking the studs from the soft-bosomed evening shirt in his hand to transfer them to the clean one lying on the bed.

"How can you be so sure about Ayling?"

"Well, that's a little different. Ernest speaks our language; he has our ways. Dad and mother make a fuss because he hasn't a lot of money; but that means no more than if he didn't wear a certain kind of hat. He's our sort, just the same."

"And I'm her sort. I can't explain it to you, Edie, but she needs me."

"How do you know she needs you? Has she ever admitted it?"

"I haven't asked her to admit it. I can see."

"Yes, that's all very fine, but—did it ever strike you, when Hubert's been talking about her, that—"

Bob made an inarticulate sound of scorn as he inserted the cuff links into a cuff.

"Oh, Hubert's a top-hole chap, all right; but my Lord!—Jennie wouldn't look across the street at him."

"But he might look across the street at Jennie; and with you so far away—"

He smiled, with something like a wink.

"Don't you fret about that. She's the kind of little woman to be true. You can't mistake 'em."

"We've known a good many men who have mistaken them."

"You haven't known my kind to make that sort of tumble. Love can be blind; but instinct can't be. Edie, I believe so much in that girl that, if she was to play me false—But there—good Lord!—she couldn't; so why talk about it any more? See here," he added. "If you're going to change your dress, you'll have to scuttle—and I must get into my waiter's togs."

Meanwhile Dauphin's struggles were of another order. It was the hour of the day which he was accustomed to spend with Collingham, and to spend it undisturbed. In this lovely spring weather they strolled about the gardens, peeped into the hotbeds, dropped in aimlessly at the stable or the garage, exchanged odds and ends of observation with the men working around the place. After this, they returned to the house, where, upstairs, in a comfortably, masculine bedroom, the man made changes in his outer fur, while the setter, less concerned about trifles, stretched himself out on the floor and blinked. It was a restful time, suited to a mind which after the stormier years was growing more and more content with material prosperity, and to a heart that was always content with its master's contentment.

But, of late, poor Dauphin had been painfully buffeted by waves of agitation. They emanated from his master, like circlets round a stone thrown into a pool. When his master's wife came into the scene the conflict of forces was terrible. She was not straight with her lord. She was using him, hoodwinking him. Dauphin would have sprung at her throat had it not been for the knowledge that, were he to do so, he would be beaten and kicked by the object of his defense. No; you couldn't deal with human beings sensibly. The wise thing to do was to stretch on the floor and pretend to snooze while they fought their own fight.

They didn't precisely fight their own fight just now. Collingham merely accepted terms. He was picking up his evening jacket from the bed on which his valet had laid it out. Junia, dressed exactly to the mean between too little and too much suited for a family dinner, had crossed the threshold of his room, where she stood adjusting a fall of lace.

"As I told you yesterday after she went away, she's just what you'd expect from such a girl, certainly no better and possibly a little worse. She's a mousey little thing, with a veneer of modesty; but 'mercenary' isn't the word. It's just a question of money, Bradley; and if you'll leave it to me to deal with—"

"Leave it to you to deal with—to the tune of twenty-five thousand dollars," he said, morosely, pulling his coat into shape round his shoulders as he looked into the long glass.

"Well, that's only half what it might have been. I thought at one time that we might have to make it fifty thousand—"

He was not sure, but he thought she finished with the word "again." If so it was uttered too softly for him to be obliged to take note of it, so that he merely picked up a hairbrush and put another touch to his hair.

She was now at work on the great string of pearls which, to keep them alive, she wore even in domestic privacy. Her object was to get the famous Roehampton pearl, from the late Lady Roehampton's collection, which had been the seal of her reconciliation with Bradley fifteen years earlier—to get this jewel right in the center of her person, to make the string symmetric.

"My point in bringing it up now," she said, speaking into her chin as her eyes inspected the long oval of the necklet, "is to remind you that you don't know anything. You haven't seen Bob for nearly a week, and after Monday you won't see him for two or three months at least. Don't let him suspect that you've anything on your mind. As a matter of fact, you haven't, except what I tell you—and I may not tell you everything."

"And that may be what I complain of."

"You can't complain of it when I give you the results—now can you? You don't complain of Mr. Bickley, or ask him for all the reasons he has for saying this or that. You leave him a free hand, and are ruled by him—you've often said it—even when your own preference would be to do something else, as it was in the case of this man Follett. Now I only claim to be the Mr. Bickley of the family."

That he had rights as father Collingham was aware, though he was shy of putting them forward. Having left them so much in abeyance, it would have been as ridiculous to emphasize them now as to dispute Bickley as efficiency expert at the bank. Moreover, the uneasiness which seizes on a man when his chickens come home to roost inclined him still further to passivity. If Bob was "knocking about town," as he seemed to be, he might know about his father what Junia did not—or presumably did not—that the woman who received the fifty thousand dollars had had her successors, and that even now the line was not extinct. While he knew of amusing incidents of fathers and sons meeting on this ground, any such contretemps in his own case would have shocked him profoundly. Junia might go beyond her powers in prescribing his course, and yet, for a multitude of reasons too subtle for him to phrase, it seemed wise to follow what Junia prescribed.

