[CHAPTER I,] [II,] [III,] [IV,] [V,] [VI,] [VII,] [VIII,] [IX,] [X,] [XI,] [XII,] [XIII,] [XIV,] [XV,] [XVI,] [XVII,] [XVIII,] [XIX,] [XX,] [XXI,] [XXII,] [XXIII,] [XXIV,] [XXV,] [XXVI,] [XXVII,] [XXVIII,] [XXIX,] [XXX,] [XXXI,] [XXXII,] [XXXIII,] [XXXIV,] [XXXV,] [XXXVI,] [XXXVII,] [XXXVIII,] [XXXIX,] [XL,] [XLI,] [XLII,] [XLIII,] [XLIV,] [XLV,] [XLVI,] [XLVII,] [XLVIII,] [XLIX,] [L,] [LI,] [LII,] [LIII,] [LIV,] [LV,] [LVI,] [LVII,] [LVIII,] [LIX,] [LX,] [LXI,] [LXII,] [LXIII,] [LXIV,] [LXV,] [LXVI,] [LXVII,] [LXVIII,] [LXIX,] [LXX,] [LXXI,] [LXXII,] [LXXIII,] [LXXIV,] [LXXV,] [LXXVI,] [LXXVII,] [LXXVIII,] [LXXIX,] [LXXX,] [LXXXI,] [LXXXII,] [LXXXIII,] [LXXXIV,] [LXXXV,] [LXXXVI,] [LXXXVII,] [LXXXVIII,] [LXXXIX,] [XC,] [XCI. ]

THE GREEN BAY TREE

The
GREEN BAY
TREE

A Novel
by
LOUIS BROMFIELD
GROSSET & DUNLAP · PUBLISHERS · NEW YORK
By arrangement with FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
Copyright, 1924, by
Frederick A. Stokes Company
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America
TO
MY MOTHER,
WHO MUST HAVE KNOWN
AT SOME TIME IN HER LIFE
HATTIE TOLLIVER

“Life is hard for our children. It isn’t as simple as it was for us. Their grandfathers were pioneers and the same blood runs in their veins, only they haven’t a frontier any longer. They stand ... these children of ours ... with their backs toward this rough-hewn middle west and their faces set toward Europe and the East and they belong to neither. They are lost somewhere between.”

“Every one of us is different from the others. There are no two in the least alike and no one ever really knows any one else. There is always a part which remains secret and hidden, concealed in the deepest part of the soul. No husband ever knows his wife and no wife ever really knows her husband. There is always something just beyond that remains aloof and untouched, mysterious and undiscoverable, because we ourselves do not know just what it is. Sometimes it is shameful. Sometimes it is too fine, too precious, ever to reveal. It is quite beyond revelation even if we chose to reveal it.”

“The Green Bay Tree” is part of what is in a sense a single work known as “Escape,” which includes three other parts: “Possession,” “Early Autumn,” and “A Good Woman.”

THE GREEN BAY TREE

I

IF you can picture a little park, bright for the moment with the flush of early summer flowers and peopled with men and women in the costumes of the late nineties—If you can picture such a park set down in the midst of an inferno of fire, steel and smoke, there is no need to describe Cypress Hill on the afternoon of the garden party for the Governor. It was a large garden, indeed quite worthy of the name “park,” withdrawn and shut in by high walls of arbor vitæ clipped at intervals into small niches which sheltered bits of white statuary, some genuine, some of them copies. The Venus of Cydnos was there (in copy to be sure), and of course the Apollo Belvedere, a favorite ornament of formal gardens, as well as the Samothrace Victory dashing forward, it seemed, to soar high above the cloud of smoke from the neighboring blast furnaces.

Here and there the hedge displayed signs of death. There were patches where the green had become withered, and other patches where there was no green at all but simply a tangled wall of hard, dead twigs. Where death had touched the barrier it was possible to see beyond the borders of the garden into regions filled with roaring furnaces, steel sheds, and a tangle of glittering railway tracks cluttered by a confusion of semaphores and signal lights which the magic of night transformed into festoons of glowing jewels—emeralds, rubies, cabuchons, opals, glowing in the thick darkness. But it was not yet dark and no one at the garden party peered through the dying gaps in the hedge because by daylight there lay beyond the borders of the garden only ugliness of the most appalling nature.

The little park sloped away on all sides from a great brick house, conceived in the most bizarre union of Georgian and Gothic styles. It was large and square and faced with white stone, but beyond this the Georgian style played no part. The roof carried a half-dozen high pitched gables; the windows were tall and pointed in the manner of a church rectory, and the chimneys, built of white stone, were carved in the most ornate Gothic fashion. Over all clambered a mass of vines,—woodbine, virginia creeper and wistaria—which somehow bound the grotesque combination of styles into one harmonious whole, characterized by a surprising look of age, considering the fact that the house stood in the midst of a community which less than a century before had been a complete and trackless wilderness.

The vines, like the hedge, had been more green and exotic at some earlier day. In places there were now no leaves at all, and elsewhere, though the season was early summer, the leaves appeared sickly and wretched, surrounded by dead bare tendrils pressing desperately against the faded bricks.

On the whole, however, the garden was at its best. Along the gravel walks leading to the arbor, irises raised crowns of mauve, royal purple and yellow. Peonies in the process of bursting from tight green buds into great pom-poms of pink and white tumbled across the flagged walk. At the feet of the flying Eros (made of cast iron and painted white), who carried a ring in one hand and thus served for a hitching post, ground pinks and white violets, brought from England by Julia Shane’s grandmother, peeped from among the blades of new grass. But the greatest splendor had its being in the wistaria. High up among the branches of the dead oak that towered gauntly above the horse block, its cascades of mauve and white and purple poured like water escaping from a broken dam. From the black iron portico tumbled more torrents of blossoms. They appeared even high up among the tips of the pointed cypresses which gave the house its name. To be sure these were not true cypresses at all, for true cypresses could not have survived the harsh northern winter. In reality they were cedars; but their tall, green-black spires, swaying in melancholy fashion at the least breath of air, resembled cypresses as one brother resembles another. John Shane, perhaps because the name roused memories of some secret world of his own, always called them cypresses and such, to all purposes, they had become. None knew why he called the house Cypress Hill or why he loved cypresses so much that he called cedars by that name when nature cheated him out of his heart’s desire. The Town set it down simply as another of his eccentricities. One more craziness no longer disturbed the Town. And John Shane had been dead now for more than ten years, so perhaps the matter was one of no importance whatever.

Under the wistarias on the wrought iron piazza his widow, Julia Shane, leaning on her stick of ebony filigreed in silver, surveyed the bright garden and the guests who moved about among the old trees, the men clad in sober black, the ladies in sprigged muslins or bright colored linens. She was a tall thin woman with a nose slightly hooked, which gave her the fleeting look of an eagle, courageous, bold, even a little pitiless and unrelenting. An air of dignity and distinction compensated the deficiencies of beauty; she was certainly not a beautiful woman and her fine skin was already crisscrossed by a million tiny lines no more substantial than cobweb. Like the women of the generation preceding hers, she made no attempt at preserving the illusion of youth. Although she could not have been long past middle age, she dressed as an old woman. She wore a gown of black and mauve of the most expensive materials,—a sign of mourning which she kept up for a husband dead ten years, a husband whose passing could have given her no cause for regret, whose memory could not possibly bring to her ivory cheeks the faintest flush of pleasure. But the black and mauve gave her great dignity and a certain melancholy beauty. On her thin fingers she wore rings set with amethysts and diamonds and about her neck hung a chain of amethysts caught in a setting of old Spanish silver. The chain reached twice about her thin throat and hung to the knees.

She had been standing on the piazza, a little withdrawn from her guests, all the afternoon because she knew that the mauve of her gown and the dull lavender sparkle of the amethysts blended superbly with the tumbling blossoms of the wistaria. She had not been, after all, the wife of John Shane for nothing. People said that he had taught his wife to make the best of herself because he could bear to have about him only those things which were in excellent taste. People also said that his wife was lame, not because she had fallen by accident down the long polished stairway, but because she had been thrown from the top to the bottom by her husband in an insane fit of rage.

From her point of vantage, her bright blue eyes swept the garden, identifying the guests—those whom she desired to have there, those to whose presence she was completely indifferent, and those whom political necessity had forced upon her. About most of them centered scornful, bitter, little thoughts that chased themselves round and round her tired brain.

Over against the hedge on the far side of the little pavilion stood a group which, it appeared, interested her more than any other, for she watched it with a faint smile that carried the merest trace of mockery. She discerned the black of the bombazine worn by Hattie Tolliver, her blood niece, and the sprigged muslin of Hattie’s daughter, Ellen, who stood by resentfully with an air of the most profound scorn while her mother talked to Judge Weissman. The mother talked voluably, exerting all her power to charm the Judge, a fat perspiring Oriental and the son of an immigrant Viennese Jew. And the efforts of Hattie Tolliver, so solid, so respectable, so downright, were completely transparent, for the woman possessed no trace of subtlety, not the faintest power of dissimulation. She sought to win favor with the Jew because he was the one power in the county politics. He ruled his party with an undisputed sway, and Hattie Tolliver’s husband was a candidate for office. Perhaps from the pinnacle of her worldliness Julia Shane detected a quality naive and almost comic in the vulgar intrigue progressing so blatantly on the opposite side of the pavilion.

There was also a quality indescribably comic in the fierce attitude of the daughter, in her aloofness from the politician and the intensity of her glowering expression. She was an obnoxious child of sixteen, wilful, spoiled, savage, but beyond the possibility of denial, she played the piano superbly, in a truly extraordinary fashion.

Presently Julia Shane, behind the shelter of the wistaria, sniffed suddenly as though the wind had carried to her among the delicate odors of the flowers the offensive smell of the fat perspiring Jew. He was there by political necessity, because the Governor desired his presence. Clearly she looked upon him as an intruder who defiled the little park.

Farther off at the side of the empty kennels, all buried beneath a tangle of vines, another group had gathered about a table where pink ices and pink and white cakes were being served. About the great silver punch bowl hung a dozen men, drinking, drinking, drinking, as though the little park were a corner saloon and the little table the accustomed free lunch. For a moment Julia Shane’s gaze fastened upon the men and her thin nostrils quivered. Her lips formed themselves to utter a word which she spoke quite loudly so that three women, perfect strangers to her who stood just beneath the piazza, overheard it and spread the story that Julia Shane had taken to talking to herself. “Pigs!” she said.

II

IN other parts of the garden the bright parasols of the gossiping women raised themselves in little clumps like mushrooms appearing unexpectedly through the green of a wide lawn. The Governor was nowhere to be seen, nor Lily nor Irene, Julia Shane’s two daughters.

The guests began to depart. A victoria with a driver on the box came round the corner of the old house. A fat dowager, dressed in purple and wearing a gold chain, bowed, and the diminutive young man beside her, in a very tight coat and a derby hat, smiled politely—very politely—Mrs. Julis Harrison and her son Willie, of the great family which owned the Mills.

Julia Shane bowed slightly and leaned more heavily upon her ebony stick. A second vehicle appeared, this time a high buggy which bore the county auditor and his wife ... common people who never before had entered the wrought iron gates of Cypress Hill. The fat and blowsy wife bowed in an exaggerated fashion, never stopping the while to fan her red face vigorously until she discovered that her elaborate bows were expended upon the back of Julia Shane, who had become suddenly absorbed in the rings that glittered on her bony fingers. The smile froze on the fat lady’s face and her heavy lips pursed themselves to utter with a savage intensity of feeling the word “Snob!” Indeed, her indignation so mounted under the protests of her tipsy husband, that a moment later she altered the epithet to another more vulgar and more powerful phrase. “Old Slut!” she said aloud. The two carriages made their way down the long avenue between the rows of dying Norway spruce to the gate where Hennery, the black servant, stood on guard.

Outside, with faces pressed against the bars, stood a score of aliens from the hovels of the mill workers in the neighboring Flats. The little group included a dozen women wearing shawls and a multitude of petticoats, three or four children and as many half-grown boys still a year or two too young to be of any use to the Harrison Mills. They pushed and pressed against the handsome gates, striving for a glimpse at the spectacle of the bright garden animated by the figures of the men and women who ruled the Town, the Flats, the very lives and destinies of the little throng of aliens. A baby squalled in the heat and one of the boys, a tall powerful fellow with a shock of yellow hair, spat through the bars.

At the approach of the carriage the black Hennery sprang up and with the gesture of one opening the gates of Buckingham Palace, shouted to the crowd outside, “Look out, you all! There’s carriages a-coming!”

Then with a great clanging and shooting of bolts he swung open the gates and Mrs. Julis Harrison and her son William swept through. The hoofs of the dancing horses beat a tattoo on the cobblestones. The mother saw nothing, but the narrow eyes of her son appraised the group of boys and even the babies as potential workers in the Mills. These Dago children grew rapidly, but not fast enough to keep pace with the needs of the growing furnaces; and so many of them died before they reached manhood.

As the carriage swung into narrow Halsted Street, Mrs. Harrison, leaning forward so that the gold chain swayed like a pendulum from her mountainous bosom, surveyed the wretched houses, the yards bereft of all green, and the shabby railway station that stood a hundred yards from the very gates of Shane’s Castle.

“You’d think Julia Shane would move out of this filthy district,” she said. “Sentiment is all right, but there’s such a thing as running it into the ground. The smoke and soot is even killing the flowers. They’re not half so fine as last year.”

Her son William shrugged his narrow, sloping shoulders.

“The ground is worth its weight in gold,” he said. “Three railroads—the only site left. She could get her own price.”

In the corner saloon a mechanical piano set up a tinny uproar and shattered fragments of The Blue Danube drifted out upon the hot air through the swinging doors into the street, throttling for the moment any further conversation.

The county auditor and his wife drove uncertainly through the gates, for the county auditor had drunk too much and failed to understand that horses driven with crossed reins do not respond according to any preconceived plan. His wife, her face red as a ripe tomato, took them from him and swore.

“She needn’t think she’s so damned swell,” she said. “What’s she got to make her so proud? I should think she’d blush at what has happened in that rotten old house. Why, she’s got nothing but Hunkies and Dagos for neighbors!”

She cut the horses across the back, dashed forward, and passed the victoria of Mrs. Harrison and her son William at a triumphant gallop.

With a loud, officious bang, Hennery closed the wrought iron gates and the wise, old faces of the alien women pressed once more against the bars. One of the throng—the big boy with the shock of yellow hair, a Ukrainian named Stepan Krylenko—shouted something in Russian as the gates banged together. It was a tongue foreign to Hennery but from the look in the fierce blue eye of the young fellow, the negro understood that what he said was not friendly. The women admonished the boy and fell to whispering in awe among themselves, but the offender in no way modified his manner. When Judge Weissman, fat and perspiring and covered with jewelry, whirled past him in a phaeton a moment later, the boy shouted in Russian, “Jew! Dirty Jew!” Judge Weissman regarded the boy with his pop eyes, wiped his mahogany face and muttered to his companion, Lawyer Briggs, “These foreigners are getting too free in their manners.... The Harrisons will have trouble at the Mills one of these days.... There ought to be a law against letting them into the country.”

The Judge was angry, although his anger was stirred not by the shout of Stepan Krylenko but by the fact that Julia Shane had become suddenly blind as his phaeton swept round the corner of the old house. The shout was something upon which to fasten his anger.

III

FROM her point of vantage on the wistaria clad piazza, the old woman watched the little drama at the entrance to the Park, and when the gates had been flung closed once more, she moved back into the cool shadows, still wondering where Lily and Irene and the Governor could have hidden themselves. She settled herself on an iron bench, praying that no one would pass to disturb her, and at the same moment the sound of sobbing reached her ears. It came from the inside of the house, from the library just beyond the tall window. There, in a corner beyond the great silver mounted globe, Irene had flung herself down and was weeping. The half-suppressed sobs shook the girl’s frail body. Her muslin dress with the blue sash was crushed and damp. The mother bent over her and drew the girl into a sitting posture against the brocade of the rosewood sofa.

“Come, Irene,” said the old woman. “It is no time for tears. There is time enough when this infernal crowd is gone. What is it? What has come over you since yesterday?”

The girl’s sobs grew more faint but she did not answer nor raise her head. She was frail and blond with wide blue eyes set far apart. Her thick hair was done low at the back of her neck. She had a small pretty mouth and a rather prominent nose. Her mother must have resembled her before she hardened into a cynical old woman, before the prominent nose became an eagle’s beak and the small pretty mouth a thin-lipped sardonic one. The mother, puzzled and silent, sat stiffly beside the sobbing girl, fingering all the while the chain of amethysts set in Spanish silver.

“Are you tired?” she asked presently.

“No.”

“Then what is it, Irene? There must be some reason. Girls don’t behave like this for nothing. What have you done that has made you miserable?”

“Nothing,” sobbed the girl. “Nothing!”

The mother sat up a little straighter and began to trace with her ebony stick the outlines of the roses on the Aubusson carpet. At length she spoke again in a clear, hard voice.

“Then you must pull yourself together and come out. I want you to find Lily and the Governor.—Every one is leaving and they should be here. There’s no use in giving a party for him if he is going to snub the politicians.... Here—sit up!... Turn round while I fasten your hair.”

With perfect deliberation the mother arranged the girl’s hair, smoothed the crumpled muslin of her dress, patted straight the blue ribbon sash, dried her eyes, and bade her stand away to be surveyed.

“Now,” she said in the same crisp voice, “You look all right.... I can’t have you behaving like this.... You should be out in the garden. Before I die, Irene, I want to see you married. You never will be if you hide yourself where no one can see you.... I don’t worry over Lily—she can take care of herself. Go and find them and bring them back.... Tell them I said to return at once.”

The girl, without a word, went out of the room into the big dark hallway and thence into the garden. Her mother’s voice was one made to command. It was seldom that any one refused to carry out her orders. When Irene reached the terrace the guests were making their way back toward the house in little groups of two or three, ladies in summer dresses very tight at the waists, shielding their complexions from the June sun with small, bright-colored parasols ... Mrs. Mills, the rector’s wife, Miss Bird, the Town librarian, Mrs. Smyth, wife of the Methodist clergyman, Mrs. Miliken, wife of the sheriff, Miss Abercrombie, Mrs.... And behind them, the husbands, and the stray politicians who treated the little arbor over the punch bowl as though it were a corner saloon. The punch was gone now and the last of the pink ices melted. From other parts of the garden more guests made their way toward the house. Irene passed them, bowing and forcing herself to smile though the effort brought her a kind of physical pain. Among the rhododendrons she came upon a little terra cotta Virgin and Child brought by father from Sienna and, remembering her convent training, she paused for a moment and breathed a prayer.

Lily and the Governor were not among the rhododendrons. She ran on to the little pavilion beyond the iris walk. It was empty. The arbor, green with the new leaves of the Concord grapes, was likewise untenanted save by the shadows of the somber, tall cypresses. The girl ran on and on from one spot of shelter to another, distracted and terrified, her muslin dress soiled and torn by the twigs. The little park grew empty and the shadows cast by the setting sun sprawled across the patches of open grass. Two hiding places remained, but these Irene avoided. One was the clump of bushes far down by the iron gates. She dared not go there because the little crowd of aliens peering through the bars terrified her. Earlier in the afternoon she had wandered there to be alone and a big tow headed boy shouted at her in broken English, “There are bones ... people’s bones hidden in your cellar!”

No, she dared not again risk the torment of his shouting.

The other hiding place was the old well behind the stables, a well abandoned now and almost lost under a tangle of clematis. There was a sheltered seat by its side. The girl ran as far as the stables and then, summoning her strength to lie to her mother if the necessity arose, turned back without looking and hastened across the garden toward the piazza. She had not the courage to approach the well because she knew that it was there she would find her sister Lily and the Governor.

When Irene entered the house, she found her mother in the drawing-room seated alone in the twilight. The guests had all departed and the old woman was smoking, a pleasure she had denied herself until the last of the visitors were gone. No one in the Town had ever seen her smoke. It was well enough to smoke at Biarritz or Monte Carlo; smoking in the Town was another matter. Julia Shane smoked quietly and with a certain elegance of manner which removed from the act all trace of vulgarity. She sat in a corner of the big room near one of the tall windows which stood open a little way admitting ghostly fragments of scent, now of iris, now of wistaria, now of lilac. Sometimes there penetrated for a second the acrid tang of soot and gas from the distant furnaces. The diamonds and amethysts on her thin fingers glittered in the fading light. She was angry and the unmistakable signs of her anger were present—the flash in her bright blue eye, the slight trembling of the veined hands. The ebony stick rested by her side. As Irene entered she did not move or shift for a second the expression of her face.

“And where are they?—Have you found them?”

The girl’s lips grew pale, and when she replied, she trembled with the awful consciousness of lying to her mother.

“I cannot find them. I have looked everywhere.”

The mother frowned. “Bring me an ash tray, Irene, and do not lie to me. They are in the garden.” She crushed out the ember of her cigarette. “That man is a fool. He has offended a dozen important men after I took the trouble to invite them here. God knows, I didn’t want them!”

While she was speaking, the sound of footsteps arose in the open gallery that ran along the far side of the drawing-room, and two figures, silhouetted against the smoky, setting sun, appeared at the windows moving toward the doorway. They were the missing Lily and the Governor. He followed her at a little distance as though they had been quarreling and she had forbidden him to address her. At the sight of them, Irene moved toward the door, but her mother checked her escape.

“Irene! Where are you going now? What are you afraid of? If this behavior does not stop, I shall forbid you to go to mass. You are already too pious for any good on this earth.”

The frightened girl returned silently and sat down with her usual air of submission on the sofa that stood in the shadows by a mantelpiece which supported a painting of Venice, flamboyant and glowing, executed by the hand of Turner. At the sound of Lily’s voice, she shrank back among the cushions as if to hide herself. There was in the voice nothing to terrify her. On the contrary it was a voice, low and warm, indolent and ingratiating—a voice full of charm, one which inspired affection.

Lily was taller than her sister and two years older; yet there was an enormous difference between them which had to do less with age than with manner. There was about Irene something childish and undeveloped. Lily was a woman, a young woman, to be sure, tall and lovely. Her hair was the color of honey. It held bright copper lights; and she wore it, in the fashion of Irene, low on a lovely neck that carried a warning of wilfulness. Her skin was the transparent sort which artists love for its green lights, and her eyes were of a shade of violet which in some lights appeared a clear blue. Her arms were laden with irises, azure and pale yellow, which she had plucked on her way from the old well. She too wore a frock of muslin with a girdle of radiant blue. As she entered, she laid the flowers gently among the crystal and silver bibelots of a rosewood table and rang for Sarah, the mulatto wife of Hennery, guardian of the wrought iron gates.

The Governor followed her, a tall man of perhaps forty, strongly built with a fine chest and broad shoulders. His hair was black and vigorous and he wore it cropped close to a well-shaped head. He had the drooping mustaches of the period. His was a figure which commands the attention of mobs. His manner, when he was not too pompous or condescending, was charming. People said there was no reason why he should not one day be president. He was shrewd in the way of politicians, too shrewd perhaps ever to be anything but one who made other men presidents.

He was angry now with a primitive, boiling anger which threatened to burst the bonds of his restraint. His breath came huskily. It was the anger of a man accustomed to dominate, who has encountered suddenly some one who cares not a fig for his powers.

“Madame,” he said, “your daughter has refused to marry me.”

The mother took up her ebony stick and placed it squarely before her, at the same time leaning forward upon it. For a moment, she smiled, almost secretly, with a sort of veiled amusement at his pompous speech. She did not speak until the mulatto woman, slipping in noiselessly, had taken the flowers and disappeared again into the vast hall. Then she addressed Lily who stood leaning against the mantelpiece, her lovely body slightly balanced, her manner as calm and as placid as if nothing had gone wrong.

“Is this true, Lily?”

The girl nodded and smiled, so slightly that the play of expression could scarcely have been called a smile. It was as though she kept the smile among her other secrets, not to be shared by people who knew nothing of its meaning.

“It is serious, Madame, I promise you,” the Governor interrupted. “I love your daughter. She has told me that she loves me.” He had grown a little pompous now, as though he were addressing an assembly of constituents. “What else is there?” He turned to Lily suddenly, “It is true, isn’t it?”

The girl nodded. “Yes, I have told you that.... But I will not marry you.... I am not refusing because I want to be unkind.... I can’t help it. Believe me, I cannot.”

The mother began tracing the design on the carpet, round and round the petals of the faded roses. When she spoke she did not raise her head. She kept on tracing ... tracing....

“There must be some reason, Lily.... It is a match not to be cast aside lightly.... It would make me very happy.”

She was interrupted by the sound of a closing door. Irene had vanished into the gallery on the far side of the drawing-room. The three of them saw her running past the window back into the garden as though she were pursued. The mother fell once more to tracing the outlines on the carpet. In the growing darkness the scent of the lilac grew more and more strong.

The Governor, who had been standing by the window, turned sharply. “I would like to speak to you, Mrs. Shane ... alone, if possible. There are some things which I must tell ... things which are unpleasant but of tremendous importance, both to Lily and to me.” He coughed and the blood mounted to his coarse handsome face. “As an honorable man, I must confess them.”

At this last statement, a faint sound of mirth came from Lily. She bowed her head suddenly and looked away.

“It would be better if Lily left us,” he added savagely.

The girl smiled and smoothed her red hair. “You may speak to mother if you like. It will do you no good. It will only make matters worse. After all, it concerns no one but ourselves.”

He shouted at her suddenly. “Please, will you go. Haven’t you done enough? There is no need to behave like a devil!”

The girl made no reply. She went out quietly, closing the door behind her, and made her way across the terrace to the rhododendrons where she knew she would find Irene. It was almost dark now and the glow from the furnaces below the hill had begun to turn the whole sky to a murky, glowing red. A locomotive whistled shrilly above the steady pounding of the roller mills. Through a gap in the dying hedge, the signal lights began to show, in festoons of jewels. The wind had turned and the soot and smoke were being swept toward Cypress Hill. It meant the end of the flowers. In the rare times when the wind blew from the south the blossoms were scorched and ruined by the gases.

Among the fireflies Lily hastened along the path to the rhododendrons. There, before the terra-cotta Virgin and Child, she found her sister praying earnestly. Lily knelt down and clasped the younger girl in her arms, speaking affectionately to her and pressing her warm cheek against Irene’s pale one.

IV

THAT night Irene and Lily had dinner in their own rooms. In the paneled dining-room, a gloomy place decorated with hunting prints and lighted by tall candles in silver holders, Julia Shane and the Governor dined alone, served by the mulatto woman who shuffled in and out noiselessly, and was at last dismissed and told not to enter the room again until she was summoned. There followed a long talk between the Governor and the old lady, during which the handsome Governor pulled his mustaches furiously and sometimes raised his voice until the room shook and Julia Shane was forced to bid him be more cautious. She permitted him to do most of the talking, interrupting him rarely and then only to interject some question or remark of uncanny shrewdness.

At length when he had pushed back his chair and taken to pacing the room, the mother waited silently for a long time, her gaze fixed upon the tiny goblet of chartreuse which glowed pale gold and green in the light from the dying candles. Presently she leaned back in her chair and addressed him.

“It is your career, then, which is your first consideration,” she began. “It is that which you place above everything else ... above everything?”

For a moment the tall Governor halted, standing motionless across the table from her. He made no denial. His face grew more flushed.

“I have told you that I love Lily.”

The old woman smiled at this evasion and the sharp look gleamed for a second in her bright blue eyes. Her thin lips contracted into the faintest of smiles, a mere shadow, mocking and cynical. In the face of his anger and excitement, she was calm, cold, with the massive dignity of an iceberg.

“It is I,” she said, “who should be offended. You have no cause for anger.” She turned the rings on her fingers round and round. The diamonds and amethysts caught the light, shattering it and sending it forth again in a thousand fragments. “Besides,” she added softly, “Love can be so many things.... Believe me, I know.”

Slowly she pushed back her chair and drew herself up, supported by the ebony stick. “There is nothing to do now but hear what Lily has to say.... It is, after all, her affair.”

The library was a square room, high-ceilinged and dark, walled by books and dominated by a full-length portrait of John Shane, builder of Cypress Hill and the first gentleman of the Western Reserve. The picture had been painted in the fifties soon after he came to the Town and a decade before he married Julia MacDougal. In the dark portrait he stood against a table with a white Irish setter at his feet. He was a tall man, slim and wiry, and wore dove gray trousers and a long black coat reaching to the knees. Set rakishly and with an air of defiance on the small well-shaped head was a dove gray top hat. His neckerchief was bright scarlet but the varnishings and dust of years had modified its color to a dull maroon. One hand hung by his side and the other rested on the table, slender, nervous and blue-veined, the hand of an aristocrat. But it was the face that impressed you above all else. It was the face of one possessed, a countenance that somehow was both handsome and ugly, shifting as you regarded it from one phase to the other as though the picture itself mysteriously altered its character before your eyes. It was a lean face, swarthy and flushed with too much drinking, the lips red and sensual yet somehow firm and cruel. The eyes, which followed you about the room, were large and deeply set and of a strange deep blue like cobalt glass with light shining through it. It was the portrait of a gentleman, of a duellist, of a sensitive man, of a creature haunted by a temper verging upon insanity. One moment it was a horrible picture; the next it held great charm. Above all else, it was baffling.

It was in this room that Julia Shane and the Governor waited in silence for Lily, who came down a little while later in response to the message from the mulatto woman. The sound of her footsteps on the long stairs reached them before she arrived; it came lightly, almost tripping, until she appeared all at once at the open door, clad in a black cloak which she had thrown over her pegnoir. Her red hair was piled carelessly atop her head and at the moment her eyes were blue and not violet. She carried herself lightly and with a certain defiance, singularly like the dare-devil defiance of the tall man in the darkening portrait. For a moment, she paused in the doorway regarding her mother who sat beneath the picture, and the Governor who stood with his hands clasped behind him, his great chest rising and falling as he watched her. Pulling the cloak higher about her white throat, she stepped into the room, closing the door softly behind her.

“Sit down,” said the mother, in a strained colorless voice. “I know everything that has happened.... We must talk it over and settle it to-night one way or another, for good and all.”

The girl sat down obediently and the Governor came over and stood before her.

“Lily,” he said and then halted as though uncertain how to continue. “Lily ... I don’t believe you realize what has happened. I don’t believe you understand.”

The girl smiled faintly. “Oh, yes ... I know ... I am not a child, you know ... certainly not now.” All the while she kept her eyes cast down thoughtfully.

The mother leaning forward, interrupted. “I hadn’t thought it would end in this fashion,” she said. “I had hoped to have him for a son-in-law. You know, Lily, you must consider him too. Don’t you love him?”

The girl turned quickly. “I love him.... Yes, ... I love him and I’ve thought of him.... You needn’t fear a scandal. There is no need for one. No one would ever have known if he hadn’t told you. It was between us alone.” The Governor pulled his mustaches furiously and attempted to speak but the girl halted him. “I know ... I know,” she said. “You’re afraid I might tell some one.... You’re afraid there might be a child.... Even if there was it would make no difference.”

“But why ... why?” began her mother.

“I can’t tell why ... I don’t know myself. I only know that I don’t want to marry him, that I want to be as I am....” For a second the shadow of passion entered her voice. “Why can’t I be? Why won’t you let me? I have money of my own. I can do as I please. It is my affair.”

V

FOR a little while the room grew silent save for the distant pounding of the Mills, regular and reverberant, monotonous and unceasing. The wind from the South bore a smell of soot which smothered the scent of wistaria and iris. All at once a cry rang out and the Governor, very red and handsome in his tight coat, fell on his knees before her, his arms about her waist. The girl remained sitting quietly, her face quite white now against the black of her cloak.

“Please ... please, Lily,” the man cried. “I will give up everything ... I will do as you like. I will be your slave.” He became incoherent and muddled, repeating over and over again the arguments he had used in the afternoon by the old well. For a long time he talked, while the girl sat as still as an image carved from marble, regarding him curiously as though the whole scene were a nightmare and not reality at all. At last he stopped talking, kissed her hand and stood up once more. The old woman seated under the portrait said nothing. She regarded the pair silently with wise, narrowed eyes.

It was Lily who spoke. “It is no use.... How can I explain to you? I would not be a good wife. I know ... you see, I know because I know myself. I love you, I suppose, but not better than myself. It is my affair.” A note almost of stubbornness entered her voice. “Two days ago I might have married you. I cannot now, because I know. I wanted to know, you see.” She looked up suddenly with a strange smile. “Would you have preferred me to take a lover from the streets?”

For the first time the mother stirred in her chair. “Lily ... Lily.... How can you say such a thing?”

The girl rose and stood waiting in a respectful attitude. “There is nothing more to be said.... May I go?” Then turning to the Governor. “Do you want to kiss me.... I think it would please me.”

For a second there was a terrific struggle between the desire of the man and his dignity. It was clear then beyond all doubt that he loved her passionately. He trembled. His face grew scarlet. At last, with a terrible effort he turned suddenly from her. He did not even say farewell.

“You see,” said the mother, “I can do nothing. There is too much of her father in her.” A shade of bitterness crept into her voice, a quality of hardness aroused by a man who no longer existed save in the gray portrait behind her. “If it had been Irene,” she continued and then, checking herself, “but what am I thinking of? It could never have been Irene.”

