THE STREET CALLED STRAIGHT

A NOVEL
BY

BASIL KING

AUTHOR OF
THE INNER SHRINE, THE WILD OLIVE, ETC.
ILLUSTRATED BY
ORSON LOWELL

NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS

Published by Arrangement with Harper & Brothers

1911, 1912.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PUBLISHED MAY, 1912

"By the Street Called Straight we come to the House called Beautiful"

—New England Saying

THE STREET CALLED STRAIGHT

I

s a matter of fact, Davenant was under no illusions concerning the quality of the welcome his hostess was according him, though he found a certain pleasure in being once more in her company. It was not a keen pleasure, but neither was it an embarrassing one; it was exactly what he supposed it would be in case they ever met again—a blending on his part of curiosity, admiration, and reminiscent suffering out of which time and experience had taken the sting. He retained the memory of a minute of intense astonishment once upon a time, followed by some weeks, some months perhaps, of angry humiliation; but the years between twenty-four and thirty-three are long and varied, generating in healthy natures plenty of saving common sense. Work, travel, and a widened knowledge of men and manners had so ripened Davenant's mind that he was able to see his proposal now as Miss Guion must have seen it then, as something so incongruous and absurd as not only to need no consideration, but to call for no reply. Nevertheless, it was the refusal on her part of a reply, of the mere laconic No which was all that, in his heart of hearts, he had ever expected, that rankled in him longest; but even that mortification had passed, as far as he knew, into the limbo of extinct regrets. For her present superb air of having no recollection of his blunder he had nothing but commendation. It was as becoming to the spirited grace of its wearer as a royal mantle to a queen. Carrying it as she did, with an easy, preoccupied affability that enabled her to look round him and over him and through him, to greet him and converse with him, without seeming positively to take in the fact of his existence, he was permitted to suppose the incident of their previous acquaintance, once so vital to himself, to have been forgotten. If this were so, it would be nothing very strange, since a woman of twenty-seven, who has had much social experience, may be permitted to lose sight of the more negligible of the conquests she has made as a girl of eighteen. She had asked him to dinner, and placed him honorably at her right; but words could not have made it plainer than it was that he was but an accident to the occasion.

He was there, in short, because he was staying with Mr. and Mrs. Temple. After a two years' absence from New England he had arrived in Waverton that day, "Oh, bother! bring him along," had been the formula in which Miss Guion had conveyed his invitation, the dinner being but an informal, neighborly affair. Two or three wedding gifts having arrived from various quarters of the world, it was natural that Miss Guion should want to show them confidentially to her dear friend and distant relative, Drusilla Fane. Mrs. Fane had every right to this privileged inspection, since she had not only timed her yearly visit to her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Temple, so that it should synchronize with the wedding, but had introduced Olivia to Colonel Ashley, in the first place. Indeed, there had been a rumor at Southsea, right up to the time of Miss Guion's visit to the pretty little house on the Marine Parade, that the colonel's calls and attentions there had been not unconnected with Mrs. Fane herself; but rumor in British naval and military stations is notoriously overactive, especially in matters of the heart. Certain it is, however, that when the fashionable London papers announced that a marriage had been arranged, and would shortly take place, between Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Ashley, of the Sussex Rangers, and of Heneage Place, Belvoir, Leicestershire, and Olivia Margaret, only child of Henry Guion, Esquire, of Tory Hill, Waverton, near Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A., no one offered warmer congratulations than the lady in whose house the interesting pair had met. There were people who ascribed this attitude to the fact that, being constitutionally "game," she refused to betray her disappointment. She had been "awfully game," they said, when poor Gerald Fane, also of the Sussex Rangers, was cut off with enteric at Peshawur. But the general opinion was to the effect that, not wanting Rupert Ashley (for some obscure, feminine reason) for herself, she had magnanimously bestowed him elsewhere. Around tea-tables, and at church parade, it was said "Americans do that," with some comment on the methods of the transfer.

On every ground, then, Drusilla was entitled to this first look at the presents, some of which had come from Ashley's brother officers, who were consequently brother officers of the late Captain Fane; so that when she telephoned saying she was afraid that they, her parents and herself, couldn't come to dinner that evening, because a former ward of her father's—Olivia must remember Peter Davenant!—was arriving to stay with them for a week or two, Miss Guion had answered, "Oh, bother! bring him along," and the matter was arranged. It was doubtful, however, that she knew him in advance to be the Peter Davenant who nine years earlier had had the presumption to fall in love with her; it was still more doubtful, after she had actually shaken hands with him and called him by name, whether she paid him the tribute of any kind of recollection. The fact that she had seated him at her right, in the place that would naturally be accorded to Rodney Temple, the scholarly director of the Department of Ceramics in the Harvard Gallery of Fine Arts, made it look as if she considered Davenant a total stranger. In the few conventionally gracious words she addressed to him, her manner was that of the hostess who receives a good many people in the course of a year toward the chance guest she had never seen before and expects never to see again.

"Twice round the world since you were last in Boston? How interesting!" Then, as if she had said enough for courtesy, she continued across the lights and flowers to Mrs. Fane: "Drusilla, did you know Colonel Ashley had declined that post at Gibraltar? I'm so glad. I should hate the Gib."

"The Gib wouldn't hate you," Mrs. Fane assured her. "You'd have a heavenly time there. Rupert Ashley is deep in the graces of old Bannockburn, who's in command. He's not a bad old sort, old Ban isn't, though he's a bit of a martinet. Lady Ban is awful—a bounder in petticoats. She looks like that."

Drusilla pulled down the corners of a large, mobile mouth, so as to simulate Lady Bannockburn's expression, in a way that drew a laugh from every one at the table but the host. Henry Guion remained serious, not from natural gravity, but from inattention. He was obviously not in a mood for joking, nor apparently for eating, since he had scarcely tasted his soup and was now only playing with the fish. As this corroborated what Mrs. Temple had more than once asserted to her husband during the past few weeks, that "Henry Guion had something on his mind," she endeavored to exchange a glance with him, but he was too frankly enjoying the exercise of his daughter's mimetic gift to be otherwise observant.

"And what does Colonel Ashley look like, Drucie?" he asked, glancing slyly at Miss Guion.

"Like that," Mrs. Fane said, instantly. Straightening the corners of her mouth and squaring her shoulders, she fixed her eyes into a stare of severity, and stroked horizontally an imaginary mustache, keeping the play up till her lips quivered.

"It is like him," Miss Guion laughed.

"Is he as stiff as all that?" the professor inquired.

"Not stiff," Miss Guion explained, "only dignified."

"Dignified!" Drusilla cried. "I should think so. He's just like Olivia herself. It's perfectly absurd that those two should marry. Apart, they're a pair of splendid specimens; united, they'll be too much of a good thing. They're both so well supplied with the same set of virtues that when they look at each other it'll be like seeing their own faces in a convex mirror. It'll be simply awful."

Her voice had the luscious English intonation, in spite of its being pitched a little too high. In speaking she displayed the superior, initiated manner apt to belong to women who bring the flavor of England into colonial and Indian garrison towns—a manner Drusilla had acquired notably well, considering that not ten years previous her life had been bounded by American college class-days. Something of this latter fact persisted, notwithstanding her English articulation and style of doing her hair. Her marriage had been the accident of a winter spent with her mother in Bermuda, at a time when the Sussex Rangers were stationed there. Her engagement to Captain Gerald Fane—son of the Very Reverend the Dean of Silchester—was the result of a series of dances given chiefly in the Hamilton hotels. Marriage brought the girl born and bred in a New England college town into a kind of life for which she had had no preparation; but she adapted herself as readily as she would have done had she married a Russian prince or a Spanish grandee. In the effort she made there was a mingling of the matter-of-fact and the tour de force. Regimental life is not unlike that of a large family; it has the same sort of claims, intimacies, and quarrels, the same sort of jealousies within, combined with solidarity against the outsider. Perceiving this quickly, Drusilla proceeded to disarm criticism by being impeccable in dress and negatively amiable in conduct. "With my temperament," she said to herself, "I can afford to wait." Following her husband to Barbados, the Cape, and India, she had just succeeded in passing all the tests of the troop-ship and the married quarters when he died. For a while her parents hoped she would make her widowed home in Boston; but her heart had been given irrevocably to the British army—to its distinguished correctness, to its sober glories, its world-wide roving, and its picturesque personal associations. Though she had seen little of England, except for occasional visits on leave, she had become English in tastes and at heart. For a year after Gerald's death she lived with his family at Silchester, in preference to going to her own. After that she settled in the small house at Southsea, where from time to time she had her girlhood's companion, Olivia Guion, as a guest.

"Perhaps that'll do us good," Miss Guion ventured, in reply to Drusilla's observations at her expense. "To see ourselves as others see us must be much like looking at one's face in a spoon."

"That doesn't do us any good," Rodney Temple corrected, "because we always blame the spoon."

"Don't you mind them, dear," Mrs. Temple cooed. She was a little, apple-faced woman, with a figure suggestive of a tea-cozy, and a voice with a gurgle in it, like a dove's. A nervous, convulsive moment of her pursed-up little mouth made that organ an uncertain element in her physiognomy, shifting as it did from one side of her face to the other with the rapidity of an aurora borealis. "Don't mind them, dear. A woman can never do more than reflect 'broken lights' of her husband, when she has a good one. Don't you love that expression?—'broken lights'? 'We are but broken lights of Thee!' Dear Tennyson! And no word yet from Madame de Melcourt."

"I don't expect any now," Olivia explained. "If Aunt Vic had meant to write she would have done it long ago. I'm afraid I've offended her past forgiveness."

She held her head slightly to one side, smiling with an air of mock penitence.

"Dear, dear!" Mrs. Temple murmured, sympathetically. "Just because you wouldn't marry a Frenchman!"

"And a little because I'm going to marry an Englishman. To Aunt Vic all Englishmen are grocers."

"Horrid old thing!" Drusilla said, indignantly.

"It's because she doesn't know them, of course," Olivia went on. "It's one of the things I never can understand—how people can generalize about a whole nation because they happen to dislike one or two individuals. As a matter of fact, Aunt Vic has become so absorbed in her little circle of old French royalist noblesse that she can't see anything to admire outside the rue de l'Université and château life in Normandy. She does admit that there's an element of homespun virtue in the old families of Boston and Waverton; but that's only because she belongs to them herself."

"The capacity of the American woman for being domesticated in an alien environment," observed Rodney Temple, "is only equaled by the dog's."

"We're nomadic, father," Drusilla asserted, "and migratory. We've always been so. It's because we're Saxons and Angles and Celts and Normans, and—"

"Saxon and Norman and Dane are we," Mrs. Temple quoted, gently.

"They've always been fidgeting about the world, from one country to another," Drusilla continued, "and we've inherited the taste. If we hadn't, our ancestors would never have crossed the Atlantic, in the first place. And now that we've got here, and can't go any farther in this direction, we're on the jump to get back again. That's all there is to it. It's just in the blood. Isn't it, Peter? Isn't it, Cousin Henry?"

Drusilla had a way of appealing to whatever men were present, as though her statements lacked something till they had received masculine corroboration.

"All the same, I wish you could have managed the thing without giving offence to Aunt Vic."

The words were Henry Guion's first since sitting down to table.

"I couldn't help it, papa. I didn't give Aunt Vic offence; she took it."

"She's always been so fond of you—"

"I'm fond of her. She's an old darling. And yet I couldn't let her marry me off to a Frenchman, in the French way, when I'd made up my mind to—to do something else. Could I, Cousin Cherry?"

Mrs. Temple plumed herself, pleased at being appealed to. "I don't see how you could, dear. But I suppose your dear aunt—great-aunt, that is—has become so foreign that she's forgotten our simple ways. So long as you follow your heart, dear—"

"I've done that, Cousin Cherry."

The tone drew Davenant's eyes to her again, not in scrutiny, but for the pleasure it gave him to see her delicate features suffused with a glow of unexpected softness. It was unexpected, because her bearing had always conveyed to him, even in the days when he was in love with her, an impression of very refined, very subtle haughtiness. It seemed to make her say, like Marie Antoinette to Madame Vigée-Lebrun: "They would call me arrogant if I were not a queen." The assumption of privilege and prerogative might be only the inborn consciousness of distinction, but he fancied it might be more effective for being tempered. Not that it was overdone. It was not done at all. If the inner impulse working outward poised a neat, classic head too loftily, or shot from gray eyes, limpid and lovely in themselves, a regard that was occasionally too imperious, Olivia Guion was probably unaware of these effects. With beauty by inheritance, refinement by association, and taste and "finish" by instinct, it was possible for her to engage with life relatively free from the cumbrous impedimenta of self-consciousness. It was because Davenant was able to allow for this that his judgment on her pride of manner, exquisite though it was, had never been more severe; none the less, it threw a new light on his otherwise slight knowledge of her character to note the faint blush, the touch of gentleness, with which she hinted her love for her future husband. He had scarcely believed her capable of this kind of condescension.

He called it condescension because he saw, or thought he saw, in her approaching marriage, not so much the capture of her heart as the fulfilment of her ambitions. He admitted that, in her case, there was a degree to which the latter would imply the former, since she was the sort of woman who would give her love in the direction in which her nature found its fitting outlet. He judged something from what Drusilla Fane had said, as they were driving toward Tory Hill that evening.

"Olivia simply must marry a man who'll give her something to do besides sitting round and looking handsome. With Rupert Ashley she'll have the duties of a public, or semi-public, position. He'll keep her busy, if it's only opening bazars and presenting prizes at Bisley. The American men who've tried to marry her have wanted to be her servants, when all the while she's been waiting for a master."

Davenant understood that, now that it was pointed out to him, though the thought would not have come to him spontaneously. She was the strong woman who would yield only to a stronger man. Colonel Ashley might not be stronger than she in intellect or character, but he had done some large things on a large field, and was counted an active force in a country of forceful activities. There might be a question as to whether he would prove to be her master, but he would certainly never think of being her slave.

"What are you going to do, Henry, when the gallant stranger carries off Olivia, a fortnight hence?"

Though she asked the question with the good intention of drawing her host into the conversation, Mrs. Temple made it a point to notice the effort with which he rallied himself to meet her words.

"What am I going to do?" he repeated, absently. "Oh, my future will depend very much on—Hobson's choice."

"That's true," Miss Guion agreed, hurriedly, as though to emphasize a point. "It's all the choice I've left to him. I've arranged everything for papa—beautifully. He's to take in a partner perhaps two partners. You know," she continued in explanation to Mrs. Fane—"you know that poor papa has been the whole of Guion, Maxwell & Guion since Mr. Maxwell died. Well, then, he's to take in a partner or two, and gradually shift his business into their hands. That wouldn't take more than a couple of years at longest. Then he's going to retire, and come to live near me in England. Rupert says there's a small place close to Heneage that would just suit him. Papa has always liked the English hunting country, and so—"

"And so everything will be for the best," Rodney Temple finished. "There's nothing like a fresh young mind, like a young lady's, for settling business affairs. It would have taken you or me a long time to work that plan out, wouldn't it, Henry? We should be worried over the effect on our trusteeships and the big estates we've had the care of—"

"What about the big estates?"

Davenant noticed the tone in which Guion brought out this question, though it was an hour later before he understood its significance. It was a sharp tone, the tone of a man who catches an irritating word or two among remarks he has scarcely followed. Temple apparently had meant to call it forth, since he answered, with the slightest possible air of intention:

"Oh, nothing—except what I hear."

While Miss Guion and Mrs. Fane chatted of their own affairs Davenant remarked the way in which Henry Guion paused, his knife and fork fixed in the chicken wing on his plate, and gazed at his old friend. He bent slightly forward, too, looking, with his superb head and bust slightly French in style, very handsome and imposing.

"Then you've been—hearing—things?"

Rodney Temple lowered his eyes in a way that confirmed Davenant—who knew his former guardian's tricks of manner—in his suppositions. He was so open in countenance that anything momentarily veiled on his part, either in speech or in address, could reasonably be attributed to stress of circumstances. The broad forehead, straight-forward eyes, and large mouth imperfectly hidden by a shaggy beard and mustache, were of the kind that lend themselves to lucidity and candor. Externally he was the scholar, as distinct from the professional man or the "divine." His figure—tall, large-boned, and loose-jointed—had the slight stoop traditionally associated with study, while the profile was thrust forward as though he were peering at something just out of sight. A courtly touch in his style was probably a matter of inheritance, as was also his capacity for looking suitably attired while obviously neglectful of appearances. His thick, lank, sandy hair, fading to white, and long, narrow, stringy beard of the same transitional hue were not well cared for; and yet they helped to give him a little of the air of a Titian or Velasquez nobleman. In answer to Guion now, he spoke without lifting his eyes from his plate.

"Have I been hearing things? N-no; only that the care of big estates is a matter of great responsibility—and anxiety."

"That's what I tell papa," Miss Guion said, warmly, catching the concluding words. "It's a great responsibility and anxiety. He ought to be free from it. I tell him my marriage is a providential hint to him to give up work."

"Perhaps I sha'n't get the chance. Work may give up—me."

"I wish it would, papa. Then everything would be settled."

"Some things would be settled. Others might be opened—for discussion."

If Rodney Temple had not lifted his eyes in another significant look toward Guion, Davenant would have let these sentences pass unheeded. As it was, his attention was directed to possible things, or impossible things, left unsaid. For a second or two he was aware of an odd suspicion, but he brushed it away as absurd, in view of the self-assurance with which Guion roused himself at last to enter into the conversation, which began immediately to turn on persons of whom Davenant had no knowledge.

The inability to follow closely gave him time to make a few superficial observations regarding his host. In spite of the fact that Guion had been a familiar figure to him ever since his boyhood, he now saw him at really close range for the first time in years.

What struck him most was the degree to which Guion conserved his quality of Adonis. Long ago renowned, in that section of American society that clings to the cities and seaboard between Maine and Maryland, as a fine specimen of manhood, he was perhaps handsomer now, with his noble, regular features, his well-trimmed, iron-gray beard, and his splendid head of iron-gray hair, than he had been in his youth. Reckoning roughly, Davenant judged him to be sixty. He had been a personage prominently in view in the group of cities formed by Boston, Cambridge, and Waverton, ever since Davenant could remember him. Nature having created Guion an ornament to his kind, fate had been equally beneficent in ordaining that he should have nothing to do, on leaving the university, but walk into the excellent legal practice his grandfather had founded, and his father had brought to a high degree of honor as well as to a reasonable pitch of prosperity. It was, from the younger Guion's point of view, an agreeable practice, concerned chiefly with the care of trust funds, in which a gentleman could engage without any rough-and-tumble loss of gentility. It required little or nothing in the way of pleadings in the courts or disputing in the market-place, and—especially during the lifetime of the elder partners—left him leisure for cultivating that graceful relationship to life for which he possessed aptitudes. It was a high form of gracefulness, making it a matter of course that he should figure on the Boards of Galleries of Fine Arts and Colleges of Music, and other institutions meant to minister to his country's good through the elevation of its taste.

"It's the sort of thing he was cut out for," Davenant commented to himself, as his eye traveled from the high-bred face, where refinement blended with authority, to the essentially gentlemanly figure, on which the delicately tied cravat sat with the elegance of an orchid, while the white waistcoat, of the latest and most youthful cut, was as neatly adjusted to the person as the calyx to a bud. The mere sight of so much ease and distinction made Davenant himself feel like a rustic in his Sunday clothes, though he seized the opportunity of being in such company to enlarge his perception of the fine points of bearing. It was an improving experience of a kind which he only occasionally got.

He had an equal sense of the educational value of the conversation, to which, as it skipped from country to country and from one important name to another, it was a privilege to be a listener. His own career—except for his two excursions round the world, conscientiously undertaken in pursuit of knowledge—had been so somberly financial that he was frankly, and somewhat naïvely, curious concerning the people who "did things" bearing little or no relation to business, and who permitted themselves sensations merely for the sake of having them. Olivia Guion's friends, and Drusilla Fane's—admirals, generals, colonels, ambassadors, and secretaries of embassy they apparently were, for the most part—had what seemed to him an unwonted freedom of dramatic action. Merely to hear them talked about gave him glimpses of a world varied and picturesque, from the human point of view, beyond his dreams. In the exchange of scraps of gossip and latest London anecdotes between Miss Guion and Drusilla Fane, on which Henry Guion commented, Davenant felt himself to be looking at a vivid but fitfully working cinematograph, of which the scenes were snatched at random from life as lived anywhere between Washington and Simla, or Inverness and Rome. The effect was both instructive and entertaining. It was also in its way enlightening, since it showed him the true standing in the world of this woman whom he had once, for a few wild minutes, hoped to make his wife.

The dinner was half over before he began clearly to detach Miss Guion from that environment which he would have called "the best Boston society." Placing her there, he would have said before this evening that he placed her as high as the reasonable human being could aspire to be set. For any one whose roots were in Waverton, "the best Boston society" would in general be taken as the state of blossoming. It came to him as a discovery, made there and then, that Olivia Guion had seized this elect state with one of her earliest tendrils, and, climbing on by way of New York and Washington, had chosen to do her actual flowering in a cosmopolitan air.

He had none of the resentment the home-bred American business man habitually feels for this kind of eccentricity. Now that he had caught the idea, he could see at a glance, as his mind changed his metaphor, how admirably she was suited to the tapestried European setting. He was conscious even of something akin to pride in the triumphs she was capable of achieving on that richly decorated world-stage, much as though she were some compatriot prima-donna. He could see already how well, as the wife of Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Ashley, she would fill the part. It had been written for her. Its strong points and its subtleties were alike of the sort wherein she would shine.

This perception of his own inward applause explained something in regard to himself about which he had been wondering ever since the beginning of dinner—the absence of any pang, of any shade of envy, to see another man win where he had been so ignominiously defeated. He saw now that it was a field on which he never could have won. Within "the best Boston society" he might have had a chance, though even there it must have been a poor one; but out here in the open, so to speak, where the prowess and chivalry of Christendom furnished his competitors, he had been as little in the running as a mortal at a contest of the gods. That he was no longer in love with her he had known years ago; but it palliated somewhat his old humiliation, it made the word failure easier to swallow down, to perceive that his love, when it existed, had been doomed, from the nature of things and in advance, to end in nothing, like that of the nightingale for the moon.

By dwelling too pensively on these thoughts he found he had missed some of the turns of the talk, his attention awakening to hear Henry Guion say:

"That's all very fine, but a man doesn't risk everything he holds dear in the world to go cheating at cards just for the fun of it. You may depend upon it he had a reason."

"Oh, he had a reason," Mrs. Fane agreed—"the reason of being hard up. The trouble lay in its not being good enough."

"I imagine it was good enough for him, poor devil."

"But not for any one else. He was drummed out. There wasn't a soul in the regiment to speak to him. We heard that he took another name and went abroad. Anyhow, he disappeared. It was all he could do. He was lucky to get off with that; wasn't he, Peter? wasn't he, father?"

"What he got off with," said Guion, "was a quality of tragic interest which never pertains to the people who stick to the Street called Straight."

"Oh, certainly," Mrs. Fane assented, dryly. "He did acquire that. But I'm surprised to hear you commend it; aren't you, father? aren't you, Peter?"

"I'm not commending it," Guion asserted; "I only feel its force. I've a great deal of sympathy with any poor beggar in his—downfall."

"Since when?"

The look with which Rodney Temple accompanied the question once more affected Davenant oddly. It probably made the same impression on Guion, since he replied with a calmness that seemed studied: "Since—lately. Why do you ask?"

"Oh, for no reason. It only strikes me as curious that your sympathy should take that turn."

"Precisely," Miss Guion chimed in. "It's not a bit like you, papa. You used to be harder on dishonorable things than any one."

"Well, I'm not now."

It was clear to Davenant by this time that in these words Guion was not so much making a statement as flinging a challenge. He made that evident by the way in which he sat upright, squared his shoulders, and rested a large, white fist clenched upon the table. His eyes, too, shone, glittered rather, with a light quite other than that which a host usually turns upon his guests. To Davenant, as to Mrs. Temple, it seemed as if he had "something on his mind"—something of which he had a persistent desire to talk covertly, in the way in which an undetected felon will risk discovery to talk about the crime.

