The Project Gutenberg eBook, Kildares of Storm, by Eleanor Mercein Kelly, Illustrated by Alonzo Kimball

KILDARES OF STORM

BY ELEANOR MERCEIN KELLY

WITH FRONTISPIECE BY ALONZO KIMBALL

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1916

Copyright, 1916, by
The Century Co.

Published, October, 1916

TO AN UNFORGOTTEN MOTHER
Who moulded for others than her daughter
the standard of great womanhood

But for once Jacqueline of the eager lips turned her cheek, so that her mother's kiss should not disturb the memory of certain others

CONTENTS

[CHAPTER I]
[CHAPTER II]
[CHAPTER III]
[CHAPTER IV]
[CHAPTER V]
[CHAPTER VI]
[CHAPTER VII]
[CHAPTER VIII]
[CHAPTER IX]
[CHAPTER X]
[CHAPTER XI]
[CHAPTER XII]
[CHAPTER XIII]
[CHAPTER XIV]
[CHAPTER XV]
[CHAPTER XVI]
[CHAPTER XVII]
[CHAPTER XVIII]
[CHAPTER XIX]
[CHAPTER XX]
[CHAPTER XXI]
[CHAPTER XXII]
[CHAPTER XXIII]
[CHAPTER XXIV]
[CHAPTER XXV]
[CHAPTER XXVI]
[CHAPTER XXVII]
[CHAPTER XXVIII]
[CHAPTER XXIX]
[CHAPTER XXX]
[CHAPTER XXXI]
[CHAPTER XXXII]
[CHAPTER XXXIII]
[CHAPTER XXXIV]
[CHAPTER XXXV]
[CHAPTER XXXVI]
[CHAPTER XXXVII]
[CHAPTER XXXVIII]
[CHAPTER XXXIX]
[CHAPTER XL]
[CHAPTER XLI]
[CHAPTER XLII]
[CHAPTER XLIII]
[CHAPTER XLIV]
[CHAPTER XLV]
[CHAPTER XLVI]
[CHAPTER XLVII]
[CHAPTER XLVIII]
[CHAPTER XLIX]
[CHAPTER L]
[CHAPTER LI]
[CHAPTER LII]
[AFTERWORD]

KILDARES OF STORM

CHAPTER I

Along a pleasant Kentucky road that followed nature rather than art in its curves and meanderings, straying beside a brook awhile before it decided to cross, lingering in cool, leafy hollows, climbing a sudden little hill to take a look out over the rolling countryside—along this road a single-footing mare went steadily, carrying a woman who rode cross-saddle, with a large china vase tucked under one arm.

People in an approaching automobile stopped talking to stare at her. She returned their gaze calmly, while the startled mare made some effort to climb a tree, thought better of it, and sidled by with a tremulous effort at self-control. A man in the machine lifted his hat with some eagerness. The woman inclined her head as a queen might acknowledge the plaudits of the multitude.

After they passed, comments were audible.

"What a stunner! Who is she, Jack?" The voice was masculine.

"Riding cross-saddle! Jack, do you know her?" The voice was feminine.

The answer was lower, but the woman on horseback heard it. "Of course I know her, or used to. It is the woman I was telling you about, the famous Mrs. Kildare of Storm."

Mrs. Kildare's color did not change as she rode on. Perhaps her lips tightened a little; otherwise the serenity of her face was unaltered. Serenity, like patience, is a thing that must be won, a habit of mind not easily to be broken. She reminded herself that since the invasion of automobiles she must expect often to encounter people who had known her before.

Her eyes, keen and gray and slightly narrowed, like all eyes that are accustomed to gaze across wide spaces, turned from side to side with quick, observant glances. Negroes, "worming" tobacco in a field, bent to their work as she passed with a sudden access of zeal.

"That's right, boys," she called, smiling. "The Madam sees you!"

The negroes guffawed sheepishly in answer.

A certain warmth was in her gaze as she looked about, her, something deeper than mere pride of possession. Her feeling for the land she owned was curiously maternal. "My dear fields," she sometimes said to herself. "My cattle, my trees"; and even, "my birds, my pretty, fleecy clouds up there."

When she came to a certain cornfield, acres of thrifty stalks standing their seven feet and more, green to the roots, plumes nodding proudly in the breeze, she faced her mare about and saluted, as an officer might salute his regiment.

A chuckle sounded from the other side of the road. On a bank almost level with her head a young man lay under a beech-tree, watching her with kindling eyes, as he had watched her ever since she rode into sight. "Miss Kate, Miss Kate, when are you going to grow up and give those girls of yours a chance?"

Her surprised blush took all the maturity out of her face. She might have been twenty. "Spying on me as usual, Philip! Well, why shouldn't I salute this corn of mine? It certainly serves me nobly."

He came down from the bank and stood beside her; a stalwart young man in shabby riding-boots and a clerical collar, with eyes surprisingly blue in a dark, aquiline, un-Anglo-Saxon face. They were filled just now with a look that made the lady blush again.

He was thinking (no new thought to Kentuckians) that of all the products of his great commonwealth, nothing equalled such women as this before him. Erect, deep-bosomed, with the warm brown flush of her cheeks, her level gaze, her tender mouth with the deep corners that mean humor—Kate Kildare, from girlhood to old age, would find in eyes that gazed on her the unconscious tribute that many women never know, and for that reason happily do not miss. But the vital quality of her beauty was not a matter of color, or form, or feature. It was a thing that had come to her since her first youth, a glow from within, the sort of spiritual fire at which a friend may warm himself. If happiness is a great beautifier, Philip Benoix believed he knew of one greater: sorrow.

"Well, well?" she demanded, laughing. "What are you staring at, boy? Why are you ogling me in that sentimental fashion? Have you mistaken me for—Jacqueline, perhaps?"

If she hoped to embarrass him in turn, she was disappointed. He shook his head. "If I were to ogle Jacqueline sentimentally, she'd slap me. Miss Kate," he added, "don't you know that saluting your corn was just your pagan way of thanking God? Why not come to church and do it properly?"

"You may just as well give it up. I shall never go to church. I don't like church, so there! Stop talking shop, and come home to supper with me. What are you doing here, anyway, lolling about like a man of leisure, as if there were no souls to be saved?"

"I was lying in wait for yours. I knew you were out on a tour of inspection, and bound to pass this way."

"Did you want to see me especially?"

"I always do."

She flicked him with her riding-crop, "You're more Irish than French to-day! And where's your horse?"

"Well, old Tom seemed so comfortable and tired, munching away in his stall, that I hadn't the heart—"

"So you walked. Of course you weren't tired! Oh, Phil, Phil, you are your father's own son; too soft-hearted for this 'miserable and naughty world.' It won't be able to resist taking a whack at you."

A little silence fell between them. Both were thinking of a man who was no longer quite of this miserable and naughty world.

"Take my stirrup and trot along beside me, boy," she said. "We'll go faster that way. I wish you were still small enough to climb up behind me as you used to do—remember?"

His face suddenly quivered. "Are you asking me if I remember!—You have never let me tell you how well I remember, nor what your kindness meant to me, in those first days"—He spoke haltingly, yet with a sudden rush, as men speak whose hearts are full. "I was the loneliest little chap in the world, I think. Father and I had always been such friends. They tried to be kind, there at school; but they acted as if I were something strange; they watched me. I knew they were pitying me, remembering father, studying me for signs of inheritance. The son of a 'killer.' It was a dangerous time for a boy to be going through alone.... And then you came and brought me home with you; made me play with those babies of yours, took me with you wherever you went, read with me and discussed things with me as if I were an equal, talked to me about father, too. Do you think I don't know all it meant to you? Do you think I did not realize, even then, what people were saying?"

"I have never been much afraid," said Kate Kildare quietly, "of what people were saying."

"No. And because of you, I dared not be afraid, either. Because of you I knew that I must stay and make my fight here, here where my father had failed. Oh, Kate Kildare, whatever manhood I may have I owe—"

"To your father," she said.

"Perhaps. But whatever good there is in me, you kept alive."

"Dear, dear! And that's why," she cried, with an attempt at lightness, "you feel it your duty to strike attitudes in your pulpit and keep the good alive in the rest of us?"

"That's why," he said, soberly, "But not you, Miss Kate. I do not preach to you. No man alive is good enough to preach to you."

"Good Heavens! When you have just been doing it!" Her laugh was rather tremulous. "What is this—a declaration? Are you making love to me, boy?"

He nodded without speaking.

The flush and the laughter died out of her face, leaving it very pale. "Look here," she said haltingly, "I'd like to accept your hero-worship, dear—it's sweet. But—If I've not been a very good woman, at least I've always been an honest one. You said even at that time you realized what people were saying. Did it never occur to you that what they said—might be true?"

He met her gaze unfalteringly. "I know you," he answered.

Her eyes went dim. Blindly she stooped and drew his head to her and kissed him.

At that moment a plaintive negro voice spoke close at hand. "Gawd sakes, Miss Kate, whar you gwine at wif my prize? Huccom you took'n hit away fum me?"

Unnoticed, an old, shambling negro had approached across the field, and was gazing in wide-eyed dismay at the china vase under her arm.

Mrs. Kildare welcomed the interruption. She did not often encourage her emotions.

"Aha! Well met, Ezekiel," she said dramatically. "Search your heart, search your black heart, I say, and tell me whether a magnificent trophy like this deserves no better resting place than a cabin whose door-yard looks like a pig-sty."

"But ain't I done won it?" insisted the negro. "Ain't I done won it fa'r and squar'? Wan't my do'-yahd de purtiest in de whole Physick League?"

"It was, two weeks ago; and now what is it? A desert, a Sahara strewn with tomato-cans and ashes. No, no, Ezekiel. Winning a prize isn't enough for the Civic League—nor for God," she announced, sententiously. "You've got to keep it won."

She moved on, resistless, like Fate. The negro gazed after her, his month quivering childishly.

"She's a hard 'ooman, the Madam, a mighty hard 'ooman! Huccom she kissin' Mr. Philip Benoix dataway? Him a preacher, too!" Suddenly his eye gleamed with a forgotten memory. "De French doctor's boy—my Lawd! De French doctor's own chile!" He shook his fist after the retreating pair. "White 'ooman, white 'ooman, ain't you got no shame 't all?" he muttered—but very low, for the Madam had good ears.

CHAPTER II

As they jogged along, man and mare at the same easy foot-pace, Benoix said, "Are you sure that vase doesn't really belong to old Zeke, Miss Kate?"

"No, I'm not," she answered frankly. "I suppose it does belong to him, as a matter of fact. But the whole purpose of the Civic League I formed among the village negroes was to keep their quarters decent. If it fails of that—Well, the Madam giveth, and the Madam taketh away." She shot him a mischievous glance. "Evidently you don't approve of me, Philip?"

"Of you. Not of your ethics, perhaps. They 're rather—feminine."

She shrugged. "Oh, well—feminine ethics are enough for Storm village. They have to be," she said, succinctly.

Before them, outlined against the red round of the low sun, stood the rambling gray outlines of a house, topping a small hill. From one of its huge chimneys a pennant of smoke waved hospitably. The mare whinnied, and chafed a little against the bit.

"Clover smells her oats," said Mrs. Kildare, "and I smell Big Liza's ginger-bread. It makes me hungry. Let's go faster."

He did not seem to hear her. She glanced at his preoccupied face, wondering at this unusual indifference to Big Liza's ginger-bread. "What is it, Philip?"

"I have been thinking how to begin," he said slowly. "I've got to talk to you about something disagreeable."

"Surely you can talk to me about anything, without 'beginning'?"

"Well—I want to ask you to do something very unpleasant. To evict a tenant. Mag Henderson."

"That girl? But why?"

"Your agent says she's months behind in her rent."

"Smith talks too much. What if she is? I can afford to be patient with her. The girl has had a hard time. Her father seems to have deserted her. Oh, I know they're a shiftless pair, but half the prejudice against them is that they are strangers. I know what that is," she added bitterly. "I've been a stranger myself in a rural community. You'll have to give me a better reason than that, Philip."

"I can," he said.

She lifted her eyebrows. "There's talk then? I suppose so. There's always talk, if a girl 's pretty enough and unprotected enough. The poor little foolish Mag Hendersons of the world! Oh," she cried, "I wonder that men dare to speak of them!"

"I dare," said Benoix, quietly. "I've my parish to think of. The girl's a plague-spot. Vice is as contagious as any other disease. Besides, it 's a question of her own safety. She's been threatened. That's why the father left."

"What?" cried Mrs. Kildare. "The 'Possum-Hunters'? You mean they are trying to run my affairs again?"

It was several years since men in masks had waged their anonymous warfare against certain tobacco planters whose plans did not accord with the sentiment of the community. The organization of Night Riders was supposed to be repressed. But power without penalty is too heady a draft to be relinquished easily, by men who have once known the taste of it.

Benoix nodded. "She has had warning."

Mrs. Kildare's lips set in a straight line. "Let them come! They'll try that sort of thing once too often."

"Yes—but it might be once too often for Mag, too. She—have you seen her lately?"

The other looked at him quickly. "Oh," she said, "oh! Well, she sha'n't suffer alone. Who's the man?"

"She will not tell."

"Loves him—poor thing!"

For a moment the priest showed in young Benoix' face. "Miss Kate! You speak as if that made a difference," he said sternly.

"And doesn't it, doesn't it? Good Lord, how young you are! You'd better pray that the years may teach you a little human weakness. I tell you, Mag sha'n't bear it all. Whoever's concerned in this thing shall suffer with her."

"I am afraid," said Benoix, reluctantly, "that would be—rather a large order."

"Oh! It isn't—love, then." For a moment Mrs. Kildare stared straight in front of her. Then she wheeled her horse, the pity in her face hardened into disgust. "Go on, will you? And tell the girls to save me some of that ginger-bread."

"Where are you going?"

"To evict Mag Henderson."

He protested. "But why to-night? Surely one night more! It will be very hard. Why not let Smith attend to it?"

She gave him a bleak little smile. "My dear boy, if I had left all the hard things to my manager to do, Storm to-day would be just where Basil Kildare left it."

She cantered back along the road and turned up a weed-grown lane, her face set and frowning. Despite her words to Benoix, at times like this she felt a very feminine need of a man, and scorned herself for the feeling.

Coming to a whitewashed log-cabin overgrown with morning-glories—the only crop the shiftless Hendersons had been able to raise—she pounded on the closed door with the butt of her crop. She heard a faint sound within, but nobody came to answer.

"I hear you in there. Don't keep me waiting, Mag."

Still no answer. But once again the faint sound came. It might have been the whining of an animal.

Mrs. Kildare jumped impatiently from her horse, and a few well-aimed blows of fist and knee sent the frail lock flying. The door was barricaded within by a bureau and a table and chairs—Mag's poor little defense, evidently, against the "Possum-Hunters."

"Where are you, my girl?" demanded Mrs. Kildare less impatiently, pushing her way to the back room. "It's not night-riders. It's the Madam."

A little slim creature, hardly more than a child, writhed on a cot in the corner, her eyes bright and fixed like the eyes of a rabbit Kate had once seen caught in a trap, both fists stuffed into her mouth to stifle the groans that burst out in spite of them.

"Git out!" the girl panted fiercely. "Lemme be! I don' want none of ye 'round, not none of ye. You go way from here!"

The change in Mrs. Kildare's face was wonderful. "Why, child, what's the matter?" she said gently, even as she stripped off her gauntlets. For she knew very well what was the matter. In a widely separated rural community where doctors and nurses are scarce, the word "neighbor" becomes more than a mere honorary title.

In a few moments she had a fire going, water boiling, what few clean rags she could find sterilized. While she worked she talked, quietly and cheerfully, watching the girl with experienced eyes. She did not like her pulse nor her color. She saw that she was going to need help.

"I'll be back in ten minutes," she said presently. "I'm going to the nearest telephone to get the doctor. Keep up your courage, Mag. Only ten minutes!"

But the girl was clinging to her, by this time, moaning, begging, praying as if to God. "No, no—you cain't leave me, you cain't! I been alone so long. Don' leave me alone! I know I'm bad, but O Gawd, I'm skeert! Don' leave me to die all alone. You wouldn't leave a dawg die all alone!"

Mrs. Kildare soothed her with touch and word, wondering what was to be done. Through the open door she sent her strong voice ringing out across the twilight fields, again and again. There was nobody to hear. All the world had gone indoors to supper. Her waiting horse pawed the earth with a soft, reproachful nicker, to remind her that horses, too, have their time for supper. It gave her an idea.

"The children will be frightened, but I can't help that. I must have somebody here," she murmured, and slapped the mare sharply on the flank. "Home, Clover. Oats! Branmash! Hurry, pet!"

Obediently the startled creature broke into a trot, which presently, as she realized that she was riderless, became a panic-stricken gallop. Mrs. Kildare went back to her vigil.

It is a terrible experience to watch, helpless, the agony of a fellow creature. She knelt beside the dirty pallet, her face as white as the girl's, beads of sweat on her brow, paralyzed by her utter inability to render aid—a new sensation to Mrs. Kildare. Maternity as she had known it was a thing of awe, of dread, a great brooding shadow that had for its reverse the most exquisite happiness God allows to the earth-born. But maternity as it came to Mag Henderson! None of the preparations here that women love to make, no little white-hung cradle, no piles of snowy flannel, none of the precious small garments sewn with dreams; only squalor, and shame, and fear unutterable.

Never a religious woman, Mrs. Kildare found herself presently engaged in one of her rare conversations with the Almighty, explaining to Him how young, how ignorant was this child to suffer so; how unfair that she should be suffering alone; how wicked it was to send souls into the world unwanted.

"You could do something about it, and You ought to," she urged, aloud. "Oh, God, what a pity You are not a woman!"

Even in her agony, it seemed a queer sort of prayer to Mag Henderson. But strong hands held hers close, a strong heart pounded courage into hers; and who shall say that the helpless tears on Kate Kildare's face were of no help to a girl who had known nothing in all her life of the sisterhood of women?

At last came the sound of thudding hoofs in the lane, and a clear voice, the echo of Kate's own, calling, "Mother! Where are you? Mother! Answer me. I'm coming—"

Mrs. Kildare made a trumpet of her hands and shouted, "Here, Jack. Here in Mag's cabin."

"Safe?"

"All safe."

"Phil, Phil!" called back the voice, breaking. "Come on. It's all right! We've found her! She's safe!"

In a moment a whirlwind of pink muslin burst in at the door, and enveloped Mrs. Kildare in an embrace which bade fair to suffocate, while anxious hands felt and prodded her to be sure nothing was broken.

"Oh, Mummy darling," crooned the beautiful voice, "how you frightened us! You're sure no bones are smashed—nothing sprained? Poor Clover had worked herself into a perfect panic, galloping home all alone. And the servants screaming, and Jemima fearing the worst, as she always does. And we didn't even know where to hunt for you, till Philip came—Oh, Mother!"

"There, there, baby—it 's all right. No time for pettings now. There 's work to be done. Why didn't Jemima come? This is no place for a madcap like you."

Jacqueline chuckled and shivered. "The Apple Blossom"—she referred to her elder sister, Jemima—"was turning your room into a hospital-ward when I left, against the arrival of your mangled corpse. She had also ordered the wagon prepared like an ambulance, mattresses, chloroform, bandages—every gruesome detail complete. Our Jemima," she said, "is having the time of her life—isn't she, Reverend Flip?"

Mrs. Kildare smiled in spite of herself. The description of her eldest daughter was apt. But she said reprovingly, "Yon sound as if you were making fun of your sister, dear. And don't call Philip 'the Reverend Flip.' It is rude."

"Pooh! Rudeness is good for that elderly young man," murmured Jacqueline, with an engaging smile in his direction.

But the elderly young man, standing at the door, did not notice. He was gazing at Mrs. Kildare questioningly.

There had come a groan from the inner room.

"What's that?" cried Jacqueline. She ran to investigate. "Oh! The poor thing! What's the matter with her?"

Benoix would have stopped her, but Kate said shortly, "Nonsense, Phil. My girls were born women. You ride for the doctor."

At dawn a faint, fierce whisper came from the inner room.

"Whar's my babby? What you-all doin' with my babby? You ain't goin' to take her away from me? No, no! She's mine, I tell you!"

Jacqueline hurried in to her with the tiny, whimpering bundle. "Of course she's yours, and the sweetest, fattest darling. Oh, Mag, how I envy you!" She kissed the other's cheek.

There was a third girl in the room, a dainty, pink and white little person who well deserved her pet-name of the "Apple Blossom." She looked up in quick distaste from the bandages her capable hands were preparing, and went out to her mother.

"Isn't it like Jacqueline? To sit outside all night with her fingers stuffed in her ears, because she couldn't stand the groaning, and then to—kiss the creature!"

Jemima was nineteen, a most sophisticated young woman.

Her mother smiled a little. "Yes," she admitted, "it is like Jacqueline, and that's why she's going to do poor Mag more good than either of us. The doctor says we shall be able to take Mag and the baby home presently."

"Home!" Philip Benoix looked at her in amaze. Like the others, his face was drawn and pale with that strange vigil. Death does not come so close without leaving its mark on the watchers. "Miss Kate, surely you're not going to take Mag Henderson into your own home?"

"Where else? You wanted me to evict her. I can't evict her into space."

"But, the responsibility!"

"Yes, there is a responsibility," said Kate Kildare, musing. "I don't know whether it's mine or God's, or whose—and I can't afford to take any chances."

"It will be easier to look after them at home," commented the practical Jemima.