Quietly Lily opened the door and stole away, the black cloak trailing behind her across the polished floor, the sound of her footsteps dying slowly away as she ascended the stairs.

At midnight Hennery brought the carriage round from the stables, the Governor climbed in, and from the shelter of the piazza Julia Shane, leaning on her stick, watched him drive furiously away down the long drive through the iron gates and into the street bordered by the miserable shacks and boarding houses occupied by foreigners. At the corner the jangling music of the mechanical piano drifted through the swinging doors of the saloon where a mob of steel puddlers, in from the night shift, drank away the memories of the hot furnaces.

Thus the long association of the Governor with the old house at Cypress Hill came abruptly to an end.

He left behind him three women. Of these Lily was already asleep in the great Italian bed. In an adjoining room her mother lay awake staring into the darkness, planning how to keep the knowledge of the affair from Irene. It was impossible to predict the reaction which it might have upon the girl. It might drive her, delicate and neurotic, into any one of a score of hysterical paths. The room was gray with the light of dawn before Julia Shane at last fell asleep.

As for the third—Irene—she too lay awake praying to the Blessed Virgin for strength to keep her terrible secret. She closed her eyes; she buried her face in her pillow; but none of these things could destroy the picture of the Governor stealthily opening the door of Lily’s room.

VI

THERE had been a time, within the memory of Lily, though not of Irene who was but two years old, when the first transcontinental railroad stretched its ribbons of steel through the northern edge of the Town, when the country surrounding Cypress Hill was open marsh land, a great sea of waving green, of cat tails and marsh grasses with a feathery line of willows where a muddy, sluggish brook called the Black Fork threaded a meandering path. In those days Cypress Hill had been isolated from the Town, a country place accessible only by the road which John Shane constructed across the marshes from the Town to the great mound of glacial moraine where he set up his fantastic house. As a young man, he came there out of nowhere in the fifties when the Town was little more than a straggling double row of white wood and brick houses lining a single street. He was rich as riches went in those days, and he purchased a great expanse of land extending along one side of the single street down the hill to the opposite side of the marsh. His purchase included the site of the Cypress Hill house, which raised itself under his direction before the astonished eyes of the county people.

Brickmakers came west over the mountains to mold bricks for him in the kilns of the claybanks along the meandering Black Fork. Town carpenters returned at night with glowing tales of the wonders of the new house. Strange trees and shrubs were brought from the east and a garden was planted to surround the structure and shield it from the hot sun of the rolling, fertile, middle west. Gates of wrought iron were set up and stables were added, and at last John Shane returned from a trip across the mountains to occupy his house. It gained the name of Shane’s Castle and, although he called it Cypress Hill, the people of the Town preferred their own name and it was known as Shane’s Castle to the very end.

Who John Shane was or whence he came remained a mystery. Some said he was Irish, which might well have been. Others were certain that he was English because he spoke with the clipped accent of an Englishman. There were even some who held that so swarthy a man could only have come from Spain or Italy; and some were convinced that his love of travel was due to an obscure strain of gipsy blood. As to the light which Shane himself cast upon the subject, no one ever penetrated beyond a vague admission that he had lived in London and found the life there too tame.

He set himself up in the house at Cypress Hill to lead the life of a gentleman, a worldly cynical gentleman, perhaps the only gentleman in the archaic sense of the word in all the Western Reserve. In a frontier community where every one toiled, he alone made, beyond the control of his farms, no pretense at working. He had his horses and his dogs, and because there were no hounds to follow and no hunters to ride with him, he set aside on the land bordering the main street of the Town a great field where he rode every day including the Sabbath, and took the most perilous jumps to the amazement of the farmers and townspeople who gathered about the paddock to watch his eccentric behavior.

Among these were a Scotch settler and his son-in-law, Jacob Barr, who owned jointly a great stretch of land to the west of Shane’s farm. They kept horses to ride though they were in no sense sporting men. They were honest stock, dignified and hard-working, prosperous and respected throughout the country as men who had wrested from the wilderness a prosperous living. MacDougal was the first abolitionist in the county. He it was who established the first station of the underground railway and organized the plans for helping slaves to escape across the border into Canada. These two sometimes brought their horses into the paddock at Shane’s farm and there, under his guidance, taught them to jump.

The abolitionist activities culminated in the Civil War, and the three men joined the colors, Shane as a lieutenant because somewhere in his mysterious background there was a thorough experience in military affairs. His two friends joined the ranks, rising at length to commands. MacDougal lost his life in the campaign of the Wilderness. Jacob Barr returned stricken by fever, and Shane himself received a bullet in the thigh.

Returning as a colonel from the war he found that in place of the dead MacDougal he had as a riding companion the farmer’s youngest daughter, a girl of nineteen. She had taken to the saddle with enthusiasm and was a horsewoman after his own heart. She knew no such thing as fear; she joined him recklessly in the most perilous feats and sat his most unruly horses with the ease and grace of an Amazon. She was not a pretty girl. The word “handsome” would have described her more accurately. She was strong, lithe and vigorous, and her features, though large like the honest MacDougal’s, were clearly chiseled and beautiful in a large way.

The strange pair rode together in the paddock more and more frequently until, at last, the astonished county learned that John Shane, the greatest gentleman in the state, had taken MacDougal’s youngest daughter east over the mountains and quietly made her mistress of Shane’s Castle. It also learned that he had taken his bride to Europe, and that his housekeeper, a pretty middle-aged Irish woman who never mingled with the townspeople, had been sent away, thus ending rumors of sin which had long scandalized the county. It appeared, some citizens hinted, that Julia MacDougal had been substituted for the Irish woman.

For two years the couple remained abroad, but during that time they were separated, for Shane, conscious of his bride’s rustic simplicity, sent her to a boarding school for English girls kept by a Bonapartist spinster named Violette de Vaux at St. Cloud on the outskirts of Paris. During those two years he did not visit her, choosing instead to absent himself upon some secret business in the south of Europe; and when he returned, his bride found it difficult to recognize in the man with a thick, blue black beard, the husband she had married two years earlier. The adornment gave him an appearance even more alien and sinister.

The two years were for the girl wretched ones, but in some incomprehensible fashion they hardened her and fitted her to begin the career her mysterious husband had planned. When they returned to Cypress Hill, Shane shaved off his beard once more and entered politics. From then on, great people came to stay at Cypress Hill—judges, politicians, lawyers, once even a president. As for Shane he sought no office for himself. It seemed that he preferred in politics to be the power behind the throne, the kingmaker, the man who advised and planned campaigns; he preferred the intrigues without the responsibilities. And so he became a figure in the state, a strange, bizarre, dashing figure which caught somehow the popular imagination. His face became known everywhere, as well as the stories about his private life, of strange brawls in the growing cities of the middle-west, of affairs with women, of scandals of every sort save those which concerned his personal honesty. Here he was immune. No one doubted his honesty. And the scandals did him little harm save in a small group of his own townspeople who regarded him as the apotheosis of sin, as a sort of Lucifer dwelling in a great brick house in the center of the Black Fork marshes.

In the great house, his wife, whose life it was whispered was far from happy, bore him two daughters, a circumstance which might have disappointed most men. It pleased the perverse John Shane who remarked that he was glad there was no son to carry on “his accursed name.”

As he grew older the unpopularity increased until among the poorer residents of the Town strange stories found their way into circulation, tales of orgies and wickedness in the great brick house. The stories at length grew by repetition until they included the unfortunate wife. But Shane went his proud way driving his handsome horses through the Town, riding like mad in the paddock. The Town grew and spread along the outskirts of his farm, threatening to surround it, but Shane would not sell. He scorned the arguments for progress and prosperity and held on to his land. At last there came a second railroad and then a third which crossed the continent, passing on their way along the banks of the sluggish Black Fork through the waving green swamp. Shane found himself powerless because the state condemned the land and it was his own party which promoted the railroad. He gave way and his land doubled and tripled in value. Factories began to appear and the marsh land became precious because in its midst three railroads crossed in a triangle which surrounded the house at Cypress Hill. Shane became older and more perverse. The tales increased, tales of screams heard in the night and of brutalities committed upon his wife; more scandals about a young servant girl leaked out somehow and were seized by the population of the Town. But throughout the state Shane’s name still commanded respect. When the great came to the Town they stopped at Shane’s Castle where the drawing-room was thrown open and receptions were held with the rag, tag and bobtail permitted to satisfy their curiosity. They found nothing but a handsome house, strange and beautifully furnished in a style unknown in the Town. John Shane and his wife, her face grown hard now as the jewels on her fingers, stood by this judge or that governor to receive, calm and dignified, distinguished by a worldliness foreign to the rugged, growing community.

And at last the master of Shane’s Castle was stricken dead by apoplexy one winter night at the top of the long polished stairway; and the wiry, thin old body rolled all the way to the bottom. Irene, who was a neurotic, timid girl, saw him fall and ran screaming from the house. Lily was in Europe at St. Cloud on the outskirts of Paris, a pensionnaire in the boarding school of Mademoiselle Violette de Vaux. The wife quietly raised the body, laid it on a sofa under the portrait in the library and summoned a doctor who made certain that the terrible old man at last was dead.

When the news of his death spread through the Town, Italian workmen passing along the railroad at the foot of Cypress Hill crossed themselves and looked away as though the devil himself lay in state inside the wrought iron gates. Governors, judges and politicians attended the funeral and the widow appeared in deep mourning which she wore for three years. She played the role of a wife bereft of a devoted husband. The world whispered tales of her unhappiness, but the world knew nothing. When great people came to the Town, they were still entertained at Cypress Hill. The legend of John Shane attained the most fantastic proportions; it became a part of the Town’s tradition. The words which Stepan Krylenko, the tow-headed Ukrainian, shouted through the wrought iron gates at the terrified Irene were simply an echo of certain grotesque stories.

After the death of her husband, Julia Shane sold off piecemeal at prodigious prices the land in the marshes traversed by the railroads. Factory after factory was erected. Some built farming implements, some manufactured wooden ware, but it was steel which occupied most of the district. Rolling mills came in and blast furnaces raised their bleak towers until Shane’s Castle was no longer an island surrounded by marshes but by great furnaces, steel sheds and a glistening maze of railway tracks. New families grew wealthy and came into prominence, the Harrisons among them. Some of the Shane farm land was sold, but out of it the widow kept a wide strip bordering Main Street where she erected buildings which brought her fat rents. The money that remained she invested shrewdly so that it increased at a startling rate. She became a rich woman and the legend of Shane’s Castle grew, spurred on by envy.

To the foreigners who lived in the hovels at the gate of Cypress Hill, the house and the park became the symbols of an oppressing wealth, of a crude relentless power no less savage than the old world which they had deserted for this new one. It was true that Julia Shane had nothing to do with the mills and furnaces; her money came from the land she owned. The mills were owned by the Harrisons and Judge Weissman; but Shane’s Castle became an easy symbol upon which to fix a hatred. Its fading grandeur arose in the very midst of the hot and overcrowded kennels of the workers.

VII

SIX weeks after the night the Governor drove furiously away from the house at Cypress Hill, Julia Shane gave her last dinner before sending Lily away. It was small, including only Mrs. Julis Harrison, her son William, and Miss Abercrombie, but it served her purpose clearly as a piece of strategy to deceive the Town. Irene was absent, having gone back to the convent in the east where she had been to school as a little girl. A great doctor advised the visit, a doctor who held revolutionary ideas gained in Vienna. It was, he said, the one means of bringing the girl round, since he could drag from her no sane reason for her melancholy and neurasthenic behavior. Her mother could discover nothing; indeed it appeared that the girl had a strange fear of her which struck her dumb. So Julia Shane overcame her distaste for the Roman Catholic church and permitted the girl to return, thanking Heaven that she had kept from her the truth. This, she believed, would have caused Irene to lose her mind.

In the drawing-room after dinner a discreet battle raged with Julia Shane on one side and Mrs. Julis Harrison and Miss Abercrombie on the other. Lily and William Harrison withdrew to the library. In a curious fashion the drawing-room made an excellent battle-ground for so polite a struggle. It was so old, so mysterious and so delicate. There were no lights save the lamps, three of them, one majolica, one blue faience and one Ming, and the candles in the sconces on each side of the tall mirror and the flaming Venice of Mr. Turner. The only flowers were a bowl of white peonies which Lily had been able to save from the wreck of a garden beaten for three days by a south wind.

“The Governor’s visit,” observed Mrs. Harrison, “turned out unfortunately. He succeeded in offending almost every one of importance.”

“And his sudden going-away,” added Miss Abercrombie, eagerly leaning forward.

Julia Shane stirred in her big chair. To-night she wore an old-fashioned gown of black lace, very tight at the waist and very low in the neck, which displayed boldly the boniness of her strong shoulders. “I don’t think he intended slighting any one,” she said. “He was called away by a telegram. A Governor, you know, has duties. When Colonel Shane was alive....” And she launched into an anecdote of twenty years earlier, told amusingly and skilfully, leading Mrs. Julis Harrison and Miss Abercrombie for the time being far away from the behavior of the Governor. She spoke of her husband as she always did, in terms of the most profound devotion.

Mrs. Harrison was a handsome stout woman, a year or two older than Julia Shane but, unlike her, given to following the fashions closely. She preserved an illusion of youth by much lacing and secret recourse to rouge, a vain deception before Julia Shane, who knew rouge in all its degrees in Paris where rouge was used both skilfully and frankly. She moved, the older woman, with a slight pomposity, conscious always of the dignity of her position as the richest woman in the Town; for she was richer by a million or two than Julia Shane, to whom she acceded nothing save the prestige which was Cypress Hill and its tradition.

Miss Abercrombie, a spinster of uncertain age, wore her hair in a pompadour and spoke French, as she believed, perfectly. It was necessary that she believe in her own French, for she it was who instructed the young girls of the Town in French and in history, drawing upon a background derived from a dozen summers spent at one time or another on the continent. Throughout Julia Shane’s long anecdote, Miss Abercrombie interrupted from time to time with little fluttering sighs of appreciation, with “Ohs!” and “Ahs!” and sudden observations of how much pleasanter the Town had been in the old days. When the anecdote at last was finished, she it was who brought the conversation by a sudden heroic gesture back to the Governor.

“And tell me, dear Julia,” she said. “Is there no news of Lily?... Has nothing come of the Governor’s devotion?”

There was nothing, Julia replied with a sharp, compressed smile. “Nothing at all, save a flirtation. Lily, you know, is very pretty.”

“So beautiful!” remarked Mrs. Harrison. “I was telling my son William so, only to-night. He admires her ... deeply, you know, deeply.” She had taken to fanning herself vigorously for the night was hot. She did it boldly, endeavoring in vain to force some stray zephyr among the rolls of fat inside her tight bodice.

“What I can never understand,” continued Miss Abercrombie, “is why Lily hasn’t already married. A girl so pretty and so nice to every one ... especially older people.”

Mrs. Shane became falsely deprecating of Lily’s charms. “She is a good girl,” she said. “But hardly as charming as all that. The trouble is that she’s very fastidious. She isn’t easy to suit.” In her deprecation there was an assumption of superiority, as though she could well afford to deprecate because no one could possibly take her seriously.

“She’s had plenty of chances.... I don’t doubt that,” observed Miss Abercrombie. “I can remember that summer when we were all in Aix together.... Do you remember the young Englishman, Julia? The nice one with yellow hair?” She turned to Mrs. Julis Harrison with an air of arrogant pride and intimacy. “He was the second son of a peer, you know, and she could have had him by a turn of her finger.”

And the association with the peerage placed for the time being Miss Abercrombie definitely on the side of Julia Shane in the drawing-room skirmish.

“And Harvey Biggs was so devoted to her,” she babbled on. “Such a nice boy ... gone now to the war like so many other brave fellows.” Then as though remembering suddenly that William Harrison was not at the war but safe in the library across the hall, she veered quickly. “They say the Spanish atrocities in Cuba are beyond comprehension. I feel that we should spread them as much as possible to rouse the spirit of the people.”

“I’ve thought since,” remarked Mrs. Harrison, “that you should have had flags for decorations at the garden party, Julia. With a war on and especially with the Governor here. I only mention it because it has made people talk. It only adds to the resentment against his behavior.”

“I thought the flowers were enough,” replied Mrs. Shane, making a wry face. “They were so beautiful until cinders from your furnaces destroyed them. Those peonies,” she added, indicating the white flowers that showed dimly in the soft light, “are all that is left.” There was a moment’s pause and the distant throb of the Mills filled the room, proclaiming their eternal presence. It was a sound which never ceased. “The garden party seems to have been a complete failure. I’m growing too old to entertain properly.”

“Nonsense!” declared Mrs. Julis Harrison with great emphasis. “But I don’t see why you persist in living here with the furnaces under your nose.”

“I shan’t live anywhere else. Cypress Hill was here before the Mills ... long before.”

Almost unconsciously each woman discovered in the eye of the other a faint gleam of anger, the merest flash of spirit, a sign of the eternal struggle between that which is established and that which is forever in a state of flux, which Mrs. Julis Harrison in her heart called “progress” and Julia Shane in hers called “desecration.”

VIII

THE struggle ended here because at that moment the voice of William Harrison, drawling and colorless, penetrated the room. He came in from the hallway, preceded by Lily, who wore a gown of rose-colored satin draped at the waist and ornamented with a waterfall of lace which descended from the discreet V at the neck. He was an inch or two shorter than Lily, with pale blond hair and blue eyes that protruded a little from beneath a high bald forehead. His nose was long and his mouth narrow and passionless. He held himself very straight, for he was conscious that his lack of stature was inconsistent with the dignity necessary to the heir of the Harrison millions.

“It is late, mother,” he said. “And Lily is leaving to-morrow for New York. She is sailing, you know, on Thursday.”

His face was flushed and his manner nervous. He fingered his watch-chain, slipping the ruby clasp backward and forward restlessly.

“Sailing!” repeated Mrs. Harrison, sitting bolt upright in her chair and suspending her fan in mid-air. “Sailing! Why didn’t you tell me, Julia? I should have sent you a going-away present, Lily.”

“Sailing,” echoed Miss Abercrombie, “to France, my dear! I have some commissions you must do for me. Do you mind taking a package or two?”

Lily smiled slowly. “Of course not. Can you send them down in the morning? I’m afraid I won’t get up to the Town to-morrow.”

She moved aside suddenly to make way for the mulatto woman, Hennery’s wife, for whom Julia Shane had rung at the moment of William Harrison’s first speech.

“Tell Hennery,” she said, “to send round Mrs. Harrison’s carriage.” The old woman was taking no chances now.

There followed the confusion which surrounds the collecting of female wraps, increased by the twittering of Miss Abercrombie in her excitement over the thought of a voyage to “the continent.” The carriage arrived and the guests were driven off down the long drive and out into the squalid street.

When Miss Abercrombie had been dropped at a little old house which, sheltered by lilacs, elms and syringas, stood in the old part of the Town, William Harrison shifted his position in the victoria, fingered his watch chain nervously and lowered his voice lest the coachman hear him above the rumble of the rubber-tires on the cobble-stones.

“She refused me,” he said.

For a time the victoria rumbled along in silence with its mistress sitting very straight, breathing deeply. At length she said, “She may come round.... You’re not clever with women, William.”

The son writhed in the darkness. He must sometimes have suspected that his mother’s opinion of him was even less flattering than his own. There was no more talk between them that night. For Mrs. Harrison a great hope had been killed—put aside perhaps expressed it more accurately, for she was a powerful woman who did not accept defeat passively. She had hoped that she might unite the two great fortunes of the Town. Irene had been tried and found impossible. She would never marry any one. One thing puzzled the indomitable woman and so dulled a little the keen edge of her disappointment. It was the sudden trip to Paris. A strange incredible suspicion raised itself in her mind. This she considered for a time, turning it over and over with a perverse pleasure. At last, despite all her desire to believe it, she discarded it as too fantastic.

“It couldn’t be,” she thought. “Julia would never have dared to invite us to meet the girl. Lily herself could not have been so calm and pleasant. No, it’s impossible!”

All the same when she went to her room in the great ugly house of red sandstone, she sat down before undressing and wrote a note to a friend who lived in Paris.

IX

AT Cypress Hill, Julia Shane and her elder daughter returned, when the door had closed on their guests, to the drawing-room to discuss after a custom of long standing the entertainment of the evening. They agreed that Mrs. Harrison had grown much too stout, that she was indeed on the verge of apoplexy; that Miss Abercrombie became steadily more fidgety and affected.

“A woman should marry,” said Julia Shane, “even if she can do no better than a day laborer.”

Two candles by the side of the tall mirror and one by the flaming Venice of Mr. Turner guttered feebly and expired. Now that she was alone, the old woman lighted a cigarette and blew the smoke quietly into the still air. It was Lily who interrupted the silence.

“Willie proposed to me again,” she said presently.

The mother made no answer but regarded the girl quietly with a curious questioning look in her tired eyes. Lily, seated in the glow of light from the majolica lamp, must have understood what was passing in her mind.

“No,” she said, “if I had wanted to marry, I could have had a man ... a real man.” For a second her eyes grew dark with emotion and her red lips curved as if she remembered suddenly and with a shameless pleasure the embraces of her lover. “No,” she continued, “I wouldn’t play such a trick, even on a poor thing like Willie.”

The old woman knocked the ashes from her cigarette. The rings flashed and glittered in the candle light. “Sometimes,” she said softly, “I think you are hopeless ... altogether abandoned.”

There was a note of melancholy in her voice, so poignant that the girl suddenly sprang from her chair, crossed the little space between them and embraced her mother impulsively. “I’m sorry for your sake, Mama,” she said. “I’m sorry....” She kissed the hard, handsome face and the mother returned the embrace with a sudden fierce burst of unaccustomed passion.

“It’s all right, Lily dear. I’m only thinking of you. I don’t think anything can really hurt me any longer. I’m an old warrior, tough and well-armored.” For a second she regarded the girl tenderly and then asked, “but aren’t you afraid?”

“No!” The answer was quiet and confident.

“You’re a strange, strange girl,” said the mother.

X

MADAME GIGON with Fifi lived in a tiny apartment in the Rue de la Assomption. In the summer she went to live at Germigny l’Evec in a curve of the Marne after it has passed Meaux and Trilport, wandering its soft and amiable way between sedges and wild flags under rows of tall plane trees with bark as green and spotted as the backs of salamanders. Here she occupied the lodge of the château belonging to her cousin, a gentleman who inherited his title from a banker of the First Empire and lent the lodge rent free to Madame Gigon, whose father, also a banker, was ruined by the collapse of the Second Empire. M. Gigon, a scholar and antiquarian, one of the curators of the Cluny Museum, was long since dead—an ineffectual little man with a stoop and a squint, who lived his life gently and faded out of it with so little disturbance that even Madame Gigon sometimes examined her conscience and her respectability because there were long periods when she forgot that he had ever existed at all. Fifi was to her far more of a personality—Fifi with her fat waddle, her black and tan coat, and her habit of yapping for gateaux at tea time.

Although Madame Gigon was not English at all, tea was a fixed rite in her life. She came by the custom at the boarding school of Mademoiselle Violette de Vaux at St. Cloud on the edge of Paris where tea was a regular meal because there was always a score of English girls among Mademoiselle’s pensionnaires. On the passing of Monsieur Gigon she had taken, under the stress of bitter necessity, a place as instructress in art and history at the establishment of the aging Mademoiselle de Vaux, who, like herself was a Bonapartist, a bourgeoise and deeply respectable. She saved from her small salary a comfortable little fortune, and at length retired with Fifi to the little flat in the Rue de la Assomption to live upon her interest and the bounty of her cousin the Baron. But above even her respectability and her small fortune, she honored her position, an element which she had preserved through a lifetime of adversity. She was respected still as the daughter of a man who had ruined himself to support Napoleon the Little. She still attended the salons of the Bonapartist families in the houses and apartments of Passy, of the Boulevard Flandrin, and the new Paris of the Place de l’Etoile. She was respected still in the circles which moved about the aging figure of the Prince Bonaparte and, greatest of all, she received a card of admission signed by his own hand whenever the Prince addressed the Geographical Society.

Madame Gigon was in the act of closing her tiny apartment in the Rue de la Assomption for the summer when the letter of Julia Shane arrived. At the news it contained, she suspended the operations necessary to her departure for the lodge of Germigny l’Evec and settled herself to await the arrival of pretty Lily Shane, contenting herself meanwhile with taking Fifi for airings in the Bois de Boulogne, a suitable distance away for one of Madame’s age and infirmities. And when the day came, she managed to meet Lily in a fiacre at the Gare du Nord.

There was something touching in Madame Gigon’s reception of the girl, something even more touching in Lily’s reception by the fat and wheezing Fifi. The shrewd old dog remembered her as the girl who had been generous with gateaux, and when Lily, dressed smartly in a purple suit with a large hat covered with plumes, climbed into the fiacre, the plump Fifi shouted and leapt about with all the animation of a puppy.

Throughout the journey to Meaux and on the succeeding trip by carriage along the Marne to Germigny, the pair made no mention of Julia Shane’s letter. They talked of the heat, of the beauty of the countryside, of Mademoiselle de Vaux, who was past ninety and very feeble, of the new girls at the school ... until the peasant coachman drew up his fat horse before the gate of the lodge and carried their luggage into the vine covered cottage.

XI

AFTER Lily had rested in the room just beneath the dove cote, the pair, assisted by a red-cheeked farm girl, set themselves to putting the place in order. With the approach of evening, Madame Gigon took off her wig, donned a lace cap, and they were settled until the month of October.

When they had finished a supper of omelette, potatoes and wine, they seated themselves on the terrace and Madame Gigon at length approached the matter, delicately and with circumspection. It was a blue, misty evening of the sort frequent in the Isle de France, when the stillness becomes acute and tangible, when the faintest sound is sharply audible for an amazing distance across the waving fields of wheat. From the opposite side of the river arose the faint tinkling of a bell as a pair of white oxen made their way slowly from the farm to the sedge-bordered river. Overhead among the vines on the roof of the lodge, the pigeons stirred sleepily, cooing and preening themselves. The evening was beautiful, unbelievably calm, with the placidity of a marvelous dream.

After a long silence, Madame Gigon began to gossip once more and presently, she said, “To be sure, it has happened before in this world. It will happen again. The trouble is that you are too pretty, dear Lily, and you lose your head. You are too generous. I always told Mademoiselle you were more like our girls than the English or Americans.”

Lily said nothing. It appeared that she heard nothing old Madame Gigon said. Wrapped in her black cloak against the chill of the faint mist which swam above the Marne, she seemed lost in the breathless beauty of the evening.

“Why, in my family, it has happened. There was my cousin ... a sister of the Baron who lives here in the Chateau....” And Madame Gigon moved from one case to another, justifying Lily’s strange behavior. When she had finished with a long series, she shook her head gently and said, “I know, I know ...,” smiling all the while as though she had known many lovers and been as seductive as Cleopatra. She drank the last of her coffee, drying her mustache when she had finished.

“I brought down some fine lawn and some lace from Paris,” she said, “I remember that you always sewed beautifully. We shall be busy this winter in the little flat.”

And then Lily stirred for the first time, moving her body indolently with her eyes half-closed, her head resting on the back of the chair. “We shan’t live in the little flat, Madame Gigon.... We shall have a house.... I know just the one, in the Rue Raynouard. You see, I am going to live in Paris always. I am never going back to America to live.”

The old Frenchwoman said nothing, either in approval or disagreement, but she grew warm suddenly with pleasure. The house in the Rue Raynouard captured her imagination. It meant that she would have the dignity of surroundings suitable to one who received signed cards from the Prince Bonaparte to his lectures. She could have a salon. She knew that Lily Shane, like all Americans, was very rich.

A little while later they went inside and Lily in her room just under the dove-cote lighted a candle and settled herself to writing letters. One she addressed to the convent where Irene was stopping, one to Cypress Hill, and the last, very short and formal, she addressed the Governor. It was the first line she had written him. Also it was the last.

XII

IN the Town the tidings of Lily’s sudden departure followed the course of all bits of news from Shane’s Castle. It created for a time a veritable cloud of gossip. Again when it became gradually known that she intended living in Paris, heads wagged for a time and stories of her father were revived. Her name became the center of a myriad tales such as accumulate about beautiful women who are also indifferent.

But of one fact the Town learned nothing. It had no knowledge of a cablegram which arrived at Shane’s Castle containing simply the words, “John has arrived safely and well.” Only the telegraph operator saw it and to him the words could have meant nothing.

It was Mrs. Julis Harrison who kept alive the cloud of rumors that closed over the memory of Lily. When she was not occupied with directing the activities of the Mills through the mouthpiece of her son Willie, she fostered her suspicions. The letter addressed to a friend in Paris bore no fruit. Lily, it seemed, had buried herself. She was unknown to the American colony. But Mrs. Harrison, nothing daunted, managed herself to create a story which in time she came to believe, prefacing it to her choicest friends with the remark that “Shane’s Castle has not changed. More things go on there than this world dreams of.”

As for the Governor, he visited the Town two years later on the eve of election; but this time he did not stay at Shane’s Castle. It was known that he paid old Julia Shane a mysterious visit lasting more than an hour, but what passed between them remained at best a subject for the wildest speculation.

With the departure of Lily, her mother settled slowly into a life of retirement. There were no more receptions and garden-parties. With Lily gone, there appeared to be no reasons for gaiety. Irene, as every one knew, hated festivities of every sort.

“I am growing too old,” said Julia Shane. “It tires me to entertain. Why should I?”

It was not true that she was old, yet it was true that she was tired. It was clear that she was letting slip all threads of interest, even more apparent that she actually cherished her solitude.

She still condescended to go to an occasional dinner in the Town, driving in her victoria with Hennery on the box through sweating smelly Halsted street, across the writhing oily Black Fork and up the Hill to the respectable portion of the Town where lived the people of property. It was impossible to have guessed her thoughts on that infrequent journey. They must have been strange ... the thoughts of a woman not long past middle-age who had seen within her lifetime the most extraordinary metamorphosis in the Town of her birth. She could remember the days when she rode with John Shane in his paddock, now completely buried beneath massive warehouses. She could remember the days when Halsted street was only a private drive across the marshes to Cypress Hill. Indeed it appeared, as the years passed, that Julia Shane was slipping slowly back across all those years into the simplicity that marked her childhood as a farmer’s daughter. She talked less and avoided people. She no longer cared for the elegance of her clothes. As though her gaunt and worldly air had been only a mockery she began to slough it off bit by bit with the passing months. The few women who crossed the threshold of Shane’s Castle returned with stories that Julia Shane, having closed the rest of the house, had taken to living in two or three rooms.

People said other things too, of Julia and her two daughters, but mostly of Lily, for Lily somehow captured their imagination. In the midst of the Town, born and bred upon the furnace girt hill, she was an exotic, an orchid appearing suddenly in a prosperous vegetable garden.

People said such things as, “Julia Shane gets no satisfaction out of her daughter Irene.... I believe myself that the girl is a little queer.”

Or it might be that Mrs. Julis Harrison, with a knowing shake of the head would remark, “It’s strange that Lily has never married. They say she is enjoying herself in Paris, although she doesn’t see anything of the Americans there. It’s like John Shane’s daughter to prefer the French.”

XIII

MEANWHILE the Town grew. The farm where Julia Shane spent her youth disappeared entirely, broken up into checker board allotments, crossed by a fretwork of crude concrete sidewalks. Houses, uniform and unvaryingly ugly in architecture and cheap in construction, sprang up in clusters like fungi to house the clerks and the petty officials of the Mills. In the Flats, which included all that district taken over by the factories, hundreds of alien workmen drifted in to fill the already overcrowded houses beyond endurance. Croats, Slovenes, Russians, Poles, Italians, Negroes took up their abodes in the unhealthy lowlands, in the shadows of the furnace towers and the resounding steel sheds, under the very hedges of Shane’s Castle. In Halsted street, next door to the corner saloon, a handful of worthy citizens, moved by the gravity of conditions in the district, opened an establishment which they gave the sentimental name of Welcome House, using it to aid the few aliens who were not hostile and suspicious of volunteer workers from the Town.

All this, Julia Shane, living in another world, ignored. She saw nothing of what happened beneath her very windows.

It was true that she found no satisfaction in her daughter Irene. On the return of the girl from a long rest at the convent, there took place between mother and daughter a terrible battle which did not end in a sudden, decisive victory but dragged its length across many weeks. Irene returned with her thin pretty face pale and transparent, her ash blond hair drawn back tightly from her forehead in severe nunlike fashion. She wore a suit of black stuff, plainly made and ornamented only by a plain collar of white lawn.

On the first evening at home, the mother and daughter sat until midnight in the library, a room which they used after dinner on evenings when they were alone. The little French clock struck twelve before the girl was able to summon courage to address her mother, and when at last she succeeded, she was forced to interrupt the old woman in the midst of a new book by Collette Willy, sent her by Lily, which she was reading with the aid of a silver mounted glass.

“Mother,” began Irene gently. “Mother....”

Julia Shane put down the glass and looked up. “What is it?”