So the family dined and spent the evening together as tourists walk across the Solfatara crater. The ground was hot beneath their tread, and here and there a whiff of sulphuric vapor poured through a fissure in the crust; but only Max and Dauphin sensed the volcanic fire.

Later in the evening, Junia knelt at her prie-dieu with the armorial books of devotion.

"And, O heavenly Father," she added, to her usual prayer, "have mercy upon that poor erring girl and help her to repent. Grant that my son may extricate himself from the toils in which he is entangled. Enable my daughter to see that her duty lies in the station of life to which thou hast been pleased to call her. Give my husband the wisdom to seek advice and to follow it. Lead me with thy counsel so that I may do what is best for all my dear ones, through Jesus Christ, Our Lord, Amen."

Having thus poured out her heart, she rose feeling stronger and more comforted.

[CHAPTER XI]

It should be said for Jennie Follett that, in the matter of her course toward Bob Collingham, she had few of those convictions of sin and righteousness which restrain a proportion of mankind. As with the other members of her family, her conduct followed certain lines "because she couldn't help it." That is as far as her analysis would have carried her, though analysis didn't give her much concern. Having so much to do to get food and clothes, the higher laws were outside her sphere of interest. Her chief law was Necessity, and it covered so much ground that there was little place for any other law.

It may be well to state here that the Folletts belonged to that vast American contingent who have practically no religion. They had had a religion in Canada, where they had attended the church of a local god who seemed to hold no sway over the United States. They never found that church in the suburbs of New York, or, if they found it nominally, it didn't, in their opinion, "seem the same." There were no local suasions and compulsions to bring them to its doors, and so, after a few spasmodic efforts to re-establish the connection, they gave up the attempt.

Perhaps this failure was due to the fact that, in the depths of her strong, proud heart, Lizzie didn't believe in God. Josiah did—or, at least, he had believed in him up to the time of being thrown upon the scrap heap. But Lizzie's faith in God had died with the dying of her faith in man. She had never said so, because she kept her deeper thoughts to herself; but along these lines her influence on her children had been negative.

So Jennie had missed those counsels to do right which sometimes form a part of domestic education. With so little latitude for doing anything, there was not—apart from the grosser vices—much latitude in the Follett family even for doing wrong. They did what they "couldn't help" doing, and there was an end of it. A kind of inborn rectitude kept them from offenses of which the public would have taken note, but behind it there was little in the way of principle.

Jennie went to her farewell meeting with Bob untroubled by qualms of conscience. Even if scruples had worried her, they would have been allayed by the knowledge, imparted by Bob's own mother, that he had done her a great injury. He made the same kind of love to every girl he had known for an hour, and forgot her the next day. "One of these days," the mother had said, "some girl would catch him, and then he would be sorry." A girl hadn't caught him in this case, but he had caught a girl, and didn't know what to do with her. Having compelled her to go through a form of marriage—it was no more than a form—he was sailing off to the ends of the world, leaving her not so much as the protection of his name. She owed him nothing; and only the goodness of his angel mother was making up for what he owed to her.

And, on his side, Bob was so carried away by his romance as to have no conception of Jennie's attitude toward him. Seeing himself as a knight riding to the relief of a damsel in distress, it did not occur to him that the damsel could have a preference as to her deliverer. It was a matter of course that, from the window of the tower in which she was a prisoner, she would drop into his arms.

In other words, Bob had his own view of the advantages of being a Collingham. They were great advantages, since they gave him the opportunity of being generous. He was in love with Jennie largely because she was an exquisite object on which to spend himself. She was a gem, not in the rough, and yet in need of polishing, and though his own refinement was not so very great, he could throw refinement in her way.

That is to say, love for Bob was very much a matter of giving himself out. Girls who could have brought him everything—and they were not scarce at Marillo Park—didn't interest him. They left no place for the selflessness which was the basis of his character. He couldn't precisely be called kind, since kindness implies some deliberation of the will. As the impulse of a fountain is to pour itself out, so Bob's impulse was to give, while Jennie was a crystal chalice wide open to receive.

"I want you to have everything in the world, Jennie darling," he declared, bending above her as lovingly as a bench in the park would permit. "I can't give it to you right off the bat, worse luck, but sooner or later I'll be able to dope you out every little wish. Good Lord! How I'll enjoy it."

"What do you mean by sooner or later?" Jennie asked, with eyes downcast.

"When I get the family broken to the bit. I can't tell you in dates or time. They'll be hard in the mouth at first; and mother pulls like the devil."