CHAPTER III

On the rare occasions when the mistress of Storm sat idle in her eyrie, her household—children, negroes, even the motley assortment of dogs that claimed her for their own—had learned to go their ways softly. The morning after Mag's affair, three collies, a hound or so, and several curs waited in a respectful row, tentative tails astir, with eyes fixed patiently upon a certain great juniper-tree at the edge of Storm garden. On the other side of it sat a very weary woman, cradled between its hospitable roots, with her back turned on the workaday world and her face to the open country. This was her eyrie; and here, when another woman would have been shut into a darkened chamber courting sleep, came Kate Kildare on occasion to rest her soul.

To the left and right of her rose taller hills, of which Storm was the forerunner, the first small ripple of the Cumberlands as they broke upon the plain. At her feet stretched mile after rolling mile of summer green, and gold, and brown. There were dappled pastures of bluegrass, clover-fields, beech-woods, great golden reaches of corn; there was the rich black-green of tobacco—not much of that, for Kate Kildare loved her land too well to ruin it. Here and there the farm of some neighbor showed larger patches of the parasite that soon or late must sap Kentucky of its vigor, even while it fills her coffers with gold; but these were few. The greater part of the land in sight was Kildare land. Storms, like some feudal keep of the Old World, brooded its chickens under its wings, watchfully.

Far away, perhaps five miles or so, the roof of another mansion showed among the trees; a new house. Kate rarely looked in that direction. It made her feel crowded. It was not the only direction from which she kept her eyes averted. On the edge of the distant horizon rested always a low gray cloud, never lifting, nor shifting. It seemed to her an aureole of shadow crowning some evil thing, even as the saints in old paintings are crowned with light. It was the smoke of the little city of Frankfort, where there is a penitentiary.

The plateau at her feet was crossed by many a slender thread of road, to one of which her eyes came presently, as wandering feet stray naturally into a path they often use. It was rather a famous road, with a name of its own in history. Wild creatures had made it centuries ago, on their way from the hills to the river. The silent moccasins of Indians had widened it; later, pioneers, Kildares and their hardy kindred, flintlock on shoulder, ear alert for the crackling of a twig in the primeval forest, seeking a place of safety for their women and children in the new world they had come to conquer. Now it was become a thoroughfare for prosperous loaded wains, for world-famed horses, for their supplanter, the automobile, which in ever-increasing numbers has come to enjoy and kill the peace of distant countrysides.

But to Kate Kildare the early history of that road meant nothing. It was for her the road that led back, a two days' journey, into her girlhood.

In the house Jacqueline was singing, her voice drowning the mellow tones of the old piano, ringing out singularly pure and clear, like a child's, lacking as yet the modulations to be learned of one teacher alone; life. It was a new song that Philip Benoix had brought for her to try:

"A little winding road
Goes over the hill to the plain—
A little road that crosses the plain
And comes to the hill again.
I sought for Love on that road—"

sang Jacqueline, cheerfully.

The eyes of the listener filled with sharp tears. She too had sought for Love on that road.

She saw herself riding down it into her great adventure, so young, so laughing and brave, Basil Kildare on his great horse beside her, all the world a misty golden green. She saw—even with closed eyes, she saw—the turn of the road where Jacques Benoix, Philip's father, had come to meet them on their wedding journey.

So far her memories often led her before she stopped them. But the experience of the night had left her oddly stirred and weakened, not quite herself. To-day the memories had their way with her.

She lived again through the whirlwind courtship that was still remembered in a community where sudden marriages are not unusual; saw again, as she had first seen it, the arresting, great figure of Basil Kildare framed in a ballroom door, with smoldering black eyes upon her, that spoke so much more eloquently than his tongue. Yet his tongue had done well enough, too, that night. Before their first dance was over he had said to her: "I have been watching you grow up, Kate. Now I think you are old enough to marry me."

Two weeks later they went to her mother, hand in hand.

"But, my dearest!" fluttered the startled lady, "Mr. Kildare is a man of forty, and you only seventeen, only a child! Besides—"

"Mr. Kildare," answered the girl, with a proud glance at her lover, "will help me to become a woman, Mother dear."

What was she, newly widowed, who had depended in all things upon her husband, to oppose such a pair of wills? Rumors of the wild doings at Storm were not lacking in that gentler community, nor was the Kildare blood what she would have chosen to mix with her own. But there is among this type of women always the rather touching belief that it needs only matrimony to tame the wildest of eagles into a cooing dove. Kildare, moreover, was one of the great landowners of the State, a man of singular force and determination, and, when he chose to exert it, of a certain virile charm. When Mrs. Leigh realized that, ever since her daughter had been old enough to exhibit promise of the beauty she afterwards attained, this man had marked her for his own, a feeling of utter helplessness came over her.

They were a magnificent pair to look at, as they stood before her, tall, vivid, vital. Beside Basil Kildare the youths who had hitherto courted Kate, young as she was, seemed callow and insignificant, even to the mother. It would need a man to rule such a woman as Kate was to become, not an adoring boy; and Mrs. Leigh was of the type and generation that believed firmly in the mastery of husbands.

She could not make up her mind to consent to the marriage, but she did not forbid it. And it is probable that her forbidding would have had as much effect upon that pair of lovers as the sighing of the southwind. Perhaps less effect; for, in a Kentucky May, the sighing of the southwind is very persuasive.

Bridesmaids and their escorts rode part way on the wedding journey; a gay cavalcade, some of the youths a little white and quiet, all of the girls with envious, sentimental eyes upon Kate where she rode beside the handsomest of the wild Kildares, with the romantic, whispered reputation of his race upon him.

When these had turned back, the bridegroom, chafing a little under their surveillance, swore a great oath of relief and spurred his horse close. In a sudden panic Kate bolted away from him, galloped up a lane, leaped a fence into a field, where he caught her and seized her, laughing aloud: "That's my girl! That's my pretty wild hawk! The spirit for a mother of Kildare men, by God!"

After that she met his kisses unafraid. Girl as she was, it seemed to her a beautiful saying—"a mother of Kildare men." Only three things she was bringing with her from the old home to the new—her piano, her father's books, and the oaken cradle that had come with the first Leigh from overseas, and followed other Leighs across the mountains along the old Wilderness Trail, into Kentucky.

Toward the end of their two days' journey through the May woods and meadows, a little barking dog sprung out at them, frightening Kate's thoroughbred until it almost threw her. Kildare struck furiously at the dog, and missed; struck again, leaped from his horse, and pursued it, striking and kicking, so that the terrified creature ran for its life, and Kate cried out, "Stop, Basil, stop. What are you doing? Stop, I say!"

He came back to her, cursing, an ugly line between his brows. "Got away, damn the luck! I almost—Why, Kate! Tears? Oh, good Lord," he laughed, still frowning. "You're as soft as Jacques Benoix!"

She mastered the tears; mastered, too, a strange little fear at her heart, thinking proudly, "He came when I called! He stopped when I called!"

Aloud she said, "It was the sun that made my eyes water. Who is Jacques Benoix?"

He told her about his neighbor, a stranger—"the only gentleman within ten miles of us, so you'll have to be friends with him"—a man so soft-hearted that he would not hunt foxes or rabbits; a man who broke his colts without the whip, and was trying to break a son the same way.

"More fool he, coming up here out of a city and trying to teach us to break colts!"

"Has he a wife?"

Kildare gave his great laugh. "You don't suppose a man as soft as that would have escaped? The woman's sickly—of course! That's why he married her, and that's why he has come up here. Gave up a big practice in New Orleans, they say, because he thought it would be healthier here. So it is! Too damned healthy for him, I reckon! We don't need more than one doctor around Storm, and old Doc Jones has got a corner on the births and deaths already. Yes, Benoix is rather a fool. But he's got his uses. He'll play poker for twenty-four hours at a stretch, and drink—Lord!" said Kildare, admiringly. "I don't know where the little fellow puts it all!"

It was at the next crossroads that they found Benoix waiting; a slender, rather foreign-looking man, very carefully dressed, with a stiff little bouquet of geraniums in his hands. For the first time Kate's direct young gaze met the eyes whose blueness, in their dark setting, was a never-failing surprise to her. They held hers steadily for a moment; it seemed to her that they had already talked together before he spoke.

"I bring to Mrs. Kildare the first fruits from her kingdom," he said, offering the little bouquet.

"Flowers from Storm?" laughed Basil, incredulously. "Where'd you get them? You're a wizard, Jacques! I never saw any flowers at Storm."

"You were not looking for them, my friend. Now you will look!" Benoix' smile was a gleam of white teeth.

Kate tucked the flowers into her habit, and held out her hand to him. "I've been ordered to be friends with you. I do not think it will be hard," she said.

Kildare laughed again as the other bent formally over her hand. "Thank Heaven, I'm no Frenchman! A woman's hand, in a glove, must be about as thrilling to kiss as a mare's hoof. Try her lips, man! You'll find them better," he urged; and roared with laughter to see them both blushing.

Benoix rode with them the rest of the way, pointing out to the girl the beauties of her kingdom; mares nuzzling their new-born foals; the tender green of young crops; cloud shadows drifting over the rolling miles that darkled like ocean beneath a wind; a pair of mocking-birds at play, their gray wings flashing circles of white. For some time the hills had been marching toward them, and at last they reached the first. It was low, and covered with juniper-bushes. On the crest of it stood a house, grim and stanch as when the pioneer Kildare built it, facing undaunted through the years the brunt of every storm that swept the plateau. Its trees were bent and twisted by the giant grasp of many winds.

"You see why they call it 'Storm,'" said Benoix.

Kildare had left them, spurring forward with sudden eagerness, whistling. Crashing down through the underbrush came two enormous bloodhounds, baying like mad things. Kildare flung himself from his horse and met them with a shout, seizing them in his arms, romping and tumbling about with the great, frantic beasts until all three were covered with mud and slaver. It was a rather terrific spectacle. Kate thought of a bas-relief she had seen somewhere of a satyr playing with leopards.

"The only things in the world Basil loves!" murmured the Creole; adding quickly, "or did love. Do not be startled, Mrs. Kildare. Bloodhounds are greatly maligned. Jove and Juno, there, are as kind as kittens, despite their rough ways. Here you will find many rough ways," he spoke as if in warning. "It is a man's place. But you will change it!"

He was mistaken. After all her years there, Storm was still "a man's place." Kate had never found the time, nor the heart, to make a home of it.

Benoix left them, and Kate and Basil mounted to their house alone. Seen close at hand, it proved to be not without a certain charm, despite its weather-beaten grimness. No house can lack personality that has grown generation by generation with the race it shelters. The older part was of rough-hewn logs, whitewashed. To this had been added later a wing of boulders; later still, one of brick. Across the long front ran a brick-paved gallery, where a disused carriage had been drawn for shelter, and taken possession of by a flock of turkeys.

Negroes, big and little, came running from the quarters at the back. A huge, beaming black woman waddled out and lifted Kate bodily from the saddle, loudly praising God.

"My Lawdy, ain't she des' a beauty? Ain't Mr. Bas' done picked him a beauty-bright?"

In the open door waited another house-servant; a handsome young mulatto girl, who curtseyed respectfully and stared at her new mistress with hostile, curious eyes.

Remembering, Kate shuddered, as she had shuddered then with the bewilderment, the sense of unreality, that took possession of her at that moment. It was all so unlike what she had expected, so appallingly unlike the gracious, well-ordered life of the stately Bluegrass homes she had known.

Rank weeds grew to the very door-sill. Within she saw a huge, raftered hall hung with antlers and guns and saddles, pelts, fox-brushes. There was a stuffed bloodhound, the ancestor perhaps of Jove and Juno. A horse's head protruded from the wall, nostrils dilated, glassy eyes starting from the sockets, as if the poor creature were still running his last race with Death.

"Welcome home, wife!" cried Basil Kildare, kissing her lips with a loud smack.

The negroes guffawed in delight, the hounds bayed again till the hills echoed.

Then beside the house she saw a few squares and circles of fresh-turned earth, planted with limp coleas, and dusty-millers, and all the other unlovely specimens of horticulture favored by men when they go a-gardening. Her eyes filled with sudden tears.

"Why, Basil!" She slipped a hand into his. "You dear! How sweet of you to try to make me the little garden!"

"Eh? What garden?" His eyes followed hers. "Oh! That must be some of Benoix' doings. He's the only man 'round here who has time to fool with posies."

CHAPTER IV

There was never a stranger honeymoon than that of Kate and Basil Kildare. It began with a view-halloa. It ended ... how should happy hunting end except with the death of something?

That first year was not without its heady charm for a girl with the facile, the almost tragic, adaptability of seventeen years. True, it was not married life as she had dreamed it; but it was her husband's life. She made it hers.

Kildare's boon companions found to their relief that a young wife was no restraint upon their pleasures; was indeed an addition to them. No sport was too rough for her to share, no riding too hard, no gambling too heavy. Despite her town breeding, this was no hothouse plant, this daughter of a horse-racing, whisky-drinking, card-playing gentry. Kildare took a vast delight in her prowess, particularly at the card-table; swearing joyously when she won, paying her losses, which were considerable, with an amused indifference equal to her own. One quality, and one alone, had power to move him in man, woman, or beast. It was the quality he called Spirit.

In that Kate was not lacking. Rumors of the wild Kildares, always rife in a countryside they had made famous for generations with their amusements, did not abate after the coming of a new mistress to Storm. Of the society of her own sex, she had little or nothing. The few women of her class within driving distance were careful to call once—Kildare was not a man to antagonize. But they did not come again. Kate was not sorry. She found them less interesting than their men-folk. Their manners were provincial, their outlook narrow, and—they did not fall in love with her. In this they were unlike their husbands, their brothers, their sons, and fathers.

The guest-house was rarely empty. The bride and groom were never alone. Storm had long been a gathering place for sportsmen of every type, from the neighboring towns, from the city, from other States. Nor were their guests always gentlemen. Kate, indeed, grew to prefer certain of the rough and simple farmers who came there to the more polished visitors. Their admiration was humbler, less troublesome.

Gentlemen or not, Kate numbered her admirers among her husband's friends by the score. She grew as adept in handling them as in handling colts; and her prowess in this, too, amused Basil Kildare enormously. He rallied her on each new victim with chuckles of delight. Too confident of himself for jealousy, he knew, if he thought of it at all, that his honor was safer in her hands than it had ever been in his own.

That the girl came to no harm in that wild year was owing to no watchfulness of her husband's. The Kildare motto was "Liberty For All." Nor was it owing to any love of her husband's, Kate soon knew this.

Her beauty was a matter of great pride to him. He flaunted it, his property, before other envious men; took her often upon his knee when any were about; pulled the pins out of her hair to reveal the full flowing splendor of it; hung her with jewels, sent away for velvets and silks and laces, so that she went about the rough place clad like a young queen at court. But despite various episodes in his career, Kildare was never a woman's man. He had married for one reason, and one alone. He made no concealment of it. "People say we Kildares are doomed, that the stock is dying out. We'll show 'em!" he often said. "Meanwhile, let the girl have her fling."

Nevertheless, there was watchfulness. No matter how far she went, no matter to what lengths her reckless gaiety led her, Kate was aware of the quiet, understanding scrutiny of Jacques Benoix. Their nearest neighbor, and by the strange attraction of opposites, Kildare's chosen intimate, it was inevitable that she should be thrown constantly into the company of the Creole. Despite his very evident admiration, he did not join the ranks of her more or less avowed lovers; a fact that in turn piqued and oddly comforted Kate. For at times this new life of hers seemed a strange dream, in which Benoix, with his gentleness, his punctilious courtesy, his rather formal friendliness of aspect, was the only fixed reality. She felt, vaguely, that she was safe with him; safer than with her husband. She thought of him more as a friend than as a man.

He reminded her somewhat of her father and his companions, courtly, scholarly gentlemen who belonged to that period of the South when men not only gambled and rode and drank, but found leisure to cultivate poetry, and Greek, and music, all the fine things of life. He talked to her about such matters as had interested them, large impersonal matters, taking for granted her intelligent understanding. This flattered the girl, though she had no ambition to be thought a scholar.

Often he borrowed books from her small store, to the impatient amusement of Basil Kildare, who looked upon the reading of books as a pastime suitable for invalids and old women. Kate, too, found no room in her exciting, absorbing life for books, at that time. Still, there was an atmosphere about the Creole far less foreign to her than to her companions. It reminded her of a sheltered, exquisite, finely ordered childhood, of certain standards that she might otherwise have been in danger of forgetting. She never joined a group of her husband's boon companions, whether in the gaming-room or the hunting-field, without first making sure unconsciously that Benoix was there. And he was usually there.

At length Benoix, in his professional capacity, spoke to Kildare.

"What the devil, Jacques! Stop her riding and late hours, and all? What d'ye mean?"

The doctor told him.

The husband swore a pleased oath. "Good little girl! I told you we'd show 'em. But what of it? Child-bearing's no disease, man! Good Gad, the girl ain't goin' to turn out sickly, is she?" Kildare had a queer horror of "sickliness."

"Not if I can help it," said the other. He added, in the language Basil best understood, "You do not race a brood-mare, my friend. You turn her out to pasture."

Kildare admitted the point. Thereafter, though the usual life at Storm went on unchanged, Kate was no longer a part of it.

She was rather glad. It was restful to be turned out to pasture. She liked to hear them start off with the hounds in the cold dawn, knowing that she might turn over and sleep again. Sometimes she was awakened at night by swearing and quarrels and loud laughter from the guest-wing. Sometimes there was singing, one rich baritone leading the rest; and to this Kate listened eagerly. Dr. Benoix sang very beautifully when he was drunk.

One night she started up out of a dream to hear tipsy voices at her very door. It opened, and Basil Kildare stood on the threshold, holding a lamp above his head, saying over his shoulder: "Come on in, boys! That's all right—Kit's a good sport. Come and look at her, if you like. Prettiest thing in a nightgown you ever saw!"

An anger possessed Kate of which she had never dreamed herself capable. She knew then that there would never be any defender for her and her children except herself. She saw that what her inexperience had mistaken for strength in her husband was only violence. She reached for the pistol at her bedside.

"Basil," she said quietly—too quietly—"if you bring those men into my room, I shall shoot."

Her voice sobered him; shocked him into an anger as hot as hers was cold. "Your room? Your room? By God, I do what I choose in this house! D'ye know who I am? By God—"

But her voice had sobered the others as well. They got him away by main force. Not one of them had glanced at her.

In the morning, for the first time in her life, Kate was ill, and Kildare in alarm sent for Benoix. Before her, he told the doctor what had occurred; ashamed, but brazening it out with a laugh. The doctor said nothing; merely looked at him. After a moment, the big man turned and went from the room.

Kate was oddly sorry for her husband. "He did not know what he was doing," she murmured. "But oh, Jacques, if you had been there, it would not have happened!"

"No. Hereafter, I shall be there."

"Please, please," whispered the girl, and she began to cry. She was quite unnerved. "Oh, I am afraid sometimes, Jacques! It's such a comfort to know you are near, to hear your voice—even when you are as drunk as the others!"

He went rather white about the lips. "Hereafter I shall be there," he repeated steadily. "And I shall not be as drunk as the others. I shall not be drunk at all."

After that night there was less company at Storm, and Kildare began to make frequent absences from home, lasting sometimes over several days. Kate was grateful, realizing that it was his way of showing her consideration. But she was also lonely. For the first time, she missed the companionship of women.

She made shy overtures to the tenants' wives, to the women in the village. But the barrier of caste was very evident, and there were other barriers. No virtue is so quick to take up arms as that of the middle classes. Kildare as a landlord was not popular. Beauty, charm, did not help her with them as it had with their husbands. There was the further barrier, which all aliens in a rural community reach soon or late: the well-nigh impassable barrier of strangeness. They would have none of her. They looked askance at her winning sweetness; they accepted her bounty with stony, ungrateful thanks.

She thought of asking friends to visit her, only to be brought up sharply by the realization that hers was not a home to which such women as she had known would care to come. Once she spoke to her husband tentatively of sending for her mother.

"Oh, by all means, if you want her," he agreed, yawning a little. "But what will that genteel female do with herself at Storm? There isn't a tea-party nor an Episcopal Church within half a day's drive of us."

Kate knew that he spoke truly. Her mother would be both shocked and unhappy at Storm. Let her keep what illusions she had a while longer. The girl was young to be guarding other women's illusions.

And so she was thrown for company upon Jacques Benoix and his wife; the latter a personality so colorless, so fragile, that strain as she might she could not now recall a feature of her face, nor a tone of her voice. Yet when Kate's time came, this helpless invalid had herself carried up the hill to Storm, so that the girl might not be without a woman's hand to hold during the ordeal.

At this memory, the older Kate flushed a little. She wondered how much the invalid had seen with her dim and weary eyes, before she closed them.

CHAPTER V

The day came when Basil, summoned from the field to his wife's bedside, foundered his best hunter in his haste to see his son. The doctor met him at the door.

"It is over, and well over," he said, gravely smiling.

Mrs. Benoix added, "She never whimpered!"

"Of course not, ma'am!" said Kildare. "Neither does my dog, Juno."

He tiptoed to the bed, quietly for him, and stood gazing down at the little wrinkled head on Kate's breast, with a queer, sheepish pride on his face; somewhat the look of a schoolboy who receives a prize for good behavior.

Kate smiled tremulously up at him, "Isn't she sweet?"

His face fell. "Gad, a she-child, is it? Well, can't be helped. We'll name her for my rich Aunt Jemima. Better luck next time, Kit."

But there was not better luck next time; there was worse luck.