“Mother, I’ve decided to enter the church.”

It was an announcement far from novel, a hope expressed year after year only to be trodden under foot by the will of the old woman. But this time there was a new quality in Irene’s voice, a shade of firmness and determination that was not at all in keeping with the girl’s usual humility. The mother’s face grew stern, almost hard. Cheri slipped gently to the floor where it lay forgotten.

“Is this my reward for letting you go back to the convent?” The voice was cold, dominating, a voice which always brought Irene into a trembling submission. The church to both meant but one thing—the Roman Catholic church—which John Shane, a Romanist turned scoffer, had mocked all his life, a church which to his Presbyterian widow was always the Scarlet Woman of Rome.

The girl said nothing but kept her eyes cast down, fingering all the while the carving on the arm of her rosewood chair. She had grown desperately pale. Her thin fingers trembled.

“Has this anything to do with Lily?” asked the mother with a sudden air of suspicion, and Irene answered “No! No!” with such intensity that Julia Shane, convinced that she still knew nothing, tried a new tack.

“You know how I feel,” she said. “I am old and I am tired. I have had enough unhappiness, Irene. This would be the last.”

Tears came into the eyes of the girl, and the trembling grew and spread until her whole body was shaking. “It is all I have,” she cried.

“Don’t be morbid!”

The eagle look came into Mrs. Shane’s face—the look with which she faced down all the world save her own family.

“I won’t hear of it,” she added. “I’ve told you often enough, Irene.... I won’t have a daughter of mine sell herself to the devil if I can prevent it.” She spoke with a rising intensity of feeling that was akin to hatred. “You shall not do it as long as I live and never after I am dead, if I can help it.”

The girl tried not to sob. The new defiance in her soul gave her a certain spiritual will to oppose her mother. Never before had she dared even to argue her case. “If it were Lily ...” she began weakly.

“It would make no difference. Besides, it could never be Lily. That is out of the question. Lily is no fool....”

The accusation of Irene was an old one, secret, cherished always in the depths of a lonely submissive heart. It was born now from the depths of her soul, a cry almost of passion, a protest against a sister whom every one pardoned, whom every one admired, whom all the world loved. It was an accusation directed against the mother who was so sympathetic toward Lily, so uncomprehending toward Irene.

“I suppose they have been talking to you ... the sisters,” continued Julia Shane. And when the girl only buried her face miserably in her arms, she added more gently, “Come here, Irene.... Come over here to me.”

Quietly the daughter came to her side where she knelt down clasping the fingers covered with rings that were so cold against her delicate, transparent skin. For an instant the mother frowned as if stricken by some physical pain. “My God!” she said, “Why is it so hard to live?” But her weakness passed quickly. She stiffened her tired body, sighed, and began again. “Now,” she said gruffly. “We must work this out.... We must understand each other better, my dear. If you could manage to confide in me ... to let me help you. I am your mother. Whatever comes to you comes to me as well ... everything. There are three of us, you and Lily and me.” Her manner grew slowly more tender, more affectionate. “We must keep together. You might say that we stood alone ... three women with the world against us. When I die, I want to leave you and Lily closer to each other than you and I have been. If there is anything that you want to confess ... if you have any secret, tell it to me and not to the sisters.”

By now Irene was sobbing hysterically, clinging all the while to the hand of her mother. “There is nothing ... nothing!” she cried, “I don’t know why I am so miserable.”

“Then promise me one thing ... that you will do nothing until we have talked the matter out thoroughly.” She fell to stroking the girl’s blond hair with her thin veined hand, slowly, with a hypnotic gesture.

“Yes.... Yes.... I promise!” And gradually the sobbing ebbed and the girl became still and calm.

For a time they sat thus listening to the mocking frivolous tick-tick of the little French clock over the fireplace. A greater sound, rumbling and regular like the pounding of giant hammers they did not hear because it had become so much a part of their lives that it was no longer audible. The throb of the Mills, working day and night, had become a part of the very stillness.

At last Julia Shane stirred and said with a sudden passion, “Come, Irene!... Come up to my room. There is no peace here.” And the pair rose and hurried away, the mother hobbling along with the aid of her ebony stick, never once glancing behind her at the portrait whose handsome malignant eyes appeared to follow them with a wicked delight.

XIV

FOR days a silent struggle between the two continued, a struggle which neither admitted, yet one of which they were always conscious sleeping or waking. And at last the mother gained from the tormented girl a second promise ... that she would never enter the church so long as her mother was alive. Shrewdly she roused the interest of the girl in the families of the mill workers who dwelt at the gates of Cypress Hill. Among these Irene found a place. Like a sister of charity she went into their homes, facing all the deep-rooted hostility and the suspicions of Shane’s Castle. She even went by night to teach English to a handful of laborers in the school at Welcome House. For three years she labored thus, and at the end of that time she seemed happy, for there were a few among the aliens who trusted her. There were among them devout and simple souls who even came to believe that there was something saintly in the lady from Shane’s Castle.

It was this pale, devout Irene that Lily found when she returned home after four years to visit her mother at Cypress Hill. Without sending word ahead she arrived alone at the sooty brick station in the heart of the Flats, slipping down at midnight from the transcontinental express, unrecognized even by the old station master who had been there for twenty years. She entered the Town like a stranger, handsomely dressed with a thick Parisian veil and heavy furs which hid her face save for a pair of dark eyes. When one is not expected one is not easily recognized, and there were people in the Town who believed that Lily Shane might never return from Paris.

She remained for a moment on the dirty platform, looking about her at the new factory sheds and the rows of workmen’s houses which had sprung up since her departure. They appeared dimly through the falling snow as if they were not solid and real at all, but queer structures born out of dreams. Then she entered one of the station cabs, smelling faintly of mold and ammonia, and drove off. Throughout the journey up Halsted street to Shane’s Castle, she kept poking her head in and out of the cab window to regard the outlines of new chimneys and new sheds against the glow in the sky. The snow fell in great wet flakes and no sooner did it touch the ground than it became black, and melting, flowed away in a dirty stream along the gutters. At the corner saloon, a crowd of steel workers peered at her in a drunken wonder tinged with hostility, amazed at the sight of a strange woman so richly dressed driving through the Flats at midnight. Whatever else was in doubt, they must have known her destination was the great black house on the hill.

As the cab turned in the long drive, Lily noticed by the glare of the street light that the wrought iron gates had not been painted and were clotted with rust. The gaps in the hedge of arbor vitæ had spread until in spots the desolation extended for a dozen yards or more. In the house the windows all were dark save on the library side where a dull light glowed through the falling snow. The house somehow appeared dead, abandoned. In the old days it had blazed with light.

Jerry, the cab driver, lifted down her bags, stamped with the bright labels of Hotels Royale Splendide and Beau Rivage, of Ritz-Carltons and Metropolitans, in St. Moritz, in Cannes, in Sorrento and Firenze, and deposited them on the piazza with the wrought iron columns. The wistaria vines, she discovered suddenly, were gone and only the black outline of the wrought iron supports showed in a hard filigree against the dull glow of the furnaces.

The door was locked and she pulled the bell a half dozen times, listening to the sound of its distant tinkle, before the mulatto woman opened and admitted her to the accompaniment of incoherent mutterings of welcome.

“Mama!” Lily called up the long polished stairway. “Irene! Mama! Where are you?”

She gave her coat and furs to the mulatto woman and as she untied her veil, the sound of her mother’s limping step and the tapping of her stick echoed from overhead through the silent house. A moment later, Julia Shane herself appeared at the top of the stairs followed by Irene clad like a deaconess in a dress of gray stuff with a high collar.

XV

ON the occasion of Lily’s first dinner at home, the mulatto woman brought out the heaviest of the silver candelabra and despatched Hennery into the Town for a dozen tall candles and a great bunch of pink roses which filled the silver épergne when the mother and the two daughters came down to dinner; Julia Shane, as usual, wore black with a lace shawl thrown over her gray hair, a custom which she had come to adopt in the evenings and one which gave the Town one more point of evidence in the growing chain of her eccentricities. Irene, still clad in the gray dress with the high collar and looking somehow like a governess or a nurse employed in the house, took her place at the side of the table. As for Lily, her appearance so fascinated the mulatto woman and the black girl who aided her that the dinner was badly served and brought a sharp remonstrance from Mrs. Shane. No longer had Lily any claims to girlhood. Indisputably she was become a woman. A fine figure of a woman, she might have been called, had she been less languid and indolent. Her slimness had given way to a delicate voluptuousness, a certain opulence like the ripeness of a beautiful fruit. Where there had been slimness before there now were curves. She moved slowly and with the same curious dignity of her mother, and she wore no rouge, for her lips were full and red and her cheeks flushed with delicate color. Her beauty was the beauty of a peasant girl from which all coarseness had been eliminated, leaving only a radiant glow of health. She was, after all, the granddaughter of a Scotch farmer; there was nothing thin-blooded about her, nothing of the anemia of Irene. To-night she wore a tea-gown from Venice, the color of water in a limestone pool, liquid, cool, pale green. Her reddish hair, in defiance of the prevailing fashions, she wore bound tightly about her head and fastened by a pin set with brilliants. About her neck on a thin silver cord hung suspended a single pear-shaped emerald which rested between her breasts, so that sometimes it hung outside the gown and sometimes lay concealed against the delicate white skin.

Irene throughout the dinner spoke infrequently and kept her eyes cast down as though the beauty of her sister in some way fascinated and repelled her. When it was finished, she stood up and addressed her mother.

“I must go now. It is my night to teach at Welcome House.”

Lily regarded her with a puzzled expression until her mother, turning to explain, said, “She teaches English to a class of foreigners in Halsted street.” And then to Irene, “You might have given it up on the first night Lily was home!”

A look of stubbornness came into the pale face of the younger sister. “I can’t. They are depending on me. I shall see Lily every day for weeks. This is a duty. To stay would be to yield to pleasure.”

“But you’re not going alone into Halsted street?” protested Lily. “At night! You must be crazy!”

“I’m perfectly safe.... They know me and what I do,” the sister answered proudly. “Besides there is one of the men who always sees me home.”

She came round to Lily’s chair and gave her a kiss, the merest brushing of cool lips against the older sister’s warm cheek. “Good-night,” she said, “in case you have gone to bed before I return.”

When Irene had gone, an instant change took place in the demeanor of the two women. It was as though some invisible barrier, separating the souls of mother and daughter, had been let down suddenly. Lily leaned back and stretched her long limbs. The mulatto woman brought cigarettes and the mother and daughter settled themselves to talking. They were at last alone and free to say what they would.

“How long has Irene been behaving in this fashion?” asked Lily.

“It is more than three years now. I don’t interfere because it gives her so much pleasure. It saved her, you know, from entering the church. Anything is better than that.”

Then all at once as though they had suddenly entered another world, they began to talk French, shutting out the mulatto woman from their conversation.

“Mais elle est déja religieuse,” said Lily, “tout simplement. You might as well let her enter the church. She already behaves like a nun ... in that ridiculous gray dress. She looks ghastly. You should forbid it. A woman has no right to make herself look hideous. There’s something sinful in it.”

The mother smiled wearily. “Forbid it? You don’t know Irene. I’m thankful to keep her out of the church. She is becoming fanatic.” There was a pause and Mrs. Shane added, “She never goes out now ... not since a year and more.”

“She is like a spinster of forty.... It is shameful for a girl of twenty-five to let herself go in that fashion. No man would look at her.”

“Irene will never marry.... It is no use speaking to her. I have seen the type before, Lily ... the religieuse. It takes the place of love. It is just as ecstatic.”

The mulatto woman, who had been clearing away the dishes, came and stood by her mistress’ chair to await, after her custom, the orders for the following day. “There will only be three of us ... as usual. That is all, Sarah!”

The woman turned to go but Lily called after her. “Mama,” she said, “can’t we open the rest of the house while I’m here? It’s horrible, shut up in this fashion. I hate sitting in the library when there is all the drawing-room.”

Mrs. Shane did not argue. “Get some one to help you open the drawing-room to-morrow, Sarah. We will use it while Miss Lily is here.”

The mulatto woman went out and Lily lighted another cigarette. “You will want it open for the Christmas party,” she said. “You can’t entertain all the family in the library.”

“I had thought of giving up the Christmas party this year,” replied the Mother.

“No ... not this year,” cried Lily. “It is such fun, and I haven’t seen Cousin Hattie and Uncle Jacob and Ellen for years.”

Again the mother yielded. “You want gaiety, I see.”

“Well, I’m not pious like Irene, and this house is gloomy enough.” At the sight of her mother rising from her chair, she said ... “Let’s not go to the library. Let’s sit here. I hate it in there.”

So there they remained while the tall candles burned lower and lower. Suddenly after a brief pause in the talk, the mother turned to Lily and said, “Et toi.”

Lily shrugged her shoulders. “Moi? Moi? Je suis contente.”

“Et Madame Gigon, et le petit Jean.”

“They are well ... both of them. I have brought a picture which I’ve been waiting to show you.”

“He is married, you know.”

“When?”

“Only three weeks ago. He came here after your letter to offer to do anything he could. He wants the boy to go to school in America.”

Here Lily smiled triumphantly. “But Jean is mine. I shall accept nothing from him. He is afraid to recognize Jean because it would ruin him. I shall send the boy where I like.” She leaned forward, glowing with a sudden enthusiasm. “You don’t know how handsome he is and how clever.” She pushed back her chair. “Wait, I’ll get his picture.”

The mother interrupted her. “Bring me the enameled box from my dressing table. There is something in it that will interest you.”

XVI

IN a moment the daughter returned bearing the photograph and the enameled box. It was the picture which interested Julia Shane. Putting aside the box she took it up and gazed at it for a long time in silence while Lily watched her narrowly across the polished table.

“He is a handsome child,” she said presently. “He resembles you. There is nothing of his father.” Her blue eyes were moist and the tired hard face softened. “Come here,” she added almost under her breath, and when the daughter came to her side she kissed her softly, holding her close to her thin breast. When she released Lily from her embrace, she said, “And you? When are you going to marry?”

Lily laughed. “Oh, there is plenty of time. I am only twenty-seven, after all. I am very happy as I am.” She picked up the enameled box, smiling. “Show me the secret,” she said.

Mrs. Shane opened the box and from a number of yellow clippings drew forth one which was quite new. “There,” she said, giving it to the daughter. “It is a picture of him and his new wife, taken at the wedding.”

There was a portrait of the Governor, grown a little more stout, but still tall, straight and broad shouldered. His flowing mustache had been clipped; otherwise he was unchanged. In the picture he grinned amiably toward the camera as if he saw political capital even in his own honeymoon. By his side stood a woman of medium height and strong build. Her features were heavy and she too smiled, although there was something superior in her smile as though she felt a disdain for the public. It was a plain face, intelligent, yet somehow lacking in charm. The clipping identified her as the daughter of a wealthy middle-western manufacturer and a graduate of a woman’s college. It continued with a short biographical account of the Governor, predicting for him a brilliant future and congratulating him upon a marriage the public had long awaited with interest.

Lily replaced the clipping in the enameled box and closed the lid with a snap. “He had done well,” she remarked. “She sounds like a perfect wife for an American politician. I should have been a hopeless failure. As it is we are both happy.”

The look of bewilderment returned to her mother’s eyes. “The boy,” she said, “should have a father. You should marry for his sake, Lily.”

“He shall have ... in time. There is no hurry. Besides, his position is all right. I am Madame Shane, a rich American widow. Madame Gigon has taken care of that. My position is excellent. No woman could be more respected.”

Gradually she drifted into an account of her life in Paris. It followed closely the line of pleasant anticipations which Madame Gigon had permitted herself during the stillness of that first evening on the terrace above the Marne. The house in the Rue Raynouard was big and old. It had been built before the Revolution at a time when Passy was a suburb surrounded by open meadows. It had a garden at the back which ran down to the Rue de Passy, once the open highroad to Auteuil. Apartments, shops and houses now covered the open meadows but the old house and the garden remained unchanged, unaltered since the day Lenôtre planned them for the Marquise de Sevillac. The garden had a fine terrace and a pavilion which some day Jean should have for his own quarters. The house itself was well planned for entertaining. It had plenty of space and a large drawing-room which extended along the garden side with tall windows opening outward upon the terrace. At a little distance off was the Seine. One could hear the excursion steamers bound for Sèvres and St. Cloud whistling throughout the day and night.

As for friends, there were plenty of them ... more than she desired. There were the respectable baronnes and comtesses of Madame Gigon’s set, a group which worshiped the Prince Bonaparte and talked a deal of silly nonsense about the Restoration of the Empire. To be sure, they were fuddy-duddy, but their sons and daughters were not so bad. Some of them Lily had known at the school of Mademoiselle de Vaux. Some of them were charming, especially the men. She had been to Compiègne to hunt, though she disliked exercise of so violent a nature. Indeed they had all been very kind to her.

“After all,” she concluded, “I am not clever or brilliant. I am content with them. I am really happy. As for Madame Gigon, she is radiant. She has become a great figure in her set. She holds a salon twice a month with such an array of gateaux as would turn you ill simply to look at. I give her a fat allowance but she gets herself up like the devil. I think she is sorry that crinolines are no longer the fashion. She looks like a Christmas tree, but she is the height of respectability.” For an instant a thin shade of mockery, almost of bitterness colored her voice.

Julia Shane reached over suddenly and touched her daughter’s arm. Something in Lily’s voice or manner had alarmed her. “Be careful, Lily. Don’t let yourself grow hard. That’s the one thing.”

XVII

THEY sat talking thus until the candles burnt low, guttered and began to go out, one by one, and at last the distant tinkle of a bell echoed through the house. For a moment they listened, waiting for one of the servants to answer and when the bell rang again and again, Lily at last got up languidly saying, “It must be Irene. I’ll open if the servants are in bed.”

“She always has a key,” said her mother. “She has never forgotten it before.”

Lily made her way through the hall and boldly opened the door to discover that she was right. Irene stood outside covered with snow. As she stepped in, her sister caught a glimpse through the mist of falling flakes of a tall man, powerfully built, walking down the long drive toward Halsted street. He walked rapidly, for he wore no overcoat and the night was cold.

In the warm lamplighted hall, Irene shook the snow from her coat and took off her plain ugly black hat. Her pale cheeks were flushed, perhaps from the effort of walking so rapidly up the drive.

“Who is the man?” asked Lily with an inquisitive smile. Her sister, pulling off her heavy overshoes, answered without looking up. “His name is Krylenko. He is a Ukrainian ... a mill worker.”

An hour later the two sisters sat in Lily’s room while she took out gown after gown from the brightly labeled trunks. Something had happened during the course of the evening to soften the younger sister. She showed for the first time traces of an interest in the life of Lily. She even bent over the trunks and felt admiringly of the satins, the brocades, the silks and the furs that Lily lifted out and tossed carelessly upon the big Italian bed. She poked about among the delicate chiffons and laces until at last she came upon a small photograph of a handsome gentleman in the ornate uniform of the cuirassiers. He was swarthy and dark-eyed with a crisp vigorous mustache, waxed and turned up smartly at the ends. For a second she held it under the light of the bed lamp.

“Who is this?” she asked, and Lily, busy with her unpacking, looked up for an instant and then continued her task. “It is the Baron,” she replied. “Madame Gigon’s cousin ... the one who supports her.”

“He is handsome,” observed Irene in a strange shrewd voice.

“He is a friend.... We ride together in the country. Naturally I see a great deal of him. We live at his château in the summer.”

The younger sister dropped the conversation. She became silent and withdrawn, and the queer frightened look showed itself in her pale blue eyes. Presently she excused herself on the pretense that she was tired and withdrew to the chaste darkness of her own room where she knelt down before a plaster virgin, all pink and gilt and sometimes tawdry, to pray.

XVIII

ON the following night the house, as it appeared from the squalid level of Halsted street, took on in its setting of snow-covered pines and false cypresses the appearance to which the Town had been accustomed in the old days. The drawing-room windows glowed with warm light; wreaths were hung against the small diamond shaped panes, and those who passed the wrought iron gates heard during the occasional pauses in the uproar of the Mills the distant tinkling of a piano played with a wild exuberance by some one who chose the gayest of tunes, waltzes and polkas, which at the same hour were to be heard in a dozen Paris music halls.

Above the Flats in the Town, invitations were received during the course of the week to a dinner party, followed by a ball in the long drawing-room.

“Cypress Hill is becoming gay again,” observed Miss Abercrombie.

“It must be the return of Lily,” said Mrs. Julis Harrison. “Julia will never entertain again. She is too broken,” she added with a kind of triumph.

A night or two after Lily’s return Mrs. Harrison again spoke to her son William of Lily’s beauty and wealth, subtly to be sure and with carefully concealed purpose, for Willie, who was thirty-five now and still unmarried, grew daily more shy and more deprecatory of his own charms.

It was clear enough that the tradition of Cypress Hill was by no means dead, that it required but a little effort, the merest scribbling of a note, to restore all its slumbering prestige. The dinner and the ball became the event of the year. There was great curiosity concerning Lily. Those who had seen her reported that she looked well and handsome, that her clothes were far in advance of the local fashions. They talked once more of her beauty, her charm, her kindliness. They spoke nothing but good of her, just as they mocked Irene and jeered at her work among the foreigners in the Flats. It was Lily who succeeded to her mother’s place as chatelaine of the beautiful gloomy old house at Cypress Hill.

It was also Lily who, some two weeks before Christmas, received Mrs. Julis Harrison and Judge Weissman on the mission which brought them together in a social way for the only time in their lives. The strange pair arrived at Shane’s Castle in Mrs. Harrison’s victoria, the Jew wrapped in a great fur coat, his face a deep red from too much whiskey; and the dowager, in an imperial purple dress with a dangling gold chain, sitting well away to her side of the carriage as if contact with her companion might in some horrid way contaminate her. Lily, receiving them in the big hall, was unable to control her amazement at their sudden appearance. As the Judge bowed, rather too obsequiously, and Mrs. Harrison fastened her face into a semblance of cordiality, a look of intense mirth spread over Lily’s face like water released suddenly from a broken dam. There was something inexpressibly comic in Mrs. Harrison’s obvious determination to admit nothing unusual in a call made with Judge Weissman at ten in the morning.

“We have come to see your mother,” announced the purple clad Amazon. “Is she able to see us?”

Lily led the pair into the library. “Wait,” she replied, “I’ll see. She always stays in bed until noon. You know she grows tired easily nowadays.”

“I know ... I know,” said Mrs. Harrison. “Will you tell her it is important? A matter of life and death?”

While Lily was gone the pair in the library waited beneath the mocking gaze of John Shane’s portrait. They maintained a tomb-like silence, broken only by the faint rustling of Mrs. Harrison’s taffeta petticoats and the cat-like step of the Judge on the Aubusson carpet as he prowled from table to table examining the bits of jade or crystal or silver which caught his Oriental fancy. Mrs. Harrison sat bolt upright, a little like a pouter pigeon, with her coat thrown back to permit her to breathe. She drummed the arm of her chair with her fat fingers and followed with her small blue eyes the movements of the elk’s tooth charm that hung suspended from the Judge’s watch chain and swayed with every movement of his obese body. At the entrance of Julia Shane, so tall, so gaunt, so cold, she rose nervously and permitted a nervous smile to flit across her face. It was the deprecating smile of one prepared to swallow her pride.

Mrs. Shane, leaning on her stick, moved forward, at the same time fastening upon the Judge a glance which conveyed both curiosity and an undisguised avowal of distaste.

“Dear Julia,” began Mrs. Harrison, “I hope you’re not too weary. We came to see you on business.” The Judge bobbed his assent.

“Oh, no, I’m quite all right. But if you’ve come about buying Cypress Hill, it’s no use. I have no intention of selling it as long as I live.”

Mrs. Harrison sat down once more. “It’s not that,” she said. “It’s other business.” And then turning. “You know Judge Weissman, of course.”

The Judge gave a obsequious bow. From the manner of his hostess, it was clear that she did not know him, that indeed thousands of introductions could never induce her to know him.

“Won’t you sit down?” she said with a cold politeness, and the Judge settled himself into an easy chair, collapsing vaguely into rolls of fat.

“We should like to talk with you alone,” said Mrs. Harrison. “If Lily could leave....” And she finished the speech with a nod of the head and a turn of the eye meant to convey a sense of grave mystery.

“Certainly,” replied Lily, and went out closing the door on her mother and the two visitors.

For two hours they remained closeted in the library while Lily wandered about the house, writing notes, playing on the piano; and once, unable to restrain her curiosity, listening on tip-toe outside the library door. At the end of that time, the door opened and there emerged Mrs. Julis Harrison, looking cold and massively dignified, her gold chain swinging more than usual, Judge Weissman, very red and very angry, and last of all, Julia Shane, her old eyes lighted by a strange new spark and her thin lips framed in an ironic smile of triumph.

The carriage appeared and the two visitors climbed in and were driven away on sagging springs across the soot-covered snow. When they had gone, the mother summoned Lily into the library, closed the door and then sat down, her thin smile growing at the same time into a wicked chuckle.

“They’ve been caught ... the pair of them,” she said. “And Cousin Charlie did it.... They’ve been trying to get me to call him off.”

Lily regarded her mother with eyebrows drawn together in a little frown. Plainly she was puzzled. “But how Cousin Charlie?” she asked. “How has he caught them?”

The mother set herself to explaining the whole story. She went back to the very beginning. “Cousin Charlie, you know, is county treasurer. It was Judge Weissman who elected him. The Jew is powerful. Cousin Charlie wouldn’t have had a chance but for him. Judge Weissman only backed him because he thought he’d take orders. But he hasn’t. That’s where the trouble is. That’s why they’re worried now. He won’t do what Judge Weissman tells him to do!”

Here she paused, permitting herself to laugh again at the discomfiture of her early morning callers. So genuine was her mirthful satisfaction that for an instant, the guise of the worldly woman vanished and through the mask showed the farm girl John Shane had married thirty years before.

“You see,” she continued, “in going through the books, Cousin Charlie discovered that the Cyclops Mills owe the county about five hundred thousand dollars in back taxes. He’s sued to recover the money together with the fines, and he cannot lose. Judge Weissman and Mrs. Harrison have just discovered that and they’ve come to me to call him off because he is set on recovering the money. He’s refused to take orders. You see, it hits their pocket-books. The man who was treasurer before Cousin Charlie has disappeared neatly. There’s a pretty scandal somewhere. Even if it doesn’t come out, the Harrisons and Judge Weissman will lose a few hundred thousands. The Jew owns a lot of stock, you know.”

The old woman pounded the floor with her ebony stick as though the delight was too great to escape expression by any other means. Her blue eyes shone with a wicked gleam, “It’s happened at last!” she said. “It’s happened at last! I’ve been waiting for it ... all these years.”

“And what did you tell them?” asked Lily.

“Tell them! Tell them!” cried Julia Shane. “What could I tell them? Only that I could do nothing. I told them they were dealing with an honest man. It is impossible to corrupt Hattie’s husband. I could do nothing if I would, and certainly I would do nothing if I could. They’ll have to pay ... just when they’re in the midst of building new furnaces.” Suddenly her face grew serious and the triumph died out of her voice. “But I’m sorry for Charlie and Hattie, just the same. He’ll suffer for it. He has killed himself politically. The Jew is too powerful for him. It’ll be hard on Hattie and the children, just when Ellen was planning to go away to study. Judge Weissman will fight him from now on. You’ve no idea how angry he was. He tried to bellow at me, but I soon stopped him.”

And the old woman laughed again at the memory of her triumph.

As for Lily her handsome face grew rosy with indignation. “It can’t be as bad as that! That can’t happen to a man because he did his duty! The Town can’t be as rotten as that!”

“It is though,” said her mother. “It is. You’ve no idea how rotten it is. Why, Cousin Charlie is a lamb among the wolves. Believe me I know. It’s worse than when your father was alive. The mills have made it worse.”

Then both of them fell silent and the terrible roar of the Cyclops Mills, triumphant and monstrous, invaded the room once more. Irene came in from a tour of the Flats and looking in at the door noticed that they were occupied with their own thoughts, and so hurried on to her room. At last Mrs. Shane rose.

“We must help the Tollivers somehow,” she said. “If only they weren’t so damned proud it would be easier.”

Lily, her eyes dark and serious, stood at the window now looking across the garden buried beneath blackened snow. “I know,” she said. “I was thinking the same thing.”

XIX

FOR thirty years Christmas dinner had been an event at Shane’s Castle. John Shane, who had no family of his own, who was cut off from friends and relatives, adopted in the seventies the family of his wife, and established the custom of inviting every relative and connection to a great feast with wine, a turkey, a goose and a pair of roast pigs. In the old days before the MacDougal Farm was swallowed up by the growing town, New Year’s dinner at the farmhouse had also been an event. The family came in sleds and sleighs from all parts of the county to gather round the groaning table of Jacob Barr, Julia Shane’s brother-in-law and the companion of John Shane in the paddock now covered by warehouses. But all that was a part of the past. Even the farmhouse no longer existed. Christmas at Cypress Hill was all that remained.

Once there had been as many as thirty gathered about the table, but one by one these had vanished, passing out of this life or migrating to the West when the Mills came and the county grew crowded; for the MacDougals, the Barrs and all their connection were adventurers, true pioneers who became wretched when they were no longer surrounded by a sense of space, by enough air, unclogged by soot and coal gas, for their children to breathe.

On Christmas day there came to Cypress Hill a little remnant of seven. These with Julia Shane and her two daughters were all that remained of a family whose founder had crossed the Appalachians from Maryland to convert the wilderness into fertile farming land. They arrived at the portico with the wrought iron columns in two groups, the first of which was known as The Tolliver Family. It included Cousin Hattie, her husband Charles Tolliver, their daughter Ellen, two sons Fergus and Robert, and Jacob Barr, who made his home with them and shared with Julia Shane the position of Head of the Family.

They drove up in a sleigh drawn by two horses—good horses, for Jacob Barr and Charles Tolliver were judges of horseflesh—and Mrs. Tolliver got down first, a massive woman, large without being fat, with a rosy complexion and a manner of authority. She wore a black feather boa, a hat trimmed with stubby ostrich plumes perched high on her fine black hair, and a short jacket of astrakhan, slightly démodé owing to its leg-of-mutton sleeves. After her descended her father, the patriarch Jacob Barr. The carriage rocked beneath his bulk. He stood six feet three in his stocking feet and for all his eighty-two years was bright as a dollar and straight as a poker. A long white beard covered his neckerchief and fell to the third button of his embroidered waistcoat, entangling itself in the heavy watch chain from which hung suspended a nugget of gold, souvenir of his adventure to the Gold Coast in the Forties. He carried a heavy stick of cherry wood and limped, having broken his hip and recovered from it at the age of eighty.

Next Ellen got down, her dark curls transformed into a pompadour as her mother’s concession to a recent eighteenth birthday. She was tall, slim, and handsome despite the awkwardness of the girl not yet turned woman. Her eyes were large and blue and her hands long and beautiful. She had the family nose, prominent and proudly curved, which in Julia Shane had become an eagle’s beak. After her, Fergus, a tall, shy boy of fourteen, and Robert, two years younger, sullen, wilful, red-haired like his venerable grandfather, who in youth was known in the county as The Red Scot. The boys were squabbling and had to be put in order by their mother before entering Cousin Julia’s handsome house. Under her watchful eye there was a prolonged scraping of shoes on the doormat. She managed her family with the air of a field-marshal.

As for Charles Tolliver, he turned over the steaming horses to Hennery, bade the black man blanket them well, talked with him for a moment, and then followed the others into the house. Him Hennery adored, with the adoration of a servant for one who understands servants. In the stables, Hennery put extra zeal into the rubbing down of the animals, his mind carrying all the while the picture of a tall gentleman with graying hair, kindly eyes and a pleasant soft voice.

“Mr. Tolliver,” he told the mulatto woman later in the day, “is one of God’s gentlemen.”

The other group was known as The Barr Family. The passing of years had thinned its ranks until there remained only Eva Barr, the daughter of Samuel Barr and therefore a niece of the vigorous and patriarchal Jacob. Characteristically she made her entrance in a town hack, stopping to haggle with the driver over the fare. Her thin, spinsterish voice rose above the roaring of the Mills until at length she lost the argument, as she always did, and paid reluctantly the prodigious twenty-five cents. She might easily have come by way of the Halsted street trolley for five cents, but this she considered neither safe nor dignified. As she grew older and more eccentric, she had come to exercise extraordinary precautions to safeguard her virginity. She was tall, thin, and dry, with a long nose slightly red at the end, and hair that hung in melancholy little wisps about an equine face; yet she had a double lock put on the door of her room at Haines’ boarding house, and nothing would have induced her to venture alone into the squalid Flats. She was poor and very pious. Into her care fell the destitute of her parish. She administered scrupulously with the hard efficiency of a penurious housekeeper.