No one else apparently at the table shared this impression. Rodney Temple, with eyes pensively downcast, toyed with the seeds of a pear, while Miss Guion and Mrs. Fane began speaking of some other incident of what to them was above everything else, "the Service." A minute or two later Olivia rose.

"Come, Cousin Cherry. Come, Drusilla," she said, with her easy, authoritative manner. Then, apparently with an attempt to make up for her neglect of Davenant, she said, as she held the door open for the ladies to pass: "Don't let them keep you here forever. We shall be terribly dull till you join us."

He was not too dense to comprehend that the words were conventional, as the smile she flung him was perfunctory. Nevertheless, the little attention pleased him.

II

he three men being left together, Davenant's conviction of inner excitement on the part of his host was deepened. It was as if, on the withdrawal of the ladies, Guion had less intention of concealing it. Not that at first he said anything directly or acted otherwise than as a man with guests to entertain. It was only that he threw into the task of offering liqueurs and passing cigars a something febrile that caused his two companions to watch him quietly. Once or twice Davenant caught Temple's eye; but with a common impulse each hastily looked elsewhere.

"So, Mr. Davenant, you've come back to us. Got here only this afternoon, didn't you? I wonder why you came. Having got out of a dull place like Waverton, why should you return to it?"

Looking the more debonair because of the flush in his face and the gleam in his eye, Guion seated himself in the place his daughter had left vacant between his two guests. Both his movements and his manner of speech were marked by a quick jerkiness, which, however, was not without a certain masculine grace.

"I don't know that I've any better reason," Davenant laughed, snipping off the end of his cigar, "than that which leads the ox to his stall—because he knows the way."

"Good!" Guion laughed, rather loudly. Then, stopping abruptly, he continued, "I fancy you know your way pretty well in any direction you want to go, don't you?"

"I can find it—if I know where I'm going. I came back to Boston chiefly because that was just what I didn't know."

"He means," Rodney Temple explained, "that he'd got out of his beat; and so, like a wise man, he returns to his starting-point."

"I'd got out of something more than my beat; I'd got out of my element. I found that the life of elegant leisure on which I'd embarked wasn't what I'd been cut out for."

"That's interesting—very," Guion said. "How did you make the discovery?"

"By being bored to death."

"Bored?—with all your money?"

"The money isn't much; but, even if it were, it couldn't go on buying me a good time."

"That, of course, depends on what your idea of a good time may be; doesn't it, Rodney?"

"It depends somewhat," Rodney replied, "on the purchasing power of money. There are things not to be had for cash."

"I'm afraid my conception of a good time," Davenant smiled, "might be more feasible without the cash than with it. After all, money would be a doubtful blessing to a bee if it took away the task of going out to gather honey."

"A bee," Guion observed, "isn't the product of a high and complex civilization—"

"Neither am I," Davenant declared, with a big laugh. "I spring from the primitive stratum of people born to work, who expect to work, and who, when they don't work, have no particular object in living on."

"And so you've come back to Boston to work?"

"To work—or something."

"You leave yourself, I see, the latitude of—something."

"Only because it's better than nothing. It's been nothing for so long now that I'm willing to make it anything."

"Make what—anything?"

"My excuse for remaining on earth. If I'm to go on doing that, I've got to have something more to justify it than the mere ability to pay my hotel bill."

"You're luckier than you know to be able to do that much," Guion said, with one of his abrupt, nervous changes of position. "But you've been uncommonly lucky, anyhow, haven't you? Made some money out of that mine business, didn't you? Or was it in sugar?"

Davenant laughed. "A little," he admitted. "But, to any one like you, sir, it would seem a trifle."

"To any one like me! Listen." He leaned forward, with feverish eyes, and spoke slowly, tapping on the table-cloth as he did so. "For half a million dollars I'd sell my soul."

Davenant resisted the impulse to glance at Temple, who spoke promptly, while Guion swallowed thirstily a glass of cognac.

"That's a good deal for a soul, Henry. It's a large amount of the sure and tangible for a very uncertain quantity of the impalpable and problematical."

Davenant laughed at this more boisterously than the degree of humor warranted. He began definitely to feel that sense of discomfort which in the last half-hour he had been only afraid of. It was not the commonplace fact that Guion might be short of money that he dreaded; it was the possibility of getting a glimpse of another man's inner secret self. He had been in this position more than once before—when men wanted to tell him things he didn't want to know—when, whipped by conscience or crazed by misfortune or hysterical from drink, they tried to rend with their own hands the veil that only the lost or the desperate suffer to be torn. He had noted before that it was generally men like Guion of a high strung temperament, perhaps with a feminine streak in it, who reached this pass, and because of his own reserve—his rather cowardly reserve, he called it—he was always impelled to run away from them. As there was no possibility of running away now, he could only dodge, by pretending to misunderstand, what he feared Guion was trying to say.

"So everything you undertook you pulled off successfully?" his host questioned, abruptly.

"Not everything; some things. I lost money—often; but on the whole I made it."

"Good! With me it was always the other way."

The pause that followed was an uneasy one, otherwise Temple would not have seized on the first topic that came to hand to fill it up.

"You'll miss Olivia when she's gone, Henry."

"Y-yes; if she goes."

The implied doubt startled Davenant, but Temple continued to smoke pensively. "I've thought," he said, after a puff or two at his cigar, "I've thought you seemed to be anticipating something in the way of a—hitch."

Guion held his cigar with some deliberation over an ash-tray, knocking off the ash with his little finger as though it were a task demanding precision.

"You'll know all about it to-morrow, perhaps—or in a few days at latest. It can't be kept quiet much longer. I got the impression at dinner that you'd heard something already."

"Nothing but gossip, Henry."

Guion smiled, but with a wince. "I've noticed," he said, "that there's a certain kind of gossip that rarely gets about unless there's some cause for it—on the principle of no smoke without fire. If you've heard anything, it's probably true."

"I was afraid it might be. But in that case I wonder you allowed Olivia to go ahead."

"I had to let fate take charge of that. When a man gets himself so entangled in a coil of barbed wire that he trips whichever way he turns, his only resource is to stand still. That's my case." He poured himself out another glass of cognac, and tasted it before continuing. "Olivia goes over to England, and gets herself engaged to a man I never heard of. Good! She fixes her wedding-day without consulting me and irrespective of my affairs. Good again! She's old enough to do it, and quite competent. Meanwhile I lose control of the machine, so to speak. I see myself racing on to something, and can't stop. I can only lie back and watch, to see what happens. I've got to leave that to fate, or God, or whatever it is that directs our affairs when we can no longer manage them ourselves." He took another sip of cognac, and pulled for a minute nervously at his cigar. "I thought at first that Olivia might be married and get, off before anything happened. Now, it looks to me as if there was going to be a smash. Rupert Ashley arrives in three or four days' time, and then—"

"You don't think he'd want to back out, do you?"

"I haven't the remotest idea. From Olivia's description he seems like a decent sort; and yet—"

Davenant got to, his feet. "Shouldn't you like me to go back to the ladies? You want to talk to the professor—"

"No, no," Guion said, easily, pushing Davenant into his seat again. "There's no reason why you shouldn't hear anything I have to say. The whole town will know it soon. You can't conceal a burning house; and Tory Hill is on fire. I may be spending my last night under its roof."

"They'll not rush things like that," Temple said, tying to speak reassuringly.

"They haven't rushed things as it is. I've come to the end of a very long tether. I only want you to know that by this time to-morrow night I may have taken Kipling's Strange Ride with Morrowby Jukes to the Land of the Living Dead. If I do, I sha'n't come back—accept bail, or that sort of thing. I can't imagine anything more ghastly than for a man to be hanging around among his old friends, waiting for a—for a"—he balked at the word—"for a trial," he said at last, "that can have only one ending. No! I'm ready to ride away when they call for me—but they won't find me pining for freedom."

"Can't anything be done?"

"Not for me, Rodney. If Rupert Ashley will only look after Olivia, I shan't mind what happens next. Men have been broken on the wheel before now. I think I can go through it as well as another. But if Ashley should fail us—and of course that's possible—well, you see why I feel as I do about her falling out with the old Marquise. Aunt Vic has always made much of her—and she's very well off—"

"Is there nothing to be expected in that quarter for yourself?"

Guion shook his head. "I couldn't ask her—not at the worst. In the natural course of things Olivia and I would be her heirs—that is, if she didn't do something else with her money—but she's still in the early seventies, and may easily go on for a long time yet. Any help there is very far in the future, so that—"

"Ashley, I take it, is a man of some means?"

"Of comfortable means—no more. He has an entailed property in the Midlands and his pay. As he has a mother and two sisters to pension off, Olivia begged to have no settlements made upon herself. He wanted to do it, after the English fashion, but I think she showed good feeling in declining it. Naturally, I approved of her doing it, knowing how many chances there were that I mightn't be able to—to play up—myself."

After this conversation Davenant could not but marvel at the ease with which their host passed the cigars again and urged him personally to have another glass of Chartreuse. "Then suppose we join the ladies," he added, when further hospitality was declined.

Guion took the time to fleck a few specks of cigar-ash from his shirt-bosom and waistcoat, thus allowing Rodney Temple to pass out first. When alone with Davenant he laid his hand upon the younger man's arm, detaining him.

"It was hardly fair to ask you to dinner," he said, still forcing an unsteady smile, "and let you in for this. I thought at first of putting you off; but in the end I decided to let you come. To me it's been a sort of dress-rehearsal—a foretaste of what it'll be in public. The truth is, I'm a little jumpy. The rôle's so new to me that it means something to get an idea of how to play it on nerve. I recall you as a little chap," he added, in another tone, "when Tom Davenant and his wife first took you. Got you out of an orphanage, didn't they, or something like that? If I remember rightly, your name was Hall or Hale—"

"It was Hallett—Peter Hallett."

"Hallett, was it? Well, it will do no harm for a young Cæsar of finance like you to see what you may come to if you're not careful. Morituri te salutamus, as the gladiators used to say. Only I wish it was to be the arena and the sword instead of the court-room and the Ride with Morrowby Jukes."

Davenant said nothing, not because he had nothing to say, but because his thoughts were incoherent. Perhaps what was most in the nature of a shock to him was the sight of a man whom he both admired for his personality and honored as a pillar of Boston life falling so tragically into ruin. While it was true that to his financially gifted mind any misuse of trust funds had the special heinousness that horse-lifting has to a rancher, yet as he stood with Guion's hand on his shoulder he knew that something in the depths of his being was stirred, and stirred violently, that had rarely been affected before. He had once, as a boy, saved a woman from drowning; he had once seen a man at an upper window of a burning house turn back into the fire while the bystanders restrained him, Davenant, from attempting an impossible rescue. Something of the same unreasoning impulse rose up within him now—the impulse to save—the kind of impulse that takes no account of the merit of the person in peril, seeing only the danger.

But these promptings were dumb in him for the moment from lack of co-ordination. The two or three things he might have said seemed to strangle each other in the attempt to get right of way. In response to Guion's confidences he could only mumble something incoherent and pass on to the drawing-room door. It was a wide opening, hung with portieres, through which he could see Olivia Guion standing by the crackling wood fire, a foot on the low fender. One hand rested lightly on the mantelpiece, while the other drew back her skirt of shimmering black from the blaze. Drusilla Fane, at the piano, was strumming one of Chopin's more familiar nocturnes.

He was still thinking of this glimpse when, a half-hour later, he said to Rodney Temple, as they walked homeward in the moonlight: "I haven't yet told you what I came back for."

"Well, what is it?"

"I thought—that is, I hoped—that if I did the way might open up for me to do what might be called—well, a little good."

"What put that into your head?" was the old man's response to this stammering confession.

"I suppose the thought occurred to me on general principles. I've always understood it was the right thing to attempt."

"Oh, right. That's another matter. Doing right is as easy as drawing breath. It's a habit, like any other. To start out to do good is much like saying you'll add a cubit to your stature. But you can always do right. Do right, and the good'll take care of itself."

Davenant reflected on this in silence as they tramped onward. By this time they had descended Tory Hill, and were on the dike that outlines the shores of the Charles.

By a common impulse both Temple and Davenant kept silent concerning Guion. On leaving Tory Hill they had elected to walk homeward, the ladies taking the carriage. The radiant moonlight and the clear, crisp October air helped to restore Davenant's faculties to a normal waking condition after the nightmare of Guion's hints. Fitting what he supposed must be the facts into the perspective of common life, to which the wide, out-of-door prospect offered some analogy, they were, if not less appalling, at least less overwhelming. Without seeing what was to be done much more clearly than he had seen an hour ago, he had a freer consciousness of power—something like the matter-of-course assumption that any given situation could be met with which he ordinarily faced the world. That he lacked authority in the case was a thought that did not occur to him—no more than it occurred to him on the day when he rescued the woman from drowning, or on the night when he had dashed into the fire to save a man.

It was not till they had descended the straggling, tree-shaded street—along which the infrequent street-lamps threw little more light that that which came from the windows shining placidly out on lawns—and had emerged on the embankment bordering the Charles, that the events of the evening began for Davenant to weave themselves in with that indefinable desire that had led him back to Boston. He could not have said in what way they belonged together; and yet he could perceive that between them there was some such dim interpenetration as the distant lamps of the city made through the silvery mist lying on the river and its adjacent marshes like some efflorescence of the moonlight.

"The difficulty is," he said, after a long silence, "that it's often so hard to know what is right."

"No, it isn't."

The flat contradiction brought a smile to the young man's lips as they trudged onward.

"A good many people say so."

"A good many people say foolish things. It's hard to know what's right chiefly when you're not in a hurry to do it."

"Aren't there exceptions to that rule?"

"I allowed for the exceptions. I said chiefly."

"But when you do want to do it?"

"You'll know what it is. There'll be something to tell you."

"And this something to tell you? What do you call it?"

"Some call it conscience. Some call it God. Some call it neither."

Davenant reflected again.

"And you? What do you call it?"

"I can't see that anything would be gained by telling you. That sort of knowledge isn't of much use till it's worked out for oneself. At least, it wouldn't be of much use to you."

"Why not to me?"

"Because you've started out on your own voyage of discovery. You'll bring back more treasures from that adventure than any one can give you."

These things were said crustily, as though dragged from a man thinking of other matters and unwilling to talk. More minutes went by before Davenant spoke again.

"But doesn't it happen that what you call the 'something-to-tell-you' tells you now and then to do things that most people would call rather wild—or crazy?"

"I dare say."

"So what then?"

"Then you do them."

"Oh, but—"

"If there's an 'Oh, but', you don't. That's all. You belong to the many called, but not to the few chosen."

"But if things are wild—I'm thinking of something in particular—"

"Then you'd better leave it alone, unless you're prepared to be considered a wild man. What Paul did was wild—and Peter—and Joan of Arc—and Columbus—and a good many others. True they were well punished for their folly. Most of them were put in irons, and some of them got death."

"I shouldn't dream of classing myself in their company."

"Every one's in their company who feels a big impulse and has the courage of it. The trouble with most of us is that we can do the feeling all right; but when it comes to the execution—well, we like to keep on the safe side, among the sane."

"So that," Davenant began, stammeringly, "if a fellow got something into his head—something that couldn't be wrong, you know—something that would be right—awfully right in its way, but in a way that most people would consider all wrong—or wild, as I said before—you'd advise him—?"

"I shouldn't advise him at all. Some things must be spontaneous, or they're of little use. If a good seed in good ground won't germinate of its own accord, words of counsel can't help it. But here we are at home. You won't come in just yet? Very well; you've got your latch-key."

"Good-night, sir. I hope you're not going to think me—well, altogether an idiot."

"Very likely I shall; but it'll be nothing if I do. If you can't stand a little thing like that you'd better not have come back with the ideas that have brought you."

III

avenant turned away into the moonlit mist. Through it the electric lamps of Boston, curving in crescent lines by the water's edge, or sprinkled at random over the hill which the city climbs, shone for him with the steadiness and quiet comfort inherent in the familiar and the sure after his long roaming. Lighting a cigarette, he strode along the cement pavement beside the iron railing below which the river ran swiftly and soundlessly. At this late hour of the evening he had the embankment to himself, save for an occasional pair of lovers or a group of sauntering students. Lights from the dignified old houses—among which was Rodney Temple's—overlooking the embankment and the Charles threw out a pleasant glow of friendliness. Beyond the river a giant shadow looming through the mist reminded him of the Roman Colisseum seen in a like aspect, the resemblance being accentuated in his imagination by the Stadium's vast silence, by its rows upon rows of ghostly gray sedilia looking down on a haunted, empty ring. His thoughts strayed to Rome, to Cairo, to Calcutta, to Singapore, to the stages of those two patient journeys round the world, made from a sense of duty, in search of a widening of that sheerly human knowledge which life had hitherto denied him. Having started from London and got back to London again, he saw how imperfectly he had profited by his opportunities, how much he had missed. It was characteristic of him to begin all over again, and more thoroughly, conscientiously revisiting the Pyramids, the Parthenon, and the Taj Mahal, endeavoring to capture some of that true spirit of appreciation of which he read in books.

In his way he was not wholly unsuccessful, since by dint of steady gazing he heightened his perceptive powers, whether it were for Notre Dame, the Sistine Madonna, or the Alps, each of which he took with the same seriousness. What eluded him was precisely that human element which was the primary object of his quest. He learned to recognize the beauty of a picture or a mountain more or less at sight; but the soul of these things, of which he thought more than of their outward aspects, the soul that looks through the eyes and speaks with the tongues of peoples, remained inaccessible to his yearnings. He was always outside—never more than a tourist. He made acquaintances by the wayside easily enough, but only of the rootless variety, beginning without an introduction and ending without a farewell. There was nothing that "belonged" to him, nothing to which he himself "belonged."

It was the persistency of the defect that had marked most of his life, even that portion of it spent in Boston and Waverton—the places he called "home." He was their citizen only by adoption, as only by adoption he was the son of Tom and Sarah Davenant. That intimate claim—the claim on the family, the claim on the soil—which springs of birth and antedates it was not his, and something had always been lacking to his life because of the deficiency. Too healthily genial to feel this want more than obscurely, he nevertheless had tried to remedy it by resorting to the obvious means. He had tried to fall in love, with a view to marriage and a family. Once, perhaps twice, he might have been successful had it not been for the intrusive recollection of a moment, years before, when a girl whom he knew to be proud without suspecting how proud she was had in answer to the first passionate words he ever uttered started to her feet, and, fanning herself languidly, walked away. The memory of that instant froze on his tongue words that might have made him happy, sending him back into his solitary ways. They were ways, as he saw plainly enough, that led no whither; for which reason he had endeavored, as soon as he was financially justified, to get out of them by taking a long holiday and traveling round the world.

He was approaching the end of his second journey when the realization came to him that as far as his great object was concerned the undertaking had been a failure. He was as much outside the broader current of human sympathies as ever. Then, all at once, he began to see the reason why.

The first promptings to this discovery came to him one spring evening as he stood on the deck of the steam-launch he had hired at Shanghai to go up and down the Yangste-Kiang. Born in China, the son of a medical missionary, he had taken a notion to visit his birthplace at Hankow. It was a pilgrimage he had shirked on his first trip to that country, a neglect for which he afterward reproached himself. All things considered, to make it was as little as he could do in memory of the brave man and woman to whom he owed his existence.

Before this visit it must be admitted, Rufus and Corinna Hallett, his parents according to the flesh, had been as remote and mythical to the mind of Peter Davenant as the Dragon's Teeth to their progeny, the Spartans. Merely in the most commonplace kind of data he was but poorly supplied concerning them. He knew his father had once been a zealous young doctor in Graylands, Illinois, and had later become one of the pioneers of medical enterprise in the mission field; he knew, too, that he had already worked for some years at Hankow before he met and married Miss Corinna Meecham, formerly of Drayton, Georgia, but at that time a teacher in a Chinese school supported by one of the great American churches. Events after that seemed to have followed rapidly. Within a few years the babe who was to become Peter Davenant had seen the light, the mother had died, and the father had perished as the victim of a rising in the interior of Hupeh. The child, being taken to America, and unclaimed by relatives, was brought up in the institution maintained for such cases by the Missionary Board of the church to which his father and mother had given their services. He had lived there till, when he was seven years old, Tom and Sarah Davenant, childless and yet longing for a child, had adopted him.

These short and simple annals furnished all that Davenant knew of his own origin; but after the visit to Hankow the personality of his parents at least became more vivid. He met old people who could vaguely recall them. He saw entries in the hospital records made by his father's hand. He stood by his mother's grave. As for his father's grave, if he had one, it was like that of Moses, on some lonely Nebo in Hupeh known to God alone. In the compound Davenant saw the spot on which his father's simple house had stood—the house in which he himself was born—though a wing of the modern hospital now covered it. It was a relief to him to find that, except for the proximity of the lepers' ward and the opium refuge, the place, with its trim lawns, its roses, its clematis, its azaleas, its wistaria, had the sweetness of an English rectory garden. He liked to think that Corinna Meecham had been able to escape from her duties in the crowded, fetid, multi-colored city right outside the gates to something like peace and decency within these quiet walls.

He was not a born traveler; still less was he an explorer. At the end of three days he was glad to take leave of his hosts at the hospital, and turn his launch down the river toward the civilization of Shanghai. But it was on the very afternoon of his departure that the ideas came to him which ultimately took him back to Boston, and of which he was now thinking as he strolled through the silvery mist beside the Charles.

He had been standing then on the deck of his steam-launch gazing beyond the river, with its crowding, outlandish junks, beyond the towns and villages huddled along the banks, beyond walls gay with wistaria, beyond green rice-fields stretching into the horizon, to where a flaming sunset covered half the sky—a sunset which itself seemed hostile, mysterious, alien, Mongolian. He was thinking that it was on just this scene that his father and mother had looked year upon year before his birth. He wondered how it was that it had had no prenatal influence on himself. He wondered how it was that all their devotion had ended with themselves, that their altruism had died when Corinna Meecham's soul had passed-away and Rufus Hallett, like another Stephen, had fallen on his knees beneath the missiles of the villagers to whom he was coming with relief. They had spent their lives in the service of others; he had spent his in his own. It was curious. If there was anything in heredity, he ought to have felt at least some faint impulse from their zeal; but he never had. He could not remember that he had ever done anything for any one. He could not remember that he had ever seen the need of it. It was curious. He mused on it—mused on the odd differences between one generation and another, and on the queer way in which what is light to the father will sometimes become darkness in the son.

It was then that he found the question raising itself within him, "Is that what's wrong with me?"

The query took him by surprise. It was so out of keeping with his particular kind of self-respect that he found it almost droll. If he had never given himself to others, as his parents had, he had certainly paid the world all he owed it. He had nothing wherewith to reproach himself on that score. It had been a matter of satisfaction amounting to pride that he had made his bit of money without resorting in any single instance to methods that could be considered shady. If complaint or criticism could not reach him here, it could not reach him anywhere. Therefore the question as to whether there was anything wrong in his attitude toward others was so patently absurd that it could easily be dismissed.

He dismissed it promptly, but it came again. It came repeatedly during that spring and summer. It forced itself on his attention. It became, in its way, the recurrent companion of his journey. It turned up unexpectedly at all sorts of times and in all sorts of places, and on each occasion with an increased comprehension on his side of its pertinence. He could look back now and trace the stages by which his understanding of it had progressed. There was a certain small happening in a restaurant at Yokohama; there was an accident on the dock at Vancouver; there was a conversation on a moonlight evening up at Banff; there was an incident during a drive in the Yosemite; these were mile-stones on the road by which his mind had traveled on to seize the fact that the want of touch between him and his fellow-men might be due to the suppression of some essentially human force within himself. It came to him that something might, after all, have been transmitted from Hupeh and Hankow of which he had never hitherto suspected the existence.

It cannot be said that his self-questioning had produced any answer more definite than that before he found himself journeying back toward Boston. The final impulse had been given him while he was still loitering aimlessly in Chicago by a letter from Mrs. Temple.

"If you have nothing better to do, dear Peter," she wrote, "we shall be delighted if you can come to us for a week or two. Dear Drusilla is with us once again, and you can imagine our joy at having her. It would seem like old times if you were here to complete the little circle. The room you used to have in your college vacations—after dear Tom and Sarah were taken from us—is all ready for you; and Drusilla would like to know you were here to occupy it just as much as we."