Less than a year later, Kildare inspected his second daughter. Kate was sleeping, the baby beside her covered to its chin. The nurse in attendance was the young mulatto woman who had looked so strangely at her new mistress when she came to Storm. Now her hostility to Kate seemed to have lost itself in devotion to Kate's child; the almost passionate devotion that makes of colored women such invaluable nurses.

As Kildare approached, he was aware of this girl's eyes fixed upon him. Stealthily her hand went out, and drew away the sheet that covered the new baby.

He ripped out a startled oath. "Good God! What's the matter with it, Mahaly? It's—it's damaged, ain't it?"

Kate awoke with a gasping cry, and put her hands out to hide the little twisted body from his gaze.

Fortunately the child died. "Fortunately," repeated the mother to herself now, without a quiver. To the end of her days she would carry in her heart the memory of its faint, unbabyish moaning. It opened to her the door of a new world, the world of suffering. She learned the agony of love that cannot help. The little Katherine lived long enough to make a woman of her; and strangely enough it reached the one soft spot in the heart of Basil Kildare. During its brief and piteous life, husband and wife came almost close to each other.

To the man with his passion for physical perfection, the breeder of thoroughbred horses and cattle and dogs, the fact that a child of his should have been born without this precious heritage was a thing incredible, a humiliation beyond words. Whenever he looked at the tiny, whimpering creature, he asked pardon of her with his eyes for so monstrous an injustice. He never tired of carrying her about in his powerful arms, of rubbing the poor twisted limbs in an effort to ease the pain away.

"The stock's sound enough," he would say again and again. "I'm all right, and you're all right, Kit. What's the matter with her?"

Once he whispered in sudden horror, "I've been a pretty bad lot, Kate. God! Do you suppose I'm to blame for this?"

She comforted him with her arms about his neck.

When the child died, Kildare himself made its grave, and carried the coffin in his arms across the fields to the little pasture burying-lot where lay all the Kildares of Storm. It was a queer funeral; none the less pitiful for its queerness. First Basil with the coffin, the two great hounds gamboling and baying around him in their delight at going for a walk with the family; then Kate, alone and quite tearless; then a dozen wailing, hysterical negroes. Benoix and a few others met them at the grave, but there was no clergyman. Kate herself spoke what she could of the burial service, till her memory and her voice failed her. Then Kildare picked his wife up in his arms, and carried her home as tenderly as he had carried his child's coffin.

But that night he was so drunk that Kate kept the woman Mahaly in her room for safety.

It was during this time, with maternity, and sorrow, and womanhood, that love came to her. She did not know it. She knew only that things could be borne so long as Benoix was there to help her, guarding, understanding; Benoix with his steady eyes, and his gentle strength to share with her weakness.

They needed little excuse for their constant companionship; mere neighborliness; small Jemima's health; presents of flower-seeds and baby-patterns from his wife; books to be lent or borrowed, for Kate had turned to books at last. Kate's strength was slow in returning, and she spent much of the day sitting in the garden with her baby. It came to be Benoix' habit to stop there for a while coming or going from his house beyond. The baby knew the pit-a-patter of his racking horse, and had learned to clap her hands and crow when she heard it. The Creole had the same grave simplicity for children, as for his equals. It never failed to win them.

Often Kate drove with him on his rounds, the child on her knees, because she needed air and was not yet strong enough for riding; and in this way she saw a side of her friend which had hitherto been unknown to her. It was true, as Basil Kildare had said, that Dr. Jones "had a corner on the births and deaths in the neighborhood," but between the two extremes there were various physical disabilities which "the French doctor," as he was called, was allowed to treat, especially when there was no money for payment. With increasing frequency he was called in by the older physician to cases which proved baffling; and it became known that when the French doctor prescribed expensive medicines and nourishing luxuries, they were invariably forthcoming, whether they could be paid for or not.

With this the young mistress of Storm had much to do; and while this fact did not apparently lessen the neighborhood's attitude of critical animosity toward her, it gave the girl a keen pleasure to know that she was helping her friend. She began to understand the secret of the strong hold his profession has upon those who follow it truly—that warmly personal relation between the sufferer and his physician which is almost filial in its intensity. Jacques loved his patients, and they loved him. But it was not a lucrative practice.

She was witness to one little scene that came often to her memory in after days. He had stopped to visit a young farm laborer whom he had recently relieved of a stomach-trouble that was literally starving him to death. An old woman had followed him to the door of the cabin, her work-worn hands twisting together, her lips too tremulous for speech.

"But your troubles are over, Mrs. Higgs!" he smiled, lifting his hat with the punctilious courtesy he showed all women. "Live? Certainly he will live, and in a few weeks we shall have him walking about, eating you out of house and home."

Still the old creature was unable to speak; but she seized the hand he held out to her, and carried it to her lips. When he withdrew it, in laughing embarrassment, there were tears upon it.

At last her voice came, hoarsely: "I don' know what it's goin' to cost, an' I don't, keer! It's wuth every cent, an' I'll wuk my fingers to the bone to pay ye. God bless ye, Doc!"

He looked down at the hard-wrung tears on his hand. "You have paid me already," he said; and Kate knew that he meant it.

Afterwards she questioned him a little about the case.

"It was a gastro-enterostomy, without complications," he explained. "A very simple thing, done every day."

He described the operation in some detail, Kate watching him in amaze.

"You can't tell me that a thing like that is done every day! Jacques, be honest—isn't it a very remarkable operation for a country doctor to perform?"

"Oh—for a country doctor, perhaps. For a surgeon who has had some experience, no."

"You are a surgeon, then, not a doctor?"

He smiled, that warm, flashing smile which always fell like a gleam of sunlight across her heart. "I am—whatever people need me to be."

It was true—physician, nurse, companion, guardian, friend—Jacques Benoix was always whatever people needed him to be.

In that moment, Kate realized that he had given up a great career to bring his sick wife into the country.

One of the closest bonds between them was a love for music. Kate's singing, untrained and faulty though it was, gave keen pleasure to his starved ears, and often he brought his little son to hear her; a boy of ten, rather grave and shy, but with his father's beautiful smile. Sometimes there were duets to be tried out together; Kildare, when he was at home, listening tolerantly and beating time out of time to the pleasant sounds they made.

But he was not often at home in those days. He sought his pleasure elsewhere. The guest-house had been empty for months.

Kate and Benoix found his frequent absences rather a relief. They were freer to discuss the things that did not interest him, to read aloud to each other, to play games with the exacting Apple-Blossom, an executive from her cradle. It was at last the sort of domestic life of which every girl dreams in her secret heart; and Kate grew lovelier than her loveliest.

Meanwhile the countryside watched, and whispered, and waited. The countryside was wise in the ways of Nature, if these two were not.

Once Kildare asked (she missed the wistfulness of his voice), "Ain't it time you were riding again, Kit, and playing cards with the boys? They like to have you 'round. They're getting jealous of that kid of yours."

Kate smiled at him, absently. She was sitting on the floor, building a house of blocks under instruction from young Jemima. The amusements of men seemed to her futile things, just then, and childish.

"Benoix has given us the go-by, too. Won't touch a card or drink a drop nowadays. I don't know what's come over him. Good gad—" Kildare gave himself an impatient shake,—"sometimes I think the little Frenchman's a female in disguise!"

Kate smiled again. She knew very well what had come over Jacques. That much at least she had done in return for the precious thing his friendship was.

At last her eyes were opened. One day she saw her husband striding toward the house from the stables, pale, frowning, splashed with blood.

She cried out, and ran to him, "Basil! What's happened? Are you hurt?"

"Nonsense! I've just had to kill Juno, that's all."

"Kill Juno?" she gasped. "Good Heavens! Was she mad? Did she attack you?" She gathered up her child with an instinctive, fierce gesture of protection.

He grinned at her. "What an imagination! Bitches don't go mad, my dear. She littered yesterday, and her pups were all curs, that's all—every damned one of them. Beastly luck! So I've killed the lot of them—Juno, too."

She recoiled from him, repeating stupidly, "You killed them? Killed your own dog because her puppies were mongrels? Basil! I—I—don't think I understand."

"Time you learned something about breeding," he muttered impatiently. "Don't you know she might never have had another decent pup? Storm's got its reputation to sustain. I can't have the place overrun by a lot of curs."

He passed her, and went into the house.

She followed, stunned. All through supper, as she sat opposite her husband, listening, answering, serving his needs, the vision was before her of the great hound's eyes as they must have looked when, one by one, he took her puppies from her; when at last she felt the beloved hand at her own throat.

She looked at her husband furtively. It seemed to her that she had never really seen him before. The coarse, hairy hands, the face with its cruel lips, its low brow above which the hair waved up strongly like a black plume, its eyes, handsome and bright and shallow, like the eyes of certain animals of the cat-tribe—surely those eyes were growing too bright? People called this family "the wild Kildares," sometimes "the mad Kildares." Were they mad? Did that explain?

Slowly a great horror of the man seized her; a fear which never afterwards went away. He was her master, as he had been Juno's. She was at his mercy, his thing, his creature. If she displeased him, if her children displeased him....

He fell asleep presently in a chair, according to his wont, snoring like a well-fed animal. She sat and watched him for a while, shivering. Suddenly she gave a little choked cry, and ran out of the house. She stumbled down the hill, through the ravine below, along the road to where a lighted window shone through the darkness. It was the window of Jacques Benoix' study. She did not pause to realize why she was going. She wanted only to be near her friend.

He sat beside a lamp, reading to his wife, who lay on her couch beyond. Against his shoulder leaned his boy, rubbing a cheek upon the rough coat as if he loved to touch it. The light fell on the two dark heads so close together, the clustering boyish curls, the strong, curved lips, as sweet as any woman's. Kate pressed her white face against the window, drinking in the homely comfort of the scene. She had no wish to speak to him, no disloyal thought of betraying to her friend this new and terrible knowledge of her husband. It was enough to know that help was within reach; always within reach.

The invalid's cough sounded from the couch. Benoix laid his took aside and went to adjust her pillows. He bent over his wife and kissed her.

Then Kate knew. This stabbing shock in her heart—it was not friendship. It was jealousy; love.

She started away from the window. She must have made some slight sound, for Jacques looked up suddenly, and after a moment came out into the darkness.

He almost stumbled over her in the ravine, face downward among dead leaves, shaken with dry sobbing. He went on his knees beside her, gripping his hands together behind him so that he should not touch her. But his voice was beyond his control. It broke into little sounds of tenderness and dismay.

"Kate—you! But what has happened? Tell me! What is wrong with you? What?"

His nearness, the trembling of his voice, filled her with an exquisite terror. If she could have risen and run away she would have done so, but she dared not trust her legs. Nor could she look at him, there in the starlight, with this new secret in her eyes. She clutched desperately at her self-command.

He bent closer. "Kate, tell me! You are hurt. Dieu! That man—" It was the first time she had heard a trace of accent in his speech. "What has he done to you?"

Still she could not trust herself to speak. In the silence she heard his breath come hard. When he said, in a crisp, queer staccato that was not his voice at all:

"If Basil Kildare has hurt you, I shall kill him."

"No, no," she gasped out. "It is not Basil. It is you!" She would have given years of her life to recall the words the instant they were spoken.

"I? I have hurt you, I, who would—But tell me! You must tell me!"

His will was stronger than hers. She told him.

"I saw you—kiss her."

"Kiss—"

"Your wife." She was close to hysteria now, all hope of self-command gone. She caught him by the arm. "Jacques, do you love her? I never knew, I never thought—Oh, but you can't love her! It is impossible, Jacques. Why don't you answer me?"

He was shivering as if with a chill. "That is a question you have no right to ask."

"I—no right?" She laughed aloud. "What do rights matter? Besides, I have every right, because it is me you love, me! I know it by your eyes, your voice. See, you are afraid to touch me. And yet you kiss her! Why? Why?"

She could barely hear the answer. "Because—it makes her a little happy."

She laughed again, brokenly. "You hypocrite!"

"No, not quite a hypocrite—" he got it out in jerks. "She cares for me. She needs me. She has given me our son. If one cannot have—the moon—at least there are stars."

She knelt facing him, with her hands out, whispering desperately, "But if you can have the moon, if you can—? Oh, my dear, my dear! Why don't you take me?"

He took her then, held her so close that his heart shook her body as if it were her own, kissed her eyes, her hair, her lips, until she was ashamed and put up her hands before her face so that he might kiss only them.

At last he put her from him, and went without a word back to his wife.

CHAPTER VI

The older Kate, looking from her eyrie at that other self of hers as at some stranger she had once known and pitied, saw a girl who wore her secret in her face, careless of who might read. Indeed she rather hoped the world would read; she had no shame of loving.

The negroes, sensitive as devoted dogs to the mood of their mistress, vied with each other in serving her, and whispered uneasily behind her back. Several times the mulatto nurse, Mahaly, more often with her than the others, seemed about to speak to her of something, but lost courage.

Kate did not notice. She noticed very little that went on around her in those days. Sometimes, indeed, she caught the hard, shallow gaze of her husband fixed upon her, curiously. But if he drew his own conclusions from her pallor, her starry eyes, her long fits of brooding, he at least did not trouble her with questions. Which perhaps was just as well. She would have answered them.

For a while she went about in a sort of daze, living over again what had passed in the ravine, wondering what she and Jacques would say to each other when he came to her. Then she began to wonder why he did not come to her. A week passed—two weeks. She grew troubled, frightened; for the first time a little ashamed. What if it were not love with him? The girl had learned in a hard school the difference between love and the thing that is called love.

She spent hours out under the juniper tree, listening for the pit-a-patter of a racking horse. She heard it often, but it did not stop. The baby playing near heard it, too; and when it passed she murmured with a tragic droop of the little mouth: "Aw—gone—by-by, Muddy! Aw—gone—by-by!"

Presently Kate lost all sense of shame; ordered out a saddle-horse in defiance of doctor's advice, and took to haunting the crossroads and the village on the chance of meeting him alone. This never happened. Fate, rather late in the day, seemed to have taken her good name into its keeping. They met, of course, but under the furtive, curious gaze of others. Usually, too, Jacques had his boy beside him. It was as if he were afraid to go alone.

So Kate had nothing to feed her heart upon but an occasional grave "Good morning," or a meeting of eyes that were instantly wrenched apart. It was enough for her, however. This was no mere emotion she had stirred. The man's face was worn as by a long illness. The least touch of his eyes was a caress.

She grew to pity him more than herself. "Poor Jacques!" she thought tenderly. "Poor, miserable, foolish Jacques!—" and longed to comfort, to reassure him. She felt in herself the strength for two.

At last she wrote to him:

When are you coming, Jacques? I miss you so! Do not be afraid. Friends need be none the less friends because they love each other. Don't you trust me?

It was her custom to send her baby once or twice in the week to visit the invalid, Mrs. Benoix. She gave her note to the nurse to carry.

"It is to ask the doctor for a prescription," she explained. "If he is not there, it will not be necessary to leave the note. You understand?"

It was her first lie, and she told it badly, flushing and stammering. Mahaly understood only too well. The woman seemed oddly reluctant; tried once again to say what she had to say, and failed.

When she had gone, Kate felt in the reaction as if her heart had been released from some heavy weight. "Why haven't I written before?" she thought. "Shyness, pride between people who love—what a silly thing! He shall see how strong I am; how much better and truer a friend, now that we know."

To prove the purely friendly nature of her intentions, she donned her most becoming dress, in case he chose to bring his answer in person.

Mahaly brought the answer, however, written across a leaf of a prescription-pad:

I do not dare to come. It is myself I cannot trust. Forgive me!

It was her one love-letter from Jacques Benoix. She wore it out with reading.

Some days later the bomb fell. Her husband said casually, at the supper-table, "I bought the Benoix place to-day, Kate."

"Bought—the Benoix place?"

"Yes; not that I could afford it! God knows I'm land-poor enough as it is. But they needed the money, and I knew you would like me to help them, my dear. They're such friends of yours."

Kate moistened her lips. "Of yours, too, Basil. But—why do they need money?"

He looked at her. "Oh, haven't you heard?" He spoke slowly, as if the words were pleasant to him. "Has Jacques not told you that they are going away to live, to the mountains? Mrs. Benoix' health; lungs, you know."

The room was whirling; around her. Clutching the tablecloth to steady herself, she was aware of Mahaly behind her master's chair, looking at her sharply, warningly. "Isn't it rather foolish of Jacques?" she heard herself asking, evenly, "to give up his practice a second time?"

Kildare laughed. "Not much practice to give up, my dear! Old Jones is good enough for us—he's not a d——d Frenchman, at least," he said with sudden savagery. "In fact," he added, smoothly again, "it was I who advised Jacques to try the mountains. He has worn out his welcome here."

At last Kate understood. Her husband had seen. He meant to guard what he did not value. He had forced Benoix to sell his home, and to give up his means of livelihood. He was driving him out of the neighborhood because he was her lover.

She rose, and walked steadily from the room. The girl Mahaly followed.

"Tek keer, tek keer!" she muttered, in a low voice. "He's watchin' you, Miss Kate!"

"He is always watching me," said Kate, dully.

"Yas 'm. I done tried to warn you. Hit were de letter. Ef you jes' hadn't 'a' sent de letter!"

"My husband saw that?"

"Yas 'm. I don gib it to him."

Kate recoiled, staring at her. "You! You gave it?" she whispered. "You whom I have trusted! My own servant!"

The mulatto woman's expression was a queer mixture of malice, and triumph, and pity.

"I was his servant first," said Mahaly.

Several months later, news came of the death of Mrs. Benoix in the mountains.

But it found Kate oddly indifferent. She was lingering, then, upon a certain dark threshold which she would have crossed very gladly but for voices that held her back; the prattle of a child, the thin, helpless whimper of a baby. She had just given birth to her third daughter.

Basil Kildare did not trouble himself to inspect his new property. Servants brought him word of its sex and its soundness.

"Good gad, another female?" he cried; and went off down the hill at a gallop.

Kate heard him go, and retreated a step from the dark threshold.

There was peace in the room.

Presently it seemed to her as if some one were near, a dear familiar presence she had learned to associate with that threshold; a strength to lean her weakness on; a hand gripping hers; eyes that held her with their tenderness, would not let her go.

By a great effort she raised her lids. The vision held. A voice said steadily: "Quiet, Kate. Remember your baby."

But she had no thought of excitement. It seemed too natural to have him there. "I knew—you would come—if you could—" she whispered.

He knelt beside her. She drew his head down to her breast, just above where the baby lay. So they stayed a while without speaking.

There was some sort of commotion downstairs; a cry, instantly hushed. The old doctor entered the room in haste, and paused, staring. After a moment he went out softly, clearing his throat. A mulatto-girl, curiously gray of face, was mounting fierce guard over the door, and would allow no others to enter.

Then came a sound of trampling feet in the road, as of men bearing some heavy burden.

Benoix began to speak, in a low and rapid whisper: "Whatever comes now, you will remember how I have loved you. From the very first, when I saw you riding to me—There is for every man one woman, only we are fools and do not wait. Wherever I am, my love shall reach you. They cannot keep my love from going to you, and you will know. For me there is only you in the world. The other things are shadows. You will remember—whatever happens, you will remember?"

She smiled: there was no need to answer.

She asked, incuriously: "What are those feet in the hall? What are they carrying?"

He answered, "Basil Kildare."

"Basil? He is hurt?"

"He is dead," said Benoix.

After a moment she began to laugh—but very softly, so that the sleeping baby on her breast might not be disturbed: "Oh, thank God, thank God! God is good to us, Jacques!"

He stopped the terrible words on her lips with his own. There were feet on the stairs. He tried to speak to her once more from the door, but he could not. He closed the door behind him.

CHAPTER VII

The peace of that quiet time with her lover remained with Kate through the days that followed, even as he had intended it should, guarding her like an armor from the seething excitement of the world beyond her door. Wailing servants, friends arriving from far and near, people filling the house with lamentations (for the kindly magic of Death had transformed Kildare for the moment into the noblest of mortals)—all this stopped at the door of the quiet room where Mahaly mounted guard over the mistress she had betrayed.

None entered that room save the old doctor, and later Kate's mother, become suddenly an old woman, broken by the terrible rumors which had penetrated her peaceful Bluegrass home. She was shocked beyond words to find her newly widowed daughter serene as some Madonna out of a painting, wrapped in a rose-colored dressing-gown that would better have suited a bride.

"Whatever comes, you will remember how I love you," Benoix had said. Kate was remembering.

She lay dreaming of the future, thinking sometimes of her husband, not unkindly, but with pity, as one thinks of poor, blundering people who have gone through life unloving and unloved. Of his death she thought not at all. It was what he would have chosen, painless and quick, a fall from his horse within sight of his own house. So her mother found her, calm and very beautiful, placidly nursing her child.

Only once was the agitated lady able to prick her serenity. It was when she began to babble of Kildare's will. This stipulated that in case of re-marriage, Kate and her children were to be deprived of any interest in the estate save only that provided by law, in which event Storm was to become an endowed home for crippled children.

At this news, indeed, Kate winced. Her husband had managed to strike at her one last time from his grave, and in a vulnerable spot—her maternity. He was forcing her to rob her children.

But she regained her calm. Surely such a father as Jacques Benoix was a better gift to her children than houses and lands and cattle!

"I can't understand it," her bewildered mother moaned. "It's a cruel will, almost an insulting will, daughter! It is almost as if he—suspected you of something. What was Mr. Kildare thinking of? You are so young, you have a right to re-marry! Surely he could have had no—reason?"