Dinner began at two and assumed the ceremonial dignity of a tribal rite. It lasted until the winter twilight, descending prematurely because of the smoke from the Mills, made it necessary for the mulatto woman and her black helpers to bring in the silver candlesticks, place them amid the wreckage of the great feast, and light them to illumine the paneled walls of the somber dining-room. When the raisins and nuts and the coffee in little gilt cups had gone the rounds, the room resounded with the scraping of chairs, and the little party wandered out to distribute itself at will through the big house. Every year the distribution followed the same plan. In one corner of the big drawing-room Irene, in her plain gray dress, and Eva Barr, angular and piercing in durable and shiny black serge, foregathered, drawn by their mutual though very different interest in the poor. Each year the two spinsters fell upon the same arguments; for they disagreed about most fundamental things. The attitude of Irene toward the poor was the Roman attitude, full of paternalism, beneficent, pitying. Eva Barr in her Puritan heart had no room for such sentimental slop. “The poor,” she said, “must be taught to pull themselves out of the rut. It’s sinful to do too much for them.”

Two members of the family, the oldest, Jacob Barr, and the youngest, his grandson, disappeared completely, the one to make his round of the stables and park, the other to vanish into the library where, unawed by the sinister portrait of old John Shane, he poked about, stuffing himself with the candy sent by Willie Harrison as a token of a thrice renewed courtship. The grandfather, smoking what he quaintly called a cheroot, surveyed scrupulously the stable and the house, noting those portions which were falling into disrepair. These he later brought to the attention of Julia Shane; and the old woman, leaning on her stick, listened with an air of profound attention to her brother-in-law only to forget everything he had advised the moment the door closed upon him. Each year it was the same. Nothing changed.

In the far end of the drawing-room by the grand piano, Lily drew Ellen Tolliver and the tall shy brother Fergus to her side. Here Mrs. Tolliver joined them, her eyes bright with flooding admiration for her children. The girl was plainly fascinated by her glamorous cousin. She examined boldly Lily’s black gown from Worth, her pearls, and her shoes from the Rue de la Paix. She begged for accounts of the Opéra in Paris and of Paderewski’s playing with the Colonne Orchestra. There was something pitiful in her eagerness for some contact with the glamorous world beyond the Town.

“I’m going to New York to study, next year,” she told Lily. “I would go this year but Momma says I’m too young. Of course, I’m not. If I had money, I’d go anyway.” And she cast a sudden defiant glance at her powerful mother.

Lily, her face suddenly grave with the knowledge of Judge Weissman’s visit, tried to reassure her. “You’ll have plenty of opportunity, Ellen. You’re still a young girl ... only eighteen.”

“But there’s never any money,” the girl replied, with an angry gleam in her wide blue eyes. “Papa’s always in debt. I’ll never get a chance unless I make it myself.”

In the little alcove by the gallery, Julia Shane leaning on her stick, talked business with Charles Tolliver. This too was a yearly custom; her nephew, the county treasurer, gave her bits of advice on investments which she wrote down with a silver pencil and destroyed when he had gone. She listened and begged his advice because the giving of it encouraged him and gave him confidence. He was a gentle, honest fellow, and in her cold way she loved him, better even than she loved his wife who was her niece by blood. The advice he gave was mediocre and uninspired; besides Julia Shane was a shrewd woman and more than a match in business matters for most men.

When they had finished this little ceremony, the old woman turned the conversation to the Cyclops Mill scandal.

“And what’s to come of it?” she asked. “Are you going to win?”

Charles Tolliver smiled. “We’ve won already. The case was settled yesterday. The Mill owes the state some five hundred thousand with fines.”

Julia Shane again pounded the floor in delight. “A fine Christmas present!” she chuckled. “A fine Christmas present!” And then she did an unaccountable thing. With her thin ringed hand she slapped her nephew on the back.

“You know they came to me,” she said, “to get my influence. I told them to go to the Devil!... I suppose they tried to bribe you.”

The nephew frowned and the gentleness went out of his face. The fine mouth grew stern. “They tried ... carefully though, so carefully they couldn’t be caught at it.”

“It will make you trouble. Judge Weissman is a bad enemy. He’s powerful.”

“I know that. I’ve got to fight him. The farmers are with me.”

“But the Town is not, and it’s the Town which counts nowadays. The day of the farmer is past.”

“No, the Town is not.”

The face of Charles Tolliver grew serious and the blue eyes grave and worried. Julia Shane saw that he was watching his tall daughter who sat now at the piano, preparing to play.

“If you need money at the next election,” she said, “Come to me. I can help you.”

XX

AT the sound of Ellen’s music, the conversation in the long drawing-room ceased save for the two women who sat the far corner—Irene and Eva Barr. They went on talking in an undertone of their work among the poor. The others listened, captivated by the sound, for Ellen played well, far better than any of the little group save Lily and Julia Shane knew. To the others it was simply music; to the old woman and her daughter it was something more. They found in it the fire of genius, the smoldering warmth of a true artist, a quality unreal and transcendental which raised the beautiful old room for a moment out of the monotonous slough of commonplace existence. Ellen, in high-collared shirtwaist and skirt with her dark hair piled high in a ridiculous pompadour, sat very straight bending over the keys from time to time in a caressing fashion. She played first of all a Brahms waltz, a delicate thread of peasant melody raised to the lofty realm of immortality by genius; and from this she swept into a Chopin valse, melancholy but somehow brilliant, and then into a polonaise, so dashing and so thunderous that even Irene and Eva Barr, ignorant of all the beauty of sound that tumbled flood-like into the old room, suspended their peevish talk for a time and sat quite still, caught somehow in the contagious awe of the others.

The thin girl at the piano was not in a drawing-room at all. She sat in some enormous concert hall on a high stage before thousands of people. The faces stretched out before her, row after row, until those who sat far back were misty and blurred, not to be distinguished. When she had finished the polonaise she sat quietly for a moment as though waiting for a storm of applause to arise after a little hush from the great audience. There was a moment of silence and then the voice of Lily was heard, warm and soft, almost caressing.

“It was beautiful, Ellen ... really beautiful. I had no idea you played so well.”

The girl, blushing, turned and smiled at the cousin who lay back so indolently among the cushions of the sofa, so beautiful, so charming in the black gown from Worth. The smile conveyed a world of shy and inarticulate gratitude. The girl was happy because she understood that Lily knew. To the others it was just music.

“Your daughter is an artist, Hattie,” remarked Julia Shane. “You should be proud of her.”

The mother, her stout figure tightly laced, sat very straight in her stiff chair, her work-stained hands resting awkwardly in her lap. Her face beamed with the pride of a woman who was completely primitive, for whom nothing in this world existed save her children.

“And now, Ellen,” she said, “play the McKinley Funeral March. You play it so well.”

The girl’s young face clouded suddenly. “But it’s not McKinley’s Funeral March, Mama,” she protested. “It’s Chopin’s. It’s not the same thing.”

“Well, you know what I mean ... the one you played at the Memorial Service for McKinley.” She turned to Lily, her pride written in every line of her strong face. “You know, Ellen was chosen to play at the services for McKinley. Mark Hanna himself made a speech from the same platform.”

XXI

AN irrepressible smile swept Lily’s face. “They couldn’t have chosen better, I’m sure. Do play it, Ellen.”

The girl turned to the piano and a respectful silence fell once more. Slowly she swept into the somber rhythms of the March Funèbre, beginning so softly that the music was scarcely audible, climbing steadily toward a climax. From the depths of the old Pleyel she brought such music as is seldom heard. The faces in the drawing-room became grave and thoughtful. Lying among the pillows of the divan, Lily closed her eyes and listened through a wall of darkness. Nearby, her mother, leaning on the ebony stick, bowed her head because her eyes had grown dim with tears, a spectacle which she never permitted this world to witness. Presently the music swung again into a somber retarding rhythm; and then slowly, surely, with a weird, unearthly certainty, it became synchronized with the throbbing of the Mills. The steady beat was identical. Old Julia Shane opened her eyes and stared out of the window into the gathering darkness. The music, all at once, made the pounding of the Mills hideously audible.

When the last note echoing through the old house died away, Eva Barr, fidgeting with her embroidered reticule in search of a handkerchief to wipe her lean red nose, rose and said, “Well, I must go. It’s late and the hack is already here. He charges extra for waiting, you know.”

That was the inevitable sign. The dinner was ended. Grandpa Barr, very rosy from his promenade about the grounds, and the red-haired Robert, much stuffed with Willie Harrison’s courting chocolates, reappeared and the round of farewells was begun.

Before Hennery brought round from the stable the Tolliver’s sleigh, Lily placing her arm about Ellen’s waist, drew her aside and praised her playing. “You must not throw it away,” she said. “It is too great a gift.” She whispered. Her manner became that of a conspirator. “Don’t let them make you settle into the pattern of the Town. It’s what they’ll try to do, but don’t let them. We only live once, Ellen, don’t waste your life. The others ... the ones who aren’t remarkable in any way will try to pull you down from your pedestal to their level. But don’t let them. Fitting the pattern is the end of their existence. ‘Be like every one else,’ is their motto. Don’t give in. And when the time comes, if you want to come and study in Paris with the great Philippe, you can live with me.”

The girl blushed and regarded the floor silently for a moment. “I won’t let them,” she managed to say presently. “Thank you, Cousin Lily.” At the door, she turned sharply, all her shyness suddenly vanished, an air of defiance in its place. “I won’t let them.... You needn’t worry,” she added with a sudden fierceness.

“And next week,” said Lily, “come here and spend the night. I want to hear more music. There’s no music in this Town but the Mills.”

By the fireplace under the flaming Venice of Mr. Turner, Julia Shane talked earnestly with her niece, Mrs. Tolliver, who stood warming her short astrakhan jacket by the gentle blaze.

“And one more thing, Hattie,” said the old woman. “I’ve been planning to give you these for some time but the opportunity never arose. I shan’t live many more years and I want you to have them.”

With an air of secrecy she took from her thin fingers two rings and slipped them into the red, worn hands of her niece. “Don’t tell any one,” she added. “It’s a matter between us.”

Mrs. Tolliver’s hand closed on the rings. She could say nothing, but she kissed Aunt Julia affectionately and the tears came into her eyes because the old woman understood so well the intricate conventions of pride in matters of money. The rings were worth thousands. Hattie Tolliver could not have accepted their value in money.

At the door the little party made its departure with a great deal of healthy hubbub, colliding at the same time with a visitor who had driven up unseen. It was Willie Harrison, come to call upon Lily and to propose a visit to the Mills to look over the new furnaces that were building. In the stream of light from the doorway the caller and Charles Tolliver recognized each other and an awkward moment followed. It was Willie Harrison, overcome with confusion, who bowed politely. Charles Tolliver climbed into his sleigh without making any sign of recognition. The feud between the old and the new, concealed for so many years, was emerging slowly into the open.

XXII

THE day after Christmas dawned bright and clear, as clear as any day dawned in the Flats where at sunrise the smoke turned the sun into a great copper disk rising indolently toward the zenith of the heavens. The false warmth of the January thaw, precocious that year, brought gentle zephyrs that turned the icicles on the sweeping eaves of the house into streams of water which added their force to the rivulets already coursing down the long drive to leave the gravel bare and eroded, swelling with the upheaval of the escaping frost. But the false warmth brought no beauty; no trees burgeoned forth in clouds of bright green and no crocuses thrust forth their thin green swords and errant blossoms. The January thaw was but a false hope of the northern winter. When the sun of the early afternoon had destroyed all traces of the snow save drifts which hid beneath the rhododendrons or close against the north wall of the stable, it left behind an expanse of black and dessicated lawn, in spots quite bare even of dying grass. The garden stripped of its winter blanket at last stood revealed, a ravaged fragment of what had once been a glory.

Lily, drawn from the house by the warmth of the sun, wandered along the barren paths like a lovely hamadyrad enticed by deceitful Gods from her winter refuge. She ran from clump to clump of shrubbery, breaking off the tender little twigs in search of the green underbark that was a sign of life. Sometimes she found the green; more often she found only dead, dry wood, bereft of all vitality. In the flower garden she followed the brick path to its beginning in the little arbor covered with wistaria vine. Here too the Mills had taken their toll; the vine was dead save a few thin twining stalks that clung to the arbor. In the border along the walk, she found traces of irises—hardy plants difficult to kill—an occasional thick green leaf of a companula or a foxglove hiding among the shelter of leaves provided by the careful Hennery. But there were great gaps of bare earth where nothing grew, stretches which in her childhood had been buried beneath a lush and flowery growth of sky-blue delphinium, scarlet poppies, fiery tritomas, blushing peonies, foxglove, goosefoot, periwinkle, and cinnamon pinks.... All were gone now, blighted by the capricious and fatal south wind with its burden of gas and soot. It was not alone the flowers which suffered. In the niches clipped by Hennery in the dying walls of arbor vitæ, the bits of white statuary were streaked with black soot, their pure bodies smudged and defiled. The Apollo Belvedere and the Venus of Cydnos were no longer recognizable.

In the course of her tour about the little park, her red hair became loosened and disheveled and her cheeks flushed with her exertion. When she again reentered the house, she discovered that her slippers, high-heeled and delicate, were ruined. She called the mulatto woman and bade her throw them away.

On the stairs she encountered her mother, whom she greeted with a little cry of horror. “The garden, Mama, is ruined.... Nothing remains!”

The expression on the old woman’s face remained unchanged and stony.

“Nothing will grow there any longer,” she said. “Besides, it does not matter. When I die, there will be no one to live in the house. Irene hates it. She wants me to take a house in the Town.”

Lily, her feet clad only in the thinnest of silk-stockings, continued on her way up the long stairs to her room. If Willie Harrison had ever had a chance, even the faintest hope, the January thaw, revealing the stricken garden a fortnight too soon, destroyed it once and for all.

XXIII

AT three that afternoon Willie’s victoria called to bear Lily and Irene to the Cyclops Mills for the tour which he proposed. Workmen, passing the carriage, regarded the two sisters with curiosity, frowning at the sight of Irene in a carriage they recognized as Harrison’s. A stranger might have believed the pair were a great lady and her housekeeper on the way to market, so different and incongruous were the appearances of the two women. Lily, leaning back against the thick mulberry cushions, sat wrapped in a sable stole. She wore a gray tailored suit and the smallest and smartest of black slippers. Around her white throat, which she wore exposed in defiance of fashions which demanded high, boned collars, she had placed a single string of pearls the size of peas. By the side of her opulent beauty Irene possessed the austerity and plainness of a Gothic saint. As usual she wore a badly cut suit, a plain black hat and flat shoes with large, efficient heels. Her thin hands, clad in knitted woolen gloves, lay listlessly in her lap.

Willie Harrison was waiting for them at the window of the superintendent’s office just inside the gate. They saw him standing there as the victoria turned across the cinders in through the red-painted entrance. He stood peering out of the window in a near-sighted way, his shoulders slightly stooped, his small hands fumbling as usual the ruby clasp of his watch chain. At the sight of him Lily frowned and bit her fine red lip as though she felt that a man so rich, a man so powerful, a man who owned all these furnaces and steel sheds should have an air more conquering and impressive.

Irene said, “Oh, there’s William waiting for us now.” And a second later the victoria halted by the concrete steps and Willie himself came out to greet them, hatless, his thin blond hair waving in a breeze which with the sinking of the sun grew rapidly more chilly. The sun itself, hanging over the roseate tops of the furnaces, had become a shield of deep copper red.

“You’re just in time,” said Willie. “The shifts will be changing in a little while. Shall we start here? I’ll show you the offices.”

They went inside and Willie, whose manner had become a little more confident at the prospect of such a display, led them into a long room where men sat in uniform rows on high stools at long tables. Over each table hung suspended a half-dozen electric lights hooded by green shades. The lights, so Willie told them, were placed exactly to the sixteenth of an inch eight feet and three inches apart. It was part of his theory of precision and regularity.

“This,” said Willie, with a contracted sweep of his arm, “is the bookkeeping department. The files are kept here, the orders and all the paper work.”

At the approach of the visitors, the younger men looked up for an instant fascinated by the presence of so lovely a creature as Lily wandering in to shatter so carelessly the sacred routine of their day. There were men of every age and description, old and young, vigorous and exhausted, men in every stage of service to the ponderous mill gods. The younger ones had a restless air and constantly stole glances in the direction of the visitors. The middle-aged ones looked once or twice at Lily and then returned drearily to their columns of figures. The older ones did not notice her at all. They had gone down for the last time in a sea of grinding routine.

Irene, who knew the Town better than Lily, pointed out among the near-sighted, narrow-chested workers men who were grandsons or great-grandsons of original settlers in the county, descendants of the very men who had cleared away the wilderness to make room for banks and lawyers and mills.

“Let’s go on,” said Lily, “to the Mills. They’re more interesting than this, I’m sure. You know I’ve never been inside a mill-yard.” She spoke almost scornfully, as if she thought the counting room were a poor show indeed. A shadow of disappointment crossed Willie’s sallow face.

After donning a broadcloth coat with an astrakhan collar and a derby hat, he led the way. For a long time they walked among freight cars labeled with names from every part of North America ... Santa Fé, Southern Pacific, Great Northern, Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul.... They passed between great warehouses and vast piles of rusty pig iron still covered with frost, the dirty snow lying unmelted in the crevasses; and at last they came to an open space where rose a vast, shapeless object in the process of being raised toward the sky.

“Here,” said Willie, “are the new furnaces. There are to be six of them. This is the first.”

“I like this better,” said Lily. “There is spirit here ... even among the laborers.”

The structure bore a strange resemblance to the Tower of Babel. Swarthy workmen, swarming over the mass of concrete and steel, shouted to each other above the din of the Mills in barbaric tongues which carried no meaning to the visitors. Workmen, like ants, pushed wheelbarrows filled with concrete, with fire clay or fire bricks. Overhead a giant crane lifted steel girders with an effortless stride and swung them into place. The figures of the workmen swept toward the tower in a constant stream of movement so that the whole took on a fantastic composition, as if the tower, rushing on its way heavenward, were growing taller and taller before their very eyes, as if before they moved away it might pierce the very clouds.

At the sight of Willie Harrison, the foremen grew more officious in manner and shouted their orders with redoubled vigor, as if the strength of their lungs contributed something toward the speed with which the great tower grew. But the workmen moved no more rapidly. On returning to the mounds of sand and fire brick, they even stopped altogether at times to stare calmly like curious animals at the visitors. One or two nodded in recognition of Irene’s “Good-day, Joe,” or “How are you, Boris?”—words which appeared to cloud somewhat Willie’s proud enjoyment of the spectacle. And every man who passed stared long and hard at Lily, standing wrapped in her furs, a little aloof, her eyes bright nevertheless with the wonder of the sight. Neither Lily nor Irene nor Willie spoke more than was necessary, for in order to be heard above the din they were forced to scream.

From the growing tower the little party turned west toward the sunset, walking slowly over a rough roadway made of cinders and slag. Once a cinder penetrated Lily’s frail shoe and she was forced to lean against Willie while she took it off and removed the offending particle. He supported her politely and turned away his face so that he should not offend her by seeing her shapely stockinged foot.

A hundred yards further on they came upon a dozen great vats covered by a single roof of sheet iron. From the vats rose a faint mist, veiling the black bodies of negroes who, shouting as they worked, dipped great plates of steel in and out. An acrid smell filled the air and penetrated the throats of the visitors as they passed rapidly by, causing Lily to take from her hand bag a handkerchief of the thinnest linen which she held against her nose until they were once more beyond the zone of the fumes.

“Those are the tempering vats,” said Willie. “Only negroes work here.”

“But why?” asked Irene.

“Because the other workers won’t,” he said. “The acid eats into their lungs. The negroes come from South Carolina and Georgia to do it. They are willing!”

As they walked the sound of pounding, which appeared to come from the great iron shed lying before them black against the sunset, grew louder and louder, steadily more distinct. In the fading twilight that now surrounded them the Mill yard became a fantastic world inhabited by monsters of iron and steel. Great cranes swung to and fro against the glow of the sky, lifting and tossing into piles huge plates of steel that fell with an unearthly slithering din when an invisible hand, concealed somewhere high among the black vertebræ of the monsters, released a lever. High in the air lights, red and green, or cold piercing blue-white, like eyes appeared one by one peering down at them wickedly. Beyond the cranes in the adjoining yard the black furnaces raised gigantic towers crowned by halos of red flame that rose and fell, palpitating as the molten iron deep in the bowels of the towers churned and boiled with a white infernal heat. Dancing malignant shadows assailed them on every side.

The three visitors, dwarfed by the monsters of steel, made their way across the slag and cinders, deafened by the unearthly noise.

“Yesterday,” shouted William Harrison in his thin voice, “there was a terrible accident yonder in the other yard. A workman fell into a vat of molten iron.”

Irene turned to her companion with horror stricken eyes. “I know,” she said. “It was an Italian named Rizzo. I heard of it this morning. I have been to see his wife and family. There are nine of them.”

William shouted again. “They found nothing of him. He became a part of the iron. He is part of a steel girder by now.”

Out of the evil, dancing shadows a man blackened by smoke leapt suddenly at them. “Look out!” he cried, and thrust them against the wall of a neighboring shed so roughly that Irene fell forward upon her knees. A great bundle of steel plates—tons of them—swung viciously out of the darkness, so close to the little party that the warmth of the metal touched their faces. It vanished instantly, drawn high into the air by some invisible hand. It was as if the monster had rebelled suddenly against its master, as if it sought to destroy Willie Harrison as it had destroyed the Italian named Rizzo.

Willie lost all power of speech, all thought of action. Irene, her face deathly white, leaned against the wall calling upon Lily to support her. It was Lily, strangely enough, who alone managed to control herself. She displayed no fear. On the contrary she was quiet, fiercely quiet as if a deadly anger had taken complete possession of her soul.

“Great God!” she exclaimed passionately. “This is a nightmare!” Willie fumbled helplessly by her side, rubbing the wrists of the younger sister until she raised her head and reassured them.

“I’m all right,” said Irene. “We can go on now.”

But Lily was for taking her home. “You’ve seen enough. I’m not going to have you faint on my hands.”

“I’m all right ... really,” repeated Irene, weakly. “I want to see the rest. I must see it. It’s necessary. It is part of my duty.”

“Don’t be a fool! Don’t try to make a martyr of yourself!”

But Irene insisted and Lily, who was neither frightened nor exhausted, yielded at last, weakened by her own curiosity. At the same moment her anger vanished; she became completely amiable once more.

Willie led them across another open space shut in on the far side by the great shed which had loomed before them throughout the tour. They passed through a low, narrow door and stood all at once in an enormous cavern glowing with red flames that poured from the mouths of a score of enormous ovens. From overhead, among the tangle of cranes and steelwork, showers of brilliant cold light descended from hooded globes. The cavern echoed and reechoed with the sound of a vast hammering, irregular and confused—the very hammering which heard in the House at Cypress Hill took on a throbbing, strongly-marked rhythm. On the floor of the cavern, dwarfed by its very immensity, men stripped to the waist, smooth, hard, glistening and streaked with sweat and smoke, toiled in the red glow from the ovens.

XXIV

BEFORE one of these the little party halted while Lily, and Irene, who seemed recovered though still deathly pale, listened while Willie described the operation. Into a great box of steel and fire clay were placed block after block of black iron until the box, filled at length, was pushed forward, rolling easily on balls of iron, into the fiery mouth of the oven. After a little time, the box was drawn out again and the blocks of whitehot iron were carried aloft and deposited far off, beside the great machines which rolled and hammered them into smooth steel plates.

While they stood there, workmen of every size and build, of a dozen nationalities, toiled on ignoring them. Lily, it appeared, was not deeply interested in the explanation, for she stood a little apart, her gaze wandering over the interior of the cavern. The adventure—even the breathless escape of a moment before—left her calm and indifferent. In her gaze there was a characteristic indolence, an air of absent-mindedness, which frequently seized her in moments of this sort. Nothing of her apparel was disarranged. Her hat, her furs, her pearls, her suit, were in perfect order. The flying dust and soot had gathered in her long eyelashes, but this only gave her a slightly theatrical appearance; it darkened the lashes and made her violet eyes sparkle the more. Her gaze appraised the bodies of the workmen who stood idle for the moment waiting to withdraw the hot iron from the ovens. They leaned upon the tools of their toil, some on shovels, some on long bars of iron, great chests heaving with the effort of their exertions.

Among them there was one who stood taller than the others, a giant with yellow hair and a massive face with features which were like the features of a heroic bust not yet completed by the sculptor. There was in them something of the unformed quality of youth. The man was young; he could not have been much over twenty, and the muscles of his arm and back stood out beneath his fair skin like the muscles on one of Rodin’s bronze men in the Paris salons. Once he raised a great hand to wipe the sweat from his face and, discovering that she was interested in him, he looked at her sharply for an instant and then sullenly turned away leaning on a bar of iron with his powerful back turned to her.

She was still watching the man when Willie approached her and touched her arm gently. It seemed that she was unable to look away from the workman.

“Come over here and sit down,” said Willie, leading her to a bench that stood a little distance away in the shadow of the foreman’s shack. “Irene wants to speak to one of the men.”

Lily followed him and sat down. Her sister, looking pale and tired, began a conversation with a swarthy little Pole who stood near the oven. The man greeted her with a sullen frown and his remarks, inaudible to Lily above the din, appeared to be ill-tempered and sulky as if he were ashamed before his fellows to be seen talking with this lady who came to the cavern accompanied by the master.

“Do you find it a wonderful sight?” began Willie.

Lily smiled. “I’ve seen nothing like it in all my life. I never knew what lay just beyond the garden hedge.”

“It will be bigger than this next year and even bigger the year after.” His eyes brightened and for a moment the droop of his shoulders vanished. “We want some day to see the Mills covering all the Flats. The new furnaces are the beginning of the expansion. We hope to grow bigger and bigger.” He raised his arms in a sudden gesture. “There’s no limit, you know.”

But Lily’s gaze was wandering again back and forth, up and down, round and round the vast cavern as if she were not the least interested in Willie’s excitement over bigness. Irene had left the swarthy little man and was talking now to the tow-headed young giant who leaned upon the iron bar. His face was sulky, though it was plain that he was curiously polite to Irene, who seemed by his side less a woman of flesh and blood than one of paper, so frail and wan was her face. He smiled sometimes in a shy, withdrawn fashion.

Politely Lily turned to her companion. “But you are growing richer and richer, Willie. Before long you will own the Town.”

He regarded her shyly, his thin lips twisted into a hopeful smile. Once more he began to fumble with the ruby clasp of his watch chain.

“I could give you everything in the world,” he said suddenly, as though the words caused him a great effort. “I could give you everything if you would marry me.” He paused and bent over Lily who sat silently turning the rings on her fingers round and round. “Would you, Lily?”

“No.” The answer came gently as if she were loath to hurt him by her refusal, yet it was firm and certain.

Willie bent lower. “I would see that Mother had nothing to do with us.” Lily, staring before her, continued to turn the rings round and round. The young workman with Irene had folded his muscular arms and placed his iron bar against the wall of the oven. He stood rocking back and forth with the easy, balanced grace of great strength. When he smiled, he showed a fine expanse of firm white teeth. Irene laughed in her vague half-hearted way. Lily kept watching ... watching....

“You could even spend half the time in Europe if you liked,” continued Willie. “You could do as you pleased. I would not interfere.” He placed one hand gently on her shoulder to claim her attention, so plainly wandering toward the blond and powerful workman. She seemed not even to be conscious of his hand.

The workmen had begun to move toward the oven now, the young fellow with the others. He carried his iron bar as if it were a straw. He moved with a sort of angry defiance, his head thrown back upon his powerful shoulders. He it was who shouted the orders when the great coffin full of hot iron was drawn forth. He it was who thrust his bar beneath the mass of steel and lifting upward shoved it slowly and easily forward on the balls of iron. His great back bent and the muscles rippled beneath the skin as if they too were made of some marvelous flexible steel.

Willie Harrison took Lily’s hand and put an end to the turning of the rings. “Tell me, Lily,” he said softly, “is it no use? Maybe next year or the year after?”

All at once as though she had heard him for the first time, she turned and placed the other hand gently on top of his, looking up at the same time from beneath the wide brim of her hat. “It’s no use, Willie. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.” She laughed softly. “But you were wrong in your method. You shouldn’t have given me the promise about Europe. When I marry, it will be a man who will not let me leave his side.”

That was all she said to him. The rest, whatever it was, remained hidden, deep within her, behind the dark eyes which found so little interest in Willie Harrison, which saw nothing but the blond giant who moved with such uncanny strength, with such incredibly easy grace about his heroic task. Perhaps if Willie had guessed, even for a moment, what was passing in her mind, he would have blushed, for Willie was, so people said, a nice young man who had led a respectable life. Such things were no doubt incomprehensible to him. Perhaps if she had spoken the truth, if she had bothered herself to explain, she would have said, “I could not marry you. I could give myself to no man but one who caught my fancy, in whom there was strength and the grace of a fine animal. Beauty, Willie, counts for much ... far more than you guess, living always as you do in the midst of all this savage uproar. I am rich. Your money means nothing. And your power! It is not worth the snap of a finger to me.... Ah, if you had a face like that workman ... a face ... a real face, and a body ... a real body like his, then you might ask with hope. It is hopeless, Willie. You do not interest me, though I am not eager to hurt you just the same.”

But she said none of these things, for people seldom say them. On the contrary, she was content to put him off with a bare denial. It is doubtful whether such thoughts even occurred to her, however deep they may have been rooted in her soul; for she was certainly not a woman given to reflection. To any one, it was apparent that she did not examine her motives. She was content, no doubt, to be beautiful, to live where there was beauty, to surround herself with beautiful, luxurious things.

She was prevented from saying anything further by the arrival of Irene who had abandoned her workmen to rejoin Willie and her sister. Willie, crimson and still trembling a little with the effort of his proposal, suggested that they leave. It was already a quarter to six. The workmen vanished suddenly into a little shed. Their shift was finished. They were free now to return to their squalid homes, to visit the corner saloon or the dismal, shuttered brothels of Franklin street, free to go where they would in the desolate area of the Flats for twelve brief hours of life.

XXV

THE three visitors made their way back to the office of the superintendent across a mill yard now bright with the cold glare of a hundred arc lights. On the way, Lily turned suddenly to her sister and asked, “Who was the man you were talking to ... the tall one with the yellow hair?”

Irene, moving beside her, cast a sudden glance at her sister and the old terrified look entered her pale eyes. “His name is Krylenko,” she replied in a voice grown subdued and cold. “He is the one who brought me home from Welcome House the other night. He is a bright boy. I’ve taught him English.”

Willie, who had been walking behind them, quickened his pace and came abreast. “Krylenko?” he said. “Krylenko? Why, that’s the fellow who’s been making trouble. They’ve been trying to introduce the union.” He addressed Irene. “Your Welcome House is making trouble I’m afraid, Irene. There’s no good comes of educating these men. They don’t want it.”

Lily laughed. “Come now,” she said, “that’s what your mother says, isn’t it? I can hear her saying it.”

Willie failed to answer her, but a sheepish, embarrassed look took possession of his sallow face, as if the powerful figure of his mother had joined them unawares. And Irene, walking close to Lily, whispered to her sister, “You shouldn’t have said that. It was cruel of you.”

At the office of the superintendent they found Willie’s victoria waiting, the horses covered with blankets against the swift, piercing chill of the winter night. The coachman shivered on the box. The three of them climbed in and Willie bade the man drive to Halsted street where he would get down, leaving the carriage to the ladies. When Lily protested, he answered, “But I want to walk up the hill to the Town. I need the exercise.”

They drove along between two streams of mill workers, one entering, one leaving the Mill yards with the change of shifts. The laborers moved in two columns, automatons without identity save that one column was clean and the men held their heads high and the other was black with oil and soot and the heads were bent with a terrible exhaustion. It was a dark narrow street bordered on one side by the tall blank walls of warehouses and on the other by the Mill yard. The smells of the Black Fork, coated with oil and refuse, corrupted the damp air. On the Mill side a high fence made of barbed wire strung from steel posts was in the process of construction. To this Willie called their attention with pride. “You see,” he said, “we are making the Mills impregnable. If the unions come in there will be trouble. It was my idea ... the fence. A stitch in time saves nine.” And he chuckled softly in the darkness.

At Halsted street Willie got down and, removing his hat, bade the sisters a dry and polite good-night. But before the carriage drove on, Lily called out to him, “You’re coming to the ball to-night, aren’t you? Remember, there’s a quadrille and you can’t leave us flat at the last minute.”

“I’m coming,” said William. “Certainly I’m coming.” And he turned away, setting off in the opposite direction toward the Hill and Mrs. Julis Harrison who sat in the ugly house of red sandstone awaiting news of the proposal. He walked neatly, placing his small feet firmly, his hands clasped behind his back, his head bowed thoughtfully. The umbrella, held in the crook of his arm, swung mournfully as he walked. His shoulders drooped wearily. He had shown Lily all his wealth, all his power; and she treated it as if it were nothing at all. In the brownstone house, Mrs. Harrison sat waiting.

The carriage drove up Halsted street past the corner saloon now thronged with mill workers, toward the house at Cypress Hill. In a tenement opposite the wrought iron gates a nostalgic Russian sat on the front stoop squeezing mournfully at a concertina which filled the winter evening with the somber music of the steppes.

Irene, leaning back pale and exhausted on the mulberry cushions, said, “Why did you ask Willie whether he was coming? You know he never misses anything if he can help it.”