In accepting this invitation Davenant knew himself to be drawn by a variety of strands of motive, no one of which had much force in itself, but which when woven together lent one another strength. Now that he had come, he was glad to have done it, since in the combination of circumstances he felt there must be an acknowledged need of a young man, a strong man, a man capable of shouldering responsibilities. He would have been astonished to think that that could be gainsaid.

The feeling was confirmed in him after he had watched the tip of his smoked-out cigarette drop, like a tiny star, into the current of the Charles, and had re-entered Rodney Temple's house.

"Here's Peter!"

It was Drusilla's voice, with a sob in it. She was sitting on the stairs, three steps from the top, huddled into a voluminous mauve-and-white dressing-gown. In the one dim light burning in the hall her big black eyes gleamed tragically, as those of certain animals gleam in dusk.

"Oh, Peter, dear, I'm so glad you've come! The most awful thing has happened."

That was Mrs. Temple who, wrapped in something fleecy in texture and pink in hue, was crouched on the lowest step, looking more than ever like a tea-cozy dropped by accident.

"What's the matter?" Davenant asked, too deeply astonished even to take off his hat. "Is it burglars? Where's the professor?"

"He's gone to bed. It isn't burglars. I wish it was. It's something far, far worse. Collins told Drusilla. Oh, I know it's true—though Rodney wouldn't say so. I simply ... know ... it's ... true."

"Oh, it's true," Drusilla corroborated. "I knew that the minute Collins began to speak. It explains everything—all the little queernesses I've noticed ever since I came home—and everything."

"What is it?" Peter asked again. "Who's Collins? And what has he said?"

"It isn't a he; it's a she," Drusilla explained. "She's my maid. I knew the minute I came into the room that she'd got something on her mind—I knew it by the way she took my wrapper from the wardrobe and laid it on the bed. It was too awful!"

"What was too awful? The way she laid your wrapper on the bed?"

"No; what she told me. And I know it's true."

"Well, for the Lord's sake, Drusilla, what is it?"

Drusilla began to narrate. She had forborne, she said, to put any questions till she was being "undone"; but in that attitude, favorable for confidence, she had asked Collins over her shoulder if anything troubled her, and Collins had told her tale. Briefly, it was to the effect that some of the most distinguished kitchens in Boston and Waverton had been divided into two factions, one pro and the other contra, ever since the day, now three weeks ago, when Miss Maggie Murphy, whose position of honorable service at Lawyer Benn's enabled her to profit by the hints dropped at that eminent man's table, had announced, in the servant's dining-room of Tory Hill itself, that Henry Guion was "going to be put in jail." He had stolen Mrs. Clay's money, and Mrs. Rodman's money, "and a lot of other payple's money, too," Miss Murphy was able to affirm—clients for whom Guion, Maxwell & Guion had long acted as trustees—and was now to be tried and sentenced, Lawyer Benn himself being put in charge of the affair by the parties wronged. Drusilla described the sinking of her own heart as these bits of information were given her, though she had not failed to reprimand Collins for the repetition of foolish gossip. This, it seemed, had put Collins on her mettle in defense of her own order, and she had replied that, if it came to that, m'm, the contents of the waste-paper baskets at Tory Hill, though slightly damaged, had borne ample testimony to the truth of the tale as Miss Maggie Murphy told it. If Mrs. Fane required documentary evidence, Collins herself was in a position to supply it, through the kindness of her colleagues in Henry Guion's employ.

Davenant listened in silence. "So the thing is out?" was his only comment.

"It's out—and all over the place," Drusilla answered, tearfully. "We're the only people who haven't known it—but it's always that way with those who are most concerned."

"And over three hundred guests invited to Olivia's wedding next Thursday fortnight! And the British Military Attaché coming from Washington! And Lord Woolwich from Ottawa! What's to happen I don't know."

Mrs. Temple raised her hands and let them drop heavily.

"Oh, Peter, can't you do anything?"

"What can he do, child? If Henry's been making away with all that money it would take a fortune to—"

"Oh, men can do things—in business," Drusilla asserted. "I know they can. Banks lend them money, don't they, Peter? Banks are always lending money to tide people over. I've often heard of it. Oh, Peter, do something. I'm so glad you're here. It seems like a providence."

"Colonel Ashley will be here next week, too," Mrs. Temple groaned, as though the fact brought comfort.

"Oh, mother dear, don't speak of him!" Drusilla put up her two hands, palms outward, before her averted face, as though to banish the suggestion. "If you'd ever known him you'd see how impossible—how impossible—this kind of situation is for a man like him. Poor, poor Olivia! It's impossible for her, too, I know; but then we Americans—well, we're more used to things. But one thing is certain, anyhow," she continued, rising in her place on the stairs and stretching out her hand oratorically: "If this happens I shall never go back to Southsea—never, never!—no, nor to Silchester. With my temperament I couldn't face it. My career will be over. There'll be nothing left for me, mother dear, but to stay at home with father and you."

Mrs. Temple rose, sighing heavily. "Well, I suppose we must go to bed, though I must say it seems harder to do that than almost anything. None of us'll sleep."

"Oh, Peter, won't you do something?"

Drusilla's hands were clasped beneath an imploring face, slightly tilted to one side. Her black hair had begun to tumble to her shoulders.

"I'll—I'll think it over," was all he could find to answer.

"Oh, thank you, Peter! I must say it seems like a providence—your being here. With my temperament I always feel that there's nothing like a big strong man to lean on."

The ladies retired, leaving him to put out the light. For a long time he stood, as he had entered, just inside the front door leaning on his stick and wearing his hat and overcoat. He was musing rather than thinking, musing on the odd way in which he seemed almost to have been waited for. Then, irrelevantly perhaps, there shot across his memory the phrases used by Rodney Temple less than an hour ago:

"Some call it conscience. Some call it God. Some call it neither. But," he added, slowly, "some do call it God."

IV

losing the door behind his departing guests, Guion stood for a minute, with his hand still on the knob, pressing his forehead against the woodwork. He listened to the sound of the carriage-wheels die away and to the crunching tread of the two men down the avenue.

"The last Guion has received the last guest at Tory Hill," he said to himself. "That's all over—all over and done with. Now!"

It was the hour to which he had been looking forward, first as an impossibility, then as a danger, and at last as an expectation, ever since the day, now some years ago, when he began to fear that he might not be able to restore all the money he had "borrowed" from the properties in his trust. Having descried it from a long way off, he knew that with reasonable luck it could not overtake him soon. There were many chances, indeed, that it might never overtake him at all. Times might change; business might improve; he might come in for the money he expected from his old Aunt de Melcourt; he might die. If none of these things happened, there were still ways and means by which he might make money in big strokes and "square himself" without any one ever being the wiser. He had known of cases, or, at least, he had suspected them, in which men in precisely his position had averted by daring play the deadliest peril and gone down into honored graves. Fortune had generally favored him hitherto, and probably would favor him again.

So after the first dreadful days of seeing his "mistakes," and, in his recoil, calling himself by opprobrious names, he began to get used to his situation and boldly to meet its requirements. That he would prove equal to them he had scarcely any doubt. It was, in fact, next to inconceivable that a man of his antecedents and advantages should be unable to cope with conditions that, after all, were not wholly exceptional in the sordid history of business.

He admitted that the affair was sordid, while finding an excuse for his own connection with it in the involuntary defilement that comes from touching pitch. It was impossible, he said, for a man of business not to touch pitch, and he was not a man of business of his own accord. The state of life had been forced on him. He was a trustee of other people's property by inheritance, just as a man becomes a tsar. As a career it was one of the last he would have chosen. Had he received from his father an ample personal fortune instead of a mere lucrative practice he would have been a country gentleman, in the English style, with, of course, a house in town. Born with a princely aptitude for spending his own money, he felt it hard that he should have been compelled to make it his life's work to husband that of others. The fact that he had always, to some extent been a square man in a round hole seemed to entitle him to a large share of moral allowance, especially in his judgment on himself. He emphasized the last consideration, since it enabled him, in his moments of solitude, to look himself more straightly in the face. It helped him to buttress up his sense of honor, and so his sense of energy, to be able to say, "I am still a gentleman."

He came in time to express it otherwise, and to say, "I must still play the gentleman." He came to define also what he meant by the word still. The future presented itself as a succession of stages, in which this could not happen till that had happened, nor the final disaster arrive till all the intervening phases of the situation had been passed. He had passed them. Of late he had seen that the flames of hell would get hold upon him at that exact instant when, the last defense having been broken down and the last shift resorted to, he should turn the key on all outside hope, and be alone with himself and the knowledge that he could do no more. Till then he could ward them off, and he had been fighting them to the latest second. But on coming home from his office in Boston that afternoon he had told himself that the game was up. Nothing as far as he could see would give him the respite of another four and twenty hours. The minutes between him and the final preparations could be counted with the finger on the clock.

In the matter of preparation the most important detail would be to tell Olivia. Hoping against hope that this would never become necessary, he had put off the evil moment till the postponement had become cruel. But he had lived through it so often in thought, he had so acutely suffered with her in imagination the staggering humiliation of it all, that now, when the time had come, his feelings were benumbed. As he turned into his own grounds that day it seemed to him that his deadness of emotion was such that he could carry the thing through mechanically, as a skilled surgeon uses a knife. If he found her at tea in the drawing-room he might tell her then.

He found her at tea, but there were people with her. He was almost sorry; and yet it keyed him up to see that there was some necessity "to still play the gentleman." He played it, and played it well—with much of his old-time ease. The feat was so extraordinary as to call out a round of mental applause for himself; and, after all, he reflected, there would be time enough in the evening.

But tea being over, Miss Guion announced that Mr. and Mrs. Temple and Drusilla Fane were coming informally to dinner, bringing with them a guest of theirs, "some one of the name of Davenant." For an instant he felt that he must ask her to telephone and put them off, but on second thoughts it seemed better to let them come. It would be in the nature of a reprieve, not so much for himself as for Olivia. It would give her one more cheerful evening, the last, perhaps, in her life. Besides—the suggestion was a vague one, sprung doubtless of the hysterical element in his suppressed excitement—he might test his avowals on Temple and Davenant, getting a foretaste of what it would be to face the world. He formed no precise intention of doing that; he only allowed his mind to linger on the luxury of trying it. He had suspected lately that Rodney Temple knew more of his situation than he had ever told him, so that the way to speak out would be cleared in advance; and as for the man of the name of Davenant—probably Tom Davenant's adopted son, who was said to have pulled off some good things a few years ago—there would be, in humbling himself before one so successful, a morbid joy of the kind the devotee may get in being crushed by an idol.

In this he was not mistaken. While they were there he was able to draw from his own speeches, covert or open, the relief that comes to a man in pain from moaning. Now that they were gone, however, the last extraneous incident that could possibly stand between him and the beginning of the end had passed. The moment he had foreseen, as one foresees death, was on him; so, raising his head from the woodwork of the doorway, he braced himself, and said, "Now!"

At almost the same instant he heard the rustle of his daughter's skirts as she came from the drawing-room on her way up-stairs. She advanced slowly down the broad hail, the lights striking iridescent rays from the trimmings of her dress. The long train, adding to her height, enhanced her gracefulness. Only that curious deadness of sensation of which he had been aware all day—the inability to feel any more that comes from too much suffering—enabled him to keep his ground before her. He did keep it, advancing from the doorway two or three steps toward her, till they met at the foot of the stairway.

"Have you enjoyed your evening?" were the words he found himself saying, though they were far from those he had at heart. He felt that his smile was ghastly; but, as she seemed not to perceive it, he drew the conclusion that the ghastliness was within.

She answered languidly. "Yes, so so. It might have been pleasanter if it hadn't been for that awful man."

"Who? Young Davenant? I don't see anything awful about him."

"I dare say there isn't, really—in his place. He may be only prosy. However," she added, more brightly, "it doesn't matter for once. Good night, papa dear. You look tired. You ought to go to bed. I've seen to the windows in the drawing-room, but I haven't put out the lights."

Having kissed him and patted him on the cheek, she turned to go up the stairway. He allowed her to ascend a step or two. It was the minute to speak.

"I'm sorry you feel that way about young Davenant. I rather like him."

He had not chosen the words. They came out automatically. To discuss Davenant offered an excuse for detaining her, while postponing the blow for a few minutes more.

"Oh, men would," she said, indifferently, without turning round. "He's their style."

"Which is to his discredit?"

"Not to his discredit, but to his disadvantage. I've noticed that what they call a man's man is generally something of a bore."

"Davenant isn't a bore."

"Isn't he? Well, I really didn't notice in particular. I only remember that he used to be about here years ago—and I didn't like him. I suppose Drusilla has to be civil to him because he was Cousin Rodney's ward."

She had paused on the landing at the angle of the staircase.

"He's good-looking," Guion said, in continued effort to interpose the trivial between himself and what he had still to tell her.

"Oh, that sort of Saxon giant type is always good-looking. Of course. And dull too."

"I dare say he isn't as dull as you think."

"He might be that, and still remain pretty dull, after the allowances had been made. I know the type. It's awful—especially in the form of the American man of business."

"I'm an American man of business myself."

"Yes; by misadventure. You're the business man made, but not born. By nature you're a boulevardier, or what the newspapers call a 'clubman.' I admire you more than I can say—everybody admires you—for making such a success of a work that must always have been uncongenial at the least."

The opening was obvious. Nothing could have been more opportune. Two or three beginnings presented themselves, and as he hesitated, choosing between them, he moistened his lips and wiped the cold perspiration from his brow. After all, the blessed apathy within him was giving way and going to play him false! He had a minute of feeling as the condemned man must feel when he catches sight of the guillotine.

Before his parched tongue could formulate syllables she mounted another step or two of the staircase, and turned again, leaning on the banister and looking over. He noticed—by a common trick of the perceptive powers at crises of anguish—how the slender white pilasters, carved and twisted in sets of four, in the fashion of Georgian houses like Tory Hill, made quaint, graceful lines up and down the front of her black gown.

"It's really true—what I say about business, papa," she pursued. "I'm very much in earnest, and so is Rupert. I do wish you'd think of that place near Heneage. It will be so lovely for me to feel you're there; and there can't be any reason for your going on working any longer."

"No; there's no reason for that," he managed to say.

"Well then?" she demanded, with an air of triumph. "It's just as I said. You owe it to every one, you owe it to me, you owe it to yourself above all, to give up. It might have been better if you'd done it long ago."

"I couldn't," he declared, in a tone that sounded to his own ears as a cry. "I tried to, ... but things were so involved ... almost from the first...."

"Well, as long as they're not involved now there's no reason why it shouldn't be better late than never."

"But they are involved now," he said, with an intensity so poignant that he was surprised she didn't notice it.

"Then straighten them out. Isn't that what we've been saying all along, Cousin Rodney and I? Take a partner; take two partners. Cousin Rodney says you should have done it when Mr. Maxwell died, or before—"

"I couldn't.... Things weren't shipshape enough ... not even then."

"I'm sure it could be managed," she asserted, confidently; "and if you don't do it now, papa, when I'm being married and going away for good, you'll never do it at all. That's my fear. I don't want to live over there without you, papa; and I'm afraid that's what you're going to let me in for." She moved from the banister, and continued her way upward, speaking over her shoulder as she ascended. "In the mean time, you really must go to bed. You look tired and rather pale—just as I do after a dull party. Good night; and don't stay up."

She reached the floor above, and went toward her room. He felt strangled, speechless. There was a sense of terror too in the thought that his nerve, the nerve on which he had counted so much, was going to fail him.

"Olivia!"

His voice was so sharp that she hurried back to the top of the stairs.

"What is it, papa? Aren't you well?"

It was the sight of her face, anxious and suddenly white, peering down through the half-light of the hall that finally unmanned him. With a heart-sick feeling he turned away from the stairway.

"Yes; I'm all right. I only wanted you to know that ... that ... I shall be working rather late. You mustn't be disturbed ... if you hear me moving about."

He would have upbraided himself more bitterly for his cowardice had he not found an excuse in the thought that, after all, there would be time in the morning. It was best that she should have the refreshment of the night. The one thing important was that she should not have the shock of learning from others on the morrow that he was not coming back—that he was going to Singville. Should he go there at all, he was determined to stay. Since he had no fight to put up, it was better that his going should be once for all. The thought of weeks, of months, perhaps, of quasi-freedom, during which he should be parading himself "on bail," was far more terrible to him than that of prison. He must prepare her for the beginning of his doom at all costs to himself; but, he reasoned, she would be more capable of taking the information calmly in the daylight of the morning than now, at a few minutes of midnight.

It was another short reprieve, enabling him to give all his attention to the tasks before him. If he was not to come back to Tory Hill he must leave his private papers there, his more intimate treasures, in good order. Certain things would have to be put away, others rearranged, others destroyed. For the most part they were in the library, the room he specially claimed as his own. Before setting himself to the work there he walked through some of the other rooms, turning out the lights.

In doing so he was consciously taking a farewell. He had been born in this house; in it he had spent his boyhood; to it he had come back as a young married man. He had lived in it till his wife and he had set up their more ambitious establishment in Boston, an extravagance from which, perhaps, all the subsequent misfortunes could be dated. He had known at the time that his father, had he lived, would have condemned the step; but he himself was a believer in fortunate chances. Besides, it was preposterous for a young couple of fashion to continue living in a rambling old house that belonged to neither town nor country, at a time when the whole trend of life was cityward. They had discussed the move, with its large increase of expenditure, from every point of view, and found it one from which, in their social position, there was no escape. It was a matter about which they had hardly any choice.

So, too, a few years later, with the taking of the cottage at Newport. It was forced on them. When all their friends were doing something of the sort it seemed absurd to hesitate because of a mere matter of means—especially when by hook or by crook the means could be procured. Similar reasoning had attended their various residences abroad—in London, Paris, Rome. Country-houses in England or villas on the Riviera became matters of necessity, according to the demands of Olivia's entry into the world of fashion or Mrs. Guion's health.

It was not till the death of the latter, some seven years ago, that Guion, obliged to pause, was able to take cognizance of the degree to which he had imperiled himself in the years of effort to maintain their way of life. It could not be said that at the time he regretted what he had done, but he allowed it to frighten him into some ineffectual economies. He exchanged the cottage at Newport for one at Lenox, and, giving up the house in Boston, withdrew to Tory Hill. Ceasing himself to go into society, he sent his daughter abroad for a large portion of her time, either in the care of Madame de Melcourt or, in London, under the wing of some of the American ladies prominent in English life.

Having taken these steps, with no small pride in his capacity for sacrifice, Guion set himself seriously to reconstruct his own fortune and to repair the inroads he had made on those in his trust. It was a matter in which he had but few misgivings as to his capacity. The making of money, he often said, was an easy thing, as could be proved by the intellectual grade of the men who made it. One had only to look about one to see that they were men in whom the average of ability was by no means high, men who achieved their successes largely by a kind of rule of thumb. They got the knack of investment—and they invested. He preferred the word investment to another which might have challenged comment. They bought in a low market and sold in a high one—and the trick was done. Some instinct—a flair, he called it—was required in order to recognize, more or less at sight, those properties which would quickly and surely appreciate in value; and he believed he possessed it. Given the control of a few thousands as a point of departure, and the financial ebb and flow, a man must be a born fool, he said, not to be able to make a reasonable fortune with reasonable speed.

Within the office of Guion, Maxwell & Guion circumstances favored the accession to power of the younger partner, who had hitherto played an acquiescent rather than an active part. Mr. Maxwell was old and ailing, though neither so ailing nor so old as to be blind to the need of new blood, new money, and new influence in the fine old firm. His weakness was that he hated beginning all over again with new men; so that when Smith and Jones were proposed as possible partners he easily admitted whatever objections Guion raised to them, and the matter was postponed. It was postponed again. It slipped into a chronic condition of postponement; and Mr. Maxwell died.

The situation calling then for adroitness on Guion's part, the fact that he was able to meet it to the satisfaction of all the parties concerned, increased his confidence in his own astuteness. True, it required some manipulation, some throwing of dust into people's eyes, some making of explanations to one person that could not be reconciled with those made to another; but here again the circumstances helped him. His clients were for the most part widows and old maids, many of them resident abroad, for whom Guion, Maxwell & Guion had so long stood, in the matter of income, for the embodiment of paternal care that they were ready to believe anything and say anything and sign anything they were told to. With the legal authorities to whom he owed account he had the advantage of the house's high repute, making it possible to cover with formalities anything that might, strictly speaking, have called for investigation. Whatever had to be considered shifty he excused to himself on the ground of its being temporary; while it was clearly, in his opinion, to the ultimate advantage of the Clay heirs and the Rodman heirs and the Compton heirs and all the other heirs for whom Guion, Maxwell & Guion were in loco parentis, that he should have a free hand.

The sequel astonished rather than disillusioned him. It wrought in him disappointment with the human race, especially as represented by the Stock Exchange, without diminishing his confidence in his own judgment. Through all his wild efforts not to sink he was upborne by the knowledge that it was not his calculations that were wrong, but the workings of a system more obscure than that of chance and more capricious than the weather. He grew to consider it the fault of the blind forces that make up the social, financial, and commercial worlds, and not his own, when he was reduced to a frantic flinging of good money after bad as offering the sole chance of working out his redemption.

And, now that it was all over, he was glad his wife had not lived to see the end. That, at least, had been spared him. He stood before her portrait in the drawing-room—the much-admired portrait by Carolus Duran—and told her so. She was so living as she looked down on him—a suggestion of refined irony about the lips and eyes giving personality to the delicate oval of the face—that he felt himself talking to her as they had been wont to talk together ever since their youth. In his way he had stood in awe of her. The assumption of prerogative—an endowment of manner or of temperament, he was never quite sure which—inherited by Olivia in turn, had been the dominating influence in their domestic life. He had not been ruled by her—the term would have been grotesque—he had only made it his pleasure to carry out her wishes. That her wishes led him on to spending money not his own was due to the fact, ever to be regretted, that his father had not bequeathed him money so much as the means of earning it. She could not be held responsible for that, while she was the type of woman to whom it was something like an outrage not to offer the things befitting to her station. There was no reproach in the look he lifted on her now—nothing but a kind of dogged, perverse thankfulness that she should have had the way of life she craved, without ever knowing the price he was about to pay for it.

In withdrawing his glance from hers he turned it about on the various objects in the room. Many of them had stood in their places since before he was born; others he had acquired at occasional sales of Guion property, so that, as the different branches of the family became extinct or disappeared, whatever could be called "ancestral" might have a place at Tory Hill; others he had collected abroad. All of them, in these moments of anguish—the five K'ang-hsi vases on the mantelpiece, brought home by some seafaring Guion of Colonial days, the armorial "Lowestoft" in the cabinets, the Copley portraits of remote connections on the walls, the bits of Chippendale and Hepplewhite that had belonged to the grandfather who built Tory Hill—all of them took on now a kind of personality, as with living look and utterance. He had loved them and been proud of them; and as he turned out the lights, leaving them to darkness, eyes could not have been more appealing nor lips more eloquent than they in their mute farewell.

Returning to the library, he busied himself with his main undertaking. He was anxious that nothing should be left behind that could give Olivia additional pain, while whatever she might care to have, her mother's letters to himself or other family documents, might be ready to her hand. It was the kind of detail to which he could easily give his attention. He worked methodically and phlegmatically, steeling himself to a grim suppression of regret. He was almost sorry to finish the task, since it forced his mind to come again face to face with facts. The clock struck two as he closed the last drawer and knew that that part of his preparation was completed.

In reading the old letters with their echoes of old incidents, old joys, old jokes, old days in Paris, Rome, or England, he had been so wafted back to another time that on pushing in the drawer, which closed with a certain click of finality, the realization of the present rolled back on his soul with a curious effect of amazement. For a few minutes it was as if he had never understood it, never thought of it, before. They were going to make him, Henry Guion, a prisoner, a criminal, a convict! They were going to clip his hair, and shave his beard, and dress him in a hideous garb, and shut him in a cell! They were going to give him degrading work to do and degrading rules to keep, and degrading associates to live with, as far as such existence could be called living with any one at all. They were going to do this for year upon year, all the rest of his life, since he never could survive it. He was to have nothing any more to come in between him and his own thoughts—his thoughts of Olivia brought to disgrace, of the Clay heirs brought to want, of the Rodman heirs and the Compton heirs deprived of half their livelihood! He had called it that evening the Strange Ride with Morrowby Jukes to the Land of the Living Dead, but it was to be worse than that. It was to be worse than Macbeth with his visions of remorse; it was to be worse than Vathek with the flame burning in his heart; it was to be worse than Judas—who at least could hang himself.