Kate told her mother the reason; partly out of justice to her husband, partly because her love was a thing she wished to confess.

The other rose to her feet, staggered, gasping: "Then they are true, those dreadful rumors! You with a lover—you a married woman! Ah, my little girl—my little girl! Such things do not happen in our family. They do not! A scandal—a murder? Thank Heaven your father died in time!"

It was Kate who comforted her mother. But in the midst of her soothing caresses, a sudden trembling seized her. The color fled out of her cheeks.

"Mother! What was that you said—A murder—?"

So at last the truth came, the truth which Mahaly and the few who loved Kate had tried to keep out of that peaceful chamber. Jacques Benoix had gone from her side to prison for the killing of her husband.

As soon as she was strong enough to travel—indeed before she was strong enough to travel—Kate went to her lover in prison; saw him for ten minutes alone.

She wasted not a moment in preliminaries; there had already developed in her that ability for affairs that was later to make her one of the foremost women of her State.

"I have engaged the best lawyers to be had for money," she said. "You will never go to the penitentiary, Jacques!"

He shook his head, his eyes roaming over her hungrily, imprinting every detail of her beauty on his memory to stay. "It is of no use, my dear one."

She blenched a little. "You mean—you did kill Basil? But no! I don't believe it. You kill a man?" she laughed. "Why, you could not kill a fox, a rabbit!"

"Nevertheless," he said, "I fear that I did kill Basil."

She caught at the doubt in his words. "You 'fear'—you do not know, Jacques?"

"I know only that I tried."

He told her the story then. Others had wished to tell her, but she would listen to nobody, saying proudly, "Jacques shall explain to me...."

He had been waiting at the foot of Storm hill, watching her window, desperate for news of how she did, when Kildare came galloping down the road. Before Benoix could speak, he had reined in his horse, crying out; "You, is it? I thought I'd catch you skulking around. You'll find a new brat at the house; female, of course. If it's yours, you're welcome to it—damn you!"

Benoix, blind with sudden fury, tried to drag him from his horse. Kildare struck with his whip, broke away, jeering back over his shoulder. Then Benoix found to his hand a jagged piece of rock, and flung it straight at the grinning face that mocked him. Kildare's horse reared, toppled...

A negro who had seen it all came trembling out of the hedge and found the French doctor striving to staunch a wound in Kildare's temple, from which blood and brains oozed together.

Benoix finished with Kate's face hidden on his breast "Oh, Jacques, Jacques!" she shuddered. "It was for me, then—you tried to defend me! But—perhaps the fall killed him, not your stone?"

"Perhaps," said her lover, soothing her.

In a moment she lifted her head. "Now," she cried, "we will face this thing together!" She proposed that he should marry her at once.

He knew nothing of Kildare's will; but he refused, would not listen, hid his eyes with his hand so that the pleading of her face would not weaken him.

"I've dragged you low enough without that, my Kate. Remember your children," he bade her, sternly, "Remember my boy. We have more than ourselves to consider."

She could not move him, neither with tears nor with kisses. The jailor came.

As they led him away, her voice followed him so that the grim place rang with it! "Your boy shall be mine till you come for us both. Jacques, I'll wait, I'll wait!"

Benoix was right. The best lawyers to be had could not keep him from the penitentiary. The judge, a just and troubled man who had known Kildare from boyhood, laid what emphasis he could on the uncertainty of the case, the probability that Benoix had fought in self-defense. The jury would have none of it. Popular prejudice had transformed the master of Storm into a hero, a martyr to the unwritten law, who had given his life to defend the sanctity of his home. It did not help the accused that he was a stranger in the State, reputed to be an atheist, had not even a decent, pronounceable English name, was—of all things!—a Frenchman.

"A Creole American," corrected the accused, quietly. It was his one word in his own behalf.

Kate was in the courtroom when the jury brought in its verdict. She rose to receive it as if she were the accused, and more than one member of the jury, glancing at her, pursed virtuous lips.

The sentence was a life term in the penitentiary.

Mrs. Kildare, now famous and infamous throughout the country, made one more public appearance, this time in the church where she had been christened, confirmed, and married. She did not wear mourning, but her face was like marble against the bright color of her dress. The congregation began to whisper. She had brought her two children to be christened.

She was not quite alone. Two friends entered with her and stood at her side: her mother, and a young man named Thorpe, who had been the least among her girlhood adorers, and was the first to offer his support in her disgrace. It was he, as godfather, who spoke the children's names: "Jemima" for the elder, and for the younger, "Jacqueline Benoix."

At this there was a rustle throughout the church. Was it possible that she was actually naming her child for the condemned lover? The old minister's voice faltered, almost stopped, in his dismay. Afterwards, she had to brave the blank, frozen glances of people who had known her since her birth, and who now, it seemed, knew her no longer.

Not until that moment did Kate realize what interpretation the world might put upon her act of public loyalty to the man who had gone for her sake into a living death.

She had, indeed, her answer for the world; but it was an answer that must wait many years, until the baby Jacqueline was old enough to marry Benoix' son.

CHAPTER VIII

On the gallery at Storm stood two anxious girls with eyes fixed upon the big juniper-tree less patiently than the eyes of the waiting dogs. Their mother was invisible, but the presence of the dogs betrayed her.

"We'll have to do it, Jack," murmured the elder of the girls. "I hate to disturb her, but—there they come!"

She pointed to the road immediately below, along which an object that looked like a large black beetle was rattling and panting and honking its leisurely way toward Storm.

"The voice of the Ark will arouse her—just wait," advised Jacqueline. "It would arouse anything. Professor Jimsy must have bought the original trial machine made by the inventor, Blossom. How did he come to see mother before there were automobiles?"

"I don't remember—but you may be sure he came. Regularly every Friday night, and again Sunday, if encouraged. There! Mother must be stirring. Look at the dogs."

Mrs. Kildare appeared from the other side of the great tree, moving rather dazedly, as people move who have just awakened from sleep. The dogs leaped and gamboled around her, and she put them down with vague, kind gestures.

"There, Beauty! Never mind! No muddy feet, please, Jock! So, boys, so—"

"Mother, do hurry," called Jemima, with some impatience.

Mrs. Kildare hurried. It had long been her habit to obey her eldest child, who made her feel at times quite immature and thoughtless.

"What's up, girlies?" she asked.

"Company," they said together.

"Oh, yes. Jim Thorpe's night for supper. But why so much excitement about it?"

"Only that the automobile is now at the foot of the hill, and your hair is coming down, and he's going to catch you in an old, faded gingham. What am I going to do with such a mother?" sighed Jemima. "I don't believe you ever notice what you put on!"

"I don't," admitted her parent, humbly.

"And you think it's highmindedness, whereas it's just pure vanity. You know that no matter what you wear, you're more beautiful than everybody else!" The girl's voice was sternly accusing.

Kate laughed and kissed them both. "You spoil me, dears," she said; but Jemima's shrewdness made her wince, as it often did.

It was quite true that clothes existed for Kate Kildare only as more or less comfortable covering for her body; but of that body itself, the fine, satin skin, the hands, the lustrous hair, she took a care that she would have scorned to use in the days of her bellehood. She was aware of her comeliness, and she treasured it; not, however, for herself. She was a woman of one idea. Never for a moment, despite many failures, had she relinquished the hope of securing Jacques Benoix' release.

She asked meekly, "What dress am I to wear this evening, please, Blossom? Dear me! It seems to me you two have made yourselves rather gorgeous for a mere godfather. He'll be quite dazzled."

Both girls looked down consciously at their pretty frocks. They exchanged glances.

"It isn't exactly for Professor Jimsy," murmured Jacqueline. "He never looks at any one but you, anyway. It's—you tell her, Jemmy!"

"No, you!"

In the end, they told her together. "It's a party!"

Kate looked at them in surprise. Suddenly their eagerness, their excitement, struck her as being pathetic. What had they known of parties, of the gay, pleasure-seeking life usual to girls of their class?

The county of which Storm was the chief estate occupied toward its more aristocratic neighbor, the Bluegrass, the relative position of an unpretentious side-street toward the fashionable residence district of a city. It had a social life of its own—what portion of the hospitable, gregarious, pleasure-loving State has not? There were many simple gaieties, dances, picnics, and the like, which took no account of distance or other obstacles to the natural coming together of young men and girls, and of older folk who have exchanged gallantry for gossip. In this life, the mistress of Storm held a certain place. No farmers' dinner, no fair, or barbecue, was complete without the presence of the county's one great landowner.

But her daughters were creatures apart, young princesses among admiring vassals. The country people looked with awe upon their tutors and dancing-masters and singing-teachers, their books, their clothes from the city. It had never occurred to them to include the little heiresses of Storm in their humble amusements; they belonged so palpably to a different world. The fact that this world was closed to them, because of the unforgotten scandal connected with their mother, left Jemima and Jacqueline singularly friendless; princesses, perhaps, but lonely princesses in their castle.

For the first time Kate realized this. Hitherto she had felt that they three were all sufficient unto themselves, with Philip Benoix, and James Thorpe, and one or two others who came regularly to Storm. Now she said to herself with a sharp pang, "My poor babies! My little hidden, lovely girls!"

Aloud she said, "A party?—that is splendid! Who are coming to the party? Some neighbor boys and girls?"

"Hardly," replied Jemima, with a superior smile. "The party is coming from Lexington."

Kate's face changed. She asked in quick dread, "Who are they?" It was not often that she met people from Lexington, except in the way of business, and then it was an ordeal to her.

"We don't know. Isn't it exciting? Professor Thorpe is bringing them."

Then Kate smiled. They would not be people who knew her. She could trust James Thorpe.

"I must make myself presentable," she murmured, moving toward the stairs.

The two girls heaved sighs of relief. It was evident that they had entertained doubts as to her reception of the party. Jacqueline walked beside her, rubbing a caressing cheek against her shoulder—a trick she had learned from the horses among whom she spent much of her time.

"You see, Mummy, Blossom thought it was high time for us to be having some beaux."

"Good Heavens—not yet!" murmured Kate.

"At my age, you had several babies," Jemima reminded her, firmly; and Kate could not deny it.

"So we consulted our godfather," continued Jacqueline. "It seemed to us we had at last found a use for a godfather—besides candy, and birthday presents, and things like that, which don't really count. We asked him if he couldn't find us some nice young professors at the university—attractive, dancing ones, you know, not old fossils like him."

"Pleasant for James," murmured Kate. "He must be very little over forty!"

"But imagine him dancing," cried Jacqueline, and dismissed him from her world with a gesture. "So Jemima suggested to him that the surest way of having you alone, the next time he came, was to bring some young professors to amuse us. And," she finished dramatically, "here he comes, the Ark simply bursting with young professors!"

There was a loud honk at the door.

Mrs. Kildare fled up the stairs. Jemima, following her, said in a low voice, "You don't really mind, then—about the party?"

Something odd in the girl's voice arrested her. "Mind? Why should I mind, dear?"

"I don't know. I thought perhaps—you see you never do have any of your old friends here, and—and sometimes that seems to me queer. You must have had so many friends there, in Lexington, a woman like you. Or were they all beaux?"

Kate's heart beat hard. It was not the first time the girl's observant intelligence had frightened her, nor did the wistfulness of the query escape notice.

"Yes, I had many friends, and beaux, too—just as you will have, dear," she said steadily. "But you see I have been too busy with the farm and such things, since your father died, to keep up with people. That is all."

Jemima looked immeasurably relieved. "I knew you would give us friends some day, Mother, just as you have given us everything else. Only, I—I got a little tired of waiting."

"Did you, dear?" said her mother sadly. "I thought you were quite happy."

"We are, of course. But you see, we've got to get married some day, Jackie and I, and—there's no use waiting too long."

"I see."

Despite her dismay, Kate's lips twitched. It was so like this capable child of hers to be arranging the future, at nineteen, ready to be a mother to herself in case her natural mother failed her. But as she got quickly into the dress laid out for her, her hands shook a little. It is disconcerting to discover that one is no longer the parent of children, but of women grown.

She had the weary, bruised feeling of one who has traveled too far—and indeed it was a long journey she had made that day, from her own wistful and eager young womanhood to that of her daughters. She brushed her hands across her eyes to clear them of memories and dreams alike.

Introspection is always a difficult matter to direct and simple natures, such as Kate Kildare's, but she forced herself to it now. Had she in any way failed her children, as Jemima seemed to imply? Was it possible that in her absorption in a fixed idea she had neglected them, taken their welfare too much for granted? Was there anything she might have done for them that she had not done?

Conscience answered, No. It was for their sakes, far more than her own, that she had isolated herself with them, hidden them away from a world which she had found unkind. It was for their interests that she had worked harder than any man of her acquaintance, experimenting, studying, managing, until she was recognized as one of the greatest agriculturists of the State, and the unproductive property left by Basil Kildare had become a stock and dairy farm which netted her an income that ran well into five figures. More than wealth, she had given them education, bringing to Storm the best tutors and governesses to be had in the country. She had shared with them, too, her own practical knowledge and experience, the wisdom not to be found in books.

Every step of the way she had walked beside them. She who could not give them friends, had given them instead herself. Busy woman that she was, she was far closer to them than mothers and daughters usually find themselves, sentiment to the contrary notwithstanding. Between them, she believed, were none of the unfortunate reticences usual in that relation, no questions that might not be asked, nor answers given. Kate would have said that she knew her daughters truly "by heart."

And yet already and without warning the time was upon her which she dreaded—the time when she might no longer walk beside them, watchfully, but only behind, and far behind. She knew—she had always known—that only the childhood of her girls could belong to her. Their womanhood, their future, they must face unaided.

It is a bitter moment for all mothers, but more especially for Kate Kildare, who knew better than most what pitfalls lie in wait for young and hurrying feet, and whose nightmare was inheritance.

Then a consoling thought came to her; came in the shape of Jacques Benoix' son, Philip, with the steady eyes, and the great, tender heart of his father. Inheritance is not always a nightmare. The future of little Jacqueline, at least, was secure. (Thus Kate to herself, with a characteristic self-confidence which took no account of chance or choice, or other obstacle to her intent.)

As for Jemima—once more her lips twitched. Jemima was certainly very capable.

Mrs. Kildare went down to meet her guests somewhat heartened.

CHAPTER IX

"This," murmured a voice into the ear of Professor Thorpe, "is the real thing at last! Everything so far has been a rather crude imitation of New York. I am disappointed in Lexington. But there's character here, distinction, local color. My dear uncle, why have you not brought me to this house before?"

"I did not bring you this time, as it happens," commented Professor Thorpe somewhat acidly. "You came."

"Thanks to a firm character and a discerning eye. What, miss a chance of seeing the Kildare on her native heath? Certainly not!"

The other turned and looked at him. "Suppose," he murmured, "that hereafter you speak of my friend and your hostess as 'Mrs. Kildare.'"

The younger man made a smiling gesture of apology. "What, ho! A tendresse here—I had forgotten," he said to himself; and added aloud, "Of course, you know, one does speak of famous women without adding handles to their names. The Duse, for instance, or Bernhardt—it would be ridiculous to call them 'Madame.'"

"Mrs. Kildare is not an actress," said the Professor, primly.

His nephew's smile grew broader. He sometimes found his uncle amusing. "I yearn to see the lady, by whatever name," he murmured. "Here she comes now. Jove, what a woman!"

His voice quite lost its drawling note. Percival Channing was a sincere admirer of beauty in all its forms, and he had without doubt a right to his claim of a discerning eye. There was something that set him apart from the other young men who had come with Professor Thorpe to Storm, aside from his English-cut clothes and a certain ease and finish which they lacked. It was an effect of keenness, of aliveness to the zest of the passing moment. He spoke of himself sometimes as a collector of impressions; and it was a true characterization. His slight, casual glance invariably took in more than the stare of other people; his nostrils quivered constantly, like those of a hound, as if they, too, were busy gathering impressions. It was a rather interesting face; a little vague in drawing about the chin and lips, but mobile, sensitive, vivid; distinctly the face of an artist.

He gazed at Kate Kildare approaching down the long stairway with the appreciation of a connoisseur. Beside her moved a slender sprite of a girl, whose hair gleamed like spun gold above a dress of apple-green. But his glance for her was merely cursory, and returned at once to the older woman. Of this Jemima was quite aware. It had happened to her before. Her lips straightened, where another girl's would have drooped, but the sensation was the same. Jemima, not for the first time, was a little jealous of her mother.

Kate greeted her guests with a gracious courtesy that was almost regal in its simplicity. Channing in particular she welcomed warmly.

"What, Jim's nephew! And you have been with him for some time? Then why has he never brought you to us before?"

"Just what I have been asking him," murmured Channing, bending over her hand. His manner reminded her sharply of Jacques Benoix.

She asked, on an unconsidered impulse, "You have lived in France?"

"For many years. Have you?"

The group around them was silent, listening. Kate went rather pale. "No. But my greatest friend happens to be a Frenchman, a Creole," she said, steadily, and turned to the others.

Channing, who knew her story, guessed at once the identity of that "greatest friend." He gazed after her in renewed admiration. It was not often in his native land that he had come across a perfect type of the grande amoureuse.

He contrasted her with the setting in which he found her—a distinctly masculine setting. The hall was enormous, rough and simple; skins on the floor, rather wooden portraits of dead Kildares on the wall, together with antlers and fox-brushes, and the stuffed head of the horse running his race with Death. The huge fireplace of field-boulders might have roasted oxen in its time. There were some modern comforts; a piano, many books, a table heaped with periodicals; even that indispensable adjunct of American homes, the graphophone; but no curtains, nor cushions, nor draperies, none of the little touches that speak of feminine habitation. In twenty years, Kate had made few changes in the house; she regarded Basil Kildare's home as merely a temporary abode until Jacques came to claim her and her children.

"I'm in luck!" thought the collector of impressions. "This is the setting for my new novel."

Here was the Kentucky, the America, he had hitherto sought in vain, with its suggestion of the backwoods of civilization, the pioneer, the primitive. And to emphasize and give the suggestion point, here was an example of the finest feminine beauty left to this degenerating world, beauty such as the Greeks knew, large-limbed, deep-bosomed, clear-eyed, product of a vigorous past, full of splendid augury for the future.

"What sons the woman must have!" he mused, stirred; and then remembered, with quite a sense of personal injury, that there were no sons.

He looked again with new interest at the daughter: but she disappointed him. She was too dainty, too petite, with a pink-and-white Dresden prettiness that was almost insignificant. (He missed, as people often did, the shrewd gray gleam behind those infantile lashes.) He hoped that the second daughter might prove truer to type.

Jacqueline, meanwhile, had made an unobtrusive appearance through a door just behind Professor Thorpe, and manifested her presence by a pinch on his arm.

He said "Ouch!" and dropped his eye-glass.

"Hush!" she admonished him, replacing it on his nose in motherly fashion. "I want to look them over and choose a victim before they see me. Why, you old duck of a godparent! Four of them—and all so young and beautiful. Two apiece. I hope they can dance?"

"Warranted to give perfect satisfaction in the ballroom, or money returned," he murmured. "But they aren't professors, my dear. None of ours seemed young and beautiful enough for your purposes."

She gave his arm an ecstatic squeeze. "I knew it! I simply knew the one in gray, with the haughty nose, couldn't be a professor."

"He's worse," warned Thorpe. "He's an author."

She gave a little squeal. "An author! But where did you get him, Goddy?" (Such was her rather irreverent abbreviation of "godfather," employed to signify especial approbation.)

"I didn't. He got me. It is my famous nephew from Boston—'from Boston and Paris,' I believe he subscribes himself."

James Thorpe spoke with a certain fortitude which Jacqueline was quick to observe. He was a small, ugly man, with the scholar's stoop and the scholar's near-sighted, peering gaze—the sort of man who has never been really young and will never be old, looking at forty-five much as he looked at twenty, a little grayer, perhaps, a little more round-shouldered and ineffectual, but no more mature. His most marked characteristic was a certain shy amiability, which endeared him to his classes and his friends, even while it failed to command their respect. Beneath this surface manner, however, were certain qualities which Kate had had long occasion to test—dogged faithfulness, and an infinite capacity for devotion. He was a very welcome guest at Storm, their one connection with the outside world. Indeed, Kate's enemies were in the habit of referring to James Thorpe as the third man whom she had ruined. His learning and his abilities were wasted on the little college where he chose to remain in order to be near her.

It was Jacqueline's custom to treat the Professor as if he were a cross between a child and a pet dog,—a favorite pet dog. She murmured now, sympathetically, "Doesn't it like its famous nephew, then? I wonder why? He does look rather snippy. Is he so famous as all that? In the magazines and everything?"

"Pooh! He would scorn the magazines. Novels are his vehicle. Large novels, bound in purple Russia leather, my dear."

"But you've never sent us any of them."

"Heaven forbid!" murmured James Thorpe.

"Oho!" Jacqueline rounded her eyes. "They're that sort, are they? Asterisks in the critical spots?"

The Professor blushed. "Well, er—no. No asterisks whatever, anywhere. He belongs to what is called the er—decadent school."

Jacqueline gazed around him at the author with increased respect. "What's his name, Goddy?"

"James Percival Channing. 'James' is for me. Calls himself 'J. Percival,' however. He would."

"What?—not the Channing? Why, Goddy, of course I've heard of him! I had no idea you had any one belonging to you like that."

"I don't often brag of it," he murmured.

"But what is he doing here?"

"Getting next to Nature, I believe. Collecting specimens, dialect, local color, animals in their habitat, you know. Take care, or he'll be collecting you."