“I only wanted to make him feel welcome,” her sister replied absently. “Since this affair over the taxes, Mama and Mrs. Harrison haven’t been very thick.... I feel sorry for Willie. He doesn’t know what it’s all about.”

XXVI

INSIDE the old house, Irene went to her room, and Lily, instead of seeking out her mother for their usual chat, went quietly upstairs. She ignored even the preparations for the ball. After she had taken off her clothes, she lay for a long time in a hot bath scented with verbena salts, drowsing languidly until the hot water had eliminated every soiling trace of the Mills. Returning to her room, she sat clad in a thin satin wrapper for a long time before the mirror of her dressing table, polishing her pink nails, examining the tiny lines at the corners of her lips,—lines which came from smiling too much. Then she powdered herself all over with scented powder and did up her red hair, fastening it with the pin set in brilliants. And presently, the depression having passed away, she began to sing in her low warm voice, Je sais que vous êtes gentil. It was a full-throated joyous song. At times her voice rose in a crescendo that penetrated the walls of the room where Irene lay in the darkness on her narrow white bed.

As she dressed for dinner, she continued to sing one song after another, most of them piquant and racy, songs of the French cuirassiers. She sang Sur la route á Montauban, Toute la longe de la Tamise and Auprés de ma Blonde. The dressing was the languid performance which required an hour or more, for she took the most minute care with every detail. The chemise must not have a wrinkle; the peacock blue stockings must fit as if they were the skin itself; the corsets were drawn until the result, examined for many minutes before the glass, was absolutely perfect. At the last she put on a gown of peacock blue satin with a long train that swept about her ankles, and rang for one of the black servants to hook it. Before the slavey arrived, Lily had discovered a wrinkle beneath the satin and began all over again the process of dressing, until at the end of the second attempt she stood before the mirror soignée and perfect in the soft glow from the open fire by her bed. The tight-fitting gown of peacock blue followed the curves of her figure flawlessly. Then she hung about her fine throat a chain of diamonds set in a necklace of laurel leaves wrought delicately in silver, lighted a cigarette and stood regarding her tall figure by the light of the lamps. Among the old furniture of the dark room she stood superbly dressed, elegant, mondaine. A touch to the hair that covered her small head like a burnished helmet, and she smiled with satisfaction, the face in the mirror smiling back with a curious look of elation, of abundant health, of joy; yet there was in it something too of secrecy and triumph.

XXVII

IRENE’S room was less vast and shadowy. In place of brocade the windows were curtained with white stuff. In one corner stood a prie dieu before a little paint and plaster image of the Virgin and child—all blue and pink and gilt,—which Lily had sent her sister from Florence. The bed was small and narrow and the white table standing near by was covered with books and papers neatly arranged—the paraphernalia of Irene’s work among the people of the Flats. Here Lily discovered her when she came in, flushed and radiant, to sit on the edge of the white bed and talk with her sister until the guests arrived.

She found Irene at the white table, the neat piles of books and papers pushed aside to make room for a white tray laden with food, for Irene was having dinner alone in her room. There had been no question of her coming to the ball. “I couldn’t bear it,” she told her mother. “I would be miserable. I don’t want to come. Why do you want to torture me?” She had fallen, of late, into using the most exaggerating words, out of all proportion with truth or dignity. But Julia Shane, accustomed more and more to yielding to the whims of her younger daughter, permitted her to remain away.

“Have you anything to read?” began Lily. “Because if you haven’t, my small trunk is full of books.”

“I’ve plenty, and besides, I’m going out.”

“Where?” asked Lily, suddenly curious.

“To Welcome House. It’s my night to teach. I should think you would have remembered that.” Her voice sounded weary and strained. She turned to her sister with a look of disapproval, so intense that it seemed to accuse Lily of some unspeakable sin.

“I didn’t remember,” Lily replied. “How should I?” And then rising she went to her sister’s side and put one arm about her shoulders, a gesture of affection which appeared to inspire a sudden abhorrence in the woman, for she shivered suddenly at the touch of the warm bare arm. “You shouldn’t go out to-night. You are too tired!”

“I must go,” Irene replied. “They’re counting on me.”

“What are you eating?...” remarked Lily, picking up a bit of cake from the tray, “Peas, potatoes, rice, dessert, milk.... Why you’ve no meat, Irene. You should eat meat. It is what you need more than anything. You’re too pale.”

Irene’s pale brow knitted into a frown. “I’ve given it up,” she said. “I’m not eating meat any longer.”

“And why not?” Lily moved away from her and stood looking down with the faintest of mocking smiles. The transparent cheek of her sister flushed slightly.

“Because I don’t believe in it. I believe it’s wrong.”

“Well, I’m going to speak to Mama about it. It’s nonsense. You’ll kill yourself with such a diet. Really, Irene....” Her voice carried a note of irritation, but she got no further for Irene turned on her suddenly, like a beaten dog which after long abuse snaps suddenly at the offending hand.

“Why can’t you leave me in peace? You and Mama treat me like a child. I am a grown woman. I want to do as I please. I am harming no one but myself ... no one.... I’m sick of it, I tell you. I’m sick of it!”

And suddenly she began to weep, softly and hysterically, her thin shoulders shaking as the sobs tore her body. “I want to go away,” she moaned. “I want to be alone, where I can think and pray. I want to be alone!” Her sobbing was at once pitiful and terrible, the dry, parched sobbing of a misery long pent up. For a moment Lily stood helplessly by her side and then, all at once, she went down on her knees in the peacock blue gown and put her lovely bare arms about her sister, striving to comfort her. The effort failed strangely. Irene only drew away and sobbed the more. “If you would only let me have peace ... I could find it alone!”

Lily said nothing but knelt by her sister’s side kissing and caressing the thin white hands until Irene’s sobbing subsided a little and she fell forward among the books and papers, burying her head in her arms. The misery of the soul and spirit in some way appalled Lily. She watched her sister with a look of bewilderment in her eyes as if she had discovered all at once a world of which she had been ignorant up to now. The spectacle stifled quickly the high spirits of a moment before. The bawdy French ballads were forgotten. She had become suddenly grave and serious, the lines in her beautiful face grown hard. She was sitting on the floor, her head in Irene’s lap, when a knock and the sound of her name roused her.

“Miss Lily,” came the mulatto woman’s voice, “Mis’ Shane says the guests are a-coming and you must come down.”

“All right Sarah.... I’ll be down at once.”

Lily, struggling with the tight satin dress, rose slowly, kissed her sister and said, “Please, dear, stay home to-night and rest.”

But Irene, still sobbing softly as if entranced by the sensual satisfaction of weeping, did not answer her. She remained leaning over the table, her face buried in her arms. But she was more quiet now, with the voluptuous stillness of one who has passed through a great emotional outburst.

Lily, once more before the mirror in her own room, rearranged her ruffled hair listening to the murmur of talk that arose from the well of the stairs. It was not until she had fastened the pin set with brilliants for a second time that she discovered with sudden horror that the peacock blue gown was split and ripped at one side from the arm to the waist. In the sudden outburst of affection for her sister, she had flung herself to her knees abandoning all thought of vanity. The gown was ruined.

From below stairs the murmur grew in volume as carriage after carriage arrived. Lily swore beneath her breath in French, tore off the gown and brought from her closet another of a pale yellow-green, the color of chartreuse. The process of dressing began all over again and in half an hour, after the mulatto woman had called twice and been sent away and the guests had gone in to dinner, Lily stood once more before the mirror, radiant and beautiful. The gown was cut lower than the one she had tossed aside, and the yellow-green blended with the tawny red of her hair so that there was something nude and voluptuous in her appearance. The smile returned to her face, a smile which seemed to say, “The Town will see something the like of which it has never seen before.”

Before going down she went to Irene’s room once more, only to find it dark and empty. Clad in the gray suit and the plain black hat Irene had made her way silently to the stairs at the back of the house and thence through the gallery that led past the drawing-room windows into the dead park. The austere and empty chamber appeared to rouse a sudden shame in Lily, for she returned to her room before descending the long stairs and took from the trunk a great fan of black ostrich feathers to shield her bare breasts alike from the stares of the impudent and the disapproving.

The ball was a great success. The orchestra, placed in the little alcove by the gallery, played a quadrille followed by waltzes, two-steps and polkas. Until ten o’clock the carriages made their way along Halsted street past the Mills and the squalid houses through the wrought iron gates into the park; and at midnight they began to roll away again carrying the guests to their homes. Lily, all graciousness and charm, moved among the dancers distributing her favors equitably save in the single instance of Willie Harrison, who looked so downcast and prematurely old in his black evening clothes that she danced with him three times and sat out a waltz, and a polka. And all the Town, ignorant of the truth, whispered that Willie’s chances once more appeared good.

Ellen Tolliver was there, in a dress made at home by her mother, and she spent much of the evening by the side of her aunt Julia who sat in black jet and amethysts at one end of the drawing-room leaning on her stick and looking for all the world like a wicked duchess. At the sound of the music and the sight of the dancers, the old gleam returned for a little time to her tired eyes.

Ellen was younger than the other guests and knew most of them only by sight but she had partners none the less, for she was handsome despite her badly made gown and her absurd pompadour, and she danced with a barbaric and energetic grace. When she was not dancing her demeanor carried no trace of the drooping wall-flower. She regarded the dancers with a expression of defiance and scorn. None could have taken her for a poor relation.

XXVIII

A LITTLE while before midnight Irene, accompanied by Krylenko, returned from the Flats and hurried quietly as a moth through the gallery past the brightly lighted windows and up the stairway to her room. The mill worker left her at the turn of the drive where he stood for a time in the melting snow fascinated by the sound of music and the sight of the dancers through the tall windows. Among them he caught a sudden glimpse of Irene’s sister, the woman who had watched him at work in the mill shed. She danced a waltz with the master of the Mills, laughing as she whirled round and round with a wild exuberance. Amid the others who took their pleasures so seriously, she was a bacchante, pagan, utterly abandoned. The black fan hung from her wrist and the pale yellow-green ball gown left all her breast and throat exposed in a voluptuous glow of beauty. Long after the music stopped and she had disappeared, Krylenko stood in the wet snowbank staring blindly at the window which she had passed again and again. He stood as if hypnotized, as if incapable of action. At length a coachman, passing by, halted for a moment to regard him in astonishment, and so roused him into action. Murmuring something in Russian, he set off down the long drive walking well to one side to keep from under the wheels of the fine carriages which had begun to leave.

The last carriage, containing Willie Harrison and two female cousins, passed through the wrought iron gates a little after one o’clock, leaving Lily, her mother and Ellen Tolliver who, having no carriage of her own, had chosen this night to spend at Cypress Hill, alone amid the wreckage of crumpled flowers and forgotten cotillion favors. With the departure of the last carriage and the finish of the music, the gleam died out of Julia Shane’s eyes. She became again an old woman with a tired bent figure, her sharp eyes half closed by dark swellings which seemed to have appeared all at once with the death of the last chord.

“I’m going to bed,” she said, bidding the others good-night. “We can discuss the party in the morning.”

She tottered up the stairs leaving her daughter and grand-niece together in the long drawing-room. When she had gone, Lily rose and put out the lamps and candles one by one until only three candles in a sconce above the piano remained lighted.

“Now,” she said, lying back among the cushions of the divan and stretching her long handsome legs, “play for me ... some Brahms, some Chopin.”

The girl must have been weary but the request aroused all her extraordinary young strength. She sat at the piano silhouetted against the candle light ... the curve of her absurd pompadour, the more ridiculous curve of her corseted figure. From the divan Lily watched her through half-closed eyes. She played first of all two études of Chopin and then a waltz or two of Brahms, superbly and with a fine freedom and spectacular fire, as if she realized that at last she had the audience she desired, a better audience than she would ever have again no matter how celebrated she might become. Above the throbbing of the Mills the thread of music rose triumphant in a sort of eternal beauty, now delicate, restrained, now rising in a tremendous, passionate crescendo. The girl invested it with all the yearnings that are beyond expression, the youth, the passionate resentment and scorn, the blind gropings which swept her baffled young soul. Through the magic of the sound she managed to convey to the woman lying half-buried among the cushions those things which it would have been impossible for her to utter, so high and impregnable was the wall of her shyness and pride. And Lily, watching her, wept silently at the eloquence of the music.

Not once was there a spoken word between them, and at last the girl swung softly and mournfully into the macabre beauties of the Valse Triste, strange and mournful music, not great, even a little mediocre, yet superbly beautiful beneath her slim fingers. She peopled the shadowy room with ghostly unreal figures, of tragedy, of romance, of burning, unimagined desires. The dancing shadows cast by the candles among the old furniture became through the mist of Lily’s tears fantastic, yet familiar, like memories half-revealed that fade before they can be captured and recognized. The waltz rose in a weird unearthly ecstasy, swirling and exultant, the zenith of a joy and a completion yearned for but never in this life achieved ... the something which lies just beyond the reach, sensed but unattainable, something which Ellen sought and came nearest to capturing in her music, which Irene, kneeling on the prie dieu before the Sienna Virgin, sought in a mystic exaltation, which Lily sought in her own instinctive, half-realized fashion. It was a quest which must always be a lonely one; somehow the music made the sense of loneliness terribly acute. The waltz grew slower once more and softer, taking on a new and melancholy fire, until at last it died away into stillness leaving only the sound of the Mills to disturb the silence of the old room.

After a little pause, Ellen fell forward wearily upon the piano, her head resting upon her arms, and all at once with a faint rustle she slipped gently to the floor, the home-made ball dress crumpled and soiled beneath her slim body. Lily sprang from among the pillows and gathered the girl against her white, voluptuous breasts, for she had fainted.

XXIX

THE visit of Ellen was extended from one night to three. The piano was a beautiful one, far better than the harsh-toned upright in the Tolliver parlor in the Town, and Ellen gladly played for hours with only Lily, lying among the cushions, and old Julia Shane, lost in her own fantastic memories, for an audience.

On the third night, long after twelve o’clock, as Lily and her cousin climbed the long stairway, the older woman said, “I have some clothes, Ellen, that you may have if you like. They have been worn only a few times and they are more beautiful than anything you can find in America.”

The girl did not answer until they had reached Lily’s room and closed the door behind them. Her face was flushed with the silent struggle between a hunger for beautiful things and a fantastic pride, born of respectable poverty. In some way, her cousin sensed the struggle.

“They are yours if you want them,” she said. “You can try them on if you like at any rate.”

Ellen smiled gratefully. “I’d like to,” she said timidly. “Thank you.”

While the girl took off her shirtwaist and skirt, Lily busied herself among the shadows of her closet. When she returned she bore across her arms three gowns, one dull red, one black and one yellow. The girl stood waiting shyly, clad only in her cheap underclothing coarsened and yellowed by many launderings.

“You must take those things off,” said Lily. “I’ll give you others.” And she brought out undergarments of white silk which Ellen put on, shivering a little in the chill of the big room.

Then Lily took the pale yellow gown and slipped it over her cousin’s head. It belonged to no period of fashion. It hung from the shoulders in loose folds of shining silk, clinging close to the girl’s slim body. There was a silver girdle which fastened over the hips. Ellen turned to regard herself in the mirror.

“But wait,” said Lily, laughing, “you’ve only begun. We’ve got to change your hair and do away with that ridiculous rat. Why do you spoil such beautiful hair with a wad of old wire?”

She took out the pins and let the hair fall in a clear, black shower. It was beautiful hair of the thick, sooty-black color that goes with fair skin and blue eyes. It fell in great coils over the pale yellow gown. Lily, twisting it into loose strands, held it against the light of the lamp.

“Beautiful hair,” she said, “like the hair of Rapunzel.”

Then she twisted it low about Ellen’s head, loosely so that the light, striking the free ends created a kind of halo. With a supreme gesture of scorn, she tossed the “rat” into the scrap basket.

“There,” she said, turning her cousin to face the long mirror. “There.... Behold the great pianist ... the great artist.”

In the magical mirror stood a tall lovely woman. The ridiculous awkward girl had vanished; it was another creature who stood there transfigured and beautiful. And in her frank blue eyes, there was a new look, something of astonishment mingled with determination. The magical mirror had done its work. From that moment the girl became a stranger to the Town. She had come of age and slipped all unconsciously into a new world.

With shining eyes she turned and faced her cousin.

“May I really have the clothes, Lily?”

“Of course, you silly child!”

And Lily smiled because the clothes had never been worn at all. They were completely new.

XXX

AT breakfast on the following morning, the mulatto woman laid before Lily’s plate a cablegram. It read simply, “Jean has measles.”

Trunks were packed with desperate haste. The entire household was thrown into an uproar, all save old Julia Shane who continued to move about with the same unruffled calm, with the same acceptancy of whatever came to her. At midnight Lily boarded the express for the East. It was not until the middle of the week, when the drawing-room had been wrapped once more in cheesecloth and scented with camphor, that the Town learned of Lily’s sudden return to Paris. It was impossible, people decided, to calculate the whims of her existence.

Three months after her sudden departure, she sat one early spring afternoon on the terrace of her garden in the Rue Raynouard, when old Madame Gigon, in a bizarre gown of maroon poplin, with the fat and aging Fifi at her heels, brought her a letter from Julia Shane.

Tearing it open, Lily began to read,

“Of course the biggest bit of news is Ellen’s escapade. She has eloped with a completely commonplace young man named Clarence Murdock, a traveling salesman for an electrical company, who I believe was engaged to May Seton ... the Setons who own the corset factory east of the Harrison Mills. They have gone to New York to live and now, I suppose, Ellen will have her chance to go on with her music. Knowing Ellen, I am certain she does not love this absurd man. As for Hattie she is distraught and feels that Ellen has committed some terrible sin. Nothing I can say is able to alter her mind. To be sure, the fellow has nothing to commend him, but I’m willing to let Ellen work it out. She’s no fool. None of our family is that. Hattie thinks it was the gowns you gave Ellen which turned her head. But I suspect that Ellen saw this young drummer simply as a means of escape ... a way out of all her troubles. Of course the Town is in a buzz. Miss Abercrombie says nothing so unrespectable has happened in years. More power to Ellen ...!”

For a moment Lily put down the letter and sat thinking. In the last sentence there was a delicious echo of that wicked chuckle which had marked the departure of the discomfited Judge Weissman and Mrs. Julis Harrison from Cypress Hill ... the merest echo of triumph over another mark in the long score of the old against the new.

For a time Lily sat listening quietly to the distant sounds from the river ... the whistling of the steamer bound for St. Cloud, the faint clop-clop of hoofs in the Rue de Passy and the ugly chug-chug of one of the new motor wagons which were to be seen with growing frequency along the boulevards. Whatever she was thinking, her thoughts were interrupted suddenly by a little boy, very handsome and neat, in a sailor suit, who dragged behind him across the flagged terrace a stuffed toy bear. He climbed into her lap and began playing with the warm fur piece she had thrown over her shoulders.

“Mama,” he cried. “J’ai faim.... Je veux un biscuit!”

Lily gathered him into her arms, pressing his soft face against hers. “Bien, petit ... va chercher la bonne Madame Gigon.”

She seized him more closely and kissed him again and again with all the passion of a savage, miserly possession.

“Je t’aime, Mama ... tellement,” whispered the little fellow, and climbed down to run into the big house in search of kind Madame Gigon and her cakes. The gaze of Lily wandered after his sturdy little body and her dark eyes grew bright with a triumphant love.

When he had disappeared through one of the tall windows, she took up the letter once more and continued her reading.

“Irene,” wrote her mother, “seems more content now that you are gone. I confess that I understand her less and less every day. Sometimes I think she must be not quite well ... a little touched perhaps by a religious mania. She is giving her life, her strength, her soul, to these foreigners in the Flats. What for? Because it brings her peace, I suppose. But still I cannot understand her. There is one man ... Krylenko, by name, I believe, whom she has made into a sort of disciple. I only hope that news of him won’t reach the Town. God knows what sort of a tale they would make out of it. I’m afraid too of her becoming involved in the troubles at the Mills. Some day there will be open warfare in the Flats.”

When Lily had finished reading, she tore the letter slowly into bits after a custom of long standing and tossed the torn fragments into one of the stone urns that bordered the terrace.... Then she rose and pulling her fur cloak closer about her began to walk up and down restlessly as if some profound and stirring memory had taken possession of her. The rain began to fall gently and darkness to descend upon the garden. In the house behind her the servants lighted the lamps. Still she paced up and down tirelessly.

After a time she went down from the terrace to the gravel path of the garden and there continued her walking until the gate in the garden wall opened suddenly and a man stepped in, his erect soldierly figure black against the lamps of the Rue de Passy. It was the Baron, Madame Gigon’s cousin. He came toward her quickly and took her into his arms, embracing her passionately for a long time in silence.

When at last he freed her, a frown crossed his dark face, and he said, “What is it? What is distracting you? Are you troubled about something?”

Lily thrust her arm through his and leaned against him, but she avoided his gaze. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s nothing.”

And thus they walked through the rain until they reached the pavilion designed by Lenôtre which stood at a distance from the house. Here they halted and the Baron, taking from his pocket a key, unlocked the door and they went in silently.

Once inside, he kissed her again and presently he said, “What is it? There is something between us. There is a difference.”

“Nothing,” she murmured stubbornly. “It is nothing. You must be imagining things.”

XXXI

ALL that Julia Shane had written her daughter was true enough. The escapade of Ellen shocked the Town, not altogether unwillingly however, for it opened a new field for talk and furnished one more evidence of the wildness of a family which had never been content with conformity, a clan which kept bursting its bonds and satisfying in a barbarous fashion its hunger after life.

When Hattie Tolliver, tearful and shaken, came to her aunt for consolation, Julia Shane received her in the vast bedroom she occupied above the Mill yard. The old woman said, “Come, Hattie. You’ve no reason to feel badly. Ellen is a good girl and a wise one. It’s the best thing that could have happened, if you’ll only see it in that light.”

But Mrs. Tolliver, so large, so energetic, so emotional, was hurt. She kept on sobbing. “If only she had told me!... It’s as if she deceived me.”

At which Julia Shane smiled quietly to herself. “Ah, that’s it, Hattie. She couldn’t have told you, because she knew you so well. She knew that you couldn’t bear to have her leave you. The girl was wise. She chose the better way. It’s your pride that’s hurt and the feeling that, after all, there was something stronger in Ellen than her love for you.” She took the red work-stained hand of her niece in her thin, blue-veined one and went on, “We have to come to that, Hattie ... all of us. It’s only natural that a time comes when children want to be free. It’s like the wild animals ... the foxes and the wolves. We aren’t any different. We’re just animals too, helpless in the rough hands of Nature. She does with us as She pleases.”

But Mrs. Tolliver continued to sob helplessly. It was the first time in her life that she had refused to accept in the end what came to her.

“You don’t suppose I wanted Lily to go and live in Paris? You don’t suppose I wanted to be left here with Irene who is like a changeling to me? It’s only what is bound to come. If Lily did help Ellen it was only because all youth is in conspiracy against old age. All children are in a conspiracy against their parents. When we are old, we are likely to forget the things that counted so much with us when we were young. We take them for granted. We see them as very small troubles after all, but that’s because we are looking at them from a long way off. The old are selfish, Hattie ... more selfish than you imagine. They envy even the life and the hunger of the young.”

For a moment the old woman paused, regarding her red-eyed niece silently. “No,” she continued presently, “You don’t understand what I’ve been saying, yet it’s all true ... as true as life itself. Besides, life is hard for our children, Hattie. It isn’t as simple as it was for us. Their grandfathers were pioneers and the same blood runs in their veins, only they haven’t a frontier any longer. They stand ... these children of ours ... with their backs toward this rough-hewn middle west and their faces set toward Europe and the East. And they belong to neither. They are lost somewhere between.”

But Mrs. Tolliver understood none of this. With her there were no shades of feeling, no variations of duty. To her a mother and child were mother and child whether they existed in the heart of Africa or in the Faubourg St. Germain. After tea she went home, secretly nursing her bruised heart. She told her husband that no woman in the world had ever been called upon to endure so much.

As for Charles Tolliver, his lot was not the happiest. At the next election, despite the money which old Julia Shane poured into his campaign, he was defeated. His ruin became a fact. The Mills were too strong. The day of the farmer was past. After floundering about helplessly in an effort to make ends meet, he took at last a place as clerk in one of the banks controlled by his enemy Judge Weissman ... a cup of humiliation which he drank for the sake of his wife and children, goaded by the sheer necessity of providing food and shelter for them. So he paid for his error, not of honesty but of judgment. Because he was honest, he was sacrificed to the Mills. He settled himself, a man of forty-five no longer young, behind the brass bars of the Farmer’s Commercial Bank, a name which somehow carried a sense of irony because it had swallowed up more than one farm in its day.

In the Town tremendous changes occurred with the passing of years. There was a panic which threatened the banks. There were menacing rumors of violence and discontent in the Flats; and these things affected the Town enormously, as depressions in the market for wheat and cattle had once affected it. No longer was there any public market. On the Square at the top of Main Street, the old scales for weighing hay and grain were removed as a useless symbol of a buried past, a stumbling block in the way of progress. Opposite the site once occupied by the scales, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks purchased the Grand Western Hotel and made it into a club house with a great elk’s head in cast iron over the principal doorway. Through its windows, it was possible in passing to see fat men with red faces, coats off and perspiring, while they talked of progress and prosperity and the rising place of the Town among the cities of the state. One by one the old landmarks of the Square vanished, supplanted by “smokehouses,” picture palaces with fronts like frosted pastries, candy shops run by Greeks, a new element in the growing alien population of the Town. On the far side of the square the tower of the courthouse, itself a monument to graft, was at last completed to the enrichment of Judge Weissman and other politicians who had to do with the contract.

In the early evening after the sun had disappeared, the figure of the Judge himself might be seen, ambulating about the square, hugging the shadows; for the heat was bad for a man so red-faced and apoplectic. For all his avoidance of the sun, he walked arrogantly, with the air of one proud of his work. When he had tired of the promenade, it was his custom to return to the Elks’ club to squeeze his body between the arms of a rocking chair and sit watching the passers-by and the noisy bustle of trade. At such moments one might hear the sound of money dripping into tills as one heard the distant sound of the Mills which in the evening penetrated as far as the square itself. He gloated openly over the prosperity to which he had contributed so much. He went his way, petty, dishonest, corrupt ... traits which even his enemies forgave him because he had “done so much to make the Town what it was.” Not since the piggish obstinacy of Charles Tolliver had he been thwarted, and even in the matter of the taxes the sympathy of the Town had been on his side, because the decision in the case had delayed the building of new furnaces for more than two years and thus halted the arrival of hundreds of new alien workers who would have made the Town the third largest in the state. Charles Tolliver, most people believed, had been piggish and obstinate. He had put himself between his own Town and its booming prosperity.

XXXII

IN the Flats, as the years passed, new tides of immigrants swept in, filling the abominable dirty houses to suffocation, adding to the garbage and refuse which already clogged the sluggish waters of the Black Fork. The men worked twelve hours and sometimes longer in the Mills. The women wore shawls over their heads and bore many children, most of whom died amid the smoke and filth. Here the Town overlooked one opportunity. With a little effort it might have saved the lives of these babies to feed to the Mills later on; but it was simpler to import more cheap labor from Europe. Let those die who could not live.

And none of these new residents learned to speak English. They clung to their native tongues. They were simply colonists transplanted, unchanged and unchanging, from Poland, Ukrainia, South Italy and the Balkans—nothing more, nothing less. The Town had nothing to do with them. They were pariahs, outcasts, “Hunkies,” “Dagos,” and the Town held it against them that they did not learn English and join in the vast chorus of praise to prosperity.

But trouble became more frequent nowadays. Willie Harrison no longer dared take his exercise by walking alone up the hill to the Town. The barricade of barbed wire was complete now. It surrounded the Mills on all sides, impregnable, menacing. It crowded the dead hedges of arbor vitæ that enclosed the park at Shane’s Castle. There had been no need for it yet. It was merely waiting.

Welcome House, the tentative gesture of a troubled civic conscience, went down beneath the waves of prosperity. Volunteer citizens no longer ventured into the troubled area of the Flats. Money ceased to flow in for its support. It dropped at length from the rank of an institution supported by a community to the rank of a school supported by one woman and one man. The woman was Irene Shane. The man was Stepan Krylenko. The woman was rich. The man was a Mill worker who toiled twelve hours a day and gave six hours more to the education of his fellow workers.

The years and the great progress had been no more kind to Irene than they had been to the Town. She aged ... dryly, after the fashion of spinsters who have diverted the current of life from its wide course into a single narrow channel of feverish activity. She grew thinner and more pale. There were times when the blue veins showed beneath the transparent skin like the rivers of a schoolboy’s map. Her pale blond hair lost its luster and grew thin and straight, because she had not time and even less desire to care for it. Her hands were red and worn with the work she did in helping the babies of the Flats to live. She dressed the same, always in a plain gray suit and ugly black hat, which she replaced when they became worn and shabby. But in replacing them, she ignored the changing styles. The models remained the same, rather outmoded and grotesque, so that in the Town they rewarded her for her work among the poor by regarding her as queer and something of a figure of fun.

Yet she retained a certain virginal look, and in her eye there was a queer exalted light. Since life is impossible without compensations of one sort or another, it is probable that Irene had her share of these. She must have found peace in her work and satisfaction in the leader she molded from the tow haired boy who years before had shouted insults at her through the wrought iron gates of Shane’s Castle.

For Krylenko had grown into a remarkable man. He spoke English perfectly. He worked with Irene, a leader among his own people. He taught the others. He read Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and even Voltaire ... books which Irene bought him in ignorance of their flaming contents. At twenty-five Stepan Krylenko was a leader in the district, and in the Town there were men of property who had heard vaguely of him as a disturber, an anarchist, a madman, a Socialist, a criminal.

Although Irene seldom penetrated the Town any longer and her mother never left the confines of Shane’s Castle, their affairs still held an interest for those who had known Cypress Hill in the days of its vanished splendor. For women who had long since ceased to take any part in the life of a community, the names of old Julia Shane and her two daughters came up with startling frequency at the dinners and lunches and tea parties in the Town. It may have been that in a community where life was so noisy, so banal, so strenuous, so redolent of prosperity, the Shanes and the old house satisfied some profound and universal hunger for the mysterious, the beautiful, the bizarre, even the mystic. Certainly in the midst of so materialistic a community the Shanes were exotic and worthy of attention. And always in the background there was the tradition of John Shane and the memories of things which it was whispered had happened in Shane’s Castle. It was Lily who aroused the most talk, perhaps because she was even more withdrawn and mysterious than her mother and sister, because it was so easy to imagine things about her.... Lily who could come back and bring all the Town once more to Shane’s Castle; Lily, the generous, the good-natured, the beautiful Lily.

Mrs. Julis Harrison discussed them; and her son, the rejected Willie; and Miss Abercrombie, who with the passing of years had developed an affection of the nerves which made her face twitch constantly so that always, even in the midst of the most solemn conversations, she had the appearance of winking in a lascivious fashion. It was a trial which she bore, with a truly noble fortitude.

XXXIII

ON the evening of the day that Mrs. Harrison called for the last time at Cypress Hill, Miss Abercrombie was invited to dine with her in the ugly sandstone house on the Hill. The call was Mrs. Harrison’s final gesture in an effort to patch up the feud which had grown so furiously since the affair over the taxes. Of its significance Miss Abercrombie had been told in advance, so it must have been with a beating, expectant heart that she arrived at the Harrison mansion.

The two women dined alone in a vast dining-room finished in golden oak, beneath a gigantic brass chandelier fitted with a score of pendant brass globes. They sat at either end of a table so long that shouting was almost a necessity.

“William is absent,” explained Mrs. Harrison in a loud, deep voice. “There is a big corporation from the east that wants to buy the Mills. It wants to absorb them at a good price with a large block of stock for William and me. Of course, I oppose it ... with all my strength. As I told William, the Mills are the Harrisons ... I will never see them out of the family ... Judge Weissman has gone east with William to see that he does nothing rash. Neither of them ought to be away, I told Willie, with all this trouble brewing in the Flats.” Here she paused for a long breath. “Why, only this afternoon, some of those Polish brats threw stones at my victoria, right at the foot of Julia’s drive.... Imagine that in the old days!”

This long and complicated speech, she made with but a single pause for breath. She had grown even more stout, and her stupendous masculine spirit had suffered a certain weakening. A light stroke of paralysis she had passed over heroically, dismissing it by sheer force of her tremendous will. The misfortune left no trace save a slight limp as she dragged her body across the floor and settled it heavily in the plush covered arm chair at one end of the table.

The butler—Mrs. Harrison used a butler as the symbol of her domination in the Town, wearing him as a sort of crest—noiselessly brought the thick mushroom soup, his eye gleaming at the sight of the two women. He was an old man with white hair and the appearance of a gentleman.

“How dreadful!” exclaimed Miss Abercrombie, and then unable longer to restrain herself, she said, “Tell me! Do tell me about Julia!”

Mrs. Harrison drank from her water glass, set it down slowly and then said impressively, “She did not receive me!”

“I feared so,” rejoined Miss Abercrombie, winking with nervous impatience.