He got up and went to a mirror in the corner of the room. The mere sight of himself made the impossible seem more impossible. He was so fine a specimen—he could not but know it!—so much the free man, the honorable man, the man of the world! He tried to see himself with his hair clipped and his beard shaven and the white cravat and waistcoat replaced by the harlequin costume of the jailbird. He tried to see himself making his own bed, and scrubbing his own floor, and standing at his cell door with a tin pot in his hand, waiting for his skilly. It was so absurd, so out of the question, that he nearly laughed outright. He was in a dream—in a nightmare! He shook himself, he pinched himself, in order to wake up. He was ready in sudden rage to curse the handsome, familiar room for the persistence of its reality, because the rows of books and the Baxter prints and the desks and chairs and electric lights refused to melt away like things in a troubled sleep.

It was then that for the first time he began to taste the real measure of his impotence. He was in the hand of the law. He was in the grip of the sternest avenging forces human society could set in motion against him; and, quibbles, shifts, and subterfuges swept aside, no one knew better than himself that his punishment would be just.

It was a strange feeling, the feeling of having put himself outside the scope of mercy. But there he was! There could never be a word spoken in his defense, nor in any one's heart a throb of sympathy toward him. He had forfeited everything. He could expect nothing from any man, and from his daughter least of all. The utmost he could ask for her was that she should marry, go away, and school herself as nearly as might be to renounce him. That she should do it utterly would not be possible; but something would be accomplished if pride or humiliation or resentment gave her the spirit to carry her head high and ignore his existence.

It was incredible to think that at that very instant she was sleeping quietly, without a suspicion of what was awaiting her. Everything was incredible—incredible and impossible. As he looked around the room, in which every book, every photograph, every pen and pencil, was a part of him, he found himself once more straining for a hope, catching at straws. He took a sheet of paper, and sitting down at his desk began again, for the ten thousandth time, to balance feverishly his meagre assets against his overwhelming liabilities. He added and subtracted and multiplied and divided with a sort of frenzy, as though by dint of sheer forcing the figures he could make them respond to his will.

Suddenly, with a gesture of mingled anger and hopelessness, he swept the scribbled sheets and all the writing paraphernalia with a crash to the floor, and, burying his face in his hands, gave utterance to a smothered groan. It was a cry, not of surrender, but of protest—of infinite, exasperated protest, of protest against fate and law and judgment and the eternal principles of right and wrong, and against himself most of all. With his head pressed down on the bare polished wood of his desk, he hurled himself mentally at an earth of adamant and a heaven of brass, hurled himself ferociously, repeatedly, with a kind of doggedness, as though he would either break them down or dash his own soul to pieces.

"O God! O God!"

It was an involuntary moan, stifled in his fear of becoming hysterical, but its syllables arrested his attention. They were the syllables of primal articulation, of primal need, condensing the appeal and the aspiration of the world. He repeated them:

"O God! O God!"

He repeated them again. He raised his head, as if listening to a voice.

"O God! O God!"

He continued to sit thus, as if listening.

It was a strange, an astounding thought to him that he might pray. Though the earth of adamant were unyielding, the heaven of brass might give way!

He dragged himself to his feet.

He believed in God—vaguely. That is, it had always been a matter of good form with him to go to church and to call for the offices of religion on occasions of death or marriage. He had assisted at the saying of prayers and assented to their contents. He had even joined in them himself, since a liturgical service was a principle in the church to which he "belonged." All this, however, had seemed remote from his personal affairs, his life-and-death struggles—till now. Now, all at once, queerly, it offered him something—he knew not what. It might be nothing better than any of the straws he had been clutching at. It might be no more than the effort he had just been making to compel two to balance ten.

He stood in the middle of the room under the cluster of electric lights and tried to recollect what he knew, what he had heard, of this Power that could still act when human strength had reached its limitations. It was nothing very definite. It consisted chiefly of great phrases, imperfectly understood: "Father Almighty," "Saviour of the World," "Divine Compassion" and such like. He did not reason about them, or try to formulate what he actually believed. It was instinctively, almost unconsciously, that he began to speak; it was brokenly and with a kind of inward, spiritual hoarseness. He scarcely knew what he was doing when he found himself saying, mentally:

"Save me!... I'm helpless!... I'm desperate!... Save me!... Work a miracle!... Father!... Christ! Christ! Save my daughter!... We have no one—but—but You!... Work a miracle! Work a miracle!... I'm a thief and a liar and a traitor—but save me! I might do something yet—something that might render me—worth salvation—but then—I might not.... Anyhow, save me!... O God! Father Almighty!... Almighty! That means that You can do anything!... Even now—You can do—anything!... Save us!... Save us all!... Christ! Christ! Christ!"

He knew neither when nor how he ceased, any more than when or how he began. His most clearly defined impression was that of his spirit coming back from a long way off to take perception of the fact that he was still standing under the cluster of electric lights and the clock was striking three. He was breathless, exhausted. His most urgent physic need was that of air. He strode to the window-door leading out to the terraced lawn, and, throwing it open, passed out into the darkness.

There was no mist at this height above the Charles. The night was still, and the moon westering. The light had a glimmering, metallic essence, as from a cosmic mirror in the firmament. Long shadows of trees and shrubbery lay across the grass. Clear in the moonlit foreground stood an elm, the pride of Tory Hill—springing as a single shaft for twice the measure of a man—springing and spreading there into four giant branches, each of which sprang and spread higher into eight—so springing and spreading, springing and spreading still—rounded, symmetrical, superb—till the long outermost shoots fell pendulous, like spray from a fountain of verdure. The silence held the suggestion of mighty spiritual things astir. At least the heaven was not of brass, if the earth continued to be of adamant. On the contrary, the sky was high, soft, dim, star-bestrewn, ineffable. It was spacious; it was free; it was the home of glorious things; it was the medium of the eternal.

He was not reassured; he was not even comforted; what relief he got came only from a feeling—a fancy, perhaps—that the weight had been eased, that he was freed for a minute from the crushing pressure of the inevitable. It would return again and break him down, but for the moment it was lifted, giving him room and power to breathe. He did breathe—long deep draughts of the cool night air that brought refreshment and something like strength to struggle on.

He came back into the room. His pens and papers were scattered on the floor, and ink from the overturned inkstand was running out on the Oriental rug. It was the kind of detail that before this evening would have shocked him; but nothing mattered now. He was too indifferent to lift his hand and put the inkstand back into its place. Instead, he threw himself on a couch, turning his face to the still open window and drinking in with thirsty gasps the blessed, revivifying air.

V

uion awoke in a chill, gray light, to find himself covered with a rug, and his daughter, wrapped in a white dressing-gown, bending above him. Over her shoulder peered the scared face of a maid. His first sensation was that he was cold, his first act to pull the rug more closely about him. His struggle back to waking consciousness was the more confused because of the familiar surroundings of the library.

"Oh, papa, what's the matter?"

He threw the coverlet from him and dragged himself to a sitting posture.

"What time is it?" he asked, rubbing his eyes. "I must have dropped off to sleep. Is dinner ready?"

"It's half-past six in the morning, papa dear. Katie found you here when she came in to dust the room. The window was wide open and all these things strewn about the floor. She put the rug on you and came to wake me. What is it? What's happened? Let me send for the doctor."

With his elbow on his knee, he rested his forehead on his hand. The incidents of the night came back to him. Olivia seated herself on the couch beside him, an arm across his shoulder.

"I'm cold," was all he said.

"Katie, go and mix something hot—some whisky or brandy and hot water—anything! And you, papa dear, go to bed. I'll call Reynolds and he'll help you."

"I'm cold," he said again.

Rising, he crawled to the mirror into which he had looked last night, shuddering at sight of his own face. The mere fact that he was still in his evening clothes, the white waistcoat wrinkled and the cravat awry, shocked him inexpressibly.

"I'm cold," he said for the third time.

But when he had bathed, dressed, and begun his breakfast, the chill left him. He regained the mastery of his thoughts and the understanding of his position. A certain exaltation of suffering which had upheld him during the previous night failed him, however, now, leaving nothing but a sense of flat, commonplace misery. Thrown into relief by the daylight, the facts were more relentless—not easier of acceptance.

As he drank his coffee and tried to eat he could feel his daughter watching him from the other end of the table. Now and then he screened himself from her gaze by pretending to skim the morning paper. Once he was startled. Reflected in the glass of a picture hanging on the opposite wall he caught the image of a man in a blue uniform, who mounted the steps and rang the door-bell.

"Who's that?" he asked, sharply. He dared not turn round to see.

"It's only the postman, papa darling. Who else should it be?"

"Yes; of course." He breathed again. "You mustn't mind me, dear. I'm nervous. I'm—I'm not very well."

"I see you're not, papa. I saw it last night. I knew something was wrong."

"There's something—very wrong."

"What is it? Tell me."

Leaning on the table, with clasped hands uplifted, the loose white lace sleeves falling away from her slender wrists, she looked at him pleadingly.

"We've—that is, I've—lost a great deal of money."

"Oh!" The sound was just above her breath. Then, after long silence, she asked: "Is it much?"

He waited before replying, seeking, for the last time, some mitigation of what he had to tell her.

"It's all we have."

"Oh!" It was the same sound as before, just audible—a sound with a little surprise in it, a hint of something awed, but without dismay.

He forced himself to take a few sips of coffee and crumble a bit of toast.

"I don't mind, papa. If that's what's troubling you so much, don't let it any longer. Worse things have happened than that." He gulped down more coffee, not because he wanted it, but to counteract the rising in his throat. "Shall we have to lose Tory Hill?" she asked, after another silence.

He nodded an affirmative, with his head down.

"Then you mean me to understand what you said just now—quite literally. We've lost all we have."

"When everything is settled," he explained, with an effort, "we shall have nothing at all. It will be worse than that, since I sha'n't be able to pay all I owe."

"Yes; that is worse," she assented, quietly.

Another silence was broken by his saying, hoarsely:

"You'll get married—"

"That will have to be reconsidered."

"Do you mean—on your part?"

"I suppose I mean—on everybody's part?"

"Do you think he would want to—you must excuse the crudity of the question—do you think he would want to back out?"

"I don't know that I could answer that. It isn't quite to the point. Backing out, as you call it, wouldn't be the process—whatever happened."

He interrupted her nervously. "If this should fall through, dear, you must write to your Aunt Vic. You must eat humble pie. You were too toplofty with her as it was. She'll take you."

"Take me, papa? Why shouldn't I stay with you? I'd much rather."

He tried to explain. It was clearly the moment at which to do it.

"I don't think you understand, dear, how entirely everything has gone to smash. I shall probably—I may say, certainly—I shall have to—to go—"

"I do understand that. But it often happens—especially in this country—that things go to smash, and then the people begin again. There was Lulu Sentner's father. They lost everything they had—and she and her sisters did dressmaking. But he borrowed money, and started in from the beginning, and now they're very well off once more. It's the kind of thing one hears of constantly—in this country."

"You couldn't hear of it in my case, dear, because—well, because I've done all that. I've begun again, and begun again. I've used up all my credit—all my chances. The things I counted on didn't come off. You know that that happens sometimes, don't you?—without any one being to blame at all?"

She nodded. "I think I've heard so."

"And now," he went on, eager that she should begin to see what he was leading her up to—"and now I couldn't borrow a thousand dollars in all Boston, unless it was from some one who gave it to me as a charity. I've borrowed from every one—every penny for which I could offer security—and I owe—I owe hundreds of thousands. Do you see now how bad it is?"

"I do see how bad it is, papa. I admit it's worse than I thought. But all the same I know that when people have high reputations other people trust them and help them through. Banks do it, don't they? Isn't that partly what they're for? It was Pierpoint & Hargous who helped Lulu Sentner's father. They stood behind him. She told me so. I'm positive that with your name they'd do as much for you. You take a gloomy outlook because you're ill. But there's no one in Boston—no one in New England—more esteemed or trusted. When one can say, 'All is lost save honor,' then, relatively speaking, there's very little lost at all."

He got up from the table and went to his room. After these words it was physically impossible for him to tell her anything more. He had thought of a means which might bring the fact home to her through the day by a process of suggestion. Packing a small bag with toilet articles and other necessaries, he left it in a conspicuous place.

"I want Reynolds to give it to my messenger in case I send for it," he explained to her, when he had descended to the dining-room again.

She was still sitting where he left her, at the head of the table, pale, pensive, but not otherwise disturbed.

"Does that mean that you're not coming home to-night?"

"I—I don't know. Things may happen to—to prevent me."

"Where should you go?—to New York?"

"No; not to New York."

He half hoped she would press the question, but when she spoke it was only to say:

"I hope you'll try to come home, because I'm sure you're not well. Of course I understand it, now I know you've had so much to upset you. But I wish you'd see Dr. Scott. And, papa," she added, rising, "don't have me on your mind—please don't. I'm quite capable of facing the world without money. You mayn't believe it, but I am. I could do it—somehow. I'm like you. I've a great deal of self-reliance, and a great deal of something else—I don't quite know what—that has never been taxed or called on. It may be pride, but it isn't only pride. Whatever it is, I'm strong enough to bear a lot of trouble. I don't want you to think of me at all in any way that will worry you."

She was making it so hard for him that he kissed her hastily and went away. Her further enlightenment was one more detail that he must leave, as he had left so much else, to fate or God to take care of. For the present he himself had all he could attend to.

Half-way to the gate he turned to take what might prove his last look at the old house. It stood on the summit of a low, rounded hill, on the site made historic as the country residence of Governor Rodney. Governor Rodney's "Mansion" having been sacked in the Revolution by his fellow-townsmen, the neighborhood fell for a time into disrepute under the contemptuous nickname of Tory Hill. On the restoration of order the property, passed by purchase to the Guions, in whose hands, with a continuity not customary in America, it had remained. The present house, built by Andrew Guion, on the foundations of the Rodney Mansion, in the early nineteenth century, was old enough according to New England standards to be venerable; and, though most of the ground originally about it had long ago been sold off in building-lots, enough remained to give an impression of ample outdoor space. Against the blue of the October morning sky the house, with its dignified Georgian lines, was not without a certain stateliness—rectangular, three-storied, mellow, with buff walls, buff chimneys, white doorways, white casements, white verandas, a white balustrade around the top, and a white urn at each of the four corners. Where, as over the verandas, there was a bit of inclined roof, russet-red tiles gave a warmer touch of color. From the borders of the lawn, edged with a line of shrubs, the town of Waverton, merging into Cambridge, just now a stretch of crimson-and-orange woodland, where gables, spires, and towers peeped above the trees, sloped gently to the ribbon of the Charles. Far away, and dim in the morning haze, the roofed and steepled crest of Beacon Hill rose in successive ridges, to cast up from its highest point the gilded dome of the State House as culmination to the sky-line. Guion looked long and hard, first at the house, then at the prospect. He walked on only when he remembered that he must reserve his forces for the day's possibilities, that he must not drain himself of emotion in advance. If what he expected were to come to pass, the first essential to his playing the man at all would lie in his keeping cool.

So, on reaching his office, he brought all his knowledge of the world into play, to appear without undue self-consciousness before his stenographer, his bookkeeper, and his clerks. The ordeal was the more severe because of his belief that they were conversant with the state of his affairs. At least they knew enough to be sorry for him—of that he was sure; though there was nothing on this particular morning to display the sympathy, unless it was the stenographer's smile as he passed her in the anteroom, and the three small yellow chrysanthemums she had placed in a glass on his desk. In the nods of greeting between him and the men there was, or there seemed to be, a studied effort to show nothing at all.

Once safely in his own office, he shut the door with a sense of relief in the seclusion. It crossed his mind that he should feel something of the same sort when locked in the privacy of his cell after the hideous publicity of the trial. From habit as well as from anxiety he went straight to a mirror and surveyed himself again. Decidedly he had changed since yesterday. It was not so much that he was older or more care-worn—he was different. Perhaps he was ill. He felt well enough, except for being tired, desperately tired; but that could be accounted for by the way in which he had spent the night. He noticed chiefly the ashy tint of his skin, the dullness of his eyes, and—notwithstanding the fact that his clothes were of his usual fastidiousness—a curious effect of being badly dressed more startling to him than pain. He was careful to brush his beard and twist his long mustache into its usual upward, French-looking curve, so as to regain as much as possible the air of his old self, before seating himself at his desk to look over his correspondence. There was a pile of letters, of which he read the addresses slowly without opening any of them.

What was the use? He could do nothing. He had come to the end. He had exhausted all the possibilities of the situation. Besides, his spirit was broken. He could feel it. Something snapped last night within him that would never be whole, never even be mended, again. It was not only the material resources under his control that he had overtaxed, but the spring of energy within himself, leaving him no more power of resilience.

An hour may have passed in this condition of dull suspense, when he was startled by the tinkle of his desk telephone. It was with some effort that he leaned forward to answer the call. Not that he was afraid—now; he only shrank from the necessity of doing anything.

"Mr. Davenant would like to see you," came the voice of the stenographer from the anteroom.

There was nothing to reply but, "Ask Mr. Davenant to come in." He uttered the words mechanically. He had not thought of Davenant since he talked with Olivia on the stairs—a conversation that now seemed a curiously long time ago.

"I hope I'm not disturbing you, Mr. Guion," the visitor said, apologetically, with a glance at the letters on the desk.

"Not at all, my dear fellow," Guion said, cordially, from force of habit, offering his hand without rising from the revolving chair. "Sit down. Have a cigar. It's rather a sharp morning for the time of year."

The use of the conventional phrases of welcome helped him to emerge somewhat from his state of apathy. Davenant declined the cigar, but seated himself near the desk, in one of the round-backed office chairs. Not being a man easily embarrassed by silences, he did not begin to speak at once, and during the minute his hesitation lasted Guion bethought him of Olivia's remark, "That sort of Saxon-giant type is always good-looking." Davenant was good-looking, in a clear-skinned, clear-eyed way. Everything about him spoke of straight-forwardness and strength, tempered perhaps by the boyish quality inseparable from fair hair, a clean, healthily ruddy complexion, and a direct blue glance that rested on men and things with a kind of pensive wondering. All the same, the heavy-browed face on a big, tense neck had a frowning, perhaps a lowering expression that reminded Guion of a young bull before he begins to charge. The lips beneath the fair mustache might be too tightly and too severely compressed, but the smile into which they broke over regular white teeth was the franker and the more engaging because of the unexpected light. If there was any physical awkwardness about him, it was in the management of his long legs; but that difficulty was overcome by his simplicity. It was characteristic of Guion to notice, even at such a time as this, that Davenant was carefully and correctly dressed, like a man respectful of social usages.

"I came in to see you, Mr. Guion," he began, apparently with some hesitation, "about what we were talking of last night."

Guion pulled himself together. His handsome eyebrows arched themselves, and he half smiled.

"Last night? What were we talking of?"

"We weren't talking of it, exactly. You only told us."

"Only told you—what?" The necessity to do a little fencing brought some of his old powers into play.

"That you wanted to borrow half a million dollars. I've come in to—to lend you that sum—if you'll take it."

For a few seconds Guion sat rigidly still, looking at this man. The import and bearing of the words were too much for him to grasp at once. All his mind was prepared to deal with on the spur of the moment was the fact of this offer, ignoring its application and its consequences as things which for the moment lay outside his range of thought.

As far as he was able to reflect, it was to assume that there was more here than met the eye. Davenant was too practised as a player of "the game" to pay a big price for a broken potsherd, unless he was tolerably sure in advance that within the potsherd or under it there lay more than its value. It was not easy to surmise the form of the treasure nor the spot where it was hidden, but that it was there—in kind satisfactory to Davenant himself—Guion had no doubt. It was his part, therefore, to be astute and wary, not to lose the chance of selling, and yet not to allow himself to be overreached. If Davenant was playing a deep game, he must play a deeper. He was sorry his head ached and that he felt in such poor trim for making the effort. "I must look sharp," he said to himself; "and yet I must be square and courteous. That's the line for me to take." He tried to get some inspiration for the spurt in telling himself that in spite of everything he was still a man of business. When at last he began to speak, it was with something of the feeling of the broken-down prize-fighter dragging himself bleeding and breathless into the ring for the last round with a young and still unspent opponent.

"I didn't suppose you were in—in a position—to do that."

"I am." Davenant nodded with some emphasis.

"Did you think that that was what I meant when I—I opened my heart to you last night?"

"No. I know it wasn't. My offer is inspired by nothing but what I feel."

"Good!" It was some minutes before Guion spoke again. "If I remember rightly," he observed then, "I said I would sell my soul for half a million dollars. I didn't say I wanted to borrow that amount."

"You may put it in any way you like," Davenant smiled. "I've come with the offer of the money. I want you to have it. The terms on which you'd take it don't matter to me."

"But they do to me. Don't you see? I'd borrow the money if I could. I couldn't accept it in any other way. And I can't borrow it. I couldn't pay the interest on it if I did. But I've exhausted my credit. I can't borrow any more."

"You can borrow what I'm willing to lend, can't you?"

"No; because Tory Hill is mortgaged for all it will stand. I've nothing else to offer as collateral—"

"I'm not asking for collateral. I'm ready to hand you over the money on any terms you like or on no terms at all."

"Do you mean that you'd be willing to—to—to give it to me?"

"I mean, sir," he explained, reddening a little, "that I want you to have the money to use—now. We could talk about the conditions afterward and call them what you please. If I understood you correctly last night, you're in a tight place—a confoundedly tight place—"

"I am; but—don't be offended!—it seems to me you'd put me in a tighter."

"How's that?"

"I'VE DONE WRONG, BUT I'M WILLING TO PAY THE PENALTY"

"It's a little difficult to explain." He leaned forward, with one of his nervous, jerky movements, and fingered the glass containing the three chrysanthemums, but without taking his eyes from Davenant. So far he was quite satisfied with himself. "You see, it's this way. I've done wrong—very wrong. We needn't go into that, because you know it as well as I. But I'm willing to pay the penalty. That is, I'm ready to pay the penalty. I've made up my mind to it. I've had to—of course. But if I accepted your offer, you'd be paying it, not I."

"Well, why shouldn't I? I've paid other people's debts before now—once or twice—when I didn't want to. Why shouldn't I pay yours, when I should like the job?"

Davenant attempted, by taking something like a jovial tone, to carry the thing off lightly.

"There's no reason why you shouldn't do it; there's only a reason why I shouldn't let you."

"I don't see why you shouldn't let me. It mayn't be just what you'd like, but it's surely better than—than what you wouldn't like at all."

Taking in the significance of these words, Guion colored, not with the healthy young flush that came so readily to Davenant's face, but in dabbled, hectic spots. His hand trembled, too, so that some of the water from the vase he was holding spilled over on the desk. It was probably this small accident, making him forget the importance of his rôle, that caused him to jump up nervously and begin pacing about the room.

Davenant noticed then what he had not yet had time for—the change that had taken place in Guion in less than twenty hours. It could not be defined as looking older or haggard or ill. It could hardly be said to be a difference in complexion or feature or anything outward. As far as Davenant was able to judge, it was probably due, not to the loss of self-respect, but to the loss of the pretense at self-respect; it was due to that desolation of the personality that comes when the soul has no more reason to keep up its defenses against the world outside it, when the Beautiful Gate is battered down and the Veil of the Temple rent, while the Holy of Holies lies open for any eye to rifle. It was probably because this was so that Guion, on coming back to his seat, began at once to be more explanatory than there was any need for.

"I haven't tried to thank you for your kind suggestion, but we'll come to that when I see more clearly just what you want."

"I've told you that. I'm not asking for anything else."

"So far you haven't asked for anything at all; but I don't imagine you'll be content with that. In any case," he hurried on, as Davenant seemed about to speak, "I don't want you to be under any misapprehension about the affair. There's nothing extenuating in it whatever—that is, nothing but the intention to 'put it back' that goes with practically every instance of"—he hesitated long—"every instance of embezzlement," he finished, bravely. "It began this way—"

"I don't want to know how it began," Davenant said, hastily. "I'm satisfied with knowing the situation as it is."