Her eyes twinkled. "Wouldn't it be gorgeous to be in a book! Professor Jimsy, don't you think we ought to give him a little local color at once? Some native habits, for instance. Dare me to? Come, be a sport and dare me to! Then if Mother or Jemmy scolds me, I can blame it all on you."

She stroked his hand persuasively. There was no resisting Jacqueline's blandishments. He dared her to, albeit with misgivings. Ever since her infancy, when hearing his voice in the hall she had escaped from her nurse and her bath simultaneously and arrived, slippery with wet soap, to welcome him, Jacqueline had been the source of an uneasy fascination for her godfather. She represented, in his rather humdrum life, the element of the unexpected.

Some moments later the group gathered about Mrs. Kildare—and incidentally Jemima—were startled by the appearance of a vision in pink at the head of the stairs, who casually straddled the banister and arrived in their midst with the swoop of a rocket.

"Jacqueline!" gasped her sister.

Kate shook her head reprovingly, and smiled. After all, one of her children was still a child. No need to trouble about the future yet!

Channing was the first of the guests to collect his wits, and he assisted the newcomer to alight from the newel-post with gallantry.

"What an effective entrance, Miss—ah, Jacqueline," he commented. "An idea for musical comedy, all the chorus sliding down on to the stage in a procession. I must suggest it to my friend Cohan."

The girl suddenly felt very small, but she concealed her embarrassment beneath an excessive nonchalance. "Why, in Boston don't people use their banisters? We find them so convenient, so time-saving."

"Unfortunately, in Boston," he replied blandly, "very few women seem to have such decorative legs to exhibit."

There was a shocked pause. Thorpe and Mrs. Kildare had moved out of hearing. The three other young men rushed into the breach with small talk, casting furious looks at Channing, much to his amusement.

He made a mental note: "In rural Kentucky the leg may be seen but not heard."

Later Jacqueline whispered to her sister, "What was wrong with that compliment? Why did everybody look so queer?"

Their education had not included a course in the lesser feminine proprieties. But Jemima was not one to be caught napping. Conventions came to her by instinct.

"He should have said 'limbs,'" she answered promptly. "And he should not have seen them at all!"

Jacqueline inspected her slim ankles with approval. "I don't see how he could have helped it. They're very pretty. Blossom, what's wrong with legs anyway?"

But for once Jemima was unable to enlighten her.

The collector of impressions had several occasions to congratulate himself, during the course of that evening. He ceased to trust his memory, and commenced a series of surreptitious notes on his cuff, to the acute discomfort of his uncle. Among them appeared items such as the following: "7 vegetables and no soup." "Pancakes are called bread." "The butler has bare feet."

The butler was one of the stable-boys disguised for the occasion in a white coat and apron, who partially concealed himself behind the dining-room door and announced in a tremulous roar, "White folks, yo' supper's dished!"—stage-fright having conquered recent instructions.

Mrs. Kildare, who was usually served by an elderly housewoman, gazed at this innovation in frank astonishment; but it was only the first of her surprises. The table was frivolously alight with pink candles, and in the center stood a decoration consisting of a scalloped watermelon filled with flowers, leashed to a little fleet of flower-filled canteloupes, by pink ribbons.

Jacqueline could not dissemble her admiration of this effect. "Isn't it artistic?" she demanded of the company at large. "Jemmy saw a table like this in the ladies' page of a magazine, and she copied it exactly."

"So helpful, those ladies' pages," murmured the author. "Once I got an idea out of them for turning a disused cook-stove into a dressing-table, with the aid of cretonne and a little white paint."

Jemima gave him a glance that was swift and sharp as the gleam of a knife, but she said nothing. She was too preoccupied at the moment to decide whether he was laughing at her or not. Temporarily, she gave him the benefit of the doubt. Weighty matters were on her mind that night. While Mrs. Kildare, as usual, sat at the head of her table, it was Jemima who ably and quite visibly conducted affairs.

From the pantry came suppressed guffaws, the shuffling of many feet, the steady fusillade of rattling china.

"It is a regiment preparing to charge!" thought Channing.

But when it charged, the author forgot his note-making and was content to eat. All day Jemima had been busy in the kitchen with Big Liza; both notable cooks in a country where cookery is justly regarded as one of the fine arts.

At one time Mrs. Kildare counted no less than five unaccustomed servitors, white-coated and barefooted, shuffling about the table, with fresh relays of waffles, biscuits, fried chicken. They ranged in size from the coachman's youngest to Big Liza herself, queen of the kitchen; a monumental figure whose apron-strings barely met about her blue-gingham waist, and whose giggles threatened momentarily to overcome her.

"Well, old woman, this is a surprise!" murmured her mistress. "What brings you into the dining-room?"

Big Liza shook like the aspic she was carrying. "Laws, Miss Kate, honey, I allus did have a eye fo' de gentlemen," she said coyly. "I des 'bleeged ter have a peep at de beaux. Mighty long time sense we-all's had a party at Sto'm!"

Jemima cast a reproachful glance at her mother; but the "beaux," accustomed from infancy to the ways of servants like Big Liza, responded cheerfully to the old woman's advances, bantering and teasing her till she retired to her kitchen in high delight, tossing her head.

Channing listened in sheer amaze. "Primitive? Why, it's patriarchal! Positively Biblical in its simplicity!" he thought.

Jemima was as pink as her decorations.

"Judging from the Apple Blossom's expression," murmured Thorpe to Mrs. Kildare, "you have committed a hopeless social error in conversing with your cook."

"I know! It was too bad of me. She takes her little party very seriously," said the other, remorsefully. "Don't you dare laugh at her, Jim! It is her first, and she's done it all by herself!"

"If she made this puff-paste herself, no man in the world will think of laughing at her," he said heartily. "But—their social instincts are awaking, Kate. They come by them very naturally. It is time for your girls to have their chance."

She winced. "What shall I do about it? How can I manage? I have no friends now. There is nobody I can count on to help them."

He leaned toward her, his lined face for the moment almost beautiful.

"There is always me, Kate. Hasn't the time come to let me help you, for their sakes? As Mrs. Thorpe—" he paused, and continued quietly, with a rather set look about his jaw, "As Mrs. Thorpe I think I can promise you a few friends, at least. And a—protector—though I may not look like one," he finished, wistfully.

She shook her head, not meeting his eyes. She always avoided, when she could, these offers of help, knowing that when he grew tired of making them she would miss him. But she had not the courage to send him away, to break with him entirely. She was not consciously selfish. If it had been suggested to her that she was interfering with her friend's career, she would have been shocked and grieved beyond measure. Thorpe's devotion was a thing so complete, so perfect in its unobtrusiveness, that it defeated its own purpose. She simply took it for granted.

He made no protest now; even smiled at her reassuringly, knowing that it troubled her to hurt him. Only the eagerness that had for the moment beautified his face died away, and Jacqueline, happening to glance across at him, thought, "Poor Goddy! How old and out of it all he looks!"

She drew him into the conversation. "I was just telling the author, Professor Jimsy, that he inherits his patrician nose from you," she said (somewhat to the author's embarrassment). "And he says one doesn't inherit from uncles. That's nonsense! If property, why not noses? And character?" she added wickedly. "Oh, I see lots of resemblances between you!"

"Do you?" murmured the Professor, rather grimly.

"For instance, you both go in for psychology—only you don't publish yours in large purple novels."

"I do not," said the Professor.

Channing looked at her with surprise. Was it possible that this backwoods hoyden—Bouncing Bet of the Banister, he had named her to himself, with a taste for alliteration—was it possible that she had read any of his books? She was hardly more than a child. The hair hung down her back in a thick, gleaming rope, her merry gamin's face lacked as yet all those subtleties, those nuances of expression which fascinated him in such faces as her mother's. Channing was still young enough to prefer the finished product. But if she read his books....

Doubtless Mrs. Kildare was not a woman to be very particular about her young daughters' reading. The standards of a well-bred world would not prevail in this strange household. He thought suddenly of the girl's dangerous inheritance—the father, notorious even in a community that is not puritanical about the morals of its men; the mother, fought over like some hunted female of the lower creatures, yet faithful always to the lover who had done away with the husband.... Truly, the future career of young Jacqueline Kildare might be well worth watching. Despite her crude youth, there was a certain warm sweetness about her which, he noticed, drew and kept the attention of every man at the table—a caressing voice, hands that must always touch the thing that pleased her, above all a mouth of dewy scarlet, curving into deep dimples at the corner.

"Undoubtedly a mouth meant for kissing," mused Channing, the connoisseur.

He let his imagination go a little. It was a pampered imagination, that led him occasionally into indiscretions which he afterwards regretted—not too deeply, however, for after all, one owes something to one's art. "Psychological experiments," he named these indiscretions. He suspected that he was on the verge of one now, and tasted in advance some of the thrills of the pioneer.

And then, quite suddenly, he became aware of Jemima's cool, appraising, gray-green gaze fastened upon his face; not quite meeting his eyes, but placed somewhere in the region of the mouth and chin, those features which Channing euphoniously spoke of to himself as "mobile." The author started. He resisted an impulse to put a hand up over his betraying mouth.

"What ho! The pink-and-white one's been making notes on her own account," he thought.

It was a privilege he usually reserved for himself.

After dinner the phonograph was promptly started, Jacqueline explaining that the young men were going to teach them to dance.

"Teach you?" exclaimed her mother. "Why, you both dance beautifully."

She had taught them herself from earliest childhood, lessons supplemented by the best dancing-masters that money could bring to Storm. Perhaps the prettiest memory the rough old hall held was that of two tiny girls hopping about together, yellow heads bobbing, short skirts a-flutter, their baby faces earnest with endeavor.

"Pooh, two-steps and waltzes, Mummy! They're as dead as the polka. Besides, you can't really dance with another girl."

"Can't you?" Kate sighed. She exchanged a rueful glance with Thorpe, "Jim, tell me, did you know the polka was dead?"

"I haven't danced since your wedding."

They settled themselves to look on, Kate murmuring, "I hope all this noise isn't keeping Mag Henderson awake. We've got a new baby upstairs, did you know it? A poor creature who had no one to look after her at home."

"So you brought her here—of course! Kate, Kate, isn't it enough that you take in every derelict dog in the county, without taking in the derelict infants and mothers as well?"

"I take in the dogs as a sort of atonement to poor old Juno and her mongrel pups," she said, soberly. "I feel as if Storm owed something to mongrels. As for this baby, it's a good experience for Jemima and Jacqueline. I want to teach them all I can, while I can."

"Humph! Where's the woman's husband!"

"There never was any."

"What? My dear Kate! And that's the type of woman you think will be a good experience for your young daughters?"

"Jim, you psychologists have a stupid way of dividing people into types. I regard them as individuals. My girls will do Mag Henderson more good than she can do them harm," she said, with a quiet dignity which ended discussion. "Good Heavens! What sort of dance is that?"

The dancing that is called "new" was just making its triumphal progress westward into the homes of the land.

"That, I believe, is a highly fashionable performance called the Turkey Trot."

"Looks it," she commented disapprovingly, even while her feet beat time to the infectious measure.

The voice of Jacqueline rang out, "But this isn't new at all! It's just ragging, like they do at the quarters, only not so limber. We've known how to rag for ever so long, haven't we, Blossom? Watch us!"

She caught her sister around the waist and went strutting down the long hall, hips and shoulders swinging, pretty feet prancing, laughing back over her shoulder with unconscious provocation, until a delighted old negro voice at the window cried, "Dat's de style, Miss Jack! Dat's de way to git 'em, honey!"

With the first note of the phonograph, the entire domestic force had transformed itself into an unseen audience.

When Philip Benoix came to the top of the Storm road, he jerked up his horse in sheer amaze. It was a scene such as he had never expected to find in that grim old fortress-home. Past the lighted windows couples stepped rapidly to the titivating strains of "Trop Moutarde"; while on the lawn outside the entire population of the quarters pranced and capered in much the same fashion, somewhat hampered by the excited dogs. Kate Kildare stood in the open doorway, gazing from the dancers within to the dancers without, and laughing until she held her sides.

Philip's grave face warmed with sympathy. "It is good to see her laugh like that. I won't tell her to-night," he thought; and would have turned away, but that the dogs suddenly became aware of him and gave tongue.

"Heah comes Pahson to jine de high jinks!" cried the erstwhile butler, running hospitably to take his horse. It was too late for retreat.

CHAPTER X

Kate stepped down into the porch with outstretched hands. "I am so glad it is you, Phil dear. You must have felt me wishing for you. Come, come in, boy! You don't have half enough of 'high jinks'!"

He shook his head silently.

She made a little grimace. "I forgot—the Cloth does not dance. But surely the Cloth may look on?"

"From afar off, perhaps, out of the way of temptation."

He spoke smilingly, but she reproached herself for thoughtlessness. Philip was very careful not to present himself anywhere that his presence might cause restraint or embarrassment, he never forgot, no matter if others forgot, that he was the son of a convict.

"Then I shall sit out here with you." As she drew closer to him, she saw his face clearly in the light that streamed from the open doorway. It was very pale. "Oh!" she cried. "What is the matter, Philip?"

"My father—"

Her hand went to her heart.

"Not bad news," he said quickly. "Good news. To-day I had a letter from the Governor."

The newly elected Governor of the State had been the presiding judge at Jacques Benoix' trial.

"The Governor! Well? Well?"

"He said—it was a personal letter, you understand, nothing official. He said that he had always entertained grave doubts as to the justice of father's sentence, and that if I could secure the signature of certain men in the State, he would be glad to consider a petition for pardon."

In the house, James Thorpe, waiting for Mrs. Kildare's return, after some time became aware that he was not the only person in the room not dancing. A girl in apple-green sat, with a rather fixed smile on her lips, watching three of the young men teaching Jacqueline a new step, while Percival Channing produced upon the piano a tune too recent for the resources of the graphophone. It occurred to him that Jemima's party might leave something to be desired on the part of its instigator. He crossed the room.

Jemima withdrew her eyes from the dancers with an effort. She had evidently forgotten his existence. "But what have you done with mother?" she demanded. "I thought you were having such a nice time with her all to yourself."

He explained.

"Oh, Philip, of course! Mother does spoil Philip dreadfully, poor fellow! She was a great friend of his mother's, you know, and his father is—but of course you know about his father. Phil simply worships mother, and I think she likes it. Any woman does," said Jemima, with the air of elderly wisdom which always amused Professor Thorpe. "Still, it's too bad of her to go off with him to-night, when I'd promised you a whole evening with her alone."

He winced. He was beginning to realize that evenings alone profited him no more than evenings in company.

"Since you've broken your promise," he said severely, "I think you will have to make me some reparation. This new dancing, now"—he mastered a certain trepidation—"it looks easy, if unbeautiful. Do you think you could teach it to me?"

She rose with alacrity. "Of course I could! I always learn things much quicker than Jacky. You see it's taking three of them to teach her—two to dance for her and one to dance with her—and I know the steps already. Professor Jim," she said irrelevantly, with a faint sigh, "do you think it pays to be clever?"

If Mrs. Kildare had noticed, she would have been more than a little astonished by the vision of shy and awkward James Thorpe, one of the leading psychologists of the country, capering nimbly in a lady's chamber under the guidance of her eldest child. But she did not notice.

"Do you know what this means?" she said, after a long silence. "It means that we have won, my dear. The very judge who tried him!"

Philip nodded, without speaking.

Her hand groped for his and clung to it. As the sisters of Lazarus must have felt when he who was dead came to them out of the tomb in his cere-cloths, so these two felt now. After seventeen years, the thing they had vainly hoped and striven for was about to be granted—not justice (it was too late for that), but mercy, freedom. And after seventeen years, what was a man to do with freedom?

"I am—frightened, a little," Philip said at last, turning to her. "What am I to do with father?"

"You are to bring him straight to me. No, I will go with you and bring him home myself."

"Home? To Basil Kildare's house?"

She lifted her head, "What matter whose house? We shall be married at once."

He said in a low voice, "Have you forgotten—the will?"

"Forgotten it?" she laughed. "Do you think that likely? Why do you suppose I have worked as I have, scheming, saving, paring corners—done my own selling and buying and overseeing, driven my men and myself to the limit of endurance, got for myself the reputation of a female Shylock? Because I like that sort of thing? Because I enjoy making money? No, my dear. When I rob my girls of their inheritance, as rob them I must, I shall be able to give them each a little fortune to take its place. I am a rich woman now, aside from the Storm property. Basil Kildare had the right, perhaps, to do as he chose with his property. Thank God he cannot lay a finger on mine!"

She stared out straight in the direction of the little cornfield graveyard, as if defying some ghostly presence there to do its worst.

Philip lifted the hand he held to his lips. When he spoke there was trouble in his voice. "Do you think that when my father hears the terms of Kildare's will, he will consent to such a sacrifice?"

She turned on him sharply. "He does not know about the will, and he must not, certainly until after we are married. Who would tell him—you, Philip?" Her eyes met his. "Philip! What do you mean?"

"Suppose," he said very low, "it were a matter of my conscience?"

"Then I ask you not to listen to your conscience, but to me!" She put her hands on his shoulders. "If, as you say, you owe me anything—if you value my friendship—if you love me, Philip—promise that you will never tell your father!"

It was a great temptation through which he passed at that moment; a temptation all the more subtle in that he could tell himself truly it was for her sake he hesitated. One word to Jacques Benoix, and the thing he dreaded, the thing suddenly so near, would never come to pass.

"Don't you know it will hurt you to give up Storm?" His voice was hoarse. "It has been your life so long. You love the land, every stick and stone of it."

"And every twig and grass-blade. But," she said quietly, "I love Jacques more. Promise, dear."

He promised.

The silence fell again. Across Kate's face a moonbeam strayed and rested, and the young man sitting in the shadow a little behind her could not take his eyes away. He had the strange feeling that he was looking for the last time on the woman he loved, who belonged now irrevocably to his father. It was a glowing face, with eyes as lovely, and lips as tremulous, as those of a dreaming bride. Before Philip she made no attempt to conceal her thoughts. They had been confidantes too long.

It came to him that his father must be a remarkable man to have held through years of absence such a love as this.

"I wish I knew him better," he said, thinking aloud. "To me he is almost a stranger."

"A stranger!" She smiled incredulously. "I should think you would find it difficult to write those long weekly letters of yours to a 'stranger.'"

Philip had never found it difficult, because from the first the subject of those letters had been herself.

At the last meeting between Jacques and his son, the man in his extremity had turned to the boy for aid, pleading with the terrified, bewildered little fellow as if with a man who understood. And Philip, already old beyond his years, born with the instinct of the priest and confessor, had understood.

"You will tell me of her?" Jacques had pleaded. "I have no friend but you, boy. You will take care of her? You will write me how she does?"

Philip had not failed his father. Every detail of Kate's life was known to the man in prison, her comings and goings, her daily habits, her work, her successes and failures, the very color of the gowns she wore. There had been from the first a sort of glamour about her, to the imagination of a lonely, dreaming boy. Even at fourteen he had been a little in love with Kate Kildare, as a page may be in love with a queen. With the passing years, more of Philip's self than he knew had crept into those weekly letters to his father; so that if Jacques Benoix was a stranger to him now, he was no stranger to his father.

"It is queer, though," he mused, still thinking aloud. "Often as I write to him, he rarely answers. Once a year, on my birthday, and again at Christmas. It is as if he wanted me to forget him!"

"I think he does," she said. "That is why he never writes to me at all. I have had only one letter, begging me never to come there, nor to allow you to come there. He even asked me not to write to him, and I have not written. But—forget Jacques!" She smiled proudly. "He does not know us, does he? Nor himself. Why, there is not a man or woman in the county who has forgotten him!"

Philip was staring at her in amaze. "You mean to say that you never hear from him, either, and that you have never seen him—?"

Her face paled. "Yes, I have seen him. Once. There were convicts working on one of the roads near Frankfort. I spoke to them as I passed—men in that dress always interest me now. One of them did not answer me, did not even lift his head to look at me. I looked more closely—"

"It was he?"

She nodded. "Working on the road like a common laborer, a negro! Oh, I went to the warden about it myself. I railed at him, asked him how he dared put such a man at that work, a gentleman. He heard me through patiently enough—after all, what business was it of mine? When I finished, he explained that he had put Jacques on the road at his own request, granted as a reward for help during an epidemic in the prison. Jacques had chosen it."

"Chosen it! Why?"

"Because it was out of doors, beyond the walls. Because he wanted to see the sky, and trees, and birds. He always loved birds...."

She felt Philip shaking, and with a gesture of infinite tenderness, drew his head down on her shoulder.

"He had changed so little, dear, so little. But it was years ago. Now he must seem older. Have you forgotten how he looks? You were such a child when he went. Glance into your mirror and you will see him again. The same eyes that flash blue in your dark face, the same smile, the same look of gentleness; strong gentleness. You are simply your father over again. That is why I love you so." She laid her cheek on his hair.

If the words brought a stab of pain that was almost unendurable, she did not guess it. From the moment her first child was laid in her arms, Kate, like many another woman, regarded herself as a mother to all mankind. For her, this was the boy Jacques had left in her care, the husband she had chosen for her own little girl; doubly, therefore, her son. That she was less than ten years his senior, the one beautiful woman in his world, the heroine of all a young man's idealism—of these things she was as unaware as of the fact that Jacques' boy had long ago left boyhood behind him.

He stayed where she lightly held him, his head rigid upon her shoulder, conscious in every fiber of his being of the cheek pressing his hair, the warmth and fragrance of her, the rise and fall of her soft bosom—praying with all the strength that was in him to become to this beloved woman only the son she thought him, nothing more, never anything more. The Benoix men came of a race of great lovers.