“It is the end! No one can say that I have not done my part toward a reconciliation.” This statement she uttered with all the majesty of an empress declaring war. “And to think,” she added mournfully, “that such an old friendship should come to such an end.”

“It’s just the way I feel,” replied Miss Abercrombie. “And you know, my friendship was even older. I knew her before you. Why, I can remember when she was only a farmer girl.” Here her illness forced her to wink as if there were something obscene in her simple statement.

“Well,” said Mrs. Harrison, “I don’t suppose any one in the Town was ever closer to Julia than I was. D’you know? That mulatto woman actually turned me away to-day, and I must say her manner was insolent. She said Julia was not feeling well enough to see me. Imagine, not well enough to see me, her oldest friend!” This statement the sycophantic Miss Abercrombie allowed to pass unchallenged. “Heaven knows,” continued Mrs. Harrison. “It was only friendship that prompted me. I certainly would not go prying about for the sake of curiosity. You know that, Pearl. Why, I wasn’t allowed to set my foot inside the door. You’d have thought I was diseased.”

After this a silence descended during which the room vibrated with unsaid things. At the memory of her reception, Mrs. Harrison’s face grew more and more flushed. The gentlemanly butler removed the soup and brought on whitefish nicely browned and swimming in butter.

“It’s a queer household,” remarked Miss Abercrombie, with an air of hinting at unspeakable things and feeling her way cautiously toward a letting down of all bars. Undoubtedly it was unfortunate that they had disputed the position of “oldest friend.” In a way it tied both their hands.

“It has always been queer,” replied the hostess. “Even since the house was built.”

Again a pregnant silence, and then Miss Abercrombie with another unwilled and obscene wink added, “I must say I can’t understand Irene’s behavior.” About this effort, there was something oblique and yet effective. It marked another step.

“Or Lily’s,” rejoined Mrs. Harrison, taking a third step.

“They say,” said Miss Abercrombie, pulling fishbones from her mouth, “that there is a common mill worker who is very attentive to Irene. Surely she can’t be considering marriage with him.”

“No, from what I hear, she isn’t,” observed Mrs. Harrison. After this dark hint she paused for a moment tottering upon the edge of new revelations with the air of a swimmer about to dive into cold water. At last she plunged.

“They say,” she murmured in a lowered voice, “that there is more between them than most people guess ... more than is proper.”

Miss Abercrombie leaned forward. “You know,” she said, “that’s funny. I’ve heard the same thing.”

“Well, I heard it from Thomas, the coachman. Of course, I reproved him for even hinting at such things. I must say he only hinted ... very delicately. He was discreet. If I hadn’t guessed there was something of the sort going on, I should never have known what he was driving at.”

Miss Abercrombie bridled and leaned back for the butler to remove her fish plate. “Imagine!” she said, “Imagine a child of yours being the subject of gossip among servants!”

Her hostess gave a wicked chuckle. “You’ve forgotten John Shane. When he was alive, his behavior was the talk of every one. But how could you have forgotten the talk that went the rounds? It was common property ... common property.”

Miss Abercrombie sighed deeply. “I know ... I know. Julia’s life has not been happy.” And into the sigh she put a thousand implications of the superior happiness of virgins.

“Of course,” said Mrs. Harrison, “he was insane. There’s no doubt about it. People may talk, but facts are facts. John Shane was insane ... certainly toward the end he was insane.”

The butler brought the roast fowl, and until his back was turned once more both women kept silence. When he had gone out of the room, they found themselves striving for first place in the race. Both spoke at once but Mrs. Harrison overwhelmed the sycophantic Abercrombie.

“Of course,” she said, “I think Julia herself is a little queer at times. I’ve noticed it for years ... ever since ... well ... ever since Lily went to Paris to live.”

“Yes,” observed Miss Abercrombie, moving toward something more definite. “Ever since the Governor’s garden party. All that was very queer ... very queer.”

Here again they found themselves halted by the immensity of the unspoken. Mrs. Harrison veered aside.

“The house has gone to ruin. Even the gate is hanging by one hinge. Nothing is kept up any longer.”

“Have you seen this lover of Irene’s?” asked Miss Abercrombie, calling a spade a spade and endeavoring to keep to one thing at a time.

“I’ve seen him once ... William pointed him out to me at the Mills. He’s one of the men who have been making trouble there.”

“Is he good looking?” asked Miss Abercrombie.

“Yes and no,” replied her companion.

“Well, what does that mean?”

“Well, he’s tall and has a handsome face ... a little evil perhaps. The real trouble is that I should call him common. Yes, common is the word I should use, decidedly common.”

Miss Abercrombie raised her eyebrows and smiled. “But, my dear, after all he is nothing but a workman.”

“Yes,” replied Mrs. Harrison, “he is.” In a manner which put an end to all doubt in the matter.

“Do you really think,” asked Miss Abercrombie, “that there is anything in it?”

Mrs. Harrison poised her fork and gave her guest a knowing look. “Well, of course I can’t see what he sees in her ... pale and haggard as she is. Now with him it’s different. He’s ... well.” She halted suddenly, adding, “This fowl is tough, Pearl ... I’m sorry it happened when you were dining with me.” And then, “I suppose it’s money he’s after. She must be very rich.”

The butler, after bringing more rich food, disappeared again and this time, Miss Abercrombie, casting to the winds all restraint, rose and said, “I’m going to bring my chair nearer, Belle. I can’t talk all the way from this end of the table.”

And she moved her chair and plate to a more strategic position so that when the butler returned, he found the two women sitting quite close to each other, their heads together, their voices lowered to the most confidential of pitches. Fragments of their talk reached an ear long trained to eavesdropping upon old women.

“But Lily is the one,” drifted to the ear. “I’d really like to know the truth about her. Of course blood is thicker than water. They say she....” Mrs. Harrison rattled the ice in her glass, thus destroying the remainder of the sentence.

So they sat until near midnight—two old women, one of them at the end of a life barren of love, the other abandoned by love forever and cast aside, a slowly decaying mass of fat—pawing over the affairs of two women for whom the force of love in some manifestation or other was still a radiant reality. They knew nothing; they possessed only suspicions and fragments of gossip, but out of these they succeeded in patching together a mosaic which glowed with all the colors of the most glamorous sin and the most romantic passion.

XXXIV

AND at the same moment in the house at Cypress Hill, Julia Shane lay propped up in her bed reading a French novel. It was an enormous bed with a vast dusty canopy supported by two ironical wood-gilt cupids who hung suspended from the ceiling; and Julia Shane, reading by the light of her night lamp, appeared lost in it like a woman tossing on the waves of the sea. To-night, feeling more ill than usual, she had her dinner in bed, wrapped in a peignoir of mauve ribbon and valenciennes, her bony neck exposed above the linen of her night dress.

She read, as usual, with the aid of a silver mounted reading glass which tossed the sentences in enormous capitals well into the range of her fading vision. On the table beside her stood one of the gilt coffee cups, a mute witness to the old woman’s disobedience of the doctor’s orders. Beside it lay two paper backed French novels and on the floor in the shadow of the table a half dozen more tossed aside carelessly, some lying properly, others open and sprawled, exposing the ragged edges of the hastily cut pages.

In the fashion of the ill and aging, she lived nowadays in memories ... memories of her girlhood when she had ridden John Shane’s wildest mare Doña Rita recklessly about the paddock of the farm, memories of Mademoiselle Violette de Vaux and the picnics with French and English girls in a neatly kept wood at Sèvres, memories of Cypress Hill in the days immediately after her return when John Shane was still more the passionate lover than the husband. As she grew older, the memories became clearer and more vivid, but they were neither vivid nor diverse enough to occupy all her time. What remained she divided between the game of patience and the French novels which Lily supplied faithfully, shipping them from Paris in lots of a dozen at a time.

The old woman had evolved her own scheme of reading, a plan which Irene condemned by the word “skimming,” but which satisfied Julia Shane because it revealed the plot without an unnecessary waste of time over long, involved descriptions of scenery and minute analyses of incomprehensible Gallic passions. Under the skimming system she read a few pages at the beginning and then turned to the end to learn the outcome of the tale. After this, she plunged into the middle of the book and read a page or two here and there until her curiosity was satisfied and her interest flagged. And at last the book was tossed aside to be carried off by the mulatto woman, who never failed to go through each volume carefully as though by looking at the words frequently enough she would be able at length to unlock the secrets of foreign tongues. The books which lay on the floor beside the bed had been “skimmed.” They lay prostrate and sprawled like the dead soldiers of an army. The titles served as an index of the old woman’s favorite authors. They appeared some in black ink, some in red, some even in blue ... Paul Marguerite, Marcel Prévost, Pierre Loti, Paul Bourget, Collette Willy and, strange to relate, Anatole France represented by L’Ile des Penguins which, it seemed, had baffled the “skimming” system, for of all the lot it was the only volume in which every page had been cut.

After she grew weary, she tossed aside Les Anges Gardiens which she had been reading and sat leaning back with her eyes closed. Perhaps she pondered the doings of the four evil governesses in the Prévost tale; perhaps she turned her thoughts to the Town and Mrs. Julis Harrison whom she had sent away because she “was not in a mood to be bored.” It is even possible that she knew at this very moment that in the sandstone house of the Harrisons, they were discussing her affairs. She was too wise and too worldly not to have known what Belle Harrison would say of her. Yet she appeared calm and content enough, completely indifferent to the opinions of her acquaintances, of the Town—indeed of all the world. She had reached the time when such things are no longer of any importance.

So great was her indifference that in more than three months she had left the house only once and then to follow the coffin of Jacob Barr to the cemetery on the hill. The old man was dead at last, after an illness which had drained with a bitter, heart-breaking slowness all the vigor of his strong and energetic body. On the day of the funeral the foreign women in Halsted street caught a swift glimpse of the mistress of Cypress Hill as she drove through on her way to the cemetery. They must have guessed that it was an event of great importance which drew her from her seclusion; and indeed it was such an event, for it was the funeral of the oldest member of the family, the last of all his generation save Julia Shane.

And after the funeral Julia Shane returned and shut herself in, resolved to see no one but Irene and her niece, Hattie Tolliver.

XXXV

WHATEVER her thoughts and memories may have been, they were interrupted presently by the knock of the mulatto woman who came to bear away the gilt coffee cup and pile of ravaged novels. The sound of the woman’s shuffling approach aroused Julia Shane who opened her eyes and said, “Here, Sarah. Give me a hand. I’ve slipped down.”

Sarah helped lift her once more into a sitting posture. The old woman raised herself scornfully as if there was between her indomitable spirit and her wrecked body no bond of any sort, as if she had only contempt for the body as a thing unworthy of her, a thing which had failed her, over which she had neither control nor responsibility.

The mulatto woman bent to pick up the scattered novels, and as she stood up, her mistress, chuckling, said, “My God. They’re tiresome, Sarah. They never write about anything but l’amour. You’d think there was nothing else in the world. Even l’amour gets to be a bore after a time.”

The mulatto woman waited obediently. “Yes, Mis’ Shane. I guess you’re right,” she said presently. At which the old woman smiled.

“And Sarah,” the mistress continued. “When Miss Irene comes in, tell her I should like to see her. It’s important.”

The servant hesitated for an instant. “But Miss Irene don’t come in till after midnight, Mis’ Shane.” She spoke with the manner of concealing something. In her soft voice there was a thin trace of insinuating suspicion, almost of servile accusation. “That foreign fella brings her home,” she added.

“It’s all right,” replied the old woman. “I shall be awake.” And then in a cold voice she added, “I’m sure it’s good of him to bring her home. I shouldn’t want her wandering about alone at that hour of the night. It’s very thoughtful of him.”

At midnight, true to her word, she was still awake. She had even managed to gain her feet painfully and to make her way with unsteady step across the room to the drawer which held her cigarettes. These too the doctor had forbidden her.

On the way back to her vast bed, she passed by the window and, drawing aside the curtain for a moment, she looked out over the hot panorama of glowing furnaces and tall black chimneys. As she stood there, she saw entering the wrought iron gates two figures sharply outlined against the glare of the white arc light in Halsted Street. The woman was Irene. She was accompanied by Krylenko.

Quietly the old woman extinguished the candle on the table beside her. The room became a vault of darkness. Beneath her window at the turn in the drive, the pair halted and stood talking in voices so low that what they said was inaudible even through the open window. After a time Irene seated herself wearily on the horseblock. Her frail body sagged with fatigue. She leaned against the cast iron Cupid who held in one outstretched hand an iron ring. Krylenko bent over her and his hands, with the curious, eloquent gestures of an alien, pantomimed their tale against the distant arc light. Above them in the recessed window the mother, clinging all the while to the heavy curtains for support, watched silently. She could hear nothing. She could only keep watch. At length Irene arose and lifting the ugly black hat from her head, ran her finger through her loose hair all damp with the terrible heat. Now was the moment. The old woman, awaiting proof, leaned against the table by her side.

But there was no proof. There was no embrace, not even the faintest exchange of intimacies. Krylenko chastely took Irene’s hand, bade her good-night and turned with his swinging powerful stride down the long drive. Irene, passing along the gallery by the drawing room, slipped her key into the lock and entered the house.

Above stairs she found her mother sitting up in bed, lost again in the midst of Les Anges Gardiens. Still carrying the worn hat in her hand, the daughter came over to the bed. With the increasing illness of the old woman, Irene’s manner had become more gentle. She even smiled a tired smile.

“What?” she said playfully. “Are you still awake? Skimming again, I see.”

Yet her manner was not the manner of a daughter with a mother. Rather it was that of a casual friend. It was too playful, too forced. The chasm of thirty years and more was not to be bridged by any amount of strained cordiality.

Julia Shane put down her reading glass. “I couldn’t sleep, so I tried to read,” she said.

Irene drew up a chair and sat by the bed. She appeared worn and exhausted, as though the August heat had drained to the dregs all her intense, self-inspired vitality.

“How are you feeling?”

“Better ... much better except for the ache in my back.”

Irene’s face grew serious. “You’ve been smoking again,” she said, “after the doctor forbade you.” The old woman, quite prepared to lie, started to protest, shaking her head in negation. “It’s no use, Mama ... I saw you ... I saw the glow of your cigarette at the window.”

(So Irene knew that she had been watched, and there was no need to protest.) The old woman sat still for a moment twisting the silver reading glass round and round, her brow contracted in an angry frown as though she resented bitterly the decay of body which gave any one authority over her. (That Julia Shane should ever take orders from a doctor or stand reproved by her own daughter!) It was this angry emotion that stood revealed and transparent in every line of her face, in the very defiance of her thin body. At length the frown melted slowly away.

“What sort of a man is he, Irene?” she asked looking straight into her daughter’s tired eyes. Irene moved uneasily.

“What man?” she asked, “I don’t know who you mean.”

“That foreigner ... I don’t remember his name. You’ve never told me.... You might have told your mother.” There was a note of peevishness in her voice which sounded queer and alien, almost a portent.

“Oh, Krylenko,” said Irene, twisting her black hat with her thin hands. “Krylenko.” Then she waited for a moment. “He’s a fine man ... a wonderful man. He has given up everything for his people.”

“But they are not your people,” observed her mother looking at her sharply.

“They are my people,” replied Irene softly. “All of them down to the last baby. If they are not my people, who are?”

The old woman, opposed once more by the inevitable wall of Irene’s obsessions, frowned. “You are wealthy,” she said. “You were born to a position.”

In Irene’s smile there was a shade of bitterness. “In this Town?” she inquired scornfully. “Oh! No! Position in this Town! That’s almost funny.” She leaned forward a little, pressing her hand against her forehead. “My people?” she said in a hushed voice. “My people.... Why, I don’t even know where my father came from.”

The mother, half-buried among the heavy pillows raised herself slowly as if a wave of new vigor had taken possession of her worn-out body. “Get me a cigarette, Irene.”

The girl opened her lips to protest, but her mother silenced her. “Please, Irene, do as I say. It can’t possibly matter what I do now.”

“Please, Mama,” began Irene once more. “The doctor has forbidden it.” Then Julia Shane gave her daughter a terrible look pregnant with all the old arrogance and power.

“Will you do as I say, Irene, or must I send for Sarah? She at least still obeys me.”

For a second, authority hung in the balance. It was the authority of a lifetime grounded upon a terrific force of will and sustained by the eternal and certain precedent of obedience. It was the old woman who won the struggle. It was her last victory. The daughter rose and obediently brought the cigarettes, even holding the candle to light it. She held the flame at arm’s length with a gesture of supreme distaste as if she had been ordered to participate in some unspeakable sin. After she had replaced the candle, her mother puffed thoughtfully for a time.

“Your father,” she said presently, “was born in Marseilles. His mother was Spanish and his father Irish. He came to this country because he had to run away. That’s all I know. He might have told me more if he had not died suddenly. It’s not likely that any of us will ever know his story, no matter how hard we try. Life isn’t a story book, you know. In life there are some things that we never know, even about our own friends, our own children. Each man’s soul is a secret, which even himself is not able to reveal.”

For an instant the light of triumph swept Irene’s pale countenance. “You see!” she said. “I am just like the rest ... like Stepan Krylenko and all the others. My father was a foreigner.”

The mother’s lips curved in a sudden, scornful smile. “But he was a gentleman, Irene.... That is something. And your mother was an American. Her grandfather was the first settler in the wilderness.... The Town was named for him. Have you no pride?”

“No,” replied Irene, “to be proud is a vice.... I have killed it. I am not proud. I am like all the others.” And yet there was a fierce pride in her voice, a smug, fierce, pride in not being proud.

“You are perverse,” said her mother. “You are beyond me. You talk like a fool....” Irene raised her head to speak but the will of the old woman swept her back. “I know,” she continued. “You think it is saintly. Does it ever occur to you that it might only be smugness?”

The old eyes flashed with anger and resentment, emotions which merely shattered themselves against the barrier of Irene’s smiling and fanatic sense of righteousness. A look of obstinacy entered her face. (She regarded herself as superior to Julia Shane! Incredible!)

“You amaze me, Irene. Your hardness is beyond belief. If you could be soft for a moment, gentle and generous ... like Lily.”

The daughter’s hands tightened about the battered old hat.

“It’s always Lily,” she said bitterly. “It’s always Lily.... Lily this and Lily that. She’s everywhere. Every one praises her ... even Cousin Hattie.” The stubborn look of smugness again descended upon her face. “Well, let them praise her ... I know that it is I who am right, I who am good in the sight of God.” And then for the first time in all the memory of Julia Shane, a look of anger, cold and unrelenting came into the eyes of her daughter. “Lily! Lily!” she cried scornfully, “I hate Lily.... May God forgive me!”

XXXVI

THEN for a long time a silence descended upon the room. Julia Shane crushed out the embers of her cigarette and fell once more to turning the silver mounted reading glass round and round, regarding it fixedly with the look of one hypnotized. At last she turned again to her daughter.

“Are you going to marry him?” she asked.

“No, of course not.”

“I should be satisfied, if he is as fine as you say he is. I would rather see you married before I die, Irene.”

The daughter shook her head stubbornly. “I shall never marry any one.”

The old woman smiled shrewdly. “You are wrong, my girl. You are wrong. I haven’t had a very happy time, but I wouldn’t have given it up. It is a part of life, knowing love and having children.... Love can be so many things, but at least it is part of life ... the greatest part of all. Without it life is nothing.”

For a long time Irene remained silent. She kept her eyes cast down and when she spoke again it was without raising them. “But Lily ...” she began shrewdly. “She has never married.” It was the old retort, always Lily. Her mother saw fit to ignore it, perhaps because, knowing what she knew, it was impossible to answer it.

“You’ve been seeing a great deal of this Krylenko,” she said. “It’s been going on for years ... since before Lily was here the last time. That’s years ago.”

Irene looked up suddenly and a glint of anger lighted her pale eyes. “Who’s been talking to you about me?... I know. It’s Cousin Hattie. She was here to-day. Oh, why can’t people let me alone? I harm no one. I want to be left in peace.”

Then Julia Shane, perhaps because she already knew too well the antipathy between her coldly virginal daughter and her niece whose whole life was her children, deliberately lied.

“Cousin Hattie did not even mention it.” She turned her eyes away from the light. “I would like to see you married, Irene,” she repeated. It was clear that for some reason the old hope, forgotten since that tumultuous visit of the Governor, was revived again. It occupied the old woman’s mind to the exclusion of all else.

“There is nothing between us, Mama,” said Irene. “Nothing at all. Can’t you see. We’ve been friends all along. I taught him to read English. I got him books.” Her voice wavered a little and her hands trembled. It was as if she had become a little girl again, the same girl who, in a white muslin dress with a blue sash, sobbed alone on the sofa in the library beneath John Shane’s portrait. “I’ve made him what he is,” she continued. “Don’t you see. I’m proud of him. When I found him, he was nothing ... only a stupid Ukrainian boy who was rebellious and rude to me. And now he works with me. He’s willing to sacrifice himself for those people. We understand each other. All we want is to be left alone, Don’t you understand? I’m just proud of him because I’ve made him what he is. I’m nothing,” she stammered. “I’m nothing to him in that way at all. That would spoil everything ... like something evil, intruding upon us.”

The pale tired face glowed with a kind of religious fervor. For an instant there was something maternal and exalted in her look. All the plainness vanished, replaced suddenly by a feverish beauty. The plain, exhausted old maid had disappeared.

“Why haven’t you told me this before?” asked the old woman.

“You never asked me.... You never wanted to know what I was doing. You were always interested in Lily. How could you ever have thought I’d marry him? I’m years older.” Suddenly she extended her arms with a curious exhibitive gesture like a gesture Lily sometimes made when she was looking her loveliest. “Look at me. I’m old and battered and ugly. How could he ever love me in that way? He is young.”

The thin hands dropped listlessly into her lap and lay against the worn black serge. She fell silent, all exhausted by the emotion. Her mother stared at her with the look of one who has just penetrated the soul of a stranger. Irene, it appeared, was suddenly revealed to her.

“Why, you know he’s never looked at a woman,” Irene continued in a lowered voice. “He’s lived in the Flats all these years and he’s never looked at a woman. Do you know what that means in the Flats?” Her voice dropped still lower. “Of course, you don’t know, because you know nothing about the Flats,” she added with a shade of bitterness.

At this her mother smiled. “The rest of the world is not so different, Irene.”

But Irene ignored her. “He’s worked hard all these years to make himself worth while and to help his people. He’s never had time to be bad.” Her mother smiled faintly again. Perhaps she smiled at the spinsterish word by which Irene chose to designate fornication.

“He’s pure,” continued Irene. “He’s fine and noble and pure. I want to keep him so.”

“You are making of him a saint,” observed the old woman drily.

“He is a saint! That’s just what he is,” cried Irene. “And you mock him, you and Lily.... Oh, I know ... I know you both. He’s been driven from the Mills for what he’s done for the people in the Flats. He’s been put on a black list so he can never get work in any other Mill. He told me so to-night. That’s what he was telling me when you stood watching us.” A look of supreme triumph came into her face once more. “But it’s too late!” she cried. “It’s too late.... They’ve voted to strike. It begins to-morrow. Stepan is the one behind it.”

It was as if a terrible war, long hanging in the balance, had suddenly become a reality. Julia Shane, propped among the pillows, turned restlessly and sighed.

“What fools men are!” she said, almost to herself. “What fools!” And then to Irene. “It won’t be easy, Irene. It’ll be cruel. You’d best go to bed now, dear. You look desperately tired. You’ll have plenty of work before you.”

Irene pressed a cold, distant kiss on the ivory cheek of her mother and turned to leave.

“Shall I put out the light?”

“Yes, please.”

The room subsided into darkness and Irene, opening the door, suddenly heard her mother’s voice.

“Oh, Irene.” The voice was weary, listless. “I’ve written for Lily to come home. The doctor told me to-day that I could not possibly live longer than Christmas. I forced it out of him. There was no use in having nonsense. I wanted to know.”

And Irene, instead of going to her own room, returned and knelt by the side of her mother’s bed. The hardness melted and she sobbed, perhaps because the old woman who faced death with such proud indifference was so far beyond the need of prayer and comfort.

Yet when the smoky dawn appeared at last, it found Irene in her own chaste room still kneeling in prayer before the pink and blue Sienna Virgin.

“Oh, Blessed Virgin,” she prayed, from the summit of her complacency. “Forgive my mother her sins of pride and her lack of charity. Forgive my sister her weakness of the flesh. Enter into their hearts and make them good women. Make them worthy to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Enter into the heart of my sister and cleanse her. Make her a good woman ... a pure woman, loving only those things which are holy. Cleanse her of the lusts of the flesh!”

Her pale eyes were wet with tears. Although she prayed to a plaster Virgin in pink gilt, she used the sonorous rolling words drawn all unconsciously from the memories of a Presbyterian childhood. And the Lily for whom she prayed ... the Lily who had been sent for ... was there in the old house just as she was always in the Town and in the memories of those who knew her beauty, her tolerance and her charm. There were, indeed, times when Krylenko, caught perhaps in the memory of a night when he stood in the melting snow peering into the windows of Shane’s Castle, spoke of her; and these were times when Irene turned away from him, frightened by the shadow of something in his eyes.

XXXVII

IT became known as the Great Strike and it served to mark an epoch. Long afterward people in the Town said, “It was the year of the Great Strike” as they said, “It was the year of the Spanish-American War” or “the year that Bryan was a candidate for the first time.” Willie Harrison found a use for his enclosures of barbed wire and his heavily barricaded gates. As the strike progressed and the violence increased, other machines of warfare were set up ... such things as machine guns and searchlights which at night fingered the Flats and the sky above with shafts of white light, rigid and unbending as steel.

In one sense the strike was a Godsend. When the Mills shut down there were no more fires in the ovens and the furnaces; no more soot fell in clouds like infernal snow over the low eminence of Cypress Hill and the squalid expanse of the Flats. For the first time in a score of years the sun became clearly visible. Instead of rising and setting as a ball of hot copper immersed in smoke, it appeared and disappeared quite clear and white, a sun such as God intended it to be. But even more remarkable was the blanket of silence which descended upon all the district. With the banking of the fires, there was no more hammering, and in place of the titanic clamor there was a stillness so profound and so unusual that people noticed it as people notice a sudden clap of loud thunder and remark upon it to each other. The silence became noisy.

In the house at Cypress Hill the world of Julia Shane narrowed from the castle itself to a single room and at last to the vast Italian bed. It was seldom that she gathered sufficient strength to struggle to her feet and make her way, leaning on the ebony and silver stick, to the window where the Mill yards and the Flats lay spread out beneath her gaze. During those last months she knew again the stillness which enveloped the Cypress Hill of her youth. But there was a difference; the green marshes were gone forever, buried beneath the masses of cinders, clay and refuse upon which the Mills raised their sheds and towers and the Flats its flimsy, dirty, matchwood houses, all smoke stained and rotting at the eaves. The lush smell of damp growing things was replaced by the faint odor of crowded, sweating humanity. Not one slim cat-tail, not one feathery willow remained in all the desert of industry. There was, however, a sound which had echoed over the swamps almost a hundred years earlier, a sound which had not been heard since the days when Julia Shane’s grandfather built about what was now the public square of the Town a stockade to protect the first settlers from the redskins. It was the sound of guns. Sometimes as she sat at the window, there arose a distant rat-tat-tat like the noise of a typewriter but more staccato and savage, followed by a single crack or two. She discovered at length the origin of the sound. In the Mill yard beneath her window a target had been raised, and at a little distance off men lay on their stomachs pointing rifles mounted upon tripods. Sometimes they fired at rusty buckets and old tin cans because these things did not remain stupid and inanimate like the target, but jumped and whirled about in the most tortured fashion when the bullets struck them, as though they had lives which might be destroyed. It made the game infinitely more fascinating and spirited. The men who indulged in this practise were, she learned from Hennery, the hired guards whom the Harrisons and Judge Weissman had brought in to protect the Mills, riff-raff and off-scourings from the slums of New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Cleveland.

There came a day, after the sights and sounds of the Mill yard had become a matter of indifference to the old woman, when the doctor forbade her to leave her bed if she wished to survive the day set for Lily’s arrival. It was October, and the park remained unchanged save that the atmosphere was less hot and the sun shone more clearly; for the trees and shrubs on the low hill were long since dead and far beyond the stage of sending out new leaves to fall at the approach of winter. It was bald now and very old. The brick house, dominating all the horizon, stood out day after day gaunt and blackened by soot against the brilliant October sky.

Lily had been delayed. Before leaving Paris she wrote to her mother and Irene that it was necessary for her to take a small boy, the son of a friend, to England. After placing him in school there, she wrote, she would sail at once for America and come straight to Cypress Hill. There were also matters of business which might delay her; but she would not arrive later than the middle of November. So Julia Shane set herself to battling with Death, bent upon beating Him off until she had seen Lily once more.

XXXVIII

IN those days, because it was difficult and dangerous for any one to visit Cypress Hill and because, after all, no one had any particular reason to visit it, there was at the old house, only one caller beside the doctor. This was Hattie Tolliver, whose strength had given way a little to an increasing stoutness but whose pride and spirit flagged not at all. To the police and the hired guards at the Mills, she became as familiar a figure as the doctor himself. She came on foot, since all service on the clanging trolley cars of Halsted street was long since suspended, her large powerful body clad in black clothes of good quality, a basket suspended over one arm and the inevitable umbrella swinging from the other. She walked with a sort of fierce disdain directed with calculated ostentation alike at the Mill guards, the police, and the dwellers of the Flats who viewed her bourgeois approach with a sullen hostility. The basket contained delicacies concocted by her own skilled and housewifely hand ... the most golden of custards, the most delicate of rennets, fragile biscuits baked without sugar—in short, every sort of thing which might please the palate of an invalid accustomed to excellent food.

In effect, Cypress Hill fell slowly into a state of siege. Surrounded on three sides by the barrier of barbed wire, the sole means of egress was the long drive turning into Halsted street. Here there was danger, for disorders occurred frequently at the very wrought iron gates, now rusted and broken. Stones were hurled by the strikers and shots fired by the police. The wagons of the Town no longer delivered goods at a spot so isolated and dangerous, and the duties of supplying the place with food came gradually to be divided between Irene and Hattie Tolliver, whose lack of friendliness and understanding toward each other approached an open hatred. They alone of the little garrison went in and out of the wrought iron gates; for Hennery and the mulatto woman were far too terrified by the disorders outside ever to venture into the Town.

On the day of Lily’s letter Hattie Tolliver, bearing a well-laden basket, arrived and went at once to Aunt Julia’s room. She brooked no interference from the mulatto woman.

After bidding Sarah place the contents of the basket in a cool place she swept by the servant with a regal swish of black skirts.

Upstairs in the twilight Julia Shane lay in the enormous bed, flat on her back staring at the ceiling. At the approach of her niece she raised herself a little and asked in a feeble voice to be propped up. It was as though the approach of her vigorous rosy-faced niece endowed her with a sudden energy.

“And how are you?” asked Hattie Tolliver when she had smoothed the pillows with an expert hand and made the old woman more comfortable than she had been in many days.

“The same ... just the same,” was the monotonous answer. “Lily is a long time in coming.”

Cousin Hattie went to the windows and flung back the curtains. “Light and air will do you good,” she said. “There’s nothing like light and air.” And then turning, “Why don’t you make Sarah keep the windows open?”

Julia Shane sat up more straightly, breathing in the crisp air. “I tell her to ... but she doesn’t like air,” she said weakly.

“You let her bully you! She needs some one to manage her. I’m surprised Irene doesn’t put her in her place.”

The old woman smiled. “Irene,” she said. “Irene.... Why she’s too meek ever to get on with servants. It’s no use ... her trying anything.”

“I’ve brought you a custard and some cakes,” continued her niece, at the same time flicking bits of dust from the dressing table with her handkerchief and setting the pillows of the chaise longue in order with a series of efficient pats. “There’s going to be trouble ... real trouble before long. The strikers are getting bolder.”

“They’re getting more hungry too, Irene says,” replied the old woman. “Perhaps that’s why.”

Cousin Hattie came over to the bed now and sat herself down, at the same time taking out a pillow-case which she set herself to hemming. “You know what they’re saying in the Town,” she remarked. “They’re saying that Irene is helping the strike by giving the strikers money.”

To this the old woman made no reply and Cousin Hattie continued. “I don’t see the sense in that. The sooner every one gets to work, the better. It isn’t safe in Halsted street any longer. I’m surprised at Irene helping those foreigners against the Harrisons. I didn’t think she had the spirit to take sides in a case like this.”

Julia Shane moved her weary body into a more comfortable position. “She doesn’t take sides. She only wants to help the women and children.... I suppose she’s right after all.... They are like the rest of us.”

At this Cousin Hattie gave a grunt of indignation. “They didn’t have to come to this country. I’m sure nobody wants ’em.”

“The Mills want them,” said her aunt. “The Mills want them and the Mills want more and more all the time.”

“But I don’t see why we have to suffer because the Mills want foreigners. There ought to be some law against it.”

As though there seemed to be no answer to this, Julia Shane turned on her side and remarked. “I had a letter from Lily to-day.”

Her niece put down the pillow case and regarded her with shining eyes. Her heavy body became alive and vibrant. “What did she say? Was there any news of Ellen? Shall I read it?”