"But I want to tell you. In proportion as I'm open with you I shall expect you to be frank with me."

"I don't promise to be frank with you."

"Anyhow, I mean to set you the example."

He went on to speak rapidly, feverishly, with that half-hysterical impulse toward confession from the signs of which Davenant had shrunk on the previous evening. As Guion himself had forewarned, there was nothing new or unusual in the tale. The situations were entirely the conventional ones in the drama of this kind of unfaithfulness. The only element to make it appealing, an element forcibly present to Davenant's protective instincts, was the contrast between what Guion had been and what he was to-day.

"And so," Guion concluded, "I don't see how I could accept this money from you. Any honorable man—that is," he corrected, in some confusion, "any sane man—would tell you as much."

"I've already considered what the sane man and the honorable man would tell me. I guess I can let them stick to their opinion so long as I have my own."

"And what is your opinion? Do you mind telling me? You understand that what you're proposing is immoral, don't you?"

"Yes—in a way."

Guion frowned. He had hoped for some pretense at contradiction.

"I didn't know whether you'd thought of that."

"Oh yes, I've thought of it. That is, I see what you mean."

"It's compounding a felony and outwitting the ends of justice and—"

"I guess I'll do it just the same. It doesn't seem to be my special job to look after the ends of justice; and as for compounding a felony—well, it'll be something new."

Guion made a show of looking at him sharply. The effort, or the pretended effort, to see through Davenant's game disguised for the moment his sense of humiliation at this prompt acceptance of his own statement of the case.

"All the same," he observed, trying to take a detached, judicial tone, "your offer is so amazing that I presume you wouldn't make it unless you had some unusual reason."

"I don't know that I have. In fact, I know I haven't."

"Well, whatever its nature, I should like to know what it is."

"Is that necessary?"

"Doesn't it strike you that it would be—in order? If I were to let you do this for me you'd be rendering me an extraordinary service. We're both men of business, men of the world; and we know that something for nothing is not according to Hoyle."

Davenant looked at him pensively. "That is, you want to know what I should be pulling off for myself?"

"That's about it."

"I don't see why that should worry you. If you get the money—"

"If I get the money I put myself in your power."

"What of that? Isn't it just as well to be in my power as in the power of other people?"

Again Guion winced inwardly, but kept his self-control. He was not yet accustomed to doing without the formulas of respect from those whom he considered his inferiors.

"Possibly," he said, not caring to conceal a certain irritation; "but even so I should like to know in case I were in your power what you'd expect of me."

"I can answer that question right away. I shouldn't expect anything at all."

"Then you leave me more in the dark than ever."

Davenant still eyed him pensively. "Do I understand you to be suspicious of my motives?"

"Suspicious might not be the right word. Suppose we said curious."

Davenant reflected. Perhaps it was his mastery of the situation that gave him unconsciously a rock-like air of nonchalance. When he spoke it was with a little smile, which Guion took to be one of condescension. Condescension in the circumstances was synonymous with insolence.

"Well, sir, suppose I allowed you to remain curious? What then?"

They were the wrong words. It was the wrong manner. Guion looked up with a start. His next words were uttered in the blind instinct of the haughty-headed gentleman who thinks highly of himself to save the moment's dignity.

"In that case I think we must call the bargain off."

Davenant shot out of his seat. He, too, was not without a current of hot blood.

"All right, sir. It's for you to decide. Only, I'm sorry. Good-by!" He held out his hand, which Guion, who was now leaning forward, toying with the pens and pencils on the desk, affected not to see. A certain lack of ease that often came over Davenant at moments of leave-taking or greeting kept him on the spot. "I hoped," he stammered, "that I might have been of some use to you, and that Miss Guion—"

Guion looked up sharply. "Has she got anything to do with it?"

"Nothing," Davenant said, quickly, "nothing whatever."

"I didn't see how she could have—" Guion was going on, when Davenant interrupted.

"She has nothing to do with it whatever," he repeated. "I was only going to say that I hoped she might have got through her wedding without hearing anything about—all this—all this fuss."

In uttering the last words he had moved toward the door. His hand was on the knob and he was about to make some repetition of his farewells when Guion spoke again. He was leaning once more over the desk, his fingers playing nervously with the pens and pencils. He made no further effort to keep up his rôle of keen-sighted man of business. His head was bent, so that Davenant could scarcely see his face, and when he spoke his words were muffled and sullen.

"Half a million would be too much. Four hundred and fifty thousand would cover everything."

"That would be all the same to me," Davenant said, in a matter-of-fact tone.

But he went back to the desk and took his seat again.

VI

aving watched through the window her father pass down the avenue on his way to town, Miss Guion reseated herself mechanically in her place at the breakfast-table in order to think. Not that her thought could be active or coherent as yet; but a certain absorption of the facts was possible by the simple process of sitting still and letting them sink in. As the minutes went by, it became with her a matter of sensation rather than of mental effort—of odd, dream-like sensation, in which all the protecting walls and clearly defined boundary-lines of life and conduct appeared to be melting away, leaving an immeasurable outlook on vacancy. To pass abruptly from the command of means, dignity, and consideration out into a state in which she could claim nothing at all was not unlike what she had often supposed it might be to go from the pomp and circumstance of earth as a disembodied spirit into space. The analogy was rendered the more exact by her sense, stunned and yet conscious, of the survival of her own personality amid what seemed a universal wreckage. This persistence of the ego in conditions so vast and vague and empty as to be almost no conditions at all was the one point on which she could concentrate her faculties.

It was, too, the one point on which she could form an articulated thought. She was Olivia Guion still! In this slipping of the world from beneath her feet she got a certain assurance from the affirmation of her identity. She was still that character, compounded of many elements, which recognized as its most active energies insistence of will and tenacity of pride. She could still call these resources to her aid to render her indestructible. Sitting slightly crouched, her hands clasped between her knees, her face drawn and momentarily older, her lips set, her eyes tracing absently the arabesques chased on the coffee-urn, she was inwardly urging her spirit to the buoyancy that cannot sink, to the vitality that rides on chaos. She was not actively or consciously doing this; in the strictest sense she was not doing it at all; it was doing itself, obscurely and spontaneously, by the operation of subliminal forces of which she knew almost nothing, and to which her personality bore no more than the relation of a mountain range to unrecordable volcanic fusions deep down in the earth.

When, after long withdrawal within herself, she changed her position, sighed, and glanced about her, she had a curious feeling of having traveled far, of looking back on the old familiar things from a long way off. The richly wrought silver, the cheerful Minton, the splendidly toned mahogany, the Goya etchings on the walls, things of no great value, but long ago acquired, treasured, loved, had suddenly become useless and irrelevant. She had not lost Tory Hill so much as passed beyond it—out into a condition where nothing that preceded it could count, and in which, so far as she was concerned, existence would have to be a new creation, called afresh out of that which was without form and void.

She experienced the same sensation, if it was a sensation, when, a half-hour later, she found herself roaming dreamily rather than restlessly about the house. She was not anticipating her farewell of it; it had only ceased to be a background, to have a meaning; it was like the scenery, painted and set, after the play is done. She herself had been removed elsewhere, projected into a sphere where the signs and seasons were so different from anything she had ever known as to afford no indications—where day did not necessarily induce light, nor night darkness, nor past experience knowledge. In the confounding of the perceptive powers and the reeling of the judgment which the new circumstances produced, she clung to her capacity to survive and dominate like a staggered man to a stanchion.

In the mean time she was not positively suffering from either shock or sorrow. From her personal point of view the loss of money was not of itself an overpowering calamity. It might entail the disruption of lifelong habits, but she was young enough not to be afraid of that. In spite of a way of living that might be said to have given her the best of everything, she had always known that her father's income was a small one for his position in the world. As a family they had been in the habit of associating on both sides of the Atlantic, with people whose revenues were twice and thrice and ten times their own. The obligation to keep the pace set by their equals had been recognized as a domestic hardship ever since she could remember, though it was a mitigating circumstance that in one way or another the money had always been found. Guion, Maxwell & Guion was a well which, while often threatening to run dry, had never failed to respond to a sufficiently energetic pumping. She had known the thought, however—fugitive, speculatory, not dwelt upon as a real possibility—that a day might come when it would do so no more.

It was a thought that went as quickly as it came, its only importance being that it never caused her a shudder. If it sometimes brought matter for reflection, it was in showing her to herself in a light in which, she was tolerably sure, she never appeared to anybody else—as the true child of the line of frugal forebears, of sea-scouring men and cheese-paring women, who, during nearly two hundred years of thrift, had put penny to penny to save the Guion competence. Standing in the cheerful "Colonial" hall which their stinting of themselves had made it possible to build, and which was still furnished chiefly with the objects—a settle, a pair of cupboards, a Copley portrait, a few chairs, some old decorative pottery—they had lived with, it afforded one more steadying element for her bewilderment to grasp at, to feel herself their daughter.

There was, indeed, in the very type of her beauty a hint of a carefully calculated, unwasteful adaptation of means to ends quite in the spirit of their sparing ways. It was a beauty achieved by nature apparently with the surest, and yet with the slightest, expenditure of energy—a beauty of poise, of line, of delicacy, of reserve—with nothing of the superfluous, and little even of color, beyond a gleam of chrysoprase in fine, gray eyes and a coppery, metallic luster in hair that otherwise would have passed as chestnut brown. It was a beauty that came as much from repose in inaction as from grace in movement, but of which a noticeable trait was that it required no more to produce it in the way of effort than in that of artifice. Through the transparent whiteness of the skin the blue of each clearly articulated vein and the rose of each hurrying flush counted for its utmost in the general economy of values.

It was in keeping with this restraint that in all her ways, her manners, her dress, her speech, her pride, there should be a meticulous simplicity. It was not the simplicity of the hedge-row any more than of the hothouse; it was rather that of some classic flower, lavender or crown-imperial, growing from an ancient stock in some dignified, long-tended garden. It was thus a simplicity closely allied to sturdiness—the inner sturdiness not inconsistent with an outward semblance of fragility—the tenacity of strength by which the lavender scents the summer and the crown-imperial adorns the spring, after the severest snows.

It was doubtless, this vitality, drawn from deep down in her native soil, that braced her now, to simply holding fast intuitively and almost blindly till the first force of the shock should have so spent itself that the normal working of the faculties might begin again. It was the something of which she had just spoken to her father—the something that might be pride but that was not wholly pride, which had never been taxed nor called on. She could not have defined it in a more positive degree; but even now, when all was confusion and disintegration, she was conscious of its being there, an untouched treasure of resources.

In what it supplied her with, however, there was no answer to the question that had been silently making itself urgent from the first word of her father's revelations: What was to happen with regard to her wedding? It took the practical form of dealing with the mere outward paraphernalia—the service, the bridesmaids, the guests, the feast. Would it be reasonable, would it be decent, to carry out rich and elaborate plans in a ruined house? Further than that she dared not inquire, though she knew very well there was still a greater question to be met. When, during the course of the morning, Drusilla Fane came to see her, Olivia broached it timidly, though the conversation brought her little in the way of help.

Knowing all she knew through the gossip of servants, Drusilla felt the necessity of being on her guard. She accepted Olivia's information that her father had met with losses as so much news, and gave utterance to sentiments of sympathy and encouragement. Beyond that she could not go. She was obliged to cast her condolences in the form of bald generalities, since she could make but a limited use of the name of Rupert Ashley as a source of comfort. More clearly than any one in their little group she could see what marriage with Olivia in her new conditions—the horrible, tragic conditions that would arise if Peter could do nothing—would mean for him. She weighed her words, therefore, with an exactness such as she had not displayed since her early days among the Sussex Rangers, measuring the little more and the little less as in an apothecary's balances.

"You see," Olivia said, trying to sound her friend's ideas, "from one point of view I scarcely know him."

"You know him well enough to be in love with him." Drusilla felt that that committed her to nothing.

"That doesn't imply much—not necessarily, that is. You can be in love with people and scarcely know them at all. And it often happens that if you knew them better you wouldn't be in love with them."

"And you know him well enough to be sure that he'll want to do everything right."

"Oh yes; I'm quite sure of that. I'm only uncertain that—everything right—would satisfy me."

Drusilla reflected. "I see what you mean. And, of course, you want to do—everything right—yourself."

Olivia glanced up obliquely under her lashes.

"I see what you mean, too."

"You mustn't see too much." Drusilla spoke hastily. She waited in some anxiety to see just what significance Olivia had taken from her words; but when the latter spoke it was to pass on to another point.

"You see, he didn't want to marry an American, in the first place."

"Well, no one forced him into that. That's one thing he did with his eyes open, at any rate."

"His doing it was a sort of—concession."

Drusilla looked at her with big, indignant eyes.

"Concession to what, for pity's sake?"

"Concession to his own heart, I suppose." Olivia smiled, faintly. "You see, all other things being equal, he would have preferred to marry one of his own countrywomen."

"It's six of one and half a dozen of the other. If he'd married one of his own countrywomen, the other things wouldn't have been equal. So there you are."

"But the other things aren't equal now. Don't you see? They're changed."

"You're not changed." Drusilla felt these words to be dangerous. It was a relief to her that Olivia should contradict them promptly.

"Oh yes, I am. I'm changed—in value. With papa's troubles there's a depreciation in everything we are."

Drusilla repeated these words to her father and mother at table when she went home to luncheon. "If she feels like that now," she commented, "what will she say when she knows all?—if she ever has to know it."

"But she hasn't changed," Mrs. Temple argued.

"It doesn't make any difference in her."

Drusilla shook her head. "Yes, it does, mother dear. You don't know anything about it."

"I know enough about it," Mrs. Temple declared, with some asperity, "to see that she will be the same Olivia Guion after her father has gone to prison as she was in the days of her happiness. If there's any change, it will be to make her a better and nobler character. She's just the type to be—to be perfected through suffering."

"Y-y-es," Drusilla admitted, her head inclined to one side. "That might be quite true in one way; but it wouldn't help Rupert Ashley to keep his place in the Sussex Rangers."

"Do you mean to say they'd make him give it up?"

"They wouldn't make him, mother dear. He'd only have to."

"Well, I never did! If that's the British army—"

"The British army is a very complicated institution. It fills a lot of different functions, and it's a lot of different things. It's one thing from the point of view of the regiment, and another from that of the War Office. It's one thing on the official side, and another on the military, and another on the social. You can't decide anything about it in an abstract, offhand way. Rupert Ashley might be a capital officer, and every one might say he'd done the honorable thing in standing by Olivia; and yet he'd find it impossible to go on as colonel of the Rangers when his father-in-law was in penal servitude. There it is in a nutshell. You can't argue about it, because that's the way it is."

Rodney Temple said nothing; but he probably had these words in his mind when he, too, early in the afternoon, made his way to Tory Hill. Olivia spoke to him of her father's losses, though her allusions to Colonel Ashley were necessarily more veiled than they had been with Mrs. Fane.

"The future may be quite different from what I expected. I can't tell yet for sure. I must see how things—work out."

"That's a very good way, my dear," the old man commended. "It's a large part of knowledge to know how to leave well enough alone. Nine times out of ten life works out better by itself than we can make it."

"I know I've got to feel my way," she said, meaning to agree with him.

"I don't see why."

She raised her eyebrows in some surprise. "You don't see—?"

"No, I don't. Why should you feel your way? You're not blind."

"I feel my way because I don't see it."

"Oh yes, you do—all you need to see."

"But I don't see any. I assure you it's all confusion."

"Not a bit, my dear. It's as plain as a pikestaff—for the next step."

"I don't know what you mean by the next step."

"I suppose the next step would be—well, let us say what you've got to do to-day. That's about as much ground as any one can cover with a stride. You see that, don't you? You've got to eat your dinner, and go to bed. That's all you've got to settle for the moment."

Her lips relaxed in a pale smile. "I'm afraid I must look a little farther ahead than that."

"What for? What good will it do? You won't see anything straight. It's no use trying to see daylight two hours before dawn. People are foolish enough sometimes to make the attempt, but they only strain their eyesight. For every step you've got to take there'll be something to show you the line to follow."

"What?" She asked the question chiefly for the sake of humoring him. She was not susceptible to this kind of comfort, nor did she feel the need of it.

"W-well," the old man answered, slowly, "it isn't easy to tell you in any language you'd understand."

"I can understand plain English, if that would do."

"You can make it do, but it doesn't do very well. It's really one of those things that require what the primitive Christians called an unknown tongue. Since we haven't got that as a means of communication—" He broke off, stroking his long beard with a big handsome hand, but presently began again.

"Some people call it a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Some people have described it by other figures of speech. The description isn't of importance—it's the Thing."

She waited a minute, before saying in a tone that had some awe in it, as well as some impatience: "Oh, but I've never seen anything like that. I never expect to."

"That's a pity; because it's there."

"There? Where?"

"Just where one would look for it—if one looked at all. When it moves," he went on, his hand suiting the action to the word, on a level with his eyes, "when it moves, you follow it, and when it rests, you wait. It's possible—I don't know—I merely throw out the suggestion—no one can really know but yourself, because no one but yourself can see it—but it's possible that at this moment—for you—it's standing still."

"I don't know what I gain either by its moving or its standing still, so long as I don't see it."

"No, neither do I," he assented, promptly.

"Well, then?" she questioned.

"Shall I tell you a little story?" He smiled at her behind his stringy, sandy beard, while his kind old eyes blinked wistfully.

"If you like. I shall be happy to hear it." She was not enthusiastic. She was too deeply engrossed with pressing, practical questions to find his mysticism greatly to the point.

He took a turn around the drawing-room before beginning, stopping to caress the glaze of one of the K'ang-hsi vases on the mantelpiece, while he arranged his thoughts.

"There was once a little people," he began, turning round to where she sat in the corner of a sofa, her hands clasped in her lap—"there was once a little people—a mere handful, who afterward became a race—who saw the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night, and followed it. That is to say, some of them certainly saw it, enough of them to lead the others on. For a generation or two they were little more than a band of nomads; but at last they came to a land where they fought and conquered and settled down."

"Yes? I seem to have heard of them. Please go on."

"It was a little land, rather curiously situated between the Orient and the West, between the desert and the sea. It had great advantages both for seclusion within itself and communication with the world outside. If a divine power had wanted to nourish a tender shoot, till it grew strong enough to ripen seed that would blow readily into every corner of the globe, it probably couldn't have done better than to have planted it just there."

She nodded, to show that she followed him.

"But this little land had also the dangers attendant on its advantages. To the north of it there developed a great power; to the south of it another. Each turned greedy eyes on the little buffer state. And the little buffer state began to be very wise and politic and energetic. It said, 'If we don't begin to take active measures, the Assyrian, or the Egyptian, whoever gets here first, will eat us up. But if we buy off the one, he will protect us against the other.'"

"That seems reasonable."

"Yes; quite reasonable: too reasonable. They forgot that a power that could lead them by fire and cloud could protect them even against conscript troops and modern methods of fighting. They forgot that if so much trouble had been taken to put them where they were, it was not that—assuming that they behaved themselves—it was not that they might be easily rooted out. Instead of having confidence within they looked for an ally from without, and chose Egypt. Very clever; very diplomatic. There was only one criticism to be made on the course taken—that it was all wrong. There was a man on the spot to tell them so—one of those fellows whom we should call pessimists if we hadn't been taught to speak of them as prophets. 'You are carrying your riches,' he cried to them, 'on the shoulders of young asses, and your treasures on the bunches of camels, to a people that shall not profit you. For the Egyptians shall help in vain, and to no purpose. Your strength is—to sit still!'" As he stood looking down at her his kindly eyes blinked for a minute longer, before he added, "Do you see the point?"

She smiled and nodded. "Yes. It isn't very obscure. Otherwise expressed it might be, When in doubt, do nothing."

"Exactly; do nothing—till the pillar of cloud begins to move."

Out of the old man's parable she extracted just one hint that she considered useful. In the letter which she proceeded to write Rupert Ashley as soon as she was alone, a letter that would meet him on his arrival in New York, she gave a statement of such facts as had come to her knowledge, but abstained from comments of her own, and from suggestions. She had intended to make both. She had thought it at first her duty to take the initiative in pointing out the gulf of difficulties that had suddenly opened up between her lover and herself. It occurred to her now that she might possibly discern the leading of the pillar of cloud from self-betrayal on his part. She would note carefully his acts, his words, the expressions of his face. She had little doubt of being able to read in them some indication of her duty. This in itself was a relief. It was like being able to learn a language instead of having to invent one. Nevertheless, as she finished her letter she was impelled to add:

"We have asked some three hundred people to the church for the 28th. Many of them will not be in town, as the season is still so early; but I think it wisest to withdraw all invitations without consulting you further. This will leave us free to do as we think best after you arrive. We can then talk over everything from the beginning."

With the hint thus conveyed she felt her letter to be discreetly worded. By the time she had slipped down the driveway to the box at the gate and posted it with her own hands her father had returned.

She had ordered tea in the little oval sitting-room they used when quite alone, and told the maid to say she was not receiving if anybody called. She knew her father would be tired, but she hoped that if they were undisturbed he would talk to her of his affairs. There was so much in them that was mysterious to her. Notwithstanding her partial recovery from the shock of the morning, she still felt herself transported to a world in which the needs were new to her, and the chain of cause and effect had a bewildering inconsequence. For this reason it seemed to her quite in the order of things—the curiously inverted order now established, in which one thing was as likely as another—that her father should stretch himself in a comfortable arm-chair and say nothing at all till after he had finished his second cup of tea. Even then he might not have spoken if her own patience had held out.

"So you didn't go away, after all," she felt it safe to observe.

"No, I didn't."

"Sha'n't you have to go?"

There was an instant's hesitation.

"Perhaps not. In fact—I may almost definitely say—not. I should like another cup of tea."

"That makes three, papa. Won't it keep you awake?"

"Nothing will keep me awake to-night."

The tone caused her to look at him more closely as she took the cup he handed back to her. She noticed that his eyes glittered and that in either cheek, above the line of the beard, there was a hectic spot. She adjusted the spirit-lamp, and, lifting the cover of the kettle, looked inside.

"Has anything happened?" she asked, doing her best to give the question a casual intonation.

"A great deal has happened." He allowed that statement to sink in before continuing. "I think"—he paused long—"I think I'm going to get the money."

She held herself well in hand, though at the words the old familiar landmarks of her former world seemed to rise again, rosily, mistily, like the walls of Troy to the sound of Apollo's lute. She looked into the kettle again to see if the water was yet boiling, taking longer than necessary to peer into the quiet depth.

"I'm so glad." She spoke as if he had told her he had shaken hands with an old friend. "I thought you would."

"Ah, but you never thought of anything like this."

"I knew it would be something pretty good. With your name, there wasn't the slightest doubt of it."

Had he been a wise man he would have let it go at that. He was not, however, a wise man. The shallow, brimming reservoir of his nature was of the kind that spills over at a splash.

"The most extraordinary thing has happened," he went on. "A man came to my office to-day and offered to lend me—no, not to lend—practically to give me—enough money to pull me through."

She held a lump of sugar poised above his cup with the sugar-tongs. Her astonishment was so great that she kept it there. The walls of the city which just now had seemed to be rising magically faded away again, leaving the same unbounded vacancy into which she had been looking out all day.

"What do you mean by—practically to give you?"

"The man said lend. But my name is good for even more than you supposed, since he knows, and I know, that I can offer him no security."

"How can he tell, then, that you'll ever pay it back?"

"He can't tell. That's just it."

"And can you tell?" She let the lump of sugar fall with a circle of tiny eddies into the cup of tea.

"I can tell—up to a point." His tone indicated some abatement of enthusiasm.

"Up to what point?"

"Up to the point that I'll pay it back—if I can. That's all he asks. As a matter of fact, he doesn't seem to care."

She handed him his cup. "Isn't that a very queer way to lend money?"

"Of course it's queer. That's why I'm telling you. That's what makes it so remarkable—such a—tribute—to me, I dare say that sounds fatuous, but—"

"It doesn't sound fatuous so much as—"

"So much as what?"

The distress gathering in her eyes prepared him for her next words before she uttered them.