She released him presently and he rose, moving with a curious stiffness as of muscles consciously controlled.

"What, going so soon? I have so much more to say to you about him—but there! You look tired—you look not quite happy, Philip. What is it? Are you still wondering what to do with him? Don't! Leave that to me, dear. And now go straight to bed and get a good night's rest. To-morrow we shall begin on the petition—our last, thank God! I will see the men the Governor mentions myself."

When he was gone, she sat a while longer in the dark. She was not quite ready yet to face strangers, to face even her daughters. Jacques was coming back to her! She said the words over and over to herself, till they rang through her head like the refrain of a song. All the years between them, the long, lonely, weary years, filled with work and with the sort of happiness that comes from successful endeavor,—these were suddenly as naught, and she was a girl again, a wistful, dreaming girl with a baby in her arms, listening there in her garden for the pit-a-patter of her lover's horse.

She closed her eyes. Presently the voice of the graphophone broke in upon her dreams, and she became aware of the dancers that passed and repassed the lighted windows; among them a man in spectacles, guiding and being guided by a determined young person in apple-green, his face flushed and earnest, his grizzled hair somewhat awry. "Why—it's Jim Thorpe!" she thought, with a stab of remorse. "I'd forgotten him. But he's dancing, he's enjoying himself like a boy. Bless that thoughtful girl of mine! She's made him look ten years younger. Dear, faithful old Jim!"

Her heart was open to all the world just then. She went to the window and smiled in at him tenderly.

Perhaps it was just as well that James Thorpe could not see that smile, and misunderstand it.

CHAPTER XI

Late summer in Kentucky; deep, umbrageous woodlands fragrant with fern, dreaming noons, shimmering in the heat, with the locust drowsily shrilling; warm and silver nights, made musical by the loves of many mocking-birds; the waste places green tangles of blossoming weed, the roads a-flutter with hovering yellow butterflies, over all the land a brooding hush, not the silence of idleness, of emptiness, but of life, intense and still as a spinning top is still. Beneath it those who listen are aware of a faint, constant stirring, a whisper of green and eager things pushing themselves up from the fecund soil.

More than ever before was Kate aware of the sympathy that bound her to these fields of hers, soon to be hers no longer. She could not keep away from them. Early and late the Madam and her racking mare were to be seen about the roads and lanes, inspecting dairies, stables, hog-pens, poultry-yards, watching the field-hands at their labor, hearing in person the requests and complaints of tenants. Much of her phenomenal success was due to personal supervision, as she knew; even, perhaps to personal charm, for field-hands and tenants are alike human. Now the executive habit stood her in good stead. None of the business of the great farm was neglected; but active as her mind was, through it all her heart was dreaming, not as a girl dreams, but as a woman may who knows well what she has missed of life. Spring had passed her by, with all its promise blighted. Now, like her fields, she had come to late summer, to the season of fulfilment.

There was much to be done in connection with Jacques Benoix' pardon; certain men to be interviewed, not always successfully, though the woman who had made Storm was heard with more respect than had been the desperate young heroine of a scandal; lawyers to be seen, land-agents, cattle-dealers, for in resigning her stewardship of the estate, a certain amount of liquidation was necessary. Optimist that she was, however, for years she had been preparing for this contingency. Her affairs were in such order that at any moment she could turn them over to others. Nothing that had any claim upon her was overlooked. The servants, the horses in her stable, the very mongrel dogs who by the instinct of their kind had discovered her weakness and spread the discovery broadcast,—all had their share in her planning for the future—their future, not hers.

Hers was to be put without question into the hands of Jacques Benoix. She would go to him at the door of his prison-house and say, "Here I am, as you left me. What will you do with us, me and my children?"

She would trust the answer to his wisdom, ready, glad to follow wherever he should lead. Yet so much of herself, of her vital force, had gone into the building up of Storm that sometimes a realization of what was about to happen stabbed through her dreaming like a sharp pain. For twenty years this had been her world, and she was about to leave it. Often, as she passed among her young orchard trees, she laid a hand upon them yearningly, as a mother might touch children with whom she was about to part.

In all her planning, there was only one problem that baffled her, a new problem: Mag Henderson. It was difficult to arrange a future for Mag Henderson.

"I shall simply have to leave it to Jacques. He will know what to do with her," she decided, with a thrill at the thought of her coming dependence. It is only strength that realizes to the full the joy of leaning.

Mag and her child were both thriving under the care lavished upon them at Storm. They had been established in a room of the long-disused guest-wing, where young Jemima might keep a capable if impersonal eye upon their welfare. But Jacqueline, somewhat to her sister's surprise, had promptly relieved her of all responsibility with regard to the baby, and was doing her best to relieve the mother of responsibility also. From the first she regarded the child as her own personal possession, neglecting in its behalf the various colts and puppies which had hitherto occupied most of her waking moments.

The girl had a fund of maternal instinct that sat oddly upon her careless, madcap nature. It was a queer and rather a touching thing to Philip Benoix to see this young tomboy running about the place with an infant tucked casually under her arm or across her shoulder; and to Jemima, for some reason, it was rather a shocking thing.

"She's perfectly possessed by the child, always bathing it or dressing it or something, just as she used to do with dolls. You know we couldn't make her give up dolls till a year or two ago. She is actually persuading Mag to wean it, Philip," complained Jemima, who had no reserves with her friend, "so that she can keep it in her room at night. Did you ever hear of such a thing? A squalling infant that would much rather be with its mother! Isn't it—unseemly of her?"

But Philip did not find it unseemly. "She's growing up, that's all," he said, looking at his young playmate and pupil with eyes newly observant.

Since his acceptance of the Storm parish, Philip had supplanted all other tutors to Kate's children, and was "finishing" their education with an attention to detail not possible in even the best of girls' finishing schools.

Mag had needed little persuasion to give over the care of her child to Jacqueline. She was not lacking in animal instinct, and those who advocated taking the child from her permanently would have found a fury to deal with. But she had also the ineradicable laziness of the "poor white," and it took effort to keep the baby up to the standard of Storm cleanliness. If one of the young ladies chose to take this effort off her hands, so much the better. Besides, it was Jacqueline who had kissed her.

Her temporary interest in the novel state of maternity was soon superseded by an interest still more novel and far more absorbing—the passion for dress.

Even in her abject poverty, there had been something noticeable about Mag Henderson, aside from mere prettiness. Her print frocks, while often ragged and rarely clean, fitted her figure very neatly, and she managed effects with a bit of ribbon and a cheap feather that might have roused the envy of many a professional milliner. Now that she had become the possessor of several cast-off dresses of Jemima's and Jacqueline's, her pleasure in them was a rather piteous thing to see. As her strength rapidly returned, under the influence of care and good feeding, she became absorbed in the task of altering these treasures to fit herself. For this she showed such aptitude and taste that Jemima spoke to her mother about it.

"I believe I've found what Mag is meant for—dressmaking."

Kate gave her daughter a delighted hug. "You clever Blossom! What should I do without you? We'll give Mag a profession. That solves the problem. Write to town at once for patterns and material, and set her to work. Teach her all you can, and whatever you do, now that she is getting strong, keep her busy."

Mrs. Kildare was a firm believer in the adage with regard to Satan and idle hands.

Jemima nodded responsibly. As it happened, this suggestion fitted in very well with certain schemes of her own. Like all good generals, she realized that equipment plays a vital part in war; and little as her mother realized it, the recent "party" was the opening move in a well-thought-out campaign. Jemima had no idea of passing her entire life in the role of exiled princess; and since her mother evidently did not realize certain of the essential duties of motherhood, she intended to supply deficiencies herself.

So the voice of the sewing-machine began to hum through the old house like a cheerful bumble-bee, and Mag entered upon what was certainly the happiest period of her career. Laces, silks, fine muslins—these had the effect upon her developing soul that a virgin canvas has upon the painter. Her fingers wrought with them eagerly, deftly, achieving results which astonished Jemima, herself a dressmaker of parts. Her attitude toward Mag lost something of its cool patronage. She had always great respect for ability.

It was perhaps her absorption in Mag's efforts and the approaching campaign which blinded her keen young eyes to certain changes which had taken place in her mother. She did notice that she spent more time than usual in the juniper-tree eyrie; and one night when the three sat as usual in the great hall, busy with books and sewing, she suddenly realised that her mother had been reading for an hour without once turning her page.

"Mother's got something on her mind. I wonder why she doesn't consult me," she thought, characteristically; but at the moment she had too many weighty affairs on her own mind to give the matter her usual attention.

Occasionally Kate wandered into the sewing-room in the rather vague way that had come to her recently, quite unlike her usual brisk alertness.

"What are you up to, you and Mag?" she asked on one of these occasions. "You seem to be turning out garments by the wholesale." She fingered the dainty pile of fineries on the bed. "What a pretty petticoat! And a peignoir to match. How grand they are! And what's this—no sleeves in it, no waist to speak of—Why, it's a ball-dress! Where in the world have you ever seen a ball-dress, Jemmy girl?"

"In a magazine." Jemima spoke rather anxiously, with a mouth full of pins. "Does it look all right, Mother? Did you use to wear as—as little as that at a ball?"

"Well, not quite as little, perhaps," murmured Kate—the frock in her hand was of the Empire period. "Fashions change, however, and it looks very pretty. But what do you need with such a dress at Storm, dear?"

The girl said rather tensely, "Mother, do you expect Jacqueline and me to spend the rest of our lives at Storm?"

Kate's eyes dropped. "No," she answered in a low voice. She wondered whether the time had come to make the announcement she dreaded.

"Well, then!" said Jemima with a breath of relief. "You see I believe in being forehanded. Young ladies in society need lots of clothes, don't they?"

"You are not exactly young ladies in society."

"Not yet. But we mean to be," said Jemima, quietly.

Kate winced. She had not forgotten it, the thing her daughter called "society"; the little, cruel, careless, prurient world she had left far behind her and thought well lost. To Jemima it meant balls and beaux and gaiety. To her it meant the faces of women, life-long friends, turned upon her blank and frozen as she walked down a church aisle carrying the child she had named for her lover. Wider, kinder worlds were open to her children, surely, the world of books, of travel, of new acquaintance. But the thing Jemima craved, the simple, trivial, pleasure-filled neighborhood life that made her own girlhood bright to remember—of this she had deprived her children forever.

She caught the girl to her in a gesture of protection that was almost fierce. "What does it matter? Haven't you been happy with me, you and Jacqueline? Hasn't your mother been enough for you, my darling?"

Jemima submitted to the embrace with a certain distaste. "Of course. Don't be a goose, Mother dear! There'll never be any place I love as well as Storm—" (Kate winced again)—"or anybody I love as well as you. But we've our position in the world to think of, we Kildares," she ended, with the stateliness of a duchess.

"The world? Kentucky's a very small part of the world, dear."

"It happens to be the part we live in," said Jemima, unanswerably. "And ever since there was a Kentucky, there have been Kildares at the top of it. I do wish," she freed herself gently, "that you wouldn't always feel like embracing me when I've just done my hair! You're as bad as Jacky."

"Forgive me," said Kate humbly, releasing her. "So you can't be happy without 'society,' Jemmy? Parties don't always mean pleasure, my little girl."

"I know that—" Jemima spoke soberly. "I don't believe I'm going to have a very good time at parties. Jacqueline is. I don't know why—" her voice was quite impersonal. "I'm prettier than she is, really, and lots cleverer, but Jacky gets all the beaux. Even that author man, though you'd think.... Queer, isn't it?" She put her wistful question again: "Mother, do you think it pays to be clever?"

Kate, with a pang at the heart for this clear-eyed child of hers, answered as best she could this plaint of clever women since the world began. "Certainly it pays. Clever people usually get what they want."

"They get it, yes," mused the girl. "But it doesn't seem to come of its own accord. And things are nicer if they come of their own accord." She gave a faint sigh. "However, we must do what we can. And of course people don't go to parties, or give them, just to have a good time."

"No?" murmured Kate. "Why, then?"

"To make friends," explained the girl, patiently. "You see Jacky and I have to make our own friends."

Kate's eyes smote her suddenly with compunction, and she leaned her head against her mother's arm, quite impulsively for Jemima. "Not that I'm blaming you, Mummy. You've done the best you know how for us, and this is going to be my affair. It's all quite right for you to be a hermit, if you like. You're a widow, you've had your life. But Jacky and I aren't widows, and if we keep on this way, we'll never have a chance to be."

She was surprised by her mother's sudden chuckle. Jemima was never intentionally amusing.

"So," she finished, "Professor Jim is going to help us all he can."

"What! Jim Thorpe to the rescue again?" Kate could not accustom herself to the thought of this shy, awkward, scholarly man, the least considered of her girlhood adorers, in the rôle of social sponsor to her children.

"I asked him," explained Jemima, "whether he did not know all the worth while people in Lexington and thereabouts, and he said he did. So he is going to see that they invite us to their balls and things. Of course, we shall have to do our share, too. And then," she added with a hesitating glance, "I thought perhaps we might go to New York some day, and visit our father's aunt Jemima."

"That is an idea you may put out of your head at once," said Kate, quietly. "Your father's aunt and I are not on friendly terms."

"I know. I've often wondered why." She paused, but Kate's face did not encourage questioning. "She's very rich, and old, and has no children. Oughtn't we to make friends with her?"

"Jemima!" said her mother, sharply.

The girl looked at her in genuine surprise. "Have you never thought of that? Well, I think you should have, for our sakes. Even if you and she aren't good friends, need that make any difference with Jacky and me? You see, Mother dear, it is we who are really Kildares, not you."

Kate turned abruptly and left the room, more hurt than she cared to show. Sometimes the paternal inheritance showed so strongly in Jemima as to frighten her; the same fierce pride of race, the same hardness, the same almost brutal frankness of purpose. A terrifying question rose in her mind. When they heard the truth about her, as hear it they soon must, would her children he loyal to her? Would they understand, and believe in her? As the girl had said, they were Kildares, and she was not.

So far, despite the frequently urged advice of Philip, she had kept them in ignorance of the facts of their father's death. They knew that he had been killed by a fall from his horse. They knew, too, that Philip's father was in the penitentiary, a "killer" as the phrase goes in a hot-blooded country where many crimes are regarded as less forgivable than homicide. But to connect the two tragedies had never occurred to them, and the isolation of their life, passed almost entirely among inferiors and dependents, had made it possible to keep the truth from them. It would not be possible much longer.

But once more the mother postponed her moment of confession. It was the one cowardice of her life.

CHAPTER XII

The fact that, while the countryside had been astir for weeks with rumors of Jacques Benoix' impending release, her daughters were quite unaware of them was evidence of the Madam's complete sovereignty over her realm. It would have been a brave man or woman who dared to gossip of Mrs. Kildare's affairs with her children. They remained unconscious of the undercurrent of excitement and speculation in the atmosphere about them. In time, mention of the pardon and reference to the old-time scandal it revived, was made in the newspapers; but these papers failed to reach the reading-table at Storm, and the girls did not miss them. Kate had never encouraged the reading of newspapers in her household, finding the monthly reviews cleaner and more reliable; and indeed the doings of people in the far-off world were less real to Jemima and Jacqueline than episodes in such novels as their mother read aloud by the evening lamp, while one girl sewed and the other lost herself in those dreams of youth which are such "long, long dreams."

They wondered a little, it is true, over Kate's frequent absences from home, and over the defection of Philip.

"He hasn't been here for days, and he used to come every evening," complained Jacqueline, always his sworn ally and companion. "No time for riding, or music, or even lessons—not that I'm complaining of that! But he's never been too busy for us before."

The fact was that Philip dared not trust himself at Storm just yet, not until he had accustomed himself to the immediate thought of Kate Kildare as his mother.

"Philip looks a little queer, too—sort of hollow about the eyes," mused Jemima, the observant. "Still, he always was rather a solemn person."

"No such thing, Jemmy!" cried Jacqueline, who could bear no criticism of the thing or person she loved. "He's positively giddy sometimes when I have him alone. Anyway, wouldn't you be solemn yourself, if you had a father in the penitentiary?"

"He ought to be used to it by this time. No, I don't believe it is that. I believe it is mother."

"What do you mean—'mother'?"

"Oh, nothing. Only"—Jemima severely bit off a thread—"I do wish mother'd grow wrinkled or—or fat, or something, like other people's mothers."

"Why, Jemmy Kildare!" cried the other, shocked. "How can you say such a thing? Mother's the most beautiful person in the world!"

"Exactly. If I'm not mistaken, Philip thinks so too."

"Well, why shouldn't he? That's nothing to be solemn about."

The other smiled an enigmatical smile.

"Stop looking like that horrid Mona Lisa. You mean—" Jacqueline stared, then shouted with laughter. "Blossom, you're too silly! Of course mother's the most beautiful person in the world, but after all she is—mother! She's old."

"Remember Henry Esmond."

"Pooh! That's in a novel. Why, Philip might as well get up a romantic passion for—for the Sistine Madonna."

"Which would be exactly like him," commented Jemima; but Jacqueline dismissed the absurdity from her mind with another laugh.

From day to day now, Kate put off the breaking of her news. "Not yet," she pleaded with her better judgment. "I will wait till everything is settled."

She waited a day too long.

Jemima had driven down to the crossroads store for some pressing necessity of the sewing-room. Like many country stores, it combined the sale of groceries, fishing-tackle, hardware, dry-goods, and other commodities with the sale of wet-goods, the latter being confined to the rear portion of the establishment, opening upon a different road from the front portion.

The proprietor's wife, who usually managed the dry-goods and groceries' section, happened to be absent at the time, and the proprietor's unaccustomed efforts to find the buttons Jemima needed aroused her quick impatience.

"Never mind—let me find them myself, Mr. Tibbits," she urged. "I'll put them down in your book. There's a customer in the back store. Do go and attend to him."

Tibbits meekly obeyed, murmuring, "You might find them buttons on the shelf with the canned goods, or then agin they might be under the counter behind them bolts of mosquito-bar."

So it happened that Jemima was on her knees behind the counter, quite invisible, when two women in sunbonnets entered, deep in a congenial discussion of their betters, such as might have been heard in a dozen homes in the vicinity that day. They had failed to recognize the buggy at the door as a Storm equipage.

"What I want to know is how's she ever goin' to manage with the two of them at once. They do say the young parson's sort of took his father's place with her."

"Laws! I should think she'd be ashamed. Her old enough to be his mother!"

"No, she ain't, either. She wa'n't twenty, nothin' like, when Mr. Kildare brought her here, and the French doctor's boy must a-been about ten then. Ten years or less ain't such a heap of difference, not when you hold your looks the way she does. Anyway, they been seen kissin'."

"You don't say!"

The informer nodded, pursing her lips. "It come to me pretty straight. That old nigger Zeke, who does chores about, seen 'em with his own eyes, and tol' me about it next day when he was doin' some work in my patch. Said he caught 'em kissin' and just carryin' on, right in the public road."

"The idea! What for do you s'pose they want the father pardoned out, then? She got up the petition herself. Laws, what a mix-up! I shouldn't think she'd dare have anything to do with either of them. Don't look good, does it? Him killin' her husband and all."

It was here that the girl behind the counter, flushed and furious and just about to speak, suddenly lost her color.

"There was some that never believed he done it, Miz Sykes. If you'd ever known the French doctor—always so sort of soft and gentle in his ways, didn't believe in huntin' rabbits unless for food, used to doctor animals just as if they was folks. He didn't seem the sort of man to make a killer. But there! You never can tell with for'ners. And Kildare wa'n't the sort of man to let his wife go gallivantin' round the country with a lover, that's certain. We was s'prised he stood it long as he did. Oh, I ain't sayin' Dr. Benoix done his killin' in cold blood! He prob'ly done it in self-defense. The gentlest critter'll fight if it's got to. But killin' it certainly was. No axdent about that!"

They went toward the back store, still talking, unaware of the white-lipped girl who slipped out from behind the counter and gained the refuge of her buggy with trembling knees.

Her knees might tremble, but her lips did not. They were set in a straight, grim line, and her brows met over eyes that had grown almost black. It would have been difficult to recognize in this stricken face the pink-and-white Dresden prettiness that had won her the sobriquet of "Apple Blossom."

An old man, fumbling at his cap as she passed, suddenly paused and stared after the buggy, aghast. He thought for the moment that he had seen the ghost of Basil Kildare.

She went straight to her mother's office, a small room opening off the great hall. She opened the door without knocking, and closed it after her.

"One moment, please, I am busy," murmured Kate, glancing up from her desk in surprise. She was not often interrupted so unceremoniously. But instantly she rose to her feet. She had no need to ask what had happened. The girl's face told her.

"Mother!" Jemima's voice was hoarse. "Is it true that—Philip's father—is coming out of the penitentiary?"

Kate inclined her head, paling.

"And that you are getting him out?"

"Philip and I together."

"Why?"

Kate did not answer. She was struggling to collect her wits for this sudden necessity.

Jemima came quite close, searching her face with curious grimness; and Kate saw the resemblance the old man had seen, and shivered.

"Mother, that was not the only news I heard at the store. I overheard some women talking. They said—"

"Surely we need not concern ourselves with village gossip, my child!" Kate was fighting for time.

But the appeal to the girl's pride went for once unheeded. "If they lied," she said tensely, "they must be punished for it. If they did not—Mother, what they said was that my father was not killed by accident. They said the man who killed him was Dr. Benoix. They said—why."

Kate moistened her lips. The time had come to speak, to explain what she could, to lie if necessary—anything to wipe out of her child's face that look of frozen horror.