“No, go on with your work. If you prop me a little higher and give me my glass, I’ll read it.”

This operation completed, she read the letter through. It was not until Ellen’s name occurred that Cousin Hattie displayed any real interest. At the sound of her daughter’s name, the woman put down her sewing and assumed an attitude of passionate listening.

“Ellen,” ran the letter, “is doing splendidly. She is contented here and is working hard under Philippe. She plays better than ever ... if that is possible, and plans to make her début in London next year. She has every reason to make a great success. I am leaving her in my house when I come to America. She gets on beautifully with Madame Gigon. That was my greatest worry, for Madame Gigon has grown worse as she has grown older. But she has taken a fancy to Ellen ... fortunately, so everything is perfect. Tell Cousin Hattie that one day she will be proud of her daughter.”

Julia Shane, when she had finished, put down the letter, and regarded her niece. “You see, Hattie,” she said, “there is no need to worry. Everything is going splendidly. Ellen couldn’t be in better hands. Lily knows her way about the world a great deal better than most. Some day your daughter will be famous.”

There came no response from her niece. Mrs. Tolliver sat upright and thoughtful. Presently she took up the pillow case and set to work again.

“These débuts,” she said. “They cost money, don’t they?”

“Yes,” replied her aunt.

“Well where is Ellen to get it? Clarence’s life insurance must all be gone by this time.”

“I suppose Lily has found a way. Lily is clever. Besides Ellen isn’t altogether helpless.”

Again there was a thoughtful pause and the old woman said, “I don’t think you’d be pleased if Ellen was a great success.”

“I don’t know. I’d be more pleased if I had her nearer to me. I don’t like the idea of her being in Paris. It’s not a healthy place. It’s the wickedest city in the world.”

“Come, Hattie. You mustn’t forget Ellen was made to live in the world. You brought her up to be successful and famous. It’s your fault if you have reason to be proud of her.”

Into this single sentence or two Julia Shane managed to condense a whole epic. It was an epic of maternal sacrifices, of a household kept without servants so that the children might profit by the money saved, of plans which had their beginning even before the children were born, of hopes and ambitions aroused skilfully by a woman who now sat deserted, hemming a pillow-case to help dispel her loneliness. She had, in effect, brought about her own sorrow. They were gone now, Ellen to Paris, Fergus and Robert to New York. It was in their very blood. All this was written, after all, in the strong proud face bent low over the pillow-case ... an epic of passionate maternity.

“We have to expect these things of our children,” continued Aunt Julia. “I’m old enough to know that it’s no new story, and I’ve lived long enough to know that we have no right to demand of them the things which seem to us the only ones worth while. Every one of us is different from the others. There are no two in the least alike. And no one ever really knows any one else. There is always a part which remains secret and hidden, concealed in the deepest part of the soul. No husband ever knows his wife, Hattie, and no wife ever really knows her husband. There is always something just beyond that remains aloof and untouched, mysterious and undiscoverable because we ourselves do not know just what it is. Sometimes it is shameful. Sometimes it is too fine, too precious, ever to reveal. It is quite beyond revelation even if we chose to reveal it....”

XXXIX

AT the close of this long speech, the old woman fell into a fit of coughing and her niece rose quickly to bring more medicine and water. If Hattie Tolliver had understood even for a moment these metaphysical theories, they were forgotten in the confusion of the coughing fit. It is more than probable that she understood nothing of the speech and probable that she was too far lost in thoughts of Ellen to have heard it. In any case, she was, like most good mothers and housewives, a pure realist who dealt in terms of the material. At least she gave no sign, and when the coughing fit was over, she returned at once to the main thread of the conversation.

“These careers,” she said, “may be all right but I think that Ellen might be happier if she had something more sound ... like a husband and children and a home.”

It was useless to argue with her. Like all women whose domestic life has been happy and successful, she could not be convinced that there was anything in the world more desirable than the love of a good husband and children. With her it was indeed something even stronger—a tribal instinct upon which life itself is founded. She was a fundamental person beside whom Irene and Lily, even her own daughter Ellen, were sports in the biological sense. They were removed by at least two generations from the soil. In them the struggle for life had become transvalued into a pursuit of the arts, of religion, of pleasure itself.

In the gathering twilight, Hattie Tolliver brought a lamp and lighted it to work by. Julia Shane watched her silently for a time, observing the strong neck, the immaculate full curve of her niece’s figure, the certainty with which the strong worn fingers moved about their delicate work.

“You remember,” she said, “that Lily mentioned a boy ... a young boy, in her letter?”

“Yes,” replied Hattie Tolliver, without glancing from her work. “The child of a friend. I thought she might have passed him by to come home to her mother.... Funny how children can forget you.”

Julia Shane stirred softly in the deep bed. “I thought you might be thinking that,” she said. “I thought it would be better to tell you the truth. I wanted you to know anyway. The truth is, Hattie, that the child is her own. She is more interested in him than in me, and that’s natural enough and quite proper.”

The strong fingers paused abruptly in their work and lay motionless against the white linen. Hattie Tolliver’s face betrayed her amazement; yet clearly she was a little amused.

“Charles always said there was something mysterious about Lily,” she said. “But I never guessed she’d been secretly married.”

The old woman, hesitating, coughed before she replied, as though the supremely respectable innocence of her niece somehow made her inarticulate. At last she summoned strength.

“But she’s never been married, Hattie. There never was any ceremony.”

“Then how ...” In Mrs. Tolliver’s face the amazement spread until her countenance was one great interrogation.

“Children,” interrupted her aunt in a voice filled with tremulous calm, “can be born without marriage certificates. They have nothing to do with legal processes.”

For a long time the niece kept silent, fingering the while the half finished pillow case. It appeared that she found some new and marvelous quality in it. She fingered the stuff as though she were in the act of purchasing it across a counter. At last she raised her head.

“Then it was true ... that old story?” she asked.

“What story?”

“The one they told in the Town ... about Lily’s having to go away to Paris.”

“Yes.... But no one ever really knew. They only guessed. They knew nothing at all. And they know nothing more to-day.” The old woman paused for a second as though to give her words emphasis. “I’m trusting you never to tell, Hattie. I wanted you to know because if ever it was necessary, I wanted Lily to come to you for help. It never will be. It isn’t likely.”

Hattie Tolliver sat up very stiff and red. “Tell!” she said, “Tell! Who should I ever tell in the Town? Why should I tell any of them?” The tribal instinct rose in triumph. It was a matter of her family against the Mills, the Town, all the world if necessary. Torture could not have dragged from her the truth.

Yet Hattie Tolliver was not unmoved by the confession. It may even have been that she herself long ago had suspicions of the truth which had withered and died since from too much doubt. To a woman of her nature the news of a thousand strikes, of murder and of warfare was as nothing beside the thing Julia Shane revealed. For a long time she said nothing at all, but her strong fingers spoke for her. They worked faster and more skilfully than ever, as if all her agitation was pouring itself out through their tips. The fingers and the flying needle said, “That this should have happened in our family! I can’t believe it. Perhaps Aunt Julia is so sick that her mind is weakened. Surely she must imagine this tale. Such things happen only to servant girls. All this is unreal. It cannot be true. Lily could not be so happy, so buoyant if this were true. Sinners can only suffer and be miserable.”

All this time she remained silent, breathing heavily, and when at last she spoke, it was to ask, “Who was the man?” in so terrible a voice that the old woman on the bed started for a moment and then averted her face lest her niece see the ghost of a smile which slipped out unwilled.

“It was the Governor,” the aunt replied at last.

And then, “Why would he not marry her?” in a voice filled with accumulations of hatred and scorn for the ravishers of women.

This time Julia Shane did not smile. Her pride,—the old fierce and arrogant pride—was touched.

“Oh,” she replied, “it was not that. It was Lily who refused to marry him. He begged her ... on his knees he begged her. I saw him. He would have been glad enough to have her.”

And this led only to a “Why?” to which the old woman answered that she did not know except that Lily had said she wished to be herself and go her own way, that she was content and would not marry him even if he became president. “Beyond that, I do not know,” she said. “That is where a mother does not know even her own daughter. I don’t believe Lily knows herself. Can you tell why it is that Ellen must go on studying and studying, why she cannot help it? Can I know why Irene wants only to be left in peace to go her own way? No, we never really know any one.”

All this swept over the head of Hattie Tolliver. She returned to one thing. “It would not have been a bad match. He is a senator now.”

It had grown quite dark during their talk and from inside the barrier of the Mills the searchlights began to operate, at first furtively and in jerky fashion and then slowly with greater and greater deliberation, sweeping in gigantic arcs the sky and the squalid area of the Flats. A dozen times in their course the hard white beams swept the walls of the barren old house, penetrating even the room where Julia Shane lay slowly dying. The flashes of light came suddenly, bathing in an unearthly glow and with a dazzling clarity the walls and the furniture. At last, as the beams swept the face of the ormulu clock, Hattie Tolliver, rising, folded her pillow case and thrust it into the black bag she carried.

“I must go now,” she said. “Charlie will be wanting his supper.”

The old woman asked her to bend down while she kissed her. It was the first time she had ever made such a request and she passed over the extraordinary event by hastily begging her niece to draw the curtains.

“The lights make me nervous,” she said. “I don’t know why, but they are worse than the noise the Mills used to make.”

And when this operation was completed she summoned her niece again to her side. “Would you like to see a picture of Lily’s boy?”

Hattie Tolliver nodded.

“It is in the top drawer of the chiffonier. Will you fetch it to me?”

Her niece brought the picture and for a time the two women regarded it silently. It was the photograph of a handsome child, singularly like Lily although there was something of the Governor’s rather florid good looks, particularly about the high sweeping forehead.

“He is a fine child, isn’t he?” the old woman remarked. “I never expected to have a grandchild named Shane.”

Still regarding the picture with a sort of fascination, Mrs. Tolliver replied, “He is a darling, isn’t he? Does she call him that?”

“Of course. What would she call him?”

“Yes, he is a fine lad. He looks like our family.” And then after a long pause she added, “I’m glad you told me all the story. I’m glad Lily did what she did deliberately. I should hate to think that any of us would be weak enough to let a man take advantage of her. That makes a great difference.”

After she had put on her small black hat trimmed with worn and stubby ostrich plumes, she turned for the last time. “If you have another of those pictures, Aunt Julia, I would like to have one. I’d like to show it to Charles. He’s always admired Lily. It’s funny what a way she has with men.”

There was no sting in the remark. It was a simple declaration, spoken as though the truth of it had occurred to her for the first time. She was too direct and vigorous to be feline.

As she closed the door the voice of her aunt trailed weakly after. “You needn’t worry about Ellen. All her strength and character is your strength and character, Hattie. She can take care of herself.”

The niece turned in the doorway, her thick strong figure blocking the shower of dim light from the hall. “No,” she said. “It’s not as though Lily were bad. She isn’t bad. I’ve always had an idea that she knew what she was about. I suppose she has her own ideas on life. Perhaps she lives up to them. I can’t say they’re my ideas.” For a second she leaned against the frame of the door, searching with an air of physical effort for words to express her thoughts. “No, she isn’t bad,” she continued. “No one who ever knew her can say she is a bad woman. I can’t explain what I mean, but I suppose she believes in what she does.”

And with this wise and mysterious observation Mrs. Tolliver returned to the world of the concrete—her own world—swept down the long stairway and into the kitchen where she reclaimed her basket, and left the house without waiting for the hostile mulatto woman to open the door.

XL

PERHAPS because she was so dazed and fascinated by the story which Julia Shane had poured into her astonished ears, she walked in a sort of dream to the foot of the long drive where she found herself suddenly embroiled in a waking nightmare. On all sides of her there rose a great tumult and shouting. Stones were thrown. Cries rang out in barbaric tongues. Men struggled and fought, and above the men on foot rose the figures of the constabulary mounted on wild and terrified horses who charged and curvetted as their masters struck about them with heavy clubs.

Through all this, Hattie Tolliver passed with an air of the most profound detachment and scorn, somewhat in the manner of a great sea-going freighter riding the waves of an insignificant squall. She carried her head high, despising the Irish constabulary as profoundly as she despised the noisy alien rabble. Clearly it was none of her affair. This embroiled rabble had nothing to do with her, nothing to do with her family, nothing to do with her world. The riot was as nothing beside the tale that kept running through her mind, blinding her senses to all the struggle that took place at her very side.

And then, suddenly and without warning, the crack of a pistol tore the air; then another and another, and there fell at the feet of Hattie Tolliver, completely blocking her overwhelming progress, the body of a swarthy man with heavy black mustaches. Before she was able to move, one of the constabulary, rushing up, kicked the prostrate body of the groaning man.

But he did not kick twice, for he was repulsed a second later by the savage thrust in the stomach from the umbrella of Mrs. Tolliver who, rushing to the attack, cried out, “Get away, you filthy brute!... You dirty coward!”

And the trooper, seeing no doubt that she was not one of the foreigners, retired sheepishly before the menace of the angry mob to join his fellows.

The basket and umbrella were cast aside and Mrs. Tolliver, bending over the writhing man, searched for the wound. When she looked up again she found, standing over her, the gigantic steel worker who she knew was Irene’s friend. She did not know his name.

“Here,” she said, with the manner of a field marshal. “Help me get this fellow into the house over there.”

Without a word, Krylenko bent down, picked up the stricken workman and bore him, laid across his brawny shoulders, into the corner saloon whither Hattie Tolliver with her recovered basket and umbrella followed him, surrounded by a protecting phalanx of excited and gibbering strikers.

The saloon was empty, for all the hangers-on had drifted long before into the streets to watch the riot from a safe distance. But the electrical piano kept up its uncanny uproar playing over and over again, Bon-Bon Buddy, the Chocolate Drop and I’m Afraid to go Home in the Dark.

There on the bar, among the empty glasses, Krylenko laid the unconscious striker and Hattie Tolliver, with the scissors she had used but a moment before in hemstitching a pillow-case, cut away the soiled shirt and dressed the wound. When her work was done she ordered Krylenko to take down one of the swinging doors and on this the strikers bore the wounded man to his own house.

When the little procession had vanished around a corner, Mrs. Tolliver brushed her black clothes, gathered up her basket and umbrella and set out up the hill to the Town. It was the first time she had ever set foot inside an establishment which sold intoxicating liquors.

Behind her in the darkened room at Cypress Hill, the sound of shots and cries came distantly to Julia Shane as through a high impenetrable wall, out of another world. At the moment she was alive in a world of memories, a world as real and as tangible as the world of the Mills and the Flats, for the past may be quite as real as the present. It is a vast country full of trees and houses, animals and friends, where people may go on having adventures as long as they live. And the sounds she heard in her world bore no relation to the sounds in sordid Halsted street. They were the sounds of pounding hoofs on hard green turf, and the cries of admiration from a little group of farmers and townspeople who leaned on the rail of John Shane’s paddock while his wife, with a skilful hand sent his sleek hunter Doña Rita over the bars—first five, then six and last of all and marvelous to relate, a clean seven!

A stained and dusty photograph slipped from her thin fingers and lost itself among the mountainous bedclothing which she found impossible to keep in order. It was the portrait of a youngish man with a full black beard and eyes that were wild, passionate, adventurous ... the portrait of John Shane, the lover, as he returned to his wife at the school of Mademoiselle Violette de Vaux at St. Cloud on the outskirts of Paris.

XLI

AS Julia Shane grew weaker, it was Cousin Hattie Tolliver who “took hold” of the establishment at Shane’s Castle. It was always Mrs. Tolliver, capable and housewifely, who “took hold” in a family crisis. She managed funerals, weddings and christenings. Cousins came to die at her shabby house in the Town. She gathered into her large strong hands the threads of life and death that stretched themselves through a family scattered from Paris to Australia. Her relatives embroiled themselves in scrapes, they grew ill, they lost or made fortunes, they succumbed to all the weaknesses to which the human flesh is prone; and always, at the definitive moment, they turned to Hattie Tolliver as to a house built upon a rock.

Irene, so capable in succoring the miserable inhabitants of the Flats, grew helpless when death peered in at the tall windows of Shane’s Castle. Besides, she had her own work to do. As the strike progressed she came to spend days and nights in the squalid houses of Halsted street, returning at midnight to inquire after her mother. She knew nothing of managing a house and Hattie Tolliver knew these things intimately. More than that, Mrs. Tolliver enjoyed “taking hold”; and she extracted, beyond all doubt, a certain faintly malicious satisfaction in taking over the duties which should have fallen upon Irene, while Irene spent her strength, her very life, in helping people unrelated to her, people who were not even Americans.

So it was Hattie Tolliver, wearing a spotless apron and bearing a dustcloth, who opened the door when Hennery, returning from his solitary and heroic venture outside the gates, drove Lily up from the dirty red brick station, bringing this time no great trunks covered with gay labels of Firenze and Sorrento but a pair of black handbags and a small trunk neatly strapped. It may have been that Hennery, as Irene hinted bitterly, made that perilous journey through the riots of Halsted street only because it was Mis’ Lily who was returning. Certainly no other cause had induced him to venture outside the barren park.

The encounter, for Hattie Tolliver, was no ordinary one. From her manner it was clear that she was opening the door to a woman ... her own cousin ... who had lived in sin, who had borne a child out of wedlock. Indeed the woman might still be living in sin. Paris was a Babylon where it was impossible to know any one’s manner of living. Like all the others, Mrs. Tolliver had lived all her life secure in the belief that she knew Lily. She remembered the day of her cousin’s birth ... a snowy blustering day. She knew Lily throughout her childhood. She knew her as a woman. “Lily,” she undoubtedly told herself, “was thus and so. If any one knows Lily, I know her.” And then all this knowledge had been upset suddenly by a single word from Lily’s mother. It was necessary to create a whole new pattern. The woman who stood on the other side of the door was not Lily at all—at least not the old Lily—but a new woman, a stranger, whom she did not know. There might be, after all, something in what Aunt Julia said about never really knowing any one.

All this her manner declared unmistakably during the few strained seconds that she stood in the doorway facing her cousin. For an instant, while the two women, the worldly and the provincial, faced each other, the making of family history hung in the balance. It was Mrs. Tolliver who decided the issue. Suddenly she took her beautiful cousin into her arms, encircling her in an embrace so warm and so filled with defiance of all the world that Lily’s black hat, trimmed with camelias, was knocked awry.

“Your poor mother!” were Cousin Hattie’s first words. “She is very low indeed. She has been asking for you.”

And so Lily won another victory in her long line of conquests, a victory which she must have known was a real triumph in which to take a profound pride.

Then while Lily took off her hat and set her fine hair in order, her cousin poured out the news of the last few days. It was news of a sort that warmed the heart of Mrs. Tolliver ... news of Julia Shane’s illness delivered gravely with a vast embroidery of detail, a long account of the mulatto woman’s insolence and derelictions which increased as the old woman grew weaker; and, last of all, an eloquent and denunciatory account of Irene’s behavior.

“She behaves,” said Mrs. Tolliver, “as though a daughter had no obligations toward her own mother.” Her face grew scarlet with indignation at this flouting of family ties. “She spends all her time in the Flats among those foreigners and never sees her own mother more than a minute or two a day. There she lies, a sick and dying woman, grieving because her daughter neglects her. You’d think Irene loved the strikers more ... especially one young fellow who is the leader,” she added darkly.

Lily, knowing her mother, must have guessed that Cousin Hattie’s account suffered from a certain emotional exaggeration. The picture of old Julia Shane, grieving because her daughter neglected her, was not a convincing one. The old woman was too self reliant for that sort of behavior. She expected too little from the world.

But Lily said nothing. She unstrapped her bag and brought out a fresh handkerchief and a bottle of scent. Then she raised her lovely head and looked sharply at her cousin. “I suppose it’s this same Krylenko,” she said. “D’you think she’s in love with him?”

“No,” replied Mrs. Tolliver shrewdly, “I don’t think she loves anybody or anything but her own soul. She’s like a machine. She has an idea she loves the strikers but that’s only because she thinks she’s saving her soul by good works. I suppose it makes her happy. Only yesterday I told her, thinking it would be a hint, that charity begins at home.” For a moment Mrs. Tolliver waited thoughtfully, and then she added, “You know, sometimes Irene looks at her mother as if she wanted her to make haste with her dying. I’ve noticed the look—more than once.”

And so they talked for a time, as people always talked of Irene, as if she were a stranger, a curiosity, something which stood outside the realm of human understanding. And out of the ruin of Irene’s character, Hattie Tolliver rose phoenix-like, triumphant, as the heroine who had seen Irene’s duty and taken it upon herself.

“You know, I’m nursing your mother,” she continued. “She wouldn’t have a nurse because she couldn’t bear to have a stranger in the house. She has that one idea now ... seeing no one but the doctor and her own family. Now that you’ve come, I suppose she won’t even see the doctor any more. She’s asleep now, so I came down-stairs to put the house into some sort of order. Heaven knows what it would have been like if the drawing-room had been open too. That mulatto woman,” she added bitterly, “hasn’t touched a thing in weeks.”

Silently, thoughtfully, Lily pushed open the double doors into the drawing-room.

“It’s not been opened since you left,” continued Mrs. Tolliver. “Not even for the Christmas party. But that wasn’t necessary because there aren’t many of us left. You could put all of us into the library. There’s only Eva Barr and Charles and me. The old ones are all dead and the young ones have gone away.” For a moment she paused, for Lily appeared not to be listening. Then she added softly, “But I guess you know all that. I’d forgotten Ellen was living with you.”

For the time being, the conversation ended while the two women, Lily in her smart suit from the Rue de la Paix and Hattie Tolliver in shiny black alpaca with apron and dustcloth, stood in the doorway reverently surveying the vast old room, so dead now and so full of memories. The rosewood chairs, shrouded like ghosts, appeared dimly in the light that filtered through the curtained windows. In the far end, before the long mirror, the piano with its shapeless covering resembled some crouching, prehistoric animal. Above the mantelpiece, the flaming Venice of Mr. Turner glowed vaguely beneath layers of dust. Cobwebs hung from the crystal chandeliers and festooned the wall sconces; and beneath the piano the Aubusson carpet, rolled into a long coil, waited like a python. The room was the mute symbol of something departed from the Town.

Silently the two women regarded the spectacle and when Lily at length turned away, her dark eyes were shining with tears. She was inexpressibly lovely, all softened now by the melancholy sight.

“I suppose it will never be opened again,” observed Mrs Tolliver in a solemn voice. “But I mean to clean it thoroughly the first time I have an opportunity. Just look at the dust.” And with her competent finger she traced her initials on the top of a lacquer table.

For a moment Lily made no reply. At last she said, “No. I suppose it is closed for good.”

“You wouldn’t come back here to live?” probed her cousin with an air of hopefulness.

“No. Why should I?” And a second later Lily added, “But how quiet it is. You can almost hear the stillness.”

Mrs. Tolliver closed the door, seizing at the same time the opportunity to polish the knobs on the hallway side. “Yes, it’s a relief not to hear the Mills. But there are other noises now ... riots and machine guns, and at night there are searchlights. Only last night the police clubbed an old woman to death at the foot of the drive. She was a Polish woman ... hadn’t been harming any one. I wonder you didn’t see the blood. It’s smeared on the gates. Irene can tell you all about it.” For a moment she polished thoughtfully; then she straightened her vigorous body and said, “But I got back at them. I gave one of the hired policeman a poke he won’t soon forget. It’s a crime the way they behave.... It’s murder. No decent community would allow it.” And she told Lily the story of the rescue at the corner saloon.

As Lily made her way up the long stairway, Mrs. Tolliver paused in her work to watch the ascending figure until it reached the top. Her large honest face was alive with interest, her eyes shining as if she now really saw Lily for the first time, as if the old Lily had been simply an illusion. The beautiful stranger climbed the stairs languidly, the long, lovely lines of her body showing through the trim black suit. Her red hair glowed in the dim light of the hallway. She was incredibly young and happy, so unbelievably fresh and lovely that Mrs. Tolliver, after Lily had disappeared at the turn of the stair, moved away shaking her head and making the clucking sound which primitive women use to indicate a disturbance of their suspicions.

And when she returned to dusting the library under the handsome, malignant face of John Shane she worked in silence, abandoning her usual habit of humming snatches of old ballads. After the Ball was Over and The Baggage Coach Ahead were forgotten. Presently, when she had finished polishing the little ornaments of jade and crystal, she fell to regarding the portrait with a profound interest. She stood thus, with her arms akimbo, for many minutes regarding the man in the picture as if he too had become a stranger to her. She discovered, it appeared, something more than a temperamental and clever old reprobate who had been indulgent toward her. Her manner was that of a person who stands before a suddenly opened door in the presence of magnificent and incomprehensible wonders.

Lily found her there when she came down-stairs.

“You know,” observed Mrs. Tolliver, “I must be getting old. I have such funny thoughts lately ... the kind of thoughts a normal healthy woman doesn’t have.”

XLII

ROOM by room, closet by closet, Mrs. Tolliver and Lily put the big house in order. They even set Hennery to cleaning the cellar, and themselves went into the attic where they poked about among old boxes and trunks filled with clothing and photographs, bits of yellow lace and brocade for which no use had ever been found. There were photographs of Lily and Irene as little girls in tarlatan dresses much ornamented with artificial pansies and daisies; pictures of John Shane on the wrought iron piazza, surrounded by men who were leaders in state politics; dim photographs of Julia Shane in an extremely tight riding habit with a bustle, and a hat set well forward over the eyes; pictures of the annual family gatherings at Christmas time with all its robust members standing in the snow outside the house at Cypress Hill. There were even pictures of Mrs. Tolliver’s father, Jacob Barr, on the heavy hack he sometimes rode, and one of him surrounded by his eight vigorous children.

From the sentimental Mrs. Tolliver, this collection wrenched a tempest of sighs. To Lily she said. “It’s like raising the dead. I just can’t believe the changes that have occurred.”

The arrival of Lily brought a certain repose to the household. The mulatto woman who behaved so sulkily under the shifting dominations of the powerful Mrs. Tolliver and the anemic Irene, began slowly to regain her old respectful attitude. It appeared that she honored Miss Lily with the respect which servants have for those who understand them. Where the complaints of Irene and the stormy commands of Mrs. Tolliver had wrought nothing, the amiable smiles and the interested queries of Lily accomplished miracles. For a time the household regained the air of order and dignity which it had known in the days of Julia Shane’s domination. Lily was unable to explain her success. After all, there was nothing new in the process. Servants had always obeyed her in the same fashion. She charmed them whether they were her own or not.

Although her arrival worked many a pleasant change in the house and appeared to check for a time the inward sweeping waves of melancholy, there was one thing which she was unable, either consciously or unconsciously, to alter in any way. This was the position of Irene. The sister remained an outsider. It was as if the old dwelling were a rooming house and she were simply a roomer, detached, aloof ... a roomer in whom no one was especially interested. She was, in fact, altogether incomprehensible. Lily, to be sure, made every effort to change the condition of affairs; but her efforts, it appeared, only drove her sister more deeply into the shell of taciturnity and indifference. The first encounter of the two sisters, for all the kisses and warmth of Lily, was an awkward and soulless affair to which Irene submitted listlessly. So apparent was the strain of the encounter that Mrs. Tolliver, during the course of the morning’s work, found occasion to refer to it.

“You mustn’t mind Irene’s behavior,” she said. “She has been growing queerer and queerer.” And raising her eyebrows significantly she continued, “You know, sometimes I think she’s a little cracked. Religion sometimes affects people in that way, especially the sort of popery Irene practises.”

And then she told of finding Irene, quite by accident, prostrate before the pink-gilt image of the Virgin, her hair all disheveled, her eyes streaming with tears.

Once Mrs. Tolliver had reconciled herself to Lily’s secret, her entire manner toward her cousin suffered a change. The awe which had once colored her behavior disappeared completely. She was no longer the provincial, ignorant of life outside the Town, face to face with an experienced woman of the world. She was one mother with an understanding for another. Before many days had passed the pair worked and gossiped side by side, not only as old friends might have gossiped but as old friends who are quite the same age, whose interests are identical. In her manner there was no evidence of any strangeness save in the occasional moments when she would cease working abruptly to regard her lovely cousin with an expression of complete bewilderment, which did not vanish until Lily, attracted by her cousin’s steady gaze, looked up and caused Mrs. Tolliver to blush as if it were herself who had sinned.

XLIII

IT was Lily who in the end mentioned the affair. She spoke of it as they sat at lunch in the paneled dining room.

“Mama,” she said suddenly, “tells me that you know all about Jean.”

“Yes,” replied Mrs. Tolliver, in a queer unearthly voice. “She told me.”

“I’m glad, because I wanted to tell you before, only she wouldn’t let me. She said you wouldn’t understand.”

There was an awesome little pause and Mrs. Tolliver, her fork poised, said, “I don’t quite understand, Lily. I must say it’s puzzling. But I guessed you knew what you were doing. It wasn’t as if you were a common woman who took lovers.” She must have seen the faint tinge of color that swept over Lily’s face, but she continued in the manner of a virtuous woman doing her duty, seeing a thing in the proper light, being fair and honest. “I guessed there was some reason. Of course, I wouldn’t want a daughter of mine to do such a thing. I would rather see her in her grave.”

Her manner was emphatic and profound. It was clear that however she might forgive Lily in the eyes of the world, she had her own opinions which none should ever know but herself and Lily.

Lily blushed, the color spreading over her lovely face to the soft fringe of her hair. “You needn’t worry, Cousin Hattie,” she said. “Ellen would never do such a thing. You see, Ellen is complete. She doesn’t need anything but herself. She’s not like me at all. She isn’t weak. She would never do anything because she lost her head.”

Ellen’s mother, who had stopped eating, regarded her with a look of astonishment. “But your mother said you hadn’t lost your head. She said it was you who wouldn’t marry the Governor.”

Lily’s smile persisted. She leaned over to touch her cousin’s hand, gently as though pleading with her to be tolerant.

“It’s true,” she said. “Some of what mother told you. It’s true about my refusing to marry him. You see the trouble is that I’m not afraid when I should be. I’m not afraid of the things I should be afraid of. When there is danger, I can’t run away. If I could run away I’d be saved, but I can’t. Something makes me see it through. It’s something that betrays me ... something that is stronger than myself. That’s what happened with the Governor. It was I who was more guilty than he. It is I who played with fire. If I was not unwilling, what could you expect of him ... a man. Men love the strength of women as a refuge from their own weakness.” She paused and her face grew serious. “When it was done, I was afraid ... not afraid, you understand of bearing a child or even afraid of what people would say of me. I was afraid of losing myself, because I knew I couldn’t always love him.... I knew it. I knew it. I knew that something had betrayed me. I couldn’t give up all my life to a man because I’d given an hour of it to him. I was afraid of what he would become. Can you understand that? That was the only thing I was afraid of ... nothing else but that. It was I who was wrong in the very beginning.”

But Mrs. Tolliver’s expression of bewilderment failed to dissolve before this disjointed explanation. “No,” she said, “I don’t understand.... I should think you would have wanted a home and children and a successful husband. He’s been elected senator, you know, and they talk of making him president.”

Lily’s red lip curved in a furtive, secret, smile. “And what’s that to me?” she asked. “They can make him what they like. A successful husband isn’t always the best. I could see what they would make him. That’s why I couldn’t face being his wife. I wasn’t a girl when it happened. I was twenty-four and I knew a great many things. I wasn’t a poor innocent seduced creature. But it wasn’t so much that I thought it out. I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t marry him. Something inside me wouldn’t let me. A part of me was wise. You see, only half of me loved him ... my body, shall we say, desired him. That is not enough for a lifetime. The body changes.” For a second she cast down her eyes as if in shame and Mrs. Tolliver, who never before had heard such talk, looked away, out of the tall window across the snow covered park.

“Besides,” Lily continued, after a little silence, “I have a home and I have a child. Both of them are perfect. I am a very happy woman, Cousin Hattie ... much happier than if I had married him. I know that from what he taught me ... in that one hour.”

Mrs. Tolliver regarded her now with a curious, prying, look. Plainly it was a miracle she had found in a woman who had sinned and still was happy. “But you have no husband,” she said presently, with the air of presenting a final argument.

“No,” replied Lily, “I have no husband.”

“But that must mean something.”

“Yes, I suppose it does mean something.”

And then the approach of the mulatto woman put an end to the talk for the time being. When she had disappeared once more, it was Mrs. Tolliver who spoke. “You know,” she said, “I sometimes think Irene would be better off if such a thing had happened to her. It isn’t natural, the way she carries on. It’s morbid. I’ve told her so often enough.”

“But it couldn’t have happened to Irene. She will never marry. You see Irene’s afraid of men ... in that way. Such a thing I’m sure would drive her mad.” And Lily bowed her lovely head for a moment. “We must be good to Irene. She can’t help being as she is. You see she believes all love is a kind of sin. Love, I mean, of the sort you and I have known.”

At this speech Mrs. Tolliver grew suddenly tense. Her large, honest face became scarlet with indignation. “But it isn’t the same,” she protested. “What I knew and what you knew. They’re very different things. My love was consecrated.”

Lily’s dark eyes grew thoughtful. “It would have been the same if I had married the Governor. People would have said that we loved each other as you and Cousin Charles love each other. They wouldn’t have known the truth. One doesn’t wash one’s dirty linen in public.”