"Papa, I shouldn't think you'd take it."

He stared at her dully. Her perspicacity disconcerted him. He had expected to bolster up the ruins of his honor by her delighted acquiescence. He had not known till now how much he had been counting on the justification of her relief. It was a proof, however, of the degree to which his own initiative had failed him that he cowered before her judgment, with little or no protest.

"I haven't said I'd take it—positively."

"Naturally. Of course you haven't."

He dabbled the spoon uneasily in his tea, looking downcast. "I don't quite see that," he objected, trying to rally his pluck, "why it should be—naturally."

"Oh, don't you? To me it's self-evident. We may have lost money, but we're still not—recipients of alms."

"This wasn't alms. It was four hundred and fifty thousand dollars."

She was plainly awe-struck. "That's a great deal; but I supposed it would be something large. And yet the magnitude of the sum only makes it the more impossible to accept."

"Y-es; of course—if you look at it in that way." He put back his cup on the table untasted.

"Surely it's the only way to look at it? Aren't you going to drink your tea?"

"No, I think not. I've had enough. I've—I've had enough—of everything."

He sank back wearily into the depths of his arm-chair. The glitter had passed from his eyes; he looked ill. He had clearly not enough courage to make a stand for what he wanted. She could see how cruelly he was disappointed. After all, he might have accepted the money and told her nothing about it! He had taken her into his confidence because of that need of expansion that had often led him to "give away" what a more crafty man would have kept to himself. She was profiting by his indiscretion to make what was already so hard for him still harder. Sipping her tea slowly, she turned the subject over and over in her mind, seeking some ground on which to agree with him.

She did this the more conscientiously, since she had often reproached herself with a fixity of principle that might with some show of reason be called too inflexible. Between right and wrong other people, especially the people of her "world," were able to see an infinitude of shadings she had never been able to distinguish. She half accepted the criticism often made of her in Paris and London that her Puritan inheritance had given an inartistic rigidity to her moral prospect. It inclined her to see the paths of life as ruled and numbered like the checker-board plan of an American city, instead of twisting and winding, quaintly and picturesquely, with round-about evasions and astonishing short-cuts, amusing to explore, whether for the finding or the losing of the way, as in any of the capitals long trodden by the feet of men. Between the straight, broad avenues of conduct, well lighted and well defined, there lay apparently whole regions of byways, in which those who could not easily do right could wander vaguely, without precisely doing wrong, following a line that might be termed permissible. Into this tortuous maze her spirit now tried to penetrate, as occasionally, to visit some historic monument, she had plunged into the slums of a medieval town.

It was an exercise that brought her nothing but a feeling of bewilderment. Having no sense of locality for this kind of labyrinth, she could only turn round and round confusedly. All she could do, when from the drooping of her father's lids she feared he was falling off to sleep, leaving the question unsettled, was to say, helplessly:

"I suppose you'll be sorry now for having told me."

He lifted his long lashes, that were like a girl's, and looked at her. The minutes that had passed had altered his expression. There was again a sparkle of resolve, perhaps of relief, in his glance. Without changing his position, he spoke drowsily, and yet reassuringly, like a man with a large and easy grasp of the situation. She was not sure whether it was a renewal of confidence on his part or a bit of acting.

"No, dear, no. I wanted to get your point of view. It's always interesting to me. I see your objections—of course. I may say that I even shared some of them—till—"

She allowed him a minute in which to resume, but, as he kept silence, she ventured to ask:

"Does that mean that you don't share them now?"

"I see what there is to be said—all round. It isn't to be expected, dear, that you, as a woman, not used to business—"

"Oh, but I didn't understand that this was business. That's just the point. To borrow money might be business—to borrow it on security, you know, or whatever else is the usual way—but not to take it as a present."

He jerked himself up into a forward posture. When he replied to her, it was with didactic, explanatory irritation.

"When I said that, I was legitimately using language that might be called exaggerated. Hyperbole is, I believe, the term grammarians use for it. I didn't expect you, dear, to take me up so literally. It isn't like you. You generally have more imagination. As a matter of fact, Davenant's offer was that of a loan—"

"Oh! So it was—that man?"

"Yes; it was he. He expressly spoke of it as a loan. I myself interpreted it as a gift simply to emphasize its extraordinary generosity. I thought you'd appreciate that. Do you see?"

"Perfectly, papa; and it's the extraordinary generosity that seems to me just what makes it impossible. Why should Mr. Davenant be generous to us? What does he expect to gain?"

"I had that out with him. He said he didn't expect to gain anything."

"And you believed him?"

"Partly; though I suppose he has something up his sleeve. It wasn't my policy to question him too closely about that. It's not altogether my first concern. I need the money."

"But you don't need the money—in that way, papa?"

"I need it in any way. If Davenant will let me have it—especially on such terms—I've no choice but to take it."

"Oh, don't, papa. I'm sure it isn't right. I—I don't like him."

"Pff! What's that got to do with it? This is business."

"No, papa. It's not business. It's a great deal more—or a great deal less—I don't know which."

"You don't know anything about it at all, dear. You may take that from me. This is a man's affair. You really must leave it to me to deal with it." Once more he fell back into the depth of his arm-chair and closed his eyes. "If you don't mind, I think I should like a little nap. What have you got so especially against Davenant, anyhow?"

"I've nothing against him—except that I've never liked him."

"What do you know about him? When did you ever see him?"

"I haven't seen him for years—not since Drusilla used to bring him to dances, when we were young girls. She didn't like it particularly, but she had to do it because he was her father's ward and had gone to live with them. He was uncouth—aggressive. Wasn't he a foundling, or a street Arab, or something like that? He certainly seemed so. He wasn't a bit—civilized. And once he—he said something—he almost insulted me. You wouldn't take his money now, papa?"

There was no answer. He breathed gently. She spoke more forcibly.

"Papa, you wouldn't let a stranger pay your debts?"

He continued to breathe gently, his eyes closed, the long black lashes curling on his cheek.

"Papa, darling," she cried, "I'll help you. I'll take everything on myself. I'll find a way—somehow. Only, don't do this."

He stirred, and murmured sleepily.

"You attend to your wedding, dear. That'll be quite enough for you to look after."

"But I can't have a wedding if Mr. Davenant has to pay for it. Don't you see? I can't be married at all."

When he made no response to this shot, she understood finally that he meant to let the subject drop.

VII

t was in the nature of a relief to Olivia Guion when, on the following day, her father was too ill to go to his office. A cold, caused by the exposure of two nights previous, and accompanied by a rising temperature, kept him confined to his room, though not to bed. The occurrence, by maintaining the situation where it was, rendered it impossible to take any irretrievable step that day. This was so much gain.

She had slept little; she had passed most of the night in active and, as it seemed to her, lucid thinking. Among the points clearest to her was the degree to which she herself was involved in the present business. In a measure, the transfer of a large sum of money from Peter Davenant to her father would be an incident more vital to her than to any one else, since she more than any one else must inherit its moral effects. While she was at a loss to see what the man could claim from them in return for his generosity, she was convinced that his exactions would be not unconnected with herself. If, on the other hand, he demanded nothing, then the lifelong obligation in the way of gratitude that must thus be imposed on her would be the most intolerable thing of all. Better any privation than the incurring of such a debt—a debt that would cover everything she was or could become. Its magnitude would fill her horizon; she must live henceforth in the world it made, her very personality would turn into a thing of confused origin, sprung, it was true, from Henry and Carlotta Guion in the first place, but taking a second lease of life from the man whose beneficence started her afresh. She would date back to him, as barbarous women date to their marriage or Mohammedans to the Flight. It was a relation she could not have endured toward a man even if she loved him; still less was it sufferable with one whom she had always regarded with an indefinable disdain, when she had not ignored him. The very possibility that he might purchase a hold on her inspired a frantic feeling, like that of the ermine at pollution.

Throughout the morning she was obliged to conceal from her father this intense opposition—or, at least to refrain from speaking of it. When she made the attempt he grew so feverish that the doctor advised the postponement of distressing topics till he should be better able to discuss them. She could only make him as comfortable as might be, pondering while she covered him up in the chaise-longue, putting his books and his cigars within easy reach, how she could best convert him to her point of view. It was inconceivable to her that he would persist in the scheme when he realized how it would affect her.

She had gone down to the small oval sitting-room commanding the driveway, thinking it probable that Drusilla Fane might come to see her. Watching for her approach, she threw open the French window set in the rounded end of the room and leading out to the Corinthian-columned portico that adorned what had once been the garden side of the house. There was no garden now, only a stretch of elm-shaded lawn, with a few dahlias and zinnias making gorgeous clusters against the already gorgeous autumn-tinted shrubbery. On the wall of a neighboring brick house, Virginia creeper and ampelopsis added fuel to the fire of surrounding color, while a maple in the middle distance blazed with all the hues that might have flamed in Moses's burning bush. It was one of those days of the American autumn when the air is shot with gold, when there is gold in the light, gold on the foliage, gold on the grass, gold on all surfaces, gold in all shadows, and a gold sheen in the sky itself. Red gold like a rich lacquer overlay the trunks of the occasional pines, and pale-yellow gold, beaten and thin, shimmered along the pendulous garlands of the American elms, where they caught the sun. It was a windless morning and a silent one; the sound of a hammer or of a motorist's horn, coming up from the slope of splendid woodland that was really the town, accentuated rather than disturbed the immediate stillness.

To Olivia Guion this quiet ecstasy of nature was uplifting. Its rich, rejoicing quality restored as by a tonic her habitual confidence in her ability to carry the strongholds of life with a high and graceful hand. Difficulties that had been paramount, overpowering, fell all at once into perspective, becoming heights to be scaled rather than barriers defying passage. For the first time in the twenty-four hours since the previous morning's revelations, she thought of her lover as bringing comfort rather than as creating complications.

Up to this minute he had seemed to withdraw from her, to elude her. As a matter of fact, though she spoke of him rarely and always with a purposely prosaic touch, he was so romantic a figure in her dreams that the approach of the sordid and the ugly had dispelled his image. It was quite true, as she had said to Drusilla Fane, that from one point of view she didn't know him very well. She might have said that she didn't know him at all on any of those planes where rents and the price of beef are factors. He had come into her life with much the same sort of appeal as the wandering knight of the days of chivalry made to the damsel in the family fortress. Up to his appearing she had thought herself too sophisticated and too old to be caught by this kind of fancy, especially as it was not the first time she had been exposed to it. In the person of Rupert Ashley, however, it presented itself with the requisite limitations and accompaniments. He was neither so young nor so rich nor of such high rank as to bring a disproportionate element into their romance, while at the same time he had all the endowments of looks, birth, and legendary courage that the heroine craves in the hero. When he was not actually under her eyes, her imagination embodied him most easily in the svelte elegance of the King Arthur beside Maximilian's tomb at Innspruck.

Their acquaintance had been brief, but illuminating—one of those friendships that can afford to transcend the knowledge of mere outward personal facts to leap to the things of the heart and the spirit. It was one of the commonplaces of their intimate speech together that they "seemed to have known each other always"; but now that it was necessary for her to possess some practical measure of his character, she saw, with a sinking of the heart, that they had never passed beyond the stage of the poetic and pictorial.

Speculating as to what he would say when he received her letter telling of her father's misfortunes, she was obliged to confess that she "had not the remotest idea." Matters of this sort belonged to a world on which they had deliberately turned their backs. That is to say, she had turned her back on it deliberately, though by training knowing its importance, fearing that to him it would seem mundane, inappropriate, American. This course had been well enough during the period of a high-bred courtship, almost too fastidiously disdainful of the commonplace; but now that the Fairy Princess had become a beggar-maid, while Prince Charming was Prince Charming still, it was natural that the former should recognize its insufficiency. She had recognized it fully yesterday; but this morning, in the optimistic brightness of the golden atmosphere, romance came suddenly to life again and confidence grew strong. Drusilla had said that she, Olivia, knew him well enough to be sure that he would want to do—everything right. They would do everything right—together. They would save her father whom she loved so tenderly, from making rash mistakes, and—who knew?—find a way, perhaps, to rescue him in his troubles and shelter his old age.

She was so sure of herself to-day, and so nearly sure of Ashley, that even the shock of seeing Peter Davenant coming up the driveway, between the clumps of shrubbery, brought her no dismay. She was quick in reading the situation. It was after eleven o'clock; he had had time to go to Boston, and, learning that her father was not at his office, had come to seek him at home.

She made her arrangements promptly. Withdrawing from the window before he could see her, she bade the maid say that, Mr. Guion being ill, Miss Guion would be glad to see Mr. Davenant, if he would have the kindness to come in. To give an air of greater naturalness to the mise-en-scène, she took a bit of embroidery from her work-basket, and began to stitch at it, seating herself near the open window. She was not without a slight, half-amused sense of lying in ambush, as if some Biblical voice were saying to her, "Up! for the Lord hath delivered thine enemy into thine hand."

"My father isn't well," she explained to Davenant, when she had shaken hands with him and begged him to sit down. "I dare say he may not be able to go out for two or three days to come."

"So they told me at his office. I was sorry to hear it."

"You've been to his office, then? He told me you were there yesterday. That's partly the reason why I've ventured to ask you to come in."

She went on with her stitching, turning the canvas first on one side and then on the other, sticking the needle in with very precise care. He fancied she was waiting for him to "give himself away" by saying something, no matter what. Having, however, a talent for silence without embarrassment, he made use of it, knowing that by means of it he could force her to resume.

He was not at ease; he was not without misgiving. It had been far from his expectation to see her on this errand, or, for the matter of that, on any errand at all. It had never occurred to him that Guion could speak to her of a transaction so private, so secret, as that proposed between them. Since, then, his partner in the undertaking had been foolish, Davenant felt the necessity on his side of being doubly discreet. Moreover, he was intuitive enough to feel her antipathy toward him on purely general grounds. "I'm not her sort," was the summing-up of her sentiments he made for himself. He could not wholly see why he excited her dislike since, beyond a moment of idiotic presumption long ago, he had never done her any harm.

He fancied that his personal appearance, as much as anything, was displeasing to her fastidiousness. He was so big, so awkward; his hands and feet were so clumsy. A little more and he would have been ungainly; perhaps she considered him ungainly as it was. He had tried to negative his defects by spending a great deal of money on his clothes and being as particular as a girl about his nails; but he felt that with all his efforts he was but a bumpkin compared with certain other men—Rodney Temple, for example—who never took any pains at all. Looking at her now, her pure, exquisite profile bent over her piece of work, while the sun struck coppery gleams from her masses of brown hair, he felt as he had often felt in rooms filled with fragile specimens of art—flower-like cups of ancient glass, dainty groups in Meissen, mystic lovelinesses wrought in amber, ivory, or jade—as if his big, gross personality ought to shrink into itself and he should walk on tiptoe.

"I understand from my father," she said, when she found herself obliged to break the silence, "that you've offered to help him in his difficulties. I couldn't let the occasion pass without telling you how much I appreciate your generosity."

She spoke without looking up; words and tone were gently courteous, but they affected him like an April zephyr, that ought to bring the balm of spring, and yet has the chill of ice in it.

"Haven't you noticed," he said, slowly, choosing his words with care, "that generosity consists largely in the point of view of the other party? You may give away an old cloak, for the sake of getting rid of it; but the person who receives it thinks you kind."

"I see that," she admitted, going on with her work, "and yet there are people to whom I shouldn't offer an old cloak, even if I had one to give away."

He colored promptly. "You mean that if they needed anything you'd offer them the best you had."

"I wonder if you'd understand that I'm not speaking ungraciously if I said that—I shouldn't offer them anything at all?"

He put up his hand and stroked his long, fair mustache. It was the sort of rebuke to which he was sensitive. It seemed to relegate him to another land, another world, another species of being from those to which she belonged. It was a second or two before he could decide what to say. "No, Miss Guion," he answered then; "I don't understand that point of view."

"I'm sorry. I hoped you would."

"Why?"

She lifted her clear gray eyes on him for the briefest possible look. "Need I explain?"

The question gave him an advantage he was quick to seize. "Not at all, Miss Guion. You've a right to your own judgments. I don't ask to know them."

"But I think you ought. When you enter into what is distinctly our private family affair, I've a right to give my opinion."

"You don't think I question that?"

"I'm afraid I do. I imagine you're capable of carrying your point, regardless of what I feel."

"But I've no point to carry. I find Mr. Guion wanting to borrow a sum of money that I'm prepared to lend. It's a common situation in business."

"Ah, but this is not business. It's charity."

"Did Mr. Guion tell you so?"

"He did. He told me all about it. My father has no secrets from me."

"Did he use the word—charity?"

"Almost. He said you offered him a loan, but that it really was a gift."

His first impulse was to repudiate this point of view, but a minute's reflection decided him in favor of plain speaking. "Well," he said, slowly, "suppose it was a gift. Would there be any harm in it?"

"There wouldn't be any harm, perhaps; there would only be an—impossibility." She worked very busily, and spoke in a low voice, without looking up. "A gift implies two conditions—on the one side the right to offer, and on the other the freedom to take."

"But I should say that those conditions existed—between Mr. Guion and me."

"But not between you and me. Don't you see? That's the point. To any such transaction as this I have to be, in many ways, the most important party."

Again he was tempted to reject this interpretation; but, once more, on second thought, he allowed it to go uncontested. When he spoke it was to pass to another order of question.

"I wonder how much you know?"

"About my father's affairs? I know everything."

"Everything?"

"Yes; everything. He told me yesterday. I didn't expect him to come home last night at all; but he came—and told me what you had proposed."

"You understood, then," Davenant stammered, "that he might have to—to—go away?"

"Oh, perfectly."

"And aren't you very much appalled?"

The question was wrung from him by sheer astonishment. That she should sit calmly embroidering a sofa-cushion, with this knowledge in her heart, with this possibility hanging over her, seemed to him to pass the limits of the human. He knew there were heroic women; but he had not supposed that with all their heroism they carried themselves with such sang-froid. Before replying she took time to search in her work-basket for another skein of silk.

"Appalled is scarcely the word. Of course, it was a blow to me; but I hope I know how to take a blow without flinching."

"Oh, but one like this—"

"We're able to bear it. What makes you think we can't? If we didn't try, we should probably involve ourselves in worse."

"But how could there be worse?"

"That's what I don't know. You see, when my father told me of your kind offer, he didn't tell me what you wanted."

"Did he say I wanted anything?"

"He said you hadn't asked for anything. That's what leaves us so much in the dark."

"Isn't it conceivable—" he began, with a slightly puzzled air.

"Not that it matters," she interrupted, hurriedly. "Of course, if we had anything with which to compensate you—anything adequate, that is—I don't say that we shouldn't consider seriously the suggestion you were good enough to make. But we haven't. As I understand it, we haven't anything at all. That settles the question definitely. I hope you see."

"Isn't it conceivable," he persisted, "that a man might like to do a thing, once in a way, without—"

"Without asking for an equivalent in return? Possibly. But in this case it would only make it harder for me."

"How so?"

"By putting me under an overwhelming obligation to a total stranger—an obligation that I couldn't bear, while still less could I do away with it."

"I don't see," he reasoned, "that you'd be under a greater obligation to me in that case than you are to others already."

"At present," she corrected, "we're not under an obligation to any one. My father and I are contending with circumstances; we're not asking favors of individuals. I know we owe money—a great deal of money—to a good many people—"

"Who are total strangers, just like me."

"Not total strangers just like you—but total strangers whom I don't know, and don't know anything about, and who become impersonal from their very numbers."

"But you know Mrs. Rodman and Mrs. Clay. They're not impersonal."

All he saw for the instant was that she arrested her needle half-way through the stitch. She sat perfectly still, her head bent, her fingers rigid, as she might have sat in trying to catch some sudden, distant sound. It was only in thinking it over afterward that he realized what she must have lived through in the seconds before she spoke.

"Does my father owe money to them?"

The hint of dismay was so faint that it might have eluded any ear but one rendered sharp by suspicion. Davenant felt the blood rushing to his temples and a singing in his head. "My God, she didn't know!" he cried, inwardly. The urgency of retrieving his mistake kept him calm and cool, prompting him to reply with assumed indifference.

"I really can't say anything about it. I suppose they would be among the creditors—as a matter of course."

For the first time she let her clear, grave eyes rest fully on him. They were quiet eyes, with exquisitely finished lids and lashes. In his imagination their depth of what seemed like devotional reverie contributed more than anything else to her air of separation and remoteness.

"Isn't it very serious—when there's anything wrong with estates?"

He answered readily, still forcing a tone of careless matter-of-fact.

"Of course it's serious. Everything is serious in business. Your father's affairs are just where they can be settled—now. But if we put it off any longer it might not be so easy. Men often have to take charge of one another's affairs—and straighten them out—and advance one another money—and all that—in business."

She looked away from him again, absently. She appeared not to be listening. There was something in her manner that advised him of the uselessness of saying anything more in that vein. After a while she folded her work, smoothing it carefully across her knee. The only sign she gave of being unusually moved was in rising from her chair and going to the open window, where she stood with her back to him, apparently watching the dartings from point to point of a sharp-eyed gray squirrel.

Rising as she did, he stood waiting for her to turn and say something else. Now that the truth was dawning on her, it seemed to him as well to allow it to grow clear. It would show her the futility of further opposition. He would have been glad to keep her ignorant; he regretted the error into which she herself unwittingly had led him; but, since it had been committed, it would not be wholly a disaster if it summoned her to yield.

Having come to this conclusion, he had time to make another observation while she still stood with her back to him. It was to consider himself fortunate in having ceased to be in love with her. In view of all the circumstances, it was a great thing to have passed through that phase and come out of it. He had read somewhere that a man is never twice in love with the same person. If that were so, he could fairly believe himself immune, as after a certain kind of malady. If it were not for this he would have found in her hostility to his efforts and her repugnance to his person a temptation—a temptation to which he was specially liable in regard to living things—to feel that it was his right to curb the spirit and tame the rebellion of whatever was restive to his control. There was something in this haughty, high-strung creature, poising herself in silence to stand upright in the face of fate, that would have called forth his impulse to dominate her will, to subdue her lips to his own, if he had really cared. Fortunately, he didn't care, and so could seek her welfare with detachment.

Turning slowly, she stood grasping the back of the chair from which she had risen. He always remembered afterward that it was a chair of which the flowing curves and rich interlacings of design contrasted with her subtly emphasized simplicity. He had once had the morbid curiosity to watch, in an English law-court, the face and attitude of a woman—a surgeon's wife—standing in the dock to be sentenced to death. It seemed to him now that Olivia Guion stood like her—with the same resoluteness, not so much desperate as slightly dazed.

"Wasn't it for something of that kind—something wrong with estates—that Jack Berrington was sent to prison?"

The question took him unawares. "I—I don't remember."

"I do. I should think you would. The trial was in all the papers. It was the Gray estate. He was Mrs. Gray's trustee. He ruined the whole Gray family."

"Possibly." He did his best to speak airily. "In the matter of estates there are all sorts of hitches that can happen. Some are worse than others, of course—"

"I've seen his wife, Ada Berrington, once or twice, when I've been in Paris. She lives there, waiting for him to come out of Singville. She avoids her old friends when she can—but I've seen her."

"I think I remember hearing about them," he said, for the sake of saying something; "but—"

"I should like to go and talk with my father. Would you mind waiting?"

She made as though she would pass him, but he managed to bar her way.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you, Miss Guion. If he's not well it'll only upset him. Why not let everything be just as it is? You won't regret it a year hence—believe me. In nine things out of ten you'd know better than I; but this is the tenth thing, in which I know better than you. Why not trust me—and let me have a free hand?"

"I'm afraid I must go to my father. If you'll be kind enough to wait, I'll come back and tell you what he says. Then we shall know. Will you please let me pass?"

He moved to one side. He thought again of the woman in the English law-court. It was like this that she walked from the dock—erect, unflinching, graceful, with eyes fixed straight before her, as though she saw something in the air.

He watched her cross the hall to the foot of the staircase. There she paused pensively. In a minute or two she came back to the sitting-room door.

"If it should be like—like Jack Berrington," she said, from the threshold, with a kind of concentrated quiet in her manner, "then—what you suggested—would be more out of the question than ever."

"I don't see that," he returned, adopting her own tone. "I should think it would be just the other way."