At this false witness, Jennie was revolted. No one knew better than herself the bigness of that maternal heart which, as early as next week, would give liberal proof of its sincerity, when Bob's promises would still be in the air.

Bob had the afternoon at his disposal. The park offered itself as a delicious trysting place, because it was the month of May. In a nook where lilac and syringa overshadowed them and water glinted between lawns and glades, they sat discreetly side by side, and she permitted him to hold her hand.

He went on to sketch his plans for the immediate future. His most trying lack was that of ready cash. The parental system had always been generous as to things, but penurious in money. In the matter of things, he would be as extravagant as he reasonably liked, so long as the bills were sent to dad. Before he went to work at the bank, his allowance in money wouldn't have kept him in cigarettes. Even now, he was only on the weekly pay roll for thirty-eight dollars and sixty-six cents per, handed him in a pay envelope. Food, lodging, clothes, saddle horses, motor cars—all these were thrown in extra; but in actual coin he didn't handle more than his two thousand dollars a year, like any other clerk.

Jennie could see, therefore, that, to begin with, their position would be difficult, though only to begin with. He could send her a little money while he was away, but it wouldn't be very much.

"I don't want you to send me any," she said, hastily.

"You forget that I'm your husband, dear. If I didn't, you could bring an action for divorce on the ground of nonsupport."

This idea being new to Jennie, she had it explained to her, rejecting it as a resource because it was unromantic.

"And so, to be on the safe side against that," he laughed, "I've got this for you now."

Slipping an envelope from his pocket, he forced it into the hand he was holding.

"It's only a hundred dollars—" he was beginning to explain.

She snatched her hand away as if she had been stung.

"Oh, Bob, I can't!"

That situation amused him. It was one more proof of the naïve honesty of the little girl. He knew how hard up she was, how hard up all the family must be, and yet money didn't tempt her.

"You're a funny little kid," he laughed, drawing her as near to him as the park laws would permit. "You'd think I didn't have a right to take care of you."

But Jennie was feeling that if she took this money she would be bound to him by principles more acute than the promises she had made before the parson.

"No, Bob, I can't. Please don't make me—please!"

But in the end he forced it on her, and she stowed it away in her little bag. By that time, too, she had reviewed the family situation. With a hundred dollars in her possession they could less easily be sold out of house and home at the end of the following week. That calamity, at least, could be dodged, whatever other misfortune might overtake herself. She might decide that to be sold out of house and home would be easier than to bind herself further to Bob by using his money; but, still, she would have the choice. As to the twenty-five thousand, there was always the possibility that it might not come in time. She had not yet seen Hubert; she couldn't see him till Bob had sailed. When she did, the other woman might be in her place and her heart would have to break in spite of everything. Better it should break with a hundred dollars in her pocket than that she should be helpless to stay the family disaster.

But when Bob sailed on the Monday she was free to make the great test. Notwithstanding his definite farewells on the Saturday, he had tried to see her again on the Sunday, but the necessity for secrecy made it possible for her to put him off. For one thing, she couldn't go through a second time such a good-by as that of Saturday. Bob had been too much overcome. As unexpectedly to himself as to her, he had broken down. Braving all publicity, he had suddenly seized her hand, pressed it to his lips, and as he bent over it she could feel his tears against her fingers. He hadn't exactly cried; he had only breathed hard, with two great sobs.

"My God! how I love you, Jennie!" she had heard him muttering. "How I love you! How I love you! How can I do without you all the time till I come back?" When he raised his head he laughed sheepishly, though the tears were still on his cheeks. "Forget it, little girl," he begged, unsteadily, wiping his cheeks and blowing his nose. "I just worship you, and that's all there is about it. It breaks me all up to go away and leave you; but the time will pass, and, if I can help it, I shall never go away from you again."

Defying the park laws once more, he had kissed her and kissed her. She had let him do it because she was so unnerved. Besides, she was sorry for him, and would have been sorrier still if she hadn't known that by to-morrow he would have forgotten her. That was always the way with fellows who took things so hard. The true love was too stern and strong to show emotion.

Nevertheless, she had had an unhappy Sunday thinking of those two sobs. It was not until after ten o'clock on Monday morning that she was able to turn again to the compulsion of the man she loved. At ten, Bob sailed, and that episode in Jennie's life was probably behind her. By the time he came back, he would be in love with a girl of his own class and eager to seize the freedom she, Jennie, would be in a position to deliver him. At last the way was clear. She had only to go to her lover and tell him she was there.

She went that afternoon. Her plan was simple. She would say that if he had not yet found a model for the girl in the Byzantine chair, she was ready to do the work. The rest would come as a matter of course.

Now that she was face to face with the task, her heart was oddly apathetic. "I might be out to buy postage stamps," she said to herself, while crossing the ferry.