Her cousin interrupted her abruptly. “It is not the same. I could not have had children by Charlie until I was married to him. I mean there could have been nothing like that between us beforehand.”

“That’s only because you were stronger than me,” said Lily. “You see I was born as I am. That much I could not help. There are times when I cannot save myself. You are more fortunate. Irene is like me. That is the reason she behaves as she does. After all, it is the same thing in us both.”

But Mrs. Tolliver, it was plain to be seen, understood none of this. It was quite beyond her simple code of conduct. Her life bore witness to her faith in the creed that breaking the rules meant disaster.

“I know,” continued Lily, “that I was lucky to have been rich. If I had been poor it would have been another matter. I should have married him. But because I was rich, I was free. I was independent to do as I wished, independent ... like a man, you understand. Free to do as I pleased.” All at once she leaned forward impulsively. “Tell me, Cousin Hattie ... it has not made me hard, has it? It has not made me old and evil? It has not made people dislike me?”

Mrs. Tolliver regarded her for a moment as if weighing arguments, seeking reasons, why Lily seemed content and happy despite everything. At length, finding no better retort, she said weakly, “How could they dislike you? No one ever knew anything about it.”

A look of triumph shone in Lily’s dark eyes. “Ah, that’s it!” she cried. “That’s it! They didn’t know anything, so they don’t dislike me. If they had known they would have found all sorts of disagreeable things in me. They would have said, ‘We cannot speak to Lily Shane. She is an immoral woman.’ They would have made me into a hard and unhappy creature. They would have created the traits which they believed I should possess. It is the knowing that counts and not the act itself. It is the old story. It is worse to be found out in a little sin than to commit secretly a big one. There is only one thing that puzzles them.” She raised her slim, soft hands in a little gesture of badinage. “Do you know what it is? They can’t understand why I have never married and why I am not old and rattly as a spinster should be. It puzzles them that I am young and fresh.”

For a time Mrs. Tolliver considered the dark implications of this speech. But she was not to be downed. “Just the same, I don’t approve, Lily,” she said. “I don’t want you to think for a minute that I approve. If my daughter had done it, it would have killed me. It’s not right. One day you will pay for it, in this world or the next.”

At this threat Lily grew serious once more and the smoldering light of rebellion came into her eyes. She was leaning back in her old indolent manner. It was true that there was about her something inexpressibly voluptuous and beautiful which alarmed her cousin. It was a dangerous, flaunting beauty, undoubtedly wicked to the Presbyterian eyes of Mrs. Tolliver. And she was young too. At that moment she might have been taken for a woman in her early twenties.

After a time she raised her head. “But I am happy,” she said, defiantly, “completely happy.”

“I wish,” said Mrs. Tolliver with a frown, “that you wouldn’t say such things. I can’t bear to hear you.”

And presently the talk turned once more to Irene. “She is interested in this young fellow called Krylenko,” said Mrs. Tolliver. “And your mother is willing to have her marry him, though I can’t see why. I would rather see her die an old maid than be married to a foreigner.”

“He is clever, isn’t he?” asked Lily.

“I don’t know about that. He made all this trouble about the strike. Everything would be peaceful still if he hadn’t stirred up trouble. Maybe that’s being clever. I don’t know.”

“But he must be clever if he could do all that. He must be able to lead the workers. I’m glad he did it, myself. The Harrison crowd has ruled the roost long enough. It’ll do them good to have a jolt ... especially when it touches their pocketbooks. I saw him once, myself. He looks like a powerful fellow. I should say that some day you will hear great things of him.”

Mrs. Tolliver sniffed scornfully. “Perhaps ... perhaps. If he is, it will be because Irene made him great. All the same I can’t see her marrying him ... a common immigrant ... a Russian!”

“You needn’t worry. She won’t. She could never marry him. To her he isn’t a man at all. He’s a sort of idea ... a plaster saint!” And for the first time in all her discussion of Irene a shade of hard scorn colored her voice.

XLIV

FOR an hour longer they sat talking over the coffee while Lily smoked indolently cigarette after cigarette beneath the disapproving eye of her cousin. They discussed the affairs of the household, the news in the papers of Mrs. Julis Harrison’s second stroke, of Ellen, and Jean from whom Lily had a letter only that morning.

“Has the Governor ever asked for him?” inquired Mrs. Tolliver, with the passionate look of a woman interested in details.

“No,” said Lily, “I have not heard from him in years. He has never seen the boy. You see Jean is mine alone because even if the Governor wanted him he dares not risk a scandal. He is as much my own as if I had created him alone out of my own body. He belongs to me and to me alone, do you see? I can make him into what I will. I shall make him into a man who will know everything and be everything. He shall be stronger than I and cleverer. He is handsome enough. He is everything to me. A queen would be proud to have him for her son.”

As she spoke a light kindled in her eyes and a look of exultation spread over her face. It was an expression of passionate triumph.

“You see,” she added, “it is a wonderful thing to have some one who belongs to you alone, who loves you alone and no one else. He owns me and I own him. There is no one else who counts. If we were left alone on a desert island, we would be content.” The look faded slowly and gave place to a mocking smile that arched the corners of her red lips. “If I had married the Governor, the boy might have become anything.... I should have seen him becoming crude and common under my very eyes. I should have hated his father and I could have done nothing. As it is, his father is only a memory ... pleasant enough, a handsome man who loved me, but never owned me ... even for an instant ... not even the instant of my child’s conception!”

During this speech the manner of Mrs. Tolliver became more and more agitated. With each bold word a new wave of color swept her large face, until at the climax of Lily’s confession she was struck mute, rendered incapable of either thought or action. It was a long time before she recovered even a faint degree of her usual composure. At last she managed to articulate, “I don’t see, Lily, how you can say such things. I really don’t. The words would burn my throat!”

Her cousin’s smile was defiant, almost brazen. “You see, Cousin Hattie, I have lived among the French. With them such things are no more than food and drink ... except perhaps that they prefer love to everything else,” she added, with a mischievous twinkle in her dark eyes.

“And besides,” continued Mrs. Tolliver, “I don’t know what you mean. I’m sure Charles has never owned me.”

“No, my dear,” said Lily, “He never has. On the contrary it is you who have always owned him. It is always one thing or the other. The trouble is that at first women like to be owned.” She raised her hand. “Oh, I know. The Governor would have owned me sooner or later. There are some men who are like that. You know them at once. I know how my father owned my mother and you know as well as I that she was never a weak, clinging woman. If she had been as rich as I, she would have left him ... long ago. She could not because he owned her.”

“But that was different,” parried Mrs. Tolliver. “He was a foreigner.”

They were treading now upon that which in the family had been forbidden ground. No one discussed John Shane with his wife or children because they had kept alive for more than thirty years a lie, a pretense. John Shane had been accepted silently and unquestioningly as all that a husband should be. Now the manner of Mrs. Tolliver brightened visibly at the approach of an opening for which she had waited more years than she was able to count.

“But he was a man and she was a woman,” persisted Lily. “I know that most American women own their husbands, but the strange thing is that I could never have married a man whom I could own. You see that is the trouble with marriage. It is difficult to be rid of a husband.”

Mrs. Tolliver shifted nervously and put down her coffee cup. “Really, Lily,” she said, “I don’t understand you. You talk as though being married was wrong.” Her manner, for the first time, had become completely cold and disapproving. She behaved as though at any moment she might rise and turn her back forever upon Lily.

“Oh, don’t think, Cousin Hattie, that people get married because they like being tied together by law. Most people get married because it is the only way they can live together and still be respected by the community. Most people would like to change now and then. It’s true. They’re like that in their deepest hearts ... far down where no one ever sees.”

She said this so passionately that Mrs. Tolliver was swept into silence. Books the good woman never read because there was no time; and even now with her children gone, she did not read because it was too late in life to develop a love for books. Immersed always in respectability, such thoughts as these had never occurred to her; and certainly no one had ever talked thus in her presence.

“I don’t understand,” she was able to articulate weakly after a long pause. “I don’t understand.” And then as if she saw opportunity escaping from her into spaces from which it might never be recovered, she said, “Tell me, Lily. Have you ever had any idea from where your father came?”

The faint glint of amusement vanished from her cousin’s eyes and her face grew thoughtful. “No. Nothing save that his mother was Spanish and his father Irish. He was born in Marseilles.”

“And where’s that?” asked Mrs. Tolliver, aglow with interest.

“It’s in the south of France. It’s a great city and an evil one ... one of the worst in the world. Mamma says we’ll never know the truth. I think perhaps she is right.”

After this the conversation returned to the minutiae of the household for a time and, at length, as the bronze clock struck three the two women rose and left the room to make their way upstairs to the chamber of the dying old woman. In the hall, Lily turned, “I’ve never talked like this to any one,” she said. “I’d never really thought it all out before. I’ve told you more than I’ve ever told any one, Cousin Hattie ... even my mother.”

Upstairs Mrs. Tolliver opened the door of the darkened room, Lily followed her on tiptoe. In the gray winter light, old Julia Shane lay back among the pillows sleeping peacefully.

“Will you wake her for her medicine?” whispered Lily.

“Of course,” replied her cousin, moving to the bedside, where she shook the old woman gently and softly called her name.

“Aunt Julia! Aunt Julia!” she called again and again. But there was no answer as Mrs. Tolliver’s powerful figure bent over the bed. She felt for the weakened pulse and then passed her vigorous hand over the face, so white now and so transparent. Then she stood back and regarded the bony, relentless old countenance and Lily drew nearer until her warm full breasts brushed her cousin’s shoulder. The hands of the two women clasped silently in a sort of fearful awe.

“She has gone away,” said Mrs. Tolliver, “in her sleep. It could not have been better.”

And together the two women set about preparing Julia Shane for the grave, forgetful of all the passionate talk of an hour before. In the face of death, it counted for nothing.

XLV

A LITTLE while later, Lily herself went down the snow covered drive and summoned a passing boy whom she sent into the Flats in search of Irene, since she herself dared not venture among the sullen strikers. After two hours, he returned to say he could find no trace of the sister. So it was not until Irene returned at midnight that she learned her mother was dead. She received the news coldly enough, perhaps because in those days death and suffering meant so little to her; but even Lily must have seen the faint glimmer of triumph that entered her sister’s pale, red-rimmed eyes at the news that she was free at last.

Just before dawn when the searchlights, swinging their gigantic arcs over the Flats, pierced the quiet solitude of Lily’s room and wakened her, she heard through the mist of sleep the voice of Irene praying in her room for mercy upon the soul of their mother. For a second, she raised her head in an attitude of listening and then sank back and quickly fell asleep, her rosy face pillowed on her white bare arm, her bright hair all loose and shining in the sudden flashes of reflected light.

The Town newspapers published long obituaries of Julia Shane, whole columns which gave the history of her family, the history of John Shane, so far as it was known, and the history of Cypress Hill. In death it seemed that Julia Shane reflected credit in some way upon the Town. She gave it a kind of distinction just as the Cyclops Mills or any other remarkable institution gave it distinction. The newspapers treated her as if she were good advertising copy. The obituaries included lists of celebrated people who had been guests at Cypress Hill. Presidents were mentioned, an ambassador, and the Governor who was now a senator. They remarked that Julia Shane was the granddaughter of the man who gave the Town its name. For a single day Cypress Hill regained its lost and splendid prestige. Newcomers in the Town, superintendents and clerks from the idle Mills, learned for the first time the history of Shane’s Castle, all but the scandalous stories about John Shane which were omitted as unsuitable material for an obituary. Besides no one really knew whether they were true or not.

And despite all this vulgar fanfare, it was clear that a great lady had passed, one who in her day had been a sovereign, but one whose day had passed with the coming of the Mills and the vulgar, noisy aristocracy of progress and prosperity.

The obituaries ended with the sentence, “Mrs. Shane is survived by two unmarried daughters, Irene, who resides at Cypress Hill, and Lily who for some ten years has made her home in Paris. Both were with their mother at the time of her passing.”

It was this last sentence which interested the older residents. Lily, who for some ten years has made her home in Paris. Both were with their mother at the time of her passing. How much lay hidden and mysterious in those two lines. Until the publishing of the obituary, the Town had known nothing of Lily’s return.

At five o’clock on the afternoon of the funeral Willie Harrison sat in his mother’s bedroom in the sandstone house giving her a detailed account of the funeral. Outside the snow fell in drifting clouds, driven before a wind which howled wildly among the ornamental cupolas and projections of the ugly house. Inside the air hung warm and stifling, touched by the pallid odor of the sickroom. It was a large square room constructed with a great effect of solidity, and furnished with heavy, expensive furniture upholstered in dark red plush. The walls were tan and the woodwork of birch stained a deep mahogany color. Above the ornate mantelpiece hung an engraved portrait of the founder of the Mills and of the Harrison fortune ... Julis Harrison, coarse, powerful, beetle-browed, his heavy countenance half-buried beneath a thick chin beard. The engraving was surrounded by a wide frame of bright German gilt; it looked down upon the room with the gaze of one who has wrought a great success out of nothing by the sweat of his brow and labor of bulging muscles, as once he had hammered crude metal into links and links into chains in the blacksmith shop which stood upon the spot now occupied by the oldest of the furnaces. It was a massive awkward room, as much like a warehouse as like a boudoir or a bedroom. It suited admirably the face in the portrait and the heavy body of the old woman who lay in the mahogany bed, helpless and ill-tempered beneath a second stroke of paralysis.

The son sat awkwardly on the edge of the red plush sofa near the mother. As he grew older, his manner became more and more uneasy in the presence of the old woman. His hair had grown thinner and on the temples there were new streaks of gray. There was something withered about him, something incomplete and unfinished like an apple that has begun to shrink before it has reached maturity. In the massive room, beneath the gaze of the overwhelming portrait, beside the elephantine bed in which he was conceived and born of the heavy old woman, Willie Harrison was a curiosity, a mouse born of a mountain in labor. He was the son of parents who were both quite masculine.

In a strange fit of forgetfulness he had worn his heavy overshoes into the sacred precincts of his mother’s bedroom and they now lay beside him on the floor where he had placed them timidly when his mother commanded him to remove them lest his feet become overheated and tender, thus rendering him liable to sudden colds. Indeed, since the very beginning of the strike Willie had not been well. The struggle appeared to weigh him down. Day by day he grew paler and more nervous. He rarely smiled, and a host of new fine lines appeared upon his already withered countenance. Yet he had gone through the blowing snow and the bitter cold to the cemetery, partly at the command of his mother who was unable to go and partly because he had hoped to see Lily once more, if only for a moment by the side of an open grave.

And now Mrs. Julis Harrison, lying helpless upon her broad back, waited to hear the account of the funeral. She lay with her head oddly cocked on one side in order to see her son. Her speech came forth mumbled and broken by the paralysis.

“Were there many there?” she asked.

“Only a handful,” replied her son in his thin voice. “Old William Baines ... you know, the old man, the Shane’s family lawyer....”

“Yes,” interrupted his mother. “An old fogy ... who ought to have died ten years ago.”

William Harrison must have been used to interruptions of this sort from his mother. He continued, “One or two church people and the two girls. It was frightfully cold on top of that bald hill. The coffin was covered with snow the moment it was lowered into the grave.”

“Poor Julia,” muttered the woman on the bed. “She lived too long. She lost interest in life.” This remark she uttered with the most mournful of intonations. On the verge of the grave herself, she still maintained a lively interest in deaths and funerals.

“I’m glad you went,” she added presently. “It shows there was no feeling, no matter how bad Julia treated me. It shows that I forgave her. People knew I couldn’t go.”

There was a long pause punctuated by the loud monotonous ticking of the brass clock. Outside the wind whistled among the cornices.

“She must have left a great deal of money,” observed Mrs. Harrison. “More than a couple of millions, I shouldn’t wonder. They haven’t spent anything in the last ten years.”

Willie Harrison lighted a cigarette. “Except Irene,” he said. “She has been giving money to the strikers. Everybody knows that.”

“But that’s her own,” said his mother. “It has nothing to do with what Julia left.” She stirred restlessly. “Please, Willie, will you not smoke in here. I can’t bear the smell of tobacco.”

Willie extinguished the cigarette and finding no place in the whole room where he might dispose of the remains, he thrust them silently into his pocket.

“I asked her at the funeral if it was true,” he said. “And she told me it was none of my business ... that she would give everything she possessed if she saw fit.”

Mrs. Harrison grunted. “It’s that Krylenko,” she observed. “That’s who it is. Don’t tell me she’d give away her money for love of the strikers. No Shane ever gave his fortune to the poor.”

The clock again ticked violently and without interruption for a long time.

“And Lily,” said Mrs. Harrison presently.

Willie began fumbling with the ruby clasp on his watch chain, slipping it backward and forward nervously.

“She’s just the same,” he said. “Just the same.... Younger if anything. It’s surprising how she keeps so young. I asked her to come and see you and she wanted to know if you had asked her to. I said you had and then she smiled a little and asked, ‘Is it for curiosity? You can tell her how I look. You can tell her I’m happy.’ That was all. I don’t suppose she’ll ever come back to the Town again after this time.”

This Mrs. Harrison pondered for a time. At last she said, “I guess it’s just as well she wouldn’t have you. There’s something bad about her. She couldn’t be so young and happy if she was just an old maid. I guess after all you’re better off. They have bad blood in ’em. It comes from old John Shane.”

Willie winced at the bluntness of his mother’s speech and attempted to lead her into other paths. “There was no trouble in the Flats to-day. None of the strikers came into Halsted street. Everything was quiet all day. The superintendent says it was on account of the old woman’s funeral.”

“You see,” said Mrs. Harrison. “It’s that Krylenko. I can’t understand it ... how a frumpish old maid like Irene can twist him around her finger.”

Willie stopped fumbling with his chain. “She’s made a weapon of him to fight us.”

Mrs. Harrison shook her massive head with a negative gesture.

“Oh, no,” she said, speaking slowly and painfully. “It may look like that, but she never thought it out. She isn’t smart enough. Neither of them is, Irene or Lily. I’ve known them since they were little girls. They both do what they can’t help doing. Julia might have done such a thing but I’m certain it never occurred to her. Besides,” she added after a little pause, “she’s dead and buried now.”

“She came to hate us before she died,” persisted Willie.

“Yes ... that’s true enough. I guess she did hate us ... ever since that affair over the taxes.”

Willie clung to his idea. “But don’t you see. It’s all worked out just the same, just as if they had planned it on purpose. It’s the second time they have cost the Mills thousands of dollars.”

This, somehow, Mrs. Harrison found herself unable to deny.

“Tell me,” she said presently. “How did they appear to take it?... Lily and Irene?”

Willie was once more fumbling with the ruby clasp. “I don’t know. Irene wasn’t even dressed in mourning. She had on the same old gray suit and black hat. She looked like a crow. As for Lily, she was able to smile when she spoke to me. But you can’t tell how she feels about anything. She always smiles.”

After this little speech Willie rose and began to move about the room, fingering nervously the sparsely placed ornaments—a picture of himself as an anemic child with long, yellow curls, a heavy brass inkwell, a small copy in marble of the tomb of Scipio Africanus, the single memento of a voyage to Rome. He drifted over toward the window and drew aside the curtain to look out into the storm.

XLVI

ALL this time his mother, her vast bulk immovable beneath the mountainous sheets, followed him with her eyes. She must have recognized the symptoms, for presently she broke the way.

“Have you anything you want to say?” she asked.

Willie moved back to the bed and for a time stood in silence fingering the carving of the footboard. He cleared his throat as if to speak but only fell silent again. When at last he was able to say what was in his mind, he did so without looking up. He behaved as though the carving held for him the most profound interest.

“Yes,” he said gently, “I want to say that I’m going to get out of the Mills. I hate them. I’ve always hated them. I’m no good at it!” To forestall her interruptions he rushed on with his speech. The sight of his mother lying helpless appeared to endow him with a sudden desperate courage. She was unable to stop him. He even raised his head and faced her squarely. “I don’t like this strike. I don’t like the fighting. I want to be an ordinary, simple man who could walk through Halsted street in safety. I want to be left alone.”

Mrs. Harrison did not raise her head, but all the violent emotion, pent up and stifled by her helplessness, rose and flashed in her eyes. The scorn was thunderous but somehow it failed to overwhelm the faded, middle-aged man at the foot of the gigantic bed.

“I thank God your father cannot hear those words! He would strike you down!”

Still Willie did not flinch. “My father is dead,” he observed quietly. But his smile carried implications and a malice of its own. “My father is dead,” said the smile. “And my mother is helpless. Before long I shall be free ... for the first time in my life ... free ... to do as I please ... the slave of no one.”

The smile wavered and clung to his face. Of course he said none of this. What he said was, “It is a dirty business. And I want nothing to do with it ... not even any stock. If it hadn’t been for the Mills, Lily might have married me.”

From the bed arose the scornful sound of a hoarse chuckle, “Oh no, she wouldn’t. You don’t know her! She wouldn’t marry you because you were such a poor thing.”

At this Willie began to tremble. His face became as white as the spotless coverlet, and he grasped the bed rail with such intensity that his thin knuckles showed blue against his skin. It was the old taunt of a mother toward a child whose gentleness and indecision were to her both incomprehensible and worthy only of contempt, a child who had never suited her gigantic ideas of power and wealth.

“And pray tell me what you do intend to do,” she asked with rich sarcasm.

A tremulous quality entered Willie’s voice as he replied. “I want to have a farm where I can raise chickens and ducks and rabbits.”

“Great God!” replied his mother in her deep voice. It was all she said. Moving her head with a terrible effort, she turned her face to the wall away from her son. But Willie, though he still trembled a little in the presence of the old woman and the glowering portrait above his head, had a look of triumph in his pale eyes. It said, “I have won! I have won! I have achieved a victory. I am free at last from the monster which I have always hated.... I am through with the Mills. I am through with Judge Weissman.... I can be bullied no more!”

Outside the wind howled and tore at the eaves and presently there came a suave knock at the door ... the knock of the worldly, white haired butler. “Miss Abercrombie is here to see Mrs. Harrison,” came a suave voice, and before Willie could answer, his mother’s crony, her nose very red from the cold, had pushed her way like a wriggling ferret into the room.

At the sight of Willie, she halted for a moment winking at him in a purely involuntary fashion.

“Your mother is so much better,” she said bridling. “Aren’t you delighted?”

Willie’s answer was an inarticulate grunt.

“I’ve come to hear all about the funeral,” she continued in her bustling manner. “I would have gone myself except for the weather. Now sit down like a good boy and tell me all about.” She too treated him as an anemic child still wearing curls.

Willie shook her hand politely. “My mother will tell you,” he said. “I have told her everything.”

And he slipped from the room leaving the two women, the ferret and the mountain, to put the finishing touches upon the obsequies of Julia Shane.

XLVII

IN the house at Cypress Hill the two sisters stayed on to await the settlement of the will proceedings.

The state of siege continued unrelieved, and as the winter advanced, as if Nature herself were hostile to the strikers, there came that year no January thaw at all. There was only more snow and unbroken cold so that Irene, instead of finding freedom with the death of her mother, encountered only more duties among the wretched inhabitants of Halsted street. The Harrisons and Judge Weissman evicted a score of families from houses owned by the Mills. Bag and baggage, women and children, were thrust out into the frozen street to find refuge in other squalid houses already far too crowded.

Judge Weissman also saw to it that the strikers were unable to secure a hall in which to meet. When the men attempted to congregate in the streets, they were charged and clubbed by the constabulary. When they sought to meet in vacant lots, Judge Weissman saw to it that the owners ordered them off. When there was a fire, the strikers were charged by the Town papers with having set it. When there was a riot, it was always the strikers who caused it. But there was one charge which the Town found, above all others, unforgivable. The editors accused the workmen of obstructing progress. They charged the strikers with menacing prosperity and injuring the “boom spirit.” The Rotary Club and the Benevolent Order of Elks, the Chamber of Commerce, even the Episcopal church (very high and much given to incense and genuflexions) espoused the cause of prosperity.

The strikers had no newspapers, no money, no voice. They might starve as slowly as they pleased. Krylenko himself was powerless.

Of what took place in the Town itself the two sisters knew nothing. During the day while Irene was absent Lily, clad in a peignoir of black silk, wandered aimlessly about the house in search of ways to divert herself. She suffered profoundly from boredom. In the course of her ramblings she discovered one morning a great wooden box piled high with the yellow backed French novels “skimmed” and cast away by her mother. These occupied her for a time and when she grew tired of reading, she sought to pass the time by writing letters—addressed always to one of three people, Jean, Madame Gigon or Madame Gigon’s cousin, the Baron. Wrapped in her mother’s old-fashioned cloak of sealskin, she made her way to the foot of the drive and paid a passing boy to post them for her. She was careful always that none of them fell in the way of Irene.

She had the mulatto woman lay a fire in the drawing-room and, opening the grand piano which had fallen sadly out of tune, she spent hours in playing fragments of Chopin, Bach and a new composer called Debussy. Mingled with these were odd snatches of music hall waltzes and the bawdy, piquant ballads of the Cuirassiers. Once at the suggestion of Irene she took up knitting socks and mufflers for the families of the strikers, but the work progressed so slowly that at last she gave up in despair and, making a solitary excursion up the hill to the Town, she purchased an enormous bundle of socks and sweaters which she turned over to her sister to distribute among the suffering laborers and their families.

She slept a great deal too, until her opulent beauty showed signs of plumpness and this led her into the habit of walking each morning a dozen times around the border of the barren, deserted park. These perambulations wore a deep path in the snow, and the Mill guards, coming to expect her at a certain hour each day, took up positions inside the barrier to watch the beautiful stranger as she passed, wrapped in the antiquated sealskin coat with leg of mutton sleeves, her eyes cast down modestly. As the month advanced, they grew bolder and stared quite openly. One or two even ventured to whistle at her, but their demonstrations aroused not the slightest response, nor did they interrupt the regular hour of her exercise. They might have been owls hooting among the branches of the dead trees.

The only visitors were Hattie Tolliver and William Baines, the “old fogy” lawyer, who paid a round half-dozen calls bearing a little black bag filled with papers. With Mrs. Tolliver, he shared an attitude of supreme indifference alike toward the strikers and the guards. It appeared that he still lived in a day when there were no mills and no strikers. He was a tall withered old man with drooping white mustaches and a thick mass of vigorous white hair. He went about his business gruffly, wasting no time over details, and no emotion over sentiment. He treated both sisters in the same cold, legal manner.

The will was brief and concocted shrewdly by Julia Shane and old Mr. Baines. Nor was it complicated. The house and all the old woman’s jewels were left to her daughter Lily. There was also a sizable gift for Hattie Tolliver and a strange bequest which came as a surprise to all but old Mr. Baines. It was added in a codicil, so he said, a short time before her death. It provided for a trust fund to support Welcome House and provide a visiting nurse until Mr. Baines and the two daughters deemed these things no longer necessary.

“That,” observed the cynical Mr. Baines drily, as he read the will, “will be as long as the human race exists. I tried to persuade her against it but she would not listen. She always knew what she was doing and just what she wanted, right to the very end.”

Thus Julia Shane placed herself for all time among the enemies of the Mills.

Otherwise the property was divided evenly with an allowance made to Irene for the value of the Cypress Hill holdings.

Then Mr. Baines delivered with considerable ceremony and advice two letters, one addressed to Lily and one to Irene, which had been left in his keeping.

The letter addressed to Lily read, “I am leaving the house to you because Irene hates it. I know that she would only dispose of it at once and give the money to the church. Likewise I am leaving my jewels to you, with the exception of two rings which I gave Hattie Tolliver years ago—the emerald set with diamonds and the single big emerald. No doubt you remember them. There is no use in leaving such things to Irene. She would only sell them and spend the money to buy candles for a saint. And that is not the purpose for which God made jewels. He meant them to adorn beautiful women. Therefore I give them to you.”

And thus the amethysts set in Spanish silver, two emerald rings, seven rings set with diamonds, a ruby necklace, a festoon of pearls, a quantity of earrings of onyx, diamonds, emeralds, and rubies and a long diamond chain passed into the possession of the elder daughter.

“In worldly possessions,” the letter continued, “I have left you both wealthy. There are other possessions over which I had no control. They were left to you by your father and by me—the possessions which one cannot sell nor throw away, the possessions which are a part of you, possessions good and evil, bad and indifferent, the possessions which in the end are you yourself.

“There are some things which it is difficult to discuss, even between a mother and her daughter. I am gone now. I shall not be forced to look at you and feel shame at what you know. Yet I have always wanted to tell you, to explain to you that, after all, I was never so hard, so invincible, so hopelessly brittle as I must have seemed. You see, my dear, there are some things which one cannot control and one of these is the unconscious control over self-control—the thing which does not permit you to speak. Another is pride.

“You see there was never anything in common between your father and me, unless it was love of horses and that, after all, is not much. Before he ever saw me, he must have known more of life than I ever knew. But those things were secret and because of them, perhaps, I fell in love with him—after a fashion. I say ‘after a fashion’ because that is what it was. I was a country girl, the daughter of a farmer ... nothing else, you understand. And you cannot know what that meant in the days when the Town was a village and no one in it ever went outside the state and seldom outside the county. He was fascinating ... more fascinating than you can ever know. I married him on account of that. It was a great match. He was a wonderful lover ... not a lover like the men of the county who make such good husbands, but a lover out of another world. But that, my dear, did not make him a good husband, and in a little while it became clear that I was little more to him than a convenience. Even sending me to France didn’t help matters.

“It was a bad affair, but in my day when one married there was no thought of anything but staying married. So what was done was done. There was no unmaking a mistake, even less chance after you and Irene were born. He came of one race and I of another. And never once in our life together did we touch in our sympathies. It was, in short, a marriage founded upon passion alone—a despicable state of affairs which is frequently worse than a marriage de convenance, for in that there is no desire to burn itself out.... You see, I understood the affair of the Governor far better than you ever imagined.

“And so there are things descended to both of you over which I have no control. I can only ask God to be merciful. Be gentle with Irene and thank God that you are made so that life cannot hurt you. She cannot help that which she is. You see I have known and understood more than any one guessed.”

That was all. The ending was as abrupt as the manner of Julia Shane while she lived. Indeed to Lily, reading the letter, it must have seemed that her mother was still alive. She sat thoughtfully for a long time and at last tearing the letter slowly into bits, she tossed it into the drawing-room fire. Of its contents she said nothing to Irene.

The letter to Irene was brief. It read, “I leave you your money outright with no string to it, because the dead have no rights which the living are bound to respect. You may do with it as you like.... You may give it all to your beloved church, though it will be without my approval. You may do anything with it which will bring you happiness. I have prayed to God to make you happy. If you can find happiness by burying yourself, do it before you are an hour older, for life is too short to waste even an hour of happiness. But do not believe that it is such an easy thing to find.

“I have loved you, Irene, always, though I have never been able to understand you. I have suffered for you, silently and alone. I, who am dead, may tell you these things which in life I could not tell you. Only know that I cherished you always even if I did not know how to reach you. There are some things that one cannot say. At least I—even I, your own mother—could not make you understand because I never really knew you at all. But remember always that I loved you in spite of all the wretched walls which separated even a mother from her daughter. God be with you and guide you.”

Irene, in the stillness of her bare, austere room, wept silently, the tears streaming down her battered, aging face. When she had finished reading she thrust the letter inside her dress against her thin breasts, and a little later when she descended and found the drawing-room empty she tore it into tiny bits to be consumed by the same fire which had secretly destroyed Lily’s letter a little while before.

XLVIII

SHE made no mention of this letter to Lily, but before she left the house late the same afternoon she went to Lily’s room, a thing which she had never done before. She found her sister lying on the bed in her darkened room.

“What is it, Irene?”

Irene standing in the doorway, hesitated for an instant.

“Nothing,” she said presently. “I just stopped to see if you were all right.” Again there was a little pause. “You aren’t afraid ... alone here in the evenings, are you?”

Out of the darkness came the sound of Lily’s laughter.

“Afraid? Lord, no! What is there to be afraid of? I’m all right.” And Irene went away, down the long drive into Halsted street which lay in thick blackness because the strikers had cut the wires of the street lights.

On the same evening Lily had dinner on a lacquer table before the fire in the drawing-room. She ate languidly, leaning back in her rosewood armchair, dividing her attention between the food and the pages of Henri Bordeaux. Save for a chair or two and the great piano, the room was still in camphor, the furniture swathed in linen coverings, the Aubusson carpet rolled up in its corner. Dawdling between the food and the book, she managed to consume an hour and a half before she finished her coffee and cigarette. Despite the aspect of the room there was something pleasant about it, a certain indefinable warmth and sense of space which the library lacked utterly.

The business of the will was virtually settled. She had announced her intention of leaving within a day or two. Two of her bags were already packed. One of them she had not troubled herself to unpack because she had not the faintest need of clothes unless she wished to dress each night for her lonely dinner as if she expected a dozen guests. And being indolent she preferred to lounge about comfortably in the black kimono embroidered in silver with a design of wistaria. Yet in her lounging there was nothing of sloppiness. She was too much a woman of taste. She was comfortable; but she was trim and smart, from her bronze hair so well done, to the end of her neat silver-slippered toe.