She shook her head.

"There are a lot of points of view that you haven't seen yet," he persisted. "I could put some of them before you if you'd give me time."

"It would be no use doing that. I should never believe anything but that we, my father and I, should bear the responsibilities of our own acts."

"You'll think differently," he began, "when you've looked at the thing all round; and then—"

But before he could complete his sentence she had gone.

Having seen her go up-stairs, he waited in some uncertainty. When fifteen or twenty minutes had gone by and she did not return, he decided to wait no longer. Picking up his hat and stick from the chair on which he had laid them, he went out by the French window, making his way to the gate across the lawn.

VIII

inding the door of her father's room ajar, Miss Guion pushed it open and went in.

Wearing a richly quilted dressing-gown, with cuffs and rolled collar of lavender silk, he lay asleep in the chaise-longue, a tan-colored rug across his feet. On a table at his left stood a silver box containing cigars, a silver ash-tray, a silver match-box, and a small silver lamp burning with a tiny flame. Each piece was engraved with his initials and a coat-of-arms. On his right there was an adjustable reading-stand, holding an open copy of a recent English review. One hand, adorned with an elaborately emblazoned seal-ring, hung heavily toward the floor; a cigar that had gone out was still between the fingers. His head, resting on a cushion of violet brocade, had fallen slightly to one side.

She sat down beside him, to wait till he woke up. It was a large room, with white doors and wainscoting. Above the woodwork it was papered in pale yellow. On the walls there were water-colors, prints, photographs, and painted porcelain plaques. Over the bed, for decorative rather than devotional purposes, hung an old French ivory crucifix, while lower down was a silver holy-water stoup of Venetian make, that was oftenest used for matches. It had been the late Mrs. Guion's room, and expressed her taste. It contained too many ornaments, too many knickknacks, too many mirrors, too many wardrobes, too many easy-chairs, too much embossed silver on the dressing-table, too much old porcelain, wherever there was a place for it. Everything was costly, from the lace coverlet on the bed to the Persian rugs on the floor.

Olivia looked vaguely about the room, as on an apartment she had never before seen. She found herself speculating as to the amount these elaborate furnishings would fetch if sold. She recalled the fact, forgotten till now, that when the Berringtons' belongings, purchased with reckless extravagance, passed under the hammer, they had gone for a song. She made the same forecast regarding the contents of Tory Hill. Much money had been spent on them, but, with the exception perhaps of some of the old portraits, there was little of real intrinsic value. She made the reflection coldly, drearily, as bearing on things that had no connection with herself.

Her eyes traveled back to her father. With the muscles of the face relaxed in sleep, he looked old and jaded. The mustache, which had not been waxed or curled that day, sagged at the corners, the mouth sagging under it. Above the line of the beard the skin was mottled and puffy. The lashes rested on his cheeks with the luxuriance of a girl's, and the splendid eyebrows had all their fullness; but the lids twitched and quivered like those of a child that has fallen asleep during a fit of weeping.

It was this twitching that softened her, that compelled her to judge him from the most merciful point of view. There was something piteous about him, something that silenced reproaches, that disarmed severity. She had come up-stairs staggered, incredulous—incredulous and yet convinced—outraged, terrified; but now the appeal of that fagged face and those quivering lids was too strong for her. It wrought in her not so much sympathy as comprehension, an understanding of him such as she had never before arrived at. In his capacity of father she had loved him unrestrainedly, but admired him with reserves. It was impossible not to love a parent so handsome, so genial, so kind, so generally admired; it was equally impossible not to criticize, however gently, a man with such a love of luxury, of unwarranted princeliness, and of florid display. She was indulgent to his tastes in the degree to which a new and enlightened generation can be tolerant of the errors of that preceding it, but she could not ignore the fact that the value he set on things—in morals, society, or art—depended on their power to strike the eye. She had smiled at that, as at something which, after all, was harmless. She had smiled, too, when he offered to himself—and to her also, it had to be admitted—the best of whatever could be had, since, presumably, he could afford it; though, as far as she was concerned, she would have been happier with simpler standards and a less ambitious mode of life. In following the path her parents had marked out for her, and to some extent beaten in advance, she had acquiesced in their plans rather than developed wishes of her own. Having grown tired of her annual round of American and English country-houses, with interludes for Paris, Biarritz, or Cannes, she had gone on chiefly because, as far as she could see, there was nothing else to do.

Looking at him now, it came over her for the first time that she must be a disappointment to him. He had never given her reason to suspect it, and yet it must be so. First among the aims for which he had been striving, and to attain to which he had hazarded so much, there must have been the hope that she should make a brilliant match. That, and that alone, would have given them as a family the sure international position he had coveted, and which plenty of other Americans were successful in securing.

It was only of late years, with the growth of her own independent social judgment, that she could look back over the past and see the Guions as in the van of that movement of the New World back upon the Old of which the force was forever augmenting. As Drusilla Fane was fond of saying, it was a manifestation of the nomadic, or perhaps the predatory, spirit characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. It was part of that impulse to expand, annex, appropriate, which had urged the Angles to descend on the shores of Kent and the Normans to cross from Dives to Hastings. Later, it had driven their descendants over the Atlantic, as individuals, as households, or as "churches"; and now, from their rich, comfortable, commonplace homes in New England, Illinois, or California, it bade later descendants still lift up their eyes and see how much there was to be desired in the lands their ancestors had left behind—fair parks, stately manors, picturesque châteaux, sonorous titles, and varied, dignified ways of living.

To a people with the habit of compassing sea and land to get whatever was good to have the voyage back was nothing, especially in the days of easy money and steam. The Guions had been among the first to make it. They had been among the first Americans to descend on the shores of Europe with the intention—more or less obscure, more or less acknowledged, as the case might be—of acquiring and enjoying the treasures of tradition by association or alliance or any other means that might present themselves. Richard Guion, grandfather of Henry Guion, found the way to cut a dash in the Paris of the early Second Empire and to marry his daughter, Victoria Guion, to the Marquis de Melcourt. From the simple American point of view of that day and date it was a dazzling match, long talked of by the naïve press of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.

By the more ambitious members of the Guion house it was considered as the beginning of a glorious epoch; but, looking back now, Olivia could see how meager the results had been. Since those days a brilliant American society had sprung up on the English stem, like a mistletoe on an oak; but, while Henry and Charlotta Guion would gladly have struck their roots into that sturdy trunk, they lacked the money essential to parasitic growth. As for Victoria Guion, French life, especially the old royalist phase of it, which offers no crevices on its creaseless bark in which a foreign seed can germinate, absorbed her within its tough old blossom as a pitcher-plant sucks in a fly. Henceforth the utmost she could do for her kith and kin was to force open the trap from time to time, so that Olivia, if she liked, could be swallowed, too. In that task the old lady was not only industrious but generous, offering to subscribe handsomely toward the dot, as well as giving it to be understood that the bride-elect would figure in the end as her residuary legatee. Owing to this prospect Olivia had been compelled to decline a comte and a vicomte of crusading ancestry, procured at some pains by Madame de Melcourt; but when she also refused the eminently eligible Duc de Berteuil, whose terms in the way of dowry were reasonable, while he offered her a splendidly historic name and background, the Marquise not unnaturally lost her temper and declared that she washed her hands of her grandniece once for all.

Not till this minute had Olivia ever considered that this reluctance on her part to be "well established" must have been something like a grief to her father, for he had never betrayed a sign of it. On the contrary, he had seemed to approve her decisions, and had even agreed with her in preferring the mistletoe to the pitcher-plant. He welcomed her back to Tory Hill, where her residences were longer, now that she ceased to be much with Madame de Melcourt, and yet was always ready with money and his consent when she had invitations from her friends abroad. On her engagement to Rupert Ashley he expressed complete satisfaction, and said in so many words that it was a more appropriate match for her than any French alliance, however distinguished. His tenderness in this respect came over her now as peculiarly touching, unsealing the fount of filial pity at a moment when other motives might have made for indignation and revolt.

He opened his eyes without giving any other sign of waking.

"Hallo! What are you looking at me for?"

The tone was not impatient, but she heard in it an implication of fear.

"Papa, are your troubles anything like Jack Berrington's?"

He gazed at her without moving a muscle or changing a shade. She only fancied that in the long look with which he regarded her there was a receding, sinking, dying light, as though the soul within him was withdrawing.

"What makes you ask that?"

The intonation was expressionless, and yet, it seemed to her, a little wary.

"I ask chiefly because—well, because I think they are."

He looked at her for a minute more, perhaps for longer.

"Well, then—you're right."

Again she had the sensation, familiar to her since yesterday, of the world reeling to pieces around her while her own personality survived. When she spoke, her voice sounded as if it came out of the wildness of a surging wreck.

"Then that's what you meant in saying yesterday that when everything was settled you still wouldn't be able to pay all you owed."

"That's what I meant—exactly."

He lay perfectly still, except that he raised his hand and puffed at his extinct cigar. She looked down at the pattern on the Persian rug beside his couch—a symmetrical scroll of old rose, on a black ground sown with multicolored flowerets.

"I suppose it's the Clay heirs and the Rodman heirs you owe the money to?"

"And the Compton heirs, and old Miss Burnaby, and the two Misses Brown, and—"

"Haven't they anything left?"

"Oh yes. It isn't all gone, by any means." Then he added, as if to make a clean breast of the affair and be done with it: "The personal property—what you may call the cash—is mostly gone! Those that have owned real estate—like the Rodmans and Fanny Burnaby—well, they've got that still."

"I see." She continued to sit looking meditatively down at the rug. "I suppose," she ventured, after long thinking, "that that's the money we've been living on all these years?"

"Yes; in the main." He felt it useless to quibble or to try to extenuate the facts.

"How many years would that be?"

"I'm not very sure; on and off, it's about ten since I began using some of their money to—help out my income. Latterly—you may as well know it—I haven't had any real income of my own at all."

"So that their money has been paying for—for all this."

Her hands made a confused little gesture, indicating the luxury of his personal appointments and of the room.

He shrugged his shoulders and arched his eyebrows in a kind of protest, which was nevertheless not denial. "W-well! If you choose to put it so!"

"And for me, too," she went on, looking at him now with a bewildered opening of her large gray eyes—"for my visits, my clothes, my maid—everything!"

"I don't see any need," he said, with a touch of peevishness, "for going so terribly into detail."

"I don't see how it can be helped. It's so queer—and startling—to think I've had so much that wasn't mine."

"You mustn't think it was deliberately planned—" he began, weakly.

"And now the suggestion is," she interrupted, "that Mr. Davenant should pay for it. That seems to me to make it even worse than—than before."

"I confess I don't follow you there," he complained. "If he doesn't—then I go to Singville."

"Wouldn't you rather?"

He raised himself stiffly into a sitting posture. "Would you?"

She did not hesitate in her reply. "Yes, papa. I would rather—if I were you."

"But since you're not me—since you are yourself—would you still rather that I went to Singville?"

There was a little lift to her chin, a faint color in her face as she replied: "I'd rather pay—however I did it. I'd rather pay—in any way—than ask some one else to do it."

He fell back on the cushion of violet brocade. "So would I—if I had only myself to think of. We're alike in that."

"Do you mean that you'd rather do it if it wasn't for me?"

"I've got to take everything into consideration. It's no use for me to make bad worse by refusing a good offer. I must try to make the best of a bad business for every one's sake. I don't want to take Davenant's money. It's about as pleasant for me as swallowing a knife. But I'd swallow a knife if we could only hush the thing up long enough for you to be married—and for me to settle some other things. I shouldn't care what happened after that. They might take me and chuck me into any hole they pleased."

"But I couldn't be married in that way, papa dear. I couldn't be married at all to—to one man—when another man had a claim on me."

"Had a claim on you? How do you mean?"

"He'll have that—if he pays for everything—pays for everything for years and years back. Don't you see?"

"A claim on you for what, pray?"

"That's what I don't know. But whatever it is, I shall feel that I'm in his debt."

"Nonsense, dear. I call that morbid. It is morbid."

"But don't you think it's what he's working for? I can't see anything else that—that could tempt him; and the minute we make a bargain with him we agree to his terms."

There was a long silence before he said, wearily:

"If we call the deal off we must do it with our eyes open to the consequences. Ashley would almost certainly throw you over—"

"No; because that possibility couldn't arise."

"And you'll have to be prepared for the disgrace—"

"I shall not look on it as disgrace so much as—paying. It will be paying for what we've had—if not in one sort of coin, then in another. But whatever it is, we shall be paying the debt ourselves; we sha'n't be foisting it off on some one else."

"Why do you say we?"

"Well, won't it be we? I shall have my part in it, sha'n't I? You wouldn't shut me out from that? I've had my share of the—of the wrong, so I ought to take my share in the reparation. My whole point is that we should be acting together."

"They can't put you in Singville."

"No; but they can't keep me from sitting outside the walls. I shall want to do that, papa, if you're within. I'm not going to separate myself from you—or from anything you're responsible for. I couldn't if I wanted to; but as it happens I shouldn't try. I should get a kind of satisfaction out of it, shouldn't you?—the satisfaction of knowing that every day we suffered, and every night we slept through or wept through, and every bit of humiliation and dishonor, was so much contributed to the great work of—paying up. Isn't that the way you'd take it?"

"That's all very fine now, dear, when you're—what shall I say?—a little bit exaltée; but how do you think you'll feel when they've—when they've"—he continued to speak with his eyes shut convulsively—"when they've arrested me and tried me and sentenced me and locked me up for ten or fifteen years?"

"I shall feel as if the bitterness of death were past. But I should feel worse than that—I should feel as if the bitterness of both death and hell were still to come if we didn't make an effort to shoulder our own responsibilities."

There was more in the same vein. He listened for the greater part of the time with his eyes closed. He was too unutterably tired to argue or to contest her point of view. Beyond suggesting that there were sides to the question she hadn't yet considered, he felt helpless. He was restrained, too, from setting them forth by a certain hesitation in demanding from her anything she did not concede of her own accord. That she would ultimately see for herself he had little doubt. In any case he was more or less indifferent from sheer spiritual exhaustion. He had ceased to direct, or try to direct, his own affairs or those of any one else. In his present condition he could only lie still and let come what might. Fate or God would arrange things either in the way of adjustment or of fatal ruin without interference on his part.

So as he lay and listened to his daughter he uttered some bit of reason or some feeble protest only now and then. When, occasionally, he looked at her, it was to see her—somewhat deliriously—white, slim, ethereal, inexorable, like the law of right. He was feverish; his head throbbed; whenever he opened his eyes the objects in the room seemed to whirl about, while she sat tense, low-voiced, gentle, a spirit of expiation.

Among the various ways in which he had thought she might take his dread announcement this one had never occurred to him; and yet, now that he saw it, he recognized it as just what he might have expected from the almost too rigid rectitude and decidedly too uncompromising pride that made up her character. It was the way, too, he admitted, most worthy of a Guion. It was the way he would have chosen for himself if he had nothing to consider but his own tastes. He himself was as eager in his way to make satisfaction as she; he was only deterred by considerations of common sense. From the point of view of a man of business it was more than a little mad to refuse the money that would pay his creditors, hush up a scandal, and keep the course of daily life running in something like its accustomed channel, merely because for the rest of his days he must be placed in a humiliating moral situation. He wouldn't like that, of course; and yet everything else was so much worse for his clients, even more than for himself. This was something she did not see. In spite of the measure in which he had agreed with her heroic views of "paying," he returned to that thought after she had kissed him and gone away.

During the conversation with him Olivia had so completely forgotten Davenant that when she descended to the oval sitting-room she was scarcely surprised to find that he had left and that Drusilla Fane was waiting in his place.

"You see, Olivia," Mrs. Fane reasoned, in her sympathetic, practical way, "that if you're not going to have your wedding on the 28th, you've got to do something about it now."

"What would you do?"

Olivia brought her mind back with some effort from the consideration of the greater issues to fix it on the smaller ones. In its way Drusilla's interference was a welcome diversion, since the point she raised was important enough to distract Olivia's attention from decisions too poignant to dwell on long.

"I've thought that over," Drusilla explained—"mother and I together. If we were you we'd simply scribble a few lines on your card and send it round by post."

"Yes? And what would you scribble?"

"We'd say—you see, it wouldn't commit you to anything too pointed—we'd say, simply, 'Miss Guion's marriage to Colonel Ashley will not take place on October 28th.' There you'd have nothing but the statement, and they could make of it what they liked."

"Which would be a good deal, wouldn't it?"

"Human nature being human nature, Olivia, you can hardly expect people not to talk. But you're in for that, you know, whatever happens now."

"Oh, of course."

"So that the thing to do is to keep them from going to the church next Thursday fortnight, and from pestering you with presents in the mean while. When you've headed them off on that you'll feel more free to—to give your mind to other things."

The suggestion was so sensible that Olivia fell in with it at once. She accepted, too, Drusilla's friendly offer to help in the writing of the cards, of which it would be necessary to send out some two hundred. There being no time to lose, they set themselves immediately to the task, Drusilla at the desk, and Olivia writing on a blotting-pad at a table. They worked for twenty minutes or half an hour in silence.

"Miss Guion's marriage to Colonel Ashley will not take place on October 28th."

"Miss Guion's marriage to Colonel Ashley will not take place on October 28th."

"Miss Guion's marriage to Colonel Ashley will not take place on October 28th."

The words, which to Olivia had at first sounded something like a knell, presently became, from the monotony of repetition, nothing but a sing-song. She went on writing them mechanically, but her thoughts began to busy themselves otherwise.

"Drusilla, do you remember Jack Berrington?"

The question slipped out before she saw its significance. She might not have perceived it so quickly even then had it not been for the second of hesitation before Drusilla answered and the quaver in her voice when she did.

"Y-es."

The amount of information contained in the embarrassment with which this monosyllable was uttered caused Olivia to feel faint. It implied that Drusilla had been better posted than herself; and if Drusilla, why not others?

"Do you know what makes me think of him?"

Again there was a second of hesitation. Without relaxing the speed with which she went on scribbling the same oft-repeated sentence, Olivia knew that her companion stayed her pen and half turned round.

"I can guess."

Olivia kept on writing. "How long have you known?"

Drusilla threw back the answer while blotting with unnecessary force the card she had just written: "A couple of days."

"Has it got about—generally?"

"Generally might be too much to say. Some people have got wind of it; and, of course, a thing of that kind spreads."

"Of course."

After all, she reflected, perhaps it was just as well that the story should have come out. It was no more possible to keep it quiet than to calm an earthquake. She had said just now to her father that she would regard publicity less as disgrace than as part of the process of paying up. Very well! If they were a mark for idle tongues, then so much the better, since in that way they were already contributing some few pence toward quenching the debt.

"I should feel worse about it," Drusilla explained, after a silence of some minutes, "if I didn't think that Peter Davenant was trying to do something to—to help Cousin Henry out."

Olivia wrote energetically. "What's he doing?"

"Oh, the kind of thing men do. They seem to have wonderful ways of raising money."

"How do you know he's trying it?"

"I don't know for certain; I've only an idea. I rather gather it by the queer way he comes and goes. The minute a thing is in Peter's hands—"

"Have you such a lot of confidence in him?"

"For this sort of thing—yes. He's terribly able, so they say, financially. For the matter of that, you can see it by the way he's made all that money. Bought mines, or something, and sold them again. Bought 'em for nothing, and sold 'em for thousands and thousands."

"Did I ever tell you that he once asked me to marry him?"

Drusilla wheeled round in her chair and stared, open-mouthed, at her friend's back.

"No!"

"Oh, it was years ago. I dare say he's forgotten it."

"I'll bet you ten to one he hasn't."

Olivia took another card and wrote rapidly. "Do you suppose," she said, trying to speak casually, "that his wanting to help papa out has anything to do with that?"

"I shouldn't wonder. I shouldn't wonder at all."

"What could it have?"

"Oh, don't ask me! How should I know? Men are so queer. He's getting some sort of satisfaction out of it, you may depend."

Drusilla answered as she would have liked to be answered were she in a similar position. That an old admirer should come to her aid like a god from the machine would have struck her as the most touching thing in the world. As she wheeled round again to her task it was not without a pang of wholly impersonal envy at so beautiful a tribute. She had written two or three cards before she let fall the remark:

"And now poor, dear old mother is manœuvering to have me marry him."

The idea was not new to Olivia, so she said, simply, "And are you going to?"

"Oh, I don't know." Drusilla sighed wearily, then added: "I sha'n't if I can help it."

"Does that mean that you'll take him if you can't do better?"

"It means that I don't know what I shall do at all. I'm rather sick of everything—and so I might do anything. I don't want to come back to live in America, and yet I feel an alien over there, now that I haven't Gerald to give me a raison d'être. They're awfully nice to me—at Southsea—at Silchester—everywhere—and yet they really don't want me. I can see that as plainly as I can see your name on this card. But I can't keep away from them. I've no pride. At least, I've got the pride, but there's something in me stronger than pride that makes me a kind of craven. I'm like a dog that doesn't mind being kicked so long as he can hang about under the dining-room table to sniff up crumbs. With my temperament it's perfectly humiliating, but I can't help it. I've got the taste for that English life as a Frenchman gets a taste for absinthe—knows that it'll be the ruin of him, and yet goes on drinking."

"I suppose you're not in love with any one over there?"

There was no curiosity in this question. Olivia asked it—she could scarcely tell why. She noticed that Drusilla stopped writing again and once more half turned round, though it was not till long afterward that she attached significance to the fact.

"Who on earth should I be in love with? What put that into your head?"

"Oh, I don't know. Stranger things have happened. You see a great many men—"

So they went skimming over the surface of confidence, knowing that beneath what they said there were depths below depths that they dared not disturb. All the same, it was some relief to both when the maid came to the door to summon them to luncheon.

IX

uring the next day and the next Guion continued ill, so ill that his daughter had all she could attend to in the small tasks of nursing. The lull in events, however, gave her the more time for thinking, and in her thoughts two things struck her as specially strange. Of these, the first and more remarkable was the degree to which she identified herself with her father's wrong-doing. The knowledge that she had for so many years been profiting by his misdeeds produced in her a curious sense of having shared them. Though she took pains to remind herself that she was morally guiltless, there was something within her—an imaginative quality perhaps that rejected the acquittal. Pity, too, counted in her mental condition, as did also that yearning instinct called maternal, which keeps women faithful to the weak and the fallen among those they love. To have washed her own hands and said, "See here! I am innocent!" would have seemed to her much like desertion of a broken old man who had no one but her to stand by him. Even while she made attempts to reason herself out of it, the promptings to the vicarious acceptance of guilt, more or less native to the exceptionally strong and loyal, was so potent in her that she found herself saying, in substance if not in words, "Inasmuch as he did it, I did it, too." It was not a purposely adopted stand on her part; it was not even clear to her why she was impelled to take it; she took it only because, obeying the dictates of her nature; she could do nothing else.

Nevertheless, it occasioned her some surprise, whenever she had time to think of it, to note the speed with which she had adapted herself to the facts. Once revealed, she seemed to have always known them—to have shared that first embarrassment for ready money that had induced her father to borrow from funds so temptingly under his control, and to have gone on with him, step by step, through the subsequent years of struggle and disaster. They were years over which the sun was already darkened and the moon turned into blood, so that, looking back on them, it was almost impossible to recapture the memory of the light-heartedness with which she had lived through them. It was incredible to her now that they had been years of traveling and visiting and dancing and hunting and motoring and yachting, of following fashion and seeking pleasure in whatever might have been the vogue of the minute. Some other self, some pale, secondary, astral self, must have crossed and recrossed the Atlantic and been a guest in great houses and become a favorite in London, Paris, Biarritz, Florida, Scotland, Rome! Some other self must have been sought out for her society, admired for her style, and privileged to refuse eligible suitors! Some other self must have met Rupert Ashley in the little house at Southsea and promised to become his wife! From the standpoint of the present it seemed to her as if an unreal life had ended in an unreal romance that was bringing to her, within a day or two, an unreal hero. She was forced again face to face with that fact that the man who was coming to marry her was, for all practical knowledge that she had of him, a stranger. In proportion as calamity encompassed her he receded, taking his place once more in that dim world she should never have frequented and in which she had no longer lot nor part.