But her tongue refused her bidding. She was hypnotized by the realization of her own utter folly. To have left such a discovery to chance! To have hoped that some impossible luck would keep her daughters in ignorance of her tragedy—and this in a rural community where nothing is ever forgotten, where every sordid detail of its one great scandal had been for years a household word!

The two stared at each other. Slowly the ruthless inquiry in the girl's eyes changed into fear, into a very piteous dismay. "Can't you deny—anything?" she whispered at last. "Mother! say it isn't so. I'll believe you."

She began to cry; not weakly with hidden face, but as a man cries, painful tears rolling unheeded down her cheeks, her shoulders heaving with hard sobs.

It came to Kate that never since her babyhood had she seen this child of hers in tears. She held out her arms, infinitely touched. "My dear, my baby!" she said. "Come here to Mother."

But the girl avoided her touch with a sort of shrinking. "All these years we've been trusting you, loving you, almost worshiping you—and you were that sort! Oh, Mother! Your husband's murderer—and his son coming and going about our house as if he were our brother. Those women said something about you and Philip, too,—but never mind that now. Will you tell me the truth, please? Before my father's death, you and—that man—loved each other?"

"Yes, Jemima, but—"

The girl silenced her. "And now that he is coming out of prison, you will go on—being lovers?"

Her mother answered quietly, "I shall marry him, dear, if that is what you mean."

Without another word, the girl turned and went out of the room. Kate hurried after her. "Wait, daughter, I haven't finished. There are some things I must tell you. Where are you going?"

"To tell Jacqueline."

Kate cried out, "No, not Jacqueline! She's too young. Wait, please—"

She followed up the stairs, commanding, pleading. "Wait! I prefer to tell her myself. Please, please! Jemima, do you hear me? I insist."

Jemima never paused. "My sister must know the truth. I owe that much to my father. Young or not, Jacqueline is a Kildare," she said stonily at the door of her room; and shut her mother out into the world of people who were not Kildares.

All that morning the Madam, greatly to the bewilderment of her household, wandered about the house in utter idleness, never stopping; saying to herself reasonably, "I must find something to do. Now is the time to be doing something;" wondering with that helpless, childlike egotism of people in great distress, how the sun happened to be shining so brightly out-of-doors, the birds singing quite as usual.

Invariably her footsteps came back to the door of the room that had been the nursery. It was there the two tiny cribs had stood, the rocking-horse, the doll's house, the little desks at which her babies had lisped their first lessons. It was there they murmured together now through the endless morning, discussing her fate, sitting in final judgment upon their mother.

She could not keep away from the door. Sometimes she pressed against it soundlessly, as if the passionate throbbing of her heart might send a wave through to reach them, to help them understand. How else could she help them to understand? Only by blackening now the memory of a father who was not there to defend himself, a father whom she herself had taught them to respect and to love.

It was an expedient that did not once occur to Kate Kildare.

"My little girls!" she whispered to herself. "My poor little frightened babies!"

If only she had been more with them, had taught them to know her better! In those hours she accused herself of neglecting her children, of leaving them too much to the care of others while she absented herself upon their business. She begrudged, as mothers of dead children begrudge, every necessary moment she had spent away from them. What things were they saying in there, what things were they thinking of their mother?

At last she went upon her knees beside the door, her ear shamelessly at the keyhole. Jemima heard her there, and opened.

She said coldly, "You might have come in, if you wanted so much to hear what we were saying. The door was not locked. We have been deciding where we shall go."

Kate got with difficulty to her feet. "Where you shall go?" she repeated.

Then she thought she understood. Jemima had remembered the terms of her father's will, by which in case of her mother's re-marriage the property of Storm was forfeit.

"Oh, but daughter!"—the words tumbled over each other in their eagerness to be out. "You need not trouble about that! Losing Storm won't matter. You lose only what your father left, and I have doubled that—trebled it. Besides, there is the little property that came to me from my parents. I've always meant, when I married, to give you more than my marriage would cost you. That is why I have worked so hard, and saved. Perhaps you thought me miserly, grasping? I know people do. But that is why. The money is to be yours, all yours and Jacqueline's—at once, not after I die. We shall need very little, Jacques and I. Just a start somewhere—"

The girl stopped the hurrying words with a gesture of some dignity. "We have not thought about the money part yet, Mother. We were simply deciding where to live now."

"To live?" The words were puzzled.

"Yes. Surely you don't expect us to go on living with you and our father's murderer?"

Kate groped at the wall behind her for support. Here was a thing she had not thought of. She had known that she might lose her children's respect, perhaps, temporarily, their love; but she had counted unconsciously upon the force of daily habit, of companionship, of her own personal magnetism, to win back both, as she had won them from others. Deprived of their companionship, what chance had she? They were lost to her, utterly. Yet not even in that bitter moment did it occur to her that she might fail the man who was coming back to her out of his living death.

She said tonelessly, "You are very young to leave your mother. Where could you go?"

The girl had her answer ready. "To my father's aunt Jemima. Now I understand why you and she have not been on good terms. I understand many things now. When she hears that we are leaving you, and why, I think she will be glad to offer us a home."

Kate bowed her head, "And Jacqueline? Is she, too, willing to leave me?"

At this there was a cry from inside the door, and a dishevelled, sobbing figure flung itself into Kate's arms and clung, desperately.

"No, no, no! Don't let her make me. I won't, I won't! She's been saying—oh, terrible things, Mummy! I tried not to listen. She said you didn't love us, you loved him. She said that when he comes—that man, Philip's father—you wouldn't want us around any more. But I know better. No matter who comes, you'll want me, you'll want your baby! Won't you, Mother? Dearest, darlingest Mother!"

"Jacky, don't be so weak," commanded her sister, sternly. "Remember what I told you. Remember our father."

"But I never knew our father. What do I care about him? It's Mummy I want. Whoever she loves, I love. I don't care what she's done! I wouldn't care if she'd killed Father herself—"

"Child, hush, hush!" whispered the trembling woman.

"I wouldn't! I'd just know he needed killing. There, there—" she had her mother's head on her breast now, fondling it, crooning over it as if it were Mag's baby. "Look—you've made her cry!" She stamped a furious foot at her sister. "What are you staring at with your cold, wicked eyes? You told me she was a bad woman—my mother! If she is, then I choose to be bad myself. I'd rather be bad and like her than good as—God. Now, then! Get out of here, you Jemmy Kildare!"

Jemima went. Sternly she closed her door upon the clinging pair, shutting both out together into the world of people who were not Kildares. But they were together.

CHAPTER XIII

The night before Jacques Benoix' release found Kate Kildare lying sleepless within sight of a grim gray wall that blocked the end of the street upon which her window opened. A great fatigue was upon her, a fatigue more of the spirit than of the body. For years, it seemed to her, she had been fighting the world alone, unaided; and now that victory was within her grasp it tasted strangely like defeat.

She tried to realize that the gray wall no longer stood between her and happiness; was a menace that with the sun's rays would disappear out of her life like so much mist. But the effort was useless. The aura of shadow that hung always over that place wrapped her in its suffocating miasma, became part of the very air she breathed.

She had taken rooms in an old hostelry near the railroad station, wishing to avoid the curious recognition that would have been inevitable in the town's one good hotel. She was occupying what had been known in days of former prosperity as the bridal suite. This consisted of a dingy parlor, in which on the morrow Philip was to perform the ceremony that made her his father's wife, and of the room in which she lay, its walls dimly visible in the light of an arc-lamp just outside the window, gay with saffron cupids who disported themselves among roses of the same complexion. Over the mantel-piece of black iron hung an improbably colored lithograph of lovers embracing.

Kate found the effect of these decorations ironic, curiously depressing. She was not usually so responsive to environment.

Very near her now Jacques must be lying sleepless, too; watching for the dawn as she was watching—but with what eagerness, what trembling hope! Her depression shamed her. She tried in vain to conjure up a consoling vision of the man she had loved so long. The figure that came to her mind was more Philip than his father. She put it from her impatiently, angrily.

"I believe I'm developing nerves," she thought.

Her eyes, weary of the meaningless, leering antics of the cupids, presently came to rest on the ceiling above her bed, which appeared to be a-flutter with small pieces of pasteboard. She made them out to be business cards, evidently momentoes of passing knights of the road who had amused themselves by sailing their credentials heavenward, each with a transfixing pin. Kate smiled a little, oddly cheered by these reminders of carefree, commonplace humanity which had lain sleepless also in that dreary bridal chamber. The knights of the road were better company for her thoughts than brides who might have dreamed there dreams to which she had forfeited her right; young, innocent brides who were not fighting their way to happiness over the happiness of their children.

Now and again a train came thundering past her window, till the old house shook to its foundation. For these she listened, tense and quivering. One of them would be bearing away from her forever the first-born of her children....

While she made ready for her journey, Jemima had also made ready for a journey, grimly; Jacqueline wandering between the two like a woebegone young specter, all her gaiety dissolved in tears. Mrs. Kildare herself had written to her husband's aunt, for the first time in years, explaining briefly her own intentions and Jemima's attitude with regard to them. The reply had come by telegraph, not to her, but to Jemima. Kate did not ask to see it. Without comment, she had observed the girl's preparations for immediate departure. She could not trust herself to speak.

It was known throughout the countryside by this time that the French doctor was indeed coming out of prison, and that the Madam intended to marry him. The news brought Professor Thorpe post-haste to Storm, pale, but ready as ever with his services.

"I never knew Dr. Benoix well, but now I shall make up for lost time," he said quietly. "What are your arrangements? Will you need a best man, or anything of that sort? Here I am."

Kate thanked him with tears in her eyes, declining.

"Jacques will prefer to see nobody, just at first, but Philip and me, I think. But if you could do something with Jemmy? She will listen to you, if to anybody. Make her understand, somehow—make her believe—" Her choking voice could not finish, and Thorpe silently patted her shoulder.

He had done his loyal best with the girl already, without success. He was handicapped by his promise not to say anything that would shake Jemima's passionate pride and faith in her father.

"I have nothing further to do with my mother's affairs," was her stony answer to all his arguments. "The day she brings that man into my father's house, I leave it, naturally; and I shall do my best to make Jacqueline leave it. That is all."

Her packing went on apace. On the last morning she found a check-book at her breakfast plate.

"Do you mean me to have this, Mother?" she asked in the coldly courteous voice she had used toward Kate since her discovery.

"Yes. There will be a deposit to your credit on the first day of each month until you come of age, when a third of my property will be turned over to you."

The girl flushed deeply, but said nothing except "Thank you." She would have liked to refuse all aid from her mother; but after all, was she not being deprived of her rightful inheritance? Let her mother make what reparation was possible.

To the last moment Kate hoped for some sign of relenting, struggled to find some explanation, some plea, that would draw the girl to her. But those who have formed the habit of ruling, suffer one disadvantage among their fellows: it is impossible for them to become suppliants.

"Good-by, Mother."

When she started for the train that was to take her to Frankfort, Jemima followed her to the door.

"You will be here when—we return, to-morrow?" Kate's steady voice hid very successfully her agonized suspense.

"No, Mother."

"Ah!... Then your aunt expects you? She knows what train to meet?"

"Yes, thank you. Professor Thorpe has made all the arrangements. He will put me on the train in Lexington."

Kate bent over her child. "Good-by, my daughter."

Even then the tremble of a lip, a tear on an eyelash, might have brought them into each other's arms. But neither was the sort of woman who weeps in a crisis. They kissed, their lips quite cool and firm.

It was Jacqueline who did the weeping for both of them, and insisted upon sitting in her mother's lap all the way to the station, so that Kate had some difficulty in driving....

Such were the scenes and memories that flitted through Kate's brain all the night before her wedding; and the night was long.

Near morning she slept at last, and dreamed. Somebody stood beside her, smiling down—a stranger, she thought him, till she met his eyes.

"Jacques!" she cried, starting up with hands outstretched. "You, Jacques!"

The consoling vision for which she yearned had come at last; but not as she had seen it before, not in the prime of manhood, strong to hear her burdens. This was an elderly man, stooping, gray-haired, frail. Only the eyes were the same, blue as a child's in his wan face, warm as a caress. He spoke to her. He seemed to promise something.

She awoke with his name on her lips, and saw that it was morning. Peace had come to her with the vision. She faced a new day, a new life, serene and unafraid. What was it that he had promised? No matter. She would ask him when she saw him, soon now.

Smiling at her own credulity, she began with hasty hands to dress.

Out in the street she heard the crisp trot of horses, stopping beneath her window. Looking down, she saw one of her own vehicles, a light phaeton drawn by a pair of young blooded colts she had sent in to Frankfort some days earlier, that they might be rested and fresh for the day's drive back to Storm, which was to be their wedding journey. She looked them over critically.

"They are in excellent condition. We ought to make it in eight hours," she thought. "How he will love to drive those pretty fillies! He was always so fond of horses."

Philip knocked on her door. His voice said, "I am ready now."

It had been her idea to send him for Jacques alone, so that father and son might have a little time together before they came to her. She opened to him and stood, a white-clad vision, framed in the doorway of that dreary bridal suite.

"You see, I am ready too," she said, blushing a little. "Do you like my dress, Philip?"

He stared at her without speaking. His eyes were heavy and rimmed with shadow. For Philip, too, the night had been long.

She asked again rather anxiously, "Do I look nice, Philip? It doesn't seem too—young for me, this white?" She was in need of all her vanity just then. The mirror had shown her a face pale and luminous, not less beautiful—she knew that—but far older than the face whose memory Jacques carried with him into prison. She was obsessed by the fear that he would not recognize her.

But for once Philip's comforting admiration failed her. "I don't know how you look," he muttered, and turned abruptly away.

She stared after him in surprise. "Dear Phil—he must be very much upset to speak to me like that!" she thought.

She went into the parlor, and busied herself arranging flowers she had ordered to make the place less cheerless for the little wedding. The proprietress came in presently with more flowers, a box bearing the card of James Thorpe. The woman was in a flutter of excitement.

"They's two reporters in the office already, Mrs. Kildare," she said, emphasizing the name, "and more on the way, I reckon. If I'd 'a guessed who you were, I'd 'a' had a weddin'-cake baked, I surely would. I've been on your side from the very first!"

"Thank you," said Kate, wearily.

"We've often had folks stayin' here to meet a friend who was comin' out,"—she jerked a significant thumb over her shoulder toward the penitentiary—"but never any one so famous, and never a weddin' right at the very gate, so to speak," she added unctuously.

Kate winced. She had registered under a false name, hoping thus to escape notoriety. Now she saw the folly of any such hope. From the first, no detail of her unfortunate romance had escaped notoriety.

"Let the reporters come up," she sighed. "Perhaps if I speak to them now they will let us alone afterwards."

She was speaking to them, when she heard in the street outside the familiar, crisp trot of the colts from Storm. Her voice broke off in the middle of a sentence, and the two reporters, exchanging glances, tactfully withdrew.

Kate was suddenly very weak in the knees. She stood by the window for a moment, clinging to the curtains, with closed eyes. "I must be prepared for changes," she said to herself. "It is many years, many years—"

She opened her eyes and looked down. Philip had alighted, throwing the lines to a porter. As he crossed the sidewalk, he glanced up at her window and she saw his face. No one followed him.

She met him at the head of the stairs. "Where is he, Philip?" Her voice was very quiet.

"Gone."

He led her into the room, closing the door in the faces of the eager reporters.

"Father caught a train that went through Frankfort just after dawn," he said tonelessly.

She cried out. "Just after dawn!" It was the hour of her vision. "He did not get our letters, then? He did not know that we were coming to take him home? There was some mistake!"

"There was no mistake. From the first he did not mean to see us. The warden said so."

"Where has he gone?"

"I do not know. The warden would not tell me."

Kate ran into her room, and returned with a hat and coat. "He will tell me," she said. "Come."

The warden received them in his private office, grave with sympathy.

"I understand what a blow this is to you," he said. "I argued with him to make him change his intention—Dr. Benoix was as nearly my personal friend as was possible under the circumstances. But from his first coming here he was determined never to be a burden upon his son—nor upon you, Mrs. Kildare. He felt, rightly or wrongly, that he had already darkened your life too much. It was for that reason he declined to write to you or to receive letters from you. He did not wish to keep alive a—a sentiment which would be better dead."

Kate gasped, "He said that?"

"Yes," said the warden, gently. "He asks that you forget him, if it is possible, or that you think of him as one who has died."

After a moment she said in her resolute voice, "You must tell us where he is."

The other shook his head. "I cannot, and I would not if I could. He has the right to make his life as he chooses. But you may be sure that wherever he has gone, there will be a place for him." The warden's voice changed, "He will be missed here. My business is not a sentimental one. It does not soften a man. We see a great deal of evil in this place, and very little that is good, and it is easy to—to question the ways of Providence, if there is any belief left in Providence. But when men like Benoix come to us, as occasionally they do come, the old-fashioned idea of a guardian Providence becomes—well, more tangible. There seems to be a reason back of such miscarriage of justice. I believe," he said rather haltingly, "that Benoix was sent here, not because he had any need of prison, but because prison had need of him."

He told them something of the doctor's prison life; of an epidemic that had raged through the wards, when he offered his services to the jail physician and for many days and nights had gone without sleep in his efforts to assuage suffering; of women in the surgical wards who mentioned his name beside that of God in their prayers; of men to whom he had given new hope and a new outlook on life by curing them of obscure disease from which they had not known they suffered.

"I would have recommended him for pardon or parole years ago, but he forbade me. He said he had more opportunity for research here than elsewhere." The warden smiled. "By 'research' he meant help, of course, he held the modern theory that crime is always a thing for the surgeon's knife, or the physician, or the teacher, to handle. We let him practise his theories wherever possible, because he was of great assistance to us. He could do more with the prisoners than we could, being one of them. Whenever we had trouble with an inmate, his first punishment was Benoix. He did not often need a second. It is many years since the whipping-post, or the standing-irons, or solitary confinement, have been used in this place, as perhaps you know. Many of our prison reforms may be traced to Benoix' influence, though he will never get the credit of them. He said once, 'What is the use of making men desperate? What you want is to make them ashamed. And that comes from inside.' Young man," he turned to Philip, "convict or not, you need never be ashamed of your father."

"I never have been," said Philip.

They went away, each with a letter Jacques had left for them. Kate's was very short:

I have known always that you would come, and that I must not let you. I am going while I have the strength to go. Fill up your busy, useful life without me, Kate. I thank God that you have your children and my boy, whom you have made a man. Once I left him to your care. Now I leave you to his, without fear. He is worthy.

Do not trouble your great heart for me. I shall find my work in a world that is so full of people—work and friends, too. We cannot be together, you and I, but remember always that I am not far from you wherever I may go, never so far that any need of yours will not reach me.

Jacques.

She gave this letter, silently, to Philip, but he did not offer her his own. There were things his father had said to him in farewell not meant for other eyes to read; and for a long time they left him awed and silent.

CHAPTER XIV

Kate made the long drive back to Storm, which was to have been her wedding journey, with Philip beside her. They rarely spoke. Conversation was never necessary between them, and now both were busy with their thoughts. She drove, sitting erect as was her custom, her hands very light upon the lines, steadying the young horses now and then with a word, never urging or hurrying them; yet after a few coltish alarms and excursions they settled down to their work with a long, steady trot that ate up the miles like magic.—It was always a pleasure to Philip to see her drive. It was her great gift, he thought, settling men and horses alike to their stride.

They stopped for the nooning at a farmhouse where they were expected, and where their hostess met them eagerly at the gate. But when she saw who was Kate's companion, her face fell, and she hurried to her dining-room to remove from the table a large cake, decorated in candy roses. She asked no questions. There was that in the Madam's face which made questioning impossible.

After the meal and a brief rest for the horses, they drove on, still in silence, the colts trotting steadily now like old, sedate roadsters. Philip's thoughts were still too chaotic for speech. Disappointment, sorrow for his father, admiration, struggled with an unwilling relief, a secret gladness that made him sick with shame.

"Poor father! What am I thinking of!" he said to himself, angrily. "He may be ill, he may be without money. Why did I not ask more questions? Oh, I must find him somehow, I must! And yet—What a solution! She is here beside me. He will not take her from me. How did he know? I shall never have to call her 'mother.' He gives her to me. His whole life has been a sacrifice. What was it he wrote—'We must consider nothing now except her happiness, you and I, except her greatest good.' I wonder, I wonder—"

He dared not look at her often, but sat quite still through the long miles, thrilling to the touch of her skirts when they blew against his knees. The thoughts within him clamored so that sometimes he feared she must be aware of them.

But Kate had forgotten that he was there. Her eyes gazed straight before her down the white road, over which yellow August butterflies hovered like drifting flowers; across the dappled, fragrant fields of the wide valley they crossed to the hills, whose vanguard, Storm, was already to be distinguished by the pennant of smoke flying from its tip. She longed for her home with a great longing, as children who have been hurt yearn for the comfort of their mother's arms.

Her mind was too bruised, too weary for consecutive thought. Sometimes the dream she had at dawn came back to her.—How broken he was, how frail! It did not seem to her that she had seen only a vision. It was Jacques himself. She understood now what promise he had made her. He was indeed never so far away that any need of hers could fail to reach him. He was giving her back her child, giving her back the land she loved, the work she loved; he was giving her what he could of happiness. But he was taking with him the hope that had kept her young.

Storm stood out clearly now against its background of hills, and a cloud of dust approached down the road, which presently revealed the galloping figure of Jacqueline, waving a large bouquet.

"Your wedding bouquet, Mummy," she cried from afar off, with rather tremulous gaiety. "Welcome home! Welcome home!"

Then, as her eyes made out the second figure in the phaeton, her expressive face changed. "Why—it's only you, Philip? Where is he?"

Philip said huskily, "We do not know."

"You don't know! You—you haven't lost him?"

Philip nodded. To his surprise he found that he was sobbing, crying as he had not cried since he was a boy.

"Oh—oh!" gasped Jacqueline. Then, "Stop, please, Mummy. I want to get in and comfort Phil."

She turned her horse loose with a slap on the flank, and clambered in between them.

Jacqueline knew a great deal about comforting people. It was a knowledge that had been given to her with her warm lips, and her crooning voice, and her clinging, caressing hands. She said nothing, because she could think of nothing to say; but for the rest of the way Philip was aware of a young arm wound tight about his shoulders, and more than once of lips fluttering against his cheek. Jacqueline's kisses were like the dew from heaven, which falls alike upon the just and the unjust; none the less blessed, perhaps, for that.

Philip had more than his share of these attentions, because Kate did not seem to need them. She still drove silently, sitting upright, staring straight before her.

Once the girl leaned far out of the phaeton, and waved a handkerchief three times, as if she were signaling. There was an answering flutter from beneath the juniper-tree.

"Who is that in the eyrie?" It was the first time Kate had spoken for hours, and her voice seemed to come with a great effort.

"Why, it's the Blossom, Mother. She hasn't gone yet. She was waiting till the last possible moment, to be sure whether—whether Philip's father was with you. I promised to signal her yes or no."

Kate turned suddenly and looked at her. "Why did Jemima think he might not be with me?"

The girl answered very low, "Because—because she wrote to him."

The colts with a last gallant effort breasted the hill at a trot. At the door a wagon was waiting with a trunk in it, and Jemima stood beside it, dressed for traveling. But as they appeared, she dropped the satchel out of her hand and ran toward the phaeton.

"Bring brandy, Mag—be quick!" she called over her shoulder as she ran.

She had seen what the others had failed to notice: that her mother, still sitting upright with the lines in her hands, was quite unconscious.

CHAPTER XV

Years before, when gentle Mrs. Leigh turned her back forever upon the beloved Bluegrass town of her youth, and came to spend the remaining years of her life at Storm—for with all her ineffectiveness she was not the woman to leave her daughter alone in disgrace and sorrow—Kate had tried to make the strange country more homelike for her by building an Episcopal church. Meeting-houses of several denominations had been long established there; but to Mrs. Leigh, with Virginia and English antecedents, "church" meant candles on the altar, a vested choir, a rector in robes reading the familiar service of her childhood. She was willing to concede to Methodists, Baptists, Campbellites, other attendants of meeting-houses, a possible place in heaven; but hardly in the best society of heaven; and she was one of the people who cannot worship God comfortably except in the best society.

The church Kate built was small and plain—she had found her husband's estate heavily encumbered with debt. But it had its cross, its choir, and its rector, a scholarly old man who persuaded Philip into the ministry and who on his death was succeeded by him. And from the first it had its congregation. The farming people of that section of the State had come, or their immediate forebears had come, almost entirely from Virginia, so that the English service was as much a part of their traditions as of Mrs. Leigh's. The building of the first Episcopal church in that country did more to break down the enmity toward Basil Kildare's young widow than any of her patient efforts to win their friendship; and this despite the fact that she herself rarely entered it.

The little edifice stood in a grove of fine beeches between Storm and the crossroads village; a four-square structure of field boulders, with a modest steeple, and a gallery across the back for negroes, in the patriarchal Virginia fashion. The mistress of Storm saw to it that this gallery was well filled. The corner-stone bore an inscription that excited much comment in the community, as Kate intended it should:

Erected in Memory of Basil Kildare
By His Two Children

It was the first word of her answer to the world, and it had its weight.

"It says his two children. She wouldn't dare to tell a lie on stone!" was the current opinion.

Near the church was the rectory, one of those log-cabins boarded over and whitewashed, which are still quite common in Kentucky, sturdy mementoes of the sturdy pioneers whom they have outlived and will outlive for many a generation yet to come. Lilac, hollyhock, and hydrangea bloomed in season about this cabin, and it had a door-yard that made women linger enviously and men smile in scorn; for to these rough, hard-working, hard-living farmers it seemed that a young man might find better use for his leisure than the tending of flowers.

He had other weaknesses than flowers. The walls of his long living-room were lined with books, many of them "poetry-books," and the rector was reported to have read them all. Passers-by often heard him playing softly on his mother's old piano, and more than once he had been discovered in the kitchen, cooking his own dinner. The one servant he kept was an ancient negress addicted to the use of whisky and cocaine. To those who remonstrated with him for keeping the old woman, he explained that he got her very cheap because of her habits; but the community suspected other reasons, and despised him accordingly.

Their scorn of his "softness," however, failed to extend to the man himself. Different, they found him, reserved, a little cold, unless they happened to be in trouble; but never alien. For one thing, he had inherited from his father a gift that made "the French doctor" long remembered in that horse-raising community. It was an understanding of horses, indeed of all brute creatures, that amounted almost to wizardry. There was never a colt so unmanageable that he could not bring it to terms, without the aid of either whip or spur; never an equine ailment too subtle for him to discover and alleviate. At all hours of the day or night owners of sick beasts sent for the young rector as they had sent for his father, confident of willing assistance.

He had created his reputation by entering, against all protests, the stall of a crazed stallion which had just mangled its groom. "I want to look at his mouth," he explained. "Just as I thought! It's an ulcerated tooth. Give me my lancet. No wonder the poor beast was vicious!"

Philip had made the discovery among animals made by his father among men, that most wickedness may be traced to physical causes. He had also been heard to say, not very originally, that horses needed more care than people, because people had speech and religion to help them and horses had neither; a saying which deeply endeared him to a community that ranks its thoroughbreds with its wives.

Two other qualities of his offset, in the eyes of the neighborhood, the matter of the flowers, the poetry-books, and the cooking. He had courage, and he had a temper, both proved. A few years previously, during the "tobacco-war" which upset the State, when the entire countryside was terrified by the outrages of the Night-Riders who had taken justice into their own hands, after the fashion of the moribund Ku-Klux Klan, young Benoix alone, of all the pastors in his neighborhood, did not hesitate to denounce from his pulpit Sunday after Sunday the men who resorted to masked terrorism as sneaks, cowards, and murderers. And this, despite the fact that the majority of his congregation were in sympathy with the Night-Riders for the best of reasons—kinship. Indeed, more than one man who listened to him with a stolid face had worn the mask and wielded the whip and torch himself. Benoix knew it; they knew that he did. They knew also that no possible circumstance could persuade him to give up one of the names he suspected to the law he was determined to uphold.

Anonymous letters came to him, warning, insulting, threatening his personal safety. More than one advised him to go armed. His board of vestrymen themselves remonstrated, counseling moderation for fear of alienating the congregation. His reply became famous throughout the State.

"Look here!" he cried, his blue eyes suddenly ablaze. "You want me to shut up, do you? Then behave yourselves, and see that your sons behave themselves. I'm talking to you, and you, and you—" he pointed direct at several of his vestrymen. "I want you to understand that I'm a disciple of peace. And, by God, I'm going to have peace in this parish if I have to fight for it with my fists!"

Such a man was Philip Benoix, priest, dreamer, idealist, son of a convicted murderer, lover of the woman who for seventeen years had been faithful to his father. He believed his great devotion a secret. Probably the only person within twenty miles who had not guessed it long ago was Kate Kildare herself....

Some Sundays after his father's release from prison, Philip, striding across the rectory garden in gown and cassock, was aware of a subdued stir among the men who lounged at the church door, waiting for service to begin. A light surrey was approaching which he knew well, drawn by the Madam's favorite bay colts. It was the second Storm vehicle to arrive that morning. Jemima and Jacqueline were already within; Jemima at the organ, which she manipulated capably if unemotionally; Jacqueline marshaling her choir of farm boys and girls into a whispering, giggling semblance of order. In the gallery sat the usual quota of Storm servants, for Kate Kildare's household took its religion each week as faithfully as it took its tonics and calomel in due season.

With a throb of the heart, Philip realised that it must be his lady herself who drove those prancing bays. He thought over his sermon hastily.—Yes, it was good enough.

She drew the colts up on their haunches, flung the lines with a smile to the nearest bystander, and walked up the aisle with her free, swinging step, followed by a girl carrying a baby. The girl was Mag Henderson.

The sensation caused by this double appearance was immense. It was the first time many of the congregation had seen the Madam since the much-talked-of disappearance of Dr. Benoix, and they were eager to see how she took it. From all appearances she seemed to be taking it very calmly; a little paler than usual, perhaps; her eyes extraordinarily dark, but nothing to suggest the illness that had been rumored. Rather disappointed, they turned their eyes upon her companion; and then the whispering broke out like the buzzing of a swarm of angry bees.

Mrs. Kildare had brought Mag's baby to be baptized. Philip wondered why she had come without warning. He did not guess that only an impulse of sudden courage had brought her there at all. She remembered too keenly the last time she had come to church with a baby to be baptized.

That was why, perhaps, she so rarely honored with her presence the church she had built; but she could not explain this reluctance to Philip. "Church is too small for me," she said to him, airily. "My soul doesn't breathe between walls very well. I have to do my praying in the open."

It had long been her custom on Sunday mornings to ride among the deserted fields with her dogs, taking note of what had been accomplished during the week past, planning work for the week to come, visiting such of her tenants or laborers as were sick or incapacitated. Sometimes as she passed she heard Philip's voice in the pulpit, and stopped for a while to listen to him. It was no unusual thing for him to see her there, framed in the sunny square of the open doorway, sitting her restive horse, surrounded by dogs who leaped and gamboled eagerly, but in perfect silence, out of respect for the long whip she carried. At such moments his congregation nudged each other in sympathetic amusement. Without turning to see, they knew by his flush and his halting speech who was outside.

But to-day there was no flushing or faltering of speech. Unprepared as he was, the priest in Philip woke to the necessity, and in his message the messenger forgot himself. Noting the women's curious, hostile glances, the buzzing whispers, the stiff-necked anger of the men, several of whom did not enter the church at all, he laid aside the text he had prepared and spoke to his people directly and very simply of that most dramatic episode in history, when Christ said to the crowd in the streets, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone."

While he spoke, he watched the girl sitting beside Mrs. Kildare, and at the first sign of shrinking, of embarrassment, he would have slipped at once into another theme. But there was no shrinking in that pretty, empty face. Indeed, after the first few moments of shyness before so large an audience, the girl looked about her openly, bridling, pleased with the attention she was attracting in her new dress and with her new baby. If there was menace in those staring faces, the Madam was there to protect her. It was no new thing to the girl to be prayed over; this had come to be an attention she expected from preachers. Young as she was, there had been good reason for her leaving the town from which she came to Storm. But a whole sermon about herself, right out in church! It was a proud moment for Mag.

Benoix, his eyes on her face, sighed even as he spoke, realizing the probable hopelessness of Mrs. Kildare's effort.

The congregation was free to leave at the close of the regular service, without waiting for the christening. But it did not leave. For one thing, there was the Madam to be welcomed to church—excuse enough for those who needed excuse. To their shocked surprise the child was christened by the Madam's own name, "Katherine."

Afterwards, to each of the women who shook her hand, Kate said some such thing as this:

"You know Mag Henderson here, don't you? We've discovered that she is quite a wonderful dressmaker. Yes, she made the dress I have on, and those my girls are wearing. She is a stranger among us, too, so that of course we must find her plenty of work. That is only hospitable."

Kate knew her people when she appealed to their hospitality. Many a village gossip, many a virtuous farmer's wife who had pursed her lips and kept her skirts from degrading contact with the notorious Mag Henderson, found herself pledged to employ the Madam's protégée for her next dressmaking.

"It does beat all," Mrs. Sykes was heard to murmur helplessly, "how that woman gets folks to do whatever she wants 'em to! 'Birds of a feather,' I say. But there! If she's willin' to give that misbegotten child her own Christian name, it won't do for the rest of us to be too toploftical. And them girls," she added, "certainly do dress stylish."

Philip usually took his Sunday dinner at Storm, and the congregation had the further privilege of watching their rector drive away in the same surrey with the Madam and Mag, apparently upon the most intimate and cordial relations with Mag's infant.

Mrs. Kildare, more sensitive of disapproving eyes for her friends than for herself, suggested that he come home with Jemima and Jacqueline instead.

"I'm a little uneasy about the mare Jacqueline is driving," she said, for an excuse.

"Pooh! Jacqueline can handle anything I can," Philip smiled. "Besides, I want to speak to you about something in particular."

"You usually do," murmured Kate, teasingly. She found his open partiality for her society rather amusing.

He was silent until they had passed the long line of homeward-bound vehicles, drawn respectfully out of the Madam's way. Then he said in a low voice, "Henderson is back in his cabin. Did you know it?"

Low as he spoke, the girl on the back seat heard him. "Not Pappy?" she cried. "Oh, oh, he's come for me agin! Please don't let me go back to him, please don't! I don't want to, I don't want to!"

"Why?" demanded Kate, sharply. "Was he cruel to you, Mag?"

"No'm, he wa'n't. He was always real kind, even if he was drunk; never kicked me, nor cussed me, nor nuthin'. But I don't want to go back to him. I'd ruther stay with you. Hit don't matter so much about me—I'm spiled anyway—but I don't never want Pappy to git my baby!"

Kate gave Philip a puzzled glance, which he met gravely. "Let her explain to you," he said.

"Is it because you are more comfortable that you want to stay with me?" asked Mrs. Kildare. "Is it that?"

"That ain't all." The girl's hands were working together. "'Tain't safe for Pappy here, noways. Them Night Riders'll git him, shore. And he's so po'ly he couldn't stand a whippin'. It'd kill him. Oh, please, you make him go 'way, Miss Kate! Tell him I'll send him money soon as ever I git work, but make him go 'way. He shan't have my baby, he shan't!" She began to sob.

"There, there, Mag, don't be foolish. What would he want with your baby?"

"She's a gal."

Vaguely, understanding began to drift in to Kate. Her voice shook suddenly as she said, "What do you mean about the Night Riders getting your father? He is in no danger from them with you not there. It was you they threatened."

"No'm, 't were Pappy. That's how he come to run away. They got down on him fer makin' me do like I done."

"Making you—?" gasped Kate Kildare.

"Yes'm! It were him what found the men and brought 'em round. But it wa'n't no business of them Night Riders," said the girl resentfully. "I didn't mind. It were a easy way of makin' money, easier 'n workin'. Pappy's so po'ly, he ain't got the strength to work hisself. Only—" she began to cry again—"I know it ain't nice, and I don't want my baby should do that-a-way, not ever. I want she should grow up a lady, like you."

Kate was shivering uncontrollably. Over the brooding Sabbath stillness of her fields it seemed to her that a strange miasma was creeping, which shadowed the light of the sun. She had read of such horrors as this. She had thought of that strange traffic, the White Slave trade, as of some hideous, modern depravity that belonged to another and harsher world than her own. Yet here, almost within sight of the home that sheltered her children, here in the domain where her will was law, where she had believed herself cognizant of the doings of every man and woman and child—the thing had been going on unknown to her; the sacrifice of a little girl creature, not in the name of love (her tolerant mind found it difficult to condemn the sinning of stupid, healthy young human animals) but in the name of filial piety.—"Filial piety!" Always afterward the smug phrase was hideous to her.

"Well," said Philip, rather hoarsely, "what are we to do with this—this man?"

"Let the Night Riders have him, and welcome!"

But Mag intervened once more in her father's behalf. "No, no, they'd kill him, shore! He's so sickly. Don't you let 'em git him, Miss Kate, don't you! He's always been real kind to me, even when he's drunk. Don't you let 'em git him!"

"Do you love him, Mag?" asked Kate, wonderingly.

"In co'se I do. He's my Pappy."

The others could not speak for a moment. Her unexpected loyalty to the father who had been "real kind" to her got them by the throat.

"What do you want me to do with him?" Mrs. Kildare asked at last.

"Jes' make him go away. Tell him he dassent come back no more. I reckon he thinks you'll take keer of him 'cause you're takin' keer of me. Ef he knows you ain't a-goin' to, he'll go away."

"Very well," said the other, gently, "he shall go away. And, Mag—" she reached back to grip the girl's hand strongly with hers—"he shall never have your baby. She shall grow up as nearly a 'lady' as I can make her. You have my word for that."

CHAPTER XVI

Kate, at this juncture, was filling her days to the brim with work, turning to it as to a tried friend, tested in many a crisis. Her recipe for avoiding thought was extreme physical fatigue; a good recipe, but one which was telling upon her physically. Philip's were not the only eyes which noticed the beginning of a change in Mrs. Kildare; a certain lack of buoyancy, an effect of effort in what she accomplished. Jemima, secretly alarmed, had insisted upon having in a doctor after her mother's fainting attack, but he made little of it. He was a bluff, cheerful, young countryman, shrewd but without subtlety, the son and the worthy successor of Jacques Benoix' successful rival, "Doc" Jones.

"She's as sound as a dollar," he pronounced admiringly. "Don't often see such a specimen of perfect health as the Madam. Nerves? Not likely. Probably over-fatigue—she does the work of ten men. Let me see, how old is she? Nearly forty—humph! Looks twenty-five. Make her take a rest. She'll be all right."

But rest, inactivity, was the one thing Kate would not allow herself. She dared not. She threw herself heart and soul into the business of her estate, and tried to feel the same interest, the same sense of large accomplishment, that had buoyed her up through so many years of loneliness.

On the Monday after Mag's child was christened, it happened that she was due to appear at a fair in an adjoining county, where she was exhibiting shorthorn cattle. But before she left, she did not forget to send a peremptory message to the man Henderson.

During her not infrequent absences from home, she had no uneasiness about her daughters, amply protected as they were by the numerous servants in the quarters back of the "great house," to say nothing of the small army of dogs which fattened upon her bounty. The housewoman who had been with her for years slept on such occasions on a pallet outside the girls' door, and Big Liza, the cook, also took up a position in the house, lying across the stairs in the great hall, whence her massive snores would have deterred the most reckless of marauders from entering.

But it chanced that this particular Monday was the occasion of the annual colored picnic in the village, held under the auspices of the Ladies of the Evening Star, of which organization both the housewoman and Big Liza were officials. So from dusk until midnight the young ladies were to be left in the charge of no one but Lige, the stable-boy who had once figured as butler, to whose unhappy lot this honor had fallen because of his known slave-like devotion to Jacqueline. Every other member of the domestic force was off rejoicing with the Ladies of the Evening Star.

This youth was making the rounds of the house with one of the Madam's pistols in his belt, taking some comfort in the dramatization of his unlucky rôle, when breathless yells were heard approaching, and a small Ethiopian made his appearance over the back fence, yelling for help and the Madam in the same breath.

"The Madam's done gone away fum heah, an' lef me in charge," said Lige, grandly. "Whut kin I do fer you, young chile?"

A window opened in the house. "What's the matter, Lige? What's Cæsar Jackson yelling that way for?" demanded Jacqueline, who knew by name every creature, on two legs or four, in the county.

"Hit's de Riders!" gasped Cæsar Jackson. "De Riders is comin'!"

"Here? Nonsense! Why should Night Riders come to Storm? They wouldn't dare!" But she thought suddenly of Mag Henderson, and her jaw set.

"I yeared 'em, Miss Jacky! I hid behine a tree an' seed 'em pass with dey false-faces on!" The little negro shivered with that superstitious awe which had made the Ku-Klux Klan possible. "Dey 'lowed dey was a-gwine ter git old man Henderson."

Jacqueline gave a quick breath of relief. "Then they're too late. He has gone. Mother sent him word to leave the cabin last night. They won't find him."

"Yes'm, dey will, kase I seed 'im! I snuck erlong 'cross de fiel', an' dey was a light in de winder, an' I calls out, 'Run lak de debbil, kase de Riders is on dey way!' But he can't do it, run—he's too drunk. An' he say, 'Go an' git de Madam. Fo' God's sake git de Madam!' So I run, an' I run, an' I yells fit to bust myse'f—"

"You certainly did, Cæsar Jackson," said Jacqueline, patting his head. "You couldn't have yelled better if you had been a white boy. The Madam shall hear of this. She likes people who keep their wits about them.—What must we do, Jemmy?" The older girl had followed her out. "Do you suppose they mean Henderson any real harm?"

There was a sobbing cry from Mag behind them. "They'll kill him, that's what they'll do! Oh, pore Pappy! They'll beat him up, an' it'll kill him, he's so puny. Oh, my Gawd! Cain't nobody stop 'em? They'll kill my Pappy!"

The two girls exchanged startled glances.

"What ef dey does? Nuffin but po' w'ite trash nohow," murmured Lige scornfully. He knew what he knew.

Jemima hushed him, sternly. "Poor white or not, we can't have tenants on our property murdered. I'll get help!" She started for the telephone.

"No time for that. They must be at the cabin already. We are the only neighbors, Jemmy. It's up to us. I wonder what mother would do if she were here?"

Even as she spoke she was running toward the stable. She knew that at least her mother would not be standing idle.

Mag cried after her, "Miss Jacky, whar you goin'? Don't you try it, honey, don't you! How could you stop 'em all by yourself? They might whip you, too, ef you was to make 'em mad."

"Whip me? Whip me?" Jacqueline threw up her head and laughed. Her purpose had not been clear in her mind, but Mag's plea settled it.