She should never have frequented it for the simple reason that for all she had brought to it or got from it some one else had to pay. The knowledge induced a sense of shame which no consciousness of committed crime could have exceeded. She would have been less humiliated had she plotted and schemed to win flattery and homage for herself than she was in discovering that people had been tricked into giving them spontaneously. To drop the mask, to tear asunder the robe of pretense, to cry the truth from the housetops, and, like some Scriptural woman taken in adultery, lie down, groaning and stunned, under the pelting of the stones of those who had not sinned, became to her, as the hours dragged on, an atonement more and more imperative.

But the second odd fact she had to contemplate was the difficulty of getting a new mode of life into operation. Notwithstanding all her eagerness to pay, the days were still passing in gentle routine somewhat quietly because of her father's indisposition, but with the usual household dignity. There was a clock-work smoothness about life at Tory Hill, due to the most competent service secured at the greatest expense. Old servants, and plenty of them, kept the wheels going noiselessly even while they followed with passionate interest the drama being played in the other part of the house. To break in on the course of their duties, to disturb them, or put a stop to them, was to Olivia like an attempt to counteract the laws that regulate the sunrise. She knew neither how to set about it nor where to begin. There was something poignant in the irony of these unobtrusive services from the minute when her maid woke her in the morning till she helped her to change her dress for dinner, and yet there was nothing for it but to go through the customary daily round. When it became necessary to tell the women that the preparations for the wedding must be stopped and that the invitations to the two big dinners that were to be given in honor of Colonel Ashley had been withdrawn she gathered from small signs—the feigned stolidity of some of them and the overacted astonishment of others—that they had probably been even better informed than Drusilla Fane. After that the food they brought her choked her and the maid's touch on her person was like fire, while she still found herself obliged to submit to these long-established attentions.

She was reduced to drawing patience from what Guion told her as to his illness checking temporarily the course of legal action. Most of the men with whom it lay to set the law in motion, notably Dixon, the District-Attorney, were old friends of his, who would hesitate to drag him from a sick-room to face indictment. He had had long interviews with Dixon about the case already, and knew how reluctant that official was to move in the matter, anyhow; but as soon as he, Guion, was out and about again, all kindly scruples would have to yield. "You'll find," he explained to her, "that the question as to breaking-camp will settle itself then. And besides," he added, "it'll be better to wait till Ashley comes and you know what he's likely to do for you."

With the last consideration she could not but agree, though she shrank from his way of putting it. It was some satisfaction at least to know that, since the two hundred cards she had sent out had reached their recipients, the process of public penance must in some measure have been started. She had seen no one who could tell her what the effect had been; her bridesmaids evidently knew enough to consider silence the better part of sympathy; not even Drusilla Fane had looked in or called her on the telephone during the last day or two; but she could imagine pretty well the course that comment and speculation must be taking through the town. There would be plenty of blame, some jubilation, and, she felt sure, not a little sympathy withal. There was among her acquaintance a local American pride that had always been jealous of her European preferences and which would take the opportunity to get in its bit of revenge, but in general opinion would be kindly. There came an afternoon when she felt the desire to go forth to face it, to take her first impressions of the world in her new relationship toward it. She had not been beyond their own gate since the altered conditions had begun to obtain. She had need of the fresh air; she had need to find her bearings; she had need of a few minutes' intercourse with some one besides her father, so as not to imperil her judgment by dwelling too incessantly on an idée fixe. Rupert Ashley would land that night or the next morning. In forty-eight hours he would probably be in Boston. It was prudent, she reflected, to be as well poised and as sure of herself as possible before his arrival on the scene.

Her father was slightly better. He could leave his bed, and, wrapped in his violet dressing-gown, could lie on the chaise-longue, surrounded by the luxurious comforts that were a matter of course to him. As she made him snug he observed with a grim smile that his recovery was a pity. He could almost hear, so he said, Dixon and Johnstone and Hecksher and others of his cronies making the remark that his death would be a lucky way out of the scrape.

She had come, dressed for the street, to tell him she was walking down to the Temples', to see what had become of Drusilla Fane. She thought it needless to add that she was inventing the errand in order to go out and take notes on the new aspect the world must henceforth present to her.

He looked at her with an approval that gradually merged into a sense of comfort. She had chosen the simplest dress and hat in her wardrobe, as significant of a chastened soul; but simplicity more than anything else emphasized her distinction. "She'll be all right," he said, consolingly, to himself. "Whatever happens she's the kind to come out on top. Rupert Ashley would be a fool to throw over a superb, high-spirited creature like that. He'll not do it. Of that I feel sure."

The conviction helped him to settle more luxuriously into the depths of his couch and to relish the flavor of his cigar. He was quite sincere in the feeling that if she were but safe he should be more or less indifferent to the deluge overwhelming himself.

"Papa," she ventured at last, watching carefully the action of the little silver button-hook, as she buttoned her gloves, "if that Mr. Davenant came while I'm gone, you wouldn't change your mind, would you?"

"I don't think he's in the least likely to turn up."

"But if he did?"

"Well, I suppose you'll be back before long. We couldn't settle anything without talking it over, in any case."

Forced to be content with that, she kissed him and turned away.

SHE FOUND COMFORT IN GETTING INTO THE OPEN AIR

She found a comfort in getting into the open air, into the friendly streets, under the shade of the familiar trees, that surprised her. The absence of pose characteristic of the average American town struck her for the first time as soothing. With none of the effort to make life conform to a rigid standard of propriety, which in an English community would be the first thing to notice, there was an implied invitation to the spirit to relax. In the slap-dash, go-as-you-please methods of building, paving, and cleaning she saw a tacit assumption that, perfection being not of this world, one is permitted to rub along without it. Rodney Lane, which in Colonial days had led to Governor Rodney's "Mansion," had long ago been baptized Algonquin Avenue by civic authorities with a love of the sonorous, but it still retained the characteristics of a New England village street. Elms arched over it with the regularity of a Gothic vaulting, and it straggled at its will. Its houses, set in open lawns, illustrated all the phases of the national taste in architecture as manifested throughout the nineteenth century, from the wooden Greek temple with a pillared façade of the early decades to the bizarre compositions, painted generally in dark red and yellow, with many gables and long sweeps of slanting roof, which marked that era's close. In most cases additions had been thrown out from time to time, ells trailing at the back, or excrescences bulging at the sides, that were not grotesque only because there had been little in the first effect to spoil. In more than one instance the original fabric was altered beyond recognition; here and there a house she could remember had altogether disappeared; a new one had replaced it that before long might be replaced by a newer still. To Olivia the consoling thought was precisely in this state of transition, to which rapid vicissitude, for better or for worse, was something like a law. It made the downfall of her own family less exceptional, less bitter, when viewed as part of a huge impermanency, shifting from phase to phase, with no rule to govern it but the necessities of its own development.

Until this minute it was the very element in American life she had found most distasteful. Her inclinations, carefully fostered by her parents, had always been for the solid, the well-ordered, the assured, evolved from precedent to precedent till its conventions were fixed and its doings regulated as by a code of etiquette. Now, all of a sudden, she perceived that life in shirt-sleeves possessed certain advantages over a well-bred existence in full dress. It allowed the strictly human qualities an easier sort of play. Where there was no pretense at turning to the world a smooth, impeccable social front, toil and suffering, misfortune and disgrace, became things to be less ashamed of. Practically every one in these unpretentious, tree-shaded houses knew what it was to struggle upward, with many a slip backward in the process and sometimes a crashing fall from the top. These accidents were understood. The result was the creation of a living atmosphere, not perhaps highly civilized, but highly sympathetic, charged with the comprehension of human frailty, into which one could carry one's dishonor, not wholly with equanimity, but at least with the knowledge that such burdens were not objects for astonishment. As she descended the hill, therefore, she felt, as she had never felt before, the comforting assurance of being among brethren, before whom she should not have the wearisome task of "keeping up appearances," and by whom she would be supported, even at the worst, through a fellow-feeling with her cares.

This consciousness helped her to be firm when, a few minutes later, having reached the dike by the border of the Charles, she came face to face with Peter Davenant. She saw him from a long way off, but without recognition. She noticed him only as an unusually tall figure, in a summery gray suit and a gray felt hat. He was sauntering in a leisurely way toward her, stopping now and then to admire some beautiful dog sniffing the scent of water-rats in the weeds, or a group of babies tumbling on the sand, or a half-naked undergraduate sculling along the serpentine reaches of the river, or a college crew cleaving the waters with the precision of an arrow, to a long, rhythmic swing of eight slim bodies and a low, brief grunt of command. The rich October light striking silvery gleams from the walls of the Stadium and burnished gold from the far-off dome of the State House brought all the hues of fire from the rim of autumnal hills on the western horizon. It touched up with soft dove-gray, in which were shades of green and purple, the row of unpainted, ramshackle wooden cabins—hovels of a colony of "squatters" that no zeal for civic improvement had ever been able to dislodge—lined along a part of the embankment, and wrought indefinable glories in the unkempt marshes, stretching away into shimmering distances, where factory windows blazed as if from inner conflagration and steam and smoke became roseate or iridescent.

The tall stranger, so much better dressed than the men who usually strolled on the embankment at this hour of a week-day afternoon, fixed her attention to such a degree as to make her forget that she herself was probably a subject of curiosity and speculation among the passers-by. It was with a little disappointment that as she came nearer she said to herself, "It's only—that man." Common fairness, however, obliged her to add that he seemed "more like a gentleman" than she had supposed. That he was good-looking, in a big, blond, Scotch or Scandinavian way, she had acknowledged from the first. On recognizing Davenant her impulse was to pass him with the slightest recognition, but on second thoughts it seemed best to her to end the affair impending between them once for all.

"I'm sorry you didn't wait for me to come downstairs the other day," she said, after they had exchanged greetings, "because I could have told you that my father agreed with me—that it wouldn't be possible for us to accept your kind help."

"I hope he's better," was Davenant's only answer.

"Much better, thank you. When he's able to see you, I know he will want to express his gratitude more fully than I can."

"I hoped he'd be able to see me to-day. I was on my way to Tory Hill."

She was annoyed both by his persistency and by the coolness of his manner, as, leaning on his stick, he stood looking down at her. He looked down in a way that obliged her to look up. She had not realized till now how big and tall he was. She noticed, too, the squareness of his jaw, the force of his chin, and the compression of his straight, thin lips beneath the long curve of his mustache. In spite of his air of granite imperturbability, she saw that his fair skin was subject to little flushes of embarrassment or shyness, like a girl's. As she was in a mood to criticize, she called this absurd and said of his blue eyes, resting on her with a pensive directness, as though he were studying her from a long way off, that they were hard. Deep-set and caverned under heavy, overhanging brows, they more than any other feature imparted to his face the frowning and farouche effect by which she judged him. Had it not been for that, her hostility to everything he said and did might not have been so prompt. That he was working to get her into his power became more than ever a conviction the minute she looked into what she called that lowering gaze.

All the same, the moment was one for diplomatic action rather than for force. She allowed a half-smile to come to her lips, and her voice to take a tone in which there was frank request, as she said: "I wish you wouldn't go."

"I shouldn't if it wasn't important. I don't want to annoy you more than I can help."

"I don't see how anything can be important when—when there's nothing to be done."

"There's a good deal to be done if we choose to do it; but we must choose at once. The Benn crowd is getting restive."

"That doesn't make any difference to us. My father has decided to take the consequences of his acts."

"You say that so serenely that I guess you don't understand yet just what they'd be."

"I do—I do, perfectly. My father and I have talked it all over. We know it will be terrible; and yet it would be more terrible still to let some one else pay our debts. I dare say you think me monstrous, but—"

"I think you mistaken. I don't want to say more than that. If I find Mr. Guion of the same opinion—"

"I see. You don't consider my word sufficient."

"Your word is all right, Miss Guion," he tried to laugh. "What you lack is authority. My dealings are with your father. I can't settle anything with—a substitute."

She colored swiftly. "I don't presume to settle anything. I only thought I might give you some necessary information. I hoped, too, to save you a little trouble in sparing you the walk to Tory Hill."

He looked away from her, his eyes wandering up the reach of the river, over which the long, thin, many-oared college craft shot like insects across a pool.

"Why should you be so bent on seeing your father follow Jack Berrington, when it could be avoided?"

"Why should you care? What difference does it make to you? If you'd only explain that—"

"It explains itself. If I saw a woman leap into the river there I should pull her out. The more she insisted on being drowned, the more I should try to save her."

"But, you see, I'm not leaping into a river. On the contrary, I'm getting out of one. It seems to me that you'd be only forcing me back and making my last state worse than the first."

It took him a minute to grasp the force of this. "That would depend, of course, on the point of view. As a matter of fact, it's something with which I've nothing to do. It concerns you, and it concerns Mr. Guion, but it doesn't concern me. For me the whole thing is very simple. I've offered to lend Mr. Guion a sum of money. It's for him to take or to leave. If he refuses it, I sha'n't be offended; and if he doesn't refuse it—"

"You'd let him have it, just the same?"

"Of course. Why not?"

"In spite of all I've said as to what I should feel?"

"But I'm not supposed to know anything about that, you know. I repeat that it isn't my affair. If Mr. Guion should accept my loan against your wishes—well, that's something you'd have to fix up with him."

She was some minutes silent, her eyes ranging over the river and the marshes, like his own.

"If you urged it on him," she said at last, "I think he'd take it."

"Then so much the better, from my point of view."

"Precisely; but then your point of view is a mystery. Not that it makes any difference," she hastened to add. "If my father accepts your loan, it will be for me to pay it back, in one way or another—if I ever can."

"We could talk of that," he smiled, trying to be reassuring, "after more important things had been settled."

"There wouldn't be anything more important—for me."

"Oh, you wouldn't find me an importunate creditor."

"That wouldn't help matters—so long as I owed the debt. After all, we belong to that old-fashioned, rather narrow-minded class of New England people to whom debt of any kind is the source of something like anguish. At least," she corrected herself, "I belong to that class."

It was on his lips to remind her that in her case there could be no present release from indebtedness, there could only be a change of creditors; but he decided to express himself more gracefully.

"Wouldn't it be possible," he asked, "to put the boot on the other foot, and to consider me as the person to whom the favor is shown in being allowed to do something useful?"

She lifted her chin scornfully. "That would be childish. It would be a mere quibbling with words."

"But it would be true. It's the way I should take it."

She confronted him with one of her imperious looks. "Why?"

In the monosyllable there was a demand for complete explanation, but he met it with one of his frank smiles.

"Couldn't you let me keep that as my secret?"

"So that you would be acting in the daylight and we in the dark."

"You might be in the dark, and still have nothing to be afraid of."

She shook her head. "I should be afraid. It was in the dark, according to the old story, that the antelope escaped a lion by falling into a hunter's trap."

"Do I look like that kind of a hunter?" He smiled again at the absurdity of her comparison.

"You can't tell anything from looks—with men. With men a woman has only one principle to guide her—to keep on the safe side."

"I hope you won't think me uncivil, Miss Guion, if I point out that, at present, you haven't got a safe side to keep on. That's what I want to offer you."

"I might ask you why again, only that we should be going round in a circle. Since you don't mean to tell me, I must go without knowing; but I'm sure you can understand that to some natures the lion is less to be feared than the hunter."

"He doesn't feel so." He nodded his head in the direction of Tory Hill.

"He feels so. He's only a little—wavering."

"And I guess you're a little wavering, too, Miss Guion, if you'd only own up to it."

He watched her straighten her slight figure while her delicate features hardened to an expression of severity. "I'm not wavering on the principle, nor because of anything I should have to face myself. If I have any hesitation, it's only because of what it would mean for papa."

He allowed an instant to pass while he looked down at her gravely. "And he's not the only one, you know," he said, with all the significance he could put into his tone.

His hint, however, was thrown away, since she was intent on her own line of thought. With a slight nod of the head, dignified rather than discourteous, she departed, leaving him, to the great interest of the passers-by, leaning on his stick and staring after her.

X

s Olivia continued on her way toward Rodney Temple's she was able to make it clear to herself that a chief reason for her dislike of Davenant sprang from his immovability. There was something about him like a giant rock. She got the impression that one might dash against him forever and hurt no one but oneself. It was a trait new to her among American men, whom she generally found too yielding where women were concerned. This man had an aloofness, too, that was curiously disconcerting. He made no approaches; he took no liberties. If he showed anything that resembled a personal sentiment toward her, it was dislike. Making that reflection and using that word, she was almost startled. A woman had sometimes disliked her; she knew that; but a man—never! And yet it was difficult to interpret Davenant's bearing toward her in any other way. It was a bearing in which there were no concessions to her whatever, while there was in it—it was only too plain!—a distinct intention to ignore her. For the time being this personal element in the situation loomed larger than any other. It challenged her; it even annoyed her. At the same time it gave Davenant an importance in her eyes which she was far from willing to concede.

Rodney Temple's house, which was really within the borders of Cambridge, built about 1840 by some Harvard professor in easy circumstances, had originally resembled a square brick box. In the course of seventy years it had passed through the hands of several owners, each of whom had built on an additional box according to his needs. To the north a rectangular wing of one story had been thrown out as a drawing-room; to the south a similar projection formed the library and study. A smaller square crowned the edifice as a cupola, while cubes of varying dimensions were half visible at the back. Against the warm, red brick a Wren portico in white-painted wood, together with the white facings of the windows, produced an effect of vivid spotlessness, tempered by the variegated foliage of climbing vines. The limitations of the open lawn were marked by nothing but a line of shrubs.

Having arrived at the door, it was a relief to Olivia, rather than the contrary, to learn that the ladies were not at home, but that Mr. Temple himself would be glad to see her if she would come in. He had, in fact, espied her approach from his study window and had come out into the hall to insist on her staying. Within a minute or two she found herself sitting in one of his big, shabby arm-chairs saying things preliminary to confidence.

It was a large room, with windows on three sides, through which the light poured in to find itself refracted by a hundred lustrous surfaces. The first impression received on entering what Rodney Temple called his work-room was that of color—color unlike that of pictures, flowers, gems, or sunsets, and yet of extraordinary richness and variety. Low bookcases, running round the room, offered on the broad shelf forming the top space for many specimens of that potter's art on which the old man had made himself an authority. Jars and vases stood on tables, plaques and platters hung on the walls, each notable for some excellence in shape, glaze, or decoration. Of Americans of his generation Rodney Temple had been among the first to respond to an appeal that came from ages immeasurably far back in the history of man. His imagination had been stirred in boyhood by watching a common country potter turn off bowls and flowerpots that sprang from the wheel in exquisite, concentric forms or like opening lilies of red earth. Here, he had said to himself, is the beginning of everything we call art—here must have been the first intimation to man that beauty could be an element in the work of his own fingers.

In a handicraft that took the dust of the earth to minister to man's humblest needs, and yet contrived thereby to enrich his aesthetic life, young Rodney Temple, as he was then, found much that was congenial to his own mystical aspirations. During his early travels abroad the factories of Meissen and Sèvres interested him more than the Zwinger and the Louvre.

He frequented the booths and quays and dingy streets of the older European cities, bringing out from some lost hiding-place now an Arabic tile in which the green of the oasis intensified the blue of the desert sky; now a Persian bowl of hues that changed with a turn of the head or a quiver of the lids; now a Spanish plaque gleaming with metallic, opalescent colors, too indefinable to name, too fugitive for the eye to transmit to memory. Later he picked up strange examples which, like meteoric stones from another sphere, had found their mysterious way from Chinese palaces to his grimy haunts in London, Amsterdam, or Florence, as the case might be—a blue-and-white jar of Chia-ching, or a Han ceremonial vessel in emerald green, incrusted from long burial, or a celadon bowl that resembled a cup of jade, or some gorgeously decorated bit of Famille Verte. He knew at first little or nothing of the nature and history of these precious "finds." He saw only that they were rare and lovely and that through beauty as a means of grace he entered into communion with men who had neither epoch nor ideals in common with himself.

In the end he became an authority on ceramic art by the simple process of knowing more about it than anybody else. When the trustees of the Harvard Gallery of Fine Arts awoke to that fact, he was an assistant professor of Greek in the University. Under his care, in the new position they offered him, a collection was formed of great celebrity and value; but nothing in it was ever quite so dear to him as the modest treasures he had acquired for himself in the days of his young enthusiasm, when his fellow-countrymen as yet cared for none of these things. As Olivia sat and talked her eye traveled absently from barbaric Rouen cornucopias and cockatoos to the incrusted snails and serpents of Bernard Palissy, resting long on a flowered jardinière by Veuve Perrin, of Marseilles. She had little technical knowledge of the objects surrounding her, but she submitted to the strange and soothing charm they never failed to work on her—the charm of stillness, of peace, as of things which, made for common homely uses, had passed beyond that stage into an existence of serenity and loveliness.

"When you spoke the other day," she said, after the conversation had turned directly on her father's affairs—"when you spoke the other day about a pillar of cloud, I suppose you meant what one might call—an overruling sense of right."

"That might do as one definition."

"Because in that case you may like to know that I think I've seen it."

"I thought you would if you looked for it."

"I didn't look for it. It was just—there!"

"It's always there; only, as in the case of the two disciples on the Emmaus road, our eyes are holden so that we don't see it."

"I should have seen it easily enough; but if you hadn't told me, I shouldn't have known what it was. I didn't suppose that we got that kind of guidance nowadays."

"The light is always shining in darkness, dearie; only the darkness comprehendeth it not. That's all there is to it."

He sat at his desk, overlooking the embankment and the curves of the Charles. It was a wide desk littered with papers, but with space, too, for some of the favorite small possessions that served him as paper-weights—a Chinese dragon in blue-green enamel, a quaintly decorated cow in polychrome Delft, a dancing satyr in biscuit de Sèvres. On the side remote from where he sat was a life-size bust of Christ in fifteenth-century Italian terra-cotta—the face noble, dignified, strongly sympathetic—once painted, but now worn to its natural tint, except where gleams of scarlet or azure showed in the folds of the vesture. While the old man talked, and chiefly while he listened, the fingers of his large, delicately articulated hand stroked mechanically the surfaces of a grotesque Chinese figure carved in apple-green jade. It was some minutes before Olivia made any response to his last words. "Things are very dark to me," she confessed, "and yet this light seems to me absolutely positive. I've had to make a decision that would be too frightful if something didn't seem to be leading me into the Street called Straight, as papa says. Did you know Mr. Davenant had offered to pay our debts?"

He shook his head.

"Of course I couldn't let him do it."

"Couldn't you?"

"Do you think I could?"

"Not if you think differently. You're the only judge."

"But if I don't, you know, papa will have to go—" She hesitated. "You know what would happen, don't you?"

"I suppose I do."

"And I could prevent it, you see, if I let papa take this money. I have to assume the responsibility of its refusal. It puts me in a position that I'm beginning to feel—well, rather terrible."

"Does it?"

"You don't seem very much interested, Cousin Rodney. I hoped you'd give me some advice."

"Oh, I never give advice. Besides, if you've got into the Street called Straight, I don't see why you need advice from any one."

"I do. The Street called Straight is all very well, but—"

"Then you're not so sure, after all."

"I'm sure in a way. If it weren't for papa I shouldn't have any doubt whatever. But it seems so awful for me to drive him into what I don't think he'd do of his own accord." She went on to explain Davenant's offer in detail. "So you see," she concluded, "that papa's state of mind is peculiar. He agrees with me that the higher thing would be not to take the money; and yet if I gave him the slightest encouragement he would."

"And you're not going to?"

"How could I, Cousin Rodney? How could I put myself under such an obligation to a man I hardly know?"

"He could probably afford it."

"Is he so very rich?" There was a hint of curiosity in the tone.

Rodney Temple shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, rich enough. It would pretty well clean him out; but, then, that would do him good."

"Do him good—how?"

"He's spoiling for work, that fellow is. Since he's had all that money he's been of no use to himself or to anybody else. He's like good capital tied up in a stocking instead of being profitably invested."

"And yet we could hardly put ourselves in a humiliating situation just to furnish Mr. Davenant with an incentive for occupation, could we, Cousin Rodney?"

"I dare say not."

"And he isn't offering us the money merely for the sake of getting rid of it, do you think?"

"Then what is he offering it to you for?"

"That's exactly what I want to know. Haven't you any idea?"

"Haven't you?"